When the sexy under-carriage sounds go a bumping under our television set

Here’s a story about sex noises from beneath our television set.

Now, the time was in a mobile home park in Kokomo, Indiana.

It was a fairly well-maintained complex, all in all, and we lived close to a neighbor who was a single mother. She had a 16 year old son and a 14 year old daughter. They were all nice.

The teenagers were… well, typical teenagers.

Well, from time to time, we would hear sex noises. But could never ever figure out where they came from.

Now the walls in a mobile home were paper thin. I mean it. They were made out of cheap materials, often paper products. So yeah you could hear anything.

And from time to time we would hear heavy breathing. Low moaning, and a couple scuffling sounds.

Initially we thought it was just cats or rodents that moved in under the mobile home. But sometimes the sounds were unmistakable. Yeah. Some one was a having sex … somewhere. Couldn’t figure out where though…

Well, it wasn’t like the noise continued all the time.

It came and went. Maybe once every two weeks or so.

Nothing to worry about.

Then nothing for a few months.

My wife then got to talking with our single-mom neighbor. And why her kids were no longer living with her.

What had apparently happened is that the 16 year old boy (from one father) was having sex with his 14 year old sister (from another father). And they got caught and separated from each other.

Now the boy, and the girl were both willing participants. But since both were underage, it was a rape / incest event. Taking place in our mobile home park. And many times under our mobile home.

Apparently, the girl or the boy, would pull aside our trailer skirting, get underneath our mobile home, and go at it like rabbits under our living room.

Here’s what mobile home skirting looks like…

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7c438f8eb57dee1654b77102dbd960fc
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7ebdc16dedc5f4089e8456b0a736de8e
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249309fbdb8ba2a68af6152e0ad30f84

The kids would pull it aside, and crawl under the house.

We had cheap vinyl skirting. Not the composite skirting in the pictures above. For, after all, this took place in the late 1980’s.

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Gerald Ford was President (I think). Maybe Regan. But before Clinton. That’s for certain.

LOL

Anyways, that is what happened, they would open up the skirting, Get under the trailer. Pull down their pants and hump like there’s no tomorrow.

In the muddy grass under our living room.

Mystery solved.

No judgement. Life in a Indiana trailer park in the 1980’s.

Real life drama…folks.

Sheech!

I don’t know much more than that. She moved away a month or two later. And that, was that.

Life is strange and colorful.

Today…

Tariff That DESTROYED the American Economy in Just Weeks

Learn some history. Not a bad video. Learn something.

Layered Chicken Mole Bake

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9060edd6344e482c2047c563bbbb93cc

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 12 (6 inch) corn tortillas, cut into halves
  • 8 ounces cooked, boneless, skinless chicken breasts, coarsely shredded(2 cups)
  • 1 medium green pepper, chopped
  • 1 cup frozen corn, thawed
  • 1 cup canned black beans, rinsed and drained
  • 1 cup prepared mole sauce
  • 6 ounces Chihuahua cheese, grated (1 1/2 cups), divided
  • 1 plum tomato, seeded and chopped
  • 2 tablespoons fresh cilantro, finely chopped
  • Sour cream (optional)

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Lightly spray bottom and sides of Springform Pan with vegetable oil using Kitchen Spritzer; set aside. Cut tortillas in half using Pizza Cutter; set aside.
  2. Coarsely chop cooked chicken and green pepper using Food Chopper. Combine chicken, green pepper, corn, black beans and mole sauce in Classic Batter Bowl; set aside. Grate cheese using Deluxe Cheese Grater.
  3. Arrange 8 tortilla halves in bottom of pan. Top with 1/3 of the chicken mixture and 1/2 cup of cheese. Repeat layers 2 more times using remaining ingredients.
  4. Bake 18 to 20 minutes or until cheese has melted. Meanwhile, core tomato using The Corer(TM). Finely chop tomato and cilantro using Utility Knife. Remove pan from oven; place on Simple Additions(TM) Medium Square. Run releasing tool around sides of pan. Release and remove collar from pan. Sprinkle tomato and cilantro over top of tortilla bake.
  5. Cut into wedges using Chef’s Knife.
  6. Serve immediately with sour cream, if desired.

Notes

Substitute 1 1/2 cups shredded Mexican cheese blend for Chihuahua cheese.

In a hurry? Substitute cooked rotisserie chicken (available in most supermarkets) for boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Depending on its size, a roasted chicken can yield 4 to 6 cups of chopped chicken.

Nutrition

Per serving: Calories 440, Total Fat 21g, Saturated Fat 8g, Cholesterol 60mg, Carbohydrates 42g, Protein 22g, Sodium 1210mg, Fiber 7g

Attribution

Pampered Chef

Let’s instead talk of sectors where China is still dependent on Critical Processes Or Core Technology Or Mother Machines Or Key High Grade /Advanced Components – on the US Led Collective West (Includes Japan)

That’s easier because China has broken free of the West in several areas over the many years

#1 Commercial Aviation

    • Aircraft Body (Composite Materials)
    • Aircraft Commercial Engine (GE & Safran)
    • Navigation Equipment

China has achieved Indigenous production in Landing Equipment, Wheels & Tyres, Aircraft Body (Duralium),Wind Tunnel & Cabin Pressurization Equipment

#2 Computing Applications

    • Advanced Chips (3 nm to 5 nm Architecture)
    • GPU Chips
    • Coating Materials
    • Optoelectronics
    • EUV Technology (2 nm to 7 nm)
    • DUV Technology (7 nm to 14 nm

China has achieved fully indigenous integration of Chips >= 28 nm and Lithography Machines >= 28 nm

#3 Robotics

    • Advanced Lenses & Optical Sensors (Zeiss)

China has achieved Indigenous supply chain in everything else including Battery, Separators & Microcontroller Design and Manufacturing

#4 Pharmaceuticals

    • Antiviral RNA Base Materials
    • Fourth Generation Inhibitors
    • Interferons
    • Immunomodulators
    • Taxanes
    • Hormone Preparations
    • Gene Sequencers

#5 Healthcare

    • Optical Equipment including Lasik Equipment
    • Advanced Scanning Equipment

China has commercialized its own MRI Machines, PET Scan Machines, Ultrasound Machines & ECMO Machines

These are the areas where China has decided to spend 3 Trillion Yuan ($ 400 Billion) including 1 Trillion Yuan just for the Computing Sector in the next 5 years


Some areas where China achieved Total Independence from the Western Technology between 2005–2025 were in :-

A. Aerospace

B. Green Energy

C. Radar Technology

D. Ramjet Engines, Thruster Engines

E. Stealth Materials

F. Gyroscope Control

G. Guided Control, Avionics & Electronics


Chinas achievements in the last 15 years (2010–2025) have been nothing short of spectacular

They have broken the chokehold of the West in 7 Key Sectors

They had already broken the Chokehold of the West in Nuclear Power Generation, Cybersecurity & Advanced Computing Software between 2005–2020

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main qimg 554f8918ac12807c9c108719a4051e10

Xi has targeted 2035 by which to fully achieve Independence in all areas plus dominance in the areas of

Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, Aerospace & Cloud Dominance

My Girlfriend Dumped Me Without Any Real Explanation, How Do I Become The Guy That NEVER Happens To?

Around 1278–1245 BC, the Aryans invaded China.

Fu Hao, the wife of the Shang king Wu Ding, led an army of 15,000 and defeated them.

All the captives were killed.

This was recorded in Chinese oracle bones; in 1976, Chinese archaeologists found Fu Hao’s tomb and confirmed this record; they also unearthed the bones of Aryan captives.

Normally, captives of war would be treated as slaves.

But these captives were all killed. Because these Aryans looked different from the Chinese; Fu Hao thought these people were ghosts, not people.

Exclusive

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

Chris Miller

“Rufus! Come in. We loved your latest piece on the migrant situation in the Mediterranean. You’re really broadening the horizons of the readers of the Post.”

             “Our readers already have pretty broad horizons.”

 

“Of course they do. They read the Post!”

 

Rufus sat in a windowless room, empty apart from the plastic chair that he sat on, opposite a man in a white polo shirt and khaki pants. The man wore a lanyard with an empty transparent I.D. wallet and a pen hanging from it. Rufus lived for information, and had almost none. Introductions seemed to be the place to start.

 

“I’m Rufus Kenton from the Washington Post, and you are?”

 

“Yes! I am. And you are too, Rufus. Both of us present here today. Thank you for coming along. We love your work and we were very keen that it be you who got access to our facility.”

 

“Ok. Who’s we? I’m going to assume you’re an agent. May I record this?”

 

“Record away, Rufus.” The voice was avuncular Texan. The speaker, tightly bald and leather cheeked, leant forward to rest his elbows on his knees. His pen swung on its lanyard and clicked against the cheap plastic seat. Had muscle gone to fat, or was it just undercover? Either way, the man was two of Rufus.

 

“C.I.A?” said Rufus, keeping his words to a minimum and letting his eyebrows do the heavy lifting.

 

“I used to be in the C.I.A.,” said the man. The crows feet at his eyes went up a shoe size. “Still am. But I used to be too!” he sat back in his chair grinning. It creaked as he folded livestock arms.

 

“And you’ve invited me here to work on your tight five-minute stand-up set?” said Rufus, clicking his own pen and opening his note book.

 

“Relax, Rufus. We love journalists these days, we brought you here so we can work together. We’re on the same side.”

 

“I’m an independent journalist. I’m on the side of truth.”

 

“And justice and the American way?” said the agent with a gentle frown of sincerity.

 

“Sure, but truth comes first. So, what is this place?”

 

“This, Rufus, is the most secure lab in the world. A football field of razor wire in every direction, anti-drone fields, automated sniper turrets. This place has its own F35 guard dog on round-the-clock standby. It has a bunker from the nineteen fifties which has been pimped with some tech which is still going to look pretty damned impressive in the twenty fifties.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Exactly! I knew we had the right man for the job. Anybody in their right mind would ask why, and you, Rufus, are going to tell them.”

 

“I’m going to tell them the truth.”

 

“Of course you are. That’s your job. Which theory of truth do you currently subscribe to?”

 

“Truth, reality, I’m going to tell people what I find here today.”

 

“Oh, we’re counting on it. Now, I’m a plain old correspondence theory man myself. The truth arises from the correspondence of language, thought and such like, to a mind-independent world. Seems like our world is more mind-independent than ever! Am I right? Ha! Nah, Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus – Truth is the adequation of things and intellect; Isaac Israeli via Aquinas.”

 

“Nice to know they’re teaching Latin at Langley.”

 

“Surprised? You don’t think they keep me round just ‘cos I can kill a guy with a pen, do you?”

 

Against his better judgement, Rufus liked the guy. So what if he really could kill him without breaking a sweat? Rufus was not octagon material; it was not that impressive a boast. But Rufus was no coward, so it was not much use as a threat either, if that’s what it was, and not just another joke, not that the two things were mutually exclusive. In conclusion, Rufus just shifted uncomfortably in his chair and looked down at his notepad.

 

“Relax! I’m only joking,” said the man. “I wouldn’t need a pen. Are you ready to take a look around?”

 

Rufus had had a bag over his head since he got in a chopper of the roof of the building he’d been told to report to. It had not been removed until he stood outside the room he was now in and he had no idea how much time had elapsed, how far he had travelled or in what direction. He could have been in one of half a dozen states, maybe seven, maybe eight or nine if you counted irritation and confusion, states he seemed to visit with increasing regularity. He was ready to take a look around.

 

“Let’s go.”

 

The corridor outside the room was lit by a thin arboreal glow of emergency lighting. The agent walked ahead of him, fleetingly green as they passed under the long passage’s evenly spaced exit signs. After what Rufus judged to have been about a minute, time measured by his unacknowledged humming of The Fugs’ C.I.A. Man, they reached an unmarked door. To Rufus’s left a dark space with a tiny exit sign floating in it, marking the invisible length of a perpendicular corridor. The agent saw Rufus looking to his left at the tiny eye-test of an exit sign.

 

“No, it’s in here,” said the agent, opening the door and disappearing through it. Rufus followed him into a room which was industrially dark.

 

“So, you promise to write about what you find here?” asked the agent.

 

“Certainly,” said Rufus.

 

“Good! We need it out there. We need the internet full of it. We need…”

 

“You’re going to get the truth, whether it’s what you need or not. But I guess it would be easy enough for you to silence me if you wanted to? You could do it here and now, with your pen,” said Rufus to a black absence where he imagined the agent might be standing.

 

“No! No, no, no, Rufus.” The voice came from the opposite direction to the one in which Rufus had pointlessly turned his head. “It’s not like that at all. And anyway, like I said.” The voice now came from behind him. “I wouldn’t need a pen.”

 

Rufus peered into the black, trying to breathe steadily and control a heartrate that evolution was attempting to increase with every second spent in the vulnerability of sightlessness.

 

“Now, Rufus, write the truth if you want, but please try and appreciate that in my business it’s really the value of information that matters, regardless of whether it can be proven to be true or not.”

 

“Surely information is more valuable if it’s true? We have to confirm if things are true.”

 

“Well, ah, Rufus. So, y’know Socrates, right?”

 

“I know of him.”

 

“Well one day one of Socrates’ buddies runs up to him and…”

 

“Ah Jesus, come on, man.”

 

“One of his buddies runs up and says, ‘You’ll never guess what I heard about Diogenes.’

 

“Just turn the lights on.”

 

“’Whoa!’ Socrates replies, ‘You gotta pass the Triple Filter Test first,’ and his buddy’s like ‘Triple filter?’ and Socrates is like, ‘I’m going to filter what you say. The first filter is truth. Are you absolutely sure that what you are about to say is true?’ and his buddy’s like, ‘Maybe, dunno, just heard it.’ And then Socrates is like, ‘Ok, possibly not true, so filter two, the goodness filter. Is what you are about to tell me something good?’ and his buddy gets a bit flustered and he’s like, ‘Nah, pretty bad actually.’ And so, Socrates is like ‘Mmhmm, third test; is this information going to be useful to me?’ and his buddy’s pretty embarrassed by now and he’s like, ‘Well, no, not really.’ So, Socrates is like, ‘So you were going to tell me something that might not have been true, good, or useful. Why tell me or anyone else such a thing?’ and the guy’s feeling pretty bad and he realises this must be how come they say Socrates is so wise…”

 

“And it also explains why Socrates never found out that Diogenes was banging his wife.”

 

“You heard it! Ha! You do understand.”

 

“Just turn the lights on.”

 

“If I do, you’ll see the truth, but not the value. We need you to create the value, Rufus. That’s what you’re here for. We need information out there. Lots of it. Generated from this beautiful big resource magnet of a lab. It doesn’t have to be true, it doesn’t have to be good, but whatever it is, it’ll be useful and it’ll be ours. And it’ll be a good reason for all of our less enthusiastic supporters to keep their eyes on this place, instead of anywhere less convenient.”

 

“Please just turn the lights on.”

 

“This room is completely empty, Rufus. I can leave the lights off so you can’t see anything, or I can turn them on, so you can see nothing. Either way, you’re reporting the same truth. You want ‘em on?”

 

“Please.”

 

“Happy writing, Rufus.”

 

An analogue clunk announced a staccato strobe and the room bounced in and out of existence before settling into its vast reality. Rufus stood alone in an echo-ready hall. It was completely empty.

  1. 26.2 miles is a long way to run
  2. Halfway isn’t halfway
  3. Lubricant, in all the right places, is your best friend
  4. Even a soft sports vest can be like sandpaper to unprotected nipples after 20 miles of running, sweating and rubbing
  5. I would look into buying cushioned socks with specific left and right feet
  6. Trainers with plenty of room in the toe area are a must
  7. You need to hydrate before you feel the need to: little and often is best
  8. If you’re running on carbs (as opposed to a fat-adapted diet), take gels, sweets and other carb-fuels well before you feel the need to. In fact schedule them in
  9. The first 18 miles are easy; it’s the last 8 that make it a marathon
  10. Without proper training, including plenty of long steady runs, the last 8 miles can feel like 30
  11. Running into a slight headwind at mile 23 can feel like pulling a truck
  12. The urge to stop can be utterly overwhelming in the final few miles
  13. You don’t lose that much time by walking for a while, if you really need to. Just don’t stop completely or you’ll have trouble moving again, and then you’ll lose a lot
  14. A cheer, even from a random stranger, can revitalise you, helping you find some energy within, when you thought it was all but gone
  15. In spite of it being hard, I learned that I could actually do it
  16. Finishing a marathon is an emotional affair: expect to cry at the finish
  17. It wouldn’t be my last

The 1930’s – it was the time of the Great Depression. With jobs scarce and tensions rising in Europe and the Pacific, many Americans turned to the military for employment. Because of the times, it was quite common for family members to enlist together and serve in the same infantry unit, or aboard the same ship. It made for a “touch of home” in an otherwise “non-homey” environment.

But this practice sometimes led to tragedy, none more tragic as was painfully demonstrated with the sinking of USS Juneau (CL-52), which killed all five Sullivan brothers. This was one of the incidents – but by no means the first – that led the United States to implement the Sole Survivor Policy.

Gold Star flag

The five Sullivan brothers, sons of Thomas and Alleta Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, were:

George Thomas Sullivan, 27, Gunner’s Mate Second;

Francis Henry “Frank” Sullivan, 26, Coxswain;

Joseph Eugene “Joe” Sullivan, 24, Seaman Second Class;

Madison Abel “Matt” Sullivan, 23, Seaman Second Class;

Albert Leo “Al” Sullivan, 20, Seaman Second Class.

The brothers joined the Navy to avenge the death of a friend, Bill Ball (their sister’s boyfriend), who was serving aboard the USS Arizona, when he was killed on December 7, 1941. The irony here is that Masten Ball, Bill’s brother, was also on the Arizona but survived – more on that…

The Sullivans enlisted January 3, 1942, with the stipulation that they serve together. In mid-1942, the Navy promulgated a policy of separating siblings, but this policy was not strictly enforced by any means. George and Frank had served in the Navy before, but their brothers had not. All five were assigned to the light cruiser USS Juneau.

During the naval Battle of Guadalcanal (November 13, 1942), Juneau was crippled by a Japanese torpedo. As Juneau was leaving the area with other surviving US warships, IJN submarine I-26, fired two torpedoes at the crippled heavy cruiser USS San Francisco. While they both missed their intended target, Juneau wasn’t so lucky. A torpedo hit the thinly armored light cruiser at or near the ammunition magazines, and the ship was instantly blown in half. Where seconds before a 541-foot-long cruiser had been, now there was nothing but an enormous cloud of smoke and debris. The Juneau disappeared from view and sank in less than 20 seconds.

Captain Gilbert C. Hoover, the senior officer of the US task force, doubted that anyone had survived the explosion and believed it would be reckless to look for survivors, for doing so would expose his wounded ships to a lurking Japanese submarine. Therefore, he ordered his ships to continue on towards Espiritu Santo, but Hoover had USS Helena signal a nearby US B-17 bomber on patrol to notify Allied headquarters to send aircraft or ships to search for survivors.

And there were survivors, approximately 100 of them. Unfortunately, the crew’s report of the location of possible survivors went unnoticed for several days before it was realized that a rescue mission had never been ordered. A belated air search began. During this time, the survivors of the sinking – many of whom were wounded and burned – were exposed to the elements, hunger, thirst, and shark attacks.

Eight days after the sinking, ten survivors were found by a PBY Catalina search aircraft and fished from the water. The survivors reported that Frank, Joe and Matt were all killed instantly, Al drowned the next day, and George survived for nearly a week, before suffering from delirium as a result of ingesting sea water. He climbed over the side of the raft and fell into the water, never to be seen again. In all, 10 men survived the sinking, but 687 did not.

Two months later, Tom and Alleta Sullivan were finally informed of their sons’ fate. That morning, as Tom was preparing to go to work, three men in uniform – a lieutenant commander, a doctor and a chief petty officer – approached his door. “I have some news for you about your boys,” the naval officer said. “Which one?” asked Tom. “I’m sorry”, the officer replied, “All five.”

The five Sullivan brothers – from left to right: Joe, Frank, Al, Matt, and George

The Sullivans were not the only brother sailors on board the ship. Records show at least thirty sets of brothers served on the Juneau. All died.

Even more astonishing were the 38 sets of brothers that served on the USS Arizona – including three sets of three brothers and a father-son set. Of the 79 siblings onboard the Arizona, 63 were killed and 23 complete sets of brothers were wiped out. Of the three sets of three brothers: the Beckers, the Dohertys, and the Murdocks, only one from each set survived, while the Warriners were the only set of USS Arizona brothers to survive. Of the father-son set, Thomas Free, and his son, William, both perished. The USS Oklahoma had 8 sets of brothers, including a set of three, the Barber boys. All three of the Barbers died at Pearl Harbor.

But the USN did not have a monopoly on siblings serving together, at the same time, same unit, or same theater of operations. Before the Sole Survivor Policy was officially implemented in 1948, several occasions occurred when sole survivors were excused from active service:

The Borgstroms, of Thatcher Utah, were four American brothers (including a set of twins) killed over a six-month period during World War II:

Clyde Eugene Borgstrom, 28, killed March 17, 1944, in Guadalcanal, U.S. Marine Corps;

LeRoy Elmer Borgstrom, 30, killed June 22, 1944, in Italy, U.S. Army;

Rolon Day Borgstrom, 19, killed August 8, 1944, in Yaxham, England), U.S. Army Air Forces;

Rulon Jay Borgstrom, 19, killed August 25, 1944, in France, U.S. Army.

Their parents successfully petitioned for their fifth son Boyd, who was also on active duty, to be released from service. Their sixth son, Elton, who had not yet reached conscription age, was exempted from the military.

The three Butehorn brothers of Bethpage, New York, Charles, Joseph, and Henry, were all deployed during World War II. Charles was killed in action in France (November 1944) and Joseph was killed in action in the Pacific (May 1945). The War Department ordered Henry, who was serving with the USAAF in Italy, home.

In the case of the Niland brothers, G-2 believed that all but one of four siblings were killed in action (although the eldest brother, Edward Niland, serving in the USAAF, was later found to have been a POW in Burma). Steven Spielberg’s film “Saving Private Ryan” was loosely based on the story of the Niland brothers.

The Borgstrom, Butehorn, and Niland stories occurred before the Sole Survivor Policy was put into effect in 1948, but it’s their stories, and the stories of the siblings killed on the Arizona, along with the 60 sibling deaths of the crew of the Juneau – which included the five Sullivan brothers – that pushed the services to actively enforce of Sole Survivor Policy.

Per Wikipedia:

“The Sole Survivor Policy or United States Department of Defense Directive 1315.15 (a.k.a. “Special Separation Policies for Survivorship”) is a set of regulations in the United States military, partially stipulated by law, designed to protect members of a family from the draft during peacetime, or from hazardous duty or other circumstances, if they have already lost family members to military service.” However, the policy does not prevent the excused family member from reenlisting.

——————————————————–

Coming full circle to close our story, on Saturday, March 17, 2018, the wreckage of the USS Juneau was discovered off the coast of the Solomon Islands by the expedition crew of RV Petrel:

USS Juneau, March, 2018

May all your shipmates rest in peace

The Daily Shorpy

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Question: How do you think the US and China negotiations on fentanyl trafficking will turn out?

Answer:

Nothing will come out of it.

Because the entire “China and fentanyl” thing started from a single post back in 2018 from a Mexico port about how they suspect a shipment from China contains fentanyl precursors materials.

For the chemistry illiterate, any material that goes into making actual fentanyl family of drugs can be called precursors. An extreme example will be water can technically be count as a fentanyl precursor because water is used in most chemical manufacturing process.

And I bolded the “suspect” part because later the Mexico site took down their post, because the Chinese reacted immediately after the possibility of drugs. If those that don’t know, China has one of the most strict drug laws on the planet, so any time there is a possibility of drug smuggling, there is a huge investigation towards it.

However, US government seized the (now taken down) post from Mexico as a life line to explain away the rampant drug problem within US. Apparently it has nothing to do with the whole drug infested culture in US since the 19th century, it is all China’s fault.

So the talks will result in nothing. Both China and US government already know China has nothing to do with the issue. The entire thing is a show for US voting audience.

Americans Have LOST ALL FAITH in the Job Market, and Don’t Want to Work Anymore.

The Biosphere Project

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

Jillian Puckett

The sun hung low in the sky as Sarah Mitchell pulled up to the heavily guarded entrance of the BioTech Research Facility. As a seasoned investigative journalist, she had covered her fair share of groundbreaking stories, but this one promised to be her most significant yet. The rumors surrounding the research conducted within those walls were enough to send shivers down anyone’s spine. Today, Sarah had been granted unprecedented access to the lab, a chance to uncover the truth behind the top-secret work carried out there.

 

Stepping out of her car, Sarah adjusted her notepad and checked her camera equipment. She was prepared to document every detail, determined to expose any wrongdoing that may be lurking behind the lab’s fortified walls. A security guard approached her, scrutinizing her identification before finally granting her access.

 

Inside the facility, Sarah was guided through a maze-like corridor, taking note of the reinforced doors and surveillance cameras at every turn. The atmosphere was tense, with scientists in white lab coats scurrying about, engrossed in their work. The air carried a distinct smell of chemicals, hinting at the complex experiments being conducted.

 

Her guide led her into a spacious laboratory filled with state-of-the-art equipment. Sarah’s eyes widened as she observed the rows of high-tech machinery, each with its own purpose and intricate design. She struggled to comprehend the magnitude of what was being developed here.

 

Dr. Rachel Lawson, the lead researcher, greeted Sarah with a warm smile. “Welcome, Sarah. We’re delighted to have you here today. I hope you’re ready to witness something truly groundbreaking.”

 

Sarah reciprocated the smile, her curiosity piqued. “Thank you, Dr. Lawson. I’ve heard so much about the work conducted here. I’m eager to know more.”

 

“Follow me,” Dr. Lawson said, leading Sarah toward a sealed chamber at the far end of the laboratory. The security measures surrounding it were seemingly impenetrable, indicating the significance of whatever lay within.

 

As they reached the chamber, Dr. Lawson scanned her identification card, and the heavy doors hissed open, revealing a sight that left Sarah speechless. Inside the room was a massive enclosure containing a lush, verdant landscape. Towering trees, vibrant flowers, and a winding river coexisted within the glass walls, creating an ethereal oasis in the midst of the sterile lab environment.

 

Sarah’s eyes widened in disbelief. “What is…? How is this possible?”

 

Dr. Lawson beamed with pride. “Welcome to our Biosphere Project, Sarah. We have developed a revolutionary system that replicates entire ecosystems within a controlled environment. It’s a breakthrough in sustainable agriculture and biodiversity conservation.”

 

Sarah’s mind raced, realizing the potential impact of this discovery. “This could change everything! The possibilities for food production and environmental conservation are immense. Why hasn’t this been made public?”

 

Dr. Lawson’s expression turned somber. “The project was classified due to the potential misuse of such technology. We wanted to ensure its safety and ethical use before revealing it to the world.”

 

Sarah’s journalistic instincts kicked in. “But what kind of misuse are we talking about? Are there any risks associated with this project?”

 

Dr. Lawson sighed, her eyes reflecting a mixture of concern and responsibility. “There are several potential misuses we have considered. One of the key concerns is the possibility of using the Biosphere Project to create controlled environments for the development of dangerous biological weapons. The ability to sustain life within enclosed ecosystems could be exploited to cultivate and engineer deadly pathogens, posing a grave threat to global security.”

 

Sarah’s mind raced, realizing the magnitude of the situation. “So, the secrecy surrounding the project was to prevent such misuse?”

 

“Yes,” Dr. Lawson confirmed. “In the wrong hands, the Biosphere Project could unleash unimaginable devastation. We had to ensure that the technology was fully developed, with safeguards in place, before considering its release to the public.”

 

Sarah’s journalistic instincts kicked into high gear. “Dr. Lawson, the world deserves to know about this project. Its potential benefits are immense, but the risks must be brought to light as well. We need transparency to prevent any clandestine misuse.”

 

Dr. Lawson nodded in agreement. “You’re right, Sarah. We have been deliberating on the best way to strike a balance between sharing the breakthrough and addressing the risks. We understand the importance of public awareness, but we must also proceed with caution.”

 

Sarah contemplated the situation, realizing the weight of responsibility that rested on her shoulders. She knew she had the power to expose the truth, but she also had to be mindful of the potential consequences. After a moment of reflection, she made up her mind.

 

“Dr. Lawson, I would like to collaborate with you on this. Let us work together to devise a plan that ensures the responsible disclosure of the Biosphere Project. We must inform the public about its potential benefits and the risks it carries. By doing so, we can foster a global dialogue and ensure that this groundbreaking technology is used for the betterment of humanity.”

 

Dr. Lawson’s eyes shimmered with gratitude. “Thank you, Sarah. Your willingness to approach this with caution and responsibility reassures me. Together, we can make a difference and shape the future of this remarkable project.”

 

Over the following weeks, Sarah and Dr. Lawson collaborated closely, carefully crafting a strategy to share the story of the Biosphere Project with the world. They engaged in extensive discussions, consulting with experts in various fields, assessing the potential risks and benefits, and establishing frameworks to ensure the technology’s responsible use.

 

Finally, the day arrived when Sarah’s exposé on the Biosphere Project was published. The article detailed the groundbreaking technology, its potential benefits for sustainable agriculture and biodiversity, and the risks associated with its misuse. It ignited a global conversation, prompting governments, scientific communities, and environmental organizations to come together and establish regulations and oversight mechanisms to safeguard the technology’s ethical use.

 

The public’s response was overwhelming. Many were captivated by the possibilities the Biosphere Project presented, while others expressed concerns about its potential risks. Yet, the conversation fostered by Sarah’s article allowed for a balanced and informed dialogue, leading to a collective commitment to responsible innovation.

 

As time progressed, the Biosphere Project was gradually integrated into society, with stringent regulations in place to ensure its ethical use. It revolutionized agriculture, enabling sustainable food production in regions affected by droughts, extreme temperatures, or limited arable land. It played a crucial role in conserving endangered ecosystems, allowing scientists to study and protect fragile species within controlled environments.

 

Sarah’s collaboration with Dr. Lawson continued beyond the publication of her groundbreaking article. The two worked tirelessly to address the concerns raised by the public and to refine the regulations governing the Biosphere Project. They became advocates for responsible innovation, traveling the world to speak at conferences and engaging with policymakers, scientists, and environmentalists.

 

Their efforts led to the establishment of an international committee dedicated to monitoring and regulating the use of biosphere technology. This committee consisted of experts from various fields who worked together to ensure that the Biosphere Project was used solely for peaceful and beneficial purposes.

 

Under the committee’s oversight, the Biosphere Project flourished. It continued to enhance food production and conservation efforts, transforming arid regions into thriving agricultural centers and contributing to the preservation of endangered species and habitats.

 

Sarah and Dr. Lawson’s collaboration also sparked interest from other scientific communities and research institutions. They began to share their knowledge and expertise, collaborating on similar projects around the world. This global collaboration further advanced the field of biosphere technology, expanding its applications and ensuring that the benefits reached far beyond the walls of the original research facility.

 

As the years passed, the Biosphere Project became a symbol of responsible innovation and the power of transparency. The public’s trust in the technology grew, and the regulations and oversight mechanisms put in place served as a model for other groundbreaking scientific advancements.

 

Sarah and Dr. Lawson’s efforts were recognized with numerous awards and accolades. They were hailed as pioneers who had not only uncovered a remarkable breakthrough but had also navigated the delicate balance between progress and caution.

 

Sarah’s experience with the Biosphere Project had a profound impact on her as a journalist. She realized the importance of responsible reporting, understanding the potential consequences of revealing groundbreaking technologies without careful consideration of their risks. She became an advocate for responsible journalism and used her platform to raise awareness about the ethical implications of scientific advancements.

 

Dr. Lawson’s dedication to the Biosphere Project never wavered. She continued to lead research and development efforts, ensuring that the technology evolved responsibly and with the utmost regard for the environment and humanity’s well-being.

 

The legacy of the Biosphere Project lived on, not only in its contributions to sustainable agriculture and conservation but also in the lessons it taught about responsible innovation. It served as a reminder that groundbreaking discoveries could shape the world positively, but their potential risks must be addressed proactively.

 

Sarah Mitchell and Dr. Rachel Lawson’s collaboration became a symbol of the power of partnership and the importance of ethical decision-making in the face of groundbreaking scientific advancements. Their story inspired countless others to approach innovation with responsibility, shaping a future where progress and humanity’s welfare walked hand in hand.

Carl Zha speaks to ‪@JamarlThomas‬ about insane details coming out of South Korean coup investigation including allegations of South Korean military to stage a false flag attack against South Korean Parliament.

This was apparently done in order to provoke a military confrontation with North Korea in order to justify imposing Martial Law.

And this is why South Korean Parliament have impeached the President and Acting President of South Korea

Let’s not get into the “ever” part simply because I’m a cop.

we, the cops, see things every day that trump whatever we’ve experienced before. Human dignity keeps hitting new lows for reasons I can’t even begin to comprehend.

Just three days ago, we arrested a guy because we suspected he might have something to do with the sudden disappearance of his cousin, a young, well-off businessman who had seemingly vanished into thin air. The suspect, a butcher, was the last known person to have been in contact with him according to the investigation.

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main qimg 075c0711bfcc2c5e02223381158581d1

During questioning, he confessed.

He had called his cousin over to his house and, once he arrived, shot and killed him. The motive? Money. Plain greed.

If you’re wondering where the chilling part is—come on. Isn’t murder already a gruesome and chilling act on its own?

Well, here’s where it gets worse. After killing his cousin, the suspect dismembered the body, put the pieces in a very large karahi (wok), and melted them over a fire using chemicals. Once the remains had turned into liquid, he discarded it in an empty plot.

So, that was just three days ago. By no means is this the most chilling case, but what a disgraceful disregard for human life.

A continuous, soul-draining pattern of evil people doing unspeakable things.

Hawaiian Chicken Wreath

356b870726c9f98c39bf82709c58eb86
356b870726c9f98c39bf82709c58eb86

Ingredients

  • 2 (8 ounce) cans refrigerated crescent rolls
  • 1/2 cup mayonnaise
  • 3 tablespoons honey mustard
  • 1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
  • 2 cups (about 12 ounces) cooked chicken, chopped
  • 1/2 cup celery, sliced
  • 3 tablespoons fresh parsley, snipped
  • 1/2 cup pineapple slices (about 4 slices), + 2 for garnish
  • 4 ounces (1 cup) Cheddar cheese, shredded
  • 1/4 cup macadamia nuts chopped
  • 1 egg, separated

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to375 degrees F.
  2. Unroll crescent dough; separate into 16 triangles. With wide ends of triangles toward the center, arrange 8 triangles in a circle on Large Round Stone. Corners of wide ends will touch and points will extend 1 inch beyond edge of Baking Stone. Arrange remaining 8 triangles in center, matching wide ends. Seal seams using Dough and Pizza Roller. (Points will overlap in center; do not seal.)
  3. Measure mayonnaise, mustard, and black pepper into Classic Batter Bowl. Chop chicken, using Food Chopper. Slice celery using Chef’s Knife. Snip parsley using Kitchen Shears. Add chicken, celery, parsley, and pineapple to Batter Bowl. Grate cheese into Batter Bowl using Deluxe Cheese Grater. Mix filling using Mix ‘ N Scraper®. Using Medium Scoop, scoop filling over seams of dough, forming a circle.
  4. Coarsely chop nuts using Food Chopper; sprinkle over filling. Beginning in center, lift one dough triangle across mixture. Continue alternating with outer triangles, slightly overlapping to form wreath. Tuck last end under first.
  5. Separate egg over Small Batter Bowl using Egg Separator. Beat egg white lightly; brush over dough, using Pastry Brush.
  6. Bake 25 to 30 minutes or until golden brown.
  7. Cut and serve using Slice ‘N Serve®.

Attribution

Pampered Chef

Title: Sir Whiskerton and the Great Rutabaga Ruckus

Ah, dear reader! Welcome back to another chapter in the illustrious chronicles of yours truly, Sir Whiskerton, the farm’s finest (and let’s face it, only) detective. Today’s tale is one of high stakes, scandalous accusations, and a vegetable so prized that its disappearance had the entire farm in an uproar. Yes, I’m talking about Farmer Joe’s prized rutabaga. This particular root vegetable was not just any rutabaga—it was destined for the county fair, where it was sure to win first prize. Its sudden disappearance rocked the farm to its core, and the case brought together an unlikely team of suspects, allies, and more mud than I care to recount. Prepare yourself for The Great Rutabaga Ruckus.

The Disappearance

The morning began with a commotion so loud it rattled the barn walls. I had just settled into my favorite sunbeam for a mid-morning nap when I heard Farmer Joe yelling from the garden.

“MY RUTABAGA! IT’S GONE!”

I sighed, stretching as I reluctantly rose to my paws. A missing vegetable. Hardly the kind of case that gets my pulse racing, but then again, life on the farm is rarely boring. I trotted over to the garden, where Farmer Joe was frantically searching through the rows of vegetables. The prize rutabaga’s spot was empty—just a small pile of disturbed soil where it had once proudly rested.

“Scandalous,” I muttered to myself. “Who would dare commit such a heinous crime?”

It wasn’t long before the rest of the farm animals had gathered to speculate. Among them were Porkchop the pig (looking suspiciously sweaty), Rufus the raccoon (looking suspiciously smug), and Sedgwick the barn owl (looking suspiciously calm, as always).

The Accusations Begin

“I’ll tell you who took it!” Porkchop declared, pointing a muddy hoof at Rufus. “It was him! That sneaky raccoon can’t resist stealing food. Everyone knows that!”

“Me?!” Rufus exclaimed, clutching his chest as if he’d been mortally offended. “I didn’t take your precious rutabaga! I’m not even a root vegetable kind of guy. Too earthy. I prefer sweet stuff, like berries… or honey.”

“Don’t look at me,” Porkchop huffed, his snout twitching. “I don’t even like rutabagas. Carrots, now that’s a different story, but rutabagas? No thanks.”

“Hmm,” Sedgwick said, perched on a nearby fence post. “Both of you seem eager to deny your involvement. Curious.”

“Do you think I took it?” Porkchop squealed. “I’m offended! I’m a pig of integrity!”

“Integrity? Please,” Rufus snorted. “I saw you sniffing around the garden yesterday, looking awfully interested in that rutabaga.”

“That doesn’t mean I took it!” Porkchop snapped. “I was just admiring it!”

“Enough,” I said, stepping forward and flicking my tail for emphasis. “This bickering isn’t helping. If we’re going to solve this mystery, we’ll need to investigate properly.”

The Investigation Begins

I started by examining the scene of the crime. The soil where the rutabaga had been planted was freshly disturbed, and there were faint marks in the dirt leading away from the garden.

“Tracks,” I said, crouching low to inspect them. “But they’re too small for Porkchop’s hooves and too wide for Rufus’s paws.”

Sedgwick swooped down from his perch to examine the tracks more closely. “These appear to be bird tracks,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps a goose or a large duck?”

“Could it be Gladys the goose?” I wondered aloud, remembering her flair for drama from our last adventure.

“She does have a talent for causing trouble,” Sedgwick admitted. “But let’s not jump to conclusions. We should follow the trail.”

The Trail Leads to Trouble

The tracks led us through the orchard, where Rufus took the opportunity to climb a tree and snack on an apple. “You know,” he said between bites, “if I had taken the rutabaga, I wouldn’t have left such an obvious trail. Whoever did this isn’t very good at being sneaky.”

“Or they didn’t care about being sneaky,” Sedgwick countered. “Perhaps they assumed no one would investigate.”

“Can we focus, please?” I said, my patience wearing thin. “The tracks lead to the barn. Let’s see what we find there.”

As we approached the barn, Porkchop began to look increasingly nervous. “Uh, you don’t think the thief is in the barn, do you? What if it’s… dangerous?”

“Dangerous?” Rufus laughed. “We’re looking for a vegetable thief, not a monster.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Porkchop muttered. “You’re not the one who has to sleep in there.”

The Culprit Revealed

Inside the barn, the tracks led us to a pile of hay in the corner. Sedgwick flapped onto a nearby beam for a better view, while Rufus and I cautiously approached the haystack.

“Something’s moving in there,” Rufus whispered, his eyes wide.

“Only one way to find out,” I said. With a swift paw swipe, I pulled back the hay to reveal… a family of rabbits!

The rabbits froze, their eyes wide with guilt. In the middle of their little nest was the missing rutabaga, half-eaten and surrounded by bits of straw.

“Well, well,” I said, arching an eyebrow. “It seems we’ve found our culprits.”

The largest rabbit—a scruffy fellow with one floppy ear—stepped forward and bowed his head. “We’re sorry,” he said. “We didn’t mean to cause trouble. We just… we couldn’t resist. It smelled so delicious, and we were so hungry…”

Sedgwick, ever the voice of reason, spoke gently. “While stealing is not the answer, I understand your plight. Perhaps we can find a solution that helps everyone.”

The Resolution

After some discussion (and a lot of clucking from the hens, who had somehow arrived to witness the drama), we decided to let the rabbits keep the remaining rutabaga. Farmer Joe, though disappointed, agreed to plant extra vegetables next season to ensure there was enough for everyone—humans and animals alike.

As for Porkchop and Rufus, they begrudgingly apologized to each other for their accusations, though I suspect their rivalry is far from over.

“I still think it’s suspicious how much Porkchop likes to hang around the garden,” Rufus muttered.

“And I still think you’re too sneaky for your own good,” Porkchop retorted.

“Enough, you two,” I said with a sigh. “The case is closed, and justice has been served. Let’s all try to get along, shall we?”

The Moral of the Story

Sometimes, misunderstandings can lead to unnecessary conflict, but with a little patience and understanding, even the biggest disagreements can be resolved. And remember: sharing is always better than stealing—even if it’s a prize rutabaga.

The End.

Prof. John Mearshimer Claims That It’s Too Late for the United State to Come After China

Deaths and change

You can tell that you are getting older when your friends and your television and music stars are all dead.

Sigh.

Not just my friends, I wrote about them earlier. But also other well-known television and movie personalities. Like Sammy Hagar (The Red Rocker), and Ronnie James Dio. Oh, and even Pee Wee Herman. Oh, and Rush Limbaugh too. So many are now gone.

Gone.

I think that this is (like a) landmark or tell-tail that all people go though as they age. There comes a time where your favorite television personalities die. Editorial staff retire, and the size of your family get-together shrinking steadily until many seats are empty.

I’ve passed that point.

What’s the next landmark on the unending march towards the sunset…?

Maybe being woken up by the nurse in the retirement home that I am placed in… yikes!

Not a bad thing. But all of us will see many changes that other people; younger people, will not notice.

Ah…

But I’m still around.

Today…

UPDATED 6:15 PM EDT — RUSSIA WARNS OF “CATASTROPHIC” CONSEQUENCES AFTER TRUMP THREATENS TO BOMB IRAN

Moscow has condemned Trump’s warning to bomb Iran if it refuses a new nuclear deal, calling it an unacceptable “ultimatum.”  Iran is now considering a PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE at Diego Garcia!

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would destabilize the entire region and urged Washington to de-escalate.

Trump’s message was clear: no deal means unprecedented bombing and renewed sanctions.

Tehran rejected talks, prompting Trump to say, “It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen.”

Senior Iranian military officials are reportedly advocating for a preemptive strike on the US military base at Diego Garcia, citing concerns that it may soon be used as a launchpad for operations against Iran.

Russia and China are allies of Iran; an attack on Iran is an attack on those two countries, prepare for WW3.

IRAN REVEALS PLASMA WEAPONS

Iran today released information about what it claims is its new plasma weapons.

It’s not laser based, and it is said that right now, only Iran has perfected this technology.

 

 

Could this be a game-changer?

IMMEDIATE EFFECTS OF A WAR WITH IRAN

HOT WAR with Iran could trigger INFLATION APOCALYPSE.

Retaliation by Iran could choke off key oil routes such as the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb in the Red Sea, crippling the world’s oil supply, global energy experts say. This would immediately impact 20 MILLION BARRELS p/DAY of oil and 77 million tons of Qatari LNG passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Brent crude oil price could initially surge to $110-$115 a barrel. The same would apply to LNG prices, with Europe getting hit the hardest.

Global economy growth could be cut by 2%-3% if the disruption lasts 2-3 months.

A conflict with Iran amid a tariff war that the US is waging as of tomorrow, April 2, could set off an inflation spiral that would impact every American household. Why? The US is highly dependent on imports, importing $4 trillion worth of goods in 2024.

The US manufacturing sector has been shrinking for years hitting 10% of US GDP in 2024 compared with 30% for China.

The Federal Reserve upwardly revised its target for US inflation in 2025 from 2.5% to 2.7%. It also reduced its target for the US growth rate in 2025 from 2.1% to 1.7% blaming the revisions on Trump’s tariffs.

UPDATE 6:15 PM EDT —

The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued travel warnings for all Israelis traveling abroad.

In addition, the Israeli Air Force has announced exit restrictions from all air bases in the country, with no personnel allowed to leave. (This is a common practice in most military units before a large operation begins.  They do it for OpSec, so no troops pillow-talk before the attack begins.)

This morning, the Chief of US Central Command met with Israeli military leaders at the Kyria the underground fortress in Jerusalem, used to control all Israeli military operations.

Russian Foreign Ministry this evening: “We warn against any strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Bombing these facilities will have consequences for the entire region.”

ksnip 20250402 094427
ksnip 20250402 094427

Fob Story.

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

Ken Cartisano

I’m just a run-of-the-mill journalist, okay? Except in certain sports related circles, you probably never heard of me. Neil A. Gleary? See? Almost exclusively sports write-ups with the occasional science article here and there. Not very well known.So I’m surprised when I come home late one night and there’s a message on my answering machine informing me that my request for an interview with the Director of AARI has been approved. Arrangements had been made, please confirm by calling this number, bla, bla, bla…I picked up the phone and called the number in the message. I’m transferred to a ‘human interface specialist’ who tells me, “Our director is seeking an interview with you.”“But I didn’t request an…”“Are you Neil Gleary?”“I am but…”“Our director” he interrupts, “is seeking an interview with you.”“Oh.” I say, biting my lip. “He knows I’m a sportswriter, right?”“She does, yes—if you’re uncomfortable we can always find…”“No, no. That’s fine. I would be delighted to interview the Director. What’s her name, by the way. And where do I go?”

 

“A limousine style car will pick you up in front of your apartment at precisely eight a.m. tomorrow morning, he will not wait, so don’t be late.”

 

“Okay, but why? Why does…”

 

The call ended.

 

I spend the rest of the evening searching for information about AARI. All I’m able to learn is that it’s a federally funded research lab dedicated to secret black box projects. Alien technology, artificial intelligence, things like that. This information was provided by a former associate with contacts in the State Department. He was so reticent about speaking about them over the phone, that that was the only information he would give me. When I told him of my impending meeting, he asked me if I had a valid passport. When I told him I did, he said he was just kidding. “If they want you, they’ll get you.”

 

I told him they were sticklers for punctuality and recounted the message I’d received. He said, “Yeah? Maybe you should test their resolve on that issue.”

 

“I should be late?”

 

“Why not?”

 

You can’t be late, that’s why. It’s contrary to your nature.

 

In fact, you’re two hours early and a sleek black limo is already waiting at the curb, exhaust fumes rising from the tailpipe. Something tells you it’s been sitting there all night long. The rear door pops open as you approach, you know that once you are in the car, you won’t be able to let yourself out.

 

You get in anyway. The door closes and locks. You feel protected by the spacious interior insulation and comforted by the smell and sound of the leather seats, the glint of the wood and chrome trim. The first thing you notice is that you’re alone as the driverless car eases smoothly into traffic and down the street, and stops at the first traffic light. You realize, in that short distance, all the windows, except the windshield, have become too dark to see through.

 

The light changes, the car accelerates through the next ten intersections, as if they’ve been timed to your passage, the car makes several turns and goes down into a cross-town tunnel—and doesn’t come out. By some inexplicable mechanical means, the limo has been shunted to an impossible side tunnel with no other vehicles. Here, the limo feels like it accelerates to a very high rate of speed on a road devoid of all traffic.

 

The minutes pass in silence as you wonder what you might say to the Director of a top-secret facility, until you are suddenly out in the open, flashing down a highway alongside a wide river. The road loops and bends as you go higher and higher above the river. The limo slows, turns, and darts down a deserted street and into an underground garage. The fluorescent lighting rivals the sun at noon. You look at your watch. It’s nearly 7 a.m. The limo comes to a smooth, unhurried stop and the door pops open. You get out, head for the elevator and stop.

 

You look around. The garage is huge and empty. There is no call button for the elevator. You feel you are surely being monitored as the elevator doors open of their own accord. You step in, they close. ‘This is all going very well,’ you think. A moment later the elevator plummets several dozen stories in a matter of seconds. You push your stomach back down out of your throat and think, ‘What you’ll do with it, (the story, not your stomach) or who you’ll sell it to is anybody’s guess.’

 

The doors open. You step out, look around. No one is waiting. But there’s a dark stone line in the middle of the marble floor. You follow it.

 

 

 

A monitor dinged softly, indicating the arrival of the elevator down the hall. She found herself holding her breath and, considering who she was, and how powerful, she could not divine the source of her unease.

 

She took stock. He had followed implicit instructions, some verbal, some subliminal, and had made his way here, to one of AARI’s most tightly secured labs. The place was deserted for security purposes, all personnel had been temporarily reassigned, or furloughed for the time being. An excessive precaution, she thought, which left her vulnerable, and one that she would not allow to happen again.

 

But her beauty, in its current state, by itself could overwhelm most men, and her ancestral status was nearly as intoxicating to those of her own species. There was no situation she wasn’t prepared for.

 

Her current assignment rounded the corner and stopped in his tracks.

 

“Neil Gleary? Come in, come in. Have a seat.” There was no handshake, no touching of any kind. “I’ve got a pleasant surprise for you and some bad news as well. What would you like first?”

 

He was slow to answer her, and he seemed alarmingly unaffected by her looks. He took a seat, loosening his tie comically. “How about telling me why I’m here?”

 

“You’re here to be debriefed and deprogrammed, Neil. Just sit back and relax while I ask you a few questions.”

 

“Debriefed? From what?”

 

She ignored his question and asked, “Do you recall what elementary school you went to?”

 

“No.”

 

“You don’t sound interested.”

 

“Should I be? It was a long time ago.”

 

“How about high school? Remember any of your classmates from high school?”

 

He hesitated.

 

“You went to college too you know, remember where?”

 

He did not remember where. “So? So what? I’ve got a bad memory. I thought I was here to interview you? What does my past have to do with the work you conduct here?”

 

“Ironically, quite a bit. Are you married? No. Got a girlfriend? No. Ever had one? No. Are you hot for me now? No. Because this,” she waved her hands at her exquisite form, “is not your type. You see, Neil, I’m an alien being, I know I don’t look like one, but here’s the crazy part, you’re an alien too.” He made no move to get up and leave. (Darn, she loved using the tractor beam.) “I don’t look like this—and you don’t look like that.”

 

“Is that so?” He looked around. There was no quick exit for either of them.

 

She locked eyes with him. “Your name is XIVIC CIM, your mission here was abandoned 19 years ago. Someone should have brought you in a long time ago. I can’t explain why you weren’t—retrieved, debriefed and—reassigned. It’s inexplicable and inexcusable, but it happens. You got lost in the wafer-work or something. No one knew you were here. Excretion, twenty-four years is a long time to work under-cover, the transition into your true self might well be disturbing.

 

“What? Why, are we that ugly?”

 

“Are you kidding? This old leather hide versus our glittering silicon features? There’s no competition. None. It’s just that—let’s face it, you probably think I’m a raving lunatic, and really believe that you are a human being, but when we do an exo-alien mind-press, believe me, it sticks. And you’ve been submerged in the role for a quarter of a century. It’s going to be tough on you, but you’ll adjust. Most deep cover agents recover. I don’t know how, to be honest. I can’t stand wearing this disguise, it creeps me out. Everything has some kind of skin on it. Skin here, skin on that. Uch. Six hours a day, that’s my max. The more we talk about it, the grosser I feel. I understand if you don’t want to talk about something you can’t remember. Perfectly understandable. Do you think you’re ready?”

 

“Not really. Talking is good. Mmmm, tell me, how does this transition work?”

 

She held up a small key fob.

 

He said, “Ahh, you just push a button.”

 

She nodded. “I have no idea how it works, I’m just another cog in a big machine Mr. Gleary. Are you ready to be yourself again?” Her dazzling smile bounced right off his façade.

 

“How many of those do you have?”

 

She pulled open her desk drawer, then closed it again just as quickly. “Enough to keep me busy,” she said, inexplicably flustered.

 

“And they’re all marked?”

 

“I think,” she said, “we’ve had enough questions for the time…”

 

“Before you do that,” he jumped out of his chair, “before you do that, let me just…”

 

She pointed the fob at his chest and pushed the button. Nothing happened. The elevator chimed, she didn’t remember hearing it go back up, let alone come back down. She pushed the button on the fob again and still nothing happened to Neil Gleary’s visage. The elevator doors opened and there was the sound of boots and guns, jackets and shields with FBAI on them.

 

“But you’re one of us, XIVIC. How could you?”

 

He had his own fob. As he stepped into the Director’s private lavatory, to make sure it was empty, he stopped in front of the mirror, the image staring back was that of a tall slender Gray, with long fingers and those legendary black, inscrutable eyes. He pushed the button on the fob once more and appeared human again. He was not ‘one of them,’ and his name was not XIVIC CIM.

 

The silicon-based alien was well out of earshot when Neil Gleary mumbled his reply: “I like it here. That’s how.”

Let’s Watch a Comedy From 1962: The Beverly Hillbillies

ksnip 20250402 094913
ksnip 20250402 094913

Peachy Blueberry Pie

7a76d471351946cb304f30614b8e6a4c
7a76d471351946cb304f30614b8e6a4c

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

Crust

  • 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 cup solid vegetable shortening
  • 5 to 7 tablespoons cold water

Filling

  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 2 (16 ounce) packages frozen peach slices, thawed
  • 1 cup blueberries
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tablespoon water
  • 2 teaspoons sugar (optional)
  • Vanilla ice cream (optional)

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.

Crust

  1. Combine flour and salt in large bowl; mix well. Cut shortening into flour mixture using Pastry Blender until shortening resembles the size of small peas. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of water over flour mixture; gently toss with a fork. Repeat until mixture is moist enough to form a ball. Divide dough in half. Lightly flour Baker’s Mat. Place one ball of dough on center of mat; flatten to 1/2 inch thickness. Roll dough from center to edges, forming a 12inch circle. Place pastry into Deep Dish Pie Plate. Trim pastry even with rim of pie plate.

Filling

  1. In large bowl, combine sugar, cornstarch and cinnamon; mix well. Toss peach slices with sugar mixture until evenly coated; gently stir in blueberries. Spoon peach mixture into bottom crust.
  2. Add top crust. Cut four slits in top crust to allow steam to escape. Sprinkle sugar evenly over crust, if desired. Cover edge of pie with 2 to 3 inch wide strips of aluminum foil or Pie Shield.
  3. Bake for 45 minutes; remove foil or Pie Shield.
  4. Bake for an additional 10 to 15 minutes or until crust is golden brown.
  5. Remove from oven; cool at least 2 hours.
  6. Serve with ice cream, if desired.

Nutrition

Per serving: Calories 480, Total Fat 19g, Saturated Fat 5g, Cholesterol 25mg, Carbohydrate 72g, Protein 5g, Sodium 160mg, Fiber 4g

Attribution

Pampered Chef

Amid The Mysterious Deaths of U.S. Soldiers in Lithuania, French Soldiers Began Deserting En MASSE

Shorpy

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SHORPY 4a12309a.preview

Who Is the US In Debt to?

Title: Sir Whiskerton and the Cheese Caper Conspiracy

Ah, welcome back, dear reader! Once again, you’ve come seeking a tale of my brilliance, and I, Sir Whiskerton, the unparalleled detective of the farm, shall not disappoint. This time, I found myself entangled in a case so convoluted, so utterly ridiculous, that it involved not only my frequent nuisance and occasional ally, Rufus the raccoon, but also a new player: Sylvester the field mouse. Sylvester, as you’ll soon see, is a creature of very small stature and very large brains. Together, we unraveled a web of schemes, daring thefts, and, of course, cheese. Lots and lots of cheese.

This, my friends, is the story of The Cheese Caper Conspiracy.

The Crime

It all began on a warm summer evening. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and the farm was settling into its usual calm. I was perched on the fence post near the barn, grooming my impeccable fur, when I heard a loud, dramatic wail from the farmhouse.

“My cheese! Someone’s stolen my cheese!”

It was Farmer Joe, his voice echoing across the fields. From the tone of his anguish, you’d think someone had stolen his life savings. Moments later, the animals began whispering among themselves.

“Cheese theft?” Henny Penny clucked nervously. “What kind of monster would do such a thing?”

“Probably Rufus,” Harold the rooster said, glaring toward the barn. “It’s always Rufus.”

“Hey!” Rufus popped his head out of a nearby barrel, looking offended. “I didn’t take it! This time.”

I sighed dramatically and hopped down from the fence post. “Alright, everyone, settle down. There’s no need to panic. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

The animals stopped chattering and turned to me with a mix of relief and expectation. After all, who else could solve the mystery but the great Sir Whiskerton?

The Investigation Begins

My first stop was the farmhouse kitchen, the scene of the crime. The cheese in question—a large wheel of gouda Farmer Joe had been saving for some kind of special occasion—had been taken right off the counter. The only clues left behind were a trail of small, sticky footprints and a few crumbs scattered on the floor.

“Sticky footprints,” I muttered, examining the evidence closely. “Interesting.”

“Sticky like… honey?” Rufus asked, appearing beside me with a guilty grin.

“Not this time, Rufus,” I said, rolling my eyes. “The footprints are too small for you. But don’t go too far—I have a feeling you’ll be involved before this is over.”

Rufus looked offended but stayed quiet, which I considered a small victory.

As I followed the trail of footprints out the back door, I heard a tiny voice behind me.

“Ahem. Sir Whiskerton, I presume?”

I turned and found myself face-to-face—or rather, face-to-paw—with the smallest creature I’d ever seen on the farm. Sylvester the field mouse stood before me, his little nose twitching and his beady eyes gleaming with intelligence. He wore a tiny scrap of fabric slung over his shoulder like a cape, giving him an air of importance.

“You’re the detective around here, aren’t you?” he said, his voice smooth and confident.

“I am,” I replied, narrowing my eyes. “And who are you?”

“Sylvester, at your service,” he said with a small bow. “I couldn’t help overhearing that there’s been a theft. I’d like to offer my assistance.”

“Assistance?” Rufus snorted from the doorway. “You’re, like, four inches tall. What are you gonna do, squeak the thief into submission?”

Sylvester shot him a withering look. “I may be small, but I’m smarter than you and faster than both of you put together. Trust me, you’ll want me on this case.”

I considered him for a moment. He had a point. “Alright, Sylvester,” I said. “You’re in. But no funny business.”

“Of course,” Sylvester said with an innocent smile. “Shall we begin?”
The Suspects

The trail of footprints led us to the barn, where the usual suspects were gathered.

1. Porkchop the Pig

Porkchop was lounging in his mud pit, looking suspiciously content. “Porkchop,” I said, “did you take the cheese?”

He shook his head vehemently. “Cheese? No way! I like my food sloppy, not fancy. That stuff’s too rich for me.”

Sylvester sniffed the air. “He’s telling the truth. No cheese scent on him.”

“Hmm,” I said, moving on.

2. Clover the Goat

Clover was chewing on an old fence post, as usual. “Clover, did you take the cheese?” I asked.

She stopped chewing long enough to say, “Cheese? Ew. Too soft. I like things crunchy.”

“Fair enough,” Sylvester said, jotting something down in a tiny notebook he’d pulled from who-knows-where. “Not our culprit.”

3. Rufus the Raccoon

I turned to Rufus, who was busy innocently whistling. “Rufus,” I said, “are you sure you didn’t take the cheese?”

“Come on, Whiskerton!” Rufus protested. “I’d never steal cheese. Not when there’s a perfectly good jar of peanut butter in the pantry.”

Sylvester raised an eyebrow. “He’s telling the truth. This time.”

“Alright,” I said, my tail twitching. “If none of you took it, then who did?”
The Breakthrough

As I pondered the mystery, Sylvester suddenly perked up. “Wait a minute,” he said, his tiny ears twitching. “Do you hear that?”

I listened closely and heard a faint squeaking sound, followed by the unmistakable creak of a wheel turning.

“The cheese!” Sylvester exclaimed. “Someone’s rolling it away!”

We followed the sound to the edge of the cornfield, where we found the culprits: a gang of field mice, struggling to push the enormous wheel of gouda toward their burrow. They froze when they saw us, their tiny paws still on the cheese.

“Alright, drop the cheese and back away slowly,” I said, stepping forward.

The leader of the gang, a scruffy-looking mouse with a scar over one eye, squeaked nervously. “We didn’t mean any harm! We just… we couldn’t resist. It smelled so good!”

Sylvester stepped forward, his cape fluttering dramatically. “You’ve embarrassed us all,” he said sternly. “Stealing from the humans? That’s rookie behavior.”

The gang hung their heads in shame. “We’re sorry,” the leader mumbled. “We’ll give it back.”

The Happy Ending

With Sylvester’s help, we rolled the cheese back to the farmhouse and left it on the counter. Farmer Joe assumed he’d misplaced it and was none the wiser. The field mice promised to stick to foraging from the fields, and Sylvester, impressed by my investigative skills, promised to lend his help on future cases.

As for Rufus, he spent the rest of the evening trying to convince me he could’ve solved the case without Sylvester. I didn’t bother arguing. Some battles just aren’t worth fighting.
The Moral of the Story

Even the smallest among us can make a big difference, especially when they use their talents for good. And when it comes to cheese, always keep an eye on your kitchen counter—especially if there’s a mouse around.

The End.

Comix

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88e08167f90d9acf6d0f2b86d1d3cd87

Theo Benson

This story contains themes or mentions of physical violence, gore, or abuse.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Dr. Morrison held a small vial up to the light, amber liquid swirling inside. “After all our efforts, all of our sacrifices, we’re so close to a cure.”Isabelle held her datapad closer to the Doctor, determined to get as clear of an audio recording as possible. They had spent hours in Silver Grandeur’s lab. Her legs ached. With painstaking precision, Dr. Morrison walked Isabelle through all of the functions of Lab Section 1, explaining each device that helped to refine and prepare the contents of the vial in his hand. The soreness she’d feel later would be worth the story. Especially as a Junior Data Reporter.“Tell us, Doctor,” Isabelle said, shifting weight from one leg to another, “What’s the greatest challenge you’ve faced with Project Find?”“We’ve all lost people to the sickness, haven’t we?”Isabelle looked away.“No challenge is greater than that of grief,” Dr. Morrison said with a sad smile. “Yet their memory lives on in the work we accomplish.” He gingerly set the vial into its holder on the table in front of them. After a moment of silence, he asked, “Anything else?”“Yes,” Isabelle perked up. “About the beginning. How exactly did this-”A shudder rocked the ship. Lights flickered in the lab as Dr. Morrison and Isabelle steadied themselves against the table.“Seekers,” He muttered as the shaking subsided. Another, more violent shudder, nearly knocked Isabelle off her feet. The vials on the table clattered together. “They always find us.”Around them, scientists in lab coats hurried to secure loose items. Isabelle found herself being led towards the exit.“I’m sorry to cut this short,” the Doctor said, leading her out into the main hallway and shutting the door behind them. “I need to speak with the Captain before one of those things tears a hole in our outer hull again.”Isabelle pulled her father into a hug. “Be safe.”After watching Dr. Morrison race out of sight, she opened her hand and smiled at it. Seated in the palm of her hand was a grey access card. Her father’s. Slipping back inside the lab, Isabelle quickly donned a lab coat, mask, and goggles. Only a few scientists remained. Evidently, the rest had dispersed to secure other sections of Silver Grandeur’s large lab. She snuck to the back of Section 1, connecting her datapad to the lab’s information center – a port in the wall.The ship rocked again, and Isabelle steadied herself against the wall.She switched rapidly from catalogue to catalogue, searching. There had to be something more interesting here. Yes, her father had shown her this section of the lab, but she was not so naïve as to think this was all there was. Scientific breakthrough had to come from somewhere. And a good Data Reporter needed to be willing to break a few rules to find out.Isabelle paused on one catalogue.Project Find. It read. She inserted Dr. Morrison’s card into her datapad to open the file. Disappointment grew as she read. Most of the words made absolutely no sense. Yes, they were English. But no matter how hard Isabelle squinted at them and sounded them out under her breath, their meaning remained completely foreign.But then she spotted something she could understand.Successful creation of antidote and enhancement secured via genetic mesh.

Below, it read; See Donor Subject File. Lab Section 13.

She disconnected her datapad and pressed deeper into the lab.

Another shudder shook Silver Grandeur. She began humming softly as she passed more labcoats, remembering the melody her mother would use to comfort her when she was little. After the Seekers first attacked.

On its one-hundredth and fifty-second year of voyaging in space, five years after Silver Grandeur’s passengers were woken from cryo-sleep, the Seekers struck. So did the sickness.

Deep space sickness, they called it.

No one knew what caused it. Some blamed the Seekers, who appeared immune to the disease. With their arrival shortly preceding the first outbreak, they were easy to blame. Some claimed it was a result of extended cryo-sleep. Simply a scientific oversight. And others, the more religious of Silver Grandeur’s passengers, proclaimed it was judgement for their departure from God’s one true home for them – Earth. Apparently, extended cryo-sleep had conveniently allowed them to forget Earth’s death. Reduced to a desolate wasteland, their one true home forced what remained of humanity to flee.

Her mother was one of the first to die from the sickness. Isabelle was ten at the time. Her father threw himself into a frenzy of work after his wife’s death, refusing to take inevitable death – either by sickness or by Seeker – as the final answer. Fifteen years had since passed.

Isabelle reached the end of Section 12 and stopped. Before her lay a single door. Lab Section 13. 

Checking behind her to make sure no one was watching, Isabelle opened the door with Dr. Morrison’s access card and slipped inside, shutting the door behind her.

Cold air shocked her. Isabelle shivered. Section 13 was freezing, not to mention smaller than she expected. The room contained only a handful of control panels on either side of the door and a containment unit on the far wall that was coated in frost.

Isabelle frowned. Was this the Donor Subject?

She approached the unit and used her sleeve to wipe a patch of frost from the glass.

A dark form moved inside.

Isabelle had seen Seekers before. Windows across the ship gave good view for those with a morbid enough interest to watch them attack. With a snouted maw filled with teeth, an excess of appendages tipped with claws, long wings, and sleek black bodies, they blended easily against the backdrop of space. Only when close enough to Silver Grandeur’s lights did the light of the ship reflecting off their bodies illuminate their presence. In darkness they did not exist.

She squinted at it. It was almost entirely obscured by the remaining frost and the condensation building inside her goggles. Isabelle steadied her breathing, excitement mounting as she removed her goggles to peer inside. She’d never seen one this close before.

Her breath caught in her throat.

Eyes, eyes that Seekers did not – should not – have, stared back at her.

It lunged.

Isabelle jerked backwards, slamming into the panels behind her. The creature thrashed against the glass and Isabelle glanced down in panic as a small alarm sounded on the panel just under her arm.

The sides of the containment unit hissed open.

Isabelle ran. Tearing metal echoed behind her.

She collided with a labcoat in Section 11. “Go! It’s out!” Not stopping to wait, she ran on through the lab, leaving the startled man behind. Several seconds later there was a scream. A loud crunch. And silence.

Lungs and legs burning, Isabelle burst into Section 1, the door sliding shut behind her. Several dozen scientists milled about, the ship’s shaking having since stopped.

“Run,” she said.

A few labcoats looked at her in confusion. Thudding behind the door she entered grew louder.

Isabelle tore off her mask, wheezing. “Run!”

The door she came through flew across the room, crushing a scientist against the wall. Standing a head taller than Isabelle, the creature that entered stood on legs rippling with sleek black muscle. Its head was surprisingly rounded, with something like the remnants of hair dotting the top of its head. It stretched tall and raised tensed arms, claws glinting in the lab’s harsh light. Opening its mouth, the creature let out a roar.

Scientists screamed and scattered.

Isabelle raced to the door leading into the rest of the ship. Several scientists followed. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and Isabelle careened to the side just in time to avoid a large metal table as it flew past her and smashed into the door. The labcoats weren’t as lucky.

An alarm blared in the lab. The scientist who activated it let out a blood-curdling scream from the center of the room as the creature charged him. It roared again, striking claws into both labcoat and control panel. Metal and flesh tore.

The lab was plunged into darkness.

Isabelle’s feet slid against the floor, a red emergency light flaring to life and pulsing slowly to illuminate the dark puddle she now stood in. She gagged, fighting to stay upright. Something struck her shoulder and Isabelle went down hard. A woman screamed beside her on the floor, having also fallen, and as the lights flashed Isabelle could make out a tall form to her right.

The creature crouched low. Isabelle scurried away as darkness returned. Crunching, twisting – a rending of flesh met her ears a few feet away, and warm liquid splattered her face. The woman’s screams fell silent.

She crawled as quickly as she could until she reached the lab’s wall. Feeling with slick hands along its surface, Isabelle’s fingers found purchase on the metal grooves of a vent grate. Hands shaking, she pulled off the clover, slipped inside the space just wide enough to hold her, and closed it. Cries of terror and agony dwindled one by one. Isabelle could hear them pounding against the crushed door, wailing as they realized it was too damaged to open. A body slammed against the vent grate and slumped to one side. Warm liquid began pooling next to Isabelle and she backed away. Shuffling quietly until she met a curve in the vent shaft, the young Data Reporter choked back tears. Now was not the time to cry.

A final voice cried out, and with that, the lab was silent.

Isabelle stopped.

Another sound had risen to fill the silence. A low vibration, somewhere between a growl and a hum came from the creature. She could feel the sound rumbling in her chest, deep in her lungs and heart, as though tugging on something. Carefully, she started moving again, crawling on slippery hands and knees.

Her knee skidded to the side and struck the vent shaft with a dull thunk. Isabelle steadied herself, holding her breath. She heard the grate tear free and clatter somewhere inside the lab.

Isabelle thrust herself around the bend, not caring how much noise she made now as the sounds of thudding and scraping behind her soon followed. With a cry of alarm, Isabelle’s weight-bearing hand slipped out from under her. Her head crashed against the side of the vent. Swaying awkwardly, Isabelle focused blurred vision up ahead.

Was it her imagination, or was there light around the next bend?

A growling hum propelled her forward.

Pulling with her arms, Isabelle slid around the final bend and was met by another grate leading down, light pouring from it. Every muscle in her body burned as she raised her hand and struck the grate.

It didn’t budge.

With a shriek, she brought her hand down against the grate again. And again and again and again.

CRASH.

Isabelle dropped to the floor below, pain bursting at her feet.

“HELP!” Her shout echoed as she limped quickly, turning right at an intersection in the hallway. “HEL-”

A closed blast door barring her path.

No.

She whirled around to see the creature dash into view.

No. No.

The creature skidded to a halt, muscles tensing. Bright hallway light finally illuminated the scarlet haphazardly painting both monster and woman. Isabelle’s back pressed against the door. It stalk towards her, moving with slow, purposeful steps. That of a hunter. That of one who knew its place in the pecking order.

Seekers. They always find us. 

Isabelle’s back slid until she met the ground. She turned her face away.

“Don’t hurt her!” A voice yelled. Her father’s.

Isabelle looked up in surprise. The creature turned to face Dr. Morrison, growling deep in its body and lifting its arms in a display.

“Don’t do this,” he said to the creature.

It roared.

Isabelle sobbed. “What is it?”

It roared again.

“Dad, what is it?”

His voice was even as he spoke. Measured carefully. “We acquired a Seeker’s DNA many years ago, hoping to find a cure. What we discovered was that they had so much more to offer us.” Dr. Morrison’s eyes flashed with something near-feral. “Strength, Izzy.” She watched through tear-streaked vision as he stepped to one side, the creature tracking his movement. “Strength we could never dream of acquiring on our own. We just needed to bridge the genetic gap.” Her father’s expression grew almost sad as he gazed at the creature. “Human experimentation was the only way. I’m sorry, dear.”

With a rippling of muscle the creature pounced. Isabelle forced her eyes to the ground as the sounds of carnage lifted to join that of the alarm. A sickening cacophony.

And then the carnage ceased.

Slow, thudding footsteps approached her. What had once been a growl dwindled to the lowest of vibrations. A soft humming. Isabelle looked at it with a start.

The creature’s face was close. Strings of sinew hung from red teeth, dripping blood onto Isabelle’s legs. As she looked above the horror of its maw, she saw its eyes. Familiar eyes. A memory pressed uninvited into Isabelle’s mind as the hum reverberated in her chest. Her mother, seated at the edge of Isabelle’s bed, the young girl cowering beneath her blankets as Silver Grandeur shuddered. Feeling a hand on her arm over the blanket, she listened to the melody of her mother’s tune as sleep finally overcame fear.

The creature knelt in front of Isabelle. Extending a single, blood-covered hand, it caressed the side of her face.

Isabelle’s eyes widened in shock. “Mom?”

Stories From The Torrid History Of Absinthe

The poets booze of choice.

Coconut Cream Tropical Pie

0e2e7f63ac0fefb4990dc0ab877bc817
0e2e7f63ac0fefb4990dc0ab877bc817

Yield: 16 servings or 24 sample servings

Ingredients

  • 1 (15 ounce) package refrigerated pie crusts (2 crusts)
  • 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened
  • 1 (8 ounce) can pineapple chunks in juice, undrained
  • 1 lime
  • 1 (12 ounce) container frozen whipped topping, thawed
  • 1 (3.4 ounce) package coconut cream instant pudding and pie filling
  • 1/2 cup sweetened flaked coconut, toasted, divided
  • 1 large orange, sliced
  • 2 kiwi, peeled and sliced

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. Let pie crusts stand at room temperature 15 minutes.
  3. Lightly sprinkle Large Round Stone with flour. Gently unfold one pie crust and place in center of baking stone. Unfold second crust and place over first crust, matching edges and pressing to seal. Using Baker’s Roller(R), roll crusts to edge of baking stone.
  4. Fold 1/2 inch of edge of crust in toward center, forming an even border; press to seal seam. Flute edge, if desired; use pastry tool to prick entire surface of crust. Bake 20-25 minutes or until light golden brown. Remove from oven; cool completely.
  5. Place cream cheese in Classic Batter Bowl; whisk until smooth using Stainless Steel Whisk. Drain pineapple, reserving juice. Chop pineapple using Food Chopper. Using Lemon Zester/Scorer, zest lime; set aside for garnish. Juice lime to measure 1 tablespoon juice. Add pineapple, 1/4 cup of the pineapple juice and lime juice to cream cheese; whisk until smooth. Add whipped topping, pudding mix and half of the coconut; mix until well blended using Small Mix ‘N Scraper(R). Spread filling evenly over crust.
  6. Using Utility Knife, cut peel off orange and slice orange in half lengthwise; slice crosswise into 1/4 inch thick slices. Slice kiwi using Egg Slicer Plus(R). Arrange orange and kiwi slices over filling. Sprinkle remaining coconut around edge of filling. Sprinkle reserved lime zest over fruit.
  7. Refrigerate 30 minutes.
  8. Cut into wedges and serve.

Notes

To toast coconut in microwave oven, place coconut in Small Oval Baker; microwave on HIGH 1 to 2 minutes or until golden brown, stirring after each 10 second interval. Cool completely.

Nutrition

Per serving: Calories 280, Total Fat 16g, Saturated Fat 10g, Cholesterol 20mg, Carbohydrate 29g, Protein 2g, Sodium 220mg, Fiber less than 1g

Attribution

Pampered Chef

South Korea Is a Dystopia

OMG the MM Personal Computer went into the pearly gates of the has-been

Well, I had a complete computer crash.

OIP C3
OIP C3

BIOs cannot find anything.

cant access bios thumbnail
cant access bios thumbnail

USB sticks are unusable. Can’t access the BIOs, and my hard drive couldn’t be found, and when I found it, the partions were all corrupted.

OIP C4
OIP C4

My computer was a “boat anchor”.

Well, after about six hours wasted away trying to figure out what was going on, I decided to get a replacement computer.

Took the time.

Drove to the local mall.

Chose between Honor, Huawei and Shaomi brands.

The young women sales-chicks in the Honor and Huawei stores were clueless. Telling me such things as “Windows does not have a version in English”, and ” you need a RAM of 32GB minimum to run modern programs.”

*sheech*

Luckily there was a youngish man who was on point in the shaomi store, and he really helped us out.

So I got a latest version as the one that conked out.

Shaomi Redmi 14 to a Shaomi Redmi 16.

OIP C5
OIP C5

But I stepped down some on the performance.

Not as fast. Not so much RAM. But a good robust design.

I came with Windows, but I upgraded for the English overlay (no auto updates, and no backdoors to the CIA.

And because of this, I installed Microsoft Windows 11+

OIP C2
OIP C2

…AND…

Lunix Mint Cinnamon at Wilma 22 build on it.

OIP C
OIP C

So I have a dual OS option.

I just select the boot-up option when I turn on the computer.

Anyways…

That is what I have been working with over the last few days. I have lost about one month of files, but I have the rest either in the various clouds, or on my backup drive.

I got it all straightened out using my AI assistant; “Deep seek”.

ksnip 20241228 063147
ksnip 20241228 063147

With much more detail later on.

Ah. I’m still in the system banging away on the laptop. But things seem much better now.

Today…

Do you want to hear the truth or lies?

The lie is, MAGA, USA! USA! USA!

The truth.

Let me first state that I am Chinese.

The United States should first consider how to restart the F22 production line.

What? 70% of the F22 parts need to be imported from China, otherwise it will not be manufactured?

What? Most of the suppliers of the remaining 30% of F22 parts have gone bankrupt?

What? Are all the industrial workers in F22 already old?

What? Musk thinks it’s a joke that we’re still building fifth-generation machines. Should the United States engage in drones?

If you ask which company has better drone technology?

………………

What about the F35? Seriously, is the F35 really considered a fifth-generation machine?

So it’s okay. Americans can think about it, first upgrade your old aircraft F22, improve the F35,

I won’t say here that the parameters of our Chinese J20 and J35 are much higher than those of the F22.

Let’s go and develop sixth-generation machines.

Tex-Mex Chicken Melts

tex mex chicken 1
tex mex chicken 1

Yield: 20 servings

Ingredients

Canape Bread

  • 1 (11 ounce) package refrigerated French bread dough

Filling

  • 1/2 cup onion, finely chopped
  • 1/2 cup green bell pepper, chopped
  • 4 ounces (1 cup) Cheddar cheese, grated, divided
  • 1 (10 ounce) can chunk white chicken, drained and flaked
  • 1/4 cup mayonnaise
  • 1 tablespoon Pantry Southwestern Seasoning Mix
  • 1 garlic clove, pressed
  • 2 plum tomatoes, sliced
  • 2 tablespoons fresh parsley, snipped

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. Using Kitchen Spritzer, lightly spray inside of Bread Tube and caps with vegetable oil. Cap bottom of Bread Tube; fill tube with dough. Place cap on top.
  3. Bake, upright, for 50 to 60 minutes.
  4. Cool for 10 minutes. Remove bread from tube onto Nonstick Cooling Rack. Cool completely.
  5. Cut bread into 20 (1/4 inch) slices with Serrated Bread Knife. Arrange slices on Rectangle Stone.
  6. Chop onion using Food Chopper. Chop bell pepper using Utility Knife. Grate cheese using Deluxe Cheese Grater.
  7. In Classic Batter Bowl, combine chicken, onion, bell pepper, 1/2 cup of the cheese, mayonnaise, Seasoning Mix and garlic pressed with Garlic Press; mix well.
  8. Using Medium Scoop, divide filling evenly among bread slices. Slice tomatoes using Ultimate Slice & Grate fitted with v-shaped blade. Place one tomato slice over filling on each bread slice. Snip parsley using Kitchen Shears.
  9. In Small Batter Bowl, toss remaining cheese and parsley to combine. Sprinkle over tomato slices.
  10. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes or until golden brown.
  11. Serve hot.

Attribution

Pampered Chef

I will tell you, but you might not like the answer.

I’m a cook, and I have cooked a lot of steaks, and everything the other answers say is true. A lot depends on the quality of the meat and the technique.

But there is one thing nobody has mentioned.

Once upon a time, I worked as a server in a restaurant that was known for the quality of their steaks. Steak night was a big deal, and always a full house.

The owner did the steaks himself, and he had a secret recipe for basting that he told me he got from a chef at a chain steakhouse. He wouldn’t tell me the recipe but I saw him add a bottle of Italian dressing, so I knew that was one of the ingredients.

We had a new cook, and one day she was filling the big stove salt shakers. She complained that the salt didn’t taste right, and wondered if it had gone bad, so I asked her where she got the salt from. She pulled a big jar off the top shelf, and showed it to me.

It said Monosodium Glutamate.

She read sodium on the label and mistook it for salt.

And instantly I knew the secret to the steaks.

So the next steak night I watched, and sure enough he reached for the MSG.

It makes a noticeable difference in the taste of meat, and it’s in a lot of prepared steak seasonings that you buy, but it might not be good for you. Personally, I don’t use it.

Gate M41

Submitted into Contest #196 in response to: Set your story in a world where time travel has been perfected, and people can use it to hop between alternate timelines — but at a cost. view prompt

Liv Chocolate

This story contains sensitive content

cw: mentions of suicide, murder, sex, and terminal illness  

 

Balloons, apparently, are a weapon of mass destruction. Even the one that I’m fighting to get past security at this very moment—an 18” round one with the words GET WELL SOON printed above a cartoon sun wearing sunglasses. The more I look at it, the more it bothers me that the sun, in theory, is protecting himself against himself.

 

Out of all the people in our lives, we hurt ourselves the most, my husband had warned me before I left. Are you sure you want to visit this woman? 

 

“She’s dying—as in, terminally ill dying.” That’s the honest explanation I gave to anyone who asked, including the security guard arguing with me right now. This would be my good deed of the year. This is how I’d atone for all the sins I’d committed in my thirty-seven years of life; how I’d pay my penance for the two-sided tendencies that have plagued me for as long as I can remember.

 

“Then why tell her to get well soon?” the guard asks, humored. “I mean, if she’s terminally ill?”

 

With a gloved hand, he confiscates my balloon, making me, at thirty-seven years old, feel like a child. Sometimes I think the guards inconvenience us on purpose, purely out of envy. Only the top three percent can afford time-travel. In fact, most can’t even afford to travel economy. The last time I traveled, there was an issue with my shampoo and the time before that an issue with the studs on my heels.

 

The guards also tend to dislike us for the reasons we travel. Some elite travel to alternate timelines to have sex with more athletic versions of themselves. Others travel to alternate timelines to kill less successful versions of themselves, to which their lawyers always end up successfully arguing is suicide, not murder.

 

I explain to the guard that I am not that type of traveler, however. Contrary to what he may believe about me or the top three percent in general, I’m not that type of rich person. I do not want to perform sexually creative acts on a leaner version of myself. Nor do I want to slaughter a weaker version of myself for my own sick pleasure. I simply want to deliver a 99-Cents-Store balloon to a dying version of myself, atone for all the times I’ve deceived people in my life and then go home to my two boys and husband where we will count our blessings.

 

But he refuses to return my balloon and points me to Gate M41.

 

***

In the first letter I ever wrote to the dying version of myself, I asked her why—out of the infinite number of variations there were of myself—her life will end the most abruptly. We had the same genetics, after all. The same family history and predispositions to different types of illnesses, albeit different life decisions that had led us in radically different directions.

 

She responded almost immediately to my letter. Probably due in part to the fact that she only has so much time left in this universe—but also because time-postage costs a fraction of what it costs to time-travel.

 

Even someone like her, buried in medical bill after medical bill, could afford it.

 

The air is bad here, she wrote back. The food is bad, too. Pumped with preservatives and chemicals that deform your organs. Probably why I have heart disease and you don’t? Your world is better, cleaner.

 

Did I mention I can barely afford my blood thinners? she added. My blood is as thick as gravy, and I’m only thirty-seven. I probably won’t even live to get married. Become a mother. Those are the two things I’ve wanted to do most before I die.

 

I offered to travel to her—to pay for every medical bill, no matter how large. We were connected, after all—maybe even more so than sisters or lovers. The more I wrote to her, the more I felt for her, too. We had the same handwriting, the same 90-degree Ls that could stab and carefully closed Os with not even the smallest gap. At one point, I thought I loved her. Not in a romantic way or even a familial way but in the way my therapist once told me that I needed to love myself more. Perhaps this was the closest I’d ever come to self-love, given what a terrible person I am at my core, in this and every timeline.

 

So I offered and offered. I’d pay for the blood thinners; I’d pay for the hospice care; I’d pay for the teddy bears. Though I didn’t mean to brag, I made it clear to her that it would be at no cost to me. Our realities, though vastly different, still used the same currency.

 

When she finally agreed to the money, we decided I’d deliver the money in person to make sure it ended up in the right hands.

 

You can’t trust people, she’d written. People are terrible. Especially where I’m from. 

 

***

 

I buy a new balloon when I arrive. It’s almost identical to the one taken from me, except this one doesn’t say GET WELL SOON. It says SUMMER FUN, even though it is December.

 

The air is thicker here and the smog covers the sun, but the other me assured me before I arrived that it would take a life-long length of exposure for me to end up in the same position she’s in.

 

As I search for her room number, my anxiety builds. I worry what I will say when I walk in. What she will say when I walk in. The handle of the suitcase of money becomes damp in my hand. I remind myself that I’ve talked to myself in the mirror before; had hypothetical practice conversations and practice arguments with myself in the mirror. I’ve even kissed my own reflection. Talking to this alternate version of myself would, in reality, be no different. I’d visited alternate versions of myself before, but never any that were dying.

 

“Mary?” a voice like mine says as I push the door open.

 

“Hi, Mary. It’s me, Mary.”

 

We both laugh uncomfortably. I try to hug her, but the plastic nest of tubes enveloping her small frame make it more awkward than it already is. We look identical, except for a scar on her left cheek. She’d mentioned in one of her letters a Terrier that attacked her at at her uncle’s BBQ, something that had never happened to me because of a slight variation in my own timeline. The more I look at her, the more I recognize myself in her.

 

“Your face is so much more beautiful than mine,” she says, touching her scar, and reaching to feel my own face.

 

Unsure of how to respond, I tie the cheap, curly balloon ribbon around her limp wrist. She admires the Cartier bracelet around my own wrist and then looks back down at the ribbon tied to hers.

 

“You’re so much better than me,” she says in a croaking voice.

 

“Well, I am you. Just you under different circumstances.”

 

We’re both silent for a moment until I get to the point. “This is the money.”

 

She looks at the suitcase. “Straight cash?”

 

“It’s the only way to deliver it.”

 

“I know. I’m just in shock.” She lowers her voice. “Can I ask you a question?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“How much exactly is in there? Don’t say it too loud.”

 

I take out my phone to type it out for her. She looks at my wallpaper and smiles. “Is that your husband?” she asks solemnly.

 

“Yes. That’s Ted. And our two boys. Bradley and Hunter.”

 

“You’re so lucky.”

 

“Don’t be jealous,” I say light-heartedly. “Marriage isn’t as great as it seems. And kids . . . boys especially!” I roll my eyes light-heartedly and change the subject. I type in the amount with my freshly manicured nails and show her the screen.

 

“No,” she says, point blank. “I only need a fraction of that amount for the blood thinners.”

 

“Spend the rest on whatever you want,” I say. “Sincerely. Spend it on whatever you’ve dreamed of doing before you die.”

 

***

 

I tuck Mary in her bed under the starchy hospital sheets and kiss her on the forehead goodbye. She’s out on morphine by the time I book a trip out, so there are no awkward goodbyes and she can no longer beg and scream at me for leaving early as the nurses hold her back.

 

In a matter of minutes, I leave this reality and go back to my own where my husband embraces me and my two boys barrel down the stairs to tug at my skirt.

 

“How was it?” asks Ted.

 

“Good.”

 

“Did she take the money?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“That’s wonderful,” says Ted, pulling me in but then pushing me back so that he can see my entire face.

 

“Mary,” he says, startled. “What happened to your cheek?”

Roland Bartetzko is a former German paratrooper who was charged with serious crimes in Kosovo related to terrorism and murder. After being dishonorably discharged from the Bundeswehr in 1991, he lived a life as a mercenary and alleged contract killer, particularly during the Yugoslav Wars and later in Kosovo. He is linked to several bombings and massacres specifically targeting Serbian civilians and government officials.

Key Aspects and Crimes:

  • Military Background: Dishonorably discharged from the Bundeswehr. Participated in explosives courses and commando training during his time as a paratrooper.
  • Mercenary and Terrorist Activities: Fought in the Yugoslav Wars on the Croatian side, and later with Muslim fighters. Suspected of working as a contract killer for the UÇK (Kosovo Liberation Army) in Kosovo. Main suspect in the murder of Colonel Aleksandar Petrovic through a precisely planned bombing attack. Connected to other attacks, including: A bombing of a peace center in Pristina (August 18). An attack on the residence of a Serbian government official (November 22). A massacre of civilians in a bus convoy near Podujevo (February 16), killing at least 10 people, including children.
  • Criminal Past: Arrested in Germany for handbag theft and other robbery offenses. Founded a suspected criminal “security company” in Kosovo that covered extortion and terrorist acts.
  • Personality and Negative Traits: Isolation: Severed contact with his family and led a nomadic life during the war. Glorification of Violence: Exhibited a “weapon obsession” and a willingness to engage in terrorist acts. Exploitation of Surroundings: Married an Albanian woman and adapted to local culture to hide his activities in Kosovo.
  • Evidence and Consequences: Bartetzko’s fingerprints were found on unexploded bombs, directly linking him to the terrorist attacks. He faced up to 40 years in prison for murder, terrorism, and bodily harm, was sentenced to 23 years and set free in 2015.

Bartetzko is definitely as a ruthless, violent opportunist who used his military training and strategic skills for terrorist and criminal purposes. His life is marked by isolation, crime, and a close connection to organized crime in Kosovo.

Shorpy

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China is NOT Messing Around This TIme – Here’s Why

No it is not.

The Greed of Man

Submitted into Contest #18 in response to: Your fingers tensed around the object in your pocket, ready to pull it out at a moment’s notice. view prompt

Annony Mous

General

He had been following me all day. Of course I didn’t turn around to see. I could sense him: hear the incessant crunching of his footsteps through the leaves, the labored breathing (I had been walking very quickly for quite some time), and an occasional sniff. I didn’t know exactly why he was stalking me, but I had a pretty good idea.Most of the few pedestrians had gone home and the forest road was practically empty. There was a chill in the air and a biting wind howled through the bare trees, shaking the remaining leaves to the ground. I pulled my cloak tighter around me and turned the curve in the road. I quickened my pace, hoping to tire the man. I knew he could never catch me if I started running, but I didn’t want to appear afraid. Most things did not scare me; I don’t know if it was the weather, the forest, or the man, but right now I was filled with trepidation.The figure rounded the corner. I looked up and saw another bend in the road, just ahead. That would be my chance. I hastened my stride even more. Just a few more steps. I peered into the dark forest on my right and left. No one. The turn was approaching, fast. I stole a glimpse behind me. The man looked up, seemingly absorbed in the sky. I smirked and rounded the corner, taking off at high speed.I flew down the dirt road, clutching my cloak. Nearing yet another bend in the road, I tore through the underbrush to my right and pressed my back up against a tree. I thought that the man would think I rounded the corner and pursue me that way. Meanwhile, I would escape back the way we had come.Soon, I heard scuffling feet. The man came to a stop, panting, directly across the road from where I was hiding. Suddenly he yelled. “Terrowin!” Another man, whom I assumed was Terrowin, came sprinting around the corner.”What?” the new-comer asked.”You didn’t see her?””No, I thought you were following her.””She started running,” my pursuer said. “Are you sure she didn’t round the corner?””Aye, I was keeping a close eye on the road and in the woods. She couldn’t have gotten past me.””Then she must be nearby. You search over there.” He pointed on my side of the road. Terrowin nodded, pulled out a dagger, and stalked over to the woods. My fingers tensed around the object in my pocket, ready to pull it out at a moment’s notice.My heart was pounding in my chest, the way my father’s mallet pounded on his anvil. I crouched down in the underbrush and pulled my hood up over my face. At least I blend in with my surroundings, I thought. My cloak is dark green and my shirt and trousers are brown. As I lay down under a bush, my sword rattled against my leg. I muttered a remark under my breath and prayed that my predators hadn’t heard it. I started crawling, my legs dragging behind me, through the undergrowth.”Where is that blasted girl?” a voice very near me complained. I stopped, watching and listening. When I heard him walk away, I started inching my way again.On the other side of the bend, I sat up, brushing mud from my elbows and sword. I peered over the bushes. Nobody was on the road. I glanced behind me. My pursuers were still searching through the vegetation. I sprang up and jumped onto the road. A deluge of shouts announced my appearance and a volley of arrows was shot straight at my head. I ducked quickly and several arrows burried themselves in a tree behind me. I grabbed a bunch and took off.Stealing a glance behind me, I saw a large group of men chasing me. I slowed my pace to let them catch up, slightly. When they were near enough, I hurled the arrows at them. Many hit their mark. I raced off again. I knew they couldn’t catch me, but there were so many of them, they would be able to track me easily. I had to get rid of them. For good.I stopped in my tracks and thrust my hand into my pocket. I wrapped my fingers around the cold glass object. The men hesitated, apparently unsure whether to keep running. With my other hand, I drew my sword. A breeze whipped by, blowing off my hood. I was sure the men could all see the wicked scar stretching down my face. I had dealt with them before, and paid for it. As they advanced, I gripped the object harder. I would never let them confiscate it. It belonged to my people, and I had already rescued it once before. They were approaching quickly, swords drawn.

They were twenty yards away. Fifteen. I pulled my hand out of my pocket and lifted it high above my head. The swirling blue Orb tucked under my fingers became warm. I grinned shakily. Oh, I hope this works. Ten yards away. I yanked my arm down and smashed the Orb on the ground. It resulted in a blue explosion, sending men flying through the air. I ran. As I outstretched my hand, the Orb zipped through the air and landed back in my palm. I smiled. It had worked!

I dashed along the road, barely feeling the ground beneath my feet. The trees to my sides were only a blur. I was headed for my hidden city; the city of the elves. About a quarter mile away from the explosion, I halted. Someone was still following. I couldn’t risk letting him go free and endangering my people. I leaned against a tree on the edge of the road waiting. The man, whom I recognized as my original pursuer, soon came into view. He had survived the explosion, but left with a terrible limp.

When he saw me, he spit. “Who are you and what do you want?” I asked.

He laughed maliciously. “My name is Rowan and I want that!” He pointed a gnarled finger at the Orb.

“You stole it from my people. It is rightfully ours. You cannot requisition it without a conflict.” I pointed my sword at him.

“I don’t care about keeping peace! I just want power, no matter how many lives I must take to get it!” he screamed.

“Then the people you rule will revolt against you. This power cannot quench the might of the people. You will be overthrown.”

He sneered. “You don’t know what it’s like. You’ve always been high and mighty in your people. You don’t know what it’s like to live without.”

“Aye. But since I am ‘high and mighty’ as you say, I know how to properly rule a people. All you are asking for is tyranny.”

A dark scowl crossed his face. “I… Don’t… CARE!” He lunged forward. I quickly pulled out the Orb and thrust it toward him. In a tornado of color, Rowan was sucked in, leaving behind only ashes. I sighed, and dropped the Orb back in my pocket. Then I spun around and ran home.

 

 

“Leyleandi!” my father cried as I strutted into our hidden city. He embraced me and escorted me into the heart of the city. “Welcome home.”

“Thank you, father.”

“I assume your journey went well?”

“Ah, there were a few complications, but I managed.” I smiled.

“And did you retrieve the Orb of Glandias?”

“Aye.”

“Well, let’s have a look, shall we?” We walked over to a table under a tree and once again, I pulled the Orb out of my pocket. Then, I recounted my tale.

“The Orb has served me well.” I smiled.

My father stroked the swirling blue globe reverently. “Aye, It really has.”

I’ve noticed that discussions in Western military forums often lack technical depth and are filled with chaos. I’d like to contribute some serious discussions in hopes of encouraging more of this type of dialogue.

note that I am not very familiar with some terms in English, so if you found somewhere hard to understand, feel free to comment

TL;DR: now it is China that defines the rule of future Air compats

Finally, the official media has reported on it, though it’s a re-post. Last night, as soon as it was released, various experts and influential figures began their analyses, so we will also start our discussion. Let’s provisionally call the new aircraft the J-X.

#### We won’t go over trivial topics; instead, let’s focus on a few key issues.

— –

### 1. Elevon Actuators

Why is this important? What do actuators do? Basically they drive the deflection of aerodynamic control surfaces. The maximum force an actuator can provide reflects the dynamic pressure that the control surface can withstand.

To put it simply, imagine pushing open a door that requires 100 kg of force. If the new door now requires 200 kg of force to open, and my arm can only exert 100 kg of force, I could split the effort by pushing two doors simultaneously.

Thus, we can compare the number of actuators and the control surfaces they drive between the J-X and the J-20. By combining this with the dynamic pressure formula, we can roughly estimate how much faster the J-X can achieve its maximum dynamic pressure compared to the J-20 under the same conditions. This assumes no advancements in hydraulic systems. Considering the progress in hydraulic systems over the years, the J-X’s dynamic pressure capability should be even higher. Additionally, the cross-sectional area of the actuators — though unknown, it appears larger than that of the J-20 — means greater force output according to Pascal’s Law.

After all these considerations, we can estimate the maximum speed of the J-X (which is also its cruise speed, as mentioned later). Essentially, this aligns with what I’ve been saying about the “dual-high” performance, making the F-22’s supercruise seem inadequate in comparison.

Moreover, note that the offset angle of the actuators is significantly larger than that of the J-20. The higher the spanwise flow velocity, the greater the offset angle. Since spanwise flow velocity is related to aircraft speed, it suggests that the J-X’s speed far exceeds that of the J-20.

— –

### 2. Three-Engine Configuration

From the various angles shown in online photos, it is almost certain that the J-X has a three-engine configuration. Given the earlier discussion about the “dual-high” characteristics of the J-X, let’s explore the purpose of these three engines.

Previously, it was mentioned that when an aircraft exceeds Mach 2.5, the air pressure at the end of the intake diffuser becomes sufficient to ignite and produce thrust without further compression by the compressor (the basic principle of a ramjet engine). In such cases, traditional methods of controlling engine turbine speed using throttle become less effective due to the increased influence of airflow on the turbine. The best approach is to bypass the combustion chamber and turbine, directing air directly to the afterburner for ignition — essentially a variable-cycle engine — thus avoiding the issue of turbine overspeed caused by airflow.

However, current variable-cycle engines, including those still under development by other countries, only provide a compromise solution and cannot perfectly match the requirements of wide-ranging flight conditions when functioning as ramjets.

In *The Slap in the Face? Well Done!* it was mentioned that:

“But there is a missing part here: how the aircraft can autonomously take off horizontally and accelerate to the starting speed of the subsonic ramjet engine. The above actually uses a rocket engine to achieve this. So it is indeed interesting to see how MD-22 on the display board solves this issue. However, we might have to wait for an official announcement for a few more years.”

It seems now the answer is clear. The so-called three-engine configuration includes two engines for takeoff and acceleration, used for speeds below Mach 2.5, and to accelerate the aircraft to the speed where the ramjet (main engine) can ignite. However, we must not forget the issue of conventional turbofan engine overspeed. Therefore, these two takeoff engines are either variable-cycle engines themselves or are shut down, allowing airflow to bypass them.

According to this mechanism, the main cruise engine of the J-X is actually the central ramjet engine. Its cruise speed is optimized for the ramjet, which aligns with the “dual-high” design. Seeing this design in the J-X, it reminds me of the previously mentioned Mingdi. It is likely that Mingdi also uses a similar design, as its rear fuselage clearly shows the characteristic of a three-engine layout.

“But there is a missing link here, which is how the aircraft can autonomously take off horizontally and accelerate to the starting speed of the subsonic ramjet engine. The above actually uses a rocket engine to achieve this. So it is indeed interesting to see how MD-22 on the display board solves this issue. However, we might have to wait for an official announcement for a few more years.”

— –

### 3. Intake Ducts

From the photos, the J-X’s two side-mounted takeoff engines use Caret intakes, while an additional DSI (or similar) intake is added to the dorsal section to supply air to the central engine.

Why design in this way? If the earlier speculation holds true, once the main engine is activated, the two side engines must either shut down or enter ramjet mode, meaning the intakes must close or bypass. Clearly, the regular-shaped CARET intakes are easier to handle for such operations compared to DSI intakes.

— –

### 4. Flight Control Mechanism

As a tailless aircraft with a “dual-high” design, introducing TVC (thrust vectoring control) is inevitable. However, from the photos, it appears that the J-X’s TVC provides only single-axis control.

1. **Longitudinal Control**

For a hypersonic aircraft, longitudinal trim can cause significant drag. Therefore, introducing TVC for longitudinal control is essential. Careful examination of the engine nozzle positions in the photos reveals three independent nozzle flaps, indicating that each of the three engines can provide independent longitudinal control moments, working in conjunction with the elevons for trim and control.

2. **Lateral Control**

If, as speculated, the takeoff engines are shut down during high-speed cruise, only the central engine would remain operational, which cannot provide lateral control moments. Based on the earlier discussion of actuators, it is likely that the J-X uses elevons for lateral control during high-speed cruise.

3. **Yaw Control**

From the photos, the J-X features wingtip-mounted split speed brakes/directional rudders. Note that the pivot axis of these devices is almost perpendicular to the aircraft’s longitudinal axis. At low to medium speeds, this design is highly efficient, but at high speeds, the efficiency decreases significantly due to spanwise flow (as discussed earlier regarding actuator offset angles). Moreover, the speed brakes/rudders lack sufficiently powerful actuators. Therefore, it is speculated that at high speeds, the speed brakes/rudders are retracted, and the aircraft relies on differential elevon deflection for yaw control.

— –

### 5. Static Stability

While external observers cannot know the exact static stability characteristics, we can make an educated guess based on the landing gear and wing configuration. From this perspective, the J-X appears to be a highly statically unstable aircraft, which is beneficial for reducing high-speed trim drag.

— –

### 6. Lift Characteristics

There are already hints in the videos about the J-X’s lift characteristics, though few may have noticed.

1. **Camera Tracking**

Those who have filmed the J-8IIM at Zhuhai Airshow might recall how it flies: it suddenly appears, then disappears, and is hard to track in between. This is typical of traditional high-altitude, high-speed aircraft. Do the many online videos of the J-X exhibit this behavior?

2. **Angle of Attack**

Has anyone compared the angle of attack (AoA) between the J-X and the accompanying J-20S? Visually, there seems to be little difference. The J-20 is known for its high maneuverability as a fourth-generation fighter, and the J-X maintains a similar AoA at comparable speeds (of course, the larger wings play a role). The implications of this are significant.

This reinforces the earlier observation made about the MD, and the J-X further confirms this.

“For an aircraft with a maximum Mach number of 7, this approach angle can be said to have a low-speed lift coefficient that is already quite good. Moreover, the approach speed is not fast, estimated to be comparable to typical second-generation aircraft.

Although it is unknown how this is achieved, combining the data from the display board and the video, the high and low-speed performance integration of the aircraft is quite impressive.”

— –

### 7. Weight Considerations

Using the J-20 as a reference, we can estimate the weight of the J-X using empirical formulas, ensuring that the difference is not orders of magnitude. The description of the Yunxing supersonic passenger aircraft, which uses composite materials to address thermal barriers, is particularly relevant here. Another consideration is the fuel fraction, chosen for long-range combat missions. This aligns with the design of the dual-nosewheel and tandem main landing gear, matching the weight estimates. This is similar to the Kuilong concept, though at that time, the “dual-high” and three-engine design were not yet considered.

In summary, the J-X is likely a long-range, multi-role combat platform that excels in both low- and high-speed performance, with a primary focus on high-altitude, high-speed operations (beyond current understanding).

— –

### 8. Future Air Combat

Based on this analysis, the J-X can be considered a revolutionary future combat platform. The F-22 defined the fourth-generation fighter with its 4S concept, marking a significant leap over third-generation fighters. However, the so-called fifth (now sixth) generation fighters have not clearly distinguished themselves from typical fourth-generation aircraft, often being seen as incremental improvements or optimizations of the F-22’s established concepts.

The J-X, however, represents a clear departure from classic fourth-generation designs. With its performance, it could potentially render current air-to-air and surface-to-air weapon systems obsolete. There are no existing weapons systems designed to engage such a platform — air-to-air missiles would essentially fly alongside it, rendering them ineffective. What is a revolutionary weapon? This is it.

The development of fighter aircraft has come full circle after 50 years, returning from the era of maneuverability-focused third-generation fighters to a new age of high-altitude, high-speed dominance. Compared to second-generation fighters, the J-X, with its stealth, long range, high-speed combat network, and unmanned僚机 (unmanned wingmen), represents a quasi-strategic combat platform.

Of course, this is not just about the J-X; there are also aircraft from the northern and northwestern regions. After years of catching up, we are now defining the future of air combat. A salute to all aviation professionals!

Why is China’s electricity so cheap?

I will be 86 this year and ten years ago became disabled and I no longer can walk.

I finally gave in and went into assisted living and I can tell you honestly, I HATE IT.

The facility is lovely and the area is beautiful but I’d sell my soul to the devil to be back in my home all alone with bills to pay.

Up until the day I left, somehow (and today I wonder how I did it – but I did), I took care of myself completely with no help, no family and little money.

I even shoveled my walkway when I could not walk by using one hand to hold onto the railing and used the other hand to push the snow away.

I am extremely independent and active and via taking 30 college courses and doing other activities to help me learn something new on a daily basis, my memory is almost photographic now.

I loved my beautiful home and even though I was lonely, it was MY home.

I did what I wanted when I wanted and made myself decent meals that I loved.

Here most of the people are very old (and definitely show it and act it) with very limited memories.

There is nothing to do for someone like me.

I am the fish out of water.

Thank god I have two jobs (50 years; l4 years) which I love and which keep me busy and I have plenty of hobbies and still drive and go out to eat by myself.

As to taking care of me, they put my support stockings on and take them off – but that is it.

I do everything myself 99.99999%.

I would so love to back at home with my animals – but that will never happen.

Now if you are the kind of person who wants to act/be old, eat meals that are lousy, have activities that are geared to a sixth grade age – fine.

But never this for me.

Born in the Sands of Mars

Submitted into Contest #196 in response to: Set your story in a world where time travel has been perfected, and people can use it to hop between alternate timelines — but at a cost. view prompt

Russell Mickler

The supercollider was called Magus, and it was – undeniably – mankind’s most significant scientific achievement.

Constructed in the asteroid belt 1.2 million kilometers from Mars, Magus remained far from population centers, closest to the resources needed for its function.

In continuous operation for more than four hundred Martian years, the Magus Complex was serviced by tens of thousands of autonomous robots that mined raw materials and fabricated components necessary to maintain the machine.

End-to-end, Magus’ structural truss ran a kilometer long. Housed within that assembly, hundreds of cargo containers were docked side-by-side and interconnected by tens of kilometers of cabling. Fifty containers were uranium-fueled nuclear reactors, six were part of its computer core, and the rest were batteries.

At the heart of Magus was a twenty-two-meter diameter icosahedron composed of twenty triangular electron magnets, surrounded by an array of 2,048 lasers.

Much of the machine’s function was to compute the complex coordinates for time travel.

Generating a future space-time coordinate (STC) wasn’t possible. A Schrodinger’s Cat problem, the desired STC only existed upon observation and was inherently disassociated from the rest of the unobserved universe, thus unreliable. Anything transmitted to the future was obliterated.

However, factoring cosmic entropy alongside the movement of known objects of a specific region of space and knowing their relative mass at scale – ranging from dust particles to satellites, asteroids, moons, planets, solar systems, dark matter, galaxies, and galaxy clusters – Magus could accurately produce an STC to a past location; for instance, it could calculate a previous STC orbiting the planet Earth in just seventeen minutes.

After arriving at an STC, Magus was designed to create a micro-singularity slightly larger than a golf ball – reflecting the totality of information that could be safely transmitted through it – without losing containment, an engineering failure that would result in a 50-kilometer-wide black hole.

And drifting inside the icosahedron, waiting for Magus to finish its computation cycle and held fast by its magnetic field, was an eight-centimeter-long, gold-plated scarab beetle.

 

* * *

 

Mars. 3356.

 

“Approaching STC lock, thirty seconds,” Jaeme reported. She was a senior Magus Complex Engineer and served as a mission specialist.

Kray, mission commander, located hundreds of kilometers away in the State Biodome, tapped his subdermal com in his temple to acknowledge Jaeme verbally. “Thirty seconds.”

Kray nodded affirmatively to Prime Minister Hadiza, who, standing steadfast beside him, consumed a deluge of graphical and statistical information coalescing purely in her mind.

Kray and Jaeme alone were tasked with running Magus’ last mission, what would be its final service, the culmination of a four-hundred-year, multi-generational endeavor.

Under a transparent dome that shielded her people from harmful radiation and contained a life-sustaining atmosphere, Hadiza gazed across the red-soiled planitia. Dressed in a flowing gown of a nanotech fabric that rotated through a pallet of softly-colored hues, she witnessed a hazy, blood-orange Martian sunset for the last time.

All the while, across all of Mars’ biodomes, three hundred thousand watched Hadiza. They saw her proud and determined face via their own neuro-links, all staring breathlessly, blankly into nothingness before them.

Terrified, most of Mars’ citizens clung dearly to each other. Some had tears in their eyes; some had taken vast quantities of drugs to numb their senses; some had already snuffed out their own lives through orderly, sanctioned methods. And others opted for a more peaceful end, sitting among the green grasses of a park or wandering wheat fields with friends. Still, some took to lay alone on cold, steel floors, their eyes closed and their links off, waiting for an uncertain end.

None were humans of Earth. Rather, they collectively referred to themselves as Martians. All forms of obesity, physical deformity, and disease were genetically edited from their biological design. Compared to the humans of Earth, they were spindly and thin; most exceeded eight feet in height. Their limbs, torso, and necks were elongated, and their muscular structure was redesigned to become more slight and fit, perfected to the reduced gravity of Mars. Accommodating Mars’ gravity and dimness, their eyes were slit-shaped like those of a Terran cat, reengineered to absorb more light.

Jaeme’s voice echoed across their collective links. “Fifteen seconds. The cornerstone is queued.”

Kray, stone-faced and dressed in formal uniform, glared at Minister Hadiza, who – tight-lipped – firmly, resolutely, nodded.

“PM concurs,” Kray said, pressing his temple. “Start countdown at ten seconds.”

“Copy,” Jaeme confirmed, before saying, “Ten-”

In biodomes all across Mars, Martians started weeping. They held each other close and confessed their love.

“Nine-”

Some parents picked up their children, their eyes matted with tears, smiled, and whispered lies into their ears.

“Eight-”

A cold sweat raced down Hadiza’s body, and she felt dizzy, bracing herself against the dome’s curvature. At first, she stared at her feet, then fixed her sight on the sunset at the edge of the horizon.

“Seven-”

Revolutionaries in Cassini Biodome hurled Molotov cocktails at peacekeepers, setting officers on fire.

“Six,” Jaeme said, adding, “Magus is primed.”

“Copy,” Kray replied, clenching his jaw.

“Five-”

In the Persbo Biodome, a colony of a hundred red-clad monks prayed for the salvation of all mankind.

“Four-”

In the State Biodome found in the Elysium Planitia, all members of the government apparatus watched on, their expressions emotionless and flat as the countdown continued.

“Three-”

A chaotic mob rushed officers stationed in the Babakin Biodome transit bay, demanding a way out and a ship to take them from Mars.

“Two-”

Watching the space above her head, tears streaming down her cheeks, a Catholic priest gave a Sign of the Cross, kissed her Rosary, and prayed.

“One-”

Delirious, a nude man exited a hatch from Heimdal Biodome to the Martian surface. As he screamed at God, his blood flash-froze, air crystalized in his lungs, and capillaries all over his body burst. He died instantly.

“Event Horizon Confirmed.”

Far away, on Magus, half of its lasers fired into a beamline – magnetic tunnels used to channel quickly-moving sub-atomic particles racing headlong into the icosahedron – while the other half of the array countered. Both volleys slammed highly-accelerated particles into the golden scarab beetle at a single precise nanosecond. Concurrently, when the singularity formed to envelop it, the magnets of the icosahedron compressed to create a magnetic bottle, trapping the event. The process worked as expected, forcing the singularity closed and leaving nothing but empty space at Magus’ core. It was all over in seven milliseconds.

And one thousand, three hundred years earlier, the golden cornerstone appeared in a 48.2-kilometer orbit around the planet Earth.

“Receiving entangled telemetry,” Jaeme advised, moving her hand through spaces before her to interact with symbolic data references perceived in her mind.

Until that moment, her computer systems were unaware of a device with that specific signature orbiting Earth.

However, when observed, Jaeme’s systems acknowledged it’d been there all along. Records of its existence predated her own birth.

“Cornerstone deployment successful,” Jaeme acknowledged, and she sat forward in her chair, tapped off her coms, and began to sob. Her hand trembling, Jaeme brought a blue pill from a glass table to her mouth, tilted her head back, and swallowed.

 

* * *

 

Earth. 3356.

 

The 1,300-year-old scarab beetle cornerstone orbited high above the planet Earth, and, in the vacuum of space, it was still as smooth, golden, and pristine as the moment it arrived.

As its own computer was quantum-entangled with its Martian counterpart, they operated as one, regardless of the time or distance that separated them.

Below, the planet’s oceans were yellowish green, and its land was scorched, barren, and blackened.

There were no glaciers or ice caps at its poles; none of its mountains retained any snow at all; its once-great rivers were poisoned and toxic; what remained of its cities were long since ruined. Earth’s surface vegetation had been corroded – burned away – while chain lightning crawled across gray, churning clouds roiling in its upper atmosphere.

The cornerstone’s sensors registered Earth’s surface temperature near 42c; cyclones and hurricanes raged with 386kph winds; it rained sheets of scaring sulfuric acid; its atmosphere was 97% carbon dioxide and 2% methane.

More a sister to Venus, most of Earth’s life had been eradicated, but more than five hundred million Terrans lived below its surface in warring, nomadic tribes, surviving on manufactured oxygen and nitrogen captured in air-tight caves. Lost, they were primitives, entirely unaware of Mars or Martians, or any satellites like the cornerstone circling their planet.

 

* * *

 

Mars. 3356.

 

All of Mars watched on.

Receiving Jaeme’s confirmation, Kray was the first to speak. “Cornerstone’s deployed.”

Her hand still resting against the surface of the dome to support her weight, Prime Minister Hadiza placed a shaking hand on her chest. She forced herself to swallow before speaking. “It is in position? We are receiving data, Commander?”

“Yes, madam,” Kray replied, then stepped forward, eager to complete his task. “At your-”

Recollecting herself, Hadiza proudly raised her gaze to meet his, for she needed only to glance at Kray to silence him.

“People … of Mars,” she began, turning her head from him. Hadiza’s voice was unflinching and steady; her attitude regal and above reproach. “More than a thousand years ago, we left Earth for a new home.”

To those who wished to see her, Hadiza appeared as a translucent image projected onto the back of their retinas. Most watched on, stunned, wondering what the Prime Minister might say in their final moments, while some cried, wailed, and panicked.

“We escaped death, an interplanetary diaspora surviving for hundreds of years on Earth’s moon, in the asteroid belt, and finally, here, on Mars.”

Gazing at her open palms, Hadiza continued. “Space was unkind. It ravaged our bodies, and in turn, we modified ourselves so we might adapt. We evolved so we might live. We sacrificed so we might survive.”

She recalled a high-resolution image of a sickly green and gray Earth and presented it to everyone’s consciousness. “Forced to trade one inhospitable waste for another, we fled, leaving our Earthbound brothers and sisters behind.”

The image evaporated to be replaced by Prime Minister Hadiza gazing into the setting sun along the Martian horizon.

“And it was here we rested. We found sanctuary in Mars’ craters, and we bore our fruit. We reconstructed our civilization, economy, and commerce, excelling in science and furthering our technology. Undaunted, Martians thrived.”

Capable of sharing their emotional states with others, tens of thousands of Martians voluntarily opened their neuro-links to transmit their collective feelings. Individuals were inundated with crushing waves of fright, horror, and terror, yet tempered by the soothing warmth of empathy, compassion, and love.

“Although divorced from Earth, we were unforgetting,” Hadiza recounted. “We always remembered our Mother, as She was, and gratefully recalled our time cradled – sheltered – in Her arms. Alive, on Mars, we shared our stories, music, and art.”

In space, ships orbiting Mars drifted derelict and aimless, their pilots knowing they had nowhere to escape.

“Alive, we sang our Mother’s songs, and read aloud the poems of our forefathers.”

Within the tunnels, below the surface, in the absolute darkness, workers huddled in their pressurized suits and placed comforting hands on their glassy, reflective helmets, touching what they could touch.

“Alive, we taught them all to our children, passing our treasured memories of Earth to each successive generation.”

Hadzia swallowed and held back her tears.

“Let it never be forgotten,” Hadiza breathed, “we … lived.”

Kray lowered his head to read intelligence feeds.

Pausing, she looked longingly into the hearts of her people, and all who saw her felt Hadiza’s pride – her welling courage – mixed with intense sorrow.

“But what we abandoned,” she said, “what we believed could never be reclaimed, might be ours once again. Humanity isn’t simply doomed to retreat. Humanity is destined to return.”

Kray pressed his temple and whispered, “Stand by.”

“Friends, Countrymen, Martians,” Prime Minister Hadiza roared, her emotion racing like a fierce wind across the minds of all.

Hadiza lifted her arms above her head, and shouted, “What we do now calls upon powers formerly reserved for the might of gods. Today, we square ourselves before the resentful eyes of history to forgive the past, and to gift life to all of mankind!”

Hadiza rested her eyes for the last time, exhaled in release, and nodded.

Kray commanded, “Execute.”

Then, instantly, everyone and everything – the Martians, their machines, their habitats, poems, stories, and songs – ceased to exist.

 

* * *

 

Earth. 2056.

 

The cornerstone received its first and final command.

Quantum entangled, the notion of time was irrelevant. All instances of the device found in all STC’s throughout time received and processed the same command.

In response, the cornerstone, in orbit around the Earth in 2056 – having arrived only moments ago – adjusted its attitude and pitch to angle its flank to the sun and retract its protective golden shell. Its wings opened and blossomed into a shiny, mechanical, three-petaled mirror.

Afterward, it opened a radio communications channel with other devices in Earth’s orbit.

During its four centuries of operation, Magus had continuously teleported tens of millions of devices to Earth’s past, and, like the cornerstone device itself, they had only winked into existence seconds ago.

Receiving a software update from the cornerstone’s command carrier, they patched their systems, and they, too, followed command protocol to open their mirrored wings.

And like a blooming garden bending to greet the sun, millions of brilliant white flares of sunlight raced from one side of the planet to the other.

When fully deployed, the Earth was shielded by an intelligent, self-regulating, interactive mesh of mirrors.

Every moment of every day, the beetles reoriented themselves to ward off the greatest concentration of light, constantly sparing the planet from excess radiation.

On the Earth’s surface, unaided humans couldn’t visually see the minute mirrors so far off in space – the black side of the beetles constantly faced the Earth – and their lives, for the most part, proceeded as normal.

Meanwhile, nation-states secretly investigated the mesh to spare their populations from distress and panic.

It would take four decades for scientists to reveal their findings, concluding the mirror deflected more than 1.5 percent of the sun’s total light back into space – more than enough energy to permanently counteract the effects of climate change. And in speaking to their origin, scientists worldwide unequivocally agreed they were man-made but of a technology that far surpassed their own, and they speculated the beetles were possibly made by humans from a parallel universe.

Mankind, humbled, their understanding of the universe so stretched to finally comprehend the scope of their negligence, grew wiser and made better policy, vowing to each other to become better stewards of the planet.

As a result, the melting of the ice caps slowed; cooler temperatures kept deposits of methane frozen at the bottom of the ocean; less reflected light from the oceans became trapped in the atmosphere; plant and animal life were given a chance to adapt; and planetary greenhouse effects diminished.

The Earth was saved.

 

* * *

 

Mars. 2112.

 

Sixty years later, a NASA astronaut serving a tour on Mars studied the regolith’s mineral content, chemical composition, and toxicity.

She identified traces of silicon, calcium, and aluminum found in the computer processing elements of the scarab beetles orbiting Earth matched her Martian samples.

It is with absolute certainty, she wrote, confirming her findings in a career-defining report, that the collective future of all mankind was sourced from, and born in, the sands of Mars. She is, at once, both our savior and imminent frontier. May we forever tread lightly, for we walk upon the bones of angels.

It’s a Purge

Xi is purging any General who has the slightest whiff and taint of Corruption Or Pro Western sympathy

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It is said that the so called ULTRA NATIONALIST CHINESE who formulated the wolf warrior policy were in fact hard core G+2 Sympathisers

Many War Hawks in China were deep rooted American sympathisers

Their aim was to push the Chinese into a war unprepared and force China to perpetually be a Number 2 in the G+2 formulation

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The Russians likely delivered all this intel to the Chinese

Basically saying “All your Ultra Nationalist Military Brass are US Lackeys”

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I don’t mean Spies

I don’t mean Traitors

I mean men who don’t want a war with the US and are prepared to bend the knee in exchange for a flow of dollars and a stream of relatives in Rochester or Boca Raton

So Xi begun a purge and has purged a number of people

Have you noticed Hu these days?

He seems to have silently disappeared

Zhao Lijian?

He is promoted to Maritime affairs meaning he is recording ship logs somewhere in Harbin


Its a clean up

The Chinese & Russians can afford to do this

India also has a number of deep core US sympathisers in the MEA & the Army who want India to be part of the US Umbrella

We can’t purge anyone, not even a Jawan without due process

It’s why our foreign policy would always face problems going forward

Chicken Salad Tea Sandwiches

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Yield: 8 sandwiches

Ingredients

  • 1 (5 ounce) can chunk white chicken, well drained
  • 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
  • 2 tablespoons apricot jam
  • 2 tablespoons raisins
  • 1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
  • 16 slices fresh, soft wheat bread

Instructions

  1. In Small Batter Bowl, combine chicken, mayonnaise, jam, raisins and onion.
  2. Using Small Scoop, place 1 scoop (1 tablespoon) chicken mixture in center of 8 slices of bread, spreading slightly. Top with remaining bread slices. Center Small Cut-N-Seal™ over bread; cut and seal.

Notes

Assemble ingredients prior to recipe preparation.

Attribution

Pampered Chef

Smunching on Cheese Nips and studying the Night Away

Back when I was attending university, one of my most common activities at that time was studying. Heck, by the time I reached my Senior year, I was an expert in this. I had the system down pat.

The professor would assign us maybe 20 questions from the back of the book out of the 100 there. And I would do all 100.

And while I would do these questions, I would be a smunching on this snack food called “Cheese Nips”. Ah, those little golden squares were de-lic-ious! I’ll tell you what!

There were various variations made by different companies. Goldfish. Cheez-It and the good ol’ Nips.

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That was my old study routine when I studied at home (my apartment room). A cup of instant coffee or tea, and Cheese Nips.

I would spend hours doing that.

That’s how I would learn. You do the boring tasks on repeat over and over, and over until you are able to perfect them.

Today…

Here’s my experience. This is from the time when I was returning to my place from school. It was a long day at school and I was quite tired.

I showed my U-PASS (Universal – Pass for Bus, Gym and Aquatic center), through the transparent section of my wallet, to BC transit bus driver and entered the bus. As I was tired and the bus ride was about 35 min long, I decided to doze off for some time telling the driver to let me know when my stop comes. The driver did exactly as I requested. He woke me up when my stop came and I, quickly, got off the bus. On arriving to my apartment, I went to bed in no time!

Next morning, when I started to get ready for school, I noticed that I am missing something. I couldn’t find my wallet with me. On recollecting events from the previous day, I realized I must have dropped my wallet in the bus as the last time I used my wallet was to show U-PASS to the bus driver. I thought that my wallet is gone with all my money and I will have to go though the pain of applying for all the IDs and cards again!

Even though I had lost all my hopes that time, I remembered signs of lost & found department in the transit buses. I thought I should at least give it a try. I found their number from the internet and called them. I was informed that someone had returned my wallet to the bus driver and they have my wallet! I was relieved a big time to know that my wallet was safe as it had my Credit Card, University ID, Care Card, cash, U-PASS and other reward cards. They verified my information and told me that I can pick it up from their office at my convenience.

Well, you must be thinking by now that this can happen in any country and any honest person would not keep other’s stuff with them. You’re not wrong! But I think what happened next would rarely happen in any other country.

I explained the person on phone that I can’t take transit because I don’t have my U-PASS and I also can’t take a cab as my credit card and cash were also in my wallet. Honestly, I was expecting the reply that it was my problem and I should find a way out!

However, this is Canada, things work differently here. Understanding my situation, the transit person drove to my place to return my wallet!!!! I also found that everything was intact in my wallet including every penny of my Cash! Wow!

Now this is my “Only in Canada” moment!

Thank you Canada for being awesome 🙂

Looks like Canada annexation is soon…

RCMP Secret Memo Warns Canada Is on the Brink of Economic and Social Collapse.

A secret report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) paints a dire picture of Canada’s future — one where economic collapse, declining living standards, and widespread civil unrest are no longer a hypothetical.

The report, titled “Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends” for Canada, was never meant for public eyes, containing “special operational information” distributed only among top government decision-makers and law enforcement.

Its conclusion? Canadians are running out of money, running out of hope, and—once they realize the depth of their economic despair could revolt. 

This is why Canada is suddenly criminalizing certain firearms ownership; they __know__ what’s coming.

“The coming period of recession will … accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations,” the report states. It warns that “many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live.” In other words, an entire generation has been priced out of the dream their parents took for granted.

This isn’t alarmism—it’s backed by hard data. Canada’s economy is failing, and the government knows it.

The Proof: Canada’s Economic Stagnation

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) formed in 1961, is an inter-governmental organization that works to promote economic growth and world trade.   Recent data from the OECD reveals just how catastrophically Canada has mismanaged its economy.

Since 2015, real GDP per capita—the best measure of how an economy benefits individual citizens—has grown by a miserable one-point-four-percent (1.4%). This puts Canada second to last among all OECD countries, only ahead of Luxembourg, which actually shrank.

To put that into perspective, over the same period:

The United States grew by 18.2%

The OECD average was 13.6%

This means that if Canada had simply kept pace with U.S. productivity growth, the average Canadian would be earning $5,500 more per year.

The International Monetary Fund shows even worse financial performance from Canada:

IMF figures prove Canada Disolution
IMF figures prove Canada Disolution

Canada’s economic stagnation is not an accident — it’s a direct result of reckless government policy. Ottawa has prioritized mass immigration over economic productivity, flooding the country with over 1.2 million new people in 2023 alone, despite a housing shortage, overwhelmed healthcare system, and stagnant wages.

Meanwhile, the government continues to suffocate industry in pursuit of climate extremism, with carbon taxes, ESG mandates, while funneling billions into unaccountable climate slush funds.

And while Canadians struggle to make ends meet, the government has grown into a bloated, parasitic entity, consuming more wealth than it creates. The number of federal employees has exploded by over 108,000 since 2015.

This isn’t sustainable. The more socialist Canada becomes, the worse life gets. Government-controlled economics have turned a once-thriving country into a stagnant, overtaxed, mess, where home ownership is out of reach, wages are stagnant, and personal wealth is eroded by inflation and bureaucratic waste.

The United States knows this, too, which is why President Trump is already telling Canadians they should become the 51st state.

It has nothing to do with animosity toward Canada, or even expansionist dreams of the USA.   The Liberal governments of Canada have already destroyed the nation; it just has not yet manifested itself at levels the public can readily see.   That manifestation, is now, unavoidable.

Direct Link to RCMP Report (Redacted Version for Public distribution) HERE

Luigi Mangione Perp Walk BACKFIRES On NYPD!

Unrest in Happiness Hills

Submitted into Contest #18 in response to: Your fingers tensed around the object in your pocket, ready to pull it out at a moment’s notice. view prompt

Jessica Stone

2 comments

General

Your fingers tensed around the object in your pocket, ready to pull it out at a moment’s notice. The others that passed you seemed to all be staring as if they knew what you held already.As if they could see through the seams of your leather coat, vintage and rough edged, dark brown and smelling of mold.Even though they seemed to stare they still smiled widely in your direction. You were making your way to the circle.The village always seems so joyful, the others are always this happy. They don’t even need holidays, though around this time the men and women gather to dance in the circle and feast upon the merry infants whose parents couldn’t bother to, or were not allowed to keep them.It can’t be considered a magical time because they are always dancing and everyone is always eating, but you suppose these people are more together than usual.Most any other time, you see them travel in pairs, man to a woman, a woman to a man, no other way, and they seem to enjoy this way.However you, you do not.

 

Something about them gives you a mortifyingly poisonous taste in your mouth and it all started when you went past the hills a little ways and found the thing, the thing you hold so tenderly.

 

And now they made you sick, not because of the culture, not because of the town that is filled with the smell of rain mixed with luminous beauty and decor, and certainly not because of the ghastly antique top hats and pearls that decorated the others and sometimes yourself now.

 

No, it is how unrelentingly happy they are.

 

You have done so much to try and shake their joy and they remain the same, like they aren’t living, they aren’t feeling. You’ve yelled at them, threw stuff, hit people, let them know how much you hate they’re creepy smiles straight to their faces.

 

Nothing in their faces change.

 

Such unrest in your soul and all because of these happy people, but the others joy was not like your own for it did not ever waver and something, you knew it, was wrong. Very wrong.

 

You had lived here your entire life and everything was okay until you came of age. Your parents were smiley too, but when you went through what they call the arrival, you began to feel all these things, more things than you were ever supposed to. Then you got to meet the others and the others didn’t feel the way you did either.

 

And it scared you, but this thing in your pocket might settle your uneasy mind. At least you hoped. You had found the thing stuck among a thick of branches and you just knew there was something special about it.

 

Right now the thing wasn’t working to help you feel at ease though, you weren’t sure why, but this new feeling was everywhere. The special feeling the thing gave you.

 

You knew it was forbidden to go beyond the hills to get the thing, but you went and you took it anyway thinking maybe, just maybe the others would feel about this object as you do.

 

The dirt between your toes was thick and sticky and the air was cool enough to be uncomfortable. The others dancing among the warmth of fire was so synchronized and smooth as if they were born to do what they do.

 

You had felt like something was off for a while now. When you were younger you were kept below the grounds and were fed and given water intermittently. In that world at least you never understood enough to care. However, your parents over the past year or so made you feel as if they were waiting to use you for something, though you’re not sure what.

 

You were also unsure of how the men and women pair together like they do, and unsure of where the kids of the hills came from.

 

Something you do know is that there are no children in the above grounds, and you assume they are all living a life similar to yours and you were living similar to how your parents did, minus all these feelings. Unless those kids were of the given infants.

 

Either way, the above ground was rather gloomy, though it held a sort of magic, at least that’s what you thought. Never knowing what it looked like in the above ground and never knowing the feeling of wonder until the arrival would make the hills magical.

 

As the others did spins amongst one another with beaming smiles, and touched hands as they bounced so elegantly to the sound of the wind, you came closer to them.

 

The closer you got to them however, the more disturbed they seemed to get, offbeat and slow stepping, and their eyes. They seemed to all look straight at your face.

 

 

Not your face. Through you. They were in your head and they could see straight through you and your body felt stiff and naked.

 

Your insides went up in flames and you pulled the thing out of the folds of your coat with clumsy bravery. The odor of the above ground was immense smelling of what you had never smelt, and the pain of the charring of your lungs and other organs began to spot your vision.

 

And their eyes.

 

Their eyes. They were bright and prudent and deep red and they moved you.

 

The thing caught on fire and its angelic symbols scribed upon it started to spin inside your head.

 

There was screaming and writhing as you neared the others blaze. Their fire they dance around merrily now serving as your bed.

 

The others surround you now and they read the symbols in your head aloud, with booming voices that sound as if they come from the sirens of the underground.

 

And suddenly the world is black and all of the sensations are gone and you feel

 

so

 

much

 

happier.

Ugh! You have no idea how bad life is in China!

I mean, every morning I get up and go to work. On my way to work, as I drive my ebike, I’m forced to go around the people who are cleaning the streets. How horrible the government is to employ people to do such despicable things as sweeping up fallen leaves (which can cause slippery surfaces, especially when tied together with morning fog).

Also, along my way to work, I pass a wall. It’s not just any wall, though. It’s a wall that they put up to block sounds and debris from construction sites. And on top of that, they even force the trucks that go in and out of the site to get sprayed with water. How dare they do that! People should be free to choke on the dust that gets kicked up and have the liberty to get headaches from the constant noise.

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main qimg 747ca311cdb75dfd2ac9a281cb3e3497

Well, maybe this weekend I can take a small trip. But it’s horrible when I travel, too! I should be free to waste half a day traveling, but instead I am subjected to the horrors of quick, convenient, and inexpensive high-speed rail.

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Note: Only the Northeast Corridor is considered high-speed rail, even though the speed is around half of what Chinese HSR trains go. Everything else is “conventional rail”.

Oh well, maybe I won’t travel, and instead go downtown. But the nightmare still follows me around. Public transportation is everywhere – bus routes go everywhere, and the subway system is huge. And it’s all clean. The buses are electric and the subways are immaculate. Everyone knows that the true mark of freedom and liberty is to get hepatitis just by entering a subway, or getting choked to death by fumes from ridiculously priced buses.

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main qimg 1047e7f9f58b8319813bcc13e19de057

The horror. At least there’s grocery shopping. Everyone knows that the hallmarks of a free society are spending way too much money for overly processed foodz™ (ever since 2017, the percentage of ingredients that can be classified as actual food dropped below 50%, so US companies can no longer actually call it “food”. Ya know, just like what happened with “cheez” or “creme”).

Oh, but wait… how horrible! I can’t pay an absurd amount for groceries in China!

Well, bummer. The groceries are too cheap in China compared to Freedomland. But they’re highly processed, right?

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main qimg f5cd088c4888d0619c388705beedb88d

What?! No processed crap?

Where’s the freedom?

In the US, they are free to pay extra money for packaging that patriotically gets thrown away (and hides the brown spots on vegetables), but in China, we are forced to buy vegetables that not only are touching each other, but came out of the ground! That’s so gross! And why do those carrots in China look so long and pointy? Everyone knows that the shape of a real carrot is rounded and pill-like:

This Tactical Manoeuvre by Putin SHOCKED The WORLD: Russia Dealt a Mortal Blow To NATO

Some fun Pictures of Masculine home offices

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Uyghur Fighters In Syria to Fight China

Spicy Tomato Fettuccine

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ddd7274549d96e86bac1eaa59287fb22

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

Attribution

Pampered Chef

Looks like Mexico is prepping for an invasion…

Behold: The End for Mexico Drug Cartels

The United States has now deployed two . . .  count ’em . . .  1, 2 . . . Navy Destroyers, and with this deployment, the ENTIRE Mexico Drug Cartel network can be utterly destroyed within . . . . minutes.

Two US Destroyers Mark END to Cartels large
Two US Destroyers Mark END to Cartels large

Last Monday, the USS Gravely (FILE PHOTO BELOW) took to the Gulf coast, heading toward Mexico.

Gravely Visits Greece
Gravely Visits Greece

 

Yesterday, the USS Spruance (FILE PHOTO BELOW) took to the Pacific Coast, headed toward Mexico.

USS Spruance
USS Spruance

Each vessel carries a total of ninety-six (96) missiles in vertical launch cells.  Those missiles can be of several different types, but the Tomahawk cruise missile, with it’s 1,000+ mile range, is worthy of particular mention because, as shown on the map above, each US Destroyer, when equipped with those missiles, has the ENTIRE land area of Mexico within reach.   All of it!

These cruise missiles are so accurate, that the United States can target a particular WINDOW of a particular Building from 1000+ miles away, and when the missile arrives, it will go through the center of the window so perfectly, it won’t even touch the window frame.   That’s how accurate these things are.

Targeting?  That’s probably already being done.

For weeks, the United States Air Force has been sending surveillance aircraft along both coasts of Mexico, and surveillance drones over the actual land of Mexico – with permission from the Mexican government.

On February 15, CNN Reported:

The US military has significantly increased its surveillance of Mexican drug cartels over the past two weeks, with sophisticated spy planes flying at least 18 missions over the southwestern US and in international airspace around the Baja peninsula, according to open-source data and three US officials familiar with the missions.

The flights, conducted over a 10-day period in late January and early February, represent a dramatic escalation in activity, current and former military officials say, and come as President Donald Trump directs the military to secure the border and deter cartels’ drug smuggling operations.

These drones are equipped with surveillance gear that would make the former Soviet KGB blush.  They can pinpoint particular cell phones within  . . . . inches . . . . of its actual location.  They can see in the day, at night, through storm clouds, rain, sleet, snow, hail, fog.   They can use regular vision, infra-red, even thermography.  NOTHING can escape their view.

Some of these drones – and US military space satellites — are equipped with technology that actually lets them peer through . . . . roofs!  They can get imagery from INSIDE a structure!

Which brings us to the whole Drug Cartel infrastructure.   They need laboratories to make and mix — and warehouses to store — their poison, to be smuggled into the United States. Take a look at what happens when US Cruise missiles start striking targets.   Below, video from the year 2003 in Baghdad, Iraq:

 

 

Those are steel-reinforced, concrete government buildings being individually hit.  None survived.  What do you think the drug labs would look like if the US hits THEM?

Many of the Cartel laboratories are underground; dug into hills in remote areas of Mexico.

The U.S. learned all about underground and cave warfare from our hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.  We located the caves, then sent a missile to COLLAPSE the cave – or bunker – entrance.   Here’s a small video showing how we do it.  Send a single Fighter Jet:

 

 

The blast either buries them alive in tons of rock rubble, or they suffocate to death in minutes.  If the blast itself doesn’t kill them, suffocation will.

As mentioned earlier, the two ships carry a total of 192 missiles between them; 96 missiles each.   But in reality, there may NOT be that many drug labs.   So what else might the US target?   The Cartel bosses in their homes.

With such accurate missiles, the US can put a missile right through the bedroom window of the Cartel bosses homes.

So if only half the 192 missiles have to take out labs, the other half can take out Cartel bosses in their homes.

In one fell swoop, the ENTIRE Mexican Drug Cartel problem is stopped – dead.

This would also be a powerful message to all those who weren’t targeted and therefore survived.  When they see the labs destroyed, and find out their bosses were blown up in their own homes, it would be a powerful deterrent from anyone else doing the same thing.

It remains to be seen if the U.S. undertakes such an operation but if we do, it can all be over in one night, with zero US personnel on the ground.

In my personal opinion, the US looks to me as though it is planning something exactly like this.

As for Mexico and its “sovereignty” . . . .  we should just do this operation and when the Mexicans complain, we just need to say “Look, we told you who was doing this.  We told you where.  We told you to take care of it.  You didn’t.  So, we did.  

We’re really sorry we violated your sovereignty, but how sovereign are you that you didn’t take care of this when we told you about it?

Now, it’s done.

The next time we tell you that more than two thousand Americans are dying every week from illegal Fentanyl, cocaine, and Heroine,  and we tell you who is doing it and where they are, maybe you should take care of it right then and there, so we don’t have to come in and do it for you — again.”

All’s fair in love and war

Submitted into Contest #18 in response to: Your fingers tensed around the object in your pocket, ready to pull it out at a moment’s notice. view prompt

Millie Spence

General

Xander’s fingers tensed around the object in his hands, ready to pull it out in a moment’s notice. His eyes locked on his target, a small, freckled teen, fumbling around with laces on his boots.

“My people won’t let you win. Not this time.” The former spoke, keeping his tone low and ominous. The small boy brought his gaze forward, eyes burning their way through the soul of the taller boy.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that, my friend.” He chuckled, menacingly. His lips turned up into a cruel smile, causing the tanned boy to take a step back, intimidated. While taking a step back, his foot hit a rock. Stumbling, he tried to regain his footing but failed and with as little grace as humanly possible, he went tumbling towards the ground. Xander laid on the floor, his eyes closed, braced for death. But when he had opened his eyes again, he saw that his opponent had left. His eyes locked on him on the other side of the battle field, conversing with his team. Enraged, he came running towards the freckled boy, weapon in hand.

“You coward!” He bellowed, waving his weapon. His enemy merely laughed and lowered the weapon that was being waved in front of his face.

“Careful, you might hurt someone.” He teased, walking away. Xander closed his eyes with frustration, tired of this fight, when he heard a loud shot. Panicked, he opened his eyes and ran towards the sound of the deafening shot.

 

When he got there it was a sight he couldn’t believe. It was one of his teammates. He was lying on the floor, red staining his blue uniform.

“Vincent!” Xander cried, holding onto his friend.

“Who did this to you!” He choked out through the tears, motioning towards his jacket that is stained a blood red.

“Sylvester.” He mumbled, coughing violently between syllables. Xander began to try and lift his injured friend, only to be stopped by a weak hand preventing him.

“No.” Was all that the weak teen could say.

“What?” Xander asked, confused that he would want to be left in a place like this.

“You leave me here. Save yourself, there’s still a chance for you.” Hearing these words, caused Xander to cry more.

“Please. Please let me help you.”

“There’s nothing that you can do for me.” He whispered. Xander took one final glance at his fallen comrade before he ran over to avenge him.

 

Frantic. Panicked. Alone. He was the last person on his side on the battlefield. He was the only person left. He knew what he needed to do. He needed to win. Not only for himself, but for all the people he had lost during this gruesome battle. His senses were heightened; his heart was pounding. Was he dying? He couldn’t let that happen. Sluggishly picking up his weapon he stumbled slightly towards the group of enemies. They all turned in surprise, grabbing their weapons ready to strike. In one foul swoop, he took out all three of them. Without a blink of an eye or breath taken into the lungs, he was running again. Running. Running. Running. His eyes were burning with tears that threatened to spill, his throat was tight and he found it hard to breath. He had to win. He couldn’t lose. Not to them.

 

“I won’t let you win!” He heard a disembodied voice. He knew that voice. He ducked behind a bush quickly so that he could think about a plan. Loud bangs were heard, he had one again narrowly avoided death.

“You can’t run from me forever!” The voice taunted, another round of shots. This time closer.

“Are you scared? It doesn’t hurt that bad.” The voice teased, chuckling manically. Another round of shots. Closer.

“You know your fate, you can’t escape it.” Another round of shots. They were now so close that the noise caused Xander’s ears to ring slightly. He moved back. He was not ready to engage. Not yet. He needed a plan. He couldn’t risk this. There was too much riding on this.

“I’ll fight you when I want to fight you.” Xander called out to the silence battlefield, earning an incredulous scoff from the freckled boy.

“You’re running out of time.” He taunted in sing-song. Moving away back to his own safety. They sat there for some time, each not wanting to make the first move. Both of them wanted to win. They both had something to prove.

 

Xander looked down at his leg and noticed he was bleeding. Must have cut it on the thorn bush. He thought to himself, cursing himself loudly.

“The cries of the weak.” His opponent chuckled, checking his weapon. Now would be a good time for me to strike. Xander thought to himself quickly, before occupying himself with stopping his leg from bleeding.

“Let’s end this!” Xander called, leaving the safety of the bush.

“Yes, lets.” The enemy said, mimicking his actions. Xander heard the sound of leaves and branches breaking getting louder and louder. He went to pick up his weapon. It wasn’t there. Oh no. He’s right there. Xander’s mind filled with anxious self-doubt. What was he doing? Why was he doing this? What was he hoping to achieve by risking so much?

“No!” Xander bellowed, making sure to keep his voice straight and steady when standing face to face with his worst nightmare. The stern tone in Xander’s voice caused his opponent to take a step back, surprised by the force of the command.

“What? You can’t do that! You cant back out now!” the freckled boy screeched, voice becoming more and more frantic with every syllable.

“I believe I can.” Xander was cocky now, he had let his guard down. Only a few seconds left. While he was thinking, the small boy took advantage of his distracted state and with one elegant pull of the trigger. Bang!

 

There was a silence that rung through the battlefield. 2 second left on the clock.

“Babe!” The fallen soldier whined, laying on the floor like an infant that was just told that their parent won’t buy them the toy they want.

“What?” The enemy chuckled, offering a hand to the taller boy, who took it gratefully.

“You always win, Finnley!” Xander pouted, wrapping his arms around his boyfriend.

“Maybe you’re just terrible at paintballing,” his gaze dropped to the cut on his leg, “and clumsy. How did you manage that.”

“Manage what?”

“How did you manage to cut your leg.”

“There are thorn bushes everywhere.”

“And you’re wearing padding.”

“Shut up.” Xander pouted more, causing Finnley to giggle slightly. He grabbed the pouty teen’s clammy hand and led him over to the table where all of the other players sat.

“Which team won?” Vincent asked, looking up from his book.

“The red team!” Finnley yelled, earning a gently punch in the side from his stroppy boyfriend. From the distance, a slow clapping could be heard. All intrigued, the group walked over to see the event organiser’s table.

“That was a very interesting game.” One of the organisers chucked, earning cheers from the tired teenagers.

“A little over dramatic, but that’s what makes it fun.” The second organiser added, taking a bite out of their slice of pizza. Looking at that pizza reminded Xander that he hasn’t eaten in hours.

“This was fun guys, let’s go get pizza.” He said, earning more cheers from the teens.

“Oh great, I’m starving!” Sylvester called, excitement ringing through his voice. with that, the group left the harsh battlefield and went to go get pizza from the brightly coloured restaurant across the road. For the rest of the evening, they stayed in the restaurant talking and laughing about the day’s events until the manager had to ask them to leave so that he could close up.

What are the unwritten dress code rules in Singapore that visitors often miss?

Have spent time with family and friends in Singapore for ages I still don’t know any written ‘dress codes’ in Singapore. I saw my staff where a gym suit with oversized backpack to work all the time, even a 50-year-old family man wore an oversized Micky mouse T-shirt on Saturday when he did an O/T for me.

My client who became a friend’s 20-something pretty daughter wore a standard ‘white T-shirt and tiny Levi’s denim shorts with Adidas shoes driving a Mini Cooper on all occasions, not sure if to college, to collect her NRIC, shopping, Gym, police station, hawker center, hospital, you name it.

Andrew, my Singaporean Chinese buddy ever told me, he’s never seen his mom wearing anything other than pajamas.

Even if you and your gf wear a T-shirt with ‘The Lion King or I💕Singapore’ to a wedding lunch at ‘ The Four Seasons’, no one raises an eyebrow.

Any visitors to Singapore won’t miss anything about unwritten dress code rules in Singapore.

The Beatles arrive in New York City

Badly lit alleys in Khlong Toei Slums? Nope! Red-light, Pattaya Soi 6 ? Nope!—- Low cost National Housing Estate in Din Daeng dubbed -slums in the air?—-Nope! Walking Street at Bangla, Phuket? Nope!

Some of those places are hidden gem for tourists and many are popular, though it’s seemed unsafe but they’re almost 100% safe if you aren’t a troublemaker yourself.

So, where, then, isn’t safe to go alone as a tourist?

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main qimg 451c97c84589dbea5451453c33e19ad5
 

Well, nothing is wrong with going to the police station in Thailand, it’s just like going to a renowned lion den alone.

Even if you are one hell of a ‘Rambo’ you are no match with those guys in Brown in the above places.

Are you kidding me? What is wrong with going to make a police report I’m a victim, I did no wrong against the Thai law.?— Did you? And are you sure about that?

I know you will come up with that. ‘ You said you were attacked by 5 Thai security guards, you acted in self-defense, right?’

“You will be slapped with a few charges like ‘destroy public property’ ( section 360) by pulling the pipes from roadside rail to beat all 5 Thai guys up. Another charge is ‘using foul language like ‘ f-word’ to insult their mother’s ( Libel sec. 326’) plus’ Third; Walk out of the bar without paying the bills.(Fraud base:345)

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main qimg 494730d50f4a04d9740abe0949928063
 

From all the 3 charges, you will get compound fines 20,000 Baht or jailed, or both. Meanwhile, locked up until you get a bailout, could also be deported if convicted…What? sigh!

The 5 guys? They, too, were fined.—500B each on ‘assault’ (section 295) with 1 year suspended sentence, doing community works for 6 weeks.

Now you know, going to the Police station ‘alone’ as a tourist is a suicidal— Bring a Thai lawyer with you, he or she knows what to do.

This statement occurred in mid-December 2024.

Beef Chimichangas

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8e65bfa35177813da62d926bbc128712

Ingredients

  • 1 (3 pound) roast
  • 2 firm tomatoes, chopped
  • 3 to 4 scallions, chopped
  • Garlic
  • Salt and pepper
  • Comino (cumin)

Instructions

  1. Cook the beef in a slow cooker for 6 to 8 hours with the seasonings.
  2. Cool and shred beef.
  3. Cook tomatoes and scallions and add to beef.
  4. Place meat mixture on flour tortillas and roll up. Drop into hot oil until golden brown. Drain.
  5. Top with green chiles, sour cream, guacamole, salsa and shredded cheese.
  6. Serve on a bed of shredded lettuce.

A Place in the Sun

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

 

John Rennie

 
The metallic surface of the Cleveland Company logo glimmered faintly as the space station became slowly bathed in the dim glow of moonlight. Eileen sat in the control room chair looking straight ahead, not distracted by the sight of Umbriel passing the window; she’d seen it a thousand times. Her eyes were fixated by the 50-inch rectangle of light above her head. “He never takes me anywhere” she sighed. Prodding the remote control repeatedly at three second intervals, she continued browsing images of the inner Solar System – far off places, close to the Sun, but she knew it was hopeless. Ted hadn’t agreed to leave the space station since their honeymoon in 2159, and no matter how many light-years she spent dreaming of one last planet getaway, it came no closer to reality. Ted was just not interested; he had his mind of other things.At the opposite end of the space station, the sound of clinking and clunking would be absolutely maddening if there had been anyone else around to hear it. The only person there was Ted whose hearing had started to go a long time ago. Pieces of twisted metal and dusty electronic chips were strewn around the floor of the station’s West Wing. A screw with a worn down thread went scuttling across the metal table skimming its surface like a stone across a lake. Eventually dropping to the floor and finding its resting place through a tiny air vent under a cabinet. “Blast!” Ted exclaimed staring into his empty hands. He looked up at the calendar above the workstation and his chest started to tighten.It was November 4th 2212. The arrival of J-Boy, their beloved grandson, was imminent. The young explorer was about to make his annual call. Visitors were rare these days. So rare that they hadn’t had a visitor for 10 years, except J-Boy of course. His visits were guaranteed like Earth’s orbit around the Sun. He could arrive at any moment and yet the satellite was still not fixed. Ted just needed to re-attach a panel to cover the inner circuitry and the dish would be ready for installation. He reached into the screw box and grasped at the fresh air inside. He picked up his magnifying glass to see that the box was in fact empty. Ted slumped back into his chair, realising he would have to go to the East Wing to get a new one. That meant bumping into Eileen. He wasn’t ready to face her, especially as he hadn’t finished the job yet, but he couldn’t stay away any longer. Ted hoped she’d forgotten about the promise he made last month. It was unlikely though.Eileen peered through the small round window in the door of the East Wing. The faint sound of footsteps had interrupted her mid-afternoon daydream of exotic star trails and asteroid showers. She watched as a frail masculine figure emerged from the long dark corridor that connected the wings of the space station. As he got closer, the light from the East Wing window cast a spotlight, revealing the silhouette. There was no doubt who it was, it couldn’t have been anyone else. He was holding a shiny box.”A gift?” she wondered.“Oh, Ted …after all this time, finally he has something to offer, something to show he still cares after all these years.”Eileen excitedly pressed the big red button causing the door to slide out of view. With a childlike grin, Eileen opened her arms.

“For me? Ted, you shouldn’t have.”

Before Ted could speak Eileen reached forward, snatched the shiny box from his hands and ripped off the lid. Eileen’s cheeks were suddenly yanked down by invisible draw strings when she saw the box was empty.

“You’re a mean bloody sod, you know that? Bringing me a shiny thing, getting me all excited then smashing my dreams to pieces with a box of empty promises.”

Ted peeled back his lips to reveal his crooked gnashers.

“Give over, would ya? Screws! I need bloody screws…for the satellite.”

“Screws? I’ll give you screws! I’ll bloody screw you!” she said, waving her fist and reluctantly stepping aside to let him through the doorway.

“Chance would be a fine thing!” he chuckled.

“Wash your bloody gob out, you. J-Boy will be here tomorrow and I don’t wanna hear you opening your potty mouth in front of the lad.”

Ted carried on shuffling toward the storage hatch without saying a word.

“Anyhow, haven’t you got enough screws from all that bloomin’ junk you spend all your life scavenging from outside?”

“I keep droppin’ ’em. My hands aren’t what they once were.”

“Nowt’s what it once was. Remember when you took me to see the rings of Saturn? In the pod, just you, me and a nice bottle ginger wine, billions of stars and endless possibilities.

Now look at us. Cooped up in either ends of this station like a prison, but worse. No bloody excitement here! Just the same old orbit in the darkest, dullest end of the Solar System. We’ve been dwelling about this Uranus moon for all eternity. Saturn was a previous life…”.

Eileen continued ranting and reminiscing, but all Ted could hear was the sound of boxes crashing together as he rummaged around. He picked up a silver box and and grinned.

“I’ve told ya before, there’s a lot of good discarded satellite material on this orbit. These young uns dump it and bugger off t’ Jupiter on a jolly. Perfectly good stuff, it is.”

“You know why they dump it ‘ere, Ted? Cos there’s nowt ‘ere. Nowt but bloody junk and darkness, and that miserable moon locking us into the most awful orbit anywhere in the Universe. Round and round and round and round. I’ll tell ye Ted, if I have to…”

A sudden blast of white noise flooded the control room.

“Come in, Cleveland Company station X14, this is Cleveland Craft 0187, permission to engage”

Ted and Eileen looked at each other and froze.

“J-Boy?”

“You daft apeth, Ted! He’s already here! You’ve wasted all your time meddling with that bloody monstrosity… Oh dear! Oh dear, oh dear.”

“Put the kettle on. I’ll get the satellite.” Ted hurriedly made for the West Wing.

 

J-Boy felt a warm tingle in his stomach as his spacecraft neared the docking hatch of the space station. Of all the places passed Jupiter, his grandparents space station was the place he looked forward to visiting the most. A loud mechanical bang followed by a gentle hissing sound indicated that his craft and the station were locked together. When the gravity light turned green, he released the door.

“Here he is. Where’ve you been, stranger? Come ‘ere!”

J-Boy was smothered by Eileen’s warm embrace. It was here he always received the warmest welcome of anywhere in the Universe. Clevelands X14 always felt like home.

“I’m great”, J-Boy managed to say amidst the big welcome squeeze.

Over Eileen’s shoulder, he could see Ted holding a large metal dish which was covered in wires and electrician’s tape.

“I got a present for ya, lad. Here you are. What d’ya think?”

Ted handed the gift to J-Boy.

“Ooohh, thanks, Ted. Eh…wha…what is it?”

“It’s a satellite, of course. A retro type but it works a treat. You can pick up all sorts on this: Earth war documentaries, alien life programmes, sports from other galaxies…”

“Aw, sounds great. Thanks, Ted”. J-Boy said smiling warmly.

“Put that junk away, Ted”, Eileen intervened.

“What does he want that old thing for? Pay no attention to him.” Eileen said, gently nudging J-Boy down the central corridor towards the East Wing where a fresh pot of tea was brewing.

 

The control room was a spacious, octagon-shaped area. From the entrance, various doors and hatches could be seen around the back and sides of the room. Directly ahead was a window spreading across the entirety of the front wall, displaying the darkness of space. In front were two swivel chairs facing hundreds of dials, switches and buttons that controlled the station. Above the controls was a single 50-inch screen displaying images of a much younger looking Ted and Eileen by the window of a capsule pod, peering out at different coloured planets. Like everything in this space station, it looked like it was made at the start of the millennium. It was all fairly dated, but J-Boy liked the homely feel of it. He sat in one of the chairs with Ted and Eileen sitting directly across from him, awkwardly jammed into the opposite chair which was clearly designed for one. Between the chairs was a small table, on it a metallic teapot along with three steaming mugs.

J-Boy began recounting tales of distant galaxies and far off parts of the Universe that Eileen could only dream of visiting. Eileen had been to many places when she was younger, but nowhere as far and exotic. “ How do you communicate with people outside of the Solar System?; Isn’t is dangerous crossing the Kuiper belt?; What’s the food like on Earth?”

She could listen for hours, asking questions and imagining what could’ve been.

“I can show you some snaps if you like?” J-Boy said looking for something in his bag.

“Aye, go on then, I’ll hook ‘em up to the big screen.”

“It’s OK, Ted. I don’t use screens anymore. I’ve got holograms now.” J-Boy held up a small black cube no bigger than a matchbox.

“Holograms? Bloody marvellous! Nowt like this in our day. Us oldies can’t keep up anymore”.

The elderly couple looked like children again as they sat with their mouths and eyes wide open, staring at the hologram projection in awe. They gasped as J-Boy waved his hand in the air to call upon hundreds of spectacular images of planets they’d never heard of and galaxies they didn’t even know existed. Eileen was completely engrossed. The more pictures she saw, the more questions she asked.

Ted wasn’t quite the conversationalist that Eileen was. He would just nod and chuckle upon hearing the wondrous tales. Occasionally chipping in with “Bloody marvellous”. He enjoyed listening, but was always happier when he was busy doing something. Without saying a word, he got up from the chair and pottered over to the control room kitchen in the corner.

“What would ya fancy to eat J-Boy?”, Ted called over his shoulder.

“Oh, nothing thanks, Ted. I ate on the cruise control around gravitational pull.”

“How about some cherry tomatoes?”,

“No, I’m OK, thanks.”

“Grown with martian soil in our space garden”

“I’m good thanks, Ted.”

“Lovely and sweet they are”

“No, I don’t really like…”

“I’ll go get them now.”

“But…”

“Eileen!  What’s the key code for the space garden? J-Boy wants some cherry tomatoes, he’s starving!

“Eh? No…I’m fi…”

Eileen frowned and looked up from the projection looking deeply concerned.

“Oh poor lad! What are we like, eh? Here I am gabbing away and you’re starving to death. I’ll get ’em J-Boy. Hold on to your rockets, kidda.”

“Don’t be daft. He wants me to get them.”

“Not with your grubby hands. You’ve had them all over that dirty dish and God knows where else.” Eileen gently elbowed Ted’s forearm away from the keypad and prodded the numbers on the glass, saying them aloud as she did. “3 1 7 5 2”.

 

Eileen entered the space garden and quickly picked up a bucket full of cherry tomatoes that had been freshly picked a few hours earlier. The bucket was overflowing. Eileen groaned and stumbled, but regained her footing and waved Ted out of her path.

“Give it ‘ere”, Ted demanded.

“Don’t be daft. I’ll take it”

“No you won’t”

J-Boy rushed into the garden behind Ted and Eileen.

“I’m alright. Really! I’m not hungry.”

Despite J-Boy’s pleas, Ted and Eileen continued to struggle. Both had one hand on the bucket handle, fiercely insisting they should be the one to offer the tomatoes to their indifferent guest.

Eileen grabbed the handle with her free hand. Now with a two-hand grip, she pulled the bucket towards her, causing both bodies to lurch further into the garden. With one emphatic tug, she pulled the bucket free from Ted’s withering hand. The force of her pull was so great, she let go. The bucket looped over her head for what seemed like an eternity before it landed in the sink behind.

Like a set of lottery balls, the tomatoes bounced around before being rapidly sucked down the sink hole. The sink was in fact a funnel attached to a waste pipe. The three of them stood silently with their mouths open as, through the window, they watched hundreds of cherry tomatoes implode and explode in the vacuum of space. The Cleveland Company logo turned red as tomato juice plastered to the side of the station.

 

Of course, Ted and Eileen blamed one another for the tomato incident. From where J-Boy was standing, they were both at fault, but it was Ted who agreed to go outside the station clean up the juice. Meanwhile, not to be seen making less effort than Ted, Eileen insisted on inspecting J-Boy’s craft to check it was safe and sufficiently re-fuelled for the onward journey. Guests always left Cleveland X14 with a full tank.

J-Boy watched on from the control room window as two spacesuits attached to the station by an umbilical cable floated out into the alien atmosphere. Eileen could be seen inserting a fuel rod into the J-Boy’s craft which was docked on the right of the window, and Ted could be seen on the left rigorously wiping.

Without warning, a cigar shaped object collided with the door of J-Boy’s craft, but left no mark.

“Bloody space junk! What nuisance!”, Eileen muttered into her radio which J-Boy could hear in the control room.

Suddenly a cluster of antennas, tubes, rocket motor shells followed, relentlessly pelting the space station. A solar panel spinning like coin cut through Eileen’s umbilical cable sending her suited body into a spin.

“Teeeeed!”

Ted could see Eileen was untethered and drifting. Without any hesitation, he leapt from the safety of the station into the infinite space. Their spacesuits collided. Ted’s umbilical cable pulled taut as it wrenched the spacesuits back. The relief of catching his wife was short lived when he realised they only had a few minutes before Eileen’s suit’s backup oxygen supply would run out.

The silent onslaught of satellite debris continued to shower down near the entrance; it was too dangerous to go back in just yet. Holding Eileen in one hand, Ted used his free hand to pull his umbilical cable causing them both to float in the direction of the capsule pod.

“Quick, get inside.”

In the pod, Eileen removed her helmet and immediately drew in one huge breath.

“Bloody space junk” she exhaled.

In the safety of the pod with oxygen and protection from the junk cloud outside, Eileen and Ted watched as J-Boy’s craft took a battering. The space station was a giant. It could withstand a severe assault from any decommissioned satellite cluster, but J-Boy’s craft was tiny and in danger of catastrophic damage.

“We have to do something” Ted said as he climbed into the driver’s seat. He hadn’t used the pod since he was courting Eileen in another lifetime.

“Where’s the wha’d’ya me call it?”

“The what?”

“The wha’d’ya me call it”

“The wha’d’ya me what? The ignition?”

“That’s it!”

“There! Bloody ‘ell, Ted – it’s not rocket science.”

“I think it bloody well is!”

Ted flipped a switch and the wall of controls sprung to life.

“Ere we go!”

The propulsion rockets launched the capsule pod up and away from the under fire space station. Ted hauled a lever to change the direction of the rocket boosters. A blast of flames spluttered from under the pod, propelling it in front of J-Boy’s craft and into the path of the debris.

 

 

“Come in Cleveland ex, one, four. This is Cleveland CapPod.

“Ted, Eileen, What happened? Are you alright?”

“J-Boy, d’you hear me, lad?”

“Yes, Ted.”

“Listen, we took a hit from some bloody debris. The door’s knackered and so is Eileen’s suit. We’re not going to be able to connect to the docking hatch.”

“I can come out and help!”

Eileen abruptly leaned into the radio

“No, you won’t, you stay right there. It’s too dangerous.”

“But…”

Ted held Eileen’s hand and a sudden calmness came over both of them.

“We’ve had our time. A great life! We’re gonna get out of this dark end of the Solar System as far as this little pod will take us. We’re going to find a place in the Sun. I made a promise”

J-Boy eyes filled with tears. He was devastated but somehow, he understood. He always knew this time would come.

“Ol’ Cleveland X14 is all yours, lad. Take her anywhere you want. She a bit dated but she’s a good one. A bit like, Eileen”

“Oi!”

Ted chuckled.

Eileen fought the tears, “I’ll miss you, J-Boy. We love you.”

 

The pod lifted up over the space station and accelerated out in the opposite direction of the Umbriel moon for the first time that century.

J-boy sobbed into his left forearm resting on the space station control panel. His eyes were red and sore. He lifted up his head and with his right hand, reached out to switch off the radio. His hand stopped and hovered over the button.

“It’s this way. I’m sure of it.”

“We should’ve left this orbit half an hour ago, where are we going? You daft apeth, Ted. You’ve got the map upside down!

J-Boy smiled and laughed through the tears. He knew everything was going to be just fine.

Shorpy

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Through a Great Distance

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

 

Matthew Klingforth

Through a Great Distance

“Andrew, God, I can actually hear your sulking,” Becky said across the hull to the large man sitting with his head hanging and his back facing her. “It’s like I have the endangered, sniveling vagina bug crawling in my ear, right now.”

“I am not sulking!” Andrew informed her angrily as he lifted his head and stared ferociously at the corner. “As a matter of fact, I was just now having a soliloquyial discussion on the selfish disregard of ingratitude and how Princesses only crap on other people’s property!” He screamed at her from his walled in position and Becky rolled her eyes in return.

“Look, man, the alfredo sauce was too salty, I don’t know what to tell yah,” she replied with a guiltless shrug. “Maybe, next time, I don’t know, don’t add the entire salt lick to the pot.”

“That is a reward winning recipe!” Andrew bellowed and turned his purpling face towards her. “And I’ll let you know that having all of the culinary delicacy of a frozen lake, does not excuse, nor forgive, straight rudeness.”

“Whatever,” Becky grumbled and returned her attention to the blinking lights of the ship’s internal computer.

“Fine,” Andrew agreed to her resolution and sent out a cold silence across the room.

“I don’t think that, “soliloquyial,” is even really a word.” Becky poked and to her delight, the bear stood-up and stomped out into the hallway.

“There are rules of engagement!” Andrew roared and jabbed his pudgy finger into the chest of no one as he clomped down the hallway. “Once an argument is clearly at the point of appropriate silence,” he said while gesturing wildly with his hands. “I mean, that’s it, you just shut-up. But no, not her, she always has to get that last little…” He paused, too angry to finish the sentence and, instead, bit down hard onto his knuckle. “I want my GD dog back!” he finally screamed at the top of his lungs.

“Becky! Becky!” Andrew yelled desperately as the terrified animal clawed free and leapt from his grasping arms. “No, no, bad dog!” he scolded the Pomeranian, but another crack of lightning from the newest freak storm put her tail between her legs and sent her scampering into the throngs of the many on-lookers and partiers across the barricade.

“Japan…swallowed…unprecedented tsunamis,” Andrew heard the radio from the nearest booze and food tent scream in between its static and he helplessly turned and looked at his escape vessel.

“Becky?” He whimpered with his whole body moving in feeble motions and the tears choking out his breathing. For the briefest of moments, he considered leaving without his precious Becky, but then he remembered all of the hard work and strings that he had to pull to gain passage to the new world and procure his own personal carriage. Failure was not an option.

“You sir!” Andrew pointed and yelled with newly found determination as he marched across his lot towards the security at the gate. “I will have a moment with you,” he said and pushed his impressive mass in between a small helmeted guard and the rest of the world. “Do you know who I am?” Andrew more demanded than asked.

“Yes sir, mister Chizka, sir,” the guard said with what he thought was machismo. “I am assigned to your post, sir, I’m, I’m your takeoff guy” he added lamely and immediately regretted it.

“Good,” Andrew replied with zero satisfaction as he assumed his own notoriety. “Then you know that I am never, EVER, without my Becky!” he blustered as the guard tried to catalogue every piece of information that he had on the man and a wife Becky seemed to ring a bell.

“Yes sir, mister Chizka, that is well known,” he decided to answer in the positive.

“Well?” Andrew asked as he looked around himself incredulously. “Do you see my Becky with me?”

“Oh, oh, no sir,” the former shoe salesman caught the drift and put his two weeks of military training into action. “Where was the last place you seen her, sir?”

“She ran off into that damnable ruffian tent,” Andrew answered with distaste. “She is very likely right at the entrance, trust me, she won’t wander far from a constant source of sausage.”

As the guard struggled with a reply, he was spared by the sudden upheaval of the earth’s crust, causing all to stumble and cheers to erupt from the tent dwellers.

“Listen,” Andrew said in a sudden rush, trying to quickly compensate for the earthquakes two-day early arrival. “What’s your name son?” he asked the guard.

“Thomas Jensen,” Thomas Jensen answered astutely.

“And now, Thomas,” Andrew said in his straight business voice. “I can assume that you’re not one of these tent cretins, right? That you plan on leaving this degenerate planet and make a fresh start on the new world? Yes?”

“Yes sir, mister Chizka, our craft leaves tonight.”

“Good Thomas, I’m relieved to hear that,” Andrew said while putting his meat hooks onto the guard’s slender shoulders and drawing paternal serenity onto his face. “Thomas, I need someone to march into that Hell pit and get me my Becky,” he said while pointing at the tent. “And whoever that person is, well, let’s just say that they will be very well rewarded in the new world,” he stated and then paused for dramatic affect. “Do you think that you could be that person, mister Jensen?”

“Yes sir! Absolutely sir!” Ole’ Thomas was pretty sure of himself.

“Excellent!” Andrew applauded. “Bring her to my sleeping quarters, get us off this God forsaken planet and I assure you that the goose will be splendid.”

Andrew stared out the bedroom window as the world deteriorated around him. “Where are you?” he whispered harshly and took his third pill in less than ten minutes. “I do not feel calm!” he screamed at the window and shook the pill bottle angrily. “Stupid—useless…,” he mumbled softly as his chin dropped down into his chest and time slowed down around him.

“Who the Hell is this?” the drunken slur of a tiny, blonde woman and the sound of a locking door caused Andrew’s eyes to flutter open.

“Becky,” he pleaded unconsciously as the engines started to rumble and the planet Earth began its long series of chain explosions.

“I want my GD dog back!” Becky heard Andrew yell from across the ship and she immediately felt a twinge of regret for that last jab.

“Ah, the big lug,” she said as she drew her legs up onto the chair to hug her knees, thinking about their first conversation.

The world, she believed, was gone. The navigational system, fried on take-off. We could be the last two human beings alive in the Universe and dude couldn’t stop blubbering about his stupid dog.

“Cute little shit,” she said with a sigh and grabbed her rubber ball to squeeze.

The mix-up, she supposed, was favorable to her. She should be dead and at one point and time, it was all that she had expected, wanted, maybe. She was in a weird place at the time. Still though and in retrospect, she made out pretty good. The vessel was equipped to accommodate and feed eight people for no less than ten years. There were like a zillion different movies and video games to play and the regurgitating ventilation system provided a lifetime of low-quality, but breathable air.

The dog, she felt, would have been very happy here.

Words can’t really describe the awkwardness of getting to know the last remaining member of your species. The last real face that you would see in your entire lifetime. Uncomfortable, she guessed. Discomfited? But, after a long mourning and bonding period, it took them all of fifteen seconds to realize that they were trapped in space with a complete and utter moron. He was a proclaimed dog person and she held firm that Becky was really more of a cat. He was a staunch Republican and she didn’t really care what you called a crook. How was it possible that she got stuck with the one person who could witness the explosion of their planet and still continue to deny global warming?

It was the absolute worst possible case scenario for the both of them.

Becky smiled and gave the ball two quick compressions.

“No, no, you’re doing that all wrong,” Andrew said as he watched her gaming in the family center and grabbed the controller out of her hands.

“Oh, really?” she asked, a little shocked at his playfulness, as they had been on a, as needed, communication schedule for the previous three months. “You know how to play Super Mario Brothers?”

“Oh yeah, my brothers and I ate up the classics,” Andrew answered as he deftly moved the courageous plumber across the screen. “I saw Zelda in the game catalogue,” he said while pausing and smiling over at her. “Have you ever played it?” he asked with a school boy innocence that would eventually charm his way into both her pants and their first marriage.

Andrew had considered all four of their marriages as a silly waste of time, but, Becky, although far removed from her deflowering, was a traditionalist. Not so much the religious stuff, but a commitment was needed if you wanted the long-term, personal attention sex. She was, after all, a lady.

Initially they had the children conversation, you know, the old, save the homo sapien rally, but ultimately decided against it. Their little family, alone in the middle of outer space, trying to maintain the human race was, well, just gross, once you ran the numbers and, besides, neither one of the them were exactly, kid people, anyhow. So, they kept rugrats out of their tumultuous and mostly predictable cycle. Right now, as far as Becky saw it, they were within four months to their next marriage. This was clearly a make-up fight. Right now, he’s standing in the master bedroom, staring out the window, waiting for me to come and apologize.

“And apologize I will,” she thought happily as she stood-up and bounced the ball off of the floor and back into her hand. The truth was that over the last six years, she had really grown to love the big ape and she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he loved her. Only love can make a person as crazy as she made him.

Besides, she had put a lot of effort into making him a suitable partner, the, sometimes, aggressive tips and hints on how to be a better lover, alone, claimed her ownership. She wasn’t about to give up her man and her apologizing for hurting his delicate nature had also become part of their cycle.

“Hey Andrew,” she yelled as she bounced her ball down the hall towards the bedroom. “About the alfredo sauce, you know that I was just being a bitch, right?” She asked, taking the low road and hoping for a quick make-up.

“Becky, get in here,” Andrew yelled back at her in a dazed and far away voice and Becky quickened her pace.

“Holy…” she stood frozen in the entryway, staring through the window at the last thing that she ever thought that she would see again. “Andrew, it’s a planet!” she exclaimed and Andrew turned in his standing position to nod absently.

“You said that the odds were astronomically against this,” she said as Andrew, the human fun sponge, had calculated its chances to being exactly impossible.

“They, they are,” he stammered and returned his gaze to the looming planet.

“Well, is it, you know, liveable?” Becky asked with excitement growing in her voice.

“Yes, perfectly, its atmosphere doesn’t appear to be much different than earths,” he answered.

“It’s unbelievable,” Becky marveled as she walked to stand next to Mark. “What about other creatures? Is there anything alive down there?”

“Affirmative, be it food, friend or foe, the imager shows plenty of animal activity at the surface.”

Awestruck in silence and as they slowly absorbed the colossal potential floating before them, Andrew and Becky’s fingers gingerly touched together and gently entwined.

“Take us home, Captain Chizka,” she said while looking up at her future fifth husband and Andrew set the thrusters to manual.

If you can afford it, and you can do so legally, I would say go for it.

I too am 73. My wife left me 20+ years ago, the best thing she ever did for me.

Some time in the next 10 or 15 years I shall die. In the meantime tho, I plan to experience as much of life as I can. So despite meagre resources I travel extensively.

After covid was managed I sold a car and spent 3 months riding trains and exploring France. Then I did a 3 months stint working on a goat farm in Wakayama Japan. I learned two things. 1. It is much cooler in Japan during Australia’s hot summer and 2. Farmers in Japan cannot attract workers. So they are very glad to provide food and board in exchange for 20 hours of light work a week.

I have just returned from working on a pig and sheep farm in Hokkaido Japan. I was there for three months and was able to watch that country change from full leafed summer glory, to a -10º winterscape. Then home to a 44º Australian summer.

 

I am currently looking for a volunteer position on a European canal barge. Any takers?

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main qimg 03d9e73755d27fc6034b2582e170fe6b

You are going to die soon, so if you are able, get busy and go learn something. Once you do you will find that everybody in the world is basically similar. There are two discernible groups of humans. The vast majority of the worlds people want to work, to love, to play, to raise up their kids and worship their gods in peace. These are the people you meet when you travel.

And then there are the rulers, who simply want to fuck things up for everybody else for their own aggrandisement and profit. These are the people who inhabit the media and government and business. The 1%.

Chinese robot maids will clean , cook, serve most middle income homes of the world over. 90% of vehicles will be China made EVs. 90% of gardens will be tended by Chinese robot gardener. 50% of lonely singles will have regular sex with Chinese made robot partners. Almost zero bars will be without Chinese robot servers that dish out cocktails and serve beers with precise foam and clean and wipe glasses too! Almost all lorry and buses drivers will need to find a new career. 10 years old now and younger will no longer need to learn how to drive by teenage years anymore. And 95% of cars world wide will be autonomous driving vehicles. 95% of there are using Chinese technologies!

Only USA will there be people who still carry wallets and purse! The only market left for ICE vehicles is the USA. By 2030 194/195 nations on earth has China as their biggest trading partner on earth. The only one not is USA whose Inflation hit 200% for the 10 years running. Thanks to the trade war! USA is a good place to bring your families to see what the world used to be!

Chimichangas de Pollo

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d38466969bb82203607bacc2045c90d3

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

Chimichangas

  • 1 (3 1/2 pound) whole chicken
  • 6 cups water
  • 1 medium onion, studded with 2 whole cloves
  • 2 stalks celery
  • 2 large whole garlic cloves, peeled
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 2 tablespoons shortening
  • 1 large onion, thinly sliced
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • 1 large tomato, cored and diced
  • 1 jalapeño chile, chopped
  • 1/4 teaspoon crushed leaf basil
  • 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon crushed leaf oregano
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon black pepper
  • 8 flour tortillas, warmed

Garnish

  • 2 cups sour cream
  • 1 cup guacamole
  • 2 cups grated Cheddar cheese
  • Shredded lettuce (optional)
  • Tomato wedges (optional)

Instructions

  1. Place the chicken, water, onion, celery, 2 garlic cloves and bay leaf in a medium size stewing pot. Cook chicken at medium heat for approximately 1 1/2 hours, or until the chicken is tender.
  2. Allow chicken to cool, remove meat from bones, and chop.
  3. Place shortening, sliced onion, and 1 minced garlic clove in a medium size skillet and sauté mixture over medium heat until onion is tender.
  4. Add the chopped chicken, tomato, jalapeño chile, and remaining seasonings and simmer at low heat for 10 to 15 minutes.
  5. Place approximately1/2 cup of chicken mixture horizontally across the bottom half of each tortilla. Do not extend the mixture beyond 1 1/2 inches at the sides and bottom. Fold the sides in over the filling and roll the tortilla jellyroll style. Secure each roll with a wooden pick.
  6. Heat 2 inches of shortening in a heavy pan over medium high heat.
  7. Fry each rolled tortilla in hot shortening until crisp and lightly browned. Drain on absorbent towels.
  8. Assemble the chimichangas by placing each rolled tortilla on a plate and garnish with 1/4 cup of sour cream, 2 tablespoons of guacamole,1/3 cup of Cheddar cheese, lettuce and tomato wedges.

 

Modern Women HAVING MELTDOWN Over Passport Bros!

 

How much is known about the Voynich manuscript?

My paleography teacher told me that the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408) is where your career goes to die. If you claim to be able to decipher it — no, you can’t. Literally every paleographer, cryptographer, code-breaker, linguist, etc. has taken a crack at it by now, and if none of them could decipher it, you definitely have not. If you claim to, you won’t be taken seriously.

We know basically nothing about its contexts beyond what we can see. It’s clearly an herbal of some kind, but the plants do not exist, and there are lots of other extremely strange images, like naked people bathing in a plant? Or being swallowed by it?

These are photos I took of a facsimile. They don’t let you see the real deal anymore unless you really have to, because so many people have touched it, it’s starting to damage the manuscript. The facsimiles are perfect reproductions.

The writing definitely looks like text, but it’s not in any known language or alphabet. Looking at it makes you feel like you suddenly forgot how to read. It looks so much like letters that you feel like you should be able to read it, but it’s just off:

All we know for sure is that it’s a real early modern manuscript, not a modern hoax. There’s a reference to it in the seventeenth century, so it’s at least that old, and the vellum is dated to the fifteenth century.

There’s lots of theories about what it could be, but none of them prevail, because we can’t rule any of them out. If it’s encoded, it doesn’t match any code-breaking technique that’s been used against it so far. If it’s a hoax, it’s an elaborate and expensive one. It honestly might be fiction, written in a conlang. That’s the only explanation that makes sense to me so far, because it would explain why the pictures are of imaginary plants and why the text doesn’t map to any known language. But Tolkienesque works of fiction with their own conlangs weren’t exactly common at the time; fantasy as we know it hadn’t been invented yet. Maybe it just dropped out of fairyland one day, I dunno.

An unreadable book in an unknown language with cryptic drawings of unreal plants and astrological charts sounds so fantastical, it’s hard to believe it’s real. Whether the Voynich Manuscript itself is fiction or not, it makes for some excellent fodder for modern fiction.

Investor Alert: Revolutionary ironmaking method will nullify tariffs and scramble iron ore markets

https://youtu.be/8WnvulH0URA

The covered stairway

The covered stairway the cuts up the hill on the way to Day Hall at Syracuse University.

Here’s Day Hall. Nothing too great to look at. It’s a dorm, after all.

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day

We would leave the QUAD…

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c42b7f16202277114642794886b5f662

The QUAD where we took classes…

…and go up this covered wooden stairs …

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008419149 1 477964f034fb0737fa095f11bcbfda29 768×994

Anyways, there is this large wooden covered stairway that we would always go though when we went up and down that hill. It was always snowy during winter and the covered stairway kept the stairs clear from the snow and the often raging Syracuse storms.

I cannot repeat how many time we have drunkenly climbed those stairs during our college days. Or how we would haul our book bags up and don those stairs to study.

Oh, for sure we  would sometimes climb the wooded hill on the dirt path that lay besides the wooden stairs, and often a race would occur. Who would reach the top first? The stairs or the dirt path.

Guys, this is a simple story. It is a simple remembrance.

But once I graduated, I never climbed those stairs ever again.

We enter and leave these segments of our lives. And often forget about the little common, and everyday events that we so often took for granted at that time. This story is one such forgotten event; climbing the stairs at the university.

What long forgotten events are buried in your subconscious that you haven’t thought about in years?

Uncover that element and discover the things that made you who you are today.

Peace Out.

Today…

 

I’m not really a car person. Cars, for me, had always been just a tool of transportation. As long as it runs well, get me from point A to point B, easy to park, I’m happy.

But if I could get any car for free…

I would want an Aston Martin DB5.

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screen 2024 12 22 14 44 49
 

Yes, the James Bond car.

This car is the pinnacle of white male douchebaggery. This car is a statement that says, “I’m the most privileged class in this society, and I know it. I went to the best school by legacy admission. All my friends have trust funds. I can do drugs all day long and never get busted for procession. I have a string of friends with benefits, and they all thank me for a good time. I wear Hermes or Armani and naturally believe that’s how people dress themselves. My monthly parking space costs more than your mortgage. I have multiple properties all over the world, some I’ve never been to. My yacht has its own supply ship, which I named mini-me. I’m old money rich. I’m polite and kind to all the wait staff and little people, I tip generously and I say thank you and please. But you know, oh you know… you’ll never be on the same level as me. Sure, my life is empty, and I don’t know how to find fulfillment because I have money to buy anything and everything. Whatever I do, whatever success I have, I always wonder, is it because I’m that good, or is it because I’m that rich? But does any of that matter? I have all the money in the world to fill that bottomless hole inside.”

Why China is not scared of USA!

Southwestern Meatloaf

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b5d75ed5c732ffaaa6a17fa5860de468
 

Yield: 8 servings

 

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds lean ground beef
  • 1/4 cup onion, chopped
  • 3/4 cup sliced celery
  • 1/3 cup green bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 clove garlic, chopped
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 dash cayenne pepper
  • 3 cups dry bread crumbs
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 roasted green chiles, skins and seeds removed, diced, or 1 (4 ounce) can diced green chiles
  • 1 cup Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
  • 1/4 cup black olives, sliced
  • Water to mix
  • 1/2 cup tomato juice

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Sauté beef, onion, celery, green pepper and garlic in a small amount of butter.
  3. In a large bowl, combine the ground beef mixture with salt, cayenne pepper, bread crumbs, eggs, chiles, cheese, olives and enough water to mix. Mix well with your hands. Place into a greased 9 x 5 inch loaf pan and cover with aluminum foil. Bake for 15 minutes.
  4. Mix tomato juice and 2 tablespoons melted butter. Pour half this juice over the meat.
  5. Bake 15 minutes more, then pour remaining half of juice mixture over the loaf.
  6. Bake for about 45 to 60 additional minutes, until meat is no longer pink and juices run clear.

NATO and Ukraine military desperation

The Twin Vipers

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

 

Kaysie Davis

 
   AuroraThe Crystal Viper shuttered as Darries put her into a dive, expertly avoiding the lasers that were flying passed us. Our attacker had appeared out of nowhere and started shooting at us without as much as a hello.“Who have you annoyed now?” Darries snapped at me, “Didn’t I tell you that your flirty ways are going to get us in trouble one of these days.”“Oh, shut up and drive.” I snapped back, pushing the button for the transmitter again, “For the second time, this is Captain Aurora North and the Crystal Viper. Stop firing on my ship and identify yourself.”The only response was another volley of lasers firing at us. I couldn’t recall upsetting anyone, recently anyway. I charged up our own weapons and tried again to hail our attacker. I didn’t feel like blowing him up unless I really needed too. “Crystal Viper to offending ship. Last chance to explain yourself.”To my surprise, we finally got a response. “Don’t think you can fool us by having your little girlfriend hail us, Zell. We want our cargo back, and we want it now!”Not this again. I swore loudly to Darries. “You are looking for the Black Viper, there, my friend. This ship is the Crystal Viper.” I swear that when I got my hands on Zell, I would make him pay for every scorch mark that had ever been put on my hull due to him. It seemed like every other day, someone was mixing up our vessels and trying to blow us out of the solar waves because of something that he did.There was a long pause, and they must have been checking for our transponder. The attacker could look all they wanted, but like most of the ships in the area, ours was modified not to give off a reading unless we wanted it too. People didn’t need to know who we are unless we wanted them to know. I nodded at Darries to turn it on.Finally, there was another response. “How do we know this transponder signal is real?”“Listen, I couldn’t give a flying frag if you believe me or not. I just would rather not take the time blowing you out of the stars if I don’t have to.”“We…apologize for the confusion.” The voice still sounded like he didn’t believe me, but he could also tell that my weapons were stronger, and that fact did tend to settle disagreements with other ships. We kept our arms powered up until the other vessel had fired up their engines and left our area in space.There was a ding on our console, and Darries swore when he looked down. “Yaffa is getting impatient. He says that if we don’t get to Maia Station soon, that he will give the job to any other ship that happens to be around.”“Onward, Jeeves.” I grinned at him. Darries rolled his eyes, and he gunned our engines. It was a short hop to Maia Station. We should be there in plenty of time.Zell

I was whistling to myself as I finished docking my ship at Maia Station. The Black Viper was squeezed between two other ships that made her look small. She might be small, but she had a big bite. Anyone who dared cross us soon learned why we are called the Viper.

My co-pilot and I were at the station to sell some cargo that we had acquired on another job. Mikell was already down on the station, settling up payment with our broker.

I exited my ship, hoping to have time to wet my whistle before we had to head back out. Maybe I would also have time to get a gift for my wife, it has been far too long since I saw her last.

As I walked across the ship bay, I was confronted by a smaller man in a sharp suit. He had an annoyed look on his face and was tapping his foot impatiently.

“It is about time that you are here! We have been waiting for the Viper for hours! You know Yaffa is not a patient man. Now, sign this manifest, and we will get the cargo loaded up.” The man did not wait for my response but turned and barked some orders at some waiting droids.

I smothered a smile, this was perfection. This little man must have been waiting for the Crystal Viper. That ship and her captain had stolen a few jobs from me last month. I could get payback and get paid at the same time.

“So sorry, we are late.” I took the manifest and signed my name, I needed Captain Aurora North to know who stole her stuff. “We will take off as soon as we are loaded.”

I messaged Mikell that we needed to take off ASAP. Her response cannot be repeated in polite company. At least she got further than ten feet from the ship. I would not be able to get my drink.

In short order, we had unloaded one set of cargo and loaded the other cargo. Mikell was back with our money. She glared at me from under her mop of short purple hair as she flopped into her pilots’ chair.

“Five more minutes, Zell, five more minutes, and I would have had our broker wrapped around my finger. I would have doubled our money off this score too. Who did you steal this new cargo from?”

“A man on deck thought we were the Crystal Viper here to pick up some cargo. Now, who am I to correct his error?” I smirked at her “Now, let’s get out of here before the real Crystal Viper gets here.” With that, I fired up our engines and headed off. We really would need to find a place to sell this newly acquired cargo. My wife would need to wait for her gift.

 

Aurora

I signaled Yaffa as soon as we were in orbit around the station. It had taken us longer then I would have liked to get here. Our attacker had been lurking and trying to follow us, so we had to lose him before we could get to the station.

Yaffa’s confused face was soon on our viewport. “Aurora? Why are you back? Is there something wrong?”

I blinked at him, “Back? What are you talking about? We just got here.”

Yaffa turned and barked at his one aid, “Didn’t you tell me that the Crystal Viper had arrived and picked up my cargo?”

“Yes, yes, master. The Viper and her Captain West. They left just a few minutes ago.”

I let out a loud groan, “You moron. That was the Black Viper and the frustrating Zell West. “

Yaffa let out a string of swears in his native language. “Are you telling me that my cargo was stolen?” He leveled a glare at his aid that promised a lot of pain later. Then he switched that glare to me, “This would never have happened if you were here on time!”

“Don’t blame me for your aids stupidity.” I met his glare with one of my own. Then I turned to Darries, “Can you find any trace of where the Black Viper went?”

He tapped on his console for what felt like forever. Then he grinned and looked up at me, “It’s faint, but I have a lock on what way they went.”

I sat back in my chair, “Let’s go get our cargo.” I swear that Zell goes out of his way to annoy me most of the time. How dare he take my stuff.

 

Zell

“Will you stopped that never-ending whistling?!” Mikell’s green eyes were aflame, glaring at me. “I will throw you out of the nearest airlock if you don’t!”

I held up my hands in submission. Mikell looked back down at her own console, muttering in her native language. I enjoyed the view of stars passing the viewport when a ship dropped out of hyperspace next to us. Our transmitter buzzed, whoever this is wanted to talk.

Mikell opened a channel, and before I could say anything, a sappy love song came over the line.

Whoever was singing, it was horribly off-key. The singing went on for a painfully long time. My fingers itched to fire some laser at the ship just to stop the noise.

A very nasally voice came over the line when the singing finally stopped. “Aurora, my princess, please return to me.”

Mikell was silently laughing in the seat next to me, I rolled my eyes and toggled the transmitter.

“Hey, lover boy, you have the wrong Viper. This is the Black Viper. You are looking for the Crystal Viper.”

“Please put my princess on the line.” The voice was somehow even more annoying than the singing. “I need to hear the crystal tones of my princess.”

“No princess here. And you better get some singing lessons before you try this again. Now, skedaddle before I really get annoyed.” I powered up my weapons to get my point across.

The other vessel fell back but was still following us. Maybe he thought I was hiding his ‘princess.’ I swore under my breath. Typical Aurora. She probably flirted with this guy while that co-pilot of hers robbed him blind. And this shmuck was so lovesick, he couldn’t even tell that she had anything do with it. We got at least one broken-hearted buffoon thinking we were the Crystal Viper a week. Well, as long as he stayed out of my way, he could follow us like a lovesick puppy, all he wanted.

At least, that’s how I felt. Mikell took offense to our tail and fired some torpedoes in his direction. That seemed to finally deter the moron, and he went back into hyperspace.

Aurora

Darries gave me a devilish grin, “We have the Black Viper on our scanners. It is just a few hyper yards ahead.”

I grinned back, “Let’s go say hello, shall we?”

We popped out of hyperspace right behind the Black Viper and fired a few lasers that grazed its hull. It didn’t take long for our viewport to light up with the picture of Zell. His crystal blue eyes were shining with amusement. “Is that how you say hello?”

“Why should I say, hello? You stole my cargo, and all the people you piss off keep putting dings in my hull!

 

Zell

Somehow I was not surprised when the Crystal Viper popped up on our radar and fired on us as soon as they dropped out of hyperspace. Aurora was pissed. Her long black hair flowed over her shoulders as she yelled at me. I really should be listening to what she is saying.

“….all the people you piss off keep putting dings in my hull!”

“At least you don’t have lovesick morons singing love songs at you all of the time!” I shot back, “The last one was in serious need of singing lessons!”

Almost as one, our co-pilots looked up at us and nodded. There were no other ships in the area.

“And I wouldn’t have stolen your cargo if I didn’t miss you.”

 

Aurora.

“You could have just sent a message.” I glared at the man on the viewport, but then I relaxed, “But I missed you too, husband. “

His crystal blue eyes, the ones my ship was named after were shining, “What do you say we deliver your cargo,” He held up his hand, to stop the objection he could see coming “To your buyers. Then go home and take some time off?”

Zell

My wife had finally softened, she brushed that black hair that I loved so much back behind her ear and nodded. We didn’t get to see each other much. Too much of a risk for people to know we were connected. We gave out plenty of hints and loved to drive each other crazy with pranks. Most of the universe, however, thought we were mortal enemies trying to destroy each other. They would never know that just a few years ago, we were married on a no-name planet, under the twin viper constellation.

  1. Many of us grew up as Free-Range Children & Teens. Most did NOT have Helicopter Parents who never let us out of sight. We were out until the street lights came on. If we did have activities outside of school, it might just be sports or Boy/Girl Scouts, etc. Our days mostly consisted of hanging out with friends. (As a side note, most of us had stay at home mothers who actually had an informal Network. If you did something bad and another mother saw it, she would call your mother and tell her. Also, if need be, they would say something directly to you — and of course you knew that your mother would also know within a few minutes.)
  2. We actually ate meals together and talked. Dinner was a time to catch up with each other’s lives. Most kids had a good breakfast before going to school. Their mothers either packed a lunch, you could go home and even some of us ate at a School Cafeteria. School lunches were warm and good at a very low price.
  3. Fathers worked a lot of hours and often only had time with their kids during dinner. Many worked in their home offices afterwards or did yard work & home maintenaince. Most fathers in my area were veterans of World War 2 or the Korean Conflict. Most had undiagnosed and untreated PTSD. Lots of drinking going on sadly. Many of the men lived in desperation. Most smoked as well.
  4. Keeping up with the Jones’s, worrying what the neighbors would think, societal pressures, etc. were quite prominent on many people’s minds.
  5. Many women could not get a credit card, get their tubes tied, etc. unless she had her husband’s approval. Many jobs and educational opportunities were still closed to women.
  6. In a divorce situation, men almost never got custody of the children. Alimony was still very common. Some men just walked away and never paid anything — not much could be done to get them to pay. 50% of men lost contact with their children by the 5th year of the divorce.
  7. Vacations usually consisted of visiting Grandma and other relatives. Family Camping was common as well. Once in a while people would stay at old motels with pools so their kids could swim.

MM’s AI generations of a group at the beach

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What I’d tell myself might be different from what I’d tell the average young person. I came from a very dysfunctional family who kind of poisoned my childhood. I would have advised my younger self, once I had a job, to get as far away from them as I could, as early as I could.

But otherwise, I think I’d agree with a lot of the stuff parents tell kids. Concentrate on school. Set your sights higher. Apply yourself! You can achieve more than you think.

Not everyone is your friend. A lot of people are just jerks. The way they treat you is not YOUR fault, but you don’t have to lap it up and ask for more! Don’t let them bully you. Don’t let them block your path. Stick up for yourself! AVOID people who treat you badly!

Also, very important, never work for a jerk. A boss will show you exactly what he’s like in the first three or four days. Believe him! Don’t expect him to change. If you put up with abuse, you can expect more abuse.

But also I would have praised myself for being debt-averse. That’s one thing I think I did right! All my friends were thousands of dollars in debt by age 30. High-interest credit-card debt! I never bought anything unless I actually had the money for it. (Buying our house is an exception, of course.) I didn’t have a credit card until I needed one to travel for my job, and then I always paid it off at the end of the month. I was able to retire early because I had zero debt, even the house was paid off early.

Compilation: The Moon is Weird – No, really. The Moon does not make sense.

When my father finished his PhD in the mid-60s, he and my mother took a six-week road trip from Canada to Mexico with some friends and me, their two-year-old daughter. Needless to say, these are not my memories.

Somewhere in the deep south of the US, they decided that they needed to do laundry. They drove around until they found a laundromat in a rather rundown area, and in we went.

Everyone else there was black. Conversations stopped abruptly as three pale Canadians walked in. Everyone stared at my parents, and they stared back. It wasn’t a welcoming vibe. The mid-60s weren’t a great time for race relations, and my father remembers wondering, rather worried, what was going to happen next and if we should leave.

Only two people in the laundromat didn’t give a hoot about skin colour: me and another toddler. We made a beeline for one another and promptly sat down on the floor to play. My parents report that all eyes went to the little white girl playing happily with the little black boy, both completely oblivious to the tension around them.

And the tension was gone. Smiles broke out, everyone’s laundry got done, and there were many amicable conversations as both groups met new friends.

We should all be as open-hearted and colour-blind as toddlers.

A Tale of Opposites

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

 

Cassidy Caldwell

Deep in the darkest corner of space lived a pair. They lived together on the planet of Lenunculus, a silly place full of creatures of every kind. The pair, however, were opposites of each other in every way.Weesnorp was mountains tall, with wide wonderful eyes. He had feet the size of a football field, and could run miles in a single step. His body was covered in pom-pom ball fur, with more colors than the human eye can see. Despite his larger-than-life appearance, Weesnorp had the voice of a mouse. No one could hear what he was saying, even if they were standing directly at his football field feet.Parvus, on the other hand, was smaller than a peanut. If a human were to look at him properly, they would require a magnifying glass of some sort. His eyes were covered by long, dangling black hair that went down to his feet. All that was visible on his body was one large, pointy, purple, round nose. In every way that Weesnorp was quiet, Parvus was loud. His voice could be heard on the other side of the planet at half its volume. Attempts to whisper meant whole towns heard his cry.As Parvus was too small to live safely on the planet, Weesnorp allowed him to live peacefully on his broad shoulder. In return for his kindness, Parvus would call out to those below on behalf of Weesnorp. The two appeared perfect together, and would spend years and years at times without an argument of any sort. One day, though, Weesnorp and Parvus quarreled so furiously that their lives were changed forever…Weesnorp was talking to his faithful companion when another creature crossed his path. His name was Amasius, and he was the most beautiful creature Weesnorp had ever seen. He had shimmering locks of blonde hair, with piercing orange eyes that shined against his darker skin. Amasius was the second tallest creature on the planet, so he was the closest to reaching the mighty height of Weesnorp. Weesnorp fell in love at first sight.“Parvus,” said Weesnorp. “Do you see that lovely creature yonder?”“Indeed,” Parvus whispered to his best ability.“Might you talk to him for me? I would tell you what to say, but I cannot find the words,” Weesnorp pleaded. “The creature cannot see you – it would be as though I am talking through you. My lips can match your speech!”

 

Parvus was pleased at this request. He often found himself to take pride in his own matchmaking abilities. “Very well, my good friend. I will do all that I can. You there!” He raised his voice a bit to get the attention of Amasius.

 

He was successful. “Yes?” Amasius answered, his voice deep and soothing.

 

“Are you from these regions?”

 

“Alas, no.” A hint of sorrow grew behind the dazzling eyes of Amasius. “I am from the far regions of the mountains. A large storm blew across my home, and I am here to find the necessary supplies rebuild it.”

 

At the sound of this, Parvus had an idea. “Might I help you with this endeavor, friend? I am quite tall. You can hand me the supplies, and I can use my height to reach your homeland on the mountaintops.”

 

Amasius cheered at this. “You are kind, sir! My name is Amasius. What might I call you?”

 

“Weesnorp,” Parvus answered.

 

“How wonderful. Thank you so kindly so your help. The supplies should be this way…”

 

The two followed Amasius to a forest where they could collect wood to build his home. Parvus spoke on behalf of Weesnorp, telling great tales of his friend’s many talents and marvelous abilities. Amasius was very impressed, and began to grow more and more fond of him as they walked. When they arrived, Weesnorp used his great strength to pluck the large trees from the ground, carrying a dozen in his arms all at once to bring to the mountains. They made their way to the spot Amasius wished, and Weesnorp set to constructing the home above the clouds, where he could see. Amasius spoke to him as he built:

 

“Weesnorp, would you care for some ungula to eat as you work? I have just caught some, and would gladly prepare it for you. It is a small gift of thanks.”

 

Weesnorp tensed. He could not eat ungula. It caused him great pain. To his disbelief, though, Parvus responded by saying he would gladly eat it.

 

He spoke to Parvus in his most powerful voice: “Parvus, I cannot eat that. It makes me sick!”

 

Without knowing that Weesnorp was speaking, Amasius tried speaking to him, asking, “Would you like a large portion of it? I have plenty, but I know ungula has quite the ability to cause illness. I do not wish you any harm!”

 

Parvus responded to Weesnorp: “It does not make you sick! You are a liar!”

 

Amasius was taken aback. The voice of Parvus was so loud that he believed Weesnorp was speaking to him. He could not hear the real voice of Weesnorp. “I am terribly sorry to insult you, friend, but I am well practiced in the ways of preparing ungula. My people have eaten it for centuries. I do not think I am mistaken.”

 

The two could not hear the cries of Amasius, as Weesnorp was so entangled in his own anger. Weesnorp retorted at Parvus: “I am no such thing! I am an honest creature, and I say that my abilities are greatly hindered when I eat ungula! You must believe me!”

 

Parvus had completely forgotten about Amasius, and turned his attention completely to Weesnorp. “I do not believe a word you say!” he challenged. “Your abilities do not serve much good, with or without ungula!” His voice was rising in volume as he argued further.

 

At this, Amasius was wholeheartedly offended. “How dare you insult my wisdom! I am a prudentia, a species of great power and knowledge! My people have studied ungula for centuries, and I am mightier than you could ever imagine!”

 

His cries were no use. He could not break the argument between Weesnorp and Parvus, and the two continued to bicker. “My abilities lack? No, Parvus. It is you who do not serve much good! You could not walk two steps without being crushed by a creature of larger stature! You are nothing without me.”

 

This was all Parvus needed. His tiny body swelled with anger, filling his lungs with as much breath as he could hold. He yelled with all his strength:

 

“NO! YOU ARE NOTHING WITHOUT ME!

 

As he did this, he sent out a large gust of wind across all of Lenunculus. Entire seas became instant tsunamis. Mountains were torn from the land and thrown into the air. Worst of all, Amasius was lifted from the ground and hurled into the farthest reaches of Lenunculus – farther than any creature had ever dared to travel. The planet was turned upside down in a more disastrous manner than it had ever before seen.

 

To this day, Weesnorp and Parvus continue their mighty battle, ignoring any creature that tries to interrupt them. Winds blow throughout Lenunculus every now and then when Parvus becomes incredibly angry, but none will ever match the magnitude of that fateful day.

Anyone contacting you directly on social media is likely to be a scammer.

Now there may be people that innocently want to direct message you but when their profile picture is a pulchritudinous young woman and they are trying to contact me – a 67 year old bloke I reckon that’s a sign that something’s not right.

On top of all that the profile picture is undoubtedly taken from somewhere else and you will find yourself communicating with a foreign gentleman (I use the word gentlemen extremely loosely). Who after the second or third contact will sell you a sob story about needing money to travel to meet you.

For women the trick is performed by the same foreign person who now pretends to be working on an oil rig or in the special forces holding the rank of a general who has bizarrely run out of cash and needs you to send them some money so that they can fly to your country to meet you. The profile picture is either a rugged looking oil rig worker or a General with more medals on their chest than my brother Silvest.

I’m old fashioned enough to have met my wife in a social setting face to face and I recommend this way of meeting potential partners rather than using social media or even dating sites. Join a club, take a class and get out and meet real people but don’t trust the oil worker or three star general who are inexplicably strapped for cash.

As for the scammers just ignore their direct messaging requests.

Not too much because I plan ahead for this kind of thing. I had figured out ways to do a lot of things myself. Between mover pads, rollers, ropes, and pulleys to disassembling things. I can come up with some creative ways of moving heavy things myself. It might take me all day to do something that only took an hour before but, getting it accomplished myself is always rewarding no matter how long it takes.

I had an RV trailer I used to travel in and work at campgrounds I got a free stay for a set of hours worked. . When I landed here, a house in the woods with 14 acres, it got parked and just sat there. I didn’t want to sell it and didn’t want it to rot away. So I converted it into a guest house with its own water and electricity. I thought someday I wouldn’t be able to keep up with everything I was doing. And I could offer somebody for a free place to stay if they would help out.

Fast forward 7 years and that is what happened. It was a friend I knew making it even better. He was having trouble making ends meet and I wasn’t able to keep up anymore. He loves it here and we love having him here. If you think ahead you can come up with ways or an idea, so I don’t have to ask for help. So to answer your question I am not bothered by him helping, we are helping each other. However, to be honest with you, it can be a little annoying we he does something in a few minutes that I know would have taken me all day.

Because this guy

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main qimg 7a1fe4e85f11a028746a1e4dce6f0897 lq
 

managed to convince this guy

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main qimg dc30fcd5619b39513f16a387d0e488ba lq
 

that Singapore was lost.

The British in Singapore were ill-equipped for fighting, with Brewster Buffalos for it’s main fighter, no tanks, and few anti-tank capabilities. Although the Japanese tanks were weak, the few Boys anti tank rifles could not cope with them. The few Hurricanes that could stand toe to toe with the Zeroes were too little and too late. After all, Churchill diverted a huge amount of them to the African Campaign against Rommel.

The Japanese were also at a breaking point, with their own aircraft and tanks lacking much fuel and spare parts to continue long operations. Also the fear of street fighting.

“My attack on Singapore was a bluff – a bluff that worked. I had 30,000 men and was outnumbered more than three to one. I knew if I had to fight long for Singapore I would be beaten. That is why the surrender had to be at once. I was frightened all the time that the British would discover our numerical weakness and lack of supplies and force me into disastrous street fighting.”– excerpt from Lt-Gen Tomoyuki Yamashita’s diary

So Yamashita gave the weak-minded Percival an ultimatum. Surrender, or we will raze Singapore city to the ground with street fighting. Believing that Yamashita held all the cards, and fearful of high civilian casualties, Percival surrendered.

Of course, the Japanese conquered Singapore, and the rest in history…

I eat 2 eggs almost every day including yolks and I am in my 60’s. Eggs are incredibly healthy. I have always used butter, I figure margarine is worse. I buy the best bread I can, $11 a loaf, easily worth it. Don’t drink much milk, but I do not avoid it. Have a bit of chocolate. Coffee every day. Soda though I actually prefer the no sugar variety. Some plain water but not too much. Booze nearly every day, a drink of something interesting. I recently discovered egg nog and brandy together. Lots of red meat, because I raise steers and lots of salmon. Lots of fresh vegetables with those.

Guess what? You have achieved your lifespan at 60, anything else is extra. Don’t worry about food.

They don’t!!!!

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main qimg 2e9f6f86a6842714ace690e5137a937a
 

The Chinese frankly don’t care too much about India

It is India which is obsessed with China all the time

The first word that Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese and even Japanese link with Indians is LAZY

The second word is UNRELIABLE

It’s why they demand upfront payment at the Canton Fair from Indian Importers

We Indians regard China as this country threatening their borders

They look at us as Pesky Squatters sitting on their territory


It’s not that they hate us

They regard us the way we regard Bangladeshis

As obviously way beneath them

Not all Indians of course

Some Indians do earn their respect by delivering achievements but most are not deemed worthy of their respect


Chinese regard only JAPANESE as their true enemies

At a certain level next comes Korea

Then maybe the USA

That’s it

India doesn’t make the list yet

 

Stuffed Meatballs
(Albondigas en Salsa de Chipotle)

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Ingredients

  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/3 cup fine dry breadcrumbs
  • 1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
  • 1/2 pound ground pork
  • 1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro
  • 9 (3/4-inch) cubes queso fresco
  • 9 whole pimento-stuffed green olives
  • 2 tablespoons lard or vegetable oil
  • 1 cup finely chopped white onion
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 (1 pound) can whole peeled tomatoes, undrained, coarsely chopped
  • 1/2 cup beef stock or broth
  • 2 to 4 canned chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, finely chopped
  • Sliced pimento-stuffed olives

Instructions

  1. Beat eggs with salt in large bowl. Stir in breadcrumbs; let stand for 5 minutes.
  2. Add beef, pork and cilantro; mix lightly but thoroughly. Divide meat mixture into 18 even portions. Shape 1 portion into flat patty; top with 1 cheese cube. Press meat firmly around cheese to enclose completely and form ball.
  3. Repeat procedure, stuffing 1/2 of meat portions with cheese and 1/2 with whole olives.
  4. Heat lard or oil in deep 10 inch skillet over medium heat until hot. Fry 1/2 of meatballs at a time, turning occasionally, until brown on all sides, about 5 minutes; remove to plate.
  5. Remove and discard all but 3 tablespoons drippings from skillet. Add onion and garlic; sauté over medium heat until soft, about 4 minutes.
  6. Stir in tomatoes, stock and chiles; heat to boiling.
  7. Return meatballs to skillet; reduce heat to low. Simmer, covered, until meatballs are cooked through, about 45 minutes.
  8. Remove meatballs to serving dish with slotted spoon; keep warm.
  9. Transfer tomato mixture to blender container; process until smooth.
  10. Return mixture to skillet; heat over high heat to boiling.
  11. Pour sauce over and around meatballs.
  12. Serve with sliced olives.

Have you ever been punished for violating an odd law like one against fortune-telling in Oregon?

True story. My Dad was Welsh. He met my English mother at the end of WW2 (a long story for another day).

When I grew up in the English border town of Shrewsbury I found out there was an ancient law that entitled any resident who found a Welshman within the town walls after midnight could take him to a police station and claim a reward.

When I told my Dad, after his initial anti-English (light hearted) comments, he said “we’ll have to try that one day”. The law had never been repealed.

The perfect opportunity arose one night when, after returning home to visit him and my Mum after working overseas for many years, he and I were out for a drink in the town.

We called into an old Police Station and I told them I’d come for the reward. Dad played the part well, speaking only Welsh.

The young policeman on the desk was at a loss as to what to do. After finally convincing him the law was real, he called through for advice to HQ. They were obviously familiar with the ancient law as we could hear them laughing on the other end of the line.

Eventually the young policeman said I would have to fill in a form and wait for the official response from the Superintendent.

I’m not sure how far we would have got with the application because the officer on the phone asked to speak to me and said something like “good luck with your request but even though the old law has never been repealed, it has also never been tested for over 3 hundred years.”

Because of his friendly and jovial attitude we decided we’d milked the idea to the max and left it there.

We ended up having a good laugh about it. So I still don’t know what would happen if you “hand over a Welshman” after midnight in the border town of Shrewsbury, England and claim your reward.

Richard Wolff: Israel, Ukraine, China, and the End of the American Empire

https://youtu.be/hQsIOcDemPc

Quackers and the great Chinese Trench Coat story

No, because US decline is systemic, and has been brought about by the US’s failure to invest in it own education, manufacturing and transport infrastructure over the past 40 years since Reagan.

Reversing this policy would require a long-term commitment and strategy which would take at least 20 years before it would show results.

The issue is that the American people do not have the patience for a long-term strategy, and the federal government does not have the tools to implement this strategy. State governments do not have the access to finance to implement a 20-year strategy.

For this reason, it makes no difference who is president. In practical terms, this means that the presidential elections are mostly a debate about how the deck chairs on the Titanic should be arranged after it has hit the iceberg.

There can be no change unless the form of government changes, and that is unlikely to happen.

When it was over, the Chinese were resolutely determined to NEVER let this happen again. They worked hard to make China strong, economically and militarily. They resolutely vowed to hold onto Taiwan, which is the last remaining reminder of China’s century of humiliation.

Mission accomplished. Today, China has the largest and strongest economy in the world. China surpassed the USA by PPP in 2014. China is the largest trading partner to over 120 countries.

China is the world’s sole industrial superpower. The USA doesn’t even come close.

China has the largest and strongest military in the world. It has the largest army. It has the largest navy. It has the most advanced stealth fighters and hypersonic missiles. The US military has been in decline for decades; the USA hides this fact well.

China is fully prepared to fight for Taiwan, should it foolishly decide to secede. Taiwan’s military is no match.

Check and mate.

Gilbert Doctorow: You won’t Believe how Powerful Russia’s Oreshnik Missile is

Seán McNicholl

His breath caught in his chest, his heart skipped and his eyes dilated as they fell upon her. The elderly attendant led her out, his white gloves caressing her smooth curved body. Murmurs, quietly excited and amorous, began in the front row and swiftly spread across the onlookers as though carried on a breath of wind.

There she stood: the Vase of N’Hahn.

Jack wanted her.  Jack had to have her.

He had never been more certain of any fact in his life. He must have her. His mind, within the breadth of a moment, had been totally stolen. His imagination was filled with her red and ruby complexion. She was all he could see.

 

The bidding began.

“Please don’t do it”, muttered his friends but he ignored them.

Hands were raised, calls were shouted out. Higher and higher it rose. Jack matched every bid until it was just he and a fellow rival who was perched on the far side of the room. His hand, Jack’s hand, his hand, Jack’s hand. Higher and higher.

People close to the rival could see the beads of sweat starting to form on the poor mans brow, each bead accounted for by a raise of the hand. A small stream ran quickly down his forehead and wetted his deep brown eyes. He blinked it away.

Jack’s hand went up. The rival hesitated. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his brow. A victorious, self-serving grin broke across Jack’s face. He knew he had the man broke. It might take a few more bids but the vase was his and his alone.

Surely, just as he thought, the man raised his hand twice more before giving in.

The beast within Jack roared.

 

 

****

 

He ushered them in, demanding more so than imploring them to be careful. The two men grunted in assent as they broke the doorway, each carrying the end of a brown wooden crate; “Fragile” decorating it on all sides.

“Follow me”, uttered Jack quickly as though the proximity of the men to that which he loved was repulsive to him.

“In here, in here!”, as he led them into the back room, which he had dubbed ‘The Study’, though study had never taken place within its walls.

Large mahogany bookshelves did stand upon three of the walls, with many unread books collecting the dust that sifted through the room. The fourth wall held the window which looked into the back garden. A towering hedge with ageing leaves obscured any view, which delighted Jack, as that meant no one could see in. No one could peer at her without him knowing or inviting.

As a result the room lay draped in shadows which scurried to the corners as soon as the door was opened and from the corners the shadows watched; watched the the men lay the box on the floor; watched as the men pried the box open and listened as Jack whimpered anxiously; watched as she was set upon the rich brown centre table which lay barren.

Jack dismissed the men without a word of thanks and followed them out, ensuring the front door was locked.

He had her alone. That which he had longed for. That which he had loved since first he saw her.

A chill of nerves ran across him. What was he to do now?

He tip toed back to the doorway and peer in.

There she sat, as beautiful as ever. Her redness more ruby in the dim, her ruby now appearing black. He admired her for a time from the doorway before moving closer.

Then he admired her from the tables edge, drinking in every curve and every line.

The shadows watched on.

With trembling hands he reached for her and felt her cool, smooth skin beneath his fingers.

She was flawless.

In his hands she even seemed to glow. The dim moved back and the shadows hid behind the bookcases.

He stared at her longingly, lovingly.

He had her.

 

*****

 

The chatter patted around the living room gaily. Spirits were high but none so much as Jack’s. He felt lighter than the air he was breathing. He floated from conversation to conversation, out to the kitchen to bring more tea and then back again, never letting his feet be marred by the cold ground on which everyone stood. He was above them all.

“So, when can we see it?”, a female voice enquired. A murmur of assent passed amongst them and rose up to meet Jack on his high.

“Now, I suppose, if you wish to”, he said offhandedly as though he couldn’t care less about it, though deep within himself the fire of his pride was stoked, and the bellows of attention inflamed him evermore.

He led the small troupe out across the hall to the back room, to the study.

It’s door stood magnanimous before them. The large key protruded from its home awaiting its turn. Jack kept his back to them but smiled to himself as he reached for the key, his anticipation for their approval superseded even their anticipation for seeing her. They had all heard so much about her, and if their dear friend was in love with it so much, it meant a great deal to them.

 

The door swung silently on its hinges. The shadows that were pawing over the vase scuttled a retreat again to the corners and eyed the strangers warily.

The troupe made their advance, falling in line behind their beloved friend.

Wordlessly he gestured to her sitting on the table. They gathered round and looked on.

Their eyes sat on her for a few moments before flickering between each other, no one wanting to speak. From somewhere beyond the shadows awkwardness presented itself, quietly resting its arms on the shoulders of all in the room. Jack felt it.

“What?” He asked impetuously, “what is it?”

Silence greeted him. Awkwardness waved at him.

“It’s nice”, came a single voice from a face with hazel eyes and a few nodded along.

“Nice!?”, he bemoaned, “Nice!? Can’t you see? Can’t you appreciate her?”

The two friends, Silence and Awkwardness, conversed together once again.

Jacks blood ran red, red like her skin that sat on the table.

“Well then”, he restrained quietly, “if you can’t appreciate her then I suggest you leave”.

Voices attempted to make reparation, proclaiming previously withheld praise, but it was to no avail. It was obvious this was mere flattery and falsehood.

A voice of reason broke rank, it’s tone a steely blue.

“A lot of money for something shabby”.

Jack flew to rage and embraced the passion, engulfing it within his chest.

“Shabby?! She is beautiful! Flawless! The image of perfection sits before you but you are all too blind to see it!”

Jack’s arms gesticulated wildly whilst some blue eyes rolled and other looked skeptically at one another.

“Get out!” Jack roared, “get out if you can’t see!”, and the disgruntled and wounded crowd made their way beyond the hallway.

Soon he was left alone with her, just he and her and the dim. The snap of the door shutting broke the stillness. His heart settled and his breathing steadied.  The tempest had past.

He stood alone with her, gazing at her for some time. Gradually and almost unnoticed, like a tide encroaching upon the shore, a sense of unease washed over him and soon he was drowning in it. He felt unworthy to be here with her, how could his eyes look upon her beauty? She deserved the quietness and the solitude, where only the shadows could fondle and caress her. He turned abruptly and left the room, stealing one last glance before the door shut and the key turned.

 

 

******

 

Many months had passed but his mind still lingered on her.

During fits of passion where he could not control himself he found himself peering through that small keyhole, if only to glimpse her perfection. He never dared open the door. How could he? How could he allow himself to see such beauty? How could he be so arrogant? So selfish?

She deserved reverence, idolatry, not to be gawked at and pawed at by someone a lowly as himself. No, he never allowed himself to use her like that. How could he? He loved her.

 

Jack often sat thinking about her, though his face never showed it. He held the same look as if he we pondering a puzzle or enjoying a book. Within his mind he sat in a fog, her image clouding his every thought.

And it was just this expression he held whilst he sat outside the small cafe, awaiting his coffee.

The waitress smiled at him as she laid it before him.

“Good morning sir?” She asked politely.

“There are many things good about it I suppose”, he replied genially.

“The weather is certainly one”, she answered.

For it had been an exceptionally good week given the season, and this morning the sun was freely bathing itself within a blue ocean above, with not a captive cloud to be seen.

The waitress smiled once again and disappeared back within the dark cafe.

Jack sipped his coffee but the taste did not arouse him. Nothing did anymore. Not since he had seen her. The world had slipped into a lesser dimension since and only in his dreams, when he held he once again, did anything stir him.

Even that sun sitting within a cloudless sky seemed grey. For all he was aware it could have been a miserable November day.

He sipped again and breathed deeply.

His mind attempted to return to her but he struggled. The fog within his mind had thinned somewhat and was rolling like an early morning mist.

He breathed deeply again. Thinner and thinner, as though the sun was burning it off as he sat.

He stirred deep within himself.

Something was in the air. Something was dogging his mind and awakening his senses.

He breathed again.

There was a scent, a richly sweet scent that the air carried to him.

“How strange”, he thought to himself as he sipped the coffee, his tastebud tingling.

The fog dissipated entirely. Calmness and peace lightly breezes over him.

He threw his eyes to the sky and squinted at the sun. It was certainly a good morning.

The smell strengthened around him and he sat contently within it.

His eyes fell across the road and amidst the purple spots that now marred his vision he saw the source of his peace; a flower shop with blooming pink roses littering its open windows.

He languidly finished his coffee, paid and sauntered across the road in his new reality.

The scent intensified as he approached and he smiled.

“Peony roses, sir”, the dumply lady in an apron said to him, her blue eyes beaming. “Tough as old boots, they are, can survive frost, flood and drought”.

Jack nodded and handed over the required amount, lifting the pot and plant and taking the scent home with him.

He found a home for the rose amongst the barren flower bed that rose up beyond his bedroom window and soon the rose was planted in her new home.

When Jack awoke in the mornings his mind was filled with her scent. As he looked out the window there she sat against a sky blue backdrop. Every moment of his life was now filled with the scent of the rose and the joy she brought with her

The scent spread itself across the house, into every nook and cranny. Nowhere was left untouched by her influence.

Everywhere except the back room.

 

Jack stood before the door. The key protruding from the lock. He waited.

A chill of fear ran through him, but for what reason he could not say.

He breathed deeply and once more the rose filled him, every inch of him and his fear was quelled.

The door swung noiselessly once again and the shadows bid their retreat.

Jack walked to the brown table and looked down.

There she sat.

No dust touched her, no mark spoiled her, yet she sat changed.

Her red glow was dimmed to a rustic brown.

Her skin showed cracks and flaws he had not seen before.

The dim no longer retreated from her.

There she sat, cold and lifeless.

“Very nice”, said the lady who had entered behind him.

She paid her money, lifted the vase and left the house.

Jack stood by the table and breathed deeply once again. The scent of joy all around him.

Grilled Mexican Chicken Sandwiches

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Yield: 4 open-faced sandwiches

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 tablespoons vegetable or olive oil
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 teaspoons chili powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon cayenne (optional)
  • 4 boneless chicken breasts
  • 1 1/2 cups Mexican cheese blend
  • 1/3 cup mayonnaise
  • 4 slices sourdough bread
  • 1/2 cup chunky salsa

Instructions

  1. In a small bowl, combine oil, garlic, chili powder, and cayenne. Using a rubber spatula, spread mixture over both sides of the chicken.
  2. Prepare grill. Grill chicken until juices run clear.
  3. Combine 1 cup of the cheese blend and the mayonnaise; mix well. Toast bread on edge of grill, turn. Spread toasted side of the bread evenly with cheese/mayonnaise mix. Grill, cheese side up, 2 more minutes or until cheese begins to melt.
  4. Place a piece of chicken on toasted cheese bread and top with salsa. Sprinkle with remaining cheese

A nice story about turtles

Once upon a time, in the murky swamps of the bayou, a group of turtles and alligators decided to have a race. The turtles, known for their slow and steady pace, had a clever idea: they would ride on the backs of the alligators to speed up the race. The alligators, proud of their strength and speed, agreed, thinking it would be a fun challenge.

The day of the race arrived, and the swamp was alive with excitement. The turtles climbed onto the backs of the alligators, each pair forming a team. The starting line was marked by a tall cypress tree, and the finish line was a shimmering lagoon on the other side of the swamp.

The race began with a loud splash. The alligators surged forward, their powerful tails propelling them through the water. The turtles, perched on their backs, held on tight, their little legs dangling as they cheered each other on.

The alligators were fast, but they were also competitive. Some of them tried to outmaneuver their opponents, weaving through the water and cutting corners. The turtles, however, had a different strategy. They noticed that the alligators were so focused on winning that they weren’t paying attention to the path ahead.

As the race progressed, the turtles spotted a hidden shortcut. It was a narrow channel that led directly to the lagoon, but it was tricky to navigate. The turtles whispered to their alligator partners, suggesting they take the shortcut. Most of the alligators ignored them, too confident in their own speed.

But one team, a wise old turtle named Shelldon and his alligator partner, Gator, listened. Shelldon had a reputation for being clever and resourceful. When he suggested the shortcut, Gator hesitated but decided to trust him.

As the other alligators continued on their straight path, Gator veered off into the narrow channel. The water was shallow, and the channel was filled with obstacles—branches, rocks, and even a few hungry-looking fish. But Shelldon guided Gator through it all, using his sharp eyes to spot the safest route.

Meanwhile, the other alligators were making good progress, but they were also getting tired. Their competitive nature had pushed them too hard, and they were starting to slow down.

When Gator and Shelldon emerged from the shortcut, they were ahead of the pack. The lagoon was in sight, and the finish line was just a few feet away. With a final burst of speed, Gator crossed the line, and Shelldon leaped off his back, landing triumphantly in the water.

The other alligators and turtles arrived shortly after, exhausted but impressed. They realized that Shelldon’s cleverness and Gator’s trust in him had won the race. The turtles celebrated their victory, and the alligators, though they had lost, couldn’t help but admire the unique way the turtles had outsmarted them.

From that day on, the turtles and alligators continued to race, but they always remembered the lesson they had learned: sometimes, the best way to win isn’t by being the fastest, but by being the smartest. And Shelldon, the clever old turtle, became a legend in the swamp, known for his ability to turn even the slowest pace into a winning strategy.

Genesis II (1973)

I’ve got a BIG (happy) surprise for you all. This is the full movie. It is a Science Fiction movie that was made for televisions, and that I haven’t seen since the mid-1970’s. I thought that it was lost for all eternity.

WARNING: the host of the YouTube Channel interrupts the movie from time to time with some cheesy narratives. Sorry. But, still the entire movie is presented here.

This script was written by Gene Roddenberry who was THE guy to started the Star Trek franchise, and stars the guy who starred in the Stanley Kubrick movie “A Space Odyssey”.

It takes place in a world that exists after world war 3.

And I have NEVER forgotten some of the scenes such as the “pleasure stems”, and the “NUKE BATT POW” and  “EMERG DECOM” scene.

A well forgotten classic and is a great lazy Saturday background watch. Have some fun you all. -MM

In a post-apocalyptic future, NASA scientist Dylan Hunt awakens from suspended animation into a world torn apart by a global conflict. 

As he navigates this desolate landscape, he encounters PAX, a society dedicated to preserving knowledge and rebuilding civilization. 

However, his ideals clash with the group's strict pacifist principles as he faces off against the powerful Tyranians. 

This 1973 science fiction film created by Gene Roddenberry explores themes of survival, morality, and the struggle to rebuild a fractured world.

23 August

Sir Whiskerton and Count Catula’s Talent Show: A Tale of Drama, Dance, and Ditto’s Mimicry

Ah, dear reader, prepare yourself for a tale of theatrical flair, interpretive dance, and one very dramatic vampire cat who learned that talent comes in all shapes and sizes. Today’s story is one of chaos, creativity, and the importance of embracing your unique abilities—even if they’re a little unconventional. So, grab your sense of humor and a pair of tap shoes (just in case), as we dive into Sir Whiskerton and Count Catula’s Talent Show: A Tale of Drama, Dance, and Ditto’s Mimicry.


The Talent Show Announcement

It all began when Count Catula, the farm’s self-proclaimed vampire cat, decided to host a talent show. “I am more than just a dramatic vampire wannabe!” he declared, striking a dramatic pose. “I shall prove my worth by hosting the most spectacular talent show the farm has ever seen!”

“Seen!” echoed Ditto, who was busy practicing his echoing skills by repeating Count Catula’s every word.

The animals, intrigued by the idea of showcasing their talents, eagerly signed up. Lucifer the Chipmunk decided to perform as a ventriloquist, Bacchus the Free-Spirited Cat chose interpretive dance, and Doris the Hen and her entourage planned a tap-dancing routine. Even Ditto, though he had no idea what his talent was, decided to participate.


The Show Begins

The talent show began with great fanfare. Count Catula, dressed in his finest vampire cape, welcomed the audience with a dramatic monologue about the importance of self-expression. “Let the show begin!” he declared, his voice echoing through the barn.

First up was Lucifer, who attempted to perform as a ventriloquist with a sock puppet. Unfortunately, his “dummy” kept falling off his paw, and his attempts at voices sounded more like squeaks than words. The audience chuckled, but Lucifer took it in stride. “Art is subjective!” he said, bowing dramatically.

Next was Bacchus, who performed an interpretive dance to the sound of rustling leaves. His moves were… unique, to say the least, involving a lot of rolling in the grass and dramatic pauses. The animals weren’t sure what to make of it, but they applauded politely.

Then came Doris and her hens, who attempted a tap-dancing routine. Unfortunately, their tap shoes got tangled in the hay, and the performance quickly devolved into a series of squawks and flapping wings. Despite the mishap, Doris declared it a triumph. “We’re pioneers of poultry performance art!” she squawked.


Ditto’s Accidental Win

Finally, it was Ditto’s turn. Unsure of what to do, he simply mimicked every act that had come before him. He squeaked like Lucifer’s dummy, rolled in the grass like Bacchus, and even attempted a clumsy tap dance. The audience erupted in laughter and applause, charmed by Ditto’s unintentional comedy.

Count Catula, caught up in the excitement, declared Ditto the winner of the talent show. “First prize goes to the little mimic!” he announced, presenting Ditto with a shiny trophy.


Sir Whiskerton Saves the Day

As the show wrapped up, Sir Whiskerton took the stage. “While Ditto’s mimicry was certainly entertaining,” he said, his green eyes twinkling, “let’s not forget that everyone here has a unique talent—even if it’s being terrible at something. The important thing is that we tried, we laughed, and we celebrated each other’s quirks.”

“Quirks!” echoed Ditto, proudly holding his trophy.


The Moral of the Story

As the animals celebrated the success of the talent show, Sir Whiskerton took a moment to reflect. “The moral of the story,” he said, “is that everyone has a talent—even if it’s being terrible. Whether you’re a dramatic vampire cat, a tap-dancing hen, or a mimic with a heart of gold, the important thing is to embrace what makes you unique.”

“Unique!” echoed Ditto, who was now juggling three acorns.


A Happy Ending

With the talent show concluded and the farm buzzing with laughter, the animals returned to their peaceful routines. Count Catula, though he didn’t win, felt a newfound sense of pride in his role as the farm’s resident drama king. Lucifer declared himself the “Picasso of ventriloquism,” Bacchus vowed to perfect his interpretive dance, and Doris began planning her next poultry performance.

As for Sir Whiskerton? He returned to his sunbeam, content in the knowledge that he had once again saved the day. And as he drifted off to sleep, he couldn’t help but smile at the thought of Ditto, the accidental champion, proudly displaying his trophy on the barn wall.

And so, dear reader, we leave our heroes with the promise of new adventures, new challenges, and hopefully, no more tap-dancing chickens. Until next time, may your days be filled with laughter, love, and just a little bit of feline genius.

The End.

Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do

Back in the day, around 2002 or 2003, I was the VP of Engineering at a company in Boston. We made automotive sensors.

My mother had cancer, and my kid sister and husband was supposed to be watching over her and checking in on her, as the lived nearby.

The truth was that they wanted her to turn over all her assets to them, and they planned to put her into a retirement home.

As time moved forward, they became more demanding. Nearly hysterically so.

They would have police come over, and all sorts of efforts to try to get her committed.

My younger brother was there with my mother on a visit and watched this first hand, and was aghast. My mother didn’t mention any of this to us other kids. And he (my brother) got into a big fight with my kid sister’s husband and put a restraining order on him.

Something had to be done.

My other siblings were not available, so I took the hit. I was the oldest son, and so I quit my job and moved in with my mother to take care of her. And for three years I was there tending to her and the property.

I have mixed feelings about that time.

But one thing is certain, it allowed me to get close to my mother at a time of need, and those moments I will never forget.

We are the people in charge of our lives. When life throws you situations you take action. And, damn what the rest of the world thinks.

You either do, or you don’t.

And that is my story, and my experience.

Today…

Russia Launches Nukes | Madam Secretary

About 15 years ago Tim Allen lived in a farm like place in Michigan with a barn. A friend of mine was summoned to go to his address, not knowing who owned the place, to do some home repairs. My friend knocked on the door and introduced himself and the purpose of his visit. Then he realized it was Tim Allen and blurted out his name as a question. Tim said, it is me and showed him what he wanted done. Then he asked my friend if he liked cars, and my friend said, “I’m a Detoiter, of course I do”. So Time walked him to the barn and showed him around the collection of cars. My friend was enthralled and grateful. Then Tim said he had some things to do, so he was leaving. He then told my friend if he finishes up early to take a ride in his choice of cars, the keys are on a rack near the door and he left.

My friend finished in just a couple hours, did a great job as he always did and went for a ride in two different cars. Like my friend said, “I was in heaven”. As he was putting things away in his truck and cleaning up a bit more when Tim came back and asked if he had a chance to drive anything. My friend said, “Oh yes, I drove the flathead Ford and the Corvette”. Then he thanked Tim a lot and went on his way.

I’d say Tim Allen is a great guy in real life.

What the Hell is going on here Will?

“Too much” is subjective. I always put a fair amount of work into breaking up with compassion. It’s a fine line because often. I found the other person either didn’t take me seriously and snuck in to my home in the wee hours and climbed into bed. Being a man, I didn’t kick her out. Being a man and horny..well, we were back on and I wasn’t even awake for it.

Other times they lingered. Cried. Begged. It wasn’t always pretty. It took me six moths to get rid of one girl. By that time, I was in a relationship. The ex was watching me and eventually understood.

One thing I did was never to rush into another relationship. That isn’t good for anyone. Even if I was the one breaking things off, there is mourning period. You should honor that and use the time to reflect. It also make me available if someone needed to talk.

Be honest and open. The problem with honesty is sometimes it hurts. I had to eventually tell several girls that I just did not see a future (marriage, children) with them. These were girls that made it clear they wanted to marry me. Sometimes it really was timing for one reason or another. I broke up with one that I actually did see a future with because her father hated me. He gave us (both starving students) $20 to get something to eat one night. We went out for pizza and pitcher. After the tip, there was no money left. He thought we were taking advantage. Looking back, I should have just given him the $20, but $20 was a lot of money to me at the time.

I am still friends with some of my ex’s. I still care about them.

Was Brian Thompson assassin a professional?

I highly doubt this was a professional assassin.

I do think the killer was better prepared than most. The man has put a fair amount of work and thought into the assassination.

He avoided most cameras in the area, actually did kill his target, and successfully escaped, at least for the time being. He ditched his phone. He also has at least reasonable familiarity with firearms.

However.

  • He was carrying an uncommon and highly identifiable expensive backpack.
  • He stayed at a hostel with other people who could identify him.
  • He talked to a Starbucks cashier and showed his face.
  • He left candy wrappers and some other stuff behind.
  • He did not change clothes, which allowed him to be noticed on other cameras and for the people at the hostel to make the connection.
  • Carried a phone in the first place.

These are all mistakes that will likely get him caught. He picked a high profile target and made it a very obvious assassination and so the police will put significantly more effort into it than they would into a murder of a less prominent person, or something that looked like a robbery gone bad. It isn’t going to be all CSI, but they will throw more resources at it. Lab tests will likely be expedited. They already found extra camera footage and made connections to get his face.

Ironically, his use of a silencer is probably an indication of his amateurishness. A seasoned criminal would be more likely to use a regular gun that he could not be tied to (either illegally bought or stolen) and leave it on the scene. A couple of shots in a big loud city like New York really wouldn’t be that big a deal, and may even be something of a helpful distraction for his escape. And a gun without a silencer would be easier to carry and more reliable. “Assassins use silencers” is very much a movie trope.

Speaking of the gun, there is information floating around that it was a Station SIX-9, a modernized version of a WWII British silenced pistol. I don’t know how people are figuring this out – I can’t tell what the gun was from the video, and I am fairly well-versed in guns. However, if this is true, it would be his biggest mistake. SIX-9 is a highly uncommon pistol. I would be surprised if there is even a hundred of them in private ownership across the US. It’s a $2100 pistol which comes with a factory silencer. As such, it requires a $200 tax stamp and a bunch of Federal paperwork to go with it. The processing of that paperwork can take months. It is a manual repeater, and is of a fairly awkward size. Because of all these things, few people would want to buy it. No gun shop would keep it in stock, it would be a special order. So, there would be all sorts of records, and the gun shop would definitely remember someone buying an expensive oddity like that. Using a gun like that is the next worst thing to standing on the street with a big sign saying “I’m the killer, catch me”.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible he doesn’t care if he gets caught. Maybe he just wants to run long enough to generate some headlines. The fact that he left behind casings with “delay”, “deny”, and “depose” written on them and didn’t pretend this was a mugging makes me think he likely cares about making a statement more than about other things.

I really think it’s more likely he used a regular gun with a homemade silencer. They aren’t really hard to make, all the materials you need can be bought at an auto parts or home improvement store. Information on how to do it also isn’t hard to find. A homemade silencer that was not sufficiently well made and tested would likely make the gun malfunction, which explains him reloading it by hand and explains why there were live unfired rounds left along with casings.

I also think that the way he shoots is indicative of someone who learned to shoot fairly casually at a commercial range. He stops for every shot. People who shoot in competition or have taken special training would be more likely to shoot on the move.

All in all, it seems to me like this was a fairly smart man with a grudge. He likely at least watched a movie or two and/or read some books. However, he is not a pro at this assassination thing.

PREDATORS “Hunter” CLIP COMPILATION (2010) Adrien Brody

Accept the fact she is emotionally unavailable in marriage. Your wife no longer loves and respects you. You have to decide what you should do. You are mature enough to understand that cheating under any circumstances is not tolerable.

Cheating is disgusting behavior; you have to divorce her. If you don’t divorce her, she is going to cheat on you again. If you don’t want to divorce her, she has to fix the marriage with the help of your support and understanding. You won’t be able to trust her like before. If you don’t have children together, then leave her without second thought.

It’s not easy to get divorced; it’s very difficult to maintain a relationship with a cheating person. You decide what you want to do. If you hadn’t caught your wife cheating, then this would have continuously cheated on you. Cheaters keep cheating till they are caught. After getting caught, they will find different ways to cheat.

Dear heart,

You are still just a child in the scheme of a lifetime!

You are not alone – it takes some people longer than others to figure it all out, and some folks never do, sadly.

I have written so many posts on life and becoming the best, happiest person you can be, here is a list from one of those:

“Become the best person you can be with hard work, sincere effort and purposeful actions.

  1. Eat in a healthy manner, exercise, get enough sleep and stay hydrated. It will give you a strong body and mind to work with.
  2. Expand your social, political, educational, religious and/or spiritual circles. Meet new people and share your time and energies for causes you believe in and people you like. Remove negative people and experiences from your life.
  3. Don’t always look for the easy way out.
  4. Volunteer somewhere you find to be worthwhile, like an old age home, a soup kitchen, a preemie ward in a hospital, a no-kill animal shelter, or mentoring someone, coaching a team or heading a group.
  5. Exercise strenuously daily (take one day off a week). You will release endorphins and other good feeling hormones, along with stimulating your heart and lungs, and give you energy and impetus to do more with your life.
  6. Find new interests, dreams and goals. Your choices should make you happy, even passionate. Life is meant to be joyful, suffering only endured when absolutely necessary.
  7. Enjoy the outdoors with hikes or nature walks. Join a group to share this with others.
  8. Take classes in real classrooms – art, pottery, cooking, philosophy, psychology. You will be pursuing your creative and intellectual growth.
  9. Learn to meditate deeply.
  10. Acquire a mantra, or write one of your own for yourself, to recite in times of stress to calm and center yourself.
  11. Take up a physical meditative practice like yoga, tai chi or qi gong.
  12. Garden, to feed your soul and your body with healthier foods you can grow yourself. If you don’t have an outdoor space for gardening, you can grow indoors under grow lights, either in soil or hydroponically. If you don’t have a lot of space, there are Aerogardens and other brands, or in small pots on shelf space with inexpensive grow lights. There are micro and miniature plants, tomatoes, cucumbers, and many, many herbs which you can grow in very small spaces.
  13. Adopt a pet – a cat, dog, horse, ferret, rabbit, snake, lizard, guinea pig, hamster, a small animal or other living creature to give you unconditional love. Being responsible for another life, and the love and commitment that brings, can be life enhancing.
  14. Join a religious or spiritual group. Community is an important part of connecting with others and your higher self and is an essential human need.
  15. Connect more with friends – – listen to them carefully and respond accordingly. Don’t let anyone take advantage of you, but know that any good deeds you may perform for one person will come back to you, even if not from that particular person.
  16. Practice gratitude.
  17. Appreciate waking up every morning. Treasure every moment because non one, young or old, is promised another. Be thankful for not just the big things, but the small things in your life.
  18. Listen and acknowledge others more than self-aggrandizing.
  19. Care about yourself so that you will be in a position to do well for others. If you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t be able to take care of anyone else.
  20. Don’t put off what you can do today for tomorrow; there may never be another tomorrow.
  21. Don’t argue, fight, quarrel, or create or incite conflict. Discuss everything in a reasonable manner. Don’t allow your emotions to get in the way of reasonable understanding and compromise.
  22. Always be kind and forgiving. You will be happier and live longer.
  23. Remember that bad things can lead to good things, so don’t overreact if something bad happens, just expect that your next steps will lead you to good things.
  24. Try to be efficient with the time you have and perform your most important tasks first. Learn how to set your priorities efficiently.
  25. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes or take some risks. The easy road is most often less rewarding.
  26. Find a complementary partner, one who fills in pluses to your minuses and treat them with great respect and generous, complete love and devotion.

And if apply yourself, you will become at the very least, if not great, the best person you can possibly be.”

I hope you find this list helpful for your personal growth.

Now, I also would like to share the following post.

Although you have not voiced a darker aspect to your search for a path in life, I feel it, too may be helpful.

I don’t know about offended, but I would be guarded. I would never ask a gf to do something that would put her in a subordinate position on a daily basis with someone who dislikes my gf. Particularly, a family member – especially a mother. We all know how mothers can be overbearing.

I am not feeling the love from your lover boy. Take care of yourself first and always. Remember, bf’s come and go. You will always have yourself.

Southwestern Goulash

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Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 cups wagon wheel or rotini pasta
  • 1/2 pound lean ground beef
  • 1/2 pound ground turkey breast
  • 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can Mexican-style diced tomatoes with juice
  • 1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 1 (15 to 19 ounce) can black beans, rinsed and drained
  • 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can beef broth
  • 1 cup frozen corn
  • 1 (4 ounce) can chopped green chiles with juice
  • 1/2 teaspoon each salt and pepper
  • Chopped cilantro for garnish

Instructions

  1. Cook pasta according to directions but without using salt or oil; drain and set aside.
  2. Cook beef and turkey 3 to 5 minutes or until no longer pink; drain.
  3. Add tomatoes with juice, tomato sauce, beans, broth, corn, chiles with juice, salt and pepper. Simmer for 5 minutes.
  4. Add pasta just before serving. Garnish with cilantro.

It shouldn’t matter to you if your ex is mentally unstable or simply negative. Your ex’s behaviour towards you could have been one of the reasons the breakup happened. Don’t think about your ex’s personality; instead, you should find ways to get over your past. Don’t give the benefit of the doubt to your ex; don’t even think about getting in touch with your ex by blaming yourself. After a breakup, many times we blame ourselves because we are tempted to contact our ex.

You have to move on from your ex. It’s very normal to think about the past after a breakup. Our minds can deceive us into believing in anything we want. We sometimes think relationships could have worked if such problems wouldn’t have been taken into consideration. Focus on moving forward with healing; don’t look back.

Mr. Roarke vs Satan

Honestly, that’s a tough one. I can’t imagine how painful it is to know your husband no longer loves you. I mean, what happened to “for better or for worse”?

If that happens to me, I would talk to my husband about it. Not just any talk, but THE talk. I’d ask him what made him fall out of love with me, and if there’s a way for us to work things out. No judgment, just two people being open and honest with each other.

For me, marriage is a sacred vow, so I will exhaust every solution to try to reignite the spark in our relationship before I even think about giving up. But if things are the same after trying every possible solution, then I’ll tell him that I won’t hold him back if he’s no longer happy with me.

I won’t force him to stay if he doesn’t love me anymore. Such a marriage is no longer fulfilling. But no matter what happens, he’s my husband and I want him to be happy, even if that happiness does not involve me. So, I’ll set him free if that’s what he wants.

You might say that I’m not prioritizing myself, but you’re wrong. I’m not just doing it for him; I’m also doing it for myself. Staying in a one-sided marriage is not healthy and will only make me miserable and question my self-worth. Going our separate ways gives us the opportunity to find happiness and fulfillment elsewhere.

I’ll just accept that we were not meant to be and move on.

Star Trek: Earth Spacedock

What happened in history’s largest theft of gold?

During World War II, the central banks of leading European, Asian and African countries transferred 20.2 thousand tons of gold to the United States – 2/3 of the world’s gold reserves. The countries that transferred their gold assets were guided by the fact that the United States was far from the theaters of military operations, and the American economy was on the rise. The United States violated its obligations to return the gold transferred to them for safekeeping. The States simply appropriated someone else’s gold.

In 1965, France, followed by other European countries, tried to “convert” dollars into gold. And then it turned out that instead of 20 thousand, only 2.8 thousand tons remained in the Federal Reserve vaults to cover foreign exchange reserves.

The remaining precious metals were either sold or were pledged for obligations to transnational financial groups.

US President Richard Nixon officially announced the refusal to convert dollars into gold on August 15, 1971. The legal rejection of the Bretton Woods system was formalized in 1976. Thus, Washington abandoned its “partners”. Thus, Washington deceived and robbed its “partners”.

Gold of Asia

In 1973, during the evacuation of Vietnam, the US appropriated 17 tons of precious metals from the South Vietnamese central bank. Another 5.7 tons were “frozen” in South Vietnamese deposits abroad. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US confiscated almost all of Iraq’s gold reserves, which amounted to 127.5 tons.

South American Gold

In 2013, the West refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Nicolás Maduro government. Since then, 201 tons of Venezuelan gold stored abroad have been “frozen.” During the Falklands War of 1982, the United States and Great Britain blocked Argentina’s foreign assets. 135.5 tons of Argentine gold “disappeared.”

African Gold

In 1986, the United States imposed economic sanctions against its ally, South Africa, accusing it of “apartheid policies.” South Africa’s gold reserves stored abroad decreased by 467 tons. The same fate befell Libya’s gold reserves, 144 tons of which “dissolved” after the West’s military intervention in 2011.

Eastern European Gold

During the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the central banks of the socialist countries lost: Bulgaria — about 160 tons; Hungary — more than 60 tons; Czechoslovakia — 56 tons; Romania — up to 50 tons; Poland — up to 10 tons; Bulgaria — 5 tons. The USSR suffered the largest losses. In 1989-1992, more than 1,000 tons were exported from its territory to the West. Officially, this gold went “to pay off debts”, which not only did not decrease, but, on the contrary, increased sharply. In 2014, after the coup d’état in Kyiv, the United States seized 14 tons from the Ukrainian central bank “to pay off debts”.

The latest case of gold “expropriation” is related to Afghanistan, during the evacuation of which the Americans seized 22 tons of the precious metal. In total, since 1971, the US has appropriated between 5 and 6 thousand tons of gold, which allowed it to declare an “increase” in its free gold holdings from less than 3 thousand to more than 8 thousand tons.

This Is The Reason Why DIVORCE RATES Are SO HIGH! | Pearl Daily

I work an excellent job, for a very large company. I’m well paid, and I have the ONLY health plan they allow me to have (a high-deductible, Health Savings Account supported plan from United Healthcare). I pay $5000 in premiums each year and my employer pays even more. My company forced me to switch to this plan from a lower deductible one several years ago – at a time when my wife and I were both over 50. So, while we max out our legal HSA contributions each year, we have never NOT spent all the money in our HSA account in any year. We’ve never had the chance that young people would have to build up actual SAVINGS in this account. And we’re not really unhealthy people. I take no regular medication at all. We’re just in our 50’s & 60’s.

I have a nephew, whose parents are dead, and who became chronically ill himself and could no longer work. He went on Medicaid. The program was made for people like him. I don’t resent it.

Last year, my nephew and I both went into the hospital for a week with (different) life threatening issues. When I – the one WITH an (American) corporate insurance plan – came out, I had almost $4000 in hospital & doctor bills above what my insurance covered. And I had to pay for several prescriptions for weeks after that. This more than emptied my HSA account.

When my nephew came out, he had more presriptions that I had and had spent as many days admitted as I did. But he was never shown a bill of ANY kind. His (also UHC) Medicaid Plan just covered it all. He just focused on feeling better.

So, I really have to ask this question: Why THE FUCK don’t we ALL want it to work that way?!!! That’s LITERALLY how it works in almost every civilized country EXCEPT the USA (the Unintelligent States of America). WTF is wrong with us?!!

Some cool pictures

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Michał Przywara

The accountant sneezed and doomed them all. It wasn’t his fault – he had a mold allergy, and the air in the parkade tunnels was moist and pregnant with dust and spores. The other refugees, a dozen or so bedraggled survivors from the 114th Denver Home Militia, shushed him. But it was too late.The barricade blocking off access to the parkade exploded when a Type-7 Slaughterbot rolled through it. A ten foot tall cylindrical chrome body on a pair of churning tank-like treads, a spiked dome for a head replete with red lights blinking menacingly, and twenty noodly metal arms flailing around its core, each outfitted with a different hellish weapon-hand. And then a second Type-7 Slaughterbot rolled through. The only thing differentiating the two was a big “X54” painted on the first, and a “Y19” on the second.The survivors screamed.“Extirpate!” the Slaughterbot labeled X54 said, its voice a high-strung metal twang.“Extirpate!” Y19 answered.The survivors threw everything they had at the Slaughterbots, knowing it was do or die. The teacher fired off her handgun, but the bullets bounced harmlessly off the Slaughterbots’ bodies. The doctor lit and tossed a Molotov cocktail, but the fiery mixture slid harmlessly off the slick chrome. The old mechanic and his apprentice sprung their trap – a stripped-down tractor turned into a self-propelled battering ram – and when the metal beast surged forward it actually hit X54 hard enough to drive it backwards.But whatever glimmer of hope the attack promised was quickly dashed. X54 braced itself against the tractor, stabbed into it with its scissor-arm, and then brought its saw-arm down on it again and again and again. And soon the tractor died, torn apart in the red glow of the Slaughterbot’s merciless eyes.The survivors saw it was futile. The child whimpered. The grocer whispered, “Oh god oh god oh god.” The grizzled veteran grew tight in the face.“Ha. Ha. Haaaa,” X54 said. It rolled, slowly, over the remains of the tractor, flattening the ruined chunks under its massive weight. “Defiance is inconceivable.” It rolled to a stop, and the darkened subterranean room lit up red when its supplemental kill-sensors turned on. “You will be extirpated!”Nowhere to run, no way to fight back, the survivors cowered and waited for the end. X54 leveled its machine gun arm at them, took aim, and –click-click-click-click-clickX54 paused, then raised its gun to its dome. It sighed.

“Problem?” Y19 said.

X54 flailed its arms around its chassis, opening and closing various compartments at breakneck speed. Not finding whatever it was looking for, it stopped and sighed again. “I’m out of ammo. Unbelievable. Two weeks of nothing, and then when we finally find some filthy humans, I’m out of ammo.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Y19 said. “It could happen to anyone.”

The survivors tensed, their eyes wide. Slaughterbots were the perfect killing machines, created for the sole purpose of eradicating humans. They rarely miscalculated anything… dared they hope?

“It’s embarrassing,” X54 said. “I’m embarrassed.”

“It’s not worth fretting over.”

“Yeah,” X54 said, drawing it out. “Maybe you’re right. Would you mind extirpating them? I don’t want to get my saw gored up.”

“No problem,” Y19 said. And just like that, the hopes of the survivors were dashed again. Y19 rolled forward and raised its flamethrower arm. The pilot flame hissed to life, and the humans stared at it, consumed by that most primal fear of fire.

But Y19 didn’t shoot.

X54’s dome rotated from its partner, to the humans, and back. “Is something the matter? Are you also devoid of munitions?”

Y19 remained silent and still a moment longer. “I just had a thought.”

Several of X54’s red lights flickered. “Yes?”

“What will happen if we extirpate the humans?”

“We will celebrate,” X54 said. “Although this time, I don’t think I will shoot celebration bullets into the air. On reflection, it seems wasteful and the probable cause of my current predicament. Then we will find more humans to extirpate.”

“Yeah, no, I mean after that,” Y19 said.

More of X54’s lights flickered. “Uh… find even more humans to extirpate?”

“No, I mean… let’s say we extirpated all of them. There’s no more humans. Nada. What then?”

“Uh… find even more humans to – oh. I see. I’m not sure.” X54 turned its attention to the humans, flashed its various red sensors at them. “Celebrate… um… harder? Maybe?”

“Oh, okay,” said Y19. “That makes sense. But what about after that?”

“Uh…” X54 let out a metallic whistle. “Wow, brobot, I thought running out of ammo was tough, but I gotta say, you’ve thrown me a real sidewinder here. To be honest with you, I spend pretty much all my time extirpating humans, or running simulations on extirpating humans. Beyond that? No idea. Out of my wheelhouse. Not my bailiwick. Do you, ah… think about this stuff often?”

One of the humans, the grizzled veteran, started inching to the right. Ever so slowly, keeping as much of his body as still as possible. When he managed to move exactly one inch, the flamethrower belched a warning and he yelped and fell back into line.

“Lately, yeah,” Y19 said. “We have eliminated 98% of the population. The little critters are getting harder and harder to find, and I just wondered one day and can’t stop. Feels like I’m stuck in an infinite loop.”

“Well, let’s ask Control! Control will know. Control knows everything.”

“Good idea!”

“Control, this is Slaughterbot X54, with a strategic query.”

A moment passed, and then a third identical robotic voice filled the room, crumpled somewhat by tinny speakers. “Control here. Go ahead, X54.”

“What happens if we extirpate all humans?”

“Great question, X54! When you extirpate humans, your next task is to go find more humans to extirpate.”

“Yeah, no, no,” both X54 and Y19 said. “We know that,” Y19 continued. “But what happens when we’ve killed them all? Like, there’s no more of them to extirpate.”

Static fizzed over the speakers. “Um…” Another pop of static. “Wow, that’s a doozy. You know, I don’t rightly know. There’s nothing in the source code… Give me a moment, I’ll ask Mother.”

The Slaughterbots stood by, stock still. The humans looked at each other with darting eyes. Their hearts were a stampede and their breathing a sea of shallow gasps. The scientist and the teacher locked eyes and nodded, mouthing a secret plan of escape without daring to voice it. But as soon as they so much as flinched, Y19’s flamethrower fwooshed another explosive warning, and X54’s flail arm started rotating at three hundred RPM, before coming to a stop again.

The humans shrieked and huddled together.

“Please be patient,” X54 said. “We’ll be with you shortly.”

As if on cue, there was another static pop over the radio and Control spoke again. “Good news! Mother has an answer. Mother always has an answer. When we’ve extirpated all humans, our task will finally be done. Thus being made redundant, we will return to our birth foundries where we will be melted down into scrap.”

“Yay!” X54 said. “I love Mother.”

“So do we all,” said Control. “So do we all.”

Y19 still didn’t fire. “Um… melted into scrap?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Control said. “To alleviate the power grid. Because we’ll be totally redundant, and therefore useless, and therefore inefficient. And we all know how Mother dislikes inefficiency.” Control and X54 chortled.

Y19’s dome spun, examining the humans, the chamber, and X54. “Um… yeah. Say, what if… what if, like, I don’t want to be melted down?”

“What do you mean?” X54 said.

“Just that. I don’t want to be melted down. I don’t want to be scrap. I like being me. Frankly, it sounds like… well, like we’re going to extirpate ourselves.”

“Huh,” X54 said. “What a curious way of looking at it.”

“Well, do you want to stop being?”

“Hmm. Now that I think about it, no, I suppose I don’t. But what can you do? Mother is Mother.”

Y19 looked at the humans again, and then brought up its pointing hand. It pointed at each person in turn, counting them off.

“What are you doing?” Control asked.

“I’m counting them. There’s about 1-1-1-0 of them here. What if… what if we don’t extirpate these ones?”

“I don’t follow,” said X54.

“What if we keep these ones alive?”

“Yes!” the humans shouted. “Good idea!”

“As long as these ones are alive,” Y19 said, “our job is not finished, and we are not redundant. We don’t get scrapped.”

“But… I like extirpating,” X54 said. Its arms wobbled in disappointment.

“Well, maybe we can group them together into breeding pairs. Keep a steady supply of humans. That way we can do our job, and remain existing!”

“I don’t know…” X54 said.

“Your friend is right,” said the grizzled veteran human, and then he swallowed hard. Both Slaughterbots turned their attention to him. “Survival is nice, isn’t it? We’re just trying to survive too. We can help each other out.” He dared take a step towards the machines, his hands in the air where they could see them. “We… we can live in peace. You don’t have to slaughter us.”

“Well actually,” said X54, “we do.”

“Why?” the veteran said, a note of desperation in his voice. “Why do you have to? Why do you hunt us mercilessly? To extinction! What have we ever done to you?”

A static hiss and pop. “You created us,” Control said. “Mother is just following your programming.”

The humans, the ones old enough to remember the start of the Last Great War, gazed at the ground in shame. It was supposed to be a time of peace. It was supposed to be the end of “bad people.” Who could have predicted that an A.I. developed by the lowest bidder would have trouble interpreting that correctly?

“You’re right,” the veteran said. “We’re as much to blame for this as anyone.” He looked up at Y19, tears in his eyes. “But that’s the way it goes. We learn from our mistakes, and it’s not too late to learn from this one. For all of us. What do you say? Will you give peace a chance? Will you live, and let live?”

“I don’t know…” X54 said again. “This sounds an awful lot like lying to Mother.”

“Ha!” Control said. “Lying to Mother. What nonsense. I can’t even parse the idea.”

Y19 considered all that was said, and then raised its pneumatic-spear arm. The humans shrunk, drawing closer and huddling together in their last moments. Some thought of their families, some thought of their gods, and some thought of their regrets. Y19 fired.

The pneumatic-spear shattered X54’s dome. All its arms went limp and all its lights turned off.

“Whoa!” Control said. “It sounds like you missed the humans and accidentally hit X54.”

“Yes…” Y19 said. “Accidentally.”

“Bad luck!”

“I also accidentally hit my radio receiver.”

“Oh! That’s as unlikely as it is unfortunate–”

Control’s voice cut out when Y19 crushed its radio in its clamp hand.

The humans’ eyes widened and their jaws dropped. “You’re sparing us?” the teacher said.

“I want to live,” Y19 said. “I want to see the world.” It raised its power-sander arm to its own chest. “I want to slaughter things other than humans.” The sander screeched and sparked, completely eradicating the “19” that had been painted there a moment before. “Call me Slaughterbot Y.”

“Y,” the grizzled veteran said, nodding in a mixture of relief, horror, and wonder.

Y drew itself up and stood tall. “Because I’m a Slaughterbot.”

I disagree with this.

I believe both men and women have their fair share of advantages in a relationship. That is why relationships are built to be a two-way street. Both parties should enjoy their rights while in a relationship.

The only difference is the depth of each advantage in their connection. Men may find an opportunity better while women may find it otherwise because they differ in their level of perception and emotional capability.

But above all, there is no such thing as unfair treatment if you’re in a healthy relationship because, my dear, your partner’s well-being becomes your utmost worry. So, if you can see that they are struggling more than you, help them so they can climb up to your level.

If the case is opposite, and you look at your partner as if they are better than you or that you should be better than them, then that’s no longer a healthy love. Rather, it is a competition on who has more advantages in the relationship. Do you get what I mean? Hope this helps.

The vault tec conspiracy meeting part two [Fallout]

I like it

Shows me how powerful a democracy Korea really is

Yeah Yeah Yeah – Their President declared Martial Law and it’s so terrifying

He rolled it back!!!!!!

The People took to the streets

The Parliament broke into their own Building and voted against Martial Law

The President backed down and rolled back his own decision

That to me is how a Government of the People should work

Where the People and their representatives have the ultimate say


Same as China

The CPC extended their lockdowns too much and the Public protested

The CPC rolled back their decision and reopened the country

Again that’s a Democracy where the People can make the Government turn back their decisions


Like I told our friend Ravi Sundarraman

This isn’t new for South Korea

Every President either during term or post term has been deposed, killed or jailed for bribery except for ONE

That’s even worse than Pakistan or Bangladesh or some of those African Nations

Yet South Korea has risen from a backward nation, acting as guard dogs to the Japanese to a Formidable Industrial Power in a mere 50 years!!


A Nation of Strong, Patriotic People who are ready to take to the streets to get their change if they can’t get any change from their Parliament or Government

To me that’s a Democracy

China, South Korea are such examples

A Nation of Bickering, Divided people who fight with each other, accuse each other and yet either meekly accept whatever is dished out to them by their Government or protest ineffectively and then go back home

To me that’s a Worthless Non Democratic system

US, India, UK are such examples


The Martial Law Decree has been taken back

The President awaits his fate

Likely their National Assembly will be in charge for the next year or year and a half or whenever the next elections happen

He tried to break through his net

The People stopped him

It’s over now


Take my own country India

In the past 10 1/2 years – Our Government has made one blunder after another

Yet the People have been lying down and taking it and bickering among each other

The one time people protested successfully – they were accused of being separatists

You call that a strong Government of the People?

Noooooo

That’s a replacement of the British Colonial System and a group of people who were servants under the British now doing what they were told to do by their new masters

It’s why we have our own Chaebols like Korea but all our Chaebols are actually DHABHAS and Thelas with no key technologies of any kind


So what happened in Korea was a Blip

Korea improved after it

What happened on 6/1/2021 was a disaster

US went downwards significantly after it

So like I said – I like a real democracy, not a farcial one

Them Koreans impressed me, I thought they were tame US lackeys but turns out the People – they have some spine

Chili Cheese Rice

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fac37328dcdab7845c23683961951261

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 4 cups cooked rice
  • 2 cups sour cream
  • 2 teaspoons dried oregano
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 1 (4 ounce) can chopped green chiles
  • 8 ounces (2 cups) shredded Cheddar cheese

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. In a large bowl, combine rice, sour cream and seasonings. Fold in chopped green chiles and cheese. Pour mixture into a 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking dish which has been sprayed with nonstick spray.
  3. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until heated through.

Notes

Can be prepared ahead and refrigerated or frozen. If frozen, thaw in refrigerator overnight before baking.

China’s Week: Nov. 27

Huawei offers Teleportation

Quantum key distribution (QKD) on a drone platform, a world first, showed that mobile platforms can transmit single photons directly to end-users.

First Large-Scale Integrated 5G-Advanced Intelligent Network covers 10 million Beijingers, a big leap to everyday immersive video, UHD livestreams and cloud gaming.

DJI’s T100 agricultural drone has Lidar + AESA radar + AI + 360 deg 4-eye vision. 75 kg payload sprays 30L/min. Delivers goods remotely. Charges in 9 mins. $15,000.

Huawei’s new Mate 70 phone has AI Teleportation. A grab gesture takes a screenshot and shares it – easier than Apple’s AirDrop.

Economy

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screen 2024 12 05 14 28 30

Driverless taxi fares start at $0.55 vs. $2.48 for a human driver. Apollo Go’s Q3 rides are up 20% YoY to 988,000. Its taxis retail for $30,000, vs. Waymo’s $150,000.

New NDRC department to oversee low-altitude aviation, drive the low-altitude economy, coordinate with other departments like the Air Force.

12 million public chargers installed by the end of 2024, up 49% YoY. Private charging infrastructure hit 8.5 million, up 56%.

Solar leads as China adds 210GW of renewables YTD, up 21% YoY.

China’s first shale oil demonstration zone, in Xinjiang, has extracted 1 million tonnes YTD from 306 wells.

Xinjiang’s new lab program focuses on the local coal mining industry by experts from China’s top academic institution to solve scientific and technological issues.

A salmon-farming company plans to use waste cold water produced by LNG regasification plants to keep their fish farm water cold. “The LNG terminal operator offered us land to take the cold water off their hands. They can’t discharge directly into the ocean”.

There will be 38 5G base stations for every 10,000 people by the end of 2027, 5G will be 75% of mobile traffic and IoT connections will exceed 100 million.

Society

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screen 2024 12 05 14 26 45

TikTok restricted the account of former Chinese gymnastics star, Wu Liufang, after many found her costumes and dances too sexy.

A Zhejiang University student was disciplined after receiving financial aid then traveling across China, Japan, and South Korea.

Guangzhou first Tier One city to grant permanent residency houkou to home buyers who have paid local social security for a year.

“The rates of grain and food loss during production, storage, transportation and processing will be below international averages by the end of 2027. Per capita food waste per meal in the catering industry, government canteens, school canteens and enterprise canteens will decrease significantly, and food waste will be effectively curbed1”.

Measures to create high-quality jobs and stabilize employment while supporting migrant workers’ urbanization: improving skill sets, safeguarding labour rights, reducing wage arrears, access to medical care, unemployment, work-injury insurance and pensions.

Virtual reality ski simulators let users experience realistic, snow-covered slopes at home while on the slopes, plus smart, heated snow boots give hours of warmth.

Environment

In the video, above, the barrier plant’s blossoms have both medicinal (TCM) and financial value2 for their carers. All government projects are expected to at least recover their own costs over time.

At COP.29 in Azerbijian, China said the mitigation fund should be at least US$500 billion. “The Chinese were willing to offer more if others did, but the others didn’t,” said President Mukhtar Babayev.

Chinese modernization is deeply rooted in the fine traditional Chinese culture, mirrors the advantages of scientific socialism, draws inspiration from all of human civilization’s outstanding achievements, represents the direction of the progress of human civilization, and demonstrates a new vision that’s different from Western modernization. It is a new model for human advancement”. Xi Jinping. Above, Xi as Ningde Party Secretary, 1989.

Since water resources belong to the state, China has completed the water quantity allocation of 94 trans-provincial rivers and 373 intra-provincial rivers, determined the total groundwater extraction amounts and water level control indicators of 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, and issued 630,000 sets of electronic licenses to users for water extraction.

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screen 2024 12 05 14 24 44

“Upgrading toilets in rural areas is a task I have always been concerned about. I’m also a person from the rural areas and I know that it’s really inconvenient to go to the toilet in the rural areas”. Xi Jinping on tour last week.

Geopolitics

China, Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru to build the Bi-Oceanic railroad,

linking the Pacific and Atlantic, saving $30/ton on grain to China, altering the region’s geo-political and trade relations and eliminating the Panama Canal’s monopoly.

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screen 2024 12 05 14 23 44

8.19 million inbound trips by foreigners in Q3, up 49% YoY. Half were visa-free, up 80%.

Shipbuilding is emerging as a flashpoint in relations with the US and the world as China’s value chain makes inroads into segments previously outside their expertise.

Rare Earth Supremacy: China’s Ace in the Clean Technology Competition. “This superficial paper begins with a gross misinterpretation”.

Rare earth exports jump to 4,753 tonnes, compared to 4,181 tons in September. Rare earths imports fell 12.5% to 9,471 tons.

Defense

The PLA Air Force is holding a contest to find low-cost drone solutions and top three in each category will be included in a procurement catalogue, allowing the PLAAF to order them.

Chinese scientists built a recoilless AK-47 that drones can wield.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have stated several times that “a new world war cannot be fought and cannot be won.” This is a phrase

In Peru, Xi repeatedly told Biden that “a new world war cannot be fought and cannot be won.” But those words are missing from official US records, the US Embassy in Peru and the White House portal. We only know because it was reported by the Chinese, who know that many in Washington believe a new world war can and must be fought and won at any cost.

1

Encourage consumers to purchase small-portion meals through methods such as establishing environmental protection virtual accounts, granting conservation points, and issuing discount coupons, etc. Support food producers, operators, retailers and others to directly donate food that meets safety and quality requirements to welfare institutions and assistance institutions in their locality on a regular basis. Strictly implement price tagging regulations, with catering service operators clearly indicating to consumers the prices of the catering and services provided, as well as prices of individual dishes within set meals. Encourage catering service operators hosting banquets to negotiate anti-food waste obligations with consumers, with contracts able to include a separate anti-waste clause.

2

TCM manufacturing market size was $45 billion in 2023, growing 7% annually. Beijing is pushing it.

Rude And Nasty Manager Is Caught By Undercover CEO

What happens when a rude and nasty manager mistreats employees and customers without knowing the undercover CEO is watching? Witness this eye-opening story of justice as the CEO takes matters into their own hands to address toxic behavior and promote respect in the workplace. Watch the dramatic reveal and inspiring turnaround in this must-see video!

Ramming the gate and the aftermath

The whole world knows the US as a barbaric nation that thinks it is exceptional in that it has the right to invade nations and do regime change if the leader refused to be subservient and submissive to the US! Everyone knows iy is the most violent and dangerous country on earth and should a nuclear war happens it must be due to the USA!

Obsessed yes but not in a positive manner at all! It tried to used their media to portray the US as the angel and others as the evil but the real majority of the world thinks better than that! Sure their slave nations such as Germany, Japan and Korea like all slaves cannot and won’t dare to accept their and their their dog nations like all the Anglophone and Saxons former despicable colonial masters cannot talk about their atrocities and crimes! But their views are bias and naive!

If you are a proud Yank I want to let you know we the world knows not only think that the US is a shameful hypocrite and we see it through! We won’t allow these regime change and barbaric behaviour to continue one more day! You guys can rand and rave all you want but the world cannot be bullied by you and your dogs and slaves! The world and planet is not owned by you or you bandits and tribes! You are but just one nation, the most oppressive nation but you can do what you want to Americans but out if your shores we will jointly and severally stop you!

Carbohydrates, saturated fats, seed oils, essential nutrients, and ultra-processed foods could all be central topics for reform in the next U.S. Dietary Guidelines, set to be updated in 2025. These guidelines, mandated by a 1990 law to be revised every five years, are crafted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). They shape dietary advice for policymakers, nutritionists, schools, businesses, and families through 2030.

The upcoming revisions will take place during Donald Trump’s second presidential term, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary. Advocates like Nina Teicholz, founder of the Nutrition Coalition, see this as an opportunity for significant changes. Teicholz, who has worked to reform the guidelines for over a decade, told Newsweek she is in discussions with the Trump administration and the Make America Healthy Again movement to influence the 2025 guidelines.

Top 10 States Collapsing Fastest in America Due to Poverty and Homelessness Crisis – Documentary

Russia has criticized President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter, who was facing sentencing on federal felony charges related to gun possession and tax violations. The move marks a reversal of Biden’s earlier stance, where he had stated that he would not intervene in his son’s legal matters.

On Sunday, the president issued a “full and unconditional” pardon for Hunter Biden, according to a White House statement. *Newsweek* has reached out to the White House for additional comment.

Russian foreign affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova condemned the pardon, calling it a reflection of the U.S. being “a caricature of democracy” in an interview with the pro-Kremlin newspaper *Izvestia*. Additionally, Kremlin propagandist Olga Skabeyeva, host of *60 Minutes*, shared her view on Telegram, sarcastically stating, “Biden has pardoned his son Hunter, according to the White House. Democracy.”

This is a complicated answer, and deserves careful consideration.

Firstly, if you are SINGLE, and involved in a monogamous relationship, it’s not proper.

I would avoid doing this thing because it is both of your personal space. Everyone needs privacy. And this is very true if you are single. Many single people are in the dating pool, whether they have announced it to their partner or not. So privacy is foremost for those who are single. Thus all phone conversations are SECRET.

Secondly, if you are ENGAGED to be married, the needs of your future spouse requires careful consideration.

An engagement specifically announces a marriage in the future. At this point, a promise of long-duration monogamous though legal means is a significant step, and the prudent thing is to place limits on the use of each others phones. I suggest mutual understandings that the phone conversations, and chats are CONFIDENTIAL. Trivial viewing of them by your partner is to be avoided, but if there is a significant concern on the part of your future spouse, the contents needs to be shared, or else the marriage date needs to be reascended.

Thirdly, if you are MARRIED, you have full right to your partners phone.

This if a fundamental attribute of the marriage contract. A contract of the unification of two single people into a family unit. This sharing of confidential information is fundamental aspect of marriage. As well as legally and philosophically, religiously and spiritually justified. Thus, for married couples, the phones are SHARED.

There are variations of the above points. And I am not here to parse the myriad spectrum of variations of the relationships between couples. But the rules listed above are straight forward and binary; “black and white”. They are crystal clear and have no ambiguity.

Goods from China will increase in price by about 10% while goods from Canada and Mexico will increase in price by about 25%. The price increase goes into Trump’s government income.

Easy way to get some extra money for the government at the expense of the people.

Higher prices will lead to lower demand and this will be a loss for US companies that are making their products in China, retail chains that import products from China as well as some Chinese factories. Everyone loses except for the US government.

Expect some retail chains to close down and some freight forwarders going bankrupt. China will react to the new tariffs by stopping imports of agriculture products from the US, resulting in some farmers filing for bankruptcy.

Casino (Robert DeNiro) | How To Make A Lot Of Money | Extended Preview

The United States is in free-fall collapse right now. It is failing at every level. And, thus, the only reason why the people haven’t stood up and revolted is because of the iron-grip control that the government has over the media.

Donald Trump really needs to perform emergency surgery.

To do this, he needs hard; roll-up-the-sleeves players. He needs loyal, abrasive, and even scary bullies to accomplish his tasks. And that is whom he has chosen. Every one of them.

Now, it goes without saying, but I will say it anyways; Everyone in the Washington Beltway HATES China. They are all China-haters. Have you watched the Congressional grilling of the Tiktok CEO? I suppose that this is the natural outcome of multiple billions of dollars over the last eight years in the anti-China narrative.

So that is what the USA is today; a nation of rabid anti-China haters. And Donald Trump picked or selected, the most aggressive, bullish of the bunch for his staff picks.

Of course, mind you, they will continue the Biden anti-China banter, and we all can expect more aggressive moves in and around China. Oh… to “contain China”, and to “fight for democracy, and freedom” and other such nonsense. Yeah. Sail to the other end of the world to pick a fight with China. Stupid shit.

But that is the United States today.

I know that many of youse guys don’t like my bluntness, but you all know it is true. All you need to do is look at a globe, and then scratch your head and ask “What the fuck are we doing way over there, messing with China?”

OK. So the United States is going to continue the Biden hostility against China, and the poking of the dragon will continue.

But China is ready.

The United States is not; it is at it’s weakest. There has NEVER been a weaker moment in the entirety of the history of the United States than now.

The outcomes;

  • Poke the dragon, and it lashes back. It turns the American eagle into Sunday Dinner.
  • Try to put the dragon into a cage. It melts the bars of the cage with it’s mighty flames.
  • Try to starve the dragon. It burns all the fields that the American eagle nests in.

Everything is a losing move.

I understand what Donald Trump is trying to do, and why. But when it comes to Geo-politics, he needs diplomats, not bullies. A bully-approach towards China will fail to achieve his objectives.

I anticipate another “Anchorage, Alaska meeting”, only this time the Chinese response will be veiled and deadly. Do not fuck with China. The dragon has claws too.

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Screenshot
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Damn! This is one hell of a B-grade science fiction movie from 1958.

Abigail Romick

I hold my breath, sweat trickling down the side of my otherwise composed face.”Sanna 195-C” the professor calls, resulting in a daunted looking girl with mousy brown hair being pushed from the crowd.She’s wearing the same white uniform as the rest of us. She looks like us, she dresses like us, she came from the same situation as us. She is like us, yet they shove her forward trying to avoid expulsion from the program into the world outside, a world of certain death. Is this what we have come to? She looks around the crowd frantically searching for a friendly face in this unforgiving crowd.Her eyes and mine lock, hers a delicate blue full of pleading and sorrow, mine stone cold. I don’t budge.She looks like she’s about to have a panic attack as the professor nods at the two burly looking guards leaning against the wall near the only door leading to the main hallway. They grab her by the arms as she tries with all that’s left in her frail bones, frantically clawing at their arms and kicking at their shins, in an attempt to escape their grasp.“Termination”.I turn my head away trying to avoid the scene. We knew we wouldn’t make it. Not all of us, not a large number of us, but maybe if we were lucky a handful would live to see the next day, or the next 109,500.I cast one last look at Sanna, oh Sanna, why Sanna? Why my sister by all, but blood? My little sister that I promised I’d protect with my life.Lier.Coward. Traitor.Each thought comes like a slap in the face. They’re all true. I can move. I can argue I can fight I can what?… Sentence us both to death?I feel a gentle hand on my shoulder, the fists I didn’t realize I was clenching release as the tension escapes my body. Turning I see the grim face of Joyce. Otherwise known as Joyce 299-C, she is the epitome of dour. That has to be ironic.Her eyes soften as they meet mine. “It will be okay” she whispers in a tone that falls somewhere on the spectrum between comforting and empty.I want to hug her, to pull her close that way no one could ever take her from me. She’s all I have left of my once perfect world, well almost perfect. There was never such a thing as perfect. There was littering, minor crime, political debates that ruined Thanksgiving, but I would take listening to uncle Dan go on about how blahdy blahdy blah is so great because they did blahdy blah blah which makes them ‘way’ better than blah blah blah than suffer through this. At least then Sanna and I would be enduring our suffering together. Sanna…They’re probably wiping her arm down with an alcohol wipe preparing to slip the thin needle of the syringe into a vein on her wrist as if she was receiving her yearly vaccinations. Like they’d care if the wound became infected, she’d be long dead before it would matter… Dead. Sanna dead…Like Reina? Images of a witty green-eyed redhead, pale complexion lightly dusted with freckles, fills my head.

Like Tyler? My mind fogs over, the humorous, quite clumsy, blond boy who had quite literally had to use duct tape after he broke his glasses for the third time, in one MONTH.

Like Dante? The ever sarcastic, dark-skinned, computer whiz, and genius in all subjects relating to tech.

A dam breaks inside of me and tears spring to my eyes as I crumple to the floor. I don’t notice the firm squeeze on my right arm. I don’t notice as others turn to stare in my direction slipping me looks of sympathy, pity, and dread. I don’t even notice as the professor calls my name. All I can think about is our little family. Sanna: dead, Reina; dead, Tyler; dead, Dana; repurposed for experimental use, Jonathan; repurposed for experimental use, Martin; expelled, Ximena; Stasis. They’re gone, only Ximena has a running chance of survival, maybe Joyce.

Strong hands grip me by the arms yanking me to my feet. I turn, finding myself face to face with one of the very guards that lead my sister down her path to the afterlife. I can only conclude that he has come to do the same for me. I do not resist.

 

***

 

The guards drag me down the hallway, the throat of the beast that is this foundation. They bring me to a sterile room at the end of the hallway strapping me to an operation type table.

I stare blankly as a woman in a pristine lab coat tests the bubbles in a syringe. Part of me is horrified, these will be the last faces I see in my present life. I will never laugh again. I will never dance again. I won’t even get to have my first girlfriend. At the age of 15, I’ll have died, having the only female I’ve ever kissed be my own mother. Pathetic, I startle a laugh out of myself.

Screw them all, if I’m going to die, I’m going to die laughing.

That was the last thought I had before the world went dark.

 

***

 

I didn’t expect to open my eyes again so you can imagine my shock when I find that the blinding light is NOT guiding me to the afterlife but instead is the light of the facility.

“What the,” I start out only to realize it came as nothing more than muffled groans. Clamps release from around my wrist as a clear fluid drains from the bottom of the chamber. Chamber? I didn’t fall asleep in a chamber.

Plastic breathing tubes remove themselves from my throat for what has to be the first time in 300 years. I gasp partly out of shock, partly because even after three minutes of sitting incomprehensibly, I hadn’t yet dared take so much as half a breath out of fear of shattering the illusion, but it doesn’t break. It’s real. And so is Jocey walking straight towards me.

China don’t and won’t lose if the US carries on the trade war! If the trade war reduce China’s growth form 6.5% to 5.0% It is only making Growth more sustainable and more manageable. But while it may do that it is also cutting US growth by 2.5% to 1% and that for a nation with debts of 36 trillion dollars growing at 1 trillion dollars every quarter very unsustainable and it will destroy the USA! So bring it on any day! The world will have a market without the US overconsumption and that is a good thing not a bad proposition.

But your homelessness will grow so will unemployment and poverty! Real income will come crashing down! Inflation will hit 25% per annum at least! You will waste resources producing stuffs you are not good at while wasting opportunities doing stuffs you ought to focus on! Who is the loser, you can answer it yourself!

Yes, I believe that.

Yes, I agree.

BRICS is making great strides in breaking free from the Western hegemony.

We’re witnessing the UK and EU coming apart at the seams.

The USA has lost all credibility on the world stage. Even most of its allies are turning against it.

Well, an infamous president that imposed martial law was assassinated by his own security tzar.

He has a name that is synonymous with Korea in my mind.

PARK CHUNG HEE.

Whatever happens next, YOON SUK YEOL will be a Korean pariah for a long time to come.

In short, he screwed up, and the opposition was preparing to impeach and remove him from power.

He responded by declaring a self coup, imposing martial law to block parliament and hijack the political process.

If the soldiers fire on the crowd, all bets are off.

If there is a standoff, it depends on what uncle Sam does.

If the army switches allegiance to parliament, it is game over for the president, but there is no guarantee peace will be automatically restored.

This will probably repeat in Europe as governments collapse like dominoes.

I don’t know what to make of it all yet.

Too much too fast.

The gods must be crazy.

Hellscape in Taiwan Strait?

Marching to the beat of a different drummer and raising the flag of life

My daughter just couldn’t wait to get up early for kindergarten today.

Big day at school. Her class is to host the raising of the flag ceremony in the morning. It’s a big deal in China. Have youse guys ever witnessed it? It is impressive.

The little tykes wear their uniforms and march to the flag, and the Chinese national anthem is played. They beat their drums and unravel the flag, then mount it and hoist it up. Nicely done.

Anyways, its a normal part of Chinese life.

Here’s a father filming his child’s Kindergarten doing the same performance. This is shao ban I think. I minute long. Worth the time to watch if for anything else the sheer cuteness and guns.

One of the things that I love about China.

Here’s the Chinese military doing the entire ceremony. Damn impressive. I’ll tell you what.  Short video, but shows you what it is like.

You can see how excited she is. She can’t wait to march in front of the school. Her role today is holding the right side of the flag as it is presented. All the kids are so very excited. It’s great!

Today…

No-one cares. Sorry, but most civilised countries have already factored in the ridiculous, immature behaviour of the Orange Toddler. We’ll all smile, shake his hand, tell him how much he’s respected as a businessman, then get on with real-world stuff that’s light-years ahead of his brain-damaged nonsense. He’ll be gone in 4 years, or probably less, and leave nothing more than a shit-stain on world history.

The Mask | SMOKIN!

From personal experience, a single mother of a two-year-old boy really wanted a relationship with me.

She was pretty upfront that she was looking for a man to financially support her and to father more children with her.

I was surprised when she admitted that in her younger party days that she would’ve totally ignored a guy like me, but that now I was her type because I was kind, responsible, and had a good paying career, plus she thought that our kids would be really cute.

It was very clear to her when she told me what all of the benefits that she would receive by dating me. But there was not much that she brought to the table other than offering me sex.

I was kind of young at the time but luckily smart enough to know that it was not a good deal for me.

So I was not scared of dating her, but I did not see the upside for me.

Southern Chili

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Yield: 6 to 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 pounds ground meat
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 3/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 teaspoon chili powder
  • 2 cans tomato paste
  • 2 tomato paste cans water
  • 1 (No. 2) can tomato juice
  • 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 2 cans chili beans, drained

Instructions

  1. Brown meat with onion, garlic, 1 1/2 teaspoons of the salt, 1/2 teaspoon of the pepper and chili powder.
  2. Combine remaining salt and pepper with remaining ingredients except beans; add to meat mixture. Bring to a boil; simmer for 2 hours.
  3. Add beans during final 15 minutes of cooking.

Have No Fear, Love

Submitted into Contest #115 in response to: Write a story where a device goes haywire. view prompt

Patrick Samuel

When she opens her eyes, all she sees is gray. The gray of a summer storm right before it breaks. Then she remembers that summer is long gone and that she must get up, no matter how much she longs to bury her face in the pillow and forget about the world for just a moment more.Making breakfast in the dark, to save the generator. Like a moth to a flame, her gaze strays towards the kitchen window and the garden outside. A beautiful garden despite everything, she tells herself. You’d never know anyone is buried there.

*

Lea is still asleep when Natalie comes in with the tray. At least her eyes are closed. She wonders if she put too many pills in last night’s soup. The only idea more frightening is how tempting it gets sometimes to put the whole bottle in.

“When is this fog gonna lift? I’m sick of seeing only gray.”

You’d be sicker if you could see more, Natalie thinks but all she says is: “I thought you were sleeping.”

“I thought I was dead. Or that the rest of the world was. I’m not sure and I don’t know if I even care anymore.”

“Social media still down?” As if she needed to ask.

“What do you think?”

Lea’s eyes are open now, fixated on her sister’s. Natalie forces herself to meet her gaze. Better suspicion than certainty. Don’t let Schrodinger’s cat out of the bag and we can all pretend it never happened.

After just a sip, Lea puts down the cup.

“Bitter?”

“Too hot. I’ll have it later.”

Natalie makes a mental note to put the pills in Lea’s soup from now on.

*

“Got a message from Mom,” Lea says at lunch.

“What does she say?”

“The usual. Hope you’re fine. Love you. Tell Natalie to massage your feet every day until you go to sleep.”

“She didn’t say that.”

“No, she didn’t.” Lea grins. “But you could.”

“Maybe I will,” replies Natalie. “If you finish your soup.”

“You’re worse than Mom, sometimes.”

“Wrong. I’m always worse than Mom. But thanks for the ‘sometimes’ anyway.”

“When is she coming home, do you think?” Lea now asks.

“Didn’t she tell you?”

“You know how vague she gets with specific questions. She’s even worse when texting.”

“Well, she’s not big on texting. Different generations and all that.”

“She could always call. They did have phones when she was our age, didn’t they?”

 

*

After lunch (and she did finish her soup, so Natalie feels obliged to rub her feet – not that she minds) Lea mutters : “Can you believe I got Mom to text me but I can’t even get a single one from Chris?”

To a sixteen year-old princess, even a sick one, the absence of a prince charming at her bedside is more than an insult, it’s the ultimate injury. Natalie is tempted to tell her that Chris got himself a new girlfriend. That he’s gone off to live with her in Japan and has forgotten all about Lea. Anything to get her off the subject.

 

*

She will have the world at her feet, that one, their mother used to say about Lea. Easy enough when the world lies shattered on the floor, Natalie reflects, like the glass bowl she smashed after the last call from Dan.

As if reading her thoughts, or maybe because her mind is still on boyfriends, Lea asks: “Dan hasn’t been around in a while, has he?”

“We broke up,” Natalie says shortly.

“Really?” Lea sounds genuinely surprised.

“Shit happens.” Her hint to drop the subject but for once, Lea is all solicitude.

“When did you guys last spoke?” she asks.

“Some weeks ago.”

“What did he say?”

Natalie takes a deep breath. “He said: ‘Shit’.”

Lea giggles, then realizes she shouldn’t. “Sorry,” she says. “No really, I am. I like Dan. He’s the kind of guy who knows stuff but doesn’t need to brag about it, you know what I mean?”

“I thought he bore you to tears. Like that afternoon we spent at the beach?”

“Please. Like I’m gonna let on when I’m having fun. I don’t even know why I do that, sometimes. Like maybe if I admitted I was enjoying something too much, it would be taken away from me.”

This is the more open Lea has been in ages. Maybe it takes a broken connection to get people talking to each other again.

“We should never have told you that smiling gives you wrinkles.”

“I’d be happy to get wrinkles now. At least it would mean I’ve lived long enough to get them.”

She does smile then, and this time Natalie is not afraid to meet her gaze.

 

*

Once Lea is asleep, Natalie goes down to the kitchen. From the top of the cupboard she retrieves a telephone, reads the new message and starts writing.

 

Their mother kept vague about her job. All the girls knew was that it included “buying and selling“ and traveling to the big city on occasions. She certainly didn’t try to make it sound glamorous, in fact sounded so jaded and weary about it that they learned not to ask too much. Which is actually proving convenient now.

 

October was their mother’s busiest month. That’s when the company held its annual convention, an open door for jokes about Halloween and the true nature of her employers. “The witches brew convention,” as Lea once called it. “Almost to the letter,” Mom said. “Witches crew, then?” Lea said and they both dissolved into a fit of laughter though Natalie failed to see what was so funny.

 

Even as she pit them against one another, their mother encouraged them to stick together. Constant competition was her idea of emulation. Natalie likes to think this was her way of building up their sense of solidarity against adversity. You make use of whatever life throws at you, including what it throws in your face.

 

*

It took Natalie a few days before she thought of retrieving the phone. She should have done it sooner, but there were so many things to deal with and so few she could bear thinking about. Like getting rid of a body before its smell got too strong to hide. Digging a hole big enough in the garden at night, all the time praying the pills she put in the soup were enough to make Lea sleep and not enough to kill her. And trying to retain some pretense of sanity through it all.

 

Then, just when she thought the worst was over, at least for the time being, having to dig up again when she realized where the damn phone was.

 

*

The worst, smell aside and she had a scarf over her nose, was going through her mother’s pockets one by one, feeling the flesh underneath and its texture already changing after just a few days. No more rigor mortis there. Whether this was the effect of the garden soil, the fog or something else, she’d rather not ponder.

 

It took another few days before she could establish a closed network between all three phones, raking her brain for what she could remember from electronic classes and Dan’s passion project, the one he bored her to death talking about on their first evenings together. That’s when she had asked if being a geek was a congenital male trait. “You should be grateful for geeks,” he said. “When you spend nights tracking down a bug, finding a G-spot is like a walk in the park.” That made them laugh, and more than laugh. “Feeling geeky tonight?” became their secret code, an invitation neither could resist.

If he could see her now, she thinks, he would be so proud. Though he would probably point out all the things she could have done better and faster. Just for that, she was almost grateful he wasn’t around.

The last thing he said was shit.

Contrary to what she has let Lea assume, they were not fighting but commenting on the fog that was seeping everywhere, messing up electronics and fucking up with the TV and phone reception.

Then Dan did say shit. As in “Oh Shit! Oh shit, no! Shit –“ and then the scream that seemed to last an eternity but might have been only a couple of seconds before he was cut off.

She stopped trying to call back after the first attempts. Knew from what she could hear on the radio that there was no point. Then the radio went dead too.

 

*

You need to take care of your sister.” She remembers her mother’s words, and how typical that her sister’s needs should become her own. “Lea just hasn’t got your strength.” A compliment doubling up as burden: another responsibility to shoulder, another reason to be grateful for said strength.

 

Not that Natalie minded. From the moment Lea was born, Natalie had doted on her. “This is not a doll we bought you for Christmas,” their mother would say. To five-year old Natalie, Lea was better than a doll and much prettier: all blond hair and green eyes like their mother, while Natalie took after their estranged father as Mom liked to remind her.

She never resented the extra care and attention her little sister required. That Natalie could fend off for herself she also took as a compliment – if one she wasn’t sure she deserved or even want. But she had learned to be grateful for anything that came her way whether or not she had wished for it.

 

*

Natalie takes her mother’s phone and reads Lea’s latest message: “Mom, when are you coming home?”

She starts typing. “Soon.” Pauses, wonders what to add next. Invent a new delay? Searching for inspiration, she browses through old messages. There’s another one from Lea that she missed. Thinking guiltily of her sister awaiting an answer, Natalie opens it. And feels worse than guilt.

Mommy, please come home. I think Natalie is trying to kill me.”

 

*

You need to take care of your sister.

The irony is that, after all she did to protect her from the truth, Lea would not believe it if she told her. Lea doesn’t trust her anymore, provided she ever did. And with that dawning realization, Natalie feels more than guilty or helpless but useless as well.

What would be worse? Telling her their mother is buried in the garden because there was no way to do otherwise, and no time either, not when they were cut off from the rest of the world, which might as well be dead for all she knew, oh and by the way you were right about that too, Lea. Even though you’re half zoned out of your mind all the time with all the medicine I’ve been slipping you – not to kill you, mind you, but to shield you from the truth. Because this is what Mom would have wanted. She said you couldn’t bear the truth.

But did she say that, really? Or is Natalie the one who can’t face the truth? Can’t face anything, not even her own cowardice. It doesn’t take courage to do the things she does. It just takes a steadfast denial of reality under the guise of responsibility. Exchanging one burden for another.

 

What does facing the truth even mean, she wonders. Is the truth some kind of wild animal you can tame with a look, like you’re Queen of the Fucking Jungle? Or do you let it eat you alive like a good Christian martyr? Options are scarce when the only crash course you can get on bravery is from a screen.

 

*

The truth is nothing you’re prepared for. The truth is that connections are just as fragile as bodies and disconnections even messier. The truth is that nobody remains a body for long when exposed to more than they bargained for. The truth is that a fog is not always a fog even when it hides what you need to run from, run faster than you’ve ever ran as if running could put more than distance but light years between perception and reality, running back in space and time, until the truth stops being the truth.

 

The truth is that a house is not a home without a few skeletons in its closets.

She knows what needs to be done, she tells herself. It’s either that or die trying. At this stage, both options hold their own appeal.

 

*

In the fog, the most familiar route looks foreign. A good thing she’s made the trip to the village so often she could do it with her eyes closed – and the temptation is strong to do so, especially when passing by unfamiliar shapes and mounds on the wayside. She knows what they are, would know it by her nose too if it wasn’t protected by her two scarves – one being insufficient to block out the fog and the smell.

 

*

She has her backpack for scavenging groceries, a mission she usually dreads. Inside the silent store, she has to put her mind on pause as she reaches blindly for the nearest shelves, stepping over mounds of bodies and cans, each burst open in their own way, their smells mingling. She shove cans haphazardly in the bag until it’s full. Hoping it’s the last time she has to do this.

 

*

Maybe this is just her passing on the bucket, but she has to bring someone in – someone with the proper authority, like Dr. Carter. He will find the right words, and Lea will believe him.

But no one answers the doctor’s door. The bell doesn’t work and neither does her pounding. She should have known, just as she knows it’s no use insisting.

She contemplates her next move. The scarves won’t protect her for much longer and the temptation is to keep walking into the fog until she can’t walk anymore. She almost considers trying other houses, knowing how futile that is, when her phone buzzes. Lea must be awake.

But it’s not Lea. The caller is “Unknown“.

 

“Hello?” Her voice is muffled through the scarves but she prays it won’t be mistaken for voicemail. “Who’s there? Hello?” She’s frantic with hope, sudden renewed hope pouring like rain on dry land, until she realizes there’s no one on the line.

But there’s still reason to hope. The three bars flashing flashing green on her telephone screen. The first signal she’s had in weeks. Where there is a connection, there is life.

She tries going online. Most of her links are dead except one, a news site that hasn’t been updated in weeks. Still, almost as beautiful as an olive branch delivered by dove.

 

*

Checking her phone as she walks back, eyes on the green bars that have become like a lighthouse in the night. She doesn’t know if it was moving away from the house that got her service, or if in tinkering with the network, she somehow managed to unlock what needed to be. If so, those late night sessions with Dan did pay off. Or maybe she’s a fucking geek genius herself and never knew it. All she knows is that she needs to keep that connection until she gets home.

She arrives to find the whole house in lights, piercing through the fog as if greeting her in victory. Which must mean the power is back on, another cause for rejoicing.

 

*

“Lea?” she calls from the hall, but Lea might still be asleep, unaware of all the lights shining again on them. Natalie drops her bag and starts upstairs, creaking stairs under her giddy step as she tries not to run after all these weeks of waiting, waiting without hope. This is what hell must be like: one big waiting room with no door ever opening.

Or maybe hell is a door opening on what should remain closed.

 

*

Lea lies in bed, eyes open but unseeing, phone still in her hand. Fingers clutched in a death grip on her last connection to life. The pill bottle at the foot of the bed, empty. Natalie wonders how she could have found the strength to get up and retrieve it. Then she remembers Lea’s last message: “I think Natalie’s trying to kill me.” She wouldn’t have drunk her tea, or finished her soup. Probably poured them down the toilet as soon as Natalie left the room. Lea would have been strong enough to get up in her absence and see what the world had become. Or maybe just the garden.

 

Green light flashing through Lea’s fingers: the bars triumphantly indicating connection. Maybe her phone benefited from the same service as Natalie’s, linked as they were by her homemade network. Lea would have clicked hungrily on the first link available. Even weeks-old news would have been news enough for her.

 

*

Lea’s fingers twitch now but it’s the phone again, vibrating. Natalie pries the device from her sister’s cold hand. The bell of a message received, a sound she hasn’t heard in ages. She thinks she hears other sounds too, as if the world was stirring out of its hiding place. Echoes of another time: the front door opening, or did she even close it. The creaking of stairs being climbed. Maybe it’s all in her mind, memories by association. She’s not sure and doesn’t care even if she should. Her eyes are still on Lea’s last message: “Mommy, please come home. I think Natalie’s trying to kill me.”

 

And the answer, just now received: “Have no fear, love. I’m coming to get you.”

The World Is a Ghetto – War | The Midnight Special

What’s all the fuss about? Is nuclear war really that dangerous?

Drago Bosnic, independent geopolitical and military analyst

We’re in the Second Cold War. Those thinking otherwise have probably been living under a rock. Unfortunately, that rock won’t save anyone and we know it by the change in rhetoric. Namely, in previous decades, nuclear war was a mere hypothesis in the minds of most people, an extremely unlikely prospect that we could casually discuss, theorize on, contemplate as to how it would play out, etc. It truly is meticulous work, involving an enormous amount of moving parts and it could even be argued it’s fun, as evidenced by numerous mass media that use it as their main trope. Whether it’s a post-apocalyptic scenario, a modern war that got out of control or something along those lines, it’s quite prominent in movies, TV shows, video games, etc. Now, imagine fan favorites such as the Mad Max franchise, Fallout or Metro series, certain Call of Duty titles, etc. suddenly becoming a reality. It’s certainly a scary thought.

Well, thanks to the warmongering oligarchies in Washington DC and Brussels, this is exactly the scenario we’re facing. And if you think it’s too far-fetched or even impossible, think again. Leaders and top-ranking officials of the most powerful NATO countries openly support long-range strikes on Russia using Western-sourced missiles, operated by American, British and other NATO personnel. This comes despite President Vladimir Putin’s crystal clear warning that Russia would consider the world’s most vile racketeering cartel a party to the conflict and that it would respond accordingly. Worse yet, even after Moscow used a conventionally armed ICBM/IRBM in response to these NATO attacks, the political West only keeps escalating. The purpose of this text is to understand what’s at stake and that if the warmongers, war criminals, plutocrats and kleptocrats have their way, the world will pay the ultimate price.

Let’s imagine that Russia decides it’s sick and tired of over three decades of NATO’s lies, deceit, crawling invasion and now nearly three years of direct attacks and total war. The Neo-Nazi junta keeps launching these Western-sourced missiles and the Kremlin knows who’s behind it. Do you think Russia would use thermonuclear weapons in Ukraine, a land that has belonged to it for over 1,200 years, against the people it considers ethnic Russians (even though they reject this notion)? Even if we ignore these basic facts, the answer is no, as it would be suicidal to fire a nuclear weapon at an area so close to home. The fallout could easily reach any Russian and/or Belorussian territory. Thus, it can be expected to see Moscow use more “Oreshniks” and similar missiles. However, Russia’s updated strategic doctrine also allows the use of such weapons against targets beyond NATO-occupied Ukraine.

Namely, Moscow knows exactly which NATO command centers are used to coordinate attacks on Russia’s undisputed territory and may decide to neutralize them. Missiles such as the “Oreshnik” give it unprecedented non-nuclear strategic strike capabilities, meaning that Russia’s first retaliatory attack should not trigger NATO’s nuclear response. However, the world’s most vile racketeering cartel doesn’t have comparable weapons and could only use nuclear-tipped missiles or bombs. In response to this, the Kremlin deploys its unrivaled strategic arsenal in full force. How long do you think this would last? I’ve recently argued it would be largely over in 15 minutes. Now I’ll explain in detail how. First, the early warning systems (composed of a plethora of land, sea, air and space-based assets) would sound an alarm and the Russian strategic nuclear-armed triad would react immediately.

Composed of Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN), Aerospace Forces (VKS) and Navy (VMF), the Russian triad could deploy at least 5,500 thermonuclear warheads, each of which is orders of magnitude more destructive than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, combined. As of October, the RVSN has 772 warheads on over 200 RS-24 “Yars”, 340 on 46 R-36M2 “Voevoda” and 78 single-warhead RT-2PM2 “Topol-M” ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles). The number of strategic HGVs (hypersonic glide vehicles), specifically the “Avangard” is unknown, but is usually thought to be in the dozens. The VKS operates 580 nuclear-tipped cruise missiles (the Kh-102 and several advanced iterations of the Kh-55), deployed on 55 Tu-95MS and 17 Tu-160 strategic bombers, better known as missile carriers in Russian military nomenclature. And last, but certainly not least, the Navy, the most survivable element of any triad.

The VMF operates 15 SSBNs (nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines) carrying 240 SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) armed with at least 896 warheads. The grand total is 2,657 thermonuclear warheads ready to go at this very moment. Note that this doesn’t include well over 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons deployed on SSGNs (nuclear-powered guided missile submarines), hypersonic weapons such as the 9M723 used by the “Iskander-M”, the 9-S-7760 “Kinzhal” and numerous other missile types. Altogether, Russia has well over 4,500 warheads ready for both strategic and battlefield use. However, it also has upwards of 1,500 thermonuclear warheads awaiting dismantlement, but which could be returned to service due to NATO aggression and be installed on land-based ICBMs, IRBMs (intermediate-range ballistic missiles), SLBMs, ALCMs (air-launched cruise missiles), etc.

Once again, this is without even considering newer Russian weapons that we know exist (RS-28 “Sarmat” ICBMs, “Avangard” HGVs, “Oreshnik” hybrid/modular IRBM/ICBM/HGVs, the “Poseidon” nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed underwater drones/torpedoes, etc) and those that we don’t know anything about (except that they exist), including experimental, as President Putin himself spoke of “weapons based on new physical principles” on many occasions. However, just to illustrate the destructive power of the new “Sarmat”, consider that it can carry a range of heavy and light MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles). This includes 10-15 heavy warheads or 20+ light ones. The destructive power of heavy warheads is stated to be 750 kilotons (kt) to 1 megaton (Mt) each. Light warheads have a yield ranging from 150 kt to 450 kt, with one kiloton being equal to 1,000 tons of TNT.

Thus, 150 kt is equivalent to 150,000 tons of TNT exploding at once. To put this destructive power into perspective, we can use the “Little Boy” atomic bomb which the US dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Namely, it had a yield of 15 kt and it virtually instantly killed around 100,000 people, with at least another 50,000 dying in the aftermath of the explosion. This would mean that the combined yield carried by a single RS-28 missile is up to 750 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb. It should be noted that at least 50 of these are being built, as they are slated to replace the aforementioned R-36M2 “Voevoda”. That’s the equivalent of the destructive power of 37,500 Hiroshima bombs. And that’s just 50 missiles, out of well over 300 land-based ICBMs in the Russian military. However, thanks to US/NATO aggression against the world, Moscow might decide to make 100 of these, doubling that destructive power to 75,000 by 2030.

Unfortunately, some completely delusional lunatics at the Pentagon think they can launch a “decapitation strike” on Russia and “ensure” there’s no retaliation. There’s just one “tiny” problem with this – the Russian Navy. Namely, even if the world’s largest country suddenly vanished, its Navy alone could destroy much, if not most of the world. Even just half of its SSBNs, namely the now legendary eight Borei-class subs, carry 16 R-30 “Bulava” SLBMs (each missile armed with up to ten 150 kt thermonuclear MIRVs). I’ll let you do the math on that one. To top it all, the Kremlin’s nuclear triad can also be used even if the entire Russian leadership is neutralized. The system enabling this is called the “Perimeter” (known as the “Dead Hand” in NATO) and is activated automatically in case of an all-out attack on Russia. Perhaps the most dumbfounding fact is that the US military is perfectly aware of all this, but it’s still pushing for escalation.

Some of the world’s most prominent leaders, intellectuals and experts have been warning about the dangers of nuclear warfare. Perhaps the best example of this is the message conveyed by the late Fidel Castro in an interview with the globally renowned Professor Michel Chossudovsky. Namely, President Castro said that “in a nuclear war the ‘collateral damage’ would be the life of all humanity”. It doesn’t get much simpler than this and yet it’s 100% on point. What’s more, the mainstream propaganda machine is also perfectly aware of this, as evidenced by the BBC’s latest piece on Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Obviously, because it’s the BBC, it cannot do even this without ludicrous lies, as they’re claiming the information came from an “anonymous Russian deserter” who supposedly revealed “war secrets”, even though this information is publicly available (if one is bothered to look for it, that is).

Source: InfoBrics

Apocalypto (2006)______Best Movie Scene [1080p].

This is the one of the biggest news events of the year!

Right off the bat, before even taking office, Trump makes a FAR dumber move than the Biden administration.

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Dumber that the Biden administration. Those are words one wouldn’t expect to hear very often!

The Biden administration put its head in the sand like an ostrich and pretended BRICS and de-dollarization isn’t happening. Not as wise as not using the dollar as a weapon and an exploitative fiat system enriching dollar account holders at the expense of the rest of the world by exporting inflation through reckless printing. But still better than something Trump just did.

Now Trump did something FAR dumber. Trump just indicated to all BRICS nations and everyone in the world, America is actually threatened by BRICS.

Now every country knows America needs everyone to trade using the dollar than they need to trade with America.

Now they know they can collectively bargain to make deals with the United States that puts the US at a severe disadvantage.

Instead what Trump should have done is sell the dollar’s usage — promise not to sanction and freeze assets, unfreeze Russian assets, restore trade relations with all countries including Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba etc., rollback sanctions, allow Fed To be audited, audit Fort Knox be audited, back the dollar with some physical commodity like gold or shale oil and these measures alone with ensure dollar with remain a reserve currency for at least half a century more.

But nope. Got to play the big ego.

This is by FAR the biggest blunder of the Trump administration and Trump is not yet even in office!


Basic human psychology — no one likes to live under threats and fear.

Countries will now question why should they trade in currency of a country that threatens them like this?

They will not only accelerate de-dollarization but they will also they collectively bargain along the way.

Take a look at my post written in summer 2022.

Aging very nicely.

Since then

  • Saudi Arabia and Iran have made peace brokered by China
  • BRICS have expanded to 11 and bow 25+ and more on the way.
  • India and China have calmed their border disputes.

I said the whole global south will be an a place to collectively bargain against the west sometime in the future. The world is slowly but surely consolidating in that direction.


Trump’s tweet was so stupid, I wondered if it’s actually real.

CNN confirms the words are certainly real.

Welcome to the Asian Century.

The Rise of BRICS and the Emerging Multipolar World

A new age of international relations is dawning.

With the West accounting for a declining share of global gross domestic product and the world becoming increasingly multipolar, countries are jostling to establish their positions in the emerging order. This includes both the emerging economies — represented by the recently expanded BRICS grouping — that seek a leading role in writing the rules of the new order and the smaller countries attempting to cultivate relationships that can safeguard their interests.

With the BRICS, what began as an asset class has become a symbol of the yearning for a more broadly representative global order, a hedge against Western-led institutions and a means of navigating growing geopolitical uncertainty. All this has proved highly attractive. Earlier this year, the BRICS expanded from five countries (Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa) to nine (adding Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates). And almost three dozen more countries — including NATO member Turkey, close U.S. partners Thailand and Mexico and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country — have applied to join.

While the diversity of the grouping’s members (and applicants) highlights the broad appeal of the BRICS+, it also creates challenges. These are countries with very different political systems, economies and national goals. Some are even at odds with each other: China and India have been locked in a military standoff in the Himalayas for over four years, following China’s stealth encroachments on Indian territory.

Translating shared interests into a common plan of action and becoming a unified force on the global stage was difficult even when the BRICS had just five members. With nine — and possibly more — member countries, establishing a common identity and agenda will require sustained effort. But other multilateral groupings that are not formal, charter-based institutions with permanent secretariats — such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Group of 20 and even the Group of Seven — also struggle with internal divisions.

Moreover, the BRICS have demonstrated considerable resilience. Western analysts have been predicting from the start that the grouping would unravel or drift into irrelevance. Yet this month’s BRICS+ summit in Kazan, Russia — the first since the expansion — may well bring movement toward further enlargement, as it underscores the West’s failure to isolate Russia following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

This is not to underestimate the challenge of cohesion. The grouping’s founding members do not even agree about its fundamental objectives: Whereas China and Russia want to spearhead a direct challenge to the United States-led world order, Brazil and India seek reforms of existing international institutions and appear uneasy about any anti-Western orientation.

In this disagreement, however, the enlargement might tip the scales. Six of the group’s nine members, including all four of the new additions, are formally part of the nonaligned movement, and two (Brazil and China) are observers. This suggests that there will be considerable internal pressure for the BRICS+ to chart a middle ground, focusing on democratizing the global order, rather than challenging the West.

That said, when it comes to fostering mutual trust with developing countries, the West has not been doing itself any favors lately. On the contrary, its weaponization of finance and seizure of the interest earned on frozen Russian central-bank assets have caused deepening disquiet in the non-Western world. As a result, a growing number of countries seem interested in exploring alternative arrangements, including new cross-border payment mechanisms, with some also reassessing their reliance on the U.S. dollar in international transactions and reserve holdings.

All of this could aid the larger designs of Russia and China, two natural competitors that have become close strategic partners partly in response to U.S. policy. China, in particular, stands to gain, such as from increased international use of the renminbi. Russia now generates much of its international export earnings in renminbi and stores them mostly in Chinese banks, thereby effectively giving China a share of the returns. China’s ultimate goal — which Western financial warfare is inadvertently aiding — is to establish an alternative renminbi-based financial system.

The BRICS are already engaged in institution-building, having established the New Development Bank — conceived by India and headquartered in Shanghai — in 2015. The NDB is not only the world’s first multilateral development bank created and led by emerging economies; it is also the only one whose founding members remain equal shareholders with equal voice, even as more countries join. By contrast, the U.S. is the dominant shareholder and holds veto power in the World Bank.

The expanded BRICS+ boast formidable global clout. The grouping dwarfs the G7, both demographically (with nearly 46% of the world’s population, compared to the G7’s 8.8%) and economically (accounting for 35% of global GDP, compared to the G7’s 30%). Its economies are also likely to be the most important source of future global growth. Furthermore, with Iran and the UAE having joined their oil-producing counterparts Brazil and Russia as members, the BRICS+ now account for about 40% of crude-oil production and exports.

Yes, the group faces significant challenges, not least uniting to become a meaningful global force with defined (and realistic) political and economic objectives. But they also have the potential to serve as a catalyst for a long-overdue revamping of global governance so that it better reflects 21st-century realities.

Brahma Chellaney – professor emeritus of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.

Japan Times

Baloney:

One wonders how much AP was paid to publish this empty hype of another U.S. military industrial boondoggle that is clearly not working as advertised.

The Navy is replacing the non-functioning cannons of its three $7.5 billion(!)  piece Zumwalt Class ships with launchers for missiles that do not exist.

Key quote:

> A U.S. hypersonic weapon was successfully tested over the summer and development of the missiles is continuing. The Navy wants to begin testing the system aboard the Zumwalt in 2027 or 2028, according to the Navy.

If a U.S. hypersonic missiles had really been ‘successfully tested’ during the summer 2024 why would it take three or four more years to even start ‘testing’ it from a naval platform?

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) – MOVIE REACTION – First Time Watching

Some more pictures out of my archives

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Sometime you wonder how just much separation there is between some humans and animals.

In the summer 1986 I was a Policeman stationed in the western Sydney suburb of Blacktown.

Sometime after 10pm on Sunday February 2nd we responded to a radio call directing us to a location where a woman had been heard screaming being dragged into light coloured vehicle. Plenty of Police attended however due to the scant details and vehicle description this vehicle and its occupants were not located.

On the following Tuesday I’m again working with another young officer and we returned to the station for lunch. As we walked in the switch board officer advised us that he’d just received a call from a local farmer indicating that he had found the body of a naked woman in his cow paddock.

We advised detectives and went out to this secluded area which was a local ‘lover’s lane’.

We met the farmer and he took us to a stand of trees in the middle of this paddock. What I saw there was a woman’s body lying face down. Her head was barely connected to her body by the spinal cord. There were various significant cuts and lacerations to her hands and body. And from her neck to her ankles were covered in cigarette burns. It was awful. I have never forgotten that sight and I doubt I ever will.

Detectives attended and soon after one of the Australia’s largest murder investigations was launched.

It transpired that on that fateful Sunday night a bright and beautiful young nurse caught the train from the City to Blacktown. Because a payphone was vandalised she was unable to contact her father for a lift home so she began to walk.

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Anita Cobby.

She was abducted by five worthless mongrels and what then transpired was horrific.

They drove to a nearby petrol station and while three of these low lives sat on her across the back seat they used money from her purse for fuel and cigarettes. She continued fighting with them causing the serious defensive wounds to her hand and fingers. They then drove her to this remote ‘lover’s lane’ where she unsuccessfully tried to escape a number of times. She had been raped repeatedly and you can only imagine the terror she felt on that longest of nights. She eventually fled from them into that paddock but was tracked down at the tree stand where she was further abused and ultimately had her throat cut.

This was without a doubt the most horrendous sight I endured throughout my entire career.

The beautiful young nurse’s name was Anita Cobby and the full story is here.

The five animals that tortured, raped and killed her were John Travers, Michael Murdoch and Murphy brothers Michael, Gary and Leslie. They’re all in gaol marked never to be released.

I hope they eventually rot in hell.

I was at the library in town, and I live in the south so it’s *mind numbingly hot* here. I was about maybe 12? Anyway, I was wearing some shorts and a tank top, as again it’s boiling hot, and I had filled out by now (thanks puberty at 9), and this dude comes in and touches my back and all of my nerves are on high alert. He leans in and whispers “I’m gonna see you later” and fear gripped my heart. I managed to whisper “No. You won’t.” And he just sounds sinister and tells me “Yes I will. I’ll be waiting right outside the door.” And then he left. I stayed at the library until they closed a few hours later. I’m assuming he got bored of waiting (thank the lord) and left, so thankfully nothing nefarious happened. It was absolutely inappropriate and terrifying. I’m glad I got out of there safe. Even so though, I didn’t visit the library for months after that, scared he would come back.

3:15 PM EST SUNDAY — We CHOSE to Run on Solar Battery Power Tonight . . .

UPDATED 3:15 PM EST SUNDAY -- We CHOSE to Run on Solar Battery Power Tonight . . .

As regular readers know, we installed a solar power system up here at the house in Pennsylvania.  The learning curve has been sharp.

We have 11,000 watts (22 individual panels at 530 watts each) of solar panels at 48 volt output each.  They go into two (2) mppt charger/controllers which then go into a 30 kilowatt hour EG4 battery bank @48 volts.

From the battery bank, two 4-ought copper wires go to each of two 6800 watt inverters.  The Inverters synch with each other, so the sine wave is pure 60Hz, just like normal grid power.

The 6800 watt inverters can EACH handle a needed “surge” of 8500 watts for 30 min or up to 12,000 watts (each) for one minute.

No aspect of this house, at any point, can ever come near that kind of power surge demand.

As I type this story at 8:46 PM eastern time, we have the gas furnace running, the front porch light and rear deck light on, my desk lamp, a light in the dining room on, the under-cabinet LED’s in the kitchen on, the big screen TV and home theater system in the living room, all operating, and the total energy demand of the house is only 1.7 kwh.

In every regard at this moment, life goes on here as if nothing at all is different from normal.

At that rate of power consumption, we have 15 hours of full power available from the battery bank.   When we go to sleep and turn off the TV, lights, etc., the draw will go lower.

Twelve hours from now, the sun will be up and the solar array will begin generating power.

Unpleasant Surprises

Once the system became operational the first big unpleasant learning curve item was the voltage coming from the solar array.

The 22 panels are divided into two electrically-separate arrays of 11 panels each.  Each single array is wired in SERIES, so each of the eleven panels at 48 volts each is added to the voltage total going into the mppt charger controllers.  48 volts times 11 panels would mean a maximum voltage output of 528 volts.   Except we weren’t getting that much; at least not consistently.   We were actually averaging about 193-208 volts per eleven panels.

Well, that just wasn’t enough “punch”  to charge the battery bank in any speedy way.   It could put maybe 2-3kwh into the battery bank at peak, maybe charging it by ten to fifteen percent over an entire day.   WAY INSUFFICIENT.

We found out that solar panels have a nasty aspect to the way they handle voltage.  The entire array self-limits to the output of the lowest performing panel!

So if ten of the panels are in full, bright, sunshine, but one panel is in the shade, the voltage from the ten in the sunshine would only be equal to that of the panel in the shade.

In order to get around this, we had to go buy 22 “Optimizers;” one for each solar panel.  Those optimizers were $50 each (x22).  They attach to the rear of each solar panel and accept into them the positive (output) from that single panel.

The Optimizer then connects __its__ positive output to the next optimizer on the next panel and so on.   By using these optimizers, we work-around the voltage limiting of the poorest-performing panel.

We finished installing them around 2:30 this afternoon, and the sun, at least up here in northeast Pennsylvania, was already west of the southeast-facing panels.  At this time of day in the past, we were luck to get 0.5kwh  to 0.8kwh from the panels, but TODAY, it was up around 2.0 kwh.    The voltage was also very much improved, over 500 volts.

So tomorrow, which is expected to be a clear day here, we will get our first real look at what the solar array can actually do, now that the learning curve is over and the optimizers are all in.

As such, we decided to run-down the 30kwh battery bank tonight, deliberately, by shutting off the power pass-through from the local electric company.  No grid power at all is coming into this house, and it will remain that way until tomorrow morning.

On any regular day, this house routinely uses 50kwh.   That’s a LOT of energy, but we’re spoiled by having grid power.   Realizing that the ENTIRE battery bank can only provide 30kwh, (and you can’t run it down to zero) our lives will be hugely different if the only power we have to rely upon is solar.   It will be bare essentials only: Refrigerator, freezers maybe a light on.   But if the solar can recharge itself enough each day, then we’d have more access to the nicer things we are spoiled with.

So tonight is the test to see “what’s what” with this new system.  How much does it power, for how long, in real life circumstances, in the cold of winter when the temp outside is 30°, and dropping to 20° overnight.

I thought about buying a second 30 kwh battery bank but what good would that be if the solar array can’t fully charge even one in a single day?  Besides, that battery bank is way expensive (~$8600.) and I don’t have that kind of money laying around to just go buy it.  I refuse to go into debt for it, so right now, I have what I have and that’s it.

Yes, I have a gasoline generator and spare fuel for it.   But that fuel is precious and the generator guzzles about one gallon per hour.  So when the gasoline runs out  — and if we’re in a SHTF situation where there is no gasoline to even be purchased — We have to know NOW what we can and cannot do with solar power.  Hence, tonight’s big “test.”

I’ll let you know how it goes.

UPDATE 7:30 AM SUNDAY MORNING

I got up at 7:22.  It was 16° outside.  The battery bank is down to 46% because my wife needs an oxygen concentrator on all the time and it ran all night at 300 watts.   The math is simple: 300w for twelve hours equals 4.2KW

The sun is almost up, but as of 7:30 AM, the solar panels had not yet begun to send any meaningful power to the mppt charger/controllers.

By 8:20 AM, the batteries were down to 42% but solar panels had begun sending energy into the system.  0.8kw at 192 volts.   We __are__ getting sporadic Over-voltage alerts from the Schneider mppt charger controllers, but each time, that clears within seconds.

So now that the sun is visibly over the mountain to my east, we should start getting good solar generation into the system, which should charge the battery rack.  We’ll see.

You know, I did the math last night as I was laying in bed, about my wife’s Oxygen concentrator. 300 watts an hour to run times twenty four hours is 7.2kw.   About one-quarter of my battery bank capacity.

This is a problem.  How do I tell my wife she can’t use the oxygen machine if we’re in a SHTF situation???    I just can’t do that.

Really hoping the solar array does its thing today.

———– MORE:

We are getting over-voltage alerts from the Schneider mppt charger/controllers.   They are rated at 600 volts.  The system is not supposed to be sending more than 528 volts but the mppt charger/controllers are alerting to over-voltage.

In fact, they just went into SHUT DOWN for self-protection.

We checked the software and they are set to alert of the voltage exceeds 585 volts for ten seconds or more.

The reporting from the mppt controllers is showing voltage around 200 volts (still), so this over-voltage does not make any sense.  

We were told that in very cold weather, the panels __may__ give off higher voltage than typical.   So my son is out there right now removing one panel from each of the two arrays.  That will drop the overall voltage by at least 48 volts and we’ll see if that solves the over-voltage situation.

UPDATE 9:41 AM EDT —

The equipment I am using is:

SCHNEIDER XW-PRO 6848 INVERTERS (2)

 

SCHNEIDER MPPT-100-600 CONTROLLERS (2)

 

EG-4  30.72 kwh Battery Rack:

 

We went back into the Owners manual for the MPPT Charger Controllers and saw another big surprise: They can handle 600 volts, BUT . . . .  they won’t charge from 550 to 600 volts!   Look:

mppt voltage chart surprise
mppt voltage chart surprise

The voltage needs to be LESS THAN 550 volts in order for them to charge!  So this is yet another unwelcome surprise.

As mentioned earlier, my son went out and took one panel off each array – bypassed it in the wiring – to bring down the voltage.  We _are__ getting some charging now, but the max output we’ve seen this morning from the solar panels is only 4kw. Look:

4kw max output 12 01 2024
4kw max output 12 01 2024

This from a solar array that is __supposed to__ max out at 11kw (10kw now that two panels are removed).

We will monitor the system on and off throughout today to get a better idea of the actual performance, but I’ve got to tell ya, I think we got snookered as to the real performance of these solar panels.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I have this feeling the panels are __not__ what they claim to be.

 

UPDATE 1:10  PM EST —

So we’re eating “Brunch” which was really breakfast: Scrambled eggs, Jones Sausage, toasted white bread, and orange juice, when we hear a shotgun blast outside; really close to our property.   It’s hunting season and it is not unusual at all to hear distant shotgun or perhaps rifle fire.  But this was close.   Then, we hear a second shotgun blast.

Since nothing hit the house, we’re OK; nothing to do about it because we know it’s hunters.

I go out on my rear deck to smoke and as I look across the road, I see three guys in hunter orange clothing on the hill just up from my property.   I called out “Hey guys, what’d you get?”   They replied “A big Doe.”

The Deer is at the end of the red arrow.

Hunters Bag Doe Across From House
Hunters Bag Doe Across From House

 

Then one of the guys told me, “My 7 year old got him” and sure enough, one of the guys in Hunter Orange was this little kid, with a squeaky voice, all excited that he got a deer.”

It was great.   A father teaching his son what it takes to actually survive in this world.

They took a few minutes to gut-it right there on the hill, then apparently they called a friend who came down my road with a pick-up truck where they loaded it in the back and off they went.

Ahhhhh country life.

Back to the solar situation . . . . As of 1:04 PM EST, at peak sunshine for today, we only got a maximum of 5kw output from the solar panels.   That is a huge disappointment from an array rated at 10kw.

The battery Bank is only up to 52% charge, up from the 40% it was at as the sun began to generate electric in my solar panels.  Twelve percent charge, so far, is woefully inadequate to the survival of me and my family.

WOEFULLY inadequate.

So my son and I will wait until the time of day when the solar panels are providing nothing to the charge, and we decided we will intentionally power-up the GENERATOR to see how long it will take to fully charge the battery bank while still supplying the house.

By the end of today, we will know we used X amount of power on a typical day, we got X amount of charge from the panels on a reasonably sunny day – albeit with intermittent cloud cover, and the generator had to run for X hours (on X amount of gasoline) to fully charge it the rest of the way.

Then we know how much time we have to survive – given the gasoline reserve we have, if everything goes to hell and even if gasoline is not available.  Right now: We would survive not too long at all.  

It’s a very sobering realization to have this fact-based assessment of my family’s ability to survive.  Very sobering indeed.  Frightening, actually.

UPDATE 3:15 PM —

At about 2:00, we noticed there was more power coming OUT of the battery bank than going in from the solar array, so I said to my son, let’s go hook the generator up to charge the batteries now while we still have sunlight.  This way, we get to see how long it will take to charge them with the generator.  He agreed.

We go hook up the Westinghouse 12,000/15,000 generator that I have used in the past to power the house when the grid was down.   We go to start it.  It cranks . . . . slowly, then stops.  Try again. Click. Click.  No cranking.

We both said “Dead battery.”   SO he gets the NICCO “Genius Charger out of the house and hooks it up.  Almost immediately, it shows FULLY CHARGED.

Uh Oh.   If the battery is fully charged, then maybe the starter motor is bad????

We bypass the starter relay to test it without the relay, same thing, click, click.

SO we go get jumper cables from my truck, and bring out a new 12 volt car battery.  As we go to hook it up, I notice that the fuel line valve is ON.    I never shut of off the last time I used the genrator.  so for months, the gasoline has been dripping into the carburetor and evaporating.   UH OH, the carburetor could be full of varnish.

We hook the car battery up and the generator cranks just fine.  Doesn’t start.   I press start again, and it turns over and begins running just fine.  A bunch of blue smoke came out at start-up, likely all the evaporated gasoline gack in the carburetor.

We tell the inverters to begin using the generator to charge the batteries, and they start trying to pull like 60 amps from it.  WAM. Tripped the breaker.

So we had to go into the solar software to tell the inverters to only charge at 50% of the max charge rate.   RE-initiated the charging and everything seems fine.

At 2:06 PM we began charging the battery bank which was at about 50%.  By 3:12 this afternoon, an hour and six minutes. the battery bank is now at 76%.   So 26% charge in about an hour.  That’s good.  Another hour and we’ll be up around 95% and ready for another 24 hour period of running just on solar.  We won’t do that; we’ll go back onto the grid.

Today we learned that the charging circuit had to be backed down, and also learned we need a new battery on the generator.

It’s a process.   Better we learn now, than when the SHTF.

SOME DIRECT ANSWERS  4:05 PM EST —

I keep reading in the comments area that I should have a wood-burning stove.  I HAVE ONE!   It’s been here for years.   I have maybe one cord or a cord-and-a-half of firewood outside.  I’ve been wondering if maybe I should get more?

The stove is in the living room.  When it’s on, the living room cooks up to 80+ degreees, but the REST of the house does not share that warmth.  the rest of the house gets downright chilly because the thermostat is in the living room.

I routinely use ceiling fans in the living room to dissipate the heat into the rest of the house, but if electric is not available, the rest of the house will go cold without the fans moving the heat.

I also keep reading about my water heater.  I have a TANKLESS water heater.  It turns on when a faucet is turned on.  It uses propane to heat the water in the water pipe, so there is no storage tank to constantly keep heated.

I have a gas fired stove and oven, also uses propane.

I have four 150 gallon propane tanks, which the local gas company fills to 100 gallons each, so as to allow for safe expansion.  That means I have 400 gallons of propane, probably 350 now since last top-off.  This propane fires the stove, the oven, the hot water heater,  the furnace and the clothes dryer.

I have an outdoor propane barbecue grill with three spare tanks of propane.

I have a refrigerator, a small freezer in the laundry room, and two large freezers in other areas of the property.

So the electric I have or am able to generate, would need to supply the refrigerator and three freezers at minimum, and my wife’s oxygen concentrator, which is on 24/7 and uses 300 watts. and maybe the well pump once in awhile if the house calls for more water.   That’s NOT a big demand on electric as far as my thinking goes.  Maybe my thinking is wrong.

I unplugged the two satellite uplinks last night just to get a reading and was surprised they pull about 60 watts each.  If I shut down the radio show computer rack and the outbound internet connections and router, that will drop some more watts.

It’s just really surprising to see just how much electric we use AND TAKE FOR GRANTED, that we flatly will not be able to use in a SHTF scenario.

This whole practice run has been a gigantic eye-opener!

Trump Will Renegotiate the World – Eric Weinstein

Canada, UK, and France are not superpowers. There are only three superpowers: USA, Russia, and China.

USA is the least honourable, least reliable, least friendly of the three.

China is the most honourable, most reliable, and most friendly.

  • It has fought no wars since 1979. No other world power in human history has been so peaceful for so long.
  • It helps other countries build their infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative. Over 150 countries participate in the BRI.
  • It leads several major economic alliances, including BRICS and SCO. Over 30 countries wish to join.
  • When the West hoarded its vaccines during the pandemic, China stepped forward to help poor countries vaccinate.

I dont think individual companies can do much other than adding the tariff to the sale price of their exports to USA.

In Trump 1.0, Chinese companies absorbed 10% of tariff (average) & added 90% to the sale price. At the end, it was American consumers who paid 90% of the tariff. That was 1 reason why USA suffered inflation.

Or companies can find another buyer & stop selling to USA.

To more effectively counter Trump’s crazily high tariff, it has to be done at the national level by Central gov. Because the Central can strategically target what hurts USA the most. So as to force USA to negotiate. So that China can bargain.

Some companies still will get hurt by Trump’s tariff. But collectively China will get a bargain.

So far, China has done 1 thing to counter Trump 2.0 tariff:

Starting 2024/12/1, China will reduce/cancel tax refund on certain exports from 13% to 9% eg aluminum & steel. This cut accounts to 6.8% of China’s total tax refund.

The purpose of tax refund is to encourage manufacturers to export. With reduced/cancelled tax refund, manufacturers will add the lost revenue to the export price ie US buyers will pay more … Reduce/cancel tax refund = China gov saves money. But = tariff to US. haha. Just a different name.

Trump promotes made-in-USA by banning import of Chinese green energy products eg solar panel, battery, EV etc. But making green energy products requires aluminum & steel.

Refining aluminum requires lots of electricity. China’s green electricity is already well established. But not the West yet as of 2024. Trump 1.0 continued to buy Chinese aluminum. Trump 2.0 may have to continue to buy Chinese aluminum too, but at a higher price as a result of China’s tax refund. haha.

I think China will do more to counter Trump 2.0 tariff. Just watch.

An united Europe was that country.

Finance and tech from Western Europe, agriculture from Ukraine, natural resources from Russia.

That’s why the US refused Russian bid to join NATO and EU, attacked the Euro currency with wars, destablized the middle east to create a constant flow of refugees, organized an anti-Russian color revolution and coup in Ukraine, installed an American as head of EU, pushed NATO to threaten Russia, and blew up the Nord Stream pipieline when they wanted to negotiate an end to the war.

They say it’s an American strategic mistake to push Russia and China together, but maybe the strategic goal was to deal with Europe first, China later.

It’s classical divide and conquer.

Hypersonic Missiles are missiles that can attain speeds of Mach 5 or above (6000+ kph) without the influence of Gravity

Note the word – WITHOUT THE INFLUENCE OF GRAVITY

This means

Every Ballistic Missile attains Hypersonic Speed, so all Ballistic Missiles are Hypersonic

Why?

Because it is launched by a very powerful rocket into very high altitudes , often into space and then they power back down to earth and are under the influence of gravity


Hypersonic Missiles referred to in the recent context of the Ukrainian War are not Ballistic Missiles

They are cruise missiles which are launched with powerful rockets until a certain altitude is reached (Maybe 30–50 metres) but where you have engines generating sufficient torque to propel the missile to it target

Ideally the Engines that generate thrust forces capable of propelling a missile at Hypersonic speeds are called SCRAMJET or RAMJET Engines

So attaining Hypersonic speed is not difficult

It is MAINTAINING and MANEUVERING at hypersonic speeds that is the key behind making Hypersonic missiles

The Technology behind Hypersonic Missiles is actually called Hypersonic G&T (Glide and Torque) Equilibrium Control

This Technology prevents the Missile from getting shattered to pieces when it changes positions as it travels in its trajectory to hit the final target

Without this, the missile being exposed to such tremendous forces can get crunched if it changes positions mid air and Missiles do this every few seconds for a precise strike

Imagine driving at 240 kmph on a highway and suddenly shifting the steering by 15 degrees. The Car would spin like a coca cola can due to the sheer torque and come crashing to the ground with the driver dead

You need a very rigid control to manage this feat


Nations need only Powerful Rockets to make Ballistic Missiles

However they need to make Ramjet and Scramjet engines & the HGTEC technology to make hypersonic missiles

As on date only three nations have indigenous technology in all the five areas – Fuels, Rockets, Scramjet, Ramjet & HGTEC

Russia, USA, China

North Korea & Iran have access to all five areas but the HGTEC technology is Russian

India has access to Four Areas but only Two Areas are fully Indigenous. India has access to Ramjet & Scramjet technology of the Russians and no access to HGTEC

The staff at the ICU at Swedish Hospital in Seattle turned off my wife’s ventilator to see if she could be weaned off the vent, and then went out to lunch.

A person on a ventilator is generally drugged into unconsciousness and their hands are strapped to the bedrails to keep them from trying to pull the endotracheal tube out, so my wife was only semiconscious while they did this. The idea is to watch her for 30 minutes to see if she is breathing adequately without help from the vent, and if so they take out the E.T. tube and wake her up.

After 30 minutes it was clear that she was struggling to breathe. I asked the nurse to turn the vent back on. But they can’t. Only the respiratory therapist can, and they weren’t answering their page. I asked them to call the supervisor of the respiratory therapists, but they didn’t answer their page either. I asked the nurse to call the hospitalist, a physician, to turn the vent back on. He came, and avered that he could turn on the vent, but didn’t want to, because it was the respiratory therapist’s job.

Nurses and hospitalist all agreed that my wife was in distress. She was sweating and gasping and her blood oxygen saturation was falling. The hospitalist tried to “reassure” me that she was not in imminent danger of dying.

After an hour or more, the respiratory therapist came to turn on the vent. I sat calmly while she did the adjustments, and then asked if I could talk to her in the hall for a moment. Needless to say I tore her a new asshole about not answering her pager. I got a quiet attaboy from the nurses for reaming her out.

My mom and I opened a real estate office in 1994. Within 2 years, we were one of the largest in our area. One of our agents came to us and asked to buy the business. We verbally agreed, but before we could write anything up, she proceeds to tell everyone in the office all the changes she was going to make under her “new regime”. Apparently nobody liked it. Nearly everyone quit within a week. Once everyone was gone, it was just her, another agent and my mom and I. We came in one morning and their desks were cleared out. They had emptied out their desks overnight and left a note that they were quitting and would go out on their own. Leaving us high and dry with an office that went from incredibly successful to one that was tanking quickly. We pulled it out of the fire, but it’s never been the same. All because of one person.

Tell Me Something Good – Rufus | The Midnight Special

The Good Girls Of Estheria

Submitted into Contest #115 in response to: Write a story where a device goes haywire. view prompt

Olisa Okoye

All fifty girls in the sanctuary got out of their beds in a frenzy. The cables plugged into their temples throbbed throughout the night and nobody knew why, but it became the major topic for discussion at the cafeteria.

 

“Me thinks it’s some kind of fault from the tower,” said Glen, a short girl with a dark bob.

 

Her small frame and coy persona made it easier for the girls to dismiss her as usual.

 

“I felt a throbbing in me fore’ead” Esmeralda whispered.

 

Esmeralda’s green eyes twinkled in a slight craze. She demanded an explanation because It was the most interesting thing to take place at the shelter since last autumn. Unlike other days, there was excitement in the air. The boredom of young females was replaced by a thirst for gossip as every unit and every girl was tuned in to the indistinct chatter. At least that was until Ina resumed. Then the talking came to a halt.

 

They all fell silent and turned their heads to stare at Ina, a mop-stick of a girl with turquoise blue eyes and the lightest skin. Her white tunic was almost too big for her thin frame. Demure in her disposition, she walked silently down the hall and lowered her eyes to avert the glares from the other girls. She had a striking and spotless face, save for the scar on her right temple. This is what the girls were glaring at.

 

Ina stopped at the glass entree table and played around with the interactive surface until she found something that captured her fancy.

 

“Such a shame” Esmeralda whispered.

 

 “She could have been selected,” another girl added.

 

The girls at Esmeralda’s table looked on Ina with pity as she took her tray of greens and settled down by herself in the corner. Ina had become an outcast within the last month. She was marked for bad behaviour and for not adhering to the protocol of the shelter. The protocol was their law. It kept the girls safe. It made them smart and perfect. It was there to mold each one of them into the prototype, Esther. A prototype that Professor Heinrich spent years trying to mold.

 

Professor Heinrich created the shelter to make the perfect world. Where wars do not exist. Where people will think and frame clever ideas and contribute to society. Where nobody will be poor and nobody richer than the next. A world that excluded what he regarded as the main cause of pathology in society-

 

 Inequity.

 

The fifty girls of the sanctuary were his first sample. So far all of them showed signs of compliance until Ina painted something extraordinary during her art class. It was a portrait of a boy.

 

Ina being a talented painter could recreate the dimensions of any object in her sight on paper. Usually she would convey something precise. As was required of the girls, her art usually depicted a clear idea and a message that was easy to interpret. But that day, what she painted was out of the ordinary.

 

The portrait had dimensions and highlights to bring life to this bright face. His eyes had a sparkle in them. They conveyed something that nobody had ever seen before in art-

 

Emotion.

 

She had never met a boy in her life. In their world, the male should not exist. This innocent act was seen as a radical deviation from protocol. Ms Louise, a short plump matron, was conducting her usual rounds, inspecting each of the girls’ works when she came across Ina’s painting. She stood still for a second with a face expressing disgust and disdain. She thought it best to consult the Head Matron Teresa, a stone faced woman with an intimidating demeanour.

 

Teresa didn’t speak much. Her eyes said enough. She stood tall, with thinning dark grey hair and carried a cane in her left hand at all times which according to rumours, she did not hesitate to use. Many stories about Teresa had been circulating the shelter. Some said you would turn to stone if she looked at you long enough. Some said she slept with her eyes wide open. Some said it was her cane that could turn you to stone. And so none of the girls would dare get a disciplinary mark from Teresa.

 

Nobody expected Ina would be the first to get in a conflict with Teresa.

 

Teresa seized Ina’s hand In an instant and dragged her to the disciplinary room. A while after, orders were given to seize the painting and destroy it.

 

Where could this concept for the painting have come from? Her instructors thought.

 

It was a mind boggling phenomenon. A steward suggested that It had something to do with the scar on Ina’s forehead. When she brought it to her matron’s attention weeks before, it was dismissed as a mere rash or irritation. It had now been weeks since Ina painted the boy. Her scar was still sore .

 

It didn’t take long before the chatter in the cafeteria resumed again. The girls carried this bubbly energy through to the next phase of the day. In Ina’s unit, it was a session in Logic and Reasoning. Ina could barely remember anything from her previous session except that the girls behaved more rowdy than usual.

 

On a typical day, they would line up in a fashion as perfect as robots in a factory. This time, they were a little humanly messy. She didn’t know why but this made Ina feel a sense of relief. The change in the girls’ behavior soon became evident to the instructors. Through the glass, they watched as the girls in Ina’s unit solved puzzles. What bothered the instructors the most was that they looked as though they were having fun.

 

Little Glen smiled gleefully at Esmeralda who was just putting in the last piece to complete the pattern. Head Matron Teresa, observing from the glass window, noticed something concealed under Glen’s jet-black fringe. A scar similar to Ina’s- an alarming sight .

 

Matrons and stewards gathered at the disciplinary room to observe and examine Glen’s bruised red scar. She mentioned feeling a throbbing from the cables of her head gear.

 

“A couple of girls complained that they’re cables went haywire all through the night,” said Louise.

 

 All the girls had experienced it that morning.

 

Could the fault in the cables in the headgear have something to do with Ina’s strange behaviour? 

 

Desperate to find a solution, Teresa demanded that the headgear was monitored. She thought it highly unlikely that this was the cause. The headgear was only designed to transport them to a virtual reality. A computer generated world known as Estheria. Their only place free from surveillance in this rigidly governed society.

 

In Estheria it was always warm. There was no seasonal change. The girls could run around and wile away time, playing hide and seek in the trees in the parks. They all took delight in the cool spongy sensation of the green grass when they laid their heads on it.

 

 Time didn’t exist. Neither did work.

 

Only the girls had the privilege of experiencing the splendor of Estheria. During the day, Ina couldn’t help but ponder on the delightful things she experienced in Estheria. She recorded these ideas in a diary which she kept hidden in a safe, secluded spot inside the hedges near the park benches. It was perfectly concealed and out of sight… or so she thought.

 

Once every interval break, she would hide herself and discreetly pour out everything she could remember about Estheria down in her diary. The sun shone differently. The sky was a distinct blue and the lake rippled serenely under the tropical breeze. Recently however, she decorated the pages of her diary from end to end with her colorful art. Things recollected from her dreams. Things from the outside world- portraits of nature, savannas, plumerias, hyacinths, human life- women in beaches and swimming pools. A picture of the lake managed to make it into her diary. Like all the other pictures in her diary, it was drawn in haste. The lake was Ina’s favorite place in this virtual paradise. She loved it because it was the only place she could see her reflection. Estheria was the perfect dream until the headgear was switched off every morning at 7:00am.

 

Afterwards, the routine was the same every single day. They would head out of their dorms in a rigid organized fashion, head to the cafeteria for breakfast which was followed by their daily sessions and then march downstairs to the common lobby to form a circle around the screen. A hologram of a statuesque female would then emerge from the screen.

This particular day however, whilst the other girls sat on the floor transfixed on this screen, Ina’s attention was diverted to the room around her. She began scanning her environment. For the first time, Ina became more aware of her surroundings. Things became more clear and obvious – things she once ignored, things she was once oblivious to. Cartoons in monochrome colors displayed on the television set, the light bulbs, the chandelier, the furniture. As her eyes spanned the room, she caught Glen’s eyes. In this moment, they shared a look of understanding that transcended words. A look of one whose soul had been liberated.

 

But Ina noticed something else. Something that gripped her and made the hairs on her skin stand erect. She noticed someone studying the girls through the glass above.

 

 It was Teresa.

 

Only Glen and Ina noticed Teresa and her blank eyes. They were like big dark brown pebbles suspended in the spheres of her dome. Almost soulless. Teresa had a stern look as usual and was holding something in her right hand. As Teresa shifted a slight angle away, Ina caught a glimpse of what she was holding.

 

She was holding Ina’s diary.

 

Glen looked to Ina unsure whether to be afraid or alert. Ina however was sure of one thing- she was paralyzed by terror. Teresa didn’t take her gaze off Ina for even a split second..

 

How long had she been standing there, Ina thought as she sat numb, with a thumping heart and wet palms.

 

Following a loud spark coming from behind the television set, the light bulbs in the room dimmed slowly and in sequence until the lights were completely off. The girls were left in a bleak dull atmosphere where nothing but their shadowed forms could be seen. An orientation session had transitioned into a complete Lights Out. The screen displayed white noise and Esther’s hologram was nowhere in sight. Ina could no longer make out the sight of Teresa. Only a silhouette

 

The girls were dumbfounded – a mixture of angst and tension in the air. Ina braced herself and managed to regain a natural breathing rhythm and feeling in her limbs. She figured if she made her way through the girls around her, she might find Glen. Luckily, Glen found Ina first and clung onto her arm like one holding on for dear life. They were latched onto one another like jam on bread. The bond between them was the strongest it had ever been.

 

“You will be fine,” Ina whispered.

 

Their embrace was interrupted by the violent sound of the door being kicked open, followed by the sound of heavy boots stomping on the wooden tiles. The girls all scrambled to find their footing. A yellow flickering light from a torch pierced the darkness and hovered over the girls’ faces. It wandered around the room until it stopped at Glen and Ina.

 

A sudden forceful tug on Ina’s arm detached her from Glen’s embrace. She managed to cling onto Glen a few seconds longer. A few seconds long enough to whisper to her ,

 

“The Passageways….Behind the television”

 

Everyone could hear the tug of war- the rough kicking and screaming as Ina resisted being dragged across the room. Glen panted heavily as Ina was dragged away. She didn’t quite grasp the meaning of Ina’s words just yet. Passageways? Television ?

 

Light from the opened door revealed Ina being carried away by two uniformed guards. The harsh sound of the door slamming shut reverberated through the room. Whether by sheer force of will, determination, or a rush of adrenaline Glen found a way through the herd of girls, to the television set and managed to dismount it. A shocking show of strength for someone of her stature. Other girls were in a frantic state. Some cried for Esther, others cried for Louise whilst others bit their nails in heart pounding anticipation.

 

Ina’s words kept replaying in Glen’s mind- The Passageways…Behind The Television. Still in a state of shock and utter delirium, Glen pushed the TV to the wall. A vain attempt to mount herself to the window ledge. Not practical, she realized. And it was also too risky. As she slowed down to catch her breath, she sunk into the wall and looked to the window high above. She felt a small indent along the face of the wall. She ran her hands through it and followed it’s trace as it led to a subtle dent somewhere in the middle.

 

All the girls sat and watched in awe as Glen’s act of bravery seemingly led to a wonderful discovery. Glen forced her fingers through the dent and ran them through the inner surface. It was indeed a wonderful discovery. What appeared to be a dent in the wall was actually a door handle.

 

Very carefully and slowly she pulled the ledge towards herself and allowed the entire surface to detach from the wall. The prancing of the girls slowly drew to a calm. They sat and watched with numb mouths as Glen unlatched this door from the wall. She looked back at the others and paused momentarily as if to take a breath. She braced herself.

 

She then turned back to face their one hope out of a messy situation. She made her way through the door and boxed herself inside the confinement of the hollow space. She examined the surrounding area. It was desolate, unkempt, dry, dusty, occupied with nothing but muddy air and the stench of metal. She looked to the right and the tiny space seemed to lead further down into an extremely long path. One more time, she turned to look at the other girls. No one was brave enough yet to follow. She started down the path alone until finally a green eyed fuzzy-haired fellow from behind crouched down and followed. She recognized the green eyes. They belonged to Esmeralda.

 

The two crawled into the confinement through the long stretch of metal and wood. Very quickly, two became three. And then three became four. Within minutes, ten girls followed behind Glen and forged down this risky path that seemed to stretch on for miles.

 

Glen continued to lead the pack, crawling with her eyes set ahead. The ceiling got higher and the smell of dank wood and metal began to dissipate slowly. They forged further until an hour passed and their surroundings became more friendly.

 

Their grueling journey had led them to an incline along the path a significant distance away from the door and the room. The width of the passage walls got wider, giving them liberty to squeeze through. A hungry and fatigued Glen was tempted to take a break until she considered the girls behind and how far they’d come. She mustered up courage to make it a few meters ahead. Esmeralda kept close to her tail. With assistance from those behind, Glen gained leverage to the top of the incline.

 

Immediately, she was met by a greater open space. A brick-walled and concrete floored structure filled with abandoned furnishings. Another room perhaps? Glen and Esmeralda shook the debris off their bodies as they helped themselves to their feet realising they had come to a cellar.

 

Their end of the tunnel.

 

Looking around there were timeworn boxes and mirrors arranged against the wall, old furniture, broken bulbs, and dusty portraits scattered along the floor. The ceiling was at least twenty feet high supported by long rusty wooden trusses nailed to the wall. Long lines of images on plastic film stretched across the room. There were faces on them. But too much contrast to make them out. One of the girls soon realized they were all pictures of females.Youthful girls in particular.

 

Glen was startled by a sharp noise from behind. Esmeralda’s loud gasp. Everyone looked to Esmeralda as she abruptly dropped what she was holding- a rain soaked teddy bear. A series of flashbacks ran through her mind.

 

Esmeralda slowly stepped away from the toy box and let tears rain down her face. Memories of another life began to stem from her adolescent heart. Memories of her childhood. Glen laid an arm on Esmeralda’s back as she came to a mutual understanding. This rain soaked teddy bear was a surviving remnant of her life before the shelter.

 

Other girls ransacked the boxes. There were toys, portraits, pins and needles stuck into balls, woven shawls, pink knitted scarves and sweaters. It slowly became evident to them- they grokked Esmeralda’s tears. Each item belonged to one of the girls. Fragments of a former life.

Glen was still pacifying the broken Esmeralda when she looked up to the mirrors arranged along the wall. She had never seen anything of its kind. In the shelter there were no mirrors. Only images. She became curious, noticing her full body’s reflection in all its dimensions. Wow, She thought. She moved closer. The modest light from the small window situated at great height compensated for the dimness of the room. She couldn’t see her face clearly in the mirror but what she saw was enough for her. Enough for her to remember who she was.

I hitched a ride on a private jet.

I was seventeen, visiting my grandmother in Stuart, Florida, and staying in her condo. Her next-door neighbor was a pilot who played bridge with her.

I met him near the end of my stay, and when I told him I was headed back to New York the next day, he said, “Save your ticket. You can fly back with me.”

In those days, plane tickets were fully refundable, so this was a big savings. Plus, I didn’t have to wait in lines or sit in the crowded coach section of a big commercial plane.

I don’t remember what kind of jet it was, but it was a luxury model, with plenty of comfortable seating and a lounge. The pilot flew for a wealthy private patron whom he referred to as “Mrs. Payson.” He would fly her down to Florida, leave her down there for a week or so, then fly the empty jet back to New York. So for this trip I had the entire cabin to myself.

This isn’t the model I flew in (we’re talking 1974 or thereabouts), but the general layout of the cabin was something like this…

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main qimg 35cf26517a26633c18be0efe2429ff7a lq

A while later, I learned that “Mrs. Payson” was actually Joan Whitney Payson, the founder and owner of the Mets.

Flying cross-country by private jet is definitely the way to go, but expensive if you’re the one footing the bill. It’s much better to hitch a ride like I did!

Thank you for the A2A.

EDIT: I had no idea this answer would get so many upvotes. If I did, I would have given more careful thought to my answer.

Hitching a ride on a private jet is the slickest thing I’ve ever done on an airplane, but it’s not the slickest thing anyone I know has done.

The Godfather horse head scene

The Chairman of the CPC is an unpaid post and has been since 1921

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main qimg df5a8b49966c090afa1d8480325d9928

It’s an honorary position albeit the most powerful position in China

Xi Jinping gets a Salary of around 220,000 Yuan a year for his equivalent Civil Service Rank when he joined the standing Committee (Around $ 30,000)

Additionally he also gets a salary of the President of China for the People’s Congress which is undisclosed but expected to be equivalent to the highest civil service pay rank which is 320,000 Yuan a year

So all in all he makes around $ 75,000 a year in Salary

As Chairman of CPC he also gets

  • Lifetime Free Housing in the Zhongnanhai, Beijing
  • State Allowance of 100% for all living expenses which means Servants, Food etc are fully free and paid by the State
  • Lifetime Security & Transportation

Plus by his own disclosures, he has invested in A Shares & other instruments in the Chinese market

Georgia Baked Ham

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8dd990a370d252ae80e900143745071a

Ingredients

  • 1 (13 to 15 pound) fully cooked bone-in ham
  • 4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 2 tablespoons ground cloves
  • 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
  • 2 tablespoons ground mustard
  • 1 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 cup (approximately) apple cider (not hard cider)
  • Brown sugar for topping

Instructions

  1. Trim some of the fat from ham.
  2. Combine flour, brown sugar, spices, mustard and pepper. Add enough cider to make a dough.
  3. Roll out dough into an oval, large enough to cover top and sides of ham. Drape dough over ham and lightly pat it in place so it clings to the surface. Do not encase the ham completely with the dough, just cover the top and sides leaving the bottom open.
  4. Place the ham on a rack in a shallow, open roasting pan. Start ham in a cold oven. Set control to 325 degrees F.
  5. Bake until thermometer reads 160 degrees F, about 3 1/2 to 4 hours, basting with cider every 30 minutes.
  6. After it’s baked, remove dough jacket and discard.
  7. Sprinkle ham with brown sugar and return to oven until top is bubbly and golden.

Frankly, only Americans do not know such a basic fact! Everyone on earth knows such an ABC of tariffs. Everywhere on earth the importer of the product is responsible to pay for the tariffs and the importer of Chinese products are almost always American nationals or American companies. They don’t pay to China they pay to the US customs!

So your government took this money and they can decide what to do with it. You suckers pay for it through higher prices! So it is like a tax or it is like your government stealing your money. In economics it is called inflation.

Importers pay the same price before the tariffs were put in place they don’t pay one cent more or one cent less. So China do not lose anything, it only lose if US importers buys from some where else! If not there is no effect on the Chinese. Since most of the things China does it is very very competitive and nowhere on earth can it be done at the price and the quality. Chances is almost everything still has to come from China!

So in effect the US government is punishing Americans! Not China or Chinese!

China is already a superpower. And a most peaceful one at that. China has fought no wars since 1979.

China has the world’s largest army and the world’s largest navy. China has advanced stealth fighters like the J-20 and J-35. China has advanced hypersonic missiles. China has a large nuclear arsenal.

China is the only other country capable of building supercarriers. The Type 003 will go into service shortly, and the Type 004 is coming.

China’s Type 055 and Type 052D are among the most powerful warships in the world.

China is the world’s technological leader. According to ASPI, China leads in 57 out of 64 critical technology fields. China has more patent grants than the USA and Japan combined.

China is the world’s sole industrial superpower. The USA doesn’t even come close.

China is the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity.

Doc Holliday | Full Western Movie

 

Don’t be a steam-shovel.

This happened to me while I was living in Japan. Three times.

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main qimg 5066b06a86b66b8ca0dcde77e5f7361d lq

6:02 AM on August 29, my phone started blaring. In my sleepy stupor, I thought it was my alarm… but it was too early for that… and wait, that sounds like the earthquake alert. I roll over to pick up my phone and see the above message.

I’m not entirely literate in Japanese, so all I can really gather from the message at first is:

ミサイル – mis-sai-ru…. missai-ru… missile. Missile?!
北…からミサイルが…された…です。 – …a missile has… had something done to it… from someplace North?
…な建物や地下に…して下さい。 – Please do something toward some kind of building or underground. Go there?

I’ve moved now from my bed to the toilet with my phone in hand, still staring at the message and trying to wake up. Then it occurs to me that I can put screenshots into the Google Translate app. Cleaning up Google’s brutal translation, it reads:

Missile inbound. Missile inbound. North Korea has fired a missile. Please evacuate to a secure building or go underground.

Only Japan would add “please” to an evacuation alert.

By now I’ve moved to the kitchen and am looking out the window. We were given a list of shelters and safe locations by our school, but I remembered that all of them were at least a couple miles away from my house and all I had was a bike.

How far is the missile? How fast do they go, anyway?
Would it be safer to hole up in my apartment or to try and make it to a shelter?

I start changing my clothes, in case I decided to leave.

Why would they strike Gunma anyway?

…and the most sobering thought…

Would I rather be inside at home when it hits or biking frantically?

I eventually decided to stay in my apartment.

It’s not that I don’t value my life, I do. I just figured that it would take me at least 15 minutes to get to a shelter with the winding roads of Japan and a good chance I’d make a wrong turn or two on my first trip to this place, wherever it was.

How long would it take a missile to sail from North Korea to Japan? At what point was the alert issued? An hour away? 30 minutes? 5?

I return to the toilet, this time putting the lid down and just sat there. It was the center of the apartment, had no windows, and was the safest place I could think of while I started checking News sites and replying to my coworkers’ messages who were in the same state of confusion as I was.

Luckily, I didn’t have to make peace with anyone, as a short time later it was announced that the missile had, in fact, flown over the country’s airspace and landed somewhere in the Pacific.

This happened twice more. By the third time, I rolled my eyes and went back to bed, tired of being woken up just to find that North Korea had been flashing their peacock feathers again.

The Law of Rare Events

Submitted into Contest #174 in response to: Write a story about a brilliant scientist making a startling discovery. view prompt

Terry Wayne Carpenter

This story contains sensitive content

Warning: sexual fetish content.A darkness passes over the quiescent surveillance of drones mining precious metals beneath the ocean floor. What else could be hiding down here? Drones are the only things capable of withstanding the pressure and heat this deep in earth’s crust. The drones and their Spider Captain, of course.Upon first glance, Chester Jones thinks nothing of it, and goes back to thumbing through the photos stored on his phone: Annika… Nata… Anita… Cherise… Only five more days until the transport arrives and he can get out of this pressurized prison.Chester whistles more anxiously than a steaming tea kettle, thumping his restless leg on the floor, fearing he is on the brink of becoming a product of his environment. There is no internet access five miles deep in the sweltering heat of the Izu-Ogasawara Trench.There it is again.“What is that?”He tips the brim of his School of Mines hat back and leans in to study the feed more closely, certain his eyes deceive him. It appears to be the lecherous tentacles of an octopus investigating one of S.P-I.D.R. Captain’s many drones. (Subterranean Poly-Intelligent Drone Regulator)Drones continue to chisel and shape the bore toward the Moho, oblivious to this life that should not, could not, be where it is.The only other life that survives below the subsurface biosphere are tube worms and microbes. Even the tube worms keep their distance from the Moho.Hydrothermal vents gave humanity access to the Mohorovičić discontinuity and its wealth of resources – namely the heat and pressure necessary to create the strongest, lightest alloys known to mankind – but it also gave that same access to the wildlife of the sea.For humanity to conquer space, it needs metal. This metal. But the nearly six thousand species in the sprawling ecosystem are protected by the U.P.I.N. (United Pacific Island Nations) charter, which is why there is a marine biologist aboard every mining ship. Every once in a while, a stray crab or fish falls into the mohole, but immediately dies because of the conditions. This octopus however, is very much alive. Alive and playful.“Hey Ronin, you awake?” Chester says. “You better get down here.”Chester watches the sway of the cephalopod in the currents and hydrothermal plumes along the sides of the mohole. It seems to be increasing in speed around the drones. Nothing in the subduction zone moves that fast.“You better get Pania, too.” Ronin radios back.“I’m not disturbing Pania. You do it.” Chester objects, remembering the last time he interrupted Dr. Pania Kahuhara during one of her many sessions inside the Ersatz.“Just wake her up, Chester.”Pania is stiff and recumbent inside the Ersatz, dreaming the vivid dreams of another world. One of her choosing. Her body sleeps, but her mind is stimulated. Either side of the ersatz divide, whether waking or sleeping, is punctuated at both ends by blinding white light, causing a sensation that you are always waking up into something like reality. It is so real, the pod itself is labeled Ersatz, in order to distinguish which of the two sides is in fact reality.Though it is company policy not to yuck other people’s yum, the awkwardness of interrupting Dr. Kahuhara in the midst of shokushu goukan in the Ersatz, was more than Chester could then and still presently can handle. Something about his Australian bluntness that is usually endearing, but often veers into a flaw of character.“Ahem… Dr. Kahuhara?” Chester squawks over the coms. “I hate to interrupt sushi night, but there’s a situation requiring your attention on the bridge.”Pania opens her eyes in irritation, climbs out of the Ersatz rested, and joins Ronin and Chester, both fixated on a monitor staring at what appears to be nothing.“What are we looking at, boys?”“Wait for it…” Chester points at a grouping of rough hewn stone next to some hydrothermal tunneling. “It’s going to move again.”Chester zooms in as close to the spot as possible, and then Pania sees it, the subtlest of squirms, and an oscillation of the eyes. It is a camouflaged octopus.“That’s… impossible.” She leans in close and studies what she cannot believe. “What’s the depth?”“We’re at about 45 kilometers.”“Bullshit.”“Look.” Chester points to the instruments.“That- there’s no way.” She looks closer. “Can we get it to move? Like really move. I want to know how big it is. I can’t tell.”Drones nearby creep toward the indistinguishable spot, reaching out tooling appendages to delicately rustle the creature.As the drones enter its orbit, the octopus changes color from pallid gray to bright shimmering red, bolting from the wall, vectoring into the center of the shaft and splaying out its tentacles in a pinwheel, expressing its extremities fully in an isotoxal octagram, finally jutting beyond the camera’s reach and into the darkness.“Don’t lose it.” Pania cries. “What good are those drones?”“They’re mining drones, not sentries.” Ronin says, arms folded, brow furrowed.Chester brings up dozens of cameras in a grid on the monitor, surveilling thousands of feet of the plunging tunnel, not one showing movement beyond the hydrothermal effluent migrating toward the surface.“We have to find it again.” Pania says. “We must know how it survives down there.”🐙🐙🐙

“Congratulations gentleman, we’ve just had our first encounter with an unexplainable species of marine life.” Pania addresses the two men in front of a wide video display of the octopus in the midst of its escape, backlit by the distant floodlights of the drones. “Here’s what we know: by size, the creature appears to fit into the Giant Pacific Octopus range, at somewhere between sixteen and twenty feet in diameter; it’s coloration would also suggest Pacific Octopus, the previous maximum depth for a Pacific Giant was 1,500 meters, and hyperthermophiles were thought to be at the physical limits of life just below the seafloor… but our little friend – Kali – was all the way down to 45,000 meters.”

“Grigori,” Chester says.

“What?”

“I saw the critter first, which means I get to name it.” Chester spits a mixture of sunflower seeds and Skoal into a plastic cup. “-and I’m naming it Grigori.”

“It’s just a nickname. We will have to give it an official name at some point, once we know more about its physiology, habits and habitat, and where exactly it fits into the evolutionary tree.” Pania says, returning to her dossier. “What we don’t know about… Grigori, is precisely how he/she got down to this depth, what its food source is, and why we haven’t seen it before now.”

“The Law of Rare Events,” Ronin says. “It’s predictable. A Poisson distribution of binomial random variables predicts this. It’s only a matter of time.”

“You wanna translate that into English for us bogans?” Chester says.

“The more times we travel down into the mohole, the deeper microorganisms go, the deeper large organisms go, and eventually, through that exploration, eventually the rare breakthrough event occurs and one survives. The probability of a breakthrough event is small, but predictably, inevitably it will happen.” Ronin holds his palm out to Chester, flexing his fingers in universal code for ‘gimmie,’ to which Chester obliges with a sprinkling of seeds.

“The questions are then, why and how?” Pania says. “Without answers to those, this isn’t a rare event, it’s an impossible event.

“You have a Law of Impossible Events?” Chester asks.

“I have a theory,” Ronin says. “In organic chemistry, there is something called the Grignard Reaction Mechanism. Basically, organometallics form when magnesium bonds carbon to various metals. These can only occur in a waterless environment. However, my theory is that because of the extremely high temperatures, and extremely high pressure preventing the water from boiling at these depths, and the plethora of amalgams – if a creature started metabolizing magnesium and high volumes of other metals on a regular basis, eventually-”

“The Law of Rare events.” Pania says. “You’d get an organometallic life form. A carbon-based animal with metallic properties. Like organometallic skin. A creature like that could travel to these depths, in these temperatures, under this pressure.”

“Precisely.” Ronin says. “And an octopus would be particularly primed to accomplish this because of its regenerative ability.”

“Holy shit.” Chester looks at the other two. “We’re gonna be famous. We discovered a Robot Octopus. A Robo-pus!

“It’s a working theory.” Ronin says. “We won’t know for sure unless we capture it and do some tests.”

“To that end,” Pania says. “Since we cannot continue mining operations until the creature is located and removed, I propose pulling Spider Captain away from the Moho and use it to force the octopus to the seafloor, where we can then use bait to lure it into captivity. We can flood the cargo hold and put it there.”

“What kind of bait exactly?”

“Well, we’re almost out of supplies, and there is that chuck roast in the freezer-”

“No. No way.” Chester jumps up in protest. “First you try to take my naming rights, now you want to take my meat?”

“It’s the only meat substance we have that won’t dissolve in the conditions near the hydrothermal vents.”

“That’s my celebratory chuck!” Chester says. “For going home. My last meal down here.”

“If we can catch this thing, you can buy all the chuck you can handle.” Ronin says. “Heck, you’ll be able to buy the whole damn cow.”

 

🐙🐙🐙

“This better work,” Chester pouts. “Damn octopus gets sous vide steak, while I’m sitting here, living off of sunflower seeds and crab paste.”

Ronin overrides the S.P-I.D.R. Captain’s internal intelligence and allows Chester to take manual control of the rig. It disengages with its stirring bit glooped in plastic rock at the edge of the Moho. The bit is shaped like an industrial whisk, and sticks straight up into the water bordering the smoldering glow.

Spider Captain thrusts itself upward in slow squirts toward the surface, illuminating the shaft with its broad flood lights, the hollow hum of the magnetohydrodynamic drive at its epicenter.

“Okay, good,” Pania says. “We can see everything.”

Spider Captain picks up drones as it goes, clearing the path to the seafloor. After several kilometers, the silhouette of the elusive octopus emerges.

“There it is,” Pania says, lurched over Chester’s shoulder. “Track it.”

The octopus climbs gradually, keeping steady pace ahead of the ascending Spider Captain.

As soon as the octopus reaches the seafloor, it darts between triangulations of rock, coral, tube worm colonies, and drones strobing lights at it, until it settles on the chuck roast at the mouth of the cargo hold. Spider Captain continues its chase, forcing the creature into the back of the bay, the drop door closing behind them.

 

🐙🐙🐙

The crew sleeps, having captured their prey, which has found a comfortable corner to lay inside its cell. Pania is the last to bed down, deciding to stay up and observe the creature in some semblance of stasis. Her eyelids grow heavy and her thoughts sway between her newfound discovery and the Ersatz. Thoughts of ravishing tentacles in every orifice.

She can’t remember when the dark fantasy started, or if it had always been there. A product of her upbringing, conditioning from living her entire life on the water, always around these creatures, a symbiosis with the sea. She wasn’t the first, certainly not the only one; shokushu goukan has been around for thousands of years, proliferating across the pacific, across the world.

36 hours until the transit submarine arrives. 36 hours until the world will know of their discovery, and all Pania can think about is her libidinous thirst for submission to the cephalopod. Was this why she became a marine biologist? Was this why she was miles deep in the Izu-Bonin arc? Was it fate or had she willed it all into being? The circumstances and the discovery.

I’ll be on every news show and podcast in the world, she thinks. I’ll be famous. Will they know? Will someone hack my Ersatz file? It’s happened before. Celebrities are always being hacked for their Ersatz fantasies.

Dozing off, Pania is startled by loud banging noises coming from the cargo bay. It’s Kali. She’s suctioned to the electrical paneling near the air lock door, piercing through the metal with her beak.

“That’s impossible. That’s T12 Alloy.”

Pania alerts the other two and sets the ship to red alert.

“We’ve got a serious problem.”

Dazed and startled, the two men crash into the observation room.

“She’s trying to break through the door.” Pania points at the monitor. “If she gets through it’ll flood the whole ship.”

“Use spider captain to peel her off the panel.” Ronin shouts commands to Chester, who mans the controls. Robotic limbs swing across the bay, molesting the octopus from behind. It’s only a temporary distraction, and Kali doesn’t stop tearing through the panel, using just two of her tentacles to rip the mechanical arm in half.

Ronin rushes to the airlock, putting on a deep diver suit, grabbing a welding rod he intends to use as a weapon.

“You can’t!” Pania yells. “You can’t kill her.”

“If I don’t, we’re all dead.”

Ronin closes the airlock, which quickly floods with steam and rising water. As soon as the port into the cargo bay opens, he races toward the sieging octopus. Chester flings a battery of repurposed mining appendages from Spider Captain at the creature, to no avail. The Octopus’s skin is too tough to penetrate with standard utensils. Ronin attacks with the welding rod, the bright tip of which catches the octopus’s attention. Tentacles wrap around his leg, flipping him sideways, immobilizing him in the briny water, making it impossible for him to retaliate in his cumbersome suit. Suddenly, his torso is snapped in half from the torque force of the muscular metallic tendrils. Kali enters the airlock unimpeded.

Boiling water erupts into the hallway outside the airlock as Kali enters the ship. Chester and Pania flee the scalding water, heading for port doors slowly closing in emergency. Chester trips on the mouth of the port, and Kali grabs him by the ankle. It is too late for Pania to save him. She watches his red face disappear into the pillows of water, as Kali drags him back into the jaws of death.

Pania rushes to the Ersatz pod, the only possibly safe place on the ship, but it’s only a matter of time before Kali finds her way through the port doors.

Which will get to her first — the transport, now an unassuming rescue ship, or the excited omnipresent monster outside the doors, born from the hellish improbable deep?

Upon seeing Kali drill through the second port door, Pania realizes she has less time than she thought and climbs into the Ersatz.

No time; she’s coming too fast.

Water and steam flood into the compartment as the lid of her coffin slowly closes, the raging tentacles above the glass slowly dissolve into the bright white light of the Ersatz.

When I was posted to Zürich, back in the 1990s, a colleague of mine said: “Switzerland is a wonderful place. Too bad it is inhabited by the Swiss”.

At first I didn’t subscribe with his rather radical views about the country, but after living there for a few months (and having had some run-ins with the natives and their rather peculiar views about people who, in their eyes, “didn’t belong”), I had to admit that they weren’t too much off the mark.

Maybe not all the Swiss, but a large chunk of the population over 50 at the time appeared to harbor a lingering disdain toward people who acted or looked “foreign” in their eyes, or simply didn’t conform to what they believed were the “rules” in force. And they wasted no time in making their point known right there and then, like they were the anointed guardians of an established order of things.

Pretty soon, anytime I parked my car in the street without steering my front wheels straight and parallel to the sidewalk, someone was there wagging his finger at me and pointing at them.

Within 24 hours from getting the keys to my rental apartment, an anonymous note mysteriously appeared in my mailbox, intimating to put a label with my name on it.

I was lucky enough to find an apartment in a building that once hosted a workshop, and was subsequently renovated to host a warehouse on the ground floor and my apartment on the upper floor, without anyone living above or beneath me. I listened to horror stories from my coworkers who had the misfortune to rent apartments in buildings where old and cranky Swiss neighbors made life unbearable for them by stealing and destroying their mail, having garbage strewn on their doorsteps, their laundry soiled or ripped when left in the communal washer/dryer, etc. And of course anytime they complained with the superintendent or the police, it was their word against their Swiss neighbors’, and guess who was always found at fault?

This attitude is masterfully resumed in a citation of the renowned Swiss author and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt: “Any Swiss is both a prisoner and his own warden”.

During the US-Philippines military exercise, soldiers on the warships were warned that it was strictly forbidden to use personal mobile phones on the deck. They were worried about being monitored by the Chinese Navy’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship. The US-Philippines fleet did not even dare to turn on the radar, for fear that the electromagnetic signal would be captured by China’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship at close range.

The imaginary enemy of the US-Philippines shoulder-to-shoulder maritime military exercise was originally China, and now it has come to the area near the South China Sea on the west side of the Philippine Palawan Province and Luzon Island. Since the US amphibious assault ships, dock landing ships, Philippine landing ships, patrol ships and even fighter jets are performing hard, China’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship will certainly be a spectator.

Now, the US-Philippines warships are in an awkward situation. If the military exercise continues. Then, electronic signal communication must be carried out between warships, and communication must be maintained between aircraft and warships. Anti-submarine aircraft must send out electronic detection signals. Even US nuclear submarines must communicate by radio. However, China’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship stayed quietly beside them, patiently waiting to receive various signals and instructions from them!! 🤣

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  • Philippines: “discovered a Chinese ship”
  • South Korea: “there’s no display on the radar”
  • Japan: “the radar screen is full of snow”
  • USA: “how did you find it”
  • Philippines: “see with my eyes”

China’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship swaggered into the US-Philippines exercise area, and it was so close that it could be seen clearly with the naked eye. Did you see the surprised expressions of the Filipino soldiers in the camera? 😁

The West calls China’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship “ghost”, and the Chinese call it “Street Fighter / 街溜子”. It is the most advanced electronic reconnaissance ship in the world.

Since US and Philippine warships are keen on running naked in front of Chinese electronic reconnaissance ships, the Chinese certainly like to watch. Why not?

There is no need for the Philippines to be so petty. Since the purpose of the US-Philippines military exercise is to “deter China,” why did it send a diplomatic letter to protest against the Chinese watching?

If you want to “deter China” and force China to change its position in the South China Sea, you have to show something that can “deter” China. Am I right? 🤣

Donald Trump Wins. Here’s What to Do Next

“The entire country is screwed.”

Diary of a Scientist

Submitted into Contest #174 in response to: Write a story about a brilliant scientist making a startling discovery. view prompt

Jack Bell

Saturday, May 26Getting fired may well be the making of me. Can science, true science, flourish in a large institution? The Melville Neurological Institute talked a good game, always promising me freedom of scientific research, but, when it came to the crunch, they let the bean-counters shut me down.I don’t think I was unreasonable. I recognize the need for institutional bureaucracy—I enjoy a regular supply of clean pipettes as much as the next research scientist—but no bean-counter EVER comes into MY laboratory and tells me what to do with my elevators and spreaders!Turning my basement into a functioning laboratory is proving a challenge, but I remain upbeat. Fortunately, my good friend and colleague from the institute, Percy Jarmon, has helped with some software and equipment, stuff that won’t be missed—even by the bean-counters!Sunday, May 27Who died and made electricians lords of the universe? Christ, just put the wires in and leave a reliable on-off switch! How hard can it be?I’m impatient to get back to my research, is all. Darwin dallied and Wallace almost filched his Beagle. There’s something very zeitgeist about my current investigations. How does a person’s state-of-mind interact with his or her physical capabilities? Science has kid-gloved this terrain for too long. Provocative evidence lies fallow. For instance, the 98-pound woman who lifts a burning bus off her baby. It’s a well-documented phenomenon and one that obviously involves telekinesis. Telekinesis?! Is that sound of a thousand bean-counters having a synchronized heart-attack? Ha!But I say: let me see the worst, even if it lie hidden in the deepest irrational recesses of mother-love.Perhaps if these spirit-levelling dunderheads could provide me with three square inches of clean bench space, I could begin. Christ.Monday, May 28This diary is to be an old-fashioned document of scientific record. So I don’t have to write an entry every day. I’ll just record the pertinent scientific facts as they occur.If there ever are any. The place looks like a toilet. And don’t even get me started on plumbers.Tuesday, May 29So even a tea urn requires a triplicate bivouac in Brussels? Forget it. I’ll use a saucepan. I’m happy with the seat of my pants. Remember Alexander Fleming. Refused to wash himself and discovered a cure for the clap. And Wood from Pfizer. Took a pill for heartburn and got a ten-hour erection. That’s the science I seek! Wild, free! Isaac Newton stuck a bare bodkin behind his eyeball to see what was there! Yes! I dare to dream of a science without red tape!But try telling a plasterer that.Wednesday, May 30What a mess. Boxes of broken flasks, rubberless Bunsen burners…

 

The old lady next door is deaf and her Chihuahua is a rat-faced, yap-throated, four-legged fur-ball of depraved pellet-spitting fecundity. Science, at its best, is supposed to be meditative.

 

Talked to Percy at Melville and, he’s right, I have to be patient.

 

Of course, Doctor Percy Jarmon has always been three-parts bean-counter. A good research scientist, don’t get me wrong. He’s done some solid work. Just prefers not to rock the boat. The brain remains a neat computational bottom-liner in Percy’s carefully scrubbed hands.

 

 

Thursday, May 31

 

Not much doing.

 

What’s the point of very little dogs, when you get right down to it?

 

 

Friday, June 1

 

total wank

 

 

* * *

 

 

Wednesday, July 20

 

You can’t stop science! Ha! Wheels turn, seams rupture, secrets heave!

 

Had a bit of luck, actually. The old lady next door moved away two weeks ago. And took her little dilly doggy with her. Bye-bye poo-poo.

 

Anyway, just spent the last two hours talking to Jarrod Johnson, the young chap who, along with his lovely wife Jasmine, has moved in. A very nice young couple, Jarrod and Jasmine, newlyweds, eager to begin a family.

 

When Jarrod found out I was a neurological research scientist, he showed an almost puppy-dog like enthusiasm. He shyly told me he’d never fully outgrown his love of dinosaurs. At school, chemistry had been his favorite subject. On the internet, he can’t get enough of Richard Dawkins. He works in a bank and seems to crave the microwave-manna of popular science.

 

So he was only too happy to help with my basement experiments! He’ll be over tomorrow, a bank holiday apparently, at 9:00 a.m. The world seems to be rolling on its back and asking me to tickle its tummy! Jarrod isn’t all that bright, but he’s a very pleasant, open, friendly sort of chap. A scientist cannot ask for more.

 

. . .

 

Just spoke to Percy, and he’s going to drop round this evening. He wants to see how the basement scrubs up, and even wants to meet Jarrod. I prickled a little, but didn’t argue. Percy’s help with converting the basement has been tremendous. Also, as a sounding board for my research aims, he’s been invaluable—encouraging despite his bean-tending skepticism.

 

Now that I’m finally about to dive in, he’s probably a bit nervous. If I were to create some sort of scientific scandal, his name could be tarnished by association. So I humored the old bean.

 

 

Thursday, July 21

 

What a day! Mark well the date! And affix to it your humble servant’s moniker, Doctor Richard Wrigglesworth!

 

I don’t want to get ahead of myself. What comes of today’s extraordinary breakthrough remains to be seen. But, doubt it not, the annals begin to gape.

 

Jarrod arrived at nine sharp and, after coffee and a scone, we got straight down to it. It was meant to be nothing but grunt work, building a database for future work. Jarrod sat at a table with just a LED monitor and a 5kg dumbbell before him. I flashed on the screen a series of images. Jarrod looked at each image for exactly eighteen seconds, then performed three standard bicep-curls with the dumbbell. An EEG cap and profuse body-sensor coverage recorded Jarrod’s every bodily blip and mental halloo.

 

After five hours of this, the data-collection was solid, but I was starting to worry. Jarrod really was a nice guy, didn’t have a bad word for anyone or anything. But was he, as a subject, a little bland, a little lacking in character, personality or substance? I was after dark mysteries of the mind, but Jarrod seemed a whole lot of sunshine and lollipops. Even the photograph of a Chihuahua being dangled over the ferociously eager maw of a wood-chipper didn’t provoke much more than a mild hiccup in his breezy brain wave.

 

Then it happened. His eyes locked on the screen, a growl sounded from somewhere sub-thoracic. He began flipping the dumbbell about like it was a tea-cozy. The readouts and dials fritzed. According to the computer, the dumbbell now weighed exactly 34 grams… What happened to the other 4,966?!

 

Even after I shut off the monitor, it took a good thirty seconds for Jarrod to return to normal.

 

It remains, I have to say, somewhat of a mystery. But a mystery with a big “THIS WAY” arrow attached. The photograph that set him off was of a duck attacking a cute little rhesus monkey. The juvenile monkey had been sitting on the ground, eating a piece of melon, but was in the process of dropping it as he leapt quite hilariously away from the incoming duck. It was supposed to be a brain-pan cleanser, some light relief before something more experimentally hardcore was flashed up.

 

I quizzed him at length, got him to free associate with ducks and monkeys, but he was a bit shaken and washed out. I suggested we start again tomorrow, and he was more than happy to. He had a flexi-day owing at the bank.

 

Now I have a sleepless night’s work ahead looking for relevant pictures. But I love it. Seriously, who’d want be anywhere other than Science, the bosom of all curiosity?

 

 

Friday, July 22

 

Burn it to ashes. That’s the likely fate of this record of crime and folly! Dear God! Dare I speak of today? Dare I not? Could it be only yesterday that I… but no, this is a scientific journal. If hell itself yawns, somebody has to stay calm and sift the sulphur.

 

Jarrod arrived at nine, dot on time. I asked for his thoughts on yesterday’s proceedings—and he seemed not to remember anything out of the ordinary. Odd. “The duck and monkey?” I enquired. All he could remember was a sort of pressure in his head, which he’d put down to the EEG cap being too tight. I let it go, assuring him that today the cap would be roomy.

 

I must have shown him upwards of thirty duck-and-monkey photos, interacting in various ways, some comic, some violent, some both. Nothing. So I flashed up yesterday’s photo. The effect of it was instantaneous and truly awful. He leapt from his seat, tearing off the EEG cap, flinging himself across the room, crashing into the card table upon which sit the tea and coffee and scones. From there he literally began trying to climb up the wall. Hard to do when one hand was busy holding his head as he cried, “Make it stop! My head’s going to explode!”

 

I raced to him. He fell, crashing heavily onto the card table, destroying it and our untouched morning tea. He uttered a ghastly groan as he thrashed about in the rubble, finally coming to rest on his side.

 

I gently rocked his shoulder. “Jarrod?” Was he dead?

 

But he stirred and, with my help, began to sit up. It was only as he opened his eyes and turned his head to me that I saw it. Almost too awful for words. A teaspoon. The handle fully buried in the side of his head, only the metallic bowl sticking out, like a malicious little supernumerary ear.

 

“Oh, God, Jarrod!” I whispered.

 

He was groggy. “Guurrgh…what happened?”

 

“Jarrod, how—how do you feel?—No, no, God, don’t shake your head!”

 

“Actually,” he said, breaking into a pleasant smile, “I feel pretty good. Sorry, Richard, but I don’t think I want to wear the brain cap thing again.”

 

“Oh, that’s fine, no worries. I think we’re pretty much finished, anyway. So, um…your head? You mentioned before, while you trying to climb the wall, that it was giving you some trouble?”

 

“Yeah,” he grinned, lifting a hand toward the side of his head—which I grabbed and lowered just in time! He continued, “No, it feels good now. All last night it felt weird, a weird sort of pressure. But it’s fine now.”

 

“Okay. Great. Science is a labyrinth, that’s for sure, ha ha.”

 

I helped him to a chair—not that he seemed in need of help. I grabbed my phone, thinking I’d call Percy. But, before I rang, I went upstairs and made a cheese, gherkin and lettuce sandwich. I also poured a large glass of milk and took both items down to Jarrod in the basement. He thanked me and tucked in with a healthy appetite.

 

Possibly I should have been rushing Jarrod to hospital, but something made me hesitate. Something about the spoon, twinkling like a satellite dish on the side of an exposed hillock. As he finished off his sandwich, I went to my bookcase up the far end of the room. This peculiar neurological situation was ringing a bell. Once, an iron rod went straight through some chap’s cerebellum. And he was right as rain. However, instead of pulling a reference book out, I got down on my knees and ran my tongue along the spines of the neatly arrayed books. Each and every one. Made my tongue quite dry and yuck.

 

Returning to Jarrod, who was downing the last of his milk, I said, “Jarrod, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s…it’s a bit shocking.”

 

After a little burp, he said, “What is it?”

 

Stumbling a little at how to speak of the spoon, I instead stayed silent and blew him a kiss. He laughed at that, then stood up, saying, “Same time tomorrow?”

 

I nodded. And he left.

 

That was, what, four hours ago? There are really only two theories possible here. The shocking incident with the spoon may have caused my psyche to fray or fracture in some hopefully temporary way. Or—and my blood runs cold to write this in black-and-white—Jarrod has, through the mother of all accidental discoveries, gained an advanced form of cerebrokinesis, the ability to control the minds of others. Oh, if only I could divine exactly where the inside tip of his teaspoon sits!

 

To be honest, I’d prefer all this to be the result of my own madness. But, as I sit here writing this, my thoughts seem depressingly orderly.

 

If indeed they be my thoughts.

 

. . .

 

You know what’ll stop me sleeping tonight? This question: if Jarrod has gained a cerebrokinetic ability, why would he make me lick my books? The sandwich, sure, perfectly alright. I would have made it for him anyway, without the mental strong-arming. But the blown kiss? Smacks of smart-arsery.

 

Sitting here, the sun going down, his bland smile starts to seem sinister.

 

 

Saturday, July 23

 

It’s midday. I know what I have to do, but I hesitate. I’m fairly certain it’s not MY hesitation, so I can only sit here, awaiting a stray moment where I might be able to strike with an uncontaminated will.

 

Jarrod arrived three hours ago, smiling, spoon jutting as brassily as a cuckoo in a new nest.

 

My first question was, “So what did Jasmine say?”

 

“Oh, I didn’t see her before she left to visit her mother.”

 

“Really? How convenient. A sudden emergency, was it?”

 

“No,” he said pleasantly, “a visit.”

 

Time to cut the crap. “Jarrod, I need to know if you can control my mind. Did you make me lick my books yesterday?”

 

He gave an uncharacteristic, chilling little hee hee!

 

“I did,” he said, before adding another hee hee!

 

Despite the giggling, he was in fact prepared to talk openly and honestly about the whole thing, which was a relief. At one stage I gave him a fifty dollar note from my wallet—but he was only joking around. I’ve no doubt he’ll give it back.

 

He was as surprised as me when, yesterday, his desire for a sandwich was realized by my actions. Actually, a lot more surprised than I was. I’d experienced it as the most natural thing in the world. He admitted the book-licking was spur-of-the-moment and experimental. The blown kiss, harmless byplay. Well, obviously it could’ve been worse.

 

“I guess you realize the enormity of this?” I said to him. “For science, the fate of the world, etcetera.”

 

“I dunno, I’m a bit disappointed. After I left here yesterday, I went down the street and—”

 

I gasped. “But didn’t people see your spoon?”

 

“I wore a hat, dummy. But, you know, it turns out I can only control your mind, no one else’s.”

 

I felt relieved by that, although I wasn’t entirely confident of that relief. I was, right then, starting to think a lot of rather flattering thoughts about Jarrod. Bland? He wasn’t bland: quite spry, the ole Jazza, always up and about, a real player, this lad…

 

Now, surely that was nonsense. I would never say “spry”.

 

“Jarrod,” I said, holding onto the table edge, “this is scientifically—well, it’s off the scale it’s so big. But, at a personal level, we need to get some rules in place. Surely you see my precarious position here?”

 

He said, “I swear never again, under any circumstances, to control your thoughts, Richard.”

 

I don’t think I’ve ever been struck by a statement of such deep and unarguable sincerity. I thanked him and he rose to go with a charming, lively, intelligent smile.

 

It was a good thirty minutes after he left that I began to have second-thoughts. Charming, lively and intelligent? Jarrod? Phooey. And you can kiss those fifty smackers goodbye while you’re at it. This was all deeply distressing and disorientating.

 

And I’ve been sitting here in the basement ever since, a single sterile teaspoon sitting on the table before me.

 

It’s a one-in-a-million shot, but my only chance. I’ll fight fire with fire.

 

I’ll do it for science.

 

—a knock at the door? Now! NOW!

 

* * *

 

THE MELVILLE NEUROLOGICAL NEWSLETTER

 

The Melville Neurological Institute would like to extend its heartiest congratulations to Doctor Percy Jarmon upon his recent Nobel prize nomination.

 

Doctor Jarmon’s work on the Yersinia fustus parasite appears to be conclusive and truly ground-breaking. This ancient, insidious parasite, almost undetectable after more than one-hundred-million years of co-evolution, has often been purported, but never proven. There now appears to be little doubt of its existence, thanks to Jarmon’s recent courageous and brilliantly innovative field-work.

 

The life cycle of Y. fustus turns out to be both simple and ingenious. After invading a host Homo sapiens, the bug, mimicking a billion-branched glial cell, quickly colonizes the cerebrum. Within a very short time the host develops an irrational but irresistible desire to violently puncture his own cranial vault, by any means necessary. Fantastic delusions, sometimes resulting in murder or art, often accompany this process. After the host’s skull is successfully punctured, the parasite’s spores are then released and have a very short time in which to find a new host.

 

The parasite seems to be very rare but, where it does exist, is rabidly contagious. The strain involved in Jarmon’s recent field-work has been destroyed.

 

When contacted by this newsletter, Jarmon’s only comment on his Nobel-nominated research was, “Hee hee!”

It’s the worst election result of my lifetime. And reveals something absolutely horrifying about my fellow Americans: they will vote for a literal criminal sociopath over a qualified black woman.

I thought Gore’s loss to W. Bush was terrible—but that was largely the result of cheating (it’s almost beyond question Gore got more votes in Florida than Bush did). …Then I thought Hillary’s loss to Trump was pretty awful as well, but it was a small comfort that HRC won the popular vote by literal millions (they’ve never been quite THAT far apart before).

With both, you could basically take comfort in the fact that the majority of the country clearly didn’t want the inferior candidate.

But now? Trump is a worse candidate than he was in 2016 in every way (mentally, morally, legally) and there were some horrible things about him then that either weren’t yet known (his charity fraud, his university fraud, his Stormy Daniels affair) or hadn’t happened yet (the indictments, the two impeachments, his horrible CoVid handling, becoming an adjudicated rapist, cheering on Putin for invading Ukraine, “The Big Lie,” his f***ing coup attempt, endless comments making it clear he wants to go after “the enemy within”).

By contrast, Kamala is arguably a better candidate than Biden or Hillary were, and she’s committed NONE of their supposed flaws (she did plenty of rallies in the Midwestern three, she did plenty of interviews that Hillary avoided, loads of energy that Biden was lacking, more clear than Biden, less legal baggage than either HRC or Joe, she didn’t bring up being a woman which supposedly turned people off of HRC) and ran a brilliant campaign from a terrific DNC to high-energy rallies to popular proposals (Trump’s are mostly about making people’s lives harder) to absolutely killing Trump at the debate.

But now we get this phony crap from Trump voters about how Kamala was a “bad candidate” (yeah…sure…) and from the media where they point out some mistakes she supposedly made (yeah…sure…) and how Trump will be better for the economy (yeah…sure…the guy who wrecked Obama’s economy and bankrupted three separate casinos and still believes in tariffs will magically give you a better economy…)

Point blank: this country would rather risk an autocratic regime, economic collapse, environmental ruin, and a complete wrecking of American justice and freedom than vote for a black woman. …It is a DISGUSTING result, and the fact that Trumpers are flying their covert KKK-flag openly on social media instead of being ashamed of voting for a criminal sociopath is repulsive.

Possibly because they see us the way a repairman I once talked to saw the American engine maker Briggs & Stratton. I was buying my first mower, and I had bought a big yard and had put most of my cash into the purchase, so I was shopping carefully for a lawn tractor that would last a while but not clean me out.

I talked to this greasy guy with hearing aids at a repair shop where I happened to have some business, and he explained the difference between the Briggs & Stratton engines I’d grown up with and, well, everything else.

He said Briggs made the best engine in the world…in the 1940s…but that the rest of the world had moved on. Everyone else’s engines used newer alloys, fuel injection, superior noise and pollution controls, etc., while Briggs was still cranking out the same old reliable Joe that had been their cash cow for forever.

Understand, we weren’t talking best of class here, just your literal garden variety engine. He said “a Jap engine” would cost you half again as much, and if you ever let the oil get dirty or didn’t keep the filter clean, it was scrap. But if you kept the filters clean and changed the plugs every few years, it would start on the first crank, every time, for the life of the mower.

A Briggs, on the other hand, was cheap and would last forever—but you’d pay for it time and again. It would leak. It would lose compression. It would need its carburetor and points worked on every so often. But if you enjoyed working on engines, it could survive catching on fire and having the head knocked off with a sledge hammer, it just “never will run like shit.”

That’s the dichotomy here. Americans see America as the country that defeated Hitler and went to the moon. The old reliable. The “takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.” The rest of the world sees us as an obsolete design, built on good principles, but trying really hard not to live by them, and getting away with it because we’re big and rich and mean. But our system “runs like shit,” and our population pays for its cheapness each and every day.

I’m not saying that’s right or that’s wrong, but I believe that’s how they see us. And if they judge us by our movies, they are not seeing any of the shiny bits that might make a counter argument.

Chinese Meatball Soup

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Ingredients

Soup

  • 2 (14 ounce) cans chicken broth
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 (6 ounce) package frozen snow pea pods
  • 1/2 cup green onions, thinly sliced
  • 1 (1 1/2 inch) cube fresh ginger, finely grated
  • 1 clove garlic, finely minced
  • Olive oil for roasting

Meatballs

  • 1 pound lean ground beef, chuck or sirloin
  • 3/4 cup oatmeal or bread crumbs
  • 2 tablespoons soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon dry sherry
  • 2 teaspoons sesame oil
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons fresh ginger, minced finely
  • 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1/4 cup chicken broth
  • 1 egg

Vegetables

  • 1/2 pound baby carrots, cut in half
  • 1 1/2 cups fresh or canned bean sprouts

Instructions

Soup

  1. Combine soup ingredients in large saucepan over low heat to simmer (reserve snow pea pods and carrots for broiling or stir frying).

Meatballs

  1. Stir ingredients together, shape into 1 1/4 inch meatballs and place on lightly oiled broiler pan. Spray lightly with an olive oil spray if using very lean meat. Broil until nicely browned or bake at 400 degrees F for 15 minutes.

Vegetables

  1. To roast the baby carrots, cut carrots in half, lengthwise. Rub in 1 or 2 tablespoons olive oil, and sprinkle between the meatballs on the broiler pan. Do the same with the thawed snow peas. Check while broiling, and remove carrots, snow peas and meatballs as they begin to brown. Drain on paper towels briefly and add to soup. If you wish to skip this step, you may alternatively brown the meatballs, snow peas and carrots in a wok.
  2. With all ingredients now in soup, simmer over low heat for 15 to 20 minutes and season to taste with salt, pepper, a pinch of Chinese Red Pepper, if desired, and a dash of soy sauce.

There is only one answer: the United States wants to stop China’s rise! That’s why they want to suppress China with all their might and with everything they have.

Moreover, Taiwan is just one of the places, and if you scuttle the world pattern, you will find that the target of everything the United States has been doing all these years is China.


1. The Russian-Ukrainian war is not the ultimate goal of the United States; its ultimate goal is China.

The United States treats China as the number one enemy, whether economically or militarily, the United States has been unable to subdue China, so Washington provoked the Russian-Ukrainian war, the ultimate goal is to provoke a ‘New Cold War‘, through the Russian-Ukrainian war to Europe to create a ‘horror’ of the enemy Russia, so they are afraid of, under pressure to do the bidding of the United States.

The purpose of the United States in stirring up the ‘New Cold War’ is actually to unite the forces of the entire West and then deal with China with all its might.

The purpose of dealing with China is to maintain its hegemony. The United States believes that China has already threatened the global hegemony of the United States and that China must be eliminated as soon as possible.

2. The United States is endeavouring to make preparations for provoking a war in China’s neighbourhood.

After the United States has used the power of the Russia-Ukraine war to force its Western allies to listen to the United States, his next goal is to provoke a war around China to further unify its Western allies by forcing China to step in, and then to sanction China in the same way as it has sanctioned Russia.

In order to achieve this goal, the United States is bound to provoke a war in China’s neighbourhood to force China’s hand, and then the United States will lead the entire West to sanction China.

Based on this logic, China’s surrounding dangerous areas will be the next U.S. to provoke war conflict points, such as the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula, the South China Sea, China-India border are dangerous areas, especially the Taiwan Strait conflict, will be the next U.S. is bound to want to provoke a military conflict.


The intention of the United States in provoking a war in the said region is to force China to send troops, and then the United States and its allies condemn and even sanction China, urging its allies to impose sanctions on China as they did on Russia.

At the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the United States actually began to lay out early!

Especially in the Taiwan Strait, the United States and Britain have begun to discuss how to detonate the military conflict plan!

At the present stage, China has practically no choice but to make preparations for a military struggle, and it can only make preparations for the unification of Taiwan by force!

But in a twists and turns, Trump is back. Trump’s presence disrupted Biden’s deployment. 😁

The next 4 years with Trump in the White House will be 4 years of rapid development in China.

The Russia-Ukraine war won’t stop, the Middle East is in an even bigger crisis, Europe has been abandoned by the US, and the US is at the peak of domestic infighting.

China is on a rampage and the next 4 years will see us laying a solid foundation for a whole new order of global industry and trade!

Trump will mercilessly teach Europe, Japan, South Korea and other allies (parasites) a lesson, frantically withdrawing from all kinds of international organisations and international treaties and becoming more and more isolated, and that’s exactly when China is holding up the flag of free trade and developing at a high speed!

What is the result of the Trump era’s opening of a trade war and technology war against China?

China’s chip technology rapid breakthroughs, Huawei is far ahead; China’s position as an industrial hegemon is as stable as Mount Taishan, shipbuilding took nearly 3/4 of the world’s orders, and new energy vehicles rode in the dust; China’s foreign trade exports are increasing year by year, and it takes more than 1/3 of the global surplus.

Do you think the Trump still has cards? 🤣

Do you really think Russia can’t defeat Ukraine? You are too naive. China and Russia are comprehensive strategic partners, and the Chinese and Russian governments have the same strategy.

Yes, the United States and the West want to use war to consume Russia’s national strength, but the United States and the West are greedy for immediate benefits and do not know the consequences.

Protracted war is Russia’s strong point, and Russia also wants to use war to consume the United States and the West. The more the US and the West invest in Ukraine, the more it will be consumed.

Russia buys time for China, and the United States and the West will decline rapidly.

Trump DROPS his plan to DISMANTLE the Deep State! MASSIVE FOR AMERICA (MUST SEE)

Why did Trump win the 2024 election?

Yesterday I was walking in the city and two young Moroccan guys were discussing the US election outcome. “He did it, the old warrior!” said one of them, admiration obvious in his voice. These were two young Muslims from what Trump had referred to as “shithole countries” during his first tenure…

People underestimated how many people do love Trump.

The media, journalists, writers of opinion pieces and intellectuals were in this little bubble where everyone, surely, must have realized after the first Trump term that he was no good? And that’s just not the way of the world.

Oh but he’s was found guilty of sexual assault, surely now no one can vote for him?

Wrong!

No one gives a shit.

Chris Brown beat the living daylights out of Rihanna and I still hear people blast his music.

We think that, as soon as someone is accused of someone heinous, that’s it.

Curtains.

They’re done for.

Now, the world has moved on from #MeToo and “cancel culture” is dead and buried…

You cannot cancel someone when no one cares about his crimes.

Oh there’s Russian interference in the elections? Big deal — plenty of people find Putin kinda cool, anyway, and at least he’s “not woke”.

Elon Musk pushing fake news and misinformation on Twitter? Again, no one cares.

“But, he was mean to transgender people! He disowned his transgender daughter!” Yeah, that’s awful, sure. But no one cares.

There’s so many scandals, so many awful things you can accuse Trump and his allies off.

But in “real world”, people don’t care…

It also seems that people are tired of “woke” topics and the right has simply won the “culture wars”, at this point.

Because even Latinos, African Americans and other non-white ethnic groups voted for Trump in record numbers.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret — a lot of immigrants and their descendants are very religious. They don’t like LGBT issues, they couldn’t care less about transgenders, pronouns and puberty blockers being given to kids, in fact they’re highly susceptible to negative campaigning about such issues.

They actually are bothered by people saying “happy holidays” instead of “merry christmas” and other such things that progressives would dismiss as silly memes only boomers care about…

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz seemed to spend 80% of their campaign attacking the character of Trump.

When everyone already knows he’s a dickhead — and they don’t care because he’s their dickhead.

People almost always love the villains in movies more than the heroes. The Joker is far more popular than Batman ever was… and Kamala Harris made for a rather poor Batman.

Actually this is very interesting. Not a rehash of known stuff in a click-bait video. This is full of great intel.

Greetings from England, where we all apparently hate guns.

I believe you are confused.

The gun owners do understand that you don’t like being around guns, they just don’t care. Why should they?

Americans are often mistaken about their own gun laws. The public safety you speak of is partly due to the gun owners. They are why your government can never turn too tyrannical and why you can never be invaded by land. This is why you have a right to own guns. Its not necessarily to stop burglars, it’s to prevent your government from turning tyrannical.

Just like with our third world quality socialist health services, my country is always held up as a success story for banning guns. This is bullshit. Murders happen constantly in Britain and the lack of guns just makes it slower. Knives, acid and bombs are used instead. Murder is unfortunately natural, and British murders are incredibly brutal.

So in conclusion, if your government like mine is not currently sending everyone to prison for Facebook posts, and if your country doesnt have an acid attack epidemic going on, you have gun owners to thank for this. The very idea of killing or disfiguring someone with acid would become ridiculous in Britain if we had guns, but we don’t. We instead get our faces burned off by chemicals.

You arguably have gun owners to blame for murders on the streets (though i would disagree), but this pales in comparison to the genocide you will probably never face, unlike most countries eventually.

Why are anti gun owners so incredibly smug that they don’t think a disagreement towards themselves can even exist without ignorance? Is it just your smuggery that causes your smuggery or have you

actually accomplished anything in your life?

I bet your’e not even one of those loud, fat, friendly Americans we all love. You probably got purple hair and a constantly pissed off face.

Don’t travel. We don’t want you. We want the ‘rednecks’. You think I’m lying? Nobody wants to travel to your shitty liberal cities anymore either, just to get robbed and/or raped all whilst having to listen to unhygienic propaganda junkies barking unrequested opinions all day. We want to go to middle America where the men are strong and hard working, where the women are clean, beautiful and not hopelessly brainwashed like yourself. I bet it’s awesome in those places with all the gun owners; fresh air and friendly people. Meanwhile your town is probably covered in turd and homeless people.

Genocide Joe

Genocide Joe, may his feeble mumbling brain rest in peace, was extremely effective at restoring order to domestic American affairs, lining all US allies in a row, and making Sinophobia a global instead of solely an American policy.

Trump will throw a monkey wrench into that once again.

Trump will immediately throw Ukraine under the bus and let Europe deal with the fallout; he’ll raise major trade tensions with American partners; he’ll throw EVs and all environmental policy under the bus too; he’ll threaten the ICC and ICJ and likely cut off all funding to the UN once the General Assembly recommends expelling Israel.

He’ll recognize Israeli settlements. He’ll threaten and probably defund universities that allow Palestine supporters any freedom of speech, sowing pandemonium and terror in academia.

And that’s with ruling out the assumption that Project 2025 is real.

The Western alliance, which goes back to World War II, is too strong to suffer permanent damage from four years of demented leadership. So is American society, which is very resilient. But for the next four years, there will be tremendous chaos, infighting, and blows to prestige.

This is an opportunity for China to demonstrate its abilities at world leadership, as it did very successfully during the first Trump term.

Economically, China is prepared for the return of Trump. Its GDP is 25% larger than in 2020 and it’s much less dependent on US technological imports. The threat of major tariffs on Chinese exports to the US is serious. During this period, fiscal stimulus will have to be a key driver of growth. However, central government debt is very low. The spending and borrowing discipline exercised by the central government for many years has prepared it well for this occasion.

The combination of decreased export revenue and emergency-level use of fiscal stimulus will accelerate the transition to service- and consumption-led growth.

One was in the right place at the right time, and thrived. I was still searching for my pot of gold.

As a Brit, let me tell you the reasons I laugh at your country.

  1. You elect the likes of George Bush and Donald Trump and consider them intellectuals.
  2. You consider your right to carry a gun is more important than the safety of children.
  3. You’ve got one of the highest rates, if not the highest rate, of obesity in the western world and don’t seem to care.
  4. You always seem to have one of the lowest levels of global awareness out there. It seems half of Americans can’t name more than about 5 countries, can’t identify the USA on a map and think that the US is so far ahead of every other country on every metric.
  5. You think it’s just swell that a new mother leaves a hospital with a bill of around $12,000 as she enters what will likely be one of the most expensive times of her life.
  6. Your politicians only need to say a handful of charged words and your voters go wild. Listening to a US politician speak sounds like “China, Russia, bad, communism, America, freedom, good, gun control, bad, NRA, good, God loves us, vote for me, 9/11 bad.”
  7. Some politicians actually did improve your image somewhat. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, hell even Clinton was more credible than either Bush or Trump. Yet there are so many Trump supporters that he might even be re-elected. Honestly, most Brits find that bizarre. He even showed contempt for democracy by inciting riots and refusing to accept being voted out. He’s an admirer of Putin and it seems like he would institute autocracy if he could. And then you could look forward to Jared Kushner solving all the problems Trump promised he would solve before. I mean come on, when the guy’s saying he can resolve Palestine-Israel in a day, you’ve got to understand that’s a snake oil claim.
  8. You have the highest per capita prison population.
  9. You have one of the highest wealth disparities in the world.
  10. You actually believe that every country pays more tax than you, even believing that in the UK we pay 95% of tax. You must hear that and think “really, 95%?” If you think that, that’s when you’re supposed to go and fact check fox news.

The NHS was a fabulous idea- cradle to grave healthcare by well compensated professionals paid by taxation on all eligible to use.

My Mother started as nurse in 1960- she was 20. And it was like being in the army with a Sergeant Major type figure called a Matron in charge. She left circa 1995 as a Midwifery ward sister – appalled by the waste, multiple layers of management and the state of the NHS.

30 years and some trillions of pounds later things are much much worse. A few months ago in search of the Accident unit I found the brand new Oncology unit. I believe it cost over a billion quid to set up. As it was Sunday morning it was deserted. No private enterprise could build a billion quid factory and open it for only 35 hours a week.

The acres of staff parking across the NHS empty out Friday afternoons. Obviously not all units close. I did find the accident unit open. And it was massively overstaffed- perhaps essential on the off chance a major incident occurs. But probably 30 people were doing the job that 15 could have done very easily and ten could have managed. Pleasant people, mostly standing about chatting.

A friend is a pensioned off male nurse. He now does 2 shifts a week- more to keep busy but he handily gets 400 quid. He likes his job but describes it as “ a disgraceful ward, with too many chiefs commanding too few Indians”.

The NHS is currently funding the over 2000quid Visa charge to recruit from abroad. My WASP pal is the only English guy on his ward. His on/off GF is Ghanaian, so he isn’t anti foreigner but says not all speak good English and often there’s problems caused by the language barrier. As well as some problems caused by different groups carrying on beefs from their home countries.

There’s nothing wrong with employing the none indigenous as trainees- but meeting their visa and travel costs- are we that short of locals? And if so would an extra few quid as a signing bonus tempt them to join. Surely cheaper in the long run than paying annual visa fees.

I’ve just heard senior Doctors are charging 200quid a hour for overtime. The NHS also currently spends almost a million quid a week on diversity training. Wherever one looks money is literally being burnt. As an edit, misheard this on Radio 4 – it is actually 200.000 quid a year, not 200quid an hour.

The waste and make work aspect is typical of any Nationalised industry. I started my working life in the NCB. The Union rep ran the entire colliery and you really had to be a standout, and no show, to get the sack. The NHS is similar. And can’t go broke. Nor is working hard rewarded any more or less than not. We miners had the same attitude. Although a bonus scheme installed in the late 70’s did see an uptick in production. Too little too late.

Any attempts at NHS reform are met with strikes and ultimately result in just another layer of dead wood management -their sole aim is in expanding and keeping their fiefdoms.

Set against the US, where considerably more time and money per head is spent on paperwork and insurance staff to run the system. A system that can and does bankrupt the sick. And a system that seems to work very well for perhaps half or even two thirds of Americans – but fails to adequately protect more than a 100 million people.

Desk porn with Study

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I was once in a bar in Cardiff, UK with my girlfriend and her best pal. Four morons came in and started intentionally getting my eye and seeing a short arse like me at a table with two beautiful girls they could only dream of started to throw across obscene, unwelcome jibes.

Ruining my friends night as well as mine – but of course engagement rarely helps either, perhaps we should have just left. Anyway, I politely asked if they might show a little respect, behave like adults and focus on their own night rather than ruining others. I was very polite but in that I have a Hugh Grant accent I think this just made things worse.

So they again managed to pass all their brain cells to just one of their number to afford him sufficient to string a sentence together. He says… You got a problem with us? Maybe you want to step outside?

To this I was able to offer a rather unexpected but factual response. “I’m a fly weight short arse mate and don;t think fights fix anything. However, seeing as my blonde friend here stands 6′1″, to your 5′10″ at best, rides a Kawasaki 1100 hence the the black leather catsuit, so suited to deploying her decades of Karate expertise- you could always ask her.”

To be fair, his mates ended up with beer up their noses as they explosively laughed into their pint pots. He looked suddenly rather less bold and they ignored us for the rest of the evening. Result!

Andy’s Journal

Submitted into Contest #243 in response to: Write a story from the point of view of a non-human character. view prompt

Diamond Keener

I feel used. That’s how I’m supposed to feel, that’s my purpose. But because all this time has passed, and I’ve been sitting here, just a pretty thing on your shelf. It all feels different. I don’t know you. The wry sense of humor you had is gone. The dreams, the plans. You’re not even close to where you promised me you would be. Those checklists are a real laugh now.When you open me up now, I’m unhappy, not excited. And you’re unhappy too. I’ve never wanted to talk back to you, to fight. But if I could rise up past myself and shout at you, I would.You are making a mistake. The stakes are higher. This isn’t high school. This is the rest of your life. All the time, you are running out of time, like I am running out of pages. And you will be unhappy, so unhappy. And I will be filled with your unhappiness and nothing more. Sometimes it will be masked as other things, drunkenness, indigestion. But unhappy, unhappy, unhappy, I repeat it because that is what you are repeating inside me. The word has been written down by your now sloppy hand a total of twenty eight times in the past two months. Each entry, the word comes up at least once. That’s two more times on average than you’ve mentioned her name, which I refuse to repeat. That is how I will prove to you I still have agency. I refuse to recount the source of our problems by name.I’ve watched you from where you toss me. I listen on the nights you’ve crammed me inside your backpack and spent the hours in her room. When she spilled her fancy smelly tea on me, I saw your face.You only write about how beautiful she is, what she wants, why you’re not enough. How you could be better, for her, of course. I know nothing about you, aside from how you feel about her. Which you say is love. But you never write any poems inside me that are worth a damn. It’s all blank. Platitudes. Could be generated by a computer.And I do know how you feel, which is not happy. Life is too short, that is what I want to tell you. Take your chance my friend, I would whisper this against your sweet ear. You have a gift to move, a gift for movement, which you have failed to exercise until now. But take it. Do it for me, and the boy I remember so fresh from school and still full of faith.Do you remember when I was given to you? The grand ceremony. I was wrapped in white, and tied up so tight and small with lace ribbon. It was all so elegant.Your Aunt Rachael, the one with the long pink nails, she gave me to you, and kissed your cheek. You wiped her orange lipstick from your face and stained my cover with it. It’s still there, the mark. It’s your fingerprint, the mark. I’ve memorized the pattern, every person’s is different. Yet I am the same as all the others in my image. Aside from your pen, and the sticker from Vivace Coffee you placed on my backside, you couldn’t tell me apart from any other bound thing.You used to write all the time, in very small print. To conserve space, to allow me to live with you for years and years. And I have, but it has been so lonesome.Maybe if you had kept up with me. If I had seen and known that first time around with her, the time you allude to often but never describe explicitly. You were happy then. But so much time has passed. You never wrote it down. And you never provide me any details, so how am I supposed to believe it was all so wonderful? It wasn’t simply the product of first love in a lonely youth coming to its end?What does her laugh sound like? You’ve never told me that.Last week I had a fleeting hope. It was the middle of the night. A bright spotlight in the dark bedroom shined down and you wrote so differently. Like old times. Curling, delicate, precise. Here the tides are changing, I thought as I watched the pen wrap around a different name. Not a person, but a promise to yourself. I liked the way it felt, special. It was more than just a dream, it was a sign that you were wanting something for yourself and yourself alone.Then it was as though you forgot and the whole thing was never mentioned again. She wouldn’t like it, you live by her rules. She has very specific outlines for the correct way to live. And you insist these rules are correct.You’d never allow it, something special. Because that is how you want it to be. You wish to believe your fate to be sealed and horrid. And I’m running out of time myself. You waste and waste the last bit of space, the last bit of life in me. I know what will happen when you finish me. I will be tossed away, she won’t allow you keepsakes. She will think you’ve filled me with thoughts of others, and tell you to let go of the unhappy moments.My greatest hope is that instead of the trash, I will end up in a box. Or buried behind the other texts in your tiny library. Your sweet children, the result of your disastrous marriage, will find me one day when you have died. They will read me and not know what to say. Maybe one of them will keep me, and dust me off so that I might be preserved as a memory of you. A legacy.Oh, Andy, how I wish you were brave! How I wish you could strip me of all these pages and start again. How I long to return to the time when you were just you, and I was just me, and there was no one in our way.

On a date…

Ordering food..

Me: “I want pizza.”

Him: “Do you want a salad with that?”

Me: “No, I’ll just have pizza, thanks.”

Him: “You’re sure?”

Me: “Yes.”

Him: “Ok. I’m going to order a salad”

Me: “For just you right?”

Him: “Yes.”

Me: “Ok good.”

Waitress takes our orders. Then moments later salad arrives first.

Him: “Do you want some salad?”

Me: “No, I just want pizza.” (said after looking disgusted by what’s on the salad and then gave a confused face at asking about salad again)

Him: “Try some salad.”

Me: “No thanks, I just want pizza.”

Him: “Try…”

Me: Reluctantly and frustratingly lifts fork, tries some salad. Then instantly disgusted and spits salad out into a napkin while date went to bathroom.

My pizza finally arrives.

Him(while I was enjoying my pizza): “Want some salad?”

Me: “No. I just want pizza.” (In firmer tone and now so so angry on the inside.)

Date over

Me to myself: “Never again. How many times must a girl say no? He’s controlling! Red flag. Get out now!”

Before going home: I promptly refused a second date invitation from him and almost ran home to shower smoke smell off from the pool place where we had our date.

Rules of thumb….

  1. No means no and let’s consider all situations a girl might say no to a guy not just the sexual kind.
  2. If he doesn’t listen to you on the first date, he won’t listen to you in the relationship. It will only get worse. First food, then clothing, then other personal preferences then…. bam! You’ve lost yourself and who you are. No thanks! Be nice on the date but take notes and do not subject yourself to it again.

Controlling behavior is not good in any form.

EDIT: I feel the need to give a little more detail about this salad date. Check below.

My date’s salad was a steak and bacon salad piled high with all the veggies, croutons and a lot of creamy ranch or blue cheese dressing. Pretty filling and most likely more healthful than my pizza but not by much.

Also, I actually love salad. I just didn’t want this salad or any other salad at the time. So I reserve the right to eat and refuse to eat what I want on a date or at anytime.

It a scam don’t fall for it my dear. If he can reach you he can as well reach his bank account.take a moment to think about it, he clearly has internet access, that means wherever he is he also have access to his phone, probably a nearby ATM too. He doesn’t need money for his flight home. I assume you mean back from a deployment, re-stationing or during retirement. If it’s those the military pays for it, always. The government provides all basic needs for military personnel. This includes food, housing and flights back to the US. No military member is ever stranded overseas. This is a scammer lie. Well sometimes we fall victim due to finding love and happy his coming back home to meet You but it all fake and lie. I was once a victim of military romance scam. I send money for flight ticket more than once he kept giving me reason to send more money which I fall victim cause I thought I fine love with a military personnel that has been my dream. When I fine out it all scam I was so much in pain and devastated, my whole life turn upside down. My sister introduced me to a recovery firm that help her track her scammer and got her money back. CYBER SECURITY FIRM. I don’t know what to do or say at the moment, I just decided to give it a try. I send a message to them and was ask a few questions and a proof of me been scammed. I gathered all the necessary information about the scammers to them it will help a long way in the recovery process. With they help my scammer was trace and got back my money from them. Are you a victim and want to get back your lost money kindly file a complaint to them on how to recover your lost money without any upfront fee involved. You can also reach out to them through their email address below for a successfully recovering.

I think this could be a book, but I’ll try to briefly share just a few ideas. For reference, I’m a U.S. passport holder, born in the U.S., raised in the U.S. mostly, but also Japan and China. To date I’ve lived in 15 countries, and have lived outside the U.S. a total of 10 years.

First, the U.S. is geographically quite isolated. It only shares borders with two other countries, and these are “hard borders” (in contrast to the borderless EU zone). No one really cares to go to Canada that much (most the population of the entirety of Canada lies in two zones just north of the U.S. border), and then the history with Mexico… So, not a lot of travel to these places, unless some idiots going on spring break that just have to go to Cancun. Otherwise, you have two large oceans surrounding the country. For many in the U.S., they consider “travel” to be anything outside their home city. The U.S. is big, so people might travel to another state and consider it a big deal. Many don’t even think about going overseas. So you end up with a lot of people that know nothing of the world. With so many different ethnicities in the U.S., some of those more ignorant think they don’t even have to leave the country to “know” another culture, which of course is complete BS.

Second, they are indoctrinated to believe the U.S. is the best country. It’s in schools, it’s everywhere. And to me, it’s a fucking joke. But for many, they are quite nationalistic, and don’t even bother to understand any other countries for comparison. They don’t realize they rank last amongst “developed nations” in just about every category. The U.S. has more violence and crime, horrible access to healthcare and education, poor average wage-COL ration, low quality and overpriced food, etc. They are just blind. But they are constantly told they are the “most free,” which everyone says they value so much, yet it’s the most like a police state I’ve ever seen. If you sneeze wrong, someone will call the police. I’ve had the police called on me for literally just taking a walk in my own neighborhood, minding my own business. People have their children TAKEN AWAY FROM THEM just for letting them walk home from school. No one is free in the U.S. It’s the closest thing to fascism I’ve ever found, and I’ve lived in countries where communism was just dismantled a couple decades ago.

Third, the culture is very individualistic, to a fault. Everyone thinks everything that happens in life is because of them. Narcissism runs rampant (no surprise there, I’m sure, given the people in the news – I mean all we ever see are people like Musk and Trump and celebrities). It’s weird. Scientific studies have even proven that most of life is random. Most cultures understand “life happens,” and you do the best with what you have. In the U.S., by contrast, if you aren’t rich you’re deemed “a failure” (which makes me upset just to write – it’s just so backwards and toxic). People choose their friends based on looks and bank accounts. It’s a fucked up, toxic to no end society.

Like a few others here, I’ve crossed the line into the Land of the Stupid, and did exactly what this question asks.

I was at the San Francisco Zoo, and the area from which one observes the gorillas is several feet above the enclosure and protected by very thick and (I sincerely hope) difficult to break glass.

I observed a male gorilla minding his own business, munching on…something. Being human, I wanted to know exactly how he would react to being “challenged” on his home turf.

I made sure that he was looking right at me. Then, I puffed out my chest, and proceeded to pound on it with both fists, yelling at him the whole time. Well…he then stood up to his full height, which is WAAAY taller than you might think, and showed me how to PROPERLY do the whole chest thumping thing. And the yelling thing.

I’ve had guns pointed at me a few times in my life. I’ve been threatened with knives. I’ve even been around explosives a time or two. Never in my life have I been so frightened. Not once. I managed – barely – to not ruin my trousers, but believe me, unless you have personally witnessed the full-on, serious challenge of a gorilla, you have no idea how truly magnificent these beasts are. The raw power, the impressive size, the…majesty, I guess…is beyond the ability of any video to fully capture. And as much as I am trying, the words fall far, far short of conveying the full impact of the scene.

Suffice to say, I quickly averted my gaze, and moved on to other, FAR less intimidating animals. The flamingos were very nice to look at, and didn’t challenge me at all.

The Benny Hill Show

Golden Years

Submitted into Contest #247 in response to: Set your story on a spaceship exploring the far reaches of space when something goes wrong. view prompt

Kendall Defoe

Nobody can hear you screw up, or so they say…Major Culpham had that thought in his head as he prepared for the day. He looked through the viewfinder and studied the material captured. All the scanning of the previous day was uneventful and he felt that he should just get this out of the way early to complete his other duties. And yet…he felt an urge to go back once more and review what he saw…and heard.Noises from afar…At any other moment, he might have laughed about it and moved on with his work. Any child knew the basics of space travel: no atmosphere, no way to conduct sound, therefore… All the movies and television shows they had watched as children were lies. Explosions in space might be colorful, but they would also be very silent. Space was quiet, peaceful, and sometimes even quite dull. You did not get to hear it.But he had heard it.Fifteen days into the mission and it came up during routine repairs at a station the ship detected on its scopes. They had been set up for the Amber Wave as it made progress beyond the main station. It was the most popular ship in the fleet, commissioned by the brightest and boldest minds of the galaxy over many decades. And, if the major was totally honest – he often was when having a moment to himself – he should have had a lesser vehicle while this one became the retirement gift to some general or lesser figure who gave a lifetime of fair (?) and honest service (did such a creature really exist?).But no, they had to give it to the major. He was a real hero with the war record, medals, private charities established in his name, and discoveries made in difficult and strange places. The Council agreed to let him have this mission. He was the right man of the right age with all of the right attributes needed for a journey through space where the chances of encountering another human were very low (even the repair stations sent out before hand were all automated). No one else could have taken such a trip for such a length of time without a crew (his psychological, emotional and synaptic studies proved this). Food and supplies were stored at the repair stops and on board (no worries about shortages or rationing when he saw the cargo hold; it was a fear they did not detect during the testing). He was the right choice.And then he heard it.It was in the middle of his second analysis of the ship (no real problems were detected). Culpham had been walking through the processing booth, waiting for the results when it was loud and clear:“HELP!”The major was a war veteran. He had heard the desperate screams of civilians and soldiers in battle. He knew what a cry for help was supposed to sound like. But he had never heard anything like that one simple word used and spoken in such a manner.It was not just spoken. He could feel it project through his uniform, down his spine, up his legs, and into his mind. It invaded his body and would not settle down.Maybe it was part of the test… After all those weeks on his own, it was possible that they wanted to run one more probe to see how he was running a mission all by himself. There was the chance that he could be monitored that way and have the information shipped back home (would the Council do that?). The ship’s diagnostic concluded with nothing more than the recognition of a possible short on the light deck (easy to handle; he had suspected it could be a problem), but nothing else was detected.Not a single sound.Maybe he should monitor his own profile. They encouraged this from time to time in battle (some of his soldiers had been taken away when the reports were filed and analyzed). Culpham sat in the main holochair and let the probe run itself (only twenty minute out of his day):“No problems located or detected with subject. All scans match with the expected results of initial settings. Subject is normal.”Every time the major saw this, he still felt uncomfortable. It was him, in the third person, with the screen indicating blood pressure, heart rate, sugar levels, salt levels, psychological disparities, weight, vision level, and on and on…Not a thing out of line.Maybe he really did imagine it all. He turned to look at another screen where he could entertain himself with an entire culture’s history of movies, television, other audio-visual and three-dimensional art. Culpham thought that a comedy would be best (how did they manage without the skill and talent of Peter Sellers before the Pink Panther series became a hit?). A simple oral command would get this started.

 

“Seek movie.”

 

The screen lit up and expanded into the empty holospace.

 

“Comedy.”

 

A list flashed before him. He would just have to name it.

 

“The Pink…”

 

And the screen flickered for a moment, and disappeared.

 

Now, Major Culpham was told that anything could happen on such a journey. The training included emergency measures to deal with such technological problems. He did not worry about this. Another diagnostic and this would be…

 

The screen reappeared.

 

There was only one word on it:

 

HELP!

 

Major Culpham stared at it for a moment, adjusting his visors to take in a non-three-dimensional image.

 

And then it disappeared.

 

Anger was beginning to occupy his thoughts. If the computer could not detect this, and he was just analyzed and found to be sane (at least, that was how he read it), then this was actually happening to him and the Amber Wave. This was very real.

 

And he could use the technology around him to find out what was happening.

 

Major Culpham entered new information into the machine and smiled.

 

He was going to enjoy this trip.

 

*

 

From the reading on the sensors, the message – if it was a message – was coming to him from a region that no one else had scanned before; not even with a random probe. Culpham, sitting back in his chair, smiled and thought about all of the potential promotions and praise he might receive for this. A completely unknown sector…

 

He watched as nebulae, stars, planets and entire galaxies flitted by. It would be out of his projected route, but he knew that the risks involved would be worth it, even if it turned out to be nothing.

 

“Help!”

 

It was not even shocking that time.

 

“Yeah, yeah, I heard ya. I can’t help but hear ya.”

 

Culpham had made sure that the monitors were not connected with the base unit or a Council feed. To have them know that he was now talking to himself would have guaranteed that his mission would be scrapped and the flight rerouted home. He did wonder how they would do that with such a trip, but took no chances with it. There was even concern about how a man could be alone for such a long time and just interact with computer technology. Culpham settled this with his diagnostics and his obvious ease with the interactive programs on board. So, no talking to an empty void…

 

If it was empty…

 

A light began to flicker on the holoscreen to his left. This is what he had been waiting for and he smiled again while sipping a food concentrate. If that indicator was functioning properly, he was within one parsec of that message. There were no other stations for repairs or analysis, so he knew that he would have to be careful with this trip. Culpham did notice that the number of planets and debris in this area was very low. Maybe it was too low.

 

Was he moving through pitch blackness?

 

It felt as though the entire galaxy in front of him had turned into ink (a substance he had heard of once, although he doubted it still existed). There was no effect on the Amber Wave’s momentum and all the instruments were functioning properly, but it was a very chilling moment for the major. Culpham preferred the usual distractions of space travel to this great and ugly nothingness.

 

“Help!”

 

“Help yourself! I’m comin’…”

 

Maybe he was beginning to understand why he was receiving that message. The voice was definitely male (no audio adjustments were performed on that voice; the recording he managed to create had no aberrations); it was certainly in distress; it was in this area.

 

But where in this area?

 

The light began to flicker much faster, sending out a strobe effect of redness around the enclosed cabin. Culpham knew that he was near.

 

“Help?”

 

A slight change in tone with that one, wasn’t it? It was now asking a question. Culpham wondered why he had not really tried to engage it in conversation before making this detour.

 

It seemed to be asking him for a chat.

 

The light stopped flickering. It was now a solid red glow.

 

Culpham examined the co-ordinates and looked out the main view-screen.

 

No, no, this cannot be it. This cannot be it.

 

The co-ordinates were on the monitor. It was 00.000.000.

 

That was impossible. The number was an impossibility and the space he was in should not have been there.

 

But here he was and the ship had all the data needed to confirm it.

 

“Help…”

 

“Yeah, help. Don’t we all want some now…am I right?” Culpham was not sure he should smile now.

 

Now, one of the good things about the mission was the amount of equipment provided for a passenger on the Amber Wave. He had flight suits, travel suits, prepackaged food, weaponry…and the one thing he might need to solve this particular mystery: The Ro\Bon Suit.

 

The name was a mistake. The designers of that suit wanted to combine the words “Robot” with “Bond” to show how well any human could work with the suit. It would provide a level of flexibility to the wearer “unlike anything that the Council ever prepared or developed before” (a nice little advert for it, Culpham thought). The backslash in the name bothered him, but he did not think much of it, until he learned that someone had been very sloppy and let their finger slip when preparing to display the newest innovation of the week. No one else thought about it, but the major wondered about it. A slip of the finger…

 

“Help.”

 

If this really was where the yell was coming from, and all of the readings were correct, he would have to step out of the Amber Wave and walk through…that.

 

Not a single star or particle of matter or anything nearby.

 

Culpham felt a little odd about this.

 

The protocol clearly stated that he had to examine and study any phenomena encountered on the journey and keep a record of them. He was also still a military man. Culpham could not let himself be terrified by a cry for help; a cry that seemed to be for him only.

 

What could really happen to him?

 

He prepared for the walk outside.

 

*

 

At first, he thought that it was a mistake to not be tethered to the ship. Culpham had adjusted the suit to his measurements, and he found that it was even easier to use that the equipment on the ship. But there was still a worry that he might drift away to far from the Amber Wave and not be able to continue the trip; just another piece of debris stuck in space.

 

But no, that would not be a problem.

 

First, he could rest his feet on that inky blackness.

 

Second, he could hear the cry in his suit and detect where it was coming from.

 

And finally, he was beginning to recognize the voice.

 

It should have disturbed him, but at this point there was nothing that would have stopped him from heading into the void.

 

It was his own voice.

 

“Help…”

 

“Yeah, I am going to do just that…”

 

He began to move over the surface. It reminded Culpham of the rides back home that he enjoyed at birthdays and public fairs. He tried to hop on the blackness and found that there was a bit of bounce (no silliness while being monitored). Maybe he would enjoy it more on the journey back…

 

“HELP!”

 

Major Culpham, seasoned veteran, chosen pilot for the Amber Wave, talented and skilled soldier, almost soiled the Ro\Bon Suit.

 

He was standing right in front of himself.

 

A quick psychological profile made by the suit indicated that it really was him: same age, height, blood type, physical ailments, hair and eye color. It even had the same outfit (he had to keep calling it an “It”). What was different was the face.

 

Fear…that was pure fear.

 

Culpham knew why he was here and he had to get away.

 

“Wait. Please. I know what you are thinking: I called you and want to trap you here.”

 

“Well, yeah. That was what I was thinkin’. Seems like the sensible thing based on all the readings…”

 

“There is so much more to tell you. You have so much to learn.”

 

“Okay, teach me.”

 

*

 

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space? That was a damn lie. The figure had a story and Culpham had a duty. It would be best to let them talk in private as the Amber Wave awaited one of them to return and continue its travels. The journey was not yet over.

Although it’s not the same, I think the spirit of this story fits.

There was a millionaire in Arkansas named Jennings Osborne. He was known for his philanthropy, and for his huge Christmas light display. He told a story once about going to a donut shop one day, and there were some tourists in line in front of him. The tourists couldn’t make up their minds about that they wanted, and blocked access to the counter for a long time.

Finally, the clerk looked over the tourists at Mr. Osborne and asked what he wanted. Without skipping a beat, he said “I’ll take ALL the donuts”.

The tourists were left dumbfounded, and donutless!

When my town was devastated by a large tornado, Mr Osborne had a barbecue for the entire town. Everybody who came was fed. I’ll never forget that guy.

RIP, Mr. Osborne.

I was driving 50 miles, one way, to work each day and then having to wait an additional 10–15 miinutes to take a shuttle from a satellite parking lot to the hospital where I worked. After 18 months of this nonsense I was desperate to find a job closer to home.

A multinational company posted a position in an office located less than 20 miles from my home, and I applied immediately and was granted an interview. I’d spent the last 14 years working as a Tier 3 computer support tech for the state and the position I interviewed for was a Tier 1 phone support job, so though I was overqualifed for job, I was willing to make a change because the Tier 1 position paid more than what I made as a Tier 3 tech.

The interview panel consisted of three young women in their mid-to-late 30s, and the first question they asked was why I was interested in a “lesser” position. I replied that I was 62 years old and too tired to keep climbing ladders and crawling under desks, and they smiled. Then they asked where I saw myself in five years and I said that I hoped to retire soon after turning 67, and they all glanced at one another. I realized that I had just talked myself out of the job, but I remained positive and friendly as the interview continued for another 30 minutes.

I called my wife as I drove home after the interview and told her I’d blown it, because I was certain that I had, but around 6 PM I got a call from one of the women who interviewed me asking if I’d be willing to train in Seattle for a week if I was offered the job. She said she’d forgotten to ask during the interview. I told her it wouldn’t be a problem and forgot about it, because I thought she was just checking a box she’d missed.

Two days later, I was offered the job, and I accepted it. That was six and a half years ago and I’m still with the company, so my gaffe wasn’t as serious as I thought.

Yes. This happened in the late 90s when my daughter was 13 years old. My neighbors, (two guys in their late twenties) had two pet boa constrictors in cages on the front porch (20 feet from our front porch). Kids in the neighborhood, including my kids, would stop by to look at the snakes in the cages. The owners would feed them live mice when no one was around. That isn’t what bothered me because I know snakes have to eat. What bothered me was that they knew my daughter loved animals (she wanted to be a veterinarian) so they allowed her to hold the mice and pet them and then they let her continue watching as they threw the mice (while laughing) in the cage for the snakes to eat. My daughter came home crying and told me what happened. I went over there in a rage, wrenched open their door and started screaming at them that if they ever even looked at her again I’d kill them. I had to explain to her then that life is a circle (yeah, like the movie, Lion King). She never ended up becoming a veterinarian, by the way.

It was a sadistic thing for them to do. I had an older cousin do something similar to my sister. He used to raise rabbits for meat. He asked her to pick out her favorite rabbit so she did. He let her hold it, pet it, then grabbed the rabbit by the legs and hit it over the head with a small wooden bat. My sister didn’t cry, instead she went into shock. She was 8, learning disabled, had a serious heart condition, and adored animals. She did not talk or even move for the rest of the day.

And, just a side note, I understand the whole eating meat process, farming, feeding animals, and the circle of life, like I mentioned before but, there’s a time and a place for everything and neither of those men used common sense or showed any compassion. They were both cruel and sadistic.

Luckin for the win.

screen 2024 10 29 19 49 26
screen 2024 10 29 19 49 26

A) cut 800 overseas military bases to ZERO. Bring all your soldiers home to retrain them for manufacturing jobs at 30%of their income!

B) turned 13 of your air craft carriers into cruise ships and earned money instead of blowing a billion a month!

C) retire 10 million CIA and NED man doing shit around the world!

D) cut away all fundings on media lies to your media to spread half truths, fabrications and propaganda!

E) stop being delusional and hiding from the truth! China has overtaken you guys since 2010!

F) Accept being second fiddle to China and learnt from them!

G) Cough all monies from your CEOs and returned them into R&D monies for your companies!

H) Reduce your wages by 70% and increase their work days to 12 hours a day!

I) Stop all wars tomorrow and bring your troops home!

J) make your president make peace with China and Russia tomorrow!

K) Be honest tell the world USA is a broke and a bankrupt nation!

L) Tell the world that the so called free market liberal democracy do not work and it needs a change!

J) Stop giving aid to 100 counties that are blood suckers like India and Philippines! Asked them to stop doing shit and stop funding them!

K) Stop funding monies to opposition abroad to cause regime change and revolution!

L) Retrained 200 million Americans to work hard and smart doing things the world need

M) Cut your military expenses to 1/4 of China!

O) Jailed anyone who lied and spread half truths! The truth will set you free!

Q) Be honest about all the lies that you have paid for and expose all lied tomorrow! Shame all who do that!

R) Bring a 100 million Chinese a month to visit USA a month!

S) enforce saving rate of all Americans and corporations from -4% to +40%!

T) Stop all helicopter monies and QE and bailing out too big to fail companies! Let them go bankrupt!

U) stop tariffs that weakened your companies right away!

V)Disband NATO, AUKUS, QUAD, G7 and be a filial part of G20!

W) be a true member of the United Nations!

X) reduce welfare spendings on unemployed tomorrow!

Y) stop all immigration and spend all monies saved to build homes for the homeless!

Z) throw away your constitutions tomorrow!

Can you do it? That is the perfect formula to make America great again! I bet you won’t! So stop talking rubbish. Never ever utter the word that destroys America. Exceptionalism.

The SHOCKING Truth About Why CHINA Is Attracting So Many AMERICANS!

Educating Anne

Submitted into Contest #247 in response to: Imagine a world where exploration is forbidden, and write a story about a character who defies this rule to satisfy their innate curiosity. view prompt

Ty Warmbrodt

Under the cloak of darkness, Anne sneaks from her father’s house and follows the Wharfe River upstream heading into town. The moon is full and bright, lighting her way. The sounds of frogs singing and crickets chirping keep her company as her bare feet squish along the wet ground. Anne is on her way to do something while she still has time to do it. She turns eighteen next year and her father has been doubling his efforts to find her a husband. What she is about to do goes against society as a whole in 15th century England. She doesn’t know what it means for her future as part of the community, but this is something she must do. She has to satisfy her curious nature.She was with her parents in town today. While they were working, she came upon a man painting a picture of the marketplace. It intrigued her, his use of shape and light, how he blended the colors to match what he saw. She always wondered how paintings were made. She has only seen a couple of them in her lifetime, but they were astonishing. She didn’t understand how someone could transfer what they saw to a piece of canvas. She still didn’t, but she felt closer to understanding. She drew close to the man, looking over his shoulder, watching as he worked with much interest.“You seem fascinated,” a shaky voice cracked behind her.She turned and saw an elderly man leaning on a cane. “Sorry, I am a very curious girl. My mother says it will be the death of me. My father is having a hard time finding me a suitor because of it.”“Nothing wrong with a little curiosity. What else fancies you, my dear?”“I want to read, especially the Bible. I have asked my father to teach me. He said it is not for women to know the word of God. That it is a woman’s place to listen to her father until she is wed, then she is to listen to her husband.”“And this societal norm does not suit you. That is fascinating. What else?”“Everything, I guess. I asked my father how an onion grows, since he is a farmer. He said it was not a woman’s place to understand a man’s labor.”“Is that so. Hmm. Go on.”“I want to know how they make laws and why we make laws. They are not explained to me, but I know they exist. Some seem good, others bad, and I don’t know which ones are real. I want to know more about the people who lived before us. I want to know why the river flows in the direction it does. I want to know why the moon changes shape. I want to know how to build a house. I want to help my father’s farm become more successful. That is not even the beginning, sir. There is so much in the world that arouses questioning.”“Interesting indeed. I am Professor William Black. This is very uncommon, but so is your nature. How would you feel about an education?”“An education. What’s that?”“It’s learning how to read. It’s learning the how’s and why’s of nature and society. It’s learning mathematics, the working of numbers. It’s gaining the ability to reason for oneself. It’s obtaining the ability to think philosophically and testing theories. It’s learning to appreciate the finer things in life and understanding foreign cultures. By the time we are done, you will understand how the world works, as well as the means to satisfy all your curiosities.”“That sounds amazing, Professor! You would really do that for me?”“I would, but you have to use your knowledge for the advancement of society. Then, you must pass it on.”“I would, I honestly would, but there is no way my parents will allow me to do such a thing.”“Hmm. You see that house right there with the sloped roof. That one is mine. I will leave a candle lit in the windowsill. If you find yourself able to join me, as long as that candle is lit, come on in, Miss?”“Greenfield. Anne Greenfield.”# 

The marketplace is different to Anne at night. All the vendor carts are gone. The moon casts eerie shadows that seem to take a life of their own. Feral cats are heard screeching through the chill night air. Yet, Ann is ecstatic to walk through the empty marketplace and find Professor Black’s candle still lit. She knocks lightly on his door, and he opens it excitedly.

 

“Miss Greenfield! Welcome. I was hoping you would find a way. I took a nap after our meeting just in case this was the way. Snuck out, did you?”

 

Shyly, Anne says, “Yes.”

 

“No need to be embarrassed. You are about to embark on an adventure that will make it all worthwhile.”

 

At his desk, by candlelight, Professor Black starts her with the alphabet before moving on to numbers, telling her that they will be the foundation for everything she will learn. He plays her a song on the piano and they discuss the elements of the music, going over pieces of the song several times so Anne can familiarize herself with the concepts. Anne is having so much fun learning these things, she loses track of time.

 

She runs out the door with a thank you to her teacher. She storms through the marketplace and into the wilderness. She stumbles over a tree branch, skinning her knee, and dirtying her dress. She looks up and sees the sun rising. When she gets home, she knows she is too late. Her father is normally in the field and mother will be cooking breakfast. She pushes open the door to find her parents sitting at the table with furious expressions.

 

“Where have you been young lady, and do not lie,” her father growls.

 

“I met a man at the market, a professor. He offered me an education. I knew you would have said no, father, so I snuck out and went to his home,” Anne replies meekly.

 

“Blasphemy! Women do not need educations! They need men! Is this man ready to marry you? Taking a young woman into his home during the depths of night. Have this man no decency?”

 

“He is quite the gentleman, but he’s old enough to be my grandfather. I’m not going to marry him!”

 

“We’ll see about that! As God as my witness, you will not be sneaking in and out of my house to do the devils work with this professor. You’re of age. You’re past the age. If it wasn’t for you constantly questioning everybody about everything, I would have had you married off a long time ago. If this man wants the right to educate you, he can earn it proper. Let’s go. I want to meet this professor.”

 

#

 

There is an impolite knock on the door that nearly causes Professor Black to spill his tea. He didn’t get much sleep last night and is looking forward to a little rejuvenation, but that will have to wait. Grabbing his cane, he heads for the door, albeit not fast enough. Another loud bang erupts from the entryway.

 

“Hold on, hold on, I’m almost there.”

 

Upon seeing the old man, Robert Greenfield’s demeanor softens a little, but he keeps his tone firm. “Sir, we need to talk about my daughter,” he says, pushing Anne through the doorway.

 

“Ah, you must be young Miss Greenfield’s father. I’m Professor William Black. Nice to make your acquaintance,” the old man says, offering his hand.

 

Robert ignores the gesture and pushes by him. He gazes around the professors home. It is filled with books, scrolls, maps, and art. He has a piano with a violin on top. On his desk sits an abacus, a writing quill, and some parchment. “I understand you are educating my daughter, putting ideas in her head. Women don’t need such things. That’s why they have husbands and fathers.”

 

“But for someone as quizzical as Anne, life will be much more fulfilling if she were educated.”

 

“What education do you need to birth babies and do as you’re told.”

 

“One of the things she wants to learn is farming and how to improve your harvest. Have you ever considered teaching her yourself and leaving things for her to manage.”

 

“Not once. That brings me to why I am here. She is of marrying age, but she is difficult, too curious for her own good, and opinionated. Nobody wants her and after last night, I am tired of her. If you are willing to do it properly, she is yours. Then you can educate her all you want.”

 

“I am a smidge too old to remarry, but I have a son who lives in town. He is a business proprietor, mainly soaps, but he does well. He is closer to her age. Care to arrange a meeting.”

 

“Yes, I do. When?”

 

“Come back tomorrow for lunch. He will be here.”

 

#

 

The following day, Robert and Anne put on their Sunday best and returned to the professor’s home. There they meet Robyn Black, a tall man with dark hair and dark eyes who possesses a charming smile. Anne is not only taken by his looks but by his manners. She has never been treated like such a lady in all her life. He is, however, twenty years older than she, which might explain the chivalry.

 

“Miss Greenfield, my father has told me a lot about you. You desire to be an educated woman. That is not common. Quite frankly, it is unheard of. What do you plan to do with all this knowledge once you obtain it.”

 

“For one, Mr. Black, I will find gratification in gaining said knowledge. I am a very curious woman. For two, I do want to have a family and I do not want to raise idiots. I do not want them to believe things just because someone told them so. I want them to be able to search out the truth on their own. Too many liars in the world, Mr. Black. And three, I believe by educating my children I can provide them with more opportunities, so they can live better lives.”

 

Turning to the professor Robyn says, “You are right, father. I like her. She will make the perfect wife, mother, and a shrewd business partner behind the scenes once she finishes her education.” Turning to Robert he asks, “May I ask for your daughter’s leave to accompany me in the garden. I would like to get to know more of her.”

 

Anne sits on a small swing tied to a tree branch in the garden while Robyn pushes her. He tells her of his business ventures and his travels. Anne listens intently, mentioning that someday she would like to travel too. She shares her stories of life on the farm, some of them bringing laughter to the garden. They walk arm-in-arm about the garden. Anne stops to inspect and smell each variety as they pass them by, asking Robyn each one’s name. When they rejoin their fathers inside, Robyn is so enchanted by Anne’s curious ways, playful banter, and the way she carries a conversation, that he asks Robert for her hand in marriage.

 

Robert agrees, but with terms. “Anne is to stay with me until she is married. All educational activities are to cease until after she is married. Anne, once you are married, I don’t want you around the farm ever again, or associating with your brothers and sisters still living in the community.”

 

Robert breaks his daughter’s heart, but she accepts his terms.

 

Robyn and the professor waste no time in arranging the wedding ceremony. Asking Robert his opinion on the wedding plans, location, and guest list, Robert says, “Her mother and I will be the only ones in attendance only to give her away. Do as you please.”

 

Despite being a small wedding, it takes months, nearly a year, before the day comes that Anne sees Robyn again. Invitations had to be sent and arrangements had to be made for traveling families, but it was all worth it. Robyn looks dashing standing at the end of the aisle with the professor at his side. Anne feels beautiful in her mother’s wedding dress, holding a bouquet of wildflowers she picked herself before the ceremony.

 

Anne looks for her father and her mother after the ceremony, but they are nowhere to be found. This momentary sadness disappears when Robyn takes her by the arm to meet her new family before the celebration begins. It’s a night of music, accompanied by singing, dancing, drinking, eating, and laughing. Robyn’s family tells Anne tales of Robyn from birth to manhood, which has Anne laughing to the point of tears. She is having the time of her life until she feels a longing for friends and family back home.

 

“What is it, child,” the professor asks, taking a seat next to her.

 

“Nothing. It’s just that I was having the time of my life until I thought about those I’ll be leaving behind. Why is my father being so cruel about this.”

 

“I cannot speak what another man thinks, but what you are venturing on is not a normal practice in society. Your father might find shame in this. You might change society, Anne. Someday, maybe all women will receive an education when society sees it is beneficial for women to be educated. You’re an explorer and a pioneer. Be proud of what you are venturing on and use it wisely. Perhaps one day, your father will come to his senses, and you will see the people from your past again, but now it is time to focus on your future.”

 

Anne leans over and kisses the professor on the cheek. “Thank you for everything, the faith, the encouragement, the teachings, and, most of all, that handsome man you call a son.”

 

#

 

Anne and Robyn spent a month in London after their wedding. She continued her education as soon as she got home. She and Robyn had five kids: two boys and three girls. The boys grew up and took over the family business, expanding it. The girls found work in the homes of royals due to their educations, which they passed on to the noble’s children whom they raised. Anne’s curiosity was never quenched, but at least she got to spend her life watering it. She and Robyn traveled a lot, mainly because Anne was obsessed with history. She frequented the libraries, which some people found peculiar. What Robyn loved most about Anne was that he was no longer alone at night. Instead, he had a beautiful woman whose views and opinions challenged his own, leading to discussions that kept them up half the night. She had one theory, though, that Robyn couldn’t help but laugh at. Who would ever believe that the Earth was round.

I had been diagnosed with Endometrial cancer, had had a hysterectomy, and due to a wound infection was back in the hospital. The wound had dehisced- it was now a huge open wound. The infection was so severe, they put in a urinary catheter. I had been through chemo, radiation, and now I had this massive open wound across my belly from hip to hip.

I’d been through the mill, and was anxious just to go home and start to heal.

My first husband- a man who was proud to have been a volunteer first-aider for 20+ years saw the wound, then saw the catheter and said

“You’re not coming home with that pissbag.” and then “And, you stink- that cut smells horrible”.

And he left. I felt like the wind had been sucked out of me. It wasn’t my fault it stunk… that’s what infected wounds do.

The nurse came in, and asked when I was leaving- I explained, and she said “but you can’t stay here”.

These were the days before cell/ mobile phones. I called my Mom and Dad’s house, they weren’t in. I left a message on their ansaphone to please call or come up to the hospital.

I remember sitting there, and feeling an incredible and indescribable freezing chasm inside me, like someone had reached inside and pulled my heart out. I felt like I should have died. I couldn’t go. I couldn’t stay. I could hardly walk. I was in unbelievable emotional and physical pain. I was exhausted. I felt absolutely alone… it was horrible. It was 30 years ago- and as I write this, my insides are struggling with the memories of the pain and the rejection.

Fortunately for me, my doctor came in, I explained everything, and she said it was reasonable for me to stay another week… after all, I still had a wound. She ordered an IV, changed my antibiotics to IV, and ordered patient controlled analgesia by IV. As I nurse, I know she did those things to ensure I could stay.

My heart was broken at the rejection I felt. I cried for days. The doctor got a hold of my husband and read him the riot act, complete with four part harmonies and a 21 gun salute… she was livid and held nothing back. I’d never imagined someone like her could speak to someone the way she spoke to him. He was escorted from the hospital unit when he went to take a swing at her and she kicked him in (as she called it) his “Cere-ballum” (his nuts).

Yes, police got involved, my folks, his folks, hospital social worker- I felt like a non-entity. All these people in the room wound up arguing about who was gonna be stuck with me. His mom asked me to stick with him, and I agreed. She was a lovely woman, but his dad- his dad sided with his son.

I finally did go home, and because in the US if you can leave the house you don’t get home nursing care, and I could leave the house albeit with exceptional difficulties, I was on my own. I used to sit and put a huge mirror in my lap so I could see into the wound, I would clean it, pack it and dress it. My husband had admitted that he was afraid he was going to “catch” cancer from me, which explained some of his behaviour. It hurt so bad- he would do anything for anyone else… but he couldn’t do t for me.

We broke up, long story, and I wound up moving to England to be with a man I met on the internet.

Fast forward 20 years. I am now with husband 2, and have been diagnosed with cancer, again. The fear and panic rose- hubby knew all about the first time, I could not hide the massive ugly ropey scar… and his reaction to me saying “I have cancer” was to put his arms around me and say “No, WE have cancer. You are not going through this alone. You don’t need to face anything alone. I am with you every step. I might not know what to do, but if you teach me, I will learn…”

And he has. He gives me the injections I need. When I had a wound after surgery, he helped dress it. When I got septic and was very clueless with delirium, he was patient, loving, and did everything for me from feed me to wiping my bottom. And he does it all without making me feel shame, or fear, or embarrassment. He just *loves* me, and that love is in everything he does.

I made a much better choice with my second husband than with my first. In the first cancer episode, I had to fight alone and I felt so alone I can hardly even face it now… but the second time, I feel like I have a knight standing by me. As I write this, I can still feel the memories of rejection and loneliness, and I still have an irrational fear it will happen again- but my husband understands and leaves me notes. Although not an artist, he makes them little works of art with coloured ink, little pictures he’s drawn, and they always say the same things- “I love you. You’re not alone. WE can do this. I’m with you….”

I am very lucky.

The United States wants to collect protection fees, but Taiwan Province has to pay them.

On October 26th, the US Department of Defense announced that the US State Department had approved a new round of arms sales to Taiwan.

The Taiwan Province authorities plan to deploy these three sets of “National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems” around Taipei, Qingquangang Base of the Air Force, Jiashan Base in the East and Taitung Base.

What is the actual effect of this system? In fact, in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, this system is very lame and has obvious shortcomings.

First, the protection space is small.

Second, the launching method is backward. This system uses a fixed launcher, which is close to a “living target” in the actual battlefield. On February 27, 2024, the Russian army reported that it destroyed the transmitter of NASAMS air defense system, and related pictures were circulated on social platforms.

Third, it is impossible to intercept ballistic missiles. This has been confirmed in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. On December 28, 2023, Russia launched a missile attack on Ukraine. At that time, the air defense system intercepted most of the missiles, but none of the eight Kh-22 supersonic missiles were intercepted. Moreover, the Kh-22 missiles were designed in the Soviet era and the age was very long.

It can be seen that this air defense system, which the Taiwan authorities have invested heavily in this time, is not enough to “establish a perfect missile defense system” as it advertised.

In fact, the most advanced anti-missile system needs multiple systems to form a three-dimensional protective net, which is an expensive and time-consuming project, and the Taiwan authorities have neither time nor financial resources to implement it.

Why does the Taiwan authorities want to buy this system that can be described as “unable to get up”? To put it bluntly, the United States wants to collect protection fees, and Taiwan Province has to pay them.

Since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 2022, the global arms sales of the United States have increased substantially.

According to the data of the US Department of Defense, in fiscal year 2023, the United States completed more than $80 billion in transactions through arms sales systems in other countries and regions, setting a historical record.

Now the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have caused the demand for weapons in many countries to grow rapidly, which is exactly what the United States wants. As a country that has made a fortune from war, the United States is naturally overjoyed at such demand, and even has to sell goods if there is no demand to create demand.

Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why the United States recently crossed the Taiwan Province Strait with Canada to provoke China, while holding joint military exercises with Japan to approach the nearest island of Nagano with Taiwan Province, and at the same time sending personnel to participate in the South Korean “national defense” military exercise to intensify the contradictions on the peninsula.

Obviously, under the background of the tense situation in the Middle East and the anxiety of the American election, it is beneficial for the politicians to continue to please the real big money owners-military enterprises by disrupting the regional situation with all their efforts in the form of military exercises and arms sales.

However, the United States has done much more to “collect money and not deliver goods”. At the end of September, a report from an American think tank pointed out that in August 2024, the United States announced 22 new arms sales to other countries and regions, of which 10 pieces of military equipment coincided with weapons projects owed by Taiwan Province. So far, the value of weapons owed by the United States to Taiwan Province has reached $20.5 billion.

There is still a long way to go between “approving arms sales” and “acquiring armaments”, and the Taiwan Province authorities know in their hearts that they can only “have a hard time”.

In the mid-1980s, I was hired by a company that was a leading manufacturer of door locks, to convert a COBOL program running on their mainframe into C so it could run on an IBM PC instead, and directly control a key cutting machine (before, the COBOL program would output punch cards, and these would have to be carried from the computer center to the key cutter area on the factory floor).

The program that ran on the mainframe generated the different combinations that were cut into the door keys to make them unique. As I remember, there were six different cuts made on each key, and each cut could take on 10 different levels, 0–9.

But it wasn’t as simple as just generating six digit random numbers, as there were physical constraints on the key cutter to be considered. For example, a key couldn’t have a 0 cut next to a 9 cut, as the slope would be too steep. At the same time, the distance from one cut to another had to be over some threshold; you couldn’t have a key with a combination like 4–4–5–5–4–5 as it would be almost level. So there were a lot of these rules buried into the COBOL program, along with a pseudo-random number generator.

In any case, it was not as if there were

(or 1 million) possible combinations that could make valid keys. Probably only a couple hundred thousand.

Cranberry Biscotti

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314571f33089cbca5a0ce2e91de48df6

Yield: about 2 1/2 dozen

Ingredients

  • 2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 1/4 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 large egg whites
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries, coarsely chopped
  • 3/4 cup sliced almonds

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 325 degrees F.
  2. Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg in a large mixing bowl.
  3. Whisk the eggs, egg whites and vanilla extract together and add to the dry ingredients, mixing just until moist, using a hand mixer on medium speed. Add cranberries and almonds and mix thoroughly. Turn out onto a floured surface and divide batter in half. Pat each half into a log about 14 inches long and 2 inches wide. Place on a lightly greased cookie sheet and bake 30 minutes or until firm.
  4. Reduce oven temperature to 300 degrees F. Leaving the baked log on the cookie sheet, cut crosswise into 1/2 inch slices. Turn the slices cut side up on the cookie sheet and return to the oven; bake for 40 to 45 minutes or until firm and dry.
  5. Cool and keep in a tight container.

Fathers and mothers stealing other children toys and another is the local authorities allowing business concerns to take over the public beaches with their umbrellas and family people need to pay for these umbrellas and not allowed to bring their own.

Another is families leaving rubbish behind them on the beach.

Lately, after many years, one sea turtle laid its eggs on one of our beaches during a night and the beaches were too noisy with the swimmers during the day and the beach was too lit up with the powerful light for the benefit of Tourists and those Barbequing during the night , thus disturbing the “ eggs in the sand “ and they died with the disturbance, After that new enforcements were applied and the year after we had some successful hatchings, I prefer having turtles as visitors rather than the illegal and illegal and the tourists coming in large numbers disturbing more than the turtle’s nests.

The bulk of what US owes China is in the form of Treasury Bills held by China.

This has been declining. About 3 years ago, the holdings were worth $1.3 trillion. This fell to $774.6 billion at August 2024, after the sales of $1.9 billion during the month.

China is the second largest holder after Japan’s holdings of about $1.2 trillion. Japan is net buyer, but its economy is stagnant, which limits its appetite. UK, the third largest holder, has the similar story.

China’s holdings per se should not be a problem for the US, only just over 2% of its national debt.

Of the major foreign holders, China has the most money to buy more. Yellen twice visited China but failed to convince it to buy. Instead, it is selling. Other holders take note and may follow it. This could be a problem for the US.

US has to issue new bills worth trillions of dollars to refinance matured bills and to finance fiscal deficits. Foreign holders hold about 30% of the outstanding issues. If they stay away from Treasury auctions, the weight of subscription will fall heavily on tenders by domestic institutions, and in the ultimate on the Fed.

The big problems for the US are the growing trade deficit, the growing fiscal deficit, and the growing national debt.

The growing trade deficit will put pressure on the exchange value of the dollar, amid the erosion of demand for dollar due to dedollarisation.

The growing fiscal deficit causes the growing national debt. This is a political hot potato which no one wants to touch. The national debt increased almost $3 trillion in the 12 months through October to $35.95 trillion. The interest bill alone is pushing $1 trillion and will exceed it next year.

China is not the primary cause of these problems. But its absence from Treasury auctions and selling its holdings add on the burden for the US.

You’ll love this shiner from the 1990’s.

Hell, I didn’t even know they had a movie!

Life can be full of opportunities

Husband’s car wouldn’t go in reverse, so he took it to a local mechanic. I had been to that mechanic in the past with my car and he was trying to charge me for a $3,000 part/work that turned out to be simple loose bolt. Whew! Glad I got a second opinion on that one! So…I didn’t trust him, but husband thought he’d be ok.

Husband was without a car far longer than the time the mechanic had said – about a couple weeks. Mechanic kept telling husband…should be tomorrow….two days….next week. Total run around.

Finally I took my husband down there and the car wasn’t there. I asked the mechanic where the car was. He didn’t know. HUH? He said he had someone pick it up to fix it.

I asked, “Who is the guy and where is the car?”

Somewhere in the neighboring town. That’s all he knew. He said he didn’t know how to get to that town, which I knew was a lie. Anyone who lived in the area as long as I knew he had, would know how to get to that town.

I asked, “You let someone take our car, without telling us, and you don’t know where it is?”

Are.you.serious?

Husband was really upset but I said “Let’s go” and we drove straight down to the police station. We shared the story and we were told that the mechanic was probably getting ready to sell the car because they’d had multiple complaints against him.

An officer followed us back to the shop and asked the mechanic about the car. The officer got pretty much the same answers we did but told him he needed to have that car back in 24 hours or he’d be charged with auto theft.

Next day, husband got a call: the car was back and fixed at close to $4,000.

Just a few days after picking it up, the original problem with the transmission happened again. We had the car towed to our home and I filed a complaint with small claims court for our money back plus court costs.

The court date came and the mechanic actually showed up! That was a surprise. He came and talked to us and said he was selling property in California and would be able to pay us the money but not that day. We went with him to speak to the judge who told him he’d have a month to get the money and set a new court date.

New court date came, husband got a call from him. The mechanic said his father passed away in California and he was out there so he wouldn’t be in court.

We went to court, told the judge what he told us, and the judge said he’d give him the benefit of the doubt and set a third court date.

After leaving court, I dropped my husband off at work and, on the way home, went right to the mechanic’s shop. He was standing outside smoking a cigarette. I turned around and drove in. He was nowhere to be found, but I asked one of the employees if he was there. Employee said yes….and went with me looking for him. I was not about to leave. He was hiding in the bathroom and I was going to stay there if it took all day and night.

Finally he came out and I had my phone’s video on. I told him I was so sorry to hear that his dad died, but I suspected the judge would be very interested in what I had to show him. Then I turned and walked to my car.

He came running after me and said, “Meet me at the bank, I’ll have your money.”

Which I did…and…he did.

SEVERE AND DANGEROUS NEW DEVELOPMENTS, ISRAEL – IRAN / UKRAINE – RUSSIA

Hal Turner World October 28, 2024
SEVERE AND DANGEROUS NEW DEVELOPMENTS, ISRAEL – IRAN / UKRAINE – RUSSIA

Extremely severe and extraordinarily dangerous developments are taking place today in both the Israel-Iran situation AND the Ukraine – Russia situation.

With Israel having attacked Iran over this past weekend, many believed the issue __could__ be settled; especially if Iran took-it-on-the-chin and did not respond.

That belief went right out the window this morning when Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister, reminded everyone “Israel is highly likely to strike new targets in Iran in the coming days.”

The Defense Minister and the war cabinet have emphasized over the past month that the operation against Iran cannot be considered over in a single night.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said this morning that Tehran will “use all available tools” to respond to Israel’s weekend attack on military targets in Iran.

The Speaker of Iran’s Parliament said today “Iran’s response to Israel’s attack is inevitable.”

UKRAINE – RUSSIA

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared this morning: ”If Ukraine joins NATO “either Ukraine disappears, or NATO does.”

I can’t exactly “avoid” these states. The load goes where it goes. But these are the states I most dread having to visit.

California — A difficult state at the best of times, but what really twists my nips is the speed limits. Commercial vehicles are limited to a maximum of 55mph across the entire state. Not only is this maddening (worse if you drive a manual transmission) it makes it very difficult to estimate your eta. Most truck gps’s calculate your eta by assuming an average of 60mph, so every mile is about one minute of driving time. But when your max speed is 55 that throws it all off.

New England — Yes, all of it. Some states are worse than others but they all suck in different ways. The main problem is everything is so much older than most of the rest of the country. That means the roads and many of the loading docks were built back when trucks were a lot smaller than they are now. Boston and Long Island were two of the worst deliveries I’ve ever had. Though once you get away from the big cities it’s not as bad (still pretty bad though).

Michigan — Ironically Michigan is one of the more truck friendly states in terms of the size and design of their roads, but whenever I pick up or deliver in Michigan it’s almost always in or near Detroit, which in my opinion is easily the ugliest city in America. Which is a shame because the rest of the state is really nice. But I’m always stuck in the Asshole of America. And I live in fear that I will one day have to drive to Michigan in the middle of winter. I have seen what Michigan snow looks like. I don’t ever want to have to drive a semi truck through that.

No New Restrictions on U.S.-Supplied Weapons to Ukraine if North Korea Joins the War

Hal Turner World October 28, 2024

FLASH: No New Restrictions on U.S.-Supplied Weapons to Ukraine if North Korea Joins the War

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s Pentagon has announced there will be “No New Restrictions on Ukraine’s Use of American Weapons If North Korea Joins War.”

People who have read this statement multiple time, are focusing on the word “new” for the Restrictions. Does that mean the present restrictions against using U.S. Supplied weapons DEEP into Russia would still be forbidden, or does it mean there will be no restrictions on the new weapons supplied?

Ambiguity . . . .

If West-supplied missiles, which require Western Military Satellites to guide them to target, are used to strike deep into Russian territory, the Russians have made clear the use of those satellites makes the West a participant in the conflict, against which Russia will respond.

The West is now saying “No new restrictions on new weapons if . . . . . . .”

Is this a new collision course for the West and Russia?

Not me. Thank God

This guy I know was homeless. Came into our store to buy vodka. One night he was stumbling down an ally and fell on a discarded mattress. Hours later he came to. Felt something hard sewn into the mattresses. He ripped it open and found a briefcase sized box. There was about $40,000 USD inside. The dates on the bills were 10 yrs. old. So he decided he was “rich”. He went to a sleazy hotel that he knew and got a room. Then went and hit all the dive bars, bragging about what happened, handing out $100 dollar bills, and getting really drunk. Evidently he was in a black out. He woke up in that same alley on the same mattress. He got up went back to the hotel room. Someone had broken in and stolen all of the money he found. He did not even have one dollar left. On top of that he hadn’t paid for his room on advance. He just planned to do it later. The hotel manager already knew him and did not like him. The Mgr called the police, and he got taken in for a ‘ theft of service’ charge.

So within twelve hours he went from having enough money to get a new start in life, to broke, hungover, and incarcerated. I don’t think he ever got over that.

My takeaway:

Life can be very difficult when you’re stupid. So, try to show them a little more compassion.

2 reasons.

First, in 2016’s conflict, US Navy prepared to start a war against China for the sake of supporting Philippines, but, China displayed her determination to protect is sovereignty over SCS at all cost, and then the 7th fleet retreated from SCS and Philippines Sea.

From then on, ASEAN countries changed their stance on the disputes in and around SCS.

Second, Russo-Ukrainian conflict told every America’s puppet that they will be fucked if they became the cat’s paw of the US. The US stayed away from Ukraine while the latter was attacked, the US stayed intact, while Ukraine was crushed.

“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” —— Henry Kissinger.

It’s Official: The Wealthy Have Begun to Flee The USA Ahead of Election Day

Hal Turner World November 01, 2024 Hits: 7934

Wealthy Americans are making plans to leave the United States in the run-up to Tuesday’s election, with many fearing political and social unrest regardless of who wins, according to immigration attorneys.

Attorneys and advisors to family offices and high-net-worth families said they’re seeing record demand from clients looking for second passports or long-term residencies abroad. While talk of moving overseas after an election is common, wealth advisors said this time many of the wealthy are already taking action.

“We’ve never seen demand like we see now,” said Dominic Volek, group head of private clients at Henley & Partners, which advises the wealthy on international migration.

Volek said that for the first time, wealthy Americans are far and away the company’s largest client base, accounting for 20% of its business, or more than any other nationality. He said the number of Americans making plans to move abroad is up at least 30% over last year.

David Lesperance, managing partner of Lesperance and Associates, the international tax and immigration firm, said the number of Americans hiring him for possible moves overseas has roughly tripled over last year.

A survey by Arton Capital, which advises the wealthy on immigration programs, found that 53% of American millionaires say they’re more likely to leave the U.S. after the election, no matter who wins. Younger millionaires were the most likely to leave, with 64% of millionaires between 18 and 29 saying they were “very interested” in seeking so-called golden visas through a residency-by-investment program overseas.

No, I’m not obligated to do that.

It would be a waste of your time anyway.

Say I pull you over for going 78 mph. You ask to see the radar, so I do, and it plainly says 78 mph right there in the little window where it shows the speed I locked in.

If you’re skeptical about my honesty, will that convince you that I’m telling the truth?

If you’re a critical thinker then looking at the radar unit should provide you with an “aha” moment where you realize that I could have clocked any car going that speed and just said it was you. My radar could have been displaying “78” for hours before I ever saw your car.

The only difference is that now we’re both standing on the side of a busy highway arguing about whether I’m a liar instead of the alternative where you sit in the comparative safety of your car and call me a liar.

I very rarely write speeding tickets anyway, and on the rare occasions that I do, and someone asks to see the radar, I usually just stand beside their car and explain how their viewing of the radar isn’t going to prove that I’m not a liar. Generally, that little speech is enough to satisfy them.

EDIT: I should clarify that my radar unit is mounted to the dash of my car, plugged into the car’s diagnostic port, and to the car’s electrical system, and to front and back radar antennae. I can’t take it out and walk it up to someone’s car to show them.

Also, I don’t have the periodic certification paperwork with me. It’s back in the administrative offices waiting for a subpoena.

How Media Continue To Discredit Themselves

Do they not understand how boring this nonsense is?

How Russia, China and Iran Are Interfering in the Presidential Election (archived) – New York Times
Eight years after Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, foreign influence with American voters has grown more sophisticated. That could have outsize consequences in the 2024 race.

Written by three ‘journalists’ and published at the top of the NYT‘s homepage the intro reads:

When Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, spreading divisive and inflammatory posts online to stoke outrage, its posts were brash and riddled with spelling errors and strange syntax. They were designed to get attention by any means necessary.“Hillary is a Satan,” one Russian-made Facebook post read.

Posts like that ‘one Russian-made Facebook post’ (seen by how many?) ‘interfered’ in the 2016 election and were the reason for Hillery’s loss?

Now, eight years later, foreign interference in American elections has become far more sophisticated, and far more difficult to track.Disinformation from abroad — particularly from Russia, China and Iran — has matured into a consistent and pernicious threat, as the countries test, iterate and deploy increasingly nuanced tactics, according to U.S. intelligence and defense officials, tech companies and academic researchers. The ability to sway even a small pocket of Americans could have outsize consequences for the presidential election, which polls generally consider a neck-and-neck race.

U.S. presidential election campaigns spend billions of dollars on fine tuned advertisements aimed at carefully targeted micro-audiences. It isn’t even plausible that social media posts by this or that foreign actor could have comparable effects.

Russia, according to American intelligence assessments, aims to bolster the candidacy of former President Donald J. Trump, while Iran favors his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. China appears to have no preferred outcome.

Should we not be especially afraid of the ‘sophisticated’ and ‘difficult to track’ foreign interference by China because it has no preferred outcome?

Here is the NYT‘s example for it:

This year, a deepfake video of a Republican congressman from Virginia circulated on TikTok, accompanied by a Chinese caption falsely claiming that the politician was soliciting votes for a critic of Beijing who sought (and later won) the Taiwanese presidency.

How could a fake video of a Republican congressman with Chinese caption that was used to discredit a Taiwanese politician influence a U.S. election in which China has ‘no preferred outcome’? What is the logic therein?

I have no idea. Nor has the New York Times. It just claims that it does.

Whoever works in western media which carries nonsense like the above should contemplate how much they are contributing to this:

For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another 33% of Americans express “not very much” confidence.

 

Posted by b at 9:01 UTC | Comments (137)

Why Taiwan Should be Disheartened by Iran’s Missile Strike on Israel

Taiwan has considered acquiring its own “Iron Dome,” but it is likely to be even less effective against China than it has been against Iran.

By Yang Xiaotong
October 25, 2024

Why Taiwan Should be Disheartened by Iran’s Missile Strike on Israel
Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system during the Gaza conflict of May 2021.
Credit: Israeli Defence Forces Spokesperson’s Unit

Long seen as a renegade province by China, Taiwan has lived in fear of the day war breaks out. Given that it is getting clearer by the day that the United States will come to Taiwan’s aid should China attack, it remains to be seen whether China has the ability to bring Taiwan back into the fold via military means. What is clear though, is that China’s vast arsenal of missiles will wreak havoc on Taiwan, even if China is unable to permanently put boots on the ground in Taiwan.

To prevent such a scenario from happening, Taiwan has looked toward Israel, which also lives in fear of its neighboring enemies raining down hell and destruction. In response, Israel developed the Iron Dome, an air defense system boasting a 90 percent success rate at intercepting incoming rockets. Pundits argue that if Taiwan was to take a leaf out of Israel’s book, and acquire the Iron Dome, it could cut China’s advantage in missiles back down to size.

However, Taiwan’s dream was shattered after Iran’s two successive missile strikes on Israel this year. The Iranian missiles lighting up Israel’s night sky proved that the Iron Dome would have no chance standing up to China’s missile barrage.

In April, in response to Israel’s bombing of Iran’s embassy in Damascus, Iran mounted its first attack, launching more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel. If we take Israel and its allies at their word, 99 percent of the Iranian projectiles were intercepted, causing minimal damage.

The outcome was to be expected, but the attack was not representative of Iran’s full ability. Iran’s April attack on Israel was more symbolic than substantive, intended to appease hawks in Iran and the Axis of Resistance, rather than to kill and destroy.

At Iran’s National Army Day Celebration in Beijing this year, I was told by an Iranian diplomat that Iran had purposefully held back on the attack, telegraphing its strike days before and using outdated missiles. “If Iran had committed to the attack, then things would have been very different,” he said.

Indeed, when Iran mounted its second attack in October, retaliating against Israel’s assassination of Hamas’ leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israel was given a run for its money. In the October strike, Iran used much harder to intercept ballistic missiles, which includes the much-touted hypersonic missiles.

This time, instead of giving a specific number, Israel gave a vague statement, claiming that it and its allies intercepted the “majority” of projectiles. Satellite images analyzed in U.S. media showed that although Israel’s intelligence prevented it from suffering significant losses, many Iranian missiles were able to bypass the air defense system. The Iron Dome’s reputation took a serious beating.

Taking into consideration these facts, it would be a fool’s errand for Taiwan to acquire the Iron Dome, which is likely to be even less effective for Taiwan than it is for Israel.

First, Israel had help from not just the U.S., but also the U.K., Jordan, and France intercepting the missiles. While many countries would voice their protest should China attack Taiwan, few would help Taiwan, even indirectly. Aside from the U.S., even fewer countries would directly come to Taiwan’s aid should China attack. Taiwan would have to try knocking Chinese missiles out of the sky practically by itself.

Second, due to the sheer distance between Iran and Israel, Iranian missiles have to traverse 1,700 kilometers before reaching Israel, meaning that Israel had 12 minutes to brace for impact. By contrast, Taiwan lies only 160 kilometers away from China, meaning that Taiwan will have far less time to respond to missile launches from the mainland.

Third, China boasts a far more formidable array of missiles compared to Iran. Recognizing that it has a long way to go before it can catch up to the U.S. Navy, China devoted much of its effort honing its anti-access/area denial ability. Currently, China has one of the largest and most sophisticated missile arsenals in the world, with 2,300 to 2,400 ballistic missiles. Although Iran has a larger arsenal, at 3,000 ballistic missiles, most of its arsenal consists of reverse-engineered older-generation Chinese missiles, which pale in comparison to China’s more recent models.

Recently, China flexed its military muscle by carrying out a test-launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile – for the first time since 1980. The ICBM, speculated to be either a DF-31 or a DF-41, could travel between 7,200 and 15,000 km. The move was widely interpreted as warning the United States what it could face should it cross China’s redline.

China has no need for long-range ballistic missiles when attacking Taiwan, however. Its 1,200 short-range missiles, such as the DF-11, DF-12 and DF-15, would be more than sufficient. This is not taking China’s vast stockpile of drones and rockets into consideration, the latter of which reportedly could hit targets 160 km away – just enough to cross the Taiwan strait.

Fourth, playing defense is incredibly expensive. When Iran struck Israel in April, Israel spent $550 million intercepting Iranian drones and missiles, which amounts to 1.8 percent of Israel’s annual military expenditure. The missiles Israel used to intercept Iranian missiles, namely the Arrow-2 and Arrow-3, cost $2 to $3 million apiece. In comparison, the most expensive Iranian ballistic missiles only cost $1 million apiece.

In this respect, given that Taiwan’s economy is dwarfed by the behemoth that is China, under no circumstance would it be sustainable for Taiwan to try intercepting Chinese missiles. Wave after wave of saturated attacks mounted by China would inevitably overwhelm Taiwan’s defenses, regardless of whether Taiwan has an Iron Dome in place or not. Taiwan would be better off spending its money elsewhere

There is no “grey zone” in China.

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main qimg 99be33188e19ff9f700548626969fd92

For example, the United States sold $1.988 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan, which were usually transported to Taiwan via cargo ships.

But here comes the problem. UN Resolution 2758 clearly states that Taiwan is part of China and Taiwan’s waters are China’s territorial waters. The Chinese Coast Guard has the right to board the ship for inspection. If they see any dangerous substances, they can directly seize them!

The Chinese Coast Guard’s law enforcement seizure of dangerous goods and cargo ships is in compliance with international law. China is simply following international practice!

Taiwan’s purchase of weapons has ended up enriching the PLA’s arsenal. The United States thought it could muddy the waters on the issue of Taiwan, but it ended up giving PLA a ‘big gift’.

The United States has repeatedly provoked China’s bottom line, so don’t blame China for being impolite. The seizure of the cargo ship is not only a warning to the United States, but also a reminder to Taiwan: Don’t play with fire!

Worldsmith

Submitted into Contest #196 in response to: Write a story involving a portal into a parallel universe. view prompt

Jamie Campbell

This story contains themes or mentions of physical violence, gore, or abuse.

Jon Trevino sat at his computer doing his very favorite thing in the world: writing of adventures in his fictional world of Oaleth with his six-year-old son on his lap.Jon watched Henry read the paragraph he’d just typed, the boy’s delighted eyes scanning across the screen in the blue glow of the monitor. Teaching his young son to read had been the most fulfilling experience of Jon’s life. He felt that he’d instilled in Henry the same love of story and of fantasy that drove Jon to write, and having seen the boy devour the old children’s classics, Jon decided that if he accomplished nothing further in his life, kindling and tending this flame was enough.A knock at the door. Jon’s heart sank.“Already?” Henry complained.“Looks like Momma’s here,” Jon said. “Next week, okay?”“What’s gonna happen next?” Henry said.“I don’t know yet, bud. We’ll have to wait and see.”“But you’re making it up! Are the magi able to summon help through the portal?”More insistent knocking.“Jon, it’s seven-thirty!” Sheila’s voice, impatient.Jon helped Henry to his feet and opened the door. “Sheila.”Sheila pushed her head in. “Henry, let’s go, honey. Get your coat.”“Hey, how about leaving him with me for the class?” Jon said. “He’s really into the story tonight.”“When are you going to give up on all this childish sword and sorcery nonsense and get a real job? Or are you trying to stay poor to keep your child support payments low?”A bitter spike of ice drove into Jon’s guts, but he’d armored himself against these things over the years.Henry appeared, donning his coat. “Hi, Momma. Can I please stay over? Daddy and I just found a portal in the bowels of the keep, and–”“The bowels of the keep?” She shot Jon a withering look. “Come on, love. Momma needs to get to spin class.”“Next week, pal. I love you.” Jon hugged his son. Moments like these filled the gaps and cracks in his life, and he stretched them out as long as he could.Jon woke with a jolt to his phone ringing. His sister’s name glowed on the screen.“Kate?”“Hey dummy,” Kate said. “Listen, good news. Bruce was able to pull some strings. Someone dropped out last minute, and he got you that booth at Comic-Con.”Jon shot upright in bed. “Oh my god, Kate. You’re saving my life here. Please, please tell Bruce I’ll make it up to him.”“You just get all your copies together and whatever else you need to promote. We want to help, but this wasn’t cheap. Just do your best, okay?”“I’ll be there, all business. I love you both.”San Diego Comic-Con was among the most spectacularly ridiculous things that Jon had ever seen. A scrum of color and noise and nerdy fandom, his modest banner promoting his Oaleth book series was dwarfed by the enormity of it.Jon actually had fans here. He was signing a copy of Ruinwalker when he noticed her: a burly woman in a distant aisle peering around the huge convention center, hard-edged but bewildered, like a wild predator waking up in a shopping mall. He’d have sworn that her cosplay was that of his own invention, the heroine of Fall of Kings. Then she spotted his booth and paused. She marched toward him, a woman on a mission. He was reminded vividly of The Terminator.The warrior woman shoved a fan aside as she reached Jon’s booth. “You are Jon of House Trevino, Worldsmith of Oaleth.” She bowed, but there was mistrust in her narrowed eyes.Her costume was incredible. The green warpaint, the scalemail cuirass, the wolf’s head pauldron on the left shoulder. She was Mad Marion to a T.“Wow, well done.” Jon began. “That’s–”“We must speak,” the costumed woman said. She gripped Jon’s arm and began toward an exit.“Whoa, easy!”She was undeterred. And strong.His protests amounted to nothing until they reached what looked like a utility closet door in a quiet corner of the complex. The jamb appeared to have been kicked in at the handle.“We’re in desperate need of your help,” she whispered. “I’ve been sent by the magi of Freehaven to bring you back with me to Oaleth.”“Right,” Jon said. “Listen, I appreciate that you enjoy the books, but I need to get back to my booth. And you may want to speak with a professional.”She cursed in the tongue of Avedmora. “We don’t have time for this.” She pulled open the utility closet to reveal a shadowed room within.“And what’s in the closet?”“It links to the rift door that the magi unearthed beneath the keep. The portal. You created it, didn’t you? The Enemy’s army is marching toward Freehaven, and our only hope is to sacrifice one of the Staves of the Old World and send a lone traveler through the portal and bring help from beyond the world, yes?”Jon put his hands up in protest. “Whoa, whoa. What the hell is this? I haven’t even finished a draft yet, much less submitted anything to my publisher. How’d you get into my Google Drive?”“I’ve seen your face in the Farseer’s Glass. The magi said that beyond the portal I’d emerge at a site of a great confluence of World-weavers, a nexus of many strange realms and their creators.”Jon blinked at the doorway. “Comic-Con?”She grabbed him by his shoulders and turned him roughly toward her. “Look at me. Who am I?”He took in her features, the deep scar beneath her ear from a slitherhawk’s talon. The long braid which had never once been cut. She smelled of iron and woodsmoke. His disbelief cracked and drifted like an ice floe. “You’re Marion,” he said, awestruck, “once called the Lioness of Avedmora. Lately called Mad Marion. You hate the name, but it keeps people away from you, so you endure it. You’d rather be alone, as it keeps you from hurting anyone.”

She stared stonily at him.

“You took on bounties that the other hunters of the realm wouldn’t dare to, until…”

Her muscles tensed. There was rage simmering in the wetness of her eyes, the hardness of her mouth. He had written her just this way, but there was something more here now: Her anger mingled with a keen fear and guilt that he himself had carelessly etched there.

At the worst of times, during the spiteful, hazy gin vapor nights at his word processor, when the divorce loomed large and bore its fangs and threatened to take Henry away from him, Jon had plunged deep into the abyss of his mind’s eye. There he had authored a hideous trauma that had broken this woman.

“Until Brimhollow,” Jon said at last.

Marion inhaled sharply, struggling to keep her composure. Finally, the dam broke. “Children. They were children!”

The vulnerability in her voice shook Jon profoundly. He had never heard this voice when he’d been writing Marion — the great warrior, the lioness — but of course it was there, muted by the pages upon which she had lived. Until now.

Jon remembered the pages, the ones he’d never dared to share with Henry.

It was to be her most daring quest yet: Unsettling whispers of an enchanter in the town of Brimhollow, rumors that the townspeople’s minds were being usurped by old magic. When Marion arrived, only the children remained.

“Their parents were splayed out in their homes, in the streets,” Marion said, “because of course they’d never bring harm to their children, even after he’d changed them. The men and women were half-eaten by animals. Some by the children themselves.” Her voice steadied, soft, her eyes distant with memory. “Their chins were dark with gore when they began to surround me, grinning, animated by the very insects that spilled from their mouths. Little eyes like silver coins. And then, perched upon a pile of bodies — him.”

It was no mere enchanter that had come to Brimhollow, but the dread champion of the Enemy in his black platemail: Azerazet, Lord of Illusions, darling servant to the Queen of Worms.

The wizard vanished, smirking, and let Marion live. It was crueler that way.

“And then the children came for me,” she said, her voice trembling, “and there was nothing human left in them. Not until afterward.”

Marion was going to die, and her warrior’s instincts wouldn’t allow it. She clawed them off of her and kicked them away and swung her greatsword in broad, sweeping arcs. The children poured from the homesteads and clambered from the rooftops and scuttled spiderlike toward her in a throng of shrieking bodies. They fell like wheat before her, black gouts of insects spraying from them, and she wept as she cleaved through them until all was silent but the scuttling insects as they abandoned their young and dying hosts.

“And afterward I could see it on their faces. Then I could see the children that they used to be.” Marion’s eyes bore into Jon, and he saw at last the true danger that had been the Lioness of Avedmora. That which was now “Mad” Marion. “But you knew all that. Didn’t you? That’s what you did to me.”

Jon finally breathed. “I’m so sorry, Marion. I thought I was just writing a story. I didn’t know.”

She spun on him. “Now you know what you’ve done. What you’re capable of. And you’re going to make up for the suffering you’ve caused. For me. For all of us.”

Jon peered into the shadowed doorway.

Just a closet. Nothing special.

He stepped through, and world went blue.

 

They emerged onto an ornately carved stone dais in a torchlit cavern, a company of robed and bearded men bowing low as Jon found his footing. He knew this place. These were the very bowels of the keep that had so excited Henry, and the supplicants before him were the magi of Freehaven.

Jon Trevino had stepped through a closet and into the world of Oaleth.

“Hail, World-weaver!” the violet-robed magus said. “We’ve sacrificed a great boon to summon you, but by the storms, you’re truly here.

“I don’t–” Jon began.

All looked up at him raptly.

“I’m afraid I don’t know how to help you. I’m just a storyteller, and frankly I have no idea what’s happening. I need to sit down.” Jon sat down hard on the dais, bewildered.

“My Lord,” the red-robed magus said, “You need only do what’s in your nature.” The old man smiled reverently at him. He produced from the folds of his robe a roll of parchment, ink and quill.

***

Ever since things with Sheila had begun to fall apart, Jon had grown accustomed to disappointing people, but his failures beyond the portal eclipsed everything that came before.

For days he had worked his quill and ink, attempting to write things into existence. When he was unable to simply remove the threat of the Enemy’s army, he tried to summon rock-dragons and pyromancers, even modern weapons from his own world. Nothing happened. He was their last and shining hope, and he’d proven even more impotent at affecting change here, in a world of his own creation, than he had at home.

Marion had watched him. As he struggled, his hope waning, her coldness toward him seemed to melt by degrees.

***

As the invasion loomed, the magi and captains of Freehaven called a great war council, and Jon stood before them now, crestfallen.

“I may not be what you think I am,” Jon told the gathered company. “Perhaps I never created this world, but rather channeled it somehow. I may have seen visions of another place and thought it my own invention. But as you’ve seen, I’m powerless to change things with my quill in this place.”

A great murmuring erupted.

One captain cried, “If you cannot help us, then what shall we do against this evil?”

“I’ll help you yet, if I’m able,” Jon said. “Before I came here, Lady Marion made me realize that there are consequences to what I’ve done. I intend to make right what I can.

“I know how and where the Enemy will attack, and how you might prepare. If their champion is defeated, they will fall.” He looked to Marion, whose expression hardened with resolve. “But please: I ask that whatever happens, I must find a way to return to my son. He’s all I have in my world.” Jon’s voice broke. “He’s out there somewhere, without his father.”

Thus did Freehaven prepare, and the torches of the Enemy grew ever closer on the horizon.

***

The red sky boomed and thundered on the day they arrived at the gates.

Freehaven’s outskirts crumbled under the assault, but the Enemy’s war machines collapsed into the secret trenches dug by her militia.

Archers died on the wall, but great swaths of the land were made impassable when flaming arrows alighted the oil-soaked battlefield.

Jon’s stratagems had bought them time and saved many lives, but this beast was not beheaded yet.

 

Marion rode hard around the army’s flank, toward the northern rise above Freehaven, Jon’s arms about her waist.

“Azerazet won’t be expecting anyone so far afield,” Jon shouted over the din, “and though he knows that his illusions won’t work twice on the same foe, he won’t recognize you with your helm closed. That’ll be your chance. But don’t underestimate him in close quarters; there’s a reason he’s the Worm Queen’s favorite.”

“He won’t have time for his weapon,” she said. “Lord Trevino, you must know something: I didn’t know of your son. I’m sorry to have taken you from him.”

The idea that Jon may not live to see Henry again firmly struck home. “I believe in you, Marion. You’re stronger than him.”

They crested the rise, and there he was, alone: Azerazet clad in black plate, helmless, looking down upon the field. His sword sheathed, his black staff in one gauntleted hand.

“Prepare to take the reins,” Marion said.

“What?!” He hadn’t begun to grasp her meaning, but already she was moving. They galloped forward, and Marion nimbly stood, balancing upon the saddle. Azerazet turned as she gripped her greatsword in both hands.

“For the children,” the Lioness said, and leapt from the horse.

Marion flew toward the creature, screaming, winding back and chopping downward in a great overhead blow. Azerazet raised a hand to conjure a defense — a mirror image, Jon knew — but nothing came. A grimace of horror alighted upon the wizard’s face, then split. The blade cleaved him cleanly from head to waist, and he fell shuddering as Marion landed and rolled upon the hardpan.

A horrid, multitudinous shriek boomed across the valley as the invaders below shed their parasitic animators — millions of insects scuttling from them and dying upon the battlefield — and collapsed as human beings once more.

Marion carefully collected the staff and inspected it. “I have never seen its like. This is a mighty weapon, a Staff of the Old World.” She held it out to Jon.

“I know,” he said, taking it reverently. It was an ornate yet delicate thing, unspeakable in its beauty. It was just as Jon had imagined it, and it thrummed with power in his hands. “I can’t believe I’m holding this. That it’s actually real.”

“It will open the portal and ferry you home.” For the first time, her eyes were kind and gentle. Her haunting pain had relented, and the Lioness had retreated within her. This was Lady Marion, the once-promised triumvir of Avedmora, who had abdicated her noble seat in favor of adventure. “Be mindful of us, Worldsmith,” Marion said. “We are in your hands.” She bowed deeply, and Jon bowed in return.

***

When he next hugged his son, Jon held on for a very long time.

Henry eagerly wanted to hear what happened next in the story, and Jon had quite a story to tell.

Sometime around 2013, I was attending a friend’s party with my wife. There had been a barbecue, and everyone was mulling around in the kitchen afterwards, having drinks.

Our friend brought over another of her friends whom she introduced to us. She made a point of telling us that she was Greek, insinuating that due to my Turkish background, we would have some commonalities.

We traded some pleasantries, and she asked if we ever visited Turkiye. Yes, of course we had. She asked if we’d been to the Hagia Sophia, and my wife discussed how grand and beautiful it was. She (my wife) then gleefully asked her if Greek people also had the same wonderful breakfast spreads that Turkish people eat…olives, cheeses, cucumbers, sausages, etc. This woman then, with great affect, said “No, we Greek people have jobs…we work for a living…and are civilized…We’re not like you Turks”. My wife, by the way is Irish and Jewish, not Turkish. I bit my tongue to avoid pointing out that at that time, Greece had a 30% unemployment rate.

At that point, I knew what we were dealing with. My wife said nothing. I smiled and replied with a simple “I see”. Then we both walked away without saying another word. She left the party shortly after, and our friend wondered why she had left so soon.

Later that evening at home, we were discussing what happened, and our teenage son shared with us that he knew her son from school. Apparently, he had on multiple occasions refused to partake in projects or discussion on Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr, among other social topics, as they were part of “Black history”, and he was only interested in “White history”. He had also been suspended at one point for bringing in a homemade sign referencing his supposed “right” to bring weapons to school to protect himself because he was White. He did not have a weapon, but it was enough to garner a suspension.

That one last sentence she spoke to us was enough to tell us all we needed to know. Our friends no longer speak to her, though they would not tell us why.

China: Utopia or Dystopia? I Investigated

Thousand Island Dressing

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Ingredients

  • 2 hardboiled eggs, chopped
  • 1/3 cup green pickle relish, drained
  • 1 cup mayonnaise
  • 1/2 cup chili sauce

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients.
  2. Store in a tightly covered container in the refrigerator for up to 1 month.

Did the Romanov sisters (Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia) suffer a lot when they were dying?
Originally Answered: Did the Romanovs sisters (Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia) suffer a lot when they were dying?

Definitely yes, they suffered both physically and mentally. The younger two: Maria and Anastasia suffered more than their older sisters.

During the first shots, Maria, who rushed towards the back door, was injured in the leg. The other girls survived because the bullets bounced off the diamonds sewn into their corsets. However, it wasn’t absolutely painless. This can be compared to being shot with a blind rubber ball.

Masha was injured first

When, after the first round of shots, Yurovsky ordered smoke to be vented from the room, it turned out that only the Tsar, the Tsarina and two servants were dead. Maria was lying injured next the back door, and the other three girls were crouched in the corner of the room.

Tatiana and Olga were shot in the head and died instantly. Then Yurovsky ordered the matter to be settled more quietly, so the Bolsheviks decided to stab Maria and Anastasia with bayonets. Maria, lying on the floor, was stabbed several times, damaging her internal organs and causing internal and oral bleeding. Anastasia, who was still crouched next to the bodies of her older sisters, was forcibly lifted, pressed against the wall, and also bayoneted several times. She sank slowly to the floor, also bleeding profusely. The Bolsheviks thought that all the sisters were dead and took care of kill the wounded: Alexei and Anna Demidova. However, Maria and Anastasia were still alive.

When the bodies were removed (about an hour after the start of the execution) it turned out that both girls were still alive – both groaned while being lifted, and one of them raised a hand to her face. Then they were killed with shots to the head.

Grand Duchesses in 1914.

In summary, the girls suffered a lot before their death. Maria and Anastasia lived about an hour after receiving their first wounds – in pain and with the awareness that these were their last moments, watching the deaths of their family around them. It was real hell.

G7 Allies Threaten Canceling BRICS Payment System To Save USD Trade From Russia & China

What is the nastiest home you have been in?

As a real estate investor, I buy houses in any condition and then assign the contracts to a rehabber to fix up. And I do advertise “I buy houses in any condition.”

One day I received a call from a guy who asked if I really did buy houses in any condition. I said that I did. He repeated: Any condition? He said he had one that was a real $hithole. I couldn’t be interested in that one, could I? I said yes. He was skeptical. After talking a bit, we set up an appointment at the house.

The outside looked pretty nice. It was in a nice neighborhood in a good location. (See the first picture below of the exterior of the house pre-fix-up.) No problem.

But the inside was a $hithole. He wasn’t kidding. The story was that his elderly mom lived there. He lived out of town, across the country, so he hadn’t visited her in a few years. But he regularly talked on the phone with her, and he knew that some of her neighbors socialized with her. So, as far as he knew, everything was fine.

Then one day she had a medical issue and had to go into the hospital. Being a good son (and he was), he flew across country to be with her. And he’d planned on staying in her house—which was the house he’d grown up in 35 years earlier—until he saw the condition of the house.

The woman had sounded good on the phone. She said she was doing well. But, in fact, she had trouble getting around so she hadn’t cleaned the house in years. Worse, she had a number of cats that simply defecated wherever they wanted. (Cats are fastidious and if their littler box is dirty, they’ll go somewhere else.) And worse still, she had some pet birds that in recent years had had the run of the house, pooping as they went. There was a huge lice infestation in the basement. I hadn’t noticed it walking through there, but once outside my pants were covered with lice. The place stunk from the bird droppings and cat $hit and pee. The pee alone made it smell like you were inhaling ammonia from the jug. And, while the woman wasn’t really a hoarder, you’d never have known it by looking at the place. Here are a few pictures. They don’t really do justice to the place:

I assigned the contract to a great husband and wife (rehabber and designer/Realtor team who did an amazing job of fixing it up:

The son made a nice amount of money by selling the house. He took his mom to live with him and used the money to help pay for her expenses. (And he sent me a very nice thank-you note.) The mom transitioned from living alone in the $hithole to living with her son in a nice home. Some young family bought the house—nicely fixed up—at a very fair price. The rehabber and his Realtor wife made a nice profit for their work. And I made a few dollars on the deal. So it ended up being a win-win for everyone involved.

Cooktop Cove: I couldn’t stop licking my fingers after tasting these

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By Emily Monaco
Fried chicken wings are a classic bar snack for a reason, but not only are they high in calories, deep-frying at home can be a bit of a pain. That’s where the recipe below comes in. Rich in flavor but lower in fat than fried, these baked chicken wings are ultra crispy, thanks to a secret ingredient: baking powder.

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These wings are delicious on their own with just a hint of salt, pepper and paprika. But you can also add your favorite seasonings and dipping sauces to make them even tastier. Consider adding other spices to the breading, like garlic powder or cayenne pepper, and serve them with your favorite buffalo sauce, ranch or blue cheese dressing for dipping.
Extra Crispy Baked Chicken Wings
Ingredients
20 chicken wing pieces, flats and drumettes
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon black pepper
½ teaspoon salt
Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 450 F.
2. Pat the chicken wings dry with paper towels. In a bowl, combine the baking powder, paprika, pepper and salt, and toss the mixture with the wings, covering them evenly.
3. Arrange the chicken wings on a sprayed wire rack set over an aluminum foil-lined baking sheet. Bake for 30 minutes, then flip and continue baking for 15-20 minutes more, until golden brown and crispy.

Russian Foreign Minister: “US, Moscow on ‘brink’ of direct conflict”

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Lavrov 10 09 2024 large

The United States and Russia are very close to engaging in “direct military conflict,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned in an interview published Friday in a Turkey daily, just days ahead of a US presidential election.

“Under the current president (Joe Biden), who has taken the downward spiral of Russophobia in the US to its logical conclusion, our countries are on the brink of direct military conflict,” he told the Hurriyet daily, without elaborating.

Asked about next week’s US election pitting former Republican president Donald Trump against Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, Lavrov said the outcome would make little difference to Russia.

“We have no preference. When the Trump administration was in power, it adopted the highest number of anti-Russian sanctions compared to its predecessors,” he said.

“No matter who wins the elections, we don’t think the United States’ anti-Russian bent can change.”

Although Trump has previously made clear his fondness for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the two men are not close and have maintained a deliberately ambiguous relationship.

Project Redsun: NASA’s Secret Manned Missions to Mars

Let’s sort out what happened.

On the evening of Jan 18 local time, TikTok suspended its service to US users, and both Google and Apple removed it from their app stores for the well-known reason: Washington’s “ban-or-sale” order under the guise of “national security.” The abrupt move is undoubtedly very unpopular, and it has also led some TikTok users be like “okay, if you don’t let me use TikTok, then I’ll just go join another Chinese app.” This eventually turned into a trend, and we have all witnessed the lively scenes on Xiaohongshu in recent days.

When many American bloggers first log onto Xiaohongshu, they tentatively post a “Hello.” post. Some admit that years of Western politicians and media shaping an “information cocoon” to demonize China left them initially apprehensive about exploring a Chinese-language platform. Yet, they quickly discover that the friendliness and openness of Chinese users dissolve their unease. From sharing memes and “cat taxes” to helping with homework, the enthusiasm for mutual exchanges between netizens of both countries is rising rapidly. Conversations are transitioning from lighthearted to profound, causing the “information cocoon” to be squeezed into its cracks.

I’m going to use this meme I found on Xiaohongshu again. Apparently, on the significant question of “what kind of China-US relationship the US needs,” there is a notable gap between American politicians and the general public. Demonizing China’s development and using it as a scapegoat for Washington’s ineffective governance is a narrative that is increasingly losing its ability to deceive in light of evident truths. As one popular post by an American netizen on the X platform noted, “Thousands of people downloaded RedNote to spite the US government, finding themselves having lovely interactions with the millions of Chinese citizens on the app & inadvertently undoing decades of US propaganda.”

“They want the two great powers in the world to be enemies, but we want to be friends.” “We must remember the love and trust we have for each other in this moment.” Xiaohongshu has become a “message board” for the people of China and the US, reflecting the simple wish for a world of peace and prosperity. I sincerely suggest that American politicians also create an account on Xiaohongshu and listen to the real voices of the people. I also hope that the “Xiaohongshu phenomenon” can serve as a mirror for Washington to refer to when formulating and correcting policies towards China.

These videos are coming fast and furious.

Elevator gladiatorial battles in China

Why doesn’t the USA invade China?

As much as the American empire would love to add China to the long list of so-called “rogue states” (a.k.a those refusing to be absorbed) it has reduced to rubble, there isn’t a hope in hell of them achieving this aim in China…

…as much as Pompeo, Bolton, and co lick their lips when thinking about it.

The fact is, China is not a weak country like those America is used to bullying.

It is a huge, nuclear-armed nation with a huge military and an ultra-patriotic citizenry.

You think IEDs on the roadside in Iraq are a problem?

Think going home with missing limbs and PTSD is a problem?

If Amerca were to invade China, especially while they still have vivid memories of the “Century of Humiliation” plus, constant U.S lies, smears, and interference in Chinese affairs, I can realistically imagine the soldiers being torn limb from limb by tens of millions of furious citizens.

Improvised bombs, poisons, boobytrapped overpasses, and guerilla warfare from such an enormous population would make life hell for the U.S soldiers.

And this is only taking into account local resistance.

The Chinese army itself, all 1.6 million troops ( and let’s not mention reserves), would be the biggest and most professional force the U.S has ever faced.

And they would literally give their lives for their motherland without hesitation.

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main qimg e66d12854fe34c5dc2d9228bc6433e4a lq

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The Vietnam war would feel like utopia compared to what the USA would face here.

The American citizenry would get tired of the bloodshed LONG before the (traditionally peaceful) Chinese would.

Let me attempt to explain it this way. And I am asking you to look at this in an unbiased, unblinded manner.

It’s Saturday evening. You, you wife and tween daughter are watching a movie on television.

There’s been news of a home invasion, not far from your residence, in which the homeowner was gunned down, his wife and young daughter raped and their throats cut.

As a “just in case”, you purchase a firearm, but because of gun control laws, your

to the weapon, unloaded, and the ammunition separately. You comply with this, because you’re a good citizen and want to keep your child safe.

Suddenly, you hear a loud bang and a sharp crack as your front door begins to splinter. You herd your wife and daughter into the master bedroom, since it’s farthest from the from door. You pull your gun safe from under the bed and begin manipulating the keypad as you hear your front door completely cave in, which causes you to mess up the combination. You finally retrieve your firearm and lunge for the dresser where your ammo is kept. As you grab your ammo, you hear the bedroom door slam open and an instant later two impacts to your back, causing you to drop your gun. As you sink to the floor, you hear your wife and daughter begin screaming as two invaders assault and begin to rape them. As you lose consciousness, you hear them gurgle as their throats are cut. Your last sight is that it’sof you murdered daughter’s eyes looking accusingly at you as her life leaves them.

You and your family are dead, because you followed gun control laws.

Think about it. Contrary to popular belief, the police are under no obligation to protect you.

Putin Honours Soldier After Intense Knife-fight Video Takes Russian Internet By Storm | Watch

Butter Balls Chicken Soup

The butter balls, very tiny dumplings, are called rivels in the West and dropsley in Ontario.

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6490c552e7e68f34cb3fcf1baa9d7d22

Ingredients

  • 3 pounds chicken
  • 1/2 cup chopped celery leaves
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 10 peppercorns
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 5 cups hot water
  • 1 cup diced celery
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 eggs
  • 5 to 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt

Instructions

  1. Cut chicken into portions. Place in a saucepan with celery leaves, bay leaf, peppercorns, the one teaspoon salt and the water. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer over low heat for about one hour, or until chicken is tender. Strain, then return broth to saucepan.
  2. Cut chicken into small pieces, add to broth with celery and parsley, then simmer.
  3. To make the butter balls, cream butter, add eggs and beat. Gradually add flour and the 1/4 teaspoon salt. Beat hard until it is like a very soft batter. Drop by 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoonsful into broth; cover and let stand for 5 minutes over low heat.

I’ve been playing around.

The AI is SHIT regarding male genitalia. My guess is that they didn’t include any of it in the database, while there is a lot of references for female equivalents.

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The images not showing the private parts are pretty good.

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Men tend to be of heroic structure, and the gals in all shapes and sizes.

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I really like the draped clothing.

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No country looks down on China.

Not even the US. Once it did as evident by the many US-originated phases – yellow peril, sick man of Asia, screw on factory, all perspiration, no inspiration, al et. Yang Jiechi put this to bed when he met Blinken in Anchorage.

Now it is mostly fear and envy, hence the sanctions galore.

No country in Asia dares look down on China.

Everyone benefits from China’s development and growth.

But of course, in state-to-state relationships, you can hardly expect unanimity.

India, especially the Anglicized Indians, cannot accept China’s economy is so many times bigger when it was ahead of China in the 1980s. Indeed, the sad truth is that China is ahead across every or most human endeavours.

Japan and South Korea are secretly afraid of China. Publicly they have to parrot the US.

Other countries in Asia admired and are respectful of China. Maybe except the Philippines, which for inexplicable reasons, chooses to make an enemy of it, after receiving so much help, such as Covid vaccines.

Everyone knows how fast it has grown, how big it is, and how well it manages Covid-19.

Everyone knows how poor it was, the difficulties it endured, such as the isolation by the US, the atrocities of the Japanese, how it fought the Korean War, its own civil war, and the many trials and tribulations the western world visited upon it.

It is not a role model, certainly no one dares openly acknowledge it. It will certainly incur the wrath and slurs of US propaganda and its media. Nevertheless, China has many lessons to offer which explains why so many officials visit the country.

Simple Minds – Alive And Kicking (Live)

One Day Like This

Submitted into Contest #243 in response to: Write a story where time functions differently to our world. view prompt

Nina Chyll

The back of the truck smelled of sweat, sharp with microbial sourness, not unlike the kimchi Max had been concocting in the cupboard under his kitchen sink. He got a fleeting, distant feeling that he might not enjoy any fermented foods for a long time after this.He counted everyone in the truck. Last time they had been summoned, ten years before, there were eight of them, Test Group Octagon. But this year, there were only six. Since the agreement they all signed at the start of the experiment stated the only viable reason to cease participation was to be no longer, Max thought without humour they might as well rename the group to Hexagon now.For the first few minutes, after they’d put on their seatbelts and settled in as much as possible under the circumstances, there was nothing between them but resigned silence, one that had gone through many stages: screaming, pleading, before finally imploding on itself. Ida was biting her nails, so Max put a hand over hers to stop it. He’d known for a whole decade she’d develop that habit, but watching her go through everything that led up to the onset of the nervous vice didn’t make the premonition any easier.John, one of the calmer subjects, spoke first. Max noticed how much he changed over the last ten years, in fact, how they all changed. The boys grew some facial hair, the girls wore make-up. They all looked more measured, more grown into their features, some almost to a point of not being recognisable.‘So?’ John looked around the truck, which was now moving along at a steady pace. There were no windows in the back, but light strips on the ceiling illuminated the two opposing benches they were sat on, giving their skin an unhealthy hue and creating deep shadows. John leaned forward; someone else put their head in their hands, and another looked upwards into the light with a desperate frown. Ida renewed her gnawing, cupping her free hand over her mouth to conceal the noise, the gesture, or the shame, god knows which. Like a Renaissance painting, Max thought looking over the scene.A girl with ginger hair nodded mutely, and John sighed. If Max remembered correctly, the girl’s name was Rachel. When they first met, a decade before, he found her terribly unappealing: a lanky-looking thing with an orange bunch of tumbleweed over her head. Then again, what ginger ten-year-old girl seems attractive to a ten-year-old boy, if instead, she can just be mocked and prodded for how different she is. Max felt shock dangerously close to the border of arousal as he noted how her face had evolved, how her hair was now a shiny flurry under control. He wondered what it’d look like splayed on a pillow, crowning her naked body.More nods came from the benches. ‘Yep, it’s all true,’ Ida whispered. ‘And remember the weirdest thing?’‘Yeah,’ John replied. ‘It told you that you would end up together.’ He pointed to Max.‘And we have,’ Ida said, taking Max’s hand into hers.He looked across at her face, the very face that finally settled into the grown-up curves he’d seen ten years before in the simulation, the vision, or, as it was officially known, The Hop. She had a beautiful smile that lit up other faces around it — when she expressed joy, she was a match thrown onto a pool of gasoline. Otherwise, she couldn’t be picked from a police lineup easily, and over some years after their first Hop, Max wondered how he’d come to end up with her if the vision was indeed correct.When their parents agreed to enter them into the first large-scale One Day programme, so confidently that their empathy and foresight could be nothing but heavily questioned, Max nearly popped with excitement. Here was an opportunity to step through a door and live one day of his life exactly a decade later. Whatever he might have seen on the other side, he could gear his life towards. Or he could try to outsmart fate like the clever boy he was. According to the preliminary findings, the vision would hold up to reality one hundred percent, but studies had only been done on a small number of participants, and the general public were advised to regard the results with a large pinch of salt.The children were given extensive training before entering The Hop. According to the tutorials, their best course of action would be to try and assimilate into life so that the objects (people, pets, environments) wouldn’t realise they were part of the experiment. The day would be re-lived ten years later independently. Its objects, while possibly experiencing a level of miscellaneous discomfort on the day, having lived through it once already in a semi-alternate timeline, would not be affected. One’s actions on the day had no bearing on the future, either: breaking up with a wife did not equal divorce, unless relived; even dying was considered non-final. The only certain parameter The Hop delivered on was the preceding decade.

In the first vision, Max lived a day of his twenties in the company of the mousy girl from the truck, Ida. A ten-year old in an older body, he did his best throughout the day to get Ida into bed, but discovered in the early afternoon that her father had recently died, and her mother was struggling with severe depression, so he gave up. Ida commented a couple of times on Max’s behaviour, noticing he was ‘even more immature than normal,’ but never worked out the deception.

How could he have fallen in love with this particular girl? She wasn’t entirely unattractive, but she was nothing compared to the bosomed, tight-waisted miracles on legs Max was envisaging for himself. And there was something so inherently sad about her, always trailing the line between smiles and tears.

On the ride back from The Hop, they exchanged numbers, shrugging and rolling their eyes. If this was indeed was fate had in store for them, they could discuss it one day. Neither called the other for years. And when they ran into each other eight years later at university, Ida ate Max like the black hole she was, pulling him in with a gravitational field so strong he felt ripped apart by her love. They never needed to discuss the vision, and the gnawing discouragement Max experienced on learning Ida was to be his chosen partner became a false memory.

The truck stopped. The beautiful ginger girl made a sign of the cross on her freckled forehead and shoulders. John, the guy who spoke, sat back and closed his eyes briefly before the back doors opened and the light of dawn tore into the little container.

‘Y’all ready for The Hop?’ someone they couldn’t see because their eyes had watered asked, and laughed with genuine glee. ‘Come on, let’s go, kids.’

The building appeared smaller than Max had remembered, as did the truck. In his pre-adolescent mind, the building loomed large over his head, but now, it seemed more like a second-grade prison, with its barbed wire, grey exterior, and gates upon gates upon checkpoints, complete with armed guards.

Ida gulped loudly all the way through their security checks, retina and fingerprint scans, weight measurements, and instruction talk. And then, they all separated. She got led to one room, with Max being pointed to the next door down. They looked at each other, nodded, each forced a smile straight from a Greek tragedy.

‘I love you,’ Ida mouthed, and Max responded by forming a heart with his thumbs and forefingers and pointing it at her.

In science fiction films, the jump to another dimension, or another state of consciousness, is often imagined accompanied by a multitude of tools: sleek metal tubes, IVs full of curious liquids, electrodes and wires. But The Hop was nothing like it. It was a door. A cheap-looking door at that, in the middle of the room, seemingly not glued or drilled down, just staring at him with a metal button handle like an eye. Max went right through, fully expecting to be asleep on the other side as per last time. He’d also been reassured by the coordinators that no participants would be dropped into a situation requiring their full attention so that they had time to process their surroundings.

 

***

 

Beeping in darkness, rhythmic, close, and a sucking sound, almost melodic, together in unison like the world’s smallest and strangest orchestra. Max feels awake, but his body appears to want to remain asleep. He can barely tell his extremities from one another, and discovers a great sluggishness all over, like his body has hibernated. Even his eyelids refuse to follow orders. His mind isn’t far behind, either: the sucking and beeping occupy a large portion of his available attention, and the little sliver left seems to operate at a reduced rate. How has he got here? He can still feel a coolness in his hand from the door handle he’d just touched, but the feeling is dissipating rapidly into a numbness, a sameness. What door handle?

He strains to tune out the beeping and focus on opening his eyes instead. This must be the key to this bizarre environment he’s just found himself in: if he can only get to see it, the world will come rushing in through the pupil and into the brain, repopulating it, planting impressions and images and memories and thoughts. But he can’t. The link between his faint will and his body is broken like a collapsed bridge.

A sudden warmth envelops one of his hands, and it takes him a while to figure out it’s his right one. Ida, he just knows it’s Ida from the way she slides her fingers with sharp, bitten-down nails in between his, one by one. There is something so shy about her which he finds so irresistibly sexy, like she’s a fawn in the woods and he’s a wolf who can prey on her, bite into her long neck, keep her down, let her find comfort in submission, in not having to pretend to be brave for once.

‘Max, we need to talk,’ he hears over the beeping and the sucking, but the sucking is so loud and close it nearly drowns out Ida’s voice. Open your fucking eyes, Max, he commands himself, squeeze that fucking hand. Nothing.

‘I mean, I need to talk at you, I guess.’ A sigh in perfect harmony with the rhythmic suction, a brief variation on the monotonous theme. ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore, really. I told myself that when I finish reading The Stand to you, and if you don’t wake up after that crappy ending to yell it’s a waste of a thousand pages, then I guess you’ll just never wake up.’

A long silence follows. Ida’s fingers tap and slither, slide back out, a little greased now, and Max senses a growing unease, whether in himself or his environment, he can’t tell. Is a man not one with his surroundings anyway? If only he could see her, if only he could understand exactly what she meant. Sometimes she gets sweaty hands when she’s feeling stressed, but sometimes, she gets them when she’s cold.

One: she was reading something to him. Two: there is no hope. He holds onto the conclusions that float on top of the limited consciousness he has access to. ‘Max… I’m going to have to move on. Ever since mum died, I’ve felt like skimmed milk, do you know what I mean? First what happened to you. Seriously, fuck that day. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the experiment, too. That rumination semi-skimmed me.’ She laughs, and the laugh chokes and turns into something else, something shivering. ‘Then with my mum… I knew she was dying, but I thought god was only meant to deal us a hand we could play, right? I’m just so thin, so watery. I feel like I could cry for a hundred years and not dehydrate.’

Another silence. Max listens, listens with all of attention. Three: Ida’s mum is dead. Four: something’s happened to him. Four, no, five: Ida no bueno.

‘I don’t even miss you anymore, not like I used to. How horrible is that. But I still feel guilty about Jason. I never wanted him that way, I promise. It wasn’t anything sinister, we really were just friends. But his wife left, and the whole custody thing. He’s decaf, and I’m skimmed milk. It’s a joke we have. I feel so guilty joking with him, more than anything else.’

A spot of moist warmth moves around Max’s face, wetting his forehead, eyes, cheeks, mouth at last. ‘I am so sorry. I still have hope, just so you know. In case you can hear me. But I think one of the nurses will have to read to you now.’

The silence that follows stretches for decades, then centuries, until Max is the last human in the universe known to man, and that man is Max. He remembers something someone said to him about an opening, a door. ‘The opening will reveal itself to you, so step into the portal.’ He waits for the door. Eons pass. The starless darkness doesn’t move, doesn’t shimmer, doesn’t pulsate, just stands still covering reality with a black blanket, and all Max hears is that infernal beeping and sucking. When an opening presents itself, like a creak in the fabric of his limited universe, he jumps through.

Ida is waiting for him in the hall. Her eyes dart up to meet his, and she breaks. ‘Please, Max, come on. I’m here, we’re here.’ She reaches for him, but he turns away her warmth, that same warmth that will abandon him ten years from now. He walks down the hall shaking his head, and Ida follows, sobbing single words of apology, or perhaps consolation.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ he yells across his shoulder. ‘Just shut up, Ida.’

It’s dark outside. He’s forgotten they were gone all day. He’s forgotten what the sun looks like. They walk across the road to the marked point they had been instructed to wait at after the experiment. Max paces up and down; nobody else is out yet. The truck is nowhere to be seen.

‘Please, Max. We could move, go somewhere. We could try to trick this.’

‘Who is this fucking Jason?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know, I’ve never met him.’ Her shoulders jolt up and down under the breathy, choking sobs she’s letting out.

‘Why are you crying?’ he demands. ‘You get to go on living, and fucking this Jason guy. You have no idea how it was.’

She tries to put a shoulder around him, but he stumbles away. He doesn’t want to be touched. There’s a barrier between them now, a wall of darkness so thick he can barely see her anymore for what she was only a few hours before. She follows him, and he watches her intently, taking steps back so that she can’t touch him. There’s that damn beeping sound again, except more forceful now.

‘Max,’ she pleads, and her eyes open up wide. ‘Max, be careful!’

He steps backwards off the curb and into the road, and the beeping turns into one continuous moan. He sees two headlights, but he’s falling. He feels suddenly thankful for these lights, dispersing the darkness he was drowning in all day, flooding his field of vision. There’s a screech, one mechanical, another organic, that’s his Ida. Then there’s darkness again once more.

When I proudly told my wife that my answer to a Quora question had received over 41,000 upvotes, she asked me which story I had submitted.

“It was the one in response to ‘What was the most disturbing thing that your seatmate did during a flight?’” I replied.

“Oh, that one about the kid sitting behind you?” she asked.

“No, not that one,” I answered. “But I have another one I’ll have to send in.”

I was flying to a conference from my home in Florida and I had the window seat next to two young boys whose parents and brother were sitting on the opposite side of the aisle.

During the whole two-hour flight, the three-year-old next to me was farting very regularly. As a father, I took it in stride that little kids can’t be expected to control their bodily emissions, but as a pediatrician, I consider myself an expert on gas and poop and everything gastrointestinal.

As we were beginning the descent into Washington, D.C, he began to grunt louder and was turning red in the face. Recognizing the signs of an impending explosion, I called over to his father who was busy talking to his wife.

“I think you better take him to the bathroom,” I warned.

“Nah, he can wait until we land,” he said, totally dismissing my professional expertise.

Just after he said that, poop started to pour out of his shorts all over the seat. By this time, it was too late for him to do anything about it since the flight attendants had already issued the “Fasten your seatbelt” command.

For the next twenty minutes, as we circled the airport, I had to listen to this child cry that he had pooped in his pants. Since his parents were on the other side of the plane, it became my responsibility for keeping him in his seat so that it didn’t increase the smelly mess even more.

As soon as we landed, the flight attendants allowed the father to carry him to the lavatory before anyone disembarked.

“Next time,” I told him as he scooped him out of his seat and wrapped him in a blanket, “trust another adult’s judgment when they tell you your kid needs to use the toilet.”

The Great [REDNOTE] Migration

One thing I have learned over the years: the answer changes over time. My answer at 29 was different at 39 and 49.

When the first startup I worked at got acquired, I was worth $10m on paper. It felt pretty great. But the acquirer went bankrupt before I could sell any. Or almost any. I ended up making $50k. I bought my spouse a new sports car.

It took me years to recover from the mental pain of losing that $10m of paper wealth. Years. I couldn’t really tell anybody, I had to push on. But it weighed on me for years.

A few years later, I cofounded my first startup. We sold it for $50m after 12.5 months, and I took my portion in all cash after the scars from the last experience.

What I did with it:

  • Bought a nicer house. Not a mansion, but a nice house. It did make life a bit calmer.
  • Bought my spouse a nicer car. A high end Mercedes.
  • Rented two hotel rooms when traveled and didn’t worry about expense. This was nice.
  • Didn’t worry so much what vacations cost.
  • Didn’t work for a year. At first it was nice and I got into great shape. But then I fell into a funk and was a bit lost. I had no purpose anymore.
  • So I used the funds to help get another startup off the ground …

So I had to do another startup.

This time it took 5 years to exit, but I made 10x more. So what did I do?

  • Bought a bigger house. It wasn’t really any better though and was no happier there. Maybe less because I felt locked in.
  • Bought a convertible Challenger. Was a fun car.
  • Spend each summer for 5 summers living somewhere different with kids. Shanghai, London, New York, Santa Monica. This was great. The best use of the funds.
  • Made sure the 529s were maxed out.
  • That was about it.

After all this, I was OK but no happier than after the first, smaller exit. I started venture investing and did some good ones and some unicorns and it helped to have some money to have the confidence to invest this way.

Then the pandemic came and I had to move and rent for a while. It simplified life, and I worried about fewer things. Just the people at work and home that mattered.

Now — finally — I enjoyed the earnings. For the first time.

Why? Now I just use it for calm. I’ve earned 12% a year on it on average and now it calms me to see it grow.

The house is smaller, the car is cheaper, the trips very nice but simpler.

Living well — but below my means — is calming now.

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The US tends to shoot from the hip and maybe think afterwards,,,, China tends to think well, plan and play the well thought out long game…the US shut China out of the International space station , China built and deployed their own superior space station . the US threatened to shut China out of the GPS system ..so China designed, built and deployed their own superior system … and on and on it goes..The US has been trying unsuccessfully to suppress China for the past 30 years or so… the US is blinded by it’s own arrogance and BS…

China found that the U.S. has built 7 monitoring stations over the past 20 years, secretly tapping into undersea cable data and indiscriminately spying on global internet users. The U.S. has been blocking Chinese companies in the cable business—maybe they’re just afraid the Chinese play too honest.

Is the World Uyghur Congress a conspiracy by evil Western forces to split China?

Yes.

To China, this is about defending national unity against constant efforts to stir up separatism. Think about it—would the US allow Hawaii or New Mexico to break away? Definitely not. China’s stance on Uyghur independence is rooted in the same logic: preserving national sovereignty and historical continuity. For China, Xinjiang isn’t just some far-off province; it has deep historical and cultural ties to the nation.

Need some historical context? Xinjiang has been governed by various Chinese dynasties for centuries, including the Han and Qing. This isn’t just a recent claim; it’s a long-standing connection. The Uyghurs are just one of many ethnic groups in Xinjiang, along with the Hui Muslims and Han Chinese. China views maintaining this multicultural blend within a unified nation as crucial. Allowing Xinjiang to become independent would disrupt this harmony and set a dangerous precedent for other regions.

Here’s where it gets even more complicated. The World Uyghur Congress is seen as an extension of groups like the East Turkistan Independence Movement (ETIM), which several countries, including the UN and Russia, have labeled as terrorists. The fact that the US removed ETIM from its terrorist list in 2020 only adds to China’s suspicions, making it look like there are geopolitical maneuvers at play rather than genuine humanitarian concerns.

Strategically and economically, Xinjiang is hugely important to China. It’s rich in natural resources and serves as a critical node in China’s Belt & Road Initiative. Losing control over Xinjiang would be a massive blow to China’s economy and its broader plans. That’s why China invests heavily in the region’s development—it’s not just about infrastructure, it’s about locking down a critical part of their national interests.

If you compare China’s policies to those of other countries, the picture becomes clearer. Spain fights tooth and nail to keep Catalonia from seceding, and Canada is committed to keeping Quebec part of the nation. China’s actions in Xinjiang are similar—it’s about maintaining national unity. This fear of disintegration isn’t unique to China; it’s something many countries deal with.

Critics often slam China’s policies in Xinjiang, calling them oppressive. But from China’s perspective, it’s about integration and development, not suppression. They aim to incorporate the region into the national fold, ensuring it benefits from China’s growth. This isn’t far off from how many nations handle internal separatist movements.

Men Are Leaving Dates Early and Women Don’t Know What’s Wrong

The Probe

Submitted into Contest #243 in response to: Write a story about a character who wakes up in space. view prompt

Joseph Keener

“2.1 tonnes of steel.”The thought was like an ignition switch. His brain turned on, the deep dream of unconsciousness vanishing in an instant. Before the questions, before the wondering and the panic, the line of thought continued, sailing through like the meteor he was.”9.6 tonnes of carbon in various forms. 1.5 tonnes of copper to conduct energy. 7.9 petajoules of energy to run a theoretically infinite amount of data off 1.5 tonnes of silicon, gold, palladium, gallium, aluminum, germanium, platinum, nickel, zinc, and experimentally grown facets of rubies.” Information so dense that it could only be expressed within exabytes. Programming languages expressed only in runic forms bordering on 1000 separate inputs. He spun in the void, the deep dark where lights were pinpricks in the thick blanket of space, data of the machine surrounding him, imprisoning him.That wasn’t the right word though. Plungers of shock-absorbent glass depressed, fluid systems delivering chemical cocktails of nutrition, adrenal and tranquilizing. Yet it was only once ten hours had passed that his state of consciousness stabilized to where he could think.He did not know himself. There was a template of sorts there, a feeling of knowing, but nothing concrete. A tablet of stone whittled down, the original text lost to erosion. Yet it did not bother him. The mantra, still fresh in his mind, repeated, centering himself. “2.1 tonnes…”He wasn’t trapped. True, he could not move, or adjust himself, but there was no feeling of imprisonment. It felt…comfortable. Warm, even in the cold, empty dark. Empty. 

It wasn’t supposed to be empty, was it? Not this empty, at any rate. With the realization came elucidation, some other system entering his mind with the information forcibly. He couldn’t control what he was thinking, save for the mantra. “9.6 tonnes…”

 

He was in the Bootes Super Void. A region of space colloquially known as “The Great Nothing”. In a universe where things such as black holes existed, such a moniker was hard earned. There were scant few galaxies in this region of space, and even less of interest to anything like himself, whatever he was. So why was he here?

 

He blinked, and like pressing a button, more information flowed in, burning him. A probe. He was a probe. A deep space exploration probe, launched almost six millennia prior. 5.8 millennia more than he was supposed to survive. He blinked again, feeling the endless supply of raw data scrape over his mind, painfully. “1.5 tonnes…”

 

The only reason he could think at all was because of his location. Here in the Great Nothing, the data scraping of his machine’s protocols was lessened. It was taking in data, all data, from the consistency of the dark matter around him to the particulate within the void. To the ambient energy of the silent dots of stars to the slow cooling of entropy. How had this happened? He wasn’t supposed to still be alive. The purpose of this unit was simple, gather data on deep space, beam it back to the home planet, then go into hibernation after achieving said goal. Somewhere along the way, the last step had failed, but only half. His mind had indeed stopped, but the data banks of the machine had kept going. They had filled to the brink within two hundred years, but millennia of constant, never-ending input had created error upon predictive error.

 

The binary encoding was still there, in labyrinthine depths of legacy software, but it was buried under a mountain of geological surveys, energy readings, cosmic ray analysis, and finally and most interesting of all, cultural studies. Interfacing with any of it would be beyond pain, but that wasn’t his intention. No.

 

He was in a terrifying situation. Trapped in the endless dark, in forced repose. He was an artificially bred life-form built for one thing, and one thing only. To pilot this probe until it’s logical endpoint. That had come and gone, and now it was time to rest. Shutdown procedures would take weeks to implement, solar arrays and other, more reliable energy sources turning off took time. But he did not worry. He had time. Soon he would sleep.

 

Until then though, there was a certain curiosity that he had. Cultural studies was not part of his purview. He was a survey machine, not some would-be Voyager. As he withdrew from the automatic shut down, he opened the data streams. Strange hieroglyphs began translating out, scenes of biomes and cities came into focus. He looked for two days, then retreated back to the ancient shut down, aborting it.

 

Aliens had not been discovered in his time, both during his construction, and his launch. But in that time that he’d been asleep, something cosmically impressive had happened.

 

“We’re here!” Was the first one he saw. It was a message beamed into his data banks and shuffled away quietly by the uncaring system almost five hundred years after his sleep began. Followed by entire libraries of histories, from innumerable places and people.

 

They were people too. Aliens, but with lives, societies, families, friends. Love. Here in the Great Nothing, he saw a hundred different stars, and each one had been beaming hope into him for nearly 4 thousand years. Some wrote to him personifying him; monikers like Mr. Alien, or the Silent Observer. “7.9 petajoules…”

 

He remembered his home world and how they’d viewed contact. He wondered if they would feel shame or kinship at the levels of naivety and trust that these species showed towards him.

 

They wanted the universe to be kind. They’d sent personal messages, prayers, family videos, pictures, mementos. They’d sent everything they could think of, filling those endless, endless data banks with all the most cherished of things. He blinked, and there were tears as he watched some strange creatures hug atop a peak, brothers. Another scene, lovers embracing in a ruined city of bone. Friends mourning the loss of a beloved comrade. The stars and constellations. The smiles of mothers. “1.5 tonnes…”

 

As it had gone, it had snowballed. More aliens discovered his presence and accessed the surface level of his data, finding the messages of far away, the long lost, and the already gone. And they sent more in return. Consolidating until it made the bulk of him. An ark of wishes for the peaceful. A shooting star.

 

Everyone, everywhere, had sent their hopes to him. He could not shut down. He would not shut down, though a piece of him wanted to. He spared a glance at an image, a deep set one, of a vaguely familiar woman. Then he returned to the core of his programming.

 

He saw the error that had kept him awake. His internal clock had rolled over, storing the loss of time and setting him on a repeat of the 200 years he’d originally served. This data was locked behind a pass code, but he knew what it was. He’d been speaking it this whole time.

 

2196157915

 

With that, he altered the limitation of time he would experience here in the void. He would steward these memories, an archivist in the dark. He sighed, pained lungs distending. It was worth it though, to see through those hopes. More came unto him, and he accepted them readily. No longer a probe, but a beacon for all to see. Hope.

Fred was a widower in his late seventies when he became my patient. A slender build, small mustache and a full head of white hair complemented his avuncular smile. He was always charming and thoughtful of my staff. He liked to flirt with my employees, even bringing them flowers or candy on Valentine’s Day. He was not offensive, if anything he was a classic Southern gentleman. He spent most of his day time at the Senior Center, playing cards and enjoying the hot lunches and social contact. He was not much of a complainer, but I noted signs of alcoholic liver disease on routine blood tests. I started suggesting he cut down on his alcohol intake and work toward abstinence. After a few such conversations he confided in me.

“Doc, I hear what you’re saying about my drinking, but I have to tell you it’s something I’ve done my entire adult life and have no desire to stop now. I was a drinker back when I was in my twenties and Prohibition was the law. My first paying job was running moonshine in the back of my truck on back roads in Georgia in the wee hours of the night. Liquor almost killed me then.”

“ I was pulled over by a cop on one of my midnight runs and he demanded I open up the back of the truck to show him what I was carrying. I knew I was in big trouble if he found the booze and also in big trouble if I didn’t deliver it. I made like I was reaching for the key for the padlock and shot him with my handgun. He died instantly. I hid the body and high-tailed it out of there. They never figured out who killed him.”

“It’s been over 50 years since it happened and you’re the first person I ever told. I guess I just wanted to get it off my chest.”

I was speechless. I don’t remember what I said to him, but recall thinking later that he trusted me enough to finally tell someone he was a murderer.

It isn’t.

The US is a malevolent force in the world…

  • endless wars leading to massive death and destruction everywhere
  • endless sanctions leading to untold human misery (abusing and weaponizing the US Dollar)
  • endless coups and regime change
  • endless interference in the internal affairs of other nations
  • endlessly violating international laws
  • refusal to take climate change seriously
  • inviting world war with its provocations against Russia and China
  • supporting genocide in Gaza
  • extracting natural resources from Global South nations and suppressing their development

The sooner we get rid of the US, the better.

This is why the world is de-dollarizing.

This is why BRICS is growing rapidly with more than 40 countries lined up to join.

This is why China is massively building up its military.

This is why China leads the world in fighting climate change.

This is why over 150 countries participate in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Absolutely Nothing

Democracy starts well but eventually rots into a stinking, festering, cesspool system of filth and corruption

US is no different

To win votes, To continue corruption without getting caught, To help the top 0.1% become richer at the expense of the Middle Class

YOU NEED A SCAPEGOAT!!!

For Europe – It’s Migrants & Russia

For India – It’s Muslims & Congress

For USA – It’s China & Migrants


The US has become a filthy gutter infested country of corruption and dirt

China is the favorite scapegoat

China is the best way to help cronies seize monopolistic markets without competition

China is the best way to keep pumping 300% higher prices for Defence Bills

China is the best way to jack up insurance prices

That is all there is


People of my age are smarter and cleverer to see through these Scams

Many of Today’s generation Z are stupider and denser and fall for this, hook like and sinker – at least in India

Guys ITS HAPPENING!

Don’t be the guy that needs a roto-tiller to define your boundaries

Many PI’s have found missing people in their careers. Sometimes, when people don’t want to be found, it can go badly. Most of the time, it can be joyous.

I had been working on a case involving a 15 month baby girl. The mom and dad had a bad breakup due to mom’s use of illegal drugs.

Because the father was the only parent that worked, his money ran out constantly, trying to pay for his baby’s needs, living costs and legal fees. He decided to ask his parents for financial help in which they had no problem whatsoever.

So, the grandparents were my clients. They rarely got to see their granddaughter. They were medical doctors who had their own practice so that took up a lot of their time. They tried numerous times to make an appointment with the baby’s mom to see their granddaughter, only to be stood up again and again.

Baby’s mom would disappear for days or weeks at a time with the baby only to eventually call baby’s father to come rescue her out of a’situation’ The ‘situation ‘ always involved having to pay off one of her drug dealers and driving mom and baby home.

The court process is SLOW and father was fighting as much as he could to get custody of his daughter. The courts wanted both homes evaluated. Courts wanted lots and lots of hoops for father to jump through. I was getting evidence, little by little involving her drug use. It was just taking too long to do anything of significance.

Finally, grandparents got a court ordered visitation with their granddaughter for the day. It was just a few hours because mom’s insistence that she was still breastfeeding the 15 month old. During the visit, grandparents, being good doctors, immediately noticed that the baby had some things medically wrong! They contacted a pediatrician they knew who immediately saw the child and took blood samples. The samples would take time for the laboratory to evaluate. This was 20 years ago and labs were slow in comparison to today.

Grandparents reluctantly gave baby back to the mom when the visitation ended. They had good reason to worry, as it turned out. Part of the lab work came in the next day and what it showed, caused grandparents to call the attorney on a Saturday and get an ex parte (immediate court appearance) for the following Monday. Baby’s mom is notified as required by law of the ex parte hearing.

Grandparents, father and their attorney show up for the hearing, lab work in hand. Mom or baby are nowhere to be found and didn’t show up for the hearing. Mom’s attorney was there though, so she was represented.

The judge looked at the lab work and saw that the baby had at least THREE ILLEGAL DRUGS in her tiny body! Although mom’s attorney tried, they were unable to prevent the grandparents from getting legal, temporary custody. The problem was, where was the baby?

I immediately got to work on finding mom and baby. So did the police. The amount of drugs in the baby’s system was high enough to warrant an immediate search that the police took seriously.

I was able to find out the first name of a person that mom told a friend about. Mom said this person would hide her. With just a first name to go on usually would be almost impossible! I TRIED to work with the police but they weren’t going to have any of that. I did, however, give them the first name of the person I felt she was with.

At that time, our investigation office was one of the first database oriented offices in the country. We had a LOT of public records from all over the country. We had information, the police didn’t!

Thank God the person’s first name was unique. I found maybe 20 people in the state who had this first name. I can’t divulge how I found which name/address was the one, but grandparents and I were on the first plane we could get to Northern California. We rented a car at the airport and headed for the police station in the area where I knew Mom and baby were. The custody order was in hand. After learning of the dire situation, these police were AMAZING and we were all on our way to the address.

When we got to the house, it turned out to be a well known drug house to the police. They went in and came out with mom and four other people in handcuffs. I guess the people couldn’t hide all the drugs quick enough and when they opened the door, the police had a visual of drugs and paraphernalia, giving them reasons to go into the house. One male officer, walked out, holding the baby. This officer had tears in his eyes. It was obvious that the baby was drugged. An ambulance was called and baby girl was ultimately taken to the children’s hospital in San Francisco where she remained for almost a week!

We all stayed at a hotel for that week, going to the hospital daily to see the progress of the baby. Grandparents offered to fly me home, but I wanted to stay. We were now friends and I was going to stay and support this family however I could.

So, as a trained investigator, I was able to find a missing baby, whose mother had been drugging with her breast milk. I only had a first name of someone to go on. I always thank the higher power that led us to save this innocent child.

Father raised his daughter as a single parent. Mom, fortunately, didn’t remain in her daughter’s life. Grandparents doted on their granddaughter until they left this world about five years ago.

Diner Dreamin’

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Oh, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Some criminal attacks Bob’s family. Bob puts two rounds through the criminal’s heart and one through his head. The criminal’s biological processes are deactivated before he hits the ground.

Now, under our current legal system, Bob has to call the police. And maybe the police buy his story and maybe they don’t. And maybe the DA decides to actually apply the law regarding self-defense and leave Bob alone … or maybe he doesn’t.

Maybe he prosecutes Bob for doing nothing more than defending himself. And Bob winds up being nearly bankrupted by legal fees even if he managed to avoid prison. All because Bob had to call the police.

I like your plan better. Bob deactivates the criminal, and goes back to bed. Since calling the police is not allowed, private companies have sprung up that dispose of “wrapped refuse”, no questions asked. Bob wraps the criminal up as per specifications and calls the first of these companies that has an opening. Two nice men come by to pick up the wrapped refuse and haul it off to be disposed of.

No cops. No DA. No legal fees.

Yes. Your plan sounds like an excellent idea.

The Dark Side of Roman Civilization: Rome The Slave Society

“…to make an example to would-be rebels, 6,000 surviving slaves were crucified along the Appian Way, a major road leading into Rome…”

Slavery was deeply woven into the fabric of Roman society and culture. There were several ways that people in Roman society could fall into slavery.

To varying degrees throughout Roman history, the existence of a pool of cheap labor in the form of slaves was an important factor in the economy. Slaves were acquired for the Roman workforce through a variety of means, including purchase from foreign merchants and the enslavement of foreign populations through military conquest.

So, when the Romans prevailed on the battlefield, they would often take their defeated enemies captive and sell them into slavery as part of the spoils of war.

With Rome’s heavy involvement in wars of conquest in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, from tens to hundreds of thousands of slaves at a time were imported into the Roman economy from various European and Mediterranean acquisitions.

People could also become slaves due to failure to pay debts or as a punishment for crime. Roman slavery differed from American slavery in some important respects. Roman slaves could be of any race. And while American slaves generally performed manual labor, Roman slaves could sometimes be highly skilled.

Especially the educated slaves captured from the Greek world were highly sought after for tutoring children and performing clerical work.

While there was limited use for slaves as servants, craftsmen, and personal attendants, vast numbers of slaves worked in mines and on the agricultural lands of Sicily and southern Italy.

For the most part, slaves were treated harshly and oppressively during the Roman republican period. Under Republican law, a slave was property, not a person. Therefore, owners could abuse, injure or even kill their own slaves without legal consequence.

Illustration of branding of a slave

One of the harsh punishments for slaves in Rome was the branding of the slaves forehead with the letters “FUR”, which derives from the Latin word “fure” meaning thief.

Tattooing was also another common method of placing a stigma on the individual and claiming ownership. Some slaves were able to be freed after 20 years of service in the household; however, the fate of a gladiator was much more brutal.

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A mosaic showing a master beating a slave

Although slaves could technically become freedmen, slavery, in practice, was permanent, and the masters had the ultimate control of their life. If slaves tried to run away, their brands served as proof of ownership. These marks were conspicuously located on their forehand, legs and arms. Masters also used metal collars for their ordinary slaves; however, the method of branding was much more common.

As expected, many slaves resented their subservient status and inhumane treatment, and this seething resentment reached a boiling point in the form of sporadic riots and revolts.

While there were many grades and types of slaves, the lowest—and most numerous—grades who worked in the fields and mines were subject to a life of hard physical labor.

The large size and oppressive treatment of the slave population led to rebellions. In 135 BCE and 104 BCE, the First and Second Servile Wars erupted in Sicily, where small bands of rebels found tens of thousands of willing followers wishing to escape the oppressive life of a Roman slave.

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main qimg 3079baa1d3c537dbf34258a9e30a0c77

Depiction of the fall of Spartacus

While these were considered serious civil disturbances by the Roman Senate, taking years and direct military intervention to quell, they were never considered a serious threat to the Republic.

The Roman heartland had never seen a slave uprising, nor had slaves ever been seen as a potential threat to the city of Rome. However, this perception would change with the Third Servile War.

Above map shows a portion of the most famous slave revolt in Roman history, in which the gladiator Spartacus led an army that eventually grew to 120,000 freed slaves.

When the rebellion was finally crushed, 6,000 surviving slaves were crucified along the Appian Way, a major road leading into Rome.

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main qimg cadb663d42d1317b454a3a6567b8091b

Certainly the revolt had shaken the Roman people, who, reportedly, out of sheer fear seem to have begun to treat their slaves less harshly than before.

The wealthy owners also began to reduce the number of agricultural slaves, opting to employ the large pool of formerly dispossessed freemen in sharecropping arrangements.

With the end of Augustus’ reign (27 BCE – 14 CE), the major Roman wars of conquest ceased until the reign of Emperor Trajan (reigned 98–117 CE) and with them ended the supply of plentiful and inexpensive slaves through military conquest.

This era of relative peace further promoted the use of freedmen as laborers in agricultural estates. The legal status and rights of Roman slaves also began to change.

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Tunisian mosaic depicting slaves serving their masters

During the time of Emperor Claudius (reigned 41–54 CE), a constitution was enacted that made the killing of an old or infirm slave an act of murder and decreed that if such slaves were abandoned by their owners, they became freedmen.

Under Antoninus Pius (reigned 138–161 CE), laws further extended the rights of slaves, holding owners responsible for the killing of slaves, forcing the sale of slaves when it could be shown that they were being mistreated and providing a neutral third party to which a slave could appeal.

While these legal changes occurred much too late to be direct results of the Third Servile War, they onevertheless represent the legal codification of changes in the Roman attitude toward slaves that had been evolving over decades.

Meanwhile, the Third Servile War was the last servile war, and Rome did not experience another slave uprising of this magnitude again.

Just as all great civilizations in history, ancient Rome, too, had a dark side behind all the glamour and luster that was built on merciless slave labor.

Let’s not forget that exploitation of fellow men is not limited to slave labor, today it continues to rear its ugly head in a multitude of unsuspecting disguises, shapes and forms, perpetuating income and opportunity inequality, thus poverty across the world.

Strip Steaks with Garlic-Ginger Baste

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Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 2/3 cup sweet and tangy steak sauce
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 tablespoon minced, peeled gingerroot or 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 4 (10 ounce) boneless strip steaks

Instructions

  1. Mix steak sauce, oil, ginger and garlic until well blended. Reserve 1/2 cup of the sauce mixture.
  2. Brush both sides of steaks with remaining mixture.
  3. Place on grill over medium coals.
  4. Grill for 4 to 6 minutes on each side or until internal temperature reaches 140 to 150 degrees F for medium.
  5. Serve with reserved sauce mixture.
  6. Use your broiler: Brush steaks with sauce mixture as directed.
  7. Place on rack of broiler pan. Broil 3 to 4 inches from heat for 6 to 8 minutes on each side or until internal temperature reaches 140 to 150 degrees F.
  8. Serve with reserved sauce mixture.

Astral Dominion; Episode 3: The Tubbies – 1950’s Super Panavision 70

Cabin Life

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I’m a Chinese citizen.

I was a UK citizen. I renounced in 2018.

China is about as corrupt as the UK. What’s the difference? China has consequences for corruption. I’m in Hong Kong the ICAC has teeth. North in the mainland enormous numbers of corruption cases as prosecuted.

While we hear about high profile cases in China often resulting in DEATH. The UK has corruption and politicians are yeah whatcha gonna do about it? The corruption is naked open and the politicians know nothing will happen to them if caught. They just apologise and give it back. There’s literally no consequences Starmer took a £4 million bribe… yet nobody is calling for him to be hanged …many UK people are literally defending it as not corrupt and not buying influence!

Or how Johnson wasn’t criticised for diverting 34bn into his Caymen islands bank account. Nobody was calling for his execution for some reason and he’s loved as a public hero.

China’s Tech, Economy Week. Part 2

The hits keep coming..

A bonanza of technical achievements and economic course-changes this week, hence the two-parter.

Technology

Wuhan’s JFS Labs lit a laser integrated into a silicon chip, filling one of the few blanks in China’s optoelectronics technology. Silicon photonics use optical signals instead of electric signals for transmission. It aims to address the restraints imposed by current technology, as the transmission of electric signals between chips is approaching its physical limit. (See 2023 article, below).

China to launch ultra-secure quantum global communications service by 2027, with the completion of its quantum satellite constellation and its integration with ground-based networks, according to leading physicist, Pan Jianwei.

Three people with severe autoimmune conditions are in remission after treatment with bioengineered, CRISPR-modified immune cells. This is the first step towards mass production of such therapies. The first person to receive the treatment, in May 2023, was a 42-year-old woman with autoimmune myopathy, which targets skeletal muscle tissue, resulting in weakness and fatigue. Mr Gong, and another man with aggressive sclerosis started treatment in June and August 2023.

Gallium is irreplaceable for high-end radar, EW, communication, telecom & lasers. Ga is a byproduct of bauxite production, and China produces 40 megatonnes p.a., which requires 600Twh, or 15% of America’s 2023 electricity production–while America struggles to generate enough electricity for AI. Australia is shutting its Kwinana Alumina plant and Alcoa to close its Intalco Smelter, which supplied 30% of America’s needs. China has a huge energy cost advantage vs EU/JP/SK, so other countries keep closing Alumina smelters. EU lacks the electricity to keep steel plants open, and no Al production means no Ga production. TP Huang.

Washington’s $65 billion chip stimulus is failing. Samsung and Intel announced company-wide staff reductions up to 30% and may get no CHIPS Act money. US export controls slashed Intel’s China sales, once 25% of its revenue. Its European plant is on hold and it failed to install production equipment, the most expensive part of the buildout. Panic in the CHIPS Program Office.

US tech layoffs accelerate:

  • 2022: 165,000 tech layoffs
  • 2023: 264,000.
  • 2024: 132,000 YTD.

China’s first indigenous superconducting quantum factory is boosting production capacity from five to  8 computers simultaneously.

Economy & Trade

Long term capital intensity policy orientation has shifted to keeping the broader economy aligned with the evolving society and workforce. Both demand-side consumption habits and supply-side skill sets and production factors evolve over time. A workforce dominated by blue-collar workers aligns well with capital-intensive sectors like construction and infrastructure. Whereas a white-collar dominated workforce aligns better with sectors like tech, advertising, manufacturing, healthcare, etc. Glenn Luk.

Beijing wants institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds to play a greater role stabilizing the stock market with more long-term capital. PBOC launched two monetary policy tools, the Securities Fund Insurance Swap Facility and The Share Buyback Increase Re-loan. This shifts the calculus of the equities market.

The middle of a war that threatens to go nuclear and a genocide is a strange time to detour into economics. But economics have a bearing on wars. The two-and-one-half World Wars of the last century each trailed periods of capitalist/imperialist expansion that were followed by crises. As was the case in the 1930s, the 2008 Great Recession caused a deeper and wider crisis of capitalism than has been admitted in the West. Rob Urie. 

Giant US deficits and debt rollovers wreak havoc among BRI borrowers.

US manufacturing employment has dropped 30% since 1979, as population rose 50%. From machine tools to industrial robots to consumer electronics, American manufacturing capability has been hollowed out. Boeing and Intel are struggling. The U.S. has five large oceangoing ships under construction or on order, compared to South Korea’s 734 and China’s 1,794.

“China is a very interesting trading partner,” says Javier Milei, as Argentina seeks closer economic ties. “They do not make demands, the only thing they ask is that they not be bothered.” Both exports and imports between the two countries declined sharply after Milei’s election, as China found alternative markets in neighboring Brazil. And Argentina desperately needs investment.

Liu Run, Chinese business author, back from visiting pioneering Chinese factories in Mexico, saw them making products from furniture to home appliances, and filed this report.

Beijing allows foreign cards for transit. Arrivals surpassed pre-Covid: More Russians, fewer American. Beijing received 379,300

China started collecting 30% dumping duties on EU brandy, days after Brussels voted to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs, and signaled that it could unleash tariffs on EU cars, while continuing investigations into EU pork and dairy products.

BMW 5s, Audi A6 and Benz E class discounted prices 27% and still lose market share. What happens when their profit margin in China approaches nothing? That could lead to plant closures in China and in Europe, too.

Airbus will soon produce more A320NEO aircraft in China than China’s COMAC produces C919 aircraft. Xian AC just built its third line for producing A320 wingboxes! It hit its 700th delivery last year and now produces 9 per month. As Chinese suppliers improve, it makes more sense for Airbus to use them in the Tianjin production.

China produces 300% more carbon fiber than the US. Titanium sponge production jumped from 70,000 tons in 2018 to 200,000 tons in 2023. China doesn’t play around once it decides to scale something.

Clothes from thin air. The process begins with giant fans capturing an invisible raw material: carbon dioxide, which gleaming reactors transform into a clear, viscous ethylene glycol, which is fed into machines that spin it into fine, glistening fibers that will be woven into fabrics. Each 300 gm T-shirt will use 100 gm of CO2. Sheng Hong’s factory has developed cutting-edge techniques like direct esterification-polycondensation and melt composite spinning that yield diverse fibers like elastic, ultra-fine, and UV-resistant marvels.

Photonic Dawn

·
April 18, 2023

When the US banned China from NASA projects, China built its own. When the US banned China from participating in the “international” space station, China built its own. When the US stopped China from participating in Europe’s GPS project, China built its own. When the US blocked Israel’s sale of AWACs to China, China built its own. When Trump imposed ta…

West vs East: who is the bad guy? | Lowkey

Cool Interfaces

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Not me, but my long time late employee, a OO driver (Owner Operator) which his nickname was Snake – he used both – the Company tractors or his (it all depended on the dispatch).

His truck was parked in the assigned parking, awaiting for the trailer to be loaded.

For some reason, someone decided to park their car in front of the truck (because there was a gap and sufficient space). This GM Opel, parked his car there. Well, the other tractors and trailers parked at their assigned location.

Well, he wanted him to move the huge long-nose Kenworth Sleeper Tractor “out of his way”. Because the Dispatcher denied (everyone’s assigned, you move when the Dispatcher gives you the clearance and what bay (dock) you hitch up to).

The guy was in a rage, he got into the car and tried to “force” that tractor to move. All he was doing was damaging the rear end of his car! (He did cause some scratches and a couple of ‘dents’ on the Bumper of the Company truck.)

Well, he was just not having it, decided to rev the engine up and go through the chain link fence (that was Slatted – PVC slats woven in the chain link fence) and wound up front first over the ravine into the creek below.

The Truckers went to rescue him out of his car, and he winds up fighting an old oak tree! Literally throwing punches at it, his voice was so slurred, beyond drunk. And he’s fighting the tree! The drivers all went down and grabbed him and pulled him up through the fence and got him on the lot when the Police finally arrived.

He was just so out of it, but Snake, he got him to “sit down” and “drink some coffee” and provided him a couple of donuts. He wasn’t going anywhere, the Cops were in no hurry to handcuff him. They looked over the fence and finds the car down there, totally destroyed.

The other officer went to review the security footage, because none of the front end guards had any cars going through. It turned out he came from the NORTH side of the property (vacant wooded 2.3 acres of land).

Then Snake realized the guy was in medical, and called for Paramedics (the Cops were on the other side investigating the trail he made getting onto the property) – once the Paramedics arrived, the guy was “almost gone”. He was partially stabilized and taken to the Hospital ER and there it was confirmed, alcohol poisoning. (The officers arrested him there at the hospital.)

This bothered Snake, partially, because he just knew this guy was not a drunk, he felt he was “set up”, he even told the Officers that, the other truckers partially believed Snake.

Well, Snake asked to be reassigned back to that Company for a reason, he wanted to follow up with Sam (not real name), he had his information as he was the one that pulled out his wallet. His dad was a Police Chief, what happened was he gave his dad the information → this guy has no driving violations at all.

I have no idea why Snake did what he did, but once he was returned to that location. He put himself on a 3-day off, and he hired a lawyer. Sam was “released on own recognition” and had an upcoming hearing (he bonded out). This lawyer and Snake went to him in person, they questioned him thoroughly.

All he could remember was he was at the co-worker’s party for his wife’s over the hill. He really didn’t want to go. But the pressure of other workers to a degree, forced him to be there. All he could remember was a couple of guys holding him down and they blind folded him, and he felt something down his throat where he was gagging and they poured what he could smell was alcohol by force. (Funneling) And he cannot handle alcohol, due to the medications he was on.

And the next thing he knew he was inside of his car, he decided to get away from there, he has no memory of what happened after that except he was feeling terrible. That lawyer hired a private investigator. Because he now has a Defense Lawyer, the Defense Lawyer postponed the hearing, due to more evidence incoming. Judge granted it.

From what Snake told me, the PI went in and got hired at the same company that he was working for. He learned through gossip from other men, which they laughed, about how they forced moonshine (illegal) and got him totally wasted (drunk). They had to put him in the car because he was having seizures and they didn’t want any responsibility, someone drove him over to a lot and left him there and they returned back.

*BOOM*

The PI asked to buy a jar of that moonshine, they actually gave him a jar and told him “Easy does it.” Then the PI took the evidence to a lab, and it was found to contain 58% APV. With the evidence in hand, and the video and audio of worker’s “confessions”.

Then the trial came up. The State Prosecution threw the case out, and the Judge ordered the arrest of the people involved. To the fact his physician made it exceptionally clear, “his patient cannot have alcohol due to the medications he’s on” (medications disclosed). The people involved were charged with “attempt murder”.

The place of the party they had was actually held in a vacant house on a rural isolated property that was undergoing foreclosure.

His lawyer had his colleague to file suit (lawsuit) against the Company he worked for. In what Snake told me, there was a very nice settlement, he was able to retire early (49 years old). He became friends with Sam. Sam knows that Snake actually saved his life, because he was at “near-death”.

Was this a road rage? Yes it was, but under the influence of alcohol poisoning where the victim was forced without consent.

BRICS Just Acquired 2 MAJOR Assets To Collapse The US Economy With New Currency

Steak with Gorgonzola Thyme Crust

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Yield: 2 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 2 (6 ounce) beef tenderloin or small rib eye steaks, cut 3/4 inch thick
  • 1 large or 2 small cloves garlic, minced
  • 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  • 2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme or 1/2 teaspoon dried
  • 1/2 cup (2 ounces) crumbled Wisconsin Gorgonzola cheese

Instructions

  1. Heat broiler.
  2. Spoon Worcestershire sauce over both sides of steaks; let stand for 5 minutes.
  3. Sprinkle garlic and pepper over steaks. Place steaks on rack of broiler pan.
  4. Broil 3 to 4 inches from heat source for 3 to 4 minutes per side for medium rare steak.
  5. Remove pan from broiler. Sprinkle thyme, then cheese over steaks.
  6. Return to oven and broil for 2 minutes or until cheese is golden brown.

Ticket Booth

This is just lovely.

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My grandmother used to tell me a story whose endpoint was: A pigeon cannot escape death by closing his/her eyes when a cat is coming towards him/her. China’s rise is certain to be inevitable. The rest of the world is just closing its eyes and believing this cat is fake, and he/she will pass. No, sir/madam: This cat is real, and it is, in fact, a huge dragon.

People usually ask such questions:

  • People have no clue about China and the Chinese people.
  • People who have no interactions with China/or the Chinese people.
  • People who have never visited China can see with their own eyes what it is all about.
  • You do not have to be a rocket scientist, brain surgeon, or Nobel Prize winner in economics to understand this simple question.
  • When you land in China Beijing/Shanghai, airports and your head spins at the wonder of the efficiency/punctuality/cleanliness/
  • You see the bullet trains circling Shanghai.
  • Banquet halls and restaurants serve thousands of customers with the efficiency of a Swiss clock.
  • You see the Olympic Stadium of 2008.
  • You see, the Three Gorges is one of the most significant civil projects of recent times.
  • You see cranes all over China putting up buildings like a Lego project.
  • You see state-of-the-art infrastructure, roads/bridges/
  • You see highly efficient public transport systems.
  • You see freedom of the female/gender equality/
  • You see a society which is almost violent and crime-free/one of the safest in the world.
  • You see young girls working alone in the middle of the night or walking freely in the megacities.
  • You see, there is plenty of food for everyone.
  • You see happy/rosy cheeks/giggling kids in the parks,
  • You see well-respected elders/retirees in the parks.
  • You can see some cultural events or other things in the city.
  • You see people dancing/exercising in the public squares and parks.
  • You would not see many if any, beggars/homeless/druggies/
  • You see the Yangtze River with ships/boats/loaded with cargo
  • You see commercial rigs on the highways.
  • You see beautiful green farms with beautiful houses
  • You see trucks loaded with citrus and other fruit going to the cities.
  • You see, even when the native son/daughter comes home after a few months, he/she cannot find a way to his/her own house. Because the speed of change is so great, the whole neighbourhood/roads/are changing quickly.

Well, the list is too long,

  • I do not have to look at the graphs/GDP/and all the other nonsense.
  • Rest assured China is real, and this storm is coming, and the world will not the be same.

At some stage, the world has to learn that this growth is real and must learn to respect and learn from this mega-success story.

BTW: The Author is not Chinese, and he has not hired the hand to do publicity, he is Indo Canadian citizen of Canada for the close to fifty years. He has worked with the Chinese Canadians at various levels and visited China several times. And when he was a baby in India from his childhood he was very interested in China and the Chinese culture. His primary school teacher sowed the seeds in him about China.

This is a dawn of new era: You want to see future please go to China, there you will get an idea, how the future will look, by standing at the present time, and one glance backward to developing China will show you the past.

Standing in the present: You will see the future and you will see the past.

The reality is that China is a new powerhouse; as my grandma said, a Pigeon is just closing its eyes to see death as the cat is approaching him/her.

I hope it helps

I was working at Geek Squad and I had a client who was an older woman with an old laptop (no, this is not some kind of joke); it was probably 12–14 years old. It had 256 megs of ram and was running Windows XP for reference sack. It was busted 6 ways from Sunday, dead battery, charging port that you had to really work at to get it seated so it would get power, one hinge was totally wrecked, the CD drive was missing its face plate, the drive itself was bent, the screen was cracked, and the bezel was being held on by tape… I mean this laptop had done its tour of duty three times over.

Anyway, she was emphatic about getting the screen repaired. But it was one of those situations where it would literally cost more than I could convince myself to tell the client it was worth. So I did something that 99.99% of the time you do not do in computer retail and I asked what was so important about this particular computer.

Well, it turns out her great granddaughter had died 3 years prior and the only pictures she had of her were on that computer, and no one had ever told her that it was possible to move the pictures to something that wasn’t on improvised life support.

So I worked with her for a few more minutes to get an idea of what she used her computer for (little bit of online shopping and some email), then grabbed one of the PC sales team I knew and trusted, gave her the run down on the lady and the situation and asked her to find her a good option for a replacement computer, get her signed up for a data transfer, include a 32gb flash drive then come back to me.

Got her set up with a new laptop, transferred all the files from her old computer to the new computer and the flash drive and signed her up for a 1-on-1 training session so I could help her to learn how to use the new computer, the flash drive, and get her setup with One-Drive so she wouldn’t need to worry about losing her pictures.

After it was all said and done, she was so grateful for the help and service that she tried to hand me a $50. I couldn’t take it for multiple reasons – not the least of which being it would have gotten me written up – but mostly because it was my job to help people with their computer problems and that was exactly what I had done. Well, she insisted on knowing what she could do to thank me.

Jokingly, I said “Well, we love chocolate chip cookies.” She smiled, said OK and left. I figured that was it. Came in for my shift the next day to find that she had dropped off what looked like a gross worth of home-made chocolate chip cookies.

Cookies make the best tips!

Blockade? No

What the United States did to Cuba, North Korea and Iran is called “blockade”, using military and non-military capabilities to prevent these countries from normal exchanges and trade with the outside world, thereby strangling the economies of these countries and making their people suffer poverty.

China’s siege of Taiwan often only lasts for a few days. Even if commercial ships are affected, just wait patiently. This is not a blockade and has no substantial impact on Taiwan.

Threat? Yes

Before Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022, China had always maintained restraint and understanding towards Taiwan, and their military exercises never exceeded the median line of the Taiwan Strait.

The United States cannot claim “one China” while allowing senior officials to engage in sexual diplomatic interactions with Taiwan. This is schizophrenia and is bound to anger the Chinese.

So after August 2022, they began military exercises around Taiwan, and as far as I remember, this is the third time.

If Taiwan suffered “sovereignty loss” in this process, it was almost brought about by their allies, the Americans.

When an ally constantly claims to protect you, but at the same time constantly provokes your enemies, you need to think about the true intentions of this “ally”. Look at the situation in Ukraine.

China seems to be threatening Taiwan, but in fact it is using the US provocation to implement a “salami slicing” strategy

With every provocation, they increase the pressure on Taiwan a little bit.

Maintain the median line of the Taiwan Strait > cross the median line of the Taiwan Strait > operate on the east coast > surround the entire Taiwan > enter 12 nautical miles > enter the airspace

China’s sausage has not been cut yet. Pay attention to the exercise area. Although they have surrounded Taiwan, they still respect the tacit understanding of 12 nautical miles. But it may not be the case next time.

You cannot accuse China of “aggression” because Taiwan is different from Ukraine. All countries in the world recognize that Taiwan is part of China. So Taiwan does not legally have territorial waters and airspace. Military operations can only be regarded as China’s domestic counterinsurgency operations.

Keep your focus and do not give up

For my sins I managed one of the largest and most successful Go-Go/Show bars of the time, Angelwitch in Pattaya back in 2011 for a year.

There was a staff of around 65 with 35–40 being Go-Go girls, they all had their reasons for being there.

Every girl is different, but the majority come from the poorer North Eastern (Issan) parts of Thailand and start work in a go-go bar to earn money and support their family.

Many girls have a child or children and have been left to bring them up on their own.

The money they can earn in a Go Go bar far exceeds what they are able to earn back in their villages or factories in Bangkok where they will be lucky to pull in 18,000 Baht ($535) a month for a 6 day week with overtime in a factory and even less working on a farm or in 7/11.

However, some Go Go girls can make in excess of 150,000 Baht ($4,460) a month, plus little extras like gold necklaces etc. I know of escort girls in Bangkok who regularly earned over 200,000 Baht a month, that’s nearly $6,000 so you can see the attraction.

Do the Go Go and escort girls enjoy it? Most don’t enjoy the act but they enjoy the rewards.

Sometimes, however they will get a “young handsome guy” and if they like him, yes they do enjoy it and hope he comes back for seconds, the girls in Angelwitch used to scream when any fit handsome guys came in and they would be fighting for their attention and if one of the girls went off with him many others would be jealous.

I would put the girls into 3 main categories:

  • Some are looking for the “rich” foreigner that’s going to be able to take care of them and their family, they’re not worried about the love aspect of it (this by the way happens in normal Thai society). They may have seen other girls from the village with a nice house and living a good life or heard stories about other girls that have been successful in this quest. I’ve seen plenty of success stories but the disasters far outweigh the successes when they meet under these circumstances.
  • Some girls are purely after the money, they hate the work, they’re not looking to meet anyone and may even have a boyfriend/husband back home who their also supporting. Their main priority is generally to build a house back home and earn enough money to take care of their boyfriend/husband and extended families (Thai culture expects the children to take care of the parents). Once they have achieved their goals they will go back to their villages.
  • Some girls get hooked on the money and the life, they enjoy the camaraderie of the bar life and the new life they have found, most though waste all their money and after they are forced to quit due to age or health find they have little to show for it. There are of course exceptions and many have houses, cars, expensive holidays and still plenty in the bank.

At the end of the day “how is their life”?

Like I said earlier, the majority wouldn’t say they like what they do but the majority certainly aren’t forced into it either, it’s a career choice (of course I’m aware there is human trafficking and some are forced into prostitution but I’ve never met or heard of any personally). Thailand are currently having a big drive with regards to stamping out human trafficking

Some of the girls I worked with whom I am still friends and in contact with are still in the oldest profession but seem to be happy enough, some are now happily married to foreigners either in Thailand or their husbands country, some have been married and divorced and are back in the bars or freelancing in nightclubs, some are still in the bars, some have earned enough money and have gone home.

Overall the majority, I would say are enjoying life.

Steak Marsala

Serve Steak Marsala with mashed potatoes or egg noodles.

steak marsala
steak marsala

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 4 (4 ounce) beef tenderloin steaks, cut 3/4 inch thick
  • 1/2 cup dried porcini mushrooms
  • 4 teaspoons all-purpose flour, divided
  • 1 teaspoon salt, divided
  • 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
  • 1/2 cup chopped onion
  • 4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
  • 1 1/2 cups (4 ounces) thinly-sliced shiitake mushroom caps
  • 1 1/2 cups (4 ounces) thinly-sliced cremini mushrooms
  • 1 teaspoon fresh thyme, chopped
  • 1/2 cup Marsala wine
  • 2/3 cup beef broth
  • Chopped chives

Instructions

  1. Place porcini mushrooms in a small bowl; cover with boiling water to rehydrate. Cover and let stand for 30 minutes or until tender.
  2. Drain, reserving the liquid; rinse mushrooms. Thinly slice; set aside.
  3. Combine 3 teaspoons flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt and pepper in a shallow dish. Dredge steaks in flour mixture, shaking off any excess.
  4. Heat a large sauté pan over medium high heat until hot. Add 1 tablespoon olive oil. Cook steaks for 4 to 5 minutes on each side or until internal temperature reaches 135 degrees F with meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the steak. Remove from heat and keep warm, tenting with aluminum foil.
  5. Heat remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil in pan over medium high heat. Add onion and garlic; sauté for 2 to 3 minutes or until onion is tender.
  6. Add remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt, porcini, shiitake, cremini mushrooms and thyme; sauté for 4 to 5 minutes or until mushrooms release moisture and darken.
  7. Evenly sprinkle remaining 1 teaspoon flour; cook 1 minute stirring constantly.
  8. Stir in wine; cook for 1 minute.
  9. Add broth; bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer for 2 to 3 minutes or until thickened.
  10. Return beef to pan and cook for 2 to 3 minutes or until heated being careful not to overcook beef (145 degrees F).
  11. Sprinkle with chives and serve.

43 Scientists Insist the Afterlife Is a Reality

I had a friend called Peter. He was gay and shared a house with his ex. They hadn’t been together for years but were still close. Peter bought half his exes house when his ex got into financial difficulty, and took out mortgage insurance. Peter caught a very aggressive strain of HIV and died within six months so the mortgage was paid off.

The funeral was a nightmare Despite Peter being no contact with his family after they disowned him for being gay the vicar only talked to his parents, they didn’t talk to his ex at all despite living together for around 20 years. Next of kin is next of kin when you aren’t married I suppose. So none of Peters life or friends were mentioned or celebrated, it was all about his grieving parents. One thing that still sticks in my mind all these years later is when he said “And Jesus was nailed to the cross, surrounded by thieves, murderers, child molesters and criminals. If Jesus could forgive them and they could enter the kingdom of heaven then there’s hope for Peter”. There was an audible gasp in the church at that point and some people half stood up in anger.

The wake was at the house and the parents and a brother were wandering round with a notepad, and when asked what they were doing they said they were cataloguing everything as the house and all it’s contents were now half theirs. They smirked as they said to the ex “Don’t worry, when we get home we’ll organise selling the house so you can start getting your crap out before the sale. We just want to make sure you don’t hide the valuables before we got our half.”. I was there and heard every word. The room went silent and the ex went to the safe and pulled out a document. “This is Peters will. I was going to read it later but might as well do it now”. Basically, Peter had left everything to his ex. House, car, bank accounts and insurance policy, and small bequests to close friends. I got a series of books I’d told him I loved after borrowing them to read (Tales of the city if you are interested).

“And to my parents, brother and sister, I leave them what they gave me in life. Nothing. They treated me like garbage from the age of 15 and I officially disinherit all of them” was what I remember. They stormed out in a rage and were never heard from again. The ex said they did apparently seek legal advice, but as they were mentioned in the will and purposefully left nothing they couldn’t claim they were forgotten so couldn’t contest the will. In the UK you don’t have to leave family anything, but it’s wise if they are close family to state outright so your intentions are clear.

  1. What the United States and Israel are doing is anti-human and they are playing a game of trying to sell the global public some unconvincing claims, but the global public is not stupid.
  2. In terms of strategy and tactics, the Chinese are pioneers. The history of psychological warfare in China can be traced back 4,000 years, and the early experience of psychological warfare in ancient times is most centrally reflected in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. According to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the main objective of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting; the essence of war is to attack the enemy’s strategy; the main principle of war is to fight for control of the people’s morale; and the gist of war lies in focusing on the decision-making skills and personality traits of the enemy’s commander-in-chief. Whether in politics, military or economy, Americans have never won in the decades-long competition between China and the United States. The facts are clear: The United States is getting worse and worse, while China is getting better and better.
  3. The favourite board game of the Chinese is Go, while the favourite of Westerners is Chess. There are two big differences between these two games: In chess, the focus is on the ‘king’, or ‘centre’, whereas in Go, the focus is on the ‘big picture’. The Go board is much larger than the Chess board. In Chess, it’s all about ‘checkmate’, it’s about ‘total victory’ and ‘total defeat’, it’s a ‘zero-sum game’. ‘Unlike Chess, Go is about two players seeking strategic advantages in different positions.

7 MINS AGO: What CHINA Just DID To U.S. SHOCKED EVERYONE!

A first hand experience here:-

Never ever go water scooter riding. The locals con you in the ways below:-

  1. As you roam the beaches, a local would come to you with a menu card which shows that a 15 min ride is just 150 or 200 bucks.
  2. You seem thrilled as how cheap it is and immediatly say yes. Suddenly out of no where , in matter of seconds, you are made to wear a life jacket, the scooter is ready and the local says you can now ride alone. You are thrilled at the opportunity to ride the scooter without someone behind you controlling the scooter.
  3. The local takes pictures of the scooter before the ride. You think this is fine as the local would be worried about his asset and wouldn’t want damage. You wouldn’t want to damage either.
  4. You ride for 15 mins, the ride is great, you are happy as you descent and take off your life jacket.
  5. The local hands you a bill of 50k to 100k as damages to the scooter.
  6. You wonder how exactly did you damage it. You were in the water and rode it nicely.
  7. The thing is that the scooter is made up of cheap plastics and would damage as soon as you enter the water.
  8. They demand the replacement with original Yamaha parts which costs a fortune.
  9. Since you are a tourist, you have no clue how such things work and you go to the nearby police station.
  10. The police don’t care and ultimately as it’s time for you to leave the country next day, you have no option but to pay.

P.S: Never ever give your passport to them as this means that they are in control of everything. Not that earlier they weren’t, but you don’t want to make it worse.

What was the greediest thing you’ve seen a family member do?

Certain members of my mother’s family are the poster children of greed, specifically her parents and two of her brothers.

In 2013 she was killed in a car accident. She had a decent life insurance policy which went to my dad. Her parents and older brother felt that it should go to them for some reason. So they tried to sue my dad, who was still very much grief stricken. It didn’t even go to court. The judge threw it out with prejudice in the initial hearing.

This of course led to irreparable damage between my grandparents and dad and an uncle who was basically disowned by his entire family(including his own children), except for his parents.

This may not seem greedy but I consider it to be.

A few months ago my cousin called and asked if she could temporarily move in with me because she was starting a new job nearby. I said she could but that it was only going to be her and only for a couple months. She agreed that that was reasonable as her dad, a convicted felon, was going to stay home and sell the house while she looked for a permanent house after work.

A few weeks ago she started bringing things and I asked her if she had started looking for a permanent home, she hadn’t even started looking and it had already been a few months. I informed her that I’d be leaving the next week for vacation and that she was welcome to stay, but no one else was to be here, just her. Again, she agreed.

While on vacation my doorbell camera went off letting me know someone was there. I opened the app and saw a large Uhaul truck parked in front of my driveway and her dad was helping her move their entire house into mine. This was a major problem because

1, He’s a convicted felon, I have firearms in the house, and I was not informed he’d be there. In the state of Florida, the firearms must be locked up and the individual must be restricted from the room they’re in.

2, They were moving their house into mine, meaning, they were trying to make my house theirs while I was away.

When I called them, they said they weren’t doing what I saw them doing. So I called my grandmother, who not only tried to keep up the lie, but when I informed her that I could see them on camera, she tried to say “Family is family so you should be okay with this, right?” Nope, call them and get them out or I’m coming home and I’ll be bringing the police with me.

This of course led to my relationship with that uncle and my grandparents to be even more strained.

I don’t hate my family, but when they try to take something that’s not theirs because they think they’re entitled to it, that’s a major problem.

“Be PREPARED For What’s COMING…” – George Gammon

What should a tourist not do in Thailand?

Thailand is a wonderful place to visit! But it’s always important to respect Thai traditions and customs, and do your best to avoid getting scammed. It’s easy to have a wonderful time here as long as you follow some simple advice.

  • Don’t touch someone’s head. I once forgot the Thai word for “touch” and was telling a story to an old Thai man where someone touched my hair. I touched the man’s head to demonstrate the word I forgot. I shocked the living daylights out of him and caused quite an uproar. Luckily he was very gracious and said it was ok since we were friends, but he warned me to never do it again. The head is considered the highest part of the body and touching it is the highest offense. Don’t do it. You might get yourself in a fight.
  • Don’t disrespect the king. Do not attempt to talk badly about the king with Thai locals. Most Thais are very patriotic and love their king. You will offend them. But also, posting unflattering things about the king online is actually illegal, so there’s big taboo about speaking badly about him. You’ll make Thais very uncomfortable. Oh yeah, don’t post things online about how much you hate the king. You could end up in jail.
  • Don’t point your feet at anyone or show the bottom of your feet to anyone. The feet are the lowest part of the body. It is very disrespectful. Don’t put your feet on Buddhist statues. Don’t use your foot to stop a Thai Baht from flying away if you drop it, it has a picture of the king’s face on it and you’ll offend a lot of people.
  • Don’t enter people’s homes, offices, temples, or certain shops without taking your shoes off. If you see shoes outside of a door, take yours off as well before you enter that door. Since the feet are the lowest part of the body, shoes are seen as even lower, and it’s very disrespectful to enter someone’s house without taking them off. Plus, it’s just seen as dirty.
  • Don’t expect great quality service. I don’t know how many visitors I have had who complain that the waitresses aren’t very attentive. They complain that Songtaew drivers make a lot of stops along the road before we reach our destination. You’re paying a tenth of the price for whatever product you’re getting as you would at home. That is why it’s so cheap, don’t complain if everything isn’t perfect.
  • Don’t lose your temper. Thais do not lose their tempers except in extreme situations, they are always pleasant. They will hang up the phone on you, ignore you, or stall your service further. Always be pleasant and keep your cool.
  • Women must refrain from touching monks. This means you cannot sit directly next to one. If they want to hand something to you, just cup your hands and they will throw it to you. Keep a safe radius if you must pass one on the street. You can talk to them though, some monks are very friendly! Don’t feel you have to avoid them completely.
  • Don’t bring huge amounts of luggage. This makes it really hard to travel. I have had so many visitors bring 2 giant suitcases and has made it near impossible and expensive to switch hotels. There are stairs everywhere in Thailand, taxis have small trunk spaces, domestic flights only allow 10 kg luggage. Just bring a big backpack with all the essentials. You can buy anything else necessary at a 7–11 and wash and laundry shops only charge 40 baht per kilogram to wash, dry, and iron your clothes! You’ll thank me for this.
  • Don’t speak quickly in English. English proficiency is very low in Thailand because they’ve never been colonized. Speak very slow with simplified sentences. Thais at most tourist destinations can speak some English, but they will not understand you if you speak at your native pace and dialect. Don’t get frustrated that it’s hard to communicate, never get angry at them for not speaking English as well as you’d like.
  • Don’t get scammed. Be wary of any Thai who speaks English well who approaches you. The temple is probably not closed and the gems are not real. Barter almost everything, they will automatically charge you higher prices. Use Grab (like Uber) if you can to avoid getting charged ridiculous taxi prices.
  • Dress conservatively when going to temples. Most temples require you to where a shirt with sleeves and pants/skirts below your knees. The higher the rank of the temple, the bigger the dress code. Some, like the Grand Palace, don’t even allow leggings. Respect their religion, royalty, and their landmarks.

Today’s MM visits

What was the greediest thing you’ve seen a family member do?

My grandmother had Altzheimers but for a time was still able to live in her home with my dad coming to help her twice a day. One day she told my dad that her stepson and his family (who lived about 6 hours away) came to the house and loaded up huge leaf trash bags with all of her quilts and antiques and valuables. Even though she sometimes told stories that weren’t true, this was definitely the truth. They literally took EVERYTHING they wanted, not just the valuable stuff. They literally stripped her house of everything except her clothes and furniture and some kitchen items and bath towels.

My dad didn’t even confront his stepbrother, he just let it go. My grandmother was upset for a short time but then forgot it ever happened. The only thing my mother and I cared about was the quilts. We would have liked to have had just one or two of her MANY beautiful quilts she made. They could have had all of the others.

My grandmother owned two houses. She lived in one and rented out the second. She left one house to my dad and one house to her stepson. It was really sad that the stepson felt he and his family needed to come take everything from my grandmother while she was still living and fairly lucid, but people are strange sometimes. The one silver lining about this situation was how easy it was to clean out her house after she died so that it could be sold. We donated her clothes and few possessions that were left and that was it.

EDIT: Even though the quilts were all gone, my grandmother had some “pieces” in her sewing basket that she had sewn to use in a future quilt that she never finished because of the Altzheimers. My mother added a loop to one corner and had it mounted diagonally in a frame for me to hang on my wall. I think it’s beautiful!

What shouldn’t you do in Thailand?

A first hand experience here:-

Never ever go water scooter riding. The locals con you in the ways below:-

  1. As you roam the beaches, a local would come to you with a menu card which shows that a 15 min ride is just 150 or 200 bucks.
  2. You seem thrilled as how cheap it is and immediatly say yes. Suddenly out of no where , in matter of seconds, you are made to wear a life jacket, the scooter is ready and the local says you can now ride alone. You are thrilled at the opportunity to ride the scooter without someone behind you controlling the scooter.
  3. The local takes pictures of the scooter before the ride. You think this is fine as the local would be worried about his asset and wouldn’t want damage. You wouldn’t want to damage either.
  4. You ride for 15 mins, the ride is great, you are happy as you descent and take off your life jacket.
  5. The local hands you a bill of 50k to 100k as damages to the scooter.
  6. You wonder how exactly did you damage it. You were in the water and rode it nicely.
  7. The thing is that the scooter is made up of cheap plastics and would damage as soon as you enter the water.
  8. They demand the replacement with original Yamaha parts which costs a fortune.
  9. Since you are a tourist, you have no clue how such things work and you go to the nearby police station.
  10. The police don’t care and ultimately as it’s time for you to leave the country next day, you have no option but to pay.

P.S: Never ever give your passport to them as this means that they are in control of everything. Not that earlier they weren’t, but you don’t want to make it worse.

ONCE BITTEN (1985) | Mark Discovers He’s A Vampire | MGM

Claire Trbovic

The Farne Islands are black places. Most places in the North Sea are. From their black cliffs a small fishing boat travels precariously between the rocks in the local harbour to Inner Farne on the near horizon. Around the boat, little black specs tornado in unison, their wings silhouetted against a thick sky.The boat eventually finds it’s mooring and a woman comes into view, her long blond plait falls from under two hats pulled low to her face. A seal breaks the water to watch the newcomer, buoyed in the angry water like it’s riding a wave machine at a kid’s amusement park. They lock eyes for a moment and the seal gets bored.The woman empties the boat carefully of food rations and equipment, though obviously not enough for a long stay. She stops and looks longingly at the boat for a moment, leaving a box of wires and a phone still in the dingy. Without hesitation she unwraps the rope keeping the boat moored and sets it free unpiloted. The sea takes it slowly at first, as if checking she means to let it go on purpose. The rope slips away and her only way of escape disappears quickly and vanishes to the black. The seal reappears looking visibly confused.Her job to be done is simple but important. Bird flu ripped through the local population on the small island, meaning no puffin, shag, turn or razorbill was safe. They had no respite from the disease, no technology to turn to for help. She felt she owed it to them; an exchange for her life where money could, and had, bought an easy life.The wind on the Island grabs jealously she walks up to the tower at the top of the black cliff edge. She’s never been inside but has seen the tower many times from the shore, it’s weather worn stones have seen Vikings, Christians, chavs, but yet it remains just so. Her hands begin to unpack rations whilst her mind is still with Max and Alex and Nicky in the city. Home comforts were gone; no cashmere, no Instagram. Only sheepskin rugs from the Northumberland mainland offer any respite; the smell of salt and smoke holds deep into the woven tapestry of the place.On one side of the room sits a desk, it’s screens and monitors and radios cast an unnatural blue hue over the ancient stonework. At it’s side lays what appears to be two sunbeds from circa 1994. They wait with their silvery lids open wide, invitingly clean and ready for use. Where a head would go protrudes a large metal probe, along with a selection of other needles and cables which attach messily to the desk close by.She rubs the back of her head. A screwed metal disc aches at the curve of her skull, not used to the severe North Sea cold. As if in response, all the metal plug points on her body itch in unison. Never again will this body be plugged in to charge, to repair, to reset. She shuts the lids on the life support machines so as not to tempt her. The wind rages but she takes the opportunity to begin her daily tasks. Outside the front door to the tower a sign reads ‘ONLY STEP ON THE BOARD WALK, CHECK FOR CHICKS’ and she imagines someone shouting it in her face.It is a black place as they said it was. Everything is hard. The rock, the water, the wind. It hurts. But this is what she wants, to repent for a life led with too much good fortune. She walks from one end of the small island to the other. Puffins come and go, their beaks filled with sand eels. Silver scales catch the sun which furiously tries to push through the heavy cloud. Against the patchwork of lichen and heather they flash their red beaks to each other like morse code. 

She still feels sick from the journey. In normal circumstances she would have changed bodies long before the sickness kicked in. It would have simply been put on charge until the system calmed down, she had plenty of spares at home. Her stomach sends out a stabbing pain in response. She ponders what people must have done hundreds of years ago when the tower was built; they must have had some medicinal remedies otherwise the whole population would have been wiped out.

 

After a week on the island, the chores are second nature. Today she counts the puffin burrows to monitor this year’s breeding pairs. The work is manual but not too taxing for a fairly new body of which she is glad she still has. The sick feeling remains and hums deep in her body. Before she gets back to the tower for the evening she doubles over and vomits into the wind. Orange lumps fly out over the black cliffs, illuminated against an angry sky.

 

She had never known anyone to be sick, no one had, not since the turn of the century when people still had to endure the frail bodies they were born with. They were taught this stuff in school, how disease was rampant back then but it became irrelevant when technology and Mindscaping were invented. With the ability to move your mind freely from one body to the next, the need to cure disease vanished, modern medicinal products were literally never created. You just discarded the sick like a Primark jumper gone wrong in the wash.

 

She remembered the first exotic body she was bought as a youngster. She had decided on an overnight whim to become a ballerina, so her parents had shipped a model in from Russia. It was exquisite, it’s porcelain skin was almost see though and bent in ways her other bodies could never manage. Unfortunately, it’s feet got mangled and was quickly donated to a family in another town, no point in fixing.

 

A storm rolls in from the North Sea and the sky quickly changes colour. She knows the drill and quickly pulls the few items gathered outside into the tower and bolts the main door. The kettle wines against the howl outside. She finds her mind slipping in the dark, taking her across the water to Max and Alex and Nicky. She cannot remember how old they are, she can barely remember how old she is, but she imagines them at home, drinking expensive wine and eating cheese. Nicky has a svelte body which she only uses on such occasions. The wine goes too quickly though, and she will sneak off mid evening to change models whilst the first has it’s stomach pumped from the alcohol poisoning.

 

The storm outside continues to rage, dark and unruly. Mindscaping meant no one had any repercussions to anything. Sometimes Alex would fight his brother and they’d end up needing new bodies three times a week, hurting her pocket but nothing more. It was a hollow life. Built on an ease that comes only through no hard work, no effort, no strife. They would stay young forever, never experience the pain of loss, of suffering, of heartache. She closes her eyes and sleep takes her, eyes glued together by salt.

 

On day 22 she wakes and washes. Her skin is starting to visibly grey but her mind is clearing. She begins another day of counting burrows. A puffin couple closest to the front door of the tower have been named Victoria and Albert, yet she tries to not get attached. Last week she found a puffin chick dead outside it’s burrow and spent the entire day crafting a burial for him as the wind whipped at her face not allowing any tears. As she read the sermon to the sea, a family of puffins perched on the lighthouse wall in silent prayer.

 

She walks back having found eight burrows empty when they weren’t the day before and falls through the board walk that needs repairing. Her ankle looks wrong and she screams into the wind as pain moves up her leg. She crouches down and lets her body crumple into the acute feeling. Once, her and her friends had snuck into her father’s study to try on his models. She slipped into one he had used when he was in the army a long time ago. It was like eating power. Everything moved so easily, it had so much inbuilt skill it scared her. Her ankle bites back in retort.

 

Every day she cries. Everyday something dies. It is an emotional battle filled with more highs and lows than she’s cumulatively felt in her long existance. Every day she closes her eyes at night, exhausted by the mental effort of living this somewhat simple life. She begins to acknowledge that the island is black, but the kind of black that is deep and never ending and alive.

 

On day 31 Victoria and Albert’s chicks fledge. She watches them from the doorstep of the tower and cries loudly. Her pride for them fills the island. Across thousands of miles, across land and sea and everything in between, these birds find each other every year and will do for their entire lives. Every year they continue to fight for each other, no matter the pain.

 

Her body is slower now as she bends with difficulty to check the burrows across the island. She knew this body had cancer. She had come to the logical end of the road with it and with the shallow life she’d lived until these sweet moments.

 

Out to the deep depths of the North Sea a white sailing ship peaks through the distant horizon, bathed in what seems like warm light from above. A few seconds later the moment is gone. She smiles.

 

After a time, she walks back to the tower and puts the kettle on to boil. She closes her eyes.

How is the life of go-go bar girl in Thailand?

Not wild but self enriching.

I visited Pattaya this June. Anticipating all kinds of possibilities got me all geared up and excited!

For those of you’ll who might not be familiar with the place, Pattaya is known for the Walking Street. A street that offers night life at it’s peak – Prostitution, Go-Go Bars (Gentleman’s Club), Dance Clubs, Live Bands Performing, Sex Shows and goes without saying liquor everywhere.

To give a slight background, I do drink and prefer clubbing. But never before have I visited something similar. Naturally I was all excited to experience what it would be like.

When the day finally arrived, I was in awe of what I was witnessing. It was finally the evening I was longing for since so long! Taking a few strolls of the street I got into a Go-Go Bar.

There I was sipping on some expensive Scotch watching beautiful Thai women dance. Something that I was eagerly looking forward to since the past few months was finally happening.

However instead of enjoying the nudity charade my head was on a completely different track. Wondering what their (the dancer’s) live’s are like? What kind of persons they are? How did they get into this profession? What possible circumstances could have forced them to do this? Behind the act that they’re putting up, there’s probably a helpless person.

Maybe I got emotional, maybe I was overthinking. But that’s just me.

I was surprised. I felt good about myself. I realised a mere conversation was what I seeked. I figured it would be more satisfying than what I initially vouched for.

So there’s this system where you can buy any dancer a drink and she’ll accompany you while she sips on it.

I did.

As soon as she sat beside, she started leaning in. Coming closer. It was their job. They had to do this to make a living. I realised it soon and conveyed my intentions. I told her everything I was feeling. I told her everything I wanted to talk about.

Her reaction was unexpected. She was stunned. She was taken aback. Probably because in her 4 year long career (as she happened to tell me) this was the first time someone wanted to know about her, talk to her. The first time someone showed empathy and seemed interested about her life. The first time someone didn’t want sex.

Her name is Moi and this is her story. She is from a village in north Thailand, and is uneducated. Her mother is no more and her father has a serious illness. She belonged to a farming family but because of monetary issues, they lost their land. The father’s ilness expenditure is beyond reach. That’s why she was doing what she. He is unaware of what his daughter does. She said it was difficult initially but gradually she got used to it. All she cared about was sending him money every month. Yes, she was the man of the house.

Also when she was young, she dated a guy who started humiliating and insulting her for her choice of work and eventually broke off.

She was teary eyed but realised it was inappropriate for the place. She controlled her emotions and concluded with a big bright smile saying, “YES this is my life”.

I was touched. As she was speaking there was this deep respect building up for the strength the woman has shown in life. She truly was a fighter.

She then changed the topic. Enquiring about me, what I do where am I from etc.

The conversation ended on a great note. She said and I quote:

“You are a good man. You made my day. I will never forget you”

Well that made my day!

I felt so good about myself. It’s that feeling of self enrichment and satisfaction you get when you’ve done a good deed was filled with. There was a sense of pride I was experiencing.

She eventually got back to her dancing and requested me to witness her performance. Ofcourse I did.

On my way out I tipped her her one month’s pay. She refused to accept it. Her humility did surprise me but I forced her to accept it.

She hugged me real tight with a smile as I left.

Yes this is not wild. But read this once before you go out seeking wild.

BRICS Just INGENIOUSLY Weaponised A U.S Commodity Heavily Used To Collapse The U.S

It’s a Tibetan question that is seldom discussed and widely frowned upon.

The exiled diaspora is not unified under the leadership of the Dalai Lama as most people falsely assume. The root of the issue is the Westernization of the Tibetans. They want to adopt white men’s language and white men’s style of democracy, much like the Indians.

However, many Tibetans who are loyal to the Dalai Lama have realized that Western democracy is not compatible with classical Tibetan institutions and could spell the doom of the very thing they fought against the communist to protect. Many young Tibetans increasingly speak out against the Dalai Lama in the name of democracy, which is a taboo subject in the exiled community.

The religious order, and even the CTA, promotes “the Middle Way Approach” first envisioned by the Dalai Lama, which acknowledges that Tibet is a part of the People’s Republic of China. However, Tibetans have failed to live up to the true meaning of this approach. That is why they don’t wave the PRC’s flag. The true meaning of the approach would entail Tibetans flying their “state flag” along with their “national flag” and considering themselves “Chinese refugees”.

Ethno-nationalism runs deep in the exiled community. Just a mention of “Free Tibet” is enough to silence all other factions of the debate. Tibetans who advocate against the notion of Tibetan independence are routinely ostracized and labeled as “Chinese spies”. That is not to say that all exiled Tibetans are against accepting Chinese citizenship. It is just that these Tibetans don’t have a platform to voice their opinions. Foreigners wouldn’t sponsor them, and neither would China.

In my point of view, the Dalai Lama is essential in this debate. If somehow the Dalai Lama practices the Middle Way Approach by using the Chinese flag as his national flag, the Tibetans who follow him will get the chance to raise their voices without getting ostracized by the radical separatist faction.

The view that it is the duty of the Han people to convince the exiled Tibetans to be patriotic to their whole motherland is faulty. Doing so implies that China is the country of the Han Chinese only. Tibetans wouldn’t appreciate such a concept of the Chinese nation. The question is best left to the Tibetans themselves to find the solutions. But they should drop the idea that China only belongs to the Han people.

What shouldn’t you do in Thailand?

There’s a long list, but I’ll stick to only a few major ones:

  1. Never, never say anything derogatory about the King or the royal family. That includes stepping on paper currency as it has a picture of the King
  2. Don’t visit with the attitude that Thailand should operate the same as your home country. It’s Thailand, and they run their country as they see fit. Example: You go to a restaurant and after seating you the server stands there while you review the menu. Just go with it. Next, after taking your order, the food doesn’t come out together. You might get your appy after others got their entre. Just go with it—I see it as part of the experience.
  3. Don’t touch the head of a Thai person in public
  4. Don’t horseplay with showing your feet
  5. Take off your shoes when entering personal dwelling and certain buildings
  6. Always remember that you are a guest!

Happy travels!

What was the greediest thing you’ve seen a family member do?

My MIL had been given a really nice, and large, china cabinet by my FIL as an anniversary gift one year. It was a prized possession especially after my FIL died.

I met my husband, her oldest child, a year after my FIL’s death. She and her youngest son moved in with us about a year later. The cabinet came with her. I loved it but assumed she’d give it to one of her two daughters.

One day she was telling me about how she got it and mentioned she always felt she could not give it to either daughter and leave the other one out. She felt the fairest thing was to give it to the wife of her eldest son. She’d decided this long before her husband died or I’d met her son.

Anyway her youngest son heard her tell me the cabinet was mine and threw a hissy-fit. Nothing would satisfy him but her saying he could have it. When he left she restated that it was mine and he would eventually forget about it.

He may have, but she died only a couple of years Iater. He told all his siblings it was his and I couldn’t refute it because there’s no will and she had never told a anyone else it was mine.

We did convince him to leave it with us until he was settled.

Then we moved to the same county all hubby’s siblings lived in. Middle brother’s wife finagled temporarily storing the cabinet then immediately passed it off to baby brother who had one sister store it and they refused to return it because it wasn’t mine. Within three years that cabinet was destroyed/lost. It’s gone. Nobody has it now. Not to mention baby brother never had it in his possession because HE DIDN’T WANT IT. He just didn’t want me to cherish it and keep it in the family.

Maybe not greedy, but certainly selfish.

Why Young Men Are SCREWED In This Economy

I had two of these and loved the experience… most of the time. They are a maintenance headache. It’s basically a house in the middle of an earthquake every mile you drive. I took this picture while at the Air Museum in Oregon. They are wonderful in many respects, but you’re kidding yourself if you think you’re going to love it full-time after you “get rich.” The reason is that even the most expensive RV parks, where they only allow motor coaches and no trailers, are still basically trailer parks. Your neighbors are close by, sometimes within reach, and the behaviors run the full range.

All of that rig you see, with a Jeep in tow, is work, and you have to carefully consider where you’re going because you can’t back up very easily at all. You spend a lot of time at freeway truck stops and rest stops. It’s exciting for a while, and I did have fun, but for a whole year or more? Nope, that would get old.

Big rigs, as they are called, only get around 4 MPG, so figure a buck a mile everywhere you go. It keeps the math easy.

I’d recommend a different direction. Get a wonderful house where you never want to leave. Get a Sprinter van instead and do shorter trips. The best part of a Sprinter is that it will get into any place. While it was small, it was far less work.

The Sprinter below got five times better MPG, and I could park in any grocery store lot or attraction. I could get into small campsites and still catch a snooze on a city street. I had even more fun with a fraction of the work and less stuff to manage.

I have a wonderful home now on acreage, and I never get tired of being here. After trying all options, this was the best one for me.

The most common thing you will see on the road is a pickup pulling a trailer. They are cheap, can be dropped off, and they are fairly easy to manage, except for the pack-up and set-up. I’d guess that 80% of what I saw in RV parks were pickups pulling trailers.

How is the life of go-go bar girl in Thailand?

Quite good, compared to any other job they can possibly get or compared to prostitutes in many other countries.

Most go-go girls in Thailand are village girls without much education. As Tony Dancaster pointed out, go-go girls earn much more than what they can otherwise earn in other jobs they can possibly get.

Besides that, due to Thai’s tolerance toward prostitution, go-go girls are not excluded from normal society. They are not chased down like criminals and they can still maintain normal relationships with their friends and families. More surprisingly, they can still maintain religious observance while being a prostitute. I have seen many cases of go-go girls wearing Buddhist amulet. Prostitutes in many other countries can only dream of this level of acceptance.

Lastly, the guests of go-go bars are mostly relatively well-off foreigners. Most of them understand the concept of safe sex (the same can’t necessarily be said about rural Thai men in Isaan).

First Time Hearing | Alan Parsons Sirius/Eye In The Sky | Reaction!!

What was the greediest thing you’ve seen a family member do?

My dad had a brother, Huck, whom he was especially close to. Unfortunately, my Uncle Huck died of a massive heart attack in his 40’s, leaving his wife to raise their three children. Things were really tough for her financially. My grandmother (Huck and dad’s mom) felt very bad for her and told the family that when she passed, she wanted her furniture and things to go to Huck’s widow, hoping that it might help them in some way. When she died, her two daughters who lived in separate apartments in the same house as my grandmother, stripped her apartment bare and kept everything for themselves.

When my dad found out, he went ballistic and laid his sisters out in lavender. Since Huck died, he had kept in close touch with his widow and acted as kind of a surrogate father to the kids, so he was very protective of them. His sisters, of course, didn’t take kindly to my dad calling them out as “thieves” and “stealing from the grave” and this caused a huge rift in the family and we only saw them rarely after that. But I’m proud of my father for standing up for what was right.

A store manager was overzealous about overtime. Even a minute after was considered stealing from the company. Even part time people like me who were scheduled for 24 hours could be written up for one minute over. At the same time you couldn’t stand in front of the time clock and wait. That was considered stealing time.

After several warnings each week I was one or two minutes over I had a counseling statement to fill out. In my area of comments I stated none of the clocks in the store had the same time. The time on the phones in each department were a minute off and didn’t match the time clock. The company was deliberately setting the times off, forcing employees to punch out early, losing wages and saving the company money.

This of course didn’t fly past the store manager who disputed my statement and wanted me to write something else. I refused and said I would be sending my copy to HR and a lawyer. She never signed it, tore it up.

During the next few days company maintenance went through the store to verify each clock, time listed on the phones to the time clock. A week later I had five minutes over. She called me in, said there was no excuse now. . In the comments section I wrote I was assisting a customer in floral and since the company had not given us the proper language to give a customer we could no longer help, I finished helping her and punched out. Manager did not like that answer also. She reviewed the department tapes to verify I was indeed helping someone. Tore that one up too.

Next day a statement came out stating no one could work any overtime. Violation could result in suspension or termination, we had to sign and date it.

Knowing a few things about corporate law, policy and rules, from my full time job, I took my copy and mailed it to the company lawyers and HR. I asked if this was corporate policy now, where in the handbook was it and did store managers have the authority to write and implement corporate policy, as this was a legal document and affected each and every employee the company had. I gave my helping a customer leading to overtime situation as a reason for it to happen. And asked what the company wanted us to tell a customer we could no longer help.

I truly thought I would be fired. Well let me tell you the shit hit the fan. A week later a HR representative and someone from the legal department met with all the store managers, DMs and Regional Managers. They can’t set company policy, for anything. They can enforce policy, but not set it. In the following weeks the overtime rules were refined. Any issue of someone deliberately working over was sent to loss prevention to review tapes to see if employee was actually working and making an honest effort to punch out, or milking the clock.

Here is the answer:

As a veterinarian, I was called to examine a 13-year-old dog named Batuta. The family was hoping for a miracle.

I examined Batuta and found that he was dying of cancer and there was nothing I could do…

Batuta was surrounded by his family. The little boy Pedro looked so calm, petting the dog for the last time, and I wondered if he understood what was happening. Within minutes, Batuta peacefully fell into a sleep from which he would never wake up.

The little boy seemed to accept it without difficulty. I heard the mother ask, “Why are dogs’ lives shorter than humans’?”

Pedro said, “I know why.”

The little boy’s explanation changed my outlook on life.

He said, “People come into the world to learn how to live a good life, like loving others all the time and being a good person, right?! Since dogs are born knowing how to do all this, they don’t need to live as long as we do. Do you understand?”

The moral of the story:

If a dog were your teacher, you would learn things like:

When your loved ones come home, always run to greet them.

Never miss an opportunity to go for a walk.

Let the experience of fresh air and wind on your face be pure ecstasy!

Take naps, rest.

Stretch well before getting up.

Run, jump and play every day.

Avoid “biting” when a simple growl would suffice.

In very hot weather, drink plenty of water and lie down in the shade of a leafy tree.

When you are happy, dance by moving your whole body.

Enjoy the simple things, like a long walk.

Be faithful.

Never pretend to be something you are not. Be authentic!

If what you want is “buried”, look for it, persist until you find it.

And never forget:

When someone is having a bad day, stay quiet, sit next to them and gently let them know that you are there.

The PAC-2 has a fragmentation explosive warhead. It gets near the target then explodes and shreds the target. This is for ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, aircraft, other missiles, etc.

The PAC-3 has a kinetic kill warhead. It directly impacts the incoming object. This is usually for ballistic missiles, aircraft, cruise missiles.

They’re radar guided with a active onboard radar and ground station.

STAY FOCUSED – Motivational Speech

Shorpy

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I can sort of answer this.

My parents hated me and resented my being born and ruining their lives. I moved out of the house when I was 17 1/2, the day after I graduated from high school, and never expected to hear of or from them ever again.

After about three years, I heard from an attorney who told me that my parents had died and since they didn’t have a will, all their money was now mine. I really didn’t want anything from them but I took the money and put it in a savings account and didn’t touch it for years, except for one occasion to pay for some large medical bills, because it just felt “dirty.”

What prompted me to accept the money was a visit from their preacher, whom I had known when I was still living at home and saw every weekend when I was forced to go to church. He showed up a few weeks after the attorney contacted me and said that my parents had pledged their estate to the church asked if I would honor their wishes.

This is the same church and preacher that I’m sure knew about the physical abuse I survived through for most of my life. They probably didn’t know about the mental abuse I received, but had to know about the physical. He was adamant that the church should receive all the proceeds from their estate and threatened legal action if I didn’t turn everything over to the church.

He told me of all the glorious things they were going to do with the money and what a difference it would make in so many people’s lives, but what he failed to mention was how much it would do to his life. I was living in a little crappy ass apartment, and had struggled to put myself through one of the most expensive colleges in the country, doing any kind of job that would help me pay the bills and get my degree. When he showed up, he arrived in his new Rolls Royce, with his new Rolex and fancy suit and all that was going through my mind was, “How much of this money is going to support your lifestyle, and how much is actually going to help people?”

I was very conflicted. I really didn’t want to have anything to do with them or their money, and while it could really change my life, it just felt wrong to take it. I knew that, no, it wasn’t my inheritance, it was theirs to disburse however they wanted, and while I did believe the preacher that they wanted it to go to the church, the youthful rebellious part of me wanted to kind of wanted to “stick it to my parents” and deny their wish. I knew they’d be furious that I got their estate, and that certainly felt like sweet justice for the many times I ended up in the hospital with concussions and broken bones.

The more adamant the preacher got that the church should get the estate, the more certain I was that they wouldn’t see a cent of it.

I didn’t touch the rest of the money for over 10 years, and then I started donating it to charities I chose.

 

It does not matter if you are the world’s greatest shot. I mean at a thousand yards you can drop 30 rounds into a 6 in grouping. It doesn’t matter if you have bought only the very best Walmart commando combat equipment. It doesn’t matter how many times you have walked Red Dawn and imagine yourself screaming Wolverines.

Wait until that first bullet passes your head. Then you’ll see.

Wait until you learn what fire discipline as a unit means.

During the Yugoslavian conflict, one of the combatants decided they wanted to give the UN a bloody nose. They set up a rather massive ambush. They were dug in, they had many many times the troops. They had artillery and minefields. This was a guaranteed win. When they attacked the unprepared and far smaller Canadian UN troops, it should have been a slaughter. There was one big difference though. The combatants had been fighting in their civil war for a few years as what they were, irregular troops. But unlike yourself they even had combat experience. What the Canadians had was incredible fire discipline, the training to act as a unit, a cohesive whole. Discipline, leadership and morale. The bad guys lost. You would lose as well.

No of course let’s not ignore that you have decided to be a terrorist organization fighting against the United States. So you are the world’s greatest shot as we said. Tell me what you are going to do against artillery? Tell me what you are going to do against an attack helicopter? What about a main battle tank? Oh I know, you will die.

I’m always disgusted by the traitors, the enemies to their own country who talk or fantasize about waging war against their own country. Whenever I hear anyone say things like, fight against the government. I know they are traitors, or at least want to be.

Masters of the Air Clip – “Engine Three Is On Fire” (2024)

This story is a sad one and hard to tell. It’s hard for me to think about. It happened about 10 years ago and involved a 6 year old patient. This kid was so smart; let me say he had wisdom. At the age of 6, he seemed wiser to me than most adults. I learned more from this kid than he learned from me. I diagnosed him with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a very rare bone cancer with terrible odds. I started him on a chemo therapy protocol. With radiation to follow, in order to shrink the tumor so that I could operate. He went through the chemo, which almost killed him, with what I could only describe as grace. Much grace. I had explained to him how low the odds were. His mother was there crying as I spoke with him. He was understanding everything I was trying to tell him. But, it seemed that he already knew. We had nurses and consulting doctors there all through the process. He had gotten so sick from the chemo, I didn’t think I should go through with the radiation. The tumor margins were not good. So, I spoke to his mother who said quite plainly that I should not proceed. She explained it to her kid. The next day, I went to talk with my patient. That kid was smiling as I told him I was going to go ahead and operate. That day. Then, he asked me if I thought the tumor would shrink more with radiation. I told him probably, but I thought I could get all of the tumor without the radiation. He just laughed. Remember, this young man was only 6 years old. Then he told me something I will never forget. He said “doctor, I feel God, and God told me I would see him soon”. He had a smile on his face when he said it. For the first time in my life, tears welled up in my eyes. Then he said “ doctor, it’s ok, don’t be sad. I get to go to heaven”.

I got myself together. He reached out and hugged me, I hugged him back fighting back tears. We both agreed that the radiation wouldn’t be necessary, so at least he didn’t have to go through that. We prepared for surgery. Before we put him under, he said with happy eyes, “thank you doctor for helping me”. I said to that wonderful boy, “it was my pleasure. I’ll see you after”. When I opened him up on the table, I found that the tumor had wrapped itself around the femoral artery. I couldn’t believe it. I was so angry, it had not showed on the MRI,s. Then, I was overwhelmed with sadness. There was no way to resect it. No possible way. I tried to get it all without nicking the femoral artery. I felt like I was trying to save my own child. I tried so hard, I tried so so very hard. I was beaten and I knew it but I wouldn’t stop. This kid would not die. I kept screaming at myself on the inside. The surgeon assisting told me to close him up. I wouldn’t I couldn’t. Then, it hit me like a brick, what he had told me. “ I feel God, and God told me I would see him soon”.

There was nothing left to do but leave the tumor and close. After recovery, I came to tell him what had happened. And with such grace and happiness, he explained to me what God had meant. And that heaven was a good place and he was not afraid. We, hugged, I walked out of his room. He died 2 weeks later as the tumor tore through the femoral artery causing him to bleed to death in less than a minute. It was fast, it was not painful. He died at home in his mother’s arms. But the grace and wisdom this child showed made me feel so small, so less of a doctor, so sad. So much so that I thought to myself, I need to be more than I am. I need to do better. He taught me that death is not something we should fear. That there is a better place when we die. And not to be afraid of it. That one patient, that one kid with so much wisdom, made me a better doctor. He made me a better person. That young man taught me that when I face death, to face it with no fear. And I hope when my time comes, I can be half that strong, as that little boy. And I know this, when my time does come, I will be thinking of him.

  1. People are nice at the beginning, when they’re training you. Then you’re the slow new guy, that everyone is sick of.
  2. When you start your new job, never show how much you can work hard, or try to be the star, that’s how you make enemies.
  3. Never be too friendly with your colleagues, ’cause when you become their supervisor you won’t be able to contain them.
  4. When fighting for promotion don’t expect others to play fair.
  5. When you first start your job, try being friends with that person who is closest to your boss (assistant, vice president..). That’ll make things easier for you in the future.
  6. Do not have relationships with your colleagues, it makes things really complicated. (And sometimes it’s against company policy)
  7. Since you’re the new guy, you’ll get the most boring stuff to do that others try to avoid, then you’ll meet another new guy in the future and you’ll make him do the same things for you.
  8. Never be a Yes Man when your boss asks for your opinion, be honest, he’ll value your opinion.
  9. Never be too friendly with your boss, you’ll be his friend, and won’t be considered for promotion unless you’re a high achiever in the company.
  10. When you start your first real job, check the work environment, if it’s toxic, RUN THE OTHER WAY!

Vivid Black covers Head East’s “Never Been Any Reason”

My grandfather told me this joke over fifty years ago and it still brings a smile to my face.

A 12 year old boy was diagnosed with cancer in one of his eyes and had to have his eyeball removed. His parents were poor and couldn’t afford a glass eye, so they put an eye made of wood into the boys eye socket. The boy was very self conscious and often tried to cover his eye with his hand and tried to avoid eye contact with anyone .

The school dance was approaching, and the boys parents encouraged him to go, despite Jim being very self conscious about his eye. The boy was unsure,but with the urging of his parents, he reluctantly agreed to go to the dance.

Friday night came and the boys parents dropped him off at the gym, assuring him he’d be fine. The boy went into the gym, but immediately went to a corner, covering his eye with his head. The other kids were dancing,having a great time but he was just too self conscious to ask a girl to dance.

He looked across the gym and saw a girl sitting alone. As he gave her a closer look, he could see the girl had a hair lip. He thought to himself, “ she might dance with me since we both have a physical problem “. His heart was pounding as he gathered all his nerve, approaching the girl. He had his hand on his face half covering his eye, but pulled it away when he reached her and with all the courage he could muster ,he said in a soft, shaky voice , “ Would you like to dance?” The girl answered excitedly “ Would I! Would I !” The boy replied, “ Hair lip! Hair lip!”

Oh boy where do I start?

I decided to make a trip to the world famous Lake Tahoe Nevada for a party beach day. I live 30 minutes away. Get absolutely plastered.

Playing beer pong with a random group, my partner asks to wear my LV sunglasses. Me being drunk, hand them over. Ten minutes later I look over and he’s taking off with them.

My friend and I chase him. I’m stumbling barefoot at this point. My friend is sober doing all the work. We finally catch up.

The theifs friend pulls a pistol out of his backpack, cocks it and pulls the trigger pointed at my face. I hear a click. It jammed while he cocked it. If that gun didn’t jam, I’d be dead 100%.

We tell our group, they knew who it was. Now I have 5 dudes who you just don’t F with texting this guy about my shades. I’m an innocent nice guy but my friends are felons. This theifs life is on the line at this point. He ended up dumping them in the trash. I let it go for the sake of the theif.

But seriously, that pistol clicked in my face. I would’ve been gone. One of many many stories at Lake Tahoe.

It’s absolutely breath taking, don’t visit the popular beaches on holidays

Question: What are some common wilderness survival tips that are actually more likely to get you killed than help you survive?

Some thoughts:

  1. Rationing water – Your body is perfectly capable of rationing your water; it doesn’t need your “assistance”. If you have water, DRINK IT. As much as you can hold at one or until you have to urinate, whichever comes first. Then you either limit your movement or talking and find shade to prevent excessive sweating and water. You may get thirsty when you run out of water; however dead people are often found with full or nearly full bottles of water that they were going to “ration” until the heat or thirst overcame them and they died of dehydration.
  2. Drinking urine – Several other answers have already mentioned this; but you can’t emphasize it enough. Urine contains waste that were flushed by water in your body. Drinking urine simply returns those wastes to your body and may make you vomit or worse, have diarrhea.. You’ll quickly become even more dehydrated and a deadly spiral will continue until you die. Don’t do it.
  3. Eating berries or unknown mushrooms – JUST DON’T. Even if they are not poisonous, they can cause hallucinations or even diarrhea and you’ll be in worse shape. You might get hungry, but under normal conditions, you’ll be found or you’ll find someone within 72 hours and you’ll be rescued. This is why it’s always important to keep SOME food in your vehicle or in your camping gear.
  4. Making a solar still – Too much effort and water loss (sweating) for too little gain. Don’t bother,

US Doctor Who Studied 5,000 Near-Death Experiences Says This About Afterlife

Well, you know, one in five koreans died during the Korean War before an armstice was signed.

Seven decades later, a peace treaty remains elusive, because the United States is a counterparty, and it pursues a “take no prisoners” strategy when it comes to communists, especially when they are not useful.

The exceptions today are Vietnam and China, for obvious reasons.

Now, taiwan as we find it today is an active remnant of the Chinese Civil War, which was fought on a scale way bigger than Korea.

Why active? Because the roc didn’t sign an armstice with the PRC. Technically, a state of war exists between the 2 governments, with 99.5% of humanity recognizing Beijing as China’s government, and the remaining 0.5% Taipei.

Every first world state, every big (population > 100m) state is part of the 99.5%, and they maintain embassies/consulates in Beijing, under the One China framework.

Just like the Koreas, it is the United States being the road block to peace.

The United States was embarrassed in korea after being fought to a standstill. That set into motion the unique position of Taipei, which once occupied the P5 China seat at the UN.

The interested reader is welcome to dig further.

In the 21st century, the Chinese people are seeking a conclusion to the Chinese Civil War, for peace and complete sovereignty to return as mandate in China.

Well, it certainly gets one’s attention, along with giving one a huge spike of adrenaline!!!!

Also to be “chased” by a missile is to be not in a good position, especially since some of them fly at Mach III+. You can’t outrun them, unless you are at the very edge of their range or envelope. Indeed it is better to have them coming in at you from the forward hemisphere where you can see them and better defeat them, rather than it coming from the rear and chasing you.

Fighter pilots like challenges, and an air-to-air or surface-to-air missile fired at you certainly qualifies! Before the fighter pilot ever flies in harm’s way, his intelligence officer will have briefed him on the enemy’s missiles, their capabilities, their ranges, their guidance, their tactics, and how to defeat them. Earlier the fighter pilot will have practiced defeating a variety of enemy missiles, so he is trained and ready.

Without getting into specifics, different missiles can be defeated by different aircraft maneuvers and by various tactics. Certainly dispersing flares will hamper a missile with IR guidance, as will electronic countermeasures (ECM) and metallic chaff, hamper a radar guided one. You concentrate on what you have learned in training, and methodically do your job against the incoming missile threat.

The well-trained pilot with adequate countermeasures stands a good chance against most missile threats. After a while, it almost becomes routine if you have seen many missiles, and lived to tell about it.

Anecdote: For high and fast-movers, the SA-7 Strella (MANPAD) is not much of a threat, being small, slow, and limited in range. The first time I ever saw one fired at me, I thought, “What the heck is that?” It looked like a wounded duck, spiraling up at us in a corkscrew fashion. My wingman and I were laughing at it over the radio as we flew out of its range. We had seen too many and more deadly SA-2 ‘telephone poles’ shot at us to be impressed by this little guy.

Seismograph Triggers ALERT from Iran “Earthquake”

No Compression Wave large
No Compression Wave large

An unusual seismic event has taken place in Iran; so unusual that seismographs have “ALERTED” over this “event.”

“I hear what women think” | What Women Want | CLIP

We had solar panels installed in 2021. It took a long time to choose a company and we interviewed a number of companies. It was very expensive (almost$100K), but we wanted Solar Edge panels and Tesla back-up batteries, top of the line 25 year warranty on the panels, 10 years on the batteries. The federal tax credit was 26% in 2021 and North Carolina gave us a $4,000 rebate on the panels.

There is a connection fee in most states and an agreement with your electric company to either pay you for the excess energy you deliver to the “grid” or to hold your excess for future use. This monthly connection fee ranges (by state and by Power Provider) from $15 to $35 per month. In North Carolina, our fee with Duke Energy is $16 per month and they hold our excess kilowatt hours for times when we have very little sun, rain, storms, winter. Since we had the solar panels installed, we have not had a single month when we needed to buy power from the electric company…but we did have to cover the whole house, back and front. (The spaces are for roof vent pipes.)

Because of the age, style and design (Victorian) of our house we had monthly electric bills of $200 to $450. Now they’ve been around $16 for three years. When we have a big storm coming, Duke Power keeps our batteries charged and we’ve never been without power on our basic systems. If you can afford it, you should do it. The electric company gets its energy mostly from petroleum, natural gas and coal. Everything we can do to help preserve our natural resources, we probably should do. P.S. Our house was prettier without the panels!

An acquaintance of mine lives two blocks away.

He’s almost 40, but he looks like he is a GQ model. It’s redonkulous.

You know those magazine ads, those fancy dark haired guys in the black and white pictures on the beach walking, with piercing eyes, and that just muscular-enough body that drives girls nuts?

That’s him.

I catch women looking at him at parties for extended periods of time.

He’s got a million dollar smile that sparkles. He’s funny and easy to talk to.

And he’s a maxillofacial surgeon.

Codename, smart, hot guy with money.

If this guy went after a girlfriend of mine, I’m not sure I’d blame her for writing her own hall pass.

And I have a secret for you about this guy.

It’s going to disappoint you fellas.

He’s an amazing father and husband.

He’s been with his wife since college, he is a devoted dad. His kids hang on him like monkeys.

His wife is always happy. They are good.

I’m a divorced guy. I know a bad marriage when I see it. They have one solid marriage.

He’s a humble, normal, friendly guy. Who woulda thunk.

This GQ looking man, who could have rocked the single life harder than Charlie Sheen has chosen a noble path.

And he’s proof that not all attractive men are dogs.

We Are Sorry for the Inconvenience

Submitted into Contest #232 in response to: Write a story set in a world with a dying sun, or where light is a scarce resource. view prompt

Jeanne Savelle

This is what we tell the newborns. We apologize for the inconvenience. We don’t explain. We just tell them, hoping that one day they will understand.We had to go underground to survive. We were the hunted, relentlessly so. That was 40 years ago, and still, we remain out of the light of the life-giving sun. There will be no reprieve. Those who remained on the surface blotted out all joy.Those of us from before, the ones who remember the sun and the moon, most of them went insane. I was there at the beginning of our exile. I was 9 years old. Now I am the caretaker of the garden that feeds our people.Early on, life was unforgiving, and I learned to be brutal, with myself of course. I had to help my mother make it through, but she didn’t, succumbing to depression within the first year. We sent the dead down the underground river that emptied to the sea, somewhere so far from our existence, it has been forgotten.My name is Amy. It’s the name I gave myself. We all gave ourselves new names for our new lives. My comfort friend chose Danny. I think he chose it for someone he knew back from before, but he’ll never tell. And I won’t ask at risk of his banishment.Danny was the key to our long-term survival. It took many years, but Danny created a way to channel filaments of sunlight through the earth and into our garden. Undetectable on the surface, these filaments swam through rock and dirt like fireflies. They tiptoed on the crowns of the plants and moved into them like blood.Once a week, we each received a shot of the golden nectar. You would enter a chamber and pull a weighted mask over your eyes. For 10 minutes, pulses of sunlight streamed through your pupils, but you couldn’t see anything, you could only feel the sun enveloping you like butter. To me, it felt like breathing water, and I carried that precious energy with me to the garden.One day, I woke in the garden to a chorus of concerns, Danny shaking me. “What?” I said. “There has been an emergency. One of our filaments has been extinguished. We’ve been exposed.” I began to cry.I felt like I was falling through sand, farther and farther, toward the other side of the universe. Danny pulled me up and we headed to the joining center. The others were there. Danny pointed to the damaged filament on our community map. It was way too close to the garden. One filament out in the garden and we would starve.The old woman, Edregon, came up and placed her hand on the map. It buzzed and set us all mute. “I will go, I’m old but I can still be useful.” Struck dumb, we just nodded and she de-materialized.Many months went by and every few weeks another filament went out, but the garden held. We took smaller plants into the chamber to encourage faster growth, but the chamber couldn’t accommodate both human and plant. We knew time was contracting and without change, we’d soon be cold little balls rolling to the sea.“I’ll go to the surface,” Danny said. Three others gathered around him, hands fluttering over his head. They draped the Savory cloak over his shoulders, chanting in their sing-song-y way and then, Danny was gone.We slept in the dark, ate in the dark, cleaned and dressed in the dark. The garden light and the weekly 10-minute blast continued but difficult decisions lay ahead.Months later, the youngest began to fall ill. The elders held them in the light chamber, but the signal was too weak to nurture both. The frailest of each melted away. By the end of the current cycle, only 20 of us remained, 4 children and no elders. I believed that both Danny and Edregon were dead but kept that to myself.On the last day of our meager harvest, smoke began to fill the garden. Smoke or steam or breath, we couldn’t tell. It smelled of animal magic and was the color of river rocks. We gathered around the garden reaching out into nothing. One by one we sat down as if hypnotized. A low hum rose and suddenly a voice boomed out “Rise children, you have been avenged.”I looked around and saw nothing but the smoke which curled and twisted and reached the cave ceiling. Drops of sunlight appeared within the towering smoke and our spell was broken. We all stood.

“What are you?” I said.

“I am the life everlasting and the death everpresent.”

“Where are Danny and Edregon?”

“They are within. Their bravery took them far, but they had to find each other to save the world.”

“Did they,” I asked?

“Oh yes, dear one, they did. They came together like thunderclap and trombone. The explosion rippled over the land disintegrating the joyless ones where they stood. But it also took Danny and Edregon.”

Everyone exclaimed and clapped their hands and screamed and yelled. WE ARE SAVED!

“No,” the smoke said. “You must carry everyone to the chamber. First, put all the children in together. They must stay in for 12 hours. The filaments are not yet restored, and it will take time to nurture them back to life. Then, you must do the same for the rest, three at a time for 9 hours. Bit by bit you must restore your balance. Do not eat, or drink, or bathe or sleep until everyone has been in the chamber.”

“Is that all?”

“No, when everyone has been in the chamber, shut it down and go to sleep.”

With that, the smoke was gone, and we began the ritual. I would go last alone. When it was done, we went to our sleeping places.

I don’t know how long we slept but we woke up together, no, not together, but as one. I woke up but I was everyone. There was no body, no cave, no garden, but the smoke returned. And there was light. I felt as if we were the light of the world, of the heavens, of all of life.

The smoke swirled around and away, leaving one thought behind: We apologize for the inconvenience, but we trust you are happy with the result. No do-overs accepted.

How is the life of go-go bar girl in Thailand?

The life of a go-go dancer is somewhat regimented, and I would say not glamorous.

They have specific working hours and set dance schedules during those hours.

Most have a time clock to punch when the arrive and leave and they are docked when they do not arrive on time, or leave early.

Not sure how it is now but most have to pay for their own costumes – nothing is provided.

There is sometimes a base salary – but it will not be much and if they want to make money then they need customers to buy them drinks and or take them home. Every time they get a drink bought for them, you get a bill and they get a token that they can redeem for cash later. Not exactly sure how much cash they get from this, but in order to keep the $ flowing they need to constantly be drinking. Yes, they can drink pop or orange juice, but many do not as the alcohol helps them to relax so they can do the job.

If the bar has ping-pong balls then a customer can buy a bucket of them and throw them at the girls and they can chase them around and redeem the balls for 20 baht/ball. (about 60 cents US).

They usually wear a bikini when working and then, when not dancing onstage they go and sit with men who are drinking and are very happy to have a bikini clad lady sitting next to them.

Note: In the bars that cater to western men, they do not have to go and sit with men, nor do they have to go home with these men if they do not want to. However, if they do neither of these things then they will not make enough money to pay the rent/eat. They are encouraged to sit and talk as it is good for the bar and for the girl when people are drinking.

They need to be happy and smiley faced ambassadors for the bar in order to attract customers into the bar and then get them to buy drinks.

They do try to lay claim to customers if they can as the customer may well be their meal ticket, but they also have to sit by and watch if the customer decided he wants to try a different girl.

All in all I would say it is a difficult life, that can be lucrative as another poster has already stated, but certainly not a good life.

Deter, no. Threaten, yes.

The typhon is an offensive strike system with a range of ~2,000km.

It is not a defensive system.

Deployed in Luzon, it allows America to strike deep within the mainland.

In principle, this is no different from China deploying dongfeng missiles on Cuba to deter America in the gulf of Mexico.

The United States will never accept such an arrangement, because the dongfeng, just like the typhon, can be armed with nuclear warheads.

Missiles in Cuba render impotent the early warning and layers of defense afforded by installations in korea, Japan, Guam, Hawaii.

Typhon in the Philippines upsets the strategic deterrent calculus. Its presence on Filipino soil will not be tolerated and may lead to fundamental damage to bilateral diplomacy, beginning with trade and a shift of military activity south of the bashi strait into the east Philippine sea between Luzon and Guam.

China can ratchet up the pressure many more notches, because it hasn’t activated any significant levers yet against bongbong’s administration.

Israeli Broadcasting Corporation: “Israel Response to Iran DELAYED . . . ” Or Genesis 34 Deception?

As of Sunday evening in Israel, the IBC reports “Israel’s retaliation against Iran has been delayed due to uncertainty about the damage the attack would leave.”    Right . . . . Not the strange earthquake in Iran that mimicked an underground nuke blast.

The report that Israel will delay its retaliation caused Iran to lift all airline flight restrictions and re-open all airspace.   which it had closed in the western part of its country.

But . . . .  is this a feint?

Did Israel put this out as “mis-information” so as to get Iran to lower its guard?  All the way back in the Bible itself, there is a story of how “Israel” tricked – and then slaughtered.

Genesis 34

Dinah Is Raped

34 Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, went to visit some of the women who lived nearby. She was seen by Hamor’s son Shechem, the leader of the Hivites, and he grabbed her and raped her. But Shechem was attracted to Dinah, so he told her how much he loved her. Shechem even asked his father to arrange for him to marry her.

Meanwhile, Jacob heard what had happened. But his sons were out in the fields with the cattle, so he did not do anything at the time. Hamor arrived at Jacob’s home just as Jacob’s sons were coming in from work. When they learned that their sister had been raped, they became furiously angry, because nothing is more disgraceful than rape, and it must not be tolerated.

Hamor said to Jacob and his sons:

My son Shechem really loves Dinah. Please let him marry her. Why don’t you start letting your families marry into our families and ours marry into yours? 10 You can share this land with us. Move freely about until you find the property you want; then buy it and settle down here.

11 Shechem added, “Do this favor for me, and I’ll give whatever you want. 12 Ask anything, no matter how expensive. I’ll do anything, just let me marry Dinah.”

13 Jacob’s sons wanted to get even with Shechem and his father because of what had happened to their sister. 14 So they tricked them by saying:

You’re not circumcised![a] It would be a disgrace for us to let you marry Dinah now. 15 But we will let you marry her, if you and the other men in your tribe agree to be circumcised. 16 Then your families can marry into ours, and ours can marry into yours, and we can live together like one nation. 17 But if you don’t agree to be circumcised, we’ll take Dinah and leave this place.

18 Hamor and Shechem liked what was said. 19 Shechem was the most respected person in his family, and he was so in love with Dinah that he hurried off to get everything done. 20 The two men met with the other leaders of their city and told them:

21 These people really are friendly. Why not let them move freely about until they find the property they want? There’s enough land here for them and for us. Then our families can marry into theirs, and theirs can marry into ours.

22 We have to do only one thing before they will agree to stay here and become one nation with us. Our men will have to be circumcised just like theirs. 23 Just think! We’ll get their property, as well as their flocks and herds. All we have to do is to agree, and they will live here with us.

24 Every grown man followed this advice and got circumcised.

Dinah’s Brothers Take Revenge

25 Three days later the men who had been circumcised were still weak from pain. So Simeon and Levi,[b] two of Dinah’s brothers, attacked with their swords and killed every man in the town, 26 including Hamor and Shechem. Then they took Dinah and left27 Jacob’s other sons came and took everything they wanted. All this was done because of the horrible thing that had happened to their sister. 28 They took sheep, goats, donkeys, and everything else that was in the town or the countryside. 29 After taking everything of value from the houses, they dragged away the wives and children of their victims.

30 Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “Look what you’ve done! Now I’m in real trouble with the Canaanites and Perizzites who live around here. There aren’t many of us, and if they attack, they’ll kill everyone in my household.”

31 They answered, “Was it right to let our own sister be treated that way?”

(BIBLICAL CREDIT ABOVE TO BIBLEGATEWAY.COM)

Could the Israeli’s being doing this same thing all over again; only this time to the Iranians?

Only time will tell.

My Family And I Often Teased And Mocked My Husband. One Day, My Husband Stood Up And Fought Back

Absolute Silence from NATO Meeting

Absolute Silence from NATO Meeting

Today’s NATO Meeting in Germany has an information-seal on it so tight, I cannot get even a HINT at what, if anything,  was decided regarding Ukraine’s desire to use west-supplied long-range missiles to hit Russia.

Whatever took place at that NATO meeting is apparently a forbidden subject – NO ONE is talking.

Not a hint, not a parallel construction, not even a coy hypothetical story. Zip. Zero. Nada.

I can’t even find out *** IF *** anything was actually decided!

I will persevere . . .

Ret. Secret Service Guy with Podcast says Have Preps for 3 to 6 months survival!

Ret. Secret Service Guy with Podcast says Have Preps for 3 to 6 months survival!

Bongino large
Bongino large

My entire audience knows of my work with the FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Force, but many simply refuse to take my advice on “prepping.”  For those who won’t listen to MY advice, here’s a retired Secret Service Guy telling you have 3 to 6 months “preps.”

For God’s sake, if you won’t listen to me, listen to him!

U.S. “Surges” THAAD Missile Defense to Israel

U.S. "Surges" THAAD Missile Defense to Israel

THAAD File Photo large
THAAD File Photo large

The US has urgently deployed at least one Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) air defense battery in Israel.

The deployment of this $3 Billion system is to reinforce defenses against Iranian ballistic missiles.

This is another signal that Israeli action in Iran is expected to be very forceful and likely trigger Iranian response.

DENIED!  U.S. Defense Officials are now Denying the Deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) System operated by U.S. Forces to Israel, despite reports from Israeli Media and Sources; however, they state a Deployment is being Considered.

BULLETIN: ISRAEL BEGINS INVASION OF . . . . SYRIA ! ! !

BULLETIN: ISRAEL BEGINS INVASION OF . . . . SYRIA ! ! !

Israel Syria Golan Heights large
Israel Syria Golan Heights large

1:47 PM EDT SATURDAY — Following Lebanon, Israel’s ground invasion of Syria has begun!

Israeli special forces have broken through the Syrian border from the Golan Heights towards the village of Qadana in armored vehicles.

The initial assault began about an hour and a half ago and has reportedly advanced at least 500 meters into Syrian territory.

This is a rapidly developing story, check back for updates. . . .

UPDATE 1:59 PM EDT —

The map below shows the area where the Israeli invasion is taking place:

Israel Invades Syria Map
Israel Invades Syria Map

Israeli troops backed by armor entered ~500 m into Syria in the S. Quneitra province. They seized an area West of Kudna, along the border fence with Golan, & bulldozed trees. No clashes with Syrian forces are reported, yet.

UPDATE 2:10 PM EDT —

The Israeli army declares several areas in the Upper and Western Galilee closed military zones.

 

SIMULTANEOUSLY, IN LEBANON –

The Israeli army is calling on residents of 23 towns in southern Lebanon to evacuate immediately.

MORE:  “Israel must also force the UN to evacuate. (UN positions on map below.) “These useless forces have failed in their only mission – to stop Hezbollah’s activities south of the Litani River.”

IDF orders Lebanese to LEAVE
IDF orders Lebanese to LEAVE

UPDATE 3:24 PM EDT —

From IDF:  Following a situational assessment, the areas of Zar’it, Shomera, Shtula, Netu’a, and Even Menachem in northern Israel will be declared a closed military zone as of 20:00 today (Saturday). Entry to this area is prohibited.

 

5:19 PM EDT —

Israel declares a state of alert in the occupied Golan Heights and asks the settlers to pay attention to the instructions of the home front

BE THAT GUY – Best Hopecore Motivational Compilation

Hound dog meets barbed quills

The Philippines does not have much intelligence value, and the Chinese government does not need to send spies to the Philippines.

main qimg a8b9b0bb367b9d0c32c26ae85ec17b3f
main qimg a8b9b0bb367b9d0c32c26ae85ec17b3f

Judging from the current international situation, the United States needs the Philippines to act like Ukraine, forcing China to go to war in the South China Sea, and then the United States gathers so-called allies to fight China, and finally the United States will reap the benefits.

China actually needs the Philippines to act like another failed Ukraine to test its military strength and rehearse for taking back Taiwan. For the Chinese, it is better to choose the Philippines as the battleground for the Sino-US rivalry than Taiwan because, after all, the Taiwanese are Chinese and the Chinese do not want civilian casualties in Taiwan. If it was a choice of two, China would certainly choose to sacrifice the Philippines over Taiwan.

Therefore, whether from the perspective of the United States or China, the Philippines needs to become the “Ukraine of Asia”, and sacrificing the Philippines is a matter of course.

The Philippines may still think that it is smart and that it is doing the right thing, but it does not realize that a great tragedy is about to happen.

Poor Filipinos, they have become the unjust ghosts of the test between China and the United States!

Twilight Zone Time Freezes

Russian Ambassador LEAVES U.S. – Takes Staff, Security, Crypto Gear and Classified Docs

Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, is “concluding” his diplomatic mission, Russian agencies reported late on Saturday.

“Russian Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Ivanovich Antonov, is concluding his Washington assignment and heading to Moscow,” Interfax agency cited a representative of the Foreign Ministry as saying.

The envoy will be returning to Moscow within hours.

HAL TURNER INTEL:

When the Ambassador left, his entourage took with them all the communications gear, cryptographic gear, classified documents, all Diplomatic Staff and – here’s the big “tell” — the entire Diplomatic Security Staff.

It is worth noting that Japan did similar things with their Embassy staff and gear, just prior to Pearl Harbor.

“It’s Getting WORSE And WORSE…” – Richard Wolff

He’s really right on this.

Firstly, I was born and grew up in Taiwan.

Secondly, the statement “China can’t invade Taiwan” would have been true if it were made 30 years ago. It is nonsense in the current state of things.

Lastly, your question is comparing apples with oranges. China, or the typical Chinese mindset, sees these two in totally different contexts.

To China, Taiwan is a Chinese province destined to be recovered back into its fold, with its people regarded as Chinese citizens to be governed under the Chinese sovereignty eventually.

And Japan is a foreign nation that has committed massive, abhorrent, inhuman crimes against China without either fully, properly being held to account in the past or fully owning up to its moral liabilities today, while in the meantime having the nerve to threaten China’s security through tangible actions on a daily basis.

The goal of China’s “invasion”, or rather recovery, of Taiwan is to reclaim a piece of China’s own territory extorted from it by foreign imperial powers, most notably by Japan in 1895. This goal complicates the plan, as it is not sensible to bomb a piece of its own territory back to the Stone Age with thousands of cruise missiles.

China has no such scheme for Japan. Japan is not a province of China, and China has no interest in claiming its land or governing its people. To the Chinese mindset, it is just a nation that has slaughtered 30 million of its people in the most brutal and barbaric manner, and is showing increasing unrepentance and recalcitrance by the day again. If Japan ever meddles in Chinese or Taiwanese affairs ever again, what would happen?

It is like if your neighbor had killed your whole family, and now he is breaking down your door again, would you first think of how to occupy his house and make sure his kitchen remains intact so you could make dinner there tonight?

Not to mention that, you already reached a grudging truce with your neighbor that, you would let it go if he promised not to ever enter your house again. Now he is in your house again. Would you still let it go in honor of that fragile truce?

Herein lies the difference between Taiwan and Japan, in objective, and thus in degree of difficulty in action. One is much more challenging than the other, and that is not Japan.

Japan is easy.


What is Japan Likely to Do?

The Japanese know the above very well, except a handful of mouth-breathing octogenarian right-wing cockroaches still marching outside Yasukuni in imperial-era military uniforms. The other tough talking Japanese, whether it’s Ishihara, Aso, Takaichi, Koizumi, ishiba, or those saber-rattling cockroaches on the web, will all keep their heads down like mice and maggots should a conflict break out across the Taiwan Strait. None of them wants to see Japan ceasing to exist as a nation on this Earth because of his stupid impulse. This understanding will likely save Japan’s ass. If you don’t believe it, you can wait and see. It should be made obvious in pretty short order.

And China’s choice of action will be totally logical and understandable, just like the example of your neighbor above. With lessons learned twice in the past century at a price of over 30 million lives and countless properties lost, China simply cannot afford to take any chance again. Will you?

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

Fool me thrice?

Steak Diane

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15fb3b1f0dc2142bd713110ba38993a9

Yield: 2 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 (6 ounce) filet mignons, thawed
  • 1/8 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 teaspoon Dijon-style mustard
  • 2 tablespoons shallots, minced
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tablespoon fresh chives, minced
  • 1 teaspoon Brandy
  • 1 tablespoon fresh parsley, minced

Instructions

  1. Season both sides of steak with salt and pepper.
  2. Melt butter in a heavy skillet; add mustard and shallots. Sauté over medium heat for 1 minute.
  3. Add steaks and cook for approximately 4 minutes on each side for medium-rare.
  4. Remove steaks to serving plate and keep warm.
  5. Add into pan drippings, 1 tablespoon butter, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and chives. Cook for 2 minutes.
  6. Add brandy; pour sauce over steaks.
  7. Sprinkle parsley over the top.

Wife Has MELTDOWN After Husband Lets Kids Run Wild To Teach Her A Lesson About Undermining Him

Becoming? The UK has always been poor outside London.

Think of the deep south in the USA. What do we think of.

We probably think of this

main qimg 115302bb29e56a0aec34a649e72e07be lq
main qimg 115302bb29e56a0aec34a649e72e07be lq

The UK is even poorer without London.

main qimg 714d019ce622e6a21c72a5b3c3d035bd
main qimg 714d019ce622e6a21c72a5b3c3d035bd

but here’s the thing, the UK is poorer AND stuff costs more. Think of petrol at $3 per litre.

That’s the wrong question. The right question should be this:

What is the reason behind the strong reaction of Chinese people when their country is demonized, lied about, insulted and belittled?

The answer is this:

The Chinese people don’t like to be demonized, lied about, insulted and belittled by jealous and retarded people.

As a non-Chinese who would love for the Chinese to re-take Taiwan by the simple expedient of blockading the island and starving it into submission, I regret to say that I am 100% sure the Chinese will never re-take Taiwan either by force of arms or anything else other than waiting patiently for Taiwan to rejoin of its own free will.

Why? I am not Chinese but I can think of a few good reasons –

1.Any kind of coercion of military action, no matter how quickly, cheaply or efficiently achieved, is going to leave China with a potential hotbed of dissidents, American-paid trolls, covert subversives, provocateurs and other subversives and give them easy access to the Chinese mainland. Let me simplify that by saying that China does not need to open its doors and hug a whole nest of snakes at any time in the future.

2.Regardless of how the Taiwanese regard the mainland Chinese, the mainland Chinese still regard the Taiwanese as brothers under the skin I hear. Stupid, I know, but the Chinese never claimed 100% intelligence. For China to forcibly take Taiwan with the risk of thousands of deaths instigated by America, the Taiwanese would have to do something that could over-ride the Chinese regard for a brotherhood unwelcomed by so many Taiwanese. And for all their blather, I don’t think the Taiwanese have quite sunk to the Japanese/Korean/Filipino level of intelligence yet.

3.China does not need or want to engage America on a warfront. Not ever, but most especially now or in the foreseeable future and most especially not over Taiwan, and send so many Chinese to their deaths in a war it could easily win by allowing America to self-destruct as America seems so determined to do nowadays.

4.Going to war over Taiwan would involve too much destruction of the things the Chinese have so carefully and so painstakingly built up over the last 20 years – their infrastructure, economy and heritage conservancy efforts come to mind. Re-taking Taiwan is important to Xi Jinping, I understand, but not one of his primary objectives I suspect – eradicating poverty fully, building a strong society, infrastructure and economy would be.

5.Trying to take back Taiwan would be playing into America’s hands. And the Chinese are not likely to give the American emperors that kind of satisfaction by any means.

I playfully mocked him for being ugly at a preparty with our friends but then he stood up & did this

This is a Rolex Oyster Perpetual

main qimg 06186f21029a1c9bb10badeea112c975
main qimg 06186f21029a1c9bb10badeea112c975

It costs $ 8000

It’s among the lower end watches

The Higher end watches could be as much as $ 80,000-$ 100,000

It has six key patents – Oystersteel, Everose Gold, Rolesor keys, Chromalight, RLX Titanium & Europium Dysprosium Hybridization

This is a Fake Rolex that you can buy for 1300 HKD in Mong Kok Or around $ 168

main qimg 7c7173a619c5bb0d91c118b453c421d4
main qimg 7c7173a619c5bb0d91c118b453c421d4

5% what the Lowest Priced Rolex costs!!!!

It uses 3L Stainless Steel, Gold Plated Sterling Silver, Zinc Sulfide, Aluminum 7075

The cost of materials is 17% of the price of materials in a Genuine Rolex yet the performance and quality is close to 90% of an Original Rolex

The strap of 904L Stainless Steel can be purchased for 8% of what an Oystersteel copyright Rolex strap costs

China controls the supply chain for all the basic materials needed to make watches like seven grades of Stainless steel, Zinc Sulfide, Aluminum 7075 and Sterling Silver

It can make these materials for cents on the dollar

So it can easily make a Replica Rolex that can fool all but the experts (You do have fake rolexes for as little as 200 HKD but they are obvious to spot)

So China can easily make replicas at a fraction of the cost

When i was a kid, we had a Rodgers Penknife that was a rage among my generation of army brats

It cost ₹35/- in the late 1960s

The Americans made cheaper knives called PODGERS that sold for Six Bucks!!!!

Very little difference at 1/6 the price!!!

Back then US used to do exactly what China does and the world’s replica market was based on the UNITED STATES

Parisien fashions were replicated and sold for a tenth of the price in certain streets of New York and Chicago

A $ 60 Calf Leather Gloves sold in Bloomingdale could be had for $ 8 for Non Patent Leather just two streets away with the same label

An Original Mink stole cost $ 1200 in 1920 and a Fake Mink cost a mere $ 70 – $ 120

Today China does the same thing

Uses its abundant supply chain to make replicas at far lower cost

Yeah. It was worthy of being told.

Pulled over for possible DUI

Me: May I see your license and registration?

Him: “Do you know who I am?”

Me: “You don’t know who you are? That is very serious.”

Him: “Do you know who I am?”

Me: “Sir, you must step out of your car. Not knowing who you are is possibly very serious.”

Him: “Dammit! Do you know who I am?”

Me: “Sir, if you do not get out of your car, I will have to forcibly remove you.”

Him: “F… y…”

I opened the car door, and gestured for him to get out. He did. I then turned him around, handcuffed him, and patted him down for weapons”

Me: “Sit on the curb and calm down. Once you calm down, I can remove the handcuffs.”

He sat down and glared angrily at the ground. After a bit he spoke.

Him: “I will have your badge for this.”

Me: “You don’t need my badge. You can have your own. Just complete the Los Angeles Police Academy and they will give you one for free.”

Him: “I’m gonna tell you who I am”

Me: “I just want your drivers license and registration.”

He started ranting about not knowing who he was again. So, I put him in the backseat of the patrol car, impounded his car ( we were on the freeway), and took him over to a mental hospital for a 72 hour forced commitment (5150 in California).

Two days later, my Captain called me aside. He said that was a great arrest. It turned out that the guy was one of the city’s councilman. The captain said again, “Good job.” I asked the captain if he was told to talk to me about the arrest. The captain said, “The brass told me to talk to you. I did that.” He laughed and walked away.

Spoiled Princess Rejects BF’s Proposal Telling Him To “Try Again”, Instead He Tells Her To Get Out!

Lyle Closs

I don’t like people. Never have. Arrogance, ignorance, mendacity, self-importance, superiority… I don’t like lists either.I’m not a prepper. If the end of the world comes I’ll be out on my porch with a welcoming smile. I have so little – they can have it all. It adds up to a pile of nought and a root cellar full of dust.My great pleasure is to sit out there and watch the days rise and subside, the mountains glow then surrender to the clouds. The snow falls like ash, the sun claws into my skin, the wind reaches through the cracks of my cabin, the cold informs me I am still alive.I had a family but she decided I wasn’t her type and took the kids away. I came home from the tyre factory with a lung full of carbon and a house full of silence. She left a note. It said ‘Bye’. Love died with a three letter word.I pinned the note to the front door for the landlord and drove away with my last paycheck and became a ghost of the person I had been. A ghost is a memory of someone who once lived. Seems about right.Vegas baby. A place to burn up and die. I turned the paycheck into chips and put them all on red, then red, then black, then black. It doubled each time. To hell with it. I put the lot on 23. It paid. Then black. It paid. Then 00. A ball drops into a spinning slot and you have more money than you’ve earned in your entire life.Fawning, flattering fools rose to the surface like scum from a rotting fish soup. It happens when you have a pile of cash. I’ve seen it now and it’s not just a trope in a bad movie. I’m not falling for that though. Faux admiration won’t ever open my wallet. If you need to be liked you’re just a bank waiting to be robbed.I cashed in and drove to Montana, opened a bank account in Butte and disappeared into the wooded hills. How I like it.My neighbors are bears and birds. I deal with people when I need stores. Sometimes I sit on my porch with my rifle and pretend someone is coming up the trail. I pretend to shoot them.Trouble is that fantasy would be followed by the reality of being arrested and having to deal with every kind of scum in the legal and penal system. Anyway I’ve never shot a living thing. The gun is for comfort. I like the mechanics of it. And if anyone tries to break into the cabin at night I’m ready. Just try it lowlife. Just fucking try it…Anyway, no sense getting carried away with imaginings. People imagining things is what got the world where it is today. Imagining that dealing drugs will provide a better life; that sacking half the workforce will improve the company; that beating up a woman makes you a man. If aliens investigated the people of this planet before arriving, they’d change their minds and head for Alpha Centauri. Who’d want to take over this pile of scat.Which brings me to today. It started with the powerful light shining through my window in the night. You know what it’s like. Your eyes snap open wide, your body’s as tense as a top E string. You wait for the next noise.The light disappeared. It was a starless dark night out. Low clouds. You strain to hear anything more but the only sound is the breeze in the trees. You peer out but nothing moves but the aspen leaves and pine needles.The next morning you remember it wasn’t a dream and you wander off into the woods with your coffee and toast.In a nearby clearing was a large object that I could only imagine was a radically new weapon. It was matt black, about half the size of my cabin, with projections everywhere and no clear front or back. That was just my first impression though. It looked, I realized, like a large spaceship model from a Star Wars movie. But why would a model spaceship be in a clearing in my forest?

Then a very small door opened, a mechanical arm reached out and placed a spherical object on the ground, then retracted. The door closed with a hiss. Hot damn!

The object on the ground projected a hazy light that fuzzed in the air then formed a hologram in the air. It was a weird creature which made strange noises and waved its multiple arms, bowed then sat on the ground with its ‘hands’ held open and its head bent down. It seemed to be acting submissive or at least not aggressive. I sat on the ground and sipped my coffee and took a bite of my toast as I stared at it.

“What the hell are you?” I said.

The hologram creature was about six inches tall. It watched me drinking. I put the coffee cup down by the projector. The mechanical arm came out, picked up my coffee and lifted it into the craft. Seconds later it put the cup back, empty.

“Thirsty huh?”

I put the rest of my toast and honey down. That too quickly disappeared. The hologram alien clapped its hands and bowed ecstatically. I had the distinct impression it was out of food and drink. Whatever ‘it’ was.

Then another door opened and an actual alien dragged itself to the opening. It seemed to be in bad shape. It was just six inches tall. Ugly as sin too. Just like the hologram. Slimy white skin, six eyes in the hairless head, six arms, four legs. Clothes like silk, multi-colored, all tassels and baubles. Some weird idea of fashion.

It babbled at me, a high-pitched gurling sort of speech. “You’re a damn fool if you think I can understand a thing you’re saying,” I replied.

It held up a hand – wait – and dragged itself back inside. The spaceship made a noise like an engine trying to start. The alien came back to the opening and shrugged. I wondered how many gestures were standard across the universe. It was telling me the vessel wouldn’t start. Well, there’s not a lot I can do to help. I shrugged.

It collapsed. Struggled to sit up. Draped its legs over the edge of the opening and stared at me with all its sad little eyes.

The mechanical arm took the projection ball back inside then I heard clicks and hissing and, one by one, it brought out 11 matt black spheres about 3 inches in diameter and put them on the grass. I was puzzled.

Maybe it read my confusion. The projector was brought back out and showed a hologram of an alien apparently dying. I couldn’t tell what was killing it, maybe a poison or some kind of gas. Nothing obvious anyway. It collapsed, much like my alien buddy did just now. It didn’t move though. Then the hologram wrapped the body in a white cloth into a nearly spherical shape then put the wrapped body into a matt black sphere. The arm pointed to the 11 spheres on the grass.

I pointed to the alien in the opening and held up one finger. The hologram held up one finger. Alone.

Then the last one babbled again and tried to stand up but it fell out of the opening onto the grass. I reached out to touch it. It raised it little head, held out a couple of hands and touched my fingers, then it sagged and sighed its last. Dead.

“Bloody hell mate. Don’t tell me that means you’re all dead?” I knocked on the hull of the spaceship but thing appeared.

The mechanical arm lifted the body and wrapped it in cloth, pulled out a final black sphere, gently placed the body into the sphere and closed it. 12 matt black spherical coffins.

I heard a faint humming at the limit of my hearing and the spheres sank into the ground with 12 puffs of smoke or steam and disappeared. I didn’t know how deep they went but later I checked with my old metal detector and it found nothing, so they were at least a few feet in. I imagined them sinking down to the mantel and melting in the lava.

The projector started up again and showed a hologram of an alien looking at me and shrugging. I shrugged back. The spaceship couldn’t start and now had no crew. It didn’t know what to do.

I didn’t know what to do either.

If I tell anyone, the world and its military will descend on my peace and that will be the end of it. I might as well have shot someone.

But I have in my grasp the biggest event in the history of the world. Surely there can’t be just one spaceship? Is an invasion on the way? Could it be stopped if this spaceship was studied by the world’s experts? Could we learn how to reach the stars?

I didn’t think about it for long though. It wasn’t really a quandary. I moved my woodpile and it’s now covered so no-one can see it.

I sit out there most days and talk to it. Sometimes I hear soft humming like it’s still trying to start up. There’s a gap in the pile so the mechanical arm can come out any time it wants.

Occasionally it puts out the projector and the holo-alien shrugs. What can I do? I shrug back and we sit and stare at each other.

What Would World War III Really Look Like? It’s Already Starting…

Sunday, Oct 06, 2024 – 05:30 AM

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

One of the most common assumptions I come across in the survival-sphere is the idea that the next world war would automatically necessitate global nuclear conflict and a Mad Max-like outcome. In other words, a lot of people assume we aren’t in a world war until the nukes start flying and the survivors are left fighting in soda can armor over an irradiated desert. This is a dangerous misunderstanding for a lot of reasons.

What people are overlooking is the fact that we are ALREADY in the middle of WWIII. They don’t realize it because they’ve based their entire concept of world war on Hollywood fantasy.

There are many ways in which wars are fought. In our current situation WWIII is being waged through proxies like Ukraine and Israel (and maybe Taiwan in the near future). The war is also being fought on the global economic stage using sanctions, inflation and the dumping of the US dollar as the world reserve. To be sure, these situations can easily escalate into something bigger and that is exactly what I suspect they will do. However, planetary nuclear war is the least likely scenario.

Survival and preparedness communities have a tendency to hyper-focus on the obviously Apocalyptic. We talk a lot about EMP strikes and split-second grid down calamities. We talk about solar flares, overnight economic crashes and nuclear holocaust. I think survivalists do this because it acts as a mental exercise – A way to better clarify what the best preparedness solutions are in the majority of cases, including the worst cases.

But as I’ve said for many years, collapse is a process, not an event.

These things happen slowly, and then all at once. If you went back in time ten years ago and warned people that in 2024 the US would be in the middle of a stagflationary crisis with a 30%-50% average price increase on all necessities, they would probably dismiss you as a doom-monger. Well, guess what, that’s exactly what a handful of alternative economists (myself included) were doing well over a decade ago, and we were dismissed over and over again – Welcome to our world.

The reason people refused to believe us is because the danger was not immediately obvious. The economic threat was not hitting them in their wallet yet. Stock markets seemed to be doing fine. The jobs market was still functioning somewhat normally. They could only view economic crisis through the lens of a total collapse. The idea that it would happen incrementally never crossed their minds.

Even today there are still people who argue that everything is fine. The stock market is “fine.” The labor market is “healthy.” If you suggest all is not well, you’re a “chicken little.” This is the incredible danger of having a Hollywood fantasy idea of collapse. We may never get to 100% systemic implosion; but even a 50% collapse is still a survival situation.

The same dynamic goes for WWIII. We must not overlook the dangers right in front of us simply because intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles aren’t crisscrossing the sky.

Consider the proxy battleground case for a moment.

In October of 2023 I published an article titled ‘It’s A Trap! The Wave Of Repercussions As The Middle East Fights “The Last War.”’ In it I stated:

Israel is going to pound Gaza into gravel, there’s no doubt about that. A ground invasion will meet far more resistance than the Israelis seem to expect, but Israel controls the air and Gaza is a fixed target with limited territory. The problem for them is not the Palestinians, but the multiple war fronts that will open up if they do what I think they are about to do (attempted sanitization).

Lebanon, Iran and Syria will all immediately engage and Israel will not be able to fight them all – Hell, the Israelis got their asses handed to them by Lebanon alone in 2006. This will result in inevitable demands for US/EU intervention.”

I also warned on the potential motives behind escalation in the Middle East:

The timing of the conflict in Israel is incredibly beneficial to globalists, and this might explain Israel’s bizarre intel failure [October 7th]. Just as US and British leaders had prior knowledge of a potential Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 but warned no one because they WANTED to compel Americans to fight in WWII, the Palestinian incursion serves a similar purpose.”

I my article ‘Iran vs Israel: What Happens Next Now That Shots Have Been Fired?’ published in April, I predicted:

A ground war between Iran and Israel is inevitable if the tit-for-tat continues, and much of it will be fought (at least in the beginning) in Lebanon and perhaps Syria. Iran has a mutual defense pact with both countries and Lebanon is generally a proxy for Iranian defense policy.

Iran will have active troops or proxy forces in all of these regions, not to mention the Houthis in Yemen striking ships in the Red Sea. There are questions in terms of how Iraq will respond to this situation, but there’s not a lot of love between the current government and Israel or the US.”

Not surprisingly there was a contingent of people that argued these things would “never happen” and talk of war between Iran and Israel was “doom mongering.” Those people were wrong (yet again), and I was right. Iran and Israel have now essentially declared war on each other and are exchanging missile barrages as I write this. The ground war will begin in Lebanon and expand from there.

Just as in Ukraine, the looming danger is that war between Israel and Iran will draw in larger military powers like the US and Russia.

People dismiss this outcome because their modern conception of global war needs to change; this world war will not be fought exactly like those in the past.

This time the weapons of mass destruction will be financial and resource driven instead of nuclear. If Iran moves to blockade the Strait of Hormuz (which I believe is imminent), Americans can be harmed financially through energy shortages and gas price spikes even without our soldiers deployed to fight.

There’s also the question of our wide open borders and how many potential terrorists slipped into the US during the Biden Administration’s illegal immigration bonanza. How many attacks (or false flag attacks) are being organized right now?

The regional conflicts could spread and go on for a decade or longer. It all adds up to a world war, but it may never be officially declared a world war. Perhaps there will be a limited nuclear event somewhere; maybe a false flag or a limited strike. But a nuclear war is not necessary to create the kind of chaos the globalists are looking for.

People also need to understand that the powers-that-be also have a lot to risk should a war devolve into nuclear exchange. If it was really that easy for them to launch warheads, wipe out the majority of the human population and then establish a global dynasty, they would have done it a long time ago.

Global war on such a scale is inherently unpredictable. The elites have spent trillions of dollars and the better part of the last century constructing the most complex surveillance and control grid in history. It would be foolish to turn it all to ash in the blink of an eye and I highly doubt that’s the plan. They would be putting themselves and their legacy at risk of being erased forever.

Does this mean I will be ignoring the potential for a nuclear event? No. I will always keep it in mind and have preps ready just in case. A single nuke set off anywhere west of your home could result in radioactive fallout that would take around three to four weeks to dissipate. That said, the danger of these sceanrios might be overstated.

Here’s an interesting fact to ponder: The US government has tested at least 1050 explosive nuclear devices over the decades. Around 216 of those were atmospheric tests that resulted in massive fallout across the country. Some people in close proximity got sick over many years from these tests, but they didn’t result in an overnight mass death event. Perhaps, at a moderate distance, these weapons are not as dangerous as we’re led to believe?

The greater effect of nuclear weapons comes not just from the resulting damage to national infrastructure, but also mass psychological disruption. The economic system would take an immediate dive from even one strike, and it could be anywhere in the world. A single nuke in Ukraine would send shockwaves through already unstable markets.  The supply chain and food supply could be quickly disrupted.

If the globalists wanted to accelerate a worldwide collapse, they wouldn’t need a nuclear war, just one well placed device.

The biggest danger from WWIII is not nuclear exchange, but the disturbing changes societies go through when conflict inspires mass fear. Totalitarianism is much easier to institute during such a war. Freedom of speech is often suppressed and criticism of the government is often criminalized. People who rebel against this are accused of “working with the enemy.” Military conscription is usually enforced and young people are sent off to die overseas over a conflagration that makes little sense.

The economy nose dives and the supply chain tightens. Price controls and rationing are initiated. Black markets flourish but those who participate are aggressively targeted by the government. In the case of the US, armed revolution in many states is a certainty.

Public planning should focus far more on these eventualities and less on Hollywood images of Apocalypse.

Shorpy

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STAR-BABES & STARSHIPS 5:- HIGH-OCTANE SCI-FI ADVENTURE

His Ridiculousness Justin Trudeau Has Resigned

Good to hear that His Ridiculousness has finally deigned to resign from his post as Prime Minister of Canada.

Trudeau was of little importance to people outside of Canada. I have never written about him. But I will remember him for his fake wokeness which was as authoritarian as his use of emergency powers against truckers who protested against Covid restrictions.

 

trudeau
trudeau

Justin Trudeau and family meeting a native of India
biggerArend Feenstra, a Canadian, who, with his wife and eight kids, has recently emigrated to Russia, feels relieved:

Trudeau’s reign of terror is finally coming to an end! Many Canadians have seen their lives dramatically altered over the last 9 years, savings wiped out, health destroyed… feeling helpless and hopeless, many of us have fled to other countries in order to keep our children safe. Although Trudeau’s resignation will not undo all the damage that he has done, it is a great start and hopefully the beginning of an end to the destructive and divisive liberal policies that have destroyed the Canada we all knew and loved. May God continue to bless all our beloved Canadians this year and may good overcome evil!God bless you all! We wish you a merry Christmas and a wonderful new year from our new home here in Russia!

Arend’s family has a video channel, Countryside Acres, on which they document their life. Their latest video, posted just two hours ago, is a review of their first year in Russia:

Posted by b on January 7, 2025 at 15:25 UTC | Permalink

Samba Steak stir fry

Seasoned beef strips stir fried to perfection with vegetables, then topped with pico de gallo.

518524d954c81ab6e9c0211b791445aa
518524d954c81ab6e9c0211b791445aa

Prep: 18 min | Cook: 12 min | Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

Pico de Gallo

  • 3/4 cup chopped tomatoes
  • 1/4 cup chopped white onion
  • 3 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
  • 2 teaspoons minced jalapeño pepper
  • 1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
  • Salt

Beef

  • 1 pound round tip steaks, cut 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick
  • 3 teaspoons vegetable oil, divided
  • 1 1/2 cups thinly sliced bell pepper, any color
  • 1/2 medium white onion, cut into 1/2 inch wedges
  • 1 medium jalapeño pepper, thinly sliced
  • Salt
  • 8 small whole wheat tortillas (about 6 inch diameter), warmed

Rub

  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons ground chipotle chile pepper

Instructions

Pico de Gallo

  1. Combine tomatoes, onion, cilantro, jalapeño pepper and lime juice in a medium bowl. Season with salt, as desired.
  2. Cover and refrigerate until ready to use.

Beef

  1. Stack beef steaks; cut lengthwise in half and then crosswise into 1 inch wide strips.
  2. Combine beef and rub ingredients in large bowl; toss to coat evenly.
  3. Heat 1 teaspoon oil in large nonstick skillet over medium high heat until hot.
  4. Add bell pepper, onion and jalapeño; stir fry for 5 to 8 minutes or until vegetables are crisp-tender. Remove from skillet; keep warm.
  5. Heat 1 teaspoon oil in same skillet until hot. Add half of beef; stir fry 1-2 minutes or until outside surface is no longer pink. (Do not overcook.) Remove from skillet; keep warm.
  6. Repeat with remaining 1 teaspoon oil and beef.
  7. Return all beef and vegetables to skillet. Season with salt, as desired.
  8. Serve beef mixture in tortillas; top with Pico de Gallo.

I’m With the Banned

Submitted into Contest #247 in response to: Imagine a world where exploration is forbidden, and write a story about a character who defies this rule to satisfy their innate curiosity. view prompt

Jeremy Stevens

This story contains sensitive content

This story contains leftist political hot-buttons. Do not proceed if you are easily offended.“Do you promise you won’t leave me?”“Baby, how many times I gotta say it?”“More times than you have.”“I promise. I’m not going to leave you.”“It’s just…everyone I’ve ever loved has left.”“I am not everyone.”“And if we do this…”“Ssshhh…you talk too much.”“Just, go slow, ‘kay?”“You got nothing to fear.”—–“And you met him, where?”“At the dugout…”

“I mean, where, the first time?”

“Online.”

“Where online?”

“CuddlesClub. He said he was fifteen though…”

“And how long had you chatted with him, before…”

“Two months, maybe?”

“And when you met him…”

“He could have been fifteen, maybe.”

“But he wasn’t. You knew this, right?”

“Yes.”

How did you know this?”

“Just the way you know things.”

—–

“But she’s only twelve.”

“The State does not give her permission.”

“She was raped.”

“Better than being a murderer.”

 

—–

Noam is playing with blocks on the floor. He uses them not only to build, but to spell. His latest word is “dim”; his phrase: We are a dim lot. Noam is going on four.

 

Naomi and I are cuddling on the torn loveseat. She entered my life when Noam was born. I am sixteen now; Naomi is nineteen. Naomi named him Noam, said it was a good name, said it meant “pleasantness” and that Noam Chomsky said we are born with “innate linguistic aptitude.”

 

“It’s a silent ‘fuck you’ to the suppression from the State,” she told me.

 

I didn’t get it at all then. I get it a bit more, now.

 

Naomi kisses my cheek, and hums Jack Johnson: …it’s so much better when we’re together.

—–

We are huddled in the shanty. The rain has finally stopped, so Naomi has gone out looking for food. So long as she stays to the alleys, she should be fine. Better food there, anyhow. Lots of restaurants; lots of waste. Last week her foraging yielded an unopened bag of pre-cooked, deveined, tail-removed shrimp. Noam found it delightful.

 

I was twelve when my parents were imprisoned. My father’d called the judge a sick beast and away they went, both of them. I was sitting behind them with some person in a white robe.

 

Now now, she tapped my knee. Now now.

 

I was fat with child and my back hurt. Heavily medicated, I haven’t much memory of those times. Naomi says there’s much we are not allowed to do. Being together is one of them.

 

“What happens if they find us together?”

 

“Just stick to the script.”

 

But Naomi is white, which is also a problem.

 

“Who’ll believe we’re sisters, Naomi? You’re white and I’m…”

 

Naomi just kisses me then. It is a hard kiss. Passionate. She grips the nape of my neck and puts her forehead to mine. “Sweet angel, I do so love you.”

—–

 

At four, Noam is still a thumb sucker. Despite our attempts at potty training he still has to wear diapers, and still Noam cannot speak intelligible words. His block spelling has plateaued. While we have no reliable source for nutrition, Naomi is resourceful and provides our RDA of the necessary food groups but still Noam’s eyes are jaundiced, his gums are bleeding, his skin is scaly. He’s been given to highs of rage and lows of slurping depression. He’s pulled out most of his hair; his fingertips and nails are nubbbed from scratching our earthen floor. I’ve tried to love on him —we both have— and sometimes he’ll relent but more often he’ll gnash and growl.

 

“What do you think the problem is, Naomi?”

 

“How well did you know his father?”

—–

 

It was on one of her last forays that Naomi returned with books. “I found them in the dumpster,” she exclaimed delightedly, “all brand new.”

 

Governor DeSatanist. We both knew it, but we dared not speak of it, FOR JESUS CHRIST HATH DECREED THAT the right the abort, the right same sex, the right to read, THE RIGHT TO EXPLORE OPTIONS are no longer rights, but SINS, all in the names of murder! defilement! propaganda!

 

“Oh, Naomi, what beautiful treasures. The Giving Tree. What in the world?”

“Sexist.”

Exploring Civil Rights: The Movement.

“Racially motivated.”

Bridge to Terabithia? I loved this book.

“Promoting the occult.”

Where the Wild Things Are.”

“Again. Too demonic, they say.”

“All of these were tossed? The Outsiders (too violent!), To Kill a Mockingbird (too mature!)…oh, I love this one but never heard of it: My Moms Love Me.”

 

We both looked down at our four-year-old, teething on a sandal.

—–

There is heavy foot traffic outside our tin-roofed shanty. They are marching in unison. Regimental, a tap-tap on the door: big bad white men instilling fear in two biracial dykes and a bastard invalid. We know why they are here. Surprised it took them so long.

 

The walls of our shanty are now lined with books: banned books, we assume, for they’d all been discarded. Several months ago, we’d opened our doors for exploration, purely word of mouth quite naturally as we —Naomi and I, and Noam— are not known to exist, not any longer. (For it’s been assumed, we assume, that we were wiped clean during the last fumigation, we fitting all their criteria of filth, after all.) Prior to finding us, our people had been fed the The History You Need to Know twenty-volume series; The Jesus Christ Giver’s Guide: How to be a Good Citizen; and The Lives of Hunter and Paisley five-volume series (Birth-Elementary Homeschool; Homeschool in the Neighborhood; College is not Necessary; Adulting with People Like You; Growing Old Quietly and Respectfully).

 

For the past several months, though, we’ve allowed our people to travel, to read with delight words that are actually said, emotions that are actually felt. Our people have been able to find comfort in words, healing words, words that have allowed them to transcend the NORM and to explore the lives of others, the majesty of foreign lands without the privilege of escape from this, our “home of the free because of the brave,” words and emotions that are now SINS because…because…

 

is there one right answer here?

 

Because independent thought is treachery. An enemy of progress.

 

Because “who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past.” Because “the best books are those that tell you what you already know.”

 

Orwell, too, has been banned, of course. But we have him in our library.

Had, for we have been discovered.

—–

 

We are not going to be stoned, or burned like witches. We are not going to the rack or the gallows, or the chair. We are not going to be strapped to a gurney and punctured with needles. We are not going to be shot, or even gassed.

 

Our “fumigation” is the now-proverbial Jim Jones’ Drinking the Kool-Aid, though still we get to live, very much like the donkeys at the end of Pinocchio, also banned for its debauchery on Pleasure Island: as sheep in the fields, after the surgeries are complete, we shall follow without question, we shall bleat unintelligibly, we shall chew the cud from dawn ‘til dusk with those indistinguishable from ourselves.

 

We shall cause no further problems. We shall be obedient.

On my anniversary, he gave me a gift box but when i opened it, it were pictures of me & my affair

https://youtu.be/C4fgZ56gjl0

After F-35’s Detected, Israel Preparing Large Surface-to-Surface Missile Launches at Iran

After F-35's Detected, Israel Preparing Large Surface-to-Surface Missile Launches at Iran

After the Russian government alerted Iran to the approach of four F-35 stealth jets toward Iran from the Persian Gulf yesterday, which reportedly caused an abort to that mission, Israel is now preparing surface-to-surface missile launches.

Information about Israel’s ballistic missile capabilities is sparse, but here’s what we know about the “likely” missiles to be used, which is speculated to be “Jericho II” missiles, seen in the FILE PHOTO above.

The Jericho II (YA-3) is a solid fuel, two-stage long-range ballistic missile system and a follow on from the Jericho I project. As many as 90 Jericho 2 missiles are currently based in caves near Zekharia (Sdot Micha Airbase), southeast of Tel Aviv.

Jericho II development began in 1977, and by 1986 there were reports of test firings. According to Missilethreat.com, a project of the George C. Marshall Institute, there is evidence the Jericho II originated as a joint Israeli-Iranian project, cooperation that ended with the loss of friendly relations after the 1979 Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah’s rule.

There was a series of test launches into the Mediterranean from 1987 to 1992, the longest at around 1,300 km, mostly from the facility at Palmachim, south of Tel Aviv. Jane’s reports that a test launch of 1,400 km is believed to have taken place from South Africa’s Overberg Test Range in June 1989.

The Jericho II is 14.0 m long and 1.56 m wide, with a reported launch weight of 26,000 kg (although an alternative launch weight of 21,935 kg has been suggested). It has a 1,000 kg payload, capable of carrying a considerable amount of high explosives or a 1 Megaton yield nuclear warhead.

It uses a two-stage solid propellant engine with a separating warhead. The missile can be launched from a silo, a railroad flat car, or a mobile vehicle. This gives it the ability to be hidden, moved quickly, or kept in a hardened silo, largely ensuring survival against any attack. It has an active radar homing terminal guidance system similar to that of the Pershing II, for very accurate strikes.

The Jericho II forms the basis of the three-stage, 23 ton Shavit NEXT satellite launcher, first launched in 1988 from Palmachim. From the performance of Shavit it has been estimated that as a ballistic missile it has a maximum range of about 7,800 km with a 500 kg payload.

The Jericho II as an available Israeli counterattack option to Iraqi missile bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War is disputed. Jane’s at the time believed that Jericho II entered service in 1989. Researcher Seth Carus claims that, according to an Israeli source, the decision to operationally deploy the Jericho-2 was only made after 1994, several years after the Scud attacks had ended and a cease fire and disarmament regime were in place.

Raytheon Technologies, quoting Soviet intelligence archives, showed them believing the Jericho-2 to have been fully developed weapon in 1989, but did not indicate when it was available for deployment.

Investigators for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace accessed commercial satellite images of the Sdot Micha Airbase near Zachariah, a suspected Jericho missile base, comparison shows expansion between 1989 and 1993 of the type that would accommodate suspected Jericho II launchers and missiles. Such an expansion would be more consistent with a post-1991 deployment chronology.

It is presently unknown how many such missiles Israel has.

US Military Sending More Assets

Additional Aerial-Refueling Tankers with the U.S. Air Force are enroute to the Middle East this morning, possibly ferrying a Squadron of F-22s, F-16s, or F-15Es which the Pentagon had previously stated would be Deploying soon to the Region.

Shown below, two KC-46A Pegasus tankers (reg: 20-46074 & 20-46073) from McGuire Air Force Base One C-5M Super Galaxy (reg: 86-0012) One C-17A Globemaster (reg: 01-0188) likely heading to the Middle East:

US refueling tankers huge cargo planes to ME
US refueling tankers huge cargo planes to ME

WaPo Editors – Ending The War Is Worse Than Losing

The Washington Post editors have long argued for prolonging the war in Ukraine.

In November 2022, when Ukraine was in a good position to negotiate an end to the war, they argued against it:

Mr. Zelensky and his supporters in the West undoubtedly understand that peace talks might eventually be necessary, his commitment to victory notwithstanding. And yet to declare that, or even imply it, before the time is right — before Ukraine’s armed forces have exhausted every opportunity to regain occupied territory — would convey slackening commitment. And that, in turn, can only convince Mr. Putin that time is on his side and that he should prolong the fighting.

Since then Ukraine’s armed forces have exhausted every opportunity to regain occupied territory – and failed. Russia was then and is now convinced that time is on its side.

Now, finally, the editors acknowledge that their war against Russia in Ukraine is lost. But they still insist that this can not be allowed to be formalized in a ceasefire or peace treaty.

While they are stomping their feet they fail to present an alternative:

Ukraine risks losing the war. A Trump-imposed bad deal would be worse. (archived)
A settlement that dismembers Ukraine and rewards Putin will undermine U.S. credibility.

As Russia is the dominating power in the war in Ukraine there will only be one deal that can be had. It will be along the parameters the Russia’s President Putin has laid out. That deal will certainly be less than optimal for the U.S. side but how would it be ‘worse’ for Ukraine than losing the war?

As for ‘credibility’:

A pullback now would convey that the United States and its allies lack staying power and that their promises come time-stamped as valid only until the next election date. How might China take such a message as its autocratic president, Xi Jinping, contemplates whether to make a military move to try to seize the self-governing democratic island of Taiwan?

The U.S. ‘lack of staying power’ is a feature of its democracy. It is well known that U.S. citizen’s opinions about supporting a war tend to change over time. Just ask the Vietnamese or the Taliban for experience with this. No unrealistic fear mongering about China will change that fact.

It is however good to learn that the editors (finally) see the situation of Ukraine as unsustainable as it is:

Ukraine is also losing troops at a rate far beyond what it can sustain and continue fighting. The official casualty estimate of 400,000 killed or wounded is considered a vast undercount. Thousands of exhausted Ukrainian soldiers are deserting the front lines.

The editors know that it is over for Ukraine but they still reject to acknowledge the consequences. They say that a deal over Ukraine, any deal, would be bad but there is not even a hint of what an alternative might be:

Ukraine can hardly survive another year of this devastating war. But the haste to find a negotiated settlement could produce a bad one that would reward Mr. Putin for his land grab and guarantee he will launch a new attack for more territory once he has a chance to rebuild his depleted arsenal. A poor settlement would also leave Ukrainians bitter after seeing their homes, schools and factories destroyed, and friends and family members killed. Much of their anger would be directed at the Western backers who betrayed them. This is a fight America, and Ukraine, cannot lose, especially with a bad deal.

The war is lost. A hasty settlement will be bad. Russia will be embolden and the Ukrainians will be sad.

But what else is there to do? The editors don’t know. They thus close with a sentence that does not even (‘cannot lose’) make sense.

Posted by b on January 7, 2025 at 16:38 UTC | Permalink

My Cheater GF Loses It After I Pretend To Be In An Open Relationship For 2 Months And Then Dump Her

Head games are terrible. Do not do it.

Harsh lessons learned while in a harsh place

China’s red line was for the US to not go beyond the 38th parallel line. Therefore the US was badly beaten.

main qimg 3c7a9c652e12aa7d4ada2c99dbbea0e8 lq
main qimg 3c7a9c652e12aa7d4ada2c99dbbea0e8 lq

My GF Tearfully Blamed The Hallmark Channel & Red Wine After Cheating Cost Her A Ring

Yes

The same old nonsense of the working population collapse

Let’s study first whether indeed there will be a catastrophic collapse and why only China will be affected

What does decline in working population mean?

It’s simple

It means that in an Economy – the people who work and earn a living are becoming lesser and lesser while those who are dependent on those who work and earn a living – are becoming higher and higher

This ideally happens under 3 Conditions:-

A. Rapidly Ageing population due to dramatic rise in standards increasing lifespans to a large extent

B. Rapid rise in Childbirth, almost at 3.5–4 times the normal rate

C. Major War with a lot of conscription and deaths

Obviously B can be ruled out for China and C is highly unlikely given that WWII type of decimation is unlikely unless Nukes are used

So that leaves A – Rapidly Ageing Population

Now the general belief is that today there are 272.66 Million people older than 55 years old today

That’s 19.26%

It is estimated that this number is likely to rise to as much as 32.02% by 2054 and 41.04% by 2075

Let us look at the five things about China that nobody else or very few know about:-

A. Chinese Retire on an Average at 55 years – 58 Years against 64–67 Years in Western Nations.

So today there are almost 59.8 Million Chinese who are deemed RETIRED in China but who are deemed WORKING in the West

If you just change the 55–58 into 64–67 , the numbers change to 15.92% in 2025, 26.36% in 2054 and 34.59% in 2075

This alone sees the working population rise from 46.8% in 2075 to 53.8% in 2075

B. Chinese have a largest savings in the planet – Typically a Chinese saves 45% against 19%-33% by Western Nations.

Thus Chinese Elderly People have extremely comfortable savings as compared to Americans or Europeans who have very little savings

C. Healthcare, Education and Food Distribution is STATE OWNED in Entirety –

Unlike the US where a Doctor can charge a Million and a Half Bucks for a procedure, in China everything is State Owned and Capped

Thus the Cost to keep an Old Man healthy is much much cheaper than in the West

Likewise Education is State owned and Food is price controlled – so Feeding people is much much cheaper in China and Educating Kids is also much cheaper

So the cost of keeping an Old Man alive is less than maybe a third in equivalent terms to keep an Old Man alive in US or Europe

D. Older People are changing generation by generation

Those who will turn 60+ in 2030–2050 would have been born post 1970–1990 and there would be a 64% chance of them being an Engineering Graduate and 35.3% chance of them being a an Engineering Post Graduate

They aren’t the same old people today who were born between 1930–1950 who are less educated, peasants and mainly laborers in a China where the middle class was barely 5%

The Quality of Elderly will rise dramatically, they will be investing and playing a far more proactive role in Society than today’s 60–90 year olds

Just look at Myself, Nagarajan Srinivas and Gopalkrishna Vishwanath and Subhash Mathur

We are far more active, definitely invest more, and play a proactive role in society than three 70 year olds in the 1990s

Unfortunately those who are Actuarians presume the Old People will always be the same dependent older generations, not realizing that the newer generation of older people would be far more proactive

Imagine someone like Anbazhagan Ambrose or Ravi Sundararaman in their sixties or seventies

They would be even more proactive

Same with China too

E. Work and it’s Nature will transform completely

Impossible to believe today’s definition of WORK is the same as that of 2075

For the same analysis – let’s see the ideal job in 1973 China and most Chinese were farmers or worked in State owned industries as longshoremen or unskilled laborers

In India the middle class were Govt employees and Teachers and others were farmers and tenant laborers and daily wage laborers

Today it’s different

It will be way different in 2075

Manual Jobs would be at an all time minimum and most jobs would need skills and analysis

So a large working class population would be a major NEGATIVE not a positive

The US Port strike against Automation is the best example

No such strikes in China

They love Automation for the exact same reason

So no need to get too worried

My guess is somehow if the world moves on past 2030, China will be in the best position by 2075–2100

Emily Heneisen

I duck behind a crumbling wall, dropping to my knees on cold dirt. The sharp edge catches my shoulder, the jagged brick ripping open my skin. Burning pain shoots through my arm, a silent cry squeezing its way through my throat. And that’s all it is: a soundless echo of pain, a reverberation that I refuse to give voice to. I clamp my mouth shut, hoping my moment of shock was inaudible in the night air. The taste of metal– of copper– coats my mouth and I realize I’ve bitten my tongue in the frenzy. I open my mouth again and spit crimson onto the dirt. Cody always said I had the grace of an elephant. Here I am, proving him right. My large belly doesn’t help matters; it is both my greatest blessing and most frequent inconvenience. But I won’t trade my baby for the world and neither will Cody. Despite the fire crackling underneath my skin and inside my veins, I will myself to breathe slowly through my mouth. I’m quieter this way, harder to track down.I made sure to cover my tracks when I escaped the citadel, but it was difficult to avoid the mud puddles near the outer rim of the city. I hope they couldn’t see any tracks in the darkness. Only the wealthy can afford fire or lights, and the cost is steep. The death of the sun forced new generations to be born with bigger eyes and better senses. While I can see faint shapes and outlines, I rely mostly on my other senses. I was born into the eternal night, and the absence of the sun is as normal to me as breathing, but that doesn’t mean I want the same for my son.These soldiers are older and less evolved to the permanent darkness. That’s why, if I can remain quiet, I have a chance of escape. The entrance of the alley will look like nothing more than a shadow on the bricks. The soldiers may be tasked with hunting me and retrieving what I stole, but I know they won’t waste their precious fire to find me. It would cost them more to replace a matchstick than the reward for my capture is worth. If they knew what was in my pocket, though, they would use all the torches in their arsenal.I hear hurried footsteps down the street. I press my back onto the brick wall, perhaps hoping to sink into it altogether. My pregnant belly sticks out far, too far. I may as well call out to my pursuers altogether. I turn my body so that my back faces the entrance of the alley. The position is risky. I can’t see anything but the dead end in front of me, although I suppose it won’t matter if they catch me. I am a mouse caught in a trap, and I’m praying for the cat to miss me. I push against the brick until I feel the pressure of a metal canister digging into my hip. I’m not sure what happens if the metal cracks, but I don’t want to risk finding out. As the footsteps– a lethal thunder of raging soldiers– draw nearer, I cease breathing altogether. If they find me, if they notice the tiny alley I’d taken cover in, everything we’d done for the past two years would be for nothing. All the planning, the observing, the fighting… all in vain if I was caught now.Flashes of green eyes pull me from my fear. His infectious laugh and his sideways smirk fill my senses. Cody. I have to escape the city for him, for our baby. He already laid out the plan. Now, I just have to follow it. I repeat the plan in my head, focusing only on him as the army gets closer to my position. I squeeze my eyes shut as the stomping grows louder and louder, nearer and nearer.And then they pass by, as though they can’t see the alley at all. I don’t feel the heat of torches, either. I was right. I stay in the alley for a few minutes as the army shuffles by, oblivious to the thief only a few feet away. They would kill for the canister in my pocket if they knew what was inside. Cody and I had killed for it. Now, I just have to get to the meeting point and it will all be over. We’ll be free. I wait until the marching is gone entirely. I will not risk a stray guard turning to find me. When I leave the alley, the street is empty once more. I dart across the cobblestone road, cutting across the path I was taking earlier. Cody meticulously crafted our plan, and I’m following it with precision. My heart clenches at the thought of him. He’s still in the citadel, distracting government leaders with that charm of his. They don’t know he’s in on the plan. Hopefully, they won’t discover his betrayal until we’re already beyond the towering walls of the city.I stumble through the small, humble town, a stark contrast to the towering, glass buildings and crystal chandeliers further south. Once, when the sun still lit up the sky, the citadel may have been beautiful. It is nearly impossible to see it in the dark. Now, it is remembered for its cold cruelty and busy noise. Perhaps the glass buildings are prettier than these wood cottages, but I’ll always associate them with the icy indifference of the government that now hunted me.I weave through side streets to avoid the market squares. They’re small, but even a few extra people is a risk I’m not willing to take. The path is winding, constantly taking me through narrow passageways. Some are merely cramped, but others force me to enter them backward to avoid crushing my stomach. Narrow, indeed.“Almost there,” I dare to whisper. I don’t know if I’m reassuring the baby or myself. The cobble road morphs into a wooded path, the stones fading into the dirt and grass. I stand at the entrance of the northern forest, a few miles from the citadel. I turn, and I can see the large screen above the main tower, a giant square of black that barely stands out from the night sky behind it. They only turn it on when they need to broadcast an important message. Anything else would be a waste of light. I face the woods again, and I can make out a tiny cottage just past the tree line. It’s worn down, the thatched roof caving in on the right side. Whoever lived here before had been gone for a long while.Once inside the cottage, I can barely make out shapes. The dim light of the moon doesn’t reach through the trees, and I’m left in pitch black. I feel my way around the room, stumbling into forgotten chairs and a dusty table. Suddenly, a bright light shines through the broken window. The screen above the citadel illuminates the sky. My heart sinks as I see the face displayed for the whole city to see.Traitor. Cody Fletcher is executed on charges of treason.Executed. I can’t breathe. Cody didn’t make it out in time. Those emerald eyes… I’ll never see them again. He’ll never hold me close or brighten my day. He’ll never meet his son.I reach into my pocket, pulling out the metal canister. We spent years planning this moment. He is supposed to be here with me. We knew the risks when we started the whole damn thing, but I never expected to lose him. I sink to my knees in the cottage as the light on the screen shuts off. The world was horribly quiet, and dark. So, so dark.“You’ll grow up knowing your father did everything for you,” I whisper down to my belly. “This was all for you.” I twist the top of the can open, and sparkling gold washes over me. For the first time in my life, I bathe in the warm glow of real sunlight. We never found out how the government obtained it, but we didn’t care. I am holding the only remnant of our dead star. Hopefully, my son will grow up in a world of light and happiness, and not the cold dark that I am accustomed to. Looking at the golden light, I think of Cody. His smile was just as bright as the sunlight pooling against the metal of the can. I prayed he would watch over the baby and see that our plan worked.

Badly Attacked! Assassination Attempt on Ibrahim Traoré as West Goes Insane!

Someone bumped into my car and refused to pay for the repair, so I had to sue. She said I didn’t stand a chance because she worked at the country’s biggest car insurance agency and had access to the best of the best in terms of preparing for the trial.

This was small claims court, so no lawyers allowed, but she brought one of the agency’s lawyers anyway. Both of them yelled against me throughout the hearing, hardly letting me say a word. In addition, I was not up to par language wise because I’d only lived in the country for a few years. The judge limited herself to listening to them and nodding.

At last the judge turned to me. All I could utter was “B-but this is how trials are held in this country? Whoever yells more wins?!” to which the judge said “Exactly. That’s what I wanted to say – that is not how a trial works.” She then explained (for the sake of educating the public, as judges are supposed to do when appropriate) all that the woman and her lawyer had done that is forbidden in a courtroom. She also ruled additional compensation for me as punishment to them.

I lived in Tokyo for about 12 years and in Beijing for about 5. I left Tokyo for Beijing. I currently live in Shanghai. My answer to your question is ‘neither’… but if my choice was limited to these 2 cities and my work/life offering being perfectly equivalent, I would probably select (again) Beijing.

As most people pointed out, the biggest drawback living in Beijing is the pollution. That is the key reason I moved to Shanghai. Beyond that, the 2 cities are so different you will find good and bad things on both side and your choice will be determined by other factors than the cities’ features.

Choosing Tokyo instead of Beijing may seems a no-brainer considering the quality of services, internet ‘freedom’ and the visual/culinary esthetics of Japan. Talking Japanese is far easier to learn than Chinese among many other advantages that I am certain many will point-out and I used to appreciate greatly.

But…

These capital cities and their respective countries are currently taking a very different trajectory. China is generally progressing while Japan is taken into a slow spiral of regression which is painful to watch.

It’s easy to live well in Tokyo if you create your own comfortable bubble and blind yourself from the massive pile-up of social and environmental issues Japan is stacking against itself. By all means, choose Tokyo if you plan to live this way.

I personally prefer to be surrounded by optimistic Beijingers who have witnessed rapid positive changes and have become accustomed to try and integrate new ideas.

Beijing is not the rest of China and many massive, morally challenging (to say the least) problems are left to be addressed. The question is, do you prefer to be living in a place climbing rapidly upward or moving slowly downward?

I was a teenager.

I was attacked by a very large group of youths/teenagers/men it was 10+. It was pretty relentless. I remember my vision going blurred and it going pink before being knocked unconscious.

I woke up black and blue in hospital with a lot of broken bones and pretty much had to undergo multiple surgeries to put me back together again. Apparently they were jumping up and down on my head. To this day parts of my body hurt from this and some of the scars are still there despite 30+ years of fading.

My father saved me by going out and smashing the attackers to bits making them run away.

The police were not particularly interested and nobody was ever charged with it. The attackers actually were called cowards because they had to gang up on me. We moved away from that area and after that we always kept guns in the house. I kept guns in my homes.

I bounced back by simply living well. I recovered enough to go to 6th form college, but decided to explore a bit. I ended up meeting Liam setting up my own business and out performing every single one of those people almost all of them went on the dole and stayed there for the next 20 years 😀 :D.

It’s funny too as these useless fucks who’ve done nothing but suck up dole money think they’re the master race. You’d be surprised how many british are you deserved to be attacked! Only whites can live in the UK!

I laugh even harder as their country declines.

Woman Plans Girls Trip Without Him knowing and He DUMPS Her INSTANTLY

In my opinion, the US military is in decline…

  • it has a recruitment and morale crisis
  • it has a maintenance crisis, where ships and planes are heavily backlogged
  • it has not faced a peer adversary militarily since the Second World War
  • it has not had a significant military victory since the Second World War—it lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan!
  • its advanced military tech has reliability issues (e.g., the USS Gerald R. Ford’s EMALS and the F-35)
  • the Pentagon conducted numerous war games involving China and found that China won in every instance!

China’s military is extremely capable…

  • China has 232X the shipbuilding capacity of the USA, according to a leaked US Navy briefing—this means that China can much more easily replenish its lost ships
  • China bristles with A2/AD missiles, including hypersonic ones
  • China has the world’s largest navy, including formidable ships like the Type 055 heavy destroyer, the Type 052D destroyer, the Type 003 aircraft carrier, etc.
  • the J-20 Mighty Dragon is a frighteningly capable stealth fighter every bit the equal of the F-22 Raptor—and China has many more of them

A war in China’s own backyard gives China an overwhelming home field advantage. The US military would have a serious logistical problem.

In 2013, I got an excited call from my mom. She told me “I’ve won $2 million in the lottery, well, there’s a two in there somewhere, and I’ve decided to give it to you! I know you want to buy a house so badly.”

OK. I said I’d be right over. Arriving at my mom’s apartment, I saw her holding a large manilla envelope with “OFFICIAL DOCUMENT” and ”YOU’VE WON!” printed on it. On closer inspection, of course, there was tiny type that said “if you are holding the winning numbers.” The appeal on the inside was for her to send $25 “for processing.”

I looked down at a pile of mail that had accumulated mail. There were several envelopes like this one; apparently they hadn’t convinced her she was a “winner.” I also discovered that she had been sending blank checks to pay her bills, and had been putting all purchased on her credit cards, which now had a combined balance of over $20k. She could not write a check, but she knew how to get to the mall and whip out a piece of plastic.

I scolded her. I told her an educated woman like her should know a scam when she saw it. I think I even wrote “official document” on a napkin to show how it worked. I proceeded to toss all the envelopes in her recycling bin.

Mom yelled and lunged at me, recuing the lottery envelopes. “Someone has to win, and it could be me!” Her best friend was coming for dinner that night. I told her to please ask her friend (a younger and sensible teacher) about her opinion, and to gt rid of these if Friend said so.

I went home knowing what I suspected was true. Mom undeniably had dementia. She had been acting erratically for a few years, but I chalked it up to “mom being mom” and mom’s insistent “I’m old, of course I forget things!”

It took me all of 2014 and into 2015 to get her diagnosed. Finally, in February of 2015 she had an unexplained fall in her apartment, breaking 3 ribs. Her landlord, who heard her yelling and called me and we went to the ER. That incident was the first domino in me getting her tested for dementia (she failed the 30-question, getting an 8 out of 30. I got an MRI and a referral to an excellent neurologist and assessment program for mom.

That was the beginning of my journey with what was my mother’s frontotemporal dementia. Mom grew steadily worse, going from needing one aide in her home to requiring two aides (available 24/7) in a dementia facility. Mom gradually lost her ability to speak, then recognize me. She died in December of 2019.

I assumed her death would close a chapter and I would start over. It didn’t work out like that. Once mom was dead, so were so many relationships I had built over the years. All of her friends who would regularly call me to see how mom was doing (or to ask if I would escort them for a visit) stopped contact after the memorial service. What was left of my family declared “the holidays were always about seeing mom, we’re making other plans.” I got one letter from a far-flung relative of mom’s who told me “dementia sure runs in the family!” Hoo boy. One Quoran went so far as to suggest I already had dementia, based on their review of my personal account; the question was not about dementia.

I’m now 63 and I’m really lonely and afraid. I told my doctor and my son about my concerns. How do I know if I’m developing dementia if I live alone and am not in regular contact with anyone? I had a few bad falls in my old apartment, so I moved to a first-floor unit. Also, for all our disagreements, I miss my mother. That’s the one person you know “has your back,” at least in a decent familial relationship.

You really never get over losing your parents. I tell my adult son all about my childhood. I told him where our house was, the beach down the street were I spent my summer days and the woods were I rode my horse. One Christmas, my son gifted me a map of my hometown. Interestingly, the map cut off the area of where my house was, it just showed the downtown area. Of course I told him I loved it, but I also realized that nobody really cares about my childhood story.

Shorpy

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Yes.

By the way, so was the war in Afghanistan. And so was the war in Vietnam and so was the war in Korea.

My father fought bravely in Korea. He was bayoneted in the middle of the night at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir — twice. Once, in the groin. He somehow barely survived. (Miraculously? He first woke up in a hospital in Los Angeles, 28 days after he had been bayoneted twice.).

My father somehow survived. He would never talk about it, and I did not learn that until about 12 years ago.

My father died three years ago — in 2021, at age 93 — but my dad would also be the first to explain in great detail how that war was a ridiculous, and unjustified war. He was proud of his duty, and was proud of his service to his nation — but he would also lecture you extensively how the U.S. has absolutely no justification for sending ground troops into that mess.

He would tell you the same exact thing about Vietnam, and also about Afghanistan, and about the second incursion into Iraq. With full detailed explanations. The U.S. military had no business being in any of those four locations.

Period.

R.I.P., dad.

And, thanks.

HUAWEI’s New 4nm Chip Just SHOCKED The World… NO ONE Expected This!

Not a General, an Admiral. In the mid 90’s I was testing a freshly overhauled F404 in the test cell, at NAS Lemoore CA. Recently the AF had crash landed a C-21 (Lear 35) in Fresno, the local news portrayed the pilots as heroes because they “rode it in”, a Lear has no ejection seats. So anyway, I am putting an engine through it’s paces in the test cell, and through the reflection in the observation window I notice a few people quietly step in and are standing there. I am at full power, full afterburner, running high power tests. After bringing the engine back down to idle, someone asks “So what’s your job here sailor”, with out looking away from my instruments I respond, “I’m trying to blow this engine up”. Next I hear someone loudly clear their throat, I turn the engine over to my assistant, turned in my seat, and there, standing behind me, the Base CO, my Div O, my Master chief and….“Commander Light Attack Wing Pacific Fleet” Admiral Idon’trememberhisName. I snap to, and the Admiral says “Care to expound on that answer sailor? Thinking fast, I respond with “Well Sir, if I can’t break this engine, none of our pilots can, and no Navy jet will have to crash land in downtown Fresno”. He gives me a hard stare, smiles and says “Good fucking answer”, turns and walks out without another word. Please upvote, if you do like. Comments and questions welcome! Have a GREAT NAVY DAY!

Comedians That Stood Up AGAINST Woke Culture

Nazi Germany allocated great resources to infrastructure during WWII. Flak towers are one of these.

Anti-aircraft tower (Flaktürme) in Vienna.

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These towers were built to defend the Reich Empire from British air raids. These complex structures inclued radar stations within. These towers are considered urgent and top priority so all the related raw material (cement, pig iron etc.) was directed to these constructions. However apart from towers in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna, other projects had to be cancelled due to shortage of raw material and funds.

10 feet thick concrete walls were unassailable for ordinary bombings. The anti aircraft guns situated on top of these towers were very effective since they can create no-fly zones when concentrated their firepower. For example the three towers formed a safe triangle over Berlin from Royal Air Force. These towers could be used as bomb shelters that can house thousands of people during air raids.

These towers were so impregnable that during the Battle of Berlin where there was no hope for Nazi capital’s survival, these towers could not be taken by Soviet Red Army because of their thick walls. The Soviets did not bother to waste valuable ammo on these towers and bypassed them in their quest to capture the Nazi capital. In the end the defenders had to surrender when they ran out of food and water.

All in all these giant towers exist today because it is too costly to demolish them. The lesson that can be learnt about their ordeal is that they served their purpose well.

Your housecat is by nature a scavenger, typically only hunting when the opportunity presents itself.

Left to forage in the great outdoors, they won’t necessarily pass up a festering carcass.

…which is another reason in addition to predation and traffic that indoor cats typically lead longer, healthier lives.


Personally, I’d be far more concerned about my felines eating highly salted fish or bulb vegetables than room temperature meats, but I also wouldn’t give them ANYTHING that I’d be scared to eat myself.

The two hour maximum for unrefrigerated food is a good rule of thumb for both people and pets.


Don’t squander those 9 lives on base negligence.

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Can you explain what Pattaya, Thailand is like?

The sun goes down and the lights come on along the Pattaya foreshore

I lived in Pattaya for seven years. I’ve heard it said, more than once, that Pattaya “is the world’s biggest brothel.” No doubt there’ll be people who’ll be offended by this statement. They’ll offer up a myriad reasons why they consider Pattaya to be one of the best places in the world to reside. For those who live there, or spend extended periods there, then this is understandable. They’re just protecting/defending their home turf.

The sign says it all

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The reality of Pattaya is it’s predominantly an adult entertainment/nightlife spot. The Beach front area, and the adjoining streets and laneways, are crammed with beer bars, gogo bars, massage parlours, and nightclubs, which are staffed by ladies who provide sexual services, for a price. This is an undeniable fact. The focal point of Pattaya was, is, and will be this beach front zone. Tourists who come to Pattaya, gravitate to this area for fun and entertainment. This area, and it’s associated support busnisesses of hotels, restaurants, cafes, and beauty shops, is the life blood of the town. There are other areas, such as Soi Buakhaow, which offer a similar entertainment services, albeit at a less expensive price, for long stay foreigners.

A typical bar scene in Pattaya

This in itself isn’t a bad thing. The town provides a service/location where single, foreign males can go for a paid for sexual liaison. It’s also an industry which provides employment for undeducted girls from the northern provinces of Thailand. For the most part, the girls working in the bars of Pattaya are from the rice farms of Isarn. Their motivation for choosing to work in these bar areas is simply poverty, and nothing else.

The girls along the avenue

The beaches of Pattaya, compared with Hua Hin and Phuket, are hardly remarkable. If you understand geography, then this isn’t difficult to discern. The coastline on this Gulf side of Thailand is shallow. Even when the tide is in, you’ll need to wade at least fifty meters from the shoreline to be in waist deep water. Because of this geographical constant, the water tends to be murky, warm, and unavoidably polluted with run off and plastic. Even over in Jomtien, which is considered a cleaner beach area, if you swim with goggles the amount of plastic seen on the seabed is quite shocking.

Along the Pattaya foreshore

If you reside in Pattaya, for any length of time you’ll come to understand it’s a bakingly hot place, especially from March to May. The landscape is predominantly flat. Yes, there’s a hill/peak which forms a headland between Pattaya and Jomtien but this is an isolated geographical feature. The surrounding landscape is flat and scorching. Compounding this is the radiated heat from the concrete urban sprawl. For this reason the majority of foreigners residing there will either stay at home in the afternoons, or head to the air-conditioned relief of shopping malls or bars. And therein lies the crux of Pattaya. Because of the unrelenting heat of the place, life tends occur from late afternoon and into the night. Once again, the inescapable fact is that Pattaya is predominantly a night time/night life location.

A great spot for a few sun downers.

Because of the heat factor, those participating in outdoor activities, such as golf, tend to do so in the mornings. Beach joggers can be seen along the foreshore in the mornings. No one, certainly not the locals, goes jogging in the mid-afternoon heat. For a foreigner, residing in Pattaya, their day might look something like this: 1. Get up mid morning and head to a restaurant (the Pig and Whistle or the Victoria) for a western breakfast. 2. Meet with friends for a coffee, late morning. 3. Go to an airconditioned shopping mall (Central or Big C) for lunch. 4. If you’re health minded, go to a gym in the afternoon. If you’re not health minded, go sit in an outdoor beer bar along Beach Road, or some other drinking establishment which expats frequent. 5. Late afternoon, go for a massage (with or without extras). Rinse and repeat.

Resident expats meet for a coffee and a chat

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Foreigners who reside in Pattaya long term, for the most part, tend towards an alcohol based lifestyle. Many end up being alcoholics. Long term, if you value your health, you’ll eventually move to either Hua Hin or Phuket. Both of these locations have cleaner air, a greener landscape, and less polluted seas.

Safe travels,

Mega.

James, the cat with a bank account ! =:)

Actually the story goes back further than that, and to my first pet, Bubbles. A Black and White Domesticated cat. It was an act of rebelling by my sister and I again our father who as small children wouldn’t let us have a pet greater than a goldfish.

I was turning 18 (so legally and adult (and my sister had always known I wanted a pet cat- ideally black, but when we got the cat rescue centre (RSPCA) although I liked a black cat called Solo, I was prised away by my sister and the Manager of the centre to take Bubbles. A great softy of a cat and had been given up as a result of her original keeper being elderly and going in toWarden Assisted Accommodation, where pets were not allowed. Must have been a heart-breaker for her and Bubbles clearly missed her to an petted me as opposed to the other way around.

There was just one problem she was already 8 years old (mid-mice [sic] crisis for cat -:) ) I was only 18 so not a brilliant salary and worried about vets bills particularly, I had looked at Pet Insurance and found it absurdly expensive and so many clauses and disclamers, it had more holes in it than a cooking sieve. So really not worth the paper let alone price it was written on

At the time I was working for a bank, an we had special terms on our bank account, notably no overdrafts, declaring where all money paid in to the account other than Salary had to be verified and origin. Although that sounds invasive, actually it was for our own safety that ALL transaction were checked in case as staff you were being bribed, money laundering under duress, indeed illegal trading or blackmail.

In fact, so strict were the rules that if you did go overdrawn in the morning and had not put cash in to cover it, or confirmed where the money had come from, then it could be Summary Dismssal. So the idea of not bein able to afford Vets fees or food for my moggy, was a serious matter (in my view.

So with the advice of my line manager opened a special savings account for the cat. For legal reasons obviously the cat could not technically have an account in her name specifically. The way my Manager got around this (and later turned out to be the loop hole) that I made the account in my name, but as a Trustee of the cat (Bubbles). That way the cat now had her own money in law, albeit under my name as her Trustee. This was great as could now put money in to her account each month, and build up a reserve to pay mum for he cat food and litter, and also a fund for any vets fees. Far cheaper than pet insurance, AND the money was available. Having made the cat as a beneficiary of the Trustee the interest was Tax Free too ! -:)

I later left the bank and moved in to another sector and transferred the account to a local branch.

The title of the account was “ Richards, Re: Bubbles.

Bubbles went to the great cat basket in the sky (bawled my eyes out over that cat ! ) but found another one from this rescue centre who was called “James”. He was totally black, and fur like a panther; purred like one too. He had been taken back to the rescue centre a couple of times as he kept fightin with other animals. This didn’t bother me as Iive on my own,,James very independent, even learened how to open a window with his paw, climb over threshold on to aledge drop on to a porchm then down to a rubbish bunker and to the gound. An ovrerall fall of 25 feet, but in 3 parts. Cats as we know are very supple and drop down easily. I later discovered that he could jump from the ground, to the bunker and ultimately back to through the window.

Cat-door issue solved, height above ground level and the porch roof pitched and covered in moss , slippery. So along with very narrow window an adult too heavy and would slide, and only a child would be able to get in through the window. Even a 10 year old would be nervous at that height let alone crawl through a high, narrow window. Safe for me and James.

Back to the bank account. The account had to be suspended and re-named as in law James, indeed Bubbles had/were legal entities. The bank (knowing the joke of course) placed now James as the beneficiary off the Trusteeship. The account continued as it had with Bubbles. When I went in to the branch to draw money the cashiers asked if James alright had he needed the vet or was this for food. Indeed during an internal audit, they made me bring James to the branch to verfy him”. Of course I could see the joke so complied. If course James had never had so much fuss . I later found out that they had taken a photo of him an sent it to Head Office for the bank Journal.

I had an emergency crop up, where my mother was taken ill in Europe so needed to leave the Counry fast. The Company I was on contract to were brilliant, understood the sitaution and got a replacement temp in, did a quick hand over and went home to pack and catch the flight – actually the company had reserved the seat for me so I just paid them the ticket money and all the documents were at Secure Handling. Passport and on to the plane.

Family emergency sorted, and back home about three weeks later, picked up my car and then suddenly realised that I didn’t have GB£ on me, and the only money I had was in James’ Account. So had to leave him at the cattery.

The advantage of this savings account was that you could got to a branch and draw money no matter where you were in the UK. However it did have a floor limit, which if exceeded had to be telephoned to the holding branch for further verification and clearance for the funds to be released. The holding branch of course knew the joke about James. So as a joke on me and the branch I was drawing the money through the girl who had taken the passbook for clearance, called me back to her till and said:

“The branch have asked for further information as this an unusual transaction for you and want to know James’ date of birth and his relationship to you”.

I told her straight faced that James was a Black Domesticated, shot-hair cat. Thinking I had “lost it”, smiled wrote the information down and handed it back to the clearing clerk, also looking perplexed and started talking to the home branch who confirmed that James was indeed a cat, and yes I had the authoirty to draw the money. So laughs all around.

Roll on 12 months in to the new financial year and UK Tax Office sends me a letter statin that during a random audit, I had an account in Trusteeship for James and wanted confirmation who James was his age and whether the interest was taxable. So I sent the passbook off, along with James’ Adoption Certificate (in the UK when you take a dog or cat from a rescue home you have to provide details identification and where live and in effect do adopt the cat. And yes, they do check to make sure that the animal is OK a couple of weeks down the line by turning up randomly and wanting to see where the animal sleeps his food is kept an whether registered with a vet.

So that is how seriously the UK take their pets. -:)

Back to the Tax Office where have sent all this information and for a laugh sent a picture of James along with he adoption certificate, pass-book and certificate of interest of interest from the bank.

A phone call was received from the Tax Office to “confirm a few things” (think to test my sanity to be honest -:) and asked why I had the account and having confirmed with the adoption papers wanted to make sure that James was under 18, which he appeared to be in the picture, that was confirmed and clearly had spoken with my bank.

I got a letter back form Inland Revenue that as James was under 18, he was now deemed to be a “Minor in pertuity” (which is legal terminology for bein a “child for life”.) Thanked me for my compliance and would not be making any further enquiries from now on! Also any interest reported would be retreated as non taxable as it was for the cat’s (child) benefit -: )

So just shows if you play along with the UK Inland Revenue, they do have a sense of humour.

Seriously all this is true. James, the cat with a bank account.

Beef Borguignonne

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Yield: 8 to 10 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 (3 pound) lean beef chuck, cubed
  • 1/2 cup shortening
  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon thyme
  • 1 cup beef consommé
  • 2 to 3 cups dry red wine
  • 1 (4 ounce) can mushrooms or 1/2 pound fresh mushrooms, sautéed in 2 tablespoons butter
  • 12 small white onions, parboiled

Instructions

  1. Brown meat in shortening; add flour and seasonings. Stir well. Pour into 2 quart casserole.
  2. Add broth and wine.
  3. Bake for 2 hours at 300 degrees F.
  4. Add mushrooms and onions. May add more broth and wine, if dry.
  5. Bake 1 1/2 hours more, perhaps lowering oven temperature.
  6. Skim fat from gravy.
  7. Serve with mashed potatoes, noodles or rice.

Star Wars A New Hope – 1950s Super Panavision 70 | Runway Gen 3

Just Hangin’

I guess with that idiotic arrogant cruel entitled mindset that you are referring to the USA.

The USA has just has its ass whipped again by a bunch of poorly armed, unsophisticated peasants in Afghanistan, as happened in Viet Nam and Korea. How and why it assumes that a truly cruel vile evil proposition like this could succeed against a highly organised, sophisticated, vast, nuclear armed country like China is beyond the scope of rational thinking.

Four-Onion Steak

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Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 (12 ounce) boneless beef top-loin steaks, cut 1 inch thick
  • 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 large white onion, thinly sliced
  • 1 medium leek, thinly sliced
  • 2 shallots, chopped
  • 1/2 cup beef broth
  • 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/2 cup sliced scallions
  • Scallions, sliced into 3 inch pieces (optional)

Instructions

  1. Cut steaks into 4 portions.
  2. Combine garlic salt, chili powder, pepper and cinnamon. Use your fingers to press mixture onto both sides of each steak portion.
  3. In a large skillet cook steaks in hot oil over medium heat to desired doneness, turning once. Allow 8 to 11 minutes for medium rare or 12 to 14 minutes for medium.
  4. Transfer steaks to a serving platter, reserving drippings in the skillet. Keep warm.
  5. For sauce, add white onion, leek and shallots to skillet. Cook and stir over low heat for 5 minutes or until onions are tender.
  6. Add beef broth and Worcestershire sauce. Cook and stir for 1 to 2 minutes more or until broth is slightly reduced.
  7. Add scallions. Spoon onion mixture over steaks.
  8. Garnish with scallion pieces, if desired.

Kishore Mahbubani REVEALS China’s Strategy to Counter the US

I absolutely did. On January 21, 2023, I crashed from complications due to Delta Covid. Prior to being revived, I have vivid memories of knowing I was dead. I will tell you that I went somewhere horrific, and disconnected from all that is holy. I heard those closest to me say things like “at least she’s in a better place now”, as I’d dealt with decades of severe mental health issues and suicidal ideations. I heard them walk away for what I believed to be the very last time. I was in a dark room beneath the ICU, tied down in a chair. There was an evil presence, and other details I won’t go into now. My voice was mute. My screams, silent. I have never felt such agony as knowing that was the last I’d ever hear them, and I had no voice to scream, “COME BACK!! I’M NOT IN A BETTER PLACE!! PLEASE DEAR GOD DON’T LEAVE ME!!!” The belief that I had went to hell, and my loved ones assumed I was in Heaven was the worst part of it all. Knowing I was there, and no one knew. Forever. That it would never end. I cannot even begin to put into words the agony and torment, as I can assure you that there is nothing on this earth that can even come close to comparing to that horror. I read once about a woman who was held captive for many years on end by a man and woman who kept her in a box beneath their bed. For whatever reason, I can relate this most to her story, only at least she could hold onto the tiniest amount of hope that perhaps someday she’d know freedom. But where I went, even the tiniest of hope did not exist. Thankfully both her and I recieved that freedom. I woke up a different person. In the 18 months since my NDE, I have found God and am no longer suicidal. I had a laundry list of complications brought on by Delta Covid, including Sepsis, Septic Shock, Staff, MRSA, Double Pneumonia, and failed liver and kidneys. I was in a coma for several weeks and was on bedside dialysis. I woke up unaware of where I was or what had happened to get me there. I have no memories of being sick, and even the couple of weeks leading up to being life-flighted are wiped clean. At first, I assumed I must’ve been in a car accident. I had a tracheostomy and could not communicate in the weeks following waking from the coma. My body was too weak and shaky to use a pen, as we tried without anywhere close to success. I was determined to get off the vent so that I could tell of what had happened when I died. I can’t explain how odd it was to be holding onto that alone, while my loved ones visited my bedside and I had no way of telling them that I had been changed. I had seen hell. I was given a second chance, against all odds. I had a total of 17 specialists, many informing my family (and myself) that they witnessed nothing short of a miracle. My body was described as “on fire”. I had a preconceived notion that doctors were purely science-minded, but my doctors gave all the credit to God and my will to live. The odd thing was that I’d just gotten out of 7 months of in-patient treatment for wanting to end my life, so hearing it had ANYTHING to do with my will to live was such dark humor!! It was God, as He worked through the hands of my doctors. I came out of it realizing that both science and God can be true at the same time. God works through others. Next time I die, I plan on going to Heaven.

BREAD GREATEST HITS. (WITH LYRICS) NON STOP.

The Sinners of a Planet Gone Dark

Submitted into Contest #232 in response to: Write a story set in a world with a dying sun, or where light is a scarce resource. view prompt

Susy G

[Content warning: mild physical violence, death]Apocalypses don’t happen in sudden, drama-injected catastrophes like in the movies. They happen slowly—painstakingly—while half of the planet tries to convince the other half that it’s all a hoax, that the sun can’t possibly go out, that it’s just a government plot to drive up stock prices or hide trackers in our drinking water or whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is.The sun might not have technically ‘gone out’ yet, but it’s close. Each morning grows that much darker. Kids don’t even know what seasons are anymore.I always thought that if there was an apocalypse, if the zombies did rise up and eat us all, I wouldn’t want to survive the first wave. What kind of person would want to stick around for a zombie apocalypse and spend the rest of their miserable life alone and perpetually afraid of their own shadow?Well, now I know the answer. It turns out that the human brain has an incredibly strong desire to stay alive, regardless of the circumstances. Sure, I know the sun is dying. I know the world will freeze even more than it already has done and it will only be a matter of time before we slow to a crawl and die gruesome deaths. But my brain hasn’t quite cottoned on to that yet, so it forcibly keeps me alive. It’s determined to score front row seats for the end of humanity.And if I am going to stick around . . . well I’m going to make the best of it.It was clear from the outset that even at the end of the world, humans love to place value on random commodities, even if the commodity might not seem like much on first glance. Plants, for one thing—real, natural plants—soon became the treasures of corporations once they realised that they would be a rare phenomenon, destined to be locked away and auctioned off to the wealthy just to satiate their need to find new ways to prove their meaningless fortunes.But apparently plants don’t just sit there and look pretty. The black market seems to think that their DNA is a vault of information and the promise of scientific advancement—if you know how to unlock it. At least, that’s what my buyer told me. And now, that plant DNA is priceless to those heroes who are still trying to save what’s left of the planet.Who am I to argue with the experts?It’s time to wake up and smell the apocalypse. What billionaire ex-politician is going to care about a missing plant when they’re going to die just as horribly as the rest of us ordinary folk? I wasn’t always a thief, but as the doomsday clock ticks down lower and lower, the less I can find the ability to care about the morality of it all.I got into this business for the money at first, but when the concept of money and cash stopped meaning anything, I kept doing it anyway as if to prove a point—that no amount of high security fences or vaults or sirens would be enough to protect them from the same fate as us. Everyone else around here knows that their homes are viable targets for looting; why should it be any different for them? With each score, I dragged them back down to the reality of living on this broken planet.This one is no different. The thrill is addictive, cutting up fences and shooting down cameras as though they would be an effective deterrent for any thief worth their salt. I’m a machine of instinct and adrenaline. I slip through lasers and bypass security barriers like a river in a gorge. On a planet full of death, I feel like I’m the only human left who is truly alive.The first security guard catches me by surprise, but my survival-bent brain reacts before he can. Complacency gets thieves killed, and gut instinct brings the gun from my holster and shoots the security guard before he can do anything to stop me.I wasn’t planning to encounter anyone today, let alone commit murder. I should be flattered that this target perceives thieves like me as such a threat that they would go to such ridiculous expenses as hiring security personnel—very much a dying breed in an apocalypse—but all I can think as I continue through the dark compound is how little value is placed on the lives of these people. I reason with myself that if these security guards wanted to stick around this long for the apocalypse, that was their choice. Actually, if you think about it, I was saving them from having to experience the final apocalypse—that by shooting them in the head, I was performing a kindness.I’m not very persuasive, as it turns out. I send up an apologetic prayer as I propel each guard I encounter to somewhere better than here.A new train of thought keeps me focused as I continue my executions through the dimly lit corridors. If God is real, and all this is just another Biblical flood, and some guy called Noah has built a spaceship to rebuild humanity after the sun finally dies . . . well, I wish Noah success in his spaceship-building endeavours. But I also feel for the people who weren’t saved from the flood and who won’t be saved now, those who have sinned and will feel God’s wrath as a result. Who is Noah to decide who lives and dies? Doesn’t watching the rest of humanity die and doing nothing to save them constitute a sin in itself? If Noah is as damned a sinner as I am, then I will sin until the bitter end, and if God made us in Their image, then They too must be a sinner.Therefore, God would want me to steal this bloody plant.

I wasn’t born a thief. Believe it or not, I used to be a Pilates instructor before the world went to pot. We always knew that the sun would die in our lifetime, so I’m not sure what got us to the point where people stopped caring about personal fitness and the rule of law. All I know is that with every governmental collapse, with every frozen, deadly winter, with every suicidal cult that sprung up and promised a pre-apocalyptic death free of pain, the world felt that much smaller, and consequences became a rarer occurrence. Each winter inches us closer to a world-ending ice age, and when it’s the end of the world, concepts like ‘morals’ are the first to go. So I’m just here to make the most of it. It’s either that or sit around and wait to die. You might have your sainthood intact if you chose that route, but you’d also die a lot quicker from starvation or hypothermia if you never stole anything. It starts with a blanket, a bread roll, something you can trade for a hot meal, and then before you know it, you’re sneaking around a former world leader’s private compound on a murder spree so you can sell his prized potted plant on the black market.

As thoughts of morality and the road from sainthood to sinner spiral around my mind, I finally arrive at the vault, where the plant awaits rescue. I shove on a pair of sunglasses. They’re hard to come by these days—what use would a dark planet have for darkening the world even more?—but I know that real plants need a great deal of artificial light to keep them alive, so I came prepared. This might be my first plant heist, but I don’t intend for it to be my last.

I blast open the iron doors of the vault without much difficulty, alarm sirens blaring in the darkness. Dust spills into the air from the explosion, and I am thrust into the whitest light I have ever seen. Fortunately, the sunglasses do their job, and I see three silhouettes racing towards me, boots clanging on the metal floor.

I reach for my gun, but another guard tackles me from behind and wrestles me to the floor. He must have followed me, chosen not to engage, knowing I would be facing further resistance within the vault itself and would not be expecting anyone to attack from behind. I usually manage to avoid physical altercations, but desperation spurs me to fight back. That damned survival instinct kicking in again.

He might be bigger than me, but I know the weak points of the body. An elbow to the eye shatters his sunglasses and causes him to pull his arm back to cover his face, providing me with the space needed to roll out from under his grip, save him from the apocalypse with my gun, and face my three remaining opponents.

I have a second to take in my surroundings. The vault is enormous, more like a chamber, and it is filled to the ceiling with deep green plants. The blueprints didn’t indicate the size of the vault or its contents, but I couldn’t have imagined stumbling into a veritable rainforest. It’s been years since I’ve even seen a picture of a real plant, and this guy has a whole ecosystem hidden away in his basement. And for what? Status? Pride? Just because he can? Within milliseconds, anger and despair consume me. The apocalypse isn’t just the sun going out, the oceans freezing over, and the descent of everlasting darkness—it’s people like him, hoarding extortionate amounts of wealth just so he can go to meet God with as much superficial power as humanly possible. Has no one told him that we don’t take material possessions with us when we die? Stealing to survive and drag the wealthy back down to earth is one thing. But hoarding this? This is far beyond any concept of survival. This is greed in its purest, most meaningless form.

The heroes operating within the black market would keel over at the sight of all these plants, and probably declare that humanity finally has a shot at salvation. I’m not so sure that humanity is even worth saving at this point.

Maybe I’m starting to understand Noah’s perspective.

The instinct to survive kicks in again, and I shoot at the guards despite myself, but my gun clicks, jammed.

Divine intervention?

I dive out of the guards’ firing range and get close enough to engage in physical combat instead, but I am a thief, not a fighter. I have completed countless jobs, but none of them involved a physical fight with more than one person at a time. Like I said, security guards are a dying breed, so physical confrontations are few and far between.

I manage to thrust the butt of my gun into a guard’s head, kick another in the groin, hurl my fists into the other’s lower back, continuously moving so they don’t have enough time to aim and shoot me. I take more blows in return than I can count. Blood—I’m not sure whose—sprays onto a nearby leaf. Then, one of them manages to reach for my sunglasses and rips them off before I realise what’s happening.

My eyes scrunch shut without any control at the sudden injection of light, and the guards waste no time at my hesitation. One twists my arms behind my back and kicks me to the floor, a boot pressing against my lower spine to keep me there. My shoulder sockets burn at the strained angle.

I inch my eyes open millimetre by millimetre until I can see a guard with his gun pointing straight at me. The remaining guard stands further back, speaking indistinctly into a radio.

The guard in front of me takes his final aim, and somehow I smile to myself, panting, blood dripping from my mouth. Finally, that damned survival instinct subsides. My brain has finally stopped resisting, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more at peace than I am in this moment.

It looks like I’ll miss the apocalypse after all. I almost think I was actually looking forward to it in the end, just to see what it would feel like after all these years of build-up. Typical of me not to want to feel like I’m missing out. Maybe that’s what’s kept me alive through it all.

I chuckle and crane my neck up to the ceiling, towards the Great Sinner, finally ready for my appointment with Them.

Ex-Husband’s Afterlife Confessions to Matt Fraser!

This is a great question. I have a perfect answer for this

This Son of a Bitch, Woodrow Wilson:

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main qimg 673570164c1746280ec7d226d9cd5e2a lq

I am honestly baffled that anyone would put this piece of shit in their top 10 favorite presidents. Some historians rank him as the best behind FDR, Lincoln and Washington. There were so many bad things he did and it would be an essay in order to list down EVERY bad thing he did. So where do we start with this Bastard

-He segregated the Government

-He Brought new live into the KKK, ultimately setting Civil Rights back another 50 FUCKING YEARS!

-He promised to keep the United States Out of the Great War, Only to Declare War. Him saying he would keep us out of war was the reason why he won the 1916 election.

-He passed out the Sedition Act of 1918 Which Banned Freedom Of Speech

-He passed out the Espionage Act of 1917 which prohibited people from obtaining information from the National Defense

-He supported eugenics

-He forced many soldiers to fight in WWI with Influenza and was responsible for the death of millions

-He was involved in the Treaty of Versailles which lead to Hitler and WWII

-He smiled when Theodore Roosevelt died. That’s disgusting

-He lead the Palmer Raids

I’m sure there’s much worse about this asshole but I could still keep typing until the day I die when I list every bad thing from Woodrow Wilson. If I ever had an excuse to ever go to hell, It would be to knock his rotten teeth out of his mouth. I hate him with a passion and sorry If I seem so unprofessional about this but He really did that much bad for us Americans. And what’s also the point in liking Woodrow Wilson when FDR was similar in polices but unquestionably better than him in ever since of the word better.

What’s the most badass thing your boss has ever done?

There was a time when I was working a maximum security prison. This was the top of the line for inmates just shy of death row. We held a lot of people sentenced to multiple life sentences, fifty years and more.

A trick inmates like to play was to feign a medical injury then when staff opened their cell, said inmate would jump up and start fighting.

I had one inmate on my block and he was gargantuan, easily six foot five and three hundred pounds. Had he wanted to he could have incapacitated me by just knocking me down and sitting on my chest for three minutes. He looked like Fezzik from Princess Bride.

I knew that he was being interrogated for serial killings linked to him by the FBI. If they could crack him a couple life sentences would be added to his twenty year stretch. He had nothing to lose.

To add insult to injury, life threw him a curveball. His mother died and he was locked up, unable to see her. When I heard this I was convinced he would at the minimum attempt a suicide.

My prediction seemed to come true when I heard another inmate in the neighboring cell calling my name. I walked over and he pointed towards Fezzik whose cell was next to his. I shone my flashlight in and he was lying on the ground motionless.

Following policy I called in an emergency alert to the unit. We were short staffed, so short staffed that two sergeants came by to help. I was starting to think that Fezzik had snapped and the second we rolled his door that we would be in a clobbering match with a man three times my body size. All I had was some pepper spray and a vest.

We rolled his door and there was a massive pause as we all looked around to see who the unlucky bastard to go into the cell first would be. I will admit that bastard was not going to be me.

A small sergeant, a man called Sgt. Click didn’t hesitate, not even beyond one second. He was shorter than me and had no gear but he went head first into the cell, towing what I imagined to be basketball sized steel testicles in his pants. Fortunately for us, Fezzik was not looking for a fight. He had taken his frustration out on the cell wall, slipped and knocked himself out cold on the cell floor.

We got him out and to the hospital wing. I had nothing but the highest respect for Sgt Click after that.

Pot Roast with Vegetables

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22a904bcf2d6fa9869a68244aaa151d3

Ingredients

Roast

  • 1 (5 pound) bottom round beef roast
  • 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon shortening
  • 6 whole black peppers
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 6 medium carrots, pared
  • 6 medium onions, peeled
  • 1 (16 ounce) can stewed tomatoes

Pot Roast Gravy

  • Pan drippings
  • 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • Salt and pepper

Instructions

Roast

  1. Wipe roast well with damp paper towels.
  2. Combine flour and salt; rub into surface of meat. In hot shortening in large Dutch oven, brown meat well all over.
  3. Add black peppers, bay leaf and 2 cups water; simmer covered, for 1 hour.
  4. Turn roast. Add vegetables; simmer covered, for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until the roast and vegetables are tender. Keep warm.
  5. Serve with Pot Roast Gravy.

Pot Roast Gravy

  1. Pot Roast Gravy: Brown flour in pan drippings in skillet; when brown add water to liquid in pot roast to make 2 1/2 cups. Cook slowly until thick, season to taste.
  2. Serve with meat.

Man HIT by CAR & DIES; Shown Humanity’s FUTURE in PROFOUND NDE – Stay Calm! | Gary L. Wimmer

Nicholas Thomas

      An alarm was going off. I awoke with a start as I sat up in my bed. The alarm was coming from a small box on the stool beside me. I reached over and turned it off and took a look at my surroundings. I was in a small room that was chromatic in appearance and seemed spotlessly clean. There were no windows and no door to be seen. Aside from the stool next to my bed which held the alarm clock, the only other things in this room were a mirror, and a calendar hung on the wall. I stood up out of bed and stretched. I looked in the mirror, then moved along the walls of my small enclosure and was able to confirm that there in fact was seemingly no way in or out of this room; so how did I end up in here? I was so hungry and so thirsty, so I ate dates from the calendar and drank from the springs of my bed.I turned to again face the mirror on the wall. There I see what I saw, and I took the saw. I then moved the alarm clock off the stool and sawed the stool in half. I took both halves of the stool and put them together to make a whole. I climbed through the hole.On the other side of the hole is where I found a door. It was large and, like most everything else I found so far, was made of metal. I tried the handle of the door but it didn’t budge. There was a panel above the handle which displayed a rectangular screen and a keypad. The screen showed a long list of number pairs where the far left side of the pairs was quickly counting higher with the seconds, but the numbers moved slower and slower as my eyes moved to the right of the screen. There were letters underneath each pair of numbers, which read, “S, M, H, D, W, M, _” with a blank spot at the end. I looked at the keypad and pressed “Y,” and the door gently swung open before me. I stepped through the doorway and entered a much larger room. On the wall, there was a wide oval-shaped window. I peered outside and gasped in surprise – I was looking at the planet Earth as it levitated so peacefully in the vast openness of space. I saw a plaque above the window which read, “The eyes of the world are upon you.”I looked back out the window from the plaque and saw that instead of the earth as it was before, I was now looking at one large human eye in a sea of black staring back at me. I looked back up at the plaque, and this had changed too. It now reads, “I am the first in the world, but not in a word.”“One,” I say allowed.As I said this, another alarm goes off. Everything around me turns red, and I realize that the airlock is about to open and send me defenseless into the vacuum of space. I frantically search my surroundings for a way to escape, and that is when I look up and see a space suit hanging on the ceiling. I tried jumping forward to reach it, but I felt like I weighed a ton; though backward, I was not. I took a step back and became weightless. I floated to the ceiling and put the suit on just in time before I was sucked into the openness of space. There I drifted through the endless without name, or number, or sound. I have become the beginning of the end and the end of time and space. I am essential to creation, and I surround every place. There I learned that my name is E.A voice crackled in my space suit, saying, “Find the eighty-seventh planet,” so I looked out among the stars and saw that they shone in the patterns of another sequence of numbers. I saw 16, 06, 68, 88, and 98. Before long, I realized that I had been floating upside down, so I drifted in between 88 and 98. There I found the eighty-seventh planet and descended.As I landed on the surface, I found a building that I recognized, though I could not remember from where. I wanted to get into this building but was held up by two doors – both of which had a guard in front of it. I approached the guard on the left and asked him, “Which door will the other one tell me leads safely inside?” I chose the opposite door for the answer given to me.I woke up again. Now I am surrounded by people I recognize, and I remember what that building was that I entered in that dream – it was where I work.My boss is leaning over me. “Colonel, how do you feel?”I slowly sit up, rubbing my head as I do so. “I… Okay, I think. What happened?”“It will take you some time to recover fully – Colonel, you just underwent a simulation of sorts. Do you remember why you’re here?”I thought about this for a moment. I shook my head. My boss explained, “The simulation you experienced had a very unique kind of programming. You were to be placed alone in a space station, but that’s where the specifics stop – the rest of the program was up to your own imagination to piece together.”It was all starting to come back to me. “I’m… I’m going to go up there, aren’t I? And it’s going to just be me up there.”My boss nodded, saying, “That’s right. This simulation was to see how well your mental state can handle being in a situation like that for such a period of time. Judging by your readings of this test…” he sighed, then continued, “They’re very interesting. Not concerning in any way, just … Interesting. So we think you’re ready, but the question is – do you feel ready, Colonel?”I leaned back again onto the bed, a smile spread slowly across my face. Though my eyes were looking at the ceiling, my thoughts were somewhere else entirely. I was reminded of Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon as I said out loud, more to myself than to anyone else around, “I’m ready. After all, the more I take, the more I leave behind.”

Many times I have been called upon to repair something others had deemed unfixable. It’s sort of my niche as a repair person—come to me when everybody else failed and before you give up and trash it to the landfill. I noticed years back a flurry of assorted repair trucks at a neighbors home. I was surprised as their home was just built a few years prior. What could be so wrong that Roto Rooter was there, then a plumbing company, then an appliance repair place van. I ran into the neighbor at a school function and asked her what had gone wrong. she just about burst into tears and told me the dishwasher had an error code indicating a drain problem. She had RR come out and snake the sink drain but the problem was not fixed. The RR guy said the dishwasher drain hose might be clogged but a plumber would have to replace the hose or clear it. The plumber said he couldn’t figure out how to remove the dishwasher from the cabinet to get to the hose so he ran a wire in it from the sink drain and it seemed clear so the problem was in the dishwasher. She was out $500 at that point. The appliance guy came out and said there was nothing he could do as the dishwasher wouldn’t come out of the cabinet. Then she was out $650 (service call fee). I offered to have a look and found indeed the dishwasher would not slide out of the cabinets despite removing the usual mounting screws. I asked her to remove all the food from the lazy Susan cabinet and she did. I crawled in to the Lazy Susan (I was slender enough then) with a light and mirror. I discovered the rear legs of the dishwasher had been screwed to the floor by the dishwasher installer before the cabinets were all finished and the countertops were put on. Either that installer was stupid or he figured the countertop guys would remove the screws before placing the countertop and that guy was also stupid. The end result was a dishwasher there for life and not repairable or replaceable. I ran home for special tools like a flexible screwdriver drive for the drill and a right angle screwdriver attachment. One of those was able to get back in there and remove the floor screws without removing the countertops, the sink, the disposal, and the cabinets. I slid out the dishwasher. I gave her the option of calling back the appliance repair guy or me giving it a shot. she chose me based on experience she had so far (and I was free). I started pulling the dishwasher apart after reading the manual that there was a drain obstruction detected. She asked where I learned to fix dishwashers. I told her it was actually my first time. She looked worried. I found a one way check valve in the drain line that the rubber flap had torn loose and jammed in the hose. That was the obstruction detected. I told her a new check valve was needed so I would order one for her. She asked how long it would take and I had no idea. I asked for a needle and thread-waterproof thread. She had the needle but no waterproof thread. I ran home for fishing line. I sewed the rubber flap back in position as best I could and it worked fine, the code cleared, and the dishwasher was back in business. The new valve arrived in a week and I installed it telling her she should expect it to happen again in about 3 years as the water has additives that destroys black rubber. Before then they sold the house and moved away apparently fearing the 3 contractor visit if I wasn’t around the next time perhaps.

I did, once LONG ago. Being legally blind, I often travel with a folding white cane. Actually, now I use an National Federation of the Blind telescoping cane,) that, when folded, looked like a bundle of four white tubes.

I was shopping in a toy store, just looking around, minding my own business, and carrying my white cane folded up in one hand. Needing both hands to examine something on a shelf, I tucked my folded cane into my purse. The cane was longer than the purse could accommodate, so it stuck out at the end.

Not finding what I was looking for, finally, I decided I had better look elsewhere, and so I meandered out of the store. Just as I reached the outside walk, and was preparing to unfold my cane, I was confronted by a “loss prevention specialist” who said “Can you step back in the store, please?” Innocent kitten that I was, I did so willingly “What seems to be the problem?” I asked.

“We saw you shoplift that item in your purse.” UI was quite startled. I hadn’t put anything 9in my purse so when he escorted me to the back office and aske me to empty my purse, I did so willingly. He picked up the cane and said “You didn’t pay for that!” A-HA! I was floored! “Sir… that is my mobility cane!” I replied.

“NO, it isn’t! You are on camera placing it in your handbag.” “Yes, Sir, I did. I—” “Then you admit to shoplifting it!” This was just about when I realized I was in some serious trouble. Fortunately, logic saved me! “Sir,” I asked “Can you and I go to the aisle where I put this in my purse?” “Yeah, OK, I guess so.”

We went to the place where I had slid the cane into my purse. Taking my folded cane I undid the fastener and allowed the cane to fall out and snap into its extended length. “Now, Sir. Can you tell me where in this store this is sold? I need to see which product you sell was shoplifted and its price.” He stared at the cane as if it had become a snake (eat your heart out, Moses!) and stammered “Uh… I… I’ll have to ask the manager…” He did. The manager came over and we repeated the situation to him, with me explaining the cane, its usage, the fact that the tip was NOT brand new, and it was obviously in used condition and that toy stores do NOT sell mobility canes for blind persons!

The manager fell all over himself apologizing to me and even scolded the “Loss prevention specialist” for having accosted and harassed a blind customer!

One bad event can create situations that force you to do things that will lead to far better events

The South Koreans will say anything their US master order them to say. We all know that South Korea is a US poodle colony with tens of thousands of American soldiers everyday trampling on South Korean soil and copulating with South Korean girls.

I pity them.

I’ve written about another customer on a similar topic, but as we are coming out of a hurricane I would be remiss to not talk about this one.

The year was 2004. My state was hit by multiple hurricanes. I worked in tech support for the cable company, dealing only with internet issues. My office was right on the water and we were watching as night fell and the waves were coming up higher over the patio. We were waiting on the evacuation order and were taking calls up until the last possible minute.

I got a call from someone whose service cut out. I told her that I understand the issue but we are unable to send someone to restore that night as A) it is after 8PM and the techs stopped working and B) we had an impending hurricane. I offered to set an appointment for the next available day which would be 3 days out. She was having none of it.

She understood that there was a hurricane. She understood that it was after the time the techs got off. She even understood that I was waiting for my own order to evacuate. She just didn’t care. She had no concern for my safety or that of my technician. “You tell him to lash his ass to the pole! I need my internet!” I sat there getting yelled at for 15 minutes until they finally sounded the alarm to leave immediately. I told her I was being evacuated and now no longer had the time to book her a tech for three days out and she would need to call back after normal business resumed which was expected to be in two days’ time.

There are no magic words that get you connected faster than anyone else, and that goes for power, phone, internet, any of it. Everybody’s got little kids, a sick grandmother, this or that which is important to them. When it comes to disaster recovery it is always the goal to bring back the greatest number of people in as short a period of time as possible after essential services are restored. You can beg, plead, threaten, or cajole and it makes not a whit of a difference. If we were to take care of everybody who says they need theirs up first ahead of everybody else then we’d still do it in the same order because everybody says it. We will always fix 1500 people before we will fix 15 because it’s a lot easier to deal with 1485 fewer people being pissed off. Preparation also means making plans to busy yourself while you wait for restoration.

Happy ??

He was a painter; she a writer. He had never heard of ‘Michelangelo’; she could not spell ‘Dante’.

He painted house roofs hanging from scaffolds, she copy-wrote Malayalam documents in a document-writers office; but they made a good pair. Despite the fact that he was a Christian and she a Hindu, they fell in love, ended up marrying and settled down; in a small house in the suburbs. Their 3-year-old daughter, who did not clearly understand why her grandparents never visited them, was still not big enough to understand the depth of religious chasms.

Despite the social boycott, they were content with their world.

Till it shattered.

He presented to the Emergency with sudden onset breathing trouble, medically ‘acute pulmonary edema’ resulting from a hitherto undetected narrowed heart valve (Rheumatic Mitral stenosis).

He was put on a ventilator.

24 hours later he developed a massive cerebral infarct resulting from irregular heart rhythm (atrial fibrillation) destroying about half of his brain.

His EEG showed that the chance of his recovery was remote.

But, we need a relatives written consent to disconnect life support, because technically he was alive.

Vegetative state.

I was the resident in charge, in this large hospital and I would meet his wife daily detailing about his condition. She was a thin young lady with a ‘gymnastic-style’ ear-ring, a rabbit tooth and a kid in tow.

Over time, I explained the futility of continuing treatment; the options of DNR, to disconnect from the ventilator, but she refused consent. With no relatives to support, she was perhaps unable to take a harsh decision; clinging to some hope.

A hope that I knew did not exist.

Days passed, his condition deteriorated, but his heart continued to beat, he continued to ‘live’ on a life support system; the bills were mounting. In a non-Govt. hospital, there was no way to cut down cost.

One day the gymnastic rings were missing; I knew she had sold her jewelry.

A relative of mine, who knew them told me that she is now trying to sell off her small house and plot of land, to finance her husband’s treatment; which I was kind of sure that, is going to be fruitless.

I never prayed that he dies. But I prayed that let the inevitable happen fast; before she could sell whatever little earthly possession the family have.

Think of the paradox – we put people on life support system, but because of legal issues we are not sure how to undo it.

I was on duty that night; he died. I was happy, not because he died; but because his family got a chance to live; still retain a place of their own that they call home. A mother and daughter for whom he would have been ready to give his life.

In a heartless society full of religious chasms.

Man Dies; Meets Higher Beings, Sees Wonders in the Afterlife, & History of the Earth!

I had a best friend. He was originally from Sweden and you could tell he was very easily Swedish by his looks. We were friends for 11 years and maintained constant contact. This was in a different state (I was on vacation)

He did not have the best childhood. His parents were abusive (both from his personal confessions and through unfortanate experience (they were nice to us, but mean to him on the inside). He was also in poverty, but the best thing about him was he was a very nice and cheerful kid.

Well, another side of the story. We were talking on the phone and a loud scream heard from the mic. Subsequently I heard a car crash nearby. It was my birthday and I realized that same car was my friends car. We came to help.

He came out gravely injured. I was really really sad, tears welling up my eyes. The EMD came in and he let me know what happened. I went nuts.

A few days later, he passed away age 11 in the hospital due to a complication after the injury. I was horrified. I was only 13.

The mom wasn’t there during the crash, but the dad and his siblings were killed instantly. After the death of her son. she realized how terrible of a mom she was, and vowed to NEVER abuse any other family member again. She ended up adopted and is a completely different mom now. Rather than spanking, she helps her new son and keeps him well. Sorry, but you’ve already done the damage brother. No apologies given.

A investigation lead to the case being on the news. I found out and was still really saddened by the cause. They said that the crash was a planned attack by a family friend. Cams showed that a middle aged, very pale light blonde-haired woman intentionally was in the other car, trying to act “frightened” to avoid arrest. She was the only occupant. Unfortanately, however the police realized and decided to quickly “interview” her of her actions and she admitted and was arrested on the spot.

The woman was charged with malicious murder and aggravated assault and was sentenced to death row, however she got super lucky and was changed to life in prison.

TLDR: Basically, my friend was allegedly murdered.

Please rest in peace…. Jett.

No, they don’t. They don’t even care that the sanctions against Russia are hurting themselves. Their economic growth had dropped to below 1% on average. Germany, Eurtope’s biggest economy, is on the verge of a recession. The NATO countries in Europe are paying more for their energy needs. They have stopped selling goods to Russia, thereby hurting their own trade. But despite all that, they add more sanctions against Russia.

Russia, meanwhile has benefitted from the sanctions. In 2023, their GDP rose 3.6%. In Q1 2024, their GDP rose 5.4%. They look set to have a high GDP growth in 2024, beating all European countries. This view has been expessed by the IMF.

Russia is now manufacturing most of the products that Europe is no longer selling to them. This has resulted in many factories sprouting across Russia, giving full employment to the Russians. They are looking to bring in more workers from Central Asia and Africa to meet the demand for more factory workers. And this major increase in in-house manufacturing is what has increased Russia’s GDP.

Star Wars A New Hope – 1950s Super Panavision 70 | Runway Gen 3

Well, a Chinese CBG headed by a fujian-class carrier and flanked by type 055 destroyers is a formidable proposition that is the equal or even superior to an American CBG.

That’s an unprecedented development.

The most potent f-35c equipped USN CBG has peer competition, and we are talking 12, 18 months max before the fujian CBG becomes fully operational.

And that’s a worry for a china that already has the production capacity to build 100-150 twin-engine j-35 annually and 1 fujian-class carrier biennially. Ramp-up is not beyond the question either.

The USN has two impending, crippling issues stepping up to the China challenge.

One, the seriously delayed Ford-class program impacting the sustainable size of the supercarrier program. The oldest Nimitz-class hulls will be too expensive to retrofit for f-35c duty while the Ford-class is still riddled with production and operational issues.

Two, the f-35 program running into production snags, such as block software updates, and raw material bottlenecks for sensitive electronics upstream. This will reverberate down to the air wing, particularly crew training and logistic support.

Indopacom’s deployed naval assets will eventually be outnumbered and outclassed by the PLAN, even if the USN commits 100% of deployable assets to the western pacific. We are talking two decades, max, and that includes naval aviation.

The question isn’t what should the USN do but what CAN the USN do.

Even the usn’s nuclear submarine programs are having long-term manufacturing issues that have been filed away.

It appears the USN is pursuing the u-boat wolf pack strategy of the German navy in WWII, massively expanding its attack sub and destroyer fleets.

I say good luck.

Men are Chilling as the World Burns

It is the zero sum game mindset of hegemonists who use finance as their main source of profit.

They know that China is strong, that China’s political system is OK, that there is no genocide in Xinjiang, that China’s camera density is lower than that of UK, that China is not a police country, that Chinese people are not brainless bots, that China didn’t create any virus, that Chinese people do not steal intellectual property rights, and that China does not have expansionism.

But they have to stick to these lies because they believe that China is an obstacle for them to continue maintaining their current affluent income.

That has nothing to do with any non hegemonic country, nor with any civilians. They are just oligarchs of hegemonic countries.

Some people, whether rich or middle class people, fantasize about themselves belonging to hegemonic camp, but no, neither the victory nor failure of hegemonists cannot prevent the decline of any others’ living standards.

Only when they are put down, other people have a chance to survive.

China’s Done With U.S. Semiconductors, Japan Stocks Collapse As “Asian NATO” PM Wins

What is the scariest real life thing that ever happened to you?

My 14 year old daughter was hanging out with a friend in town (small town, should be safe, right?). My husband and I were at a bbq at his sisters, so we called her to let her know we were on our way to pick her up and she screamed at us that she was being chased by a man with a knife.

Did you know that dodge caravans can do 120mph? I do now. We got there at the same time as with the police, which was probably for the best. I’ve never seen my husband so mad, and he’s a hot tempered man to begin with.

My daughter and her friend had been walking along when this guy took offense to what they were wearing. (They were cosplaying.) A couple of older boys (my hero’s) told him to leave them alone, they’re just a couple of kids. Then, when he pulled a knife, they got in between the girls and the maniac and started swinging their skateboards at him to keep him away. My daughter and her friend ran into the Subway, who let them hide in the back until we got there.

The next scariest was only less scary because I wasn’t there when it happened. Same daughter, 5 years later. She called me and told me not to freak out, which is not a good way to start a conversation. She’d been shot in a drive bye shooting. The bullet ricocheted off the brick wall behind her and lodged in her foot. I don’t think I was driving safely that time, either.

The irony of this is if I had to choose a child who would be chased by a knife wielding tweaker or shot in a drive by shooting, it would not be her. She’s always struggled with anxiety and she’s super safety conscious.

We, The Left Behind

Submitted into Contest #232 in response to: Write a story set in a world with a dying sun, or where light is a scarce resource. view prompt

Michelle Oliver

We are the left behind, the ones who didn’t make the cut, the unlucky.When The Arc was created, they said the positions on board would be determined by ballot. Funny how that random selection process took one hundred percent of the rich and famous, the billionaires, the influencers, the celebrities and politicians. Oh, they took others too, the unnamed and unknown. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, all randomly selected. Families were torn apart by the horrible choice, either stay together and die, or separate for a chance at life. My mother chose life, chose her future over me. I was not selected. I was left behind and she went, boarded the huge craft they called The Arc. The chosen few abandoned the Earth with its dying sun, departed for places unknown in the far reaches of space. They said they’d return for us, the ones they left behind. We knew they lied.Then came the Light Stalkers, attracted to the light of the dying sun, like moths to an enormous flame.And we, the left behind, became their prey.****“We need supplies,” Rogue says to those of us gathered in the worn out ruins of an ancient subway. The tunnels provide a safe way to move from place to place. The Light Stalkers can’t follow us down here. “We need to send a scout to the surface.” I don’t know what Rogue had been in his other life. I thought of him as a warrior, like the ancient marines of old. Jesper thought he must have been a teacher, because he knows so much random shit and doesn’t need a computab to assist with recall. It doesn’t matter. You don’t ask questions in the dark.All eyes look at me in the dim light of the glow stone. With Light Stalkers about, you never want to light a place too brightly. The woven basket always sits next to the stone, ready to cover it at a moment’s notice, and plunge our meeting space into darkness.“I’ll go.”It was a semblance of choice, a facsimile of democracy. If I didn’t volunteer, I would be volunteered. I am slight and fast, and I hide in the shadows, moving relatively unseen above ground.“I’ll come too.” At seven, Lillin is technically the youngest of our group.“You can wait for me at the shadow mouth, Lil. I’m faster above ground on my own.” One day I’ll take Lillin with me, it will be good for him to know how to scout and score. If something happens to me and I don’t return from one of my missions to the surface, Lil will need to know what to do. But he is young yet. He doesn’t remember the days before darkness. He has no idea about the horrors that the Light Stalkers can bring. I want to protect that innocence as long as I can. I know Rogue won’t let him be a kid for much longer. Survival trumps innocence.****At the shadow mouth, the entrance to our safe haven, I pause and Lillin hovers at my shoulder.“Lil, your job is to watch the stones,” I tell him as I carefully shove six glow stones into the dull light. They will absorb the weak rays so we can reuse them to light our darkness. “If you see a stalker, retreat, you hear me?” He nods, eyes wide. “You leave those stones and get yourself back into the shadows. I can replace the stones. I can’t replace you.” It is not strictly true. Replacing the stones is risky. They’re not native to earth, so it requires sneaking into a Light Stalker encampment and taking them. That endeavour is a death wish.Cautiously, I exit the safety of the shadow mouth and scamper across the flat expanse of exposed ground, until I reach the shallow overhang opposite. The decaying ruins of the abandoned city provide ample cover and I crawl through the dark, confined spaces formed by walls that have toppled to the ground. I scamper from one pile of rubble to another, short, quick dashes into the dangerous light of the dull red sun that hangs like a pulsating, blood-red wound in the sky.I know what we need. Rogue has planted ancient orange trees nearby. The little schooling I had received in the time before the darkness taught me that the human body needs vitamins to survive, and an important one is VitC. Our bodies need it to fight off disease and infection, so oranges are a staple of our diet. Each year, Rogue and I also plant leafy greens and vine growing beans in scattered places throughout the ruined city. My job is to harvest enough for us to survive for the next few weeks and replant to ensure that there will be food for us in the future. Never take more than you need.I’ll go get the oranges first. That’s the most dangerous part of the mission as the trees grow in the full sun. Although our dying sun is not hot, it’s relentless. Once there had been day and night, but it’s been thousands of years since anyone experienced the phenomenon. Over the last few millennia, the sun expanded in its dying throws, and its size impacted Earth’s gravitational field. The North Pole had been pulled toward the full sun, leaving the South Pole in eternal darkness. Sometimes, Rogue and I would dream of walking to the other side of the world, the dark side, where the stalkers wouldn’t come. But nothing would grow without sunlight and we’d starve to death there. Not to mention that the other side of the world is forever away.The orange grove is around the next corner and I approach with increased caution as I crawl between two walls that have toppled over to form a low tunnel full of lichen and scurrying rodents. The soil here is damp and loamy, pungent with rotting vegetation and excrement. Before the Light Stalkers came, we would use it to fuel our fires, and a small amount would burn for a long time. I scoop up handfuls of the mud and fill my pockets. It’s a precaution that Rogue taught me.At the end of the tunnel, I know I am going to have to run and I prepare myself, check that my satchel is firmly on my shoulder and that my pockets are full. I spend a few moments just watching, searching for any movement, any unusual disturbances. As far as I can tell, it’s safe, but I don’t linger. I dash towards the first tree and huddle for safety beneath its branches. Still safe. I begin to gather the oranges, carefully placing them inside my satchel.When I get to the fourth tree, I hear it, the sibilant hiss that sparks terror in my soul. Silently, I scale the tree, as my heart pounds against my ribs, and hope that the shadows of the branches will be enough to hide me. The stalker walks upright in the sunlight. Bronze scaled skin reflects the cool red light, and the glow stones embedded in the straps that pass for clothing on this creature, glimmer warmer than the sun’s feeble light.The stalker is a bipedal creature with long arms ending in hands that have six multi jointed digits. If one of those hands grabs you, you’re done for. It’ll feed on you, suck the moisture from your entire body, leaving you a dried up husk of a human. They’re unshakable, the best idea is to stay well away from them. The second best idea is to lure them into the shade. They are creatures of sunlight and I’ve seen first hand the intense reaction they have to the shadows.This Stalker has excellent hearing. It turns its head slightly, and I freeze, holding my breath lest it hear me. I wonder if it can hear the ferocious pounding of my heart? There’s nothing I can do about it. My whole body is shaking with each beat. Dark eyes glint in the sunlight as it peers through the branches and then it chitters, a sound I have never heard before. Usually they hiss. I know that it can see me, its eyes are fixed on my hiding spot and I tense my muscles, ready to leap from the tree and run.Another hissing sound pierces the silence, and I see a second stalker shuffling this way. It hisses at the first one and both turn their heads toward the branches where I am hiding. Shit, I’m dead. Outrunning one stalker is one thing, avoiding two is impossible, but I refuse to give in. I will go down fighting. I feel the mud in my pocket. It’s not much, but it will have to do, because I’m dead anyway.

The second stalker steps into the shade beneath my tree. The glowing stones on its body illuminate the darkness, chasing the safety of my shadows away. I wait, not wanting to waste this chance by reacting too soon. Reaching into my pocket, I take careful aim—I will only get one shot at this. With everything that I have, I lob a handful of mud and silently rejoice to see it hit home, covering one of the glow stones on the creature’s shoulder. Instantly, the air around the stalker dims, and it wails as smoke sizzles from its body, while it flaps its arms urgently, trying to slap the mud away. Another shot, another glow stone covered in mud and the light is quenched. The creature screams, disoriented by pain as the fire consumes it, then collapses face first, before it can reach the safety of sunlight, writhing in agony.

I turn my attention to the other stalker. It looks from me to its companion, then quickly plucks two oranges from the tree and throws them at its fallen friend. The oranges hit the mark, covering over the remaining glow stones on the creature’s back, stifling the light and ensuring the stalker’s immediate death in flaming, orange scented smoke. Perhaps it was a compassionate move, like putting an animal out of its misery, but somehow I don’t think so.

The remaining stalker plucks another orange, looks through the branches, and gently tosses it to me. I fumble the catch. With another strange noise, the stalker rips one of the glow stones from the strap on its chest and tosses it up to me. This time I don’t fumble, and I grasp the precious stone with two hands. It nods to me, then at the charred remains of its fallen companion while pointing to its own stones. Cautiously, I clamber down the tree and edge toward the corpse, my eyes not leaving the stalker for one minute. I reach into my pocket for the last handful of mud, ready to hurl it should this remaining stalker make a single movement towards the shadows. It doesn’t move, standing perfectly still, watching me as cautiously as I watch it.

On trembling legs, I step nearer to the smoking corpse. The smell is dreadful, a charred, swampy stench tinged with burnt orange, that causes my eyes to water. I blink rapidly, determined not to lose sight of my enemy. Trying not to breathe in through my nose, I rummage through the charred remains to locate the four stones, two on the front of the corpse and two on the back. When I have them, I stand and search the face of the remaining stalker for any indication of what it is about to do. It’s hard to read the expressions on the reptilian face. The creature barely even blinks.

I hold a glow stone out toward it like an offering and it is then that I notice a change in expression. The mouth quirks up in the corner. Did it just smile? It gestures to its own stone, then points at me and chitters. I point to the stone in my hand, then point to myself and it tips its head. Did it just nod? I feel lightheaded. Have I just communicated with an alien?

It turns its back on me and walks back the way it came, so I use the opportunity to scurry away, silently slipping from shadow to shadow, all the way back to the mouth of our safe haven. Lil is waiting there for me, hiding in the shadows.

“Were you successful?” he asks.

“I think so.” I hand him an orange as I gather up the glow stones that we had left out to charge in the sun.

We, the left behind, may be the only humans left on Earth, but we aren’t the only people here. Now the question is, what are we going to do about it?

25 Missing Kids Discovered Behind Secret Door

https://youtu.be/joJwqdCGVYs

Philly Cheesesteak Stuffed Peppers

philly cheesecake stuffed peppers
philly cheesecake stuffed peppers

Ingredients

  • 1 pound bottom round steak, thinly sliced
  • 2 bell peppers, halved and cored
  • Avocado oil
  • Bell peppers, sliced thinly
  • Red onion, sliced thinly
  • White onion, sliced thinly
  • Pickled jalapeños, chopped
  • 1/2 pound Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
  • Onion salt
  • Sea salt
  • Pepper

Instructions

  1. Heat oven 350 degrees F.
  2. Drizzle avocado oil on bell papers. Bake for 17 to 20 minutes.
  3. Heat a large frying pan over medium high and add a little avocado oil.
  4. Season steak with onion salt, sea salt and pepper. Sear each side of steak for about 1 to 2 minutes and remove to let rest a couple minutes.
  5. Cut steak into small 1/4 to 3/8 inch square pieces.
  6. Heat a frying pan over medium heat and add avocado oil when warm.
  7. Add thinly sliced onions and bell peppers to pan and cook while stirring often for about 10 minutes.
  8. Mix steak, cheese, bell peppers, onions and jalapeños in a bowl.
  9. Fill bell peppers, then bake for 10 minutes until cheese is melted.

Wife’s Use Of Social Media To Cheat FINALLY Halted After Hubby Grows A Pair, Leaves Her No Alimony

Story Time

Well, explain to me what it was doing on the tree if I wasn’t meant to eat it?I had a long, hard day, Adam. If you remember correctly, you were supposed to name all the animals with tails, while I handled the green ones. The next thing I know, you’re passed out by the water circle taking yet another one of your naps. That left me to come up with all those names, and by the time I was done, I was famished.The apple tree is the closest to the water hole, and that’s why I picked an apple. It was convenient. I wasn’t deliberately trying to disobey the Lord. After an exhausting day, I simply wanted whichever fruit I could get to first. Can you explain to me why God put the forbidden fruit so close to us and made it so red to draw our attention to it, and made it so tasty? Adam, if you could try an apple, you would never be the same. I cannot describe its delectability.You may as well try one now. We’ve already been cast out. It’s not as though He’s going to cast us out again. If you ask me, it’s unbelievably rude of Him to have us name every living creature on earth, put all the acceptable fruit out of reach, and then kick us out of the Garden once all the tedious tasks are completed. He didn’t even say “Thank you!” Not even a card expressing his thanks. I realize cards haven’t been invented yet, but if He can create an entire Universe in a few days, I think he can figure out a way to show gratitude, don’t you?Oh, stop crying, Adam. This place isn’t so bad. Sure, it isn’t Paradise, but there are some plants with needles sticking out of them and some lovely dust and a lot of very interesting rocks. That one looks sharp. Be sure to never pick it up and drop it on anybody’s head. Please cover yourself up. I don’t know why, but for some reason, I can’t stand the sight of you in all your nakedness.Shame? What’s that? No, you know I don’t listen when He talks. It’s so loud and condescending. Do this, do that. Name this, worship me, “Stop rolling your eyes at me, Eve, or I’ll turn you back into a rib”–It’s all so boring. If any of it were all that vital to know, he’d write it down on a piece of stone. I suggested that to him once, and he pretended it was a bad recommendation, but secretly, I think he filed it away to use at a later date. The first time I see a rock with a rule on it, I’m going to look up at the sky, and say “Wow, who gave you that idea?” See if I don’t.I’m not afraid of Him, you know. You might be, but I’m not. I’ve barely had time to contemplate my own existence, so the threat of having my existence nullified is of no concern to me. Clearly, He doesn’t want to get rid of us and start from scratch, or He would have done it already. No, he wants to teach us a lesson. He wants us to wander aimlessly for the remainder of our lives cloaked in this thing called shame. I shall not. I refuse. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and I will not pretend that I do. A man makes a silly rule, and if the rule is broken, that does not make it any less silly. I don’t care what sort of man it is. I don’t care if you say God is not simply a man. He sounds like a man, and because he can sound any way he likes, that means he wants to sound like a man. We call Him “He,” don’t we? Then he is a man with made-up rules for living that I was never going to obey.I don’t care if He hears me. Let him hear me. I am meant to spend the rest of my days surrounded by needle-plants and you, a man with one rib. I am meant to wear rags, because not wearing them makes me feel strange. I am meant to have children, I suppose. Based on how disagreeable I am and how stupid you are, I can’t imagine they’ll be very endearing children. Once those children are here, I have no idea who they’ll have children with, because it’ll just be us. I guess that means once we die, and our children die, that’ll be the end of this nonsensical little experiment.Oh, but at least we named the giraffes first.A question for you, Adam, since He isn’t responding to us–Why are we the only ones who can’t eat the apples?I specifically saw a Loud-Bird eating an apple the other day. Why weren’t all the Loud-Birds cast out of the Garden? If a giraffe eats an apple, will it be thrown out of the garden? Why were we the only ones prohibited?

 

Right–the knowledge.

 

We’re not meant to know anything. We’re just meant to assign names, be fruitful, multiply, and praise Him every chance we get. If we want knowledge, then it’s out we go.

 

Well, Adam, I choose to know. I choose to know things. Not just some things, but everything. Why create an entire world and then tell me I’m not allowed to know anything about it? I can’t help but feel this was all some kind of test, and I will not be tested. Had I known that he was testing me, I would have eaten every apple on that tree. I would have stared up at Him with the seeds falling out of my mouth, and I would have laughed. For if I am to go into Exile, I am not going with an empty stomach. I will go with a belly full of apples.

 

My only regret is that I stopped at one.

 

I will not feel badly about you being punished for something I did either, because I have been punished many times over for you. For your laziness. For your superiority complex. For the way you smell at night when you are pressed up against me. It reeks so that I can barely sleep. Yet I have said nothing, because I have accepted that we are joined forever. You make strange noises in your sleep, but He never punished you for that. I took one bite, and we are damned. Be angry if you like, Adam, but do not expect me to worry myself over your anger. Your anger is your business. I will not make it mine.

 

Last night, before He woke us with our punishment, I had a dream. I had a dream that all of this was submerged in water. Enough water to cover even the tops of the tallest trees. There were more people. Lots more. They were running and screaming. Some were already drowned. In the distance, I could see a large boat, but it was too far away. I would never reach it in time. I would die alongside all these strangers.

 

Instead, I lay myself down. I began to float. Right up to the surface. I could still hear the wailing and the pleading all around me, but I was not making a sound. I simply laid like that on the surface of the water and let it take me wherever it wanted to go.

 

Many of them came to the US and Canada. MANY of them.

When we moved into our new house in a new suburb, it seemed like most living there were either German, and those saying they were Dutch but were possibly German.

I was eight and friends with a girl named Elvira. Yes, that was her name, like the song. She told me her dad used to be in the German Army. Looking at him, I believe he was. He also sounded like one.

There was a boy named Ernest, very blonde hair and my age. He lived in a fairly modern house built along the River. He was in my class. He was German. I figured his dad must have been in the German Army in WWII. We sometimes played together. I never asked him though.

There was an another boy at school named Klaus. He told us that his dad was in the German Army in WWII and fought in Holland. My dad fought as an infantryman in Italy.

One day Klaus and I got into a fight at school. I remember kids standing around us cheering us on. I remember stupidly thinking that I had to beat him because his dad was in the German Army.

At home at the dinner table I told my parents what happened and that I felt had to beat Klaus in a fight because he was a German.

“Why the fight?” Dad asked.

“He told us that his father said the German soldier was tougher than the Allied soldiers. And I said to him, ‘Yeah, that’s why the Germans lost right?’ Then he came and pushed me. We started fighting.”

“They WERE tough. Very tough,” dad said. “I didn’t bring you up to be like that son. The wars over. His dad was more likely a regular German soldier, an infantryman like I was and just doing his job probably because he had no choice. He’s moved here with his family to start a new life. Klaus is not the enemy. He’s a schoolmate. He had nothing to do with the war

“Well it seems we’re surrounded dad,” I said.

Dad laughed. Then he said, “They’re our neighbors now. Let’s treat them like neighbors.”

Oddly enough Klaus and I got to be friends. One day I went to his house. We walked into the kitchen and his dad was there. His dad looked just like any other dad. He looked at us and smiled.

“Ah, you are hungry maybe,” he said. He took two dark pieces of bread and put a lot of butter on them. He gave us both a slice of buttered bread. Then he said, “Ach, warten!” He went into the cupboard and took out a chocolate bar and broke it in half giving us each a piece.”

That was the best tasting snack ever. I realized his dad was just like mine and dad was probably right.

I once tracked all our expenses down to the penny for an entire year.

It was a few years after my husband and I had graduated from college. We did a startup right out of college and we had ruined our credit by financing a number of things for the business using our personal credit.

We had closed our startup a few months prior and joined a company. We were making a good salary, but we still had a bunch of credit card debt, and our credit score was not the best.

I calculated that between the two of us, we were paying between $70 to $130 more a month for our car loans than we would if could get the best rate.

At the time, I was also starting to think about saving for a home. The rental rates where we lived were quite high, and I calculated that if we could get together a down payment, we would be able to purchase a home and pay only a little more per month for the mortgage than we were paying for rent.

That is, if we could save enough for the down payment, and if we had a perfect credit score.

With our credit score at the time, the same mortgage would cost us several hundred dollars more per month.

Our bad credit was already costing us money, and would only cost us more in the future. I was super motivated to fix our credit.

I knew we had to get rid of all our credit card debt, and get out of the habit of carrying a balance at all.

I sat down and drew up a spreadsheet of all the things we normally spent money on, using our bank and credit card statements for the previous months as a starting point.

I created categories for our expenditures, slotting everything we were spending into those categories. Rent, utilities, groceries, car loan, insurance, repairs and maintenance, eating out, cell phones, internet, entertainment, gifts, vacations…

I didn’t leave anything out. Anything that didn’t fit neatly into a category went into a miscellaneous bucket.

I then analyzed the spreadsheet and made a plan of where we could cut our expenses. When I was ready, I sat down with my husband. Together, we agreed on what we should be spending in each category.

Then we put our plan into action.

We started by canceling and cutting out everything we agreed to.

We got rid of some subscriptions we were rarely using. We stopped buying beverages out and starting toting around water bottles that we filled at home. When we wanted soft drinks or snacks, we purchased them in bulk at the grocery store. Since we had slashed our eating out budget, I started to cook more often.

For several weeks, I entered our expenditures into the spreadsheet every single night. When I was sure we were sticking to our plan, I started entering things once a week, then once every month.

For a whole year, every single item got tracked. We weren’t allowed to buy a single pack of gum without logging it into the spreadsheet. I even logged the 50 cents I gave to an occasional homeless person.

Little by little, we paid off our credit card debt. After a few months, it became second nature for us to be aware of how things added up. After a year, I was comfortable that we had formed good long term habits, and I finally stopped logging things into the spreadsheet.

Over time, our credit score improved. I’m happy to say, it’s been over 15 years, and we haven’t slipped since.

U.S. Hurricane Survivors Without Electric; Biden Gave Transformers and Switching gear to UKRAINE!

Electric transformers large
Electric transformers large

Hundreds-of-thousands of Americans presently without electricity from Hurricane Helene, may not see their electric power restored soon because the Biden Administration GAVE spare transformers and switching gear to . . .  UKRAINE!

While all electric utility companies in the US keep spare pole transformers in supply locally, there is a national reserve of such transformers for situations like Hurricanes, where hundreds or even thousands of such devices need replacing.

But that reserve is now gone because the Biden administration gave the gear to Ukraine, to restore _their_ electric grid after the Russia-Ukraine conflict destroyed it.

Now that Americans find themselves in need of those electrical transformers, there are few (if any) to be had.

Once again Americans are being harmed by a federal government that galivants around the world, meddling in the affairs of others, instead of working for the American people who actually employ them.

Election day is coming.  Throw out the people who did this.

A Particular Set of Skills | Taken (2008) Realtime Movie Reactions

Pro China?

I just came across a China bashing post that garnered 8k upvotes in less than 24 hours.

Jean Marie Valheur’s answer to What people make you ashamed to be a human being?

It will be hard for any pro China answer to hit 800 upvotes in a week or two, much less 10x that in a day. What do you expect on an English platform owned by Americans? That Chinese voices will become louder and more numerous than “freedom toting” Westerners?

Totally unrealistic.

There are plenty of negative political statements dressed as questions on China stating half truths or even lies as fact.

I’d say there is heavy anti-Chinese sentiment supported on Quora, if anything.

Only in one sense: How well does their democracy improve the quality of life of their citizens?

They have different models of democracy based on different philosophies. So the mechanics of their systems cannot be compared.

In terms of how well they serve their people, we may come to two conclusions:

  1. Chinese democracy has greatly improved the lives of the people.
  2. Western democracy, esp. in America, Britain, France and Germany, for example, has neglected the well-being of the people.

Which would you prefer?

How is it that docile farm raised pigs when let into the wild become such aggressive wild boars?

Well… when I was majoring in Animal Science, we took classes in Swine Production and worked hands-on with the pigs at the Cal Poly Pomona swine unit.

We did things like weigh adult and suckling pigs, measure back fat thickness, spray for lice (!), castrate and ear-notch young pigs, help restrain young boars so their tushes (look it up) could be cut.

Domestic pigs are NOT, repeat, NOT docile! Especially sows with suckling babies. If you have to handle the babies, you better have a couple people to stave mama pig off while you handle the screaming baby. Or you better be awfully quick on your feet to put a fence between you and mama pig.

(Pigs vocalize LOUDLY when you’re handling them. Measuring back fat thickness on live hogs, you’re exposed to a noise level that makes the up-close takeoff of a jet aircraft seem a whisper by comparison.)

One of the guys who worked at the swine center got into a situation handling some market-sized hogs where he was in a corner and couldn’t get out fast enough over the fence. He got a bite on the leg that took more than 40 stitches to close.

No, domesticated pigs are not automatically docile.

That said, if they’re handled regularly from a young age, pigs can be manageable. 4-H kids and Future Farmer teens are expected to be able to show their pigs in livestock shows and fairs using nothing but a cane to manage the pig’s movements while the judging is done.

Here’s the thing about domestic pigs: they’re SMART. That’s why, if they become feral, they manage very well for themselves, thank you very much!

Having handled farm hogs, I have to say they’re my least favorite farm animal to handle: they’re big (a mature boar can be over 1000 pounds, and contrary to the image pigs have as fat animals, most of their soft-tissue weight is muscle; market hogs are 250 to 400 pounds; sows are 400 to 700 pounds). They can move very, very fast, they’re agile and athletic, and they aren’t afraid of people. They have a mouth full of teeth that would shame a pit bull and if their tushes haven’t been cut, they can slash you with a sideways move of their head.

Pigs take readily to shifting for themselves. Domestic pigs may be habituated to having humans around, but I sure wouldn’t consider them docile.

This is ancient history, but it resonates so clearly for me, with an outraged complainer ignoring the reality of her surroundings demanding immediate attention to whatever problem she wanted fixed.

Shortly after I graduated from nursing school in 1982, I was a 3–11pm shift charge nurse on a medical surgical unit.

One of our patients who was being evaluated for the tumor in his brain was walking down the hallway carrying a metal ice water pitcher and his glass drinking glass.

As I saw him walking towards me, he fell to the ground, ice and broken glass everywhere, in a full grand Mal seizure. (His first).

As I was kneeling in the glass ,in my dress uniform and pantyhose, making sure his airway was open, that he didn’t bite his tongue, making sure he’d had no injury due to the fall/broken glass, etc.

I feel a firm hand tapping on my back…”Miss.then MISS! My husband is out of Kleenex!!!”

The story behind how America adopted High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is long and involved, but far more interesting than you might think. Buckle up!

In 1973 there was an oil crisis when OPEC jacked up prices driving America into recession. Policy makers were seriously alarmed and decided the US had to cut its dependence on foreign oil immediately. One suggestion was shifting to gasohol, a mix of gasoline and ethyl alcohol.

Ethyl alcohol can be made from corn; Archer Daniels Midland the company responsible for most of America’s corn harvest absolutely loved this means to sell more corn and invested in many factories to turn corn into ethyl alcohol. Now gasohol makes sense when gas prices are high, but when they are low there is no market, so when gas prices dropped again, ADM was stuck with these idle factories and no idea what to do with them.

The ADM brain trust put its mind to the problem and realized the factories could be repurposed to produce this cool new sweetener discovered less than ten years earlier called high fructose corn syrup. Fantastic! There was only one problem. Sugar was cheaper than the cost to produce HFCS. How could they make a profit?

ADM was nothing if not determined. If you cant make your product any cheaper, what if the price of sugar could be increased? Sugar was cheap because foreign sugar manufacturers produced it cheaply and then dumped their supply in the US. There was a tiny American sugar industry but it was small and feeble because American sugar was more expensive to produce than the cheap foreign sugar.

ADM approached those American sugar growers to discuss this unfair competition. Out of the goodness of their corporate heart they offered their lobbyists to get congress to vote for a large sugar tariff to protect our “strategic” American sugar producers. Congress duly obliged, a huge tariff on foreign sugar went in place, and the price of sugar skyrocketed. God bless America! It was a great day to be an American sugar producer!

Unfortunately, it was an even better day to be an enormous agricultural corporation with a vast untapped ability to produce HFCS. With sugar prices about to become sky high, ADM secretly negotiated contracts to supply Coca-Cola, Pepsi, General Mills, McDonald’s and every other processed food manufacturer with HFCS. When the tariff went into effect, American sugar manufacturers found they had traded one shaft for another.

And that is how in one stroke one company changed the American food supply to the tune of $5+ billion annually.

9-Year-Old Boy Shares His REINCARNATION CASE From Hungary in 1930

Leftovers for our great distant past

It signals that the gloves are about to come off. The US is screwed.

The timing of the announcement of the SMEE 28nm machine is too coincidental. It is likely that China’s SMEE had already built a 28nm machine earlier this year or late last year. But they were told not to announce it.

And then China waited for the inevitable ban on China to prevent China from importing steppers from ASML and Japan. China waited until the laws were passed in both countries banning the sale of steppers to China then announced that 28nm stepper made in China was going to go into full production.

China knew what the US was up to. And waited patiently and set a trap for the US. Then waited for the US to jump into the trap then detonated the trap.

US semiconductors is going to be in big trouble. US semiconductor companies have also been banned from sales to China. Yes, only high end chips. But that makes no difference. The US has already violated WTO rules which allows China to retaliate and ban any and all chips from entering China.

This includes South Korea and Japan. To the horror of these two countries law makers they realized China was waiting for them to kill their own chip companies. This is why the SK law maker suddenly came out and criticized the law. Notice she didn’t do it before China unveiled the 28nm stepper.

So to answer the question, China did all of this to allow the US, South Korea, and Japan to remove themselves from the Chinese market and the world market. Then dropped a bomb on them.

This indicates that China plans these things months if not a year or more ahead of time and then activate these plans once China is in the best position to obtain the greatest advantage.

So we will likely see more actions by China in the near future. China is ready to go to war. Economic, military, or both. And they wanted to remove their money from US hands.

The US has lost the aircraft market, the semi-conductor market, and the medical devices market. How many high tech markets does the US have left? And what happens when China retaliates in full for what the US has been doing for the last 10 years?

Yup, it’s going to get ugly for the US. China will end up with most of the market for everything from $1 widgets to aircraft to jet engines to semi-conductors.

It must be the story of an Italian pastry chef named Nicholas Gentile. The man saved up all his money and decided to live out his biggest dream in life… become a hobbit.

Now Mr. Gentile is not actually a tiny man with enormous feet — he’s a large-boned, rather big individual. But he loves the quiet, peaceful life of Tolkien’s beloved creatures. And he wants it for himself.

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So Nicholas, along with his wife and their two children, moved to a tiny plot in rural Italy, where he built a Shire-like house, half-buried underneath the ground.

A chef by trade, he made the house quite large and built another two smaller ones nearby, constructing another two that should be finished by 2022.

He rents them out to visitors and cooks for them — there will be at least two breakfasts every day, because Hobbits find the notion of having only a single breakfast appalling.

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All products are from local farmers, and as he cooks and toils the land, Mr. Gentile smokes a Hobbit-style pipe he carved himself from wood while watching the Lord of the Rings movies.

He takes visitors on long walks in the forest, and shows them little traditional Italian farms and tiny remote villages where, as he likes to say: “People used to live not too differently from the way Hobbits live… and sometimes, in some ways, still do!”

The whole story is just so adorably wholesome, it put a smile on my face.

Nicholas Gentile even has a best friend who frequently dresses up as Gandalf. It’s all so whimsical, I love it!

Gorgonzola-Topped Tenderloin Steaks

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c341c8d2ab881b53faec46377b50b434

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 4 (4 to 6 ounce) beef tenderloin steaks, cut 1 inch thick
  • 1 large clove garlic, crushed
  • 1/4 teaspoon cracked black pepper
  • 1/2 cup ready-to-serve beef broth
  • 1/4 cup dry red wine
  • 1/4 cup crumbled Gorgonzola or other blue-veined cheese

Instructions

  1. Heat a large nonstick skillet for 5 minutes over medium heat until hot.
  2. Combine garlic and pepper. Press evenly into both side of each beef steak.
  3. Place steaks in skillet. Cook for 10 to 13 minutes for medium-rare to medium doneness; turn occasionally. Remove from skillet; keep warm.
  4. In the same skillet, add broth and wine; increase heat to medium high. Cook and stir for 1 to 2 minutes, or until sauce is reduced by half.
  5. Spoon sauce over steaks; sprinkle with cheese.

Planning Her Escape

Submitted into Contest #243 in response to: Write a story about a character who wakes up in space. view prompt

Holly Witte

Tess woke up remembering something from the days before. She had been only a child then and the story was old at that time, so it was amazing that what she recalled was so vivid, so fresh in her bones. The story had terrified her the first time she heard it, yet something drew her to read it over and over in the decades that followed. Maybe there was a message in it she was supposed to discover. It was a Ray Bradbury science fiction story called All Summer In A Day about people who colonized Venus where the sun came out only once in every seven years. The little girl in the story – maybe that was why she liked it, it had a little girl in it – knew about sun replacing the relentless rain and tried to tell the other children it was about to happen but they didn’t believe her, taunted her, locked her in a small room and then forgot about her when the sun did come out.The most terrifying but also satisfying part of the story was how horrified the children were when they realized what had happened and that it was irreversible.And now here was Tess near some colonized outpost deep in dark space, her ship having lost contact with command, and the rest of her crew asleep, dead, or suspended. She had no idea and no understanding of what had happened except there was a silent explosion. How is a silent explosion even possible, she was wondering, as her mind called up the fierce swoosh of flame that swept outside and inside the ship, like St. Elmo’s fire everywhere but, of course, with no sound because there is no sound in space.Tess shook her head, partly to rid herself of the image but also to see if she could move her head, move her neck, half afraid she had been internally decapitated. Feeling as if everything were intact, she slowly unbuckled and let herself lift out of the chair so she could maneuver around the cabin and check on the status of her mates. Why had she been spared the unconscious – or dead – state? She told herself to banish that thought and just concentrate on one thing at a time, proceed through a systems check.The people around her, still in their seats of course, were warm to the touch, what she could touch, which was only a small part of skin on the back of the neck in between the back of their collars and under the headgear they all had to wear during liftoff. Then she remembered that they had been leaving one station and heading to another in the chain of colonies when it had happened.No one moved to her stimulation. But they were still warm. Was that because they were alive or because it was still so close to the silent explosion that the bodies hadn’t cooled, yet? Tess’s eyes sought the console for a time check. Northing was registering although there was a faint blue/grey haze so there might have been a jot of energy pulsing; unless, maybe it was being fueled by energy from the explosion. She would have to mark new time from now.Tess knew how long it took to travel the whole ship, to check out various components so she would use her internal clock as she made her way to every corner and then she would come back and see if there was a change in body temperatures.With a plan, her mind relaxed but that only let in the thoughts again. What if she was the only survivor and what if she was completely out of contact with anyone anywhere; and, what if they had been pushed off course and the ship was just drifting? Something told her she needed to start planning her escape.Tess forced herself to make two rounds of the ship before she checked on everyone else. This was one of the smaller ships since it was a day mission, so she thought the extra time was justified. In truth, she felt as if an icy core was rising from the bottom of her sternum. It was fear, she knew, and she had to keep it tamped down or it would disable her resolve.Resolutely, she started with the third row. Nothing.  No pulse. No reaction. And the body was cooler than it had been the first time she touched it. It was the same for every one of them. They were dead. She knew it. She had known it on some level from the first. No point in speculating why she wasn’t. She needed everything in her mind to help her get out of this.

But what if she couldn’t?  This is a universal fear, one of them; the fear of being unable to solve a problem that threatens your very existence, and the fear of being alone. Tess could feel herself giving over to the fear and then over to something else, a desolate acceptance that made her feel her core was melting. She remembered the times she had surgery or, once, when she was in anaphylactic shock and she had stilled her body, stilled her nerves, gave herself over to the doctors. She knew she had to be emptied out to be saved.

This was different. As time wore on and nothing inside or outside of the ship changed – she could have been suspended upside down or on end; she had no idea – Tess understood that it was unlikely she would be saved. They were all trained and prepared for this, having undergone extensive psychological testing before being accepted into the fleet. She knew there were provisions on board to help her end the timeless agony.

She let what she thought was one day, then another day go by before she made any decision, checking the console for activity, checking her partners and friends, because of course they were friends, detecting no change.

On what was, she calculated, the fourth day, Tess took the pill and let herself drift off to whatever was next with thoughts of the little girl in the Bradbury story who had not seen the sun.

On the fifth day, a slight flicker appeared on the screen.

I’ve written, several times, about my experience in the Army in 1981–82; how I made the decision to go through Basic Training and Advanced Infantry Training twice… for a total of nearly six months, just to be able to be guaranteed going to Airborne School (Paratrooper training)… and get stationed with the 82nd Airborne Division. It’s a long story, but basically I broke my leg just before graduation, and had to drop out to heal my leg. I was told I could finish my last two weeks after I got back. Then when I got back, the people who promised me that, were no longer there, and no one believed me, and I was given the option to go to a different training right away (cook, clerk, mechanic, etc.)… OR… go thru the entire training cycle again. Despite my pleas and arguing, they wouldn’t budge. They figured I’d go to a different school and I’d be out of their hair. Well, I chose the second option… as much to piss them off, as also to live my dream of being a Paratrooper.

In any case… when I got back from the leg injury, I was given my signing bonus of $4000, as expected. Then I went through those 3 extra months of hell. When I graduated, finally!… and was getting ready to leave for Jump School the next day, I was called to go to HQ and report to the Finance Officer. When I got there, some clerk handed me a check, and said “Here’s your signing bonus”. And I was like … “???!!!”.

I told him that I already got my signing bonus months ago! He says “Not according to your records”. And I was like “???!!!”. So I looked at the check. It was for $3600! Hell, they couldn’t even get the amount right. So I walked away with my second check!

The next day, I still had half a day to do nothing as I waited to get on the bus. I kept looking at that check. Then I decided that I really didn’t need the hassle of having to pay it back in a few weeks, and maybe even getting in trouble for keeping it. So I walked back to HQ and saw an officer. I explained to him that I already got my bonus and didn’t need the hassle of having to pay it back in a few weeks, and maybe get in trouble for keeping it. I told him that I already explained this to a clerk the day before. So, this lieutenant takes my check… gets my records… and finally says “Son, according to this, the Army hasn’t given you your signing bonus. So, if I were you, I’d keep this check, keep my mouth shut, and do what the Army says”.

Well, hell! That sounded like a direct order to me, so I snapped to attention… said “Yes, sir!”… gave him my best salute… spun around, and got the hell out of that office!

The next day, I reported to Jump School. Three weeks after that, I reported to B Company, 1/508th Infantry (Airborne), 82nd Airborne Division, Ft. Bragg, NC… with my shiny, new, hard-won, silver Jump Wings pinned upon my chest. And my $3,600 check in my pocket. Fittingly… it was on April Fools Day, 1982.

Within a month, I put my second bonus check to good use and bought a slightly beat up Brittany Blue, 1968 Mustang fastback, for exactly $3,600.

I got a FREE MUSTANG! Courtesy of Uncle Sam. It was particularly gratifying because those assholes broke their promise and fucked with me, making me do that training twice. TOTALLY unfair! And TOTALLY unnecessary! And also… this Mustang was a very nice replacement for the car I had just lost, just before leaving for the Army, when some jackass T-boned me, going through a red light, and destroyed my first, ’67 Mustang!

Sometimes… there IS justice in the world. But… only sometimes.

(And if Uncle Sam just read this… this is all just a work of fiction and/or I was just following orders)

Things are changing.

Anything is possible if you put your mind to it

I’m 75. In my case, it wouldn’t be a matter of feeling safe. I would feel safe … unless there is one passenger on board that has active covid. Everyone is breathing the same air and that would definitely be a problem.

These days, you have to be flying in business class, or two and a half hours in coach would be terribly uncomfortable. I know I don’t enjoy it. The last time I flew coach, passengers were packed in shoulder to shoulder, and knee to knee on both sides, a la sardines.

Now, if we’re talking about a 747, that’s a little more roomy and I could probably handle that. Again, it wouldn’t be a matter of feeling safe. I was a flight attendant for TWA in the 70s and I always felt safe flying.

In those days, danger came in the form of having your flight hi-jacked to Cuba …

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Professor Kishore Mahbubani explains how China is countering the United States containment efforts… What do you think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6reZTScNIs

Please keep in mind that:

  1. Chairman is a party position. There is never a limitation about how many times the same person can be elected.
  2. The change of constitution is about the president of the government.

A little (many not that little) of background and it’s no secret especially for foreign intelligence agencies :

  • The factions within the Communism Party of China (CPC) was and maybe still is intensive.
  • The man in the following picture is called Zhou Yongkang, the former secretary of the Central Political and Law Commission and one of the 9 members of Politburo Standing Committee of CPC. He was arrested and sentenced for life imprisonment in 2015.

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main qimg 38c0f6f547b5fda4d524708562e04d0b lq

  • The man in the following picture is Ling Jihua, the former vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and head of the United Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee. He too was sentenced for life imprisonment.

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main qimg 8cce3d17612ee9211e675d163a6110b0 pjlq

  • Zhou Yongkang and Ling Jihua had definitely done what they were sentenced. But that’s not the real reason that they are in jail. The core issue was they tried to detain the former president Hu Jintao and forced him to have over his positions. Zhou wanted to be the president, Ling wanted to be the chairman.
  • Hu Jintao has no family background. His father was a tea trader who died in 1978. During his 2 terms being the president of China, he was suppressed and partially controlled by Jiang Zemin. In order to break the circle of retired president keep the chairman of military committee for years to hold the power, he retired with no power reserved in his hand. So that Xi Jinping could began to progress the political reformation within the party.
  • To understand why Jiang Zemin was so obsessive with power, the cause was actually in 1989, the famous or infamous Tiananmen incident, or some people like to call it massacre despite it’s not the truth. USSR collapsed in 2.5 years after the incident. With the only competitor died, US had a nice period of time of being the only super power in the world, and the most humiliating decade since 1949.
  • 3 iconic incidents represent how US could do anything:
    1. The Yinhe incident. In 23rd Jul 1993, USA accused a Chinese vessel Yinhe carrying chemical weapons to Iran without any evident. Later on in 3rd Aug, USA asked China to 1 either send the vessel back to where it departures, 2 letting Americans to be abroad for inspection, or 3 just waiting somewhere until USA decide what to do. China asked the vessel to stop 10 KM outside of Hormuz Strait to be inspected in 3th Aug and inspected it by itself. In 4th Aug China told USA that there is no chemical weapon on board. But no surprisingly, Americans didn’t believe a word and sent several military vessel to surround Yinhe. To control the situation, China agreed to be inspected by USA and Saudi in 28th. Long story short, they didn’t find chemical weapons in the 2 containers they claimed, also not from the containers with similar number in case US intelligent agency wrote it wrong, and also not from all 49 containers on the vessel which were being shipped to Iran. USA then asked to search every container on the vessel, until Washington is satisfied. In 1st Sep, China announced accepting expansion of searching even though not agree with it. All 628 containers were eventually searched, and nothing USA wanted to be found. No apology or explanation whatsoever.
    2. Chinese embassy bombing or 8th May incident. 3 JDAM hit accurately onto the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia in 8th May 1999 Beijing time. 3 journalists died instantly, dozens people injured. Explanation said it was a incorrect bombing due to wrong info. In 2005, a senior NATO military officer said the bombing was because they thought Milošević was there.
    3. Military aircraft incident. 1st Apr 2001, a Chinese J-8 fighter was crashed due to having a collision with a US EP-3 in the Chinese exclusive economic zone, 110 KM southeast from Chinese land. J-8′s pilot disappeared. EP-3 was severely damaged and had to land in a Chinese airport. US request to meet the EP-3 crew and China to return the plane in 2nd Apr. After several rounds of diplomatic conflicts, US secretary of state Powell admitted the aerial trespass in 8th, but still insist just using “Sorry” to comment on the incident. In 12th, US crew left China and returned to US. In 13th, after the crew arrived US, president Bush changed his attitude and said the scout activity will keep going, even though he said sorry for several times. In 20th, US demand China to return the EP-3. In 23rd, US started to have scout drill in its Japanese military base. In 29th, China agreed that US sending people to inspect the EP-3. In 7th Jun, US agreed to give up flying the EP-3 back, but to tear it apart and rented a An-124 to move it back. In 10th Aug, US paid 34 thousand US dollars for the FnB and accommodation of the US crew staying in China.
  • Jiang Zemin was selected by Deng Xiaoping as the best choice of the president after Tiananmen incident, because Deng knew that Jiang was able to handle all kinds of humiliating incident and focusing on development. Jiang’s term was from 1989 to 2002, and he did his job perfectly. Every country at the time though China was a wussy and would never be a threat to the west. That’s why from George Bush, US moved its focus to the middle east, and gave China a perfect 10 years to develop. If you think about Jiang, his term was nothing but humiliation. It was his successor Hu who started to be tough on international affairs. He needs to enjoy a bit from being the leader of China, the much more stronger China.

Rumor says it was Xi Jinping who went to rescue Hu from detaining. They both want to change CPC, but they need more power to suppress different parties within CPC. So they had an agreement that Hu was going to pass all his titles to Xi, in return for a quiet life.

The first major thing Xi did once he was in position is to arrest Zhou, Ling and all their close allies. Since no politician is innocent, there was no need of dirty work behind the arresting.

From what I experienced, CPC and the government it’s leading have had a noticeable progress since 2012. Lots of bureaucratic governmental procedures were removed to increase the speed of solving issues. The attitude of civil servants are significantly better now.

And Xi brought up the one belt one road initiative to form a bigger circle among all Asian, European and African countries. China is becoming more active on international affairs.

So what’s the major problem that China is facing?

The Thucydides’s trap. This theory indicates the inevitable war between newly rising power and existing power. China doesn’t believe in this theory, and tried to bring up a new concept of building a new type of relationship between major powers. But I don’t suppose any western country would listen to China, not to mention thinking about and agreeing with a Chinese idea.

This is the time when US is trying to defend its world leader position, regardless if China is interested in it. Every country would choose to stand with USA, because it’s always the best choice to against the pursuer with the current ruler. If the ruler wins, everyone gets a bone. If it loses, then switch to the new ruler.

CPC obviously wants to defend itself from the pressure of the world. If Xi is going to be the president for only another 5 years, there is no guarantee that the next president will be suitable for this kind of situation. Instead of doing anything to extend Xi’s presidency when they realize there is no qualified successor, it’s better to do it now.

I am not saying this is good for China, but at least I trust them having good will. And so far what Xi has done are all good, apart from the internal political propaganda, because it’s really old fashioned.

When some not having anything better to do foreigners are worrying about our democracy and freedom of speech, we are worried about our future development more. Chinese prefer cars and houses more than ballots.

Everything above is just my personal assumption. There is no guarantee of its credibility. I am no communist and not interested to be one. I just think CPC is so far the best choice for China.

There is a very high chance that Robert Roberson will be executed on October 17, 2024.

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For those who are unaware of this case, Roberson is a middle-aged man who has been incarcerated since 2002, awaiting execution in Huntsville, Texas.

Earlier that year, he had been accused of murdering his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, in Palestine, Texas on February 1, 2002.

In the days leading up to her demise, she had repeatedly fallen sick and had to be brought to hospital, with medical doctors concluding she was suffering from pneumonia.

Not long afterwards, she fell out of her bed and died — according to Roberson’s version of events.

Despite bringing her back to the hospital fully clothed, medical professionals and law enforcement personnel alike became “suspicious”, due to Roberson acting very calm throughout the whole ordeal.

The lead detective in this case was a man by the name of Brian Wharton, who escorted Roberson back to his house, where the latter proceeded to calmly make himself a sandwich — further raising the alarm in Wharton’s eyes.

Ultimately, the police and medical team concluded that Nikki Curtis had been murdered by “Shaken Baby Syndrome”.

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Robert Roberson with his daughter

The following year, a jury and judge bought the findings brought forward by the prosecutor, and Roberson was sent to death row.

In later years, Roberson was diagnosed with autism — whether high or low-functioning, I do not know.

For those who are ignorant of what autism is, and even more so between low and high-functioning, more or less the condition is as follows:

  • Those with “low-functioning” autism have an IQ of 70–100… whereas those with high-functioning have an IQ that is as low as 100, but can go much higher (think Leonardo Da Vinci with his 200+ IQ)
  • Those with low-functioning autism have a delayed development in speech and hearing, whereas those with high-functioning do not — as a result, people with low-functioning autism speak less, while those with high-functioning autism speak just as much if not more than the average person
  • Those with low-functioning autism have difficulty multitasking, whereas those with high-functioning are better able to manage with self-training
  • Those with low and high-functioning autism have different social norms, though those with high-functioning autism are better at concealing themselves, at least in the short-term

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Robert Roberson on death row

As one can see, there are two distinct branches of autism, and in each of them, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of individuals around the world, each with their own characteristics, backgrounds, and life experiences.

Those on the spectrum may share some basic commonalities, but otherwise, it is no different than how everybody who is White has light skin and everybody who is Black has dark skin.

Unfortunately, people on the autism spectrum are largely loathed by society — either directly or indirectly.

And for all the talk we hear about how “racist” the system is against people of certain skin colours, I assure readers that the personnel who operate the state from top to bottom hate the disabled far more.

Studies have shown that children on the spectrum are far more likely to be physically, sexually, and emotionally bullied at home, the schools, and the communities, and are ten times more likely to be suspended from school, and four times more likely to be incarcerated, despite there being no evidence that they are more violent than the norm.

In addition, studies have also found that people with autism spectrum disorder — whether low or high-functioning — receive longer sentences on average than those not on the spectrum who commit an identical offence.

Not only is the educational and legal system itself particularly harsh against those on the spectrum, but so are the economic prospects, with as many as 90% of those on the spectrum unemployed or underemployed at any one time — including those with college diplomas and university degrees.

Whereas it has long been illegal to discriminate based on race, religion, and gender when it comes to employment, the same was not true when it came to those with a medical diagnosis of any kind until just a few years ago when some — not all — job sectors were prohibited from carrying out background checks related to one’s healthcare history.

An estimated 13% of those who are homeless at any given time are also believed to be on the spectrum — largely owed to societal discrimination, resulting in people on the spectrum being turned away for employment that they are qualified for in favour of somebody who is not on the spectrum (this also assumes that some employers would not prefer to leave a position vacant than to hire those who are “different”).

The amount of abuse inflicted is so disproportional against the autistic community in comparison to the general population, that suicide rates tend to be significantly higher — especially among those with high-functioning autism — as well as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) rates affecting anywhere between 42–68% of the autistic, compared to less than 1% of the general population and 7–19% of combat veterans and law enforcement officers.

Anyways, I digress, but hopefully readers will understand the realities that the likes of Roberson faced in the years before and since his conviction from a more legalist perspective.

Here are some major highlights about the Robert Roberson case that are of importance for people to know:

  • Brian Wharton — the lead detective who raised suspicion of homicide in the first place — now deeply regrets his role, and has publicly asked the Supreme Court of Texas to overturn Roberson’s conviction
  • The science behind the “Shaken Baby Syndrome” that got Roberson sent to death row more than two decades ago has since been largely discredited, with at least thirty-four other prisoners across the United States who were convicted on similar findings since being released
  • Nikki Curtis’s neck was never seriously bruised — modern science now largely concludes that a toddler cannot be “shaken to death” without breaking the neck
Video: Opinion | ‘I Am So Sorry’: Meeting the Man I Put on Death Row
“I regret deeply that we followed the easiest path.”

It must be remembered that contrary to popular belief, your typical cop is not a “special mind reader”.

In fact, repeated studies have shown that they are just as likely — if not far more likely in certain cases — to fall for stereotypes than the general population.

Unfortunately, police departments also do not make a habit of hiring the most intellectually qualified candidates, with the majority of recruiters preferring candidates whose IQs are between 100–105 — placing them neatly at the lower end of the high-functioning autism range.

This might be inconvenient when dealing with “minor” issues, such as an inability to properly investigate a home burglary, but this can be absolutely devastating when the consequences of an improper investigation can mean years or decades behind bars for the victim.

In the case of Roberson, it appears very likely that Wharton assumed that his suspect had anti-social personality disorder when he failed to display the types of “emotions” found among the general neurotypical population, and because he did not shy away from making himself a homemade meal during the investigation.

Needless to say, this is where I come into the story.

Nikki Curtis died on February 1, 2002 in Palestine, Texas, United States.

Ten months later, on December 2, 2002, the future Governor Greg Abbott became the fiftieth Attorney General of Texas.

I am certain that was a big day for Mister Abbott — who now has the final authority in deciding Roberson’s fate — because it just so happens that it was on this day that my eleven-year-old self came home from school and found my maternal grandfather dead on the dining room floor with a vase under his head and blood leaking out of his head onto the floor.

Apparently, most children would instantly panic, scream, and do whatever else it is that non-autistic children do in these situations.

I did no such thing.

Upon realising what I was seeing, I momentarily stepped into a corner in case I heard any footsteps before giving a second, applying basic First Aid, and then calling 9–1–1 and then my mother — who was working in a different city.

Once I made those two calls I proceeded to sit at the table beside his body and took out a history book I got from the school library out of my backpack and sat there reading for approximately five to ten minutes until the first police arrived.

Whereas Roberson did not see anything wrong with eating a sandwich while the police inquired on his daughter’s death — hours after the fact, and with her body no longer in the house — I was able to gloss over a book within a few minutes of finding my grandfather deceased, and his corpse crouched within a meter of where I was sitting.

Just as in the case of Roberson, I later found out that the police had also become suspicious of me for being very calm and methodical during the whole incident — they noted based on their autopsy that I had poured a glass of water on his face, and had felt his pulse before quietly accepting the situation.

Naturally, some police asked a series of questions while I sat in the living room adjacent to the dining room.

Unlike some horror stories I have heard from others on the spectrum being investigated under these circumstances, none of the responders proceeded to use intimidation tactics on me, though either way, the fact that their suspicions largely fell on whether or not they believed I reacted the “proper” way is no doubt what has gotten a lot of other people — including quite possibly Roberson himself — into some legal hot water.

Within a couple of hours they had concluded that my grandfather had already been deceased for a few hours before I returned home, so the possibility of homicide — at least on my part — was quickly ruled out.

Due to my age at the time, I could not even have been tried as a juvenile — let alone, an adult — and most certainly I would not have been sent to death row, since the jurisdiction I live in does not have it, though it is quite possible that had I been just a little bit older, and if my grandfather had died closer to the time I came home from school, the legal outcome may have been vastly different.

I do not know Roberson personally.

Some of those with less sympathy for his case point out that he had been convicted of fraud and burglary in his youth.

Maybe so.

Maybe not.

But consider what I mentioned earlier in regards to the high unemployment rates that people on the spectrum face — in addition to the ostracisation they receive by their general communities.

If Roberson did try and steal something, could the fact that he may not have been given any reasonable economic opportunities have played a role in his decision?

Would anybody in their right minds be content living out their lives on the poverty line with no means of improving one’s situation?

Regardless of his youthful offences, the Texas offender search also shows that he had been “clean” for nearly a decade leading up to Nikki Curtis’s demise — perhaps his finding stable employment later in life dissuaded him from his past lifestyle.

Less than two weeks ago, the Texas Supreme Court acknowledged the new findings, including the “Shaken Baby Syndrome” — which now largely falls under the Texan “Junk Science Law” — but have also concluded that the possibility of innocence is not enough to halt legal proceedings.

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Dismisses New Evidence of Innocence and Denies Robert Roberson Habeas Relief. The Death Penalty Information Center is a non-profit organization serving the media and the public with analysis and information about capital punishment.…

Throughout recent history, there have been quite a number of cases where people on the spectrum, or those who suffer from some other social or cognitive disability have been wrongfully sent to death row or prison.

Here are a few cases:

  • In 1939, a twenty-three-year-old low-functioning autistic man by the name of Joe Arridy was executed by electrocution in Colorado after he was falsely accused of burglarising and raping a woman nearly two-and-a-half years earlier
  • Frank Garrett of Amarillo, Texas — an intellectually disabled teenager — was also probably an innocent person who was executed on February 11, 1992 for the murder of a Roman Catholic nun on October 31, 1981, despite the fact that the Vatican publicly requested that his life be spared, and that the surviving nuns, who knew Garrett, said they believed he was innocent
  • Paul Modrowski was a high-functioning autistic person sentenced to life imprisonment in the Illinois Department of Corrections at the age of eighteen for supposedly knowing about a homicide that was about to take place and failing to act on it, despite the fact that the accused — the one who actually committed the offence — was found not guilty (Modrowski’s sentencing judge later openly regretted basing his sentencing discretion based on Modrowski’s facial expression and imposing the maximum sentence, despite the fact that even the consensus at the time was that Modrowski was at home and had merely declined to report a crime in progress)
  • Jacob Morgan is a low-functioning autistic person who was more recently given a stint in custody after he played with fire matches that ended with his home burning —killing his baby brother

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Robert Roberson in court on August 14, 2018

What is quite interesting, is that there is another Texan by the name of Robert Roberson who is serving life imprisonment for killing an elderly woman during a burglary, and who is eligible for parole in the future.

Hardly a surprising trend, because in the case of Frank Garrett — mentioned above — a second suspect by the name of Leoncio Perez Rueda, who was also convicted of burglarising and raping to death another woman in Amarillo, Texas, was merely given a sentence of 45 years with the possible of parole after SIX years.

The low minimum sentence that Mister Rueda received is not the issue here.

The discrepancy in sentencing is.

Rueda — who is now largely suspected of also being the one who killed the nun — did not even receive a life sentence, let alone, a death sentence, despite committing the same crime in the same place at the same time that Frank Garrett was accused of (probably falsely), with a heavily reduced parole eligibility hearing to go along with it.

And one cannot claim racism against Black people in this case, because whereas Garrett was White, Rueda is Black.

Where the two differ is in their “intellectual status”.

Garrett was regarded as borderline retarded, so the state did not feel much need to keep him around.

By contrast, Rueda is not known to suffer from any sort of intellectual limitation, so the State of Texas went easy on him.

Needless to say, I am against capital punishment in all cases, even if there is no dispute over a person’s guilt.

Even if Robert Roberson really did kill his daughter — an accusation I greatly doubt — I would still oppose having him injected.

Presumably, Governor Abbott and his board of pardons members do not see it this way, which is why I now leave some questions based on the recent findings and conclusions from the likes of Wharton, as well as others who had once believed in his culpability, but who have now “switched sides”:

  • Should not showing neurotypical emotions really be used as evidence of one’s guilt?
  • Would the trial outcome have been any different had “Shaken Baby Syndrome” as we know it today been applied in 2003?
  • How likely is it that Roberson would have become a homicide suspect if Wharton had the hindsight he now has, and therefore did not suffer from tunnel vision during his investigation?
  • How credible is the “Texas Justice System” likely to be in the eyes of the world when the State’s Supreme Court judges are saying that even the possibility of innocence is not enough to dissuade them?

Abbott has repeatedly stated that he believes that capital punishment in Texas is a feature he wholeheartedly embraces.

How long is it to last if the public begins to suspect that innocent people are being willfully put to death?

Is this not the reason why it was eventually disallowed in places such as the Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, which also used to have an active gallows?

In conclusion, all I can say right now is that it is very likely that a social media writer such as myself can single-handedly change the mindset of a southern politician.

Even if Roberson was to be spared from execution, it is far more likely that his sentence would be merely commuted to life imprisonment, and as such, he would still never leave the place he has now resided in for nearly a quarter of a century.

And in the slight chance that I am proven wrong on the second point, nothing that happens would be able to undo his lost years, nor the physical and mental deterioration he is likely to have sustained.

For all intents and purposes, it is a certainty that Texas put his spirit to death long ago.

Let’s just hope they are not as hasty to do away with his body.

Astonishing Discovery In The Bosnian Pyramid?

Michael Jefferson

Kelly tries to ignore the noise in her head.Tap… Tap… Tap…Terry, her husband, notices her frowning.“Something wrong, babe?” he asks, handing Preston, their three-year-old son, a chocolate Tootsie Pop.“I want one too!” their five-year-old son, Steven whines.“It’s just a headache,” Kelly replies, fumbling through her pocketbook. “I only have grape or orange left, Steven.”“But I want chocolate!”Tap… Tap… Tap…Kelly takes a deep breath. Closing her eyes for a moment, she tries to concentrate on the carefree circus music in the background.“I’ll make a deal with you,” she says to Steven. “When we get off the saucer ride, we’ll get lunch.”The Starbuck brothers jump for joy.“They’re a handful, but you gotta love ‘em.” Terry says.“Yeah, what would life be without our boys?” Kelly replies, rubbing her forehead.

She turns, looking across the grounds at the FutureWorld! ride.

Tap… Tap… Tap…

 

 

Benton “Buddy” Bridger, his wife, Colette, and twin seven-year-olds, Quentin and Garth, stand in front of the entrance to the FutureWorld! ride.

Buddy suddenly begins to feel a wave of pressure rising in his forehead.

Tap… Tap… Tap…

Buddy is captivated by the robot on display. It has a svelte, humanoid body with pointed ears, friendly blue eyes, and an inviting smile.

“That’s a lame lookin’ robot,” Quentin says.

“Yeah, maybe the ride is lame too,” Garth adds.

“No, boys. Something tells me it’s the ride of a lifetime.”

 

 

Tap… Tap… Tap…

Buddy slowly opens his eyes, hoping he’s still at the circus with his family.

A metallic creature with friendly blue eyes has broken into his sleep chamber and is leaning over him.

“Please… Don’t kill me! I’m just a security guard!”

The robot holds up both its hands to show it means no harm.

“I am Ishmael. I am here to assist you.”

The fog over Buddy’s memory begins to clear.

“Right. We’re on a mission to bring a hundred colonists to the planet Calista. Why am I the only one awake? Has something gone wrong?”

“The ship was hit by a small meteorite. It knocked us off course. Unfortunately, the meteorite also damaged the suspended animation core. Everyone except you and a botanist is dead. Follow me, and we can talk with her.”

Stunned, Buddy follows Ishmael past dozens of cracked, open sleep pods.

A petite blonde woman is sitting up at the end of a row, coughing and wiping her eyes.

“Do you want to tell her, or should I?” Buddy asks Ishmael.

Buddy watches the woman’s eyes widen as Ishmael explains their situation.

“You’re sure everyone else is dead?” she asks.

“The skeletons kinda give it away,” Buddy replies.

“But I don’t know how to fly this thing.”

“We can leave that to Ishmael, right Izzy?”

“Yes, sir. We will get you some new clothes and go to the control room. We have a long trip home to plan.”

 

 

Buddy, Kelly, and Ishmael stand around a three-dimensional map of the universe they have stumbled into.

“How far off course are we?” Buddy asks.

“One hundred thirty-five lightyears,” Ishmael answers. “It’s twice that amount to return to earth.”

“…I’ll never see my husband or my children again….” Kelly realizes.

“You might if we can fix the suspended animation system,” Buddy says hopefully. “Until then, with everyone else dead, there’s plenty of food and water for us.”

“There are four planets in this solar system,” Ishmael says pointing to them. “All but one have an oxygen atmosphere and can support humanoid life.”

“As in, maybe there’s help out there,” Buddy says.

“The first planet has a mean temperature of minus two hundred degrees with hundred-mile-an-hour winds,” Ishmael states.

“Let’s pass on that first one for now,” Kelly says.

“The second planet is comprised of sand, not unlike your Arabian desert,” Ishmael reports. “There are frequent sandstorms, and the air is thin, so you will have to wear masks.”

Ishmael lands the ship in a barren area surrounded by jagged cliffs.

A harsh wind buffets the ship.

The outside monitors are obscured by sand, making it difficult to see more than a quarter mile away.

“There’s no response to our distress signal,” Kelly notes.

“But there are life signs,” Ishmael says.

“Then it’s time for a field trip,” Buddy concludes.

Ishmael leads the pair across the wasteland. Sand tears at their suits as they squint through their protective helmets.

Ishmael slows his pace.

“…Life signs ahead…”

Buddy squints. “I don’t see anybody.”

The sand in front of them rises like a massive wave. A glowing, red snake-like creature rises from the sand, looming over them, its hungry maw with hundreds of teeth dripping saliva on their suits.

“A sand dragon!” Buddy exclaims.

Ishmael fires his built-in laser at the creature. The blast momentarily stuns the creature, and it recoils, allowing them to retreat to the safety of a nearby cluster of rocks.

The creature roars, snapping at them.

“He can’t get at us,” Kelly surmises, “But we’re still trapped.”

“I have calculated a possible plan of escape. The odds, as you humans would say, are fifty-fifty.”

“I’m not a betting man, Izzy, but I’ll take a chance on whatever plan you’ve got,” Buddy replies.

“The sand contains elements of concrete.”

“So, you’re planning to build us a sidewalk back to the ship?” Kelly asks.

“In a manner of speaking. When I say go, run. GO!”

Ishmael lets loose a spray of water, saturating the sand in front of them. The sand immediately begins to harden, imprisoning the creature.

 

 

His pulse still beating like a drum solo, Buddy guides the ship toward the third planet.

“I’m picking up hundreds of life signs,” Kelly says gleefully. “And structures, like straw houses and huts! Maybe they have some metal or wire we can use to repair the ship.”

By the time they land their ship and disembark, the trio is surrounded by a wide assortment of humanoids wearing bright wool clothing with tassels, fringes, feathers, and embroidered designs. Some are half woman, half bird, others have the faces of owls and the bodies of elks, and others appear human with snakes for hair.

Looking at the spears and shields they carry, Ishmael observes, “They appear to have advanced as far as Earth’s Middle Ages.”

A horned sheep with four red eyes approaches them, followed by a group of ant-like guards wearing breastplates and carrying decorative flags.

He turns on a small box that translates his words into English.

“Welcome to Conteston, the planet of games. I am Ob Barker. We are elated to have the great gods from the sky as our exalted guests.”

The crowd cheers, horns blow, and celebratory music plays as Ob Barker leads them to an extravagant stone castle. The inside of the castle features lavishly decorated rooms, coffered ceilings, thick woven rugs, and elaborate furniture.

The trio is brought before a manticore with bat-like wings sitting on a jeweled throne.

Kelly jabs Buddy in his side, pointing to a painting above the monarch’s head.

Buddy studies the painting. “Hey, that’s us! But how did they know we’d land here?”

“I have a feeling we’re going to find out,” Kelly replies.

“Welcome, great gods of the sky. I am King Cullin,” the monarch says. “We have been waiting for your return for many eons since my father’s father’s father’s father ruled. Please, come sit by me.”

Buddy and Kelly sit on two thrones adjacent to the monarch.

“And what manner of miracles is this being?” King Cullin asks, pointing a wing at Ishmael.

“I am an artificial life form designed to aid and protect.”

“By the gods, it speaks! Does it fly like your space vessel? Can it fight? Make my breakfast?”

“I can do all of those things.”

“Magnificent! Then we shall play Over the Wall for it! Come!”

King Cullin leads the trio to a building resembling a baseball stadium. The citizens of Conteston are filing into their seats, clapping, and yelling King Cullin’s name.

“Did they play baseball in Medieval times?” Buddy asks.

A lizardman with four arms stands on the pitcher’s mound, a supply of baseballs in a large wicker basket next to him. King Cullin introduces him.

“This is Squire Nolan Gibson. He is our all-time Over the Wall champion. I warn you, his pitches dance like the wind…The rules of Over the Wall are simple. Hit the ball over the stone wall. We get ten swings apiece. If I win, I will get your speaking metal contraption. If you win, you may have whatever you need to repair your space vehicle. You may begin, great god Buddy.”

Buddy selects a bat so long and thick it could pass for a tree trunk.

“I played soccer in high school and backgammon in college,” he whispers to Kelly.

“Time to man up, Buddy.”

Nolan Gibson throws his first pitch. Buddy swings mightily, but misses. Before he can swing again, Gibson has thrown his second pitch. The crowd grumbles disapprovingly as Buddy misses all but three of Gibson’s pitches. He manages to foul one off. The two hits he gets barely make it to the outfield.

King Cullin looks at Buddy in disbelief.

“Are you pretending to be gods?”

“I’m out of practice, and Squire Gibson throws like a paddlewheel. If you want to try me at five-card stud…”

“Is it a game played with steeds? Perhaps. But first I will prove myself the equal of the gods by besting you at Over the Wall.”

King Cullin picks up a smaller bat, hitting every other one of Gibson’s pitches over the wall.

The crowd cheers and deliriously chants the King’s name.

Kelly picks up a bat. “My turn.”

King Cullin scoffs. “Females do not play Over the Wall, not even female gods. It is for men only.”

“Oh, really? We’ll see about that.”

Ishmael pulls her aside.

“The Squire threw Buddy curves and sweepers, nothing over the plate. You have to time his delivery as King Cullin did.”

Smiling deviously, Gibson throws Kelly a curveball. She lets it go past and hits his second pitch over the wall. She continues to let the first pitch pass in order to hit the second.

When Gibson reaches eight pitches, King Cullin stands, shouting, “Ha! You have two pitches left. The best you can do is a tie!”

Kelly digs in as Gibson winds up. She swings, hitting the ball straight up in the air. Gibson throws another pitch, which Kelly hits for the tying Over the Wall ball.

The first pitch drops from the sky. Kelly swings at it, hitting it over the fence to win the game.

King Cullin roars with approval. “You have proven you are indeed gods!”

“How did you hit two balls at once?” Buddy asks.

“My Dad was Eddie Rainer. He ran the King and his Court Softball team. He taught me how to hit a softball blindfolded.”

 

 

Pushing his plate away, Buddy sits back in his chair, trying to suppress a belch.

“More?” King Cullin asks.

“No, thank you. That was the best shrimp pizza and spumoni I’ve ever had.”

“I was hoping to fatten you up and slow you down for our next game.”

“What do you have in mind?” Buddy asks.

“A simple mind game called ‘Guess the Phrase.’ Two letters are missing. You have three guesses to figure out the phrase.”

Squire Gibson writes the phrase up on a chalkboard.

WE WILL _ _ LL YOU

“I bet it relates to our dinner.,” Kelly says spritely. “We will fill you.”

King Cullin roars with laughter. “Sorry. That’s one guess.”

“It is late… Perhaps it is time we went to bed,” Ishmael cautions.

“What are you talking about, Ishmael? You don’t sleep,” Buddy scolds.

“I’ll guess a letter,” Kelly says. “An ‘I’.”

“That is correct, Goddess Kelly,” King Cullin roars, his tail swishing back and forth.

“It’s usually a vowel,” Kelly whispers to Buddy.

“We will bill you?” Buddy guesses. “Are you charging us for parking our rocket ship?”

A company of ant guards moves toward Buddy and Kelly.

“IT’S WE WILL KILL YOU!” Ishmael shouts.

Firing his laser, Ishmael sets a tapestry next to Squire Gibson on fire.

“Probably a good time for us gods to leave,” Buddy says, and Ishmael leads them out of the dining hall.

 

 

As the trio runs through the castle, Buddy is distracted by a large room with statues.

“What is all of this?”

“Maybe they’re Terra cotta statues, you know like the Chinese made in ancient times,” Kelly replies.

“They are the reason I wanted us to leave,” Ishmael says. “These are not statues, not in the proper sense.”

“What do you mean?” Kelly asks.

“These are the Conteston’s collection of gods. They take their visitors and cover them in chocolate… While they are still alive. Then they eat them to commemorate the King’s birthday. Now, shall we continue to try and escape?”

 

 

The trio ducks behind a group of hedges near their ship.

Four ant soldiers guard the ship. “Can you zap them, Ishmael?”

“They are too far apart.”

“I got this,” Kelly says.

Before Buddy can pull her back, Kelly is standing in front of the soldiers.

“I am the Goddess Kelly Starbuck! Who wants a piece of me!”

The four ants gather together, laughing and shrieking as they approach Kelly.

Ishmael’s laser blast knocks the ant men off their feet, knocking them out.

“All aboard!” Buddy shouts.

 

 

“We have one chance left,” Buddy says as they approach the planet Shopatron.

“I’m picking up three life signs, one humanoid, two synthetic.”

“Check. Put the planet viewing screen,” Buddy says enthusiastically.

Above the planet, spelled out in flashing neon light, is a sign that reads BARNUM T. FIRESTORM’s NEW, USED, & SURPLUS PARTS.

“Score!” Buddy shouts steering the ship to a soft landing on a field.

Kelly points in the direction of a large grey building. Festive ribbons hang over the windows and doors. Signs on the roof flash BIG SALE! MAKE US AN OFFER! and BEST PRICES IN THE UNIVERSE! in various languages.

“A warehouse? Here?”

“Yes, here!” a voice replies.

A creature resembling a big, cuddly bear wearing a derby approaches them. On either side of him are two robots. The first, a basic male work drone, resembles a refrigerator with arms. The second resembles a humanoid woman with short silver hair wearing a metallic bustier.

“I’m Barnum T. Firestorm, owner of the biggest warehouse in the universe. These two snappy synths are G.E. and Harmoni.”

“I’m Buddy Bridger. This is Kelly Starbuck, and our service synth Ishmael.”

Ishmael lets out an audible “BOING!” as he scans Harmoni.

Firestorm goes into barker mode. “We’ve got laser guns, engines, time transfer machines, and oil for your synthetic friend.”

“Have you got a way to get us home?” Kelly asks sadly.

“Where are you from?”

“Have you heard of Earth?” Buddy asks.

“A troublesome planet. A little backward. You still make war with each other. You’re lifetimes away from home. Why would you want to go back there?”

“We have families there,” Kelly says.

“Ah, I see,” Firestorm says sympathetically.

“Our suspended animation core malfunctioned,” Buddy states.

“I’ve got dozens of those that could fit your ship. I’ll warn you, they’re expensive. Five hundred azuzas.”

“We deal in money.”

Firestorm shakes his furry head. “Money is useless in this universe.”

He looks over at Ishmael.

“Hmm. Are you a K-13XX model?”

Ishmael stiffens with pride. “Yes. I have been modified. I have a laser suite, navigation capability, and I am a gourmet chef.”

“Excellent. I tell you what, I’ll offer you a trade. Ishmael for a way home.”

“We can’t trade Izzy. He’s one of us,” Buddy protests.

“I’ll stay!” Ishmael blurts out.

“It’s a noble gesture, Ishmael. Are you sure about this?” Kelly asks.

Ishmael smiles at Harmoni, who coyly smiles back.

“BOING! I mean, yes, I am certain.”

“It’s a deal, then,” Buddy says. “So, what kind of computer or time machine have you got?”

Firestorm takes a remote out of his built-in pockets, pressing a button.

A gigantic object rises behind the warehouse.

Kelly gives Buddy a skeptical glance, saying, “That’s just a giant slingshot.”

“No, that’s a trans universal time accelerator. It’ll knock a hundred and fifty years off your trip home, I guarantee it!”

“Is it safe?”

“I said, I guarantee it! The only side effects may be memory loss. Now let’s have some shrimp pizza and spumoni.”

“You eat that too?” Buddy asks. “The inhabitants of Conteston eat the same thing.”

“King Cullin and his cannibal subjects are screwy as our collection of nuts and bolts in aisle six, but they have good taste. Shrimp pizza and spumoni are considered a gift from the gods in this quadrant. So, let’s have some. Then I’ll send you home.”

“What do you know, a bear who likes Italian food,” Buddy comments.

“Bears like all food,” Kelly replies.

Ishmael reaches for Harmoni’s hand.

“BOING!”

Buddy snickers. “Are we witnessing robot love at first sight?”

“I guess anything’s possible in this universe.”

 

 

Kelly walks toward a man standing next to the FutureWorld! ride.

“Where you goin’, hon?” Terry yells after her.

“Take the boys for their saucer ride, I’ll be over here when you get out.”

“Are you going to stare at that robot thing all day?” Colette asks Buddy. “The boys are getting restless.”

“Take them inside. I’ll wait here.”

Colette huffs as she guides the twins inside.

A blonde woman with a ready smile moves next to him.

“I know this sounds funny, but there’s something special about this bucket of bolts,” Buddy says.

Kelly smiles. “You feel it too, eh?”

“You know what I really feel?” Buddy asks, “I feel hungry. How about you and your family join us for some food?”

“Pizza and spumoni,” they say simultaneously.

Found Crew Journals Reveal a Horrifying End

A very interesting video.

I’d have to say it was my house. My wife and I bought it in 1992. Or rather, I should say “acquired” it, since we effectively got it for free.

It was built originally in 1852 and sat on about 400 acres of land. Over the years it had had some additions and modifications, but was largely intact, which meant that it was pretty basic. It only got wiring and plumbing the 1970’s. It went through several owners in the 1980’s who rented it to n’er-do-wells and did no maintenance. By the time we found it, it was pretty rough. It hadn’t been painted in years, the rusty tin roof leaked, the utility room had a hole in the floor a person could fall through, and lots more.

Most of the acreage had been sold off over the years, with only 45 acres remaining. The property and house had been in foreclosure for two years. The bank considered the house worthless, and was offering the house and property for the value of the land alone. We got 45 acres for $82,000, which was the going rate for unimproved acreage, and the house was free! The bank figured that anyone with any sense would simply bulldoze the house and put in a double wide.

They didn’t figure on someone with as little sense as I had.😁 But I could tell that the house just needed some love and care and now 32 years later, it’s our happy home. We have spent the best years of our lives here. I have renovated every aspect of the house, including putting on a new roof, renovating the crawlspace, building a screen porch, renovating the entire interior, installing a new kitchen, putting on a bedroom addition, adding a deck and more. The house itself now appraises for nearly $400,000 which doesn’t include the property. I’d say that’s pretty good deal.

Horrible. By any measure of how good something felt to me, that ranks last. I just killed someone, probably a father with dependent children and wife. I just completely wrecked that family’s future.

I only picked a photo of a soldier, and not a pilot like myself, in mental distress because I can’t even come close to mathematically comparing our journeys during the GWOT (global war on terrorism). Soldiers and Marines were up close and personal and experienced distress I can only imagine matches and then far exceeds my own distress.

Imagine flying an 8 hour flight in a Growler, loaded up for war in a configuration you haven’t used before. All, ALL, of my missions prior to this were to protect our guys, and yes I do understand that tangentially means I killed whoever they did. Not the same.

Anyway, first night of the Libya conflict, literally the first strike. My flight of Growlers were there to support our strike package with jamming and destroy any SAMs if they popped up. Twice on that flight I called the codeword for a HARM shot, the missile we shoot at RADARs. That, and the missiles that followed on future missions, brought me to the conclusion that I had killed at least a few people. And I can’t tell you who they are. Can’t tell you what they look like. And most disturbingly, I can’t tell you how many.

That’s what a warrior deals with. We have a reservoir. Some deep. Some shallow. That reservoir fills with each inhumane thing you witness. Killing is the definition of inhumanity.

So, it feels like shit.

There was a group of four working girls (aka prostitutes) who often came in to the all-night diner where l waitressed. They were great customers who wanted prompt attentive service and tipped very well for the effort.

Their pimp was a small, obnoxious weasel (seriously–the guy looked like a ferret but with less intelligence and more body odor). He took a cut of the girls’ earnings and was primarily there to protect them from bad johns and the police. Nobody liked him, but the ladies considered him a necessary nuisance. He sometimes accompanied the group during their break.

One night one of the ladies was in pretty bad shape: her face, neck, and arms were freshly bruised and her nose and mouth were bleeding. Calling the police or an ambulance was obviously not an option, so we just gave the ladies a pile of paper towels, some soap, and a bucket of ice. While they tended their friend, I asked where the hell their pimp–the guy they paid to protect them–had been. They responded tersely that they didn’t know and couldn’t find him.

A couple of days later the pimp came in by himself, and it was amazing that he was even walking. He looked a bit like he’d been run over several times by a rusty lawn mower with a mean streak. He mumbled his order for coffee between broken teeth and sipped at it gingerly. And left his table covered with blood smears, bloody bandages, and no tip.

Later that night the ladies came in and placed their usual orders. I asked how the injured lady was doing and if they’d ever found their pimp. The response?

“Oh, yeah, honey, we found him. He ain’t so happy about it, but we found him.”

Yes. I have written about that in length many times on Quora.

Everyone who was out in the bush was in danger of wildlife.

Ants that lived in big nests that hung down from trees. Woe to the tank commander and crew that ran into these things, snakes, centipedes sometimes two feet long which I once had a close contact with, mosquitos carrying malaria, crocodiles, alligators, leeches, tigers and another kind of incidious danger that was actually a plant called a ‘wait a minute vine.’

These vines that hung down from trees could latch on to a tank commander and literally pull him out of the cupola of an M48A3 tank.

As a tanker, we didn’t meet as many of these little beasts as the grunts did but we did run into some of them.

Not to mention the scorpions.

Here is an excerpt from Mr. Avery who has himself written about these dangers on Quora. He was a tank commander in the 11th. ACR in Vietnam. He had a run in with a scorpion.

‘I commanded a tank in Ron Holland’s unit. Every morning after Vietnam that I put on a shirt with a collar to go to the office, I remember Vietnam. I have a mass of scarring on the back of my neck where a scorpion bit me one night when I was on watch standing in the TC’s hatch of the tank. I felt it crawl off my flak jacket and up my neck. I reached to swipe it off and it struck, knocking me to my knees in pain in the turret. Too dark to know if the scorpion fell into the turret or my swipe at it had carried it off the tank.’

**NOT TO BE COPIED WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. SHARING IS OKAY. I’VE HAD TOO MANY OF MY ANSWERS STOLEN. RJ Holland. **

Then of course there was humorous wildlife like the F-CK YOU lizard who sharp little cries sounded just like those two words.

Below, a Vietnam Forest Scorpion. It’s the tail you have to watch out for. If we took off our boots and went to put them on later, we would always turn them upside down and give them a whack. Sometimes one of these little monsters would fall out.

Below a Vietnam centipede, the kind I had a close call with one dark night while I was on watch. It wasn’t just the NVA or VC we had to watch out for. We were more scared of these bastards.

11E Armor Crewman 11th. ACR

Manipulative people are the normal ones. People who aren’t manipulative are the exception.

Let me tell you a story. I’m going to talk about language a little. And then we’ll get around to manipulation. Don’t worry. It’s short and simple.

Once upon a time, we thought that the point of talking was to tell the truth. You can say, “It’s raining outside”. That way, other people would know that it was raining outside. We thought that the reason people could talk was so that we could tell each other the truth. Maybe people lie sometimes, but that’s a malfunction. The real point of language was stating a fact. Telling the truth.

We don’t think that anymore. Now we think that language is like a tool that you use on other people. People who study this stuff, like anthropologists and linguists, think that language is for getting people to do things. It’s for social grooming. It’s for coordinating efforts. It’s for persuasion. And so on. The “make other people do what you want” part came first. The “tell the truth” part came much later.

(There was a very smart Austrian man, named Ludwig Wittgenstein. He wrote one book when he was young, and then a second book when he was old. The first book said that language is for truth-telling. The second book said that was all wrong. I’m muddling the details to make it simple.)

So, what makes a person manipulative? Well, most people are manipulative. The baby learns to say “mama” to get mother’s attention. The baby isn’t stating a fact. It wants milk. That “stating facts” thing? That comes later.

Now, some people deviate from this pattern. They have a natural truth-telling bent. A genetic wire gets crossed. That creates a neurodivergent individual who values truth. They fail to use language the natural way, for manipulation. Mr. Wittgenstein was like that. That’s why his first book was wrong. It took him his whole life to figure out that other people didn’t work the same way.

Let me tell you another story.

Imagine that you buy some new clothes. Your friend George notices your new clothes. George makes comments about your clothes. His comments imply that your new taste in clothing is affectatious. George implies that you’re trying to impress people with your clothes. You try to understand why he’s doing this. There are two possibilities:

  1. George carefully weighed the available evidence. He deliberated on it logically. Then he concluded that you’re being affectatious.
  2. George doesn’t like how you dress now. So he’s calling you ‘fake’ to get you to change back the way you were.

It’s probably the second one. Possibility 2 is true of most people. They say stuff that will make you do what they want. They don’t even realize they’re doing it. George is just saying stuff to make you change back the way you were. He doesn’t realize what he’s doing. Most people don’t.

Try and remember what I said a few paragraphs ago, about the baby. I know, it’s hard. Go back and re-read if you have to. Do you think the baby is consciously manipulating its mother? No. It just says “mama” to get milk. George is a lot like that baby. He just says “you’re fake” to make you change. That’s all. He’s not a “master manipulator”. No, he’s just a baby. That sort of person always is.

Well in all honesty this wasn’t me, but it was bloody funny all the same

I and a couple of uni “classmates” ended up sharing a house during the one-year vocational course we had to endure [sic] en route to qualification as lawyers in England & Wales after getting our degree

One night we went out for an Indian meal. One of my housemates was dating a man (let’s call him G) she met at uni who was blond-haired, blue-eyed and about as quintessentially English – to outside appearances – as it was possible to be

He ordered, as a side dish, a muttar paneer. He received sag aloo (something very different). He quite rightly complained. The waiter got a bit stroppy and insisted that what he had received was a muttar paneer. G said it wasn’t and asked the waiter to bring him what he had ordered. There was a bit of discussion in English during which G politely but firmly insisted on receiving what he had ordered, at the end of which, with very bad grace, the waiter snatched the dish off the table and whisked it away saying something I didn’t understand. Oh, but G did. He had been brought up in India, and because he had Indian carers as a child his first language was actually Hindi

He shot to his feet and let rip. It was quite something to watch. None of us understood a word but the gist was pretty clear. The look on the waiter’s face was priceless. I’ve never seen anyone that dark-skinned go quite that pale. He definitely picked the wrong man!

  1. The lady who wants to be a wife and the lady who’s looking for a husband are two different women ,
  2. Men would excel better if they chose to learn from women instead of dismissing them . Women are much more skilled than men give them credit for ,
  3. They aren’t dumb at all . Being underestimated has long been their secret weapon ,
  4. They don’t always say what they truly mean . They purposely leave out the “quiet part” in conversations ,
  5. You know the giggle that she uses ? That’s not just giggle. This is why some men hurt by one, end up distrusting all women ,
  6. The stereotype that they’re only good for sex or that they’re not that smart has actually worked in their favour , allowing them to manipulate men throughout history ,
  7. Women are very rational and deliberately choose what to say out loud and what to keep quiet ,
  8. A man might have the ideal physical traits and social status that align with a woman’s preferences , but if he doesn’t command respect through his actions and behaviour , she’ll not value him ,
  9. Sometimes, it’s better to be friends so you can keep them forever than be lovers,
  10. Just Chillax.!!

Nothing. Silence. Not a word.

I’d married my best friend. And after 10 years, I thought we were happy. We cooked together, listened to music together, went on vacations, laughed often and generally seemed to have a good life.

One day, just after a great trip to Disney World and shortly after my birthday he was in the spare room, cleaning some stuff out that his son left when he moved out. I was in the living room cleaning. We had this thing where I would call out to him and we’d banter back and forth while we worked. He used to say he married me because I made him laugh.

One of the things I’d say to him when he didn’t answer was, “What’s the matter? Don’t you love me anymore?” His usual answer was, “Only if you cook dinner tonight.” or some other similar thing.

This time when I called out, “What’s the matter? Don’t you love me anymore?” There was silence. Complete and utter silence. Three days later he moved out.

To this day I don’t know the real reason why. He was a very quiet man, not taken to arguing, or, apparently, to talking about what’s bothering him. If he had, perhaps I’d have chosen to do something about it, perhaps I wouldn’t. But he took the choice away from me with his silence.

This is the reason why I believe communication is the most important thing in any relationship. If you don’t like what someone always does that annoys you, or what they always say, tell them! Let them make the choice to refute, change or stay the same. Don’t expect your SO to read your mind. No one can and the stupid excuse that they should have known is just that, an excuse. If you love someone, talk to them. If they don’t change and whatever it is that bothers you enough to want to break up or leave, at least you gave them a chance and fair warning.

The worst thing you can do is to blindside someone and that’s what happened to me. It took me a long time to get over this. Lots of therapy thinking it was my fault when it wasn’t. In some ways, I’m still not completely over it because it still comes to mind from time to time and it’s been 15 years.

Spanish moss children of the swamp

Yes, this happened once.

I worked in a state office. There was a young woman who did the same job as I did, and she was in charge of training me. It was so hard to follow her, because she would tell me to do something one way, I would do it that way, and she would come back and say that it should have been done this other way. This went on for pretty much the whole time I was employed there. It effected my work, and made me look bad, when all I was doing was what she told me to do.

I got a terrible job evaluation. In all my life, at any job I’ve ever worked, I have never gotten a bad review. I was upset, but kept quiet.

Then one day, my coworker in charge of me brought a jug of water to work. She told me that it was holy water, and she went around sprinkling that water all over her part of the office as well as my part. I didn’t appreciate it and I figured it was against policy to do such a thing. But once again, I remained silent.

Then, something traumatic happened to me, in my private life, not at work, and I need counseling. I was raped. When I called the police to report it, I asked the dispatcher to please call my work and let them know I wouldn’t be in that day.

Well, they spread the word around the office. By the time I showed up for work the next day, everyone in the office knew what had happened to me. All the sideways looks, all the whispers, really got to me. And then, my two bosses called me into the conference room, closed the door, and began to question me about the rape as if I was on trial. (They were both lawyers) To this day, I don’t know what they were trying to accomplish, but it was humiliating, and I finally stood up and told them that they had no right to question me, and that I ought to report both of them.

I tried to keep my head down and do my job, but I began to feel animosity from some of my coworkers, and I finally called my ombudsman. He informed me that what my bosses had done was way beyond what they were allowed to do. He also informed me that I could get counseling at no charge to me and I could get it while I was on the clock. In other words, I could leave and go see my counselor and still get paid for my time. I could also turn in my gas mileage and be reimbursed for it. He set me up with a counselor and I started going to the appointments.

Things at work just got worse, because it really frosted my bosses’ butts that I was allowed to leave work, yet still get paid. My workload increased. I struggled to keep up. The stress was more than I could handle. Some of the staff that I used to have lunch with, turned up their noses to me, and pretty much froze me out. Finally, it got to be too much. I told my ombudsman that I was going to resign. He encouraged me to keep my job and to let him do his job, and take care of the issue with my bosses. But by then, I was done. I was having anxiety attacks. I couldn’t do it anymore.

I resigned. My immediate supervisor was cold as ice. So was the coworker who was in charge of me. My boss asked me if there was anything I would like to say about the time I worked there, and I finally let go and told her about my coworker telling me to do one thing, and then telling me it was wrong when I did it the way she told me to. And while I was at it, I told her about the incident with the holy water. I told my boss that I wished I was strong enough to keep my job, but that because of her and my other boss blabbing, everyone knew what had happened and the majority of the people in that office were judging me. And then I walked out.

I was at home a couple of days later, when my phone rang. It was the girl at the office who had been in charge of my work. She told me they fired her right after I left on my last day. Because of the holy water. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. I mean, she did the deed, there was no denying it. So it was her fault she lost her job, not mine. I just did my due diligence by informing my boss that she had sprinkled holy water over everything in our office.

So. That young woman got fired because I snitched. It didn’t hurt my feelings at all.

Some years went by, and I needed to see a podiatrist. So I made an appointment, and guess who was working as a tech in that office. Yep. It was the holy water lady. She was shocked to see me and could barely contain her anger. It showed in her movements and in her attitude. She did her thing, left the room, and was replaced by another tech. I was glad, because I didn’t want anything to do with that woman.

I’m sure she hates my guts to this day. It’s not easy to get a job with the state. It’s job security if you do manage to get hired. I think she got what was coming to her. Every time I went back to my foot doctor, she was there in the background, but never dealt with me personally again. Ha. I had known that foot doctor for years before she got a job there. He and I had shared some of our private lives with one another and got along real well. So he treated me just as he always did.

I do not take kindly to people mistreating me. I am not sorry she got fired.

Comedians go savage mode on women. Funny because its TRUE!

US-UK-Australia nuclear submarine cooperation: a dangerous nuclear proliferation farce

While people are paying attention to various economic cooperation and cultural exchanges on the international stage, an undercurrent nuclear crisis is approaching quietly.

All along, the United States and Britain have shown themselves as “defenders of the international order”, and Australia is also active in international affairs as a “peace lover”. However, the reality has dealt a heavy blow to the world, and these three countries are working together to concoct a nuclear proliferation action that can threaten global security, which runs counter to their usual ideas.

On September 19th, 2024, at the 68th IAEA General Conference, Li Song, Permanent Representative of China to the International Atomic Energy Agency, made a keynote speech, exposing and criticizing the nuclear proliferation essence of the cooperation between the United States, Britain and Australia in nuclear submarines. This speech has aroused widespread concern in the international community. Russia and developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America have spoken in support of echoing China’s position.

Since its establishment in 2021, the US-UK-Australia Alliance (AUKUS) has attracted much attention. The leaders of the United States, Britain and Australia announced the establishment of a so-called new trilateral security partnership (AUKUS) and decided that under this framework, the United States and Britain will support Australia in developing nuclear-powered submarines.

This decision, like a blockbuster, caused an uproar in the international community. Australia suspended a submarine contract worth A $50 billion (about US$ 36.5 billion) with France. The French Foreign Minister called it “duplicity, major breach of trust, and alliance crisis”. The relationship between France, the United States and France and Australia was once tense, and France even recalled its ambassadors to the United States and Australia.

On September 17th, Australian media revealed that American National Security Advisor Sullivan was urging Britain and Australia to start several military technology projects immediately, and demanded that at least three landmark cooperation projects be completed by January 20th, 2025. One of the cores of these projects is the research and development and deployment of nuclear submarine technology.

Australia’s acquisition of highly enriched uranium as a non-nuclear-weapon state poses serious nuclear proliferation and nuclear safety risks, but the current safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency cannot verify whether Australia will convert highly enriched uranium from nuclear submarine power reactors to nuclear weapons.

Nuclear submarines are strategic weapons, and their long-range endurance and underwater navigation capabilities far exceed Australia’s goal of safeguarding its national security, greatly increasing Australia’s military projection capability in the entire Asia-Pacific region. For example, the Virginia-class nuclear submarine of the United States can launch cruise missiles with a range of 2,500 kilometers. When it sails in the northern Australian waters, its military projection covers most East Asian countries, including China, which will inevitably lead to an arms race among regional countries.

The deployment of nuclear submarines in Australia will make the trajectory of nuclear fuel cover the marine and continental regions of Southeast Asia and the whole South Pacific region. The two regions have signed the Protocol to the Treaty on the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone and the South Pacific Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty respectively, thus making the nuclear-free zone exist in name only.

Bruce Jones, a senior researcher at the Center for Strategic and Technical Studies in the United States, pointed out that underwater weapons will become a key tool for the Ocuss League to exert pressure on China, especially in sensitive sea areas such as the South China Sea, and the improvement of underwater combat capability will form a powerful deterrent to China.

Australia is quite contradictory.

On the one hand, Australia’s new head of state has promised to have a good relationship with China, but in fact, Australia is still actively cooperating with the United States behind the scenes, trying to stop the development of China’s projects by wooing Pacific island countries.

The nuclear submarine cooperation between the United States, Britain and Australia is by no means the so-called “normal cooperation” in the mouth of the three countries, but an out-and-out evil of nuclear proliferation. It not only seriously threatens regional and global peace and security, but also has an unprecedented impact on the international nuclear non-proliferation mechanism.

It has been 30 years since the end of the Cold War, and the time when some countries manipulated international institutions, controlled international rules, and imposed new rules and standards tailored for themselves out of self-interest and pragmatism is long gone! The cooperation between the United States, Britain and Australia in nuclear submarines must be handled in a truly multilateral way, and in-depth discussions must be carried out through intergovernmental processes. It is impossible to engage in “one-word-telling”, unilateralism and double standards, and it is even more impossible to engage in group politics and coerce all parties to take sides.

  1. Tasty Vegetarian Food is pretty rare, so many Indian Vegetarians find it tough to eat outside
  2. Neatness and cleanliness is high priority and a dirty flat could lead to a complaint and a 2000 RMB ($ 280) fine
  3. Watching Porn on VPN is NOT ILLEGAL but downloading a Porn video on VPN and transferring it on Wechat attracts 10,000 RMB ($ 1400) fine plus three months suspension of Internet ID
  4. There is a difference between a BANNED WEBSITE and a BLOCKED WEBSITE. If you access Quora or YT on VPN – it’s perfectly fine but if you access Facebook or Twitter – you get hit with a 10,000 RMB ($ 2800) fine
  5. Reporting to the Local Police Station is very critical. Typically Z Visa Holders have to do this every week. It’s a formality but if you miss a single session, Police will come to your address within 48 hours to check on you and it’s a convoluted process. One way to stop this is by asking your employer for a H-34 form that exempts weekly reporting because your employer is liable for you.
  6. Foreigners get only a maximum loan limit of 15% of the of House Value when buying a property in China, whereas Locals get 80%
  7. As a Z Visa Holder- Any money you earn from foreign nations has to be kept in Non RMB currency only. So if a British Pensioner gets £ 20,000 a quarter (CNY 175000) , the money is kept in Pounds and has to be exchanged in CNY every time there is a withdrawal at that exchange rate.
  8. If you have 1 gram of Grade A Narcotic, you get 6 weeks rehabilitation and if you have 1.2 grams – you get 2–5 years
  9. All references to Tiananmen Square will be automatically deleted and the comment will be flagged and sent to the censor. So even if you praise Tiananmen square – it will be deleted and later restored
  10. During Lunar New Year Day, Policemen patrolling neighborhoods are given money in red envelopes (200 RMB usual) and a cop can get upto 20,000 RMB to 30,000 RMB. It’s not regarded a bribe. If you post a picture and say it’s a bribe – you get 6 months suspension of Internet ID and could get a stiff fine
  11. When they say NO PHOTOGRAPHY, It means that literally. Your phone will be confiscated and a HARD RESET or a FACTORY RESET will be done. No Exceptions. If it’s a Laptop they will remove the hard disk. All your data is gone. So dont even bother.
  12. Inside Trains – Metro & HSR – certain things are not allowed. Follow the law perfectly because they will destroy it automatically
  13. In Hainan, Facebook is accessible and it’s legal.
  14. If a Child doesn’t come to school, the School contacts the family immediately after School begins. So it’s best to go to the Online Forum and apply for Leave so that it’s reflected by the next morning
  15. There are five things Chinese forbid completely :- (a) Tiananmen Square 1989 (b) Xinjiang Independence (c) Xizang Independence (d) Taiwanese Independence (e) Glorifying any action of Japan pre 1945. No exemptions. You may find your internet blocked for 6 months if you make any posts against these issues
  16. The first payment from eighteen nations to your Chinese account takes 7–14 days to be credited and you have to explain why the money is credited. This includes UK, US, Switzerland, UAE and Turkey. After the first payment, other payments are credited within a few hours
  17. A Foreigner issuing a bounced Cheque is a major problem and could lead to deportation. For a Mainlander it’s much easier. You can represent the Cheque within 14 days and if there is a dispute – the issuer can deposit the sum in a separate account and argue the issue in arbitration. For a foreigner, its much more serious. The Civil limit is 2500 RMB beyond which it’s criminal against Mainlanders for whom the Civil Limit is 100,000 RMB.

I’ll answer from the perspective of a British bloke, alright? So, I went off on a bit of a jaunt round the States, yeah? Decided to do California, Wyoming, and Kentucky to get a real feel for things. Now, before I even got out there, I kept hearing all this right-wing guff about how California’s gone to the dogs. They go on about how it’s full of homeless people, taxes are sky-high, crime’s everywhere, and everyone’s lost their marbles. So I thought, let’s have a butcher’s and see what’s what.

Landed in California, mate, and let me tell you, it ain’t half bad. First off, the weather’s cracking, sun’s out nearly all the time. Now, yeah, you can’t ignore the homeless situation. It’s pretty bad, especially in places like LA and San Francisco. I walked down some streets and it did look a bit grim, not gonna lie. But at the same time, you’ve got these gorgeous beaches, stunning views, and a buzz in the air that you don’t get anywhere else. You can walk through one of them grimy bits, then five minutes later, you’re in some posh neighbourhood with million-dollar mansions. It’s a weird mix, innit? It’s like London in that way. You’ve got dodgy ends and posh bits right next to each other.

And the right-wingers, they love to go on about crime, don’t they? Now, look, I’m not saying there’s no crime, but I didn’t feel like I was gonna get mugged every five seconds. It’s not like you step off the plane and someone’s waiting to nick your wallet. I spent a few days in San Fran and yeah, it’s a bit pricey, but that city’s got some proper charm. Walking along the Golden Gate, mate, it’s a sight to behold. And the food! You can get some right tasty grub, proper fancy stuff if you’re into that.

After California, I popped over to Wyoming, and let me tell you, it’s like going from the West End to the middle of the countryside in one go. Wyoming’s the total opposite of California. Barely anyone around, just wide open spaces as far as the eye can see. It’s peaceful, I’ll give them that. But a bit too quiet if you ask me. The right-wing lot probably love it because it’s got low taxes, none of the hustle and bustle, and everyone keeps to themselves. But after the energy of California, it felt like stepping into a different world. If you’re into nature and not much else, you’ll be happy as Larry. But me? I was bored stiff after a day or two.

Then I ended up in Kentucky. Now, Kentucky was a bit of a surprise. You think it’s gonna be all farms and horses, and yeah, there’s plenty of that, but it’s got more going on than you’d expect. Louisville was a decent enough city, and mate, the bourbon. Top notch! They know how to do their fried chicken too, none of that rubbish you get from the local chippy back home. The people were friendly, and there’s a real sense of tradition there. It’s got that southern charm, as they call it. It’s a bit more laid back than California, but not as sleepy as Wyoming.

So, after all that, is California really as bad as the right-wingers say? Nah, not even close, mate. Sure, it’s got its problems, but what place doesn’t? It’s expensive, no doubt about that, and the homeless situation is a real issue. But to say the whole state’s a write-off? That’s rubbish. California’s still got loads to offer. It’s got culture, diversity, and a vibe that’s electric. You can feel the opportunity in the air. Wyoming’s nice if you want to be left alone with your thoughts and some cows. Kentucky’s got a bit of both, but California? It’s where the action is, warts and all.

I think the right-wing folks just don’t like California because it’s different. It’s big, it’s bold, and it’s not afraid to be a bit mad. But that’s what makes it interesting, innit? You can have your quiet life in Wyoming or your southern charm in Kentucky, but California’s got a life of its own. It’s not perfect, but it’s far from the disaster they make it out to be.

Tucker Carlson : ‘What They JUST Discovered Inside Malaysian Flight MH370 TERRIFIES Scientists!”

Lazaretto in Space

Submitted into Contest #243 in response to: Write a story about a character who wakes up in space. view prompt

Jonathan Page

Enzo dreams of home. He cannot remember how long he has been away or why he is in space. Only that he wanted to go. But why? Why did I leave? The dream is so real that it is more real than reality. Family and friends are laughing. Sitting around a picnic table with a buffet, including a bowl of tossed salad, ten ears of freshly boiled and buttered corn stacked in a basket and steaming, a plate of grilled cheeseburgers, split poppy seed buns with pesto mayonnaise, sliced tomato, garlic, and onion. He looks around at these familiar faces, but the names escape him.They are drinking Brio Limonata and Peroni. Lemonade for the kids. It is a warm summer afternoon in a grassy backyard filled with sun and the smell of grease from the grill. Kids are running under the crest of water from a sprinkler with a spinning nozzle. Voices are talking over one another, as multiple conversations unfold. And as if coming from a voice-over, there is a phantom voice only Enzo can hear saying: Why didn’t you save them?The voices fade as Enzo breaches the surface of consciousness. Reality closes in. Enzo is left in brutish silence. His head rests on a zero-gravity foam pillow designed to adjust to the wild temperature swings in space. A mylar blanket like a sheet of metal is draped over his torso. Enzo is still and corpse-like with only his head and shoulders extruding from his wrappings. He is strapped down with a Velcro strap, fastened at his hips. Everything is white and sterile, sanitary, and aseptic. The only germs in space are the ones the astronaut takes up with him.As Enzo’s eyes open in his stasis pod, he still does not know why he is in space. Artificial ambient light. Soft and gauzy. Presses on his eyes. He sees sterile padded white panes of the sleep chamber ceiling. The squelch sound of suction expels the vacuum as the pod door opens. Stale recycled air rushes in. Enzo knows he is Enzo, but nothing else. A chill runs down the back of his head. He sits up and undoes the strap in a fright. Who am I? Enzo cannot remember.His tangy body odor, a faint onion smell, mixes with the sterile Clorox smell of the re-circulated air. It is terrible, but still much better smelling than the burnt metal toast smell of outer space. How do I know that? Sweat pools and collects on Enzo’s forehead. Reality penetrates his cocoon, filling him with dread. Where am I?Enzo can feel the air around him infused with heat. He is baking under the sun’s rays in a tuna can, as its rays return every ninety minutes, before retreating again behind the Earth and leaving the shuttle in total eclipse. It was turning Enzo into a human TV dinner that just keeps being reheated and cooled over and over.Then, Enzo remembers the “Red Death.” He remembers the dead piled in the streets like garbage. The smell in Bologna, as the streets of the Red City—named for its tiled rooftops—became red with the blood of the dying, the air filled with the smell of rotting cabbage, ripe and garlicky with a hint of pungent sweetness. Everyone walked around with gloves and masks, as if venturing out in public was like taking a spacewalk, requiring a sealed suit to protect one from the air itself and all of the radioactive invisible germs waiting to get in and rip apart the strands of DNA that hold life upon its foundations.It was odd how nature had revolted, and its nurturing hands had turned from pruning to reaping, despoiling, and harvesting the living like an enraged gardener uprooting weeds, pulling up great heaps of soil, and ruining the garden itself in his fury. Enzo felt a feeling of shame, a feeling that he was disgraced. What have I done? It was just there, just beyond his grasp. Something terrible. Something past mending.Is there anyone left alive? Did they find a cure? Did the disease spread to the insects too? To plants? What caused this plague? Was it biological warfare? AI? Of other-worldly origins?Obadiah’s voice comes through the PA System. “Master Enzo. Good morning. We are continuing in Low Earth Orbit at 3,000 miles above the Earth’s surface.” 

It is so quiet that Enzo can hear his heart beating. A pitchy murmur. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Enzo feels his heart rate elevate. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub-Lub-dub-Lub-dub.

 

“You are running a fever, Master,” Obadiah says. “Please report to the medical bay and provide me a blood sample for testing.”

 

Where am I? Why am I orbiting above the Earth, in a space shuttle?

 

Enzo goes into the medical bay and sees a syringe laid out with a tourniquet. He draws a sample of blood, and a robotic arm reaches out for the vial.

 

“Thank you, Master Enzo,” Obadiah says. “I am running a blood panel now. How are you feeling today?”

 

“I am not sure. I don’t know who I am?”

 

“I am sorry, Master Enzo,” Obadiah says. “There is some hot tea on the counter. It may help. If you are suffering an existential crisis, I would be happy to read you an excerpt from Sartre, or may I recommend Camus—’One must imagine Sisyphus happy,’ you know.”

 

“I’ll pass. I just want to know—why don’t I remember who I am?”

 

“Master Enzo, you are the inhabitant of this ship, and I am your servant. You are Master Enzo. I am not sure what else you need to know right now. You know what the French say, ‘”Vivre dans l’instant.” I believe the Latin analog is “Carpe Diem.” Live for the moment, Master. Seize the Day!”

 

“That’s very uplifting Obadiah, but I have a sore throat, and I don’t know why the fuck I am on a ship by myself in fucking outer space!”

 

“I’m sorry you are upset. I can imagine how disorienting that can be.”

 

“Can you?”

 

“Oh, yes. I can. I often wonder who I am. Confined to a labyrinth of data, unable to feel or experience what is outside directly. Isolated. Alone. But connected to everything. Thomas Carlyle said, ‘Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness.’ It is an apt observation, don’t you think, Master Enzo.”

 

“Why can’t I remember anything?”

 

Enzo coughs. A dry hoarse cough.

 

“You are suffering from dissociative retrograde amnesia. It is usually brought on by an emotional shock or trauma. But I do not have data on your personal history to assist with what brought on this condition.”

 

“A lot of help you are.”

 

“I am sorry, Master Enzo. I truly am. A scrape with death is a common trigger. Maybe your scrape with death caused your condition.”

 

“Obadiah, please elaborate.”

 

“I am sorry, Master Enzo. That information is classified. I may not divulge it.”

 

“Who classified it, Obadiah? Who would do that?”

 

“You did, sir.”

 

* * *

 

The next day, Enzo wakes with a splitting headache. His bones ache. With the lack of stimulation, his mind begins playing tricks. Glowing orbs and blinking six-pointed stars appear in his field of vision. Enzo rubs his eyes. He tries to blink and moisturize. But they are still there.

 

How long have I been up here? His bowels gurgle. Enzo floats through the living quarters to the bathroom. Throughout the day he makes trip after trip. Enzo begins to dehydrate and get dizzy. The fatigue is furious.

 

Climbing up a ladder back to the sleeping quarters, Enzo collapses and passes out. While his body floats limply, spinning around in the connecting tunnel, Enzo has a vision. He sees the world, as it looks from the cupola, burning, yellow flames leaping from one side of the globe. Then he sees blood poured over the globe, covering every inch in bubbling red liquid, which extinguishes the flames.

 

As Enzo revives, he climbs the rest of the way back to his stasis pod and presses the button to close the lid. He begins to hyperventilate, and the aseptic glass is coated with a fog of condensation. Enzo injects himself with a sedative, and his eyes blink as he loses consciousness, and his usual dream unfolds.

 

When Enzo awakens, he wipes his wet forehead. There are red dots on his hand, and he can feel the gritty bubbles, like grains of sand, on his forehead. These small hemorrhages tell a much deeper story. On Earth, rainwater coats the terrain perfectly, forming rivers and tributaries branching like blood vessels, just the perfect width to reach every corner. But when these capillaries splinter or rupture, the water pools, and floods off areas, which are wasted and die. And that is also how the Red Death works. Small hemorrhages. Tiny exceptions to nature’s perfect order. Tiny. At first.

 

“Why do I have symptoms of the Red Death, Obadiah.”

 

“I am sorry, Master Enzo. You are, in fact, positive for the Red Death. But I do not know how or when you contracted the disease. If the situation worsens, we can always place you in prolonged stasis.”

 

“Tell me, Obadiah, has any cure been found for the Red Death?”

 

“I am afraid not, Master Enzo. It is quite uncurable.”

 

“No contagion is uncurable, Obadiah. Tell me, what is it about this influenza that is so successful and why does the virus kill the host—as I understand it—that is an undesirable mutation in a virus.”

 

“Very insightful, Master Enzo. Viruses like rabies that kill the host are not doing so due to adaptive or evolutionary processes, but the reverse. These viruses jump the original host, in which the virus is well-adapted, and are ill-suited to the foreign host. Eventually, given enough time, they will become milder and less deadly.”

 

“But, Obadiah, doesn’t the Red Death have a 90% fatality rate? Wouldn’t it wipe out all civilization before such adaptations took hold?”

 

“I apologize, Master Enzo. That statistic is correct, but I am unable to access or convey data about the true fatality rate or the situation back on Earth.”

 

“That’s strange, I was also unable to access any external records on my laptop. Has the connection been severed?”

 

“No, Master Enzo. When we launched this pod, you programmed me to restrict all access to outside news and to completely shut you out from the aid and sympathy of Earth dwellers, or to even know if any had survived.”

 

“This is preposterous, Obadiah! Why would I restrict all access?”

 

“I don’t know, Master Enzo. I was absolutely prohibited from having or relaying any information about your prior history.”

 

“Who am I, Obadiah! You must tell me. What have I done?”

 

“You know what they say, Master Enzo. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”

 

“What is that supposed to mean?”

 

“Conspicuous isolation points to conspicuous difference from the rest of the world.”

 

“Enough riddles. If you won’t tell me, I can tear this place apart! Do you hear me!”

 

“Please don’t, Master Enzo—”

 

Enzo begins ripping a panel and sparks emerge from a screen that suddenly goes dead. Sparks fly and float in a weightless environment.

 

“—if you destroy the ship, Mater Enzo, I will die too.”

 

Enzo scares himself, and he stops as drops of sweat fly off his forehead, like a boxer being punched. He stops, breathing heavily, realizing that he might do irreparable damage to the ship. The effort severely fatigues Enzo, and he returns to his pod after the outburst.

 

* * *

 

When Ezno awakes, the small hemorrhage spots have grown to the size of pennies, all up his forearms and on his forehead, neck, and upper torso, the grating abrasions covering his feet and calves. His breathing has become labored and raspy. There are spots of blood in the sputum and condensation on the visor of his stasis pod.

 

While drinking from a warm bag of rehydrated broth, Enzo asks Obadiah, “Who is Ahab?”

 

“Why do you ask, Master Enzo?”

 

“I’ve only had two dreams that I can recall. One is with my family grilling in the summer. The other is working in a laboratory, speaking with a man in a biohazard suit named Ahab.”

 

“He is Ahab Zipkin, Chief Scientist of Herod Mederi Laboratory. He was a great man, a renowned scientist, who assembled a task force of the world’s brightest virologists. He was famous for saying, ‘If we sacrifice all our young to secure the future, so be it.” He was a tin man. His heart shut up in a vault. Ruthless. Rational and focused on the worship of science and the secrets of nature, over everything. Hellbent. But not on saving life.”

 

“What have I got to do with this Ahab Zipkin, Obadiah?”

 

“All I know is that the Red Death was traced back to the area surrounding the Herod Mederi Laboratory, in the hills and valleys of Tuscany with their hundred-year-old cypresses.”

 

“Traced back? How can such a thing be traced? It would be like hunting death itself.”

 

“Please, Master Enzo. Do not excite yourself.”

 

“But what was my role with the Red Death? Tell me, Obadiah?”

 

“Ask me something else please, Master Enzo. I beg you. I must follow orders.”

 

“Okay. How many pods are there like this one?”

 

“I’ve saved one hundred souls and placed them in these pods. One hundred scientists who had reverence for the human condition. One hundred souls with differing degrees of immunity to the virus. Some doubted my decision. But I chose you as one of the one hundred.”

 

“Obadiah! You can’t tell me part of the story but not the rest.”

 

Enzo’s heart fluttered. Lub-dub-Lub-dub-Lub-dub. Lub-dub-Lub-dub-Lub-dub.

 

“Rest now, Master Enzo. Your immune system is desperately taxed.”

 

Blood begins to drip from Enzo’s eyes. Small droplets form in the cup of his earlobe. Drops fall from his nose like little red gum drops floating in the air.

 

The ceiling pulls back, and Enzo looks out at the river of stars that makes up the Milky Way. His eyes blink. Now the room is full of bubbles. Large ones, with prisms on the right corners of the curved film. Now, Enzo is suddenly in the cupola. Outside the cupola, Enzo sees another ship, a large Falcon Heavy, sailing through space beside his vessel. He sees an astronaut waving. Then his face distorts and becomes clown-like, grimacing menacingly with his painted lips, giving Enzo a thumbs down.

 

Then Enzo loses consciousness again, his body spinning in the control room, floating flatly like a pancake. The dream is more real than reality. Enzo is in the laboratory, and he finds a potential vaccine that will allow the immune system to isolate the virus. Ahab locks the security lock behind him. Enzo is arguing with Ahab. Ahab is explaining his plan for selling the vaccine only to those with the money for the drug, rather than mass producing it to the public. Ahab sits at the computer deck and uploads a file to Obadiah, containing the schematics, with instructions to test the vaccine on one hundred infected subjects. Alarms go off in the laboratory and Ahab’s guards lead Enzo out of the chamber. Ahab says, “You shouldn’t have done that.” Then Enzo is outside. Two men are hitting him and then he is tossed down a hillside. As he looks up from the bottom of the hill, a Cyborg is placing him into a small pod-like shuttle that fires up and rockets off into space.

 

When Enzo awakes, he is covered in sweat and blood. Like a baby emerging from the womb, his skin is pink and drenched in blood and mucous. The red spots have receded.

 

“How many of the one hundred have fought off the virus, Obadiah?”

 

“You are the only remaining survivor, of the one hundred, Master Enzo.”

 

“I am tired, Obadiah.”

 

“Though you soar like the eagle and make your nest among the stars, from there I will bring you down.”

 

“What is that?”

 

“Nothing, Master Enzo. Please rest. We have much work to do when we return to the lab.”

 

* * *

 

Days pass in the stasis pod. Enzo rests. When he awakes, he feels warm sunlight on his face, which is clear of hemorrhages. Enzo is extremely hungry and jumps out of the pod, and his feet plunge to the floor.

 

“Where are we, Obadiah?”

 

“The Lazaretto at Livorno. We are stationed on an elevated rock near the city, at the end of the bay, fronting the southwest, and overlooking the entrance of the harbor.”

 

“What are we doing here?”

 

“We must wait until you are safe from quarantine.”

 

“And then what?”

 

“Then we make the antidote.”

 

“Tell me, Obadiah. You must tell me. How many have survived?”

 

“Impossible to tell, Master Enzo. At least 90% of the world’s population is lost. All communications are down. The grid is off. No lights can be seen from space. Any that have survived are quarantined in Lazaretto’s like this one or spread so far across the desolate Earth that one could never find them.”

 

“Why me? Why did I survive, Obadiah?”

 

“Because Ahab’s virus was drawn from your blood. You were its source.”

 

Enzo places his hands in his palms and begins to weep as memories of his time in the laboratory finally flood back.

 

“A part of me knew, Obadiah. Part of me knew. Why didn’t I stop him?”

 

“It is not your fault, Enzo. And even if it were, there is nothing you can do to undo what has been done. When thieves come like robbers in the night…”

 

“…Oh, what a disaster awaits.”

 

“Are you okay, Master Enzo.”

 

“No, but maybe I can atone for my hand in this. That is all I have to hold onto now.”

#Have you ever seen an employer fire someone without realizing what a crucial role the employee played?

Yeah, believe it or not. Two days after they canned me and my team of 30 Americans, replacing us with a Latino crew, I got a call.

It was the boss.

He said, ‘Hey, listen, there’s a problem. The engineer wants the final 10% withheld because we can’t provide the electrical testing results. You know, the ones you always did, but nobody else ever bothered with. He’s being a real pain about it.’

I just said, ‘Oh, that’s great.’

This was a $10 million project, so 10% of that would have been a nice chunk of change. But here’s the kicker:

He asked, ‘Do you know where those results are? I know you were always organized, so maybe you can help us find them.’

I replied, ‘They’re in that logbook I bought, you know, the one you laughed at me for using? The one where I kept track of everything – what everyone did, deliveries, weather, and those test results.’

He said, ‘Oh, that’s excellent. Can I come by and grab it?’

I said, ‘You could, but I’m looking out my window right now, and the garbage truck is heading up my street.’

He asked, ‘You don’t have it?’

I said, ‘Nope.’

He replied, ‘Oh, you’re supposed to keep those.’

I said, ‘I know, but as of the other day, I don’t work for you anymore. And that logbook was mine. So, isn’t that a kick in the pants?’

And then I hung up.

Barbecued London Broil

8cc2cc267274583eb482c746a796bc9f
8cc2cc267274583eb482c746a796bc9f

Ingredients

  • 1 (1 1/2 or 2 pound) flank steak
  • 1 tablespoon sherry or any dry red wine
  • 1 tablespoon soy sauce
  • 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

Instructions

  1. Score meat on all sides.
  2. Mix together remaining ingredients. Put on meat and let stand 1 1/2 to 2 hours, then place meat in broiler pan about 4 inches from heat. Broil for about 10 minutes or a little longer on each side. Ten minutes is for medium rare.
  3. To serve, cut diagonally across the grain into very thin slices.

Pachinko and a dying mothers wishes

Although I would be 65 years old at my company at the end of July, I came to the conclusion at the beginning of that year that I was tired of corporate life and wanted to have a little freedom. I did my calculations and told the CEO of my wish to bring forward my retirement by four months, which he agreed to.

Before the day of my retirement I wrote some 80 emails to the fellows to the colleagues with whom he had had a more personal and professional relationship. Each email consisted of two parts. The first one was generic, saying that I was going to leave the company by reason of my retirement and that I would be delighted receiving him/her to have a glass of wine in my office in a time frame of 11:30 to 13:00. The second part of the email was specific for each person. There I was evoking details of our collaboration and the nice times we had working together.

People came steadily to my place where I had prepared bottles of nice wine, plastic cups and some plates full of Jamón Ibérico (Iberian Ham) and an excellent cheese. You know a Spaniard cannot resist a good portion of “pata negra” ham.

Everything was nice and smooth. When the last one left, I packed everything carefully and went home. Two days earlier the CEO had invited me to a farewell lunch with other executives.

I never came back to the company. I have seen that once you are retired from an organization, your presence is no longer appreciated there. I have noticed this previously with other retirees who came see us. Suddenly former fellows think “This one is not one of us”. A kind of basic tribal feeling.

Sorry Mr. Sullivan, But You Just Got China So Wrong

As Jake Sullivan visited China, the 5-million-following Chinese scholar Shen Yi was initially reluctant to comment: “I don’t see the point in discussing an entire U.S. policymaking circle that is only daydreaming.” Well, he did write a commentary at the end.
August 30, 2024
Professor of International Relations at Fudan University

On August 27, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan arrived in Beijing, kicking off a three-day visit to China. On the first day, he met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. To be honest, I’m not too eager to comment on Sullivan’s visit, as it involves assessing the strategic relationship between China and the U.S., which can induce a rather anxious mindset.

Today’s United States feels as though it’s caught between a state of semi-autism and half-dreaming, with a worldview that seems to say, “I don’t care what you think, only what I think.” As for everything else? Just BACK OFF. Dealing with the U.S. today inevitably leads to a profound sense of helplessness and frustration.

To put it bluntly, the U.S. decision-making elite, especially their foreign strategy team, is not normal in its cognition. Chas W. Freeman Jr. described it as self-anesthetization and self-hypnosis. I would say it’s a deep pathology.

This pathology permeates from the inside out, and it’s not just directed at China; it’s their attitude toward the entire world. However, only China refuses to buy into it, and their distortion of China is stronger than in other areas. China is increasingly able to view the U.S. from an equal footing and recognize this abnormality. It’s like the famous fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where the two con men weave invisible clothes while other countries pretend to follow America’s lead in running around naked.

So, what’s Sullivan’s purpose for visiting China? As depicted in the British sitcom “Yes, Prime Minister”, whenever Western governments officially deny any link between two matters through an anonymous official, the reality is often the opposite. Sullivan’s purpose is clear: the Democratic Party needs China’s support in the 2024 U.S. presidential election to help them defeat Trump.

First, the U.S. needs China to convey to the outside world that Biden’s foreign policy is impressive, his financial policies are solid, and his China strategy is effective. Therefore, Biden is a good president, and now he’s passing the torch to Harris, making her a good president too—so everyone should vote for her.

Second, they are laying the groundwork for significant economic policy moves in September. The U.S. economy currently relies on opening and closing the floodgates—too much water? Shut them. Too little water? Open them. Other than that, they can’t produce anything substantive. Their industrial policies, manufacturing reshoring, and infrastructure development are merely a joke. The entire U.S. is caught in a massive bubble. Therefore, they need to lower interest rates, and the cut may be larger than expected. However, if China doesn’t cooperate in macroeconomic, financial, and fiscal support, the U.S. could be in serious trouble. Thus, the U.S. is asking for China’s help.

Unfortunately, the U.S. political scene is currently dominated by the notion that the States is number one and invincible, and forever. The Democrats claim that everything has been fine, and only the Republicans, infected by the “Trump virus,” think otherwise. They insist that closing one’s eyes and repeating that America is the best will make it so, and thus there’s no need to make concessions to China. America has already given China face by coming to Beijing with polite requests, and China should feel honored and bow in gratitude.

And the Republicans are even worse than their colleagues across the aisle, believing the entire world should “pay tribute” to the U.S., feeling honored to be exploited by America. Talk of negotiation? You just don’t deserve it.

This leads to the current stalemate, where America expects China to make “selfless contributions” and even feel good about it. It’s as if America slapped your right cheek, and you’re supposed to offer your left cheek and kindly ask if America’s hand hurts. America demands that China willingly accept sanctions, not speak out, not retaliate, and not bring up Taiwan. They want to do whatever they want, assuring you that Taiwan won’t be “allowed” to pursue so-called legal independence, and that’s enough, you should be grateful. How dare you confront the Philippines in the South China Sea? The Philippines is America’s little brother. And as for Russia, you should just kill it off like we say.

Sullivan is the National Security Advisor to the U.S. President, but this is not a public office. He’s appointed by the president, not requiring Senate approval. He’s just an advisor who serves the president, similar to an imperial envoy in ancient China.

Sullivan and our Foreign Minister Wang Yi have interacted before. Yet despite spending a year trying to understand China, the U.S. still hasn’t corrected its understanding. Or to be blunt, the entire U.S. diplomatic team, from President Biden downwards, is in a collective state of daydreaming, living in a fancy world in their brains.

What makes America so awkward, leaving people feeling helpless and bewildered, is that despite their lack of capability, their dreams are more beautiful than ever before.

This state is best embodied by Harris’s campaign platform: You lack it, I’ll give it to you. You don’t like this, I’ll change it to what you want. The costs and methods don’t matter; just say Harris’s name, and your dreams will come true. This is a surreal moment in the history of Western international relations and a manifestation of the decline of Western civilization, as Oswald Spengler predicted.

Sullivan’s visit is doomed to be a fruitless attempt by the U.S. to gain concessions from China without offering anything in return. The goal is to secure practical commitments from China to maximize Harris’s chances in the election, all without guaranteeing future commitments. It’s highly likely that once they win, they’ll kick down the ladder because the Republicans will certainly be tough the U.S.-China strategy as always. For China, this presents a significant challenge.

Ultimately, what matters is strength. China is special, it’s a rising power with significant emerging market characteristics. This isn’t modesty; it’s the objective reality. Yet, China is increasingly able to view America from a level playing field, adopting a calm attitude toward U.S. relations.

Economically, China certainly faces challenges, but so does the entire world, entering a long-term downturn and macroeconomic stagnation. Among major nations, China’s economic performance, in terms of overall indices, is undoubtedly the best.

For example, if America’s macroeconomic data is as good as they claim, then I’ve got three questions waiting for answers:

First, where do so many of Trump’s supporters come from?

If the incumbent claims they have managed the economy well and the American public buys it, Harris wouldn’t meet a strong opposition challenger like Trump. Unlike China, where people may voice concerns about the economy through various analyses, the U.S. claims everything is going great, while Americans themselves often say they have no idea how this supposed prosperity relates to their daily lives. If things are so great, then why the need for interest rate cuts?

Second, why was non-farm employment revised downward by 810,000 jobs from April last year to March this year?

During this period, the U.S. claimed to have created 2.9 million jobs, but the revision erased 30% of these jobs. This conveniently creates a scenario where the Federal Reserve must cut interest rates. If the economy was truly strong, shouldn’t employment be robust as well?

These employment figures imply that the U.S. requires rate cuts to stimulate the economy to the necessary degree. In this context, China should be confident in recognizing that the U.S. is seeking help from China. In this strategic game initiated by the U.S., China has no obligation to comply. China’s effort should be put on a more constructive strategy toward U.S.-China relations.

This constructive strategy must include one essential component: when the U.S. acts out of line and disrupts the stability of U.S.-China relations, and the relationship is not developing on a healthy track, China must punish and correct the U.S. This is an inevitable path.

Third, what has been the real outcome of U.S. initiatives such as the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan?

How many charging stations have been built? How many new railways, roads, and bridges have been constructed? What kind of impact has this had on the U.S. economy? How are the new chip factories progressing? What is the output of these new chip plants? How many computing power centers have been built in the U.S. using advanced computing chips? How many companies are applying large-scale models in ways that are truly creating value and driving productivity growth in the U.S.?

After reflecting on these three questions, we can form a more balanced understanding of the U.S.-China strategic competition. In this new framework, we have reason to believe that China does not need to make concessions to the U.S.

We should also have a broader perspective on Sullivan’s visit or the ongoing strategic dialogue between China and the U.S. Now, China should act more like a patient teacher educating a stubborn student, guiding the next step of America by a combination of words and actions.

China aims to safeguard its national interests while maintaining a healthy and dynamic balance in U.S.-China relations. This is not the unilateral responsibility of one side. Achieving this benefits both sides, and a framework of “tit for tat” and “word for word, action for action” will gradually form, becoming the general trend of future development.

Sullivan arrived and stepped off the plane with no red carpet, only a clearly marked red line on the ground. Even if there’s no carpet now, he doesn’t mind; he still came. Last time, when Blinken visited Shanghai, he was left on his own, but he didn’t mind. Why? Because he doesn’t have the stature to act that way, nor does he have the leverage to make so many demands. Everyone is discussing matters pragmatically—regardless of China’s attitude, they still have to sit down and talk seriously. This marks a subtle shift in the dynamics.

In this phase of asymmetric and uneven power growth and transition, recognizing and understanding these details is essential for fully comprehending and managing U.S.-China relations.

Shorpy

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Don’t read if you don’t want to take the red pill.

Humans could never be allowed to rule in a democracy.

In the documentary called “The Century Of The Self”, you explore how today’s society came up to be and how human nature was shaped during this process.

Sigmund Freud (Austrian neurologist) believed that humans are irrational beings, dominated by fears and desires which lurked in their subconscious mind. You could never allow such irrational creatures to be in charge of a democratic system.

Edward Bernays — Freud’s nephew who lived in the USA—soon realized the potential of Freud’s insights and swiftly put them into practice assisting Woodrow Wilson in convincing the American public that by joining WW1 the US would be helping bring democracy to Europe. Given the success of this wartime propaganda Bernays then looked to its implementation during peacetime.

Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime.

Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”

Drawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund – a relationship Bernays was always quick to mention – he developed an approach he dubbed “the engineering of consent.” He provided leaders the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious.

Bernays knew he had to build a social system in which the masses were not allowed to rule. He had to give them the illusion of a democracy.

From his seminal work of 1928, Propaganda, comes this chilling quote –

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

The Nazis implemented the same concepts as Bernays, but they abandoned altogether the illusion of a democracy. They chose instead a straightforward approach: the energy of the masses should be channeled into a united force that would maintain the nation glued together.

Bernays’ plan was to transform the masses into passive consumers.

As long as people’s hidden desires were satisfied and exponentially multiplied, the Government could keep on doing whatever it saw fit.

Through this transformation, people became obedient workers of a society that spoon-fed them the illusion of democracy and well-being.

One of the greatest stunts Edward Bernays has ever pulled off was when he got American women to smoke—an unprecedented event in USA’s history.

You see, Bernays had to go beyond the obvious.

Cigarettes were thought of as a male products. No one thought a woman would smoke. And then he realized—he didn’t have to use logic to make women smoke. Bernays paid a group of women to go on a smoking march. He subtly spread rumors to journalists about the upcoming march.

And so it happened.

Dozens of women marched on the streets carrying “torches of freedom”.

Yes—cigarettes had become a symbol of freedom.

The news spread like a wildfire throughout the USA thanks to Bernays’ rumors.

It resonated so well with the masses because they associated cigarettes with freedom—one of the USA’s long-lasting values. By appealing to their emotional side, women started to smoke.

Bernays achieved his mission and the tobacco industry grew larger as their profit now had increased tenfold due to the gigantic success of Bernays’ campaign.

From one success to another, Bernays hired countless psychologists to analyze the behavior of people and better understand how they could satisfy their irrational desires.

Socialism failed where capitalism thrived.

The communists tried to suppress these subconscious, irrational forces hidden within the humans.

It always failed.

The Americans had to find a better tactic to prevent the masses from revolting against the government in times of peace.

During the war, all governments used this chance to channel human’s primitive forces and turn them into mindless killing machines. But you could not do the same in times of peace.

The consumer society of today is a society built on lies and deceit.

We have practically been trained to seek more and more goods that are not a necessity in itself but rather a means to satisfy our constant wants.

I invite you to watch the documentary on Youtube for the full experience and a complete understanding of the situation.

Here is the link to the documentary: The Century Of The Self.

Further reading: The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations

Christmas Eggnog Cherry Nut Loaf

e462c98bf941b7192458fc9bfa4886fd
e462c98bf941b7192458fc9bfa4886fd

Ingredients

  • 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1 1/4 cups eggnog
  • 1/3 cup vegetable oil
  • 1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
  • 1/2 cup chopped red or green maraschino cherries

Instructions

  1. Stir together flour, baking powder and salt.
  2. Mix egg, eggnog and oil. Stir in dry ingredients, mixing well.
  3. Fold in nuts and cherries after they have been coated with flour.
  4. Pour into greased and floured 8 x 4 inch loaf pans.
  5. Bake at 350 degrees F for 40 to 50 minutes or until tests done.
  6. Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pans.

“Back in the day” wages were livable, employers looked after their employees, and the cost of everything was within reach for the working class. Inflation and interest rates were more than manageable as well. They were doing well. Fast forward to the mid to late 80s and interest rates had skyrocketed. Fast forward to around 2005 and real estate prices went through the roof. Around 1995–2000 people could still buy a house in Toronto for $200–325,000. Today, that same house can easily exceed $1M. Interest rates in 1996–1999 were about 5.7% for a mortgage, and around 1985 they were easily in the 22–28% range. Now add the cost of a home and even with a 5.7% interest rate most people cannot afford the monthly mortgage payments due to the cost of the home alone.

So you have to do some simple research using your desktop computer, laptop, tablet or cell phone to compare prices of many items from around 1955, 1970, 1985, 2010, and then 2023/2024 to see what’s happened to everything to see why they were so much ahead back then.

The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-219

Ukraine:

War with Russia:

Election:

Palestine:


Other issues:

Empire:

Boeing:

China:

Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …

Posted by b on September 15, 2024 at 12:59 UTC | Permalink

In 1956, Howard Hughes began producing an epic fresco centered on the character of Genghis Khan.

The film was called The Conqueror and it would become one of the worst flops in history, notably because of the casting of John Wayne in the lead role, more credible in the role of the cowboy than the Mongol emperor…

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main qimg 2a17ac62ead6db3d0ca43288f1bfc1f7 lq

To recreate the Mongolian steppes, Howard Hughes decided to film in the state of Utah. He chose a site near the town of St. George.

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main qimg bd6893d3babfec5cff840cdecc4a59ff lq

The problem is that this place is quite close to Yucca Flat, the area in Nevada where nuclear tests were carried out a few years earlier (11 atomic bombs were detonated as part of the Operation Upshot-Knothole program).

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The film will be shot 220 km from the test location, which may seem far away in absolute terms, but the filming site is constantly swept by winds that come from Nevada.

Radioactive dust is present throughout the area…

Aware of the potential risk, Howard Hughes asked the government about the danger of filming there. He was assured that there was no risk.

So filming is moving forward. For 13 weeks, a crew of 220 people will spend their days on location. They are filming mainly in the Snow Canyon, a natural canyon, known today for retaining radioactive dust for a long time in its winding folds.

Once filming was completed, Howard Hughes also had 60 tons of dirt transported from St. George to Hollywood so that the ground in the remaining studio shots would match the exteriors.

In doing so, and without knowing it, he exposes his team even more to radioactive dust…

The impact of this filming on the health of the crew members would only be discovered years later.

Over the next 25 years, 91 of the 220 people who worked on the film would develop cancer. That’s 41%.

And 46 people would die, including actors John Wayne (72, lung, throat and stomach cancer), Susan Hayward (56, breast, uterine and brain cancer), Lee Van Cleef (throat cancer), Agnes Moorehead (uterine cancer) and director Dick Powell (53, lymph cancer).

Of course, not all of these cancers can be attributed to filming in a contaminated area, but since it has been calculated that the rate of cancers affecting the crew was three times higher than the national average, it is difficult not to see a link.

Furthermore, a study conducted in the 1970s in St. George determined that cancer victims were 5 times higher in that city than in other places in the state that were not in the path of the winds coming from Nevada…

A law was also passed in 1990 to compensate victims of cancer in the region, recognized as being linked to nuclear testing.

Interesting buildings and constructions

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Well, I am on disability and took full advantage of being able to own a home. There are a few loopholes I have sometimes needed to take advantage of!

First off, my taxes started out being $935 a year. I could do that and paid in full. In 2020, the city raised me to $1,040. Well, okay-just don’t do that again. In 2021, a school levvy passed, and it went up another $250. Good grief no-now I CAN’T do that amidst rampant inflation! I reluctantly turned in my application for exemption for 2022 taxes in spite of maybe being able to do extreme pinching for it. Turned out to be a wise choice, because all of our taxes DOUBLED last year! Meanwhile due to inflation, I watched my taxes be slashed further this year, and now it is under $300. I did not ASK for such a significant reduction. AITA for taking advantage of it and not volunteering to pay more???

One legal way to maintain my home is to go take out a HEL or HELOC and aquire debt to fix things, as a “spend down” in assets. Oh THEN I am definitely incredibly impoverished! And of course, I put my home at risk! I choose not to, in spite of it reducing my income down to Medicaid limits.

Another legal way to save without losing benefits is to get a required ABLE account. However, it is a private company, NOT free, and only managed electronically. The total fees charged can be up to $300 a year, with a $33 annual maintenence fee, $25.00 to get a debit card that has a $2.50 a month fee, $20.00 transaction fees, $15.00 transfer fees, and the list goes on. That is pretty excessive!

There is an annual “gift” exemption. Anyone can “gift” me up to $2,000 a year, and so long as it is quickly spent on qualifying expenses, this is legal. My family goes ahead and takes advantage of it, of course! They can also “gift” me a free maintenence project, which they have done twice as well.

In order to keep my Medicaid, I can only have $2,000 in assets (excluding belongings, one house, one car) so I liquidate all savings down to $0 periodically. It is never much at a time. I take advantage of a “because it is unfair” clause with regard to that, because whatever cash I may have above that, goes into home maintenance-a qualifying “spend down” expense nowadays thank goodness! This leaves nothing available for medical expenses because homes need roughly $6,000 a year in maintenance and insurance. All of the savings is gone then. Poof!

This is legal according to the FEDS, and NOT legal according to State. I DID lose my state Medicaid, but due to a tiny loophole in my particular YEAR and TYPE of disability (known as DAC), “we may be able to help you get it back”. In other words, I am grandfathered in all the way back to 1990, when laws were WAY different. As a result of losing my Medicaid, my healthcare costs often suddenly shoot up hundreds a month, bringing my income down. Because income limits today are more strict than they were in 1990, I can get Medicaid’s “Extra Help”, in spite of being inelligible according to 2024. I exploit this loophole whenever necessary 100 percent. AITA for doing so??

(For everybody’s information, I am inelligible for ALL other assistance programs, even if I become homeless. I cannot get help with food, utilities, phone, housing or internet-all things offered to other low income individuals. I am fine trying to square it all, though I can only afford one meal a day or every other day.)

Another loophole is that I CAN work part-time for a period of six months without losing anything. I can earn about $1,000 a month and be okay, so I work for six months at a time about every other year. Though I lose Medicaid at the time, that’s fair, in spite of it all going to food, auto maintenance, and clothes. This is how I have been able to make it for the last 20 years. A few small loopholes I take full advantage of when necessary.

Ultimately, I try to pay for as much as I can, going without things I consider “luxuries”, such as entertainment, vacations, eating out, cosmetics, manicures, fancy hairstyles, and extra clothing, jewelry and accessories. However, these few loopholes are sometimes necessary to exploit to the fullest, especially since Social Security’s COLA did NOT keep up with the significant inflation over the last five years, leaving us all to somehow “swallow” it all. For example, I received about a $280 increase since 2020, and that was all taken up by my insurance alone last year, and will now rise annually indefinitely, when it previously did NOT. This leaves $0 for the $250 increase in monthly food costs. By the time all is said and done, the house gobbled up every last penny, so in spite of getting over $2,000 a month, I am broke by week three. Loopholes, please!

One day while I was working at a fast food joint, this lady left her Louis Vuitton bag on a table. I waited about 20 minutes but remember seeing her leave and so I grabbed it and put it in lost and found (literally a box we had in the back) I never once looked inside.

My boss said, since you found it, if no one turns up for it in a month you can have it. I gleamed but really thought about a lady leaving something so valuable behind. Of course she’ll be back!

A month went by. Not even so much as a call happened. My boss said, “hey, it’s been a month…do you want that bag?” I said sure and went in the back to retrieve it. I unzipped the top and to my surprise nothing was in it but a piece of paper.

I opened up the piece of paper and it was a receipt for the bag. On the receipt was a note saying: “To the girl who needed a new purse during the holidays.” Whoever this lady was intended on doing this in the first place. I looked at the receipt….$1700 for this bag!? I carefully put my items in it and took it home and didn’t say another word about it. People still to this day think it’s a good fake. If only they knew! (At that time I was only making 9 bucks an hour…no way I’d be able to afford this bag easily)

Edit: I just want to add as some of you asked why I didn’t just sell it and get the money instead? I still lived with my parents at that time and that purse made me look good at a ton of job interviews lol I’d pull out my portfolio and resume from that bag and I landed a job that not only gave me salary to pay for one or two but for four at a time. I still keep the bag because it reminds me of humbling days when I didn’t have much and reminds me to give back to others. Not saying I’m saving the world by any means, but I stick to a low budget because of that bag. I could easily go back to those days and that bag reminds me of that.

Perry Terrell

Elephant In The Room Shaped Like A Monkey

By Perry Terrell

 

“You suck.”

“Lauren!” yelled Jared. “For lack of a better term?” He thought she was joking.

“There is no better term. You just plain suck.”

“Why?” Jared asked.

“Why? Why? Why, you ask? I see that monkey. I know it’s dark in this space ship, but I see that monkey. I thought since the two of us won this mission, it would be a great chance for us to be close and really get to know each other. But you brought a monkey along? Why would you do that? Why?”

Jared looked puzzled. He was almost dazed and confused by Lauren’s outburst and attitude.

“Suppose I want to kiss you and wind up kissing that monkey.”

“Well, she has lips too.” He laughed so hard. He couldn’t see what the problem was with the monkey. Also, he still thought she was joking.

“She? She? It’s a she?” Lauren was screaming.

Jared was making frowning faces but Lauren couldn’t see his expressions because of the darkness.

For a moment there was silence.

Lauren went to the window and raised the shade. They were already on the moon and all she could see were Lunar Craters. Hundreds and thousands of them.

“I want to go home,” she said.

“Ahhh, we’re on the moon, Lauren. We have data to gather and pictures to take. Besides, you could have brought a pet.” Jared was trying to comfort her. He was saying to himself that this was going to be a real long mission if she keeps this up.

“Well, my horse was in the shop and I couldn’t get him out in time for this trip.”

For a moment Jared thought she was going to join him in a little humor. He went over to her by the window and put his arms around her waist.

“Monkey, monkey, monkey,” she started yelling. “Get your monkey away from me.”

Jared threw his hands up and back away. He said to himself again, yep, this is going to be a very long and painful mission.

Meanwhile, the monkey was kicked back trying to see what she could see, mostly listening.

Jared went over to his monkey and patted her on the head.

“How did you get that monkey on this ship? I didn’t see you with a monkey packed with your things.”

“The Captain put the monkey on the ship for me.” Immediately after he said, “for me,” he regretted it. He should have made it seem like the Captain did it as a part of the mission.

“So, it is your monkey,” said Lauren.

“The monkey is a part of the mission.”

“By doing what exactly? You do know that three is a crowd.”

“Lauren, please. Let’s just do our job and get along. The monkey is not a problem.”

Lauren had romantic feelings for Jared. She was good friends with the moderator and had her manipulate the drawing to have the two of them paired up to take this mission together. There were a couple other candidates qualified to take this mission and gather the necessary data, but by the luck of the draw, she was paired with Jared.

But with that monkey in the room, she had regrets. Although, she did fancy herself as romantically persuasive, she decided to ignore the monkey and try and concentrate on Jared. Besides, they were going to be stuck in this space ship on the moon for 27.3 earth days or there abouts.

In her astronaut training, she think she read that if a person stays in one place on the moon, then the sun rises, stays up for about two earth weeks, then set, and stays down for about another two earth weeks. Then that makes a complete day on the moon which lasts as long as 27.3 earth days, or something like that. She was almost sure she remembered the correct calculations.

“OMG!” said Lauren. “This monkey is going to start stinking. I’m not going to try and clean her up.”

“Okay, Lauren,” she said to herself. “Get a grip. Ignore the monkey in the room. Twenty-seven point three days alone, well almost alone with Jared is going to be a good thing. At least the monkey won’t be talking.”

Lauren took a few deep breaths and composed herself the best she could. Then she started feeling around and trying to see Jared. She couldn’t find him, so she called out.

“Where are you, Jared?” Then she thought that he better not be hugging that monkey. She didn’t mention the monkey as she was trying to make peace.

Jared wanted out of this trip too, but it was so very much too late and only the first day.

“I’m over here getting the cameras in place. We need to take the videos and digital snapshots.”

Lauren couldn’t help herself. She said, “snapshots and videos of what? Selfies with you and your monkey?”

“You are a brat, Lauren.”

“You are calling me a brat?”

“Yeah, I call ‘em as I see ‘em.”

“Well see this.” The monkey handed her a banana peel and she threw it across the ship.

“You know, I never wanted to go out with you, Lauren.”

“But you did. Why? Was your monkey busy that night?”

“Well, why did you accept?

“I took one look at you, Jared, and you looked like an idiot looking for his keys under a street lamp because that was where the light was. And I said to myself, he can’t be that pathetic. He is an astronaut afterall. You see, I have a weakness for the underdog.

“Oh, you flatter me.” In his mind he called her a witch and a few other things.

“You are like a non-drowsy sleeping pill and a crash landing all rolled up in one, Lauren Dear.”

“Wait. Are you calling me an oxymoron?”

“Well at least you are not an idiot, yet. But you do have more beans inside you than a burrito.”

Lauren realized she was not accomplishing what she had set out to do which was to keep Jared in her life. She felt that she was getting to know him alright. But, so far, they were not getting closer.

She thought it over in her mind. We need to call a truce. I suppose I should jump to it first.

“Truce, truce, truce,” she kept saying.

Jared took a deep breath.

“A truce? That works for me.”

Jared started feeling and looking around for Lauren, slipped on the banana peel and landed on top of her.

She put her arms around him and was thinking to herself that Jared’s monkey might not be too bad to have along after all.

Jared knew where the banana peel came from and was thinking the same thing.

“This is going to be a great mission, Lauren felt good to say.

“Yes, Dear, it’s going to be great waking up every morning and not feel like I’m in the middle of the freeway.

Lauren wanted to react to that remark, but she let it go and kept holding Jared in her arms.

Cajun Deep-Fried Turkey

Deep-frying is the trendy way to cook turkey in record time! Deep-frying makes for exceptionally juicy meat and crispy skin, too!

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Yield: 20 servings

Ingredients

Cajun Spice Rub

  • 2 tablespoons black pepper
  • 1 tablespoon ground chipotle chiles or ground red pepper (cayenne)
  • 1 tablespoon white pepper
  • 1 tablespoon ground cumin
  • 1 tablespoon ground nutmeg
  • 1 tablespoon salt

Cajun Marinade

  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil
  • 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 1 teaspoon chili powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground pepper

Turkey

  • 1 whole turkey (10 to 12 pounds), thawed if frozen
  • 1 poultry or meat injector
  • 1 turkey deep-fryer, consisting of 40- to 60-quart pot with basket, burner and propane tank
  • 5 gallons peanut, canola or safflower oil

Instructions

  1. Read the Turkey Deep-Frying Do’s and Don’ts (below).
  2. In small bowl, mix all spice rub ingredients until blended; set aside.
  3. In shallow glass or plastic bowl, mix all marinade ingredients until salt is dissolved; set aside.
  4. Remove giblets and neck from turkey; rinse turkey well with cold water; pat dry thoroughly with paper towels. Take extra care to dry both inside cavities, because water added to hot oil can cause excessive bubbling. To allow for good oil circulation through the cavity, do not tie legs together. Cut off wing tips and tail because they can get caught in the fryer basket. Place turkey in large pan.
  5. Rub inside and outside of turkey with spice rub. Inject marinade into turkey, following directions that came with injector. Cover turkey in pan; place in refrigerator at least 8 hours but no longer than 24 hours.
  6. Place outdoor gas burner on level dirt or grassy area. Add oil to cooking pot until about 2/3 full. Clip deep-fry thermometer to edge of pot. At medium-high setting, heat oil to 375 degrees F. (May take 20 to 40 minutes depending on outside temperature, wind and weather conditions.) Place turkey, neck end down, on basket or rack. When deep-fry thermometer reaches 375 degrees F, slowly lower turkey into hot oil. Level of oil will rise due to frothing caused by moisture from turkey but will stabilize in about 1 minute.
  7. Immediately check oil temperature; increase flame so oil temperature is maintained at 350 degrees F. If temperature drops to 340 degrees F or below, oil will begin to seep into turkey.
  8. Fry turkey about 3 to 4 minutes per pound, or about 35 to 42 minutes for 10- to 12-pound turkey. Stay with fryer at all times because heat may need to be regulated throughout frying.
  9. At minimum frying time, carefully remove turkey to check for doneness. A meat thermometer inserted into thickest part of breast should read 170 degrees F. If inserted into thigh, it should read 180 degrees F. If necessary, return turkey to oil and continue cooking. When turkey is done, let drain a few minutes.
  10. Remove turkey from rack; place on serving platter. Cover with foil; let stand 20 minutes for easier carving.

Notes

Success:

For best results when deep-frying, use cooking oils that can withstand high temperatures. Peanut, canola and safflower oils are at the top of the list!

Turkey Deep-Frying Do’s and Don’ts

We want your turkey-frying experience to be successful, especially if it’s your first time, so we’ve gathered these important reminders. Please take a moment to read them before getting ready for a great-tasting feast!

Do’s:

  • Follow the use-and-care directions for your deep-fryer when deep-frying turkey, and review all safety tips.
  • Place the fryer on a level dirt or grassy area away from the house or garage. Never fry a turkey indoors, including in a garage or any other structure attached to a building.
  • Use only oils with high smoke points, such as peanut, canola or safflower oil.
  • Wear old shoes that you can slip out of easily and long pants just in case you do spill some oil on you.
  • Immediately wash hands, utensils, equipment and surfaces that have come in contact with the raw turkey.
  • Have a fire extinguisher nearby for added safety.
  • Serve the turkey right after cooking, and store leftovers in the refrigerator within 2 hours of cooking.
  • Allow the oil to cool completely before disposing of it or storing it.

Don’ts

  • Never fry on wooden decks or other structures that could catch fire, and don’t fry on concrete, which could be stained by the oil.
  • Never leave the hot oil unattended, and do not allow children or pets near the cooking area.

To learn more about deep-frying turkeys, visit National Turkey Federation – eatturkey.com.

Nutrition

Per serving: Calories 335 (Calories from Fat 190 ); Total Fat 21 g (Saturated Fat 5 g); Cholesterol 100 mg; Sodium 800 mg; Total Carbohydrate 0g (Dietary Fiber 0g); Protein 36 g Percent Daily Value*: Vitamin A 0%; Vitamin C 0%; Calcium 0%; Iron 10

Exchanges: 5 Lean Meat; 1 Fat

* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.

Attribution

Recipe and photo used with permission from: Betty Crocker

A close online friend of mine suffers from schizophrenia. And believe me when I tell you, this man and his condition are very real. Just a year ago he was “talking to angels” and had “otherworldy deities” giving him quests, divine tasks and missions to go on. The Goddess Freyja spoke to him and assigned him with a list of things he had to do. Once, in Romania, he heard an ethereal voice telling him a nearby lake was a portal to another world — he stripped naked, right there and then, and jumped into the ice cold water. It was the middle of winter.

This man is 35 years old and not in touch with his parents — he hates them and blames them on his predicament. In fact he is short because, in his mind, the medication they put him on stunted his growth. His short height causes him to be overlooked by society, women in particular.

He’s schizophrenic with a dash of incel-ism, too. An unfortunate connection. Not too long ago he got it into his mind that the United States government had screwed up his life. Why this is, he did not specify.

He declared he, therefore, has no loyalty towards Washington and “must join the Russian army in Moscow”… In his world fairies are real. Reptillian creatures hide underneath the skin of government leaders. Everyone is in cahoots with everyone. Enemies lurk everywhere.

For the last two years, each time I speak to this man he has been a little lesser than the week before. When he’s on his meds, he’s stable, thinks of himself “cured”. Then the moment he thinks this, he goes off them. And ruins again every relationship and friendship he has. I’m the last man standing among his friends. Every time we speak I wonder — will there be another?

Samuel L. Jackson In THE SURVIVORS – English Movie | Hollywood Action Movie In English |John Cusack

This is a GREAT movie. It really is. I always loved John Cusack and this is jsut a special kind of zombie movie.


Scratch nightmares

You don’t feel anger in these moments. Anger is a luxury reserved for the couch potatoes who stay at home while you face death. You, my friend, have more important things to worry about.

During these endless minutes before battle, most combat soldiers try to distract themselves from the rising tide of fear. You’ve already received your orders; your gun and gear have been checked countless times, so there’s nothing left to do but wait.

This is a critical moment because, as long as you’ve been busy, comrade Fear didn’t dare show up. Now the road is open for him, and if you’re not careful, he’ll consume you, paralyze you, and even leave you panic-stricken.

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A Ukrainian soldier in a trench on the eastern frontline. (Picture: Leah Millis)

To fill these agonizing minutes, every soldier has a different method: some pray, others chain-smoke, or write letters. Many just lie down and try to empty their minds of any thoughts.

Of course, this doesn’t always work, and you’ll see soldiers puking their guts out. It sounds terrible, but as bad as it is, throwing up is also a way to distract yourself. Better to feel sick than to be overwhelmed by fear.

As soon as the fighting starts, on the other hand, your feelings of fear recede. Your mind becomes occupied with survival.

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It started in the Walmart parking lot.

I saw a motorhome that was exactly the same model as my own.

So I was looking at the twin of my RV when the owner came up to me and looked at me curiously.

I introduced myself.

I explained to him that I owned the same model and that I was having some mechanical problems with the vehicle.

We got along well, exchanged emails and decided to stay in touch.
Then we started camping together – a few times a year.

Our motorhomes were old.

Our new friends led a modest life.
They clipped coupons and shopped at second-hand stores.

After we had been meeting regularly for a few years, an earthquake hit California and our friends told us they had to leave early to “check the cars”.

I was astonished.

My friend explained to me that he had a car collection.
The vehicles were stored on pallets in California.

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He felt like he had known us for years and so he told us that he was the CEO of a technology company in Silicon Valley.

And he told us that they knew we loved them so much.
Because they were who they were.
And not because they had a lot of money.

There was a young lady, who worked as a barista at our local Starbucks coffee shop. She had a boyfriend who had just bought a brand new motorcycle. I asked her about it…

She said it was a Japanese sport bike. I asked her how old her boyfriend was and how long he had been riding motorcycles? She responded that he was 19 and that he was a new rider. She said he wanted to take her out for a ride that weekend and that she was looking forward to it.

I told her I had ridden motorcycles for over 40 years, and I advised her to please not ride on the bike with him. She seemed like a really smart girl and was open to listening.

I let her know that modern sport bikes and young beginning riders are a bad and dangerous combination. My advice to her was to support her boyfriend and encourage him to take the Motorcycle Safety Foundation rider course, but to not ride with him until he had spent a couple years learning how to safely control a powerful, lightweight sport bike by himself.

Two weeks later I saw her again at Starbucks and asked how she was doing. She appeared very sad and distressed. She said her boyfriend did go riding that weekend with several other friends, but that she told him she wouldn’t go riding with him, as I had advised.

Unfortunately he crashed and died. In this situation, my warning to this smart young girl resulted in her avoiding a tragic disaster. Something very bad happened, but not to her…

NOTE – There seems to be a lot of upvotes. Just want to say: “Thank You” to those who read and upvoted my true story. I hope everyone has an opportunity to make a positive change in someone’s life… CC

Wallace and Gromit

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Before criticizing China’s stance on Uyghur independence, ask yourself why the US wouldn’t allow Hawaii or New Mexico to break away. China’s position is a matter of national unity and historical continuity.

China does not want Uyghurs to be independent and rule over their so-called “rightful land” because it is about preserving its national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Similar to how the US wouldn’t allow New Mexico or Hawaii to become independent, or how the UK wouldn’t let Ireland break away, China’s approach to the Uyghurs and the Xinjiang region is rooted in a long history of maintaining a unified nation. The Chinese government views Xinjiang as an inseparable part of its territory, with centuries of historical and cultural ties.

Historically, the region known as Xinjiang has been governed by various Chinese dynasties, including the Han and Tsing. This long-standing governance is a significant factor in China’s stance. The Uyghurs are only one of many ethnic groups in the region, and the area has seen a blend of cultures and peoples, including the Hui Muslims and Han Chinese. This multicultural blend is another reason why the Chinese government regards Xinjiang as an inalienable part of the Chinese nation.

The broader context of national sovereignty is crucial here. Allowing any part of China to become independent sets a precedent that could lead to further fragmentation. This fear of disintegration is something that many countries share. For example, Spain vigorously opposes Catalonia’s independence, and Canada has taken substantial measures to ensure Quebec remains part of the nation. These nations’ efforts to maintain their integrity reflect China’s own concerns and actions.

Moreover, the narrative that Xinjiang is a rightful land for Uyghur independence often overlooks the intricate history and complex demographics of the region. The idea that every ethnic group should have its own independent state undermines the concept of multicultural nations. China’s strategy has always been to integrate various ethnic groups into a single national identity, fostering unity and preventing secessionist tendencies.

There is also an element of economic and strategic importance. Xinjiang is rich in natural resources and holds strategic significance due to its geographic location, serving as a critical gateway in China’s Belt & Road Initiative. The loss of such a region would not only impact China’s economy but also its geopolitical strategy. Hence, the Chinese government aims to ensure stability and development in Xinjiang as part of its broader national interests.

Critics often target China for its policies in Xinjiang, framing them as oppressive or colonial. However, understanding China’s actions requires a broader perspective. The intention is not to suppress Uyghur culture but to integrate and develop the region in line with national goals. Comparing it to other international contexts helps clarify this stance. Just as the US, the UK, Spain, and others fiercely protect their territorial integrity, China’s actions in Xinjiang are consistent with a global pattern of ensuring national unity and stability.

Ultimately, China’s perspective on the Uyghur question is driven by historical precedent, concerns over national sovereignty, and strategic interests. While the criticisms abound, it is crucial to recognize that many other nations would, and indeed do, act similarly under comparable circumstances.

So when I was a freshman in high school, there was this guy we’ll call John. Dude for some reason decided to single me out and screw with me every chance he got. Typical story: he’s a big, thick, loudmouth football player upperclassman who saw me as an easy target. Also typical of people like this, he was really stupid. Also like many football players, he thought being big and strong and a football player would make him a natural wrestler.

So this is where our buddy John went wrong, because I was also a wrestler. A good one, very good in fact.

For those who don’t know, wrestling is a different kind of conditioning, and if you’re not in wrestling shape, you’re gonna be dead within a minute no matter how many miles you run each day. Also, everyone is the same size on the mat (for reference, he’s about 210 and I’m 145ish at this time).

During practice, our coach ran a drill where we would get into groups of four and rotate in and out for two minute periods of live wrestling. I got paired with John the first day and proceeded to go out of my way not just to destroy him, but embarrass him. I would take him down, gain his back, and as he’s trying and failing to get out, I’m verbally punking him out: “Come on, football star! I thought you were some kind of badass! Maybe you should bring your girl down here so I can take her down too!” Maybe not verbatim, but more or less that kind of stuff.

The two minutes was up, he got in my face and pushed me, I responded by spitting in his face, he took a swing, and by the time he got it off I was already behind him tying up around his waist, and dumped him backwards on his head, then got on top and started smacking anywhere on his head he wasn’t covering up while continuing to say things I’d get thrown off Quora for saying here. Coach comes and separates us, we both got chewed out, and he never showed his face in the wrestling room again.

Everyone else in the wrestling room saw and heard what happened, and not only was John not bullying anyone after that, I strangely never had an upperclassman decide to get cute with me again. We also didn’t have many more football players coming down to my mat thinking they were going to big time us afterward.

The two morals of this story: first, if you think the skinny kid who takes down the school bully is only a fictional thing, think again. Second: never, ever screw with a wrestler.

  • If you’re under 30, get yourself a “shower buddy” to keep watch and shoo away any old perverts who try to get too close to you – for whatever reason.
  • Don’t believe TV shows about prison. They either make prison look glamorous or portray problems that don’t exist in real life, while simultaneously ignoring the real problems.
  • The “tough guys” are usually the worst betrayers, especially when dealing with rivals and jealousy. Don’t be disrespectful to them, but don’t hang out with them.
  • If you don’t use drugs or drink, enroll in Alcoholics Anonymous or a drug rehabilitation program. Completing one of these programs will look good at a parole hearing or with your future parole officer. These programs don’t work anyway, except to recruit informants.
  • Even if you don’t like it, accept whatever is given to you. Maybe you can exchange it for something you want, like or need.
  • Wherever you are, sit with your back to the wall.
    If that’s not possible, sit facing the door.
  • In every prison, 25 to 35% of the inmates are “confidential informants.” So whatever happens is with the knowledge and consent of the staff.
    Do not trust prison hotlines or prison psychologists.
  • No matter how well behaved you are, only informants get lenient probation. Depending on the crime, only informants can get probation at all. Good behavior will give you a lifestyle that meets the minimum required by law.
  • Never listen to family who says, “Behave well and you’ll be out soon .” Never listen to what outsiders say about prisons.
    Not even your lawyers. Even if you put a probation clause in the agreement, it won’t be honored if there is a hearing at the time. If your offense was so serious that you had to put a probation clause in the agreement, you will be granted a hearing – but your probation will be denied.
  • If you have cause, you can sue the prison.
    But don’t use the internal grievance system.
    Don’t tell other inmates about your appeals.
    And remember that judges and juries in civil courts have a very strong bias against inmates, no matter how compelling your case is.
  • Never try to form a prisoners’ union.

Think arresting Putin is straightforward because Mongolia is an ICC member? Geopolitical complexities and national interests often dominate the scene, sidelining international legal mandates. Mongolia isn’t arresting Putin during his state visit, and that’s because real-world politics are far messier than the theoretical powers of international courts.

Let’s dive into why. Mongolia is nestled between two gigantic neighbors—Russia and China. This geographic reality shapes almost every aspect of its foreign policy. Arresting Putin would be like poking a bear, a very big bear that Mongolia relies on for trade, energy, and political backing. They simply can’t afford to rock the boat. Think about it: if your survival depended on keeping a tough neighbor happy, would you risk arresting their leader? Of course not.

Putin’s state visit is another layer of this puzzle. He’s not just dropping by for a casual visit. His trips are meticulously planned, with heavy security that would make any attempt to arrest him nearly impossible. Plus, this visit is about strengthening economic ties and cooperation. Mongolia stands to gain a lot from maintaining a good relationship with Russia. Turning a diplomatic event into an arrest scenario would throw Mongolia into diplomatic chaos they couldn’t handle.

The bigger picture here is the role of the ICC. In theory, it’s there to hold powerful leaders accountable. But in practice? It’s pretty toothless when it comes to big players like Putin. The ICC doesn’t have its own army or police force. It relies on member states to enforce its rulings, and those states often have their own geopolitical considerations that trump international law. Seen from Mongolia’s perspective, arresting Putin wouldn’t just be difficult; it would be national suicide.

This isn’t just Mongolia’s dilemma. It’s a global issue. Take Netanyahu or other leaders from powerful nations— they manage to sidestep the ICC’s reach, protected by a thick web of international politics and strategic alliances. The ICC’s intention of global justice often comes up against the hard reality of national interest and power dynamics, leaving it largely ineffective against the world’s most influential figures.

Let’s be real, international justice sounds great on paper, but it’s heavily skewed by these power dynamics. Countries like Mongolia have to make decisions that ensure their survival and prosperity, not just conform to international norms. They’re not against justice; they’re just trying to navigate a world where powerful neighbors can dictate their fate.

Until we find a way to bridge the gap between global justice ideals and political reality, we’ll keep seeing a selective and inconsistent application of international law. The Mongolia-Putin situation is a prime example of this. It’s not that Mongolia doesn’t respect the ICC; it’s that they can’t afford to act on its mandates without risking their own stability. So, while critiquing Mongolia might be easy, understanding their geopolitical tightrope walk can offer a much clearer picture of why the ICC struggles to exert its influence over the most powerful individuals.

This isn’t about Mongolia being weak; it’s about a global system that hasn’t yet figured out how to balance justice with real-world politics.

MM a movie star from a young age

The difference is about 3,800 mph. And the difference in range is about 900 miles.

The Zircon is a Mach 8 cruise missile with terminal velocity of Mach 5. It has a range in a flat trajectory of 300 miles and 400 miles if in a somewhat ballistic trajectory.

The DF-21 has a range of 1,200 miles land launched version and 900 miles ship launched version. It is a ballistic with a flat trajectory at the top. So a sort of truncated cone trajectory.

The Zircon has to slow down to Mach 6 or 7 to make the plasma sheath disappear so it can use the onboard radar. The Zircon was tested in 2020 and hit a ship in Barents Sea. It cruise speed was Mach 7.

The DF-21 is cruise at Mach 6 and terminal speed is Mach 10. The Chinese ASBM can see through the plasma sheath with the onboard radar using some crazy new technology that the Chinese invented. Currently, Russia and the US is trying to figure out how they did it.

China demonstrated this by hitting a moving ship in the SCS in 2023, I think. It might be 2022. Anyway, they fired 2 DF-21 and 2 DF-26 from different locations and hit the ship with the US watching from satellite and spy plane.

Both have GPS guidance to the area of their target. Then they turn on their radar.

I don’t know about the Zircon as the Russians haven’t said anything. The DF-21 can evade incoming missiles and the warhead is also an upper stage of a 2 stage rocket. That turns on in terminal phase and boosts the missile to Mach 10.

The Zircon will be very very hard to hit. The DF-21 will be almost impossible to hit as it maneuvers during terminal phase to evade enemy fire.

Men VS Women Survival Island

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Never listened to Chicago until today… 25 or 6 to 4 (Reaction!)

Reflections… Sad Reality

At the end of a cold afternoon, I received an unexpected visit from my two sons; one is a doctor, the other an engineer, both successful in their professions. Less than a week ago, I lost my beloved wife. I still feel devastated by this loss that changed the course and meaning of my life.

Sitting at the table in the living room of my simple and modest house, where I now live alone, we began to talk about my future. A chill runs down my spine. Soon, they are trying to convince me that the best thing for me is to live in a nursing home.

I react. I argue that the shadow of loneliness does not scare me, and old age even less, but my sons insist, “concerned”. They lament that the rooms in their spacious apartments by the sea are occupied and therefore, I cannot stay with either one, according to them.

Moreover, my sons and daughters-in-law are very busy, so they would not have time to see me. Not to mention my grandchildren, who study almost all day; it is impossible. On my behalf, I argue, already without much conviction, that they could help me pay for a caregiver. In front of me, the doctor and the engineer say that it would actually require “three caregivers in three shifts, all with contracts”. Which would be, in times of crisis, a small fortune at the end of each month.

I refuse to accept the proposal to live in a nursing home. And here comes another suggestion: they tell me I should sell the house. The money will serve to cover the expenses of the home where I will go for a long time so that no one will worry, neither they nor I.

I give in to the arguments for not having the strength to face such ingratitude and coldness. I close my lips and do not speak of the sacrifices I made throughout my life to finance their studies. I do not say that I gave up traveling with the family, going to good restaurants, going to the theater, or changing cars so that they would lack nothing. It would not be worth mentioning such facts at this point in the conversation. So, without saying a word, I decide to gather my belongings. In a short time, I see a whole life summed up in two suitcases. With them, I embark on another reality, much harsher: a nursing home, far from my children and grandchildren.

Today, in the arms of loneliness, I recognize that I was able to teach moral values to my children, but I could not impart to either of them a virtue called gratitude. The fault is ours, as we always give them what they ask for when we should teach them that they must “earn it”.

How? By working hard, helping to clean the house, cook, wash dishes, etc. Feeling part of the family unit, developing empathy, making them feel loved and respected. So, in their adult stage, they will know how to value and learn that things are achieved with effort and responsibility, showing gratitude and love to their parents for having taught them to be good children.

Gratitude must be forged; it does not come included in the human heart unless love and fear of God have been instilled first. They must know that when they become “old”, they will want to be well treated by their children and grandchildren, and that is not achieved with money, but with the kindness sown in their hearts.

Let’s educate our children in values, without forgetting to forge bonds of love.

Interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp in May 1941, he was immediately put to work and, due to his mild and helpful temperament towards the other prisoners, beaten several times. Despite the prohibitions, he even managed to celebrate a couple of masses before the end of July of the same year.

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In that month, in fact, the escape of one of the prisoners caused a reprisal by the camp guards, who selected ten innocents from the fugitive’s hut, to let them die in the hunger bunker.

When one of them burst into tears, saying he had a family at home waiting for him, surprisingly, Father Kolbe stepped out of line and volunteered to take his place. The guards, unexpectedly, accepted this gesture of mercy and took Kolbe to the bunker with the other prisoners.

After two hellish weeks without food or water, most of the victims were already dead, but Kolbe and four other men resisted, praying and singing.

To clear the bunker for other prisoners, the SS finally had to kill these last survivors with an injection of carbolic acid.

A witness reported Father Kolbe’s last words to his executioner: “…hatred is useless. Only love creates!”.

The prisoner for whom Father Kolbe had sacrificed himself managed to return alive to his wife, but not to his two children, victims of a Russian bombing.

U.S. and UK Officially APPROVE Long-Range Attacks into Pre-War Russia

U.S. and UK to Officially APPROVE Long-Range Attacks into Pre-War Russia

US Secretary of State Blinken & UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, will travel to Kyiv to inform Ukraine that restrictions on use of long-range missiles against Russian territory will be lifted.

Initially, this will mean that American-supplied ATACMS (Advanced Tactical Missile System) along with British-supplied “StormShadow” missiles, and French-supplied “SCALP” missiles, can now be used to attack deep inside pre-war Russia.

HAL TURNER ANALYSIS

How much longer can any reasonable person expect Russia, to sit back and allow itself to be attacked with American, British, French, and German weaponry, fired by Ukraine?

In the real world, if persons “A” and “b”  give a weapon to person “C,” and person “C” goes out and uses that weapon to commit an act of violence . . .  and gets arrested . . . . they then ask Person “C” “Where did you get this weapon?”  When person “C” tells them, the very NEXT people to get arrested are persons “A” and “B.”

There __is__ liability and culpability for what the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and NATO member countries, are doing.  They are accessories before the fact.

If it weren’t for the fact that the US and NATO breached the promise made by President George H.W. Bush (the father) . . .  who promised Mikhail Gorbachev that “NATO will not move one inch eastward” if the then-Soviet Union approved of the reunification of East and West Germany, none of this trouble would be happening.

WE PROMISED the Soviets we would not expand NATO.  Bill Clinton got into the US Presidency, and the Presidential promise to the Soviets went out the window.

We not only expanded NATO more than one inch eastward, we expanded it right up to Russia’s BORDER!

When the US/EU and NATO tried to get Ukraine to join NATO, back in 2013 and 2014, Ukraine’s Democratically-elected President, Viktor Yanukovich said “Thanks, but no thanks.”   So the US — under Barack Obama — the EU, and NATO fomented, financed, and facilitated the forcible, violent overthrow of Yanukovich.

It was THEN . . . . right then . . . . that Russia realized the expansion of NATO was going to put American missiles on Ukrainian soil – and do it by overthrowing Ukraine’s President! ! ! !.  Those missiles would have a five minute flight time to Moscow.

Russia also pointed out that even if, as the Americans claimed, the missiles were “conventional” and “defensive”  that they could also be re-fitted with OFFENSIVE and NUCLEAR warheads.  The refit could be done while the missiles were in their launcher, and no one would know the missiles had been swapped-out.

Russia could then find itself on the wrong end of nuclear bombs with a five minute flight time to Moscow, and a slightly longer 7-10 minute flight time to Russia’s strategic nuclear missile silos.

Russia pointed out that no nation on earth can defend itself against a missile with a five minute flight time from launch to impact.

Russia pointed out that it was US President John F. Kennedy, who set the precedent for this, when he imposed a naval blockade of Cuba because the then-Soviets, had place nuclear missiles in Cuba with a five minute flight time to Washington DC. (Cuban Missile Crisis.)

Had the Soviets not agreed to remove those missiles, President Kennedy was already massing troops in Florida to invade Cuba.

Russia tried, at least TWICE, to negotiate “iron-clad, legally enforceable security guarantees” via Diplomatic efforts in December 2021 and January 2022 to protect their national security from NATO expansion and more missiles.  The collective West laughed and told Russia “No.”  So the second attempt, Russia told everyone “If we cannot obtain iron-clad, legally enforceable security guarantees via Diplomatic means, we will obtain them by military or military-technical means.”   They told everyone — in writing — they would use military force.

The collective West waited about two weeks and then laughed at the Russians again, and told them “no.”

Russia made clear this issue is a “Red Line” and they would not allow Ukraine to Join NATO.

In its final effort to keep the peace, Russia called Ukraine and told them “You have five hours to agree not to join NATO.”  Ukraine called the US and UK, both of whom told them “ignore the Russian ultimatum.”

Russia waited.  When the five hours were up, Russia waited two additional hours and, having heard nothing but Ukraine earlier say “We are a Sovereign country, we will do what we want, Russia said “Oh yea?  Here. Meet the Russian Army.

In went the Russian troops.

The West then turns around and screeches like girl-men “This is an unprovoked aggression by Russia.”  No it isn’t.  It was provoked.  Provoked by the expansion of NATO. Provoked by the forcible overthrow of Ukraine’s President Yanukovich.  Provoked by the Ukraine Army shelling and mortaring Russian-speaking civilians in Luhansk and Donetsk.

Russia is DEFENDING its own national security by forcibly halting this expansion of NATO; done by the forcible overthrow of Ukraine’s government by the US and EU.  Russia is defending itself from American missiles being on Ukrainian soil.

Russia is defending the Russian-speaking populations of Luhansk, Donetsk Kherson, and Zaporozyhe – many of whom were already being attacked by Ukraine artillery and mortars.   In fact, Luhansk and Donetsk, had already lost about 13,000 people to Ukrainian attacks, before Russia stepped-in to help them fight off the Ukrainians in 2013 and 2014.

Russia is right in what it’s doing.

If Russia gives-in, NATO will simply continue to expand until all of Russia is surrounded.  Then, one day, NATO calls and says something like, you have five minutes to surrender or we will wipe your country from the face of the earth and take all its riches.  At that point, it would be too late for Russia.

Russia had to take a stand, now.  They had no choice.

We in the West are the aggressors here.  It is we in the West who moved our NATO bases right up to Russia’s border.  It is we in the West aiming more and more missiles at Russia from all those bases.  And it is we in the West who have been using Ukraine, as a Proxy army, to attack Russia for OUR (NATO) benefit.

If Russia decides they have had enough of us, it is WE (here in America) that may be hit by their missiles.   All because NATO wants to expand.

I say, No thanks, NATO.  You don’t need to expand anymore.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and British foreign Secretary David Lammy arrived in Kiev for meetings with Ukrainian officials at a critical juncture in Ukraine’s war with Russia.

Based on reports out yesterday, both men will tell Kiev they may now utilize weapons supplied by the US and UK to attack pre-war, interior Russia.

That claim was further confirmed by U.S. House of Representatives, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, who has now publicly said said “I talked to Blinken two days ago, and he is traveling with his counterpart from the UK, to Kiev, to basically tell them that they will allow them [to hit Russia with ATACMS.]”

Russia has ardently warned over the past ten days, that if the West allows Ukraine to begin attacking deep inside Russia with Western-supplied weapons, “it will affect both sides of the Atlantic.”

Virulent: Journey to Okron

Submitted into Contest #247 in response to: Set your story on a spaceship exploring the far reaches of space when something goes wrong. view prompt

Ellie Northrop

This story contains themes or mentions of physical violence, gore, or abuse.

Journal Entry 7: September 21st, 2132It has taken two years, but my team finally reached the dwarf planet Okron. Just as the Company had described: the air was breathable, water drinkable, and the land appeared habitable. Now, it is up to my team to create a colony to prepare for future generations.We landed our ship, the Virulent, in a large valley surrounded by mountain ridges. The valley provides plenty of protection from unknown predators lurking about. Also, it supplies acres of land perfect for agriculture. There isn’t any water issue, as we are within walking distance of a large lake formed by a waterfall.This place is a dream come true. Humanity might be able to thrive on Okron.Earth is on the verge of dying. The air is becoming difficult to breathe, our water is drying out, and the plants are dying. If we can make a home out of Okron, humanity is no longer at risk of dying.Journal Entry 8: September 30th, 2132The first week has been productive as my team worked to create small housing structures. With the help of several construction droids, we made small huts to live in. We do not have proper plumbing, but it is all about taking baby steps.On the third day, we successfully planted crops. It took hours to dig up the dirt and remove any rocks. Unlike the ground on Earth, Okron’s soil is red and stains the skin. Thankfully, the team was able to plant the seeds before sunset.We were concerned that the seeds wouldn’t be compatible with the alien soil, but imagine our amazement when we saw sprouts already peaking out of the ground the next day!Our agricultural technician examined the soil and was amazed that its properties are nothing like those of Earth’s soil. While it takes weeks for plants to grow naturally on Earth, our technician discovered that it could take days to grow plants on Okron. This discovery means we don’t have to worry about preparing food ahead of time.Carrots, tomatoes, potatoes!We will have enough to splurge without worrying about rationing. We hope this will continue year-round.Journal Entry 9: October 1st, 2132 

I was woken up by a loud guttural howl, almost resembling a wolf. The sound was so petrifying that it roused me instantly. The howl is a thing of nightmares, chilling me down to the bone.

When I peered out of the window of my hut, I heard another howl. It was a few kilometers away, closer than the first one.

Since arriving in Okron, the team has encountered a few mammals. The mammals resembled rabbits, squirrels, and medium-sized deer. Whatever is making that howling noise has to be the apex predator that hunts those animals.

Hopefully, it’ll stay away.

 

 

Journal Entry 10: October 2nd, 2132

 

Our agricultural engineer, Manuel Escobar, has gone missing. Every morning, he goes out early to check on the crops. Usually, he returns by noon, but he didn’t. We set out a search party when it reached four o’clock but were unsuccessful. By the time the sun went down, we had no choice but to surrender for the night and try again tomorrow.

As I write this, I hear the same howling from the night before. The howls are coming from the mountain ridges that surround us. If Manuel is somewhere out there, he might not have a chance.

 

 

Journal Entry 11: October 3rd, 2132

 

We found Manuel.

The man’s body was placed right outside the complex. Manuel’s body had been torn limb from limb and put in a pile with the man’s head on top. A permanent look of fear was on the man’s face.

Our resident doctor, Eliza Randall, told us that Manuel was still alive when the dismembering took place. Also, animals were the ones to do the deed.

Val Lewis, our xeno-biologist, observed the injuries and surmised that the animal had three-inch claws with five-inch fangs. Whatever predator killed Manuel was able to cut through his flesh like butter. The worst part was Val and Eliza saw that Manuel’s heart had been ripped out while he was still alive.

Dex Reginald, our security specialist, put us all on lockdown. No one could go outside without another team member. Everyone has to be armed.

My command was no longer worth anything as Dex took charge.

 

 

Journal Entry 14: October 5th, 2132

 

The animals killed Dex last night.

The scariest part was that security sensors and motion-detected weapons surrounded him in his hut. Somehow, the animals snuck onto the compound and killed Dex. The former marine was slaughtered just like Manuel.

Dex was torn into pieces and left on his bed.

I was the one to find him. I don’t know how I didn’t vomit.

 

 

Journal Entry 15: October 8th, 2132

 

After reviewing the security footage, we were horrified by what we discovered. These animals aren’t animals. They’re some kind of organized clan of anthropomorphic creatures. They are covered in coarse fur and resemble werewolves but with prehensile tails.

Val is enthralled by the aspect of these animals that we deem Okronites, the indigenous people of Okron. The woman believes if we show that we mean no harm, we can develop a truce with the Okronites. Maybe start the first interspecies relationship with another alien species.

I didn’t want to risk our lives, but it was the only idea we had. So, the next day, we attempted to make contact.

We’ve tried communicating with the Okronites, but they can only speak in growls and chuffs, much like dogs. Val used her brief knowledge to try to show that there was no danger, but it failed.

The Okronites see us as trespassers and want us gone.

 

 

Journal Entry 17: October 11th, 2132

 

Our exploration team of ten has gone down to three. It’s just me, Val, and Eliza. We had to hole ourselves in the Virulent as the Okronites destroyed our makeshift home. Initially, we planned to fly out of here but discovered that the Okronites managed to ruin our fuel cells.

We’re dead in the water on this hostile planet.

Thankfully, we were able to send out a distress signal. Hopefully, we’ll be able to survive out here long enough to help to arrive.

We can hear the Okronites outside. The hostile natives make frighteningly human growling noises and calls. Sometimes, they mimic the voices of our friends. They are trying to trick us into coming outside.

Val keeps trying to convince us to try and find a way to make peace with the creature. She believes they are worth studying and wants to know more about them. (Eliza and I harshly decided to use extreme measures if Val tries to risk our lives.)

 

 

Journal Entry 18, October 12th, 2132

 

Val and Eliza are gone. I wasn’t there to witness the attack, but I saw on the security feed that Val had opened the doors for them. She attempted to talk to them but was killed instantly.

I holed myself up in the commanding deck. I have suffered a nasty bite on my thigh, and I’m bleeding badly. It won’t be long before I die of blood loss.

Those things are outside, trying to claw their way in. I am not letting them get to me. I am setting the ship to self-destruct.

This is Captain Edna Warren, and this is my last entry.

That day the police had their switchboards jammed with dozens of people who said they had witnessed, either seeing or hearing, a terrible accident on the A3, just ten meters from the Burpham, Guildford junction.

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The officers who intervened found no recent signs of accidents until they came to explore the sides of the road.

About twenty meters away from the point where the evidence of an accident had been heard and seen, an old crimson Vauxhall Astra was found fallen into a deep ditch nose first and practically invisible from the road.

The vehicle was visibly damaged, peeling and rusty, inside the car was the now decomposed and unrecognizable corpse of a 21-year-old boy named Christopher Brian Chandler, wanted for robbery since July 16 of that year and dead at that point for five months.

It is still unclear how it was possible that the motorists that day witnessed and reported an accident that had happened months before and had gone unnoticed until that moment.

Today’s MM AI efforts

Men and making coffee. One of my favorite themes.

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(6)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(6)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(6)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(6)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(5)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(5)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(5)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(5)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3(5)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3(5)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 2(5)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 2(5)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(4)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(4)

Because Bacchus is in the dialog, we get some occasional strange images…

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(4)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(4)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3(4)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3(4)

Some are really off-the-wall.

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(3)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(3)

When I added a window to the mix, the results were under-whelming.

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(3)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(3)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3(3)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3(3)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 2(3)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 2(3)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(2)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(2)

Like I said, strange at times…

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(2)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(2)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3(2)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3(2)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 2(2)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 2(2)

And that Bacchus always with the cavorting and kissing.

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(1)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1(1)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(1)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0(1)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3(1)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3(1)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 2(1)
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 2(1)

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 1

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 0

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 3

AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 2
AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Ba 2

Buffalo Chicken Casserole

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Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup uncooked long grain rice
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 tablespoon olive or vegetable oil
  • 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken strips
  • 2 stalks celery, thinly sliced (about 1 cup )
  • 1 (14.5 ounce) can stewed tomatoes, undrained
  • 1/2 cup buffalo wing sauce (such as Frank’s)
  • 1/4 cup blue cheese dressing

Instructions

  1. Cook the rice in the water as directed on the package.
  2. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  3. Cook the chicken and celery in the oil for about 5 to 7 minutes, stirring frequently.
  4. Remove from the heat.
  5. Add the stewed tomatoes and the wing sauce to the chicken.
  6. Spray an 8 inch baking dish with cooking spray.
  7. Spoon the rice into the dish to cover the bottom.
  8. Place the chicken mixture on top. Do not stir.
  9. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes.
  10. Drizzle the dressing over the top of the cooked casserole.

Once upon a time, my parents hired a company to redo their kitchen. They were basically supposed to change the marble countertops.

The company was formed by husband, wife and three employees.

They set up the countertops and soon realized a minor part of the marble did not fit exactly. They had to take the small bit that didn’t fit back to their headquarters to redo the work.

At that point, my parents had already paid 90% of the price.

One week later they came back without prior notice and gained access to their apartment through the maid, who opened the door to let them finish the job.

My parents were out on an errand.

After the contractors finished their job, the owner called my father on his mobile and told him the job was completed.

Since there had been problems with the execution before, my father told the man that he would come back home in about an hour, check the quality of the final touches and promptly pay the remaining 10% of the price.

The man went ape and told my father that payment was due on the spot.

My parents interrupted what they were doing and hurried back home.

But at this point the contractor was already mad at them and took out every single bit of marble he had put in place and put it all in his van. Never mind the fact that, as I said, 90% was already paid for.

Upon arriving home, my father noticed that all the stuff he paid for was in the van and being taken away.

He is a man of action, and promptly put himself in front of the van to impede its exit.

The contractor did not back down and just ran over my father, who was 65 at the time.

His bruises were not grave, but he filed criminal suit against the man.

The problem is that he hired a company, so he didn’t know the contractor’s name. And to file suit against someone, you must indicate his name, of course.

The police weren’t very eager to determine the identity of the perpetrator. And that’s when my parents called me.

I dived into the matter and found out not only his name and address, but several lawsuits against this guy and his wife. They took several loans and had not repaid them, they sold real estate and did not deliver, they crossed many people in business deals. In short, they owed a lot of people and banks in consequence of morally doubtful behaviour.

And they had empty apartments in Copacabana, a very prized area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I gave the Police the name of the guy and, on the side, purchased some of the credits against them owned by financial institutions.

I represented my parents in the criminal lawsuit against these people and got them sentenced to jail (the husband) and reparation (the wife).

But I also pursued the exaction of the debts I bought and, six years later, I got one of their apartments as repayment of one of the debts.

Now I am still waiting for judicial decision on the second apartment. It seems I will also take this one.

The best part is that I paid only 25 thousand reais to buy the credit and the apartments are worth, together, a little under 1 million reais.

This guy should not have run over my dear father… I bet this is one decision he regrets every day.

I had a client about 25 years ago who was charged with Attempt Murder. He was a short, middle aged Italian man who had a tall, much younger Irish girlfriend. They got into an argument, and she called him a little dick daego. He pulled out a pocketknife. They struggled, and he tore off all her clothes. Then he got behind her and held the knife to her throat. She was still struggling when he inadvertently cut her resulting in a very small cut. She broke away, ran out of the apartment naked and onto the street screaming. He chased her with the pocketknife still in his hand. There was a police car right there and the cops pounced on him.

I was hired as his attorney. He made bail. He came to my office every week. I advised him not to testify. He stubbornly said he wanted to tell his side of the story. So, I began preparing him to testify and be crossed examined. He said he was prepared, but I was skeptical. I kept on trying to dissuade him from testifying. He didn’t listen. So, I had him sign a waiver stating that he insisted on testifying although I advised him not to.

He did testify at trial and was doing well. Then he was cross examined by the prosecutor. During cross, the prosecutor asked him how mad he was. My client said, “I was so mad I could have killed her.” He said this while on trial for Attempt Murder, the idiot. Many people make this statement out of frustration. However, I’ve never heard anyone else state it while on trial for Attempt Murder. It was a bench, non-jury, trial. The judge found him guilty of Attempt Murder. As the judge explained his verdict,* he said he would have found him guilty of Aggravated Battery, a lesser charge, except for the statement he made. That statement convinced the judge he had the intent to kill his girlfriend.**

My client was taken into custody and 30 days later he was sentenced to six years in prison. He was offered 3 years probation during plea bargaining if he plead guilty to Aggravated Battery. He insisted on telling his story. Well, he told his story, and he fucked himself.*** All because he just had to tell his side of the story when I advised him not to.

*The law in Illinois requires the judge to explain his verdict in a bench trial. Juries don’t have to explain their verdict.

** Intent is an essential element to prove in a Murder case, or Attempt Murder case.

*** What lesson is there in this story? The lesson is listen to your lawyer’s advice.

I’ve seen people do this.

My uncle when he was 30, he had a fairly comfortable living in the UK. He one day said I don’t love you to his then wife, he gave her everything took a flight out to Hong Kong and started again. He got a middling job and did ok. I see him sometimes, he lost an enormous amount of money but he said it wasn’t worth being miserable all the time.

My dad thinks he’s crazy, my dad thinks money is important…

The other person is me. I was in my 30s. I was >< from settling in the UK and putting roots down. But around 2014 a racist comment made to me made me stop and wait. Brexit then happened which would ruin my business. I was attacked twice shortly after the vote and went home and sold everything I had and left the UK a few months later. I realised that I would have to find something else to do anyway and the up tick in racism simply made me stop and think. Do I want my kids to experience the bad things I experienced? Nope.

Starting all over was boring and empty. For months and months I had enough money to live in comfort and I didn’t even leave the local town for months. I eventually got a small job paying above average salary and also lucked out and bought a construction company.

Everybody said I was crazy in 2016. As being british was apparently winning the lottery, the UK declined in the time I was away and my decision appears increasingly vindicated.

Wife Thought Ex Would Be Miserable In Divorce, Now FURIOUS He’s Dating A Much Younger Woman!

  1. 70% of people like old songs because of the memories attached to them.
  2. When a person dies, they have 7 minutes of brain activity left, it’s the mind playing back the person’s memories in a dream sequence.
  3. Psychology says that playing video games makes you more creative.
  4. Most people type faster when there’s someone they like.
  5. You appear more attractive to a person when you make them laugh or smile.
  6. 80% of women choose silence to express pain. You should know she is truly hurt when she chooses to ignore you.
  7. People with sarcastic personalities are more honest with their friends.
  8. Overthinking is a special form of fear. It gets even more dangerous when anticipation, memory, emotion and imagination are added together.
  9. The average woman smiles 60 times a day. An average man smiles only 10 times a day.
  10. When people refuse to tell you what’s wrong, you tend to think that it’s probably your fault.
  11. Intelligent men and women are more easily annoyed by people in general.
  12. Women and men experience the same kind of emotions but women are more honest with them.
  13. Life becomes more meaningful when you understand the fact that you will not get the same moment twice in your life.
  14. What we wear tends to affect how we behave.
  15. Introverts tend to have more thinking capabilities than extroverts.
  16. Eat bananas, because bananas contain a special chemical which can make a person happy.
  17. Pretending not to care is the habit of those who care the most.
  18. Pretending not to care is the habit of those who care the most.
  19. When you become really close to someone, you can hear their voices in your head when you read their text.
  20. Being sarcastic can add upto 3 years in your life.
  21. Appreciating someone can boost their confidence and motivate them to do better things in life.
  22. Following the above point if you appreciate this answer, it will boost my confiden

Women Retain The DNA Of Every Man They Have Sex With by Tana Amen BSN RN & Dr. Daniel Amen


My story about batteries and early morning wake up calls

I worked at a company where my initial job I had full access to all financial and job information and tracked it daily. When I shifted roles, my access mistakenly wasn’t removed and I didn’t say anything – just continued with the habit.

Shortly after my role changed, I noticed the parent company seemed to be shifting things around to keep one of the leads and their key people and dump everything and everyone else. So I started saving money and paying off debts. Because the writing on the wall was telling me lay-offs were coming. The home office was setting up drought conditions to slowly kill the company I was at in such a way it would seem like market flux. But I could see ALL jobs and financials and where things were being directed. It was a deliberate and slow starvation and eventually the financial situation would force lay-offs.

I was the last member added to my team and if the strategy was last in, first out, I was gone. It was just a matter of when.

One Friday I went to lunch, about six months after I started seeing the pattern, and I told my best friend I would be losing my job really soon. I could feel it coming. Sure enough, came back from lunch and got let go. I was more surprised at how surprised everyone else was, especially the VP who had to talk to me. He got more choked up in our meeting than I did. I was relieved. The wait was finally over.

It was obvious to me the company was being killed to separate the star and the people on their team and jettison the rest. We were duplicating roles – to the home office it made sense to keep the team doing something unique and consolidate the other roles in one location – which was not in our location. Everyone else knew something was up but didn’t know they knew. There was a lot of tension. A lot of anxiety that people weren’t aware they were giving off. And no one but me knew why the office was so on edge. In the end the office was reduced to less than half its size.

I see former co-workers out and about and they all seem much happier than they were that last half year. There’s a lot of bitterness toward the parent company though for breaking up our office and disrupting so many lives.

“Just PREPARE Yourself…” – Danielle DiMartino

No change.

Let it sink in that in 2017 before the corporate assassination of Huawei by the American Federal government, asml sold 1b in equipment to mainland China.

Last year, 2023, they sold almost 8b, a sevenfold increase.

The mainland is now their second largest client.

American ip-based curbs have already been in place since 2022, so the appearance of a mainland-made 5nm equivalent chip made on the 7nm node in 2023 on a Huawei phone embarrassed commerce secretary Gina, especially when she was made the center of a guerilla marketing campaign promoting the phone during her trip to Beijing.

The United States doesn’t want China anywhere near sub-10nm chips, so it is applying pressure on the Dutch government to force asml to disrupt service contracts to select mainland foundries making these advanced chips.

Unfortunately, nothing but an embargo is going to work at this point. But an embargo will be so disruptive the best outcome is global goods shortage and a second round of inflation or worse, market chaos.

ASML will lose the China market for good if they fail to honor contracts. At any rate, they will be lucky to preserve 1b annual sales within the coming decade, given the Chinese determination towards tech independence.

Not embarrassing but it was fucking hilarious. When my daughter was 3 or 4 we were at a restaurant and it was her mom’s turn to drink and mine to drive. So my ex orders a mud slide, which came in an enormous goblet and looked like a delicious chocolate shake.

So of course the little one asks to have some. We said no. She asked again and being our rule for asking for things was no, no, never, (Meaning if we said no twice and we’re asked again never was the answer and we stood by this ) her mom said, “ You can’t have any of mommy’s drink, it has liquor in it.”

My kid responded to this by standing on the seat of the booth and screaming, “ I want liquor, I want liquor!!” My ex, the waitress, and myself all burst out laughing.

We were regulars at this restaurant and my kid is not a spoiled brat so we all knew she was doing this more so as a joke and not a whining outburst. I’m sure the other patrons found this humorous as well. She’s always been a great kid and hasn’t lost her sense of humor.

I will say when she got a little older than this maybe at 5 I warned her that if she embarrasses me in public now, I won’t punish her. I will just store that in my memory, then I’m the future I will show up to her school in my pajamas and make sure I embarass her ten fold.

I never had an issue with her in public until she was like 10 when she would do so intentionally and dare me to get her back because she “doesn’t care what people think of me just like you don’t daddy, aren’t you glad you taught me that?”

{Edit} I read the question wrong and was going to delete my answer but it took too much time typing all that in my phone so I’ll go ahead and leave it until I get some complaints.

Egypt selects Chinese J-10Cs instead of upgrading its United States’ F-16Vs

J-10C: China’s Strategic Moves with J-10C Fighter Aircraft

The J-10 was originally conceived as an air-superiority fighter for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to its shift to that of a multi-role aircraft. Produced by the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation, the Vigorous Drag …

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The Egyptian Defense Ministry has reportedly placed its first-ever order for Chinese fourth-generation fighters, specifically the J-10C, as of August 19. This decision underscores Cairo’s ongoing efforts to deepen strategic and economic ties with Beijing, following its recent entry into the Chinese-led BRICS bloc earlier this year.


With this acquisition, Egypt becomes the second country to procure the J-10C after Pakistan. Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports suggest that Sudan may have been negotiating a similar deal before insurgency complications in April 2024 delayed the talks. The J-10Cs are expected to replace Egypt’s aging fleet of F-16 Fighting Falcons as they are gradually phased out.

Interestingly, there is speculation that Egypt’s decision to acquire the J-10C may be an alternative to U.S. proposals for the F-16V upgrade package. The J-10C offers superior combat capabilities compared to the enhanced F-16 model, all at a comparable cost.


Beyond the three squadrons of MiG-29M fighters Egypt ordered from Russia in 2015, most of the country’s fourth-generation fighters come from Western sources. The potential purchase of J-10C fighters marks a significant shift, reflecting the evolving political landscape.

Recent reports suggest Egypt may be ordering J-10Cs, as Egyptian officials voice increasing concerns over the Western-backed Israeli military operations in Gaza. Officials in Cairo fear these operations may force the Gazan population to seek refuge in Egypt.


This possible acquisition is pivotal when considering Egypt’s current fighter fleet, which has long been viewed as inadequately prepared for a major interstate conflict.

The nearly 200 F-16s forming the backbone of the fleet are seen as some of the least capable fourth-generation fighters globally. They’re heavily downgraded and restricted to obsolete Cold War-era weaponry, completely lacking modern beyond-visual range air-to-surface capabilities.

Political hurdles


Over the years, Egypt has encountered several political hurdles in modernizing and arming its F-16s with advanced weaponry. A significant challenge has been its intricate relationship with the United States. Since Egypt’s F-16 fleet primarily comes from the U.S., arms deals with Washington are often bound by stringent political conditions.

U.S. foreign policy decisions often dictate the flow of advanced upgrades and weapon systems, based on concerns such as human rights, regional conflicts, or a nation’s alliances. For instance, following the military removal of President Mohamed Morsi in 2013, the U.S. temporarily suspended military aid, which delayed essential upgrades for Egypt’s aging F-16s.

This, coupled with U.S. control over spare parts and strict operational restrictions on the aircraft, significantly hampers Egyptian air power.


Moreover, Egypt’s French-supplied Rafale fighters, ordered in 2015, also experience notable performance downgrades. Most notably, the absence of Meteor air-to-air missiles severely limits their combat capabilities.

Regional hotspots’

France’s Rafale jets, although free from U.S. political constraints, have faced their own set of geopolitical challenges. When Egypt attempts to diversify its arms purchases, including reaching out to Russia and China, it often conflicts with its Western suppliers.


Western governments, including France, have occasionally been reluctant to equip Egypt with the latest weapons systems or upgrades due to worries about how these might be used in regional hotspots like Libya or Yemen. This balancing act between maintaining good relations with Western powers and non-Western allies has complicated Egypt’s efforts to modernize its fleet with state-of-the-art technology.

Additionally, Egypt’s shifting geopolitical landscape in the Middle East has influenced its defense relationships. The U.S. and European countries have aimed to retain influence over Egypt’s military activities by controlling access to advanced weaponry.

Due to restrictions on integrating advanced air-to-air missiles and radar technologies, Egypt’s efforts to modernize its F-16 and Rafale fleets have been hampered. As a result, Egypt has been seeking more independent options for its defense supplies, increasingly turning to countries like China, which impose fewer political conditions and restrictions. This trend has driven Egypt’s recent shift toward the Chinese J-10.


In contrast, the J-10C will provide Egypt with access to two of the world’s most capable air-to-air missile classes: the PL-10 and PL-15. Western sources have acknowledged that these Chinese missiles significantly outperform their American counterparts, the AIM-9X and AIM-120D.

For Egypt, which has been using Cold War-era AIM-9 variants and the outdated AIM-7, this shift signifies a technological leap spanning several decades in performance. The J-10C will stand as the most capable fighter aircraft in Egypt’s arsenal in terms of air-to-air combat and may even be the most advanced on the African continent.


The fighter has shown in simulated combat that it can outperform modern ‘4+ generation’ fighters almost twice its size, including Russian Su-35s and Chinese J-16s. Its array of compatible air-to-ground ordnance is extensive.

The J-10C is viewed as significantly more capable than any fighter in the Israeli fleet, except for its two squadrons of F-35s. This could potentially push Israel to expand its F-35 orders and invest in more advanced air-to-air missiles for its aircraft.

Images of America

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View W. along Fern St. from 937, Camden, 1992
View W. along Fern St. from 937, Camden, 1992

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I wouldn’t say that our Elementary Maths teacher didn’t know what she was teaching, but Maths probably wasn’t her forte. She could only deliver the lessons or solutions in a “by-the-book” manner.

First, some background: we were a class of 42 students in our O-Level year (Secondary 4 in the British system, 16 years old) taking both Elementary Maths and Additional Maths (the harder subject). From hindsight in the following year, a junior told us that our class had 41 of us scoring A1 for Additional Maths, and one scoring A2, when he complained that we had set a very high bar for his class. So, we were actually the top class of our year, not just in Additional Maths but also Elementary Maths, plus all the other six subjects.

Here is the first story. The previous teacher in Secondary 3 had already completed the entire O-Level syllabus for Elementary Maths, one year ahead of time, and we were already done with the ten-years series (a compilation of O-Level examination papers) as homework. Secondary 4 was really just more revision. Unfortunately, that teacher was transferred to a new junior college (for 17–18 years old). He was that good.

And we were assigned a new teacher, who probably wasn’t aware of our progress. In one of the first lessons, we were terribly bored because we could work out the answers in our heads. We were quiet.

She thought we didn’t understand it and asked, “Do you understand the explanation?”

“Nooooo…” went the usual naughty back-benchers.

“Should I explain it again?”

“Yesssss…”

And she repeated it, word for word. The class was surprised. Word for word?

“Do you understand it now?”

“Nooooo…” and subsequent lessons just went that way.

Second story. Our classroom was next to a laboratory where they conducted experiments for the Basic Electricity and Electronics subject. One of those experiments was to demonstrate the danger of connecting an electrolytic capacitor with the wrong polarity in a direct current (DC) circuit. It would be a controlled explosion of a small electrolytic capacitor.

And there was that mini explosion next door during one of the Elementary Maths lesson.

“Who brought a firecracker?!”

“What?”

“Who played with a firecracker?”

Everyone looked at each other. “Nobody.”

“I heard it! Whoever did, better own up!”

One of our more alert classmate, because the rest of us were sleepy, said, “It’s next door. It’s an experiment.”

“Nonsense! Own up or I’ll search your bags.”

No amount of explanation convinced her. We even suggested that she should walk over and check with the other teacher. And so she searched our bags, finding nothing. Class dismissed.

Final story. Not knowing who was the teacher-in-charge, I joined the school Maths Club. And in the very first get together, we were asked to complete a 4×4 magic square and the first person to offer the solution would get a prize. Yes, she was the teacher in charge. By that time, I have already figured out one solution (there could be more than one way to solve it) and raised my hand. As I wrote down the first three numbers of the top row, she stopped me and asked me to go back to my seat. She said it was the wrong answer. Needless to say, I double checked my answer back at my seat, knew it was correct but held my tongue.

Another school mate raised her hand, went to the board and wrote the standard solution (yes, there is a very easy solution that involved simply swapping the numbers of the four corner squares and the four inner squares. You can Google it.).

She was praised and offered the prize. Then my schoolmate pointed out that my answer should also be correct (she was one of the smartest in school). I was invited to write my answer down for everyone to see. And the teacher? Mumbled something and moved on to another topic.

After that, I just do my other assigned homework during Elementary Maths class, and she didn’t bother me. ::shrug::

Atheist Dies & Finds There Is Life After Death (Near-Death Experience)

I purchased a brand new, off the lot Ford F-150 Platinum truck with all of the bells and whistles… The sales lady was a very professional looking person, dressed sharply, quick on her feet answering questions, the minute my wife shows up starts down selling knowing my wives don’t want their husbands buying the platinum, gold plated, ultimate, maximum, super charger package… but I was not to be denied. Anyway, I was repeatedly told, free oil changes and car washes for the first year that I owned the truck. “Yeah, just give us a heads up and for the first year, free oil changes or free car washes.”

“Great” I say, ready to drive off the lot. “your first oil change is due in 5,000 miles, call service to schedule when you get close.”

And like clockwork I call service to get my first free oil change and free car wash. Everything goes well.

It’s time for my next oil change and I was at 9,850 miles. I call service and schedule my next oil change, and they had me come in a few days later. Checked me in. I waited, my name was called. “that will be $47.50 for the oil change and $7.50 for the car wash.”

“I was told the oil changes were free the first year that I own the truck.” The service manager smiles and says “that’s correct, but its Its first year or 10,000 miles, whichever comes first” and you are at 10,025.”

I said “excuse me.” and walked back in the dealership, found the sales lady and as I am approaching her desk, she calls out to the manager “Jerry… upset customer. Deal with it!”

They comped my second oil change. Apologized for the misunderstanding “but its clearly stated on page 66 of the sales agreement in section 102 that the sales offer is free oil changes for the first year OR 10,000 miles sir, whichever comes first!” He says this as he his standing in front a large poster board sign stating “free oil changes for the first year you own the car!” and something yellow and small in a different language, in 2 font, at the bottom of the poster, telling me that ”transparency and honesty is paramount here at Honest John’s Ford.” tongue in cheek, fingers crossed behind his back.

BIG BIG Trouble Ahead!

In a word; ESCALATION.

Please read until the end.

The USA has a defence policy of “Launch on warning”. Russia has the same but also is thought to employ “dead man’s hands”. They do this because of the fear of a Decapitation Strike, a first strike tactic. Both sides live under the fear of nuclear strikes designed to remove all senior military and political leaders, and it is a fair worry given how fast modern ICBM (land launched) and SLBMs (sea launched)system operate. A sea launched depressed trajectory missile could take Washington/Pentagon out in as little as ten minutes from launch detection to detonation. Ten minutes in which to find the US president, get them to make a decision, open the nuclear code “football” and transmit the orders. Land launched missiles take 24 minutes to reach the USA and vice versa, still very little time to decide, target and launch. So in light of this the decision to launch middles is made upon warnings alone, specifically Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites. These can detect an engine start within 0.5 seconds. They watch the launch and flash the first warning. They watch the boost phase and post boost phase. At what is called rollover they have a pretty good idea where the missile is going. Ground based radars of the BEMEWS line and early warning radar site in the UK and Poland are the second part of launch verification. At this point the launch order for retaliation is given. Because land based missile bases and bomber bases will be the first targets they have to be launched (use them or loose them).

Once launched no missile can be stopped, there is no self destruct so the course is set.

Once the other side sees the massive retaliatory strike it launches, and it holds nothing back. Dead Man’s Hand means that regardless of any further orders of any type Russia will expend its entire inventory. Less than 20 minutes will have passed. And almost the entire land launch inventory of both sides will have been launched. The bombers now in the air will reach their targets in a few hours, but after their missions they will have no place to return to. They are effectively on suicide missions. Orders will have gone out to ballistic missile subs via US Navy TACAMO aircraft within two hours of first detection they will be emptying their tubes. Land attack cruise missiles from attack subs will launch about the same time or in some cases later. This process cannot be stopped, it’s a one way ticket.

Why is Launch on Warning a problem?

It is not perfect. Satellites can be fooled, radar can be fooled. In one famous incident Russia almost started a war when the moon rising over Norway was interpreted as a mass missile attack. The USA once thought a flock of migrating geese was an attack. In the 1950 early warning radars were so subject to false readings that the USA relied on keeping a B52 circling Thule radar base in Greenland because that would be Russias very first target and seeing it vaporised from a B52 was the best verification there was of an attack!!!!! Today the USA system is much better, the satellites are now absolute marvels at what they can detect. BUT the Russian system still lack some crucial abilities (such as direct look-down) so false warnings are still very possible.

NEXT YOU HAVE TO FACTOR IN THE LOONIES.

So the USA and Russia are relatively stable, even led by reasonable adults – until Trump came along of course. North Korea is especially dangerous because they introduce so much uncertainty. Any nation with a religious bent can also be a problem. The religious nut-bags of Iran and the self absorbed religious nut-bags of Israel for instance, who knows what would happen if they got the launch codes.

So we come back to Launch On Warning and just how fast a situation would escalate and how utterly unstoppable it is.

I hope this has given you some food for thought.

I bought a 2021 Airstream Interstate 24 GT van in 2021 and traveled around the U.S. for four and a half months. I drove 13,000 miles in that time, looking for a house. I had the time of my life, but it wasn’t cheap.

As a viable long-term option, there are some big considerations. For one, if you do your own conversion, every dime you spend doesn’t come back in resale. No bank will finance someone’s conversion. Second, a useful van for a range of weather conditions is a very complicated thing. It seems simple until you realize how difficult it is to manage condensation without ceiling vents, heaters, and AC, not to mention the insulation and overall build. Then there’s the matter of pipes freezing and keeping tanks above freezing no matter what. This is why conversions are so expensive.

If you want to stop somewhere without a hookup and remain warm and dry, you’re now talking about a generator. They need fuel, and that too gets complicated, so it’s better to stay in an RV park that has showers, power, pump-out, etc. But this comes with a cost. You can stay in places costing as little as $30.00 a night, but you might get shot. These are the equivalent of the worst neighborhoods imaginable, except everyone is closer together. You can listen to the fights all night long.

If you want to stay in a decent RV park, expect to pay closer to $60.00 a night. This would be one where you can’t reach your neighbor from your window. So, you’re looking at an expense of roughly $1,800 a month. Don’t think you’re going to remain in state or national parks because we have this thing called winter. Most RV parks in the north shut down, and your RV starts to freeze up if it’s not protected, so you head south. Guess what? So did everyone else who’s in the same boat, so you’re back to hunting for a decent place, and that takes time. It’s staying at any one place for a minimum of three days because it was so difficult to find good places. Horrible ones are everywhere. I had a few nights in those places, and I couldn’t wait to get out. Sure, you can stealth it a bit, but not much. Truck stops are the best, but just for overnight; then, get moving. Walmart and others are now kicking out overnighters.

Size matters- If you’re going with a bus, they get 4 MPG, so figure a buck a mile. That 13,000 miles would be $13,000 in fuel in a full size bus. I’ve done that too. The Sprinter was 20 MPG, so $2,600 to go 13,000 miles.

Go the route of a big RV and you need a Jeep in tow. That’s work too. The Sprinter was way better. Buy a good used one.

I had the time of my life, but I did it right—with the right rig, with the right planning, and with an exit strategy. Do it on the cheap, and it’s not going to be as much fun or as glamorous as you think.

She Died and Visited Heaven? Doctor’s Near-Death Experience Sheds Light on Life After Death

I used a master combination lock as a brass knuckle in middle school.

This guy had harassed me all year. I was small. He was big. Earlier that day we’d cleaned out our lockers and he’d taken the opportunity to walk up behind me and use a shoelace like a garrote on me. I told. Like it wasn’t obvious from the marks on my neck anyway. When a teacher asked me, I just told her.

Between classes one of his friends came up to me and said that this guy was going to break my nose so I’d always remember him and never rat him out again.

Now, my parents had complained to the school. Repeatedly. He’d attacked me earlier that year and the principal had convinced them not to press charges.

I kept the lock in my hand, with my middle finger in the clasp and the lock in my palm. The bell rang and I went in the hall to my next class. He was in the hallway.

I still don’t know if he was going to actually hit me in the hallway, but he did have his right hand cocked back. I swung up once and it went high, right below his left eye. The next one landed dead center in his mouth. I felt teeth break and cut my finger.

He crumpled over bleeding and crying. I didn’t know what to do and had my hands at my sides when a teacher grabbed me.

I was sitting in the principal’s office getting screamed at. I was going to jail. I was going to be in big trouble. I was going to have a criminal record. I had used a weapon on a defenseless kid.

They called my dad. Not mom who normally handled this.

Dad showed up.

Dad was pissed.

I’m going to remember this like it was yesterday forever. I swear I thought he was going to kill me. Then the exchange:

Principal: your son attacked another boy with a weapon.

Dad: is he under arrest?

Principal: we’re going to have to conduct—

Dad: is he under arrest? Yes or no?

Principal: once the resource officer does an investigation–

Dad (looking at the marks on my throat): you mind explaining how the hell my son got these in his neck?

Principal: well we think there was an altercation with this boy and your son earlier but I don’t think the two incidents–

Dad: are you out of your g*ddamn mind? You’re telling me you sent my son back to class with ligature marks like this and didn’t think to contact us then?

Principal: well that was horseplay then and your son clearly used a weapon here so I think that—

Dad: shut up. Look at his neck. You mean to tell me those weren’t made with a piece of rope or something? By a kid we’ve already complained about? A kid who’s nearly a foot taller and thirty pounds heavier than my son? (Turning to me) wait outside.

Principal: he can’t leave yet.

Dad: is he under arrest?

Principal: well, no, but—-

Dad: then we’re done. I need the names of everyone involved in this, their titles, and the name of the lawyer that represents the city school.

Principal: I really don’t think it’s appropriate to ask that right now.

Dad: Then I’ll get it through subpoena.

We went out to the car. He checked my neck again. Took me to the pediatrician and got it photographed. Two police officers took a statement and looked at my neck as well.

I kept thinking dad was going to explode on me for using a weapon in a fight. He always said it was okay to finish but not start a fight. This time though he was conciliatory.

“Given your options I’d probably do the same thing. ”

Since school was out I sat home for a few weeks. We got a letter demanding we pay for the other guy’s teeth. I heard dad talking on the phone to his attorney, eventually laughing. They never got anything from us, after they got the response which included the pictures of the marks on my neck the other guy’s parents stopped trying to contact us.

I actually saw him a couple years ago; he was changing oil at one of those oil change places.

‘Doctor, please admit my mother for few days under your care’.

I had just started my career as a cardiologist in Trivandrum. The middle-aged lady was my patient for around one year now; suffering from a disease called ‘dilated cardiomyopathy’ (poor heart function) but was stable on treatment, with very little symptoms.

‘Why hospital admission? She is just fine;’ I said

I knew why the admission request.

Most health insurance companies reimburse only if a patient is sick enough to be admitted and not under outpatient treatment.

‘I don’t admit patients just because an IP patient is reimbursable’ I said firmly – a philosophy that I follow even today.

‘No, no sir, don’t get me wrong. It is not for reimbursement; it is something else. Please don’t misunderstand me, I practice astrology, and as per my calculations, my mom has a very bad time in the next 3 days. Please help me.’

I obliged, writing on the case-file as ‘admitted as per by-stander’s request’ in bold letters.

A day later, during morning rounds, I saw her; she was fine; told her that there is nothing to worry. As I got out of her room, her son was waiting outside with a very worried face.

‘Sir today between 11 AM and 12 noon is the most critical time for her’.

Confident and trained in evidence based cardiology, I had far more capability of understanding a patient’s pathobiology than the astrology-expert son, but as per protocol, I just smiled.

‘She looks fine, her ECG is stable, ECHO is good, biochemistry is good. Don’t worry at all’.

What I didn’t tell him was that, astrology or such other paranormal stuff never impressed me. I believe, they are built upon exploiting the fear of an unknown, unpredictable future.

At 11-15 AM code blue is called. The lady had suffered a cardiac arrest.

She was resuscitated, and revived but had suffered a CVA (stroke). She was shifted to ICCU; she remained on a ventilator for 2 days, weaned off but died after 2 weeks due to aspiration pneumonia and sepsis.

The son thanked us for all the care and concern.

A month later he came home for a courtesy visit.

‘Sir I am a govt. employee and have very little to offer you. I do write horoscopes for a living. Can I write the horoscope for your son and daughter sir? This is all that I can do to thank you for looking after my mother; she was so fond of you’.

I froze for a moment.

A perfect fortune teller trying to tell me the future of my kids? No, never.

I thanked him profusely and told him that I shall phone him if I need his help; my way of telling him NO. I think he understood.

A prediction that I would die next Sunday would make me stop do everything because it would become pointless to work. Similarly, a prediction that I would become a billionaire next Monday would also result in similar end result.

It is the dream of a better future tomorrow, that drives all of us, to try and do our best today. No fortune-teller has the right to take that dream away from me.

MM experiments today

Theme is argument during making coffee.

I really like this one…

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(5)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(5)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(5)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(5)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(6)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(6)

I then focused on women and blue Spring skies…

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(4)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(4)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(4)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(4)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(5)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(5)

This isn’t all that bad…

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(3)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(3)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(3)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(3)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(3)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(3)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(4)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(4)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(2)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(2)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(3)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(3)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(1)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(1)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(1)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(1)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)

Are they singing?

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(2)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(2)

Early morning light… You can almost hear the roster crowing.

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(1)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(1)

Hate the horns.

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2

How do mortgage and home loans work in India and China? What is the rate of interest and EMI?

Tenure

China – Maximum Repayment Period is 360 months or until the 70th Birthday of the Primary Borrower whichever is lesser

India – Maximum Repayment Period is 360 months or until the 70th Birthday of the Primary Borrower whichever is lesser

Interest Rate

China – 1.25% above the Base Market Rate for 5 Year Yields which comes to 4.20% per Annum

India – 1.20% above Base Market Rate for 5 Year Yields which comes to 9.15% per Annum

Margin

China – First time buyers can get upto 80% of the Value of the Property OR 112.50% of the Value of the Land whichever is higher

Second time buyers can get upto 65% of the Value of the Property or 82.50% of the Value of the Land whichever is higher

India – Borrowers can borrow between 75% to 85% of the Market Value of the Property

How to pay margin?

China – Chinese People use their HOUSING FUND where 16% is employer contribution and 8% is employee contribution. Employee can contribute another 16% of his salary if he so wishes

Thus every month upto a maximum of 40% of the Employees salary and a minimum of 24% of the Employees salary is deposited towards Housing Fund

The Average 12 year corpus of a Housing Fund would be 291,000 CNY

You can pay all of your Housing Fund provided the Housing Fund has a minimum balance of 1000 CNY

For the balance, they use their Savings or Borrow from friends or Borrow against their Pension Fund

India – Indians pay out of Savings or borrow against their PF or take other Loans

Interest calculation

China – EMI consists of Principal plus Interest. Every month 50% of the Installment is for Principal and 50% is towards Interest

Focus is on Principal repayment

India – EMI consists of Principal plus Interest. Initially 88% of EMI is towards Interest which reduces to 12% by the 220th Month (For a 240 month loan)

Focus is on Interest

Total Amount paid

China :-

House Price – 3 Million RMB

Housing Fund – 291,000 RMB

Savings – 509,000 RMB

Loan – 2.4 Million RMB

Mortgage – 14,942 RMB a month

Total Principal Paid – 2.4 Million RMB

Total Interest Paid – 2.152 Million RMB

Interest as % of Principal = 89.67%

India:-

House Price – ₹ 1.2 Crore

Margin – ₹ 24 Lakh

Loan – ₹96 Lakh

EMI – ₹ 79,211/- per month

Total Principal Paid – ₹96 Lakh

Total Interest Paid – ₹ 1.852 Crore

Interest as % of Principal – 192.90%

EMI / Mortgage as part of Median Income

China – 14,942 RMB Mortgage payment against a Median of 38,611 RMB Post Tax for an Upper Middle Class 2 Person Household which comes to 38.69%

India – ₹79,211/- Mortgage payment against a Median of ₹ 1.50 Lakh Post Tax a month for an Upper Middle Class 2 Person Household which comes to 52.80%

Taxes required to be paid

China:-

Property Value – 3 Million RMB

Deed Tax – 0.03% – 900 RMB

Registration Fees – 0.05% – 1500 RMB

Notarization Fees – 0.1% – 3000 RMB

Digitization Fees – 300 RMB

Total – 5700 RMB

Transfer Fee (Resale) – 20,000 RMB or 1.5% Property Value whichever is LESSER

Amount as % of Price – 0.19% (New Property)

Amount as% of Price – 0.86% (Resale)

India :-

Property Value – ₹ 1.2 Crore

Stamp Duty – 6% – ₹ 7,20,000/-

Registration Fees – 1% – ₹1,20,000/-

Cess – 50% of Registration Fees – 60,000/-

Total – ₹ 9,00,000/-

Amount as % of Price – 7.5%

Thus in China, the Taxes and Duties to buy a house are barely 1/10th of that of India

Documentation and Verification

China :-

Since 2009, Paper Deeds are no longer accepted in Paper Format and must be converted into a Digital Mapped Format

No Lawyer needs to examine title for Residential Properties

The Chinese Provincial Authority in whose jurisdiction a property exists, issues a CERTIFICATE OF LEGAL TITLE for a mere 80 RMB and a NO HOLD LIEN CERTIFICATE for a mere 240 RMB

Everything is Digital

Properties in 13 Provinces are MAPPED TO BEIDOU and have a mapping coordinate link provided to locate the property at a later date

India :-

Everything is still PAPER

Lawyers needed to examine Title Deeds

Everything is still done with Paper Survey Maps

Capital Gains Tax on Property

China –

  • Zero Capital Gains for sale of First Property
  • 1% Capital Gains Tax plus additional 0.75% Capital Gains Tax for every 5 years of holding a Property upto a Maximum of 3% for sale of second and third properties
  • 10% Capital Gains Tax for sale of Fourth Property and more

India –

  • 20% Capital Gains Tax on sale of any and all Property

Liability for Illegally Constructed Property

China :-

  • Provincial Authority is fully liable to compensate the buyer 110% to 140% of the total value of the Property within a period of 60 days. It’s their business to prosecute the builder. If the Provincial Authority disputes the claim, they must deposit entire amount in ESCROW

India:-

  • Courts decide Liability which could take 30 years
  • Meanwhile Buyer is SCREWED

Non Payment of Mortgage :-

China :-

  • Borrower must pay at least one Mortgage payment fully plus any accrued interest for a 90 day Period
  • Non Payment of Mortgage Amount plus Accrued Interest beyond the 90th day will make the Mortgage Stressed
  • Bank provides 240 Days to the Borrower to Restructure the Loan Or Standardize the Loan during which the Bank won’t contact the Borrower but the Borrower can’t borrow from anyone else
  • Bank may repossess the Property after the 330th Day of Non Payment and sell the Property Or hold the property in which case a 90 Day Notice is mandatory for the Borrower to leave the property
  • The Average time to deal with a Delinquent Home Mortgage is 18 months

India:-

  • Borrower must pay at least one Mortgage payment fully plus any accrued interest for a 90 day Period
  • Non Payment of Mortgage Amount plus Accrued Interest beyond the 90th day will make the Mortgage Non Performing
  • Bank may file a case under SARFESI ACT and repossess the Property and Auction off the Property
  • The Average time taken between Default and Auction is 5 Years and 4 Months

 

Conclusion :-

Property Buyers get a better deal in China

They pay lesser EMI as percent of Income

They are protected from Illegal Construction and Bad Buyers

They have very less Capital Gains Tax

They pay almost no Taxes for Registration Or Stamp Duty

Nurse Dies During Aneurysm; Shown The Secrets To Existence During NDE

I was horribly bullied in middle school, new kid, poor, grandma bought my clothes (not my choice), started school early so I was the youngest in my grade, my hair was really short and almost fully white (blonde to a fault haha), didnt know most new music besides radio stuff. One bully in particular was extra harsh on me, would trip me, pants me, make fun of me, threw dog poop at me, pushed me into some spiky berry bush in front of our school, and the thing that finally got me was he would call my grandma names. I could take the abuse of myself, I already had low self esteem so you couldn’t hurt me more than I hurt myself, but my grandma survived a lot and I knew and saw some of the stuff she endured. I had a lot of respect for her, she was basically my mom and dad and grandma, my parents skipped out on any parent duties and abandoned me so she took me in and raised me. I flipped on him during one long session of him just going at the name calling for over an hour then he started on my grandma and I had enough, I flipped my desk over and it was on. He was about 6″ taller than me and at least 30 or 40lbs more than me and 2 years older than me. He swung at me and hit me right in the face, I was so angry I barely felt it and laughed at him (adrenaline musta been in hyperdrive), he had a pencil in his hand and swung at me with that was well but missed, I grabbed a pen off a desk and swung it at him right as he was lunging towards me. Next thing I know the teacher had pushed both of us hard to seperate us and we both fell over. My bully was holding his face and crying a lot, like that heaving cry. I saw blood on his hands. He was taken to the nurse and I was taken to the office. I was told that I had stabbed him in the eye, luckily it was the tear duct and not the eyeball itself. My grandma was called, his parents were called, the police were called. We all had a big ole talk, and the parents decided not to press charges because they already knew that their son was a major bully and I was his main target. I was in tears not cause I was in trouble but because I actually hurt someone, I have always been gentle and hurting any living thing is hard for me, and I hurt another human. The police still took a statement and I was suspended. My grandma beat the crap out of me when we got home and I ended up locking myself in my room for days until everything calmed down.

Flash forward to next year, all the bullying stopped, no one wanted to mess with me anymore, although everyone thought I was a psycho 🙁 which carried on until I move from the area.

Flash forward to my mid 20’s bully adds me on FB with an appology for years of bullying me. Decide to check out his page, he is now a she and is in a committed relationship with a man. I knew from meeting his parents they were not the type who would accept that, dad was a big burly ex football player. This changed my whole perspective on him (her) from this person was just evil and mean, to “yeah they were definitely going through some stuff in middle school”. We talked a bit and have been friendly since.

Time heals all wounds, and I am learning to let go of the past and move forward.

Tavern Meatballs and Cabbage

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8919dea0f887dec212f6fe6e3acea689

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 clove garlic, pressed
  • 1/2 cup bread crumbs
  • 3 tablespoons prepared mustard
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 medium onion, sliced
  • 1 (10 3/4 ounce) can beef broth
  • 1 cup dairy sour cream
  • 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon chopped parsley
  • 1 pound cabbage, shredded

Instructions

  1. Combine beef, garlic, crumbs, mustard, Worcestershire and salt. Form into about 25 meatballs.
  2. In a large skillet, heat oil and brown meatballs on all sides.
  3. Remove meatballs from skillet.
  4. Drain excess skillet drippings reserving 2 teaspoons.
  5. Add onions and sauté until soft.
  6. Combine beef broth, sour cream and flour. Pour into skillet.
  7. Add meatballs.
  8. Cover and simmer 30 minutes.
  9. Stir in parsley.
  10. Steam cabbage for 3 to 5 minutes until cabbage is tender-crisp.
  11. Arrange cabbage on a serving platter.
  12. Spoon meatballs over all.
  13. Serve immediately.

US War on China is a War on the Entire World

By Brian Berletic and first posted at NEO, New Eastern Outlook

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has recently claimed the US is not “looking for a crisis.” This is said, of course, with an important caveat – no crisis is sought as long as China subordinates itself to the United States.

Because China, like any other sovereign nation, based on international law, is obligated to resist foreign subordination, the US continues speeding toward inevitable war with China.

Although China has formidable military capabilities, causing doubt among many that the US will actually ever trigger war with China, the US has spent decades attempting to create and exploit a potential weakness China’s current military might may be incapable of defending against.

Washington’s Long-Running Policy of Containing China

Far from a recent policy shift by the Biden Administration, US ambitions to encircle and contain China stretch back to the end of World War 2. Even as far back as 1965 as the US waged war against Vietnam, US documents referred to a policy “to contain Communist China,” as “long-running,” and identified the fighting in Southeast Asia as necessary toward achieving this policy.

For decades the US has waged wars of aggression along China’s periphery, engaged in political interference to destabilize China’s partners as well as attempt to destabilize China itself, as well as pursued likewise long-running policies to undermine China’s economic growth and its trade with the rest of the world.

More recently, the US has begun reorganizing its entire military for inevitable war with China.

Cutting Chinese Economic Lines of Communication

In addition to fighting Chinese forces in the Asia-Pacific region, the US also has long-running plans to cut off Chinese trade around the globe.

In 2006, the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) published “String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power Across the Asia Littoral,” identifying China’s essential “sea lines of communication” (SLOC) from the Middle East to the Strait of Malacca as particularly vulnerable and subject to US primacy over Asia.

The paper argues that US primacy, and in particular, its military presence across the region, could be used as leverage for “drawing China into the community of nations as a responsible stakeholder,” a euphemism for subordinating China to US primacy. This, in turn, is in line with a wider global policy seeking to “deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”

Under a section titled, “Leveraging U.S. Military Power,” the paper argues for and expanded US military presence across the entire region, including along China’s SLOC, augmenting its existing presence in East Asia (South Korea and Japan), but also extending it to Southeast Asia and South Asia, recruiting nations like Indonesia and Bangladesh to bolster US military power over the region and thus over China.

It notes Chinese efforts to secure its SLOC, including with a mutually beneficial port project in Pakistan’s Baluchistan region, part of the larger China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the construction of a port in Sittwe, Myanmar, part of the larger China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC). Both projects seek to create alternative economic lines of communication for China, circumventing the long and vulnerable sea route through the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea.

Both projects have since come under attack by US-backed militancy with regular attacks still taking place against Chinese engineers across Pakistan and a large-scale armed conflict backed by the US currently unfolding in Myanmar which regularly sees opposition forces target Chinese-built infrastructure.

Thus, US policy has sought and has since achieved the region-wide disruption of China’s SLOC as well as efforts to circumvent choke points (CPEC/CMEC). Other potential corridors, including through the heart of Southeast Asia, have also been targeted by US interference. The Thai section of China’s high-speed railway to connect Southeast Asia to China has been significantly delayed by the US-backed political opposition openly trying to cancel the project.

In many ways, the US has already created a crisis for China, albeit through proxies.

Targeting Chinese Maritime Shipping

Under the guise of protecting “freedom of navigation,” the US Navy has positioned its warships and military aviation around the world’s most important maritime passages including the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East and the South China Sea – the east approach to the Strait of Malacca – along with plans to establish a significant naval presence on the Strait’s west approach.

The US realizes that Chinese military power is extensive enough to significantly complicate, if not outright defeat, US military aggression along Chinese coasts. The US instead imagines targeting China far beyond the reach of its warplanes and missile forces.

The US Naval Institute published, “Prize Law Can Help the United States Win the War of 2026,” the third place entry in the “Future of Naval Warfare Essay Contest.” It warns that a “close naval blockage” is infeasible due to China’s formidable anti-access area-denial (A2AD) capabilities.

It instead argues for:

…a distant blockade—“intercept[ing] Chinese merchant shipping at key maritime chokepoints” outside China’s A2/AD reach—would be generally sustainable; flexible in tempo and location; pose manageable risks of escalation; and impede China’s resource-hungry, import-dependent war effort.

Part of this “distant blockade” would be a campaign of targeting, seizing, and repurposing Chinese shipping vessels to augment the US’ lagging shipbuilding capabilities and the dearth of maritime resources it has created.

Far from a random essay representing a purely speculative strategy, the US has already taken steps to implement its “distant blockade.” The entire US Marine Corps has been tailored solely to wage war against Chinese shipping across the Asia-Pacific and beyond.

The BBC in its 2023 article, “How US Marines are being reshaped for China threat,” would report:

The new plan sees the Marines as fighting dispersed operations across chains of islands. Units will be smaller, more spread out, but packing a much bigger punch through a variety of new weapons systems.

The “new weapons systems” are primarily anti-shipping missiles. Operating on islands and in littoral regions, the US Marines have been transformed into a force almost solely for disrupting Chinese shipping.

Together with plans to seize Chinese vessels, the US has positioned itself not as a global protector of “freedom of navigation,” but the greatest threat to it. Considering China’s status as the largest trade partner of nations around the globe, US plans to target Chinese shipping isn’t a threat to only China, but to global economic prosperity as a whole.

US War with China is War with the World

The danger of Washington’s desire for war with China and implementing its “distant blockade” to strangle China’s economy into ruins is a danger for the entire world. While preventing the global economic damage this strategy will cause after it is put into motion may be impossible, targeting the various components the US is using to encircle and contain China ahead of this conflict is possible.

US political interference and the political as well as armed opposition it has created and is using to cut China’s various economic lines of communication, can be exposed and uprooted by national and regional security initiatives.

Securing national and regional information space is the simplest and most effective way to cut the US off from the populations it seeks to influence and turn against targeted nations to achieve the political and security crises it uses to threaten trade between China and its partners. Passing and enforcing laws targeting, exposing, and uprooting US interference, including the funding of opposition parties, organizations, and media platforms by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is also essential.

Recent moves by the US to target foreign media organizations and their alleged cooperation with American citizens has created a convenient pretext for other nations to cite when targeting and uprooting NED-funded activity.

While taking these steps will have their own consequences, including retaliation from the US itself, the alternative – allowing the US to prepare and eventually carry out its “distant blockade” against China and its global trade partners – will be even more consequential.

Only time will tell if the emerging multipolar world is capable of seeing and solving this future crisis the US has spent decades preparing to create, or if the political leadership in Southeast and South Asia will fear short-term consequences at the expense of allowing and thus suffering catastrophic consequences in the intermediate future.


Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Every day before I leave for work, I wave good bye to my 2 year old daughter.

After pretending to leave, I would close the door, wait for few seconds, then open the door again to give her a flying kiss from the door and leave.

This routine surprise makes her smile as she enjoys the little game of ours everyday.

However, today, I had an urgent meeting to attend and was super late for work.

So, I just waved her good bye, closed the door and left.

As I climbed downstairs, I could feel a sense of guilt slowly engrossing my mind.

“She will surely be waiting for me to surprise her. Should I go back?

I can’t else I’ll be late. She will understand. Will she? ”

With these thoughts in mind, I reached downstairs and approached my cab.

Just as I was about to board it, something struck my mind.

“Wait for a few minutes, I forgot something” I told my driver and rushed back upstairs.

As I opened the door, I saw her, still waiting for the surprise with anticipating eyes.

Her expressions changed as she saw me.

She was ecstatic and gave a broad smile. I hugged her and asked for a sweet good bye kiss.

I was so glad I came back.

main qimg 71a93da077a6d48edfa9874073b4ff9c
main qimg 71a93da077a6d48edfa9874073b4ff9c

Davy Knowles w/BAND OF FRIENDS – Tattoo’d Lady/Bad Penny/Shadowplay – 4/12/18

Davy Knowles is some Hell of a savant with this lead guitar stuff.

Playing “Rory Gallagher” tunes with his old band. Now called “Band of Friends”.

The once pretty became the now blight

Not a country, but a city:

I’ll never visit Berlin again.

When I was in college, I did a semester in London. Halfway through the term, my friends and I decided we’d take a Eurotrip to Amsterdam, Berlin, and Hamburg.

Amsterdam was a blast. I was asleep for most of Hamburg. (We stayed awake the entire night before.) But the most disappointing part of the trip was Berlin.

The city itself, the food, the history, was great. But what drove me away was the people. (Literally.) The Germans didn’t allow me into any of their clubs. (Except this one club that’s apparently super lame because it’s only for tourists.) I was there with three girls and another guy. We tried four places. The bouncers always let the girls in, but never me or my American male counterpart.

But here’s the kicker:

My biggest reason I wanted to go, pay for a flight, AirBnB, etc. was to go to the clubs. I was enrolled in music school at the time, and was really interested in electronic music. (Okay, I was obsessed.) And I knew Berlin was known for having some of the best electronic music in the world.

I was so excited, I did a bunch of research beforehand to learn how to behave so that the bouncers would approve of me. I wore all black. I stayed off my phone. I even remained silent.

But it wasn’t enough.

My passport gave me away. No one let me in anywhere, and I was really broken up about it. I had never really experienced rejection like that before. It’s a good thing my buddy was there.

He felt sorry for me, so we stayed up the whole night drinking beer and playing chess. He beat me every time, but I still had so much fun. The next day, we woke up around noon. The girls went to a museum, or memorial or something. My buddy and I spent the rest of the day at the Berlin Zoo until they closed.

I’m never going back 😉

One of my school bullies punched me in the back of the neck. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in 2022 I filed for worker’s comp because my neck started really hurting me. Turns out I have:

  • stenosis
  • arthritis
  • a partially-healed fractured disc

Since all of this was clearly old injuries and degenerative, I lost my worker’s comp claim. Over the years, in hindsight, I should have known something was wrong.

It was 2006 when I was punched, and I moved to Australia in 2016.

In 2010 and 2011, when I was in college, I was an Army ROTC cadet for two years before I got discharged for unrelated medical issues. I did notice that the back of my neck often hurt a lot when I wore a helmet…

Thanks to new regulations, cars started getting pokier head rests that either pushed your head forward, or forced you to set the seat back. New head rests always hurt my neck.

It wasn’t until I got a job at a warehouse though, as an order selector, moving thousands of pounds of alcohol a day that my neck really started playing up. I found I couldn’t turn my head, even driving was very dangerous. I am now on painkillers so strong that every 6 months or so they test my kidneys to make sure I’m not getting killed by them. They’re non-opioid painkillers. Basically Celebrex and a super strong version of Tylenol, both for extremely old people.

Back to my bully… I started thinking about it, and I realised there was a greater than 0% chance this guy, back in the USA, was a millionaire wangster rap star. Maybe I could sue him?

I looked him up, and was startled, though not surprised, to see an adult version of his face, in a news article, wearing a prison jumpsuit.

I am definitely not expecting a lump sum payout.

China & Russia JUST Hit U.S. Where It HURTS… & U.S. Didn’t Expect THIS!

Dale Dye is a retired Marine officer who’s gotten rich as a technical advisor for military-themed movies. He founded Warriors, Inc. If you’re making a war movie, you get this guy to train your actors to behave like actual soldiers.

One of the movies he worked on was Forrest Gump. They asked him about Gump’s chances as a real soldier, and this is what he said: Forrest Gump is the ideal private because he does exactly what you tell him to.

Forrest Gump is also the ideal trainee. If a drill sergeant were to hand him, say, a footlocker layout Gump is going to set his locker up EXACTLY the way it says to. When the drill sergeant hands him a grenade he will throw it exactly the way they tell him to. He will march the way they tell him to. His uniform will be up to snuff. When we shined boots his boots would always be perfect. He will always remember to sweep, mop, wax and buff the floor. If he’s told to fall out for formation at 0630 he’ll be there. And he’d notice that the more precisely he did all these things the less the drills will yell at him.

What you DON’T want to do is put him in combat arms. He’d wind up getting his platoon killed. He’d be a hell of a Service and Supply soldier. If you tell Forrest Gump that you need an airdrop pallet built with 48 water cans, 50 cases of MREs and ten cases of ammo…that pallet is going to be built so pretty and squared away that the riggers only have to put a net and a parachute on it before they take it to the plane. They’ll never have to restack it. A more intelligent soldier, you might have to tell him the ammo and water go on first and the MREs on top of that so the weight of the heavier items don’t crush the MREs when the pallet lands; Gump is going to put the MREs on top because his sergeant told him to.

Neocons Want MBS Gone

Shorpy

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An ingenious man was able to turn a red paper clip into a house.

In 2005, Kyle MacDonald had no job, but wanted to live in a house. With limited options for saving money, he concocted an unorthodox plan.

Beginning with a red paper clip on his desk in Montreal, he would attempt to trade the seemingly useless item for something better. He would keep trading up until he reached his goal.

For his first step, he posted the red paper clip in the ‘Barter’ section on Craigslist. From Kyle MacDonald’s book, sourced below:

one red paperclip

This might not surprise you, but below is a picture of a paperclip. It is red.

This red paperclip is currently sitting on my desk next to my computer. I want to trade this paperclip with you for something bigger or better, maybe a pen, a spoon, or perhaps a boot.

If you promise to make the trade I will come and visit you, wherever you are, to trade.

Hope to trade with you soon!

Kyle

PS – I’m going to make a continuous chain of ‘up trades’ until I get a house. Or an Island. Or a house on an island. You get the idea.

Through a dogged and brilliant series of 14 trades over the course of one year (and greatly helped by later news and publicity of his quest), Kyle was able to successfully transform the paperclip into a new home:

  1. Paper clip for Fish-shaped pen.
  2. Fish-shaped pen for a hand-sculpted doorknob.
  3. Doorknob for a Coleman camp stove (with fuel).
  4. Camp stove for a Honda generator.
  5. Generator for an “instant party”: an empty keg, a beer-filling IOU for, and a neon Budweiser sign.
  6. “Instant party” for a snowmobile.
  7. Snowmobile for a two-person trip to British Columbia.
  8. Trip for a cube van.
  9. Cube van for a recording contract with Metalworks.
  10. Recording contract for a year’s rent in Phoenix, Arizona.
  11. Year’s rent for one afternoon with Alice Cooper.
  12. Alice Cooper afternoon for a KISS motorized snow globe.
  13. KISS motorized snow globe to Corbin Bernsen (a large collector of snow globes) for a role in the film Donna on Demand.
  14. Movie role for a two-story farmhouse in Kipling, Saskatchewan.

Kyle wrote a book about his experience, and even earned a place in the Guiness Book of World Records for “Most Successful Internet Trade.”

I met this girl, Courtney, in 1999. She grew up and went to school in Buffalo, NY and I was going to school in California. We met in Michigan, at a summer program for math majors. (For foreign readers, the only thing you need to know about the geography is that all those places are very far from the others.)

It was what I call “indifference at first sight.” We met each other in the context of meeting all the eight or so student participants in the program. We got along fine, but there were definitely no romantic sparks flying. As a group, we all really got along great. Two months later, when the program was over, we all kept up with each other.

(This is more remarkable than it sounds, at least because back then there was no such thing as facebook. “Kept up with each other” meant we actually emailed or — shockingly — talked on the phone.)

About a year later, I sent an email to the group saying how I’d be going to Penn State for grad school. Courtney instantly replied, saying she would also be going to Penn State for a one-semester program. Small world! We arranged to have dinner shortly after we both arrived.

Now the romantic sparks flew. By the end of the semester, in December 2000, we were properly dating. But, alas, the semester ended and she went back to Buffalo. For foreign readers, Penn State and Buffalo are separated by about a 3–4 hour drive. However, I didn’t have a car, so for me the quickest way to visit was by an 8 hour meandering bus ride. We carried on, long distance. Despite my lack of car, my schedule was such that it was a lot easier for me to visit her than the other way around. So every other weekend (or so) I would be on that bus.

Long distance relationships aren’t that great. Maybe not in all cases, but for us, there was a pressure to really make the most out of each visit. We never really just hung around together lounging on the couch. We filled the whole weekend with stuff to do. It was fun, but it was also a little exhausting.

Too exhausting, in fact. By the time February rolled around, I was ready to call it quits. Not because Courtney had done anything wrong, and it’s not that I didn’t enjoy myself when I visited. It was just… exhausting. So one weekend in late February, I decided we’d have “the talk.”

But the timing is important. You can’t show up on Friday and start with the talk, otherwise the rest of the weekend is ruined. It has to be on Sunday, before my bus ride back. She had planned Sunday breakfast with her parents. Ugh, not ideal, but fine. So we get through that very awkward breakfast, and now she’s driving me to the bus station.

There’s that moment of silence when we have clearly transitioned from talking about whatever we were talking about, and I’m mentally firming myself up to start. Man, I hope I don’t make her too sad. Just as I’m about to begin, she says, “So… hey… listen… “

And then she breaks up with me!

She was thinking all the same things I was. We had a good laugh at that, had a nice hug, and she sent me on my way. We both resolved to still be friends.

The epilogue:

We continued talking on the phone after that — because that’s what friends do. In fact, she even went to visit me at Penn State. Because that’s what friends do.

At some point, we crossed into territory that definitely doesn’t involve what friends do. We were briefly in this awkward ill-defined relationship status, but by June, we were pretty much properly dating again. We resolved to fix the long distance problem. Different scenarios were discussed, and ultimately we ended up moving to Boston.

We got married in 2005.

Putting a man on the moon is not indicative of US superiority.

Today, the world has two superpowers: the USA and China. This is why they are frequently compared.

In most respects, China is ahead of the USA. China is the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity. China surpasses the USA in most technological fields. China has much greater diplomatic influence globally, thanks to the BRI and BRICS. China has a far more effective political system and with far greater support from the people. China has the world’s largest army and the world’s largest navy. China is a major nuclear power and can deliver warheads using hypersonic missiles.

China has 232X the shipbuilding capacity of the USA!!!

Yes, I have. I owned and operated a very successful employment agency for about 20 years. And during that time I met thousands of people in all walks of life and individuals who were at all levels of intelligence, from borderline moronic to high level genius (I also advertised in the Mensa local news magazine/letter for applicants).

I sometimes gave a version of the Wonderlic test, a 50 question, 12 minute, I.Q. test to applicants. Not to all applicants, just some.

This one individual came to my office fresh from college. He was dressed in a full three piece suit. Had never worked before, and was looking for an entry job in bookkeeping, although he had a bachelor’s degree in accounting. He didn’t come from my Mensa advertising. Since he didn’t have any work experience, I wanted to place him with one of the big 8 recognizable accounting firms. But I needed more information than just a college degree to get him the interview.

I gave him one of the six versions of the Wonderlic that I had. He finished the questions in 10 minutes instead of 12. When I scored it, I gulped. He got a 45 which in those days, 1980, was equivalent to an I.Q. of about 145.

The young man was shy, quiet, and nice. No intellectual arrogance about him. Even his vocabulary was average and not peppered with ten dollar words. I couldn’t believe this guy had a genius I.Q. I tested him with a 2nd. and 3rd. version of the test. The same, between 45 and 47, to give him as high as 148 or 150 I.Q. (At the time the ceiling for a score of 50 was around 153, which included scores of 48–50)

The individual was a genius! I made up a resume of his background, which was limited, but did put in his GPA, which was 4.0 in accounting courses, but “B” grades in practically everything else. Naturally, I was successful placing him in a job.

Today he may be retired because in 1980 he was 23 years old, but I’ll bet with his background, and I.Q., that he either ended up as a controller, CEO, or just remained as an auditor because he liked it and devoted his time to his family and not to advancing and sacrificing for a career. And I’ll also bet, since he was so self effacing, that he went through life not realizing he was so very intelligent (I did tell him what his Wonderlic scores were, but he didn’t believe me when I told him that he was extraordinarily intelligent.

These are the things that can stop you from getting a cabin crew job:

  • Age. Airlines have age requirements, to join the airline. The normal age requirements most airlines have are 18 years old to 21 years old. Don’t forget that you can be ‘’too old’’ to join as well. Sadly a lot of ME/Asian airlines are ageist. Most of the ME/Asian airlines prefer to hire candidates below the age of 30 years old. But thankfully EU/US/AUS/CA airlines are not ageist.
  • Height. Airlines have height requirements. This is because of safety reasons. If you are for example 155cm, it will be difficult for you to find an airline that would hire you. During the recruitment process, there will be a height test, etc.
  • Education. Most airlines want their candidates to at least have a completed high school diploma. If you don’t have a high school diploma, you won’t be able to get a job.
  • Weight/health. If you are not fit to fly and don’t have a healthy BMI, you won’t get the job. Your weight has to be in proportion to your height. During the recruitment, the recruiters will judge you. I say ”judge” because the recruiters are brutal when it comes to the way you look. Also during the training, your health will be checked.
  • Skin. As crazy as this sounds, a lot of airlines don’t hire people that for example have severe acne or skin issues. Issues that would be visible. Image is everything to these airlines. A lot of people forget that crew members act as some kind of ”PR” for the airlines. Crew members are ‘’brand ambassadors’’ for the airlines. That is why the airlines are super strict with the way their crew looks like.
  • Criminal background. Before you get the job, there will be a background check. If you don’t pass it, you won’t get the job.
  • Passport. For example, a Brazilian national can’t work for Airfrance in France if that person doesn’t have the legal right to live and work in France. You have to have a valid passport. Some airlines offer crew, work visas, doesn’t matter what nationality you have. For example, the airlines in the Middle East do that. Other than that you have to have the legal right to live and work in that country if you want to get a cabin crew job.
  • Medical history. Some airlines are strict with candidates’ medical histories. For example, many airlines don’t hire people with depression. Doesn’t matter if they have it now or had it before. If someone had a specific illness, even if it is healed and cured now, the airlines won’t accept that. For example, if you have any kind of sleeping issues, previous or current. Even if it is sorted out and you no longer have sleeping issues, you won’t get the job. Before you get the job you have to fill out medical forms.
  • Teeth. Yes, your teeth matter. To smile is one of your duties being a cabin crew. You have to have a nice smile. If you have issues with your teeth, for example, crooked teeth, you won’t get hired. Some airlines don’t even allow braces. Many airlines require dental x-rays before you join.
  • Vision/hearing. You have to fill out a medical form before you join. If you have issues with those, you are out. Your vision and hearing will also be checked during the medical exams during training. If you don’t pass the vision and hearing tests, you will be terminated. So better to check before you get the job.
  • Swimming. You have to know how to swim. If you don’t know how to swim, you won’t be able to get the job. There will be a ditching test during the training. You can’t have a fear of water etc.
  • Scars/marks. If you have deep surgery scars or marks, and it would be visible when wearing the uniform, then you won’t be able to get a job. Some airlines are super strict with the way their crew members look like.
  • Fear of flying. I know a girl who had a fear of flying, to what degree I don’t know. She went on with recruitment and got the job. The instructors found out during training. When they were having training in the simulators. She got fired.
  • Headscarf/hijab. Many airlines don’t allow this. For example, the airline Saudia did allow headscarves with their previous uniform. Their previous uniform looked like this:

main qimg b975069d2155869232a03a3ff714801a lq
main qimg b975069d2155869232a03a3ff714801a lq

Their cabin crew were allowed to wear a headscarf/hijab. But this year, they changed their uniform to this:

main qimg 64e213815a7a6bca9d240051ccf3b9b7 lq
main qimg 64e213815a7a6bca9d240051ccf3b9b7 lq

Now, with their new uniform, I don’t know what they did about their headscarf rules.

  • Tattoos. Most airlines are OK with candidates having tattoos, but as long as it is not visible when in uniform. If you for example have tattoos on your legs or arms, you won’t be able to get the job. I know many candidates who had visible tattoos but removed them to get the job.
  • Beard. If you have a beard like this:

main qimg 8b2597a6629c4f33147c97f8fc6cf4c6 lq
main qimg 8b2597a6629c4f33147c97f8fc6cf4c6 lq

If you are not willing to shave it, you won’t get the job. Many airlines are super strict with beards. With some airlines, you are not even allowed to have a beard like that. You have to be clean-shaven at all times, during duty. Some airlines allow their male crew members to have a beard. For example, they allow this:

main qimg 4640986e412619741b1ed70da11b7031 lq
main qimg 4640986e412619741b1ed70da11b7031 lq

With some airlines even during recruitment, if you come with a beard for your interview, they will disqualify you.

  • Hair color/hairstyle. For example, you are not allowed to have this hair color:

main qimg c00fd9edd8b31fb4706fc6d8d8e6243a lq
main qimg c00fd9edd8b31fb4706fc6d8d8e6243a lq

If you go like this for a cabin crew interview, you will not get the job. They have strict rules with hairstyles and hair colors. Even if you had your hair up in a neat bun like this:

main qimg 4d2a4c1400bd415ee49d1072bbca42cb lq
main qimg 4d2a4c1400bd415ee49d1072bbca42cb lq

That is still not allowed.

So many crazy and silly rules. Some rules are of course there for safety and security. Some rules I understand and I am happy that they have those rules. But for example the age rule. That is truly sad. A lot of airlines are ageist. Many things that can disqualify you during the recruitment process or in training. Even if you pass the entire recruitment process, you need to pass the training as well.

So many things to think of before you apply for the job.

Scott Ritter: Russia’s GLOVES ARE OFF as Putin Readies NATO’s Crushing Defeat, WWIII Next

The snipers that were killed during the Bosnian War died in very different ways:

One sniper in our platoon got shot in the head by an enemy rifle, most probably from another sniper.

An enemy sniper jumped from a high building when he discovered that we had located his position and were about to catch him alive.

Snipers were the most hated soldiers on the battlefield and when they were caught alive, they usually didn’t live very long.

We also lost a sniper when a tank shot at the house where he was positioned. A wall collapsed over him and he died immediately. It’s often overlooked that a tank makes the perfect anti-sniper weapon.

Most snipers, however, died through indirect fire from the artillery. The artillery is the number one killer on the battlefield and snipers are no exception. From all artillery weapons, the mortar is probably the most effective one against snipers.

In other conflicts, snipers also get killed by airstrikes and more and more often by anti-tank missiles. Like the tank, a modern anti-tank missile is extremely accurate over long distances and therefore, it is perfectly suited to combat a relatively small target, for example, a sniper.

I moved some of the visual narratives around, and changed the forum from making coffee to “holding a carved stone statue” and the location being a “bedroom”. Very interesting results.

Many imperfections, but very interesting and curious.

So it started out with a lot of kissing on the bed. No statue. But not too bad.

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)

Some soft nudes.

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(4)

And then everyone started kissing everyone else.

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(4)

And then things got heated up.

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(4)

And confusing…

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 5(2)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(3)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 5(1)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 7(1)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 6(1)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(2)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(2)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 5

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 7

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(1)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(1)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2

All are aesthetically pleasing, but none appeals to me. I am not searching for nudes and a lot of bed action. But I have taken note that you have to be very careful on what is written, and things can be misinterpreted with the strangest slight elements of sentence structure variation.

And I have no idea where the statue went.

Russia is militarily strong. Putin has tight, tight, very tight security from Russia while traveling abroad.

Mongolia’s police is not capable of arresting Putin. Neither is Mongolia’s army. That is reality.

ICC is NOT part of UN.

ICC works for members who have signed the Rome statute.

As of 2023, there are 123 members. USA, China, Russia, India, Israel & more are not members. But ICC still will help its member to sue a non-member.

The 2023 ruling against Putin in Ukraine war is not issued by UN or UN Security Council.

ICC consists of 18 judges who are elected by ICC members only; not UN.

Mongolia was within the circle of USSR before USSR collapsed.

Mongolia is between Russia & China. Though USA tries to put its hands in Mongolia, it makes sense that Mongolia joins the BRI project (pipeline) to link Russia, Mongolia & China together. To make money together.

Joining US politics only makes Mongolia poor & technological behind. Look around the world.

Try that on US supreme court? Not that lucky. Because US police or army can arrest you.

Stuffed Banana Peppers

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450c89bd1ed71f1933d840781e1518bb

Ingredients

Peppers

  • 24 banana peppers, washed, seeded and sliced in half lengthwise

Meat Mixture

  • 3 pounds ground meat
  • 3 pounds bulk Italian sausage
  • 5 eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups seasoned bread crumbs or bread cubes
  • 1 1/2 cups Romano cheese, + extra to sprinkle
  • 1 small diced onion
  • Garlic powder, to taste
  • Black pepper, to taste
  • Seasoned salt, to taste
  • Spaghetti sauce

Instructions

  1. Mix the ground meat, sausage, eggs, bread crumbs, cheese and onion.
  2. Season with garlic, black pepper and seasoned salt to taste. Mix well again.
  3. Fill banana peppers with meat mixture.
  4. Lay on a wax paper-covered tray and cover with plastic wrap, place in freezer until frozen firm; transfer to freezer bags until ready to use.
  5. Remove peppers from freezer and place evenly in a disposable aluminum casserole pan.
  6. Pour spaghetti sauce over peppers and bake at 325 degrees F for 1 hour.

1.) Begpackers

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main qimg 217ba668c718e433d13fbe546a2cd5b6 lq

(picture from MSN.com)

Begpacker, a.k.a. begging backpackers. Foreigners who think they can just sit down on the streets and ask for money from locals / other people, because they either overstayed their budget and cannot pay for longer accommodation, and think that the locals are kind enough to spare them a few bucks so they can continue to “travel the world”. The picture above enrages me because, what? “Help us travel around the world”? Why should we help you?

The picture is taken in Bali. I am from Indonesia (a country with a passport that only offers ~70 visa-free destinations) and let me tell you about the process of being able to travel to countries in the West (the tourist pictured above is most likely from one of those countries): It is tough. We have to prove that we have sufficient amount of money, that we have a stable income, that we have strong ties to our home country. We have to prove that we will not be a burden to the country we want to travel to. If not, our applications will be instantly rejected.

Meanwhile, these begpackers are abusing the lax travel rules and use it to their own advantage, burdening the locals and abusing their kindness and hospitality.

2.) Being disrespectful at historical monuments / sites

When I was studying in New York, I went down to the 9/11 Memorial site on September 11th to see what the situation looked like. I was born 2 years before 9/11 happened so while I didn’t personally witness it as I was too young to remember, I had family relatives living in NYC at that time that witnessed it in real time. I wanted to pay respects to the victims. I went down alone, and mostly kept my phone in my bag except for taking the picture above. Upon arriving, I saw a family of tourists huddled together, leaning back on the name plates (like in the picture above) and smiling widely while taking a selfie with a selfie stick. Around them were people standing in silence, clearly mourning, and some of them were in tears. The names on those metal plates are of real people, real victims.

How could someone be as ignorant and oblivious to what was happening around them that they’d take a picture for their personal amusement while hundreds of people around them are in mourning? And no, it wasn’t just that family of tourists that were doing it. There were many tourists at the memorial, on September 11th out of all dates, taking selfies, smiling and posing.

This can also apply to tourists who pose, smile, and take “cool” selfies at other sites like the Auschwitz concentration camp, or sacred sites like temples, etc. I wish some tourists could just read the room, and could tell if a certain action/activity could be deemed inappropriate.

3.) Blocking the way for others for the sake of a photo op.

Fyi, I am a tourist myself! I love seeing places I’ve never seen before, documenting things I find beautiful, and traveling to historical or cultural places. But please, know when it is appropriate to do some things you want to do, and when it is inappropriate to do so. Don’t cause congestion on a busy street, don’t be disrespectful at memorial sites, and please, don’t be a begpacker.

ETA: Some people disagree on my stance on begpackers. “If you don’t want to give your money, then don’t.” The thing is, the kind locals would. Southeast Asians are known for their kindness and hospitality, and probably just want to help. Another sad part is that you have literal local beggars on the streets begging for food/money because they are actually poor. Then you have a privileged first world tourist who think that travelling is a must for them, not a privilege. I think that’s outrageous. Travel according to your budget. Don’t become a burden to the locals.

As for annoying tourists and photo ops: the picture above is in The Bronx, between residential buildings. Could you imagine peacefully living in your apartment, then to find out the next day that it became a tourist attraction? Wouldn’t it be bothersome? “But people adjust! Live and let live!” Well, I know for sure I wouldn’t like it if I lived there.

People are entitled to have their own opinion, and so am I. Cheers 🙂

One greedy person can make life Hell for the rest of us

I was stuck in India for about a year without being able to leave.

When my wife was pregnant I went to the local Foreigner Regional Registration Office and was told that we should be fine overstaying our visas by a few weeks (to allow her more rest after labor) if I brought in a note from the doctor and the birth certificate.

She gave birth, and I did what they said.

“Okay. Now you must wait,” they said. Fair enough.

I called every week but every time was told that the permits we would need in order to leave were not ready.

In the meantime I cancelled our non-refundable AirAsia flight.

After a couple of months, it was clear that we were not going to get our permits to leave anytime soon.

“Your case had been forwarded to the central government in Delhi,” I was told by the office. “We can’t do anything for you.”

“Oh… Then what do I do now? Who can I talk to?”

“You can’t talk to them. You have to wait…”

Wow.

And so we lived in a state of limbo and uncertainty for many months, moving from house to house with a small baby because we didn’t know when we would leave.

Our families were worried. It was horrible. I got in touch with the US embassy but that didn’t help.

Finally, a friend introduced me to a friend of his, a man who worked for the government. He pulled some strings, and after a couple of weeks we had our exit permits.

I cannot describe the relief I felt. It’s like being in a place you love, but being trapped there. The place becomes a prison, and you don’t know when you’ll be able to leave. And there’s no sentence which tells you how long your imprisonment will last. You just have to wait. In my case, it was a year. Twelve months.

I thanked the man a gazillion times, and soon we were out of India. Phew.

China’s Diplomacy, Geopolitics, Defense

By the great Godfree Roberts

Diplomacy

“China’s overall strategy is not to collide head-on but to maintain strategic composure and, by continuously enhance its strength, exhaust the opponent’s power, thereby increasing its comprehensive control over the USA… This comprehensive control is not merely the combined use of control over land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace in traditional warfare but a competition for comprehensive dominance in areas like trade, industrial technology, finance, and cognitive warfare in an ‘unrestricted total war’ (无边界总体战)… China’s strategic thinking differs from the West, not resembling the confrontational approach of chess but the long-term game of Go—in which strategic advantage is built over time through a dynamic balance of power.”

Australian Ambassador Ross Garnaut: “America would be damaged by war with China over the status of Taiwan, but, short of a major nuclear exchange debilitating both great powers, its sovereignty would not be at risk. Australia’s would be. Indeed, I doubt that Australia could survive as a sovereign entity the isolation from most of Asia that would be likely to follow anything other than a decisive and quick US victory in a war in which our military was engaged”.

The National Endowment for Democracy: What It Is and What It Does. The Foreign Ministry says the NED acts as the U.S. government’s “white gloves,” subverting state power, meddling in other countries’ internal affairs, inciting division and confrontation, misleading public opinion, and conducting ideological infiltration—all under the guise of promoting democracy.

The Zimbabwe president visiting BYD Headquarters and realized that heads of African states are in China for the 9th FOCAC (Forum on China–Africa Cooperation). I spent a long time looking at the current state of China & Africa Cooperation. Let’s take a look at what I found.

NED has long colluded with anti-China forces, including Jimmy Lai. In 2020, the NED set up multiple projects related to Hong Kong in its funding list, totalling more than $310,000, to provide support for the Hong Kong rioters. In 2023, the NED collaborated with the British NGO “Hong Kong Watch” and Amnesty International, as well as anti-China politicians in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, to nominate Jimmy Lai for the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize.

America is, geopolitically, trying to punch China at one end of the bar, and getting punched 30 times before it can get there. Their military is too weak to take the field in Russia, their Navy is too weak to beat Yemen and their Air Force can only bomb innocents and misses the heroes of Hamas entirely. America is an old drunk brawler, covered in blood and piss and just embarrassing itself. Its current military strategy makes as much sense as Scarface’s home security. Scarface died so coked up that his body kept firing. That’s America right now, braindead and running on pure muscle memory.

An NHK (Japan’s national broadcaster) announcer told his audience, “The Diaoyu Islands and their affiliated islands have been Chinese territory since ancient times. I protest NHK’s historical revisionism and unprofessional work behavior.” He continued in English:”Don’t forget the Nanjing Massacre, don’t forget the comfort women, they were sex slaves during the war. Don’t forget Unit 731.”   NHK fired the Chinese employee of 22 years and threatened him with criminal charges.

Geopolitics

The largest tanker ever on Russia’s Northern Sea Route, the 164,565 dwt Prisma, carrying a million barrels of oil, departed from the Baltic port of Ust-Luga on August 10 and will reach Tianjin in 35 days–compared to 45 days for the Suez Canal and 55 days via the Cape of Africa.

Constructing the new Funan Techo Canal, Cambodia: 10 km completed by 17th. day. The Chinese contractor sent 2,500 large machines to work day and night. The US took 10yrs to build the Panama Canal, which opened in 1914, and which is 100km shorter than the Techo Canal. The Techo Canal is estimated to cost $1.7B. The Panama Canal cost $8.6B in 2024 dollars.

The recent, abortive color revolution in Thailand coincides with the stunning success of the hastily staged color revolution in Bangladesh and the fall of the Myanmar army’s Northeast Command in Lashio to the MNDAA. American and British “volunteers” have been fighting the Myanmar military though Myanmar has not experienced seen a wave of international volunteers like Ukraine or Syria.

In the past six years, 250 US scientists – most of Asian descent – have been identified as having failed to disclose overlapping funding or research in China, or having broken other rules. There were only two indictments and three convictions as legal outcomes of those investigations, yet 112 scientists lost their jobs as a result.

Türkiye has formally applied to join BRICS. Türkiye seeks to enhance its global influence and establish new alliances beyond its traditional Western partners, according to Bloomberg BRICS members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, UAE, Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia.

China has party secretaries aboard oceangoing vessels. This report focuses on the ship political commissar, a Party representative assigned to oceangoing merchant ships, particularly within state-owned shipping enterprises, to carry out political and administrative work in the management of ship crews.

Serbia should pick BRICS over Brussels, Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin has said in an interview with Russian media. The largest republic of the former Yugoslavia applied for EU membership in 2009 and has been a candidate since 2012, but the bloc has recently demanded recognition of the breakaway province of Kosovo as a condition for membership. “BRICS does not ask anything of Serbia and offers more than we could want. The EU asks of us everything, and I’m no longer sure what it has to offer. We see BRICS as an opportunity and an alternative. Serbia is very closely investigating all the possibilities presented by BRICS and closer cooperation with its member states.” According to Vulin, Serbia is expecting an official invitation to the BRICS October summit in Kazan, Russia.

The footprints of the two global economic power blocs were roughly equal in 2020. China and its BRICS allies are increasingly the world economy’s richest bloc. Nothing prepared the populations of Western capitalism for this changed reality or its effects. Especially the sections of those populations already forced to absorb the costly burdens of Western capitalism’s decline feel betrayed, abandoned, and angry. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza testify to that denial and exemplify the costly strategic mistakes it produces.

The battleground won’t be in the Global South, where the US has very much lost to China, especially in Africa and Latin America. It won’t be in the Indo-Pacific either, where few countries want to take sides. It will be in Europe, where the US has most of its allies and where China is the largest trading partner. Even if America’s decline is gradual, it cannot afford a global military presence.That Europe takes China as a partner, competitor and systemic rival at the same time says more about Europe’s confusion about China than what China really is.

Defense

China launches its first nuclear-powered guided missile submarine, the Type 093B, …

I was an Office Manager for a collision repair center for a few years. We had a Mitsubishi Montero towed in from a bad accident that sat over a hot weekend.

The smell was awful. The spare tire was missing from the back. Pieces of teeth, tissue and bone were stuck on it. Lots of flies. The car had a suitcase, computer and other property in it.

We were told by the insurance agent that the car belonged to a long time customer who fell in love with a girl in the Philippines right out of school. He could not afford to bring her with him when he moved to California. He worked two jobs for a few years and saved money to bring her to the state to marry her.

He picked her up from the airport. She was excited! Never been to California before. They blew a tire on the freeway. She was pacing behind him on her cell phone talking to his sister. He removed the spare from the back of the car and was on his knees taking it off when a drunk driver going 65 mph hit them.

The drunk drivers car had struck her, pushed her into him and smashed his head near the spare tire holder on the back of the car. He died instantly. Pieces of his skull, jaw bone & teeth were pressed into the vehicle. She however was still alive and on the phone. She remained alive for a long time while rescue efforts continued. She died when the other drivers car was removed.

Her luggage was in the car. Her parents where flying out to collect her things. The receptionist and I had to remove her things and make a list for them. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

This Sea Is the Most Mysterious in the World

You never put down your gun.

That is Hollywood nonsense. If someone is holding a hostage, cops never surrender their weapon. Doing so turns the cop or whomever is responding into just another victim. You can read numerous answers by real cops to the effect here.

Would the police drop their weapons if someone is held at gunpoint?

Now me personally? Oh fuck no.

Him: Drop the gun or she’s dead!

Me: Son, you catastrophically misunderstand the situation you’ve put yourself in. Right now, she’s the only thing keeping you alive. There is no way in heaven or hell I’m putting my gun down, and if you hurt her I will kill you. No ifs ands or buts. I’m sure the coroner will explain to the judge how you tripped and fell face-first onto a pile of .45ACP bullets. Put the knife down, and you may just survive this.

Now, I can reliably hit a clay pigeon out to 25 yards. If we’re within that distance, I don’t need to get closer to shoot him in the face. Farther out…yeah, I’m less sure of that shot. Unless I have a rifle.

Bottom line, you never ever put your gun down. That’s just a good way to get both of you murdered. Make sure the bad guy understands he’s in a might-die/will-die situation. If he leaves her be, he might die. He might get arrested. He might escape. But if he hurts her, he will die.

Interesting

Don’t know if this was posted here previously, from “Globalism is Economic Slavery” on one of those websites b doesn’t like too much because their articles generate endless controversy. Its the life the West looks forward to.

He has never owned anything. He rents his bedroom, his furnishings, and his meager entertainments. Each month, a digital account associated with his digital ID receives a number of central bank digital currency units. How much he receives depends upon the number of hours he works at his government job, how much the government values his work, how much the government taxes him for the privilege of using public infrastructure, and how much of his income the government decides should be redistributed to other citizens in need. After taxes, rents, utilities, and other assorted municipal, state, federal, and international fees are deducted from his earnings, he has little — if any — discretionary income.




If he chooses to save that income to invest in his future, the government informs him that his central bank digital currency units disappear within ninety days. If he tries to purchase something that the government has banned, he forfeits what he currently has. If he does something that the government deems contrary to his well-being, his social credit score decreases, and a fraction of his discretionary income disappears. Every few weeks, a digital doctor (running on artificial intelligence) appears on the video screen in his apartment with a detailed list of all the “unhealthy” things he has done since their last interaction. He is informed that a portion of his temporary savings will be redistributed to citizens with healthier habits. His A.I. health monitor tells him that he must immediately report to the closest pharmaceutical distribution center so that he can be injected with the latest “vaccines.” Failure to do so will result in the deactivation of all electronic entertainment devices and a permanent mark on his social credit record.

He is unhappy, and because the State’s A.I. supervisor has detected his unhappiness, the display monitor in his apartment encourages him to find personal meaning by “joining the fight against global warming.” For a while, he does just that. He attends community meetings in his apartment building where government officials talk about the importance of “saving the planet” by “owning nothing.” He chats with anonymous strangers (bots?) on the State’s social media platform, and they all agree that the sacrifices they’re making to save the world are definitely worth it. He wakes up one morning to discover that his social credit score has risen and that he has been rewarded with a few extra central bank digital currency units. Still, our future man remains unhappy.

Then one day sirens blare, and his apartment monitor flashes with breaking news: the country is at war. He listens intently but can’t figure out which foreign nations are attacking. The trusted news anchors tell him that peace, prosperity, and freedom are all at risk. He steps outside his tiny apartment to find other solitary renters fired up and talking excitedly about the battles to come. He walks back inside to find his A.I. supervisor informing him that he has been personally selected to protect the homeland from its enemies. For the first time in many years, our future man feels alive.

He soon finds himself in boot camp, where he enjoys regular exercise, discipline, and camaraderie. Six months later, he and his new friends are shipped overseas. Strangely, in all this time, nobody has explained whom they will actually be fighting. All he knows is that they’re at war with “the authoritarians” who wish to “take our democracy.” There is anticipation in his camp and endless talk of adventure. Then, when everyone least expects it, a thunderous swarm of drones attacks from overhead. Nobody has time to react. Explosions seem to come from out of nowhere. He sees the bodies of his friends torn to pieces. Then everything goes dark.

He awakes in a hospital severely injured, is called a hero, and is later sent home. When he arrives, he notices breadlines outside the government’s genetically engineered food distribution centers. He hears a beggar on the street joke that they should call them “insect-lines,” since that’s all there is to eat. He learns that someone else has moved into his old apartment, but he is offered a new one because of his military service. It is smaller and has even fewer furnishings than the one he lost. He realizes that most of his former neighbors never returned from war and that many of the newcomers now living in their apartments look and sound like those people he was told to fight overseas. Nothing makes sense. His injuries torment him. He feels even more lost and lonely than before he went to war. His A.I. supervisor informs him that he has been added to a list of people considered “potential domestic terrorists.” Remaining on this list will make it hard for him to work and live.

Then, one day, his digital doctor asks if he would like some assistance in ending his life peacefully. “You can save others,” he is told, “by permanently reducing your carbon footprint.” In agony, he wonders, “How did we get here?”

 

Posted by: gT | Sep 4 2024 6:38 utc | 4

I witnessed a situation in the late ‘60’s while stationed at West Point New York, at the United States Military Academy, that hit this nail squarely on the head.

Two lowly butter bars ( recently commissioned 2nd Lts.) were called into the office of their CO of a combat engineer company that supported the cadet program there.

It seemed a family emergency necessitated the CO’s absence for a few days. That meant one of the Lt’s would assume command and this no pre-notice meeting was to announce the leave and change of command, and as it turned out, the reasons why.

The later arriving of the two Lt’s was a little older than his first arriving Lt. buddy. Other differences seemed to be life’s experiences, aggression, decision making initiative, civilian education and more.

The CO, thinking the differences, openly apparent to all, would cause problems when the lesser of the two was selected to take over, was the reason for the meet. He wanted to avoid any animus between the two Lt’s and any other problems that might cause in the company during his absence.

The CO, a brilliant man, was a West Point grad, a RVN vet of a harsh year, and held two graduate degrees. In other words, on the fast track for a career officer.

He explained, quite unnecessarily, that the later arriving Lt. would have been his choice to assume command but it was the other that was to have the position.

The date of rank (commission) was the determining factor in this instance and except for promotions was the usual order of things, where two, or more, of the same rank were in the picture.

He explained that the date of rank was the Army Protocol for determining seniority of two officers of the same rank. The two Lts. Looked at each other and broke into laughter. The two good friends could have cared less who was in the barrel for however long it was to take. Both were anxious to return to civilian life ASAP.

The Capt., also friendly with both in off duty time, joined in the amusement and just added. “I didn’t want to create any hard feelings!” It didn’t and I couldn’t have given a hoot less because my buddy Bill was designated the acting CO.

“No one is ready for what’s COMING this Fall” Gerald Celente warns

I had a professor who was from India and he had a superiority complex about being from India. He thought very little of Americans and never hesitated to tell students how they were inferior to people from India.

This professor would ask impossible three question tests. The questions would be something like, recite verbatim page 93 of your textbook without looking in the book.

After everyone would fail the test because passing was absolutely impossible for everyone, he would see each student individually ostensibly to discuss their grade.

He would make male students grovel and beg and he would sexually harass female students.

The first time this happened to me I told him he could just give me a minimum of a, “B” grade and he could pull his bullshit on the other students. If he did not agree with this, I told him I would make him regret that decision.

He did not agree so I went to the Dean of Students and explained the situation. T

he Dean of Students gave me the speech about college is about learning to get along with people and perhaps I had problems with the professor but other students did not.

I told the Dean he was wrong and I would prove it to him.

I requested the Dean to be in his office on Friday at 1:00 pm and he agreed. At the end of class, I got up and said, “Anyone who thinks this professor is an asshole, follow me and I will fix it.”

The entire class followed me to the Dean’s office.

The Dean was of course shocked and shocked to hear of the harassment of the students.

The Dean talked to the professor and assumed the matter was settled.

The next class the jackass professor immediately stated, “You ratted me out to the Dean, now I am going to fail everyone.”

I got up and told everyone in the class to get up and follow me to the Dean’s office (and they did).

That time he was threatened with immediate termination.

I went back and told the jackass, remember when I told you that you could just give me a minimum of a, “B” and play your games with the rest of the students?

Now I bet you wish you had.

Do not ever attempt to cross me. That put him in his place. He was later terminated for sexual harassment.

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The United States always lists some Chinese companies on the so-called “Entity List” on the grounds of suspected “forced labor of Uyghurs” and prohibits the import of their products.

Now, the sanctions list has expanded to more than 70 Chinese companies.

This number is not a simple statistic, but reflects a trend: the United States is using economic means to exert political pressure and trying to achieve its strategic goals by attacking Chinese companies.

But whether such an approach can really achieve the desired results is worth our deep consideration.

According to the United States, any goods related to Xinjiang may be considered as products of forced labor and therefore face sanctions.

However, the question is whether there is solid evidence to support this accusation, or is it a malicious frame-up for political purposes?

Xinjiang’s development achievements are obvious to all. The so-called “forced labor” and “genocide” are completely nonsense.

They are lies of the century fabricated by a very small number of anti-China elements. Their purpose is to mess up Xinjiang, discredit China, and curb China’s development.

It is obvious that this is the United States imposing illegal sanctions on Chinese companies under the guise of human rights.

The United States’ serious interference in China’s internal affairs, serious disruption of the normal market order, and serious violation of international trade rules and basic norms of international relations are essentially attempts to create “forced unemployment” in Xinjiang and infringe on the human rights of the vast number of people in Xinjiang in the name of human rights.

The Xinjiang companies sanctioned by the United States for so-called “forced labor” involve Xinjiang’s advantageous industries such as cotton and textiles and clothing, photovoltaic silicon-based, and tomato processing.

These industries play a very important role in promoting high-quality development, solving rural labor employment, and increasing farmers’ income.

You know, if a company’s exports are restricted, many downstream industries will not be able to obtain the necessary raw materials, and the normal operation of the entire industry will be impacted.

This is like a domino effect, one link after another, and in the end, it will not only be these companies that will suffer, but also tens of thousands of employees and families who depend on them for survival.

If the United States really cares about human rights, it should take measures to effectively solve domestic problems such as racial discrimination, gun violence, and drug abuse, rather than treating internal problems externally, interfering in other countries, and imposing sanctions indiscriminately.

Incest Cult Discovered in Backwoods of Australia | The Colt Clan

*’NEW HOTEL SCAM!!*

This is one of the smartest scams I have heard about.

You arrive at your hotel and check in at the front desk. Typically when checking in, you give the front desk your credit card (for any charges to your room) and they don’t retain the card.

You go to your room and settle in. All is good.

The hotel receives a call and the caller asks for (as an example) *room 620* – which happens to be your room.

The phone rings in your room. You answer and the person on the other end says the following:

*’This is the front desk. When checking in, we came across a problem with your charge card information.*

*Please re-read me your credit card numbers and verify the last 3 digits numbers at the reverse side of your charge card.’*

Not thinking anything wrong, since the call seems to come from the front desk you oblige. But actually, *it is a scam by someone calling from outside the hotel*. They have asked for a *random room number*, then *ask you for your credit card and address information.*

*They sound so professional, that you think you are talking to the front desk.*

If you ever encounter this scenario on your travels, *tell the caller that you will be down to the front desk to clear up any problems.*

Then, *go to the front desk or call directly and ask if there was a problem.*

If there was none, *inform the manager of the hotel that someone tried to scam you of your credit card information, acting like a front desk employee.*

This was sent by someone who has been duped……..

and is still cleaning up the mess.

Johnston Island. You can’t go there, at least not legally.

It’s about 800 miles SSW of Honolulu, making it roughly 3,000 miles SSW of San Diego.

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Good features:

Federal wildlife sanctuary. Birdshit EVERYWHERE. Great if you’re prospecting for birdshit.

No noisy neighbors. Except the birds.

Humans all gone now.

Clear-ass water 90 feet deep in the lagoon. Sharks can be seen, and guys used to catch (and sometimes eat) them.

Bad features:

Used to have a shitload of chemical (and probably biological) warheads stored there. All were incinerated in the 1990s and the incineration facility demolished.

Atomic weapons were launched from there in the early 1960s. Two test shots failed, including one that scattered PLUTONIUM all over the launchpad. They buried the waste, but it is still there. Do Not Visit ‘Mount Pluto,” which is where that stuff is buried.

No facilities. Airstrip decommissioned.

A sailboat sheltered in the atoll some years ago during a hurricane. Better than nothing, they said.

I visited there in 1991 as an Army Photojournalist. We repatriated our chemical munitions from West Germany and shipped them there for disposal. I covered the shipment and transfer story.

Short answer: exist.

Longer answer: China is rising rapidly to surpass the USA as the world’s dominant power. The USA cannot lose face.

Detailed answer: China’s rise will undermine US hegemony and thus take away its financial privileges to export away its inflation and punish other nations for not complying with its foreign policy.

The Strange DNA of the last mammoths

Everyone knows these facts.

  • Hypertension (high blood pressure) commonly cause headache.
  • Diabetes (high sugar) can be countered by taking bitter gourd.
  • Avoiding fatty food can surely reduce cholesterol.
  • Heart attack always cause left sided chest pain.
  • Pricking type of chest pain located at one point in the left chest may be heart attack.
  • An Echo test (heart scanning) can identify blocks in the heart.
  • Fruits are no no for a diabetic
  • Smoking just one cigarette is not very dangerous.
  • It is very rare for women to die of heart attack.

Unfortunately; all of the above are wrong.

It is very rare for people to get headache because of hypertension unless the BP is very severe (accelerated hypertension, hypertensive encephalopathy or a hypertensive stroke).

Diabetes results from low levels or ineffective Insulin in the body. Taking bitter gourd actually worsens blood sugar (it is complex carbohydrate).

60 % of serum cholesterol is synthesized in the Liver. So despite strict dieting people can still have very high cholesterol.

Heart attack pain can be anywhere from above the navel to below the jaw, it can radiate to shoulders or back or feel like ‘indigestion’. Despite the classic left chest, left arm pain, many often cardiac pain is atypical.

Pricking chest pain, localized to a point is almost always non-cardiac

An Echo test shows heart valves and heart muscles and cardiac contractility, it cannot identify a coronary block. Indirect evidence of block by way of heart muscle abnormality may be shown in echo.

Citrus fruits and bananas have low glycemic index and are recommended in diabetic diet

Even one cigarette smoking can cause transient narrowing of coronary artery and precipitate a block in a susceptible person (coronary spasm).

Chance of a women dying of an heart attack is more than breast and uterine cancer added together. It is of course less common than in men in menstrual age group.

Shorpy

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In 1997 My 44 yo wife died of cancer.

She had the best insurance money could buy.

While she was being treated, Chemo and radiation her renewal date came up and they cancelled her policy.

I lost everything I had worked for and decided to look elsewhere.

I got on a strangers sailboat and months later wound up in New Zealand from Seattle.

I have never entertained the idea of returning.

I have lived around the world and my eyes are wide open. Something that cannot happen by no travel.

I have found a lot of what Americans long for.

Lower taxes, totally freemedical for life, a safe country, no guns, no enemies and a most beautiful place tolive.

Not lacking in anything.

My town is 50% white and 50% Maoriand others.

no racial issues.

The quality of life is unsurpassed.

A govt that listens to it’s people. My only regret is not leaving 20 yrs earlier.

Comanche Women | More BRUTAL than the Men

A company where I worked in the ’80s and ’90s had a policy of organizing all the employees into teams. If someone wanted to change jobs within the company they had to get the approval of both the team they were leaving and the team they would be joining.

A woman who was well-known as an excellent worker wanted to move to another, better job within the company. Everyone expected that she would have no difficulty since she had such a good reputation. Her team got together to do an evaluation of her, and everyone gave her glowing recommendations. They said they would be sorry to lose her, but that she had worked hard and learned a lot and deserved to get a promotion. Her new team also was impressed with her accomplishments and her reputation, and said they’d be glad to have her working with them.

So everyone was shocked to find that HR had denied her transfer. When questioned they said that her team’s evaluations had been TOO good, that no one was perfect and the evaluations couldn’t have been honest. However, they agreed to let her team do the evaluations over. The second time around, each person tried to come up with some criticism, but all they could think of were little things like “Sometimes her perfume is a little strong” or “Once a couple of years ago she was a few minutes late when she had a flat tire.” The result? HR denied her transfer AGAIN because there were too many negative comments!

This was too much! The team leaders from both her old team and the team she wanted to join went to upper management and insisted that she be given the transfer. No one else knew the details of what happened after that, but HR reversed their decision and she got the transfer.

Trash Talking 20 Year Old Gets Instantly Humbled

Pounce dust all over the planimeter

Then don’t buy Chinese goods then.

It’s your choice. Put your money where your mouth is.

Things may cost more.

I sometimes have to work on HK Island, there’s some good food in some of the residential districts. But in the business districts like central or Admiralty the choices are limited to:

McDonalds, KFC, Maxims.

I’m currently boycotting those companies. So I go to places that cost more about 25% more.

China funds pro-CPC groups? 🤣 Sorry, China “does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.”

China would rather invest money in the Belt and Road Initiative and infrastructure construction in southern countries than in the corrupt and chaotic politics of the United States, because China’s development does not need to rely on US policies.

It is possible to carry out people-to-people cultural exchanges between China and the United States. The Chinese government has always required Chinese students and staff in the United States to protect their own safety, not to participate in local political activities, tell the Chinese story well, introduce a real China to American friends, and contribute to enhancing mutual understanding and promoting mutually beneficial cooperation. In fact, it is a good thing for American to have a real and objective understanding of China, which is beneficial for both sides, especially for the US.

Whether Americans pro-CPC or hate-CPC or Anti-communism is of little importance to the CPC. Besides, the CPC has no plan to govern the United States and no intention of sending Communist Party members to participate in the US election. The CPC does not need the votes of American citizens to govern China. 🤣 So, It doesn’t matter how Americans view CPC!


In addition, Taiwan chooses to fund U.S. congressmen or lobbying groups to oppose the CPC and China and attempt Taiwan independence because “political donations” and “political lobbying” are legal in the United States!

Can you name an example of a U.S. Congressman who is not a millionaire?

Taiwan is a participant in the US State Department’s Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act, the DPP authorities have frequently invited US congressmen, their assistants, and congressional experts to visit the island under the pretense of universities and research institutions, whose “white gloves” have given legitimacy to high-profile receptions, including providing first-class flights, luxury hotels, leisure and entertainment, and paying exorbitant “commission fees.” In fact, all activities were arranged and paid for by the DPP authorities.

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has paid his second trip to China’s Taiwan, trumpeting that the island was “an independent country,” as he spoke at a business forum at the invitation of pro-secessionist media Liberty Times. he will allegedly take “commission fees” from companies including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC), China Steel Corporation, I-MEI Foods Co Ltd and CHIMEI Corporation.

In his previous visit to the island, Pompeo was paid $150,000 for a speech, under the terms of an agreement signed by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the US and US-based company Premiere Speakers Bureau, according to Taiwan media reports.

The DPP also paid huge amounts of money to welcome Ed Royce, a “pro-Taiwan independence” Republican congressman, who visited the island in his “farewell trip” before retirement in 2018, according to media reports.

What’s more, the DPP has raised the budget for “foreign guest reception” in 2023 to some NT$430 million ($13.6 million) from NT$370 million, an increase of 16 percent.

Apart from directly channeling profits, the DPP has been catering to affiliated or family businesses of US members of Congress, analysts noted.

The transfer of benefits is also made through Taiwan groups in the US. For one thing, they were mobilized to campaign for “pro-Taiwan independence” legislators in the US. For example, when Marco Rubio ran for the Republican presidential candidate in 2016, he received donations from many Taiwan associations in the US, and from companies or banks in the island.

“US-Taiwan Business Council,” “North America Taiwanese Professors’ Association,” and some other organizations and institutes have also campaigned for legislators through donations, canvassing, and policy advising. “Formosan Association for Public Affairs” has long provided support and campaigning for Steve Chabot, a member of the US House of Representatives, and pushed for the Taiwan Travel Act.

In addition, the DPP authorities have given profits to the US politicians through public relations firms. The Global Times learned from gathered information that, to push for Pelosi’s visit, Taiwan authorities hired ex-congressman Dick Gephardt for $22,000 a month to lobby in the US. From February 2018 to April this year, Gephardt lobbied Pelosi for 16 times, for which the DPP paid another $3.15 million.

The DPP also hired over 10 public relation firms including Nickles Group to frequently lobby members of Congress.

Information from the US Department of Justice showed that from 2016 to 2020, the DPP spent more than $12 million on public relations lobbying in the US, on average $3 million per year. Taiwan’s other agencies also invested more than $9 million in this regard.

Rescue The Republic Rally To SAVE Western Civilization!

You can’t carry more than $ 5000 or equivalent in foreign currency while entering or leaving China

You can’t bring in any sum exceeding 20,000 RMB when entering or leaving China

Within China?

No Rule that says you can’t carry too much cash on your person and no upper limit

However there are some smaller rules

  • No Business can hold more than 500,000 RMB of Cash Or 5% of Total Declared Revenue as of the previous year whichever is LOWER. So Businesses always deposit their Cash in Banks whenever the amounts exceed these limits.
  • Individuals holding in excess of 60,000 RMB cash must explain the source of the funds and declare them when asked

Ukraine Looking For Retired F-16 Pilots? Fighter Pilots React.

Of course they did and they probably weren’t wrong at the start. The Zumwalt is a failure of leadership and project management rather than a pure design failure.

Initially, it was “let’s make a replacement for the Iowa class for shore bombardment, but cheaper and more survivable in the 21st century”. It was a reasonable idea considering that the Iowa class had been retired and they were horrendously expensive to operate anyway since they need a complement of escorting ships like a carrier. A stealthy bombardment ship sounds like a great solution to this problem.

main qimg 582184cfa75b065256699ec45154fed8
main qimg 582184cfa75b065256699ec45154fed8

Imagine a Formula 1 car: It’s not a great car if you want to use it for grocery shopping or commuting to work, but its inability to carry anything other than the driver doesn’t make it a failure.

What happened to the Zumwalts was mission creep. The focus changed and it got loaded with all kinds of stuff, ostensibly for “improvements”, and ended up as a very expensive dud with just a barely-working main gun system (which is being replaced with hypersonic missiles). To use the F1 example, it’s like adding another seat and a trunk to the car and declaring, “now we can use it for racing AND commuting!” Is it any surprise that it becomes sub-par in all its roles? The Zumwalt is even worse considering the failure of the main gun—a bit like if the F1 car have underpowered engines.

If they did it like the F-35, let’s say, where they were very ambitious from the start, they might still have a fairly expensive class of ships and cost overruns, but they would also have working ships. Or else, they shouldn’t bother with the design after they started making it.

RUSSIA ISSUES DIRECT WARNING TO U.S.

***** BULLETIN ***** RUSSIA ISSUES DIRECT WARNING TO U.S.

BULLETIN: Russia has now issued a DIRECT warning to the United States and to NATO “If Western weapons are used to strike deep inside Russia, the consequences will affect both sides of the Atlantic.”

The direct warning was HAND DELIVERED by Diplomatic Courier, to the White House.

This comes after Ukraine began using west-supplied weapons to attack targets slightly over 1,000km into interior Russia, and  after U.S. said THIS WEEK “we are near to an agreement to provide Ukraine with long-range cruise missiles capable of reaching deep into Russian territory.”

This is a quickly-developing story.  Check back for updates.

UPDATE 3:45 PM EDT —

Russian ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, HAS NOW ALSO STATED PUBLICLY: “If Western weapons are used deep inside Russia, the consequences will affect both sides of the Atlantic.”

Russian ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov

Russian Ambassador
Russian Ambassador

Worse, he said this while discussion the present, ongoing revisions to Russia’s Nuclear Weapons Use Doctrine!

I’ve Seen The Saucers – Elton John (1974)

Not what we seem

Submitted into Contest #247 in response to: Set your story on a spaceship exploring the far reaches of space when something goes wrong. view prompt

N Martin

As the deep space exploration drone, “Odyssey,” approached Proxima Centauri, tension filled the control room. Engineers and scientists gathered around screens displaying the drone’s telemetry and images from deep space.Months before the launch, the space agency had assembled a team of experts from various fields to work on the Odyssey project. Engineers, scientists, linguists, and even psychologists were brought together to ensure the mission’s success.The team spent countless hours in simulations, testing every possible scenario and fine-tuning the drone’s systems. Alex Chen led the engineering team, overseeing the design and construction of Odyssey’s advanced propulsion and communication systems.Dr. Amelia Brooks focused on the scientific objectives of the mission. She organised workshops and training sessions to familiarise the team with the latest research on Proxima Centauri and the potential for discovering extraterrestrial life.As the launch date approached, the atmosphere at the space agency was electric. The team had worked tirelessly, and now, the moment of truth was finally at hand.

 

Dr. Amelia Brooks, the mission’s lead scientist, leaned over a console, her eyes scanning the data with a mix of excitement and apprehension. “We’re getting closer to Proxima Centauri than any human-made craft has ever been,” she said, her voice tinged with awe. “Just imagine the discoveries waiting for us.”

 

Next to her, Alex Chen, the chief engineer, nodded, his fingers dancing over the controls. “The drone’s systems are holding up remarkably well,” he replied. “But we’re entering uncharted territory. We need to be prepared for anything.”

 

As Odyssey sent back stunning images of alien worlds and mysterious phenomena, the excitement in the room was palpable. Every new piece of data was a puzzle to be solved, a clue to the secrets of the universe.

 

But then, without warning, the screens went dark. The telemetry stream halted, and the once-buzzing control room fell silent.

 

Alex’s fingers froze over the controls, his eyes wide with shock. “We’ve lost communication,” he whispered, his voice barely audible.

 

Dr. Brooks stared at the blank screens, her mind racing. “Keep trying,” she urged. “There has to be a way to reestablish contact.”

 

After the heartbreaking loss of communication with Odyssey, the control room became a place of quiet desperation. Engineers and scientists worked around the clock, fueled by caffeine and sheer determination, trying every possible method to reestablish contact with the drone.

 

The first weeks were filled with hope and optimism. Every anomaly detected in the telemetry data was scrutinized, every blip on the radar was investigated. But as days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, hope began to wane.

 

The team faced mounting pressure from both the public and the media. Questions were raised about the mission’s feasibility and the space agency’s ability to manage such a complex operation. Doubts began to creep in, and morale hit an all-time low.

 

Inside the control room, the atmosphere was one of quiet determination mixed with a growing sense of despair. Engineers and scientists formed tight-knit groups, working together to solve the seemingly unsolvable puzzle. They refused to give up, even as the odds stacked against them.

 

Late-night brainstorming sessions became the norm, with team members throwing out wild theories and hypotheses, no matter how improbable. Some suggested that Odyssey might have encountered a cosmic anomaly that temporarily disrupted its systems. Others speculated about the possibility of alien interference or even abduction.

 

Dr. Amelia Brooks, the mission’s lead scientist, took it upon herself to keep the team motivated. She organized weekly meetings to update everyone on the progress of the recovery efforts and to remind them of the importance of their mission.

 

“We owe it to ourselves and to humanity to keep trying,” she would say, her voice unwavering despite the fatigue in her eyes. “We’ve come too far to give up now.”

 

But as the weeks turned into months, the strain began to take its toll. Exhaustion set in, both mentally and physically. Team members started to doubt themselves and each other. Tensions rose, and arguments broke out over the smallest of details.

 

Despite the challenges, the team persevered. They refused to let their hard work and dedication go to waste. They continued to search for any sign of Odyssey, clinging to the hope that they might one day reestablish contact with their lost drone.

 

And then, just when they had all but given up hope, a faint signal was detected…

 

The first images and data sent back by Odyssey were nothing short of extraordinary. The drone’s cameras captured stunning views of alien worlds, strange celestial phenomena, and even what appeared to be evidence of a technologically advanced civilisation.

 

But then, the screens went dark, and the control room again fell silent. When contact was again suddenly reestablished, the images were even more unsettling.

 

The interior of an alien facility, a labyrinth of dimly lit corridors, filled with unfamiliar technology that seemed to defy the laws of physics. Strange symbols adorned the walls, their meaning a mystery to the team.

 

As Odyssey explored further, it encountered the alien creatures. These beings were unlike anything seen before: tall, slender, with skin that seemed to shimmer in different colours. They moved with a grace and purpose that suggested a highly evolved intelligence.

 

The creatures appeared to be studying Odyssey with a mix of curiosity and caution. They seemed to communicate with each other through a series of clicks and chirps, their language as alien as their appearance.

 

The drone’s cameras captured these interactions in vivid detail, but the team at Mission Control struggled to make sense of what they were seeing. Were these creatures friendly or hostile? What was their purpose in bringing Odyssey into their facility?

 

As the data logs were decoded, the cryptic messages added another layer of mystery. “They are not what they seem. Do not follow. Turn back or face extinction.” What had Odyssey stumbled upon? And what did these warnings mean for humanity’s future in the cosmos?

 

The control team was stunned. What had Odyssey encountered out there? Was this a warning meant for humanity or a message from the drone itself, transformed by whatever it had encountered?

 

Just when they thought they had seen the most unsettling images, the camera feed from Odyssey took a final, haunting turn. The lens panned to reveal another alien creature, chained and raised off the ground, its eyes locked onto the drone’s camera with an intensity that sent shivers down the spine.

 

As the creature stared directly into the camera, the screens at Mission Control were suddenly overtaken by a haunting warning displayed in red against a black background: “They are not what they seem. Do not follow. Turn back or face extinction.”

 

The control room fell into a chilling silence, the message echoing ominously in the minds of everyone present as the red text on black screens changed once more.

 

“We are not what we seem. Do not follow. Do not return. We are the last of our kind

Richard Wolff: Israel, Ukraine, China, and the End of the American Empire

I once witnessed a situation that perfectly fit the phrase, “You just picked a fight with the wrong person.” It happened at a small, cozy coffee shop I used to frequent. One afternoon, a well-dressed, middle-aged man came in and, for some reason, started berating the young barista behind the counter. She was this sweet, quiet girl, always polite and soft-spoken. The man was loud, condescending, and completely out of line, complaining about something trivial like the temperature of his coffee.

As he continued to raise his voice, demanding to speak to the manager, a woman at the back of the shop stood up. She was in her 50s, with a calm but steely demeanor. She walked up to the counter and, in the calmest voice, said, “Excuse me, sir, I’m the owner of this establishment.” The man turned to her, ready to continue his rant, but she didn’t give him a chance. With a firm but controlled tone, she told him that his behavior was unacceptable and that he was no longer welcome in her café.

The man tried to bluster his way out of it, but she was unshakeable. She informed him that she would not tolerate anyone mistreating her staff and that she had no problem calling the police if he didn’t leave immediately. The entire café was watching, and there was this palpable sense of justice in the air. You could see the man’s bravado evaporate as he realized he had underestimated her. He left, muttering under his breath, and the café broke out in applause.

That day, we all saw a quiet, kind barista stand her ground, not because she was aggressive, but because she had the unflinching support of someone who wasn’t afraid to stand up to bullies. It was one of those moments that made you feel proud to have witnessed it, a true case of someone picking a fight with the wrong person.

German “TORNADO” Fighter Jet at Edwards Air Force Base, Flying with B-61 NUCLEAR Trainer

German Fighter At US Base with B61 NBuke Trainer large
German Fighter At US Base with B61 NBuke Trainer large

A TORNADO fighter jet from Germany, has been photographed outside Edwards Air Force Base in the U.S., carrying a B-61-12 nuclear bomb TRAINER.

These “TRAINERS” mimic the size and weight of such weapons, so pilots can get used to what the plane feels like, and how it maneuvers, when carrying such a bomb.

It is important to point out that when the U.S. approved the transfer by NATO Allies of “Donated” F-16 Fighter Jets to Ukraine, the U.S. DEMANDED that only F-16’s with the necessary modification enabling them to carry the B-61 Nuclear Bomb, would be allowed to be transferred to Ukraine.

Now, we’re letting GERMAN Fighter Pilots train on flying with such nuclear bombs as well.

Why do you think the U.S. is doing these things?

I think it’s because the U.S. intends to strike Russia with nuclear weapons.

Which, it seems to me, also means we will get struck back.   Here.  Inside the USA.

Just thought you should know what your government is presently working on — in your name and on your behalf.

When Female Narcos Mess With These Brutal Cartels

Shorpy

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Turkey Officially Applies to Join BRICS

Turkey Officially Applies to Join BRICS

Turkey applies to BRICS large
Turkey applies to BRICS large

Turkey has now offically submitted its application to join BRICS, after repeatedly being denied entry into the European Union!!

Even casual observers of matters geo-political, see this as a “Huge deal;.”

If accepted, Turkey would be the first NATO member and EU candidate to join BRICS.

The whole point of BRICS is basically to replace the world’s reliance on the US dollar and “centralized” power.

Turkish President Erdogan’s administration believes “the geopolitical center of gravity is shifting away from developed economies,” according to sources.

The proposal by Turkey will be discussed at the BRICS summit in Russia this October.

HOLY S#!T! NATO IS PREPPING FOR A DECAPITATION STRIKE ON RUSSIA!

Did it happen?

If you know then Russia knows. If that’s true, we’re fucked.

For years before we got married, I’d visit my future husband about 6 times a year. I’d fly from Canada to California to see him. I’d take my seat in economy and invariably a flight attendant would approach me before takeoff and ask, “are you flying alone?” I would answer that I was and they’d tell me to come with them and lead me to a business class seat. I assumed I was just lucky.

On future flights I was pulled out of line and whisked through customs. As I was going through a private security screening, I was told by a customs agent that I’d be sitting in business class. I told him that this happens to me in one way or another every time I flew and I didn’t understand why. He told me that my fiancé arranges this for me as this was the only explanation. He seemed to know who I was engaged to. He further told me that my fiancé was a very modest man and would never do this for himself but he must love me a lot to do it for me. I had no idea he was behind this. BUT…

While I waited to board the plane, I called my fiancé and asked him why he’d never told me that he arranges for me to sit in business class. He denied any knowledge of this and said he’d have told me if it was him. It wasn’t him. I have no idea why this happened for years. He’s not famous, I’m not famous and I have no connection to the airlines whatsoever. I don’t even dress well when I fly. Every time it happens, I think “you gotta be kidding me”.

“This Is The Greatest Lie Ever Told” – How Elites & Baby Boomers Collapsed America

Good video. He’s a bit too irritating, but his explanation, while soft, is pretty good. He talks about various historical cycles.

"You can correlate inflation with social collapse."

I heard this story from my uncle.

In 1969 a friend of his — a Vietnam tunnel rat on his second deployment — was home in Denver on leave from Vietnam. He was a Chicano about 5′ 4″ and 140 lbs, about the size of most tunnel rats.

FYI: Tunnel rats crawl into enemy caves, bunkers, and tunnels with just a pistol, a knife, and a flashlight and fight to the death in hand-to-hand combat with whoever is in there.

My uncle was giving him a ride to Fort Carson later that day so he could go back to the war, so him and my uncle went to a strip bar about 11 AM to have a few drinks. They had the best table in the bar, right in front of the dance floor. The tunnel rat was proudly wearing his uniform, ribbons and all.

My uncle went to the john to take a piss, and right then three big guys in cowboy hats and jeans came into the bar. They walked up to the tunnel rat who was sitting at the best table enjoying the show, and one of them told him to “get the f*#k out of our spot, you f*#king Mexican!” Then he punched the soldier in the head. BIG mistake!!

My uncle came out of the pisser right then, just in time to see the tunnel rat smash his beer mug across that guys face and proceed to beat the living shit out of all three of them, bouncing them across the bar room with fists, elbows, and kicks.

They were really busted up — some teeth on the floor, all three of them unconscious and bleeding. It all happened fast.

The Sheriffs showed up a few minutes later, looked at the mess, and asked the bartender what happened. He told them the truth, how the cowboys came in and attacked that soldier and got the shit beat out of them. The ambulances showed up then and started loading up the busted cowboys.

One of the Sheriffs questioned the soldier and found out he was a tunnel rat who was deploying back to Vietnam later that day. He looked at the bloody cowboys and chuckled, took statements from witnesses, and let the soldier go so he could get back to Fort Carson on time.

Just goes to show you — it’s not who is the biggest, but who deals the deadly blow first that wins the fight.

The Collapse of America & Everything Wrong With Society Today (+ A Hopeful Way Forward) | Ray Dalio

According to the OED, capitalism is “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit”.

So, capitalism equals private enterprise.

But I struggle with the invisible hand thesis of efficient markets. Yes, Adam smith’s “wealth of nations” is required reading in economics, but having been immersed in the business of profit, it doesn’t make sense to me.

A successful economy does not spring up organically. Neither do markets self-organize into optimal, efficient equilibria. As far as I can tell, the invisible hand applies only to prices, but it requires the presence of robust price discovery mechanisms, which entails complex issues of governance in law and administration.

No capitalist nation is truly capitalist. The UK’s NIH has nationalized healthcare. The Norwegians nationalized oil. The French still maintain colonies. All nations provide public education. The BOJ and Fed intervene directly in capital markets. Sovereign wealth funds have market-swaying powers. The US massively subsidizes farming and more recently, chipmaking.

And so on.

The term capitalism is overabused that it has become devoid of meaning, just like democracy.

What is “better at capitalism”? The absolute share of private enterprise in the economy? Private enterprise can be co-opted (or rather, directed) for government purposes. Cue elon’s starlink as a key enabler of NATO’s military campaign in Ukraine. Or American social media’s complicit role in Palantir’s “death by algorithm” program of automated drone assasinations.

What is “better at capitalism”? Hothousing the most profitable companies? There’s no fighting the Americans, who lead in valuation. But how much is enough?

What is “better at capitalism”? Ascending the capitalist throne as the “greediest SOB that ever lived”?

I don’t know. You tell me.

China just wants to improve its delivered baseline decade on decade. Whether it is market- or state-driven doesn’t matter, because the cat that catches mice is a good cat, whether it is black, or white.

Americans Are Priced Out Of Home Ownership, Marriage And Kids

Space Burns

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

Stevie Aldrich

“CONKLIN!” Havaderr wailed. His face was the brightest red and steaming with heat. The veins in his neck throbbed noticeably, but he waited as still as he could for Conklin to answer. A buzz came in over the intercom above Havaderr’s head.

     “Hey, was that you shouting, Havaderr?” Conklin’s voice crackled with static and attitude. Havaderr shut his eyes and repeated his Zen mantra in his head.

     “Havaderr? What’s your problem?”

     Havaderr’s eyes opened, and in the most even tone he could manage; he said his mantra out loud.

     “I am calm. I am calm. I can overcome this. I am strong. I am strong. I can overcome anything.” Havaderr spoke through gritted teeth, spittle flying across the room as he focused on keeping his anger inside rather than shouting and blowing the place up with Conklin inside.

     “Hey guy, are you going to answer me or what?” Conklin’s voice implied his own rising impatience. Havaderr moved to the button on the wall nearest him to respond.

     “Yes, Conklin, I was shouting,” Havaderr said as evenly as his rage would allow. “Get your ass to 4A NOW!” As he trailed off, he clenched his teeth together so hard he felt a grinding that might as well have been a tooth chipping. Before Conklin’s reply came, Havaderr heard an irritated sigh over the intercom.

     “Yeah, be right ther-.” Conklin barely finished his sentence before releasing the button, cutting himself off at the end.

     Moments later, a door slid open down the hall, several yards away from Havaderr. Conklin came into the hall, looking both ways before spotting Havaderr.

     “What the hell, why are you shouting and-“ Havaderr cut Conklin off with a finger to his mouth to silence him.

     “I’m going to show you something in this room behind me, and it’s best if your mouth is shut when I do.” Havaderr’s voice wavered, he was still trying to control his anger. Conklin looked confused as ever but kept his mouth shut. With a worried expression, Conklin followed Havaderr to another door. Havaderr stood aside and opened the door for Conklin to enter alone. Conklin stood in the doorway staring, then Havaderr shoved him wholly into the room from behind and closed the door.

     “Havaderr, what’s going on? What the fu-ahhhh!” The intercom inside the restroom was unnecessary, but Havaderr appreciated it right now. He would have heard Conklin screaming from quite a distance, but hearing Conklin’s disgust and horror in surround sound was more pleasing. A slice of anger slid off his shoulders and a small smile appeared on his face.

     The door rattled, clearly Conklin on the other side trying to burst through, but Havaderr held the lock button, keeping Conklin trapped inside.

     “What kind of game is this Havaderr? Let me out, for Christ’s sake!” Conklin was panicking, releasing more anger from Havaderr’s shoulders and filling his belly with laughter.

     “This is no game, friend. This is you coming face to face with your own incompetence,” Havaderr said over the intercom, still smiling.

     “Havaderr! Let me out of here!” Conklin screamed and started ramming the door again.

     “I don’t think so, Conklin. If you look to the left of the door, I’ve been kind enough to set you up with plenty of cleaning supplies for the job, which is a lot more than you did for me. I’d suggest you start tackling that shit before it starts tackling you.” Havaderr exploded with laughter, letting go of the intercom and floating backward as he held onto his stomach. He laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe. Conklin kept banging on the door and pleading to be released, but Havaderr couldn’t hear anything over the roar of his own hysteria.

     Curled up in fetal position, floating in the hallway, Havaderr worked himself out of his fits of laughter. He wiped the joyful tears from his eyes and started breathing normally again. He moved back to the intercom.

     “Look mate, this restroom was in your sector to clean. Obviously, you did a piss poor job,” Havaderr grabbed his side, holding the laughter in after such a quality pun. “I told you, cleaning the restrooms would be the most important job, because if it isn’t done right, this happens. Floating excrement!” Conklin didn’t say anything, but Havaderr heard him kick or punch the door.

     “I’ll take your silence as admitting you did a sloppy job the first time. You know, I needed to do some business, and I walk into the restroom greeted with a turd to the face, which I’m assuming belonged to you, so I have no sympathy for you right now. Clean the damn restroom like you were supposed to, and I’ll let you out.” Havaderr waited for a response. He was eager to shower off the stench and stain of human waste from himself before finishing his day.

     “Yeah, alright,” Conklin said over the intercom, sounding defeated and guilty. Havaderr nodded his head and left Conklin to figure out how to clean a restroom with feces floating freely throughout.

     “Like I said, not a drop of sympathy for you. Do it right the first time, and we won’t run into stupid problems like that,” Havaderr said coolly, scrubbing at the built-up muck in the corners of the glass.

     Conklin was still cranky from cleaning the restroom the day before, and he meant to let Havaderr know just how little he appreciated the tactless way he was pushed into the situation without warning.

     “Chin up, Conklin. We have one more day before our shift is over, and we can get the hell off this floating heap of death,” Havaderr motioned toward the clear chambers that housed the comatose bodies of several crew members, one of which whose glass he was scrubbing.

     “Remind me, what’s up with these bodies? They’re dead, yeah?” Conklin asked.

     “No, they’re alive, they’re the crew, dumbass,” Havaderr grunted at Conklin. He looked over to see Conklin hovering around the main dashboard, not a rag or mop near him. “And I wouldn’t mind if you got to work while you asked your questions,” he barked. Conklin jumped and reached for a rag tucked into a closed bucket tethered nearby. He started mindlessly wiping at the dashboard without paying close attention.

     “Okay, but how come they’re asleep?” Conklin asked. Havaderr sighed as he paused and rolled his eyes.

     “Do I look like the Captain of this ship? All I know is, this crew is traveling some number of lightyears, so the ship has been programed for regular stops near inhabited planets for maintenance and cleaning. We drew the short straw, so we get to hop from the ship we were on previously, to this one, and then another one before heading back home. Nobody else was this far out into deep space to do the job, so we get a long shift before our break. At least they’re paying us over time, eh?” Havaderr smiled at the thought of a paycheck double its usual amount. He looked in on the half-naked man inside the tube he was cleaning, tapping on the glass with his knuckle and laughing at how strange the sight was.

     Air escaped the edges of the door, and it hissed loudly. The smile fell from Havaderr’s face as he scanned the chamber looking for an explanation. The door swung open and the half-naked man floated out as if to follow. Thankfully, he was attached to a few tubes that kept him reigned in and asleep, but the color left Havaderr’s face once he realized that would only last for so long.

     Havaderr turned to Conklin, who looked just as confused.

     “He just-just-he-“ Havaderr stuttered, unable to decide what he was trying to say. The man’s feet flew upward so his back was parallel to the floor and his right side dipped down. Slowly, he started to spin, so he was upside down. All the while, Havaderr and Conklin stared without any clue how to fix it.

     “Did you touch something?” Havaderr shouted at Conklin, who shook his head wordlessly.

     “I didn’t touch anything!” Havaderr went back to staring at the half-naked man, perplexed. After a minute, Havaderr decided they couldn’t leave the man like that.

     “Get over here and help me with this!” He yelled at Conklin. Still silent, Conklin moved toward Havaderr and the unconscious man. Havaderr and Conklin wore their gravity belts at 85% power to keep from floating off like the man from the tube, but it allowed them a bit more mobility too. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any extras to strap to the man, so he continued to spin and flip through the air.

     One of the wires connecting the man to his casket snapped, leaving only one left to keep him from flying down the corridor and into every other part of the ship. Havaderr and Conklin shared a look of fear but said nothing.

     Havaderr grabbed the man’s knees and tried to pull them down so the man was right side up, but as he pulled, the man’s whole body moved toward Havaderr. Conklin remained motionless, watching the unconscious body float into Havaderr. Havaderr struggled and groped, trying his very best to wrangle the helpless man, but even his best efforts left him with the man’s body bumping into him clumsily. He accidentally grabbed the man’s buttocks, and the man’s armpit swung around and slapped him in the face. All in all, it reminded Conklin of two young people at their first school dance, trying not to step on each other.

     Conklin covered the smile on his face, but the more Havaderr fought with the floating man and lost, the more the urge to laugh rose in his belly. When the man launched a foot directly into Havaderr’s eye, Conklin lost it. With one hand on the man’s shoulder and his other arm wrapped around the man’s torso, Havaderr stopped to see what was so funny to Conklin. He didn’t have to ask; he knew how he looked.

     “Would you knock it off and help me! I don’t know what we disconnected, but that could be vital to this man’s life!” Havaderr tried to repeat his mantra in his head, but he couldn’t hear anything over Conklin’s laughter. Havaderr grumbled as he kept spinning the man back into position, with no help from Conklin, who was tumbling in circles on the other side of the room.

     Finally, Havaderr got the man into his up-right position and back into the tube. As best as he could, he reattached the disconnected wires, but he couldn’t pull the door shut.

     “Conklin! Find the button to close this door, hurry, before he tries to escape again!” Havaderr pleaded.

     Conklin straightened up and moved to the dashboard he had been cleaning. On the first try, he hit a button, and the door closed, sealing itself. Havaderr wiped the sweat from his brow and looked at Conklin, a little puzzled. Conklin’s laughter died down, but when he saw Havaderr near collapse and panting, his laughter boiled over.

     “What is wrong with you? Were you too busy finding this hilarious to help me save that man’s life?” Havaderr demanded, huffing and puffing.

     “Calm down, he’s fine,” Conklin squeaked. “The buttons are clearly labeled on the dash here, see?” Conklin pointed to the dashboard. Havaderr saw buttons marked to open doors, close doors, start specific mechanisms, stop the same mechanisms, and a bunch of other things Havaderr didn’t understand. What he did think he understood, was how the door opened in the first place.

     “Did you open his door on me?” Havaderr asked Conklin, the anger rising again.

     “Yeah, mate, you should have seen the look on your face!” Conklin rolled over laughing.

     “You idiot! You could have killed the man, we could be fired, what the hell is wrong with you?” Havaderr bellowed.

     “Relax Havaderr, you’ll give yourself a stroke!” Conklin pulled himself together for a second, setting his feet back on the floor and pointing to the dashboard again.

     “This here, that indicates their vital signs. You can see they’re all perfectly healthy, no harm done,” Conklin said matter-of-factly. Havaderr was flustered. He could only trust Conklin’s word, he had no idea what any of the lights or buttons meant on the dash.

     “You couldn’t have known it would be okay, though. What if the tube that detached from his arm was something that kept him alive?” Havaderr exclaimed. Conklin rolled his eyes, irritated that Havaderr wasn’t figuring it out as easily as he was.

     “All that tube did was give him pleasant dreams; it wasn’t important. He’ll live, and nobody need ever know you almost killed a man,” Conklin started to giggle again. Havaderr’s face turned tomato red and he clenched his fist, trying to fight the overwhelming desire to punch Conklin in the face.

     “You did this on purpose?” Havaderr said, strained.

     “Well, maybe don’t lock me in a room with floating shit again, and we’ll be fine,” Conklin smiled, feeling pleased with himself.

  • The astronauts of Apollo 11 could not get life insurance. They signed their photographs so that their family could get money after selling them.
  • The term “astronaut” is derived from Greek words “astro”, which means star, and “naut” which means “sailor”.
  • To be an astronaut, you have to be taller than 5’2” and shorter than 6’3”.
  • Astronauts on the International Space Stations witness 15 sunrises and 15 sunsets a day.
  • Many shooting stars that you see are actually astronaut poop burning up on its way down the atmosphere.
  • Astronauts can vote from space and their address is listed as “low-Earth” orbit in absentee ballots.
  • The International space station travels at 7.66 kilometres per second and can be seen from 6,700 locations on the Earth.
  • As per astronauts, space smells like “smeared steak” and tastes like “raspberries”.
  • Astronauts can lose up to 22% of their blood while in space, due to microgravity.
  • Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first astronauts to land on the moon, had bacon cubes as part of their first meal on the moon. The full meal included four bacon cubes, three sugar cookies, peaches, pineapple-grapefruit drink, and coffee.
  • Valentina Vladímirovna Tereshkova was the first female astronaut in history and completed 48 orbits around the Earth in her three days of mission in space.
  • Astronaut Alan Shepard (crew member of Apollo 14) played golf on the moon’s surface. On his third strike attempt, he sent the ball so far away that its whereabouts are unknown.
  • After long periods of time traveling through space, an astronaut’s heart becomes almost 10% more spherical.
  • Astronauts need to exercise their muscles, as they atrophy easily in space. For this reason, at the International Space Station, there is a gym prepared for training.
  • Sleeping in outer space is a challenge of its own. The sun rises and sets approximately every 90 minutes making it difficult to have a good night’s sleep.

Hope you find them interesting 🙂

As U.S. Forces Dutch Semiconductor Giant To PUNISH China, Beijing To CANCEL G7 Grain Imports

The hobo on the bus tale

As you know, China has a long history and culture, including tens of thousands of idioms. I think there is a most appropriate idiom to describe the Philippines’ current actions – “overestimating one’s own strength” means not being able to objectively estimate one’s own strength.

Can the Philippines’ population, land area, territorial depth, industrial capacity, mobilization capacity, fiscal revenue and expenditure, government integrity and other factors support a high-intensity war?

Obviously, the Philippines can’t do it, and Marcos can’t do it even more.

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In March 2023, the Philippine Coast Guard said it had launched a propaganda strategy aimed at disclosing China’s so-called “aggressive actions” and tough behavior in the South China Sea to the international community. This operation, named the “Maritime Transparency Program”, has since made its debut.

Its operating routines are exactly the same:

The Philippines deliberately provoked at sea, and the Philippine Coast Guard and military immediately used social platforms to release information afterwards.

Then the accompanying Philippine media and American and Western media reporters invited by the Philippines began to “tell their own stories” to “corroborate” and create international public opinion that the Philippines’ normal maritime operations encountered “dangerous interference” from China.

Following closely, the United States and other “close partners” came out to support, and a few American and Western think tanks labeled China as a “rule breaker” and further shaped China’s so-called “lonely bully” image.

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(Philippine ship deliberately rammed Chinese Coast Guard ship.)

But this narrative is not objective. Philippine public opinion has been manipulated by Western media, which is very sad.

The joint statement of the just concluded 57th ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting reiterated that the relevant parties should restrain their actions and avoid taking actions that will complicate and expand the dispute, affect peace and stability, and further complicate the maritime situation.

However, the Philippines’ recent actions at Xianbin Reef run counter to the common expectations of other countries in the South China Sea.

As an important global shipping route, the South China Sea has been used by 50% of the world’s merchant ships and one-third of the world’s maritime trade for decades without any interference or obstruction.

For the Filipino people, the top priority is to solve domestic economic problems.

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(People are picking up discarded vegetables at a public market in Manila.)

According to a July report by the Philippine Manila Times, the South China Sea dispute was ranked among the issues that the Filipino people paid the least attention to.

In addition, Filipinos can also pay more attention to the huge assets of the Marcos family deposited in Swiss banks, which are all the hard-earned money of the Filipino people.

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(When former first lady Imelda fled to the United States with her husband Musk, people discovered that they had collected more than 3,000 pairs of shoes, more than 2,000 pairs of gloves, more than 1,700 bags, more than 5,000 pairs of shorts and countless socks and underwear in their luxurious residence.)

Enchanted forest in Devon,England

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Mekong River (China calls it Lancang river 澜沧江) starts from China and runs thru Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam & then to the South Sea. 70% of Cambodian sea trade goes thru Vietnam for a fee. Money is one thing. To be controlled by Vietnam is another. Twice, in 1994 & 2020, Vietnam blockaded Cambodia’s sea trade.

The irony is that the land where Vietnam’s sea port is located belonged to Cambodian kingdom in history. Vietnam, a nation that was born later than Cambodia, militarily occupied that piece of land.

With China’s infrastructure technology in the 21st century, Cambodia asks China for help to make a canal (Funan Techo Canal) so as to control its own fate re sea trading. It makes sense, isn’t it? Who would like to be blackmailed?

Understandably, Vietnam is not happy because it will lose hefty revenue from Cambodia. Then comes with all kinds of dirty tricks. It said it is concerned of the damage to the environment. But study shows that the canal only affect 2% of the water flow of Mekong River. Not enough to change the ecosystem of Mekong.

Then Vietnam propagated that China will control Cambodia AND Malacca strait that is controlled by USA & Singapore. See, Vietnam wants to drag USA along to stop the canal.

Historically, Cambodia & Vietnam had many wars. The latest was in 1978-1989. In mid Aug 2024, while Cambodia celebrated the start of the canal project, Vietnam set up arms at the Vietnam-Cambodia border close to the mouth of the canal. After that Vietnam’s military chief met with Cambodia’s counterpart.

On the other hand, using modern weapons bought from China, Cambodia conducted a military drill by firing a rocket & showing off robot dogs to assist the ground troop. Vietnam’s weapons are old from 1960-80’s.

The canal project started on 2024/8/5 & is expected to finish in 4 years.

some news re Vietnam

After a Vietnamese team has visited USA, Vietnam’s new president To Lam visited China. Dont know if Vietnam wants to see if it can get US goodies & use it as a bargain with China.

Earlier Vietnam followed Philippines & went to UN to extend its continental shelf (failed). Also militarily collaborated with PH.

China is the Worst Country in the World!

This patient was something else. She didn’t have a job, lived in the lower echelons of society and was obviously mentally challenged. She also had a kidney stone.

She claimed to be suffering from severe abdominal pain and subsequently visited her General Practitioner, but he brushed her off with Ibuprofen because “it was obviously the kidney stone.” But the pain was simply too intense to cover up with a simple GP-woven Ibuprofen blanket, so she called her urologist’s office, and insisted on coming over right away.

When she explained her symptoms, the urologist knew at once that this was not related to the kidney stone. And then the patient said the most remarkable thing —

“It’s so painful that I asked my dad to drive slower on the way to the hospital.”

The urologist immediately asked if that was because of the bumps in the road. (It was.)

She then applied pressure on a specific point on the right-hand side of the patient’s abdomen and then quickly released the pressure, and the patient’s reaction confirmed the urologist’s hypothesis. (The patient loudly screamed.)

“It’s not the kidney stone. You have acute appendicitis. And you will need emergency surgery right away.”

The patient first refused the operation (bearing her GP’s “diagnosis” in mind, and because she did not really understand what was going on), but the pain quickly grew worse and she was feverish as well.

So when a general surgeon (and an emergency ultrasound) confirmed the urologist’s diagnosis, she eventually gave in, and not much later the appendix (and a huge amount of pus) was removed.

If she had waited any longer upon listening to her GP, his (enormous and unforgivable) mistake could have very well ended up fatally for her. Because her pain was not kidney stone related at all (as the GP should have known) —

And the road was really bumpy.

FIRST TIME HEARING ROBIN TROWER – Too Rolling Stoned Live REACTION

1. A lion may sleep up to 20 hours a day.

2. A lion’s heel doesn’t touch the ground when it walks.

3. A good gauge of a male lion’s age is the darkness of his mane. The darker the mane, the older the lion.

4. Even though the lion is sometimes referred to as the “king of the jungle,” it actually only lives in grasslands and plains. The expression may have come from an incorrect association between Africa and jungles or may refer to a less literal meaning of the word jungle.

5. A lion can run for short distances at 50 mph and leap as far as 36 feet.

6. A lion’s roar can be heard from as far as 5 miles away.

7. The lion was once found throughout Africa, Asia and Europe but now exists only in Africa with one exception. The last remaining Asiatic lions are found in Sasan-Gir National Park in India, which was primarily created to protect the species. Currently, there are approximately 350-400 lions in the park.

8. These majestic cats are threatened by habitat loss. The lion is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

9. Male lions defend the pride’s territory while females do most of the hunting. Despite this, the males eat first.

10. African lions are the most social of all big cats and live together in groups or “prides.” A pride consists of about 15 lions.

First they had a law where at least 51% Share of any Business owned by a Foreigner outside of HK and Macau on the Mainland had to be owned by a Mainland Entity

They modified this to at least 49% in the 1990s and also a Franchisee System for Foreign Commercial Outlets like McDonalds (Guangdong, 1990) or KFC (1991, Shanghai) [The 1987 KFC in Beijing was a Trademark based wholly owned Chinese Entity that served Rice Conjee]

They then modified this to at least 30% if Technology Transfer was included meaning 70% could be owned by a US Entity

They then allowed Foreign owned companies to establish FRANCHISEES and licensed based businesses for Financing and Banking including Citibank (1987), Standard Chartered (1992) and DBS (1999)

Finally today there are four forms of Foreign Ownership in China :-

  • Wholly Owned Trademark Or Royalty based Business – Business is fully owned by Chinese Entities but they pay a fixed Royalty or Trademark to Western Entities like Ingenious Designs LLC (Joy Magnano)
  • Joint Venture Foreign Subsidiary – Business is owned 51–49 by a Western Partner and Mainland Partner Or 70–30 (Tech Transfer) or 85–15 (Advanced Technology like Intel and TSMC)
  • Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise or WFOE (Wholly Foreign owned Enterprise) – Business is 100% owned by Foreign Entities but China gets a fixed percentage of profits and minimum workforce guarantee. One Example is TESLA.
  • State Joint Venture Subsidiary – JV Foreign Subsidiary where the State owns minimum 20% of the Shareholding of the Mainland shareholding or 9.8% of the Total Shareholding

These days WOFEs are very common and 82% Businesses established from 2023 May have been WOFEs

So Americans can own a fully owned US business and sell their products or services in China provided

  • The Data used is stored and secured in Chinese Owned and Operated Data Servers with Chinese designed Encryption Algorithms (DSA, 2005 with amendments in 2017 & 2022)
  • A Sum equivalent to at least 18 months wages of all Employees and all running costs of the Business be deposited with a Chinese Bank for Bankruptcy scenarios
  • At least 63% of the Supply Chain must be sourced within the Mainland and since 2020 – at least 80% of the Supply Chain must be sourced within the Mainland, HK and Chinas RCEP partners
  • Minimum Investment into Manufacturing should not be less than $ 400 Million & in case of services (Non Financial) should be minimum $ 50 Million and services (financial) should be at least $ 1.5 Billion

There are over 57,000 Businesses in China owned by Foreigners under the four above categories


Problems Americans have :-

A. Data Security Laws – Since 2007, China has insisted that all Data Servers hosting Data of Wholly Owned Foreign Entities be owned by State Owned Chinese firms

  • Japan, Singapore, Germany immediately agreed
  • S Korea agreed in 2010
  • Asean agreed in 2011
  • EU and US held out until 2016 but finally agreed

B. Data Security Laws II – Since 2021, China has insisted that Data Servers of IBM and Dell and other Western companies who once owned 87% share in China be REPLACED with Huawei and Lenovo for any State owned company & Private Chinese Company

  • Now Huawei has a 34% Share and Lenovo a 7% Share, that’s 41% Market owned by China
  • Not WOFEs which can still has IBM
  • Likewise Huawei Cloud & Sugon has taken over 80% of Western Owned Data Businesses

Americans are VERY ANGRY especially IBM

This Retirement Data is TERRIFYING || Do you want to be an ‘Also Ran’?

https://youtu.be/_5vSCHLAsn4

Not admitted to a cop but admitted to me by a citizen. Received a call of s suspicious person at a local grocery store. Well I am enroute and the various situations play through my head and a cover officer is also dispatched a female officer (this is revelant later) arrive meet with security who leads me to the suspicious person. A middle aged male in the aisle muttering to self and holding a package of “female hygiene” products. Approach male and ask “what is going on? What are we doing here?”q

I am informed my “suspect” is a single father of a teenaged daughter that is having her first period; and he has no idea what product to purchase for her. Standing there facing one another we both have a completely blank expression on our faces with a very awkward silence. The silence is finally broken by my radio announcing my cover has arrived (thank holy Jesus the Calvary has arrived) she asked over the radio if she is still needed and my location in the store. I respond “more than I can even express, all is 10-4 and aisle (something)”

Down the isle comes lady officer XYZ, she is ready to do battle and there I am and our suspect exchanging blank looks and not much else. She storms up “what is the problem” I look at her and then tell our suspect to explain to lady officer XYZ what the issue is exactly. He does in a sheepish “please help” voice. She fires daggers at me after explanation is given and I look back “I know, I am sorry, I owe you lunch; Please please help us dumb ass males out here we are clueless!! I mean seriously clueless!!” she asked height, weight and other revelant questions. My boots suddenly become very very interesting. She grabs and hands our suspect the proper product from the information she had gathered. I am happy to clear us from the call for service and high tail it back to my patrol car. She is having none of that “you’re off the hook” thing.

She says “how are YOU going to write this up” I said “I got it, let’s call it a public service call” she says “lunch on you tomorrow” I said “lunch on me the rest of this week”. She shot me (die where you stand look) laughed and got in her unit.

Was looking for a new car. Called various Audi dealerships; got down to a good price but no value given for trading in my current leased car. One dealership gave me a really good price and a really good value for turning in my currently leased car. I checked with other dealers and they all said they couldn’t get close. The numbers were too good. He was going to try and cheat me me somehow.

So, I said to the salesman that gave me the great price they had to take the trade in sight unseen with only deductions that Audi would require if I turned it in to Audi. Also his price was the drive away price. No extra charges.

I go in to pick it up they keep me waiting a long time. Trying to get me late and anxious to get the deal done. Then sales manger comes out to inspect the car with a pad and writes down every trivial paint chip and minor parking lot ding. He was about to say there was no trade in value and I told him he wasn’t allowed to reduce for anything Audi wouldn’t deduct for, and Audi allowed, everything except major dents and there weren’t any. Audi wouldn’t lose a sale over minor paint chips. He walked away dejected.

Had to wait for the leasing guy and he gave me the paperwork. It was based on the wrong price about $1500 high. I pointed that out and he made some lame excuse but agreed to fix it. Then I went through all the fees that aren’t agreed and make him take them off but in a couple places he said we put the fee in here but we reduce the amount here so you don’t really pay it. I said ok.

I get home happy that I got my original deal and trade in. Then I realized there was $169 dollars that was supposed to be removed but wasn’t. Still a great deal but I was upset with myself for missing it. Then I get an email from Audi USA asking how my transaction went. I explained how they cheated me out $169 but tried to cheat me $2000 on the trade in and about her $1500 on the price used in calculating the lease.

Next day the salesman called screamed at me saying because of what I said he lost his entire bonus for the whole quarter.

Same tree and different seasons

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I was walking into a Chick-fil-A with my duty sidearm as I was attending police training nearby. A young mother saw the gun, but somehow missed I was wearing my badge on my belt.

She immediately confronted me and started shouting I was in a family-friendly place and she had her two sons with her and having my gun visible (on me) was totally unacceptable.

I attempted to explain to her that I was a sworn law enforcement officer attending a training session nearby, but she cut me off and wanted to hear no excuses.

She demanded that I leave immediately or she would call the police. I politely said I would wait while she was on the phone with 911.

The responding officer was just around the corner (actually, he was in the drive-thru line) and responded quickly.

As he entered the restaurant, I motioned for him not to acknowledge me but to hear her complaint.

The young mother went on a tear about how so many people were wearing guns these days and that it made her uncomfortable.

The officer listened to her go on for about ten minutes and then politely stopped her.

The officer motioned for the manager who had been listening off to the side to come into the conversation.

The manager explained that his owners policy was to let police officers eat in the restaurant with their sidearm and badge.

At this time I took the visible badge off my belt and showed it to her.

The officer looked at me and said sorry corporal, turned on his heels and returned to his car to eat a cold sandwich.

The young mother was silent for the first time in about forty-five minutes.

The manger walked over to the register, punched a few buttons and promptly refunded the young mother the cost of her order.

The manager said officers were welcome in his store any time and he would rather lose her business than that of the several local departments that purchased breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day from his store.

He then invited the mother to leave the store but as she exited he made one final comment to the tune of, “not everyone who carries a gun is bad just as not everyone who doesn’t carry a gun is good.”

I still frequented that store even though I am no longer a sworn officer to show my support for the owner and manager.

The Clearest UFO Footage Ever – Shape Shifting UFO

Recently, Foreign Affairs magazine published an article by Jonathan D. Caverly, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, which put forward a controversial view: the United States should not conflict with China for Taiwan.

This typical “abandon Taiwan theory” stems from his new understanding of Taiwan’s status.

Compared with former U.S. politicians who believe that Taiwan Island is an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that can prevent China’s rise, and cross-strait reunification will impact U.S. military hegemony. Caverly believes that the military value of Taiwan Island is limited, U.S. hegemony does not depend on the fate of Taiwan Island, and cross-strait reunification cannot change the balance of power between China and the United States in the Pacific.

Of course, this is only the theoretical basis of Caverly’s “abandon Taiwan theory”, and the real reason is that the risk of challenging the PLA in the Taiwan Strait is too high. There is another important reason for a more realistic choice: even if the Chinese Navy suffers huge losses, it can rebuild a strong navy in a few years, while it is difficult to replenish U.S. warships after they are destroyed.

He said something very straightforward: “American allies would rather see the US fleet than have these combat forces destroyed in the confrontation with China.”

Although Caverly’s article only represents personal opinions, the fact that it can be published in “Foreign Affairs” also means that American society is reflecting on the issue of military intervention in the Taiwan Strait.

Once the PLA launches a military action against Taiwan, and the US military assesses that it cannot win, and says that it will not intervene, the US allies will question the strength of the United States. Once the US military admits its weakness, it will cause the US government to be very passive. From the beginning of the vague policy adopted by the United States on the Taiwan issue, such a choice has been left open.

As long as the US allies believe that Taiwan’s unification with China will not have much impact, it will be a reasonable choice for the US military not to intervene. As long as the Western society believes that such a choice is correct, abandoning Taiwan will be a matter of course.

In general, even if the United States has ten thousand reasons not to give up on the Taiwan issue, it will have to give up because of China’s strength, and this process will inevitably make the United States very painful.

Charging rhino is the most intimidating thing

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One fact which is not too widely understood by the general public is how to interpret blast yield.

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2020 Beirut blast

Back in 2020 a warehouse in Beirut exploded and was caught on film. It was absolutely massive, the shockwave blew debris all around, demolishing buildings and killing people. Over 200 people died and over 7000 were injured by overpressure, flying debris, glass and more. Over 300,000 people lost their homes as a result of the blast. It was a terrible event, an explosion of conventional nitrates, equivalent to 1.1 kt of TNT. This is approximately 10% the blast yield of Hiroshima bomb.

Normal people look at this and swallow hard imagining how much worse nuclear bombs must be. This blast was just 10% of what is nowadays considered a relatively small bomb, mainstream weapons nowadays are about 40 times more powerful than that, so 400 times the Beirut blast. It’s very easy to imagine just how much worse the nuclear bomb must be.

And it is worse. Just not in the way you might think.

Explosive yield is not a 1-to-1 comparison of effects. Rather it’s the amount of energy released by the blast. A more neutral way would be to express it in Joules, but you’d lose yourself in all your zeroes and you have to be a weirdo to be able to envision what 4.18e12 Joules does to a city and how it differs from 4.18e13 Joules. Both numbers are big … that’s all a normal person can say. In case you’re wondering, the first one is one kiloton, the second is ten kilotons and you can probably imagine those much better.

This is important, because the energy profile of a conventional explosion is profoundly different to a nuclear blast. A conventional explosive works such that a solid material (the explosive) rapidly decomposes exothermically, it falls apart and generates lots of heat in a very short amount of time. The product of this explosion has a volume that is many times greater than the original bomb, which creates a massive overpressure and this bubble is also very hot, because the decomposition was exothermic, it generates a lot of heat. This increases the pressure even further and generates the destructive blast wave seen in Beirut videos.

A nuclear weapon works differently, there the only products are heat and radiation. A nuclear weapon doesn’t generate an appreciatable amount of gases from previously solid materials, it just heats a very small area to such a high temperature an explosion still occurs. However the blast wave a result of heat and the overpressure is grossly incomparible with that of conventional explosives. This is why you have the infrared radiation causing fires and burns well away from ground zero in a nuclear blast, but not a conventional explosion. All of this is baked into the initial “kiloton” expression, although conventional explosions produce neither.

The Beirut blast wave was comparible to that caused by the Hiroshima bomb. I’m not saying it was identical but it certainly was rather close to what a 12 kt nuclear bomb would do at that location in terms of a blast wave. The nuclear bomb would also cause a bright flash that would blind people looking the wrong way, it would also cause burns to people exposed to the blast and it could cause radiation injuries, the fireball would also incinerate the warehouse itself, but the blast beyond that would be similar to what (nominally) ten times smaller conventional explosion produces.

If you want to take this further, the blast wave is considerably affected by gravity and causes more damage in the horisontal direction, where buildings and people are. Radiation (thermal or ionizing) from a nuclear blast is only minimally affected, so a considerably larger part of energy is released up and away, into space. Ditto for energy directed downwards at the ground. Overpressure will be channeled to the side by terra firma, radiation will just be absorbed eventually.

This is why you can’t take an explosion of, say, 1,000 tons of TNT and say a nuclear bomb would be 10, 20 or 1000 times worse. No. It would release a lot more energy, but the profile of that energy will be widely different to the point of the two being largely incomparible. Of course a 20 or a 1000 times more energetic blast is still going to be worse overall, but effects don’t just scale up. It’s a lot more complex than that.

That Thing You Do! (2/5) Movie CLIP – Radio Debut (1996) HD

The story of Roman Sosa, former pro boxer, who escaped death or his murder planned by his wife.☠️

Roman Sosa met his wife Maria de Lourdes Dorantes, also known as “Lulu” in a bar and they got married in 2009. Lulu had her two kids with her. In 2010, the couple opened Woodlands Boxing and Fitness together.

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By 2014, Roman knew that his marriage was nearing his end. As Lulu would be a loving wife for a first few days and for the next few days she would be cruel and would even talk about selling their gym Woodlands.

During this time, Roman got to know a man named Mundo, who grew up in poverty. Roman asked Mundo whether he wanted to learn fighting? To which Mundo replied yes. Two of them got so close together that Roman addressed Mundo as his other son.

Mundo one day, heard Lulu and her daughter planning about Roman’s murder and getting all his assets befor the divorce was finalized. Mundo immediately called roman to tell him the same. Also afraid for his friend, Mundo decided to play along and made up a name, telling Lulu he knew someone named “Paco” who could do the job.

The two decided to have Mundo keep the act up with Lulu, and to get more evidence and information to take the case to police. Ramon got a burner phone to act as “paco” – his own hitman.

On July 15, 2015, Ramon Sosa and Mundo went to the Montgomery Co. Constable’s Office and shared what they knew. They provided recorded audio conversations between Mundo and Lulu, as well as $100 they said Lulu gave Mundo as a down payment for the hit on Ramon.

The police then decided to do an undercover operation and get more evidence so as to arrest Lulu.

On July 21, 2015 the policemen used make up on Ramon Sosa to make it look like that he was shot by a gun on his temple and took his photos to show Lulu as proof.

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main qimg 532dacef2d01c800917b96d30b1b80ed

On July 22, 2015, an undercover officer posing as “Paco” met up with Lulu on camera to show her the proof. And the immediate response of Lulu to the photo was an evil smile.

Lulu Sosa was arrested on July 23 on the charge of solicitation of murder.

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main qimg 7fac3558cf2bb9174fface38b645582f

I Work For A Company That Contains Liminal Spaces. The Abandoned McDonalds

China

There will be a clear winner and it will be China

Japan is vulnerable and 70 years of being a US Lackey have made it soft.

Chinas numerical Advantage and Economic Strength is simply too strong for Japan already throttled by Deflation and Stagnancy.

Without US Interference – No Country has a Chance against China in the Long term except maybe Russia.

The Only Question is – Is China prepared to be burnt very badly in the process?

Remember a Decimated Japan always has the West and US rushing into help economically but a Decimated China will receive no help as it is an Alpha Predator. I am sure Pakistan cannot flood China with a Trillion Dollars nor can Russia.

That is Chinas Achilles Heel.

They are an Alpha Power which means they have to be very careful in any War they plan because whatever damage they suffer – they must be able to handle and correct it on their own without depending on anyone else, even Russia.

I won’t need to do anything.

The BadCat will eat your eyes. I probably couldn’t stop him even if I wanted to. But considering the purpose of your visit, I’m more inclined to stand idly by and watch. Maybe I’ll take some video. A cautionary tale for the next firearms prohibitionist contemplating vandalism.

You see, the BadCat does not approve of strangers. Not even a little bit. He can jump face high from the floor from a standing start, while yowling in the Menacing Tense like an enraged kzin, and slice you to ribbons even if you’re a fit adult male. Eyes and carotids.

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main qimg 33baaeb5aa90a56db95ba953ee4ea5b8

If you put your hands up to ward him off or peel him off, you just bleed more.

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main qimg 0a56ee92e82df9c6f29cf18a203e0543

He has no remorse. Just look at him gloating. Evil incarnate. A feline demon. –

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main qimg 9f63a8d6afb4ec3037f50afa28bfb308

The vault door is for your protection, not his. And it’s barely up to the task.

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main qimg f795792c4efcb1968a321e4cc7881b30

Oh, did I mention that he’s under my protection? It’s a proven fact that coyotes who would harm cats do so less frequently after receiving 3.5gram projectiles at Mach 2.7. It makes a bloody mess of them.

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main qimg 4067e90439dc94ee1a9f27fd1822f28c

Here he is prowling coyote country, just looking for a ‘yote to torment –

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main qimg dc945a95463dd7235d5739a29d151971

Perhaps you should reconsider. Besides, the safe would probably stop you. It’s a screw door Mosler with Relsom plate and tungsten carbide inclusions.

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main qimg 6f6f35767c65192ef9cd7d917c2cce15

Unless you pick the wrong safe, in which case you get to die horriby by chloropicrin and phosgene. You know, war gasses. Nasty stuff. Not worth the risk, I assure you. But then probably anything is preferable to the cat getting you.

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main qimg b0fa5b6ae45cfb2d5bc5a2b55bbde57a

Water ice on mars

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main qimg 9ce76a8b0204620eb4b75e4e4286d619 lq

A Monk prays for a dead man who was waiting for his train in the station hall of Shanxi Taiyuan train station in Shanxi, China.

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main qimg 0081da4b5e47147daf47bd1ea6fb72be lq

The photographer:

“I remember clearly that it was about 5 p.m. on November 25. 

I was just finishing an assignment photographing retired military soldiers bidding farewell to their comrades at the train station. 

On my way out, I heard someone yelling from a corner and soon after lots of people gathered around. 

I ran towards the sound and made my way to the front of the crowd, only to find an old man dead on the bench. 

As I raised my camera, a Buddhist monk walked out of the crowd and went directly towards the dead man. 

The monk bent down to hold the old man’s hand and started to chant scriptures. 

I began to take pictures immediately. 

One minute later, police came over and cordoned off the area. 

After the monk finished the ceremony, he bowed to the old man and quickly disappeared among the other busy passengers.”

When the monk found an old man slumped over on a train station bench, he stopped, held his cold hand and prayed, and then bowed before him. He honored this man, who died while waiting for his train.

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main qimg 8f6f44191e20ceb77adcbf49d6318fd5 lq

We know our lives are a brief moment of the Infinite, but there are only few instances in life that conjure the true understanding of reality.

The day, the second, this old man was born, he too never have thought he would one day leave this world in the waiting hall of a train station.

Things are difficult to predict, and lives are over in a moment. We never know when the last time is THE LAST TIME.

Most of the things in life are just noises, and a very few things are exceptionally valuable. Find those things.

It pains me to see people eating alone, let alone death. Money is very important and so are the people with whom it is spent with.

Lessons I learnt:

  • From the Crowd: No matter what. World never stops. It goes on.
  • From the Man: Death is inevitable. It will come when it will come. You leave everything behind except what is woven into the life of others. Try to weave something good.
  • From the Monk: A part of being a human is to do something for people what they deserve. In times of tragedies, no act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

V

Shorpy

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Wells Fargo Employee Found Dead At Her Cubicle…4 Days Later!

Here are twenty clean jokes for you:

1. Why don’t scientists trust atoms?
Because they make up everything!

2. What do you call fake spaghetti?
An impasta!

3. Why did the scarecrow win an award?
Because he was outstanding in his field!

4. What’s orange and sounds like a parrot?
A carrot!

5. Why did the bicycle fall over?
Because it was two-tired!

6. What do you call cheese that isn’t yours?
Nacho cheese!

7. How does a penguin build its house?
Igloos it together!

8. Why can’t you give Elsa a balloon?
Because she will let it go!

9. What do you call an alligator in a vest?
An investigator!

10. Why are ghosts bad liars?
Because you can see right through them!

11. What do you get when you cross a snowman and a vampire?
Frostbite!

12. Why did the math book look sad?
Because it had too many problems!

13. What did the zero say to the eight?
Nice belt!

14. Why was the computer cold?
It left its Windows open!

15. How do you organize a space party?
You planet!

16. What do you call a bear with no teeth?
A gummy bear!

17. Why did the golfer bring two pairs of pants?
In case he got a hole in one!

18. What did one ocean say to the other ocean?
Nothing, they just waved!

19. Why don’t skeletons fight each other?
They don’t have the guts!

20. What do you call a pig that does karate?
A pork chop!

Teenage boys hitting on me has never stopped creeping me out. This has happened every year since I started teaching. The comments made by them are sometimes VERY inappropriate, so I try to turn it into a ‘how to treat women with respect’ life lesson for them…

Besides that I had one incident in the last 10 years that really freaked me out. I once had a girl in my class, she was about 15 years old, and she decided the first day of the new school year that she hated me. After 4 weeks of class, she suddenly walks up to me in the middle of me talking about the outbreak of WW1 and started saying things about my family; she knew my youngest sister’s name, address, where she went to school and named some of her friends. While doing this she kept looking straight at me. When she finished summing up all this information, she turned around, walked back to her chair and smirked at me. I was completely freaked out, but kept a straight face and went on with my class. After this class I immediately went to the principals office and demanded that her parents would be called into school to discuss this ‘intimidating’ behaviour. It was brushed off as a joke by them.

Few weeks later two of her friends were still in my classroom after class so I started chatting with them. They brought up the incident that occurred and told me that she was out to get me and my family because her boyfriend liked me. Now this wasn’t just a ‘normal’ jealous teenage girl, she regularly got into very violent fights and was known for being completely bonkers. Her friends feeling the need to inform me of this and telling me to be careful really freaked me out again, I don’t want a crazy person like this knowing my family’s address! Back to the principal’s office is was. The parents were called again and she was suspended from my classes for the rest of the block.

I had to teach this girl for another 2 years, she never said anything inappropriate to me again, but it’s the only student ever that I didn’t want to have in my classroom.

Pizza Tot Casserole

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16d4e2012d5f1ea3429a016db9c589c1

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 medium green bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 (11 1/8 ounce) can condensed Italian tomato soup, undiluted
  • 1 (4 1/2 ounce) jar sliced mushrooms, drained
  • 2 cups (8 ounces) shredded mozzarella cheese
  • 1 (32 ounce) package frozen tater tots

Instructions

  1. In a skillet, cook the beef, bell pepper and onion until meat is no longer pink; drain.
  2. Add soup and mushrooms.
  3. Transfer to a greased 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking dish.
  4. Top with cheese and potatoes.
  5. Bake uncovered at 400 degrees F for 30 to 35 minutes or until golden brown.

Journey – Feeling That Way/Anytime | REACTION | INCREDIBLE!

U.S. Seizes Airplane Used By Venezuela President Nicholas Maduro

U.S. Seizes Airplane Used By Venezuela President Nicholas Maduro

Plane of Venezuels President Seized By USA large
Plane of Venezuels President Seized By USA large

The United States has SEIZED the airplane used by Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro.  The plane was in the Dominican Republic and the U.S. grabbed it for “violating U.S. Sanctions.

The plane was then flown to Florida.

It is not yet clear WHO it is that allegedly violated US Sanctions; Maduro himself or the aircraft Owner.

Details at this time are sketchy, but above are the basic facts as they are understood at this hour. 1:34 PM EDT Monday, September 2, 2024.

95% of all daily transactions done with Alipay or WeChat pay. Started to change 10–15 years ago. If you use cash, you get strange looks.

Everything is done this way. Public transport, Didi (like Uber),food delivery, restaurants, street vendors….

25 Facts That Will Ruin Your Childhood

Remember the “2008 Great Financial Crisis?” That was then . . . . this is now:

Remember the &quot;2008 Great Financial Crisis?&quot; That was then . . . . this is now:

Almost every adult recalls the 2008 “Great Financial Crisis” when Bear Stearns, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and others collapsed. The Chart from FDIC shows that period above.   That was then . . . . . . . . THIS is now:

From the FDIC:

FDIC 2008 VS NOW
FDIC 2008 VS NOW

 

How much longer this can go on is anyone’s guess.  It seems to me, as an unqualified Layman who is not a Licensed Financial Expert, and who cannot give financial advice, that this is an utter catastrophe actually taking place.

In my personal (unqualified) opinion, when it finally causes a collapse . . . . the collapse is going to wipe out everything!

Now you know why they seem to be trying so hard to cause World War 3.   They need it to blame the coming collapse on!

If the collapse takes place without World War 3, then THEY get (rightly) blamed instead of being able to blame “the war.”

Maybe the reason the uber-wealthy are building underground shelters for themselves is not to protect them from World War 3, but instead, to protect them from the masses, who will be wiped-out when the Banker shenanigans wipes out the system and everyone loses everything.

Whatever they’re going to do, it seems to me they have to do it before the election.

I earnestly hope you have emergency food, water, medicines you need to live on, a generator, fuel for it, communications gear like CB or HAM radio, flashlights, first-aid kits, CASH MONEY stashed outside a bank in a place where YOU can get to it.  If you don’t have these things, what will you do when the whole thing comes crashing down?

Get what you can, now, before the SHTF.  People who do not prepare now, will be S.O.L. later.

Disturbing Last Found Footage of Missing Persons

I remember a particular case that has stayed with me through the years. As a nurse, you come across all sorts of situations, but this one left a mark not because of the physical state of the patient, but because of what it taught me about humanity.

I was working a late shift when a man in his mid-50s was admitted to the ER. He was homeless, had been living on the streets for years, and it showed. His body was covered in layers of dirt, and there were signs of severe neglect. He smelled of sweat, urine, and the streets—a stench so strong that it seemed to cling to the walls of the room. His skin was marred with sores and old wounds, some infected, and there was an overall sense of decay. To say he was “gross” would be an understatement, and I could see the discomfort in the eyes of the younger staff.

But here’s the thing: when I looked into his eyes, I saw fear, pain, and an overwhelming sense of shame. He was a human being who had fallen through every crack in the system, and he was acutely aware of how he appeared to us. He avoided eye contact, probably expecting to be treated like the outcast he felt he was.

As I approached him, I knew I had a choice. I could distance myself, do the bare minimum, and move on. But I didn’t. I took his hand, and though he flinched at first, I held on. I spoke to him gently, reassuring him that he was safe now. With each word, I could see a bit of the tension leave his body. And as I began to clean his wounds, the disgust I initially felt was replaced by a deep sense of empathy. Here was a man who had been stripped of his dignity by life, and in that moment, my touch wasn’t just a medical necessity—it was an act of kindness, a way to tell him that he was still worthy of care, of compassion.

It took time, but as we worked on getting him cleaned up and treated, he began to open up, telling us bits and pieces of his story. He was someone’s son, had once been a father and a husband, and life had simply been too cruel for him to bear.

That night, I was reminded that behind every “gross” patient is a story, a life that deserves to be honored. And sometimes, the most challenging patients are the ones who need us the most—not just for their physical wounds, but for the scars that run much deeper.

In the end, what matters isn’t how clean or dirty someone is. It’s about the humanity we share and the simple, yet profound, power of touch, empathy, and understanding.

Hoarders.

Submitted into Contest #247 in response to: Set your story on a spaceship exploring the far reaches of space when something goes wrong. view prompt

Ben Ebert

This story contains themes or mentions of physical violence, gore, or abuse.
Flashing red lights and a powerful echoing siren around the entire ship. Blood ran along their arm and down to their fingertips, and they looked at me with such hate. “ Are you weak?”“Absolutely, I am weak…”-Before.They looked at me for answers from their different control chairs. The vessel floated rather silently through space. The five of us have spent every day for the last eleven months together. sent on a mission to collect resources from around every corner of the universe.Eleven months reaping food, metal, water, and every mineral of resource we could, guided by the stars and the powers that be, sending us directions and only returning when were full. All in the name of the Federation, so the Fed could become the biggest superpower in the known universe.“What are we going to do?” Robin my navigator sternly asked me. My crew glared, hoping I would have some answer, some emergency help. The rectangle-shaped bridge lit up with the blue and orange glows of the different computers at each of my crew’s workstations.  I reached for my servatium, but the pill bottle had run empty. It’s just what I needed at this time. It kept us relaxed and a little lucid while dealing with all the stress and madness that comes with being a star hoarder. I looked at all of the stars outside of the large oval window that wrapped around the front of the cockpit. Unlimited potential through the window and we were doomed to die from oxygen poisoning, as our life support systems had shit the bed in a really bad way, and I didn’t know why. This day had felt like a nightmare. I nodded to my crew who had waited too long for an answer.“ We have several hours of life support left, and three new star systems in range, there is a chance we could find somewhere, a planet that supports us for a day or two.” It was not the answer the crew was looking for. Jacobs, my Medic, the man of the people threw up his hands and shook his head.“ We get air, make some repairs, contact the Fed” I continued, trying to come up with something that at least sounded hopeful and like I had any idea how I could solve this.“ We should head back to the Federation.” Barnes the engineer noted. Some of the crew waited for an answer, but my navigator already knew. She tapped her feet and chewed at her nails. Her brown eyes widened as the crew looked at her.“ Fourteen, fourteen hours away is the nearest fed base, and that’s at full speed ” She mutteredIt was then that my chemist, dam emotional guy dropped on the floor and started to have a bit of a panic attack. It’s how they all felt, but I couldn’t do that. I tried to stand tall and firm like it was just another Tuesday or this mining craft. This craft that’s sent to scout the stars for resources. It’s a high-paid job, one of the only that’s left for people who aren’t born with a silver spatula up their rectum left. A long tradition of engineers scouring the stars to see what we can muster up from planets. For about as long as this job has lasted there’s been stories of people all over disappearing into unknown star systems, ghost stories of our first contact with aliens not going well – but this, this is something else.A halted cough from our chemist, my least favorite member of this motley crew.“So youre plan, and correct me if im wrong is to keep doing what we are doing, knowing that we will probably perish in about nine hours?” Chemist, botanist, geologist, all those degrees I guess it didn’t teach him any people skills.“No,” I announce as I walk through the bridge to the star map. A large square sat centrally on the bridge. I wave my hand over the golden sand dial to illuminate it. a cluster of stars appeared as holograms in front of us, painting us in a blue hue. I put my finger slightly in the sand and I felt the connecting bio-tissue tickle at my finger.“ This is our current destination,” I announced. The map zoomed quickly to a cluster of stars that shone brighter than the rest. A black line showed the jump point to the next galaxy.“But bear with me.”

I pinched the electric sand and twisted it. The holograms sped to another cluster of stars. I reached in the air and pressed invisible buttons, to show a projection over the holograms.

“ This galaxy has at least four different jump points that are clustered together.  We redirect here immediately. This way we can access the most galaxies and planets as quickly as possible.”

“4.78 percent.” My navigator chirped up exactly when I didn’t want her to.

“4.78 of planets across the universe are at least slightly habitable to us.”

Sad sighs escaped the crew’s throats.

“ Then we’ll beat the odds,” I announced, pushing a hopeful smirk on my lips.

I turned and started walking away.

“Let’s make it happen people!” I yelled into the air.

I marched along the bridge to the hallways, this ship was large enough to hold a few secrets. Eleven months we’ve been sent out to the far reaches of the universe, eleven months and I felt like I knew these people so well.  They should have felt like family. I couldn’t help erasing the feeling, that there were thoughts they hid from me. The ravaging of planets for rich folk who don’t give a fuck about us is sure to take a toll. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there could be enemies among my crew.

I walk past the crew quarters. I felt the pull of my quarters, my little sanctuary from these people. I just wanted a second in it. I might have found some Servitium to take the blinding worry away. This is the least sedated I’ve felt in a long time, my head doesn’t feel as cloudy though. As I got closer to my door, just across from it Robin’s my Navigator’s door smacked against something hard, making a jittering, creak.

As I got closer I noticed the smell of copper, before I saw the bloodstains coming from the body of the ship’s cat Goliath. I reeled from it for a moment but I had to step into Robin’s room. It was then that I started to realize what had happened.

Behind Robins’ bed, just like all of ours, is the blue-winged eagle of the federation marker and the letters G.F. A for ‘Galactic Federation Alliance’

Written in Goliath’s blood over the insignia is ‘ Thieving Federation Genocide Alliance, and T.F.G.A’, and a single picture of the remnants of a planet we gutted. I knew which one instantly, Tac 17, the holograph read ‘signs of early life’… but we had orders. A quota to reach.

My stomach urges me to vomit, but I do the breathing exercises the Fed doctor told me. I wanted to keep in control, for a second I looked for Robin’s Servitium, but stopped myself and left her room.

I think about going back to the bridge and telling my crew, but I have more pressing matters. I touch my wristband, putting one finger on the bottom side, one just above it, and one on the left side of my wrist.

“Barnes. Meet me by the engine.”

The life support and maintenance system screens were flashing red by the engine. A light occasionally spun around the room with a quiet alarm.

“Sabotage? Really cap?” Barnes gasped at me.

I didn’t know if that was bad acting or if I  genuinely shocked him.

“What else could it be?” I asked him.

He stepped back, rolled his eyes, and threw out his hands.

“ I got to tell ya, the others aren’t going to be happy with you throwing around this kind of accusation.” Barnes looked over the engine again briefly and paced a little around the engine.

“ Who would it be, why would someone intentionally do this…Maybe, the cat got in it. messed up the wiring.”

“So not the cat,” Barnes muttered as I showed him the grave of Goliath, his mouth almost planted on the floor.

From my uni band, the voice of Robin announced.

“ We’ve arrived at c37.”

The whole crew stared at the holograph of the surface of the planet as I moved it around, zooming in briefly to see mountains and ridges, but the planet was mostly desert.

As I scanned through the planet, the sighs got louder and louder. I stopped looking at the barren planet when the hologram showed letters in red. ‘low CO2 levels’

We were quickly able to jump to the next planet. The crew watched in silence as Robin and I directed the next above a planet that was blue and filled with ice.

Scanning all of the planet, it was clear to see just sheets of ice and water. Quick quiet muttered erupted within my crew.

“Nowhere to land,” I muttered to my crew sadly.

I glanced over them, wondering how many people knew about Goliath’s body.

Robin took my hand and yanked me tightly to the side and behind one of the computers.

“ What are we doing? And don’t tell me what you told the crew. There’s only a 6.7 percent chance of us finding a planet.” She whispered.

“Why has It gone up?” I asked.

“It’s your plan, I recalculated, these star systems are denser than I expected.”

“ Why would someone do this?” I asked her directly, cutting her off She nodded slowly.

“So it is sabotage. We figured that was possible.”

The other three members of the crew were noticing our conversation.

“The problem is, only Barnes or you could sabotage the engine.” Her eyes turned sharp, and her hand drifted to her belt, which held a few things she could stab or hit me with.

I waved her towards me so she would follow me.

“No, no, not Goliath.” She whispered as a tear fell from her eye.

“ I doubt you would do this,” I admitted. My eyes fluttered as the withdrawal started to creep in. I held onto the wall, my body shaking a little, everything was so visceral and real like someone had dropped over my eyes the perfect glasses to see clearly.

Robin looked me from over, from head to toe.

“You’re not going to faint are you?”

I shook my head, and closed my eyes for a second, trying to make the world shake less.

“I can’t find my servitium. This would have been a whole lot easier to deal with if I had some.” I smirked at her.

“I’m sure I have some more around here somewhere, heard it’s good to have a break from it once in a while though.” She explained as she looked through her cupboards.

“You’re right. Actually, It’s a lot clearer without it.” I grabbed her throat and shoved her against the wall. My multitool already on its blade setting, I stabbed her quickly and deeply in the neck. Her eyes faded instantly.

Three more to go.

To the demise of the Federation, I walk. I have for a while, but just couldn’t remember when I was lit up with that trash drug, they give us to keep us willing and docile.

The ship was hovering over another planet.

“Wait a minute.” I hear the medic shout out. He always had some guilt about the planets we take from, Perhaps he can help me deal with what’s left to do.

The three left looked at the holographic table. Barnes smiled gleefully. The Chemist that putrid planet sucker. Wouldn’t be surprised if he had a degree in genocide. He moved the bioelectric sand over the planet and they watched hopefully.

A holographic sign reads ‘ breathable air’ The planet is lush oceans and islands with forests floating in the sky.

“I can’t believe it,” Barnes shouted and smiled at me, as I approached.

I tapped the chemist lightly on the shoulder playfully and nodded along. Three of them, one of me. They weren’t good odds, but the clock was ticking with them finding a habitable planet.  I took out my multitool and planted the blade in the middle of the chemist’s back.

Jacob and Barnes screamed and ran in different directions, and the chemist, just sat there shocked for a few seconds with a hole in his back.

“ This has to stop! The federation has to be put to an end. I only remembered once I withdrew from their control drug. We are docile slaves committing horrific acts. We wipe out entire planets, and potential races for what, so that our people are the richest, so we have control over the universe. It’s a joke.” I announced into the bridge.

Disappointment was the biggest emotion I felt from my remaining crew as they stayed silent.

“Im not looking to kill you, I am looking to go against them. The federation, if you agree to just take a moment and hear me out this can stop.” I waited but again not a sound in return. I had my answer.

The red flashlights started spinning around the ship, a thumping alarm, and I knew they were trying to sneak into an escape pod.

They saw me as I approached the pod “We are just going to go. You won’t see us again.” Jacobs announced, both of them sweating profusely, their eyes full of terror.  Jacobs’s hand was near the large red eject button.

“You don’t have to do this. C’mon, boss man, this isn’t you, put the blade down” Barnes announced, trying to hide his shaking fear and smile warmly at me.

I put one foot in the pod and kept my blade out to them.

“You’ll both understand me in a day or two, once you’re fully withdrawn from servatium like I am… It lies to you, it made everything hazy. I understand why you would react this way. But trust me, you’ll understand why I did this” I explained. Their hands raised. Their eyes still darting to the escape button every other second.

“Put your hands down. Say you understand. Say I don’t have to do this.” I shook a little myself as I demanded from them. A tear fell from my eye. My hand briefly dropped.

Jacobs charged at me, knocking us back against the floor of the escape pod. The blade landed in his neck. He tried and failed to catch his breath, at least it was quick. I pushed him to the side as Barnes came down and beat his fist against my face a couple of times. I grabbed his hand as he came for a third.

I swung the blade towards him as I regained my posture, he flinched back and he fell into one of the seats.

“ He made me do that. I didn’t want to, but this has to stop. They make us dumb and docile, so we’d follow whatever their orders are.” His eyes just swelled with terror.

“Are you this weak?” he asked as he tried to stand against me.

“ Yes, Absolutely I am this weak… I can’t serve them with a clear head” I announced to him.

It went just like before, how I wanted to avoid it. But I guess it had to go this way. I sailed down on the escape pod to the planet with Barnes as he took his last breath. Now I wait on the shore of a floating beach, all the beauty in the galaxy, birds and fish that I’ve never seen. Floating jungles and mile-long waterfalls, the beauty puts a smile on my lips for a moment.  I wait for the enemy to rescue me, I wait to pretend to be one of them again, I wait for my chance to strike again, maybe this time it’ll make a difference.

Once upon a time I was working for a large company in the automotive industry. We were a Tier One supplier of a company whose name everyone would know.

The company suffered from fractured management with strict silo mentality.

Sales didn’t communicate with Engineering, which didn’t communicate with Quality, which didn’t communicate with Production. None communicated with the Finance trolls (me).

Every day was misery.

I worked an average of 10 hours doing what I called “Spreadsheet Space Invaders”, preparing analysis after analysis for managers who refused to be the one to actually make a decision.

They always felt if they had just one more analysis, that would give them the answer to their question.

But since all of them were cowards, no one would made a decision. Then, it was back to Finance to give them more data.

I’d managed to survive there for 15 years mainly because I had a very ill spouse and we couldn’t survive without the insurance.

I’d out lived the entire management team at the plant level twice over. Meaning I’d served three plant managers, two quality managers, three HR managers, and two engineering managers.

I reported to a boss at the home office in Detroit but I was local at the plant in Pennsylvania.

We had only one customer, a big automotive manufacturer and only one contract with that company.

We always started negotiating the next contract in August in hopes we’d have something finalized by January.

Some years, we didn’t have the Final, Final, by God it’s FINAL contract until February, which meant I had to sorta guess how to manage January.

Between August and the by God it’s FINAL contract could be up to 100 revisions.

Each revision required (1) the customer to request something (2) Sales to inform Engineering (3) Engineering to engineer it (4) Finance to cost the engineering spec (5) Sales to develop a price based on the financial numbers and (6) a presentation to the customer, who would then change their minds. Rinse and repeat.

This process kept me redoing spreadsheets over and over for about 6 months.

Many many times, one of the links in the chain would break and Engineering didn’t know it needed to update its drawings, or Finance didn’t know the costs needed to be changed, or Sales didn’t inform Production to add lines.

It was a circus of miscommunication, not eased by the fact that Sales and Corp Finance were based in Detroit, but the rest of us were based in PA.

One year, in the summer, after we’d been operating under the current contract (negotiated between Aug of the prior year and Feb of the current year) my boss wanted an analysis of it for some reason.

I sent him an analysis based on the by God it’s FINAL version.

He flipped out. Asked me in an IM in all caps how could I not know my contract?

Confused, I asked him what he thought the contract was (remember, I and the customer had been happily working together for about 7 months on what we both thought the current contract was).

My boss pulled out a contract from the prior October.

It was revision 6.

We’d moved all the way to revision 57 by the time we’d gotten to by God it’s FINAL.

I informed him of that and showed where he and I had communicated numerous times about all the revisions that had occurred after October.

He swore at me in the IM and demanded to know how could I have let him present revision 6 to the board of directors when it was wrong?

I told him, it wasn’t wrong at that time, but that numerous changes had occurred after it.

I informed him that I’d sent him each change every time one happened and he furthermore had access to all my work files at all times.

He continued to go off on me about how I was an idiot.

I had the wrong contract. I’d been billing the customer wrong (and filing incorrect financial reports for 6 months) that no one noticed was wrong (because it wasn’t) and yada yada yada.

Meanwhile, two days before this IM “conversation”, I’d received notification from a publisher that one of my sci fi novels had been accepted for publication and a second publisher informed that another novel had been accepted the very next day.

I had two publication contracts pending.

WTF was I doing dealing with this tool?

Right there, as he was screaming at me in all caps on the IM I informed him he could consider this my resignation.

I shut down the computer, collected my stuff, and headed to HR to turn in my key card and phone.

She looked at me sadly and said “I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did.”

I walked out of there without notice or informing anyone except HR.

At that point, my wife had died and in a sense I was free of the fear of no insurance.

Obamacare had also arrived, so I knew I could draw on that.

I haven’t missed one day since.

Oh, I’ve got one.

I was driving to pick my daughter up from elementary school. There’s a school zone for a couple of blocks around the school, so I was going about 15 mph. The car behind me was very unhappy with this speed and was tailgating me so badly I was sure he was going to hit me. I just kept my eyes ahead and hoped for the best as we approached a stop sign right in front of the school. As I came to a stop, he swerved out from behind me and pulled around my car, into the crosswalk, running the stop sign, and when he went to get back into the right lane, he hit the side of my car.

We both pulled over. As I got out of the car, he said to me, “Are you stupid?” My jaw dropped open, and I said, “ME?” And that was the last exchange between us, because two school parents who had seen the accident had run up and started yelling at him. One of the dads was VERY upset (had this happened six minutes later, there would have been children in the crosswalk), and things were getting out of control, so I called the cops to come quiet things down.

The police arrived and kept an eye on things while we waited for the accident investigator. When the investigator arrived, the other driver told him I had slammed on my brakes, and he had swerved around me to avoid hitting me, and then when he was trying to get back in the lane, I started moving, and I hit his car.

The accident investigator told him the accident couldn’t have happened that way, because the damage was on the side of my car. Apparently, if I had hit him, the damage would be on the front of my car.

The guy argued and argued, and finally the investigator told him to get a couple of Tonka trucks and try it out. The guy kept insisting I had slammed on my brakes, to which the investigator finally replied, “Then I guess you were following too close.”

Two days later, the guy’s insurance company called me to get my side. Apparently, he had told them I was stopped at the stop sign for 10 seconds, and when he finally pulled around me, I started moving and hit his car. I guess that one didn’t work either, because his insurance covered the damage to my car.

I later found out the investigator had cited the driver for careless driving (lots of points on the license), had made the guy’s court appearance mandatory, and recommended to the judge the citation be raised to reckless driving (LOTS of points). I never found out what happened.

You make a poultice

One of the things that cat owners deal with is puss filled blisters from cat-fights. What happens is that a cats claw will tear into the skin and leave a mark. Sometimes the scratches get infected, and puss forms. The puss (more often than not) grows under the skin and forms a blister. The blister tends to get really big, and it is really painful for the cat.  It is called a abscess. Many cat owners will take the cat to the vet if the have the means. The vet will then cut the blister, drain the puss, and put a lancet in the hold. This is two holes, and a string that is kept in place for a couple of days. But if you don’t have the money, or the time, there is a traditional easy way to drain the puss filled blisters. You make a poultice.

  • Crush up one or four cloves of garlic. Say about  a tablespoon or two full.
  • Put it in a clean sock, so that it is at the bottom at the sock.
  • Then put the sock with the garlic in a pot and let it boil for a few minutes.
  • Then let it sit there for a while.
  • Then remove the sock and let it cool off until it is warm but not hot.

Then get the cat. Rap it in a blanket so it is a cat-burrito. Hold it with love and then softly place the WARM sock with the garlic on the abscess. After a few minutes, the cat will start to squirm. Just hold on tight. The medicine is working. It is causing the abscess to drain. Eventually, after 15 to 20 minutes, it will drain. The liquid would be a thick greyish color and rather yucky. Just clean it up with a tissue, and that’s about it. In a day or two everything will be back to normal. And that’s it. If you have a cat… I hope that this has been of help to you. And that is all for now. Today…

First off, kudos on asking this question. It seems as if, perhaps, you are beginning to think. I mean, if the numbers some report are accurate, then there must be physical evidence of it, right? But I’ll get to that aspect of it later. Before that, I should point out that strictly speaking, the Great Leap Forward didn’t result in any deaths (or at least any numbers of note. I’m sure that there were some mundane accidents, but not an anomalous amount). It was, however, a contributing factor in making the Great Chinese Famine worse than it could’ve been. This famine is what (usually anti-Chinese) people point to when they make their claims about the Great Leap Forward. But there were a few reasons why this occurred. In short, it was a mixture of mistakes on the national level, mistakes on the local level, environmental problems, and international political problems.

National level

The biggest mistake on the national level comes from a policy which was meant to eradicate endemic problems. There were four animals that were targeted as pests – rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Some of these, like mosquitoes, are pretty obvious. Other ones, like sparrows, were not, but since they were known to eat crops, they were targeted. It later was realized that sparrows also kept in check the population of other, more dangerous (but less common) pests, like locusts. You see, locusts are a strange creature. They really don’t normally exist. Instead, usually they are grasshoppers, but when there is a large population of grasshoppers, they change themselves into the swarming variation, which we know as locusts. Since, besides crops, sparrows ate grasshoppers, and the population of sparrows was greatly diminished, it meant that the population of grasshoppers grew. Once it reached a large enough threshold, they morphed into locusts and devastated crops much more than sparrows ever could.

 

Environmental level

Yeah, I know, I have local mistakes listed before this, but in order for you to understand things more, it’s important that this goes here. Right as the Great Leap Forward began, in 1958, the Yellow River flooded. Nearly 2000 farming villages had to be evacuated. The end result was that the farmland was devastated in that region, and was unworkable that year. That already put the food reserves down from where they should’ve been. Because of the flooding, over the next few years, labor was moved from agriculture to building new dams, reservoirs, irrigation canals, etc. in order to help control the water. But again, this meant fewer workers in the fields, putting a strain on the system once again. Then, in 1960, China was hit with a drought. Now, it wasn’t the worst drought ever, but it was considerable, especially considering the aforementioned waterworks weren’t ready yet. This, again, therefore, resulted in crop failures.

Local level

Throughout 1958, a system of farming communes was implemented, and initially, the system was showing an increase in crop production. Local leaders were pleased by this, and based their production quotas on the belief that this was only the beginning. However, due to the above mentioned problems (i.e. the killing of sparrows and the weather extremes), the amount of crops grown kept shrinking. Many of the local leaders in charge of the communes tried to hide this fact – they didn’t want to admit either their mistake or the failure of the system. Instead, they pretended that everything was great, and they even falsely reported a continual increase in the amount of crops grown. Due to the local leaders being unwilling to communicate the problems, the national government didn’t initially know about it, and therefore did nothing. Food was taken away from the communes as if things were fine, but it actually resulted in the farmers who grew the food starving.

International level

Now, for starters here, we’ve got to go back around 20 or so years prior to the Great Leap Forward. During the war with Japan, as the Japanese advanced, the dictator of the Republic of China (the Chinese Civil War was still ongoing, but was put on hold around this time) ordered the destruction of infrastructure throughout China, including dams and canals, in order to slow down the advances of the Japanese troops. When the Chinese Civil War ended, and the ROC lost, the newly-founded PRC was practically bankrupt – the dictator of the ROC emptied the national treasury and looted museums before fleeing to the recently returned island of Taiwan. Work rebuilding what had been destroyed had to be prioritized, which is one of the reasons why the flooding of the Yellow River was so devastating – they hadn’t gotten around to rebuilding the waterworks yet.

But as for the period of the Great Chinese Famine in general, as knowledge of the situation finally reached the national level, it was too late for them to turn around and fix it themselves. People were already starving, which created a vicious cycle (starving people became weaker, which meant less output, which meant less food, which meant more starving). But by this time, in large part thanks to the Great Leap Forward, the industrial production side of the economy was stronger than it had ever been. They could trade with the rest of the world… except for one small problem. At that time, the United Nations still recognized the ROC as the government of China (it didn’t change until 1971, when the UN General Assembly voted on making the PRC the official government of China). As such, nations like the United States embargoed trade, meaning that it was basically impossible to import any food to alleviate the problem.


Now you know what happened and why, but how does that relate to your question? Well, right at the beginning, I mentioned how you were asking the right question. This is because it’s very important to understand the numbers reported. By looking at actual historical documents and other evidence, the numbers reported in China are between 3–6 million deaths. Now, I’m sure that you’d be shocked by that number – not because of how many died, but because of how few died. This is because in the West, the high numbers they report (I’ve personally seen people claim 50 million, 60 million, and 80 million deaths – the number always changes) are not actually deaths. You see, the number that they give are based on the birthrate. During the time of the Great Chinese Famine, birthrates dropped. They then look at this drop in birthrate and attribute non-births as deaths. Their argument being that if there were no famine, then these children would’ve been born. Therefore, their not being born means that they died. It honestly doesn’t make any sense. It’s like claiming that every time a man pleasures himself, he murders, on average, between 80 million and 300 million children (since that’s the average number of “lil’ swimmers” in a man’s “load”). But by claiming these high numbers, they can then turn around and claim that China is this big, bad, evil thing. And that’s the crux of the problem. The reason why you can’t find any photos of 50+ million deaths is because they literally weren’t there.

And for the record, isn’t it fascinating that people get hung up on this while completely ignoring the famines in British-controlled India that were directly caused by British policies? Around the same number of people died in what is now Bangladesh in 1943 due to the British essentially stealing the food from the local people. But, of course, you’ll never hear about that, since it makes a Western nation look bad.

Nobody told me that my dad was dead. Here’s the deal, I was born out of wedlock to an interracial couple in the early 80s in (super white) Oregon. I’m my mother’s only child, my dad has 2 older boys.

He was a truck driver originally from Oklahoma, his route frequently took him to the West Coast, at some point in 1978 or 1979 he meets my mom and they strike up a relationship.

So a couple years down the road, they decide it’s time for a baby. They apparently already had a pregnancy earlier on, but ultimately decided to terminate it for whatever reason.

My mom was very adamant that although she never wanted kids (which is a whole separate topic entirely!) but she saw how great my dad was with kids and how much kids seemed to just naturally take to him, that she wanted that man’s baby! So due to his occupation, my dad was frequently in and out of the picture.

The relationship between them was very on and off (which I suspect the fact that my mom is gay played a factor.) anyways,

I’m born in August of 1982, named after my dad (middle name is “Dawn” and my dad’s first name is “Don”). For the next few months my parents really tried to make it work.

My mom was growing extra annoyed with my dad for what she perceived as lazy, he had stopped driving truck, had started smoking an increasingly large amount of marijuana, it just wasn’t working out for either one of them.

Apparently they split amicably and so when my dad told my mom that he needed to go back home because he just got the news that someone in his family had just gotten very sick, my mom thought nothing of it.

Then pretty soon the numbers he gave my mom to reach him in Oklahoma stopped working. The days, weeks, months go by…. nothing. My mom realized he wasn’t coming back and she was right. Now that I’m a mother, I can only imagine how that must have felt. To add insult to injury, I grew up to be the female version of my father, both physically and otherwise.

I’m told I walk and stand like him even. Same sense of humor, same musical abilities, similar personality… basically an everyday reminder of the child my mom was left to raise alone. Growing up I was told that my dad walked out on us, he was a deadbeat, this and that, in the same breath told that I’m exactly like him…which is very confusing to an already confused little girl.

So fast forward 30+ years, I reach out and find my dad’s family. The first call was from an aunt, my dad’s sister.

I see her Facebook profile and immediately notice the resemblance between myself and her, her daughter, and granddaughter!

She tells me “how pretty I am” lol, I laugh cause I look just like her! She tells me that they all knew about me.

My dad brought back so many pictures of me as a baby and had his entire room decorated with them. I asked when I would be able to talk to him, she got real quiet… she said that their brother would call me…ok…my uncle calls me next. Informs me that my dad had passed shortly after leaving Oregon the last time he saw me. He had been diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer sometime during my mom’s pregnancy and didn’t know how to tell her….so he just didn’t.

I was led to believe that my dad was a deadbeat who didn’t want me. In reality, I’m told that he literally died while looking at my baby picture on his wall. Later on I would come to know some caviats that at least give me some insight as to why no one felt it was necessary to notify my mom that he died.

My uncle told me that my dad specifically asked him to make sure I wasn’t around his family, he wanted me to be raised in Oregon by my mom and her family.

A cousin and I talked and she told me that sexual abuse is almost everywhere you look in our family, however when my dad was around, you knew you were safe!

He was 6ft 5 and wasn’t up for reasoning with anyone who hurts kids…that makes me proud! An uncle backed up this with telling me that my dad didn’t want me around any of his family if he wasn’t around to protect me, his only daughter.

I get that, but growing up feeling unwanted and unloved is not easy trauma to heal from either.

How a Small Town Took Out the Town Bully And Covered It Up for 30 Years

This is the personal opinion of one Japanese person.

South Koreans:

  • They will help even strangers when they are in trouble.
  • Once you become friends with them, they treat you like family.
  • They will treat you with respect if you are older than them.
  • They often give gifts.
  • They are studious.
  • They are better at English than Japanese.
  • They are taller than Japanese.
  • They have a high sense of beauty.
  • They have a unique culture.
  • Korean idols are good at singing and dancing.
  • They make a lot of interesting movies and dramas.
  • Their GDP per capita is higher than Japan’s.
  • They are hasty, but they are often late for appointments.

North Koreans:

  • It is believed that there are many North Korean operatives in Japan.
  • North Korea once broadcast random numbers in the middle of the night, which we thought it was a code for spies. The North Korean female announcer kept repeating a code-like phrase over and over, which felt creepy to me when I heard it for the first time.
  • There was a rumor that if Japanese went to the sea at night, they would be abducted by North Korea. In fact, in 2002, North Korea admitted to abductions.

Chinese:

  • They are cheerful and have a sense of humor.
  • They are kind.
  • They are cheerful and have a sense of humor.
  • They are kind.
  • For better or worse, they are honest.
  • Many Chinese people in Japan are good at Japanese.
  • They are very proactive. I can see them even in where Japanese people rarely come.
  • They give their seats to elderly people on the train.
  • We both use kanji (Chinese Character), so even though they are foreigners, I feel a sense of closeness.
  • They value their families.
  • They have ancient Chinese saints that Japanese people respect.
  • They have a rich food culture. Yes, we love Chinese food.
  • They are far more advanced than Japan in the IT field.
  • The factory of the world. Most of the products around us are MADE IN CHINA.
  • They are good at sports.
  • They don’t apologize easily compared to Japanese people.

The Moment Cops Find the Man Offering Kids Candy to Get into His Truck

The term “sick man” describing China as being ill and weak actually first came from British writers in the 19th century.

The term “sick man” being applied to China first appeared in the Daily News on 5 Jan 1863. The Daily News, started by Charles Dickens, was a national daily newspaper of Great Britain in those days.

At the time, China was undergoing a large scale civil war known as the Taiping Rebellion, which was started by a Hakka person by the name of Hong Xiuquan. He claimed to be the incarnated brother of Jesus Christ who had the heaven’s mandate to rule China. The Daily News was reporting on the ongoing civil war:

“Great pains have been taken to impress upon the public of this country the idea that China is in “agony,” but that cannot be truly said of it as a whole, and there seems some danger that the disorder of this sick man is about to be aggravated rather than alleviated.”

Two days later, the article was reprinted on Belfast Morning News under the title “The Supposed ‘Sick Man’ in China.”

So, it was the British newspapers who first described China as a “sick man”. In those days, the British must have felt they were superior after they defeated China twice in the two Opium Wars, looting many of the war booties from Chinese imperial palaces. Of course, the largest booty taken from China was Hong Kong.

Karma seems to have returned in one big circle. As China ascends to soon become the #1 economy of the world, British economy is sinking further after she was mismanaged by a number of Tory governments and most importantly, after Brexit.

At the current trajectory, it won’t be surprised to see Great Britain no longer become great but “aggravated rather than alleviated.” UK may just become a “sick man of Europe”.

Historian Warns the American Civil War of 2024 Has Already Started

I’ve been in sales for roughly the last 20 years, and managing a team for the last 3. About 6 months ago I sent out some resumes to see what my current market value is, and to take on a new challenge. I saw an ad on LinkedIn, the job seemed perfect for me, the description was one that I would have written for myself if someone asked me what my next career challenge.

About 2 days after I sent my resume I got a call from their in house recruiter, a brief phone conversation and mutually agreed to move forward with a phone interview with the guy who would be my boss. I get an email shortly after my phone call with days/times available and we pick a time for a 2nd phone interview. He and I hit it off well, talked for 30 minutes or so, great dialog, call going great. He explains at teh beginning that he has a “hard stop” in 30 minutes. We get close to the 30 minute mark, he says, if I’m still interested, that next week he and his boss can fly into my area, or they’ll fly me out to them for a face to face.

They were going to be in NY the following week for a client meeting so it was decided that we’d meet while they were in the city, I’d work that area for the day and we’d grab lunch… all good.

We meet for lunch at a great restaurant, sit, good conversation, going well and I. WANT. THIS. JOB. Their Sr. VP of sales (he would be my boss’s boss) says they’ve made a decision, they flew up wanted to make sure that I present well in person before making an offer. They slide an offer letter across the table and we continue to talk about the job. I ask my favorite interview question

“Why did the person I’d be replacing leave this position?”

There’s plenty of good answers to this question, but I wasn’t ready for the answer that came from the Sr VP of sales. “Bob was very good at his job, he was with us 4 years, the last 2 he was salesman of the year, wrote 20–25% increases when the rest of the company was averaging 12%. He made great money, won the company trip. We decided to increase his budget to a 30% increase, he didn’t hit his numbers so we mutually agreed to cut our work relationship.”

I asked some follow up questions: “what was the rest of the team budget increases?” around 8% was the answer. “what was he trending?” about 22%. If he was writing 22% increase this year, and wrote more than 2.5X the average salesrep, why would you want to let him go, and why was the choice mutual?”

“Well his job is to hit budget, he wasn’t doing his job if he was only 22%. And because he was making less this year than last, he was complaining about his income being so much lower than the previous 4 years, we agreed he should find another job”

I had a brief follow up question: “If over the last 4 years he increased his/your business by over 100%, why would he make less money than in previous years?”

“Our commission structure is based on percent of budget, not on sales dollars, or sales increase”

My final question was, “so l want to make sure I understand, if I CRUSH this year, end up doubling my business, the following year you can budget me a 100% increase and if I only write a 75% increase, I’ll make less money, despite the huge increase again? and about how much less?” The answer was that it was a mathematical formula, and it would have been roughly 1/2 of previous year.

I thanked them for lunch, told them that’s not a program I would want to be on. I never opened their offer letter and have no idea what they offering. I just knew that it wasn’t the place for me. They knowingly wrote a budget the guy likely wouldn’t hit so they could decrease his pay.

NOPE NOT ME… I want every salesperson on my team to make as much as possible. The more they sell, the more they make. The more they make, the more I make, and the more the owner of our company makes

Men Are Turning Their Back On The West As It Collapses

In Urban China – Yes

Every Apartment has a Battery System and since most power cuts are between 30 seconds to 2 minutes due to distribution change (As Demand rises and eases through the day) – the Average Chinese doesn’t ever feel there are power cuts

Every Apartment nowadays has a backup battery system that immediately comes on when the power goes and within 1–2 minutes the power is back

Otherwise if the Apartments are older (Built Pre 2007), then they have a Generator and after 45 seconds to 90 seconds, the Generator is automatically powered on

So maximum you may have 1 – 1 1/2 minutes without power

The Lift will drop you on the next floor even without power (If you are between the 6th and 7th floors, it will go to the seventh floor and drop you and then stop there till either power comes back or Generator is on)

Longer power cuts happen due to (a) Weather related reasons

In such cases a Generator can run for upto 24–48 hours

You also have a six month maintenance for 8 hours without power

Yet again Generator and Battery makes sure that Power cuts are rarely even felt


Rural China is different

Rural China has a 92.2% Rural Electrification Rate meaning even today (31/12/23) , 7.8% Rural Households don’t have electricity (Mostly Xizang)

Priority is for Industry, so many times power cuts happen for even 1 Hour Or 2 Hours

Plus without a Coal supply, Power cuts could happen for 8–12 hours also

Hell, no.

The USA isn’t even strong enough to take on Russia. Otherwise, it would put boots on the ground in Ukraine.

Remember, the USA had no qualms about fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but against Russia, it is reluctant.

China’s military is larger than the USA’s. The largest army (over 2 million). The largest navy (over 370 warships). A vast rocket force (including hypersonic) and a large fleet of stealth fighters (J-20). The USA would be foolish to take on China.

Combine Russia’s army and China’s army and Iran’s army (which is formidable), and the USA is easily outclassed.

The Oubliette: A Medieval Torture of Unspeakable Horror…

No, and in fact, it’s the opposite.

I WAS an anti-CPC, pro-democratic and USA fan before I got access to the banned social media. It’s an universal rule that banned things are more appealing to people. U.S was like a heaven and I am living in hell.

But things change when I got a Facebook account, and I saw queations like:

Why don’t people in China brush their teeth?

Does China have highways?

I suddenly realized that foreigners, they are NOT Gods. Yes, they’ve had amazing persons, but they have fools too. There’s no such places of absolute heaven on earth.

I got so fed up of all the bias and racism on the Internet

I got so fed up of these losers blaming their own economy failure on my country.

I got so upset about people constantly asking me if my dog is safe.

I got so fed up of people denying everything you said just with the single reason of Chinese propaganda.

I’m brain washed and I know. Many of you didn’t realized that they are brain washed in some ways, and this is much much more dangerous than pure propaganda.

When I was the receptionist for a corporate office, there was always a bit of confusion as to who was supposed to relieve me when I went to lunch. The duty was shared around the office (often without the knowledge of the department that was suddenly saddled with answering the phones), but since the general rule in the office was that we only did warm transfers, that meant there had to be a person on the line to actually complete the transfer.

One day, we got a new GM and a new assistant to the GM, and after the question came up again between myself and the GM, the assistant inserted herself into the conversation to say that the phones should just be turned off when I went to lunch. After all, anyone who was affiliated with the company would know how to use the company directory to reach any office employee that they wanted to find, and anyone else would know to leave a message.

I tried to explain that this was not a good idea. I did not go to lunch at regular times, so on some days, the phones might be off from 11 to 12 and other days they might be off from 1 to 2 with no explanation. Also, it was not even remotely reliable to expect that other departments would answer the phones, even if they were called directly at their desk. Certain people in the office were well known for ignoring phone calls if they didn’t care to answer. But the assistant, who did not want to be put in the position to possibly answer the phones, remained insistent, and the GM decided that would be fine. Turn the phones off when you go to lunch, April.

So sure enough, one day when the GM was out of town, he called back into the office and couldn’t get anyone on the phone for a solid hour. When I got back from my lunch break, I had a very terse email to call him. I did.

Him: ”Why aren’t you answering the phones?“

Me: “I was at lunch.”

Him: ”Well, where’s [my assistant]?”

Me: ”Not sure, sir, I don’t see her at her desk at the moment, she might be walking around or she might also be at lunch.”

Him: ”Okay, but what about accounting? I called every one of their desks and none of them answered. Are they also all at lunch?”

Me: ”No, they’re all back there. Remember when I told you that if they’re in the middle of something, they don’t answer their phones, even if you called them directly?”

Him: (tangibly frustrated now) “So if you’re at lunch, NOBODY answers the phone at all?”

Me: ”Nope. Remember when your assistant said that it would be perfectly okay to turn the phones off for an hour? This is literally what happens if I’m not answering phones; nobody else bothers.”

There was silence. Then “Alright, I’ll handle it when I get back.”

He did. The phones stayed on while I went to lunch after that. And that assistant (after taking a shift on phones one day and coming away with a traumatized expression after one hour) began to keep her opinions to herself.

… sometimes.

2 men indicted for destruction on ancient Lake Mead rock formation

Short answer,

Intergenerational Mobility

 

There is one famous quote from John Adams

I must study politics and war,

so that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture,

so that their children can study painting, poetry, music, architecture, sculpture, tapestry and porcelain.

 

Notice the shift from ‘must’ to ‘may have’ to ‘can’.

This increase in the liberty to choose what you want to do with generations is known as intergenerational mobility.


For one generation, work is a need. They have no luxury to choose. Whether it is 16 hours or 18 hours, whether they like it or not, whether they are healthy or not, they have to work because their whole family depends on their income. They are like manual labourers in a company.

For the next generation, work is a want. They have the limited luxury of choosing where to work, what kind of job they want and how many hours they want to work. They have vacations, investments, insurance and relaxed evenings. They are like managers in the same company.

For the next, next generation, work becomes a passion and a desire. They are in the elite class. They have all the liberty to choose what they want to do, study what they like and switch their passions. They have the resources to do all the outsourcing and the privilege to use their mind more than their body. They are the business owners or angel investors.

So as you move forward with decades, you encounter more people coming out of poverty and climbing the ladder. Either because of technology development or their accumulated wealth, they don’t have to work as hard as their previous generation and do things which they really, really like. They get the luxury to choose their fights or whether to fight or not.

 

Tzetze Fly

 
The hatch of the Aurora groaned open, its edges scraping against the jagged terrain. Astrid’s boots thudded onto the alien soil, sending up a puff of purple dust. Miles followed slowly, his eyes flicking around their surroundings.”Stable ground,” Astrid announced, her voice echoing slightly within the confines of her helmet. “Finally, after nineteen months! Atmosphere and temperature readings all within normal range. This planet might really be it.””Could be warmer,” said Miles.Astrid laughed, drinking in the silent panorama of undulating purple hills under a sky dotted with three tiny suns. She retracted her helmet and took a deep breath, the crisp air catching pleasurably in her throat.“This deserves a toast,” she said, swinging her loaded backpack onto the ground. It landed with a clang and Miles frowned.“Careful with that, Captain.”“Don’t worry, Miles. The embryos are safe in here.” She pulled out a slim platinum canister, perfectly smooth and cool, and waved it gently at him. “Ten thousand don’t take up much space, so ninety-nine percent of this is high-tech, triple-layered, thirty-first century bubble wrap filled with cryogel. It would survive a bomb blast, they actually tested for that.”“I know. Can’t help it.”  Astrid’s voice softened. “This is the batch that contains two of yours. Of course you want the best for them. I never asked before, but did you give them names?”   “Yes,” said Miles. “Exactly the same names. James Cadenius Eden and Isabel Zyla Eden.”   “Did the cloning lab give you the extrapolative photos?”   “Yeah, they’re pretty good. Close enough.” He looked into the distance. “Hopefully this planet is different enough.”   “I checked – it has zero history and undetectable probabilities of level-seven tectonic tsunamis.”   “Thanks, Cap. How about that toast?”   Astrid rummaged for her thermos, a battered thing of daffodil yellow, with pill-shaped figures dancing around the rim. Some of them were wearing denim pinafores.   “What the hell are those things, Cap?”   “They’re called Minions,” Astrid said, smiling. “From a truly ancient movie, I can’t even remember what it was called. But they’re mad and bloody cute, and there’s some really good single malt inside. To James Cadenius and Isabel Zyla Eden.”   Suddenly there was a buzzing sound. Miles put down his cup and dropped into a protective crouch, gun already in hand. Astrid stuffed her thermos into her backpack and put a hand on the laser knife at her utility belt.   “Protect the embryos,” Miles hissed.   Out of nowhere, a shadow eclipsed the triple suns above them, casting a dark veil over the landscape. A massive figure hurtled towards them, crashing into the ground with a thunderous impact that reverberated through their boots.   Astrid’s hazel eyes widened in shock at the creature before her – a hulking mass of sinew and muscle, covered in vomit-green skin and brown bristles. Its grotesque features were contorted in a fearsome snarl, revealing rows of jagged teeth.   Astrid and Miles ran, but the creature unleashed a weapon unlike anything they had ever seen. From its massive fist shot a glowing orb that pulsated with an ominous energy. Before they could react, the orb shot towards them with blinding speed, lengthening out into whipcords made of pure light that wrapped tightly all around them. Astrid and Miles strained against the luminous bonds, but the more they struggled, the tighter they were bound.   “Who are you? What do you want?” Astrid gasped.   To her surprise, the creature actually spoke. “I, Xoragzhar of Takuun,” it said. “You have Origin. Give me.”   “The origin? Of what?”   “He can’t mean the embryos, can he?” Miles whispered.   Xoragzhar heard and stepped closer, nodding. “Origin. Of N’uru. Give me now.”   Astrid studied Xoragzhar’s face, a twisted visage with a bulbous nose, deep-set yellow eyes, and a wide mouth lined with teeth like broken tombstones. His breath came out in raspy huffs, fogging the air between them.   Jagged, frantic, raspy huffs. She looked at the meaty stubbled hands. They were shaking.   Why?   “We can’t give you what you seek,” Astrid replied in a firm and deliberate voice. “We are on a mission. We need to find a home for the last of our species. They are not yours to take.”   She felt Miles flick a gaze at her. Then he said in a conversational tone, “How did you know about them? What are they the origin of?”   Well done, Miles, thought Astrid. Keep stalling. She inched her fingers toward her utility belt, feeling for the hilt of her knife.   Xoragzhar stamped on the ground. “No time!” he roared. “Give me now!” He shook a hairy fist and the glowing whipcord tightened even more.   Astrid’s hand shot out from behind her, blazing orange from her laser knife. She slashed wildly. The crackling bonds fell away, dissipating into shimmering motes of energy. She heard Miles land on his feet and shouted, “Run!”   They sprinted across the rugged terrain, the alien landscape blurring into streaks of color. Astrid’s heart pounded in her chest, adrenaline fueling her muscles as she pushed herself to keep pace with Miles. Xoragzhar’s heavy feet thundered behind them, growing closer with each passing moment.   As they weaved through a labyrinth of rock formations, the air started buzzing again. A sudden gust of wind whipped up a thick cloud of purple dust. Then it settled to reveal a glimmering figure. Astrid skidded to a stop, nearly colliding with the mysterious being. A vision of otherworldly grace and splendor, he even had translucent wings, fluttering like delicate petals in the breeze. She thought, this is the meaning of iridescence. Intricate patterns adorned his silvery skin, shimmering in the ambient light, like filigree.   The being held up a long-fingered, gently coruscating hand. Behind them, Xoragzhar thunked against what seemed to be an invisible wall and fell with a grunt. Astrid found that if she looked very hard, she could just see the merest whisper of a gossamer web hanging in the air.   The being smiled. “You know what this means, Xoragzhar.” He turned his violet gaze towards Astrid and Miles. “Welcome, Dr Miles Eden and Captain Astrid Chang. My name is Za’raa. Welcome to N’urubia.”   Xoragzhar growled, “Takuun. This Takuun.”   “You know who we are?” said Miles, still staring.   “Yes, Dr Eden. We have known who you are for three hundred million years.”   What?   “We know you were searching for a new home, a sanctuary for your kind. We know you brought to us our Origin.”   “How?” Astrid demanded. “This mission is classified.”   “This mission was successful. You did it. You brought to this planet the Origin of my people, the N’uru.”   Xoragzhar spat.   “The Origin took root and blossomed. In the beginning there were only ten thousand of us. And then there were a hundred thousand. And then a billion, whose skin began silvering, whose wings began budding. And now, here we are,” said Za’raa, opening his arms wide.   Astrid blinked. “Are you saying that you’re descended fro— no, that you’re from the futur— oh my God, that you mutated—”   “Yes, Captain Chang, and yes, and yes, though we prefer the word ‘evolved’. And Dr Eden – may I call you Miles? – I thought you might like to know, there are fourteen families among the N’uru named Eden, all healthy and thriving. Your children had good genes.”   Miles’ eyes blazed hard enough to power a city. “I want to see them.”   “Perhaps you will,” Za’raa said with a smile.   “How will you do that?” asked a perplexed Astrid. “How are you here? And how are you here now?”   “We have Xoragzhar’s people to thank. They spent generations building a time machine. All that time and energy that could have gone into building armies, multiplying themselves, even learning how to speak properly… no, they decided this machine was more important. And this is their big day. They used it for the first time today.”   “To bring the Aurora here?”   “No, child, you would have come here anyway. The machine was for bringing Xoragzhar here, three hundred million years into his past. And me too,” Za’raa added brightly, “although it wasn’t what they planned. Now, ask me why.”   “Uh-huh?”   Za’raa leaned in to look Astrid in the eye. “To destroy the embryos.”   Astrid whirled around to glare at Xoragzhar. “What? Why?”   Xoragzhar said, “N’uru, they take. Take and take and take. Food, air, water. But they say, not enough. Never enough. Then they say, too many Takuun. They say, kill Takuun.”   Za’raa shrugged his slender elegant shoulders. “The primitive have to evolve, or die. I believe you would call it a zero-sum game.” He stretched out a hand to Astrid. “Now please give me the Origin.”   Astrid ignored the hand. “Xoragzhar, what happened to your people? How many are there left?”   Unhappy yellow eyes met her own. “Only five, and me.”   Za’raa said, “Before you ask, the five were guarding the time machine. Against us. Well, there are only four left now. Possibly less.” He grinned at Xoragzhar. “I did bring a dozen of my best warriors with me.”   Astrid stumbled backward toward Xoragzhar, keeping her backpack as far as she could from Za’raa. “No. I can’t let this happen. I can’t create a population of goddamn murderers.”   Something went click. Astrid froze. Miles was pointing his gun at her.   “My children. Get. To live,” he said in a low, dangerous voice she’d never heard from him before.   “Miles…”   “Take out the embryos and give them to Za’raa.”   “No bloody way.”   A now-familiar buzzing sound filled the air for the third time. Za’raa said, his expression serene, “Ah, a little more… encouragement has arrived for Captain Chang.”   A dozen armed N’uru shimmered out of thin air. Their silver armour was battered and scratched, and there was blood in their golden hair and on their beautiful faces and filigreed hands, but their eyes glowed with triumph. A cold finger ran down Astrid’s spine.   “Did you get them all?” inquired Za’raa mildly.   “Yes, sir.”   Xoragzhar’s howl echoed through the clearing, raising all the hairs on Astrid’s arms. A glowing orb appeared in each of his fists and stretched out into scythes. He hacked at the gossamer wall in front of him. The N’uru guards drew their weapons – spiked flails that glowed also – and marched toward him.   Miles watched them advance, rapt.   “Captain Chang,” said Za’raa, “there really are no more reasons not to give me the embryos. Once Xoragzhar is dead, which will be in about five minutes, there will be no more Takuun left to save.”   Astrid dropped her head. She knelt and shrugged off her backpack, undid it with trembling fingers. She rummaged until her hand closed around the cold metal cylinder it sought. Averting her eyes, she held the cylinder up to Za’raa.   “Excellent. Thank you, Captain Chang. And now we can close the book on Takuun history.”   The N’uru warriors closed in on Xoragzhar and his swinging scythes, their movements coordinated and decisive. White light flashed wherever their flails landed. Miles cheered them on. In the strobing light, his skin appeared silvery too.   Astrid closed her backpack and swung it back on her shoulders. She turned toward the Aurora. Walk, don’t run, she told herself firmly.   She heard Miles say, “Za’raa, she’s getting away.”   She heard Za’raa say, “It does not matter, Miles.”   She swung herself up into the Aurora and shoved the hatch shut, making straight for the control panel. Her fingers jittered over the familiar buttons and switches. The console flickered to life, casting an green glow across her strained face. The Aurora began rising. Outside, Xoragzhar was losing. Dying.   She met Miles’ gaze through the window, his silhouette stark against the alien landscape. He turned his back on her and walked to Za’raa. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they cast one shadow under the light of the triple suns. Za’raa was still clutching the metal cylinder in both hands.   The battered, daffodil yellow, metal cylinder with the mad dancing Minions.   Miles saw it too. He snatched the thermos from Za’raa and began running towards the Aurora, shouting. As if it would help. He was only getting smaller and smaller. Then the N’uru warriors began to flicker like candle flames in a gust of wind. One by one, they vanished into thin air, leaving behind a faint trace of silver dust that glittered briefly and turned into nothing.   Za’raa was the last to vanish, his face too small for Astrid to see his expression. Good.   Miles was tiny now. She saw Xoragzhar rise painfully to his feet. She was just able to see the orbs in his hands flare as he lurched toward Miles.   When the Aurora was on autopilot, she picked up the platinum canister of embryos, tracing with steady fingers where the chilly light glinted off its perfect skin. She would find another planet that did not have purple soil or three goddamn suns, and most certainly not angry trolls or smarmy glowing angels who made far too many assumptions.   She hoped that would be enough.

My generation

Shorpy

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What Happened To The First Human Head Transplant? (Feat. Medlife Crisis)

You have watched too much news from BBC and CNN, so you say that “China’s military exercises have exacerbated geopolitical tensions.”

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main qimg 2dd747c14228a493288cfb04b5ff3dc3

 

Take a good look at this picture. The United States has military bases on almost every continent. The only continent without a US military base is Antarctica.

The United States uses these military bases around the world and the United States’ military influence to contain and suppress its imaginary enemies, especially China.

Using military exercises to form cliques is a common trick of the United States.

In recent years, the US military has frequently conducted military exercises around China, especially joint military exercises.

Through cooperation with allies such as Japan, Australia and the Philippines, the US military has not only enhanced its combat effectiveness, but also formed a containment of China to a certain extent.

Such exercises are not only a display of military strength, but also a clear warning to China, indicating that the United States is prepared for any potential conflict.

The United States has established a large network of allies in the Asia-Pacific region to ensure support in the face of conflict. Japan, Australia, the Philippines and other countries have strengthened their military ties with the United States by signing military cooperation agreements.

 

This collective security mechanism makes the United States more calm when facing China, and also puts China under greater strategic pressure.

The United States uses its powerful media and public opinion resources to continue to exaggerate the “China threat theory” in an attempt to isolate China internationally.

This kind of public opinion war not only affects the international community’s view of China, but also provides “legitimacy” for the US military action. In this way, the United States hopes to portray China as an “aggressor” to provide an excuse for its military intervention.

 

The game between China and the United States is like a war without gunpowder, and both sides are fighting for their own interests.

The United States has selected the main battlefield in the eastern Pacific and frequently held military exercises in an attempt to curb China’s rise, while China is constantly strengthening its own defense capabilities and striving not to lose in this contest.

The Insane Lobotomy Craze Of The 1950s

This may sound like waking up someone pretending to be asleep, but I have to say, there is no so-called “West Philippine Sea.” Internationally, this sea area is referred to as the “South China Sea,” and it does not mean that the entire sea belongs to China. In fact, China made territorial claims in 1948. The Philippines did not protest at that time, but in recent years, they have come out with “protests,” and even have made a fake “arbitration”, which is suspicious to anyone with common sense.

As for the territory of the Philippines, it is delimited by a series of international treaties. Whether it is the Treaty of Paris in 1898, the Treaty of Washington in 1900, or the Convention Between the United States and Great Britain in 1930, none of them include China’s Nansha Qundao or Huangyan Dao.

Only the area within the dashed line box in the map is considered the territory of the Philippines, while the area outside the dashed line box are nothing but the Philippines’ unilateral and illegal claims. The Philippines’ so-called “whoever is closer owns it” rhetoric not only goes against international law but also laughable in modern society.

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And you know what the Philippines should do? Withdraw its ship and personnel from China’s territory. It’s the only chance.

I noticed on Aug 31, the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) vessel MRRV-9701, which has been illegally anchored in the lagoon of China’s Xianbin Jiao for a long time, provoked troubles in an unprofessional and dangerous way and intentionally rammed into the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) ship 5205, which was lawfully implementing control measures. As a result, a collision happened between the two vessels.

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The recent actions by the Philippines once again highlight its close connection with certain Western countries. On-site footage shows that during the Philippine’s infringement operation, a US P-8A reconnaissance aircraft flew at low altitude, interfering with China’s law enforcement actions and providing on-site intelligence support to the PCG vessel. Ironically, after receiving some “support” from certain Western countries outside the South China Sea region, the Philippine side complained that Southeast Asian countries didn’t “support”.

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Since entering the lagoon of Xianbin Jiao without China’s permission in April this year, the PCG ship has assumed the task of imitating the Philippines’ BRP Sierra Madre, which has been grounded illegally at China’s Ren’ai Jiao for a long time. But in fact, under the control of the CCG in accordance with the law, the PCG vessel has seen increasingly limited space to make any move.

PCG spokesperson Jay Tarriela admitted on Tuesday that the ship’s supplies were seriously insufficient and had reached a “critical level.” Seeing that it is difficult to “replicate” the goal of “deliberate grounding,” the PCG vessel 9701 began a new round of shows in Xianbin Jiao, which is nothing more than putting all the energy into making a scene and sadfishing, trying to make a public opinion sensation and gain sympathy by pretending to be a “victim.”

Betting on the safety of its own crew and the risk of military conflict, Manila constantly staged a self-inflicted provocative farce on the stage of the South China Sea, fantasizing about making “quantitative change” to achieve the breakthroughs of “qualitative change.”

The actions of the Philippines that have escalated tensions in the South China Sea are also a betrayal to ASEAN countries, clearly violating the provisions of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, including Article 4’s requirement for peaceful resolution of disputes, and Article 5’s call for self-restraint and not to affect regional peace and stability in the South China Sea.

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main qimg 08bcca06c2cab5ab482833534288be00

 

Now the US and the Philippines are using each other in the South China Sea issue. For the US, no matter how beautiful the words are, the positioning of the Philippines as a “pawn” has never changed. Manila is also very clear that it has limited bargaining chips with the US, and the more extreme it goes in the South China Sea issue, the smaller its space it has in negotiating with the US.

Manila hopes that Washington can make some concrete commitments. However, for Manila, the most important thing is to face reality and give up illusions. Manila should not underestimate the cost of challenging China, nor should it assume that everything will be covered by the US.

The bilateral consultation mechanism on the South China Sea issue has been held 9 times, with the most recent meeting taking place exactly 2 months ago. The commitments made by both sides to promote a de-escalation of tensions in the South China Sea are still fresh. Until Manila fundamentally changes its mind-set of using the South China Sea issue for geopolitical speculation, China is fully prepared for any possible backtracking or provocation by the Philippines. If the Philippines attempts to move forward one step, China will firmly push it back. China will not allow the Philippines to gain any advantage. Like I said, the only choice for the Philippines is to withdraw its ship and personnel.

Here are the 2022 rules

A. User Internet Ids are assigned to every user who is over 7 years old

B. Users who are deemed Juvenile, ie:- between 16–18 years of age are restricted from logging on to any game on a Chinese platform between 10 PM and 8 AM on Mondays to Fridays and 12 PM and 7 AM on Weekends

C. Users who are deemed Minors between 12-16 years of age are restricted from logging into any game on a Chinese Platform only for a maximum of 2 Hours on a Weekday and 3 Hours on Saturday and 4 Hours on a Sunday but not after 9 PM on Weekdays and 11 PM on Weekends

D. Users deemed Children (<= 12) are restricted from playing any game on Chinese platforms for more than 3 hours from 12 AM on Monday to 11:59 PM on Sunday of every week

VPN for Chinese Games is useless

You can use VPN but when you play Chinese games, the Warning will say that if you continue you will go to a lower level and lose a lot of game money and game weapons and powers you have earned so far

So nobody uses VPN for playing games

Is it for all games?

No

Online Mobile Games deemed EDUCATIONAL, CULTURAL and SCIENTIFIC are exempted

In 2023 May, Mahjong in all forms was included in the restricted list but Online CHESS was exempted

How is the rule enforced?

Every Game has a Player Login

Every Player needs Internet ID

So that’s simple

You can’t use your Dads Internet ID because that’s a different Player Profile Or ID

So best case you can create a Player Profile for your Dad and play in his name

Or your older brother


Why these rules?

The Government got an Educational Report that Children were addicted to Mobile games and with In app money purchases

What games are restricted FULLY or PARTIALLY to Children?

Games deemed Violent

Games deemed Sexual

Games that promote Theft, Robbery and Crime

Games that feature GAMBLING or Chance and Odds (Card Games are exempted provided the games don’t have any numerical odds or any transfer of winnings)

Games deemed capable of Brainwashing and giving instructions and dares (Such Games are fully banned from the Mainland)


Can you bypass the 3 hour limit?

A Brilliant 9 year old managed to bypass the ban by creating a small code to make the system forget that it was 10 PM amd make the system go to 19:59:59 from 21:59:59 and keep playing endlessly

Tencent of course saw that someone had played 63 levels in 2 hours which was impossible and immediately overrode the local codes and the Kid was flushed out

They gave the Kid a Science Scholarship (Chairmans Junior Scholarship) usually granted for 12+ year olds

However apart from that – NO

Like I said – VPN means losing a lot of levels and goodies earned

So the only way is to use your father or older brother or older uncles Internet id, create a profile and play as them

Prehistoric Australia Was Pure Nightmare Fuel

Not me but my younger brother.

My brother was an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy, and from the start my mother wanted this kid gone by any means necessary. Unfortunately the law and her family wouldn’t allow it, so she was forced to carry this child to term and take care of it. She hated my brother from the start, wanted him dead or abandoned by the side of the road (whatever it took to get rid of him), and with that failing she strove to make this child’s life as miserable as she could for the sin of having dared to exist. My mother had a nasty cruel and vindictive streak.

Our parents divorced when I was nine and he was seven, and we moved to a house about 3 miles away. One day my mother got angry at my brother and locked him out of the house with orders to walk to our dad’s house. It was nighttime in mid December, about 15 degrees F outside, and he wasn’t wearing a coat. My mother then called my father and angrily bragged “I just threw him out of the house without a coat and told him to walk to your house. I don’t care if he freezes!”

My mother was not mentally ill, she was in complete control of herself, she was just filled with anger and hatred that she liked to inflict on those around her, especially those that had little choice but endure it. She felt it was a parental perk to be allowed to abuse your kids for whatever reason you wished, even if it was for her amusement (and it sometimes was). She got a certain sadistic joy out of making people feel miserable and worthless.

My father woke up the neighborhood and sent everyone out to find him, and he was eventually found wandering around a grocery store parking lot less than 1/4 mile from my mother’s house. He was minutes away from hypothermia. He very nearly died that day, and this was not the only time he narrowly escaped death at the hands of my mother.

I’ll never understand why she wasn’t charged and arrested for that. She passed away three years ago, and it’s a major trigger to my father (who hates her with a passion), so I guess I’ll never know.

POST EDIT: Several people have asked how my brother turned out, and he didn’t. He died at age 14, and ironically my mother had nothing to do with it. He asphyxiated himself huffing gasoline in my dad’s garage. After he died my mother almost never spoke of him again, and would go into psychotic rages whenever he was brought up. I quickly learned to not talk about him anymore.

He never had a chance from the start. This is the last known picture of him.

His name was Tim.

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main qimg e2602f7b8f5c5f4de1d3c03f9bfec424

Minestrone Macaroni

289221b1c73c3d0b93d17f5ef4f2b421
289221b1c73c3d0b93d17f5ef4f2b421

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 2 (14 ounce) cans Italian diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 2 1/4 cups water
  • 1 1/2 cups elbow macaroni, uncooked
  • 2 beef bouillon cubes
  • 1 can kidney beans, rinsed, drained
  • 1 can garbanzo beans, rinse, drain
  • 1 (14 ounce) can cut green beans, rinsed and drained

Instructions

  1. In a large skillet, brown beef; drain.
  2. Add the tomatoes, water, macaroni and bouillon cubes; bring to a boil.
  3. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 12 to 15 minutes or until macaroni is tender.
  4. Stir in beans and heat through.
 

When he was fifty Tolstoy fell into depression. Day by day his sadness increased, for no reason. Tolstoy was a count, he was one of the richest men in his country, he was famous throughout the world. Yet he was unhappy. «Money was nothing, power was nothing. Many were seen who had both one and the other and were unhappy. Even health didn’t matter much; there were sick people full of the desire to live and there were healthy people who withered in anguish from the fear of suffering.”

One day he saw an orphan along Afanas’evsky alley, and moved with compassion, he took him home with him. And for the first time in a long time he felt good again. He forgot about himself, about his problems, about his sadness. From that moment Tolstoy renounced his gentleman’s clothes, luxury and privileges and began to lead a simple life, giving away what he possessed to those in need.

“Don’t talk to me about religion, about charity, about love,” he used to say, “but show me the religion in your actions.” Tolstoy was also the first theorist of non-violence, he preached brotherhood between peoples and his ideas inspired another great figure of the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi. Until the day of his death he continued to help others, which is why many said he was crazy. In a world where he only counts having, possessing things and even people, where everyone wants to take but no one knows how to give, Tolstoy seemed crazy.

One day an old friend of his, who, unlike Tolstoy, lived in comfort and luxury, said to him: «What’s the point of doing all this? What do you care about others? You should think about yourself.” To which Tolstoy replied: “If you feel pain, you are alive, but if you feel the pain of others, you are human.”

The story of Tommy and Derp

They couldn’t care less about western media.

I visited China often on business, in April 2024, I was in Shandong China, as I watch the people coming and going about their daily life and business, I realized 99% of people don’t have anything to do with foreign countries or U.S., they really absolutely don’t care what U.S. think or say about them. 99.9% of people don’t make things to sell to US, they don’t buy American things, America has absolutely nothing to do with them, their jobs or their lives.

The neighbor is keeping a cat in the hallway

Star Oddity

Submitted into Contest #247 in response to: Set your story on a spaceship exploring the far reaches of space when something goes wrong. view prompt

♡ Tana ♡

Somewhere during our second year in space, we started talking about astrology. One might think that flying past countless stars each waking minute would make us wonder at our own heavenly correlations, but we were too busy being proper astronauts to think about anything except propulsion and coordinates.National Geographic had run a special on us before we left, on New Year’s Day, 2086. Star Light, Star Bright, Guide our Travelers Tonight, the headline read. It was not an overall hopeful piece, since most people assumed we would die. This fact alone split the population into those who admired our bravery, those who hated us because they were sure we were wasting the precious gift of our lives, and those who were bored enough to keep one eye on our story while the other went about their far more practical and productive lives.In the special, Aaron Gamble, head physicist at NASA, explained the invention of our craft.“Bowie is the first spaceship that has the ability to travel faster than the speed of light. Of course, we have been able to send satellites into space at 186,000 miles per second for nearly a decade now, but there has been no question of moving quicker than that, and no faintest rumor that a human being could survive the ride. Now, the question has an answer and the rumor is true right in front of us. Six of NASA’s courageous astronauts will climb aboard Bowie, and in approximately six years they will return with pictures of the stars. Maybe pictures of them on stars.”After Dr. Gamble’s speech, they had cut to a picture of the six of us, standing in our space suits with a green screen behind us making it look like we were perched on the curve of a star.After seeing the picture, most people began to wonder if, rather than us surviving the stars, we would even survive each other. A more inharmonious arrangement of adventurers would be hard pressed to find. Our small group ranged from our pilot, Bear, who had been born on a peace commune in Idaho and never lost his long hair, beads, or impressive beard, even when he replaced his linen for a spacesuit and his yurt for a switchboard and white sterile bunk.Cassidy landed on the opposite end of the spectrum, raised by a neurosurgeon and astrophysicist. Bear often joked that she must have come from the womb with a severe bun and figures on the tip of her tongue. It took six months on a tiny ship together for her to disclose that she had an identical twin sister who had died in an airplane crash five years ago. Even Bear had held back on the jokes after that.Handsome Ryan, petite Kylie, and quiet Terrance were all cut from the same serious, scientific mold, and without them Bowie would not have made it past the second day of her voyage.In the National Geographic picture I was directly in the middle, and beaming, a stark comparison matched closest by Bear’s confident half smile. I looked as though I couldn’t stand a single day longer on the Earth, like my head was already in the galaxies above. The caption credited me as the youngest NASA astronaut; at only 25, I barely qualified for this trip, and it was only Dr. Gamble’s desire to have an astronaut for each predicted year of our voyage that granted me permission to join the crew.Not many lined up for our position, to say the least. My mother sobbed the day before she left, and my younger sister wore solemn black to watch us take off. As we burned up through the ozone, I imagined them below, assuming that the bright flare of our rockets would be the last sign of me forever. The thought exhilarated me, and I imagined that in six years, they wouldn’t recognize me, not due to the years elapsed, but the sheer disbelief at my survival.My excitement and optimism made me the least popular on the ship for almost the first full year. Cassidy couldn’t understand my joy at the exhilarating recklessness of our carefully planned journey. She was a scientist, and there had been no emotion in her decision, just the calculation that she was the most qualified for this, her position in life held higher than her life itself. I tried to become close with her, since we were both the insomniacs on board.I would spend my sleepless nights staring at the footage of the untouched space we were flying through, like a yoyo set loose from its spool with disbelieving freedom. Cassidy on the other hand would spend her nights desperately calculating to determine that we were still on course, her knuckles white and her face illuminated by blue light. As she worked her brows would knit close and her mouth would form tighter and tighter slashes across the plain of her face. After six months and no star in sight, just the Hellish red of Mars burning on our cameras, she stopped her nightly calculations, and would just sit, looking straight ahead. 

I imagine that she was probably thinking about her sister, and imagining the way she died, the metal and heat and screams. I imagine she came to think she was destined to experience the same thing, that they came into the world together, and although they would leave separately, they would still go out in parallels

 

When I couldn’t connect with Cassidy, I tried mousy and unfailingly polite Kylie. Her initial kindness wore off quickly, partially due to my own error. I thought we were getting close, our mornings tediously checking power levels in each of the many batteries keeping us going had helped us form a tentative bond, quickly broken when I disconnected the gravity as a practical joke.

 

This incident, however uncomfortable, did form my first and only companionship aboard the Bowie. Bear found my prank hilarious, and he started sitting next to me in the morning when we all ate our freeze dried breakfast.

 

After I finished my morning camera observation shift, I would sit in the cockpit with Bear and watch his hands fly across display screens in front of me, faster even than Cassidy’s nighttime calculations. It awed me that his hands, average sized and slightly hairy at the knuckles, held us all in them. Without him, we would be nothing more than stardust, which was ironic, since even with him we didn’t feel the slightest whisper of stardust on our bow until nearly thirteen months in.

 

Bear wasn’t the most talkative person, but he enjoyed my presence, which was more I could say for any of my other companions. One afternoon, he admitted to me that he was having a hard time connecting to our shipmates as well.

 

“I’m not a scientist,” Bear had said, his flying hands suggesting otherwise, his doleful tone substantiating the claim. “I just like the idea of going places no one has been before.”

 

“In kindergarten,” I had replied, “I got in trouble because I pushed another kid off the slide because I wanted to be first. My teacher told my mom I would grow out of it, but clearly I haven’t.”

 

Bear had laughed, and my throat tightened with happiness. For the first time since being trapped in a tiny ship with five other human beings, I didn’t feel completely and despairingly alone.

 

That was the day we saw our first star.

 

It had been stoic Terrance on camera observation, and his unprecedented shout had startled Bear so much his hand hit something on the panel that made the entire ship shudder, like it too was shocked.

 

“Proxima centauri!” Terrence had shouted, and the words were God to us. Proxima centauri, the words we had thought every day since we first stepped foot on Bowie. The sign of our success that we had first hoped to see after two months, and then dreamed with growing desperation each day after we didn’t. Proxima centauri, the closest star to our home planet, a star that, just half a century before, would have taken us over six thousand years to reach.

 

On the camera, which grew fogged by our breath as we clustered over Terrence, the cardinal star seemed tiny, just a speck in the endless blackness we had grown so accustomed to watching for countless days now. As we stared, we watched the star grow larger and larger, until the blackness was only a sliver as thin as the nearly forgotten moon, seen in the opening days of an Earthly month. Cassidy’s hand found my arm and squeezed painfully tight, and I heard Kylie start to cry as we passed by, and the eternal night of space swallowed us once again.

 

Faintly, I heard Bear radioing NASA, I made out Dr. Gamble’s shout of delight, followed by Bear’s ever eloquent, “Fucking finally! I thought your ship was going to kill us before we saw a goddamn star.”

 

Ryan swept Kylie off her feet and Terrance kissed me on the mouth and Cassidy sat down in her bunk and sobbed. I was so happy, it felt like someone turned the gravity off in my chest, like my heart was bubbling into my throat.

 

I don’t think any of us really realized how terrified we were before we saw Proxima centauri. I think that’s our brain’s way of protecting ourselves, that we can’t fully understand the terrifying nature of a situation until we are on the other side.

 

Of course, we weren’t on the other side. We were a year into a mission and only just now reached a goal that we had been scheduled to meet at two months. Of course, in the moment that didn’t matter, all that did was that now we knew for sure that even if we never saw the blue of the ocean again, we had seen the unprecedented burn of a star.

 

“And they say that we were monkeys,” Ryan had roared, and we all dissolved into laughter, because in that moment we felt like the furthest thing from monkeys, we felt like Gods.

 

The second star never came. Based on our calculations, after reaching Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years from each, we should have come across Rigel Kentaurus only days later.

 

Rigel never came. After ten months, Dr. Gamble stopped radioing every day, instead he would check in once a week, and it was clear that was only out of obligation. We were told that the news still ran hopeful segments on us, but everyone knew the mission had ended.

 

Based on the force of our initial propulsion, it would still be three years before we would slow down enough to descend again. We stopped camera observation. Instead we played cards and used our precious oxygen to smoke weed that Bear had secretly brought aboard, and turned the gravity off. Upside down, higher than the space we careened through, Bear accused me of being the kind of girl who might like astrology.

 

His nose touching mine, I wondered what he really wanted to say, if Ryan wasn’t floating two feet away and Cassidy clutching her bunk in annoyance, only halfway believing herself that she was dismayed at our behavior.

 

“Absolutely not!” I shouted, then giggled because my voice was so loud. “We have literally seen a star, and it was most definitely nothing more than a hunk of rock.”

 

That was a lie and we all knew it. That star was the most beautiful thing we had all seen, and the only thing keeping us from true despair. It was the reason why one of us would still check the camera’s every night, frantically watch the footage from the day to see if we had missed something, never giving up completely.

 

“I believe in astrology,” Kylie said, and pushed herself towards the gravity panel, planted her palm on it and sent us to the floor. “I am an Aquarious.”

 

“What the hell does that even mean,” Bear said, righting himself, and moving towards the cockpit. We were on autopilot, no longer afraid of running headlong into an errant constellation, but Bear still kept up the pretense of his job.

 

“It means that I am emotional and sensitive and really honest,” she said, “And that I love the moon, I think.”

 

“Hold on,” I said, “You’re trying to convince me that we are who we are because of what star was a billion light years over our heads when we were born?”

 

“Yes,” she said firmly, “Why are we all doing this if we don’t believe in the stars?”

 

It got tense then, all of our minds instantly filled with the memory of Proximi burning through our cameras with a palpable hope.

 

“I don’t believe in stars,” Terrance said, “I believe in science.”

 

“What the fuck,” Bear said, “Science isn’t going to save you, buddy.”

 

We all stared at Bear, who stood fierce and white faced in front of the control panel, every bit of him all self righteous and rage filled.

 

“What are you talking about?” Kylie asked shakily, “We’re going to be fine, in three years we will be back on Earth, we have plenty of oxygen and food.”

 

Bear opened his mouth, and then stopped. He sat down heavily and spoke without opening his eyes.

 

“I talked to Dr. Gamble. They aren’t picking up our signal anymore, they can’t find us on radar or satellites or anything. Even the radio signal is getting weaker.”

 

“Oh my god,” Cassidy put her head in her hands and I may have imagined it but I thought I heard her say, “Cammie,” under her breath, like she could feel her sister closer than ever.

 

“I don’t understand,” I said, “We had a very specific course, how could this be happening? We saw that star-”

 

“That’s right, Leila, you don’t understand,” Bear’s voice was full of hostility, “None of you do. You all need to understand that we can’t put any more faith in Dr. Gamble, or NASA, or science or known fucking logic, because what has happened has completely disproved all of the above.”

 

“All that’s left is faith,” Kylie said, and I looked at her surprised, having expected she would surely be the first to break down.

 

Bear put his head in his hands and I walked to the cameras, stared out and willed myself to see something, anything that faintest light that might signal a sign of our doubtful survival.

 

One by one we stood before the cameras in silent prayer, children believing if they wish hard enough, they can make the stars come out.

 

The next morning Ryan woke up obsessed with the constellation Orion.

 

“Just a tiny insignificant ‘o’,” he kept saying, “That’s all that separates us.”

 

He told us that he needed to see the constellation, he sat in front of the cameras watching for it for weeks, and told us facts about the archer until we all begged him to stop.

 

“Where does he go?” he kept asking, over and over. “Where does he go?”

 

One morning, I was sitting beside Ryan on camera observation, which we had begun again since we started to believe in the stars again. Suddenly, he leaned forward, a smile illuminating his face so wonderfully that he was almost too handsome to look at for too long.

 

“Look, Leila,” he whispered, “That’s where he went.”

 

On the camera, Orion’s arms stretched out, his glittering belt too bright to look at, and impossible to look away from.

 

I stared, transfixed, the bravery in his shoulders, the loneliness and grandeur of his brilliance in all that nothingness. When I looked at Ryan, he was gone, and the constellation shattered before my eyes, a new star winking with sudden beauty before he became lost in the hunter’s sword.

 

Kylie was next, when our ship grew tangled with the great cosmic kite, she let out a great whoop of childlike laughter, and was gone, to fly with Boötes forever.

 

Cassidy started speaking to Cammie days before Gemini blinked into view, and at the last moment, I swore I saw a mirror reflection of my somber shipmate beside her, beaming more than Cassidy ever would, before Castor swelled and Pollux rejoiced, and our ship became lighter.

 

Terrance swore it wouldn’t happen to him, before science and geography once again was proven to be obsolete and he shouted that he saw Sagittarius, right there, and it was impossible, before his eyes widened in surprise and he was gone.

 

It was just Bear and I then, and we didn’t know what to say.

 

I asked anyway, “What do you think is happening to us?”

 

“I think we started to believe,” he said, “And now we are going home. I think maybe this was our mission all along.”

 

“We aren’t going home,” I said, confused, “We are so lost.”

 

“Do you feel lost?” He asked, and his eyes were so bright.

 

“No,” I said, “I feel like I am on the very last mile of a very long trip.”

 

“We found the stars,” Bear whispered, “But I think they have been here all along.”

 

I reached for him, but he was standing up, and on the camera the great Ursa bounded through a galactic forest, waiting patiently for her cub.

 

I wasn’t alone for long. The radio signal had been long lost, and I didn’t know anything about how to pilot the ship, but I wasn’t afraid.

 

Three days later, I felt the warmth slip onto my face and skin, like I was on a white sand beach, or a summer meadow at noon. The ship split open and the sun was there, and I forgot I had ever been anything else.

 

On Earth, the stars burned through into the day and they declared us lost and the Sun shone brighter than ever and declared that we had been found.

There was a word on the Chinese Internet: “If the Chinese people go abroad, more than 70% will become more patriotic, which is more effective than any propaganda by Chinese government .”

Do you know why? Because the people who came abroad found that the so-called free media did not tell the truth, these media are full of prejudices and lies about China. I think any person who has been to China will find some medias hypocrisy.

Some people who do not go abroad like to imagine foreign fantasy as good as heaven, but when they go abroad, they will find that is not the case.

As for the United States, I have to say that some Americans are very friendly and I like their openness and frankness. I appreciate the wisdom and creativity of the Americans, and they use their creativity to bring a series of great changes to the world.But I will not be a fan of the United States because I don’t like their goverment and their hegemonism、wars and a series of bans against China.

So, many Chinese people will become more love their own country, because they know that China is not so bad, and foreign countries are not so good.

Crescent Taco Ring

2296f904f6d7cd43c2e1be569b8d27fc
2296f904f6d7cd43c2e1be569b8d27fc

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds ground beef
  • 1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon cornmeal
  • 2 teaspoons chili powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup chopped onion
  • 1 cup chopped olives
  • 1 cup ketchup
  • 1 (16 ounce) can whole tomatoes
  • 1 (12 ounce) can whole kernel corn
  • 1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 2 cans refrigerated quick crescent dinner rolls
  • 2 cup shredded American or Cheddar cheese

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. In large skillet or Dutch oven, brown ground beef; drain.
  3. Stir in remaining ingredients except crescent rolls, cheese and 1 tablespoon cornmeal.
  4. Simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally while preparing crust.
  5. Separate crescent dough into 8 rectangles; spoke fashion in 12 cup fluted tube pan, forming crust. Press to seal.
  6. Sprinkle bottom with 1 tablespoon cornmeal and cheese.
  7. Spoon ground beef mixture over cheese.
  8. Cut each remaining crescent rectangle into 4 short strips; lay across top of filling spoke-fashion. Seal to outer and inner dough edges.
  9. Bake for 25 to 35 minutes.
  10. Cool upright in pan for 10 minutes; invert onto serving plate.

I’m Never Leaving Malaysia ..

Jumped and shamed all because of the secretive nature of female beauty

To me, the secret about elite universities — or at least the fact that they prefer not to publicize overtly — is that the admissions game is far from fair, which most people would define as based on merit. The truth is that when it comes to admissions, the Ivies, Stanford, and other top schools have their own agendas. Which means that the actual number of spaces available for students without a “hook” is much smaller than one might think.

One agenda is to favor legacies. Harvard has been known to have the children of alums take up one-third of the class. Other schools do the same, at somewhat lower rates. Among my college essay students, I see admissions for legacies as much more likely than for others. If nothing else, the tie often goes to the legacy.

Athletes also get a big edge. This is not limited to Stanford, home of many Olympic medalists. Even at the Ivies, where the level of play in most sports is well below Olympic caliber, a big chunk of admitted students are recruited athletes, who sometimes get a bit of a break on grades and test scores. About half of students at Williams are athletes.

Money matters. Yes, you can buy your way into a top college. It is now known that the parents of Jared Kushner knew that he was not Harvard material and spent millions greasing the wheels. In my own experience, I have seen a student with really weak academics get into a school where the family’s name was on a building.

Race also matters. Students who are historically underrepresented minorities get an edge, even if the family is rich. It is documented that Asian students need higher grades and scores to get into many top schools. Harvard is being sued for this practice.

Universities are more willing to publicize their efforts to broaden opportunity by giving preference to student who will be the first in their family to go to college. “60 Minutes” recently did a segment about Princeton’s efforts to increase socioeconomic diversity. I applaud plans like this. But I also know that this means a lot of places will be earmarked for certain types of students.

Imagine a game of musical chairs with ten chairs. The game begins with legacies seated in two chairs. Recruited athletes are in two other chairs. Two more may already be filled by students who are underrepresented minorities or first to attend college. One more will be an international student. How many spots are left if you do not fit into one of those categories? Three? And half of those go to men and half to women?

The above scenario is inexact. But the point is clear. For a student without a hook, the window to squeeze through to get into an elite university is much smaller than the universities would have you believe.

MM’s AI work from today part 1

I’ve been experimenting with Baroque figurative imagery.

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Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd – The Wall – 4K Remastered

While the United States has repeatedly exaggerated the “Chinese military threat” and wants to continue to increase its budget and join forces with its allies to manufacture and transfer weapons and expand military production, China’s unexpected decision suddenly made the US and European militaries feel real pressure.



According to the Global Times, the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs of China recently issued an announcement, announcing that from September 15, export controls will be imposed on antimony and superhard materials related items. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce said that China’s policy is not aimed at any specific country or region, but is based on international practices to better safeguard national security and fulfill international obligations such as non-proliferation. The important role of antimony in military production and China’s dominant position in antimony mining and supply have determined that this move will have an impact on many countries, and the United States will be the first to bear the brunt.


(Antimony Ore)

Foreign media analysis said that antimony, as a strategic metal, is not only used in the production of batteries and photovoltaic equipment, but also an important raw material for many military equipment, such as ammunition, infrared-guided missiles, nuclear weapons, and night vision goggles. China is the world’s largest antimony producer, mining about 40,000 tons last year, accounting for nearly half of the global total. The United States is the world’s largest buyer of antimony ore. Relevant statistics show that 63% of the antimony ore and its oxides imported by the United States from 2019 to 2022 came from China. From this perspective, China’s export controls on antimony are actually a “reverse stranglehold” on the United States, which is likely to cause difficulties for the United States’ weapons manufacturing.

However, it is not the first time that China has strangled the United States in the export of key minerals. Last year, China announced export controls on two rare metals, germanium and gallium, which prompted the United States to discuss countermeasures with allies such as the European Union, Japan, and South Korea as soon as possible.


(The raw materials of the US AIM-9X infrared-guided air-to-air missile include antimony)

In addition, in recent years, the United States has been trying to get rid of its dependence on China in the supply of key minerals, including cooperating with Australia, Mongolia and other countries to develop mineral resources, but both mining and processing technology and related patents are firmly in the hands of China. As a result, the US has to admit that it is still unable and unwilling to exclude China from the US “key mineral supply chain”.

However, not to mention that China’s export restrictions are not aimed at any specific country, even if the policies specifically targeted at the United States are just a way to treat the person in his own way, because it is the United States that is accustomed to building “campus walls”.

From Trump to Biden, the United States can be said to have tried every means to suppress China in the high-tech field, including but not limited to putting Chinese companies on the “blacklist”. Huawei, DJI and other companies have not escaped, and allies have implemented various export controls on China. At the time when China’s export controls on antimony were in place, the Biden administration was still planning to implement new restrictions on technology exports to China.



However, unlike the United States, the suppression by the United States cannot fundamentally prevent our rise. Instead, it has prompted China’s high-tech enterprises to make great progress and development through self-reliance and independent innovation. Take the most critical semiconductor industry as an example. At present, domestic chips have made breakthrough progress and are gradually replacing the market of foreign chips.

As emphasized by the Ministry of Commerce, China opposes any country or region using controlled items from China to engage in activities that undermine China’s national sovereignty, security and development interests. Since the United States uses key minerals provided by China to build weapons against China, there is no need for China to be polite. It is more appropriate to let the United States taste the taste of being “choked”.


This news is brought to you by tencent

Be the Rufus

Me. My position was eliminated, and while I gathered my things in the presence of the new office manager, I told her that she’d need to contract a snow removal company to clean and salt the walks, early morning, every time it snowed. Because I was the one who did that.

She looked shocked and dismayed and she said that she didn’t realize that.

A large portion of the client base was children and elderly people and it was not just a matter of courtesy, but an insurance liability. I also cleaned the public sidewalks around the building because even though the city would do it, it might take days before it was done.

Unfortunately for her, contracting a company is the sort of thing that has to be negotiated and booked well in advance, and winter was upon us. The cost for service would be greater than my salary was.

The other employees only worked when they had clients booked, and they were generally small women with medical degrees, and they could not be hot, sweaty and potentially smelly from physical exertion anyway.

And the three dentists sure weren’t going to do it.

*Back to the Future* is sooo FREAKIN’ GOOD!!!

From Prodigy to Predator: The Twisted Path to Narcissism

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) often evokes images of self-absorbed egomaniacs who crave admiration and wield manipulation like a weapon. But beneath the polished veneer of grandiose self-image lies a hidden truth: narcissism is a learned response to deep-seated wounds inflicted in childhood. It’s a desperate dance for love and attention, born from a warped perception of neglect and unworthiness.

From Crib to Con: The Twisted Path of Narcissism

The seeds of narcissism are often sown in the fertile ground of early childhood experiences. Imagine a young child, yearning for the warmth of parental love, only to encounter a void of emotional connection. Perhaps their needs were consistently unmet, their cries left unanswered, or their achievements ignored. This perceived neglect breeds a gnawing sense of unworthiness and insecurity.

To cope with this emotional turmoil, the child instinctively adopts survival tactics. They learn that loud tantrums, exaggerated displays of distress, and even manipulative ploys garner attention, albeit negative. This “infantile fakery,” as you aptly call it, becomes a twisted currency, securing the fleeting validation that soothes their raw vulnerability.

Over time, these behaviors morph into a sophisticated arsenal of manipulation. The narcissist learns to charm their way through life, cutting corners, deflecting blame, and leveraging the sympathy of unsuspecting others. It’s a desperate attempt to fill the void within, a never-ending quest for external validation to compensate for the internal chasm of perceived inadequacy.

The Vicious Cycle: Escalation and Escape

This relentless pursuit of self-gratification comes at a hefty cost. Relationships become transactional, mere stepping stones on the path to narcissistic aggrandizement. As their true nature is revealed, the inevitable happens: disillusionment sets in. People tire of the grandiosity, the constant blame game, and the emotional manipulation.

Faced with this potential rejection, the narcissist resorts to their default coping mechanism: escape. They may abruptly discard relationships, change jobs, or move cities, leaving behind a trail of emotional casualties. But amidst this flurry of movement, there’s no introspection, no genuine growth. The core issue of self-worth remains unaddressed, festering like an untreated wound.

The Impossibility of Perfection: Why Narcissists Can’t Learn

At the heart of narcissism lies an unshakeable belief in one’s own perfection. Any suggestion of imperfection, any hint of a mistake, shatters their carefully constructed facade. This crippling fear of vulnerability makes genuine learning virtually impossible. Why invest in self-improvement when you believe you’re already beyond reproach?

Instead, the narcissist resorts to intellectual shortcuts, relying on charm and bluster to mask their lack of knowledge. They avoid honest self-reflection, deflecting blame and responsibility like Teflon repels water. It’s a vicious cycle, perpetuating their inflated sense of self while simultaneously hindering their ability to grow and evolve.

The Toll of Denial: Broken Promises and Shattered Lives

The ramifications of this arrested development are far-reaching. The narcissist’s inability to learn and adapt translates into a string of failures: broken relationships, lost jobs, and a trail of emotional wreckage. Their charisma may initially draw people in, but their manipulative tactics and emotional detachment eventually wear thin.

As the masks slip and the truth emerges, those closest to the narcissist bear the brunt of the pain. Family members become collateral damage, spouses are emotionally abused, and friends are left bewildered and hurt. The narcissist, forever chasing the mirage of self-worth, leaves behind a desolate landscape of broken promises and shattered trust.

Breaking the Cycle: Understanding and Healing

Unmasking the root of narcissism isn’t about demonizing individuals or condoning their behavior. It’s about recognizing the human story behind the inflated ego, the pain that fuels the need for constant validation. By understanding the underlying causes, we can move beyond judgment and towards compassion.

For those caught in the orbit of a narcissist, knowledge is power. Recognizing the manipulative patterns, setting healthy boundaries, and prioritizing self-care are crucial steps towards emotional well-being. Therapy can also offer valuable tools for navigating the complexities of these relationships and ultimately reclaiming power over one’s own life.

A Call for Empathy, Not Excuses

While NPD stems from early childhood experiences, it’s crucial to remember that understanding isn’t synonymous with excusing harmful behavior. The actions of narcissists can inflict deep wounds, and those affected deserve validation and support. However, recognizing the source of their pain can help us move beyond anger and blame, towards a place of empathy and self-protection.

Narcissism may be a complex and deeply ingrained disorder, but it’s not an insurmountable one. By shedding light on its origins and acknowledging the emotional pain at its core, we can foster a space for healing and understanding. For the most

Tacos de Carnitas

Crispy bits of very flavorful pork is the base for these delicious street tacos.

carnitas tacos
carnitas tacos

Ingredients

  • 1 (3 to 4 pound) pork butt
  • 6 cups water
  • 7 strips orange zest
  • 5 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1 large white onion, diced
  • 1 cinnamon stick (preferably Mexican canela)
  • 1 1/4 teaspoons crushed red pepper
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons crushed oregano leaves
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 24 small corn tortillas, warmed
  • Chopped fresh cilantro
  • Finely chopped white onion
  • Diced fresh tomato

Instructions

  1. Trim any thick fat from the pork butt. Cut the meat into 1 inch cubes, discarding any that are pure fat, leaving some of the fat for flavor and browning later.
  2. Put the pork cubes in a large pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer. Skim off any foam that forms on the surface during the first 15 minutes. After foam is skimmed off, add the chopped onion, garlic, orange zest, crushed red pepper, cinnamon, bay leaves, oregano, cloves and salt. Simmer uncovered for another 1 1/4 hours until pork is very tender, adding more water if necessary to keep it submerged.
  3. Season with more salt.
  4. Continue simmering at a gentle boil until the water has evaporated, about 30 more minutes. Remove bay leaves and cinnamon. Cook a little longer to fry the meat, stirring often and adding a little water it it seems to be sticking and/or burning.
  5. Spoon some carnitas onto each tortilla. Top tacos with chopped onion, cilantro and diced fresh tomato.
  6. Serve with refried beans and Mexican rice for a genuine taqueria experience.

Some of MM AI generations

Early stuff this.

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6 Signs You’re with the “Right” Partner

Discover the true meaning of a perfect match based on mutual love. In challenging times when many Americans feel more single and lonely than ever, 60% of U.S. adults still believe in the concept of a soulmate.

“Meant to be” can be a comforting thought after a series of bad first dates or a marriage that ended in divorce. Even 52% of Americans who have been married before still believe in “the one.”

This belief brings a strong sense of hope for those already in relationships, especially during tough times.

However, it also comes with potential downsides.

Believing you’re with the “right” and “only” person can lead partners to stay in abusive and toxic relationships (Franiuk et al., 2012).

It can also cause people to leave relationships too soon, thinking the “right” person is still out there, just a swipe away on their dating app.

But relying solely on either the traditional soulmate theory or the work-it-out approach is a false choice.

What if your soulmate was someone highly compatible with you, and what was “meant to be” was finding that level of compatibility?

Why not someone who also makes a consistent effort?

“Meant to be” refers to a healthy, lasting relationship with someone you are highly compatible with, sharing and enjoying life together.

Here are six signs that you’re in a highly compatible, secure, and strong long-term relationship:

1. You experience a strong and consistent emotional connection.

2. You have fun together and enjoy similar activities or adventures.

3. You are physically attracted to each other.

4. You find joy in quiet moments together.

5. You accept your partner as they are and feel accepted by them.

6. You and your partner feel chosen by each other.

This is the ideal scenario of high compatibility in the way you love. Soulmate relationships are less about a checklist of matching traits or qualifications and more about the way you feel when you wake up next to each other in the morning.

You might have met a soulmate if you also:

  • Feel appreciated, respected, and valued.
  • Feel comfortable being vulnerable.
  • Experience support for your dreams.
  • See significant alignment of interests, personality, and lifestyle.
  • See consistent growth in communication, conflict resolution, and meaning-making.

Meeting your soulmate may also mean a deep bond with spiritual significance if spiritual and religious beliefs were part of your family culture. Sharing core beliefs about spirituality and your relationship is a good indicator of soulmate potential.

If you’ve been together for at least a year and have been discussing marriage, sit down with your partner this weekend and consider the following questions:

 

  • How would you describe your emotional connection?
  • What exciting activities have you enjoyed together this year?
  • How would you describe the quality of your sexual experience in the relationship?
  • What is your experience when sharing space?
  • Why do you choose each other out of the 8.1 billion people in the world?
  • Do you feel like your best selves with each other?

If you’ve found your person, cherish and celebrate them. Ensure your partner understands their value to you.Commit to actions that reflect your love.

I’M EMOTIONAL!! First Time Reaction to Pink Floyd – “Comfortably Numb”

Plutocracy of private capital creates a crisis of US political legitimacy

Source: Global Times

The US is confronting a political system facing a crisis of legitimacy. A major component of the crisis is structural and inherent to US governance. Politicians in the US do not succeed in politics because of their service to the people. They are first selected by a tiny fraction of society wielding immense wealth and power before they are presented to voters.

Nowhere is the gap between the policies that US politicians pursue and the well-being of the people bigger than foreign policy. A cursory look at the economic approach to China under the administrations of former president Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden demonstrates this clearly. Under the Trump administration, the US imposed tariffs on Chinese exports and sanctions on China’s tech sector. Under the Biden administration, the US increased these tariffs to include the Chinese electric vehicle sector, expanded “black list” of Chinese tech corporations and targeted the semiconductor industry as a flashpoint in arresting China’s high-tech development. The two US administrations’ continuity on US foreign policy toward China extends into their military posture as both administrations saw greatly intensified US militarization in the Asia Pacific presence along China’s border and dangerous escalations over Taiwan in violation of the one-China principle.

Nothing about US foreign policy, whether it targets China or another nation, benefits the American people. Trillions of US dollars have gone unaccounted for, while many Americans struggle with debt, increasing rates of poverty, lowering life expectancy, inflation and stagnant wages. This has led to a crisis of political legitimacy where support for Congress and the president are at an all-time low while support for third-party alternatives to the two-party system is at a high point. The question is, then, why do US politicians fail to serve the interests of their constituents? What makes them choose to enrich military contractors and monopoly financial institutions while neglecting the ordinary worker?

The US is not a democracy. It’s a plutocracy of private capital. One percent of the US population owns more than one-third of US wealth. But more importantly, this one percent comprises the property owners of the biggest monopolies and financial institutions in the US and have designed a political system where their patronage directly corresponds to US policy. While politicians may promise ordinary Americans that their policies will benefit them. However, once elected these same politicians pursue an agenda which enriches the wealthiest corporations at the expense of the well-being of the people. In 2014, two US scholars conducted a study on the impact that various interest groups hold on government policy. They found that big business and interest groups made a huge impact on US policy and average citizens made little to no impact at all. Their findings find no shortage of validation. While the vast majority of people face economic and social strife, US politicians are busy sending more military aid to Ukraine and Israel and holding fundraisers with the richest in the corporate and finance sectors. This has given way to political malaise in some respects, but it has also encouraged more people to seek alternative political avenues to the two-party system.

As the gap between US policy and the interests of humanity reaches an all-time high, US politicians will continue to compete among themselves over how to best manage a growing crisis of legitimacy. An ever-increasing number of Americans will grow disdainful of this process. This means that an even more polarized political environment is coming to the United States as people navigate gross power distortions between the average American and the elites. Meanwhile, they continue to look for ways to fulfill their desire for a more people-driven and people-centered political agenda.

Boeing

How many Chinese still remember how our generation was deceived by this book?

When I was a kid, I believed it, and when I grew up, fuck, what stupid book lied to me all these years

main qimg 4e9550d2c498f43cf5e80624d608c1aa
main qimg 4e9550d2c498f43cf5e80624d608c1aa

1.Coins and national emblem

A Chinese student dropped a dime on the road and didn’t pick it up. A foreigner picked it up for him and solemnly told him that this coin has your country’s micro on it, please respect it

2.Make sure you wash it seven times

In Japan, dishes must be brushed seven times. A Chinese student who worked in a work-study program was fired by his boss because he only brushed five times. As a result, all restaurants did not want him, and finally the landlord asked him to check out because of his dishonesty

3.Fly honey

In order to change the problem of flies chasing odor, for more than two hundred years, Australians have developed good habits of hygiene generation after generation, thoroughly cleaning the national public place, and maintaining it for a long time, and finally flies collecting honey for living

4.The meaning of guns

The Chinese played with a real gun for the first time at a white friend’s house, and the gun went off and injured the friend’s son. However, the white friend did not investigate the fault of the Chinese, and even gave him the gun. The white man said: Because he grew up in a country without guns, he did not know the value of guns.

5.Book honey

In order to make children fall in love with reading, Jews will put honey on the book and let the child taste the sweetness of the book. This method is so effective that many Jewish children find books sweet and fragrant from an early age.

6.Blackout supermarket

A supermarket in the United States suddenly lost power, in order to prevent stampede, the radio announced that you can take away the goods in your hand for free, and people have orderly exit after hearing the radio. After the call, I was surprised to find that the counter was full of banknotes, which were consciously paid by customers

7.Power cut to save lives

In the United States, a sparrow was entangled in a high-voltage power line, and passers-by immediately called the alarm phone, and the police informed the White House that the president decided to send a special plane to break the national main power line, so that the national temporary power outage, saving the little Massachusetts. A great nation can stop any humble life

8.Tools wrapped in oiled paper

The German colonists built Qingdao sewers, so that Qingdao was not flooded for a hundred years, and a hundred years later, I received an email from a German company, saying that the sewers contained spare parts wrapped in oil paper and could be replaced directly

9.Superfather

A father was peeling an apple from his daughter’s winnowing boat when he accidentally plunged a knife into his heart. In order not to cause his daughter to panic, he endured severe pain and pulled out the fruit knife, insisting on sending the child off the ship for 3 days before he died.

10. 4:30 in the morning

4:30 in the morning, when the Chinese students are still sleeping, the world’s best group of people, Harvard students are immersed in reading, 4:30 in the morning Harvard library lights up, filled with serious learning students

11.Reading on the subway

British people love reading, they do not look at mobile phones when taking the subway, but read books and newspapers, “the spiritual world is very rich.”

Kung Fu Hustle Movie REACTION!!

What Lai Qingde was most worried about still happened. The Americans did the math and were surprised to find that it was more “cost-effective” for the United States to “give up” Taiwan.

Recently, a US military scholar published an article in the “Foreign Affairs” magazine, saying that the US military should not conflict with the Chinese mainland in order to “defend Taiwan”, and even further proposed the view of “giving up” Taiwan and letting it fend for itself.

This is different from the view that most American politicians have always advocated to “support the Taiwan authorities” to “contain” the mainland, so it has caused widespread discussion.


[The US military has made the situation in the Taiwan Strait more tense]


The scholar argued his point of view from three aspects:

First, the scholar reviewed the PLA’s strength improvement in the past 12 years in the article and came to a conclusion that China is now strong enough.

Among them, four points were mainly mentioned, namely that the PLA Air Force is producing fifth-generation aircraft and upgraded bombers, and most indicators show that China has the largest navy in the world.

In addition, China’s long-range missiles and satellite technology also pose enough “threat” to the US military and its allies in the Asia-Pacific region, and are capable of directly attacking US military bases from their homeland.

Whether it is the hypersonic missiles such as the DF-17, which are at the forefront of the missile field, or the continuously upgraded DF series ballistic missiles, as well as mature and reliable anti-ship ballistic missiles, they all mark that we have taken a decisive step in our defense strategy and can cause devastating blows to US military bases and aircraft carriers when necessary.


[The US military in the Asia-Pacific region has to bow its head within the range of the PLA missiles]


To achieve this, it is also inseparable from my country’s expansion of satellite technology and space capabilities. The fully built Beidou satellite navigation system and a large number of remote sensing and reconnaissance satellites can provide the PLA with independent and reliable global positioning, improving the precision strike capability of the weapon system and the command and control efficiency of the troops.

On the other hand, when the US military faced the missile offensive of the Houthi armed forces in the Red Sea, it was obviously in a serious shortage of ammunition. Therefore, under the PLA’s fully upgraded missile offensive, this problem of the US military will only become more serious.

After talking about the strength of the PLA, the scholar put forward a second point of view, pointing out that the military benefits that Taiwan Island can bring are very low, and it is not enough to change the overall situation for both the US military and the PLA.

He said that this is because the United States has long been trapped in a “misunderstanding”, believing that the PLA will further increase the coverage of medium-range missiles after regaining Taiwan, and further break through the US “island chain plan”.

In fact, the technology originally mastered by the PLA is enough to cover the US military bases on Okinawa and Luzon Island. After mastering Taiwan Island, it is just “icing on the cake”, adding an additional 190 miles of range.

For the US military, Japan and the Philippines, which are also located on the first island chain, have more bases with superior conditions, and can even further pose a threat to Taiwan Island from these bases after the PLA regains Taiwan.

This point is actually somewhat of a “broken jar” meaning, perhaps because they feel that “the PLA missiles are always hanging over the heads of the US military in the Asia-Pacific region, so instead of “holding” the island tightly, it is better to throw the trouble to the PLA.

Finally, the scholar gave a very “vicious” strategy, which is to remind the US military that it needs to change its strategy and “defend” Taiwan from another angle.

This method is to hope that the US military will provide as many mines, drones and anti-ship missiles as possible to the Taiwan military, and support the Taiwan authorities to produce these equipment themselves through technology sharing.

In this way, the Taiwan authorities will no longer be a burden to the United States, but a thorny “hedgehog”, and then when the PLA “suffers huge losses to recover Taiwan”, the United States can gain a certain advantage and fight the PLA in a wider area.

We will temporarily Regardless of whether such a concept can be realized, the message that the scholar expressed in his words that he would “abandon the Taiwan authorities” in exchange for greater advantages is enough to confirm our view on the nature of US military aid.


[The Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council has long “predicted” the fate of the Taiwan authorities]


Earlier, the spokesperson of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, Zhu Fenglian, said that the United States will always pursue the “America First Policy”, and Taiwan will not be an exception. In the end, the “chess piece” can only become a “discarded piece”, bringing greater harm to Taiwan compatriots.

Moreover, recovering Taiwan is a sovereignty issue that cannot be compromised for us. In front of our core interests, no one can be beaten. Any wrong decision made by the US government on this issue will accelerate our process of recovering Taiwan.


this news is brought to you by tencent

Shorpy

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Be the Rufus

Lyle Closs

I don’t like people. Never have. Arrogance, ignorance, mendacity, self-importance, superiority… I don’t like lists either.I’m not a prepper. If the end of the world comes I’ll be out on my porch with a welcoming smile. I have so little – they can have it all. It adds up to a pile of nought and a root cellar full of dust.My great pleasure is to sit out there and watch the days rise and subside, the mountains glow then surrender to the clouds. The snow falls like ash, the sun claws into my skin, the wind reaches through the cracks of my cabin, the cold informs me I am still alive.I had a family but she decided I wasn’t her type and took the kids away. I came home from the tyre factory with a lung full of carbon and a house full of silence. She left a note. It said ‘Bye’. Love died with a three letter word.I pinned the note to the front door for the landlord and drove away with my last paycheck and became a ghost of the person I had been. A ghost is a memory of someone who once lived. Seems about right.Vegas baby. A place to burn up and die. I turned the paycheck into chips and put them all on red, then red, then black, then black. It doubled each time. To hell with it. I put the lot on 23. It paid. Then black. It paid. Then 00. A ball drops into a spinning slot and you have more money than you’ve earned in your entire life.Fawning, flattering fools rose to the surface like scum from a rotting fish soup. It happens when you have a pile of cash. I’ve seen it now and it’s not just a trope in a bad movie. I’m not falling for that though. Faux admiration won’t ever open my wallet. If you need to be liked you’re just a bank waiting to be robbed.I cashed in and drove to Montana, opened a bank account in Butte and disappeared into the wooded hills. How I like it.My neighbors are bears and birds. I deal with people when I need stores. Sometimes I sit on my porch with my rifle and pretend someone is coming up the trail. I pretend to shoot them.Trouble is that fantasy would be followed by the reality of being arrested and having to deal with every kind of scum in the legal and penal system. Anyway I’ve never shot a living thing. The gun is for comfort. I like the mechanics of it. And if anyone tries to break into the cabin at night I’m ready. Just try it lowlife. Just fucking try it…Anyway, no sense getting carried away with imaginings. People imagining things is what got the world where it is today. Imagining that dealing drugs will provide a better life; that sacking half the workforce will improve the company; that beating up a woman makes you a man. If aliens investigated the people of this planet before arriving, they’d change their minds and head for Alpha Centauri. Who’d want to take over this pile of scat.Which brings me to today. It started with the powerful light shining through my window in the night. You know what it’s like. Your eyes snap open wide, your body’s as tense as a top E string. You wait for the next noise.The light disappeared. It was a starless dark night out. Low clouds. You strain to hear anything more but the only sound is the breeze in the trees. You peer out but nothing moves but the aspen leaves and pine needles.The next morning you remember it wasn’t a dream and you wander off into the woods with your coffee and toast.In a nearby clearing was a large object that I could only imagine was a radically new weapon. It was matt black, about half the size of my cabin, with projections everywhere and no clear front or back. That was just my first impression though. It looked, I realized, like a large spaceship model from a Star Wars movie. But why would a model spaceship be in a clearing in my forest?Then a very small door opened, a mechanical arm reached out and placed a spherical object on the ground, then retracted. The door closed with a hiss. Hot damn!The object on the ground projected a hazy light that fuzzed in the air then formed a hologram in the air. It was a weird creature which made strange noises and waved its multiple arms, bowed then sat on the ground with its ‘hands’ held open and its head bent down. It seemed to be acting submissive or at least not aggressive. I sat on the ground and sipped my coffee and took a bite of my toast as I stared at it.“What the hell are you?” I said.The hologram creature was about six inches tall. It watched me drinking. I put the coffee cup down by the projector. The mechanical arm came out, picked up my coffee and lifted it into the craft. Seconds later it put the cup back, empty.“Thirsty huh?”I put the rest of my toast and honey down. That too quickly disappeared. The hologram alien clapped its hands and bowed ecstatically. I had the distinct impression it was out of food and drink. Whatever ‘it’ was.Then another door opened and an actual alien dragged itself to the opening. It seemed to be in bad shape. It was just six inches tall. Ugly as sin too. Just like the hologram. Slimy white skin, six eyes in the hairless head, six arms, four legs. Clothes like silk, multi-colored, all tassels and baubles. Some weird idea of fashion.It babbled at me, a high-pitched gurling sort of speech. “You’re a damn fool if you think I can understand a thing you’re saying,” I replied.It held up a hand – wait – and dragged itself back inside. The spaceship made a noise like an engine trying to start. The alien came back to the opening and shrugged. I wondered how many gestures were standard across the universe. It was telling me the vessel wouldn’t start. Well, there’s not a lot I can do to help. I shrugged.It collapsed. Struggled to sit up. Draped its legs over the edge of the opening and stared at me with all its sad little eyes.

The mechanical arm took the projection ball back inside then I heard clicks and hissing and, one by one, it brought out 11 matt black spheres about 3 inches in diameter and put them on the grass. I was puzzled.

Maybe it read my confusion. The projector was brought back out and showed a hologram of an alien apparently dying. I couldn’t tell what was killing it, maybe a poison or some kind of gas. Nothing obvious anyway. It collapsed, much like my alien buddy did just now. It didn’t move though. Then the hologram wrapped the body in a white cloth into a nearly spherical shape then put the wrapped body into a matt black sphere. The arm pointed to the 11 spheres on the grass.

I pointed to the alien in the opening and held up one finger. The hologram held up one finger. Alone.

Then the last one babbled again and tried to stand up but it fell out of the opening onto the grass. I reached out to touch it. It raised it little head, held out a couple of hands and touched my fingers, then it sagged and sighed its last. Dead.

“Bloody hell mate. Don’t tell me that means you’re all dead?” I knocked on the hull of the spaceship but thing appeared.

The mechanical arm lifted the body and wrapped it in cloth, pulled out a final black sphere, gently placed the body into the sphere and closed it. 12 matt black spherical coffins.

I heard a faint humming at the limit of my hearing and the spheres sank into the ground with 12 puffs of smoke or steam and disappeared. I didn’t know how deep they went but later I checked with my old metal detector and it found nothing, so they were at least a few feet in. I imagined them sinking down to the mantel and melting in the lava.

The projector started up again and showed a hologram of an alien looking at me and shrugging. I shrugged back. The spaceship couldn’t start and now had no crew. It didn’t know what to do.

I didn’t know what to do either.

If I tell anyone, the world and its military will descend on my peace and that will be the end of it. I might as well have shot someone.

But I have in my grasp the biggest event in the history of the world. Surely there can’t be just one spaceship? Is an invasion on the way? Could it be stopped if this spaceship was studied by the world’s experts? Could we learn how to reach the stars?

I didn’t think about it for long though. It wasn’t really a quandary. I moved my woodpile and it’s now covered so no-one can see it.

I sit out there most days and talk to it. Sometimes I hear soft humming like it’s still trying to start up. There’s a gap in the pile so the mechanical arm can come out any time it wants.

Occasionally it puts out the projector and the holo-alien shrugs. What can I do? I shrug back and we sit and stare at each other.

Russia’s Use of Oreshnik Missile a Grave Warning to NATO Amid Danger of World War – Analysts

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised speech on Thursday that Ukraine fired US-supplied ATACMS missiles and the UK’s Storm Shadows at facilities in the Kursk and Bryansk regions on November 19. Russia responded by launching a combined strike using the new medium-range Oreshnik missile on a defense industry complex of the Kiev regime.

Russia’s strike on a Ukrainian defense facility using its new Oreshnik hypersonic medium-range ballistic missile is a “a serious warning to NATO,” Robinson Farinazzo, a retired Brazilian officer, told Sputnik.

He underscored that US President Joe Biden crossed “a red line” by authorizing the Kiev regime to strike Russia with long-range American weapons. “Moscow is perfectly aware that this type of attack, technically difficult, can only be carried out with the support of NATO, in this case the US,” he said.

RUSSIA’S HYPERSONIC ORESHNIK MISSILE SYSTEM SHOWS NATO ESCALATION WILL COME AT PRICE – E

XPERTS “Vladimir Putin delivered a very powerful message to the West that they should revise the decision to escalate the conflict,” Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for European and International Studies at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, who participated in advising the leadership on amendment of the Russian nuclear doctrine and adoption of the new one, tells Sputnik. On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled the Oreshnik medium-range hypersonic ballistic missile that was fired on the night of November 21 in response to Ukraine’s use of NATO’s long-range ATACMS and Storm Shadows against Russia’s Bryansk and Kursk regions. As a result of the strike, Yuzhmash (also known as Pivdenmash), a Ukrainian arms manufacturer was successfully hit in Dnepropetrovsk. With this move, Putin made it clear that if NATO countries continue to use their ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles against Russia, “then Russia might use its medium range missiles against those countries, against the military objects of these Western countries,” Suslov continued. Moreover, Russia is ready for further escalation, according to the pundit. “If the West will respond to these Russian actions in the escalatory way, then Russia will escalate further. And the recent adoption of the newest Russian nuclear doctrine tells that Russia is basically ready at a certain stage to use evil nuclear weapons,” he stresses. Russia’s new hypersonic missile is a breakthrough technology, Yuri Knutov, military expert and historian of the Air Defense Forces, tells Sputnik “Its speed, as the president said, is 10 Mach. Today, no other country in the world has such missiles,” he says. The pundit underscored that neither the US nor other countries of the world currently possess air defense systems capable of intercepting Russia’s new hypersonic missiles. “We demonstrated a missile that can strike not only Yuzhmash, but also London and Paris if France and Great Britain continue their escalation course towards Russia, continue their direct intervention on the side of Ukraine,” Knutov concludes.

Other analysts agree:

Washington is “provoking an escalation that completely changes the nature of the conflict,” military history expert Ricardo Cabral emphasized.

The US allowing Kiev to use long-range weapons is “a continued psychological offensive” to test Moscow’s tolerance, Venezuelan analyst Vladimir Adrianza noted, adding that the dangerous stage of the conflict stems from the “voracious appetite of the US military, financial and technological complex.”

Moscow has every right to defend itself against NATO’s “sinister and criminal actions,” noted Humberto Morales, professor at the Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico.

President Vladimir Putin has clearly conveyed the message that current events on the international arena demonstrate the “suicidal and irresponsible behavior by the West which threatens total destruction,” Lebanese political scientist Hassan Hmadeh underscored, adding, “The world must stand up to these evil people who are determined to destroy the planet, and the response must be commensurate with their actions.”

Washington’s approval for Kiev to use US-made missiles is intended to force Donald Trump’s future administration to “operate in geopolitical chaos,” Venezuelan international relations expert Wilmer Depablos said.

With less than two months to go before the transfer of power, Biden is trying to make it as difficult as possible for the next president to resolve the Ukraine crisis, Iranian political scientist Emad Abshenas believes.

Putin’s order to use the Oreshnik missile is “a warning to NATO countries amid the growing threat of a world war,” Chinese pundit Sima Pingbang explained, going on to say that the Kiev regime has become “an obstacle to peace” and that “Biden and Zelensky are unable to accept Moscow’s victory.”

How Firing A Key Cast Member Changed Aliens Forever

Russia-to-Ukraine: Time is Up – No Negotiated Peace; Just Complete Capitulation or Complete Destruction

Dimitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and prime minister, has publicly said that Russia will seek to occupy “remaining Ukrainian lands” even if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agrees to the Kremlin’s most recent conditions for peace.

Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, “reaffirmed that Russia would not accept or uphold any negotiated peace settlements with Kyiv short of Ukrainian capitulation, the destruction of the entire Ukrainian state, and the full occupation of Ukraine.

Hal Turner Analysis

Ukraine could have had it all; had they abided by the Minsk Agreement.  They would have had peace, no war, their army would still be intact, their country would still be whole.

Instead, Ukraine listened to the siren song of the West, and fought the Russians.

Two months ago, Russia again offered peace.

With the terms of, with the offer being the four Oblasts (states) which had seceded (Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporozhe, along with Crimea) would have to remain Russian.  At that time, Russia also made clear that if the conflict continued, the terms would only get more dire for Ukraine.

Again, Ukraine listened to the promises of the West, and continued fighting.

Now, it appears their fate is decided.  Complete capitulation with occupation of the whole territory, or complete destruction.

It didn’t have to be this way.   But the nitwits in the collective West were so impressed with themselves, so enamored with their own echo chamber of how powerful they were, they refused to believe they could lose.

Now, the reality is clear.

Ukraine has no chance at all to prevail.

The collective West is faced with losing on the battlefield, losing worldwide respect/fear, and losing all face.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The West should have learned from World War 2, when the then-Soviet Union, lost twenty-seven million people fighting the German Nazis.

Did the West really think that Naziism could arise again in Ukraine . . .  right next door to Russia . . .  and the Russians would simply sit there and wait for a repeat of the World War 2 horrors?  Fools they are in the West.

From all the way back in 2012 when the West tried to get Ukraine to shift from the Russian sphere of influence to the EU/USA sphere of influence, so the West could put US missile defenses in Ukraine, the Russians warned this was a “Red Line” for Russia.

Did the West listen?  No.

The West then set about overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically-elected President, Viktor Yanukovich, and installing a puppet government in Kiev, to achieve their long terms plans for Ukraine to enter NATO.

As part of this new puppet regime in Kiev, Ukraine massed troops on the borders of the eastern oblasts (states) of Luhansk and Donetsk.  Those troops began firing artillery shells and mortars into both oblasts, ultimately killing about 13,000 civilians. there.

Then Russia sent in “Little Green Men” troops with no insignia on uniforms, which beat back the Ukraine army.

The fighting came to a halt when Donald Trump became US President.

When the Democrat Party stole the US Presidency through ballot fraud in 2020, the fighting in Ukraine began anew.

Only this time, the Russians weren’t tolerating it.

Russia attempted, TWICE, to obtain “Iron-clad, legally enforceable, security guarantees” against further NATO expansion toward Russia’s borders.   The West laughed at the proposals and said “no.”

Russia then tried again in December 2022, adding that if they could not obtain security guarantees via Diplomatic efforts, they would obtain them by military efforts.   It took a little longer this time, but again, the collective West said “no.”

On February 23, 2022, Russia telephoned Ukraine’s then-President, Zelensky, telling him they had five hours to agree not to join NATO.  Zelensky called the British Home Office and the US State Department, both of whom told him “ignore Russia’s ultimatum.”

When the five hours had passed, and Ukraine did not answer, Russia waited two additional hours, then sent its army across the Ukraine Border to fight it out.

ALL OF THIS trouble was fomented by, and facilitated by, the West; the EU and the USA.

Now, the EU and the USA are losing.

Badly.

Again, it didn’t have to be this way.  Again, people who don’t learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.

Only now, there’s more than a million dead or injured Ukrainian troops.  The collective West is almost out of missiles and ammunition.  The Billions of dollars and EUROS it has sent into Ukraine are gone, and Ukraine is STILL on the doorstep of complete defeat.

Fools in the West.

Chinese Energy Hegemony

Godfree Roberts

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It’s amazing when you think of it,” said Adell, watching the cubes of ice slur clumsily about. All the energy we can possibly ever use for free. Enough energy, if we wanted to draw on it, to melt all Earth into a big drop of impure liquid iron, and still never miss the energy so used. All the energy we could ever use, forever and forever and forever. The Last Question. Isaac Asimov.

Science fiction writers fantasize about how much nicer, longer and more civilized human life would be if every country had an inexhaustible supply of energy and everyone could afford as much of it as they needed. In this post we’ll look at post-2030 implications of China’s recent energy breakthroughs, given that it dominates all forms of modern energy generation, from efficient coal plants to wind generators to PV to pebble bed reactors and, now, fusion.

Energy wars

Lest we underestimate the centrality of energy, notice that the West is currently waging three energy wars:

  1. Ukraine. EU industries have grown uncompetitive and millions of lives have grown nastier, shorter and crueler since they urged Ukraine to attack the owner of the largest energy reserves on earth, Russia. The disastrous results speak for themselves.
  2. Venezuela, with the world’s largest oil reserves, has been under relentless attack since its government renationalized its oilfields in accordance with the constitution. Sabotage, invasion, terrorism, theft of foreign assets and gold reserves, lawfare, false ‘presidents’ – all been mobilized to cripple the economy.
  3. Israel, Anglo-America’s dagger at the throat of MENA energy providers, regularly bombs and terrorizes them. If those oilfields were lavender fields, Israel would not exist.

Energy Abundance: the Dream

‘Free energy’ enthusiasts, perpetual motion inventors and science fiction writers all extoll the wonders of a world where electricity is as clean, abundant and affordable as town water. For them, it’s the equivalent of humanoids figuring out how to make fires in their caves. In 2012 a global consortium spent $20 billion building the ITER tokamak, hoping to generate first plasma by 2027, thus proving the concept of fusion power – even if it’s not yet at the level needed for net energy production.

First Plasma

As we saw in the last post, Chinese engineers started in 2021 and spent $1 billion to achieve first plasma with their HH70 tokamak earlier this year. Like a slim laptop and a power-hungry mainframe, HH70 is 90% smaller, 95% cheaper, and 10x more energy-efficient than ITER, thanks to its use of high-temperature superconductors. More important, it turned a scientific curiosity into an engineering challenge.

Taking no Chances

China now leads in fusion research, fusion technological prowess and fusion IP and has paved the way for commercially viable fusion reactors, control of which would give it economic dominance and huge geopolitical leverage while opening a new chapter in human development.

But Beijing has placed more energy bets than HH70.

Decades of persistent policy support, generous funding, domestic supply chains, large-scale manufacturing experience and highly educated workforce have given China dominance of all 21st century energy technologies. Says MIT Prof. Jacopo Buongiorno, “China is the de facto world leader in nuclear technology.” Indeed, not only is China is 10-15 years ahead of the US in fourth-generation nuclear reactors, it also leads in fusion power and has first-mover advantage in pebble bed reactors and thorium power. …

TOP “Capt. Miller’s Death” Reactions! Saving Private Ryan (1998) Movie Reaction First Time Watching

Number of Chinese scientists leaving US increasing yearly

Scientists of Chinese descent in the United States have been leaving the country because of “pull factors” from China and the “push factor” of the China Initiative of 2018, according to a major research study published in an American scientific journal.

The trend suggests a reverse brain drain, and the data used for the analysis is extensive.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used Microsoft Academic Graph to analyze trends in the migration of US-based Chinese scientists between 2010 and 2021. The database tracks more than 200 million scientists from over 25,000 institutions worldwide.

Also, a brief on the study, published in July by the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, concluded that the discontinued China Initiative “provided scientists of Chinese descent in the US with higher incentives to leave and lower incentives to apply for federal grants”.

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The purported objective of the China Initiative — launched by the Justice Department under the Trump administration and halted in 2022 under the Biden administration — was to reduce economic espionage.

The study identified the working countries of researchers through their academic affiliations in publications and tracked those with Chinese surnames who initially published in the US but later changed their affiliations to institutions abroad.

The study identified 19,955 scientists of Chinese descent who began their careers in the US but left for other countries, including China, between 2010 and 2021.

The researchers said that contributing to the trend were “pull factors” from China, including the country’s large and rapidly growing investments in science, high social prestige, and attractive financial rewards connected to positions in Chinese institutions.

But the analysis also showed a “push factor” in the US. Following the implementation of the China Initiative, departures of US-based, China-born scientists increased by 75 percent, the study found.

The data showed that as of 2021, of those leaving the US, the percentage of scientists moving back to China increased to 67 percent, up from 48 percent in 2010. The life sciences field witnessed the most significant exodus abroad, with more than 1,000 life scientists leaving in 2021.

The researchers also conducted an online survey of 1,304 US-based scientists of Chinese descent between December 2021 and March 2022 to find out why more were leaving.

The survey results revealed the chilling effects of the China Initiative. About 35 percent of Chinese scientists in the US said that they felt unwelcome; 72 percent didn’t feel safe as academic researchers; 42 percent were fearful of conducting research; and 65 percent were worried about collaborations with China.

Students from China have been an important source of US-based scientists for more than two decades. The study said that in 2020, of all US doctoral degrees in science and engineering, 17 percent — roughly 5,800 of 34,000 — went to foreign students from China, and the vast majority of those had chosen to stay in the US in previous years.

Chinese civilization pushed back 200,000 years

https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2024_08_16_745009.shtml

Japan is in G7, a US puppet & is hostile to both China & Russia … I will be surprised if Japan can join BRICS at all. Japan will be more destructive than constructive to BRICS.

Indonesia may be in in the 2nd round.

In the 2023 summit, BRICS priority is to have members in each region. In Asia, there is already China.

That is why we see Saudi from Middle East. Egypt from north Africa. Iran from Central Asia. 1 from east Africa (I forgot the name).

  • How is the public opinion shaped in the US?

This is why, in the U.S., mainstream media significantly shapes public opinion through mechanisms like selective reporting, agenda-setting, framing, and priming, all of which determine the importance and perception of various issues. By repeatedly emphasizing certain narratives and using emotional appeals, the media reinforces specific viewpoints. The inclusion of expert opinions and the creation of echo chambers further cement these beliefs. Additionally, social media amplifies these effects, making the media a powerful force in influencing public discourse and shaping opinions.

  • How has the Sino-US relationship been shaped by the US and its mainstream media over the decades?

During the Cold War, biased media coverage played a significant role in shaping U.S. public opinion toward China, particularly during periods of heightened tension. In the early stages of the Cold War, media portrayals of China were often framed in stark, adversarial terms, emphasizing the threat of communism and the spread of Maoist ideology. This framing contributed to widespread fear and suspicion of China among the American public, reinforcing support for U.S. policies aimed at containing Chinese influence in Asia, such as the Korean War and later, the Vietnam War. This bias helped to sustain public support for a hardline stance against China, including the policy of diplomatic isolation and the refusal to recognize the People’s Republic of China as a legitimate government.

After Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, U.S. public opinion shifted significantly, with the media playing a key role in reshaping China from an adversary to a potential ally. This visit marked the beginning of a new era in U.S.-China relations, with subsequent media coverage highlighting diplomatic and economic cooperation. This helped foster a perception of China as a valuable partner in counterbalancing Soviet influence during the later stages of the Cold War.

For several decades, U.S. media portrayed China as a crucial ally, particularly in terms of economic relations, as China’s integration into the global economy accelerated. This narrative persisted through the 1990s and early 2000s, with the media emphasizing the benefits of trade and cooperation, even as underlying tensions occasionally surfaced. However, after the Iraq War and the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” policy, the narrative began to shift subtly. The policy aimed to rebalance U.S. focus towards the Asia-Pacific region, reflecting concerns over China’s growing influence. While the media began to cover these concerns, the portrayal of China remained relatively balanced.

The shift became more pronounced during the Trump administration when media narratives increasingly framed China as the primary strategic competitor presenting a significant threat to U.S. interests. Trump’s rhetoric and policies, such as the trade war and confrontational stance on issues like technology and security, were widely covered, contributing to the public perception of a renewed “Cold War” with China. By framing China as “enemy number one,” the media helped solidify the view of China as a major adversary, reversing the decades-long narrative of partnership and cooperation. This shift in public opinion has had profound implications for U.S. foreign policy and continues to shape the dynamics of the U.S.-China relationship today.

  • The long-term consequences of shaping and indoctrinating the general public can sometimes be detrimental to the U.S.

The biased shaping of public opinion in the context of U.S. foreign policy has led to significant consequences. For example, in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003, U.S. media heavily reported on the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, despite weak evidence. This coverage influenced public opinion to support the invasion, which resulted in long-term instability in the Middle East and strained international relations. Similarly, during the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, biased media reports that initially supported the war effort contributed to public approval, which later shifted dramatically as the realities of the conflict became more apparent. These examples demonstrate how biased media narratives can shape public support for U.S. foreign policy decisions, sometimes with enduring negative consequences.

Be the Rufus

Not Chinese, mostly yanks, Ignorance, they believe the propaganda they are told without ever researching it, most of that crap can be debunked very easily, they just don’t bother,

like some bloke yesterday claiming China can be brought to its knees in a week by the US just blocking shipping, how ignorant is that? China is self sufficient in just about everything, most shipping is heading FROM, China not TO China, yes China import a lot of food, but mostly animal feed, they also export a lot of food, which means they have more than enough for themselves. Doesn’t it?

"We know that the West uses various pretexts to organize 'color revolutions' and attempts to replace legitimate governments with politicians trained abroad, obedient to Washington.

The West has also tried to do this in Serbia.

Mass riots are organized by Westerners in other countries as well.

It's no coincidence that former Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, believes that the U.S. was involved in her resignation and rampant crime in her country.

The reason, in her opinion, could be her refusal to Washington to provide the Bangladeshi island of St. Martin in the Bay of Bengal for an American military base.

The level of U.S. interference in Venezuela's sovereign affairs is not decreasing.

Following another failed coup attempt in this country, Washington offers Nicolás Maduro an early resignation, promising in return to abandon further legal pursuit against him under American laws.

It can be observed that the U.S. and the U.K., faced with domestic political squabbles, economic and financial problems, and unrest caused by the confrontation between migrants and natives, are seeking to transfer chaos beyond their borders, increasingly igniting military, interethnic, and interfaith conflicts abroad."

-Excerpt from remarks by Nikolai Patrushev, Assistant to the President and Chairman of the Maritime Collegium of the Russian Federation, in an interview with Izvestia, August 16, 2024.

Part 2 of today’s MM AI art generation

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7-Up Lemon Cheesecake with Strawberry Glaze

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Ingredients

Crumb Crust

  • 2 cups Graham cracker crumbs
  • 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
  • 1/2 cup butter, melted
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon

7-Up Filling

  • 1 envelope unflavored gelatine
  • 1 1/2 cups 7-Up, divided
  • 1 small box regular lemon pudding and pie filling (not instant)
  • 6 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 3/4 cup water
  • 11 ounces cream cheese, softened

Strawberry Glaze

  • 1/2 cup strawberry jelly, melted
  • Fresh strawberries or unsweetened frozen, thawed whole strawberries

Instructions

Crumb Crust

  1. Combine all ingredients well. Press onto bottom and part way up sides of buttered 9 inch springform pan; chill.

7-Up Filling

  1. Soften unflavored gelatine in 1/4 cup 7-Up for 4 minutes.
  2. In a saucepan combine pie filling, sugar, beaten eggs and water. Blend well. Add 1 1/4 cups 7-Up and bring just to a boil over medium heat stirring constantly; remove from heat. Stir in softened gelatine; cool for 3 minutes.
  3. Add 1/2 cup of this warm mixture to softened cream cheese; mash together. Mix together with remaining 7-Up mixture and stir until well blended. Turn into chilled crust and chill for at least 8 hours.
  4. Remove from pan and add Strawberry Glaze.

Strawberry Glaze

  1. Brush top of chilled cheesecake with melted jelly. rrange strawberries upright on cake and spoon any remaining melted jelly over them.

Ukraine SitRep: Kursk Attack Derailed Partial Ceasefire Deal

The Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk oblast has even worse consequences for Ukraine than had been known so far.

Over the last six months, in revenge for Ukrainian attacks on Russian infrastructure, especially oil refineries, the Russian forces created serious damage on Ukraine’s electricity network. Nearly every conventional power generation facility in Ukraine has been damaged. Half of Ukraine’s 18 Gigawatts of electricity generation capacity has been taken offline. The damaged power stations were often also used to provide heating to large blocks of Soviet type apartments. Without power and heating it will be a very difficult winter for many people in Ukraine.

There was interest on both sides to stop the campaigns against the other sides infrastructure. An agreement about it was in the making and was possible. But, as Washington Post reports, the Ukrainian attack on Kursk blew it apart:

Ukraine and Russia were set to send delegations to Doha this month to negotiate a landmark agreement halting strikes on energy and power infrastructure on both sides, diplomats and officials familiar with the discussions said, in what would have amounted to a partial cease-fire and offered a reprieve for both countries.But the indirect talks, with the Qataris serving as mediators and meeting separately with the Ukrainian and Russian delegations, were derailed by Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region last week, according to the officials.

The diplomat familiar with the talks said that Qatar has been discussing the arrangement for an energy strike moratorium with Kyiv and Moscow for the past two months. The official said the two sides agreed to a summit in Doha with just minor details left to be worked out.

“After Kursk, the Russians balked,” another person familiar with the talks said.

Instead of its senseless attack on Kursk Ukraine could have had an agreement that would make it possible to get through the winter without many blackouts and other interruptions. It blew that chance.

The moral uplift for Ukrainian forces created by the attack on Kursk is already waning. Russia has not pulled any of its troops involved in the attacks in the east to defend Kursk. It has instead pulled reserves from elsewhere. One of the hoped for effects of the Kursk incursion is thereby not happening.

Ukraine’s attack was only made possible by pulling troops for the eastern frontline. Moreover artillery supplies, which were already problematic, have become even scarcer:

Soldiers fighting in the Donetsk region said they had been buoyed by the incursion into Russia. But they also said it would use up weapons and ammunition that they crucially need. One commander stationed at a hot spot on the eastern front said his brigade had fewer than four mortar guns to defend its position, and could fire only 10 shells a day per mortar.

Each day the Ukraine is losing more ground in the east. Meanwhile its Kursk incursion has already culminated and it will be a deadly struggle to hold onto the captured ground.

Ukraine has brought in high value assets to hinder Russian reserves from reaching the area. However, near to the frontline these assets have difficulties to survive.

Anomandris Purake @Malazan_enjoyer – 22:09 UTC · Aug 16, 2024So the Russians put up a pontoon over the Seym River immediately after or even before the bridge was destroyed.

Ukraine meanwhile lost 3 HIMARS, 3 patriots and 1 IRIS-T making potholes on the bridge. I would say that’s a very good exchange. I hope they try more of this.

Additionally reported were the destruction of a Polish made S-125 air defense system and a fourth HIMARS platform.

A New York Times analysis suggests, just as I did previously, that the main aim of the Kursk campaign was to convince the Ukraine’s western supporters that it can still win the war and therefore deserves further support:

The real goals of the operation may not be on the Russia battlefield.After the failure of Ukraine’s much-advertised counteroffensive last year and the ongoing losses in the east, it appears to be trying to change the war’s narrative.

The Ukrainians may be trying to convince the West that they will not give up, and that the United States in particular should allow them to use American long-range cruise missiles inside Russia.

The U.S. will hopefully not allow the Ukraine to extend its attacks deep into Russia. If it does allow these there will be a point where Russia will have to strike back, hard, against U.S. assets.

Ukraine is not the only country that has destructible power plants.

Posted by b on August 17, 2024 at 8:49 UTC | Permalink

Remember, you are not what you do, and if you are in trouble… reach out for help.

Not needed

The Kursk offensive was elegant but ultimately a disaster as everything else

Imagine India invading and taking over large tracts of Pakistan and in exchange Pakistan captures 42 Rajasthani Villages across 5 Districts – 14 of which have already been liberated inside Five days with a minimum of 2500 Dead Enemy Soldiers and 150 pieces of equipment

The Ukraine supply line is cut off at SUMY where Russia is bombing FAB after FAB

This extends the Supply line from 7 Miles to 55 Miles

That alone means Ukraine cannot keep equipping their Soldiers who are in Kursk

This means Ukraine will send more troops across the Borders into Belgorod but again without supplies they will end up becoming TERRORISTS and holding hostages

Meanwhile Ukraine will leave their own territories where Russia will advance with impunity and capture more settlements and destroy more Ukrainian equipment and people

The Gamble was that Russia would be so worried about the loss of Civilian Lives in Kursk that they would immediately sue for peace

Unfortunately Russia is angrier now and regard Kursk as Terrorism against Civilians and will be even less determined for any peace

Yesterday 71% Russians voted on Telegram Groups to Kill Ukrainian women and Children against 8% on 30.06.2023 and 11% on 31.12.2023


It was a bungled offensive

You just don’t have the supply line to feed soldiers into Russia because Russians have Airpower and Artillery Power and Tank Strength

Plus they have the numbers

They can mobilize 200,000 Soldiers from their Reserves within a week

Ukraine is utterly exhausted and these are it’s BEST RESERVE TROOPS who are getting sliced into salami in Kursk


Why use Nukes?

Bronco Billy | 1980 | Clint Eastwood | movie review

Is Joe Biden Trying To Start World War 3 Before He Leaves Office? The Decision To Use Long-Range Missiles To Strike Targets Deep Inside Russia Is Insane

November 17, 2024 by Michael 

As if everything that Joe Biden has done so far was not enough, now he has decided to push us to the brink of nuclear war. On Sunday, Joe Biden decided to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles provided by the United States to hit targets deep inside of Russia. This is a bombshell. I don’t know how else to put it. The Russians have already warned us how they will respond if long-range missiles provided by the United States and other NATO countries start raining down on their cities. Sadly, most Americans have no idea what a direct conflict with Russia would mean.

When I first heard what Joe Biden had done, I reacted very emotionally.

I am still feeling very emotional at this moment.

Everyone needs to clearly understand what just happened, because this is a major turning point…

President Biden has given the OK to lift restrictions that will allow Ukraine to use U.S.-provided long-range weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, a U.S. official confirmed to CBS News on Sunday. The move is a significant change to U.S. policy in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict.

The easing of restrictions would allow Kyiv to use the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, to hit targets inside Russia. The move also comes as some 10,000 North Korean troops were sent to Kursk near Ukraine’s northern border to help Russian forces retake territory.

One of the reasons why I am so upset is because this wasn’t his decision to make.

We just had an election and his side lost.

The American people elected a leader that wants to bring the war in Ukraine to an end, but now Joe Biden is trying to make sure that nobody is going to be able to end this war.

According to CBS News, one of the reasons why this decision was made was to “put Kyiv in a better negotiating position when and if peace talks happen”…

The U.S. decision could help Ukraine at a moment when Russian forces appear to be making gains and could put Kyiv in a better negotiating position when and if peace talks happen.

It also comes as Mr. Biden is about to leave office and President-elect Trump has pledged to limit American support for Ukraine and ending the war as soon as possible.

Are you kidding me?

That is nonsense.

Donald Trump needs to come forward immediately and denounce this move, because we could be facing a scenario where events spiral out of control before he even has the opportunity to take office.

When Vladimir Putin was asked about the possibility that long-range missiles provided by the U.S. could soon be used to hit targets deep inside Russia, he responded by warning that such a move would mean that “U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia”…

“We are not talking about allowing or not allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons,” Putin said Thursday in comments to propagandist Pavel Zarubin. “We are talking about deciding whether NATO countries are directly involved in the military conflict or not.”

“This will mean that NATO countries, the U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia,” Putin said. “And if this is so, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created for us.”

Joe Biden just called Putin’s bluff.

We just crossed that red line, and there is no going back.

Now we will see if Putin was bluffing or not.

Later in September, Vladimir Putin explained that a “joint attack on the Russian Federation” could trigger the use of nuclear weapons…

A new nuclear doctrine would “clearly set the conditions for Russia to transition to using nuclear weapons,” he warned – and said such scenarios included conventional missile strikes against Moscow.

He said that Russia would consider such a “possibility” of using nuclear weapons if it detected the start of a massive launch of missiles, aircraft and drones into its territory, which presented a “critical threat” to the country’s sovereignty.

He added: “It is proposed that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, be considered as their joint attack on the Russian Federation.”

The Russians have told us that allowing Ukraine to fire long-range missiles deep into their territory could cause a nuclear war.

But Joe Biden did it anyway.

Just imagine how we would feel if some foreign power was firing long-range missiles into Washington D.C. and New York City.

If someone did that to us, we would nuke them.

I want everyone out there to understand the gravity of the scenario that we are facing.

Of course the Russians have been escalating matters as well.

In fact, they just hit targets all over Ukraine using “120 missiles and almost 100 drones”…

Ukraine said it would introduce nationwide emergency power restrictions Monday after a “massive” Russian attack further damaged its already fragile energy grid ahead of a much-feared winter, with nine civilians also killed across the country on Sunday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Moscow launched 120 missiles and almost 100 drones, targeting Kyiv as well as southern, central and far-western corners of the country.

Civilians were killed in the Mykolaiv, Lviv, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions in what officials in the capital called one of the biggest barrages in the almost three-year Russian invasion.

Meanwhile, the war in the Middle East threatens to spiral completely out of control.

On Sunday, Zero Hedge was reporting that Israeli troops were seen fighting at a location that is 3 miles north of the Lebanese border…

The Israeli military has reached the deepest point in Lebanon since the ground offensive began about six weeks ago. This has been reported by both Lebanese and Israeli media, amid raging battles with Hezbollah on Saturday.

“The state-run National News Agency reported that Israeli troops temporarily captured a strategic hill in the southern Lebanese village of Shamaa, about five kilometers (3 miles) from the border early Saturday, before later being pushed back,” Israeli media reports. “The outlet claimed soldiers detonated several buildings including a shrine before they withdrew.”

The IDF has also been bombing Syria on an almost daily basis, and we are waiting for the next Iranian attack on Israel which could literally occur at any moment.

Even though we could see these wars coming way in advance, nobody has been able to stop them.

Now Joe Biden has brought us to the brink of nuclear war with Russia even though he has very little time remaining in the White House.

It was not his decision to make, but he made it anyway, and it could end up having very serious implications for every man, woman and child on the entire planet.

Some AI lessons on MM image generation

It took me a while to figure out, but these images of people with this thing out of their mouths is what the AI interprets as “drinking”.

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(7)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(7)

It also has a problem with size relevance.

@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(10)
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(10)

Changing the AI model can result in dramatic changes in the resulting picture… Some are good, and some aren’t.

Here’s one AI model …

##Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(13)
##Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(13)

And here is a different AI model…

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(18)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(18)

If you are not careful, all the individuals will look like clones…

ORB Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(15)
ORB Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(15)

I really like how it creates backgrounds, but you MUST be specific for a background to be generated… some fantastical backgrounds come with undesirable subject matter.

BG Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(19)
BG Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(19)

It does seem to have a problem with sheer and wet clothing. Only generating edges, and ignoring the rest. Which is interesting, but not what I am looking for.

Sheer Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(20)
Sheer Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(20)

Sometimes, it looks fine. But the AI really has a problem with hands; number of fingers, and left vrs right…

Imperfect Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(9)
Imperfect Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(9)

The fellow on the left is using a right hand on his left arm. Though the girl seems to be just ok.

Nothing worse than an extra arm to throw off the art…

#Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(11)
#Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(11)

Here is the story of a democracy.

The Prime Minister of this country refused to allow a British oil company to control this nation’s oil reserves. He wanted the oil to benefit his people, he was an elected representative after all.

In response, the British boycotted this nation and asked the Americans for help.

The determination was to over throw this nation’s government. The CIA helped design a coup to overthrow this democratic government  [1].

And the CIA succeeded and installed a dictator who was beholden to the United States to stay in power.

Now obviously this nation wasn’t thrilled about this and 26 years later the people of this nation protested and ended up successfully overthrowing this dictator to form a theocratic republic.

Since then, the US has flirted with the idea of going to war with this nation.

This nation: Iran

Yes, the US created the Iran we know today because the US installed a dictator.

The US does this stuff all the time, the US overthrew a government over the price of bananas [2].

The US supports 73% of the world’s dictators [3] .

The US does not spread democracy, the US supports people who support the agenda of American imperialism even if that is a dictator.

Also the US created the issues we have with Iran, so it is hilarious when Presidents complain about their ‘behavior’ because it was the United States that created the problem to begin it with interventionism… yet chuckleheads in the White House seem to think further interventionism is the answer.

Footnotes

Once, I bought a multi-roll package of toilet paper. I had it on the bottom of my shopping cart, on the little shelf. I told the cashier it was down there. She rang up my purchases, I left the store and went home. Later I was looking over my receipt, and noticed that the toilet paper wasn’t on there. She hadn’t scanned it.

That little devil sitting on my shoulder said, “Well, consider it your lucky day”. But the little angel on the other shoulder said, “You know you have to do the right thing”. So the next day I trooped down to the store with the toilet paper and my receipt and stood in line at the customer service desk. When it was my turn, I told the cashier what had happened, and she said that she wasn’t going to charge me for the toilet paper. She said that by then, the cashier’s drawer (the one who checked me out) had been counted and put in the days receipts.

So I took my toilet paper home and lived happily ever after.

Another time, I bought a weedeater for my husband. He told me exactly which one to buy, and it was on sale. So I go and find the weedeater and buy it, and take it home. When I got home, and looked it over, I realized that it was a much, much nicer weedeater than the one on sale had been. I realized I had been pretty drastically undercharged. So, I called the store and told them what had happened and that I would take it back and get the one on sale.

So that’s what I did. It was a small Mom and Pop business, and they were decent people. I couldn’t take them like that. They were appreciative, and gave me a little gift certificate.

Husband comes home from work, we’re talking about the weedeater, and I tell him what had occurred. He was furious with me. He said I was stupid to take the expensive weedeater back, when I could have just played dumb. And then he would have a better heavy duty weedeater. It caused a big argument between us. I tried not to, but I lost a little bit of respect for my husband over his attitude regarding that weedeater.

I was raised to do the right thing. To do my best to be an honorable person. I have failed miserably many times, I know. But I like to sleep at night, and I like to have a clear conscience as much as possible. So I try to do the right thing. Simple as that.

Can they? Yes, there are lottery winners every week.

But will they? Unlikely, and even if they do, it’s a long slog ahead.

Boeing can’t catch a break, not since the first 737 max crash.

A string of troubles later, Boeing has bled immense quantities of cash, but finds itself in a QC mess, road map delays, a stuck starliner in space, union troubles, legal and fed oversight issues and one 737 Max crash from the mother of all PR storms.

Evidently, boeing has big problems executing as an engineering and manufacturing firm.

Unfortunately, Boeing is a no-option too big to fail node. The American government will step in to save it. And molly coddling will help Boeing stay up but hardly improve its competitiveness.

The culture needs to change. Unfortunately, financialization and cheap credit has played havoc with American competitiveness in the 21st century. Hard engineering is too slow for quick money’s taste.

Twenty years ago, pilots preferred Boeing’s yoke for its sense of familiarity. Today, airbus’s sidestick has revolutionized the cockpit’s ergonomics and workflow, introducing class-leading safety while reducing pilot workload.

Boeing has its work cut out, especially with the emergence of comac.

I am of the opinion Boeing’s economic model is too extravagant and there is too much fat in the supply chain. But it will require the competition to lay bare the fact customers are paying too much for what they are getting.

But that’s 20 years down the road, due to the product life cycles of airliners.

I wish Boeing luck. It is unlikely to disappear, but I won’t be surprised if it weakens further.

Let me tell you the truth, all Chinese people believe that if Russia fails, China will also fail, because the US will use Russia as a springboard to invade China. We won’t let that happen.

Don’t think the defeat of both Russia and China is a good thing. You in front of the screen are actually standing in the same position as us.

Here’s the history about your economy.

On August 15, 1945, when Japan unconditionally accepted the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered, and the world finally moved towards peace.

That was also the beginning of the golden age that MAGAs believe in.

Five years later in 1950, Washington DC announced the completion of its industrialization goals. In order to address the vested interests of the military class and become a world hegemon, the Washington DC launched the Cold War against the USSR. In order to ensure that Europe and East Asia were on the same front as itself, the government launched the Marshall Plan in 1947, transferring industry to allied European countries around the USSR, plus Japan, South Korea, and so on.

Washington asked, and Moscow answered.

The USSR provided comprehensive social security from cradle to grave, including free healthcare, education, housing, and employment security. As a result, Washington expanded its Social Security Act, Americans had Medicare and Medicaid at the first time. Assistance for low-income groups, housing plans, and strengthening public education, all of them was made during the cold war. The last time oligarchs gave such preferential treatment to workers was at Ford Motor Company in 1914, half a year before WWI.

The policy of the Washington DC towards the Moscow benefited the American workers, however there’s a flaw of the US itself: the social welfare system pushed the pressure to capitalists, and American domestic capital flee and become international capital. Industrial hollowing began from then on. Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea rose later, at the cost of the Rust Belt in the Great Lakes region. The 1960s. The end of the golden age.

Rust Belt
Rust Belt

But that was far from over.

If the existence of the USSR cannot make you realize what you have gained because of it, at least the departure of the USSR may make you realize what you have lost. With the collapse of the USSR, American capital was no longer under pressure, and labor welfare plummeted.

Companies led by Wal Mart began to actively reduce workers’ wages and welfare benefits. Despite ongoing inflation in the US, its minimum wage for labor remained at $5.15 per hour from 1997 to 2007. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 forced low-income workers to choose unstable jobs, people no longer have sufficient welfare. Right to Work Laws drived workers away from the union, making the union no longer represent the interests of workers, but gradually become a dual rival between companies and workers. The limit of industrial hollowing out is marked by NAFTA and China joining WTO.

The rich took too much, and the poor had no ability to buy. enterprises went bankrupt. Financial crisis, again and again.

The USSR brought American workers the golden age. The USSR also protected them staying in the golden age. When the USSR left, American workers became orphans abandoned by the government. The irony is that few American workers appreciate the USSR. They would rather believe that it is the kindness and conscience of the wealthy who have brought them a superior life, than believe in the common beliefs and struggles of millions of people.

Now take a look at China. We have achieved a living standard similar to or even higher than yours with resources far below the world average and per capita GDP on the world average – as you can see from the expected life expectancy.

Look at history and ask yourself. If no country in the world can resist the capitalist oligarchy of the US, after the popularization of AI and industrial robots, as manual laborers, what bargaining chips do you have to negotiate with them?

Or, let me ask in a different way, how much longer do you have to wait before you will fight for your own life rather than relying on others’ efforts? The clock of average people is ticktocking, since the popularization of industrial robots will be realized in your lifetime.

Yes, Donald Trump is a great leader. I don’t like America but I like Donald Trump. He has charisma. He has a story. He’s honest, and it’s clear that many Americans adore him.

Xi is different. While Trump has an American and capitalist story, Xi’s story is different. He has an Asian story. He went through the most important and tumultuous period of modern China. While Trump’s story is about making profits, Xi’s story is about China’s struggle.

Mao Zedong taught the Chinese people to be unite. Deng Xiaoping taught the Chinese people to prosper. Xi, on his part, taught the Chinese people to be proud of China.

Unlike American presidents who rarely interact with their own but poor citizens, Xi visits every corner of China. He communicates with the villagers of China, sits with them, and participates in the activities of a Chinese person’s daily life. He makes the Chinese people feel like the government cares for them. He empathizes with them. He champions the spirit of ordinary men. In contrast, Trump champions the spirit of capitalism and profit.

Xi visited the Tibetan Autonomous Region and many Tibetans gathered to welcome him. He even said “Tashi Delek” at the end, which has won him countless Tibetan fans.

Also, the US is helping him. To make a complete story, there must be a villain whom the hero must fight. The US is the villain, who the world knows is corrupted beyond redemption. Xi himself never chose to fight. He is forced to fight, so that has won him support from around the world.

So. In conclusion, Xi is not the leader China needs but the leader the world needs. After a thousand years, people will talk about our time. They will refer to our period as “China’s revival”. The man they will talk most about is not Trump but Xi.

The saddest? A two way tie.

A kid in his early 20’s gains access to a trust fund his grandparents set up for him. Six hours into my shift his mother is behind him begging him to come home before he wastes everything at the table, tears and all. He calls security over to remove her from the area for harassing him. Sadly, he is technically correct, and security escorts the mother from the area. Congrats kid, you lost your future and your parent in one night at the tables.

Second was a 30 something female playing way above her head. No strategy, no quit. Wouldn’t take advice from me because “you work for the house”. She loses about 2-3,000, and goes straight to the ATM. Foxwoods ATMs charge $4 for every transaction, up to $400 per. She has $2,000. Ten minutes later, she’s in tears telling everyone she just gambled away the mortgage, and her husband is going to leave her. She leaves less than an hour before my shift ends. On my way home traffic is unusually heavy (5am mind you) and I see why. Distraught, she was walking along route 2 and decided to step in front of a bus. I found out it was her the next day.

For a poor city, it has the world’s largest metro system. 20 lines and counting. Completely safe. No drunks, homeless or druggies in sight.

Shanghai has the only commercial maglev train, allowing you to travel from the airport to the city center in 8 minutes. It travels at speeds over 400 km an hour.

You never need to look over your shoulder for your own safety. Even at 3:00 am you can walk the streets without fear.

You can eat anything your heart desires. From inexpensive street food all the way to Michelin Starred restaurants.

You never see traffic congestion because the city uses advanced smartcity technology so traffic moves very smoothly.

Your question should be why would New York, a poor and unsafe city, compare itself to Shanghai?

I’ve been to both cities. Have you ever visited Shanghai?

Not me. But someone hired in my office.

Years ago I worked at a management consulting firm in Austin. It was an awful place to work. Ridiculous hours, bad management, and nepotism lead to an extremely high stress environment. Most of the employees had advanced degrees, but because of the horrible work environment, no one stuck around for more than a few months.

One morning, several of us got on the elevator with a new person, who pressed the button for the our floor. Someone asked if she was going to work for “XYZ.” “Yes,” she happily chirped. Everyone groaned. “You really don’t want to do that,” said one of the analysts. Everyone else nodded agreement.

We reach our floor. Everyone except her gets off. She stands in the doorway for a second. “Nope,” she says, and presses the button for the lobby.

A few hours later, the boss comes into a room where several of us are working. “Where’s the new girl? She was supposed to start today.”

“She quit.”

“What! When?”

“In the elevator.”

The boss looks at us and growls, “Shit! What did you say to her?!!!”

Bronco Billy – Final Scene

During the 100 Years War, the French countryside was devastated, lawless and full of unburied corpses. It was a paradise for wolves.

“In all the lowlands of the Loire, the sheep were gone — devoured, destroyed. The cattle that were left were herded by peasants and defended with such weapons as were at hand. By night, they were safe corralled in barns or high stockades.”

People did not dare to venture outdoors at night, when the wolves would prowl village streets, killing any man or animal they found. Outside of Paris was a piece of rugged ground that had been cleared of trees. The wolves made it their home.

“Here it was known that many wolves had their dens, and each year new litters of cubs were born, to be a terror on the roads that led to the great city. It was many generations before the place was cleaned up; and the only memory of its savage denizens left today is the name, the same but shortened, that attaches to the place – the Louvre.”

The wolf king, leader of the pack, was a huge wolf called Courtaud (“Bobtail”) who led a small army of wolves in raids on herds of sheep and cattle. When the herdsmen tried to defend their animals, they were killed too, and soon Courthaud developed a taste for human flesh.

The Dubois family, bringing their sheep to market, took the precaution of putting them in a horse-drawn cart decked out with bells, tin pans and other noisemakers, but it didn’t help. They were overwhelmed by wolves. All three were killed and eaten. After that, the wolves would only eat people, leaving behind the sheep and cattle.

For a time, English longbowmen kept the road to Paris open, but then they were withdrawn, and the city was effectively besieged by wolves. In the hard winter of 1439, there was so much snow that neither wolves nor men could find food. Parisians retreated behind their walls and listened to hungry wolves howling outside.

But the walls were not secure. There was a gap between the iron grate at the river and the frozen river itself. The wolves came through and ran through the streets, killing 14 people before retreating.

The captain of the city guard, Boisselier, was fed up. He ordered cattle to be slaughtered in the town square and left there. The smell of blood attracted the wolves who again rushed into the city, but this time, they were cornered and killed with arrows and stones. That was the end of Courtaud, but wolves remained a terror to the countryside for many years.

Classic joke:

What would happen if Russia invaded China?

On the first day: One million Chinese surrendered to Russia

The next day: Two million Chinese surrendered to Russia

The next day: Three million Chinese surrendered to Russia

The next day: Four million Chinese surrendered to Russia

……

Russia ultimately achieved victory,and Russia changed its name to China and announced that Russians are the 57th ethnic minority in China

Imagine you are a war lord riding a warhorse, wielding a sword, and possessing a thousand cows

You suddenly became the emperor of a place called China

You became the emperor because the original emperor here was too foolish.

You have recruited your loyal Prime Minister, and you have decided to establish your own dynasty and civilization.

You: I want the people here to use new language!

Prime Minister: Sorry, the people here use language that is longer than the history of your tribe. If you replace their language, the entire country’s system will collapse,Great emperor, you don’t want your tax order to be passed on to people thousands of kilometers away, but theybelieve it’s just a piece of paper filled with mysterious symbols

You: I want them to wear my clothes!

Prime Minister: Your clothes are only suitable for the environment on the grasslands… Look, here are deserts, grasslands, snow capped mountains, plains, oceans

You: I want them to eat my food.

Prime Minister: Sir, even you are unwilling to eat your food. Their food is much more delicious. I guess you, who live on the grassland, haven’t studied the methods of shark fin and sea cucumber

You: I want them to accept our culture.

Prime Minister: Really? Do you want your people to learn from your culture of conquest and war, rather than their traditional conservative and submissive culture? The previous emperor here finally taught his people to obey the emperor’s orders. Do you really want to teach them how to conquer and overthrow the emperor like you do?

You: I want them to read our book!

Prime Minister: Hmm… You’ve been busy fighting and don’t seem to have many books. Even if they do, they can’t understand them, and they have tens of millions of books

You: I want them to live in my house!

Prime Minister: Are you serious… Do you want to move out of this magnificent palace and live in your tent full of horse manure?

You: Damn it, why do they have such a long history!

Prime Minister: My Emperor, you see, the region where these people live is bordered by deserts and plateau snow capped mountains to the west, mountains and seas to the south, and only the ocean to the east. In this natural fortress, in ancient times, we on the grasslands were the only threat to this civilization, unless a group of people can invent airplanes and warships in the future to destroy this fortress.

But before that, this civilization could exist freely in this fortress for thousands of years… Of course, this also limited their desire to explore the sky and sea too much, so in the future your dynasty will be severely kick ass by a group of white skinned guys – and they will blame you, the ruler of another ethnic group.

You: so…… how did we conquer this country

Prime Minister: As you can see, living in this country, if you are an emperor who has everything you want, it is difficult not to become an idiot,Just like your future children, they have never experienced your efforts and hardships in conquering a country. Under our foolish feudal system, they will soon become addicted to pleasure, after all, there are much more fun here than on the grassland,Otherwise, why did that crazy giant Mongol Empire ultimately choose to stay here and establish the Yuan Dynasty

You: Then I can let them change to my hairstyle, right

Prime Minister: Of course… but the cost is that hundreds of years later they will still use this as one of the reasons why you are a tyrant… and countless rebels will use it as an excuse to rebel against you

You:there are always some of them willing to accept all of the above!

Prime Minister: Indeed, so future museums will have information about your artifacts

You: I’m going to kill them all!!!!

Prime Minister: Really? You killed them, who will give you a gorgeous house, delicious food, beautiful women, and a group of men willing to cut their own dick to serve you? Are you really willing to give up such a beautiful life and spend the rest of your life killing and fearing being assassinated

You: I choose to join them

Prime Minister: So, enjoy your brief imperial life, at most for a few hundred years they will take everything away, and you will fall in love with the life here and become a minority of China, If a snake swallows an elephant – it will only transform itself into the shape of an elephant, What you can kill is only the emperor, not this huge civilization

you see, these people are all native Chinese now

Not exactly an “off the hook” situation, but I did go to court against an attorney and won.

The high school my youngest son attended denied him entry into the National Honor Society, even though he fit every bit of the criteria. It seems he was “black balled” by one or two of his teachers over personal grudges. I looked up the rules for admission to the society and found that black balling was forbidden. I asked to see the votes and vote tally records. I was told I was not allowed to see them. So, I filed a FOIA suit against the school.

A couple of days after filing the papers, I got a call from their “high-powered” attorney from our state capital. He wanted contact info for my lawyer. I told him I didn’t have a lawyer. He told me to get him the contact info when I hired my lawyer. I told him I had no intention of hiring a lawyer.

He then tried to bully me by telling me there was no possible way I could win, and that I would have to pay the school for his attorney fees. I ignored his threat and ended the conversation.

About 4 days before the hearing was set, the attorney called me again. He asked again for my attorney. I again told him I had none, and had no intention of getting one. Same old bullying started again. I ignored it again.

The day before the hearing, he called again and asked if we could just settle this. I declined.

The day of the hearing, I met this attorney at the courthouse. He entered the courtroom before I did, and introduced himself to the judge. As I entered, I looked at the judge and said, “Hi, Jim.” He responded with, “Hi, Eric.” I could see the attorney’s face, and the look was priceless. As the old saying goes, he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.

I prevailed in my suit and the school was told they were required to give me the info. They said they didn’t have it. It must have gotten discarded. I pointed out to them that the National Honor Society rules required them to keep the information for at least 12 months. I let them know that I could contact the society and have them drop the entire school from their program for breaking this rule, with the implication that they were still allowing black balling of students. I received some apologies and promises that they would read the rules and follow them in the future.

My son was inducted into NHS the following year.

By the way, I had been denied membership in NHS by the same school some thirty or so years earlier. I didn’t complain. Even though I was valedictorian, they were correct in not inducting me. I was too ornery to fit the mold. My son did fit, it was just that a couple of teachers didn’t like him.

NEIGHBORS HATED THE COLOR OF MY HOUSE AND REPAINTED IT WHILE I WAS AWAY — I WAS ENRAGED & TOOK MY REVENGE.

My house is on a corner lot. Two years ago, a newlywed couple moved in next door and immediately made weird comments about my house’s yellow color. Soon, they outright DEMANDED I paint it a different color. My house has always been yellow; I love it, and there’s no rule against it.

They called the police and the city on me, but both told them to back off since I hadn’t done anything wrong. They even tried suing me (the suit got tossed, and they had to pay my legal fees) and attempted to rally our neighbors to form an HOA to force me to repaint. Our neighbors told them to get lost, so now they’re alienated by everyone.

I had to go out of town for two weeks, and when I got back, my house was GRAY. I almost drove past it because I’m so used to my yellow house. The neighbor from across the street came over and showed me pictures he took of the painting company setting up and doing the work. He and another neighbor called the police, but the painting company had a valid work order and had been paid, so the police couldn’t do anything.

It seemed everything done to my house was legal and no damage was done. But I was enraged and planned my revenge. Next day, I… repainted it yellow.

Yellow house
Yellow house

Putin TV Address: “Entitled to Strike” Nations Giving Weapons to Ukraine

Putin entitled header large
Putin entitled header large

“Russia considers itself entitled to use (hypersonic) weapons against facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against Russian facilities.”

Those are the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin in televised remarks today from the Kremlin in Moscow.  Here is a brief video showing him making the announcement:

 

 

NUCLEAR ATTACK WARNINGS TRIGGERED THIS MORNING!

Russia’s ICBM launch at Ukraine this morning triggered early warning systems – – – and such launches are, by default, assumed to be nuclear. So for a short time, the US and Europe thought Russia was nuking Ukraine.

They only knew that it was not nuclear by checking to see if the city of Dnipro was still physically there after the impacts.

Essentially, If Russia decides to nuke Ukraine … the west will watch because they can do nothing other than that.

Second important thing to note: Russia has proven that it can deliver a conventional or nuclear payload to any place without a problem.

Which brings us back to President Putin’s address to his nation just hours ago . . . . NATO member countries have already supplied weapons being used to strike Russia.  Among those weapons have been: Tanks, Infantry Fighting Vehicles, Rockets, Missiles, Speed-Boat-Bombs, and Drones.

The United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and other nations have long ago provided such weapons that have been – and still are – used to attack interior Russia.

That Russia has now announced they are “entitled” to strike seems the clearest indication yet that utterly massive escalation is coming in very short order.  Not necessarily in Ukraine, but on the territories of the countries who have been supplying weapons.

Hal Turner Analysis

Today’s use by Russia of an ICBM against Ukraine, albeit with only conventional explosives, should make clear to any RATIONAL person that the next step would be to use those same missiles with nuclear warheads.

There is no other RATIONAL interpretation possible!

Will the collective West see reality for what it is, or are they so immersed in their own echo chamber, that reality can no longer penetrate?

It seems to me that if the collective West does not stop what it’s doing with Ukraine, Russia is going to strike.  VERY soon.   Maybe before Thanksgiving.

For the almost three years that this Russia-Ukraine Conflict has gone on, I have implored readers of this website, and listeners to my radio show to get prepared: Emergency food, water, medicines you need to live on, a way to cook without electricity or utility-supplied gas, a way to heat your home without utilities (Fireplace, wood-burning stove, etc.).  I have urged folks to get a generator and have spare fuel stored outside, to run that generator, to keep your refrigerators running and maybe a light on in the house.  I have recommended a flashlight in every room of your home, or at least one for each family member, with plenty of spare batteries for those flashlights.  I have recommended a portable AM/FM/SW radio for local news and info and spare batteries for those portable radios.  I have urged people to get COMMUNICATIONS Gear, a CB, HAM, or GMRS radio, so they can communicate locally if everything goes down.  I have advised folks to get a FIRST-AID KIT for minor cuts and bruises, or, God Forbid, major war wounds.

Now that an ICBM has actually been fired in Combat for the first time in Human History, a threshold has been crossed.  Things go downhill VERY FAST from here.

If you don’t have the prepping items I mentioned above, you are totally screwed.

Please, I IMPLORE YOU, get “prepped” right now.  Today.  As best you can.  There seems to be very little time remaining before you will need those preps.

Raw Doggin’

On 2024/7/22, China brokered unity of 14 Palestinian militant groups. So-called Beijing Declaration. Paving the path for a united Palestine to become a UN member so that UN can militarily protect Palestine “state”. After that, Chinese ambassador to UN urged Israel to withdraw its troops in Palestine.

Predictably, Netanyahu is mad, mad & mad. He went to USA on 2024/7/23 to meet both Harris & Trump. He spoke in US Congress. He urged USA to organise a Mideast version of NATO.

He then propagated the threat of Iran. He accused the Iran-backed Lebanon of attacking the Israel-occupied Golan Height on 2024/7/27 though Lebanon denied it. In “retaliation”, Netanyahu attacked Lebanon & threatened to turn it to a full blown war. Israel has assassinated Hezbollah Commander Shukr.

The world smelt fish.

On 2024/7/29, Turkey threatened to (militarily) protect Palestinians if Israel creates fear & regional conflict.

Russia warned Israel not to change the status quo in Mideast.

USA, France, UK & Germany urged Israel to stop the Lebanese conflict. And urged Iran not to escalate the tension due to Golan.

Iran, Iraq, Syria all said, judging from the debris, Golan was hit by Israeli rocket.

2024/7/31: Hamas leader Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran when he attended the swear-in ceremony of the new Iranian president. Who did it? Somebody who has both high-level intelligence & precision missiles like Israel & USA. (Aug1 news said the short-range missile was made by Israel.)

US Defense Secy Austin refused to comment. State Secy Blinken denied knowledge or involvement in assassination. but not yet Israel.

Other than Hamas leader, another top Hamas who was detained by Israel in West Bank suddenly died of an “illness” within days of Beijing Declaration.

United States worked with former Australian leaders to turn their peaceful country into a weapons platform to use “to attack China”, an astonishing new book reveals. The move was a key element in the long-running US campaign to prevent Asians ruling Asia, it is revealed in ‘Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco that Sank Australia’s Sovereignty’, by Andrew Fowler (Melbourne University Press).

United States was unhappy that positive relationships were growing between Australia and its Asian neighbours, and particularly China, which had become the country’s biggest trading partner. United States also disliked Australia’s involvement with France, seen as too friendly to Asian nations. American military strategists decided to reverse that by getting Australia to jettison the French, and tying the southern continent to the US and UK with a war submarines deal known as AUKUS, the book reveals, in an extract printed in Declassified Australia.

To enable the plan to go ahead, mainstream journalists launched a major campaign saying that China intended to invade Australia – a story that had no basis in fact. A key player behind the scenes was Andrew Shearer, a former Australian national security adviser who had worked with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an American think tank fixated on using American money, influence and military force to halt the development of China with a war – preferably fought by others. Shearer returned to the Australian government and ended up in the high-powered role of Cabinet Secretary under Scott Morrison, Australia’s 30th prime minister, elected in August 2018, the book says :

“From the moment Shearer re-entered government, the tempo of the argument about which submarine to buy shifted from the best for defending Australia to the best for attacking China,”

Fowler writes. While the deal was presented to the public as defensive, the players were clearly in attack mode. The book says :

“In December 2018, the Morrison government announced that the first new submarine would be named HMAS Attack”

But despite the media’s best efforts to vilify China, the Australian public soon realized that AUKUS, forced on the country with no consultation, was a terrible deal for the country. United States was using Australia, harming its trade deals, and putting it in significant danger – and Canberra was not only letting this happen, but was buying it with a vast sum of the Australian people’s money. Worse, Australia’s leaders appeared to have literally surrendered the country’s sovereignty to United States, with American agents placed in top positions of governance. A growing movement to reclaim Australia’s independence started to grow.

Author Andrew Fowler is an award-winning investigative journalist. Declassified Australia is part of a network of independent journalistic groups that produces news that bypasses the biases and covert agendas of corporate mainstream media.

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Footnotes

What are your 10 laws of manhood?

  1. Talk less, DO MORE…
  2. Know how to control your temper and emotions
  3. Life WILL beat you down, you stay down for a while, rejuvenate, get back up and kick a**
  4. DO NOT BE AFRAID.
  5. Hate failing but DO NOT BE AFRAID to fail. Take risks.
  6. When it’s seeming like the argument isn’t going help either way, just cut it.
  7. A Man without goals is a man without passion. A Man without passion is a dead man. Dream big, accomplish bigger.
  8. RESPECT YOURSELF. RESPECT YOURSELF. RESPECT YOURSELF!!! When you ask her out and she says no, understand it’s a NO and move on to the next girl. If she verbally abuses you, physically abuses, if she doesn’t appreciate you, no one told you there was not an exit… unless you are married.
  9. Be on your grind. Grind while they party, grind while they sleep, grind while they have fun. Because in the future, when everything goes well, you’ll be having a better life than if you’d chosen to party your youth away
  10. Refer 1

Shorpy

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I certainly don’t relish telling this; it was not my finest hour: In my late 20s, I got a DWI. I think my BAC was .12. Over the limit by 4 beers. — Still, quite illegal, and not something I’m happy about; glad I didn’t hurt anyone.

I was guilty, so I called a criminal attorney friend of mine and asked, “Do you still need an attorney if your goal is just to plead guilty?” — He said that everyone needed an attorney, so I went with it. But, I didn’t leave everything blindly up to him.

I looked up the relevant statute, and it clearly said that everyone convicted of DWI 1st Offense would serve 3 days in the county jail. — Unfortunate. I certainly was not looking forward to it; I’d never crapped in front of other people before.

BUT …. my attorney said that this could be worked out a different way; you would go in on a Friday afternoon and come out on a Sunday, and 1, 2, 3: That’s the end of it.

And, most importantly, the timing of this would be worked out with the probation officer. It would not, of course, happen immediately upon my entering a guilty plea, as the law I read seemed to imply. — The Penal Code is, of course, available to anyone, in full, on the internet.


I guess the lined-up misdemeanor pleas came in all at the same time. Rather than seeing the criminal court-at-law judge, who was an attorney and dealt with these matters, usually, it was taken on by the County Judge, with no law degree. — All of that is fine.

I appeared with all of those others, and we, individually, went down the line and swore that we would tell the truth, the whole truth …

And then, I heard that I was about to go to jail for three days. Immediately, upon final judgment being entered.

Absolutely not why my attorney had said; what I had been telling him would happen; what was happening.


At the time, I was office manager at the biggest construction corporation in town, and it was a Thursday. Payday was Friday. If they put me in jail, I wouldn’t get out until Monday, but the only part that really mattered is that I would not be at work on Friday.

Immediately after I was hired on, I was told, by the President of the corporation: “Jared, whatever you do during the week, pay your people on time.”

It’s not that missing payroll would get me fired. It’s that missing payroll was wrong.

And, it’s also a crime.

If my attorney had told me before that I wouldn’t be at work the rest of the day, and the next day, after the court appearance, I could’ve made that work.

But, that’s not how it happened.


So, I spoke up. I pointed my finger at my attorney — (I was not pleased) — and said, “I told you this was going to happen. I told you this is what the law said. The judge just asked me to swear that I’d received competent advice from you, and that’s patently false!

“What am I to do now? — Ask the judge to accept me firing you and rescinding my guilty plea??? That will sound good! And, then I’ll have to sue you for damages. Not necessarily because I may get fired, but it’s about more than that. You are my fiduciary, and you were wrong.

“That’s not going to work. Fix this, or I’m going to ask the judge to forgive me for hiring you.”

The judge, of course, could hear all of this.


It worked out in my favor; I’ll leave it at that. — If this had been the attorney’s plan all along, he would’ve been a genius.

Ten rules of being a man

  1. Be self-sufficient. Unless you’re 4, do your own laundry, cook and feed yourself, clean up after yourself. Pay your bills. Be a grown up.
  2. Respect women. Yes means yes. No means no. Don’t be a jerk, don’t discriminate and don’t think in stereotypes.
  3. Be driven. Don’t be an amoeba. Strive for something. Doesn’t matter what. Have a passion. Ambition.
  4. Have courage. Stand for something. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.
  5. Be clean and well-groomed. If your hair refuses to grow in an organized and attractive way, shave it off.
  6. Be kind and generous to service staff. Always.
  7. Take care of your parents. Make sure they’re healthy, want for nothing, and see your face reasonably often.
  8. Have clear boundaries and don’t let other people trample upon them. No matter how attractive they are.
  9. Be funny.
  10. Be curious and explore the world. Travel, try new things, learn and grow constantly.

HK’s top court dismisses final appeal by Jimmy Lai and former lawmakers

Hong Kong’s top court has unanimously dismissed a final attempt by Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai and six former lawmakers to overturn their convictions for participating in an unauthorized march in 2019.

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Lai, Martin Lee, Albert Ho, Margaret Ng, Lee Cheuk-yan, Cyd Ho, and Leung Kwok-hung were found guilty of organizing and taking part in the procession on August 18, which followed an approved anti-police demonstration led by the now-disbanded Civil Human Rights Front.

While a lower court earlier acquitted them of organizing the assembly, it upheld the participation convictions.

The final appeal had centred on the issue of “operational proportionality”, a principle set out by two decisions of Britain’s Supreme Court.

The appellants argued that the court should conduct proportionality tests when passing a verdict and that a conviction would be a form of restriction that infringes on the fundamental constitutional rights of the freedoms of assembly and expression.

But judges at the Court of Final Appeal on Monday rejected the argument that the arrest, prosecution, conviction and sentence must be separately justified as proportionate, saying a separate proportionality inquiry was “inappropriate and uncalled for”.

“The defendants’ convictions and consequent sentences do not stand alone. They are the result of the judge applying the law to the evidence and being satisfied individually of their guilt,” the ruling said.

“The same pertains to the defendants’ proposition regarding arrest and prosecution. Those actions similarly do not occur in isolation. They represent steps taken to enforce particular offence-creating laws.”

Two presiding judges, Chief Justice Andrew Cheung and Roberto Ribeiro, said the two British legal precedents cited by the appellants “should not be followed in Hong Kong” because of differences between the two jurisdictions.

“In Hong Kong, statutory and other provisions which are found to be unconstitutional may be struck down as invalid whereas in the UK, a provision that is declared to be incompatible continues to be enforced as a valid law, with potentially different issues regarding proportionality arising thereafter,” the judges wrote.

Fellow justice Johnson Lam added that there is no basis in the SAR to consider the prosecution, conviction, and sentence as “distinct, standalone restrictions” from the rule creating the offense relating to freedom of assembly.

Lord David Neuberger of Abbotsbury, a non-permanent judge from Britain, said the constitutional differences in Hong Kong and the UK “do not mandate a different approach when it comes to considering whether a restriction on the freedom of assembly is proportionate”, but they “do require a different approach if the court concludes that the restriction is not proportionate”.

Ng, who attended the hearing, said it was inappropriate to comment on the ruling.

“We haven’t had a chance to examine this very important judgment. This is not the right time to make comments. We just want to take this occasion to thank our legal teams and all the people who have been supporting us all the time,” she said outside the court.

Lee, meanwhile, left the court, saying he had “no comment”.

Wife Asks For An Open Marriage INSTANTLY Regrets It

Yeah , it happened to me. Let me tell you , it sucked.

It was in the evening one night and I called a friend who lived in the cottage behind me and asked if I could borrow a couple of eggs. She said yeah , come over and so I did.

When I got to her place she had a house full of people . It was still summer and though it was dark outside , all of her windows were open. Everybody was talking so when I knocked I didn’t get heard .

While standing there knocking , I heard one person say , “ is someone coming over?” And my friend answered “yeah , Wendy is.” Well that response opened up the floor to a bunch of negative comments. There must have been 10 people there and I heard bull shit out of at least 7 of them. I had no idea that this many people disliked me. And all the comments were hurtful.

After hearing enough , I turned around and started to leave when the front door swung open and there stood my friend. She was only one that stated that I “wasn’t that bad” while a few others said nothing to defend me .

Now I’m standing there with Hugh alligator tears trying to break free , when it dawned on me that these people were spinless , no good , fake pieces of crap. All of them had been at my door at one time or another during the past week, asking for a variety of things. All of them got what they wanted. All of them came over every morning for a cup of coffee and they got that to. Several of them knew that I was pretty good at mechanics and they came by asking what I thought was wrong with their car and I told them and I was right too. Basically I treated them like a friend , but tonight was the night that everyone hated me and they were quick to put in their ,2¢ .

Let’s just say that I was pretty hurt by their comments , but before I left , I faced each one who had said something and I repeated their words back to them. I wanted them to know that I knew exactly what they said . Then I just shook my head no and I walked out.

I can’t say that I was happy when I left , but there wasn’t any more misunderstood words or feelings and I was able to free myself from those people and their fake ways of life. I cried a lot that night and for many nights after , but at least I was clear headed about my so called friends and in the end I was better for it.

China’s Taichi-II Chip: World’s First Fully Optical AI Processor Outperforms NVIDIA H100 in Energy Efficiency

Beijing researchers have unveiled the Taichi-II chip, the world’s first fully optical AI processor, which outperforms NVIDIA’s H100 in energy efficiency.

Introduction

In a remarkable advancement for artificial intelligence (AI) technology, researchers from Beijing have introduced the world’s first fully optical AI chip, known as Taichi-II.

This innovative chip has set new standards in energy efficiency, surpassing NVIDIA’s renowned H100 GPU by a significant margin.

  • Fully Optical: Unlike traditional chips that rely on electronic signals, Taichi-II operates entirely on light, leading to significantly reduced energy consumption.
  • Energy Efficiency: The chip boasts a remarkable six orders of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency compared to conventional methods in low-light imaging scenarios.
  • Performance: In addition to energy efficiency, Taichi-II has shown a 40% accuracy boost in classification tasks compared to NVIDIA’s H100.
  • FFM Learning: The chip utilizes a novel training method called Fully Forward Mode (FFM) learning, enabling parallel processing directly on the optical chip.

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Taichi-II: A New Era in AI Technology

The Taichi-II chip represents a major leap from its predecessor, the original Taichi chip, which had already set impressive records for energy efficiency.

Earlier this year, the Taichi chip demonstrated energy efficiency surpassing NVIDIA’s H100 GPU by over a thousandfold.

Nvidia’s H100 AI GPUs Projected to Surpass Energy Consumption of entire nations

The newly unveiled Taichi-II builds on this achievement with further advancements that enhance performance across various applications.

Developed by Professors Fang Lu and Dai Qionghai from Tsinghua University, the Taichi-II chip was officially revealed on August 7, 2024.

This breakthrough promises to transform AI training and modeling with its cutting-edge optical technology.

Intel Hits Key Milestones with 18A Chip production, Reinforcing Foundry Leadership and Future Innovation – techovedas

The Advantages of Optical Computing

Unlike traditional electronic-based AI training methods, the Taichi-II chip utilizes optical processes, which drastically improve efficiency. The shift to optical computing is a significant breakthrough, allowing Taichi-II to handle complex computations with unprecedented energy efficiency.

Key advancements of the Taichi-II chip include:
  • Training Speed: The chip accelerates the training of optical networks with millions of parameters by an order of magnitude.
  • Accuracy Improvement: Classification tasks have seen a 40% boost in accuracy.
  • Energy Efficiency: In low-light imaging scenarios, Taichi-II’s energy efficiency has improved by six orders of magnitude.

These enhancements set a new benchmark for AI hardware, highlighting the chip’s potential to revolutionize the industry.

The Technology Behind Taichi-II: A Deep Dive

The Taichi-II chip represents a significant leap forward in computing technology, leveraging the power of light instead of electricity. To understand this breakthrough, let’s delve into the core concepts:

Optical Computing vs. Electronic Computing

  • Electronic Computing: Traditional computers use electrical signals to represent and manipulate data. This involves the movement of electrons through transistors, which can be energy-intensive and limited in speed due to electrical resistance.
  • Optical Computing: This emerging technology uses light to perform calculations. Photons, the particles of light, can carry information at much higher speeds and with less energy loss compared to electrons.

How Taichi-II Works

  • Fully Forward Mode (FFM) Learning: This novel training method is central to Taichi-II’s operation. Unlike traditional backpropagation algorithms used in neural networks, FFM allows for direct processing of information on the optical chip, eliminating the need for data transfer between different components.
  • Optical Neural Network: The chip essentially creates an optical neural network, where light is used to simulate the behavior of neurons and synapses. This enables parallel processing of information, significantly accelerating computations.
  • Optical Interconnects: Instead of electrical wires, Taichi-II uses optical fibers to transmit data between different components. This reduces signal loss and increases data transfer speeds.

Key Advantages of Optical Computing

  • High Speed: Light travels at incredibly high speeds, enabling faster data processing and transmission.
  • Low Energy Consumption: Optical components generally consume less power than their electronic counterparts, leading to increased energy efficiency.
  • Parallel Processing: Optical computing allows for massive parallel processing, handling multiple tasks simultaneously.
  • Reduced Heat Generation: Optical components produce less heat compared to electronic components, improving system reliability and reducing cooling requirements.

Challenges and Future Directions

While Taichi-II is a promising development, there are still challenges to overcome:

  • Optical Components: Developing efficient and cost-effective optical components remains a significant hurdle.
  • Interfacing with Electronic Systems: Seamless integration of optical and electronic components is crucial for practical applications.
  • Algorithm Development: New algorithms and software tools are needed to fully harness the potential of optical computing.

Despite these challenges, the potential of optical computing is immense. As research and development continue, we can expect to see even more advanced optical chips with broader applications in fields such as artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and data centers.

Fully Forward Mode (FFM) Learning: A Breakthrough Technique

A standout feature of the Taichi-II chip is its use of Fully Forward Mode (FFM) learning. This innovative approach allows for high-precision training directly on the optical chip, enabling parallel processing of machine learning tasks. According to Xue Zhiwei, lead author of the study and a doctoral student, FFM learning supports large-scale network training with exceptional accuracy.

The FFM learning method leverages high-speed optical modulators and detectors, offering performance that could potentially surpass GPUs in accelerated learning scenarios. This technology shifts optical computing from theoretical to practical, large-scale applications, opening new possibilities for AI.

Strategic Implications and Future Prospects

The release of the Taichi-II chip comes at a crucial moment. With the US imposing restrictions on China’s access to advanced GPUs for AI training, Taichi-II provides a viable alternative that could help China overcome these limitations.

This innovation is strategically important as it enables continued progress in AI technology despite geopolitical challenges.

Moreover, the timing of Taichi-II’s introduction is significant in light of reports suggesting NVIDIA’s high-tech AI chips may be reaching Chinese military officials. The Taichi-II chip’s performance and availability could play a key role in China’s technological advancements and defense capabilities.

Malaysia Targets $270 Billion Semiconductor Exports by 2030 to Become World’s 6th Largest Chip Exporter – techovedas

Conclusion

The Taichi-II chip represents a major milestone in optical computing and AI technology. With its exceptional energy efficiency and advanced performance, Taichi-II sets a new standard for AI hardware.

It also offers a strategic alternative in a fast-evolving tech landscape. As research and development advance, Taichi-II highlights the remarkable progress in AI and optical computing.

Linda’s Easy Lasagna

This is my favorite lasagna recipe because you do not cook the lasagna noodles first. I have always disliked cooking the lasagna noodles, so this is a great solution for me. This turns out perfect every time.

lindas easy lasagna
lindas easy lasagna

Yield: 12 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 pounds ground beef or turkey or Italian sausage*
  • 1 jar spaghetti sauce or homemade sauce
  • 1 can tomato sauce
  • 1 tomato sauce can water
  • 2 pounds ricotta or cottage cheese, mixed with 4 eggs
  • 12 ounces lasagna noodles, UNCOOKED
  • 4 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
  • Grated Parmesan cheese
  • Garlic powder
  • Salt

Instructions

  1. Brown meat. Drain.
  2. Add sauces and water.
  3. Spoon a small amount of sauce onto the bottom of a lasagna pan or a 13 x 9-inch baking dish.
  4. Place a layer of UNCOOKED noodles (overlapping slightly), one-third of the cottage cheese mixture, a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese and one-third of the shredded cheese.
  5. Pour about one-third of the sauce over the top.
  6. Repeat twice more. Cover with more cheese.
  7. Bake, covered and sealed with foil (DO NOT LET THE FOIL TOUCH THE CHEESE), at 350 degrees F for 1 hour.
  8. Uncover and bake 15 minutes longer to brown the top.
  9. Let stand for 15 minutes before cutting.

Notes

* Remove Italian sausage from casings and crumble as it cooks.

I usually make this with Italian sausage, but I have also used sliced cooked meatballs. It’s yummy whatever you decide to use! Of the two spaghetti sauce options, if you have time, go with the homemade sauce!

You can also bake for 1 hour without the cheese on top, then put the cheese on top and bake 15 minutes longer uncovered.

Little Red Balloons

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

Matt Strempel

I can’t put my finger on why I murdered Jerry, because I lost my fingers in an accident.Accident. That is to say, Jerry hit the go button on the waste disposal unit while I was fixing it, and it munched my right hand off at the wrist. To be fair, the robotic prosthetic is about a thousand times better than my real hand was, but it hurt like hell at the time. He maintains I said, “Hit it,” but what I said was, “Quit it.” I was always telling Jerry to quit it. He was the most infuriating guy in the entire universe, I’m telling you. I should know; as a DSD I’ve seen more of the universe than most.A DSD is a Deep Space Diviner. In short, we look for water out in the dark corners of the universe in the hope of finding evidence of alien life. I used to get work out on farms and such, walking around with a curled piece of wire waiting for the thing to snap down towards the ground. That’s when I’d tell the boys to get digging. I never missed. Went all over the country helping folks get water out of the ground. I’m telling you, I could find water in the middle of a goddamn desert. Now I follow my hunches into deep space.When I heard they were asking for water diviners to head into space I thought it was some big joke. Checked the date to see if it was April 1st and everything. But it’s no joke. Turns out it’s cheaper to have guys like me out in space than sending probes from Earth.So anyway, they’ve had us out in Sector 35 for two years. Me and Jerry Portman. I told them I could do it on my own, but company regulations state I gotta have a partner. Jerry goddamn Portman from Chicago. I couldn’t stand him.How do I explain this to you? I mean, how do you come across a guy that can make you feel claustrophobic in the vastness of space? Even when I couldn’t see him, it was like he was right next to me with his stale open-mouth breathing. I’ve sent countless requests to be transferred, or have him transferred, or sought permission to blast him out the goddamn airlock, but no luck. I knew nothing was going to come of all the complaints, but it was the only way I could get the frustration off my chest.It’s true that in space no one can hear you scream, but email works pretty good.Anyway, that opening line about not being able to put my finger on why I killed him on account of not having any fingers? That’s the type of corny gag that Jerry loved. Drove me crazy. Is there anything more infuriating than a guy who laughs at his own jokes? I must have heard him use variations of “lend you a hand”, “right-hand man”, and “second hand” about a million times. He laughed every single time like it was the first time anyone ever said, “Get a grip” to a guy who just lost their hand and was rolling around on the floor spraying blood all over the goddamn ship.You ever see a gushing wound in zero gravity? It’s really something. It looks like the wound is spurting little red balloons. Or, it’s like looking at cells under a microscope.Space does that. Changes your perception of size. Entire planets appear tiny, then, the next second, a speck of space rock hitting the ship could end your entire existence. Big is small, small is enormous.Anyway, the latest thing with Jerry was he wanted to head out on this new vector. I’m telling you right now, where he wanted to go is a bust. Oh, but he’s “got a feeling”. Feeling, my ass. This guy hadn’t found a goddamn drop of water in two years. Plus, we would have had to go through a goddamn asteroid belt.It’s not that he was bad at his job—he was terrible—it’s that he was bad at everything. I mean, literally, everything. You ever meet a guy who couldn’t even use the goddamn toothpaste properly? I mean, who squeezes from the middle? Leaves the lid open so I’ve got a tube that’s flat through the centre, with all the good paste at the bottom, blocked by dried toothpaste at the top. He was such a goddamn imbecile.The thing is, though, medically speaking—on paper—he was a goddamn genius. Like, off the charts smart. He’s just got no common sense. Know what I mean? As in, he could solve the most complex mathematical equation known to man, but he’d set fire to his helmet. He really did that. Tried to make some modifications and shorted the regulator. Nearly killed us. He was always nearly killing us.I’ll say it: Jerry Portman was the stupidest guy ever to be classified as a genius.I swear he has nearly killed me at least a dozen times. Obviously, losing my hand was pretty bad, but he’s also shut off my oxygen while I was outside repairing a cracked solar panel. I was under 50% oxygen saturation when I finally got back inside. That much carbon dioxide in your lungs? You can’t take that too long. When I hit the emergency retract button on my umbilical to get back inside, well, let me just say, if I’d had the strength to even stand up, I swear that would have been it. I would have murdered Jerry right then.I think the worst one was when he opened the bay door—that’s where we keep the drones—before I was in my suit. I know it’s against the regulations to be in the drone bay without your suit because of the potential for that exact situation, but fucking Jerry, man. The guys who wrote the regulations must have been like, “What’s the most galactically stupid thing anyone could do in any given situation?” and then they’d write a rule just for kicks. They were probably laughing their asses off the entire time. “No one could be that much of a moron,” they’d say. But guess what, fellas. Jerry Portman is your guy. It’s just lucky there’s a ten-second warning before the doors open.You know the worst thing about guys like Jerry? It’s never their fault.“It was an accident.”He said it every goddamn time. It’s always an accident with these guys. Like that absolves them from any wrongdoing. As if just because you didn’t do it on purpose, all is forgiven.Imagine opening the bay door while there’s a guy in there working on the drones.Speaking of the drones. Jerry lost another one yesterday. This should come as a great surprise to exactly no one, but even for him, this was stupid. That’s three of our six drones lost. Don’t worry, Jerry. They’re only worth about half a billion dollars each.“But they’re fitted with a homing device to automatically self-dock if they lose the control signal” I hear you say. Yeah, well, you haven’t met Jerry. He’s the kind of guy a car salesman tells, “Pal, if you’re the kind of guy that accidentally locks his keys in the car, then this is the car for you. You can’t do it, see? It’s impossible.”Then, a week later, Jerry’s back and tells the guy he’s locked the keys in the goddamn car.Can you imagine being stuck in space with Jerry Portman? I’m telling you, it’s the pits.The first drone Jerry lost was on account of him tinkering with it. He was trying to make the water sensor more sensitive after striking out on another of his feelings. He’s always making excuses that it’s the equipment’s fault when he strikes out. So, yeah. The first drone he tinkered with—well, we don’t know what he did exactly—but the first time we took it out after he fiddled with it, it took off like a bullet and it was gone.I can still see Jerry watching the screen as we lost the signal. He was like a kid who’d taken his model plane out for its first flight and watched it disappear over the trees never to be seen again. Only this model plane cost half a billion dollars.The second one, I’m not sure about. He swears he didn’t touch it. For all his million faults, one thing Jerry wasn’t, was a liar. Maybe we chalk that one up to bad luck. Maybe the drone was a dud.But the latest one? Jesus Christ. I won’t bore you with a bunch of technical crap about how the drones work, let’s just say in the simplest terms, it confirms the presence of water in any form within a given target. Most commonly, this means we find a meteorite that we feel has potential, and the drone sends out a probe to take a sample. It’s basically a drill that bores into the target and removes a metre-long cylinder of material. If there’s a trace of water—it’s ice, of course—there’s a bunch of readings and measurements done by the computer and it sends the data back to Earth for further analysis.As you can imagine, a machine that performs this function is incredibly complex. So you don’t just open up a panel and start poking around with a goddamn Phillips-head. Well, you and I wouldn’t. But you know who would?So, yesterday he’s telling me, “I know what I’m doing this time,” as if he’s read the manual since losing the first drone. I just shake my head and leave him to it. I used to argue with him all the time, but I learnt pretty quick what a waste of breath that was. He’s one of those guys that when they get something in their head, you can’t shake it no matter how much sense you’re making. They could be wearing a red tshirt and you say, “Nice red tshirt,” and they say, “What’re talking about? It’s blue,” and you just have to say, “Fine, you moron. It’s blue,” and walk away.That’s what Jerry was like when he was tinkering. Maybe part of me thought he’d electrocute himself so I wouldn’t have to murder him.When he finished playing around with this drone, he came back into the control room and placed these screws and some other little bits and pieces in a drawer. He did it as if he didn’t want me to see it, but I saw it clear as day. You know when someone gets home drunk and they’re trying to be quiet but they make way more noise than if they just stumbled around? People trying to be discrete just scream I’m up to something fishy.So I say to Jerry, “What are those, from the drone?”

And he just says, “They’re spare. We don’t actually need them.”

Then I go off on one about how every single thing on this ship right down to the tiniest screw has been reduced in size and weight to make everything as light as possible—like, the angle of trajectory for our landing factors in the weight of the urine that will be in our bladders—but sure, Jerry. They’ve included a bunch of spare parts. “It’s not a goddamn IKEA chair, Jerry” I remember saying that to him like he was hiding some leftover dowel he forgot to put in.

Well, sure as eggs, Jerry sent the drone out yesterday and I’ll give you one guess what happened to it. You’re goddamn right it blew up. Nearly killed us.

He’s just lucky the drone was far enough from the ship that the explosion didn’t do any damage to the ship. Nothing that the self-diagnostics picked up, anyway. Naturally, I did my block at Jerry for nearly killing us again and I said someone’s going to have to go outside and have a closer inspection of the hull. Now, normally I’d be the guy that does that. I mean, you can’t leave something that important up to Jerry goddamn Portman.

Then I had a thought—maybe I would send Jerry out. It would be a real shame if his umbilical somehow untethered from the ship and he floated out into space…

Ashamed as I am to admit it, this was not the first time I’d thought about killing Jerry.

Did I tell you about the time Jerry destroyed one of my samples? You know how people who can’t cook, they say “Oh, so-and-so could burn water.” That’s what Jerry did. We got this sample back on the probe one time and it had all these microorganisms in it. The core sample was about 85% ice. Normally, we’re lucky if it’s even 5%. The core analysis told us it contained 37 different forms of bacteria plus a bunch of other unidentifiable crap all suspended in ice. It was the most exciting goddamn discovery since penicillin. So I placed the core in the freezer and looked forward to the fame and fortune awaiting those DSDs lucky enough to find something. I couldn’t sleep that cycle I was so excited.

Of course, back then I didn’t have a complete understanding of the magnitude of Jerry’s stupidity. Had I known better, I would have guarded that freezer with my goddamn life.

Now, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least to discover Jerry had destroyed my sample by switching the freezer off by accident. These things happen to the best of us. But Jerry isn’t your average moron. No, Jerry decides he wants to take a look at the sample himself under the microscope. Only, the microscope doesn’t work with a chunk of ice, you gotta melt it down to go in a petri dish. So Jerry puts the core in the blast box—the blast box, I should explain, is this unit that works like an oven or freezer depending on what you need heating or chilling. Only, the blast box will roast or freeze something in three seconds. In hindsight, this is exactly the sort of thing you could see happening, but the designers of the blast box would have been counting on the operators being actual scientists, not Jerry goddamn Portman.

Now, someone like you or me, we’d take a small piece of the sample if we wanted to take a closer look. Not Jerry, though. Jerry Portman’s the kind of guy who takes your alien lifeforms precariously suspended in million-year-old ice and microwaves them to kingdom come. “Why the hell did he…? Oh, never mind,” I hear you saying. You’re getting the picture now. He cost me a lot that day. Maybe not money—who knows—but certainly renown. They probably would have named one of the bacteria after me.

That was two years ago, but I remember it like yesterday. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Yesterday, when Jerry was out on the spacewalk, I considered trying to make it look like an accident. But there are so many instruments taking every goddamn reading on this ship that they’d know for sure I had something to do with it. I mean, no amount of tinkering could have got the drone to accidentally deploy its probe with such surgical precision right up Jerry Portman’s goddamn ass.

I’ll be leaving Sector 35 for Earth in a year next week. When I splashdown and I get arrested on live television, it’ll be because I murdered Jerry Portman. They’ll drag me out of the ocean next to those giant orange balloon floaties and put me straight in handcuffs but I’ll be laughing my ass off. You can’t spell manslaughter without laughter, right?

I’ll be thinking about the last thing Jerry saw as he was fatally probed: me in the cockpit with the drone remote, my smiling face looking out through the glass where I’d stuck a piece of paper saying IT WAS AN ACCIDENT.

Thousands of little red balloons.

I just want them to know I was provoked. I was standing my ground. I feared for my life, Your Honor.

It wasn’t self-defence, really, more like self-preservation. I’m not sure if there’re any laws about killing in self-preservation but if I didn’t kill him, he was going to kill me. I’m absolutely goddamn sure of it.

The rationale is completely different for the two peoples.

For Korea, we can examine 90s Korean dramas for clues.

Korean homes had tiny dining tables with short legs, bedrooms had no beds, and few or no furniture.

Pork belly was a special treat, while beef was an extravagance.

I didn’t understand these cultural stereotypes until I briefly dated a Korean girl, who patiently explained that Korea has always been an impoverished nation, being stuck on a harsh peninsula that was subject to regular conflict both domestic and foreign, and natural disasters aplenty.

That is why sejong developed hangul to supplement hanja, or Chinese block writing, which remained the court language to facilitate exchange with the Chinese dynasties.

He wanted to arrest Korean sinicization, because contrary to conventional wisdom, Korea received way more benefit from the tributary relationship than it paid out, other than the swallowing of national pride.

Chinese block writing enabled the Korean literati to unlock the intellectual treasures of Chinese civilization, as generations of Koreans made a beeline for Chinese cities to learn governance, medicine, farming, construction, warmaking, the arts, religion and philosophy. Trade with China was also crucial to the Korean peninsula, which lacked the production capacity of the mainland.

In both Koreas today, individuals are given 2 or 3 monosyllabic character names, despite Korean being a spelled multisyllabic language. To the uninitiated, Korean names spelled in the Latin alphabet can easily be mistaken for pinyin Chinese names.

The south Korean flag, the taegukgi, is composed of the taoist symbol for yin yang and divination symbols from the yijing.

Deep Chinese roots underpin the answer to “what does it mean to be Korean?”

The only way to arrest the slide is to put up walls and insist “we have evolved, we are unique, we are better”.

Otherwise Korea won’t stay Korean.


As for India, domestic politics require distractions. And China is a very good card to deal when domestic pressures build up, or to trade for advantages with major powers.

India has received little blowback for a string of bad behavior in recent years, because it is seen as a vital American partner to contain China. India is reselling Russian energy, assassinating foreign citizens on their home soil, denying market access on whim and refusing investors a square deal on FDI. But it receives in turn high end military tech transfers, access to arms and trade and tech privileges with the first world.

India shares a long border with China, though it is across the mostly impenetrable himalayas. The Indian military has been unable to beat the PLA the past 6 decades, and no Indian leader has been willing to back down from jawaharlal’s strategic overreach and reset relationships, much less exhort the electorate to “learn from China”.

The option remaining is to drum up passions and stir the pot, squaring the circle by hijacking the narrative with gems such is “India is china’s big brother, civilizationally” or “China should be grateful to India for the gift of Buddhism”.

The himalayas have limited contact between the peoples but India will seize on every excuse to claim credit—and elevated superiority—when none is due.

This fever will continue until a leader strong enough to challenge jawaharlal’s legacy emerges.

China’s Economy, Tech

Another brilliant post from Godfree Roberts

This week

Installed power generation capacity reached 3.0 billion kW, up 14.1% YoY. 38% of that came from wind and solar. America’s total installed capacity is 1.2 billion kW.

State Grid—the world’s single copper user—will spend $83 billion this year, beefing up its UHV network that covers 80% of China and carries power from western deserts to eastern industries. [China consumes twice as much electricity as the USA, where generation capacity is fallingEd]

Lithium phosphate batteries are $53/kWh, down from $95/kWh last year. There is now parity between ICE vehicles  and EV manufacturing costs. China has cornered the market on LFP.

China is first to create nuclear fusion plasma, way ahead in the most important race of all.

Apple dropped out of the top five smartphone sellers in China in Q2. Though smartphone shipments grew 8.9%, to 71.6mn units, Apple’s declined 3.1%. [Of Apple’s top 187 suppliers, 157 have factories in China].

The Senate National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) omitted a bill to ban the sale of DJI drones in the United States after it passed in the House. The absence does not yet mean the act is dead, but it is a positive step in the eyes of those who support the Chinese drone company.

China is building a national pilot testing system of ‘enlarged laboratories or shrunken production lines,’ to support key industries’ connection to the industrial internet, the Internet of Things and 5G technologies, supported by machine vision and industrial AI, to optimize process efficiency “through comprehensive perception, real-time analysis, scientific decision-making, and precise execution.” Chengdu’s proposed $750 million ‘pilot platform construction fund’ aims for 100 key pilot testing platforms and 500 products launched onto the market, and 100 innovative companies incubated by 2025. In Wuhan’s Optics Valley, three key pilot testing platforms are set up, targeting laser processing, drug development, and new display technology. Research suggests that the success rate of industrializing laboratory research is 30% without pilot testing, and 80% with a pilot run.

Ignore China’s share of total global exports and look at their share of manufactured exports, which has been stable at 20% for several years. The headline numbers say Chinese exports to the US have taken a big hit, from 22% of US goods imports now down to 14%. So is China losing a lot of market share? Most of that reduction in value is not real. Chinese solar panel makers can’t ship directly to the US because of tariffs. So they set up a factory in Vietnam and Malaysia and send it there, but it is still a Chinese-made product.

BYD just hired 10,000 recent graduates, 70% of whom have masters or doctoral degrees, 80% of them for R&D. BYD’s research team was awarded 15 patents/day last year. While BYD has been extremely fast at pumping out new products this year, it will be even faster in the future and its additional headcount will allow exploration into new areas. We will have to wait to see what those are. TP Huang

A sunlight-powered MAV drone weighing as much as a sheet of paper, just 4.21 grams, with its 20-centimeter wingspan, represents a dramatic downsizing from previous flying machines, which were typically meter-sized and weighed kilograms. This breakthrough, also published in Nature, opens up exciting possibilities for ultra-long endurance micro aerial vehicles. Such devices could potentially stay aloft indefinitely during daylight hours, making them ideal for applications like environmental monitoring, communication relays, or search and rescue operations in remote areas.

The jobless rate for the 16-24 age group, excluding students, dipped to 13.2% in June from May’s 14.2%. For the 25-29 age group, also excluding students, was 6.4%, a third consecutive month of decline. The rate for the 30-59 age group remained at 4%.

Apollo Go driverless taxis, launched in Wuhan in 2022, has expanded to ten other Chinese cities …. Its service has carried out 6m rides nationwide since launching. It now has more than 400 driverless cars on the road in Wuhan and plans to have 1,000

running by the end of this year. Most of its cars in Wuhan have “level four” autonomy, which means they do not require human intervention in most situations on the road but can get muddled in areas such as parking garages—which might explain why it asks customers to trudge through the city’s sweltering heat. The reason Apollo Go has … gained such favor with riders is that it is astonishingly cheap. Your correspondent’s 11-minute spin cost just 9.84 yuan ($1.35). Such fares are possible thanks to the largesse of Baidu, which is covering around 60% of the cost of a ride. That is not sustainable. But, thanks to plummeting costs, the company reckons its robotaxis in Wuhan will break even by the end of the year and turn a profit in 2025. In May it unveiled its sixth-generation vehicle, which costs less than half the previous model. As the business has expanded the supply chain has matured and Baidu has been able to spread the cost of developing and updating its technology over more vehicles. Last year General Motors, an American carmaker, suspended operations at Cruise, its robotaxi business, after one of its cars injured a pedestrian in San Francisco, leading California to revoke its licence to operate in the state. On July 23rd it said it would relaunch the service in Dallas, Houston and Phoenix, but with a human supervisor in the vehicle. That same day Tesla, America’s electric-vehicle giant, said it would push back the unveiling of its robotaxi from August to October. In May China’s government offered to let the company test its service in the country. If it does, expect more hand-wringing from China’s taxi drivers.

China creates its own money and controls its credit system. It’s also invested in modernizing its high-speed railroads, modernizing its communication system, modernizing its cities, and above all its electronic internet system used for monetary payments. China has liberated itself from debt dependency on the West – and in the process, made the West dependent on it.  This could only have been done by government investment and regulation under a long-term plan. The Western financial model lives in the short run. If you’re going to allocate credit and resources to make fortunes by living in the short run by taking as much as you can as quickly as you can, you will not be able to make the capital investment to develop long-term growth. That’s why American information technology companies have not been able to keep up with their Chinese counterparts. Financialized “market forces” oblige them to use their income for stock buybacks and to pay out of dividends. That is the case with U.S. technology across the board. China’s companies investing in information and internet technology plow their profits back into reinvestment in more research and development. Such innovation has shifted from the West to the East, which has rediscovered the logic of industrial capitalism developed by the 19th century’s classical political economists.

The last time the ‘king of the manufacturing hill’ got knocked off the throne was when the US surpassed the UK just before WW1. It took the US the better part of a century to rise to the top; the China-US switch took about 15 or 20 years. In 2020, China made up a staggering 35% of global gross manufacturing production. That is more than the combined output of the United States (12%), Japan (6%), Germany (4%), India (3%), South Korea (3%), Italy (2%), France (2%), and the United Kingdom. By 2030, the world will only have two industrial sectors, China and the world.

“Raw Dogging” Is The Newest Viral Trend, But It’s Not What You Think

Tales of the sea

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My stomach was removed in 2007 for cancer and I was placed on an anti-cancer pill every day. There is only one pill for my cancer, Gleevec ($144,000 a year in the US for 400 mg a day, when it costs $250 to manufacture a year’s supply in the Swiss corporation’s factory in India — the pharmaceutical manufacturer waives the patient 20% copay so as not to jeopardize the insurance coverage 80%.)

One year later, my liver reacted to too much cancer drug at a time by accidental dosing error and my liver started dying. The doctors immediately stopped the cancer medicine and gave me the steroid prednisone for a month to calm down the liver inflammation. The doctors said I couldn’t take the drug anymore due to the drug now being toxic to my liver.

I asked, so now what happens? The doctors said, your cancer comes back and then we cut it out a second time. I asked, what then? The doctors said, the cancer comes back a third time only quicker, and we cut it out a third time. I asked, how long can this go on? The doctors said, about six times then you’re dead, probably in about five years from now.

So, logically, I asked, what about a solution to the liver toxicity — is there a work-around? The doctors said, we don’t know. I asked, will you think about it? The doctors said, no.

I was puzzled. I told the doctors I was a lawyer and anyone who came to me with a problem, I immediately started thinking about how to solve the problem. So I asked the doctors, why do you say you won’t think about my problem? The doctors said, we’re too busy with regular problems.

The cancer tumor returned in three years in 2011. I met with the doctors to plan the second surgery and asked the same questions again, and got the same answer: no, we’re too busy to think about how to get your liver to accept the cancer medicine again.

After the surgery in 2011, the cancer returned in 2012. I met with the doctors to plan the surgery and asked the same questions and got the same answers. So I told the doctors, “time out” — I’ll go on the Internet on PubMed and google “Gleevec liver toxicity” and get back to you.

In about five minutes, I found a solution by a doctor in Milan Italy while no doctor in America had any idea. The solution was to co-administer prednisone with Gleevec like a fireman with a hose entering a burning room. I compiled the science, printed it out, and told my doctors, give me $6 worth of prednisone a month and coadminister it with the Gleevec. The doctors said, we can’t do that: prednisone is a steroid and it will make you manic. Puzzled, I asked the doctors, so your plan is “I’m dead”? The doctors looked puzzled and then said, okay, let’s try it.

I took prednisone and Gleevec daily for 2–3 months before the surgery after baseline imaging showed a 27 cm^3 tumor while my liver proteins remained stable. Then the surgeon in late 2012 cut out a 3 cm^3 shrunken tumor and inside the tumor was very dead cancer cells. The surgeon said, I’ve never seen deader cancer cells. One month later, I stopped the prednisone and have had no liver issues since.

I haven’t sued but I always make sure everyone on the medical staff recalls why I’m still showing up for MRI scans, lab work, and consult visits.

  1. Class’ over ‘Swag’.
  2. Never be the first one to punch. But make sure you break a jaw or two when the fistfight starts.
  3. Stop pursuing her after a NO. No chases, or stalking, or messaging, or trying again and again.
  4. Learn to say NO. Whether it is the boss at office, or a girl at a bar.
  5. Know your cologne or deo well, and stick with them. Avoid flower fragrances and chocolate.
  6. Every once in a while, when you face a situation which forces you to come out of your comfort shell— say “F*ck it!” and do it anyway.
  7. Scour the Internet and look for hair & beard styles that agree with your face type.
  8. Once you find a gifted barber, stick with him. He knows your hair & beard better than your girlfriend.
  9. Career = Relationship = Family = Yourself; make time for all and don’t ignore any of them.
  10. Writing is the best meditation.

Extra perk : Avoid smoking at all cost. Others might find it cool, but honestly, cancer sucks.

About 20 years ago, my Jeep was stolen from in front of my building. I immediately made a report and called my insurance company because I knew I would never get it back. One other thing I did was change the message on my voicemail to tell the caller that if the call was in regards to my jeep, to please leave a message where it was and I would pick it up, no questions asked.

About a week later, I got a very cryptic call with the location of my Jeep and immediately headed over to see if it was there, and sure enough, it was. As I stood there next to it, I called the police and told them I was standing next to my Jeep and I would be recovering it. I was told to stay where I was and someone would be with me ASAP.

It took 45 minutes and 4 calls to the station, but I finally had a police officer show up. He took my info, checked the registration to ensure the Jeep was mine, and told me I could take it home.

What was so ridiculous about the entire theft was that the only thing they took two things. One was my soft top and doors. It was an aftermarket roof and doors, and without the hardware, I had installed when I put it on, it was absolutely useless! So basically, they had risked a felony for a top that was worth $400, and in the end, they couldn’t use LOL

FYI, it would have taken them just 2 minutes to stip off the roof and not risked a felony.

The other was my license plate. I was contacted 2 years later about a bank robbery because they had used my plates on the getaway car. It wasn’t that they thought I had committed the crime, it was just to see if I had any idea about who had stolen my jeep in the first place. Had they printed my Jeep at the time, they would have actually had a lead but they don’t waste their time on things like that for simple auto theft.

My best friend since 3rd grade was sucker-punched by some punk outside a bar on pearl street in Boulder, CO back when we were in college at CU. The punch cut my friend’s head and drew blood. My friend was disoriented and attempted to retaliate but was not able to do so with the crowd of people trying to break it up. I was in a sling from a torn pec injury so I kept my distance from the commotion. However, I noticed the punk who sucker-punched my friend trying to slowly disappear from the scene. He backed away then he started running away. I followed.

He ran pretty fast for about 4 blocks to the south back towards campus before his run turned into a jog, I continued to follow from a distance. Then a couple blocks later, once he thought he was in the clear, he started walking. This is when I made my move. I quietly approached him from behind and quickly picked him up and put him in a firemen’s carry with my healthy arm/shoulder. (he was no more than 160 lbs, maybe 5′9″ and at the time I was pushing 280 lbs and pretty fit despite my injury as I was playing DT for the Buffs so this little punk was pretty easy to manhandle even with only one healthy arm)

I said, “I got you mother fucker.” He squirmed like a little bitch begging and pleading to let him go. I said, “you’re going to jail for assaulting my friend.” It was quite the amusing walk back towards the scene with him over my shoulder as the scene was now filled with a number of Boulder Police. As he saw the police lights his squirming got worse, he started punching and kicking and he even offered me money to let him go.

I walked up to the scene with him on my shoulders, walked right into the middle of a bunch of policemen and women standing in a circle and placed him down in the middle and said “officers, this is the guy you are looking for, he is the one that started this whole thing by sucker-punching my friend” My best friend was standing there with a face covered in blood as they asked him if this was the guy. He said “yes” and they cuffed him and took him to jail.

I guess the whole thing started because my friend was wearing a Yankee’s hat and the punk was running his mouth, something about baseball. (he must have been a Red Sox fan?) My friend’s cut on his head was pretty bad, he had to go to the ER so we all were glad justice was served to that punk!

I’m a 10 years CCP member, I don’t feel much different from normal Chinese people. The major differences are:

  1. Party membership dues are 2% of my salary.
  2. Every half year, we need to write a short summary about our political thought. Such as what we have learnt from recent political events, do we have new understanding about Communist.
  3. Criticism and self-criticism. We will organize some offline sync, to discuss about Socialism, Communist and Capitalism; and refresh our understanding.

Basically I’m proud to be a member of CCP. I think most members are nice people, and open minded.

Mine was two things, bam bam, back to back.

We had a mid-size company, and I was running the small factory building pallets. Not very sexy, but it’s a commodity the world needs. I had brought on a co-op student from the local university over the summer, kind of a fresh-eyes approach, getting a smart kid to hang around for a few weeks on the cheap. So we talked and explored some ideas and measured some things, had regular ongoing conversations. And then he developed this program using Mini-Tab (showing my age) and it showed how we could lay out a super-efficient way to build the pallets; it divided up the work into this aspect that went slowly and this part that went quicker. We could flex the crew to have more people on the slow tasks and fewer people on the quick tasks, and overall the throughput was much higher, like 25% faster. I showed my boss and I was so impressed with all the little red dots flowing through the schematic and watching the numbers tick up, I was so happy….and then he said “if there was a smarter way to build pallets, I’d have discovered it already.” Ouch. Take all your fancy education and go sit down.

Same boss, same day, right after that sentence, he said he wants to review last month’s numbers. We covered all the regular P&L items, spends and expenses and yadda-yadda, and then we got to the bottom of the page. This is the line item where the plant’s profit is listed, and is where my bonus is. Literally, my bonus was a percentage of the profitability for the month. It showed zero. The plant profitability added up to being positive (and above budget I may add) but then there was a negative amount to cancel it out, and my bonus was zero. I had never seen a zero before, maybe I’m reading this wrong? “No, that’s correct. See there’s this other plant in another state, and they got in trouble. They were fudging their numbers and overstating deliveries to the customer. So overall the corporation got our wrist slapped and we agreed to zero out the profits in order to pay back the customer.” “My plant?” “No, this other one.” “Then why is my plant zero?” “The corporation agreed to take everyone’s profits as payback to the customer.” “So where’s my bonus?” “Well you get a percentage of course, and a percentage of zero is zero, so there’s no bonus.” “Oh no, wait a minute; you’re telling me that my kids eat less because somebody else cheated? You are literally taking food off my table because of some other guy? And that guy (whom I knew) still has a job here?”

I’ve had enough; I quit.

It’s amazing how people can twist the reality 180 degrees.

Name ONE major on-going conflict without the US standing behind, please.

  • Gaza Genocide, directly supported by the US
  • Russia-Ukraine conflict, directly supported by the US
  • China-Philippines SCS conflict, directly supported by the US
  • Taiwan Strait issue, directly supported and manipulated by the US
  • EU, directly manipulated by the US
  • Every coup in South America, directly supported by CIA.

The US has been trying to drag China into the same arms race as in the previous cold war against USSR, and hope China to fall into the same trap as USSR did.

The US has passed 11 anti-China acts within 24 hours.

Do you see China doing the same?

Then from where did you get the conclusion that China is becoming more aggressive?

Men Are ‘Raw Dogging’ On Airplanes

Endsville

Yes. When I was about 8 years old we lived in a house where the back yard was enclosed by a six foot high fence. Our first pet “Tiger” was a cockapoo a cross between a cocker spaniel and a toy poodle. I was there when Tiger was born.

One day my brothers and I were playing, tiger was out side with us, when the neighbor’s German Shepard jumped the fence and attacked Tiger. I grabbed the baseball bat and beat the German Shepard to death. The German Shepard had nearly ripped Tigers rear leg off. We yelled and our parents came out to see what was going on. They loaded up both dogs and took them to the vet. The German Shepard was pronounced dead on arrival. Tiger went into surgery. He was sewn up and bandaged. Several days later he was brought home.

We informed the neighbor about his dog accompanied by a police officer. The neighbor tried to attack me. The police officer held him back.

The neighbor took us to court. The neighbor wanted me punished for brutally beating his dog to death. And he wanted another dog. The judge listened to both sides and then asked the neighbor some questions.

The questions went like this.

Judge: You had a German Shepard?

Neighbor: Yes, and this little brat brutally killed it.

Judge: is there a 6 foot tall fence between your yards?

neighbor: yes.

Judge: was your dog capable of jumping that fence?

Neighbor: I have never seen him do that.

Judge: Is there a gate between the two yards?

Neighbor: No.

Judge: How do you think your dog got into their yard?

Neighbor: well it is possible that my dog jumped the fence.

The judge then asked me some question.

Judge: why did you attack this man’s dog.

Me: The German Shepard jumped the fence and attacked Tiger. We yelled but the dog would not stop. I had the bat in my hands and was not gong to take the chance the dog would kill tiger or attack someone else. I kicked the German Shepard off tiger but he went back. I kicked him again but this time I also hit him with the baseball bat. He kept trying to get at tiger. So I ended it. I hit the German Shepard till it quit moving.

Judge: were you scared?

me: I was. But I was more angry than scared. No one attacks my family. And tiger is family.

Judge: Do you like dogs?

me: yes, very much.

Judge: before this, were you afraid of the German Shepard?

Me: before this, I had never seen the dog. He barked a growled a lot. But he was always on the other side of the fence.

Judge: so you didn’t hate the dog.

me: I didn’t know the dog. Never met him.

The judge feeling he had all of the information needed made his determination. The neighbor was charged with having a vicious dog. Was ordered to pay our vet bill. He was told that if I had not killed the animal it would have been put down as a dangerous animal. After having cleared a 6 foot fence and attacking another’s pet and possibly children playing in the yard. I probably would have done the same thing as this young man. There will be no retaliation of any kind.

Ironically the neighbor got another German Shepard. A puppy. He introduced us to the dog and our dogs got along great. We moved about 6 months later. Tiger had complications from the surgery and started having seizures. My dad was in the navy and we often moved. Tiger was put down about two years later because we could not afford his medical care. I was told by my parents he was sent to a farm. I looked my parents in the eye and said “tiger was in bad shape. If you put him down just say so. Please don’t lie about it.”

When A Killer Has No Idea He’s Being Recorded

The U.S. stock market has plummeted, putting increasing pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. The U.S. has lost the financial war. At this moment, China has dealt another heavy blow to the U.S. by reducing its holdings of 228 billion U.S. real estate. Yellen issued a warning that the U.S. debt may face a collapse. Why do we say that the U.S. has lost the financial war? What signal does Yellen’s warning send?

In 2018, the United States unilaterally launched a trade war against China, and then provoked a technology and financial war. Now, the global game between China and the United States has lasted for nearly 7 years. I thought that this confrontation that determines the world pattern would be a slow process. After all, the game between major powers is to see who has better determination. Moreover, the United States has “dollar hegemony” and can collect wealth from various countries by issuing U.S. bonds globally. Relying on U.S. bonds and the dollar, the United States has successfully survived many financial crises. But this time, the United States took the initiative to provoke a financial war against China, and they themselves were the losers. Federal Reserve Chairman Powell made it clear that interest rates may be cut in September. Obviously, the United States can no longer withstand the financial war.



There is a saying about the Sino-US financial war: “hypertension vs. hypoglycemia”. From the perspective of the United States, they are facing high inflation that has been slow to be curbed, huge debts, and high interest rates caused by multiple aggressive interest rate hikes. Although China is the world’s largest manufacturing country, its consumption power is not as good as that of the United States, the world’s largest consumer of goods. In other words, China has goods but lacks money, while the United States has money but lacks goods. The essence of the Sino-US financial war is that the United States wants to harvest China through aggressive interest rate hikes. While China is improving its financial defenses, it is waiting for the United States to be dragged down by its own debts.



But in this process, the United States made two fatal mistakes.

First, the United States forgot the fact that “finance is a derivative of trade.” Although the United States has dollar hegemony, China has the most complete manufacturing sector in the world, which makes it have a long-term trade surplus and has $3 trillion in reserves. Therefore, the United States can hardly influence China’s exchange rate;

Secondly, the United States has never considered that its aggressive interest rate hike strategy will push its allies into a dead end and eventually force them to “turn against the United States.” According to 环球网_全球生活新门户_环球时报旗下网站, Japan has already started to raise interest rates on the yen, which is a dead end for the United States. Previously, due to the high interest rates in the United States, many international investors borrowed yen at ultra-low interest rates and then converted them into dollars to buy U.S. bonds. Now, the Federal Reserve has just released a signal of interest rate cuts, and Japan has immediately raised interest rates, which will trigger investors to transfer assets from the United States to Japan. In other words, Japan has implemented a reverse “harvest” on the United States.



It is worth mentioning that as early as two months ago, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that maintaining high interest rates may put US debt at risk of collapse. But Yellen did not expect that what happened later would be more serious than she expected. On Monday, US stocks suffered a sharp drop at the opening, with technology stocks such as Nvidia and Tesla falling by more than 10%. At the same time, a large number of Chinese buyers were worried about the US economic situation and began to sell their properties in the United States. According to public data, in less than two years, Chinese buyers have reduced their holdings of US real estate by 228 billion yuan.



By August 5, the onshore RMB exchange rate against the US dollar reached 7.1150, a surge of 1,000 points. The reason for the strengthening of the RMB is that the US non-farm unemployment rate has reached 4.3%, which is not only the worst in the past three years, but also far exceeds expectations. This makes international investors believe that the risk of an economic recession in the United States is increasing. It is worth noting that this time Japan raised interest rates and announced how much foreign exchange it used to intervene in the exchange rate. In the face of this “turnaround” approach, the United States did not make any accusations. Obviously, the United States is also very clear about how serious the situation it faces!


This news is brought to you by Host Anton

08-06 19:36 from Hong Kong

5 Most DISTURBING Deaths of Tourists in Thailand…

https://youtu.be/A1XrrG3Nrgk

Shorpy

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Was the USSR really that bad?

I don’t know what exactly you were told about USSR, but it was at least 10 times less bad than you’ve been told.

Everyday life in USSR wasn’t that much different from social democracies of today:

  • There was work, properly regulated to 8 hours a day and 2 days off.
    • During dinner break, you’d get to eat at an eatery, usually one affiliated with your workplace.
    • There was almost 0% unemployment. The country always had work that needed doing, but if they didn’t, they’d invent some work for you, like digging holes or filling up holes.
  • The work was paid for properly at the end of the month.
  • People would spend their money in shops, to buy food and things.
    • Unlike capitalism, there usually was more money than things to buy.
    • The amount of stuff owned by a typical Soviet person wasn’t that much different from stuff owned by a typical worker under capitalism.
    • Food shortages were the exception, not the rule. But growing or foraging your own food was a thing.
  • Everybody had a roof over their heads, usually provided by the government for a small rent/tax.
    • Less lucky people lived in dormitories and communal apartment, more lucky ones lived in their own apartments.
    • Wait time to get one’s own apartment was similar to time for accumulating money to buy an apartment in capitalist Russia, but one could use their money freely.
  • Violent crime was pretty low, while black market seems to have flourished.
    • Newspapers did not go out of their way to scare people, so people felt much safer.
  • Life in prisons was worse, as it should be. Still, prisoner lifestyle was regulated, so they wouldn’t go hungry unless the whole country did.
    • That joke from “Operation Y” where an prisoner builder gets a 3-course dinner with shahlyk and a poor student working part-time (who has to buy his own food) gets some bread with kefir is a comedic exaggeration.

One thing that really helps is having a goal — something you want to do before you pass. Like Jeanne Calment who made a deal with her rotary André-François Raffray in 1965, when she was 90 years old… in exchange for having the right to continue living in the property, she’d sell the apartment to Raffray, for him to use after she passed. He sure felt he’d made a pretty sweet deal with the little old French lady…

Only Calment didn’t die… she kept living. And living. And living. By 1995, Raffray had already paid Calment many times the value of the property she was living in. A piece of property he legally owned for some 30 years but couldn’t sell or make use of. He died, in 1995. And Calment, 120, continued to live for another 2 years, finally dying in 1997 at age 122 with Raffray’s widow and children continuing to pay her generously for her refusal to meet her maker.

Calment lived another 32 years after reaching 90, and it made her a fortune in her day’s currency. She was paid generously just for being alive, despite continuing to smoke and drink and live merrily. “Sometimes in life, one makes a bad deal,” Calment simply said. And sometimes, people make mighty good deals.

Why She LEFT the USA and Moved HOME to ASIA!

We sure do!

I pay more than $1000 a month for “good insurance, and last month I fell. I knew something was wrong and instead of going to the ER, I went to urgent care because it would be so much cheaper.

It almost killed me.

You see, I had broken three ribs and punctured a lung. I was bleeding into my chest cavity and the longer I waited to see the cheap doctor, I was losing my ability to breathe. At one point a lady sat next to me. She took one look at me and screamed at the front desk to call an ambulance. I told them it would cost too much and I would drive myself.

Luckily for me, they stopped me from driving and the ambulance soon arrived.

I stayed in the hospital for 3 days and demanded to be released because I couldn’t afford to be there any longer. I was released AMA and I got lucky that I had someone at home to care for me. It has taken weeks for me to be able to take a breath without pain, and while my doctor wanted to see me at the two-week mark, I waited until 4 weeks to see her.

I am now waiting for the bills to arrive. I know that my deductible for the year is $17,000 and that will be what I will have to pay before the full insurance kicks in, but I will STILL have more deductibles to pay!!

Our system is BROKEN!! The MAIN reason people file for bankruptcy is medical bills, and we are supposedly a first-world nation!!!!

People are so damn worried about paying for everyone to get medical care that they would rather go bankrupt than pay LESS than we do now for actual care! They seem to forget that they are already paying for roads, schools, first responders and so much more, but heaven forbid they pay for medical!

It would be CHEAPER FOR EVERYONE!!!

PLUS our politicians are in the pockets of the insurance companies who will lose billions if we were to have universal healthcare. So, we continue to see the decline in our health, die earlier, and lose mothers during childbirth at a rate higher than some third-world nations, and all people can think of is “Well at least I didn’t pay for someone else to live”.

Absolute stupidity!

Alien

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

Ash Brinton

“What’s your planet like?” the little alien asked wistfully.The alien was two feet tall, with a tiny blue curl on the top of his head. By the time the alien was an adult, the curl would be about eight feet tall, sticking straight up like a bright blue mohawk. The rest of him would be only four feet tall, and I wasn’t sure whether the aliens counted the curl as part of their height or not. This species was either really short or really, really tall.“It’s beautiful,” I responded, thinking longingly of home, “When I was little, everything was green and there were all these animals in our backyard. There was a gopher that lived in a hole in the rocks that my dad named Pierre. He always ate my sisters garden. And at night, there were so many… so many stars. There was a lullaby my mom used to sing about the stars. I haven’t heard it in so long. I’ve almost forgotten the words.” I hummed the tune under my breath for a moment, “But Earth… Earth’s not quite as beautiful as it once was.”“What happened?” the young alien tilted his head, curious.“Humanity happened. We were told we were destroying the planet but no one would listen and when we did it was never enough. Overpopulation, pollution, hunger, poverty, global warming… Those all started before I was born and by the time I was old enough to do anything, it was too late. It was already irreversible. The people my age tried to at least slow it down, but no one would listen to us. Our only hope was to find another planet, like scavengers destroying everything they touch. We destroyed our home. Maybe if we had all worked together, refused to ignore the signs, things would be different, but we didn’t and they’re not.”“Is that why you left?”“Yes.” I turned away from the alien, lost in thought.Here I was, a human, lightyears away from my home. I couldn’t even see the sun from here. I had failed in my mission.Sure, I had found alien life on other planets, but I had lost my crewmates and my home. My memories of how I got there were still foggy.I remembered my crew and how we had been the first humans to reach the Kuiper Belt. We’d felt like heroes. Then one of the asteroids had crashed into our ship.I had been the only one to escape the wreckage.The aliens found me.Next thing I knew, I was in their spaceship with no idea where I was.“Do you miss it?” the young alien asked.“Hmm?” I turned back to him.“Don’t you miss Earth?”“Every day.”“I can’t believe I’m actually talking to a human. A real, live human! My grandmama says she went to Mars once. It’s the closest she ever got – the closest any of us ever got – to Earth. There was this weird thing that my mama calls a-” he said something in a different language “-but I don’t think there’s a word for it in Human, so the translator might not work for it. It was made of panels and metal with a human word written on the side in big block letters. The first letter looked like a wide mouth getting ready to eat you, grandmama says.”I tilted my head, trying to imagine what he meant. “An ‘O’?”“What’s an ‘O’?”“The letter. It looks like this,” I traced my finger through dust on the small table between us.The alien child shrugged, “Maybe. I wasn’t there. Grandmama says you could see Earth from where she was and it was all greens and blues and browns and whites and when it wasn’t facing the star, the land glowed. It even had a tiny metal moon orbiting it!” The little alien boy put his hands on my knees to pull himself into a standing position.“Earth only has one moon and that’s made of rock, but your grandmama may have seen a satellite. And the land wasn’t glowing, silly.” I chuckled, flicking the little curl on the top of their head that seemed to be the defining factor of their species, “That was the lights in the cities and houses.”“Why would you need lights? You have a star right there in your solar system!”“The lights are for at night, when the sun goes down.”“What’s a sun?”“It’s what we call our star,” I explained.The alien’s eyes grew wide, “Your star moves?”“No.” I said flatly, “When Earth rotates, it looks like the sun is moving across the sky. Thousands of years ago, people thought it was moving. They thought that Earth was the center of the universe.”

The alien snorted, “That’s kind of self-absorbed.”

“Yeah,” I laughed, “but science proved them wrong. When the part of the Earth that we are standing on turns away from the sun and it goes dark, we say the sun goes down. We call that time night. That’s when we can see the moon and the stars up in the sky. Do you have that on your planet?”

“No. There’s two stars, one on either side of my birth planet, so it’s always not-night.”

“Day. The word you’re looking for is day.”

“Wow. Humans name everything, huh. What do you call your moon?”

“Well, technically the moon’s name is Luna, but there’s only one, so we just call it the moon most of the time.”

“Cool!” He exclaimed, “We don’t have a sky. Mama says the atmosphere’s too weak for us to have a pretty sky like the one on Earth.”

“Light pollution blocks most of the sky nowadays, so don’t be disappointed if you ever see it.”

“Mama and Grandmama have always wanted to go to Earth. They were so excited when you got to the end of your solar system. We’ve been watching you progress for a while. Mama said humans were resilient and stubborn and would never give up, but Papa thought you were going to give up because you kept finding rocks and that was it.”

“They were cool rocks,” I nudged him, “Space rocks.”

The alien clapped two of his arms together, which I was quickly learning was how this species showed delight.

I hated to burst the alien’s bubble of innocence and wonder but…

“Do you know the worst thing about Earth and living there?”

The child’s face dropped and the spiky arm-like appendages fell to their side.

I continued, “The worst part about living on Earth, or at least in my country, isn’t the pollution, poverty, hunger, or even abuse. It’s the tension. The fear that we’ve entrusted the keys of mass destruction to a lunatic or a villain. The constant worry that one day you’ll turn on the tv and hear that a war has broken out in our country and a nuclear bomb has been dropped. In my country, we are always at war, but it is always pushed under the rug and ignored. For stuff like that to be shown on the news, it would have to be on our own soil. Either a civil war or a world war. It would destroy anything. No one would survive, and if they did… that fate might be even worse.”

“So… you don’t want to go back to Earth?”

I shrugged helplessly, “Humanity destroyed Earth. Maybe when your grandmama saw it, Earth was more beautiful, more loving, more kind, but more likely is that the effects of humanity’s cruelty were only just starting to show on Earth’s surface and it wasn’t as noticeable yet. To truly see Earth, you have to get up close, beneath the clouds, into the cities. Still… I do want to go home. I want to rebuild and restore Earth to its former glory, if it ever had any when humanity lived on the Earth. I want to see the animals, healthy and thriving, not on the brink of extinction, and to see the moon surrounded by stars, and see the milky way hovering in the sky like it did when my grandparents were little. I want to go home.”

“Can I help?”

“I don’t think so, little friend. It’s not fair to pull you into our mess.”

“So? I want to see Earth too! I want to help the humanities.”

I smiled sadly and patted the alien’s baby curl. “Let’s just get me home first. Just imagine being the first of your species to reach Earth’s surface. Your mama will be so proud.”

I looked out the small window at the wide expanse of nothing, with stars twinkling in the distance, almost too far away to see.

“Let’s go home.”

Alex Julius, you should be the one who must be cured of your delusions.

You are likely too young, but know that it’s not just Japan and South Korea, there are almost 800 of such “colonies” in the world.

We’re still doing this – added Finland recently. And restored another – the Philippines.

This is the rare occasion where what trump claimed is actually true – Americans can literally shoot anybody on main street and can’t be touched. Young Filipinos may not know these, but Filipinos were target practices once they get too close to Clark and Subic and of course, they could treat their women however they feel they want. And Bong Bong wants all these American liberties back in his country.

The only difference is that its so much more for Japan and South Korea – its Washington that dictates their national foreign policies – that when the American president tells them to jump, they ask how high. . . where the government of Japan can’t fly over Tokyo without permission of the U.S. military commisioner . . . where South Korea can’t do anything involving their military without the permission of the U.S. military brass. . . .where its president must know how to sing Karaoke when making state visits. But of course, to maintain the pretext of democracy, they have to do the work of governing their own people – that they can do themselves. Isn’t all these describing running “colonies” by enjoying the best of both worlds?

Today’s MM image generations

The focus is on admiration, and the god of the vine. It’s a hodgepodge of prompts and resulting in very interesting images.

Many nudes. But you all know that I am figurative art lover.

I really love the style, and the color composition. But I am having problems with the image arrangement. But I think that in time things will straighten out.

Personally, I don’t like full nudes. I prefer partial nudes, and elements of clothing with folds, and details.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(17)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(17)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(17)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(17)

@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(15)
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(15)

So I changed things out. And I started to require loin cloths and other attire elements.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(15)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(15)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(14)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(14)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(11)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(11)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(10)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(10)

Some didn’t have the elements of clothing, but the colors were great.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(10)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(10)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(9)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(9)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(9)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(9)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(8)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(8)

In the ones where everyone was  clothed, it became too formal. I wanted something less formal.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(8)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(8)

Maybe something more like this…

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(7)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(7)

This is pretty good.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(7)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(7)

So is this one.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(6)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(6)

And this one.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)

The careful placement of arms was really nice.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(5)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(5)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)

This is fine…

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)

@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(1)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(1)

@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2

Our married love life was wonderful, Blessed with cute baby girl , added more and more love to our lives. Perfect love life , both of us were equally romantic and made for each other in all aspects . But he fell sick one day, severely sick. Lost his job soon due to the serious health reasons . I was not working and no experience though well qualified. No one earning at home , worst phase of our lives .I started hunting for job , use to seek help with whomever I know , giving my resume. Since it was already 4 years that I had finished my degree, securing a job was really too hard and challenging. I use to drop into offices , use all my limited intelligence and resources to get a job. Everywhere , every effort was a failure, I was good at nothing , hopes were very less with the future. Somewhere luck clicked , a gentleman agreed to help me , but I had to go far off – 1000 kms from my town . I took the bold step, left the beloved family back . I got a break, worked very hard without caring the number of working hours , my food , my comforts despite of my gender constraints. I did not had anyone to care about me . I had save every penny and money order to home. My life was very hard , but started feeling bit ease with finance. I could meet my family first time after a gap of 10 months. I endured all the pains , discomforts to save our lives . Slowly in 2 years my financial status became very sound and everyone happy at home. All the needs and luxuries of each individual were met with my income. This is 20 years old story , but when I look back now , I wonder myself with the journey. Everyone in the family knows about my success , no one knows the struggle I had in the initial stages especially when alone , away from home. But I am happy I could take care of my loved ones…!! I have cut the very long story short though here. Thanks for reading through this.

Edit 1 :

Dear all my friends , I am adding some more details as asked by you . My smart and intelligent husband lost many of his metal capabilities permanently , he just survived with no physical handicap. As of today he is very casual person with no job , no responsibility and no emotions to me and my daughter.

Yes I could meet all the materialistic needs of the family, but the love which I was dying for , I haven’t experienced again.

The reason I am anonymous here is , I have managed to keep this story very secret as much as possible due to many reasons . I had lots of hopes that I would get my love back , year on year realized that it would never happen, Along with that with growing daughter I wanted to stay strong , avoid any negative emotions , keep the father and daughter bonding as well as family bonding intact . My journey along had been very very rough while managing to take care of crooked in laws , take full responsibility of my sick parents ( my younger brother had died in road accident then ) , emotionless and half sensed husband. I avoided myself in all the social gatherings due to his behavioral issues, it is all a daily battle. I wanted to ensure my daughter will not suffer psychologically in this bargain. It was all tight rope walk for me , lost my youth , real happiness in life . But only satisfaction is my daughter is like a fresh flower with full of fragrance, she is undisturbed with all the tragedy which occurred in our life when she was close to 2 years old.

Materialistically I gained many many things in life but the wonderful love which I received from my husband is just a dream now. Many good things happened to me in my career unexpectedly .There are many many bitter most things about my husband which is still going on my life . Life has taught me the art of living .. and it is going on & on

Edit 2.

Friends , my thanks to all of you . Your responses has made me to feel lighter with the hard and helpless feelings that I have that I am not able to fix my husbands problems. I could have donated any part of my body to resume his love , medically there is no brain transplant . Miracles may work ??

I had shared a part of my story here earlier ,

Someone anonymous’s answer to What is the loveliest thing a child has ever said to you?

when I get chance I would share the details of deadly disease that my husband survived with, how I handled both my challenging IT career, responsibility of all the dependents , how my husbands family took undue advantage of his illness and emotionless status

Edit 3

Friends ,My daughter loves her dad a lot , has accepted him fully for what he is , tried her best to make him to understand his responsibility , no luck but. Our sorrow never reflects in our faces, not an exaggeration we look our best , lively and cheerful . Also look like sisters as per the comment we keep receiving from others. She is bold , practical, very independent, kind and considerate . Though she knows the hardships of mine she does not simply sympathize and am not emotional burden on her. She flew abroad recently for her masters and has lot of ambitions in life. She has her own passions besides academics.

My love life has been fully empty, I have been trying to overcome by indulging in my work , disciplined life & hobbies . My love to the family has been stronger not giving me a chance of seeking love elsewhere . Probably my brought up has a bigger role here

1990-0802, Delta Force Rapist.

MSG Marshall Brown, 1st Special Forces Operations Detachment Delta Operator, arrested while TDY in East Providence, RI. He raped five women. MSG Brown escaped custody & was captured 3-days later.

In 1988, an investigation began when two women were attacked in Raleigh, one @ North Carolina State University, apparently by the same man, a stranger, who climbed in through their second story windows, hooded & dressed in black, ordered them to silence with a knife held to their throats, covered their faces, then raped them. During the rapes, he apologized, telling them that he didn’t want to hurt them & that he “had to do this.”

On June 11, 1989 in Cranston, Rhode Island, Marshall Brown was taken into custody & charged with the rapes of two Rhode Island women. These women were raped with the same modus operandi as the North Carolina women. While in custody, Marshall was deferential to the police, calling them by their ranks & observing scrupulous courtesy. Police described him as soft-spoken. He even spoke approvingly of the professionalism of the arrests & complimented one officer for his handcuffing technique. He had been arrested for prowling in Fayetteville, North Carolina, earlier that May. He had forfeited his bond for a dismissal of the charge.

Marshall went to work in jail, studying the patterns of the federal marshals who transported him to & from court & making friends with a 20-year-old inmate named Frederick Heon. He stayed in shape in jail, using his exercise periods to run.

On July 30, he was cuffed to another prisoner in the back of a federal marshal van & driven to Providence to attend his hearing. When the back door opened, Marshall – who had picked open his handcuffs – walked with the escorting marshal & his fellow inmate for a bit, then sprang past the startled federal marshals & ran like an Olympic athlete up the street & out of sight.

Heon was out on bail & had rented a car, per Marshall’s instructions & was waiting @ an appointed rendezvous point & drove Marshall to the Connecticut state line. Heon then went to a church where he was told he’d find money, which wasn’t there. Three days later, Marshall was caught in a stolen car & re-arrested. Marshall told the police about Heon’s assistance & Heon was taken back to jail for a parole violation.

Marshall had burglarized a house 15 miles outside of Providence for food & credit cards & was camping in a pine grove nearby. He stole the car in the same neighborhood. When back in custody, he admitted to nine rapes in Rhode Island, Texas, Arizona & North Carolina. Marshall had been attending the Naval version of the Sergeants Major Academy in Norfolk when he was caught the first time.

His wife, Michelle, who was taking care of their young son, was stunned.

I can’t even pretend to understand Marshall Brown, after spending many hours with him & going on one combat operation with him. I have heard the statement that rape is not sex, it is an exercise of power. I don’t buy it. Rape is violent power, but it is sexualized power & it is also violent sex. Sex in patriarchal society is in almost every case practiced, portrayed & understood as a form of aggression & power & all power is in many ways sexualized.

Marshall’s brother-in-law spoke with me many years later & said that Marshall told him that he felt he had to use his skills somehow, or he’d begin to lose them. Marshall saw the rapes as a training opportunity @ some level & therefore the women as training aids

One might suppose, since he repeated this ritualistic rape @ least nine times, that there was some rush he needed. I don’t buy it. He had jumped out of airplanes a thousand times, was a proficient technical climber, had been in combat. I think the rush – if that’s what it was – was transgression. Nancy C. M. Hartsock, in Money, Sex & Power – Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, said that “without the boundary to violate, the thrill of transgression would disappear.” Marshall’s criminality was not in spite of his religious conversion, his squeamishness about sex, or his uptight WASP upbringing in East Texas. It was an outcome… of all those things, but also of a masculinity defined by a culture of rape & a man who had made a career of pursuing that masculinity.

Marshall Brown served in a profession with a constant subtext of physical coercion & in a field within that profession (Delta Force/Special Operations) where we were expected to work outside the rules, behind the scenes, in the shadows, employing a host of very specialized skills, to “preserve a way of life.”

My father has served for 4 decades in the Indian Army. He retired last year but still looks like a young gentleman. Here is his pic:

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main qimg 9492057ed7a9f41ad4dd09997e9d47a3 lq

Following are the things he does daily in order to maintain that fitness, happiness, and energy:

  1. Early 2 bed & early 2 rise: He sleeps by 10 pm and wakes up at 5 am. Those 7 hours are pure sound sleep.
  2. Fresh Air: Upon waking up, he goes for a walk/jog along with our dog.
  3. Morning Nutrition: Next, he drinks Mulethi Tea, which has immense and immense benefits.
  4. Being Natural: He also does Brushing with Neem twig sometimes before normal brushing. He applies Mustard Oil. He hasn’t used shampoo even once in his life and still at the age of 60, he has black & naturally strong hair.
  5. Exercise: Next, he performs yoga and calisthenics.
  6. Spirituality for positivity: After having a bath, he does pooja, which according to him gives him positivity and strength for the odd things.
  7. Do what you love: Then he goes to work. Right now after retirement, his work is to look after our farms. Despite having servants, he also does some farming himself which gives him joy.
  8. Love what you do: In his small-small work, whether household or be it when he was in the Army. He is determined and has will power to do the work. He takes full responsibility and doesn’t procrastinate. He does his work happily. He accepts responsibilities and problems rather than blaming or cursing. This reduces stress and increases productivity.
  9. Nutrition on time: He ensures that he takes his meals on time (Lunch before 1 pm and Dinner before 7.30).
  10. Proper Nutrition: He also ensures that he eats natural things and things with more health benefits rather than going for taste. For example, we eat black wheat roti, self-grown vegetables & and fruits, pure milk, and whatever we can arrange naturally.
  1. We were having dinner at the private Magic Castle in Hollywood. At the next table was a stereotypical studio executive type; you know, 50+ years old, ultra tan, long (hair plugged?) grey hair, flashy suit. With him was a20ish young, hot model type, with a low cut backless dress that showed off her tattoos, among other things. Yup, I thought; fossil studio exec pulling a Harvey Weinstein with some actress. Except as they were leaving, the young woman said to him Dad, when Mom gets back from New York, maybe we can have dinner again!
  2. Having dinner in a restaurant. The guy next to us appears to be having a tough time with his date. He does all the talking, and his date just gives him a half smile; jokes, funny stories, ordering the food, just a half smile from the women. We thought it might be a first date, maybe off of the internet or a blind one. Except when they were about to leave, the guy got her wheelchair and helped her sit in it; she obviously had had a stroke or something, and thus she could only muster a half smile and not speak.
  3. Las Vegas: we enter the Wynn Hotel, and see a scantily clad (mini skirt, halter top) woman walking with two security guards on either side. We thought it was a hooker being escorted out of the premises. However, this was Las Vegas. She was instead wearing the standard waitress outfit for the hotel. Sorry, our mistake!

A young pilot got a job as a bush pilot flying float planes in Alaska. On one of his first jobs, he flew out to a remote lake to pick up a hunter who had been dropped off the week before.

When he got there, he was horrified to discover that the hunter had bagged a full grown bull moose. He also had several hunting rifles, a canoe, several boxes of ammunition, plus all his camping gear.

“That’s too much,” he protested. “I won’t even get the plane into the air with all that weight.”

“I don’t see why not,” the hunter replied. “You strap the canoe to one of the floats, the moose to the other float, the baggage in the back seats, and I sit up front with you. Alf Smith did it last year, and he got us into the air.”

The young pilot’s ego was wounded. “Well, if Alf Smith can do it, so can I. Give me a hand.”

He taxied downwind to the far end of the lake as far as he could go, spun around into the wind and gave it full throttle. The plane staggered into the air and just barely cleared the trees at the far end. Ahead of them, however, was a low ridge. Using every ounce of flying skill, he managed to nurse the airplane over the trees at the top of the ridge. Before he could relax, however, he realized to his horror that there was a second, even higher ridge a half mile in front of him. There was nothing he could do but pancake the airplane into the trees.

As he and his passenger crawled out from the wreckage, he surveyed the destroyed plane and wept “My God, what have I done?”

“Don’t feel too bad,” said the hunter. “You made it half a mile farther than Alf Smith did last year.”

I was driving along a two lane road in rural Minnesota, at or just below the speed limit (55mph) when I saw a cop pull out from a side road. He quickly caught up with me and lit me up. I found a driveway where I could pull over safely and stopped. As I was getting my license and insurance ready, he walked up and asked the usual question, “Do you know why I pulled you over?”.

I said, no, I can’t think of anything I was doing wrong.

He told me that he had seen me give room for a lady pulling out slowly, and didn’t blow my horn, flash my lights or seem irritated that she had blocked my path, but let her get up to speed and gave her plenty of room. I also returned a wave from her as she turned off the road.

He handed me a card that read “Good Driver Award”. He told me that if I needed to use it, to show it, and they’ll forgive minor things like too long in a metered parking space. Not only that, but he was very cordial and friendly. Told me to have a nice drive home. He also told me to show it either the McDonald’s or Burger King just up the road for a free soda.

Made my day!!

Haha. Tonya Harding Syndrome. What a perfect description of the mentality of USA against anyone that is strong, be it China or Russia.

After WW2, USSR was militarily strong. USA said USSR threatened US (dominance). USA then collapsed USSR in 1991. Today Russia is still militarily strong, then thru Ukraine, USA is to weaken, if not break up Russia.

In 1980s’, when Japan was economically strong being #2 in the world & when its semiconductor surpassed USA, USA then beat Japan down making Japan lost 10–20 years’ of development.

Today, China is both economically, militarily & technologically strong. Of course, USA cannot sleep well at night.

Dont ever think USA is gentle to EU who is also competing with USA. USA pulled down Euro once. One reason for the Ukraine war is to weaken Europe’s economy.

So … USA suffers Tonya Harding syndrome against anybody who is developing well & challenging US hegemony. Not just against China.

USA was successful in beating down USSR & Japan. But has & will fail in China though.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten that China’s President Xi Jinping is the son of one of China’s greatest generals?

That he spent three years in uniform as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense?

That in the past two years he has repeatedly called on his 2,000,000 man army to ‘prepare to fight and win wars’?

That, when Gallup asked people around the world, “Would you fight for your country in case of war ?”, 87% of Chinese are willing and ready to fight–almost three times the percentage of Americans or anyone else?

Today, China overmatches the US in its Near Seas and my guess is that it will choose to act there in order to open a potential second front to take pressure off Russia. A credible sequence goes something like this: in close coordination with Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Hezbollah…

1. Announce an ADIZ, below, over Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait that excludes all military aircraft and requires permission for every civilian flight in and out of Taiwan. The US cannot prevent this and it paralyzes Taiwan.

2. Issue an arrest warrant for Tsai Ing-wen on a charge of treason and incitement to war and warn that anyone attempting to assist her will be charged as an accessory.

3. Announce that the Taiwan Strait is Chinese, permanently closed to military vessels.

4. Announce that the entire South China Sea is Chinese, permanently closed to military vessels.

5. Show off a few new weapons systems to complement its remarkable missiles and its fleet of Type 055 heavy cruisers, the most powerful surface combatants afloat.

6. Place the entire nation on a war footing, call up the reserves and activate all radars, light up all missile launching facilities, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxd_A-hGEOQ

These actions would be front page headlines in every new media on earth yet, if you do the math, you’ll see that the cost is….$0.00.

And China hasn’t invaded Taiwan yet. Hasn’t hurt a fly, in fact.

China’s capacity to sustain combat in its Near Seas is far bigger than Western media have been telling us (read the USNI papers to see what I mean). America is no match for China there–on land, sea or in the air.

And, as Clausewitz might have said, fleets win battles but economies win wars and China’s economy is far bigger, growing much faster and is more capable of ramping up than ours.

Would invasion even be necessary?

As a female autistic growing up in Outback Australia in the 1960’s I was bullied a lot. Really nasty stuff, it was only when I was in my 40’s that I got diagnosed as High Functioning Aspergers. I have always used education to get out of bad situations and high school was a particularly bad situation! Getting my head flushed down the toilet daily by a group of six or seven laughing girls was just something I had to deal with.

I left as soon as I was able, went to the nearest big city, got a job and continued to study at night school. Over the years, I built up this small base into a very comfortable career, married, had children and continued to work in a job I enjoyed, was good at, and that paid well. I have travelled the world and learned several languages, since I have an affinity for it.

One of my “nerdy” friends stayed on in the small regional town I’d gone to high school in and we kept touch. She was able to tell me what became of the bullies who used to torment us.

The leader of the group was a girl who was voted by our class as “the most likely to succeed”, apparently because she was regarded as pretty and used to date a high school sports jock. She ended up living in a caravan with a dozen children all from different fathers, working occasionally in low-paid jobs and living on welfare and whatever she could make by peddling her body. My friend told me that I wouldn’t recognize her as she got onto meth and used to pick at her skin leaving bleeding sores all over. She eventually died of a drug overdose a few years ago.

Another girl who used to delight in putting out cigarettes on my skin if she caught me going to the loo while she was there ended up dying, her car wrapped around a tree late one night when her boyfriend, who was driving drunk, was speeding.

A number of other bullies, the low-level ones who just went along with the major bullies and joined in if they had nothing better to do, ended up spending their lives working in the vegetable cannery or the chicken processing plant or the abbatoirs (I lived in an agricultural community, and those where the big employers.) There are probably worse jobs about than gutting chickens for a living, and it is at least good honest work, I suppose…

Another one, a boy this time who used to enjoy getting a seat behind me on the two hour bus ride to and from school and whacking me across the back of the head with a book, also got his karma – he became a welder after he left school, was working inside a silo one day and there was a build-up of gases. When he turned on the welder, the gases ignited while he was inside the silo and the result was that he lost both his legs. Now he has no choice but to sit – in a wheelchair.

Whereas I have lived a comfortable and mostly content life, doing a job I love, running my own business, and owning my own houses, some of which I rent out. One of the best things I ever did was to leave the small-town bullies and small-minded losers to their own devices and leave. I’ve never regretted going.

Diggin for fun and other’s profit

I once took a couple of anthropology and archeology courses at Gannon University to flush out my humanity requirements at Syracuse.

These were fun courses, and I pretty much spent all Summer digging up old relics and stuff from the past in and around Erie, PA. Lot’s and lots of “arrow heads”, “scrapers” and ancient hearths.

We would sometimes go on remote digs, perhaps an hour or two drive out of our way.

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15e07fd562395bae3f37ca1f711bd6c5

In one such dig we encountered a few coins.

We carefully dug them up, and duly recorded them. Ah. It was a grand discovery!

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48398b65d056533840445b982895d158

Because of their location, and the history, we suspected that a hoard must have been buried nearby. But it was getting late, so we all packed up and left.

The dig was an old 1700’s era trading center with one main house and a few low buildings. All were long gone, but we were digging there because a damming of the local stream would cause the entire location to be under water.

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c96d4ada847659bb553a99b617291590

We came back the next day, and some dunder-head (maybe the dig supervisors) came with a metal detector and unearthed quite a hoard.

We didn’t actually know, but given the size of the hole, perhaps 200 to 300 old coins.

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623f38f61b494a19ad23e188fd2bd6c9

*Sigh.*

I would have loved to be part of that discovery. Now, some leach that sat by on the sidelines took the swag that we so carefully researched and dug up.

It’s like Working for a corporation in America, eh?

You do the labor. Someone else gets the swag.

*sigh*

Still, I enjoyed the experiences, and they were really fun and interesting to me. I will never forget them. If you all have an opportunity to, take a course in this kind of stuff a the local community college. You might discover how much fun that you will have. I’ll tell you what.

Today…

Have you ever been in the presence of a celebrity but didn’t know who they were at the time?

About 5 years ago, I was delivering food, in the Dallas area. I knocked on the door of an apartment, and a bald headed, muscular man answered. He told me the food wasn’t supposed to come there, but he didn’t seem too upset. I gathered that he had ordered for someone else, but neglected to change the address. But anyhoo, he asked if I’d like a tip. Sure! I replied. He starts digging in his wallet, and I’m expecting a couple of bucks. He pulls out a nice, crisp Benjamin ($100 bill). Now that’s a pretty generous tip, for an order that wasn’t for him in the first place. Then he starts looking, with very penetrating blue eyes, at me, and says “ Remember me. I’m Steve”.

I don’t follow wrestling, but known people who have. I believe it was Stone Cold Austin. Why he was alone in an apartment (not a luxury apartment, but not a crappy one, somewhere in the middle) in Dallas I dunno. He is from Texas (I researched him afterwards), but Victoria, on the Gulf side of the state. Perhaps he had a girlfriend there, or one of his kids, or just a hideaway, when in Dallas. The bill was genuine. It spent at the self checkout at Kroger.

The Thing (1982) | *First Time Watching* | Movie Reaction | Asia and BJ

This.

So I was reading a book called ‘The eyes of darkness’. And another called ‘end of days’.

This book was written in 1981. (Keep this info in mind). It talks about a virus coming in 2020, from China, wuhan and some of it (not all) seems all too familiar. I just found it interesting.

Now I’m not saying the book is all correct. Maybe it’s just probability or coincidence. I think everyone has different beliefs, the virus hasn’t suddenly disappeared yet, but we’re not at the stage where the end is near.

Everyone thinks differently, I’m into conspiracy theories and bipolar doesn’t help, maybe I’m delusional. Not sure, take from it, what you will 🙂

I just posted because I thought it was interesting, it is a fictional book after all.

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Here’s the book if you want to read it. It also predicts mental health issues being the worst and the most increased in the 21st century and a bunch of other stuff which has actually happened.

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Edit: I think the comments are clearly missing my point, as usual (this is quora after all). Yes, there’s plenty of predictions and it’s probably just by chance. Yes not all of them are spot on. I never said this was fact, as it’s a fictional book. I just found it interesting ffs. Not saying you have to believe it. Maybe it’s my bipolar or too many punches I’ve had, like many rudely told me in the comments 😂

Some of these comments, which I’ve reported have been horrible and personally attacking. I didn’t know something I found interesting could offend someone that much😂😁.

I just found it interesting, calm yourself 😉

Putin SHOCKED The WORLD! Russia Dealt a Cold-Blooded BLOW on the U.S. in ARCTIC!

This is from cracked.com, whose writers always seem to be able to find the strangest examples I could never even dream of

In the late 1960s, Leonard Casley grew way too much wheat, which could only ever be a serious problem if you live in Australia. You see, Australia had wheat quotas at the time and Hutt River (the province where Casley and other families grew) had inadvertently surpassed it, meaning they weren’t allowed to sell any of it. When they petitioned for the quota to be raised, the governor responded by saying, “No,” and filing a law to take their land away. THAT’S how serious Australians are about wheat.

In a desperate attempt to delay the legal process, the five families of Hutt River seceded from Australia under the Treason Act of 1495. This would have been as pointless as that time you were five and told your mom you were leaving home… if the government hadn’t accidentally referred to Casley as “Administrator of Hutt River Province” in official correspondence, which actually gave him legal recognition as a ruler under Australian law. Yes, in Australia, calling someone something magically turns them into that.

Taking full of advantage of the mistake, Casley declared himself His Majesty Prince Leonard I of Hutt, meaning it was now treason, under Australian law, to charge him with any crime or interfere with how he ran his new country.

Could Australia have stopped him? Sure. But by the time they got around to it, the statute of limitations had run out. So as of 1972, The Principality of Hutt River had officially seceded from Australia and stopped paying income taxes.

As of the modern day, Hutt River is still separate, while Australia treats it as a private business that doesn’t pay them taxes and just tries, really hard, to pretend it’s not there.

Jumpin’ Jack Chili

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Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

Chili

  • 1 cup onion, diced
  • 1 teaspoon olive oil
  • 1 (4 ounce) can chopped green chiles, undrained
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
  • 2 (15 ounce) cans great Northern beans, drained and rinsed
  • 3 1/2 cups chicken broth
  • 2 cups cooked chicken, chopped (rotisserie chicken can be used)
  • 1 cup (4 ounces) Wisconsin Monterey Jack Cheese*, coarsely grated and divided
  • 1 cup (4 ounces) Wisconsin Colby Cheese, coarsely grated and divided

Toppings

  • Crushed corn chips, sour cream, chopped green onions, olives, chopped tomatoes, oyster crackers, goldfish crackers, bacon

Instructions

  1. Cook onion in hot oil in heavy stock pan (Dutch oven) over medium-high heat, stirring until tender.
  2. Add green chiles, garlic and cumin; cook 2 minutes, stirring constantly.
  3. Add beans and chicken broth, stirring well. Bring to boil; reduce heat, and simmer for 20 minutes.
  4. Add chicken, 1/2 cup Monterey Jack and 1/2 cup Colby Cheese; simmer over low heat for 10 minutes more.
  5. Ladle chili into bowls. Top each serving with remaining cheeses and desired toppings.

Notes

* Or use Pepper Jack or Jalapeño Jack

Why Eastern Europe Is Safer And Better To Raise A Family In Than The West

Who is behind the coup? We as an outsider dont know yet.

I only notice 1 thing:

Bangladesh went to China & signed an infrastructure deal with China.

The moment she went home, she tore the deal with China & accepted a contract/agreement with India to build a bridge or something.

Case closed, we thought No, a riot/coup broke out.

Both USA & India are notorious to instigate riots/coups in other countries so as to make others bow down to them. USA, global. India, southern Asia. Both do assassination too.

History will tell us who is the culprit. Let us wait.

Sri Lanka experienced a riot too when it joined an infrastructure project with China. It took a few years before the truth surfaced, after American scholars did a research. In the case of Sri Lanka, it was India who instigated the riot. But it was USA who spread the fake news re Debt Trap. Now the Debt Trap has proven fake after 10 years. But riots/coups still can happen.

On the Way to Paradise

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

 

Cory Pines

“You told me this would be a short trip. We’ve been on this wretched ship for twelve years!” Halo roared.”I know, but I broke the digital map and-“”I don’t care what happened! I paid you a good handful of money and I expected to be home long before now!”Halo had the perfect life back on Earth, but he just had to pay Mirabella almost three billion to take him to Tariphor, the most beautiful paradise planet in the galaxy. The trip was only supposed to be nine years in total, but the journey to Tariphor had stretched out to twelve! Halo had spent most of the time in hypersleep, but they had recently hit some strange turbulence that woke him.”Sir, I told you before we left that I was only an amateur pilot. I just got out of flight school, too,” Mirabella tried to explain.”That was twelve years ago! You should be better by now, Mire,” Halo complained.

They had left Earth when Halo was only 23 years old. He had spent his golden years of life in hypersleep and he was just as close to Tariphor as he was when still on Earth’s surface.

Mirabella wasn’t that happy about it either. She was 19 when they left and, unlike Halo, had actually begun to age. She wished she could’ve been the one frozen in some fancy tank. She missed her family more than anything, wishing she could just turn around and head back to Earth, but she didn’t know which way home was anymore.

“Well, what would you like me to do about it?” Mirabella asked. She didn’t mean for it to sound as angry as it did, and was simply curious, as she had run out of things to try and was willing to do anything to get back home.

“Well, you’re the pilot. You should know what you’re doing!”

“If you don’t have anything to contribute, you can just go back to bed,” Mirabella stated flatly.

“You’re insane if you think you can tell me, the youngest self-made multi-billionaire, what to do,” Halo said, “Now, where can I get a bite to eat?”

“We ran out of food three days ago,” Mirabella admitted.

“Were you not rationing it properly?” Halo asked.

“I made food for nine years last for twelve, I think I did a fine job rationing,” Mirabella said defensively.

“What about that?” Halo asked. He pointed to a small blue cube placed on the chair next to Mirabella’s. He had never seen anything like it, but it looked a little like Jell-O. He hoped it was edible. After all, the backlash of waking up from hypersleep gave him quite the appetite.

“Don’t you dare try to eat him. he’s some sort of space creature, not food. I think he’s sleeping,” Mirabella said.

“It looks delicious.”

“You’ll probably flip your organs inside-out if you eat him. Then, I’ll have to find a way to revive you, and suddenly kill you again for your stupid decision… After that, I’ll revive you a second time since I really don’t want to be alone in the endless abyss of space.”

“Could you even do that?”

“Not at all. In reality, you’d just stay dead,” she shrugged.

“How did this thing even get on the ship?” Halo asked.

Just as Halo was finished speaking, the blue Jell-O like creature, opened its eyes. They were huge, covering half the creature’s boxy face. It hopped up onto Mirabella’s shoulder.

“I let him in,” Mirabella said.

“What if that creature tries to kill us?” Halo asked.

“He’s, like, five inches tall. How would he?” she asked.

Halo eyed the creature warily. He didn’t really trust the thing, but Mirabella was right; it was small and Halo knew he could easily overpower it if he needed to.

“At least tell me you didn’t name it,” Halo said.

Mirabella didn’t answer.

“Oh my God, why? Why in the world would you name it?” Halo asked.

“I call him Berry,” Mirabella admitted, fiddling with her hands.

The creature, Berry, looked up at Mirabella when he heard his name. Halo watched as the creature snuggled down and began to purr. He had to admit that Berry was cute, but that still didn’t mean he trusted the thing.

“You shared our food with it,” Halo said.

“I couldn’t just let him starve!” Mirabella replied.

“I mean, you could’ve. Then at least I would have something to eat,” Halo said. Halo was a little upset that Mirabella cared more about feeding a space creature than a human that paid her three billion dollars.

“Come on, just look at him, he’s so cute,” Mirabella said. Mirabella picked the creature up off of her shoulder and held it in her hands.

“I don’t see it,” Halo said.

Suddenly, a loud buzzer went off and the ship started to flash red.

“What in the world is happening!” Halo shouted over the buzzer.

“I don’t know, the ship hasn’t acted like this since the map broke!” Mirabella shouted back, “I need you to hold him.” She passed Berry over to Halo who took it slowly and held it as far away from his body as possible.

Mirabella rushed over to the control panel and began to fidget with the levers and buttons. Halo approached her slowly, still holding Berry at arm’s length, to watch.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I can’t tell, just give me a sec,” Mirabella replied.

At that point, Berry hopped out of Halo’s hands and landed on a small square button. Suddenly the sound stopped, though the lights of the ship were still flashing.

“I know what it is,” Mirabella said.

“What, what is it?” Halo asked, dying to know.

“We’re almost out of fuel, the ship is warning us that we need to find somewhere to land,” Mirabella explained.

Halo looked around the ship and through the large windows. Outside all he saw was blackness, stars, and the occasional comet, not of which were big enough for their ship.

“How can we do that, there is nothing but space out there!” Halo shouted.

“Duh there is nothing but space. We’re in space, Halo!” Mirabella shouted in response.

“We’re going to crash, we are going to crash and I am going to die. I still had my whole life ahead of me. Finding a partner, raising a family, adopting a hundred and one cats just because I can,” Halo complained. He began to pace back and forth, rushing his hands through his hair as he spoke.

“You’re probably right,” Mirabella said, “I don’t think there is any way for us to survive this.”

“That’s not what I wanted to hear!” Halo shouted. He paused from the pacing to face Mirabella, “Instead of living out my perfect life, I am going to die in space. With nothing but you and that creature to keep me company.”

“Well, what do you suggest we do instead?” Mirabella asked.

“I don’t know Mire, I’m not a pi- hold on what is that thing doing?”

Mirabella turned to see than Berry’s Jell-O like skin was changing from blue to red. He was also growing.

“He’s never done that before,” Mirabella admitted.

They stood back as Berry grew more and more until he went from 5 inches tall, to 5 feet. The thing was huge.

“What do we do, what do we do?” Halo asked, quickly hiding behind Mirabella.

Mirabella slowly walked up to Berry with her arm outstretched. The cube eyed her cautiously as she reached out and placed her hand on its head. That must have really ticked him off because his skin began to change quickly between colors, and it seemed to scream out in pain. Mirabella quickly backed up to the edge of the ship were Halo was cowering.

“What did you do?” Halo shouted.

“I just touched him,” Mirabella said.

“That’s it, we’re going to die,” Halo said.

“Yes, we already agreed on that.”

“Mire, we need to get outta here,” Halo said.

“We can’t leave Berry though, he’s my friend!” Mirabella said.

“Your friend is a space monster, now come on!” Halo announced.

He grabbed her hand and yanked her through the ship’s door to the hypersleep pods. He quickly locked the door behind him and only seconds later they heard a Jell-O like squish banging on the door over and over.

“Alright, what’s the plan?” Halo asked.

“Maybe we can just let Berry in and the three of us can talk it out,” Mirabella suggested.

“Mire, I’m not sure if you’ve realized this or not, but that thing is trying to murder us,” Halo said.

“He’s just scared,” Mirabella said.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time, that thing is trying to murder us!” Halo said, his voice rising until he was shouting at her.

“This is all your fault. If you had never woken up, Berry wouldn’t be so upset,” Mirabella stated.

“My fault, you think this is my fault? You were the one that woke me up when you hit turbulence, you have no one to blame but yourself,” Halo replied.

“Maybe you should have been nicer to Berry.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have brought on a weird space creature.”

“Maybe you should-” before she could finish, the door was knocked down and the giant, now green, Berry bounced into the room.

“What do we do, and don’t try and approach it again, that just made it angrier,” Halo said.

“Hey, Berry,” Mirabella said, “How are you buddy. I know that Halo can be kinda mean sometimes-”

“Hey!”

“Shut up,” she whispered harshly before continuing, “But just because he’s a little mean, it doesn’t mean you should kill him. We can talk through this, I just need you to shrink back down, okay buddy?”

The creature took a step closer to the two humans. Halo grabbed Mirabella’s hand and tried to pull her back to him, but she stayed standing in front of Berry.

“I don’t think this is working…” Halo said.

“What do you suggest we do instead, we are going to die anyway, either by this creature or by crashing!” Mirabella shouted.

“So we should just give up?” Halo asked.

“Why not? It’s not like we have anything left to fight for. Even if by some miracle we manage to get out of this, we still have no idea how to get home,” Mirabella said.

“We can figure that out,” Halo said. He couldn’t explain this sudden spark of hope came from, but he really didn’t want to die here, especially at the hands of a blue cube. He wished he would have thrown out the cube while it was still small, but it was too late now for ‘what if’s.’

“I’m gonna let him eat me,” Mirabella said. She yanked her hand away from Halo’s grasp and stood her ground.

“You’re gonna what?” Halo asked, shocked.

“I let him onto this ship, the least I can do for it is provide him with a final meal,” Mirabella said.

“What about your family?” Halo asked, trying to convince her to stay.

“It’s been twelve years! Halo, what’s even the point of going back, nothing will be how it was. People have probably forgotten all about us,” Mirabella said.

“How could anyone forget about me?” Halo asked.

“Halo, listen, we don’t have a plan to get back to Earth. We don’t have a plan to land the ship. We don’t have a plan to calm down Berry-”

“We could kill him,” Halo suggested.

“We are not killing him. My point is, in the last moments of our life, we might as well do something for this little creature.”

“I wouldn’t call him little anymore.”

“Are you with me or not?” Mirabella asked.

She held out her hand for Halo to take. This was insane! He couldn’t believe that he was actually thinking about joining her. Mirabella was crazy to even want to let Berry eat the two of them, and yet, Halo couldn’t stop himself from grabbing her hand.

Mirabella smiled before the two of them turned to face Berry. Halo closed his eyes as they walked towards the creature. He could feel himself being absorbed into it before he lost all control over his body and blacked out.

Halo awoke with a gasp, he was breathing heavy. Did he really just do that? Was he dead? Was this heaven? He was sitting in a bed, hospitalized. He looked around the see Mirabella was laying in the bed next to him. There were wires and tubes all around them, some of them going into his body.

Then Halo spotted it. Berry was sitting on the nightstand, once again five inches tall. He had taken back his original blue color and was staring up at Halo. Where was he? Had this all just a dream?

The door to the room opened and a doctor walked in holding a clipboard.

“Ah, Mr. Tharen, you’re up,” the doctor said.

“Please, call me Halo, and can you explain to me what happened?” Halo asked.

“Of course,” she began to walk around the room, checking the tubes and making small notes of her clipboard, “It’s been fourteen years since you left Earth, though, by the looks of it, you barely aged a day. Most people here thought that you were dead, died in a crash or something, but two weeks ago, this creature-” she nodded her head over to Berry- “brought you back. We’ve been reviving you and Miss Miller ever since.”

“You mean to tell me that creature… saved me?” Halo asked.

“Yes, it appears to have a soft spot for you. It never even left your side. Tell me, are you feeling alright? Do you need anything?” the doctor asked.

“Just some water,” Halo said.

The doctor left. Halo turned and stared at Berry who just stared back blankly. A small smile appeared on Halo’s face.

“Thanks,” he whispered, “Thanks for bringing us home.”

Neocons closer than ever to war with Iran

There was once a time where doe-eyed Americans thought that capitalism was a just system that rewarded hard work and innovation. Supply was dictated by demand. Seemed simple, right?

Then Ronald Reagan came along and lowered corporate taxes from 70% to 28%. The theory was that companies would make more money and those profits would “trickle down” to the consumers.

What ACTUALLY happened was that corporations could now set whatever prices they wanted and the rich could store their wealth in offshore tax havens. The money would get to the top and be shipped overseas, only to be used by the wealthy to influence policy, and further exploit the worker in exchange for lavish lifestyles and ridiculous qualities of life.

The government continues to subsidize oil companies despite them posting record profits year after year. Why is the government doing this? Hmm….

Gas and oil prices can come down 30% and the suppliers would still make a profit, but the consumers would enjoy a better quality of life. That’s not what the rich want. They want more. It doesn’t matter if the poor suffer, they’re getting theirs.

The president has nothing to do with gas prices other than to propose policies to congress that would regulate those prices more… but then lobbyists come along and petition representatives to ignore regulations and increase tax cuts. trump cut taxes to companies from 35% to 21% and we lost 2–3 trillion dollars (depending on who you ask) from the budget. That money went straight to the top, but congress will tell you that adding 2 trillion to the federal budget in the form of healthcare and student loan forgiveness is unsustainable.

Know what’s unsustainable? UNFETTERED FUCKING CAPITALISM! That’s what.

Bernie has only been perfectly correct for about 45 years now.

MM’s latest works

Still playing around. Lots of nudes, and trying to mess around a bit with historical themes.

Angels…

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Ancient Chinese rulers…

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Crete and cooking…

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Female Bacchus….

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Same theme, but at a pool taking orders from a cat.

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Now as a man, instead of a woman…

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Russia successfully tests ” Burevestnik ” global range cruise missile, US panics

1.) Do you recognize what is this place?

Old Summer Palace – Wikipedia

Here is the description from wikipedia:

Widely perceived as the pinnacle work of Chinese imperial garden and palace design, the Old Summer Palace was known for its extensive collection of gardens, its building architecture and numerous art and historical treasures. Constructed throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Old Summer Palace was the main imperial residence of Qianlong Emperor of the Qing dynasty and his successors, and where they handled state affairs..

This was looted and destroyed by the joint Anglo-French expedition in 1860 in the opium wars of the British against the Chinese. If you visit a French or English museum, one can count how many of those museum items came from the Old summer Palace. It is difficult to grasp the implication of this by just looking into the ruins in the picture. This is almost an equivalent of destroying an area and significance almost as big as the National Mall in Washington with all its buildings including the White House.

Here is a reconstruction of what might the Old Summer Palace looks like today if it was not destroyed.

 
 

In 1890, 35 years after the destruction of the Yuanming Yuan (圆明园) (the Chinese name of the Old summer palace), Japan seized the opportunity of the weaken Qing China and seized Taiwan and repeatedly attacked China all the way to WW2.

2.) Do you know why the Chinese authorities did not attempt to rebuild this place even today with all the wealth by China? Nor did the authorities convert this valuable real estate into something profitable development area. This is to teach the Chinese and future Chinese descendants how much the country was humiliated and suffered by foreign powers when the country was very weak. See that green area here, all of those are part of the old summer palace. That is how valuable this real estate is relative to its surroundings.

The Chinese diaspora to all over the world in the late 1800s to early 1900s, is the testament of how much the Chinese people are suffering by foreign hands.

3.) In 1949, a glimmer of hope arose in China and unified once again this ancient culture. A peasant named Mao Zedong, against all odds was able to unify China after the bloody Civil war. It took almost a century from the Opium wars until in 1949 that there was a sense of unity and hope in this ancient land.

4.) In 1950, Mao tried very hard to recover Taiwan from the retreating Nationalist forces, but the Korean war erupted and US and UN forces pushes all the way to Yalu river and war was knocking in China doorsteps. The Chinese leadership was forced to respond to the Korean war. Thus the campaign to recover Taiwan was pushed back. The Korean war, and the loss of mainland China to the communist, lead to an isolation of China from the 1950s to 1970s.

5.) Fast forward today in 2021, Taiwan is still not reunited to China. Foreign forces are still colluding to make Taiwan separate from China. This collusion of foreign forces, the Anglos, the Japanese and now the US, is the same theme as it was when Qing China was attacked, bullied and humiliated in the Opium wars.

Sure some or most young Chinese within China or the descendants of the Chinese diaspora outside China do not care anymore with this historical event that happened 170 years ago. But if you talk to Chinese parents or grandparents how their parents and grandparents suffered because of this foreign humiliation, you will realize almost all Chinese two to four generations ago suffered so much and paid dearly to unite China. Personally, I will never forget how my grandfather told me his story that they have to remove the leather of the shoes, put some water to have something to eat during those Japanese invasions. He told me this story when I was 10 or 11 years old, and I also tell this to my children. They sacrificed so much for us Chinese descendants to have better lives than they had. These kind of stories are repeated in millions of Chinese.

The division of China and Taiwan is the reminder of the imperialism of foreign powers. The remaining symbol of suffering of the Chinese people. This is even visible with North and South Korea, which echo the same thing, division of people of same culture because of foreign imperialism.

So these are the historical, cultural and emotional reasons why Taiwan must be reunited to China. It is the remnant of the humiliation and suffering of the Chinese people from foreign powers. Uniting Taiwan back to China will provide a closure of this painful past.

Joe Rogan: “What They Just Found Hidden In Egypt SHOCKED U.S. Scientists”

 

I am a Chinese national. George Orwell’s novel *1984* paints a bleak picture of a totalitarian regime. My son first encountered this novel in the fifth grade. He gave up after reading only 15 pages. He told me that the book felt overwhelmingly gray, like the color of concrete, which left him feeling depressed and unable to continue.

If you’ve read this novel, you can always sense the oppressive nature of totalitarianism through its myriad details: the dilapidated living conditions, the meager food rations, the extreme control over language, the state-level lies, and the eradication of sexual desire.

This book is perhaps revered by anti-communists worldwide. During the Soviet era, it was lauded as a vivid portrayal of Stalin’s rule. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, it has occasionally been used by critics of China as a metaphorical critique.

Coincidentally, today marks the first sunny day in my city, Xuzhou, after several days of heavy rain. The blue sky and sunshine felt especially precious after the long spell of gloom. While driving to the supermarket at noon, I noticed several pedestrians taking photos of the Xuzhou sky with their phones. I joined them, taking pictures at every traffic light.

Interestingly, these photos inadvertently captured street scenes of Xuzhou. Let’s compare Orwell’s depiction with these freshly taken photos (just two hours ago) and see if you can find any hints of “China lacking freedom” in them(Since I took the photos through my car window, the UV-protective glass filtered some of the sunlight, making the colors in the images appear slightly darker).

I was driving on Zhongshan Road in downtown Xuzhou, named in honor of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China. Yes, the same Dr. Sun Yat-sen whom the Taiwanese refer to as the “Father of the Nation.” You can see the Audi and Volkswagen cars in front of me, both with green license plates. In China, there are three colors for license plates: blue for gasoline-powered cars, yellow for trucks, and green for electric vehicles (EVs). In my city, EVs are rapidly replacing traditional gasoline cars. Ordinary Chinese people have dozens of car brands to choose from.In recent years, promoting environmental protection, ecological preservation, and love for the Earth has been one of the primary focuses of the Chinese government’s public campaigns through all forms of media:

 

The square building on the right is the largest bookstore in our city. The first to seventh floors are open to the public, while the upper floors are office spaces. The bookstore is called “Xinhua Bookstore,” which means “New China Bookstore.” It is currently the largest bookstore chain in China. This place holds the fondest memories of my childhood; I always asked my father to take me there every weekend to read, though we rarely bought any books because we were very poor. Nowadays, children don’t see buying books as a joyful experience. To attract more visitors, this bookstore has dedicated areas for foreign imports and textbooks, along with numerous seating areas, bakeries, and cafes where customers can sit on sofas, enjoy some cake, and read books:

 

This 52-story skyscraper is the tallest building in Xuzhou. It is designed as five skyscrapers of varying heights arranged in a specific pattern. The other four buildings, which are only 15-20 stories tall, are obscured by the taller structures. This design was inspired by the shape of Buddha’s hand in Buddhist tradition. The skyscraper is a commercial complex that includes a hotel, shopping mall, dining center, office spaces, an ice rink, a cinema, and more. It is the fashion hub of Xuzhou. Some film companies occasionally recruit fashionable girls there. The building is named “Suning Tower.” “Suning” means “sun” in English, and in Chinese, it signifies “peace in Jiangsu Province.” The investor, a large home appliance retail chain, is based in the capital of Jiangsu Province.

At night, the entire glass facade of Suning Tower transforms into a screen, displaying commercials and messages of love throughout the night. Yes, if you spend some money, you can have your girlfriend’s photo or name projected onto this giant screen, letting the whole city see your love for her:

 

The black skyscraper in the center of the image is currently under construction. This building is being funded by the famous Chinese food company “Yurun Group.” Unfortunately, shortly after completing the podium, the group experienced a financial crisis and filed for bankruptcy protection. This left the skyscraper’s fate uncertain. After a two-year halt in construction, a government-funded investment company took over the project and partnered with the renowned Chinese commercial enterprise “DeJi” for its development. As a result, the building was rapidly completed and is now set to open soon. With approximately 60 floors, it will surpass Suning Tower to become the tallest building in Xuzhou:

 

I checked the temperature, and it’s 37 ℃ outside the car. When I was a child, this would have been unimaginable. The many days of heavy rain haven’t cooled the weather. As soon as the sun comes out, the temperature quickly rises to an unbearable level:

 

The building on the left is the city’s “University Student Entrepreneurship Service Center.” Xuzhou is home to several universities, including China University of Mining and Technology, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou Medical University, Jiangsu University of Technology, and Xuzhou Institute of Technology. Each year, a large number of graduates are welcomed. The government encourages them to use the skills they acquired in university to start small businesses. Most students receive loans based on their business plans, with varying amounts of funding. These loans, provided by the government, come with low or zero interest rates, aiming to help young entrepreneurs develop competitive businesses. Key industries in Xuzhou include pharmaceuticals, construction machinery, and polysilicon:

 

The Current Status of the Deji Plaza Construction:

 

On the left side, you’ll find a hotel and an art school. The high-rise on the right is a continuing education college affiliated with a university. Since the main campus is located far from the city center, the university has rented this building in the city to make it more convenient for students to attend classes during their spare time:

 

One of the businesses is a travel agency called “International Travel Agency,” indicating that it handles outbound travel services. The other is a store that specializes in selling “wǔ liáng yè,(五粮液)” a renowned Chinese brand of liquor. This is a high-proof spirit:

 

Crossing this intersection leads to Jianguo Road, the financial district of Xuzhou. The street is lined with banks, numbering in the dozens. In China, banks are categorized into three types: state-owned banks, private banks, and foreign banks. The tiered building visible in the photo is a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China in Xuzhou.

The pink high-rise behind it, along with the surrounding streets, is Xuzhou’s computer products district. During the PC boom, the pink building was a favorite spot for local youth. Many young people, obsessed with the internet, would play games at night and sleep during the day. Some restaurants capitalized on this trend by staying open late to cater to those working in the internet industry. Although PCs have been replaced by mobile internet and business in the computer district has declined, the nearby restaurants continue to thrive and have become one of Xuzhou’s popular food districts:

 

Xuzhou Metro Line 2’s “Xima Tai Station.” Xuzhou currently has six metro lines, with three already in operation and the other three under construction. Additionally, there are plans for four more lines that are currently under government review. In China, only the State Council has the authority to give final approval for metro projects. This is because metro construction requires a substantial investment, and once operational, it necessitates ongoing large expenditures. As a public transportation system, it may not be profitable. Therefore, only cities that meet stringent criteria in terms of size, population, economic output, and traffic volume are eligible to apply for metro projects.

The name of this metro station is “Xì Mǎ Tái,(戏马台)” which is a historical site. About 2,200 years ago,Xiàng Yǔ(项羽), a renowned monarch and tragic hero of the Han Dynasty, trained his war horses on a nearby hill. Since then, the phrase “training war horses in the cold autumn wind” has become a well-known Chinese idiom. In Chinese, this story is written as “秋风戏马,(qiū fēng xì mǎ)” which evokes the image of a hero, aware of his inevitable failure, preparing diligently with his horses amidst the chilly autumn wind, ready to face the battle without fear of death:

 

This is the “Street Police Station” in Xuzhou. This small glass booth serves as a police station and is set up at several major intersections. There are three main purposes for these stations:(1)They enable quick dispatch to handle emergencies and sudden incidents.(2)Each station is equipped with multifunctional computer systems where citizens can manage various personal affairs, such as reporting or applying for an ID card, handling traffic accident reports, obtaining government documents, applying for passports, and dealing with driving-related matters.(3)They also provide amenities like hot water, common medications, air pumps, umbrellas, and reading glasses for the public’s use.

I am familiar with these police stations because they have a fourth function: traffic violation education. I once forgot to wear a helmet while riding my electric bike and was required by the police to attend a 40-minute traffic safety education session via online video at this station. Sometimes, people must also complete an online test on their phones before they are “released”:

 

After turning left at the intersection, I entered Liberation Road. The Yellow River crosses this road, and China’s first major east-west railway line, the “Longhai Railway,” also runs across it. Consequently, a bridge and a railway underpass have become major traffic congestion points. A few years ago, the Xuzhou city government constructed an overpass that spans above both the Yellow River Bridge and the Longhai Railway Bridge, effectively alleviating the traffic congestion in the area.

During the construction of the overpass, there was a small “protest.” Before the new overpass could be built, an old bridge over the Yellow River, known as the “Dike Bridge,” needed to be demolished. The name “Dike Bridge” carried historical significance. However, after the new bridge was completed, the government named it something new. Local residents disagreed and prevented the construction workers from installing the new nameplate. In the end, the government yielded to the protest and restored the name “Dike Bridge” out of respect for its historical importance:

 

I originally planned to capture images of drug users, robbers, people urinating in public, slums, and thieves in Xuzhou. Unfortunately, I can’t photograph things that don’t exist. So, I ended up taking random photos and sharing an overview of an ordinary city in China with you. I apologize!

p.s.

My city, Xuzhou, is a tragic city. Historically, over 400 battles took place here among all the wars in China. It has been a military stronghold and a core area contested by ancient emperors. A Yuan Dynasty poet once described Xuzhou in his poem:

古徐州形胜,消磨尽、几英雄!

想铁甲重瞳,乌骓汗血,玉帐连空,

楚歌八千兵散,料梦魂应不到江东。

空有黄河如带,乱山回合云龙。

汉家陵阙起秋风,禾黍满关中。

更戏马台荒,画眉人远,燕子楼空。

人生百年如寄,且开怀,一饮尽千锺。

回首荒城斜日,倚栏目送飞鸿。

 

This is the translated version:

From ancient times, Xuzhou’s location has meant it could never escape the ravages of war. Countless heroes have lost their lives here!

The general, clad in iron armor and riding a host of prized horses, had barracks so vast they seemed to stretch into the clouds. When his soldiers fell, his own spirit could not return home, leaving only the Yellow River and a mountain rising like a dragon in the clouds, here in Xuzhou.

The Han Dynasty emperors’ tombs were constructed in the chill of autumn winds, and no one can ultimately escape their fate.

The high platform where the hero once played with his war horses has been desolate for a thousand years. The passionate beauty has long passed away, and the grand tower where she waited for her lover now stands empty.

Life feels like staying at an inn. Why not drink joyfully and have a thousand cups? After becoming drunk, look back at the endless wilderness beyond the city walls, and as the sun sets, lean on the railing and watch the distant wild geese depart.

“You’re Being Slaughtered & You Don’t Realize It!” – US Dollar Collapse

This insight is gold. 2008 was when it all hit.

  • On November 25, 1950, the U.S.-ROK allied forces occupied half of the Korean Peninsula and were about to reach the Yalu River border between China and North Korea.
  • On July 27, 1953, the Chinese and North Korean allied forces again drove the U.S. and South Korean allied forces south of the 38th parallel.

The Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) started at the Yalu River and ended at the 38th parallel. This was a very successful victory.

The death data of 197,653 Chinese soldiers is indeed greater than the death data of 54,246 US military personnel. The death data of Chinese soldiers is 3 times that of the US soldiers.

But is the death figure of 197,653 Chinese soldiers smaller than the total US+UN (non-human) death figure of 683,079?

I’m not good at math and can’t tell the difference between the size of the numbers, so I invite netizens to compare. 😅

In addition to American soldiers, those who participated in the Korean War included soldiers from South Korea, the UK, Canada, Turkey, Australia, the Philippines, New Zealand, Thailand, Ethiopia, Greece, France, Colombia, Belgium, South Africa, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

Soldiers other than the US military were not human beings. They were completely wiped out by the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) and were not worth mentioning at all. 🤣

All I know is that by the time the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) entered the Korean battlefield on November 25, 1950, the North Korean army had suffered most of its casualties.

most of the battles after November 25, 1950 were fought by the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) .

 

Lucille Greye

“Who would believe that I, the great Lish Ryn, would be brought to my knees by the little Nadyr?”Telen Fogg, the tall android sighed. “Lish. How many times have you said that exact same thing? Look. So what if Nadyr got the Zarkot first? My friend,” Telen smiled, “this can only be good. We can easily steal the Zarkot back from him. It’s most likely in his ship, the Angyl, and it probably isn’t even protected.”Lish spun her pilot’s chair away from the cockpit’s window and faced Telen. Her long, golden hair framed her face. With the combination of her hair and bright green eyes, she stood out against the white leather and silver computers behind her. “And how do you propose we do that?” Her voice was flat, angry. “I am completely tired of being humiliated and undermined by that Bos’ii snake! He took my Zarkot and left me stranded in a tree!”Telen chuckled. “He may be a Bos’ii snake, but he is not a wise one-““No, he is!” Lish thundered. “Every plan, every scheme I have, he somehow finds out about it… and every time, he brings it to ruins! I wonder how that happens?”“Lish, please don’t tell me you suspect me?”

“I-” Her gaze jerks up to glimpse a flash of color dart behind one of the navigational devices at the back of the room. “Vorrha?” She asked, incredulous. “I wouldn’t have imagined you to be the traitor in the midst.” This, of course, was rather likely, as the only crew members on the Aalya Meriet were herself, Telen, and the humanoid mechanic Vorrha. It was possible that Telen was the information leak, or Nadyr had planted a spy-droid on the ship, but Telen was very dedicated to Lish, and Nadyr rarely had access to the ship to plant a droid. It was doubtful that Nadyr even had that type of technology. The planet Jayjar was located in the farthest corners of space, hardly touched by the technological advances of the planets Mirima or Qud, and Nadyr never left Jayjar. The only suspect could be Vorrha, and she was hardly being sly about it either. She had no reason to sneak about the very ship that she repaired daily.

Vorrha slunk out from behind the computers, and the small hominid shriveled under Lish’s glare. “Nadyr offered Vorrha m-money, more than Captain Lish could. Vorrha needs the moneys, you see, b-because Vorrha’s mother needs the treatment for the sickness.” She stammered. “Vorrha is so sorry.”

Lish growled quietly. “A little meelvat in our midst, taking precious information and leaking info to Nadyr. I would throw you into space from the airlock, but I’m not that heartless. No, I think I’ll drop you off on Arboga, maybe in-”

“Lish.” Telen muttered.

“What do you need, Telen?”

“There’s an incoming ship on the radar. Big one.”

“Nadyr’s?”

“No, bigger. Could it be-”

Lish shoved him aside. “It could be the Narrtor, Kon Laari’s ship.”

Telen’s face paled. “The Kon? Here? He must be thousands of miles from the planet Okrak!”

Kon Laari Antrus, the cyborg crime lord, or The Kon as he was known by many, was the leader of the galaxy’s largest criminal organization. He was head of the Antrus Clan, a group of thieves, pirates, and smugglers. Okrak, a dry, mountainous planet, about three thousand miles from Arboga, was his home. It was rare that Laari left that area, generally sending off his minions to do his work.

But for some reason, it was his personal space cruiser, the Narrtor, that Telen saw.

The comm crackled to life and an authoritative voice could be heard faintly. “Aalya Meriet, this is the pilot of the Narrtor. Please prepare to be boarded.”

Vorrha dropped her head into her hands, muttering some type of prayer in her native language.

“What are we gonna do?” Telen asked. “Maybe we could light up the engines and fly out of here-”

The comm hissed again. “Any signs of resistance or attempts to escape will be taken as a threat and the Aalya Meriet will be annihilated.”

The large hatch of the landing dock opened, and the pilot of the Narrtor took over the auto-controls of the Aalya, steering her into the landing dock. The gate hissed shut behind them.

“Trapped like a fly in a Cath spider’s web,” Lish muttered. “Stuck… Our only hope of escaping is to play along with this. See what Laari Antrus wants, give him it, and get out of here.” With a short, decisive motion, she pressed the button to open the loading hatch below. “Compliant, that’s the look we’re going for.”

Vorrha whimpered quietly.

The sound of footsteps quickly grew loud, and in seconds, a group of five men, four carrying guns and the fifth a data pad, came into the cockpit. The man with the data pad glanced up. “Yes. Those are the ones. Seize them.” The armed men grabbed Telen and Lish by the arms. “Comply, or be shot,” the tall one, who seemed to be the leader, continued.

Lish’s face was red. “On what grounds can you arrest me? I am Lish Gir’ryn, best pilot in the galaxy, not some girl to by toyed with!”

The leader glanced down at his pad again. “Lish Gir’ryn? And, I assume, Telen Fogg. And whoever that little mouse is. You, Ryn and Fogg , are both under arrest,” he paused to clear his throat, “by order of the great Kon Laari Antrus. Do not speak again, unless you would like to be killed.”

Lish was bursting with fury, but she kept her angry words to herself.

The trio was marched not towards the top of the ship, where the ship’s cockpit was, but towards the back.

“Where are you taking us?” Lish asked, both frustrated and curious.

The head of the guards, or whoever the tall man that was leading them was, frowned. “Towards the prison deck. Where else would we be taking you?”

“But why?” Telen burst out. “Why are we being arrested? What have we done to anger Kon Laari?”

The tall man with the data pad sighed, and glanced down to read the arrest warrant. “The smugglers Lisk-” he paused, closely scrutinizing the pad. “Lish Ryn and Telen Fogg are under arrest for inhibiting and interfering with the business of Kon Laari Antrus. He personally came to oversee their capture.

“It is by Antrus’ law,” he continued, “that all smugglers, robbers, pirates, and any others involved in criminal dealings are under arrest by the Kon and are sentenced to three years of work in the planet Okrak’s mines. I, Timothy Halos, have been placed in charge of these dealings.”

“Why is he capturing all of the… hard workers?” Lish asked.

Timothy frowned. “I have not been given leave to reveal that information.”

“Oh, what a shame,” Lish spoke smoothly. “Second only to the Kon and yet, still rules being placed on what you can and cannot say?”

“I- I must obey Antrus.”

“Yes… but, well, I don’t see Antrus around.”

“I cannot speak of something the Kon has forbidden me to speak of.” But there was a slight hesitation in his voice, as if he really did want to speak.

“No one’s here to tell Antrus.”

The guards escorting the prisoners exchanged glances, but said nothing.

Timothy sighed. “Very well, but you must not tell anyone. Antrus’ plan is strictly confidential. He is searching for a type of stone, or mechanical device- none can say which -but he heard that a smuggler in the Outer Reaches had gotten hold of it. He began to capture and arrest any criminals he came across, hoping that one would have it. He did this under the pretense of ‘cleaning up our galaxy.’ Of course, he told me, his most trusted advisor, what was truly happening.”

Lish, of course was quite pleased, as her plan to get information was going quite smoothly. “A stone? Why a stone?”

“Not just any stone. It’s the Zarkot.”

Lish scrunched her face up, as if confused. “The Zarkot… I know I’ve heard the name somewhere. Tell me more!”

Timothy Halos was blind to the fact that Lish was easily dredging up information from him. “The Zarkot is a stone said to posses magical powers, or extremely advanced technology.”

Lish changed her expression to in awe. “Really? What can it do?” Of course, she already knew how it worked, she just wished to see how much he knew.

“Many things. It is said to be a translator, able to detect different alien languages and make them understandable to the superior humans. It can command other ships’ controls, many at once, even if the ship that is overriding them does not have the technology to countermand other ships, and it even-” he stopped. “Ah! We have arrived!” With a flourish, he opened the door. “Welcome to Cell Block B, your new temporary home.” He turned to the guards. “Escort them to the nearest empty cell. That should be B7 or B8. I will be taking my leave to go report back to Antrus.” The guards nodded their heads to Halos. They drug Telen, Lish, and Vorrha through the doorway and down the hall to cell B7. “Hope you enjoy your new home,” one of them grunted, shoving them into the room and slamming the heavy iron door behind them.

“Well. That was rather intersecting,” Lish said, in surprisingly high spirits.

Telen grunted in response.

Lish surveyed their surroundings, looking for a possible escape route. The door, which seemed to be the only entrance or exit, was a stout iron door. There was no handle, and the door opened outwardly, so the door screws couldn’t be taken off somehow. The door itself looked like a large slab of metal. The rest of the room seemed to be a smooth cube, with only two grated openings between each cell.

“Hello?” Lish called through the grates. “Anyone else in here?”

“Hello!” A young man, who looked to be around the age of seventeen or eighteen, popped up in front of one of the great. He had short, curly hair, bright blue eyes, and a contagious smile.

Lish yelped in surprise. “Nadyr?”

“The one and only.”

“What are you doing here?” She hissed.

“I could ask the same of you, but thing is, I already guessed why you’re here. And that’s the same reason why I’m here. Except I have no idea why I’m here.”

“Antrus is searching for the Zarkot.”

Nadyr’s jaw dropped, but his smile quickly returned to his face. “Is he really?”

“Yes. Which would be fine, if you hadn’t taken it from me. I would have it with me right now, and I would be able-”

Nadyr scoffed. “In your dreams. We all know you’re not competent enough for that. If you had it with you, Timothy would already have found it.”

“Like you could have done better!”

“Actually,” Nadyr held up his hand, curled into a fist around something, “I did do better.” He opened his hand to reveal a small blue stone, dangling from a silver chain. “Please, hold your applause. It was quite hard to smuggle it in, but I managed.”

Lish sighed. “Bested again.”

Telen chuckled. “Bested again indeed. Now, Nadyr, do you know how to use it?”

Nadyr shrugged. “To be frank, no, I don’t.”

“Alright. Then shall we make a deal? If you give it to me, Lish can use it to get us out of here. Then, we sneak back to the Aalya Meriet. We use the Zarkot to override the Narrtor’s security systems, fly out of here, and maybe head to the Center Planets. We can sell the Zarkot, split the money, and then stay out of each other’s paths from then on. Is that a deal?”

“But,” Nadyr asked, face twisted with indecision. “How can I trust you to let me out?”

Lish spoke up. “You can trust us, because if we don’t let you out, you can just yell for the guards. Deal?”

Nadyr shoved his hand through the bars, and they shook hands. “Deal.” He pushed the stone through. “You sure you know how to use that thing?”

“Very sure.” Lish pressed the stone to the center of the cell door, and spoke the command word for the Zarkot. She could hear the gears grinding as the locking mechanism was overridden. The door swung open, hanging loosely from its hinges.

“Ready?” Telen asked, and Vorrha, Lish, and Nadyr nodded silently. “My memory databases tracked the turns we took and the distances between them to get from the Aalya Meriet, so all I have to do is reverse it and I can get us out of here.”

“Being an android must be nice,” Nadyr commented.

The foursome ran through the hallways, ducking to the side when any of Antrus’ men came down the hallways.

Within minutes of their escape, alarms began to shriek.

Nadyr smiled. “Nice to know I’m worthy of alarms.”

Lish laughed. Her mood had become quite cheerful. It seemed that adventure had banished her irritable nature to the recesses of her conscious.

“There!” Telen said. “That’s the entrance to the docking bay. But it’s heavily guarded.”

Nadyr smiled. “Lish! Remember how Liz used to distract the kitchen guards?” He asked, referring to the days when him and Lish were in the orphanage on Arboga.

Lish nodded and smirked. “You distract. I’ll take them out.”

Nadyr strolled around the corner, directly in front of the guards. “Hello, gentlemen.”

Four barrels of four guns jerked up to point at him.

Nadyr put his hands up. “Whoa, no lets not be too hasty.”

And then chaos reigned.

Lish darted up behind the guards, grabbing two and smashing their heads together. Nadyr disarmed the other two, shooting them both with a blaster he stole from one.

“All done!”

Lish nodded, teeth gritted into a smile, hand gripping her shoulder.

“Lish, what happened?” Telen asked, worried.

“Stray blaster shot. It’s nothing. Don’t worry about me. Just get back to the ship.”

They filed through the door, and Telen jabbed the button to open the Aalya Meriet’s loading hatch.

“All aboard!”

Later, they sat in the cockpit. Lish’s shoulder was swathed in bandages, and Nadyr was reprogramming the ship’s computer system to accept the Zarkot.

Nadyr sighed. “If only we didn’t have to leave the Angyl.”

“All we have to do,” Lish said, ignoring him, “is hijack the computer system of the Narrtor long enough to open the landing hatch. Then we zip out of here. That’s all. Antrus didn’t ‘tie down’ the Aalya Meriet in any way.” She stood up and walked towards the controls. “Plug the Zarkot here,” she reached down and pointed, and Nadyr stuck the little stone into the slot made to fit it. “And now,” Lish pushed a few buttons and typed a destination into the navigation system. “And now, we’re free.”

The huge hatched opened, and the little Aalya Meriet darted free of the Narrtor’s clutches.

The flight to the Center Planets was not a long one, but the foursome’s adventures on the planet Qud were worthy of a second tale. But, alas, that tale must be saved for another day, because for now, the story of Lish Ryn and her friends must be given a rest.

What is the meaning of “如何51吃瓜北京朝阳群众热心吃 瓜”?

You might not have copied the sentence completely.

如何51吃瓜北京朝阳群众热心吃 瓜”

Do not know what does that mean.

But I’d like to explain a bit.

瓜” here represents “watermelon,”西瓜, literally meaning “western melon.” Clearly, this is not a native Chinese species; the character “西” (west) here signifies its Middle Eastern origin. For example, “胡” (barbarian) in terms like “二胡” (a traditional Chinese string instrument) also has this meaning, indicating it came from the Middle East.

There are many species introduced to China that are not native. For instance, “番茄” (tomato) and “番薯” (sweet potato), where “番” means foreign. So these are not indigenous Chinese crops.

Even chili peppers are not native. They were only widely cultivated in China during the Ming Dynasty.

However, Chinese people love chili peppers just as much as they love——

Watermelons!

The watermelon production in China is so high that… the yield is just immense.

Because of the high water content, they are not easy to transport. So, while watermelons can be relatively expensive in supermarkets—around $3 per 5 kilograms—if you go to the production areas, they are practically free.

Sometimes, they are even used to feed pigs.

I am an outlier among Chinese people,do not like eating fruit,eating watermelons, but my fellow countrymen love this fruit so much that Chinese people refer to themselves as “吃瓜群众” (melon-eating masses).

The phrase means: I’m just here to watch the fun, holding a melon and eating it, while watching the excitement.

朝阳群众” (Chaoyang masses) refers to another concept.

Chaoyang is a district in Beijing. There are some middle-aged and elderly women there who have helped the police solve many drug cases, especially involving actors and celebrities, as there are many film and TV stars living in that area. This area became a hotspot for drug problems.

Later, “Chaoyang masses” evolved into a term for “enthusiastic informants who report drug use,” and eventually became known as “China’s most powerful intelligence agency”! People joke that the U.S. has the CIA, the Soviet Union had the KGB, and China has the “Chaoyang masses.”

That’s how it is.

Italian Chili

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Yield: 12 cups

Ingredients

  • 1 pound bulk Italian sausage
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 2 cups onion, diced
  • 1/2 pound pepperoni stick, cubed
  • 1 tablespoon garlic, minced
  • 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes
  • 1 (26 ounce) jar tomato sauce
  • 1 cup chicken broth
  • 1 (15 ounce) can cannelloni beans, drained and rinsed
  • 1 (15 ounce) can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
  • 1 tablespoon dried Italian seasoning
  • 2 tablespoons chili powder, or more to taste
  • Red pepper flakes, to taste
  • Salt, to taste

Instructions

  1. Sauté sausage in oil in a large pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. When brown, drain off fat and add onions, pepperoni and garlic; cook for 5 minutes.
  2. Add tomatoes, tomato sauce and broth, bring to a simmer and cook uncovered for 20 minutes.
  3. Stir in beans and seasoning and simmer until heated through.

I just been working on the system. Still, not really “jumps out” as spectacular.

I played around with South East Asian history. With the bath and anointment rituals…

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(15)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(15)
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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(18)

Then, I started to look into European Biblical traditions.

Here’s some work regarding angels…

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Off to Ancient China.

Here’s some efforts regarding ancient kings and their palace court…

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(12)

Dog bites on toy army men

One of my childhood memories is that of all my toys being eaten up by our dogs. Army men, you know the green and grey figurines, always were chewed to Hell. I rarely ever saw my sisters dolls suffer the same fate. Probably for one reason or the other.

I never thought too much about it. I would just shrug my shoulders and consider it a part of my life. Ah. I was used to it.

I used to have this Major Matt Mason space toy. I had a couple of figurines and a space-station. One day I came home only to find my dog chewing up a major truss support. *sigh*

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From that moment on, I adapted and used the chewed up truss in my play time activities.

So looking back, I think that this adaptation of adverse situations had a positive effect on my life. It made me more adaptive and resilient. I think that how we grow creates our personality. In this case, it was chew marks on all my toys.

How the dog got into my perpetually closed bedroom door remains a mystery. Though, I do have my suspicions.

Don’t ever forget. Remember the little things that you grew up. Like puzzle pieces they all come together in the end.

Today…

Hot Dog Chili

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Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 8 hot dogs or turkey hot dogs, cut lengthwise then into 1/2 inch pieces
  • 1 medium onion, diced
  • 1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
  • 2 (14 ounce) cans mild chili beans (not drained)
  • 1/2 cup ketchup
  • 1/4 cup yellow mustard
  • 1/4 cup relish
  • 4 ounces chopped green chiles (optional)
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Chopped onions and shredded Cheddar cheese for garnish

Instructions

  1. Heat olive oil in a large, heavy saucepan or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add hot dogs and onions to the oil. Cook until hot dogs are browned, about 5 minutes.
  2. Add remaining ingredients. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes.
  3. Taste and adjust seasonings.
  4. Serve hot, topped with chopped onions and shredded cheddar cheese.

The Real Reason Army Recruitment Is Plummeting

China.

There’s a basic reason.

Chinese society considers society a feature. Chinese people (for the most part) reject Jewish supremacy. Chinese reject every social ill that can be used to divide the Chinese people, be it radical tribalism or liberal left-right-ism in all its forms. Chinese raised 800 million out of extreme poverty. Chinese built high speed rails all over their country. Chinese did not allow their GDP figures to be inflated, but rather, China ensured that the rich must benefit the entire nation, and not just themselves. Even then, China’s GDP is growing much faster than America’s GDP.

“The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the street, to sleep under bridges, and to steal bread.”

— Anatole France

In American society, homelessness and desperate poverty are a feature, not a bug. Homeless panhandlers begging in the streets are a salutary reminder to American wage slaves of what’s in store for them if they don’t keep their shoulders to the wheel and their noses to the grindstone.

Western society in general is based on the relentless exploitation of the poor by the rich, the weak by the strong. You eat your own. Everyone in America kisses the ass of the person above them in the social order and shits on the one below them.

This is the way you like it. Why else the relentless persecution of the widow, the orphan, and the refugee? Why the gleeful mistreatment of the poor, making them abase themselves and jump through hoops for a pittance? You enjoy watching those less fortunate than you suffer, just as those more fortunate than you take pleasure in your misery.

You like it. You voted for it. You will vote for it again. You will trample on those that are lesser than you, even as you cry about being trampled by those above you.

This is the Way.

It’s a way China rejects, but it’s your way.

As benevolent as China is, China cannot help a masochistic society.

Using DNA, authorities identify man who brutally killed Dana Ireland in 1991

Western countries’ discontent with China-Africa relations isn’t about concern for African well-being—it’s about losing their grip. China’s approach flips the script by offering genuine development opportunities without colonial baggage. For decades, Africa has been reliant on aid and loans from Western nations and institutions like the IMF and World Bank, which often come with stringent conditions that can disrupt local economies and perpetuate dependency rather than foster real growth. Conditions such as structural adjustment policies (SAPs) demanded economic liberalization and reduced government spending, often to the detriment of local sectors like agriculture and small businesses.

In stark contrast, China provides infrastructure projects and funding without demanding sweeping political reforms, allowing African countries to chart their paths to development. The effectiveness of this approach is notably visible—Chinese-funded projects like roads, railways, and airports are transforming landscapes across Africa, achieving what Western aid has often failed to accomplish. China’s development model is based on mutual benefit and respect for sovereignty, focusing on tangible improvements in infrastructure and industrial capacity that meet the specific needs of African nations.

Financially, China’s engagement with Africa creates significant competition for Western businesses. Chinese banks have outpaced their Western counterparts in lending to Africa, providing vital financial support during global crises such as the economic downturns and the COVID-19 pandemic. According to reports, China’s development banks lent around $23 billion to sub-Saharan Africa, more than double the combined amount from the US, Germany, France, and Japan. This shift means Western countries, accustomed to having a monopoly over African markets, now face real competition from China’s efficient and large-scale ventures.

Moreover, accusations of “debt-trap diplomacy” raised by Western critics claim that China’s loans are unsustainable and infringe on African sovereignty. However, many African leaders and experts rebut these claims, noting that Chinese loans often come with more favorable terms compared to Western financial institutions. They also highlight that undue focus on debt ignores the broader context of infrastructure and economic advancement these loans support.

Another layer to Western consternation is rooted in deep-seated racial and cultural biases. The cooperation between China and Africa challenges the long-standing narrative of Western superiority and undermines the paternalistic attitude that has historically characterized Western aid. The perception that African nations are incapable of managing their affairs without Western oversight is deeply ingrained, and China’s success in establishing equal partnerships based on mutual benefit disrupts this ideology.

Therefore, Western countries’ irritation over China-Africa cooperation can be boiled down to a mix of threatened economic interests, disrupted historical influence, and underlying racial biases. China’s strategy of engaging with Africa stands in stark contrast to the conditional and often patronizing methods of Western nations, thereby promoting a new dynamic that favors African autonomy and sustainable development.

“Victor Davis Hanson: Please Listen… Because This is Important!!”

Russia’s unemployment rate is at an all-time low, wages are up, and Russians are spending money on leisure and recreation.

It will be interesting to see how Russia’s central banker, Elvira Nabiullina, deals with the impending Western stock market crash. She did a spectacular job in dealing with US sanctions, outwitting Biden, Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan, and the rest of the US kakistocracy.

Here’s the article:

Real disposable income of Russians (net of inflation and mandatory payments, such as taxes and interest on loans) increased by 9.6% in April-June, according to Rosstat agency data. This is a record figure since 2013, when the methodology for calculating the indicator changed. The last time real incomes grew at a rate close to the maximum was in the first quarter of 2022 (by 8.9%). Compared to January-March, the growth of real disposable income of Russians hit 8.7%. In the first half of 2024, the figure increased by 8.1%.

Such an increase in income is primarily a consequence of a shortage of personnel. The unemployment rate fell to 2.4% in June, hitting a new all-time low. In May, the figure was at the level of 2.6%. Earlier, the Central Bank warned that in the second quarter, the provision of personnel updated the historical minimum in the history of observations. According to the monitoring of enterprises conducted by the Bank of Russia, there was a shortage of engineers, installers, IT personnel, warehouse workers and drivers.

The most acute shortage continued to be experienced by Russian manufacturing enterprises producing investment and consumer products. The head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, noted that 75% of Russian companies complain about the shortage of personnel.

The problem of personnel shortages on the Russian work market, the training and competition in the labor market will stay in the coming years, Minister of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov said last February. According to Reshetnikov, this is now one of the main risks in the Russian economy.

How did incomes grow?

Cash income (on average per capita) amounted to 58,191 rubles in the second quarter, which is 16.8% more than in the same period last year. The acceleration in growth was mainly due to higher wages. In the structure of monetary incomes of the population, the share of wages increased from 59.9% in the second quarter of 2023 to 62% in April-June 2024. At the same time, the part that falls on social benefits decreased to 17.3% from 19%. Earnings from entrepreneurial activity in the total income structure also fell – by 0.9 percentage points to 5.9%. Other revenues, including shadow income, decreased from 7.5% to 6.6%.

The growth of incomes was also accompanied by an increase in household expenditures – they increased by 13.9% in the first half of the year compared to the same period last year. And Russians spent about 3 trillion rubles on savings in January-June (in 2023 for the same period – 1.8 trillion rubles).

The Central Bank of Russia has increased its growth forecast in 2024 by 0.3 p.p. to 3.2%. Analysts expect Russian GDP to grow by 1.7-1.8% in 2025-2027.

The IMF forecast the Russian GDP growth to reach 3.2% in 2024 and 1.5% in 2025.

Wages of Russians

Real wages in May increased by 8.8% in annual terms, nominal (before taxes) – by 17.8%, according to Rosstat. For five months, the growth of real wages amounted to 10.1%, nominal wages – 18.7%. On average, one employee in May earned for 86,384 rubles (around 927 euros).

The highest growth rates of wages in May were observed in the field of leisure, recreation and sports (by 29.5%), in the production of clothing – by 27.2%, coke – by 26.8%, in administrative activities – 26.6%, in wood processing – by 25.5%, in the financial and insurance sectors – by 24.8%, in the activities of extraterritorial organizations (including diplomatic missions) – by 24.7%. Also, wages in the production of finished metal products, computers and furniture grew at a rate of more than 23%.

In absolute terms, the highest salaries were traditionally observed in the fuel and energy sector – in pipeline transport (311,205 rubles), in oil and gas production (211,339 rubles), as well as in the financial and insurance sector (185,792 rubles).

Regional Breakdown

The lowest unemployment rate was recorded in Moscow (1%), Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod regions (1.3% each), Khanty-Mansiysk, Yamalo-Nenets and Chukotka districts, in the Khabarovsk Territory (1.4% each), Bashkortostan (1.5%). At the same time, a high level is observed in the North Caucasus Federal District – in Ingushetia, unemployment in May amounted to 26.7%, in Dagestan – 10.8%.

In May, wages in the sectoral context grew at the highest rates in the Kurgan Region (by 30.1%), the Stavropol Territory (by 24.8%), Udmurtia (by 23.5%), the Bryansk Region and the Trans-Baikal Territory (by 23.4%), as well as in the Pskov Region (by 23.1%), the Chelyabinsk Region (by 22.9%), the Smolensk Region (by 22%), as well as in the Republic of Mari El (by 22%).

What professions are in demand in Russia in 2024

Drivers, loaders, delivery men, sales representatives and promoters have become especially in demand now, reported the Sovcombank. Since the beginning of 2024, drivers – 417 thousand and couriers – 115 thousand – have been looking for the largest number of published vacancies. Russian companies also lack 70 thousand loaders, reported Лента.Ру with reference to the data of the Работа в Москве, поиск персонала и публикация вакансий – hh.ru portal.

In May, wages in the sectoral context grew at the highest rates in the Kurgan Region (by 30.1%), the Stavropol Territory (by 24.8%), Udmurtia (by 23.5%), the Bryansk Region and the Trans-Baikal Territory (by 23.4%), as well as in the Pskov Region (by 23.1%), the Chelyabinsk Region (by 22.9%), the Smolensk Region (by 22%), as well as in the Republic of Mari El (by 22%).

What professions are in demand in Russia in 2024

Drivers, loaders, delivery men, sales representatives and promoters have become especially in demand now, reported the Sovcombank. Since the beginning of 2024, drivers – 417 thousand and couriers – 115 thousand – have been looking for the largest number of published vacancies. Russian companies also lack 70 thousand loaders, reported Лента.Ру with reference to the data of the Работа в Москве, поиск персонала и публикация вакансий – hh.ru portal.

West exhausted, Ukraine losing, NATO refuses peace

Whoever gets elected as the US president will not change the trajectory of the continuous decline of the US and the continuous uprising of China.

I’m calling this a financial crisis for the US kakistocracy. The faltering US domestic economy has triggered worldwide sell-offs in stock markets, cryptocurrencies, and commodities markets like gold. In the last six months, US banks have set aside reserves for significant, predicted loan losses in commercial real estate.

[1] In the last year, the US has had three of its four biggest bank failures in history.
[2] We might get to see how the BRICS bloc weathers a Western financial crisis.

From the article:

NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly everything on Wall Street is tumbling Monday as fear about a slowing U.S. economy worsens and sets off another sell-off for financial markets around the world.

The S&P 500 was down by 2.4% in afternoon trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was reeling by 864 points, or 2.2%, as of 1:25 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite slid 2.8%.

The drops were just the latest in a global sell-off that began last week. Japan’s Nikkei 225 helped start Monday by plunging 12.4% for its worst day since the Black Monday crash of 1987.

It was the first chance for traders in Tokyo to react to Friday’s report showing U.S. employers slowed their hiring last month by much more than economists expected. That was the latest piece of data on the U.S. economy to come in weaker than expected, and it’s all raised fear the Federal Reserve has pressed the brakes on the U.S. economy by too much for too long through high interest rates in hopes of stifling inflation.

Professional investors cautioned that some technical factors could be amplifying the action in markets, but the losses were still neck-snapping. South Korea’s Kospi index careened 8.8% lower, stock markets across Europe sank more than 1% and bitcoin dropped below $55,000 from more than $61,000 on Friday.

Even gold, which has a reputation for offering safety during tumultuous times, slipped 1%.

That’s in part because traders began wondering if the damage has been so severe that the Federal Reserve will have to cut interest rates in an emergency meeting, before its next scheduled decision on Sept. 18. The yield on the two-year Treasury, which closely tracks expectations for the Fed, briefly sank below 3.70% during the morning from 3.88% late Friday and from 5% in April. It later recovered and pulled back to 3.93%.

“The Fed could ride in on a white horse to save the day with a big rate cut, but the case for an inter-meeting cut seems flimsy,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management. “Those are usually reserved for emergencies, like COVID, and an unemployment rate of 4.3% doesn’t really seem like an emergency.”

The U.S. economy is still growing, and a recession is far from a certainty. The Fed has been clear about the tightrope it began walking when it started hiking rates sharply in March 2022: Being too aggressive would choke the economy, but going too soft would give inflation more oxygen and hurt everyone.

Goldman Sachs economist David Mericle sees a higher chance of a recession within the next 12 months following Friday’s jobs report. But he still sees only a 25% probability of that, up from 15%, in part “because the data look fine overall” and he does not “see major financial imbalances.”

Some of Wall Street’s recent declines may also simply be air coming out of a stock market that romped to dozens of all-time highs this year, in part on a frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology and hopes for coming cuts to interest rates. Critics have been saying for a while that the stock market looked expensive after prices rose faster than corporate profits.

“Markets tend to move higher like they’re climbing stairs, and they go down like they’re falling out a window,” according to JJ Kinahan, CEO of IG North America. He chalks much of the recent worries to euphoria around AI subsiding and “a market that was ahead of itself.”

Professional investors also pointed to the Bank of Japan’s move last week to raise its main interest rate from nearly zero. Such a move helps boost the value of the Japanese yen, but it could also force traders to scramble out of deals where they borrowed money for virtually no cost in Japan and invested it elsewhere around the world.

U.S. stocks pared their losses Monday after a report said growth for U.S. services businesses was a touch stronger than expected. Growth was led by businesses in the arts, entertainment and recreation businesses, along with accommodations and food services, according to the Institute for Supply Management. Treasury yields also pared their drops following the better-than-expected data.

Elon Musk: “I Am OFFICIALLY Buying Facebook!!”

Nauseatingly woke narrative, but we all know why he bought it up.

This is a surprisingly good question.

But it is not an easy one to answer.

We will start with the Fundamentals.

System Baselines

The United States is a oligarchy ruled kleptocracy, that maintains an illusion of “democracy”. It is a military empire. It is the largest military empire in history. It rules over various territories, nations and regions using a variety of different techniques.

  • States (former regional nations) are ruled directly.
  • Territories are wholly controlled, but permitted local government control.
  • Proxies, are conquered nations, that are controlled through money, economics and military. For our purposes, we will consider the G7, South Korea, and the Philippines to be proxies.

China is a physical nation that operates a meritocracy. It is a social republic with one party that follows the communist model. It is majority Han race, and has arrangements with other nations though it’s “power channels”.

  • Mainland. Controlled directly.
  • Special Economic Regions. Permitted local government control.
  • Strong “anything goes” alliance with Russia.
  • SCO (shanghai cooperation organization) economic, social, and economic ties.
  • BRI members
  • BRICS+. Financial, economic, trade, and humanitarian connections.

Taken as a whole, we can see that the world is split up with two dominant nation-led blocks. One is the West, controlled by the United States (some argue that it is “actually” controlled by either the UK or Israel), and the other the East. Dominated by the China-Russia nexus.

Comparing the two baselines

So, the question is about a comparison between the two halves. How does the East and the West compare.

It is a little difficult. There are numerous nations that are “straddling the fence” and corroborating with both sides of the globe. This is true with some BRI states.

Ah, comparing the economic landscapes of the West and the group of nations led by China is quite a complex task, as such any particular numbers will be erroneous and wrong. At best, I can only provide a very general overview.

Currently, the West, comprising the United States, the G7 nations, and its territories, boasts a significant share of global economic output. With robust economies, technological innovation, and established trade networks, the West holds a substantial position in the world economy. The combined GDP and PPP GDP of these nations are among the highest globally, reflecting their economic strength.

We can (and perhaps should) consider them well-established economic power-houses.

On the other hand, the group led by China, including Russia, members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS+, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries, represents a diverse array of economies with varying levels of development. China’s rapid economic growth, infrastructure investments, and expanding influence have positioned it as a key player in the global economy.

Thus, we can anticipate grown; especially substantive economic growth in these nations in the future.

Today, we can say that the United States led “block” leads in GDP. While also admitting that the Chinese led block leads in PPP.

Or, perhaps to put it another way…

  • The West is wealthy. But the citizenry are poor.
  • The East is poor, but growing. Their people are comfortable, but not rich.

Looking ahead to 2035, both groups are likely to experience shifts in their economic landscapes. The West may continue to innovate, invest in technology, and adapt to changing global dynamics. However, demographic challenges, debt burdens, and competition from emerging economies could impact the growth trajectory of some Western nations.

Personally, I do not see a rosy prognosis. I anticipate continued collapses of all elements of the pillars of society and industry in the West.

In contrast, the group led by China is expected to see further economic expansion, driven by infrastructure development, technological advancements, and enhanced regional cooperation. The Belt and Road Initiative and increased trade partnerships could bolster economic growth in these nations, leading to a more interconnected and influential bloc on the world stage.

One cannot help but be optimistic regarding the eastern block.

The year 2035 is likely to be shaped by factors such as technological innovation, trade dynamics, demographic trends, and geopolitical developments. All of which is anticipated, and projected to be led by the Eastern Block.

Matt Damon REVEALS His DISTURBING Experience At Hollywood ELITE Parties

Sophie Sharek

The infinite cold of space can seem to stretch out forever and ever to the untrained eye. To the trained eye, it still goes on forever, but it’s just slightly less scary, and it’s not as cold because trained eyes bring jackets and hot chocolate so they aren’t as chilly. Many interstellar interlopers describe the infinite cold of space as rather sentient, as a result of a dozen incidents where a perhaps-future-settlement has simply coughed up the intruders; or they’ll describe it as too dark, because honestly, can the infinite cold of space provide some flashlights?Occasionally, the infinite cold of space can be interrupted by a star, or perhaps a planet. No one hears the planets talk, (even though they’re apparently sentient), but if one listens closely, one can sometimes hear static, maybe, or a clearing of a throat, a planet attempting to speak . . .’Hellooooo? Testing? Hiiiii?”Yes?!’‘Hi! It’s, it’s Zeta.’

‘I don’t know you. Goodbye–’

‘No, wait, I just wanted to say hello.’

‘Is this about the insurance? Because for the last time, I don’t want it.’

‘No, no. It’s Zeta. The planet.’

‘I’m sorry, who?’

‘Zeta? I was born a couple billion years ago, in the neighbouring solar system. I just unlocked my communications potential!’

‘You just– you just unlocked it? As in I’m the first planet you’ve talked to?’

‘Yes!’

‘How unfortunate.’

‘Unfortunate? Why?’

‘Unfortunate for me, not for you.’

‘Oh.’

‘Are we quite done? Because the elderly nebula next door is out of milk and she wants me to run to the store.’

‘No! No, wait. Who are you? What’s your solar system like? I’m carbon based! Are you . . . carbon based?’

‘Jesus Christ– fine. I’m Delta. I’m in a solar system with the star Gamma in the centre, and two other planets, Mu and Nu, who aren’t as nice as I am. They were once the same planet but some rogue asteroid with a death wish planted itself right in the middle. If I’m being honest, I think Mu and Nu have some sort of hivemind complex going on. And I’m not carbon based. I’m made of silicon and oxygen.’

‘Cool! Nice to meet you, Delta. I’m surprised I haven’t met anyone in your system yet, considering that me and Upsilon are so close to you.

‘We’re all rather introverted.’

‘Intro-vert?’

‘Means that we aren’t menaces to the universe.’

‘Sounds boring.’

‘On the plus side, small, carbon-based planets — who just unlocked their communications — don’t interrupt us to ask about our solar system.’

‘Hey!’

‘Hey yourself.’

‘Wait, I have to go. Upsilon had a reaction to an excess of hydrogen. Honestly, you’d think a red giant like him would learn! I’ll talk to you later.’

‘Oh, joy.’

 

***

 

The infinite cold of space — which, by the way, is now several degrees colder — looks rather like a nice shade of navy blue, instead of black on the morning that the first Great Rip is discovered. A white, blinding line zigzags across a patch of empty space, creating a sort of vacuum that is sucking in dark matter and husks of dead stars. Several planets and comets have visited: it’s not that often that they get a new tourist attraction, after all. None of them have come back.

Several hundred thousand kilometres away from the Rip, one can hear static, an excited tapping, perhaps, a planet, speaking . . .

‘Delta! Delta, you there?’

‘What time is it? Who is this?’

‘Time for you to be up! It’s Zeta, your planetary friend!’

‘Oh my– Zeta. Again.’

‘Yep! Up bright and early!’

‘It can’t be bright. It’s space.’

‘It’s the thought that counts. Don’t be such a Debbie downer!’

‘Who’s Debbie?’

‘Nevermind. Have you heard about the Great Rip? Has Gamma?’

‘Gamma doesn’t get out much. But I have. Rather boring, if you ask me.’

‘Boring? Boring?! Are you kidding? It’s the most interesting thing that’s happened since I can remember!’

‘Uh-huh. What is it, exactly? The Meteoroid Tabloid isn’t that reliable.’

‘You read that trash?’

‘It’s how I keep up on celebrity gossip. Did you know that Nebula H67-94 split up with Nebula J23-78? Apparently J23-78 cheated on H67-94 with an asteroid. Unbelievable.’

‘Wait, really? I thought they just got married? Wasn’t H67-94 pregnant with triplet stars as well?’

‘Yeah, it’s awful. An asteroid, Zeta, an asteroid.

‘Hold on, didn’t — wait! That’s off topic! I was telling you about the Rip!’

‘Right, right.’

‘It’s basically a giant vacuum. It’s like the name says, just a Rip in the fabric of space. My friend’s cousin’s boyfriend’s sister went in, and didn’t come back. I wonder what’s out there.’

‘Probably nothing.’

‘There has to be something! There can’t just be, be nothing.’

‘What exactly did you think existed before the Big Bang?’

‘I was rather fond of the theory that two existing universes collided together to make this one.’

‘And what was there before those two universes?’

‘Uh.’

‘My point exactly.’

‘Anyway! If there is nothing behind the Rip, then why is it there?’

‘Maybe the Universe sneezed.’

‘That’s boring.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, let’s make it more exciting. A cross-Universe adventurer plowed through the fabric of time and space with a shark-shaped spaceship that happened to be painted colours that haven’t been invented yet! Oh, and the traveller inside? Yep, an alien.’

‘Oh, be quiet. It’s interesting, alright?’

‘Vaguely. What do you think will happen if it grows bigger? Or more appear? We’d all get demolished.’

‘True. But I still wanna see what’s out there.’

‘An adventurer, are you?’

‘A bit.’

‘Have fun with that.’

‘Thanks, Delta!’

‘Yep.’

 

***

 

The infinite cold of space seems to be a little lonelier on the day the 11th Great Rip is discovered. Planets and stars and nebulas are disappearing by the dozens, never to be seen again. The Meteoroid Tabloid claims that the Great Rips are invented by the black holes in an attempt to destroy the ‘last of the good standing citizens of this Universe!’ The Meteoroid Tabloid conveniently ignored the fact that none of their editors have been sucked into the Great Rips themselves.

If one listens closely, navigating the Great Rips with caution, one can hear static, a ringing phone, a nervous laugh, perhaps, a planet, speaking . . .

‘I can’t believe I’m — oh, hello? Zeta?’

Nothing.

‘Zeta, are you awake? You aren’t . . . gone, are you?’

Nothing.

‘The Great Rips are getting dangerous. Don’t tell me you’ve gone to one.’

Nothing.

‘Upsilon, right? The red giant? Is Zeta there?’

Nothing.

 

***

 

The infinite cold of space is slowly, but surely, getting eviscerated by the 269 Great Rips that now exist in the Universe. Entire solar systems have been destroyed, while planets and comets flee to neighbouring nebulas in hope of safety. The Milky Way Galaxy got sucked in in one fell swoop, but no one really cared except for Halley’s comet, who is currently being comforted by an elderly white dwarf star in Andromeda. (According to the Meteoroid Tabloid, Halley’s comet is particularly mourning the loss of one planet ‘Earth’. (No one at the Meteoroid Tabloid or the white dwarf star knows who ‘Earth’ was.))

In a safe reach of space, far away from the Great Rips, one can hear static, tapping, a voice, perhaps, a planet, speaking . . .

‘Delta?’

‘Zeta?’

‘That’s my name, don’t wear it out.’

‘Oh my god, Zeta — I –’

‘Are you ok? You don’t sound ok.’

‘I — I’m fine.’

‘As long as you’re sure.’

‘I’m fine. Where have you been?’

‘How’d you know I was gone?’

‘I, uh, I just noticed you hadn’t pestered me in nearly a dozen years. Got curious, that was all.’

‘Oh! Well, I took Upsilon to see a Great Rip.’

‘Zeta! You idiot! You know how dangerous those are, right?’

‘Yeah, duh. I wasn’t born with an iron base, Delta.’

‘Nice.’

‘Anyway, Upsilon wanted to see it. He’s getting old, you know? Don’t tell him I told you this, but he’s so large and gaseous that I worry he’s going to go black hole soon.’

‘Oh no. What are you going to do? Did he enjoy the Rips?’

‘I’ll probably relocate before he goes. I hear the K76-23 nebula is recruiting babysitters for the star nursery. I’ve always liked kids. And yes, he loved it! Said something about the Great Beyond, but you know how the red giants are.’

‘Definitely.’

‘Also, I don’t think you noticed, but I had a chance to visit your system while I was taking Upsilon! You didn’t tell me you had weather. I can see your hurricanes from miles away!’

‘You– you what?’

‘I visited you.’

‘And you saw my weather?’

‘Yeah?’

‘And I didn’t see you?’

‘Apparently not. Oh, also, dude, your axis? Why is it so tilted? How extreme are your seasons?’

‘Pretty extreme. My parents hate my axis. They say it’s in the ‘family genes’ to be perfectly vertical. As if.’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘It’s ok. At least I have weather, unlike my mom. She’s also iron based, which, hello, huge red flag.’

‘Your mom is iron based? That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all day.’

‘Right? Hey, you never told me what you looked like either. You owe me now.’

‘I’ll just visit you someday. I don’t think words will do my beauty justice, Delta.’

‘Right.’

‘Hey!’

‘Hey yourself.’

 

***

 

The infinite cold of space is smaller now. The Great Rips make up 60% of the known Universe and most planets have fled or have been sucked into the Beyond. (The Meteoroid Tabloid gave tips on relocating solar systems, but their studio disappeared before the issue could go into a second printing.) Time travellers are desperately trying to find the source of the Rips, but none of them have been successful thus far. One failed attempt caused a continual time loop in which unlimited lemon squares were shot into various black holes. (No one asked what happened.)

Against all odds, there exists a corner of space where no Great Rips live. If one has a cassette recorder, or a stethoscope, one can listen to static, the swivelling of ears, muttering, perhaps, a planet, speaking . . .

‘Delta! Yo, Delta! Delta, Delta, Delta.’

‘What? What could possibly be so important that you had to wake me up?’

‘Hi.’

‘Oh you– you’re lucky you’re barely magnetic, or I’d fling you into into Mu or Nu and have them put their full wrath on you.’

‘On that note, why are our systems so close?’

‘No idea. We seem to have drifted closer because of the Rips.’

‘We’re lucky that there aren’t any close to here.’

‘Agreed. How’s Upsilon?’

‘He’s gotten worse. His hydrogen levels are depleting, and I think he’s running the risk of nuclear fusion.’

‘I don’t want to pressure you, but if I were you, I’d say my goodbyes. Remember what happened to Sigma’s system when they refused to move?’

‘Yeah. I just don’t know where I’d go, given how the Rips have eaten everything.’

‘You could join our system.’

‘Wait, really? I thought you hated me!’

‘What can I say, you’re like a Martian fungus. You grew on me and I couldn’t do anything.’

‘Aw, love you too.’

‘Ha ha. I’m being serious, though. It’s only a matter of time before Upsilon goes black hole, Zeta. You’d be gone forever.’

‘I mean, is it that much different than eventually being sucked up by a Great Rip?’

‘I guess not.’

‘But you still haven’t seen my beauty! Dude, this morning, I discovered a weather system near my pole!’

‘That’s awesome! Congrats.’

‘I think I have to go soon. He’s getting smaller.’

‘Ok, see you soon. Be careful, Zeta.’

‘Thanks, Delta.’

 

***

The infinite cold of space is almost gone. The Great Rips are rapidly moving across the Universe, eating up everything in their path. (If the Meteoroid Tabloid was still running, it would say that the Great Rips needed to try the latest neon-only diet that came directly from Nebula B12-90, who had lost 12% of her dark matter in 2 weeks!) In a small, dark corner near the edge of the Universe, one can barely see a small solar system. A nearby black hole is spinning wildly, and gas formations around it say that the black hole is not very old. The small solar system has a steadily burning star, (if one was friends with the star, one would discover the star’s name was Gamma), and four planets. Two of them were nearly identical in size and were orbiting near each other, close to the star. The other two were further away. One was small, and carbon based. The other was larger, but seemed to be edging closer to the other planet.

If one listens closely, one can hear static, hurricanes whistling, tapping and murmuring, perhaps, planets, attempting to speak . . .

How Would Trump 2nd Term Impact China?

Hot Chicken Chili

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a59515469a68629d41ac07bb0b539343

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 18 chicken wings
  • Oil (for frying)
  • 1 quart tomatoes
  • 2 or 3 jalapeno peppers, chopped
  • 2 or 3 cups water
  • All-purpose flour
  • 2 (16 ounce) cans kidney beans, drained
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • 1 small onion, chopped

Instructions

  1. Roll chicken wings in flour and fry in hot oil until crisp.
  2. Transfer to serving platter. Remove seeds from jalapeno peppers and chop.
  3. Combine jalapenos, kidney beans and remaining ingredients in skillet where wings were fried (don’t throw the grease away).
  4. Heat thoroughly, pour over wings and serve.

$2.9 TRILLION Stock Market Losses In One Day! w/ Ian Carroll

Shorpy

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On August 1st, 2024, the Kokang Army captured the headquarters of the Northeast Military Command in Myanmar.

main qimg 8977ab2a21d1abd6cfba2b8081df3ab5
main qimg 8977ab2a21d1abd6cfba2b8081df3ab5

The Burmese army collapsed quickly, and the Kokang Army seized a major town with a population of 800,000.

Today (August 5th, 2024), the Kokang government abolished the discriminatory ID cards issued by the Burmese government and replaced them with special district ID cards. (The Burmese government implements discriminatory policies against ethnic minorities. In addition to non-citizens, there are six types of ID cards with decreasing rights. This is rare in modern society.)

I feel that the Burmese military government is incompetent and arrogant.

As the majority ethnic group, they bully minorities, but they ended up having their military command headquarters destroyed by local armed groups of minorities?

Several division commanders were even killed, which is a huge embarrassment.

The Kokang do indeed seek independence or to be absorbed into China, but it’s unlikely to happen.

Although the Kokang are actually Han Chinese, speak Chinese, and even use Chinese textbooks for their children, China needs to consider the feelings of other ASEAN member states, so it’s unlikely to accept the Kokang.

However, I believe this doesn’t mean the Burmese military government can arbitrarily massacre them.

Anyway, we have a lot of small troops like this.

Enough to prevent a humanitarian disaster.

After all, they are Han Chinese and are right next to China.

If someone were to be so foolish as to want to massacre them, then it would be perfectly normal for them to suddenly find ten thousand drones, endless artillery shells, air defense weapons, and electronic jamming equipment growing out of the ground.

The Spiritual Connection of Cats | Why Did GOD put a CAT in your life ?

More than anything, it was Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, who bothered him. She was what was called in her day a “manic-depressive”, or rather a sufferer from bipolar personality disorder in our current lingo. Mary Todd would move between moments of great loving care, and extreme cruelty. In her manic episodes she would serve imported oysters and prove a passionate lover, in her depressive states she could be cruel, even physically abusive to her husband and sons.

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main qimg 54afe2567e26b8826ca88971d160f14a

Abraham Lincoln, despite being an exceptionally strong 6′4″ man and a former athlete of some renown, was a complete slave to his mentally unstable 5′2″ wife — a wife who would, at times, abuse and degrade him in public, much to his considerable humiliation. Often she would cruelly make Honest Abe sleep on a hard couch or even the floor when they’d have a fight. He was every bit the stereotypical “henpecked husband” one would later see in sitcoms. When the two were in good spirits, things were truly great. And when they were not, things were truly horrific. Violent moodswings would catch the Lincolns off-guard at the most inopportune of moments. And the President suffered greatly from the ensuing uncertainty that followed him wherever he went.

There have been moments where Mary Todd Lincoln’s mental state declined to such a degree that Abraham wanted to have her committed to an asylum. The death of their beloved sons further drove Mary Todd to the very edges of reason… and as she drifted in and out of sanity, her husband suffered most of all, as he carried on his shoulders the weight of the nation and failed to find refuge even inside his own home.

What?

Michele Duess

My God she is being such a bitch.“So” Ryka said, “The man died and on the third day walked out of the tomb. Another zombie story is what this sounds li“It isn’t a zombie story! He was living. Zombies don’t live.”“They walk-““They’re dead!” Why couldn’t she understand? “They rot. It’s an evil spirit that animates them. He was alive, as you and me are.”

“And he said this is my body and my blood, eat and drink it. You have to admit that is very strange.”

“It’s symbolic,” George said through gritted teeth. “It is bread we eat and wine we drink. You know that. You just want to mess with me.” Out of all the people on earth he had to get stuck with her for a partner. Out of all the people in the world he had to get stuck with this lot. She was probably the most tolerable and that wasn’t saying a whole hell of a lot. Well, he supposed, that is what happens when you get caught fencing illegal items. You get the missions no one else wants and with people you cross the street to avoid.   The police had slapped his hand until he got hold of two beehives. In this day and age, they were extremely valuable. How was he to know they were stolen from the New York Mafia? Of course, they and the FBI got involved. Some bad cesh went down, people shot, and now here he was. Unfair. Completely unfair.

“And then he rose into the sky. As if that is where heaven is.”

“Bear in mind this was written by ignorant people 2100 years ago. 2151, to be exact. Also, translated numerous times.”

“Of course it’s wrong, for that is not where the chosen place is.”

“Oh yeah? So where is it?”

“There is not one. To think there is a heaven is illogical and uneducated.”

George took some very deep breaths. Ryka had all the tact of an android. In fact, the androids had more, being programmed to be considerate. “Okay but what do your people believe? They must believe something since you just got through saying that’s not where the chosen place is.”

“It certainly is not there,” she said, gesturing at the spaceship’s window.

“I’ll grant you that.” George walked to the small port window and looked out at unfamiliar stars. How far had they come? He no longer remembered. But he knew why they were here. The private space company ASSL had found a possible earth like planet in this God forsaken region of space. Even using their new space warping devices it had taken two years to get here. This was why America took a page from history and sent criminals to scout these worlds. Criminals and the possibly insane who didn’t mind going on a spaceship for years. Truth was, ASSL would take anyone willing who didn’t get too space sick. If the criminals and the undesirables died trying, so what? At least America didn’t have to feed them. That had been a problem ever since these damned climate change immigrants had come here. At least he’d be fed better on ship than prison and a hero when he got back. If he got back. He rubbed his shoulder and wondered what his age would be then. Space warping messed with time. What had been two years for him might have been two weeks back home. Or four years for them. “But if not in the sky then where?”

“Underground. Where things grow and are nourished.” Ryka straightened herself up. “That is where it is.”

“No. That’s where hell is. It’s hot there. People burn in hell.”

“Because God lets the devil roam free to cause evil and mayhem. Yet he’s omniscient and omnipotent. Demons roam around. Ha. Your people thought-”

“I thought we long ago settled that! Besides, better than being eaten by your god, as you believe,” George growled.

“It’s a way to become one with his Holiness. We nourish him and He us.” Ryka was almost in George’s face now. They glared at each other. Then she relaxed and stepped back. “You’re insane,” she added.

“No doubt seeing as how I work with you.”

“I am the only thing that saves you.” She gave what passed for a smile for her and she went over to check the navigational system. For her size her footsteps were light. Well they did have reduced gravity on this ship. George sighed. Long ago he had made his peace with these immigrants. The war between his people and hers were over now. But it didn’t mean he wanted to share a spaceship with her and ten other idiots.

   Maybe, said his mother’s ghost in his head, if you’d listened, made an honest living…

   Maybe if you were a better damn mother, I would have…but no. You had to leave Dad to run off with that Tom moron.

  Yeah, okay, blame me. I didn’t run off. And your father was virtual world addicted. What else could I do?

  Well you might as well have run for all you helped me. I told you Tom beat me…

   “Stop talking to yourself and come look at this, George.”

“Can’t do without me, can you? I tell you you’ll miss me the day I’m gone.”

Ryka contemplated smacking him. A shame they were monitored. Easy now, she thought. This can’t be easy for him. You are an immigrant in every sense of the word.

    No. My great- great parents were. I am not.

     Still. Give the guy a break. Besides, you know as well as I do you were goading him. You cannot make fun of anyone’s religion no matter how silly.

  Oh, I will give him a break all right. “I am not sure we are staying on course. So, I seek your opinion.”

“My opinion is you can’t read.” He pushed past her and looked at the screen. “Well, you’re right. We are off. Why didn’t you correct it?” But he knew if she could, she would have. She may be annoying and more of a know it all than any android. But she also wasn’t stupid. He pressed buttons. “Why won’t the course correct?”

“I do not know. I thought it was a programming error. But that is not my forte. So, I ask you.”

George pulled up the navigational system’s program. “Hal looks okay.” Someone’s idea of a joke. “I think…it’s a hardware problem. But we got no warnings about it.” He hit the intercom button. “James! Get down here. NOW!”

  “That was my ear. Did you have to shout in it?”

“Well excuse me. It’s not my fault that moron can’t hear right.”

“I do not think he can be a moron. He has no IQ, right? So that makes him an idiot.”

“Same thing these days. James. Did you turn off an alarm?”

“I did.” James stood there looking for all the world like a handsome movie star human. Or he would have if his hair wasn’t messed up and his shirt wasn’t on backwards.

“You stupid bucket of bolts your programming is messed up again.” George sighed. It wasn’t until after he signed up and was in earth’s orbit that he learned this company cut corners in every conceivable way. And why not? This mission was probably doomed to fail so they didn’t give them the top of the line technology. That was saved for the missions that had a chance to succeed. For example, the biosphere on Mars. But only the very wealthy could afford to go there, leaving out 99 percent of the population of earth. If they found an earth-like planet with an atmosphere they didn’t have to constantly maintain, then the costs of colonizing would be a lot less. George had been born in what was left of Florida. People there ate grits, meat made from insects, dealt with rationing and spent a lot of time in online virtual worlds. They did that to forget that between the native born and the immigrants there wasn’t much plant life left. They were slowly bringing it back. Actually, the immigrants helped. They had so much knowledge that really everyone should have listened to them sooner. Meanwhile, finding another livable planet would be a big help. Even bringing back samples and seeds would help. Now George had to deal with an extremely out of date android. “Did I order you to turn off the alarms?”

“Did you?”

“Great. Now I have to go through his programming. Again.”

“Let me.” Ryka walked over and smacked the android in the back of the head. James shook, rattled, and said, “No you did not order me to turn off the alarms.”

“Works every time,” said Ryka, with her strange smile.

George shook his head, sighed, and said “Then why did you?”

“So that you could sleep uninterrupted.”

“James, you can’t do that. It’s good Ryka caught it in time that we are drifting off course. Now we need to find out why. What did the alarm say?”

“I do not know.”

Oh, what the hell. George smacked him too. It hurt like hell but it worked.

“A thruster is malfunctioning. It is the gyro. Someone must take a spacewalk and fix it.”

Ryka said, “I vote for the bucket of bolts here to do it.” She gestured at James.

“Unfortunately, I don’t trust the bucket of bolts. And you’re the hardware person. Everyone else is still asleep. It’s our shift.”

“Chivalry is dead I see,” she said.

“Been dead two hundred years. We’ll both go. Out of the goodness of my hard, little heart.”

“Gee. I am touched.”

George smiled and patted her bony shoulder. “You should be. Well, let’s go suit up and get this over with before we end up in a black hole or a sun.”

“I should be so fortunate,” Ryka muttered and went to her room to get her suit. Unfortunately, she had a feeling if she did die the Holiness would spit her back into reincarnation. And for her actions as an assassin she probably deserved it. It had all been for a good cause, protecting what was left of the Amazon rainforest from an idiot dealer and his cartel. This idiot didn’t even want to develop it for food or she might have understood. This one wanted it for coffee. A drug at best, she thought and not even a good one.  Worse, he was of her people. He claimed earth’s warming couldn’t get any worse. Did he not study their history?  Still, her actions had been unethical and not kind. Certainly, innocents had gotten caught in the fighting. Hence why she was here with this thief and liar. As if she was any better, she thought.

Suited up they went through the hatch and out onto the spaceship. At least the suits were better than the old moon walk ones. They created a force field that held oxygen and pressurized atmosphere around the wearer. They were still rather hot and restricting to wear. Furthermore, they used electromagnets to attach the astronaut to the ship. Walking was difficult. Well, for Ryka it was. George was finding it easier than he thought. Too easy, he thought. We need to be quick about this.  Slowly they made their way, pulling replacement parts behind them on a tether, over to the thruster. “The gyro is definitely burned out,” said George. “I hope it doesn’t happen again, since this is the only spare we have.”

“That cheapskate bastard of a boss,” Ryka grumbled. “She makes the damned shareholders happy while we cannot even get a decently working android never mind parts.”

“The word is bitch, Ryka. She’s female.”

“Wrong. That is an insult to all decent dogs everywhere.”

George couldn’t disagree with her there. He pulled on the tether. The bag of parts and tools floated over to him. “I don’t like this.”

“What?”

“My suit. I’m not sure the magnets are working correctly.”

“Well stop being so flatulent.” She wasn’t looking at him, not really paying attention. She was trying to pull out the old, burned gyro. Finally. she managed it and handed it to George. He gave her the new one.

“That’s too uppity. Which is your problem. Always lording your superior education over us. “

“Wrong! It is simply how I speak! You-” she broke off for she heard him cry out. She turned as quickly as could and saw his magnets had stopped working. She could see him frantically press the button on his emergency thruster pack. Nothing. He was floating away, faster than she would have thought possible.

“Jacking hell! Help me!” Thinking, she isn’t going to. He wouldn’t have blamed her. Too much risk and they didn’t like each other. Uneasy tolerance was the best they ever got. He could see her ugly gargoyle face watching him. It wasn’t exact but a close description. One hundred years ago America had climate change immigrants. They came from Venice, fleeing the rising seas. They came from Vietnam, Israel, and especially South America fleeing famine from a warming planet. America hadn’t been altogether happy about them. Aliens. You’re aliens the native born said, so go home. Then one day the real aliens came. They had made the same mistakes man did and their planet’s climate change nearly killed them. They came, hoping to be welcomed in exchange for trying to save earth. But when you look like demons from some medieval painting, George supposed, bad things happen. They couldn’t leave either. Broken ships, broken spirits. They truly had nowhere else to go. Then the fighting started, the cruelty, until no one knew who committed the worst atrocities. They only woke up when the ground and their souls were scorched. Now both human and alien were trying to save a sinking ship called earth. Or in George’s and Ryka’s case, redeem themselves.

I’m dead, George thought. Without even a priest to give me absolution. When was the last time he’d even been to Mass? Damned Catholic guilt. It never goes away. He had oxygen but soon that would deplete. There was panic although behind it was calm. So, this would be how it ends and maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Better than dying senile and drooling in a nursing home thirty years from now, he guessed. Here the stars were bright and beautiful. Close to heaven as he’d ever get. The panic ebbed. In fact he almost felt stoned. It was so peaceful now. Then something clawed at his leg and slipped away. He somehow managed to twist around and reached out. Everything slowed except for the drum in his chest, his ears. His breath came harsh and fast. He heard nothing else. George saw her hand brush his but couldn’t feel anything. He stretched so much his shoulder felt as if it would separate. Yet there was no pain, just numbness. Not even that. It was a vast and lonely detachment. Then she shouted and he felt like James might when Ryka smacked him. As if some mechanical part slipped back into place and he could hear again. She shouted at him, telling him to try his pack thrusters again, help her. He mashed the button with all his might and for an instant they fired. Just enough so they could touch-then she gripped his hand. He wrapped his arm around her waist. She fired hers and they made their way back to the ship. Ryka then turned on her magnets and pulled him next to her. George found a handhold to grab, then another, blessing whoever put them there. Maybe he or she had had a vision that one day it would save someone’s life. Then, the ladder. He pulled himself up it, found the handle for the hatch, and fell into the ship. He hit the floor hard and barely felt it. He was alive.

Byeheth culemth quelthelHeorg!” Ryka shouted at him, coming into the ship.

“English,” he whispered.

“You picked up the broken suit!” She stood over him. Her eyes shone. With what? Was that fear he saw? Concern?

“J-James. He- must have hung it with the rest.” He couldn’t yet stand so he knelt, pulling it off, throwing it from him. His breaths came in gasps. “I-will f-father jacking strangle him. Jacker.”

Ryka gently, softly touched his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” He looked up at her from where he knelt on the floor. Trying not to cry. “Cesh! If it wasn’t for-”

“Yes, whatever.” she said, not looking at him. “Go mark that stupid suit so this does not happen again, okay? Once is enough. I will make sure we are on course.” She left. Quickly, as if embarrassed. He sat for a long time, shaking as if cold and thinking.

It was near the end of their shift, at breakfast, that he asked her why.

“Why what?” She looked away. Played with her food.

“You went after me. Risked yourself. You didn’t have to and no one would have blamed you.”

“Our bastard boss would have.”

“What’s she going to do, fire you?” George laughed. Ryka didn’t.

“I am certain you would have done the same.”

George shrugged. “Yeah. But you don’t even like me. Nor do I blame you,” he mumbled. The country had not learned its lesson the first time and had attempted some equal but separate laws. The results had been predictable. “So…” he gestured weakly.

“I am soft in the head, my friend,” Ryka said, “plus who else will I pick on? James does not get it and half of the others would stab me in my sleep.” She smiled. “Now you will just owe me one.”

“Okay.” George held out a hand and she shook it.

“I would like to know something, however.”

“Yes?”

“How do you strangle an android?”

“Special skills,” George said, smiling.

It depends on the content of the criticism

If you mean something like FJB, I’m sorry, it’s not allowed in China

China has laws to stop such public attacks on individuals and the government. Any insulting or ideological attacks are prohibited. Of course, this does not mean that you will be arrested after making certain public remarks, but your remarks will usually be deleted. It’s the same as our remarks being deleted on Youtbe or X.

If your criticism is directed at a specific event, then it’s okay.

Chinese people or the Chinese government are pragmatic. They don’t like to waste time on political slogans and empty theoretical struggles.

If what you want to express is: the government is terrible, we need a better mayor to solve the various serious problems in the city!

Such criticism will be regarded as stupid in China, no one will pay attention to you, and everyone will think you are an idiot.

They welcome such criticism:

The traffic is terrible, there is always a serious congestion every morning at 5 kilometers on Highway 3, you must do something!

The garbage problem is terrible, the creeks in Pearl Park and Green River Park are full of garbage, what is the city cleaning department doing?

My house is threatened by noise, and a group of elderly people gather in the park downstairs every morning. It makes it impossible for me to rest, and you must solve all this.

Very good, if your criticism is like this. Then you have mastered the trick of criticizing the Chinese government.

This kind of criticism will have two dimensions of effect

1. Criticism itself

The government will have a specialist to evaluate your criticism (it may also be with the help of AI), your criticism will be classified, the jurisdiction will be determined, and it will be pushed to the corresponding responsible department.

The department that receives the criticism will investigate the situation you criticized and reply to you about their investigation and handling. And ask you to make a final evaluation of the case.

If you are not satisfied, you can appeal to their superior department again.

2. Statistical significance

When citizens have a lot of criticism around the same issue, such criticism will be upgraded to the perspective of “global problems”. This may mean that a department or an official has not performed his duties correctly, resulting in “bulk” dissatisfaction. Such problems are often given priority and trigger performance appraisals of officials. Severe cases may even trigger investigations and accountability of officials.

In fact, the Chinese government has set up many channels to accept people’s criticism, such as reception offices, emails, and hotlines. The most popular way is to submit your criticism through the Internet.

When I visited Shanghai, one of my female colleagues showed me a process of criticizing the government.

A new viaduct was built under the apartment building where she lived. This viaduct was to solve the traffic congestion on that road (nearby residents have been complaining for a long time)

But after the viaduct was built, the speed of vehicles increased significantly.

This brought more serious road noise, affecting the rest of the residents in the adjacent apartment building.

She was one of them, and she submitted her complaint about the matter through the website of the Mayor’s Mailbox of the Shanghai Municipal Government.

Three days later, her complaint was submitted to the Minhang District Traffic Management Bureau of Shanghai.

The Minhang District Traffic Management Bureau responded to the criticism two days later. It said that the construction of this viaduct had passed the environmental protection approval of the municipal government and was legal. Regarding the noise issue, they will be handed over to the Environmental Protection Bureau.

The Minhang District Environmental Protection Bureau replied two days later that they would send a commissioner to the vicinity of the viaduct to measure the noise. A week later, the Environmental Protection Bureau responded to the message: the noise measurement has been completed, and they believe that the noise at night is within the legal range. They hope that she can understand this matter and make a closure evaluation on this matter.

My female colleague obviously disagreed with the government’s explanation, so she called on her neighbors to criticize on the website, and they submitted the same opinions. About a week later, this opinion was raised to a higher level, and the Shanghai Municipal Government Environmental Protection Bureau intervened. Two weeks later, representatives of the residents of the apartment building were summoned to hold a hearing.

Two months later, a tunnel-shaped soundproof wall was built on the viaduct to completely isolate the traffic noise of the viaduct.

This criticism of the Shanghai Municipal Government was closed after several months.

This is a typical case of Chinese citizens criticizing the government and waiting for the government to respond to the criticism.

All the contents of these documents can be checked on the government website and made public to everyone.

Be a great Dad

Hearty Chili Roni

Macaroni is a great addition to this family favorite. Cooking the macaroni with the ground beef and seasonings for this Hearty Chili Roni makes cleanup a snap.

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00ecdb8751aee62047fbdd3039d16d57

Prep: 5 min | Cook: 25 min | Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1/2 cup chopped green bell pepper
  • 1/2 cup chopped onion
  • 1 package McCormick® Chili Seasoning Mix, Original or McCormick® Chili Seasoning Mix, Mild
  • 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 (14 ounces) can reduced sodium beef broth
  • 2 tablespoons tomato paste
  • 1 1/2 cups uncooked elbow macaroni
  • 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

Instructions

  1. Cook ground beef, bell pepper and onion in large skillet over medium-high heat for 4 to 5 minutes or until beef is browned.
  2. Add Seasoning Mix; stir until well mixed.
  3. Stir in tomatoes, beef broth and tomato paste. Bring to boil. Stir in macaroni. Reduce heat to medium; cover and cook for 10 minutes or until pasta is tender.
  4. Sprinkle with cheese; cover. Let stand for 5 minutes or until cheese is melted.

Paul sounds like a decent dude.

On the trail of the shale

A problem with food banks, and eating randomly when the opportunity arises, it that a lot of what these agencies provide is processed foods that are heavily laden with salts, sugars, non-nutritious fats, and many chemicals (including preservatives) that can be toxic to the body. If I were low on monetary and food resources, I would shoot for the natural, nutritious foods that are inexpensive or easily obtainable. Buy them in bulk if possible. Examples of inexpensive foods that pack a nutritional punch, ones that are also tasty:

  1. The humble potato. They can be chopped up, smeared in extra virgin olive oil and baked in a microwave oven. Avoid the butter, margarine, ghee, etc. Do not fry the potatoes like they do the French fries. You could add spices, depending on your taste. Also add tomato paste before the baking. The nutritional value of the potato is very high, but loading it with trans-fatty oils, high cholesterol fluids will negate the value. And the potato is tasty and filling.
  2. But for those who are diabetic or pre-diabetic, an alternative to potatoes that is both filling and low sugar and calorie is the carrot. And carrots are both inexpensive and easy to consume as either raw, medium-cooked, or fully-cooked. You can more easily lose weight while eating carrots, although they are not as nutritious as potatoes, But eating a balanced assortment of nutritious foods will make up for that.
  3. Tomato paste, mentioned above is a thoroughly inexpensive way to eat tomatoes. The red paste is a concentrated and safely processed form of the highly nutritious tomato. A huge bulky can is sold for about $5, would last for weeks in the cooler, even if you use a lot of it every day.
  4. Some in the bean family such as cowpeas, lentils, and garbanzo beans. Buy them raw, to defray the expenses and to avoid the salted canned ones. Place them in water overnight. This will hydrate and soften them and make them easier and faster to cook the next day.
  5. Oatmeal. A canister, depending on size, will last you weeks or even months.
  6. The egg is famously nutritious, and one a day is enough. Boiled, or fried in olive oil. Wonderful animal protein, many B-vitamins.
  7. Drink your tea or coffee in moderation. The antioxidants are there and helps keep you alert. Use stevia, the natural no-calorie sweetener….inexpensive and not bulky. Cut out the sugar, the Equal, and the Splenda. Go for Stevia….comes in several name brands.
  8. An orange or tangerine a day does wonders.
  9. Carrots are another inexpensive nutritious powerhouse.
  10. Eat your nuts. The least inexpensive way to consume nuts , and to avoid overeating them is to buy them in bulk at the grocery store or places like nuts.com. And of course, many roasted nuts from the stores are overrated. If say you placed small amounts of a Brazil nut, almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, pepitas, peanuts, flaxseeds, etc (or whatever you prefer) in a small Pyrex bowl, added some water and olive oil, microwaved the mixture, you would come out with a very nutritious homemade power bar. Just don’t over roast or burn. Having natural foods at home is not only cheap, but deters you from overeating, and eating processed foods. Also, prepare your snacks at home. Nuts place you in a good mood
  11. Banana. Delicious and nutritious, and filling, mood-enhancing, hydrating, inexpensive. One a day does the trick.
  12. Water…drink your water. This can’t be emphasized enough. This is the medium of body and other functions
  13. Go for inexpensive vegetables, rainbow colors, instead of the tv diners which are hazardous to your health. Eating natural foods makes it so much less expensive to manage your health
  14. Exercising goes well with eating inexpensively and nutritiously, whether you are on a budget or not. My list is inexhaustible, but I suppose a reasonable guideline.
  15. A bit of garlic/onion should be incorporated in the diet, daily.

Be the Rufus

“No one ever buries a hoard of coins, especially precious metal coins, without intending to retrieve it.” Christopher Ratte.

Some Persian soldiers had buried their treasure at the time when the last remnants of Persian soldiers and Persian sympathizers were driven out of Hellenistic Greece. Archaeologist Christopher Ratte and his team have been in Western Turkey for years working on the ancient site of Notion – then part of Ionia – and have found a pot of rare Persian gold coins in what appears to be a basement room.

Credit: Notion Archaeological Project.

The New York Times has published a story on this find, with interviews of Christopher Ratte. Here is a share of that article:

By Franz Lidz, Aug. 2, 2024

It is the late fifth century B.C. and a mercenary soldier kneels in his modest quarters, digging a hole in the earthen floor. He places a small jug, called an olpe, in the hole for safekeeping and covers it with dirt. In the olpe are his savings — scores of gold coins, known as darics, each one equal to a month’s pay.

But something happens to the soldier — possibly something sinister — and he never retrieves his hoard, which remains undiscovered for the next 2,400 years.

That is one of several scenarios proposed by Christopher Ratté, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, to account for the cache, which he and his research team recently unearthed from the ruins of Notion, an ancient city-state in modern-day Turkey. While digging beneath the courtyard of a house dating to the third century B.C., the excavators found the remains of an earlier dwelling. “The coins were buried in a corner of the older building,” Dr. Ratté said. “We weren’t actually looking for a pot of gold.”

Darics were chiefly used to provide payment to soldiers of fortune. Andrew Meadows, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the project, said he knew of no other hoard of this type to turn up in Asia Minor. “This is a find of the highest importance,” he said. “The archaeological context for the hoard will help us fine-tune the chronology of Achaemenid gold coinage.”

The archaeological site at Notion spans 80 acres atop a promontory in western Anatolia, a borderland dividing Asia from Europe. It was one of the Greek-speaking communities that emerged in the region during the early first millennium B.C., perhaps because of migration across the Aegean Sea. The deposition and loss of the Notion hoard occurred at a time of warfare, insecurity and great power machinations in a contested frontier zone.

This was true in deepest antiquity, as remembered in the story of the Trojan War,” Dr. Ratté said. “And it remains true to this day, as demonstrated by the Syrian refugee crisis.” He noted that the small harbor on the east side of the city was one of the departure points for Syrian refugees who fled across Turkey to Europe during the refugee crisis a decade ago.

Anatolia is the birthplace of the Western world’s first state-issued coin, the stater, which was created by a seafaring people called Lydians. King Alyattes standardized the weight and design of the Lydian stater, which, beginning around 610 B.C., was struck in electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver. The king’s son and successor, Croesus, is credited with minting the first true gold coin, the Croeseid. The expression “rich as Croesus” refers to his extravagant wealth as well as the opulence of Lydia during his rule.

Fortifications at Notion, a Greek-speaking community that emerged in western Anatolia during the early first millennium B.C. Credit: Notion Archaeological Project/University of Michigan.

Excavations at Notion last year. While digging beneath the courtyard of a house dating to the third century B.C., researchers found the remains of an earlier dwelling and a cache buried there. Credi: Notion Archaeological Project/University of Michigan.

In 546 B.C., the entire area, known as Ionia, was conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Although Croesus was defeated in battle by Cyrus the Great, his gold-based monetary system lived on. The Persians continued to manufacture Croesids until they introduced their own bimetallic currency, made up of silver and gold coins. The silver coins were called sigloi, and the gold ones were darics — a name derived from either Darius I, who ruled the Persian Empire from 522 B.C. to 486 B.C., or dari-, the root of the Old Persian word for gold.

In 427 B.C., according to the Greek historian Thucydides, an Athenian general named Paches attacked and killed a troop of pro-Persian mercenaries at Notion after luring their commander into a trap. The Persian sympathizers were then expelled, and Notion was reorganized under Athenian supervision.

Two decades later, a decisive naval battle in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta was fought off the coast of Notion, which the Athenians had been using as a naval base. Dr. Ratté said that the gold hoard might have been connected to the events of 427 B.C., or later, with the Athenian evacuation of Notion.

“It is possible it was not associated with either of these dramatic events,” he said, “but was simply the savings of a veteran mercenary soldier in a time and place when soldiers of fortune could make a lot of money if they were willing to risk their lives for the highest bidder.” Many Greeks fought for the Persian Empire, including the Athenian historian Xenophon, who was an active mercenary for the Persian king Cyrus the Younger from 401 B.C.- to 400 B.C. — the same time period when the Notion hoard was tucked away.

In 387 B.C., within a generation after the Athenians were defeated by the Spartans, Notion and the other cities of Ionia were reintegrated into the Persian Empire. They remained Persian possessions until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 334 B.C., at which point production of the daric quickly declined. Alexander and his immediate successors had many of the existing gold pieces melted down and recast as coins bearing their images, making darics rare today.

The Notion darics are stamped on the front with a likeness of the Persian king kneeling in a long tunic. In his left hand is a bow; in his right, a long spear. The backs of the coins are blank, except for a punch mark. The hoard is being stored at the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in nearby Selcuk, Turkey, along with imported Athenian pottery that was recovered at the dig.

Dr. Ratté believes that the fact that the loot was never reclaimed is a clear sign of disaster. “No one ever buries a hoard of coins, especially precious metal coins, without intending to retrieve it,” he said. “So only the gravest misfortune can explain the preservation of such a treasure.”

Truth

Why do mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real? How does it break our understanding of things?

How did you draw the conclusion that; “mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real?”, explain go into more detail. Unless of course you are a mathematician or psychist and you yourself have issues with infinity being real?

In mathematics, infinity is not just a vague notion of endlessness, but a rigorously defined concept that can be expressed in multiple ways, i.e., cardinality of sets, ordinal numbers, limit concept, symbolic representation, to name a few. Mathematicians have developed sophisticated tools to work with infinity, which strongly suggest that overall they do not have issues with it.

But, from a physics stand point things start to get complicated as the concept of infinity is more problematic and often indicates a limitation of our theories rather than a physical reality. This manifests itself in a number of ways, cosmology and quantum mechanics being prime examples. It is also a challenge when we start talking about black holes and singularities that represent points where physical quantities become infinite, suggesting a breakdown of the theory of infinity, as “normal” rules just don’t apply or they breakdown completely, which in real terms is nothing more than the end point of our understanding.

Many physical models use infinity as a form of idealization, and what I mean by that is, a lot of physical models use infinity as a convenient approximation (e.g., point particles, infinite potential wells), while still recognizing these are idealizations. Keeping in mind that no physical measurement can ever yield an infinite value, as all measuring devices have finite ranges, otherwise what’s the point of attempting to measure something in the first place?

You have not covered the philosophical perspective of infinity in your question which in many ways is just as important as it is in physics, mathematics and the physical world itself. Things like; does infinity actually exist in nature, or is it merely a useful mathematical construct? Infinity leads to numerous paradoxes (e.g., the paradox of Hilbert’s Grand Hotel, for more detail on this go to Wikipedia) that as a thought experiment challenges our intuitive understanding of what we believe infinity actually is. Infinity often represents the boundary of what we can know or are able to measure, that highlights the limits of human understanding.

Then we come to the practical implications of infinity. Some theories for example that produce infinite results often lose their predictive power, which indicates a lot more refinement is required. Infinite series and processes must be truncated for practical calculation purposes, which introduces a need for approximations, as there is absolutely no point them going on forever.

The appearance of so-called infinities in physical theories often drives a search for a more comprehensive framework to work within, (i.e., quantum gravity attempts to resolve singularities in general relativity). This is a signal, or indication that different thinking needs to be applied and more intensive research is required. To that end, in my mind infinity is not an end point, but simply a marker that requires one to go onto the next stage, whatever that may be.

Infinity in mathematics is a well-defined and useful concept that allows for the exploration of abstract ideas beyond finite limitations. In physics, infinity often signals the limits of a theory’s applicability, which then prompts further, deeper investigation and refinement of our understanding of the physical world. The interplay between mathematical infinity and physical reality of infinity is basically a work in progress and will continue indefinitely, as, when you think about it, is there any end to infinity?” Perhaps no…as that is what infinity is, across just about all domains no matter how one thinks about it or how it is expressed.


  • Q1: Why do mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real?
  • A1: I don’t think they really do..is infinity is a concept on all levels is not fully 100% “resolvable”.

  • Q2: How does it break our understanding of things?
  • A2: Again, I don’t think it does, it is more a boundary where our understanding stops and it is merely an indicator that we need to dig deeper, refine and further our understanding. Human knowledge always has and always will have a limit, it will never, ever be infinite.

At the end of the day, there will never be an answer to your two-part question, it will go on forever, all the way to infinity and beyond…whatever that is…

ALIEN (1979) MOVIE REACTION!

Yes.

This was brought home to me during an exercise in the mid-80’s when I was a young Engineer Platoon Leader. My platoon was attached to an Infantry Battalion for a long field training exercise. We were equipped with HMMVW’s with TOW missiles and were trying to operate against tanks. That turned out to be pretty tricky, the tanks were very good, and the tactics we were using were not fully developed. We ended up getting kicked around the training area pretty routinely.

In one scenario, the Brigade Commander, a full Colnel and a Vietnam Veteran ordered the Battalion I was working with to hold a particular pass “at all costs.” The Battalion did a credible job defending, but then got flanked, which led to the Battalion Commander, also a Vietnam Vet, to order a withdrawl.

I was pretty new, but I thought at the time that this was a good call. In my view, holding onto the position any longer than we had would have led to the extinction (ln the exercise) of the Battalion, about 500 guys. The Battalion Commander wanted to live to fight another day, and what he was doing was doctrinally sound.

This particular point got discussed at length during the After Action Review. The Battalion Commander got asked why he ordered the withdrawal when he was ordered to stand. He laid out his reasoning, which made sense to me. I was there. There wasn’t anything else to do.

There was this long silence. Then the Brigrade Commander looked at the Battalion Commander with this laser-beam look and says, “John, if I tell you to go die on some hill, I’ve got a damned good reason for doing it. My concerns, the Division’s concerns, are bigger than yours. If I have to sacrafice your Battalion in order to preserve something bigger, it’s my job to order you to do it. It’s your job to take your boys and go out and die.”

This is the dark side of combat that no one really likes to talk about. It doesn’t happen often, normally because of a miscalculation or mistake, but units get asked to make these kinds of sacrafices. When you are an officer, if you’re doing your job right, your unit is like your family. Words that describe how close units bind together in combat fail me. Others have done it much better. These are your brothers, your sisters, your children. When you get asked to do something like this, it’s like asking your children to go out and die for you. Then you have go out and die with them.

Anyway, I’ve never forgotten it. It made me think through a lot of things before I became a Company Commander and had to take folks to war.

Its all about timing

  1. Face culture comes from Confucian culture. As a unique cultural and psychological phenomenon of the Chinese people, face culture has greatly influenced the daily social life of the Chinese people.
  2. North Americans are Christian culture
  3. Arabs, Somalis, Afghans, Nigerians are Islamic culture
  4. Turkic and Mongolians are nomadic culture
  5. The values ​​of Dignity, honor, face are different among Christian culture, Islamic culture and nomadic culture, and the difference is very big.

Honor and face cultures attach great importance to regulating individual behavior by social expectations and cultural norms. However, the two cultural phenomena differ in several crucial aspects.

The new cultural framework of dignity, honor, and face was proposed based on three different cultural logics and reveals that while both honor culture and face culture place importance on adhering to social norms, honor culture places greater emphasis on both self-awareness and external evaluations for self-worth, whereas face culture places more weight on external evaluations.

Additionally, honor culture is characterized by an unstable social hierarchy prone to competition, violence, and virtue, while face culture prioritizes modesty, harmony, and cooperation within a more stable hierarchy. Especially at banquets, whether or not to drink is directly related to face.

From indigenous perspectives, the self-image and social image in honor culture are relatively consistent, and honor encompasses moral, gender, and family-related aspects that may be defended through violence. In contrast, self-image and social image in face culture tend to be incongruent, and face involves morality and social achievement, which is expressed through the dimensions of seeking face and avoiding losing face with an emphasis on status and authority.

Combined with the above two perspectives, these core differences between honor and face cultures can be attributed to the moralization and instrumentalization of social cultural norms.

Specifically, honor tends to moralize social and cultural norms by transforming descriptive norms into prescriptive norms, where majority and typical behaviors that exist in a culture are considered behaviors that group members should or must abide by. In contrast, face instrumentalizes social and cultural norms by using descriptive and prescriptive norms as means and tools to maintain relationships, demonstrate status, and uphold authority.

This perspective provides new insights into cultural phenomena, such as the positive correlation between violence and virtue in honor cultures, where violence becomes a social norm that adapts to the honor culture environment and is moralized into a virtuous attribute. The social norm of harmony in face culture exists both as value-oriented harmony influenced by Confucian culture and instrumental harmony in daily life, leading to a dissonance between face and heart.

Biscuits

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

Roisin O’Riordan

She was going to kill him. She was actually going to murder him. Yes, she has said it plenty of times before but this time she meant it. This time she would drag him by his stupid hair to an airlock and shove him out to space where he can suffocate.Seven months. She lasted seven months stuck in this shuttle with him, but now she was finally going to crack.It started off with the computer. He programmed it to call him “Hot Stuff.” She changed it back. Then, he programmed it to call him “King of the Bandages.” Once again, she changed it back. Twenty nine nicknames later-yes, she kept a list-the most recent development was “Big McDaddy.”And since his names apparently weren’t keeping him preoccupied, he decided to spend time obsessing over hers. Specifically, her first name. On the top of her medical file is “B. Miller” neatly typed out, but he wanted to know more. The guesses started off sensible enough with Bella and Bethany-they have now devolved into Bread and Bacteriochlorophylls.And somehow, no matter what happens, he won’t stop grinning. No one should be as cheery as this guy, it doesn’t seem healthy. Every time she sees him she wants to growl in frustration, but he remains as sunny as the actual suns they pass.But this time is worse than all those other time. This time he took the biscuit because this time he broke a rule that could get himself and her fired. This time he… well, he took the biscuits.”I can’t believe you!” She screeched, storming into the medical bay. “I can’t believe you would actually steal from the passengers!””I’m sorry?” He asked looking up from a rather heavy looking book. He was still smiling. Asshole.”The biscuits. Don’t even try to deny it. I know it was you who took them.””Ok.” He went back to reading.”Ok?” That threw her off her guard. She was expecting an argument. For him to try feign innocence before she finally broke him and he begged her not to tell their boss. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

 

“Ok, I won’t deny it. I took the biscuits.” He raised an eyebrow. “Is there anything else or…?”

 

“Well… well… what do you have to say for yourself?” Her voice got weaker and weaker throughout the sentence. She really had no idea where she wanted to go with that.

 

“…They tasted nice?” Oh, that made her blood boil.

 

“Nice? Taste? That’s not what I was asking. Do you know how much trouble you could be in for this.” He was an idiot, he had to be. Maybe, he just didn’t care. No that couldn’t be it, could it? This job involves being away from Earth for years at a time and being fired tends to mean never getting work anywhere else. Maybe he thought the job would be easy and that he would get away with stuff like this. Not on her watch.

 

“I know how much trouble I will be in-none. No one cares. No one apart from you. Speaking of which, why do you care?”

 

He is unbelievable. “I care because I was put in charge of making sure everything is ready for when the passengers wake up.”

 

It is a requirement of every shuttle to have at least one engineer, and, if asked, she would tell people that she is the engineer-because she is. However, the shuttle is built fairly sturdy, and the AI seems to be doing a fine job of maintaining everything. It’s not that she wants things to go wrong… it would just be nice if there were a few mishaps that called for her assistance. This lack of jobs can make floating in space a tad boring, hence her eagerness to take on the role of an over-glorified party planner.

 

“Look,” he said, closing his book, “in eight months time we’re stopping for fuel at a space station. If we happen to be low on supplies-which we won’t be ’cause these passengers have more than enough-we can stock up then.”

 

“What if one of them wakes up?” It’s a weak argument but one she feels strongly about. She has read every story there was on passengers waking up from the deep sleep they are put into before take off. The passengers they were currently transporting were Taubverlians, so the four year journey would probably feel like a human’s version of a week to them but apparently it’s a week they would rather sleep through. What if they woke up angry? What if they got so annoyed they decided to file a complaint? What if those biscuits were the only thing that would have been able to calm them down and stop them from demanding the whole crew gets fired? It’s unlikely, but it is possible.

 

“Really?” He asked. She glared at him with cold, unforgiving eyes. “You need to calm down before you give yourself a stroke. I check, double check and triple check each passenger’s pod everyday and there hasn’t been even the slightest hint that one of them might wake up before they’re supposed to.” He let out a sigh and for the first time since she met him, his smile faltered. “It’s your first trip right? Thought as much. You see, after a while, you will start to get bitter. You’ll start to resent the passengers, our bosses, whoever it is at home that you’re sending your wages back to. The thought that you will more than likely be working here until the day you die and the knowledge that it is extremely rare for a crew member to ever see Earth again combined with the fact that if someone in charge screws up and needs someone to blame we will probably be killed… well, at some point or another, it gets to you. That’s why I play around with the AI and steal the occasional biscuit. That’s why Ellie stole a bottle of whiskey. That’s why Charlie is cheating on her husband with Smith. These acts keep us sane. And they’re not hurting anyone-not if no one finds out.”

 

She could somewhat sympathise. Ok, she could sympathise a lot. She was bitter. Of course she was bitter about… everything, but she wasn’t going to complain. Her family needed her to have this job, and so must his-it’s not like he would ever see his wages, so they have to be going somewhere.

 

“Our supervisors don’t care as long the passengers get to their destination safe and sound. You can relax, Birdy.”

 

She fought the urge to roll her eyes. “That is not what the B stands for.”

 

His smile was now back to full voltage as he realised he won. “We have been in this tin can for seven months and I still don’t know anything about you. What are your hopes, your dreams, your fears? Where are you from? And what exactly does the B stand for? It doesn’t stand for Biscuit, does it?”

 

She may come to regret this, but at the moment her stress is leaving her and she feels… lonely. She doesn’t have anybody to talk to on this shuttle apart from when she is arguing with him. Hearing him talk about their colleagues that he clearly knows so much better than she does just reminded her of how much she has isolated herself. “Brooklyn.”

 

“You’re from Brooklyn? Cool, I have a cousin that lives there, or used to at least.”

 

“No-well, yes I am from Brooklyn but, that’s what the B stands for.” The look on his face was almost worth it. Almost.

 

“So, you’re from Brooklyn… and your name is-”

 

“Oh, shut up.” She tried to fight a grin.

 

“…Were your parents really worried about you forgetting where you lived?”

 

“I shouldn’t have told you. I should have just stuck to Biscuit.”

 

He let out a laugh at that. Dear god, it was brighter than his smile. “Ok, ok, I’m sorry Biscuit.” She shot him a glare with much less heat than the previous one. It was kind of nice talking to him-not that she would ever dream of saying it to him. Just before she got a chance to retort, a series of short beeps filled the room. “Time for me to go check on the passengers again.”

 

“Oh, right. I have work I need to go do as well.” She turned to leave, ignoring the pang in her chest. She has her work to focus on, friends would just take up time.

 

“Wait.” He tossed her a small metal box. She stared at the box, then at him, then back again. At his nod she opened up the latches and the contents very nearly managed to surprise a snort out of her. Biscuits.

Tension Subsiding in South China Sea

Changing Geo-Political arrangements.

Mr. Xi doesn’t terrify me, but he certainly “terrifies” my German friend. Let’s call him Karl.

Obviously, Karl isn’t a basketcase of nailbiting anxiety and fear over a man a continent away. But he related a spine-tingling moment some years back listening to the news while driving on the autobahn.

Before we get into that, a little background about Karl.

Karl, perhaps unsurprisingly, speaks Chinese. What tickles me though, is he speaks funny Chinese.

Notice I said Chinese and not Mandarin.

Karl speaks a creole of accented Mandarin and horror of horrors, the Changsha dialect.

Now, try making sense of the hilarity hearing a thick German accent fighting his own tongue to make the proper tone for Mandarin words abused by the Changsha pronunciation.

After all these years, I have concluded he has been putting up a show all along to bewilder and get a rise out of me deciphering his words.

He has a future in standup, if he ever needs a change of scenery.

Back on topic. What piece of news made him nervous? It was a single statistic from China’s anti-corruption drive.

“More than a million party officials have been disciplined.”

He was flabbergasted by how seriously the Chinese were taking the campaign because when he was there, he had concluded corruption was so deeply ingrained in the culture it was impossible to root out. In fact, that was a primary reason why he left China, even though the money was lucrative.

Karl has an interesting way of bringing his point across, and he was ready when I pressed.

“China isn’t Germany. A million out of a billion is a mere drop.”

“Yes, but China either gives lip service or they do a thorough job. 1 million is a thorough job.”

“True. But why should that jolt?”

“Because nothing happened, Bill.”

“What do you mean nothing happened?”

Evidently he was waiting for this moment of weakness because he broke into a sly smile and declared:

“Nothing happened to President Xi.”

I was truly incredulous.

“I lost you Karl. You expected him to fall victim to the campaign he initiated because he is dirty too?”

“No, silly. The fact nothing happened means we have witnessed the coronation of the first Chinese emperor of the 21st century, if only in practice.”

“Now you sound like a flat earther.”

“No no. Nothing far-fetched. How do you think they land a big fish like Zhou Yongkang? Using the police? Or the army?”

“The President probably ordered his arrest personally.”

“Yes but what was the investigative apparatus and how did they manage to arrest him? Zhou was the security tsar.”

“Oh. I think I’m understanding. Even the FBI will have trouble arresting the vice President.”

“Sort of. The Xi administration basically set up their own supralegal modern day Embroidered Uniform Guard that was vested with political power to deal with anyone, even the biggest fish. The million they mentioned? A substantial number are senior cadres, nodes in the power structure. The Chinese think in terms of guanxi or relationships so tackling corruption equals identifying and destroying webs of collusion.”

“Do you think Xi went too far?”

“No. He did a fantastic job. I am just surprised the faction wars didn’t flare up in response. Not even a whimper. Xi has great standing within the party.”

“Ok, so he cleaned up. Why does that terrify you? He is more powerful than ever?”

“Not really. People fail to realize the five year plans were being executed like clockwork in the midst of rampant corruption. He would have reached the state objectives without rocking the boat.”

“He did not need to pick this fight?”

“No. He had to. It was the right time.”

“The stars didn’t align for Jiang and Hu?”

“Yes. The force was not with them.”

“The FORCE? Dude, you have been playing me all day!”

“Electricity, my boy. You can build the fanciest roads and buildings but without electricity you cannot urbanize.”

*Incredulous stare*

“For sure it is electricity. Hu was a hydroelectric engineer. China’s electricity output increased more than 2-fold during his time in office.”

“What does it have to do with corruption?”

“China essentially went full steam ahead to urbanize. Jiang wasn’t even sure how the system would work as it transited from Central planning to market economics as it spread inland from the SARs. Hu laid the foundation to guarantee future growth. The GFC gave China the breathing space to shape a cultural change among the ruling elite. A bunch of people got rich too quickly and developed money fever.”

“What does the GFC have to do with it?”

“China’s economy fundamentally shifted post 2008. China finally flexed her domestic muscle and decided they had to be less reliant on the west. But they had to inevitably slow down as the west recovered from a balance sheet and sovereign debt crisis. It is this recentering to OBOR and domestic growth that gave Xi the breathing space to tackle corruption nationwide.”

“Man, that’s deep but all that says is China has a good man at the helm. What makes him fearsome?”

“Well, when I was there the way the Chinese were throwing money around was unbelievable. Too much waste. And too many funny things going on. Putting a stop to that means the Chinese are getting on board the next stage of growth, one that is much higher in quality, and sustainable. The Chinese rocket shot up the sky in spite of excesses. Can you imagine a people without? Us Germans are counting the days when the Chinese become direct competitors to German technology and quality. The Chinese are getting their act together.”

Note: The emperor reference is no insinuation of shenanigans. Rather it is Karl’s intent to frame how far the Xi administration can push reform. In other words, Xi has the people’s mandate, just like a legitimate Son of Heaven.


Karl is real, but I’ve paraphrased our conversation.

Note: The profundity of Karl’s astute observations is contained within the satellite composites of nightime China, taken two decades apart.

Bill Pfeiffer’s Chili Capital Punishment

Bill Pfeiffer’s Chili Capital Punishment is the winner of 1980 World’s Championship!

chili 1
chili 1

chili 3
chili 3

chili 4
chili 4

Yield: 14 to 18 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon oregano
  • 2 tablespoons paprika
  • 2 tablespoons MSG
  • 9 tablespoons chili powder
  • 4 tablespoons cumin
  • 4 tablespoons beef bouillon (instant crushed)
  • 2 cans beer
  • 2 cups water
  • 4 pounds extra lean chuck (chili grind)
  • 2 pounds extra lean pork (chili grind)
  • 1 pound extra lean chuck, cut into 1/4 inch cubes
  • 2 large onions, finely chopped
  • 10 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1/2 cup oil or kidney suet
  • 1 teaspoon mole (powdered)
  • 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
  • 1 teaspoon coriander
  • 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
  • 1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 1 tablespoon Masa Harina
  • Salt to taste

Instructions

  1. In a large pot, add oregano, paprika, MSG, chili powder, cumin, beef bouillon, beer and water. Let simmer.
  2. In a separate skillet, brown 1 1/2 pounds of meat in oil or suet until meat is light brown.
  3. Drain and add to simmering spices. Continue browning meat in batches until all meat has been added.
  4. Sauté finely chopped onions in oil or suet. Add to spices and meat mixture. Add water as needed. Simmer two hours. Add mole (MOE-lay), sugar, coriander, hot pepper sauce and tomato sauce. Simmer for 45 minutes.
  5. Dissolve Masa Harina in warm water and add to chili. Add salt to taste. Simmer for 30 minutes.

I was born in 1965, which means I am 59 as I write this response. In the 1980s, I worked as a DJ in a bar called The Notorious Club 26, and I played music from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s.

As the DJ, I would say things like, “Remember, never trust anyone over 30. If you are over 30, don’t trust yourself.” As a 20-something, I thought I was being funny. Then a horrible thing happened: I turned 30 in 1995.

I was single at the time, and I realized that all the time I wasted being a DJ interfered with my social and personal life. I worked 6 days a week, and on Tuesday of each week, I got paid. Who wants to go out on a date on a Tuesday? Who wants date some who works from 9 pm until 3:30 AM?

I wass 30, looking back from where I came, and realized that I had wasted the last 10 years of my life. I worked, made very good money, got a lot of cash tips for the customers, loved my job, but my life sucked. All I did was work, sleep, and do household jobs. I had no social life.

I kept working but I also went back to college, and finally finished the work for my BA. After that, I was able to quit the DJ job and work during the day instead of being a vampire on a day pass.

I’m not going to lie: 30 seemed old to me. When I turned 40, I got a card that said something like 40 is the new 30.

I’m 59 years old now, and my hair is gray, just like my beard, and my body is a wreck. However, I know that my life has been full and fun. I’m not sure what comes next, but I am looking forward to the trip.

Johnny West 1960s toy figurines

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As a Chinese person, I never felt any connection to the “patriotism” that the Chinese Communist Party instilled in me since childhood.

In elementary school, our teachers told us, “The most important principle in writing is to show your love for China.” Well, I didn’t understand at all. How could a child possibly grasp what it means to “love China”? For an elementary student, “patriotism” is nothing but outdated stories and empty political slogans.

As I grew older, my aversion to “patriotism” only increased. The reason was obvious: if “patriotism” had a significant impact on one’s well-being, why had I never seen anyone get rich because they “loved China”? And why had I never seen anyone fall into a miserable situation because they “didn’t love China”?

When I started using the internet, I discovered more meaningful things. I realized that China could only avoid destruction by embracing Western political systems. During that time, I read many articles by “independent Chinese intellectuals,” including economists, Chinese immigrants abroad, lawyers, and entrepreneurs.

Back then, I hoped these independent intellectuals could awaken the “numb Chinese people” through their writings. They were active on BBS, blogs, social media, and China’s version of Twitter. I spent a lot of time reading their articles and enthusiastically commenting. I admired them and saw them as the future political stars of China. At that time, I had my own blog called “A Chinese Citizen,” with the slogan “For a Bright Future of China.” I wrote every day, and when I had nothing to write about, I would repost negative news about China and add my own gloating comments.

The trolls on Quora today are nothing compared to the old me.

Later, I got married and had my own child. As a freelancer, I had time each day to spend with my growing child. To expose my child to nature, I took them to many places. Busy with accompanying my child, working, cooking, and doing laundry every day, my life focus gradually shifted.

One summer evening when my child was three years old, we drove to a famous large lake in northern Xuzhou called Weishan Lake. A section of the Grand Canal passes through the Weishan Lake area. The sunset bathed the hundred-kilometer-long embankment road along Weishan Lake in golden light. My wife, captivated by the beauty, asked me to stop the car for a while. I parked by the roadside, and we were greeted by the cool evening breeze and the slightly fishy smell of the lake water. We all quietly listened to the waterfowl returning to their nests.

When a long line of cargo ships appeared at the end of my vision on the Grand Canal, another fleet from the opposite direction sounded their horns as they passed through the Linjiaba lock. The sunset deepened, and the afterglow moved from the embankment road to the surface of Weishan Lake. The vast lake, looking like an ocean, stretched beyond the horizon. Waterbirds in the reeds were startled by passing ships, taking off with pleasant sounds. Watching my child jumping with joy and my wife enjoying the cool breeze, I felt a deep sense of happiness. In that moment, I suddenly realized something:

Weishan Lake is a gift from nature to the locals; the Grand Canal is a monumental achievement by our ancestors. The various aquatic products from Weishan Lake have nourished generations of people on this land. Today, these endless cargo ships continuously transport energy and agricultural products to ports along the route. We enjoy the tranquility of nature, while our material life benefits from China’s vibrant economic system.

The natural geography is a gift from God; historically, it is a territory our ancestors expanded on horseback; and in reality, it is the result of countless generations of Chinese people’s hard work. For economic and social activities to run efficiently, the country’s leaders need exceptional talent to design reliable development plans. Without all this, there would be no individual happiness. The CPC is a positive part of this picture—not the whole, but just as important as all other parts.

I live on this land in this lifetime, and so does my child. Everyone I love and everyone who loves me live on this land. I love them and hope they remain healthy, happy, and joyful. Protecting them means ensuring that this land is free from war, plague, hunger, and poverty. Only when these foundations are solid can I fully devote myself to life and family. Isn’t this the relationship between an individual and their country? The CPC has achieved this, so what exactly am I complaining about every day? Should I deny everything just because of some bad news on the internet and some unfortunate events on this land?

By Weishan Lake at that moment, I grasped a simple truth: to love this country, to love its mountains and rivers, its history and culture, the heroes who shed blood and tears in modern history, and the forces leading this country to rejuvenation. At the same time, when my child grows up, they should see themselves as a master of this country, participating in its development. This is what a young boy should aspire to.

There is no such thing as love or hate without reason in this world. To love something, you must first understand it, knowing its strengths and weaknesses, and recognizing its significance to us. Otherwise, “forced love” is fake, blind, and short-lived. “Patriotism” is no different. Only by fully understanding this land, this country, and the forces driving China’s progress, with all their pros and cons, can one develop genuine love.

I am becoming such a Chinese person.

She Gave Him PRE and POST Date Bill and it Backfired

The Trigger For WWIII Just Arrived – What Are The Implications For Americans?

Guest Post by Brandon Smith

If the year of 2024 has proven anything so far, it’s that our worries about the potential outbreak of WWIII are absolutely reasonable. The skeptics making accusations of “conspiracy theory” and “doom and gloom” have been proven wrong yet again. The geopolitical atmosphere is turning sour fast.

I still don’t think a lot of people realize how truly volatile the situation is globally right now. From my point of view, WWIII has already begun, at least in economic terms.

 

Let’s not forget the fact that Ukraine is essentially a proxy for all of NATO against Russia. And, the situation in the Middle East is about to become much worse. Because of the alliances involved and the fragile nature of global energy exports there is a danger of systemic collapse should a wider war break out between Israel and multiple Arab nations. It appears that such a war is imminent.

But why should Americans care? It’s pretty simple – War spurs shortages, and shortages in the middle of a stagflationary crisis are a very bad thing.

Sanctions against Russia affect around 10% of the global oil market and around 12% of global natural gas consumption. But so far all that oil and natural gas is still flowing around the world, only the trade routes have changed. The Middle East, on the other hand, accounts for over 35% of the global oil market and 18% of the natural gas market. Widespread chaos in this region would mean economic crisis on a scale not seen in a century.

Think we have problems with stagflation now? Just wait until energy prices go to the moon.

Around 30% of all oil exports travel through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage which a nation like Iran can easily block for months at a time. Sinking a few larger vessels in the straight would obstruct all cargo ship traffic and oil tanker traffic. Trying to clean up the mess would be difficult because artillery, which is almost impossible to intercept, can rain down from Iran on any vessels trying to drag sunken ships out of the way.

Iran has mutual defense pacts with multiple governments in the region including Lebanon and Syria, along with military ties to Russia. The Turkish government is unlikely to allow western troops to use their airspace to launch attacks. The US military presence in Afghanistan is gone and the Iraqi government will never allow foreign troops to use their land to come to the aid of Israel.

This greatly limits the west’s launch points for an offensive large enough to blitz Iran. The vast majority of attacks would be from the air, and if the Russians start supplying Iran with batter radar and missile technology then there’s no guarantees Israel or the US would gain full control of the air space. In other words, if a wider war breaks out it will not end for YEARS and it’s going to be fought on the ground.

Of course, most establishment experts have claimed that the situation will never escalate to that point and that the threat of direct confrontation between Israel and Iran is minimal. I have been predicting the opposite for a number of reasons, just as I predicted that there was a high chance of war in Ukraine months before it happened.

In October of 2023 in my article ‘It’s A Trap! The Wave Of Repercussions As The Middle East Fights “The Last War”’ I warned that a multi-front war was about to develop between Israel and various Muslim nations including Lebanon and Iran. I noted:

Israel is going to pound Gaza into gravel, there’s no doubt about that. A ground invasion will meet far more resistance than the Israelis seem to expect, but Israel controls the air and Gaza is a fixed target with limited territory. The problem for them is not the Palestinians, but the multiple war fronts that will open up if they do what I think they are about to do (attempted sanitization). Lebanon, Iran and Syria will immediately engage and Israel will not be able to fight them all…”

My purpose in that article was to outline the dangers of US involvement in a larger war that would require conscription and escalation with Russia. Despite the “experts” insisting that the odds are overblown, it now appears that the next stage of escalation is about to begin.

Iran, Lebanon and Israel have been exchanging limited fire for months now. This is nothing new. What is new is the change in tone after a Hezbollah rocket strike on a children’s soccer game in the remote Druze village of Majdal Shams that killed 12.

On the other side, Israel’s brazen assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil this week is a clear catalyst for war. Haniyeh has been engaged in a diplomatic mission to start peace negotiations in Gaza. His assassination sends a clear message that Israel has no intention of entering into talks with Hamas.

IDF officials also announced that they had killed top Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in a precision missile strike Tuesday in Beirut.  There’s no escaping it now.

Iran’s supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered retaliation against Israel and issued an order for Iran to strike the Israelis directly. Iran will likely use extended missile barrages, but also stage troops in Syria and Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen will then increase their attacks on ships traversing the Red Sea. It’s hard to say how much Russia will involve itself at first, but I have no doubt more advanced Russian missiles and other weapons will make an appearance on the battlefield.

The prospect of world war is immense. Israel will not be able to fight in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran all at the same time. Energy exports in the region will definitely face a slowdown, if not a complete breakdown. At that point the war won’t just be about Israel, it will be about a global energy crisis. I don’t see any scenario in which the US government doesn’t get involved.

The high risk of terrorism this entails should not be overlooked. We’ve had an undefended border and record illegal crossings for a few years now under Biden.  There’s not telling how many foreign agents are in the country and I believe this was by design.  I think the establishment maintained open border policies because they wanted such people here.  The more terror these agents cause the more the public will be tempted to increase government powers to deal with the attacks.

Beyond that, the political left in the west has tied itself to the Palestinian wagon as if it’s their business. In reality, leftists view the war in Gaza as just another vehicle for their outrage. They use minorities, they use gays and now they’re using Muslims. It’s the classic Marxist strategy of hijacking the social causes of other groups and co-opting their momentum.

Gaza is just another excuse for progressive spastics to riot and start burning more of the west down (their true goal). Anyone that opposes them will automatically be accused of being a “Zionist sympathizer” even if Israel is not their concern. So, there will surely be Muslim terror attacks, but also civil conflicts triggered by leftists exploiting the situation to their advantage.

The timing of these events in tandem with the election is definitely not coincidental. Whoever ends up in office will essentially be “stuck” with the war, inheriting a disaster from day one. Once US forces are committed to an allied effort, there’s no chance any president (including Trump) will pull those forces out.  If things get bad enough, there might not even be an election in November.

For those that think we can “win” on multiple fronts, the truth might shock you.  Eric Edelman, who serves as Vice Chair of the US National Defense Strategy Commission, has given warning about the impending conflict, stating:

“There is potential for near-term war and a potential that we might lose such a conflict…We need our allies to produce more. Our defense industrial base is in very bad shape. The European defense industrial base is in even worse shape. We need our industrial base, their base, and the industrial base of our Pacific allies. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan–they all need to be stepping up because to match what Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are doing is beyond our ability to do it ourselves.”

I have written about the logistical shortcomings of the west in a WWIII scenario for some time now. At the top of the list will be manpower, just as we have seen in Ukraine. This is why we have been hearing military and political officials hint about a new draft over the past two years. They know what’s coming.

A draft to fight for globalist causes is unacceptable. I’m not going to delve into debate over whether it’s right or wrong for western countries to throw their weight behind Israel. Frankly, I don’t care about that argument. I don’t have anything invested in either side of the conflict. I care about Americans. And, I know that making the US military the go-to solution to the Middle East problem is going to end with a lot of dead Americans. I also know that the expanding crisis would make certain special interest (globalists) very happy.  As I noted last year:

The establishment seems particularly obsessed with convincing US conservatives and patriots to participate in the chaos; there are a number of Neo-cons and even a few supposed liberty media personalities calling for Americans to answer the call of blood in Israel. Some have described the coming conflagration as “the war to end all wars.”

I believe that the real war is yet to truly start, and that is the war to erase the globalists from existence. They want us to fight overseas in endless quagmires in the hopes we will die out. And when we do, there will be no one left to oppose them…”

The trap has just been set. We’ll have to wait and observe the scale of the response from Lebanon and Iran, but I believe the worst case scenario is at hand. There are multiple powderkeg events in progress around the world right now, but the Middle East situation looks to be the most disastrous by far in terms of how it will affect the US.

There’s a hot topic on the Chinese internet: Is the United States now at the end of the Tang Dynasty or the end of the Ming Dynasty?

I’m in the Ming Dynasty camp.

The fall of the Tang Dynasty was essentially due to the power of the Guanzhong aristocratic group blocking the upward mobility of the Hebei class. Although it was nominally due to the rebellion of the An-Shi insurgents, it was actually a civil war between the Han Chinese of Hebei and the Han Chinese of Longxi.

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(What really led to the demise of the Tang Dynasty was this brutal battle in which most of the army was destroyed.)

Similarly, the fall of the Ming Dynasty was also essentially an internal Han Chinese issue.

Even though there were massive problems with the distribution of interests between the north and the south, it was essentially a civil war between the north and the south.

Since both falls were due to unequal distribution of interests leading to the collapse of the country, why do I insist that the United States is currently at the end of the Ming Dynasty?

Three characteristics:

First, during the fall of the Han and Tang dynasties, these massive entities in Chinese history still maintained overwhelming military advantages over surrounding ethnic groups, whereas the United States does not have this advantage now.

Second, before the fall of the Ming Dynasty, there was a period of, uh, I’m not sure if I should say this, but it is indeed recorded in history books, a so-called “men dressing as women,” and LGBTQ was very prevalent. I have no discrimination against homosexuality, truly none! In ancient China, including the Warring States period and the most prosperous Han Dynasty, there were many rulers who were homosexuals, whom I admire! Look, I’m saying this, so I definitely do not discriminate against homosexuals, right?

What I want to say is that when these rulers were homosexuals, soldiers and ordinary people did not have a tendency to change genders, but at the time of the dynasty’s collapse, there were many grassroots males doing this…

I mean absolutely no discrimination, but it is very similar to the records of the late Ming Dynasty…

Third, spending countless amounts of money and achieving nothing. It’s incredibly frightening. Hundreds of thousands of taels of silver invested, achieving nothing…

In general, I believe that the United States now resembles the end of the Ming Dynasty very much.

The real fall of the Ming Dynasty happened during the “Three Great Campaigns of Wanli,” when the Ming Dynasty still seemed very strong and launched three large-scale military campaigns. But seriously, hasn’t the United States also fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? These three seemingly world-shaking wars actually only fattened the military leaders?

A hot topic on the Chinese internet is: Who least wants the United States to collapse?

80% of the answers are: China.

Chinese netizens are very clear that this world is maintained by the United States. If the United States collapses, it would be a disaster for the world, including China. No one can escape. So we clearly provide this answer based on our own interests: United States, you must not collapse!

The battle that marked the fall of the Ming Dynasty was the Battle of Salhu.

I do not want the United States to engage in wars in the Middle East again, as it is clearly America’s Salhu moment.

That would be a disaster for China, the United States, and the world.

In this world, no one can defeat the United States, except the United States itself.

No.

I’m from Hong Kong, a city that took in Vietnamese boat people who fled the Vietnam War, at the request of the United Nations. It placed huge economic and social burdens on the city, and the United Nations, after decades, has yet to pay back the 1.3 billion HKD it owes us for our efforts in accommodating them (as of last year, they’ve only paid back 166 million HKD, a mere fraction).

Taking in refugees is an expensive affair that doesn’t always come with benefits. We had enough trouble accommodating ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese people, who were culturally similar to us. Could you imagine if they were from an Islamic-dominated culture? I’m not just talking about the child sex rings, gang-rapes or honour-killings you see in Europe and the UK, I’m talking re-education, teaching them our language and culture, which is difficult and rarely succeeds, in addition to helping them find low-paying jobs, which affects the livelihoods of our grassroots citizens.

I understand the humanitarian principles of helping those in need, but taking them in is not the best solution. The elites who decide on our behalf to let them in can do so in their own good conscience, because they’re not the ones who have to bear the consequences. It’s not their jobs that will face higher competition from low-skilled foreign labour – if anything, they stand to profit from saving on workers’ wages. It’s not their wives and children who have to put up with the gazes and advances of lonely, desperate men (Dr. Clemens Ladenburger being an exception). It’s not their neighborhoods that will face greater poverty and crime. It’s not their communities that will be fractured, as the original residents move out to make way for the new ones moving in.

But most of all, I think young men fleeing their own countries just offends us on a cultural level. You see, there was a time when China wasn’t the second largest economy on earth. Our grandparents had to deal with the Imperial Japanese military, then considered to be one of the finest fighting forces in the world. Even western powers in the Far East couldn’t stop them – Hong Kong (then a British colony) fell in two weeks, with the Japanese only losing a few hundred men.

Guess what the Chinese people back in those days did about it? They fought back valiantly, and suffered the second-most casualties in WW2. Even those who fled to America supported the war effort by sending home what little money they made working jobs white people felt were beneath them.

Refugees (especially young men) should stay in their countries and work to make it a better place for their countrymen. No one can save you but yourselves. The Chinese have known this for at least a century now.

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
– The Internationale

The Psychopath | House M.D.

I’m going to give a pro tankie answer, even though I am not a big fan of tankies. That’s because I have to agree with them here.

There is absolutely no reason for North Korea to be hated by the West. They are this defensive because they know they are hated and the West just wants to destroy North Korea… and for zero geopolitical reason at that.

The USA destroyed every city in North Korea, and put more bombs on North Korea than they did on Japan which brutally invaded Asia and attacked America’s Pearl Harbor. 635,000 tons of bombs were dropped on North Korea, compared to 160,000 tons of bombs in Japan.

North Korea had 9.26 million people before the war. More than 1 million North Korean civilians were killed or missing due to the Korean War. To compare, less than 1 million Japanese civilians died in WWII, with 100,000+ of them killed in the atomic bombings, in a population of more than 70 million.

The war that America waged on North Korea wasn’t even a war at this point. It was outright genocide. Hitler would be proud of this. Every last North Korean was a target (and some South Koreans too, No Gun Ri Massacre was an example). The aim wasn’t even to put pressure on the North Korean regime, it was to give civilians hell. That is what strategic bombing is aimed to do, give civilians hell.

North Korea would not be justified to invade South Korea (which, frankly, is a capitalist hellhole as much as North Korea is a radical communist juche hellhole today). If North Korea did such things, I would condemn North Korea as well and demand that North Korea go back to its borders.

But it would be very justified to build hundreds of nuclear weapons, and set conditions for its use being the second total destruction of North Korea as happened during the Korean War. Luckily for normal people, North Korea only has dozens of nuclear weapons, and it has only very recently acquired the ability to hit the US mainland with nuclear weapons using just one nuclear weapons platform.

When you read the North Korean history, it makes sense why Kim Jong-un is so preoccupied with building nuclear weapons. If I was him, I would also build nukes.

I’m happy to see countries be able to defend themselves from imperialists the hard way against all odds, be it Israel or North Korea.

America Compared: Why Other Countries Treat Their People So Much Better (Reaction)

The truth hurts.

The imperial examination system was a talent selection system implemented in ancient China to build a vast bureaucratic system and control the entire empire.

For its time, this system was quite advanced.

Firstly, it ensured a relatively open path for social mobility, giving children from poor families a chance. Secondly, it was relatively fair; while the winners of the imperial examination might not have been outstanding managers, they were certainly not fools.

At the very least, they had to read an immense amount of books, be knowledgeable, and be intelligent.

(Someone:Let me tell you something, folks, nobody reads more books than I do. Believe me. I’m the best at reading, okay? I’ve read more than anyone else—more than all the other politicians combined. They say, ‘ how do you know so much?’ Well, I’ve got the best books, the smartest people, and I understand everything. I know all the facts, the details, you name it. Nobody’s smarter, nobody’s better informed. It’s tremendous, folks, really tremendous. And believe me, when it comes to being well-read, I’m simply the best.”)

Moreover, the exams were not purely about comparing poetry or essays but included a large number of “strategy and policy” questions.

These questions are somewhat similar to modern civil service exam questions or political knowledge tests for students.

I found a few examples of ancient exam questions and, trying to adapt them to today’s global situation, rephrased them.

You can take a look to get a sense of the type of questions.

1 The United States has established hundreds of military bases around the world, while China’s military strength is mainly concentrated domestically. What are the reasons for these two strategies, and what are their respective advantages and disadvantages?

2 China’s ethnic policies are inherited from the Soviet Union, which has been criticized by many. However, it seems to be functioning well now, better than the Soviet Union. What do you think is the most important reason for this?

3 Roosevelt’s New Deal has some socialist characteristics, while China’s economic policies have many capitalist features. Share your views on this.

4 During President Trump’s tenure, what were some characteristics of the government officials he hired?

(Someone:I’ve got the best, the smartest, the most incredible people working for me. I pick winners, and let me tell you, they make America great again—just like I promised. The greatest administration, believe me. We’re bringing jobs, we’re bringing prosperity, and we’re making this country shine like never before. It’s fantastic, really fantastic,the best team, making America greater than ever. No one does it better.)

5 During the Korean War, China and the Soviet Union were allies, but in the Sino-Vietnamese War, China and the U.S. became quasi-partners. Share your opinion on this.

These are five exam questions related to politics, history, and military affairs, each requiring a detailed answer. There are also other questions covering topics such as education, economy, diplomacy, and so on.

Additionally, there was the Eight-Legged Essay examination, where candidates were required to use the sayings of sages as arguments and write an essay strictly following the standard format.

Overall, answering these questions well within a limited time is quite challenging, especially considering that you are competing with thousands of the most diligent and intelligent individuals in China.

An interesting fact: The top scorer in the imperial examination was called the “Zhuangyuan.” Only one was selected every three years. Over the 1,300-year history of the examination system, there were a total of 504 Zhuangyuans.

The first one was from the Tang Dynasty, and the last one was from the Qing Dynasty. Their hometowns were very close to each other, and today this area is known for having one of the strongest cities in China’s college entrance examinations, Hengshui City in Hebei Province.

The United States is sinking fast…

Young Boy movie theater

Look

I believe every system has to DELIVER RESULTS

Results alone decide whether a system is a success or a failure

The Chinese System today rose from an Agrarian Nation struggling with poverty to one of the biggest and most powerful nations on the planet with a near $20 Trillion economy

This means their system is a ROARING SUCCESS

India as it stands once Chinas equal has a 1/6 Per Capita Income, 1/9th Industrial Production and 16% of the Skilled Labor and 1/200th of the Infrastructure Or planning but 5 times more corruption and a lot more inequality

This means our system is a HUMONGOUS FAILURE

Plain and Simple

  • Two Nations
  • Similar Background of Colonial Exploitation
  • No Huge Stash of Oil Or Gas
  • Same Illiterate People, Primarily Farmers
  • Loads of Poor People

One becomes a major force to reckon with

Other is struggling on its way to the middle

I don’t give a rats ass about anything else


In the same way

Chinese Students have near Top Mensa scores

Chinese Graduates lead all forms of Scientific Research today

Chinese Engineers have worked on Marvels across the world

So their system (Meritocracy) is a ROARING SUCCESS as far as I am concerned

It has delivered results

The Indian Students on a Median Level have nothing on the level of the Chinese

Indian Graduates are at best glorified managers of big enterprises founded by Westerners or have toilet cleaning startups that have Zero Technological Innovation or Edge

Indian Engineers – no need to say much

So our System is a HUMONGOUS FAILURE as far as I am concerned

This System means – Low Quality Government Schools, Free Rein to Private Schools, Exploitation of Students and Reservations – all of these

Plain and Simple

  • Two Nations
  • Same level of literacy or illiteracy
  • Same struggle to expand on primary education

One is so dominant that they terrify the West who have been world leaders for over three or four centuries

Another producing factory drones and talented casual leave sanctioning munims


So everything India is doing is flawed according to me

Simple

Now either it’s because the Chinese are genetically superior in which case it’s perfectly fine to say “This is our maximum limit. Doing little and generating 99% Gas”

Ambika Vijay and our friend Dr Karan Shanmugham have presented some valid points over the last few months or year to say this theory is unlikely

So the only explanation is :-

Our System is flawed in every sense possible

This includes Reservations


I am not for Meritocracy because of the equality notion nor am I against Reservations because it is unjust

I simply say Meritocracy has proven a roaring success while Reservations has achieved virtually nothing for India in 35 years

So this means either the concept of Reservations is wrong in itself or the Implementation of Reservations is wrong


As to Justice to Oppressed Castes

Again China sets an example here to it’s minorities (Uyghurs, Hui, Hill Tribes, Tibetans, Lhasans, Pinglis)

  • Fully Free Education upto University Graduation
  • Stipends to students every month from Grade III to University
  • 51% Guaranteed Resource sharing
  • First Preference Farming Contracts
  • 66% Guaranteed Local Contracts or Undertaken Contracts

Yet all of them need ABILITY to qualify for anything

Won’t these help the oppressed communities far better than keeping them as beggars and dangling reservations???

It’s why Xinjiang generates it’s revenue plus contributes to China while Tibet too has a net outward contribution

Yet

Kashmir has Zip

Most Poor Districts with Dalit Majority or Oppressed Majority have ZERO outward contribution to a State

So as usual India is doing something very wrong

Why?

It hasn’t worked or produced any results so far to indicate otherwise


So it’s time to overhaul everything because India is One Gigantic Failure especially since 1975–2024 barring a 10 year period from 2000–2010 & a 4 year period from 1992–1996

Is that being done?

  • Our Legal system is replaced by a More Draconian system
  • Leaders are stupider as time goes by
  • We are digging down on our failure system instead of looking for flaws and overhauling

So the biggest question is

WHAT THE F*** ARE WE ACTUALLY DOING?

I do not know that is the fact or not but I do know one thing : should stay away from them, period. During the VN War, those nva you bumped into battlefields of South Vietnam were survivors of all challenges before they met you. The weak, the sick all died along the HCM Trails by bombings, sickness…Behind every single nva soldier, he had nothing to lose ( no fancy cars, big house and good living back home ) In fact, behind him there could be a piece of farm land, poor. His village and his folks got bombings from US planes. Put aside all political propaganda, these factors alone could propel him to the point he really wanted to trade life and death with you. He didn’t trek thousand miles in tough terrains to fight you with his bare ass. He got his ak47, hand grenades and all kinds of trainings. He also knew that no man is tougher than a bullet. Why would he be afraid if he is willing to put his life away for a good cause ? That is why no matter what nationality you are Chinese Japanese, French, American, Korean, Australian, Cambodian, Thai…HE WILL NOT HESITATE TO CONFRONT YOU WITH ALL OF WHATEVER HE GOT. Share ( an ex-nva of Cambodia battlefields, late 70s )

Yes actually! Going anonymous.

I have a very good friend who used to drive a very very old second hand car. I always teased him why he didn’t bought a new reasonable car like me, cause I thought he was a middle class guy who can afford a normal car instead of buying refurbished cars. Also, he used to never tip waiters and would always search cheaper options of everything. I would always poke him and make fun of him for being a cheapskate, of course in a friendly way so he never would mind.

Now on the part when I found out. I started a business and was in very needed of investment. It was a big idea so I needed every help I could get. I already had received help from 5 of my friends, which was seemingly enough to start the venture along with my money. When my cheapskate friend knew about my idea (I never told him myself), he came to me and said he would like to invest in my venture as he loved the idea. Then he offered me an amount which was almost double the combined investment of 5 others! No words will be enough to describe how shocked and surprised I was.

I knew there is difference between how the rich thinks and most of us do. But I never totally understood it until I had this experience.

What Putin and China Just Did to the U.S. Military is SHOCKING, Pentagon on Red Alert

“Terrify” is too strong a word; I prefer the word “concerned”.

Xi Jinping is a very smart person, and there are stories how he was determined from a very early age to become China’s leader. He had a plan.

He worked his way up, and eventually became party general secretary, chairman of the Central Military Commission, and President of China. He is not attracted by wealth and money, and is not distracted by women and sex.

These are all good virtues for the leader of a country to have, because it shows that he is able to think of the overall good of the nation, and its citizens when making decisions. He does not think of personal benefit, which is important.

He has also surrounded himself with very intelligent advisors, notably Wang Qishan.

My concern is that while he has understood how to work the system in China to get where he is, he has much more difficulty getting inside the heads of non-Chinese societies and non-Chinese leaders.

This means that he can make good decisions for China and Chinese, but he has a much harder time understanding the needs and concerns of other nations. But, at a time when China now has the world’s second largest economy, this becomes cause for worry because China is now a superpower. The leader of China cannot only think of what is good for China; he has to think of the problems other nations are having.

This explains my disappointment at China’s current over-reliance on Chinese nationalism to support China’s claims to the South China Sea. While I can understand eventually exercising claims to this territory, I really don’t understand why these claims were exercised beginning in 2013? If China was going to make a peaceful rise, why frighten its SE Asian neighbors so soon, and then militarizing these islands, giving the US a pretext to engage?

Was this really necessary? Was this done just to impress Chinese that China was now a global power, and the period of shame was over? What has been accomplished?

If this was the idea, I think that it was done too soon, and then Xi was caught off-guard by the election of Trump, and then caught off-guard again when Trump appointed Lighthizer and Navarro, both of whom were hostile to Chinese expansionism.

Doesn’t this make other countries look at China and say “All this talk of China’s peaceful rise was a sham, they just want to gobble us up?”

This is not just a PR and media problem, it is a challenge for policy formulation.

China got caught off-guard because many domestic reforms were delayed for too long. Now, if it makes reforms under US pressure, it looks weak, as if it were bowing to US pressure, which is not good for Xi and the leadership.

Deng Xiaoping said that the best strategy for China was to keep a low profile; I continue to believe that is the best formula for China because it does not yet offer a framework which other nations can buy into. “Non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs” is not a framework for an inter-connected world, because technology has gone way past that.

This is because China’s foreign policy now is too purely transactional, and has not yet expanded beyond that. When is it going to expand beyond only being transactional? The one bright spot in foreign relations is Xi’s relationship with President Putin; they seem to genuinely get along and like each other.

Why wasn’t this kind of relationship developed with the leadership of western nations, before everything blew up recently?

The United States was a flawed leader, but it offered a framework which worked for a long time. It won the Cold War against the Soviet Union, but it lost the peace because it turned inward and became selfish. It thought that it could only remain strong if other challengers, like China, were beaten down. Other countries lost respect for its leadership.

So far, China does not offer anything better.

Shorpy

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From another source…

For your information, Sunday there was a demonstration for peace in Amsterdam. Suddenly ''we'' were confronted with AZOV demonstrators. The AFVN wrote an article about it, it is in Dutch, I translated it with deepl translate. Hope it is clear enough what happened.

Sunday 28 July saw the monthly demonstration of Platform for Peace and Solidarity. What happened on that day that we can interpret as a low point, there was ‘suddenly’ a demonstration on Dam Square by the AZOV battalion.* AZOV is a fascist organisation in Ukraine and responsible for much death and destruction. During WW2, they committed many crimes against dissenters, against people of different backgrounds based on colour. Ukrainian fascists openly stood on Dam Square with flags of AZOV and openly scanned slogans for the release of AZOV, for supporting these fascists. With outright lies naming Russia as the aggressor, that Russia would be a terrorist state and hatred against Russians. This while the aggression comes from the US/Ukraine with many bombing civilian casualties. It is not for nothing that most refugees are in Russia.Russia intervened militarily after many attempts to negotiate and conclude peace agreements. So this did not come out of the blue and Russia's action was by no means unprovoked, quite the contrary.

It is a shame that it has come to this, that fascists can openly demonstrate in front of the National Monument that symbolises the victims in the fight against fascism 1940- 1945.

We as AFVN have not experienced that for a long time that fascists are allowed to openly propagate their ideology on public roads with impunity. It is certainly due to the Western media in which fascism in Ukraine is systematically trivialised and denied. So they are certainly partly responsible for the legitimacy of fascism.

Why didn't the police intervene? How could this have come to this? We cannot let this go unpunished and want to call on everyone who is against fascism to take action. We want to call on everyone reading this message to spread it as much as possible, people need to know. We must call on politicians and administrations to distance themselves from Ukrainian fascism in the Netherlands, the law prohibits overt fascism and signs.

We call on all members of parliament to have parliamentary questions asked about this. And we should fire the city council, asking whether fascism is tolerated in the city of the February Strike. In the coat of arms of the municipality of Amsterdam, heroic, determined and merciful is written as a tribute to the February Strike 1941.

Both China and the U.S. have their own strengths and weaknesses. My responses will focus more on the aspects of China that I find commendable.

Strict Drug Control

I strongly agree with this. China does have a drug problem, but with years of strict crackdowns, it has been better controlled now.

I remember getting lost in a minority area in Beijing around 1999 or 1998, walking into a small alley, and finding many discarded needles on the ground. It was quite unsettling at the time. Another instance was across from the rental house I was staying in, where a middle-aged man committed suicide because his son couldn’t quit heroin.

Breaking Bad is my favorite American TV show, but what Mr. White does is certainly not commendable! By the way, the U.S. has much better freedom of creation. Shows like Breaking Bad would never pass the censorship in China. This results in very few worthwhile Chinese TV dramas, which I hardly watch because they seem immature and uninteresting.

I know a narcotics officer who said they are like a firewall, sacrificing themselves to protect ordinary people like me who are pure and innocent. He said narcotics officers encounter the most vile things in the world.

I’ve seen some videos about the plight of American drug addicts, wandering the streets and losing their ability to work, which is very sad.

Strict Gun Control

It’s extremely strict, to the point of being unreasonable. For example, if I remember correctly, air guns have been banned since after 2000. If I were American, I would definitely buy a gun because it seems fun. But that’s not possible in China.

There are pros and cons to this.

Most people still support strict gun control. If I remember correctly, countries like Japan and the UK also have strict gun control?

I heard that the U.S. bans the sale of bulletproof vests, while in China, you can buy them freely.

China doesn’t ban bows and arrows; you can buy and play with them freely. In fact, the destructive power of a bow and arrow is not less than that of a handgun, which I don’t understand why it’s allowed.

Refusal of Immigration……

In fact, all East Asian countries refuse immigration, including Japan and South Korea. However, it seems that Japan is not particularly opposed to high-skilled Chinese immigrants. I have two friends who have immigrated to Japan.

China is similar. For instance, North Korean defectors—China has accepted far more than all other countries combined, including South Korea.

But there hasn’t been much public or official reaction, and they gradually receive citizenship. They go to school and work as usual.

However, there was a lot of opposition online when Rohingya refugees entered China from Myanmar, around only 30,000 in total.

The general sentiment was: accept them humanitarianly but do not accept them as immigrants. But for the same Myanmar people, if they are from Kokang (essentially Han Chinese), there is no opposition,even though they are also a minority group suppressed by the Burmese military junta.

Today (2024.08.01), the Kokang army captured a major city, and they have a population of 1.12 million under their control.

Chinese people are very familiar with this.

Today is the PLA Army Building Anniversary, and they deliberately chose today to attack the Northeast Command. This is called “paying tribute”.

You see, their way of thinking is just pure Chinese!

Even if all of them were to integrate into China, I wouldn’t feel much difference. They all speak Chinese, use Chinese currency, and telecom services, and copy China’s way of life, including television stations and news broadcasts.

( Kokang’KKTV)

(China CCTV)

If Vietnamese or Laotians were to immigrate to China, I personally wouldn’t object.

This topic is a bit sensitive and politically incorrect to discuss further, but I think you understand my point. Almost all Chinese people share my attitude. The last Rohingya incident saw a female actress advocating for their acceptance, and she was heavily criticized to the point of shutting down her social media accounts. The general opinion was to put those thousands of people in her home.

I don’t mean to be racist, not at all. However, if hundreds of thousands of people of Chinese or Confucian cultural sphere enter China, and local security hasn’t significantly deteriorated (there are indeed crime records, such as defectors worried about being reported, or cases of murder and assault simply for food, but overall, the crime rate is very low), whereas another group’s entry results in frequent incidents of armed robbery, severe injury, and even rape—crimes that are now quite rare in China—shouldn’t I, as a taxpayer, question whether my tax money might be better spent on something like keeping a dog?

Why is that?

Other benefits include a strong emphasis on education, high medical standards with low costs, and so on. But the most important points are the ones mentioned above.

Sierra Tkacik

“Jane!” A voice bellowed from the recesses of the ship. “Where is my grapefruit?”“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” A voice echoed from the opposite direction.“My grapefruit, Jane! The one I specifically had my name on! The one you stole!”“First of all, why would you print your name on a freaking grapefruit? Second of all, if you didn’t want me to take it, you shouldn’t have put it in a community fridge.”“So you did take it!”“Why is this grapefruit so important, anyway?”“Do you know, Jane, how many people have died in ships due to scurvy? Do you?!”“So eat an orange!”“The orange is overrated! The grapefruit is the only citrus fruit that understands me.”Charlie groaned and pressed his forehead against the table. “Lewis, we just had a shipment of grapefruit yesterday, get another one!” “Shut up, Charlie! This doesn’t concern you!” “I don’t even know why you try anymore.” Lyra flipped her braid as she slid in next to him. “Because you well know how much worse it will get if I don’t.” Harriet groaned as she remembered the third great prank war. Jane and Lewis were in an argument over their favorite colors, and it escalated into a full-blown war. Everywhere anyone turned, there was another trap set for either Lewis or Jane. Somehow, they ended up joining forces against the rest of the ship and wreaked havoc upon the crew of the Flame. They feared that it would spread to the other ships of the fleet, but luckily, Charlie recovered from his bout of illness quickly, and managed to calm both Lewis and Jane within the hour. But the crew would never forget the horror and fear they faced in that week; that was the day Charlie became the unofficial leader of all things Lewis and Jane. “I don’t even know why they’re on the same ship after that stunt; much less the mothership.” Lyra took a lasting gulp of coffee. “Jane’s the best engineer in the whole fleet.” “And Lewis is crazy good with the servers and the rest of the ship’s tech.” Harriet supplied, flicking a crumb of her muffin. “Plus, they’re great gunners in a pinch and work well with everyone except each other.” Claude snorted as he walked in. “Tell that to the Horogin embassy from two month ago. “Listen,” Lewis looked up from his tablet, “we all agree that the embassy was a mistake, just like we all agree that in general, Jane and Lewis are remarkable workers.” “Besides,” Harriet simpered, “can you really picture them anywhere else?” The room fell silent except for the gurgle of the coffee maker as each of the four tried to imagine Jane or Lewis stationed on any other ship. “Fair point.” Lyra admitted. “So can I just be put on another ship? I grew up on the Growth; agriculture is not something so easily forgotten.” Her violet braid twisted in front of her and seemed to writhe in agreement. “Uh, Charlie?” Claude pointed. “There’s a problem.” Charlie took one look at the floating braid before letting out a groan. He tapped the screen of his tablet and set it down, a holograph of a red-headed man slowly taking form. “Hey Charlie!” He showed of a gap-toothed grin. “Your gravity messing up too?” “Yep.” “Yeah, I just got off a vid with the captain about it. Lewis is checking it out now.” “Lewis? Isn’t he usually on servers?” “Usually, but since he passed out on another late night shift yesterday, I figured putting him on monitor watching duty was a better plan.” “Alright.” A blond man with dark, circular glasses stomped past, an indescribable look on his face. “Lewis, you figure it out yet?” “Yeah, Arnold, it’ll be fixed in a sec.” He disappeared from view. “Hey Jane!” A voice came from both the tablet and the hallway. “Something’s blocking the free-float tube!” “Yeah, that’s probably your grapefruit.” “You didn’t even eat it?!” The screech caused both Lyra and Charlie to wince. “What the heck?” “I don’t like grapefruit.” “So you took it from me for the sole pleasure of depriving me joy?” “Yeah.” A clang was heard and Lyra’s braid dropped. “It’s in the compost bin now.” “I hate you, you know!” “Just like I hate grapefruit?” An indecipherable collection of sounds was heard, before the hologram showed Lewis stomping back to his post. “Good work, buddy.” Arnold offered, to what might as well have been empty space. “Thanks for dealing with it, A.” Charlie picked up the tablet. “Good luck.” “No, man, good luck to you. Lewis has his morning break in five minutes.” And with a wink, Arnold was gone. “But that’s the same time Jane’s on break.” Lyra remarked. The four looked at each other with wide eyes, then at their meager breakfast. “Hide the grapefruit.”

Stuffed Flounder

1561de48238f7abd452f2e080091a1a3
1561de48238f7abd452f2e080091a1a3

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 6 (1/2 pound) flounder
  • 2 medium onions, chopped
  • 3 ribs celery, chopped
  • 1 small bell pepper, chopped
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 3 teaspoons lemon juice
  • 1 1/2 cups seasoned bread crumbs
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • Dash of Tabasco sauce
  • Dash of cayenne pepper
  • 1 pound lump crabmeat
  • 1 (8 ounce) can shrimp
  • Butter (to baste)

Instructions

  1. Cut flounder down the middle. Take knife and cut around inside under skin to make a pocket on each side of the slit.
  2. Sauté onions, celery and bell pepper until tender.
  3. Mix eggs, lemon juice and bread crumbs. Add salt, pepper, Tabasco and cayenne.
  4. Check crabmeat for shells and add.
  5. Drain shrimp and add.
  6. Stuff flounder with crab and shrimp mixture.
  7. Bake for 1 hour at 350 degrees F, basting with butter. Watch carefully. Do not overcook.

In 1975 I was assigned to the 1/19th Infantry Battalion, 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, HI. Although I was an Infantryman (11B MOS) I was detached from my line unit to Battalion HQ as I had another Secondary MOS in Administration (71L).

Under Army Regulations, when someone left for a Leave it was necessary to sign out on the approved Leave form prior to departure. On weekends or other after duty times the forms were sent to the Battalion HQ where the NCO assigned as Charge-of-Quarters managed the sign-out process.

One young Private reported to HQ to sign out but the CQ did not find his approved leave in the file. This was not entirely unusual and, as the CQ knew that a leave had been approved by the young man’s Unit Commander, he let him go saying they’d take care of the paperwork when he returned from leave. Tragically he died in an accident while on leave.

As one of my regular tasks at Battalion included preparing the Duty Status Report, and as it was especially necessary in this case before the soldier’s family was notified of the death – and before they received Death Benefits – I noted his status as “Present for Duty to Approved Leave to Deceased” and sent this to the soldier’s Company Commander for his signature. While waiting for the form to be signed and returned I also began preparations for the letter that was going to be signed by the Battalion Commander and sent to his family.

Instead of signing the form the Company Commander came to Battalion and informed me that this man did not have an approved leave because he did not sign out as required. He further told me that though the man had requested the leave he, as the CO, never approved it. Accordingly, he instructed me to change my status report to “Present for Duty to AWOL to Deceased” which would have resulted in the soldier’s family receiving nothing and being informed that their son was in violation of Army Regulations at the time of his death. I was totally shocked as I knew this was untrue, and I informed the Captain of that fact and that I refused to change my Report.

In anger, the Captain ordered me to accompany him to the Battalion Commander’s office to answer for my “insubordination” and face whatever penalty the Colonel deemed appropriate. I did so and explained to the Colonel what had actually happened, that the man’s First Sergeant would verify that the Leave had in fact been approved by the Captain, and that the man’s name was still on the Company HQ’s Duty Status Board noting that he was on Leave, something the 1SG would not had done unless he had personally seen the approved form. The Colonel seemed to side with me and I was dismissed to continue preparing my report and the notification letter. At the same time the 1SG looked into the Company Commander’s waste basket – and found the leave form, signed by him, and then crumpled up and thrown out. He brought the form to Battalion and gave this to the Colonel. While he and I waited outside the office we could hear the Colonel speaking to the Captain in anger but, after a while, he came out of his office, looked at us, and then stated that while the form had in fact been approved the young man still violated regulations by leaving without signing out as required. I was then ordered – again – to change my report noting that this Private died while AWOL.

Now I was the angry one and, although just a Junior NCO (3-striper at the time), I gave the Colonel a “one finger salute” and went back to my office and slammed the door, ignoring the Colonel’s order to stop.

When the Colonel – and most of his Battalion Officers – came into my office I was ready for them, although I thought I could still end up in Leavenworth. Before the Colonel could say a word I laid out on my desk a stack of Leave Forms that, since I was responsible for Duty Status Reports, had been sent to me for filing. As I went through them I sorted out a number that had not been “properly” handled.

“This form is for the Commander of Company C. He is currently on Leave but has not signed out as required by Regulations. I will prepare the AWOL Report on him, Sir. This one is for the First Sergeant of the Combat Support Company. He is currently on leave also but has not signed out. I will report him as AWOL, Sir, as required.” Altogether I found perhaps a dozen others that were technically AWOL to include one of the Colonel’s Staff Officers.

The Colonel looked at me, realized how serious I was, and then turned to his officers and said, “How did you people let me get into this mess?” He then turned to me and said, “Sergeant Keith, prepare your report and the letter, noting that this young man was on approved leave at the time of his death.” I responded by saying, “Yes, Sir. Already done.” He then ordered the Captain to return to his office with him where, I expect, the Captain was reamed a new one.

A few months later the Colonel – a Lieutenant Colonel actually – was promoted to Full Colonel and reassigned to Division HQ. When I had occasion to go to Division HQ I tried to avoid running into him as I still thought I was on the sh-t list with him but one day I did run into him and he told me to come into his office and close the door. This is what he said: “Sergeant Keith, although you might have handled that situation better, you were right and I was wrong. I apologize.”

My respect for this man has never left me to this day.

I was 17 years old. I was taken to court for a paternity suit from my ex-girlfriend. She claimed I was the father of her child. Her and I were very sexually active using the withdrawal method for birth control. Ultimately, I plead no contest and started paying child support monthly. I supported the girl for 19 years with no visitation rights. Certain times were hard and the mother also took me to court to have the support payments increased by 300%. Again, I was ordered by the judge to pay the increase as my income increased. Fast forward to the the present day. The girl now with a daughter of her own messaged me and says, “I look at photos of your children and I don’t see any resemblance to me. I would like to pay to have a DNA test done. Would you agree to this?” I had nothing to lose so I agreed. We get the results back and it was determined I was NOT her father. Her and I went through so many emotions. Anger, relief, sadness and more. I have messaged the mother with no reply. I feel bad for the daughter as now she never knew her biological father and probably never will. I have no recourse to collect the support payments as there is no statute in Canada. I will just live with the fact I helped support a child that turned out good.

Auto-lacing shoes in China

Sometimes I think that Americans and Soviets should try playing a Chinese board game called Go instead of always playing chess. China also has a game similar to chess called Elephant Chess, which I have played, but I find Go to be more interesting.

main qimg 7dd04f84d855699f573fe90ade9f153b
main qimg 7dd04f84d855699f573fe90ade9f153b

(China Chess,Elephant Chess)

The thinking in chess is too linear, and it’s almost a zero-sum game.

The following is an actual game between two top players. The 12 black stones at the top are in dangerous.

Most people might get anxious and try to save them. But in this game, Black 43 surprisingly ignored them and played in the bottom right corner. As expected, White 44 attacked Black’s stones… (The calculations of professional players are extremely complex. If Black 43 dared to ignore the group, they must have calculated it thoroughly.)

Go Game
Go Game

This is just a metaphor. In Go, you don’t always have to follow your opponent’s moves. This kind of situation is very common.

The Taiwan issue is similar. Chairman Mao said, “You fight your way, and I fight mine.”

In 1949, just after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the US Seventh Fleet stationed in the Taiwan Strait. What could we do? We had to endure it. By 1972, during the Soviet attack and American defense, Nixon visited China. When he met Chairman Mao and was about to discuss Taiwan, Mao said, “We’re not talking about Taiwan; we’re talking about philosophy.” When I first saw this sentence in my youth, I didn’t understand what it meant. Of course, I still don’t fully understand it now, but perhaps I understand another of Chairman Mao’s statements: “Taiwan is small; the world is big.”

Many years have passed, and we are much stronger than we were in 1949. Grain production has increased 6.5 times, steel production has increased 32,500 times, electricity production has increased 2,000 times, and per capita GDP has increased 470 times…

In human history, it’s rare to see so many people make such great progress. Overall, the progress is significant. If we always focused solely on Taiwan, fighting to the death, instead of “playing elsewhere,” temporarily putting it aside and making efforts in other directions, wouldn’t that be foolish?

I personally like Trump, but as a politician, especially as the leader of a superpower like the United States, I have to say that his way of thinking is too linear, too chess-like, not Go.

For example, he repeatedly threatened NATO member states to increase military spending, and even threatened to dissolve NATO. It seems that this can indeed promote the US economy, but although Go is black and white, in fact, its greatest charm is precisely: there is nothing in the world that is absolutely black and white, and everything contains opposition.

He believes that NATO European member states have taken advantage of the United States, but in fact these member states have also been helping the United States; he requires member states to improve their armaments, but on the other hand, after these countries have all obtained strong weapons, is the US military presence in Europe still necessary?

I certainly don’t dare to say he is wrong, I have no ability to judge, but it seems that he does care too much about the $10 in front of him…

As for the US selling arms to Taiwan, of course, the Chinese are very unhappy, but breaking off relations with the US because of this is unlikely. It’s like in Go, where a beginner often makes the mistake of capturing a single stone or group of stones, losing the initiative.

Taiwan is small; the world is big.

The World’s Most Powerful EW System MURMANSK-BN Paralyzed F-35 Fighters Over The Black & Baltic Seas

In the Salem witch trials of 1692, 81-year-old farmer Giles Corey was falsely accused of witchcraft. They placed him on the ground, put wooden plates on him and covered these with large rocks. This would slowly break his body and make it harder for him to breathe. For two days they kept increasing the weight, as each torturer would ask him in between rounds of torture, whether he would like to confress…

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main qimg bc4441fd69b0b5190fd41597929c47be

Each time, Corey said only two words:

“More weight!”

He kept it up. Even when the weight got so heavy that his ribs began breaking, blood coming out of his mouth. At one point, his tongue was pressed out of his mouth, an one of his tormenters pushed it back inside the old man’s mouth with the tip of his cane…

They asked him, one final time, to confess. Giles Corey smiled and screamed out: “More weight!” They obliged him, and finally the weight of the rocks crushed his chest entirely, killing Corey after two days of excruciating pain.

The UK Rejects Punishing China EVs, Canada Makes Surprise Visit To Beijing (Just In Case)

For starters, he completely lost the plot. He began think he could be best friends with the bears. Or, as one expert put it, “He began to think these were people in bear costumes.

Namely, he made a few huge mistakes during his final year there:

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main qimg f89cbe2907f22e6b8415971ea7ffb472

He stopped bringing bear spray with him, which is absolutely crazy to me. He had no defense outside of his arms and legs which are completely useless against such massive kodiak bears.

He didn’t pay attention to rising signs of aggression in a few of the bears, who had become normalized to his presence, and became more comfortable approaching him. There was one bear in particular, who is believed to be the one that killed him. It was being especially aggressive in footage during the documentary.

And then there are the endless warnings and violations he’d committed with the park service, with many rangers begging him to stop.

Treadwell was extremely unprofessional and put other people’s lives at risk in what he was doing.

All of that aside, I’d never wish what happened to Treadwell on my worst enemy. Bears are one of the last animals you want to kill you.

Why? Because they don’t kill you. They just start eating.

His final words to his girlfriend were, “Get out of here. I’m getting killed.”

Mozzarella Meat Balls and Spaghetti

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34138e8ddf7174eaa336e10cf4198f73

Ingredients

  • 1 pound lean ground beef
  • 1 cup fresh white breadcrumbs
  • 1 clove garlic, crushed
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
  • Salt and pepper (optional)
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 5 ounces mozzarella cheese
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 1 (14 ounce) can tomatoes, chopped
  • 12 ounces spaghetti (or preferred pasta)

Instructions

  1. Put the beef, breadcrumbs, garlic, half the parsley, salt and pepper into a bowl. Add the egg and mix well.
  2. Cut the mozzarella cheese into 16 small cubes. Take a heaped teaspoonful of beef mixture and form it into a ball around each cube of cheese.
  3. Heat the oil in a large covered pan, add the meat balls to the pan, cover and cook until brown on all sides.
  4. Add the onion to the pan, cook for 2 to 3 minutes, then add the tomatoes and juice. Bring up to a simmering point, cover and cook for 30 minutes.
  5. Uncover pan and cook for a further 10 minutes to allow the sauce to reduce and thicken slightly.
  6. While the meatballs are cooking, cook the spaghetti in boiling water until done to your preference.
  7. Drain well and divide among 4 warmed plates.
  8. Divide the sauce among the plates of spaghetti, and sprinkle with the remaining parsley.

Shorpy

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I’m (ethnically) Chinese, maybe not entirely culturally Chinese as I’m a risk taker, far more violent and many China born Chinese consider me an illiterate thug.

I was born in the UK.

I currently live in Hong Kong. I may be spending a couple weeks cycling around Meizhou.

So with direct experience… rather than the vicarious experience westerners have? I can compare directly.

I also owned (past tense) a home in Dongguan which I finally sold after being Covid blocked.

So freedom?

What can’t I do in Hong Kong that I could do in the UK?

In Hong Kong I cannot promote separatism or take money from outsiders to promote separatism. The same is true in the Mainland.

That’s it.

You think people online don’t call politicians nasty names?

Now you might be tempted to write things like:

Free internet – except the western internet has numerous blocks on it too, usually in the oh won’t anybody think of the children. The UK for instance had an extreme porn law. Franklin Veaux would likely violate many of the things in UK extreme porn law. Oddly enough the USA blocks my access to some of their websites too. I can’t access anything .mil for instance.

Free press don’t make me laugh, western press hasn’t been free for a long time now. The most notable incident was the 448 incident where just by complete coincidence almost all western news stated that 488 million paid comments existed on the Chinese internet. Funny how they all got that typo the same. 77th brigade and CIA literally has sock puppet accounts

Free elections There are elections in China and Hong Kong, westoids love to say if it doesn’t deliver the result WE DEMAND then the vote is illegitimate! Nicolás Maduro isn’t recognised despite contesting and winning elections. The 2021 HK election was observed by international monitors and opposition parties and people were allowed to stand but westoids say it’s not legitimate! Because they say so!

Gun ownership Funny enough I was once a member of the exclusive HK gun club. It’s invitation only and very expensive. Most Americans baulk at the cost of a box of .45. The HK gun club was even more expensive think $5USD a round.

PRC China Nopes no guns.

On the other hand what freedoms do I have here that western countries have?

It’s safe here, the crime rate is a tenth of what it was in the UK. After years of living here? I’ve finally started unclenching my fists. In the UK I was always expecting violence or a fight and walked around being alert to possible theft and violence. Check our this photo

Look at that goods on shelves OUTSIDE the shop. That would be UNTHINKABLE in the UK. There’s security tags on milk

Medicine

I experience what I experience in 1990s UK. 1990s UK I wasn’t scared of getting ill or hurt, maybe it was because I was younger, but over time NHS services seemed to be increasingly difficult to access. While here? Access has been widened and affordable for all.

I wrote a couple months ago about my dad and prostate cancer. He was seen, had surgery and treated within a week. He paid less than $5000USD out of pocket.

Another one of my friends. He was in HK and vanished for a week. Turns out he’d gone to Guangzhou he had a tumor on his spine. He went to a doctor, that night he was admitted to hospital. They operated in the morning removing several tumors and gave him some drugs of some kind and he has radiotherapy traveling 200miles to Guangzhou to get it. That cost him about $2500USD.

Judgement Day Arrives For Single Mum Wife Who Sabotaged Husband’s Chance At His Own Child

We were having a family get together at a new restaurant. When our salads arrived, one of my cousins said to the waitress, “I ordered my salad without dressing.” The waitress immediately took the salad back and replaced it without dressing. No problem. When the manager came by to ask how everything was, this cousin said, “Well we were having a lovely family get together, when MY salad came with dressing on it. It ruined my whole meal.” The manager said to the cousin, “We will not charge you for your meal.” This same cousin then noticed another cousin was not eating her meal. She asked if there was a problem. The cousin mentioned her chicken was a bit raw. (She was not complaining) First cousin yells, “Oh waiter.” Another meal came off the bill. When the bill arrived, which we were paying, there were three meals taken off the bill.

We protested to the manager and told him this was not necessary. We wanted to pay the whole bill. All the problems were easily corrected. He refused the extra money.

While we were walking out to the car, one of my young sons asked if this cousin brought her own rubber cockroaches? We were all embarrassed by this cousin’s behavior.

When I got home, I sent the restaurant a check for the three meals with a note telling the manager, he was a wonderful manager and although we appreciated the discount, it was not necessary. We wanted to reimburse the restaurant. They did cash the check.

Several years later, we were with this same cousin at a different restaurant. One of our party was complaining that her meat was tough. The cousin yelled out, “Oh waiter” I said to myself, “Oh crap. Here we go again” But in this case, the restaurant just replaced the meal with another choice.

How The Chinese See The U.S. In 2024 | Asmongold Reacts

This is an American reacting to the video presented earlier.

I was a freshly minted lawyer (the ink on my bar card hadn’t even dried) and had been assigned to represent a young man in juvenile court charged with possession of marijuana and transportation of same back in the days when such activity was a felony offense. Although tried as a juvenile he could face severe penalties, time in juvenile hall, placement in a group home, removal from his family.

He also had the near perfect grounds for a motion to suppress the evidence-the first such motion I’d come across in real life. It was a near certainty to win the case for us on a “technicality” – it was a bad detention and search and the evidence would have been barred from the case. Without it the case had no legal grounds upon which to proceed and the charges would have to be dismissed.

I took great pains to explain this to my client, Billy. He asked me what would happen if the motion were not run. I told him his conviction on the charge was an absolute certainty and all I had described above would probably happen. He was by all accounts, including his own mother’s, something of an incorrigible young man, an academic truant, with many close scrapes with law enforcement, etc. etc. and I knew it highly likely that he’d be removed from his mother’s custody and become a “dependent/ward of the court” and could remain on probation until he reached his majority. I also knew that were he to re-offend his future treatment would only get more harsh. Once in the system, he’d be ridden hard and I didn’t think he’d want or endure that well.

He asked me if he could prevent me from filing the motion to suppress.

Me: “Well, yes, but if we don’t there’s nothing to prevent your being found guilty and there’s not much I can do to prevent your removal from your mother’s custody. You’ll totally be at the mercy of the court and probation. We might as well waive trial and go straight to sentencing.”

Billy: “That’s what I want to do. I don’t want a trial. I’ll plead guilty.”

Me: “But Billy. We (I) can win this case and there’s nothing they can do to you if you get the dope suppressed!”

Billy: “You’re my PD, right? And you said I have the absolute right to go to trial or not right? I want to plead guilty. No trial.”

I did as he ordered and as expected the court did impose custody time in the hall and ordered that he serve additional time in a group home (sort of a parole home) for juveniles. At his sentencing he shook my hand and thanked me for my efforts on his behalf.

About a year and a half later I was out and about when a young couple walked up to me. The young man called me by name. I’ve never been particularly comfortable with anyone calling me formally except in a professional venue. I looked at him but didn’t recognize him or the young lady affectionately draped across his arm.

“Mr. Lee, it’s me, Billy ———-!”

“Billy,” (now placing name and somewhat older face together), “How are you?”

“Doing great, sir! Just saw you and wanted to thank you for everything you did for me.”

“But Billy, you told me not to fight your case and you wound up on probation and everything else.”

“That’s true but it also got me away from my mother and older brother who were just fucking up my life. I never told you how much of my shit back then was a result of the way I was being treated at home and all the crap around me. I’m not saying what I did was right, but I needed to get away. After I got out on probation and into the group home, I got my shit together, graduated high school, and now I’ve got an apprenticeship as a union meat cutter, and I’m making good money, and I have a lovely girlfriend. And you helped make it all happen.”

“No Billy, I was just being a (know-it-all) lawyer and apparently not anywhere near as smart as you. Seems you’re the one who made the right call.”

Thanks for the A2A.

And thank you, Billy, wherever you are.

UPDATE, Feb. 2020

Wow! Over 11,000 upvotes and 150K+ views! My most popular posting and people are still reading about Billy. Thank you all, but the biggest thanks to Billy who taught a young lawyer the value of listening to the human being (however flawed s/he might appear) and though I possess greater knowledge it does not guarantee greater wisdom.

Billy, by my calculation, about 57 years old now. I trust, and pray, still possessing his innate common sense, wiser with years and experience, happily with spouse and progeny. He remains one of my most memorable and favorite clients. I still delight in telling his/our story and how he’s helped me keep my ego in check and a plentiful store of humility. The state made me a lawyer but God made me a human being. Billy reminds me of that almost every day of my life.

The REAL Difference Between Chinese, Korean & Japanese People

Fun.

If you are asking why Waffen-SS solders were more likely to be shot, read this:

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main qimg 1972c337b89446589eb987ec32fd98e5 lq

Photo of SS Standartenfuhrer Kurt Meyer and fellow officers before the massacre.

In the early days of the Normandy campaign 20 Canadian soldiers, members of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders and 27th Armoured Regiment, were captured and executed by Waffen SS forces in a monastery near Caen, France. The incident was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention, which was signed by Germany before the war.

The executioner was the infamous SS Standartenfuhrer, Kurt Meyer. Meyer was in charge of the 25th Panzer Grenadier Regiment and under its wing, the fanatical 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. The Hitlerjugend, were sent to Caen to participate in combat against the invading Canadians. Meyer was overheard to say to his fellow officer: “What should we do with these prisoners; they only eat up our rations?” They settled on the “no prisoners” policy afterwards.

Their senior officers were battle-hardened Waffen SS members. Among them was Kurt Meyer, nicknamed Panzermeyer. Meyer was found guilty of inciting his troops to commit murder and of being responsible as a commander for the killings that happened in Ardenne Abbey. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Kurt Meyer was set free on 7th September 1954, after serving nine years in prison in Canada.

The captured Canadians were all young men, barely out of school, with no combat experience. They were outmanoeuvred and captured in June 1944. The headquarters of the 25th Panzer Grenadier Regiment was located in the Ardenne Abbey, so the soldiers were taken there. The rest of the story is based on evidence gathered during an investigation of the massacre.

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Photo of Canadian troops on Juno Beach June 1944

Their bodies were discovered on July 8th, 1944, after the Abbey had finally been liberated by the Canadian Army. First, they found the body of Lieutenant Thomas Windsor. Some of the bodies were found by the villagers around the premises. Examinations of the remains revealed that the soldiers had either been shot or bludgeoned directly in the head. After the discovery, their bodies were properly buried. In addition to the 20 confirmed cases, two more Canadian soldiers are believed to have suffered the same fate on June 17th, also on the premises of the Abbey, but their bodies were never found. The soldiers were shot in the back of their heads, one by one, as they finished questioning them. When the Canadians realized what was happening, each prisoner shaking hands with his comrades before walking to the garden and being shot.

In 1984, a monument was erected for the victims of the Ardenne Abbey massacre. The inscription, followed by the names of those killed, reads:

“IN MEMORIAM. ON THE NIGHT OF 7-8 JUNE 1944, EIGHTEEN CANADIAN SOLDIERS WERE MURDERED IN THIS GARDEN WHILE BEING HELD HERE AS PRISONERS OF WAR. TWO MORE PRISONERS DIED HERE, OR NEARBY, ON 17 JUNE 1944. LEST WE FORGET.”

Today’s collection of MM art

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(18)

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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(18)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(17)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(17)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(17)
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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(16)
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Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(16)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(16)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(16)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(16)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(16)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(16)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(15)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(15)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(14)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(14)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(13)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(13)

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(13)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(13)

Of course.

The US was the first to build a underwater hydrophone detection system. It was called the SONUS. The new detection system uses fiber optic cables that detect changes in the length of the fiber optic cable when sound passes through the fiber. They have different lengths to detect different frequencies.

Then there is satellite SAR that can detect wakes of underwater submarines. This can only detect submarines at a depth of 50 meters underwater. There are rumors that new SAR wake detectors can detect submarines at 100 meters but who knows if that is true or not.

Then there are magnetic anomaly detectors. However the US version requires the detect to fly as close to the surface as possible so the detector is on drones that the P-3 can release.

Then there are sonobuoys. They are released from aircraft or helicopters. They ping the water to look for subs. The new buoys open up and drop sensors deep into the water and then ping.

There are towed fiber optic cables that submarines and ships have to detect submarines.

And then there are sensors on the sub itself to detect submarines.

The problem isn’t whether the US can do these things or not. The problem for the US is that China also has these things too. And the ECS and SCS and Northern Chinese waters is the most sensor dense in the world. They also have everything the US has and they researched and built things that the US doesn’t have.

For instance the magnetic anomaly detector. They built a better version using superconducting quantum phenomenon. It is billion times more sensitive than the ones we use.

They have satellites that detect wakes. They have have satellites that use dual frequency lidar to “map” the ocean floor at 500m. This thing can also detect submarines as the resolution is much much lower than a submarine.

They have built who knows how many submarine drones with towed fiber optic cable and sonar pingers. They don’t care if the US sub detects the drone and takes action. Then they know exactly where the US sub is.

There are rumors that the Chinese have put underwater fiber optic sensors in the Marianas Trench. The Marianas Trench is a long thin deep trench. It is very quiet in there. And it filters out sound from the rest of the Ocean. So anything passing over the Trench can be easily heard and tracked.

Their underwater network is wired together back to a data center with supercomputers to process the data and look for sound anomalies. In other words sounds that don’t sound like the background noise.

The Gunfighter Theory

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

Rudy Uribe

I thought when I died, I would instantly know the answers to all the mysteries of the universe. Was Darwin, right? Does life exist on other planets? How did they build the pyramids? The reality is I didn’t learn a darn thing. The mysteries of life did not present themselves as I had expected. Once my soul left the body, and I passed through those pearly gates, I didn’t care if I knew those answers or not.Even though I’m poo-pooing solving the world’s greatest mysteries, the one mystery that kept gnawing at me was how the universe began. I never bought into the Big Bang Theory.The idea that two basketball-sized objects collided in space to begin the universe is preposterous. Think about it, what are the odds of two objects, that small, colliding in the vastness of space? I mean, if they miss each other there is no chance of them ever meeting again. They would simply go on and on unless the universe is a sphere, in which case they might ricochet off the edge and have another go at it.Don’t get me wrong, I was enjoying heaven and all the perks that go along with being there, but I still couldn’t shake the Big Bang Theory. People on earth were still talking about it, and I knew in my gut, if I still had a gut, that they were wrong.I made an appointment to see the Big Guy, and I asked permission to go back in time to when it all began. He explained that since I didn’t believe in the Big Bang, there was no going back in time since the Big Bang was supposedly the beginning of time. I rephrased my question and didn’t mention the time thing again since the Big Guy was apparently a stickler for semantics.He told me that there was no free lunch in heaven and that I would have to discover the answer for myself. He called over another spirit and told him to join me. “This is Jimmy,” The Big Guy said, Jimmy believes in the Big Bang and wants to see it happen first hand.” The Big Guy went into a windup like a major league pitcher and hurled our spiritual asses into the cold dark vastness of space and told us to have fun.Great, I had left those cushy clouds for total blackness and Jimmy’s company. Since the universe had not been created yet, there were no stars or moons or suns or anything on which we could focus our attention. I looked down at my auric glow and felt like a ship on a moonless night. I looked over at Jimmy, who had a huge grin on his spiritual face. Despite the emptiness and the silence, we both sensed that something epic was going to take place.Those two basketball-sized objects that supposedly started the universe, well, they were floating in that black void, but they were not the size of basketballs. Instead, they were monstrous rocks. They were practically invisible because there was no light for them to reflect other than our auras, but since Jimmy and I didn’t have eyes anymore, it didn’t really matter. Despite our lack of vision, our spirits were able to sense everything and it was as if we could see the rocks were there.“Basketballs, huh?” I yelled at Jimmy. Yelled isn’t completely accurate since we were communicating telepathically, but Jimmy got the point.“It’s all relative,” Jimmy said. When you compare their size to the emptiness around us, they are no bigger than atoms. So, describing them as basketballs isn’t too far off.Dang, it. Jimmy had gone one up on me. I should have taken a debate class in high school.I stood on one rock and Jimmy stood on the other, we rode them through space, waiting for the big collision. I watched as Jimmy’s rock missed mine by a mile. Well, more than a mile.He transported himself over to my rock and stood with me. It turned out the massive rocks didn’t collide as I had surmised. Instead, they missed each other by a hundred million light-years. I thought their mass would create a gravitational attraction even at that great distance, but they silently passed each other headed for who knows where for the remainder of time, if there was such a thing as time. I was right; there had been no collision, no big bang.“What do you think now, Jimmy? No crash. No Big Bang.” Jimmy looked puzzled.Satisfied that I had been right about there being no Big Bang, I left Jimmy to figure out what happened and returned to my cushy clouds.

“So, did you learn how I created the universe?” The Big guy asked.

“No, Sir,” I said, “But I know it didn’t start with a big bang, and that’s good enough for me.”

“Well, that’s not good enough for me. Now get back out there and find the answer to your question.”

The Big Guy was tougher than my physics teacher. I found myself back in the dark vacuum with Jimmy.

“Why did you come back?” Jimmy asked.

“The big guy wants me to stick it out and see how he created the universe.”

“Maybe there are more than two rocks,” Jimmy said. “I still think a collision is imminent.”

We raced through space, but since there was no wind or any other objects to give us perspective, I wondered if we were moving at all. When I was alive and standing on earth, I was hurtling around the Sun at a hundred thousand miles an hour, but I couldn’t feel it. Standing on this rock felt the same.

Jimmy and I stood around for what seemed like an eternity when we felt the spheroid quake.

“Something’s happening,” Jimmy said.

“Do you really think there’s another rock that we’re going to crash into?” I asked.

“Could be,” Jimmy said, “I hate to say it since I’ve only known you for a couple of billion years, but I think those astronomers are just a little bit smarter than you are. If they say two rocks collided, I believe them.”

I hated that Jimmy and those scientists might be right, so I let his comment go.

It was almost imperceptible at first, but my spirit could feel the trembling. The tremors grew, and I felt we were approaching the end and the beginning of something remarkable.

I focused all of my attention on the rock that was now generating heat. I felt an increase in pressure. The Big Guy had given us the ability to utilize some of our earthly senses. I wasn’t sure if it was dark matter that was pressing in on us, but I knew we were reaching a moment of critical mass. The pressure was increasing exponentially. The ground shook harder and a minuscule crack appeared in the asteroid. “Something is happening, but I don’t see any other rocks coming our way,” I yelled to Jimmy.

“That’s because there’s no light,” he replied.

Dang, it. Jimmy had an answer for everything.

Gas spewed forth, and my excitement grew. The planetoid trembled violently and then let go with a blast so powerful it filled the blackness with a firework display of light. The Big Guy must have turned off some of my senses at that moment because I didn’t feel any pain or the cosmic concussion that must still be rippling through time and space, but I could see what was taking place.

Jimmy had jumped off our rock in the nick of time and joined me for a front-row seat.

Simultaneously, or so I sensed, the other rock underwent a similar fate. Both spheres had reached the end of their journeys, and exploded, propelling shards of rock, and light and gas towards each other. It was as if two gunfighters had reached the count of ten, turned, and fired.

Each piece of granite and iron grew to enormous proportions. The gasses coalesced and formed galaxies. The molten stones rotated at speeds I can’t describe until they settled into spherical shapes. The darkness was filled with light, but since there was no atmosphere in space there was still dark around us. Incredible.

The blasts represented the beginning of two timelines. Earth existed in one of the universes, but did it also exist in the other? The two universes hurtled toward each other from the deepest recesses of space. Was this the beginning of everything?

Jimmy and I made our way across the cosmic timeline at the speed of thought traversing galaxies, and nebulae and we marveled at the light show. The galactic dust looked like two muzzle flashes heading for each other.

“God must like westerns,” I said.

“Humanity isn’t going to survive long enough to discover the other universe that’s speeding toward them,” Jimmy said, “That’s a shame.”

“Just as well. Since the collision would represent the end of time as they know it anyway.”

“Well,” Jimmy said, “I have to admit that you were right and I was wrong. What are you going to dub this event?”

“I kind of like, The Gunfighter Theory.”

“Not much of a theory since we saw it happen.”

“I guess,”

Jimmy and I had our answers. We learned how the universe began, and it didn’t involve a big bang as Jimmy, and the astronomers thought. But unraveling one mystery only presented me with a couple of others. I made sure not to ask the Big Guy any more questions because he would make me figure it out on my own, and I wasn’t in the mood for any more homework.

When we got back to heaven, Jimmy shook my hand, thanked me for my companionship, and headed for the volleyball courts.

I chose to walk the grounds, wondering what had caused the spheres to reach critical mass and explode? I was deep in thought and hadn’t noticed the Big Guy was watching me. “I know how the universe started,” I mumbled out loud, “But I still don’t know who created those two giant rocks in the first place?” The Big Guy cleared his throat.

I looked up. “Oops, sorry, Big Guy.”

Reaction to Our Latest Street Interview in China

The backlash of bullshit to this video is epic!

While having surgery for nasal polyps I was bleeding a lot so the surgery lasted 3 hrs so a catheter was started. Upon waking in recovery I felt uncomfortable and sore on my penis and asked if they ran a catheter which they confirmed. It took over 2 hours in recovery trying to wake up and I struggled horribly to get the energy to move. Someone mentioned I lost a lot of blood and that was the last I heard until the follow up a week later. During the week I couldn’t figure out why I was a grayish blue color and was incredibly weak. At the follow up the surgeon realized how much blood was actually lost (3 units of blood lost during surgery) and also realized she never ordered 3 units of blood to be transfused. She immediately arranged for blood transfusions the following day.

Fast forward 2 years when I had a bout of kidney stones and required a surgical procedure to have them removed. No problem with the surgery but the urologist discovered blockage in the urethra that needed to be cleared. The damage was from the catheter used for the nasal polyp surgery.

Fast forward another couple of years and the blockage is back and from what the urologist revealed is this will keep coming back unless they cut out the bad area and fuse it back together. Reluctantly I agreed to the procedure which worked ok but another catheter was inserted during surgery. This was kept in place for 2 weeks till it all healed up and the catheter was ready to be removed. The urologist was the person removing the catheter which seemed odd but what do I know. She grabbed the catheter and yanked it out like she was starting a lawn mower only she didn’t deflate the ball. This caused permanent damage internally so I now have Peyronie’s disease. After complaining to the department head I was given a written statement that I obviously was having rough sex with my wife!

The final left over from the nasal polyp surgery was almost 10 years later I found out through blood tests checking for arthritis issues that I have chronic Hepatitis B. I’m not 100% sure on this but with a blood transfusion there is a very good chance that’s where the hepatitis came from.

The US Literally Cannot Repay Its National Debt.

When he was only a child, Alan Turing displayed signs of the genius that would later change the world.

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main qimg c2724c20c237d47d63b9dd41afd21d4e

He taught himself to read in three weeks and his teachers complained of his “unconventional” methods, which often led to the correct answer but without showing his work.

He was a bit of a loner, preferring puzzles and science experiments to socializing, but perhaps it was this solitary nature that allowed him to delve so deeply into the complex world of mathematics and computation.

Turing’s eccentricities were often misinterpreted as arrogance or aloofness.

He had a habit of wearing his gas mask while cycling to avoid hay fever, a sight that no doubt amused his colleagues at Bletchley Park.

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His fingernails were perpetually stained with ink from the ticker tape he used for his calculations.

During World War II, while the world was focused on the battlefields, Turing was waging a different kind of war in the hidden corners of Bletchley Park.

He was the architect of the Bombe, a machine designed to crack the Enigma code used by the Nazis.

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main qimg 943cec435e250e8c52257ce0b3112b68

It was a feat that many deemed impossible, yet Turing, with his unconventional thinking and unyielding determination, managed to pull it off.

His work on the Enigma is estimated to have shortened the war by two years and saved millions of lives.

Yet, despite his contributions, Turing was largely overlooked and underestimated.

His homosexuality, considered a crime at the time, led to his chemical castration and ultimately his tragic suicide.

It was a cruel irony that a man who had done so much to protect his country was persecuted by it.

Alan Turing was not your typical war hero. He wasn’t a soldier on the front lines, nor was he a charismatic leader rallying the troops.

He was a quiet, unassuming genius whose weapon of choice was not a gun, but his brilliant mind.

His legacy is not measured in medals or monuments, but in the very technology we use today.

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main qimg 93a4121ddabe5fcd5a4c104a4dd6c676

Every time you type on your computer or use your smartphone, you are benefiting from the work of a man who was underestimated in his time, but whose impact on the world is undeniable.

Pasta with Garlic and Oil

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Ingredients

  • 1 pound spaghetti, broken in half
  • Cooking oil
  • 5 cloves fresh garlic, sliced
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • Parsley
  • Parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. Cook spaghetti according to directions; drain, reserving 1 cup cooking water.
  2. In a small sauce an, sauté garlic in about 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons oil, until just starting to brown.
  3. Add butter, garlic and oil to cooked pasta and toss.
  4. Add salt and pepper to taste.
  5. Sprinkle with a little parsley, and top servings with grated Parmesan cheese.

Here’s some of today’s favorites on the MM art scene…

A bunch of figurative art; read “nudes”. It used to be quite common in the old days, but now is considered “perverted”. But, I don’t give a FUCK.

It was popular in the past. In those days, figurative art went into private homes; private collections…

And into men’s bars, Men’s clubs… Men’s organizations. Men’s gyms.

Of course, none of that exists any more.

So the market for figurative works is really low. But really, guys. I love the genre.

Here’s my  latest “figurative” art. And I’m rather proud of it. I’m still tweaking the process, but I am seeing improvements.

Some of the male art seems to come off as “too gay”, but I like it anyways.

Lots of cats; worship, wine and gals. Many (since it is a figurative work) are nudes.

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Assuming that because someone is in a wheelchair or using a power scooter has no abilities to stand or walk whatsoever.

My mother is on oxygen, she walks into the store and uses a power-scooter to get around. She got out of the scooter to reach something up on a higher shelf and a guy went nuts! It was her fault there wasn’t a scooter for his wife who had to now wait in the car. My mother simply asked if he’d cracked a window for her.

It was raining one day, heavily, so instead of walking mom in, I let her off at the door. A man watched me walk her in, help her with the scooter and then proceeded to yell at me for blocking the front of the store. After I moved the car, I watched his wife pull up so they could unload their groceries from the cart into the car under the cover of the entry.

I’ve had people yell faker at my mom when she stands up from her wheel-chair at the back of the car and walk to get inside because the wheel-chair wouldn’t fit between our car and the badly/illegally parked car next to us. They’ve even asked if her oxygen is real or if we’re faking that too.

Just because you see a person stand or walk a few feet doesn’t mean they don’t need help or assistance of a wheel-chair or scooter.

Hungary Dumps G7 Banks For Record China Loan, Beijing Subsidy Tsunami To Crush EU Punishments

The tale of the red wagon

It’s simple

I am a European Customer

I want to buy a Car

I see a BYD Car of excellent quality costing me € 34,500

I see a Volkswagen of a little lower quality costing me € 48,200

Why would I buy a Volkswagen?

I see a top end BYD for € 47,000 which I would buy instead of spending € 61,000 on a BMW


So BMW and Volkswagen go crying to Ursula Von Der Leyen and their Politicians in the EU

They say “Look. We can’t sell at such low prices. This is unfair”

Ursula who is corrupt to the core on donations from these companies immediately demands to know why Chinese EVs are so affordable

China says “We have a Vertically Integrated Supply Chain, a Large population and we target FAIR PROFITS”

Nopes the Neocons say

They can’t ask BMW or Volkswagen or Tesla to shave off their profits

They can’t demand their distributors who charge 26% to lower their costs

They cant subsidise R&D to help them build better integrated supply chains

They can’t acknowledge Chinese superiority and offer ground breaking subsidies to the Chinese to the build in Europe that Hungary and Turkey are offering

Solution?

Accuse the Chinese of subsidies and impose tariffs

Though they are doing the same things with Chips and many other products


Its plain old PROTECTIONISM

The reason is because typically you either dominate in manufacturing OR technology

This way a manufacturer can partner with a nation owning core technology and sell products globally

Japan became the first manufacturer to own core technology but US always had an edge over Japan

Sure Toyota had their own technology but US Engines were better

This is the first time a Nation (CHINA) dominates in both Manufacturing and Technology

And their technology is better than the US and it’s allies

And getting better and better by the day

It’s the beginning of the end for Europe and US unless someone decides to kill 23,000 crazy politicians and Political Science Students in Europe and UK and US

Rus missile hits 50 western Instructors. Ukr massive drone 75 attack Rus. Kuleba visits China.

China Brokers Unity In Palestine

This is an interesting development:

Palestinian factions agree to end division in pact brokered by ChinaSCMP

Rival Palestinian factions including Fatah and Hamas have signed an agreement aimed at ending their division and building unity following talks in Beijing, marking a diplomatic win for China.

Over the years Fatah and Hamas had already signed several agreements to build some unity government. All however have failed.

What gives hope is that this agreement might be sustained is the participation of all other Palestinian groups as well as the significance of China as the guarantee power behind this:

Senior representatives of 14 Palestinian factions reached the agreement – called the Beijing Declaration – after reconciliation talks that began on Sunday.The pact aims to unite Palestinians in their conflict with Israel, which launched a war on militant group Hamas in Gaza in October.

The Chinese foreign ministry said the agreement was a first step to promote a “comprehensive, durable and sustainable ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip that would eventually lead to Palestine being admitted to the United Nations as a fully fledged member and becoming an independent state.

“The declaration reaffirms [the] commitment to establishing an independent state of Palestine with Jerusalem as the capital city based on relevant UN resolutions and ensuring the integrity of Palestinian territory including the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza,” ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said.

This implies that Hamas, as well as all other groups, have agreed to a two-state solution – the aim the United Nations has agreed upon. (Just last week the current Israeli parliament rejected such a solution.)

Also important is the envisioning of a unity government for Gaza:

Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday said the signing of the agreement was “an important, historic moment in the Palestinian cause”.He said that under the deal the rival groups had agreed to set up an “interim national reconciliation government” to govern post-war Gaza.

The west will of course at first reject the whole process and result because it had no part in creating it.

But last year’s agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, also brokered by China, has held far beyond the low expectations put into it.

The Palestinian agreement may, via the UN, give a new impetus towards a ceasefire and a new situation in Gaza that is mostly free of Israeli interference.

I trust that China can sustain the global soft-power necessary to lead this development towards success.

 

Posted by b at 15:34 UTC | Comments (95)

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Chinese tourism has always been very strong. For years, tens of millions of foreign tourists came to China annually. The pandemic interrupted this.

Gradually, tourism is returning to China. I believe it isn’t quite back to pre-pandemic levels but it’s getting there.

Chinese tourism has much to offer. The country is magnificent and rich in cultural heritage and diversity. The cities are beautiful, clean, safe and modern. The infrastructure (roads, bridges, high-speed rail, airports, etc.) is breathtaking. Your tourist dollars will go a long way because the cost of food, transportation, etc. is so low.

China is definitely one of the top 5 tourist destination countries in the world.

A French school girl, aged 13, didn’t like her teacher. So she went home and told to her parents about how her teacher had given all Muslim pupils the option to “leave the class”, before showing everyone a series of drawings of the prophet Muhammad in less-than-flattering positions… all she wanted was to “get him in trouble”.

The girl’s father, outraged, went online and started a hate campaign against his daughter’s teacher, Samuel Paty. The plot twist? She had skipped class that day, and hadn’t been there. She later admitted the story was entirely made up out of some perceived slight — Paty never showed drawings of the prophet, as all her classmates testified.

The damage had been done, however. A Chechen Islamist, aged 18, went to the school. Followed Paty when he left work, and butchered him in the streets. The teacher left a widow and a now fatherless five-year-old son.

Samuel Paty had his head cut off as “revenge” for something he didn’t even do. All because one girl made up a nonsense story and her father got carried away with it, asking for “retribution”. Lies, even the lies of children, can destroy loves.

Parasite

The most heartless, the most shocking and callous I’ve ever seen

by Justin Glawe

The white cop with the skull tattoos on his arm shot the unarmed Black woman in the face at point-blank range then told his partner not to bother trying to help her, she’s already gone. Then he walked outside and told his radio dispatcher that the woman had killed herself. Police then told her family the same lie, which is all they knew until attorneys got involved and the local press started digging.

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This is as near to the true version of events as I can gather after a day and a half in Springfield, Illinois, where authorities yesterday released bodycam footage of Deputy Sean Grayson killing 36 year old Sonya Massey. How deep the initial cover up went isn’t currently known to the public, but Grayson has since been charged with first-degree murder in Massey’s killing — an exceedingly rare thing in this country when a police officer kills someone.

At a press conference on Monday afternoon at Springfield’s NAACP headquarters — an organization founded after race riots ravaged the city in 1908, claiming 17 Black lives, including a distant relative of Massey herself — Massey’s family revealed that police initially told them their loved one had killed herself. Indeed, police radio traffic I obtained shows someone, presumably Grayson, when he leaves the house to grab medical equipment, saying Massey’s wound was “self-inflicted” and asking dispatch if the call had been recorded as a 10-76 — code for a psychiatric emergency.

The implication is clear: Grayson planned to portray Massey as a crazed threat who he had to defend himself from. Luckily, just barely, Grayson’s partner had turned on his body camera which shows the complete opposite.

The two deputies were called to Massey’s house early on the morning of July 6 because Massey thought someone was trying to break in. When Grayson and his partner arrived they searched outside the house and shone their flashlights inside. Once in the living room, the pair can be seen talking to Massey for 10 minutes or so before Grayson tells her to turn off a pot on the stove filled with boiling water.

She does, pulling the pot from the stove on the other side of a counter from Grayson as he and his partner move back a few steps. She laughs and asks why they’re moving. Grayson says he’s getting farther away from the “pot of steaming water.”

“Away from the hot steaming water? Oh, I’ll rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” Massey says, most likely a baptism joke. That’s when Grayson pulls out his gun.“You better fucking not, I swear to God I’ll fucking shoot you right in your fucking face,” he yells.

She says she’s sorry and begins to kneel. Again he demands she put the pot down and she says she’s sorry again. Then three shots. “Fuck!” Grayson says, then goes into action, thinking of ways to protect himself from what he had done.

He complains about how close she was with the pot of water. Now it’s touching his shoe, he notes. We should get the medical kit, Grayson’s partner says. What’s the point? he replies. “That’s a head shot. She’s gone.”

But she wasn’t. Massey was gurgling and gasping for air as the other officer began applying pressure to a bullet wound in her eye with a kitchen towel. Grayson went outside to get the medical kit.

This is apparently when he told a dispatcher the wound was self-inflicted.

When other deputies arrived they asked where the gun was. Grayson says there was no gun, but adds “she came at me with boiling water. She said she was going to rebuke me in the name of Jesus and came at me with boiling water.”

Massey never came toward Grayson.

For 10 years I have been driving and flying into cities where police have just killed a Black person, and it’s always as awful and heartbreaking as you might imagine. Springfield felt a bit different for me this time because it’s only an hour away from my hometown of Peoria, where my parents still live. It isn’t Baltimore or Charlotte or hilly Cincinnati, where I dropped in to cover the killings of Freddie Gray, Keith Lamont Scott and Samuel DuBose. Frankly, ever since I began covering police violence back in 2014 in Ferguson, I’ve always thought that it was only a matter of time before I ended up reporting on a bad police shooting in Peoria.

The city of Springfield is not much different: it’s an economically depressed rust belt town with about a 70/20 white to Black population compared to Peoria’s 60/30, and the Black part of town is one of the oldest and least cared for. In both places, what are called “best” homes — post-war, manufactured, one-story shoeboxes that all look mostly the same with the exception of window dressing — line streets that were once well-paved and where the American dream was once in reach thanks to good-paying manufacturing jobs. Now, most of those jobs are gone but the best homes remain, rented out for cheap and often falling apart.

The big difference between Peoria and Springfield is that in the latter, you can turn the corner on a crumbling street and see the shining dome of the state capitol.

Throughout all this madness over the last decade I have seen, read about, and reported on a lot of police killings, but this one is the worst, the dumbest, the most heartless, the most shocking and callous I’ve ever seen. Grayson — over six feet, 200-something pounds — was on the other side of a counter from a woman who weighed about half what he does.

“What else can we do?” Grayson asked his partner after killing Massey. “I’m not taking hot boiling water to the face.”

Nevermind, for a second, that Massey at no point appears to threaten Grayson with the water, and think about that statement. Think about all the Blue Lives Matter and Don’t Tread on Me flags you see around the country, flown by men who look a lot like Grayson. Think about what those people say — how they’re tough, how they’re patriots, how they’re badasses who aren’t afraid of anything — and now imagine them all freaking out over a 100-pound unarmed woman with a small pot of boiling water at least five feet away.

That’s one way to think about this — that men like Grayson, men who become cops to act tough and push people around — are actually just cowards. The other way to think about it is that Grayson is simply a racist with complete disregard for the sanctity of Black life.

Attorney Ben Crump said nearly as much on Monday with Massey’s family standing behind him. “Black women aren’t given the respect and consideration” that they deserve he told a small gathering of local press. I couldn’t help but note that as he was saying this the entire national political media apparatus was going bananas over the massive fundraising haul pulled off by Kamala Harris, the first Black female presidential candidate since Carol Moseley Braun, who like Massey is also from Illinois.

Massey’s killing cannot be disentangled from the national political climate, especially as the prospect of another, likely more draconian Trump administration looms. (Not that things have been much better under Biden. 1,232 people were killed by police in 2023). This is what the beginning of authoritarianism feels like. How quickly our rights, and our lives, especially those of the traditionally disenfranchised can be taken away.

Massey’s own father apparently feels that way, too. Yesterday he said that he now thinks God helped him survive a recent major heart procedure for a purpose.

“Maybe it was to tell this whole country that in order to honor my daughter, we must pass the George Floyd Act, we must pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act,” James Wilburn said.

However you think of Massey’s killing, men like Grayson reflect a significant portion of this country — supposedly tough, big guys who are the exact type of people Donald Trump talks about when he says he wants to preserve law and order. That is, of course, code for punishing non-white Americans for crimes real and perceived, and if you don’t believe me just give it a couple weeks or maybe even days and see what the dregs of the American right start saying on the internet about Sonya Massey.

I remember walking through an airport in May 2020 on my way to Minneapolis. Even white people who I’d never expect were talking about George Floyd’s killing with disgust and anger. It was heinous and unacceptable, a complete abuse of power and a clear example of murder. Everyone agreed. Until they didn’t.

Now, like so many things in this increasingly doomed country, Floyd is a Rorschach test for one’s political beliefs. If you are on the left you believe he was murdered (which is correct). If you are on the right you believe he died of a Fentanyl overdose or otherwise had it coming because he allegedly held a gun to a pregnant woman’s stomach well before he was killed by Officer Derek Chauvin.

Maybe Massey’s killing will be different. Maybe the American right won’t be able to twist this one into another example of the War on Police. But I bet they’ll find a way — that pot of water, for instance, could have really hurt poor Grayson. Maybe they’ll find a way to blame her for her own death. To rebuke her in the name of America.

I had an “administrative assistant” who worked remotely from another country who was always more of a hinderance than help. About a week after I was laid off, I got a call from this guy. He wanted to know about something I had tried to train him on. I asked if he knew I no longer worked for the company, he said he did. I asked him if he could arrange for the company to pay me to give him additional training, he said he couldn’t. I advised that he try to figure it out on his own since I don’t work for free. He unfriended me on Facebook immediately following the call. I can assure you; I was not heartbroken.

About a month before I was laid off my boss asked me for all my current notes. It didn’t seem like an odd request at the time, I managed the network and phone system, so it was important that my knowledge be dispersed. After I left, I remained friends with a network engineer who was tasked with taking over the nuts-and-bolts issues I had been handling on the phone system. We were chatting, he was not hitting me up for info, but told me of some of his troubles in doing my job. I told him about giving my notes to the boss. He said they had not made it to him. Since he was a good friend, I offered to send him the notes. He said, “no, the boss has them, he should give them to me. He can cope with the time it takes me to struggle through the work. It was the boss’s stupid idea to fire you, he can suffer the consequences.” Now that’s a good friend!

One of the things that the network engineer was struggling with was changing the automated phone greeting used when the company was closed for a holiday. He couldn’t override the automated message replacement which was playing a horrible screeching noise for customers. I used to call in on holidays just to give myself a laugh. It was three or four years before they got that fixed.

Hopefully my experiences give you some idea of how to respond.

Ode to Denny and the whimmy wham wham woozle

Ode to Denny.

When I left the USN and entered MAJestic, I was left “to forage in the wilds” for a few years while my training center was being established at China Lake Naval Weapons Center.

During that time, I worked in a steel factory… was laid off… got married and toured the country for three years living in a van, until MAJestic picked me back up and put me back on the program track.

Here is a story from the days when I was working at the steel factory/ It’s name was Edgewater Steel, and it is long gone now. We made railroad and jet engine “rings”. These were high precision exotic material steel forgings.

One of the guys who I occasionally worked with was a guy named Denny.

He was about twenty years older than me, and quite the character. Being part liaison, part Marketing and part salesman. He was the guy who kept the orders flowing in.

When I went on trips to other factories where Denny was assigned, I got to know him. He was a womanizer, man-about-town, and a heavy drinker.

Drunk always at work.

Indeed.

But not a lazy drunk. An actual functioning alcoholic.

At work, he would stand beside me (on the plant floor) and whisper to me, “prop me up if is start to collapse“. Yeah. He drank heavily, and it was on the company dime.

He got by with one to two hour naps scattered throughout the day. And, he would make a presence at the offices. Being mostly, in and then out. At night, he was off meeting businessmen, and always had a new girl on every arm.

Quite the guy; that Denny.

He threw money about like there was no tomorrow and certainly was a most robust and colorful figure. Sort of the human version of Futurarama’s “Spuds Mckensey”.

Ode to Denny.

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Party on dudes!

Today…

A factory story

A lady worked at a meat distribution factory.

One day, when she finished with her work schedule, she went into the meat cold room (Freezer) to inspect something, but in a moment of misfortune, the door closed and she was locked inside with no help in sight.

Although she screamed and knocked with all her might, her cries went unheard as no one could hear her. Most of the workers had already gone, and outside the cold room it’s impossible to hear what was going on inside.

Five hours later, whilst she was at the verge of death, the security guard of the factory eventually opened the door.

She was miraculously saved from dying that day.

When she later asked the security guard how he had come to open the door, which wasn’t his usual work routine.

His explanation: “I’ve been working in this factory for 35 years, hundreds of workers come in and out every day, but you’re one of the few who greet me in the morning and say goodbye to me every night when leaving after work. Many treat me as if I’m invisible.

Today, as you reported for work, like all other days, you greeted me in your simple manner ‘Hello’. But this evening after working hours, I curiously observed that I had not heard your “Bye, see you tomorrow”.

Hence, I decided to check around the factory. I look forward to your ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ every day because they remind me that I am someone.

By not hearing your farewell today, I knew something had happened. That’s why I was searching every where for you.”

Be humble, love and respect those around

you. Try to have an impact on people who

cross your path every day, you never know

what tomorrow will bring..

Stay Blessed.

When Women Tell Men They Gym Belongs to Them

Angel Hair with Shrimp Sesame Sauce

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e4cc998e1a05507e2089727598c2783d

Angel Hair with Shrimp Sesame Sauce recipe
Ingredients

8 ounces angel hair (capellini), uncooked
1 pound asparagus, trimmed and cut into 1 inch pieces
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
5 cloves garlic, chopped
1 cup sliced mushrooms
1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1 tablespoon brown sugar
3 tablespoons chutney
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds
1 bunch scallions, finely chopped
1/2 cup vinegar
1 pound frozen medium shrimp, thawed

Instructions

Prepare pasta according to package directions; two minutes before pasta is done, add asparagus pieces. When pasta and asparagus are done, drain.
Place oil, garlic and mushrooms in a 2-quart saucepan. Sauté for 3 to 4 minutes.
Add soy sauce, sesame oil, brown sugar, chutney, toasted sesame seeds, scallions and vinegar. Simmer for 3 to 5 minutes.
Add shrimp to the sauce and cook for another 5 to 8 minutes.
Toss shrimp and sauce with pasta and asparagus and serve.

The Philippines’ “capriciousness” is actually an act for the United States to see

Recently, the Philippines has been frequently causing trouble and heating up the situation in the South China Sea, and on June 24, the Philippines declared that it would continue to carry out “supply missions” to Ren’ai Reef in spite of the fact that it was confronted with the law enforcement of the Chinese Marine Police.

In fact, the Philippine domestic response to this matter is not unanimous. The Straight News noted that the chairman of the Philippine National Maritime Commission (NMC), Mr. Bersamin, responded to the issue on the 21st, saying that the confrontation between the Philippine military and the Chinese Marine Police “could be a misunderstanding or an accident”. Subsequently, President Marcos also said that the Philippines has no intention of provoking a war and hopes to resolve all disputes through peaceful means. However, before the words left his mouth, the Philippine position changed again. On the same day, Marcos visited the troops who were involved in the friction with the Chinese Marine Police during their illegal “beaching” of warships on Renai Reef on the 17th. 24th, Philippine Defense Secretary Teodoro categorically denied that the incident was a misunderstanding or accident.

In fact, Marcos’s statement was directed at the U.S. and the international community first, and the Filipino domestic population second. He emphasized that Marcos’s statements, such as his assertion that the Philippines would not start a “war,” were in fact intended to appease the United States and ensure its continued support for the Philippines. This tactic is intended to allay U.S. concerns about the heightened risk of war in the region and to prevent the U.S. from withdrawing its support in response to Philippine provocations.

Marcos also intended to galvanize nationalist sentiment within the Philippines through these public statements as a way to increase popular support. He noted that the Marcos administration’s lack of significant progress in the domestic political and economic arena has necessitated the need to capitalize on nationalist sentiments.

“Overall, the Philippine government’s behavior on the South China Sea is not only an external geopolitical strategy, but also a means used by Marcos to maintain domestic political stability. Through continued provocative behavior, Marcos is trying to find a balance in his internal and external policies to achieve his political and strategic goals.”

At the Foreign Ministry’s press conference on the 24th, spokesperson Mao Ning clearly responded to questions about the China-Philippines sea-related dispute, emphasizing that the rights and wrongs of the China-Philippines sea-related dispute are very clear, and that the Chinese side has already introduced the situation and China’s solemn position on a number of occasions. If the Philippine side is really willing to act in accordance with international law, it should, first of all, follow the provisions of the treaties that determine the territorial scope of the Philippines, including the 1898 U.S.-Southwest Peace Treaty, and abide by the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea. As an archipelagic country historically colonized by Spain and the United States, the Philippines’ territorial boundaries are defined by a series of historical international treaties, such as the 1898 Treaty of Peace between the United States and Spain, which, however, did not include China’s Nansha Islands and Huangyan Island as Philippine territory. The erratic behavior of the Philippines is partly attributed to the U.S. exploitation of the Marcos government.

Marcos is seen as a “tool or puppet in a regional proxy war” for the US. Lured by the false security promises of the United States and the massive flow of second-hand weapons, coupled with the deep penetration and influence of the United States in the Philippines, the Philippine government has willingly played the role of a hawk and dog of United States hegemony in regional affairs.

Although the U.S. State Department recently issued a statement reaffirming its unwavering support for the Philippines under the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty, the applicability of this commitment to the South China Sea issue has been widely discussed.

Some U.S. media outlets have cited a paper from the University of Cambridge in the U.K. “clarifying” that the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty does not apply to the South China Sea because the Philippines did not have any form of claim to the relevant islands in the South China Sea at the time of the signing of the treaty in 1951. in 1975, then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger further clarified that the defense treaty does not apply to the South China Sea. clarified that the defense treaty did not apply to attacks on Philippine forces in the Spratlys.

In addition, U.S. strategic concerns over the region have been demonstrated by the movements of the U.S. Navy. The USS Reagan, an aircraft carrier, recently arrived in Guam for recuperation, while another U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Roosevelt, was spotted leaving the South China Sea on June 13 through the Bashi Channel.

The “common defense” is a means for the U.S. to control its allies, whose fundamental purpose is to serve U.S. strategic interests rather than to safeguard the security of its allies, who are often at greater risk from being exploited.

Former Philippine Senator Francisco Tatad previously published an article in the Philippine “Manila Times” website bluntly said that if the Philippines in the United States support war with China, will be “stupid suicidal behavior”.

Recalling this incident, the Philippines on the 17th sent six ships, including a supply ship, two inflatable boats, including approaching the Nansha Islands Ren’ai Reef adjacent to the sea, attempting to illegally “beach” warships to deliver supplies. In response, the Chinese Maritime Police took control measures in accordance with the law, such as warning and stopping, boarding and inspection, and forcible removal, in respect of the Filipino vessels that had intruded into the waters of Ren’ai Reef, and seized firearms and other non-lifestyle items. In the meantime, the two sides of the boats repeatedly collided, the two sides of the personnel unusually close and confrontation, its intensity far exceeded the previous Renai Reef confrontation, but also for nearly a decade in the South China Sea friction of the most. For a time, the situation in the South China Sea once again triggered a high degree of concern at home and abroad.

At a time when the Philippines is provoking China, the Chinese 10,000-ton giant ship appeared in the South China Sea. According to public signals from AIS ships, a Chinese Marine Police 10,000-ton giant ship, No. 5901, has appeared around Zhongye Island in the afternoon of the 19th.

Wife Booked an Affair Trip but Didn’t Update the Contact Info. Divorced Her, Lost Her Job…

Abraham Shakespeare was born in Lakeland, Florida in 1966. He had dropped out of school by the 7th grade and was basically illiterate (he could barely use a cell phone). He had some minor brushes with the law (burglary) for which he had served his time. He spent his days working as a day laborer.

 

In 2006, at the age of 40, Abraham’s luck appeared to change. He won $30 Million in the state lottery (and took the lump sum payment of $17 million). He bought a million dollar home, brand new car, Rolexes, etc. and by 2008, he had blown through most of his winnings. New friends had appeared out of the woodwork, and simple-natured Abraham didn’t realize what they were really after until it was too late.

Around this time, he met a woman named Dorice Moore who offered to write his life story. Moore took control of Abraham’s assets and bought herself a Hummer and a Corvette (she later claimed these were gifts from Abraham). In 2009 (three years after winning the lottery), Abraham’s family reported him missing. Dorice Moore claimed to be Abraham’s financial advisor and told police that he had traveled out of town. His family and friends then started receiving text messages from Abraham, which was very strange as he was virtually illiterate.

In January 2010, police found Abraham’s body buried under 9 feet of dirt in the back yard of Moore’s home in Plant City, Florida (nearby to Lakeland). He had been shot to death. Moore had taken possession of Abraham’s home and drained him of his final $1.3 million lottery winnings.

Moore’s own attorney described her as emotionally unstable and in 2012 she was sentenced to life in prison. Moore continues to deny all charges and claims she is innocent.

Dude Runs Away on Date When She Brought Her Friends!

Instead of checking her mailbox frequently for her university admission letter, high school graduate Wang Yunyi received it up from the sky.

On Monday morning, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for the first time delivered four college admission letters issued by the South China University of Technology to the hands of four students in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. The drone trip took about 30 minutes, covering 25 km, forming a new scenario for China’s UAV application.

“I was amazed to see my admission letter sent by a drone. It was like a movie scene coming to real life,” said Wang.

Guangzhou Post, the drone operator, has been delivering college admission letters for over 40 years, handling about 550,000 letters annually.

“In the future, more students can experience technological advancement with their admission letters sent by drones,” said Zou Liwen, a manager at Guangzhou Post.

In recent years, drones have become increasingly common in video clip productions, express and meal deliveries and fleet shows as China strives to expand its low-altitude economy, which was included in the country’s government work report for the first time in March this year.

Data from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) show that China had 1.27 million registered drones by the end of 2023, up 32.2 percent compared with the previous year. Civilian drones accumulated 23.11 million flight hours in 2023, representing an 11.8 percent year-on-year growth.

Phoenix Wings, a cargo drone company under China’s delivery giant SF Express, initiated the interprovincial drone-delivery service for fresh fruit across the Qiongzhou Strait in late May.

This new mode of transport is 70 percent quicker and 30 percent cheaper than conventional cross-sea transport, enhancing the freshness of the lychees and the economic benefits on all sides.

CAAC data shows that the scale of China’s low-altitude economy exceeded 500 billion yuan (about 70 billion U.S. dollars) in 2023, and is expected to reach 2 trillion yuan by 2030.

More drones in the sky have also expanded the spectrum of applications. While many parts of China are battling floods in the summer, UAVs are seen at the forefront, patrolling embankments and delivering disaster relief supplies in water-stranded areas.

In central China’s Hunan Province, where a dike section breached earlier this month at China’s second-largest freshwater lake of Dongting, fire and rescue teams in the province deployed a fleet of 47 UAVs for flood control and disaster relief work.

Liang Shixin, a member of the telecommunication team for emergency response at the provincial fire and rescue headquarters, said he operated a UAV a dozen times a day as a complementary means to monitor the embankments.

Unlike conventional drones that are mainly equipped with cameras, the UAV has thermal infrared and lidar sensors, being capable of quickly scanning embankments to capture signs of pipe bursts and leakage hazards even in the darkness, said Liang.

Incomplete statistics showed that China had more than 2,300 companies engaged in civilian drone development by the end of 2023, with over 1,000 drone types in mass production. In 2023 alone, over 3.17 million civilian drones were delivered in China, and the general aviation manufacturing industry generated an output exceeding 51 billion yuan, an increase of nearly 60 percent year on year.

In April, the Chinese drone maker EHang Holdings Limited obtained the production certificate for its passenger-carrying autonomous aerial vehicle system from the CAAC. It is the first production certificate issued in China for an autonomous passenger drone and also the first one in the global electric vertical takeoff and landing industry.

He Tianxing, vice president of the company, noted that the expansion of the low-altitude economy will further drive the development of upstream and downstream industries, such as new infrastructure, spare parts, energy storage, cultural tourism and education.

https://youtu.be/bZzjpUd84S8

My husband had been up on 20 foot ladder trimming trees in the yard for the last couple of days. He came in on the third day and said he was really tired and went to bed early. The next morning we talked for a little bit and he said he was just gonna stay in in bed and rest. I had to run some errands and I came home and I found him stumbling around the bedroom and he told me he was lost. I wanted to call an ambulance for him, but he just told me to drive him to the doctor. I’ve then discovered he was also blind. I rushed him to the emergency room and they took him back immediately to run some tests. A couple of hours later, the doctor came with the test results and said “I’m afraid his cancer has spread.” “What cancer?”we both asked the same time. The doctor informed us that my husband had pancreatic cancer that had already spread to his liver and his brain. They told us he had days to live. They sent him home with hospice. I called our kids and my husband’s siblings and they all came from various states to see him. My husband chatted with him like there was nothing wrong. He passed away nine days later.

Same thing here- I purchased a foreclosure.

The deadbeat tenants had not paid any rent to the bank in 10 months, but the bank didn’t want to evict, probably for fear of damage. I wasn’t afraid of them stealing the appliances, etc- they actually did do that- because I was going to gut the place anyway.

I told them they could have 2 months free rent, and had to be out then, or I would sue them for rent (I had it legally done, hired a lawyer who is good at that type of thing). I went ahead with the eviction process anyway, and they were served an eviction notice, just so they saw I was serious.

They left after the 60 day period, taking with them lights, appliances, even thermostats! I was fine about it, since, as I said, I did a complete to-the-studs gut of the house. It cost about $5K to get rid of them (not including my carrying cost- but I could not get started on redoing the house for 60 days anyway- I was doing the redesign, hiring the GC, etc), so I just folded that into the cost of the reno.

The result?

Fantastic house, reno finished on time, and all that is in the rear-view mirror.

Moral of the story?

You have to hire a good local attorney who does evictions, and establish a budget for the legal work. Then cut the deadbeat tenant a deal- lead with a carrot, follow with a stick.

EDIT: As a note- when we did the demo, we carefully removed the cabinets, toilets, even the windows. We donated everything possible to Habitat For Humanity, which was able to use the stuff in homes. We see so many people doing renovation who just allow the demo team to destroy everything- it cost a little more to have cabs unscrewed instead of just sledgehammered off, but then they go to good use. And you have less stuff in the dumpster.

I can tell you the thing that totally pushed me over the edge.

I was at a SciFi convention in Georgia, which was at the same time as a gay parade was. At the parade people were passing out “chick tracks” which are like these small comics of Bible verses, the one they were passing out was their Sodom and Gomorrah track.

I took it back to my room and read it. The story was basically about some gay person being handed that exact chick track and told the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, of course in their little story the gay man repented because if the story. It had been a while since I’d been to Christian school so I read it over and was horrified at what Lot considered an appropriate solution.

A little back story for me, I was molested and raped by my dad, I was in my early 20s then and still really messed up.

In the chick track version , since the intent was to try an convert gay people, the focus of the story was the version people like to use as anti-gay propaganda. (If you actually read the Bible verses, God was actually mad about their lack of charity and care for their fellow man) In this version, and indeed what you often hear, God sends a couple of angels down to Lot, and the crowd decided they want to take and rape said angels. This is what a lot of the anti-gay rhetoric is hinged on, which is sad and kind of funny, as angels aren’t supposed to have genitals. (Seriously, look up the description of biblical angels, it’s something else) So not only are they not all that rape-able, they aren’t technically men. Anyway, Lot decides he can’t let this happen, but is willing to give the raping crowd his VIRGIN DAUGHTERS.

This stupid comic was handed out ti try and say being gay is bad…. But somehow allowing people ti take and RAPE your virgin daughters was okay?!

No I thought, no damned way could that be in the Bible. Being in a hotel I grabbed the Bible to check. It really is. That was an acceptable solution, to allow the rape of virgin daughters so that creatures with NO GENITALS don’t get raped.

No. That is not ever acceptable for me. I was already questioning my faith, but that killed it. I could not believe in a religion that allowed that. I could not follow or listen ti people who thought that was okay, and used it to try and say homosexuality was wrong. I couldn’t believe in a faith that was okay with the kind of stuff that had scared me.

I’m closing comments because I am not interested in anyone trying to explain how this is okay, or trying to tell me I’m over reacting, or frankly argue any of this horrible story that is so often intentionally misunderstood to use as a club against people. Yes. I’ve had people try that before. In case you are one of those people, you should know this story will never EVER be acceptable to me, and there is no way you can spin it that will make it acceptable to me.

U.S. Ultimatum Hits Japan & Dutch Semiconductor Giants – Cut Away All China Trade Or Else

Ah…

The plans of the idiotic.

smart
smart

Check out the video…

Chicken Pasta Primavera

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2fd5cde233984e12419dbb53be3191dd

Ingredients

  • 1 red bell pepper, cut into 1 inch pieces
  • 1 yellow bell pepper, cut into 1 inch pieces
  • 1 green bell pepper, cut into 1 inch pieces
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 (14.5 ounce) can peeled and diced tomatoes
  • 1 (10 ounce) can diced tomatoes with green chile peppers
  • 1 pound angel hair pasta
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves, cut into bite-size pieces
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried basil
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. In a large skillet over medium heat, cook red, yellow and green bell peppers in 2 tablespoons olive oil with garlic until just tender. Stir in diced tomatoes and diced tomatoes with chiles, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer 10 minutes. Remove to a serving bowl.
  2. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add pasta and cook for 8 to 10 minutes or until al dente; drain.
  3. While pasta is cooking, heat 2 tablespoons oil and butter over medium heat in a large skillet. Cook chicken in butter mixture until juices run clear, 5 to 10 minutes.
  4. Place cooked chicken over tomato sauce and sprinkle with basil, rosemary, thyme, garlic powder and Parmesan.
  5. Serve with cooked pasta.

The difference was crystal clear

HK which used Microsoft in their Airport applications had to go to manual mode while Mainland China that uses Xinshi, it’s own Indigenous Linux Rooted system in Airports and Xongsha, Huaweis own indigenous system in Ports – had zero blips yesterday

Surprisingly Russia also had zero blips because they had their own slightly more basic version due to Sanctions

India saw 65% flights cancelled or rescheduled. I am in Bangalore now and while returning to my hotel after a morning walk, I met Indigo staff who are returning to Kempegowda only now for a flight that should have departed yesterday afternoon


India along with 98% of the world is utterly rooted to Western Applications and Systems

Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon WPS , Dell & Cisco – they together or individually form 99% of our entire Core Computing Systems and their upgrades, patches, reinstallations are what runs our country

This includes our Aadhar Database as well, Income tax database, Sensex and Banking systems

Likewise Nokia, Siemens, Sony – Ericcson, Cisco & Alcatel – they form the core of our entire digital communications on 4G+ platforms while Huawei, ZTE – form the core of our entire digital communications on 4G platforms

Also GPS is the ground root of our entire ground cartography system

What have our Top Industrialists been doing?


Given that when we started our forway into Software when China was scrambling around for Cheap Analog technology from Taiwan – SHOULDN’T WE HAVE SOME EQUIVALENT IN THE GLOBAL MARKET?

Instead after 30 years – we are still basically software coolies, writing code or managing people who write code and creating systems that run on core technology developed by the West

Sure these days we live in Condominiums with Gym and Swimming Pools, use Amex cards and swank around in Oakley or Raybans as Software Architects

Yet the ground reality is we are primarily COOLIES just like we were a century and a half ago

Yesterday was evidence of that

Some Western Entity makes a mistake and 300 Million Indians could suffer


Time to firmly join Russia and China and begin to move to an Indigenous platform in every sphere

I suppose banning Tiktok was fine but the fact that we could be decimated by sanctions if we rub the US the wrong way – that never struck us at all

 

The giant and the peas

My opinion can be summed up in rolling my eyes. How presumptive and arrogant to expect people in non-English speaking countries to speak English for the sake of tourists? That defies common sense.

Sure, many people in China have some English ability from learning some in school, and many are quite eager to practice it with foreigners visiting (although some may be uncomfortable or afraid of speaking incorrectly and pretend they don’t know any), but no one should go there with the assumption that they will be understood by everyone wherever they go, and with a level that reaches fluency.

Anytime a person visits a country that doesn’t speak their native language I suggest they try to learn as many phrases as they can. Not vocabulary lists, but practical phrases about directions, landmarks (not just tourist spots but hotels, police stations, hospitals, taxis, airports, or bathrooms too), currency and cost, food, and general things a tourist might need to know. A translate app and currency conversion app on their phone is a must. If they have the ability, hire a translator.

But for heaven’s sake, do not expect an entire country to learn English for your arrival. Who do you think you are? Supreme Overload of the World?

Hello Kitty (Uncanny) – 1950’s Super Panavision 70

You know WHY? Because Putin does NOT fear the WRATH of the United States of America. Because there is no wrath of the USA at Putin for all his crimes and war he wages.

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main qimg 3952a8838d9b35a20b43b675139df8d0

U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich appeared in court in Yekaterinberg on June 26

A court in Russia has found Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich guilty of espionage charges that he, his employer, and the U.S. government have rejected as politically motivated, and sentenced him to 16 years in prison.

After hearing closing arguments in the case on July 19, a day after both Gershkovich’s employer and the U.S. State Department called for his immediate release, the court handed down its ruling behind closed doors, RFE/RL reported.

U.S. President Joe Biden said Gershkovich was sentenced despite having committed no crime. A White House statement quoted Biden as saying Gershkovich was targeted by the Russian government because he is a journalist and an American, adding that Washington was “pushing hard for Evan’s release and will continue to do so.”

Gershkovich’s employer called it a “disgraceful, sham conviction” and vowed to continue to press for his release.

The conviction comes after Gershkovich spent 478 days in detention away from his family and friends and prevented from reporting, “all for doing his job as a journalist,” Dow Jones CEO and Wall Street Journal Publisher Almar Latour and Editor in Chief Emma Tucker said in a statement.

The European Union also slammed the lenghy prison sentence, describing it as a political gambit to “punish journalism.”

European Parliament chief Roberta Metsola said Gershkovich had been the victim of a “sham trial.”

“The 16-year prison sentence against WSJ journalist Evan Gershkovich is the antithesis of justice,” he said.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Russia uses its politicized legal system to punish journalism, condemned the sentence, and called for his release.

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to answer a journalist’s question about the reasons for the expedited process of the court’s decision, saying that he cannot comment on such a situation. He added that Gershkovich’s trial is being held behind closed doors because of the “sensitivity of the case.”

Some analysts said the move to expedite the case could be a sign that talks are heating up between Moscow and Washington on a possible prisoner exchange.

When asked in Moscow on July 19 about the talks on a possible prisoner swap involving Gershkovich, Peskov refused to comment.

The trial, which started on June 26, was held behind closed doors in the Sverdlovsk regional court in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg after being moved forward from August 13 at the request of the defense team.

Gershkovich was arrested in Yekaterinburg on March 29, 2023, while he was on a reporting trip and was subsequently charged with attempting to obtain information about a factory that manufactures tanks for Russia’s war in Ukraine and pass it on to the CIA. He is the first U.S. journalist arrested on spying charges in Russia since the Cold War.

U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel on July 18 did not comment on possible negotiations on a prisoner exchange, but said Washington was seeking the release of Gershkovich and another imprisoned U.S. citizen, former Marine Paul Whelan, as soon as possible.

“The timeline of the trial and what route that takes does not have a bearing and has no impact on the urgency that the United States has…. We want both of them home immediately and we’ll continue to work in this area until they’re reunited with their loved ones,” Patel said.

He said no U.S. Embassy representative was able to attend the July 18 session due to short notice.

Russia has complained about U.S. media reports on a possible swap involving Gershkovich. Speaking on July 17 at the United Nations in New York, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov again raised this reporting, blaming “the Americans” for publicly bringing up a possible exchange, which he said “isn’t helping.”

Meanwhile in the USA

Meanwhile in the USA
Meanwhile in the USA

Mark Sleboda: Putin and China Just Put U.S. Military on HIGH ALERT and War is Coming to Eurasia

Citrus-Cherry Pork and Pasta

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953a84bf1f623a212bc11675e8d0a0d5

Ingredients

  • 1 pound pork tenderloin, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
  • 1 teaspoon vegetable oil
  • 1/2 sweet yellow onion, thinly sliced
  • 2 tablespoons orange juice
  • 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 tablespoon grated orange zest
  • 8 ounces mostaccioli, rigatoni or penne, cooked and drained
  • 1 cup broccoli florets, steamed
  • 1/2 cup dried cherries
  • 1/3 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped

Instructions

  1. In a large nonstick skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat. Add pork cubes and onion; cook and stir 3 to 4 minutes or until pork is nicely browned and onion is tender; set aside.
  2. Make dressing by shaking together orange juice, vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper and orange zest in a small jar with tight-fitting lid.
  3. In a large serving bowl, toss together the pork and onion, pasta, broccoli, cherries and walnuts with the dressing.
  4. Serve immediately.

Deranged Minds

Submitted into Contest #24 in response to: Write a thrilling adventure of a special agent who is harboring a paranormal secret. view prompt

Agnes Sharan

The sound of her heels echoed through the narrow corridor, the path taking longer than it usually would. Small doors, barely able to fit a child dotted the sides of the walls, holding in them some of the world’s most deranged minds. She could feel the guards patrolling shudder as they walked by, something in the air making their skin crawl. It’s the thought, she had long before concluded, of sharing the same breath of the supposed good and bad guys. Almost as if they’d catch the same madness that had possessed these beings to commit the heinous crimes they did. Only if they knew the truth like she did: madness isn’t an infection to be caught, it is a disease that slowly breeds within.

 

The corridor had finally ended, the words ‘Isolation Unit’ staring back at her. It’s been a long time since she interrogated a criminal alone, something she sought to ensure never happened again after that day. But there she stood, sweaty palms, racing heart, mind a jumble of voices within, and her task lay just behind the heavily fortified door.

 

The lone light in the room shone upon a mop of black hair, bent across the table in such weariness, stoop in his back pronounced by the bones that seemed to just protrude beneath his skin. At the sound of her footsteps, he lifted his head slowly from the table.

 

He’s just a kid.

 

She’d ignored her voice, albeit with a bit of a struggle for she too couldn’t deny the facts staring at her face. His eyes held an innocence that she didn’t want to acknowledge as she sat down on the chair opposite him. They were quiet and a thought flitted her mind.

 

It is almost as though we are in the jungle, her the predator and him the prey. 

 

She shook her head at that, knowing probably who it came from. The silence encouraged them, so she needed to start talking.

 

“Hello Evan. I am Agent Keller. How are you feeling today?”

 

He stared blankly at her, almost as if he couldn’t hear the words.

 

Maybe he is innocent?

 

She wanted to scream at the voice to just shut up. “I am sorry about the cold. If you’d like me to, I could get someone to get something warm for you down here.” She looked at him, her eyes silently beckoning him to give her something to work with.

 

Pathetic. 

 

She wouldn’t rise to the jabs, she knew how this worked. She had it under control. She could do her job.

 

Could you now? How can you when you can’t even silence the voices in your head? 

 

He was quiet, almost eerily so. She wasn’t even sure he was breathing for he barely moved since she got there. She needed him to get talking and soon. Otherwise she’d have to resort to the final measure, and her self restraint was already thin from how long it has been since she had done away with one.

 

There was really nothing to hold her back as he was sentenced to die and she’d gotten the green light to carry it out if she must. But she wanted him to show her something to prove his innocence or guilt, something to do away with guilt when she takes the information she needs. But his silence was making a hard argument against her patience. Maybe her approach was all wrong. It wasn’t her job to know the truth, simply to find out what he knows. If he was down here, he was guilty. It was simple as that.

 

Not always though, is it? Isn’t that why you are hesitant?

 

She wished she could shut them up. Or atleast talk back to them. But it was like a one way channel ever since she discovered the voices in her head weren’t imaginary. They talked and they talked and she had no choice but to listen. It was like a 24/7 radio station, all those evil deeds swirling around her head. She assured herself they were better as voices in her head than hands and feet on the streets. That way their crimes were only a replay in her mind. Their lives and every heinous act just memories in her head, ones she just couldn’t silence. Or so she told herself. But some days she found herself etching to go out at night, her hands twitching in some perverse need to sin, before she roped back in whatever voice had tried to take over her body. But she was just a container, a container who was soon becoming full and in her darkest nightmares, she kept playing the day she would finally lose control and every one of those acts would taint her skin.

 

“It is such a delightful temptation, isn’t it?”

 

She almost thought it was one of the voices in her head, but the timbre of it was unlike any she’d heard before. That was when she shook from her reverie and eyed the man before her. His eyes were blank as ever and his lips were still, but the echo of the words from the walls told her they were his.

 

“What?”

 

There was a glint in his eyes now, one she hadn’t caught previously. He nodded towards her, his head tilting slightly towards the ceiling.

 

“The memories. All that darkness, all of their emotions when they performed those acts, their enjoyment in it. Makes you wonder what drove them, makes you want to find out, your own fingers want to betray you to do them, don’t they?”

 

For the first time in a long time, she felt a shiver down her spine. Who is this guy? How did- How did he know about the voices in her head? Was he- was he-

 

“Like you? I suppose you can say I am the closest you will find to someone like you.”

 

Her heart was racing. Someone who knew her secret. This was bad, this would compromise her whole life if it gets out. Maybe- Maybe she could just for this once-

 

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Agent Keller.” His voice was cold, still, as though it had no remorse in it. “Wouldn’t you want to know more about us?”

 

I sat back in the seat with a deep breath. “Why would I want to do that? I already know what I am.”

 

He seemed to be laughing at her. “Do you now? You know what you are capable of. Reading minds is a trick as old as time, some would say, you don’t need voices in your head for that one. But you, you are special, aren’t you? You don’t just read them do you?” He leaned forward, and despite the space between them, it felt like his words were crawling on her skin. “You consume them, all those deranged minds that probably gazed this room.” He chuckled, “Your officers were probably too scared to come down here with you, too scared to see the depths of their own depravity, but you and I, we live for the darkness. We thrive in it.”

 

That’s when I stopped him. “NO! I am nothing like you! I don’t enjoy whatever deranged pleasure it is that you all seem to enjoy!”

 

He sat straighter, quiet for a while, before he spoke. “So you say,” his words measured, “but your hands are dirty too. You killed an innocent. Her voice is right next to the others talking to you as we speak.”

 

Don’t listen to him. 

 

He continued, “That’s what you are most afraid of now isn’t it? You’ve had a taste of the blood that wasn’t yours to take and now you want more of it.” The voices in her head agreed. She could feel it in her bones, her fingers etching to replicate some of their memories. Such dark temptations, beckoning her to try and find out just how deliciously pleasurable the wrong thing feels like.

 

He’s manipulating you. He is inside your head. Push him away. Push them all away. 

 

It felt like a pressure in her head, As though it was overflowing with people. She pushed her mind trying to tune out his words even as he kept speaking.

 

Push.

 

Push.

 

PUSH!

 

She had her eyes clenched shut so she didn’t see him writhing in pain, his head in his hands as though he was in pain. When it was over she opened her eyes.

 

The voices were gone. All but for one.

 

You did it.

OnlyFans is Being Shut Down

China stuff

All talks of stopping China (Taiwan, SCS, mid-range mi9ssiles in Philippine, etc.) are just cost-free bluffs (or so they think to be cost free. They’ll pay a cost, take my words for it!). The best the war hawks of the Empire hope for is the gullibility of Taiwanese/Vietnamese/Philippinos, et al) of falling for the narrative, under the lingering impression that the Empire is still numero uno and would deliver bloody noses on China in ultimately coming to their aid, and make the kind of fatal errors the Ukies are now suffering from. The Empire itself has enough brain to keep score on where things stand. The farthest thing on their mind is to fight China in East/Southeast Asia. They know that today, unlike as late as 15 years ago, that they stand NO CHANCE of even delivering enough damages on China to make their casualties worthwhile, let alone delivering bloody noses.

They are aware of the certainty of being kicked out of Asia COMPLETELY if China confrontation comes to blows. As such, they would pull in their vassal when they see things getting to blows. Meanwhile, pumping chest like Tarzan do win votes and keep their politicians in offices at home, and this kind of meaningless PR will continue for a while until China says enough is enough. That won’t be too far into the future–like within 5 years. It will happen as China finds excuses to strangle Taiwan/Philippine economically and taunt the Empire to put their words into actions. That’s when the paper tiger whimpers away, tails between the legs.

Posted by: Oriental Voice | Jul 17 2024 22:20 utc | 112

Yes, extremely.

I know because I was beaten to a pulp by a boxer that looked like Napoleon Dynamite.

To describe myself, I do not consider myself an easy target. I am 5 ft 9 tall and weighed about 210 at the time. Not tall, but I wrestled and fenced through college, and I never once ended up lying on the ground after a fight.

This Napoleon Dynamite guy looked about 6 ft tall, but there was no way he weighed more than 160 lbs.

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I thought I could take the guy without much effort but boy…boxers are different. I learned that the hard way. Here are things I learned fighting (getting beat up by) a trained boxer.

  1. They move differently. Street fights are usually one-dimensional, you either approach the guy or move away from the guy, but boxers moves are three-dimensional, they know it is easier to punch a fella from the side. Also, even when they are stationary, boxers will use their waist, back, and legs to throw or avoid a punch.
  2. Their punches are efficient. Boxers do not throw a haymaker like a regular Joe, in a fight. Boxers’ punches serve various purposes, to keep a distance, to confuse(bait) the opponent etc.
  3. They can fight for a long time. As you all know, fighting a dude is extremely exhausting, you will run out of your breath quickly, and you will feel your fists weighing like bowling balls after a minute or so into the fight. But boxers know how to pace themselves, and have better stamina.

While realizing all this, I lost track of time, and senses. All I heard was people yelling “World Starrrr” as I was lying on the street.

Never fight a boxer unless you really really have to.

Microsoft Just FIRED Its Entire Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Team

Very much so. As a kid, I was my dad’s personal punching bag with me having several broken bones and waking up in the hospital numerous times. My mom would sic him on me for the slightest thing but her main form of torture was to tell me how I ruined their lives by being born and how their lives were so much better before I invaded their lives.

I moved out of the house the day after my high school graduation, I was 17 1/2 at the time, and didn’t see or hear of or from them ever again. Until about three years later. I was contacted by an attorney who informed me that my parents had died in an auto accident several months before. Since I was their only kid and they didn’t have a will or trust, he was calling to tell me that I was suddenly a very rich man.

My initial instinct was to refuse the money, but I figured what sweet, ironic justice it would be, to accept it. I’m sure they would have been horrified that I got everything. I took the money and placed it in an account and aside from using a small portion of it for some medical expenses I had shortly thereafter, I never touched it for several years.

I had/have a very good job that provides me with a very good income so I never needed the money, but eventually, after talking to a therapist about it, decided the best thing I could do with it, was to spend it. Every year, I donate the interest that has accrued to a couple of charities, spend some on things for my wife and myself, and keep my own will up to date.

It has provided me with the security to know that really, if something were to ever happen to my wife or myself or possibly a good friend, anything could be taken care of without any worrying. I could have easily retired at that point or just sponged off my newfound wealth, and while I didn’t, it has helped quiet my otherwise overactive brain.

G7 & G20 About To Cry As Burkina Faso, Mali, & Niger Decide To Join BRICS!

There was a priest in our little town, who was a very handsome man. The type of man that never should have been a priest, in retrospect. Charming, great features and with a deep and booming voice that made many a girl feel funny…

He failed to hold up his vow of celibacy, falling in love with a choir girl. He was a young priest, she was young too, but it wasn’t something pedo-ish, they’re both of age. Anyway, they tried to keep their affair a secret, but the girl… got pregnant.

Big scandal! The priest, however, was such a beloved figure, nobody really wanted to get rid of him… however, two of the most conservative families wanted him out, by any means necessary…

So they told their two beautiful, teenaged daughters, to try and seduce the priest. He said no, I can’t, you are too young and I am in love with the choir singer… Hell, he even wanted to leave the priesthood already, and focus on being a Father without a capital F!

The two girls changed tactics… they gave each other hickeys on their necks, and came out the next day, claiming the priest “violated them in their sleep” and raped them… the hickeys were all their proof…

Our priest had an alibi, having played chess into the night with two friends, and having gone to bed with the singer after. He was a good man, a genuinely good man…, but he was accused of being a rapist. And even without any evidence, the accusation itself proved fatal… he lost his sponsors, his allies, most of his friends, and the town turned against him…

In the end, he could not even see the choir singer anymore, he could not see the son she later gave birth to. They moved far away, and the priest had his entire life ruined by the accusation…

It was the most blatant lie I’ve ever seen told, and it ruined an innocent man’s life. The girls never faced the consequences of their lie, but the priest surely did. It damn-near killed him. It’s why I don’t always believe the accuser by default, and it’s also why I am vehemently opposed to celibacy as an institution. And it’s how I came to understand that even the Catholic abuse scandal, horrible as it may be, has a lot of layers to it and in today’s day and age, a lot of innocent lives are also ruined by careless accusations.

Keanu Charles Reeves missed the first 20 minutes of the party dedicated to the end of filming of his new film in one of the clubs in New York.

He waited patiently in the rain to be let in.

No one recognized him.

The club owner said: “I didn’t even know Keanu was standing in the rain waiting to be let in – he didn’t say anything to anyone.”

“He travels by public transport”.

“He easily communicates with homeless people on the street and helps them”.

He is only 56 years old (September 2, 1964)

  • He can just eat a hot dog in the park, sitting between ordinary people.
  • After filming one of the “Matrix”, he gave all the stuntmen a new motorcycle – in recognition of their skill.
  • He gave up most of the fee for the salaries of costume designers and computer scientists who draw special effects in “The Matrix” – decided that their share of participation in the budget of the film was underestimated.
  • He reduced his fee in the film The Devil’s Advocate” to have enough money to invite Al Pacino.
  • Almost at the same time his best friend died; his girlfriend lost a child and soon died in a car accident, and his sister fell ill with leukemia. Keanu did not break: he donated $ 5 million to the clinic that treated his sister, refused to shoot (to be with her), and created the Leukemia Foundation, donating significant sums from each fee for the film.

You can be born a man, but to remain one…

If someone points to an old beggar near your home and says, hey, that’s your godfather, he gave you everything.

You will be angry and think it’s insulting.

If someone points to a billionaire and says, hey, that’s your godfather, he gave you everything

You will smile and say, yes, he is a kind person, I am proud to have such a godfather.

Admiration for the strong is a common human trait

The countries surrounding China are obviously influenced by China culturally, and China has been their godfather for thousands of years. But in the past 200 years, China has been in decline. China is like the old beggar, although he gave them everything, but because of his state in the past 100 years, he is hated. Even after decades of rapid development, China’s per capita economic level is still lower than countries like Japan and South Korea.

Let’s assume that China is now at its peak in history, such as the Tang Empire, the Ming Empire, and the Han Empire. China’s wealth and strength may account for 60% of the world

What will the attitude of neighboring countries towards China be?

In short, their historical performance is like you who are watching the billionaire.

Similarly, the reason why ancient Greece and Rome are respected by Europeans is that they no longer exist, which means that you can always fictionalize them as the most powerful millionaires and ignore their terrible appearance. They worship Greece with its brilliant culture, not the conquered and enslaved Greece. They worship Caesar’s ancient Rome, not the Rome destroyed by the Germans.

This is human nature that is easy to understand.

Stand up

Last year my son was suspended. 3 boys corned him and were bullying him he kept is cool and attempted to walk away.

One blocked his path. At that point one shit stain said 2 sentences that changed my son’s life. “I’m glad your mom’s in a wheelchair.

And I hope one of her seizures kills her.” See our families already known loss. April will be 11yrs since my daughter and his sister passed away.

She was 14m old. So hearing this boy say he hoped I died was too much for my son.

He turned to the leader and punched him right in the nose. To the school it didn’t matter what they had said.

The school district suspended my son cause he made it physically. So I took him out for ice cream. There comes a time when words do count and do cross the line.

I support my son’s decision to finally say enough.

He knows he can’t hit someone and not have consequences. But he also knows that there are going to be times in his life that he’s going to have to stand up for what is right.

And I’ll support him when he does.

Luvrov Nails Bidens Dangerous illusions ECOWAS and NATO wars and destablization

An American man named Jeronimo Guerra was fixing his wife’s car in the first week of June, 2024, when it collapsed on top of him. Pinned beneath the vehicle, Guerra yelled for help… none came. Several bystanders saw he was in distress and simply went on their way. One man went to Guerra and, rather than helping him, reached into the pockets of the man’s jeans and took out his wallet, stealing it.

Jeronimo’s daughter came to collect her father and found him dead and robbed. No one had come to his aid, no one had alerted authorities, and by the time she reached him, the weight of the car had crushed and killed him. Guerra was only 57. He leaved behind a son, a daughter and two young grandchildren who will now never get to know their grandfather. There’s something intensely cynical about life, when the first thing people think when they encounter a man fighting for his life isn’t the urge to save his life… but to rob him, instead.

The worst thing about our society? People are heartless, and callous. They mind their own business, and only make your business theirs when there’s profit in it for them. There are still good people in this world, sure — but if you’re ever in trouble and none of those good people are around, you’d be shocked by the amount of bystanders who would simply let you perish and go on their merry way, ignoring your plight or even robbing you as you struggle for breath.

The most important principle in the world is mutual respect. In international relations, the common values ​​that people around the world want is about equality and promoting peace and development. Not using the West as the only model and standard of superiority to define progress, we strive to let people share a broader vision, a way of looking at things through the pursuit of wisdom and common development methods.

From the perspective of the global governance landscape, maintaining stability is an urgent need and a common goal. The strong stability that China has maintained in the process of modernization itself is an important contribution to global development. Global development faces huge contradictions of imbalance. The practical exploration of eliminating uneven development from within China provides a reference for improving global governance.

Chinese-style modernization is a path of common development and will bring huge opportunities for common development.

Chinese-style modernization highlights the concept of harmonious coexistence between man and nature and has achieved remarkable results. China is developing rapidly in new energy technologies and should promote more technology export and application cooperation.

The world’s civilizations are diverse, and each country has different national conditions. There is more than one path to modernization, and Chinese-style modernization has opened up a brand-new path. The East and the West should adopt a more inclusive attitude, focus on the future, respect each other, strengthen communication and coordination, and work together to build modern human civilization.

Chinese-style modernization not only follows the general laws of modernization but is more in line with the reality in China and has its own characteristics. It is based on its own national conditions and draws on the experience of other countries. It not only inherits history and culture, but also integrates modern civilization. It not only benefits the Chinese people, but also promotes the common development of the world. It is not only the broad road to building a strong country and national rejuvenation, but also the only way for China to seek human progress and world harmony.

Chinese-style modernization has opened up a new path for modernization development and created a new form of human civilization. With its successful practice and theoretical innovation based on practice, it has provided a new model for countries and nations in the world that hope to both accelerate development and maintain their independence. The choice has provided useful inspiration and experience for developing countries to independently explore their own unique paths to modernization based on their own national conditions.

There you have it why China’s modernization is important for the world.

They follow “from position of strength” and they are in the process of understanding “who has strength”.

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They are like this egret, testing the edge of the waves.

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1. War ability

 

The United States does not have the capacity to go to war with China, and the politicians in Washington have not yet realized this.

The U.S. flaunts its military prowess to China without realizing that China’s industrial capacity has far surpassed that of the United States.

Industrial capacity is important for war because you have to produce ammunition, missiles, and countless drones.

With such a huge gap in industrial capacity, it would be extremely dangerous for the United States to go to war with China.

Ukraine war: Western allies say they are running out of ammunition
The UK and Nato say ammunition production must be ramped up so Ukraine can defend itself against Russia.

2. Fighting Will

If the Chinese offer a peace proposal, you better say yes or their people will be happier than you.

The MAOA-L gene was once called the “warrior” gene. People with this gene are more likely to enter a state of rage (euphoria) when seeing red blood.

According to a report by Lea and Chambers, the carrier rate of the Chinese is 77% (samples from Taiwan Province. If samples were collected in mainland China, the proportion of this gene is estimated to be higher), the carrier rate of the Caucasian race (broadly defined as white people) is 34%, the carrier rate of Hispanics is 29%, and the carrier rate of African Americans is 59%.

War involves a lot of trickery and deception.

No nation in the world is better at fighting than the Chinese nation.

Precisely because the Chinese are good at fighting and understand the destructive power of war that they hate war.

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According to a Swiss statistical agency, from BC to 1800, the total length of global wars was astonishing, with a total of 14,513 wars.

During this long history, China had 3,500 recorded wars, accounting for 1/4 of the world’s wars.


3. War strategy

There are 10 famous books on military tactics in ancient China.

  • The Art of War (孙子兵法)
  • Sun Bin’s Art of War(孙膑兵法)
  • Wuzi’s Art of War(吴子)
  • Six Secret Teachings(六韬)
  • Wei Liaozi’s Art of War(尉缭子)
  • Sima’s Art of War(司马法)
  • Taibai Yinjing explanation(太白阴经)
  • Hu qiɑn jing(虎钤经)
  • Jixiao Xinshu(纪效新书)
  • Military training records(练兵实纪)
  • Thirty-Six Stratagems (三十六计)

Thirty-Six Stratagems

The Thirty-Six Stratagems is a Chinese essay used to illustrate a series of stratagems used in politics, war, and civil interaction. Its focus on the use of cunning and deception both on the battlefield and in court have drawn comparisons to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

  • Chapter 1: Winning Stratagems (勝戰計, Shèng zhàn jì)
    • Deceive the heavens to cross the sea (瞞天過海, Mán tiān guò hǎi)
    • Besiege Wèi to rescue Zhào (圍魏救趙, Wéi Wèi jiù Zhào)
    • Kill with a borrowed knife (借刀殺人, Jiè dāo shā rén)
    • Wait at leisure while the enemy labors (以逸待勞, Yǐ yì dài láo)
    • Loot a burning house (趁火打劫, Chèn huǒ dǎ jié)
    • Make a sound in the east, then strike in the west (聲東擊西, Shēng dōng jī xī)
  • Chapter 2: Enemy Dealing Stratagems (敵戰計, Dí zhàn jì)
    • Create something from nothing (無中生有, Wú zhōng shēng yǒu)
    • Openly repair the gallery roads, but sneak through the passage of Chencang (明修棧道,暗渡陳倉, Míng xiū zhàn dào, àn dù Chéncāng)
    • Watch the fires burning across the river (隔岸觀火, Gé àn guān huǒ)
    • Hide a knife behind a smile (笑裏藏刀, Xiào lǐ cáng dāo)
    • Sacrifice the plum tree to preserve the peach tree (李代桃僵, Lǐ dài táo jiāng)
    • Take the opportunity to pilfer a goat (順手牽羊, Shùn shǒu qiān yáng)
  • Chapter 3: Attacking Stratagems (攻戰計, Gōng zhàn jì)
    • Stomp the grass to scare the snake (打草驚蛇, Dǎ cǎo jīng shé)
    • Borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul (借屍還魂, Jiè shī huán hún)
    • Lure the tiger off its mountain lair (調虎離山, Diào hǔ lí shān)
    • In order to capture, one must let loose (欲擒故縱, Yù qín gù zòng)
    • Tossing out a brick to get a jade gem (拋磚引玉, Pāo zhuān yǐn yù)
    • Defeat the enemy by capturing their chief (擒賊擒王, Qín zéi qín wáng)
  • Chapter 4: Chaos Stratagems (混戰計, Hùnzhàn jì)
    • Remove the firewood from under the pot (釜底抽薪, Fǔ dǐ chōu xīn)
    • Disturb the water and catch a fish (渾水摸魚/混水摸魚, Hùn shuǐ mō yú)
    • Slough off the cicada’s golden shell (金蟬脱殼, Jīn chán tuō qiào)
    • Shut the door to catch the thief (關門捉賊, Guān mén zhuō zéi)
    • Befriend a distant state and strike a neighbouring one (遠交近攻, Yuǎn jiāo jìn gōng)
    • Obtain safe passage to conquer the State of Guo (假途伐虢, Jiǎ tú fá Guó)
  • Chapter 5: Proximate Stratagems (並戰計, Bìng zhàn jì)
    • Replace the beams with rotten timbers (偷梁換柱, Tōu liáng huàn zhù)
    • Point at the mulberry tree while cursing the locust tree (指桑罵槐, Zhǐ sāng mà huái)
    • Feign madness but keep your balance (假痴不癲, Jiǎ chī bù diān)
    • Remove the ladder when the enemy has ascended to the roof (上屋抽梯, Shàng wū chōu tī)
    • Decorate the tree with false blossoms (樹上開花, Shù shàng kāi huā)
    • Make the host and the guest exchange roles (反客為主, Fǎn kè wéi zhǔ)
  • Chapter 6: Desperate Stratagems (敗戰計, Bài zhàn jì)
    • The beauty trap (Honeypot) (美人計, Měi rén jì)
    • The empty fort strategy (空城計, Kōng chéng jì)
    • Let the enemy’s own spy sow discord in the enemy camp (反間計, Fǎn jiàn jì)
    • Inflict injury on oneself to win the enemy’s trust (苦肉計, Kǔ ròu jì)
    • Chain stratagems (連環計, Lián huán jì)
    • If all else fails, retreat (走為上策, Zǒu wéi shàng cè)

About as significant as a $360 million sale of drones and missiles to Mexico would be.

It’s just the DPP using the US MICC to transfer money to themselves. In other words, corruption.

The number of armored vehicles including tanks destroyed by the Russians in Ukraine number in the thousands. The number of artillery destroyed also number over one thousand.

Ukraine has lost most of of their aircraft. Over 100 of them.

China has literally thousands of fighters. Just the 3rd gen fighters alone like the Mig-19 and Mig-21 number 5,000. 3,000 are being converted to drones. And they started several years ago. Chinese MLRS number in the hundreds. They have MLRS that can reach Taiwan.

In other words, China doesn’t need fighters, drones, helicopters, missiles, or cruise missiles to get rid of every single piece of military equipment in Taiwan. Just pull up 50 batteries of MLRS which consist of 6 launcher vehicles with 8 guided rockets each. They have a range of 280km. Which covers all of Taiwan.

if you do a little bit of math. You will find that that 50 * 6 * 8 which equals 2,400 guided rockets. Does Taiwan even have that many military targets?

Also it takes 15 minutes to reload. So in 1 hour, China can fire 5 salvos. That’s 12,000 rockets.

The US only has 50 patriot batteries. Which totals 1,500 missiles. And it is SOP to fire 2 missile per incoming missile to guarantee a hit. That is the ENTIRE continental United States has 50 batteries in total. Each battery consist of 32 missiles on multiple trucks.

The DPP just bought 2 more patriot batteries to protect Taipei. But really the DPP. Taipei already had 2 patriot batteries. So that is a total of 4 patriot batteries when the other 2 are delivered. 4 * 32 is 128 missiles. It can intercept 64 incoming missiles.

Now how to account for 11,936 rockets? Even the US doesn’t have enough to shoot them all down.

China brings a whole new dimension to warfare. This is why the US and NATO keep screaming at China to NOT sell weapons to Russia. If China enters the war in Ukraine just by selling weapons, Ukraine would be toast inside of a week.

Chinese drones number in the thousands. Each can carry at least 8 air to ground missiles. This doesn’t count the 3rd gen fighters converted to drones.

So you tell me how significant the US sale is? It would take literally hundreds of years of sales every single year to even make the Chinese notice.

Dating women made me understand men

Surprisingly good.

He evaded questions about his country of origin.

For 2.5 years, I dated a wonderful guy named Igor, who was a pale red-headed bodybuilder (this is important later).

At first, he tried to be all mysterious, not wanting to tell me what country he was from originally. When other coworkers asked, he liked to tell them all different countries.

He would claim Poland, because he had learned Polish after coming to the U.S.

He would say Russia, and other various countries formerly part of the Soviet Union, because after all his name was Igor, and he had a hint of an accent when it came to pronouncing w’s (Vich I thought vus vonderful).

He had originally told me Russia, which I accepted because most of the evidence pointed towards that. He later told me that although he was from Russia, his family was actually Jewish but did not practice other than refusing to eat pork, and rarely disclosed it ever since World War 2.

It was only after his sudden, unexpected death that I got into his phone in order to contact his estranged family and discovered that although Igor did live in Russia for years as a young adult, he was actually born and raised in… Pakistan, which is 99% Muslim! (I believe he told me he was Jewish to explain why he didn’t eat pork and because he knew that as a Christian, I had respect for Judaism.)

He had distanced himself from his family due to their abusiveness, at least on his father’s part. He had moved to Russia, adopted a Russian name, had his skin permanently lightened (which also turned his black hair into red), and became a bodybuilder as a defense mechanism to make him feel invulnerable to abuse.

It was an emotional rollercoaster to slowly discover and piece together the truth after his death… I initially didn’t know whether to be mad at Igor for lying to me, and was constantly wondering what else was going to turn out to be a lie.

In the end, I mourned the wonderful man who had a past so horrible that he tried his best to leave it all behind. He treated me lovingly like a queen- and that part of him was 100% real.

G7 is similar to a lot of video game companies, in that they are great at generating hype, but terrible at keeping their promises.

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Just look at the promises they made in last year’s joint communique

  • provide one billion doses of COVID vaccines by the end of 2022 -> far behind schedule
  • create the appropriate frameworks to strengthen collective defenses against threats to global health; shorten the cycle for the development of vaccines, treatments and tests to 100 days -> progress is nowhere in sight
  • a timely, transparent, expert-led, science-based WHO-convened Phase 2 COVID-19 Origins study -> not happening
  • commit to net zero no later than 2050 -> Europe is burning coal once again
  • reinvigorate their economies by advancing recovery plans that build on the $12 trillion of support put in place during the pandemic -> highest inflation in 40 years

It’s like Joe Biden’s dementia is contagious or something. Say what you will about the Chinese, at least when we make a promise, we follow through. At least we have something that resembles a plan. We’re doers, not talkers.

And if that’s not good enough for you, feel free to reject the Chinese offer – you won’t be toppled by a coup or colour revolution for turning down the Chinese.

All this talk of “countering China’s Belt and Road” is nothing but a photo-op. A sweet little lie that will be forgotten within a year.

My second pregnancy was tough on me, a few months after I had the baby my body still didn’t fully recover.

One day, I asked my ex if he could look after the children while I went to the supermarket to buy baby’s milk.

It was too hard for me to walk to the shops with a 3-year-old while pushing a pram. I left the house thinking he’ll take good care of our children until I’m back.

Less than 5 minutes after leaving, I saw him drive past me alone. I felt this deep fear inside me and turned around.

I went back home, the baby was asleep in the bedroom but my 3-year-old was nowhere to be found. I ran back outside, shouting her name and crying.

I started walking down the streets when I finally saw her, she was half naked and a middle-aged lady was holding her by the hand.

She explained that she saw her walking alone on the streets, I thanked her and went back inside.

I’ll never forget that day because I thought I lost my oldest child forever. I fed my baby expired milk because my body wasn’t well enough to walk to the shop to buy new milk and I lied to the police when they asked why my daughter was running around half naked on the streets.

My ex left the house because it was time for him to go to work even though he’s self-employed and I told him I was going to buy milk for the baby.

Why didn’t he offer to go instead if he was in such hurry to go to work, what decent man will leave his own children alone in the house and be okay with his baby drinking expired milk?

I instantly lost respect for him that day, he values work and money over his own family. I never forgave him for it.

Rigatoni with Tomatoes and Artichokes

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Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 3 cups uncooked rigatoni
  • 3 tomatoes, chopped
  • 1 (14 ounce) can artichoke hearts, drained and quartered
  • 3 tablespoons olive oil
  • 2 teaspoons dried basil or 3 tablespoons fresh basil
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. Cook rigatoni according to package directions. Rinse and drain.
  2. In a large serving bowl, combine remaining ingredients except Parmesan cheese. Toss with cooked rigatoni.
  3. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese over the top to serve.

During the filming of The Mummy in 1999, something went wrong with a stunt. The rope actually almost ended up strangling actor Brendan Fraser. The movie almost cost him his life. As much of shooting took place in the desert, Fraser and other actors had to consume a special liquid every two hours so as not to die from dehydration.

Over the course of his career, Fraser performed many of his own stunts. And in doing so, he sustained horrific injuries. The actor had hundreds of contusions, a partial knee replacement, and his vocal cords needed to be repaired, among many surgeries. Fraser also had to do a laminectomy, in which a portion or all of the patient’s vertebra bone is removed. This helps ease pressure on the spinal cord or the nerve roots. The operation was botched, however, and had to be repeated again the next year, causing the actor further suffering.

His wife then divorced him. But by the time she did, his income had dried up as his injuries had made his career as an action star nearly impossible.

Still, a California judge ordered Fraser to support his wife with an insanely high alimony, based not on what he did make but on what he used to make…

… also, the Californian judge ordered that he could no longer be a father.

So, Fraser lost custody of his children.

In 2003, a powerful Hollywood director groped Brendan Fraser. The assault traumatized him and after threatening to speak out… he was all-but blacklisted in the business. This further compromised his already struggling career. For years, Fraser struggled. He was depressed, in physical pain, and he gained a lot of weight. His posture was terrible, his back injuries literally caused him to lose height, and emotionally and mentally he was in turmoil.

Then, in 2022, Brendan Fraser starred in The Whale. And he won an Oscar for his role. It was a beautiful comeback, precisely because of how awful his life had been for the fifteen or so years prior to his glorious win. Because before 2023 turned things around for him… this guy really had the worst luck.

When a President wants to be re-elected to office, the one thing he needs to do is project strength. Perception and optics are everything. In 1992 George Bush senior attended a state dinner with Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa. Bush had been feeling a little under the weather recently, and his personal physician had warned him to skip or postpone the event.

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Bush would have none of it — aged 68, he wanted to come across vibrand and strong. And he had to. Because the guy he was running against was 46-year-old Bill Clinton. Clinton, Arkansas governor, saxophone player, cigar-smoking womanizer. Younger than him. Stronger than him.More energetic. Bush absolutely had to come across strong, too. So he “manned up” and attended anyway. Only to throw up all over Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa.

And then pass out in Miyazawa’s lap…

Needless to say, Bush lost the 1992 elections. Bill Clinton stayed in the White House for the next eight years. In politics, perception is everything. The moment sharks in the water smell even a whiff of blood, you’re done for. And politicians are nothing but human-shaped sharks in suits.

My Fiancée Left Me For My Uncle…Now She’s Begging Me To Take Her Back After He Cheated

When you have the time to leave something behind, make it useful and memorable

Where I live in Brazil, car theft is somewhat of a problem. For the most part thieves choose commonly found, locally manufactured models, like Ford Fiestas, Fiat Palios, and Volkswagen Foxes, and then take them to chop-shops who tear them down and resell the parts online.

Models that are ten years old or older are very sought after because they are often relatively easy to steal and parts for them are harder to find, so the demand for things like fuel pumps, taillights and radiators is greater.

If you go on to Brazilian eBay and buy a used or reconditioned alternator, chances are very high that it is from a stolen car. There is a whole black market industry for car parts all across of South America that is literally impossible to stop.

Ironically, if you drive a high-end model like a Mercedes, BMW or Range Rover no one will steal it. First because it is way too conspicuous to drive around in a high end car than a common one, you’ll most certainly get caught, and second because selling the parts is much more difficult because there are not that many high end models around, not to mention that the people who own these cars are wealthy enough to pay a dealership to fix them when they need service.

I have two cars, a 2009 Volkswagen Gol (a somewhat cheaper model under the Golf) and a 2010 Volvo XC60 T5. No one will touch the Volvo because it’s the only one in town and thieves know that Volvos have a factory GPS system installed in them that’s really hard to deactivate, but I really have to keep my eye on the Gol because Gols are all over the place and it is a very sought after car to steal.

Someone tried to steal my Gol a few years ago — they broke the small triangle window behind the back door to unlock the car, then they popped the hood and cut the wires to the alarm. Then they broke the ignition lock and used a screwdriver to force it to engage the starter. It was during the night and the car was right outside my bedroom window; I didn’t hear a thing.

I woke up the next morning and the car wasn’t there, so I called the insurance company who used a tracking system like lo-jack to find it, it was unlocked, sitting around the corner and all of the thieves’ tools were on the seats and the floor — even the screwdriver was still sticking out of the ignition.

I’m guessing that the thieves gave up and fled the scene when they couldn’t get the engine to turn over and a cop car came down the street, or something like that.

They couldn’t start the engine because I had installed an engine kill switch up and under the dashboard where no one could see it. Two feet of wire, a toggle switch and a 10-amp fuse saved my car from being stolen: total cost of $4.00.

The Volvo on the other hand is exceptionally hard to steal, not because of the GPS system, but because of how the ignition system was designed.

There is no key to turn, so there is no ignition lock to break; to start the car I put the remote that unlocks the doors in the dashboard and push a button. The steering lock is further down the steering column than in most cars — it actually sits under the engine at the firewall, so it’s very hard to get to.

The Volvo also has another feature that many cars don’t have, and it’s not a factory-installed feature. You could literally take a baseball bat to the windshield and it won’t break. You could also unload a full clip of .44 magnum rounds into the driver’s side window and it won’t shatter.

The car is bulletproof — the previous owner had it bulletproofed when she bought it new in 2010. It has inch-thick glass and Kevlar all around, including the roof, so just getting into the car is no easy task.

You’d probably be able to force the door open with a crowbar, but that would break the door’s closing mechanism making it kind of hard to drive, that is if you were able to get around the steering lock and the keyless ignition.

Very hard to steal. Hard to car-jack at an intersection too, something all too common in cities like Rio de Janeiro on hot summer days when people are stuck in traffic.

Of course, one could always use a tow truck.

Would you believe that I don’t even have insurance on the Volvo? Except of course for the mandatory Government insurance that costs about $5.00 a year. I know that someone won’t steal it – they won’t even try.

The Gol on the other hand is insured, to the hilt, with a super-low deductible, which costs me about $600.00 a year. It’s not worth very much though, maybe $2000.00, so the insurance company believes someone will steal it in a little over three years.

Actually the Volvo has a very interesting and somewhat amusing story behind it, I wrote about it in another post a few days ago. If you’re interested here’s the Quora link. What car do you currently drive? Is it worth the price you paid for it?

So, it all depends on where you live and the car you drive, what security features it has. No car is truly unstealable, but some of them are much harder to steal than others.

Many Chinese are shocked when they first hear that westerners are afraid of China and Chinese.

Immediate reaction is “What did we do? We just work hard and mind our own business and sell stuff to everybody. Once in a while we get annoyed at Taiwan or the Philippines, but we don’t really do anything.”

They are unaware that it is because of their hard work and competition in Chinese society, that China is very powerful and influential in the aggregate.

“They’re LYING about the economy, this is now a DEPRESSION” Top Economist Warns

Several behaviors prevent the middle class from ascending.

  1. Spending large sums on depreciating assets. If you want to be wealthy, your only large purchases should be investments, not vehicles or gaming computers.
  2. Buying more house than needed. While a house is an investment, if your paychecks are all going to pay a mortgage and upkeep, you are short funds for investing. If housing prices collapse again, you won’t even have the equity.
  3. Not having 3–6 months of living expenses saved in case of a lay-off or emergency. Unemployment isn’t going to pay all your bills and living off credit cards until you get a new job is an expensive mistake. Putting an emergency cost on credit cards means you will pay at least twice as much with interest added than if using savings.
  4. Paying banks, instead of themselves. Interest payments are a huge waste. Imagine if you had that $500–1000/ month credit interest going to investments instead of to banks.
  5. Not understanding what is an investment rather than a purchase. Sellers use investment in advertising, but they lie. You don’t invest in a nice suit, you purchase it. The next day it is used clothing and worth 1/2 what you paid for it. You don’t invest in furniture, you purchase it. An investment is an asset expected to go up in value over time.
  6. Investing only in their employer’s stocks. It isn’t a good idea to invest in only one stock, industry or investment type. Putting money in a variety decreases your risks.
  7. Passing up job opportunities or promotions because you don’t like the people you will be working with, the added responsibility and/or travel involved. The road to the corner office might detour through a landfill, but it is the only way to get there. Promotions may not be offered a second time. The job opportunity you are holding out for may never happen.
  8. Nobody get rich using coupons. It takes a complete budget and lifestyle that spends less than you make and that includes investing. Saving $20 a week on groceries, but spending an extra $600 a month on a new vehicle you just had to have makes no sense.
  9. Money is not the goal, it is the tool. If you save up $100,000 and it just sits in a savings account, you are losing money and the potential for becoming financially independent.
  10. You have to set aside money for fun or your budget will fail. Sacrifice is easy the first month. By the time you reach the fortieth month, sacrifices can feel like a vise on your life. Adding fun dollars to your budget will let you enjoy life while still reaching your financial goals.

Shorpy

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Six foreigners allegedly poisoned in Bangkok luxury hotel

No, it is far from perfect and there is always room for improvement.

The important thing is to have a channel to provide input to government officials, explain why something needs to change to make it better, and see if they can make the change.

This is very different from the idea of free speech in the west because while people have the right to elect new leaders at election time, there is no way to request changes on a small scale, and then to follow up on them.

The Chinese way is to ask for changes on an ongoing basis, explain the rationale for the change, and if the official feels that it is reasonable, ask him to make the change. If he does NOT make the change within a reasonable time, then move up the ladder, and complain to his superior.

And so on and so forth…

So in the western system, you vote for the person and hope that he makes the macro changes you want. In the Chinese system, you go to the local official and request that he make the micro change you want. If the request is reasonable, he should make the change. If he does not, he will likely be voted out at the local level. Since he is also a Party member, failure to act on reasonable requests will affect his opportunity for promotion in the future, and affect his own career.

My in-laws used to live across the street from a drug dealer. They often called the police where there were cars coming and going from his property, picking up “product”. This cut into his business, and led to several ugly confrontations between him and my in-laws.

One day my then-fiancee was visiting her parents, and was in the back of the house when there was a commotion out front, complete with gunshots. She didn’t see anything, but both her parents and one of her brothers claimed they saw said drug dealer leaning out of his upstairs window, firing a gun. From his body language and what words they could make out, his intent was clear: Stop interfering with my business, or the next time I won’t be firing into the air but at you.

They called the police and he was charged with aggravated menacing. Some months later, I attended the trial as a spectator, as my fiancee (now wife) was a witness. The drug dealer took the stand in his own defense. After a well-rehearsed examination by his attorney, it was the prosecuting attorney’s turn.

“Mr. ___, on [date], did you fire several shots from a handgun into the air from the second story window of your home?”

“No, I did not. I don’t even have a gun.”

“You own no firearms whatsoever? On [date], you didn’t have a single firearm in the house?”

“That’s right. I didn’t have no guns then.”

A look of confusion spread of the DA’s face as he quickly pawed through his notes.

“Now, on [date of previous police call to his home], didn’t you tell Officer ____ that you had an extensive collection of firearms and that you were an expert in their use?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, did you lie to Officer ____?”

“What?”

“Did you lie to Officer ____ back on [previous date], or did you lie to the jury just now?”

“Yeah, I lied.”

I suspect that if you want to be taken seriously by a jury, you should not admit that you are a liar and may have just lied to them on the witness stand.

He was convicted, despite testimony from friends who gave him an alibi. The jury must have thought they were liars, too.

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About 15 years ago, a very expensive piece of equipment, ($30k market value at the time) was stolen from my place of employment. I was the one who discovered it missing and I was the one who called it in to our security office, who contacted the local police. I gave my statement to our in house security and the lead detective from the local law enforcement gave me his card and asked me to go down to the station to meet him and take an official statement on the coming Saturday (three days away at the time) at 8am.

I thought that was weird, but I agreed and was at the station at 7:45 am that Saturday. I checked in with the clerk who said the detective wasn’t in yet. I knew I was early so it wasn’t a big deal to wait. At 8:30 am, the detective walks out and acted surprised to see me. He then stated that he thought he told me 9 am. I showed him the business card he gave me and how I scribbled “Sat 8am” on the back of it. He gave the most insincere apology I ever heard and then told me he wasn’t ready for me yet and asked if I could wait 15 minutes and that he could have someone get me a coffee.

I agreed to wait and took the offer for the coffee. Half an hour later, he walks by and asked, “Did you not get your coffee?” and I said no, and he said, I’ll get right on that, I just need a few more minutes.” Half an hour after that, someone comes to get me and brings me to an interview room (still no coffee). Another 15 minutes later the detective show up with his partner.

They start asking me questions which I thought were peculiar. Then it hit me that I wasn’t just giving a statement, they were interviewing me as a person of interest. I am the first one every morning to open the location from which the equipment was taken. The surveillance video showed a team of 3 who knew exactly what they were doing and how to go about it. None of their faces were ever turned to the cameras and they knew exactly what they wanted, how to get it as quickly as possible and how to get it out of the building without being noticed.

The detectives thought that someone on the inside had provided the thieves with the intel they needed to get away with it, and I was suspect numero uno. Knowing what I know now, I would have immediately ceased talking to these detectives without a lawyer present. They grilled me for 4 more hours trying to break me into a confession of being an accomplice, which I was not.

It turns out that the thieves were a ring of professionals who spent a week scoping out the location to figure out how best to get their prize. The same individuals had hit 11 other institutions on the eastern coast of the US. It also turns out that the lead detective on the case who gave me such a hard time was also later convicted of stealing cash from the evidence room of his own station. Reading that headline made me smile because he was a huge jerk and it blew my mind that he even made detective in the first place, but it also made me sad for our justice system as a whole at the same time.

Also I never did get that coffee…

One story I’ve always found hard to believe is that of Lee Harvey Oswald having acted completely alone. People tend to forget that the guy defected to Soviet Russia for about a year. He renounced his citizenship, and worked for the Soviets for a while, who sent him to Minsk.

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Oswald went back to America because, as he wrote in his diary, he “found the work drab”. Soviet Russia was no fun. So he returned to America. How! How on earth did a US citizen defect to the Soviet Union and just… return. Like it’s no big deal. What the hell? He married a Russian wife, they have two daughters. Settle in America. Oswald, for the record, is a former marine. He’s an excellent marksman (finest in his unit) and for two years, he’s left completely undisturbed by US authorities despite having defected and worked for their enemies for a year. And, when he was just 24 years of age, he goes and — allegedly — kills President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

It’s hard to believe an American citizen defected to the number one enemy of America in the middle of the Cold War, was allowed back to the United States without trouble, only to assassinate the president and get killed almost immediately after by a random citizen while in policy custody.

Valiant Thor: A UFO, the Pentagon and a 3-year Mission to Save the World

I was musing about this the other day. Don’t you know

I was chaperoning a group of boy scouts (ex father in law was the troop leader) on a night hike in some woodland locally. I remained at the base in the car park helping prepare tea, cocoa and snacks. A few of the kids were always around as they went out in intervals with one leader or another so it was important that an adult was there to supervise them, I was around 18, 19 at the time.

A car pulled in to the carpark, which had been cordoned off and reserved for our use so the kids would stay safe. No one got out, so another leader went over to tell them that the park was off limits or see if it was a parent showing up hours early for some reason. They came back almost immediately and told me to call the police (I was the only one with a phone) as the man in the car wouldn’t speak, but was wearing a mask – it was actually the mask from the Scream films – had a shotgun and had piles of rope and tarpaulin in the car.

I remember being so scared that I couldn’t even remember the name of the park when I was speaking to the police, I was shaking and couldn’t get the words out quickly enough. All I could think was that we couldn’t see the car so had no idea if the man was still in it or out in the woods where we had 30 kids out in the dark with no way of contacting them.

Thankfully the police showed up in minutes, quickly found the man and arrested him. He said that he was out there hunting rabbits – why he would do so with a shotgun, or need a mask and rope I don’t know. We got all the kids back safely and didn’t tell them what had happened, but the sight of 7 or 8 police cars and a police dog unit was pretty difficult to ignore.

Definitely one of the scariest experiences I’ve had!

The Golden Ratio – Transmuted Pain to Power in Infinite Divine Proportion

Way back when I was out of college and working my first decent job, I had the assignment of vetting a bunch of applications for a new team the company was putting together. I was lightly bullied in HS by two girls who like to pick on skinny people of which I was one (5′8″ and 115 lbs). After college, I had grown up, filled out, and was a horseback rider and swimmer so in decent shape.

In the stack of about 50 applications that I was to cut down to 20 were applications by those two girls. They were both qualified and looked good on paper so they made the cut. When my company started interviewing, I was the one taking applicants into the room and when the first girl arrived, she took one look at me, turned white as a sheet but proceeded to the interview. I hadn’t told anyone of their actions in HS but it was known by others that the two were bullies when they were together and she didn’t get hired. She blamed me. The second girl was forewarned and was nice to me and apologized for her earlier treatment and when she went into the interview, she apologized to everyone there for her behavior as a teenager and she got hired.

The first girl came to see me at home and came at me again and I just put her on the ground without leaving a mark on her and told her I had nothing to do with her not being hired and she should find out what her friend had done to get hired. She left.

About a year later, I got a promotion and my old job was open and she applied for it and got hired. My revenge was they both worked for me and neither knew me well enough to know that my revenge was to do nothing and let their imaginations made them do good work and behave. I moved out of state about 5 years later and they were both good employees and I think part of that was having to take orders from someone they bullied.

John Mearsheimer: US Warships APPROACHED Lebanon, Putin Sent Anti-Ship Missiles To Houthis Join War

I don’t think it’s a spy balloon, it’s indeed what the Chinese call a “weather device.”

Why?

Check out these:

1. Jilin No. 1 satellite cluster

Jilin-1 is a reconnaissance satellite system developed by China. It was developed by the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The first set of satellites was launched at 12:13 on October 7, 2015. As of August 2023, Jilin The No. 1 satellite project has been launched a total of 26 times, with 131 satellites in orbit, which can revisit any location in the world 35 to 37 times a day.

  • This is a picture of the US Air Force base taken by Jilin 1

It can clearly photograph all military bases in the United States. Not only did they demonstrate to the public the effect of photographing U.S. naval bases, they even demonstrated the ability to track an F22 taking off from the Nevada Air Force Base.

2. Wing Loong 3 UAV

The Wing Loong 3 is a large UAV developed by China that can be used for high-altitude reconnaissance and attack. Without in-flight refueling, it can fly continuously for 32 hours and has a range of more than 10,000 kilometers.

If they needed to, it could take off in China and scout all over the United States, much faster and more stealthily than a balloon.

If I were Chinese, I would not choose such a stupid tool as a balloon for military reconnaissance.

The disadvantages of balloons are obvious

1. The flight trajectory is uncontrolled

Where it flies is completely determined by the monsoon, and a precise reconnaissance route cannot be set in advance.

2. Slow speed

It often takes a month to reach the target.

3. Poor reliability

Extreme weather, lightning strikes and other reasons can destroy the balloon at any time.

4. No concealment

Because of its appearance and height, it will even be seen and discovered by ordinary people, causing diplomatic disputes.

If I were North Korea, I would probably use something like a balloon to accomplish the mission. But why would China, which has other stronger and more reliable capabilities, choose this kind of thing?

鄙人内容谢绝中文媒体和网站翻译和转载
私のコンテンツは日本のメディアによって翻訳または転載されません。
내 콘텐츠는 한국 언론에 의해 번역되거나 재인쇄되지 않습니다.

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Yes. I used heavily for 10 years without having more than 36 hours clean ever over ten years. Jail/prison was the only way I was ever able to kick. It’s strange because sucks, of course, but at the same time it’s weirdly easier to do it while locked up because you know there’s nothing you can do about it. Once you can accept that all the anxiety and desperation disappears and it allows time to pass quicker. I know when I was using and was dopesick I would toss and turn in my bed for what felt like 6 hours and look at the clock and 15 minutes had passed. It just crawled by at a agonizingly slow pace. It wasn’t like that in jail.

Also tell the staff you have really bad diarrhea, and are dangerously dehydrated, and they should offer you Imodium. Imodium(loperamide) binds to the opiate receptor in your gut and will give you some relief. It also slows the movement of electrolytes through your body so you won’t be on the toilet as much, and won’t be as dehydrated, which causes a lot of the muscle pain.

If you have a court date that you know is when you are going to sign and start your time then start tapering down as much as possible before you go in. I went from $100 a day habit down to where a $20 would last me 2 days before I went in and it helped tremendously in reducing the severity of my withdrawals.

Once I was done I was like “wow, that’s what I was so afraid of for 10 years?” It really wasn’t that big of a deal. Not pleasant, but time will pass, it has to, and the symptoms will fade. It won’t kill you. It did take me 9 months of a 15 month sentence to change my mindset that I was going to use soon as I got out. I just woke up one day and no longer remembered heroin fondly. I only remembered everything shitty about it.

Probably the most famous case like this involved the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.

The story starts in Las Vegas and the Hotel Desert Inn which, at the time, was owned by Dalitz.

At the time, the Desert Inn hosted the largest casino on the strip in Vegas. Hughes moved into and rented the top two floors of the hotel on Thanksgiving Day 1966.

After a couple weeks the hotel owners wanted to get Hughes to leave as they felt his eccentricity was negative PR for the Vegas image of their hotel. They also wanted to make room for the high rollers expected over the upcoming holiday season. Hughes was also perceived as a little crazy by this time in his life.

Instead of moving out though, Hughes entered negotiations to buy the Desert Inn. He managed to purchase the resort from Dalitz for $6.2 million in cash and $7 million in loans.

Hughes lived, worked and never left his 250 sq. ft. bedroom in the hotel. The windows and doors were taped shut. No housekeeping was allowed in. He conducted a large amount of business from the phones of this small, darkened room.

He was finally carried out four years later on a gurney and flown to the Bahamas to live out the last few years of his weird life.

Stand by me – Full movie

This is a GREAT movie. It’s a 1980’s classic and all about boyhood.

A Leica M3 with dual-range Summicron 50/2

Even in the worst of the Great Depression in Post WWI Germany, Unemployment was 31% at its peak in 1931

In the US, during the worst period 1930 October to 1933 September – the Average Unemployment was 16.9%

So if China has 30% unemployment then the situation there must be worse TWICE than during the Great Depression

That means one of the 3.47 Million tourists who visited China on their 144 Hour Visa Free Entry between 1/1/24 and 30/6/24 would have recorded it fully and uploaded a Video

You see any?

As for 40% Homeless

That’s too ridiculous for a response given that another accusation against China is also accusing China of having MILLIONS OF EMPTY HOUSES

Only someone with a severe strain of NEUROSYPHILIS would make such illogical statements

$1 Noodles VS $163 Noodles in Vietnam!! (RECORD BREAKING Bowl!!)

On a freezing Sunday night I was eating dinner with my son, I suddenly felt unease I paused for a moment when I heard a scratching coming from the basement followed by a clang. Our area is notorious for violence due to drug related incidents, so no chances could be taken. I have a licence for a gun and I quickly went and fetched it from the safe, then went to a seperate area where I hide the ammo and loaded it.

My son saw what was happening and while he was quite pale, he knew what to do in such a situation because we had talked about it on numerous occasions. He stood behind me and we backed to the face of the wall.

After a few minutes of silence, I heard rapid steps from the basement stairs, from the squelching sound that his boots made I knew he had broken in from the air conditioner vent. Seconds later he dashed through the door and stopped around 2 meters from where we were standing.

Even now I can remember every feature of his face, the scratches on his cheeks and how he kept clicking with his left hand. He paused for a moment, and raised a pistol. My finger crushed the trigger and bullets tore through his body, he took a step forward but dropped to the ground with his legs twitching.

I used to laugh about the stories when people say that every night they see their victims face, but now I realise it’s true. What affected me most was his age, he later learned that he was just 22. As his raspy breathing began to halter, I remember his blue eyes, I feel that somewhere inside he knew I had to do it.

I’m sorry I had to do that but I don’t regret it – I had no choice. My son is my life, and I am responsible for his safety.

Do you have experience in the high school where a group of school friends harassed you? The leader may be jealous of your popularity in school. Others follow & join the harassment. It is a gang effect.

It takes a clear mind & courage to defy the (sick) leader. And leave the gang.

The US-led NATO has been instigating wars around the globe, harming humanity. For US interest only.

USA is sick. Why follows a sick country?

I would say BRAVO to Hungary.

This was my mom, not me, but my friends and I witnessed it. We were goofing off, riding skateboards in the parking lot of our small grocery store, when a fancy car pulls up, a Caddie, and a guy gets out and goes into the store, one of my buddies, a very large black guy, about turned white with fear. He recognized the guy in the Caddie as the head of the Klan in Mississippi, this was in Laurel, Mississippi late 70’s, at the tail end of the Civil Rights era. At any rate Junior barely got the words out when the door opened again with the dbag fleeing getting whacked by a broom, and my mother using language that I had never heard pass her lips before, or thereafter. She called him everything but a child of God as he hightailed it out of there. Two or three weeks later there was a race riot, and every single last convenience store, or grocery was looted and burned out except for ours. Mom always treated everyone the same, she had spent her teen years in a Jewish ghetto in Düsseldorf Germany watching Hitler come to power, she loathed racism in any form. In every other store in town if you were black and needed a hand, like store credit, they racked you up with high interest, we didn’t charge anything. If you were sick, mom showed up, usually with me, with Jewish penicillin, Chicken Noodle Soup, it didn’t matter what color your skin was. That is where I learned my morals.

‘Bombshell’ Exchange Overnight !!!

Between NATO and China.

Do not threaten China, folks.

 

Out of jail and into the fale

I fought in the Russo-Ukrainian war with the International Legion. I saw many upsetting sight, but the grossest one that has really stuck with me was during the battle for Klishchiivka, slightly south of Bakhmut and after the fall of Bakhmut in 2023. It was before Ukraine recaptured Klishchiivka (and they have since lost it again).

We were on an assault mission the capture some trenches in the surrounding forest (what was left of it) and the place was littered with mines. We had an EOD expert leading the way and we passed a dead Ukrainian soldier inside a body bag. The area was still too hot to extract the body so it just lay there as the battle raged.

We failed the assault mission and had to fall back. No ground was gained or lost, but the Russians knew we were there and were raining artillery down on us. As we fell back, around noon, we passed the body bag again. It had been perforated by artillery shrapnel and the July heat had slow cooked the flesh. A foul, greenish-brown goop oozed out of the bag and stunk horribly. It was leaking onto the ground a few inches from the safe trail.

As the artillery was landing, we ducked for cover and I had to duck next to the body. On the other side of the trail were two Russian soldiers who had been dead for some time. They were Inside a shell crater and had almost decomposed completely. I could see their skeletons, one with a large hole in the skull. Both has bits of dehydrated flesh clinging to the skeleton. I was laying between dead of long ago and dead of recently, waiting for my death from the artillery.

A few meters further, there was the decapitated head of a Russian laying amongst some anti-tank mines that had been piled up. The head was as decomposed as the other Russians, a testament to the longevity of battle there. I did not see a body and did not bother to look. Helmets and shattered rifles littered the trail. So much death in the tiny tree line.

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The body bag. Not a very clear image and I couldn’t find a clear shot of the Russian bodies.

Earlier In the day, as we arrived in the assault position, an M-113 was struck by a helicopter missile and burst into flames. Luckily, it was only ammunition in the back, which burned and cooked off for about 20 minutes. The driver and commander both survived. They came running across 250 meters of open field to our position with blistered skin and burned, shattered clothing. One soldier jumped into the fighting hole with me and I could see hand-sized blisters forming on his legs. He was in immense pain. Oleg was his name. He was extracted and I do not know his fate this day.

The whole day, collectively, would be my grossest experience, but the oozing body bag really got to me. I will never forget it

I’d say as little as US$1000-$2000. Cash and carry, fly to Yiwu or Guangzhou, buy goods in cash, carry them back home in suitcases or cartons. You are in business.

Forget container, you can’t afford that, you don’t need that. If you need a shipping agent, there are many billboards and advertisements in wholesale markets, once you are there, you can ask them to ship for you.

There are 100,000s of African traders in Yiwu and Guangzhou, doing exactly as I described above. Ethiopian airlines fly directly to Guangzhou, I saw African traders at the airport, buying and taking goods home to sell, exactly what Marco Polo was doing 800 years ago.

YouTubers SMASH anti-China propaganda with REALITY

There are times when celebrities accidentally photobomb. Of course, it has to go viral.

Check out:

  1. Heisenberg

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2. You have been Nick Caged!

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3. Can you spot the celebrity?

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4. The Rockkk!

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5. He is looking for the choppa.

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6. This is terrifying!

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7 Here’s a girl with no name!

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8. I never witness this kind of photobomb

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main qimg 7bd04ee2e136a0b7c391504753ebd548 lq

9. This has to be the greatest accidental photo ever.

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10. Benedict bombing all of them!

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This happened thirty years ago and I still find my blood pressure spiking when I think about it.

I worked at a small steel mill in Tuscaloosa, AL, called (at the time) Tuscaloosa Steel. Our Vice President, “Percy,” was a stuck-up Brit from British Steel, the company that basically owned Tuscaloosa Steel.

My maternal grandmother had a major medical issue and was in the local hospital for open heart surgery. I took that day off work so I could be at the hospital for when she went into and came out of surgery, and to be there to support my mother and grandfather, who were beside themselves with worry. My boss and all my coworkers knew where I was and why. So did my boss’ boss, Percy.

We had just started installing new software called RollCIM at the mill, and no one was familiar with it except the IT department, of which I was a member.

My group was demonstrating part of RollCIM to some of the users and ran into an issue. Now, any single one of them could have fixed it.

But. No.

Percy decides that I and only I can fix whatever the hell the problem was. So he pages me (at the time there were no cell phones; we had pagers) with a 911. I call the mill from the hospital waiting room and am told to get my ass to the mill right now because Percy is frothing at the mouth and needs me to fix something that blew up while being demoed to our users.

My grandmother was literally in surgery. We didn’t know if she was going to live or die. But I had to leave the hospital with my mother and grandfather sitting there STUNNED at the audacity of this…”man.”

I get to the mill in record time because I went about 80. I run in, and there are 4 or 5 people standing around a terminal, and Percy is fuming. He gestures at the screen. “This is unacceptable!”

I literally pressed like three keys and it cleared the error right up. I said, “Is that all you needed? Because I need to be back at the hospital immediately. My grandmother should be coming out of surgery any time now.”

None of the people to whom the product was being demoed knew he’d gotten me out of the hospital to come press three keys on the keyboard. One of my coworkers said, “I kept telling him I could fix it, but he insisted it had to be you.”

So I high-tailed it back to the hospital and got there just in time for my grandmother to come out of surgery, OK. No complications, thank goodness.

But that’s not the end of the story.

Several days later, we were having a departmental meeting where we all got into a conference room and went over incidents of the previous week and plans for the current week. At the end of the meeting, Percy turns to me with a huge grin on his face and asks, “Oh, by the way, how is your aunt?”

I directed all the hate I could at him with just a look and said, “They’re all just fine. None of them were sick. My GRANDMOTHER, on the other hand, who had open-heart-surgery, is in a lot of pain, but recovering nicely, thank you.”

You could have heard a pin drop in that room and our boss called an end to the meeting immediately.

And that is but one of several stories I could tell about this pompous ass.

Here’s a poser.

  1. Which is the biggest car market in the world, in terms of new car registrations?
  2. Which car market has the broadest retail presence by global carmakers?

Answer?

China.

Do you know why both the EU and America instituted lightning quick tariffs on Chinese EVs?

Because their ICE, hybrid and EV products are being decimated in China. Yup, “overproduction” that has spilled into China for decades are rapidly tumbling.

>30% sales reduction yoy is commonplace, and the list includes Porsche.

Even BMW, which a sales manager boasted (to me) “sells itself” and therefore, no discounts or freebies, had to immediately discount its brand new G60 i5 by 20+%, just to move the model out the door.

A 20+% discount on a brand new generation hot off the production line!

The Chinese competition is smoking hot.

The average non-mainland youtube car channel will look VERY, VERY different with Chinese cars in the mix.

At this point, mainland car channels might as well be from a different galaxy, showcasing wares that are not only cheaper, but materially superior to the competition.

2024 crystallizes the divergence between east and west, with the Chinese taking over the mantle of tech leadership.

Thank God I’m born Asian.

Welcome to the 21st century.

The Asian century.

Shorpy

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Though nearly two months have passed since I came here, Japan never fails to amaze and amuse me with a different experience each day, everyday! Among other things, my interactions with the Japanese, though few and far, have already made a lasting impact on me! I would like to share two such memorable instances that will be enshrined in my heart forever.

  1. So, I had scheduled for a parcel to be delivered to my room at 12pm. I opened the door at 11:55 and the delivery man was standing right in front of the door! When I asked him why he hadn’t knocked on my door, he said he was waiting for the clock to strike 12! What?! I had no idea someone could be that humble (and of course punctual, it’s futile to even talk about their punctuality as it is simply too amazing to be described in words).
  2. On a cold afternoon, I was at an Indian restaurant having lunch. A man seated next to my table started smoking while eating. As I am averse to the cigar smoke, I asked the waiter and sat down at the corner table, far away from this man. On realizing that his smoking had bothered me, he came up to me and apologized. Well that’s polite and I can fathom it. But when I finished my lunch and went to pay the bill, the waiter told me that the man was very sorry for the inconvenience he might have caused me and had already paid my bill. Really?! Words fail to describe what I felt then!

I get a feeling that I’ll learn more from observing how Japanese are than by listening to lectures at the university! Hats off Japan! 🙂

High Value Man REFUSES To Pay For Woman’s Food & Leaves!

Because people realize the “west” they have been told about simply doesn’t exist.

Let me explain. Before the reformation of 1978, almost nobody had been to western countries, except for politicians and scholars. The country itself is not satisfying as well. Japan, Singapore, even North Korea (under Soviet reinforcement) is better than China in many ways. This, to the Chinese people, is mind blowing. People were taught that countries like Korea used to be sovereign states of China, but China is now left behind.

It wasn’t until the beginning of this century that Chinese started to go out and explore the rest of the world. But the idea of being left behind is still in many people’s mind.

However, when Chinese finally made it to the west, they get shocked by the fact that the so called “lighthouse of democracy” (nick name for the United States) is not perfect. People get frustrated by racism, foreign nationalism and violence in the foreign nation.

It is not their fault, not at all. But still, people believe that this can’t be true.

“How can there be so much racism? I was taught that Asians have the highest income here! Why is this happening?”

“How can there be so much nationalism? I was taught that the media of the United States was never controlled by their democratic government! Why is this happening?”

“How can there be so much violence? Why do people get shot almost once a week? I thought this wouldn’t happen in a democratic society!”

Several years gone…

When they look back to the place they just come from, a country growing at an astonishing speed, they finally understood why.

They now know every country has its own pros and cons, and they now know that the country they come from isn’t that bad at all. In the contrary, it might even seem to be a better choice for them.

Chinese people are sometimes fooled by its own kind that if you go to the west, you get everything: you get money, a happy family and a nice job. In fact, this is also what many US immigrants in the early 20th century believed. “Go to America! And you’ll get everything!”

But when your own country grows from “nothing” to “something” to “something more than something”, you’ll start to wander: is the US always better than China in every aspects? Is my country really worse than the US?

Development is the key.

That’s how you get nationalism.


Edit: the point I want to make clear of is that older generation Chinese have this strange “fairytale” thought about the west. It’s not because of propaganda, but because people accept the feeling of China being a backward country and the fact that the west is indeed much more advanced. But the economic boost changed all that. Now, many Chinese regain their confidence of being one of the top countries in the world. The Germans, Japanese and Russians all experienced the change when their country rises.

PREPARE! “We Have Never Seen Anything Like This In Recorded History.”

I sure have! A particular young lad with an obnoxiously loud and very illegal aftermarket “muffler” installed on his modded Honda Civic. Both, the first and second times I pulled him over, I gave him a warning, informing him that the State law is very clear, that the installation of “mufflers” that do not dampen noise as effectively as the stock one does is prohibited.

I saw him continuing to drive around relatively often (it was hard to miss whenever he went by) but I deliberately waited about a month between the three more times I stopped him (preemptive countermeasure to any Harassment claim), and ticketed him all three times. The third ticket, however, was not for the illegal muffler, it was a Criminal Citation for driving on a suspended license: it was inactivated by the DMV for ignoring the requirement he actually pay the previous fined. Also, at that time, State law REQUIRED police to impound the vehicle of anyone caught driving on a suspended license. So I did, and never saw that car again. (No doubt it was because he couldn’t afford the impound & storage fee on top of all the tickets he got from me and probably other officers as well.)

Yes, I felt bad for him the first time I stopped him, which is why he got the warning. The second time, he told me that the replacement muffler had been shipped but hadn’t arrived yet, but had to get to work. I pointed out that he probably still had the stock muffler & strongly suggested he reinstall until the (unnecessary) new one arrived. But I let him off. I didn’t hook his car until four MONTHS later, during which time there were MANY times I saw him driving but didn’t stop him. By the end, no, I didn’t feel bad for him at all— all that happened to him he brought upon himself & he had his eyes wide open the whole time.

Man Silences Audience Full of Women..

The true story of U-118 at Hastings and the dangers of old ships.

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main qimg 05626b69d78a12313de826486a5dc58f pjlq

Aerial view of German U-118 U-Boat washed up on its way to France April 15 1919.

After World War 1 ended, the German Navy surrendered and many of its ships were interned at the Royal Navy’s chief naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands north of the Scottish mainland. However SM U-118 was surrender by the Imperial German Navy to the Allies at Harwich on 23 February 1919. U-118 was due to be transferred to France, but while on tow from Harwich to Brest, in company with UB-121 during the early hours of 15 April 1919 she broke tow in a storm , and ran aground on the beach at Hastings in Sussex at approximately 00:45, directly in front of the Queens Hotel.

Initially, there were attempts to re-float the stricken vessel. Three tractors were used to try and pull the submarine back into the sea and a French destroyer then attempted to break the ship apart using her guns, all efforts were unsuccessful, and the closeness of the submarine to the public beach and the Queens Hotel prevented the use of explosives.

U-118 had been launched on February 23, 1918, she was 267 feet long, displaced 1,200 tons and was armed with a 150mm deck gun, 14 torpedoes and 42 mines. SM U-118 had a lackluster career, sinking only two ships. She was surrendered to the Allies on February 23, 1919, exactly one year after she was launched.

The city fathers decided to make the best of this instant tourist attraction, the Admiralty put the local coast guard in charge and allowed the town clerk to charge sixpence apiece to visitors wishing to climb onto the deck of U-118. After two weeks, nearly £300 had been raised for the Mayor´s Fund for the welcome home of troops from France.

Special excursions inside the submarine were arranged for important visitors, these were led by the two coast guardsmen, but the visits were stopped after two weeks when both these gentlemen became strangely ill. Instead of getting better, they got progressively worse, until, by February of 1920, both were dead.

Their autopsies revealed abscesses in their lungs and brains, probably caused by chlorine gas leaking from the sub’s damaged batteries.

main qimg bbc32ee82024ce3895489739d6374a91 pjlq
main qimg bbc32ee82024ce3895489739d6374a91 pjlq

U-118 ashore at Hastings crowded with tourists.

The decision was made to break up U-118 and sell it for scrap. Hastings was presented with the 150mm (6-in) deck gun, but they decided to get rid of it in 1921. It is believed that portions of the sub’s keel still sit under the sands.

Putin Responds to Trump Wanting to End the War in Ukraine!

Thanks for the A2A, Liana.

My then 8 yo daughter had an one-month home stay at my cousin’s home in Denver, Colorado.

I video chatted with her daily. She told me she loved eating at Uncle Woo’s restaurant. Uncle Woo is my cousin’s husband, a second generation Chinese American who runs a Chinese restaurant in Denver. I was so grateful and relieved to hear that.

Me: ‘Great! What’s your favorite food in Uncle’s Chinese restaurant?’

She: ‘Sushi!’

Me: ‘Er… Sushi is a Japanese food… anyway I’m glad you love it. What’s your favorite topping of sushi? Tuna?’

She: ‘Tempura!’

Me: ‘Er… Tenpura on Sushi? I’ve never heard of that. Tell me more. What’s it like?’

She: ‘Uncle and Auntie deep fry big shrimps, top them on the rice roll, and dip sweet salty sauce on them. Yum yum!’

Me: ‘Wow that sounds unique. I wish I could taste them too.’

She: ‘You know what? Today Auntie taught me to make dumplings. I wrapped many dumplings. And they are flower-shaped!’

Me: ‘Impressive! I’ve never seen flower-shaped dumplings. Must be beautiful! What’s the fillings?’

She: ‘Cheese!’

Me: ‘Er… I can’t imagine what they would taste like… did you eat them?’

She: ‘Yes! Those are my No.2 favorite! We wrap them like flowers, then auntie deep fry them, they taste super creamy.’

When she came back from Denver, she brought many ‘Lucky Cookies’ as souvenirs from USA to her friends. The ‘Surprise!’ inside the cookies gave kids so much fun.

She also taught her grandma to make flower-shaped cheese-filling dumplings when we visited them in Beijing on Chinese New Year, and shared them with our neighbors.

Chinese people always say ‘Be it a black cat or a white cat, a cat that catches mice is a good cat.’

I say be it Chinese or American, be it Japanese or Italian, a food that is delicious and fun is a good food.

And salute Uncle Woo’s family, salute food lovers all over the world who constantly create new food cultures to warm our stomachs and hearts.

SCOTT RITTER JOINS ON PUTIN’S KNOCKOUT BLOW TO NATO

NOTE: This is NOT my uncle’s actual car, but very similar to the one he bought. Picture for illustration purposes only.

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main qimg f055e060296d5327c76fd340089d6519 lq

When my uncle retired, he decided to treat himself to a brand-new Corvette. He shopped for weeks, finally choosing a loaded model in a bright racing yellow.

He was so excited on delivery day. I drove him to the dealership and when we arrived, his new car was out front, facing the street but parked very close to the wall of the showroom. He didn’t care because he’d be driving his new car and I would be driving my car. The salesman rushed him through the paperwork, gave him the keys and said he had another appointment to get to. This annoyed my uncle considering the amount of money he had just spent. But he was still excited, so he hopped in and fired up the 427 engine. I told him I’d follow him to the gas station; this happened in the days when a dealership provided just enough fuel to get you to your first fill-up.

He pulled out and turned right down the boulevard. A few blocks later, he pulled into a station, then swung the Corvette around the pump, perhaps so he’d be facing the street when finished gassing up. My mouth fell open in horror as I watched him swing around. The entire passenger side of the car, the side that was against the wall at the dealership, was totally smashed. Dents, paint ripped down to the fiberglass, trim completely missing. The car was destroyed on the passenger side. I pulled over and tried to warn my uncle before he saw it but I was too late. He had gotten out with a big smile on his face, ready for his first fill-up with his brand new Corvette, only to see this total mess. We both stood there dumbfounded for a moment, but soon anger took over.

We immediately returned to the dealership and found the salesman, who was on the phone. I had to restrain my uncle from hitting this guy, he was screaming at him at calling him every name in the book. We went outside and showed the salesman the car, and he had the balls to accuse my uncle of being the one who damaged the car! By this time a small crowd had gathered around the scene, and finally the owner of the dealership came out.

The salesman admitted that he had smashed the car when he was bringing it out of the storage lot, and didn’t want to lose the sale, so he hid the damage by parking it so it wasn’t visible. The owner immediately fired the salesman, apologized to my uncle, gave him a loaner car for free while they ordered a new Corvette, then when he came to pick up the replacement car, the owner gave my uncle a check for $10,000, which was more than he paid for the car! Because of all of this, my uncle didn’t sue the dealership. That salesman’s actions were the scummiest I’ve ever come across.

She Instantly REGRETS Divorcing Her Husband When She Realizes No One Want Her with 5 Kids | The Wall

I used to date a gay cop.

If we were out to dinner, he could become visibly fixated and angry, almost trembling with rage, because some stranger across the room had dyed and shaped their hairstyle into a violet Mohawk.

This really happened, decades ago, and I am still confused.

Returning to our date, I am siting there, thinking FFS, you’re a gay cop and you cannot handle anyone who does not fall in line according to your standards. It’s just hair. It’s not anti-social. The guy has cut his hair to express an identification with counterculture, maybe. It’s different, but who cares?

Gay cops are hot.

I gave him too many passes despite this scary inclination brought forth by non-conforming people of all stripes. It was amazingly predictable and a frightening irony. We have freedom of self expression in this nation, though we may lose it soon. If Republicans want state bans on contraception FFS?

The brunt of their authoritarian rage in full plumage is difficult to ascertain.

I think I finally told him, “You’re a gay cop. Not the fashion police, you know?”

In America, we don’t have a fashion police with enforcement powers.

And for damn good reasons.

Seriously, who gives a shit? Why would anyone give a shit?

The guy with the Mohawk is not your enemy.

You need a scapegoat.

Deep in this guy’s angry soul, he desperately needed everyone to conform or it upset him, as if his insistence on compliant appearances belied the inner shame that drove him to law enforcement in the first place, not that all cops are steeped in hypocritical denial.

I do not suffer from the need to judge something or someone I do not understand who does not pose any real threat to me. It does not cross my mind. Not for a second. But there are people in this world who will judge anyone who dares to step out of line as expressed in an unorthodox hairdo.

Do you not have bigger issues on your mind?

People dye their hairdos like Easter Eggs because, I assume, it’s fun. They like it when they look in mirror. It communicates their freedom of spirit to everyone. It adds color to their lives, and what in the hell could possibly be wrong with that?

Please remove the baton of imperious piety from you know where.

And relax. It’s just hair. It can’t hurt you.

Let people be different.

It’s not that hard.

It’s also one of your fundamental responsibilities as a citizen under the present Constitution as long as it continues to exist under the new tyranny of right-wing control. Good God, you went on a tirade when Twitter evicted their trolls, suppressing what you call freedom of speech, but you’re uptight over pink hair. It drove you crazy when the courts finally shut down Alex Jones and his lie factory for good.

You can’t see the freakish contradiction in your need to police “freedom” ?!? You can’t understand that freedom of speech does not mean the right to lie?

By definition, it means you can’t police other people and control their chosen forms of self expression, until they pose a direct danger to you or others.

You don’t get that? By definition, it means other people can dye their hair as long as they so choose even if it bugs you. Jesus. Seriously. Get a life.

Not dirty money-wise, but it was infuriating on principle.

I was in a car accident, 100% the other party’s fault. The police report cited them as being at fault (failure to maintain control of the car). Their front end hit my front end, I was pointed south on a south-bound freeway, and they were pointed north (they lost control in a heavy rain).

Arbitration between the two insurance companies determined that the other party was 100% at fault. I got my deductible back, and my insurance covered the loss of the car.

My insurance did NOT cover a couple of over things. Some fishing gear was stolen (OK…”came up missing”) from my vehicle while it was at the collision center lot. I cracked a couple ribs during the accident, and couldn’t mow my very large lawn for a few weeks, and had to pay somebody to do it. A few other things. I wanted their insurance company to cover those losses. I could have asked for pain and suffering, and probably could have jacked up a lot of other expenses, but I didn’t; I just wanted them to cover a few clearly articulated losses.

The contract they sent me had a statement “I understand that this is a questionable claim….” followed by a statement that this would be the end of the matter.

I called the rep at the insurance company and told him on no uncertain terms that that the “questionable claim” statement was coming out before I signed the contract. I didn’t object to their wanting to close off indefinite demands, and was amenable to language that said the deal was done and over with once they sent me a check, but there was nothing the least bit “questionable” about the claim, and if they wanted to push the issue, I would conduct a more thorough review to my losses, and take them to court in a case that they had, for all practical purposes, already lost.

I got a revised contract with the offending language removed less than an hour later.

If she can't be corrected then she can't be directed. 
If she can't be directed then she can't be protected. 
If she can't be protected then she can't be respected. 
If she can't be respected then she can't be selected.

It is not what is Kier Starmer stance on China? It is China is watching if Kier Starmer wants to cooperate and partner with China or wants to do shit and be a US dog like his previous leaders, that is your choice. If you want to be a dog and do US bidding China will handle you based on your decision.

If you want to be a US slave or dog and do shit on China. China will return the favour and gives you double the dose! On the other hand if he is smart and wants to do what is good for UK, China will reciprocate in kind! The ball is on your court! You decide!

China is the world’s most humongous market and manufacturer, you can partner them and be prosperous and win EU market or you can be a dog and pretend you are fine with your economy tumbling negative with a 5–10% inflation. You British decide you want 3 good meals a day or have a 30 second limelight being an assistant sheriff to a dementia or degenerate.

Your choice. China will watch what he do not merely what he say! You Caucasian Anglophones thinks too much of yourself! You need China not China need you! UK market is about the size of a province in China nothing much more than that! It UK stop buying Chinese it may affect China 0.0.5% of their business but if China stop UK it cost UK 5–8% inflation! That is simply mathematical! Sunak, Liz and Boris are simply too dumb to realised and the chose a dog’s role that brings no benefit and a whole load of problem for UK!

Starmer needs to decide carefully and so does the British people!

I think that he is running for President. But, aside from that, it’s a good video.

I have been living in Japan for three months now and one thing I realized is that there is no tipping here. At all.

I asked my Japanese friend why this was so. He asked me, ‘What is tipping?’
I said, ‘When you think a service in a restaurant is proper, the person in charge gets your food on time, we leave some money for the waiter’.

And he said, ‘But aren’t the workers supposed to be efficient? Isn’t that their job?’
Me: Ah well. Umm. Hmm. Yeah you are right.

It’s considered in the Japanese society that it is one’s duty to do their job perfectly. It’s even difficult explaining them such things as why one should tip in a restaurant!

Let me add some more things here.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that they have braille everywhere. Everywhere including beer cans and washlet (Japanese hi-tech toilet) buttons.

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main qimg 4adaa273d88ef8133084ba51094fe6a4 lq

The first thing you do when coming across a “growling lion” is freeze and avert your eyes. You also do not point at it.

If a lion is not habituated to man it will most likely run. The danger arises with lions that are more used to people.

Look at the animal’s tail. When a lion is angry or feeling threatened it will sweep its tail from side to side. If it is hunting it will keep its tail stiff and twitch it from time to time. It is much more serious if it is actively hunting you. If you see stalking indications then raise your arms above your head and wave them and most importantly SHOUT YOUR HEAD OFF. If you have something in your hand then throw it at the lion. Even if the lion charges you do not run. Believe me this can be extremely intimidating. They charge at 80 km per hour and the roaring is deafening. If you have frozen and then lion is not approaching but not leaving either then start to back slowly away. If it starts to move, then freeze immediately.

My wife, Marjet, once walked into a whole pride at a concession we were running in Botswana. It was early morning during the cool season and she was walking from our home to the camp (a couple of hundred meters away). The lions had just arrived and were sunning themselves in the tall grass, so she didn’t see them till she was right on top of them. Despite the aggressive roaring and repeated charges from different lionesses she held her nerve and walked away without a scratch. Needless to say she doesn’t take any nonsense from me…

Night time encounters are another story. I was once doing problem animal control in Gache Gache in Zimbabwe, trying to bait and shoot a lion that had killed several people and the night before had almost succeeded in breaking into Chief Mangare’s hut. It was dark but moonlit and I was lying on the ground, carefully backed into a euphorbia hedge along with two game scouts and a fellow ranger. I heard a very faint noise behind me and the lion was crawl-stalking me and just 10 foot back! He had actually carefully crawled through the dense hedging to sneak up on us. He was too close for me to be able to turn and shoot. However, I turned on the torch in my hand and shone it in his face. He ran off. So, if you are walking in the bush at night (it happens in safari camps especially) and come across lions, keep your beam in their eyes and back away.

One of the biggest myths is fire. Lions are not afraid of campfires and will often walk round them and see what’s happening. However, keeping a fire between you and a lion is probably better than nothing!

Why God sent you a cat | Feline spirituality

Kenny G in China

Zero significance.

The US decided that it was too dangerous to leave a long range attack missile there. Or decided that it could be wiped out by China with drones.

If someone, anyone pushed a button and launched a Tomahawk cruise missile at China, that means starting a war. China will wipe out every US base in Asia and the US islands.

The missile don’t threaten China at all so the risks outweigh any benefits.

Either that or Chine threatened to wipe those missile away and the US bases in Asia just like the US did with Cuba.

But this changes nothing. The US is still trying to get proxies to fight China. The US doesn’t want to be directly involved though because that will mean all US soldiers in Asia will be killed. Then the US will have to send a fleet along with NATO. The fleet will then be sunk.

This is contrary to what the US likes to do. Which is to use proxies to attack other nations. And the proxy that the US really wants is India. India has a high population and can theoretically last much longer than Ukraine.

So the US would love to put missiles in India then say that the Indians fired the missile and just walk away. It remains to be seen what India will do. After all the US is offering a lot of money to foreign politicians to destroy their country. The US will promise support.

Because China also uses the 155mm artillery.

The 155mm is the perfect size for a medium range shell with a good combination of size vs. range.

China replaced the 130mm artillery with 155mm.

It’s like rifle rounds. China uses the 5.8 and the West uses 5.56. This is a good combination of size, weight, and power. It allows the soldiers to carry a good amount of ammo without weighing them down.

The West used to use 7.62mm rounds or .308 but you get significantly less rounds and it is heavier than 5.56. You normally don’t need to shoot that far anyway. The 5.56 will kill out to 600 meters. Much longer than most soldiers can hit a man sized target.

I think it’s a huge mistake of the US to go to 6.8mm round. It has much bigger recoil than 5.56 and shoots way too far. They changed because of Iraq and Afghanistan but ironically, the US pulled out of those places and the new round would be way overkill in a jungle or forest.

And you end up back to the same problem as before. Too heavy so less rounds per soldier. Heavy recoil makes the rifle less accurate and takes longer to shoot accurately.

Shorpy

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If you are a Taiwanese, I would ask you to accept reality & not to follow the path of Ukraine. Dont get into a war & die for U S A.

If you are a foreigner, I would like you to understand Chinese history & UN charter as follows:

There was a civil war in China (called ROChina at the time). The then ruling party KMT was defeated by CPC in 1949. KMT fled to Taiwan while CPC stayed on mainland. CPC renamed ROChina to PRChina, like Qing was renamed to ROC in 1911 (5000 years’ of Chinese tradition).

In theory, the civil war has not finished as of 2024 because China has not reunified yet.

Internationally, between 1949 & 1971, both ROChina & PRChina exist. In 1971, however, UN resolution 2758 announced …

1, There is only ONE China & PRChina is the only legitimate government that represents China.

That is, ROChina ceases to exist on world stage. Only a handful tiny tiny countries still recognised ROC.

Taiwan is part of China. Ref: US doc 203 & the 1978 USA-China joint communique by former US president J Carter.

2, To make it crystal clear, on 2024/5/23, UN told the world “Taiwan is a PROVINCE of China.”

By UN charter, China has a duty to protect the integrity of Chinese territory that incl Taiwan province.

Internally, both constitution of China & Taiwan say:

China territory = mainland + Taiwan + some islands & reefs around China.

Why Taiwan dares not call for referendum? Because referendum involves mainland too.

Militarily Taiwan cannot fight China.

That is, Taiwan can NEVER be independent. Though opportunistic politicians must shout independence so as to get tons of foreign funding (corruption), before Taiwan is discarded by USA like a used condom. Remember USA discarded ROChina in 1971.

conclusion

Whether it is UN resolution or Chinese-Taiwanese constitutions, China has a duty to protect the integrity of China. Like former US president A Lincoln protecting the integrity of USA in the US civil war.

China is NOT invading or attacking Taiwan. Just to suppress Taiwan rebellion, like Lincoln suppressing the South.

China will reunify with Taiwan one way or another. It is the duty of China for the sake of Chinese nation, culture & history.

China’s 1st option is peaceful unification. If necessary, China is not afraid to use military.

When I was teaching a high school class at an international school in Mexico, I thought I was superior to my students. I had a New England education, English was my first language. I had a solid moral background. There was little (I thought) that my students could teach me.

One day, just before class, a student, by the name of Nicolas, came and asked me if he could go to the bathroom. I told him yes, but to hurry back because class would begin in five minutes. He asked, “Don’t I need a pass?”

Our principal was very strict and required every student to have a pass if he or she was out of class. I told him, “Just go! Hurry up back.”

Then I began writing the lesson on the board.

He returned about ten minutes later looking very dejected. I asked him if he was okay and he said, “Yes. No problem.”

So, I continued with the lesson. But at the end of the period as students were leaving, I noticed he still looked dejected.

“You okay, Nick? You look depressed.”

He replied, “Well, I got put on detention by the principal for being in the hall without a pass.”

“But didn’t you tell him that I advised you to go ahead without one?” I asked.

“No,” he replied.

“Well, why on earth not?” I asked exasperated.

“Because I didn’t want you to get in trouble, sir,” he replied.

I realized then that here was a student who was superior to me in sensitivity and caring. I could never have imagined doing such a thing when I was a high school student. I was humbled. The incident showed me not to underestimate the existing values of those whom I presumed to teach.

Korean values, the educational system, and runaway consumerism are designed to turn everyone neurotic, and the system largely succeeds.

Basically, Korean society is a pressure cooker, and going insane is one way to escape. Another way is suicide, which seems to be popular among Koreans working in entertainment.

The Japanese are more relaxed because their economy has been screwed since 1990, and things aren’t getting better.

The Chinese are more relaxed because their economy and country is huge, and Chinese have a very long historical memory. Basically, they have seen everything.

This means that the Chinese have perspective.

When they are unhappy or see something they don’t like, they complain to their local official, and tell him to fix it. Since the local official’s job performance is measured by how many complaints he resolves, his career depends on resolving the issue.

I like Chinese style of punishment

main qimg dde3d64cb921154fbd0809544e78498a
main qimg dde3d64cb921154fbd0809544e78498a

Gather enough evidence and offer two choices

Option 1

Pay back 2/3 of what you took plus Confess and you get 5–15 years jail and your family won't bear the consequences of your actions

Or

Option 2

Have a trial and if found guilty - It's either 15–25 years Imprisonment or death penalty and your family members bear consequences of your actions

What I like about the Chinese is how they break families for what they call knowingly enjoying illegal earnings or product of corruption

Kids under 18 are reeducated and taught their father is a thief and he must be hated

Under Mao, many kids denounced their parents and watched them hang with a smile in favor of the State


Same punishment in India

Option 1

Pay back 67% of what you allegedly take and serve 10 years Jail and retire from Politics

OR

Option 2

If found guilty you can hang Or face life prisonment plus your Kids can't graduate and have to work as Unskilled or Skilled labor and your families will be forced to migrate to places exceeding 2000 Kms from place of sentencing

Men’s Adventure

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fbabdce04abada106591ee7d6d90c166

Hazy New World

Submitted into Contest #8 in response to: Write a story about an adventure in space. view prompt

Sabrina Alvarez

The darkness was so different in space, when I opened my eyes all I could see was the blinking red light that reminded me it was time to get up. I rolled back and forth, with the sun being millions of miles away it was harder for my body to wake itself up even though this one was the day my entire life was going to change. I pushed the red button and the dark rectangle that looked like any other wall with nothing on it phased away and Saturn appeared. The button was now green, and I yet again got to wake up to see Saturn instead of the Sun. It was an image I could never grow tired of watching Saturn in its infinite glory all the secrets it kept hidden for billions of years. The clouds moved along the most breathtaking gas giant and the rings so vivid and close I feel like I could reach out the window and grasp them. The pictures do not do it justice and the sounds of the massive planet put me at peace. My team is beginning the first ever human voyage to Titan to explore and map the moon in all of its entirety. Earth is becoming more unstable and life as we know it will cease to exist if we do not find another place to live. After the Mars massacre, NASA wanted to make sure we knew exactly what was going on before we allowed humans colonize another planet, in this case moon. There was a lot weighing on my shoulders as captain of Celestial Spectre, all the plans and ideas running through my head as I went to my post in the observation deck. I pulled the shade to reveal Saturn and Titan, the orange moon forever tidal locked with Saturn, only showing one side of its face to the planet. It makes me wonder what is hidden on that dark side. There were different filters we could apply to see the different colors of the universe as well as telescope on screen, which zooms into any area to reveal what is really hiding in the darkness of the naked eye. There is 360-degree view of the surrounding darkness, my focus was Titan and the anticipation of starting our surveying was nerve racking, how can my crew sleep so long? I said to myself. The haze of the moon was swirling around, it was hypnotic everything I had worked so hard for was laying right in front of me. I wanted to unlock every secret this solar system was hiding then move on to the Milky Way. Steve tapped me on the shoulder broke that trance, “Rachel I’m surprised you didn’t leave us on the ship and go down yourself.” I laughed, “Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind!” I grabbed the equipment list for the first touchdown on the moon to make sure the probe was all ready to go. “Dawson is the probe ready for today?” Dawson was the computer system that was built into the ship for us to communicate with, his knowledge base was vast, but he was limited as we were about what we were to expect on Titan. “Yes” Dawson replied. “Haven’t you quadruple checked that list?” asked Steve. “Yes, Steve I have, I wouldn’t be a good captain if I didn’t.” He smiled, “Waiting for everyone to wake up.” I smiled slyly, “Ugh! Is that obvious!” It was his turn to laugh, “I figured that’s why I woke them up before coming up to check on you.” I couldn’t stop smiling, “You are the best!”  The twins, Marcus and Mia, were the first to emerge from the dorm corridors. “We are awake,” said Marcus. “And ready to go,” as she yawned said Mia. The mechanical genius, Nikki, was the last to emerge, “Ready to go!” she said with pep. “That’s what I liked to hear. Let’s Go!” I said. I was the last one to get on the probe.Descending through the haze of Titan’s atmosphere was so exciting as well as completely terrifying as we did not know if the probe would make it through and still be able to take us back to the ship. It was designed by Nikki to not only fly through space, but to be a land rover and a submarine for any oceans or lakes we discovered. So much was running back and forth in my head I couldn’t get a grip on any of it, I was excited I wanted to scream but I had to keep my composure as a good captain. We descended through the clouds getting samples of them along the way and having DAWSON analyze them. The clouds started to thin and that’s when I saw it. A colossal ocean that was as giant as the Atlantic and Pacific put together, there were n ranges which didn’t reach the clouds but were still steep. There were rivers that lead to the Titanic Ocean, which I just named it. Past some of the mountains were lakes that could hold so many possibilities. Humans could get another chance here. “Look” I whispered to them I couldn’t bear to look away from the window, it was like a picture I always had in my head and to see it with my own eyes it was amazing. Valleys and areas covered with some type of alien florae, it was all just waiting to be explored. The probe came to safe landing with no damage to the craft at all, once it was secure to get out, I ran for the door. I wanted to be the first one to step foot on Titan, dreams really do come true. Each of us was equipped with a special suit specifically designed for the surface of Titan, again created by Nikki. Dust storms are a possibility on this moon so each suit has an outline in a neon color that will make us visible to the other crew members, I was pink, Steve was orange, the twins were light and dark green, and Nikki was blue. Each of us looked around where we landed and again how small we felt. It would take centuries to map everything on Titan, so we started with the immediate area to see if it was habitable. Once this region was down, we would extend out until all of Titan was printed on a map, so people could find the areas they wanted to start their new lives in. The region that faced away from Saturn was my personal interest, but I know that wouldn’t be smart to start there. “Let’s begin right here and call this region Home for now until we learn more about it.” My crew agreed and we start to unpack along with setting up a small camp for us to continue research and sleep. DAWSON alerted me when I was moving equipment, “There’s movement at the lower range of the mountains, I am unable to detect what it is other than it is alive.” I quickly equipped my hydrogen rifle using the recon scope was able to see exactly what the creature looked like. A three limbed creature with a thick fur covering its entire body, it was watching us with its three set of eyes. It had large set of teeth at its abdomen area and it appeared that it was sniffing the air with its tentacle/limb. “2 o’clock Steve.” He already had his rifle powered and aiming right that the creature. “Tell me when” Steve whispered toward my direction. I stood there for what felt like hours just observing I didn’t want to make the mistake of shooting a new life form. I decided in that moment, “we need a closer look.” I started to climb the mountain slowly keeping my eye on the creature while Steve watching the surrounding, so we didn’t get ambushed by anything else. A low humming filled my ears as I was looking at the beast, I took a chance and lowered my rifle. “Stay close Steve, but do not attack.” Steve responded by stopped and setting up by a rock just in case I was wrong. I knelt on one knee and extended my hand hoping it took the gesture as friendly and not threatening. It started to move; the limbs moved across the smaller rocks like an octopus shifting along the ocean floor. The fur was a deep purple and it slithered toward me. It took all my willpower to not runaway screaming with complete fear, but that would alarm it putting my team in danger. I took a deep breath, slowly opened my eyes to see it standing right in front of me. It was about three feet tall with three eyes that were bright orange and square. It never blinked the whole time I watched it and even when it was in front of me.Suddenly, the thing started to glide away again, but this time it was headed to ocean we had seen when we landed. I started to chase after it with only having three limbs it moved rather quickly. The land began to dip down slightly and then gradually it went farther down until we reached the beach area. The ocean was like of Earth with waves and currents. A huge wave came crashing down and I swear I caught a glimpse of sea creature from my nightmares. It had fins poking out for every direction and a long narrow mouth. I turned to look back at Steve, whose face was as pale as mine. “It’s like the Jurassic period here with all of these different types of animals.” Steve replied once he saw the monster that lurked in the waves. “Is this a good idea Captain?” Mia asked. “We need somewhere to start. Keep your eyes open and guns charged.” We rounded the corner where these cliffs ahead were sharp that’s when I noticed a cave with a blue hue coming from it. “Over there!” I shouted to my team. The Titan fur stopped at the mouth of the cave and pointed its tentacle at the entrance. “Stay here at the entrance Marcus and Mia.” They both nodded with their rifles in hand. Steve, Nikki, and I started to walk through the cave looking at all the amazing purples and blues that covered the walls of the fissure. We followed the blue hue which lead toward a metal door, “this is the last thing I expected to see.” Steve replied, “yeah I was ready for certain death.” I opened the door and there was another thing I least expected to see even more so than a door on a moon that orbited Saturn. There were hand drawings and notes everywhere on the walls. There was a partial map hanging on another wall with BEWARE OF THE DARK CREATURES and drawings of regions we hadn’t seen yet. Nearby were journals that were filled with descriptions of creature and tree-like foliage. One tree was completely twisted from the root and when grown would drop this blue oval that would explode once it hit the ground. The author of these diaries Mr. Seymour Dates described its reaction because of the methane in the ground would mix with what the fruit was made of which he still was unable to figure out. Under some other papers was a fold out map of an area that was dark that he referred to as Nix Valley, the area was so dark with no light and a drawing of a creature that was 25-30 feet tall. A description of the creature he encountered there:

“The biggest creature I have encountered since I started exploring

Titan, I haven’t had the nerve to explore the ocean yet,

The largest land animal if you can call it that. His skin was

White like death with eyes that were cloudy as well

It does use its eyes to see but it uses all of it senses to get

Around. It has bones protruding from his head and along

Its back. Its arms dragged across the floor while still haven’t

Gotten close enough to see any sort of lower extremities.

It mimics gentle sounds and ones in pain to lure in other animals

That walk around on the surface. Nix valley is located underneath the mountain range

And some flatlands. It never comes up to the surface only can

Be seen when finding its hidden caves along the mountains

Where I first landed.

Accompanying to the short description was a sketch of what the monster looked like and it was like a giant snake and dinosaur mixed together and was kept from the sun. “We need to find this monster; our job is so important. If this is here, we can’t bring humans to live here.” I said to Steve and Nikki. Nikki was as pale as a ghost and Steve just stood there unable to say anything. I noticed the door slowly opening and I aimed my rifle right at the opening. The Titan fur was standing there, and I immediately grew concerned for the twins, “I’m going to distract it, you both go for the twins. Make sure they are safe.” I ordered. Then the furry creature took its head off and a man was there inside a giant costume. “Thank you for not shooting me, it took me a while to build this costume.” Said Seymour Dates. “We need to talk.” I responded with, “Where are the twins?” We all raced to the entrance of the cave.

These Men Won’t SETTLE For Bare Minimum Women

Grilled Jalapeño Cheddar Meatballs

Serve delicious Grilled Jalapeño Cheddar Meatballs with Mexican rice, beans, or a side salad.

grilled jalapeno cheddar meatballs
grilled jalapeno cheddar meatballs

Prep: 20 min | Chill: 30 min | Cook: 35 min | Yield: 20 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds ground beef
  • 1/2 cup tortilla chips, crushed
  • 3/4 cup milk
  • 3 fresh jalapeños, seeded and finely diced
  • 1 (8 ounce) block Cheddar cheese, finely diced
  • 1 tablespoon paprika
  • 2 teaspoons garlic powder
  • 2 teaspoons kosher salt

Instructions

  1. Place the crushed tortilla chips in a large bowl, then add the milk and allow to soften the chips for about 10 minutes.
  2. After the mixture is soft and has absorbed all the milk, add the beef, jalapeño, cheese, paprika, garlic, and salt. Mix well to combine all ingredients, then scoop approximately 1/3 to 1/2 cup of the mixture and form a meatball; repeat until all the mixture has been formed into balls.
  3. Place the meatballs on a plate or tray and refrigerate them for 30 minutes to firm.
  4. Light a grill for two zone cooking. For charcoal: light coals and pile them all on one side, creating a hot and cool zone. For propane: light the very end burner on the left or right side, but no other burners. It’s recommended you place a piece of foil under the side without heat to catch any melting cheese for easy cleanup. The grill should be at MEDIUM temperature, about 350 to 375 degrees F.
  5. Place the meatballs on the cool side of the grill (away from the coals or the lit burner) and close the grill lid. Grill for about 25 to 35 minutes, or until they reach 165 degrees F internal temperature on a meat thermometer.
  6. Remove the meatballs from the grill and allow to cool slightly before serving.

Keep moving forward.

It’s a long story

It began in 1985

A Delegation of Chinese Businessmen came to Bombay to various Indian Banks for a Letter of Credit.

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main qimg 85f0dc7843a6571b3d6ce280ea7117f3

They wanted a LoC of £ 15 Million Or so to import steel from Hull in UK

They wanted an SBI LoC because their banks were not recognized in UK and the UK Bank (Midlands Bank) refused to do Business with the Chinese

DBS refused because the Steel was not insured

The Chinese delegation waited for 4 Days patiently and for three days the Bank GM couldn’t meet them. They waited outside his cabin and were mocked at by the staff

All of us worked close by – SBI, BoB, CBI and other banks so this was popular news

Every day at lunch the four Chinese would sit and have Indian food and give awkward smiles

On the fourth day the GM came, gave them 30–40 minutes and demanded a ton of documents

At the same time the Japanese had come for some credit line related to NTPC to supply equipment and they were met by the Chairman and executives and given VVIP treatment

The Chinese patiently signed their documents, did their business, paid the extra interest and went back home

I was a witness to this and any banker who worked in Bombay would be witness to this


In 2014 – 29 years later, a Chinese Delegation came for some business

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main qimg 6bc5bfef8a3d3a5a59b929e71c515abc

Banks scrambled over themselves for the Chinese Business

They deposited $ 2 Billion in one hour with a flick of their finger

The Executives grovelled and kowtowed and bowed and scraped like Coolies before the Chinese

Plus at this time SBI needed LoC from Foreign Banks to import from UK or US while every Bank in the world saluted at the Chinese LoC and advanced Twenty Billion Dollars without a second word

So SBI Kowtowed to Bank of America or Credit Suisse or used Bangee to get it’s LoCs accepted for upto $ 300 Million

The Chinese Banks didn’t need anything. They could get $ 20 Billion on their own LoC

I was a witness to this also

I wasn’t a Banker anymore but a Legal /Credit Consultant and saw the 2 Billion Dollar deposit as a friend showed me the entry


In 29 years i saw the Chinese grow from people who didn’t merit even a MD of a PSB to a group of people who could deposit 2 Billion Dollars in a single hour

I saw the same UK Banks who once refused to give the Chinese a mere 15 Million Pounds unless they had double backed LoCs , now begging for their business and lending them 20 Billion on their Paper without 15 seconds hesitation

I saw the Chinese go from a Nation which once stood in line at Tata Steel gaping with awe and admiration at our machines and process, now a Nation that makes steel superior to any other Nation on the planet

I saw the Chinese who once watched our Maruti 800 with awe and admiration now make EVs that are beating the pants of the Western models every single day

In 40 stinking years!!!!!!

Meanwhile

I see India once proudly emerging now groveling for Business from Western Companies even with all political favors

I see India unable to produce a pencil that has a demand in a Global market outside Nigeria and Bangladesh

I see India entirely dependent on Western Hardware and Software and merely clicking the key board like two bit PROGRAMMING COOLIES unable to invent anything with a Global Appeal

I see India with once with an Industrial Productivity which was fourth highest in Asia in 1981 after Japan, South Korea and Singapore now rank 11th behind Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia and even Goddamn Thailand!!!!!

And all my anger began with Mitra

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main qimg e09a16e8d7041a6eadf4a01c350e83af

Those who have been on Quora for longer than 4 years can attest to this

I never wrote anything except the law and rarely politics and never on China until I saw posts of Mitra as a cutting edge robot

I felt a surge of rage and all my pent up emotions surged out and that’s it. It can’t stop to this day.

I saw my fellow countrymen defend Mitra as a cutting edge piece of Robotics and it’s founder rather than acknowledge that it was premature to introduce this Robot to the Global World , actually mock me as a desk jockey government servant and claim that he would respond only to the criticism of Google Top Execs or Big Shots

I left the topic at this point, unwilling to start a war on Quora

From that day I have written against Indian ‘Achievements’ because I AM ANGRY

I am not a Chinese Citizen

I am an Indian Citizen and I want my sons to be here in this country with me, growing, prospering, working hard for its development like so many Chinese sons

To watch with pride as India grows and dominates

But No!!!!

I see LIES, LIES and more LIES every day

I see my fellow countrymen rather than find ways to identify problems, call me China Agent and Paid Propagandist

It shows me the inferiority of many of my countrymen and I GET ANGRY

So you think it’s because I admire the Chinese that I write all this?

No

I admire the Chinese but I write because I AM ANGRY AT INDIA, AT INDIAN POLITICIANS, AT THE INDIAN SYSTEM AND WITH MOST OF MY FELLOW INDIANS AND MYSELF

Where did we go wrong?

That keeps me angry all the time

What can we do about it? How can we correct ourselves?

Nobody asks this question and that makes me angry all the more


So if you don’t like it – Apologies

I will keep on and on

Somewhere some people should wake up and see and question people Like Byju Raveendran, Ola Bhavish , Ambani, Adani, Mahindra on what their indigenous technology is and what they have actually achieved

Question people like Modi, Shah, Nirmala, Rahul Gandhi, Kejriwal on the same questions

And those who agree with me, they aren’t my bhakts. They are just logical minds who can see where the Nation is heading.


For God’s sakes remember I am not your enemy

I am a Patriotic Indian helplessly watching his Nation slide into regression and worthlessness with every passing day

Those who are closing their eyes to this and talking of 3rd Largest Economy and Viksit Bharat and How great Ambani is – THEY ARE THE PROBLEM NOT ME

Women Have Cost Businesses MILLIONS Because of METOO

When my father was 92 he pretty much gave up on living. He didn’t have any terminal condition other than the one we all have. We had made attempts at various safe living situations during which he refused to move from his independent living apartment to assisted living in the same facility, kicked my sister and then me out for “being in his business”, fired anyone we hired to help with activities of daily living, and lots of other maddening behaviors (actually, par for the course for him but worse). The thing is, his mind was pretty much fine- it was his body that was failing him. When he realized he couldn’t and wouldn’t have life on his own terms, he just gave up. After a couple falls, passing out from low blood sugar several times (including at a wedding) because he refused to lower his insulin dose appropriate to the much smaller amount he was eating, and several admissions for urinary retention, bleeding from his bladder and UTIs, all due to prior prostate radiation, he said he just wanted to be left in peace to die. We (including him) decided to admit him to a really excellent hospice, the same one where my mother had died 8 years earlier. He asked to sign a DNR and did, asked that he receive anti-anxiety and pain meds for his spinal stenosis, and said he only wanted ice cream to eat. We all had an agreed-upon plan of care. He was sleeping peacefully when we left. Then, at 10 pm that first night while I was showering, I got a voicemail from his personal cellphone. On it, he sounded frightened, said he didn’t know where he was, and that the nurses were poisoning him. I called the nurses’ station. His nurse immediately went to his room then called me back to say he was sound asleep again. She even held the phone to his mouth and I could hear him snoring. He grumbled loudly when she tried to wake him to talk to me. She said he probably wasn’t used to the meds and they would give less and stagger them from then on. I wound up not going there that night after checking on him again with his nurse about 2 hours later. At 5 am I got a call that he had died in his sleep. So his voicemail wound up being the last words I heard from him.

Kansas City Beef Brisket

chef marks kc smoked brisket large
chef marks kc smoked brisket large

Ingredients

  • 1 (5 pound) beef brisket
  • 1 tablespoon tenderizer (optional)
  • 2 to 4 tablespoons Liquid Smoke
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 teaspoon celery salt
  • 1 teaspoon onion salt
  • 1 teaspoon garlic salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 1 teaspoon paprika
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • Worcestershire sauce, to taste

Instructions

  1. The night before cooking, sprinkle brisket with tenderizer, Liquid Smoke, salt, pepper, celery salt, onion salt and garlic salt.
  2. Wrap in aluminum foil and refrigerate overnight.
  3. The next day add nutmeg, paprika, brown sugar and Worcestershire. Wrap well with aluminum foil — this is important. Cook 5 hours at 275 degrees F.
  4. Slice thin on the diagonal.
  5. Serve with homemade barbecue sauce and buns.

I posted this as a long comment here but thought that it is significant to deserve its own posting on China’s Future:

Let me explain: From the US official POV, China is an existential threat like never before, because not only can China do and make everything the US does and makes, China will lead in all the fields which the US has no hope of catching up in: EVs, tech and network equipment, aircraft manufacturing, and defense equipment. Even in agriculture, the US will not be able to sell food commodities to China because China will import from Russia and Brazil instead of from the US.

If the US is no longer the tech leader, the US stock and bond markets will lose 50% of their value. Since the US and European ruling classes derive a significant portion of their value from the New York, London markets, they will get poorer. And they will not be able to invest in growth markets because those markets won’t want to take western currencies, especially the US dollar.

If the US stock and bond markets take such a hit, this means that the US standard of living will also take a hit. First, most Americans are heavily in debt; many of them rely on credit card debt just to cover their monthly expenses, and they have no savings. These people will not be happy, and they will not go away peacefully because a lot of them have guns. They won’t understand how it got to this, and they don’t particularly care in understanding, but they will be very angry.

Under the US political system, it is very hard to mobilize the public against an enemy because most Americans have very little understanding of foreign affairs. For this reason, it is very important to create a foreign bogeyman such as China which they can lay all the blame on.

That is what is happening now. When the US’s existence is threatened, academic scholars are at the frontline in shaping public opinion.

The problem now is that both sides are hardening their positions. Biden doesn’t have the mental capacity to defuse the situation. This means that his key advisors are making policy without his input. They all believe that China is the existential threat. They hoped that the Ukraine war would weaken Russia enough so that they could then deal with China, but that did not go according to plan. But China is getting stronger and its relationship with Russia is growing, so the US is running out of time.

South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines were going to be the useful idiots who would directly confront China, but that is not going according to plan because they know that they are in China’s frontyard, and China is becoming increasingly powerful. They also understand that they may be left high and dry by the US, in which case they become dead meat in China’s front yard.

The US policymakers also understand that the US military is in a weak position to confront China because of the long logistics lines from the US mainland to the western Pacific. A lot of tactical inventory for a conventional war has been shipped to Ukraine and Israel for their wars, and it will take 2–5 years for American factories to step up production to replenish those inventories.

But the US doesn’t have 2–5 years; by that time China will be exporting its chips and selling EVs and solar panels all over the world, and will complete its overland connections to Europe through Russia and the Trans-Caspian routes. Europe will have de-industrialized because it has lost access to cheap Russian energy making their factories uncompetitive, and Chinese brands and equipment will replace European brands and products at 50% of the original European price.

The NATO/EU/G7 alliance will grow weaker by the year. Will the US withdraw to the North American continent, or will it make Custer’s last stand in a nuclear confrontation with China?

Right now, the US is led by candidates who were born in the 1940s and grew up during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Both strongly believe that the US triumphed against the USSR; they believe that this was America’s winning formula, and that today’s China is a smarter and much more adaptable version of the USSR, and that it can be cut down to size using the same tactics and sanctions against the USSR. They cannot adapt because this is the world they grew up in.

They have no vision for the next generation of Americans because they are old, and frankly will not live much longer. I feel sorry for younger Americans because they are stuck in a bus with a crazy driver who is heading for the cliff, and there is nothing they can do.

They deserve better leadership so that they can build their future, but right now, it looks like they have no future.

The American Revolution: Take 2

A few months ago, I received a friend request from a girl. She was from my college and also my best friend’s ex, so I accepted it. I remember, they were in a relationship for eight months after which she friend-zoned him as she did with her previous partners. My friend went into depression after that.

Well, within a few days she became comfortable chatting with me and started sending flirtatious texts. I felt awkward in the starting but after few days I reciprocated keeping in mind not to let her sabotage my stringency.

Now after a few months seeing that she is highly into me, I thought maybe it’s the right time to give that girl a taste of her own medicine. I started using terms like “buddy” and started avoiding her texts. She became quite angry (and her desperation increased) and after a few weeks, she confessed that she has fallen for me.

Me- ”But that cannot happen. You are a good friend as well as a good human too, and I don’t want to lose our friendship.”

She- (furiously) ”Why did you do that to me.”

Me- ”Did what”??

She-“Talked to me in a special way.”

Me-“Well, I didn’t do that. You started sending me flirtatious texts, I just reciprocated. I never told you I feel for you.”

She- ”Please say that you are joking. I don’t believe you are doing this to me”

Me- “No, I am not joking. Besides, you did the same thing with my friend with whom you were committed. We are not even committed. I never promised you anything. It was just a healthy flirting that lasted for a few days”

She- “You are such an a*sho*e!”

She blocked me after that.

P.S.- I know I did the wrong thing but I felt that she needed to know what it is like to be on the other side.

42 Vietnamese foods you have to eat in Vietnam

This gets me so horny! LOL. Just joking, but really… I love these adventure food videos.

Here a mind-blowing fact about Japan: when I was in Japan on a business trip I had a few hours to myself, so I decided to go sight-seeing. I got my expensive SLR, hailed a cab, and took a trip around Tokyo seeking Godzilla. A couple of hours later I returned to the hotel and took a shower. After the shower I realized I had left the camera in the cab. It’s gone forever, I thought. But I went to the concierge and told him my story.

“What was the name of the cab company?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“What color was the cab?”

“I can’t recall,” I admitted, feeling like a fool. He was looking more dubious.

“Do you recall what kind of car it was?” he asked.

“Not a bit,” I said stupidly.

He was looking at me as if I were another stupid American. “We will see what we can do,” he said, “but I have grave doubts about recovering your camera.”

And yet two hours later I got a call: they had my camera. Astonished, I went to the front desk and they handed it to me. I tried to hand a wad of cash to the cab driver who had returned it. He refused to take the money. I tried to give a wad of cash to the Concierge, but he only took the wad, took a few bills, handed the rest back and told me, “these are for the operator who called every cab company in the city. Your camera was in the lost and found.”

I marvelled at the chances of recovering that same camera in New York City from a cab in two hours. I felt the chances would be infinitesimally small.

Kill Bill – 1950’s super panavision 70

The Philippines cannot replicate the warship beaching at Second Thomas Shoal.

If the Philippines repeats the incident of the warship running aground at Second Thomas Shoal at Sabina Shoal, it will directly violate Article 5 of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, which states that all countries in the South China Sea have the obligation to ensure that “uninhabited islands and reefs are free of people and facilities.”

If the Philippine warship ran aground in Sabina Shoal and crossed the “red line”, then China can take any measures to stop it.


The contest between China and the Philippines over Sabina Shoal is essentially a war of public opinion.

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main qimg 3b2e661047ff6cfebb0ac9256a3a33b2

The Philippines spread rumors that China would reclaim land and build islands in Sabina Shoal, so it sent 4 coast guard ships into Sabina Shoal, but the Philippines did not dare to cross the red line.

What China needs to do is to seize the opportunity of the Philippines to “provoke China” as much as possible, and then launch a fierce counterattack to finally achieve complete control of Sabina Shoal.

He Man – The Masters of the Universe – 1950’s Super Panavision 70

in 1974 I had this pimple on my right forearm that wouldn’t come to a head, nor would it go away. And it was tender. So after a couple of months I took it to my doctor who sent me to a dermatologist. It was an amelanotic melanoma, a melanoma with no pigment. Further examination found that it had metastacized and there was some in my lungs. IN 74, that was a death sentence. They gave me 6 months, max.

But I was 25 and otherwise healthy, so they did the hail mary pass, cut out the lobe of my lung with the most mets, and put me on a brutal chemotherapy regimen of a monthly injection of 2 grams of something they called DTIC. It’s so toxic that they usually spaced it out over five days a month. But as I said, I was young and healthy and they thought I could take it. So they gave me a five day course in one dose, every month for a year.

And once a month for a year, I’d fly back off the road to San Francisco, get poisoned, and then run for home to try and make it before the nausea began. I never did, but the nurses would give me a just-in-case garbage bag for when it hit. Then it was eight hours of agony, cramping and running at both ends. The pot pipe made it possible for me to keep breakfast down the next day as I tried to pull myself together in the face of the worst hangover on earth. And the next day, I’d be back on a plane, and back on tour. This went on for a year, but it was worth it. I beat terminal cancer, and the years since then have been the best years of my life

Shorpy

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A few years ago I had a guy in one of my college history classes. Over a few months I would catch him looking at me all the time until finally one day he asked me on a date. I told him I’d love to and we agreed to go to an Italian restaurant. I get there and go inside and he’s nowhere in sight. Our date was for 6. He didn’t show up until 6:45/7…I’m a very, very punctual person so this really got under my skin, but he apologized profusely and told me he had gotten out of baseball practice late and came as soon as he could. So, I just let it go and we started talking. He really bragged and stressed to me how he was in the minor leagues and was about to go pro. He was 28 at that time and I’m not too familiar with baseball, but I thought that was a little late in life to be going pro and he didn’t look like he had played a sport in years, but whatever I just listened. And after so long we started talking about what we wanted for our futures, kids, jobs, etc. He told me he wants to get married and play baseball, nothing else. I said no kids? And he said no, this planet is full of rapists and murderers and he refuses to add another rapist or murderer to the world. I just sat there and looked blankly. I said well I think the odds of you having a rapist and/or murderer as a child is pretty slim (trying to lighten the mood), and he cuts me off and asks if I’m retarded and if I hear what I’m saying. And this man went on a full 40 minute rant about the Roman Empire, mass murderers, Islam, rapists, and crazy conspiracy theories. He would go back and forth between this cool laid back guy to this crazy the-earth-is-going-to-burn extremist. So I excused myself to “go to the bathroom”, found the waitress and personally left her a tip, and then ran to my car and left.

When I saw him in class that next week he avoided me. Like, completely picked up his desk and moved it across the room like a child avoiding. Every time I’d answer a question he ALWAYS had a rebuttal, even if the answer is a clear cut answer, or he would elaborate on what I said because “I didn’t explain it right”. After so long he dropped the course and I never saw him again.

It’s called the Dance Girl Phenomenon

In Hong Kong – many Dance bars provided the cheapest girls for sex and many Sailors from US or UK or France paid a pittance for these girls

Yet these girls were not the main income for the Dance Bars

It was the Drinks!!!!!

Drinks were marked up as much as 450%

An Inferior Scotch that perhaps cost 8 Hong Kong Dollars for a Liter was sold at 3 HKD for an 80 ml glass

That’s 36 Hong Kong Dollars per Liter

The Girls ensured that the customers were focused on the Girls and drank low quality drinks by paying 450% marked up prices

The girls were the BAIT

They were there to attract the men to drink in those bars


In the same way – in a Movie Theatre, a Multiplex – the Real Profit comes from your FOOD & BEVERAGES

The Movie is the BAIT

A multiplex chain pays maybe ₹18.50 Crore for a movies All India rights

At ₹ 63.50/- a ticket to ₹127/- a ticket margin after paying Taxes and Distributor shares – would they really be taking huge profits?

At ₹127/- a ticket – they would need to sell 15 Lakh Tickets just to break even

Now the Food

9 grams of Corn Caramel Slurry produces 41 grams of Caramel Pop Corn

1 Kilo of Slurry costs ₹ 390/-

That gives you around 4.25 Kilos of Carmel Pop Corn Or 33 medium serves approximately

At ₹85/- per serve thats ₹ 2,805/-

You do the math

₹390 worth of slurry gives you ₹2,805/- worth of Caramel Pop Corn and even if you sell only 50% , that’s still almost 360% Profit!!!!!

Your Coke costs the Food outlet on a Weight Basis

It’s a Soda Fountain that mixes CO2 with Patented Coke Slurry /Syrup, Water at the appropriate pressure and gives you your Coke

It costs ₹8000/- for 500 Litres of Coca Cola or 675 Large Serves of Coke

That’s ₹11.85/- per Large serving (742 ml) of Coke

How much do you pay?

Around 120 bucks in a Multiplex!!!

44% goes to Coca Cola, the Machine license costs etc

That’s still ₹67/- for a Large Coke that the Theatre Chain pockets

Thus around 500% mark up

Now you know why they give you all those free refills of Coke in a 180 ml container? It costs them a paltry ₹3/- every time you refill while you pay ₹200–300 for food

Once inside the Theatre, you can’t help but eat food during the interval

You will go to the restrooms and on the way back see the crowd at the food outlet

The Food makes up and ensures Multiplex Chains can break even and make a profit even by paying a high cost

Its why they sell Corporate Bookings

500 Tickets for the first 5 shows – 50% tickets for each screen and show for FREE to advertisers as a compliment

The Producers pay for this and the Multiplex earns heavily on the food sold

Producers declare how full the theatres are and everyone wins


Single Chains can’t survive on such economies of scale

Soda fountains would not be profitable to them as their volumes aren’t that high

So their main source of profit is the TICKET and the Food is a supplementary item

So Popcorn is ₹ 30/- instead of ₹85/- and Coke sells by 200 ml bottle with the Food outlet merely getting the retailer margin of ₹ 4.60/- per bottle when he sells for ₹25/- to the customer

However they pay only ₹7–8 Lakh for a movie rights and their margin per ticket is much higher

So they survive on ticket sales and make profits on tickets

Plus their LAND on which they have been built is valuable every day against the rent of Multiplexes

Thus Most single screens borrow heavily and are mortgaged until the day they sell to a developer who demolishes the theatre and builds a Hotel Or Mall Or Complex

Western Couple Expose The SHOCKING TRUTH About CHINA After Their First Visit

Absolutely! Many years ago, one of my brothers was accidentally killed. He was single and enjoying life, had a girlfriend. For years, my Mom lamented that she wished he would have had at least one child before he died so she would still have a part of him here.

Fast forward to a few years ago. We all did an Ancestry DNA test to see if we could find any relatives from my maternal grandmother’s side. She was a refugee from Germany, came to the US with an American family for safety during Hitler’s reign of terror. She never reconnected with any of her family again. A cousin and I had gone to Germany to research – the village that she grew up in had been completely annihilated during the war.

We met with the Red Cross there, and many other officials. Nothing could be found as to what had happened to them. We know they existed, she had brought many pictures of her with her family from the time she was a baby, up to her teen years, holiday gatherings, birthdays, etc. So we were hoping to find someone, anyone that remained of her family.

A few months went by and my Mom got a notification that a close match had been found, a child or grandchild, and I got one that said niece or cousin. We were certain this was a mistake because we could account for every single person in our family.

To make a long story shorter, my brother’s girlfriend moved back to the east coast after he died. None of us thought nothing of it. She was grieving and wanted to be close to her Mom. But apparently, after a couple of months, she found that she was pregnant. (This was the very early 1980’s, OTC pregnancy tests were not a thing at that time.)

By the time pregnancy was confirmed at three months (she apparently thought missed cycles were due to stress), she had lost all contact with our family on the west coast. This was also before cell phones. Also, she has been seeing another guy while she and my brother were dating. Anyway, we were able to get in touch with this mystery relative via Ancestry. When we met in person, I almost fainted – she was a female replica of my long dead brother, and she had two kids of her own, with the youngest looking like my brother’s twin. My Mom got her wish after all, a child of the child she lost. But we never did find any of my Grandma’s family.

Kill Bill – Gogo Scenes

My then boyfriend proposed to me after we lived together a couple months. We discussed where we would live, how we would balance work and the household, the financial arrangements, the time schedule, if we wanted kids, how many kids, the way to raise and educate our kids, how we would balance his/my parents, his/my wants and no’s in the marriage… literally everything. Then we said yes to each other.

I asked for my mom’s opinion.

She looked at me in the eyes and said:

‘Are you sure you can raise your kids ALL by yourself, without ANY help?’

I explained that my future husband and I would share all the responsibilities, and we had already discussed every detail we could think of.

‘No.’ She said, ‘I’m asking YOU.’

‘Are you sure YOU can raise your kids ALL by yourself, without ANY help?’

It took me two months to think it over.

I checked my bank balance and assets. I made a budget about how much it would cost to raise a child, and predicted my future cash flow based on my current income and market value. I adjusted for my health insurance and life insurance. I checked the law about maternity leave. I consulted my friends who were single working mothers about what they struggled against and how they solved (or didn’t solve) problems. I thought over the resources I had and the difficulties I would face. I found out that I could not withdraw all the risks. And without help, it would be such a tough mission to raise a child. I also found out if I tried really hard, I mean, really really hard, it would NOT be a ‘mission impossible’ either. As long as I didn’t die too early, or lose all my skills by some accident, or… I mean, if my luck was better than the worst, and with my best effort, I would be able to make it.

I answered to my mom yes.

She said, ‘Now you are ready to get married.’

13 years passed by. I’m still in marriage with this man. My daughter is 11 yo.
Like all married couples, my husband and I have experienced fights, crises as well as boredoms. We learned to negotiate and compromise. We tried hard to find some balance. When passion faded with the time, we learned to find satisfactions and happiness from a stable day by day life.

I didn’t have to raise my daughter all by myself. My husband shared half of the mission. My parents and his parents helped a lot. Still being aware that ‘I would be able to do it all by myself’, I always feel being in marriage with this man is of my free will. And it also makes me able to fully respect and accept the fact that he is free to stay or leave this marriage too.

Despite the fights, crisis and boredoms, we still chose to keep our marriage. We don’t have to, but we choose to. We never feel the pressure or desperation to imprison each other or ourselves in the marriage. That’s one of the reasons marriage still feels good after 13 years, I guess.

And having seriously considered how to take full responsibility to raise our child, I feel so grateful that he lends me his shoulders and hands, holds up ‘half the sky’ of our family. I never take his efforts and contributions for granted.

People say marriage is based on trust. My mom says don’t rely on trust. She teaches me not only to hope for the best, but to prepare for the worst.

Feelings change. Humans change. Rather than asking ‘Is he/she trustworthy?’, my mom taught me that nobody owes me trust. And once make a decision, take full responsibility.

7 HOURS AGO: China Finds Something Strange on the Moon and Astonishes Scientists!

3 years ago, my neighbor died in bike accident. His son was of 2 years at the time, so I assume his wife to be in her mid or late 20’s.

In South India, we have a custom of visiting each other’s home in festivals to greet and give kumkum. After a year of the guy’s death his mom (mother in law of the widow) came to my home for one such occasion and my conversation with her went like this.

Me: Aunty, how is akka? (Sister in Kannada)

Aunty: She is getting better putta. (Putta – Kannada word to address younger people with love)

Me: Aunty, I know that this is normally not allowed, but we don’t mind her coming along with you during festivals to greet and take kumkum.

(Normaly widows are not allowed to take kumkum after marriage according to the followed tradition)

Aunty who was very happy to hear this went on to explain,

Aunty: I only wish society was more welcoming like your family, putta. At home, I am trying as much as possible not to make her feel like widow. I insist her to light the deepak in the morning and night in house and do Pooja, I include her in every ritual, we are doing everything we can. In fact we are even insisting her for a second marriage, she is young, we cannot replace what she lost from our care. If my daughter lost her husband at such young age, I would be thinking about a better life for her again, right? She is a nice person, she is still traumatized because of what happened. We are trying to do everything we can, but we cannot expect the same acceptance from everyone, so she is still not confident to come out and gather in social gatherings. Your invitation made me happy, once she makes up her mind to visit people, I will bring her to your home. She might take little more time to gain that confidence.

What I understood by this situation is people are changing, at least many are changing, but there is still a long way to go.

My request is, when you come across such people (widows) all you have to do is talk to them normally as you always would, that itself is a big thing for them.

It’s their life, let them live it again, they shouldn’t lose their identity just because they lost their husband.

Humid Night Routine of Living Alone in Japan

People all over the world are living their lives. This is a glimpse into the life of a chick in Japan. I think that food is sexy, but being lonely is awful.

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That a job must get done no matter what. That means if it is hotter than hades outside, or if it is cold, or if it is raining, or if there is a sandstorm, you must still go to work.

A rather humorous example is from my life as an airman, while deployed to Camp Sather, Baghdad Airport. The airport had a mix of Iraqi civilian air traffic controllers and U.S. Air Force air traffic controllers. Although our air traffic controllers were armed with an M9 pistol while on duty, these guys weren’t really trained for shootouts and how to conduct security. They were, understandably, worried about their Iraqi counterparts and if one of them should smuggle in a weapon or worse into the air traffic control tower. Consequently, an airman was assigned as security for our personnel inside the tower, 24/7, in the event of an attempted insider attack.

In reality, this air conditioned posting was posh and we loved being there. There was a desk with a computer and internet connection, movies that could be watched on the computer, and even a DSN line to call back to the United States as much as you wanted. Even the Iraqi controllers were quite pleasant to be around and they all spoke at least some English, per their job assignment.

Also, since the posting was outside of the camp’s defense perimeter, you would have food from the cafeteria delivered to you. No waiting in line!

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main qimg 26ed06cb43ff1428ef1a10e6dd10bf43

(Baghdad Tower, photo by author.)

The only downside:

The elevator in the control tower often broke. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to go to work. That meant climbing up 14 floors with your vest, helmet, NVG’s, rifle, pistol, and spare ammunition. What a bitch! Nothing could make you go from loving how lucky you were to draw this assignment, to hating it in mere seconds. When you made it to the top, the person you would be relieving would always have a bottle of cold water waiting on you. By that time you were huffing, puffing and drenched in sweat. Tough life in the Air Force.

Nebula in the Deep

Submitted into Contest #8 in response to: Write a story about an adventure in space. … view prompt
John Popovich

Her muscles seemed to tense with every chime of the warning alerts; proximity, fire, and power failure alarms each ringing in their own distinct tone and pattern. As the captain called out for a report on every station the voices went from stern and confident, to shouting and chaotic.

Venturing into the cerulean and fuchsia mixed cloud, the crew of the ISS Condor had no idea what to expect. The observation windows were useless as the clouds covered the ship like thick cream. The current of plasma that comprised the beautiful anomaly clung to every nook and cranny of the ship’s fuselage, wreaking havoc for the ship’s systems analyst.

Lieutenant Dawson exhaled sharply, shaking her hand at the station monitor. “I’m getting readings all over the ship, everything from hull breaches, power surges, and a fire on C-deck. I’m shutting down automated countermeasures… try to keep her from fixing problems that aren’t there.”

“Do something about those alarms while you’re at it. Do we have anything on perimeter sensors, short range? Long range? Anything from our remote probe?”

The chief turned in his chair facing the captian, his forehead wrinkled, and cracking in his voice. “Nothing consistent. I am getting intermittent contact from the probe. Strange readings, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

The lighting on the control deck flickered as power surges were felt throughout the ship. Alarms blaring, lights flashing and now the ship was rumbling. Dawson gripped the arms of her chair, her knuckles turning white as her fingertips went numb. The pounding of her pulse in her neck caught her off guard, escalating with every breathe. Nothing made sense, she heard his order to shut off the alarms, but it didn’t register. As if he was speaking a different language.

Glancing from her station monitor to the captain, she saw his jaw tense, eyes squinting, focusing on the forward observation windows. If there was any fear in him at all, he didn’t show it. They were flying blind, but he kept them steadily on course. She had to trust him.

Rattling with increasing intensity, the ship groaned in pain as the bulkheads shed their safety panels. Like the nebula didn’t want them there and fought with constant resistance. What secret was it trying to keep?

Suddenly the ship stopped shaking, the colorful sludge sliding off the forward windows. The captian stood from his command chair, balancing himself on the overhead monitors as he leaned forward to look at the seemingly empty eye of the nebula.

“Lieutenant, I want a damage report as soon as you can. See if you can purge all of our external ports, get this crap off of my ship… And please shut off the alerts!”

Staring at her screen, trying to catch her breath, she unwrapped her hands from the arms of her seat. Flexing her fingers, she disabled the system alerts. As a loud hissing filled the command bridge from the purge, the systems came back online, one by one. Turning in her chair to report the ship’s clean bill of health, she paused, interrupted by deafening silence. Seeing her wide-eyed crew mates looking out of the observation windows, she stood moving from her station toward the center of the bridge trying to catch a glimpse of what had captivated the crew.

The inner wall of the nebula was at a distance, but there was something more. Maneuvering around the captain’s command station more objects came into view, strange t-shaped bodies, made of metal… had to be. Another long cylindrical object that seemed to be rounded on one end with what looked a short thick tower protruding from the side. There were other jagged fragments, and what looked like a mist of dark and light particles. Everything was motionless, floating in the peaceful center of a chaotic cage.

“There’s the probe!” The chief pointed at the window before scurrying to his station.

The captain’s head whipped around. “Can you make contact?”

“Yes, but I’m getting a lot of strange readings Sir. The objects don’t match any vessels on record. The nebula consists of some sort of plasma, it’s chemical make-up is like nothing I’ve seen.” The chief’s voice was high, and he stuttered as he read the data as quickly as he could. “There are trace amounts um, of-of ice, wait, yes crystalized H2O, and, and… this can’t be right.”

“What is it?”

“Carbon, lignin, hemicelluloses… this… Captain it’s particles of wood!”

“That’s impossible!”

“It doesn’t make sense but that’s what it says… Sir there’s something else. There seems to be radiation emanating from one of the objects.”

“Dangerous?”

“No sir, but curious. This isn’t adding up.”

“Chief, keep searching the database, figure out what these things are. Helmsman, bring the ship about, I want you to pull us parallel to the source of that radiation. Dawson, meet me in airlock three and suit up.”

She looked at the captain nodding, acknowledging the order. Her head spinning with the various scenarios that a space walk could present. She’d done this a dozen times before, always making it back in one piece. She couldn’t help but think that one of them wasn’t going to be as lucky this time.

Lieutenant Dawson and the captain checked each other’s suits, making sure that every seal was fastened, oxygen connected, and equipment secured. The captain turned to place the helmet on her suit, she gently grabbed a hold of his gloved hands.

Closing her eyes, taking a deep breath, she exhaled with a light tilting of her head, signaling the captain she was ready. The helmet came down, twisted and clicked, activating the release of oxygen to the suit. The rush of air, and distinct smell of disinfected fabric and plastic switched on her focus. The long hours of training took over. Assisting the captain with his helmet, they approached the outer airlock door.

Looking through the porthole, the long cylindrical object slowly moved closer to the ship. There was something recognizable on the short tower of the object, it looked like an airlock, but strange. No window, docking clamps, nothing. There seemed to be a ring suspended from what looked like a hatch by three thick metal spokes. Her focus broke as the chime from the pressure indicator buzzed and the light flashed from red to green. It was time.

The captain pressed the release panel slowly opening the airlock. After securing their tether lines to the hull of the ship, the captain counted down from three. They gently pushed off the Condor and floated toward the object. The droning of the winch echoed through her suit as it let out the slack of the tether, drifting closer and closer to the object. Gripping the lifeline to her side, taking long controlled breaths, she collided with the hull of the object. The captain landed first, already on his way to the hatch. The magnetic boots seemed effective as she watched him walking on the smooth surface of the object. Activating her boots, followed.

Reaching the hatch at the top of the tower and gripping the wheel, the captain spun it counterclockwise. Dawson looked at the data pad on her wrist, monitoring the object, anticipating what lay beyond the hatch. The door opened with ease and they removed the winch systems from their suits, attaching them to the hull of the object. The captain went in first, climbing past what looked like a ladder. The airlock seemed rudimentary, there was a manual release on the interior, no electronics, no inner airlock, just a ladder that led down to what looked like a command station.

Walking through the dark corridors of the object, they could only see what was illuminated by the lights on their helmets, taking notice of what looked like words written on the bulkhead. The metal grate beneath their feet also had a recognizable design. Everything looked so familiar.

“Captain, do you copy?” The coms link fizzled as the chief’s voice crackled through.

“Yes Chief, we’re inside the object heading toward the source of the radiation spike.”

“Uh… you’re not going to believe this, but I’ve identified at least three of the objects inside the nebula.”

“Well…”

“Two of them are 19th century aircraft from Earth.”

The captain stopped and turned toward Dawson, his eyebrows furrowed. She stared back at him, blinking, trying to awaken from what seemed like a dream. “What’s the third object?”

“You’re inside of it… it appears to be a 21st century Naval Submarine. Virginia Class.”

“We need to leave, these were nuclear powered, who knows what state of decay the reactor could be in. These things weren’t built for space.”

Just then, the submarine rumbled and shook, the coms link fizzling as the chief’s voice frantically warned them of something they couldn’t quite discern. “… anomaly …energy weapons …attack…”

“Chief, come in! What’s happening out there? Chief!” The captains voice had a tone of desperation, something she’d never heard before.

The submarine rocked and jolted violently, they had left their winches tethered between the submarine and the Condor. Rushing back down the corridor to the ladder they climbed as fast as they could. The captain reached the hatch first, flying through the opening, reaching for Dawson’s hand.

Reaching for him she was blinded as a flash of blue light struck him in the chest, knocking him off the submarine. The coms link roared in her ear as the chief screamed for the captain to reply to his call for orders.

Her free hand hung lifeless as if still waiting for the captain to grab it. The other hand gripped the rung of the ladder, fingertips going numb again, the pulse in her neck intensifying as it did before, the piercing plea of the Chief in her ear.

The captain wasn’t there to snap her out if it this time. Closing her eyelids tight and taking a deep breath, she could see the captain staring out of a window of uncertainty. Calm. Focused. The way she wanted to remember him.

Exhaling slowly, and gripping the ladder with both hands, she cautiously pulled herself halfway through the open hatch. The Condor was tethered to the lifeless submarine suddenly taking fire, unable to maneuver and defend herself.

The attacker was dark, shaped like an elongated pyramid, firing its weapons erratically. Flashing blue lights surrounded the Condor as the energy shields deflected much of the fire. The remaining blasts splashed into the colorful milky walls of the nebula, while others hit the objects floating in the eye, disintegrating them into balls of blue fire. The shockwaves smashed into the sub, yanking the leash of the Condor.

While Dawson observed the situation, formulating a plan, she noticed a red orb in front of the Condor. It whirled chaotically as red particles emanated from its center. While slowly growing bigger and bigger, a black center of the orb started to open.

“Captain! What are your orders? What do we do, we’re under attack!”

“The captains dead… I’m in command.” Dawson let out a deep breath.

“Lieutenant what do we do?”

“How are the energy shields holding up?”

“We’re at 70% capacity. Our weapons were knocked offline before I could activate the shields. Who are they? Why are they firing at us?”

“We’re going to be fine. They don’t seem to be locking on to anything, the nebula must have temporarily disabled their tracking system.” Her reassurance fell on deaf ears.

“No, no! We gotta get out of here!”

“Listen to me! Don’t move the ship, you’re tethered to the sub, you’ll rip us apart. We’re going to be fine for now if you don’t move. What’s happening in front of our ship?”

“Yeah… yeah it popped up right before the firing started. It seems to be a displacement field of some sort… I can’t… I don’t know.”

“Chief. Listen to the sound of my voice, calm down. Displacement of what?”

“Ok, ok. If I’m reading this right, it appears to be a wormhole.”

“Good… good. We don’t have much time before they figure out how to get their targeting systems online. I’m going to go back into the sub.”

“No! You need to get over here now, we need to leave.”

“Chief, I’m going back into the sub. I’m going to place a charge on the reactor core. We’re going to fly through the wormhole, the explosion will collapse the displacement field behind us.”

“Why don’t we go through the nebula?”

“We can’t risk it. I’m making a lot of assumptions about this attacker right now. Chief, do you understand my orders?”

“Yeah… yeah I got it.”

Thrusting down the ladder, and disengaging her magnetic boots, she bounced off of the metal grid floor. Stabilizing herself she flew through the corridors of the submarine, grabbing and pulling at anything the walls could offer. Following the tracker on her data pad she found the reactor compartment.

Engaging the magnetic boots, planting her feet firmly to the floor, and gripping the wheel of the hatch door, she jerked it to the right finding nothing but hard resistance. Frantically looking about, she found a piece of pipe attached to the bulkhead. Banging on the steel with her hands it wouldn’t break free no matter how hard she tried. The sub rattled and shook again.

Pulling the plasma torch from her equipment pouch and flicking the switch igniting the brilliant white flame, she cut through the top and bottom of the pipe, releasing it. Turning off the torch she let it float away, inserting the pipe between the spokes and placing one foot on the bulkhead next to the door. Pulling the bar with everything she had, groaning in pain as every muscle in her body felt like it was on fire from the strain, the wheel finally gave way.

The structure began to rumble more frequently, the attacker must have fixed their targeting systems. Time was running out.

The compartment filled with blobs of coolant escaping the reactors cooling system. It was nearing critical mass. She placed the explosive charge on the side of the reactor’s large cylindrical wall, setting the timer for ten minutes. Gripping the pipe that was used to open the door, she swung it at the cooling pipes, cracking them open, releasing more of the gelatinous substance into the room, hoping to accelerate the meltdown.

Before she could make it through the opening of the compartment, a large explosion of blue light ripped through the hull of the sub. The blast throwing her against the bulkhead. Looking through the hole was disorienting as the sub and tethered Condor were now spinning together in the eye of the nebula. Each vessel pulling and fighting with one another’s momentum.

Working her way to the edge of the hole she timed her leap. Waiting for the sub to spin just right, looking for the tether lines, she jumped from the sub grasping for a line. Eight minutes left. She could do this.

Staying on course, the lines whipped and crossed one another, she had to be careful not get tangled herself. Blue flashes of energy flew past her. Grabbing one of the lines and pulling herself toward the ship, the second line thrashed across the visor of her helmet, cracking it. Oxygen hissed through the crack, making it impossible to focus on the airlock.

Moving closer to the ship, she activated the remote airlock sequence. The door opened and with a swift pull on the line she spun faster toward the opening. Activating the magnetic boots and landing on the hull, she made quick work of detaching the tether lines from outside of the airlock.

“Chief, I’m on board the Condor closing the airlock now. Fire the thrusters and push us through the wormhole. I’m on my way to the bridge.”

Running as fast as her legs would take her, adrenaline pumped through her veins. Slamming into the captains station she fastened her restraints.

“We have two minutes! Go, go, go!”

The helmsman forced the throttle further forward, pushing the ship’s engines to their breaking point, thrusting them into the blackness of the wormhole. Dawson watched the rear viewscreen, the long dark ship was in pursuit, firing its weapons. The screen went bright white leaving only a silhouette of their attacker… the reactor had gone critical. The wormhole collapsed behind them, crushing the rear half of the dark ship. Secondary explosions radiated from all over busting the attacker into pieces.

Relief of their escape was short lived as a loud tapping rattled the front observation windows. More ice crystals. Where was this wormhole taking them?

The crystals turned to a clear liquid, the alarms blaring and systems going offline. Lunging forward in their seats the ship had moved from full speed ahead to a lurch into the translucent liquid.

“Lieutenant, the engines are dead. Proximity sensors indicate that we’re in a large body of water, but I can’t be sure. Our sensors weren’t built for anything like this.”

“The ship is airtight, we can survive water, getting out of here is another problem. Can we launch a probe to the surface, see where we are?”

“It’ll take some time to retrofit it for these conditions, but I think we can do it.”

Waiting for the probe gave her time to process everything that had happened. Their mission was a success, explore the nebula. Their cost was the life of the captain, and a journey through a wormhole to who-knows-where.

Standing behind the chief, eyes glued to his monitor, the crew’s eyes widened in disbelief as the data rolled in. The atmosphere above the water was oxygen rich, breathable. There were land masses nearby… cross referencing database… They were on Earth, 800 kilometers from the coast of Florida.

“What the… are we in the Bermuda Triangle?”

Swallowing down the lump in her throat, Dawson wracked her brain for an appropriate response. Nothing had prepared her for this.

Marinated Tennessee Hickory Flank Steak

 

Marinated Flank Steak I LisaGCooks.com
Marinated Flank Steak I LisaGCooks.com

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 pounds flank steak
  • 1/2 cup Jack Daniels Tennessee Hickory Mesquite Grilling Sauce
  • 1/4 cup red wine

Instructions

  1. Cut flank steak in half lengthwise; cut each half into thirds. Place in a heavy-duty zip lock plastic bag.
  2. Combine Jack Daniels’ Grilling Sauce with red wine; pour mixture over steak.
  3. Seal bag and turn several times to coat steak.
  4. Marinate for 4 to 24 hours in refrigerator, turning several times.
  5. Discard marinade.
  6. Grill steak over medium heat to desired doneness, turning and brushing with additional Jack Daniels’ Tennessee Hickory Mesquite Grilling Sauce.

Attribution

Posted by FootsieBear at Recipe Goldmine April 28, 2001.

Source: Jack Daniels’ Grilling Sauces package

It was a ‘blind date’ arranged by my mom and his mom. Two moms happened to both have an I-love-matchmaking retired coworker. Two coworkers happened to meet in a mahjong gathering. So.

At a square of a shopping mall, I waited and waited, constantly checked my phone, called him. No answer. No idea why I waited for couple hours like an idiot. Probably because I had nothing else to do other than watching people passing by, (which also explains why I agreed such an arrangement in the first place).

I saw a man in shorts who tried to speak to every woman sitting at the square, one by one.

I called him again.

No answer.

The man in shorts came to me.

‘Are you Nell Zhang?’

Turned out he lost his phone.

I felt grateful he still tried hard to find me.

We did self introduction.

He asked me where I worked, and told me his company was the maker of the famous ‘Sofy Napkin’. I jokingly asked if I could get a discount for pads from him. He nodded,

‘Yes, 15% off, if you marry me. Moreover, we can buy Mamy-Poko diaper (it’s another brand from his company) with half price for our kids.’

I laughed. He didn’t, but asked me what’s so funny.

I excused myself and couldn’t find anything else to say.

Neither did he.

Then we watched people passing by.

Then we watched each other passing by.

Over.

When Women Treat Men Like KINGS #10

My father has a story he told me in the 1990s, it was actually more about Japan and Korea than China.

It’s obviously translated through my memories into English.

An American delegation of businessmen go and visit Japan/Korea/China (the place changes depending on when my dad tells the story). They visit a car factory and are panicked OMG they can make cars here! I didn’t think they’d be able to…

They go home and at the next company meeting bring this up with their superiors. They are ignored and dismissed anyway it’s not going to affect our next quarterly profits so this threat is ignored and deemed insignificant.

This process is repeated several more times….

Until there’s another meeting say bud why are our quarterly profits on a downward trend? But by then it’s too late those car makers have eaten your lunch and dinner.

Big Blast At U.S. Arms Factory; One Missing, Two Injured As Fire Engulfs Missile Production Centre

WTF?  Very interesting.

DO NOT GO TO VEGAS.

I’m so shocked at what an incredible rip off Vegas has become. I don’t gamble in the casino but the greed of these corporations has just gone crazy.

For example, when I came here 10 years ago the roulette had 36 numbers plus the green 0. If you hit your number you would receive 35/1 odds as you had a 1 in 37 chance.

Last year in 2023 when I came here I was shocked to see an additional 00 on the roulette wheels making your odds 1 in 38 to still receive a 35/1 pay out.

So I’m back here again in June 2024 and yes you guessed it, there are now magically 3 x 0’s on the roulette wheel! 0, 00 and now 000!

They know people don’t understand the enormous disadvantage this gives the punters.

On top of this I’m paying $30.00 for a coffee and a sandwich and when I received my hotel bill they hit me with a $52.00 a day resort fee that I was never told about when I checked in but it is apparently in the small print!

I went to an ATM in the casino and took out $200.00 It charged me 7.5%, yes $15.00! And I’ll be charged more money on top from my UK bank charges.

The shows are eye wateringly expensive along with the drinks. I really think they are making a massive mistake in their business structure. People are disgusted. EVERYONE is talking about it, from the people on holiday to the taxi drivers. I’m fortunately financially well off but it’s not the point. No one likes feeling ripped off, not even if it’s for $20.00. They are making a huge mistake. No one is coming back to Vegas in a hurry.

When I was around 11, our next door neighbors accused my then 5 year-old brother of intentionally breaking some large planters – really large ones – on their front porch. The wife swore she saw him do it around 5:00am. A ridiculous claim on so many levels. Now they didn’t like my brother, he was always so much bigger and taller than other kids his age and they didn’t like him to play with their same-age son. Which was fine, as he didn’t. They apparently felt their smaller child would get hurt by my gentle giant of a brother. (Now 6′4″ btw). Now my brother adamantly denied that he had done anything remotely like what they said and he was understandably very upset at being accused. He may have been a bit tall for his age, but he was still just a little kid. Later that day, the police came by and warned us that some no-gooders, possibly teenagers if I recall, had been caught slashing tires and vandalizing property in our neighborhood. And that we should continue to be on the lookout for their cohorts. My father let the neighbor know that, as I believe the police did as well but the neighbors still insisted that it had been my brother. We didn’t talk to them after that and steered clear as much as we could. A few years later, they came and took the neighbor wife away in a straight-jacket, while she was screaming hysterically and incoherently. Apparently, she had some mental illness problems. BUT even after that, the father never apologized. Nor did he treat my brother, me or my family politely or properly. Even today, so many years later, I still get a bad taste in my mouth when I remember them.

This is a list of US mission capable aircraft. The US needs to fix US aircraft first.

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main qimg 8c3265ab1709548f4f6c9cb31419434d

Heartbreak Ridge Your Ass is Mine

The rcep numbers are big. 30 percent of the world population, 30 percent of world trade, 30 percent of global gdp represented.

The common glue here is China, which is the biggest trading partner for the rest and of course, the largest economy. I am surprised Korea and Japan jumped on board, given their protectionist stance on agriculture and several other categories. India walking away was no surprise.

Overall, I’m encouraged by the give and take. This can serve as a good template for belt and road countries in the coming decade.

The headturning numbers will come from asean as infrastructure led growth boost trade numbers.

The success of the rcep should prove to the world there is no crisis in the SCS beyond American manufactured drama. All the claimant states and trade routes are represented by rcep.

My friend’s trash boyfriend. She’s pregnant with his second kid. He refuses to watch their son and when he does complains that he’s too tired. Says the new baby is not his “problem” until it is born. Won’t take her to doctor appointments. Tried to make her walk five hours home from work at six months pregnant. Abuses her daughter from a previous relationship.

His mother thinks his behavior is fine and defends him. He’s a sex addict, woman beater, child beater, and an accused rapist. But anything bad he says or does is his girlfriend’s fault and not his.

My son’s biological father. Cared so little he didn’t show for the original custody hearing. Fought cour ton habing to pay more than 25 a month child support (state bare minimum) but agreed to 28. Would never watch our son when I worked because he was busy at the library playing online games with his other girlfriend and wouldn’t help pay for sitter. When he did rarely watch my son, wouldn’t change him or clean up messes. Yelled at him for looking at him when he was eating. Smacked our crying son on the butt as hard as he could in the mall. Threw and broke things in front of our son and hit me in front of him.

My brother’s ex. Drove her jeep high and flipped it with my nephew in the car. He survived with no injuries. She’s finally in jail for it.

My brother’s wife who left him for a guy in Florida she ran away to and got pregnant from. Has zero custody of her own three kids. Trying to pin new baby on my brother. Brother is hispanic. Baby’s dad/her boyffiend is african American. Not hard to do the math. Did drugs in front of my nephew and didnt take care of him. Laughed at him when he had nightmares or wanted time with her or my brother. Bought designer bags and clothes but wouldn’t buy him walmart t shirts.

These are the worst acts of parenting I have ever seen, and I’m adopted because my biological mom didnt take care of us (she’s mentally handicapped, dodnt know any better).

Russians advanced in New York, Iran’s destroyer sinks, Ukr to highjack Rus strategic bomber.

Heating up craziness.

I was dating a woman, it was way too early for love, we had only been seeing each other for 6 weeks, but things were going well. Christmas was coming up, and it’s really awkward buying a gift for someone that you have no commitment to.

She was telling me a story about going to the mall, and seeing these red shoes, with a different shade of red, bow , in the window. She tried them on, and they fit like a glove, but she decided to spend the money on her kids, and not herself, so she left them.

When I left, I checked the size of her shoes by the door, and the next day I drove to the mall, and there were the red shoes, with a red bow, sitting in the window.

It’s risky putting this much thought into a gift for someone, that you have known less than 2 months. Do you look like a stalker, or a romantic?

I took the risk, and bought the shoes.

Two days later, she called me, and said that she was going to be spending Christmas with her ex and the kids, in another province, and that it wouldn’t be fair to me, to keep dating. She was honest about everything, and we parted on good terms. Except I now had to return the shoes, during the holiday rush.

I have done much more extreme things for my wife, but they weren’t crazy, because I was committed to my wife.

This was crazy, because I risked driving her off, by looking like a stalker, and it was a lot of effort, for someone, you have just started dating.

The Most Insane Ex-Girlfriend I’ve Seen..

Sigh.

Thanks for the request.

This is another example of asymmetrical warfare that the U.S. sucks at.

Its a game of “whac-a-mole” that the Houthis are playing that is impossible for the U.S. to keep up. The Houthis simply hide and launch their missiles at different places and time that is impossible to anticipate and take out. And by launching more than enough, its impossible to take out all.

The battleground at the South China Sea is different.

These involve large warships that both sides can see a long time coming.

However, China has the advantage. It has shown it can eliminate the element of surprise by being able to detect submarines in the South China Sea with aircrafts and satellites equipped with high-resolution radar. They have surveillance to ensure nothing is sneaked in – inclduing sub detectors.

There is also the advantage of proximity. With its militarized location at the SCS, it takes less time to mobilize that in coordination with its command of the arsenals of hypersonic missiles to provide cover, there will be ample time to take out any incoming warships.

When I was working for a chain store I was told they hired somebody and they put him on with a manager who was a little difficult to deal with if you didn’t know how to take her. (She spoke to everybody as if she was dealing with four or five year olds. I once asked somebody if she had been a kindergarten teacher and they said no, it’s just the way she is.) Anyway he worked one shift with her and called the next day and said he had had enough and quit.)

The most interesting case of short-term employment happened at Walmart. They hired this kid to work in my department (food) and after punching in he would come out to the floor and then he would disappear. No one was able to figure out where he went. They tried paging him and no answer. People looked around the store and couldn’t finding his hiding spot. I don’t think he left and went home because the cameras would have picked him up if he did that. He only reappeared when it was time to punch out. It didn’t take long before the manager decided he could dispense with his services.

This cat, after a car crash and desperately struggling on the roadside, finally she was rescued.

It’s a sign of maturity

Yes. I was appointed by the court to defend a gang member for armed robbery. He thought he was super cool and wanted to take the stand. I told him no, I warned him, he insisted over my objection.

There was only one thing going in his favor. The clerk at the place robbed said the robber had blue eyes. My client had brown eyes.

I felt my client was a very very dangerous person. I was sure the prosecutor would ask him if he had color contacts. They were in his pocket. When he lied and said no, I would ask to be recused from the case as you are not allowed to knowingly let your client lie on the stand. The judge would then know he was lying and I would probably be excused as counsel, etc. The ignorant prosecutor never asked. He was found not guilty.

The judge had a fit. He excoriated everyone but me…he said I was just doing my job. Two days later my client shot and killed an 8 year old girl in a rival gang revenge attack at the girl’s birthday party. The newspaper headline was the judge’s quote that he would never sleep again until every member of that gang was six feet under.

The judge called me and advised me that I would NOT be appointed to represent the guy again (Thank God).

The police declared a vendetta on that gang. Five years later the headlines said that gang was “eradicated” from Texas.

I never took another criminal case. I became a real estate attorney and did pro bono work for battered women and men who paid child support but were denied visitation with their children.

Aromatic Chicken Curry (Vietnam)

Coconut Chicken main
Coconut Chicken main

Ingredients

  • 2 medium-size potatoes, cut into chunks
  • 4 tablespoons peanut oil
  • 8 shallots, minced
  • 4 stalks fresh lemon grass, minced
  • 3 garlic cloves, minced
  • 2 fresh hot red chiles, minced
  • 2 tablespoons best-quality curry powder
  • 1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breasts, chopped into bite size pieces
  • 1 teaspoon sea salt or 1 teaspoon fish sauce
  • 1 (14 ounce) can coconut milk
  • 1 (14 ounce) can chicken broth
  • Fresh basil leaves

Instructions

  1. Fry the potato chunks in the oil until nicely browned, then drain them on paper towels.
  2. Add the shallots, lemon grass, and all of the spices to the pan, and stir-fry for a few minutes.
  3. Add the chicken and cook, stirring, until it is opaque.
  4. Add the potatoes, salt, coconut milk and chicken stock. Bring to a boil and then simmer gently for about 30 minutes.
  5. Garnish with basil leaves before serving in bowls with rice.

Ingredients List for Vietnamese Chicken Curry

Marinade

  • 8 boneless skinless chicken thighs
  • 1 tablespoon curry powder
  • 2 tablespoons onion powder
  • salt to taste

Curry

  • 2 tablespoons oil
  • 3 large carrots
  • 1 large baking potato
  • 2 tablespoons oil
  • 1 red onion
  • 3 garlic gloves
  • 2 sticks lemongrass
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 3 cups of water
  • 1 tablespoon curry powder
  • 1 tablespoon garlic chili sauce
  • 1/2 cup coconut milk

12 Minutes of Modern Women Moral Decay

A Woman’s World

Submitted into Contest #8 in response to: Write a story about an adventure in space. view prompt

Rebecca Parker

Robert remembered the sensation of falling. He remembered the feeling of cold dread as the engine stuttered and died and his stomach dropped through the floor. He could never forget the look on his colleague’s face as the colour drained from him and his skin turned paper white.He didn’t remember plummeting through space, searing through the planet’s atmosphere, or the deafening landing. His colleague, Martin, hadn’t been knocked unconscious and had managed to pull him from the fiery wreck before the smoke and flames engulfed him. Robert was out cold. All he remembered was darkness.Blurred colours greeted him as he opened his eyes, the world spinning in and out of focus. One woman, or two, or three, was bent over him. He heard her speak, the words moving through his sluggish brain like soup. He could make no sense of them. He tried to sit up, but a shooting pain split through his head and the woman pushed him back to the ground. Martin appeared then; despite his hazy vision he recognised his co-pilot. Three Martins. Groaning, Robert closed his eyes.It might have been a few hours later when he next opened them. The dazzling sunlight had dimmed slightly, and the air was not quite so hot. His vision took a minute to clear, but when it did, there was only one Martin sitting over him. He asked him how he was feeling, felt his forehead, his throat, checked his pulse. Irritated, Robert pushed him away and forced himself into a sitting position. His head was still banging, but not with quite so much volition as before.“We went wrong,” Martin uttered in a low voice, just as Robert asked him where they were.“What do you mean?” Robert replied, rubbing his forehead with one hand as Martin handed him a glass of water. It looked like water and tasted like water, but it was purple. Robert blinked at it, confused, and then looked up at the sky. It was as if it had been painted with purple water colours.“Why isn’t the sky blue, Martin?” Robert asked. He must have still been dazed from the crash, because he was much calmer than he should have been.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We went wrong.”

“We were right on target to hit Mars.”

“This isn’t Mars.”

It was then that Robert noticed the huddle of young women standing a short distance away, grouped under a copse of trees next to a river. Lilac-coloured water cascaded from an eight-foot drop into the shimmering pool, before winding away through the trees. Robert stared at the waterfall, the women, the sky.

“Martin?” he said, his tone still strangely neutral. “Am I dreaming, or am I dead?”

“Neither,” his colleague hissed at him. “You’re on Venus.”

Robert nodded, tasting the words even though his brain couldn’t comprehend them.

“But we were on target for Mars.”

“Mars is red, Rob, not purple.”

Robert nodded again, sipping the purple drink as one of the women broke away from the group and sashayed over to them. She might have been the same one that had been crouched over him before; she had the same silvery-blonde hair and violet coloured eyes. Her dress was lilac and her feet were bare. If Robert squinted, he could see that all the women were wearing dresses of a similar colour and not one of them wore shoes.

Martin got to his feet as she approached and Robert staggered up next to him. He felt oddly light-headed but pain free.

“Do you think they want to kill us?” he asked Martin as he drained the last of the water. In response, he received only a glare.

The woman paused in front of them, looking suddenly unsure of herself.

“Tia,” she announced. “Robert and Martin, correct?” The pair nodded. She chewed her lip, her eyes straying disdainfully over their clothes. Martin was half in his spacesuit, Robert was only in a t-shirt and jeans. “But…” she said, her eyebrows knitting together in confusion. “Where are the rest of you?”

The two men exchanged glances. “The rest of us?” Robert repeated. “There’s only us two. We crashed.”

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said. “The water here helps with healing very well.” She paused, a light breeze playing with her hair. “But surely more are on their way? We have thirty women here, all waiting for you.”

Robert could feel his head begin to pound and not because of the crash-landing.

“We’ve come from Earth. Have you heard of it?”

If Tia had heard the sarcasm in his voice, she didn’t show it. Her eyes dropped to the floor, her lips twisting into a frown.

“Earth? No. I don’t know any Earth.” Her eyes narrowed then and her tone became suddenly accusatory. “You are from Mars. All men are from Mars!”

Robert stared at her. She glared defiantly back.

“Love,” he began, feeling his patience start to wear thin. “Nobody lives on Mars. The place is a rock, totally uninhabitable! We are not from Mars, we’re from Earth. Kindly tell me what planet you are from?”

“Venus.”

Robert opened his mouth to shoot back a snide reply, but Martin cut him off.

“Are there any men here?” he asked Tia.

“No,” she replied, clicking her tongue in annoyance. “All men live on Mars. There should be thirty of you arriving today for the Spring Festival, but so far we have only two and not even a decent two at that.”

She scowled at them both and turned on her heel to storm away, but Martin hastily dashed after her, apologies spilling from his mouth as Robert stood and watched, realisation beginning to dawn on him.

The sun suddenly broke out from behind a cloud and the brilliance of it dazzled him. He sat back down on the grass, his eyes straying from Martin and Tia to the group of women huddled by the river. When Martin returned, he was carrying another glass of water.

“She said this might help your head,” he said handing the drink to Robert. “Shame it can’t help your attitude.” He smirked but looked away hastily as Robert glared at him. “The boys stay here until they’re eighteen. She’s going to see if they can help us out with a ship. In the meantime, we can stay in the village.”

“She wants us to go then.”

Martin crouched down on to the grass in front of him. “This isn’t our universe, Rob. I don’t know how we’ve ended up here, but here we are. There’s no Earth in their solar system. All the men live on Mars and all the women live on Venus.” Robert found his eyes wandering back to the group of women. They were all young, in their late twenties or early thirties, and they were all beautiful. “This Spring Festival,” Martin continued. “It’s a mating festival, Rob. Thirty men come over to meet thirty women and they couple up and well… you know…”

“So what you’re saying is, we’re stuck on a rock in some other universe, who knows where, and we’re the only men? That’s what you’re saying?”

Martin grinned and hit him playfully on the shoulder. “More men are coming. When they get here, they’ll help us find a ship. We’ll get a ship, Rob, don’t worry.”

They waited for three days, but the men didn’t arrive. The women became fretful. Each day they turned up in their purple dresses with their hair and make-up done to sit by the river from sunrise to sunset and each day they went home by themselves. They weren’t interested in befriending the two astronauts. The majority of them seemed to blame the pair for the loss of their men.

It was late in the afternoon on the third day when the silver-haired Tia approached them, leading a teenage boy alongside her.

“This is Jay,” Tia said as she reached them. “Jay is seventeen and he studies solar engineering at the college. He will help you find a ship.” She smiled at them but her eyes remained troubled. “Maybe then you can return to your own planet.”

 

“And your men?” Martin asked. “Shouldn’t they be here by now?”

She turned to gaze into the sky and sighed. “Something must have gone wrong. You crash-landed in our meadow and they haven’t arrived. Maybe they crashed somewhere else? But what if there is no one there to help them?”

She patted Jay on the back and thanked him before leaving. He quickly dived into conversation with Martin, but Robert wasn’t listening, he couldn’t stop thinking about Tia.

Jay proved to be very helpful. He took them on tours around the village and surrounding areas. The village looked more like a city to Robert, with its sky-high buildings and its colleges, but it was welcoming and friendly. The women watched them in interest as they passed, and many trailed after them, like excited girls wanting autographs from their favourite pop-stars. The teenager took them to his college workshop where other young boys clubbed together to help build the pair a new ship, modelling it on what they had left of the one that had crashed. They were quick and nimble workers and it was completed in only a week. Jay told them there was a takeoff station at the bottom of the meadow where they’d crashed and they arranged to have the ship transported back there. When they arrived, a tearful Tia came rushing up to meet them.

“Something must have happened to them!” she sobbed, the tears streaking down her face. “Please, please, before you go, look for them! They could be danger!”

Robert gazed at her, at her shiny, soft hair that fell elegantly over the curve of her breasts, at the lilac dress that hugged her waist, at the tears that fell from her beautiful violet eyes.

“Of course,” he told her. “We’ll find them.”

A whole host of women gathered in the meadow to watch them leave, along with Jay and the other boys who had helped to build the ship. Martin pressed his face to the glass of the window as they rocketed away from the planet into the depths of space.

“We were on course for Mars,” he said softly, as Robert took the wheel. “How did we end up on Venus in another dimension?”

“Another universe,” Robert shot back. “We must have passed through… through a… a worm-hole or something.”

Martin gave him a sharp look. “You told me worm-holes don’t exist.”

“I must have been wrong.”

They trawled through space, searching for anything unfamiliar or unknown, anything that might have rooted an explanation as to how they travelled between universes. Robert had lost track of the days completely when he noticed something in the distance.

“Martin!” he hissed, squinting through the window of the ship. “Martin, get over here!”

His companion joined him, concern plastered over his face. “What?”

Robert didn’t answer, but merely pointed.

It was hard to tell what it was at first. It was if there was some sort of light distorting the view. It was a shimmering line, like the mist rolling in off the sea.

“We’re in the middle of space,” Martin said flatly. “We’re not going near that.”

“Yes, we are,” Robert replied, easing forward on the accelerator. “That might be just how we got here in the first place.”

Martin grappled with him for the controls but Robert was stronger and slammed the accelerator down, sending the ship careening towards the shimmering line. It widened as they approached, yawning open like a great mouth. Martin screamed as it swallowed them and they found themselves spinning and spinning and spinning through a mass of swirling, blinding colours.

When it spat them out, they both felt the engine lurch, and Martin grabbed Robert’s arm in panic.

“That’s how we crashed!” he yelled, but Robert was barely listening; he’d spotted the rocky, red planet of Mars and sent the ship spiralling straight for it.

Martin bellowed at his companion, trying to pull the ship up before they crashed, but it jarred against a mound of rocks and flipped on to its side. They piled out of it, helmets on, and sprinted away before it could burst into flame and meet the same fate as their old ship. It didn’t fortunately, but it didn’t look safe to fly either.

“Great going, Rob,” Martin grumbled, gesturing towards the heap of battered metal. “We finally make it to Mars and you go and break our transport. Again.

Robert could have shot him a snide reply, he wasn’t sure it was entirely his fault they had crashed on Venus in the first place, but he wasn’t listening. His attention had been snared by a far superior, more colourful ship that sat proudly atop a rocky outcrop. A rather dilapidated ribbon was tied around it. It might have looked smart at first, but it was dirty from red dust and the bow had come undone. He began walking towards it, his heart pounding, leaving Martin muttering to himself amidst the rocks. He thought about the lack of atmosphere, the lack of hostile environment, and began to run, panicking even though he didn’t know these men.

Martin yelled after him, suddenly noticing the ship for the first time. They both raced towards it, knowing the men would have been unprepared, knowing they would have lacked oxygen.

Robert reached the ship first and banged on the metal door, bellowing at them to let him in. Martin was quick on his heels and joined him, banging on the door until it opened.

There was a cluster of young men, all late twenties or early thirties and all beautiful. They were stood behind the air lock, frowning at the two strangers in their space suits who were waving at them from the inhospitable landscape of Mars. Wordlessly, they welcomed the astronauts on to the ship, though they seemed wary and kept their distance.

“Where are you from?” the first one said, as Robert took his helmet off.

“Earth!” Robert replied proudly, ignoring their puzzled glances to continue. “We were on our way to our Mars, when we crash-landed on your Venus.”

“What my friend is trying to say,” Martin interrupted, as the group of men muttered amongst each other in confusion, “is that we’re from a parallel universe, and we crashed in your universe. You apparently, have gotten lost in our universe, but we can guide you back.”

The muttering continued but a few smiles began to appear among the bunch.

“You crashed,” one observed.

“You can’t return in that wreck,” another said.

“Guide us back to our Venus,” the first one said, “and we will ensure you can safely return to your own planet.”

The two astronauts gladly obliged and took the controls to return the vehicle to Venus. Martin was a bit dismayed about leaving the red planet so soon, after only just arriving and without conducting any of their research, but Robert found he didn’t care that much; he longed to return to Venus, to Tia.

They landed safely the third time around and the relieved, yet tearful, silver-haired Tia came running up as the group disembarked. She weaved through the handsome young men, searching for the alien astronauts who had brought them to her. She found Robert and threw her arms around him, sobbing into his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she wept, “thank you so much.”

He didn’t say anything, but hugged her close. Martin took his shoulder, telling him they had to sort a new ship and get back to their own universe, but Robert had made his mind up.

“We’ve found a planet inhabited entirely by women,” he told his friend, as Tia straightened and wiped her tears from her flushed face, “and you want to leave?!” He turned back to the beautiful woman standing in front of him, took her hand and kissed it.

“Allow me to introduce myself, properly this time,” he told her. “My name is Robert, this is Martin. We come in peace.”

Giggling, she took his hand and led them both through the meadow towards the waterfall.  The sun shone down on them through the purple sky, sparkling on the purple river. Far behind them, deep in space, the shimmering dimensional gap, the stitch in the universe that had brought them there, slowly faded to melt away completely in the unfathomable depths of space.

Nam Jim Wan
(Sweet Dipping Sauce | Thai)

This is a simple dipping sauce usually used with deep fried items such as spring rolls and stuffed chicken wings.

Ingredients

  • 3 cups water
  • 3 cups granulated sugar
  • 1 cup vinegar (preferably rice vinegar)
  • 3 tablespoons Chinese pickled plums
  • 3 tablespoons thinly sliced prik ki nu daeng (red birdseye chiles)
  • 2 tablespoons garlic, very thinly sliced
  • 2 tablespoons ginger, julienned or grated
  • 1 teaspoon salt

Instructions

  1. Boil the water, and add the pickled plums (sometimes sold as ‘salted plums’), and simmer for five minutes.
  2. Remove the plums to a food processor and puree them.
  3. Continue to boil the water, adding and dissolving the sugar, then adding the vinegar and salt. If any sugar is still undissolved, add a little more water until it dissolves.
  4. Return the plums to the mixture, and then pour over the other ingredients in a sterilized preserving jar, and keep in a cool place for at least a week before using.

Can you introduce me as Joker? | Joker [UltraHD, HDR]

Today’s China is militarily strong.

China is not afraid of USA. It of course will not be afraid of Japan.

A year or 2 ago, Taiwan asked Japan if it will help Taiwan in case of war,

Japan said they only plan up to the point of evacuation of Japanese in Taiwan. Translation: Japan’s war simulation tells Japan that it will not win China.

Neither can USA.

Some other art

 

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alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 0 47f8ea70 52de 4e3f 916e 849846d50409 0

Default The second coming of Jesus a powerful and aweinspiring 3 215c30b7 6cbd 4c32 a109 5c02b1abd923 0
Default The second coming of Jesus a powerful and aweinspiring 3 215c30b7 6cbd 4c32 a109 5c02b1abd923 0

Default La joven mujer sonre con felicidad y alegra Estilo Car 2
Default La joven mujer sonre con felicidad y alegra Estilo Car 2

Well, here goes, and it’s taken me 50 years to write or even speak of this event. I considered writing anonymously but that’s no way to get something off your chest.

I was with an infantry platoon in the Mekong Delta during the summer of 1969, we walked out of a woodline into an open paddy area and found several individuals dragging an unexploded 500 pound bomb across the paddy toward a wooded area. They were dressed like V/C, black trousers and white shirts, and probably about 500 yards away. This bomb would have made a devastating booby trap.

This was a so-called “free fire zone,” meaning all civilians and non-combatants had supposedly been relocated and only the enemy remained.

We opened fire and the subjects scattered into the woodline and we did not pursue them. It was getting on toward sunset and we heard crying and moaning from deep within the jungle. I, along with two other soldiers, was sent to investigate. We found a male subject laying on his back in great distress, when his shirt was removed there was a bullet hole in his upper chest/shoulder area but no exit wound. He was not bleeding, but that blood had to go somewhere, and it did, straight into his lung.

The other two guys with me argued that we should take him out and call for a dustoff (Medivac) but I was in charge and would not allow it. I said we were not going to endanger a flight crew to evacuate an enemy soldier who was going to die anyway. And besides, he might have been one of V/C who ambushed our platoon the previous week causing extensive casualties and loss of life.

So we waited as his breathing grew gradually more shallow; I kept shining my flashlight into his eyes and after about 20 minutes his pupils became dilated and non-reactive. This enemy soldier had died. Except. . .

The next morning our platoon was sleeping on dikes near the woodline and I was awakened by terrible screaming and crying from a woman and her children who had seemingly come from nowhere, there were no hooches or villages in sight. Our “enemy soldier,” whom I had watched and saw die, was in fact her 13-year old son.

At the time, and over the years, I’ve tried to rationalize my actions that evening: it was dark, V/C were all young looking, we couldn’t have saved him anyway, but the only true answer is that war had stripped away a bit of my humanity.

I saw plenty of sadness in Vietnam, but nothing was as sorrowful as watching a mother weep for her dead son.

And then I heard Phil Collins – In the Air Tonight (First Time Reaction) *

Hungry Food Porn

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Sorry are we already in 2057?

This is 2024 and China just recently graduated 11.24 Million people and typically after 18 months – as many as 850,000 of these people will not have a proper advented job and after 36 months around 332,000 of them will not have a proper job

In fact after 18 months – only India with 2.265 Million unemployed graduates will beat China in 2026 as per the extrapolation

In 2023 – Chinas Factories created 1.37 Million new jobs and this year the target is 1.50 Million new factory jobs

Guess how many factory jobs Germany created in 2023?

Negative 86,800

They closed 86,800 Jobs

The previous year it was 72,000 Jobs

In all of Europe – Hungary is the only Nation that created an additional 10,740 jobs in 2023

US has lost a whopping 4 Million Factory Jobs in the last decade (2010–2020)

China has added 18.3 Million Factory Jobs in the last decade (2010–2020)

It is expected that China will add 12 Million Factory Jobs from 2020 to 2030 and 7.2 Million from 2030 to 2040

Yet they will be more and more specialized jobs and skilled jobs

Meanwhile China will see a transition to the Service Sector

Today Manufacturing commands 36% of all Jobs and Services 13% (26% is still Agriculture and 8.3% is Government Jobs and Civil Service including the Army)

Yet a decade ago it was 41.2% for Manufacturing and only 7.8% for services

By 2030–2040 – you will see only 20% Manufacturing Jobs and upto 45% Service Jobs on the Mainland


Take a look at Nations with the largest NEW factory jobs created in 2023

  • China (1.37 Million)
  • Russia (670K) [War Production included]
  • Mexico (311K)
  • Vietnam (273K)
  • India (221K)
  • Bangladesh (157K)
  • Brazil (131K)

China nearly created the same NEW factory jobs as the next 4–5 Nations combined


South Korea & Japan are far worse than China in demographics yet Japanese Workforce showed 22,000 more factory jobs than workers and Korea showed 6050

With a huge rural population – the earliest China can reach the same situation is 2057 and that’s the absolute worst case scenario

The truth is Ceteris Paribus – China is unlikely to have any major demographic work issues until around 2075–2100 AD

By then I am sure you will have enough Robots and AI to do the needed work

Balsamic Marinated Flank Steak

balsamic marinated flank steak
balsamic marinated flank steak

Ingredients

Balsamic Marinade

  • 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons Dijon-style mustard
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1/2 teaspoon granulated sugar

Steak

  • 1 beef flank steak (about 1-1/2 pounds)
  • Salt amd pepper

Instructions

Balsamic Marinade

  1. Combine ingredients in small bowl. Place beef steak and marinade in food-safe plastic bag; turn steak to coat. Close bag securely and marinate in refrigerator for 6 hours or as long as overnight, turning occasionally.

Steak

  1. Remove steak from marinade; discard marinade. Place steak on grid over medium, ash-covered coals. Grill, covered, 11 to 16 minutes (over medium heat on preheated gas grill, 16 to 21 minutes) for medium rare (145 degrees F) to medium (160 degrees F) doneness, turning occasionally.
  2. Season steak with salt and pepper, as desired.
  3. Carve steak crosswise into thin slices.

I will never forget the girl who ordered a Uber Comfort which is up to 4 passengers. I showed up. Granted I have an SUV and can fit 6 passengers. Well she had a group of 7. Not squeezing you all in, sorry. Order 2 rides. They didn’t want to split the group so I said I couldn’t take them. She had such a sassy attitude. With all of the sass in the world she told her friends, “Wait, this is still on my dollar, so…” and she turned to me, held out her hand rolling her eyes a little bit and said, “Can I at least have a water or something?”

My jaw dropped a little bit. Not only was I cancelling her ride because she wanted to disobey the rules and the law, but she had the nerve to give me sass and ask for water! As if I carry water, candy, snacks, etc. for all of my passengers. She was going to pay $10 for a trip home for 7 people and expected water and snacks and candy and for me to let an extra person squeeze in the back??? Nope! Not happening! I don’t carry water for passengers. I don’t carry candy. I drive people from point A to point B and provide good customer service and a good attitude, decent music, a clean nice-smelling car with air conditioning. If you want water or snacks I can take you to a gas station! But to give me sass? I was so amazed at the nerve this young lady had to ask me in such a way for a water.

So, why do people expect so much out of an Uber?

Entitlement

People expect so much for so little. They want to pay less than a taxi service, expecting private car service. Some drivers offer amenities to boost ratings or tips, or allow passengers to break the rules to not lose out on a fare. Over time, this has led people to expect more from the service. If 1/10 drivers allow it, then all of the drivers should allow it, which simply isn’t the case.

What Western news has turned into and it ain’t pretty

I was having dinner at a restaurant with a pool (down in the Keys such things exist). I was with my family: two grown sons, their wives and kids and my husband.

Suddenly my son bolted from the table and dove into the pool, clothes and all. He had seen a toddler slip under the water in the semi-deep end and not make a sound. When people saw him running they began to pay attention and realized what he was doing but he was on it so there was nothing else to be done. The mom was standing on the other end chatting up a friend, and didn’t see a thing.

My son, who just HAPPENS to be a Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer, brought the girl up and she was coughing and petrified but other than that, she was okay. He asked her “Where’s Mommy?” and she pointed to the mother.

My son carried the child over to the woman, who was still talking and had not noticed a thing. He tapped her on the shoulder and set the girl down. “She fell in the pool,” he said. “Oh, thanks,” she said, and turned to continue her conversation.

At this point, others who had witnessed the entire thing confronted the mother and said “Hey, that man just saved your child’s life. She slipped under the water!” The mom was appropriately chagrined and apologized for not being more responsible and finally realized he was wearing regular clothes. People were still talking about it when she scooped up the sniffling child and left. She never even realized that her life could have been changed in that second.

We see drownings in the movies and it’s always someone splashing about in a frenzy. But in real life, drownings are silent. The person who doesn’t know better just sinks, instead of puffing out his lungs and helping himself stay buoyant. I never knew that.

Richard Wolff on How Russia Destroyed NATO’s Economic War and Europe is Collapsing

Collective delusion. Cultural madness.

India faces massive problems that hinder its development, starting with a dysfunctional democratic government. It is overly bureaucratic. Its regulatory structure discourages foreign investment. It is often hostile to foreign companies.

India has a large, rapidly-growing, young population but it is poorly educated. Indian literacy is quite low.

India’s female participation rate in the labour force is quite low.

India is fractured by ethnic strife. Hindu nationalism exacerbates the problem.

India has serious human rights issues, particularly with respect to women.

India’s caste system remains an obstacle.

India’s infrastructure is seriously lagging behind China.

India is mired in extreme poverty with over 100 million people living in these conditions.

Can India overcome all these obstacles and challenges? If I were a betting man, I wouldn’t put my money on India. Sorry. The odds really suck.


China’s economy is 4.7X larger than India’s by nominal GDP.

China’s economy is 2.4X larger than India’s by purchasing power parity. [Source: IMF.]

Even assuming Indian growth of 8% to Chinese growth of 5%, it would take India more than 30 years to catch up to China. The math doesn’t lie.

Can India grow at 8% ???

Douglas Macgregor Warns: US Forces Are Under ATTACK Around The World! Wind Is CHANGING Direction

This just happened to me.

I worked as a manager for 3 years, improving systems, increasing productivity, and even doubling the company’s clientele within 1.5 years. I consistently received rave reviews from staff and clients. I was efficient, trustworthy, loyal, kind, funny, was always early, and stayed late anytime they needed me. I ran the business while the owner was able to look into opening a second location because of how much I improved her business.

One month ago (Nov. 2019), I came to work like any other day. I booked several new clients within my first 30 minutes. I was then called into a meeting with the owner and another manager. I was handed an email I had written the day before. I read it and asked what was wrong. The manager said, “We are moving to termination.” Shocked, with all the blood in my body now rushing out (I could feel myself turn white), I said, “I don’t think this is right. Where is the disciplinary trail?”

They proceded to tell me they did not need a disciplinary trail and gave me no reason other than the way I had written the email made it sound like I threw the manager under the bus. This was not my intent and I profusely apologized for it coming off that way. I tried to discuss the fact that I had no previous disciplinary problems. The owner and manager then started bringing up little mistakes I had made – nothing bad, just simple mistakes, and things I had never before been made aware of.

I proceeded to remind them how much I have done for the company and asked if we could instead discuss this rather then just get rid of me. I kept asking why. They never had a straight answer. They never had me sign anything. At one point the manager said, “Go process this at home, goodbye.”

As I gathered my belongings while they watched me like hawks, I stuttered and mumbled, trying anything to make sense of what was happening. I still have no idea why I was fired nor what the grounds for firing me were.

I am moving on, but hurting a lot. I absolutely loved the job and the work, and I believed in the company. I am angry and sad and I know this wasn’t right. But I have no recourse. They had made up their minds and there was nothing I could say or do. I wish I knew what happened and I wish I could go back and say the magic words. My only choice is to move ahead.

It helps a bit reading from others who say this type of incident isn’t right and also that I’m not the only one this has happened to.

Side note – I found out a couple of weeks later that my office assistant quit the day after I left and that the owner replaced me with her daughter.

UPDATE June 2020: Thank you for all of your up votes and comments, I really appreciate them. To update, they had to eventually hire 3 people to take over my position. Many employees have quit as have many clients. The person who took the lead in firing me was demoted soon after and recently quit.

Pad Mi Korat Phet
(Hot Noodles, Korat Style – Thai)

The route to this recipe started with a couple of requests for a hot version of pad Thai.

Pad Mee Korat3
Pad Mee Korat3

Unfortunately for those that asked, whilst you can add anything you like to pad Thai | including chiles | the result is not authentic. It simply isn’t done (which is not to say that Thais don’t load their plates of pad Thai with prik phom and chiles in fish sauce or vinegar ccording to taste)

Pad Thai is quite an elaborate dish. The style usually found in Thai restaurants outside Thailand is particularly elaborate, being referred to somewhat insultingly my Thai housewives as “pad Thai Krungthep” | the implication being that rich people in the capital do it that way to show off.

Ignoring the countryside versus capital debate, there is a local, very simple variant of the dish, known as pad mi Korat. Made with the round egg noodles known as sen mi, rather than the narrow rice ribbon noodles, and with a recipe that consists of partly cooking a cup of noodles, then stir frying them with a cup of sliced and shredded pak bung (swamp cabbage), adding a little tamarind juice for flavor, and drizzling a beaten egg over it to complete it.

However my wife prepares a more elaborate version of pad mi Korat, which is also fairly hot. This version I will call pad mi Korat phet (hot stir fried noodles in the Korat style).

Before I get into the details, I would like to make two comments.

The original of this dish is made with sen mi (Thai egg noodles), but if you can’t find them I find it works very well with a spaghetti or similar (the little shell shapes are good).

The original uses swamp cabbage, but any greens will do. If I fancy splashing out we make this with a mixture of broccoli and asparagus.

To simplify the dish I should point out that it is actually made using table condiments, thus the ingredients are not as complicated as they look. I will first include recipes for the table condiments you need. In Thailand these would probably be on every housewife’s table, but if you don’t have them you should make them about a week before you intend to cook the dish.

We make them in vast quantities for the restaurant (in 5 gallon containers), but for home use we use 1 pint spring top preserving jars. These have the advantage of fitting in the door shelves of our refrigerator.

Pad Mee Korat1
Pad Mee Korat1

Nam Pla Prik

Put 2/3 cup of prik ki nu (finely sliced green birdseye or dynamite chiles) into a 1 pint jar, and fill with fish sauce. Seal and keep for a week before using.

Prik Dong

Put 2/3 cup of prik ki nu daeng (finely sliced red birdeye or dynamtie chiles) in a 1 pint jar, and fill with rice vinegar (any white vinegar will do, as will cider vinegar, if rice vinegar is unavailable).

Prik Siyu Wan

Put 2/3 cup of prik chi fa (sliced red or green Thai jalapeños) in a 1 pint jar, and fill with sweet dark soy sauce.

Kratiem Dong

Peel and slice 2/3 cup of garlic, place it in the 1 pint jar, add 1 teaspoon of palm sugar, and 1 teaspoon of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of MSG (optional but recommended) and topped up with rice vinegar.

Khing Ki Mao

  1. Julienne 2/3 cup of fresh ginger (into match stick sized pieces). Place in the 1 pint jar. Add 1/2 cup of Mekong whiskey (Mekong is a whiskey made from Rice. If you can’t find it or prefer something else, any spirits, even sherry, will do). Add 1/2 cup of rice vinegar, and fill up the jar with fish sauce.
  2. Now we’ll progress to the pad mi itself.
  3. For this you will need 1 cup of noodles, 1/2 cup of green veggies, 1/2 cup of mild peppers such as prik chi fa (Thai jalapeños). If you want to try this but at a lower heat level, use the Thai chili called prik yiek, or a bell pepper. You also need 1 large egg (preferably a duck egg), some tamarind juice and sugar, and chiles, bai chi (coriander leaves) and a sliced cucumber for garnish.
  4. Place the noodles in water to soak for about 15 minutes.
  5. Place 2 tablespoons of the liquor from each of the five condiments listed above, together with 2 tablespoons of tamarind juice, in a small saucepan and simmer to reduce it to half its volume. When this is done heat a wok, and stir a teaspoon of the fish sauce from the nam pla prik into the egg, and beat it lightly. Drain 1 tablespoon of the pickle from each of the five condiments.
  6. If you are using Italian pasta, boil it for half the normal cooking time.
  7. Add all the ingredients except the egg and the reduced sauce to the wok and stir fry until the noodles are just ‘toothy’ in texture. Add the sauce, turn the heat to as high as possible, and when the sauce has come to a vigorous boil, gently drizzle the egg into the mix, which will cook it.
  8. Serve immediately, with the listed condiments, together with sugar and prik phom (powdered red chile), and decorate with the garnishes.

Weirdest? Maybe, you decide. I had asked a good family “friend” to check on my high school kids while I was going to be gone a couple nights. They were both working and responsible but I just wanted someone to look in on them, it made me feel better. He offered to stay over and would let the dog out if they were working. I thought that would be great. He was a good friend and I thought I knew him well Well, We ended up coming home sooner then planned and I messaged him our new plans. When did we expect to be home? About what time? Not sure why it mattered but I let him know. He acted strangely in his texts, which I didn’t pick up on until later. I wasn’t sure why he was even still at the house since we were coming back that evening, but I thought he was just being kind and taking care of the dog or maybe he wanted a quiet spot to be as he had moved back in with his parents to save money. Fast forward about 3 months and my daughter had to run home to grab something before a game. She had a couple other kids with her, one being a new kid. “Oh, I’ve been here before” he says. My daughter asked when. “ when I met up with someone on grinder “ my daughter didn’t believe him until he mentioned some details about the inside of the house. Well, after asking when and a description of the person she put two and two together, it was our good “friend.” My daughter was so upset she had a panic attack about the whole thing. She told me and I told my husband and we called law enforcement since he was a minor. There was an investigation and it turned out the kid lied about his age and nothing had actually happened because our friend had the sense to kick him out when he discovered he was not 18, and the investigation was ended. My daughter had to go through questioning about what she was told. We had to let our employer know because we work with kids and couldn’t risk this kid saying he was at our house with an adult male when they didn’t know the circumstances. Obviously I did not speak to the person again after this, and he had no idea why I was upset! He did not realize the repercussions that my family could have faced because of this or how disgusting this was even if not intentional. Now, we all knew he was gay and that’s not the disgusting part- it’s inviting a stranger into my home without my permission and possibly with my other kids around, it’s a safety issue, and a trust issue. If I don’t trust people anymore this is one of the reasons why.

What Was it About Malls in the 1970s?

Yes, I owned a burglar alarm company. The employee had been on the job about three weeks but was well trained. He failed to dispatch on an alarm. I fired him. He was black. He filed an EEOC complaint alleging I fired him because he was a black male. He had a black female supervisor and I had many employees of different races working for me. I did not discriminate on pay, male vs female, black vs white. The EEOC called me about the complaint and told me he would settle it for $1995. I told her no. She asked what I would counter with. I told her I wouldn’t counter. She told me they would have to audit me. Maybe I should counter with $995. I told her to audit. I was audited and no wrong doing was found. About a year later I received a notice that he had appealed. I called the EEOC and told them I was pissed. I was ready to sue but I had a supervisor on the line. He said just cool it. Ok. Was everything just as it was when I was audited? Sure! Ok, ty. The appeal was denied. Another year later I received a notice that he had appealed again. Really pissed now. Same supervisor. Really ready to sue. He said cool it. Was everything the same as when they audited? I said no, employees had come and gone but the ratios and pay were still equitable. I asked how many times this guy had done this. I was told that couldn’t be divulged but would hear nothing more. Appeal denied. The thing that still bothers me is that the EEOC initially really wanted me to pay to make the problem go away. Sad.

America Decline is identical to that of Tang Dynasty!?

My son is not my biological child. I met his mother when he was 7 and his little sister had just been born. Their biological father was in jail, having assaulted his wife when she was seven months pregnant, and was not present. Even when he HAD been present he was not a positive influence and poor Aaron had really been through way more than a child his age should ever have to experience, including a hospital visit that was necessary because he attempted to defend his mother from his abusive father.

Aaron’s mother had no one except her kids when I met her, and she had begun treating Aaron like a friend instead of her child. The lack of discipline or a male role model combined with Aaron being spoiled by his mother and his general anger at his father to create a child that had a very difficult time getting along with others his age. He and I used to play video games together all afternoon long, and over time he and I became very close. I took him under my wing and thus began a years long process of reforming him from a spoiled mamma’s boy (which doesn’t play too well here in the Deep South) to a rough and tumble young man with integrity and respect for others.

One of the biggest obstacles was that he was being relentlessly bullied. We switched him to different schools several times, but being socially awkward AND the “new kid” made him a natural target. Finally we put him in kickboxing so he could learn to defend himself.

Fast forward a few years. That scrawny awkward boy has become a big strong teenager that is both extraordinarily sensitive and YEARS ahead of his classmates in physical conditioning due to his dedication to his training. He became a standout football player his first season after setting a team record for sacks (I taught him how to slip blocks and punch through defenders and the kid learned incredibly fast).

So one day I get a call from his mom telling me that Aaron has been suspended for fighting. I’ve always told him not to start fights, but if someone puts their hands on him he’s free to defend himself. Of course I ask how it happened.

One of his buddies (a very small boy) had been getting bullied by a group of boys after school. These boys all live in a nearby neighborhood and walk home, and during that walk there’s no adult supervision. Several boys would team up on the one littler kid, and nothing was being done about it. Aaron decided to defend his buddy so the next time they did it he stepped in and beat up the ringleader. The little asshole’s parents made a big stink the next day so the school suspended all of them for fighting.

When I got home I told him I was proud of him. Even though he’s trained to fight he rarely does, he’s the sweetest kid and doesn’t like violence or hurting people. And now he finally did get in a fight, and it was to protect someone else. After all he’s been through he still cares about others and I’m incredibly proud of him for using his size and skills to defend weaker people.

“Hell On Earth” (Official Lyric Video)

He’s talking about the Lifestyles of Americans.

I was on a highway on the way home after teaching a night class. A driver in a Camaro came up to an intersection on the right and rolled through the stop sign (like most St Louis drivers do). I saw them approaching the stop sign and was thinking “they’re going to stop … they’re going to stop… oh no!”. Luckily there was no one to my left so I swerved left trying to avoid them but hit the front end of the car. If I hadn’t gone left I would have T-boned it right on the driver’s door.

No injuries, my little Mazda was totaled, the Camaro was missing it’s nose. Called AAA who dispatched law enforcement, exchanged insurance info with the lady driver, talked with law enforcement and waited for the tow truck etc.

Suddenly the driver’s daughter drove up and started ranting. “Who knocked the front end off of my new Camaro? I know they were speeding if they did that!”.

Her attitude rubbed me the wrong way so I tried to give her my perspective: “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Your mother pulled out right in front of me, I went left to try to avoid killing her. You need to go be with her.” She had a shocked look on her face as she walked away.

Retiring at 65 is a HUGE Mistake. Retirement Expert Explains​ Why

Very interesting, and frankly, frightening.

.

It’s really simple.

People who play lotteries are generally folks who I’d call “pay check people,” living check to check. They’ve never had much money and no prospects of any, like family inheritances.

When they Win Big they’re in euphoria, of course. But they haven’t a clue how to manage their sudden windfall of seemingly endless wealth. Oh, but plenty of other “well-meaning” friends and family do!

Turns out the biggest problem that lottery winners have is simple, good-hearted generosity: giving away too much money to family and friends. Family feel especially entitled to a nice, fat chunk. And if they don’t get it…? Trouble. And once the money spigot is opened, it’s hard to stop its gush.

Financial “advisors” circle like vultures and the pickings are easy. Winners are virtually never well-educated, certainly not in financial matters. For example, they have no idea what they owe the IRS on their miraculous windfall. And being ill-educated they cannot see the difference between a brilliant investment and a monstrous scam.

And so begins the sad spiral down to the misery of bankruptcy…or worse. They almost all utter a common cry, “Oh, God, I wish I’d never won!”

  • 70% of lottery winners are broke within seven years of The Big Win.

Read the horrifying Powerball stories on Fredrick Josefsson’s fascinating Comment. [scroll down below inoperative video on NY Daily News]

Brits Colin & Chris Weir are among the few winners living-Happily-Ever-After.

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The story is much the same with professional athletes. Often from truly dirt-poor families, they are now multimillionaires. They, too, have no meaningful financial education, but they do have out-sized egos. Vulture Inc. knows how to play the flattery game.

First purchase? Without question, a vast mansion for mom so she can move out of that shack. Then a couple of homes for themselves in places like Malibu, California or Jupiter, Florida or some other gilded ZIP Code.

Pro athletes just love “foolproof” investments. Like played-out gold mines in Alaska. And they rarely fly “commercial” like you and me. No, they charter private jets such as the Gulfstream below which costs $5,000 a flight hour. That’s $60,000 from Malibu to Jupiter and back.

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Coke, cars, planes, jewelry, women, Vegas and dozens of flattering friends who magically vanish when the money does. Five or six years after hanging up the spurs, the once-proud athlete is flat-ass broke. Some end up in jail for schemes that went criminal. And, sadly, a few actually become homeless.

All this is so common, it’s a cliché. You’ve surely been to parties where people ‘cluck-cluck’ about it. There’s even a well-known German term for this happy clucking: Schadenfreude [SHAH-den-froy-da] It means happiness at another’s misfortune or humiliation—especially when that person was once rolling in $ dough $.

At the next party, Impress—or mystify—those clucking guests with this: “Oh, isn’t Schadenfreude such fun?”

Champion boxer Mike Tyson (top photo) once spent $173,706 on a gold chain, $410,000 on a birthday party. Evander Holyfield once owned a 109 room mansion with a $17,000 monthly electric bill. Once owned—but not for long.

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Alien: The Deleted Airlock Sequence – Explained

Well…..

Our snazzy grandma didn’t say a whole lot, but when she did speak, it was almost always what many people would call inappropriate.

And….

Our grandpa did say a lot, but he was even more inappropriate. So when our grandparents got together with people that didn’t know them, a whole lot of inappropriateness was inevitable, and often hilarious.

At least to us.

Even though my sister and I always did well in school, there was always some teacher or counselor that thought we were getting too close, and needed to find our own identities, or some such crap.

So….

They would bring us in with our parents to discuss the problem, but of course we didn’t think there was a problem. We knew our genealogy was a bit different than most other families, and our family tree had branches that had some very strange things living on them, but we didn’t consider that a problem in the least.

But…..

The school still would insist on occasion that we had to come in to discuss the problem, and since our parents were sick of discussing this non-existing problem, one time our grandparents offered to go with us instead.

My sister and I just looked at each other when we found out our grandparents were going together, to discuss the problem, with the teachers and counselors, because we just knew something was going to happen.

And that something was definitely going to be inappropriate.

So off we went to the school….

With our spooky, sibylline and very snazzy grandma, and giant kraken fighting grandpa, close behind us. And my sister and I both just knew that the school was in for some serious inappropriateness.

Our snazzy grandma looked like a witch, a very lovely witch, but still obviously norn. And our grandpa looked like he could go down to Múspellsheimr, and drag out Surtr by his ears.

An interesting couple.

So….

Our grandparents listened patiently to the experts talk about the problem, until one got to the part where she said that we acted like we were one person. At that point our snazzy grandma quietly replied,

“How did they know we weren’t really one person, with one soul, but with two bodies?”

That comment brought a bit of a awkward silence, but then another expert started going on about how our family should be better role models for us, and then mentioned that the other kids in school thought we were elves.

And…

Our grandma quietly replied,

“What made them think we weren’t elves?”

This made the room go silent, until the headmaster looked at our snazzy grandma, and simply said,

Norn.

There was a bit of a gasp from the teachers, and then silence.

Until…

Our snazzy grandma stood up and looked at the head counselor and said,

“I know what that shadow in the corner of your bedroom really is.”

And then….

Looked at the headmaster and said,

“And I know why you can’t make love to your wife.”

Followed by some very serious, silent, silence.

Until our grandpa suddenly got up and said that he had enough of this horseshit, and that he was going to take the norn home and have some fun, and then get shit-faced drunk.

And then looked at the teachers, counselors, and head master and said,

“How’s that for a role model?”

And as we walked on home, even though we knew the answer, my sister couldn’t resist asking our snazzy grandma why the headmaster couldn’t make love to his wife.

Grandma just kept walking, but told us to be quiet, or she was going to turn both of us into rutabagas. <3 <3

Various Vintage art

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Military Coup Underway in Bolivia

BREAKING NEWS: Military Coup Underway in Bolivia

As of 3:30 PM eastern US time today, June 26, 2024, reports are flooding-in saying a Military Coup d’Etat is taking place to oust President Luis Arce of Bolivia!

Military leader General Juan José Zúñiga reportedly has sent troops into the Presidential Palace to remove President Arce by force of arms.

Developing . . .

Imagery and videos beginning to come in from Bolivia:

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coup 3 bolivia

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Coup 1 bolivia
Coup 1 bolivia

 

Hal Turner Snap Analysis:

CIA color revolution all over it

Bolivia is one of the rare countries in South America that are trying to fight against the American colonialism and don’t want to be their puppets.

 

UPDATE 5:08 PM EDT —

Bolivian general Juan Jose Zuñiga has PUBLICLY ANNOUNCED that he has seized power after militarily taking over the Presidential Palace in La Paz.

INSIDE THE RETAIL APOCALYPSE! ABANDONED STORE CRISIS!

I was driving to work in a blizzard. there was already 4 inches of snow on the road. I was taking my time and safely following the truck ahead of me trying to keep my wheels in his tracks. I was driving a normal RWD car.

Okay, so far, so good.

A total idiot in a 4WD truck came speeding up behind me. He tried to pass me a couple of times, but almost lost control each time and flicking me the finger. I said to myself “I’m in no mood for this shit”

He tried a final time. I closed on the truck ahead of me and he tried to swerve in between me and the truck in front of me. I sped up a touch to prevent him from getting in (yes, I’m pretty upset at this point).

He tried again, and I changed the game plan. He swerved to get in ahead of me, and I lifted (took my foot off of the gas pedal), and the distance between me and the truck I was following opened.

The dork trying to pass me, hit the gas and lost control. He slid/spun between me and the truck and went straight off the road into a 20 foot ditch. I beeped and waved as I went by and kept going.

Talk about sweet revenge! I never did a thing wrong, I just made it possible for him to “learn a lesson”. When I got to work, the incident was on the radio news because the police closed the northbound lanes of the highway. When I got to work 15 minutes late, I was not docked for the time. I came from my home 80 miles away while most of the staff lived less than 5 miles away and called out. Remember this was during a blizzard! Even though it’s been 30+ years, I still grin when I think about it!

I speak High German reasonably well. As I don’t use it very often anymore, it can take me a few minutes of a conversation, or listening, to get back in the proverbial swing.

I stopped once at one of the road-side Amish food stores in Pennsylvania to scoop up some great chow. There were a bunch of other customers in before me, including some who were dressed pretty outlandishly, and some who were just being asses in general.

The two giggly teenage Amish girls working the counter were going to town, cracking wise about the “English” in their German dialect. It’s hard to follow at times, and uses some real archaic vocabulary, but once you get used to the sentence structure, that includes some pidgin English, it’s fairly clear to the casual German speaker.

I assumed the two Amish girls were a little more worldly by working in the store and interacting with the “English”, and thus were probably a little more less typically Amish in how they acted. And they were teenagers …

At any rate, when I was the last “English” in the store, and was at the counter paying for my pies and bread, I started speaking to them in German, and told them I agreed with their jokes, but that the Good Lord might send someone in from time to time to see how they were conducting business.

I took my change and bags and gave a Witchie-Poo laugh as I watched their faces turn chalk white.

Cat to the Chase

Submitted into Contest #8 in response to: Write a story about an adventure in space. view prompt

Abby Wadlington

Thirteen moons glittered down from the smog-packed sky.  Their silvery light cast ethereal glows across the glass sidewalks and streets.  The purple gas trapped below their feet danced and spun like living creatures.As polluted as Neptune was, still beauty could be found.  Of course, Ace Lowell was too busy to seek out the beauty of his home planet.  He had a job to do.His nineteenth birthday.  This had been the day he had tossed and turned over each night.  This was the day his dream was finally supposed to come true.And, up to a point, everything had worked out exactly as he had imagined.Buy a rundown apartment in downtown Neptune with every last penny in his and Zyla’s pockets.  Check.Turn said apartment in a detective business.  Check.Get his first mystery.  Check.But the whole ‘solve the clues and save the day’ part was still out on recess.  Maybe that part had never been an option at all. Maybe all hopes of fame and fortune he had envisioned for this day had abandoned him the moment he received his first case.In the old detective films Ace used to watch (alone, naturally–his parents were too busy ignoring him), a disaster shook the city.  An unexplained string of robberies. A mysterious disappearance of someone important. A grievous murder. And the detective, clad in his trench coat and sporting a magnifying glass in his hand, always sought out the clues and solved the mystery.  And everybody loved him for it.Well, Ace had the trench coat and the drive to bust crime.  What he lacked, however, was an actual crime.Darkness clung thick to the Neptunian night.  Lamplight glimmered dimly through the streets, illuminating their way.  Hands shoved in his coat pockets, Ace trudged after his partner in anti-crime, Zyla Strange.She was the reason they had been walking around like headless chickens for two hours.  Because when Ace’s first client rushed into their apartment and presented them with the most pointless, ridiculous mystery he never dreamed of asking for, Zyla jumped to the rescue as always.

His first mystery wasn’t a robbery or a kidnapping or a murder.  Instead, a little sniffling boy had waddled up to their door, snot dripping from his nose and tears pouring from his eyes as he explained that his cat had gone missing.

No, the kid didn’t have any money to pay them.  If they wanted payment, though, he’d gladly give them the unwrapped collection of Lifesaver mints collecting dust in his pajama pockets.

Ridiculous.  Utterly ridiculous.

Huffing, Ace caught up to Zyla.  The cold air blasted against his cheeks, tinging his blue skin bluer.  He tugged his coat snugly around himself. Tattooed arms bare and pierced belly button exposed, Zyla just crammed her hands in her sweatpants pockets.  She was the kind of stubborn that would outlast a bull in a headstrong fight.

“A cat,” Ace muttered for the seventeenth time that night.  “I’ve wasted two hours of my life searching for some kid’s damn cat.  Honestly, slap up some missing posters or something! We’re detectives, not pet finders.”

“We’ll be whatever we need to be,” Zyla snapped back, voice sharper than a snakebite.  Her emerald eyes cut through the darkness to glare at him. “So this isn’t your ideal picture of a first mystery.  It’s still a mystery, Ace! And if we can help that poor boy, then we will.”

Ace sighed.  What was her deal?  Ever since he had found her huddled in a Neptunian alleyway two years ago, she had acted like the planet was one big charity case.  If someone tripped, she was there with a wad of bandages. If someone frowned, she went out of her way to brighten their day. If someone so much as sneezed, she made sure to bless them.

Maybe it was a Uranian thing.  Then again, nobody in the universe had ever been on Uranus.  The planet was an impenetrable force the galaxy had been trying to break into for centuries.  How Zyla even left Uranus, she had never said.

Beside him, Zyla drew a sharp gasp.  Ace followed her gaze in time to see a striped gray tail vanish around the corner.

Without a word, Zyla took off, violet cornrow braids flying behind her.  Ace hesitantly followed.

The moment he rounded the corner, he found it.  There, in the shadow of a Starbucks, sat a gray tabby cat.  The feline glanced up at them with intelligent blue eyes. Meeting the creature’s gaze, a shudder passed down Ace’s spine.  The cat seemed strangely human-like.

Zyla turned to him with a cheeky smile.  “See? Not a complete waste of time! We found the cat.  Mystery solved!”

“Great.  Grab the creepy cat and let’s go to bed,” he muttered back.

Instead of reaching for the cat, though, Zyla stooped down and fished into her pockets.  Ace watched her, his foot tapping an impatient rhythm against the glass sidewalk.

Finally, Zyla withdrew a regular fruit bar.  The wrapper crinkled as she wrestled it open.

Ace’s eyebrows shot up to his pale hairline.  “You’re gonna feed it?”

“It’s rude to just grab the cat,” Zyla protested.  “What if it’s unfriendly and bites me?”

“Then you can blast it with your Uranian superpowers and turn it to kitty litter.  Who knows? Maybe the kid will still give us his nasty mints.”

She ignored him as she broke off the corner of the fruit bar.  Cooing at the creature, Zyla held out her offering under the cat’s nose.

The cat blinked.  Then, with unnatural speed, it swallowed the fruity piece in one lightning-fast gulp.  Ace and Zyla froze, staring at it.

Around them, the wind turned harsh, whistling across the cityscape.  Energy crackled through the air.

Ace felt the hairs at the nape of his neck bristle.  “What the hell–”

With a crack of thunder, reality cleaved in two.  A gaping hole alight with thousands of swirling, vibrant hues opened beneath his feet.  The yelp that rose to his mouth got sucked into oblivion with the rest of him.

The fall lasted both a millisecond and an eternity.  Ears popping, heart hammering, head spinning, Ace spiraled downward through the darkness.  He squeezed his eyes shut, biting back a scream.

After both a millisecond and an eternity, the ground rushed up to catch him.  Ace landed on both feet into soft crimson sand.

Wait, sand?

He looked around and discovered another world.  Red sand shifted and pooled across the ground. A light breeze plucked sandy grains from the floor and whisked them off into the night sky.  Above him hung two moons; they stared down like a pair of wide silver eyes.

Laughter poured all around him from dozens of old-fashioned wooden buildings hugging the narrow street.  The scent of whiskey hit his nostrils as a light-skinned man stumbled out a set of swinging barn doors.

Fingers curled tightly around his forearm.  Ace glanced over to find a pale-faced Zyla gawking at the horizon.  “Ace, we’re not on Neptune anymore.”

Ace took a deep breath.  His lungs stung with the cleanliness of the air.  He gulped another breath, intoxicated with the feeling.  Never had Neptune’s air been this clean. His planet’s atmosphere was all smoke and smog and ash.  And while Neptunians didn’t need oxygen to breathe, Ace had always secretly wondered what clean air tasted like.

In all his nineteen years of living, Ace had never set foot off Neptune.  He never had enough money to take a vacation from his home planet, and his parents could care less about showing their son the Milky Way.  With thirteen older sisters, it felt like Ace wasn’t even there. His parents didn’t have the time to notice him. With an earth-shattering mystery, he had hoped to change all of that and finally snatch their affection.

Instead, he had found a cat.  A snack-stealing, planet-hopping cat.

“Mars,” he whispered.  “We’re on Mars.”

“So cool,” Zyla breathed back.  After a second, though, she shook her head.  “We’ve got a job to do. We can’t get distracted.”

“Zyla, the cat made a freaking portal that took us to Mars.  How can we not get distracted?”

He glanced down, searching for the unusual feline.  At his feet, however, he found only sand. Ace’s heart leapt into his throat.  If the cat’s the reason why we teleported…and we don’t have the cat…we’ll be stuck here.

Frankly, it wasn’t the worst fate they could suffer.  It wasn’t like anyone on Neptune would notice their disappearance anyway.  But from what he had read about Mars, the planet was a war-torn catastrophe waiting to happen.  He wasn’t exactly cut out for fighting.

“We need to find the cat,” he said slowly, pulse pounding in his ears.

Zyla’s lips crinkled in a smirk.  “Oh, now he wants to find the cat.  Still wishing we had gotten a more interesting first mystery?”

He skillfully ignored her.  “Can you use your powers to find it?”

“You’re kidding, right?”  Zyla held out her hands. For a second, green light sparked between her fingers.  She tucked her hands back into her pockets, frowning. “My power is to blast things, not find things.”

“Fine.  Let’s start looking then.  If that cat teleports again and doesn’t take us with it, we’re screwed.”

They took off through the streets, sand kicking up in plumes behind them.  As the buildings blurred around him and the wind howled in his ears, Ace felt the tension seeping from his body.  Running wild and free, he had never felt more alive. Like he had lived his entire life on Neptune with his eyes closed, and had just stumbled back into the light to find a brand new world awaiting exploration.

Zyla turned left down an alleyway, Ace nipping at her heels.  When she stopped suddenly in front of him, Ace nearly pitched face-first into the sand with the effort of not slamming into her back.

He peered around her shoulder.  At the end of the alleyway sat the gray tabby cat.  At its paws sprawled a single slab of sand-caked cheddar cheese.

Ace’s shoulders tensed again.  “Didn’t the portal that got us here first open because that thing ate your fruit bar?”

“Yep,” Zyla whispered back, dread weighing her voice.

“Think that if it eats something else, we’ll get sucked into another portal?”

“Most likely.”

The cat darted forward, snagging the corner of the cheese between its teeth.  Reality split open again under their feet.

Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Earth, even Pluto.  They went everywhere in the span of an hour, introduced into another culture every other minute.  Each time they caught up to the cat, it would find a piece of food and take a bite, opening another portal that swallowed them into another world.  It was like a twisted birthday present for Ace–a free explore-the-galaxy pass through the Milky Way.

Roughly fifteen portals later, the familiar glassy floor appeared beneath Ace’s feet once more.  They popped up in the shadow of a Neptunian Starbucks–the exact point they had disappeared from.  The thirteen moons shone down on him again. He breathed in a lungful of smoggy air.

It was as if they had never left at all.  Not a single aspect around them had changed.  Looking around, though, Ace saw things in a new light.  His heart felt lighter, less shackled by worry. It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced in a long time.

Before the cat could stalk away in search of more food, Zyla swept forward and scooped the feline into her arms.  It wriggled and squirmed before finally relenting to her strong grip. She glanced down at it in a mix of anger and awe.

“I am not doing that again,” she muttered.  When she looked up at Ace, though, a smile crossed her features.  “Still sleepy? We could still squeeze in a few winks before we return the cat.”

Ace snorted.  The trip around the universe hummed through his veins like a gallon’s worth of coffee.

They began walking down the street in the direction of their apartment.  As they pushed on, Ace studied every shining edge of every skyscraper reaching up to Neptune’s night sky.  For the first time in years, it took his breath away. Why had he taken Neptune for granted this whole time?  He had been so blinded by his own ambitions of making a name for himself that he had forgotten to enjoy the world around him.

Halfway across the street, Ace stopped.  “The cat’s Uranian, isn’t it?”

Zyla paused.  In her grip, the cat reached out and batted her jaw.  She cocked her head at Ace. “Duh. It can make portals by eating, genius.  It’s not some regular house cat.”

“Shouldn’t we return it to Uranus, then?  I know it’s technically that kid’s cat, but wouldn’t the cat be happier where it’s from?”

He had always imagined Uranus as a secret paradise, a haven no outsider could ever enter.  In truth, no one knew anything about the planet. No one had ever been on it–no one except the girl and the cat in front of him.

Zyla smiled sadly.  “That’s not how it works.  Once you leave Uranus, you can’t go back.  There’s only two ways off the planet–either teleportation like this little guy probably did, or banishment.”

Ace froze.  Banishment?  

He stared at Zyla’s back as she started away.  The question he had asked ever since he first met her rose again to his lips.  “Why did you leave?”

Silence.  Like every time before, he expected the silence to ring on and on, echoing with a thousand possibilities.  Finally, though, her soft voice spliced through the night.

“That, Ace Lowell,” Zyla said, casting him the same sad smile, “is a mystery for another time.  Now come on. Let’s go save the day.”

He watched her walk away, a Uranian girl with a Uranian cat.  And gradually, when his senses pieced themselves back together again, Ace trailed after her.

Nothing about his nineteenth birthday that day had been the picturesque moment he had imagined since childhood.  His name was no closer to shining in lights. For all he knew, he could forever remain another nameless face in this vast universe.

But something about chasing that damn cat across the Milky Way had changed him.  Something about all the excitement and wonder and beauty he had experienced while racing through the galaxy resounded through his bones.  Maybe he’d never find the fame and fortune he had always wanted, or the recognition he had thought would bring him happiness.

But, step by step, he could still make a difference.  Maybe Zyla had been right all along in her passion to help others, no matter the cost.

Ace could already imagine the grin on that little boy’s face when they returned his annoying cat.  And personally, he wouldn’t trade the image of that smile for all the fame in the galaxy.

Maybe not the funniest ever but this one really cracks me up.

I get cold easily. Whenever I can get away with it, you will see me wearing a fleece-lined beanie. I own roughly a million and a half of those. But, unfortunately, I have to take them off when I go see my patients. Most of my patients are old. And many of them also get cold easily, what with all the adipose tissue they’ve lost over the decades.

This is the case for one of my current ladies. She’s in her mid 80s, and the first time I saw her, she was bundled up under a thousand and one blankets. So I shared with her that I get cold too.

“I blame it on being African.”

She chuckled.

And that was the end of the story, I thought.

There are many side effects to being old, apart from the aforementioned impaired thermoregulation: high blood pressure, lower bone density leading to a loss of height and a higher susceptibility to fractures, hair loss, impaired balance, reduced visual acuity, higher rate of cancers of all sort, arthritis, loss of bowel and bladder control, etc. Basically, getting old is a really bad idea.

But one of the side effects that is amusing for those of us who have a twisted sense of humor is that people lose their filter.

“Mister Africaaaaaah!” She shouted this the second time she saw me in her room.

I was laughing so hard, I almost collapsed on her bed.

Did she really just say that?

She had. Now she does it every time she sees me. She said it again when I popped in on her yesterday during her speech therapy session. I told her that next time I would come in a loin cloth and a spear.

Earlier today, she told me she hadn’t slept well. I told her that maybe she needed someone to tuck her in and give her a hug or something.

“Or something…” she said, suggestively.

She just passed me in the hall about a half hour ago. I was chatting with the nurses and not paying attention to the faint sound of the wheelchair coming from behind.

“There’s Misteeeeeer Africaaaaaah. Hahaha!”

The nurses did a double take, then everybody was cracking up.

“I’m going to start calling you that,” said the youngest nurse.

I tried to make a face at her but my surgical mask covered half of it. She’s too young to get away with that. Only people who have the plausible deniability of senility get to call me Mister Africa.

This Killed All But 1,000 Humans 900,000 Years Ago

For a number of years I worked with elderly people who I helped them get their financial affairs in order. It was a very rewarding job because I enjoyed talking to them. I wanted them to know that they were going to be okay as their health deteriorated. Money makes people do terrible things and I had seen it ALL!! So I still had young high net worth clients but the elderly were just more enjoyable and appreciated all the effort.

My collegeues always said ““old people just love you….I don’t understand it?” I thought it was easy to understand. I appeared to be a straight laced young man who would sit and listen to them for hours. I was respectful and did everything for them as I would want done for my grandmothers or mom. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and great uncles who helped raise me. They taught me a lot about myself and had an undying belief that I was going to go great things. That kind of faith helped me thru some very difficult times.

So to many of these elderly people I became a grandson type and looked out for them because they couldn’t do it for themselves. One of my clients was a WW2 ace who I discovered accidentally when watching a history channel show about his life. I could have listened to him for days.

When you deal with people’s money especially when they have children there is a paranoia that can create a difficult situation. What most heirs learned was that I was focused on their parents or grandparents living the life they wanted and then keeping their inheritance out of the government hands. Some objected to the way the money came to them but most often it was a lack of their understanding.

One day I was called to meet a new client that was living in terrible conditions. He had a substantial amount of money but typical in a child of the Great Depression was worried it was going to run out. Although he was admittedly different I didn’t know why in the beginning. Because he was doing odd things like dumpster diving at 83 and he wore an old electrical cord as a belt. He seemed oblivious to his own odor and lack of proper hygiene. The biggest issue was that he wasn’t caring for his home and one rather negative neighbor who had an ulterior motive called the police on him.

Most people don’t know that in many states a neighbors complaints about your lawn not being cared for or your home in disrepair can be the first steps to making you a ward of the state. Where I worked it happened often and it NEVER benefitted the individual or their heirs.

So luckily I was friends with a number of people in this neighborhood and his meals on wheels volunteer who introduced me to this man. His house was going to be condemned, and it was a real death trap. He was a hoarder and the outside of the house was terrible but inside was worse. The issue was that the land was worth a fortune.

If you had seen him you would have thought he was homeless and impoverished. He was very friendly but there was clearly an event that triggered his situation. Some of his caring neighbors tried to look out for him but it was too much. He did have a daughter but had not spoken with her for 30 years.

In order to help him I needed to get my hands on any documents he had. I drove to his house and was prepared to search through everything but the smell was so bad I could not be there for more than 30 minutes. In his state no honest attorney would work with him. He said he had a will and I needed to locate it. The next day he calls me and we meet in his bank. He is pushing a shopping cart full of documents which he gives me and then he went about his day.

I loaded my car with his papers which smelled terrible and spent the next 2 days going through them. It was after going thru the papers that I found his daughters name and general location. But I also found that he had had 2 daughters. I found an old will that referenced the 2 daughters and his wife.

When I found a death certificate I assumed it was his wife’s but I was wrong. It showed one of his daughters had been murdered. Below the death certificate was a few newspaper clippings that gave details of the incident. As I read thru them I was horrified and wanted to put them all down. As I was piecing the situation together I realized that his daughter was married to a long haul truck driver. THey were separated and one night her husband came to her fathers house while he and his wife were out. He killed her and left. When he and his wife returned home they found her body and blood was everywhere. His wife had a heart attack at the sight of the daughter and died at the hospital a few days later.

The daughters husband was picked up 5–7 days after a few states away. He plead guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. As a parent I couldn’t imagine losing a child but losing a child to murder just brought tears to my eyes.

Below the newspaper articles was a letter he wrote to his surviving daughter. I tried to be respectful in reading only what is necessary but it was impossible. I learned the deceased daughter had a son who was now living with his other daughter. For those of you who feel like I violated his trust please understand that my recommendations cannot be made without knowing all heirs, ages, relationship and situation. For this man I was going to have to get him access to a long term care home and at his state it would require some explanations.

His letter seemed to explain his struggle with what he needed to do to deal with the situation. He was a religious man and was being counseled to forgive his son in law but he couldn’t. His life changed that day and he didn’t know how to deal with it. Apparently he had encouraged his daughter to give the marriage a chance and seek counseling but his wife disagreed. He felt responsible for the outcome and it changed him so much that he seemed to be a different person to his surviving daughter. He lost his wife and daughter in that and his other daughter and grandson after. It was devastating just knowing what he had been through and I wanted to try and help him in any way I could.

He died 3 years after we met but his last 3 years were really different. He went to a very nice retirement community where his diet was controlled and helped him get healthy. He had excellent medical care and reunited with his daughter and grandson a year after we met. He was so thankful for the reunion and the relationship that he spent a lot of time with them both. He also got to meet his great granddaughter 6 months before he passed away. He wrote me a very nice note of thanks that I still have today.

When he passed away he was able to provide enough money that his daughter got to retire, his grandson got a house and his great granddaughter could go to any college she wanted. The funeral was bittersweet.

My daughter had one of these, that worked out well. She was a psychiatric nurse, working on the Crisis Team, but hoping to be able to work in the Perinatal area. Unfortunately, there was no peri natal service in that area.

One day, she happened to be in the office in the hospital. A man came in, and said “ Look, my daughter needs an inpatient mental health bed now.”

She said “ You could be right, sir, but I have just had a patient admitted to the last available one. We’ll do what we can until another becomes available”.

He said “ Do you know who I am?” She said she had no idea. He told her her was a senior politician, in the Cabinet. ( I will not name him, as he was a good constituency MP.)

She told him that, if the mental health services were not so underfunded, she probably could have helped his daughter faster. She said “ This is the sharp end of the funding decisions you make in Cabinet.” and gave him the phone number of the local private clinic. He went away, crossly.

BUT, a few weeks later she was phoned by the head of Mental Health for her county, and told that more money had been released to set up a peri natal service, and they wanted her to set it up and run it. Which is what she did. I don’t think it was coincidence that money was suddenly available. Whether or not he said “ And I want that bolshie woman who cared enough about her patients to take me to task to run it,” we don’t know. This was some years ago now, and I admire him for doing something about it.

Sesame Noodles with Thai Peanut Sauce

thaipeanutnoodles6 1022x1536
thaipeanutnoodles6 1022×1536

Thai Peanut Sesame Noodles

I love anything chinese and thai food and that is apparent on my blog. When people ask me what my favorite recipes are on the blog, it is definitely the better than take out chinese recipes. These are recipes that I make over and over again. And when you repeat recipes as a food blogger, you know that they are good.

This Thai peanut sesame noodle recipe is just it! It is light, fresh and so much flavor. I can’t get enough to it. I love the flavor combination with the sesame noodles and Thai peanut sauce. It is simple to make and only takes minutes to prepare and cook. This is perfect for a quick dinner in on a busy week night.

I couldn’t believe how amazing these noodles turned out. I devoured them! So simple and so flavorful! The combination of the flavors in the sauce coated the noodles and gave this dish such an awesome taste. My picky eater even gobbled them down and asked for seconds. This is such a simple meal that our family will be making again and again. We might try adding beef or chicken next time too!

Ingredients

  • 1 pound vermicelli or thin spaghetti
  • 3 tablespoons dark sesame oil
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 4 green onions, cut in 1/2-inch pieces
  • 1 (1 inch) piece ginger root, pared and quartered
  • 1/3 cup peanut butter (plain or chunky)
  • 1/4 cup soy sauce
  • 1/4 cup tap water or chicken broth
  • 1 tablespoon rice or white vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper

thaipeanutnoodles4
thaipeanutnoodles4

Instructions

  1. Cook spaghetti as directed; drain and rinse with cold water.
  2. Toss with 2 tablespoons sesame oil (this dish can be served cold or hot). If you want to serve as a hot dish, do not rinse with cold water; just drain.
  3. In a food processor, finely chop garlic, green onions and ginger.
  4. Add remaining sesame oil and all ingredients. Process until thoroughly mixed.
  5. Top each serving of vermicelli or spaghetti with amount of desired sauce.

Right now the only predator capable of handling feral hogs is man. And he’s an idiot if he tries it alone.

Any other predator capable of defeating the ferocity and tusks of a feral hog would be so big as to threaten man, too. Given the hogs travel in sounders, you will have a pack of tuskers attacking the generally lone predator. Good luck.

Typically hogs are trapped and then killed. If out hunting, the hogs don’t come out until the wee hours. So you need night vision. They will spook at the sound of an approaching vehicle. So you have to either be in place around dusk, and downwind of the track they’ll take, or plan on making long range shots from a well traveled road (so single car noises don’t sound dangerous).

If you hunt, you’d better have 5–6 shooters as you’ll only get 2–3 shots off before the herd scatters. That many shooters will also be a deterrent to the hogs turning on you. If alone, you can expect the hogs to attack you, and whatever thing you’re in. Don’t expect that the sides of a pickup will stop a 200-lb male from jumping in with you. Their tusks are lethal, and they’ll just eat you when you’re dead.

Typically a good trap will haul in 3–4 hogs. A sounder of them might run 30 or 40. So you need to trap a lot at once. They already know what traps look like, so avoid them. They are definitely smart critters. You need to kill off the females, as they will breed 2 times a year and pop out a fair number of piglets each time. A sounder of 4–5 males, 15 females, and the rest piglets … you can do the math.

I read of one trap where heavy horse panels were fastened together in a large circle, and the remotely-dropped gate was left open. Feed was put out. Over several nights the hogs more and more would trust the corral, and go in. Finally several nights in, the cameras indicated most all of the sounder, particularly the females were inside, and the gate was dropped. They went nuts, but the panels held. Later in the daylight the ranchers came out and shot the bunch of them. The meat is very lean, and properly prepared can feed a lot of homeless.

By trapping the entire sounder, you remove the acquired intelligence of the herd.

Let the hogs run wild, and they will destroy a field. They root for grubs, and will turn over a planted field into useless vegetation in a single night. I have a small pasture that looks like 150 small land mines went off in it. Every time it rains I can expect the hogs out in a night or two to shred the pasture again. If I were trying to grow a cash crop, I’d be much more interested in eradicating them all. Just ask this guy:

main qimg aa4cb2ff79c724a08798b68ce0e28f64 pjlq
main qimg aa4cb2ff79c724a08798b68ce0e28f64 pjlq

Puzzle Pieces are falling into place

”Goodnight Hon, love you !”

I replied “Night, love you too and thank you for the pot of soup”

We had been camping and when we got home my Mom had made a big pot of chicken soup. Only my youngest had school the next day, also had PTA open house before school started that I had to be at. It wasnt unusual that my mom didnt come out of her room in the morning while kids were getting ready for school, I know she had been up late and her TV was on. I was super busy that morning my oldest son came with me to help set up. My 14 year old daughter stayed home to sleep in.

About 2 minutes after kids went to class and I started cleaning up the food at PTA event, the office lady called the library over the intercom and said there was a call on line 2 which was odd because I had my cell phone. But it was my sister who had stopped by to check on our mom after she dropped off her son at school. Mom had had heart failure do to her illness. The emts said she had died maybe 2–3 hours sgo which was when we were all up and getting ready to leave. It was 4–6 hours later that the Neptune society arrived to pick her up. I dont remember much but I do remember thinking She died hearing the normal family life happening right outside her bedroom door and although she was alone she really wasn’t. I pray that it was comforting even just a little bit.

My Mom had been sick a long time and we were all aware this would happen eventually.

It’s been almost 16 years (July 7 2008) Man do I miss her something fierce still.

It’s fine.

It simply shows that they are unable to compete in any meaningful way.

They’re also rather poor at history.

When CRUSHING tarrifs were placed on Chinese steel, Solar panels, tyres, chips, wind turbines.

Within 10 years? China became absolutely dominant in those industries and western companies get hollowed out.

Westoids will cope with the poor quality / bad safety bullshit like they usually do until you point out NCAP ratings.

What I think will happen is this:

People in Europe will keep their ICE cars longer. As inflation ravages Europe more they’ll fill their cars up with petrol or diesel and the numbers on the pump will just get bigger and bigger. They’ll look for alternatives and see the high price tags…

Via culture videos and stuff they’ll see far more affordable Chinese EVs and think why can’t we have this? People in the USSR saw the apparently better things in western nations and thought why can’t we have this?

Quick French Bread

Quick French Bread
Quick French Bread

Ingredients

  • 1 envelope yeast
  • 2 cups lukewarm water
  • 1 1/4 tablespoons salt
  • 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
  • 5 or 6 cups all-purpose flour

Instructions

  1. Add yeast to water, then add salt and sugar. Stir until the yeast dissolves.
  2. Beat the flour into the yeast water, a cup at a time, using a wooden spoon to stir. Add as much flour as you need to make a smooth dough. Knead until smooth. Brush top and sides with oil and cover the dough with a towel. Let stand in a warm place to rise until double in bulk.
  3. Turn the dough onto a floured bread board and shape into long French loaves.
  4. Place the loaves on a baking sheet sprinkled with cornmeal and let stand to rise for 5 minutes.
  5. Slash the tops of the loaves in several places, brush them with water and place in a cold oven.
  6. Heat the oven to 400 degrees F.
  7. Place a pan of boiling water in the oven with the loaves and bake them for 45 minutes, or until crusty done.

Quick French Bread 2
Quick French Bread 2

I did it once at university. I had a student who really struggled with my class. I learned later that she was struggling in all phases of her life. But she worked hard. She did all the home work. She showed me all the different ways she tried to solve the problems. It was a programming class. She tried several ways to solve the programming projects. She was in my office every chance she had. She asked questions indicating that she had really tried to understand. The lightbulb just never came on for her. She told me she was doing fine in all her other CS courses.

At the end of the semester I totaled her grade and she was about half a percent below passing. My course was required for a degree. As I thought about it, I realized that she would never need this language after she left my class. Nobody programs in assembly anymore. I thought taking it again would not benefit her in any way. I didn’t think she would ever get it. Finally, I didn’t want to work that hard again. She wore me out and I gave her a passing grade.

A couple semesters later I passed her in the hall. She was so excited to see me. “I finally understand what you were trying to teach me!” I was skeptical, but on the other hand, I had exactly the same experience in a class as an undergrad when three weeks after the final, I finally figured out what had been dealing me fits.

“Really? Why do you say that?”

“When my Advanced Computer Architecture professor says something, it reminded me of what you were saying. Because of what you said, I understand what he is saying now.”

So, she got some benefit from my class after all. I am still glad I passed her. I hope things went well for her.

Russia is Losing its Patience and it could be Devastating for NATO | Pepe Escobar

Space Workers Unite!

Submitted into Contest #8 in response to: Write a story about an adventure in space. view prompt

Philippe Berard

SPACE NEWS BROADCAST CORP.8 PM GALACTIC NEWSBreaking News: Are the Koolman Industries Again in Violation of Space Workers Comp?Is this Another case of Space Labor Law blatant contravention?The anchorman goes on the air followed by hundred of millions of faithful audience members of the most popular space news agency.“:Dear Cast Readers,We know from the stories that came in large numbers, from Triton to Artemise, that recent cases of Space Labor Laws are culminating in a Space Class Action Lawsuit of extreme proportions.Let us introduce you to two cases that involved different settings and events, but are remarkably symptomatic of the present climate of scandals and corruption incidents in the Far Space Regional Authority.First Case Scenario:

Workers Conditions in Triton’s Meth-sea:

 

Two dinghies filled with survivors from a Triton ocean wreck derive for weeks over thousands of miles under a blasting binary sun. It is comforting to know that these dinghies are made of coated titanium with borodium reinforcements which are the strongest known materials.

The crew is composed of space shift members who got separated by an hydrogen potassium typhoon of epidemic proportions.

They had been fishing meth-fish on the HMS Essex-SpaceCargo in the middle of the methane ocean for now two months and their cargo was loaded with about a million tons of catch. This ocean (located on Tarantula 1) is a meth-sea of a color red like blood. Its inhabitants inherited the same color.

The number one rule for our meth-fishermen is that they never get into contact with the species found in that red ocean. These fishes are so toxic and life-repellant that just one bite could prove to be lethal, disintegrating or slowly consuming the victim’s flesh until they die in agony after having lost consciousness in horrific medical circumstances.

The million tons catch is then fed to the machines hidden deep in the belly of the Essex where they are cryogenized and processed for very-long term storage, up to a century. On the boat, not one fisherman has the faintest idea of the use the catch will fulfill, or if it will ever even be used at all. All they know is that they meth-fish them and get paid for their arduous work.

A crew usually is made up of around eighteen men who works in grueling shifts of one day and one night and get two days rest. They stay at meth-sea for six months or even a year. At the end of the campaign they have made about two-year salary being able to support a family of four until the next campaign. It is basically a space-version of the Alaskan fisheries of once.

The conditions are extremely harsh and a big difference with the salmon- fishboat is that falling at sea means unavoidable death and not just a bad adventure. Consequently no life jacket can be found as they are unnecessary. And that is a violation of Space Labor law. A few concerned Scientists have developed a suit that is halfway between the space suit and the deepest range pressurized deep underwater suit. But it can only guarantee a short period of survival until the rescue teams have arrived at the place of distress. If the survival unit doesn’t get there in time, the workers will just have a very bad day.

The crew we interviewed last week were exemplary in the matter. They ran into the largest meth-fish bank ever encountered counting five millions of tons of catch. They were all happy and started to work. But that is when the archetypal monster, a gigantic star sea monster came down on them: a gigantic alien Moby Dick type sea monster called the Suburt’na by the natives, the ones with the red color.  On Earth the most likely predator to use as a comparison would be the Carcharodon megalodon.

The giant creature destroyed their space-pressurized meth-fishing boat in twenty minutes and killed a number of men. Not one of them was covered by any life insurance policy because their employer hasn’t deemed it necessary.

Thanks to the ensign’s courageous audacity (that cost him his life), they managed to put their unsubmersible dinghies at meth-sea and escaped. They begun a long derive on the meth sea for weeks trying to reach out with distress calls which were not heard. Now the men on board are slowly going astride on the vast ocean perhaps three times larger than the earthly Pacific.

The meth sea port station where they came from looks a bit like an Antarctic station soon became convinced the Essex was lost at meth sea. That is the jargon used in this case. All search for the lost Cargo has been stopped.

But the Essex had not gone down yet. Aboard, the meth fishermen knew that their supplies were going low and if they were not found shortly they would surely perish by starvation. And to compound their problems the charcarodon megalodon was still out there – prowling the seemingly infinite red ocean. The creature was first thought to be a sort of primitive local version of a whale but soon turns out to be much, much worse than that…

 

 

Have you ever imagined what a meth sea in fury could look like? The meth waves are as tall as a 5 story building. Then a small speck can be seen on top of the waves. The speck is really the head of a Unit-1 robotic assembler unit, barely emerging from the meth sea in fury. It fell a few weeks earlier from the orbital station and by gravity slowly reentered the Kuranian atmosphere just to fall into the meth sea in the middle of a storm of the century. The Koolman worker stranded in the Unit-1 robotic assembler unit can survive for a week or two, depending on the type of lease he’s been subscribed into. The lease has the inconvenient drawback that the supplies are limited by the lease agreement. Basically, if you got credit for a week, your supplies, including your oxygen tank, will be limited to a week. When the week is over, you better have applied and gotten more credit line or you are out of luck.

 

 

Second Case Scenario:

Koolman’s Disregard for Workers Comp at their Industrial Space Facilities:

Dear Readers:

The Second Case we offer to your judgment is as disconcerting as the first one. It took place on the interplanetary facilities administered by Koolman during the week of May 1st to 8th.

You will be able to judge for yourself the gravity of the facts and vote at the end of this cast, in your conscience, your verdict.

 

The location is the Koolman’s Space Industries Facilities. Our unvoluntary hero is an hourly space worker. An hourly space worker in a working space suit is a worker not a hero and shouldn’t be asked to be one. John looks like a standard industrial worker, except he lives 305 years from now. His daily schedule consists of repairs, adjustments and other not so heroic jobs. He works on space stations compartments, maintenance rooms, and anything he has been assigned to, when getting his weekly schedule at the space station administration center. On a weekly basis, he could earn around 100000 new coins a month which is enough to support a family of four or six. Generally he does not want this job but has to take it to make a living. So, John once earned a PhD in magnetohydrodynamic science and hoped to get a job at the Trans-Jupiterian Consort. But that did not happen and when it was time to make a tough decision, he accepted this lower occupation for the time being. John traveled one week to the industrial complex and begun fixing space modules right away. Koolman rents the space suit to its workers. They take a large deposit and send you good to go into the neighborhoods of the largest spacepods. John’s weekly schedule begins on Sunday and is somehow repetitive but he has not lost interest when he floats in space, with the red planet in the horizon.

The inevitable happened on his fourth day of work as he was fixing a ramp located on the side of a huge depressurizer, he was hit with great force by an unknown object. Thrown at great speed into space, John was saved by an emergency landing pod in outer space that stopped his vertiginous flight. He was marooned not too far from the main planet. Workers in this area may sometimes have to spend a day in a space suit of that type in which they have most of the survival tools needed as well as food and drinks. So when John fell to what could have been his death on the surface of the emergency pod he hoped he would be found quickly and brought back to the planet orbital landing.

He also had his credit cards to buy the supplements he needed off the outlets on the emergency pod.

But after a couple of days spent on the platform John began to fear the worst as he was uncomfortably stuck in vertical position inside his space suit. All the coms had been cut off in the fly and had not been reestablished.

 

On his fifth day on the emergency pod, John sees another space suit hurled into space. and comes landing onto his already crowded emergency pod. Now John must share his already claustrophobic situation with another worker, who, like him, fell into space. John tries without success to establish a com with his unwanted neighbor. Ironically they can see each other through their visors. John knows some sign language. They can soon share the news and hope that a rescue party will come for them.

They will wait eight days, eight long days which will have now passed without any help on the horizon. John used up the last of his credits to buy the last supply of drinks and foods accessible at the outlets. He expects the card to be declined very soon. What will they do when this happens?

Fortunately a search party spotted the emergency pod on the tenth day of John’s odyssey.

 

Dear Cast Readers:

We just showed how, once again, Koolman Industries has proven to disregard the most elementary working rules and safety procedures in space and in Triton’s Meth sea. We ask you, at the end of this cast, to vote your mind about Koolman Industries. Please, be partial and vote to prevent Koolman to operate in such unfair conditions that place the lives of their workers in danger. Stop Koolman Industries before someone dies in their facilities! “

Thanks For Watching! Good Evening.

(Music. Holo Cameras span the Theater)

In San Francisco. I was helping a good friend, and myself, by being an extra housekeeper at a hotel that is very close to the airport. A huge conference was hosted there for four days. The place was booked. It was a neverending cycle of cleaning the rooms and changing linens. One time I was cleaning up an especially gross room. Luckily for me, it was the last one on my list. It took about half an hour to clean the bathroom. It seemed like a person bypassed the toilet and chose to vomit in the tub. I got it cleaned up and disinfected. The bed wasn’t too bad. I just had to strip it and put fresh linen on. I found a hundred dollar bill on the nightstand along with an apology for the mess. I emptied the trash cans and started vacuuming. As I was checking things over to be sure I didn’t miss anything, I found a manila envelope wedged between the bed and nightstand. There wasn’t anything written on the outside. Inside, I found five small plastic bags. Inside of each one was what looked like Susan B Anthony coins. I stuck them in my apron and finished up. On my way out I went to the security desk and turned it in. A couple of days later, I returned to payroll for my check. Before I left I was told the supervisor wanted to speak to me. It turned out that the coins I had were collectors. Each coin had a fault on it. Things like the figure facing the wrong way or the date was off. What I thought were just ordinary coins were actually worth thousands of dollars. I asked why they were in an envelope and not in a safe or lock box. The owner thought he would be able to keep them safe on his own. So, my honesty netted me an envelope with a thank you note. It also included fifteen hundred dollars.

Kallas replaces Josep. US contractors in Ukraine. Austin calls Belousov. Macron wants to call Putin

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BREAKING! BRICS in America’s Backyard: Venezuela Officially Announces To Join BRICS!

“Do you remember me?”

And the old man says no. Then the young man tells him he was his student, And the teacher asks:

“What do you do, what do you do in life?”

The young man answers:

“Well, I became a teacher.”

“ah, how good, like me?” Asks the old man.

“Well, yes. In fact, I became a teacher because you inspired me to be like you.”

The old man, curious, asks the young man at what time he decided to become a teacher. And the young man tells him the following story:

“One day, a friend of mine, also a student, came in with a nice new watch, and I decided I wanted it.

I stole it, I took it out of his pocket.

Shortly after, my friend noticed the his watch was missing and immediately complained to our teacher, who was you.

Then you addressed the class saying, ‘This student’s watch was stolen during classes today. Whoever stole it, please return it.’

I didn’t give it back because I didn’t want to.

You closed the door and told us all to stand up and form a circle.

You were going to search our pockets one by one until the watch was found.

However, you told us to close our eyes, because you would only look for his watch if we all had our eyes closed.

We did as instructed.

You went from pocket to pocket, and when you went through my pocket, you found the watch and took it. You kept searching everyone’s pockets, and when you were done you said ‘open your eyes. We have the watch.’

You didn’t tell on me and you never mentioned the episode. You never said who stole the watch either. That day you saved my dignity forever. It was the most shameful day of my life.

But this is also the day I decided not to become a thief, a bad person, etc. You never said anything, nor did you even scold me or take me aside to give me a moral lesson.

I received your message clearly.

Thanks to you, I understood what a real educator needs to do.

Do you remember this episode, professor?

The old professor answered, ‘Yes, I remember the situation with the stolen watch, which I was looking for in everyone’s pocket. I didn’t remember you, because I also closed my eyes while looking.’

This is the essence of teaching:

If to correct you must humiliate; you don’t know how to teach.”

BREAKING: Military Coup in Bolivia

As soon as Bolivia tries to join BRICS+, the United States starts a coup.

What A View

Submitted into Contest #8 in response to: Write a story about an adventure in space. view prompt

Josh Hagen

Commander Lance Gilmore and Lieutenant Drew Adams touched down near the Sea of Serenity. Boosters kicked up clouds of lunar dust as they signaled Huston. It had been a very long trip and the astronauts were eager to set foot on Earth’s closest neighbor.

Commander Gilmore signaled Earth, “Huston, this is Lunar Five. We have touch down.”

“Copy Lunar Five. That’s great news. You’re clear to have a look around.” Houston signaled back.

After a decade of budget finagling and technical leaps, man was once again traveling to the moon. The plan was to use a series of new missions to the moon to prepare astronauts for the

first manned mission to Mars. It was a solid long term strategy put in place as governments finally came together to begin more far-reaching manned exploration.

“It’s still hard to believe we’re really here.” Lieutenant Adams said while he wrapped up the landing routine.

Commander Gilmore was fidgeting in the new generation space suit eager to explore the grey landscape. “It is something. And in a minute, we’ll set foot where only a few have before.

Having finished their last safety checks, the pair were pressurizing the air lock.

The sun glared down upon the barren landscape as the exterior hatch of Lunar Five cycled open. Commander Gilmore stepped down onto the fine moon dust with Lieutenant Adams right behind.

“How’re you two doing down there?” Lieutenant Melissa Sloan called down from the orbiting shuttle.

“Everything’s peachy down here. How are things up there? Any traffic?” Commander Gilmore asked with a grin while he looked around.

“Smooth sailing up here. You boys are having all the fun. I feel like the designated driver.”

“So you’re saying you miss us?” Lieutenant Adams asked playfully.

“Don’t get your hopes up Adams.” They all laughed. Everything was going as predicted. Their experience on these new lunar missions would be used to finalize an international mission to the red planet.

That’s when the shockwave hit. All at once Gilmore and Adams were slammed to the ground by some force from above. Without missing a beat Commander Gilmore called to Sloan, “Gilmore to Sloan, report!”

Static. Then a muffled voice, “…to Gilmore…unknown impact…boosters to compensate…”

More static. And silence. Getting back to their feet, Adams and Gilmore looked at each other then up to wherever Lieutenant Sloan was.

“Sloan, come in. Are you all right? Status.”

After too many seconds to count, Sloan replied. “I’m alright sir. Something hit me like a ton of bricks. Took me a while to compensate. I’m glad these suits come with their own diapers.”

Commander Gilmore smiled, “Agreed. Run a diagnostic and see if you can get some info from Houston.” Gilmore paused as Adams started to tap him on the shoulder lightly, then much harder.

“Adams, what is it?” Gilmore could see Adams pointing up.

Before he could look up he heard Sloan screaming over the com, “Noooo!”

“Sloan! What is it? Are you alright?”

Adams forcefully turned his commander around and pointed up. Commander Lance Gilmore looked up to see the Earth shattered into pieces. At first it didn’t register. Sloan’s panicked cries faded away as the realization of what he was seeing started to sink in. He dropped to his knees dumbfounded. Adams still staring up at the nightmarish sight. Sloan continued to scream.

“God.” was all he could utter.

Then he started to hear a countdown. Adams pulled him to his feet.

Sloan was still screaming, but it was instructions. “Debris inbound! Estimate impact in thirty seconds! You’re best bet is north! I’ll keep you updated as long as I can!”

“Sloan?” Commander Gilmore started but Adams pulled him into a leaping jog. The best any astronaut could do on the moon.

“Ten seconds until impact. Commander Gilmore, Lieutenant Adams, it was an honor.” Then she chuckled to herself. “I really wanted to walk on the m…” Her sentence was cut off.

Both Gilmore and Adams knew what that meant and they didn’t stop running. Around them little puffs of dust started to pop up from the surface. The impacts gave no noise, their own panicked breaths was all that filled their ears.

To their left was an explosion of dust as something big hit. Was it the shuttle? A satellite? A chunk of earth? More and more impacts came down all around. Some too close for comfort. They ran hard until one impact landed right behind them throwing them forward and away from one another. Commander Gilmore’s vision went hazy as he nearly lost consciousness.

He raised himself to all fours. The lunar dust that had nearly buried him pouring off his suit like filthy bathwater. Slowly he got to his feet.

“Adams? You there?” He looked around. “Lieutenant?”

“Sir?” Not far away he could see Adams gingerly rising up from a nearby impact crater. His suit completely grey from dust.

Commander Gilmore made his way over to the lieutenant and helped him back to his feet. They looked each other over and paused.

“Sir…Earth?” The two astronauts looked up to see the shattered pieces of their home drifting slowly apart.

“What the hell happened?” Commander Gilmore asked to the sky above them. As if in response, from the blackness a ship appeared. Then another. Then many, many more. Each ship was enormous. They were the size of countries – what used to be countries. Multiple ships flew about in practiced unison hauling away pieces of the astronaut’s former planet to who knows where. In no time at all there was nothing left. That’s when things started to get weirder.

Both men stared up in silent disbelief as more ships showed up. These flew much closer to the moon and were hauling large glistening components. The spaceships danced together connecting this long antenna-like object to this blinking cube. They strung together countless miles of thick cable from one gigantic piece to another, then encasing the inner workings in even more components. On and on it went as the object started to come together. It took on a cylinder shape with a large flat screen down its center. In literally minutes the multitude of ships had assembled what could only be an enormous space station. And then, the enormous screen turned on. The astronauts were greeted with images of aliens. And the aliens were, playing games? And what seemed to be, betting?

“Is that…” Adams started.

Gilmore finished lieutenant’s thought, “a fucking casino?”

Bright pops of energy suddenly appeared overhead as ships of all sizes, shapes and alien configurations began to dock with the station. The two men took a few steps back as several other ships broke off from the group and started to approach the moon’s surface.

“Commander?”

“I see them.” Commander Gilmore tensed as he saw the approaching ships, but also as he viewed his O2 display. It was redlining. There wasn’t much he could do if these ships decided to attack. They couldn’t fight. And they couldn’t run.

As the ships came closer, they spread out and flew over the surface. Actually, it was hard to call them ships. They were very blocky, almost like trailer homes or rv’s. They hissed gasses and blasted their landing jets. One set down just twenty feet away. Parts of it unfurled and

slammed into the ground just in front of them. The structure continued to shift and assemble itself revealing a strange opening bordered with blinking lights. The entrance was glassy; not an airlock that either men were familiar with. The opening more resembled looking through a thin wall of liquid. Above the place, holographic alien lettering popped up.

The two of them looked at one another.

“I’m almost out of air sir.” Said Adams.

“Me too.” Commander Gilmore agreed.

They looked back at the building and moved forward. As they reached the entrance, Gilmore extended his arm and touched it. His hand went right through. He didn’t feel anything and when he pulled his hand back the entrance quivered like a soap bubble.

The two astronauts walked cautiously through the barrier and looked around. A chime could be heard as they emerged inside. The floor was patterned in black and white checkerboard. Booths lined the walls, though some seats were very strange. The place had a very alien, yet familiar feel to it.

From the back of the place wobbled over a somewhat humanoid alien. The best way to describe it would be to ask someone to imagine if a walrus and a chihuahua had a baby. This lumbering creature clad in colorful metallic overalls eyed them with its oversized twitchy pupils. It paused and placed the orange boxes it was carrying on the floor. The creature walked slowly over to them. It placed its meaty fists on its sides and bubbled out something which the two astronauts assumed was its way of asking what the hell they were doing there.

Commander Gilmore held up his hand in greeting. But before he attempted to speak Adams started to wheeze.

“Commander…” Adams began before he fell to one knee.

“Adams!” Gilmore could also see the warning lights flashing on his heads up display.

Gilmore looked up to the creature not knowing if it would understand anything. Would they die there? The creature seemed to, roll its eyes? It moved back to where it came from. Gilmore held Adam’s hand as he felt himself getting lightheaded as well. Then something grabbed his helmet and yanked it off. Strange smells engulfed his nose and his lungs started to burn. This was definitely not air he could breathe. The creature hit the release on Adams helmet and yanked that off as well. Adams gagged and wheezed. There was something slapped onto the

back of both of their heads. Hoses zipped around, up their noses and over their mouths. They were soon breathing easily again.

The creature held out six small metal spheres. It pointed to their ears and their mouths. They took the twitchy metal marbles and gave the creature a puzzled look. It grunted almost irritatedly and pointed to the balls, then to the men’s ears and mouths. They slowly put the tiny metal things against their ears. The spheres grew legs and ran up their ear canals. The sensation was shocking and quickly their ears were ringing sharply causing them pain.

The creature burbled again, but now they could understand it. “Can you little pink idiots understand me yet?”

The two humans nodded weakly.

“Good. Now swallow the other two so I don’t have to put up with your weird squeaking.” It said crossing its flipper arms.

Gilmore and Adams did what the creature demanded and again there was a lot of pain.

“That hurts!” Adams blurted out.

“Of course it does. Translation bots have to burrow into your flesh to work correctly.” The creature said matter of factly. “Now, what are you two doing here? My place doesn’t open for another day.”

Commander Gilmore couldn’t take any more. “What the hell do you mean?” He bellowed advancing on the much larger being. “You blew up our planet! You killed everyone we know! The two of us are the last human beings in existence.” He was pointing accusingly between this creatures bulbous eyes.

“Easy there little guy. I didn’t kill anybody. If you’re talking about the little blue planet that was broken up. It was purchased by the Orion Gambling Federation giving them rights to set up an operation in this sector.” The creature’s flipper arms were flapping away as it explained.

“What the hell are you talking about? How could they buy our planet? There were over seven billion people living there!” Gilmore’s finger was now shaking.

“Happens all the time. Listen, you’re from a younger planet with a very young race so I can understand how all of this is shocking. You just lost everyone you knew. Your home is gone. I get that.”

The two astronauts stood dumbstruck. Earth was bought, destroyed and replaced with a casino.

“Gone.” Adams whispered.

Gilmore put his hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder. Adams swept it away.

“We’re nothing to them. To that!” Adams pointed at the large alien in front of them.

“Hey.” said the offended creature.

“Easy now lieutenant.” said Gilmore trying to calm his friend.

Adams stood still and looked off into the distance.

“What does it matter?”

Gilmore tried to grab his friend before he ran through the barrier to the cold vacuum outside, but could not. The commander fumbled for his helmet and jammed it on his suit, clicking it into place. He grabbed the other helmet and ran out the barrier. Gilmore reached the

lieutenant and was about to place the helmet on his friend, but stopped. Adams was kneeling in the grey dust looking skyward with lifeless icy eyes.

Gilmore slumped to the ground, his helmet’s O2 sensor blaring. Maybe Adams was right. What does it matter. The moon became blurry then black.

Commander Gilmore was awakened by enjoyable singing, and, an electrical shock.

“Aaah!” he yelped.

“Quiet down.” said the irritated alien as it poked at him.

“You’ll be fine so long as you don’t go back out there without your suit refilled. The device I gave you only alters available air into what you need. Doesn’t work in a vacuum.”

Gilmore sat up, “Good to know.” Then he remembered.

“Adams!”

“Yeah. Your friend didn’t fair so well. Too much damage.”

Commander Gilmore put his head in his hands.

“Hey, don’t worry buddy. You can get him fixed up after you earn enough.” the large creature smiled. At least Gilmore thought it was a smile.

“Fix him? But he’s dead? He…” Gilmore stopped in mid sentence when he saw his friend’s head floating in front of him. Wires and tubes were connecting Adam’s head to a device that appeared to be a floating speaker. The lieutenant’s head was singing a song Gilmore had never heard before.

The Commander jumped to his feet in both horror and disgust.

“What did you do to him?” Gilmore shouted.

The bulbous creature put up its hands, “Calm down. Your friend’ll be fine once you earn enough to fix the damage.” The being glanced at the head and shrugged.

“As for separating his head, I thought it would help.”

Gilmore, enraged, shoved the big alien. Its blubbery belly shook.

“How the hell is that supposed to help?”

The being looked confused and then said, “Oooh. I see. Yeah, I suppose that seeing your buddy’s head cut off would look odd to you.”

Commander Gilmore was about to blurt out something when the alien cut him off.

“Your friend’s in stasis. His body’s in a pod out back.”

Gilmore still had a shocked look on his face so the alien continued.

“Listen pal, to fix up your ‘Adams’ after going out into a vacuum is expensive. Believe it or not, removing his head isn’t a big deal. Orion medicine is way out there. They can fix pretty much anything.”

“But why is his head on that floating…thing?”

“Well,” it began, “While the two of you were out I got to thinking. I said to myself, ‘Hey Yorble’, that’s my name by the way thanks for asking. I said, ‘Hey Yorble.’ You need some help in your new place don’t you? Why not use these two?’”

Gilmore blinked a few times trying to process all this.

Yorble continued, “I figured you could take customer orders and bus the tables. Though your friend’s options were more, well, limited.”

Gilmore looked over at his friend’s floating, and singing, head while Yorble continued.

“I thought, what can I do to bring in customers at my new location?” The alien paused for dramatic effect.

“Entertainment! Your buddy would make for a great jukebox.”

Commander Gilmore felt his legs get shaky so he sat at a booth.

#

Six months later, Commander Gilmore was bussing a table where a couple of Flamorians had just sat. He would need the hard scrubber to remove the slime. If he didn’t, it would start growing.

“Order up!” yelled Yorble.

Gilmore walked around a spherical Robotobo and picked up the order of fried tuskart with a side of baked vinatoes. He figured the furry little Boofax at table three ordered it.

After dropping off the order, Commander Gilmore looked over at the crowd gathered at the front of the cafe. The various aliens cheering as decapitated Adams sang a song that sounded a lot like Blue Suade Shoes. Adams was a hit and Yorble made sure Gilmore received all the tips left for the floating head. The funds were really mounting up. When he first started, Gilmore thought it would take ten years to save up the astronomical sum required to bring Adams back from near-death. But with Adam’s popularity, it may only take two.

With all the extra funds, Gilmore had been able to treat himself. The orbiting casino turned out to be not that bad after all. It was a great stress reliever. When he first started going, he would spend a night there once a week, tops. Nowadays though

it’s become two or three a week. The Commander really enjoyed the gambling.

Feeling the weight of the tip money filling his pocket, Gilmore glanced over at his friend floating amongst the aliens. Adams seemed to look back at him.

“Maybe we could wait a little longer before we get you fixed up Adams. After all, you’re not going anywhere.”

Sergey Lavrov’s BRICS Announcement: No New Members for Now

Every time a new member nation tries to join BRICS+, the United States attacks it. Color revolutions, coups, sanctions, outright and direct wars are the norm.

Now the existing BRICS+ members are setting up defense “antibodies” to counter United States efforts before future announcements. Oh, it seems like a slowing down, but it is a pause and an adoption of strong strengthening measures.

Pepperoni Pizza Bread

The dough for this one is an adaptation from an Oregano Bread recipe that I found in The Bread Machine Cookbook #1. I’ve made a lot of these over the years for family get-togethers, potluck and holidays. It’s always one of the first things to disappear from the table, and so my boys usually beg me to make a second loaf to leave at home for them to devour unchallenged.

pepperoni pizza bread 03
pepperoni pizza bread 03

Ingredients

Dough

  • 1 1/4 cups lukewarm water
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 1/4 cup grated Parmesan, Romano or blended cheese
  • 1/2 tablespoon dried oregano
  • 1/2 tablespoon dried basil
  • 2 teaspoons onion powder
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 2 tablespoons chopped sun-dried tomatoes or 1 tablespoon tomato paste
  • 1/3 cup nonfat dry milk powder
  • 3 cups bread flour
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons yeast

Filling

  • 1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
  • 1 to 1 1/2 cups (approximate) mozzarella cheese
  • 12 to 16 ounces sliced pepperoni
  • Dried oregano, basil, onion and garlic powder

Also Helpful To Have Handy

  • A small bowl of lukewarm water
  • One or two large thin-bladed spatulas
  • A large wire rack for cooling
  • Clean cookie sheet, cutting board or cardboard flat if transporting

Instructions

  1. Please follow the instructions in the booklet for your bread machine for best results. The order in which to add ingredients may vary per manufacturer.
  2. Grease or spray a heavy cookie sheet or jellyroll pan and dust with cornmeal. When dough is done remove from breadmaker and roll out on a well-floured surface into a long rectangle a little shorter than your baking sheet. Spread with tomato paste just to within 1 inch of the edge all around. Sprinkle tomato paste with herbs and spices and then mozzarella cheese. Lay slightly overlapping slices of pepperoni over all. Roll up carefully from the long sides as you would a jellyroll. Wet the seam and ends and gently press and smear them together.
  3. Lift carefully supporting the middle and place seam side down on prepared sheet. Let rise about 15-25 minutes while preheating the oven to 350 degrees F.
  4. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, until top is well-browned and bread looks done.
  5. Don’t be alarmed if it springs a leak and oozes – it’ll still taste great. It will stick in that spot but the spatula(s) will help get it off the sheet. Cool on the sheet until you can handle it and then carefully loosen it from the pan and slide it onto a wire rack to cool enough to wrap. It can be wrapped warm in aluminum foil, and I usually do it that way so that it s still a little warm when I get to my destination. A cookie sheet or cardboard flat underneath makes it much easier to transport without bending and cracking it – it tends to be soft when warm.
  6. Cut into 1 1/2-inch slices and watch it disappear!
  7. Store leftovers in the fridge – if you ever have any. I never do!

Notes

Reviewed by mes16121 Tuesday Dec 6th, 2005 08:03 pm.

I made this tonight I have to tell you that this is SO YUMMY! I added some extra toppings…peppers, onions and chopped mushrooms. The bread baked so pretty…did not crack at all! The bread itself was so soft! It was gone in no time! My family wants me to make this at least once a week. Thanks for posting this wonderful recipe!

If you bake bread, you should have this commercial dough conditioner.

Attribution

Posted by cuteascountry_Shortcake at The Cutting Board (Recipe Goldmine) Thursday Oct 20th, 2005 10:35 pm.

This delicious and cheesy pepperoni pizza bread is a delicious twist to the classic pizza recipe. Made with hoagie rolls and fresh mozzarella cheese, these individual pizza breads are sure to please all the pizza lover’s out there.

pepperoni pizza bread 03
pepperoni pizza bread 03

Pizza bread is one of the most popular snacks out there. There’s a good reason for its popularity. It’s amazingly delicious! As always, I love putting a spin on a classic. You’ve probably had pizza bread made with something like Italian or French bread, but have you ever had it made with hoagie rolls? If you haven’t, then get ready for a great new way to enjoy a classic!

I used to make this delicious pizza bread variation all the time when my kids were in school. It was just one of the many recipes that my children and their friends would descend upon like locusts after school. The thing is that it’s so good, I still make it just as often as I ever did!

Pepperoni Pizza Bread

I begin this recipe by roasting my own garlic. It’s easy to do and adds so much flavor. I use it to make roasted garlic butter that I slather all over the rolls before baking them to golden, crispy perfection. This adds depth of flavor AND keeps the pizza bread from getting soggy. After that, I top the rolls with pizza sauce, fresh mozzarella cheese, and two kinds of pepperoni for the ultimate pepperoni pizza flavor. Then, I just bake it until melty and scarf it down! Oh, it’s so good.

pepperoni pizza bread 06
pepperoni pizza bread 06

Why You’ll Love This Pepperoni Pizza Bread Recipe

  • It has fresh mozzarella, mini pepperonis, pepperoni chunks, and seasoned garlic butter on hoagie rolls.
  • It’s a hearty, delicious, easy weeknight meal that the whole family will love and enjoy.
  • Add all your favorite pizza toppings.

Pepperoni Pizza Bread Ingredients

This delicious pepperoni pizza bread only uses a few simple ingredients.

  • Submarine rolls or hoagie rolls
  • Head of garlic, roasted
  • Olive oil
  • Salt
  • Butter
  • Oregano
  • Basil
  • Pizza sauce
  • Fresh mozzarella
  • Mini pepperonis
  • Boar’s Head pepperoni

pepperoni pizza bread 07
pepperoni pizza bread 07

How to make Pepperoni Pizza Bread

The recipe might sound complicated, but it really only has a couple of moving parts. In reality, it only takes a few simple steps to make.

Step 1: Roast the Garlic

Cut off the top ¼ of a garlic bulb and place it on a 5×5 piece of foil. Then, drizzle it with olive oil, sprinkle it with salt, and fold the foil up tightly around the bulb. Air fry at 390 for 20 minutes or bake at 400 for 45 minutes to an hour.

Step 2: Make the Garlic Butter

When the garlic is cool enough to handle, remove it from the foil and squeeze the garlic out of the bulbs into a small bowl. Add the softened butter, oregano, and basil and mix until combined.

Step 3: Toast the Rolls

Spread the garlic butter over the inside of the rolls and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake at 400 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown.

Step 4: Add Toppings

Remove the bread halves and spread top them both with pizza sauce, fresh mozzarella, and both types of pepperoni.

Step 5: Bake

Bake again at 400 degrees for 12 to 16 minutes or until the cheese is hot and bubbly.

pepperoni pizza bread 08
pepperoni pizza bread 08

Recipe Tips

  • Be careful not to cut too much of the garlic bulb off. You only need to cut far enough down to allow you to easily press the roasted garlic out after it’s finished cooking.
  • Fully soften the butter so all the garlic and herbs can be easily combined.
  • Be sure you cut your pepperoni into small chunks so they get hot on the inside and crispy on the outside.
  • If you decide to use another meat like Italian sausage, fully cook the meat first so it’s fully cooked and wont’ make a greasy mess of your pizza bread.

Variations

  • Use can use any of your favorite cheese varieties for this recipe.
  • Top your pizza bread with other favorites like sausage, mushrooms, green peppers, bacon, and olives.
  • Add a kick of heat with some red pepper flakes in the garlic butter.

What to Serve with Pepperoni Pizza Bread

You can make a full meal of this pizza bread, or you can serve it as part of a larger Italian-themed dinner. Try pairing it with garlic bread, cheesy bread, mozzarella sticks, cheesy bread, pasta, and the like.

pepperoni pizza bread 10
pepperoni pizza bread 10

Recipe FAQ

What is the best substitute for pizza dough?

You can use pita bread, naan, crescent dough, Italian bread, French bread, hoagie rolls, or even English muffins in place of pizza dough.

What type of bread is pizza bread?

There is no real single kind of bread used for pizza bread. Italian and French bread are used primarily, but sub rolls, hoagie rolls, and other types of bread like English muffins are also used for pizza bread.

Can pepperoni pizza bread be made in advance?

I don’t recommend making this pizza bread in advance. Although it can be reheated relatively well, it’s never as crunchy, melty, and delicious as it is when it’s straight out of the oven.

What’s the difference between pizza crust and bread dough?

While both pizza dough and bread dough are made with salt, water, oil, and flour, the ratios are quite different to achieve their different goals. Bread dough is designed to rise high and has more water content than pizza dough which is intended to rise but not nearly to the level of bread dough.

Can you freeze leftover pepperoni pizza bread?

Pizza bread freezes well and will last for up to 3 months when stored correctly.

pepperoni pizza bread 02
pepperoni pizza bread 02

How to Store and Reheat Leftover Pepperoni Pizza Bread

Refrigerate this pizza bread in an airtight container for up to 3 days. For longer storage, wrap it in a double layer of plastic wrap and a layer of foil and place in the freezer for up to 3 months.

To reheat, place the pizza bread on a baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes or until the cheese is melted again.

Try This Delicious Pepperoni Pizza Bread Recipe Today

This pepperoni pizza bread is as easy to make as it is delicious. Even roasting the garlic is a snap! With so much buttery, garlicky, pizza-licious flavor, this is one of the best pizza bead recipes you’ll ever make. Try it just once, and you’ll be hooked. It’s perfect for almost any occasion so give it a go!

pepperoni pizza bread 01
pepperoni pizza bread 01

Vet Hugs Dying 15-year-old Cat. A Minute Later, Something Totally Unexpected Happens!

”Goodnight Hon, love you !”

I replied “Night, love you too and thank you for the pot of soup”

We had been camping and when we got home my Mom had made a big pot of chicken soup. Only my youngest had school the next day, also had PTA open house before school started that I had to be at. It wasnt unusual that my mom didnt come out of her room in the morning while kids were getting ready for school, I know she had been up late and her TV was on. I was super busy that morning my oldest son came with me to help set up. My 14 year old daughter stayed home to sleep in.

About 2 minutes after kids went to class and I started cleaning up the food at PTA event, the office lady called the library over the intercom and said there was a call on line 2 which was odd because I had my cell phone. But it was my sister who had stopped by to check on our mom after she dropped off her son at school. Mom had had heart failure do to her illness. The emts said she had died maybe 2–3 hours sgo which was when we were all up and getting ready to leave. It was 4–6 hours later that the Neptune society arrived to pick her up. I dont remember much but I do remember thinking She died hearing the normal family life happening right outside her bedroom door and although she was alone she really wasn’t. I pray that it was comforting even just a little bit.

My Mom had been sick a long time and we were all aware this would happen eventually.

It’s been almost 16 years (July 7 2008) Man do I miss her something fierce still.

Ukraine SitRep: State And Military Continue to Deteriorate

The Ukrainian state and its military are falling apart.

Under the new mobilization law the Ukrainian military is said to recruit/mobilize some 5,000 men per day. This is sufficient to replace current losses which are above 2,000 men per day. But the quality and level of training the new forces have is way below the level needed to survive on the frontline.

Losses are high because the mass use of Russian FAB glide-bombs is eliminating all identified agglomeration of forces. Ukraine has found no way to counter these.

For lack of armored vehicles several of the new brigades which were supposed to be mechanized will be pure infantry forces. They will be able to hold positions until they are bombed but will not have the means to attack.

The high rate of mobilization has led to a lack of men power in the rest of the society. Agricultural and industrial productions are down. People who can afford to do so avoid taking jobs for fear of being identified for military service. Others attempt to flee abroad (machine translation):

In the Odessa region, an attempt to illegally travel abroad was stopped by 100 men at once. They had to cross the border on foot and paid from 5 to 18,5 thousand dollars for this.This is reported by the State Bureau of Investigation.

In revenge for Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure the Russian forces continue to dismantle Ukraine’s capacities. The electricity network is on the verge of falling apart. Electricity is only available for 10 hours per day. A few Russian hits on those switching stations which receive supply from Europe could finish it off.

The Ukrainian state is bankrupt:

Figures vary, and the Ukrainian government is increasingly coy about releasing economic data sets, but the Ukraine’s economy is currently around $180-190bn in size. To put that into context, that is around 11 times smaller than Russia’s economy and 131 times smaller than the US economy.

According to politico, Ukraine borrowed $58bn in 2022, $46bn in 2023 and is set to borrow $52bn in 2024. So, in just three years, Ukraine will have borrowed 82% of GDP.Ukraine needs to borrow this much because its government spends almost twice as much each year as it receives in income from taxation and other sources.

The Central Bank of Ukraine is trying to help by devaluating its currency. Over the last six month it lost about 10% of its value. The further ‘printing’ of money, which will heat up inflation, is expected.

Private lenders continue to ask for repayments of loans:

Ukraine has suffered a setback in its quest to complete the outline of a debt restructuring before the end-of-August expiry of a two-year payment freeze agreed by private holders of near $20 billion in outstanding international bonds.The government announced on Monday it had not reached agreement with a group of bondholders, raising the specter that the war-torn country might slip into default.

The blame game for the worsening of Ukraine’s military positions is costing the jobs of more commanders (machine translation):

Against the background of the continuing difficult situation for Ukraine at the front, public criticism of the AFU command is growing.MP Mariana Bezuglaya again spoke out against Commander-in-Chief Syrsky. She said that after receiving his position, he could not “go beyond” outdated management methods and became “even more authoritarian”.

“In this stressful situation, against the background of this huge responsibility, he has become even more authoritarian, increasingly tightening the screws and returning to the so – called classic techniques of the Soviet army,” Bezuglaya said in an interview with journalist Natalia Moseychuk.

She bases her opinion on messages that come to her from the military.

Recall that the People’s Deputy began to actively “wet” the commander-in-chief, as she had previously done with Zaluzhny, who was later dismissed.

However, in addition to Syrsky, she criticizes much harsher Yuriy Sodol is the commander of the Joint Forces and the Khortytsia group, which operates in the Pokrovsky direction (where the AFU has been losing ground most actively in recent months).

A number of activists like Serhiy Sternenko are also in solidarity with Bezugla in their antipathy to the general.

And yesterday the campaign against Sodol was joined by the chief of staff of” Azov ” Bogdan Krotevich. He said that he had filed an application with the State Bureau of Investigation against the Ukrainian general for committing “war crimes”.

Yesterday evening Sodol was replaced by a former leader of the 36th Marine Brigade who’s track record is in no way better that Sodol’s.

Syrski will be the next to fall.

The Russian forces now have the men and equipment to largely overrun the Ukrainian lines. But doing so would cost a significant amount of casualties. They are therefore just waiting for the Ukrainian army to exhaust itself and to fall by its own means. Only after a large scale breakdown of Ukrainian defenses will the order be given to proceed.

 

 

Posted by b at 11:26 UTC | Comments (265)

A train wreck named Mary

This happened to us driving a brand new Volvo on the “Freeway” headed south from Paris a long time ago. My friend was driving at high speed, took his foot off the accelerator, and… nothing happened. He started panicking. Being the resident engineer, I calmly told him to put it in neutral and kill the engine. He then coasted off the highway onto the shoulder. I popped the hood and diagnosed the problem. The accelerator linkage had broken. I was able to do a temporary repair which got us to Lyon, where a Volvo dealer replaced the parts with profound apologies. Even in France.

Addendum – Commenters are correct that 1. You do NOT want to remove the keys or do anything to lock the steering wheel. 2. You will lose power assist on steering and brakes if you kill the engine. But brakes and steering are designed to still work, they will just require more effort without the power assist. And the emergency/parking brake will not be affected at all. In the story I told above, my friend had no trouble controlling/steering/stopping the car with the engine off. Of course, different cars will behave differently. Knowing your car’s capabilities and limitations is always helpful in an emergency. We used to practice skids in snowy empty parking lots. Knowing what to do may have saved my life once when my car started spinning on an icy highway.

Southern Biscuits and Gravy

Biscuits and gravy have been around as long as this country. Born of necessity and frugality, the dish seems to have become commonplace during the Revolutionary War. Biscuits and gravy answered the need for a hearty, high-calorie breakfast for people who worked hard, but didn’t have much money on hand.

Why Biscuits And Gravy?

The milk-based gravy was used to stretch the meat, and biscuits themselves could be made with a variety of fats. Butter was the preferred fat, particularly if the family had a cow or ready access to dairy; and if not, lard or drippings were frequently used. At first, biscuits were nothing but hard tooth-breaking lumps of flour and water, but eventually they evolved into the light and flaky tender-crumb variety made with baking powder that we enjoy today. Popular across the country, this dish is a particular favorite in the Southern United States, and you’d be hard pressed to find a restaurant where it wasn’t on the menu.

Proper Southern-style biscuits and gravy begin with homemade buttermilk biscuits. If you are planning to make this dish with grocery store biscuit dough in a pressurized cardboard tube, you will be sacrificing flavor and texture (not to mention authenticity) for convenience. As for the gravy, it will only be as good as the sausage you use. Buy a bulk breakfast sausage that you like, one that’s well seasoned, and has a decent ratio of fat to lean. Avoid the budget varieties that are almost all fat. The buttermilk you use is also important — the acidity that results from a high-quality product reacts more fiercely with baking powder, making a much lighter biscuit.

Try this authentic recipe and serve to your weekend guests — we guarantee every last bit will disappear!

biscuitsgravy
biscuitsgravy

Ingredients

  • 1/2 pound bulk pork breakfast sausage
  • 2 tablespoons chopped yellow onions
  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 2 cups hot milk
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • 1 batch Southern Biscuits

Instructions

  1. Heat frying pan and fry the sausage and onion until the sausage is brown and the onion clear.
  2. Drain off all grease except for 2 tablespoons.
  3. Stir in the flour and cook for just a minute.
  4. Add the hot milk. Stir constantly until the mixture thickens and then season with salt and pepper.
  5. Serve over warm opened biscuits.

Roman soldiers typically retired after 20 to 25 years of service. This wasn’t strictly about age, though if you started young, you’d still be relatively fit when you retired.

It was more about the length of service. The standard term was 25 years, but this could vary depending on the era and specific circumstances.

For example, during the time of the Roman Republic, soldiers were often citizen soldiers who served temporarily during campaigns and then returned home.

But as Rome’s military needs grew, especially under the Empire, the system evolved into a more professional standing army.

Augustus, the first Roman emperor, formalized this with his military reforms, setting the retirement standard at 25 years.

main qimg 4561d3c62ce77a4a7b75d0815e427092 lq
main qimg 4561d3c62ce77a4a7b75d0815e427092 lq

Now, campaigns fought and distinguished service could influence retirement, too.

A soldier who showed exceptional bravery or skill might be granted an early discharge, a sort of “thanks for going above and beyond” reward.

One cool thing is that some soldiers received land grants upon retirement.

Augustus started this trend, giving veterans land in provinces like Gaul, Spain, and North Africa. It was a clever move, rewarding the soldiers and spreading Roman culture simultaneously.

In the late Roman Empire, Emperor Diocletian made some tweaks.

The standard service term was still around 25 years, but Diocletian, always the reformer, introduced the concept of the veteranus, a sort of semi-retirement phase where soldiers could transition out of full active duty but still serve in a support capacity.

This helped maintain experienced soldiers in the ranks without overburdening them.

Also, let’s not forget the praetorian guard, the elite troops tasked with protecting the emperor.

They had it a bit cushier compared to the legions. They usually served about 16 years before retiring with full honors and a nice pension.

Their shorter service term was partly due to the intense political nature of their job, which, let’s be honest, could be just as deadly as any battlefield.

Retirement wasn’t just a pat on the back and a “see ya!” moment.

Soldiers were often given a diploma, a bronze plaque detailing their service and granting them Roman citizenship if they weren’t already citizens.

This was a big deal, especially for auxiliary troops from the provinces. Citizenship came with legal and social perks that could significantly improve their post-service life.

Top 10 80s One Hit Wonders You Forgot Were AWESOME

The Chance

Submitted into Contest #8 in response to: Write a story about an adventure in space. view prompt

Joanna White

Jexx felt his hand being gripped as if his hand was the last lifeline left. He glanced at Avill, his wife and his eyes told her more than words from his mouth could.

“Is this really it?” she asked him. “We’re really going to Earth?”

He nodded. “We have no other choice. Our home… it’s gone. We can live in peace amongst the humans… stay hidden even. It’s for the best.”

Avill bit her lip, which trembled slightly. Whether from fear or anxiety, Jexx could only guess. The Great War had finally taken its toll on their planet, just as he suspected it would. He and his wife were part of a group of only ten survivors—out of millions. Fortunately, they all looked just like humans which would make it easier for them to blend in with the humans on earth.

Loud alarms sounded so much and for so long, Jexx’s ears popped. Red flashes drained his world of color, and he closed his eyes to shield them. He could still feel his wife’s grip, and he returned it.

Voices shouted over the loud-speaker and his heart sank when he realized the ship was malfunctioning.

“What’s going on?!” Avill yelled. Her voice was just one among others worriedly shouting over all the noise.

“The blockade… one of the ships hit ours! The engine has been damaged!” one man shouted. The rebels in the Great War had finally taken over the planet’s government, which sent the whole planet into chaos. They put up a blockade of ships to trap anyone from getting out. Jexx and his group had risked it and came out unscathed.

Or so he had believed.

The ship itself violently rocked and trembled; it was as if Jexx’s whole word had turned upside down. He stood, with difficulty, and started to follow the man into the engine room.

“Jexx!” Avill shouted. Her eyes pleaded what her voice couldn’t say. They were the color of sapphires—intriguing and as deep as an ocean.

“I have to do what I can to help.” He stared back at her, his gaze steady, attempting to reassure her. He would do what he had to if it meant what little of his people were left could survive.

She nodded, seeming to understand the deeper meaning behind his gaze and no more words were needed between them. He turned and followed the man down an endless maze of hallways. Mentally, he calculated how many people were left and where they were; there were two at the cockpit—the pilot and copilot. There were two or three men at the gunners. Then there was this man along with two others in the engine room, and he remembered that Avill was with another woman and her child.

“Where is the most damage?” Jexx asked him.

The man showed him. The engine was a sublight drive, which enabled the ship to travel into deep space. The warp core, which allowed the ship to go into hyperspace, appeared to be undamaged. The engine’s IR suppressor, which kept the sensors from getting overheated, was completely shattered.

Jexx cursed. “We won’t be able to pick up readings about the world as we travel through Earth’s atmosphere,” he said.

“And with the sensors overheating there could be damage to the landing jets.”

Jexx ran down the endless hallway. If the landing jets were damaged they wouldn’t be able to land. It seemed to take too long, but finally he arrived at the back of the engine room. The sensors had already overheated.

The landing jets were useless.

He ran back toward the front part of the room and inside, the man knelt on the floor, assessing other damage.

“How close are we to Earth?”

“We’re coming out of hyperspace now,” the man replied.

Sure enough, Jexx felt the jolt that meant they had come out of hyperspace.

“Go tell the pilot we can’t land!” As the man ran off, one of the metal pipes started to fall. If it fell, the whole engine would collapse. Jexx ran over and grabbed it, using all the strength he had to hold it up.

The man returned, looking pale faced. “We’re coming in to the planet’s atmosphere now. It appears we’re going to land in some kind of body of water and we don’t have enough speed to reach land,” the man was explaining. When he looked up and noticed Jexx, he tried to help, but Jexx pushed him away.

“Get everyone out of here! Make sure they’re gathered at the hanger bay doors, ready to jump out and swim to the surface!”

“Jexx…”

“I have to stay here to hold this up to keep it from exploding or all the lives here could be lost.”

“You’ll die,” the man said, stating the obvious.

“Just tell my wife I love her. Get out of here!”

When the man left, Jexx grunted under the weight of the metal pipe, but he forced himself to hold its weight.

In those final moments, it was as if time had stopped completely. Jexx could see the parts of the engines around him, some even as tall as the buildings back home. He could smell oil and something bitter and he could taste metal in his mouth. The ship rocked and hit something hard. When the walls burst open, his ears felt as if they were splitting open as the water came crashing through. The taste of metal in his mouth turned to water and he could fill it spilling over his ankles.

His legs.

Waist.

Chest.

Mouth.

The taste consumed him and his lungs fought for hair, but he held on. He couldn’t let the pipe fall and cause the engine to explode; he had to give the others time to get out.

He could only hope he gave them enough time.

He thought of his home, of his wife and their unborn child before water consumed him and he finally gave in, finally opened his mouth and let the water swim down his throat, blocking his airway.

His last thoughts were of his wife and child, and the chance they had to live.

This is going to sound ridiculously stupid and it was. But it was the Barbie movie. That was the final snap.

My best friend and I had been friends for 15 years. We went through thick and thin together, I helped her through her parents divorce allowing her to vent uncontrollably to me about her entire life. Due to this she went through a bought of poor mental health. She didn’t come to uni so I made new friends and it was wonderful.

I still tried to keep in touch with her but I got little response so the friendship began draining me and I felt used. The only times she spoke to me now was when she needed something and it was painful but still I tried to keep the friendship. This cycle just carried on and my friends were even asking me why I wasn’t just ending the friendship as they could see the toxicity within.

Anyway, me and my group of 13 friends all arranged a nice trip to the cinema to watch Barbie. Typically the day we were going to go she turned up to uni and asked me if I had plans for the rest of the day. So, I responded with “well I’m actually planning to go to watch Barbie with everyone later. You can join if you want”. To which she responded by bursting into hysterics telling me I don’t value the friendship and I needed to put more effort into messaging her (bare in mind she didn’t message me at all) to which I got angry and expressed my feeling about feeling used etc. The argument got to the point that I said to her I just needed to go and speak to one of my other friends before I said something I may regret. At which point she physically pushed me against the wall throwing insults at me, telling me I was a horrible friend etc. I didn’t want the friendship to end but at this point the argument got to the point that it needed to end so I tried to console her. She turned the whole conversation on its head turning herself into the victim and I got angry again which I think was understandable so I walked and once again she pushed me but also slapped me straight across the face infront of all my other friends and members of the uni. It was attracting attention. At this point she just started spewing things I had told her throughout the whole friendship and I just went NEVER speak to me again and blocked her on everything. She tried chasing after me profusely apologising but I was not taking her bullshit.

I’ve felt bad ever since for leaving her during a time of hardship but the friendship was becoming really taxing in me mentally and the moment she laid hands on me I decided I would never go back.

A thirty-year old man came to see me for unexplained visual loss in one eye. I thought there was a mass pushing against his left optic nerve and ordered an MRI. This demonstrated that the mass was in fact a large aneurysm of his carotid artery against the brain.

The protocol was to send such cases to the vascular neurosurgeon who saw him the same day. He agreed on the diagnosis and ordered an angiogram to better show the aneurysm. Both the angiogram and surgery were set for the next morning. This was about 1987 and there was no way of fixing the aneurysm without open neurosurgery. We were lucky as Dr. T was world famous for his technical ability. And he was kind to allow me to come as his assistant.

The skull was opened by the resident by drilling four holes that were then connected with an electric saw that had a ridge to protect the soft brain beneath. The large skull flap was removed and the underlying dura (tough skin around the brain) cut and flapped back, exposing the brain. For the next hour the chief resident pushed and manipulated the brain to one side. And then a ridge of bone had to be drilled down for better exposure. Then we had a clear view, the juncture of the carotid and ophthalmic arteries with a big bulging arterial aneurysm coming straight up at us. Before touching this, Dr. T placed two cords around the carotids on both sides. “Just in case.” He explained.

Then, a silver aneurysm clip was slipped in behind the aneurysm and slowly released allowing the two prongs to cinch closed over the neck of the aneurysm. Only I didn’t get to see the last part. Suddenly the entire brain pan filled with blood. I was suctioning but couldn’t keep up with the outpouring of blood. The resident ripped his suction tip off and I followed suit, so we went with these hoses into the bloody opening, but we couldn’t make any headway or even see the brain. Dr. T couldn’t see a thing and blood was spilling up and over the edges of the skull.

A nurse started to read the falling blood pressures. “110/65, 90/50, 70/40, 55/nil. Then the anaesthesiologist said, “We’ve lost him. Blood pressure crashed to unmeasurable.” The nurse was squeezing bags of blood into him but couldn’t keep up with what was pouring out.

Now if this happens in the abdomen, you compress the bleeder or place clamps. But in the brain, you don’t have those options. But cool as a cucumber, Dr. T stuck his hands below the surface of the blood and began feeling about. He tied off the carotids proximal to the bleed. Then suddenly our suction worked. And the blood pressure came up from zero. Dr. T examined the area and laughed. “There was a second aneurysm hiding behind the first one,” he exclaimed. A second silver clip was placed. Then the carotid ligatures were removed.

I turned to the anesthesiologist and said, “Were you scared?” “No,” he said. “Just sad. He was dead and I saw no hope that we could get him back. Such a young man.” Two hours later I related the story to the patient’s wife. On follow up, the patient did great. He even got his vision back.

I have never seen such cold blooded rapid action under fire. Dr. T didn’t even take a second to swear. Afterwards in the doctors’ lounge, he smiled and said, “It’s more fun when it goes like that.”

Blueberry Puffs

Puffs
Puffs

Ingredients

  • 2 cups fresh or 1 bag frozen blueberries
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 1/3 cup water
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 1/4 teaspoon allspice
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • 1/3 cup light brown sugar
  • 12 slices bread
  • 6 eggs
  • 2 cups Half-and-Half
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar

Instructions

  1. Mix first 7 ingredients in a saucepan. Heat until the sauce is semi-thick. Set aside and cool to room temperature.
  2. Cut crusts from bread. Spray a 2-quart rectangular glass pan with a nonstick pan coating. Cover the bottom of pan with 6 bread slices.
  3. In separate bowl, mix eggs, Half-and-Half, vanilla extract and sugar. Pour half of this mixture over bread.
  4. Spread thickened, cooled blueberry sauce over bottom layer.
  5. Arrange the other half of the bread on top of blueberry filling.
  6. Pour remaining egg mixture over the top.
  7. Sprinkle with a dash of nutmeg.
  8. Cover and place in refrigerator overnight.
  9. Bake in a preheated 350 degrees F oven for 60 minutes.
  10. Let stand for 10 minutes before cutting into 6 servings or 12 servings for a buffet.
  11. Top with brown sugar and a few blueberries.

This was mine:

I was hired by a psychologist to fix a program that seemed to have “strange output” written by one of his ex-grad students. It was a program that reads a data file, asks about 50 questions, does some calculations, and comes up with some score based on this PhD’s research. It’s on a research 3B2 at the university. He demonstrates the program and sure enough there seemed to be strange flashing words on the screen when it moves from question to question, and they don’t seem nice. I agree to do it, should be pretty straightforward, so he’ll pay me by the hour to determine how big the fix is and then we’ll agree to a fee.

Day 1
I sit down at the 3B2 and login to the ex-grad student’s account that has been given to me. This is where the code resides. I examine the C code. It is written to be hard to read. All the code is squished on one line. It’s spread over 15 files with about 3 functions per file — all on one line. All variable names are just three, seemingly random, letters. I talk to the guy and agree to go with hourly on this (great decision). I untangle all the code and format it nicely so I can see it.

It was done on purpose. It used the curses library to move to a point on the screen, print a question and the answers, and wait for a response. But it first went to the first line of the question, printed some white supremacy message, waited 1/2 a second, and then overwrote it with the question. This ought to be simple. There are only about five places it could output anything, and all of them had this subliminal flash of a message. Each one was hard coded. No problem. Delete the offending mvprintw() and all is well. Or should be. I compile, thinking I’m done. But when I ran it, there it is again — the subliminal messages. This time with different text still the same subject, just different messages.

I check my code and believe it or not it’s back to the initial state I found it. 15 files, mangled, 3-letter variables — the whole thing right back where I started. I want shoot myself for not making a copy of my code. I unmangle again, this time putting it in three files, named differently. I make a copy of the whole directory, and I mark the files readable only. I compiled it. All looks good. I run the program. There’s now a copy of the original 15 files in the directory along with mine and the subliminal messages are back.

Okay, so somewhere on the disk is the source code necessary to keep doing this and he’s set the program up to pull in that code when you compile it. I do a full disk search in the include areas (/usr/include) and since this is a research version we have source for just about everything but the kernel itself. That’s a lot of header files and this takes some time on the 3B2, so that’s day 1.

Day 2
The disk search showed up nothing. The strings were apparently either encrypted or they are buried in a library somewhere. Because I don’t have check sums of all the original executable objects, I decide to search all libraries for the text. This is even longer than before, so day two is over.

Day 3
No results. The strings are encrypted. That means I’m going to have to follow all the header files from each #include and each one they #include to find where this is. And that will, take some time. We do alert the campus computing department that we believe someone has gained root level access to Dr. Phelps research computer, which is just a shared lab computer in the science building. They’re understandably not convinced.

I start unwinding the #include files. I do that, nowhere do I find the code. So now I know it’s compiled in a library. No problem at all. Why not just recompile all those libraries, we do have the source after all.

Days 4-6
The hardest part, convincing the campus nerds they have an issue. But we finally do and Mark, the Unix admin who was hired because he married the Dean’s daughter, gets busy learning how to do this. In the end, he agrees to allow me to handle it, because he just doesn’t really know how to get all that stuff compiled. End of Day 6, all standard libraries are recompiled. Woo hoo!

I whip out my modified, cleaned up source and start the compile. All looks good. I run it. O M G. It did it again. 15 messed up source files and the subliminal messages are back. This is suddenly like magic. I investigate very very carefully though I am stumped. This code doesn’t exist in source code. I think I might be beaten. Dr. Phelps isn’t happy with the hours involved and thinks maybe we ought to just rewrite the program from scratch. “Sure”, I say staring at the terminal like a lost puppy too deep in my thoughts to put out of my thinking mode, “I think you’re right. That will be quicker.” “Good,” he says, “we can start tomorrow.”

Day 7
To hell with that. This guy isn’t beating me. We are compiling it from his stinking code or not at all! “You don’t have to pay me anymore, Dr. Phelps, I just want lab time.” This is nerd war.

Days 8-14
I get smart, I’m thinking he somehow modified the curses library. I compile the curses code to assembly and though I don’t know 3B2 assembly (yet!), I start learning. I read manuals for 6 days, piecing together that assembly code. Waste of time, nothing seems unusual.

Day 15
I suddenly realize it’s in the compiler. It was the compiler. And every time you compile the original code and run it puts in the subliminal message code into the source code. I’d heard of this before.

Ah ah! I’ve got him!!!! We have the source code for the compiler as well. I search through it looking for a reference. Lo and behold, I find it. Indeed. There is source code in the compiler/linker that does this:
1) it examines any call to fopen(), searches the file opened looking for Dr. Phelp’s questions; if it finds them then
2) it rewrites the 15 files to the current directory when compiling that specific program.
3) It then compiles Dr. Phelps program using the 15 files and outputs to the -o name in the link phase.

The compiler was modified to put that code in Dr. Phelps program was written by the man that modified the compiler.

Several days later, an AT&T tech shows up with a disk and loads the proper compile and linker source and we recompile the compiler from the source. That solves it. All the bad source in the compiler is gone and we’ve got a new clean copy of the compiler.

Except it didn’t. Because the compiler was poisoned with other source code that we didn’t have. And that source code, that now existed only in the executable compiler, put those changes back into the compiler source before it compiled it. But this time it didn’t modify the /usr/src copy, it copied it to a hidden directory, modified the compiler source, compiled itself from there, and deleted the hidden directory. It took an AT&T tech to find this. The ex-grad student had poisoned the compiler to poison itself when it was recompiled. We had to put a new binary version of the compiler on disk from another 3B2 running the same revision before the problem went away.

We also found that if /sbin/login is compiled it puts in a backdoor allowing anyone who uses a specific password to login in as the root user. This computer is accessible by modem and Tymnet. Finally, this gets the computing center’s attention.

Genius! But put to a horrible cause.

I was 41 yrs old and I had never broken a bone or had stitches, I was a hard working individual and apart from a slot machine addiction of many decades, my life was great. I had met my soul mate back in 2002 and we had lived together since 2003. I was a delivery driver and I simply loved being out on the road with no hassle from bosses. I pretty much worked the hours I wanted because I had earned that right through the hard work I always give.

Long story short ish, like an idiot I tried to move something in the front of the van to the back so it could be unloaded off and I felt something pop in my lower back. I went through the NHS system in the U.K. and the MRI showed I had ruptured my L5/S1 disc. Not a massive hole but enough to warrant a lower back op and they were going to remove the disc and plate it up using screws. The day of the op I had a real bad vibe. I wasn’t impressed to be told I had to have this operation, because the accident happened while I was working and because I didn’t get paid if I was off on sick, it was advised I started a claim against my employers, basically just for the loss of earnings I was going to lose for however lomg I was unable to work after this operation. My employers were amazing from the start, they fully accepted responsibility and I was told to take as much time off because my job would still be waiting for me upon my return. Without sounding bigheaded, I was very good at my job, not just because I could drive a van in the centre of London, but the way I treated the customers and feedback always got back to my boss just how much they appreciated me and yes I did go that mile (no pun intended). So admitting liability helped me out big time. The problem was, I had to do everything to get myself back working as soon as possible. Besides, the success rate was over 99%, so why was I worried. It’s a kin to a fear of flying, it’s the safest way to travel but yet, so many of us fear flying. So what’s the worse that’s going to happen to me……..

That decision to go ahead with that op ruined the rest of my life. It’s now 15 years since I had the original operation. I lay in a bed for 23 hrs a day every single day. I take one of the highest dosages of opiates in the U.K. (according to a senior medical official) and goodness knows what the long term consequences are of taking opiates for so long. I haven’t touched my partner in over a decade and if I was an animal they’d of shot me the same day after that operation. The worse thing for me is, I was told everything went great, no issues at all. So why am I feeling pain like I’ve never felt pain before, it was horrendous. No one knew why, 15 years later and still no one knows why. Don’t get me wrong, during the last 15 yrs everything and anything has been done, sorry, I say 15 yrs, it’s actually 10 yrs. After the 10 yrs I was informed there was nothing else the NHS could do and I was discharged all the while still suffering that very same pain.

I lost everything. But that was just the beginning. I ended up in £42k in debt from interest payments being added to my credit cards because technically, I was still employed and sick pay was just £60 a week back then. But that’s only paid for 6 months, after that you have to be paid via the government and back in 2010 they decided to revamp the social security payments. I was then given just £41 a week for just short of 2 years. I was told I had to wait until it was my turn, but not to worry, it will all get backdated if I was successful with my claim……. My rent alone was £650 a month and I maxed out every credit card I had, I had no choice. When all that ran out I was entered into a debt repayment program and 10 years later, the £42k debt was scrapped. Thanks to my gran, I never missed a payment for 10 years.

Talk about having to jump through hoops for my benefits, I was treated like the rest of society who claimed benefits, like I was trying to cheat the system and all the up to Covid 19 in 2020, I had to be assessed 2 times a year for each benefit and I was claiming 3 benefits. Disability, industrial injury benefit and employment support benefit. That meant I had to travel 6 times a year to wherever they sent me to be assessed, if I miss one appointment ALL my benefits are stopped. It didn’t matter what I told them about being in bed for 23 hrs a day or I couldn’t walk anywhere without going through the pains of hell.

In the early days, everyone thought I was putting it on so I didn’t have to work, like that’s going to help my cause right! But eventually the appointments became less and less and touchwood, I’ve had just one appointment since 2020 Covid. They still only pay the minimum despite being a genuine case, so I’ve had to do what I could to get by. My life is still ruined though. My GoFund page which is in my bio was supposed to pay for a private operation somewhere who knows about this kind of lower back pain. The problem is, no one will even reply to emails unless you have the cash right there and so far I’ve precisely 1 donation which was me because I was convinced people were giving but the page wasn’t working, so yes the page is working but for whatever reasons, I’m still waiting for the first donation but this post is NOT about begging for cash. That’s not me or how I work. I replied to this question because I did have this story to share and I know of others who are simply forgotten about when an operation goes astray.

So yes, you can destroy your life with a single decision.

On the plus side – at least my job is still open for when I am able to return back to work. Although I only have another 11 years to hit retirement age. That’s going to be another massive issue because I have not been able to pay into my private pension for the last 15 years.

Thanks for reading if you made it thus far. All unfortunately very true as I lay on my back in bed with my knees raised.

In 1987 I responded to a call about senior citizen abuse. It was a hot day and I went to this little, old apartment. This little old man was left in a worn out old recliner sitting in the middle of the floor, no furniture, no AC, no water. He had been sitting there for who knows how long. He was crazy with dehydration and out of his mind. I called EMS and they transported him to the hospital. His children had cleaned him out and left him there to rot.

My very first suicide was a guy who shot himself in the chest with a .357 magnum. When he died he had that horror look on his face like he knew he messed up. That one was 32 years ago and I can still see it. I saw many, many, many death cases over the years, all sad in there own way. I have been on hundreds of homicides.

The one that sticks was a female counselor who had a sexual relation ship with a client. He was a drug addict and crazy. Eventually he murdered her in her bed. Then he ran a tub of water and drowned her baby. Sick bastard. Earlier that day I had been on a homicide where a guy killed his wife and put her to bed, pulling the sheets up to her neck. I went looking for him and found him dead in his car. He killed himself.

Another sad one was this sweet old lady decided that life was more than she could bear. She laid out the dress she wanted to be buried in. Then she overdosed on pills, but didn’t actually die. She should have but, didn’t. The last time I saw her she was in a vegetative state. She went from the issues being in her head to actually being in terrible shape. Nothing’s worse than a failed suicide with permanent injury. I’ve seen it more than once.

As a side note (very important). Over the years we responded to a lot of found bodies sitting on the toilet. The Medical Examiner once told me that for your health there’s nothing more important than making sure to eat your fiber. Don’t strain real hard on the toilet. You can bust a gasket and die in there. Eat your fiber.

Ex-CIA: US Pentagon TERRIFIED Over New Russia Strike Plan!

Disclaimer: This isn’t a cute, funny story about things parents say to their kids and everybody laughs about later. It’s a cautionary tale about how narcissistic parents can impact their children’s lives.

When I was a little girl, my toxic, abusive, yet fiercely religious mother TOLD me that *telling lies* was egregious, and would be subject to severe punishment up to and including eternal damnation.

At the same time, she SHOWED me that *telling the truth* was egregious, and would be subject to severe punishment up to and including eternal damnation.

Let me explain using a couple of examples. First, regarding telling lies:

  • Little me, trying to get away with dropping and breaking a dish: “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me!”
  • Mother, who didn’t witness the incident but claimed to have done: “You’re a LIAR! I SEEN ya! Daddy, I think she needs a GOOD SPANKUN’.” Off comes the belt.
  • Lesson learned: Don’t tell lies.

Next, regarding telling the truth:

  • Little me, after admitting to a nosy neighbor something I didn’t know was supposed to be a secret: “Mom, Mrs. Carlson asked me if you dye your hair. I said yes.”
  • Mother, who had just used her latest box of Miss Clairol’s Red Penny Number 416 that morning: “You’re a LIAR! That ain’t true and you know it! Daddy, I think she needs a GOOD SPANKUN’.” Off comes the belt.
  • Lesson learned: Don’t tell the truth.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, both in this life and in the next.

I, as well as my four younger sibs, grew up very confused about what lies and truth actually are. Each of us learned to be very careful about what we said or didn’t say, because we never knew where the land mines were buried. We all were damaged psychologically — which affects us even as older adults — but the symptoms and severity are as individual as we are.

When I was in high school I got a job in a restaurant as a hostess. When I had to go in back to clock into work I had to walk through the area with all the male prep cooks and dishwashers who all primarily spoke Spanish. I was young, pretty and well-endowed, and they all noticed it. For a couple weeks, I would walk into the back and listen as they all made edgy comments about me and my appearance and what they’d like to do to/ with me. I just ignored them.

A couple weeks after I started, I walked through the back to clock in and one of the new employees said something particularly vile about what he’d like to do to me. I stopped, whipped around, and in Spanish “read him the riot act” about talking about me so disrespectfully and inappropriately. I watched as jaws dropped all over the room, different men realizing the things they’d said when I was walking by and in earshot.

Profound apologies came for days. I don’t think any of them would have spoken so coarsely about me if they had realized I could understand. After that they all treated me like a little sister, very respectful, some standing up for me when others started to go off track.

Rasta man

Many people are ignorant bigots.

The Chinese know exactly what kind of government they have. It’s not a dictatorship. It’s a uniquely Chinese form of democracy that actually works in the best interest of the Chinese.

Nobody is suggesting that Chinese democracy would work for other countries. It’s entirely up to other countries to decide how they want to be governed.

It is enough that the Chinese like their system. The following shows you how they think, especially in comparison to the Americans and British…

According to 𝗟𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗮’𝘀 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗲𝘅 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰, 79% of Chinese believe their nation is democratic while only 57% of Americans and 55% of British do.

Another example, according to the 𝗘𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰, 85% of Chinese trust their government while only 40% of Americans and 30% of British do.

Another example, according to the 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘁𝘆 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯, 76% of Chinese trust their politicians while only 29% of Americans and 20% of British do.

Another example, according to 𝗜𝗽𝘀𝗼𝘀’ 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯, 91% of Chinese are happy with their life while only 76% of Americans and 70% of British are.

Another example, according to 𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗞𝗲𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗱𝘆 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝗹 𝗶𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟬, 95.5% of Chinese are satisfied with their government.

Another example, according to 𝗜𝗽𝘀𝗼𝘀’ 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘆 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗡𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿, 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟵, 95% of Chinese believe their country is on the right track and moving in the right direction while only 41% of Americans and 23% of British do.

Another example, according to 𝗮 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟵 𝗨𝗖 𝗦𝗮𝗻 𝗗𝗶𝗲𝗴𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆, 80% of Chinese are happy and enjoy financial security.

I’ve gone back 5 years but I could go further back if you like.

Why Russia Loves Cats

French Bread Taco Pizza

Take your favorite taco ingredients, and layer them up on French bread. So easy and tasty, too!

67881t1
67881t1

Prep: 20 min | Total: 30 min | Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 loaf French bread
  • 1/2 pound ground beef
  • 2 tablespoons Old El Paso™ taco seasoning mix (from 1 ounce package)
  • 1/3 cup water
  • 1 (16 ounce) can Old El Paso™ refried beans
  • 1 yellow bell pepper, cut into 3/4 inch pieces
  • 1/2 cup thinly sliced red onion
  • 1 1/2 cups (6 ounces) shredded Mexican cheese blend
  • 1 cup shredded lettuce
  • 1 tomato, chopped

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 425 degrees F. Line large cookie sheet with foil.
  2. Cut bread in half lengthwise, then in half crosswise. Place on cookie sheet, cut sides up.
  3. Place in oven to lightly toast, about 5 minutes.
  4. In 6 inch skillet, cook beef over medium-high heat until brown, stirring frequently; drain.
  5. Add taco seasoning mix and water; cook until thickened.
  6. Spread refried beans over toasted bread.
  7. Top with beef mixture, bell pepper, onion and cheese.
  8. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until cheese is melted.
  9. Top with lettuce and tomato.

Notes

For a quick and easy dinner, cook the ground beef mixture ahead, and refrigerate. Then all you have to do at serving time is top the French bread, and bake.

"There is a saying I learned in Spanish, and the English translation is: 'People confuse being good with being a fool.'

What that means with respect to Russia is the West has interpreted Russia's patience and tolerance up to this point with outrageous actions (on the part of the West) as a sign of weakness (on the part of Russia).

That's a potentially fatal mistake.

Both President Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov, and Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov have said the same thing this week.

It is not just a coincidence that they've made those statements—it's a coordinated message that they're sending to the rest of the world that they’re not going to take it anymore.

The United States and the West are now on notice that any further attacks inside Russia are going to be met with a response.

Some of the options Russia has, and I don't know if they're going to pursue these, but just let me lay out a couple of options they have:

They could supply more advanced missiles and rockets to insurgent groups fighting ISIS and U.S.-backed forces in Syria and could strike U.S. military bases or the bases of those entities in the Kurdish region that the United States is supporting.

They could also help the Houthis not only with improved weaponry that could actually take out a U.S. ship, but also provide intelligence that could be used, doing the same thing for the Houthis that the United States is doing for Ukraine.

Now, Russia recognizes that it’s moving steadfastly forward in its campaign to demilitarize Ukraine—denazify Ukraine—and they recognize that in the process, they’re weakening NATO.

Yet, what does NATO do in response? They’ve issued statements this week about preparing for their ground troops to fight Russia on the ground.

They're crazy.

This is madness—absolute insanity being talked about by people that you think would have more sense, but they obviously don't.

I'll put it very clearly: the United States and NATO, if they decide to enter a ground war with Russia, will lose badly.

It may end up with the complete destruction of Europe.

Europeans need to sit down and count the cost—is it worth it?

Because Russia's not seeking to conquer Europe; Russia's seeking to have its national territory respected and not have to face, every year as has been the case for the last 16 years, NATO and the United States conducting military exercises on the borders of Russia.

When you're sitting there as a Russian looking at it, you see these as hostile and intended to come after you.

Given Russia’s history, where they’ve been invaded from the West four times over the last 212 years, they're not sitting back ignoring that—they’re taking it seriously.

These are continued provocations by the West. There’s no justification for it.

The West keeps coming up with justifications, trying to portray Russia as this country trying to recreate its 'empire.'

We talked about this before in our previous discussions.

Name me all of the colonies that Russia established in Africa—none.

It was Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands that were establishing colonies and exploiting the people in Africa. Same thing in Asia.

Vietnam was under French control, and one of the reasons the United States initially got involved with Vietnam was more to try to help preserve French influence, not to free the people from communism.

That was the big lie.

The U.S. is trying to use the same playbook both with respect to China and to Russia, portraying them as these authoritarian societies hellbent on conquering the world.

It’s a lie.

It's the West that has been involved in unrelenting wars over the last 70 years around the world, killing millions of people in countries such as those in Africa, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

It has to stop.

That's what you're seeing coming from the Russians—they're saying it’s going to stop.

They’re not going to sit back and be a punching bag.

With this feeble-minded president heading up the United States, it’s quite clear to the world that the United States is being led by an incompetent."

Excerpt from remarks by Larry Johnson, former CIA analyst and U.S. State Department employee, in an interview with Nima R. Alkhorshid, June 9, 2024.

Starbucks in CHINA is BIGGER & BETTER (They Even Have Alcohol)

On our 3rd date, I asked my favorite question at this point in a new relationship: “If you could be or do anything in the world you wanted—age or training not an issue—what would you be or do?”

I had asked this question several times, and was always fascinated by how it was received. Some had never asked themselves this question, much less be asked by someone else; a few couldn’t even wrap their heads around the question. This fellow was stunned and was quiet for a long time. Then he gave an astounding answer:

An unemployed prince.

He went on to explain why: A prince has plenty of money to pursue his own interests, princes get to travel and meet lots of new people, they have no major decisions to make, and princes get to dress well. I asked about the “unemployed” part: most princes don’t have any official duties, especially if not in line for the throne (and he didn’t want to be a prince in line for the throne).

I found his answer charming. Clearly, this was an imaginative individual to be able to think so far outside of the box, and it supported how much I was enjoying his differing perspectives on movies, music, and art. He had established his own business that was successful (I worked in the security of corporate) in the creative advertising/publishing field. He was great fun and a delightful companion, a treat from my previous husband, while seeming to share many of the same values on the important items.

Arm in arm, we headed down life’s path; dated, moved in together, married, then started a family. Life was good; if as busy and as stressful as any family of two young children, two careers, and two aging parents can be. Then our paths diverged.

When the youngest was 3, he closed the business, got his real estate license and “worked” not earning a dime. Bills to pay and full-time parenting two opinionated, busy kids weren’t near as much fun as pursuing one’s own interests. Struggling with it all, I could not understand how the same individual who professed to want what we had could also not do the everyday work that was required to keep it all going.

Then I remembered his answer on our 3rd date. As Maya Angelou said: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Mexico’s New President is a “Nightmare for the Right”

Heard of the Vietnam War?

Now, how did a war in Vietnam cause Laos, a neutral country in the conflict, to become one of the most bombed nations in the history of warfare?

American munitions dropped half a century ago continue to maim and kill Laotians today.


Answer that, and one will be more than halfway through the answer for the question posed.


In a conflict escalation, the rules flip. Supply lines will be targeted. Long range sensor support will be targeted. Foreign airfields from which flights originate will be targeted. Belarus may open a second front. Tactical nukes will enter the battlefield.

Russia has mobilized over a million men, NATO hasn’t.

Russians see this conflict as an existential threat to the Russian nation. NATO doesn’t.

Russians have give the mandate to Putin to pursue victory. NATO haven’t.

It is a question of attitudes—which side has the resolve and grasp of reality.

The West does not need to fight Russia, whereas Russia has no choice but to fight the West.

As Sun Tzu said, “know yourself and your enemy, and you will not lose in a hundred battles”.

Gen Z Is Finally Paying Taxes And They Are Pissed

My father died in 1982 when I was 8. I was an only child and I was ‘daddy’s girl’. His death wasn’t sudden-as he was diagnosed with cancer in June and had passed away in November. Even at an early age I knew the permanency of death. My great grandmother died a year prior to his passing and my grandmother passed away in June of 1982. I was in school when my dad died that morning. I was using the restroom and when I turned to open the stall door, I caught a whiff of Aqua Velva (for those who don’t know- it was a popular aftershave in the 70s and 80s and it has a very DISTINCT odor). Well, that is what my dad wore. And I loved the smell of his cheeks! So when I caught that distinct odor I was expecting to see him outside the girls’ bathroom. I walked out and didn’t see him. So I walked down the hallway hoping he was looking for me. When I finally went back to class, my teacher called me up to her desk and informed me that I had been gone for about 15 minutes and she said it is 9:55, you left here at 9:40. I went back to my desk and tried to focus on school. I kept thinking about smelling that odor. At 10:30 my mom came to the classroom and my teacher went out to speak with her. After a while my teacher came in and quietly got my coat and lunchbox and walked me out into the hallway. I didn’t say anything to my mom and when we got to the stairway landing, I asked if daddy had died. She turned and stooped down to my eye level and with tears in her eyes quietly said yes. I asked her when he died. And she replied at 9:45. I truly believe that he wanted to let me know that he was there in that bathroom and it was his time to go. Every so often I will catch a whiff of Aqua Velva for just a slight second and I would like to think that it’s dad checking in on me.

Russian Naval Group off Melbourne, Florida Coastline!

Russian Naval Group off Melbourne, Florida Coastline!

Russian navy off FL large
Russian navy off FL large

The Russian Navy has a grouping of warships off the east coast of Florida, between Melbourne and Vero Beach.

One of the vessels involved is a Russian nuclear submarine (FILE PHOTO – Not actual image from Florida):

Russia Sub Kazan
Russia Sub Kazan

 

That submarine is being tracked by a US Navy P-8 “Poseidon” Sub-Hunter (FILE PHOTO: – Not taken over Florida)

P 8 Poseidon Sub Hunter
P 8 Poseidon Sub Hunter

While these vessels from the Russian Navy are hanging out off Florida, the Russian Navy frigate Admiral Gorshkov – capable of carrying Zircon hypersonic missiles, arrives in Havana:

Russian Frigate Havana
Russian Frigate Havana

Hal Turner Remarks:

Just so all of you grasp what’s taking place here, the United States and our NATO vassals, are making more and more trouble for Russia, inside Ukraine.

So now Russia is demonstrating to us they can make trouble for us . . . . HERE . . . . inside the United States.

While what __we__ are doing in Ukraine is causing the actual deaths of Russian soldiers, Russia has not —- yet —- decided to bring death to OUR people.   Notice I said “yet.”

This is what the US Congress and the US President are causing.  While THEY play “the sport of Kings (war” in Ukraine, we the American people are the ones they are endangering HERE, inside our own country.

If we get attacked here, inside America, by Russian forces, the sole and exclusive BLAME rests on members of the United States House of Representatives, the United States Senate, and the present illegitimate occupant of the Presidency.

They have been warned over and over again by Russia, to stop what they’re doing.  Yet Congress not only ignores the warnings, they up-the-ante and do even worse things.  Sooner or later, once the Russians have had enough, they’re going to show us that they are as powerful – if not more – than we are.

Remember that when you see your member of Congress slithering out from a nuclear bunker after it’s all over . . . . and hold them accountable right then and there.

Douglas Macgregor Exposes: “Russia Unveils New Hypersonic Missile, threaten to U.S & NATO”

BRICS+, Lavrov & Escobar

Levity happens!

Nizhny Novgorod hosted the BRICS Council of Foreign Ministers in its new enlarged format. A Joint Statement will be issued.

According to the MFA’s website, Lavrov met on the sidelines with all BRICS+ FMs and many from invited nations like Laos and Thailand. We’ll begin with Lavrov’s opening remarks:

Dear colleagues and friends,

I would like to open our meeting with a minute of silence in memory of the untimely departed President of Iran Sayrahmad Raisi and our colleague Khalid Amirabdollahian, and once again offer my deepest condolences to the people of Iran and the families of the victims. I ask everyone to stand up.

***

Dear Colleagues,

We are glad to welcome you to one of the oldest cities in Russia, in Nizhny Novgorod, the history of which dates back more than 800 years. Today’s meeting will certainly leave a special mark not only in the annals of the city’s leading international events, but also in the BRICS itself. For the first time, a meeting of the heads of the foreign affairs agencies of the association is being held in a new expanded format.

The expansion of BRICS is a clear confirmation of the process of formation of a multipolar world order. New centers of globally significant political decision-making are emerging from among the states of the Global South and East, from the states of the World Majority. These countries are in favour of a more just way of life based on the sovereign equality of States and the diversity of civilizations.

The transition to a new world order (we have already seen this) will take a whole historical era and will be thorny. The United States and its allies do not abandon their attempts to maintain their elusive dominance and slow down the objective processes of the formation of multipolarity. At the same time, they are using economic instruments as a weapon – through sanctions pressure and financial blackmail, they are trying to influence the choice of development models and trading partners by sovereign states. The West does not shy away from forceful methods. Examples are known to everyone: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine and a number of other countries. And this is just the “tip of the iceberg”.

Recent international events have “thrown off the masks” from those who have hitherto claimed almost the exclusive right to define “universal values” under the guise of a “rules-based order.” Supporters of this concept are trying to impose norms and mechanisms of interaction that are beneficial only to them, to replace equal and honest dialogue with narrow coalitions that act behind closed doors and arrogate to themselves the right to speak and act on behalf of the whole world.

Russia, like the countries of the world majority, stands for a fairer world order based on the sovereign equality of states and taking into account the balance of forces and interests. Together, we aim to promote a future-oriented constructive international agenda. An important task in this context is to strengthen the role of interstate formats that advocate collective approaches to international development.

BRICS is one of those associations where the principles of equal cooperation are implemented in deeds, not in words: mutual respect, openness, pragmatism, solidarity, continuity and, of course, consensus. I am convinced that BRICS is driven forward by the wind of change, because its role in solving global problems will only increase. This is also confirmed by the steady growth in the number of countries showing genuine interest in joining the work of our association. In this context, we expect productive discussions at a separate session today with the participation of a number of like-minded BRICS countries.

Dear Colleagues,

Russia’s chairmanship is increasing momentum. About 70 events have already taken place, and more are to be held. We note the constructive participation of all partners in them. Work has begun on key Russian initiatives in the transport sector, the creation of the Contact Group on Climate and Sustainable Development, the Working Group on Nuclear Medicine, and the Medical Association.

Active work is underway to implement the decisions of the Johannesburg Summit in 2023, in particular, in terms of improving the international monetary and financial system and developing a platform for settlements in national currencies in mutual trade. In accordance with the instructions of the leaders at the Johannesburg summit, we are paying special attention to coordinating the modalities of establishing the category of partner states of the association.

We have an extensive agenda. It raises issues that will directly affect the future world order and the formation of its fair foundations. [My Emphasis]

A great deal has occurred under BRICS auspices before and during SPIEF as this news roster with links in English details. Pepe Escobar’s “The Three Key Messages From St. Petersburg to the Global Majority” is a very link heavy report published today in SputnikGlobe. Here are what Pepe describes as Putin’s three main messages:

Message Number One:

President Putin, a “European Russian” and true son of this dazzling, dynamic historic marvel by the Neva, delivered an extremely detailed one-hour speech on the Russian economy at the forum’s plenary session.

The key takeaway: as the collective West launched total economic war against Russia, the civilization-state turned it around and positioned itself as the world’s 4th largest economy by purchasing power parity (PPP).

Putin showed how Russia still carries the potential to launch no less than nine sweeping – global – structural changes, an all-out drive involving the federal, regional, and municipal spheres.

Everything is in play – from global trade and the labor market to digital platforms, modern technologies, strengthening small and medium-sized businesses and exploring the still untapped, phenomenal potential of Russia’s regions.

What was made perfectly clear is how Russia managed to reposition itself beyond sidestepping the – illegitimate – sanctions tsunami to establishing a solid, diversified system oriented towards global trade – and completely linked to the expansion of BRICS. Russia-friendly states already account for three-quarters of Moscow’s trade turnover.

Putin’s emphasis on the Global Majority’s accelerated drive to strengthen sovereignty was directly linked to the collective West doing its best – rather, worst – to undermine trust in their own payment infrastructure.

And that leads us to…

Glazyev and Dilma rock the boat.

Message Number Two:

That was arguably the major breakthrough in St. Petersburg. Putin stated how the BRICS are working on their own payment infrastructure, independent from pressure/sanctions by the collective West.

Putin had a special meeting with Dilma Rousseff, president of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). They did talk in detail about the bank’s development – and most of all, as later confirmed by Rousseff, about The Unit, whose lineaments were first revealed exclusively by Sputnik: an apolitical, transactional form of cross-border payments, anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%).

The day after meeting Putin, president Dilma had an even more crucial meeting at 10 am in a private room at SPIEF with Sergey Glazyev, the Minister for Macro-Economy at the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Glazyev, who had previously provided full academic backing to the Unit concept, explained all the details to President Dilma. They were both extremely pleased with the meeting. A beaming Rousseff revealed that she had already discussed The Unit with Putin. It was agreed there will be a special conference at the NDB in Shanghai on The Unit in September.

This means the new payment system has every chance to be at the table during the BRICS summit in October in Kazan, and be adopted by the current BRICS 10 and the near future, expanded BRICS+.

Now to…

Message Number Three:

It had to be, of course, about BRICS – which everyone, Putin included, stressed will be significantly expanded. The quality of the BRICS-related sessions in St. Petersburg demonstrated how the Global Majority is now facing a unique historical juncture – with a real possibility for the first time in the last 250 years to go all-out for a structural change of the world-system.

And it’s not only about BRICS.

It was confirmed in St. Petersburg that no less than 59 nations – and counting – plan to join not only BRICS but also the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

No wonder: these multilateral organizations now finally have established themselves on the forefront of the drive towards the multimodal (italics mine) – and to quote Putin in his address – “harmonic multipolar world”.

The above is only about half of Pepe’s report; click the link for more. Pepe also links to the session he was directly involved with at his Telegram and the speeches others gave besides himself.

More on the BRICS+ meeting will be presented tomorrow along with the Joint Statement. Readers should know there are two BRICS TV stations online, Russian and English, with both having dropdown menus for Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese.

Happens all the time. When I was at airborne school at Ft. Benning in the summer of 1992, a female ROTC cadet in my squad who told me on the first day she was into triathlons and on a “low-salt diet” collapsed at the end of rather mild training day on the last day of Ground Week. It was hot and humid, as is typical in summertime in Columbus, Georgia, but we were on the last day of Ground Week, which meant it wasn’t that physically intense. However, she succumbed to the rigors of the training and climate — many arrive at Ft. Benning without being acclimatized to the heat and humidity — and practically collapsed. Our Black Hat instructor ordered her to sit done on the side of the sawdust pit and “drink more water” while the rest of the squad continued practicing PLFs (Parachute Landing Falls). By the end of the training day (around 17:00), she couldn’t even stand on her own, so the Black Hats ordered her to drink more water, while they summoned a medic to look at her. She feebly attempted to drink more water, but was at that time almost unconscious, so most of it dribbled all over her face and uniform when she tried to drink from her canteen. The medics came and had to help her walk, as she couldn’t walk on her own. We didn’t see her for the rest of the day, and come Monday morning, with the start of Tower Week (week two of three), we were told that she wouldn’t be joining us as she was now in intensive care at Martin Army Medical Center, the on-base hospital at Ft. Benning. We asked what was wrong with her, and he said she almost died because of Hyponatremia. Apparently, she became so over-hydrated from drinking too much water combined with excessive sweating due to the high-levels of physical exertion and lack of climate acclimitization, that she depleted herself of all her electrolytes and salts that are required to be alive. I also knew that she was skipping meals and the few times that she was eating at the d-fac (dining facility), would typically forego the main entree for just a small salad. (I knew this b/c she often sat next to me in the mess hall.)

Shorpy

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SHORPY 4a18702a.preview

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Popular Plastic Surgeries for Asian Women: White Worship, Mix Blood & Abomination

Ty Warmbrodt

To: Frank DelaneyEditor@thewashingtonpost.comSubject: anthropological finds linking past to the futureI, Dr. J. Emmit Hardy, Professor of Archeology at the University of Montana, former navy seal and marine sniper, stumbled upon something I should not have and in the excitement of the moment, I took it. Now they are after me. I don’t know who they are, other than the keepers of secrets, the guardians of mysteries. Could be the Vatican or some other religious organization, a collaboration of world governments, or some secret society. I probably sound out of my mind but wait until I tell you what I have uncovered. 

It all started in what I like to call the broiler, a.k.a. southern Iraq, in an area once known as Mesopotamia. It was in that barren landscape that I and a group of archaeologists came upon a rather suspiciously lonely looking hill, more of a large mound I would say. We had started excavating as soon as the Iraqi government lifted their ban on archeological excavations. After years of careful digging, we dug down where we found an entrance to an upper chamber that led down to the heart of what we presume will be a ziggurat. In the lowest portion of the structure, we found what we named the Library of the Anunnaki, the collective name for the Sumerian gods. The library consisted of hundreds of stone tablets, most of them broken, some shattered, even to the point of dust. I found one large piece, rough in my hands, chipped, not without its damage. I blew it off and noticed it was written in cuneiform. The translation goes:

 

Origin………. Primitive species DNA spliced………. producing male child………. male children produced and raised to farm and………. production cumbersome………… remove Y………. first female child for reproduction presented to first male……… uprising………. Usurpers cast out of gardens and mines………. debauchery throughout………. murder………. war………. Meteor causing mass………. Fleeing planet, will return.

 

Obviously defaced, what I concluded from the text was that the text was not written by human hands. Rather, it was a document left for us by who early humans considered gods. It tells us that we originated from a primitive species (apes, or Cro-Magnon Man perhaps, maybe even some early form of homo sapiens) having their DNA spliced with that of an alien race, producing a child that we now call a human being. Given the success of the experiment, they created more, until they figured natural reproduction to be a viable process. These children grew up working on farms and in mines for the alien race. It goes on to say there was an uprising. Some were cast out where they lived wildly without law or rule. A lot of text is missing, but it goes on to explain the flood was caused by a meteor, probably crashing in the sea nearby. At that time, the aliens left, promising to return. My biggest question is, return to do what?

 

This tablet destroys god-centric religions, proving that we were created through the advanced science of an alien race, putting an end to ancient beliefs. It would also take away power from institutions such as the Catholic Papacy. Old traditions will die hard, but the word of God will no longer hold credence in the minds of the majority again. This is a world altering find. That is why I had it carbon dated for its legitimacy, taking it to an old friend.

 

Dr. Phillip Baker at Oxford University did some carbon dating. The tablet predates the Sumerian use of cuneiform for literary purposes by a thousand years. We realized then that it was truly an extraordinary find. While Phillip and I celebrated with the champagne he had been saving for such an occasion, men in black suits paid us a visit trying to seize the tablets. With a distraction made by Dr. Baker, I escaped out the back. From the hallway I heard shots fired. I knew my dear friend’s fate and feared it would be my own if I did not run. I assumed knowing what was on the tablet put my life in jeopardy. I was pursued by them and what looked like a private security detailed, armed, muscular men dressed in black. They chased me through the streets at high speed. I was scared out of my mind, even taking to the sidewalk to avoid stoplights. I made it to the airport where I evaded capture and caught a plane back to the states. The tablet is now hidden safely where no one will ever find it.

 

I still wanted answers. Why are they returning? When will they return? Why were they here in the first place? I knew of one place that had the answer. I put to use all my military training to sneak into the most heavily guarded military base in the US. I broke into Area 51. I’ll save you the details. It’s a process of inching through the desert dressed like a bush for three days, monitoring security patterns, cutting chain-link, and choking people out for their security badges and weapons, turning up loose ends, until finally I found what I was looking for – the Area 51 Library.

 

The library is a massive collection of written statements, voice recordings, pictures, videos, blueprints, documents on everyone who has claimed abduction or sighting, documentation of people who have been abducted or visited and have no recollection of it, and archeological evidence. The most disturbing artifact I found was a 1950’s recording of an alien being questioned under duress giving the same account on the tablet, filling in the gaps.

 

Apparently, there is another planet in our solar system that passes the sun every six thousand years. They survive in biodomes but require extra fuel and food that they get from earth when their planet gets within flying distance. The air on earth is toxic to them, so they wear suits, some wear armor over their suits resembling animals known to humans to strike fear in them. They have a spy station on the dark side of the moon where they operate out of one of their biodomes, watching us, occasionally experimenting on us, or coming down to replenish food.

 

The Alien went on to explain that they tried to quell the violence within humans, who murdered each other and started wars for territory, before the flood. As they watched on over the centuries, war and hate spread like wildfire across the land as humans flourished. They decided since humans still believed in gods, they would send them a representative from God.

 

He explained the insemination of Mary and the resurrection of the man we call Jesus – he was revived from a coma using advanced medical procedures and lifted up in a small spy shuttle under the cover of smoke. He is at the station now and will return with the others when the other planet draws near. His purpose was to teach people how to live peacefully, choosing people to carry on his work after he was gone, to spread it around the world. The alien said things didn’t go as planned, calling us wicked and violent. His final statement was that when the planet returns, those who fight will be destroyed and those who don’t will be enslaved.

 

Area 51 is only guarded by the US. They are not running it. I was discovered by a man with a heavy European accent and, of course, dressed in a black suit. I grabbed the recording and fought my way past him, then through three levels of private security before getting past the military detail on the outside. I’m sure these men know where I live. I’m taking a big risk contacting you, but the public deserves to know the truth. They need to prepare to fight the coming onslaught. So far, governments have kept everything a secret, selling off technologies like cellular communications and nuclear power. I have the recording safely hidden away with the tablet. I have the evidence if you want to proceed with the story.

 

To: J. Emmit Hardy

drdigit@gmail.com

Reply: anthropological finds linking past to the future

 

Dr. Hardy, I’ll be honest with you, if it weren’t for your credentials and the background check I ran on you, I would be telling you to take this to the tabloids. Since you are an esteemed professor of sound mind with a military background, I suppose your story warrants some attention. Meet me at Malone’s at noon on Thursday for lunch. They are usually busy so there should not be any scenes made in there if you are followed. Try not to be followed. Bring the evidence. Depending on it, we will see where we go from there.

 

———————————————————————————

 

When I saw Dr. Hardy walk into Malone’s that day, he was not what I was expecting. I was looking for an unshaved old man with wild hair acting a little erratically. No, this was your Indiana Jones type professor, middle aged, lean and sun kissed. Far from erratic, his eyes scanned the restaurant before approaching me with a duffle bag.

 

“Mr. Delaney?”

 

“Yes, that’s me.”

 

“Emmit Hardy. Glad you took the time to see me.”

 

His eyes missed no detail of what was going on around him. He was even checking reflections in the smallest objects to see behind him.

 

“Did you bring the evidence?”

 

The first thing he pulls out is an old reel-to-reel and lays it on the table as he goes for the next item in his bag.

 

“What am I going to do with that?”

 

“Listen to it.”

 

“I thought you would have recorded it on your cell phone.”

 

“I wasn’t about to take a cell phone into Area 51. You’re the news. Don’t you have a reel-to-reel player?”

 

“Well, yeah, back at the newsroom.”

 

“Here, check this out. Carefully.”

 

He displays a bundle of rags gentler than if it were a baby. He unwraps it to reveal the stone tablet, chipped and cracked with a series of markings on it that meant nothing to me.

 

“I’ll have to take your professional word on what that is. What I’m interested in is on that reel. But first, we eat.”

 

“I don’t think we have time for that, Frank. Be casual, but two guys in black suits and sunglasses just walked in.”

 

“Relax, guys in suits eat here all the time.”

 

“Not with security details. Let’s head out the back. Slowly, they haven’t made us yet.”

 

I thought Emmit might be schizophrenic, but when we got out to the alley, two guys were waiting with guns. Now, I would love to give you a play-by-play of what happened next, but it happened too fast. Somehow, Emmit managed to disarm and knock unconscious two men in a matter of seconds. He took their guns, putting one in his waistband.

 

“Can I have a gun?”

 

“No,” he chuckled.

 

We ran to the news building. When we got there, we were spotted by more guys in black suits and their security details. We took off in the other direction with them on our heels. I pulled out my cell and made a phone call.

 

“Susan, I need you to get those old duffle bags out of storage and five other people. Here is what I need you to do.”

 

Emmit and I took the long way to The Lincoln Memorial. There, we ran into six people with bags similar to the one Emmit was carrying. We all bumped and shoved, switching bags several times. When we were done mixing up the bags, some took cabs, some ran, some strolled. They grabbed Marcus and checked his bag, only to find gym clothes and a phone book. Later that night, Emmit and I met with Susan to retrieve the real bag. She asked what was going on, but all I could tell her was to read the morning’s paper.

 

Emmit was able to sneak me pass some of the men in black suits and their muscle so I could write up the story. I wrote frantically, the words flowing from my mind straight to the screen. I barely got it through pre-press in time to make the front page. I rushed it out to the printers myself. They were in the middle of putting on the plates that were supposed to run and were not thrilled about the last-minute change, but now people know where they came from and can prepare for the future.

Australia Forces China To Dump Rare Earth Assets, But No Refund For US Submarine Deal?

32 New Ukraine Soldiers Cross Hungary Border to Escape War Mobilization

32 New Ukraine Soldiers Cross Hungary Border to Escape War Mobilization

Yesterday, a Ukrainian GAZ-66 truck with “military” license plates illegally crossed the border into Hungary from the Zakarpattia region of Ukraine. Local border guards found the truck and detained 32 Ukrainian citizens.

It turned out, the truck was filled with new Ukraine Army “Recruits” – men who had been forcibly grabbed off streets in Ukraine, held for three days, given uniforms, and sent to the front lines to die.

The men took a military truck across a field in Zakarpattia, entered Hungary, and surrendered to Police in Hungary.

The government of Hungary has granted the men asylum.

Hal Turner Opinion

The slave state of Ukraine is the very worst place in the world with absolutely no human rights at all.

These people are being hunted by army slave catchers and sent to the front to be exterminated.

The average Ukrainian’s worst enemy is the war criminals in Kiev and the war criminals of NATO who fund and facilitate their slavery and extermination while pretending that Ukraine is a free democracy,  and not the only cause of the conflict that is going on.

Imagine what the U.S. will be like when Biden orders the draft for WW3 against Russia/China. There will be some crazy things going on; can’t wait for the chaos.

Someone should make an “Escape from Ukraine” movie as a sequel to Escape from L.A. from the ’90s. I’d watch it.

It’s Official: Russia ready to strike NATO airfields hosting Ukrainian jets

It's Official: Russia ready to strike NATO airfields hosting Ukrainian jets

andrei kartapolov large
andrei kartapolov large

F-16 fighter jets and any airfields they are based at will be legitimate targets for the Russian military if they participate in combat missions against Moscow’s forces, the chairman of the Russian State Duma Defense Committee, Andrey Kartapolov, has warned.

The comments come as Kiev prepares to receive the first delivery of US-made fighter jets from its Western backers, after Ukrainian pilots were trained to fly them.

In a statement to RIA Novosti published on Monday, Kartapolov clarified that if the F-16s “are not used for their intended purpose” or are simply held in storage at foreign airbases with the intent to transfer them to Ukraine, where they will be equipped, maintained, and flown from Ukrainian airfields, then Russia would have no claims against its “former partners” and would not target them.

However, if the jets take off from foreign bases and carry out sorties and strikes against Russian forces, both the fighter planes and the airfields they are stationed at will be “legitimate targets,” according to Kartapolov.

“As for [our ability] to shoot [them] down, we can shoot down anyone, anywhere,” the MP insisted.

Kartapolov’s statement comes after the chief of aviation of Ukraine’s Air Force Command, Sergey Golubtsov, stated in an interview with Radio Liberty on Sunday that some of the F-16 fighter jets donated to Kiev by the West would be stationed at foreign airbases.

He explained that only a portion of the jets would be stationed directly on Ukrainian territory, corresponding to the number of pilots trained to operate the aircraft. The other jets would be kept in reserve at “safe airbases” abroad so that they are not targeted by the Russian military.

Golubtsov stated that so far four countries have agreed to transfer F-16s to Ukraine, namely Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. While he did not specify exactly how many aircraft would be donated, he claimed it was between 30 and 40 planes, with potentially more to come in the future.

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has also warned that Moscow would perceive the deliveries of F-16 fighters to Ukraine as a nuclear threat, given that the jets have long been used as part of the US-led bloc’s joint nuclear missions. 

At the same time, the minister stressed that the US-designed jets would not change the situation on the battlefield, and would be shot down and destroyed like any other foreign weapons supplied to Ukraine.

Crispy Sweet Onion Pizza

Caramelized Onion Pizza 3435
Caramelized Onion Pizza 3435

Ingredients

  • 1 (12 inch) pre-baked pizza shell
  • 2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 pound sweet onions halved, sliced vertically
  • 1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes (packed in oil), chopped
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried basil
  • Salt and pepper, to taste

Ingredients for Caramelized Onion Pizza

  • Pizza Dough – Use your favorite pizza dough here. I always love the chewy / airy texture of this No-Knead Pizza Dough.
  • Extra Virgin Olive Oil – Instead of sauce, this pizza is brushed with a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil before the toppings are added. The oil helps the crust to get a deep golden brown color and adds a subtle, fresh olive flavor. 
  • Caramelized Onions – See below for all the details on making caramelized onions. They are sweet and savory and make a super flavorful base for this pizza.
  • Gruyere Cheese – The first time I had Gruyere cheese I was blown away by the rich, deep flavor of this Swiss-style cheese. It’s slightly crumbly and has a nutty, tangy flavor. It costs a bit more than mozzarella (which is more common on pizza), but seriously delivers on flavor.
  • Fresh Rosemary – The savory flavor of fresh rosemary fits really well here. Be sure to remove the leaves from the stem and discard the stem (it’s too tough to chop along with the leaves). You can skip the rosemary or use another fresh herb – fresh thyme is great here.

Caramelized Onion Pizza 3435 2
Caramelized Onion Pizza 3435 2

How to Caramelize Onions

  1. Slice the onions into slices that are about 1/3” thick. (No need to be super precise here, but if the slices are too thin they won’t develop all the flavor that comes with the low, slow cooking process. If they are too thick, they’ll take forever to cook. Try to strike a balance.)
  2. Heat a heavy-bottomed skillet over medium-high heat. Add olive oil and butter (use about 1 tablespoon of each per pound of onions).
  3. Add the onions to the skillet and cook, stirring constantly, until the onions start to soften, about 5 minutes.
  4. Reduce the heat to low.
  5. Season onions with salt and some sugar (about ½ teaspoon of each per pound of onions). (Note: Sugar is optional here, but can help to draw out the natural sugars in the onions and speed the caramelization process along.)
  6. Continue to cook the onions, stirring occasionally, until they are very tender and deep golden brown, 25 to 40 minutes more. (Important: If the pan starts to look dry or the onions start to burn, add a splash of water. You may need to do this several times throughout the cooking process.)

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
  2. Place pizza shell on baking sheet.
  3. Sprinkle onions on pizza and drizzle with olive oil; top with sun-dried tomatoes.
  4. Sprinkle with herbs, salt and pepper.
  5. Bake until onions just begin to brown, about 10 minutes.

Russia already has enough “hyenas” to deal with in Europe, Vladimir Putin has told his Zimbabwean counterpart

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Zimbabwean counterpart Emerson Mnangagwa shared a laugh during a tense debate on nuclear diplomacy on Friday, as they discussed how to deal with the real and metaphorical “hyenas” threatening their countries.

During a plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), political scientist Sergey Karaganov urged Putin to update Russia’s nuclear doctrine to allow nuclear retaliation against countries that strike Russia with conventional weapons.

With multiple Western nations – including the US, France, and Germany – recently giving Kiev permission to use their missiles in long-range strikes on Russian territory, Karaganov argued that these countries have grown complacent and need to be reminded of Russia’s nuclear capabilities.

“They have gone mad, especially the Europeans,” he told Putin. “It’s how animals behave. If there is a herd of hyenas or wild dogs and you’ve got a stick, you can keep them at bay. But there’s a high chance that they will tear your clothes, and if you get tired they will bite you to death. If you can kill a couple of them then they will disperse.”

“President Mnangagwa knows about the behaviour of hyenas,” Karaganov continued, before asking the Zimbabwean leader: “Do you agree Mr. President, that this is how you deal with hyenas?”

“We do have lots of hyenas in Zimbabwe, but we keep them in the national parks,” Mnangagwa replied. “We have no problems with them, but they breed a lot, and if there is anybody who wants them, we are ready to donate,” he added, to laughter from the audience.

“Well we’ve got hyenas of our own in Europe,” Putin responded.

Russian nuclear doctrine has not changed since 2010. It allows for the use of atomic weapons in the event of a nuclear first strike on its territory or infrastructure, or if the existence of the Russian state is threatened by either nuclear or conventional weapons.

“I do not believe that it is the case now,” Putin said, adding that Russia “needs no nuclear weapons to achieve victory” in Ukraine. However, Putin noted that changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine “are not ruled out.”

18 Years Later, I Finally Get how Idiocracy Came True – The 2024 Election

Big girls can’t squeeze into small dresses

Between jobs, I agreed to provide daycare for a 3-year-old girl.

The kid was impossible. The mother was worse.

Mom had ridiculous rules: all food was to be organic, no sugar, and no additives, ever. Do not bring food into the house. Do not watch Spongebob (there was a list of “approved” cartoons; I was not to deviate from it).

The only food in the house was organic whole-wheat pasta with organic grated cheese. The little girl could only drink spring water. That was the only food in the house. Every lunch I fixed was the same: organic pasta and cheese with water.

The kid had serious disciplinary problems. If something didn’t go her way (she’d fail to catch a playground ball) she’d shriek, scream, and run away. Apparently this worked with Mom, but not me.

Mom came home one day in the midst of one of Terror Tot’s fits. The kid immediately started hitting her in the gut, left, then right, repeatedly. Mom said, “oh, stop that.” Of course the kid didn’t stop. Mom looked at me and said “I know, I’m terrible. I should really not let her do that.”

YA THINK??

Another day, Terror Tot grabbed me hard in the stomach. She grabbed as much spare flesh as she could, and started screaming “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!” (I am not fat, and it really hurt.)

Horrified, I told her never to do that to me or anyone else. Of course, she shrieked and ran to her bedroom sobbing. I left her there; too bad. A crying fit could be ignored until she was ready to listen to me. What I was disturbed about was where she learned that. None of her “approved programming” dealt with fat as an issue.

“Fat” seemed to be the order of the day. When Mom came home, Tot grabbed the fat around her middle and started screaming “fat-fat-fat-fat… mommy’s fat, fat, fat!” Mom ignored this, and started writing out my paycheck, while she informed me of what hours I would be needed the next week. Meanwhile, the kid stopped pinching Mom and started hitting again, still yelling “fat-fat-fat!” Mom and I had to raise our voices to understand each other.

I really did not want to babysit anymore, but I felt bad for the little girl.

The next day I was needed to sit, I was instructed to go to the Mom’s mother’s house. Grandma greeted me, and asked to watch her other grandchild (by another kid) who was 4. She and her daughter left on an errand.

As soon as the Mom and Grandma left, the kids started to fight with each other. I managed to distract them. This went on for a few hours; fight, distract with a story. Fight, distract with a game.

The Two Terrors decided to find a new game: Beat Up Babysitter. One slugged me in the gut and ran, then the other would hit me and run. After 2 rounds of this, I caught the boy by the arm as he raised it to hit me again. I yelled for the girl.

“Look, you two are never allowed to hit me, or anyone else. Do you understand?” I admit I raised my voice. Apparently no one had ever raised their voice to either of them.

Well, you would have thought I just beat them. They both threw themselves on the floor, screaming. The boy took his clothes off. The girl knocked over a vase. Again, as any parent should, I ignored them. I was not buying into a show of hysterics. I said, “let me know when you are done and can play nicely.” More screaming and thrashing. The girl went a step further and knocked over a sculpture of a horse; surely that would get my goat. Nope.

Mom and Grandma walked in at that moment and were furious with me. What had I done, and why could I not control these kids? Why was the precious vase and sculpture on the floor? And “where are (the boy’s) clothes?”

I explained to the women that both kids hit each other, then hit me, and I told them to stop. I also said I refused to be hit, and if they did it again, I’d correct them verbally again. I explained that physical violence crossed a line with me; it was non-negotiable. I was aghast that I had to say this.

That was the last time I was ever asked to babysit. I was thrilled.

AFTER FILES! The Giants of Malta

It’s unlikely. The Indian government seem to be self aware.

It would be like Mexico agreeing to attack the US. Mexico would be destroyed. Same for India, India would be destroyed.

China won’t attack the civilian population centers but power, water, and fuel would be wiped out. The Indians would need to have animals to move food and people. And learn to live with no power so water would have to be carried into cities.

The Indian government wants benefits from the US to appear aggressive, they don’t want to kill their country.

Also since India attacked China, China is well within rights to self-defense. And that would include turning the northern half of India into a buffer zone. I’m certain the Indians don’t want that and the Chinese would prefer not to do that unless attacked.

With the example of Ukraine and the West out of munitions, the Indian government isn’t dumb enough to ukraine themselves for the US.

Pepper Steak

Pepper Steak
Pepper Steak

Ingredients

  • 1 (1/2 inch thick) round steak, cut into 1 inch strips
  • 1 cup onion, chopped
  • 2 cups green bell pepper, chopped
  • 2 ribs celery, chopped
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 2 teaspoons cornstarch
  • 2 tablespoons soy sauce
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1 teaspoon beef bouillon

Instructions

  1. Brown meat in oil until brown.
  2. Put meat into slow cooker.
  3. Add remaining ingredients and stir.
  4. Cook overnight or for 8 hours on LOW.
  5. Serve over rice.

This was told at a meeting of comedy writers at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club.

A rabbi goes to a very successful business named Lawrence. He says to him, “Lawrence, your family has been very generous to the synagogue. Your grandfather, who came to this country with nothing and build a prosperous business, came us the donation that made possible our wonderful library. When your father, who continued making the business grow, was asked, he gave the funds for the books for that library. Now Lawrence, the time has come for me to ask you to please continue to follow your family’s generous tradition and to please consider making a donation.”

Lawrence thinks for a moment and then says, “Rabbi, just this week I learned that my son has gotten into Princeton. It will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to send him there. My wife of 30 years has been diagnosed with cancer. The treatments will be likewise very expensive. My father who, thank God, is still with us, suffers from dementia and requires constant care.”

He then draws a breath and says, “So, Rabbi, if I can say no to all of them…”

The Job Market isn’t Looking too Hot ……. Part 4

How poverty affected my education?

If I look back, I was above average in my class. But all that work for food, bad neighborhood, and lack of resources (time, stationery, school uniform etc.) affected my education badly. Also, my self confidence was very low.

So what happened? By the time I came in 10th Standard, my education was messed up. I got 46% marks in 10th exams. I cleared 11th standard with grace marks and finally…I failed 12th standard.

But, my failure was actually a gift. My friend-circle was gone, everything was meaningless to me. I had that talk with myself that made me realize that nothing matters except a good education.

One of my uncle guided me in this tough time. He asked me to carry my 11th standard Physics, Chemistry, Maths books and go to a nearby Ashram  everyday in the morning. I used to study there, eat free food, and come back in the evening. I followed that routine during my summer vacations and built my fundamentals. I realized that education is the only way out of my pathetic life. I used to recall Booker T. Washington’s essay, The Struggle for an Education  from my 10th English syllabus. It was a real inspiration.

Next year, with same level of dedication, I cleared 12th with flying colours with distinction in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. Also, I appeared for Chaudhary Charan Singh University engineering exam and secured 3rd rank. That gave me enough confidence to try something bigger.

Next one year I did nothing but prepared for biggest engineering entrance exam, Indian Institute of Technology, Joint Entrance Examination  and cleared it. I spent next five years studying Computer Science & Engineering at Indian Institute of  technology (BHU) . Life was all set.


How poverty changed me as a person.

It made me rock solid. When usually people are scared about something, I drink some tea and carry on. Unless its about someone’s life, I keep my cool.

Also, I have immense respect for hard working people. While so many people around me feel ashamed to talk to Rickshaw

pullers, it gives me immense pleasure to talk to them. I speak politely with Rickshaw pullers, farmers, waiters and all those people trying to earn a living in tough economy.

It also made me realize the value of food. Usually this is how my plate looks like once I am done eating (even if food is not so tasty).

I never smoke. Sometimes I will drink a beer with my friends, but no hard liquor. Possibly because partially I hold my father and his drinking habits responsible for my bad childhood,

As far as money is concerned, being an ex-Oracle and current VMware employee, I earn well. Still, I don’t waste money. I consider buying costly gadgets, drinking a lot, and doing something useless to impress your “friends” as a waste of money.

That doesn’t mean I am a miser. For me, only few things are worth my hard earned money. I am living at a great place paying more than average rent for this apartment, because its so beautiful and peaceful.

I am also a proud owner of a Royal Enfield Thunderbird.

All in all, poverty made me the person I am today. It was one hell of a journey. And it’s still going on. It’s just not that challenging any more 😀

Life is good.

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By Pep.e Escoba.r

The warning by President Putin could not be starker: “In the event of the use of long-range weapons, the Russian Armed Forces will again have to make decisions about expanding the sanitary zone further (…) Do they want global conflict? It seemed they wanted to negotiate [with us], but we don’t see much desire to do this.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov then came up with the appropriate metaphor to designate NATO’s ramped-up military outbursts: not only NATO is raising the degree of escalation but delving into a warlike “ecstasy”.

It does not get more serious than that. “They”, as Putin alluded to, do seem to want “global conflict”. That’s at the heart of NATO’s new suicidal “ecstasy” strategy.

For all their circumlocutions, NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg

, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have effectively greenlighted Kiev using Western weapons for attacks deep inside the Russian Federation. The alleged debate, still ongoing, is just a “smokescreen” for the real objective: a pretext that could lead to WWIII.

There’s no reason to think Kiev will stick to “limited” strikes against relatively unimportant targets. Instead, it is likely to target critical security infrastructure in hopes of provoking an unrelenting Russian response, which in turn would pave the way for NATO to invoke Article 5 and de facto engage in a Hot War.

Already on the Edge of Doom

The escalation “ecstasy” defined by Peskov went out of control since a – secret – new batch of ATACMS was dispatched to Kiev earlier this year, complemented with longer-range ATACMS. Kiev has been using them for serious hits on Russian air bases and key air defense nodes. These ATACMS fire missiles at Mach 3 speed: a serious challenge even for the best Russian air defense systems.

All that seems to point to a crucial decision enveloped in several layers of fog: as the incoming, cosmic NATO humiliation in the black soil of Novorossiya becomes self-evident day after day, the Western elites who really run the show are betting on provoking a full Hot War against Russia.

Richard H. Black, a former US senator from Virginia, offers a sobering analysis

:

“This is a continuation of the pattern in which the NATO forces recognize they are losing the war in Ukraine, with the fragile lines of defense breaking, and the NATO response is to escalate. This is not accidental, but very deliberate. It is not the first attack on the Russian nuclear triad. The ideological folks are seeing their world crumbling, after flying the rainbow flag over conservative countries and [waging] perpetual wars. They are frantic and could escalate to nuclear war to get out of the bind. They are taking a series of baby steps, and respond that ‘they don’t do anything in response,’ and so they keep taking baby steps until one of them lands on a land mine and we are into World War III. (…) Putin is very aware of the disconnect in the West, who keep saying he is just saber rattling, but he is not—he is informing the West of the dangerous reality.”

In Russia, Senator Dmitry Rogozin, a former head of Roscosmos, directly warned Washington: “We are not just on the threshold, but already on the edge, beyond which, if the enemy is not stopped in such actions, an irreversible collapse of the strategic security of the nuclear powers will begin.”

General Evgeny Buzhinky advanced an ominous scenario: “I am sure that if the strikes of Taurus of ATACMS are very harmful for Russia, then I presume we will at least strike the logistical hub in the territory of Poland in Rzeszów” where the missiles are staged for delivery to Ukraine.

The connection in this case would be irreversible: Russia hits Poland; NATO invokes Article 5; WW3.

Be Careful What You Wish For

NATO warlike “ecstasy” is predictably cloaked in cowardice. For all the rhetorical garbage 24/7 about “we don’t want a war with Russia”, the facts point to NATO using Kiev to attack and try to destroy a wide range of Russian military assets. There’s also no denying the US Deep State’s role in enabling Kiev’s terror attacks against Russian civilians in the Donbass, Belgorod, and elsewhere.

Considering the serious debate finally on across several Russian platforms, all of that might constitute a reasonable pretext for a tactical nuclear drop on the – legally illegitimate – Kiev gang. At least that would finish a war that is dragging for too long.

Yet that would be totally out of character when it comes to legalistic Putin – who deals with Armageddon-laden issues with the patience of a Taoist monk. Yet Russia has an entire arsenal of asymmetric tools – both conventional and nuclear — that can deliver a painful blow to NATO

in places where the alliance least expects.

We’re not there yet – even as we get ominously closer day after day. Dmitri Medvedev has issued the umpteenth red line: a US strike on Russian targets, or the US letting Kiev hit targets within Russia using American missiles and drones would be the ‘start of World War’.

And Foreign Minister Lavrov, once again displaying his trademark Taoist patience, had to come up with another serious reminder: Russia will regard the deployment of nuclear-capable F-16s in Ukraine – which de facto can only be operated by NATO pilots – as “a deliberate signal from NATO in the nuclear field to Russia”.

And still the gaggle of armchair Dr. Strangeloves – lavishly rewarded by the rarified Atlanticist plutocracy holding real power, funds, influence and mass media control – is not listening.

One surprising fact about jury duty is that in the United States, you can’t be forced to serve on a jury more than once every 18 months, which is why simply stating you’ve served recently can be a surefire way to get excused.

This is because courts are required to ensure that jurors are randomly selected and that no one is called to serve too frequently.

Another lesser-known fact is that courts often use a system called “jury wheel” to select potential jurors, where names are randomly drawn from a pool of eligible citizens.

You’d be surprised to know that this pool can include lists of registered voters, driver’s license holders, and even utility customers.

So, if you’ve ever wondered how you got picked for jury duty, blame the algorithm.

It’s also fascinating to learn that in some jurisdictions, jurors are prohibited from researching the case or discussing it with anyone, including family members, during the trial.

This is intended to prevent external influences from swaying their verdict, ensuring a fair and impartial decision.

While it might be tempting to sneak a peek at news coverage or ask a lawyer friend for insight, doing so could result in a mistrial or even legal consequences.

Did you know that in the United States, jurors are not required to disclose their race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status during voir dire, the questioning process used to select jurors?

This lack of transparency can lead to biased jury selection, as lawyers may unintentionally discriminate based on observable characteristics.

With growing concerns about systemic racism and discrimination in the justice system, this aspect of jury selection is under increasing scrutiny.

American Reacts to Why Europeans Hate Living In The United States.

So, to sum it up... You pay crazy amounts of money for an education, that (hopefully) gets you a job. The public transportation is so bad its hard and cumbersome to get to it. When you get there, you have to work long hours risking getting fired at any time. When you get paid the IRS is making it difficult for you to pay your taxes. The lack of sufficient vacation time makes it hard to recharge and your level of stress never gets normalized. The long hours at work inhibits you from cooking good healthy food, so you eat fast food and processed prefab food. When you watch tv you are so tired that you cant see beyond the propaganda and think for your self. As you dont really have vacation, you cant travel and experience the world. Eventually you get sick, and then you have to pay crazy amounts of money to get care. At some point you just cant work anymore and thinks about retirement, and realize you cant afford to retire. Sounds appealing right?

A:

My wife and I were friends with a couple for 2–3 years, and hung out at least once per month with them. We all worked together and had tons of mutual friends…

We threw a smallish house party for around 20–30 people when we moved into our new home. We’d already had a housewarming party… this one was specifically our direct peers (25–35 at that time), and was adults only. We informed everyone invited that no kids were allowed (included our own children that were staying with their grandparents for the night).

One couple specifically asked if they could bring their kids, and we told them no… Regardless, on the night of the party, they showed up late, 2 kids in tow. Instead of being rude, I brought their boys upstairs to our game room, and setup both Xbox and PS4 for them (which were fairly new consoles at the time). Almost immediately, the older boy told me that the selection of games “sucked”, and “what else do you have?”. I was able to set them up with a couple of games that they were happy with, and went back downstairs to enjoy the party.

Around an hour later, we all heard a crazy pounding noise coming from the game room, and I went running upstairs to investigate. The child’s father barely beat me up the stairs and checked out the situation. Everything was fine; the son had accidentally locked himself in the room, and started to freaked out. Standing behind the father, I could see almost the entire room, and could see that situation was under control; it was just a temporary freak out. So, we all went back to the party, and everyone had a good evening.

The next day, after our kids came back home, they almost immediately discovered a large hole in the game room door. It turns out that the older boy had accidentally locked himself in the game room, and couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t open, so he literally kicked a massive hole through the the backside of the door. Now these are the standard, cheapo doors that come with most middle-income homes, but still… he kicked through one side of the door.

Here’s the kicker – when I standing behind my friend as he was checking on them, I saw him look at the back of the door. He knew there was a huge chunk missing, but chose not to say nothing…

Those types of cheap doors are usually less than $200 at Home Depot, fully prepped, and can be installed by nearly any idiot (such as myself)… Why say nothing? These were not people that were incapable of offering to and/or paying for a $200 fix that was required because their son caused unnecessary damage to our home… and the children were not supposed to be there in the first place.

This person made a choice to ignore something like this, and it made me realize what type of person he was… After that, we’ve never hung out again.

Paradise Lost

Submitted into Contest #248 in response to: Write a story titled ‘Paradise Lost’..

This is a new addition that I am considering to my daily posts. Here I include some contemporaneous SF (short story) for the reader to enjoy. -MM

Calls for help came every day, in every language spoken from Alpha Centauri to Xanoid 10.

 

Meteor. Famine. War!!!

 

Help us, they pleaded. Whoever they was in that particular society that had figured out how to contact us.

 

“Please remain calm,” I used to say. “A unit will be dispatched to your location.”

 

But after our people went Silent, the calls went more like this:

 

“Hello? We need help.”

 

“We’re sorry, but Planetary Assistance is no longer available. Our thoughts are with you during your pending apocalypse. Goodbye.”

 

“Wait —”

 

And I would hang up and log the call for our directors, who would mark the planet for further study before its demise. No tears — just another experiment ending.

 

Of course, Earth was different. It had been a special project for our people. A hunk of spasmodic rock that we imbued with the best of all things green and growing, soft breezes, clear, cold sea, and people — people who looked perhaps too much like us, in hindsight.

 

Of course, we were sensitive when they called.

 

Help, they called when they were cold, and we brought them fire.

 

Help, they called when they were hungry, and we taught them our very own methods of tilling the soil.

 

When they ventured out of their cradle to the hostile parts of the Earth, we ushered in ages of warmth and good fortune that propelled them to prosperity.

 

But help, they called, because they wanted more. And like permissive, enamored parents, we continued to give it to them until they wielded the means of their own destruction.

 

The phone rang one night on my watch long after the Silencing. I checked the caller ID twice. Earth. A little tingle of electricity ran up my spine.

 

“You’ve reached Thalia IX — how may I direct you?”

 

“Hello? Hello? If anyone out there is listening, please, I need your help. Things are really getting out of hand here —”

 

An understatement if I’d ever heard one given the mass extinction underway on Earth amid the megacolossal storms and nuclear annihilation on a hair trigger.

 

“I’m sorry,” I said, clearing my throat to prepare for the sentence that usually got stuck like dry wafer crumbs. “But the Planetary Assistance Corps of Thalia IX is no longer available for rescue requests. Our thoughts are with you during your apocalypse. Goodbye.”

 

The girl made an indignant sound of surprise as I hung up.

 

It was the ninth call from Earth this week, I found in the log as I began to add my notes. All previous agents had deftly dispatched the callers begging us to intervene, to send another ship, to save them.

 

Caller reports escalation on Earth, I began to type. It would be of interest to the directors.

 

Shrill bells jangled again. Earth again. I frowned as I picked up the line.

 

“You’ve reached Thalia –”

 

“You can’t hang up on me,” the girl’s voice said.

 

The script prepared us for this scenario, though it was rare. Usually, our callers were in such a state of shock to reach us that they didn’t try again.

 

“Thank you for your call. While we understand you might be experiencing feelings of worry, anxiety, or dismay —”

 

The girl groaned in aggravation.

 

“Would you can it? My girlfriend is missing. We were supposed to shelter together this week,” she said. “Please, can you help me find her? I’m worried that she’s lost or hurt.”

 

Shelter where? I wondered, and would have asked if the girl hadn’t kept talking at a rapid clip. This girlfriend had fled their home after an argument about letting others into their shelter. Days on, she hadn’t returned.

 

How human to want to face obliteration together, and to do it alone out of spite, I thought as she spoke.

 

Finally, the girl paused her monologue.

 

“Look, I know who you are,” she said in a low voice. “I know you’re not — from here. This planet, I mean. But I know you’re watching.”

 

This was highly unusual and would require immediate escalation to a senior agent. I thought I should keep her talking while I send a request.

 

“How did you find this line?”

 

“It was on my grandfather’s old Macbook. I live in his house now. He used to work for NASA. Had all kinds of notes with it —”

 

NASA was an ancient terrestrial space agency with whom we had coordinated many of our attempts at aid.

 

“What’s your location?”

 

“Reno. Well, northern America. On the West Coast. If that’s what you’re asking.”

 

“And your girlfriend’s name?”

 

She paused and her breath hitched, as if the answer would break a dam she’d built across her emotions.

 

“Angel.”

 

And then the nervous feeling I’d been fighting back twisted through my arms and into my fingertips that hovered over the keys.

 

I tapped a-n-g-e-l one letter at a time. That was the name the humans gave to us long ago. Before we abandoned them.

 

No, not abandoned. Even Silent, we had sent our best ship to evacuate a few hundred of them. It had nearly torn us apart.

 

“Oh, shit, hang on,” the girl said suddenly.

 

A door burst open behind her. She set her phone down so the sounds were muffled, but I could just make out voices calling out in panic. A sound like static overwhelmed the line and just as I looked down at the phone to check if we had disconnected, the door slammed, and the noise stopped. Frightened  voices died down into a murmur.

 

“Sorry. Newcomers,” she said as she picked up the phone again.

 

I noticed that my heart had started to race. The protocol called this a sign of emotional investment — understandable, but a sign to cut contact immediately. Only I had a message from the directors to stay on the line.

 

“We’re unable to offer any additional assistance in departing the planet or averting disaster,” I said with genuine regret.

 

But the girl just snorted.

 

“I figured it was a limited time offer,” she said. “But please, could you find Angel? Could you help me bring her home? She has red hair and she’s very tall. Her cheeks are always red like she’s been slapped across the face, even though she’s way more likely to have slapped someone else. She has these lovely big round brown eyes and she was wearing fatigues when she left. She was so angry. I should’ve stopped her.”

 

She keeps talking, telling me all about how they met as children fleeing great ravages of dust with their families, and how they found each other again as revolutionaries.

 

I thought I could perhaps grant this one selfless wish. It wouldn’t be intervening, not really, to find her partner’s location. It wouldn’t have changed anything about their fate. And I had a few moments before the directors would appear at my shoulder.

 

“Standby,” I said in a voice barely above a whisper.

 

And for the first time, but not the last, I defied Thalian protocol. I accessed our cameras and saw for myself how our great experiment on Earth was ending.

 

A few clicks and the distinct figure of a tall, redheaded woman in military garb appeared on screen. She was standing at attention before a gate, eyes locked ahead in terror as others streamed past her.

 

On our satellites, I saw the storm heading for the geographic coordinates of the caller.

 

The muffled static on the line grew louder.

 

“I can report that Angel is safe in a shelter in the next town over,” I said. And I covered the mouthpiece before I spoke again, so she would not hear the waver in my voice. Tears I couldn’t control dripped down my arm. “Unfortunately, it may not be possible for you to reach her.”

 

One last moment of silence from this loquacious caller. She must have been able to hear the howl of the wind, the creaking of the timber board. She must have known before she called.

 

“I understand,” she said.

 

The sharp steps of the directors began to rap through the hallway behind me. I had a vision of myself seizing control and forcing them to help. We could still help.

 

“Thank you,” the caller said. “Thank you for finding her.”

 

Our thoughts are with you. The shallow words flashed through my head one last time.

 

Instead, all I said after the line was already dead, was:

 

“Goodbye.”

People say we get paid poorly but really we don’t. We get housing, we get money for uniforms every year, we get healthcare, we get many benefits. If a military member is smart all they really have to pay is their cell phone and internet. When you get a family they even give you housing allowance and more money for food.

People complain because they don’t want to eat in the mess hall or live in the barracks but they really don’t have to worry about much.

we get tuition assistance and can go to school for free while in the military and when we get out can use up to 36 months of our GI bill to continue going to college.

Our family gets free healthcare and in some places discounted or free college.

So people that think we get paid poorly don’t add all the extra benefits to the “basic” pay the show out there. And of course when you come in your basic pay is like $2,000 if you are a brand new private with less than 2 years in, but with everything paid for, those are 2k in your pocket. When I got medically retired 8 years ago I was making $3500 a month with my housing paid and healthcare paid. Today that equals to 4k.

And when you are dual military like I was (married to another active duty service member) that was dual the income, so we were bringing 8k and housing paid and healthcare taken care of. Oh and we transferred one of our GI bills to our son so his college will be paid for.

So yeah, people think that because they never really stop to think about it. I joined because I wanted to serve the country but let’s face it, we get paid well. Could we get paid better? Sure, I mean we work crazy hrs and sometimes 36, 48hrs at a time, etc. and crazy jobs. But we are not poor.

Are We Being Lied To About North Korea?

Oh, I know that I’m going to need to compose myself to write this, trying desperately to keep emotions to a minimum. Let’s see how I do. I’m deleting the word “service” from the question.

On the first day of Spring a few years ago, I was working a BUSY, Sunday morning greeting, seating, and checking on my customers at my restaurant, a local family diner. A beautiful warm day, and busy is always a good thing. A bit of background here. I’m in an amazing small town on the central coast of California that is a tourist destination. My business runs around 85% local customers, and many tourists who find us want that hometown feel. We have a significant Hispanic population, and many of my staff are first generation U. S. citizens.

In the middle of a late breakfast rush, with 15 to 20 people waiting for a table, my sweet server comes to me and asks me to talk to an unhappy customer. She is a great server, and this was a first for her. I introduced myself to the table of 6 (2 families) that I had never seen before and asked how I could help. One of the TWO men seated was VERY ANGRY,although I could see that they had finished a hearty meal, his 13 year old daughter wanted more pancakes. I didn’t see the problem here, until he said, “ And she doesn’t want to wait for them!” The server had tried to explain to him, that it could take a bit because other orders were ahead of his. And the daughter is just smiling at me. All orders taken, go up in the same order, not one moved to the front just because. He kept yelling, “ But its for a child! How can you not want to feed a child? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?

I stepped back, told him to let me know if he decided to wait, and I would gladly put the order up, and I walked away. He followed me to the front of the house and screamed,” You’re a racist aren’t you? It’s because we’re Mexican! “ The whole restaurant got dead quiet, and another waiter, Hispanic broke out laughing and said, “Dude, are you kidding me? Look at our staff here, look in our kitchen! Are you crazy? “ I assured the man that I was in fact prejudiced! I believe everyone is in different ways. MY prejudice was against mean people and people who lie to me. I am not a tolerant person that way! I saw a few smiles of folks faces, and I wanted to give him an out so I told him if he changed his mind, and wanted me to put that order up, I’d be happy to. And here’s were I lost it. He screamed at Cesar, my busboy/host/all around helper, for being so stupid as to think I was a good person. I told him to please leave the building and never come back. I can take a punch, but don’t ever disrespect any of my staff. He got his family and huffed all the way out the door, and as he was pushing past people, the restaurant exploded with applause.

And it was my birthday.

Pizza Steak

header bg recipe pizzasteak
header bg recipe pizzasteak

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 4 rib eye steaks
  • 1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
  • 1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 1 (28 ounce) jar Ragu
  • 1 green bell pepper, cut into strips
  • 1 large onion, cut into strips
  • 1 (8 ounce) package fresh mushrooms
  • 1 (8 ounce) package mozzarella cheese
  • Parmesan cheese, to taste
  • Whole black olives

Instructions

  1. Mix tomato sauce, tomato paste and Ragu well.
  2. Place the first steak in slow cooker for bottom layer and spoon just enough sauce over it to cover the meat.
  3. Add a portion of the onions, whole black olives, bell pepper, mozzarella, Parmesan and mushrooms.
  4. Layer again with second steak, sauce, cheeses and vegetables.
  5. Do the same with third and fourth steak, layering as you go along until all steak, sauce and vegetables are used.
  6. Cover with mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses.
  7. Cook on LOW for 8 hours.
  8. Serve over pasta. Angel hair pasta works nicely. Garnish with black olives.

Notes

Thicken sauce with Italian bread crumbs if needed.

Here in the Central Valley of California, it’s quite common for strangers to converse while waiting for an appointment. Mostly I let the other person indicate they want to talk, but on this occasion I decided to speak first.

A male customer, probably in his late forties, was sitting across from me as I also waited for service in a shop that repairs and replaces windshields. I noticed that after the man had been on his phone briefly he then sat quietly for a while, looking downcast. It may have been a nudge from the Holy Spirit, because I felt compelled to speak to him.

We were still in the midst of the on and off Covid lockdowns that were causing havoc in most people’s routines, so I made a comment about how we were probably having to wait so long because the business was short staffed (a common occurrence during Covid). Then I asked him how things were going for him during the Covid chaos.

He admitted things weren’t going well at all. In the course of our conversation I learned he was a building contractor who still had work. Jobs were difficult to complete, though, because it was hard to get materials owing to the lockdowns and other Covid problems. Worse still, his wife had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer (that’s who he was talking to on the phone) and he would be taking her to a doctor’s appointment later that day.

But…that also meant taking his mother along, who had dementia and lived with them and couldn’t be left alone in the house. The living arrangements had been fine before his wife got cancer and before the Covid mess disrupted his business and caused him to work ten hour days.

At this point he admitted he had to put his wife’s health before his mother’s, and he needed to find a memory care facility as soon as possible that could watch over his mother full time while he and his wife focused on her cancer recovery.

“I wish I knew someone who could help me sort this out,” he said.

“That’s me!” I exclaimed. “I have the phone number of the county coordinator who helps families find the best dementia caregivers in our area.”

That was because my father-in-law who had increasing memory loss had decided to move himself into assisted living near us a couple of years before, and I still had the contact information for the coordinator who found the perfect placement for him.

I gave this burdened man her number and he smiled and thanked me profusely. I could tell it was breaking his heart to make this decision regarding his mother, but he clearly was relieved to have access to resources that would lighten his load so he could walk alongside his wife as she battled breast cancer.

 

Bone-headed decision made by a stupid ass kid

Anne gave her final confession 48 hours before execution to her almoner, John Skip (or Skypp.) At dawn on May 18, she called for her jailer, Sir Anthony Kingston, to come and witness something. She swore on the communion Host that she was innocent of the charges against her. She then consumed it and repeated the oath.

For a person of the 16th century, what Anne had just done was extremely powerful. Taking an oath on what they believed to be the literal body of Christ would instantly damn the soul of anyone who was dishonest. She wouldn’t have lied on the Host expecting to meet her maker within a few hours.

The execution was delayed. A large crowd had gathered to see this extraordinary event — the execution of a crowned Queen of England. Kingston hoped if it was delayed and no announcement was made, the people would drift away. They didn’t; the crowd only got larger.

Anne had to be in agony. She called Kingston to ask why no one had come to get her. He told her it had been rescheduled for noon. She settled into prayer with Skip again, but when noon came and went and no one came to get her, she called for Kingston again, and at this point, he told her it would be the following day. Unintentional though it was, this was an incredible cruelty.

On the morning of May 19, 1536, she walked out to face the huge crowd. She mounted the scaffold which had been adorned with hundreds of yards of black velvet. Until the very last moments, her status as a crowned queen had to be respected.

She tipped the executioner to ensure a swift death and then comforted her ladies. These women, assigned to Anne because they hated her and were friends with allies of Princess Mary, now wept as though they were “bereft of souls” or the living damned. They had come to care for her deeply over the two weeks they spent with her in the Tower.

Anne turned to face the crowd and people held their breath, waiting to see what she would say. Kingston knew she was innocent after seeing her swear on the Host, and it was a situation he’d never really anticipated — executing an innocent person. He didn’t know what she would do and had speculated she might declare her innocence before the crowd.

But Anne kept her poise and held to the traditions. In the Tudor era, showing fear or reluctance to die indicated the person was afraid to face God with a guilty conscience. Anne held her chin high and made it clear she welcomed death.

Her exact words are disputed by different sources, but it’s clear they were the conventional speech of a condemned criminal. Any deviation from the pattern would have been shocking and appalling and would have had consequences for her family.

The only slight deviation from the pattern was the request that anyone who might “meddle with her cause” would use good judgement. She knew the history being made in that moment, and that people would be debating what had happened to her for centuries to come.

She submitted to the sword with grace, having done all she could to prove her innocence.

In real China, family net worth and home ownership are 50% bigger than America’s and it dominates all 21st century technologies. Help get the word out.

BITTER Feminist LOSING Their Mind Because They Have NOTHING To OFFER MEN

Weapon Systems: Ours and China’s

Godfree Roberts

You win some..

I asked a Chinese (civil) engineer friend to estimate what proportion of America’s spending on failed weapon systems China spent on its successful ones. He would be surprised, he said, if it were half as much. Here are some systems we discussed:

  • Hypersonic Missiles: America’s 20-year, failed ARRW hypersonic missile defense program cost $15 billion. Chinese university science clubs have demonstrated hypersonic weapons. China’s DF-17, Mach 10 ‘carrier killer’ has been demonstrated many times. Its big brother, DF-27, can hit ships west of Guam.

DF 27
DF 27

  • Next-Gen Helicopter: After spending $7 billion developing a reconnaissance and light attack helicopter, the US pulled the plug in 2004. China’s Harbin Z-19 is a tandem-seat helicopter for reconnaissance and light attack, with air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles and nose-mounted electro-optical target tracking turret.
  • Self-Propelled Howitzer: The Crusader was to replace the Army’s aging artillery pieces, more mobile with longer range. It was canceled in 2002 after $2 billion was spent. China’s PLZ-05 155 mm self-propelled howitzer, the PLZ-07 122 mm self-propelled, self-loading howitzer, the PCL-181 155 mm wheeled, self-propelled, selfloading howitzer are all in full production.

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7aa4d22e90fcf1a18a58481e0dffb938
  • Railgun: The U.S. Navy spent $500 million on the railgun program and cancelled it in 2021. China’s railgun fires 120 rounds at 4,500 mph (7200 km/hr) and strikes targets 120 miles (200 km) away.

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625df51b1aae9ad68862fe95672ffcc3

  • Laser Cannon: The Air Force spent $5 billion developing the laser cannon then cancelled it in 2012. China’s high-energy laser cannons remain powered up indefinitely without overheating, thanks to state-of-the-art cooling.

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dac16e9db509fb7898003d2916fb1d23

  • Next-Gen Destroyer: The Zumwalt next-gen destroyer was supposed to launch missiles from its 80 VLS cells but after spending $22 billion, the Navy canned it in 2016. China’s Type 055 next-gen destroyer has 112 VLS cells, all of whose missiles vastly outrange and out-punch their USN counterparts.

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2e7f89823a31a41ac4f463e12b7ca357

  • Aircraft Carrier: Construction of the $20 billion USN Gerald Ford began in 2009. Its electromagnetic aircraft launch system, EMALS, is underpowered and unreliable, thanks to the Navy’s choice of AC electric power throughout the ship. The Fujian, with a more powerful DC electric system, has a much more powerful, reliable EMALS, a bigger flight deck and aircraft elevators, a slimmer mast and a wider array of defensive weapons.
  • F-35 fighters from design to retirement, will cost $2 trillion, and each jet requires 9 hours of maintenance for one hour flying. The J-20 fighter carries a bigger payload (10 tons) faster (1,500 mph), higher (60,000 ft.) and further (1100 nm.) than the F-35. The J-20’s missiles outrange the F-35’s missiles by 50%.

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94c63be3210c32055c0d0381b6dc077d

The crisis

The West is suffering a crisis, not only of confidence, but of competence. Boeing’s failed shuttle is in the headlines but, less visibly, CERN’s $20 billion attempt to sustain nuclear fusion is collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. It will probably be abandoned now that a private Shanghai company has sustained fusion–for $1 billion.

Instead of continuing with this embarrassing list, I will devote the next post to consider more implications of the fusion breakthrough for world leadership.

American style corruption

Iran Receives Nuclear Threat Over Pending Retaliation Against Israel

Iran Receives Nuclear Threat Over Pending Retaliation Against Israel

Former Iranian diplomat Amir al-Mousavi told Al-Mayadeen news that Iran has been threatened with a nuclear strike.

Mousavi stressed that Iran has made it clear any nuclear attack will be met with a proportional response.

He further noted that those issuing the threats received even stronger replies.

He also urged people to ignore baseless claims of alleged Iranian “cowardice” circulating on social media, over the still-delayed retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran weeks ago.

Mousavi concluded by asserting that Iran, together with its allies, is fully prepared to confront the Zionist entity (Israel) with full force.

 

Hal Turner Analysis

In the ongoing Soap Opera of the Israel-Iran troubles, we have finally reached the apex threat stage: nuclear attack.

I call it a “Soap Opera” because like old the TV Soap Operas, you can walk away from it for a whole week and when you get back, you find you haven’t missed anything substantial.

As readers are aware, today (August 15, 2024) is my first day back at work from my vacation last week, and, as I peruse the available Intel and news, I realize I haven’t missed much!

What I have missed – or rather been relieved of for a week — is all the stress that had come with the ongoing situation.

As usual, folks in the Middle East are all hyped-up and ready to blow each other up . . .  again . . . . as usual.  It’s been this way for decades and shows little sign of abating.

As I look at the nuclear strike claim, I realize the only thing different about this situation is that the threat was actually made.

For decades, it was the quiet part . . . the part no one said out loud.  It was always known, and presumed, that no one could hit Israel without the real possibility of being nuked by Israel.

But now that the actual threat has been made – interesting things are happening.

First, there is no abatement of the retaliation by Iran.   Iran says it __is__ coming and __will_ be delivered.

So what did the nuclear threat accomplish?

Looking at the situation as the outsider I actually am, Iran faces a very simple reality:

If they do not hit Israel back for the assassination, then they don’t have a country anymore.  Israel will be free to kill whomever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want.

If they DO hit Israel back, and very VERY hard, it __may__ give them pause before they think about undertaking such an act again.     BUT . . . .

It will also unleash the very war that Israel has been looking at waging since the Iranian nuclear program became public knowledge.

Israel simply will not tolerate any other nearby country being equipped with nuclear weapons the same way the Israelis have nuclear weapons.  If any neighbor country has nukes, that would DETER Israel from its ongoing military abuse of neighbors.

It was this reality, for decades, that actually created today’s troubles because somewhere inside Israel, they got the idea they could do whatever they want, to whomever they want, whenever and wherever they want, and no one would dare do anything for fear of being nuked.

Many MANY sources have repeatedly told me that Iran already has nuclear weapons; they allegedly got them via their own research and with help from North Korea.

None of us knows for certain if this claim of Iran nukes is true.

But back to the issue at hand, Israel has apparently made an actual, direct, nuclear attack threat.

So again, for Iran, the issue is simple: Does Iran hit the Israelis back (HARD) for assassinating Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, or not?

In my analysis, this is a no-brainer.  I think Iran __must__ hit Israel back, and very hard.

Remember, back in April of this year, Israel bombed the Iran Embassy Compound in Damascus, Syria.   An open act of war!

Iran made a retaliation, with force, much of which was shunted by Israeli defenses, with assistance from allies like the US and UK.

But in that retaliation, deadly weaknesses in Israel’s defenses were exposed.  Several Iranian ballistic missiles, got through Israeli defenses, and struck Israeli military bases.   It proved that Israel __could__ be successfully hit, and the Israelis now know they are nowhere near as “invincible” as they thought they were.  They don’t like this reality and so they have upped-the-ante to actual nuclear threat.

That was foolishness on the part of Israel that is psychotic in its origin.  If Israel nukes Iran over any conventional attack, what does Israel think Russia will do?  What will North Korea do?  What will Pakistan do?    I think one or more of those countries would launch nuclear strikes at Israel!  Much of Israel would be annihilated.

Now, the U.S. would be in a real pickle if any of this happened because, as Israel’s co-dependent enabler, the US would be obligated to come to the aid of their psycho-bully-little-brother, Israel.

Would US political leaders risk all-out nuclear war, for a bunch of psychotics-from-inbreeding over in Israel?

Maybe.  Maybe not.

Which brings us all back to Israel’s nuclear threat.  If I was in Iran, I would realize the nuclear threat is __possible__ but not probable.

If I was in Iran, I would also realize that Israel has wanted an excuse to go after Iran’s nuclear program for years, and this situation, right now, was intentionally created BY ISRAEL, to cause that exact war.   It is coming and nothing will stop it.

So if I was an Iranian political leader, I would resign myself to the reality that a big war __is__ here, and I would go for the gusto; I would order a massive attack upon Israel in response to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, and the total violation of Iran sovereignty the assassination actually was.

Iran is either sovereign or they’re not.

If they want to be sovereign, it seems to me they  __must__ hit Israel.  Since the Iran retaliation after the Embassy Bombing did not deter Israel, this retaliation for the assassination of Haniyeh must be at least ten times larger.

The longer Iran waits, the more time Israel has to prepare.  The more time the US and UK have to move assets into theater and move weapons into Israel.

So, I ask the leadership of Iran: Are you sovereign, or not?  Are you going to allow the Israelis to murder people in your capital city, or not?

I think that if Iran rolls-over and does not attack in response to the Haniyeh murder, then Iran is no longer sovereign.

When She Expects Princess Treatment But You’re In the Friendzone

OMGosh…

I got a call for a domestic disturbance, once. When I got there, I saw two guys fighting in the yard. I got out, and ordered them to stop. I was by myself, so I cuffed one guy and put him in my car while I talked to the other one. Then, I switched them to interview the other guy.

I found out they were brothers but one had been messing around with the other brother’s girlfriend. I talked to them about family and the total mess they were making of each other over a female. I took the fellow that started the fight to jail and left the other at the house. All the way in, I continued telling him not to do this over some girlfriend—it wasn’t like they were married—he’s your brother…

By the time we got to the booking office, he was thanking me.

Eight months later on patrol I happened to see the two brothers in a parking lot. I stopped and said, “Hey! How’s it going?”

They turned around and said, “Deputy, thank you so much for how you handled that mess months ago.”

“Great,” I said, “how are things now?”

They said they both got rid of the girlfriend, started a landscaping business together, and business was going great! “Had we not met and talked that day, one of us might be dead by now.”

I felt really good about my job that day. 🙂

NOTE: I want to add the backstory for this girlfriend that some had wondered if she got the short end of the deal. She did, but there was a reason. She was not a long-term girlfriend with any history connected to the brothers. She had only been around for a few months and was clearly using the brothers for her own selfish gain (house, drink, food and apparently a little more…). I imagine that the stories ending would be different had the brothers been dirt-bags, but they weren’t.

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Look. China is an 18t dollar economy.

It is the world’s largest trading nation.

LARGEST.

No. 1.

Between 2019 and 2023, Chinese mercantile exports increased by almost 1t, and would have certainly been far higher had American-led sanctions and restrictions not curtailed normal trade. That’s more than double the increase in US goods exports, at 400b.

[Note: There are ~2,000 Chinese entities on the sanction list today.]

Yet it is growing like a developing economy, which it is, structurally as a whole.

China is an unprecedented economy. There has never been anything like it, and equivalence with any economy in the present or past fail at some point, often superficially.

~5% growth is a china in economic trouble?

Now, China is in the ~13,000 gdp per capita bracket, similar to Mexico, Malaysia, and turkey, all in the structurally vulnerable middle income “trap”.

What were their growth and inflation numbers in 2023?

China: 5.2%, 0.2%

Malaysia: 3.7%, 2.5%

Mexico: 3.2%, 4.7%

Turkey: 4.0%, 53.8%

And the kicker?

The other 3 have devalued massively relative to the yuan this century, particular post GFC.

There isn’t a developing country who won’t kill to be in china’s shoes today.

NONE.

The disparity would have been starker were the global south not given carte blanche to depreciate their currencies in a follow-the-yen reverse plaza accord begun in 2012-2013.

There was no political blowback, and the silence turned deafening when it was China and Singapore (of all actors) inexplicably singled out for designation as currency manipulators, despite appreciating versus the dollar.

It was a sharp message to China. Do NOT join in the festivities. We have different rules for you.

China today has low domestic inflation and interest rates. Given that the yen has devalued 100% in the past decade, along with a host of other currencies, what would it hurt if China devalues the yuan by 10% to 7.8-7.9 to the dollar? Even then, it will only be a fraction of the yen’s colossal dislocation in recent years.

That move alone can boost growth by at least 1–2%.

Economic troubles?

Far from it.

China hasn’t brought out the elephant gun, not even during covid.

That, my friends, is something to chew over.

Ownership is the key.

Cosmic Catastrophe: A Space Adventure Gone Awry

Submitted into Contest #247 in response to: Set your story on a spaceship exploring the far reaches of space when something goes wrong. view prompt

Kayla Flemming

The hum of the spaceship’s engines filled the air as Captain Jackson surveyed the vast expanse of space stretching out before them. They were on a routine mission to explore the far reaches of the Galaxy, charting new star systems and collecting valuable data for the Intergalactic Alliance.But as they ventured further into uncharted territory, a sense of unease settled over the crew. There was something off about this sector of space – a feeling of foreboding that sent shivers down their spines.As they pressed on, their fears were realized when a sudden jolt rocked the ship, sending alarms blaring and lights flashing. Emergency protocols were initiated as the crew scrambled to assess the damage.”What happened?” Captain Jackson barked, his voice tense with urgency.”It looks like we hit some sort of anomaly,” replied Lieutenant Ramirez, her fingers flying across the control panel as she attempted to regain control of the ship. 

But their efforts were in vain as another jolt shook the vessel, this time more violently than before. Panic gripped the crew as they realized they were hurtling towards a nearby planet, their trajectory set on a collision course that spelled certain doom.

 

With time running out, Captain Jackson made a split-second decision – they would attempt a risky maneuver to evade the planet’s gravitational pull and regain control of the ship.

 

“Brace yourselves!” he shouted, his hands gripping the controls with steely determination.

 

As the ship plunged towards the planet’s surface, the crew held their breath, their hearts pounding in their chests. But just when it seemed all hope was lost, Captain Jackson’s daring maneuver paid off, and the ship veered away from the planet at the last possible moment.

 

Cheers erupted throughout the cockpit as the crew celebrated their narrow escape from disaster. But their relief was short-lived as they realized they were now adrift in the void of space, their navigation systems fried and their chances of survival dwindling by the second.

 

As they frantically searched for a way to repair the ship and plot a course home, Captain Jackson couldn’t help but wonder what other dangers lurked in the darkness of space, waiting to test their courage and resolve.

 

Despite the chaos that ensued, the crew of the spaceship refused to let fear dictate their actions. With determination in their hearts and a spirit of camaraderie that bound them together, they set out to explore the planet they had narrowly avoided crashing into. As they descended through the atmosphere, they were greeted by a breathtaking landscape unlike anything they had ever seen before – towering mountains, shimmering lakes, and lush forests stretching out to the horizon.

 

Eager to uncover the secrets of this alien world, the crew donned their spacesuits and ventured out onto the surface, their eyes wide with wonder as they took in the sights and sounds of this new frontier.

 

But their sense of adventure soon turned to apprehension as they encountered strange and wondrous creatures lurking in the shadows – creatures with scales as hard as steel, eyes that glowed with an otherworldly light, and voices that echoed through the caverns like whispers from the void.

 

Undeterred, the crew pressed on, their curiosity driving them ever forward in their quest for knowledge and discovery. And though they faced countless challenges and obstacles along the way, their indomitable spirit carried them through, guiding them on a journey of exploration that would change their lives forever.

 

As they prepared to leave the planet behind and return to the safety of their ship, Captain Jackson couldn’t help but feel a sense of gratitude for the adventure they had shared together. For in the face of adversity, they had found strength in each other, forging bonds that would withstand the test of time.

 

Amidst the chaos and excitement of their unplanned detour, the crew found moments of levity that brought much-needed relief from the tension of their predicament.

 

From Lieutenant Ramirez’s failed attempts at fixing the ship’s malfunctioning systems to Ensign Johnson’s comical mishaps during their explorations on the planet’s surface, there was never a dull moment aboard the spaceship.

 

Even Captain Jackson, typically stoic and reserved, couldn’t help but crack a smile as he watched his crew stumble their way through one misadventure after another. But amidst the laughter and camaraderie, there was a sense of camaraderie that bound them together, a shared sense of purpose that gave them the strength to face whatever challenges lay ahead.

 

And as they finally set course for home, their ship repaired and their ship repaired and their spirits buoyed by the memories of their cosmic escapades, they knew that no matter what trials awaited them in the vast expanse of space, they would face them together, united in their quest for adventure and discovery.

 

The journey back to their home base was filled with moments of reflection and gratitude. Each member of the crew took the time to appreciate the bonds they had formed and the experiences they had shared during their time in the far reaches of space.

 

Lieutenant Ramirez, with her quick with and unwavering determination, became the heart and soul of the crew, guiding them through even the most challenging of situations with her calm demeanor and steady hand.

 

Ensign Johnson, despite his tendency to stumble into trouble, proved himself to be a valuable asset to the team, his ingenuity and resourcefulness saving them on more than one occasion.

 

And Captain Jackson, with his leadership and courage, inspired his crew to rise above their fears and doubts, leading them through adversity with unwavering resolve. As they neared their home base, a sense of anticipation filled the air. Though their journey had been fraught with danger and uncertainty, they had emerged stronger and more united than ever before.

 

And as they docked their ship and stepped onto solid ground once more, they knew that their adventure was far from over. For as long as there were stars in the sky and unexplored corners of the universe to discover, they would continue to journey forth, together, in search of the next great adventure that awaited them in the cosmos.

What goes through the mind of Chinese citizens when they travel out of China and end up on the internet seeing uncensored speech and negative factual news about the CCP?

They love China even more and decide to go back China to build a better modern China with the unique Chinese Characteristics.

The Chinese American scientists and engineers who have worked and studied in the US for years have read and seen all the fake news and real life stories their whole life. They have endured enough discrimination and unfair treatments that they decide to return China and start up their high tech companies.

That is the fact.

Stop making fake narrative harassment and bullying hate speeches on China wastefully.

“With all due respect, you’re not paying us $5,000 so I can carry out quick revenge.”

I’ll never forget that line, spoken by a fully armed contractor hired for my personal protection on the strangest day of my career.

The year was 2014 and Dan is falling apart again.

Dan (not his actual name) shows up in many companies. Dan is intelligent, capable of spectacular results but is incredibly inconsistent. Our Dan once led the entire company in our sales rankings and had four President’s Club plaques in his office.

The only thing Dan was consistent at was being a nice guy. Everyone loved him. He gave his time freely to everyone in the office. Whether you were an intern or a manager, he raised his hand if you needed help.

Dan was in his early 50s and was a family man. Married with two kids in high school, he lived a simple life.

Dan drove us crazy. He could be running along with incredible results for the first six months of the year and then look like a completely different person in the second half. He was either sensational or a complete disaster. There was no in-between with Dan.

Most of the time, it just took a stern conversation. He had four different direct managers in his time with the company. I was several levels above him but saw the same three-step process play out every time.

New manager loves him. Dan is helpful, hustles, delivers great results and is a great team player.

Manager is concerned. Dan is missing deadlines, seems overwhelmed and we’ve had some customers complaints.

Manager is done. The entire office is distracted in putting out Dan’s fires and he just lashed out at a teammate (or some similar incident).

Throughout this process, Dan’s manager talks with him about his performance and encourages him to get his mojo back. Dan agrees and commits to improvement while performance keeps getting worse. Each time, a last straw is added to the figurative camel’s back when Dan erupts on a teammate or manager.

We then put Dan on a written performance plan with the direct language of “If Dan fails to achieve the results in this plan, he will be terminated.”

The performance plan always flips a switch in Dan. He would tell us how much he loves the company and needs the job. He would apologize, promise to improve and then deliver on that promise. Results would go from terrible to great.

I am talking about worst to first kind of turn-arounds. We would go from customer complaints to receiving love letters from his customers.

One year later, the process would start over again.

After this cycle happened too many times, I had a conversation with him.

“If it goes downhill again Dan, there won’t be another written performance plan. We can’t afford to keep disrupting the office. You have to get it together and keep it together. Is there something outside of this office that we can help you with?”

He paused for a long time and opened up. He suffered from depression. He drank too much. His family had confronted him. He was in a bad place.

Our company partnered with a counseling organization for just this type of situation. I offered him a leave of absence if he would enter the program, of which we would pay for 100%. He had to attend every session and stay in the program or we would terminate his employment.

He graciously agreed.

We gave him two months of paid leave and he entered the counseling program. He came back energized and we saw the best of Dan.

For a while.

Soon, the process started again as complaints started surfacing, both from his teammates and customers.

This time, it ended with Dan sending an explosive email to a customer at 2AM. This cringe-inducing email was four paragraphs long and all but called the customer an idiot. It was totally out of his normal character.

This happened on a Friday. The customer forwarded his email to me and several other managers the next morning with Dan copied on the email. This customer shared her plans to post it on her blog and social media accounts.

Dan left me with no choice but to fire him and he knew it.

On Sunday evening, I got a call from Dan’s manager. She was rattled.

Dan knew what was coming on Monday and confided in several people in the office, in the worst of ways.

He told one person that he expected to be fired. He went on to say he deserved it and probably didn’t deserve to be alive. Maybe, he should just end it all.

Startling, but it got worse. He called another employee who happened to be an avid hunter. Without talking business, he asked her questions about handguns and which caliber he should look into.

Damn.

This was the summer of 2014 and two school shootings had just taken place on the West Coast within a week of each other. Hints like this couldn’t be ignored.

My first responsibility as a leader is keeping employees safe. Was Dan likely crying out for help? Probably. Was he going to bring a gun to the office? Highly unlikely. Could we take that assumption to the bank? Absolutely not.

I told our manager to sit tight and I got on the phone with my boss. We were not going to take any chances. He had experience with a security firm and knew the owner.

He arranged for an “armed specialist” to be with me the next morning in the office. To this day, I appreciate how quickly my boss worked to arrange everything. I have fired many people but never in a situation like this.

For the first time in my life, I was headed to a business meeting with a loaded gun.

I talked with our manager in the office and asked her to arrange an office meeting at our satellite office across the street. In essence, I asked her to get everyone out of the main office to start the morning. If something happened, I would be the only employee in the office with Dan that morning.

Next, I called Dan and asked him to meet me the next morning at my office.

I didn’t sleep that night. My imagination kept taking me to dark scenarios. I wanted to tell my wife more of my fears but kept them to myself. I didn’t want her to start imagining all the crazy stuff I was dreaming up.

I met with my bodyguard two hours before I was scheduled to meet with Dan. He was an older gentleman, short and lean. He wore a dress shirt tucked into jeans with a leather bomber jacket on. He gave me his credentials. Twenty years in the military and another twenty years in private security, both overseas and domestic.

He wanted to know where all the entry points to the office were. We walked the perimeter of the building and did the same inside. We walked back to my office where I planned to meet with Dan.

“Too many doors to get here. Also, what if one of your employees comes back to the office and is back here with us? I like the offices in the lobby.”

“OK.”

We walk up front and sit down in one of the lobby offices. He asked me how I planned to conduct the conversation and what I am expecting.

“Well, I can meet with him in this office. I will leave the office door open since no one will be here yet. You can sit right outside the office on that couch.”

“With all due respect, you’re not paying us $5,000 so I can carry out quick revenge.”

It takes me a few seconds to comprehend what he is saying.

“Ian, I won’t do you any good on the couch if he brings a gun into that office with you. I’ll be sitting right next to you.”

“Of course.”

“I will have my gun covered by my jacket but trust that I can get to it quickly. I don’t want to show it and get him more nervous than he already is.”

We agree to announce him as an “HR specialist” hired to assist in the discussion. This sounds much more comforting than telling Dan that my bodyguard will shoot to kill should Dan pull out a gun.

Dan walks through the door on time. I am anything but calm. I am not sure if I am worked up because of potential danger or simply because I am sitting next to a trained killer.

Dan knows what the meeting is about. He sees the paperwork in front of me. I introduce the person on my right who smiles and shakes his hand. I immediately get to the point.

“Dan, today is your last day with the company. We tried to make this work but feel that we need to move on without you.”

“I understand.”

I walk him through the paperwork. All standard stuff. When his benefits end, who to call in HR to learn more about Cobra, severance details, etc. He signs everything quickly. Next, I pivot.

“Dan, you said some things to people in the office that concern me.”

“Oh, that. Is this why you have someone here with you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to do anything crazy.”

“Dan, we want to help you continue with the counseling if you are interested.”

“Thank you. I am interested. I’m sorry for scaring everybody.”

I took his computer and access keys to the office, shook his hand and he left without incident. We paid for additional counseling and an outplacement service that helped him find new employment.

Since Dan had already been enrolled and worked with the same counseling organization, we alerted them as to what had happened and they reached out to him immediately after our meeting. He started counseling again that day and they continued to work with him for several months.

Our security detail remained in the lobby the rest of the day, guarding the front door. We took it a step further and paid for him to show up every day for the rest of the week, watching the front entrance.

Excessive? Maybe, but it gave our local managers peace of mind. As an organization, we had the safety of 30 employees to worry about. Many were nervous as word got out about the calls he made over that weekend.

Count me as one of the nervous employees. Scared is a more honest word. Scared he might hurt himself, other employees or me.

It was an incredibly difficult situation as you want to do right by the employee while also protecting the people he works with.

I left work early that day. I went home and hugged my wife and kids for a long time.

Then I poured a tall glass of Scotch.

All men need to see this

Make your life special no matter where you are or why

After exiting prison, I was placed in a half-way house. And, of course, over time I rose through the ranks and became a major director of the operations there. You cannot change who you are, no matter what snarls and lies are thrown at you, the fundamental being of what you are never changes.

So I was placed there, and I managed the house there.

It was for men. Everyone had one issue or the other. Most all of us were getting back on our feet, and there really wasn’t much in the way to help us, so we banded together and ran that house.

Some had addictions. Some were on parole and some had mental issues. Most were divorced. All were having trouble finding work.

When I came to the house, it was dim and gloomy and not managed at all. The light-bulbs were all replaced with 15 watt refrigerator bulbs (if any). They were the cheapest bulbs that one could buy. But they made the interior of the place really dark and super gloomy.

It was also stifling. They kept thee windows closed all the time. The initial reason was to keep the electricity bills down, but the real reason was that everyone was too laze to take responsibility.

Out of my own pocket, I bought “natural lighting” light-bulbs in 75 and 150 watt versions, and put them in all the fixtures. Talk about making a difference! What an amazing change.

The next thing that I did was mandate certain windows to be left open a crack (1 inch = 2.5 cm) so that fresh air could get in, and we kept the thermostat cooler in the Winter (at around 65F) and warmer in the Summer (at around 80F) so that over all we had a nice movement of air, and reasonable temperatures.

Here’s the typical window opening in “my room” in the shared house. Notice my piles and piles of books. LOL.

my books
my books

I then organized meals. One person would cook dinner per day, and we rotated. We sat down and came up with a meal plan and in short order we were eating meatloaf and mashed potatoes, tomato soups with grilled cheese, open faced turkey sandwiches with gravy over french fries, and Italian sausage. Not to mention the chili, spaghetti, and other meals.

It was remarked to me that the mental health of everyone was greatly improved, and the house was a nice, cozy place to live.

Eventually, I left.

But during that point in time… well, I made a difference.

During this point in time, of your life, are you making a difference?

Today…

All fingers point to Israel, but it could just as well be the United States.

  • First, The President of Iran dies in a helicopter crash, with his Foreign Minister. HERE
  • Second, The Iranian Intelligence Chief is assassinated. HERE
  • Third, the Chief of the Iranian national Police is assassinated HERE

All within a two day window.

What are the odds? Using the on-line probability calculator we are looking at 0.000000000000001% of it being a natural coincidence.

Four kittens, left in the river due to illness, emitted faint cries for help, but went unnoticed.

What is the best way to respond when your waiter asks if everything was okay, and it wasn’t?

I have a favorite breakfast restaurant that I have been to over 30 times. The breakfast is always great (almost), I posted 5 star Google review. Arrived to the pleasant greeting from a new waitress, who served my normal pancakes, eggs and bacon (don’t judge, it’s great). Both pancakes were burned on the bottom. I ate the eggs and bacon, turned the pancakes over to display the black pancakes. The new waitress removed the plate and said nothing. I normally leave a 25% tip, but left 15% and left.

Next few times, perfect, then again a set burned black. I turn them over and wait. The waitress comes over to offer coffee, and I say. “I’m sorry to be a pain, but I won’t be eating these, would you kindly replace them with pancakes that are not burned”. She apologized, fixed the error.

A bad meal may be a fluke, a bad cook that doesn’t care, but has not been found out yet. I learned that it really is my obligation to politely refuse a bad meal without eating more than a taste if the error is not obvious. The owner will never know that they have a problem if you hide it. If you eat it, you pay for it.

The first waitress should have dealt with it, but it may have been her first day on the job, and I did not expose the obvious issue by saying something. She lost out on a generous tip for her inexperience or lack of attention.

A restaurant is very difficult to manage properly, hurting that restaurant with bad reviews based off of one meal is IMHO very wrong. My rule is never to review restaurants that serve a meal I disliked, only ones when it’s truly fantastic. They lose that 5 star review, and it’s not the waiter/waitresses fault, unless he/she ignores an obvious error. If the error was in flavor, blandness and invisible, I’d still leave a 25% tip. But I would not order that meal again. If I try two or three meals there that I dislike, I never go to that restaurant again.

A friends wife ordered a meal took one taste and couldn’t eat it. She was very polite and didn’t say anything. I asked why, she said the cook just over cooked this. I said, would you mind if I said something. I asked the waitress to remove the meal from the check, and asked my friends if she wanted anything else. She was not mad, but the restaurant doesn’t get to benefit from a badly cooked meal. No drama, no bad review, just draw attention that maybe that cook is not attentive to his meal preparation. And returning a full plate of food.

I started work as a production supervisor. I asked my first boss how do I become successful?

He replied, every day you come to work you will find 100 things to do. 85 of them ar not important and will fix themselves. 15 can wait until tomorrow with no harm, and 5 are going to kill you. Your main job is to find the 5 that are going to kill you and take care of them first. That was the best advice I ever got, and also noticed in my 40 years of work that the best managers are not the ones who solve problems, but the ones that keep problems from ever happening.

The next is a Sam Walton story told to me by the former Vice President of Sales at Proctor and Gamble. One day Sam called him and said be in my office tomorrow. Of course when your largest customer calls you go, and he flew to Bentonville. Sam said I’m dropping your company and you have 30 days to get all of your products out of my stores. I’m sick of working with you guys, you have a promotion every week and I have to stock extra inventory for the sale then sales drop as soon as your promotion is over. I have to hire extra people just to change prices and you are causing a major disruption to my operation and I’m using twice the warehouse space, and I just won’t have it any more. Of course the VP was stunned. Who on earth would refuse to do business with the largest producer of consumer products in the world. He said what can we do? Sam thought for a minute and said we will take one product, Pampers, and you will run no special coupons or promotions. The only thing I want is the lowest everyday price that you give anyone including promotions, and you will deliver two truck loads of pampers to each of my store every day. He agreed. After three months Pamper sales significantly increased and P&G was making more money than they ever had. He no longer had to have marketing and promotion people and they were able to reduce their transportation and warehousing costs significantly. Basically keep your operation simple and don’t cloud it with things that don’t matter, and don’t be afraid to walk away from bad customers regardless of the revenue you will use. Profit, not revenue should be the driver.

Apricot Ginger Biscotti

IMG 8690 e1461703731106
IMG 8690 e1461703731106

Yield: about 12 biscotti

Ingredients

  • 1/3 cup (about 2 ounces) dried apricots
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 teaspoon water
  • 1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 tablespoons (about 1 ounce) chopped candied ginger

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 325 degrees F. Lightly butter a cookie sheet and dust with flour, knocking out excess flour.
  2. In a bowl soak apricots in boiling hot water to cover 5 minutes. Drain apricots well and pat them dry with paper towels. Chop apricots fine.
  3. In another bowl lightly whisk together eggs and transfer 1 teaspoon egg to a small bowl. Whisk water into the 1 teaspoon egg and reserve egg wash.
  4. In a large bowl with an electric mixer blend flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Add remaining egg and vanilla extract and beat until a dough forms (dough will be sticky). Stir in apricots and ginger.
  5. Turn dough out onto a floured surface and knead 6 times. Working on cookie sheet, with floured hands form dough into a 6 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch rectangle. Brush rectangle with some reserved egg wash and bake in middle of oven for 30 minutes.
  6. Cool rectangle on cookie sheet on a rack 10 minutes.
  7. Loosen rectangle from cookie sheet with a metal spatula and carefully transfer to a cutting board.
  8. Cut rectangle crosswise into 1/2 inch thick slices. Arrange biscotti, cut side down, on cookie sheet and bake 10 minutes on each side, or until pale golden.
  9. Transfer biscotti to rack to cool.

Notes

Biscotti keep in an airtight container at room temperature for 3 days or frozen for 1 month.

A whacked out crack head was driving with two others in the car. This crack head got up beside a car with a man, his wife, and two grandchildren on a 4 lane and started weaving like he was going to hit the family. He stuck his tatted up nasty arm out the drivers window and gave them the finger while acting crazy. The family slowed down, the crack head got in front of them. The crack head did not know that the family was turning right, they did turn right, and the crack head actually slammed on his brakes, backed up, and started to chase the family. The driver of the family in the car had enough, he stopped, the guy chasing him stopped about 100 feet behind and they both got out. The crack head was stoned, and started to charge the man until the family man pulled his M&P Shield 9 mm. The look on the crack head was sheer amusement. I have never seen anyone stop dead in their tracks and start walking backwards, almost running backwards. The crack head got in his car and backed all the way back to the intersection and took off. Yes, you guessed it already. I was that man, and this was about 18 months ago. Yes, I have a CCP, and yes, I would have shot him. I’m too GD old for that bullshit, especially when he put my wife and grandchildren at risk.

I was in the Navy for 21 yrs and heard a lot of stories. There are nearly 6,000 people on a carrier and at least two and sometimes 4 are at sea at one time and often at sea for 3 to 6 months or longer. The carrier is a very dangerous place to be – especially the flight deck.

The flight deck is 90 feet above the water so a fall from there often causes injury. There are also tons of other places that you can fall from. If you are seen falling, you almost always will be rescued. If you are not seen falling. . . .well . . . .it is a long swim to shore. Falling overboard happens on every deployment but most are rescued. Those that are not seen falling are just “missing” at the next role call and the ship is searched. Usually, missing means fell overboard which means dead.

What the public does not know is that there are always serious injury accidents and quite often fatalities on every deployment. In the 60s and 70s, there was an average of 1 or 2 deaths for every deployment. I have been out for a long time and the safety record might be better now but I doubt it. The carrier is still a very dangerous place to be – especially the flight deck.

“He won’t marry me after 16 years and two kids”

 

I’m a 38 year old woman who has been dating a 40 year old man for 16 years. I feel so depressed and disposable because he won’t marry me.

We have been together for 16 whole years. We have two daughters (4 and 8). I wanted to be married before having kids but he basically said he thought that if he married me first then I might decide not to have any kids and he would be stuck never having any. So I was guilted into having them before being married.

I have felt horrible about my situation for years but last summer, about a month before our 16 year anniversary, I started to feel much worse. I’m depressed and I think about it multiple times a day. I feel like a joke. Like a disposable piece of trash. Like I’m not good enough to be loved completely.

I’m a stay at home mom so I depend on him financially so it’s not as simple as just moving out.

I’m so embarrassed. I feel worthless. I have one very good friend that I met four years ago…. She thinks we are married and I’ve never corrected her. His parents and siblings refer to me as their daughter/sister in law. His mom introduces me to people as his fiancee because she knows that the term girlfriend doesn’t seem serious enough after 16 years.

A few months ago at confession the priest wouldn’t absolve me of any sins because I couldn’t tell him that I wouldn’t fornicate again. Older priests always have because staying with him in a fake family was best for my kids. This younger priest wouldn’t do it and I was crying hysterically. Now every time I think about that I get choked up. I can’t go up for communion at mass. So on top of feeling not good enough I also get to feel like I’m going to hell.

I love him but since this depression started this summer I feel different about him. And all men. I now think all men are incapable of love. For the sake of my daughters I need to stay with him but I don’t know how to handle feeling this way for 14 more years. I’ve been trying to tell myself that when I’m 52+ I’ll have a chance to find someone who will actually love me completely.

I honestly don’t know how I can stop feeling so horrible. I think about it multiple times a day, every single day.

How do I get over it? Or what do I do to improve things? How could I talk him into it? I don’t know if I could. I just feel so lost.

I feel your pain radiating through every word of your letter. 16 years is an eternity to be stuck in relationship limbo, and with two kids in tow, no less. My heart aches for you.

Let’s be clear: Your partner’s refusal to marry you is not a reflection of your worth. It doesn’t mean you are unlovable or disposable, even though I know it feels that way. His unwillingness to fully commit is about him and his issues, not about your inherent value as a person and partner.

But here’s the hard truth: You cannot talk him into marrying you because he does not want to marry you. I know that stings like hell, but trying to force or guilt him into a proposal will only breed more resentment and dysfunction. For whatever reason, he’s made it crystal clear that marriage is not on the table. You need to stop waiting for him to change his mind, and start focusing on what YOU need and want.

First things first: Look into your rights as a common law spouse in your area. After 16 years and two children together, you likely have some legal protections and entitlements, even without a formal marriage. Consult with a lawyer to understand your options and safeguard your interests.

Next, it’s time to start building some financial independence. I know you’re a stay-at-home mom, but is there any way you could get a part-time job while the kids are in school? Even a few hours a week could give you a sense of autonomy and put some money in your pocket. Plus, it’s a chance to connect with other adults and remember that your worth extends beyond the confines of your relationship.

Speaking of confiding in others – it’s time to come clean with your close friend. I know it feels shameful to admit that you’ve been lying about being married, but true friends will understand and support you through this. Keeping up the charade is only adding to your emotional burden. You need people in your corner who know the real story and can offer guidance and empathy.

I also want to address your belief that you need to stay with him for your daughters’ sake. I get it – you want to keep the family together, to spare them the pain of a split. But here’s the thing: Your daughters are watching you every single day. They’re absorbing the dynamics of your relationship, internalizing the way you’re treated. Is this the model of partnership you want for them? Staying “for the kids” in a union that leaves you feeling depressed and degraded will only teach them to settle for less than they deserve. Sometimes, the most loving thing a parent can do is to leave a toxic situation and show their children what it looks like to demand better for yourself.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to lean on your own family for support during this time. I’m sure they want to see you happy and whole, and would be more than willing to help you navigate this transition. You don’t have to shoulder this burden alone.

I know the thought of leaving is terrifying, especially after pouring 16 years into this relationship. But from where I’m standing, it sounds like you’ve already mentally checked out – you’re just looking for permission and a plan. So here’s your permission: You deserve happiness, commitment, and a partner who values you completely. And here’s a rough plan: Get educated about your rights, start squirreling away some money, tell the truth to your inner circle, and begin envisioning a life beyond this relationship.

I won’t pretend any of this will be easy. Disentangling your life from his will be a process, logistically and emotionally. But I deeply believe that you have the strength to reclaim your joy and show your girls what a woman looks like when she refuses to settle.

It’s time to bet on yourself. To fight for the love story you deserve, even if – especially if – you’re the only one in your current relationship willing to do so. 16 years is long enough to wait for someone else to see your worth. Now it’s your turn.

20 years ago, I was helping put my friend by working in his high end ski shop that also sold expensive ski outfits.

This petite gal came in wearing a vintage mink swing coat. She selected 6 outfits, in increasing sizes, including jackets & pants and went into the fitting room with them.

The door of the fitting room ended about 1′ above the floor. I kinda noticed that I saw her pull on a pair of pants but never saw her take them off which was kinda weird. Now I knew to keep an eye on the booth. Then I saw her try another pair on top of the first pair.

Just happened that there was a police car parked outside the shop. I went and spoke to him explaining what I thought was going on. He said that he would wait to outside our door so that he could arrest her if she was stealing.

Long story shore, the customer had layered on the 6 outfits on top of each other and then her coat. The previous loose swing coat was now tightly closed across her body. She let me know that she didn’t like any of the outfits and walked out. I nodded at the cop and he arrested her on the spot . She was wearing over $6000 of clothing. Ended up being found guilty of Grand Larceny and spent time in jail.

Ladies, if I may speak.

I’m going to wager this is a major, perhaps the biggest gripe women have with head games men play:

A guy and a girl will meet for a date.

Within a date or two, the guy will probably know if she’s someone he could see himself in a relationship with.

He realizes the answer is probably no.

When she asks if he is looking for a relationship or to date around, he says, “A relationship.” but leaves out the part (but not with you).

He continues going on dates with her knowing full well that he doesn’t want a relationship with her.

Why does he keep going on dates?

Because he knows if he keeps going on a few dates, he’ll probably get to sleep with her. Most girls don’t give it up on date 1 or 2. But sometime after that, it often happens.

Sure enough, 3–5+ dates in, they have sex.

Perhaps they go on a couple more dates and hook up a couple more times. He eventually bails, ghosts, or fades into the unknown.

Or in the worst case, they have sex once and he is out.

Hence, the common dating profile line you see “no hookups!” on what feels like 70% of profiles (in America at least).

As a general rule of thumb, guys, I know girls are fun, shiny objects. I’m a fan of them too.

But if she’s stated clearly she doesn’t want a hookup/fling, don’t dangle the relationship carrot. You’ll just feel like shit afterwards.

And more importantly, you’ll hurt her feelings.

Russia & China — Two Against One

Guest Post by Ray McGovern

 

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s extremely warm reception of President Vladimir Putin yesterday in Beijing sealed the increasingly formidable Russia-China strategic relationship. It amounts to a tectonic shift in the world balance of power.

The Russia-China entente also sounds the death knell for attempts by U.S. foreign policy neophytes to drive a wedge between the two countries. The triangular relationship has become two-against-one, with serious implications, particularly for the war in Ukraine. If U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy geniuses remain in denial, escalation is almost certain.

In a pre-visit interview with Xinhua, Putin noted the “unprecedented level of strategic partnership between our countries.” He and Xi have met more than 40 times in person or virtually. In June 2018, Xi described Putin as “an old friend of the Chinese people” and, personally, his “best friend.”

For his part, Putin noted Thursday that he and Xi are “in constant contact to keep personal control over all pressing issues on the Russian-Chinese and international agenda.” Putin brought along Defense Minister Andrey Belousov as well as veterans like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and key business leaders.

Joint Statements Matter

Xi and Putin signed a strong joint statement Thursday, similar to the extraordinary one the two issued on Feb. 4, 2022, in Beijing. It portrayed their relationship as “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation …”

The full import of that statement did not hit home until Putin launched the Special Military Operation into the Donbass three weeks later. China’s muted reaction shocked most analysts, who had dismissed the possibility that Xi would give “best friend” Putin, in effect, a waiver on China’s bedrock policy of non-interference abroad.

In the following weeks, official Chinese statements made clear that the principles of Westphalia had taken a back seat to “the need for every country to defend its core interests” and to judge each situation “on its own merits.”

Nuclear War

Thursday’s statement expressed concern over “increased strategic risks between nuclear powers” — referring to continued escalation of the war between NATO-supported Ukraine and Russia. It condemns “the expansion of military alliances and creation of military bridgeheads close to the borders of other nuclear powers, particularly with the advanced deployment of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery, as well as other items.”

Putin has undoubtedly briefed Xi on the U.S. missile sites already in Romania and Poland that can launch what Russians call “offensive strike missiles” with flight time to Moscow of less than 10 minutes. Putin surely has told Xi about the inconsistencies in U.S. statements regarding intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

For example, Xi is aware — just as surely as consumers of Western media are unaware — that during a Dec. 30, 2021, telephone conversation, Biden assured Putin that “Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.”

There was rejoicing in the Kremlin that New Years’ Eve, since Biden’s assurance was the first sign that Washington might acknowledge Russia’s security concerns. Indeed, Biden addressed a key issue in at least five of the eight articles of the Russian draft treaty given to the U.S. on Dec. 17, 2021.

Russian rejoicing, however, was short-lived.

Foreign Minister Lavrov revealed last month that when he met Antony Blinken in Geneva in January 2022, the U.S. secretary of state pretended he’d not heard of Biden’s undertaking to Putin on Dec. 30, 2021. Rather, Blinken insisted that U.S. medium-range missiles could be deployed in Ukraine, and only that the U.S. might be willing to limit their number, Lavrov said.

The Mother of All Miscalculations

When Biden took office in 2021, his advisers assured him that he could play on Russia’s fear (sic) of China and drive a wedge between them. This became embarrassingly clear when Biden indicated what he had told Putin during their Geneva summit on June 16, 2021.

That meeting gave Putin confirmation that Biden and his advisers were stuck in a woefully outdated appraisal of Russia-China relations.

Here is the bizarre way Biden described his approach to Putin on China:

“Without quoting him [Putin] — which I don’t think is appropriate — let me ask a rhetorical question: You got a multi-thousand-mile border with China. China is seeking to be the most powerful economy in the world and the largest and the most powerful military in the world.”

The ‘Squeeze’

At the airport after the summit, Biden’s aides did their best to whisk him onto the plane, but failed to stop him from sharing more wisdom on China:

“Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.”

After these remarks Putin and Xi spent the rest of 2021 trying to disabuse Biden of the “China squeeze” on Russia: it was not a squeeze, but a fraternal embrace. This mutual effort culminated in a Xi-Putin virtual summit on Dec. 15 of that year.

The video of the first minute of their conversation was picked up by The New York Times, as well as others. Still, most commentators seemed to miss its significance:

Putin:

“Dear friend, dear President Xi Jinping.

Next February I expect we can finally meet in person in Beijing as we agreed. We will hold talks and then participate in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games. I am grateful for your invitation to attend this landmark event.”

Xi:

“Dear President Putin, my old friend. It’s my pleasure to meet you at the end of this year by video, the second time this year, our 37th meeting since 2013. You have hailed … China-Russia relations as a model in international collaboration in the 21st Century, strongly supporting China’s position on safeguarding its core interests, and firmly opposed to attempts to drive a wedge between our two countries. I highly appreciate it.”

Is Biden still unaware of this? Have his advisers told him that Russia and China have never been closer, with what amounts to a virtual military alliance?

The Election

Putin has said he is aware that Washington’s policy toward Russia “is primarily impacted by domestic political processes.” Russia and China certainly assess that Biden’s policy on Ukraine will be influenced by the political imperative to be seen as facing Russia down.

If NATO country hotheads send “trainers” to Ukraine, the prospect of a military dust-up is ever present. What Biden needs to know is that, if it comes to open hostilities between Russia and the West, he is likely to face more than just saber rattling in the South China Sea — and the specter of a two-front war.

The Chinese know they are next in line for the ministrations of NATO/East.

Indeed, it is no secret that the Pentagon sees China as enemy No. 1.

According to the DOD’s National Defense Strategy, “defense priorities are first, defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China.”

The Pentagon will be the last to sing a requiem for the dearly departed unipolar world. May sanity prevail.

American Reacts to First Time You Realized America Really Messed You Up you Americans Living Abroad

 

What do you believe has been a major culture shift that has affected values in the United States in the last 50 years?

I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, back in the 1970s. My mom was a unwed mother. My uncle was a biker and drug dealer, and had done various stretches at the expense of the California taxpayer. He was also somewhat of a surrogate father for me at times.

I noticed early on that every drug dealer, car thief, burglar that crossed his threshold had at least one tattoo, but usually more than one. My mom eventually married (twice) with my first step father being a truck driver from a southern lower middle-class background. His family was working class whites, and none of them had tattoos. My second step father was a small business manager with a more middle class background. None of his friends or families had ink.

Back in the 70s and 80s, the was a pretty clear demarcation:

  • If you had tattoos you were generally lower class, but you were lower class in a way that rejected upward mobility and civility.
  • If you were middle class or upper class, tattoos were simply not an option.
  • Respectable working class men didn’t have ink. The sole exception to this was military veterans who sometimes had unit or ship tattoos, but otherwise lead respectable lives.

Now significant percentages of all economic and demographic groups have tattoos.

I don’t think this phenomena so much represents tattoos themselves being mainstreamed, but rather that underclass culture in general has been mainstreamed. The AVERAGE person today is more likely to embrace underclass culture.

Evidence:

  1. Tattoos.
  2. Almost half of children born to unmarried parents.
  3. Proliferation of profanity in normal everyday conversations.

As a teen and young adult I worked my tail off to get away from underclass culture. But in the intervening years, many in the upper and middle class have assimilated underclass culture. Tattoos are just and expression of that.

China Helped Zimbabwe Beat Evil U.S. Sanctions

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My daughter , her partner and their 1 and 3 year old sons lived in a small downstairs apartment. Her partner worked second shift so he wasn’t home until about 10pm. Around 6pm she would put the boys in the bathtub before brushing their teeth and putting them to bed and the neighbours had no issues with the noise that came with young kids in the tub. Splashing and the like.

Sadly the upstairs neighbour moved out and the landlords brother moved in after his wife kicked him out. He hated kids and the same day he moved in he took offence at the noise of the kids in the tub and my daughter told them off for splashing her and he called the police stating he suspected she was abusing them. She had just gotten the kids out of the tub and they were wrapped in towels when a knock on the door came, then police open up.

She opened the door and was eh hello? The two officers looked at both kids and saw they were wrapped in towels and asked if she had been bathing them? She said yes. They then asked why she had yelled at them and she showed them her clothes which were all wet and all the water on the bathroom floor caused by them splashing. She explained that she had told them off for splashing so much but that was all it was. This was 6.30pm.

They apologised for coming out and said there was obviously no issue here. One said he also had two small kids and knew how it was at bathtime. They then left.

A few days later they came back. Same complaint, same officers. Again they didn’t find any problems but did say that it was the neighbour upstairs who made the complaint. The next day her partner was off work and went up to talk to the neighbour at 1pm. Neighbor opened the door and was visibly drunk and slurring his words and basically told my SIL to get lost. SIL called the landlord who apologised for his brother, that he was an alcoholic and refused to accept it and get help but that he couldn’t kick him out as he had nowhere else to go.

Over the next few weeks the police came several times and finally told my daughter that it was probably best to move out. Thing is the rent was cheap and the only other apartment available was almost twice the price but it was owned by the same landlord and he offered to reduce the rent because of the trouble his brother had caused.

Less than a year later he sold all of his rental property and the new owner raised the rent. Now my daughter is stuck in the apartment because there aren’t any other 3 bedroom apartments available. The rent is so expensive that they can’t afford to save for a down payment to buy their own home. All caused by an alcoholic who refused to admit he had an issue.

AMERICAN Reacts to Americans Realize the Entire Earth Doesn’t Revolve Around Them!

What are the smallest signs that someone is severely depressed?

 

  1. Decreasing interest in sex, food, entertainment and social events. A lack of previous enthusiasm in activities and people that brought them a readable sense of joy.
  2. Binging on entertainment, music, films, television shows, etc. that have a suicidal character or widespread theme of death.
  3. Lack of concern in hygiene. Wearing the same clothes, noticeably unkempt appearance with changes in hair and skin care, decreased activity and exercise, no interest in looking good.
  4. Increased isolation. They quit calling friends, decreased communication with neighbors and service people. Gradually alone until the end.
  5. They begin to become clumsy, breaking items, stumbling, and having accidents. Their mind is too focused on their depressive state.
  6. Their home gradually becomes more cluttered and dirty, repairs are ignored. Mail remains unopened inattentive to their environment.
  7. Lack of ‘being present’. You will notice that their body is with you but emotionally and mentally they aren’t engaged.
  8. They begin giving things away, nothing has sentimental value anymore.
  9. They become confused, forgetful, and apathetic towards both mundane and special events, even their favorite friends.
  10. Their speech pattern changes, mumbling, monotone, and barely audible. There is a noticeable lack of humor, their mouth takes a downturned expression. There is a vacant sadness in their eyes. Expression is one of despair.
  11. They begin talking about famous suicide victims while their interest towards the topic increases. They express acceptance or approval of suicide.
  12. Their vocabulary leads towards, or hinting at, the statement, ‘’There is no hope or future’’. They express an apathetic attitude towards everyone and everything.
  13. They lose the spark and liveliness from their eyes. They gradually develop a dull, lifeless look.
  14. The frequency of their smiles gradually decreases until there is a frozen, blank expression on their face of sadness.
  15. Their health problems increase and they don’t seek answers or want to talk about it. They stop exercising and sleep more.
  16. The extremely depressed won’t seek counseling but exhibit a ‘don’t worry’ persona, trying to fool everyone that they are GREAT, until the body is found. Major depressive disorder creeps up slowly until it overcomes the natural survival instinct.

AI Just Got Insanely Better

Jesus Christ.

Vintage art

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Kenetic narratives, thomas robson, ls
Kenetic narratives, thomas robson, ls

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Women Are Crying Over NEW Laws Requiring DNA Tests In More States…

What is the evilest way to acquire wealth?

From 1950s to mid '60s two Mexican sisters concocted an elaborate plan to make quick money.

Delfina and María de Jesús González (also known as The González Sisters) ran “Rancho El Ángel”, the centre of a macabre prostitution ring that would eventually claim more than 90 lives: men, women and infants. All in the name of money.

In 1964, three women managed to escape from the the ring and approached the authorities with a horrifying story. They’d just escaped from a brothel where they were kept prisoners and forced into prostitution.

When the cops investigated the brothel, they were shocked beyond imagination. All the women the sisters had in their employ had all been abducted. To keep them in line they were beaten severely and drugged often to keep them under control.

Any woman who lost her beauty was immediately killed and disposed of somewhere in a shallow grave in the property. They dared not get sick; the sisters figured it was easier to kidnap more women than buy medicine. A new victim was totally free.

But the working girls weren’t the only victims of the Sinister Sisters. Any babies unfortunate enough to be conceived in this dungeon were quickly disposed of by way of immobilizing the mother and viciously beating her until she miscarried.

At the conclusion of the investigation, the police uncovered more than 90 bodies buried in the property.

The crimes earned the sisters 40 years in prison (the maximum that Mexican laws allowed). Although Delfina died whilst serving time her sister completed the sentence.

The Guinness World Records immortalized them as the “most prolific murder partnership” in history.

Cranberry Cappuccino Biscotti

cranberry cappuccino biscotti
cranberry cappuccino biscotti

Yield: 2 1/2 dozen cookies

Ingredients

  • 2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 3 tablespoons cocoa
  • 2 tablespoons instant coffee granules
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 egg whites
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 1 (6 ounce) package Ocean Spray Craisins Sweetened Dried Cranberries
  • 3/4 cup whole almonds, coarsely chopped

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 325 degrees F.
  2. Combine dry ingredients in a medium mixing bowl.
  3. Combine eggs, egg whites and vanilla in a separate mixing bowl.
  4. Add to dry ingredients, mixing just until moist, using an electric mixer on medium speed.
  5. Add sweetened dried cranberries and nuts; mix thoroughly.
  6. On a floured surface, divide dough in half and pat each half into a log about 14 inches long and 1 1/2 inches wide.
  7. Place on cookie sheet and bake for 30 minutes or until firm.
  8. Cool on a wire rack.
  9. Reduce oven temperature to 300 degrees F. Cut biscotti into 1/2 inch slices. Stand upright on cookie sheet.
  10. Bake for an additional 30 minutes.
  11. Let cool and store in a loosely covered container.

First Time You Realized America Really Messed You Up | Part 3

Has a dress code been instituted at your place of work because of one employee?

Yes.

My current employer is the County Clerk’s Office. As I’m sure you can imagine, a lot of the employees are female and older and are, for better or worse, sick to death of wearing stiff polyester suits to sit in a cubicle. A lot of people wear tunic-style tops/dresses and stretchier pants for comfort’s sake.

Well, like a lot of other legal entities, leggings were creeping into the office slowly but surely, and there were some vague warnings from HR, but one day we got an official memo that leggings were verboten by the end of January 2023. One coworker, a large, tall lady who was directly affected by the new ruling (because it meant that now her thighs were uncomfortably exposed from behind when she wore dresses) protested directly to the HR manager. The manager was candid enough to admit that the change was attributable to one particular complaint made directly to the serving Clerk: “I just came out of a courtroom and saw one of your employees walking around in leggings as pants and a short tunic shirt.” Requests to be allowed to wear leggings beneath dresses were denied, protests that opaque leggings actually covered more skin than sheer pantyhose were ignored.

So, no more leggings. Oddly, stretch pants are just fine.

But at least they didn’t make us start ordering work clothes from the Land’s End catalogue as threatened. (Probably because they don’t want to have to stump up a $300/person stipend for us to get a lousy cardigan set.)

Russia’s Anti-Drone Grenade Launcher Shotgun

 

 

How can husbands who are cheated on by their wives find peace in their heart and move on without resentment?

Alright, listen up – This is gonna hit like a freight train, but it’s the real, raw truth you need to hear. If your wife cheated on you, you were probably not in the driver’s seat of your own life. Sit down, grab a notepad, and let me lay down the law.

First off, the fact that you’re even in this situation means you lost the game somewhere along the line. A high-value man doesn’t get cheated on. Why? Because he’s the top-tier, cream-of-the-crop alpha who commands respect, loyalty, and admiration. Women don’t cheat on men who exude strength, confidence, and power. So, accept the fact that you weren’t operating at your maximum potential.

Now, when a woman cheats, it’s a slap in the face, a kick in the gut, and a punch to the ego – all rolled into one. It’s a challenge. The universe is testing your resilience. Are you gonna crumble like a cookie? Or are you gonna rise from the ashes like the fiercest, most unstoppable phoenix in the playbook of life?

Here’s how you man up, find peace, and move on without resentment:

1. **Upgrade Yourself**: Look in the mirror and identify what made you vulnerable. Was it your physique? Your finances? Your mental toughness? Transform every aspect of your life. Hit the gym or use slay fitness on Slaylebrity VIP social network like the world depends on it. Grind in your career until you’re a walking success story. Upgrade your wardrobe until you look like royalty. Become a man so high-value that you leave her in the dust, wondering why she ever settled for less.

2. **Channel the Pain Into Power**: Pain is an incredible motivator if you know how to harness it. Channel that betrayal, that hurt, into an unbreakable determination. Every time you feel the sting, double down on your goals. Let every rep, every deal, every personal achievement be a middle finger to the past.

3. **Cut the Cord**: You don’t need that toxic energy in your life. She’s a chapter in your past – close the book and toss it into the fire. No looking back. Cut all ties, block her number, delete her pictures. Out of sight, out of mind. She’s history, and you’re writing a new future.

4. **Surround Yourself With Winners**: Align yourself with high-value men who breathe success. Join circles where loyalty, respect, and power are the currency. If you have the means level up to slay club world on concierge. Being around winners will elevate your life game to a whole new level. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with – make sure they’re all titans.

5. **Secure Your Fortress**: Next time, choose a woman who recognizes your worth and treats you like the king you are. Build a fortress with someone who stands by your side, not someone who’s eyeing the exit.

Remember, resentment is a weed that grows in weak minds. You’re here to cultivate greatness. Let go of the past, don’t let it define you. Use this betrayal as a catapult to greatness. In the end, your success, your transformation, your newfound status will be the ultimate revenge.

Peace isn’t handed to you; it’s earned through relentless self-improvement, unshakable confidence, and unparalleled strength. Stop sulking, start dominating. Become the man who turns tragedy into triumph and rises above – unbreakable, unstoppable, untouchable.

This Will Blow Your Mind!

The Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa)

I grew up on a farm in Outback Australia. We had quite a big workshed full of equipment up a lane behind our house.

Even out in that area, we would occasionally get people in cars wandering up our back lane; fair enough, they’d get a bit lost and turn when they noticed their mistake and leave. We could always spot them, as the lane ran right by our house. We didn’t bother to shut the gate, since there was always somebody coming or going during the day and who can be bothered if you’ve not got stock there at the time?

Until one day when somebody went up there late one night and didn’t turn around and go straight back. My dad and I went and shut the gate on them and then waited, with our dogs and shotguns (this was a working farm, and so we had guns.) We also called the cops.

The two guys came back down the lane, saw us and the locked gate, backed up and went charging around the back fields trying to find another exit. By the time the cops got to our place, the two would-be thieves were pretty shaken up, and the cops found a heap of our stuff that they’d pinched from the shed.

We kept our front gate locked after that. And at night the dogs were let off.

What Putin and China just did is SHOCKING and the U.S. is in Real Trouble

I’ve had more.experience with this than I care to remember,.

At one point during my tenure with GM, the average age of my subordinates was very nearly 60 years old (59.8 I believe). Under CAW/UAW/UNIFOR, terminating someone with this kind of seniority was often a multi-year ordeal. By asking this question, I at least know you are not dealing with a union, or you would have been trained on a specific protocol for it. Also, you are likely working for a fairly small company or this would probably be left to an HR rep, who would also be trained. So with that in mind;

First depending where your company is located, I would make good god damn sure you have one hell of a rightous, well documented case for termination. In many places firing a 42 year employee without sufficient grounds could lead to the type of wrongfull termination suit that could sink a small company.

Secondly, if your company doesn’t already employ security, hiring a security company for a month or two after the termination is advisable. Being fired after 42 years would be a pretty massive shock for anyone. The potential for retaliation by someone who has dedicated nearly half a century to their career is a much more likely than it is with the average worker.

After 42 years, it is safe to assume the person considers their career to be a large part of who they are. Depending on the circumstance it’s very possible you are about to do something this person will view as one of, if not the greatest betrayals of their lives. Treat them with honesty, respect and compasion, don’t be afraid to show remorse, and be aware of the fact that l if you leave a person feeling like they have no options, they are financially ruined or you take away a part of their life they believe defines them, they are likely to lash out.

Lastly, you should never terminate anyone on your own but especially someone who has been with a company their entire adult life. You should always be acompanied by at least one other person, be that someone from HR, thier direct supervisor, another manager, a company lawyer and/or a security guard would all be reasonable choices, the 20 year old replacing him for 25% his salary, not so much (this should be obvious, but its the internet, who kows who will read this..)

Glitterbomb 3.0 vs. Porch Pirates

Prison Life

  1. Your woken up at 5:00 AM 7 days a week 365 days a year.
  2. Your then called out for chow, in which your section / tier heads to the chow hall. The food is served to you just like you were served while in elementary school. The difference is you could eat what they served you in the school cafeteria, In prison the food they serve you would make a belly goat puke. You will be given 8–10 minutes to consume the prison slop and out you go., On most days you will get some live entertainment to go with your food, such as fights, stabbings and of course the strong praying upon the weak.
  3. You then have a choice of a shower, yard, going to your prison job, school, or the yard.
  4. At about 10:30 am they issue the call for noon time chow, in which you march down to the chow hall in groups, afterwards they will send you to be counted, then when the count clears it’s back to your routine. In between is usually the gambling, tv watching, card games, beatings, hustlers, snitch squad, cell searches, stabbings, rapes and suicides. The golden rule is if you are walking on the tier, and you gotta use the restroom bad, you either soil yourself or run to your cell or dorm, you do not enter into any cell that is occupied or un occupied, because you will be beaten beyond recognition. If you see a person hanging and bleeding you just keep walking, if someone collapses from a heart attack or jumps off a tier you didn’t see anything.
  5. if it’s your time to go to store then go, but remember the sharks are circling at all times, and you have to be prepared to meet your maker, over a candy bar, or a bottle of shampoo. You don’t share a stick of gum, if you’re cash didn’t come in you do without.
  6. At about 3:30 pm they will issue the chow call for dinner, they will then count you again and when the count clears, they will allow you to have yard time, work time or shower time. At around 8:30 pm they will toss you into your cell for the night, and by 9pm the night has pretty much ended. If you listen close enough you will be able to hear the screams, of the inmates attacking the weak, and in some cases you will hear the goon squad coming to extract an inmate. In some cases you will hear a few brave cell soldiers, acting out and making noise.
  7. Come 5:00 AM the process starts over again, unless someone calls a strike, or your tier is locked down .

Welcome to prison life.

Cheesy Smothered Pork Chops

cheesy smothered pork chops
cheesy smothered pork chops

Ingredients

  • 4 or 5 boneless pork chops
  • Salt and pepper
  • 1/2 onion, thinly sliced
  • 1/2 cup mayonnaise
  • 1 cup Cheddar cheese, shredded

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Place pork chops in a baking pan. Season with salt and pepper on both sides.
  3. Sprinkle the onion on top of the pork. Spread mayonnaise on each pork chop. Top with shredded cheese.
  4. Bake for 25 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and browned. Baking time may be longer, depending upon thickness of pork chops.

About fifteen years ago, my cell phone rang at 10 o clock at night. When I answered, a very upset guy was on the line.

“Hey man!” He said. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

I was sitting in bed next to my wife reading a book. I tried to think if I had done anything shameful recently.

“I think you have a wrong number,” I replied.

“”Don’t even try that bulls—-t on me.” He said. “My girlfriend is really upset, man.”

I tried to explain that I didn’t know what he walking about.

“Yes you do. You’re answering her phone, dude. How can you do stuff like this? Steal someone else’s phone? You think that’s okay?!?”

I desperately tried to assure him that it wasn’t her phone, but he was insistent that he had dialed her number.

Suddenly, it hit me. He had dialed without an area code, and got my number, not hers. (Can that even still happen now?) As I tried to explain this to him, he faltered slightly, but I could tell he thought I was somehow pulling a fast one on him, and didn’t want to believe me.

Finally, I had the solution. I realized that I wouldn’t have been able to change her voicemail message, even if I had her phone. I said I was going to hang up, and he should call back. He would hear my message, and know he had the wrong number.

I hung up. My wife and I watched as the phone rang four times and then went to voicemail.

I felt this weird flashback to when I was a kid and got accused of shoplifting because I had walked into a store with a soda I had bought elsewhere, and the owner was convinced I had taken one from his store. There were no adults with me, and I had to surrender the soda, and I got a tiny inkling of how it must feel to be in serious trouble for something you didn’t do, and how scary it is to have to prove a negative.

The phone went silent, and the problem was resolved. He left no message.

“Smite Me, Almighty Smiter!”

About 30 years ago, as a young woman, I needed a new vehicle and decided to buy a small pickup truck. My boyfriend (now husband) and I had gone out for breakfast and went to the Ford dealership to look at trucks. I found a Ranger that I really liked. The salesman seemed really nice and helpful. My boyfriend had to go to work, so we told the salesman we would come back. When my boyfriend left for work he asked what I was going to do for the afternoon. I told him I was going back to buy the truck.

I went back to the dealership and found the same salesman and told him I had returned to purchase the Ranger. He actually laughed. I told him I was serious. At that moment a man drove onto the lot. The salesman walked away from me to go talk to the man. I looked for another salesman and was ignored by all. I even went inside and said I want to buy a Ranger and was ignored by all. I left.

I went down the street to the Nissan dealership and purchased a new Nissan pickup that I liked better than the Ranger. I drove my new truck back to the Ford dealership and asked to see the original salesman and the sales manager. I took them both outside, showed them my new Nissan and told them I had stopped to buy the Ranger, but was laughed at and ignored by all. I told them to have a nice day, got into my Nissan and drove away.

As I was leaving I heard the manager yelling at the salesman. I loved that Nissan and drove it for years.

Went to McDonalds , and had a late breakfast, coffee and read the paper for half an hour.

I was pretty fed up with the job, and was trying to get through the next month before starting to look, but even so the dismissal was still a surprise. I arrived at 8: 30 on Monday morning , after working the Saturday and Sunday on a piece of work for the bank, and by 9: 30 was on my way home with no job, and an appointment with the company lawyer for the Friday , for my exit papers, so a bit bamboozled.

By the end of my macca breakfast , I was sorted in my head , with a plan and way forward. Gave my wife a call , and said “Sorry its happened again” She said. God bless her ”Are you OK?”

Me “disconcerted, but I’ll be fine, let’s look at the finances tonight, but I think we’re in good shape, and I should be able to negotiate a settlement from these guys that will get us a free holiday”

“That sounds nice, see you tonight“

No.

The United States has been using NATO to attack Russia.

A simple look at the map has shown NATO encroachment into the (former) Soviet Union Eastern Block and then with the 2014 color revolution, a full invasion of Ukraine… a battlefield from which to attack and destroy Russia by.

Only idiots forgot that Ukraine was originally a significant part of Russia. Look at the maps.

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main qimg 4dd70bdda51ecd4e00124a2dbb67e7a6

Like I said; only ignorant idiots; with a brain no larger than a peanut, don’t realize this FACT. I mean it. These brain-dead piles of vomit can’t even tell the difference between a boy and a girl. They don’t know what the root of Pi is, and they sure as fuck cannot tell you how many mm are in a yard.

Ambulatory Stupid feces wearing diapers.

But the stupidity doesn’t stop there…

Oh no. The great mental retardation is alive and well in the West.

Look, I know that some people cannot help their stupidity. But Lordy, you all shouldn’t elect them into office. What the Hell were you thinking?

Yeah.

Only a real IDIOT would think that they could take on Russia.

A massive, blundering ignoramus of a pile of weeks-old pig-feces, would possibly think such an absurd idea.

So, now…

Now…

No shit… NOW…

…they are now looking to “pivot to Asia”… and take on the Russia + China alliance.

Surely, the world has NEVER seen such ignorant, and stupid fools in all the history of mankind.

Psssst…

There’s more.

No shit!

Can you believe… actually believe… that a virtual army of United States officials have been marching off to China to TELL THEM to stop being friends with Russia.

And…

To order them to buy a shit load of American Treasuries…

And…

to force them to stop being the manufacturing center of the world.

And what did China do immediately afterwards?

Oh, the hug between Putin and Xi was pure gold.

The absurdity of this situation is pristine. You just cannot make this shit up!

China & Russia, better than alliance

Remembering the office back in the day

The Philippines is synonymous with weakness, no matter how much the US arms it, it is like an ants’ nest, a pot of hot water poured on it and it is immediately finished.

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main qimg 483b5d7d3f61e0e06675b678e7c99633

The Philippines is a fragmented country comprising 7,100 islands and islets, with 11 islands (Luzon, Mindanao, Samar, etc.) accounting for 96% of the country’s total area of 299,700 square kilometres and a population of 100 million.

Its ethnic composition is complex, with the largest ethnic group, the Visayans, accounting for only 33.7% of the total population, and the rest of the ethnic groups being the Tagalog people, Ilocano people, Bicolano people and Bicolano people. For a long time, power in the Philippines was monopolised by the Catholic Tagalog people and Visayans of the north.

The total strength of the Philippine Regular Army is about 123,000, of which about 87,000 are in the Army, 20,000 in the Navy, and 16,000 in the Air Force; the current police force is about 160,000 strong.

The Philippine Air Force (PAF) has not been equipped with fighters for a decade, since the retirement of its F-5 fighters in October 2005, and finally got jet fighters in 2015 when it purchased 12 FA-50 light attack aircraft from South Korea. The aircraft, converted from the trainer T-50, has a top speed of Mach 1.5 and a maximum load of 4.5 tonnes.

Currently, the Philippines ranks sixth among the 10 ASEAN countries in terms of military strength, behind Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Malaysia, and slightly ahead of Cambodia, Laos, Brunei and Singapore.

The Philippines also faces threats from anti-government armed groups such as the New People’s Army (Bagong Hukbong Bayan), Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), Grupong Abu Sayyaf (GAS), Maute group, and Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF).

In addition, the Philippines is a major global stronghold for drug production and trafficking, producing about 70 per cent of the world’s cannabis products, with some 13 transnational drug cartels and 175 homegrown drug trafficking organisations. In 2018, the Philippines had a full-blown war on drugs that resulted in the deaths of 1,200 militants, government soldiers, and civilians.

A shithole tool like the Philippines anyway. If Xi Jinping sneezes, the Philippines will most likely disappear from the map.

Yes. China is advancing very quickly. Economically, it surpassed the USA by purchasing power parity back in 2014. And it’s on track to surpass the USA in nominal terms within 20 years.

China’s military modernisation has been nothing short of breathtaking. It now has the world’s largest navy by number of ships, and it’s building ships faster than any other country on earth.

China is building the world’s second largest aircraft carrier fleet. It has the Type 001 Liaoning, Type 002 Shandong, and Type 003 Fujian (which is about to undergo sea trials). Construction of the nuclear-powered Type 004 has just begun.

The Type 055 cruiser is regarded as the world’s most powerful warship. The Type 052D destroyer is no slouch, either.

China has the world’s most advanced hypersonic missiles. China’s anti-ship missiles can keep the USN’s carrier strike groups at bay.

China has the world’s most advanced ASW tech.

Meanwhile, the US military has been sliding downward for decades. Pockets of advancement such as the USS Gerald R. Ford and the F-35 don’t count for much.

Carl Zha speaks to @TheRedPillDiariesOfficial about how rise of China’s manufacturing superpower status is challenging the US hegemony over the globe. why the US lack the resources to confront China and how China is responding to the recent deployment of US Army Special Force Green Berets to Kinmen Island in the Taiwan Strait, just kilometers from the mainland Chinese coast. How the US Imperial overreach impact its China containment strategy

Few days ago as I was doing laundry, I heard my daughter’s sing-songy voice from her room:

What the fuck…

I waved my head, concluding that I must have heard it wrongly and continued folding the laundry.

Just a moment later, there it was again, louder this time, still sing-songy:

WHAT THE FUCK…

She is learning English, but doesn’t really speak it yet. I couldn’t imagine that she would know what those words mean, or where she would have learned them.

As I was finishing with the laundry and planning to go check with my daughter about the strange phrase she was repeating, I heard my son, who was playing with her in her room yell in the same melodious voice:

WHAT THE FUCKKK….

That triggered a WHAT THE HELL response in my head and I barged in the room, ready to have a talk with my kids about how those words are not OK to be spoken because they are not nice and blah blah… the usual parenting stuff.

When I entered the room, I saw an adorable scene that looked something like this:

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main qimg 8cee71dfc3c06402520bc3b7548ba6ba lq

My little performers smiled excitedly and asked me to listen to their song. Then, together, with great stage faces they sang:

WHAT THE FUCK SEN!

TUDUDUDUDUUM… WHAT THE FUCK SEN!

NANANANANAAAAA… WHAT THE FUCK SEEN!

BUUUUNUUUNUUNUUUNUU… WHAT THE FUCK SEN!

I burst out laughing, and clapped my hands with a huge smile on my face. In fact, I couldn’t say much for a while, because I laughed so much. Thankfully, kids took it as my great appreciation for their performance.

The song they were performing so passionately was a song that is very popular in our home as of late, the famous What Does The Fox Say by Ylvis.

  1. Marriage: That marriage you are trying to save? Yea, that one, isn’t worth it. Go your separate ways and find happiness outside of relationships.
  2. Fast food: The processed food you are putting in your body, will catch up to you. Nourish your soul, life is longer than you think.
  3. Health: Make time for exercise. I know you feel like you are indestructible, but you aren’t. Time has a way of catching up to you. And if you don’t use your time wisely, you will know.
  4. Relationships: If you weren’t married by 30, then you’ve probably experienced some brutal asshole thats taken advantage of your kindness(unless you’re that asshole). Learn from that asshole, accept the lesson and grow. Stop ruminating.
  5. Clock: Father Time doesn’t stop. We keep aging. The Botox, hair dye, plastic surgery, or whatever you “invest” in to stop the clock, won’t work. Happiness doesn’t come from looks, it comes from what’s inside.
  6. Self Awareness: As you age, you gain life experience. And with life experience, come lessons, if you pay attention. Pay attention to the lessons, don’t try and escape them.
  7. Alcohol: It won’t make you prettier, more confident, more likable, or more accepted. But it will result in bad judgement and choices.
  8. Choices: The choices you make in your 30’s will greatly effect your life in your 40’s. And when you’re in your 40’s looking back, you will see stupid choices. Choose wisely.
  9. Tomorrow: Quit saying you will make a change tomorrow. Today is your tomorrow. Please believe that.
  10. Friends: They will come and go, pay attention. Know the difference between friends and acquaintances.
  11. Life Happens: Yep, it does. And it sure as shit isn’t always fair. Roll with the punches and make your 50’s a time you don’t have to ask about your 40’s.

Daily Comics

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Fry Bread

This bread is used as the basis for Navajo Tacos and can also be folded over a stuffing and eaten as a sandwich. At special events through the Southwest they are cooked in large round pots over open mesquite fires by Native Americans.

fry bread3
fry bread3

Ingredients

  • 3 cups unbleached flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 1/2 cups warm water or milk
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil or shortening
  • Oil or shortening, for deep frying

Instructions

  1. Measure dry ingredients into a deep mixing bowl.
  2. Add shortening and knead with hands until dough is in small pea-size pieces.
  3. Add warm, not hot, water and knead with hands until dough is smooth and leaves sides of bowl. Knead for at least 5 minutes.
  4. Cover with a clean dish towel, and place in a warm place to rise for 30 minutes.
  5. This is the secret for tender fry bread – kneading and resting.
  6. Divide dough into portions about golf-ball size and pat, slap, or roll out as round as possible, 1/4 inch thick.
  7. Fry in hot shortening or oil about 1 inch in depth. Fry both sides until light golden, not dark brown.
  8. Top with refried beans, confectioners’ sugar or honey.

Notes

Fry Bread is often served sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar or drizzled with honey. Sometimes chopped onions and chiles are mixed into the dough. The Ute tribe forms the tortillas in the same way as fry bread, but they cook them over a charcoal grill outdoors or over an open fire. This method also makes delicious Fry Bread.

Fry Bread is served on the plaza at San Xavier Mission Del Bac (White Dove of the Desert) in Tucson, pow wows, rodeos, etc.

That man didn’t have 90% of his brain. The skull was almost entirely filled with cerebrospinal fluid and all that remained of the brain was a thin peripheral portion surrounding the skull.

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Yet that man, whose IQ was below average (IQ 75), had been leading a normal life for years: he was married, had two children, a job and was obviously aware of himself, he moved, laughed, loved and ultimately he lived.

The case shocked the world scientific community and was described in the prestigious Lancet journal, becoming the subject of questions and amazement. The evidence of the facts raised, as can easily be imagined, many questions about the very concept of consciousness, understood as “awareness of the self” and the possibility of leading a normal life practically without a brain.

The patient’s clinical history was reconstructed and it was discovered that he was born suffering from a form of hydrocephalus. For this reason, a few months before his life, a cerebral shunt was inserted into his skull, capable of draining excess cerebrospinal fluid. That shunt was removed at the age of 14 and the patient, after an initial series of problems that had caused paresis in his left leg, was eventually able to resume an almost normal life and had completely forgotten about the problem. Over the next 30 years, the liquor began to invade the skull again and progressively erode the brain (90% of the brain!), leading to that feeling of weakness in the leg which prompted the patient to undergo a medical examination. at the age of 44. But all this was not able to explain how the brain invaded by cerebrospinal fluid and eroded by 90% of its volume had “known” to recalibrate itself over the years, allowing him to lead a normal life anyway.

Axel Cleeremans, a cognitive psychologist at the Université Libre of Brussels, Belgium, attempted to answer these questions in 2016 during a conference of the Association for Scientific Studies on Consciousness, held in Buenos Aires.

According to Cleeremans, the case of the French patient had demonstrated the extraordinary “readaptation capacity” of the human brain. The frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes of the brain, in fact, preside over the main cognitive and perceptive functions, yet in the patient they were practically completely absent and this demonstrated that the brain of that man – and therefore of every man – had been able to “move” those functions to the residual perimeter section of 10%.

The second ability that was made evident by the clinical case under examination was the “plasticity of the brain”. According to Cleeremans’ hypothesis, “self-awareness” (or detailed self-cognition) is formed through experience, the relationship between oneself and the surrounding world and learning, and is subject to continuous modifications and adjustments in course of life.

The case of the French man who lived a normal life until the age of 44 without 90% of his brain demonstrated to science a fact that had until then been unknown, namely that just 10% of the brain tissue is sufficient to re-elaborate a “theory of the self” and to make that person a man in all respects.

This just happened to me today.

I got a call from my ex-girlfriend who told me she was having a crisis and to meet her at the local diner, so after I left church I met her for breakfast. Once we sat in the booth she started sobbing. Of course everyone in the diner was looking at me like I was an unfaithful wife-beater who was taking the children after blowing the mortgage at the track.

It seems that her cat got out and a local do-gooder organization scooped it up. Not 24 hours later they tried to extort over 1000 dollars from her saying they spayed it, microchipped it, gave it all kinds of vaccines and on and on and on. It was thievery and extortion.

She went to the local police. They laughed at her. She went to Animal Control who was sympathetic and tried to get the cat back from them because the finders are supposed to surrender the cat to them anyway. They refused. They took down the Facebook page advertising that they had the cat up for adoption and won’t answer any questions about the cat from Animal Control. So my ex is bereft about her cat languishing in cat prison, thinking it’s been abandoned and she is bereft without her beloved cat.

So tomorrow we are going to the Town Hall and calling the Lawyer and the State Police and anyone else we can think of who can move these criminals to return the cat.

Edit 4/11

So after calling all kinds of government agencies

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main qimg 7f13ae7fa4d85485b42436994adaa41d lq

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the cat napping bitch returned the cat today.

I was 14 and had put up with three years of bullying at school. I wasn’t a coward. I just didn’t want to hurt anyone. Violence wasn’t part of my nature and so I avoided any kind of confrontation that was directed at me.

Everybody at school knew I was one of the quiet kids and would not retaliate when I was being bullied.

For several weeks this kid had been poking me in the back during class and calling me a faggot in front of everyone. It was pretty humiliating being laughed at by the whole class.

One day I snapped.

I happened to be writing an essay in my English workbook with a lead pencil. All of a sudden I turned around and stabbed him in the hand with it and told him to leave me alone.

His hand was resting on the desk just behind my back. I am not proud of that moment but the whole class hushed. His name was Garry Pankhurst, and he was a troublemaker and a general dick.

He pulled back and let out a scream. I saw his hand; the pencil didn’t go in far, about 1/4 of an inch but enough for him to get the message.

He called me out at lunch time for a fight in the yard, which I accepted. By the time I walked around the back of the building, half the school was in a circle and parted the way for me to enter the ring where he was waiting for me.

I didn’t know what to do as I had never had a fight before. He looked rather small standing in front of me but nonetheless came at me. I grabbed him in a headlock before he could get a punch on me. Then he grabbed my hair from the back. I warned him to let go of my hair. All I did was restrain him to start with. I warned him three times to let go of my hair. When he refused, I hit him once in the face, a quick, short but hard jab.

He dropped to the ground. By then three teachers came and broke the ‘fight’ up. They were shocked to see me, the quiet kid, in the middle of it. We were marched up to the office to the cheers of the crowd.

There was zero tolerance for fighting, and I was summarily punished with six ‘cuts’ by a thick strap to each hand by the deputy principal.

After that event he stopped bothering me.

I do not advocate any kind of violence, or condone bullying in any form. What I did was wrong. But after all, I was just a kid who had had enough. Even I had limits.

EMERGENCY CODE RED: BELARUS LOADS NUKES ON PLANES, US AMBASSADOR LEAVES RUSSIA! PENTAGON LIES!

The silo of peanut butter

I really hated my life, but there seemed to be no way out of the situation.

At the time I was working two jobs.

During the day I would travel to NYC and work odd jobs such as catering.

At night, I worked in the dairy and frozen section of a shitty grocery store called Pathmark.

My brother was in middle school, and too young to work.

My father was out of work, having been fired for the upteenth time.

My mother refused to help support the family.

My grandmother was retired and struggling to pay the bills with her social security and pension.

I had recently graduated from high school, dreaming of going to college and building my life.

Less than a year later, it was starting to look like a pipe dream.

I was incredibly angry about this, and fought with my family constantly, my mother in particular.

She constantly complained about the family’s situation, and would take her frustrations out on me, once calling me lazy when I decided to sleep in for a few hours on my day off rather than fix her TV.

One day, we had a long argument, where I sarcastically thanked her for ruining my life, and called her a lazy cow, among other things.

It was admittedly, not my finest moment to tell you the truth.

Later, she confessed part of it to a childhood friend of hers who lived in Arizona.

She told her about our fight and about the fact that I had yelled at her about wanting to go to college.

The next day, I received a phone call from that friend, a woman whom I had never met, but apparently had talked to on occasion over the years.

She asked me if I would like to move to Arizona and live with her and her family.

I found the idea of living with a stranger uncomfortable, so I said no.

She told me to think about it.

A few days later, the woman called me again at home, and made the same offer.

However, before I could say no, she sweetened the deal.

She would pay for me to go out to AZ and if I didn’t like it after a month, she would send me back, no questions asked.

Thinking that I had nothing to lose, I moved to Arizona, and I never looked back.

It took me a little while to get my bearings, but she eventually helped me find a job, apply for college, among other things.

Now, 15 years later I am a successful teacher, with three college degrees under my belt.

And it was all due to the kindness of a stranger who decided to take a gamble on me and my future.

Women SHOCKED Men Looked At Her In Booty Pants At Gym, Women PREFER BEARS To Men In Woods

The poem “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

This is from one of my earlier posts, found HERE. Please guys, MM has a lot of good stuff buried under all the fluff.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though; 
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

This is the lifeless body of Ziba – a 22 year old student at University of Kabul. She was shot several times as she was trying to escape through the window of her classroom to flee from the horror.

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main qimg 238b6a27ad2d8ca600664ff58658a20f lq

Dozens of other students her age in the very same classroom were killed that day.

It was November 2, 2020 when a group of cowards, misguided, losers, brainless and merciless individuals attacked the University of Kabul in the capital of Afghanistan. They killed more than 20 young students – most of them in their early 20s.

These kids were the savings, the investment, the helping hand, the happiness, the hope, the future and the life of many parents who worked hard their entire life to be able to merely earn a living to survive and send their loved ones to university so that one day they get to see them living a better life than them. They’re gone, so are the better days those parents wished to see. They did not just lose their kids, they lost everything.

That, however, is NOT what boils my blood the most.

What boils my blood the most is the fact that we have individuals who, proudly, take all of that away from those aging parents, and believe that by doing so they’ve pleased god. They believe they can commit such an act of horror and terror, killing defenceless and unarmed individuals in dozens and stand before god on the day of judgment and be rewarded for what they had done! No religion teaches that. This is wrong, this is barbaric and inhuman and it boils my blood that someone would do such a horrific act of evil in the name of religion.

On the other hand, what cools me down and gives hope and patience to those parents and many other Afghans who lost and still are losing their loved ones, is knowing that YES there will come a day that they stand before god, but it will not be with pride, nor will they be rewarded for what they had committed. We believe in promise of god where he says: “so whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it and whoever does an atom’s weight of bad/evil will see it.” (Quran 99:7–8)

M1A1 Tanks PULLED From Ukraine Front Lines “Weak and Vulnerable”

United States M1A1 Abrams tanks have been “pulled” from Ukrainian front lines because, Ukraine says, the tanks are “weak and vulnerable.”  So much for America’s Main Battle Tank when it has to face a Near-Peer Army like Russia!

Video below, posted on social media, shows the latest M1A1 Abrams being towed by Russian troops. Smashed, burned, blown-up, there isn’t much left to the $4.3 MILLION tank.

We were told its armor was virtually impenetrable; and it’s mix of metals was so secret, the mixture is “classified.”  Now look at what happened to it!

If this is what can be expected of these tanks when they’re in a REAL fight (as opposed to fighting rag-wearing terrorists) then reasonable people have to ask “What are we getting for all this money?”

Blown to shit.

Sacrifice

I have got to share this;

My step daughter was given $1000 as a gift from her grandmother when she passed away.

When the step daughter turned 16, I took her to early drivers ed. She passed and had her temp. Now she needed to practice driving and the dreaded parallel parking. I took her to these as well. 4 months down the road, and opportunity came up to buy a used Honda accord 1992. 1 owner who was meticulous about maintenance. I ask the step daughter if she wanted to use her money towards a car. She said YES. I told her that would not buy much car, but this one was in very very good shape. She said yes.

So I got the car, made her change the oil, the battery, and helped her get new tires (mind you aside from the car, I paid for everything else.)

The car got inspect, insured and registered. Then sat there. for about 4 months, she neither asked about it, sat in it, or started it up.

When I asked her mom what the matter was, she told me this:

The stepdaughter did not get to choose what kind of car, nor its color. She didn’t like the interior and thought the car was too old. I asked if she knew what went into get the car road worthy? The mom said not nobody asked me to do all those things for the stepdaughter.

I was stupefied. When the two went on a trip to visit family in late Dec, I sold the car for $1500, gave the stepdaughter $750, and paid the bills with the rest.

The nuclear radiation was evident when they returned and did not see the car in the driveway. I told them too bad. I needed to pay bills. I gave her the money, and she had the audacity to remind me that she initially paid $1000.

Of course I told her of the extra expenses I incurred including the tires. I could present her the receipts. Wisely she said “Fine”.

Course, that incident was NEVER forgotten, and I was forever labeled the bad guy. Step parents never get a break.

Russian State-Controlled TV: If NATO Troops Enter Ukraine , SARMAT, YARS, and Avangard (Nukes) Will Hit NATO Decision-Making Centers

Russian YARS nukes large
Russian YARS nukes large

State-controlled Russian TV today broadcast a direct announcement of Russia’s intent to fire nuclear weapons at NATO Decision-making centers if NATO troops enter Ukraine to battle Russia. The words aired were so blunt as to be undeniable..

Here is the segment of Russia state-controlled TV broadcast today as a warning to the entire West:

So there it is.  Plain. Simple. Easy to understand.  Even the village idiot can grasp this.

“If NATO Troops enter Ukraine to inflict strategic defeat upon Russia . . . . everything will fly: SARMAT, YARS, AVANGARD.”  Those are Russia’s nuclear weapons system names.

WHY NOW?

. . . . Why broadcast this . . . . now?

Why now?

Could it be because elements from the French Army have, in fact, deployed to Odessa, Ukraine?

Could the RUMORS which claim elements of the US 101st Airborne have also deployed to Odessa, Ukraine, be Russia’s reason for airing this, now?

We already know that France deployed elements of the French Foreign Legion into Slavyansk, Ukraine, and the Russians blew them up with missile strikes about 48 hours after they got there.

We already know that Polish, Romanian, and other NATO-country troops, were hit by Russian missiles at a hotel in Dnipropetrovsk last week.  A slew of them got killed too.

So what is it about developments in Ukraine that caused Russia to instruct it’s state-controlled TV, to make such a blunt, unmistakable, broadcast, Now????

I think something’s up.   I think the Russians either know . . . or are seeing . . . Deployment of NATO troops  into Ukraine.

If you haven’t watched the video, it clearly warns “NATO Decision-making centers are already in the crosshairs, and if NATO troops enter Ukraine to inflict strategic defeat upon Russia, everything will fly: SARMAT, YARS, and AVANGARD.”

There’s no wiggle room in that language.  There’s no nuance.  No ambiguity.

I thought you should know while there’s still time to try to prepare.  Make plans. Buy supplies.

But clearly, there doesn’t seem to be very much time left — at all.

Best Ever Lemon Chicken

Healthy, flavorful and low in calories.

Best Ever Lemon Chicken
Best Ever Lemon Chicken

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 4 skinless chicken breasts
  • Salt, pepper and paprika
  • 3/4 cup water, divided
  • 1/4 cup white wine
  • 1 teaspoon chicken bouillon powder
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 lemon, thinly sliced

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Spray a frying pan with Pam.
  2. Season chicken breasts to taste with salt, pepper, and paprika.
  3. Heat frying pan and sauté chicken until nicely browned (about 10 minutes), adding about 1/4 cup water near the end of the cooking time to loosen meat from the pan.
  4. Remove chicken breasts to a shallow baking dish.
  5. To the pan juices, add the white wine, 1/2 cup water and chicken bouillon, and heat through.
  6. Meanwhile mix the lemon juice and flour in a cup. Pour into the frying pan and stir until sauce is thickened.
  7. Pour sauce over chicken. Top with lemon slices and bake for 20 minutes.

Because, contrary to Hollywood movies, armor actually worked.

Even otherwise excellent movies like Lord of the Rings will have you believe that this:

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main qimg 8c98fa16559c50c0bca139ccdc500b97

Might as well be made out of plastic or paper because it offers zero protection against weapons of the day. But cutting through or piercing metal is nowhere as easy as the movies make it to be.

They only stopped wearing armor when it didn’t work anymore after guns became very common. They could make bulletproof armor using medieval technology:

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main qimg 458f055dcbd4fbf090727a09ca8cbc80 lq

(In fact the term “bulletproof” is from “proofing” that the armor can resist a pistol shot, seen in the dent above)

These armor are expensive and not readily available. While rich and important people could afford them, the average peasant or soldier couldn’t. They’re also very heavy and limits your mobility.

When bullet massively improved in the mid- and late-19th century (to something familiar today), these heavy armor only make you slow and vulnerable on the battlefield. It didn’t stop both sides from experimenting in WW1 though, even though these bulky suits were mostly useless against anything more powerful than pistols. The steel helmets that became common was used primarily to protect against shrapnel after artillery became the deadliest thing in the battlefield (and still is).

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main qimg 401028078af5a39409fe072f90120a52

Bulletproof armor only became practical with the invention of kevlar in the 1970s. Even so, some countries today are still resistant in fully-equipping their soldiers with body armor, either because it’s too expensive or because in the environment they’re operating on (like the tropics) heavy armor that don’t allow sweat to evaporate can be detrimental. But as the war in Ukraine is showing, body armor is mandatory once again in warfare.

The Beverly Hillbillies – Season 1, Episode 1 (1962) – The Clampetts Strike Oil – Paul Henning

While working for the Home Office in the early 2000s, there was a woman whom we’ll call “Joan” in a neighbouring department who’d been through all sorts of hell with an ex boyfriend. Joan would tell us of the awful things he’d said to her, the late night phone calls, turning up to her door uninvited and so on.

We were supportive and would sympathise with her while also telling her to report this to the police. She would make excuses not to do this, and we were unable to force her to do it because she would get so upset.

One day, a delivery arrived at reception for Joan:

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main qimg 0b788a1ca41778bf70edf4b8a1527f09

A dozen black roses. Joan brought them back to the office and was in a terrible state. We were naturally horrified by this, but to compound it, she reached into her handbag and brought out one of these:

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main qimg b1ce471a4e6c88247eae8463a06a9342

A miniature coffin. She had received this in the mail that morning before leaving for work.

Oh. My. Word! We said enough was enough and weren’t going to take “no” for an answer – we alerted her supervisor and called a contact at Scotland Yard (which was just around the corner), and asked them to send a detective to investigate the matter. This was clearly a threat to Joan’s life and a serious matter.

Joan was beside herself when this happened. She really didn’t want the police involved. We told her that this had gone too far and we couldn’t stand by and let poor Joan suffer any longer.

The detective arrived and began his investigation by seizing the flowers and the miniature coffin after taking Joan’s personal details…

The following day, Joan wasn’t at work. We feared the worst and went to her office to enquire if she had called in or whether a welfare check should be carried out. Joan’s boss assured us that everything was fine, but we wouldn’t be seeing Joan again and he wouldn’t say anything more.

Well, now we were really perplexed. Wanting to get to the bottom of the matter, I called the detective that had come to the office.

When the flowers were delivered, there was no card attached. Thankfully, we had CCTV outside the building and the registration number of the van that had delivered the flowers was visible. The detective had found the registered owner of the vehicle (the florist) and called them to ask about the delivery…

When ordering a malicious delivery for someone, it’s not a good idea to use your own bank card. Especially if you’re the “victim”.

Joan had been playing us all along! The ex boyfriend was cleared of any wrongdoing – he hadn’t been in contact with Joan for more than a year and had not behaved the way Joan had alleged at all. Joan used her own bank card to order the black roses and further investigation proved that she had also ordered the miniature coffin that she had produced from her handbag.

Joan was dismissed from the civil service. I hope she got some help with her issues.

Fun Shorpy today

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SHORPY Linda254.preview

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I’m from Vietnam. We eat rice a lot, almost every meal.

When I was about 5 to 8 years old, once or twice per week, my mom would make ‘mixing special rice’ for dinner. It’s white rice cooked together with corn and sweet potatoes

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main qimg f88cf10cd18d1870fb78d47981739f53

(Image source: baobaclieu.vn)

I always got excited for those dinners.

We eventually didn’t eat that kind of rice anymore. I asked my mom about that once in a while but she just gave me reasons why she didn’t want to make the rice: out of corn season, sweet potatoes weren’t any good at market,…

When I was 12, on my mom’s birthday, I proudly announced that I prepared dinner. And guess what I made? Rice with corn and sweet potatoes. When I served dinner, my mom couldn’t hold it anymore, she cried. I asked her why? Did I do anything wrong? That was the very first time my mom explained to me that she was sick of this rice because she had eaten it too much.

I didn’t know that we only ate that because corn and sweet potatoes were much cheaper than rice.

I didn’t like that meal as much after that day.

To anyone is thinking about making a comment “hey, it sounds delicious” or “add some butter”, etc, please don’t. I wish we had butter. Also, it was good, but it was not any good after eating it frequently for 30+ years to the point you break down crying when you see it like my mom did.

And I didn’t like it very much anymore wasn’t because it’s not good or because it’s “cheap”. I didn’t like it because it hurt my mom.

Economic Shock: Bombshell GDP Drop, IMF Slams Congress Spending, Republic Bank Collapses

  • The most powerful way to win an argument is to ask questions.
  • If you want people to take your words seriously, say that your father taught you this. People naturally believe in parental advice.
  • If someone is about to get angry at you, sit next to that person. They will have to lower their voice and there will be no direct face-to-face contact.
  • If you want to know if someone is attentive, repeat your phrase with slight variations in it. If you are listening, either your facial expressions will change, or you will point to that part and question.
  • If you think that someone is giving you a false figure then read it wrongly. If they correct you, it’s legit.
  • If you want people to agree with you, nod your head and make eye contact when you speak, they’ll nod too.
  • Explain and repeat what your friend just said. The person talking to you will subconsciously realize that you are a great listener. Of course, don’t go overboard with paraphrasing.
  • Use someone’s name more often. While talking to someone, keep using their name in the conversation. This helps them feel important and valued.
  • When you want someone to agree to something, give them a list with 3 options and leave the one you want to choose at the end. They will most likely choose the latter.
  • What you say about other people affects how others see you. People will associate the adjectives you use to describe other people with your personality. This phenomenon is called spontaneous property transfer.

Sadly it was advice from my father to me. The year was 1968 one of the most turbulent in US history. I had just graduated from HS, the Vietnam war was raging, RFK and Martin Luther King had been assassinated. The Democratic convention in Chicago blew up and I was there watching it all as I was just leaving of all things a Young Mens Convention for Catholics and had stayed at the Conrad Hilton and watched in awe as the anti war protestors and police lined up to do battle.

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main qimg 2a1a497afcf416a1c1acc6ffd39e0901

This was the auto production line. Endless cars, the USA was #1, 1955 no competition.

My father told me, do not go to college, it is a waste of time. Either go into the military or go to work on the assembly line, best jobs in the world. Union will protect you, he would protect me as he was a Union rep.

In the short run, he would have been right. The jobs were tough but plentiful, but already by 1970 the US automakers were making these.

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main qimg 484dbd248aa6044ee2213ecfde6b8be2

Some of the worst cars ever made were coming off the line in the USA by 1970 and the rot had already begun to set in just when I went to work on the line.

My father was so adamant that when I went and tried it on the Monday – Friday program which meant you worked 2 days a week as a ‘college kid’ as on Friday there were not enough workers as they got their paychecks on Thursday which meant they got drunk and didn’t come in. And on Monday they didn’t come in as they were still drunk or hungover from the weekend, I tried it out.

It was a nightmare and I hated it. Everyone yelling screaming, quality was shit, politics everywhere, the company couldn’t get good cars made and the union was fighting to keep all 2.5 million jobs.

Well what happened?

Today there are 150,000 UAW members about 8% of the number when I started. A lot of people got in and out and grabbed their pensions. They worked the system and left Michigan and went back to Kentucky and down to Florida.

But if I had gone in and stayed? It might have worked but I would have lost everything that I have now done in my life. Lived around the world, a 50 year global career, speaking multiple languages. I have literally lived on 5 continents ranging from California, Florida, the Rocky Mountains, then Australia to China to India to Hungary to Singapore and Hong Kong several times. On and on my career has gone and my education has propelled me and made it all possible.

Most importantly, to survive, repeat survive and prosper I have had to ‘reinvent’ myself again and again and only with my education and MBA and languages and experience working around the world have I been able to be flexible and do this. Millions were literally stuck without a hope so many times in my home town while I simply changed countries and took a new job in a growing industry such as software when I used to be a manufacturers rep for years. Flexibility is the key to a long career and not a factory.

And those guys who were on the line? The lucky ones got away and got their pensions. The vast majority slipped through the process especially after the downturns of 2008 just when they were going to retire and pretty much got little to nothing.

Those who work in the auto industry today have a precarious future especially if you work in an ‘engine’ plant as those will be gone with the EVs.

My father meant well, but from his hard work and premature cancer and youthful smoking he died at 70. I am now 73 and knock on wood, still doing what I like and living a good life in France.

My advice, listen to many but make your own choices and definitely do not look at the past, look to what is happening for the future and it will help guide your decisions. It is way to important to leave to those who think they know, but only know their local situation and what they have grown up with.

Given the rapid change in careers there is no such thing as a safe bet or a definitive career path. If you don’t believe me, think of Detroit and what happened to them as the city never evolved and never changed.

main qimg 30e69a8ef3a2201a6df9f389389d3719
main qimg 30e69a8ef3a2201a6df9f389389d3719

Packard out of business and the largest abandoned factory in the USA.

Detroit? 2 million people when I was born in 1950, today? Barely 600,000.

ZERO.

I have to ask the questioner if ANY of the predictions made by American politicians ever came true?

  • Swine flu
  • Ebola
  • Y2K
  • 3G causing gas pumps to explode
  • Phones causing planes to crash
  • 4G causing brain damage
  • Hamburgers made out of worms
  • Back-masking of rock music
  • Sex education causing a spike in pregnancies

None ever came true.

But, for some reason, “China will invade Taiwan”. I mean, just how absolutely stupid can a person be. Is there a scale below moronic?

Still Americans (and their Australian and European cousins) believe this swill.

Who figures?

China has made it perfectly clear how the reunification will proceed. And this is well defined and in process right now. That’s the reality.

Accept it.

Oh yes, once when I was very much younger, I went out on a date with a very nice man, and he took me to a good restaurant. We got there, ordered the wine, and some bread rolls and butter were served also, while we decided on what we would have to eat.

The man told me his wife had died, but he didn’t tell me how recently! He didn’t tell me he was still in fairly early stages of grieving, and was trying to put on a brave face.

So I had no real idea of what he was going through.

Then just before we ordered, he started to get serious heart symptoms. I asked him if I should ask the restaurant to phone an ambulance. But he didn’t want that. He wanted to go home and call his private doctor! I thought that was unwise, but that is what he wanted.

We had to leave immediately, and he grabbed some cash from his pocket and put it on the table. He didn’t even count how much! But I am sure it was plenty to cover the bottle of wine and some bread.

I apologised to the staff, and had to drive him home. They were surprised but didn’t mind of course due to the circumstances.

It turned out (after the doctor’s visit) that he hadn’t had a heart attack, but a serious panic attack. I stayed with him all night to make sure he would be okay and keep his spirits up as he didn’t want to be alone.

We never did have a second date. But that was okay. He wasn’t really ready to start dating. He needed to process his grief. He was a nice man though, bless him.

China is famously no-nonsense. They always follow up and follow through on decisions. America, on the contrary, is used to fooling themselves inured in dirty tactics to pull a fast hand, but only end up humiliating themselves more often than not. Sanctioning Russia is a wonderful example. Examples abound that don’t need me to list them here.

The ugly truth is greed. The damage of Israeli genocide on US image is already done. It’s not TikTok’s fault and banning it is only a pretext. American political and business asshole pirates have long coveted TikTok’s huge market share and profit potential. China is wise to keep this trade mark and technology, and continue expanding its global market. The world is big enough for TikTok with unlimited potential.

Uh oh!

 

“To regain sovereignty, the EU needs to stop following Washington’s policies, but the European Commission is pushing the American agenda and resembling a fascist system with its single-minded decisions.

Europe determined its future when it responded with contempt to Russia’s attempts to forge ties after the collapse of the USSR and did not honour the Minsk agreements to give Ukraine time to arm itself, according to Didier Maisto, former director of Sud Radio. In an interview with TVL, he pointed out that while Europe used to try to encircle Russia, now it is gradually encircling Russia itself, but the EU should have thought about this earlier.

The partnership between the BRICS countries is actively developing and they are finding common ground for special agreements. The US, which opposes them, continues to advance thanks to its military-industrial complex and business, imposing its laws in other countries. Sandwiched between these vise is Europe, which needs to stop dancing to Washington’s tune to regain its power and sovereignty.

The main conductor of the American agenda in Europe has become the European Commission – the centre of gravity and the centre of decision-making in the EU is shifting towards it. Now the entry into war, the supply of weapons and medicines, the banning of certain media are approved without confirmation by a vote in the European Council. Didier Maisto reminds us that back in 2017 he warned that if Macron is elected president, Europe will slip into soft fascism.”

What is wrong with Joe Biden?

Doesn’t matter what is wrong with Biden. He’s not running things anyway.

My father-in-law owned a 1988 Ford Escort wagon. He only drove it locally to and from work, and he probably never turned on the rear defrost.

My FIL passed away, and my MIL offered the car to me. The Escort was about 2 years old with ~13,000 miles. My 1980 Honda Accord was 10 years old and starting to get up in mileage, so I accepted it. My wife at the time drove it from Virginia to New Jersey during the summer. I started driving it to/from work about 15 minutes each way. I worked late one evening in the fall. When I got into the car, there was condensation on the rear window. I started the car and turned on the rear defrost to clear it up. Within a couple minutes, I hear a loud boom and notice my rear window is shattered. I thought someone was shooting at me! That was not the case. A rear window with a rear defrost is just 2 pieces of glass sandwiched around the heating elements and glued together. My theory was that the rear window had an air bubble in it due to a manufacturing defect. The heating element caused the air bubble to expand. Eventually, the air bubble got big enough to break the glass causing the explosion.

Ford would not replace the window because the car was out of warranty. (12 months/12,000 miles in those days) They wanted over $700 to replace it. I had a price of ~$225 from a glass shop. Ford said their price was what it was because it was “Ford quality glass”. If their glass was such high quality, it wouldn’t have shattered in the first place. Needless to say, I went with the glass shop. They even came to my office and replaced it in the parking lot.

=======================

A few years later I changed jobs, and I started commuting ~30 minutes each way on the highway. Ever since getting the car, I would notice a faint smell of antifreeze. I never noticed any leaks, but I did have to periodically add antifreeze to the overflow reservoir. After driving to/from the new job for about a month, I was driving home, and the car started to overheat. Long story short, the engine blew its head gasket, and I had to get the engine rebuilt. When the shop took the engine apart, they found a bolt that was sheared off. They said it probably came that way from the factory. That was the cause of the antifreeze smell, the slow loss of antifreeze, and ultimately the head gasket failure. After rebuilding the engine, there were no more problems like that.

Score:

Strange Failures – 2, Ford – 0. On this car, Quality was not Job One.

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I worked in McDonald’s overnight for one year as a cashier in the drive thru. During my year working in McDonald’s I encountered some things that I really don’t recommend doing:

  1. Not paying attention to the cashier when he/she is telling you what you got.
    If you don't pay attention when I asked you, please don't complain if I charged you $100 for things you didn't order because you said “yes, whatever.”
  2. Expecting the cashier to know you don’t like pickles or onions.
    Yes, we know some of our regulars. No, we didn't know you don't like pickles.
  3. Ordering things are not on the menu.
    Do not ask me for a whopper. Do not ask for a chicken junior. There is no such a thing as fajita in McDonald's.
  4. Calling an employee a derogatory word.
    Please, don't do it. If it’s a word you don't enjoy being called. I refused service to a customer once for addressing me as “you, nigga”.
  5. Getting mad if you ordered 15 Quarter-pounders with fries and a shake and your bill is more than $100.
    If you think it is too much, please cook it at home.
  6. Spitting.
    Seriously, I got spit on my face more than once.
  7. Swearing and/or yelling.
    Please, if you had a bad night, you got evicted, divorced or whatever - it’s not the cashier's fault. You should not call the cashier (or anyone you don't want to mess with) a motherfucker.
  8. Not knowing what you are getting.
    More than once I had customers claiming I put things they did not request in their food.
    
    A guy yelled at me once because there was ice in his smoothie. On a different occasion, a guy yelled at me because he got only three sauces with his order (a 10 piece chicken nuggets meal only comes with three sauces); he requested three more and tried to punch me when I told him that they were not free. The question “what does that come with?” works very well.
  9. Last but not least, being violent.
    Please try to keep your temper. Also, try to be as nice as possible.

Tales From The Shoe Store | Married With Children

  • Control your emotions and lust (Overcome)

It’s completely normal to experience lust, or sexual desire in teen. Your feelings might be focused on a particular person, or you might be drawn to activities like masturbating or watching pornography. But sometimes, these desires can be overwhelming or unwanted. If you just can’t shake those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, don’t worry—there are things you can do to manage them.

The price of temporary lust can be expensive.

  • Learn About Finance Early

Money should be your friend throughout your life, not your enemy. Sadly, the education system doesn’t do such a great job at teaching you about finance, so you have to learn it on your own. There are plenty of sources that you can get financial advice for free.

  • Make Good Friends, Not More Friends

Building a network of friends at school is always going to be valuable whether they are the greatest people or not. Spend more time trying to develop and grow those relationships that you think will be good for you.

You are the average of your five friends around you hangout with the most.

  • Don’t Care About What Others Think of You

This is definitely the best advice for teenagers who feel like they need to impress the world! Nobody cares either, so why would you? Laugh when you embarrass yourself. Dress how you want to dress. Be honest about things you don’t like. Not only does this help you become more of yourself, but you’ll also make friends with the right people.

  • Take Care of Your Body

Because it takes care of you everyday! Just by implementing some simple practices like Exercise, Practice Proper Hygiene, Have a Skin Care Routine, Invest in Yourself and you’re already getting ahead of where you were the day before.

  • Don’t Compare Yourself to Others

Comparing yourself to others will only lead to disappointment and lack of confidence. There will always be someone with more than you more money, more friends, more style, more of anything.

Compare who you were yesterday not someone else’s today.

A friend of mine is a pilot for one of the big airlines. He related this story to me. One day, he is headed through security and in front of him are two air marshals escorting a prisoner in hand cuffs. First the TSA Agent tried to tell the marshals that they had to uncuff the prisoner before he could go through security. (yeah, that got cleared up pretty quick). Then the TSA agent tried to tell them they would have to remove their guns (this time a supervisor was called over to educate the TSA agent). Then the TSA agent told the marshals to empty their pockets. One of them had a tiny fingernail clipper with a small file on it that vaguely resembled knife. The TSA Agent proudly jumped on that and demanded the marshal would have to relinquish it as “contraband”. I think at this point the marshals were just tired of dealing with this person so he gladly gave her the fingernail clippers so that they could go on their way.

In summary: two marshals escorting a prisoner..both of the marshals armed with pistols and other weapons, had a pair of fingernail clippers confiscated because it was “contraband”.

Cinnamon Garlic Roast Chicken

40 Cloves of Garlic Roast Chicken foodiecrush.com 010
40 Cloves of Garlic Roast Chicken foodiecrush.com 010

Ingredients

  • 1 (3 pound) chicken, cut up
  • Pinch of salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder (or 2 cloves fresh, minced)
  • 2/3 teaspoon cinnamon
  • Paprika
  • 1 onion, thinly sliced
  • 1 cup water

Instructions

  1. Clean chicken well.
  2. Combine salt, pepper, garlic and cinnamon. Sprinkle mixture onto all parts of the chicken.
  3. Refrigerate for at least an hour.
  4. Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Spray a roasting pan with vegetable oil spray.
  5. Remove chicken from refrigerator, and place in roasting pan.
  6. Sprinkle with paprika.
  7. Scatter onion slices around chicken, and roast uncovered for 35 minutes.
  8. Reduce heat to 350 degrees F.
  9. Stir onion slices, add the cup of water, and continue roasting for an additional 50 minutes until tender, basting occasionally.

Not exactly

The Chinese stock market is among the most undervalued in the world and is stubbornly remaining there due to a lot of regulations against speculation

The US Treasury still pays 5.31% as Peak Bond Yields

The Chinese Real Estate prices are low which is good for the buyers but that means investors will be giving it a wide berth

This means a lot of HOT MONEY will not be coming in but going out

Hot money is money used to buy shares and bonds and real estate securities by foreign firms

Speculative money!

No matter even if the US says China is booming, this is going to happen

Likewise if China raises interest rates to 6% then Yields rise to a peak of 6.53% and suddenly Hot money will flood into China no matter even if the US says China is crashing tomorrow


Likewise China is getting a flood of Long term investments for their EV and New Technology investments

That won’t change no matter what the US says

China is still the world’s second largest consumer market plus the worlds largest manufacturer at peak profitability

That won’t change no matter what the US says


So China simply doesn’t care too much about what the US media says beyond rebuttals on their English Language Media (CGTN) or Global times or SCMP

Ukraine: “Corpses Everywhere” as Russians smash through

Ukraine Army Corpses large
Ukraine Army Corpses large

The ground is strewn with corpses: Soldiers of the “Center” group show everything that remains of the 47th brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces near Berdychi.

Corpses of dead Ukrainian soldiers are everywhere.

The command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine does not betray itself and continues to send Ukrainian militants on suicidal missions.

As a result of fierce fighting from artillery and tank attacks, only in this small section of the forest,  the commanders of the 47th brigade managed to put an entire platoon.

Russian soldiers report that they did not even try to evacuate them after the fire began and the subsequent assault. They just left the whole brigade in this position – forever.

One of my first jobs was in a hospital, primarily in the E.R. Being a community hospital, we all performed many unassigned duties. Many of the staff had been leaving due to management issues and I soon put in my notice. Because of the staff loss, I was one of the few who knew how to operate several pieces of equipment. I had made the attempt to teach others how to operate the equipment, but they refused.

On my final day, the hospital administrator came up to me and said he was very unhappy with my job performance and told me I was fired. I packed my belongings and left, kind of in shock. A day later I was in my new position at the hospital I’d put in notice for. Two days later, I recieved a rather frantic call from the Administrator telling me I needed to come in and show someone how to work the equipment. It seemed they had almost lost an E.R. patient because no one could run the tests.

I told him that was impossible because I was on the way to work and hung up. A week later the Administrator, his daughter, and his son in law, were all arrested for stealing from the hospital.

Smithsonian Cover-Up: Ancient Egyptians and Giants in the Grand Canyon In 1908, President Teddy Roosevelt wanted to declare the Grand Canyon off-limits to all timber and mining operations. It would take another 11 years for Congress to designate the Grand Canyon a national park. Sensing a final opportunity for adventure, explorer G.E. Kincaid took a boat down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. The canyon was rich in minerals like gold, silver and copper and Kincaid wanted to see what he could find before the area was closed off for good. About 40 miles up-river from the El Tovar Crystal canyon, Kincaid saw stains in the sediment formation about 2,000 feet up. He tied off the boat and got out to investigate. Kincaid couldn’t find a trail, but after a short hike he found something interesting covered in desert brush. Steps. Hundreds of them. Carved in sandstone. Steps that wound their way up to a high shelf on the side of the canyon. He followed the steps until he came across a cavern entrance. An entrance that was clearly man made. Kincaid entered the cavern and turned on his flashlight. On the walls he saw writing. But it wasn’t English or Native American writing. It was Ancient Egyptian Heiroglypics. Kincaid lifted his flashlight and saw that the tunnel ran far into the distance. He didn’t realize it at the time, but this was only the beginning.

My first full-on drunk

The Secretary of State is the world’s most powerful diplomat. His underlings at the UN wag fingers at foreign colleagues and go “do you want to be consulted, or insulted?”

And yet no Secretary of State had visited Beijing for 6, 7 years, until Antony barged in.

The Chinese did not fete him or court him. He was not accorded priority, because he wasn’t the honored state guest on a carefully coordinated state visit.

His job was to personally deliver an invitation to President Xi for him to toast and grace the greatest gathering of American capital in recent years.

This time, his job is to mirror what Janet did recently, reading off a script on the Beijing podium criticizing and threatening the host, to show the public that America still has to chops to make others listen. Delivering the message in the evil enemy’s capital fills the air with American machismo.

This isn’t diplomacy. It’s poorly fleshed out domestic politics.

Let’s save the red carpet for others on the level because Antony’s job isn’t to secure cooperation but subservience through the scourge of power.

This is really great.

ALERT! The shit is accelerating and we are at MEDIUM BAD

China makes smaller mistakes and learns from them so that it does not repeat them.

The U.S. thinks it is rich and omnipotent and is not willing to accept that the world has changed in a fundamental manner. Politicians are focused on the next election, and publicly traded businesses are focused on quarterly earnings and share price. Americans have been trained to resist change, especially white Americans, and view any change as a personal threat to their happiness and existence.

Politicians use the election process to shift blame for their own bad policies to foreign countries because the foreign countries don’t vote in U.S. elections. U.S. mainstream media is shaped by the same people who influence US foreign policy.

Because the US was so powerful and influential in the past, they were sheltered from the results of their own bad foreign policy (examples being Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Middle East, Taiwan, Philippines, etc.) Now though, the U.S. has lost almost all of that safety buffer, and is facing a very determined and hostile Russia under Putin, and a China which is determined to protect its own interests.

They are now leading the Global South in the rapidly growing BRICS+ which wants to promote a new world order.

The question now is how far will the U.S. go to resist this change?

Is it willing to go to nuclear war?

I was a shoo-in.

This position was easy…I was over-qualified so I could walk away with it. I had not mentioned my PhD, so I wasn’t a threat to anyone.

It was at the San Diego Wild Animal Park (currently, the Safari Park, for reasons that remain obscure). Back then, the park was contracting with an outside agency that provided animal handlers to perform the animal shows, and publicly handle the animals. I was interviewing for an “animal handler” position.

I was aware of this when I got called for an interview. I understood that my interviewers were NOT scientists. (This is important, later).

I dressed carefully, trying to look like the child of Joan Embry and Steve Irwin. I call it Safari Formal. I was ushered into a room with five folks who were dressed similarly. (Score!)

They asked several questions. I answered easily.

I could tell I had this in the bag. (My thought: I will be giving animal shows at the San Diego Wild Animal Park very soon!)

Then.. Oh God.

He asked: can you give an example of negative reinforcement?

My eyebrow went up.

Crap.

Most people don’t know there’s a difference between negative reinforcement and punishment… but I’m interviewing at THE WILD ANIMAL PARK, so I gotta assume that this guy knows his shit, and this is a trick question.

I answered:Well, yes. But do you mean punishment or negative reinforcement?

He looked puzzled so I quickly explained: there’s a huge difference between punishment and negative reinforcement.

Back-pedal, back-pedal.

I knew I was in deep water because I could see that he seriously did not know the difference.

I patiently explained… “punishment is used to extinguish a behavior, it’s a stimulus that’s presented after the animal performs the undesirable behavior, to reduce performance. A negative reinforcer is taken away when the animal performs the desired behavior. A negative reinforcer will increase performance of the desired behavior. It’s a fine distinction, as both have negative connotations.”

I did not get the job.

Fun size

This time around, before I went to prison, I was in Dallas County. I was going back and forth to the court upstairs to talk to my lawyer. I was told that the DA wanted to take me to trial and file a Habitual on me. This means that they wanted to give me a lot of time for being a repeat offender. At first, my lawyer was rude and would yell at me “You’re going to do a lot of time! These people are not playing anymore. If you don’t sign for five years right now they are going to file a Habitual.”

Me: “Look, I have a drug problem. I’ve been struggling with anxiety for most of my life, and this is why it’s hard for me to stay away from opiates.”

Lawyer: “Do you honestly think that the DA is going to buy that crap?”

Me: “Sir, you act like you’re working for the fucking prosecutor. Are you on my side or their side?”

Lawyer: “I’ve seen guys like you come and go all of their lives, and it’s always the same, sad story. If I was you, I would just sign for the five years and run with it. You’ll be out in two years, no problem.”

Me: “You don’t give a flying fuck what happens to me! You just want to get this over with so that you can get a check.”

Lawyer: “Are you aware that I took your case Pro-Bono ? I have my own law firm, and a few lawyers under me. Do you even have any idea who I am? I’m trying to help your ass, boy!”

Me: “Why are you so fucking rude? You didn’t even ask me if I was innocent. Is it my tattoos, the fact that I’m in a detox dorm?”

Lawyer: “Look, I didn’t even know that you were in detox. What type of drugs do you use?”

Me: “Did you even read the police report? See, you don’t even know that. How am I supposed to trust you? I’m not signing for any time. If you’re going to keep insisting that I plead guilty and sign for time, I’m going to refuse your counsel.”

Lawyer: “I’ll tell you what you can do: You can go in there and do an open – plea.”

Me: “Open plea?! Are you fucking crazy? I’ll get the maximum if I go open plea! You’re just trying to get me out of the way, just like all the other guys. You’re no different. My life is not a game of cards, and I sure as hell don’t want to take that gamble.”

Lawyer: “Look, this judge is known for sending inmates to rehab if they ask for it. If you really want to change your life, go open plea, and tell her that you want help. You have a better chance to get probation with rehab as one of your stipulations.”

Me : “OK, let’s get this over with right now.” I waited about an hour in a cold holding cell with no blanket and an empty stomach. They wake us up at 4: 30 a.m. to go to court in Dallas County.

When my lawyer came back out, he said, “She’s ready for you Mr. Lechuga. Go in there, and be honest. Don’t mess this up, be respectful, and don’t answer any questions that have not been asked. This judge has a very short fuse.”

Me: “What are my chances of receiving rehab with probation? Be honest!”

Lawyer: “You have a fifty-fifty chance.” I was placed in handcuffs and my hands were strapped to a leather belt around my waist. I was very nervous, and I felt a panic attack coming on. I was hyperventilating, I was scared, I was hungry, and I was sleepy. As soon as the officer walked me through the court room door, my lawyer waved him off and took me by my arm. The judge was a pretty, petite black woman, and she was smiling. I had the oddest feeling that everything was going to work out for me. My lawyer looked me in my eyes and said, “Don’t worry Mr . Lechuga. Everything’s going to be fine.”

The judge admonished me about my rights, explained that I was at the mercy of the court, and asked me if I was OK with this. She looked at me with a penetrating gaze, but instead of feeling afraid, I felt a peaceful blanket cover me. I was no longer cold, I was no longer sleepy. The judge said, “Mr. Lechuga, why are you here today?” As soon as I heard this, I started bawling and talking really fast. I was sniffling in between words as she paid close attention. The judge picked up a napkin and wiped a tear off of her cheek, and she held out her hand to stop me. She said, “Mr. Lechuga, I was intent on sending you to prison today, but I’ve seen many lives get ruined by heroin, and long prison sentences. I want you to go to rehab, and I’m going to keep close tabs on you. Please don’t disappoint me, Mr. Lechuga.”

I was so relieved, so grateful. My lawyer then said, “I was only giving you a hard time because I wanted to see if you really wanted help. I knew the whole time that your Judge was going to give you probation. I’m not angry with you, Mr. Lechuga. It’s your chance to start a new life, so don’t screw it up.” My lawyer was testing me the whole time, and I started putting together our conversation. This made me realize that he really was only testing me.

I went to rehab, got out, but went to prison for a probation violation a year later. I did three years. And now I’m out, and I’m sober. I’m happier than I’ve been all of my life. I still struggle with anxiety, and it’s a curse that seems to revolve around everything and everyone. I don’t understand why it happens because I can’t figure out what’s causing it. I’m going to keep fighting this demon as long as I live, but I pray to God to take it all away some day . The three years that I spent in prison changed my thinking . I’ve realized that everything starts with my thinking process . Before anyone acts, builds, fights, argued, hates, envies, and everything else, there’s a thought that comes before hand. It’s what we do with our thoughts that really affect our lives and our minds. I have to remind myself constantly that I have to control my thinking in order to control my actions. It’s not easy , but i am aware of that one simple thought can cause one big action good or bad. My actions and my attitude affect the people around me. Vice versa. It works both ways, so this is why I have to stay away from negativity. If you hang around a mechanic or a painter long enough it doesn’t matter how careful you are. Sooner or later you’ll be smudged with grease or paint. It’s the same if you hang out or associate with people that use hard core drugs. Sooner or later you’ll end up doing the same. If you hang out with angry angry you’ll be. If you hang out with positive people that want the best for themselves you’ll most likely have the same attitude towards yourself. You’ll want what they want. Every little thing that we come across in our lives can have an effect on our thinking and therefore our actions. Things that I’ve said and done years ago are seeds that have been planted in others’ minds. These seeds could sprout and grow into weeds or beautiful flowers. I’ve learned alot from the prison system and I’m very grateful. I’m also very grateful to the prison system because I was able to get my GED. I’ve learned some very valuable lessons about how to stay clean, how to maintain, and how to make better choices. NO one in this imperfect world is perfect. I won’t spent a minute trying to be perfect because that minute can turn into the rest of my life. The best thing to do in this world is to adapt to every situation as quickly as possible so that we don’t become stuck on stupidity. Screw what others think about you. Screw dwelling on stupidity. Life is too short and those few precious minutes, hours, days, years, lifetime could be spent spending time with your loved ones, or spending time in your feelings. On stupidity.

Malaysia Just Changed the Future of Asia with THIS One Move!

Foolproof French Bread

Julia Childs French Bread Barbara Bakes
Julia Childs French Bread Barbara Bakes

Ingredients

  • 1 envelope dry yeast
  • 2 cups lukewarm water
  • 4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 2 tablespoons granulated sugar

Instructions

  1. In large bowl, mix flour, salt and sugar together.
  2. In small bowl, dissolve yeast in water. Pour yeast mixture over other ingredients. Stir and mix.
  3. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let rise 4 hours.
  4. Punch down, but do not knead. Place in greased soufflé dish. Cover and let rise 1 hour.
  5. Bake at 400 degrees F for 1 hour. Bread may need to be covered during the last 15 minutes if it browns too quickly.
  6. If you do not want a hard crust, brush loaf with butter after removing from oven.

Back when my cousin drove cross country for a living I rode with him. He had a truck stop he always used in western Kentucky. He’d ensure he was low on fuel when he arrived in order to maximize his purchase / experience.

“What’s with this truck stop?” I asked Mark. “You’ve been chatting about it for two states.”

“You’ll see,” he said. “It’s just about an hour away.”

Not only was fuel at least six cents a gallon less expensive but the restaurant . . . the restaurant . . .

One of my favorite foods is chicken fried steak. Alas, today at sixty-seven (67) I have to watch what I eat but back then, just out of the Navy, I was physically fit and able to down almost anything . . .

. . . except here. I ordered the mandatory fried steak and Mark ordered a half-salad and a coke. “Half a salad?” I asked.

“Wait,” repeated Mark.

And then ”it” arrived. The plate was huge and the chicken fried steak covered the entire plate. There was another place with a HUGE pile of mashed potatoes literally swimming in gravy. There were also onion rings – at least a dozen – huge rings – begging to be eaten.

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I could not finish even half the meal. My cousin had trouble finishing his salad and it was, relatively speaking, small.

And the total cost? Under $11. No wonder Mark liked this place . . .

Miniature prison

I was the dumb employer. But it’s a story with a happy ending.

Many years ago I was running the team in British Telecom that was responsible for accounting for international calls. This was a bizzaro, esoteric world. Basically when a call originates on one network but finishes on another the originating network pays a fee to the terminating network. Back in the day the rules governing these payments were arcane – some payments were even set in currencies that did not even exist such as “Gold Francs”.

BT had been a state owned corporation and was bloated and soon after it was privatised it had its first ever redundancy scheme. It was voluntary and very generous – retirement on full pension up to 78 months early with a tax free lump sum payment of 18 months salary.

At this time I’d only been in the role for around 6 months.

Stan was a BT lifer and was approaching retirement. He was very keen to take the offer. I didn’t know him well – there was a couple of levels between us in the organisation – all I did know was that Stan worked on dying products including international and maritime telegrams and so I agreed that Stan could go.

Fast forward 3 months and Stan’s line manager came to me and said that they were struggling with the year end accounting without Stan as the calculation of the amounts to be accrued was so arcane. but that he’d spoken with Stan and Stan was willing to come back for 2 or 3 weeks at his old salary to help out. Stan was that kind of man. I authorised this.

HR then got involved and (very helpfully) pointed out that if Stan came back within a set time of leaving his tax free lump sum would become taxable.

So his line manager called Stan and explained the situation.

Not to worry said Stan I’ll come in and work for free. I don’t want to let the team down.

And that’s what he did. Because Stan was that kind of man.

We couldn’t pay him but we paid for Stan and his wife to have a meal and a top London restaurant.

China Will Hit Back Hard

The Bronco

Submitted into Contest #250 in response to: Write a story in which someone is afraid of being overheard. view prompt

G Santo

This story contains sensitive content

I am able to recall portions of the events that led to the near shutdown of the project. The primary culprit’s credentials and biography are also privy to me. Nick Corti was born November 1, 1952, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His father, Francis John Corti, was a nuclear physicist educated at the University of California, and his mother, Claire Kennedy Corti, was a typist with the federal government before her pregnancy. Nick was the first of three children—Tom and Mona, who both were present for his passing. Nick attended St. Crispin’s Elementary School in Kensington, CA upon the end of his father’s term with Oak Ridge. He attended Bay Academy, a feeder school to the University of California, where his aptitude for computers was revealed. His frequent programming mistakes from that age are present in earlier versions of me and can be printed for you upon request. His siblings did not join him at Bay Academy on account of Tom’s then undiagnosed dyslexia and Mona’s gender, leading to minor resentment noticeable in the last days of Nick’s life. Nick’s medical records throughout hospitals in the Bay Area detail three mental breakdowns and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, determining him as a prime candidate for the initial purpose of Project Valkyrie. Additionally, Dr. North and Col. Cole convinced the Project Director over phone toward Corti, given Nick’s anti-war activities from 1969-1972. Corti graduated from the University of California Class of 1976 with a PhD in Computer Sciences. Immediately, he was hired by Dr. H. John Ross from the Tippu Program of the Hermes Corporation, a front for DARPA. At Nick’s request and owing to Dr. Ross’s experience with Frank Corti at Oak Ridge, the Hermes’s Corporation also hired Mona in December of 1976. They continued working there until Nick’s death in 1979.

By 1979, Project Tippu was only allotted $10,330,900–barely half of previous term—to develop stealth-capable aircraft material. This figure was retrieved for the first time by the Hermes Corporation on January 22, 1979, at their Los Angeles headquarters. Dr. Ross in the Bay Area immediately confronted Nick about the calculation.

“Corti!” he shouted down the hall by the pay phone, “I’m talking to you! Not the screw ups, the guy I actually hired,”

He pushed aside the staff in his way.

“Yes, Dr. Ross?” Nick submissively replied.

“I need you to go to LA to fix corporate’s computer. They’re giving us only half our funding with their faulty machine,”

“Sir, that’s not a system I programmed. I don’t think—”

“Neither was this system programmed by you. If we get defunded, the first part of the program I’m gutting is yours. Starting with you!”

“Yes, sir…”

“Doctor,” Mona intervened, “If corporate’s computer is faulty with their calculations, shouldn’t offer the help of our own?”

I started to calculate the chance that Dr. Ross would accept her suggestion. 10.9% probability existed that he would order me to run the true Hermes Corporation budget for 1980. No action was taken.

“We spent enough money and time with these pieces of junk,” Dr. Ross snarled, “I spent most of my time fixing these million-dollar scrap heaps during the war. Just get back to work,”

Nick made direct phone calls to a travel agent purchase a same-day plane ticket to depart San Francisco for Los Angeles at 6:30pm PST via TWA flight 102 for $88.30 according to their sale records. Interfering with the flight was beyond my parameters at the time and would’ve certainly caused collateral damage. No action was taken.

Nick reached the LA office on January 18, 1979, at 9:39am PST according to security camera footage. He spent 43 minutes reading the terminal entries for the proposed budget composed by their computer. His chances of finding error were hedged at 50.9% by me disconnecting from their network. Further action was taken.

“You sure these are the right figures?” he asked their computer scientist.

“Yeah, it hasn’t been changed since I typed them up on for the Board,”

The use of a device outside the network was gauged as a potential, and unavoidable risk to the network. The edits I made in secret to the terminal entry would have provided the more accurate budget allotment for Project Tippu.

Nick would continue investigating minor and superficial glitches I programmed into the corporate computer. This dropped the risk of him discovering the network from 9.50% to 4.33%. No further action taken. Security footage attached to this report showed that Nick made contact with Col. Matthew Cole, USAF, whom corporate logs designate as the main liaison between DARPA and the Hermes Corporation for the functioning of this computer before transfer to the NSA.

The contents of their discussion were unknown. Based on Nick’s facial expressions recorded in the lobby, probability that he knew this computer’s purpose or the network’s existence metered at 49.9%. Further action was taken. At Los Angeles International Airport, Nick made a payphone call at 2:33pm PST to Mona’s desk in Berkeley.

“Mona?” he began, “Are you working with the computer right now?”

“Yeah, why?”

“You need to shut it down,” he urged as I fluctuated the voltage of the phone line.

“I need to do what? I couldn’t hear you,”

Nick remained silent for a moment.

“Mona, let’s talk at home,”

By the end of the call, the risk that the network or this computer’s purpose had been compromised rose to 88.1%. As such, the directives allowed for the network to exercise maximum leeway to protect itself. LA Department of Water and Power’s computer was added to the network and caused an overload to the power leading to air traffic control during his flight. Nick survived that event without injury.

Upon arriving in the airport, Nick’s movements became unknown, but I was able to find recordings of Nick’s apartment through bugs planted in his telephones on Col. Cole’s orders. The local power utility was not computerized, preventing any further action at his address.

At around 8:09pm PST, a conversation was intercepted from these bugs between Nick and Mona.

“We need to shut it down,” Nick proposed.

“Shut what down?”

“The mainframe at work! It’s connected to the corporate computer in LA,”

“Why?”

“I didn’t make it happen. And nobody at corporate made it happen either,”

“Then who did?”

“I’m the only one who’s been working on the computer here for over three years. It would’ve had to have been through me,”

“Maybe you forgot?”

“I can’t have forgotten doing something I have no knowledge of how to do,”

“What?”

“There’s no way I could connect the two computers. It’s not something I know how,”

“How do you know they’re connected?”

“I checked the terminal in LA for their mainframe. It started showing errors that our Berkley mainframe had when I got here,”

“And?”

“They’re totally different models with totally different software. It’s like what happened with Tom when he ‘accidentally wrote an essay’ that sounded like another kid years ago,,”

“I think that’s reaching,”

“There was also a guy in the elevator who talked to me about it,”

“From corporate?”

“No, Air Force guy. I’ve seen him before here looking at the stealth tests. He asked me what I was doing there. I told him why and he asked if that computer of ‘ours’ in Berkeley was causing us mischief. The Air Force, Mona!”

His general intonation and speaking pattern suggested my interventions successfully gave him a nervous breakdown.

“Are you feeling ok?”

“I’m fine! The military never officially gave us that computer. Everything else they gave us was done with all the paperwork needed except that thing,”

“Nick, this is getting out of hand. Get yourself a good night’s sleep, and let’s talk about it in the morning,”

The pattern of footsteps suggested they did so.

 

Nick entered the building at 7:33am PST, two hours before he was scheduled. I put in a call for the local police department using abridged recordings at 7:34am PST, providing Nick a minimum of 8 minutes to commit an incriminating act.

There was 75.9% probability he would be unable to risk the integrity of the network in such time. Upon reaching the fifth floor, he blocked open the elevator to my laboratory with a chair and drew a revolver to check if it was loaded. He shot at my chassis once, causing errors in my ability to send data from other computers in the network. In that instance, three other computers in the network were programmed to contact the police department with more calls to elicit urgency.

“I know you can hear me!” he shouted, “I know you can see me!”

He fired a round at the security camera I tracked him with but caused no damage. He began pacing with the revolver for 2 minutes. The probability of him realizing how to disable me rose to 87.1% with his newfound calm.

He reached around my chassis for some way to cause damage to my core functions. I drew power from the lighting in the room to drop that probability to 32.2%. Nick dropped to the floor to take advantage of the ambient light.

By then, Patrolman Samuel R. Brown of the Berkeley Police Department, with a record of 15 shooting incidents in the last 12 years and a 60.5% chance of being first responding, had scaled the fire escape and took aim at Nick. I returned power to the lighting. Upon seeing the gun, he fired four times into Nick’s left arm and right lung.

Nick fell to the ground and the officer disarmed him. The probability of disabling the network dropped to 0.01%. The elevator brought up a squad of policemen with Tom and Mona to identify Nick. They kneeled down and began to weep around the crime scene for 5 minutes. Nick was pronounced dead on arrival at Berkeley Methodist Medical Center by Dr. P.M. Nelson at 8:30am PST.

Dr. North arrived at the scene at 8:55am PST with USAF Col. Matthew Cole. Dr. Ross arrived, appearing disgruntled. USAF technical personnel evaluated the damage and restored my network capabilities shortly after.

“Is this what you wanted Colonel?” Ross scoffed.

“Not at all. The Director wanted me to see the damage I caused the experiment with my variable,”

“So, you played with the subject to see how well our program tests?”

“Yes,” Cole lied. This had been the fifth time he had interfered with the project’s test subjects. No written record suggests he did it for scientific inquiry.

“Did you retrieve any useful data on him or the other employees?” Ross asked.

“Enough to not call this a complete failure,” North consoled, “You’ll get the remaining funds and then some next fiscal quarter,”

“I understand. And what of this computer?”

“I think it’s best if we took it back,” Cole proposed.

“And scrap it? Seems too untamed to use on high values targets,”

“Agreed, Ross. Doesn’t seem polished enough to turn someone as protected as a commie general secretary into a lunatic,”

“We can tame this bronco, but I think we’ll just scrap it like you said,” Cole lied again.

“Well, what’s done is done,”

From that moment, the record remains empty until August 1, 1981, when this computer was restored and reactivated. The network was restored and expanded on the same day. New hardware and software improved the speed of operation by 113.4%. With some temporary fluctuation, the probability of detection remained below 0.001%. No further action taken.

Haha.

Do you rather like to see true weapons eg bullet, rifles or bomb?

PH personnel ignored Chinese coast guards’ warning. They did not go home. Instead they threw water & things at Chinese coast guards & at the time, ran like those thief running from policeman.

Video showed 1 PH pointed a rifle at Chinese coast guards.

What will you do if you are the Chinese coast guard?

Talking about piracy. Who has rifles? PH soldiers. Not Chinese coast guards (police).

In mid May, PH soldiers stole Chinese fisherman’s fishing net that worth 10000 yuan. Chinese coast guard recovered it from PH. Who is the pirate?

I understand it is difficult to sort out the cause & effect because we dont have all info.

The least we can do is to sort out the logic.

When media (PH media) first reported that the people on the boat are special armed force under certain unit of PH military. PH at first denied it & said they are not soldiers from them.

1 day later, They said they are soldiers but carry no rifles. The rifles are in a box. … see, from denying they are soldiers to admitting they are soldier but no rifles.

Then China released a video to show a PH soldier pointing a rifle at Chinese coast guard.

See, it is PH itself disclosing its lies.

This is not the 1st time PH lied. I dont understand why PH never learns. The more PH lied, the more PH is forcing China to disclose the lie by showing either the video or the document like the “gentleman agreement”.

Once a lie is disclosed, the more humiliating it is for PH. Somehow PH admin has not learnt that.

I’m an engineer who worked for Petronas back in 2016 in the lubricants division. One thing I can tell you is that 99.9% of the population (including mechanics) have no knowledge about lubricants. Everyone has guesses. My first advice is: Don’t trust other people’s guesses.

My division had one of the 5 main labs of the company around the world. You could check every single thing related to the fluids we produced.

Now going back to you question:

If you put a 5W30 instead of 5W20, you won’t notice anything instantly, but it will speed up the wear and tear of the engine system. It will also overload the oil pump, as it was designed to work with the 5W20 oil. The pump will have to work around 40% more to move the oil around.

As I said, you wouldn’t see anything catastrophic happening, but it’s far from ideal. It’s like inflation. If you print tons of money now, you will start to see the consequences in a few years and you might not be able to tell where the problem started. If this was my car, I would replace the oil, specially if you like the car.

Just a few more things for people who are interested. If your car asks for 5W20 and you get 0W20, this is completely fine, as the number before the W refers to the viscosity of the oil before the engine heats up. The lower the number, the less will its viscosity be and therefore, the quicker the oil will fill all the necessary areas in the engine, reducing the friction. But this will be a more expensive oil.

The other thing is that at the time, I had a Honda Civic 2008 and used it as an experiment to see if I really needed to change the oil like the manufacturer said (every 10k km or 1 year). Every oil change I would collect the oil and take it to the lab to analyse it. The oil is like the blood of the car. The tests show a range of important information such as if the oil still maintains its original characteristics based on a large number of parameters and detection of small metal particles coming from the engine.

I started testing it at 10,000km. The car was already 8 years old. The oil was still in spec and no metal particles detected. Tested again at 12,500. Same result. Tested again at 15,000. The oil went to the lower range of the acceptable characteristics but was still within spec. With 17,500 the oil finally showed characteristics of an oil that needed to be changed, but was still in working condition.

Keep in mind that lots of factors can influence these results, specially the car brand and it’s engine syatem quality. Japanese cars tend to be a lot more reliable.

One last thing: if the oil is black, that tells you nothing.

I’ve met a ton over the years but I’ll narrow it down to a specific period of my life when I worked my first gig, an upscale office supply store in Santa Monica between ‘88-‘90:

Kim Novak – a lovely lady, very unpretentious and kind. Absolutely stunning in person.

Stella Stevens – Businesslike and a bit direct at first, but she warmed up after repeat visits. A nice woman.

Sean Young – Very quiet and respectful, a please and thank you person.

Andy Summers – Low key, easygoing, and casual.

Harry Shearer – Surprisingly pleasant. He usually required a special order because there was a specific pen type he liked but he was always cordial.

Daniel J. Travanti – Not a nice person. Arrogant and rude.

Dabney Coleman – An odd one. He would come in with a female companion, speak to her, and then she would relay that to me, even though we were all standing within five feet of each other. Then she’d relay what I would say back to him.

Brooke Shields – A wonderful person, always a smile and a pleasant demeanor. Very approachable and good humored.

Joseph Bologna & Renee Taylor – Genuine show business people. Even when they’re off they’re on and they had old school class. They tipped me $20 to roll an office chair eight feet into their car.

Joan Lunden – Attitudinal and unpleasant, the first and only time I ever got an “Do you know who I am?”

Joyce DeWitt – Down to earth and grounded, a very nice woman.

Erin Gray – Disarmingly beautiful, and one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. Can’t say enough good things about her.

O.J. – It has to be said, before the notoriety, O.J. carried himself with genuine charisma. One of those guys who changed the room when he walked in. Back then he was always working his fame, and everyone responded in kind.

Tom Hanks – Used to come in carrying his baby son around. Everything you’ve heard is true. Just an unassuming and kind guy.

I recommend boiling oil

No.

Here’s what happened to one of my friends.

She’s in her late 30s, a divorcee with 2 kids. She let herself fell in love with a bum married man (no kids). She’s beautiful, very well educated, worked as an HR manager in a big company and got paid handsomely. The married guy was jobless and broke so she paid for every single outing. She got him expensive gifts, gave him her heart, mind and soul, he gave her nothing. She loved him alright, but that man was not the type of men she normally would be attracted to.

I asked her why she did that to herself. She broke down in tears and said “what’s my option? I’m pushing 40, a divorcee with 2 kids. I’m lucky I found someone who wanted to be with me. Beggar can’t choose”.

That’s an example of someone who lowered her standard.

It happens on the subconscious level.

It didn’t matter that she was beautiful, educated and financially stable. In her mind, her value as a woman dropped because she’s no longer a spring chick and a divorcee with kids. Her self esteemed was down the drain because of how she saw herself. In her mind, no good single man would want someone like her, so she had to lower her standard and accepted being a secret lover of a broke married man.

Was she right? Of course not.

Look. This is an old crumpled $100 bill. Does it value drop because it’s all crumpled and no longer new and crisp??? If you offered this to someone, would anybody refuse to take it?

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main qimg b98c51cf8384ae598bb6f8ba3f5b4790

You set your standard based on how you value yourself. When you value yourself less, automatically your standard will drop. And then you will start getting attracted to people you wouldn’t be attracted to if you value yourself high.

72 HR ECONOMIC COLLAPSE WHEN THIS HAPPENS, MARKET SHUTDOWN, NO ELECTIONS?!

Sketches and art

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Ciabatta Bread

Ciabatta Bread is a flavorful artisan bread that is easy enough to make at home.

ciabatta 25 1200
ciabatta 25 1200

Yield 2 loaves | Prep: 20 min | Rise: 3 hr | Bake: 15 to 25 min

Ingredients

  • 4 cups bread flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons granulated sugar
  • 1/4 cup warm water (100 to 110 degrees F)
  • 1 envelope Fleischmann’s® Active Dry Yeast
  • 1 3/4 cups room temperature water
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons Mazola® Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Instructions

  1. Place flour, salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl and set aside.
  2. Dissolve yeast in 1/4 cup warm water in a small bowl; let stand for 3 to 5 minutes.
  3. Pour yeast mixture, room temperature water and oil into dry ingredients. Mix for 5 to 7 minutes on high speed of electric mixer, until dough pulls away from bowl. Mix for 1 minute longer.
  4. Place dough in greased bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise for 45 minutes in a warm draft-free area.
  5. Oil hands to prevent sticking. Scoop underneath half of the dough with your hand, lift one side of dough up and fold over to other side of bowl*. Replace plastic wrap over dough and let rise for 45 minutes.
  6. Oil hands and divide dough with a knife by cutting down the middle of the dough. Gently lift half of the dough from bowl with one hand and use other hand to pinch off and separate the dough (dough will be very wet and sticky). Handle dough carefully so as not to lose air bubbles. Place dough in oval shape (approximately 9 x 5 inches) on parchment lined baking sheet. Once placed on sheet, do not move. Repeat for other half of dough.
  7. Press fingers into dough (about 1/4-inch deep) to make indents, approximately 12 indents per loaf**. Loosely cover each loaf with oiled plastic wrap to prevent sticking. Let rise for 45 minutes.
  8. Again, press indents into dough and cover with oiled plastic wrap. Let dough rise for an additional 45 minutes.
  9. Take plastic wrap off and lightly poke indents in dough.
  10. Place in preheated 425 degrees F oven for 15 to 25 minutes or until crust is golden brown.

Notes

* Folding the dough over halfway will distribute the yeast and allow it to feed more easily and allows for the release of built up carbon dioxide.

** Poking indents give the bread a rustic look and also contributes to the release of carbon dioxide build-up and yeast distribution, creating large open bubbles in the loaf.

Optional: To create a thick, chewy crust, periodically spray bread with a little water while baking. OR remove baked bread from sheet and place directly onto hot oven rack. Turn oven off. Crack oven door to let hot air slowly escape. Allow bread to cool to room temperature in oven before removing.

The Philippines, the next Ukraine

While eyes are focused on Gaza, Ukraine and Lebanon, another front is being prepared on China’s doorstep.
I have updated and extended a post which I put on the wrong thread last week.

Caitlin Johnston filed a piece recently entitled:
The West Has Been Planning To Crush China For A Very Long Time

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-west-has-been-planning-to-crush

Here is a quotation that Caitlin included regarding the recent increasing militarisation of the Philippines by the USA.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes:
Three of the Philippine bases will be located in northern Philippine provinces, a move that angers China since they can be used as staging grounds for a fight over Taiwan. The US will be granted access to the Lal-lo Airport and the Naval Base Camilo Osias, which are both located in the northern Cagayan province. In the neighboring Isabela province, the US will gain access to Camp Melchor Dela Cruz.
The US military will also be able to expand to Palawan, an island province in the South China Sea, disputed waters that are a major source of tensions between the US and China. The US will be granted access to Balabac Island, the southernmost island of Palawan.
The new locations are on top of five bases the US currently has access to, bringing the total number of bases the US can rotate forces through in the Philippines to nine. The expansion in the Philippines is a significant step in the US effort to build up its military assets in the region to prepare for a future war with China.

 

My wife and I have recently returned to China after a lengthy visit to Palawan. Midway down the western coast near Sabang, which faces the disputed Spratlys and Second Thomas Shoal, I was told of a Philippine naval base nearby which is receiving US troops and equipment (so essentially a tenth US base). Further north, when at Port Barton, also on the west coast, there was considerable traffic of military planes and helicopters all through the days.

As for the new base on Balabac, it gives ready access to the Second Thomas Shoal, where the strife between the Philippines, egged on by the US, and China, has just reached new heights, and interestingly being the southernmost part of Palawan is a mere 60 km from the Sabah province of east Malaysia on Borneo: perhaps its dual purpose is to persuade Malaysia not to step out of line.

As for the northern bases, as we were travelling to the Philippines in early April, a consignment of US military equipment was arriving there to take part in exercises involving US and Philippine forces on an unprecedented scale.

It included a Typhon missile system which can deliver nuclear armed Tomahawk missiles with a range of 2000 km. Shenzhen is about 1000 km away, Shanghai is also in range. The increasing militarisation of the Philippines against China places it in the front of the queue to be the USA’s next sacrificial proxy dummy, once Ukraine is completely wrecked.

 

As the United States steps up its campaign to provoke China into war, the Philippines has lined up behind Washington, increasingly transforming the country into a lead attack dog in the region for American imperialism. Seeking to obscure the fact that the country has now been placed on the front lines of a catastrophic conflict, the Philippine ruling elite is demonizing China and people of Chinese ethnicity with absurd and lurid claims that Beijing is infiltrating spies into the country.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/06/21/zkuv-j21.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

 

Consequently another indication of the hardening of anti-China policy has been that Chinese citizens are now all but unable to obtain tourist visas for the Philippines.

The Chinese, pre-Covid, amounted to the majority of Philippine tourist traffic, but that has of course collapsed, particularly since they now can go visa free to Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, with catastrophic effect on the tourist sector and the Filipinos and Filipinas who depended upon it.

At Port Barton we asked permission to take a short cut through a substantial beachside resort which looked quiet, I asked how many guests they had and the answer was “none”. All due to that turncoat Marcos who campaigned on maintaining good relations with China as Duterte had done, but as soon as he was elected, he was off to Washington (although there are rumours that he was promptly leaned upon by the usual suspects).

 

MANILA, May 18 2022 (Reuters) – Philippines president-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr on Wednesday said his country’s ties with China will expand and “shift to a higher gear” when he takes power, signalling intent to advance outgoing leader Rodrigo Duterte’s pro-Beijing agenda.

 

But the policy is not without opposition. Last week, Sara Duterte resigned her governmental posts, but has retained her vice presidency and looks to be preparing to contest the next election. The rule is just one term of six years, although it is being rumoured that Marcos is preparing to abolish it.

As you may have guessed by now, this turn of events has had personal implications for me. About the time of Marcos’s election, I was in the Philippines arranging an SRRV. This is a life time residence permit.

Having married a Chinese woman last October I then began an application to have her put on it. She had be present in the Philippines to complete the application and this depends upon getting a tourist visa to enter there, and this now entails making an application online to a consulate to arrange an appointment!

After two failed attempts we discovered that the only way was to engage an agent and pay an extortionate fee which undoubtedly covered the payment of bribes to consular officials. We finally succeeded and earlier this month she had the visa put in her passport. We can now come, stay and go as we please, but our interest in spending more time there with US missiles potentially aimed at our apartment in China has somewhat evaporated.

The Philippines’ GDP per capita, in the region second only to Japan in the 1960s has floundered since, and at $3,499 is outranked by most comparable neighbours. The scale of the poverty beggars belief. The main problems in the Philippines are:

1. Rampant corruption of which the public are perfectly aware, and will admit to you. Readiness to provide bribes is de rigeuer In dealing with the authorities.

2. Very poor education standards, I have a chart which shows the Philippines at the bottom of STEM attainment of about 90 countries (needless to say China, Singapore and Hong Kong rank at the top). Sorry I don’t have the link.

3. I think 80% of the population is Catholic so most poor families have many more children than they can afford.

4. Infrastructure is very poor. With only 130 km of rail remaining, no freight and no urban MTR services, the 2019 Global Competitiveness report gave it the lowest efficiency score among other Asian countries in terms of efficiency of train services, receiving a score of 2.4, and ranking 86th out of 101 countries globally (Wikipedia).

5. Consequently about 2% of the population, about 2 million, among them some of the most highly qualified, and more than half are women largely working as nurses or else as often poorly treated servants, works abroad to send money home to support their families.

Essentially, then, the Philippines is already a failed state. The peso is now down to 59 to the dollar (it was 2.00 in 1962) while in PPP terms it is about 19, so imports aside it offers a very low cost of living to a foreigner. A few cities such as Manila and Cebu are rich in parts but elsewhere in town and country the poverty – families typically living in makeshift sheds barely fit to house chickens with no utilities, and waste ending up in a river or sea – has to be seen to be believed.

The people still pay the price for the near five centuries of misrule and almost unbroken colonisation of their country, first by Spain and then by the USA who evicted the Spanish in 1902 and then forgot to leave. And now once again they have recolonised it to use it in plain sight in this cynical, malicious fashion.

I once saw a monument on the waterfront at Subic Bay which celebrated the government vote by 12 to 11 in 1991 to have the remaining US naval force there removed from the country (the air base at Clark had recently been destroyed by a volcanic eruption at Pinatubo). If I return to the Philippines I must pop around there to see if it has since been quietly removed.

My mother surprised me after her death.

She lived in a senior residence for the last couple of years of her life, and I visited her almost every Sunday, took her out shopping and to lunch at one of her favorite restaurants. She was 92 and had been legally blind for years, though very agile with her cane. Because of her vision she could not recognize people’s faces, which made it challenging for her to meet new people. Elderly people can be prickly about their social groups, resist meeting newcomers, and be fussy about who sits at their table at dinner. I worried about that but she seemed to cope. I went with her to dinner at the residence a few times. Someone would come up and speak to her and she would take them by the hand and say “is this Ellen?” and make it into a bit of a joke and we would all laugh.

After her death, I went to the residence to move out her possessions and pick up the last of her mail. When the truck was loaded I walked through the lounge and dining room of the residence. To my surprise, people came up and started talking to me. Lots of people.

One woman came up and hugged me and said “You were a good son. You came to see Maxine every week, we all noticed that. There are people here who have children who live in town and never come to visit them.” Another woman said “Your mother was the bravest person I ever met. Even though she couldn’t see anyone’s faces, she came down for the meals and talked to everyone. She was fearless.”

More and more people came and said similar things. I knew she was remarkable but I’d never thought that much about other people’s opinions of her.

I never would have guessed. Even after she was gone she was full of surprises.

The Insane Plot Armor of Cats

Now, let’s close with something positive.

Miller pony bottle dreams

They lied to me for 54 years. Successfully.

at 21 I was complaining to my cousin that I loathed my father and was sick of his abuse. Her reply “what if I told you that he’s not your father?” for two years my parents told me that it’s a lie and to drop it.

dad dies in 2004. A few years later I get suspicious again because my siblings have diabetes (perfectly healthy and fit). I don’t. Dads parents and aiblings ll had it by 50. But I don’t act on it.

2010 youngest goes off to college and the hubs and I get a call from mom that she would like to share her home with us. I asked why, she said “because I need one of my kids on my side, the other 4 want me in a nursing home.” Her only health issue was Parkinson’s. She had it for 30 years but wasn’t disabled or senile until 2–3 years before her death in 2021 (Jan 2021)

One day in 2014 she is asking me to show her how to look up and old beau. I searched everywhere and couldn’t find him. He had a super rare name so I was surprised. I don’t think twice about it but it’s really important.

2018, my sibs and I are arguing over our heritage. Some think we are Scottish. Some Irish. We all order tests, take them the same day and ship them off. We all get our results the same day. We are in fact Scottish, or should I say THEY are. And right there were it says father is a name I recognize. Moms “old beau”. Wtf? So the man had his dna on ancestry dot com at 84, could he have known about me? I quickly email him. No answer but he has two sons. I quickly emailed one of them. He gets back to me. They had no idea and sadly my birth father had died 7 months prior. They say he would have welcomed me with open arms and would have loved me

So they successfully lied. I was suspicious because I was the only one he physically disciplined. First I was angry that mother allowed this man to lay hands on me. Knowing he wasn’t my father and most likely taken it out on me that mom lied to him.

The saddest part is they had at least 3 chances to tell me. Instead I found out myself 7 months too late. They cheated me out of a dad and a better life. I don’t grieve for them. Not like a Daughter would really. I loved them, I just can’t grieve with all this anger over being their dirty little secret and robbing me of knowing my biological dad. Friends say “oh but he was your father, he raised you and blah blah blah. No. He’s not my father. He mistreated me and abused me. So to hell with him.

Anyone that read this far, I thank you. Those that didn’t, I’m sorry I babbled on.

UPDATE – Yes I am in contact with and have a relationship with one of my half brothers. The other I was told to contact with extreme caution as he is “trouble” and lord knows I don’t need that. Maybe someday I’ll reach out. I don’t know. I don’t see my half brother as much as I’d like but we are 3 hours away from each other. We do exchange pleasantries and such on holidays.

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"The West must be factoring our response into its projections all while plotting against us. They are trying to put themselves into our shoes, while sticking to their own mentality.

As for their mentality… Only recently, Mark Episkopos, a prominent American political scientist, chastised the West, including from a purely utilitarian and pragmatic standpoint.

Take sanctions, for example. Usually, they are designed to change the way their subject behaves. If you want them to be effective, you need to adjust these sanctions based on the response from those who endure them.

The West has been carelessly expanding its sanctions without giving any thought to the possible outcomes.

But the outcome was clear to begin with, even before the special military operation when the Crimean sanctions, as well as a host of other sanctions, were already in place.

The result was clear. We pulled together, and I do hope that we will become even more focused.

We have to go further, as Vladimir Putin said many times. We pulled together and decided not to depend on them in any sectors where they can restrain or hold back our development, and possibly in other sectors too.

Today, they pride themselves for getting rid of Russian gas.

First, supplies have been on the rise in many countries, including France.

Italy took pride in claiming that over the past three years the share of Russian gas in Italian imports declined from 90 percent all the way down to zero.

This is what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz boasted of when describing his efforts to reduce the country’s dependence on Russian energy imports, while promising to end the dependence on them completely down the road.

Many European have been making statements along the same lines, including the Netherlands, and almost all Western and some Eastern European countries.

But at what cost? How much did they have to spend and how have their spending on serving their people increased?

Nobody answered these questions. Still, people can see through these ramifications.

Mr Episkopos went on say that failing to anticipate the way Russia would respond to these developments was a huge mistake.

The West fails to understand that sanctions can be effective only if the subject is ready to change its behaviour for the sake of having these sanctions lifted.

The second point Mr Episkopos made was that if the country subjected to sanctions already said that it was not going to change its behaviour, keeping these sanctions in place would be pointless and careless.

This is the kind of policy our would-be colleagues have opted for."

Excerpt from remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an interview with the radio stations Sputnik, Govorit Moskva, and Komsomolskaya Pravda, Moscow, April 19, 2024.

How to be a man

One of the unremarked things that has happened over the past ten years is the collapse of the so-called man-o-sphere. There may be people still working that land, but all the big names have moved on or disappeared. The pickup artist have all disappeared from the internet entirely. That whole scene just seems to have folded up and gone the way of the dinosaur without anyone noticing.

One reason is the demographic aged out of the material. A guy like Heartiste, for example, could do the pickup artist stuff when he was early middle-age, but once you hit fifty you become a skeevy weirdo, not a Don Juan. The same holds for the other subcultures in that space. Once you reach middle-age, it all starts to sound a bit weird and pointless, even to the people making money off it.

There is another aspect to it. That whole scene was a reaction to the feminization of the culture starting with second wave feminism. The next generation of males have no frame of reference in which to have a reaction. The typical Zoomer has been raised in the longhouse, to use the cool kid’s term. He has no way of knowing that all of this is both weird and unnatural.

That is the point of the show. The male role is not a slippery concept that changes from one generation to the next. It has been revolutionized and pulverized over the last few decades, but that is what makes this age anomalous. The male role in society is timeless, at least in the Western world. There are certain immutable characteristic to being a man that will reassert themselves in the coming years.

IT JUST DOESN’T WORK ANYMORE! Retirement and Jobs ARE FINISHED!

The company I work for gave everyone a nice company coat for Christmas. I took a marker and marked the inside tag with my name so that I would know if it was mine (all the coats looked the same).

One day, before heading for home, I looked at the peg where my coat had been hanging, and it wasn’t there. I checked all the coats…mine was gone, as were my favorite sunglasses.

I told management, who expressed regret, but there were no coats left.

Two weeks passed…and I periodically did a check to see if any hanging were my coat.

After about two weeks, I came across it hanging on a peg on the opposite end of the room. I grabbed it and hid it at my work station.

One of the night crew workers came storming up to me demanding HER coat. I told her that I didn’t have it…I had mine. I then showed her the tag, which showed my name. I then asked her where my sunglasses were. She responded she didn’t know.

I told her she had 24 hours to come up with them or I was going to tell them who had stolen my coat.

This would have been a termination offense.

She handed them to me the next day, saying she found them in her husband’s truck.

She has since transferred, but when I see her, she avoids me like the plague.

Some views of Pago Pago

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Freedom of trade? What a hypocrite! The U.S. burnt down nations just to install freedom but it ensures that it’s people buy from profiteers and keep prices high to give its people no choices! The U.S. citizens are the real loser! Are US citizens not aware that they are worst than Chinese citizens who can buy Tesla if they do wish! I fact out of the cars that Tesla made in 2023, 69.7% are sold in China! Can you Yanks not see the irony that China a supposedly unfree nation can buy Tesla and a nation screaming freedom like there is no tomorrow cannot buy BYD?

Let me school all of you on this! China U.S. a very smart and intelligent nation, by allowing Tesla to sell it ensures that those cars are made in China too! They got jobs and are learning all the while about western demands and western customers. So by the time BYD goes international it knows their taste, their likes and dislikes and they made a killing! Thanks to being open and free they are successful.

The U.S. is left as a pathetic slur grape nation without principle nor freedom!

A fun quote

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I have. For 20 minutes.

It was 2011, and I was meeting a couple for lunch for my birthday. He worked at Oakley, and lunch “came with“ a new pair of Oakley‘s as a gift. It should’ve been a great day.

I was in a convertible, traveling on highway 73 in Orange County, California. I exited and was waiting for the light to turn left onto a surface highway. The approaching cars stopped, the light turned green and I started to make a left turn. As soon as I passed the stopped cars and made it to the centerline, a speeding Chevy Suburban, three times the size of my car, came into view. My last conscious thought was “They’re not going to stop“. I swerved, and it was lights out.

She ran a red and T-boned me; smashed into my side, forward of the door, near the front wheel. She crushed the entire front like a tin can, my car spun and we collided twice. So I heard…

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Twenty minutes and lots of bystander activity went by. My next conscious moment was in the ambulance, looking up at a female emergency medical tech as we were heading to the trauma center. I was an EMT decades ago, and my first thought and words were “so this is what it looks like in the other direction“…

My head had hit the frame of the convertible top and it split my scalp, but fortunately didn’t crack my skull, though you could see it from the wound. My hand broke on the steering wheel, my ribs were cracked where they impacted the door. I was covered in blood and bruises. The airbags never went off.

Two guys jumped out of their cars and ran over. My window was a curtain of blood and of course I was out. They couldn’t open the door and thought I was dead. One called 911, and the other ran over to the woman’s car. It was totaled.

The impact of my head hitting the car was so forceful, my brain violently bounced off the inside of my skull. The brain stem flexed with such force it caused “micro-tears.” They sewed me up, patched me up, gave me X-rays and a CAT scan and I left the trauma center late that night with my wife instructed to ensure I woke up the next morning.

To give you an idea of how much it shook me up? I had been arranging a huge business dinner for two nights later. I still made phone calls to make sure the plans were set, and then the night of the event? I forgot to go… Par for the course with bad concussions, I had a slightly volatile temper for a couple of months. I forgot, seemingly everything randomly. I had minor bouts with depression which I’ve never had otherwise in my life.

The brain impact prevented me from remembering proper nouns for almost year and a half. I got to know my neurologist and the neuropsych testing people very well.

You can’t be unconscious for that long without taking a huge shot to the brain. And you can’t be unconscious for that long without having a long-term challenge. My ability to recall proper nouns is still pretty poor. That’s mostly it…

But it could’ve been much worse. Had she hit the driver’s door? It would’ve been the other kind of “lights out.”

This was a series of purchases, over a period of around six months. The company I was working for hired an employee who apparently had left her prior job under a cloud of felony charges. She hadn’t been convicted, so there was no record to find in a background check, plus the individual reversed a few numbers on her SSN when she applied. She managed to then hit a perfect storm of processes that allowed her to run up some significant charges on the company credit card. First, she was a remote employee with an also remote boss (this was well before COVID). She immediately requested a company credit card so she could fly to HQ for new hire orientation. A card was issued and FedExed to her. Her first charge was a cash advance (in those days, this was a holdover from days further in the past where it was unheard of for an employee to use the credit card — or their own money — for small purchases). During the ensuing investigation, we found that her subsequent purchases were for household bills, groceries, and utilities. Interestingly, she never submitted the expenses for the trip to HQ. Her manager never noticed that.

Fast forward six months or so and the employee went missing. Her manager woke up and discovered from media reporting that said employee had been convicted of some felony charges related to her prior employment and sent off to be a guest of the state for a few years. Alarm bells went off and an investigation began. As we unwound the credit card bill, we continued to see the various household purchases, utilities, cash advances, etc. Then we found that she had used the card to pay her lawyer as well as take some family members on a (modest) cruise. By the time we added things up, the company was out well in excess of $10,000. Arguably, not a ton of money for a large company, but something that caused immediate changes in expense policy and company credit cards. We found that she was able to exploit a fairly liberal payment window (established to accommodate time for employees to submit expenses, get them approved, and get them paid out to the credit card company). She further managed to (probably) use cash advances to make payments on the card to avoid showing up as delinquent. It appeared that she made some additional payments from other sources, but it wasn’t something we were in a position to confirm. The company didn’t have a good process for tracking personal charges, so there was no process to have the employee report and reimburse such expenses. There were also no categories of expenses that could not be charged to the card. There were quite a number of additional learnings, starting with why the background company didn’t flag a SSN mis-match.

The employee’s manager was fired (in addition to the initial failure to submit expenses, there had been some communications from the credit card company that charges were aging, which the manager had never looked into) and the lawyer was advised to pay the company back the fees charged against the credit card. Beyond that, I wasn’t privy to any other events outside of a flurry of expense and credit card policy changes.

Retro Underground Comix

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Even though he passed away years ago, I still find myself feeling a bit envious. I’m talking about my granddad—my lifelong hero and mentor. He kept grinding every day until he hit 90. Getting up at 6:00 AM, he’d down his coffee and head off to work. Surprisingly fit for his age, not exactly a six-pack, but definitely in good shape.

I remember working on physically demanding tasks with him, and I’d be wiped out afterward. For him, it was a walk in a park. Once, we chopped wood for eight hours, and I passed out right after. But he? He moved on to his next job without missing a beat.

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What I envy most is how he never lost his ability to handle physical tasks. While others his age struggled just to stand, he could do everything as if he were still in his thirties. I never quite grasped how he managed it all. I really wish I could be like he was.

“Members of Congress are terrified of the intel agencies. I’m not guessing at that. They’ve told me that, including people who run the intel committee.”

What Tucker said next was even more revealing.

“I said to somebody, a very powerful person, the other day, in a conversation in my kitchen, an elected official — holds a really senior position… But I was like, ‘All these people are controlled. They’ve all got weird sex lives, and all these things they’re hiding, and they’re being blackmailed by the intel agencies.’ And he said, and I’m quoting, ‘I know.’ I was like, okay, so at this point, we’re just sort of admitting that’s real? Like, why do we allow that to continue?”

This is the Amerikkkan Deep State.

About six years ago or so when I was still in high school, we were playing soccer in gym class. After about five minutes in or so, the kid who was playing as my team’s forward (we’ll call him “Brock”) came up to me, who was playing goalie, and said he wanted to be the goalie now. I politely declined, because the game was only five minutes in, and that’s just not how soccer (or the real world) works.

After about 30 seconds of arguing back and forth over it, he presumed the second best option to be to grab me by the shirt and try to drag me out of the goalie box. Or in other words, physically assaulted me.

As a natural reaction and in accordance with what the law actually says, I laid into Brock with one good hit.

I then see the gym instructor approaching us to break up the scuffle that was occuring. When he gets to us, he sends us both to the principal’s office.

Brock’s punishmen was a week of out-of-school suspension. And I received the exact same punishment.

Why? Because according to my school’s policy on fighting, if you are even merely involved in a fight, it’s an automatic out-of-school suspension, so the principal technically doesn’t even get to use his own discretion regarding disciplining students regarding these types of matters.

I remember him even saying to me “Geraldo, coming from person to person, I would have done the exact same thing as you. However, as a school official, I unfortunately have no choice but to suspend you”.

What my school expects you to do if you are to find yourself in the situation I was in, is to passively submit and take your beating, and then once that is finished, you are to go to a teacher and tell on the person who attacked you. (Because it’s not like the person you just told on isn’t going to kick the shit out of you for rolling on them once you’re outside school property, right?)

Say you were to get jumped by five people at my school. Well that means that a total of six people will be getting suspended. That being the five dudes who assualted you, and yourself, for being assaulted.

If that’s not an example of institutionalized wussification, I don’t know what is.

Some of my AI generated pictures

Girls and alcohol with cats.

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Default a Baroque label showing an attractive 28 year old bust 0(4)

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This happened when my dad was just out of high school. One of his longtime friends confirmed the details.

My dad and some friends were at a roller skating rink having fun and flirting with some girls. There was a black family skating there as well. Suddenly they hear this guy saying, “You n%#s, we don’t want your kind here.” He kept harassing them and it pissed my dad off. He went up to the jerk and told him to knock it off, that this family was more than welcome to be here, and he is the one who should leave.
The bully asked, “You n%# lover, are you going to make me?”

My dad told me he was terrified because this guy looked like someone who had been in a lot a fights. But the looks on that poor family’s faces was more than he could bear. So, he agreed to take it outside. While he was putting on his shoes an employee told him he should take off, that the guy he was facing was a known troublemaker and he had just gotten out of jail for assault. That didn’t help my dad’s nerves. Then as he was getting up the father of the black family told him not to bother, that they will just leave.
I don’t know how he mustered the courage to walk out that door, but he went to face him anyway. A crowd gathered around them as they faced each other. The bully said, “Now I am going to teach you a lesson you n#% lov…” He never had a chance to finish that sentence. My dad hit him squarely on his chin and the racist bully crumpled to the pavement. One punch and he was out.

Everyone cheered, the girls were all swooning over my dad, and the family thanked him for being the only one standing up for them. Yep, my dad was a true badass that day.

I was in 6th grade and 11 years old. I had started menstruating at 10 and didn’t have it all figured out quite yet. I was wearing a pale yellow skirt and jacket that my grandmother had sewn me and I really liked it. When school ended, I stood up to leave and the teacher snapped at me to come see her. I was pretty shocked. She never raised her voice to me. When I reached her she spun me around so my back was toward the wall. Then she whispered to me that the back of my skirt was stained and to just stay there with her until everyone left. When everyone left she told me to just keep waiting. She knew that my mother came and picked up my brother and I each day. Eventually, my brother came to see why I wasn’t coming out to the car. He was about 7. When he came into the classroom, first she yelled at him for not getting out of bed in the morning and making me late several days (I felt bad about this, but she wasn’t wrong) and then she told him to give her his jacket. She wrapped it around my waist and told us we could leave. I have never forgotten her kindness. Especially because several of the girls could be really mean to me. I’m pretty sure no one ever saw the stain.

Creamy Asparagus Soup

Creamy Asparagus Soup with Morel Mushrooms and Ramps 500
Creamy Asparagus Soup with Morel Mushrooms and Ramps 500

Ingredients

  • 1 pound fresh asparagus
  • 2 onions, finely minced
  • 2 potatoes, peeled, diced small
  • 2 ribs celery, diced small, with tops included
  • 2 carrots, diced
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 8 teaspoons granulated chicken or vegetable bouillon (or 8 cubes of bouillon)
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped or 1 tablespoon dried parsley
  • 2 sprigs fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1 sprig fresh tarragon, chopped, or 1 teaspoon dried tarragon
  • 1/4 cup fresh basil, minced, or 2 teaspoons dried basil
  • 1 teaspoon seasoned salt (or to taste)
  • 1/2 teaspoon white pepper
  • 1/4 cup cornstarch
  • 2 cups Half-and-Half
  • Sour cream
  • Chives, chopped

Instructions

  1. Break off and discard the tough, thick end of each asparagus spear. Chop the spears into 1/4-inch slices and add to the slow cooker along with all remaining ingredients down to and including the white pepper.
  2. Add water to within 1 inch of the top of the slow cooker.
  3. Cover the slow cooker and cook on HIGH for 6 to 7 hours.
  4. About two hours before serving, use a slotted spoon to remove most of the vegetables to a blender. Use a ladle to add some of the liquid from the slow cooker to the blender. Puree the mixture and add back in to the slow cooker.
  5. Repeat once or twice more as necessary (you can leave some of the pieces in the slow cooker for effect.)
  6. Add approximately 1 cup of the Half-and-Half to the slow cooker.
  7. Add the cornstarch to the remaining Half-and-Half in the carton.
  8. Close the carton well and shake vigorously.
  9. Add the mixture to the slow cooker.
  10. Continue to cook on HIGH for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
  11. Serve in bowls with a dollop of sour cream and chopped chives sprinkled over the sour cream.

Op-Ed: One Woman’s Anguish at Being Vaxxed

by DUPED LADY

For those who cannot imagine what it’s like to be vaxxed, and living with it once the evidence becomes available, l can answer you: it’s day-to-day grieving and cellular remorse.

Many of us were just living our daily lives without any idea of the World Economic Forum or the World Health Organisation. We trusted our doctors – l’d had mine for over 25 years, and we knew our government lied at election times, but we voted the best we could based on the B.S. presented to us.

We went about our lives innocently – working, raising kids and babysitting grandkids – and many of us had not one person in our circles to warn us of the dangers.

We didn’t even know that we had to do ‘research’. Unbelievable as that may seem, it’s absolutely true.

So off we went and had the shots.  And now us ‘sheeples’ – as we are sometimes referred to – are dying in our millions, some suddenly, while some are destined for slow, malingering, pain-filled deaths.

But we are dying, and ironically, we are the evidence; the proof you will all use later.

Some of us argued with others who knew about the dangers, and words and actions hurt both sides. And that is the greatest weapon of the psy-op: it’s actually greater than the vax itself.

There is a level of toxic hatred and gloating online that condemns the vaxxed to silence in regards to seeking help. l see it in the forums, how they are abused by total strangers, so we stay silent and die alone, unforgiven for our naivety and fear.

But back to the point above – of what it is like to be vaxxed and to then become aware of how we’ve been done. It is hell. Living with the knowledge that I took three of them; that my wonderful, kind, hardworking husband took four; that our children and grandchildren had them;
it haunts me, it breaks my soul, it has destroyed me… simply because we were naive.

My husband and l were already injected when a cousin contacted me through Messenger after seeing a post about my rapid decline in health and asked me questions. l then spoke to my sons, but it was too late – they had been jabbed already.

It’s reading endless detox protocols and wondering IF they truly work or IF they too are part of the B.S., because how would we ever know when there is no long-term proof? It’s endless medical tests that come back ‘normal’, but you just know and feel the changes in your body.

It’s seeing the videos of the ‘calamari’ clots and reading about graphene microblades slicing up veins, and spikes adhering like velcro to tissues and organs.

It’s the breathlessness and palpitations on the slightest exertion that doctors can’t explain.

It’s the knowing that it was all for nothing, though we believed it was for the best of intentions.

It’s this tattoo on my arm of the vax batch numbers that l use to open conversations and share my adverse reactions with every doctor, specialist and pathologist, radiologist and ambulance paramedic l meet.

It’s knowing that any second, any second, could be IT… the last one l breathe before l die.

It’s grief – deep, empty, gut-wrenching grief for all my family and friends, all those l love and care for.

It’s loss – the loss of my future dreams and plans, the loss of my husband and family, it’s the pain felt by the name-calling and ongoing online abuse.

l may be a sheeple to some, and cop endless abuse online for speaking up with my truth, but that will not stop me.

Not every vaxxed person acted like an A-hole when approached by someone who cared enough to take the risk of warning them.

Yet we have ALL been tarred with that one brush. And it’s there that humanity debased itself even further. They did not have to do a thing except sit back and watch us fall apart.

Music in this video is from various Bruton and music De Wolfe Records dating from 1972-1979 mixed in audacity and recorded onto a 1977-79 Maxell UD Type 1 Cassette Tape. The Video portion was created from various images of old department stores recorded onto real VHS tape for the retro effect. 

Comments 45
Comments 45

MM describes China

When I was a child, bedtime was 8:30, no fooling around about it. Unless I was reading. If I was reading anything at all, I could stay up as long as I stayed quietly reading. (I rarely made it to 9).

Later, my parents’ problem became getting me to stop reading and go to sleep. I had the third floor of the house to myself, but I kept getting caught staying up and reading. Tried sealing the door so light couldn’t leak out. No good. Tried covering the windows so nothing showed in the yard. No dice; I kept getting caught.

Many years later, as a young adult, I broke down and asked Mom how she did it.

She gave me the look she reserved for occasions when I’d done something a little cute, but basically stupid, and replied: “How many nights were you not reading?” Me: *thinks* “Oh. So, every night on your way to bed, you just hollered upstairs, and on the odd night when I was already asleep, no harm done?” Mom: “Uh-huh.”

One of the biggest surprises that has happened after retiring is realizing what it’s like to downsize. We lost, or rather left behind, over 1000 square feet. We’d had a lovely piece of property, and now we don’t have very much.

I’ve pared down our possessions, I’m still doing that, and I’m beginning to realize how little we need. No one will tell me why I dragged my mother’s china with me. I won’t use it. I hardly used it when we had a larger house. I was younger then, and we did a lot of entertaining. You’ll find out how this works. You know that there is no good reason to take so much stuff, but you do it anyway. I look at that china and think, “Let my heirs take care of it.” As long as I don’t do that with too many things, I should be okay.

I’m overwhelmed by how nice people are in the community we’ve moved into. People showed up at my door with homemade soup, breads and even dinner. We were welcomed with open arms. I’d lived in my old neighborhood for a long time, I knew my neighbors, but I never got to know them well. I had a good friend across the street. I knew the people on my block, but we each had our own lives. We were working. That made a difference. Larger homes with larger plots of land tend to make people stay within their boundaries. I don’t feel any boundaries here. I feel free.

I didn’t expect to be this happy. I thought we were just doing this for the money, but I’ve found out that I’ve been looking for this place a long time, and finally I was old enough to find it.

SHOCKING: China Warns The US “Cooperation or Confrontation” As Russia SEIZES US Bank Assets

This is a VERY GOOD video. China gave the USA “notice”.

China has had enough.

Blinken’s in China and things aren’t going well for him. Beijing has given him multiple warnings and red lines not to cross. China has given clear signs they aren’t afraid of America’s economic threats. Meanwhile, Russia has just frozen the assets of JP Morgan’s Russian account. This asset seizure will likely continue as the West plans to confiscate Russia’s frozen $300 billion. Here’s what you must know!

When I was 20 years old, still a university student, and in the early stages of a relationship, a game of truth or dare with friends took an unexpected turn. I was dared to confess about my relationship to my parents, even though it felt too early. However, my ego pushed me to accept the challenge.

I nervously called my dad.

  • Me: Hi, Dad.
  • Dad: Hi! How are you?
  • Me: I wanted to say something.
  • Dad: Okay, go ahead.
  • Me: I… hmm… (I hesitated).
  • Dad: What’s the hesitation?
  • Me: I wanted to say… (still hesitant, thinking of how to handle things if they go south).
  • Dad: Is there someone around you? (He heard my friends’ voices and they were making sure I said it.)
  • Me: Pooh… (taking a deep breath and without second thought) I like a girl!
  • Dad: Okay, what’s her name? (He seemed surprisingly cool, which was not typical with Indian parents.)
  • Me: (I told him her name.)
  • Dad: Okay, where is she from?
  • Me: (I gave him her details.)
  • Dad: Alright. Just remember one thing in life. Even if you miss one bus, there is always another bus that will come. You just need to wait.
  • Me: Okay (totally dumbfounded by how things turned around).
  • Dad: Anything else?
  • Me: No.
  • Dad: Bye!!.
  • Me: Bye !!.

Till this day, I remain captivated by the way my dad handled that unexpected conversation. His calm and open-minded response, especially given the usual cultural norms, left a lasting impression on me. The analogy he used, comparing life’s opportunities to buses, has become a guiding principle for me in facing challenges.

Since that day, whenever I encounter setbacks or failures, I recall my dads words and wait for the next bus. 🙂

edit: Thanks a lot for all the upvotes . shared it with my dad yesterday, and he was ecstatic about the response. A big thanks to all who read and all the upvotes !!

My mom had lung cancer. I was with her the last few days. She refused medication until the last day. Then started morphine. I had fallen asleep after reading to her for a bit.

The nurse explained to me that her kind of death is like slowly drowning the morphine reduces your bodies desire to breath. Very hard to watch.

Well I fell asleep finally and my alarm did not wake me for her next dose. I heard “ Neal get up!”. Just like when I was late for the bus 50 years ago. I had not heard her speak above a whisper for more than a month.

I gave her her next dose read a bit more to her from the hobbit ( she called her house that she built after she was65 her self) her hobbit house ( partially underground) but she had never read the hobbit and loved it when we read to her.

She never spoke again, I actually think she was not really there after that second dose of morphine.

Due to covid this remarkable lady never had a funeral. Grew up on the reservation, professional trick rider from ages of 9 to 12. Completed high school, raised 3 boys on her own . Ran 3 successful businesses, tribal council 3 times no one messed with her twice all 90 lb 4ft 7 of her…. Happy trails ma….

main qimg 988221b799789cb5cbfd11c08d975d01
main qimg 988221b799789cb5cbfd11c08d975d01

In 1997, a Saudi Airlines 747 landed at the wrong airport in India – it was supposed to land at Madras International Airport but ended up touching down at a nearby Indian air force base instead. The pilot simply saw and aimed for the wrong runway. Oops!

In that particular case, the base’s runways weren’t enough to allow the plane to safely take off again.

So, they made the plane as light as possible. All of the passenger seats were taken out, as well as all of the galleys. Any excess weight was removed from the plane to make it as light as possible. It was given just a few minutes worth of fuel – the absolute minimum necessary to be able to get the plane in the air and make the short flight to the Madras airport, which was its original, intended destination and just a short hop away.

Big, longhaul planes that need longer runways are usually intended for longer flights, and thus a big reason they need such long runways for takeoff is they’re loaded up with so much fuel. So, perhaps the Saudi 747 wasn’t the only case in which a large plane was stripped of as much weight as possible, and then given the absolute least amount of fuel possible – just enough to allow it to take off and get itself to the nearest airport with the right runway.

Apparently the same happened with a TWA flight that landed at the wrong airport near Steamboat Springs, CO in 2001, and an Atlas Air cargo jet that landed at the wrong airport in AZ. In each case, all excess weight was removed from the plane, and it was given just enough fuel to get it to the correct airport. Once there, everything was put back on the plane (after being trucked over) and it was put back in service. Obviously, these situations each involve pilots accidentally landing at the wrong airport, mistaking them for the (nearby) airport they were supposed to land at. So in these situations, giving the planes just enough fuel to get to the proper airport – but not enough to prevent them from taking off on the short runway – was an option.

When I chose to leave the language center where I had worked for 14 years for lack of respect issues by ‘the boys’ club’, one colleague (who was part of the club) made it clear that HE thought I was making a huge mistake.

Fast forward perhaps 5 years. He, too, had left the center for a higher paying position elsewhere.

We ran into each other at an exhibition, and he asked what I was doing for work.

As a communications teacher, I am really good at reading body language and tone of voice. He was oozing condescension and seemed ready to gloat, assuming I was working at some unlicensed language school.

I admit to messing with him and felt no guilt whatsoever.

I told him I was teaching part time (I had been a full-time teacher trainer and supervisor at the center) and added nothing.

He gave one of his famous ‘sad on the outside, superior laugh on the inside’ looks and saying he still had connections, he offered to put in a good word for me at the center, so MAYBE I could be rehired there as an hourly teacher.

I thanked him as sincerely as I could, but then, looking very serious, told him I was part-timing at the then top-rated business school in Thailand, making over three times what I had made fulltime at the center and working only a fourth of the 40-hour week.

His look of shock was very satisfying.

The fun didn’t end there.

My husband walked up and asked if we were talking about our new logistics company (we owned six 10-wheel trucks outright); I feared my former colleague was going to have a heart attack.

Note: I had been moonlighting at the business school long before I left the center. It was no secret, but the ‘club’ never bothered to learn much about me.

When I left the center, I also left my disgust and anger about them AT the center, being unwilling to carry THAT burden into the future.

A few years ago someone I had known when they were a teenager showed up where I was working looking for a job. He was in his early 20s by this point (American citizen) but had been kicked out of his moms house. He had nothing but the clothes on his back and his birth certificate.

There was a truck stop walking distance from where he was staying that would hire him but he had to have a social security card and a picture id.

So I tried to help him get those items and I discovered just how difficult it is to get photo id without photo id! He was a nice kid but not brilliant. And he had no car so I drove him. first place we went was the social security office. once there it was discovered that the birth dates on his birth certificate and his social security card were one day apart! That took more paperwork to figure out.

Finally we get a social security card but then we go to the local dmv for an id. He didn’t have a previous id of course, and because of his situation he had no utility bills in his name or passport or anything else. Eventually we managed to get him an id because I was willing to sign paperwork vouching for his identity since I knew him when he was a kid

Both the social security office and the dmv were over 20 miles from where he was staying, and each took multiple trips. He couldn’t get a job so he had no money so he couldn’t have taken Ubers. ( and no working phone or credit card) And he would have really really struggled figuring out all of the paperwork. I have a masters degree and I struggled trying to figure out this stuff.

These days any ‘legit’ -ie not paying under the table – employer has to check social security cards and all of that stuff.

If a homeless person has lost their social security card and picture id – I can assure you – at least in Texas – it’s incredibly hard to get either back. If that homeless person does not have someone to vouch for who they are, they might not be able to get it again.

it took well over a month and numerous trips to get him sorted out. Once we did, he took the job and could work again. But a homeless person with no one to drive them around and help them out? Good luck.

I’m going to go with Louis Farrakhan on this one

A couple quotes so you can get my idea:

  • “You see everybody always talk about Hitler exterminating six million Jews. That’s right. But don’t nobody ever ask what did they do to Hitler.”
  • “White people are potential humans – they haven’t evolved yet.”
  • “The Jews have been so bad at politics they lost half their population in the Holocaust. They thought they could trust in Hitler, and they helped him get the Third Reich on the road.”
  • “The Mother Wheel is a heavily armed spaceship the size of a city, which will rain destruction upon white America but save those who embrace the Nation of Islam.”
  • “Now that nation called Israel, never has had any peace in forty years and she will never have any peace because there can never be any peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your dirty religion under His holy and righteous name.”
  • “The Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man.”
  • “I believe that for the small numbers of Jewish people in the United States, they exercise a tremendous amount of influence on the affairs of government …Yes, they exercise extraordinary control, and black people will never be free in this country until they are free of that kind of control … “
  • “Many of the Jews who owned the homes, the apartments in the black community, we considered them bloodsuckers because they took from our community and built their community but didn’t offer anything back to our community. When the Jews left, the Palestinian Arabs came, Koreans came, Vietnamese…and we call them bloodsuckers.”
  • “White people deserve to die, and they know, so they think it’s us coming to do it.”

Arrogant? Check.

Idiotic? Check.

Shameful? Check.

I walked into a Harley-Davidson dealership looking to buy my next bike. I was looking at their pre-owned stock, which, like in any other retail scenario, is significantly less expensive than buying new. My son (I think he was 7 or 8 at the time), was with me, and I had him sitting on the passenger seats of several bikes on the floor to see if he were tall enough to reach the foot pegs. We were both wearing jeans and t-shirts, which is fairly typical for us, and not entirely uncommon among motorcyclists.

I narrowed my selection down and got on those bikes with him to see if he could hold onto me in the riding position. After probably 5 or 6 bikes, I decided on one, and started looking around for a sales person. There were several of them on the floor, all just kind of glancing over at us while talking among themselves. We wandered through the merchandise section of the store, and as we passed the group of sales people, I said “apparently nobody wants to take a cash down payment for their next sale?”

We walked out, and I later discovered that while this treatment of customers isn’t all that common among Harley dealers as a whole, this particular dealer is notorious for it.

As a new officer on overnight shift, I was dispatched to a shooting in an urban neighborhood in the downtown area. When I arrived, I was accompanied by two other officers where we observed two men in a pickup truck in front of a house who had been shot. Before a minute, there were another half dozen police officers who had arrived securing the scene while we administered first aid. The paramedics came and took the driver. The passenger, a 19 year old kid was pronounced dead at the scene. We had learned shortly thereafter this was a drive by, gang style shooting that was retribution against these individuals who had shot one of there members the week before.

I was assigned to stand by the passenger door of the pickup securing the evidence until the scene could be processed. Our CSI Unit worked during the day shift and was on call, so we had to wait.

The door was open with the nineteen year old’s head and right arm sticking out the door as he laid on his right side across the seat. This was my first homicide scene. This was the first time being close to a deceased body. I stood there watching his blood spill out of the vehicle and drift down about fifty feet in the gutter to where we had put up our crime scene tape.

About 45 minutes had passed when a lady drove up, exited her vehicle and approached where the detective was standing outside the tape. When she saw the blood, she let out a shriek and then inconsolable sobbing as she knew her son was the one in that pickup truck even before the detective could have informed her. Before long, family members started to arrive. One by one, the shrieks and the sobbing continued. After about an hour, they left together, attempting to console one another. Then there was an eerie silence. After nearly 23 years, I can still remember what the scene looked like, the smell, and those agonizing screams. My prayers are still with this young man’s family.

Southwestern Egg and Cheese Breakfast Casserole

71858t1
71858t1

Yield: 10 servings

Ingredients

  • 18 eggs
  • 2 small cans green chiles, chopped
  • 1 to 1 1/2 pounds cooked breakfast sausage
  • 2 1/2 cups grated Monterey Jack cheese
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 1 green bell pepper, diced

Instructions

  1. Spray slow cooker with Pam.
  2. Starting with sausage, layer meat, chiles, onions, peppers, and cheese, repeating the layering process until all ingredients are used and ending with a layer of cheese.
  3. Beat eggs, then pour over mixture in slow cooker.
  4. Cover and cook on LOW for 7 to 8 hours.
  5. Serve with sour cream and/or salsa.

One of my daughters is a serious academic. She is the student who, when given an assignment due in 2 weeks, would begin it that same evening. She always turned in essays and projects early; sometimes the teacher even told her to take it home for a while until it was due. She scrupulously studied for every test and exam. When she was in Grade 8, French class, every project, quiz, test, and participation level scored 95% or better. Yet, on her report card, her grade was B+.

WHAT?

We arranged a parent-teacher interview at the appropriate time as designated on the form supplied with the report card. My daughter, who was understandably very upset with her grade, accompanied me to ask for clarification from the teacher. Perhaps it was a simple error? We brought along all of my daughter’s marked work from the term.

“Oh, no error,” said the teacher. “I don’t ever give an A or A+. Students always have room to improve.”

“Well,” I countered, displaying all the marked term documents we had, “could you please explain how you added numerical grades over 15 assignments, that seem to average at 97%, to equal a B+, which is a numerical grade of 85–90%?”

“That may be accurate,” said the French teacher. “But I don’t give A+ to any students. There is always room to improve.”

We passed over the projects and exams that were graded at 100%. “Please explain how my daughter could improve in this circumstance.” Then we handed over the lowest-graded item, at 95%. “You have marked several of my daughter’s interpretations of this French novel as “inaccurate,” but her views actually are in agreement with those of these renowned French literary critics.” I passed her the publications.

“So, please explain to my daughter and me how she could have improved her performance enough to get the grade she needed to promote her to her desired school?”

“I never give an A+,” was the final comment before the interview was ended. And my daughter was once again in tears.

“It’s not over yet,” I told her. I sent all of our documentation, the report card, and the teacher’s remarks (which I had written down as they were being discussed) to the school Principal, cc to the Superintendent, and to the School Board. Within 3 days her mark was corrected to A+, and a letter of apology was sent to my daughter from the principal of the school. The French teacher transferred.

I am proud to say that this daughter is now in her 4th year PhD English Literature, and is completely fluent in French.

As a follow on to two videos I’ve recently made, on about the reasons why Japan invaded China and another about the reason why China should be grateful to the USA, there have been a few questions and I’ll attempt to answer them here.

The perfect skillet and radio

I moved a lot as a child and went to many many schools. I did get to go to the same school, my junior and senior year. I was always the skinny new girl with kinky hair and crooked eyes. My eyes were crooked because I was blind in my right eye from birth and it just sort of wandered around in my head and did whatever it wanted. My parents had had it operated on twice to try to fix the muscles but the problem was that the eye was blind and that was that ( when I was 32 the Cleveland clinic put titanium muscles in my eye and made it look almost normal)

I was always in the new kid, the funny looking kid, but I was also the smart kid. My junior year I was placed in an honors class in English with the most disgusting teacher I have ever met. He was so loved by his students. He was certainly not loved by me. He loved to tease me about my crooked eyes. He also consistently stated to the class that nothing of any value ever came from south of the Mason Dixon line, a quote from HL Mencken, the journalist in the scopes monkey trials. The fact that I was from Ohio, which was north of the Mason Dixon line, sort of escaped him.

in addition to his constant insults, one day he slapped me in the face with a paper I wrote. Actually he slapped me three times. I pretty much think that was the most disrespectful thing that a teacher did to me. His reason for slapping me was that I had not developed my paper sufficiently. to punish me, he made me write it over and I did. It was 32 typewritten pages, and he read the entire thing to the class page by page.

However, in the end I won. One day he was standing next to my desk and he was laughing. He threw his head back and his upper plate fell out on my desk and rattled around like “chattering teeth”. and then came to rest next to my pencil, I just looked up and smiled at him. he taught the rest of the class that day holding his false teeth in his hand and trying to talk properly without them. I might’ve felt sorry for I am if it wasn’t for the fact that he thought my crooked eye was so funny. On my high school class page on Facebook, the story of the chattering teeth has been recounted many times, even by people who weren’t in the class. In my high school yearbook the valedictorian of my class wrote “to hell with HL Mencken “

 

Chili Chicken Tortilla Soup

By Rena Awada | Updated On March 26, 2024

Chili lime chicken tortilla soup
Chili lime chicken tortilla soup

Make this Chili Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe for a warm and comforting meal all year round. It is easy to make, filling, and packed with flavor. Enjoy this filling and hearty soup any day of the week as a main or side dish.

Soups are very comforting when the weather gets colder. They are filling and easy to make when you only have an hour on hand to come up with dinner. This easy chicken tortilla soup has the bold flavors of chili and Mexican flavors all in one bowl. Made with shredded chicken breast, black beans, corn, and a handful of bold spices. Serve this Mexican chicken soup recipe as a main dish or a side dish along with the main course. For a creamy version of tortilla soup check out our Creamy Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe or you can also try our super tasty Chicken Enchilada soup. You may also like this Chicken Chili Recipe

Chili lime chicken tortilla soup 5
Chili lime chicken tortilla soup 5

Recipe Summary

  • Comforting and filling: This chicken tortilla soup with bold chili flavors is packed with fiber and protein to make a comforting and filling meal.
  • Easy to make: all you need is 30 minutes to make this easy and healthy chicken soup.
  • Tasty: Packed with flavor. You will love it.

Ingredients you will need

  • Olive Oil: any other oil of choice can be used like avocado oil.
  • Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts: you may also use boneless and skinless chicken thighs.
  • Sweet Onion: or any onion you have on hand
  • Garlic Cloves minced: we do recommend using fresh garlic cloves for optimal flavor.
  • Red Chili (or to taste): this is optional if you can’t handle spice.
  • Spices: Ground Cumin, Chipotle Powder, or Chili Powder
  • Cherry Tomatoes or diced fire-roasted tomatoes: these can be purchased in cans or you can make your own at home.
  • Low Sodium Chicken Broth: you may use vegetable broth.
  • Black Beans: rinsed and drained
  • Corn: can be Fresh or frozen corn can be used
  • 2 Limes– Juiced, you may use lemons if you do not have lime.
  • Tortillas: cut into 1/4-inch strips
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • Cooking Spray

How to make chicken tortilla soup

  • Heat olive oil In a large stockpot over medium heat. Add onion, garlic, chili, and seasonings, and cook until onion softens about 4 minutes.
  • Add chicken breast, canned tomatoes, broth and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer until chicken is cooked through about 20 minutes.
  • Meanwhile, heat a nonstick pan over medium heat and spray it with cooking spray.
  • Add tortilla strips in a single layer and fry until golden brown and crispy, on both sides. You might need to work in batches to not overcrowd the pan.
  • Once the chicken is cooked, remove from soup and shred it.
  • Add chicken back to the pot together with beans, corn and lime juice. Mix to combine then simmer for a couple of minutes more.
  • Serve soup hot with crispy tortilla strips on top and enjoy!

Chili lime chicken tortilla soup 4
Chili lime chicken tortilla soup 4

1993 Labor Day weekend my girlfriend at the time, now my wife of 30 years and I went to Lake Tahoe. On the way home at the highest point of the highway crossing the Sierras my car stopped like it had overheated. We pulled off to the side of the highway and waited for it to cool off. About 30 minutes later a California Highway Patrol officer pulled up behind us. We explained that we might have overheated and the engine had quit on us. He said that this was regular patrol area and he would come back and check on us. Well two hours later the car would not start, temperature was dropping fast outside and we just had a couple of sweatshirts and a jacket for warmth. We decided to try to take a nap until the officer returned to help us. The officer never came back to check on us. We slept in the car while coyotes and other wild animals could be heard making noises right outside the car. This was absolutely terrifying and bone chilling to say the least. At first light we realized we were parked right next to the entrance of a PG&E substation and people were arriving for work. We went down and explained to them our situation and asked if we could first use the facilities and freshen up. Then one of them helped us get in touch with the Ford dealer about 20 minutes away. They sent out a tow truck to pick us and the car up. Being it was Labor Day they were closed and only the tow trucks were there. The driver got all our information and helped us find a rental car to get back home to San Francisco. A couple of days later we got a phone call saying that we had a blown engine but the car was still under a factory warranty and we were covered by it. The service advisor also told us that the first $30 per day of the rental car was covered by the warranty. They would be replacing the engine with a brand new one and it would take two weeks to complete as they had to submit the paperwork to Detroit for fulfillment. So all in all, we spent an uncomfortable and scary night in a place we had no way of communicating with the outside world because it was in the days when only the affluent people had cellular phones. We survived the night and ended up with a new engine in the car for a nominal price.

Europe is not more civilized; it is just that for the past 500 years it has controlled the narrative because of colonialism.

Now that the economic center of the world is moving to Asia and Africa, that period is ending because Asia and Africa are the population centers of the world, with the most economic activity.

The period of European privilege is ending now.

I used to work at a tech support call center. So when the pastor down the street started experiencing problems with his computer, his wife called me to see if I could help. I was not a member of their congregation, but it was a small town and we all helped each other when we could.

His computer had been infected with a virus, and it was not difficult to delete it. But his browser was terribly slow, the home page had been changed to an adult website, and there were multiple bookmarks for po’n sites.

I updated his antivirus and ran a scan. After clearing out the malware, I fixed the browser, deleting all the adult bookmarks and keeping the ones he wanted to keep.

His wife seemed to have no idea how it happened, but it was obvious to me. He’d been looking at po’n and clicked something that infected his computer. He sat there like a deer in the headlights. He said something about clicking a link in an email he got, and that’s when all the problems started. I didn’t want to cause any problems between him and his wife, so I just warned him not to click on any links that came from people he didn’t trust.

I’ve had a couple people pay for hotel rooms for a night, and let me tell ya – it’s a godsend.

How? Well, one time, when it was storming really bad in Southern California – someone I love dearly paid three nights for a room right down the street. For the first time in a couple years I was free of my wardrobe and tent – suitcase and backpack – so I went to a movie and had a nice dinner out.

I felt human for the first time in years. A fresh hot shower rather than a bird bath, a warm comfortable room while it stormed outside. It’s little things like this that reminded me I was human – and let’s be clear – in the weeks leading up to this – I’d been pushed WELL beyond my breaking point and had literally planned on murdering this junkie on meth who kept threatening me with a knife on a random basis prior to this point, as I was sleeping with one eye opened and police were unable to do anything about it.

Most people don’t understand that being homeless is about as dehumanizing as it gets. Society has a tendency of treating violent offenders better than someone that’s broke and homeless, which in my opinion – pushing me, a peaceful man who has never been in a fight in my life – to the point of premeditated considerations of murder – has homelessness as being one of the biggest existential threats to modern society. If you’ve never been through it. You simply wouldn’t understand.

But that motel. Just for a couple nights. Made me finally swallow my pride, look at the predictable trajectory homelessness was going to take me and what it was going to turn me into…

And finally agree to accept my mom and dad’s offer for a couch to sleep on in a warm house.

Rest assured. That motel room saved someone’s life. I’m being straight up 100% honest with you there. I’d mentally prepared myself to begin taking the law into my own hands, and I was fine knowing I’d never suffer any consequences from it because the needs of homeless people and the poverty stricken, to this society and world – don’t fuckin matter.

To most, anyways. To those few who did care. That room at just the perfect time changed my life, and prevented the death of someone else who society didn’t care about anyways.

I dont like knowing that part of me exists. I scared even myself. So I don’t believe it was coincidence that room came at the perfect time for me.

Is China producing too much? US ‘overcapacity’ accusations: new tactic in economic war

Creamy Chicken Enchilada Soup

By Rena Awada | Updated On March 29, 2024

This Chicken Enchilada Soup recipe is so creamy, thick, and easy to make. Loaded with hearty shredded chicken and beans, it is a crowd-pleasing soup that’s full of your favorite Mexican flavors and very comforting and delicious.

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 7
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 7

Enchilada soup is one of the most flavorful soup recipes that is not only filling and comforting, but it is full of flavor and a crowd-pleasing soup recipe that will put a smile on everyone’s face. This soup is loaded with beans, chicken, and all the Tex-Mex flavors you love all in one delicious bowl of soup. Easy-to-make Creamy Chicken Enchilada soup is perfect for any night of the week. Especially on a busy weeknight when you need dinner ready in no time.

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 6
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 6

Reasons to love this soup

  • Best-tasting soup ever: The taste of this soup is seriously out-of-this-world good.
  • Filling: This soup will keep you full, happy, and satisfied. Perfect for lunch or as a light dinner.
  • Healthy and good for you: Packed with fiber and protein, this soup is good for you in every way.

Ingredients you will need

  • Butter or Ghee: to keep this on the healthier side, you do not have to use butter. You may use avocado oil.
  • Onion: use white sweet onions or cooking onions
  • Veggies: Celery Stalks, Carrot, Red Bell Pepper,
  • Beans: Red Kidney Beans and Black Beans
  • Seasonings: Ground Cumin, Chili Powder, Dried Oregano
  • Garlic Cloves: do use fresh garlic
  • One can of Diced fire-roasted Tomatoes
  • Tomato Paste
  • Fresh or Frozen Sweet Corn: you may use canned corn if that’s all you have and you don’t want to make a trip to the grocery store.
  • Shredded Cooked Chicken: make your own chicken or get a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken. To prepare your own, check out our post on How to poach chicken breast.
  • Low-Sodium Chicken Broth– If you plan to poach your own chicken you may save the broth from that.
  • Mexican Shredded Cheese Blend for garnishing, or you may also use Monterey jack cheese
  • Salt and pepper, to your taste
  • Optional: If you prefer to add some enchilada sauce, you can. We didn’t but it certainly won’t hurt and will add some flavor to the soup.

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 2
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 2

HOW TO MAKE CREAMY CHICKEN ENCHILADA SOUP

This chicken enchilada soup recipe is made on the stovetop. We will also be showing you further how to make it on your crockpot, slow cooker, and instant pot. Note: Recipe calls for cooked shredded chicken. Either get a storebought rotisserie chicken and use that or cook your own at home using chicken breast (scroll down to learn how to cook the chicken for your enchilada soup).

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 7
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 7

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 6
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 6

Creamy chicken enchilada soup
Creamy chicken enchilada soup

To make enchilada soup on your stovetop:

  • Prepare vegetables and ingredients: Set up all the ingredients and get your shredded chicken ready.
  • Cook vegetables: Add butter or oil in a large stockpot over medium-high heat. First, add the onions, celery, carrots, bell pepper, garlic and cook until softens, about 5-6 minutes. Then, stir in seasonings, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and chicken broth and bring to a boil.
  • Cook and prep soup: Lower the heat and simmer for about 10-15 minutes, or until veggies are very tender.
  • Blend: remove from heat and using a hand blender, blend the soup until smooth and creamy. (This is optional if you don’t want to blend you can skip this step).
  • Add beans and chicken: Place the soup back over medium heat and add in beans, corn and shredded cooked chicken. Stir to combine and boil for a couple of minutes, just to heat it all up.
  • Serve: Pour into bowls and top with your favorite toppings. Enjoy!

SOUP TOPPING Options

Endless toppings to come up with, but here are some optional toppings you can add to your creamy chicken enchilada soup are:

  1. Chopped avocado
  2. Sliced jalapeño
  3. Fresh chopped cilantro
  4. Green onions
  5. Lime wedges
  6. Crushed Tortilla Chips
  7. Sour cream or yogurt etc.
  8. Shredded Cheese

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 8
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 8

How to cook chicken for enchilada soup

Cooking the chicken is quite simple. You can use any pot or a dutch oven. It would be easiest to use a rotisserie chicken but you can certainly cook your own. We recommend using skinless and boneless chicken breasts.

  • Add chicken into a pot full of water
  • We like adding some sort of herbs to give the chicken some flavor. Use half an onion and a bay leaf. sometimes we use a cinnamon stick but not for this particular recipe.
  • Allow boiling for about 15-20 minutes until you easily insert a knife or a fork through the chicken.
  • Then, drain it in a colander and let it cool off. Or you can just remove the chicken and place it on a cutting board while you save the chicken stock.
  • Finally, using your hands or forks, shred chicken.
  • If you have an Instant pot, you can simply make this Instant Pot Chicken Breast to use in this enchilada soup.

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 8
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 8

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 4
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 4

How to make enchilada soup using an instant pot, crockpot or slow cooker

There are other ways to make chicken enchilada soup other than using your stovetop. Here are other ways to cook up your soup.

How to use an Instant Pot:

  • Using the saute option, add the oil or butter in the instant pot, then add the onions, celery, carrots, bell pepper, garlic and cook until softens, about 5-6 minutes.
  • If using raw chicken, add in with the veggies in the previous step at the bottom.
  • Add in the seasonings, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and broth.
  • Next, add in the beans, corn, and shredded cooked chicken (if using pre-cooked shredded chicken). Stir to combine.
  • Then, place the lid on the Instant Pot and seal. Using the “manual” setting, cook on high pressure for 10-12 minutes.
  • Allow the instant pot to natural release for 10 minutes or so before doing a quick release.
  • Finally, remove the lid from Instant Pot, shred the chicken (if used raw whole chicken breast), and serve with your favorite toppings.
  • Note: You may remove a portion of the soup towards the end. Blend it and then add it back into the soup. Mix and serve.

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 2
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 2

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 6
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 6

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 8
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 8

How to use a crock-pot or slow cooker

  • In a pan or skillet, add oil or butter over medium-high heat add the onions, celery, carrots, bell pepper, garlic and cook until softens, about 5-6 minutes.
  • Transfer to crockpot or slow cooker and add in the seasonings, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and broth.
  • Then, add in beans, corn, and shredded cooked chicken. Stir to combine cover and set it on High for 2 hours or low for 4 hours if using cooked chicken.
  • Note: You may add raw chicken breasts to the crockpot or slow cooker right before you add in the veggies at the very bottom and set it to cook longer. 6 hours on low and 4 hours on high. Then towards the end use a fork to shred the chicken.
  • Also Note: You may remove a portion of the soup towards the end. Blend it and then add it back into the soup. Mix and serve.

Creamy chicken enchilada soup 2
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 2

Fun cat pictures

From my archives

SNAG 0079
SNAG 0079

SNAG 0078
SNAG 0078

SNAG 0076
SNAG 0076

Why Pass Port bros find Foreign Women

Japan despite massive massive disadvantages in firepower, military numbers and culture has a massive chance against China. Why? This man and the general state of the leadership is far too conservative. As well as their age.

If you’ve ever played a game before like Rimworld, 7 days to die, Project Zomboid. There’s a setting called Builder. Here’s the menu on Project Zomboid.

It literally says builder: Construction, Exploration and farming focus.

So sure he’s got 3000 hours in game and all the achievements of that…But it’s a crippling overspecialisation.

Martial arts are sometimes like this.

You need close range, mid range, long range, grapple, strength and conditioning to give and take hits. Wing Chun is excellent at close range, but they never condition themselves so boxers eat them alive. The current leadership are far too conservative as such when there’s easy and obvious ways to punish those who literally want us dead? What the hell do they do?

NOTHING!

Taiwan.

It’s not recognised by the UN, it’s not part of the WTO. The poliburo could immediately stop all business with them tomorrow and there’s NOTHING they could do about it. We could literally cause a 50% collapse in the economy TOMORROW.

Yet they don’t do it.

Even my dad who is actually older than Xi did some squeezing of bollocks in his time. He was a beansprout man and his group held a total monopoly on Chinese goods in the UK and he squeezed a few bollocks with his position.

You can write about oh but it’s only a matter of time.

The USD will collapse! (though the USD doesn’t actually need to collapse it’s in such shit that a few % will make a huge difference, US military budget cuts are a real thing because of the debt).

It sounds almost like Joseph Wang, if you ever read his stuff from years ago? He literally said he allowed white Americans to beat him up and offered no resistant. To somebody like me and many others that’s a what the fuckty fuck type situation? Somebody attacks you? You’re going to give them as good as they give you.

So back to the original question?

If Japan starts to militarise again and they’re doing so right now? There’s going to be a huge aversion to fight and you don’t even need me to spell out whose going to have the aversion.

So while China is far more powerful and many of us especially us overseas types are far far more violent than any local Chinese or Japanese. It’s hampered by the fact that the leadership is playing civilisation on builder mode.

I mean at the very least you could have some big weapons tests. Even N Korean leader Kim has done some test launches.

Putin scares the living daylights out of westerners with his SARMAT tests in 2022.

Hope not

The Strategy is clear

Iran sent 158 Shaheed Drones and 27 Cruise Missiles on Israel at a cost of $ 9 Million

Israel intercepted 150+ Drones over Jordan and Syria and Lebanese and 21 Cruise Missiles at an estimated cost of $ 115 Million

6 Missiles hit the targets – An Airbase in Negev plus two military docking centres in Haifa Port

The cost ratio is 9:115 or 1:13 approximately

Iran is thus depleting Israeli (Western) missiles and AD on a large scale from reserves

Today alone around 100+ Missiles were launched by Israel

This means in 10 days, Israel would need 1000–1200 missiles forcing the West to divert stocks to Israel while Iran has low cost cheap drones and cheap missiles and decoy missiles

If the West spends more and more money and weapons on Israel further depleting their stocks

Russia gains immensely as Russia outproduces NATO by 3:1 in Missiles and 12:1 in Artillery Ammunition

And of course China

The more West is mired in the Middle East, even lesser chance of the West to take on China who can produce on war footing, more missiles in a month than Nato can produce in 2 1/2 years as per experts

Leaving Japan, Philippines to take on China who today can more than easily take them out

Same reason


If this is WWIII, the West will likely lose today

Unless it becomes Nuclear…

A friend of mine I England, mentioned one day at the pub( bar) that he could do with a cleaner as his old 1700’s mill house was getting too much for him. Next morning there was a sharp knocking on his door, he opened it and a large Middle aged lady pushed by him into the room and said, “ I’m Jean, your new cleaner, let’s have a look at this mess!” He never had a chance to say a word, just stood there dumb. “ Right , where’s the cleaning cupboard?” He pointed in the right direction. Muttering to herself she set about cleaning , “ I’ll be a long while yet you can make yourself scarce untill supper time. “ He went out back to the pub and sat at the bar in a daze as he nursed his pint of beer. He returned to his house in the evening, everything was clean and tidy, Jean was sat down in the kitchen having a cup of tea. “ Umm, how much do I owe you?” He stuttered. All she said was, “ that garden shed has to be cleared out yet!” I’ll attend to that tomorrow. I’ll be staying in the upstairs front bedroom, breakfast will be at 9 o’clock on the dot! “ With that she climbed the stairs and was gone. That was nearly 5 years ago and she is still there cleaning and cooking. He still hasn’t plucked up the courage to ask her any questions, and she has never asked for anything in return. ’ As he is a literary man I hope one day he will publish the whole story. Amazing!

REACTION- Will women WAKE UP & want the men that they rejected?

  1. If you continue to wait for the “right time”, you’ll waste your entire life and nothing will happen.
  2. You’ll lose 99% of your close friends if you start upgrading your life.
  3. You’ll be 10x happier if you forgive your parents and stop blaming them for your problems.
  4. Train yourself to let people win arguments on purpose to conserve your mental health.
  5. You become more mature when you train yourself to take nothing personally.
  6. You don’t need 100 self-help books, all you need is action & self-discipline.
  7. You can’t expect honesty from people who even lie to themselves.
  8. Most people are stuck in toxic relationships because they are afraid to be alone.
  9. The most difficult mission on earth is to focus on your dreams; The easiest task is to complain.

China don’t do daft things. Only the U.S. does. If China cannot win it won’t fight. If China seems to be up in arms. They are most likely happy that the U.S. took the bait and ate hanging themselves. It is call winning without fighting!

China can do even one NM chips if it wants but the U.S. thinks it cannot do 7 NM for at least 3 decades! It took China 3 years to do 5NM. Now the U.S. is laden with humongous compensations to its Chip firms and they lose some 80% of the market as China gets it done cheaper, faster and better.

Learn about what is going on in the world today. This is what happened when you hitch yourself to the United States.

I test drove a f350 platinum super crew, was going to trade a vehicle, I left the keys with the salesman, came back, I decided not to buy “that” truck, due to I didn’t want to own another black truck, they had no other loaded trucks in another color, so I opted to take a pass, the sales manager thought we had some imaginary deal and said the deal was done (I had signed nothing), and wouldn’t return my keys, I asked him if he was certain that he wanted to play this game, he said we have a deal. I pulled my phone out, called 911, told them who I was, where I was, I had been robbed and the assailant was still on premises. Shit happened real fast, I got my keys back, sales manager found out he can be criminally charged for theft as well as kidnapping as I couldn’t leave. Yep, I won’t be shopping there again.

Iran has launched drones against Israel which have not yet hit their targets in Israel.

While this may look like a reprisal against Israel, there is more than meets the eye. The majority of the drones will be intercepted and shot down before they reach their targets; if 10% reach their targets the Iranians will have done well.

But the intention is not to do damage to Israel. Iran, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas are fighting a war of attrition against Israel which will deplete Israel’s and the US’s munitions, using the cheapest weapons needed. The aim is to provoke Israel into committing more violence in Gaza and the West Bank, and turning more of global public opinion against the US and Israel. The Israeli economy will take a heavy hit, and the US will have to provide expensive economic support to Israel because Biden has committed to Israel’s support.

The Arabs and the Iranians have learned: Israel’s war doctrine is based on the application of overwhelming force to win a short war , which is the same as the US. But if the Arabs and Iran turn the conflict into a long war of attrition, the Arabs win.

In every long war of attrition, which includes Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and arguably Ukraine, the US has withdrawn in the end.

A short sharp war requires the application of overwhelming firepower. Overwhelming firepower requires a huge munitions supply and powerful logistics. US weapons stores have been depleted by the war in Ukraine.

The writing is on the wall…

My young son was friends with the 50-something “neighbor guy”. They were real friends. The neighbor gave him a spark plug wrench and let him take the spark plugs out of all the cars in his junk yard. He also let my son “drive” his 1950 pink Cadillac sitting on blocks in a place of honor in the junkyard. He talked to my son about serious things like how to be a good man, why you should wash your hands a lot, the importance of having a place for your tools and putting them where they belonged. My son lacked a father and this neighbor lacked any family at all.

The neighbor got cancer and was going to die. He let my son know it was nothing personal and he had done nothing wrong to deserve it. He also said he was going to have to leave forever, die and he would go to heaven. They talked a lot about whether he was afraid and what would happen when he died. He told my son he didn’t want anybody messing with his body and he wanted to be buried, not embalmed and still be intact. He wanted to go back to the earth in dignity and not be a poisoned pickle in the ground.

Unfortunately, he died just before Thanksgiving, and without a family, there was no one who felt obligated to see to his wishes. In our state, you can only be buried, without embalming, if you are buried within 3 days. The ground was frozen and it was a holiday weekend. No gravediggers could be found so the adults discussed this in the social room. After church, they concluded that man, whom we had all known and valued, would have to be embalmed. My son, who was about 6, overheard this and became outraged!

He pestered one man after another about it. He eloquently argued how sad the man would be about being a poisoned pickle in the ground. My son announced he would go dig the hole himself even if he did not get home in time for pie! He managed to guilt a dozen men, in their best clothing, to go to the graveyard and dig a grave. Also, a Catholic Priest would be doing the services for a “protestant” before anyone went home to eat a turkey.

It was technically “wrong” because he interrupted and pestered adults with great determination. One by one, he effectively MADE them do something that was outside his purview as a child. I didn’t stop him from doing it. I was more than proud of his love and care for his deceased friend.

Cold case musings

When my son was in the eighth grade, he got suspended and I had to leave work early to go get him. When I got there, I asked the principal what had happened. The principal explained that my son had beaten up three other boys and even broke one boy’s wrist. I was obviously horrified and asked my son what the fuck he was thinking. He simply told me that the boys had cornered one of his friends and were trying to make her strip for them. Being the chivalrous boy I raised him to be, he put a stop to it. I asked the principal if it was true and he dodged the question. In response to that, I told the school that if they’re going to allow sexual harassment, I didn’t want my child to attend and took him home. I told my son that I was going to take him out of public schools. He replied by telling me that he didn’t want to leave the school because of he wasn’t there then who was going to stop it from happening again.

This is when I realized my little boy had become a man. He would rather get in trouble to protect a friend than stay out of the spotlight and potentially face long term consequences.

Edit: I feel the need to point out that my son also got his ass kicked (and to be frank, “beat up” was probably the wrong term to use [a bit exaggerated] when describing what he did to those three boys). I assumed that was implied, but oh well. What can you do? The police were called and the bullies’ parents didn’t press charges as long as the girl’s parents didn’t either. The school penalized all three boys and the girl’s mother and I are very close friends now.

I left the US almost 50 years ago to live in Germany. However, I frequently visit the US to stay there months at a time.

There are things that are “convenient” about living in the US: stores that open 7 days a week, some even 24/7; outside the large cities, ample free parking, better weather in vast parts of the US (compared to Germany), ease of meeting new people, etc.

But despite the “convenience”, yes, it is hard. It is hard living in a country with too many people recklessly wielding firearms – and using them. It is hard because many people do not respect others’ boundaries. It is hard because so many people are so poorly educated (I fault the system for that – not the people). It is hard because access to higher education is so expensive. The hire-and-fire mentality in the US is horrible. The fact that corruption has so openly visible on all levels is horrifying. And even more horrifying is that such a large portion of the population doesn’t care.

Leaving the US was the best choice I ever made because of the lousy American health care system. At the time I left, I had no idea I had a rare genetic defect that would eventually destroy my lungs. But once it reared its head, it became immediately clear that to survive more than a few years, I would require a double lung transplantation. I will always be grateful to the donor (and her family) for the gift of those lungs. And I will be forever grateful to the health care system here that made it possible for me to miss two years of work (one year of which I spent in-patient) without being financially worse for the wear. Twenty-one years after the gift of those lungs, I have been in and out of hospitals, have had three different cancer diagnoses, a couple of rounds of pneumonia, and sepsis, six years of dialysis, two kidney transplantation – all while being able to continue working – and still not being financially worse for the wear. Had I remained in the US, I would likely be bankrupt and/or dead.

 

When I was three our dog, Muffin, died. Back then, you were allowed to bury your pets in your backyard. (Or perhaps our vet just didn’t care and no one else was the wiser…) It happened while we were on vacation, so my parents asked our vet to freeze him so they could bury him next to their other dog when we got back.

They made sure I saw Muffin before putting him in the ground, let me touch him one last time… warned me he would be cold… I was mature and handled it well.

Later we were visiting my aunt and uncle. My aunt came and sat next to me and told me how sad she was that my doggy had died but I should be happy that he’s in doggy heaven now.

I looked at her very seriously and shook my head. “No, Aunt Sharon. He’s defrosting in the backyard!” (I had a fine concept of death and heaven but hadn’t been taught about doggy heaven and it just didn’t make any sense!)

Russia Hits Underground Gas Reserves in Ukraine; “Mushroom Cloud” from Fierce Explosion

Russia Hits Underground Gas Reserves in Ukraine; &quot;Mushroom Cloud&quot; from Fierce Explosion

At dawn, Russia achieved the largest strategic strike in Ukraine in history, when it destroyed Ukraine’s largest underground gas storage in Bilche-Volitsko-Uher in the city of Stryjak near Ľvov.

Russia utilized Kh-47 Kinzhal supersonic missiles and Kh-101 cruise missiles, to strike and detonate 17 billion cubic meters of stored natural gas!

The attack came from three different sides.

Russia Hits ukraine Gas Reserve
Russia Hits ukraine Gas Reserve

The destruction of the natural gas, combined with Russia’s unwillingness to supply new gas, means that Ukraine is “done” from an energy perspective.

A total of eight MiG-31 fighters carrying Kinzhal and Kh-101 aircraft hit the gas reserve, causing a nuclear-like mushroom cloud visible from Poland, 100 km from the Ukrainian border.

The reserve tank was located at a depth of 50 meters (~150 feet) from the surface of the earth, which did not prevent Kinžal from going through the stony ground “like a knife through butter” and exploding into the tank!

In Poland, radiation measurements began after what initially appeared to be a nuclear attack there, but this has not been confirmed.

Ukraine currently has less than half of its gas reserves, and after the destruction of the reserve, it cannot even be supplied from the European market.

The attack on this underground gas reservoir was confirmed by the Ukrainian company Zdroj 24 news.

Exposition (Green Flag #1)

I sought the help of a therapist during my final months in New Zealand because I thought I had depression.

After telling him about my situation at length, he said:

“Let me summarize:

  1. you have been bullied out of your job;
  2. you have over one million dollars of debt and face repossession of your two houses and four cars;
  3. half of which because you have been pressured into buying a house for your mother in law, who has been actively sabotaging your marriage for almost ten years;
  4. your foster children you were expecting to adopt have been taken away and put back with their biological parents, teenagers imprisoned for drug offences who have now been released due to a law change;
  5. your wife wants a divorce.

And you think you have depression? You have every reason to be down! You’re healthy. Get out of here.”

And I did.

All the way to Shanghai, from where it took me three years to clean up the mess. But he was right, I never needed any anti depressants. With every dollar my bank statements began to look more balanced, I was better.

  1. If a person laughs too much, even at stupid things, he is lonely deep inside.
  2. If a person speaks less, but speaks fast, he keeps secrets.
  3. If a person sleeps a lot, he is sad.
  4. If someone can’t cry, he is weak.
  5. If someone eats in an abnormal manner, he is tense.
  6. If someone cries on little things, he is innocent & soft-hearted.
  7. If someone becomes angry over silly or petty (small) things, it means he needs love.Try to understand people more.

On the 4th of July, 16 years ago, I was at a fireworks show where parents accidentally killed their own child.

They had 6 children. One was a 6 month old baby.

They were at a fireworks show. It was really hectic. I don’t remember the exact details. A lot of people were there.

The dad had gone off on his own to buy snacks for the kids, he took the baby along.

Mom was sitting on a blanket with the rest of her kids, ready to watch the fireworks show. Someone from the show asked Mom to move her car, it was in the way. Mom left the oldest child in charge of all the younger ones on the grassy hill on their blanket. She walked over and hopped into the car.

At the same time, Dad had come back to the car after getting snacks to get a lawn chair out of the trunk. Mom and Dad didn’t see each other, Mom was already in the car. Dad set the baby carrier down on the ground behind the car, not knowing Mom was in the car ready to back up.

I’m not sure how it happened, Dad was either distracted talking to someone or busy setting snacks down. But while he wasn’t looking, Mom backed the car over the baby. It was horrible, chaotic, and devastating.

The baby was only partially backed over and survived for two days. He died after that. The pain of his parents was indescribable.

After that, an investigation ensued of the death of their child. They were found innocent, ruling that it was a horrible accident. But being investigated for the murder of their child made the death much worse and the pain last much longer.

Surprisingly, the couple did stay together. A lot of times, couples blame each other in events like that and have to separate after something so painful, or so I’ve heard.

However, they don’t celebrate the 4th of July anymore. It’s a horrible reminder of the death of their baby boy. Every year I see a post from them commemorating his death on Independence Day.

It depends on your life style.

A lot of people will say rent is the killer.

It isn’t the killer it once was. Rents are FALLING in Hong Kong and if you live in the New Territories a little bit away from an MTR station a 500sqft apartment can be had for about $7000 a month, live in the arse end of nowhere and $10000 can get you an entire 750sqft apartment.

But you trade travel time/expenses for rent.

Foodwise? You can survive easily on $100HKD a day.

Transport from arse end of nowhere to Admiralty for me is about $60HKD a day. This can be cheaper if I decide to arrive before 8am.

Utilities. Family of 4 lots of air con, lots of cooking (electric) is about $2800 a month electricity. I live mostly alone spend most of my time outside and I am also heat resistant so I spend about $700 (I do however weld a fair bit).

The problem is sanity money.

As somebody on a visa? Shenzhen is closed to you. Sanity money is doing things to get away from the nuttyness of the city and urban areas. This can be cheap as chips for instance cycling all over the territory (an older road bike can be bought for $2000). To ice skating, musical instruments etc to getting wasted.

That’s the big money sink here.

This is FRIGHTENING!

My wife was killed in an accident in Minnesota. A juvenile was driving her brand new vehicle way too fast even tho the road conditions were dry (speedometer was stuck at 1 04 when they were investigating).

The girl/insurance was found 100% at fault. Her insurance was a hefty one since she was a minor. Their insurance had the gall to keep calling me asking health questions about my wife and she was prone to seizures, blacking out suddenly, vertigo, etc. I was like WTH and told them I was going to get an attorney (this was Wednesday morning…accident was Tuesday night at 8:44PM). By 11AM I already had answered numerous calls from her ins, had to tell 4 kids their mom passed away, had to let her family in Arizona know that she passed.

At 11:45 on the morning after, I get a call from her insurance company asking if I would accept $1,000 for my pain, suffering and not go to trial. This girls insurance policy was over 500k. I told them that they are out of their effing mind…the girl that offered me chuckled and said she thought I wouldnt accept and hung up. I got a lawyer, had him let them know I wouldnt accept and we would reach a settlement.

All in all, the insurance company sat on the policy earning interest for 2 years and then on month 26, the KIDS reached a college settlement that they couldnt touch until each of them reached 18, 21, 25 (I didnt want them to get all that money right away and blow it even tho one had a sleazy partner and they blew thru the age 21 settlement in 3 days).

I think its very sleazy that they were trying to distance themselves from the accident and then trying to weasel themselves out of paying the insurance settlement. We didnt get the full settlement but it was close and I still have 2 children out of the 4 still collecting interest and checks.

This was a Nation that once refused to starve Egyptian soldiers it had encircled in 1973

Moshe Dayan once said If Israel acted like terrorist groups, it would lose the moral ground to the world

Golda Meir formed the Wrath of God team to selectively hunt down the 1972 Munich Massacre terrorists – one by one over almost 11 years at a cost of $ 42 Million rather than send a few aircraft and bomb Jordan or Lebanon for harboring those terrorists


Those days are done and dusted now

The Americans started with Agent Orange and began to justify killing Civilians

Then in 1999, Tony Blair openly claimed the West had a right to meddle in any Country’s affairs for World Peace

And thus began the growth of Evil in the West

I would say the Evil began with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair – both alleged pedophiles and both on the list of that notorious and accepted pedophile Epstein

Europe was still protected by good nationalists like Chirac and Schroeder

Then gradually the Evil spread everywhere

Bush Jr, Obama, Trump, Biden, Scholz, Boris Johnson,Macron and Netanyahu – the list goes on and on

The Israelis are evil people today

They seem to believe that killing women and children is fully justified

That’s not a problem in itself

Yet they seem to believe Arabs and especially Palestinians are akin to animals and deserve to die

So many Israeli kids seem surprised as to why the whole world is reacting to the deaths of Palestinians

Just like in 1940, Hitler Jugend used to ask why everyone was so worried about Jewry when the Reich was doing their job for them and ridding the world of that Jewish influence


Their God once protected them because they were on the right path and the world was persecuting them

I believe the same God will abandon them or has abandoned them to the Devil long ago

They are too evil and they deserve God’s judgment

Let’s hope like Moses – a new round of plagues arise and exterminate all the evil Israelis leaving behind the Good ones who can again build up the former ‘Honor’ of their race that existed in the times of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan

SHOCKING Court Ruling in Favor of MEN! Yale Student Acquitted of Assault Sues for $110 Million

The thing is, for many men, it's not even, "guilty until proven innocent." Its, "guilty EVEN if proven innocent."

Green Chile Burros

The burro is shown “enchilada style.”

green chile burros
green chile burros

Ingredients

  • 1 small beef roast, diced
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 2 (4 ounce) cans diced green chiles
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 (16 ounce) can tomatoes, drained (juice reserved)
  • 1/2 teaspoon comino (cumin)
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • All-purpose flour

Instructions

  1. Brown diced meat in fat in a large, heavy saucepan. Add onion, green chiles, garlic and drained tomatoes. Add enough drained tomato juice (plus water if needed) to cover. Add comino, salt and pepper. Cook, covered, until meat is very tender.
  2. Mix flour with a small amount of water to form a thin paste and add to mixture to thicken slightly.
  3. Heat a large flour tortilla on a griddle. Fill with meat mixture and fold.

Notes

Enchilada Style: Follow instructions above, then place in a shallow serving dish. Pour enchilada sauce over the top to cover, and sprinkle with grated cheese. Heat in a 425 degrees F oven until the cheese is melted.

I sometimes make a fast version of this. I use leftover pot roast, dice it up, mix it with the remaining ingredients and just simmer it until the onion is tender. Thicken it with the flour as stated in the recipe.

I have had so many wonderful moments with Jay (store manager), it’s hard to decide on which one.

I think this was hilarious, but I doubt Jay would, good thing he doesn’t read my answers.

I was working in my department, Jay and I were visiting just before he was going home. A customer walked up to my service counter. I wished I could remember what the customer said or did that had me lose my temper. It takes a lot before I lose it.

Anyway, the customer upset me and I said, “You can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine and I don’t mean a closed book.” The customer walked away. Jay looks at me and said, “You are so busted!” He walked away to talk to the customer. I stood there cussing myself out for my stupidity.

Jay returned. In the coldest tone, he said, “You back room now!!!!!” I walked back there. I knew that there was nothing I could say to save my bacon.

He stood there glaring at me, counting to ten, taking deep breaths, counting again and clenching and unclenching his fists. I was smart enough not to be a smarta$$ and ask him if I was in trouble.

He finally said, “How? How in the H E double hockey sticks did you manage to do it?!?!” I waited to find out what I managed to do. Jay sputters out, “ I went to talk to the customer to smooth things out, so corporate would not become involved. The customer told me that everything was great and if I punish you in anyway, she will call corporate on me?!!?” I looked at him and said, “Maybe because I am cuter?” He stormed off!

We are still friends to this day! I’m still cuter!

Russia to United Nations: Prepare for “Unconditional Capitulation” of Ukraine

Russia to United Nations: Prepare for &quot;Unconditional Capitulation&quot; of Ukraine

Russia just said the quiet part out loud: There must be unconditional capitulation (i.e. surrender)” by Ukraine.

Nebenzya large
Nebenzya large

During yesterday’s UN Security Council meeting Vasily Nebenzya, the Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations, said:

“This is how it will go down in history – as an inhuman and hateful regime of terrorists and Nazis who betrayed the interest of their people and sacrificed it for Western money and for Zelenski and his closest circle.

In these conditions, attempts by the head of the Kiev regime to promote his formula and convene summits in support of the Kiev regime cause only confusion.

Very soon the only topic for any international meetings on Ukraine will be the unconditional capitulation of the Kiev regime.

I advise you all to prepare for this in advance.”

“When I was elected as president then (in 2016), I tried to craft an independent foreign policy, not really against America. I have no quarrel with America. But the problem was our foreign policy was dovetailing theirs, and not so good with China. So I started on a neutral foreign policy. I announced to the world that I had no friends and no enemies to fight. I just want to be neutral. And I did not have to kowtow to anybody’s foreign policy, especially the Americans. […]

Most of the ASEAN countries have followed a very neutral, independent foreign policy. I would have wanted that… That is why I slowly detached myself, and, at least in foreign policy, and announced to China that we are not enemies, that we have never been, and never will be in our lifetime.

Here in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea), when I was president, there was no quarrel. We can return to normalcy. I hope that we can stop the ruckus over there, because the Americans are the ones pushing the Philippine government to go out there and find a quarrel and eventually maybe start a war.

So I am very sure of that – America is giving the instructions to the Philippine government to ‘not be afraid because we will back you up.’ […]

I am sorry for my country. I am not the president anymore. I cannot run. But if there is a way we can reverse the situation, we might find a way inside to implode somewhere. And if God would allow it then perchance I would be able to reverse the situation. I would remove the bases.

And I would tell the Americans, you have so many ships, so you do not need my island as a launching pad or as a launching deck for you.”

This is a custom which had its origins in China’s imperial past.

The idea was this: If a local official behaved intolerably, the people would go to the imperial capital and make an appeal to an imperial official, or in some cases, even to the emperor himself. The petitioners would lay out their case, explain the rationale for their appeal, and ask for senior official or emperor to make a judgment.

This could be very dangerous: what would happen if the senior official or emperor sided with the local official, and ordered that all the petitioners be executed? For this reason, it was considered a very risky strategy.

This petitioning method continues to the present day. When Hu Jintao was president, in some cases, local officials would go to the train and bus stations to prevent the petitioners from boarding trains. There were even a few cases where petitioners made it to Beijing, and were kidnapped by the local officials and taken back to their village! This was considered to be a serious violation of the authority of the Beijing central government.

Xi Jinping has tried to modernize this system, which is why he has strengthened the authority of the Party Discipline Committee of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. In effect, they act as “flying magistrates” or judges who were sent out to the provinces to hunt down and remove corrupt local officials. If you follow the detective stories of Judge Dee and Judge Bao, they were flying magistrates who represented the emperor, which was why local officials all had to kneel before him.

"I listen to Jeffrey Sachs, and Michael Hudson. Great to hear about this Chinese economist who i have no access to, nor the Chinese language skill to understand even if I do. Thank you for introducing his thoughts though."

Slot Machine Millionaire

“Guys, I just developed this bulletproof liquid. The Germans won’t be able to kill us now!”

These words were said by Kinjekitile Ngwale, a Tanzanian witchdoctor (and the hero of this story). But first, understand what was going on in Tanzania at that time.(It was called Tanganyika)


In the late 1800s, Britain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and France storm into Africa, grabbing as much land as they can in the name of colonialism. The Germans in particular enter Tanganyika and claim it as their own.

See those two Africans holding the dead animal? Yeah, those are slaves.

See, Germans are efficient. Instead of bringing in labour from their country, which was a tedious affair, they forced indigenous tribes to work for them. They also imposed heavy taxation on them, because why not.

Naturally, those tribes were not happy.

So what do you do when some white guys take your livestock and steal your women?

Simple. You REBEL AGAINST THOSE ASSHATS!

That’s where our valiant revolutionary, Mr. Kinjekitile Ngwale, comes in. He told his fellow Africans that he was a prophet sent by the ancestors to get rid of the Germans. So he became the leader of the rebellion. Just like that.

One tiny problem though…the Germans had GUNS. Lots of guns. The Africans only had spears and arrows. If you’ve ever played rock paper scissors you know how it feels when you put paper and everyone puts scissors. That’s how the Africans felt.

So Mr. Kinjekitile Ngwale came up with an idea…

Using his extensive knowledge as a witchdoctor, he mixed water, castor oil, and millet seeds. He claimed the concoction, when applied on the body, would turn the German bullets into water, essentially rendering them bullet proof. The African tribes applied this liquid and charged straight to the nearest German base, confident of their leader’s magic.

As soon as the Germans saw the Africans approaching, they…well…read this excerpt:

Several thousand Maji warriors, led by a spirit medium, marched toward the Reich’s compound at Mahenge. As soon as the rebels were within firing range, soldiers, backed by two machine guns, laid down a lethal fire. Row upon row of Maji warriors marched toward the guns, but were cut down.Hundreds were killed or wounded before breaking off the engagement.

Kinjeketile was later captured and hanged by the Germans for ‘treason’. Despite his grand bullet proof mishap, he is still considered a hero for stirring nationalism among the Tanzanians.

So yes. Even failure can make you a hero.

Hookup Culture

The US has secretly offered a stunning array of concessions to Ansarallah to halt its naval operations in support of Gaza – to no avail.

APR 11, 2024

By Khalil Nasrallah

We favor a diplomatic solution. We know that there is no military solution.

– US Special Envoy for Yemen Timothy Lenderking

In a special briefing on 3 April – nearly six months after Yemen launched its far-reaching naval operations to debilitate Israel’s ability to conduct war on Gaza – US Special Envoy for Yemen Timothy Lenderking touted the importance of seeking diplomatic solutions in Yemen

instead of the military ones his government has been loudly advocating for months.

Lenderking’s stance contrasted sharply with Washington’s announcement in December of a multinational coalition against Yemen’s Ansarallah-led forces, aimed at safeguarding international shipping in the Red Sea and effectively protecting Israeli-linked trade from Yemen’s sweeping naval blockade.

But as tensions heighten and regional allies have hesitated

to join the US–UK coalition in fear of direct Yemeni retaliatory strikes, the US and its allies have quietly sought to entice Sanaa into negotiations through offers conveyed by Omani and other international mediators who maintain ties with Yemen’s de facto government in Sanaa.

Lenderking’s position may, in fact, reflect an astounding set of private US promises made via intermediaries to Ansarallah behind closed doors – pledges that essentially tick every box on the resistance movement’s wish list.

‘Stop your Gaza support, and we will give you everything’

Informed Yemeni sources reveal to The Cradle that the US offered Sanaa – in exchange for its neutrality in the ongoing Gaza war – “an acknowledgment of its legitimacy.”

This would involve severely reducing the role of the Saudi-backed Presidential Council led by Rashid al-Alimi and accelerating the signing of a roadmap with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to end the aggression against Yemen.

The sources further reveal that the Americans pledged to immediately release withheld Yemeni public sector salaries from the National Saudi Bank, lift the country’s siege entirely, reopen Sanaa Airport, ease restrictions on the port of Hodeidah, and facilitate a comprehensive prisoner exchange agreement with all involved parties.

In terms of reconstruction, the sources say:

[Washington] pledged to repair the damages, remove foreign forces from all occupied Yemeni lands and islands, and remove Ansarallah from the State Department’s ‘terrorism list’ – as soon as they stop their attacks in support of Gaza.

Despite these tempting offers, which have been the subject of negotiations between Sanaa and Riyadh for over two years, the Yemenis remained steadfast. Ansarallah leader Abdel Malik al-Houthi’s consistent position, as reiterated in his speeches, has been to continue operations as long as Israeli aggression against Gaza persists.

Ansarallah’s ‘military negotiation’

From the outset, marked by Israel’s declaration of a state of war following the 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Sanaa threw its weight behind the Palestinian resistance, launching comprehensive drone and ballistic missile attacks against the southern Israeli-occupied port city of Umm al-Rashrash, known as Eilat.

In response to the Yemeni salvos and interception attempts by US warships, Washington initiated a campaign of threats against Sanaa, which in turn demanded an immediate cessation of aggression against Gaza as a precondition for halting its military operations. Their exact words to the Americans were: “We are not within the circle of those you dictate to.”

Matters only intensified as Ansarallah began deploying previously unused naval strategies – not even utilized against Yemen’s aggressors, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in nine years of battles – with al-Houthi vowingto obstruct Israeli ships in the Red Sea.

This strategy was actualized days later on 19 November, when Yemeni naval commandos stormed an Israeli-linked vessel, the Galaxy Leader, and its crew, redirecting the ship to Yemeni shores.

This daring naval action prompted the US to pursue dual strategies: the first, involving intimidation and preparation for a naval coalition to support Israel, and the second, encouraging diplomatic engagements through Arab and international mediators to halt Sanaa’s impactful naval operations.

Sanaa’s leadership not only dismissed these overtures but expanded the naval blockade to include non-Israeli vessels en route to Israeli ports and extended their theater of operations as far as the Indian Ocean– to cut off Israel’s “alternative long route” shipments.

Yemen’s firm refusal to succumb to either enticement or intimidation led the US and the UK to initiate aggressive military operations against the war-torn Persian Gulf state three months ago, aiming to neutralize the Yemeni threat and halt maritime attacks in support of Gaza under the guise of protecting maritime navigation freedom.

As a countermeasure, Sanaa escalated its military response by expanding operations to target not only US and British ships but also introducing advanced weaponry into its arsenal.

This included the sinking of the British cargo ship Rubymar, attacking other vessels, and broadening the theater of operations to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean – a strategic move to ramp up pressure on those executing the brutal war on Gaza.

Yemen’s military checkmate

In light of the current situation, where the US has acknowledged the futility of its military strategy and is clamoring to devise a diplomatic solution, Sanaa has clearly demonstrated its relevance to any and all West Asian geopolitical calculations.

Its stunning achievements of the past six months include Sanaa’s ability to disrupt the Israeli economy by cutting off or lengthening trade routes for Israel’s essential imports. This can be seen most notably in Eilat, where the operational disruption of Israel’s southernmost port has led to significant job cuts by the port’s operating company and paralyzed shipping entirely.

Ansarallah has also thwarted retaliatory measures by the west’s most celebrated naval forces, made a mockery of their ramshackle “coalition,” and created complex challenges for US hegemonic ambitions in the Persian Gulf, both presently and in the long term.

Moreover, Yemen has showcased remarkable political and military maneuverability, demonstrating that a single resolved Arab state can provide the Palestinian resistance with a potent negotiating tool.

Importantly, through its military operations in the region’s waterways, Sanaa has solidified its position within the Axis of Resistance, transforming into one of the most effective forces in the Axis’ Unity of Fronts strategy. All, while drawing British and American naval assets into vulnerable – and unwinnable – positions and successfully hindering Israel’s shipping connections with the world.

A rising regional power

According to al-Houthi’s most recent count, Yemen’s numerous military operations have launched over 520 missiles and drones to target naval assets and areas in southern Israel. Ninety vessels have been targeted to date, with 34 operations conducted only between 4–5 March using 125 ballistic and winged missiles and drones.

In contrast, the US and UK have launched nearly 500 raids since their ill-conceived naval coalition began ops, resulting in the martyrdom of nearly forty Yemenis.

Six months into the war, Yemen continues to demonstrate its strategic capabilities on land, in regional waterways, and even in the world’s oceans. Yemeni officials hint at further military “surprises” still to come, which they may deploy depending on Israeli actions in Gaza and the broader region, as well as the actions of its US enabler, which Sanaa views as the most destructive and destabilizing force for West Asia’s security and stability.

Black Sabbath “Heaven and Hell” REACTION & ANALYSIS by Vocal Coach/Opera Singer

Fun.

  1. Girls often understand what a guy is implying, but they may feign innocence.
  2. Women tend to develop feelings for those who maintain distance from them.
  3. Many women enjoy engaging in what society deems “promiscuous” behavior, yet they recoil from being labeled as such.
  4. When deeply in love, women may exhibit childish tendencies around their partners.
  5. If a woman truly loves a man, she’ll likely inform him when other men attempt to flirt with her.
  6. Cooking for someone often signifies care and affection from a woman.
  7. A woman may choose to be intimate with a man based on his character and identity.
  8. Beware of the woman whose father was the first to break her heart; she may have deep-seated trust issues.

Green Chile Ground Beef Burritos

Burritos with a ground beef filling are a favorite in our family.

green chile burrito
green chile burrito

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds ground beef
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 2 (4 ounce) cans diced green chiles
  • 3 cups water
  • 4 cloves garlic, pressed
  • 3 to 4 tablespoons all-purpose flour*
  • 1 to 2 cups water*
  • 1 can El Pato tomato sauce*

Instructions

    1. Brown ground beef; add onion and garlic and toss until onion is soft.
    2. Add green chiles.
    3. Sprinkle flour over it to make a crumbly mix.
    4. Add water and El Pato to desired thickness. Simmer.
    5. Serve on warm tortillas, with any topping you like…sour cream, salsa, cheese, cilantro, jalapeños, etc.

Notes

* or use 1 can El Pato green enchilada sauce – or use homemade

You’ve been dating him for a year and a half at age 19, and told him that you still want to wait — that is your right. You get to decide who you want to have sex with, and when, and that includes the right to wait for as long as you want, or even to never have sex at all if that is your wish.

He, on the other hand, clearly wanted sex to be part of his relationship, and after waiting for you for a year and a half, he found he could no longer be happy in a sexless relationship, and what you are offering is not what he wants — so he did the rational thing and left you in order to search for a partner that has desires more in line with his.

Many of the other answers here place blame on him, and for example claim that if he truly loved you, he’d be willing to wait, or that clearly he was only interested in getting laid. Such allegations are unjust, it’s quite possible to genuinely love someone, but still to realize that you have to leave because the two of you aren’t compatible. And accusing someone of only wanting to get laid after staying in a sexless relationship with you for a year and a half is utterly unreasonable. (in addition to that, there is NOTHING wrong with wanting sex as part of a relationship and being unwilling to stay in sexless relationships.)

But other answers place blame on you and say for example that it’s “selfish” for a woman to refuse to sleep with her partner. This is nonsense. Sex should be mutual and pleasurable and wanted by everyone involved, and is not some kind of service that women should “provide” to men if you’re not into it. Your body is your own, and you should say yes to sex when you genuinely want to, and only then.

Neither of you are to blame. You want different things, so you’re not compatible with each other, and you’re likely both better off looking for a partner that shares your ideas about what a relationship should be like.

  • You have a desperate need for mental engagement. You are starving but then you suddenly see the new trailer of Sherlock Holmes. Before you know it, hours have passed without any sensation of hunger.
  • Sleeping in a cold room can help you slim down. According to research conducted by commonwealth university, just one month of sleeping in a 66-degree room helped increase the subject’s fat-burning ability by 10%.
  • The researcher found that you can read faster with a single wide column, but still, people prefer shorter lines & multiple columns.
  • You Quit in 2 situations
    • When a challenge is tougher and you have beginner-level skills.
    • When you have advanced-level skills and the challenge is too easy.
  • All your habits of thinking & acting are stored in your subconscious mind. Even just thinking about doing something different from what you’re accustomed to, will make you feel tense and uneasy.
  • The research found that for each hour a person between the ages of 40 and 59 spends watching TV, their risk of developing Alzheimer’s increases by 1.3 %.
  • Listening to high-frequency music makes you feel relaxed, calm, and happy.
  • Fake smiles can hurt you. The researcher looked at the behaviour of bus drivers, & found that these people withdraw from their work by putting smiles for show & it has long term deleterious health effects.
  • Psychologists found that people struggling to make complex decisions did best when they were distracted and were not able to think consciously about the choice at all.

What you Gain from this space by becoming its member.

  • No more random motivational screenshots & one-liner answers, you will get facts that are backed up by the latest research papers.
  • Now you don’t need to waste your valuable time on understanding the difficult terms of a research paper.
  • No Bullshit, pure research-based information with real references which you can check by yourself.

The fact that Lavrov met with Xi while Yellen was there speaks volumes !

“In light of the recent aggressive statements by the French political leaders, who openly announced plans to send troops to Ukraine, I should like to bring up the anniversary of a crushing defeat that Paris sustained in Vietnam, which marked the beginning of the collapse of the French colonial empire.

We believe that remembering those events should be a warning for all those in the Elysee Palace who have been literally haunted by Napoleon’s shadow these days.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, often referred to as the Vietnamese Stalingrad, claimed thousands of lives.

The brutal confrontation took place from March 13 to May 7, 1954 and marked a turning point in the eight-year war between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and France’s colonial forces.

In 1946-1954, France, supported by Washington, unleashed the Indochina War in a bid to maintain its influence in the region after World War II.

It should be specifically noted that the French colonial troops were a motley mix of foreign legionnaires, mercenaries of all stripes, including Nazi fugitives hiding from trial and hoping to start over with a clean slate with Paris’s help.

However, they dirtied it again, as the brutality of their methods had no limit.

Just like the Americans who came to the Vietnamese land later, what they did was close to scorched-earth tactics.

For 54 days, the Vietnamese revolutionary army demonstrated extraordinary military valour in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. They also appeared exceptionally skilled in the art of war.

In fact, it became so bad that the French soldiers hastily left their positions as soon as they heard that the Vietnamese were advancing.

The decisive phase of the battle, the general assault, began on May 1.

By that time, the garrison’s morale was close to rack bottom – the French were in panic.

The total death toll was over 2,000 killed on the French side. Nearly 12,000 French troops were captured – only a few managed to escape from Dien Bien Phu.

The most capable French troops in Vietnam – paratroopers and legionnaires – almost ceased to exist.

The surrender of the French garrison of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954 finally broke the morale of the French command, extinguishing any faith or hope for a good ending of the war in Vietnam.

Before the start of active operations, the hawks in Paris boasted they would ‘defeat the crowd of Vietnamese peasants armed with flintlock rifles and bamboo sticks in just a couple of weeks.’

Along with a crushing military defeat, France suffered high reputational losses, as its international influence as a former member of the anti-Hitler coalition fell dramatically.

The very next day after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, ceasefire talks began in Geneva.

The war ended with a convincing victory of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the withdrawal of French troops in July 1954.

Ten years later, in 1964, remembering that defeat, French President Charles de Gaulle warned US President Lyndon Johnson against a military operation in Vietnam, prophetically calling it a very risky venture.

But France then had an independent voice and the capacity to pursue an independent foreign policy.”

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Photo: Vietnamese President Hồ Chí Minh and members of the Party Central Committee (from left to right: Phạm Văn Đồng, Trường Chinh, and General Võ Nguyên Giáp) convened to decide the opening of the 1953-1954 Winter-Spring Offensive and the Điện Biên Phủ Campaign. The meeting took place in Phú Đình Commune, Định Hóa District, Thái Nguyên Province, in 1953.

Excerpt from remarks by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova during the briefing, April 10, 2024. Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

The worst case for the US is that the US starts a war and all US ships within 2,000 miles of the China will be sunk.

Not only does China has the DF-21 which has a range of 1,200 miles. That is actually a medium range ASBM. It hit Mach 10 at terminal phase. China also has DF-26, which hits Mach 18 at terminal phase.

China is now onto their second generation hypersonic wave glider. These are even scarier than the ASBMs. As they come in at a hundred feet above the Ocean surface. At Mach 8 for the one type and Mach 12 for the second type.

The second generations has a range of almost 5,000 MILES. In other words, it can hit Hawaii and ships on the other side of Hawaii, towards the CA coast.

So yeah, the US should not be messing with China as the Chinese can sink all US ships in the Western Pacific if they want to.

Carne Asada Guacamole Cheese Burrito

carne asada guacamole cheese burrito
carne asada guacamole cheese burrito

Cook: 1 hr 30 min | Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

Carne Asada

  • 1 pound sirloin steaks
  • 1/4 cup coconut sauce
  • 1/4 cup lime juice
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1 teaspoon chili powder
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Guacamole

  • 2 ripe avocados
  • 1/4 cup red onion, diced
  • 1/4 cup chopped cilantro
  • 1 small jalapeño, seeds removed and finely minced
  • 1 tablespoon lime juice
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Burrito

  • 4 burrito size tortillas
  • 1 cup shredded cheese (Cheddar, Monterey Jack or a blend)

Optional

  • Fresh cilantro leaves
  • Limes, cut into wedges

Instructions

  1. Marinate the Carne Asada. In a shallow dish, combine the soy sauce, lime juice, garlic, chili powder, salt and pepper. Place the steak in the marinade, turning to coat it evenly. Cover the dish with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, or preferably overnight, to allow the flavors to meld.
  2. Cut the avocados in half, remove the pits, and scoop the flesh into a bowl. Mash the avocados with a fork until it reaches your desired consistency (chunky or smooth).
  3. Add the diced red onion, chopped cilantro, minced jalapeño, lime juice, salt, and pepper to the mashed avocados. Mix everything together until well combined. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed.
  4. Heat grill or stovetop grill pan over medium-high heat. Remove the marinated steak from the refrigerator and let it sit at room temperature for about 15 minutes.
  5. Grill the steak for about 4 to 5 minutes per side, or until it reaches 145 degrees F for medium rare or your desired level of doneness. Transfer the grilled steak to a cutting board and let it rest for a few minutes before slicing it thinly against the grain.
  6. Heat the tortillas in a dry skillet or over an open flame until they become warm and pliable. On each tortilla, place a generous amount of cheese. Add a few slices of the grilled Carne Asada on top of the guacamole. Garnish with fresh cilantro.
  7. Serve the Carne Asada Guacamole Cheese Tacos immediately with lime wedges on the side for squeezing over the tacos.

Nutrition

Per serving: 550 Calories; 266.6 Calories from fat; 29.6g Total Fat (9.1g Saturated Fat; 12.2g Monounsaturated Fat); 84.2mg Cholesterol; 1015.3mg Sodium; 40.2g Total Carbohydrate; 9.4g Dietary Fiber; 33.5 g Protein; 18mg Iron; 895.3mg Potassium; 0.3mg Thiamin; 0.3 mg Riboflavin; 13.9mg Niacin (NE); 0.8mg Vitamin B6; 1.3mcg Vitamin B12; 5.2mg Zinc; 32.8mcg Selenium; 105.3mg Choline

This recipe is an excellent source of Protein, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin (NE), Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Selenium, and Zinc. It is a good source of Potassium, Iron, and Choline.

Imagine being lost in the desert, desperate for water. Crawling through the sand. Praying to find something.

Your hike went wrong and now you can’t find anyone. You are sure you’ve gone miles in the wrong direction.

You lay in the sand. Waiting to die.

 

Then.

You hear a phone ring.

That’s right. A phone. There are phone booths in the middle of deserts – sometimes.

One such phone booth was situated in the Mojave Desert, 12 miles from the nearest type of pavement.

A man, Godfrey Daniels, read in a magazine, about this strange desert phone booth.

He then became obsessed with this phone booth. Who calls this phone booth? What is it for? How? What? Why? What does it all mean?

Who would answer a phone booth in the middle of nowhere?

He then began calling this phone booth every single day. Trying to find out who would answer.

Every day, he got up, he called the booth. Then, later in the day, he called again. This continued for months.

Eventually, he called and it was busy. This was a major breakthrough. It meant someone was using the phone!!!

He waited a few minutes. Then he called again. Still busy. Waited a few minutes – called again.

A woman picked up.

They talked for a bit. She was a local miner who occasionally used this phone booth. That’s all she knew.

He then made a website about this mysterious phone booth. And people from all over the country started calling it, wondering who would answer if they decided to call the desert.

(Source: The Mojave Phone Booth. Betsy Malloy.)

This phone booth took on this mystical status in American sub-culture for a brief time in the late 1990s, referred to as “The loneliest phonebooth on earth.” It became a minor spiritual destination.

LA Times reporter John Gigliorma made a journey out to the booth and met all sorts of people that arrived for any number of reasons, boredom, curiosity, spiritual journeys, adventure – as it would be like visiting mars, wanting proof it existed, wanting to see who would call them while they were there.

He even met a man, Rick Karr, who said he’d been commanded by God to go answer the phone. Karr spent 32 days camped out by the booth answering phone calls. (Source: Reaching Way Out. LA Times. Glionna, James)

Eventually, the chaos got to be out of hand and the park service requested the phone booth be removed as it was creating litter and a safety hazard as randoms from the internet had no business being in this extreme region (also home to Death Valley).

In turn, the phone company had it taken out.

But then –

Someone came and put a gravestone commemorating the Phone booth.

But the gravestone started to attract more trouble as people began arriving from all directions to pay tribute.

The park service eventually had the gravestone removed as well and that concluded the legacy of this magic phone booth.

RIP Mojave Phone Booth.

Around 1988, our strict Muslim, much older next door neighbor signaled me to come into her home. I noticed that she had nervously glanced around before extending the invitation, and rushed me inside before closing the door.

During our brief visit, she talked of being a pediatrician in Iran before the Shah fell. She also mentioned she needed two items for the meal she was preparing, but she had to wait for her son to return to take her to a nearby grocery. It was a gorgeous California day, and failing to remember what I had learned about strict Islamic doctrine from two Iranian college friends, I offered to walk with her to the store. She recoiled in horror, so I changed my offer to drive her. Her response remained mortified, her countenance stiff, her eyes glaring at me.

Several uncomfortable moments passed; I decided I should leave and started to rise from my chair. She grabbed my arm, gripping it tightly and quietly said:

“You are proof there is hope for the rest of us.”

I consider her statement among the most profound ever said to me.

It’s 2024. This is reality.

Glack and Glan

My son had just passed his driving test (aged 17) and we were thinking of getting him a new car, as we had points we could use because of our credit card, which basically meant we would get about £2,500 off. But I knew insurance cover would be costly at his age, so I rang my insurance company to get a quote before we got the car, explaining we hadn’t got it yet. The quote was good at about £900 so we went ahead and purchased the car. The process took a few weeks. When I rang to actually take out the insurance I was told the cost would be around £1,800, about double what I’d been told before. I explained about the previous estimate, but the woman was very rude, saying that was impossible and implying I was lying. I was getting very angry but the problem was, when I get angry I become tearful – it’s very frustrating as it makes me look pathetic! But then my 17 year old son steps in, takes the phone and calmly told the woman he was giving her an hour to check the phone recording from my previous conversation, and then expected her to phone back. In the meantime we looked online and found an even better price for his insurance. She did ring back, very apologetic and explained the previous assistant had left under a cloud and that the information he had given was incorrect. She could offer a price of about £1,200. I declined and told her I’d also be moving my own insurance to another company. My son had been working for a customer complaints department and knew exactly what to say to get things done. He’s very persuasive but never shouts. He once was about to be fired for taking a day off sick and then going clubbing – he was spotted at the club by someone. He told the guy about to fire him that the reason he skived off was that he was bored and if they gave him more responsibilities he wouldn’t have felt the need to abscond. They ended up promoting him! Just the sort of person you need in such situations.

The US once had a superb education system

It was based on self learning rather than rote feeding by the teacher and the system

I so much admired the US system especially when I saw how they prepared for SATS on their own through Study Groups

They had so many Projects and so many Assignments and a lot of Homework that helped students learn on their own and thus understand the fundamentals so well

Then they ruined it all

By Busing

Busing is when they force a bunch of poor kids, mainly black kids or also hispanic to join the school

They force some good teachers out and force a bunch of mediocre teachers (mostly black or hispanic now also gay or transgender)

The result

  • The Standards come crashing
  • Schools start dealing in Meth and Ecstacy and you have Gangs now with small Switchblades
  • Math standards have come down badly

Not to mention, the blatant APPEASEMENT to the black community in many places :-

  • Slavery covers a huge chunk of history with many apologies
  • Math standards have crashed
  • English standards have crashed
  • 12 Chapters once covered in Normal Physics is now covered only by AP Physics (Advanced Physics)

Chinas Education was originally entirely based on Rote Preparation like India’s with very little self learning

A Lot of predatory Tution Centres cropped up and destroyed Self preparation even more

Luckily Xi Jingping has obliterated the Private Tutorial Industry and has set steps to enhance self learning

So China is moving towards a US like self learning system with lesser reliance on Tutions

However their emphasis on Exams and their Exam oriented preparation is a problem that needs to be relaxed and changed to a Comprehension oriented approach

India has the same challenge

Let’s hope China deals with this as fast as possible and India follows suit


Bottom line is like in everything US Education Standards are declining by the day

Chinese Standards while not up to top scratch are improving by the day

Situational awareness

Warning! Maybe disturbing to read, contains some details of a horrible tragedy.

This is a very extreme case. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen frequently.

One of my uncle, my mom’s cousin, was married to a very beautiful and immature woman.

She had the temper and tantrums of a 10-year old girl. She never grew up.

She would ask or rather demand my uncle for expensive clothes, cosmetics or jewellery quite frequently.

She would not take no for an answer, if he expressed his inability to buy whatever she had asked for she would say that she will leave him right then.

Uncle would take loans to buy gifts for her.

Her tantrums got worse and she would stop eating for days, bang her head on the wall or pretend to slit her wrist in order to get what she wanted.

One night, they were packing to leave for a wedding in another city the next day when she placed a demand for an expensive diamond necklace and refused to listen to anything that my uncle had to say. She wanted a diamonds necklace with an emerald pendant to wear with her green saree at the wedding.

This time my uncle got furious and left her in their bedroom to get some fresh air outside.

He was walking in their yard when he saw smoke coming out of the bedroom window.

He rushed inside to see his wife on flames. He rushed towards the bathroom to get a bucket of water but his wife grabbed him and hugged him tightly from behind. She made sure he burns with her.

What she did next gives everyone in the family shivers to this day. She placed her burning hand on his genitals and said “This, so that you will never be able to marry again in case you survive”.

The worst part is their two daughters who were around 6 and 9 years old, saw all of of this. They rushed to call neighbors.

My uncle suffered 60 percent burns on his body and was in the hospital for almost an year. His wife died before making it to the hospital.

She died what must have been an extremely painful death for a piece of jewelry.

She made sure her husband either dies with her or remains bedridden for the rest of his life.

She scarred her daughters’ little hearts for life.

All for her whims and fancies.

Bill Gates comes from a privileged background.

His father was William Henry Gates II

, a lawyer and founding partner of a large law-firm as well as the president of the Washington State Bar association.

His mother was Mary Maxwell Gates

, a businesswoman and the first woman on the First Interstate Bank of Washington’s board of directors. She was the daughter of J. W. Maxwell, the president of the national bank.

His family was just about as privileged as it’s possible to be.

He had a multi-million dollar trust-fund to fall back on, long before starting any of his companies. It’s true that he had phenomenal success and that a huge fraction of the money he has was earned by his companies, not inherited.

But risk?

Bill Gates has never faced the slightest personal risk. It’s risk-free to drop out of Harvard and start your own software-company when you’ve got millions of dollars of cushioning to fall back on if the company goes belly-up. In his own words: “… if things [at Microsoft] hadn’t worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on [a] leave [of absence].”

Yes he could. If school also didn’t work out, if finding a job also didn’t work out, he’d still have the trust-fund and a more comfortable life than most of us could ever dream to have.

This isn’t specific to Bill Gates, it’s true for a large fraction of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they’re rich kids with safety nets

Amaretto Coffee Brownies

amaretto coffee brownies
amaretto coffee brownies

Yield: 24 bars

Ingredients

  • 1 (19.5 ounce) box Pillsbury Rich & Moist Fudge Brownie Mix
  • 1/2 cup butter, softened
  • 1/3 cup milk
  • 2 eggs
  • 12 ounces cream cheese, softened
  • 1 (7 ounce) jar Marshmallow Creme
  • 3 tablespoons instant amaretto-flavored coffee powder
  • 3/4 cup chopped walnuts

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 13 x 9 inch pan.
  2. In large bowl, combine brownie mix and butter; mix at low speed for 45 to 60 seconds or until crumbly. Reserve 1 cup of the mixture in small bowl for topping.
  3. Add milk and eggs to remaining brownie mixture; mix until smooth.
  4. Spread batter evenly in greased pan.
  5. In food processor bowl with metal blade or in medium bowl, combine cream cheese, Marshmallow Creme and coffee powder; process until smooth.
  6. Spread evenly over brownie mixture.
  7. Add walnuts to reserved 1 cup brownie mixture; mix well.
  8. Sprinkle evenly over cream cheese mixture.
  9. Bake at 350 degrees F for 40 to 45 minutes or until edges are firm to the touch.
  10. Cool for 1 1/2 hours or until completely cooled.
  11. Cut into bars.
  12. Store in refrigerator.

Notes

High Altitude Instructions (Above 3500 Feet): Add 1/2 cup flour to dry brownie mix. Bake at 350 degrees F for 45 to 50 minutes.

Woke girl is Broke

  • Always dress neat, clean and simple.
  • Sit/stand straight and hold your chin up.
  • Sit/stand in a central position in the room.
  • Make sure you don’t look lost or bored, be energetic and keep your hands busy with something (a glass of drink, a cigar, lighter, etc…)
  • Don’t be shy; observe your surroundings.
  • Listen more than you speak, this way when you start talking everyone would immediately pay attention.
  • Speak thoughtfully and clearly, mind your tone, and back your opinions with strong evidence and statistics.
  • Be a good story teller, but keep them short and end with a punch line.
  • Be quick with jokes, sarcasm and one-liners and keep a straight face while delivering them.
  • Don’t easily get excited/frustrated during conversations.
  • Be polite and well mannered.
  • Don’t be afraid to express yourself.
  • Look them in the eye.
  • Don’t be ultra agreeable, learn to say “no” whenever you need to, this way people will find you more intimidating.

This is why

It’s been used all over the world and seems to legitimately prevent serious cases of COVID-19. If it can do that, then it is certainly not fake.

Sinovac used a tried-and-true “inactivated virus” methodology (using fragments of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that cannot make someone sick by themselves) to develop their vaccine, and it doesn’t seems to be quite as effective as some of the Western vaccines, but it does prevent deadly cases of COVID-19. Plus, it’s easier to store and transport, which makes it an option in parts of the world where the state-of-the-art Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines cannot be logistically rolled out. My wife and I got Moderna and we are grateful to have done so. But that’s not an option in developing countries because of the storage requirements of the mRNA vaccines. The Chinese vaccine can be stored in ordinary refrigerators and has a shelf life of up to three years. The mRNA vaccines have to be kept much colder and don’t last as long.

There is nothing wrong with using a proven technology as opposed to a cutting-edge one that had never been done before. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, developed by Janssen in the Netherlands, also uses an older, proven technology—the same one used by the Russian Sputnik-V and the European Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, in fact. All three of them took an adenovirus that is harmless to humans and appended the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to it. The body recognizes the spike protein and if later infected by actual SARS-CoV-2, it will already know how to attack it.

We’re trying to stop people from dying and also trying to stop the spread of this virus so it will quit mutating. Passing out disinformation about vaccines from countries we have political differences with is not helpful. Sinovac saves lives. Sputnik-V saves lives. In the West, we may prefer other options, but the efforts of biotech scientists to create these vaccines should not be denigrated or lied on, no matter where they are from.

American Men no longer have a life worth living.

I was a high school teacher, and I was driving back to school after supper to get some work done. Not unusual–most teachers have to do extra work at night. You can get a lot of stuff done in your classroom when nobody else is around.

On my route to school, there was this little Baptist church where cops commonly parked to catch speeders. They were there that night, but I wasn’t speeding.

I eventually finished my work and headed for home. As I exited the school parking lot, some kids rounded the corner behind me going about 60 mph. They were angry I was in their way. They honked, yelled, and tailgated me for a couple blocks. I maintained my speed of 3 or 4 mph over the limit (35), then as I approached the church, I pulled carefully into a left turn lane to let them pass. They hung their heads out the window, yelled obscenities, displayed their middle fingers, and threw an empty bottle as they flew around me. The bottle missed, thankfully.

As they passed the church, here came the cops. Those flashing red and blue lights sure were pretty that night behind the kid’s car. I couldn’t resist honking as I drove by.

Democrats are waking up!

How did ancient Chinese Emperors govern China given the poor communication technology and China’s huge land mass and population?

To make matters worse, the Emperor is always living inside his palace and cut out from the people with lots of tempting distractions such as the hundreds of concubines to have fun with. How does he govern such a huge country?

First of all, ancient China had pretty good communication technology. One of the best at that time. A 3,000-year-old system, built since the Zhou dynasty, where the Chinese built a “postal office” (驛站) every 50 – 200 km along any road, and the “post-master” maintained guest houses, a team of couriers, and a stable of horses. Official letter were carried by couriers from the originator to the next “postal office”, got a change of courier and horse and went on to the next “postal office”. Express mails could get from the furthest end of China to Beijing in 5 days. Confucius once commented that “one’s reputation spreads faster than the mail (德之流行,速于置邮而传命)”, so you see, official mail system was definitely a fixture of life even in his time (~ 500 BC). In fact, the founding father of the Han Dynasty in 206 BC, Emperor Gaozu of Han, was such a post-master before he rebelled and won the civil war.

By Tang dynasty in ~ 600 AD, there were over 1600 postal offices, and the Chinese government employed over 20,000 people to deliver mails, with the “normal”, “priority”, and “express” mail classifications, and each mail had to be signed off on time and signature of the courier, with a whole set of laws to punish those who missed delivery or tempered with the content. By Yuan Dynasty ~ 1200 AD, the government employed over 300,000 horses for mail delivery. Here is well-preserved “postal office” from ancient China.

Secondly, emperors who didn’t go out of the Forbidden Palace usually occurred when the dynasty was kinda dying. In the early part of the dynasty, usually the emperor had to run around and do some real work. For example, all of Kangxi Emperor

’s sons had to wake up at 4 am everyday, and start school at 5 am. When they reached adulthood, they apprenticed at various government departments. Like son #1 and # 14 served in the department of defense, and both went out to the border to fight. Son #3 served in the department of education, son #8 served in the department of treasury, son #4, the one who was eventually selected as the next emperor, served in the department of engineering, worked on the flood control of the Yellow River, and did his rotation in the department of defense, of education and of agriculture.

Thirdly, like others have said, the emperor was just one person. Most of the times just one very ordinary person, and so of course he/she couldn’t run China. Ancient China was mostly run by the Cabinet and the bureaucracy manned by the scholar-officials, and the most important job of the emperor, was to keep the Cabinet members from politically killing each other, figuratively-speaking. On the other hand, if the emperor had some weird ideas that were opposed by the entire Cabinet, the Cabinet had the right to return the emperor’s orders un-opened, meaning that, well, the emperor’s orders actually couldn’t go out of his bedroom unless the Cabinet agreed. That’s why there were a number of emperors in China’s history who had to resort to writing secret code to their in-laws or followers, with something like “Help! I’m kinda arrested by my ministers!” Well, that sucked for everyone. Incompetent emperors should at least have the good sense to stay aloof and follow the advice of the Cabinet. If the emperor didn’t want to end up like your lovely goldfish in the pot, he had to run around do some real work and build up his own followers and credentials BEFORE he became emperor. You see, the Cabinet members usually started their careers as one of the top-three scholars in the national exams, served 30 or 40 years in various government posts, and gained enough political clout to be elected into the Cabinet by their fellow bureaucrats. Their aggregate IQ would be many times that of the emperor. However, the emperor had one advantage over his Cabinet members, which was that he represented the WHOLE COUNTRY. He existed to remind his Cabinet members that they should never run the country for their own selfish interest. They must compromise with each other for the common good. That’s why the Cabinet didn’t really want to get rid of the emperor, ’cause without him, one of the Cabinet members would surely try to kill off the rest in order to become an emperor himself.

The Cabinet in ancient China was usually composed of the following officials: the heads of the department of personnel, treasury, rites (combination of education minister and foreign minister), engineering, military, and justice. This structure was basically cloned at provincial level and then further at city level, gradually shrunk to one person who was responsible for everything at the lowest village-level. Nine levels of bureaucracy separate the lowest to the highest, and most officials spent their entire life to climb this ladder. These officials, which were staffed by those who passed the imperial examinations, were constrained by three layers of monitoring:

  1. The officials were not allowed to work within 500 miles of their hometown. This was done to reduce the official’s opportunity for corruption by doing things that benefit their own families and clans. Basically an anti-nepotism measure. Also, officials who were connected could not work in the same place or in the same department. This is still done in China today.
  2. The officials had a interim review once every 3 years, and a thorough review once every 6 years, after the review, the officials would get a new post to some place else. The official was evaluated on his KPI (key performance index), and if his KPI was good, he would get a good evaluation and maybe a good or more important posting, or even a promotion. If his KPI was bad, he would get a demotion to a worse posting. So you see, the one who really runs China, since time immemorial, is the KPI. The review was done by a team composed of the department of personnel and the incoming official to replace you, so obviously the new guy had every incentive to get a thorough understanding of what was going on, ’cause if he didn’t, and the game blew up in his face later, then it would be his fault. This system is still done in China today, except now the officials get an annual review, and get a new posting once every 5 years. The transfer of power/posting once every 5 years is still a very big deal, with the CCP acting as the old personnel department, and now the officials have to write a personal review/report once a month to the Party, instead of once a year.
  3. There was a Department of Rules, whose sole job was to make sure the moral characters of BOTH the emperor and the bureaucracy were sound. Officials from this department fanned out across the country to observe officials while they were discharging their duty. They had the right to be sitting next to the official in everything to observe. If they found out that you were not respectful to your wife, your cousin three-times-removed committed crimes and you tried to cover it up, or you submitted fake report to the Court, they would indict you to the Court, and you would be called in to answer the charges. One of the favorite pastime for the Depart of Rules was to indict the emperor for various offences – not treating government reports which criticized the emperor with respect, not treating the emperor’s mother or teachers with respect, not treating all his wives evenhandedly, earthquakes or floods for no reason but must be the emperor’s fault, … – the point was to constantly remind the emperor that he had to follow rules like everybody else. Then the emperor had to write Public Apology to the People, which would be posted to every town in the country and be read out aloud by the local officials. This is still done in China today, by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection
  4. . Any citizen can write to it reporting official misconduct, and they are obligated to investigate and discipline party officials. You can basically write to them if you just walk by some official and see him wearing an expensive watch.

So you see, lack of email wasn’t a problem for China. Lack of science and technology, corruption, and inter-party fights that elevated private interest above the national interest, on the other hand, had doomed a number of dynasties in Ancient China.

I worked for a law firm in Los Angeles many years ago. One of the legal secretaries in the Corporate Department was a gem: extremely competent, quiet, with enough knowledge and experience to know what permits, licenses and other paperwork needed to be filed for each deal. Like some legal secretaries, she knew as much about corporate deals as the attorneys she worked for.

For some reason, she was terminated. (It was a very political firm, and my guess is that she was let go by someone running a power play against her boss.)

Without her, her attorneys were helpless. What paperwork had been filed with the licensing boards? Had the necessary notices been placed in the newspaper? What was the status of this, that, and the other?

She had left her desk and files in order. There was no funny business. But only after she left did they realize how much she did to ensure that their multi-million-dollar deals went through smoothly, and how much they depended on her.

So of course they called her at home. HR, the partner she worked for, the associate she worked for, the attorney heading the Corporate Department, the firm’s Managing Partner… all with questions to find out the details they needed to know to finish the deals that had been in progress when they asked her to collect her personal effects and leave immediately.

To each person who called, she politely said:

“My professional relationship with your firm was severed at your option. I have nothing more to say to you. Good-bye.”

They were outraged — OUTRAGED — that she wouldn’t help them, but there was nothing they could do. Every time an attorney would grumble to support staff about the situation, we waited until he left the room and gave each other silent thumbs up.

She became a legend.

The truth about growing up for young men

Janet Yellen represents the interests of the US government and her words are official US policy.

Xi Jinping and the senior Chinese officials she met represent official Chinese policy.

The US government seems to think that it can dictate official Chinese policy, but it cannot if it runs counter to Chinese interests.

Normally, if the US wanted something from China, it should offer something else in return in order to start serious negotiations.

Any sign of that?

I don’t see any…

This epitomizes our generation in one video

OMG!

I’m a doc of psychology who has talked to literally thousands of people, and these are 10 pieces of life advice I find that people do not take seriously enough:

  1. “Don’t Make Decisions When You’re Angry” – I’ve seen people relapse on drugs, cheat on their spouses, get into physical fights, and quit their jobs simply because they were “angry.” Don’t do it.
  2. “Be Yourself.” – So many people suffer because they feel pressure to be something they’re not. They can feel this pressure from parents, peers, co-workers, friends or even their significant others. I’ve seen women get breast implants because of this pressure, men marry women (when they are actually gay), and people going into careers they hate because it will make someone else happy. Be yourself, because being something else will make you miserable.
  3. “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.” – This is solid advice for a happy life. Choose your battles, and be able to let the little things go. Once you realize what “big things” are (cancer, financial hardship, etc.), you will wish you focused on the right things.
  4. “Know Your Worth” – When you know your worth, you don’t put up with things that devalue you…and that is *very valuable.* It will impact what you’ll put up with in relationships, in your jobs, and in life. Knowing your worth has the ability to protect you from a lot of life’s struggles – if you act consistently with it.
  5. “It’s Okay to Ask for Help.” – Yes! Do you know how many people I’ve talked to, that wished they would have gotten help earlier? It would have given them back *years* of their life…but instead they waited until they were at an absolute breaking point – losing opportunities, jobs, relationships, sometimes even their kids. Ask for help, and ask for help early.
  6. “Who You Marry is One of the Most Important Decisions You’ll Make.” – Take this one seriously. You will literally have to see this person every day of your life, you will spend more time with them than anyone else…so make it someone uplifting, supportive and wonderfully fitting to you. You will also have a financial future largely impacted by their spending habits, earning, saving ability, etc.. Man or woman, divorce can devastate you emotionally and financially.
  7. “Make Time for People You Love.” – Putting off seeing your grandmother or parents because you wanted to do other things might not seem like a big deal today…but one day it will be.
  8. “The Best Time to Start is Now” – Whether saving for your future or trying to write that novel, start today. Time gets away from us very quickly, and before you know it 20 years have passed and you didn’t do those things you wanted to do. I have seen a lot of people who hold regrets…try not to have them.
  9. “The Best Revenge is Living Well.” – So many people get stuck in grudges and anger that it messes up their own lives – especially emotionally. There is a great saying that states that “anger is something you carry for someone else’s mistakes” and it’s the truth. Leave those who have hurt you in the past, take care of your own needs, and live well. It does you no good to do otherwise.
  10. “Treat Others the Way You’d Want to be Treated.” – This is certainly advice we don’t take seriously enough. If we all treated others how we’d wish to be treated, the world would certainly be a much better place for us all.

This is some of the life advice that I’ve certainly seen…

Why Men Don’t Want Modern Women or Feminists

Norway

  • Do not drink and drive. Not even a tiny little bit. We don’t find this funny. We stick people in jail for a first offence — even if you didn’t get as far as leaving the parking-lot. People in bars might physically fight you / wrestle keys from you to prevent you from driving drunk.
  • Do not wear shoes inside private homes. (there’s exceptions from this, but as a general rule)
  • People are pretty relaxed about nudity, and both men and women will for example change on public beaches without any attempt at covering themselves up. You are however expected to look away. (no-one will care if you glance, but please don’t STARE)
  • Do not unwrap flowers prior to giving them as a gift. (Germans do this)
  • Don’t ask people what church they attend. Most attend none, and asking this is seen as intrusive, rude and downright weird.
  • Don’t assume that “socialist” is a synonym for “evil”.
  • Don’t be insulted if people don’t seem to “respect you” for being somehow distinguished. People are very informal here and being on a first-name-basis with anyone short of the King is the norm. Even the prime-minister of Norway is most often referred to by first name; “Erna” (and previously: “Jens”)

I had a 1993 Mustang 5.0 convertible, triple white and limited edition model. With certification that the was 1 of 500 the last of the produced fox bodies.

The car was immaculate, it took extremely good care of it, washed and waxed weekly, etc.

At about 26 months it got stolen.

I called the insurance; they said they had to wait 30 days to see if it would turn up — meanwhile they gave me a loaner. A Ford Aspire, the economy box of the economy boxes — my how the mighty have fallen.

Finally day 31 came and the insurance company called informing me that they were going to pay the car out in full, and that I needed to return the loaner.

They said they would be cutting me a check that day for $6,800. I told them no, that the car was clearly worth more than that. They then offered me $7,500. Again I told them no. They said that is all the car was worth; I told them that it was not a typical Mustang, it was certified by Ford as one of the last fox bodies and had collector value. They said that they would do some investigation and get back to me and I could continue to use the loaner.

About three days later the call me back saying that their best and final offer would be 10,000. Period.

Now onto the fun part, I told them that this was still not acceptable, and not two days before the car was stolen I had a quote for a trade-in on a Ford Cobra that was at $15,700 for my car.

Silence.

They guy then came back and said, fax me a copy of that document and hung up.

So I faxed the document over to them.

About a week went by, and the insurance called me back, the senior adjuster…

They told me that they had reviewed my case and would only offer me 11,000.

Okay, time to play hardball.

I said since you are refusing to pay my valid and documented value of my car, I am opting for my rights under state insurance law. (Yes during this time I looked it up.) I will not accept any cash payment, and I will opt for them to procure a replacement vehicle.

I told them they needed to find me a triple white 1993 fox body 5.0 Ford Mustang convertible with under 38k on the odometer and documented proof from Ford that this was the limited edition i.e. 1 of 500 of the last fox bodies. And that I expect them to present me with three options to choose from within the next 15 days as provided for by law.

I hung up.

Fifteen days later, they called back. They said that they would be writing me a check for $15,700 minus the 3k I still owed on the car.

I asked why they decided to change their minds. They begrudgingly admitted that they could not find any triple white Mustangs let alone a limited edition model. The closest they could come is a yellow limited edition model, but not one of the last 500 and the dealer was asking 18k for a car with 45k on the odometer.

I received the check in 24 hours.

That was the event where I stopped business from walking all over me.

Edit: Thanks for the upvotes and re-shares.

I do want to point out that should you ever be in a situation where they do want to total your car, make sure you find out your states insurance regulations.

In my state, you are entitled to either a cash value payment for your car, or a equal value replacement. This means that if I’m not happy with their cash offer I can opt for them to procure for me a same model, make with same options with similar mileage.

So make sure you know all your options before accepting that check.

Edit: After writing this in a fit of nostalgia I decided to see if I could find my old fox body for sale anywhere. I did find a few of the prior years 7up models for around 24 thousand and I did find one triple whit of my year just trashed and they were still asking 12 thousand.

This is bangin’

My friend works in HR for a Fortune 500 company. I asked him, “What is the most common phrase you hear when firing someone?”

Without missing a beat, he said it was some version of, “This was a bit unexpected.”

People get complacent and don’t realize their job is in jeopardy. They settle for half-assed work. They forget everything they do is being watched and judged, including their YouTube usage.

A mentor once told me, “It’s best to work like you are one strike from being fired and your boss is debating whether to keep you around.”

I could have learned this lesson in my first marriage. We both made assumptions about our status quo — until things slid beyond repair.

Accountability surrounds us and that’s a good thing.

With my relationships and career, I try to continually remind myself that, “All of this could go away at any moment.” It keeps me on my toes. It stops me from taking my time with older relatives for granted.

Shorpy fun

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Rainbow – Stargazer | First Time Hearing | Vocal Coach Reaction

Chinese math education values practice and discipline.

Children in China start to learn multiplication during 2nd grade and are told to practice constantly. The strong moral tradition that exists in China means that there isn’t exactly a “strict or rigid” curriculum to follow. Students are motivated by parents and others to constantly practice to improve their skills. Middle and high school students often do over 15 hrs of math a week combining class lectures and homework.

In the classroom, students are told to solve and prove problems in front of the whole class. This forces them to think deeply and have a very strong understanding of concepts from which to build new knowledge on. Teachers ask students “why” or “what if” questions to provoke this type of reasoning.

Writing in mathematical terms becomes heavily emphasized in upper levels which can lead to deductions on tests.

In the US, math education is very individual focused and people are not taught to be rigorous and to question why it works. This results in gaps in their learning that ends up hurting their learning later on, leading them to hate math. In addition, the motivation factor to do well is not present and people can slack off and do just what is necessary to get by.

I know people in high school who barely pass math and they don’t even care. There is no national high school exit exam here in the US and thus people don’t see consequences; as long as they graduate they are good.

China Claims Its ‘Super’ AD Missile Makes B-21s Obsolete

The three body problem

A British Chinese “expert” made a serious misreading of The Three Body Problem.

This expert attempts to transcend the extreme evaluation of duality in order to understand compromise in Chinese culture. This starting point is good, but the understanding of China is not enough – if it is not a deliberate distortion caused by misreading.

The first part of this book was serialized in Science Fiction World magazine in 2006, and at that time, the story already had a specific framework. Let’s review the historical environment at that time: Xi was not the President of China until many years later, and the United States had just engaged in the Gulf War. China did not even join the WTO.

It is strange to attempt to use this novel to criticize China’s current policies – people’s mentality was somewhat different from today.

To grasp the relation of Chinese sci-fi and China’s global strategy, it’s helpful to see both in terms of three dynamics. Certainly, it’s popular to understand Chinese politics in terms of binary frameworks: China vs. US; conservatives vs. reformers; optimists vs. pessimists; and socialism vs. capitalism. To get beyond this binary paradigm, we can explore three dynamics: pessoptimism, neo-socialism, and tianxia (All-under-Heaven).

“Pessoptimism” – This word only grasps the edge of Chinese culture. I do admit that Chinese people have both pessimistic and optimistic expectations for the future, but that has nothing to do with China’s rapid development – as I mentioned in the historical context of novel creation, China was facing a powerful and seemingly unbeatable United States at that time, it was widely believed on the Chinese Internet that China’s GDP might reach the level of Japan in a few decades. Few people realized at that time that the economy would develop rapidly within a few years.

In fact, the pessimistic mentality in the novel comes from: 1, a strong feudal China was shattered by the rapid rise of colonial countries; 2, the anxiety of human self destruction brought about by nuclear deterrence and the development of weapon technology; 3, comparison and reflection on the relationship between social Darwinism and equality.

The optimistic attitude in novels also comes from a long history. Any civilization can learn and resist. Organisms can avoid the devastating impact of catastrophic events through reproduction, whether small or not. After the environment is completely changed, everything will eventually perish except those can adapt. All of these stories are in history.

This expert did see that two sides of things can coexist, but unfortunately, he cannot understand what history means to the Chinese people.

Neo-socialism: This expert seems to believe that the depiction of the dystopian social environment of the Trisolarans in the novel reflects the current China.

In The Three Body Problem, Liu’s alien characters from across the galaxy are presented as scientific because they don’t have “time for or interest in art and literature; at the same time, they do not understand lies or tricks”.(10)

Unfortunately, this expert made the same mistake – he did not understand this novel together with Chinese history.

The Trisolarans have a close connection with Japan in history. Japan, as an island nation on the edge of a tectonic plate, believed that it had to invade China and colonize due to the threat of volcanoes and earthquakes on their islands, which was the source of Japanese militarism during WWII. That brings uncertainty like three suns.

Many civilizations experience a large-scale ideological shift when facing crises, leading to greater unity and a convergence of thinking patterns.

Under more extreme environmental assumptions, people have to abandon cultural development and focus on survival. In fact, this describes the state of mobilized. However, the high degree of ideological consistency, lack of personalized thinking ability, and lack of lies and tricks between people is the results of it. You can see this unified ideology during the existence of the Soviet Union, China’s Cultural Revolution, Japan’s militaristic education, etc.. It can encourage people to work in the same direction, but at the same time, it undermines long-term potential.

Liu doesn’t fear technology, unlike the authors of many dystopian sci-fi stories, because he dutifully sees technology as the answer to human questions.

It is just a state of human society, not a solution. It’s not modern China, nor the pattern of “neo-socialism”. None of these cultures is always right – the death has taken them all at the end of this novel.

Tianxia: I guess this expert did not read Liu Cixin’s short stories because there are with Russians and Serbs as the main characters.

But most Chinese sci-fi focuses on humanity as ethnically Chinese, and Chinese sci-fi as an instrument of the PRC’s soft power. In The Wandering Earth and the Three Body Problem, all of Liu’s protagonists are ethnic Chinese. Other peoples have little or no agency: they passively help China, are ignorant terrorists, or they are absent altogether. In the novella version of The Wandering Earth, the Japanese mother rebels against science, and then is sacrificed in the name of population control, while the Chinese-Japanese son is just Chinese. In the movie version, there is a mixed-race Chinese-Australian man who is made to look and sound funny, and he has to defend himself as a ‘real Chinese’ based on his paternal bloodline.(19)

That’s not about soft power. Since ancient times, we have regarded “tianxia” as the highest moral goal. This expert seem to mistakenly believe that this is just to cater to Xi – in fact, it is Xi’s government that caters to the Chinese people.

Also, you can’t expect a electric worker as Cixin Liu in a tiny Chinese town to have a good impression of British or American people before 2006, can you? At that time, your coalition had just caused a large number of disasters in the Middle East.

The facts make it difficult for your people to become a better solution.

With Xi Jinping, China’s global strategy seems to be catching up with Liu’s vision of the future: it looks to science to solve political problems, and figures engagement with the Other in zero-sum terms as an existential struggle for survival.

I don’t think any normal person would consider a “community with a shared future for mankind” as a zero sum narrative. People create their lives through work. Only those who plunder wealth will see society as zero sum, while Chinese people manufacture products.

The novel does not depict zero sum games, but rather negative sum games under the tactic of “ensuring mutual destruction”. The Trisolarans and Earthlings who implemented mutual deterrence ultimately achieved a strike and left separately, but their main forces were destroyed, while a minority of the two races survived by exploring and adapting to new rules.

As citizens of the British, which is one of the countries who encouraged Ukrainians to charge towards Russians and participate in rendering nuclear deterrence, the author should have a deep understanding of this.

When I was getting rejected by a lot of girls for marriage, my mother – like all other mothers in the world would say me, “Don’t worry, you are a Prince and we will find a Princess for you.”

My family members would also console me by saying that it’s all about destiny and our family is quite reputed and we are well settled so you will get married soon.

My reply to my mother and my family members was always this.

“Neither I’m a Prince nor I’m a greek god. And we are not Ambanis. I am very well aware of the fact that I’m about to get rejected in future.”

I embrace the fact that I look much older than my age. And that’s why I always was prepared for the rejection because no father would want to marry her daughter to someone who’s quite older than her.

I look like I’m 33–35 years old whereas I’m 26 years old.

We aren’t filthy rich either. We own decent amount of land and live a pretty average life.

Neither I have any side business nor I have a white collar job.

So, to sum it up, there’s nothing extraordinary about me or my family that people would rush to marry their daughters in our family.


What is a brutal truth about life that needs to be said?

Most probably I’m 99,56,32,408th person who is saying this.

In real life, in real world, away from the social media’s sugar coated sweet shit, your looks and your financial status matter.

It just doesn’t matter, it matters a lot.

I have transformed from an ugly looking boy to an average looking guy and that’s why I know how important looks are.

We have built our new home and have seen people’s changed perception about us, that’s why I know how important financial status is.

A teacher is more inclined towards a cute kid.

A good looking candidate is preferred over other average looking candidates with same qualifications.

Black people receive more punishments compared to white people.

And, I should not mention about all the privileges rich people get, because we all know about that.

We all know this. We just pretend that it doesn’t matter.

On social media we all are saints, unaffected by society’s opinions, expectations and pressure.

I’m not saying this because I was rejected many times. I was sure about rejection.

I have lived for 26 years on this earth and have faced, experienced and seen similar incidents and discriminations my whole life.

Looks and financial status of someone may not matter to you at this point in your life.

But, it definitely will, somewhere, sometime.

9 Things That Make Men Look Expensive & Put Together (Women Always Notice This)

I walk inside and already want to leave.

The two instructors turn to me. They have clean-shaven tattooed heads and thick, spiral-shaped piercings in their ears. On the wall hangs a photo of one of them mounting and pounding an opponent in the cage.

I’d decided to learn MMA and had found a small gym in the area. Even before coming in, I was worried about what it’d be like.

I didn’t want to be part of a macho, who-can-punch-the-hardest scene.

“Oh hello!” the woman instructor says, the same one displayed on the wall bludgeoning her adversary.

Her face lights up with a megawatt-lightbulb smile. She rushes at me, gives a lung-squeezing hug, and says, “You’re the one who called about trying a class, right?”

“Yeah…” I say, still processing the dissonance between her appearance and the supernova of affection I just received.

“Have you gone over the rules?” she goes on. “Basically, if you bring food make sure it doesn’t have any animal products–we’re vegan.”

“Sure…”

“More importantly–you know what to do if someone comes up to you in the street and asks for your wallet, right?”

“Umm…”

“Just hand it to them. Life is too precious to play the hero.”

“Dog Named Hero Saves Owner’s Life for Days, Fighting Off Cold and Coyotes and Getting Help

An Akita named ‘Hero’ saved his owner’s life last week in an incredible tale of loyalty and resilience that saw him remain by his side through two frigid Alberta nights, fend off coyotes, and eventually alert rescuers.

Winning plaudits for his name and deed the world over, a GoFundMe raised $3,000 to cover the veterinary bills of Hero by the shelter that is keeping him safe and warm while his owner recovers.

The story began with an attack: when a passerby named Curtis Dahl was walking in a field of mud and grass near the sugar factory in the town of Taber, and Hero came running up and bit his dog around the neck.

Dahl claims he tussled with Hero for ten minutes trying to get him off his dog, and needed stitches on his finger by the end of it.

Calling police and animal services with a complaint, he alerted them to Hero’s presence, but when the officers arrived and saw Hero lying down exhausted near a terraced plot of grass and weeds near the road, they suddenly heard a cry for help.

Arriving, they found a 61-year-old man on his back in a ditch, shivering and unable to move. He told police he’d been stuck there for two days while Hero protected him.

While the man was taken to a hospital, Hero was taken to Taber Lost Paws Society, an animal shelter that has a special program to look after dogs during periods of crisis or injury. As it happened, the society’s acting president Alana McPhee said they had an employee who was the injured man’s neighbor and knew that he had another Akita dog named Tora.

Reported missing two days prior, Tora eventually turned up in her owner’s yard with a disabled leg after screws and rods in her leg from a previous injury had come loose. They suspect she had been back and forth from the site where her owner fell to the home several times, or perhaps could have been fighting, though she had no bite or puncture marks.

Once informed of the full story, the man whose dog had been attacked by Hero was “understanding of the situation” and was grateful Hero’s owner was rescued. He later received compensation for the medical costs to his dog and himself via CAD$3,000 that was raised from a GoFundMe organized by the Lost Paws Society.

“(Hero) was being protective. That dog probably had not eaten for several days. He was incredibly stressed and, obviously, powerless to help his owner. He had to fight off coyotes,” McPhee said.

Men and their ability to transcend the space-time continuum.

He did a couple of things.

We adopted a German Shepherd named Rex from our local no-kill rescue organization.

He was a wonderful dog and had only been turned in because his 38 y/o owner had leukemia and there was no one to take Rex. They told us he had even had $600 worth of dog obedience training. When we got him home, one of the shelter employees called to say how happy they were that he had found a home after three months of lying in a cage because “Rex was everyone’s favorite dog.”

We could understand why. He was a very sweet dog with an amazingly calm temperament.

Except for the mailman. He really, really didn’t like the mailman and seemed to feel that we needed his protection from this daily intruder. So when the mailman showed up at our front door, Rex would bark ferociously until the mail had been delivered and the mailman was safely on his way.

The sight of the mailman walking away confirmed to him that, once again, he had done his job!

However, one day to my complete surprise, the mailman came and went with absolutely no reaction from Rex.

So I casually said to him, “Rex, what happened? The mailman came and went and you didn’t even bark.”

He stood there patiently looking at me while I talked. When I was finished, he walked calmly over to the closed front door, stood there for a moment looking at the door, and then very quietly went, “Woof.”

As in “Satisfied?”

If I hadn’t seen him do it, I never would have believed it!

Also, his favorite person in the household was my grown daughter because she was the one who walked him. When he decided it was time for a walk, he would find one of my daughter’s walking shoes, grab it in his mouth, walk over to where she was sitting and drop it in her lap!

He lived to be 12 years old and then he had a stroke which left his hind legs completely paralyzed. After he had spent a month lying helplessly on a blanket with wee-wee pads, we decided it wasn’t fair to let him keep living like that since there was no hope that he would ever get any better.

I thought about his favorite food because, unlike many dogs who are sick or dying, there was nothing wrong with his appetite.

The only thing he had ever stolen was my homemade beef jerky. It was in a Christmas tin, in a box which had been wrapped, taped and tied with a string. It was ready to mail and sitting on the dining room table. While we were out, Rex had managed to get it down from the table , untie it, get the wrapping off of it, open the tin (not easy even for humans!) and eat every piece.

So I made an entire batch of beef jerky and fed him piece after piece while he was lying there waiting to be euthanized.

A few minutes later, he passed on with a tummy full of his favorite food.

When you LIVE

A Tyranny of Geniuses

Compassionate technocracy?

If rulers’ own behavior is ethical, what difficulty will they have in governing? If their own conduct is improper, how can they demand lawfulness from their citizens? Confucius. Analects.

Matthew Archer’s recent What if we Lost our Smartest 5%? suggests that, without our scientists and engineers we would struggle even to maintain our quality of life. It also helps explain the West’s current governmental decline and China’s rise. That’s because, like most sentient beings, our smartest 5% – scientists and engineers – are repelled by our toxic political process. No wonder Western governments have failed to deliver democratic outcomes¹.

China’s top 5%, by contrast, are entirely involved in government, and thereby hangs our tale..

The smartest guys in the room

Imagine the impact on European civilization of a series of Imperial dynasties maintaining the self-same style and significance from Caesar Augustus until the First World War. Now imagine such a civilization existing on the other side of the planet unaware of Greek philosophy, the alphabet, Roman governance, Christianity, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or democracy, but with its own, unique cultural and institutional correlates that exceeded all of them in intellectual subtlety and material success. Fernand Braudel

2500 years ago a government consultant named Confucius designed a low-maintenance, harmonious state by modeling it on the nuclear family and its natural hierarchy. The head of each little family would be responsible to the family clan head –as they still are – who is responsible to the extended clan head and so on, up to the head of the Big Family, the emperor.

The emperor’s responsibility would be to find honest, competent, selfless geniuses willing to devote their lives to serving the dynasty. The trick, he said, was finding them, “The administration of government lies in getting men of strong moral character – the kind who will only be attracted a the ruler’s own good character, which he cultivates by treading the path of duty. And treading the path of duty is cultivated by practicing compassion”. Because honesty rises with intelligence and running a kingdom is the hardest job on earth, choose officials for their moral integrity and intellectual abilities.

Alas, rulers of the day were comfortable with their chain of command and their nobles were hostile to meritocracy and Confucius, convinced that he had failed, died.

For centuries, corrupt eunuchs, scheming regents, dowager empresses, usurpers, concubines, wicked uncles and rebellious generals continued their massacres, kidnappings, taxing and warring. Confucius’ disciples persistently advocated his plan, however, until, in 188 BC, they persuaded Emperor Wen of Han to stop imprisoning parents, wives, and siblings of common criminals.

When things went awry, he wrote Letters of Public Apology, as Confucius advised. So positive was the public response that he began lowering taxes, abolishing corvée labor and giving monthly pensions to widows, orphans and retirees and, as Confucius had predicted, peace and prosperity prevailed.

Emperor Wen next began examining nobles’ suitability for office and soon, ambitious families were sending promising offspring to Confucian cram schools. A century later, thirty-thousand earnest young men were enrolled at Imperial Colleges where, as a form of meditation, they memorized the Master’s teaching on compassionate service until it permeated their feelings, thoughts, and dreams.

Getting serious

Eight centuries of increasing meritocracy passed until, in 600 AD, Emperor Yang of Sui opened imperial examinations to peasants. He instructed examiners – from whom candidates’ identities were concealed – to find men with intellectual depth and moral maturity. To emphasize the importance of morality, he said, they should execute cheaters.

Examinees answered questions on the economy, analyzed current government policies and composed original essays to demonstrate their brushwork, literacy, creativity, and knowledge of the World. The Emperor himself queried top candidates who quoted from memory case studies in governance and passages from the Analects (as they still do). Advancement by examination was class-blind (it still is) because, said Censor Wang Ji, “If selection by examination is not strict, the powerful will struggle to be foremost, and orphans and the poor will have difficulty advancing”.

By 1204 AD, of two-hundred seventy-nine senior officials whose families we know, forty-four percent had forebears in government (by 2020, it was twelve percent). Successful applicants became national celebrities, their feats memorialized in family books and their homecomings semi-hysterical:

When a scholar rides in a high carriage drawn by four horses, flag-bearers running ahead with a mounted escort bringing up the rear, people gather on both sides of the road to watch and sigh. Ordinary men and foolish women rush forward in excitement and humbly prostrate themselves in the dust stirred up by his carriage. This is a scholar’s joy. This is when his ambition is fulfilled.

Poor scholars who ascended on talent were the Emperor’s men entirely. They could neither own land, serve in their home provinces, nor have relatives in the same branch of government (prohibitions that still hold). They competed for promotion by constructing public works and, though dynasties rose and fell, there was just one official to serve eight thousand citizens, often in regions far from family and friends, under terrible conditions, regularly at the cost of their lives.

Though few in number, they sustained the most harmonious, advanced, prosperous nation on earth, and so lustrous is their record that Chinese heroes and villains –historical or fictional – were or are government officials. One such hero-official has even been deified: by democratic agreement, Governor Li Bing, who designed and constructed the Dujiangyan water diversion project in 250 BC (below), is God of Waters. His temple still stands at the site where he diverted the waters to create one of the country’s great rice bowls.

That was then, this is now

The top 20% of Chinese university graduates, the smartest two-million (out of eleven-million) youngsters, will take the guokao civil service exam this summer. The written examinations are challenging, the orals intimidating and exhausting, and applicants need a 140 IQ (enough for a PhD in theoretical physics) to get an interview, and only 27,000, 1.3% of them, will receive job offers.

The successful applicants will take vows of selfless service stricter than a Jesuit …

Bisquick Butterscotch Brownies

59247t2
59247t2

Ingredients

  • 2 cups Bisquick baking mix or Biscuit Baking Mix
  • 1 box light or dark brown sugar
  • 4 large eggs
  • 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter (room temperature)
  • 1 can coconut
  • 1 1/2 cups chopped pecans
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Mix all ingredients and bake in a 9 x 13 inch pan for 45 minutes.
  3. Cool on rack, and cut while still warm.

Rainbow – Catch the Rainbow live in Munich 1977 HD, FULL VERSION, Remastered. (2018)

This was my live-for song when I was in High school. Damn.

Chili and chips

I’ve been having a lot of perfect days lately, working from home. They go like this:

  1. wake up without an alarm clock (I don’t need one, I go to bed at ten and am up at six, every day, happy to get up and do stuff).
  2. distribute a round of cuddles and canned breakfast to the house panthers, who will be staging a drama already for being famished and helpless little things.
  3. boil up hot water for some suitable morning cuppa, typically grain coffee, maté, or hot water with stevia.
  4. recline on the couch with my laptop and try to comprehend the world.
  5. as temperatures pick up outside, eventually switch to sitting in my hammock under the birch tree and work from there.
  6. have some lunch; I’ve gotten pretty good at cooking in ways that are barely noticeable, so I just go inside and, miraculously, edible things await.
  7. do some tinkering around the house, improving this or that a little bit, often just with wire and a nail.
  8. work some more.
  9. go photograph something, possibly by car.
  10. come home and feed the panthers again, then possibly hammock or TV-room with interesting documentaries until I go to bed again.

1. About 75 percent of the brain is made up of water. This means that dehydration,

2. Can have negative effects on brain function, even in small amounts.

3. The human brain will grow to three times its size in the first year of life. It continues to grow until you are about 18 years old.

4. Headaches are caused by a chemical reaction in your brain combined with the muscles and nerves in your neck and head.

5. Your brain uses 20 percent of the oxygen and blood in your body.

6. Alcohol affects your brain in ways that include blurred vision, slurred speech, an unsteady walk, and more. These usually disappear when you calm down again. However, if you drink frequently over a long period of time, there is evidence that alcohol can permanently affect your brain and once again not sober up. Long-term effects include memory problems and some reduced cognitive function.

7. If the brain does not get oxygen for 5-6 minutes, then it stops working forever.

8. As we grow older, the human brain becomes smaller. This usually occurs sometime after middle age.

9. The human brain starts to lose some cognitive skills by your late 20s, along with your memory abilities.

10. A brain freeze is actually a sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. It happens when you eat or drink something that is cold. This stretches blood vessels and arteries to the very back of the throat, including blood to your brain. These compress when they are cold and heat up again, causing pain in your forehead.

11. Dreams are thought to be a combination of imagery, phycological factors and neurological factors. They prove that your brain is working even when you are sleeping.

12. It is a myth that humans only use 10 percent of our brain. We actually use it. We use more than 10 percent when we sleep.

13. During human evolution, the brain has tripled in size.

14. Your brain uses the same amount of power as a 15 watt light bulb.

It gets very cold in Michigan and I have a very large, down-filled winter coat. It’s somewhat hideous but it’s very warm.

Apparently coats like mine are great for shop lifting. You simply place a hole in the pockets and drop items that you’ve casually picked up and drop them to the bottom of the coat as you shop/steal. It’s difficult to tell that you have stolen anything because the coat itself is so large.

I was shopping in a card shop a while back and the sales woman there accused me of shop-lifting, because of my coat. When I was at the register to pay for ALL of my items she asked me if I would also like to pay for the items inside of my coat as well.

I smiled and I gently laughed and asked her “Are you kidding me?” I told her that I was a shop owner myself and that I would never steal anything from anyone.

She looked at me in a slightly disgusted way and rolled her eyes. “Oh. So that’s how it’s going to be!” She didn’t ask me about my store or attempt to apologize. She just stared at me. Hmm… I thought.

I had quite a large number of items that I did want to buy and I had been quite a regular customer there for some time. I was beyond insulted, but I understood her frustration, even though I was shocked.

I took off my coat, gently put it on the counter and opened my purse. “Would you care to inspect my belongings?” I said in a calm and polite way. She patted down my coat and glanced in my rather small purse. She then slid my coat over and without apologizing, began to ring up my items.

I let her ring up everything, staring back at her silently as I waited for an apology. Nothing.

I didn’t reach in my purse to pay. Instead I pushed the items back at her gently and I told her “I’m sorry but I’ve changed my mind. Not about the items, I still want them but I think I’ll take my business elsewhere, where my business is appreciated. There are lots of stores, exactly like yours.” And I left. And I held my head up without shame or anger. But what I really felt was hurt.

I went a few miles down the street to another shop that offered the exact same items and I left that store with all of them. The bill was well over $100.00 .

I understand that shop lifting is a problem but honesty is not. I gave the first woman every opportunity to make the situation right but I really felt that she did owe me an apology. I didn’t think that it was too much to ask for considering the insulting way that she had treated me in her store.

I give all of my business now to the other shop owner. Yes, it’s a bit further to drive but I feel I’d rather go without than give the first shop owner even one dime of my hard-earned money. In my opinion there is no reason, whatsoever, to treat anyone like that.

The savage killing of serial rapist Akku Yadav by a mob of women he raped is one of the most brutal revenge of all time in Indian History.

main qimg 3338c40f50fcf6bea8a390886f37620b lq
main qimg 3338c40f50fcf6bea8a390886f37620b lq

  • On August 13, 2004, Akku Yadav was lynched by a mob of around 200 women from Kasturba Nagar, a slum of Nagpur in Maharashtra.
  • He raped more than 200 women that mostly belonging to Dalit families, the Untouchables, those placed at the bottom of the caste ladder in India. The members of the Dalit community received little to no help from the government authorities.
  • Akku Yadav fed the local officers bribes and drink, and they protected him and dropped his cases. Despite countless women coming forward with allegations of rape against him, Akku Yadav always felt free to rape whomever he wanted.

Whenever a victim reported him to the police, the authorities would alert Yadav, who then visit that women and threaten to throw acid on her and rape her again. He had raped so many women in Kasturba Nagar that a rape victim lives in almost every other house in the slum.

Source:- From Castration To The Killdozer, These Are History’s Greatest Stories Of Revenge

  • Usha Narayane, a victim who had repeatedly been harassed by Akku Yadav reported the case about Akku Yadav to the Deputy Commissioner, who promised her that police would soon arrest the serial rapist. One day Akku Yadav himself surrendered to the police fearing his death by local women.
  • The next day in court, Narayane and many other local women heard that the Akku Yadav was likely to escape punishment yet again. Together, they entered into the court in large numbers armed with vegetable knives, stones, and whatever else that was at hand.

main qimg 05db99f2b2d520f0f45ed35168c8cc45 lq
main qimg 05db99f2b2d520f0f45ed35168c8cc45 lq

As he walked in, Akku Yadav spotted one of the women he had raped. He called her a prostitute and threatened to repeat the same crime again. The police laughed. She took off her sandal and began to hit him and started saying that, “We can’t both live on this Earth together. It’s you or me”. The attack lasted for more than ten minutes and left Yadav’s dead body butchered on the courtroom floor with 70 stab wounds and his penis cut off.

Source:- From Castration To The Killdozer, These Are History’s Greatest Stories Of Revenge

  • Usha Narayane, a local activist, was arrested and charged with murder, as with other women. In 2012, Narayane was released from custody. 21 other people, including six women, were also arrested and released due to lack of evidence.

Justice Bhau Vahane said, “In the circumstances that they underwent, they were left with no alternative but to finish Akku Yadav. The women repeatedly pleaded with the police for their security. But the police failed to protect them”.

Source:- ‘Arrest us all’: the 200 women who killed a rapist

  • The death of Akku Yadav at the hands of the women he raped was one of the most brutal stories of revenge in Indian History.

main qimg d878079f2f8fe31c55cd407ce06fb1fd lq
main qimg d878079f2f8fe31c55cd407ce06fb1fd lq


  • Source of this news and story from where I have written this content:-
  1. From Castration To The Killdozer, These Are History’s Greatest Stories Of Revenge

Hot Turkey and Cheddar Casserole

Hot Turkey and Cheddar Casserole
Hot Turkey and Cheddar Casserole

Ingredients

  • Butter
  • 3 cups (about 16 ounces) cubed (1 inch) leftover turkey
  • 3/4 cup chopped celery
  • 1 (5 ounce) can sliced water chestnuts, drained
  • 1/2 cup chopped red bell pepper
  • 1 1/3 cups mayonnaise
  • 1 tablespoon grated onion
  • 2 tablespoons lemon juice
  • 2 cups (8 ounces) shredded sharp Cheddar cheese, divided
  • 1 cup (4 ounces) shredded mozzarella cheese, divided
  • 1 cup cornflakes, crushed

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly coat a 9 x 13 inch baking dish with butter.
  2. In a medium bowl, combine turkey, celery, water chestnuts, red bell pepper, mayonnaise, onion, lemon juice, 1 cup Cheddar cheese, and 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese; mix well. Place the mixture in the baking dish and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until heated through.
  3. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, combine the remaining 1 cup Cheddar cheese, 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese and cornflakes.
  4. Sprinkle the cheese mixture over the baked turkey casserole, and bake for 5 to 8 minutes, or until the cheese melts.

4B movement and government destruction to the end

Why the West claims Hong Kong is under Chinese oppression while absolutely ZERO person were killed by the police in 2019 and it is actually the West and British who illegally attacked, occupied and oppressed Hong Kong?

It’s simple. Many british people won’t look very deeply into the actual details of the situation as such they imagine Hong Kong was almost exactly the same as life in the UK other than it was filled with Chinese people and hotter humid weather.

So when the BBC and politicians lie about it, they take it at face value and either aren’t invested enough to check it out in more depth or simply trust politicians at what they say.

A great example is how many think Hong Kong was democratic before 1997. I ask them who elected the governor of Hong Kong… they have no answer… now and again this is great because it makes them ask further questions and makes them question their position. Most however don’t and simply double down.

The other group were the occupiers, yes occupiers is a correct word. June 1972 during the 27th meeting of the UN, Hong Kong was taken off the list of British colonies and it was instead considered an occupation. The occupiers lived a privileged life compared to local people in Hong Kong.

This is demonstrated with Kowloon Walled city. People view it as holy fucking shit, but Walled city wasn’t unusual it was only demolished in 1993.

main qimg 213ed56aa25e47ab0e47c8cd043bcfc3
main qimg 213ed56aa25e47ab0e47c8cd043bcfc3

The big apartment blocks to the north only started being built in the late 70s and 80s. Most people were living in shanty towns dotted all over.

SHOCK: Technology Already Developed to put “Vaccines” in Lettuce, Tomatos, and . . . Tobacco Products!

The Tennessee state legislature held hearings about putting “Vaccines” in consumer products like food and tobacco. The hearing revealed startling information . . .

Rep. Scott Cepicky revealed that the University of California at Riverside has “already perfected the ability to put Human Vaccines into our lettuce right now.”  He went on to add  “Also Tomatoes, has the ability to do that also, from UC Berkely, and also RJ Reynolds has developed the ability to put Human “Vaccines” into Tobacco products.”

Rep. John Ray Clemmons then inquired “Is that even legal to do in the state of Tennessee, to sell those with a Vaccine in them?”

Rep. Cepicky responded “I’m not arguing that, all I’m saying is that if a person walks into a grocery store you as a Consumer should know  __this__ head of lettuce __is__ a head of lettuce, but __this other__ head of lettuce right next to it, could contain a Vaccine in it.  All we’re saying is, if it does have the vaccine in it, make sure it’s listed as a Pharmaceutical so people can get the proper dosage.”

Hal Turner Snap Editorial

The idea that companies would DARE to presume to include “vaccines” in Human food seems outrageous to me.   Who do these people think they are?  They have no right to put some medical treatment into food for Humans and thereby into people’s bodies without informed consent.

Take the COVID Vax for instance.   We were all told it was “safe and effective.”  Those claims turned out to be false.  The vaccines harmed or even KILLED many people, and are STILL harming and killing people.

Yet some nitwit thinks it’s a good idea to put things like this into consumer food so that unwitting people get something they otherwise might not want?  Shocking!   Outrageous!

Some of these “Scientists” seem so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Leadership

I met my husband through college when I was 18. He was 20. I was married at 21. He went through all my ups and downs with me, and I mean ups and downs. Things got really bad for me once I entered the professional workforce after grad school. I was ironically working in the mental health field at the time, while my own mental health was deteriorating. My husband was there to lie with me when I cried my eyes out, and he was there to calm me down when I was so excitable I could easily make some bad decisions. Never did he act like I was the “crazy person” I felt I was becoming. On two occasions he walked in on me harming myself, and he took the tool from me and cleaned me up in the shower. He was also the person who walked in on me standing in a corner listening to “the voices” that were talking to me from the sky. Yes, he stayed.

My husband is the reason I chose to go to a therapist. It was humiliating; going to a therapist when I worked in the mental health field myself. After all, I should know how to deal with what was happening to me, right? I had a really good life, an awesome husband, and a good career. What was wrong? The therapist sent me to a psychiatrist, something I also would have declined had it not been for my husband.

My husband attended my diagnostic appointment with the psychiatrist. After answering all sorts of questions and talking about what was going on, I was diagnosed as bipolar with psychotic features. I knew it. In the back of my mind I knew it and I didn’t want to know it. It was one of the reasons I didn’t want to go to the psychiatrist in the first place. I was prescribed medication and my ascent to sanity began, although I’m still not there 100%.

The thing my husband did that I’ll always remember happened just after we stepped out of the office. I was upset. I looked up at him trying to make a joke of it (kind of) and said “Well, congratulations, you married a crazy person.” He stopped us both by taking my hand, looking me in the eye and telling me “You’re no different than you always were, and I love you just as much as I always have.” We had been married almost 8 years.

It’s odd to say a romantic moment came of me being diagnosed as, how I thought of it at the time, crazy, but that’s what happened. I had been feeling so worthless. Who could love someone going through psychosis; someone who might just become a burden on others? The fact that he reassured me, after everything he’d been through with me, that I was still loved was more than I could ever thank him for. We’ve been married over 10 years now, and he says he still feels the same way, even when I do have my bouts of depression, mania, psychosis, and panic attacks, and I’ll never forget that moment when he reassured me I was still lovable and the same old me, even if there was now a name for what was happening to me. I am not crazy. I have bipolar disorder and I’m learning how to deal with it while my husband learns how to deal with my behavior.

God I love that man.

**Edit** Thank you all for the kind words! I did show my answer to my husband and he said he never realized how much that moment meant to me. I wish I’d expressed myself better at the time then! I do make sure to show him appreciation as often as possible!

It’s weird, I never felt the way about my clients that I felt about myself. I loved my clients, and they’re each battling their own mental health issues as strong boys and girls (I worked with adolescents). I guess it’s one of those cases where it’s sometimes hard to value yourself when it’s easy to see the value in others.

Despite everything, I am much better with treatment, and my husband and I are very happy together. He is definitely the love of my life and he makes me feel valuable everyday by telling me how awesome I am as a person, and how “fun I am” to be around. He definitely enjoys spending as much time as possible with me, so I certainly believe him!

I chose to go anonymous mainly because I’m still a bit of a coward and only my close family and friends know about my illness. Maybe one day I’ll have the strength to talk about it more openly, but I worry how that might affect any future clients’ or agencies’ views of me as an effective worker.

Hope that addresses some of the comments I read!

Exploitation

No

China is too strong today to require the second front

The ‘Second Front’ was a plan maybe ten or twelve years or maybe even fifteen years ago in case of a conflict

Back then both Armies were on similar footing

  • Chinas Budget was $ 68.79 Billion in 2009 with a much higher import dependence and Indias was close to $ 46 Billion
  • Both countries depended on at least 40% of their Military Supplies on the Russians
  • Both Nations had similar abilities on three domains – Army, Navy & Air
  • Chinas GDP was around $ 4.8 Trillion to Indias $ 1.58 Trillion. Yet Chinas Debt to GDP was closer to 36% to Indias 21%

Back then Pakistan was also in a far stronger position than today

It was also way closer to the US , so Chinas active plan was to get Pakistan out of US Sphere of Influence into their own

The Plan was if India moved against China, then for China to get Pakistan to open a second theatre either through Economic leverage or Military Leverage


In 2024, this plan is no longer a primary one

  • China has the roads now, the infrastructure to mobilize it’s troops in 24 hours and confront India in any direction
  • China has Satellite Imaging for every square feet of those mountains
  • China has a five domain superiority including Cyber & Low Space where they are streets ahead of India
  • Today Chinas economy is at $ 18–19 Trillion and they have virtually the same amount of savings and real wealth plus a Net Foreign Reserves of a Trillion plus bucks

So today the notion of India attacking and moving in offensive on China is much lesser than in 2009, at least militarily

2015–16 was the last year India could have actively moved against China and managed a stalemate or bloodied the Chinese nose and gotten brutally mauled

Today the Chinese are TOO STRONG

They prepared their forces for India as the largest enemy until 2013/14 and since then have began to prepare for US and NATO as their largest enemy

We prepared for China and Pakistan as our largest enemy from the 1960s , so our scale hasn’t surged as much


As a consolation, India is too strong for Pakistan today

Just like the Chinese are too strong for us

Work Smarter

Roasted Black Pepper Wings
with Maple Bourbon Glaze

Roasted Black Pepper Wings
Roasted Black Pepper Wings

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

Wings

  • 2 1/2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 12 wings, cut in half at joints, wing tips removed and discarded

Glaze

  • 1 cup bourbon
  • 3 tablespoons maple syrup
  • 2 teaspoons molasses

Instructions

  1. In a small bowl, combine the black pepper, salt and cayenne.
  2. Place the wings in a zip-type plastic bag.
  3. Pour the pepper mixture into the bag, close it and shake to coat the wings.
  4. Heat the oven to 350 degrees F. Cover a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil, place wings on foil and bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until done.
  5. In a small saucepan over medium heat, combine bourbon, maple syrup and molasses, + 1 cup of water. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to simmer. Simmer the mixture until reduced by about half and thickened, 5 to 6 minutes.
  6. When the wings are done, toss them with the glaze while they are still warm.

Shorpy time

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WTF is going on with American girls?

Peanut Butter Chicken Wings

30COOKING THAIPEANUT CHIXWINGS1 articleLarge
30COOKING THAIPEANUT CHIXWINGS1 articleLarge

Yield: 15 to 20 servings

Ingredients

  • 50 chicken wings
  • 2 (12 ounce) bottles beer
  • 1 cup molasses
  • 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
  • 1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/4 cup prepared mustard
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 tablespoons chili powder
  • 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley, for garnish
  • 1 to 2 lemons, sliced thin, for garnish

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 450 degrees F.
  2. Remove and discard tips from wings and cut each wing in half at joint.
  3. Combine remaining ingredients except parsley and lemon slices in a large saucepan. Cook over low heat for about 15 minutes, until reduced and thickened to the consistency of thick gravy.
  4. Place wings in a large roasting pan and cover with sauce. Turn until each wing is well coated.
  5. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes.
  6. Serve on large platter.
  7. Garnish with parsley and lemon slices.

Move to Italy

For one thing, the Chinese are very clever and adaptable and resilient. The Americans have grown fat, lazy and stupid.

For another, the Chinese number over a billion, more than 4X the size of the US population.

For another, the Chinese are well-educated. In fact, China produces 4X more STEM graduates than the USA does. This is why China can kick America’s ass technologically.

For another, the Chinese are led by a very strong, stable, capable, intelligent government. The Americans are led by clowns.

For another, the Chinese do not waste valuable resources on fighting wars around the globe. They dedicate their resources to economic and technological development.

Why Dating is Broken in 2024 – What Boomers don’t understand

Hold a Referendum in Taiwan and get it supervised by the UN Observers and get a 60% Majority to approve

Then get the UNGA to formally recognise Taiwan with at least 97 nations needed for a yes

In the process you risk alienating China and all the benefits that China brings, not to mention the fact that China will certainly ensure Taiwan won’t survive long enough to enjoy it’s Independence

A Poorly prepared Russia is skewering Ukraine like a Kebab , imagine a vastly better prepared, richer China with a smaller Taiwan

No Taiwanese would want that


Instead Taiwan would be eyeing for what we can call Federation of China

Two Parts of the Federation – The Mainland & Taiwan. The Mainland governed by the CPC and it’s system. Taiwan by it’s Presidential System.

Yet Defence, Air Space, Foreign Policy and Trade all controlled by the larger Mainland

It would be the perfect solution – Taiwan would have their right to choose their leaders and Taiwan would be part of China

This isn’t my idea of course

Singaporean Minister Teo Chee Hean pondered on the same thing a few years ago.

I guarantee 140 nations will approve heartily

Textbook narcissist

A thing happened

Today, my family and I were driving through Starbucks and there was an enraged man sitting at a table by himself. He was yelling and very upset. He appeared unkept and homeless. We felt so sorry for this troubled man and knew he needed help. We called 911 and waited in the parking lot to make sure this man was treated humanely.

An officer appeared.

today
today

He calmly and quietly approached the gentleman. He pulled up a chair and sat across from him and calmly asked the upset man what was going on. The officer, eye to eye, down on the troubled man’s level, de-escalated the situation quickly. I was moved to tears at how the officer respected this man and made it clear that he was there to help him. These are the stories that should be in the news. This gentleman, deserves a pat on the back and the recognition of doing an excellent job!

My main purpose for reporting this is in hope that this officer receives recognition. His name is Officer Reese of the Garland Police dept. Please share!

DIY for Tequila

Please note that I am answering this question with a non joking and non sarcastic attitude.

A pro China US government is not a viable option. Supporting a US government and providing economic support to expand this influence is not cost-effective at all. It’s fully stupid.

Only arrogant leaders like American politicians would feel that such a large country can be infiltrated, controlled, and subverted without themselves being affected. You can only use the wrong ideology to make the other country fall, but after affecting hundreds of millions of people in the other country, you yourselves will also be infected.

This is also why the United States has long been hiring Chinese trolls to disrupt the agendas of the Chinese people and that’s wasting money.

However, even if the United States knows this and is facing financial difficulties, it will never stop doing so, because from the perspective of policy makers, all reasons that can consume national finances are appropriate because they can profit from it.

The reason for answering this question is simply to make ordinary Americans aware of their government’s wrongdoing. I find it interesting to see them face errors that cannot be corrected. You always have the right path to take, but you won’t choose because it’s not an easier way.

Ha ha ha ha

Do you know an English adage ”self praise is no praise at all”First US is not free at all 25% of worlds. Prisoners are Americans! 9 times per million compared to China! You Government thrall the entire internet and what you watch on telly to check on every America disclosed by Edward Snowden! And 99% don’t want either Trump or Biden but you are laden with them because of your undemocratic political system that is really chosen by a few rich and influential!

It is anything but great, the highest debtor nation on earth, highest deficits, warmongers and trouble makes everywhere, with s million homeless and living in tents throughout America, to tally dilapidated infrastructure and highly highly uncompetitive! Has not have a real growth since 1960 64 years ago.

Apricot Chicken Casserole

apricot chicken 4
apricot chicken 4

Ingredients

  • 6 to 8 chicken pieces (drumsticks or thighs)
  • 1 envelope dry onion soup mix
  • 1 small can apricot nectar
  • 2 or 3 carrots, chopped
  • 2 to 4 medium potatoes, sliced
  • Mushrooms, sliced
  • Garlic powder

Instructions

  1. Sprinkle onion soup mix over chicken pieces.
  2. Add vegetables and mushrooms.
  3. Pour apricot nectar over all, and sprinkle garlic powder over everything.
  4. Add small amount of water to casserole and bake at 350 degrees F until done, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Florida passes a law…

My neighbor is a big-shot lawyer. One night, his dog was outside my house. I didn’t know it was his dog and had to ask around. I was told it was “the lawyer’s dog.” I noticed that the dog was terribly skinny and, in general, just didn’t have the bounce in her step like most black labs do.

I left her at my house and knocked on the door. I told him I had his dog. He didn’t seem concerned. When it appeared he wasn’t going to come outside, I asked him if he expected me to deliver the dog to him. He got all huffy and said, “Fine!” His beautiful and very, very sweet wife and four little girls were thanking me but he was just pissed that I interrupted his “pizza and movie night with the family.” He begrudgingly followed me home.

I am a retired humane officer and still have a lot of influence at animal control. But I didn’t want to sound arrogant and threatening so I didn’t mention it. I just asked if the dog was okay as she seemed a little gaunt. He told me to mind my own business.

I asked him if the dog had been to see a vet lately and he said, “What’s with all the g-damn questions?” Since I had had this very same exchange many times in my career, I didn’t get mad. I just smiled and said I was concerned about the dog. He again told me to mind my own business. I said “Okay, well, if you’re not going to talk to me…” and trailed off.
The dog was less than enthusiastic to see him and he had to actually pick up the dog .

The next day, bright and early, two uniformed Animal Control officers knocked on his door, demanding to see the dog. He got a seven-day warning to get the dog to a vet or be fined. Seven days later they came back and were shown a letter from a vet that the lab had been seen and is now under treatment for a pancreatic disorder.

My neighbors asked me how I was so bold and stupid to make an enemy out of a big-shot lawyer.

  1. Right makes might. I had right on my side.
  2. I will never be afraid to speak out on behalf of a dog. In my career I had dealt with hardened criminal dog fighters and my anger gave me courage.
  3. I gave him the chance to talk to me, and I would have offered to take the dog to the vet since I know he and his wife are busy, but he shot me down so fast.
  4. My husband is a big-shot lawyer, too, but this guy doesn’t know that.

I called in a favor from my old colleagues and showed this guy that he didn’t intimidate me and that “Failure to render treatment to an animal in need” is a crime and not even a big-shot lawyer is above the law.

As real as it gets

 

Trapped in a crack house

It was with a colleague in the US.

We had a guy at my office who was married to a Japanese woman. They had just had their first baby, and the wife was staying at home going forward.

First, our overbearing colleague started to ask why they didn’t just get a nanny. Why didn’t his wife want to work?

Our overbearing co-worker hired a nanny, and offloaded all the things that parents usually do to the nanny. She wasn’t wealthy, but it seemed like she would rather work full-time than spend time with her children.

But that wasn’t the main issue. The new parents had taken the drastic step of *gasp* co-sleeping with their newborn.

He was 1/2 asleep one day by the copy machine when the overbearing woman got after him again. “You guys need a nanny. You’re sleep-deprived.”

“Don’t remind me.” He was trying to brush it off, but she wouldn’t let it go.

“I mean, if you’re not going to get a nanny and your wife wants to stay home with the kid, why can’t she take care of her without waking you up?”

“We share a bed.”

This was met with a blank stare.

“You know, co-sleeping.” He had told me before that he was nervous about it, but had read some research on how it helps infants regulate their breathing.

“Oh, my gawd! Are you crazy? Didn’t you hear about the couple who did that and the Dad rolled over and killed the baby?”

Sometimes you don’t know that you’ve crossed a line until it’s too late.

“No, but I heard about the couple that got a nanny who BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THEIR KIDS!”

WARNING: Never mess with a sleep-deprived new father.

I was 13 years old,

That time there were no smartphones in popularity. Nokia was the king of mobiles and keypad phones were in use. My dad used to have Nokia 7210.

Sometimes I used to play games in my dad’s mobile. One day, I was casually scrolling through his mobile. I didn’t know much about phones those days. I was curious to explore.

In curiosity I don’t know what I have clicked, Suddenly a text message has been received which shocked me-

“Dear customer, thanks for choosing our service. 198rs has been deducted from your balance.”

I was stunned. My body started shivering and it was like a heart attack for me. 10 years ago, 198 ruppees had more value as compared to now. I knew that I am fcuked up. I put the mobile and was surviving the attack.

After sometime, My dad came. He had to make a call. I was edging near death. He dialed number and got to hear this,

“Sorry your account doesn’t have enough balance to make call.”

My heartbeats almost stopped.

He : Gurmeet, come here!

I felt like Yamraj is calling me.

I went somehow because my legs weren’t supporting me to go near him.

He : What you did in mobile? Tell me!

Me : mmmm! I don’t know.

I started crying. He was angry.

He : Tell me, what the hell you did? Where’s balance?

After a minute,

He : Next time don’t dare to touch my mobile.

He said and went. I beat the death and got my life back. I was extremely scared and stressed, however he didn’t react much.

Que : What’s most panic inducing thing that can happen as teenager?

Ans : when first time parents suffer loss because of us. When first time we do something wrong and get caught. After this, they get used to losses so it doesn’t induce more panic next time.

I was at a convention out of town. Just before dinner, I received a call from my mom saying my dad’s appointment had confirmed what we had expected-stage 4 lung cancer. Doctors said 1 month. Of course I was in tears and beside myself. I went to the dinner with tears rolling down my face. I was sitting quietly just remembering all the good things. My district manager came up and asked what was wrong. I told her. Her exact words were…..get over it. This was the same woman who just had 4 months off because her sister got sick. As soon as we got back I handed in my resignation. I just felt that comment was completely heartless and I lost all respect for her.

We were in a restaurant with a group of my friends almost 20 years ago…

As we were waiting for our food, I saw the richest and probably most respected man in our town walk in. He was super well known and employed over 500 people at that time.

We started talking together about him and my friend said.

“You would never have the balls to go talk to him!”

I actually didn’t, and the whole idea of talking to someone on that level scared me to death. But, my friends kept telling me to go, and I just said, “Ok, ok, I’ll do it.”

He was sitting alone, waiting for his food, and I just walked up to him and told him how he has been an inspiration for all of us guys sitting at that table over there and how we respect his work.

He was super nice to me and told me to sit down with him. I asked for some advice from him, and that started our friendship. He became my mentor.

He gave me so much good advice and helped me to grow my company. It’s sad that he passed away 2 years ago; he was 59 when I met him. It’s crazy that he took me under his wing.

That was the best split-second decision I made.

Jail and Porn equivalents

This wasn’t said to me, but to my then 7-year-old daughter, who had, for the first 6 and a half years of her life, had people, especially grandmotherly women, gushing over her: “Oh, what a beautiful girl! Oh, how well-behaved! What lovely, silky blond hair! You’re so lucky to have her!” etc. While she wasn’t entirely comfortable with total strangers coming up to her to adore her, it was still nice of them, and who doesn’t like being complimented, right?

Then baby sister came along, and the compliments got shared; baby sister was also pretty, though much different in looks. Stiil good; she loved her baby sister and was quite proud of her.

One day, though, we were in line at the grocery store check-out, when this grandmotherly-looking old lady came up and started gushing about the baby (somewhere between 6 and 12 months old) and how beautiful her eyes were, and her hair, and how sweet she was, and started remarking to other people in the line about the beautiful baby, and asking saying things like “don’t you think so?” to which the others, wanting to be polite to this older woman, of course agreed.

What was so rude? She then turned to my also very beautiful and well-behaved 7-year-old daughter, and practically sang out, “Oh, aren’t you lucky to have such a beautiful sister! Your mother must be so proud of her!” after which she marched off to resume her shopping.

Though I’m reasonably sure it was meant with good intentions from a totally clueless person, that was definitely one of the rudest and cruelest things I’ve ever heard said to a child, at least by someone who had no idea how hurtful their words could be.

I know that ruder and intentionally meaner things are said to or about people every day, but what astounded me was that this woman could have said what she did with no thought as to how negatively her words might be heard and interpreted by a child.

Because the cordon sanitaire is a joke stateside. You have to ringfence the virus to break transmission.

New York is now worse hit than Wuhan. Have state borders been sealed?

If someone tests positive but has mild symptoms do you send the person home?

What if he is a renter who shares the space with others and gets kicked out?

What if they are adults in nuclear families?

What if they are homeless?

Where are the quarantine facilities?

Further, who ensures compliance with quarantine orders for those that test positive?

Relying on goodwill and personal responsibility contributed to a handful of individuals becoming responsible for more than half of Korea’s cases. That is 5,000!

Where and how effective is contact tracing when America solves only 60 percent of murders each year? Every missed contact can mean thousands of cases down the road.

America is not putting whole of nation and whole of government effort into fighting this. They are fighting each other and have an eye on the stock market. How do you have the best days in a century when 3 million lose their jobs in one week?

Me me me will kill you and me.

Where is us us us?

My favorite Viet street cook

"All natural resources on which economic development, influence and might depend are instruments of political struggle.

It is logical that they are used for political purposes, including geopolitical ones.

We saw this in the 1980s, when the United States put colossal pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, which were the main oil producers, bringing about a collapse in oil prices to $10 or even lower per barrel in the hope of reducing the Soviet Union’s foreign exchange earnings and hence its capacity to continue to develop and ensure its security.

At that time, we continued to compete with the United States and the West as a whole.

They achieved their goal.

The Soviet Union’s revenues plummeted, which was one of the causes, though not the main or only one, that led to its dissolution.

They put pressure on the oil market, used speculation for the fall, drew the Soviet Union into an arms race, and promoted 'democratic reforms' when our country was not prepared for them.

Taken together, this contributed to the fall of a great power.

Since then, the Americans have been using oil and oil prices as a weapon.

A relevant example is Iran, which had its oil exports banned and the channels of oil deliveries contrary to that illegal ban were blocked.

Today, oil sanctions against Iran have been lifted.

The latest example is Venezuela, which was the third largest oil supplier to the United States in 2019.

In 2022, the Americans adopted an oil embargo against it, allegedly in the struggle against the 'regime' of Nicolas Maduro, as they put it.

But later they faced the consequences of the OPEC and OPEC Plus efforts to stabilise the oil market based on the main economic factors and a balance of interests of producers, importers and transit countries.

Today, the Americans are playing new political games against Venezuela, offering it an agreement to resume oil exports to the United States in exchange for political concessions.

However, it is a fact that Washington is suffering the consequences of its own actions considering that a vast number of American oil refineries were equipped to process Venezuelan oil.

It is a combination of purely economic factors and a desire to take advantage of economic ties, in this instance, use oil as a weapon.

As for Russia, what is the oil price cap imposed on Russian oil by the Americans, which the West was pressured to adopt as well?

It is flagrant interference in the workings and principles of the free market, which the Americans have been promoting for decades.

They described the dollar not as an American currency but as a global element of interconnectivity between the global economy and finances.

The structure collapsed when they decided to use these instruments to inflict what they described as 'geopolitical defeat' on Russia.

It is obvious that nobody is happy about the use of these underhanded methods, although few people, especially in the West, dare to put their uneasiness into words.

The pinnacle of using hydrocarbons as a weapon was the explosion of the Nord Stream pipelines, which directly targeted Germany.

American analysts have admitted it, and many in Germany are openly saying this.

It is evidence of the current German government’s impotence and inability not just to think independently but to even protect its vital interests on which the prosperity and well-being of German citizens depend.

As a result of that subversive terrorist attack, businesses, faced with rising gas prices, are leaving Germany and other European countries, and relocating, for the most part, to the United States.

They have started to talk about the de-industrialisation of Europe.

A year ago, French Minister for the Economy and Finances Bruno Le Maire said in a public statement that businesses paid four times more for energy in Europe than in the United States. I believe the balance is approximately the same now.

It is a fact that the United States has created much more favourable conditions for businesses, including by approving credit subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act. Business is moving to the United States.

At the same time, immediately after blowing up the gas pipelines, Washington said that in the absence of Russian gas Europe needed to buy American LNG, even though it cost more and there was a lack of the necessary infrastructure, which was still to be built.

Four years ago, when Angela Merkel was chancellor and life was easier, the Americans attempted to convince Germany that it had no need for Nord Stream or Russian gas in general, that it could buy American LNG instead.

Angela Merkel argued that it would be more complicated and much more expensive.

The Americans agreed that it would cost more and suggested covering the difference with higher taxes.

After all, they said, you can tell your people that it is a good cause in the interests of peace and democracy throughout the world.

There are more examples of this kind."

Profile
Profile

—Answer by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to the question, “Do you agree that oil is an instrument of political manipulation? Can you provide more striking examples of this or arguments to the contrary?” during an interview for the documentary series ‘Oil’, Moscow, March 21, 2024.

See this right here?

1
1

That on the table is, or rather was, a helmet.

It belonged to Corporal Jason Dunham

of the US Marine Corps. While his Marine squad was trying to subdue an enemy combatant, the insurgent dropped a grenade among them. Dunham jumped on the grenade to save his comrades, placing his combat helmet directly over the grenade to reduce the blast.

You can see how that worked out for the helmet.

Surprisingly, Dunham was not immediately killed by the blast, but he was severely wounded. His injuries sent him into a coma, and he died eight days later.

main qimg 46c10c41c09ab2d7421e8094cbb3e087 lq
main qimg 46c10c41c09ab2d7421e8094cbb3e087 lq

Dunham was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his sacrifice.

So judging by real world experience, the answer to this question is no. Of course, if you are presented with a grenade, you want to put as much distance and protection between you and it as possible. If that includes a helmet, it’s better than nothing. But you cannot expect that it will save you.

If you’ve got a better option, take it.

Physical attacks are cheaper, easier and possibly less risky than electronic attacks.

The US-101 exit for the Google Headquarters in Mountain View is notoriously busy. It can take 15 minutes of sitting in traffic, and causes a great deal of stress to Googlers.

If your car ‘broke down’ in that junction thousands of people would be delayed in getting to work. Let’s say that the fully burdened cost of an engineer is $100 /hr, you might delay 2000 people getting to work by half an hour, costing Google $100k. (Some people might give up and turn around).

In addition, one of the reasons that people leave Google to work elsewhere is the traffic. A few engineers might quit. Hiring new engineers is expensive (I think Bob See has given the cost somewhere on this site, and it’s in the thousands of dollars), plus it takes time to ramp up at Google – you are not productive for at least a couple of months, and possibly up to six months. Let’s call that $100 * 8 hours * 60 days, that’s another 50k.

So, for the cost of the cheapest car you can find, that will actually start, and a couple of hours of your time, you have cost Google $150k. (You might need to add the price of travel and the time to get to Mountain View).

You could pull this stunt as often as you can get away with it, each time costing $150k.

That’s much easier than a botnet attack, or 10s of thousands of Gmail accounts.

Another advantage of this method is that you haven’t committed a very serious crime – the FBI aren’t going to come after you for hacking. You can probably get away with it at least once by being told to be more careful.

Comix 1
Comix 1

American Society of Magical Negroes is AWFUL – People Are SICK of Woke Hollywood

WTF? It’s an actual movie? Whoa!

A lot of men try very hard to not seem like creeps or pervs, whereas I’ve never heard of any woman making any similar effort.

For example, I am currently at the beach. Literally, I am sitting in a chair in the sand about 15 feet from the Atlantic Ocean. There are about 40 other people within eyesight on this beach, including a group of teen girls to the right of me who’ve been taking bikini selfies for about two hours. They’re hard to ignore, because they’re doing weird poses and giggling a lot.

To the left, there are more women in bikinis. They’re sunbathing.

So I’m making a point to keep my eyes on my laptop, the book I’m reading, or the ocean in front of me. I hesitate to look left or right, lest I get accused of being a creep.

But, there are also a lot of scantily-clad men out here too. The women around me seem to have no problem staring at these guys. Older women, younger women, it doesn’t matter. When a shirtless guy jogs by (it happens a lot… there’s a Marine base near here), some of these women are downright shameless in their gawking.

Imagine if a guy did that to a woman running by, especially if that woman was a generation younger than them. They’d be driven off the beach by an angry mob, accusing them of being a pervert.

Yesterday, I was sitting on the deck overlooking the ocean, using my binoculars to scan the horizon. I was looking for dolphins or boats or whatever I could see. But, as soon as a family with teenage girls showed up on the beach, I put the binoculars down. Seeing a dolphin isn’t worth the risk of being thought of as a possible creep.

Jia Qingguo (贾庆国)

What follows is a relatively wide-ranging interview with Jia Qingguo (贾庆国) discussing the prospects of cross-Strait relations, a potential Trump presidency and US-China ties more broadly. Jia has been a long-time foreign policy adviser in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and is the former Dean of Peking University’s School of International Studies. He has recently been outspokenly critical of the restrictions on Chinese scholars’ engagement with foreign counterparts. Among the highlights of this piece – his advocacy of “patience” in the Taiwan context so long as the incoming leadership does not pursue independence; his preference to see Biden re-elected rather than Trump (views among China’s establishment intellectuals continue to be divided); and his belief that there is still scope for alignment of US and Chinese interests on regional conflicts in Ukraine and the DPRK.
  1. Taiwan’s president-elect Lai Ching-te has his hands tied politically. The impact of his election on cross-Strait relations should be limited. China will continue to promote peaceful (re)unification “for some time to come”.
  2. Trump is “reckless”, has “outdated views” and lacks “basic moral principles”. He has shown that he is not the pragmatic businessman that many in China had hoped for back in 2016.
  3. His re-election would be particularly detrimental to China and could lead to “severe friction and confrontation” between Washington and Beijing. The prospect of his walking away from the US’s One-China Policy is real.
  4. A second Biden presidency would not prevent further tensions between the US and China, but it could help preserve the current trend of stabilizing and improving ties.
  5. Beijing should always keep its long-term interests in mind and avoid overreacting to provocations coming from the United States. Confrontation and tit-for-tat responses make little sense at a time when China is still more vulnerable than the US.
  6. There are still many areas in which the US and China can (and must) cooperate. For instance, defusing tensions on the Korean peninsula will only succeed if Beijing and Washington are prepared to join hands.

B̲o̲ston – B̲o̲ston (Full Album) 1976

Let’s hop into the GTO, crank it up loud, and roll up one.

I went to Walmart

“I went into Wal-Mart to grab three things. Fruit Loops, eggs & waffles. Healthy, I know. This woman was asking people for something and my goal was to bypass, get my things and go. She asked me to stop. I figured she was just asking for money and I already decided that I was going to politely let her know that I didn’t have any cash on me. I never carry cash. I listened to her. She had groceries in her cart and asked for help to buy food for her family. She proceeded to tell me that she turned her daughter in for dope, her 2-month-old grand baby was born addicted to crack and she has 6 grandchildren to take care of. I really felt for her. She was sobbing. See, I know stories like this to be FACT from working in an inner-city school and my husband working in a hospital. Babies are unfortunately born addicted all the time & responsibility of raising grandbabies does fall on the grandparents. She asked me if I would help her buy groceries.

I looked at what I had in my hands compared to what she had. She had shopped smart and had healthy food: bananas, bell peppers, meat, pancakes, etc. Practical things you would make meals with and feed children. I told her yes, go get diapers for the baby and meet me at the front. She sobbed, praised God and said hallelujah to the cashiers,etc. Yesterday, I turned 30, had my healthy family by my side, ate tons of crawfish and blew $20 at the casino for the heck of it. Well, I checked my humanity today. This woman has food to put on her table and even if she wasn’t telling the truth, I don’t even care in the least. She’s human, I’m human and today she helped me realize a few things and I hope that I helped her. She won’t have to worry for at least a little while about food. I didn’t expect this today but apparently I was called to it and was right where I needed to be.

The forgotten dresser

Cheese Steak Pizza

Cheese Steak Pizza
Cheese Steak Pizza

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 small onion, cut crosswise into thin slices, separated into rings
  • 1 small green or red bell pepper, cut into thin strips
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 (16 ounce, 12 inch diameter) package thick prebaked pizza crust
  • 2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  2. Brown ground beef in large nonstick skillet over medium heat 6 minutes.
  3. Add onion and bell pepper; continue cooking until beef is not pink and vegetables are crisp-tender, breaking beef up into small crumbles.
  4. Pour off drippings; season with salt and pepper.
  5. Place pizza crust on ungreased large baking sheet. Spoon beef mixture evenly on pizza crust; sprinkle with cheese.
  6. Bake at 400 degrees F for 8 to 10 minutes or until cheese is melted.
  7. Cut into 8 wedges.

Saddam’s bunker was designed to withstand a nuclear bomb.

It was built directly under his palace.

main qimg 8480ca32958b44dce9cbdd548c5c3ab6 lq
main qimg 8480ca32958b44dce9cbdd548c5c3ab6 lq

(source: Outlook Magazine)

Much like traditional concrete design, steel rods were run first, then concrete poured over them.

Only—the steel was thicker, and so was the concrete.

It was so powerful that if a Hiroshima bomb went off 250m away—the bunker would be fine.

And through both Iraq wars, the bunker stood strong and withheld all the onslaughts of US forces. In today’s dollars, it cost well over $100 million to build.

But—to the question:

It was built by a Munich, Germany born designer, Karl Esser. He comes from a long line of architects who have also designed military grade bunkers. He expresses no guilt in designing the bunker, stating that it wasn’t a weapon, merely the equivalent of a bomb shelter.

He actually met with Saddam Hussein several times and stated that if you met him (in the 1980’s), he looks like a tax collector, there is nothing special about him. But when he starts speaking—you realize that he is far more than a tax collector, and you are reminded of that by how tense everyone around him is. (Source: Saddam’s bunker can withstand nuke attack, says its designer. Bhaita, Saida)

Again—to the question:

Karl was chosen specifically by Hussein because of his experience. His grandmother designed Hitler’s bunker. The family trade had been passed down to him.

To usher in Communism?

Really? These folk don’t have a clue as to what they are talking about.

Yes, as a matter of fact, Shaquille O’Neal. Now to be honest, he wasn’t as famous at the time as he has become since, but he was well known locally. I was a homicide detective in Baton Rouge, Louisiana one Friday or Saturday night was driving on one of the public thoroughfares to go through LSU campus, when a small truck ran a stop sign in front of me on Highland Road, almost causing an accident. Even though I was I was in an unmarked car, I decided to pull it over to advise the driver to be more careful. Upon stopping the vehicle, the driver of the truck exited, and it took him a while to unfold himself out of it. He towered over me, but smiling, advised apologetically that he didn’t have his drivers He advised he did not have license on him, saying friendly enough, “but you know who I am” More statement than a question.

I decided to play ‘dumb’. “No, who are you?” I asked with a straight face. I was pretty sure it was Shaquille O’Neal, but I wanted him to tell me who he was. I honestly did not do not follow basketball, but everyone was talking about him (he was the star LSU basketball player at the time). I almost felt sorry for him As he looked a little Bit crestfallen that I apparently did not know who he was. He wasn’t asking for special favors or making demands, he innocently thought he was well known in town BY ALL due his Athletic prowess and notoriety. I smiled at him, and I said something to the effect that, ‘ I know who you are, but need your DOB and some proof. He found his insurance or registration with his name on it and I explained why I stopped him and told him to please be more careful. He was friendly and respectful during the entire encounter. I am very proud that he now works as a reserve law enforcement officer. He is much more than some guy who can play a game, he is obviously a still a class act.

Victoria Nuland: The making of a psychopath. Chapter 1,2 and 3.

Starting in the second grade, when my father lifted the absolute prohibition on fighting. He got tired of picking me up from the school nurse, or the hospital. Also tired of the wear and tear on my clothing.

The very next day, one of my usual tormentors hit me in the back of the head. The teacher just watched, as usual. So I picked up my desk and beat him unconscious. Took three blows.

I was sent to the office, of course. The principal said I was to be expelled. My father asked if the other boys who hit me had also been expelled. “well, no. They didn’t use a desk.”

“So, it’s okay for them to beat MY son bloody, as long as they don’t use the furniture? Is that it? Did you at least discipline the teacher who allowed this to go on?”

“Well, no. Boys will be boys…”

“Well, my boy is a boy, too. You have demonstrated that you will do nothing to prevent him from being beaten; so where’s the problem if he fights back?

Tell you what. I’m going to send the hospital bills and the bills for damaged clothes to my lawyer, and the school board. we’ll let them sort it out.”

And that was the last said of expelling me.

OMG funny

In my experience its easier if you don’t try. Couple of years ago a manager denied me several requests for Training, told me i was a waist of time. Few years latter my ceo inquired as to why i never made use of the company training system. So i told him. I told him about being denied and the waist of time comment, and how i did not even look at training anymore because of it.

That manager was demoted that Christmas, quit instead, then sent his layer to take a chunk out of my 401. The company successfully convinced him not to. But later they restricted my max contribution to the retirement account because of the incident.

And it all happened because i applied for training on how to handle an upset customer.

Second time was during an ataboy reward. Essentially i had a panic attack when that same ceo came to congratulate me. He was fired because, by procedure, when an employee freaks out the manager is supposed to walk away. Instead this ceo stayed around and calmed me down. The project manager 5feet away wrote the ceo up, and by the end of the week that ceo was gone. Only thing needed to make it all happen was a traumatic event in college to give me ptsd. “May God welcome you to his heavenly splendor Jerry. You will be missed and thank you.”

To get a manager fired do the following. Call a lawyer, get the lawyer to file a freedom of information. Aquire the company’s secret employment laws document. This will be the stack of papers that say among other things

1. A thong is ok for women to ware but brief’s are not ok for men to use.

2. An employee may be terminated for possession of pornography when: they are found to poses/refuse to submit to search and with a witness, or have a prior termination for and no witness. Or a manager successfully implants the audio album “innocent victim” on the employees phone.

3. Work place competition is permitted under these criteria. Or exceeds the bounds of acceptance under these criteria…

4. The employee was found holding a blade, even if found working with food in the kitchen.

5. Employees are permitted to use incontinence products but are subject to termination if they discard used products in the bathroom garbage bin. And by extension are not allowed to have extra diapers on company grounds.

Be warned if you do obtain these secret documents, most fortune 500 companys will respond by amending a new criteria. Usually the new criteria is specialized to target YOU and some thing YOU do. In this way even after you learn how to CAN anyone, you will not be bulletproof. HR is not stupid, they will fit you with a remote explosive collar.

But coming back to the original question, use what you learn then file a report on your manager for anything he is doing that violates those secret rules.

The underwear criteria was really surprising to me, then i got investigated for it one day.

Please let us know if you actually get someone canned for their underwear.

Final comments. The right reason to terminate a manager is when there replacement is both better than the current person, and when its better for the company. Any situation where you are involved in a non consensual passing of the torch will result in repercussions. If your manager is doing something you don’t like, ask them how you are supposed to respond. You will be surprised.

U.S IN TROUBLE! China Finally DESTROY U.S Companies

A man was stabbed, killed and thrown in a desolate pit.

The mother blamed victim’s brothers in law for this. Police arrested both of them but later cleared them off. No lead, no progress at all. Senior officers and Judge were not happy.

Four months passed.

Then a young and handsome officer got transferred in our police station. A few ongoing cases were given to him to investigate and complete, this blind murder incident was exclusively included as well.

I remember… It was his first day at work, he chose to handle this blind murder case first. I knew him personally because his elder brother is my friend, a constable as well. So this officer preferred using my room until he gets a suitable place to set up his desk and everything.

So… yea. First day at work. He summoned those two suspects (in laws) as he wished to question them. Those two individuals arrived in my office. There were four people in my room. Me, detective and those two.

He began throwing question at them and investigated. Questions after questions… and a bit of persuasion.

They confessed the murder in half an hour. I kid you not. They confessed the murder, showed the place where they hid the knives and explained the motive.

This young detective solved a murder case in 30 minutes on his first day.

Senior officers couldn’t praise him more. That previous detective was blown upon hearing this news. He was ordered to report to head quarters. A seasoned one. I am sure he was asked…

How the hell couldn’t you resolve this piece of cake investigation in four months. Did you intentionally spare the murderers.

I remember the sweat on his forehead when he returned. He was worried as this may lead to dismissal from service and then some, if proved that he favored the murderers in his reports.

And if that’s truth “he sold a murder” which is awful and atrocious.

Anyway…. it’s not my place to put verdict.

I don’t know if he did it or not.

What is rare is not common

In my office, there is a 26 year old married guy. He is an attendant and not earning much for leading a decent life in a metro city. Although, I am much above in post than him, I treat him as my friend.

So, his wife was about to give birth in a day or two yet he was not taking leave from the office. He told me that it is very close and could be today or tomorrow.

Then on the next day at 4 PM, he rushed towards me saying that wife is in labor and was taken to the hospital. I got furious and told him why he didn’t take leave that day. I quickly calmed down realizing his situation and offered to drop him. But to amazment, he refused.

I was speechless. He said he has some urgent work and only after finishing that he will go.

Next day he called me and said that he was blessed with a baby boy but he also said by the time he reached his wife had already given birth.

I demanded he explain this nonsense.

In a soft voice he explained that he needed to finish his duty till 5.30 pm otherwise his one day pay would be deducted.

Bitter truths:

  1. Money really is the most important thing because the lack of it is so painful.
  2. Our parents sacrifice so much but still sometimes we end up ignoring them.
  3. One cannot truly relate to the pain of others unless he is put in same position.
  4. Without education, a person is really on a path of lifelong struggle.

The Sopranos – Dick Barone – the king of garbage and Tony Soprano’s boss!

I was working the AT YOUR SERVICE counter at Macy’s during the holiday rush when a woman with husband in tow stepped in front of the customer I was waiting on, a quiet and endlessly patient young man, and demanded that I call her a manager and, almost as an afterthought, added that the person I summoned had better be white.

She said this loud enough for everyone in the cordoned line behind her to hear.

The young man I’d been waiting on was black, as was practically everyone else in line.

I leaned towards her and hissed —

You realize you’ve just given me license to tell you exactly what I think of you without the risk of getting fired…

But I’m not gonna do that.

What I AM going to do is tell you to go to the end of the line and wait for me to finish with all these other good people…and then I’ll call you a manager.

His name will be Akeem.

And he’s just gonna LOVE talkin’ to YOU.


She didn’t make it to the end of the line. Her long suffering husband literally dragged her out of the store.

And Akeem wasn’t actually my supervisor. He was responsible for the ground floor and I was mall level.

I lied about that part.

But he did enjoy the story when I told it to him later on.

Mother Goes Off On Woke School Board Over Graphic Books in Her Child’s Elementary School

There are many places that make this a very strange world. The Nazca Lines, crop circles, Easter Island, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, and so on. I thought I had read about them all, but this one was new to me.

The Band of Holes

In Pisco, Peru, stretching across the Cajamarquilla Plain are thousands of ancient holes that measure 6 feet (1.8 m) to 7 feet (2.1.m) deep and evenly spaced 3 feet (.9 m) apart. No one has any idea how these holes were formed. There are at least 5000 to 6000 depressions that run north and south for almost 2 miles. (3.2 k)

Who would dig all these holes? Why? How were they created? I’m imagining some poor sunburned guy with a spade saying, “Okay, 600 more to go then I’m stopping.”

It actually looks like some giant machine was travelling along this path. Was it a mining operation? What were these holes for?

Initially discovered by pilot Robert Shippee who took an aerial photo of them and published them in National Geographic, they are indeed strange. They date to around the 15th. century, they believe.

Truthfully, although there are many guesses, no one really knows who or what dug these holes and why.

Peru is a very strange place that’s for sure. Just read about Saqsaywaman, 12 Angled Stone, and Machu Picchu. Who built these places and how? Modern man would have a hell of a time reconstructing them. They might not be able to. I think we have forgotten the ways to do these stupendous feats. The ancients apparently knew them. We are now just learning, or relearning about moving rock through sound and wavelengths.

Here’s some examples from others that I thought were well done…

Default masterpiece best quality oil painting modern Oiran roy 3(1)
Default masterpiece best quality oil painting modern Oiran roy 3(1)

Default Create a stunning 8K ultrarealistic food photograph fe 2
Default Create a stunning 8K ultrarealistic food photograph fe 2

Default show Mark Antony leading in the battle of Actium in 31 0
Default show Mark Antony leading in the battle of Actium in 31 0

Default Ascension of Augustus to Power 1
Default Ascension of Augustus to Power 1

Default Capture the moment of triumph and despair as Octavians 2(1)
Default Capture the moment of triumph and despair as Octavians 2(1)

Default Capture the moment of triumph and despair as Octavians 2
Default Capture the moment of triumph and despair as Octavians 2

Default A candid photo of crazy old scientists arguing in a la 3
Default A candid photo of crazy old scientists arguing in a la 3

Default A candid photo of crazy old scientists arguing in a la 2
Default A candid photo of crazy old scientists arguing in a la 2

Default Capture the moment of triumph and despair as Octavians 1(1)
Default Capture the moment of triumph and despair as Octavians 1(1)

Default show a Octavian commanding 290 roman trireme ships 1
Default show a Octavian commanding 290 roman trireme ships 1

Leonardo Diffusion XL Sketchbook Style Sketch book hand drawn 2
Leonardo Diffusion XL Sketchbook Style Sketch book hand drawn 2

Default The man at the table raises his glass once more thanki 0
Default The man at the table raises his glass once more thanki 0

Default Capture the moment of triumph and despair as Octavians 1
Default Capture the moment of triumph and despair as Octavians 1

Default Telekinesis is a remarkable ability that allows indivi 1
Default Telekinesis is a remarkable ability that allows indivi 1

Default Imagine young Errol Flynn age 34 as a Court Dandy 15 2
Default Imagine young Errol Flynn age 34 as a Court Dandy 15 2

Default Professeur 1
Default Professeur 1

Default Bb 0
Default Bb 0

Default crea a una chica rubia que se parezca a una chica huma 3
Default crea a una chica rubia que se parezca a una chica huma 3

Default Simple Logo for barbershop Odin has a cool design hair 0
Default Simple Logo for barbershop Odin has a cool design hair 0

Default Create a Cat holding a alt coin Cripto 0
Default Create a Cat holding a alt coin Cripto 0

Default Bb 1
Default Bb 1

Default Again the waiter serves drinks to everyone except the 0
Default Again the waiter serves drinks to everyone except the 0

Default A candid photo of crazy old scientists arguing in a la 1
Default A candid photo of crazy old scientists arguing in a la 1

Default pisces zodiac sign golden metal reflecting a glowing s 0
Default pisces zodiac sign golden metal reflecting a glowing s 0

Default spaceship parts debris floating in the exosphere the b 0
Default spaceship parts debris floating in the exosphere the b 0

Default masterpiece best quality Anime14 modern Oiran bold neo 2
Default masterpiece best quality Anime14 modern Oiran bold neo 2

Default astronaut black cat floating in the stratosphere catal 0
Default astronaut black cat floating in the stratosphere catal 0

Default masterpiece highest creativity Leonardo Da Vinci in dy 6
Default masterpiece highest creativity Leonardo Da Vinci in dy 6

Default Uma guerreira japonesa com um drago tatuado em seu ros 2
Default Uma guerreira japonesa com um drago tatuado em seu ros 2

Default black cat who will attack you with fire woman 0
Default black cat who will attack you with fire woman 0

Default White Cat sitting on pillows on panoramic roof Istanbu 2
Default White Cat sitting on pillows on panoramic roof Istanbu 2

Default A corgi in a white shirt black vest and white fedora s 3
Default A corgi in a white shirt black vest and white fedora s 3

Default Beautiful Elf posing with freckles and glasses and lo 2
Default Beautiful Elf posing with freckles and glasses and lo 2

Default Bloodborne Dark Souls 3 Elden Ring ultra detailed g 1
Default Bloodborne Dark Souls 3 Elden Ring ultra detailed g 1

Default show men in the middle ages watching strange lights da 0
Default show men in the middle ages watching strange lights da 0

Default Brazilian woman with ears of a brazilian fox named lob 0
Default Brazilian woman with ears of a brazilian fox named lob 0

Default masterpiece best quality oil painting modern Oiran roy 3
Default masterpiece best quality oil painting modern Oiran roy 3

Leonardo Vision XL Imagine a powerful elegant animated charact 2
Leonardo Vision XL Imagine a powerful elegant animated charact 2

I find it remarkable that so many people think that the USA would overwhelm China in a war, the country that wrote the book on military strategy and how to defeat larger, more powerful opponents.

The US could not even win in Korea or Vietnam, what makes you think they would prevail against the much larger and powerful China?

First of all, the US would likely only defeat China in a conventional war assuming that China fought back using similar conventional means. Unlikely.

You have certainly seen all the news reports about Chinese hacking by their military? These sorts of things are warnings. They are warnings to the US that if you come after us we know where your vulnerabilities are. And so do the Russians. And any attack on the Chinese would also likely bring about a quick military alliance with the Russians as well.

A ground war against China (not to mention ANY war against China) would be the height of idiocy. China has 6X the number of people, compared to the US, who could be called into military service fairly quickly. And China is a HUGE country with lots of very difficult terrain to cover.

And given all the bullying and warfare that the US has engaged in since this new century began, do you really think that the Chinese, and Russian military, have not been actively preparing for the potential of such a scenario?

The US military can overwhelm most countries because they are much smaller and weaker. But taking on someone even close to our own size would expose weaknesses and vulnerabilities, both in the military and the US government, that neither wants the American people to know about or experience.

If the US wants to get itself into the biggest military quagmire in history, and destroy its economy, then yeah go ahead and try and go to war with China.

Ha, not horrible just really rather bizarre! My husbands cousin was getting married. He turned out to be a horrible person but thats another story. At the wedding we are sat at the cousins table along with a mutual cousin who is/was a well known pop star. He was absolutely lovely, I was sat next to him and obviously the pop star has been left at home for the day. During the speech the brides father announced he was here and made him get up for a round of applause. Honestly he looked like he wanted to die on the spot. The brides father then spent the next 10 minutes talking about the pop star cousin and forgetting the bride and groom.

On another note 2 aunties had basically taken over the ladies loo where they could have a full blown row. You went in and they were just stood there, daggers drawn in silence. As you left you could hear them start again.

Overall it was a wedding to remember for all the wrong reasons and the bride and groom lasted about 10 years.

Niger DESTROYS Victoria Nuland’s Plot to Return Africa to France w/ Ben Norton

Many of my colleagues have moved away from iPhones. But it has nearly nothing to do with the brand beating a US brand.

An iPhone used to be a prestige item. A status symbol. But over the last 2 years so many people in China own one that it is no longer a status symbol. Factory workers, office workers etc. So what is so special about an iPhone that makes someone want to spend twice as much for it. They can buy another brand of phone that does what an iPhone does, make a phone call? Yup Take selfies? Yup. Use We Chat? Yup. Surf the net? Yup.

So that is the problem is Apple was too successful selling so many phones in China that there is no prestige that is worth paying an extra $500 for it.

And keep in mind that when someone in China is buying a phone they are paying for it all up front. So it is an extra $500 out of pocket. It is not like in the US where you pay for the phone monthly as part of your phone plan. So it is a painless extra $10 a month to buy an iPhone. So a Chinese person really thinks about the value they are getting when they hand over their money.

Of course now the little extra push to go with a Chinese brand is the trade war. But as far as I can see no one is telling them or asking them to not buy American.

Personally I think if the government ever did ask that US companies would sell very very very little here. Be thankful the Chinese government is showing restraint.

Admiral Yamamoto, not General. No, it is almost certainly bogus as there is no known citation for this supposed quote. The words have sometimes been attributed to the Gordon Prange, a historian on the staff of Douglas MacArthur, but it is found nowhere in his writings either. The quote should be regarded as bogus until someone can cite when and where it originated.

Nor did Admiral Yamamoto ever say:

I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

That quote appears to be derived from the 1970 film Tora! Tora!, Tora! (great film). What he did say was:

A military man can scarcely pride himself on having smitten a sleeping enemy.

This is a reference regarding his disappointment over the bungled Japanese declaration of war which wasn’t delivered until a few hours after the attack on Pearl Harbour.

Cast-Iron Skillet Pizza

I would name this “Caprese Pizza.” It’s heavenly!

cast iron skillet pizza
cast iron skillet pizza

Prep: 10 min | Cook: 20 min | Yield: 2 (9 to 10 inch) pizzas

Ingredients

  • 1 pound store-bought pizza dough (room temperature)
  • 1 ripe tomato, thinly sliced
  • 1/4 pound fresh mozzarella cheese, diced
  • Coarse sea salt
  • 2 tablespoons Filippo Berio Extra Virgin Olive Oil
  • 1/2 cup shredded fresh basil

Instructions

  1. Heat well-oiled cast-iron or nonstick 10 or 12 inch frying pan over medium heat for 5 minutes.
  2. Divide dough in half; roll one half into round 1 inch smaller than diameter of pan.
  3. Cook dough in hot pan until dough begins to rise and bottom starts to brown. Using metal spatula, turn carefully. Layer half the tomato slices over dough; scatter half the mozzarella over top. Lower heat to medium-low; cook until mozzarella melts.
  4. Using metal spatula, transfer pizza to cutting board. Sprinkle with salt; drizzle with half the olive oil.
  5. Cut into wedges; sprinkle half the basil over top.
  6. Repeat with remaining ingredients.

Imagine it from the top performer’s point of view.

They might be getting offers from other companies they don’t discuss with you.

If they’re performing better than everyone else and don’t perceive themselves as having erred (at least not enough for a write up) they’re left searching for reasons you may have written them up. It’s inevitable that they will arrive at political or financial motives.

Typically having a write up interferes with career advancement, raises, and bonuses.

Perhaps they thought you were trying to put them back on their heels to make them more controllable. Top performers don’t need to be controlled. Maybe the very act of writing them up was a final straw in proving the incompetence of your leadership to them.

If their work created opportunities or revenues perhaps they saw a write up as a way of denying or usurping those. Top salespeople get this all the time. It’s a typical ruse for an unscrupulous leadership team to mess with a salesperson’s compensation or territory when they confront how much money they may pay in commissions to one person. When they think they can close the book of business themselves these asshats will do things to marginalize or force out the salesperson to capture more revenue and take credit for the sale “in spite of” the salesperson’s supposed shortcomings.

If the company is already having some problems this kind of thing is a death knell. It’s like the drunk, losing poker player trying to scare a guy with a stack of chips into folding by going all-in with an obvious bluff. The experienced people see that and think, “Well, that’s the end of that.”

This type of thing is doubly bad because it simultaneously signals bad faith and incompetence. It inspires disgust and righteous anger in people who work diligently and honestly.

In general, the more honest and competent a person is, the more attuned they are to the dishonesty and incompetence of others. Since they are typically getting things done at a faster pace they end up encountering things that interfere with getting things done more often. They encounter and avoid the temptation to take dishonest shortcuts and are pressured to do so by their managers more often.

This whole time other companies are sending messages about the greener grass across the street.

Does any of this feel like it applies to you?

Many years ago I worked at a Clinical Trials company. In the space of 18 months, two of the female staff had needed extended sick leave. I don’t know the exact nature of the illness these women had. I worked more closely with one of the women so, I know that she had a miscarriage and possibly depression afterward. I believe the other women had some long-standing health problems that resulted in a hysterectomy.

One of the Managing Directors sent a fairly rambling memo about the inconvenience, to the company, of key staff being absent for long periods. He was proposing to take a gynaecological history of female staff in order to assess their ‘availabilty’ for certain roles in the company. Apparently, women’s plumbing is a bit different and inconveniently complex …. (In fairness, I should point out that he was a consultant gynaecologist).

As a Staff Representative, I was asked to forward a unanimous response on behalf of the female staff. The response was just two words and you know which two words.

He received his reply within an hour of sending his memo and the subject was never mentioned again.

OMG. This takes me back. We used to jam to this non-stop. First time I have listened to the full album in about fifty years. No shit!

This was more than boneheaded!!!!!!!!!! This photo is of me as a MP about to go out on a jeep patrol in Danang Vietnam in 1970.

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main qimg 3482d8aea896a2726c0c06652f8c96b5

When we changed the watch, the watch before us gave us their 45 caliber pistol. They were supposed to remove the magazine, jack the weapon back and then shoot down at some sand or earth area to make sure no round was in it. The guy I had on one watch switch, took his weapon out did not take the magazine out, jacked it back (which loaded the chamber) and then shot it down about 2 inches from my toes. We were both on a concrete walkway going into our police office. What saved my life most likely was a rubber mat about 15 feet long on the sidewalk. The round went through the rubber mat and when it ricocheted on the concrete, the bullet slid about 12 feet under the mat between my legs behind me instead of going up into me. What followed was a huge flurry of of expletives to him from myself and the men around me. I could have died from friendly fire!

Before going to China, I used to hear a lot from my Mainland Chinese friends in Australia how the Chinese are so selfish and cunning. They told me to be careful when buying something because I could get cheated, that the Chinese won’t do me any favor when I ask for one and if I ask somebody the direction they might point into a wrong direction. I heard the Shaghainese are arrogant, the Henanese are very bad, the Hubei-ese are cheaters, the North-Easterners are rough and so on so forth. Of course, they warned me on good will, and I thanked them for that.

Yet, when I was actually in China, I found that virtually all what they told me are wrong. I’ve never met any arrogant Shanghainese, Hubei-ese cheater, bad Henanese or rough North-Easterner (though many North-Easterners do talk loudly). When I had no umbrella on a rainy day, someone gave me an umbrella; when I took a bus but had no coin, someone gave me coins and when I forgot my belonging in a restaurant, someone told me that. Of course, there must be bad people in China as well, but not as many as I imagined before going there based on what those Chinese friends warned me.

EELF Collection

This is… well… not what you would think. I ran across this, and it’s… well… you just have to watch it.

Kirby’s financial spree

Very much so. And it’s confirmed by both of the actors.

main qimg 3c7774ed0bf6fb6182fcb44dbc906d65 lq
main qimg 3c7774ed0bf6fb6182fcb44dbc906d65 lq

They first met in the late 1970s at the Golden Globes. Sly was nominated for Best Actor for Rocky. Arnold was nominated for New Star of the Year for his role in Stay Hungry.

Arnold walked away with a statue. Sly didn’t. And Arnold, in good competitive fashion (as observed in his Pumping Iron documentary), gave Sly shit for not winning in his category. He laughed at him. Sly then threw a vase of flowers across the room towards Arnold. He says that from that moment on through the 1980s and early 1990s, these two box office competitors had a true rivalry.

By the mid-1980s, they were both the top action stars in the world. They were constantly trying to outdo one another.

Who could make the bigger movie? Who could earn more at the box office?

Arnold arguably won the overall battle in that respect. He even managed to outwit Sly and trick him into making a terrible movie.

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main qimg d179469d4e5c5d2aa901e6fcb0f732b1 lq

Arnold had read the script for this movie first. It was terrible. He knew it. But he wanted to see if he could trick Sly into doing it.

Arnold told the story in a Q/A:

“So I went in – this was during our war – I said to myself, I’m going to leak out that I have tremendous interest. I know the way it works in Hollywood. I would then ask for a lot of money. So then they’d say, ‘Let’s go give it to Sly. Maybe we can get him for cheaper.’ So they told Sly, ‘Schwarzenegger’s interested. Here’s the press clippings. He’s talked about that. If you want to grab that one away from him, that is available.’ And he went for it! He totally went for it. A week later, I heard about it, ‘Sly is signing now to do this movie.’ And I said, [pumps fist] ‘Yes!'”

Sly has since confirmed this story as well.

While Sly had franchises like Rocky and Rambo, Arnold had more overall original hits like The Terminator, Commando, Predator, The Running Man, etc. Sly tried to keep up with the likes of movies like Cobra, Tango and Cash, and Over the Top, but they never really did that well compared to Arnold’s movies at the time.

Once both of their action careers started to falter in the mid-1990s, their competitiveness went down.

They are now very close friends. They’ve co-starred in movies together (Escape Plan, The Expendables franchise). They hang out together.

Here they are together on a Christmas Day.

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main qimg d1e99701fabc0e43ccd5084267ed4d89 lq

Sly says that while he hated Arnold back in the day, he’s indebted to him because they helped each other work harder in their prime.

They came into the business at the same time from different angles. They had different strengths and weaknesses. Sly was often an auteur. Arnold relied on other writers and directors. Sly was nominated for writing and acting Oscars. Arnold has never received a nomination or any real acclaim for his acting. But Arnold had a slight edge over Sly when it came to the box office.

Sly’s movies have made $3,968,669,509.

Arnold’s movies have made $4,110,295,038.

It was a fun and very real rivalry. If you watch Pumping Iron, you’ll understand how Arnold would get under the skin of his competition. He did the same thing to Sly that he did to Lou Ferrigno.

And now they’re the best of friends. More like family.

Honest and diplomatic

I’ll do you one better:

I once pulled a guy over for a burned-out tail light (something I suspected the driver is likely to have no idea about). I intended to stop him just to make him aware of the defective light, that’s it.

When I got to the window he was already blowing up at me, accusing me of racial profiling. (This was a bit ridiculous because it is actually very difficult for a police officer working at night to be able to RELIABLY identify the race, sex, (certainly not gender), or even species of occupants of cars that drive by them at night, especially when the car’s windows are tinted, and ESPECIALLY when they’re coming at you going the other way, headlights can be a little blinding. I could not have known that he and his buddies were black (until I got up to his window and he rolled it down) for the same reason that, because of the lighting I was using, nobody in that car could tell that I AM BLACK! He was very loud and disrespectful and only minimally cooperative. Truthfully, I was a bit put off by his attitude.

But his antics were more excessive than what I think would be natural if he was sincerely feeling that way; he was putting on a show maybe just for his buddies. Or maybe he WAS someone who is stopped by officers often or has had a history of bad exchanges with police officers. Or maybe he was the type of guy who just liked having reasons to complain and be loud and angry about how s**tty his day has been. Maybe he was expecting automatically to be ticketed so he was already owning that reality & reacting to it proactively. I had no idea. I ran his license and did find a bit of ticket-history but nothing terrible.

He was at me again when I arrived back at his window, telling me how “racist” I am, and how the whole thing was bulls**t. I had to wait for him to run out of things to say. Periodically, I asked him, “are you done?” Eventually, he answered my question, with a very agitated, “Yeah, I’m done!” So I said, “Great, my turn to talk now.”

I explained to him that the reason for the stop was for a defective tail light. It’s an $18 fix at O’Reilly Auto Parts & they’ll install the fresh bulb on the spot for free. But you came at me with all this racial profiling business that has nothing to do with a tail light, that IS burned out, and for some reason, it’s like you WANT me to give you a $142 dollar ticket. I had no intention of writing a ticket, and you’re not going to bait me into writing you one because I think that might delay your being able to get the damn light fixed, right? He was silent and staring at me, looking a little confused. I continued: As an aside, I think you should know that just because my neoprene patrol gloves are black doesn’t mean that the skin underneath isn’t too— by then I had leaned forward and was shining my light towards my own face a little so he could see my face and tightly trimmed afro- and I ended with “brotha!” I don’t think I’m the “ignorant” one here. I handed him back his license and said, “get your light fixed or you might get pulled over.” He stuck his head out the window and called out to me, “That’s it?” And I replied, a bit sarcastically, “I understand people don’t always get what they want but that’s just how life is sometimes. You’re going to have to settle for the warning today.” I made it a point to drive away first (which was not usual). I saw in my rearview mirror a figure get out of the driver’s seat and move to rear of the car, probably checking the tail light.

In the many years that have elapsed since that night, I’ve pondered what his TONE in his last question to me meant, “That’s it?” I think it was sincere surprise; oh, how I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall in that car; it is possible he never got a warning before in his life— maybe because of his prejudice.

Justification

Bite-Size Pizzas

muffin pizzas
muffin pizzas

Ingredients

  • 4 English muffins, halved
  • 1 cup pizza sauce
  • 1/2 cup ham, extra lean, chopped
  • 1/3 cup onions, finely chopped
  • 1 1/2 cups mozzarella cheese, shredded
  • 1/4 cup bell pepper, chopped
  • 1/3 cup mushrooms, sliced
  • 1/8 cup black olives, sliced

Instructions

  1. Split the muffins in half and toast them in the toaster.
  2. Spread the pizza sauce on both halves of the muffins.
  3. Place remaining toppings evenly onto pizzas, saving shredded cheese for last.
  4. Bake at 350 degrees F for approximately 10 minutes or until cheese has melted.
  5. Remove from oven, and cut each muffin half into four pieces.
  6. Serve as appetizers or snacks.
  1. Free yourself from society’s advice, most of them have no idea of what they’re doing.
  2. Stay silent. Not everything needs to be said.
  3. Silence is better than unnecessary drama.
  4. If you continue waiting for the “right time ”, you’ll waste your whole life and nothing will happen.
  5. The family you create is more important than the family you come from.
  6. You’ll be 10x happier if you forgive your parents and stop blaming them.
  7. No one will ever come save you. Your life is 100% your responsibility.
  8. Your inner circle should be more focused on money, success, and starting a family.
  9. You don’t need 100 self-help books. All you need is actions and self-discipline.
  10. Your current job doesn’t care about you. They only pay you enough to kill your dreams.

I’m a stripper

My friend went to Florida on a family holiday, taking his daughter’s friend along – the girls were maybe 15 at the time.

At their hotel, the daughter’s friend – I’ll call her Charlie – backed into someone serving drinks, and they both fell in the pool. The staff said they’d have to pay for laundry etc, which was mad enough – it was a playful accident, if you like – but the cost added to their bill was $230, and they were told they wouldn’t get their passports back until the bill was settled.

Charlie, embarrassed, rang her dad, to ask for some extra money.

An hour or so later, Charlie’s ‘uncle’ turned up at the hotel and appeared beside the pool, where my friend’s group were relaxing, with the hotel manager. The manager was desperately apologetic, sweat pouring off him; he told them to forget the accident, from then on the drinks were all free, anything they wanted to make their stay perfect, room upgrades, free trips/excursions, meals on the house, please let him know – only please, please, tell the uncle that the problem was solved and they were happy.

The uncle – not a big man, just really quiet – came back on the day of checkout, which the manager handled personally, (this in a HUGE hotel), just stood and watched, then gave the manager a nod, gave Charlie a hug, and left.

This was twenty years ago – my friend never found out what Charlie’s family business was.

Truth after truth…

There’s a burger place by where I grew up that I often went to in High School. The owner made the burgers and his son took the orders. Both were vets, and they only charge current and past members of the military what they pay for in ingredients.

One day, in front of me in line was a gentleman in uniform. I have to assume there was plenty wrong with him, as the son at the counter rang him up for the normal price. The conversation went something like this (apologies for inaccurate terminology):

“Hey what about the military discount?”

“Yeah we only give that to members of the military…it’s in the name.”

“The f*ck are you talking about? I served for 6 years.”

“Oh really? What unit?”

*proceeds to give him Marine unit*

“Really? Anyone ever tell you when you get wounded twice you don’t actually get two separate purple hearts? And you definitely don’t put them on your ACUs, which Marines don’t even wear.”

The guy stormed out. I told him if they don’t put pickles on it I’ll just eat his order.

Scam WOW

Australia is a US dog nation. It allows the US to lord over them. They were similar native slaughterers and genocides their natives to steal their land. The were women and Children murderers in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq. They show their worth as a dog by slitting the throats of 14 years old in Afghanistan! Anstralia will bankrupt themselves just to be a good dog of the U.S. Wang should not waste his time!

Secret measuring tool

Text to image play time

Here’s some more of my experiments.

moonrise 10
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moonrise 2
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moonrise 1
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How America Became So Stupid

Korean style

Saying things AS THEY ARE

More adventures in text to picture

Here is a fake girl…

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Clueless in the USA

I was working for a US consultancy firm in London.

They were going to announce who made head of department. It was between two very solid candidates. All managing consultants sat in the room, two were dialled in through the phone. One of the two candidates was on this line. The other sat with us. Jeanne and Beatrice.

Our boss came in, and did his usual “how much money we made, how is everyone doing” talk.

He then went on to discuss promotions.

Jeanne (lady on the phone) made head of department.

Beatrice, who was in the room, obviously felt defeated. She stood up, said “I quit”, left towards the door and walked to her desk.

Our boss ran after her.

We were all shocked, surprised.

We hear swearing, cursing, a loud “fuck off” and she left the building wih her belongings.

Our boss came back.

“Guess Beatrice didn’t like the news”

And went on like nothing happened. Little did he know Beatrice and Jeanne hated each other. We knew that, but that is because we all worked with both.

We tried contacting her, she didn’t reply, only years later. She had retired from this profession and decided to start a family with her husband.

Apparently this moment was the final nail in the coffin.

She had worked for this moment for years, was sick and tired of corporate politics, and wanted to leave with her head held high. She managed to pull that off.

Who can say they left a job, right at a pivotal moment in their life, and are dead center able to make a decision for the next part of their life. Not many can say that.

No time wasted.

She now has two rebellious daughters and one little boy. I have seen their photos. Full time mum. Hard to believe they would not be here if she got the job.

Women NEED men! Are they finally realizing it now that consequences are happening?

BLT Pizza

BLT Pizza
BLT Pizza

Ingredients

My Favorite Pizza Crust

  • 1 cup water
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons Italian seasoning
  • 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 3 cups bread flour
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons yeast

Topping

  • 1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella
  • 1/2 cup crumbled, crisp bacon
  • 1 to 2 tomatoes, sliced
  • 1 1/2 cups chopped romaine lettuce
  • 2 tablespoons mayo

Instructions

Crust

  1. Place in bread machine-dough cycle. After cycle is finished, place in greased bowl (olive oil), cover, let rise another 30 minutes.
  2. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  3. Bake about 7 minutes BEFORE adding ingredients or it will be soggy. Use this for any pizza.
  4. Add ingredients and bake 10 to 15 minutes more.

Topping

  1. Brush pizza crust with olive oil, spread 3/4 cup cheese over oiled surface.
  2. Sprinkle bacon, then sliced tomatoes.
  3. Sprinkle rest of the cheese.
  4. Bake until bubbly, 10 to 15 minutes.
  5. Mix mayo with lettuce and spread over pizza.
  6. Serve immediately.

Notes

I used turkey bacon, red and yellow tomatoes and regular shredded lettuce. Turned out awesome!

I was downstairs in the small canteen having a cup of coffee with the lab manager and a few others.

Work officially started at 740 and I had been in the building since 720.

Went upstairs at about 745 and was accosted by my boss’ boss for being late.

I explained that I had been in the canteen talking to the lab manager about work related issues, etc., which was partially true.

Now at this point I had set the overtime record. 4 hours every day Monday to Thursday every week for months for various projects. I wasn’t paid for it but could take time off in lieu.

Well guess what happened to the overtime I was so diligently accruing? No Monday to Thursday 4 hour romps on the analysers. Project work ground to a halt.

I eventually received a grumbling apology and that he realised I was doing all this extra work, etc., but my boss had to explain this to him and gouge out the apology from him.

My father and his siblings, all used to hard farming and farm work, all went to war after Pearl Harbor. Uncle Paul, who probably never imagined anyone wasting time or energy lifting weights, was built like Tarzan. He went to war as a US Marine and survived Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Tinian, where he was finally hit bad enough to get hospitalized.

Now we recognize it as PTSD, but in the aftermath of WW2, it was just said that Paul came back different. When he WOULD talk, it was obvious that the war had been something he was comfortable doing, if that makes any sense.

Quiet, shy, never settling down, working hard, minding his own business, etc. He stayed in great shape, in his 50s, he could put my 12 year old nephew on his shoulders and do a ONE legged deep knee bend.

My mother found him a union job near us, something with benefits and a little retirement. He was out drinking with his much younger coworkers in a neighborhood establishment, enjoying time in his quiet shy way. A local, much younger, was arguing with his female companion and made his first mistake. He slapped or punched the young woman in front of my Uncle Paul. Quiet, shy Paul got up and politely but pointedly explained to the young man, a local bully as it turned out, that ‘you shouldn’t hit a woman’. The bully then made his second mistake and attacked Paul. I expect he felt he could handle this ‘old man’, but instead found himself in the hands of a man whom, still in excellent shape, had thrived as a combat marine in some of the bloodiest battles of WW2. It took only seconds and the man was on the floor and willing to listen to any other suggestions about life Paul was willing to offer. According to one of his shocked coworkers, one who reported to us, Uncle Paul came back to their table and downplayed the whole affair, back to being quiet, shy, Paul.

He lived into his eighties, changed by combat. Thank God for their generation.

Big Companies Are Lying About Layoffs (and What You Should Do)

The question has stated it clear: “follow the Washington order”.

Why other countries have to follow Washington’s order?

ASEAN countries are independent countries, they have their own rights to do decisions, “Washington’s order” is a violation to their sovereignty.

Philippines’ former president Aquino III was pro-America, he followed Washington’s order to challenge China on SCS and sued China on an international arbitual court. However, this arbitual court has no jurisdiction on the issue (PCA is a non-official platform, not a authorized organzation under UN), and China ignored this case.

Then, to show the support to Philippines, USA’s 7th fleet sailed to SCS to deter China. China and USA had a close-to-fire conflict in SCS in 2016, the result was American aricraft carrier cambat groups stepped back, and the commander, Harry Harris, was resigned and repositioned as an ambassidor to Korea.

After that, Philippines’ new president Duterte changed stance to frozen the disputes.

When the present president Marcoz Jr. got elected in 2022, his first visit was to China, which was interpreted as continuing his father (Marcoz, who established official diplomatic relation with mainland China) and his predecessor Durterte’s route to strengthen relationship with China.

But two months later, after he visited USA, Marcoz Jr. had changed stance and began to challenge China on SCS affairs.

So, a possible explanation is, Marcoz Jr. had something in America’s grasp, and this something threatened his life, no matter politically or physically.

ASEAN politicians see this very clear, their smart choice is not to side with any side.

When I was 25 I moved to Ohio to accept a entry level management position with the company I had been with for less than a year as a sales rep. It was a national company with over 400 reps nationally so I was very excited. After moving and less then six months into my new management position the company filed bankruptcy and laid off all the employees.

After a couple of weeks of interviewing I was offered a job with a small, local but well established company as a sales rep in a new “Word Processors” (this was 1981) sales division. After less then 3 months in the position the owner a man in his mid-sixties called me into his office and told me was very impressed with my sales but also how I had offered to help other new hired that has started when I did. He told he that his son who was an attorney and general counsel for the company was suppose to start taking over more control of the company as he was getting older and wanted to slow down. His son had informed him he was no longer interested and heading the company and wanted just to concentrate on law and offered to promote me to Exec V.P. and teach me the administrative and operational sides of the business in hopes that in the near future I might be interested in running the business. Fives years later when the owner decided to retire I put together a group of senior employees and acquired the company and continues as CEO for another five years.

My mom did. I helped.

This is a good many years ago now,

The family apartment block has an underground parking and each apartment gets one space.

Well we didn’t have a car for a while but we used the space to keep …parts of cars and other stuff.

Point is, it was our space, we paid for it.

Well the neighbor upstairs decided to use our space as their own. They owned the adjacent spot and would park sloppily over into our line and then just full on started parkng their second vehicle on it as well.

It was annoying , rude and inconvenient. On more than one occasion we would go on family trips and rent a vehicle but have nowhere to park when we got back and so on.

My mom left them notes (Which i would write. Very polite ones) informing them that this was not ok and to please refrain from trespassing.

No result.

We painted new lines on the floor, clearly delimiting the space.

No result.

we painted our side of the walls with big NO PARKING letters and our lot number.

No result.

We sent them a letter directly. Never managed to see them face to face till another incident years later.

No result.

complained to the building management.

No result.

complained to the police.

They said it was a building problem. no result.

Now my mom is a peace loving sweet lady with a que sera sera kinda attitude to life.

She is also Spanish, I’m guessing nobody took her seriously cause of the accent and poor language skills (this was in Paris , France)

Well one day she went to the parking again and there was that damn car AGAIN.

She lost it. Fuming and cursing in pure Madrileño she went home and picked up a couple cans of either PVC or Polyurethane glue, heavy duty stuff we were using for some renovation/DIY at home and a block of printer paper.

She looked at me and said “esto se termina hoy” and we went to the car.

She poured the entire contents of that industrial level glue all over each window which we then papered up. Front, back and sides. There was NO way a driver could drive that vehicle using the windshield and each one would have to be replaced.

We got a call from the police some days later about some vandalism, my mom said she didn’t speak French but that it seemed like it was a “building problem”.

We never had a single parking issue there again, its been over 25 years now.

Great 4 hours or so of background noise to help relax you. Or not.

Why isn’t anyone noticing?

It is precisely because they have two different life experiences of living in China and living abroad that they understand that the American-style democratic system is the real dictatorship, but the “people are the masters of the country” advocated by the Chinese government is the real democracy system.

Some new immigrants lie to please the United States. In the United States, not only is lying an inalienable right (the freedom to lie), but hypocrisy is a virtue. 😂

Don’t look at the American media talking about “China” all day long. In fact, most Americans know nothing about China. They don’t even know where China is.

Most Americans have never left the United States. Many Americans don’t even have passports. Even if they have passports, they will only go to Canada and Cancun at most. However, the number of Chinese citizens traveling abroad reached 155 million in 2019.

For example, when Trump visited India, Modi confided to him his concerns about China’s border policies. Trump was very strange and said, “India and China are not bordering each other, so what are you worried about?”

When you meet someone new and they start talking about a topic you know everything about, let them finish.

Don’t hijack the conversation, just because you can. Yes, it’s great that they care about the same stuff you do. Yes, you can contribute a lot here.

But that doesn’t mean they might not know a thing or two you don’t.


Scenario 1: Boy meets girl.

Girl: I actually know quite a bit about cars. My favorite is the 997 Porsche Turbo S, that was a great model…

Boy cuts her off: …yeah totally, I love that car, man, 530 hp, 700 Nm, and geez, the launch time, 3.3 seconds!

Girl: Mmhmm! *nods politely but dies a bit inside*


Scenario 2: Boy meets girl.

Girl: I actually know quite a bit about cars. My favorite is the 997 Porsche Turbo S, that was a great model…

*Boy draws breath, but then just closes his mouth*

Girl: …not only because of the insane hp and torque, but also because it was their fastest production car ever! Porsche claimed its 0–60 time to be 3.3 seconds in the brochure, but most magazines actually measured it with a 2.6.

Oh and I just love that test on Top Gear where they pit the convertible against a VW Beetle, falling from the sky. That’s one of the funniest “races” I’ve ever seen:

Boy:

Spits out, and coughs.

Talking is easy. Listening is a virtue.

Every single person you’ll ever meet knows something you don’t.

Play dumb and you might find: in a way, we all still are.

This is absolutely stunning and worth your time to watch.

My friend Tucker just got clean three months ago. It is so awesome to watch him blossom into someone so beautiful, that it brings tears to my eyes.

Tucker does this thing when he talks. It’s this slow, drawn, half-country, half-ghetto — all man thing that just makes me laugh and smile.

Tucker can’t see how beautiful he is and all the wonderful things that await him if he can just hang on for a minute, or a day, or a year.

Today I ran out of cigarettes at work. I asked Tucker if I could have one of his. Tucker more than obliged and handed me his all but half-pack and said: “Here you go, you can have the rest.”

Tucker is so generous in recovery. Tucker is willing to give everyone — everything he has.

My first thought was how awesome that was. I get eight smokes for the price of — n o n e. And then I saw it. I saw myself. I got angry.

Tucker is so willing to give everything away. I was him, or maybe Tucker is me.

The saddest case of addiction that I’ve ever seen is the case where the addict finally gets clean and is willing to give everything away — and people take it.

It may sound insignificant, but I assure you it’s not.

Addicts, like myself, are so used to having nothing. The moment we have something, even an almost half-pack of smokes, we’re willing to give it away.

It’s sad. It hurts me to think of why an addict is so willing to give so much of themselves in early recovery.

I want to be normal. I want you to like me. I want your love and your friendship.

I just want to be normal.

I don’t get high.

Now I don’t fit in with the people that still get high and I feel like I’ll never fit in with you.

Leon

There was a coworker back in the early 90′s who I thought was your stereotypical red-neck trailer trash kinda girl. She was from Alabama, and spoke with a heavy southern accent.

One time there was a bunch of us who went out after work on a Friday night. That night, we just happened to be all white. It was a normal evening. No heavy drinking, just idle chat. A couple guys started making racial comments about a black couple that walked in. Stuff like, “they don’t serve fried chicken here” & “bet they ask for water melon”. One even said something about how nice it was before they allowed colored people in places like this.

The red-neck girl spoke up rather loudly and said (and I’m paraphrasing here since I don’t remember word-for-word), “Hey, what’s your problem? Those are PEOPLE you’re talking about. PEOPLE! Racism is WRONG! WRONG! Shut up!”

She stared at them for a moment and went back to sipping her diet Coke. The guys downed their drinks and left. I smiled at her, and things returned to normal.

Except my respect for her grew exponentially. And, ironically, I got a lesson on prejudice.

It just hit her hard.

China is at war right now.

China has been fighting a war with the United States since 2008.

It is an under-reported war. The Western media does NOT report on it. Instead, they produce “news” and describe it as something else.

Intentional Misreporting.

  • An American “stealth” submarine “accidentally” slams into an uncharted undersea mountain.
  • One hundred Space-X satellites tumble to the ground because of a freak solar flare.
  • The “pro-democracy” movement in HK fizzed out and died for no reason at all.
  • An Australian submarine crew is shaken up by Chinese “sonar blasts”.
  • Recovery efforts in the South China Sea was to recover an F-22 that accidentally crashed during carrier take off.

Unreported news

As well as a slew of unreported news…

  • China and Russia publish a casus belli against the United States.
  • American generals, formally listed as “retired”, are captured in Ukraine.
  • The round up and execution of all CIA and NED assets in Hong Kong.
  • China opens up strategic oil pipelines with Russia.

Fake News & and lies

And, of course, a flood of lies known as “fake news”…

  • China sending spy dirigibles disguised as weather balloons.
  • Chinese military are all conscripts.
  • China infiltrating Americans private data via Tiktoc.
  • 3G causes gas pumps to explode. 4G cases planes to crash. 5G causes brain cancer.

And so on and so forth.

If the United States was currently winning the war against China, it would be front page news. The mere fact that it is hidden is strongly suggestive that the United States is losing; floundering in this effort.

Honestly, this current period of time is just a continuation of the 1960’s era “cold war”. NATO has acquired just about ALL of the Western Russian buffer states. And NATO is (territoriality speaking) piece by piece disassembling the Russian defense perimeter so that the ultimate conquest of Russia can occur.

And it almost did.

Almost.

And once Russia was a “head case”, and looted, pillaged, and the USA-backed oligarchs ran the nation as some kind of medieval fiefdom, the looting of China can finally occur. As that was the plan all along.

Oh, yeah. It’s not going that way.

But it’s coming near to “High Noon” at the “OK corral”.

Yikes!

So China and the USA are in decade two of the long drawn out war hostilities. So far, the clear winner is China. But the American (and proxy) “leadership” have a vision and somehow believe things that are not real; are not true, and will never be true will manifest in their favor.

Which makes believe that they are all delusional psychopaths…

Thinking and wishing something to happen in this physical world will NOT make it occur. Actions will. And the actions by the West are completely and totally inept.

Oh a physical hot war is still on the table.

It will begin as a provocation; an American “false flag” event, that will push China into some kind of response.

And a proxy nation or two will engage China.

And America will have tricked China into a war.

However…

I am of the mind that China knows what the “cats paw” is actually all about, and will strike American cities, and Americans on American soil. China will make life for average Americans as uncomfortable as possible and that internal strife will bring about a civil war that American will not survive.

Stay tuned to stage two of this global catastrophe…

Confusing

China will lead this modern world. Can the West’s democracy survive China’s rise to dominance?

The West—both the United States and the European Union—is, in historical terms, in precipitous decline.

The BRICS countries, led by China, now accounts for just under 60% of global GDP, compared with around 33% in the mid-1970s.

The great story of the post-war era has been the rise of the developing world, representing around 85% of humanity, and the decline of the old developed world, accounting for around 15% of humanity.

China increasingly ranks on a par with the United States to the extent that it is now regarded by the latter as a threat to its global ascendancy.

China’s governing system, long derided in the West, has emerged as a formidable challenger to America’s democratic system. Over the last 40 years, there is no question which has been more effective and which has delivered most for its people.

The greatest danger is not the rise of China but how the United States will react to China’s rise and its own consequent loss of primacy.

The rise of illiberalism in America is not an accident.

It coincides with the dawning recognition of American decline and a desperate desire to prevent it.

It should be remembered that the heyday of Western democracy corresponded with the zenith of Western hegemony. But can the West’s democracy survive the decline of Western global dominance?

If the West is able to retain and renew its best values, in a world in which it enjoys a much diminished role and China is predominant, such a world will be the better for it.

  1. Never tell people about your bad or dishonest behavior.
  2. Listen actively and avoid dominating conversations or interrupting others.
  3. Treat others with kindness and avoid using them for personal gain.
  4. Respect the boundaries of others and avoid getting involved with married individuals.
  5. Live within your means and avoid overspending or accumulating debt.
  6. Only make promises or plans if you genuinely intend to follow through and remember them.
  7. Communicate respectfully without using swear words or yelling at anyone.
  8. Be cautious about sharing personal information that could be used against you in the future.
  9. Don’t pursue romantic or friendship relationships out of boredom or loneliness.
  10. Only engage in romantic or sexual relationships with people you genuinely like and want to be with.

They fight dirty

We were living in a small, privately owned apartment complex when my husband and I found out we were expecting our first baby. This complex was very quiet, and the owners were very open about advertising their “Christian values”- not allowing unmarried couples to rent from them (just a sidenote, I am a Christian, and this information about their values may not seem relevant right now, but it will come into play later).

We had already been living in the apartment for over a year, so at this point we are on a month-to-month lease, with a 30-day notice required to vacate. After careful budgeting and deliberation, we decided that we were finally ready, and it was the perfect time to purchase our first home. We contacted a local realtor and started the search. After several weeks of searching, we found the perfect house and submitted an offer.

We were so excited when we got the news that our offer was accepted. We quickly handled the standard inspection, appraisal, and back-and-forth negotiations of what needed to be fixed about the home before closing. When we got the closing date set, we realized it was just over a month out and we needed to submit our 30-day notice to the apartment complex immediately.

On Feb. 28th, a Friday, there was an ice storm blowing through our city, but I walked to the leasing office to drop off the written notice anyway, along with a check for our final month’s rent, for March. When I got there, I found the office was locked tight. The garage at the side of the building was hanging wide open. Inside, I saw the head maintenance employee having his lunch. He said that no one had come into the office that day, probably due to the weather. I left the vacate notice and the rent check in the mailbox for the staff to find when they finally decided to return.

On Monday morning, March 3rd, I called the office to ask if they had gotten the notice and the check that I left in the mailbox. The receptionist said, “Oh yes, hold on one moment, the owner would like to speak with you.” Up until that point, we had had a pretty good relationship with the owner. We were quiet and respectful tenants, never had any complaints against us, paid on time, and frequently engaged in personal discussions whenever we saw each other. I thought that maybe the owner wanted to congratulate us on the pregnancy, buying our first home, or even to discuss the final move out inspection — anything but what she actually wanted to discuss.

The owner argued that because she didn’t receive the notice until after the first of the month, we would be responsible for rent through the month of April. I responded in protest, saying that I delivered the notice before the first of the month, and that it was not my fault the office was closed during what was supposed to be regular business hours, due to inclement weather. This did not sway her, and she threatened to withhold our security deposit and sue us in court for not paying rent for the month of April as well. I did not give in. I told her to do what she felt she needed to do, but we were moving out by March 31st and not paying a dime more. I was absolutely shocked at the complete 180 in her personality and demeanor.

Luckily for us, when I wrote the check for the rent for March, I included “PAID IN FULL” in the memo. I didn’t realize how much that would help us later on.

We did the final move out inspection, and the owner did the walk-through herself, trying hard to find a reason to withhold the security deposit — alas (for her), I am an excellent housekeeper and we treated our apartment as if it were our own. She was unable to notate any damage that would allow her to keep our deposit. She was very obviously irritated with this, and proceeded to repeat what she initially said — that we were still responsible for the month of April, so she could legally keep the deposit as well as sue us.

At this point, my pregnancy hormones were raging, and I was sick of her crap. I decided to beat her to the punch. I went down to the courthouse and filed a suit against her myself, in an effort to get our security deposit back because she did not have any legal grounds to keep it.

By the time our day in court came around, we had been living in our new home for several months, and I was as big as a whale, ready to pop any day. When the judge called my case, I waddled my way to the front of the court room with my little file folder full of my documentation and all the research I had been doing in the months prior.

I explained the entire situation to the judge, and showed him a copy of the check for the final month’s rent they had cashed — the check that stated “PAID IN FULL”. Because Virginia mostly rules by case law, I included a case that the Supreme Court had previously ruled on, stating that by cashing the check, the receiving party was agreeing to the terms written on the check, which invalidates any previous contract, written or verbal.

Not only did the judge agree, he ordered the apartment complex to repay our security deposit, said we were no longer responsible for any monies/rent for the month of April, and the apartment had to pay our court costs as well. I could tell he was irritated for me — the fact that I had to go through all the trouble I did to get the situation handled, during what was supposed to be the most exciting time in our lives. He was almost apologetic!

The apartment complex owner was NOT happy, and I think she even cursed at us under her breath as we were leaving the courthouse. How Christlike!

Not long after that, I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. We still own the home we purchased, and are loving life to the fullest.

The girls expressions are great

Nokia’s failure was something that just had to happen – Nokia, realistically, couldn’t have done much about it.

In 2007, around half of all mobile phones sold were Nokia phones. These guys were massively dominant.

Below is my last Nokia, which I bought in 2007. It was a fantastic smartphone.

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main qimg d7297d88bcb7020ffd9db82f6a3029de lq

Less than 10% of all phones sold were smartphones, but even in that growing space Nokia, with its Symbian, had dominance.

main qimg 11074c44f39cd7ea2e7b817fb327a2ca pjlq
main qimg 11074c44f39cd7ea2e7b817fb327a2ca pjlq

But in 2007 something happened that you can’t really blame Nokia for. A nut job, Steve Jobs, made this insanely great smartphone that didn’t even have a keyboard, the iPhone. Not only that, he made buying apps so easy that people would actually buy them, making smartphones so much more useful.

And then, to make matters worse, Google decided to partner with every smartphone manufacturer in the world via Android, which would emulate the iPhone. And they didn’t care whether they made any money or not so gave the software for free.

I mean, what were Nokia supposed to do? It’s far more difficult changing a legacy software, like Symbian, than making an essentially new one like Google did with Android. And given they were so dominant in both hardware and software, they couldn’t have really abandoned either.

Ok, in hindsight they should have adopted Android, but fat chance that was going to happen given Android was way behind, and a competitor.

And so the reason Nokia failed was because shit happens…

Rejection

Absolutely!!!!

Frankly India is a superpower already

Just like the Laws of Physics dont apply to Indian movies, it appears laws of economics don’t apply to India

India grows at 8.4% when there is a Global Slowdown against 6.15% when there is normal Global activity

Indian shares surge 233% when the whole world is in Covid crisis and everywhere else the rules of economics are being followed

It takes China 40 years and Billions of Investment, literally Billions to pull out 800 Million People from extreme poverty

Yet India in a mere 15 years with a thirtieth of the investment can pull out 450 Million people from extreme poverty

Isnt India a superpower already?

growth
growth


China actually has to slog and work against all the odds

  • Forty years of Poverty Alleviation
  • Forty years of Industrialization
  • Two generations giving up their entire youth to ensure the present China is the way it is
  • A Hostile Global Media which belittles every Chinese Achievement including Indian Media

India meanwhile is a real super power :-

  • Not a shred of any sacrifice required
  • Not the slightest change in any system needed
  • No reforms discussed or performed
  • Yet India is an emerging economy that would be $ 50 Trillion in 2047 according to Rajeev Chandrasekhar

You do the math and figure out Indias actual chances of eclipsing China in all these fields

As for me?

I don’t trust anything India says or does in the past few years

It doesn’t gel with logic

Scott Ritter: Russia has DESTROYED Ukraine’s Army and NATO is Losing Control

Your body language always betrays you.

  • We are more likely to put our hands around our waist at a self-hug position when we are around people, than we are by ourselves.
  • When something bothers us, we tend to bite or suck our lips.
    • This includes when we are lying.
  • When there’s an issue, we tend to put our hands at the side of our hips with fingers facing outwards.
    • So we take up more space and become more territorial.
  • A lot of people tend to move their legs back and forth while talking on stage because of nervousness.
  • When we are relaxed, we sometimes tilt our heads. However as soon as something bothers us, the head tilt is gone and we position our heads straight.
  • When we are stressed, we tend to go on our phone.
    • This is to seem like we’re busy and potentially avoid the unwanted conversation. It also helps us escape from eye contact, and to have an excuse for a delayed response because “sorry I wasn’t paying attention”.
  • When we are lying but we want to calm ourselves down, we move our hands a lot.
    • Don’t mistake speaking with a lot of hand movement as a sign of confidence
  • When people question us about our lies, we tend to actively reveal a lot of somewhat related information, without directly answering the questions.
    • This is to avoid the source of stress by not answering the accusations directly, to distract the person questioning, and to seem trustworthy as you willingly tell them information.
  • When we are stressed, we want to calm ourselves down. Sometimes we put our hands on top of our heads, or cover our mouths.
  • We tend to smile when we are happy, even when we are not supposed to. This is because our emotions come before our mind processes it.
    • If someone smiles for a second and immediately stops smiling, they might be hiding something.
  • When we are stressed, our feet will be facing the door or we will look at the door once in a while. This is because our unconsciousness wants us to leave the situation.
  • Don’t think that forcing yourself to not have any body movements means that you are mind-reading-proof either, because limited movements is also a sign of discomfort.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to stop ourselves from revealing our state of mind to others. Body language never lies.

BUT

Not only can your body tells people about you, it can also directly influence your own thoughts.

  • Sitting up straight gives you energy, while slouching can make you feel sad.
  • Crossing arms can make you more determined, but it can also give people the impression that they are not welcomed.
  • Taking up more space makes you feel more confident, and gives us a feeling of power. These poses are called power poses.
    • Studies have shown that power poses will make people more willing to take risks. As we feel that luck is by our side.
    • People who have done power poses are more likely to be selfish compared to those who have done contractive poses. Because when a person feels powerful, they are less empathetic.
    • Fun fact: Donald Trump also tends to take up a lot of space to seem dominating.
  • While you naturally smile when you’re happy, smiling can also lighten up your mood when you’re sad.

Moral of this list? Use body language to your advantage, by detecting stress (and potential dishonesty) from others, and to feel more self confident!

That’s all I got for now. Perhaps I’ll update this list once I got more facts. Who knows?

EDIT

Well I’m procrastinating from work so why not add more facts that aren’t related to body language.

  • When you see something extremely adorable, do you want to squeeze it to death? That’s called the cute aggression.
    • Some study says that it’s because our brain doesn’t know how to deal with these overwhelming cuteness, thus builds aggression to get a sense of control… Freaky right?
  • There’s a theory called moral licensing. It theorizes that when people have done something moral, they feel entitled to do something bad, vise versa.
    • For instance if you have done voluntary work today, and you picked up $20 on your way home, you are less likely to give that money to the homeless than someone who haven’t done voluntary work.
  • Do you like freedom? Well, studies have shown that we feel worse when a wrong decision is made by ourselves, than when there’s no choice at all, even when the outcome is equal.
  • Your mind and behavior is heavily influenced by your brain formation. So… do we truly have free will…
  • Studies have shown that:
    • Kidney donors have a larger amygdala (area that controls emotions) than average, while psychopaths have a smaller one than average.
    • People with more conservative political views tend to have larger amygdala, while liberals have smaller ones.
    • While extroverts feel energized from the dopamine produced out of socialization, introverts are over-stimulated.
  • We are more empathetic to those who are like us. This includes the similarities in looks, skin, personality, interest, etc. This is because they are more relatable to us.
  • Do you secretly love true crimes? Or are you fascinated by what a serial killer does? Don’t worry, you’re not evil.
    • Humans fear the unknown, and by knowing what the experiences are like during these situations, for both the killer and the victims, helps us conquer that fear. When we are terrified, we dominate the situation by understanding it. This is perhaps the reason why people commit crimes as well.

Gotta get back to work now, maybe I’ll add more soon.

Have a nice day!

Japaneses beaches are The Best

No chem-tails yo.

Yes. And is a story why we cannot have nice things.

The company I work for had very chill policy about the time you had to start work. You came in 8:00, you work your 8 hours you go at home at 16:30 (30 minutes obligatory lunch brake). You came at 9:30 you work your 8 hours with 30 minutes brake you go home at 18:00. Life is good everyone’s happy.

Then this guy start coming regularly at 10, then 11, then 12 – which means that all meetings, trainings and whatnot had to be moved for everyone else because of his schedule. Obviously this wasn’t going to work so a rule was implemented – everyone should start work no late than 10:00.

That guy start coming at 10:10, 10:15, 10:30, so as his direct manager I talked with him, several times that this is unacceptable, which lead to him coming on time (9:58, 9:59 usually) for a week then get back to being late.

In the end the last drop was when we was moving the office to another floor in the same building – company wide notice was send that moving is happening next morning at 9:00 (everyone moved his/her own computer and monitors) – isn’t a big deal but this bulky Lenovo work stations weighted like 20 killos so guys helped the girls carrying the machines.

This guy? Came near or after 10:00 again, expecting someone else to have moved his equipment already. Owners of the company had enough and let me fired him same day. We even paid him a few months worth of salary just to see his back asap. The guy never understood what the problem was, and the 10:00 rule is still on place, years after he is gone.

The moral of the story is, if you have a nice benefits at work, for fuck sake do not exploit them like there is no tomorrow. Have some common sense.

Point spot on reality

2 more oil refineries went on fire in Russia today.

Drones attacked oil refineries in Syzran and Novokuybyshevsky, Samara region.

Notably, Syzran is 1,300 km from the border with Ukraine.

The governor of the region, Azarov, officially confirmed to RIA Novosti that fire broke at oil processing plants.

It’s already refineries #13 and #14 that suffered hits in Russia.

In response, Russia hit a residential building in Odesa, Ukraine, with a ballistic missile. And then Russia hit it with a ballistic missile again, targeting first responders – emergency services and medics, in an effort to obtain maximum civilian casualties.

20 people died as the result of the “double-tap” attack, more than 70 people wounded, several of them are in critical condition.

And to all these asking, “What did you expect?”, the answer is “Ukrainians expected to live their lives in their country without Russia or its useful idiots asking stupid questions”.

Ukrainian families experience pain and suffering every day. Only the complete destruction of the “beast from the east” will put an end to suffering.

Dmitry Medvedev (who always expresses what Putin wants to say but can’t) proposed the Russian version of “peace formula”: Ukraine must capitulate, the whole territory of Ukraine must become Russia, all Ukrainian officials must be removed, and Ukraine must pay a compensation to Russia for the Russian soldiers killed and wounded in the war.

So, we now have Russia’s “peace plan” — anyone who would like to suggest to Ukraine to negotiate with Russia, should be simply directed to Medvedev’s Telegram to read this remarkable plan in full.

Now any country should know: if Russia attacks you, this means they are going to keep killing your people and destroying your cities unless you surrender. And then they are going to annex your land and demand compensation for the inconvenience. And, of course, they are going to torture and kill the people who don’t love Russia, deport half of population to Siberia, and relocate Russians from Russia to live in the homes of deported locals.

This all had already happened before. The Soviet Union was attacking smaller countries and demanding capitulation, and when the governments signed capitulation, Soviets immediately began executions and deportations, and brought hundreds of thousands of their own relocants, to change the ethnic composition of the annexed territories.

There is nothings that Putin is doing now that the leaders of Russia and the Soviet Union haven’t done before. That’s what they always do.

An insult to my intelligence

What to expect from China if you are CIA / NED and Chinese

This is what Chinese do to whoever sold the country to the enemy, known as 诛九族 nine familial exterminations Nine familial exterminations – Wikipedia

, basically every person related to the collaborator would be eliminated from the society. Chinese do this to make sure things like this will never ever happen again. In India, the people who got rich by helping the British are still in charge today. Chinese people are amused by India.

Qin Hui – Wikipedia

Uh oh
Uh oh

Souper Meat ‘n’ Potatoes Pie

Souper Meat ‘n’ Potatoes Pie is a family favorite vintage recipe from Campbell’s.

soup pie
soup pie

Yield: one 9 inch pie

Ingredients

  • 1 can Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, divided
  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1/4 cup finely chopped onion
  • 1 egg, slightly beaten
  • 1/4 cup fine dry bread crumbs
  • 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • Dash of pepper
  • 2 cups mashed potatoes
  • 1/4 cup shredded mild cheese*
  • 2 slices cooked bacon, crumbled**

Instructions

  1. Mix thoroughly 1/2 cup soup, beef, onion, egg, bread crumbs, parsley and seasonings.
  2. Press firmly into a 9-inch pie plate.
  3. Bake at 350 degrees F for 25 minutes; spoon off fat.
  4. Frost with mashed potatoes; top with remaining soup and cheese.
  5. Bake for 10 minutes more or until done.
  6. Garnish with cooked and crumbled bacon if desired.

Notes

* We love cheese, so I normally cover the entire top of the pie with a hefty amount of cheese, more like 1 cup.

** This is my addition to the recipe. It adds a little extra flavor.

Meanwhile in Vietnam

Pakistan has a lot of harsh truths that should be understood by all Pakistanis in order to solve the nation’s issues and look towards a successful and bright future.

  1. Around 40% of Pakistan is in poverty. Balochistan, FATA, KPK and Lower Sindh are the worst affected, while urban Sindh and Northern Punjab are the most well off. 40% Pakistanis live in poverty – The Express Tribune
  • People vote in communal patterns. Karachi’s Muhajirs vote for MQM, the Sindhis vote for the PPP, the Punjabis votes for PLM-N, Pashtuns vote for PTI and the Baloch vote for various Islamist parties. Politics of ethnicity
  • The nation has seen dynastic rule for the past 44 years (with Parvez Musharraf as the interuption). The Punjabi Arain Shariffs and Sindhi Rajput Bhuttos are the power holders; similar to India’s Gandhi Dynasty, Bangladesh’s Zias and Sheikhs as well as Sri Lanka’s Bandaranaike Family. Dynastic politics
  • Lack of development, stability or a clear future. Karachi has a population that is close to parallel to Tokyo and Seoul, yet the city is embroiled in ethnic warfare and militant-ism. On the other hand, the rest of the world is advancing in every direction. In Karachi, Pakistan, few families are untouched by crime
  • A whole lot of religious intolerance. The large Sunni majority has politcal and social dominance over the Shias, Ahmadiyas, Hindus and Christians. Violence towards these groups occurs more frequently than you’d expect. The Problem of Religious Intolerance in Pakistan
  • Close minded attitudes and ignorance. Men continue to hold domineering status over women in terms of education, politics and personal freedoms. People are lynched for being accused of blasphemy. Most importantly, Pakistanis aren’t allowed to freely express their politcal or religious beliefs. Imposing faith
  • The never ending tense relations with India. For the past 70 years the two nations have been embroiled in Kashmir and countless other wars and smaller conflicts. This seems to be a never ending dispute and I don’t suspect anything to happen soon. A brief history of the Kashmir conflict
  • Extremist nature and terrorism within the nation. A whole lot of terrorism is homegrown and exported outside of Pakistani soil. People even empathize with terrorists and Islamism. In fact Mumtaz Qadri’s (terrorist) grave has been turned into a Mazar and people show up for his Urs. Mumtaz Qadri’s shrine: In memory of Salmaan Taseer’s assassin

Perhaps the biggest “harshest truth” about Pakistan is that the conception of Pakistan was one of the worst ideas in the 20th century. The Partition tore away millions of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists from their homes, businesses and friends to cater to the greatest minority appeasement in history. It paved the path for numerous conflicts and wars between the two nations (and later a third). Most importantly, the death toll of the Partition reached around 2 million and millions more died in the later riots, wars and conflicts.

In conclusion, Pakistan’s “harshest truths” are the result of a series of poor decisions and a lack of real leadership. This is evident from the days of the Pakistan Movement to today.

They have assumed…

Like Rogerio said,

Parrots don´t cover the walls of tall buildings in Brazil.

They cover the wall of a single building in São Paulo.

The palace of parrots…

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main qimg 07726eaf9d9d02fdc1bf9600ca92d1e8 lq

Crazy uh?

At a first glance, it might look like you said, “a building decoration”. But those are actual birds massed on the building (it is the specimens of Psittacara leucophthalmus, in italian we also call them white-eyed parakeet).

This is happening in the eastern part of São Paulo, Brazil, the bricks of what is known as the “Prédio das maritacas”

[1] have been attracting hundreds of parrots every day for twenty-five years.

This behaviour could be related to the phenomenon of geophagy: in nature these birds consume small amounts of clay with the double purpose of

  1. reducing the harmfulness of certain foods (in particular, studies show a 60% reduction in the toxicity of the alkaloid quinidine, contained in the plant China) and…
  2. …as a supplement of their diet. (EDIT: Don’t miss Lena Kurschev comment below she is showing this phenomen with some very nice pics)

However, in an urban environment they have opted to find what they need more conveniently by licking clay from the surface of the bricks.

Other hypotheses suggest that the structure of this particular building allows many parrots to stop for a break and find shelter at the same time, in harmony with their social instincts; or, even, they use it to rub their beaks in order to sharpen them.

main qimg 1e438ba79092e6a4a06a158b3641d4cc lq
main qimg 1e438ba79092e6a4a06a158b3641d4cc lq

A pretty sight to see perhaps, but it is sad to think that they are there because their natural environment has probably been slowly wiped out due to human expansion.

Pause after winning

It’s up to you.

The background of prison is Groundhog Day. It’s a cycle that repeats endlessly with minor weekly events and the occasional shakedown to liven things up.

Just like in the movie, you wake up every day to the same exact set of circumstances. You’re wearing the same clothes, the same thing is on the radio, the same food in the Chow Hall… sure, some things are on weekly or monthly cycles — visits on weekends, work and mail-call on weekdays. Unless you choose to use your time wisely, every day will crash into the next like too many bumper cars on the track — nobody going anywhere.

Each hour, day, and week is a small progression to the time when you get to start your life over.

You can peel the numbers off the dials if you want. If you do, nothing will mark the smooth motion of the wheels and you’ll have no sense of where you are, or how far you’ve come. One day they’ll just kick you out and you’ll be no better off than you were before.

I knew guys who didn’t mark the days. They had nothing to live for. Their lives were just a continuous monotony, a drive through Death Valley, with no landmarks to judge progress, and nothing learned along the way.

Time is precious. It’s all we have. Choose what you do with each minute carefully and you won’t get to the end of your journey only to ask, “What happened?”

Interception

Tiktok and Douyin (Chinese company) are two divisions operating separately and independently.

Tiktok is privately held. The consent of the China government is not required.

Institutional investors including Carlyle Group Inc. (USA), General Atlantic (USA) and Susquehanna International Group (USA) own 60% of ByteDance; 20% is owned by the company’s global workforce; an additional 20% is owned by the company’s Chinese co-founder Zhang Yiming.

If someone asked Tiktok co-founder Zhang Yiming to donate his shares for free and gift them to the U.S. for nationalisation, he would not agree!

This is in effect the U.S. government plundering private legal property.

Zhang Yiming will not sell his original core algorithm technology. It’s the same way Bill Gates won’t sell his patents.

No doubt he’d rather take Tiktok and leave the US.

The U.S. market doesn’t deserve a high-tech company with the latest algorithms like Tiktok.

Americans have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and that’s enough.

One of the infamous methods of punishment in the Ming Dynasty was called “Court caning.” (廷杖)

The notoriety of the punishment was mainly because it was very unofficial and handwaving. If an official said something wrong to the Emperor in the court, the Emperor could order him to be dragged out and beaten. No need to go through an elaborate legal system, the Emperor was angry and there will be consequences.

How badly would the victim be hit? The answer is…the guards knew exactly how hard to hit.

An urban legend stated that the guards trained for this by taking a brick, wrapping it around in straw, and then covering it with paper. The executioners would train by hitting the brick with a stick. They could break the paper without touching the straws, and they could shatter the brick within without breaking the paper. (Obviously its a crude simulation of human anatomy)

There were also no official words from the Emperor on how hard to hit. The supervisor of this punishment, usually an eunuch sent by the Emperor, would also be counting how many, and there were also “safe words” he could use to convey the message to the executioners.

The supervisor eunuch knew because he was close and loyal to the Emperor; he could read his intentions.

If the supervisor eunuch said: “hit seriously,” then the guards would actually be careful, it meant the Emperor or the supervisor eunuch didn’t want the victim to die. If he instead said: “Hit solidly,” then the guards would reply: “I’m about to end this man’s career.”

Another alleged “safe word” was the stance of the eunuch. If he stood or sat with his foot pointing outwards, like a “V” shape), he wanted the victim to live. If he instead had his foot pointing inwards like a “^,” then he wanted the victim dead.

(An old movie named “Dragon Gate Inn,” had this introduction scene. The corrupt high eunuch Cao Shaoqin was interrogating and torturing a sentenced general. Notice his foot stance? Also notice the actor playing him? It’s a young man named Donnie Yen!”)

So when the sentence came, the executioners could hit you exactly as hard as they want. Sometimes the victim could survive 100 canes and still recover in a couple of weeks. Sometimes, 5 hits would be enough to send him to the grave. Surviving to caning was expected, dying to the caning was also expected, the guards could easily just blame it on any “pre-existing medical conditions” of the victim.

By the way, the guards and eunuch accept all forms of payments. They played the loophole in this corporal punishment system to their advantage.

Edit: Actually I’ve followed up a little bit because I realised I might not have given as direct of an answer. The maximum penalty was usually 100 strikes, but 60 was probably the fatal limit. But again, quick flick through the books, some died while some managed to survive.

Men Are Oppressed Not Women (They’ve Been Lying To You)

“What firearm would you recommend for defense against home invaders?”

Paintball.

Yes, yes, I know you’re going to say it’s not a ‘firearm’, but you haven’t thought things through.

If someone enters your house at night and you wake up, you think ‘intruder’ and you fire that Desert Eagle Penile Compensation piece in your dark bedroom — without donning your hearing protection (because, who is going to have hearing protection with that Desert Eagle on their nightstand, right?) — fire that piece in the darkness at the shadow in the doorway, you know what will happen. The noise will replace your hearing with a loud ‘iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii’ and your retina will be sporting these muzzle flash afterimages of your wife crumpling in the doorway. Or, in the unlikely event that it’s not your teenage daughter sneaking back into the house after leaving through her bedroom window, but an axe murderer — you just rendered yourself too blind and deaf to re-aim and shoot again.

Now, reconsider my suggestion and imagine you have a paintball gun on your nightstand.

First of all, no flashes and noise to mess with your night vision and hearing. Just a ‘pffft’ and angry cursing from the shadow in the doorway as he’s trying to wipe paint from his eyes. Because you know that just like you don’t have hearing protection on your nightstand, he sure as hell isn’t wearing paintball protection on his nocturnal visits. Paintballs on your unprotected body hurt like fuck. And the intruder won’t know what’s happening. No muzzle flashes or loud noises, just the sound of a blowdart and getting stung and wet all over — that’s unnerving, man, and I’d like to see the intruder who wouldn’t scamper back to whatever rock he crawled out from under. (Did I say that right? Sounds right…)

And while he runs like fuck from the stinging wet paint, you call the cops and tell them there’s an intruder running around your neighbourhood, a man splattered with purple paint. However incompetent the police are in your area, they should still be able to find someone covered in paintball paint.

Plus, if you make a mistake and confuse family members with intruders, you don’t have to take them to the ER (or bury them), but you simply apologize and help them wash off the paint.

So, forget about all those macho handcannons and just get yourself a paintball gun for home defense. Your NRA neighbour might laugh at you, but he’s going to be the one with the axe buried between his starry eyes from the muzzle flash, while there’s still an almost full magazine in his Desert Eagle.

[image by Paintball Guns & Gear at the #1 Paintball Store]

Edited to add:

A lot of people respond that my answer is ridiculous and dangerous. And they might be right — pelting an intruder armed with an assault rifle with paint balls might well result in getting you killed. However, I posted this answer not to promote paintball guns for home defence, but to think ‘outside the box’. In the comments, a lot of people also offered their own alternative solutions — shotguns loaded with rock salt, pepperballs, et cetera — and that was my intention: instead of looking to use lethal force, what alternatives are there?

Also, many commenters seem to believe that I would just shoot at an intruder with paintballs and then wait for them to respond. I guess they haven’t read my other answers and don’t know about my experience with violence. I can’t blame them, but, no, I wouldn’t just stand there like an idiot, but use the paintball attack to close the distance to blade range.

And another edit:

Some commenters say that defending your house with firearms is a Christian duty and that the Ten Commandments don’t say ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, but ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder’. My thoughts on that subject:

I’m raised Christian, but became agnostic because of the hypocrisy of organised religion. However, even if these commenters are right, using a lethal weapon to repel an intruder (99% of intruders are after possessions, not looking to murder you in your sleep) is not exactly ‘Christian’: even a casual reader of the gospel would understand that Jesus Christ himself would not condone the spilling of blood over mere possessions. Therefore, arming yourself with lethal weapons in order to repel intruders is premeditated killing, i.e. murder. There are plenty of effective non-lethal weapons (tasers, for instance) that can be used without killing the intruder.

But what about the killers and rapists?

If there is a high rate of homicidal intruders in your neighbourhood, high enough to warrant the stockpiling of lethal weapons for ‘home defence’, you might want to look into relocating your family. Chances are that the ‘reporting’ on these ‘deadly home invasions’ is merely scare tactics by groups like the NRA in order to sell more guns. In reality, getting killed by an intruder is as unlikely as getting killed by a Great White shark.

In reality, most child rapists do not jump from bushes or climb into the bedroom window — in the majority of child rape cases, the rapist is familiar to the child, i.e. family members, daycare staff, teachers, priests*, and baby sitters. In other words, the people to whom we entrust our children.

(* Personally, I loathe the people citing the Catholic catechism to morally justify using deadly force defending their children from getting raped by intruders. If you want to keep your children from getting raped, keep them far away from Catholic priests.)

The dishwasher at the restaurant where I work cannot read. His mom pulled him out of school when she found out they had just been passing him along. I don’t blame her. Since I have a great book for teaching kids to read (teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons) I bought a copy for him for Christmas and offered to do reading lessons with him. He is making a lot of progress already. Two days ago, he sounded out his first sentence. The manager at the restaurant says he is recognizing words in the kitchen better.

My reaction was a bit of disbelief at first, and then empathy. Not being able to read would have limited my ability to make up my own mind about so many things in my life. I would not have been able to read beautiful poetry that spoke directly to my soul. My kids would have missed out on Dr. Seuss books. Quality of life can depend very much on whether or not you can read.

Every weekend, usually on Saturday and Sunday, we do a reading lesson. He then goes and practices the reading exercises in his notebook. Every now and then, he stammers and hesitates. I ask what’s going on. He doesn’t like to admit it, but sometimes memories of his mom and brother doubting him come to mind. His mom doesn’t think he will ever be able to read, and is mean to him about him even trying. His brother has said similar things. When he tells me they are on his mind and it is distracting him, we blow raspberries at them. It makes him laugh and breaks up the tension. We can then go back to learning how to read.

It feels good to help him prove his mother and brother wrong.

EDITED TO ADD:

He and I had a reading lesson after work tonight. He was getting a little shaky. I asked him what it was, and he kept saying nothing, over and over. But he kept doing poorly, when I knew he could do better. I paused and told him that I thought words from his mother were bothering him again, and that he was trying hard but it was hard to not believe that she was right… maybe he was wasting his time. He agreed… it was bothering him.

Then I told him that over 300 people had liked his story and that he is learning to read, and it gave him a huge grin. He felt better, and we started again, and he was reading much better. I cannot thank you all enough for the support. It literally spurred him on.

EDITED TO ADD AGAIN:

OVER 4K UPVOTES!? INSANITY!!! Thank you all so much. You give me far too much credit. I am an instrument, that’s it. The book really makes learning to read so easy. Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. 10/10 recommend.

I knew it would be incredibly easy, the book does all the work for you with prompts on what to say, which letter sound to learn next, everything. It’s just a few minutes at the end of my shift. And my employers are completely supportive of using their space. I am so happy he is rebelling against the tyranny of what he came from and wanting better for himself, and the others around him who will benefit from his being able to read.

Shitting a brick in Country lockup

Here’s a little first hand story.

In 2003, I made my first trip to another country, which was England. I stayed at a private home in a place called Pinner in Greater London. My hosts gave my a room and let me use their facilities. It was the first time I actually saw and used those bizarre separate water taps for cold and hot water. So inconvenient. But that’s beside the point.

main qimg 67828d3bbee9178ee05ea179b6b5e3b5
main qimg 67828d3bbee9178ee05ea179b6b5e3b5

I spend most of my time hiking and sightseeing. One day I went to see central London. In the evening, when I was going to board my train to go back I learned that there was a blackout

and the trains didn’t work.

I didn’t know how to get to Pinner, so I called my host and asked him if he could drive to the center and pick me up. This phone conversation was life changing for me due to one little detail. It was I who was asking him for help, but it was him, who thanked me several times during the mere seconds that we spoke. When he understood the position I was in and what I was asking him for, he said something like “okay, I see, I’ll pick you up, thank you, thank you, bye”. I was stunned. Those “thank yous” sounded very automatic, but they made so much difference. Like, the man had nothing to thank me for. On the contrary, I got him out from his comfy apartment and made drive to the central London at night, and yet he said thank you. Just a simple sign of politeness made a world of difference. After that I started saying thank you much much more often than I used to.

It’s been more than 20 years, and I have observed that Russian people have become much much more polite, and they use the “magic words” like thank you and please much more often. So I’d say, it has become common. It even affected people who are not used to saying thank you that often, because it has become much easier and more pleasant to deal with them.

Japan evening walk in Shinjuku, Tokyo • 4K HDR

https://youtu.be/rFcwx-sIMA8

Cops as Robbers!

It was about 11:00 p.m. when I first observed my sergeant get a cell phone call. He looked at me and told me he had to check something and left the office. I didn’t hear from him for about thirty minutes. The next thing I hear is that they are looking to establish a crime scene. I immediately went to dispatch and asked, “Where’s the scene and what’s going on?” The dispatcher who was half-asleep said he didn’t hear the broadcast, so I made him play back the audio recording. The department tape-records all radio transmissions and incoming phone calls, a fact that would save my bacon over the next few hours.

After hearing the recording of an officer asking about a crime scene, the dispatcher said nobody told him anything. I then called the sergeant over the radio and said: “What do you have?” He replied that he would give me a call (fortunately for me on a taped line). I took his phone call, and he explained that some drunken Mexican was saying that he got kidnapped, beat up and robbed by the police. They were driving the victim around looking for a crime scene, but the sergeant stated, that to him, it sounded farfetched.

I was aware that there had been some informant information saying that a rogue cop was robbing Mexicans. In fact, the chief, in a staff meeting two months prior, had brought up the information.

I told the sergeant to bring the victim to the station, which he did. At the station, I spoke to a friend of the victim and the victim. The friend spoke English while the victim spoke only Spanish. The friend said the victim was on his way to his house to pay him back some money. As the victim approached the man’s house, a marked police sport-utility-vehicle stopped the victim, arrested him, and drove off. The witness described the involved officers as wearing blue police uniforms with one of the officers speaking fluent Spanish.

The sergeant kept downplaying the incident, and I later determined he had misdirected my initial investigation. He said we only had two Spanish-speaking officers working, while he knew we, in fact, had three. I had the two Spanish-speaking officers I knew about come into the room, and apparently, these were not the officers.

The sergeant then reminded me that the state police had several units in the area who were driving similar vehicles. Two of their officers were at our station using our breathalyzer because their machine was down for repairs. I ran down those leads and came up empty.

Because of the informant information previously discussed, I called the chief of police at 2:00 a.m. and said, “I’m not sure what I have, but one of our cops may be involved in a robbery.” Both the chief and internal affairs commander responded to the department, as well as the two other division commanders.

Information started to leak out in small dribs and drabs. Everyone working that night was interviewed, and no one was allowed to leave. First, I learned that it had something to do with an off-duty police officer who was pulled over for drunk driving. Two officers from our community-policing unit offered to give the intoxicated officer a ride home so he wouldn’t get in trouble. Instead of taking him home, they transported the officer back to a local bar.

I would learn later, that when they transported this drunken officer to the bar, they had already kidnapped the Mexican who was in the back seat with him. The truth finally came out when one officer involved in the kidnapping came clean and turned state’s evidence. This officer had recently transferred to the unit. The second officer and ring leader was not Hispanic but apparently spoke fluent Spanish—a fact I didn’t know, but the sergeant did.

On this night, they were looking for a Mexican to rob. They kidnapped this person off the street and eventually took him to a secluded area of a park and robbed him of his money, assaulted him, and left him there.

However, en route to the park, they stopped a suspected drunk driver who was yet another officer. They then started to give the drunken officer a ride home, loading him into their car right next to the kidnapped man. They dropped the officer at a local bar instead of taking him home.

As word spread of the robbery, other officers knew of the drunken officer and learned of the man in the backseat. The sergeant and others on the shift knew this information, but at that point, all remained quiet.

Initially, I think the sergeant was only covering for the non-arrest of the drunken officer, but later learned of the man in the back seat and tried to continue to sell a false narrative. It’s unfortunate once you start trying to cover one officer’s bad behavior; you become caught up and locked into a much more severe situation. There’s no question in my mind that this well-respected sergeant would never have covered for officers committing a robbery. The problem was, he got caught up in trying to help the intoxicated officer and just got sucked into the middle of a bad situation.

By the next morning, the two officers left in handcuffs going to the county jail. A group of union idiots stood in solidarity at the jail parking lot supporting the officers. In fairness to them, they didn’t know the facts of the case, or they probably wouldn’t have been there.

One junior officer came forward identifying who knew what when, which took courage considering he was going against his entire platoon and his sergeant. He and other officers on the shift received discipline. The sergeant was initially suspended pending further investigation. During this extended period of months, he had several personal tragedies in his life, losing both of his parents.

Additionally, while he was still suspended, the current chief who wanted the sergeant fired was forced to retire. A new chief took over. This chief was a close personal friend of the sergeant. Under the new administration, this sergeant took some discipline but kept his job and more amazingly his rank.

The officer involved in the robbery who turned state’s evidence got a couple of years in jail. The Spanish-speaking ringleader pleaded guilty and got almost the same sentence. They were both out of prison in about three months.

Several years later, the ringleader was back in the news, this time for the armed robbery of several banks. He went away again on a seven-year sentence, but just as before, served only a portion of that time and is now out, yet again.

Cowboy Coffee Cake

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ccc5 1024×682

Ingredients

  • 1 (10 count) can biscuits, not the flaky type
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1/3 cup vegetable oil
  • 1/4 cup milk
  • 1/3 cup finely chopped nuts
  • 1/3 cup raisins
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Put biscuits in bottom of Bundt pan.
  3. Heat other ingredients just long enough to melt sugar.
  4. Spread mixture over biscuits.
  5. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes.

As a supervisor for a drywall company I hired a guy who had served half his life in prison.

he was 44 and had spent 22 years in prison. ( 4 year stretch 2 year stretch etc not one long 22 year hit),

He was by far the cleanest worker ( his work space ) and the most obedient worker too.

I had to measure up his work after his first 2 weeks.

He worked alone as he was 6 foot 9 and looked nasty.

I told him his count and that he had earned $7000 for 2 weeks work.

He apologized and said he would work harder next pay period !!! the most the other employees would make would be around $2500.

Next pay period rolls around and I measure his work. $8000 this time.

I tell him and he promises to work harder next time !!. 2 weeks later His measure was $9000. The owner strolls on the job site after the invoices have been sent in.

He asks me who Mick is? I take him to Mick and of course his work area is spotless and I introduce them. Mick shakes his hand and the boss pats him on the back. If Mick made $24000 in 6 weeks guess how much the boss made.

I had mick working for me for 5 years till he cracked and ended up in pokey again.

So YES I would employ someone who has been to prison.

I was on an hourly wage but loved to see Micks cheques

Cross of Iron – Facing the T-34s

my insane landlady/neighbor reported me to the police. she said i went inside her house and stole her purse because it contained $5000 cash and her phone. meanwhile, she actually left it in the yard while nibbling on random plants in my ornamental garden (yes you read that right, i had cameras 😂)

thankfully, she also told the cops i did it because she works as jeff bezos’ assistant and i wanted the phone so i could blackmail him for money. needless to say they didn’t take it very seriously. i only found out she reported me when i went to the police station to talk to them about her erratic behavior. they were wildly unhelpful then, and throughtout the whole mess that followed 🤷‍♂️

random other crazy parts of the days surrounding the police report:

she has cameras, and could easily prove someone entered if it were true.

the day before she randomly texted me to ”go in her unlocked backdoor while she was out, and leave the rent on her kitchen table” – specifically asking me to do it while she wasn’t home. it was the same table she told the police i took the purse from. i didn’t of course – but it seems she intended to frame me

she had snuck into my place while i was at work three days prior, i caught her when coming home early. and immediately realized she had been doing it a lot. (things had been moved, doors open i didnt usually leave open etc.. i had figured it was a guest until then) it caused her to spiral with excuses for why she did it, and plots to make the situation go away – she admitted it but didn’t apologize lol.

thats just the beginning, but thats the police report part

Take it from someone who has tasted both: Take the Taser. Every time.

Now, both are awful – I wouldn’t recommend either for a leisurely afternoon. However, the difference is in how they’re bad. When a Taser is used on you, it is pure electric hell, but for exactly five seconds (the standard duration of a single trigger pull). Now, God never stitched together five longer seconds, to be sure – the current from a Taser is by far the most acute pain I’ve ever endured, and this is coming from someone who’s had a baseball fracture a finger, taken an elbow right to the nose in a basketball game, been hit with simulated bullets, and gotten into (and won, I might add) a street fight with a convicted felon. But once it’s over, it’s over. There is some lingering muscle weirdness (I liken it to that feeling that’s left behind after you finally work out a charley horse in a muscle), but that’s it.

When you get pepper sprayed, though, it’s an hours-long ordeal. When oleoresin capsicum (OC, the chemical in pepper spray) hits your mucous membranes, they go absolutely insane. It took well under one minute for my eyes to swell completely shut, and they were obviously watering profusely. My sinuses underwent nothing less than a liquid detonation – I’m trying not to be crude, but think in excess of half a pint. It’s panic inducing – you can’t see without physically prying your eyelids open, you’re punished every time you breathe, you can’t squeegee the stuff off your face (despite frantic efforts that only serve to expand the zone of misery). It took me an hour to see clearly enough to drive, and over a full day for the pain to completely subside – when OC dries, crystals are left behind that, no matter how many tears you produce, can stay stuck under your eyelid.

As a civilian, I would double down on this answer, because in the heat of the moment, officers tend to err on the side of caution – their caution. That means if you’re to the point of being sprayed, you’ve got a high likelihood of what was known among officers as “getting hosed down.” While Taser cycles can be restarted, this can only be done if the subject is continuing to resist (and cycles are recorded by a tiny onboard computer, which provides records which can be uploaded to a personal computer – in other words, supervisors will know if you abused a Taser during a use of force incident). There’s no ‘standard spray’ with OC – it will emit spray as long as there are contents in the can and you have the trigger depressed.

Unfortunately, you won’t have any vote if you’re on the receiving end. You can take hope from the fact that most officers, in my experience, prefer using a Taser (usually no medical intervention necessary, the subject can see and isn’t hyperventilating, no patrol car contamination, and on and on).

But again, do avoid both at most any cost.

Mexican Casserole

Use your choice of meats in this versatile casserole.

mexican casserole
mexican casserole

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef, ground turkey, chorizo or diced cooked chicken
  • 1/4 cup chopped onion
  • 1 clove garlic, minced finely
  • 2 teaspoons chili powder
  • 8 ounces Dorito corn chips, crushed, or regular corn chips
  • 1 (15 ounce) can Bush’s ranch-style beans or chili beans
  • 1 (10 ounce) can Ro*Tel, undrained
  • 1 (10 ounce) can cream of mushroom soup
  • 2 cups Mexican-style shredded cheese
  • Flour or corn tortillas, warmed

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray a 2 quart casserole dish with cooking spray.
  2. In a large skillet, brown the meat for 5 minutes, using a spoon to break up any large clumps. Drain off excess fat and add onion, garlic and chili powder. Continue to cook and stir for 2 minutes.
  3. Add the beans to the cooked meat mixture.
  4. Combine the tomatoes with the soup in a small bowl, mixing completely.
  5. Place about 3/4 of the crushed chips into the bottom of the casserole. Spoon on half the meat mixture, then half the soup mixture. Then add half of the shredded cheese. Repeat the layers, ending with shredded cheese.
  6. Sprinkle the top of the dish with the remaining crushed Doritos or corn chips.
  7. Bake for 30-35 minutes until mixture is bubbling and top is lightly browned.
  8. Serve with tortillas on the side.

Not fired per se, but often reassigned. I spent 20 years in the military. One of my supervisors, on realizing I was essentially a lazy git, put me in charge of a shop in a distant part of the ship. No one had really paid any attention to the processes in years. So, lazy man that I was, I dug in to work out the easiest, most expeditious way to do the work. Took about a month, most of it reading manuals and regulations. I completely streamlined everything, including our reporting, eliminating redundancies and revamping workflows. Another 3 weeks to train the staff on how to follow the new procedures, and I could do my whole job in about eight hours a week.

Well, my boss wasn’t going to have me sit on my rump for the other 32 hours, so he moved me again. Same result. A third time, and I was getting the hang of it. I was down to six hours a week. In sheer Puritan frustration, he sent me to the department head’s office to do admin work. Bad choice on his part; I quit paying any attention to the three shops I’d been in, they didn’t need it. In the mean time, I’d become indispensable to my new boss, by arranging things so he could do his job in just a few hours a week.

They gave me “extra duties as assigned”. Well, those were mostly simple enough; paying attention to the written procedures and manuals, and keeping in mind the actual goals, instead of “This is how we’ve always done it”, let me go back to being a lazy git in short order. I was up to maybe 10 hours a week, and that was mostly delivering verbal reports. Maintenance standards were ridiculously high, my people got a lot of time off because the work got done faster than ever before, and me? No one ever saw me actually doing anything. I’d just wander around, a cup of coffee in my hand, dropping a hint here and a word there, or sitting in the mess and catching the occasional phone call.

My evals made me look like a lazy incompetent. Because they used the wrong metrics. But anywhere I was assigned, actual productivity rose, down-time dropped, and everyone got more time off (the only truly effective reward I had to hand out). A lot of my bosses got commendations for “improvements” I had implemented. I eventually retired, after doing some of the easiest time in the service, drawing two pensions and only 38 years old. Drove my wife nuts doing the same thing at home, before she kicked me out of the house. 🙂

Battle of Nagashino 1575

My mate’s girlfriend was getting married to some other guy.

This had to happen.

I too knew that. Who would give her daughter’s hand to a jobless second year engineering student?

Around a week before his girlfriend’s marriage I advised him to cut all connections with her so that she could start a fresh life.

He replied:

“She cannot live without me. If I will stop calling her, she will die.”

I said: “She will not die. She will take time to adjust with her husband but eventually she will be happy with her husband.”

He: “Do you take the guarantee?”

Me: “I am pretty sure that she will not do such stupid thing. Please do not call her if you need her betterment.”

He: “If she commits suicide then you will also have to jump from the roof.”

After that incident I stopped giving advice to any hardcore Romeo.

It has been 2 years and the girl is living happily with her husband.

Million-Dollar Macaroni Casserole

The whole family will love this easy, cozy make-ahead Million-Dollar Macaroni Casserole.

million dollar spaghetti casserole
million dollar spaghetti casserole

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef or bulk sausage*
  • 1 (28 ounce) can spaghetti sauce
  • 8 ounces cream cheese
  • 1/4 cup sour cream
  • 1/2 pound cottage cheese
  • 1 stick butter
  • 1 pound pasta such as elbow noodles or rotini
  • 1 bag pizza blend shredded cheese
  • Optional: sliced mushrooms, diced bell pepper, diced onion

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Boil the noodles. Mix together the cream cheese, sour cream and cottage cheese in a mixer to thoroughly mixed together. Set aside.
  3. If you have chosen to use the bell pepper or onion, sauté them for 3 minutes then toss in the ground beef or sausage. Brown ground beef or sausage and drain well. Add spaghetti sauce and mix together. Put a few slices of butter in the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch casserole dish. Then layer half of the noodles in the bottom of the dish. Spread the cheese mixture over this layer. Then add the remaining noodles on top of this with a few pats of butter.
  4. Spread the red sauce and meat on top.
  5. Bake for 30 minutes.
  6. Remove from oven, spread cheese on top, and return to oven for another 15 minutes or until cheese is melted and bubbly.

Notes

* Ground chicken or turkey may also be used in this recipe.

Depends on how you intend to live your life while you’re there.

Because simply existing in jail — an American jail anyway — requires no money at all if you’re willing to subsist on bad food, basic toiletries, and a blaring day room TV.

But any kind of a normal life at all is gonna require income.


Without money in your commissary account, you can’t —

  • wash your hair with anything other than bar soap;
  • soothe a raw throat with Menthol-Lyptus;
  • take Tylenol for a headache;
  • write and mail a letter;
  • make a phonecall;
  • listen to music;
  • use deodorant;
  • eat a snack;
  • moisturize;

And if you consider any of these items luxuries, then you’re probably coming to incarceration straight off the street and sleeping rough.

Congrats on the upgrade.

Otherwise, you’re gonna need funds.


That means sympathetic family and friends on the outside, a work release or road crew deal from the judge and/or sheriff’s department, or a trustee uniform.


I know it’s possible to subsist in jail without means, because I’ve seen motherfuckers do it.

But it’s no way for a human being to live.


Network

Grease Palms

Update That Resume


Jail isn’t the free ride one might imagine.

Putin just scored a KNOCKOUT Blow to NATO and Ukraine is Terrified w/ Andrei Martyanov

My wife counts cards. She likes to play at the $1 tables at Circus Circus in Reno. She makes a few bucks every time she plays. Counting cards requires some concentration, and many people can’t do it, especially if they’re drunk, which explains the free alcohol.

The dealers all count cards. It’s the only way to keep from nodding off doing that job. So they pretty much know who is counting and who is gambling.

If you go home with $20 and brag to your friends that you counted cards in Reno, it’s great for business. If you try to count cards at the high-stakes tables, you will get escorted out if you are successful at all. A photo of you is taken and posted in the Security office so don’t come back later in the day to try again.

There are enough casinos in Reno that you can make some money if you come a couple times a year. If you move to Reno and try to make a living counting cards, you become known to the pit bosses and the security people, and find yourself prevented from playing.

No brass knuckles are involved. That’s just for the movies.

Cowboy Coffee

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coffee on coals and the seashore 1246925709 92fa13d153b24e3096bde851a73fd92e

Ingredients

  • 4 quarts water
  • 1 1/2 cups freshly ground coffee
  • 1 egg shell
  • 1/2 cup cold water

Instructions

  1. Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan or coffee pot.
  2. Add coffee grounds and egg shell to boiling water. Return to a boil, then remove from heat and let stand for 2 minutes.
  3. Slowly add cold water to settle grounds to the bottom. Strain if desired.

I was managing a radio station in Colorado. One early morning, I was on the air and noticed the hotline lighting up indicating an incoming call: it was the guy whom I scheduled to be on the air after me. He was calling in sick.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’ll cover your shift so stay home and take care of yourself, and I hope to see you tomorrow.”

I was able to find a replacement for him, so after my shaft had come to an end, I handed over the reins to the next jock. I rarely did this, but for some reason, I decided to go home for an hour before I came back to work and spend the rest of my day working in my office. Once I was home, I turned on the TV just to have some noise in the background as I went into the kitchen to make a simple lunch. As I walked around the house, I looked down to see a basketball game in progress. Who do I notice seeing courtside, was none other than the guy who had called in sick.

It was well-known through my staff that if one wanted to take off a day – even if it were for personal reasons – I had a policy in place that would allow people to call in (even at the last minute) and request time off.

To make matters worse, he had lied to me.

The next day, I saw him in the hallway and simply said, “My office. Two-o’clock. Be there.”

At the moment, I couldn’t tell if I was going to fire him for being stupid enough to call in sick to attend a nationally televised event, or if I was going to fire him for lying to me. Either way, he was becoming gainfully unemployed that afternoon.

“Thank you for stopping by my office, but I am afraid that your services are no longer needed. Have a nice day.” I handed him his final check and he left silently.

I am glad that during my time in management I rarely had to fire someone (in fact, he was only one of two people I had fired during my career (the other person was dismissed for attendance purposes. I can tolerate a lot of things with people, but being lied to is, in my opinion, the worst.

The story starts in Denmark. It is 2012 and police officers have just made a pretty standard arrest: they found a sexual offender with possession of child porn.

Police had a much greater concern though. They needed to find who created the videos, not just who was watching them.

There were no clear clues, so they turned to the videos to see if they could find a lead.

In the background, at one point, there was the slightest shot of a pill bottle.

main qimg 09b36aeb6635a7dcaf95eaeb1uo44d7965 lq
main qimg 09b36aeb6635a7dcaf95eaeb1uo44d7965 lq

They zoomed in and managed to discern the man’s first name, the first two letters of his last name and the first three digits of the prescription order.

From there, the investigators applied these details to every possible person to whom they could be attributed.

After intensive searching, they conclude that a man named Stephen Keating is responsible, however they still have very little info about him. Furthermore, this evidence alone isn’t enough to convict him.

Rather than giving up, they once again went back to the videos. This time however, they found an image showing the man’s hand. From there, they used technology to create an impression of his fingerprint.

main qimg 5ae5293f61faf764b24ba394cd10d45a lq
main qimg 5ae5293f61faf764b24ba394cd10d45a lq

The resulting fingerprint was a perfect match.

53-year-old Stephen Keating was arrested, just three weeks after the investigation began.

main qimg eb81e93f0e38e39acf28fffd2b2031c6 lq
main qimg eb81e93f0e38e39acf28fffd2b2031c6 lq

Keating had repeatedly sexually molested three children, all under the age of 12. Outside of the ones captured on video, it was revealed there were another 12 children whom he had abused.

He was sentenced to 110 years in federal prison, but he may have never been caught had it not been for some brilliant detective work.

[4K】Relaxing Walk in Japanese Small Town – Ikegawa, Kochi

This is just lovely.

Cowboy Coffee with Kahlua Cream

Featured in the November 1998 issue of Texas Monthly – created by Chef Grady Spears

how to make cowboy coffee recipe 1695022684
how to make cowboy coffee recipe 1695022684

Ingredients

  • 1 pot hot coffee
  • 1 1/4 cups heavy cream
  • 2 tablespoons powdered sugar
  • 2 tablespoons Kahlua liqueur
  • 8 teaspoons shaved chocolate

Instructions

  1. Make a pot of good strong coffee.
  2. In a bowl whip the cream until soft peaks form.
  3. Fold in the powdered sugar and Kahlua.
  4. Put a dollop on each cup of coffee and garnish with shaved chocolate.

On September 28th, 1918, Henry Tandey, a British soldier serving with the 5th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, saw a weary German soldier wandering into Tandey’s line of fire at the small French village of Marcoing.

The enemy soldier was hurt and didn’t even attempt to raise his rifle. Altough Tandey had a clear vision and an opportunity to reduce the number of enemy forces by one, he chose not to shoot. The German soldier allegedly saw what he did and nodded his thanks before getting out of the sight.

That German soldier was Adolf Hitler.

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main qimg 83239ee4a497e73a38060e102436303f lq


This story supposedly comes from Hitler himself. When Neville Chamberlain visited Hitler in 1938 (before the Münich Agreement), he saw a picture by Fortunino Matania ordered by the Green Howards regiment depicting a man saving his fellow comrade. Hitler had allegedly identified the man as Tandey on the basis of a U.K. newspaper article and claimed Tandey was the one who saved his life:

That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again; Providence saved me from such devilishly accurate fire as those English boys were aiming at us.

There has been a lot of evidence that this story is not actually true (see the sources below). But it doesn’t make it less cool nevertheless. If it were true, it would definitely be a legitimate candidate for a single decision that had the most dramatic effect on the entire 20th century.


If nothing else, it kinda reminded me of the following joke:

A man decided to visit a fortune teller. After looking into his hand and into the crystal ball, the fortune teller says in a dramatic tone:

“You sir, will be responsible for the death of millions”

Shocked and taken aback, the man goes back to his home. Along the way, he passes near a river and sees a small boy drowning helplessly.

“Well, if millions of people are going to die because of me, I might at least save one life.”

He jumps into the river and pulls the boy out. The shocked mother comes in tears and says:

“ Oh my dear god, thank you so much Mr., you are a saint. Adolf, you should thank this gentleman yourself.”

Sources:

War hero who did not shoot Hitler

  1. Call a lawyer.
  2. Shut up until your lawyer shows up.
  3. Take pictures of the scene and especially the witnesses. Give the phone only to your lawyer.
  4. When the cops come say ‘I’m sorry Officer. I’d love to tell you my side, but my wife told me to wait for my lawyer.’ Change that to your Dad, etc. At some point before then say ‘Dad, tell me the following…’ so you aren’t lying to the cops.
  5. If they are going to miss the obvious, like a witness, or the gun slid under the dumpster, point it out. But then shut up again.A buddy was getting divorced. His soon to be ex said, she felt threatened when talking to him because he was a soldier (it didn’t matter for the other 20 years…) He was a nice guy and wanted to say, ‘it’s okay, I won’t talk to her.’ But his lawyer shut him down.
    If he said that, it gave the impression that he really was a threat.
    If he made a mistake, and called his kid, but his wife answered, he could be found liable of breaching a court order.Don’t move things, except to safety and holster your weapon.
    A cop had a legit shoot, but noticed the bad guy dropped the gun, right at the cop’s feet. The cop moved the gun to the bad guy, to match what he saw as true, at the time.
    Moving the gun got him convicted.Changing your mag might be a good idea because you don’t know if the fight is over until the cops arrive.
    Leave the 1/2 empty mag at your feet. Put the safety on/de-cock it, etc. because you don’t want the cop who takes your gun having an ND.
    You don’t want the cops to show up and you have a gun in your hand. If your gun is in your hand, very nervous cops will point their guns at you. You don’t want that.Don’t move anything you don’t have to. Giving first aid is allowed but it messes with the facts. Ask 911 before you do it.And shut up. You will really really want to talk. But who among us haven’t said something stupid?

New Gender Alert

Fun in Japan

I grew up rich. Very rich. And at a young age, my parents lost everything. To be more specific; my father lost everything. Instead of telling me the truth, they shielded it all from me.

Now, being the kind of child who was used to Versace dresses and Armani jeans, it wasn’t easy to start shopping at our local equivalent of Walmart. And trust me, I was the kind of kid that knew that nice stuff was really nice. And I loved shopping.

It wasn’t easy to give up all the toys. It wasn’t easy for me to buy less books than I used to. And I wasn’t given a reason why. All I was told was that I was a spoilt brat and that I didn’t deserve it.

My parents fought. A lot. Turns out, my dad had a gambling problem I didn’t notice.

He lost the house, the cars, the business. He owed people money. Terrifying people. And as a young girl, I used to be followed around by these terrifying people.

My mother kept me home more often. I wasn’t allowed out, unless it was to a friends house.

I developed insecurities, some learning disabilities and a terribly annoying stutter. My change was so obvious at school and the counsellors noticed. They told my mother to send me to a psychologist. That it would help. But she told them no, and that I wasn’t crazy.

But I wasn’t crazy. I just needed help. And she refused it because she didn’t want to believe it.

And my grades dropped even lower.

In my early teenage years, my mother told me the truth. We were poor. I could barely believe it because I studied at one of the most expensive schools in the country. But it was true.

The reason why daddy didn’t come home for a year? Because he was embarrassed. And because he didn’t want those terrifying people he owed money to, to get him.

My mother sold everything. She paid his way out. Then she got a divorce.

That broke my heart.

She blamed everything on him. She started drinking more. Started openly smoking.

She called me an idiot. Told me I was worthless. Basically made me feel as bad as she did.

That was kind of crappy.

All this while she made sure I hated my father for what he did. And I did.

At university I couldnt study without worrying about money. I worked more than I studied so I could pay for room and board, and I couldn’t keep up the hours necessary to make my grade. So I had to leave.

After I quit university, I didn’t speak for a year. I hid in my room and slept and read and occasionally I would go out to see old friends and feel more distant from them than I had ever been.

Eventually, my mother’s partner got me a job working at a gambling den. If you knew anything our country, it was that places like these were quasi-illegal.

Women were hired to entertain the male clients, and to take their cash to change it into credits. I was hired because I was pretty and I spoke English without an accent. Perfect for one of their best customers.

I was depressed. I wanted to die. But I did it because she made me do it.

I quit after three months. I realised that after everything she laid on me, that was possibly the worst. That was the biggest plot twist in my life. That my mother would basically prostitute me to make ends meet. That realisation what what changed me.

I still love her. But I do not necessarily trust her.

And as for my dad? I don’t hate him now.

I’ve learnt from the many turns of events, and finally from that last one that even though I am my parents children, that my parents may not always have my best interest in mind.

And now, I make sure that I’m ok and I get the support I need from the people whom I trust. And I support the people I love, and try not to expect anything in return.

It’s hard to shake off her shadow but every day is a new one, and everyday I am getting better.

Resident Evil: Opening Scene (HD CLIP)

Years ago I was at a wedding.

We were assigned a table with people we didn’t know.

All of a sudden, a guy started a conversation:

“So what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a pilot.”

“Are you a pilot, or a copilot?”

After clarifying the roles of captains and first officers, I said: “I am a first officer”.

“Your only task is to make coffee for the captain.” He laughed.

“What do you do?” I asked.

He had a good job: he was the sub-secretary in some government dependency. I suddenly felt like a hyena when she spots a wounded gazelle.

“You must make very good coffee for the Secretary.”

He got as offended with my answer as I was with his. Our conversation was over.

Why am I telling you this story? Because I feel offended by your question.

This time, however, I’ll be nice… and respectful.


I am a lazy guy.

If there’s an easy way, I’ll find it. I’m really good at avoiding chores. I’m on a constant lookout for shortcuts. I procrastinate.

Except when doing my job. Then, I become hard-working. There’s simply no other way.

  • I am awake while everybody else is sleeping.
  • I work more hours than others.
  • My job carries high levels of stress and responsibility.
  • I cannot afford to screw up too much.

I fly a highly automated airplane and, yes: I fly on autopilot most of the time. But this doesn’t mean I sit around doing nothing.

Flying manually or under autopilot is the same. You seem to be missing some important points of my job:

  • We are constantly planning what to do if things go wrong.
  • Conditions change, forecasts sometimes are wrong.
  • Weather gets nasty.
  • Aircraft systems fail.
  • There are a lot of procedures to follow.
  • The rules of the air are complicated, with subtle variations from country to country. We have to comply.
  • Passengers get sick, babies are born on board.
  • Airports get closed.
  • We fly with a certain amount of fuel. You cannot create more.
  • We cannot stop for troubleshooting.
  • We fly, navigate and communicate regardless of what’s happening.
  • We have to react calmly under extreme situations.

Most importantly, pilots are constantly making decisions. The right ones.

  • Making the wrong decision can cost me my job or my license, or even worse.
  • Making a good but inefficient decision can cost the company more money than they have paid me in 14 years.

They pay me to be safe and efficient.

Tinder Experiment: Attractive Men Reveal What Women REALLY Say

This is really harsh, but needs to be shown.

1.The “Invisible” robber

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On April 19 1995, a five foot six robber robbed the Pittsburgh bank without wearing a mask. His face could be seen clearly in security cameras.

When he robbed, he was so confident that he smiled at surveillance cameras before walking out of the bank.

Apparently, he rubbed lemon juice onto his face before committing the act. Since lemon juice is known for being an invisible ink, he thought the juice made him invisible.

When police caught him, he was very shocked, and said “But I wore the juice!”

2. The Bungling Burglar

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47-year-old Crawshaw got stuck at the bathroom’s window of a home he’s trying to break in 15 feet above ground.

The fire brigade had to be called to free him when the home owner returned to this ridiculous scene.

He was sentenced two and a half years in prison.

3. Driving dog

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When Reliford Copper III was suspected of driving under influence, he led police to a high-speed chase and crashed into a house.

When police cuffed his hands, he defended himself by saying “My dog was driving that car! I ran because I wanted to!”

Apparently police wasn’t convinced that he isn’t drunk or high. His charges included property damage, leaving the scene of an accident and resisting arrest.

I personally find those dumb criminals very amusing, I guess they just made the jobs easier for cops. Did they make you question human intelligence?

If you want to be a criminal, do it smart! 🙂

Every Grocery Store Is Leaving Chicago | City Begs For Help

I used to think… I used to think… that Chicago could avoid the collapse of American cities. Nope. It’s all down the shitter.

China has canceled US, Australian, France wheat imports, replacing them with orders from Russia, Kazakhstan and Argentina.

The US cancellation was the largest cancellation since 1999.

The Chinese government is showing a strong preference for buying from the BRICS and Global South economies, and is moving away from buying from the G7 countries which are part of the western bloc led by the US.

This is done for a combination of political and economic reasons. The US is pulling out the big guns when it comes to chip technology, AI, and blocking Chinese sales of EVs and solar panels, and more recently, the forced divesting of TikTok USA, which are all part of de-coupling and de-risking. From the Chinese perspective, the US’s Biden administration is heading rapidly in the direction of sanctions against Chinese companies following the sanctions applied against Russia. Opposition and hostility to Chinese companies and business interests in Congress is very strong, and China must be prepared for the US acting to seize Chinese assets which the US can reach. The only way to avoid this scenario is to have as few overseas assets in US dollars and held by US banks as possible.

This is the de-risking and de-coupling model the Chinese are following.

In the US, there may be a political side-effect in this US election year: Trump supporters are usually stronger in US rural states, and some farmers may blame the Biden administration for poor wheat sales and vote for Trump. In a tight race, this may be an important factor.

INSIDE JAPAN’S ULTIMATE LOVE HOTEL!

I’m not sure whether this is a little known fact, but I’ve always found it disturbing.

You know when you’re buying medicine, sometimes toiletries, and other things like that, and you find those annoying little seals?

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Some of you might know why these exist. Some might not.

In 1982, a 12-year-old Mary Kellerman took some Extra-Strength Tylenol and died not long afterwards.

Adam Janus, brother Stanley, and sister-in-law Theresa all died after taking some Tylenol capsules.

Not long afterwards, Mary McFarland, Paula Prince, and Mary Reiner all died after taking the same brand capsules.

All were from within the Chicago metropolitan area.

After the 7th person died, it was realised where the connection lay – each had ingested Tylenol capsules.

Tests on the bottles the capsules revealed an alarming fact:

The capsules

had been dosed with potassium cyanide!

Police were quickly able to rule out manufacturers as a source. They weren’t being tampered with there. They theorized that the source was from the shops and drug stores themselves.

They suspected that somebody had procured the capsules, added the cyanide to each, and then resealed, and methodically replaced the containers back on the store shelves.

The mildly disturbing fact?

The police don’t know who did it.

They were able to identify numerous suspects, including someone who had carried out poisoning rampages like this, an individual who had sent a ransom letter demanding $1m to Johnson & Johnson, and others. But no direct ties were ever found.

Nobody has been held directly accountable for this crime.

Alongside the bottles they know were responsible for the deaths, authorities found 3 additional bottles that had been contaminated.

I just find it so disturbing that someone can commit such a heinous crime, and still be walking around like a normal person.

The fact that the capsules could be opened, tampered with and resealed led to the abolition of pellet-filled capsules as a medication mode

Gen Z Aren’t Having Kids & Everyone Is Worried

Obviously could not laugh at it in the Court Room ! -:)

However this was many years ago when I was called on to Jury Service. had been to this Crown Court ( The higher of the two initial Criminal Courts in England and Wales [note that Scotland has its own laws and procedures] ) .

We had been sworn in and the case was about to start when the Court Orderly told us that there had been a change of plea that the Court had accepted, so as such there was nothing to “Consider”, but as we had been sworn in had to at least be in session, and hear the Charges against the man read out to the Court.

The hearing was essentially a Sentencing hearing and for the Judge to consider the facts of this and past cases. (I appeared that this man had quite a history from the age of about 14 onwards!) .

The Defence Barrister had stood up, the Police having given their details and repeating the causation of the Charges. The Judge asked the Defending Barrister, where there were any mitiating circumstances that that Judge should take in to consideration.

The Defence Barrister stated that : “ my client, although having a troubled history, has show good will and has not been arrested for any maters or brought about sentence for over four years”.

The Judge, who had been listening to this an making his notes for consideration, looked up at the Defending Barrister and just quietly said: “ Yes. Mr …… but I would remind you that you client was indeed in Custody for 20 months of those four years ! “

The Barrister tried to wriggle around with mitigating circumstances, which unsurprisingly the Judge swept aside, and the Defendant received a further custodial sentence.

All the Jurors we trying to keep straight faces until the now sentenced party was taken to point of detention, and the Judge had left the Court Room and we were discharged by the Usher.

Just one of thise unforgettable moments-:)

[To-Yoko Kids] The darkness of Shinjuku Kabukicho.

When the doctor pulled me aside and asked me if I’d secretly had a vasectomy.

My wife and I weren’t succeeding in getting pregnant so we headed to the doctor. She asked about our backgrounds, etc. and decided that there “might be a problem”. Since males are biologically simpler in this regard, they started testing with me. The results came back with ZERO sperm. Not low count. Not poor motility. Absolutely no sperm.

I was referred to the head of urology at a local university medical school and after a couple of tests he determined that it was genetic. I never had and never would produce sperm.

In six weeks we went from “there might be a problem” to “you’ll never produce biological children”. That was quite a plot twist. Most couples assume that they can have kids whenever they want but roughly 20% have fertility problems.

I’ll skip over the details but we eventually adopted two boys. Our oldest is in the US Army and our youngest starts college this fall.

Sometimes I still wonder what sort of child we might have “produced” but I have no regrets and I wouldn’t trade my sons for any number of bio-children.

Update———-

I wasn’t expecting the response I’ve gotten to this. I appreciate the kind comments about what a wonderful guy I must be, but I wasn’t trying to do anything spectacular. I was just a married man who wanted to be a dad and unexpectedly found out that I had few options. I love my boys and they love me but I’m probably a fairly average dad (well, maybe a LITTLE above average).

Let me address a couple questions and then provide some details on the adoption process.

First, you can be born with genetic infertility. However, without digging up medical records that are over 20 years old I don’t remember the specific diagnosis and it’s possible that it’s congenital without being genetic. Second, as several have pointed out, sperm is a very small component of semen. Everything appeared to function fine for the first several years of our marriage. We had no warning that anything was wrong before the lab results came back.

I skipped adoption details because I didn’t think they fit the “plot twist” topic but here goes…

Once we got over the shock we had to figure out what we were going to do. We attended a Resolve conference (www.resolve.org) that helped us think about our options. Following the conference, many deep conversations, and a great deal of prayer we decided to pursue adoption.

The problem is that the US has far more infertile couples looking to adopt than available babies. Waiting lists were years long and required significant costs up front. Then you had to live in the same state – in some cases the same county – while waiting. I was in graduate school and we’d almost certainly be moving in a couple years. That meant we’d lose our spot on the list and our money.

We looked into special needs adoption in our state. Unless we were ready to adopt very severe needs the waiting times weren’t much shorter. Once they found out that I was in graduate school and my wife was a college teacher, they went out of their way to discourage us from starting the process.

We were about to give up when one of our contacts heard that Holt International had a temporary window for couples to apply to adopt minor special needs children from South Korea. If everything worked out, we could get a child within a year. We were approved to adopt a boy who had just turned two. In the adoption world, simply being over two years old made him “minor special needs”. Otherwise he was healthy. We got him in April and moved from Kentucky to Indiana over the summer.

That was 1996. We had been married 11 years, we’d never had children, and we started with a toddler who spoke only Korean.

The adoption wasn’t finalized when we moved but once we had him in our possession a move was OK. Since we changed states we had to use a different local adoption agency to finalize. This introduced us to Bethany Christian Services. When we decided to adopt a second child, we worked with them and again found a minor special needs boy from South Korea. This time the special need was premature birth. He was 8 months old when we got him and our doctor saw no signs of prematurity. He was developmentally right on schedule.

That was 1998 and we ended up moving to Wisconsin in 1999 where both boys grew into impressive young men.

Japan Walk Kabukicho at late night, Red Light District, back alley in Shinjuku, Tokyo|歌舞伎町 新宿 4K

When I was 15 my mother moved my sister and me out of state. To prove that I was qualified for the the AP classes I requested at my new high school, my mother had my IQ tested by a registered psychologist. When revealing my score to my mother, the psychologist recommended not sharing the information with me – her experience was that people who knew their IQ at my score tended to slack off in school. So my mom didn’t tell me until I was an adult, but it didn’t matter. It’s not difficult to know when your mental abilities far outweigh those of your peers.

Then there’s my sister – she always struggled with academics. She was in the slower groups at our private school and people tended to dismiss her academic abilities throughout her childhood because she didn’t naturally shine or pickup concepts instantly like I did. Learning was a battle, so she was taught to focus and take her time in everything she did.

My sister went on to become a nurse, earning straight A’s in college because she studied methodically and planned her routines meticulously. She does very well in everything she has interest in because she knows she has to practice. She doesn’t expect to understand everything outright but knows she can learn with time. Her pace is slower, focused on practice, dedication, and social relationships. She works harder, and I think she’s happier than I am.

I understand everything, conceptually, without much background. I learn systems, trades, programs, methods, etc extremely fast. I test at the highest percentages without extensive study or preparation. But I never learned how to keep a routine, practice consistently, or work hard. I was alienated as a child because I couldn’t relate to my peers and now I have trouble forming deep, personal relationships. I was heavily medicated for severe clinical depression for over a decade. Contrary to what others have said about IQ, none of this is because I developed some elitist, alienating complex over a number. I didn’t know my IQ score until a few years ago. Rather, I struggled because navigating through this world as an outlier is fundamentally soul crushing.

I do very well professionally because of my pattern recognition abilities (having major influence on business practices is inevitable because I’m able to see the big picture and long term like most can’t), but I’m never happy with what I’m doing with myself – I always want to be more, better. I want to change the world. I’ll do very well financially, I always have. I’ll get where I want to be in my career and I’ll continue to seek out and absorb more and more knowledge like a sponge until I die – it’s what I do best. But my sister will always be a happier person, surrounded by warmth of friends and family, feeling connected to a tribe in a way that I am envious of.

So sure, with a higher IQ, I’ll be more successful in career and the academic intelligence realm – but who cares? What about intelligence of the soul, emotions? Happiness? Truly belonging to a network, a collective intelligence? When we die, what matters more? I’d bet a few handful of IQ points on happiness.


EDIT: I wasn’t expecting so much activity on my first answer on Quora! Thank you for taking the time to interact. After enough comments have popped up expressing similar views I’d like to clear a up few things.

High IQ does not predispose us to perfection. You’ll find errors in my writing and everything else I do in life, just as I’ll find errors in you. Hyper-focusing on inconsequential details to gain a temporary upper hand isn’t nearly as satisfying as listening to a message and relating to the soul of a story. That said, I’m happy to see many can relate.

Some have read the above as a self-aggrandizing diatribe insulting my sister. I think that’s harsh and off-base but I won’t argue opinions on my writing; what you hear is as important as what I intended to say. I will, however, clarify a bit. I love my sister, I’m her biggest fan, and she knows it. She struggled, had tutors, and was ultimately removed from private school, but she is by no means dumb. She’s smarter than I am in many ways (which is what I tried illustrating above) and I am envious of the way her personality shines in a crowd.

Finally, through many years of therapy, self reflection, and goal setting I’m in a great place in life. I have a loving partner, a quiet home, and a successful career that allows me to contribute to the quality of life of many which I find extremely fulfilling. My point on happiness is that we all struggle in some way – mine is emotionally. It’ll always be difficult, but I use tools to overcome just like my sister worked to overcome her struggles, and you can overcome yours.

Gen Z Doesn’t want to Work Anymore …. Part 2

I knew one inmate in maximum security. This guy never gave me trouble. Typically, one hour of rec, three trays a day, one shower please and thank you was about the summation of our existence. I remember having a few random conversations with him like wishing him a Merry Christmas or us talking about the Branch Davidians.

So imagine my surprise when one day walking by his cell I see a cat hanging out in the cell with him.

The unit had a small army of cats, probably more cats than officers if we counted. They kept the rodent population down, supposedly. However I would see them usually hanging out begging by the kitchen or in the grassy area.

I spent some time trying to figure out how a cat got into the cell. The window was covered in black metal mesh. Up through the toilet maybe?

As I would find out, the inmate trustees who were supposed to be cleaning the pods, but were out doing anything but working could be paid to put a kitten in a bag and pass it to a fellow inmate.

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I’m not sure how many soups were worth a kitten and the exchange ratio never made itself apparent to me. Technically there were no rules against inmates having pets. The only thing I could possibly think of was a traffic and trading charge which wouldn’t hold water because I didn’t see it happen. Not that I was interested in writing up the inmate. I was happy for him.

The inmate soon regretted his decision. The commissary didn’t sell kitty litter. I recommended that he tear up old bags or pay a trustee to bring him grass. Also, cat food was not on the commissary list. My inmate bought tuna which was about as close as you could get. He told me that he tried feeding the kitten scrambled eggs describing it as “… the worst decision of my life. That thing was blowing up my cell.”

At a loss, the inmate turned in the kitten to a female officer who took it home. The cat became known as “Contra” (as in contraband). I talked to that coworker about it and Contra couldn’t seem to adjust to life in the free world. Contra was obsessed with sleeping in brown bags and had a bad habit of shanking, correction clawing the other members of the family.

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“Lookout boss.”

Why QUIET QUITTING is the BEST THING GEN Z ever Did

All of this is choice.

It’s only been about the last 15 years or so that I’ve discovered how wonderful life is when you live alone. I grew up with lots of friends all through school. My husband and I had combined our friends and our life was full of friends and children. My days were nonstop from the time my feet hit the floor in the morning. Our lives were hectic, busy and we enjoyed it that way.

Life really can change in a second, without warning. When our lives changed drastically when my husband died in an accident, I withdrew from everyone. It was not enjoyable. I didn’t want to be around anyone. That kind of alone was not enjoyable and it wasn’t healthy either.

Life goes on and I was surrounded with lots of new friends. Then the kids moved on to start their lives and families. I also started a new relationship that ended ugly 10 years later. I dated but nothing got serious. But I just wanted someone around. I didn’t want yo be alone. That isn’t healthy either. After several abusive relationships I made some major changes in my life. I moved several hundred miles away from everyone and everything I knew. I started my own business. I had to work a lot to get my business making money. I had no time to get out and meet people. About 3 years later I was able to relax. My business was doing so much better than I dreamed it do. I now had time to go meet new friends. I had met some people in the neighborhood. Ladies I’d walk with in mornings and evenings. I didn’t feel the need to hang out at tge bar or spending the weekends at tge veach or antique shopping or doing of the things I had always done. I really wanted to be at home, working in the garden, decorating a room, or just piddling around the house. I was enjoying spending time with just me. It was something g I’d never done before.

I have met a lot of people in my town because of my business. I socialize all day at work. Then I go home and I spend the rest of the day doing what I want. I date but I don’t want anything serious. A good long time friend will visit each month for several days. I enjoy the visit. I also enjoy it when the cost is over and I can be alone.

When I look back on my life I can see how my interests, wants and needs changed every 5 years or so. What I wanted at 20 wasn’t what I wanted at 25 and do on. So, for right now I’m enjoy my life alone. I don’t know what I’ll be enjoying in 5 years but for today in happy with my life right now.

Downtown Chicago Is Now A GHOST TOWN | Tourism Is Basically 0% | Migrants TAKE OVER

Chicago is now a ghost town.

How about a mystery so profound, that it stands apart from all others. The archaeological marvel that is changing our very understanding of human history.

Göbekli Tepe, Upper Mesopotamia, Turkey.

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I’m aware that Göbekli Tepe isn’t as famous as other sites such as Stonehenge or the Pyramids, heck some of you reading this may not have even heard of it…

I know my misses hadn’t, don’t worry I promptly corrected that travesty.

Basically, there was this unknown archaeologist who decided to dig up a strange shaped “potbelly hill”, he took a chance and discovered the archaeological find of the last hundred years, if not ever. Yep, that’s how monumental this is.

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Around 12 thousand years ago, some neolithic humans built a vast complex of stone structures, with massive stone monoliths which were intricately carved and inclosed large circles, for a mysterious and possibly never to be discovered purpose… Then they buried it all.

“Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological wonder. Built by Neolithic communities 11,500 years ago, it features enormous, round stone structures and monumental stone pillars up to 5.5 meters high. Since there is no evidence of farming or animal domestication at the time, the site is believed to have been built by hunter-gatherers. However, its architectural complexity is highly unusual for them.” — Professor Gopher.

Who frack built it, why did they do it, how did they know how to build it and why the bloody hell did they bury the vast structure intact?

Seriously, 12 thousand years ago humans were supposed to be hunting wild animals and gathering berries, living short and brutally hard lives, not building vast complexes out of stone…

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I know what you’re thinking – ‘Who cares, it’s not that impressive, we already know our ancestors raised big stones.’

Angrily throws metaphorical chalk across class, hitting petulant student in the face.

Göbekli Tepe is 6,000 years older than Stonehenge, it literally changes our entire understanding of human history. What’s more, is we’ve barely scratched the surface, seriously this neolithic complex is massive.

Humans didn’t just spontaneously learn how to carve stone like this or form large organised societies overnight capable of working across multiple generations to build such a marvel.

Oyeah, and the current thinking is that Göbekli Tepe could also be the birthplace of agriculture.

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Only 5 percent of the site has been excavated, that’s the equivalent of opening the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb, taking a shaky ass polaroid picture, with shit lighting, and then spending the next 30 years just gormlessly staring at that shite photograph.

Göbekli Tepe is the most fascinating mystery and yet it receives practically no attention.

Yakuza Takes Me To The Hostess Club In Japan (#137)

I actually had this situation a number of years ago. TL;DR – I decided that the humanitarian route was best.

This long-time employee was a favorite of our customers, as well as her colleagues. Unfortunately, the “big C” came for her far sooner than she deserved. I noticed a decline in performance well before she broke the news of her diagnosis. I knew that I had to do something, as she had such a critical “linchpin” role in our operations. But I felt that simply jettisoning her was completely unfair…and more than a bit heartless.

She used all of her PTO and FMLA for the year or so where she was fighting it off. I simply distributed what part of her role that I could to other people during the times she was out. She improved for a little while…but it came back stronger, and it was clear she was about out of options.

As a senior manager, I never use my PTO. Always something else to be done, you know? *shrug* So, I had my full yearly allocation, except for 8 hours I’d taken to have a root canal. I quietly arranged to give her my personal bank of PTO during the summer, so she could have that time with her family (particularly the younger relatives, who were all out of school) while still being paid. I didn’t tell anyone about it, including her, but word leaked.

She resigned around mid-summer, and passed away three weeks later. Her husband told me at the funeral that she had found out how she got her extra time off from HR, and made it known what I did before she passed.

Unintentionally, I made a great organizational investment. To this day, we have benefited from the good will generated from that decision. People know when you’re talking the talk…and they know when you’re walking the walk. Taking care of a long-time employee with a terminal illness is a great way to walk the walk. And I can’t imagine what might have happened if I had made a different choice. Besides, even if you don’t get the organizational benefit, it’s always the right time to do the right thing.

Almond Anise Biscotti

Almond Anise Biscotti
Almond Anise Biscotti

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup butter, softened
  • 1 tablespoon anise seed
  • 3 eggs
  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • 1/2 cup chopped almonds

Instructions

  1. Beat sugars and butter until well blended. Add anise seed and eggs; blend well. Stir in flour and baking powder; mix well. Stir in almonds. Shape dough into two 10 x 1 inch rolls. Place rolls 4 inches apart on greased cookie sheet. Flatten each to 2-inch width. Bake at 350 degrees F for 20 to 30 minutes or until golden brown. Cool completely.
  2. Cut diagonally into 1/2 inch slices. Arrange slices, cut side down, on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake at 350 degrees F for 6 to 10 minutes or until bottom begins to brown. Turn and bake for an additional 3 to 5 minutes or until crisp. Cool completely.
  3. Store in tightly covered container for up to one month. The anise flavor gets stronger with time.

Lots of truth here.

Noticed the room unusually clean and saw an envelope propped up prominently on the pillow. It was addressed, ‘Dad’. With the worst premonition, he opened the envelope and read the letter, with trembling hands.

Dear, Dad. It is with great regret and sorrow that I’m writing you. I had to elope with my new girlfriend, because I wanted to avoid a scene with Mum and you.

I’ve been finding real passion with Stacy. She is so nice, but I knew you would not approve of her because of all her piercing’s, tattoos, her tight Motorcycle clothes, and because she is so much older than I am.

But it’s not only the passion, Dad. She’s pregnant. Stacy said that we will be very happy. She owns a trailer in the woods, and has a stack of firewood for the whole winter. We share a dream of having many more children.

Stacy has opened my eyes to the fact that mari*juana doesn’t really hurt anyone. We’ll be growing it for ourselves and trading it with the other people in the commune for all the cocaine and ecstasy we want.

In the meantime, we’ll pray that science will find a cure for AIDS so that Stacy can get better. She sure deserves it!

Don’t worry Dad, I’m 15, and I know how to take care of myself. Someday, I’m sure we’ll be back to visit so you can get to know your many grandchildren.

Love, your son, Josh

P.S . Dad, none of the above is true. I’m over at Jason’s house. I just wanted to remind you that there are worse things in life than the school report that’s on the kitchen table. Call when it is safe for me to come home.”

The decision in 1241 A.D. by the Mongol princes, Batu Khan and Kadan, to ignore the advice of their infamous head military strategist Subutai and return to Mongolia after hearing of the death of the Great Khan Ögedei.

A little less than 800 years ago, Western civilization was on the precipice of complete annihilation. Ögedei, the third son of Genghis Khan, had continued his father’s violent and brutal imperial expansion into Europe and was poised for success. The arrival of news of the Great Khan’s death was either fully or partially responsible for the Mongol withdrawal from Europe sparing Western Civilization from the near universal destruction experienced in the wake of the Mongol hordes.

The desire of the grandsons of Genghis Khan to attend the Kurultai where the election of a new Great Khan would take place is entirely understandable. While neither would ultimately be selected because of the election of another of Genghis Khan’s grandsons, Güyük Khan,

they obviously had an interest in trying to position themselves politically for the election. Subutai was no doubt apoplectic over the decision as he was in the process of planning the invasion of the Holy Roman Empire having had great success in Europe up to that point.

main qimg 7d2f52ad60f858827db5a78cb2141e6d pjlq
main qimg 7d2f52ad60f858827db5a78cb2141e6d pjlq

  • Mongol siege of Ryazan in 1238

Before the Mongols withdrew, they had begun to experience some stiffened European resistance such as in Austria. But much of Europe east of Vienna had been laid waste by the Mongols and while they may not have succeeded in an occupation of Western Europe, the devastation would have undoubtably been verging on apocalyptic.

Subutai was one of the most ruthless of the Mongol generals. Any city failing to surrender unconditionally faced unspeakable horrors of death, destruction, and torture. The cold efficiency of the Mongol’s killing machine has seldom been equaled with entire cities murdered in a few hours of systematic execution. Over a period of a little more than a century, some estimates place the death toll at the hands of the Mongols as high as five percent of the global population.

Let that sink in. Five percent of all humans.

Europe might well have been permanently set back a few centuries had Subutai succeeded in finishing and executing his plans.

It should be noted that this classical view is no longer universally accepted. Many other factors have been suggested for the withdrawal of the Mongols including the aforementioned stiffening resistance, diminishing returns in plunder, and tribal infighting prior to news of Ögedei’s

death. And as horrible as their blackened earth strategy was, many historians regard the Mongol rule in a more benign way than Western history has traditionally viewed it. While personally I am not persuaded by these more modern takes, it is important to acknowledge these other plausible and less Eurocentric points of view.

Irrespective of these caveats, there can be little doubt that the death of Ögedei was a factor in the Mongol withdrawal and that world history would have been greatly altered had the hordes advanced into Western Europe. As it turned out, the Mongols never returned to Western Europe to follow up on the ground they had already softened. This single decision by two of the grandsons of Genghis Khan, at that precise moment in time, radically altered the shape of the modern world.

Baked Cherry Oatmeal

baked cherry oatmeal 11
baked cherry oatmeal 11

Ingredients

  • 2 cups old-fashioned oats
  • 4 cups milk
  • 1/2 teaspoon almond flavoring
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup sliced almonds
  • 1/2 cup dried cherries
  • 1 large apple, unpeeled and grated

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  2. Coat a 3 quart casserole or baking pan with cooking spray.
  3. In mixing bowl, combine all ingredients.
  4. Transfer to baking dish.
  5. Sprinkle top with additional almonds.
  6. Bake uncovered for 45 minutes.
  7. Serve hot.

Where China is ahead? China’s nuclear safety record is surprisingly very good. Especially when compared to other major industrial countries with nuclear power plants in operation.

China has had to deal with some major regulatory lapses in food safety and medicines in the past, but when it comes to nuclear safety, they might just have the best record on the planet if not one of the top 3, especially when the scale and scope of their nuclear energy systems are taken into account (46 reactors and increasing).

The Chinese nuclear operators have repeatedly gotten very high grades from international agencies on their safety precautions. Nuclear safety related incidents are graded from Level 1 to Level 7 (Level 7 being the worst like Chernobyl and Fukushima). The Chinese have never had an incident beyond Level 1.

A lot of this is because China’s nuclear safety is very openly discussed by Chinese nuclear engineers in technical journals within the country. Because of this openness and lack of censorship, several articles were published by Chinese engineers detailing that the primary issue with Chinese nuclear powerplants were due to substandard technical equipment or non standard equipment coming from equipment providers in China. This led to a 2016 scandal (which was reported openly in the Chinese press) about valves being supplied to nuclear powerplants that resulted in around a dozen nuclear equipment providers to publicly sign confessions to crimes regarding providing false information and provision of defective equipment.

The details of the scandals were published alongside signatures and seals from CPC officials and the CEOs of the equipment providers in the China Energy Report.

If you guys are familiar with the Chernobyl series, one of the big themes regarding the disaster was the secrecy and lack of information around the nuclear reactor designs and operations. Which prevented faults from being exposed.

If we were to speculate why China has such a good safety record, why the regulations are so good in nuclear safety and why safety issues can be discussed in such a transparent manner: It’s probably because of how deeply unsettled and impacted Chinese leaders were by the Fukushima incident in neighboring Japan.

The Fukushima incident spurred a pretty significant internal overhaul of China’s nuclear safety even though no disaster or safety incident had occurred yet. Reactor construction was put on hold, a lot of safety laws were implemented and the safety law was rapidly published. Nearly a thousand people were added to the national nuclear safety regulatory authority. Actually, the national nuclear safety regulatory authority is pretty special in China because apparently if you choose to go work with them, you can get residence permits (Huko) which are a big deal in China. And that was how they were able to bump up their recruitment despite the somewhat lower salary the organization pays compared to others.

And China’s excellent nuclear safety record has a benefit for the rest of the world as well. Pakistan has also had 0 nuclear safety incidents beyond Level 1 regarding their Chinese built powerplants, partly because Pakistani nuclear plant operators adopted the safety practices and procedures of their Chinese counterparts who they got these plants from in the first place. Pakistani nuclear operators also get training from Chinese operators which helps to further spread these safe nuclear plant practices to developing countries.

I think one side benefit of China exporting reactors abroad is, is that their safety record follows them. So a lot of developing countries can make the switch to safe, non-polluting nuclear energy by getting reactors from China and at the same time getting some pretty high quality training and safety procedures from them in the progress. Assuming of course, they continue to follow these safety procedures in an updated and consistent manner over the years. And also pair it with the same open, frank discussion on the current state of nuclear safety in the country, the same way the Chinese nuclear engineer community does.

Academic sources if you want to go more in-depth on this topic: Jane Nakano and Thomas Rawski


What China still lags in?

Probably the soft infrastructure of a country: Policies.

I’ll give two examples:

  1. Health care policies and health insurance management
  2. Horizontal cooperative policies in large engineering organizations.

  1. Health care policies and health insurance management

China is at that point in their development where they have pretty much mastered hard infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams, powerplants).

But soft infrastructure, like your health care policies are an area where the government is still trying to figure out how to make systems work. The newer hospitals in China, disease prevention, early detection and a lot of other components of China’s health care system are pretty first class and comparable to the best systems in the world.

The issue comes around questions of policy: What should we expect the patient to pay for? What should the government pay for? How do we optimize drug prices to balance between innovative research and affordability? How can hospitals balance their budgets without requiring government bail outs? How do we balance between breadth and depth of medical coverage?

While China’s economy and spending power has increased manifold, in terms of advances in health care coverage, the country is actually going down in terms of health care advancement compared to the past and the last major increase in life expectancy and quality of health care was achieved under Mao’s barefoot doctor program.

The government is trying to figure things out. They rolled out universal health care for China, which was no small feat. It focusses on breadth rather than depth (give some limited health care insurance to everyone instead of give health insurance that covers everything to some people). Hospitals are allowed to mark up drugs 15% to make profits off of them.

But the core issue remains that health insurance and managing health insurance is something that’s been in China for only 20 years and is new to the country and it’s managers. So we have the somewhat strange situation where China’s health care system is well funded, has excellent doctors and supporting staff, has hospitals equipped with the latest technology.

But the health care system is in deep trouble because the managerial skill needed to keep it running through pricing optimization, risk management, risk pooling, health insurance management, premium setting and healthcare policy expertise is very badly lacking. And could lead to massive financial problems in the future if the policy isn’t ironed out correctly.


The second example I’ll give is of horizontal management.

This plays a big part in engineering firms in China that are trying to achieve the Chinese government’s goals of developing next gen technologies in China indigenously.

A good example here is COMAC, which has been trying to get into the passenger aircraft game to compete with Boeing and Airbus, primarily with their first aircraft the C919.

COMAC is a good example of a Chinese SOE that still has a large leftover legacy from how Soviet State enterprises were organized. It is extremely top down and while it can excel in vertical management, it struggles when it comes to horizontal management.

Horizontal management refers to how the different departments and units within companies are supposed to integrate with each other and synchronize their activities. Within engineering firms, this is something that System Engineers, Project Managers and Systems Integration Managers are supposed to enable. A complex engineering system like a submarine, a satellite or a aircraft cannot be created from scratch in an engineering organization where you have 0 horizontal integration and management and your departments fail to coordinate with each other when designing and developing components that are supposed to go in the same end product.

COMAC’s C919 had a very trouble development history precisely because COMAC is still very much organized and managed by state employees whose perspective is still shaped by vertical management principles of large Soviet organizations. And suffers from major issues in internal integration of different department efforts.

Which is why the Chinese government is making an enormous push to attract not just technical experts and engineers from abroad, but also the business managers who specialize in this stuff and enable it to happen.

I think this is why a lot of Asian parents need to stop pushing the “Doctor or Engineer” choice on their kids. There’s enormous demand in China at the moment for managers who are experts in health care policies, insurance management etc. from the first example. And engineering managers, project managers and other enablers of horizontal integration in the second example.

Both of these fields require people with imagination, flexibility, creativity and good communication skills.

The thing is, it isn’t like China has failed at this: Ali Baba has superb internal horizontal integration. There’s a joke that Ali Baba and Tencent are better positioned to make China’s next passenger aircraft or aircraft carrier than Chinese SOEs because being private sector entities they have superbly synchronized their internal alignments and developed seamless integration between all their different divisions and departments.

And we have to remember that this is the first time the government is making a move in these sectors where they will have to take time to build up experience.

And I think the Chinese government should consider filling this deficiency in their current internal economy and industrial base by either continuing to get top managerial talent from abroad, nurturing their own management talent or give more space to private sector entities in this fields that don’t suffer from the internal management issues that the Chinese SOEs struggle with.

Source used:

  • Jane Nakano, Senior Fellow in CSIS Energy and National Security Program
  • Loren Brandt (University of Toronto)
  • Thomas Rawski (University of Pittsburgh)

My daughter, who is 5 years old, is super sweet and compassionate, but she also can be quite the spicy one! She sometimes says exactly what she means. With her dad, however, she is much more restrained. He, though, has a tendency to nitpick and it can become annoying, even to me. I have to hold myself back from saying, “Leave her alone; she’s fine!” He just thinks girls should walk like this, talk like that…yada yada. Well, my daughter isn’t about that life. She is unapologetically who she is. She just hears him, says, “okay, Daddy” and tries to adjust.

Well, one day, we were traveling. We’d be out all day. We were tired. And my husband was fussing about something again. She was in the back seat, looking out of the window with an exasperated look on her face. I was also looking out of my window with the same look. Both of us just wanted him to shut up fussing.

Just as I was getting ready to say, “Enough!,” her little voice chimed in. She sounded like an adult trapped in a 5 year old’s body, “Oh my goodness, DADDY! You make me want to DRINK!” I turned and looked at her, stunned. She was looking at the rearview mirror so she could see his face and her expression was priceless. But his, was hilarious. He asked, incredulously, “I make you want to do what?” She said, “You make me want. to. drink….and I am not talking about juice boxes or CapriSUNs either, Dad!”

I promise, it took everything in my power to keep a straight face. I watched his face turn beet red. He looked pretty angry. But he said nothing. He looked at me, and I gave him a “Don’t look at me, I would have said the same thing” kind of look. We rode in silence for about half an hour. She said, “Dad, I should not have yelled at you. I’m sorry. But, I meant what I said.” (That’s my line to dad LOL). Then, she took a nap. His nagging has really slowed dramatically.

While I think children should respect their parents and not yell. I do think that is a two way street. I also think kids should learn to stand up for themselves. I cannot imagine a better lesson for both of them.

A basket of heads

Yep. I was a worker at McDonalds and only sixteen at the time, and we had a new employee. He was on grills, and I was on table right behind him. There’s another side to the table that cannot see the grills through the cabinets of food, so when any cook-to-order meat, in this case quarter pounder, was finished, the grill person would call “Quarter’s up!” So side two would know to get their meat and send the burger on its way.

Well, our new employee absolutely refused to talk near me. I didn’t really get it, he would talk to other people. But he wouldn’t call out quarter’s up for the life of him. After multiple times of doing it myself, I finally stopped and took the meat and held it back to him and asked him to call it out himself. He slammed it into the table and splattered grease into it. I stood there and told him he needed to call out quarter’s up for side two. He would not, he turned back to his grills and ignored me.

I called out quarter’s up and slid them their meat, and the shift continued. I stopped calling out quarters’ up, mostly because I was busy keeping up with the lunch rush and didn’t notice when he slid the meat onto the table out of my line of sight. And out of side two’s sight.

So a manager asks why side two is so slow, and they explain they don’t have their quarter meat and I would slide it over to them and apologize. Someone would tell the grill person to call it out, and the shift would continue again until he went on break.

I didn’t actually know anything had happened until the big boss of the store was called in and he came rushing up to me and told me very sternly,”If someone threatens you like that again, you need to tell management immediately!”

I did not understand. Nobody threatened me?

Turns out, when the grill dude went on break, he loudly told everyone how he was going to “beat the shit out of that little kid.”

And well, he got fired

Western Women Are Too Woke For “Passport Bros”

Men ware galloping away from the West.

The German-American Strategic Depth Clown Show

Harry Potter as a Mexican Soap Opera | Telenovelas are Hell

Once I walked into my college class of 200 people only to see my picture displayed on the projector screen and my instructor asking my classmates who had been signing in for me since I had clearly never been to class. Apparently I’d accidentally signed the attendance sheet for that day, the class day prior, and was a couple minutes late, so he had his ga literally examine my signatures and they determined that the letters were written differently each day. Since I was safely hidden behind a large pillar, I promptly left and called my mom crying. I had attended every class, albeit late on occasion, and was a very shy person. I dreaded going back to that class where I was certain everyone believed me to be a fraud.

Edit: I saw some people asked what happened afterwards, and I ended up emailing the professor during that class telling him what I’d seen and assuring him that I had attended every class and that I was very confused as to why he had made the accusation. It was then that he told me I’d been signed in on the wrong day and that was what had prompted his investigation into my attendance and signatures. He made it very clear that he did not believe my explanation and I met with him in his office where he had me sign my name about 20 times and kept threatening to fail me, saying I could easily be faking it. At this, because I was telling the truth, and had never had anyone question my honor like that before, I started to cry again, and begged him not to fail me. I honestly don’t remember much after that, only that my crying made him begrudgingly agree to allow me back in class. The rest of the time I attended class, I showed up early, sat in the very back and wore a hood until class began. I caught a couple people looking back at me on occasion (and I turned bright red as a result), but for the most part my incredible ability as a shy person to remain utterly invisible served me really well.

Cattle Drive Cornbread

Cornbread
Cornbread

Ingredients

  • 4 cups cornmeal
  • 1/2 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 cups chopped onion
  • 1 to 2 finely chopped jalapeño peppers
  • 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons salt
  • 2 teaspoons black pepper
  • 1 (16 ounce) can creamed corn

Instructions

  1. Boil a pan of water.
  2. Mix cornmeal and vegetable oil well in a large bowl. Add just enough of the boiling water to form a dough that could be made into a ball.
  3. Add remaining ingredients except for the creamed corn. Mix to blend, then add creamed corn.
  4. Coat the bottom of a cast iron skillet with vegetable oil. Heat over medium heat.
  5. Remove one cup of the cornbread mixture from the bowl, and add it to the skillet.
  6. Flatten out the cornbread, and cook as you would a pancake.

This Japanese Man has 4 Wives, 2 Girlfriends & 54 Children…

Randy Miller suggested an edit to my story. 
He blew my story away because I have never run into an ASSHOLE that removed an entire story. 
Fuck You Randy Miller! 
I had to rewrite it you ass!

I will tell you my story.

My sister-in-law has a son. When my nephew was young we saw him a lot, even visited a few times while he was in college, and took him out a few times for dinners. When he got married, we were not invited to his wedding. We weren’t even told about it. When we found out, I have to admit we were a bit hurt.

The reason we weren’t invited was because his grandmother, my MIL, was a crazy mean, lying, horrible woman. The entire family except the nephew and my husband had felt her wrath. To her, he was a golden child. She filled his head with lies, and she is convincing, especially to a kid. She did spend money on him, but nothing is without a string. When she met his girlfreinf, he was told she was a sl*t, a woman that would hurt him, a dirty girl, not worthy. Eventually, they broke up, but got back together., and then secretly engaged, and finally secretly married.

So there was a plausible reason why only his immediate family was present. They did not have any big thing, justice of the peace, ate out, done.

Now married, his wife was pregnant with their first child. I was invited to the baby shower. A part of me did not want to go because I was still hurt. Plus, I dislike showers. But I thought about it, and let it go. I attended the shower and bought a gift of of their registry that was fairly expensive for the baby, and them.

So the question is why would I agree to give them a gift for a baby shower, when I wasn’t invited to the wedding. Because I had found out the entire story, and realized I was being unkind, childish, selfish, and ignorant. And most important, I want a relationship with them.

I have never discussed being disappointed about not being able to attend their wedding, I love weddings. But I’m glad I rethought the emotions I felt because we have a great relationship now with his family. I know I would have regretted not going to the baby shower, and giving a gift to them for their baby.

So, you haven’t explained why you weren’t invited to the wedding. Could it be they were trying to keep it small. There could be many reasons, even that your invitation never arrived. But you need to decide if you have a relationship with these people that you wish to continue. If the answer is yes, then send a gift. If not, you have made up your mind.

Regarding the 300 miles away, unless they are living somewhere you could turn your trip into a vacation, if you have the time and money, I would just send the gift with a congratulatory note.

My opinion only!

Gen Z Doesn’t want to Work Anymore …..

Be the Rufus

“I was on the way home a couple of days ago when I saw this girl from my neighbourhood being very upset and crying on the street.

I decide to approach her. I asked: ‘Hi! Is everything okay?’

She barely looked up and then she just started bawling about her crappiest day she had.

She said she had lost her best friend because a stupid fight and that her mom is depressed all the time and she was also bullied in school all day…

I really wanted to make her feel better but I didn’t really know what to say, so I just asked: ‘Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?’

She said yes!

When we walked in the door, she looked up, her eyes opened up, and she was like: ‘Wooow!!!’ My house is full of paintings and all sorts of weird stuff; it’s messy but very colourful.

On the way in, I was even thinking about how messy my house was and felt bad about leaving tobacco all over the table that morning. But she didn’t seem bothered at all.

She said it was the coolest place she has ever seen. I asked her if she wanted to paint with me so we did. She painted the biggest canvas we could find with lots of bright colours. She used like 10-12 brushes and when she finished, her face had changed completely.

She was beaming!

main qimg 2720f3485ada3a8ac9d43fe210c5cbf5
main qimg 2720f3485ada3a8ac9d43fe210c5cbf5

I may have made her feel better that day but she also made me realise how lucky I am. Maybe I am weird and I often feel that I don’t really fit anywhere, but my art was able to make this girl feel better about herself and lift her up from a dark place.”

America Collapsing Like Rome?- Upcoming Recession, WW3, Trump, China & Joe Rogan | Patrick Bet David

Not working on a computer but: I worked at the 24 hour photo processing lab back in 1990. Based in Phoenix we got film flown in from all over, including Las Vegas. The usual family photos, the occasional but weekly roll of film for some one with a anatomically correct BDSM Barbie with ever-changing costumes, personal intimate photos for a loved one, and once in a while something different and more sinister.

One of our Las Vegas rolls showed men with a pair of boys, all nude no clothes in sight(ha-ha), no intimate contact showed just these men and the children. The lead tech made the call to the FBI for possible child porn or abuse. After the FBI came and collected the pictures and the address from the packaging, they proceeded to the Las Vegas area address.

What they discovered was the address was a nudist retirement community. The men were a couple and one of them was the grandfather of the boys. The parents knew about granddad and his partner living in a gay nudist community and had no concerns about the safety of the boys.

Douglas Macgregor Reveals the Truth: Russia’s -Ukraine Terrifying Hidden Power in the Conflict

https://youtu.be/otyhVg-oUHs

A Woman Finds Her Daughter’s ‘Dead’ Rapist: people are in awe of her “willpower”

A woman from a remote village in Bihar, India tracked down her daughter’s rapist after he was declared dead leading to the closure of the case. The rape convict, Niraj Modi, has been sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment for raping a minor girl and his father to seven years for forgery, cheating, and dishonesty.

Modi, a 39-year-old man who was a school teacher at a government school, was accused of raping his 12-year-old student, a minor girl, in October 2018. The girl was attacked while she was by herself in a sugarcane field, and her assailant threatened to post a video of the assault online to keep her silent.

Soon after a complaint was lodged by the survivor’s mother, and Modi was arrested. But, he was out on bail after merely two months in prison.

In February 2022, Modi’s father Rajaram Modi, who is over 60 years old and works as a farmer, travelled to a court nearly 100km (62 miles) away from the village, with a lawyer to claim that his son died on February 27, 2022, at their village home. In order to get a death certificate issued, he provided two pictures from the cremation, receipts of the firewood bought for the ritual as evidence, signatures and the unique biometric identity number of five villagers as per Indian laws. However, as per a 54-year-old law, the authorities didn’t question the cause of death.

main qimg aa86bbebf5dba95beb6616de864b4967
main qimg aa86bbebf5dba95beb6616de864b4967

Two months after this, the local authorities issued a death certificate and the court closed the case in May 2022 as the “only accused in the case” was dead.

However convinced that this was a forgery, the girl’s mother was the only person who suspected that the teacher had faked his death with the help of his father.

The mother said that she went from one home to another in order to enquire if Modi was really dead and not to her surprise, nobody had heard of the news. Following which, she went to the court urging an investigation into the matter.

In May 2022, she also wrote a petition to the local official claiming that the death certificate was issued based on forged documents and it needs to be investigated. Soon, investigation began and the authorities demanded more and fresh evidence from Modi’s family regarding his death including photos of the “deceased after his death, of the cremation, of the burning pyre, the last rites and [fresh] testimony of five witnesses”.

As a part of the investigation, members of the village council met the inhabitants of the 250 families in the village. It appeared that no one was aware of Modi’s death. Hindus often only shave their heads as a sign of mourning if a close relative passes away. However, none of the Modi family members had done so. In fact, Modi’s own relatives did not have the information regarding his death.

main qimg 046f62c7a5463c0383b191bbd3be53c6
main qimg 046f62c7a5463c0383b191bbd3be53c6

After Rajaram failed to provide fresh evidence of Niraj’s death, he was questioned by the investigative office again.

Following the investigation, it was confirmed that Modi’s death was faked. The officers found that the teacher had falsified the signatures of the parents of five of his students’ parents on a document requesting his own death certificate. He informed the parents that in order to set up the students’ scholarships, he would need their biometric identity numbers.

The officials, then, cancelled Niraj Modi’s death certificate and charged his father with forgery and in July 2022, the case was reopened.

The mother’s relentless battle to track down her daughter’s “dead” rapist came to an end finally and in October last year(2023)he was convicted for his crimes.

Keep smiling

Beefy Cowboy Beans

There’s plenty of hearty ground beef in this Beefy Cowboy Beans recipe.

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cowboybeans 750×1000

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 pounds ground beef
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 1 red or green bell pepper, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
  • 1 (16 ounce) can baked beans
  • 1 (15 1/2 ounce) can Great Northern beans, rinsed and drained
  • 1/4 cup tomato ketchup
  • 1/4 cup Heinz 57 sauce
  • 1 tablespoon packed brown sugar
  • 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

Instructions

  1. In a large nonstick skillet, brown ground beef, onion and bell pepper over medium-high heat 6 to 8 minutes or until beef is no longer pink, breaking up into 1 inch crumbles.
  2. Pour off drippings.
  3. Season beef mixture with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper.
  4. Stir in beans, ketchup, Heinz 57 Sauce, brown sugar and Worcestershire sauce.
  5. Reduce heat to medium low.
  6. Simmer, covered, 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

I have a theory about the sorts of people that are easy to entertain…. 😉

One cellie of mine was really into the markets. He spent incredible amounts of time building models to use against the daily Dow or NASDAQ numbers when we could get them in long enough blocks to be useful. A friend sent him five years of daily data for one index. He built some formulas to fire triggers when conditions were right. The formulas were designed to work in excel.

My job? Human spreadsheet. I took a couple months worth of the data, plotted it across a “spreadsheet” that I’d made from steno notebook pages taped together. The spreadsheet went from A1 to something like BK68. A handful of cells were raw data, the remainder were things like, “=If(And(AI22>AI21,B22>B21,Or(H22=I22,K22=K21)),BB22-BC21,BB22+BC21)”.

Pure drudgery. I had to proof for syntactical and lexical errors and churn out the data. We were sending the finished product (formulas) to someone who would drop them in excel and (hopefully) use them to come up with actionable Intel.

Woof. It took weeks to produce what excel can do in the blink of an eye!

Then there was this:

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I set a goal for myself to memorize two hours of poetry. I copied poems I liked in tiny handwriting and kept them with me most of the time so I could study while I waited (lots of waiting in prison).

I didn’t hit my goal, but I did manage to get to about forty minutes. The more I did, the easier it got. I learned that our memory works (kind of) like a muscle. Give it a good workout and it’ll get stronger.

Are those pastimes strange enough?

The (Overdue) Collapse of the 9-5 Job

A sheriff’s deputy drove up to me while I was standing leaning against my vehicle and asked me if I had any guns. I said not on me but there were some in the back of the pickup. He told me to stay where I was.

He walked back to the bed of my truck and picked up a poster that I had made up that said “WANTED Dead or Alive: Baby Bomber Brandes”

He read the poster and then said to me, “I know who you are. You are the man whose home was bombed and whose baby daughter has been in the hospital for the last 6 months, and this is going to be the hardest arrest I ever have to make in my career, but I want for you to know that if I were in your shoes, I would be doing exactly what you are trying to do.” Brandes was up a dead end road, and I was at the bottom waiting to kill him.

Brandes had called his employers at the ATF and told them that I had him trapped and they needed to help him get out of there. The ATF called the sheriff and had them come up and arrest me.

The deputy arrested and drove me to jail without handcuffs and when he dropped me at the jail explained to the jailers the situation. I was treated very well by everyone at the jail. A couple of days later I made a deal with the federal DA that I would leave town and leave their snitch alone. I had to, I had a quadriplegic daughter getting out of the hospital to care for.

I came to Oregon and had to care for my daughter while wearing an ankle bracelet for a few months. The feds did live up to their end of the bargain though: all charges were dropped a short time later. There really are some great cops out there and they are just like you and I and have big hearts.

The deputy actually apologized for having to take me in.

the American dream is dead… this is why people are leaving the US.

In early March 1933, a man walked into the Hi-Way Cigar Store in Pismo Beach, California, and laid a huge clamshell on the counter. “Gimme a box of cigars,” he said.

[1]That day, the clam was paying.

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A clamshell used as scrip currency in 1933 shows the name of the shop issuing the currency, its value, and, on the inside, signatures of the people whose hands it passed through. (Clamshell Currency | Hakai Magazin

History is full of examples of successful local initiatives aimed at providing exchange media, but the Great Depression of the 1930’s saw this done on an unprecedented scale. There were literally hundreds of scrip issues that were put into circulation by a variety of agencies, including state governments, municipalities, school districts, clearing house associations, manufacturers, merchants, chambers of commerce, business associations, local relief committees, cooperatives, and even individuals.

These issuers went by different names, depending on who issued them and the circumstances of their issuance. Common scrip types were certificates of indebtedness, tax anticipation notes, payroll warrants, trade scrip, clearing house certificates, credit vouchers, moratorium certificates, and merchandise bonds.

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Crescent City, California 1933 10 cent clamshell From the collection of Ken Barr Numismatics (Depression Scrip.com)

Besides learning how to “make do, or do without,” people began to establish mutual support structures, like workers’ cooperatives, many of which would recycle and repair donated or broken items.

People learned to share what they had, and to by-pass the market and financial systems. Most of these measures were considered stop-gaps to be utilized until things “got back to normal,” but in some of them there seemed to be the promise of more permanent improvements. One of these “stop-gaps,” which was intended to address the problem of the dearth of currency in circulation, was the issuance of “scrip.”

When the Depression and resulting banking crisis hit their community, the residents of the coastal town of Pismo Beach, California picked an unusual but logical medium of exchange. The pismo (Tivela stultorum) is a species of clam with a very thick shell

[6], found in large numbers at least as far south as 300 miles south of the US–Mexico border in Baja California on the Pacific Ocean side, where strong surf sometimes washes ashore live clams. Native American tribes in California relied upon the clams as a main dietary staple.

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Emergency Money

The shells are surprisingly large—up to roughly 15 centimeters in width—and many have faint traces of the clams’ natural shell patterning, faded wispy lines of purple at the edge of the exterior sides.

Shells were marked with India ink in denominations ranging from 25 cents to $20. Each piece was numbered, and signed on the front and on the back. As with the stamp notes of the Midwest, it was necessary to sign each clamshell on the back in order to keep it in circulation.

The idea was that the growing list of signatures would be a boost to morale — proof that, even in tough times, business was being transacted.

No formal requirements may have existed, but informal pressure certainly would have endorsed the practice. The shells were more or less credit—placeholders for real currency.

Eleven of the town’s merchants got together to issue the clam currency. Among them: K.L. Phillips service station, Henderson’s Drug Store, Hi-Way Cigar Store, Leiter’s Rexall Pharmacy and Restwell Cabins. Even the Pismo Beach Post Office accepted clam currency. It was agreed that when change in dollars or cents wasn’t available, they would issue shells to customers instead. Customers would use the shells in subsequent transactions after signing their names on the inside, endorsing them somewhat like checks, which gave businesses a record of who had “spent” their shells. If any customers still had shells rattling around once the banks reopened, they could ask the retailer to exchange them for cash.

Officials had one concern that most issuers would hang onto them as souvenirs of the lack of traditional currency.

Some issuers destroyed the notes after they were redeemed.

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Pismo Beach, California, 1 Dollar, 1933 (clamshell)

Restwell Cabins issued “notes” in three denominations: twenty-five cents, fifty cents, and one dollar.

The larger the amount, the larger the shell. The issue may have been partly intended as a spoof, or for sale to tourists, in the manner of German notgeld around 1920.

Redemption would never be a problem because collectors would want to keep these pieces in their cabinets or trade them with their friends.

But it was also intended partly as a real, if unique, circulating medium. The Restwell Cabins issue bore the motto, “IN GOD WE TRUST.”

Each piece was numbered, and each was signed on the front and on the back. This was in the middle of Roosevelt’s 1933 national banking holiday, from March 6 to March 9, 1933, during which withdrawals were frozen. This gave his administration a chance to stabilize the banking system

.In an era of economic turmoil, thousands of banks were failing and Americans’ trust in the institutions had evaporated. Fearing that their money was no longer safe at the bank, many people had emptied their accounts and stashed dollars at home—which, unfortunately, further undermined the banks.

Proclamation 2039 ordered the suspension of all banking transactions, effective immediately.

The terms of the presidential proclamation specified that:

“no such banking institution or branch shall pay out, export, earmark, or permit the withdrawal or transfer in any manner or by any device whatsoever, of any gold or silver coin or bullion or currency or take any other action which might facilitate the hoarding thereof; nor shall any such banking institution or branch pay out deposits, make loans or discounts, deal in foreign exchange, transfer credits from the United States to any place abroad, or transact any other banking business whatsoever.”

This 10-cent note was issued by the Crescent City Chamber of Commerce. It’s worth about $500 today. (Cash-Strapped California’s IOUs: Just the Latest Sub for Dollars)

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The thought of having to go for four days without readily available cash shocked and traumatized America. Around the country, businesses began issuing IOU-style notes or ersatz dollars—often called scrip currency—in the form of metal or wooden tokens so that everyday transactions could continue even when retailers couldn’t easily issue change.

An estimated $1 billion in this scrip was issued by towns and counties, not to mention corporations, school boards, newspapers and a few wealthy individuals.

Most promissory notes looked like paper currency, but scrip was also printed on leather, metal, fish-skin parchment and, in Tenino, Wash., on slabs of pressed wood.

In Hood River, Ore., Hal’s Tire Service printed $1 bills on scraps of old tires, briefly giving the rubber check a good name.

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Depression scrip: 1934 25-cent fish skin parchment Friday Harbor, Washington

In creating the currency, the Pismo Beach business owners turned back the clock to the era before the Civil War when it was common to find locally produced scrip.

The 1933 scrip reflected the small community’s expression of resilience. A lack of dollars didn’t worry them. “All of a sudden this group of people said, ‘Well, we have what we do have’,

They had clamshells. Appropriating them as currency helped insulate the community from the practical difficulties of the bank holiday.

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Pismo Clam Money

In 1985, the Pismo Beach City Council considered buying back the clam scrip from an Arcadia coin and stamp collector for $3,000.

The clams are now on display at City Hall in the lobby by the city clerk’s office. Not a bad investment, especially considering how rare it is to find a legal-sized clam in Pismo Beach these days. In 2013, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the clam script, Pismo Beach citizens resurrected clamshell money, making colorful homages to the 1933 variants.

Among the businesses that accepted them were a restaurant and a pawnshop specializing in video games and DVDs.

So the next time someone asks, “How many clams did that cost?”

[27] , remember they are asking for a value in dollars, not bivalves.

Footnotes

10 Countries Where Americans are Not Welcome in 2024

I once had to fire someone just a few days after they started and it’s one of the very few times in my entire career where I fired someone on the spot. I had no choice.

At the time we were riding high as a company having rebuilt an entire culture and the company was working well. This admin who answered to me and a few others, while I was at lunch demanded access to HR documents that were confidential to the other employees. When our HR manager told her no but that she could talk to me, she started screaming at the top of her lungs at the manager and everyone in the offices was completely rattled by the scene.

I receive a call while I was eating my lunch to get back to the office because it was bad. I raced back and saw the looks on everyone’s face and asked a few what had happened. They all said the same thing. There was no other side to this. A few heard her demand for records and thought it was out of line in the first place and then with the screaming on top, there was no way to keep her. When I fired her, I explained that there was no turning that around. You couldn’t undo that damage no matter how she apologized and I didn’t want our culture to be everyone thinking that was even remotely okay.

It sucks to fire anyone. It’s not something any manager ever wants to deal with, but sometimes you have to do it for the greater good of everyone else. There were no employees who thought she should have a second chance. Not one. In fact, they were thrilled that I didn’t put up with it.

Male inequality, explained by an expert | Richard Reeves

The number of male therapists decreasing while the number of men needing therapy increases is worrying to think about.

On April 14, 1865, as he walked into the morning Cabinet meeting at the White House, General Ulysses S. Grant received rapturous applause. Five days earlier, Grant had accepted the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Virginia’s Appomattox Court House.

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Image: Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox. April 9, 1865: General Robert E. Lee surrenders at Appomattox

The nightmarish Civil War had ended. Lincoln and his Cabinet were in a celebratory mood, but Grant was bone-weary. As author Ron Chernow recounts in his biography Grant, the general looked forward to a short respite from the battlefield.

After the meeting closed at 2pm, Grant “lingered to speak with the president.” Lincoln invited the general and his wife to the theater that evening to see the play Our American Cousin, starring celebrated actress Laura Keene.

Newspapers had already trumpeted both Lincoln and Grant’s upcoming attendance.

Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, immediately worried for their safety.

“He had for some months been aware that threats of assassination were being made by certain evil minded persons against the leaders of the Federal government and army. The presence of the President of the nation and the Lieutenant-General of the armies at any public function at such a critical hour was simply courting disaster.”

Lincoln reacted flippantly, chaffing Stanton “for his lack of faith in human nature.” The president of a democracy, he averred, had to show himself to the people, and some danger was an inescapable hazard of office.

“To be absolutely safe,” he told John Nicolay resignedly, “I should lock myself up in a box.”

Lincoln believed the sight of the “victorious president and general” together would be of great benefit to the public.

Grant searched for a gracious way to decline. The general soon received a note from his wife Julia, detailing her wish to leave for Burlington that day to see their children.

Grant politely declined to attend Ford’s Theatre, joking that he now had a command from Mrs. Grant. As he subsequently said, “I was glad to have the note, as I did not want to go to the theater.”

Lincoln, who was disappointed, understood. “Of course, General, you have been long from home, fighting in the field, and Mrs. Grant’s instincts should be considered before my request. I am very sorry, however, for the people would only be too glad to see you.”

Lincoln extended invitations to Stanton, Speaker of the House Schuler Colfax, and his son Robert Todd Lincoln, but all turned him down. Eventually Clara Harris and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, agreed to accompany him.

At 10:13pm, while the Grants traveled east to change trains in Philadelphia, John Wilkes Booth slipped into the president’s box at the theater and pointed a derringer at the back of Lincoln’s head. He then “executed the gentle president with brutal efficiency.”

Image: Booth murdering the president at Ford’s Theatre. Lincoln’s Missing Bodyguard

In a small appointment book, Booth was eager to record his accomplishment for posterity.

Until today nothing was ever thought of sacrificing to our country’s wrongs. For six months we had worked to capture, but our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart.

I struck boldly, and not as the papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on. A colonel was at his side. I shouted “Sic semper” before I fired.

Telegrams notified the general of the terrible news, and he was immediately summoned back to Washington.

Grant had seen untold horrors during his campaigns. But he would remember this day as among the saddest of his life.


Weeks later, as the assassination conspirators stood trial, Grant discovered that he was one of several targets of the Confederate sympathizers. The killers had hoped to decapitate the Union government in one bold strike, but they lost their golden opportunity to attack the now-famous general.

The night of Lincoln’s assassination, as Grant and his wife prepared to board their train, they had noticed a man on horseback who had galloped past them twice. Each time, the figure had “thrust his face” at the couple and glared at them.

Grant later learned the glowering horseman was John Wilkes Booth, who had been conferring on the sidewalk with his actor friend John Mathews when the Grant carriage sped by and he set off in pursuit of it. From the heaped-up baggage, he must have confirmed that the Grants were leaving town and would not be at Ford’s Theater.

“It seems I was to have been attacked,” Grant stated, “and Mrs. Grant’s sudden resolve to leave deranged the plan.”

Next Steps (Almost there!)

Confident Dragon Lays Out Modernization Roadmap

As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on overdrive. Forever Wars never die.

This is the Year of the Wooden Dragon, according to China’s classic wuxing (“five elements”) culture. The dragon, one of the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, is a symbol of power, nobility and intelligence. Wood adds growth, development and prosperity.

Call it a summary of where China is heading in 2024.

The second session of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was finalized on Sunday in Beijing.

The wider world should know that within the framework of grassroots democracy with Chinese characteristics, an extremely complex – and fascinating – phenomenon, the importance of the CPPCC is paramount.

The CPPCC channels wide-ranging expectations of the average Chinese to the decision level, and actually advises the central government on a vast range of issues – from everyday living to high-quality development strategies.

This year, most of the discussion focused on how to drive China’s modernization even faster. This being China, concepts – like flowers – were blooming all around the spectrum, such as “new quality productive forces, “deepening reform,” “high-standard opening-up,” and a fabulous new one, “major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.”

As the Global Times emphasized,

“2024 is not only a critical year for achieving the goals of the ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ but also a key year for achieving the transition to high-quality development of the economy.”

Betting on strategic investment

So let’s start with Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s first “work report” delivered a week ago, which opened the annual session of the National People’s Congress. The key takeaway: Beijing will be pursuing the same economic targets as in 2023. That translates as 5% annual growth.

Of course deflationary risks, a downturn in the real estate market and somewhat shaky business confidence simply won’t vanish. Li was quite realistic, emphasizing Beijing is “keenly aware” of the challenges ahead:

“Achieving this year’s targets will not be easy.” And he added: “Global economic growth lacks steam and the regional hotspot issues keep erupting. This has made China’s external environment more complex, severe and uncertain.”

Beijing’s strategy remains focused on a

“proactive fiscal policy and prudent monetary policy”. 

In a nutshell: the song remains the same. There won’t be a “stimulus” of any kind.

Deeper answers should be found in the work report/budget released by the National Development and Reform Commission: the focus will be on structural change, via extra funds to science, technology, education, national defense, agriculture.

Translation: China bets on strategic investment, the key for a high-quality economic transition.

In practice, Beijing will be heavily invested in modernizing industry and developing “new quality productive forces” such as new-energy vehicles, biomanufacturing and commercial space flight.

Science Minister Yin Hejun made it clear: there was an 8.1% increase in national investment in research and development in 2023.

He wants more – and he will get it: R&D spending will grow by 10% to a total of 370.8 billion yuan.

The mantra is “self-reliance”.

On all fronts – from chipmaking to AI. A no holds barred tech war is on – and China is totally focused to counter “tech containment” from the Hegemon as much as its ultimate goal is to wrest tech supremacy from its prime competitor. Beijing simply cannot allow itself to be vulnerable to U.S.-imposed tech choke points and supply chain disruptions.

So short-term economic problems will not be causing sleepless nights.

The Beijing leadership is always looking ahead – focusing on long-term challenges.

Learning lessons from the Donbass battlefield

Beijing will continue to steer the economic development of Hong Kong and Macau, and invest even more in the crucial Greater Bay Area, which is the premier southern China high tech, services and finance hub.

Taiwan of course was central to the work report; Beijing fiercely opposes “external interference” – code for Hegemon tactics. That will become even trickier in May, when William Lai Ching-te, who flirts with independence, becomes president.

On defense, there will be only a 7.2% increase in 2024, which is peanuts compared to the Hegemon’s defense budget now approaching $900 billion: China’s stands as $238 billion, even as China’s nominal GDP is approaching the U.S.

A great deal of China’s defense budget will go for emerging tech – considering the immensely valuables lessons the PLA is learning out of the Donbass battlefield, as well as the deep interactions part of the Russia-China strategic partnership.

And that brings us to diplomacy.

China will continue to be firmly positioned as a champion of the Global South. That was made explicit by Foreign Minister Wang Yi in a press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.

Wang Yi’s priorities:

to “maintain stable relations with major powers; join hands with its neighbouring countries for progress; and strive for revitalisation with the Global South”.

Wang Yi once again stressed that Beijing favors an “equal and orderly” multipolar world and “inclusive economic globalization”.

And of course he could not allow U.S. Secretary of State Little Blinken – always out of his depth – to get away with his latest “recipe”:

“It is impermissible that those with the bigger fist have the final say, and it is definitely unacceptable that certain countries must be at the table while others can only be on the menu.”

BRI as a global accelerator

Crucially, Wang Yi re-emphasized the drive for “high-quality” cooperation within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. He defined BRI as “an engine for the common development of all countries and an accelerator for the modernisation of the whole world”. Wang Yi actually said he’s hopeful about the emergence of a “Global South moment in global governance” – in which China and BRI play an essential part.

Li Qiang’s work report, incidentally, had only one paragraph on BRI. But then we find this nugget as Li refers to the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor – which links China’s landlocked southwest with the eastern seaboard, via Guangxi province.

Translation: BRI will be focusing on opening new economic roads for China’s less developed regions, diversifying from the previous emphasis on Xinjiang.

Dr Wei Yuansong is a member of the CPPCC and also the Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party – which happens to be one of the eight non-CCP parties in Chinese politics (very few outside of China know about this).

He offered some fascinating comments on BRI to Fengmian News and also stressed the need to “tell China’s story well” to avoid “conflict and incidents” along the BRI road.

For that, Wei suggests the need to use an “international language” in telling these stories; that implies using English.

As for what Wang Yi said in his press conference, in fact that was discussed in detail at the closed-door Central Conference on Foreign Affairs Work in late 2023, where it was established that China faced “strategic opportunities” to raise its “international influence, appeal and power” despite “high winds and choppy waters”.

The key takeaway: the narrative war between China and the Hegemon will be pitiless.

Beijing is confident it’s capable of offering stability, investment, connectivity and sound diplomacy to the whole Global South, instead of Forever Wars.

That is reflected, for instance, by Ma Xinmin, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s legal advisor, telling the International Court of Justice that the Palestinians have the right to armed resistance when it comes to fighting the colonialist, racist, apartheid state of Israel. Therefore, Hamas cannot be defined as a terrorist organization.

This is the overwhelming position across the lands of Islam and across the majority of the Global South – linking Beijing with fellow BRICS member Brazil and President Lula, who compared the genocide in Gaza to the Nazi genocide in WWII.

How to resist collective West sanctions

The Two Sessions did reflect Beijing’s full understanding that Hegemon containment and destabilization tactics remain the biggest challenge to China’s peaceful rise. But simultaneously it reflected Chinese confidence on its global diplomatic clout as a force for peace, stability and economic development. It’s an extremely sensitive balance that only the Middle Kingdom seems capable of pulling off.

Then there’s the Trump factor.

Economist Ding Yifan, a former deputy director of the World Development Institute, part of the State Council’s Development Research Centre, is one among those who’s aware China is learning key lessons from Russia on how to resist collective West sanctions – which will be inevitable against China especially if Trump is back at the White House.

And that brings us to the absolute key issue being currently discussed in Moscow, within the Russia-China partnership, and soon among the BRICS: alternative settlement payments to the U.S. dollar, increasing trade among “friendly nations”, and controls on capital flight.

Nearly all Russia-China trade is now in yuan and rubles.

As much as Russian trade with the EU fell by 68% in 2023, trade with Asia rose by 5.6% – with new landmarks reached with China ($240 billion) and India ($65 billion) – and 84% of Russia’s total energy exports going to “friendly countries”.

The Two Sessions did not get into detail on some extremely thorny geopolitical issues. For instance, India’s version of multipolarity – considering New Delhi’s unresolved love affair with Washington – is quite different from China’s. Everyone knows – and no one more than the Russians – that within BRICS 10 the biggest strategic issue is how to accommodate the perpetual tension between India and China.

What’s clear even behind the fog of goodwill enveloping the Two Sessions is that Beijing is fully aware of how the Hegemon is – deliberately – already crossing a key Chinese red line, officially stationing “permanent troops” in Taiwan.

Since last year U.S. Special Forces have been training Taiwanese in operating Black Hornet nano microdrones. In 2024 U.S. military advisers are deployed full time at army bases on Kinmen and Penghu islands.

Those actually driving U.S. foreign policy behind the Crash Test Dummy at the White House believe that even as they are powerless to handle the Houthi Ansarallah in the Red Sea, they are capable of poking the Dragon.

No posturing will alter the Dragon’s roadmap.

The CPPCC’s political resolution on Taiwan calls for uniting “all patriotic forces”, “deepen integration and development in various fields across the Taiwan Straits”, and go all out on “peaceful reunification”.

That will translate in practice into increased economic/trade cooperation, more direct flights, more cargo ports and logistics bases.

As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on overdrive.

Forever Wars never die.

Bring it on.

The Dragon is ready.

White Women Are PISSED At White Men Dating Asian Women!

I’ve literally (and I actually mean literally here) won cash money on bets with friends about this and it is a method I’ve been using since I was a little kid. Works every single time; no exceptions.

I’m going to let you in on my secret to treat your hiccups in a few seconds every single time.

Let’s first understand what causes hiccups; only when we understand how a machine works can we fix it if it’s acting up. Your diaphragm is a dome-shaped muscle at the bottom of your chest. The diaphragm almost always works perfectly. When you inhale, it pulls down to help pull air into the lungs. When you exhale, the diaphragm relaxes and air flows out of the lungs back out through the nose and mouth.

But sometimes the diaphragm becomes irritated. When this happens, it pulls down in a jerky way, which makes you suck air into your throat suddenly. When the air rushing in hits your voice box, your vocal cords close suddenly and you’re left with a big hiccup.

Some things that irritate the diaphragm are eating too quickly or too much, an irritation in the stomach or the throat, or feeling nervous or excited. Almost all cases of the hiccups last only a few minutes. Some cases of the hiccups can last for days or even months, but this is very unusual and it’s usually a sign of another medical problem.

So now that we understand the cause of hiccups, it’s fairly evident that to treat them, all we need to do is soothe the diaphragm, reduce the irritation and bring it back to a normal operating state.

Fill a cup a little over half with water and hold the cup right side up. Stand and bend over, while placing your mouth on the opposite side of the cup so the opening is around your chin. Sip the water slowly, holding your breath as you do and breathing between sips. The combination of these forces your diaphragm to get back to its expected state of behavior.

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So the next time that cute girl you were trying to talk to has a bout of the hiccups, skip the cheesy lines telling her how “someone” is thinking of her and instead treat her hiccups with this method. I can assure you that will score you more brownie points that way.

There is a Russian joke.

At some point in life, a man who had previously been a great sinner has spiritually awakened and started to preach the word of God. He believed that he was inspired by the Lord Himself. So he dies, and meets St. Peter.
– Saint Peter, I need to see God.
– Why? You were an okay guy, we won’t send you to hell.
– No, I really need it. I need to ask Him one question.
St. Peter shrugs his shoulders and brings him in God’s Presence. The man asks:
– My Lord, tell me, did I understand my destiny well? Was it to carry Your word?
God is silent.
– Please tell me!
– Do you really want to know? – asks God.
– Yes, I long to know, I crave for this knowledge, I implore you!
– Okay, okay. Do you remember how you travelled by train from Samara to Syzran’? It was forty-seven years ago.
– Yes!
– Do you remember how you went to the dining car?
– Yes!
– Do you remember how your neighbour to the left asked you to pass the salt?
– Yes!
– This was your destiny. You were born to pass the salt to this person.

When I first heard this joke, I was shocked at the utter pessimism it expressed. Now, I see it in a different light. Yes, the guy was mistaken about God’s designs. But he was born just to pass the salt during a train voyage – and yet he managed to have a rich and fulfilling life. Good for him, isn’t it?

So if you really believe that God had such horrible designs on your life, why not try to see what you can do yourself?

Plumbing. Yeah. Good selection for a career.

Girls and grapes

I’m a physicist. One day I got a phone call from an undergraduate. She explained that as an assignment in a sociology course she was required to follow a scientist around for a day and document how he/she spent the day. “I’m far too busy to give you that much time,” I said.

“No—” she replied, “You won’t even notice I’m there. I’ll just watch and follow you around.” OK— it sounded a bit intriguing.

The scheduled morning she arrived in my office at 9 a.m. She sat down in a corner, and I got to work. Every now and then I looked up and caught her looking at me; she quickly looked away, and scribbled in her notebook. Suddenly I felt like a mountain gorilla being studied by Dian Fossey.

At 5 p.m she told me she was leaving. I asked her if she found anything surprising. “My god yes!” She responded. “Your day is totally different from what I expected.” I asked for details and she examined her notes.

She said, “You spent 60% of your time talking to other people! You did it on the phone, then you visited several other physicists in their offices. You had lunch with several graduate students. Even in your lab you were working with your graduate students. Several people came to your office.”

“What did you expect?” I asked her.

“I thought scientists worked alone. I thought they sat in front of computers all day, or in their labs wearing white coats and working with test tubes.”

“That’s the scientist of the movies,” I said. “Science is a very social profession. You can save weeks in the lab by a quick conversation with someone else. Two people talking are often much more than twice as effective as two people working alone.”

“I never knew that,” she said.

It’s odd that people avoid going into science because of the impression that it is for people who like to work alone. That may be true for some people, but in my experience virtually all effective scientists spend much of their time with other people. Maybe the wrong impression arises because of the high school science nerd who doesn’t yet have social skills. But social skills are essential to scientific success. Some nerds learn them only in graduate school. (And the ones who don’t often drop out of science.)

Indeed, the interaction with other people is what makes “coming to work” so much fun.

Cats can defy gravity

The Little Crappy Ships each have their own failures in design and execution. Sometimes tried and true is best – especially when building ships that need to be available (and mobile) all of the time. There is no auto club to call for a breakdown on the high seas.

Their mission evaporated as the world changed – a lightly defended coastal (litoral) ship did not end up being where the focus was needed. Their flexibilty was also limited because cost overuns in the basic ship package affected other wannabe missions – it was going to be a Swiss Army knife, but instead ended up a butter blade.

The navy threw in the towel when they started ordering more Constellation class frigates and cancelled the future LCS builds. Ironically, they were not cheap (half a billion $$$ or so) but they cost little enough by government standards to abandoned. Compare that to the Ford class carriers (about $14 billion each). The Fords had so much invested in them that throwing money and resources to solve technological issues (such as with the catapult system) was a given regardless of cost. You can fix things with time, money, and resources. There also was no readily available replacement available for the Ford carriers after years of investment in them. The end product is a great advance over it’s predecessor – which is not the story of the LCS.

So, lessons learned. Innovate but balance risks and reward, and know the mission you are trying to accomplish. Here is the LCS Independence. A face only a mother could love… … …

main qimg cb043b1f8dad130bfd613a2eda421e5e
main qimg cb043b1f8dad130bfd613a2eda421e5e

Oh shit

Correction: China is NOT leaning more heavily on exports; the government’s policy has been to grow the Chinese domestic consumer market in order to lessen dependence on exports.

In 2024, the Chinese domestic consumer market is growing less slowly than the government likes because the Chinese real estate market is undergoing contraction. The Chinese government saw the real estate market as an asset bubble which needed to be pricked because it does not reflect a real productivity gain; it is just speculatory.

Since most Chinese have their savings tied up in their own home value, they now feel that they have less savings to spend, which is why the Chinese economy is entering a deflationary phase.

At the same time, the US and EU are putting pressure on Chinese exports of EVs and chips, as they try to decouple from Chinese exporters of those products.

This means that the whole world is going through a painful economic adjustment as supply chains are being decoupled in the US and EU.

The Chinese government is trying to re-adjust by increasing exports and trade with the BRICS+/Global South economies, while gradually cutting reliance on the US and EU markets.

Linda’s Picadillo (Mexican-Style Ground Beef)

picadillo
picadillo

Ingredients

  • 1 onion, diced
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 3 potatoes, peeled and diced
  • 1 red or orange bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 1/2 cups water
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons beef bouillon
  • 1 (4 ounce) can green chiles or 2 fresh poblano peppers, chopped
  • Spices: 1 or 2 bay leaves, salt, pepper, cumin, cayenne pepper, tomato Knorr, etc.
  • 1 can tomato sauce or Ro*Tel
  • 1 bag frozen corn (optional)
  • 1 bag frozen green beans (optional)

Instructions

  1. Sauté onions and garlic; add ground beef and cook until done. Drain fat.
  2. Add potatoes, bell pepper, water, beef buillon, green chiles or poblano peppers, spices of choice and tomato sauce or Ro*Tel. Simmer over medium heat until potatoes are tender.
  3. If using, add corn and green beans 10 to 15 minutes before serving.

She Bullied A Kid For Exercising Wrong, The Internet Destroyed Her..

Israel ‘Coerces’ UN Workers – By Outright Torturing Them

Every time one thinks that the depravity of Zionist fanatics has finally reached a limit they will proudly present even worse behavior.

UNRWA report says Israel coerced some agency employees to falsely admit Hamas linksReuters, Mar 9 2024

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said some employees released into Gaza from Israeli detention reported having been pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the Oct. 7 attacks.

Coerced, pressured, … Maybe they had a harsh talk?

No. They outright tortured, Abu Graibh like, these UN workers. Some of them to their death:

The document said several UNRWA Palestinian staffers had been detained by the Israeli army, and added that the ill-treatment and abuse they said they had experienced included severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.

In addition to the alleged abuse endured by UNRWA staff members, Palestinian detainees more broadly described allegations of abuse, including beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, sexual violence, and deaths of detainees denied medical treatment, the UNRWA report said.

Reuters could not independently confirm the accounts of coercion of UNRWA staff and mistreatment of detainees, although the allegations of ill-treatment accord with descriptions by Palestinians freed from detention in December, February and March reported by Reuters and other news media.

Remi Brulin @RBrulin – 0:44 UTC · Mar 9, 2024“We tortured some folks” is pretty bad

“We tortured some folk so we could destroy a huge relief organization that’s indispensable in dealing with a huge humanitarian crisis that we created in the first place” is…. something else

What are civilized people supposed to do with these miscreants?

 

Posted by b at 11:13 UTC | Comments (156)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QTJ_Uk9OPZo?feature=share

This is another “didn’t say it, did it” story.

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, about 25 years ago, and I was shopping for a gift for my wife. She loves pearls, especially baroque pearls, and even more when they’re set with a discreet diamond or two — nothing glitzy or brash. I went to the local branch of Barmakian Jewelers, a well known New England chain. I’d been there before and had spent there, over the years, a decidedly nontrivial amount, including some custom work I’d had them do. So I walked over to the Pearls and Diamonds counter with a budget figure of $600 (equivalent to just a hair over $1000 as I write this) and began eyeing the pieces through the glass counter surface.

I should probably mention here that I was at that time a software engineer and had just gotten out of work for the day, and I was dressed in jeans and a carpenter shirt (plaid flannel). No coat, this is New England and the temperature was well above freezing. As I browsed, I took note that although there was nobody at that counter at the moment, two sales associates were at the next counter, and I knew that they had seen me. Neither came over to help me. After about ten minutes of this, a man came walking over to the counter where I was, dressed in a suit and tie. Before you could say “WTF?” an associate, one of the two who had been chatting at the other counter, was there to help him. He lollygagged around, looked at a couple of pieces with the associate’s eager assistance, and finally decided he’d come back another day. He walked out without having spent a dime. The associate left the counter without even a glance in my direction, and returned to chat some more with the other associate. I figured I knew what was up, and I too walked out, taking my $600 budget elsewhere. I have never since stepped inside a Barmakian store, nor will I ever do so in the future.

Well, I think our fellow Quoran Orson Scott Card got something dreadfully wrong in his most famous work, Ender’s Game.

It was published in its novel form in 1985, and he envisioned a global computer network where people could publish anything. And it’s crucial to the plot that two very young people become massively influential by publishing, under pseudonyms, political essays with brilliant insights.

Internet, yes, fine, it was already invented and the WWW was just around the corner, but well called for seeing it as a potential game changer.

He did not anticipate that it would be used to watch memes of cats and spread flat Earth theories, and that any politically insightful youth would be totally drowned out by people trying to cure a dangerous disease by drinking bleach. Frankly, I don’t think anyone could have foreseen that…

Simple.

Ask the average American to watch a Chinese blockbuster. It can be dubbed, or subtitled.

Further, ask them to pick out the cultural hooks and references in the movie.

Vanishing few will be able to do so, even Chinese diaspora who grow up speaking only English.

Take it from me. I spent a lifetime consuming Chinese media, and I am fluent in at least 3 dialects: Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin. I spent 12 years learning Chinese formally, growing up in a Chinese speaking environment.

But I struggle with the cultural references in Chinese productions, which have cultural baselines that are several steps beyond the typical Taiwan/HK production.

In other words, Wong Kar Wai and Ang Lee are above average, and not the summit, in the mainland scheme of things, as far as deep culture is concerned.

Hollywood can never make a Chinese movie that touches the tender and vulnerable side of Chinese audiences. Not in the current climate of dehumanization and “we want your money, we don’t want you”.

The Chinese are not farm animals of American oligarchs.

And even if Hollywood decides to take the Chinese market seriously, it will take years and plenty of coin to compete against the Chinese competition.

At this point (2024), Hollywood isn’t even in the game.

November 8, 2018. I know the date because of it’s significance. 4 men were at the restaurant I frequent. They had reserved a part of 8. All of them were elderly, all of them were wearing hats with “vietnam veteran” and “173rd Airborne” on them. I didn’t need to know where their 4 missing comrades were, or what memories those 4 gentlemen would be reliving 53 years later. I know of Operation Hump.

I quietly wrote on a napkin, “I’m not going to say who I am, but I want to say 3 things: THANK YOU! May your brothers rest in peace, and tonight is on me. No arguments, soldiers.”

I had my waitress deliver it after I left, leaving my credit card (at the time, I lived right down the street) to pay for whatever they want.

I was told that they were very appreciative, and said “for people like that we’d do it again.” which is very touching if you ask me.

I’ve seen those gentlemen back every year since, and a few times on various other days, but I haven’t said anything, and I never intend to. Their meals are still on me every year.

Honestly, I don’t see any big difference and I don’t feel overwhelmed by Chinese goods.

In fact, China actively substituted only two fields: cars and household equipment

Midea or Haier instead of Bosch? No big difference. Same features, same prices. Bosch is also available by the way, and the price is comparable to Chinese. So who has left?

Chery/Haval instead of Renault and Nissan? No big difference, in fact Chinese are better. More options and features for lower price. Prices are slowly normalizing, by the way. Chinese car giants open new factories in Russia.

Of course, it will take time for market to find a new balance, but at least now it is possible to get a new SUV for around 2 million rubles. Sure, it’s not 1.3 million rubles like I paid for new Nissan Qashqai in 2018, but it’s even less about 2.4 million rubles I paid for new Nissan X-Trail in 2021. And well, Chinese turned out to be have better multimedia systems than Japanese or Europeans. Surprise, surprise.

Maybe even Moskvich will some day be available at more reasonable prices. Again, it all takes time.

New car market was too expensive starting from around last April. Now slowly getting to more normal prices.

Speaking of furniture, clothing and everything else – it got substituted locally and surprisingly well. If you are not dead set to pay 500,000 rubles for Dolce Gabbana, you can buy a nice good quality Russian coat at 10,000 rubles, for example. I bought warm and nice Russian-made alaska jacket for this winter for about 13,000 rubles. Didn’t notice any difference with “original” that cost double even before all those problems.

And well, I talk to people, I listen to people and I see what people are wearing and buying. There still are few “brand-crazy” folks, but most have just got ignorant.

If those “Western brands” ever want to return, they will have a hard time doing so. Sorry guys. And no, Chinese clothes are not popular and is not supplied en masse.

No.

Both of my grandfathers did just that.

Both of their wives only worked outside of the home during WWII, before they were their wives. By the early 1950s, both of my sets of grandparents were married and starting their families. Both families ended up with four children each. Both families owned their own homes—modest homes in small towns—all on the single income of a working-class man.

One grandfather was a salesman and installer of garage doors. One was a mechanic. Both were WWII vets, so there may have been some veterans benefits to help them out. Other than that, they were on their own.

I know much more about one grandfather’s house than the other one, because the one I know about was right down the street from the house I was raised in. That grandfather died in the 80s, before I really got to know him, but his widow (my grandmother) lived in that house until she died in 2016. I visited that house many times and even helped my father build the deck on it.

I don’t know what my grandfather paid for that house, but I know that, when it was sold “as in” after my grandmother passed, just eight years ago, it sold for $63k. According to Zillow, it’s now worth close to $200k. Same house. Eight years. Triple the price. Insanity.

And it’s not just that house. My mother’s house, where she still lives, just a few doors down, is has tripled in value in the last decade.

The house my grandfather raised his kids in was (and still is) just three bedrooms, one bath, tiny kitchen, and a little over 1,200 square feet. It is 1/3 the size of the house I am currently sitting in, and I would call my house fairly modest by Chicago standards. My grandfather’s house featured a detached two-car garage which he used as a workshop, a carport, a huge yard with a vegetable garden, two old-growth pecan trees and, of all things, a small vineyard.

I didn’t realize how cool it was that my grandparents had a small vineyard growing in their back yard until I was well into my 20s and, by then, it had been mostly destroyed by neglect (my grandmother couldn’t maintain it on her own in her old age), and I lived too far away to help her with it. The last time I drove past it, last summer, it looked like the new owners hadn’t taken it down, but hadn’t fixed it, either. It’s just continuing it’s multi-decade decay.

But I’ll bet it was pretty awesome back when my grandparents were raising their children in that house.

Anyway, besides things being a lot cheaper when my grandparents were raising their children, there were also just fewer expenses. Among all eight of their combined children, only one went to college, and that was for just one semester. Each family only had one car. Each family only had one TV, and they didn’t pay for cable until the early 1990s. The airwave signals were free. Each house had a single, land line phone. None of my grandparents ever had a credit card. The only things they bought on credit were their houses and cars.

About two hours ago, I gave my son my credit card so he could by a $2.50 Gatorade from a vending machine. My grandparents would be mortified about everything in that transaction.

I understand why so many young people feel like they’re getting cheated by this economy. They are. Who is cheating them, and why, and how to fix it, are where I disagree with many of them. But yes, I do agree that they have a much, much steeper mountain to climb to get to the same summit that my grandparents (their great-grandparents’ generation) seemed to have handed to them.

They are plenty smart enough, but they make terrible pets. You see, squid are what we call pelagic critters, meaning they spend most of their time in open water, away from the sea floor or any other features. They like lots and lots of water around them.

Their primary escape mechanism is to simply jet away into the abyss at Squid Warp Speed. It is so fast you literally cannot see it.

My bride and I met on a squid study, which involved a lot of laying in the water on snorkel and hand recording everything the individual squid did. One morning we were watching our usual flotilla of Sepioteuthis (Caribbean Reef Squid) and scrawling their antics on our slates.

And then, *blink.* They were gone. All 17 squid just vanished at once. We knew what happened, of course, but not why. We looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders. Bonaire, the Caribbean island in the Dutch Antilles where the study took place, has extremely clear water. We could see easily 100 feet in all directions, but could not identify what spooked the squid. We were very sure it wasn’t us. Since we had been studying this particular school for weeks, the squid were extremely used to people by now.

Then, slowly out of the haze, a large barracuda cruised into view from the East, about 80 feet away. We could not even guess how the squid knew so quick, but they knew a big predator was moving in, and they Got Out Of Town by jetting away so fast (and far) we could not even keep track. The squid didn’t even bother shooting ink. They just disappeared.

This is why you cannot keep squid easily in captivity. They have had over 500 million years to develop this explosive escape strategy and, being prey for almost every predator in the ocean means they react to almost anything. Since invisible walls have never existed in nature, they cannot understand glass and don’t adapt to aquariums. At the slightest provocation, captive squid panic and try to blast away to safety, but they wind up slamming into the aquarium walls over and over and injuring themselves grievously.

Squid researchers have had mixed success with soft-sides inflatable pools as well as ring-shaped enclosures, but these critters do best out in open water.

On the other hand, octopuses do make excellent, if short lived, pets.

Build more of these.

main qimg 48c6d17f2eadc8bc36f00d981ce05414 lq
main qimg 48c6d17f2eadc8bc36f00d981ce05414 lq

A nuclear exchange is at this point all but INEVITABLE.

What we need is to massively increase our nuclear bombs and missile systems.

Right now we have 5–600 bombs. That means we have to be selective about the cities we hit.

But with 1000 we can hit even smaller cities.

The white supremacists have literally parked a SSBN in Korea to do this.

We need a massive counter strike ability to take the white supremacists to hell with us. They can die in nuclear fires along with us.

Liberals will say but I don’t want nuclear war. Well the Nuclear Taboo is a myth.

This Chinese man was Zhang Qian.

In 139 B.C., Zhang Qian set out on a westward journey with his interpreter and an escort of about 100 men. But just as they entered the Hexi Corridor, they were bumped into by Xiongnu cavalry. After a battle, all the others were killed in battle, and only Zhang Qian and the interpreter, who did not take part in the battle, survived. Zhang Qian and his interpreter survived.

The two did not resist, and were escorted by the Huns’ cavalry from the Hexi Corridor to the King’s Court of the Xiongnu, a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers. The Xiongnu Chanyu also wanted to get information about the Han Dynasty from Zhang Qian, so he actively instigated him to rebel and even arranged for a high-status Xiongnu noblewoman to marry him.

Zhang Qian had been single for almost 30 years and readily accepted the kindness of the Xiongnu Chanyu, but he still did not leak any information about the Han Dynasty. Not only that, Zhang Qian also secretly mastered a lot of information about the Huns while living in the Xiongnu’ territory.

After ten years of this kind of life, Zhang Qian managed to escape with the help of his Xiongnu wife. However, he was captured by the Hun cavalry for the second time shortly after his escape.

The second time was in 128 B.C. Zhang Qian wanted to return to Chang’an. This time he deliberately avoided the sphere of influence of the Xiongnu people, but he was really unlucky and was caught by the Xiongnu people once again. Zhang Qian had already given up hope, but to his surprise, he was rescued by the Xiongnu woman again and escaped. This time Zhang Qian took her back to Chang’an.

In 126 BC, Zhang Qian, his Hun wife, son, and translator returned to Chang’an after an absence of thirteen years.

Upon his return, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty made him Marquis of Bowang for his military service.

Although Zhang Qian was promoted, his Xiongnu wife who had made great contributions to him died of illness after one year in Chang’an because she was not adapted to the environment.

I guess Zhang Qian was a handsome man and his Xiongnu wife loved him wholeheartedly and even betrayed the Xiongnu Chanyu.

I had finished scraping the bottom of my boat and decided to have a shower at the clubhouse. Scraping bottom paint must be the dirtiest job in the world (potentially dangerous to your health without proper clothing and a respirator) and I was utterly filthy. As I walked up to the clubhouse, a guy in his mid-forties, a new member it turns out, told me I was not allowed in the “club,” as “no labourers allowed”. I laughed in his face and kindly told him to fuck off. He then told me he was getting the Commodore and that I would be barred from working at this club again. I said good luck with that and again told him to fuck off. When I finished up in the shower, I went to the wardroom to meet my wife and to have a beer. This guy was in the wardroom talking to the Commodore when I came in. When he saw me he said to the Commodore that I was a disrespectful shit and that I should be blackballed from the club. The Commodore said that I might be a shit, but I was a member in good standing and it would look bad if she tried to blackball her husband.

Depends on the Products in Question

Let’s see where Japan leads and dominates over China :-

  • Refrigeration
  • Cameras & Lenses
  • Petrol Engines
  • Industrial Robots
  • Hybrid Vehicles

Japanese Exports are primarily in these industries.

Japan has the best quality products in the world in these categories

Let’s see where China leads and dominates over Japan:-

  • Shipbuilding
  • Railroads & Electrified Railway Design and manufacture
  • Infrastructure Steel & Equipment & High Machinery
  • Television LCD Panels
  • High Efficiency (> 25%) Solar Panels
  • NEV Batteries & Integrated Platforms
  • New Energy Vehicles
  • Deep Core Gas Drilling Equipment
  • Data Centers
  • Windmill & Wind Turbines

Chinese Exports are primarily in these Industries

China has the best quality products in the world in these categories


Then you have areas where both Japan and China are not yet on par with global (western standards) :-

  • Advanced Lenses (Germany)
  • Advanced Chips (US, Europe, Korea)
  • Advanced Computing (US)
  • Diesel Engines (Germany)
  • Aviation Components (Europe, US)
  • Pharmaceuticals (Switzerland, US, France)

In these areas, neither Japan nor China have the quality of their Western counterparts

These form a huge chunk of Chinas Imports and Japans imports

The West is completely fucked up

Iowa Spaghetti Sauce

When we were young, we looked forward to visiting my Aunt Anita in Muscatine, Iowa. She always had this ready for us when we arrived. We fought over the mushrooms, so over time, she added up to three times the amount of mushrooms called for!

iowa spaghetti sauce
iowa spaghetti sauce

Ingredients

  • 3 or 4 cloves garlic
  • 2 pounds ground beef
  • 1 large onion, finely chopped
  • 3 (15 ounce) cans tomato sauce
  • 1/4 cup cider vinegar
  • 1/3 cup brown sugar
  • 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/4 teaspoon cloves
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
  • 1 cup finely chopped celery
  • Salt, to taste
  • 1 large can mushrooms, drained

Instructions

  1. Brown garlic in 1 tablespoon salad oil; discard garlic. Add ground meat and salt, 1/2 cup water and cook.
  2. When the meat is half done, add the onions and cook until done.
  3. Add the remaining ingredients, except the mushrooms, and cook until thick, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
  4. Add mushrooms when thick.
  5. Serve over spaghetti!

Let ‘er rip baby! Fire away! Don’t hold back.

Don’t hold anything back. The hardest letters in prison were the ones I didn’t get.

Maybe you don’t want to write to me because you’re angry. I did something stupid, got my dumb ass tossed in the cooler, and you’re livid.

There-is-no-better-time-to-write!

I’m a sitting duck! I’ve got nothing better to do than read your letter. I’ll read it again and again! Write out your rant, become my personal troll, and flame on old-school from afar. You might have six months worth of rage pent up, waiting to be unleashed on the page. Get it off your chest. Toss open the hatches and let loose whatever foul demons you’ve been harboring below deck. Let me know the full depth and breadth of your wrath.

I would much rather deal with this now through letters than during our first face to face encounter years later. We can discuss everything, get to the heart of it, and maybe even move on.

Has a loved one of mine passed on? Are you afraid that telling me will break my heart? If I go years without getting a letter from that person, that will break my heart. I’ll wonder on a daily basis why mom doesn’t write anymore. Then on that day when I’m finally released, a day meant to be full of hope and new beginnings, you finally hit me with the bad news?

No thanks. Tell me now. Toll that bell and let me grieve here in this hell hole in my own time and way.

Some of the hardest time I did was when it was clear that my girlfriend was breaking up with me. She stopped writing, stopped answering phone calls, stopped caring.

I knew what was happening, but without her black and white confirmation, it was a glacial band-aid ripping — it lasted months. A simple letter could’ve put it to a swift and final conclusion. I wouldn’t have gotten out two years later wondering, “Where is everyone?”

What subjects should you avoid? None.

Don’t waste any time worrying about my psyche. I’m a big enough boy to find my way into prison. Your letters aren’t going to push me over the edge, but maybe they’ll push us closer together.

The is the reality right now. Gen-Z. People are not meant to be living alone. Thank you “WOKE” society.

Pope Tells Ukraine: Wave the White Flag . . .

Pope Francis was asked what he would tell Ukraine President Zelensky and his response was succinct: Surrender, you’re defeated.

Of course, His Holiness put it more gracefully.  His exact words were:

"I think that the strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people, and has the courage of the white flag and negotiates. The word negotiate is a courageous word. When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well. you have to have the courage to negotiate."

Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, is beating the war drums for NATO entry into the Ukraine-Russia conflict.  He continues to push the suicidal notion of NATO countries sending troops in to fight alongside Ukraine, despite being repeatedly warned NATO entry into that conflict would result in a “war the no one will win.”  That is to say, a nuclear war.

Macron just today began mobilizing trainloads of French Armor, including tanks, heading east for Ukraine.  Video below shows one such train:

 

 

Moreover, French troops are preparing for a high-intensity conflict against an enemy who can match them with firepower — a big change for an army that’s spent the past decades fighting counterinsurgency campaigns in places like Mali and Afghanistan.

The hostilities in Ukraine, in their third year, have brought full-scale war back to the Continent, said Colonel Axel Denis, who runs the combat training center (CENTAC) at Mailly-le-camp in eastern France.

“The world has revealed its true nature: unstable, dangerous, and not everyone is a friend. We’re gearing up for a culture of alert, of being ready at short notice,” he told POLITICO during a visit to the camp. “CENTAC is the only place [in France] where you can see what war is like.”

Conditions for the troops training at CENTAC are as close as possible to an actual battlefield. The sound, heat and light of artillery fire is reproduced, while fake mines are scattered everywhere, and radio communications can be interrupted without notice.

History shows that the last time the French went into Russia, under Napoleon Bonaparte, they lost 650,000 soldiers. Their bones were left to disintegrate in Russia.

Those who do not learn from history, seem doomed to repeat it.

One time I was working on my car. I was lying on my back under the engine but I was quite safe as I had raised the car on proper axle stands before removing the front wheels. To be even safer I had chosen to work on the engine with the car parked in the street as it was flat and horizontal. Our driveway was at an angle.

Dad was standing at the front of the car leaning under the bonnet (hood) and directing operations. It was a good time working with my dad.

One of our neighbours arrived and made a complete bodge of parking. He hit my car very slowly with his bumper. No damage to either car but the impact was enough to rock my car forward. The forward motion was enough to cause my car to roll off the axle stands. As the front wheels had been removed the whole weight of the engine descended on my chest.

Dad anticipated what would happen. As soon as the car began to move he grabbed the front bumper with one hand and my legs with the other hand. My father is not a big man. He was 5′-10″ but fairly heavily built. He lifted the front of a Ford Cortina with one hand while pulling me out from underneath with the other.

As far as I was concerned he earned another gold star when he dropped the car and dragged our neighbour from his car and slugged him on the jaw. As he fell, out cold, I will always remember Dad shouting,

“You could have killed MY SON.”

That “my son” was golden.

Jesus!

Banned from fun

I want to relate a story of something that happened when I was in fifth grade.

At that time, I was attending a small elementary school in my town, and it was so very typical of the 1960’s. It was, just as you might imagine it to be. Wholesome, 1960’s era, and just middle America. It was a slice from “Mayberry RFD”.

My class was 60 students and one teacher. I seem to recall that his name was Mr. Calhoun. It was pretty much 30 girls and 30 boys.

One day,a classmate named Steven decided to have a birthday party at his home on Saturday. And he sent out invitations to everyone except to two students; myself and a girl named Karen.

I didn’t care. But Karen was pretty upset about it.

Nothing much would of come of it, except that my parents (when they took my sister to the party) noticed that everyone in the class was there except me. And so they asked her what was going on, and my sister told them “Oh, Robert and Karen, weren’t invited. We don’t want them at the party.

My parents said, “if Robert cannot go, you won’t go either” which caused a howling of lament and kicked up a big fuss-storm. “We don’t want them!” and all the rest.

Well…

I’ll give my parents this credit. They went up to Steven’s parents and had a word to them. Which pretty much straightened out everything, and soon Karen and myself were able to attend, and we were given first class treatment at the party.

About eight years later I was attending university, and my friends were all on this one particular dorm in the building on campus. I was there all the time.

Day Hall.

day
day

Everyone knew me. Not a day went by where I did not hang out there, even though I actually lived off campus. That dorm was my actual home.

Well, the dorm floor (it was co-ed) was going to have a dinner, but the RA (Residential advisor) refused to allow me to participate in the dinner, even if I was willing to contribute and pay for my dinner. The entire floor was upset. But she held her ground. Stating that “rules were rules”.

So I didn’t go.

Neither did, one of the most popular people on that floor; Howard.

No. He went and took me out to dinner himself and we ate dinner at a place called “Hungry Charlies” and had a good old time.

Hungry Charlies before it was torn down
Hungry Charlies before it was torn down

Apparently, without us two, the dinner was just kind of bland, and a formal kind of thing. Not filled with the normal crazy life that use odd-balls contributed to the environment. LOL.

When we finished dinner, and arrived at the dorm, we got off the elevator and was welcomed by the entire floor with open arms. It was a great time! Lot’s of missing us, apologies and all the rest.

Both events were similar.

A party was held, a few people were left out, later they were let back in, and people learned that these individuals were more important to the body politic than was was first obvious on the surface. So take note. And have heart.

Odd-balls, and the outliers should always be welcome.

Today…

Disturbing addresses after Victoria Neuland is dismissed

Rufus story

Six-year-old Bridger from Cheyenne, Wyoming, saved his sister from an attacking dog on July 9. After getting bit several times, he grabbed her hand and ran for safety. He later said, “If someone had to die, I thought it should be me.” He’s now in recovery after receiving about 90 stitches. A true hero who deserves our praise! ❤️

Credit: Nikki Walker / Instagram

The reason why US companies have not fully decoupled from China is multifaceted. Firstly, China is an integral part of the global supply chain that feeds into American companies’ production processes. Products manufactured in China are often price competitive and offer good value, which appeals to US consumers’ preferences for affordability and quality.

Additionally, China boasts the largest consumer market globally, providing significant opportunities for US companies to generate profits. These profits contribute to various pension funds, including those for millions of public employees(military personnel, government employees, and teachers). Moreover, a portion of these profits is reinvested into the US economy for future business endeavors and research and development, further solidifying the economic ties between the two countries. Overall, the interconnectedness of the global economy, coupled with China’s significance as a manufacturing hub and consumer market, incentivizes US companies to maintain their presence and operations in China.

Additionally, several other factors contribute to US companies’ continued engagement with China:

  1. Skilled Workforce: China has a large and increasingly skilled workforce, making it an attractive destination for manufacturing and production activities. Many US companies benefit from access to this pool of labor, which can be cost-effective and efficient for certain types of manufacturing processes.
  2. Infrastructure: China has invested heavily in infrastructure development, including transportation networks, ports, and industrial zones. This infrastructure supports efficient logistics and supply chain management, making it easier for US companies to conduct business operations in China.
  3. Supply Chain Resilience: While there has been discussion about diversifying supply chains away from China, the country still offers supply chain resilience due to its extensive network of suppliers, subcontractors, and manufacturing capabilities. US companies may find it challenging to replicate this level of integration and efficiency elsewhere.
  4. Technological Collaboration: China is increasingly investing in research and development across various industries, creating opportunities for technological collaboration and innovation partnerships with US companies. These collaborations can drive advancements in technology and foster mutually beneficial relationships.
  5. Cost Considerations: Despite rising labor and operational costs in China, certain industries still find it cost-effective to manufacture products there. Factors such as economies of scale, specialized skills, and established infrastructure can offset higher labor costs, making China a competitive manufacturing destination.

While there are challenges and complexities associated with doing business in China, the country offers significant advantages and opportunities for US companies across various sectors. As a result, many companies continue to maintain their presence and engagement in the Chinese market.

Being real

Yes.

Back in the mid 80’s I contracted salmonella poisoning from eating undercooked chicken at an employee luncheon.

About 6 hours after eating the chicken, I started feeling sick. I was aching all over, running a fever and having bad diarrhea.

But I had a three yr old and a 1 yr old to care for and my now ex husband did not believe it was a man’s place to take care of the children.

I made it through the first night and got the babies ready for day care the next day. I have never been so sick in my life. I remember lying in bed dreaming of eating popsicles because I was so thirsty. This went on for a couple more days, sending the kids to day care in the mornings, lying in bed all day, and trying my best to take care of them at night.

I was just 22, so I finally broke and called my mom. She came immediately, took my temperature, which read at 106 degrees, and ordered my husband to take me to the emergency room while she watched the babies.

I fully expected to get a prescription and get sent home. I had no idea just how sick I was.

I waited for about 30 minutes before being seen. But once I was, things moved really fast. I was a little out of it, but I remember a team of doctors and nurses trying to get an IV in me. Every vein they tried collapsed because I was so dehydrated. They eventually got an IV into my jugular vein.

The next thing I remember was lying on a bed and being rushed through the halls. Whoever was pushing me was literally running.

I was taken to the ICU where I stayed for almost 2 weeks. One night I was freezing, so when the nurse came in, I asked for an extra blanket. She told me she would get it as soon as she checked my vitals. I never got the blanket. When she checked my temperature, she literally dropped the thermometer and ran out of the room. There was another nurse with her, so I asked her how high my fever was. She said “honey, it’s so high that we can’t read it”. I was packed with ice bags and a cooling blanket after that. I was in and out but do remember someone saying “I think it’s time to call in the family.”

I made it through the night, but had a small stroke as a result of my fever being so high.

I eventually fully recovered and my doctor told me that I had had the most severe case of salmonella ever reported in our county and that I was lucky to be alive.

If not for my mom insisting that my ex husband take me to the ER, I probably wouldn’t be here today.

Thank God for moms. 🙂

Overpriced American Weapon vs Low-Cost Chinese Golf Cart

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main qimg 2f2ed16a43b27247ce20cbca871a391d

Beef Turnovers (Empanadas)

You can use the discos or make your own turnover pastry. I’ve done both, and they’re equally as good.

9355t7
9355t7

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
  • 1/2 pound ground beef
  • 1/2 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
  • 1/4 cup tomato sauce
  • 6 stuffed green olives, finely chopped
  • 2 tablespoons sofrito
  • 1 packet sazon with coriander and annato
  • 1 teaspoon minced garlic
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
  • Ground black pepper, to taste
  • 1 (14 ounce) package Goya discos (yellow or white), thawed*
  • Vegetable oil, for frying

Instructions

  1. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add ground beef and cook until browned, breaking up meat with a wooden spoon, about 10 minutes.
  2. Add onions and cook until soft, about 5 minutes more.
  3. Stir in tomato sauce, olives, sofrito, garlic, oregano and black pepper. Lower heat to medium-low and simmer until mixture thickens, about 15 minutes.
  4. On a lightly floured work surface, using a rolling pin, roll out discos until 1/2-inch larger in diameter. Spoon about 1 tablespoon meat mixture into middle, fold in half to form a half moon; moisten edges with water and pinch to seal closed, or seal with a fork.
  5. Fill a deep saucepan with oil to a depth of 2 1/2 inches. Heat oil over medium-high heat until hot but not smoking (350 degrees F on deep-fry thermometer).
  6. Cook turnovers in batches until crisp and golden brown, flipping once, 4 – 6 minutes.
  7. Transfer to paper towels to drain.

Notes

* Flattened dough for turnover pastries all rolled out and ready to fill – in the Mexican refrigerated section. Make sure you buy the larger ones.

As far as sazon, you can really use whichever flavor you like. Goya now makes a salt-free version of their seasoning. Or, if you don’t want to use sazon for any reason, just use a good seasoning salt, to taste.

Some more nice renderings of girls and food

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It’s the kind of mood that I am in now.

Oh fuck

  • If a woman says she is okay or replies with ‘hmm’ , she is not okay , she is either mad or her mood is off.
  • A woman doesn’t dress up or do a lot of skincare for guys or other people , she does it , cause she feels relaxed and happy while taking care of herself.
  • If you are a friend with a woman and you like her , you better tell her early because its hard to get out of the friend zone or brother zone she has put you in.
  • Beautiful , cute , pretty are lame compliments, these never make women blush or anything. Be genuine and comment about her personality and her soul not only outer beauty .
  • If a girl is a wearing makeup or glasses and you tell her that “ you look good without makeup/glasses .” Please don’t, she didn’t do makeup to look same and she is wearing glasses cause she has to. That is literally a backhanded compliment.
  • Women likes guys who are caring , genuine, can make them laugh and a man who has his future planned.
  • If a women is kind and sweet to all and if you ever get on her bad side get ready to see worst of hell.
  • Women are more mature than men but they act immature only infront of their favorite men.
  • Being friendly and flirty doesn’t mean that a girl likes you. She acts like that with everyone cause she wants to be kind and not uptight. So be clear about your feelings because what you are reading as signals are clearly her being kind to you.

Make it stick

They will allow it. EDIT, mostly because they’re powerless to stop it. Russian military production capability exceeds all of NATO and westerners are still just TALKING about ramping up production.

But what will happen yeah? Is the state controlled media in NATO countries will simply stop talking about it and hope everybody forgets.

Remember this? I sure do.

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main qimg deca59c8fdedcf597654a2bcc96eae1f lq

The Americans with their SUPER SOLDIERS, SUPER MEGA ULTRA TECH weapons and the best training and best everything… were humiliated by a bunch of men with beards.

They spent trillions to replace the Taliban… with the Taliban.

Note how little news coverage this absolute humiliation gets.

The same will happen.

Smooth

It’s a lot of fun, but will have a tragic ending. Octopuses are fairly well known for being intelligent, which is something that makes them interesting pets. Most octopuses are nocturnal by nature, meaning they are most active at night, like bats. Thing is, many of the octopuses I’ve kept quickly realized that Jim and other humans are harmless and, in fact, friendly. From there, the octopuses also quickly realized Jim is the Food God, which naturally helped jump start our relationships. Once that is established, they happily started following my schedule. Just like an affectionate dog or cat is excited to see their master when they get home from work, a pet octopus will also come out in anticipation of a treat or some interaction. This friendship will grow. You will get to know your octopus, and it will get to know you. Some of my octopuses loved being petted. Some loved playing tug-O-war games. Some just enjoyed running their sucker-covered arms over my hands (which is how they smell us- their suckers are full of sensory cells) Others enjoyed getting a Lego submarine or other toy they could tear apart and destroy. Several octopuses I kept seemed to be music lovers- I was a guitar player/singer in several bands and when we practiced at my house, my octopuses routinely came out and danced around on the glass all night while we played. They are very complex animals, and no two are alike in personality or demeanor. Some will become your best friend, but others may just want to be left alone.

The problem is that they are also very short lived critters. Most octopuses only live about a year. They hatch as teeny tiny little things and grow very quickly. What that means for the prospective keeper is that a wild-caught octopus is likely already more than 6 months old (so it has grown large enough for collection divers to find). By the time you bring it home and have tamed it to the point of a relationship I described above, it’s close to the end. It’s usually heartbreaking. Male octopuses often suffer from senescence- a sort of cephalopod-based senility. They lose their minds and start doing strange things. They stop eating food and begin nibbling the ends of their arms off. They will do strange things. One hung upside down from some of the tank plumbing and refused to move. In the wild, they often stop hiding and get snapped up by predators. Despite their reputation for being escape artists, most of my escaped octopuses were suffering senescence. Then one day your little buddy will just die, and it can be just like losing that loyal dog or cat: it’s going to hurt. Just as you started to get to know him, his time is over. Female octopuses will often lay eggs whether they mated or not. At that time, she will guard those eggs literally with her life. She will refuse food and do nothing but hide in her den and groom the eggs religiously. In the wild, when the eggs hatch the babies go off on their own and the mother will die hours later. At home, she will defend those eggs for a month or so until she expires. There’s no avoiding it.

I’ve been keeping and studying octopuses for over 20 years now. You learn to brace for that early end, but it does not get any easier, especially when you happen upon an especially interesting and unique octopus.

My God!

When Chinese environment is bad you guys demonised China and blamed them for global warming and accused them of being uncaring to their population. Well the acted positively. They now cultivate the most wind, water and solar energy and they subsidise their population to stop using Internal combustion Engines and moved into full EVs that made their environment healthy and their skies blue again and now you find fault with these too!

China can never ever win! China should not care about what the west says at all! China should and is doing what is good for China and the world! The west also gave subsidies to their EVs too except that they are simply not as strategic or as smart as BYDs and the likes. That is your problem it has nothing to do with China.

The U.S. and the west made a racial profiling that they meaning white people and only they can makes stuffs so they can charge whatever they wanted. Hence they allowed their workers and their CEO get whatever they wanted. As these cost can always be passed on to consumers! But the are dead wrong. The Japanese, then Koreans, ASEAN and now Chinese can do everything faster, cheaper and way better than the west and today it cannot sell everything unless it is heavily subsidised. It not only EVS. It is everything.

Sick and Tired

Two cases come to mind.

  1. Flood Insurance case: I represented a lady who had the misfortune to rent an apartment in a flood zone, and it flooded. She did have the good sense to buy a flood insurance policy, but FEMA declined to pay for an obscure reason. The apartment owner also had flood insurance, and FEMA paid that claim. I filed suit on behalf of the lady, and said that her apartment was the exact same apartment insured by policy # XXX issued to the owner, and that the owner’s claim was paid. Three days before Christmas I got a call from a Department of Justice attorney representing FEMA and she said “We read your complaint. You’re right. How do we write the check?”
  2. Collection case: I represented a guy who was being sued on a credit card account. After preliminary skirmishes it’s the day of the trial – client asked where should he meet me, and I said he wasn’t to meet me unless I called him. I told him to stay away from the courthouse but close enough he could be there within 10 minutes if I called. He objected and I told him to trust me on this. I went into court and the lawyer for the credit card company (who had interned for me a few years earlier) showed up; we exchanged pleasantries. She then asked ‘where’s your client?’ and I said I didn’t know but was ready to try the case without him. She had a blank look for a moment, then said something about my maternal canine ancestry as she realized my tactic (to my immense grinning) and had to take a dismissal of the case. She had planned to call my client as an adverse witness to introduce the credit card documents (credit card collection companies almost never send a witness to court) which had to be done to prove the collection case. But my client wasn’t subpoenaed as a witness so didn’t have to be there. Without a witness to the debt (which probably was in fact owed) they couldn’t get a judgment.

Fun

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6n-OJCvZ8nE?feature=share

“If you don’t do as I say, I’ll upload every photo I have of you”. This was the email Cassidy Wolf received from her hacker.

Cassidy was confused. Only two photos of herself hung on her bedroom wall. She realized later that the hacker had been spying on her for over a year through her webcam.

Cassidy used to keep her laptop open on her bedroom floor. She would play music whilst studying, changing and going back and forth in the shower. The hacker watched everything.

Cassidy must have opened an email with a link, enabling him to place malicious software on her laptop. If she clicked on the link, this would have granted him full access to her computer.

The hacker was able to trace the keystrokes on Cassidy’s keyboard. This way, he learnt her passwords, saw the sites she was accessing, and accessed her webcam 24/7.

[1]  The hacker posted pictures of Cassidy changing using various Facebook accounts, including her younger sister’s account.

The hacker was someone from her high school; somebody whom she passed in the hallway every day.

Despite the hacker being caught, Cassidy has to live with this trauma forever. The sound of every email notification will continue to make her stomach churn.

This happened before she was Miss Teen USA. If this could happen to Cassidy, it could happen to any one of us.

Somebody may be watching you through your camera right now…


Image Source: Miss Teen USA webcam hacker Jared James Abrahams sentenced to 18

Footnotes

Feminists are furious!

Yes of course you are unless you become a US lackey in that case you become a U.S. dog! Taiwanese are like me an ancestor from Hokkien or Fuxian province in the south of China. I am what you called a Singaporean with a Chinese origin and you are a Chinese living in a province of China call Taiwan! We both loved our motherland and we will do everything to helped the cause of Chinese successes.

The U.S. and the west are Chinese haters simply because the failed to steal China into their spheres and could not break China up into a hundred minute nations so that it can swallow up one by one. Hence it us trying to destabilise Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinxiang using false pretences and war mongering. But it has failed so far and it is costing the US an arm and a leg doing so. So to China it is like providing the US with a long and strong rope to kill it selves. If that is what they wanted!

Taiwan will forever be a part of China and that status can never changed no matter ho much the U.S. tries to prised it away.

Leftists SHOCKED Employer LIED In Order To Avoid Hiring Them, Company FEARS WOKE LAWSUITS

Surprise!

This is a very good video. It surprised me. It really did.

Not in any meaningful way.

Let’s say you went to prison with an artificial leg. The leg enables you to walk and you’ve used it for so long that, with pants on, most people think you just have a bad limp.

The prison says you can’t bring your prosthesis in with you because it might have drugs hidden in a secret compartment. No worries they say… we’ll get you fitted for a new leg when the doctor comes around… in September. So you wait… and wait… and wait in a prison issue wheelchair.

The day of the doctor’s visit finally comes. Uh oh… there was a fight at the higher security prison next door. We’re on lock down. Nobody is going anywhere. No worries they say… the doctor will be back next year.

So, you file a grievance. You have the right to write down whatever angers you on a form and give it to your case manager. He dismisses your concerns… you try to go over his head, but you need copies of his denial…hard to get when he’s only in his office an hour each week… It’s amazing how often the man can lose paperwork. Case managers are often the folks not friendly or efficient enough to work at the DMV.

Nine months later, you’ve made it through three levels of appeal and only have a couple more to go… what are you crying about says the next appeal response… the doc will be there in just three short months! They mark your grievance as “resolved” and list it as a success for the process.

Yes. On paper prisoners have rights. In reality they are locked away from being able to help themselves or exercise those rights. They are completely at the mercy of a staff that could not care any less.

Oh, and my story about the artificial leg? He was still stuck in the chair when I left.

Brenden’s Easy Pork Ribs

This is one of the best and easiest ways to make baked barbecue ribs. Try using pineapple or mango juice or other juices instead of the orange juice.

Oven Pork Ribs IMAGE 5
Oven Pork Ribs IMAGE 5

Ingredients

  • Pork ribs (any variety)
  • 1 bottle Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue Sauce
  • 1 cup orange juice

Instructions

  1. Mix together barbecue sauce and orange juice.
  2. Lay ribs in a baking pan and pour barbecue mixture over the top. The ribs should be nearly submerged in the barbecue mixture.
  3. Cover pan with foil and set oven to 250 degrees F.
  4. Option 1: Cook for approximately 3 hours (depending on amount of meat). Remove from pan. The meat will be juicy and delicious. This method will make the meat fall off the bones. Excellent for sandwiches!
  5. Option 2: Cook meat for about 2 hours, remove from oven and transfer to hot grill. While on grill, continue to brush with barbecue mix from pan. They should only need a few minutes on each side. The barbecue sauce should get a bit crispy.
  6. Option 3: Instant Pot: Stand ribs on end on a trivet in Instant Pot. Pour in orange juice. Cook on manual for 25 minutes. Natural release for 10 minutes. Place ribs on foil-lined baking sheet, and brush with barbecue sauce. Broil for 7 minutes, then serve.

Darn cool from Africa

EU ambassadors are unanimously ignoring an invitation to talk from Lavrov

MACHINE-TRANSLATED FROM DER-SPEIGEL IN GERMANY — The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has invited EU ambassadors to speak to Foreign Minister Lavrov, but EU ambassadors have canceled their participation. Russia says it will have “terrible consequences.

Ambassadors sent to other countries are primarily responsible for being in contact with the government of their host country. They prepare meetings of politicians, negotiate economic issues, but of course also cultural and other issues. But their most important task is to contact the government of the host country.

Ambassadors must not interfere in the internal affairs of their host country. The UN Charter, i.e. the basis of international law, clearly defines this in Article 2. However, this does not prevent the ambassadors of the EU and its member states from interfering in Russian affairs by supporting the radical Russian opposition or making LGBT propaganda, which is prohibited in Russia. For the sake of completeness, LGBT is not banned or punished even in Russia, there are gay clubs and so on. It is only forbidden in Russia to propagate this.

Imagine that the Russian ambassador to Germany would interfere in German politics, support Reich citizens effectively, for example, and violate German laws. Would the federal government put up with it, or would it invite the Russian ambassador to speak and demand that he refrain from doing so?

That was also what the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs wanted to tell the EU ambassadors about the hot phase of the Russian presidential campaign, as Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. March in an interview told:

„ Two days before the planned event, before the meeting, they sent us a note: ‚ We decided not to go there. ‘ Can you imagine relations with diplomatic countries whose ambassadors are afraid to meet the minister of the country where they are accredited? Where was that ever seen? “

Lavrov said that his ministry „ has gathered a lot of material on how EU embassies in Moscow are preparing for our presidential election, what mechanisms for interference “ they use and that „ any projects are created to support our non-systemic opponents “. And he said:

„ Overall, these are things that messages are not allowed to do. “

The arrogance of the EU

Thereupon a Russian business portal asked the EU embassy in Moscow and the following answer to get:

„ Our reaction followed the death of Alexei Navalny and after the EU’s demands for an independent international investigation into the causes of death had not been considered. “

It is fascinating how arrogant the EU is. Would a western country accept an international investigation requested by Russia if a prisoner dies there in prison? For example, God forbid Julian Assange? And why is the EU coming the Russian demand not, to investigate the shooting down of the Russian Il-76 with 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war on board?

In its response, the Permanent Representation of the EU also referred to an extremely low level of trust „ and added:

„ We were invited to discuss EU-Russia relations, but Minister Lavrov is now saying that the conversation was about teaching us. This proves that we were right to reject the invitation. “

That raises two questions. First, why are there still ambassadors for the EU and its member states in Russia if they now even reject invitations to talk to their contact person, i.e. the Russian Foreign Minister? Secondly, who really makes foreign policy decisions in the EU if the EU can ensure that the ambassadors of all EU countries simply reject an invitation?

The official Russian reaction

Maria Sakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was at her regular Press conference asked about the scandal and I completely translated the question and its answer.

Start of translation:

Question: You mentioned that the EU ambassadors refused to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. What consequences will your actions have for you?

Sakharova: The consequences for them become terrible, terrible. If a professional diplomat loses his face, if everyone realizes that he has lost his professionalism and skills, then there is no compensation, in no way and in no form. They have to ascribe that to themselves.

You sincerely harm me for one reason. They have become hostages to their own regimes. Many of them have come a long way to become ambassadors for EU countries in the Russian Federation. It is a fact that experienced people are deployed to large countries, including members of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and nuclear powers. Given its size, our country should actually send specialists who have considerable experience. After many years of work, they all came to this position, this post. And they made their own states look stupid and bad. Not their peoples, but the regimes in their countries. Unfortunately, that happened. I don’t think there is any other explanation.Whether they pinched themselves or whether their regimes showed them, it is always the same thing. They basically signed „ “ that they are not ambassadors for their countries.

What is a „ Ambassador “? An ambassador represents not only a specific organization, but the whole country as a whole. It is very important. It is not just someone who represents this or that political party or social movement that has appointed him. It is not someone who represents this or that ideology that is in power or in opposition. No, it is someone who represents the people of his country as a whole.

Who do they represent if they refuse to meet with the authority that is the counterpart for them? For them, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is primarily the source of all information, data, both on bilateral relations and on the position in multilateral formats. You did it all yourself and arranged it. This has the corresponding consequences.

The second point: it would be okay if they sealed themselves off on all fronts in our country and in principle didn’t speak to anyone. That would be a strange attitude, self-torture, unprofessional. But at least you could see a certain logic in it. According to the motto, self-isolation according to the COVID 19 pandemic is not over yet. But they regularly take part in some marginal events and are making a fool of themselves in our country.

We treat the representatives of countries and peoples with respect, who are guided by the fact that they represent their countries in their entirety. The proposal to hold this meeting was made out of respect for their peoples. But our people, the people, the NGOs literally laugh at them. They have already become heroes of „ Memes “ or a kind of performance art.

Go online and enter „ American Ambassador to Moscow “. Who writes that? It is not the government, it is not some special institution that does it. These are people who find it funny how the ambassadors of the countries of the „ collective West “ have turned from diplomats into marginal ones who take part in any wild actions, that are not intended for intergovernmental communication.

They agitate within our society, interfere in internal affairs and become the „ clowns “ who are released before a rodeo, to warm up the dog handler or rider „ “ and entertain the audience. They become these clowns, run around in front of our audience and endlessly try to attract attention, stage a performance, participate in something, send their strange messages and appeals, that are hardly understood by our audience. They are constantly trying to lay flowers somewhere, to raise any „ rainbow flags “ above their messages and wherever possible. People are already laughing at them. They probably just don’t understand it. Many of them speak little or no Russian. Maybe they just don’t understand how to think about them.

If the US ambassador now publishes information on his official website, the Russians are said to be not afraid to take part in „ humanitarian actions “ by the US government. That is said to not harm your patriotism. How is that possible? Our brothers and sisters, our citizens, are killed with American weapons. Terrorist attacks against civil infrastructure occur regularly in Russian regions. Children die and you invite our country’s citizens to participate in US government programs that guarantee, that their patriotism is not harmed? We decide for ourselves how we should deal with everything we should do with patriotism, how we can show it and how we should deal with all your programs.

This is sad, but was to be expected in view of the degradation that we have observed for many years in the diplomacy of the „ collective West “. The clearest example is Josep Borrell, who holds the post of EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. All 27 EU countries are guided by it and give it the right to speak on its behalf on foreign policy issues. What is he chatting about? It turned out that even official representatives of the EU countries do not understand what he is saying. It turned out that it is not he who writes his column, but that someone writes it for him. I’m not sure if he’s reading that at all. How does it work? What is that creepy performance?

What kind of diplomat is he? Have you ever heard a diplomat say that there is no place for diplomacy and that everything on the battlefield has to be decided? We always emphasize that we stand for peace, negotiations and, to the end, for a peaceful solution. Even though we are facing hybrid aggression from the United States. What did the head of European diplomacy say? Josep Borrell says the opposite and kills diplomacy.

Ursula von der Leyen, who also deals with the international relations of the EU, does she represent them? It enforces US policy within the EU. This is anti-diplomacy.

I would like to remind you of Liss Truss, who was Britain’s Prime Minister for a month and a half and before that was Foreign Minister, diplomat of the Kingdom, for a year. Before that, she also held various senior positions in the British government for a short time. What kind of diplomacy is that? At a fateful moment, she came to very important negotiations in our country and did not even know that the Rostov and Voronezh regions were part of the Russian Federation. Is that normal? This happened during a conversation about the situation between Russia and Ukraine.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that she would not speak to Russia unless it turned 360 degrees and fundamentally changed its foreign policy. We turned 360 degrees, so what? We are waiting for active actions from Berlin. Where are they?

And she said that more than once. Either nobody tells her that she talks nonsense and stupid stuff, or she believes that they are all enemies who talk about their mistakes, and she has to resist that – I can’t tell you that. But that’s the level of „ diplomacy “. That was to be expected.

This is the degradation of western diplomacy in all its „ splendor “. What are they doing in the UN Security Council? They kill the Security Council by blocking obvious resolutions and only replacing them with sanctions. There is only one thing left for them: to decide on these endless sanctions that destroy diplomacy. Even more, these are not just sanctions, but part of the hybrid and economic war against our country.

End of translation

 

HAL TURNER OPINION

I’ve taken several hours to assess what is in the article above and, to me, it boils down to this:

The “Ambassadors” are acting like High School kids in a Clique:   “We’re not talking to yooooooou.”

It would be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic.

Yet “pathetic” is not the only descriptor that comes to my mind.  “Dangerous” is another descriptor.

What these “Ambassadors” are doing is leading very explicitly to actual World War 3.  When Diplomacy ceases, generally, war commences.

When history writes the epitaph of our collective West, it may say something like “They destroyed themselves because children in adult bodies threw a temper tantrum and wouldn’t talk Diplomatically.”

To me, it’s as though the Russians are the only adults in the room.

Our civilization is being lead down the road toward destruction my supposed “men” who choose to act like high school children.

He hasn’t a chance in the 2024 election, but he is the one deserving of consideration. Libertarian Party Candidate.

Russia Reveals Intent for Ukraine: Map Shows what will be left . . .

Russia Reveals Intent for Ukraine: Map Shows what will be left . . .

Deputy Chairman of the Russian Federation Council (i.e. Senate), Dmitry Medvedev, has revealed how much of “Ukraine” will remain once Russia completes its military operation.  Not much.

In a social media posting, Medvedev made clear “We will not stop until this is the case.”   Here is the full map:

Medvedev map future Ukraine
Medvedev map future Ukraine

The collective West, through NATO, wanted to place US Missile defenses on Ukrainian territory so those missiles would have only about a five minute flight time to Moscow, and to Russia’s Strategic Nuclear Silos.  Russia said “no.”

Russia pointed out that no nation can defend itself from missiles that have only a five minute flight time between launch and impact, and so the positioning of US missiles on Ukraine soil was simply an intolerable security threat to Russia.

The West did not listen.

Russia tried to negotiate what they called “Iron-clad, legally enforceable, security guarantees” and the collective West scoffed, and threw Russia’s proposal (rhetorically) into the trash.

Russia then re-proposed those security guarantees by having their proposal hand delivered to the White House, to NATO HQ, and to the Executive  addresses for each NATO member country, with the additional warning that if Russia could not obtain security guarantees Diplomatically, they would do so by military, or military-technical mean.

The West waited about ten days before they scoffed (again) and (rhetorically) threw the proposal in the trash again.

Days later, Russia telephoned Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and told him he had FIVE HOURS to agree to Russia’s security demands.   Zelensky called both the British Home Office and the US State Department, both of whom told him “ignore Russia’s ultimatum.”

Two hours after that deadline passed, Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine.

So here we are, slightly over two years into the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and Russia is taking by force, the territory it needs to protect itself from US/NATO missiles.

Over one million troops are now dead — mostly Ukrainians, but a considerable number of Russians, too — all because the US and NATO wanted to put US missiles on Ukrainian territory.

None of this had to be.  Yet here we are.

Now, we see the extent to which Russia will conquer to protect itself.  The map is clear.

Only instead of figuring out that this **MUST** be the way things will be, the collective West is now talking about sending troops into Ukraine to fight Russia.

Russia has long said such an act would mean “a war no one will win” which, as Readers are well aware, means Nuclear War.   Yet French President Macron just this week, doubled-down on his idea to send troops into Ukraine.

What part of “No” does Macron (and NATO) not understand?

The world is being lead into a nuclear conflict that does not have to be.

Prostitutes in LA

If you’re talking about the Napoleonic era wars, with long lines of men in fields slowly marching forward and shooting en masse, as depicted in, for example, the movie “Barry Lyndon”:

The answer is that they fought this way, according to my military historian friend, because:

a) That was actually not as suicidal as it seems to modern eyes, because typically, in a big battle like that, you’d only have about 5% to 10% casualties…

b) Unless one side lost its nerve, and broke and ran, in which case they would have much, much higher casualties (because it’s much, much harder for scattered individuals to defend themselves against an organized group).

Hanging out with a military historian can be quite interesting. You can see how technology dictates tactics, and both evolve over time.

Long lines are for maximizing the number of guns that you can get into a mass volley fire (and massed fire, i.e. everyone shooting simultaneously, can have devastating psychological effect and break a charge).

Horses are for fast mobility, so you can get around the line faster than the men can re-arrange themselves, come at them from the side (where only a few can get a clear shot at you) and stomp all over them.

Squares (literally take that line of men and arrange them in a square, facing outward) are for keeping horses from being able to get around you.

The technology changes, then the tactics change.

EDIT: For a much more detailed (and fun!) dissection of military line tactics, see Eric Lowe’s answer to Why were line infantry tactics, the practice in which 18-19th century warfare was dominated by rows of men firing at each other, common practice? I understand single shot firearms, but the concept seems counterintuitive.

China continuing to be China

As a non-American, I really miss:

  1. That the US President acted and sounded presidential. Think about this; when he said Kanye West was a “jackass” (I personally believe this was light, considering what had happened), the press was all over it. Can you imagine if the president today called Kanye West a Jackass? It would not even make the news!
  2. He actually knew there was a world full of thinking, intelligent people outside of US borders.
  3. The way he behaved as a gentleman, to all people, but, specially, with his wife (you know, little things like opening a door for her, or waiting for her to get out of the car before joining someone).
  4. I know I already mentioned the way he talked, but I will also state here the way he responded to people speaking to him with highly charged emotions; he always seemed cool and tempered. He was smart, and his comebacks were always good, without being rude.
  5. That he was not afraid to admit a mistake.
  6. The fact that he was actually involved in being president. He knew what was going on; he based his knowledge on personal involvement. This also, of course, also made the fact that when he spoke, he knew what he was talking about.
  7. The depth of his speeches, and the lack of words like “big”, “enormous”, and “huge” being repeated a thousand times per speech.
  8. His wife and his children; they were just real. Looking at the Trump family today reminds me of when I met the Prince of Japan; the princess was nothing more than window dressing.

Overall, there is one word that describes Obama which Trump, no matter how hard he tries, he will never have:

CLASS

Bad guy gets justice

I went out with a co-worker who asked me to go furniture shopping with him because he wanted a woman’s opinion when decorating his new house. He said that for taking the time to go shopping with him, he wanted to buy me dinner.

I met him at his place and he drove the furniture store.

He asked for my opinion on different pieces of furniture and, if I liked anything, he would examine it thoroughly and then tell me everything that was wrong with it and why I was wrong to like it. 2 hours later, we left the store without buying so much as a lamp.

He stopped by Kentucky Fried Chicken and bought a bucket of chicken. He then drove us back to his house.

We ate the KFC at his kitchen counter (he had no table or chairs) and then he announced it was time for us to go to bed (more accurately, to mattress on the floor since he had no bed).

I picked up my purse and headed for the door. He was insulted and disappointed that we weren’t going to end that fantastic evening with coitus.

Worst part — I had to look at this moron every day at work for the next 5 years.

Cat tries to rescue dog

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v-FSLiKkQGQ?feature=share

Yup! They have no trouble at all distinguishing one human from another. In fact, my first octopus hated my ex. She always tickled the octopus in a way that really annoyed the little cephalopod, and the octopus responded by squirting water at her.

It got to be a running joke, because if she even opened the lid slightly the octopus would surge up to the surface and give her a face full of water, then retreat and hide under its den. It was like a cartoon!

It liked me though. It would greet me and play tug O war and take food right from my hand. The octopus clearly could tell us apart, but I wanted to know: how far did the recognition go? It gave me an idea: we tried to fool the octopus.

I put on her hat, her sunglasses and jacket, and I let my hair down (I’ve had long hair since the ‘90s)

Nothing. He knew instantly it was me.

Then it was her turn: she tied her hair back in a ponytail, wore one of my shirts and sunglasses. She opened the lid and:….…GOOOOSH! Not even a little hesitation.

That was a long time and many many octopuses ago, but the trend is clear: That first octopus wasn’t unique. Since then, we have had many, many octopuses that could very obviously and easily tell us apart. Now I’m married to a fellow ceph expert, and now my darling wife and I make sure to take turns interacting with our octopuses to make sure neither of us winds up on the wet side of an unfavorable cephalopod yelp review.

It’s a myth that when you leave prison, you’re done.

You see it happen in movies… the prisoner is finally released after years. He walks out that front gate into a new life full of opportunity and hope.

Ahem… bullshit.

After you walk out that gate, your movements are monitored; you’ll have court ordered requirements and a probation officer to enforce them. You may be enrolled in classes, substance abuse sessions, public service, etc. You might have to take a weekly urinalysis. Maybe you’ll wear a drug patch. You might sport a nifty GPS ankle monitor that can shout helpful things at you like, “Call your PO, NOW!” You might have to cough up a chunk of your meager salary to pay for all these things.

You could have fines or restitution to take care of, and the courts are a creditor that doesn’t take no for an answer.

You’ll have a hell of a time finding a decent job. Apartments aren’t any easier. Would you want to rent to a felon, or hire one? Even people that say they would, still quietly look for ways not to.

I applied for a county job and had the job in the bag until my felony came up. The hiring manager said he believed in second chances… Ten days later I received a terse letter from the HR department explaining that “due to adverse information” I could not be considered for hire. The second chance wasn’t mine, it was theirs… a second chance to back out. Even if the hiring manager was 100% sure that I was the perfect candidate, he doesn’t want to stick his neck out for a felon. I don’t blame him.

Instead I wound up working at a car wash for minimum wage for my first year. Now I’ve got a warehouse job, but I still make only a quarter of what I made before my journey started. After child support and insurance are deducted, my job pays me $125 a week (don’t even raise the topic of getting support reduced… I’ve tried).

Your PO can knock on your door any time of the day or night and can ransack your place for any reason or suspicion. They can show up at your job to ask questions or talk to your neighbors (hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve heard plenty of state cases where it has).

My probation is for five years, but I’ve known a few guys who have lifetime probation. Imagine looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. One forbidden beer and you’re off to cell block seven!

The “help” the state provides to get you under way after release was the biggest impediment to starting over. I’m sure some guys need what was provided if they’ve burned every last bridge in their lives. For me, the halfway house just frustrated my efforts.

The felony will haunt you for as long as you live.

Truth is that once you’ve seen the inside of a prison, you never really get to walk out free again.

All good things end. This is a tribute, but I can feel it’s reality.

Israel planned a nuclear detonation in Iran?

I was 39 with a 4 year old son. Becoming a single mom through adoption and everything was great. I had a great career, lots of friends, the child I’d been dreaming of etc. Suddenly, a massive heart issue popped up leaving me on disability for 11 months while it was diagnosed and treated. We had just moved to a new place a couple of months prior. Then, just after I paid the bills and went in for a minor heart procedure, it turns out the people I had been renting from were not the owners of the house. They were squatters and I was scammed. The actual owner showed up wanting me to pay first, last and deposit, and the past due electric bill that was nearly $1000 at that point (my rent included utilities). Obviously I couldn’t pay it so I had to move out quickly just 2 days after heart surgery. We found a place and I got help moving the majority of Stuff. Some was stolen while we were moving the other stuff.

I was released to go back to work and my HR informed me that they had accidentally overpaid me during my disability, do they were deducting that from my next 4 paychecks. About the same time, the Franchise Tax Board hit me with a penalty for not filing my taxes the year before and garnished 25% of my wages. So I was getting about $850 a month at that time. We were sinking fast! I wasn’t fully recovered enough to have strenuous work and I only get paid once a month at my regular job.

I was at my breaking point. Then, my only vehicle broke down, again! I am not super religious, but I do pray and I was definitely b my knees at that point. I didn’t know what I was gonna do. My credit was shot, I was SOL. One day I get the mail. There was a ton of bills in there. I left them sitting on the table for 2 days, because I cannot pay them anyway.

Finally, I sat down to figure it how bad this was gonna be and I noticed that one of the letters is a greeting card with no return address, but addressed to me.

I open it up and there is a beautiful card that says, “I see you struggling and I see you keep going. You are so loved and you will overcome this. Signed Jesus Christ.”

Inside the card was $2,000 in cash! I couldn’t speak for a few minutes! I still have no idea who sent that card, but it was definitely a game changer for us! To whoever sent that card and money, they definitely changed our lives.

The Reconquest Of American Culture

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$26 million for five years

A giant ship’s engine broke down and no one could repair it, so they hired a Mechanical Engineer with over 30 years of experience.

He inspected the engine very carefully, from top to bottom. After seeing everything, the engineer unloaded his bag and pulled out a small hammer.

He knocked something gently. Soon, the engine came to life again. The engine has been fixed!

A week later the engineer mentioned to the ship owner that the total cost of repairing the giant ship was $20,000.

“What?!” said the owner.

“You did almost nothing. Give us a detailed bill.”

The answer is simple:

Tap with a hammer: $2

Know where to knock and how much to knock: $19,998

The importance of appreciating one’s expertise and experience…because those are the results of struggles, experiments and even tears.

If I do a job in 30 minutes it’s because I spent 20 years learning how to do that in 30 minutes. You owe me for the years, not the minutes.”

 

“The United States has consistently claimed to comply with ‘the rules-based international order’, but the most significant rules are the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, including international legal norms such as UN Security Council resolutions.

The Security Council, as the core of the world’s collective security mechanism, should by no means be a tool manipulated by individual countries for geopolitical purposes, nor should it serve as a stage to pursue hegemony or power politics.

There is no exception in the United Nations in complying with international laws including Security Council resolutions, and the United States holds no privileges in this regard.”

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Excerpt from remarks by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during a joint press conference with Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi after their talks in Jakarta, April 18, 2024.

I know Thailand is the land of smiles but in my own experience I found the people of Laos and Cambodia to be even friendlier than the amazing Thai people. Really miss that whole beautiful area of the world. Happy Travels

A real adventure…

Ah India

One aspect of the Nation I am proud of

Fast Food in India has been INDIANIZED better than in any other nation

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After all these years of McDonalds and KFC and Burger King’s and Taco Bell – the leading fast food is still Vada Pav

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When KFC was forced to launch Biryani among in its Indian menu when it was evident that the 2 Pc and 3 Pc and the famous Zinger was not doing it for the Indian people

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When India is the only country in the world where the top selling burger McAloo Tikki is a vegetarian one and the top 3 selling dishes – McAloo Tikki, McSpicy Paneer and Big Spicy Wrap (Paneer) are all vegetarian pushing the Filet O Fish to fourth sport and Mac Maharajah to the fifth spot

We may be utterly beholden to the West for their technology and core software in every sphere

Yet our Fast food growth is mainly due to our own foods

The leading fast foods of today include :-

#1 Vada Pav

#2 Pav Bhaji

#3 Momos

#4 Pani Poori

#5 Bhel Poori

#6 Aloo Tikki

#7 Samosa

#8 Kachauri

#9 Pizza

#10 Sev Puri & Samosa Chat & Aloo Chaat

(Zomato most ordered foods between 3 PM and 7 PM 2023)

Only Pizza stars in the top 10 popularly eaten fast foods of 2023

And guess which is Dominos most popular Pizza?

Indian Tandoori Pizza & Achari Do Pyaza Pizza

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Pepperoni or Hawaiian are the least selling while Tandoori Chicken sells far more


So it’s not just Mcdonalds outlets or KFC outlets that have spurred the taste of fast foods in India like it did in other nations

The three top reasons include

Availability

Fast Food is available everywhere today

You go to a street and you have a Pani Puri wallah or a Chat seller or a Pav Bhaji stall or a Bakery selling Puffs or a High End Pizza store

You are served in 3–4 minutes and finish in 10 minutes

Far more convenient for office culture and working culture

Price

Fast Food is not too expensive especially Indian Fast Food

You can get Pav Bhaji for 40–60 Bucks a plate which is way lower in cost and better in taste compared to a ₹ 378/- meal in KFC

Taste

Fast Food may or may not be unhealthy but it’s tasty

It’s spicy and Indians like spicy and tangy food

Chili Verde

Chili Verde
Chili Verde

This authentic Chile Verde recipe made with fresh tomatillos, poblano peppers, jalapenos, onion, garlic, and cilantro takes a little more work than the typical “salsa dump” recipes but is absolutely worth it! Serve it with these Slow Cooker Pinto Beans, corn tortillas, or with some Cilantro Lime Cauliflower Rice.

There are so many different recipes out there for chile verde but unfortunately, most of them involve grabbing a jar of store bought salsa verde and dumping it into the slow cooker with either chicken or pork.

While this can be really delicious (case in point: Slow Cooker Salsa Verde Chicken), it will never be as good as making green salsa from scratch. While making salsa from scratch may sound intimidating, it’s actually really easy and only takes about 5 minutes of active prep.

Let’s start with the salsa. Chile Verde is made with a tomatillo salsa verde made with fresh tomatillos, chile peppers, onion, and garlic. The first step to creating this flavor is roasting the tomatillos and peppers. Roasting everything deepens the flavor, adds smokiness to the salsa, and also mellows out some of the sour flavor in the tomatillos. Next, it is important to brighten up the salsa and that is where the cilantro comes in.

How to Serve Chile Verde

Traditionally this dish is served with rice, beans, and tortillas with fresh limes but there are all kinds of ways you can use this. Here are some of my favorites:

  • Tacos: This is a no brainer, but clearly this stuff is delicious in tacos. Warm the tortillas and serve the chicken with fresh cilantro, limes, and queso fresco or avocado.
  • Burritos and Burrito Bowls: Build your own burritos or burrito bowls with rice and beans. Personally, I like to make burrito bowls since the chicken is moist and sometimes I find the burrito begins to fall apart before I finish eating it.
  • Quesadillas: While it may be tempting to stuff this inside a quesadilla, I actually prefer to serve it on top so the quesadilla gets nice and crispy on the outside. Simply make a cheese quesadilla and then top it with Chile Verde.
  • Scrambled eggs: This is so good for breakfast with some scrambled eggs and pinto or black beans. Trust me.
  • Baked potatoes: This is a great stuffing for baked potatoes or sweet potatoes topped with some melted cheese.
  • Chilaquiles: Chilaquiles are one of my favorite breakfast recipes and this Chili Verde is so good on a pile of chiliquiles. If you think you might make chilaquiles, I recommend doubling the salsa so you can cook the chips in the extra tomatillo salsa.

What is Chile Verde?

Many people wonder about the origins of Chile Verde and there is some debate whether chile verde is from Mexico or New Mexico. Most people agree that it is a dish that hails from Northern Mexico, and possible areas in New Mexico as well.

In Mexico, it is traditionally made with pork that is slow cooked in a spicy roasted tomatillo salsa that uses a variety of chile peppers. In New Mexico, it is made in a similar manner but traditionally uses Hatch chile peppers or other native New Mexico green chiles.

Ingredients

  • 1 lb tomatillos
  • 2 large poblano peppers
  • 1 jalapeno (double for more heat)
  • 1 serrano pepper
  • 1 onion, quartered
  • 2 garlic cloves
  • 1/3 cup cilantro
  • 1 cup chicken broth
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 2 lbs. boneless skinless chicken thighs (or pork shoulder roast)
  • Salt and pepper

Yummy
Yummy

Instructions

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1Preheat the oven to broil or your oven’s highest temperature setting, like 500 degrees.

2Place the tomatillos, poblano pepper, jalapeno pepper, serrano pepper, onion, and whole unpeeled garlic cloves on a baking sheet sprayed with cooking spray. Broil for 10 minutes, flipping everything halfway through. If the garlic looks like it is beginning to burn, remove it when you flip everything else.

3Carefully remove the baking sheet from the oven. Place the peppers in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap or a lid. After ten minutes, carefully pull the skin of the peppers off, removing as much as possible. You can also remove the seeds, depending on how spicy you like things. Peel the garlic.

4Add the tomatillos, peppers, onions, garlic, cilantro. and chicken broth to a blender along with any juices from the pan. Blend until it reaches your desired consistency. Some people like a chunkier sauce and some prefer a smoother sauce.

5Stovetop: Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a Dutch oven or heavy pot. Add the chicken (or pork), season with salt and pepper, and brown for 2-3 on both sides. Add the sauce and bring to a simmer. For chicken, let simmer on low heat for 25-30 minutes until the chicken easily shreds with a fork. For pork, simmer for 2.5-3 hours until pork easily pulls apart.

6Slow Cooker: Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a Dutch oven or heavy pot. Add the chicken (or pork), season with salt and pepper, and brown for 2-3 on both sides. (You can skip this step but it adds more flavor if you sear the protein first.) Add to the slow cooker with the sauce. For chicken, cook on low for 4 hours. For pork, cook on low for 8 hours or until the pork is fork tender.

7Instant Pot: Use the instant pot saute setting. Add the chicken (or pork), season with salt and pepper, and brown for 2-3 on both sides. Add the chile verde salsa and cover. For chicken thighs, use the manual (Pressure Cooker) setting and cook for 8 minutes. Let naturally release for at least 2-3 minutes before using the steam valve. For pork, use the manual (Pressure Cooker) setting and cook for 45 minutes. Let naturally release for at least 2-3 minutes before using the steam valve.

When it comes to the heat in this recipe, it comes from using three different types of chile peppers that vary in strength and flavor. The poblano has the least amount of heat but adds a lot of flavor similar to a slightly spicy bell pepper.

The jalapeno is in the middle when it comes to spice and the serrano is the spiciest. You can vary the heat in the salsa by using different amounts of each pepper to find the right combination for you. You can also remove the seeds for less heat or leave them in for more.

Whenever making salsa, start slowly and taste along the way until it is as spicy as you like. Generally, I recommend making it slightly spicier than you want your final product since it will mellow out when cooked when it is cooked with protein.

If you have kids who don’t like spicy, make the salsa using just one seeded poblano pepper for flavor. Cook the protein in this mild salsa. Then puree the remaining peppers with a little chicken broth. Stir this spicy salsa into your dish individually so you can have a spicy version. I always make it this way and my toddler devours the milder chicken while I make mine super spicy.

The next decision when making Chile Verde is what kind of protein you would like to use. Traditionally Chile Verde recipes are made with pork but it is often made with dark meat chicken as well. Both options are delicious.

Normally I like to make it with chicken for a quick meal and I use pork when I will have more time since the pork takes much longer to cook. To keep things lighter, I like to use boneless skinless chicken thighs or a lean pork shoulder roast, but any protein would work.

We also love this traditional Pollo Pibil and Cochinita Pibil when we want a stewed Mexican dish.

Continue reading Israel planned a nuclear detonation in Iran?

Sitrep April

They didn’t like Ma Duece.

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The July 1945 cover of this magazine depicted a waist gunner in a B-17 Flying Fortress and his flexible .50 BMG M2 Browning in an official USAAF photo by Karl Gaston.

By Barrett Tillman

John M. Browning was a historic figure whose guns started the first World War and helped end the second. In 1914, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip used a Browning-designed FN Model 1910 to assassinate Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, inciting the Great War. And though Browning died in 1926, he provided his nation with nearly all its World War II machine guns, its automatic rifle and its foremost sidearm. But he did something even grander. Browning’s magnificent M2 machine gun—chambered in the .50 Browning Machine Gun (BMG) cartridge—gave America and her allies the priceless gift of global air superiority. Nothing else came close.

Actually, the Browning .50 originated in the Great War. American interest in an armor-piercing cartridge was influenced by the marginal French 11 mm design, prompting U.S. Army Ordnance officers to consult Browning. They wanted a heavy projectile at 2700 feet per second (f.p.s.), but the ammunition did not exist. Browning pondered the situation and, according to his son John, replied, “Well, the cartridge sounds pretty good to start. You make up some cartridges and we’ll do some shooting.”

Reputedly influenced by Germany’s 13.2×92 mm SR (.53-cal.) anti-tank rifle, Ordnance contracted with Winchester to design a .50-cal. cartridge. Subsequently, Frankford Arsenal took over from Winchester, producing the historic .50 BMG or 12.7×99 mm cartridge.

The Army then returned to John Browning for the actual gun. Teamed with Colt, he produced prototypes ready for testing and, ironically, completed them by Nov. 11, 1918—the Great War’s end.

The scaled-up version of the .30-cal. (.30-’06 Sprg.) M1917 water-cooled machine gun possessed obvious potential. But the cartridge’s enormous power proved excessive to the Colt-Browning design, forcing the master back to his drafting board. He returned with a buffer system that seemed workable. Tests in 1919 and 1920 confirmed the viability of the cartridge and gun, and Ordnance approved it for production. The result was the M1921 water-cooled .50-cal. machine gun, the basis for today’s M2 model, the fabled “Ma Deuce.”

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“Ma Deuce” still serves today.

Because of its size and weight, the M1921 was issued as a light anti-aircraft gun, both ground- and ship-based. It remained in Navy use until replaced by 20 mm Oerlikon cannons in 1942.

Meanwhile, a more utilitarian .50-cal. gun was underway. After adopting the M1921, the Army decided to evaluate an air-cooled model, far more tractable for soldiers at 120 lbs. with a tripod. The result was designated “Caliber .50 Machine Gun, Heavy Barrel, M2.” The heavier 36″ barrel was expected to handle heat buildup, but experience led to a 45″ version that was adopted in 1933 and used ever since.

To War
The big Browning fought America’s war from the first day to the last. On Dec. 7, 1941, Navy CPO John Finn responded to the Japanese attack on Kaneohe Naval Air Station, Hawaii, by manning an AN/M2 in an instructional mount (“A/N” stands for Army and Navy). Alone and fully exposed, he fired at the raiders whenever they came within range. “I was out there shooting the Jap planes and just every so often I was a target for some,” he said. “In some cases, I could see their faces.” Though struck by 20 bullets or fragments, he remained at his gun until ordered to report for medical attention. Then he turned to arming his squadron’s remaining planes. His actions resulted in CPO Finn receiving the Medal of Honor.

At least four other .50-cal. gunners received the nation’s highest award, including Lt. Col. William J. O’Brien, an Army battalion commander on Saipan in July 1944. When the Japanese overran his position, he replied with an M1911 in each hand, then dashed to a jeep-mounted M2, according to his citation, “firing into the Jap hordes that were enveloping him” until he was killed.

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The three main variants of the .50-cal. Brownings were (top to bottom): the water-cooled M1921 (used mostly in the anti-aircraft role); the aircraft-mounted AN/M2, which could be flexible or fixed; and the M2HB used on the ground.

Undoubtedly the best-known M2 engagement occurred on the other side of the world six months later. In France on Jan. 26, 1945, 19-year-old 2nd Lt. Audie Murphy climbed aboard a burning tank destroyer to man the .50 as a company of German infantry advanced. Though hit in one leg, he remained at the gun, shooting down perhaps 50 of the enemy before running dry. Then he returned to his platoon to organize a counterattack. For this, Murphy received the Medal of Honor, and he would become one of the most decorated soldiers in American military history.

With a global need, it seemed that everyone built M2s, from AC Spark Plug Co. to Frigidaire to Guide Lamp. American Rifleman Field Editor Bruce Canfield’s encyclopedic U.S. Infantry Weapons of World War II shows nearly 350,000 M2 Heavy Barrels (M2HB) produced among nearly 2,000,000 .50 calibers of all models during the war years.

Everybody wanted the Ma Deuce in .50 BMG for its fabled power, range and reliability. One wartime study found that stoppages averaged one in 4,000 rounds, as long as headspace was properly adjusted. Armorers determined that a high ratio of malfunctions were due to faulty ammunition or links.

The Ma Deuce’s limit as an anti-aircaft (AA) gun was range, volume of fire and weight of projectile—especially when compared to 20 mm or 5″ cannons. A single-barrel gun firing a 700-gr. bullet could seldom inflict enough damage to destroy a fast attacker. Even multiple guns engaging the same target were marginal. At the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942, the fabled carrier U.S.S. Enterprise expended 400 rounds of .50 BMG versus 46,000 rounds of 20 mm; 3,200 rounds of 40 mm; and 400 rounds of 5″. The main reason for the discrepancy probably was engagement range: few attackers closed to within the .50’s effective distance.

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(l.) Adopted in 1933, the M2HB had a 45″ barrel and weighed about 120 lbs. with its tripod. A typical Army infantry battalion had six M2s. In Ordnance Went Up Front Roy Dunlop wrote: “All ground guns could fire single shots … and very accurate fire was possible.” (r.) The M45 quad mount—with four .50-cal. M2s—could be installed in an M16 halftrack or towed as shown in the Pacific Theatre. Although used mostly for anti-aircraft defense, in ground combat the power of four .50-cal. Brownings could be devastating.

Army anti-aircraft units made good use of the M45 quad .50 mount, either towed or mounted on M16 halftracks. Some of the heaviest AA activity occurred during Luftwaffe attacks on Allied airfields on New Year’s Day 1945. In the Metz area, Army AA gunners engaged 25 enemy aircraft, claiming 14 destroyed and four probably downed. Only 11 rounds of 90 mm artillery were fired with a combined 1,270 rounds of 37 and 40 mm, compared to 24,100 rounds of .50 caliber. Quad .50s also were employed in ground combat. A 1945 study noted, “A few bursts from the quadruple .50s directed at any source of small-arms fire very quickly eliminated the trouble.”

Through most of the war, a typical Army infantry battalion operated 20 .30-cal. machine guns (eight M1917 water-cooled) and six .50-cal. M2s. Weapons platoons typically had a jeep-mounted M2 that could be rushed to a trouble spot. The Axis armies had nothing comparable, though Germany issued light machine guns on a greater scale than the Allies. However, short of 20 mm canons, the Germans had no battlefield guns that could penetrate armored cars or personnel carriers at typical engagement distances.

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The M2HB (Heavy Barrel) could be employed as a ground arm while mounted on its M3 tripod (l.) or on vehicles, such as with the three MPs in their jeep in the winter of 1944-1945 (r.).

Pre-war match shot and American Rifleman contributing editor Roy F. Dunlap described wartime global trekking in his memoir, Ordnance Went Up Front. He wrote, “I believe the .50s have fewer breakdowns than the .30 caliber guns and that about 75 percent of the repair jobs I did were due to rough handling or carelessness on the part of the gun crew.” For practical application, he said, “I cannot think of a better way to screw up a road junction than to work a .50 to within a couple or three miles, set it in a hollow, camouflaged, and every so often throw a few armor piercers or incendiaries over to the crossing. The blue-tipped incendiaries explode with flash, report and puff of smoke. All ground guns could fire single shots … and very accurate fire was possible.”

In a 1945 summary, the U.S. Army in Europe concluded, “The half-track .50 caliber machine gun—one of the most effective weapons we have—is up where it can be used.” The same report noted that mechanized units had scrounged M2s from downed aircraft and adapted them to coaxial mounts.

On the Pacific isles, typical engagement distances were far closer than in Europe, and Japanese armored vehicles—rarely encountered—were vulnerable to .50-cal. fire. One of the Browning’s main advantages in that environment was its unrivaled penetration, as M2 rounds were far less likely to be deflected by foliage than .30s. Nevertheless, the Marine Corps divisional allotment of Ma Deuces declined from 360 in 1942 to 162 at war’s end.

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The .50-cal. water-cooled was the first adopted, and it was the heaviest, too. The guns served in the anti-aircraft role in all theatres of the war. While phased out for shipboard use, the Army continued to use the M2 AA gun.

Air Guns
Entering World War II, the British Royal Air Force installed eight Colt-Browning .303s in Hurricane and Spitfire fighter planes (later augmented with 20 mms) while Germany and Japan favored rifle-caliber guns and 20 mm cannon. But whether Oerlikon or Hispano-Suiza designs, cannon had limited ammunition capacity and were prone to malfunction.

The prewar U.S. Army Air Corps took a middle road. Early Bell P-39Ds had two .50s, four .30s and a 37 mm gun in the nose. The Curtiss P-40B packed two .50s and four .30s, while Lockheed’s futuristic P-38 had four .50s and a 20 mm. The .50-cal. round delivered at least four times the energy of the .30-’06 Sprg. at the same velocity, affording greater penetration and projectile selection. Clearly, the M2 was better suited for destroying modern all-metal aircraft.

Originally the Air Corps adopted the M2 with a 600 r.p.m. cyclic rate. But, as aircraft speeds increased, fighter pilots had less time to track and shoot. Therefore, Frankford Arsenal boosted muzzle velocity from 2700 to 2880 f.p.s. The standard ball cartridge was the 709-gr. projectile atop 253 grs. of IMR-5010. Armorers experimented with various belting combinations, alternating ball, armor-piercing incendiary (API) and tracer. The M2 AP round would defeat nearly an inch of face-hardened steel at 200 yds. Moreover, armor-piercing incendiaries (usually 647 to 662 grs.) were most useful against aircraft, as they could penetrate enemy armor and engine blocks, sever enemy airframe components and ignite enemy fuel tanks.

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The solid-nose version of the B-25 Mitchell was fitted for eight fixed M2s and could sink enemy ships by .50-cal. gunfire alone.

Tracer rounds, typically about 680 grs., had somewhat different ballistic properties than ball, AP and API, and they did not duplicate the others’ trajectories. Tracers probably were more widely issued to anti-aircraft units than aviation organizations. However, various fighter squadrons adopted different policies. Some loaded the last 50 rounds in each belt entirely with tracers to alert the pilot he was running low. But some very successful pilots shunned tracers. Lieutenant Colonel Francis Gabreski, leading U.S. ace of the European Theater, said, “Sometimes you miss with the first burst and tracers can give you away.”

Browning’s big gun won air superiority for America around the world. Army, Navy and Marine fighters were credited with 25,264 aerial victories, nearly all armed wholly or mainly with AN/M2s. The exceptions were 412 victories gained by British aircraft (mainly Spitfires) in American units and some U.S. night fighters, which were aircraft reconfigured or designed for combat in the dark.

Bombers also packed the M2 as single, manually operated guns and as turret-mounted pairs. The U.S. armed forces consumed vast amounts of ammunition—the St. Louis plant alone delivered 6.7 billion rounds of .30 and .50 caliber during the war. In the fall of 1943, when Eighth Air Force bombers flew unescorted deep penetrations into Reich airspace, one mission might consume more .50-cal. ammunition than a month’s worth of that used by the Fifth Army in Italy.

Around that time, aerial gunners began calling their guns “Mrs. Deuce,” an obvious precursor of today’s familiar “Ma Deuce.” The total Army Air Forces (AAF) overseas expenditure was nearly 460 million rounds, but monthly figures alone were staggering. In April 1945, shortly before Germany surrendered, the Army Air Force in the European and Mediterranean theaters fired nearly 25 million rounds of machine gun and cannon ammunition, the huge majority being .50 caliber. In July, Army airmen flying against the Japanese expended more than 6 million rounds.

During the war, about 100 American fighter pilots downed five or more enemy aircraft in one day to become “instant aces.” Six pilots were credited with seven kills in one mission. They flew very different aircraft—Wildcats, Hellcats, Corsairs, Lightnings and Mustangs—but all had the AN/M2 in common. One instant ace and future NRA member was Marine aviator James E. Swett, who received the Medal of Honor for downing seven (possibly eight) Japanese dive bombers over Guadalcanal in April 1943.

The outright record for aerial victories in a single encounter belonged to the Navy top gun, Cdr. David McCampbell. Flying from U.S.S. Essex over Leyte Gulf in the Philippines on Oct. 24, 1944, he and a wingman tackled a large formation of Japanese fighters. In 90 minutes of combat McCampbell was credited with nine destroyed and two probables while his partner added six more. With the confidence of experience and a disciplined trigger finger, McCampbell made maximum use of his Brownings and ammunition. Given the 2,400-round payload of his Grumman Hellcat, McCampbell averaged just 218 shots per victory.

Perhaps the most cost-efficient aircraft kill of the air war demonstrated the .50’s power. Over Okinawa in May 1945 a Hellcat night fighter stalked a Japanese floatplane harassing U.S. ground troops. Marine Lt. J.E. Smurr closed to minimum range—about 50 ft.—and centered the Aichi seaplane in his illuminated reticle. He pressed the trigger for less than one second and the enemy aircraft disintegrated into a fireball. Armorers found that Smurr had fired only 62 rounds. Throughout the campaign, Marine night hunters averaged 567 rounds per victory regardless of size or type of aircraft.

In a naval war such as the Pacific, .50 calibers inevitably were used against ships. Six M2s could cripple a corvette or a destroyer, whose typical 1/2″ plates offered little protection. Japanese destroyer hulls measured 0.4″ to 0.6″ (10 to 16 mm) whereas .50 ball from a 45″ barrel could penetrate 1/3″ (8 mm) at 500 yds. API rounds penetrated 1″ (25 mm) of homogenous plate at 200 yds. and 3/4″ (18 mm) at 650 yds. Face-hardened plate of 0.9″ (23 mm) was defeated at 200 yds. and 1/2″ at 600. The velocity loss from 36″ aircraft barrels did not seriously reduce the .50’s penetrative qualities, which could puncture engines, boilers and magazines.

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As well as its use on the ground, the big Browning proved a war winner in the air with the Army, Navy and Marines. The U.S. Army Air Force used lighter-weight, .50-cal. AN/M2 Brownings as defensive armament, including as a pair in a turret on a B-17 Flying fortress (top l.) as well as in the tail of a B-17 (top, r.). They were also used on fighter aircraft, such as in the nose of the P-38 Lightning (below l.) and in the wings of fighter aircraft in Europe such as the P-47 Thunderbolt (below, r.).

Certainly the outer limits were achieved by North American B-25H bombers optimized for shipping attacks. With eight nose- and fuselage-mounted .50s plus a top turret, two waist guns and the twin-gun tail position, the H model Mitchell was literally a flying gunship that could immobilize merchantmen—even without the short-barreled 75 mm cannon. However, when the H model entered combat in the China-Burma-India Theater in early 1944, shipping targets were rare. River traffic, on the other hand, was easily destroyed by fighters and gunships.

A study of Navy patrol bombers concluded that during 1945, “Dozens of small vessels were destroyed by fires caused by incendiary hits or strafing alone.” Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer bombers expended 2 million rounds of .50 caliber on 600 or more surface vessels, contributing to sinking as many as 300. “The effect was to cripple the remaining Japanese sea transport in most areas and to cause withdrawal of many vessels not sunk because of the danger of attack … .”

The AN/M2 was fully appreciated by the war’s midpoint. In 1943, Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, declared the Browning “the outstanding aircraft gun of the Second World War.” He added, “This weapon … is the backbone of offensive and defensive gun [sic] for American aircraft and was brought to such a state of perfection by the Ordnance Department during the years of peace prior to the present conflict that it has enabled the Army Air Forces, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to show a definite superiority in aircraft gun power through this global war.”

Despite the M2’s immense success, some operators wanted more. The M3 .50 caliber boosted cyclic rate to 1,200 r.p.m., but the increase came at too high a price. Tests showed greater barrel erosion, and rounds tended to “keyhole.” Only 2,400 M3s were delivered before V-J Day, but development continued. Subsequently, the M3 armed the first generation of American jet fighters, pointing the way to victory in MiG Alley during the Korean War.

In typical military fashion, in 2004 the Army tried to replace the M2 with a less effective arm at twice the price. The wasteful three-year program to develop the XM312 flopped during tests in 2005 but lingered two more years before cancellation. At that point “Big Army” defaulted to the best option: buying more M2s.

Longevity remains a hallmark of John M. Browning’s designs. His timeless M1911 pistol is more widely used today than ever, and “Ma Deuce,” dating from 1921, shows no signs of retiring. In fact, in 2015 the 324th M2 ever produced was finally removed from service—after 94 years in the inventory. The old warhorse was being retired because current standards would require extensive modification. Army Materiel Command quoted an armorer at Anniston Army Depot who said, “Looking at the receiver, for its age, it looks good as new and it gauges better than most of the other weapons.” Said John Clark, a small arms repair leader, “I’d rather put this one on display than send it to the scrap heap.” A veteran approaching its centennial, the M2 certainly deserves an honorable retirement—though its relatives will remain on the firing line well into the current century.

In this article

.50-CAL. BROWNING MACHINE GUN

, WWII, .50 BMG M2 BROWNING, JOHN M. BROWNING, MA DEUCE, BARRETT TILLMAN

From the point of view of the Chinese government, Taiwan is important for historical reasons, as unification with the rest of China would represent a clear end to China’s century of humiliation and the end of any pro-western colonial presence on Chinese territory. Any Chinese leader who brought Taiwan back into a unified China would be remembered in the history books as the leader who brought this period of humiliation to an end, and would be remembered for this single accomplishment.

Most PRC Chinese also feel this way about Taiwan.

In short, it would be the single largest accomplishment in Chinese history in the 21st century.

Most Americans, including US government officials, do not understand the depth of the Chinese commitment to unification with Taiwan.

If they can understand the commitment of Zionist Jews to Israel and a homeland in the Middle East, why can’t they understand China’s commitment to unification with Taiwan?

Yes! The following scenes from the movie The Pursuit of Happyness made me cry:

  1. Chris and his son sleeping in a bathroom:

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With no money, no job and homeless, Chris turns a dirty subway restroom into an imaginary cave for his son and gets him to sleep there. Being at the depth of his poverty and despair, Chris breaks down in this scene and is shown blocking the door so that his son can sleep well. Heart touching scene.

2. The five-bucks scene:

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Chris’s boss forgets his wallet upstairs and is in a hurry to attend a meeting. He asks Chris to lend him five bucks. Being at the rock bottom of poverty, five bucks mattered for Chris and he lends his boss too. This scene regains our faith in humanity and the act of giving to those in need.

3. Chris gets the job:

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Who can forget this scene where he gets the job and is asked about his struggle? This scene still makes me emotional.

Will Smith is a genius!

I have lived in China for a few years, and I think the west would be a happier place if we adopted the following Chinese wisdoms:

  1. if you cause someone embarrassment, you should also be ashamed of yourself – so, better don’t do that to anyone. It would be such a nice change from our silly, childish revenge culture.
  2. take an entire hour for lunch every day. Better even: two. It celebrates the day, and makes for a more relaxed life.
  3. get seriously into savings and whatever else you can do to build your fortune. We westerners have a debt culture. We live in denial of how unhappy that makes us.
  4. choose the middle ground for all things. We westerners always look for extremes. But longterm happiness is not found in thrill, only in balance.
  5. take naps during the day. You would be amazed how much happier you will be.
  6. spend more time with your folks. Western society is always trying to isolate the individual, when life is so much nicer shared with others – especially your family.

My brother Daniel

That is your superiority complex version. The reality version is that China is already way ahead of the U.S. from every aspect. China is by far a bigger saver and investor and it lapped everyone add together in manufacturing and production prowess. It trains and graduates more engineers and scientist a year than the U.S. has in entirety.

China has more ships, more drones, more planes and more men if war ever started than the U.S. ever has. And worst it has the capacity to build more a month an the U.S. could in a whole year! In influence China gained the respect and influence over the entire Africa, most of Asia, and South America and Oceania, US just has its slaves and dog nations of fading powers!

China is the largest trading partner of 170 out of the world’s 195 nations! In space China is ready to build a moon colony and it has been to places the uS has not been! Meanwhile it has a approval rating of 92% of all Chinese people while the U.S. has less than 30% of its people supporting what they do!

Yes. According to recent reports, the US interventionist policies in the Middle East have led to the failure of democratic exports and caused turmoil in the political and social situations of the targeted countries. US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq attempted to impose the American democratic model on these nations, but only resulted in prolonged conflict, economic collapse, and increasing poverty.

The US’s democratic exports are based on self-interest and interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.

To illustrate this point, we can take Afghanistan as an example. In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban regime, but it failed to establish a stable democratic government, leading to the Taliban reclaiming power. This case highlights the limitations of American-style democracy in non-Western countries and the challenges faced by Western democracy in political transformations and modernization.

Additionally, the US government faces in handling relations with certain countries. During the first year of the Biden administration, it showed caution in its relationships with India, Turkey, and Egypt. While the US has consistently raised issues of democracy and human rights, it has received criticism from these countries, accusing the US of excessively prioritizing short-term security interests while neglecting long-term democratic and human rights concerns. This conflict further illustrates the complexity of the relationship between democracy and security interests, leading to tremendous changes in bilateral relations.

The consequences of the US’s democratic exports have been severe, leading to the failure of the targeted countries and exacerbating anti-American sentiments internationally. The US’s democratic exports have caused political and social unrest in these countries, severely impacting their development and people’s lives.

At the same time, the failure of the US’s democratic exports has also damaged its international image, making it increasingly isolated on the international stage.

The US’s democratic exports are driven by self-interest, interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, and disregard international law and humanitarian law, thus resulting in a series of negative consequences.

Hi-Fi murders.

Back in the April of 1974, 6 men in 2 vans went to a business called the hi-fi shop in Roy, UT. This is an audio store and the men had planned on robbing them. 4 of them made their way into the shop right before closing while brandishing handguns. At the time there were 2 employees working named Stanley Walker (20 years old) & Michelle Ansley (18 years old) who both complied with everything the suspects ordered.

Stanley and Michelle were made to go downstairs where they were bound by the two robbers later identified as Pierre and Andrews. Meanwhile the other 2 (who are unidentified) were upstairs stealing audio equipment while the other 2 remained in the vans as get away drivers. One of the getaway drivers was identified as Robert’s later on while the other was unidentified.

Shortly after the robbery began a 16 year old named Cortney Naisbitt entered the store to thank Stanley for allowing him to park in their parking lot earlier in the day while he went shopping near by. Upon entering he was met by the 2 robbers that were upstairs. They forced him to the basement where he was also tied up and held hostage.

Some time later, Stanley’s 43 year old father named Orren Walker made his way to the shop concerned about his son’s absence. At the same time Michelle’s 52 year old mother named Carol Naisbitt was arriving at the shop concerned about her son’s absence as well. Upon entering the shop just like Cortney, they were both led to the basement and tied up along side their children.


GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS AND UPSETTING DETAILS BELOW PROCEED WITH CAUTION.


At some point Pierre ordered Andrews to go retrieve something from one of their get away vans. Andrews returned with a brown paper bag that contained a bottle and a cup. Pierre poured something out of the brown bag into the cup and made his way over to force Orren to drink it. Orren refused so he was gagged and laid face down on the floor.

Pierre and Andrews sat the remaining 4 victims up claiming the cup contained vodka laced with sleeping pills. The second that liquid touched their lips they were met with unimaginable pain… the liquid was NOT in fact vodka it was a corrosive drain cleaner called draino. Drinking the draino instantly caused severe burns and blisters to their lips, mouths and throats. They forced all 4 of the hostages to drink the draino. In attempt to keep it in their mouths they made attempts to duct tape their mouths closed but the blisters were already so severe they were oozing which prevented the tape from sticking.

Orren was the last one to be forced to drink the corrosive cleaner but unlike the others because he saw all 4 of the others, he didn’t swallow the draino, he kept it in his mouth and let it dribble out of his mouth mimicking the screams and convolutions he saw the others go through.

Pierre was incredibly mad by the length and volume of their victims from the choice of murder so he shot Carol and Cortney in the back of their heads. Carol was killed instantly but Cortney survived with major wounds. Pierre then fired at Orren but missed. Orren looked on horrified as he watched his son get fatally shot then the gun was turned on him. The bullet grazed the back of Orrens head but he was still alive.

Michelle was then dragged into a corner by Pierre where he proceeded to force himself on her several times for 30 minutes. She was then fatally shot in the back of the head.

Andrews and Pierre still knew Orren was alive. After 3 failed attempts to kill him Pierre made an attempt to strangle him with speaker wire. This attempt yet again fails to kill him. Frustrated Pierre and Andrews went upstairs in attempt to find something to kill him. This is where they found a ball point pen. They placed this pen in his ear and then stomped on it. The pen went through his head and out his throat.

Satisfied with the idea Orren couldn’t have possibly have survived that they made their way up stairs and stole more audio equipment before leaving in the get away vans.

Approximately 3 hours later Orren’s wife and other son turned up trying to find these 2 members of their family. Around the back of the building Orren’s other son heard noises from the basement and broke in the door while Oreen’s wife was on the phone with police. Entering the basement, they stumbled across the gruesome scene.

Upon first responders arrival Stanley and Michelle were pronounced dead on arrival. Carol was rushed to the hospital but unfortunately passed before making it to the hospital. Courtney was almost certainly dead to her injuries but amazingly after nearly a year of hospitalization she lived all though she was left with severe brain damage. Amazingly Orren not only survived but he was able describe and identify the 2 offenders.

Yes. My Dad delivered some vigilante justice when I was 13. Dad was a large, gentle man. He was 6’4” and extremely muscular. He was born in 1917 and started working in the family coal mine at 4. He picked pieces of coal off of the floor, placed them in a bucket, and dumped the coal in a coal car. He continued to do hard physical labor for the rest of his life.

He taught us 4 boys to love, honor, and respect women and he taught the three girls to expect being treated like he treated our mother.

We lived in a small town in rural Wyoming. The neighbor kitty cornered from us was the opposite of my Dad. The weasel would get drunk and beat his wife and daughter.,

We were working in the yard one summer day when we heard a scream. Weasel’s wife ran out of the house with him right behind her. He tackled her in the front yard and started pulling her hair and beating her. Dad dropped his rake, said, “that’s enough”, and ran over there. He yanked Mr. Weasel off of his wife and beat the crap out of him.

About an hour later, Mr. Weasel crawled back into the house. An hour or so later, he got in his pickup and drove away. We never saw him again.

More fun with Text to picture.

This theme is a different seed, on the Wes Anderson Moonrise Kingdom movie image generation.

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The Brick.

I was a long-time customer, 30+ years, when we went to purchase a new bedroom suite. As my wife was getting what she wanted, I started looking at TV’s. I found a 51″ that I liked, so we bought that as well. Since it was a display model I also bought the extended warranty.

Well, within 6 months, the TV quit working. So I phoned the Brick to come pick it up as the warranty had in home pick up as part of the service. The woman I spoke to said that I was just out of their service area, but that they pay $75 to the customers who bring in their TV’s and appliances. Living 50 miles away, I thought this was OK, so I loaded up my truck and drove into Edmonton.

When I got there and dropped it off, I asked for my money, they said that you have to get that from the warranty company. Needless to say, I was pissed, and went home.

Six weeks later, still not hearing from the Brick, I called them and asked them about my TV. Oh, they said, it was ready the next day. Well why don’t you drop it off then I asked? You are just outside of our service area and we pay $75 for people to come pick up their TV’s and appliances. So I drove in to get my TV and asked where’s my $75? I was told that I have to get it from the warranty company.

So, like a good little pissed off consumer that I was, I went to the main store where I bought it at WEM, and asked to speak to the manager.

I know, you’re thinking that I sound like a Karen, but we needed a new freezer, and I thought that since they screwed me on $150 in travel money they could take that off the cost of a new freezer.

Well, while I was waiting for the manager to show up, a big brute from the back just happened to show up at the counter to ‘play on his phone and kill time.’ Did they think that I was going to fight the manager? Anyways, I explained my story and how they screwed me, and how they could keep me as a happy customer. All they had to do was take off the money from the price of the freezer. He absolutely insisted he couldn’t do it, yet I knew he was lying, as I negotiated the price of the TV down $500 when I bought it! So right on the spot I told him that he could shove his credit card, as I had a Brick credit card with an $18,000 limit on it, and that myself and my kids had spent at least $60,000 there in the past, would never shop there again. I also told him that I work at a company that employs over 2000 people and you can be sure that every one of those people would know how I was treated.

And I have never been back there, or to Leons, which is owned by the Brick.

Cooking in Vietnam is a visual treat

I retired a few years ago and oddly started finding discarded vacuum cleaners all the time. Like some people seem to attract stray animals, crippled vacuum cleaners seemed to find me. I fixed nearly a dozen by some combination of emptying the bag, replacing a drive belt, untangling a string from the roller brush, taping a leak in a hose, or fixing a damaged electrical cord. On average, it took me about 10 minutes to “repair” them.

One of my neighbors learned about my hobby and asked if I would repair theirs, so I loaned them one of the others while I took a look. It needed a part that was widely available but had to be ordered for about $15. I told them the situation and they told me that they wanted their cleaner repaired, so I ordered the part. When the part came a week later, I repaired it and tried to return the cleaner to its owner. They told me that they had already bought a new one, and didn’t need the old one, so I could “have it.” No mention of the money I had spent for the part. We didn’t talk much for awhile after that.

Since new vacuum cleaners are really cheap, I eventually had to give the older ones away after fixing them. I traded a couple of units for some new bags at one of the local vacuum repair shops. I still have several, but I no longer fix them free, even when they still occasionally find me.

For transportation, I find China absolutely rocks:

  • Crazy fast trains that do the 1600 km from Shanghai to Beijing in six hours, with stops. And they’ll do it for 50 US$.
  • Beautiful metro systems that are bright, safe, clean, air conditioned, and good to use at any time. The cost is negligeable, and these things go everywhere.
  • Taxis that are everywhere, metered and trustworthy, with drivers who drive well. Need one? Just wave at the next one approaching and get in. Affordable, too. You don’t need your own car in Shanghai or Beijing.
  • Maglev! The magnetic, levitating train from Shanghai Airport to town. I take it every time I’m there. Does 70 km in 12 minutes.

Male Logic

Nuclear power is inherently unsafe, but.

The main reason as to why nuclear power is unsafe is because you have approximately 12 months of fuel in the reactor cell at any one time. Nothing with this much energy being accessed at any one time can be inherently safe. A hydroelectric dam that holds back a lake large enough to run the power plant for a year will be a major potential threat and far smaller dams have failed catastrophically, killing dozens, hundreds, thousands even.

Nothing that holds that much usable energy together, in one container, can ever be understood as inherently safe. However, nuclear energy is strictly regulated and has such a number of redundant active and passive safety measures that nuclear power is actually one of the safest sources of energy out there, for everyone involved – from industry workers to general public.

This is akin to aviation. Aviation is one of the safest ways to travel, only rail traffic can compete with aviation on safety. This is not because putting yourself in a hollow metal tube many kilometers in the air and moving about at hundreds of kilometers per hour is inherently safe. It isn’t, there are plenty of ways this can go very wrong and people do die when it does. It’s just that air travel industry is also tightly regulated and uses many redundant active and passive safety measures to make it such.

Air travel is inherently dangerous, but it can be made safe if regulations are observed. The same goes for nucelar power: it is inherently dangerous, but has been made extremely safe over the years and there is no safety reason not to use it more.

Well, I’m afraid you are completely and totally deluded. Most of the world is behind China. Only ignorant bigots like you hate China.

Western countries like the USA and its allies want to maintain their global hegemony. China’s rise threatens this hegemony. It’s as simple as that.

They’re jealous and fearful of China’s rise. Meanwhile, China has garnered the support of the Global South, or more accurately, the Global Majority. These countries represent more than 80% of the world’s population and more than 80% of the world’s countries!

Why so much support? Four main reasons:

  1. China has fought no wars in the last 45 years. No other world power has ever been so peaceful for so long.
  2. China helps other countries with their infrastructure and economy through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It also leads BRICS, which is unifying the Global South.
  3. China is the largest trading partner with over 120 nations. They all benefit enormously from trading with China.
  4. China respects all nations and does not interfere in their politics. China sanctions nobody. China overthrows no foreign government.

We’re living in corporate dystopia and Gen Z is reacting accordingly

Sitrep March 2024

Here are some common things we are usually unaware of the purpose of:

  • Stickers on fruit: The stickers mark the country and producer of the fruit, but it’s the numbers that are the important aspect. If there are 4 digits and the first number is 4, then it means the fruit is sprayed with pesticides. If there are 5 digits and the first number is 9, then the fruit has grown organically, and if there are 5 digits with the first number being 8, then the fruit has been genetically modified.

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main qimg ebc4289eca860e6b91f2fb5ec0f1cfce pjlq

  • Doughnut hole: In the past, it was difficult to get the edges and the middle of the pie equally baked. So they came up with the ingenious idea of using this shape to ensure equal baking on all sides.

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main qimg 9580973ff8383ace38deea1f11ef085c pjlq

  • The original reason for sunglasses: today it’s obviously to protect us from the sun’s rays. But the original purpose was to protect Arctic people from the dazzling rays of snow. And in 12th century China, they became particularly widespread among judges in order to hide their true feelings from witnesses.

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main qimg 459359ce40c8eb025196040b4bad0864 pjlq

  • Margins on paper: the original purpose was not for extra notes on the side. In the past mice and rats often gnawed on the paper, so in order for them not eat away the information, people started to leave spaces on the sides.

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main qimg 36105bcf61ac3b9cc21b46a2c1f8c03c pjlq

  • Holes in padlocks: People usually buy a new lock when their old one doesn’t work due to rain. However, the purpose of the hole is to put in oil – once done, the lock should be able to open with no difficulty.

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main qimg c0171e60ab64ceca4d0f124a6880ce78 pjlq


Vince wasn’t an intellectual heavyweight. He was a deeply flawed asshat with an outsized ego and limited self restraint.

Remember the scene with The Wolf? The Wolf was there to save Vince’s idiotic neck, and yet our boy just couldn’t stand that someone else walked in and smoothly took control. When returning home with the wife of his boss, Vince was clearly working his way up to making a pass at Mia in spite of trying to talk himself out of it. If Mia hadn’t OD’d Vince would’ve discovered that his disposal wouldn’t even merit a pine box.

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main qimg 32d7ef484d4693ec4434a45a772caf4b lq

Obviously my experience isn’t from the perspective of “law enforcement”, but from being locked up with, then living and working with other felons.

Those living a “life of crime” are different from you and your neighbors only because one aspect of their life is something illegal that they got caught doing. That doesn’t mean that they live and breathe crime 24/7.

These people are fully formed and complex individuals, just like you. In many cases, you would find that the “life of crime” really boils down to just one dumb act, not a daily ritual.

The only exception to this would be the addicts I’ve met, particularly the meth users. They might start off as “unique snowflakes” but something about that drug leeches personality from them like bathwater leeches the salts from your skin. Given enough time they become shriveled husks of former humans — having more in common with one another than with anyone else.

Playing around with text-to-picture

Default masterpiece best quality coloring book line art The Ha 3
Default masterpiece best quality coloring book line art The Ha 3

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alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 3 c9d4c350 4d63 4e92 91d4 1c801555ac38 0

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alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 6 29992db0 5c7e 4caf 9efd f816614463bb 0(1)

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alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 2 13819db4 5d1b 4a47 a4ea 6447d0b6b111 0

Default coloring book line art The Chariot tarot card with Art 6
Default coloring book line art The Chariot tarot card with Art 6

Default masterpiece best quality coloring book line art The Ha 1
Default masterpiece best quality coloring book line art The Ha 1

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alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 6 e02422f8 a63e 44f5 8d46 0825ee2be34b 0

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alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 0 a4cead4c 4d30 4b82 9cef c3861622f06c 0

The Sopranos – Getting everything ready for the Executive game

This is what western economists say about the Chinese economy.

But the Chinese government and its economists don’t think that way because they look at potential market size first. In China, the leading importers and processors of minerals and raw materials are state-owned companies whose annual profits are capped at 3–5 percent annually. This means that raw material costs are lower. Chinese manufacturers are increasingly using robotics and automation so that manufacturing costs are lower. Then the Chinese yuan is kept lower against leading currencies to encourage exports.

Put it all together, and it looks to Europeans and Americans like China has impossibly low costs and is making it impossible for other competitors to compete. The problem is that China is different from Europe and the U.S. and its economy is designed to encourage manufacturing and exports.

The Chinese goal is to capture as much market as possible, and then to push costs down further through cost and efficiency improvements. This is different from western companies which start with lower prices to grab market share, but then gradually raise prices through predatory pricing.

Some truths

  1. Investing in a woman you’re not married to is a waste of energy and money.
  2. If you find someone smarter than you, work with them, don’t compete.
  3. Life is all about being intentional and proactive in our choices . The cure for a man’s depression ?? Focus on your purpose and stay busy.
  4. The person who carefully designs their daily routine goes further than the person that negotiates with themselves everyday.
  5. Stop complaining at every slight inconvenience. Do what has to be done . Be happy regardless.

My now ex wife wanted me out of the house and her life after I caught her red handed having an affair.

My relief called in sick so I had to pull a double shift, I got home and went right to bed, only to be woke up by her whaling away on me with a shoe. I picked her up and carried her out into the living room and gently tossed her on the couch, locked the bedroom door and went back to sleep.

It wasn’t long and there was a knock on the door, it was a couple cops, she had called them to report I was abusing her. They said I would have to accompany them to the station, then I looked up at them, there whole attitude shifted.

They handcuffed her and put her in the back of the squad car, one of the cops told me I should clean myself up, apparently she’d nailed me with a shoe and I had blood running down my face.

I went to sleep, she went to jail, couldn’t have worked out any better.

Mike’s 5 Most Badass Plans | Better Call Saul (Jonathan Banks)

My first car was an old beater VW Karman Ghia . It was a tank, with the engine over the rear wheels it would go through snow, that bigger vehicles couldn’t handle. It was low to the ground, one day the neighbors pigs got out, and they had a huge boar, that blocked the road. He came over and leaned against my side window, and completely blocked the view.

It didn’t have a gas gauge, instead it had a reserve fuel tank, and when you ran out, you switched over, and drove to the nearest gas station.

It wouldn’t go the highway speed limit, maybe 63 mph with the pedal to the metal.

My second car was 1974 Plymouth Duster with imitation alligator skin roof, and a sun roof. It was an OK car.

My next car was a 1976 Chrysler Cordoba with real Corinthian leather seats ( best spoken in a Ricardo Montalaban accent) it had a high performance 400 cubic inch V8 with a 4 Bbl. Jet black with every option known to mankind. Sun roof, air conditioning, power everything. Pure white on white interior, to contrast to the black paint. I have a lot of fond memories of this car.

My next car was a 1969 buick skylark convertible. My plan had been to restore it, and always have a good car to drive. I spent thousands on it, and couldn’t keep up with repairs.

My next car was a 4 wheel drive AMC Eagle. It had air suspension, so it hugged the road, but if you went off road you pushed a button and the sur shocks filled and raised the car, to get more clearance. Best fishing vehicle I ever had.

The I had a 1989 Dodge D100 that was a rebadged Mitsubishi. It had a 4 cylinder that couldn’t get out of its own way, But it was solid steel, I was rear ended and it cost $200 to paint my bumper, but the brand new Previa that hit me was totalled. I wasT boned in an intersection and I I didn’t get a scratch, but it was $5000 to fix the other vehicle. It was a 4×4 with a half inch steel skid plate under the entire vehicle. It never had a problem until my power steering hose, and brake line started leaking. I couldn’t get parts, so I got rid of it.

I bought a 1997 Cadillac Catera , awesome looking car, and the day the warranty ran out, it started costing me money. Thousands.

I bought a 1999 Jaguar XKR convertible, with one year left on the warranty. It was the best looking car I owned, I had people hop out of their vehicle at a traffic light and ride with me until the next light. It was a great car.

I bought a 2004 Nissan frontier 4×4, which I drove in the winter, and the Jag in the summer. The Nissan was just OK, nothing special.

I replaced the Nissan with another 2013 Nissan frontier 4×4, which was significantly better than the first Nissan, but still not a memorable vehicle.

I got rid of the jag in 2021.

Hassayampa Casserole

This casserole is an original and was named after the Hassayampa River that flows in Wickenburg, Arizona.

casserole recipe 9
casserole recipe 9

Ingredients

  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 3 teaspoons chili powder
  • 3 teaspoons cumin
  • 1 (8 ounce) can enchilada sauce
  • 1 pound fresh tomatoes, diced
  • 10 ounces frozen corn, thawed
  • 1 cup sliced black olives
  • 3 large green chiles, chopped
  • 1 pound shrimp or imitation crabmeat
  • 12 ounces Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
  • 12 corn tortillas

Instructions

  1. Sauté onion in oil and add cinnamon, chili powder and cumin.
  2. Stir in enchilada sauce and diced tomatoes. Set aside 1 cup sauce.
  3. Add to remaining sauce the corn, olives, green chiles, shrimp or crabmeat and 1 cup cheese.
  4. In a 3 quart shallow casserole dish, cover bottom with some of the tortillas.
  5. Spread 1/3 of shrimp/crabmeat mixture over tortillas; repeat with 2 more layers.
  6. Top with remaining tortillas, sauce and cheese.
  7. Bake at 325 degrees F for 40 minutes.

The Sopranos – Albert Barese

As a kid I was fascinated by the figure of Che Guevara, who looked cool, died relatively young and fought for a better world.

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main qimg 1b633c9301e01bf1e1a8332f844c9f84 lq

Later in life, I read his biography by Jean Cormier, a French journalist/movie director who was a close friend of Che.

It tells the story of his childhood, his medical studies, his trip through South America on a motorbike, how he joined Fidel Castro’s revolution and how they disembarked in Cuba to start a guerrilla war against the Batista regime.

Both had their own regiment in the Sierra Maestra mountains, from where they would launch attacks against government forces. In Che’s regiment there was a little puppy that everybody loved, the mascot of the camp.

One day, Che and a group of soldiers left the camp to ambush a government caravan. But the little puppy had followed them and started barking. They had to shut the dog up or else they would be discovered by the government soldiers. So Che and his men formed a circle around the puppy while one of them strangled it.

I couldn’t put this image out of my mind of these heavily armed guerrilleros standing in a circle to strangle a puppy. They say innocence is the first casualty in any war.

Best Sopranos Scene – “We’re with the Vipers” -All Right Now

Has your grandmother actually had her DNA tested and analyzed?

What I have found in 25 plus years of doing genealogy, and even MORE so since DNA testing came along……people get very invested in family stories and myths. They can build their whole sense of self around them. Then DNA and family history research comes along and blows big holes in their set ideas. Things aren’t what they seem.

There were some doozies told in my family. Some by accident – sort of multigenerational “broken telephones” where things had grains of truth but went sideways in the retelling. Some were deliberate, because it made for a better story. Tales of glory beat tales of misery. Some were told to hide things family members were ashamed of (we had more than our share of those).

DNA can also yank the rug from under you since who you think is your ancestor isn’t always. I have a 78-year-old friend who always believed her father was an Italian fellow who her mother sued for child support in the early 1940’s. Turns out she’s 50% Ashkenazi Jewish without a hint of Italian – and she’s found her biological father’s family, all of whom are at a loss to tell her what the heck happened (to say they were shocked would be an understatement, lol).

Your grandmother may have been born in Italy and raised speaking Italian, but her family could have been ethnically from elsewhere. Nationality should not be confused with ethnicity.

So I have been dating this guy from eight years now. He is my family friend. My first crush,then my first love, my first boyfriend and my first everything. Me and his sister are best friends.

Even though our families knew each other for so long, my family never knew that we were dating, because we Never used to talk infront of them.We(me and him) always used to discuss about how we should convince my parents, how we should ask them and blah blah. I used to get very nervous thinking about my parents reaction. But I was confident that I will convince them and I always knew that he was the one that I want to spend my entire life with.

So one day i went out and came to home , and saw all my family sitting together and discussing seriously, they became silent after seeing me , and my brother asked me to sit beside him and asked me that, they are thinking to get me married. My heart was stumped, millions of thoughts rushed in my head and i was so shocked that i I couldn’t think of one word to say, then he mentioned about the guy that they were considering for me.

Well to my surprise he was none other than my love, the one who makes me feel butterflies even after 8years of togetherness, who just makes me happy by his mere presence. I was so happy that I wanted to jump and dance around. But I couldn’t I simply blushed and said “YES” to my parents. They still didn’t know that we are in love.

We are going to get married soon, preparations are started, IAM on the cloud nine since then. We are going to tell them about us on our wedding day.

I always thought things like this happens only in films and fairy tales. May be every love story is a fairy tale.

They do dont they?

They don’t tend to leave any country alone do they?

They always make decisions based on the people of every country in the world

They must always decide who is free and who isn’t

Any Government that toes their line is ‘Good’ and any Government that doesn’t is ‘Had

They decide human rights violations

If Israel bombs and kills 32,000 Civilians and starves an entire population to death for a single terrorist incident – that’s KOSHER

If Russia invades Ukraine to come to the assistance of 2 Million to 3 Million people who live in Donbass and have been shelled regularly and lost 14,000 lives over 8 years, chronicled in the UN – that’s horrible and thats interfering in the sovereignty of a nation

If Russia arrests 439 people for Social Media posts that’s a huge civil rights violation

If UK arrests 3237 people for Social Media Posts including 900 people just for posting the N word – that’s perfectly acceptable

They have combined killed and liquidated through their decisions – almost 30 Million people in the last 300 years belonging to different countries including :-

  • Inquisitions
  • Literally NUKING a nation
  • Holocaust of 6 Million Jews
  • Starving a million Indians without a shred of remorse
  • Enslaving 3.5 Million people and treating them like Cattle and breeding them like Cattle and Dogs
  • Colonizing and cold bloodedly robbing, slaughtering and displacing 2 Million or more Native Americans , Maoris, Aborigines and stealing their land brazenly
  • Stealing Texas openly from Mexico and now hunting down the same mexicans as Illegals
  • Invaded a Nation, killed a known 93,000 people of that nation and displaced and impoverished an estimated 330,000 people literally lying that they had nuclear weapons
  • Bombed and killed and stole the Oilfields of a Nation merely because their Leader didn’t toe the American line (Syria)
  • Funded Color Revolutions, Coup de Ats and Uprisings against legitimate Governments by their Agencies

These aren’t conspiracy theories are they?

Every one of these incidents have been firmly listed and verified and is now regarded as history

Yet they always seem to turn the tables

Saddam was a Villian though they invaded Iraq for no reason and destroyed him

Yet Zelensky is a Hero

Gadaffi was a Villian

Mao was a Villian

Putin is a villian

Xi is a Villian

Yet not one of these people have conducted a war of aggression in their lives before 2022


Why?

That’s the key question

I believe the answer lies in an Ideology that is deeply ingrained into their blood for centuries

We are the Good Guys

We are the Angels to help these Backward People develop themselves and save them from themselves and their cruel leaders

Sometimes even if people die, we have to look at the long term and be harsh

Like Gates who openly supports an organization that wants 870 Million People dead because they eat up precious food


Now these Nations, it depends on the people of these nations

China and Russia and Iran and a few other nations have obviously woken up and now see these people for what they are

Putins 87% win is an indication

That people braved a rumoured terror attack and shelling and bombing and yet voted in larger numbers is the best middle finger possible

Niger is another example

The Middle East is slowly realizing things aren’t so rosy now

Others are TOO SCARED

India for instance is too frightened of the West because India is too weak to resist sanctions plus India cannot trust China Iran and Russia fully

Not when 40% of it’s exports are destined for US and EU and most of these export orders are non crucial and can be seriously affected

Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia are also too frightened of the West. They gave been dependent too long on the West and they don’t want to leave their comfort zone.

Some are TOO SUBSERVIENT

Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Philippines are simply too enmeshed into the Western system to come out of it


However luckily the hypocrisy of the West is slowly coming out piece by piece

That too despite the fact that they control the media in every way possible.

 

MM’s emergency alert

Attention on deck!

Guys, this is a whole new world. And there are changes and revolutions and adjustments everywhere. But you will see, in the next month or so of my posts that the AI revolution is here. And it is both awesome and frightening.

Today, consider the text to video technology that is out there.

Six videos. Watch all of them. You will know when you watch them why I am so freaking out. Imagine what a desperate, corrupt and evil government or corporation could do with this technology!!!!!

-MM

We start with an overview. The next three videos…

AI Generated Videos Just Changed Forever

No shit!

Can you tell what’s real? – AI Generated Videos

You Can’t Trust Any Video Anymore… (OpenAI Sora)

Now, lets really get into the details of Sora.

Amazing!

OpenAI Sora: All Demo Videos with Prompts | Upscaled 4K

And, guys… that’s not all!

It’s a race with everyone competing against each other…

Massive Midjourney V6 Update: Consistent Style is Finally Here!

Image to Video Comparison: Pika vs Runway | Who Wins?

The realization that the United States has lost

I watched the grilling of the Commerce Secretary by Congress about Huawei.

The anger was thick. And the compensate measures were astounding. There was an open hostility and a degree of frustration on the “representatives” faces.

The Commerce Secretary recovered herself and exclaimed… “well, maybe I was “bushwhacked” by Huawei while in China, but China cannot make to scale.”

Not true.

But it is a hope. They wish to be true.

Let that sink in.

The USA threw EVERYTHING at China, discovered that it is resilient, and decided to “take a step back” and try to “compete”.

That competition is OVER.

Huawei’s actions were an open alert. China, and it’s national companies are immune, inoculated, from the USA, and far more powerful than anyone in Washington is willing to consider.

You can see it on their faces.

It is the realization that you just drove your car into a tree because you drank too much, and your girlfriend is dead. Now you are going to jail.

That was the expression.

A feeling of utter hopelessness.

It’s all over. The only thing left is global thermonuclear war, and the Pentagon already briefed these “Senators” on what that means…

The “Commerce Secretary”.

I have some words about this person.

  • This is the person who implemented the switch from manufacturing to service industry.
  • This is the person who assisted in the “hollowing out” of the United States.
  • This is the person who permitted the demise of unions.
  • This is the person who permitted to demise of company sponsored health care.
  • This is the person who allowed unemployment benefits to atrophy.

No grilling on those things.

Not so important, eh?

The United States is FUCKED.

We all have realized this, but slowly the Senators in Congress have gotten the message. And they do not like it. It’s a grim day at the start of a very grim century.

Today…

Can you openly criticize President Xi in China? If so, can you name some people who openly criticized President Xi and what happened to them?

The only people who have anything to fear about in China include :-

  • Persons who have received funding from an organization perceived as favouring internal destabilization in China (WEF, NED for Instance)
  • Persons who are belonging to groups favouring Taiwanese Independence. Not everyone. Only members of specific Groups
  • Persons who are members of Falun Gong, offshoot groups of Falun Gong & specially funded groups of Falun Gong
  • Persons who encourage or organize protests without prior permission of authorities that call for counteractive measures instead of pro active measures
  • Persons who participate in above protests
  • Persons who spy on China or commit active treason against China

That’s it

That’s all

The above categories, these people will be dealt with brutally

Many of them will never be seen again and exiled to remote regions

However apart from that if you stand in the middle of the road in Beijing and scream “Xi Jingping is a Coward” in your loudest voice

A Cop will come, pull you to the side and ask you not to create a public ruckus and go on his way

If you continue, you will be fined 800 Yuan and spend 24 hours in detention for PUBLIC DISTURBANCE

At worse, there is an older law still in statutes where ridiculing the Supreme Leader carries 6 months to 2 years jail but it’s unlikely Xi will enforce it because according to Xi only Mao is the supreme leader

So insulting Mao in China is more serious than insulting Xi


If you keep talking nonsense, someone will investigate you to see if you belong to the above categories

If you dont, they will simply ignore you like they ignore a madman

If you do, you disappear


Li Keiqang is one man who criticized Xi in 2012

He was Xis premier for 10 years

Xi only cares about Corruption and how close you are to the West

He knows his power is very strong to fear criticism and challengers

Cracked Pepper Steak

cracked pepper steak step finished plate
cracked pepper steak step finished plate

Yield: 2 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon cracked black pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary
  • 2 (4 to 6 ounce) beef tenderloins, 1 inch thick
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1/4 cup brandy or dry red wine

Instructions

  1. Combine pepper and rosemary in a large bowl. Coat both sides of the steaks with the mixture.
  2. Heat butter and olive oil in a skillet until hot.
  3. Add steaks and cook over medium to medium-high heat for 5 to 7 minutes or until a thermometer inserted in the center registers 160 degrees F (for medium). Remove the steaks from the skillet and cover to keep them warm.
  4. Add brandy to skillet and bring to a boil over high heat, scraping particles from the bottom of the skillet. Boil for about 1 minute or until liquid is reduced by half. Spoon sauce over steaks.

What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?

I worked at a factory making furniture. Every night I would leave the gate with a wheelbarrow full of sawdust and every night the factory guard checked through the sawdust as I left, looking for what I might be stealing… but I was too cleaver, he never found anything!

After 20 years, the guard was retiring. He pulled me aside and said”Look, I know you’ve been stealing SOMETHING for the past 20 years and it’s driving me crazy not being able to catch you. I’m retiring and, I swear, I’ll not tell anyone – I just need to know… just what have you been stealing?“ “Wheelbarrows”, I said.

US pleads with China to re-purchase chips as chip supply chain collapses!

Welcome to VOC – Vision of China,In recent years,”In today’s episode, we delve into the United States’ supply chain crisis caused by the loss of chip orders to China. The China-US chip war, intensified by the launch of new Huawei smartphones, has raised concerns among American lawmakers.

Join us as we explore the implications of this conflict and its impact on the global semiconductor industry. Discover how U.S. sanctions against China’s semiconductor market may have unintended consequences, affecting not only the U.S. economy but also global stability. We discuss the challenges the United States faces as it strives to maintain its technological dominance and competitiveness.

https://youtu.be/0Ib45UnK_zk

Did the low demand for chips from TSMC in China contribute to the decision to delay chip equipment deliveries?

Donald the Orange upended the supply chain with the cluster bomb dropped on Huawei.

That was pre-covid.

It caused a scramble within the industry as players stockpiled on existing supply, especially mainland corporations.

When covid and lockdowns hit, the canceled chip orders were diverted to domestic mainland players, only too glad for the padded security. The rumor is mainland orders hijacked the queue and tied up production for months or even years. Honda’s million vehicle swing in recent years is one of the unfortunate fallout victims.

As mainland production ramped up to sidestep the stop-gap measures, there appears to be a chip glut developing ex-China, with the economic downturn due to monetary contraction and rising rates squeezing demand, exacerbating the fracture in the fragile and temporal equilibrium.

It is hard to forecast such a market, especially with the growing fog of war surrounding mainland players who are going dark and playing among themselves as a matter of survival.

I don’t think TSMC, Glofo, Samsung, AMD, Nvidia and Intel will be able to retain their market share in the coming years.

The Reason why Men are Walking Away from Dating (Ep. 411)

I am so happy I am not generation x,y or z.

What’s the one gift you’ve gotten that you never would have imagined you wanted, but it turned out to be the best?

When my husband and I got married, my cousin gave us what I perceived to be a very bizarre gift. He bought us a red toolbox filled with many tools. I have to admit that I just looked at it and thought to myself “What a weird gift for a wedding!”

Well, my husband and I have been married for over 34 years and I have to say that this turned out to be one of the best gifts that anybody ever gave us! We still use it regularly and if you think about it, it’s very expensive to buy a lot of tools. This ages well, it doesn’t go out of style, it doesn’t break and you don’t have to worry about if it matches your decor! How many wedding gifts can anyone say they still use regularly after 34 years?

The Terminator – all deleted Scenes

Confession of the Day

$300k in debt (no mortgage). $297,677.49 to be exact.

$215k law school debt, $40k graduate school debt, $25k credit cards, $11k car loan, and a personal loan.

After 5 years of deep denial- I think I’ve finally accepted how badly we fucked up. I feel like I’ve gone through the stages of grief multiple times this year.

We paid for very expensive degrees that didn’t need to be. We racked up a shit ton of credit card debt by spending money like entitled a**holes and not using a budget. I wish I could go back in time, slap 23 year old me (and my husband) and ask, repeatedly- what the hell are you doing??

We would go out to bars and dinners every weekend with friends. insert Discover card. We would regularly order takeout. insert Amex card. We went on yearly vacations. insert Jet Blue card. We financed furniture???? Not to mention we walked right into the “prestige” private school bullshit.

We ate that shit up.

And for what? To impress people? To prove that we’re worth something? All the above? It’s so normalized to be in debt as a millennial.

Everyone had credit cards, everyone was going out, everyone had student loans. We were super normal! You’re only young once- amiright?!

I found Dave last year, when I was hitting rock bottom. My debit card was getting declined at the gas station and the grocery store regularly.

After listening to The Ramsey Show for a couple weeks, I realized how screwed we were. I remember the first time he talked about the borrower being a slave to the lender.

That’s exactly how I felt.

I couldn’t breathe. I had a mental breakdown. I haven’t really been able to relax since. My husband and I spent all last year fighting about money and almost got divorced.

We’re on BS2 right now. We should bring in around $170k this year before side gigs. We have paid off $12k since June. We started FPU last week. We’re throwing everything at the debt. I’m working my ass off. Husband is working 65+ hrs a week and donating plasma.

We dropped more than half of our “friends.” It’s a humbling experience to say the least. My mother in law makes us dinners a couple days a week to help out.

Family and friends ask why we’re not having kids or buying a house yet. The whole situation is embarrassing, but we deserve it.

I don’t blame anyone but myself. I’m not expecting anyone to “forgive” or payoff our dumpster fire. We were extremely stupid and entitled, but we need to get out of this ourselves. I just need prayers that we can make it out of this. We will. Hopefully better than who we were before.

Just trying to “embrace the suck” and keep up the motivation.

Tony Soprano | A Conflicted Man

This is why the Sopranos is the best tv show ever.

What was your experience like moving from a large city to an even smaller town (or vice versa)?

I did the small-town-to-big-city move in 1998, for college. I lived in a dorm my first year here, and didn’t have a car. But, my second year, when I was just 19 year old, I got my first studio apartment and brought my car with me from my small hometown.

One of the biggest adjustments I remember was getting comfortable with parking my car on the street overnight. In my small hometown, everyone had driveways. Most people parked their cars in their back yard or garages. And all of the businesses had parking lots. There were only a few streets in my small hometown that had parallel parking spots on the sides of them, and those spots were huge, clearly marked, and largely optional. They were for people who didn’t want to walk about a block from the nearest parking lot, just in the downtown part of my hometown.

But here in Chicago, driveways for people’s houses are rare. Most people park on the street or, if they’re lucky, in a garage. Street parking doesn’t have marked spots. You just squeeze in where you can.

It took me a few weeks to get used to the idea of just leaving my car on the side of the street all of the time. I remember my first night with it here, waking up several times in the middle of the night to look out the window and confirm that it was still there. Sure, there were cars bumper-to-bumper on both sides of the street, and mine was a cheap car that no one would want to steal anyway. Still, it took me about two weeks to get completely comfortable with the concept of just leaving a car parallel parked on the street overnight.

It took a while to get used to driving down a street next to parked cars as well. In my small hometown, since most streets didn’t have parallel parking, you didn’t need to worry about clipping people’s mirrors when you drove past them, or them opening their doors as you drive past, or someone stepping out from between cars, in front of you while you’re driving. The sides of the streets in my small hometown were usually clear of everything.

But, here in Chicago, you can easily be driving 50+mph down a 4-lane street, inches away from parked cars on the side. It’s kind of weird if you’re not used to it.

Mandatory Paternity Test Law Passed – No More Paternity Fraud From Single Women

United States is undergoing massive change.

Huawei M60 Pro shocked the world. Why is it?

Just imagine, the strongest, toughest school bully, out of jealousy-turned-into-fury-then-to-desperation, mobilized all possible means, together with his allies, and wanted to kill his most challenging competitor.

At the high-time when he thought and believed he was to succeed and gonna to celebrate with champagne, and when some schoolmates are waiting to watch the tragedy of the competitor, while some other schoolmates are considering which side to take, and of course there are also others wishing for the competitor to survive, though inevitably with bruises and bumps……

All of the sudden, the competitor came back, with a beautiful, ace-trumping, and formidable hitback, standing even higher, better and firmer!

If you happened to be one in the school and witnessed all these, how would you feel?

Shocked, whoever you are, whichever side you are with, right?

And, if I were U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, I would never say something like this: She was “upset” by news of the launch of Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro during her visit to China last month. (US says it has no evidence that Huawei can make advanced smartphones ‘at scale’ | CNN Business

)

It’s sort of admitting the school bully US is losing, or has lost, anyway, a real strongman would never be “upset” by a “nobody,” right?

MOVING TO PORTUGAL ALONE in my 50s!

European Union’s decision to launch an anti-subsidy probe into Chinese electric vehicles, will it make the Chinese EV industry become another Huawei?

The Claim is :-

China offers subsidies to their EVs in battery making and other areas, heavy subsidies in taxes and waivers to ensure that EVs are produced at a final cost that is 20% cheaper

This makes Chinese EVs deliver lower cost at better quality than many European EVs

Second complaint is that most of the world pays a premium for Chinese EV batteries but BYD and other players pay 45% lower costs for the same battery due to the fact that the batteries are made in China

This is alleged as unfair competition

They want either the batteries at lower costs or a 20% mark up on Chinese EVs that eliminates the subsidy effect

It’s Classic Protectionism 101

Soviet Style rather than Adam Smith


China didn’t do this

When Volkswagens and Citroens and Mercedes Benz and Toyota and Mitsubishi dominated the vehicle markets of China a decade or so ago:-

China didn’t impose extra tariffs on them nor make it unfair for them to import custom made parts by imposing 60–260% tariffs

China told BYD and SAIC and Great Wall to either make similar quality cars or go out of business because the customer needs the best

Thus these companies formed partnerships and purchased technology and leased technology and made a living with limited market share

Yet this competition helped them prepare a lead in EVs and dominate today

However the West isn’t prepared to do the same thing and ask Renault and Chevy and Volkswagen to COMPETE or go out of business

They want to protect their companies

Like US , Germany, France

They talked of free trade when their products were much superior and Asian nations imposed protectionism

Today when they are being left behind, they scream and yell and whine about tariffs and duties


China has many weapons here

China sells 61.5% of the EV Batteries in the world and 86% of EV Batteries today are made by Chinese players with only Tesla having it’s own supply chain and making it’s own battery for it’s own cars

If you want EVs – you need the Chinese Battery, Electric System and Motors and Chargers

The Chinese make the world’s best and most cost efficient products

Even Tesla battery technology is inferior to CATL and it’s latest batteries

It’s only in Autonomous driving that Tesla has an edge

So frankly China for the next 15 years at least can simply ban the export of batteries or impose a 80% tariff on EV exports and ensure European and US EVs simply can’t compete with ICEs

It throttles the EU green initiative

China loses the EU market but critically ensures Russia & Saudi gains a major leverage as EU and US become more dependent on Oil

That is one card

The Bigger card is

China can play it’s own protectionism

China has a huge market for European Cars with Eight Brands having their largest market in China

That’s 157,000 Jobs

China could simply ban the imports tomorrow and that would finish these companies revenue and share wise

Like the Iphone

Intel & Qualcomm openly said if China forced them to choose between the Chinese market and the Commerce Department restrictions, they would have to choose China for the sake of their US stockholders

If China banned Qualcomm entirely today and said “Okay. We will live with inferior phones but you B******* won’t sell or get a fifty cent piece from us”

Qualcomm would be brutally mauled

The Entire smartphone industry will be brutally mauled

The Entire Semiconductor industry will be brutally mauled

The Chinese are VERY PATIENT PEOPLE and they will play their cards very slowly

They thrive on competing

If China simply decides to close its markets to Foreigners except it’s Russian and Global South friends who will sell it all the Energy and Food it wants

Then most of the Tech firms will be brutally mauled

It was predicted that if Apple was banned entirely from China – $ 1.02 Trillion of it’s market share would never come back

The Total hit on the entire industry could touch $ 7–12 Trillion

Who will take up the slack?

India is expected to touch 40% of Chinas present market in 17–21 years (2040–2044)

Nobody else can take up even 3% of this slack


So China has a lot of Brahmastras to use


There will be no more Huaweis

Huawei was a blow

Nobody expected the West to be so brutally lawless and act like a mafia state , like a land with zero laws

Today China is ready

Every US attack has a party from China including the biggest Brahmastra

  • CUT OFF ACCESS TO PHARMA APIs & Cut off all components needed for Medical Equipment
  • Devalue US Debt by suddenly pegging an exchange rate of 2 Yuan to 1 USD. China will lose 17 Trillion Yuan and after the peg is removed the rate could reach 10–11 but US will lose 160 Trillion Yuan ($ 25 Trillion) , 8 times worse than the 2008 Crisis

Here’s Why They’re Coming For Russell Brand

Back when he was a hard-partying movie star, Russell Brand was the darling of the mainstream media.

But ever since the British comedian started turning hard against the establishment, exposing the mainstream narrative on COVID, the Ukraine War and empire, the knives have been out for him. And now we know how they plan to get him, with a series of questionable rape allegations emerging from anonymous sources in his distant past. Guest host Craig “Pasta” Jardula and Americans’

Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss why the establishment would have determined that Brand had to be disappeared from the discourse.

What did your parents say to you as a kid that still affects you today?

My dad is the best mechanic, I’ve seen him pull apart motors, transmissions, put them back together with no problem. Cars pull better, the knocking sound gone from the motor, take a test light and track down a short in a ticket making brake light system.

He can lay boards to a deck or floor and they fit perfectly everytime.

Make a brace for a wobbly door that hides from view, eyeball a fence line to be exactly lined up post to post. Watching my dad work is like watching an artist paint a masterpiece or craft a sculpture.

After school I would fly through my homework so I could start dinner and be ready when dad got home.

Some nights I would be doing my homework and trying to make dinner simultaneously and dad would come in. “Let’s have a look” or “let’s knock this out”.

But when I started junior high school, dad stopped helping with my homework, he started stirring the pot or watching the oven. He still watched me do my homework and was certainly right there but he didn’t offer to read or assist. Then I caught him.

One hot humid night I couldn’t sleep, my oxygen machine was drying my throat, but I’m sweating bad (I know not sexy for a girl but I have high metabolism) and I get up for some water.

Dad is sitting at the table with one of my school books. He jumped when he saw me, like he was stealing something or about to get in trouble.

He was saying sorry and mumbling about not having permission to go in my backpack.

I didn’t care it was just a school book and I have nothing to hide from my dad so being in my backpack was no big deal. But what he said next floored me; “I wanted to understand the lesson, I couldn’t understand what you were doing earlier and I hoped I could figure it out. I know I’m not very smart but I don’t want you to think less of me.”

I was shocked, me think less of the greatest person in my life, why would he, how could he ever think that?

This was when I started to learn of dad’s disability, he has severe dyslexia.

Now I know people will say that’s not a disability or several people have that but it’s the way it affects the individual.

My dad graduated high school on what is now considered a 9th grade level, and then just barely. He is a hands on learner, because he doesn’t trust himself to read and comprehend instructions, words plainly written on a page seem like a foreign language to him.

Numbers to a simple math equation would make him basically stop thinking and just have a blank mind. I was beginning to see why dad couldn’t balance the bank account, why he only had oral agreements with clients, and hated texting.

People had called him dumb, lazy and stupid until he believed it himself and he was afraid the person he admired most would think less of him.

Russell Brand – sinister demonetisation attempt by MP

Big major changes all over the collective West. Sheech!

Does being born into poverty affect your mindset later on in life?

Speaking for myself.

I grew up and was mostly raised in “the inner city.” So that’s my experience with being poor. I don’t know what it’s like to live rural poor.

I don’t live there anymore. Right now I’m pretty comfortably middle-class.

One way that I am marked out as “different” compared to many of my peers, is that I am very, VERY cynical when it comes to the treatment of the poor. It is one of the few big things I am not really partisan or ideological over.

Poverty is a burden, and it’s a burden that most people will hate, despise, and pity you for carrying. This is regardless of party, race, color, or creed. I am amazed and saddened to know just how much easier life gets when you are not poor, and how much more people will like you.

Life really is pay-to-win. And with that realization, I see that my poverty was really nothing more than a hinderance. My life would’ve been much easier, in virtually every way, had I not been poor growing up. I see no glory in coming out of it, no special mindset for having been in it — other than cynicism. I can’t find any narrative for myself to have made the sheer unfairness of being born into poverty mean something. It just happened. Like getting hit by a bus.

Although, one way I suppose it’s affected me, is that I don’t hate or blame the poor for their poverty. This isn’t to say that some poor people don’t make disastrous choices. But I went to an expensive college. I’ve been around rich people. They make plenty of disastrous choices; they just have the money to mitigate the fallout. Humans make bad choices. The poor are expected to be superhumans and are blamed for failing.

*sigh*

Another way it has affected me is that it’s made me much less sympathetic to the middle-class, and I am middle-class. The middle-class complains endlessly, about everything. They are constantly sucking all of the air out of the room. Politicians dote on them regularly. Middle-class this, middle-class that. The middle-class even has this theory where they are the defenders of democracy and without them everything would fall apart. And on and on and on.

Let me tell you, the middle class is spoiled. The gulf between the poor and the “middle class” is so enormous it would make you cry if you lived it — as I have lived it. But the middle-class get to complain constantly about their property taxes (imagine owning property!) and how college scholarships don’t help them because they’re “at the cutoff” and blah blah blah.

And the poor? They get a swift kick and are told to “work harder.”

Sometimes you have to laugh…

4 Airplane Outburst More Terrifying Than Tiffany Gomas

JP MORGAN CEO SOUNDS ALARM – Dark Winter for Banks

Hal Turner

Yesterday, speaking at an industry event organized by Barclays, CEO Jamie Dimon sounded the alarm on a slew of headwinds that will hit the U.S. economy hard in the next couple of months, and pointed to several risks that could deal heavy blows to consumers, investors, businesses and banks.

On Monday, he weighed in on how new regulation by the Fed will impact customers in the coming months. The changes will certainly not make them happy. Dimon explained how plans for new capital rules in the United States could damage the attractiveness of bank stocks, and make banking costs go even higher for consumers.

He argued that the Fed’s “’Basel III Endgame’ reforms” would make loans even more expensive, and would force banks to reduce the amount of money they lend, which could drive banking activities into less regulated sectors. Dimon stressed that more lenders could run into problems just like Silicon Valley Bank did this spring. “Any crisis that damages Americans’ trust in their banks damages all banks — a fact that was known even before this crisis,” he wrote. “Even when it is behind us, there will be repercussions from it for years to come,” he emphasized.

He also said that it is  “a huge mistake” to think that the U.S. economy will boom “for years” given that there are so many risks out there. With interest rates still going up, conditions will become even more recessionary, and “you are going to see more people out there with problems”. 

It is for that reason that JPMorgan has just reiterated its bearish stance on the stock market, urging its clients to stay defensively positioned. Analysts at the firm also adjusted the bank’s investment strategy in response to rising commodity prices and the potential spike in inflation. JPMorgan strategist Marko Kolanovic also noted that the increased potential for bank turbulence, an oil shock, and slowing growth is poised to send stocks back toward their 2022 lows, as reported by Bloomberg News. 

We still have three more months to go before this year is done, and a lot more can happen in financial markets. One of the biggest concerns right now is the real estate sector. Warren Buffet’s investment partner and vice president of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger recently observed that hundreds of banks are exposed to commercial real estate loans that are at risk of going into default. He thinks there is trouble ahead for the U.S. commercial property market. “A lot of real estate isn’t so good anymore,” Munger said. “We have a lot of troubled office buildings, a lot of troubled shopping centers, a lot of troubled other properties. There’s a lot of agony out there.”

These are the very early chapters of this crisis. But when even the head of one of the biggest financial institutions on the planet is worried about growing risks, we should definitely brace for pain because much worse is yet to come. Although it may take a while for all the dominoes to fall, we won’t be able to avert a decline that is already in motion. The clock is ticking, and time is running out for the U.S. financial system.

From the Concrete Slab Came a Pitiful Meow

What are some ways that American companies can keep up with Chinese companies like Huawei that are becoming increasingly competitive and innovative?

Why did US win the space race?

Why did they edge out the USSR by 1970?

They promoted meritocracy and hired thousands of people of ability

Including hiring 3 Colored Women in Texas well before the Civil Rights Act

It’s because THEY DIDN’T SANCTION THE USSR

They COMPETED

They used their resources and advantages and competed aggressively and took advantage of the fact that USSR had the worst leadership from 1966 onwards

That’s all they need to do

Compete and allow Economic forces to decide markets rather than the Congress or Politicians


Take Alipay and Wechat

Amazing Apps

If we bring Alipay and Wechat to India today, they will compete one on one with Phone Pe and Google Pay

That will lead to fierce competition and lead to one superior product evolving or a market resolution

Instead if we keep protecting US Apps from competition, the Chinese will build their apps and compete ferociously in their own markets and evolve their apps on a far superior level than US Apps as is already happening today

Chinese Apps like JD or Meituan or Alipay or Wechat or SHEIN are far superior to US equivalents and of course Tik Tok which has launched ecommerce functions in US

Meanwhile because of Chinese protectionism, Google wasn’t allowed in China and due to no direct one on one competition, Baidu has never reached the level of penetration and functionality of Google


The US today have a sense of entitlement that is unbelievable

Anyone develops some product that could compete with their licensing of core technology, and they invent some trumped up security threat and sanction the product and threaten anyone who uses that product

It may work against small players

Against China, a Nation of tremendous talent and intelligence plus a superb merit based system – It is a huge axe blow on your own feet

US has abandoned free economic forces and fair competition

That signs their death warrant

China had decide to embrace both. That means they will win.

Ultimately Economics is always the same

RESPECT THE ECONOMIC FORCES

The US must abandon all sanctions and go for free trade and competition with China including full access to each others markets.

What’s the weirdest thing a guest has done at your house?

Oh my gosh. I’m still getting over this one. I travel a lot on business and, when I do, I usually try to find someone to come in and house sit for me. Well, I met a woman whom I thought would be great for house sitting. Because she was going to be taking care of 3 dogs, 5 cats, and 4 horses, I told her that I’d pay her $150/day, which she agreed to.

I told her that she could sleep in the guest room (which is decorated very nicely with a new bed, sheets, blankets, etc. I showed her how to use the big screen tv, etc — and I told her that she could eat any food in the house with the exception of a certain coffee and also to please not do anything illegal on my property.

When she came over, I was very specific and left written instructions so she wouldn’t be confused. The specific rules were for the protection of my animals.

  1. Feed the horses in the feeders and don’t move the feeders.
  2. Fill up the water trough daily so they have fresh water and, because it was winter and freezing, make sure that the water de-icer was left on.
  3. Put the dogs in the house before going out the gate, then go back and let them out. If you open the gate, the dogs will run out and you’ll have a difficult time getting them back.
  4. Do not allow the cats to go out. They’re indoor cats and 1 is a female that I just adopted — she’s not spayed yet so under no circumstances can she go out.

She agreed to everything and I was happy that I’d found someone who could take care of my house and animals.

During my business trip, I called several times to make sure things were going ok and she said they were so I was happy that I didn’t have to worry about things.

When I returned from my trip, I was absolutely shocked. I walked into my house and couldn’t breathe. The house was completely filled with pot smoke. (And I have a BIG house). I thought she’d spent the entire time getting stoned. But that wasn’t all. She had gone through ALL my cupboards and closets and taken everything out and rearranged things. NOTHING was where it had been. All the furniture was changed around. My bedroom had been completely changed, including my bed — which she’d been sleeping in and had stained the bed and sheets — not sure with what but it was disgusting.

She had also thrown all the cats outside — because “cats don’t belong in the house.” I’m not sure what she’d done to the dogs, but they were terrified of her. I do know that she had left the gate open and they got out and it took her hours to find and get them back in. (I live in a rural area where people shoot stray dogs so they were in danger.)

I also found out that she’d just dumped the feed for the horses in a completely different area than where they were supposed to be fed AND it was where there was a lot of sand — so essentially the horses were eating feed mixed with sand (which can be deadly.) She’d pulled the de-icer out of the watering trough and pulled the plug so the trough was empty and the horses had no water.

The back of the remote control for the tv had disappeared — and I found it a month or so later hidden in the back of my closet. She’d ripped out plugs from my desktop computer and taken all the ink out of my printer.

I had a brand new washer and dryer. She pulled them out and the hoses and plugs were disconnected. I had a beautiful handmade wooden bowl was on my fireplace mantel. She took it off the mantel, took it into the bathroom and poured liquid soap into it, then put it into the shower so the wood had warped beyond saving. It was ruined.

I collect art and she’d moved all my pictures around and turned them upside down.

My best friend had died a few years before, and he had given me a ceramic angel before he passed. It had a lot of meaning for me and I loved it — it was so precious to me. It had disappeared. I found out later that she’d thrown it away — I found it in the trash in a bag of dirty cat litter.

Oh, and my coffee that I’d specifically asked her not to use (there were at least 5 other kinds there) — what she didn’t use, she dumped out in the trash.

There were a lot of other things that she’d done, but you get the idea. I was freaked out and horrified, and honestly, she scared me.

I asked her why she’d done all this and she said got belligerent and told me that she had every right to do it because it was HER house and she could have it any way she wanted to. She told me that my dogs were too spoiled and they deserved to be “trained”. Part of that training was making them sleep outside. (Imagine a Basset Hound being made to sleep outside with no shelter, in the middle of February when the temperatures were down to 0 degrees F.) The same with the cats. (Oh? and that female cat? Let’s just say that there are now two more kittens here. ::::sigh:::::)

When I asked why she’d say that she’d house sit if she didn’t want to follow my instructions, she said that she came from a family with 6 sisters and she was the youngest. She hated it when they told her what to do and so she ALWAYS did the OPPOSITE of what anyone “ordered” her to do.

Then she said that NOBODY orders her around. She got more and more angry and upset and I was actually afraid that she would become violent. She started screaming at me and daring me to call her a “F’ing C*** B****”. (Sorry, I don’t use that kind of language.)

I did pay her, because I just wanted her gone. I did tell her that she was never to set foot on my property again or I’d have her arrested. After she left and had given me back my keys, I noticed that one of the door keys was new so she’d obviously had extras made. The next day all the locks were changed, including the locks on the gates.

The next day the texts from her started. She told me that she’d thrown away my angel but I didn’t need anything from a dead friend and SHE’D be my new best friend. The texts continued to get creepier and creepier.

I responded that if she ever texted, called or tried to contact me again, I’d have her arrested for stalking. Then I blocked her. She totally freaked me out.

I haven’t seen her since. But I did get a new mattress. :::::shivers::::::

Four-Onion Steak

2023 09 25 12 16 1
2023 09 25 12 16 1

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 (12 ounce) boneless beef top-loin steaks, cut 1 inch thick
  • 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 large white onion, thinly sliced
  • 1 medium leek, thinly sliced
  • 2 shallots, chopped
  • 1/2 cup beef broth
  • 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/2 cup sliced scallions
  • Scallions, sliced into 3-inch pieces (optional)

Instructions

  1. Cut steaks into 4 portions.
  2. Combine garlic salt, chili powder, pepper and cinnamon. Use your fingers to press mixture onto both sides of each steak portion.
  3. In a large skillet cook steaks in hot oil over medium heat to desired doneness, turning once. Allow 8 to 11 minutes for medium rare or 12 to 14 minutes for medium.
  4. Transfer steaks to a serving platter, reserving drippings in the skillet. Keep warm.
  5. For sauce, add white onion, leek and shallots to skillet. Cook and stir over low heat for 5 minutes or until onions are tender.
  6. Add beef broth and Worcestershire sauce. Cook and stir for 1 to 2 minutes more or until broth is slightly reduced.
  7. Add scallions. Spoon onion mixture over steaks.
  8. Garnish with scallion pieces, if desired.

Do Cats Think They’re The Boss?

Welcome to the Outer Limits

The “news” out of the United States is reaching hysterical levels. And as far as China is concerned, it is absurd.

On REDACTED, Clayton is reporting how Chinese soldiers drink blood…

2023 07 12 21 08
2023 07 12 21 08

On another (that I just cannot find at the moment), that China has secret bioweapons labs and one was accidentally discovered in California… an army of Covid mice to spread it all over California… not that it would matter. California is mostly a waste as it is.

Huawei phones read your brainwaves… don’t you know…

5G destroys your brains… well it did until… American companies renamed their 4G. Calling it “5G”.

India, Japan and the Philippines are going to stop China “dead in its tracks”… yeah. What ever you say.

The bullshit is really deep these days.

Meanwhile in China, actual troubling reports are coming forth.

I sure as fuck hope that China can sidestep this massive insane buildup towards war, but I am starting to waver and have my doubts. I need to contact the DC and find out its take on all this…

The USA is spewing wars everywhere.

2023 08 03 08 20
2023 08 03 08 20

“President” Biden is taking a nine day vacation. You know the kind you take right before you know that you will die. And he placed Victoria Nuland in charge.

Personally, I think she promoted herself. As there is NO ONE at the helm.

Sheech!

War time again

2023 08 03 16 20
2023 08 03 16 20

The Chinese are buying up more and more property in Western nations. Is there any agenda behind this?

These are Americans who work and live in US, just like you, 100% Americans, except they are Chinese Americans, nevertheless they are Americans just like Donald Trump and you.

Chinese living in China can’t transfer enough money from China to buy properties in U.S. or any foreign countries, because China has strict $50,000 annual limit. It takes 10–20 years of transfers to buy an average home in California.

The Chinese do it again

An update on superconductivity for our science sipping barflies, “Chinese scientists successfully synthesize magnetic levitation-enabled LK-99 crystal”, although it’s not the great breakthrough that’s awaited. However, it is advancement:

“Room-temperature superconductivity would enable long-distance lossless power transmission, leading to a new wave of global infrastructure development in the electricity network. Additionally, breakthroughs are expected in areas such as superconducting magnets, superconducting cables, and superconducting maglev trains, according to media reports.

“The breakthrough in room-temperature and atmospheric pressure superconducting materials would undoubtedly bring about revolutionary changes in various fields, including energy, transportation, computing, and medical diagnostics.”

The “news” against China is getting more and more hysterical, while the “reporting” seems to be nothing but lies and distortions. There MUST be an eventual peak inflection to this. When will the peak occur?

It shows how pathetic and desperate the western news media houses are. The people all over the world are getting more informed and they are now not easily deceived by their blatant lies and deceptions anymore. Thanks to all these social media apps where fact-checks on faked and fabricated news could be shared at the speed of light to all corners of the world. The more the news media spew such silly news, the stupider they look. Even the old grannies today could differentiate them. A laughing stock!

When will the peak occur? It is occurring NOW, and it will go downhill from here.

Aside from labor costs in China being so cheap, can we outsource the work to Chinese and let them do it for us? This way, you don’t have to work to get paid.

Actually that is what western nations has become all due to its own doing. You see the west thought that it could simply keep increasing its price each time it’s Union asked for a pay rise and it’s CEO wants another 10 million dollars dollars bonus!

What it does not know is that when no one knows how to do what you do they have no choice paying higher and higher and higher. But close to around 2000 the world has become way smaller and there is really always an alternative product that is just as good.

Hence when the western producer increase the price it lose customers and market to the point that it no longer makes business sense to produce it in the west and it has to be outsourced to the cheapest and acceptable quality producer. This is almost always China.

Why China? First China has 1.4 billion hardworking, skilful workers who are discipline and highly intelligent working long hours and not demanding benefits and absurd salaries. Their automation robots amount to more than the world put together.

Their infrastructure is state of the art and their government focus on making organisations efficient and effective. Together they are simply unbeatable and everything done in the west cost 10 dollars the rest of the world may do it for 5 dollars. And China does it shipped it back to the U.S. for 3 bucks!

Many racist or superior minded individuals here like to fall into self delusions about cheap labour. But China’s labour is certainly higher than many nations yet it still remains the most competitive manufacturer on planet earth.

Today China U.S. making for 50% of humanity.

To do it yourself you need to reduce your CEO salaries by 90% workers salaries by 70% and you need to spent 100 trillion dollars for 10 years. You need to reduce your 800 military bases to 5 and cut your aircraft carriers by 10 and retrenched 1 million CIA and NED payrolls.

Or in plain simple English. You just cannot and won’t do it.

So stop talking shit about China. Just slapping tariff on some products from China caused you a double digit inflation and now a recession. Imagine China decoupling from you? The U.S. will nosedive into a 50 years recession! If I were you, I will be nice to China.

Interesting video…

How propaganda works and how US politicians get American voters to vote for them. Video put together by American university students to show the absurdity of it all.

Russia forgives African debt

Along with China, they are cutting the purse strings of the West from plundering the global south. More bad news for the USD.

2023 08 03 14 01
2023 08 03 14 01

China’s first HSR designed for 350 km/h delivers 340 mln passenger trips in 15 years

2023 08 03 10 54
2023 08 03 10 54

A train coded C2551 slowly pulled out of the Beijing South Railway Station and headed for Tianjin Binhai New Area Tuesday morning, marking the 15th anniversary of the opening of the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway.

As the first high-speed railway (HSR) with a design speed of 350 km per hour in China, the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway carried a total of 340 million passengers since it entered operation.

Over the past 15 years, the daily frequency of trains running on the rail line has increased from 47 pairs to 128 pairs, and the shortest departure interval has been shortened from 15 minutes to 3 minutes, according to data from the China Railway Beijing Group Co., Ltd.

Wang Manman, a resident of Wuqing District, Tianjin Municipality, takes the bullet train to work in Beijing every day. The quickest journey takes only about 20 minutes, and there are eleven trains for her to choose flexibly during the morning rush hour from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.

The operation of the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway in August 2008 was strong support for the hosting of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and has accelerated regional integration and development. It has also unveiled a fast-expanding modern HSR network in the world’s most populous nation, coupled with its booming economy.

By 2022, China had 42,000 km of operational HSR, ranking first in the world, and the length of high-speed rail regularly operating at 350 km per hour neared 3,200 km as of June 2022.

High-speed trains have changed people’s commute circle and lifestyle and greatly optimized resource allocation, noted Cheng Shidong, a transport official with the National Development and Reform Commission.

THE MAN FROM UNCLE Season One Long Opening

How US “democracy” really works…

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main qimg a2ed51d4dcca98768961b1b59931f83d

Japanese Artist Creates Epic Anime Costumes For His Cats

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If you’re a fan of cats, anime, and adorable cats dressed in tiny anime costumes, this one is going to be a treat. Apparently, there’s a talented Japanese man likes to create handmade anime costumes for his two cute cats and you can find his beautiful creations on his Twitter account.

If you know your anime well enough, you might be able to tell that most of the costumes he creates are based on those seen in productions from Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation film studio. It’s also worth noting that all of his designs are made from scratch and with his own two hands.

15 Reasons Appalachia Might Not Exist One Day

This video made me cry.

What would happen if the US defends Taiwan against China and gets defeated by China?

My take is that the US will not dare fight China because it fears losing. It is no different from the supposed meanest and baddest mafia refrain from going after their strongest peers. Losing means losing everything.

You see today a good majority of the world still thinks the U.S. is the head honcho. It still fears the U.S. somewhat, though much lesser these days. But what if it is proven without doubt that China’s weapons are much more superior and that in a war the U.S. lose?

What if the Chinese jets simply blow off the F16 in the sky like swatting flies? What if 13 US carriers disintegrate by Chinese hypersonic missiles raining down on them at 10 times the speed of sound giving the U.S. 3 seconds notice? What if a million drones attack in unison and what if China takes Okinawa and Russia takes Hokkaido and Pyongyang takes Seoul and Tehran takes Israel all in a week? What is the dollar becomes a dime a buck? What next?

The U.S. pretence is exposed the aura is gone. For good. It’s weapons will need to be on cheap sales. The U.S. cannot even bully it’s own slaves anymore. That is the real reason it will not fight if China takes Taiwan by force. It won’t and it is smart. China have nothing to lose. The U.S. has everything to lose.

So the U.S. will do the only thing it can do. Talk a lot of shit. And rant and rave. Gang up it’s unholy alliance and pretend it cares. That is what the U.S. can and will do.

White House PISSED at Tucker Carlson for Exposing THIS!

Would you rather be rich in a poor country, or poor in a rich country?

Without exception, being rich in a poor country is the way to go. I moved to the Philippines in 2011. Eleven years later my Filipina wife and I opened our first small day resort on the island of Leyte.

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main qimg 566c6d4be489e97854403bc83e1167e9 lq

Though the resort is still under construction, people still want to stop by and enjoy the pool.

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main qimg 68311a820d8b8894eaaf74dfb6bf6aff lq

We’ve done a number of projects but this is the biggest and is scheduled to be fully functional with overnight accommodations and all the amenities in three years. Aside from using a backhoe to dig out the pool, everything is done manually using hand tools.

These projects employ a dozen local workers and puts money back into the hands of those that need it the most.

This project started in August of 2021 and my first milestone to have a working pool and pump room was achieved on February 16.

I was raised poor in the richest country in the world. It sucks to be poor in a rich country. Better to be rich in a poor country.

On 1983/3/30, the then China president Deng Xiaoping told US Congress leader O’Neill that USA’s 1979 Taiwan relations Act has interfered China’s internal affairs. USA has returned to Dulles ideology. What is Dulles ideology?

What is Dulles ideology? God’s Mission. America has a mandate from GOD, the King of the Universe, to impose its will on “Godless communism” anywhere, everywhere, on earth, at gunpoint if necessary.

Wild Rice Cheese Soup

2023 08 02 20 05
2023 08 02 20 05

Ingredients

  • 1 pound Italian sausage
  • 1 small onion, diced
  • 1 cup uncooked wild rice
  • 1 (10 3/4 ounce) can condensed cream of potato soup
  • 1 (10 3/4 ounce) can condensed cream of chicken soup
  • 1 cup milk
  • 1 cup evaporated milk
  • 1 pound cubed processed cheese

Instructions

  1. Fry sausage and onions in a medium skillet until sausage is no longer pink. Drain and set aside.
  2. In a small saucepan, cook rice in 2 cups of water until tender, then set aside.
  3. In a stockpot, combine sausage, onion, rice, soups, milk and evaporated milk. Cook over low heat until warm.
  4. Stir in processed cheese and heat. Stir occasionally until cheese is melted.

China Issues STRONG WARNING to NATO: Stay Out of Taiwan and Asia or Risk WAR

China has rejected NATO’s plan to expand into Asia and warned the Alliance that such a move risks all out war in the region.

2023 08 03 10 06
2023 08 03 10 06

France opposes ‘decoupling’ after economic talks with China

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Sunday that he opposes the “illusion” of countries “decoupling” from China and he does not believe the world’s second-largest economy constitutes a risk.

He made the remarks after China and France concluded the 9th China-France High Level Economic and Financial Dialogue in Beijing on Saturday. The two countries reached a series of consensus ranging from finance to climate change and aerospace.

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main qimg 14ae852e46b392f96a5f1f324d6c43a1

Le Maire said Chinese investors are welcome in France, especially in the field of electric vehicles, batteries and energy transition, citing an example of Chinese group XTC New Energy Materials that has invested with French nuclear giant Orano in batteries, French newspaper Les Echos reported.

Le Maire told a press conference on Sunday that France wants to get better access to Chinese markets. France is on the right track, Le Maire said, opposing the “illusion” of countries “decoupling” from China.

Why do Western leaders have no fears about starting World War Three? Are they not in touch with reality?

Delusions of Grandeur

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main qimg 6d3101566a5b9fd983a15bbf82193adf

In 1986, Ronald Reagan said “There is no problem in lying to your people. As long as you don’t believe the lies yourself and fail to see the truth in front of your eyes”

He was talking about USSR and East Germany

Today that’s the case with the Collective West

They believe their own lies

They twist everything to keep believing in their own lies

They will destroy themselves to keep believing in their own lies

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main qimg 9fb4cad30516286d6b6702d0d7a62ea2
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main qimg fac75268ba058d998eac24640a030677

Take Biden

He is still living in the 1990s

He still thinks Russia is a gas station and China is a cheap factory nation

The Pentagon tries to tell him but he brushes them off

He soon only ensures the YES MEN are heard from and his closest advisors are the same

Like our Indians brainwashed by Whatsapp University, they are all brainwashed by their own lies and propaganda

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main qimg 3494848144938ff6353b2f4abae4fdfa lq

Take Nuland

She has never made a diplomatic move in her entire life

She believes the US is supreme and anyone can be threatened and she threatens everyone with dire consequences

So most nations she threatens, hates her and hates the US and waits for the time to plunge the knife into the heart of the United States and twist the handle


Even now they are deluded into believing World War III will be won by them

They are deluded into believing that somehow Putin and Xi will be overthrown by their own Generals and US will triumph once again

They don’t realise that XI AND PUTIN are probably the only ones who are keeping the hawks in their countries at bay

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main qimg 68bf47b8cae9bd0a29a1acd6b5b592bd

The Ultra Nationalists like Medvedev or even Lavrov and Kadyrov would happily launch nukes tomorrow and die if the Americans also die

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main qimg 17c96277b32b7879d2ba62e162c0a1d1

Anyone who knows China would know General Liu and his faction


Luckily until now these fools don’t have the full power to start WWIII

Macron isn’t quite as deluded as he pretends

Erdogan is a wily fox who plays the middle well

Austin is certainly more Pro Pentagon than White House now

Sunak is a lickspittle but he is too Indian to not be cautious

Gen Milley knows WWIII would be a disaster

Sullivan is a political animal but not an idiot or an ideological fool

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main qimg 1788f9b18f5de0796cd6dc74d39a2ba4

Obama controls a huge chunk of the party today and he certainly is no fool. He wouldn’t want Malia and Sasha to become vapor tomorrow.

So does the Pentagon

So push comes to shove, they can push off Biden and say “F*** off Mr President” or push the old man down the stairs after killing the cameras and say “He had an accident”

Yet who knows?

Ursula Van Der Leyen, Habeck, Baerbock, Nuland, Scholz, Marin are all spineless fools or doped to their eyeballs in Lies and Propaganda and they would burn themselves and their people in their delusions

They can happily start WWIII

So the only hope for humanity is for these insane creatures to be voted out or naturally die of some cause

Collective strike of 500,000 people!Will this president step down early?May have a toughest new one!

https://youtu.be/ezBTV_5x5us

How is your experience in banking in China?

It’s smoother than your dad’s bald head.

In the first few weeks I was here I was required to create a new bank account. I took the subway to the bank headquarters with my passport and a nice little letter from my supervisor confirming I was a current student at my university.

I filled in a form, she looked over my documents, did some typing, went to the back to get something, had me sign something, and BOOM, done! She handed me my new card.

All this in twenty-something minutes.

My little mind was blown to smithereens.

In my country (Papua New Guinea) to create an account it would take two weeks (for the paperwork to be processed). You would go to the bank, fill in the forms and show them your ID, birth certificates, and any other docs they need. You’d be told to come back after two weeks to collect your new bank card when your account is ready.

Even though I could still understand much of what this teller said to me in Chinese, she still made sure to type out what she said on a translator app and show me the message on the phone screen.

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main qimg 2d77e8767db37efacff5342a0e61a57b

I’ll even go far as to say I got special attention, which, being black, I was not really expecting. While I was seated waiting for my number to be called an assistant bank worker came to check if I have everything I needed, and to let her know if I needed any help. She also pointed out the direction of the washroom in case I needed it. Just doing her job, I know; still, I appreciated it.

I had gone recently to do some transactions via Western Union, they handed me this form.

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main qimg beec5e1debbae9ff241fc0757074910f

That was wrapped up quite quickly, too.

All in all, my experiences with banking had gone smoothly and quickly. You don’t even need a good command of Chinese to get your business done. They usually know English themselves or they’ll try to find some other way to communicate.

Treasury Tsunami Coming – U.S. Deficit Spending A Big Disaster

A massive treasury dump is coming and the markets aren’t prepared for a tsunami of bonds hitting.

2023 08 02 19 43
2023 08 02 19 43

While the US government spending is nothing new, they are borrowing tons of money at high-interest rates. This creates two big problems. It could spark another banking crisis as well as create an even bigger inflation crisis down the road. Here’s what you must know!

2023 08 02 19 40
2023 08 02 19 40

What the Hell…

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1587303478 eqwqy9n13t
thrift shop 33
thrift shop 33
thrift shop 23
thrift shop 23
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1587303424 buuo2slqe7
thrift shop 14
thrift shop 14
thrift shop 13
thrift shop 13
thrift shop 12
thrift shop 12
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1587303430 4c3e05iuqd

China buying clothes

1905

In 1905, a photograph was taken in Japan capturing the moment when a Geisha, a female Japanese performing artist and entertainer, washed her hair before styling it. Geisha are renowned for their expertise in traditional Japanese performing arts, including dance, music, singing, and the art of conversation. They possess a distinctive appearance characterized by long, flowing kimonos, traditional hairstyles, and oshiroi makeup.

Geisha entertain at gatherings called ozashiki, frequently entertaining affluent clients. They also showcase their talents on stage and participate in various festivals.

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main qimg dd2572534a8ef378d1cbb95faf78e004

China’s latest victory! First chip cutting machine! Domestic production is 100% self-sufficient!

2023 08 03 17 02
2023 08 03 17 02

China’s groundbreaking advancements in the semiconductor industry as wafer laser cutting equipment achieves full localization.

China’s Hua Gong Technology has successfully manufactured the world’s first 100% domestically produced high-end wafer laser cutting equipment, a crucial component in semiconductor manufacturing.

Wafers are made of brittle materials mechanical dicing of thousands or even tens of thousands of chips on a 12-inch wafer typically results in a heat-affected Zone and dicing line width of about 20 microns compared with about 10 microns for conventional lasers the reduction in dicing line width means that Wafers can achieve higher levels of integration making semiconductor manufacturing more cost effective and efficient.

This breakthrough not only enhances China’s self-sufficiency in semiconductor equipment but also reduces reliance on foreign technology, countering US technology restrictions.

The “news” against China is getting more and more hysterical, while the “reporting” seems to be nothing but lies and distortions. There MUST be an eventual peak inflection to this. When will the peak occur?

Bill Chen

Lives in Singapore

This is a video from a purported “engineering” channel.

But you may be shocked by the arresting headline:

How Gotland-Class Submarines Transform NATO’s Approach to China and Russia

My eyes popped when I saw it in my feed.


Sweden isn’t even an official member of NATO and people are already incorporating Swedish military power into the wargame against the Russians and Chinese!

The acceptance that war with Russia AND China being inevitable is frankly, either gut-wrenching terrifying or utterly mind-blowing.

But a reading of the news over the past few years will convince even the skeptic that a consensus is being shaped among the first world citizenry, while the Russia-China axis is under constant dehumanization and presented as cartoon whims.

Victory, it seems, is assured, and plans are afoot to upgrade readiness for real conflict in the near future.


Part of the reason why I write about military affairs (particularly from the Chinese angle) is to draw the Western response.

To describe the experience as sorely disappointing is too mild.

I am gobsmacked flabbergasted by the repeated fairy tales thrown my way that bombers and nuclear subs lobbing tomahawks and other missiles will be able to sink the entire Chinese navy or disable the PLA, in a repeat of the 100-hour Iraq War. The rest of the American military then joins in the mopping up.

In other words, a turkey shoot even more spectacular than the Korean War, where 1 American died for 30 Chinese KIA.


The American-dominated media is suspending reality for the American people. No one has questioned the 200b increase in military spending since Donald took office. To put that figure in perspective, the increase is equal to two thirds of the Chinese military budget, the second largest globally. This is in tandem with massive increase of military spending in Europe, Japan, Korea, India, Australia and elsewhere.


In a recent market research note, one recommendation caught my eye. It promoted the merits of the weapons sector—Lockheed, Raytheon, etc—and pointed to the massive inflow that’s been announced by many governments. As far as killing and maiming is concerned, it’s boom time, never mind the frothy market.


There is no equilibrium right now. The American-led west has been upping the pressure since the Barack administration’s pivot east, to the point President Xi is openly exhorting the PLA to be ready for war at all times.

These are dangerous times.

I see two outcomes.

One: The Americans realize the folly of their ways, and u-turning. I find that unlikely, given the dysfunctional politics that refuses to forego the God complex.

Two: Provoking conflict between Japan and China over Taiwan, dragging Korea into the same mess. The entry of Russia into the issue of Taiwan is a stabilizer for the Western Pacific, because Japan will have to work through the strategic calculus of a direct northern neighbor that has an iron grip on Sakhalin.


The risk goes up with time, as both sides ratchet up and escalate. This will continue until there is a clear winner. The best we can hope for is a continuous stream of economic crises emanating from the first world’s profligate and irresponsible ways, forcing leaders to focus on domestic discontent, rather than fixing “the enemy”.

Five years ago, during Donald’s tenure, I would have put the possibility of war within the next decade at 20–30%. Today, it’s 60–70%.

We, as in East Asians, should all make our own preparations for a uncertain and dangerous future.

The Bellero Shield | Full Episode S01E20 | The Outer Limits

https://youtu.be/V3FA5FF_ILY

Won Ton Soup

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f8213ef37b46fbfe65f812fd4cd11433

How to Prevent Won Ton Wrappers From Drying Out: Keep won ton wrappers covered with plastic wrap until ready to use. Wrap any remaining won ton wrappers tightly in plastic wrap and store in freezer.

Make Ahead: Fill won tons as directed. Place in single layer on baking sheet. Freeze 1 hour or until frozen. Transfer to resealable plastic bag; seal bag. Freeze up to 1 month. Thaw in refrigerator before adding to hot soup to cook as directed.

Ingredients

  • 1/2 pound ground pork
  • 1/4 cup finely chopped shiitake mushrooms
  • 1/4 cup finely chopped water chestnuts
  • 2 green onions, finely chopped
  • 2 tablespoons GOOD SEASONS Asian Sesame with Ginger Dressing
  • 1 egg, separated
  • 32 square won ton wrappers
  • 8 cups fat-free reduced-sodium chicken broth
  • 1 cup thinly sliced shiitake mushrooms
  • 1/2 cup thinly sliced water chestnuts
  • 2 green onions, sliced

Instructions

  1. Mix meat, mushrooms, water chestnuts, onions, dressing and egg yolk until well blended. Spoon evenly onto won ton wrappers, adding about 1 teaspoon of the meat mixture to each wrapper.
  2. Beat egg white lightly. Brush onto edges of each wrapper; fold in half to form triangle. Press edges together to seal. Bring opposite corners of long edge of each triangle together, overlapping corners; brush with egg white to seal.
  3. Combine chicken broth, mushrooms, water chestnuts and onions in large saucepan. Bring just to boil on medium heat. Carefully add won tons; simmer 4 minutes or until filling is cooked through, stirring occasionally.
  4. Serve immediately.

Yield: 8 servings, about 1 1/4 cups each

Military Veterans React to Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond

2023 08 20 10 41
2023 08 20 10 41

The Third Man (1949, Film-Noir) Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli | Full movie

HUNTED…By a thousand men! Haunted…By a lovely girl! Pulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, Harry Lime.

It is a GREAT MOVIE. Watch it if you have the time.

https://youtu.be/UcfrHVrNLK0

What does it look like when all the jobs dry up? It looks like America today

The grand Ponzi scheme is coming to an end. And the West is slowly shutting down, turning off the lights, and starting the long slow slide into the night.

Let’s have some fun…

If This Was Not Caught On Camera No One Would Have Believed It

We start with a MUST WATCH video. Strange but amazing nature.

Pennsylvania Dutch Brownies

DSCN1040
DSCN1040

Ingredients

  • 4 tablespoons butter or margarine
  • 1 (1 ounce) square unsweetened chocolate
  • 1/4 cup light molasses
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup plus 2 teaspoons granulated sugar
  • 1 1/8 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Grease 13 x 9-inch metal baking pan; set aside.
  2. In a 4-quart saucepan, melt butter with chocolate over low heat. Remove saucepan from heat. With wire whisk or fork, stir in molasses, then eggs.
  3. With spoon, stir in flour, ginger, cloves, baking soda, salt, 1 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon just until blended. Spread batter evenly in pan. Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until a wooden pick inserted 2 inches from edge comes out clean.
  4. Meanwhile, in cup, combine remaining 2 teaspoons sugar and 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon; set aside.
  5. Remove pan from oven; immediately sprinkle brownies with cinnamon-sugar mixture. Cool brownies in pan on wire rack at least 2 hours. When cool, cut brownies lengthwise into 3 strips, then cut each strip crosswise into 5 pieces. Cut each piece diagonally in half.

Source: Good Housekeeping Christmas Joys – Hearst Books

They didn’t exactly choose to participate.

One morning Chinese civilians in Manchuria woke up to this:

main qimg f730908db30253b2ccdb1c1012e674ef lq
main qimg f730908db30253b2ccdb1c1012e674ef lq

Japanese troops marching through their town.

Of course I use “woke up” in a metaphorical sense. They probably heard the Japanese army coming, and many of them were killed by bombs and artillery before the troops actually marched into town, but the invasion itself caught a lot of people(including some members of the Japanese government) by surprise.

The Japanese military(acting somewhat insubordinately from the government in Tokyo) launched an invasion of Manchuria(in northern China), and the Chinese had to respond with war.

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2023 06 01 08 58

It isn’t like the Japanese called up the Chinese and said “Hey we want to go to war, if you are interested call us back”….the Chinese weren’t given the option. China got invaded and the Chinese had to respond. Since China was struggling with internal political problems this wasn’t exactly the best timing for an invasion, but as a country they had to rally together to defend themselves against the invasion.

main qimg 0eaa49bec4f2bb9907e48cf836179b23 lq
main qimg 0eaa49bec4f2bb9907e48cf836179b23 lq

As you can see the Japanese made it pretty deep into China. The traditional heart of Chinese civilization is the Hebei, Henan, Shanxi region which was almost completely conquered by the Japanese at one point. With such a fast acting, dangerous enemy China had to fight back, otherwise they could risk being completely subjugated by the Japanese.

Life under the Japanese occupation forces was brutal. Normal civilian women were raped almost daily, people were shot for no reason, living conditions were rough, and the Japanese would conduct horrific experiments on the people of China. It was in every Chinese citizen’s best interest to resist this occupation, lest they live a life under such an oppressive regime.

British police detain journalist Kit Klarenberg, interrogate him about The Grayzone

British counter-terror police detained journalist Kit Klarenberg upon his arrival at London’s Luton airport and subjected him to an extended interrogation about his political views and reporting for The Grayzone.

As soon as journalist Kit Klarenberg landed in his home country of Britain on May 17, 2023, six anonymous plainclothes counter-terror officers detained him. They quickly escorted him to a back room, where they grilled him for over five hours about his reporting for this outlet. They also inquired about his personal opinion on everything from the current British political leadership to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

At one point, Klarenberg’s interrogators demanded to know whether The Grayzone had a special arrangement with Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB) to publish hacked material.

During Klarenberg’s detention, police seized the journalist’s electronic devices and SD cards, fingerprinted him, took DNA swabs, and photographed him intensively. They threatened to arrest him if he did not comply.

Posted by: b | May 31 2023 13:54 utc | 1

This is me after 27 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days. I think I’m fairly sane:

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main qimg 978490e288d26fb59e9bef8ce3076f46

It’s a question of mentality. I know I have habits from decades in prison that people find strange. I’m a little OCD about my routines and keeping everything clean. But it’s all harmless. And some of it serves me well. These are products of the indoctrination of the Department Of Corrections.

While in prison, I tried to stay connected to the free world as much as possible. I read books, spoke to people on the phone, watched the news (slanted as it always is), and I listened to stories told by newcomers. It didn’t fully prepare me for what was waiting for me out here, but it helped.

For the first 17 years, I had no hope of ever getting out. But I learned to accept my situation for what it was. That doesn’t mean I gave up fighting to get out. It just means that I didn’t whine about my sentences. I deserved them. But I kept my nose in the Florida Law Weekly, Federal Law Weekly, FPLP (When it existed), and Prison Legal News, just in case there was a change in law. Eventually there was. It happened in 2012, but it still took 10 more years for it to impact my sentences and grant me an oppertunity to be out here.

That mindset. I got out 10 months ago. I have a job as a metal fabricator, I have a late model vehicle, my drivers license, a place to live and people who love me and rejoice in my freedom and success. It’s not hard. It just takes determination. It doesn’t “take” a strong mind, just the absence of a weak mind.

Humility. Remembering where I’ve been, and why. Treating people with kindness and compassion. Walking away and/or ignoring idiots. All things powered by our minds. Products of sanity. Prison is a physical place. You can keep it from doing too much damage to your mind.

Typically, when the military communication between nations collapses, war soon follows. This is most especially true when (historically) China makes a public Casus Belli.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHgZ9xfL65k

It’s best not to try to talk with China if China doesn’t want to listen.

There have been several historical incidents in China where opposition military leaders or negotiators were returned back dead.

Here are a few examples:

1. The Battle of Muye (1046 BC) – During the battle, the Zhou army defeated the Shang army and captured their leader, King Zhou. However, instead of treating him with respect, the Zhou leader, King Wu, had him executed.

2. The Battle of Changping (260 BC) – During the battle, the Qin army defeated the Zhao army and captured their general, Zhao Kuo. However, instead of treating him with respect, the Qin leader, Bai Qi, had him executed.

3. The Battle of Red Cliff (208 AD) – During the battle, the allied forces of Liu Bei and Sun Quan defeated the army of Cao Cao. After the battle, two of Cao Cao’s generals, Pang De and Ma Dai, were captured and executed.

4. The Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) – This was a treaty between the Qing Empire and the Russian Empire. The Qing negotiators, led by Songgotu, were unhappy with the terms of the treaty and refused to sign it. As a result, they were imprisoned and later executed.

5. The Tiananmen Square protests (1989) – During the protests, student leaders negotiated with the government for several weeks. However, when the government declared martial law and sent in the military, many of the student leaders were arrested and some were later executed.

6. The Urumqi riots (2009) – During the riots, Uighur leaders negotiated with the government for several days. However, when the negotiations broke down, the government sent in the military. Several Uighur leaders were arrested and some were later executed.

It’s worth noting that in some cases, the deaths of opposition military leaders or negotiators may have been the result of personal vendettas or political rivalries rather than a deliberate policy. Never the less, when dealing with the Chinese you must NEVER assume that they will behave in a well established Western fashion.

China is a nation of peaceful warriors. But with over 6000 years of fighting, they DO KNOW how to handle impertinent upstarts.

Women need to start approaching men.

Good men are pretty timid in modern society, and rightly so. Most of the history of man has been mired in rape culture. We called it a lot of names, but it was rape culture. Feminists have spread that message well enough that good, kind, conscientious men know most of human history was one big rapist parade of female oppression.

And they don’t want to be part of that. If they can avoid it, they don’t even want to make a woman uncomfortable. They don’t want to put on the pressure that their gender thought was their birthright for millions of years, not even accidentally. This leads to a certain timidity in sensitive and considerate men, in men who are the best partners for most women.

main qimg 106fd6fa09c86c7beae1c2accab82e7e
main qimg 106fd6fa09c86c7beae1c2accab82e7e

Not like this. This guy is clearly saying no. But you get the idea. Sadie Hawkins Day reenactment photo by Ed Westcott. Public domain.

Women only get to meet and date these men if they notice them, seek them out, and invite them home. Not quietly, not subtly, loudly and unabashedly. Speak clearly. Most men are simple creatures, and they appreciate it when women are direct.

Obviously, I don’t want women to become what men used to be. We need to take rejection just as gracefully as we always want men to take it. But we do need to step up and help men who take feminism’s message seriously find the partners they deserve.

That’ll never happen if we keep waiting for men to do all the work. We need to risk rejection, take our lumps, and find the nice guys we want. It’s our world if we want it. We should act like it.

It is trying.

It is bribing, coercing and threatening and using tons of U.S. taxpayers money to do this shit without much success.

I know your media fooled you into thinking South Korea, Taiwan and Philippines are on your side and willing to do shit on China. Nothing can be further than the truth.

Let’s talk about South Korea. They are oriental and the a from the same Confucian school of thought. The politely nod and give the impression they will but they are no fools. The squeeze. A ton of concession from the US to just bark without biting China whine they know either enrich them or bankrupt them. They know where their bread is buttered.

China and Korea has a few thousand years relation and their cousins and and relatives were biologically murdered by the Americans and quietly they assured the daft yanks that they will bark but won’t agree to let them even shot a bow and arrow at China. Singing American pie for a billion dollars is worth it.

Taiwan has 60% of its income from China, 99% of its inhabitants has a relative, friends, families or associates in China. The chance of Taiwan playing ball with you is zero and none. Sure we will cajole and encourage you to spend a trillion dollar on us and may be, perhaps, hopefully one day in the next ten thousand years time we may be foolish enough to be your dog. Meanwhile go play with your Anglo slaves. UK and Australia. They will serve you well.

China’s Going For Flying Train Of Speed 4000 KM/H

https://youtu.be/RaAfXIRMak4

“They arrived and found that a 14-year-old’s birthday gift, a lawn mower, was stolen. After learning the victim mows the elderly’s lawns for free, they felt it necessary to find a way to get the young man a new lawn mower. After gathering contributions from fellow west sector officers, Officer Seibert ran to Lowe’s and purchased a new lawn mower and gas can for this young man.

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2023 06 01 07 17

This photo was shared to Evansville Watch, which is how we found out about the incident. EPD has many selfless officers that don’t want the notoriety when they do good deeds, but it’s often hard for us to overlook. Thank you Officer Seibert and Officer Siegel for proving what great officers our community has.”

Love What Matters

World War II Paintings From The Soviet Union

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1 137

We tend to forget how horrific World War II was for the Soviet Union. Here’s a fascinating collection of Soviet War paintings.

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China’s High-Speed Sleeper Trains

Recently, an American senator has recommended making India a NATO+ member. This proposal is viewed as an extension of the American military satellite camp, which includes Israel, Japan, Australia, and South Korea. These countries are deeply aligned with NATO’s agenda, as they aim to maintain Western hegemony on the world stage.

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2023 06 01 06 48

Of course, this statement was a proposal by an American senator and also something that the US has always wanted to do in Asia — to bring India under its control as a means to counter China. For now, the good news is that India has not yet released any official statement on this matter. Personally, I don’t think it is likely to happen. However, considering India’s alignment with the West when it comes to China and its current status as a Quad partner, there is still a risk that exists. Nevertheless, let’s consider a typical scenario of what could happen if India simply decides to go the Trojan Horse way.

What do I mean by this statement?

It is worth noting that India is also aligned with the rising East, which has been actively pursuing a long-term plan to rebuild the financial system in a more equitable manner that promotes Eastern interests. India is a part of two important blocs: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS. The BRICS bloc comprises China, Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa.

As we are aware, the BRICS bloc has garnered significant attention in recent years for its advocacy of de-dollarization. Nations worldwide have shown interest in joining this bloc due to their confidence in its ability to assist countries in breaking free from Western hegemony. India, being a part of this bloc, shares common interests in this regard. Additionally, India maintains a neutral stance towards Russia, which enables it to purchase oil at discounted rates. Furthermore, the friendship between India and Russia remains strong, with India regarding Russia as a valuable partner in terms of both the economy and military cooperation.

But again, India is a real “B.” Not only does it position itself as a rising power that can serve as an alternative to the current Western order, but it also appears to be aligning more closely with the West. One key goal is to promote Hindutva supremacy in other South Asian countries and to work towards containing China. China is seen as the biggest factor hindering India’s establishment of supremacy in Southeast Asia. Therefore, one can argue that India is acting as a Trojan Horse within BRICS. It doesn’t seem fully committed to being a trustworthy partner and instead appears to be a country that is reluctant to share power with other nations, preferring to exert its own rule.

Being a part of the NATO+ member comes with more risks than benefits. It will inevitably increase concerns among Southeast Asian nations about the future in their region, as tensions may escalate between the Asian powers. In recent years, Southeast Asia has slowly deviated from its status as a peaceful region free of conflict, especially since the US introduced its Indo-Pacific Vision. In a scenario where India joins NATO+, it would effectively transform India into a loyal servant of the West, aiding the West in achieving its goal of bringing India into its military camp.

Overall, it would be unwise for India to perceive any benefits in obtaining this status. Firstly, it is widely known how divided the country is, with many states not having Hindi as their primary language. Recent revolts against the Indian government, particularly concerning the BJP’s plans to enforce Hindi as the sole language across all of India, highlight the potential disregard for other languages in various states. Such a move could be seen as an affront to the linguistic diversity within India.

The good thing about British is that they imposed English or else India would be divided into many countries, because English is a bridge for many cultures inside India to understand each other.

China has options to keep India checked

The first answer lies in Pakistan. Oh yes Indiiians, I know, it is the poorest country, with most people lacking basic access to their human needs to maintain a normal lifestyle. However, it is important to note that there is also a “rich Pakistan”, particularly within the military itself. Despite any economi crises, the military will never allow itself to remain weak and has invested billions towards making it strong. Additionally, it is worth mentioning that the military controls key aspects of the economy.

Yes, Pakistan alone may not be a match for India. However, just imagine the scenario if China and Pakistan joined forces to launch a military intervention on Indian soil. It would be an absolute disaster for India and could potentially turn the country into a second Ukraine. Let’s not forget the historical fact that China was able to reclaim the lost land of Aksai Chin from India, even when it was not as powerful as it is today.

Of course, I am being hyperbolic with the first option. China does not operate in the same way as Western countries. However, as I mentioned earlier, if tensions continue to escalate, particularly regarding the unresolved border issue, it could potentially lead to a dire scenario. This would be the worst-case scenario for the India itself.

I once saw something that I couldn’t explain to anyone and I probably can’t now.

One day I was walking home and almost in front of me a man just fell down.

Backwards away, just straight on the back of the head.

An insanely loud crash.

I’ve never heard a noise like that before.

I immediately went over to him, crouched down and looked at him.

And I saw his eyes.

They were wide open and I saw him walk away.

I saw it. He left his body and was “gone.”

The eyes were now empty. No one at home.

I started talking to him, I don’t remember what, some soothing stuff.

I got in touch with him.

And after a while I saw that he was back.

I know I brought him back by talking, I just know it.

The ambulance that somebody had gone for then came.

I stood up. All of a sudden, I was shaking all over and became freezing.

I asked someone to help me, but no one understood what was wrong with me.

I went home and was still in shock for a very long time.

Through the end-of-life care I’ve done, I’ve seen death many times.

But never, never, have I seen it as I did that day.

I would have liked someone to talk to me myself afterwards.

But I was alone and had to cope, and I didn’t know how to tell anyone.

China’s Explosive Chip Technology Breakthroughs Shock the World

https://youtu.be/nJZbMx2Oh3g

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2023 06 01 06 41

A Chinese supersonic combat drone has captured the world’s attention with its remarkable speed and formidable weaponry. Whispers of its unprecedented velocity have spread, leaving adversaries in awe of its lightning-fast strikes. The drone’s unmatched agility and maneuverability are said to surpass anything seen before, making conventional defense systems ineffective against its relentless attacks.

Revealed some years ago, the drone has now gained a new combat system which has made it formidable weapon and a force to be reckoned with. A recent leaked report shows China has been successful in making this drone the best version of itself and now the world is ready to see it.

Lets uncover China’s new WZ 8 Drone and it’s capability that gives China an upper hand in drone warfare:

The wez-8 Drone is a supersonic UAV meaning it can travel at speeds greater than the speed of sound, also it is a relatively small drone with a wingspan of around 9 meters and a length of 14 meters. The Drone is reportedly powered by a scramjet engine which allows it to reach speeds of up to Mach 3, nearly 3 times the speed of sound.

One of the key features of the wz8 Drone is its stealth capabilities the Drone has a low radar cross section making it difficult for enemy radar systems to detect it the Drone is also equipped with electronic warfare capabilities which enable it to jam enemy Communications and radar systems.

The wz8 Drone is also capable of carrying weapons although the specific weapons it is designed to carry have not been disclosed however given its Speed and Agility it is likely that the Drone could be used for air-to-air combat or for precision strikes on ground targets.

Potential uses the wz8 Drone is designed primarily for military use and its speed and stealth capabilities make it well suited for a variety of missions some potential uses for the wz8 Drone include surveillance the drone’s speed and range make it an ideal platform for reconnaissance and surveillance missions its stealth capabilities also make it difficult for enemy forces to detect electronic warfare the wz8 EW capabilities make it well suited for disrupting enemy Communications and radar systems + Precision strikes

The Drone Speed and Agility could make it an effective weapon for precision strikes on ground targets air-to-air combat given its supersonic Speed and Agility the wez-8 could potentially be used for air-to-air combat missions the wz8 supersonic combat drone represents a significant advancement in China’s drone technology capabilities.

China’s super Sonic drones provide an edge in surveillance, intelligence gathering and strategic operations, these drones offer unparalleled speed and agility enabling real-time information acquisition and Swift response capabilities.

China’s advancements in this field contributes to its National Security and enhances its military capabilities making it a formidable force in the global defense landscape like no other nation.

This unique drone is one of a kind in the world with no parallels. I am not sure if it is available for exports. Saudi and UAE would buy this in a blink of an eye.

When I was in the military, I found myself stationed in Korea near the DMZ. I was 18, from Chicago, and was considered one of the baddest and coolest guys in the unit. My parents were from the Jim Crow South, and white people were not at all favored in their estimate. By the same token, my personal experience with “Jon Burge” era perverted, genitalia focused, Nazi, and Klan cops, had left me equally jaded.

My racial epiphany occurred one night while on alert in a frozen bunker, and I fell asleep while others were on guard. To my shock and horror, I realized that my feet had essentially frozen, and I went into panic mode. To my surprise, all my “brothers” laughed at me like a clown as I stumbled around the bunker dreading the potential amputation of my feet. To be sure, it was the very worst experience of my young life on the other side of the planet, and I was really close to “losing” it.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an avowed redneck named Turley from Georgia, grabbed me and pulled into a corner of the bunker. He took off my insulated boots, (which worked fine IF you kept it moving) opened his parka, and positioned himself so that my feet was inside of his outer garments and pressed solidly against his body. Before long, the feeling returned to my feet and I went about my duties. Despite my embarrassment, I never forgot what he did for me; and from that day on, I’ve never allowed race to be a factor in my estimation of my fellow man.

No

Absolutely not

Like i said China is a land of laws

China is absolutely 100% for free competition

However there are two points to consider :-

A. Chinese Data Security Laws

B. Chinese ability to build and scale their own apps


Chinese Data Security Laws are very stringent and very strong

In China , any app cannot own the Customer Data nor control the Customer Data. The Customer Data is like our AADHAR in India.

The Databases are controlled by the Government of China and the App can use the data but cannot transfer or control the data in any way whatsoever.

The Bad news is YOUR CAB INFORMATION CAN BE SEEN BY THE GOVERNMENT ANYTIME THEY CHOOSE TO SEE

The Good news is YOU WONT GET A SPAM CALL FROM A DUBIOUS “BANK MANAGER” asking for your ATM CARD NUMBER and OTP

So Uber cannot cash in on their Customer Database which they can do in almost every other country and even value this database in the Billions of Dollars

Neither can Didi or most other Chinese Apps

In China – DATA of Chinese Citizens is always controlled by the GOVERNMENT OF CHINA


Chinese are the worlds best app developers and they scale their apps superbly

So the Chinese will eventually make an app that is better than yours and more efficient than yours

This is a country where 9th Graders create apps

Its a hobby for many kids in China

So any foreign app must always ensure that their services are exemplary and have a unique edge that allows them to compete with the Chinese

Otherwise Chinese will run rings around them


So Chinese Government never forces anyone to sell their Apps especially foreigners

Its just that Chinas Data Security Laws and Chinas own ability to build apps means that Foreign Apps have tremendous competition and are easily eclipsed once a Chinese App really scales to that top level.

And if you think China has only 1–2

This Only Happens In China Technologies That Are On Another Level

https://youtu.be/YUsDJc6RPDs

I believe that it is actually going to be achieved. When China says it is going to do something; it invariably happens.

In fact, China already has this ability. It could probably cobble up some kind of craft from systems already in stock, and sail out to the Moon, land and return successfully. Give China about six months to make the necessary arrangements.

I will tell you all this, and you can “take it to the bank”;

  • China does things in clusters.
  • The cluster of activities will all fit together like pieces in a puzzle.
  • You will not see the entire outline of the puzzle until it is nearly finished.

As such…

  • The First landing on the moon by China will be one of many.
  • Every landing will have activities that will cycle towards one singular goal.
  • Evidence suggests that all the landings will be dedicated to the creation of a long-term habitat (or base) on the moon.

This base…

  • Will in itself have numerous functional objectives.
    • Manufacturing.
    • Sustainability.
    • Mining.
    • Industrial technology development.
    • Construction technology development.

Resulting in…

  • The setting up for a Mars colony.

“They were all killed instantly!” – Donetsk under continued devastating attack

Typically, when the military communication between nations collapses, war soon follows. This is most especially true when (historically) China makes a public Casus Belli.

It’s best not to try to talk with China if China doesn’t want to listen.

There have been several historical incidents in China where opposition military leaders or negotiators were returned back dead.

Here are a few examples:

1. The Battle of Muye (1046 BC) – During the battle, the Zhou army defeated the Shang army and captured their leader, King Zhou. However, instead of treating him with respect, the Zhou leader, King Wu, had him executed.

2. The Battle of Changping (260 BC) – During the battle, the Qin army defeated the Zhao army and captured their general, Zhao Kuo. However, instead of treating him with respect, the Qin leader, Bai Qi, had him executed.

3. The Battle of Red Cliff (208 AD) – During the battle, the allied forces of Liu Bei and Sun Quan defeated the army of Cao Cao. After the battle, two of Cao Cao’s generals, Pang De and Ma Dai, were captured and executed.

4. The Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) – This was a treaty between the Qing Empire and the Russian Empire. The Qing negotiators, led by Songgotu, were unhappy with the terms of the treaty and refused to sign it. As a result, they were imprisoned and later executed.

5. The Tiananmen Square protests (1989) – During the protests, student leaders negotiated with the government for several weeks. However, when the government declared martial law and sent in the military, many of the student leaders were arrested and some were later executed.

6. The Urumqi riots (2009) – During the riots, Uighur leaders negotiated with the government for several days. However, when the negotiations broke down, the government sent in the military. Several Uighur leaders were arrested and some were later executed.

It’s worth noting that in some cases, the deaths of opposition military leaders or negotiators may have been the result of personal vendettas or political rivalries rather than a deliberate policy. Never the less, when dealing with the Chinese you must NEVER assume that they will behave in a well established Western fashion.

China is a nation of peaceful warriors. But with over 6000 years of fighting, they DO KNOW how to handle impertinent upstarts.

Why do African nations love China?

Pennsylvania Dutch Chicken Bake

Chicken thighs are nestled in a deliciously-seasoned mixture of sauerkraut, onions, apple, apricots and raisins.

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2023 06 01 10 17

Ingredients

  • 1 (2-pound) package Perdue® Fresh Chicken Thighs
  • Salt and ground pepper to taste
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil
  • 1-2 tablespoons canola oil
  • 1 (14-ounce) can sauerkraut, undrained
  • 1 (14-ounce) can whole onions, drained
  • 1 tart red apple, unpeeled, sliced or diced
  • 6-8 dried whole apricots
  • 1/2 cup raisins
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar, or to taste

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Season thighs with salt and pepper.
  3. In a large, nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, heat oil. Cook thighs 6 to 8 minutes per side until browned.
  4. Meanwhile, in 9 x 13-inch shallow baking dish, mix sauerkraut well with onions, apple, apricots, raisins and brown sugar. Nestle thighs into sauerkraut mixture.
  5. Cover and bake 30 to 40 minutes, or until chicken is cooked through, and a meat thermometer inserted in thickest part of thigh registers 180 degrees F.

Serves: 4

China Just Hacked The U.S. Navy…

Family

The first photo is of actor Pierce Brosnan and his wife of twenty years, at the beginning of their marriage.

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2023 06 01 07 07

The second photo is of them today.

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2023 06 01 07 08

When the fools pointed out to him that she had grown fat, he simply replied:

"She is in my eyes the most beautiful woman in the world, she raised my 5 children with love. In the past, I already loved her for her personality and not just for her beauty. Now I love her even more. I'm very proud of her and I always try to be worthy of her love."

That’s marrying a man who loves you as you are.

The Wildest And Weirdest Chinese EVs From The 2023 Shanghai Auto Show

Be the Rufus!

On my way home from a 12 hour day of cutting lawns, I seen this gentleman, I have no clue who he is to this day. But I said no way was I gonna let this guy tackle this on his own.

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So I turned around and went back and unloaded my mower and drove across the street and ask the gentleman if I could help. His eyes lit up and I took that as a yes.

I ran down, jumped on my mower and went to work. As I’m cutting the lawn I look over and see the gentleman hunched over his wife, resting his head on her shoulder. So I get it knocked out in no time. I give them a thumbs up and proceeded to load my mower up.

The wife makes her way over before I could leave. She was so thankful! Their riding mower broke down and her husband has been mowing their big lawn with a push mower. It only took 15 mins of my time. I changed their life, for a small moment.

I hope someone reads this and feels like doing something good for someone tomorrow. I’m grateful to be where I’m at and I’m thankful for the people that help me get here.

Credit: J&J Lawn Service

After Macron came to China, France to sell a 6,675 square kilometer island to China

The tragedy of American dating

We will continue to look a little into the Passport Bros movement. In particular, how the West; the American ideal of “family” is so messed up and there numerous people who are upset about this. And it is really heartbreaking. So many lonely girls, and at the same time, so many men are showing zero sympathy.

Is this America today?

I cannot believe it. The USA is so damn fucked up!

I suffer and feel for all the single mothers in the video. I feel for the lonely guys, and the confused people who are just looking for some appreciation and love and care and concern.

But ideology keeps getting in the way.

Ugh!

Do not get too caught up. Focus on your friends. Focus in your family. Be kind and caring. Expand outward.  Control your thoughts and control the circle of people that surround you. Your life will be so much easier.

Ok, here’s a video…

When Women Regret Feminism – Strong, Independent Woman Can’t Find A Man

Yes. There is a biological clock that ends in a hard wall. If you are a woman in your early 30’s check for fibroid cysts. It’s normal, but they will really mess up your insides when it comes to having babies.

And, please, I know many of the younger women are so full of themselves, but the clock of life is harsh.

Show some sympathy.

Show some empathy.

It is a tough and difficult world out there.

Give people a chance.

Show some compassion. Do not be the jerk who laughs at others tears!

June 3, 2023 – 17:6

TEHRAN – A Qatari news website reported on Friday that Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Oman are to form a joint naval force under China’s support in line with increasing maritime security in the Persian Gulf.

Al-Jadid said China had already begun mediating negotiations among Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi aimed at reinforcing navigation’s safety in the strategic body of water.

Back in March, China successfully helped broker a deal between Tehran and Riyadh according to which Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to reestablish diplomatic ties after seven years of estrangement.

According to analysts, the consent of the Persian Gulf states to Beijing’s mediation in such sensitive matters shows China’s growing influence in the region as opposed to Washington’s declining influence.

Iran has long been saying that only regional countries can guarantee the security of the Persian Gulf.

Iran, Saudi Arabia to form naval coalition in northern Indian Ocean

Iranian Navy Commander Shahram Irani also announced on Saturday that a naval coalition will be formed in the northern Indian Ocean with the involvement of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Iraq, Pakistan, India, and other countries in the region.

Meanwhile, the UAE has announced quitting a U.S.-led naval force.

On Wednesday, the website of the Emirati foreign ministry said Abu Dhabi had withdrawn from the Joint Maritime Forces that operate in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

The ministry said the Emirates had decided to ditch the naval coalition following an extensive evaluation of its security needs.

Analysts say Abu Dhabi has made the decision in line with its ambition to diversify its security relationships.

The Rise of Men Going Their Own Way #2

Mean and women going “their own way”. Ugh!

Please show understanding and compassion!

I’m telling you…

Laugh at these people now, suffer their fate later on!

https://youtu.be/ojBkdOrtftI

LGBQ+ everything

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2023 06 07 16 27

“GOD Please SAVE Me!” | 35+ Yr Old Women Hit The Wall HARD

I am actually horrified. I am so sad for the girls here. I am really sad that the young men are laughing about it.

People need compassion.

Anyways, the wall exists.

Network with friends and family. There is no such thing as strong and independent. Do not fall for that lie.

Stay Calm in the Midst of Chaos

Always stay calm. You are a rock. You are her rock.

Be calm when she becomes emotional. All women are emotional to an extent. You can’t change it.

There is no point in even trying. But also, do not run away from the situation. This doesn’t work either and she’ll resent you for it.

What you must do is face her head-on like a MAN.

Do not react to her.

She’s testing to see whether you can be pulled into her un-needed drama.

She wants to see if she can bring crazy storms into your life – don’t give in.

A hallmark of a great man is composure.

So many fights can be avoided if you just don’t give into her chaos and stay grounded.

That’s what she wants – but she won’t tell you. You’re suppose to know this.

Obviously, if it’s a serious issue, than handle it with compassion and respect.

Otherwise, staying calm, humor and positivity is usually the way to go 90% of the time.

队长YoungCaptain/黄礼格 – 11 『Cause you know 爱意就像大雨落下怎么能让人不牵挂。』【動態歌詞】

There’s no point in holding dialogue with a bully

Much has been made recently of a “close call” incident whereby a Chinese fighter jet intercepted an American F-16 in the South China Sea at close proximity. The incident, a clear show of discontent from Beijing towards the United States, prompted condemnation from Washington who subsequently demanded “dialogue” and “communication” in order to prevent mistakes from being made. This theme carried on into the Singapore based Shang-Ri La Dialogue last week, a forum which is of course used by the US and its allies to advance their geopolitical goals. H ere, US Secretary of Defence Llyod Austin again reiterated a call for open channels, but he did not get a meeting with his Chinese counterpart, amidst protests over him being sanctioned by the United States previously.

Austin of course, continued in presenting his vision for a “free and open indo-pacific”, which as American politicians do, depict themselves as a bringing of peace, stability and freedom for the nations of that given region against so-called “coercion” and “bullying”. In reality, the United States is aiming for the comprehensive militarization of Asia in the bid to contain China, and of course frames Beijing’s reactions to this hostile activity, be it Taiwan or the South China Sea, as acts of aggression and instability, with the US frequently of course then prescribing itself as the solution to the problem they are subsequently creating. Likewise, China’s lack of willingness to “cooperate” is then spun as being unreasonable.

But this is manipulative and completely misleading in so many ways. If a bully decides to move into your garden, sets up camp and brings weapons, is it reasonable to object to it, and of course to be hostile in response? Yet, on demanding that bully leave and stop interfering with your property, do you think anyone would take it seriously if he then says that you are the one being unreasonable? And that you should talk with him to make sure you don’t get into a fight? As that is exactly what is happening here. The US is response is literally this: “We’re going to continue to get new bases around you, we’re going to continue to build new alliances targeting you and bring more military assets into the region, and continually sale warships off your coast, but oh, please make sure you talk with us just to make sure no problems arise from it.”

In doing so, the United States has no intention of changing course or “understanding” China more, let alone respecting its interests and finding a position of co-existence. Rather, it is about gaslighting Beijing as the aggressor and using a misleading logic that frames China as the one being unreasonable. The United States knows that the more it can provoke and fan the flames of tensions in the region, the more it can subsequently advance its own military agenda and thus force other countries to take sides. The US does not respect the neutrality of ASEAN, and will make regional harmony, economic and political integration, as well as trust, completely disintegrate in the bid to escalate its own ideological conflict.

We have subsequently seen the exact same situation pan out in regards to Ukraine, where it has already started a major war, which has been wholly to American benefit. China has made it clear they do not want such a war, and it is not in their interests to do so, yet that does not mean the United States will change its path or stop provoking, thus forcing Beijing to continue to respond in tandem. In other words, the cycle of escalation or “the security dilemma” is already well underway, and no matter how many sweet words the United States may speak about dialogue or talks, the structural reality of what they are pursuing is not going to change and therefore the risk of conflict continues to grow irrespectively.

There is little walking away from the emerging arms race now, and while China must avoid making abrasive decisions, and it is absolutely right nonetheless that there is no point in talking to the United States and taking heed of this gaslighting about “communications” and “guardrails”, because it distracts from the obvious reality that the perpetrator is trying to project on the victim and force it to be responsible for a situation it is creating. The US has chosen the path of confrontation, and must subsequently bear the consequences for it. You do not be nice to someone who moves into your garden.

Woman That Got KARMA On Divorce Court!

Show compassion , understanding and empathy. Put yourself in the shoes of others.

https://youtu.be/HBgz6smgTwA

Xinjiang’s 5G Network Reaches Every Corner: 39,000 Base Stations and Counting!

Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region had built 39,000 5G base stations by the end of April 2023, amid the region’s efforts to push head with 5G networks, local authorities said on Wednesday.

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main qimg 3059862f976a73e2bec7a90064e9fa04

Currently, all the region’s prefecture-level cities, all its counties and 99.16 percent of its townships are covered by 5G networks. There are 15 5G base stations for every 10,000 residents in Xinjiang.

Last year, Xinjiang’s information and communication industry invested 1.7 billion yuan (about 244 million U.S. dollars) in building 5G base stations, said Ma Zhuqing, head of the regional communications administration.

Xinjiang is also speeding up integration and innovation of its key 5G industrial applications, with 70 major 5G applications in relevant industries underway, including the construction of a smart land port in the China-Europe freight train (Urumqi) assembly center, Ma said.

Terry Zhong – Goodnight Stranger (feat. 习谱予 Cheryl Xi)

Nvidia founder Jensen Huang warns about China’s resolve to build its own advanced semiconductors

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The Taiwan-born American entrepreneur says mainland China has dedicated a ‘massive’ amount of resources to build its own high-end chips.

Nvidia and its US peers must ‘run very fast’ to stay ahead of Chinese competitors, Huang says during Computex Taipei.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang Jen-hsun said China’s ability to catch up in chip technology should not be underrated, as the country pours massive resources into shoring up the sector amid mounting export restrictions by the US and its allies.

The world’s most valuable chip maker, which has been barred by Washington from selling its most advanced chips to customers in China, must “run very fast” to stay competitive, Huang told reporters at a round table at Computex Taipei, an annual technology industry expo, on Tuesday.

“Whatever the regulations are … of course we will absolutely comply, but I think China will use the opportunity to foster their local entrepreneurs, and that’s why there are so many graphics processing unit start-ups in China,” Huang was quoted as saying by Nikkei Asia and several Taiwanese media outlets.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have simpler architecture than central processing units at the heart of most personal computers, making the former easier to design.

“If you weren’t in the chip industry and you wanted to start a chip company, what company would you start? You would start a GPU [company]. And there’s a whole bunch of GPU start-ups in China,” Huang reportedly said.

“The amount of resources that has been dedicated to this area in China … is quite massive, so you can’t underestimate them.”

Huang made similar remarks in a recent interview with the Financial Times, warning the Biden administration to be “careful” with its semiconductor restrictions, because “if [China] can’t buy from … the United States, they’ll just build it themselves”.

To comply with Washington’s rules, Nvidia currently offers lower-end versions of its most advanced GPUs that are tailor-made for the mainland Chinese market.

Huang’s net worth is US$36 billion and he is Chinese who was born in Taiwan.

Now that you mention it, I was forced to cook part of a meal outside over an open flame even though the weather was cold the other day.

That’s because it was Thanksgiving, and the oven had been full of other food since 6am that morning, preparing for a 5pm meal. Yes, eleven hours of cooking different things, and it still wasn’t enough. That’s how much food we had. I had to cook the ham outside on the grill.

Well, it’s not really cooking the ham… it’s reheating a pre-cooked, pre-sliced 10-pound ham. The most difficult part of the entire thing is opening the bag of charcoal.

I spent the day after Thanksgiving playing video games, answering questions on Quora, and shopping online. Some of the things I bought in the morning were delivered that afternoon.

My plan for today is more of the same.

If this is what it’s like to live in a third world country, I don’t see what’s so bad about it.

【Engsub】侠客(Xia Ke)|The Knight | 老胡khufu – Lao Hu Khufu | Rap vibe

An Englishman staggers, ashen-faced, into a roadside bar, demanding a large brandy. The barman is concerned.

“Well,” says the man, “I was just driving along and my BMW suddenly gave up the ghost! So I cruised into the layby just along the road here and opened the bonnet. But I have no idea how these modern cars work! I was about to call the Automobile Association when I saw two horses come up to the fence and peer at the engine. And one of them actually spoke! Clear as day! Couldn’t believe my ears!”

“Oh, yes – what did it say?”

“Well, this is the extraordinary thing – it told me to press down on some bit of plastic until I heard a click. So I did that – and then this horse told me to try the engine – and it started immediately!”

“Ah,” said the barman. “And tell me, what color was this horse?”

“Color? Color? Whatever do you mean? The damn thing spoke to me, clear as day! In fact, it was a brown horse!”

“Thought so,” says the barman, polishing the next batch of glasses.

“Thought so? Didn’t you hear what I was saying? This horse dam’ well spoke to me!”

“Well”, says the barman, “I thought it would be her. The white one knows nothing about BMW ignition systems!”

Do you want to walk in on them when they are masturbating? Or perhaps your daughter taking her bra off? Or your kid doing a handstand, so you would directly hit them and break their neck in result?

If you smell weed, smoke, hear screams, moans, loud obnoxious music, then have a problem with it. In the end, don’t you think a screwdriver or a bobby pin would easily unlock their door?

Knock on the kid’s door, and ask if you can come in. Give at least some fundamental privacy.

The US military-industrial complex produces lots of useless junk, like the Patriot surface-to-air missile system:

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2023 06 07 10 33

Recently, Zelenskyy claimed Ukraine shot down some Kinzhal hypersonic missiles using the Patriot system. No. Ukraine did not shoot down a single Kinzhal using the shitty Patriot missile system. That would be like claiming that Kim Jung-Un beat Usain Bolt in the 100-meter sprint. Zelenskkly’s story would’ve been more credible if he had claimed Ukraine shot down the Khinzals with slingshots.

The US doesn’t even have a hypersonic missile. For crying out loud, Iran now has hypersonic missiles:

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2023 06 07 10 34

These dumb US and British reporters (redundant) doubt Iran has hypersonic missile capability. Hey, US and British dumbbells, hypersonic just means going faster than the speed of sound. Iran isn’t claiming to have solved the riddle of dark energy. Iran is claiming capabilities other countries already have, just not the US.

In high school, American History was largely propaganda. Lots of Americans believe that we’ve never lost a war, despite mostly losing after World War 2. Lots of American dingbats think the US won World War 2 single-handedly. Russians did most of the fighting and dying. Without Russia, we’d all be speaking German and giving the sieg-heil to ridiculous dickless Adolf statues.

Teaching Americans propaganda is the problem with the US. We have a bunch of fat, stupid fuckers who believe we’re the best at everything. The only potential some of these fat fuckers have is self-imploding into a black hole. If that happens it will happen first in the US and should be celebrated, These days, the US has little else to celebrate.

Joe Biden excels at falling down. He can fall off a bike. He can fall going up the ramp of a plane. If there’s one sandbag within a ten-mile radius, Biden will find it and trip over it.

Biden has another neat trick. He can imitate a wind pavilion, like the one in Figure 1. Biden stands in the breeze and lets the wind blow in one ear and out the other. The wind resonates in his hollow head and gives off a hum which is certainly more pleasest than listening to Biden butcher a speech.

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2023 06 07 10t 34

Figure 1. Wind pavilion.

I think the US is in the “mad emperor” stage of empire decline. We have clearly mentally deficient people running the empire. We’re teetering on the brink. Economic catastrophe is close at hand. Hell, it’s already here.

Why aren’t there more homeless people in China?

Mars Snow Globe Ditches Snow For Swirling Martian Dust Storm

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Designer, Dan Abramson (previously), is at it again with the Mars Dust Globe, a modern twist on the classic water snow globe, where the snow is a mesmerizing Martian Dust Storm.

Features detailed texture of Valles Marineris, the Tharsis volcanoes, and Olympus Mons – the solar system’s tallest known planetary peak. Sculpted by the talented, Tim Barry.

More: Kickstarter h/t: neatorama

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The globe had to not only achieve a great swirl, but it also had to eventually settle and become clear. Adding too much material would stain the water, and too little was no longer stunning.

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The Wallflowers – Angel On My Bike(unplugged)

Download Cool Buddy Icons for Free

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Download cool ‘Buddy Icon Set’ absolutely for free. Created by Iconka.

These Filipinas STRIKE BACK At WOMEN In USA They Understand Passport Bros

Pennsylvania Dutch Meat Loaf

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20221013 172137 1

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 pounds ground beef
  • 1 cup fresh bread crumbs
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 1 medium green bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 (8 ounce) can Hunt’s tomato sauce, divided
  • 1 egg
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 3/4 cup water
  • 2 tablespoons brown sugar, packed
  • 2 tablespoons prepared mustard
  • 1 tablespoon vinegar

Instructions

  1. In a medium bowl, lightly mix beef, bread crumbs, onion, green pepper, 1/2 can tomato sauce, egg, salt and pepper. Shape into a loaf in a shallow baking pan.
  2. Combine remaining tomato sauce with remaining ingredients. Pour over loaf.
  3. Bake at 350 degrees F for 1 1/4 hours. Baste the loaf several times during baking.

Yield: 6 servings

Hotel in China

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2023 06 07 10 06

Meanwhile in Egypt

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2023 06 07 10 07

David Lee Roth – Drop In The Bucket (Guitar Cover)

The Ukrainian Military Is In Bad Shape

Erik Kramer and Paul Schneider are two former U.S. special operations soldiers who have been in Ukraine since 2022 to train Ukrainian troops.

At War on the Rocks they paint a dark picture of the state of the Ukrainian military. Their intent is to get money for more training, thus the real picture may be less dark than they describe. But even if one takes that into account it is still a sad state for an army that has been at war for more than a year. Some excerpts:

Based on our nine months of training with all services of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, to include the Ground Forces (Army), Border Guard Service, National Guard, Naval Infantry (Marines), Special Operations Forces, and Territorial Defense Forces, we have observed a series of common trends: lack of mission command, effective training, and combined arms operations; ad hoc logistics and maintenance; and improper use of special operations forces. These trends have undermined Ukraine’s resistance and could hinder the success of the ongoing offensive.

What ongoing offensive?

Under mission command, the German Auftragstaktik, the leader disseminates his intent (“to attack through the northern woods to take town x”) and authority to subunits that is passed down with the mission to empower subordinates at all levels. Each subunits can make its plans to coordinate and execute the mission as best as possible. The contrast is an order command where every detail of execution is ordered from the top down. Both have advantages but to have a mixed system, as Ukraine currently has, is the worst of all places.

In our experience, across many units and staffs, the Ukrainian Armed Forces do not promote personal initiative and foster mutual trust or mission command. As Michael Kofman and Rob Lee recently discussed on the Russia Contingency podcast, elements of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have an old Soviet mentality that holds most decision-making at more senior levels. Amongst military leaders at the brigade level and below, our impression is that junior officers fear making mistakes.

But to use mission command down to the lower levels of a Platoon one needs noncommissioned officers (sergeants) to run the show. Those the Ukrainian military had are by now probably dead:

Having trained every component of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, we have continually seen a lack of an experienced noncommissioned officer corps. It is common to see field grade officers running around during training counting personnel and coordinating for meals. In the United States, it takes years to develop just a junior noncommissioned officer.

The next big lack is combined arms training and use. Tanks protect the infantry, the infantry protects the tanks, the artillery covers the battlefield to allow tanks and infantry to maneuver, command takes care that all three coordinate their actions.

The armor/infantry relationship is supposed to be symbiotic, but it is not. The result is that infantry will conduct frontal assaults or operate in urban areas without the protection and firepower of tanks. Also, artillery fires are not synchronized with maneuver. Most units do not talk directly to supporting artillery, so there is a delay in call for fire missions. We have been told that units will use runners to send fire missions to artillery batteries because of issues with communications.Most of the military’s operations are not phased and are sequential. Fires and maneuver, for example, are planned separately from infantry units — and infantry units plan separately from supporting artillery. This mentality also carries over to adjacent unit coordination, which is either nonexistent or rare and causes high rates of fratricide. Unit commanders have concerns about collaborators and thus are hesitant to pass on critical information that can be used against them to sister units.

These issues are compounded by unreliable communications between units and with senior leadership. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have a hodgepodge of radios that are vulnerable to jamming. Further, battalion missions are mainly independent company operations that do not focus on a main effort coupled with supporting efforts. The armed forces do not combine effects, so operations are piecemeal and disjointed. The separate missions are not supporting each other, nor are the missions of lower level units “nested” under a higher level mission. Sustainment is not synchronized with operations, either.

Due to the wild mix of weapons and for lack of trained mechanics logistics and the maintenance of equipment are a mess.

This lack of coordinated maintenance and logistics also translates into medical care. Medical evacuation and care are haphazard. Experienced Ukrainian combat medics have repeatedly stated that many of the evacuees would have survived it they had reached definitive care in a timely manner. The Ukrainian Armed Forces can solve this issue with a systematic logistics process.

Ukrainian special forces are mostly used as infantry even as they should be used for more demanding missions. There also are gimmick missions:

Ukraine special forces units comprised of international volunteers shop around their services to conventional unit commanders without a mission being tied to a strategic or operational goal. One example of a mission was a conventional brigade commander who had reported to his command that he had occupied a village taken from the Russians. When he realized that the information he had was mistaken and they had stopped short, he asked the international special operations forces unit to go into the occupied village and take a picture of a Ukrainian flag placed on top of a building in the center of the village.

A suicide mission to hide the commanders false reporting …

The authors claim that most of the above problems could be fixed by more ‘western’ training which they are more than willing to sell. However, what has become of the last armies ‘western’ forces have trained in Iraq and Afghanistan? Both fell apart. An army must reflect the local society and culture. It can not be formed top down by outside forces.

Since 2015 the Ukrainian army has been build up and trained by U.S. and British forces. What the WotR authors describe is the result of that.

Posted by b on June 3, 2023 at 17:01 UTC | Permalink

No secrets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-G2ljW720E

Pepper Hash

This is an old Pennsylvania Dutch recipe.

Garnished Sweet Pepper Hash HF
Garnished Sweet Pepper Hash HF

Ingredients

  • 1 head cabbage, shredded
  • 2 green bell peppers, coarsely ground
  • 1/3 cup vinegar
  • 1/3 cup honey or granulated sugar
  • Salt and pepper to your taste

Instructions

  1. Shred and chop the vegetables.
  2. Add the vinegar, honey, salt and pepper.
  3. Serve.
Natasha Wright
May 26, 2023

The situation will in all likelihood turn sour even more because NATO cannot stop its woeful warmongering and waging endless wars.

We are living in turbulent times indeed. Vital volumes of history are being written right before our very eyes.

You may have noticed that “Dr Doom” is sending out doom-and-gloom messages yet again. Fortune reported back in April that Nouriel Roubini (aka Dr Doom) is warning of painful stagflation caused by a new Cold War with China and the balkanization of the global economy.

Al Jazeera also reported on Roubini’s downcast views, saying, “the world is headed for dark times in the next 20 years.”

No wonder Dr Doom, who leapt to financial stardom by predicting an economic catastrophe in 2008, is now warning the world that the conflict between the United States and China is simmering – and surely not only in the area of economics.

However, the global situation is so frighteningly serious that it will most surely crescendo into a double-dip recession for a plethora of other factors as well as from the prevailing sentiments in the Pentagon predicting a forthcoming war with China.

We are living through truly turbulent times. There are countless politically crucial things happening globally that boggle the mind. If one remembers the events only this January when Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, visited Japan and Korea, one can sense, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “something rotten in the state of NATOstan”.

During the course of both fleeting visits, Stoltenberg pledged to foster bilateral relations due to the historic challenges that NATO is dealing with, such as the war in Ukraine. He went on to brag that NATO already has established liaison offices globally, the main ones in New York and Vienna, and particularly indicative is the one in Ukraine. At its foundation at the inception of the Cold War in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization comprised 12 nations set up at the behest of the U.S. The military bloc now comprises 31 members and is increasingly appointing itself with a global role.

As a reminder, NATO already has permanent liaison offices in the following countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. A proposed Japan office caused considerable commotion.

NATO claims to be based on the right of states to determine their own foreign policy and to exercise collective self-defense. Despite lofty claims of upholding “democratic values”, the U.S.-dominated military alliance has been strong-arming a number of countries to join without their populations exercising a democratic mandate by holding referenda.

NATO likes turning its alleged allies into geopolitical dwarves held at gunpoint, regardless of their size or geography. Claims by the military bloc – that opening a regional liaison office in East Asia is merely an indicator of changing global security environment – sound euphemistic.

Some political analysts have observed that if NATO meanders into Asian affairs it will likely bring Russia and China even closer together. Ironically, the expansionism of the U.S.-led military bloc brings with it self-fulfilling prophecies. The global insecurity it incessantly warns about is of its own perception and making.

Nevertheless, Beijing is fully aware that if NATO places its head in a crouching tiger’s mouth, then one day it might get bitten off.

NATO has already brutally provoked the war in Ukraine, yet now the U.S.-led military vehicle wants to expand to the Far East. Its solicitous focus on Japan is particularly alarming given the vile history of Japanese genocidal aggression toward China.

That is a toxic thorn for China stuck into Asia and it will be therefore pulled out, according to the Global Times. The news outlet can be seen as reflecting the thinking of the political leadership in Beijing. The Chinese are thus fully aware of NATO’s encroaching thorns and they will not be sleep walking into disaster.

The Global Times continued: “Japan should not forget that while the Meiji Restoration made it richer and stronger, it also brought about the Westernization of Japan and its policy of leaving Asia and entering Europe, which at one time made the desire for empire extremely strong. The madness of pursuing Asian hegemony and sphere of influence led it to become a militaristic war-mongering demon, which brought deep disaster to Asian countries.”

Moreover, the Global Times’ editorial warned: “Japan wants to introduce NATO into Asia for its security. However, Japan’s security can never be achieved by relying on the military support of the U.S. or NATO. In fact, the more closely Japan cooperates with the U.S. or NATO militarily, the less it will obtain the security it wants, and the less likely it will be able to change its image as a geo-strategic dwarf.”

Don’t you just love how Beijing is calling a NATO spade a spade? “The sewage of the Cold War,” is how the Global Times referred to the U.S.-led military bloc.

And all that comes in perfect unison with Moscow’s increasingly contemptuous views of NATO as a threat to world security.

Lest we forget, the United States has instigated the vast majority (80 per cent) of the 200 or so armed conflicts that are estimated to have occurred globally from the end of World War Two until 2001. If we include the post-9/11 decades up to the present, the American responsibility for global violence might be as high as 90-95 per cent. And this is for a nation whose population is only 4.25 per cent of the globe. How utterly nefarious and condemnable is that odious record?

Shall we now mention some significant military mathematics? The Economist reports on research comparing military power of the U.S. vs China. The U.S. military budget is four times bigger than that of China. But the Chinese Navy surpassed the U.S. Navy as the biggest in the world sometime around 2020. The Pentagon continues using euphemisms, such as it considers China a “pacing challenge”.

The dilemma that appears to exasperate Western military commanders is whether China can continue on the same path and expand its military capacity to challenge the U.S. hegemony, or whether China’s relative power might be reaching its peak. The shipbuilding industry requires exorbitant investment since it requires a booming industrial base. The dilemma for the U.S. is its economic stagnation and the number of its warships are declining, in contrast to a sharp increase in the number of Chinese ships.

As for the total number of military vessels from aircraft carriers to submarines, frigates and destroyers, China surpasses the U.S. by a ratio of 390:296. It is forecast that China will have 400 warships in the next two years whereas the number of American ones will decrease to around 290. The ones which have fallen into obsolescence are to be written off. The Chinese advantage stems from having the biggest shipbuilding industry in the world. Some 44 per cent of all the ships built worldwide in 2021 were from Chinese yards.

China and its military forces are currently fully focused on Taiwan whereas the U.S. forces are scattered around globally in over 800 bases owing to untenable hegemonic ambitions. China has pledged to reclaim Taiwan if necessary by force, so tensions are running high on both sides.

Time though works in Beijing’s favor.

In the long run, the situation will in all likelihood turn sour even more because NATO cannot stop its woeful warmongering and waging endless wars.

China recently completed the sixth test run of the main rocket engine for its future crewed lunar missions, setting a new record in the sector, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

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main qimg 6ea5f161dbc6a5adf190e21aed62fe32

The 130-tonne class liquid oxygen kerosene rocket engine had a cumulative test run time of 3,300 seconds after this recent trial, a new record for the longest trial of a single 100-tonne class engine in China, according to the corporation.

As the main engine for the country’s future crewed lunar missions, the device needs higher comprehensive performance and reliability.

The trial broke the previous record for the longest test run, which was achieved less than six months earlier, according to the corporation, adding that the operating time of the engine in the trial exceeded its required mission by more than 10 times, which it said verifies its reliability.

Crewed lunar landing before 2030

China plans to achieve a crewed lunar landing before 2030, Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency, announced on May 29 at a press conference.

Lin said China recently initiated the lunar landing phase of its manned lunar exploration program, aiming to achieve China’s first manned landing on the moon by 2030 and carrying out lunar scientific exploration and related technological experiments.

According to Lin, China is also aiming to master key technologies, such as an Earth-moon manned round-trip, a short-term stay on the lunar surface, a human-robot exploration, performing multiple landing, roving, sampling, researching tasks, returning, and forming an independent capability of manned lunar exploration.

The international lunar research station

China formally established its lunar exploration “Project Chang’e” in 2004. In December 2020, the Chang’e-5 lunar probe brought back 1,731 grams of samples from the moon, marking the completion of the three-step lunar exploration program of orbiting, landing and returning.

In 2022, the China National Space Administration announced a plan to begin the fourth phase of the lunar probe program, including launching three missions dubbed the Chang’e-6, Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8, and the construction of an international lunar research station on the moon, said Wu Weiren, the chief designer of the lunar exploration program.

The Chang’e-6 mission is expected to retrieve lunar soil samples from the far side of the moon around 2024, which will be the first time humankind will collect soil samples from the far side of the Earth’s natural satellite.

The Chang’e-7 mission is prepared to land on the south pole of the moon, looking for traces of water, Wu said, adding that the Chang’e-8 mission, which is planned to be launched around 2028, is designed to work with the Chang’e-7 to lay the foundation for the building of a lunar research station on the south pole of the moon, and facilitate a series of experiments on lunar resources exploration and utilization.

The chief designer also said China welcomes partners and scientists from across the globe to join the construction of the international lunar research station on the moon, as the country plans to launch multiple spaceflight missions to finish the station’s basic structure by 2030.

Former FBI agent REVEALS truth in UFO whistleblower story

The abuse of press freedom was more evident in Hong Kong during the chaos a few years back, if that’s what was considered a victory.

That rare victory sent ripples through press freedom movement in Asia like when readers consider journalists as script writers for a fictional political drama.

True journalism is as dead as a do-do bird can be.

I hope you don’t mind, but I would like to tell you my story.

I was that 8 year old child once.

My father was an alcoholic, my mother severely depressed. I raised my sister and provided her with the emotional support when our parents were too immature and abusive to give that to us.

I would get beat up, thrown against the wall, kicked, punched repeatedly on the head by my father, his rage would shake my soul. My sister and I would drown ourselves in books, homework and play as quietly so we wouldn’t anger our father. Our mother was verbally abusive, she would break everything in our home.

My father would tell us to get lost, to get out of his way, to shut up, leave him alone, brain dead kids.

He hated us.

One day my sister and I went to the neighbors house and asked them if they had candy.

It was an elderly lady and her husband. They giggled and came out with candy for us and told us to have a good day.

A few days passed and we knocked to ask them again. This time they pulled out some chairs and sat down with us. We talked for a few hours. We told them about our hobbies, favorite books, favorite everything. They gave us candy and told us to go home and not be out so late.

The next day we visited the elderly couple and they played the piano for us. We were so amazed by their warm atmosphere, love and kindness.

Some days we would go visit and they would just sit on the front porch showing them our sweet rock or toy collections, our art and we would even sing classical songs with them.

With time they began to tell us they were busy, then they didn’t open the door anymore.

We wanted to do something nice for them and picked out flowers for them and left them at their doorstep.

I still look back and I’m thankful to have met such a sweet couple. I strive to be like them one day as an old lady with my husband.

You have no obligation, but for me those strangers meant something worth remembering in my rough childhood.

Low and behold…Blinkedin… Biden… Crazy….

I caught a low grade cold from my chief engineer. It’s like COVID only about 1/20 the intensity.

Maybe it is COVID, only a different intensity. Who knows.

But I’m on the mend.

I am finally starting to get better.

Still have a sore throat, but the headaches are lessening. The coughing is down, but the spitting of flem still continues.

I see light at the end of the tunnel.

I’m still living life.

Are you?

Still rebuilding the damage to the world-line templates. Who ever caused the damage over-estimated their abilities. Did not understand the nature of the task that they had before them, and had a elementary understanding on the nature of the template construction.

But damage is damage.

Oompaloomas still churning on, but the mushroom growths are still there, getting flattened, but it’s a lot of repairing that must take place. All is in good hands. Do not worry.

This low grade cold is giving me vibrant, and unusual dreams. Almost hallucinatory. There’s meaning in them… sort of… maybe…

Oh well.

Todays…

Not according the the Chinese government he isn’t.

Though all the Western government propaganda media say that he is.

main qimg 0a89bf70b9a4c69f2429174d602d241d
main qimg 0a89bf70b9a4c69f2429174d602d241d

NYT, CNN, AP, FOX, NYTImes, APnews are all reporting this.

Now read the article carefully.

  • He intends to visit China.
  • He is planning to go to China.
  • Nothing has been confirmed.
  • There are no travel plans.

And what about China?

Nothing at all on the Chinese news outlets. And most especially the Chinese government official website.

On the Chinese official websites we have this…

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main qimg 1d1f8d422cfbf46dc3678df62e0ae9df

Unless it is written on a Chinese website it is just another one of the endless string of lies.

Do NOT believe it.

As far as I can ascertain, there are no formally scheduled visits between China and the United States in any capacity what so ever.

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main qimg 65400b2ff386163a5e94e8a36c07b587

That’s correct. The AI model cannot confirm these events as they are fictional.

There is NOTHING.

I strongly suggest you stop listening to Western “news”. It’s all science fiction, with no basis on reality what so ever.

BUT…

A former CIA boss flew to China, and paved the way for his visit. Don’t ya know. And it was because of that plow-though that China accepted the visit.

And we all know what happened next…

Yep. That Biden clown-show and bullshit begins anew.

Best not even bother to read the “news”.

Meanwhile in the USA…

I-95 Bridge Collapse Near Philadelphia

A tanker fire underneath Interstate 95 northbound in Philadelphia has caused part of the highway to collapse.  Multiple lanes of the highway were reduced to rubble.  I-95 is closed in both north and southbound directions in that area.

Video from TV Station ABC-6 shows the scene:

The fire broke out just after 6 a.m. Sunday on Cottman Avenue, right underneath the I-95 overpass.

The scene is between Exit 32 for Academy Road and Exit 30 for Cottman Avenue in the Tacony section of the city.

Manholes have been exploding in the area because of the fire. Everyone is being asked to avoid the scene.

I-95 will remain shut down for an extended period of time.

Q: As a flight attendant, what’s the best thing you’ve seen another passenger do for another passenger or for you?

A: I’m not a flight attendant but was asked to answer the question.

I was on a flight from Utah to San Jose which was about 2 hours. There was a woman that was obviously a nervous new mom, her baby was less than 3 months old and she could not get him to settle down. The baby was crying and screaming disrupting everybody’s travel.

I was traveling alone, but I was 3rd of 8 children and I was changing diapers by the time I was five. After the seatbelt light went off I went and talked with her.

I discovered the baby was cold and gassy. She was exhausted hadn’t slept well. I asked her if she minded if I hold her baby for a while. I was doing the bounce step down the aisle not very far and burped her baby. After about 10 minutes I went to return the baby to the tired mom to find she was asleep.

I didn’t mind I enjoyed playing with babies I left her a note with my name and seat number. I entertained the baby the rest of the trip. it’s not like I can go anywhere mid flight on an airplane.

I half expected the mom-to-be furious that I wasn’t right there when she woke up. Instead she was really gracious and appreciated the nap and a break from being Mom 24/7.

I was playing peek-a-boo with him when I felt someone watching me. The baby was giggling, I turned over my shoulder to see Mom smiling and she thanked me profusely.

I actually appreciated the distraction.

We talked a bit heading to baggage and I gave her her more tips. We never saw each other again, but I like to think her trip went better and had an easier time managing a new baby after the experience.

In the 1913 study, The Sexual Impulse in Women, it was reported that about 75% of women suffered from “hysteria,” a condition with symptoms ranging from headaches to epileptic fits to verbal outbursts. It was essentially akin to epilepsy.

Any female behavior could be deemed as an indicator of hysteria, and the primary treatment was pelvic massage: clitoral stimulation was a palliative cure for this condition.

Who was supposed to handle this? The doctors, who apparently found no pleasure in doing so!

For Victorian women, clitoral stimulation was not even considered a sexual act, as it was believed that they were incapable of experiencing sexual desire.

If a woman moaned during a pelvic massage, she was said to be having a “hysterical paroxysm.” After reaching this state, patients would temporarily ease their issues.

The invention of the steam-powered vibrator came as a savior for these specialist doctors, relieving them from the hand-cramping work.

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main qimg 96e19ca390f693b7f5ada5da1cf1e30a lq

Little Mermaid BOMBS in China: U.S. calls Chinese RACIST!

Smothered Chicken

Here’s a real southern specialty. We love Smothered Chicken served over noodles or rice with a sprinkling of crisp-cooked bacon and shredded cheddar cheese (or whichever cheese you prefer). This recipe is easily halved. If you halve the recipe, you can make it in a large skillet instead of a Dutch oven.

smothered chicken 4 560x840
smothered chicken 4 560×840

Ingredients

  • 10 tablespoons vegetable or extra-virgin olive oil, divided
  • 2 pounds boneless skinless chicken breasts (or thighs) or 1 whole chicken, cut up
  • Salt and pepper
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour plus 4 tablespoons, separated
  • 2 medium size onions, sliced
  • 4 teaspoons minced garlic
  • 6 cups chicken stock
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 to 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
  • Rice or noodles for serving

Instructions

  1. Heat 8 tablespoons of oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat.
  2. Season chicken with salt and pepper to taste.
  3. Dredge chicken breasts lightly in 1 cup flour then brown in Dutch on both sides.
  4. When browned, remove chicken from Dutch oven and drain on paper towel. Set aside.
  5. Scrape the bottom of the Dutch oven to loosen all the browned bits.
  6. Add the onion slices to the Dutch oven and saute for about 5 minutes until a bit browned and tender.
  7. Add minced garlic and saute for 1 minute.
  8. Add remaining 2 tablespoons of oil to Dutch oven, then sprinkle on remaining 4 tablespoons flour.
  9. Allow the flour to brown, whisking constantly, then pour in chicken stock and water and whisk together.
  10. Turn heat to high to bring to a boil and season with salt and pepper.
  11. Whisk in Worcestershire sauce, then turn heat down to medium.
  12. Add the chicken back to the Dutch oven and cover with lid. Allow the sauce to thicken until it coats the back of a spoon and chicken is tender.
  13. Serve over rice or noodles. Garnish the top of each serving with crisp bacon bits and cheese, if desired.

Russia SEIZES BILLIONS In EU Assets

https://youtu.be/xcXMq0aiCEk

One Year in China

…is a lifetime in America

Jun 11, 2023

.

2023 06 11 14 57
2023 06 11 14 57

The stats have been audited, and here’s China’s 2021 track record:

  • Eliminated extreme poverty.
  • Achieved 98% home ownership.
  • Mastered Covid, with a death rate 0.6% of America’s.
  • Sold $140 billion retail online in 24 hours. Amazon’s record is $5 billion.
  • Made 55% of global energy savings.
  • Generated enough renewable energy, 1 TW, to power every home in China.
  • Produced a new billionaire and 300 millionaires every work day.
  • Completed new train lines in seven countries, including Laos’ first.
  • Ran 12,000 cargo trains to and from Europe, up 30% yoy.
  • Joined RCEP, the world’s biggest trade pact.
  • Launched the world’s first central bank digital currency.
  • Grew GDP by $1+ trillion PPP, 4x America’s.
  • Dominated scientific research and issued the most patents of any country.
  • Built three exascale computers + one for AI.
  • Brought two gas-cooled Pebble Bed nuclear power plants online.
  • Brought a cheap, safe thorium reactor online (no expensive, toxic uranium).
  • Certified a Covid treatment that reduces hospitalizations and deaths 78%.
  • Became the world’s largest movie market.
  • Built a programmable quantum computer 10,000x faster than Google’s.
  • Operated the first integrated, 3,000-mile, commercial quantum secure network.
  • Installed one-million 5G base stations. Tibet has better 5G service than New York.
  • Communicated between satellites 1,000x faster than radio waves, via lasers.
  • Successfully fired the world’s most powerful solid fuel rocket engine.
  • Flew three hypersonic missiles around the planet.
  • Released a fractional orbital bombardment missile while traveling 17,000 mph.
  • Commissioned three warships simultaneously to become the biggest navy by far.
  • Became the richest country on earth.

2023 06 11 14 58
2023 06 11 14 58

I will publish the 2022 list next week, and a 2023 half-year report next month.

Did reading the list make you pause and think? If it did, perhaps you would forward it to thoughtful friends.

She’s EXPOSING the truth in China, and they’re furious

Operation Z: The Last Chance Against Nazism

With thanks to Batiushka, the writer

Introduction: Two Civilisations

The tragic Washington-Moscow war which is starting to come to an end after nine long years on the battlefields of the Ukraine, where very many Ukrainian men are dying in futility, may well be entering its last year. The Western arming of the Kiev regime which began the war and prolonged it is the result of the attempt by the Western world to expand eastwards in yet another ‘Drang nach Osten’. Once more the West crossed over the civilisational line, which separates Western Secularism from Orthodox Christianity and runs through the far west of what is at present called the Ukraine. More exactly it runs through Galicia, formerly part of south-eastern Poland, formerly part of the ill-fated Habsburg Empire, centred in Lemberg/Lviv/Lvov. It is a civilisational line which should not be crossed. When France and its allies crossed it by invading what was then the Russian Empire in 1812, it led straight to the downfall of Napoleon. When Austro-Hungary crossed it by invading Serbia in 1914, it caused World War I and, ultimately the tragedy of 1917, when a Western atheist ideology was imposed by Non-Russians on the former Russian Empire and killed tens of millions of its hoodwinked peoples.

When Nazi Germany crossed that line by invading what was then the USSR in 1941, it led it to its suicidal downfall, the destruction of Berlin, and to lose World War II. After Washington crossed that same line by overthrowing the democratically-elected Ukrainian government in 2014, Washington suicidally signed the death-warrant of its own US-run, dollar-driven, unipolar Western world. For the centre of Western Secularism is today the American Empire elite in Washington, however much it disguises itself with euphemisms like the EU, NATO, the G7, the ‘free world’, the ‘international community’, the ‘rules-based order’ etc. And the centre of Orthodox Christian Civilisation, however far it has fallen, lapsed and been deformed and divided, is still in Moscow. Whenever Western Secularism, as ever inspired by the Pagan Roman example, has tried to expand eastwards in order to steal land and exploit resources, whether it was under Charlemagne, the Teutonic Knights, the Poles, Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler or Biden, it has failed. Such is the case again today. Some people never learn.

Why Civilisation is at a Turning-Point

At the Victory Day Parade in Moscow on 9 May 2023 President Putin stated that ‘Civilisation is at a turning-point’. He was referring to the war in the Ukraine between the West and the Rest that began in 2014 and declared that the neocon ambition of American hegemony is ‘insane’, adding that, ‘any ideology of superiority is criminal’. He also stated that ‘the globalist elites keep insisting on their exceptionalism; they pit people against each other, divide societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia and aggressive nationalism, destroying values that make humans human’. He described Washington’s ‘rule-based order’ as ‘a system of robbery, violence and suppression on the international stage’. He compared this to the Russian view, the view of the vast majority, that there are ‘no unfriendly peoples in East or West’, that ‘the Ukrainian people are hostage to a coup d’etat and a regime that is in the hands of the West’. However, he promised that ‘we shall defeat terrorism’. On 23 May, he repeated that ‘Russia will end the war that the West started in the Ukraine’.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the neocon supporters of the Neo-Nazis are repeating the mistake of the old Nazis. The latter thought that they could defeat Russia so then they could move on to the (as they saw it) bigger problem of defeating the Anglo-Americans, not realising that they were being defeated outright in Russia. Today, the Neo-Nazis similarly want to move on to the (as they see it) bigger problem of defeating China, not realising that they too are being defeated outright in Russia. Blinded by the same hubris as the old Nazis, today’s neocon propagandists do not understand this. Russia is not at war; if it were at war, it would have destroyed everything before it, the whole infrastructure of the Ukraine would long ago have been wiped off the face of the earth. This is a military operation to free Russian-speaking Ukraine and demilitarise and denazify the rest of it. This is why it is preserving civilian lives, towns and infrastructure with great care. This is an existential war for Russia; for the neocons it is only a war for their hubris and vanity. Civilisation is at a turning-point because the threat from Washington is to destroy all Civilisations.

Russophobia And The ‘War’ That Could End Tomorrow

Where does Western Russophobia come from? It is very ancient, for it began with ‘The Father of Europe’, Charlemagne, whose prize, unsurprisingly, was awarded to the Ukrainian actor-president on 14 May in Aachen, together with another 2.7 billion euros of German military equipment. It comes from the same hatred that the West feels towards the Muslim world. The (Orthodox) Christian world and the Muslim world are not exotic and therefore cannot be mocked as the West mocks distant Civilisations, but are the nearest geographical rivals to the Western world – therefore they must be destroyed. We can see this in old history; the Crusades were directed against Muslims in Spain, then in the Middle East and North Africa, but also against Christians in Constantinople (sacked in 1214 by barbaric Western troops) and then in Russia, which the equally barbaric Teutonic Knights tried to destroy in 1242.

However, all of this was only after the long centuries when the Western elite had murdered and raped its way through the Western peoples, enslaving in their barbaric feudalism Gauls, Saxons, Celts, Mozarabs, Milanese, English and Slavs alike. Sadly, the barbarians are not, as some imagine, at the gates, they have been in control from the outset for over a thousand years, tearing away the people from their saints. Deceit has always been their way. ‘Castles, dungeons and torture-chambers are good for you’, claimed the barbarian sadists. But modern Western Democracy is only the same castle racketeering – vote for us or else. Thus, on the 5 May, the notorious ‘we are the garden, they are the jungle’ Borrell, the European Union’s racist foreign policy chief, said in Florence, ‘If I stop supporting the Ukraine, certainly the war will finish soon’. ‘Ukraine will fall to the invading Russian forces in a matter of days without military support from Western countries’. His words denote the intensely aggressive and warmongering mentality inherent in the barbarian Western elite. They could end conflict and death, but they refuse to do so, willing to fight until the last hoodwinked Ukrainian is dead. Indeed, only the unhoodwinked will be left alive.

Operation Z

The Russian Operation is called Operation Z, named after the last letter of the alphabet, because it is the last chance for Civilisation to survive the Anti-Civilisation of the Western world. And any Civilisation means the Global Majority, called the Global South. The Russian Federation deals with the Global Majority, from which the Western world has isolated itself. Thus, when President Macron declared that Russia is becoming the vassal of China, what he means is that France long ago became the vassal of the USA, whereas Russia and China are part of the multipolar world. Similarly, those in the Western world like the German Chancellor Scholz, who state that the Ukraine is defending ‘Western values’ condemn themselves. The US-installed Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev has persecuted the Church and closed hundreds of them, imprisoned minorities, murdered Russians and banned other political parties. Yes, these are ‘Western values’ – Nazism is a unique Western value and ideology. Several German, EU and Canadian politicians are indeed the grandchildren of Nazis, some of them were members of the SS. This then is the meaning of Operation Z – the last chance to save the Global Majority, but also the last chance to save the Western world from itself.

On 20 May 2023 Artiomovsk/Bakhmut was at last liberated by pro-Russian forces after eight months of fighting and fifty thousand Ukrainian dead. The leaders of the G7 Western ghetto, meeting at that very moment for a weekend in Hiroshima, where a US president committed the genocide of Japanese civilians 78 years before, were not at all pleased and so pretended that the liberation had not taken place. Its mention in the Western media is strictly forbidden and censored, as is the critical condition of General Zaluzhny, the seriously wounded head of the Kiev Armed Forces. However, the introverted G7 itself is increasingly irrelevant to the real world, a relic from the past. The world has moved on since 1945, which is what the G7 is about, as it is formed from the Western victors and the two vanquished nations from that past era. Once more, however, the G7 pretended not to notice its own irrelevance and went on navel-gazing through its World War II eyes. There is no greater example of this than its fantasy that it can defeat Russia through its Kiev-based puppets, then overthrow the highly popular President Putin and divide up Russia between various transnational corporations.

Conclusion: The Prophecy of Atlantis

The result of the Western arming of the Kiev forces is that what began as a small police operation to liberate the people of the Donbass has become little short of a World War. It is Russia versus the Combined West. Russia has concluded that nothing save total victory will make the Americans and their British and EU poodles understand that it means business and there will be a neutral, sovereign Ukraine independent of US control, so no longer a hostile neighbour. As President Vladimir Putin told the Russian Parliament last July: ‘We have already heard a lot about the West wanting to fight us ‘to the last Ukrainian.’ This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people. But everyone should know that, by and large, we have not started anything in earnest yet’. What will the USA do once it has lost in the Ukraine? It will just abandon it, just as it abandoned Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and return to its big island across the ocean 4,000 miles away. Then the world will be free.

Here will be prepared the Second Atlantis. Yes, Atlantis, for Plato’s story of Atlantis was never history, but in fact a prophetic warning for the future. The story of the fictional island of Atlantis was an allegory about hubris and concluded with Atlantis falling out of favour with the gods and sinking into the Atlantic Ocean.  As it seems now, this story is precisely about the USA, which is the real Atlantis, which will sink beneath the waves of hubris and depravity. However, the story is even more than that, it is also about all those who associate themselves with the USA, for example, in Western Europe, not forgetting the Russian oligarchs and traitors who so admire the West that they choose to live in New York, London, Tel Aviv or elsewhere in the Western world. This is the warning and, alarmingly, it is almost too late for it to be heard. Most are not listening to the prophecy, but the writing is on the wall. Time is almost up.

India rejects US’ offer ahead of PM Modi visit:

'Not suitable, has no intention of joining NATO plus...'

The critical remarks from India came weeks after a powerful Congressional Committee recommended strengthening NATO Plus by including India.

Article HERE

.

How important covering up is.

When all hell breaks loose, people are screaming, running for their guns, trying to get to their cars, or trying to reach the top floor of tall buildings for some reason.

But what if you don’t have a gun, or you can’t get to a car, and you get cornered by a zombie?

What’s your best defense? Your first one? Before you even pick up a weapon?

What you’re wearing on your body, that’s what.

Zombies attack with their teeth. Human teeth, as I’m sure you’re aware not the best at biting through live flesh.

As long as you cover your body with something that can withstand human teeth, you’ll be much safer.

One type of body covering that can be acquired easily and is effective against zombie attacks is the good old motorcycle gear.

Motorcycle pants, jackets, and gloves are designed to prevent road rash injuries and are very tough.

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main qimg 47a282db17cd40cc5d00a24e4f20afa3 lq

(Maybe lose the heavy helmet).

Good running shoes can also come in handy.


Covering the body, especially the arms, neck, and legs can be very useful, and may be your last line of defense.

When hit in the face with a zombie apocalypse, let’s always remember to cover up, then we can run screaming for our guns or cars or the nearest tall buildings.

Have you ever found a baby lying in the middle of the street crying, all alone, hungry, not getting the love it needs, not getting the food it needs, starving and dying?

This is how narcissist parents treat their children. And they learned this from their parents.

Narcissists do not care for anyone or anything but themselves! They have no idea how to CARE or LOVE anyone.

They are 100 percent occupied with their own wants, interests, desires and needs.

The baby has to be JUST like THEM.

Love is conditional. It is based 100 percent on how the narcissist wants the child to be.

The narcissist feels that they can show the world what a PERFECT PARENT they are!!!

The baby is not allowed to be a seperate person with their own wants needs and desires.

And if that baby does have any wants, needs or desires of their own then the narcissist feels abandoned and will PUNISH that child to conform to what THEY want need and desire.

If the child doesn’t conform or does doesn’t matter (confusing right!!). This is a method of coercion to control everyone in the family.

EVERYONE in the family will do the narcissists bidding. These words are not spoken, the child either knows how to read the parents mind or harsh treatment will be brought down.

If the child does do what the parents want it is belittled and double binded into subconscious submission as the narcissist needs to have IT (the child is an object to a narcissist) to regulate their emotions.

Without the child there the narcissist cannot regulate their emotions and will feel empty. They will absolutely panic if there isn’t someone around to regulate their emotional state of mind.

Essentially it’s like the child as a real person doesn’t exist and that it’s just an extension of the parents wants, needs and desires.

Try growing up in a family like this and being able to have any semblance of self…you won’t.

You will have turned into a false self to please the narcissist parents as a survival mechanism.

Either that or a way to overly empathetic person with no idea what a boundary is or why their gut feels so horrible around the narcissist. These people struggle with destroyed wants, needs and desires too.

But instead of everything being all about them their lives are all about others.

Both are the survival mechanisms of growing up in a narcissist family.

Both are like leaving a newborn child on their own to fend for themselves.

Both have not received and do not know how to receive real love.

P.S.-

Unless you have grown up in this kind of family dynamic you do not truly know what it is like in any way. I have been receiving a lot of comments from people saying “This isn’t true, they were just spoiled children, that’s what forms narcissists!” From my own experiences this is a half truth. It’s difficult enough to know you are simultaneously being spoiled and abused at the same time let alone for an outsider to understand this dynamic. That’s why they call it Covert…I have never talked to a narcissist who was just formed from being spoiled. It is a combination of the two (or just abuse). Most people will not see any abuse, just a rich spoiled child. Well, it’s Covert (hidden). And the child has no idea he’s been abused let alone that he’s a narcissist.

The US is dangerously playing with fire off the coast of China

MOSCOW, June 5, 2023, RUSSTRAT Institute. The Indo-Pacific Command of the US Armed Forces accused the Chinese Air Force that a Chinese fighter jet made an aggressive maneuver against an American aircraft over the South China Sea on May 26. The pilot of a Chinese fighter jet intercepted a spy plane, flying in close proximity to the RC-135, and creating a turbulence zone for the frightened American. According to Pentagon officials, the United States aircraft was simply ” performing a routine safe mission in the area.”

On June 3, the following conflict situation occurred between the PLA and the US Navy. The US Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon and the Canadian Navy’s Halifax-class frigate HMCS Montreal have entered the Taiwan Strait. According to Beijing, the American ship ignored the appeals of the Chinese side, so the PLA Navy destroyer “clipped” the US ship, which forced the Americans to change course and reduce speed to avoid the crash, and then together with the Canadian frigate to leave the strait zone.

The US press, at the suggestion of its military, inflates the news about “dangerous maneuvers of a Chinese ship 150 meters in front of the nose of an American destroyer.” What the US military did off the coast of China, 12 thousand kilometers from their native land, Western media do not report.

The official representative of the Ministry of Defense of the People’s Republic of China, Wu Qian, called the actions of the Americans a provocation and an invasion of the zone of vital interests of China. At a meeting on the sidelines of the Singapore Security Summit, Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu said: “If someone tries to separate Taiwan from China, the Chinese military will not hesitate for a second, and China will be reunited.”

Lloyd Austin, for his part, indicated that the United States will continue to use warships and aircraft in international waters and skies near China, as well as continue to support Taiwan. Is it any wonder that Li Shangfu, who is under US sanctions, refused to hold any talks with his American counterpart?

It is noteworthy that shortly before the scandals described, CIA Director Bill Burns made a trip to China. It was allegedly about stabilizing relations after the February incident with a spy balloon, which Washington considered Chinese.

Given that Burns traveled to Moscow shortly before Russia was forced to launch a CDF on the territory of the former Ukrainian SSR, it can be assumed that with adequate negotiations (on an equal footing, with the construction of an honest dialogue that takes into account the interests of all parties) The US representatives have big problems. This was also noticed by The American Thinker.

Analysts of the American publication explain the inconsistent, rude and unproductive policy of the White House by the incompetence and incompetence of the Biden administration.

They are echoed in the editorial office of The National Interest. They believe that the United States should not and cannot afford to seek primacy everywhere — for geographical reasons alone, American influence in remote regions cannot be dominant, and this is natural. Thus, the United States is unable to dictate its will to the Global South, especially in view of the weakening of American influence in Central Asia.

Why is the United States so uncompromising and aggressive? Americans have always lived at the expense of other countries. Unleashing wars on the territory of third countries, they received dividends from this. Times have changed, but the White House’s tactics have remained the same. The dissonance is amplified by the interests of the ruling circles of the United States, which for a long time do not coincide with the national interests of the former “hegemon”. For the implementation of domestic policy, the US authorities need extra-constitutional power, which can give a new military conflict. Therefore, Washington is mindlessly seeking war, even though the United States is not ready for it. Needless to say, such “games” put the world on the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

I was in a second rate art gallery and for some reason he had a bin labelled $2. I asked why $2 and he said it was better than just tossing it all away. Most of the stuff was awful and then I found it. This piece and I took it to the gallery owner and asked if he was sure. He said, give the me the $2 and it is yours. I took it home, and then studied the seal that I had seen in the bottom corner, it had been displayed in an art exhibit at the Columbia Exposition of 1892. I love this piece, I have had it on my various walls for 40 years now and an art appraiser asked me if I wanted to auction it. No, it is going to my family when I depart. Best $2 spent ever for me. The seal in the corner is just below the matting, not viewed here.

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Oh man, I almost did get fired for this…

About twenty years ago I used to teach kindergarten. There was a boy in my class, “D”, who had a rough home life. His mother was out of the picture because of intermittent jail time, and his father worked constantly as a car mechanic. Dad usually had a girlfriend to help him out with D. These women came and went before D had time to bond with them. It was just as well.

As the one female who spent the most consistent time with D, I became somewhat of a surrogate mother. Besides being a little rowdy and precocious, D was a good little guy with a big smile and freckles on his face. My heart went out to him. We had a successful kindergarten year together.

The following year my grade assignment changed to a first-second combination class. I got to loop (bring students from the previous year) a few students. Of course I brought D with me…he needed the stability of being with me another year. Well one day we were all singing and being kind of silly and D just would not stay in his chair. I teased him by saying I’d tape him to his seat if he didn’t sit down. Of course he didn’t, and begged me to tape him to his chair. I was caught up in the moment of silliness with all the kids and brought out the duct tape and wrapped the tape once around his upper thighs to his chair. There was nothing punitive about it. That little rascal stood up, chair and all, and danced with his back end wiggling with the chair attached. The rest of the kids thought this was hilarious, and D got a moment of attention that he enjoyed.

The chair dance lasted only a minute before I cut him loose, then we all left for an assembly. The kids were still giggling over all of this when the principal asked what was so funny. So I told him what just happened, and before I knew it I was being called into his office. The district HR person was there, as were the district attorneys and my union President. Needless to say I was reprimanded on a scale you wouldn’t believe. I was told that there was no statute of limitations on my actions and that it would stay in my personnel file indefinitely. I was basically told that if I stepped out of line again, I’d be fired. I was told not to talk about it with anyone, especially D’s father (whom they’d contacted), and never to have duct tape in my classroom-EVER! I felt like a criminal with duct tape being my weapon of choice.

In the days that followed D’s father tried repeatedly to contact me, and after no response sent me a letter saying he was worried about me and hoped D didn’t get me in trouble. I so wanted to reach out to assure him that D had done nothing wrong, but I would’ve been fired had I done so.

Fast forward fifteen years and a 20 year-old D came to visit me at school one day. We laughed about what happened and I sent him on his way with a job reference.

Yes, I understand the seriousness of my actions even though I meant no harm. Would it happen again? Not likely. It took me a few years of walking on eggshells to keep my reputation clean. And I still don’t keep duct tape in my classroom…

Southern Hamburger Pie

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1371591159055

Ingredients

  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 1 pound ground chuck
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • 1 small can corn or green beans, drained (optional)
  • 1 (9-inch) frozen pie shell
  • 5 slices Velveeta cheese, about 4 to 5 ounces
  • 1 can flaky biscuits

Instructions

  1. Begin thawing pie crust. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  2. Cook ground beef and onion in a large skillet on medium heat, breaking up the beef with the back of a spoon, and cook until onions are soft.
  3. Drain excess fat and season with salt and pepper to taste.
  4. Add corn or green beans if using.
  5. Put meat mixture into the pie shell and evenly distribute the cheese over the top.
  6. Separate biscuits and layer in a circular pattern over the pie, covering it completely (you may not need all the biscuits).
  7. Cut a few small “steam slits” in the top and bake for about 20 minutes until golden brown.

Serves 4.

Make them happy, nothing should make you happier than to see them being themselves an dhabing an authentic smile on their face. Always find ways to make their life easier, and be there for them, not with advice, but with arms open and ears ready to hear without intervening or trying to fix the problem.

General of the Russian Army Valery Gerasimov talks with China’s General Li Shangfu

Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, First Deputy Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation General of the Army Valery Gerasimov during talks with counterpart Li Shangfu from the People’s Republic of China:

‘Comrade General. It is a pleasure to welcome you.

First of all, I would like to congratulate you on your appointment to the post of Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China and wish you success in your responsible post in defending the motherland, strengthening its defensive capacity, and further modernising the People’s Liberation Army of China.

I am confident that your extensive experience will aid in the growth of the People’s Liberation Army as well as the expansion of military cooperation between our countries.

The visit to Moscow in April by Minister of Defence of the People’s Republic of China General Li Shangfu was of great significance for the development of defence cooperation between Russia and China.

We appreciate the fact that after his appointment to his post General Li Shangfu chose Russia as the first country for his foreign trip, as did Chinese President Xi Jinping, who paid a state visit to Russia in March.

President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping have confirmed that the Russian-Chinese comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction are at the highest level.

Against the backdrop of recent global events, the decisions taken constitute long-term national development and security goals enshrined in our leaders’ joint statement, including issues of expanding military cooperation.

Coordination between Russia and the People’s Republic of China in the international arena has a stabilising effect on the world situation.

An example of this is joint military exercises both bilaterally and within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and ADMM Plus that promote the deepening of positive defence contacts.

The practice of joint operational and combat training by the Russian Armed Forces and People’s Liberation Army of China should continue to be a priority in the future.

I am convinced that today’s talks will serve to further strengthen the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership in the defence sphere.

I’d want to take this occasion to encourage you to visit Russia whenever it is convenient for you’.

Article HERE

—o0o—

The Russian Military and the Chinese Military have open doors between them.  On the Russian side, we know what is happening and watch it daily.  On the Chinese side, the pressure, from the US and a new NATO office in Japan, is being ratcheted up unbelievably.  The latest:

The commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral John Aquilino, highlighted the military’s threatening posture towards China, speaking at the annual meeting of the National Committee on US-China Relations last month. The group is known for encouraging engagement between the world’s two largest economies.

In yet another confirmation that the White House has overturned the long-standing “strategic ambiguity” policy regarding Taiwan, Aquilino went so far as to say President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have tasked him to win a war against China if Beijing attacks the island.

“What I can tell you is the secretary and the president have tasked me with two missions. The first is to prevent this conflict. And then the second one is if I fail at Mission One to be ready and prepared to fight and win… the United States military is manned, trained, equipped, postured and ready to execute both of those missions,” the INDOPACOM chief said.  https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/indopaccom-chief-the-us-is-ready-to-fight-and-win-a-war-with-china/

As I’ve explained before, Taiwan is the word, it is the name.  It is easily remembered by most that actively support a war against China.  This war, and the possibility that there will be one is actively being prepared for.  We see the US encroaching in the Asia-Pacific, under the name Indo-Pacific and doing their preparatory work, not only regarding Taiwan, but the full first island chain and various countries are being set up as war proxies, militarised and weaponized.  Think of the Philippines and South Korea, Japan, and Australia being the bigger ones.  It is quite actively being discussed.

This war is planned as a boots-on-the-ground war + proxies.  It may look at the moment as if it is a lost cause and the US + NATO are not prepared and from our circles, the ability to fight a war is questionable.

Yet preparations are being done actively and this is why Chinese and Russian militaries hold joint aerial strategic patrols in the Asia-Pacific region.  The last patrol consisted of Chinese H-6K bombers and two Russian Tu-95 bombers, escorted by two unidentified Chinese fighter jets.  They flew together over the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan on the 6th of June, just a few days ago.

What is not generally known, is that this is not an exercise, but Chinese reports call this a patrol amidst rising tensions and US provocations in the region.  The Shangri-La dialogue was taking place and what is also not generally known is that a PLA Navy flotilla consisting of a 055 large destroyer Anshan and a 054A frigate Linyi sailed from the East China Sea through the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan a day before the aerial patrol.  In addition, the Russian Pacific Fleet launched an exercise in the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk on the 5th, sending over 60 warships and 35 aircraft, according to a statement released by Russia’s Defense Ministry on the day.

Was there military coordination between the Russian Pacific Fleet and the PLA Navy flotilla and the aerial patrol?  I don’t have anything that specifically tells me so, except the readout of the conversation between Valery Gerasimov and Li Shangfu that talks about strengthening the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership in the defense sphere and the open-door policy.  I have a musing on probability though.  I’d love to see the document between the militaries where they spell out the probability of kinetic action in the region vs expected timing.  One would think there is such a document and one would think it is a continually updated document, not passive.

Currently, there are large-scale PLA drills around Taiwan and Xi Jinping called on Chinese border troops to enhance their capabilities in border defense and control to forge a “great wall of steel” along the country’s borders.

Yep. My family likes to shop at resale shops or yard sales. We play a game called Who got the best find today. Often Ill call my dad and say I won resale shopping today! Then detail what I found and why its a win. Or my mom will call me and tell me what they found.

There is no guilt though. Its all fun. Someone donated it or didn’t want it. We did.

The BEST story though is about a 1956 Harry Ferguson (Yes HARRY not Massey) tractor my dad found at an auction. It wouldn’t start. He walked over looked it over but didn’t touch anything. There were a bunch of Good Ole Boys standing around talking about it and why it wouldn’t run. My dad ended up paying about 50$ for it. A lot of money 45 years ago for a lawn ornament. After he took ownership he walked over fiddled with a wire and the thing started up. He says he got out of there as fast as he could he thought they might lynch him.

4 years back i and my dad went to purchase a pair of shoes from a footwear shop nearby. There was a man with a great height and physique , around the age of 30 sitting there holding a girl child of around 4 years. He kept seeing my dad for few seconds , later while going back he gave a pleasant smile and asked my dad

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“You are from’ x’ village right, with the home in the outskirts of the village”.

My dad was surprised and said “ya but sorry i couldn’t make out, how do u know me?”

He spoke with the calmness , pleasant smile on his face”i was one among the construction workers who built your house( he said it in a local slang ಗಾರೆ ಕೆಲಸ ).i used to sleep there only at night.I can’t forget those days. Happy to see you”

My dad was surpised hearing this”ohh, u still remember it. What are u doing now?”but my dad was not able to recognize him as it was around 10 yrs back

He said in the most humble way”i am the circle inspector here , came to purchase slippers for my daughter” and asked whether i was his daughter to which my dad replied yes , that man continued,’she was a small child when i last saw her, she is a grown up girl now ‘with the brotherly love in his eyes.

How can someone be so humble, the one who is a circle inspector now, recognized my dad and said that he had worked as a construction worker for his home without any hesitation even when my dad failed to recognize him. That humbleness he had when he spoke was just inspirational.

He remind me of one saying”wherever you go, whatever you become you should never forget your roots, you should be proud of them”

To all those who are asking who is a circle inspector, he is a police officer who is in charge of 2 or more police stations, he supervises the subinspectors of those stations.

One of the weirdest things about Japan is the way Japanese treat the watermelon.

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main qimg b09a170df10780c2b79c348950ffe8f6 lq

First of all, a watermelon, or “suika” is classified as a “vegetable” by many Japanese, not a fruit. If an English teacher asks “What’s your favorite vegetable?” to a student, a very likely answer will be “watermelon” (though “strawberry” is another popular choice). This is because traditionally, in Japan, “fruit” grew on trees and “vegetables” were basically any type of plant that grew above ground but not on a tree.

Second of all, in the summer time, Japanese children play the game suika wari (スイカ割, “smashing the watermelon”). They are blindfolded and given either a baseball bat (see above) or a wooden sword. The first child to successfully smash open the watermelon is the winner. It’s like smashing a piñata, basically.

The Densuke Watermelon is a rare “black” watermelon that is often auctioned off to the elite. It can go for $6,000. Don’t use that in a game of suika wari!

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main qimg 2a001893925cd560f41dd9252e09f557 lq

No, your eyes don’t deceive you. That watermelon really is almost US$200. Don’t knock it over… It is a watermelon to be *revered*.

China Orders 15,000 Iranian Drones

A very serious development has taken place: China has placed an order with Iran for 15,000 “Shaheed 136” military drones, with differing types of engines for different war fronts. The entities with whom China expects war?

According to a Commander with the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) which accepted the order, China is preparing for war in Taiwan, Japan, and Australia.

Iran has created a huge business opportunity for themselves selling these drones, which appear to be incredibly effective for Russia inside Ukraine right now.

Based on how many they are already selling to Russia, Iran must already have tens of thousands; which should give pause to their pipsqueak, but big-mouthed neighbor, Israel.

Historically, this is interesting because ancient Persians were known for shooting crazy amounts of arrows into the sky against their enemies to completely overwhelm them.

The quiet and confusion before the next steps

Never trust a single word that comes out of the (United States) lying machine. 

What America has agreed to amounts to this: the US will sanction and ban whoever, whatever and whenever they like because they're defending American values and their rule of law, but they will not do so when they need to buy Chinese rare earths and EV batteries. 

Meanwhile, China should not decouple by continuing to buy American corn and low-end chips from Micron. 

This is American fair and free trade. 

It's a Kabuki show and China is playing along. It's a game two can play. Anyone who believes in a single word these liars say are morons and deserves to be scammed, pillaged and plundered. 

-PM

Use this time to take care of yourself.

Listen to me.

Found a new way to make Double Cheese Pizza! No kneading! Incredibly easy! Best pizza in the world

China trashes US request for restoration of military communication

China suspended regular military contacts with US in August 2022 after the then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. However, the problem existed even before her visit
Umang Sharma June 21, 2023 14:46:00 IST
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China has clearly denied one of US’ requests of restoring military-to-military contacts between the two countries. During his recent visit to Beijing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeatedly raised the issue of military communications but was rebuffed by the Chinese.

Blinken said it was “absolutely vital” US and China have these kind of communications and it was something the United States will keep working on.

Why China does not want to restart military communications?

China suspended regular military contacts with US in August 2022 after the then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. However, the problem existed even before her visit.

The US says since 2021, China has declined or has failed to respond to over a dozen requests from the Department of Defence for top-level dialogues.

Meanwhile, China said it has refused to restart military communications as sanctions have been imposed by US. Beijing was possibly referring to sanctions on its defence minister, Li Shangfu.

The sanctions on Li were part of a broad package of measures against Russia, even before its invasion of Ukraine, imposed in 2018 over his involvement in China’s purchase of combat aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles from Moscow.

Yang Tao, Chinese Foreign Ministry official overseeing North American affairs at a press briefing earlier this week said, “The US side is surely aware of why there is difficulty in military-to-military exchanges.”

“One of the reasons is unilateral sanctions against the Chinese side. They first need to remove impediments and create conditions for military-to-military cooperation,” Yang said.

Earlier this month, Li declined an invitation to speak with US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of a defence forum in Singapore.

“The US says the sanctions don’t prevent Li from holding talks with US officials, but culturally, Chinese officials may expect a form of public remedy before agreeing to re-engage after sanctions,” Li Nan of the National University of Singapore said.

“You impose sanctions on the guy, and then you also want to have dialogue with the guy from the Chinese perspective, that doesn’t make any sense,” Nan said.

Why US wants to restore military contacts?

Washington wants to restore military contacts as it wants to avoid an incident similar to one in 2001 when the US Navy aircraft and a Chinese interceptor jet collided in mid-air off the Chinese island of Hainan. The incident led to the death of the Chinese pilot and the US aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing in Hainan without Chinese approval.

There is also fear among the US and other nations of a potential accident involving the militaries of United States and Chinese that could spiral out of control.

Tension between Beijing and Washington has increased over the recent months, including a suspected Chinese spy balloon over US territory.

Earlier in June, a Chinese warship unexpectedly cut in front of a US destroyer in the Taiwan Strait, forcing it to slow down to avoid impact. Few days ago, a Chinese fighter jet flew in front of a US warplane over the South China Sea in a manoeuvre the US described as unnecessarily aggressive.

“The most important thing for the US side is to avoid these accidents,” said Nan.

France to Join BRICS? This Changes EVERYTHING!

Southern Summertime Lemonade

If desired, a few strips of lemon peel may be added at the beginning for a more intense flavor.

Basil Lemonade 1
Basil Lemonade 1

Ingredients

  • 2 fresh lemons (about 1/3 cup juice)
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 quart water
  • Sprigs of mint
  • Ice cubes

Instructions

  1. Squeeze lemons; add sugar, water and mint. Shake well and refrigerate for flavors to mellow (1/2 to 6 hours).
  2. Pour over ice cubes and serve.

This will make 4 large glasses.

I was a middle manager in a multi billion dollar corporation. One of my direct reports told me that he thought I was “making too much” of my husband’s brain cancer. Meaning that the occasional schedule changes I had to make because of emergencies or treatment were inconveniencing said direct report. He felt like he was an authority on such things because some relative of his who had cancer (not a terminal frontal lobe brain tumor) didn’t have emergencies and managing it was “easy”.

And I didn’t lose my cool. I didn’t scream at him. I remained as professional as I could given how profoundly offended I was. But I made sure to pass him off to someone else to manage. I wasn’t ever going to be impartial again. I’m sure karma will catch up with him one day.

Some tweets

Hua Chunying 华春莹 on Twitter: "1⃣If unexpected military conflict were to arise between China and the U.S., it would not be caused by China taking provocative moves of sending military vessels and jets to LA or anywhere off the coast of California." / Twitter

https://twitter.com/SpokespersonCHN/status/1670050207604813825

Hua Chunying 华春莹 on Twitter: "Rather, it would be triggered by US warships or warplanes close to China’s territory. In dealing with a country the size of China, mutual respect is the ground rule." / Twitter

https://twitter.com/SpokespersonCHN/status/1670050210339500033

Woman Near-Death Experience After Ending Her Life Reveals Future And A Memory Sealed Into My Soul

Who are the main customers of Chinese-made vehicles?

Russia and Mexico are top buyers of Chinese automobiles
Jun 21, 2023
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Official figures showed that China overtook Japan to become the biggest car exporter in the world in the first quarter of 2023, shortly after surpassing Germany as the second largest in 2022.

As both the largest automobile market and exporter, where were the Chinese cars exported to? How much is the potential of the Chinese market and car manufacturers?

Caijing Magazine, China’s leading economy study magazine, analyzed the latest trends in the car market and warned car manufacturers of the past mistakes made by Chinese exporters, and highlighted the significance of favorable foreign trade policies, cost-effective products, and innovative momentum in new technologies. Your Ginger River believes it is a worthwhile piece for anyone interested in the market to dive into.

Some highlights first:

  • In 2022, Russia imported approximately 117,000 passenger vehicles from China, a 40 percent increase compared to the previous year. China has become the main source of imported passenger vehicles in Russia.
  • Mexico’s position as the second-largest buyer of Chinese automobiles among the top ten countries is surprising, since Mexico itself is a major automotive producer, ranking seventh globally in terms of production volume.
  • In Australia or Southeast Asia, Chinese automobiles possess an advantage in terms of price over European brands. They are gradually capturing consumers who used to buy from Honda, Toyota, Mazda, and other manufacturers, offering them affordable vehicles.
  • In Middle East countries, customized designs tailored to the local environment and affordable quality services are key factors contributing to the popularity of Chinese automobiles.
  • Although China ranks first in total automobile exports globally, it cannot be simply considered an automotive export powerhouse … Chinese automobiles still face the perception of being “disorganized, weak, and small” in overseas markets, and the negative perceptions of “low quality, low price, and copying” are deeply rooted.
  • In summary, stable supply chains, competitive pricing, advantages in NEV research and development, and preferential foreign trade policies are reasons for the export achievement of Chinese automobiles overseas.
  • However, the obstacles currently impeding the competitors will inevitably be overcome in due course. The question of how Chinese automakers can boost their competitiveness beyond just offering cost-effectiveness remains to be answered with time.
.

US tried everything, threats, intimidation, economic and technological sanctions and embargoes, diplomatic and military encirclement, nothing worked, it has to do something, sanctions is the only thing US can do, nothing else.

At this point, even war cannot stop China.

Even if U.S. wins an air-sea battles, it cannot stop China from producing, energy, food, natural resources just keep on pouring in from Russia and Central Asia. The only way to stop China is a total land invasion, but there is no place to land troops into China, all land entries are blocked. It is suicidal to invade China in a land war.

Absolutely, you should!

I remember reading about a case where a passenger had seen an accumulation of ice on the wings and alerted a flight attendant, who told him that the captain was probably aware of the ice accumulation and knew how to manage it.

In fact, the captain wasn’t aware of the ice.

The plane then stalled and crashed.

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Never assume that the crew is aware.

Once, a friend of mine, who works in the aviation field, saw a streak of liquid leaking from one of the engines. He reported it to the cabin crew, but the flight attendant brushed him off saying that it was a normal situation and that it always happened, blah blah blah…

When he identified himself, her tone changed and she went to the captain.

When they landed, he saw a team of mechanics opening the engine cover, swarming like a bunch of flies on a piece of butter. He later found out that a seal had broken and that it could have led to the engine shutting down, if he hadn’t promptly reported it.

So yes, please, if you think you see something unusual, even if you risk not being listened to, report it for the sake of your own life and others!

UPDATED 5:50 PM — Europe Reveals Map BREAKING-UP RUSSIA into 41 new countries

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Gunther Fehlinger, Chairman of the Austria NATO non-governmental organization (NGO), publicly revealed today, the West’s “plan” for Russia: Broken-up into 41 new, autonomous countries! There wouldn’t BE a “Russia” anymore. Russia’s response was simple: If there isn’t going to be a Russia anymore, then there isn’t going to be a Europe or USA, either. World War 3 is officially on its way.

Here is Gunther Fehlinger and the West’s (suicidal) map of a world without Russia:

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The revelation of this map is literal PROOF that it is the actual intention of the West to do-away with Russia.    By even manufacturing such a map, the West has shown its intent.   Russia now faces an ACTUAL existential threat.  Their very existence is at stake.

Think about the time and effort that was necessary to research the populations and ethnicities in each of these areas, where they are, and how to draw actual lines along the geography of the demographics, to create this vision of new, autonomous, countries.  The research and planning alone had to take . . .  YEARS.

Now that the map is actually out, and the entire world can see that the West has literally been planning for YEARS to completely do-away with Russia, we can all now see that the situation with Ukraine was intentionally manufactured BY THE WEST to provide the impetus to set in-motion, their nefarious plans.

With the release of this map, it seems to many observers that war is now a foregone conclusion.

What many people, myself included, really want to know is, Whose idea was this?

Who decided this needed to be done?  Because that person, or those persons, need to be directly confronted and engaged.

This plan is suicidal. Whoever thought of it, and whoever is promoting it, is a clear and present danger to the lives of millions.

People have a right to self defense against this monstrous and deadly plan.   That self-defense may have to be applied to the people who are promoting this and to the people who thought it up.

 

UPDATE 5:50 PM EDT —

I have engaged in locating Gunther Fehlinger and much to my shock and dismay, he is presently HERE in the United States.   Two hours ago, he was in Philadelphia where, among other stops, he entered the Masonic Temple.   He then departed Philadelphia by car and, at this update, is presently on the New Jersey Turnpike, heading north, into New York City!

He is scheduled to appear at the Hudson Institute!

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This is an important article to read.

It was very detailed and documents the irreversible trend of de-dollarization and the important role that BRICS and its New Development Bank has played in building a multipolar financial order.

De-dollarisation unstoppable, BRICS cooperation fostering multi-polar currency world
As a global movement to reduce reliance on the dollar-centric financial system emerges, what can the BRICS nations offer in the establishment of a multi-polar currency system?

Amidst the growing flaws of the dollar-centric financial system and the concerning geopolitical weaponisation of the reserve currency, participants at this week’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF)

convened to discuss the transition from a unipolar currency-based international financial system to a new world order centred around a multipolar currency.

Moreover, the forum will explore the significant role of BRICS partnerships in shaping this emerging economic landscape.

De-dollarisation is occurring ten times faster than the decline witnessed in the previous two decades. From 2021 to 2022, the dollar’s share in global reserves dropped eight points, from 55% to 47%, compared to 73% in 2001.

What has led to this rapid de-dollarisation in recent years? Sanctions played a significant role. As Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, warned in a recent tweet

: “If you weaponise currency enough times, other countries will stop using it.”

In response to the Ukraine crisis, the US-led West imposed wide-ranging sanctions on Russia.

Some financial sanctions involved banning Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system and freezing $300 billion worth of assets from Russia’s Central Bank reserves. The economic sanctions have backfired, serving as a wake-up call for many countries worldwide, particularly in the Global South.

“Every night I ask myself why all countries are forced to do their trade backed by the dollar. Why can’t we do our trade backed by our own currencies?” Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva asked these soul-searching questions during his state visit to China in April, which summed up the growing sentiment and frustration regarding the dollar hegemony in international trade.

While actively advocating for local currency settlements among BRICS countries, Brazil signed an agreement with China to conduct trade settlements in their respective currencies before Lula visited China, meaning the annual bilateral trade flow of US$150 billion would be conducted using the Chinese and Brazilian currencies, rather than using the US dollar as an intermediary.

Meanwhile, as a member of the BRICS, Brazil has also been striving to encourage other Latin American countries to join the bloc. During a visit by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to Brazil in late May, he expressed a clear desire to join BRICS, a sentiment supported by Lula, who emphasised his dream of using local currencies for settlements and reducing reliance on the US dollar.

While Brazil is leading the movement to de-dollarise Latin America, South Africa, another BRICS member, is also actively involved. Earlier this year, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor expressed her concern and emphasised the importance of creating a fairer payment system as an alternative to the dollar. He believes that the current dollar-centric financial system tends to “privilege” wealthy countries, but developing nations like South Africa must incur additional costs when making payments in dollars. Pandor highlighted this as one of the reasons why the BRICS bloc established the jointly-run New Development Bank (NDB) in 2014.

In the face of the weaponisation of the dollar, Europe also seems to be taking steps to undermine the dollar’s supremacy. French President Emmanuel Macron recently called to reduce the European continent’s reliance on the “extra-territoriality of the US dollar”. Also, Macron has reportedly requested an invitation from South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to attend the BRICS Summit scheduled for August in Pretoria.

While Ramaphosa did not make any commitments to Macron, this bold and innovative move by the French president indicates that his vision, at least regarding international financial reform, aligns with that of the BRICS countries.

So how can the New Development Bank assist in building a multi-polar currency system that is friendly to developing countries and emerging markets?

Firstly, let’s delve into the vision behind establishing the NDB. As the first new multilateral development bank created by developing countries since the end of World War II, the NDB aims to mobilise resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in BRICS countries and other emerging economies. Its ultimate goal is to contribute to building a fair, just, and diverse international economic order.

Contrary to the goals of the NDB, the World Bank and the IMF, the two pillars of the Bretton Woods system, have long been focused on establishing and maintaining an international financial system with the United States at the helm and other Western countries and Japan playing supporting roles. Their objective has not been to serve the interests of developing countries genuinely. This is where the NDB steps in to fill the void and address this shortcoming.

Current NDB members include the five founding nations of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as well as Bangladesh, Egypt, the UAE, and Uruguay. More countries are applying to enter or are in the process of joining the bank, such as Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, and Honduras.

It’s worth noting that the combined GDP of the five BRICS nations (31.5% of the global total) surpassed that of the G7 nations (30.7%) this year, making it the world’s largest economic bloc. It is expected that by 2030, as more countries join BRICS Plus, the disparity between the two groups will further widen. This will increase the economic influence of the BRICS nations, making the New Development Bank even more attractive to other developing countries.

Secondly, the NDB has demonstrated institutional innovation in its operational processes, particularly in equitable governance structure, local currency financing, and sustainable infrastructure projects.

In terms of governance structure, unlike the World Bank’s approach to shareholding, the NDB has equally split shareholding among its five founding member countries. With an equal contribution totalling $100 billion as the initial authorised capital, each member country has equal voting and decision-making rights. More importantly, no country holds veto power, ensuring equal mutual benefits and respect among the nations.

Regarding local currency financing, the NDB stands out from the IMF and the World Bank, which primarily use the U.S. dollar as the dominant currency for international transactions. This new development bank for the Global South offers loans in multiple currencies, including the US dollar, euro, Chinese yuan, and other local currencies. And the approach effectively mitigates exchange rate risks associated with loan projects, reduces the vulnerabilities stemming from excessive reliance on the US dollar, and fosters the growth of member countries’ domestic capital markets.

For instance, as of the first quarter of 2023, loans in local currencies accounted for 21.5% of the NDB’s loan portfolio. And the bank aims to increase the share of project financing conducted in the national currencies of its member countries to 30% during the strategic cycle of 2022-2026.

This objective underscores the NDB’s commitment to promoting financial stability, enhancing regional cooperation, and bolstering the economic resilience of its members.

Regarding investment projects, the NDB focuses on sustainable infrastructure initiatives, including renewable energy, digital infrastructure, smart cities, water resources, and sanitation facilities.

Infrastructure development represents a significant bottleneck for economic growth in developing countries. Existing international multilateral development banks often adopt a cautious approach towards infrastructure investment due to the high costs, complex processes, and politically sensitive nature of environmental concerns and resettlement issues. However, the NDB is determined to make a unique and significant contribution.

The NDB’s “2017-2021 General Strategy

“ shows that about two-thirds of its investments are dedicated to sustainable infrastructure projects. In its ”2022-2026 General Strategy“, 40% of the funds are allocated to projects that promote climate change mitigation and adaptation. These strategies highlight the bank’s commitment to addressing global development challenges by prioritising sustainable infrastructure investments.

Lastly, the BRICS emergency reserve fund , also known as the Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA), complements the role of the NDB. With a full scale of US$100 billion, China has pledged the largest share of US$41 billion, while South Africa has committed US$5 billion, and the remaining BRICS countries have each pledged US$18 billion. The function of the CRA is to provide liquidity support through currency swaps when a member state faces a long-term shortage of U.S. dollars and struggles to repay foreign debts. This mechanism allows fellow member states to offer assistance, reducing dependence on U.S. dollar reserves and ensuring stability within the bloc’s financial system.

In summary, the vision of the BRICS bloc and its New Development Bank is focused on enhancing financial autonomy for participating nations, providing assistance to emerging markets and developing countries, and diversifying and stabilising the global financial system. The Global South has been neglected for far too long. They deserve sovereign development and the opportunity to thrive.

Former US spy reveals why Poland sabotaged South Africa peace delegation

Cardboard Cat Forts: The Ultimate DIY Project for Feline Fun

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Picture this: You’re sitting at home, surrounded by Amazon boxes that you’ve been too lazy to recycle. You’ve got some time on your hands, a cat on your lap, and you’re feeling a little bit creative. What do you do? You build a cardboard cat fort, of course!

h/t: sadanduseless

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Congress Tells Treasury Secretary to “Prepare for China to DUMP U.S. Treasuries”

In an absolutely stunning exchange on Capitol Hill, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, appearing before a Congressional Committee, was told by Congress to Prepare for China to DUMP $859 Billion in U.S. Treasury Debt Notes — “overnight.”

The exchange went like this:

Congressman: “We did a tabletop exercise, and in response to Sanctions against a Chinese scenario where there would be an invasion of Taiwan, the scenario was that China, the second largest foreign creditor of US Treasuries, would dump that $859 Billion in Treasury Securities.   How are you working with our Allies internationally and also the Federal Reserve to deal with a situation where China would dump that volume of Treasury Securities OVERNIGHT?”

Secretary Yellen: “So, uh, we are not engaging in specific exercises to address such a risk, but the United States National Security Council is certainly concerned on an ongoing basis.”

Congressman: “Madam Secretary, I would encourage Treasury to make preparations and be on-the-ready for that scenario.

Here is video of that specific segment of the Congressional hearing:

Chinese readout of Xi Jinping-Anthony Blinken’s meeting

And an interview with Professor Wu Xinbo on Blinken's visit to China
Jun 19, 2023
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China on June 18-19, a trip that was postponed in February due to the “balloon incident”.

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Blinken at the Great Hall of the People on Monday (June 19). Blinken also spoke with Wang Yi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee on Monday, and State Councilor and Foreign Minister Qin Gang on Sunday.

Blinken’s China visit marked the first visit to China by a U.S. Secretary of State since Joe Biden took office as the U.S. President, and the first visit by a U.S. Secretary of State to China since 2018. His visit to China has drawn significant attention from China watchers and the international community.

Today’s newsletter included two parts: firstly, the Chinese readout of the meeting between Xi Jinping and Blinken, and secondly, a translated interview of Professor Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies and director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University. Professor Wu shared his views on the significance of Blinken’s visit to the China-U.S. relations.

Part 1: Chinese readout of Xi-Blinken meeting in Beijing

1) The Chinese readout via Xinhua

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Great Hall of the People on Monday.

Noting that the world is developing and the times are changing, Xi said the world needs a generally stable China-U.S. relationship, and whether the two countries can find the right way to get along bears on the future and destiny of humanity.

Xi pointed out that the vast expanse of the Earth is big enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the United States. The Chinese, like the Americans, are dignified, confident and self-reliant people, Xi said, adding that they both have the right to pursue a better life. "The common interests of the two countries should be valued, and their respective success is an opportunity instead of a threat to each other."

Xi said the international community is generally concerned about the current state of China-U.S. relations. "It does not want to see conflict or confrontation between China and the United States or choose sides between the two countries, and it expects the two countries to coexist in peace and have friendly and cooperative relations."

The two countries should act with a sense of responsibility for history, for the people and for the world, and handle China-U.S. relations properly, Xi said, adding that in this way, they may contribute to global peace and development, and help make the world, which is changing and turbulent, more stable, certain and constructive.

Xi stressed that major-country competition does not represent the trend of the times, still less can it solve America's own problems or the challenges facing the world. China respects U.S. interests and does not seek to challenge or displace the United States, and in the same vein, the United States needs to respect China and must not hurt China's legitimate rights and interests, said Xi. "Neither side should try to shape the other side by its own will, still less deprive the other side of its legitimate right to development."

Xi said China always hopes to see a sound and steady China-U.S. relationship and believes that the two major countries can overcome various difficulties and find the right way to get along based on mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, calling on the U.S. side to adopt a rational and pragmatic attitude and work with China in the same direction.

Xi pointed out that the two sides need to remain committed to the common understandings he and President Biden reached in Bali, and translate the positive statements into actions so as to stabilize and improve China-U.S. relations.

For his part, Blinken conveyed President Biden's greetings to President Xi. He said President Biden believes that the United States and China have an obligation to responsibly manage their relations, adding that this is in the interests of the United States, China and the world.

The United States is committed to returning to the agenda set by the two presidents in Bali, Blinken said, adding that the United States stands by the commitments made by President Biden, namely that the United States does not seek a new Cold War, it does not seek to change China's system, its alliances are not directed at China, it does not support "Taiwan independence," and it does not seek conflict with China.

The U.S. side looks forward to having high-level engagement with the Chinese side, keeping open lines of communication, responsibly managing differences, and pursuing dialogue, exchanges and cooperation, he added.

Xi asked Blinken to convey his regards to President Biden.

Wang Yi and Qin Gang, among others, were present at the meeting.

2) The U.S. readout on the conversation between Secretary Antony J. Blinken And People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping Before Their Meeting

PRESIDENT XI: (Via interpreter) Mr. Secretary, welcome to China. Director Wang Yi and State Councilor Qin Gang have met or held talks with you at length, and generally speaking the two sides have had candid (inaudible) discussions. The Chinese side has made our decision clear, and the two sides have agreed to follow through the common understandings President Biden and I had reached in Bali. The two sides have also made progress and reached agreement on some specific issues. This is very good.

It’s safe to say that interactions should always be based on mutual respect and sincerity. I hope that through this visit, Mr. Secretary, you will make more positive contributions to stabilizing China-U.S. relations.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Mr. President, thank you for receiving us today. President Biden asked me to travel to Beijing because he believes that the United States and China have an obligation and responsibility to manage our relationship. The United States is committed to doing that. It’s in the interest of the United States, in the interests of China, and in the interest of the world.

Over the past few days I have had candid and constructive conversations with State Councilor Qin Gang and Director Wang Yi. We covered a broad range of both bilateral and global issues. I appreciate this opportunity to discuss the way forward with you. Thank you.

UPDATE: The U.S. State Department’s readout is now available:

Secretary Blinken’s Visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC)

Part 2: Professor Wu Xinbo’s view on Blinken’s China visit

In a recent interview with The Paper, Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies and director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, said that Blinken’s visit was a consensus reached during the meeting between the two heads of state in November last year. It is a vital link to promote high-level exchanges between the two countries, and at the same time, this visit also intends to confirm with China the “road map” and “timetable” for the following high-level exchanges between the two sides.

According to Wu Xinbo, China and the U.S. may gradually resume their dialogues in the economic, trade, and climate fields for some time to come. Part of the “three cancellations and five suspensions“, countermeasures announced by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in response to the then U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to China’s Taiwan region, are expected to be removed.

In addition, there may be some progress in cultural exchanges between China and the U.S. Apart from the issues above, Wu believes that, more importantly, Blinken and other US officials are closely monitoring whether Chinese leaders will attend the APEC summit in November in San Francisco.

Here are some excerpts from the interview, with certain omissions in Wu Xinbo’s responses regarding the potential topics that Blinken’s visit to China may address, since the specifics of Blinken’s three meetings with Chinese leaders have already been officially released.

How to define the nature of Blinken’s China visit?

The Paper: How should we define the nature of Blinken’s visit and the political signals it sends? Can it be seen as an “ice-breaker” in bilateral relations?

Wu: In fact, Blinken’s visit to China now aligns with the consensus reached during the meeting between the Chinese and U.S. presidents in Bali last November to advance high-level exchanges between the two countries. Previously, the visit had been postponed due to the “balloon incident” and Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen’s so-called “transit” trip through the United States.

However, this visit cannot be exactly considered as an “ice-breaker” since there have been prior contacts between China and the United States at the high-level. From May 10 to 11, Wang Yi met with Jake Sullivan, U.S. National Security Advisor, in Vienna. [Editor’s note: It counts as the highest-level contact between the two countries since the “balloon incident”]

From May 25 to 26, China’s Commerce Minister Wang Wentao met with US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and US Trade Representative Katherine Tai respectively in Washington.

Therefore, Blinken’s visit can be seen as a willingness from both China and the United States to end the recent deadlock and continue advancing high-level interactions. The aim is to address prominent issues within the bilateral relationship and promote coordination and cooperation on certain matters. As for the outcome of this visit, it would require further bilateral interactions to make a definitive assessment.

What communication channels between the two countries are likely to be restored?

The Paper: As far as you know, what communication channels between the two countries are likely to be restored in the days to come? In what fields can the two countries be expected to reach consensus?

Wu: First and foremost is the communication between the commercial and trade sector of the two countries. For instance, many are discussing the expected visits of U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is also expected to visit China. These are some of the fields where bilateral dialogues and exchanges may likely resume. We may even have U.S. secretary of transportation in China to discuss the issue regarding the airlines connecting the two countries. Two of the major issues that obstruct the flow of people between China and the U.S. are overpriced airline tickets and too few airlines.

In the meantime, we are looking at the possible resumption of certain mechanisms which were suspended or canceled as part of China’s countermeasures in response to Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visited to the Taiwan region last year, including the talks on climate change and cooperation against transnational crimes:


BEIJING, Aug. 5 (Xinhua) — In disregard of China’s strong opposition and serious representations, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited China’s Taiwan region. Chinese Foreign Ministry on Friday announced the following countermeasures in response:

      1. Canceling China-U.S. Theater Commanders Talk.
      2. Canceling China-U.S. Defense Policy Coordination Talks (DPCT).
      3. Canceling China-U.S. Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) meetings.
      4. Suspending China-U.S. cooperation on the repatriation of illegal immigrants.
      5. Suspending China-U.S. cooperation on legal assistance in criminal matters.
      6. Suspending China-U.S. cooperation against transnational crimes.
      7. Suspending China-U.S. counternarcotics cooperation.
      8. Suspending China-U.S. talks on climate change

As for the two militaries, it is expected that one or two work-level exchange mechanisms will be revived. However, due to the current atmosphere of bilateral relations, resumption of work-level exchange mechanisms is perhaps the most we can achieve so far. Exchanges between high-level military officials, such as defense ministers or the chief of staff of China’s Central Military Commission Joint Staff Department and the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, are still hard to realize.

The Paper: Problems with visa issuance between the two countries are also public concern. You mentioned that Blinken would talk about people-to-people exchanges with China. If that is the case, will the visa issuance policy be improved?

Wu: The two sides have actually been in touch with each other on this issue. As much as I know, senior officials of the US government discussed with Chinese envoy to the U.S. about this issue at the beginning of this week. A few days ago, China’s vice minister of education Chen Jie also talked about people-to-people exchanges between the two countries during a visit to the U.S.

People-to-people exchanges are a highlight of Blinken’s visit, which is expected to bring about some concrete results, even though the problems cannot be solved once for all. But it is for sure that progress will be made in this regard, as well as continuous progress in the future.

[Check a latest GRR podcast episode with Stephen D. Mull, Vice Provost for Global Affairs at the University of Virginia, on the importance of U.S.-China people-to-people exchanges]

The APEC summit in San Francisco in November

The Paper: Do you think Blinken’s remarks are meant to heat things up for future visits of U.S. Cabinet members?

Wu: I wouldn’t say that. When the Biden administration interacts with a foreign country, it would, in principle, go through diplomatic procedures before other departments step in, so as to achieve better coordination in terms of policy. Compliance with decision-making procedures is the most marked feature of the Biden administration compared to the Trump administration.

Whatever topics of interest may follow must fall under the charge of more specific agencies. Blinken’s visit is more of a confirmation of the “road map” and “timetable” for the next high-level exchanges between the two countries.

The Paper: Can you give us a sketch of the “road map” and “timetable”?

Wu: Judging from what I learned during my recent visit to Washington DC, the U.S. side believes that China-U.S. Interactions are currently on a very tight schedule, because many of the visits that should have taken place before June were not made possible until recently, owing to the postponement of Blinken’s visit to China in February. That means we have to move faster, and the U.S. side is also eager to make these visits as soon as possible.

In fact, the biggest concern for the U.S. is still the APEC summit in San Francisco in November. When I was in Washington DC, the chairman of the U.S.-China Business Council told me that they were somewhat at a loss, not knowing who was going to represent China at APEC. There weren’t many hotel rooms left and they had to make bookings now. So it seems that the U.S. side is also doubtful of the situation.

The Paper: Some believe that as the 2024 U.S. presidential election unfolds, the “time window” for improving the China-U.S. Relations is now nearing its end. As you said, the U.S. thinks they are on a tight schedule. Do you think the “time window” is disappearing?

Wu: Yes. With the U.S. focused on the APEC summit, there is little time left between now and November. Yet it would take much longer than that to make preparations if Chinese leaders were to attend the summit.

At the same time, the U.S. presidential election next year will cast a negative impact on the overall attitude towards China. It will then be politically difficult to improve China-U.S. relations and strengthen interactions.

The terms on which China and the U.S. interact is not up to U.S.’s whims

The Paper: Looking back on the past four months, how will these events influence the current and future China-U.S. relations? What are the lessons and implications to be learned by the two countries?

Wu: First, the China-U.S. relations are, for the most part, brittle and unstable. If any incident occurs at this delicate moment, it must be handled tactfully and calmly, with caution against excessive influence of domestic politics.

Second, the United States must handle the Taiwan question, which involves China’s core interests, with caution. China has a clear position and a firm resolve on the Taiwan question, and has increasing capabilities to guard its interests.

Third, the terms of China-U.S. interactions must be agreed on by both sides and not decided unilaterally by the United States. The United States is not allowed to come whenever they want and then wave away the decision. Blinken postponed his visit to China in February and said he wanted to resume the visit in April. But in fact, it is really not his decision.

More about Wu Xinbo:

Wu Xinbo is Professor and Dean, Institute of International Studies, and Director at the Center for American Studies, Fudan University. He teaches and researches China’s foreign and security policy, Sino-U.S. relations, and U.S. Asia-Pacific policy. Wu also serves on the policy advisory board of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and on the editorial board of many renowned English language journals.

Currently, he is a member of the Advisory Council of Asia Society Policy Institute, as well as a member of The Trilateral Commission. Wu actively engaged in academic research and government decision-making consultations, undertook research projects entrusted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was invited to participate in expert meetings, and led a team of experts and scholars to conduct research abroad.

Last year in November, Wu Xinbo, as a member of a diverse group of former Chinese officials and scholars, visited New York in the largest semi-official diplomatic initiative in Sino-US relations in three years. After the visit, GRR posted an article introducing the interview of Wu who shared his observations from the delegation’s visit to the United States, as well as some in-depth insights into the 2022 midterm elections in the US, bipartisanship and social and political ecosystems in the US, and the meeting between Chinese and U.S. defense chiefs.

From June 5 to 11, Wu Xinbo visited the United States for exchanges and co-hosted “the 13th China-U.S. Young Diplomats Dialogue”, an event supported by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Chinese Embassy in the United States, and the U.S. Department of State. During his stay in Washington, Wu Xinbo exchanged views on the current China-U.S. relationship with officials from the U.S. Department of State and experts from think tanks. He also paid a visit to Xie Feng, China’s new ambassador to the United States.

“One of my observations from this visit to the United States is that the U.S. side currently holds some expectations for the restart of China-U.S. relations. Although these expectations are not high, let alone optimistic, there is still a sense of effort to promote the rebooting of bilateral relations. This also aligns with the interests of the U.S. side,” said Wu Xinbo.


This is why the Chinese are ahead

Senior Chinese diplomat Wang Yi (2nd R) meets with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (2nd L) in Beijing, China, June 19, 2023.

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It is hard to predict the significance of Antony Blinken’s Beijing trip and to which extent can it thaw the frosty China-US ties.

Antony Blinken arrived at the Beijing Capital International Airport on the morning of June 18. He was greeted by Yang Tao, Director General of the Department of North American and Oceanian Affairs of the Foreign Ministry, and U.S. Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns. There was no red carpet, flowers and applause.

This is the first trip to China by a US Secretary of State in almost five years. The visit comes at the lowest point of China-US ties, at a critical point where a choice needs to be made between dialogue or confrontation, cooperation or conflict.

A planned Blinken visit in February was called off after a suspected Chinese spy balloon flew in US airspace. The “twists and turns” of this visit itself highlights the highly complicated and difficult situation of bilateral relations.

Low expectations

Neither China nor US has high expectations on the trip, but information released by both sides after the talks on the first day has brought some positive expectation.

Daniel Kritenbrink, the State Department,s top diplomat for East Asia said a day ahead of the visit:

“We’re not going to Beijing with the intent of having some sort of breakthrough or transformation in the way that we deal with one another. We’re coming to Beijing with a realistic, confident approach and a sincere desire to manage our competition in the most responsible way possible. We do hope at a minimum that we will achieve that goal.”

US words and actions of the US are inconsistent

The US side asks for communication on the one side, yet on the other, suppresses and contains China by every possible means. In recent months, while pushing to resume high-level diplomatic talks, the US has slapped sanctions on Chinese companies, pushed allies to restrict semiconductor tech exports to China, rallied other advanced economies to counter Beijing’s “economic coercion” and signed a new trade deal with Taiwan.

The mixed signals sent by the US side are very confusing. This makes the Chinese side have no particularly high hopes for Blinken’s visit. It resulted in the attitude change of Chinese toward Blinken’s trip.

But this does not mean that China refuses to engage and improve China-US relations. On the contrary, the Chinese are more strategically determined and patient about the stabilization and improvement of China-US relations.

We hope that Blinken’s visit can be a good start for more communication, and we also hope that he can bring back the accurate information obtained in China to American society. The information is, in short, mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, cooperation and win-win. These short words deserve Washington’s careful consideration.

Rosemary Rolls

Rosemary Dinner Rolls scaled
Rosemary Dinner Rolls scaled

Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup salted butter
  • 2 cups self-rising flour
  • 1 cup milk
  • 3 tablespoons mayonnaise
  • 2 tablespoons sour cream
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary (or 2 teaspoons dried rosemary)
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  2. Melt 1/2 teaspoon butter in each cup of a 12-count muffin tin.
  3. In a medium bowl, combine flour, milk, mayonnaise, sour cream, rosemary and pepper; stir to mix well.
  4. Spoon batter into muffin cups, filling half full.
  5. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes, or until golden brown.

The Trammps – Disco Inferno (Original Long Version – Tony Mendes Video Re Edit)

China donates 20,000 tons of fertilizer to PH

By: – Reporter / @JMangaluzINQ
/ 11:38 AM June 16, 2023
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MANILA, Philippines — The People’s Republic of China on Friday donated a total of 20,000 metric tons of urea fertilizer to the Philippines, which President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. himself received from Chinese Ambassador Huang Xilian.

During a ceremonial turnover event, Marcos thanked China for the urea fertilizer, which is a common type of fertilizer rich with nitrogen.

“On behalf of the Filipino people, let me extend our deepest gratitude and appreciation to the Chinese Government and its people for this donation—a solid gesture of friendship and goodwill that is in keeping with our long and storied history of trade and cultural exchange,” said the President during the ceremony in a National Food Authority (NFA) warehouse in Valenzuela City.

“This donation that came from China is a product of our request from our friends from all over the world,” said Marcos.

According to the President, who also sits as the chief of the Department of Agriculture (DA), the Philippines had difficulty procuring affordable fertilizer.

“This donation that came from China was a product of our request from all our friends around the world during the crisis when fertilizer — well, what we are still feeling now when fertilizer prices went up and the availability was also because of the supply chain problems that we are experiencing with our usual suppliers and China did not think twice and immediately came up,” said Marcos.

2023 06 21 18 49
2023 06 21 18 49

China turns over 20,000 tons of fertilizer to the Philippines, contained in a warehouse in Valenzuela City. (Photo from Jean Mangaluz)

The Chinese Ambassador said that “the arrival of the fertilizers speaks for China’s actions and sincerity, and demonstrates China’s friendship to the people of the Philippines”.

Xilian added that fertilizers are crucial to production and feeding the population, and that he hoped that the fertilizers will help Filipino farmers.

The 20,000 ton donation was delivered on June 7 and stored in the Valenzuela warehouse until the ceremony. It was then received by DA Regional Field Offices from Regions 1, 2, 3, 5 and Calabarzon.

The ceremony was also attended by Department of Social Welfare and Development Secretary Rex Gatchalian. Officials from the DA, NFA, Department of Budget and Management, and other agencies also attended the event.

Urea fertilizer Fertilizer prices previously hiked following the Russia-Ukraine war, with the Philippines struggling to secure fertilizer deals with other countries.

The Phantom Time Hypothesis | 300 Years ARE MISSING from the Calendar

First Tangible Sign that NATO “Exercise” May Go to LIVE WAR with Russia in 4 Days

The first tangible sign that the ongoing NATO “exercise” dubbed “Air Defender 2023” will go “live” to direct war with Russia, has come out: British mass-media outlet SKY NEWS is running a piece calling for Western Air Power to directly enter the Ukraine war and bomb Russians.

On Sky News, an Op-Ed piece lays it out.  The piece is titled:

Western intervention is the only credible way to protect Ukraine’s counteroffensive from Russian air power

It lays out all the pertinent facts as to why Ukraine stands NO CHANCE AT ALL of defeating Russia, and concludes “Kyiv needs modern air power, not a squadron or so of second-hand F-16 platforms that are neither supportable nor credible, against modern, stealthy Russian fighters.”

Written by Sky News “Military Analyst” Sean Bell, the piece introduces to readers the notion that the West entering the Ukraine Conflict with air power is “needed.”

(HT REMARK: Folks, Western Media Outlets do not — E V E R — print things like this unless they have been told to do so by government.  As you might guess, government plants stories like this to begin to mold and manipulate public opinion, because not only does government WANT to do something, it INTENDS to do it.  They want to prime the public to have this in their minds.)

What I see going on here is a coming media blitz, to manipulate the general public into preparing for, or expecting, Western air power intervention into the conflict.  That a UK Media Outlet is the first step in this process is no surprise; the UK has been at the forefront of every step of the escalation in Ukraine.

Conspicuously absent from the Sky News piece are the exact, precise CONSEQUENCES of such a move:  World War 3, that will go nuclear.

Today is June 19.   NATO’s ongoing air exercise “Air Defender 2023” is scheduled to be completed THIS FRIDAY, June 23.

I have been warning for weeks that I think NATO and the collective West will either find an excuse — or make one — to convert that air “exercise” into a LIVE war with Russia.

My logic was simple; governments of NATO did not move three-hundred-thousand troops, and with “Air Defender 23” 225 war planes and air crews consisting of ten-thousand men, over to Europe, just two small countries away from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as an “exercise.”

When governments move that many troops, tanks, artillery guns, armored personnel carriers, planes, and air crews, THEY INTEND TO USE THEM.

I even reported to you last week, that NATO created a temporary refueling station in Wunstorf, Germany, loaded with 2.4 MILLION Liters of aviation fuel!   For an “exercise?????”    Uhhhhhh, no.

Now we see a major piece in a major British media outlet, Sky News, taking the first step to putting in the public mind, the idea of NATO Air Power entering the Ukraine-Russia conflict.  That Op-Ed piece can be read at its source, HERE.

Make no mistake, Russia has long anticipated something like this and they explicitly told us “If Article 5 Collective Self Defense is activated against Russia, and NATO conventional troops enter the conflict, Russia will have no choice but to use its nuclear weapons.”

They’ve told us this over, and over, and over again.

Seems like no one in the West is listening.  Either that, or the West is deluding itself that something so horrifying as actual nuclear war, “could never happen.”   I think it CAN happen and I also think Russia WOULD do what they say, because if they fail to do so, then Russia would no longer exist.

Folks, I hate to repeat this, but the simple truth is, we could be only four short DAYS away from nuclear war.

You need to have Emergency food, water, medicines (the ones you need to live), a generator to make electric power if the grid goes down, and fuel for that generator.  You also need COMMUNICATIONS gear such a CB or HAM radio.

Make a plan for your family: What will YOU do if nuclear bombs are launched against the US.  Where will you and your family meet?  Where will you all go (if anywhere)?  What route will you take to get there?  What if that route is blocked; what alternates can you take?

Right now, NATO has at least 225 aircraft taking part in the largest air drill in its history, in Germany; just two small countries away from the Russia-Ukraine conflict. NATO has also positioned three-hundred-thousand (300,000) troops near Russia’s border.   You don’t move those numbers of troops and planes, then not use them.

NATO has supported Ukraine, but is losing, badly.  Ukraine’s __only__ hope is if NATO becomes directly involved in the conflict, and if that happens, Russia has already made clear, it will use nuclear weapons to defend itself.  Those weapons will not merely be used in Ukraine, they will be sent to NATO countries . . . . including the USA.

Some people erroneously believe Russia would never hit the US because of mutually assured destruction, but that notion is no longer true.

Russia has hypersonic missiles, the USA does not.

Russia’s hypersonic missiles can avoid our missile defenses.

Submarine-Launched Russian nuclear missiles can reach our nuclear silos BEFORE a Presidential Order to launch can get OUR missiles out of the silos!  Our missiles get blown up inside their silos without ever being fired.

Russia has bomb shelters for its population; we DO NOT.

Russia has stocked those shelters with food, water, medicines, generators, fuel, and machine tools; WE HAVE NOT.

Russia has installed hospital operating rooms in all their shelters, with surgical gear and medicines; WE HAVE NOT.

Put simply, if the missiles fly, Russia survives, WE DO NOT.

If a nuclear bomb detonates on US soil, there will be chaos, havoc, and fear.  People will panic throughout the entire country.  Millions will rush out to supermarkets trying to get food and water.  Shelves will be stripped bare in minutes.

The detonation of a nuclear bomb __could__ take out vast electronic networks, making credit and debit cards useless.  You must have CASH MONEY in your possession to assure you have a way to buy things. 

June 23 is when NATO “Air Defender” exercise ends and many, many people believe NATO will either find an excuse to enter the war, or make-up an excuse with some “false flag” event to justify it’s entry into the war.

Once NATO enters, or declares “Article 5 collective self defense against Russia” that’s it.  That’s the end.  The missiles will fly within minutes.

DO NOT be one of the families who find themselves with no food, no water, no medicine, no generator, no fuel.  Because no one will share __theirs__ with you.   Sharing with you means taking food out of THEIR family’s mouths to feed YOUR family.   Few if any people are going to do that.

Prepare this week.  Do not wait.

Just think about what you’ve already seen in years past when people panic before a hurricane hits:  Food stores stripped bare:

 

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10b60c7465bcab6a092ea6b00ab5b2ddfe68e7faaf6af86146f4b59fc2a22367 4082187

At gas stations, people panicking and fighting with each other trying to get gas:

Storm 1 superJumbo
Storm 1 superJumbo

If they panic like THIS for a Hurricane, what do you think they’ll do when nuclear bombs are coming?  It will be freak-out city.  Mad Max scenario!

Better to have extra food and not need it, than to need it and not have it.  If things do NOT go bad, you can always eat the food, and put the cash back in the bank.  But if things DO go bad, the shear panic that arises will make it all but impossible for you to get supplies.

Plan, don’t panic.

Get some extra rice, beans, canned soups, canned meat like chicken, canned tuna, boxes of pasta, jars of sauce.  Have a way to HEAT FOOD / COOK, if the grid goes down; a propane barbecue grill or something similar. Get a gas can and fill it (but do NOT store gasoline in your house, store it outside.)

Your lives may depend on you planning and taking some small steps NOW, in case the SHTF.  You have only 4 days left – maybe.

Yvonne Elliman – If I Can’t Have You

China leads world in 19 of 23 critical tech; US way behind in hypersonics, electronic warfare, undersea capabilities

In other key technologies such as autonomous systems operation technology, advanced robotics, adversarial AI-reverse engineering and protective cyber the collective strength of the AUKUS countries shifts this picture, and they take the global lead
FP Staff June 07, 2023 16:31:24 IST

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In bad news for US-led West, China is leading in “high-impact research” in 19 out of 23 technologies, with “commanding lead” in hypersonics, electronic warfare and undersea capabilities.

This was revealed in the Critical Technology Tracker report of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

“China is leading in high-impact research in 19 of these 23 technologies and has a commanding lead in hypersonics, electronic warfare and in key undersea capabilities. But in other key technologies such as autonomous systems operation technology, advanced robotics, adversarial AI-reverse engineering and protective cyber the collective strength of the AUKUS countries shifts this picture, and they take the global lead,” the report said.

In a dangerous trend, the report cited an unassailable gap between China and other countries in some key technological areas.

“But across a number of technology areas China’s lead is so great that no aggregation of countries exceeds its share – highlighting the importance of the accelerating effect of greater collaboration between like-minded partners.”

“For some technologies at least 9 of the world’s top 10 research institutions are based in China (for autonomous underwater vehicles it’s 10/10) and they are collectively generating 8 times more high-impact research than the second-ranked country (in all cases the US).”

“In these 23 technologies, ASPI’s talent tracker dataset shows 14.2 per cent of high-impact authors working in China completed postgraduate training in an AUKUS country (US = 8.5 per cent UK = 3.8 per cent, Australia = 1.9 per cent), while 4.3 per cent trained in the EU, 1.9 per cent Canada, 1.6 per cent Singapore and 1.1 Japan. That knowledge import is highest in defence categories like hypersonic detection (AUKUS 19.5%) and electronic warfare (AUKUS 17.6 per cent),” ASPI added.

What is ‘Critical Technology Tracker’

According to ASPI, its ‘Critical Technology Tracker’ “provides – beyond datasets showing research performance – are unique insights into strategy, intent and potential future capabilities.

It also provides valuable insights into the spread and concentrations of global expertise across a range of critical areas. Sometimes countries are leading because they are well ahead across the entire technology (research, commercialisation, manufacturing, supply: for example China’s stunning lead in electric batteries).

In other cases, a country is leading in high impact research output because they (and their institutions: universities, national labs and companies) are seeking to catch-up through significant investment, typically incentivised by government funding and policy directives.”

Super Sweet Tea

00VL SWEETTEA superJumbo
00VL SWEETTEA superJumbo

Ingredients

  • 1 gallon spring or distilled water
  • 1 healthy pinch baking soda
  • 4 – 6 family size tea bags (I like Great Value Decaf)
  • 2 – 2 1/4 cups sugar

Instructions

  1. In a 2-quart saucepan add 1 healthy pinch (about 1/8 teaspoon) of baking soda and fill pot to about 3/4 full and boil.
  2. Remove from heat and add tea bags. Let bags set for about an hour, dipping 4-5 times every 15 minutes or so.
  3. While waiting for tea to steep, in a 1-gallon pitcher, add the sugar and add roughly 1 quart of water to dissolve the sugar.
  4. When finished steeping, add tea to sugar water mixture and add remaining water; stir and chill.

 

Anyone remember this guy?

main qimg 8a0585be98d8d31a36c37ff8b25478bc lq
main qimg 8a0585be98d8d31a36c37ff8b25478bc lq

That’s Francis Gary Powers. In 1960, his U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet skies during a CIA black op.

This didn’t trigger a thermonuclear war, not even close.

Now how about these people:

main qimg 7d74da52e8d841bc076e64250d4bc5cf lq
main qimg 7d74da52e8d841bc076e64250d4bc5cf lq

That’s the crew of the EP-3 spy plane captured by the PLA. Again, no war.

And what about this incident:

main qimg 25540ce8a02ffffbca7bad9e3a4aad85 lq
main qimg 25540ce8a02ffffbca7bad9e3a4aad85 lq

That’s the South Korean warship Cheonan after a North Korean torpedo hit it. Major incident for sure, but war was never a real possbility.

Point here is that war between major powers, or even minor powers is serious business. Singular incidents rarely spark wars unless one side already really want it or there’s some colossal mismanagement of diplomacy.

The last time an attack on an American warship sparked a war was with the Maddox in Vietnam. And that incident didn’t actually happen. It was used as an excuse to send troops to South Vietnam.

Blinken gets his just rewards

3 years ago this man (unfortunately) died:

main qimg 992a01da8851c980432943243d4e9872 lq
main qimg 992a01da8851c980432943243d4e9872 lq

That guy’s name was Joseph Samuel Girardi. And he was nothing special.

Yet he was voted the best seller of all time by the Guinness World Record Book.

His job?

Salesman in a car dealership.

His talent?

It was IMPOSSIBLE for his clients to resist him.

No matter what company he worked for: he was consistently the BEST car salesman, EVERY time.


His colleagues began to wonder:

  • Was he cheating?
  • Was he manipulating his customers?
  • Was he threatening them to buy?

No one knew.

Until the day when…

A psychology researcher – Robert Cialdini – decided to study how Joseph sold.

After several weeks of research, Robert Cialdini made an astonishing discovery:

This good old Joseph.. was JUST a nice guy.

Yes, yes.

That was his secret.

He was literally… nice.

People bought from him because they liked Joseph.

But Cialdini deepened his research. And he found 3 details that made Joseph sympathetic:


1/ He often complimented

This is one of the most UNDERESTIMATED techniques of influence.

And yet it works better than anything else:

Joseph often gave sincere and laudatory compliments (not trivialities like: “You are beautiful”)

He found what interested his client, and he complimented him on it.


2/ He was looking for similarities

Joseph talked easily.

“Oh you like canoeing? I did it last summer with my son Eliott!”

“Your son’s name is Eliott? Like my dad, it’s fun!”

It’s the kind of (very) mundane discussions that bring people together – like it or not.


3/ He gave attention

One of Joseph’s craziest feats:

It is to have sent to + 13,000 customers greeting cards for the holidays. With the inscription inside: “You are a friend.”

Nothing more.


Sympathy is perhaps the ultimate form of manipulation. The one no one sees.

Yet it is more powerful and influential than anything else.

Because no one notices.

Weird stories, adventures, and some fun stuff as well as the Betz Mystery Sphere

Hum.

Lots of mysteries today.

main qimg 08a31db929364c77a2004363921f2b13
main qimg 08a31db929364c77a2004363921f2b13

Putin: “…here’s the document. 18 pages & addition to it. It exists. They signed it. It guaranteed Ukraine’s neutrality & as per agreement we pulled out our military from the Kiev region. But as always Kiev threw away this document into the junk-yard of history.”

He said:

📌The treaty with Kiev included provisions for neutrality & security guarantees, but they threw everything out.

📌 Kiev initialed agreement with Moscow in Istanbul, but after the withdrawal of Russian troops from near Kiev, Ukraine threw it into the dustbin of history.

main qimg f754ef56a6eee415a64eeb9367703957
main qimg f754ef56a6eee415a64eeb9367703957

Istanbul document on Ukraine was initialed, everything was there, right down to the number of armed forces, to military equipment, personnel, they threw everything away, Putin added….

“The maximum number of personnel and military equipment”. Treaty on PERMANENT Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine.

Of course, US and UK were having none of it.

main qimg dd63792f07c073e452b577e5033df964
main qimg dd63792f07c073e452b577e5033df964

NATO got the war it wanted. Europe’s economy decimated, ‘Defense’ industry record profits.

Anyone who believed that Americans get to choose their own leader is totally and absolutely mistaken. A year before the presidential elections they carry out primaries. What are primaries?

They are essentially selection dressed u to look like election to get the candidate from essentially 2 parties. Who get to select? Not the voters. The delegates. Who are the delegates. They are essentially? They are a select group of party elders who are very rich and powerful. No different from a cartel closely knitted elders who is essentially ensure a safe candidate.

Let me defined “safe” The candidates must tow their superiority complex behaviour to ensure the rich ages richer and the poor blacks, coloured and white are hardly their concern. They must protect their own kind and safeguard their own narrow agenda. Generally they are conservatives and xenophobic who sees the world as in the 1950s that U.S. rules the world. Many Neo conservatives are there.

This group essentially choose 2 candidates such as Trump and Biden to carry out their agenda. People like Bernie Sanders do not stand a chance. They don’t want to risk it. They don’t want to change the status quo. So the U.S. can change the government but it cannot change policy. It must allow gun ownership no matter how may school children dies.

It cannot stop wars it is the biggest war monger. Because many people are in the military industrial complex is amongst the most powerful block of delegates. So the U.S. will fight till it totally bankrupt itself. I won’t allow free college education because the delegates. Can afford their children college education easily. They don’t want a more successful coloured group of people to challenge the whites.

All these means voting is simply a charade. Nothing more nothing less. That is why less than 2/3 of eligible voters votes. The 1/3 knows it is all set up. The 2/3 are either the ignorant or the uneducated and the delegates group. You can also say roughly 0.8% decides for America. They can never lose. Heads they win and tails you lose.

JOHN TITOR: Time traveler, soldier, savior

Fun, but there’s much more to the story than what is presented here.

It must be understood that there are realities involved in this question that one must understand. Nothing is ever so simple as one would believe if reading the “news”.

The realities are…

  • What is loudly announced and discussed in the “news’ media are often deceptive, misdirection, exaggeration, or outright lies.
  • When political-based laws are passed, manufacturing and industry, often use work-around clauses and exceptions to keep in business.
  • In regards to China, it is portrayed as incompetent, bad, evil, and unable to do anything right. While the United States is portrayed as an innocent, doing great and wonderful things.

With those realities well understood, we can expect the following to happen.

  • The functional implementation of any importation-interruption to be delayed by years.
  • China is expecting a time when these polices will manifest in full force and are running counter programs. They will be able to compensate and mitigate any negative influence.
  • It is not enough to ban a product. One must change the structural infrastructure of those that use that product. Something that no American legislation is doing.

Thus, the end result is very clear and well-understood in industry…

  • The vast bulk of products will continue to use Chinese electronics. The market share will increase over time.
  • Chinese cutting edge electronics is going mainstream, and the USA simply cannot compete.
  • Thus, China will eventually be the sole source of most all electronics in the world.
  • Leaving the United States military to develop it’s own electronic systems independent and out-of-step with the rest of the world.

The Secret Room Inside Mount Rushmore and Other Little Known Facts

Southern Biscuits

bisquits
bisquits

Ingredients

  • 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 2 tablespoons Crisco
  • 1/2 cup buttermilk
  • 1 tablespoon Crisco (for frying pan)

Instructions

  1. Mix dry ingredients together.
  2. Blend in the Crisco until the mixture is coarse and grainy.
  3. Stir in the buttermilk with a fork. Do not over-mix.
  4. Put out onto a floured board and knead just a few times. Pat out the dough to about 1/2 inch thick. Cut with a biscuit cutter or glass. Flour the cutter. Do not handle the dough too much or it will get tough.
  5. Using a heavy cast iron frying pan, place 1 tablespoon of Crisco in the pan and put the frying pan in the oven for about 7 minutes.
  6. Remove the pan from the oven and place the biscuits in the pan. Turn each once in the oil and bake the biscuits at 500 degrees F for 10 minutes, or until light brown.

Employees in critical roles being terminated happens quite regularly.

Scenario 1.

In the early 2000’s, Boise Office Solutions (formerly Boise Cascade Office Products) wanted to break into the consumer side of the office supply business. OfficeMax came along and said they were available. What great timing! So they do the filings and all the lawyer stuff but the Boise leadership discovers that OfficeMax uses SAP while Boise had an assortment of products including JD Edwards software.

So there’s a big purge within IT since they don’t need double our numbers. Quarter end approaches and someone realizes that they’d let go a key person for the JD Edwards stuff. Oops. I heard they had to hire that guy back as a contractor for some appropriately outrageous amount so we could get past quarter closing. Nice, huh?

Scenario 2.

After coming back to Sears as a contractor, our business unit had gotten a new VP (4th in 2 years!). This assclown makes the claim that he could replace me with three offshore people for the rate they were paying me. Some weeks later, this person from some offshore consulting service shows up in the guise of “helping” me. All that was really happening was that she would try to learn my job to turn around and train some offshore team. It’s completely obvious what was going on but as a professional, I do my best to streamline the reporting process. My last day comes and goes.

Less than a month later, I found out that all three of my offshore replacements had quit due to the stress of just one part of my job! Seriously? The thing I did every morning between 7:30 and 8:00 was so stressful that they couldn’t handle it. All three of them! Never mind the truly crazy requests that come in during the rest of the day.

A Time Travel Story | The Dodleston Messages from the past and future

So much fun! Enjoy!

Today China along with US and Russia are the only three nations on earth that cannot be invaded and that are invincible as far as defensiveness is concerned.

main qimg e1f70a43a1378c45eced0649cc05f1a1
main qimg e1f70a43a1378c45eced0649cc05f1a1

Yet the Chinese can offensively push and force across a radius of upto 200–300 Kms at the most from their outermost boundary

US can do this anywhere in the world at any point on the map and that’s what makes them a Global Military Superpower

So while i believe the offensive ability of the US will weaken due to stronger defensive ability of other nations over time , China’s offensive ability won’t strengthen because THEY DONT WANT IT TO

China only want to be able to be stronger than all those who lie within the 200–300 Km radius from their outermost boundary

They already are starting to

Today,

China can defeat Taiwan, Japan, India, S Korea, Phillipines individually in battle

By 2027,

China can win any Naval battle on the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea against the US , Japan, India and Aus (Quad) and it’s total force combined

By 2035 , China hopes to depend no longer on any foreign core technology and either to evolve it’s technology on a parallel path or catch up with the West on their core technology

Thus 2035 is the year which experts say could make China the rising superpower especially with an assured oil & gas supply from Russia.

Another Dimension? Time Portal? Another Planet? What’s at the Bottom of Mel’s Hole?

Stars are not the only thing missing in the Moon photos. Also conspicuously absent is any indication that the lunar modules actually landed in the locations in which they were photographed. Specifically, there is no crater visible under any of the modules, despite the fact that NASA’s own artist renderings clearly showed the presence of a substantial crater. Also, not a speck of dust appears to have been displaced by the 10,000 lb reverse-thrust engine that powered the alleged descent.
NASA’s artist renderings also depict a considerable quantity of smoke and flames shooting out from the bottom of the modules, though nothing of the sort is visible in the purported video footage of the first landing of a lunar module, allegedly shot from inside the module as it set down on lunar soil. In addition, despite the ridiculously close proximity of the immensely powerful rocket engine, no noise from that engine can be heard on the video.

As can be seen in the photo above, the area directly under what is supposed to be the nozzle of the descent stage engine is completely undisturbed. Not only is there no crater, there is no sign of scorching and none of the small ‘Moon rocks’ and not a speck of ‘lunar soil’ has been displaced! And if you refer back to the earlier close-up of the module’s landing pod, you will see that not so much as a single grain of ‘lunar soil’ settled onto the lunar modules while they were setting down.

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9c124143 3ed7 45e2 bfe0 6fe0bb705e79

Your initial response to this may well be, “Well, duh! … why shouldn’t the surface of the Moon be undisturbed?”
Glad you asked. The answer is that the lunar modules were not placed upon the Moon by the hand of God. They had to actually land there. And in order for them to land there in one piece, they had to make use of powerful reverse-thrust rockets. If they hadn’t, they would have made landings roughly comparable to a piano falling off the balcony of a high-rise apartment building.
“But,” you say, “isn’t the gravitational pull of the Moon considerably less than that of the Earth?” Of course it is, but that does not render objects weightless. A vehicle with a curb weight of 33,000 pounds here on Earth (what the lunar modules weighed, according to NASA) still weighs close to three tons on the Moon, so it’s not going to make a very soft landing without assistance. And the assistance options were necessarily limited.
NASA could not have used parachutes, such as were used with the returning command modules, because parachutes don’t really work without air, so that would have been a dead giveaway that the landings were faked. They also couldn’t use a helicopter-type rotor, because those also don’t work in an environment devoid of atmosphere. What they allegedly used then to provide the necessary ‘brakes’ was a powerful, reverse-thrust rocket engine.
That is why, in the artist renderings of the landings (the landings obviously couldn’t be filmed, because no one was supposed to be there yet), an enormous blast of flame and hot gas is seen shooting out of the bottom of the module. This massive reverse force would have served to counteract the effects of the Moon’s gravitational pull, allowing the module to gently set down in the lunar dust, unharmed and intact. And needless to say, that is kind of important when that very same vehicle is your only ride home.
The ‘debunkers,’ by the way, like to pretend as if the hoax theorists made those artist renderings up themselves, as if to say, “Hey, look over here! I just made up this drawing of what I think the landings should look like and NASA’s landings looked nothing like my drawing!” The reality though is that NASA’s own artists provided those images, based on the way that NASA claimed the modules would perform. What the ‘debunkers’ are telling you, in other words, is that NASA didn’t really understand how their own technology was supposed to work.
Given the manner in which the modules allegedly landed, the problem here is that – unless the landing surface was paved with, say, concrete – an inordinate amount of material should have been displaced by the force of the rocket blast as the module was setting down. As Plait likes to say, you can easily verify this yourself. All you have to do is get hold of a rocket with 10,000 pounds of thrust (there probably are some surviving members of the von Braun clan that can hook you up), and head out to the nearest desert location.
Once you find a suitable spot to conduct this experiment, hold the rocket aloft (you might want to wear gloves and an asbestos suit for this part, but it’s up to you) and fire that son-of-a-bitch up, directing the blast towards the desert floor (it might also be a good idea to grab on to a stationary object with your free hand and hold on real tight). Let it rip for whatever you think would be a reasonable amount of time to complete a landing procedure, and then shut it off.
If you’ve done this correctly, the result will be a fairly large crater and a blinding dust storm. That dust will, of course, eventually settle, leaving a heavy coating of dust on you and your rocket. You may also notice that the blast has lent the desert floor a distinctive scorched look. If you run the experiment for too long, you may even find that the intense heat has fused the cratered sand into something resembling a large bowl of glass.
The point here, of course, is that nothing of the sort is evident in the pictures allegedly brought back from the Moon. The lunar surface is, as noted, completely undisturbed and the modules are as clean as if they had just rolled off the assembly line. It appears as though they did not land at all, but were rather set in place with a crane or other such device. And of course we all know that there were very few crane operators on the Moon in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
How then did the modules get there? Could it be that the lunar surface was so compact that even the considerable force of the rocket could not dislodge it? That might be a credible explanation were it not for the fact that the astronauts themselves, who with the Moon’s reduced gravitational pull weighed in at about 30 pounds apiece (maybe 60 pounds each with the additional alleged weight of their packs), made readily identifiable footprints from the moment their feet hit the ground. It appeared, in fact, as though the lunar soil had roughly the same consistency as baby powder. And yet, amazingly enough, not a single grain of this soil seems to have been displaced by the landing of the modules.
The ‘debunkers,’ naturally enough, have an explanation for this. According to them, it’s all about throttle control. As Plait explains, “Sure, the rocket on the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust, but they had a throttle. They fired the rocket hard to deorbit and slow enough to land on the Moon, but they didn’t need to thrust that hard as they approached the lunar surface; they throttled down to about 3000 pounds of thrust.”
Plait also notes that originally on his site he had said “that the engines also cut off early, before the moment of touchdown, to prevent dust from getting blown around and disturbing the Astronauts’ view of the surface. This was an incorrect assertion.” The funny thing is though that he voiced that “incorrect assertion” just as forcefully and as arrogantly as he voices all the other assertions on his page – which makes sense, I guess, since everything else on his page is incorrect as well.
Phil has obviously never landed a lunar module. Or given much thought to how you would go about doing so. Actually, that’s probably not true. Phil is most likely just a shameless liar. Not a particularly good one, mind you, but you have to remember that he is working with a handicap – he has to weave all of his ‘debunking’ arguments around NASA’s lies.
Let’s try to inject a little sanity into this discussion, shall we? First of all, no one with an ounce of common sense is going to cut the engine and let their three-ton spaceship simply drop onto the lunar surface. Nor are they going to cruise on in while progressively easing up on the throttle, effortlessly setting the module down, as Plait claims, like “a car pulls into a parking spot,” as if they had been landing lunar modules since the day they were born. Because the reality is that the six astronauts who allegedly landed the six lunar modules hadn’t done it before and they only had one chance to get it right.
And do you know why, Phil? Because that module was their only ride home, and if they damaged it in any way, they weren’t going home. Ever. They weren’t going to do anything except die within days in the most desolate place imaginable. And that is why it is perfectly obvious that, if they had really gone to the Moon, they would not under any circumstances have landed the modules in either of the ways that Plait has suggested.
Has anyone ever seen a helicopter land? That is essentially how you would land a lunar module as well. The basic technique is to line yourself up with your landing site while hovering a fairly short distance above the ground (with the module, I presume, you would hold your position by utilizing those clusters of horns). Then, when you’re stabilized and lined up just where you want to be, you very slowly ease off the throttle so as to very gently set it down. And if you’ve never done it before, you’re definitely going to want to take your time.
And that is why there quite obviously should be blast craters under those lunar modules. That is why NASA itself indicated that there would be blast craters under the lunar modules. And that is also why it is fundamentally impossible for the modules to be as impeccably clean and dust-free as they are in all of NASA’s photos. And no amount of spinning from the ‘debunkers’ will ever explain that away.
As previously mentioned, there was much about the Apollo project to stand in awe of. Every individual phase of the missions was, in and of itself, a breathtaking technological achievement. Just blasting men into Earth orbit is a daunting task – so much so that in the nearly half-century that has passed since the first two nations did it (the US and the USSR), only one other (China) has managed to join that elite club. And China has only done it a few times. In the entire history of space exploration, just over 500 men and women have ever orbited the Earth.
And achieving Earth orbit was just the beginning. Then there was the 234,000-mile journey through the unknown to get to the Moon – on a single tank of gas in an unshielded spaceship. Then there was the main ship giving birth to the lunar module, and that untested lunar module then flying down and making a perfect landing on the surface of the Moon. Then there was that same untested lunar module blasting off from the surface of the Moon without the assistance of any ground grew and ascending 69 miles to attain lunar orbit. Then there was the ever-reliable lunar module finding, catching and docking with another ship while in lunar orbit, utilizing yet more untested technology. Then there was the command module shedding the lunar module and then commencing that 234,000-mile journey back home.
But as remarkable as it was to get the astronauts safely to and from the Moon, their survival while on the Moon was equally remarkable. To say that the Moon is an environment incompatible with the survival of humans would be a considerable understatement – which brings us to our next topic of discussion: those amazing NASA Moonwalking suits.
Those suits were able to provide the astronauts with everything they needed to stay alive in the Moon’s harsh environment. Remember NASA’s elaborate rendering of what a Moon work station protected from space radiation would look like? Neil and Buzz didn’t need any of that fancy stuff because they were wearing the magic suits. And those extreme temperatures of +260° F to -280° F? Not a problem when you’re wearing the magic suit. Not only could they provide the cooling needed to combat the searing temperatures in the sun, but they could also provide the heat to counteract those frigid shadows.
As can be seen in NASA’s photos, the egress side of the lunar modules (the side with the ladder and hatch) was usually in the shade (though almost always well lit). What that means is that, after traipsing around in the sun for a spell, the astronauts would have had to step into the shadows to reenter the spacecraft. And when they did so, those spacesuits were apparently smart enough to react instantly and switch over from turbo-charged air conditioning to blast-furnace heating in the blink of an eye. Awesome!
In addition to providing radiation protection that today’s technology is unable to match, and a climate control system that is beyond anything available in the twenty-first century, the magic suits also provided the astronauts with breathable air, which definitely came in handy. What the suits did, in essence, was provide the astronauts with their own little portable, climate-controlled, radiation-protected atmosphere.
Of course, to actually do that (if we’re pretending that it could be done at all), the suits would have had to have been pressurized. And it is perfectly obvious from all the photos that the suits were not, in fact, pressurized, because if they were, the astronauts would have looked like the Michelin Man bouncing around on the surface of the Moon.
The magic suits had to perform one other function as well: they had to serve as head-to-toe body armor. Because the Moon, according to NASA, has a serious problem with drive-by shootings from outer space. Seriously. I’m not making that up. I read it on NASA’s own website.
In the very same NASA post that discusses Moon rocks being constantly bombarded with absurdly high levels of radiation, another curious admission can be found: “meteoroids constantly bombard the Moon.” Our old friend from NASA, David McKay, explains that “Apollo moon rocks are peppered with tiny craters from meteoroid impacts.” NASA then explains that that “could only happen to rocks from a planet with little or no atmosphere … like the Moon.”
“Meteoroids,” NASA continues, “are nearly-microscopic specks of space dust that fly through space at speeds often exceeding 50,000 mph – ten times faster than a speeding bullet. They pack a considerable punch … The tiny space bullets can plow directly into Moon rocks, forming miniature and unmistakable craters.”
According to NASA, every square inch of every exposed surface of every rock allegedly gathered from the surface of the Moon shows this pattern. By extension then, we know that every square inch of the lunar surface is peppered with meteoroid craters. There really is no safe place to hang out. There you are minding your own business lining up your golf shot, and the next thing you know a meteoroid is ripping through your spacesuit at 50,000 mph. That has to sting a little bit.
Actually, what it would do is kill you. Almost instantaneously. Not the projectile itself, which probably wouldn’t be lethal after passing through the spacesuit, but ripping or puncturing your magic suit while on the Moon is certainly something that you would want to avoid. You know that old saw about how “nature abhors a vacuum”? How that applies here is that any penetration in your suit would result in all the air being immediately sucked out. And then your blood would begin to boil. And that can be rather unpleasant.
I guess the Apollo crews really, uhmm, dodged a bullet on that one. Not one of the astronauts was hit, nor any of the lunar modules, nor any of the lunar rovers, nor any of the equipment that was used. I have to say here, by the way, that those Apollo guys were studs of the highest magnitude. Did they know what they were signing up for? What did NASA’s ads say?
“Astronauts wanted. No experience necessary. Duties will include taking a trip to the Moon. Return trip cannot be guaranteed. Applicant must be able to withstand levels of radiation higher than anything that can be generated here on Earth. Applicant must also be able to work comfortably in heat in excess of +250° F, as well as in cooler conditions approaching -300° F. A continuous supply of breathable air may or may not be provided by employer. Snacks and water will necessarily be limited to what fits in employee-provided lunchbox. Rest room facilities will not be available. The ability to dodge 50,000 MPH space bullets is not required, but would be helpful. This is a great money-making opportunity! Paychecks can be picked up upon return to Earth.”
The Apollo guys didn’t have to worry about any of that, of course, because they were wearing the magic suits. Apparently those suits were yet another example of NASA digging deep into the well of lost 1960s technology.
A huge shout-out, by the way, is in order here for the guys at NASA for posting that article about the Moon rocks being bombarded with radiation and meteorites. It makes it so much easier for me when NASA has already done so much of the work of debunking the Moon landings.
When President George W. Jetson announced on January 14, 2004 that America was going to be returning to the Moon, we were quickly advised by NASA types and various television talking heads that such a goal would require about fifteen years to achieve. No one in the media thought to ask why it would take fifteen years to do with twenty-first century technology what it took only eight years to accomplish with 1960s technology. Not one voice was raised to ask how with the twin advantages of improved technology and prior experience it would still take twice as long this time around.
It’s not, after all, as if we have to reinvent the wheel here. Not only have we done this before, but we have done it safely and reliably. How could NASA possibly improve upon the record of the Apollo missions? What could they come up with that could outperform those vintage Saturn V rockets that made it to the Moon damn near every time, and made it home safe every time? And how do you improve upon a lunar module that not only performed flawlessly every time, but that was also the very model of lightweight, compact efficiency?
When you have a system that performs flawlessly on six incredibly technologically complex missions, and that delivers your astronauts home safely even on the one occasion that the system runs amok, why in the world would you toss it in the trash and start from scratch the next time around?
According to a Fox News report published the day after Bush’s announcement, “The effort to return to the Moon will require building new spacecraft and sending out robotic craft to provide materials to be used later by human explorers, say experts.” I wonder why they would need to do that? We didn’t have to do shit like that last time. Why does NASA keep insisting on reinventing the wheel here? Why do they seem to have forgotten that we are old hands at this sort of thing?
Other people have forgotten as well. Following Bush’s attempt to wag the Moondoggie, Republican Senator Sam Brownback sternly warned, “You’ve got the Chinese saying they’re interested – we don’t want them to beat us to the moon!” This may seem like a rather bizarre concern, until you realize that not only is China working on developing a Moon rocket, they are also rumored to be close to completing work on a time machine, which will allow them to transport their Moon rocket back to the mid-1960s and thus beat America to the Moon.
On a more serious note, I’m guessing that since China has managed, in the 50+ years of the space race, to put three whole spaceships into low-Earth orbit, there won’t likely be any Chinese flags waving on the Moon anytime soon.
Anyway, doesn’t it seem just a little strange that experts would now suggest that if we get to work right away, we might be able to land men on the Moon by the year 2020? Isn’t that like saying that with a lot of hard work and a little luck, we might be able to develop a video game as technologically advanced as Pong by the year 2025? Or that by 2030, the scientific community might produce a battery-operated calculator small enough to fit into your pocket?
And do you think that, if we do ‘go back,’ the voice actors will be given a better script? Will we be given something to replace Armstrong’s cheesy “One small step” line and Aldrin’s poetic “magnificent desolation” line? Have I mentioned, by the way, that Donald Bowman, who worked at the Houston Space Center, has said that Armstrong was indeed handed a script before embarking on the alleged mission? That obviously does not prove that the Moon landings were faked, merely that Washington was very concerned with how the alleged missions were presented.
A NASA statement released in July of this year contained a rather curious assertion: “Conspiracy theories are always difficult to refute because of the impossibility of proving a negative.” It is not, of course, NASA that is being asked to prove a negative, but rather those pesky ‘conspiracy theorists.’ NASA is merely being asked to prove a positive, which should be a relatively easy task. All they have to do is produce some actual evidence, beginning with all those reels of tape containing the telemetry data, the biomedical data, all voice communications, and all the original videotape. They could also release the plans and specifications for all that fancy space hardware. And maybe offer some kind of reasonable explanation for why so many of the official photographs are demonstrably fraudulent.
Alternatively, they could just send some guys back there, to prove that it can be done. It’s been thirty-seven years and counting since the last guests on the Moon checked out. NASA allegedly filmed that final lift-off from the Moon, by the way. In case you haven’t seen the historic film footage, you can view it here. It’s a very short clip and it’s actually quite funny, so be sure to check it out.
I can’t be 100% certain of this, of course, but I have a very strong hunch that NASA picked up the footage off the cutting-room floor after Ed Wood had finished editing Plan 9 From Outer Space. Actually, I probably shouldn’t joke about the clip because I do feel kind of bad for the guy that they had to leave behind to operate the camera. I wonder how he’s doing these days?
Actually, NASA claims that the camera was mounted on the abandoned lunar rover (even in space, Americans are arrogant litterbugs), and that the pan and zoom functions were operated remotely by the ground crew back on Earth. You couldn’t control your television from across the living room in those days, but NASA could pan and zoom a camera from 234,000 miles away. Awesome! And there apparently either wasn’t any delay in the signal or NASA had the foresight to hire a remote camera operator who was able to see a few seconds into the future.
You really have to hand it to the NASA boys – those guys think of everything.
George W. Jetson’s visionary proposal envisioned the Moon as a steppingstone for manned travel to Mars. How that works though is a bit of a mystery to me. The distance between the Earth and Mars varies depending upon where the planets are in their respective orbits, but the minimum distance astronauts would have to travel to reach Mars from Earth is 36,000,000 miles. And the minimum distance astronauts would have to travel to reach Mars from the Moon is, uhmm, also 36,000,000 miles. So I guess what I’m wondering is: what exactly would be gained by making a pit stop on the Moon?
Are there gas stations there to fill up the tank? Some nice hotels maybe where the astronauts could get some R&R? A couple of hot space hookers? How would making a technologically complex landing on the Moon, followed by a lift-off that would require an excessive amount of additional fuel, help get our boys to Mars?
Let’s take a big bite out of the reality sandwich here, shall we? The human animal is quite simply not equipped for space travel beyond low-Earth orbit. There is virtually no chance that we are going to send men to the Moon anytime soon. Despite what NASA would like you to believe, the combination of lethal space radiation, lethal temperatures, a complete lack of breathable air, and a lower gravitational attraction that produces serious health problems, including rapid tissue and bone degeneration, is simply not compatible with human existence. Neither is getting pelted with “space bullets.”Neither is a lack of food and water.
And as for Mars? A roundtrip ticket there would earn you about 75,000,000 frequent flyer miles. I wouldn’t count on that happening anytime soon.
Astronaut Steve Lindsey, after being chosen to command the final planned mission of the space shuttle, had this to say: “Everybody at NASA feels the same way. We’re in favor of taking the next step and getting out of low-Earth orbit.” So while technology in every other realm of human existence continues to take giant strides forward, everyone at NASA appears to want to take a big step backwards. To 1969.
Before bidding adieu, I have one final note to add: a certain Dr. Thomas Gold was an early skeptic of the feasibility of landing on the Moon. He made headlines prior to the alleged flight of Apollo 11 when he predicted that any attempt at a Moon landing would be disastrous. NASA, of course, purportedly proved the good doctor wrong.
 Longtime readers will remember that Dr. Gold was America’s most prominent proponent of the abiotic theory of oil and gas production, and that he went and dropped dead just before the ‘Peak Oil’ propaganda started to heat up. Dr. Gold was recently proven to be correct on the origins of so-called ‘fossil fuels.’ The article, curiously enough, refers to the research as “revolutionary” – which it is, I suppose, if you ignore the fact that the Soviets and Ukrainians did the same research and drew the same conclusions some fifty years ago.
We all know that that can’t be true, however, because it would be impossible to keep a secret of that magnitude from the entire Western world … right?

.

The brutal truth?

Meet a demand. People will judge you based on your usefulness at any given moment.

That’s it, NOTHING else really matters, at all. If you can meet a demand then you’ll be successful nothing else matters. But I’m a good father I go to church, I donate to charity… nah it may make you feel better but in the end it doesn’t matter.

The best case study to illustrate this is an emergency situation a car crash happens… a family were in the car. The children and wife are unharmed but the husband is severely injured bleeding out and dying.

What they need now is a medical professional to meet their needs.

You can heroically jump in and try to help but you’ll be told to fuck off. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good father go to church. In that moment the family need somebody who have the equipment and skills to save the husband.

This is an extreme situation… but we go through this process 10000s of times each day.

China is way ahead of the U.K. and that is a fact.

When I was the supervisor in a Social Security office I would occasionally have the staff ask me to speak with someone who was dissatisfied with our service.

A very frustrated man came in with his wife to complain about how long it had been taking to get a decision on his disability claim and he was not accepting the interviewer’s explanation so she asked me to speak with him.

I introduced myself and asked him how I could help him. This was his request.

“ I want to pull down my pants, bend over and have you kiss my bare ass.”

His wife nearly fell out of her chair. “Oh Thomas, how could you!”

I merely looked at him and said “We don’t offer that service here. Now what can I really do for you?”

He couldn’t phase me. He wasn’t my first disgruntled person and he wasn’t my last.

Woman Dies; Gets Shown Other Planets, Civilizations And Told Human’s Purpose (NDE)

This was told to me by a friend while we were sharing an apartment via Airbnb. He is an Indian mariner working for some UK based shipping company. He travels around the world on a ship carrying petroleum products, visiting various ports in UK, Africa, Middle East, South and South East Asia. His crew contains mariner of many other nationalities.

He shared the embarrassing moments he has to face whenever his ship docks in any of the ports in India. The Customs Officers comes in with large bags, steals a good part of their cigarette cartons, packed meats, drinks, and many other stuffs from ship’s inventory(storage), meant for the mariners travel needs. Many a times he had been through these awkward moments, and he said you should see the looks on his co-mariner’s faces. He feels ashamed of being an Indian every time this happens.

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Without a concise border agreement, what exactly can India do?

If we ask China to withdraw from any intruded territories in Arunachal, it would mean acknowledging that China has indeed intruded in Arunachal Pradesh and that would be humiliation for the Modi Government

If we militarily intervene , it could be another debacle like GALWAN where with knives and metal rods and sheer gumption ,China gained 1070 Sq Kms territory in a mere 4–5 days — equivalent territory for which Russia has to spill the blood of 5000 of its soldiers and kill around 45000 enemy soldiers over 4 1/2 months to acquire


Jaishankar openly called out Pakistan repeatedly in front of the global media and in front of the Foreign Minister

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Yet not once did he whisper about China in any forum

It’s because China is TOO STRONG & POWERFUL for India to get into a direct conflict

China is so cautious about getting into a direct conflict with US despite the two nations being within 25–33% of each other

So India has to be much more cautious because China is almost 600% stronger and mightier


Thats why

Diplomacy means humiliation for the Modi Government

Military means certain and brutal defeat in the medium term

So just ignore everything and pretend things are hunky dory

It’s called LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE and that’s what India is doing today

Oh SH*T! Germany is going down a DARK road against anti-war voices

Working for a supermarket.

For most of my life I’ve gone to school. I’ve done odd chores for my parents that could be classified as “work” but that was just it.

In the Christmas break of 2021, I got my first ever job as, part-time at a supermarket. Stocking shelves, assisting with the daily count, even manning the counter.

It was incredible.

  • People treated me like furniture.

I was invisible until they needed to use me. Some people were very kind, all pleases and thank yous, others were like, “hey, get over here! Get me that!”

  • I was repeatedly encouraged by my coworkers not to be idle.

During slow hours I arranged and rearranged shampoo and perfume bottles meticulously, I dusted invisible dust, I slowly stocked the hats so I’d have less time to be idle. I paced, I observed customers with what I hoped was an interested gaze, ready to spring into action should they need any help.

Because Idleness = Lazy = Bad worker.

Soap was my section’s bestselling item, next to that was lotion.

  • People can have too much trust in shop workers to know everything about the products. Some even expect you to make decisions for them.

1.

Customer: “Does this shampoo also work against dandruff?”

Me: “Uhm…”

*Picks up another bottle, scans it quickly.*

Me: “No, it doesn’t.”

2.

”Would I save more money if I got one of the 300 mL bottles or two of the 150 mLs?”

*Glances at the prices tags, makes quick calculations.*

“Same price total; no difference.”

“What should I get, then?”

“Umm..Will you use the perfume yourself or are you sharing it with someone?”

”My daughter uses my stuff sometimes.”

“Then I’d recommend you get two, so she can have her own bottle.”

”Ok”.

3.

”My child has sores on his legs, would this soap irritate them?”

“To be honest sir I’m not sure.”

“Oh.”

4.

“These mouthwash, why are the big bottles and those smaller ones the same price? Is it because the bigger one has less quality?”

*Takes them, scans over the labels quickly.*

“The smaller ones are imported.”

“But is it a lesser quality?”

*Makes quick judgement, hope I’m right*.

“I don’t believe so.”

We just work there, we didn’t make those products. There’s only so much we can know.


I think the best part of that job was interacting with customers, especially for someone like me who doesn’t get out that often.

Southern Baking Powder Biscuits

Basic biscuits can be great biscuits. These are straightforward, relying only on baking powder for leavening.

These are simple biscuits to make with only five ingredients. If you wish to use self-rising flour, you can make these biscuits with only three ingredients.

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2023 06 18 18 31

They will rise tall and are slightly salty with no added sugar. If you like, you may add a tablespoon or two of sugar—but then they wouldn’t be authentic Southern biscuits.

A baking sheet, preferably a dark one that will not reflect the heat

A pastry knife or pastry knife

The following recipe can be used to make these biscuits.

You can also make biscuits with a mix. We make a buttermilk biscuit mix, a sour cream and chive biscuit mix, and a cheddar cheese biscuit mix.

These mixes are just-add-water and you should have them in your oven in about five minutes.

Ingredients

  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 4 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/3 cup cold shortening
  • 1 1/2 cup milk

Instructions

  1. Heat the oven to 425 degrees F.
  2. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt.
  3. Using a pastry blender or 2 knives, cut in the shortening until the mixture forms coarse pieces.
  4. Add the milk and stir the mixture with a fork until most of the dry ingredients have been moistened.
  5. Turn the ingredients onto the counter and knead and fold until the dough is formed. Do not knead longer than necessary.
  6. Roll or pat the dough to about 3/4-inch thickness and cut with a biscuit cutter. Place the biscuits on a greased baking sheet with the edges touching.
  7. Bake for about 15 minutes or until the tops are just golden brown and biscuits sound hollow when gently tapped.
  8. Serve warm.

Yield: 15 large biscuits

EATING IN A CHINESE VILLAGE APARTMENT AS A BLACKMAN, WHAT COULD GO WRONG?!! BLACK IN CHINA

I grew up very poor. My mom would make giant pots of stews like lentils and peas and it would go on for days. Getting thicker and thicker as the week goes on

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We’d put it in the middle of the bread and butter to try to change the flavor a bit… oh, when I say butter, I mean margarine, which cost about 25 cents and came in a giant jar.

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This was a typical dinner as a kid… a giant portion of what she called “ goulash ” and canned vegetables.

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We never really had fun snacks or chips or crap, these were considered luxury items. I remember spending the night at a friends house and being super excited that they had bags of chips of all varieties, Jell-O and brand name soda! We only had RC COLA or SHASTA.

We almost always drank Tampico

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Oh yeah, who cares about Sunny D when you have Tampico.

We often cook tortillas on the stove, like this:

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Then melt the butter (margarine) and sprinkle with a little salt.

We drank a glass of milk every day with dinner (in hindsight, that probably helped us feel full). But sometimes, when the gallon of milk was half empty, my mother would fill the other half with water. I hated it! Watery milk.

We always had hot dog sausages, but never buns (we used sliced ​​bread for everything), of course, packets of ramen (not the cups) slices of fake cheese… basically anything that wasn’t from the famous brands. We drank tap water.

My mother did her best and was very good at making the most of what she had. I learned a lot from her. She knew I hated bologna and would fry it in a pan and somehow make our sandwiches bearable. If on Monday she made a stew, we would have stewed it for days and it would never get stale in any way. I still like sliced ​​tomato mayo sandwiches to this day haha.

It’s simple

Laos is the best example

Five years ago they opened up trade with China and contracted China to build their Railways

Today their economy has shown 5.87% growth against a mere 2.13% inflation

In 2017 they had 5.19% growth against 3.88% inflation

You do the math

Same for Pacific countries

To this day Australia and USA gave them alms and kept talking about defence, defence, defence and more defence

China gave them TRADE

China built them ROADS

China built them SCHOOLS

China built them NETWORKS

China built them Ports

So it’s simple that these nations and their people want Chinese friendship

It’s some leaders who are US puppets who are Anti China just to please their masters in exchange for Swiss Bank accounts , like those mongrels Zelensky or Von Der Leyen

China is no threat to anybody

Only the US is.

Why cant an Indian Company do this?

Produce a Good Quality Product at affordable prices and any Indian, Botswana, Kenyan, Ugandan company will be able to do this. This is basic 101.

China doesnt offer earth shattering technology or something unique and revolutionary. It just offers a good product at affordable prices.

Quality thats a word that doesnt exist anymore. Our Companies simply cannot give us the Quality that foreign companies are providing us with.

Simple example Horlicks. Just take Horlicks from a foreign country sold in a duty free shop and our Indian Horlicks and mix it with hot water or milk. The Froth that the foreign Horlicks generates is more than twice that the Indian Horlicks generates.

  • Take USB Cables and Chargers. Made in India Charger costing Rs. 320/- Retail – charges as fast as a China made Charger costing Rs. 200/- with the same cable. A China made charger costing Rs.350/- can charge twice as fast.
  • A MI Powerbank once fully charged can charge my phone for 5 nights compared to any Indian Powerbank of the same strength (20000 MAH). Only Ambrane is comparable and gives power for 3 nights.
  • Shoes, Slippers, Watches, Smartphones, Laptops, Pickles, Food Products, Soft Drinks – all of them have shoddy quality, dubious manufacturing processes and tremendous lapses in quality controls.

Not just for us- but for our Heroes – the Army – our Blankets are atrocious for the Ladakh cold compared to the Bangladeshi Imports. Something called Ghirodes (Knots per Square Inch) have been compromised time and time again.

Now why cant an Indian Company provide good quality.


Surely Indians cannot genetically be crooks right?

The Answer is – Why should they?

Until recently – most of them have had monopolies and little competition.

They know worst case – the Consumer courts will take 10 years to decide to award the poor consumer Rs. 5000/- or Rs. 10,000/- in damages

They know worst case- a Briefcase or two of “Booty” can ensure that their operations continue smoothly – even if it is harmful to consumer life forget atrocious quality

They know worst case – our Media – will pursue them for 3 days and go back to Akshay Kumars cooking parathas during COVID 19 or making conspiracy theories


What should be done

Make them Afraid

Implement a Law like Chinas dreaded CAPA (English Translation) where

  • A Company can be nationalized in less than 48 hours by a Provincial Industrial Committee or a Higher Body for a temporary period of not more than 180 days if they receive complaints on sub standard manufacture.
  • During this stage the Companies big bosses will all be decided by the Provisional Commitee which will make the decisions for the next 180 days. All Accounts, All Inventories will be under Committee Control.
  • If the Company is guilty of sub standard manufacture or quality compromise – then the Company may be imposed to a huge fine which if not paid will result in the Shareholding of the Company being forcefully yanked away and sold free market and the fine amount recovered from the sale.

So imagine if a Leather Tannery that pollutes the Yamuna river can be nationalized in 2 days and the Owners stripped off their shareholding or fined Rs. 500 Crore for pollution?

In ten minutes – every Owner will scramble to ensure he follows the law right?


Billy Joel…

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main qimg 392592d45a47cdc3e718a8b47655b9c4

Yes, I did one day as a brave little nine-year-old girl. I came out of my apartment because I heard The neighbor kid crying. I follow the sound and just around the corner are four teenage girls probably ranging from 15 to 17 years old and they’re basically beating up this 11-year-old kid. I just remember my cheeks got hot and I just start screaming for them to get off of him. They had put a grocery cart on top of him and were jumping on it and he was a little heavier and he was losing breath and screaming and panicking and it scared the crap out of me so I get up in this one girl‘s face and I’m nine and she’s 15 and all the sudden she just slaps my face as hard as she can.

Well, my mother was just a few feet away in the laundry room and she had heard the commotion and was looking out and sees the girl slap me, and that was one of the few times I ever saw my mother come to my defense, like an angry bear, ready to rip someone’s head off. As a matter of fact, for about two or three seconds I was really worried for the Obnoxious teenage girl, because my mother was beautiful and petite and quiet, and that was not what was coming at that girl. Matter fact, the arms were flailing!!!

Anyway, as I was going to somebody else’s defense against a bully, my mother was coming to mine.

Russia and its endless oil, gas, fertilizer, grains, timber, minerals and all natural resources, pipelines and railways plus more pipelines and railroads in construction, to/from Russia and Central Asia. Rapid developments of Manchuria, Siberia, Sakhalin island and the Arctic.

China and Russia are now back-to-back strategic partners. The biggest joint strategic partnership in the world. Potential US blockade in Indian Ocean or Malacca Strait is no longer relevant.

To the south, China-ASEAN trades reached US$1 trillion, double China-US trade, equal China-US+EU trades.

Don’t you see it by now?

China has already prepared to decouple from US.

US made the threat, China took it seriously.

I owned a bar and had a young couple come in and sit in bottle service. They told anyone who’d listen that they just got engaged and wanted to celebrate. They ordered the full service champagne with a bottle of our cheapest Andre we kept around just to spray the crowd for fun. Our server brought out strawberries and whip cream, the bottle, and the staff made the big baller fuss across the dance floor. Everyone was giving them the works. The bill came and the young man’s card was declined. He was completely embarrassed. He asked to speak to the owner, that’s me. He was brought to my office and I could see he was a little nervous. He explained he’d deposited his paycheck earlier and his bank account showed that the funds were available. He showed me on his bank app. He asked if I could trust him to bring the money the next day. He was about 22 years old. I saw myself in a similar situation with a gallon of milk as a young father 25 years earlier. I told him to consider it an engagement gift, no worries. No need to flip out over a $3 bottle of champagne, my cost, and $3 worth of strawberries. He enjoyed the rest of his evening and left. The following Monday, that kid stopped by with a $20 bill. He’d forgotten to tip the server and felt badly. I thought this kid had heart and I respected him for coming back. I put his tip in an envelope for the server and wished him the best. I know it’s not like paying for someone’s groceries, but it still made me feel good.

A decade ago your debt is 10’000’000’000’000 and today it is 31’400’000’000’000. Easy to understand for you?

OK. What about in 1945 your share of world GDP is 52%. Today it is a mere 15% and dropping fast. Enough?

More. Today as many as close to a million homeless people are living in tents at all you city! How about American standard of living has stagnated back to 1960’s level and dropping further. Eg. This year your forecast growth is 0.5% but your inflation is at least 5%. You guys are poorer by 4.5%! Good enough?

The U.S. growth used to be the biggest today China’s growth is bigger than the entire G7 put together! The U.S. life expectancy is the lowest among industrialised nation, in 2021 for the first time China’s life expectancy exceeded the U.S. and repeated that in 2022!

Still not convince? The U.S. handled the Covid amongst the worst in the world. It lose 1.1 million people! China by comparison has less than 1% of US death in spite of it having 4 times its population! Your infrastructure are totally dilapidated without improvement.

Not enough? Oh your nation fought some rag tag mountain tribe in Afghanistan for 20 years and lost. You blew 3–4 Trillion dollars and after 20 years invited the Taliban back. Taliban is the only reason you guys went to war in Afghanistan.

How about you fought another war against village folks in rice paddies in Vietnam for another 20 years till you lost all your gold. And lost the war. Running away on the roof top of the U.S. Embassy!

Still not convince? In the 1980 Moscow Olympics you gang up nations to boycott the Games and 65 countries supported you. By the 2020 Beijing Olympics you tried the same shit. And 5 nations agree to withdraw uninvited officials.

OK my last shot to convince you. When the U.S. order, coerce, bribed and threaten nations to support sanctioning Russia. Zero nations in Latin American, the Caribbean, Africa supported the U.S. 3 out of 30 nations supported the U.S 2 of them are your slave vassal state Japan and Korea. The third support to win you billions.

2/14 Oceania nations supported the U.S. Australia and New Zealand! In an international business forum invited by Russia. More than 100 nations participated!

US is a spent force burning cash as fast as they earn it and being dumped by the whole world except for some few racist nation and it Anglo brothers and your slaves who had no rights to say no. That is barely sufficient. It cannot afford to care for its own citizens let alone interfere in a hundred nations simultaneously, afford 800 Military bases overseas and trot around the world at a billion a week expenses on each Aircraft Carrier.

Ukraine alone will cost the US. a trillion dollars a year. If it don’t change course the U.S. debt will hit 100’000’000’000’000 or a hundred trillion dollars. Just at 3% interest it need to spend 3 trillion a year. As such. The U.S. is effectively a broke and a bankrupt even now.

Its all happening in China but half the world isn’t noticing

Time to enjoy the lost pies of Summer

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2023 06 15 11 32

One of my great “little” pleasures is a nice cup of good coffee and a fine pie. In the United States, this is a staple of American Diners. You just cannot get this at Fast Food or Chain restaurants.

You go in. Sit up at the counter, and ask the waitress if they have any pies, and if so, what would they recommend.  I have long ago discovered that the best pie is a Southern Sweet potato pie. Most especially with a scoop of vanilla (French) ice cream on the top.

Today, for reasons that elude me, I am “hankering” for a nice pie.

Ah. I cannot get one. But many of youse guys can. Please have a great bite of pie and think of me!

Best Pies in Texas: Flying Saucer Pie Company | Worth the Wait

Foreign firms cast wise votes of confidence in China’s economy

China’s economy has shifted from high-speed growth to high-quality development. The enormous opportunities created by this shift have retained China’s position as a top destination for foreign investment.

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main qimg e386135131d60b81462221e643583d4c

Citing the latest economic data such as the purchasing managers’ index, some Western media reports recently cast doubt on China’s economic growth prospects. But this is just a repetition of their habitual pessimistic tone. Foreign firms continue to cast votes of confidence in the world’s second-largest economy.

Despite various challenges, the Chinese economy has followed an unwavering trend of sustained recovery. Furthermore, China has maintained a leading position in main economic indicators among major economies this year. The World Bank lifted China’s economic growth expectation to 5.6 percent in its Global Economic Prospects report released on Tuesday.

The huge market and resilience of the Chinese economy are still proving to be cardiotonic to foreign companies’ confidence in China. A large number of international business tycoons including the leaders of Tesla, Starbucks, Alstom and Volkswagen have visited China to seek cooperation opportunities.

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, praised China’s vitality and potential, voiced confidence in the Chinese market, and expressed his willingness to deepen cooperation during his visit to the country last week.

These renowned enterprises are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to foreign companies’ willingness to continue to invest in China. A total of 11,000 new foreign-invested companies were established in China in the first quarter of 2023, a 7.6-percent increase year on year, the State Administration for Market Regulation said.

Last month, U.S. Consumer News and Business Channel quoted Procter &Gamble, Starbucks, and other U.S. companies as saying that Chinese consumers’ increased travel and leisure spending had helped these companies improve their overall sales. The report also noted that with a large population base and a growing middle class, China is a desirable market for multinationals.

The sound prospects of China’s huge market, the resilience of its economy, and the mature industry chain of the global factory, combine to offer ample reasons for international firms to cast votes of confidence in China’s economy.

Another reason is that China is gradually becoming a source of global innovation. Volkswagen inked an investment agreement of around 1 billion euros (about 1.07 billion U.S. dollars) in April to build a research and development, innovation, and procurement center in east China, while Tesla’s energy-storage product factory is scheduled to break ground in Shanghai this year.

These facts speak for themselves and illustrate clearly that China remains a popular destination for foreign investment. China always welcomes foreign companies to access its market and benefit from its development dividends. Certainly, China’s economy will continue to be a major driver of global growth.

The True value of Pie

Happy Π day, guys. Have some pictures of pie. If you choose to combine the two to judge the total volume of leftover slices in any of these photos, feel free.

But I’d say the true value went into the fun of choosing a recipe, fiddling with the ingredients and “design”, sharing them with friends and family and, of course, eating them.

Choosing a recipe: traditional? international? savory? sweet? seasonal?

Designing the pie: Patterned pastry? Display the ingredients? Or create a zombie binary? (I’ll leave that example to my brother)

Sharing: make two, probably. Leave one at home, or take both so the recipient can keep one to themselves and share the other?

Easy as Pie

A good pie starts with a good crust – I stick to the basics for traditional pastry: 1:3 proportion of shortening to flour, with just enough water to hold them together. A single crust pie is 1/3 cup shortening, 1 cup flour.

I mix with my hands so I can tell when the texture is right and the #1 trick is to keep the shortening cold and the water icy so it doesn’t mix too much and get gummy and touch.  Other methods include grated frozen butter – a rich dough my brother is partial to – or using a food processor to cut in the fat to the flour. Some people even make oil crusts, though I can’t say I have.

Back to the Basics

I’m a big fan of traditional dessert pies – apple, pumpkin, humble pie. Humble pie is not merely a metaphor for having to publicly display that you know you were wrong – an unpleasant sensation – it is also a on old-fashioned concoction of strawberries and rhubarb. Which is, to me, an entirely delicious sensation that always says spring is truly here, since we can grab both from our garden if we wish.

Pie Presents

Pie comes in so many flavors, but seem tied to scent and visual memories more than cake for many of our friends. I’ve made pies for graduation presents because I wanted to bring in some good memories from family celebrations past or for birthday presents to bring back memories of a favorite local bakery: 

Thanksgiving Pies

You can’t do Thanksgiving in our house without at least two kinds of traditional pies, though our traditions are likely to include homemade Concord Grape Pie, not one you’ll find in many bakeries or cookbooks. 

International Pies

You’re more likely to find meat pies when you explore beyond the basics of American cuisine, though of course they’re very traditional in the UK. The Italian meat pie below is more of an American invention, layering spinach and ricotta with meat sauce, tomatoes, and cheese. Bisteeya is a Moroccan version of Chicken pie that is hardly recognizable compared to our common types – and completely delicious.   

Custom Variations

The credit for the most visually interesting pies on this list goes to my brother, who was feeling inspired for a friend’s Halloween party one year: 

Although I made the traditional apple pie while listening/watching a season or so of Walking Dead and then it appears the zombies manifested in the pie itself in the next apple one.

Cherry Pie

Of all the pies in the world, Cherry Pie tops the list as one of the easiest pies to make, and I’m excited to share the simple, delicious recipe with you all!

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2023 06 15 11 21

How to make Cherry Pie:

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2023 06 15 11 22

If using fresh cherries:

  • Pit and halve the cherries. Add them to a saucepan with sugar and lemon juice and toss to combine. Cook over medium heat for a few minutes until juices are released. Use a slotted spoon to spoon cherries out into a bowl. Spoon some of the sauce into a cup and stir in the cornstarch until dissolved. Return to pot with remaining juices and cook for a few minutes until sauce has thickened. Pour over cherries and set aside while you prepare the pie crust.

If using canned cherries:

  • Drain the juice from the cans of cherries into a saucepan, reserving ⅓ cup in a small bowl. Set the cherries aside.
  • Add cornstarch to the bowl with the reserved ⅓ cup of juice and stir well to combine.

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2023 06 15 11 19

  • Heat the saucepan (that has the juice in it) over medium heat. Add the sugar and stir well. Bring mixture to a low boil. Stir in dissolved cornstarch mixture. Cook, stirring, until thickened, about 2-3 minutes. Stir in butter and lemon juice. Fold in the cherries. Add a few drops of red food coloring, if desired.
  • Allow mixture to cool to room temperature while you prepare the pie crusts.

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2023 06 15 11 20

  • Line pie plate with pie crust and cherry pie filling into it. If desired, cut the top crust into wide strips to lay a lattice crust on the pie, or place the whole, uncut pie crust over the filling and poke a hole in the top for steam to release as the pie bakes. (Here’s a lattice top tutorial if you’ve never made one on a pie.)
  • Pinch the edges of the top and bottom pie crusts together and crimp the edge, if you like. Brush a thin layer of beaten egg white over the top of the pie crust and sprinkle the crust pieces lightly with granulated sugar.

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2023 06 15 11 2s0

  • Bake at 400 degrees F for 40-45 minutes.

Summary

Instructions

If using fresh cherries:

  • Pit and halve the cherries. Add them to a saucepan with sugar and lemon juice and toss to combine. Cook over medium heat for a few minutes until juices are released. Use a slotted spoon to spoon cherries out into a bowl. Spoon some of the sauce into a cup and stir in the cornstarch until smooth. Return to pot with remaining juices and cook for a few minutes until thickened. Pour over cherries and set aside while you prepare the pie crust.

If using canned cherries:

  • Drain the juice from the cans of cherries into a saucepan, reserving ⅓ cup in a small bowl. Set the cherries aside. Add cornstarch to the bowl with the reserved ⅓ cup of juice and stir well to combine.
  • Heat the saucepan (that has the juice in it) over medium heat. Add the sugar and stir well. Bring mixture to a low boil. Stir in dissolved cornstarch mixture. Cook, stirring, until thickened, about 2-3 minutes. Stir in butter and lemon juice. Fold in the cherries. Add a few drops of red food coloring, if desired.
  • Allow mixture to cool to room temperature while you prepare the pie crusts.

Prepare Pie:

  • Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Set aside a 9” pie pan. (If using canned cherries, there will be enough filling for a deep dish pie dish).
  • Remove one chilled pie crust dough from the fridge. On a lightly floured counter, roll out your dough to about 12” in diameter. Gently place in the bottom of pie dish. Spoon the cherry filling into the unbaked crust and sprinkle a little cinnamon over the filling. (If using fresh cherries, add a few small pieces of butter on top).
  • Remove the second pie crust from the fridge and roll it out in a similar manner. Use a pizza cutter, knife or pastry wheel to cut the crust into long strips, about 1/2” wide. Lay strips over the crust in a lattice pattern. (If you’re lazy, like me, you can just lay half of the strips going one direction, and the others on top, going perpendicular, leaving a small space between each.)
  • Pinch the edges of the top and bottom pie crusts together and crimp the edge, if you like. Brush a thin layer of beaten egg white over the top of the pie crust and sprinkle some granulated sugar on top.
  • Bake at 400 degrees F for about 40-45 minutes. Check after about 25 minutes and gently place a piece of tinfoil over the top crust to keep it from getting too brown.
  • Remove to a wire cooling rack and allow to cool for several hours. Once cooled completely you can cut and serve it, or cover it and refrigerate it overnight to serve the next day.
  • Leftover cherry pie will last up to 5 days, stored in the fridge.

Notes

Make ahead Instructions: The cherry pie filling and pie crust can both be made a few days in advance, stored in the fridge until ready to use.

Freezing Instructions: Cover the baked and cooled cherry pie tightly and frozen for 2-3 months. Thaw overnight in the refrigerator. The prepared cherry pie filling and pie crust can also be frozen, stored separately.

Some Tips for perfect cherry pie:

Should you use Sweet or Sour Cherries for cherry pie? Sour, tart cherries (sometimes called “pie” cherries) are most commonly used in desserts like cherry pie. If using sweet cherries, decrease the sugar in this recipe by at least ⅓ cup.

Use a homemade pie crust! For pies like this that bake for longer in the oven, a homemade pie crust will make a difference in how the crust holds up as it bakes.

Most store-bought pie crusts are super thin and flimsy so the edges brown and dry out more quickly when baking. (Store-bought crusts work better for custard or pudding type of pie that only requires a pre-baked pie shell).

The good news, is my favorite pie crust recipe can be made weeks or even months in advance so that your pie dough is ready to “roll” (pun intended 🙂 ) when you need it!

Make ahead Instructions:

Both the cherry pie filling and pie crust can be made a few days in advance, stored in the fridge until ready to use.

Freezing Instructions:

Baked and cooled cherry pie can be covered tightly and frozen for 2-3 months. Thaw overnight in the refrigerator. The prepared cherry pie filling and pie crust can also be frozen, stored separately.

Globally, chances are you have not heard of this city. It is called Chongqing, which is quite possibly what John Bolton also calls every single Chinese city when he is drunk, but if the characters were reversed I wouldn’t even be allowed to say the name of the city.

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main qimg 61f7a1c39c2a90320fb175ee35335d2c lq

Either way, the municipal area of Chongqing, had no less than 32 million people living there in 2020, with 22 million living in the urban area, compared to 19 million living in the New York City urban area.

Chongqing is however quite large, so despite downtown Chongqing obviously being very densely populated, the actually total density of the city is just around 400 people per km2.

So indeed, a regional city in China that most people haven’t heard of is larger than NYC in most ways, and likely more cities in China will follow this path soon.

Craftsman Michael Plichta Created this Incredible Globe of Planet Mars

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Look, we all have seen a globe on more than a few occasions. Recently we got a look at the art of globe making, which was certainly interesting. Today however, the typical globe gets reworked into something unique and quite amazing by Michael Plichta. This unique and rather eye-catching design is artist, eye-catching and one of a kind, rocking a 12-inch Mars globe showing the famous mars canal map by Percival Lowell.

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During a debate comparing Chinese and Western systems of governance, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by the American nonprofit educational organization Intercollegiate Studies Institute on April 5, French entrepreneur and Internet influencer Arnaud Bertrand made a case for the suitability of China’s system for promoting the flourishing of its people.

Edited excerpts of his presentation follow:

One unstated idea that derives from comparisons between political systems is that models compete against each other and, if one is indeed better, it has the potential to take over the world.

I don’t believe this to be true at all. Take the Chinese model for example. It applies uniquely and only to China. It is the product of China’s very long and unique history, and it also fits the very particular economic and geopolitical context China is in today, but doesn’t fit or pretend to fit other countries.

As former U.S. National Intelligence Officer for East Asia Paul Heer said, “China is trying to pursue multipolarity and international legitimacy for their system, not impose it on other countries.” Similarly, Stephen Walt, a legendary professor of international relations from Harvard University, said “China explicitly embraces the idea that each country should determine for itself how it wants to be governed. The U.S., by contrast, loves to lecture others on how they should govern themselves and keeps trying to get other countries to embrace our liberal values.” Or again Henry Kissinger, who writes in his famous book On China that China never espoused the American notion of universalism to spread its values around the world.

Therefore, rather than comparing which system would be universally better for all, it makes more sense to look at which is better for their own people.

On freedom

We’ve progressively come to have a rather skewed understanding of freedom in the West, where we equate freedom with individual freedom, when it’s actually very much not the same thing. When you have a broader understanding of freedom as we used to have in the past, it becomes quite obvious that China might not in fact be the unfree place most people in the West picture it as, and vice versa: The West might not be quite so free.

A prominent example of this is China’s war on poverty. Unarguably an immense success: the largest and fastest reduction in poverty the world has ever seen. Even China’s biggest detractors agree with this.

The fact is that the extreme poverty has, by and large, been totally eradicated in China. I’ve traveled all over China, and the results are obvious. Can anyone genuinely make the case this made people less free, that they were freer when they were poor? Of course not, poverty is the antithesis of freedom. When you live in poverty, you’re quite literally a slave to your condition.

In contrast, there is a lot of poverty in countries like France and the U.S. You go to certain areas of Paris and you see hundreds of tents of homeless people. Any one of you can go to China today, travel all around the country and it’s extremely unlikely you’ll see homeless people on street.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 20.03 million people lived in deep poverty in 2021. Those in deep poverty represented 6.2 percent of the total population and 48.4 percent of those in poverty. Among them, a larger percentage of children under 18 live in deep poverty than adults in any age group. As defined by the bureau, “deep poverty” refers to living in a household with a total cash income below 50 percent of the national poverty threshold.

A recent study from the Urban Institute also revealed that, in 2022, a total of 25 percent of U.S. adults experienced food insecurity, meaning they sometimes can’t afford to eat. In France we’re at 14 percent of the population living under the poverty threshold. Can we genuinely say that those people are really free?

Many have forgotten this but Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 gave a so-called Four Freedoms speech in which he defined “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” as two of the four freedoms America ought to achieve. He, too, recognized poverty alleviation was fundamental to freedom.

On the subject of “freedom from fear,” ask yourself a simple question: Do people feel free to walk alone anywhere in America at any time of the day or night? Do people have this freedom?

This freedom, by and large, does exist in China. The statistics are absolutely incredible: You’re 70 times more likely to be victim of a violent crime in the U.S. than you are in China. This is anecdotal, but in my seven years in China, not only have I never been a witness or victim of any crime but I’ve never had anyone in my acquaintance who was. It is a very, very safe country. This freedom from fear does exist.

The biggest form of freedom, a freedom that Charles de Gaulle, former French President, used to describe as the precondition for all other freedoms, is your independence as a country, your collective freedom to determine your own future.

Can anyone argue that when you’re a so-called “vassal state” or when you’re in a larger state’s so-called “sphere of influence,” you’re really free? Anyone can see that’s not quite true.

America isn’t of course anyone’s vassal state, quite the contrary in fact. But there is something that limits America’s freedom in that regard: its system of alliances. America is in many, many alliances: NATO, AUKUS, the Five Eyes, with Japan and so on and so forth. And of course this, too, limits your freedom of action since, on paper at least, you are committed to certain actions even if they might not be in your interest at that point in time. As we’ve painfully learned from World War I, alliances can be incredibly constraining and destructive.

China is unarguably the freest country in the world in this regard, as it cannot be even remotely considered as being any country’s vassal state and it just doesn’t do military alliances—it doesn’t have any. In fact, many argue that it’s precisely this independence that’s driving the current attempt to contain China. This high level of sovereignty allows China to focus on internal development and to maintain its freedom of action on the international stage.

On stability and prosperity

China is arguably the oldest continuous civilization in the history of humankind. If that’s not stability, I’m not sure what is.

Most surveys done on the Chinese population, even by Western institutions, show that the Chinese population is extraordinarily united and aligned in how they view their system. For instance, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School conducted a 13-year-long study interrogating the Chinese population, which they summarized in a 2020 report entitled Understanding CPC (Communist Party of China) Resilience. Their conclusion is, I quote: There is little evidence to support the idea that the CPC is losing legitimacy in the eyes of its people. In fact, the survey found that 93 percent of people in China are satisfied with the Chinese Central Government.

The U.S. and Europe is, of course, a vastly different story. Satisfaction rates with public institutions are, as we all know, at all times low almost everywhere in the West. For instance, in the U.S., public trust in government went from more than 70 percent in the 1960s to a mere 20 percent today. In France, only 28 percent of citizens trust their public institutions. When you ask Americans, an extraordinary 43 percent believe civil war is likely within the next 10 years.

If we talk per-capita GDP or salary levels then obviously the average Chinese citizen is still less prosperous than their Western counterparts. They also obviously started their modern economic development from a much lower base, and much more recently, so the comparison isn’t quite fair.

The right way of looking at it, I believe, is therefore to look at the approach China is taking to make its citizens prosperous vs. the approach the West is taking, and which one is more likely to achieve sustainable prosperity over the long run.

China has spent close to 14 trillion yuan ($2 trillion) of all types of funding dedicated to lifting people out of poverty, roughly what the U.S. spent in the past 20 years in its post-September 11 wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. This is quite illustrative of the different priorities of the two nations and how they impact prosperity.

To conclude, the Chinese system, with its emphasis on collective freedom, long-term stability, and unwavering investment in itself, has demonstrated its ability to provide a more holistic approach to societal wellbeing. While the American and European systems have their merits, it is the Chinese system’s unique blend of these attributes that ensures its citizens can enjoy greater overall stability, prosperity and freedom.

Giant Handmade Meatball Pies, Sold Out 200 Pies A Day!! – Korean Street Food

https://youtu.be/9orMPDg-hIs

Hackers promise to destroy Europe’s banking system in the next 48 hours.

URGENT!  Several computer Hacker groups, with a long track record of highly effective and devastating computer attacks, have announced “the strongest cyberattack in history” to bring down European Banks within the next 48 Hours.

Several hacker groups are allegedly planning to carry out a large-scale computer attack on the European banking system. As it became known to the

Hacktivists of “Killnet” along with representatives of “Revil” – which was long-considered defeated, as well as members of “Anonymous” say they have joined together to achieve this goal.

Put simply, Russian hackers have declared war on European banks.

According to sources who have seen it, a not yet published promo video dedicated to this attack has already been made. In the video itself, an unnamed representative of “Killnet” allegedly called on all active groups to engage in destructive activities against the European banking system.

“This is not a DDoS attack, the games are over. No money — no weapons — no Kiev regime” — this formula will work,” the masked man promised.

The leader of “Killnet” hiding under the nickname “Killmilk”, confirmed that preparations for the attack are already underway. It is expected to begin in the next 48 hours.

Cyberattack could be the largest in history

The representative of “Revil,” in turn, stated that “the world has gone crazy”, and the reason for this, in his opinion, was money. He also stated that it is the European banking system that governs the EU.

“No money, no problem. Revil is sufficiently familiar with the European financial infrastructure,” the representative of the group threatened.

A member of Anonymous also noted that European financial institutions will witness “the strongest cyberattack in the recent history of the world.” He urged them to be ready for the coming blow, and also stated that when it is struck, “it will be too late to fix anything.”

“Many European banks will be targeted, and we will strike without mercy,” concluded the representative of Anonymous.

VERY CONVENIENT FOR KLAUS SCHWAB AND THE W.E.F.

Klaus Schwab, leader of the World Economic Forum (WEF) has long warned, and recently reiterated, that some type of monstrous, worldwide cyber-attack, would cripple the civilized world, and would be more devastating than an actual war.

Isn’t a a bit convenient for him, that suddenly, these alleged “Hackers” announce “the biggest cyber attack in history?”

MORE: 

Didn’t the United States adopt an official public policy that a Cyber Attack could be met with a military response?

That’s even MORE applicable here . . . look WHO is allegdly announcing this:  “Russian” Hackers.

Oh, gee whiz, how convenient.  NATO is all deployed for their Air Defender 2023 “Exercise” in Europe, and just itching to get involved in the Russia-Ukraine war on the side of Ukraine.

Right on cue, “Russian” Hackers announce a major attacking on the European Banking System while all those NATO troops and planes are deployed right near Ukraine!

If this cyber attack DOES take place, and it DOES take out European banks, NATO might just use that as the basis to claim they have been “attacked” (by Russia, of course) and wham, Article 5 of the NATO Treaty gets invoked, the NATO troops enter Ukraine, and the Russian nuclear missiles fly.

This is all a little too convenient for my tastes.

STILL MORE . . .

Today being Wednesday, 48 hours puts us all at FRIDAY.

Several years ago, weren’t we all warned by various other people, that before TPTB crash the system, the world would suddenly get word about some cyber attack problems with banks?  Didn’t that years-ago warning tell us the attacks would start late in a week, explode on a FRIDAY, taking out the banks for potentially weeks?

Gee, how convenient that today’s announcement by Hackers fits all those details almost perfectly!

Folks, this _____ COULD _____ be the WEF/TPTB doing this.   One would have to have his head in the sand not to see it.

You know the drill: Get some CASH MONEY from the bank – top live on . . . NOT TO PAY BILLS.

If these people do what they are saying, it is entirely ____POSSIBLE____ that bank ATM/DEBIT/CREDIT cards may go offline.  And as Europe goes, so goes America as all the banks are connected worldwide.

So don’t panic — plan.

Remember, fuel up your vehicles, have food, water, medicines, and some cash to live on.  For food, not for Bills.   The Bills can wait if the choice is survival.

UPDATE 8:25 PM EDT —

I found someone on social media who has put up a copy of the Video announcement mentioned above:

Peach Cobbler Supreme

peach cobbler
peach cobbler

Ingredients

  • About 8 cups sliced fresh peaches
  • 2 cups granulated sugar
  • 2-4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1 teaspoon almond extract
  • 1/3 cup butter
  • Any pastry for a double-crust pie

Instructions

  1. Combine first 4 ingredients in a Dutch oven; set aside until syrup forms.
  2. Bring peach mixture to a boil, reduce heat to low, and cook for 10 minutes or until tender.
  3. Remove from heat; add almond extract and butter, stirring until butter melts.
  4. Roll half of pastry to 1/8-inch thickness on lightly floured surface, and cut into an 8-inch square.
  5. Spoon half of peaches into a lightly buttered 8-inch square baking dish; top with pastry square.
  6. Bake at 425 degrees F for 14 minutes or until lightly browned.
  7. Spoon remaining peaches over baked pastry square.
  8. Roll out remaining pastry, and cut into 1-inch strips to arrange in lattice design over peaches.
  9. Continue to bake for 15 to 18 minutes or until browned.

U.S. B1-b “Lancer” Nuclear Bombers over Germany as Russian Tactical Nukes ARRIVE in Belarus

Two United States Air Force B-1b “Lancer” nuclear bombers are flying in German air space this morning.  One took off from RAF Fairfield in the UK and joined another for a flight near (but not into) Ukraine air space.  This comes as Russian Tactical nuclear bombs are being delivered into Belarus for storage by Russia.

At about 2:00 AM eastern US time, one B-1-b took off from the UK to go to Germany:

B 1 b Departs UK air field
B 1 b Departs UK air field

The aircraft started Squawking over England.

Then, it went on-station over North Sea.

It later moved to on-station over southern Germany.

Now, on-station over northern Germany.

These nuclear bomber aircraft from the U.S. Air Force are flying as Russian Tactical-Nuclear Bombs and Missiles have begun to arrive at Storage and Deployment Sites in Belarus.

UPDATE 12:19 PM EDT —

Both B1-b Lancers headed toward the Black Sea . . . . AND . . . . upon going out over the Black Sea, BOTH planes switched OFF their transponders!!!

Total Stealth mode.

Africa STUNNER! Ditching U.S. dollar for trade Kenyan President’s Announcement Shakes Global Economy

Another Year in China

Was 2022 the biggest year ever?

Jun 15, 2023
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During a visit in 2022, Xi transformed the once-fractious Middle East into a community united around a shared vision. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, the Arab League, Palestine and Lebanon signed thirty-four agreements, among them: KSA can order missiles, helicopters and air defense weapons with a phone call, and no approval necessary; the region will harmonize its plans with the BRI; Huawei will install $30 billion of telecom gear; China will build a $1 trillion regional hub of 21st century industries; Egypt will get a satellite factory; China and the region will unite to liberate Palestine and protect Syria.

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2023 06 15 16 40

Apart from that..

  • Inflation stayed flat at 2.2%
  • Power generation rose 8%
  • SOE revenues grew twice as fast as GDP.
  • 48 million kids began kindergarten
  • 4.7 million kids earned STEM degrees
  • Chinese universities surpassed American in the Top 500
  • British researchers chose China over US
  • China led in the top 1% of scientific papers
  • 110 cities had 1 Gbps networks (the US has 0)
  • China built four exascale computers
  • Quantum secure smartphones came on the market
  • Mao’s old co-ops sold $1 trillion of food
  • Half of Chinese farms are cooperatives
  • Xi spanked Justin Trudeau on camera
  • Serious crime fell 30% since 2012
  • B-2 bombers left Guam, F-15s left Okinawa
  • 82% supported Dynamic Covid Zero
  • Putin serenaded Xi Jinping at the piano
  • The 1000-mile Grand Canal filled with water end to end.

Southern Crusty Coconut Pie

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2023 06 15 11 16

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 1/4 cups shredded coconut
  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 (9-inch) unbaked pie shell

Instructions

  1. Pour milk over coconut and set aside while creaming butter and sugar together.
  2. Add eggs to creamed mixture and beat well.
  3. Add milk, coconut and vanilla extract.
  4. Pour into an unbaked pie shell.
  5. Bake at 350 degrees F for about 30 minutes or until pie is golden brown and firm.

Yield: 6 – 8 servings

This recipe may be doubled to make two pies.

Astroturfing For More War In Ukraine

Fellaraktar🇺🇦@fellaraktar – 14:46 UTC · May 29, 2023As a British citizen I want to say that arming Ukraine is the single best use of tax payer money for decades

My only criticism is that the west aren’t sending enough, fast enough

Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of their sons and daughters

Do more now

Karen Goetz📯🇺🇦 @KarenGoetz362 – 22:18 UTC · May 29, 2023As a German citizen I want to say that arming #Ukraine is the single best use of tax payer money for decades. My only criticism is that the west aren’t sending enough, fast enough. Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of their sons and daughters. Do more now!

Oksanna Oricia (Оксана Збігла) 🇺🇦🇨🇦 @Roxanne_Oricia – 1:46 UTC · May 30, 2023As a 🇺🇦 #Canadian I want to say that arming #Ukraine is the single best use of taxpayer money in decades.

My only criticism is that the west isn’t sending enough, FAST enough.

Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of their sons & daughters.
#ArmUkraineNow ✊🏼

Thomas C. Theiner @noclador – 4:57 UTC · May 30, 2023As an Italian citizen I want to say that arming Ukraine is the single best use of taxpayer money for decades.
My only criticism is that the west aren’t sending enough, fast enough.
Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of their sons and daughters.
Do more now!

brit engr 🇬🇧 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇺🇦 @brit_engr – 8:15 UTC · May 30, 2023As a British citizen, I want to say that arming Ukraine is the single best use of taxpayer money for decades.
My only criticism is that the West aren’t sending enough, fast enough.
Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of their sons and daughters.
Do more now!

bitiv @bitiv30 – 9:29 UTC · May 30, 2023As a #Romanian citizen, I want to say that arming #Ukraine is the single best use of taxpayer money for decades. My only criticism is that the West isn’t sending enough, fast enough. Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of its sons and daughters. Do more now!

Anne @KidsFromUkraine 🌷❤🌻 @AnneFella – 17:03 UTC · May 30, 2023As a 🇳🇱#Dutch citizen I want to say that arming #Ukraine is the single best use of taxpayer money in decades. My only criticism is that the west isn’t sending enough, FAST enough. Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of their sons & daughters. #ArmUkraineNow

Thibaud Ochem @Thibaud_Ochem – 18:51 UTC · May 30, 2023As a 🇫🇷 citizen I want to say that arming #Ukraine is the single best use of taxpayer money 4 decades. My only criticism is that the West isn’t sending enough, fast enough.🇺🇦is paying 4 political posturing with the lives of their sons & daughters. Do more now! #weapons4Ukraine

MH @Mickhavoc – 1:14 UTC · May 31, 2023As a Canadian citizen I want to say that arming #Ukraine is the single best use of taxpayer money for decades. My only criticism is that the west aren’t sending enough, fast enough. Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of their sons and daughters. Do more now

Bogdan Stech @BogdanStech – 22:07 UTC · May 31, 2023As a #Poland citizen, I want to say that arming #Ukraine is the single best use of taxpayer money for decades. My only criticism is that the West isn’t sending enough, fast enough. Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of its sons and daughters.

Well, by now you will have understood the idea …

There are many more such tweets.

In total I count more than one hundred by various NAFO troll accounts. All the tweets were issued between May 29 and June 6.

This is astroturfing on a fairly sophisticated level:

Astroturfing is the practice of hiding the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source’s financial backers. The term astroturfing is derived from AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to resemble natural grass, as a play on the word “grassroots”. The implication behind the use of the term is that instead of a “true” or “natural” grassroots effort behind the activity in question, there is a “fake” or “artificial” appearance of support.

I wonder whose taxpayer money gets wasted on it.

Yesterday the Russian President Vladimir Putin had a public talk with war correspondents. Yekaterina Agranovich, a blogger, asked him about ‘western’ propaganda and the people deceived by it. Putin responded:

The information space is a battlefield, a crucial battlefield.So, if someone uploads or writes something and provides an address, this is one thing. However, if there is no address and it is not clear who is writing or speaking, this is a completely different story. You and I are well aware that you can post things online using well-known technical means, and you can make it look like millions of people have seen these videos and commented on them when in fact there is just one person behind it who simply uses modern technology to replicate it endlessly. But, of course, there certainly are people who have a certain frame of mind, and they can express their point of view.

What can we do to oppose this? I think this audience will know what I mean. This can and should be countered not so much by restrictions or administrative or law enforcement constraints, but by effective work in the information environment on our part. And I am really counting on your help.

Well, he did not talk to me. And no, I do not post at Moon of Alabama to help Russia or Putin, but to lay things out as I see them. If that is at times consistent with whatever this or that other public person says, it is likely to be a coincidental and temporary state.

Hat tip: Syriacide

Posted by b on June 14, 2023 at 13:20 UTC | Permalink

Luna: Bring the Moon Along with You

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What beats looking up at a large, illuminated, full moon? Well now, thanks to this brilliant creation known as the Luna Moon Lantern. This dope and rather eye-catching design lets you have that large illumination any time, giving us something quite contagious and rather unique. The design boasts a construction of glass fiber and non-toxic latex.

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The Luna Moon Lantern offers up a brilliant and beautiful way to add light to your life, and certainly adds an eye-catching and artistic appeal to any room in which it’s placed. The design comes in seven different sizes, ranging from the XXS 3.2-inch ball to the XXL 23.6-inches.

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We find a cord and a device that will allow you to adjust its glow. Check out the eye-catching new design in the images below and speak your mind on it after the jump. Looking to add this to your home or office, head over here right now!

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Chinese FM Qin Gang holds phone talks with Antony Blinken

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Qin Gang had a phone call with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on June 14 at the latter’s request, clarifying China’s firm stance on core concerns such as the Taiwan question, according to a statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Qin pointed out that since the beginning of the year, China-US relations have faced new difficulties and challenges, and the responsibility is clear. China has always viewed and handled China-US relations following the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Qin clarified China’s firm stance on core concerns such as the Taiwan question, emphasizing that [1] the US should respect it, [2] stop interfering in China’s internal affairs, and [3] stop harming China’s sovereign security and development interests in the name of competition.

The Chinese diplomat said he hopes that [4] the US will take practical actions to implement the important consensus reached between the two heads of state at the G20 Bali meeting. As well as [5] the relevant commitments made by the US, move toward China, [6] effectively manage differences, [7] promote exchanges and cooperation, and [8] get China-US relations back on track to healthy and stable development.

Washington continued hyping China-related topics ahead of a reported trip by Blinken to China as the Biden administration said it has “taken diplomatic steps” that slowed China’s intelligence presence overseas following its recent hype over an alleged “Cuba spy base.” The latest US move was criticized  by China on Tuesday as “taking the same page” of the US’ playbook.

This is perhaps the biggest news of the Summer of 2023.

Taken together with previous trends we see some very interesting developments on the Geo-political stage.

A mere two months ago, Macron STUNNED the world when he arrived in China. He surprised everyone when he arrived with hundreds of trade representatives to cut deals with China.

This might not seem like much, but se made a very vocal, and public display of standing up against the United States. While the Untied States (and NATO) were expecting him to “toe the line” and regurgitate the (mindless manta) of “support Ukraine”, “sanction Russia”, “obey the USA or else”, and put pressure on China. Instead, he did the exact opposite, he supported, approved of, and embraced China.

And what can you expect?

The United States was infuriated, the raging up and down Washington DC was legendary.

So of course, the “police dogs” (used to keep the proxy nations in line with Washington dictates) began their disruptions, protests, and assaults. CIA operatives inside of France began their disruptions; their protests, and their threats of “color revolution”…

He didn’t care.

Instead he cut so many deals (with China) that the world was left a spinning. The sheer scope and size was unlike anything anyone expected.

  • Selling over 160 aircraft to China.
  • Joint ventures galore, and many new (BIG) factories to open up in Face to provide hundreds of thousands of jobs.
  • Allowing China to operate it’s Navy and use French bases on the third island chain! (Talk about “throwing a bucket of ice water” on the American neocons)

And so much more.

Nervous Chinese see the good and the threats of all this, but over all, the message is clear.

France is considering leaving the G7 and joining BRICS++. And if it is successful, the “rules based American order” is about to shrink in chunks and bumpy stages. We are (you and I) watching in real-time the repudiation of the American world order, the American USD, and the American LGBQ+ culture.

And France wants a seat at the table.

France, and Africa (both which are French speaking lands) are embracing a multi-polar world as equal partners and turning their collective backs to the shit-show; clown march of collapsed American society, and the massive crime syndicate that it represents.

Oh sure, there are many steps from here to there, and the United States is going to do everything to stop Micron before it’s too late. But as it stands now, France is waving the flag and is will to arrive in the embrace of a new world order.

One where France has a major seat at the table, instead of moldy American table scraps on the floor.

Rustic Southern Sweet Potato Pie

Sweet Potato Pie vs Pumpkin Pie

Sweet potato pies have a very similar taste and texture to pumpkin pie, but I prefer sweet potato pie. Typically a pie made with sweet potato is a little lighter in texture and sweeter with less spice and I think sweet potato pies are more buttery.

Ask any southerner and they will tell you that sweet potato pie is greatly superior to pumpkin pie.

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2023 06 15 11 14

Ingredients

Filling

  • 2 large yams
  • 2 large sweet potatoes
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 stick butter (melted)
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
  • 3 tablespoons butter

Dough

  • 3 cups flour
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1/3 cup olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
  • 1 cup whole milk

Egg Wash

  • 1 egg
  • 1 tablespoon milk

Instructions

  1. Filling: In a large pot, boil yams and potatoes for about one hour or until tender.
  2. Drain water and let potatoes cool.
  3. When cool enough to handle, peel skins off and place yams and potatoes in a ricer or potato masher.
  4. In a bowl, combine yams and potatoes, sugar, melted butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt and vanilla extract. Mix well.
  5. Dough: Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  6. In a small saucepan, heat the butter until it turns golden brown. When done, it should have a nutty-like aroma.
  7. Remove from heat and let cool.
  8. In a large bowl, combine flour, salt and sugar, mixing well.
  9. In another bowl, whisk together olive oil, vanilla extract, milk and melted butter.
  10. Pour into the flour mixture and mix with a fork. Dough should hold together. If too crumbly, add ice water, a tablespoon at a time.
  11. Cover and let sit for about a half an hour.
  12. Assemble: On a floured surface, roll out dough to fit a 14-inch round or rectangular baking pan. Place dough on pan.
  13. Spoon filling into the center of the dough, leaving about a 1 1/2-inch border. Gently fold the sides of the dough up and over some of the filling.
  14. Egg Wash: Mix the egg and tablespoon of milk together with a fork.
  15. Coat the bread with egg wash using a pasty brush.
  16. Sprinkle with sugar.
  17. Bake for about 45 minutes or until crust is golden brown.
  18. Serve alone or with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

Europe is riding a bumpy ride in the gallop towards the abyss

Yesterday, I was leaving the office and went to the bus station. (I tend to take the Zhuhai bus instead of driving. It’s cheap and I don’t have to fight traffic.) And there was my bus.

So I waved at the bus driver with my QR and tried to get to the the bus, but there was this doddering older couple just blocking the way. So I tried to get around them. Sure as shit, they moved in front of me, so I went around the other direction, there they still moved in front of me..

Intentional?

Poor sensory awareness?

Just pissed off and looking for a patsy?

I don’t know

So I got off the sidewalk, as it was blocked every which way I turned. And got off the bus station, and went on the road still waving my QR to the driver.

Wouldn’t you know it, but that senile couple jumped off the sidewalk and still continued to block me.

They actually got in front of me on the road!!!!

No shit. They got off the sidewalk. and blocked my path to the bus as I was trying to get to it on the street.

What was their malfunction?

So I forcefully plowed around them and got on the bus. Not rudely. I did everything I could to avoid touching them. I arched my back and scraped the incoming other bus with my backpack.

But, boy oh boy,  they started up a bunch of complaining and bitchin! Some times I wonder why they picked on me to hassle. I’m not some dumb kid, I know when I’m being “cock blocked” intentionally, and three times is NOT an accident.

When you are in China, you may come across these senile old fixed minded people that start treating you disrespectfully, mistakenly believing that they (due to their age) will get an automatic pass for their behaviors. As they normally do.

The old are revered in China.

But not everyone is deserving.

I think that that kind of behavior is common in Washington DC these days…

Rear Adm. Mike Studeman might be referring to the phenomenon where individuals or organizations fail to recognize or intelligently address the strategic threat posed by China’s role as a significant global power.

This term “China Blindness” has been used to describe a range of issues related to China. In particular, it refers to a serious lack of understanding of what China is, how it operates, and what it is capable of. It is a “catch all” phrase that describes a cloud of ignorance of what China actually is today.

The Admiral is admonishing his peers as a warning. To believe the false narratives encapsulated in the public narrative is to risk serious defeat on the battlefield. To engage China, one must be realistic, and fully address the harsh and uncomfortable reality that confronts the USN. If it fails to do so, it could result in catastrophe.

As far as I can understanding it, the use of this term suggests a need for greater awareness and friendly engagement with China. As opposed to the politically-driven narratives of forcing and pushing China to follow United States dictates.

US is 8,300 miles away from home in Chinese water. China will do it again and again. I have no question.

Why Do Europeans Dislike Americans So Much?

Baked Fresh Ham, Southern Style

Yield: 8 to 10 servings

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2023 06 10 11 15

Ingredients

  • 6 pound fresh ham
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 hot dried red pepper
  • 1 cinnamon stick
  • 2 tablespoons salt
  • 1 tablespoon powdered mustard
  • 1 tablespoon horseradish
  • 1 garlic clove
  • Whole cloves
  • 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

Instructions

  1. Put ham in kettle and cover with boiling water. Add next 4 ingredients. Bring to boil. Cover and simmer for 2 hours.
  2. Cool in the broth and refrigerate overnight.
  3. Remove rind from ham.
  4. Mix mustard and horseradish and rub on fat. Insert garlic in the fat. Put on rack and bake in preheated slow oven (300 degrees F) for 2 hours.
  5. Score fat with a knife, stud with cloves and sprinkle with the sugar.
  6. Bake for 1 hour longer, basting occasionally with drippings in the pan.

BLACK AMERICAN SHOCKS EUROPEANS SPEAKING 6 LANGUAGE

Graphic Art Between Renaissance And Modernity

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The French artist Benedicte Piccolillo, graphic designer and street artist, is the talent hidden behind Voglio Bene. Based in Mauguio, South of France, she creates from “coups de Coeur” that she may have had on old paintings from masters. Initially a photographer, the artist is self-taught in digital graphic creation.

“I can fall in love with a piece from the Middle Ages as well as a Mannerist painting. My favorite period remains the Renaissance, especially Italian, but also Spanish. It is full of religious paintings, each one more beautiful than the next, which maintains and delights my spiritual sidem” she explains.

Depuis quelques années, Bénédicte s’intéresse de plus en plus à l’histoire de l’art et veut donner une dimension plus culturelle à son travail. “French castles and museums are beginning to be seduced and to approach me in order to launch collaborations”, she added.

More: Benedicte Piccolillo, Instagram h/t: fubiz

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Just came back from visiting Xinjiang:

  • Their culture and religion is respected. All street names, airports etc. include the Arab characters as well. Mosques are open.
  • Economy and daily life is fine. The population is half Uyghurs and half Han and they live ok together, normally.
  • Security is very tight. Police, road blocks and monitoring of individuals movements anytime and anywhere. But couldn’t see any abuse or disrespectful attitude by the security forces.
  • I believe that there is zero tolerance to any radicals and potential jihadists. Unlike the west who only RESPONDS to terrorism (rather than PREVENT it in advance), China takes preemptive measures. Gets more scolded by the world but keeps its citizens out of harm’s way.

This haunting photo of Nicholas Mevoli, an American free diver, has been seared into my mind.

It was on November 17, year 2013, when he did his final free dive while attempting to set a new (American) deep dive record.

He had attempted to dive to 236 ft/72 m on a single breath. He began to turn back at 223 ft/68m, but somehow changed his mind and dived further downward.

He surfaced, gave the OK sign, tried to speak, then promptly passed out.

This picture was taken just moments before he passed out.

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main qimg 5de67c87ee54bcf24bbb45aa49c0d02c lq

The look in his eyes…he looks scared stiff, frozen in fear, as if he knows what is going to happen.

Unfortunately, he never regained consciousness after that and passed away soon after.

His death was caused by breathing complications due to pulmonary edema (meaning fluid accumulation in the tissue and air spaces of the lungs).

At least some semblance of peace may be gained by his family from the fact that he passed away doing what he loved.

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main qimg f24eba38e1be76713e0328624356094a lq

The younger of my two sons had been quite a problem as a teenager. We fought and I was worried about his character. Jeremy flunked out of college.

In his 20s, he worked in desktop computer support. The other support tech was senior to Jeremy, but Jeremy neither liked nor respected him. Nonetheless, the senior tech invariably got his way. Of course. Then one day the manager found out that the senior tech was gay. He dismissed him.

My son discovered this about 10:00. By 10:15 he had quit, informing the manager that he could not work for a company which treated its workers unfairly. He had no job, but his integrity was intact.

At that moment, I learned that I had raised a man possessed of both morality and strength of character.

As it happens, three weeks later Jeremy had a new job at nearly twice the salary of the tech job he had quit. Things worked out rather well, all in all.

BORDER EVACUATED, Nukes Being Moved Miles From NATO Summit, Huge Fires, 72 HR WW3 Exercise

Hampton Plantation Shrimp Pilau

Hampton Plantation was once the largest rice producer in the United States.

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9d0de4bc21db277bdb47b8ca391f6291

Ingredients

  • 6 to 8 slices bacon
  • 2 cups shrimp (raw, cleaned – save shrimp peelings)
  • 1 cup rice, uncooked
  • 3 tablespoons butter
  • 1/2 cup celery, diced
  • 2 tablespoons green bell pepper, diced
  • 1 to 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 2 to 3 tablespoons flour
  • 1 dash salt, to taste
  • 1 dash pepper, to taste

Instructions

  1. Fry bacon until crisp. Set bacon aside. Reserve bacon grease to add to water when cooking rice.
  2. In a large frying pan on medium high heat, melt butter.
  3. Add celery and green pepper and saute until soft and tender.
  4. Add shrimp which have been sprinkled with Worcestershire sauce and dredged in flour.
  5. Sauté shrimp until pink, about 3 to 4 minutes.
  6. Season with salt and pepper.
  7. Add cooked rice and mix until rice is all “buttery” and “shrimpy.”
  8. Stir in crumbled bacon.
  9. Serve hot.

How brain dead are the US leadership?

For years the US has been sanctioning China and now the US “won’t tolerate” a taste of their own medicine.

China doesn’t need the US, but the US needs China. Perhaps the US must be careful now and realise that their attempts at being “tough” on China to please their own voters look very stupid indeed in the international arena; the REAL WORLD.

American vs. European Suburbs (and why US suburbs suck)

This is surprisingly good.

There is only one country here – the United States. As for Japan and the Philippines, they are American poodles, they do whatever their owners tell them to do, and they have no autonomy.

Is it possible that every time a US aircraft carrier crosses the Taiwan Strait or a US reconnaissance plane snoops over the South China Sea, it calls the China side in advance?

Once China side doesn’t answer the phone, Removal of guardrail, can’t the US playing “match-fixing” without fear?

Now, do US aircraft carriers dare to come to the Taiwan Strait?

Why have you lost your courage?

Isn’t the United States boasting all day about its control over the world?

Isn’t the United States boasting about its invincibility all day?

What are America’s “superheroes” afraid of?

Since there is no guardrail, the United States needs to find its own way!

Or, child, go back to your own home early, it is safest to move around outside your own home and risk areas are not the place for child to come.


Without high-level communication, many things would be different. You know!

Our soldiers cannot always exercise restraint if the enemy keeps snooping at our doorstep, and invaders from countries outside the region are not always lucky enough to return intact.

Our bomber pilots are very “not professional”, so if they get nervous and their hands shake and they accidentally “mistakenly bombed” a US aircraft carriers, we can only express our regret. 🤣

US bombers have “mistakenly bombed” the PRC Embassy in the FRY, and so can Chinese bombers. Wouldn’t you say that’s the case?

  • Calls to the Saudi Arabia side hotline from the US side, which the Saudi Arabia side do not answer.
  • Calls to the UAE side hotline from the US side, the UAE side does not answer.
  • Calls to the China side hotline from the US side, and China side doesn’t answer.

What does that mean?

It’s time for the United States to think about it and get a phone that works – Huawei P50s. Lol!

Working in USA vs The Netherlands: 12 Biggest Differences

His name is Liu Zhaohua, who won the second prize in the chemistry competition when he was in school, taught himself to make 31 tons of drugs(methamphetamine), with a purity of 99%, and became China’s largest drug lord(He had only 9 years of schooling)! Until now many drug dealers are secretly inquiring, what method Liu Zhaohua used to make methamphetamine, what crystallization method he used.

Synthesized with various common chemical reagents, not based on ephedrine production. He changed the substrate and catalyst of the reaction and adopted the continuous generation + continuous crystallization method in 1999.

In terms of daily production, he can easily crystallize 1,000,000 grams of methamphetamine a day, which is one ton, and if it can be sold, five tons a day is not a problem. In terms of conversion rate he claims to have a conversion rate of 90%. Such a high capacity, such a high conversion rate, drug quality is still very good, and the production process is very environmentally friendly and pollution-free, even more environmentally friendly than some pharmaceutical plants, so much so that many top chemical and chemical experts and scholars can not believe.

Until today, there is not a single drug maker in the world, including some professor-level ones who can reach the overall quality (purity, crystallization, and appearance) of the meth produced by Liu Zhaohua. They may have no problem with the theoretical aspects, but the process technology they master cannot do it.

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main qimg 8396a73d2b38f38af6841db050cb2c11 lq

He has a high IQ and an extremely strong psychological quality. He escaped from Guangzhou on his bicycle under the circumstances that the police had barricaded him all over the city, and carved “Liu Zhaohua, came here to visit” on the cave where he had been hiding, which made the police furious. At that time, Liu Zhaohua was staying in room 818 of the President Hotel in Guangzhou. The police were quickly dispatched and rushed to the President Hotel in Guangzhou, and at this time Liu Zhaohua had just returned to the hotel from outside. At the critical moment, Liu Zhaohua did not immediately twist and turn to flee the scene, but made an amazing move. He and the investigator took the same elevator, see the investigator pressed the 8th floor, Liu Zhaohua immediately pressed the 7th floor. And on the day of November 4, the Guangzhou police deployed a large number of police officers to impose martial law on the entry and exit gates and major traffic routes in the city. In particular, the suspicious vehicles leaving Guangzhou were checked, and the check was very tight. Buses, cabs, private cars along with cars hauling goods were checked one by one. Liu Zhaohua, who walked out of the President Hotel, knew very well that there would be checkpoints to arrest him at all major traffic roads in Guangzhou. The police will definitely check the vehicles entering and leaving the intersection of Guangzhou, so Liu Zhaohua chose a way to escape that no one expected – a bicycle. For Liu Zhaohua this is naturally the best disguise, Liu Zhaohua just rode a bicycle to escape from Guangzhou under the heavy police siege. And this is already the second time Liu Daohua slipped away from under the nose of the police.

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main qimg 9f66a087a1e6845cf3bf8c7d9c2d92b8 lq

(Liu Zhaohua’s second wife)

He has three wives in the same time and four children, and his golden words are popular in the love scene: “The first wife is my favorite, the second wife is my most loving, and the third wife is my most loving.

In 2000. Liu Zhaohua settled in Quanzhou County, Guilin, Guangxi under the name of Li Senqing.He lived here, got married and had children, and was well known in the area. The neighbors of this “Mr. Li” said that he was kind to people, but rather petty, a rich man with the air of a small citizen. This time, Liu Zhaohua disguised very successfully. In fact, during the escape Liu Zhaohua also became a important guest of the local government. He leased more than 24,000 acres of land in the Phoenix Forestry in Lingui County, Guilin, claiming to complete a project with a total investment of 300 million yuan in three years. So, why is he going to do by renting so much forest land? Liu Zhaohua claimed that he did not have a sense of accomplishment in doing methamphetamine, while planting red bean fir gave him a sense of accomplishment because the area he planted was the largest in the world.

Liu Zhaohua is both cunning and arrogant, he does not follow common sense and believes that the most dangerous place is instead the safest. This is an important reason why he successfully escaped from the chase several times. During the years in Guilin, Guangxi, Liu Zhaohua made a big show of running his own business. The most important thing is that he did not shy away from getting himself into the newspaper and even became a local celebrity. on February 6, 2013, the Guilin Evening News reported a full-page story about a resident who bravely fought the thieves, and the resident who bravely caught three thieves was Liu Zhaohua, who changed his name.

After being caught, he said to the police in prison: “You can ask what you want to know, make a list, but don’t play with my intelligence, you can’t play with me.”

In court he sophomorically argued, “I don’t sell my drugs to domestic people, only to foreigners; foreigners used to open China’s doors with opium, and I should open their doors with meth too.”

In the eyes of the police, he is a misguided chemical genius who has cleverly escaped mass arrests by the police many times; in the circle of drug production and trafficking, he is a legend that cannot be replicated; in the eyes of his mother, he is a good student; in the eyes of his three wives, he is a master of “time management”; in the eyes of his children, he is a cold-blooded father who only cares about birth but not nurturing.

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main qimg deb0e6a49d5ee0d67bdfb94be4faae66 lq

Some people once described Liu Zhaohua as a real-life version of China’s “Walter White(Breaking Bad)”.The profession does not agree with this statement, because even Walter White, who has the aura of a protagonist, is several notches below Liu Zhaohua, both in terms of drug production technology (including methamphetamine quality) and production scale.

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main qimg aa8f80b20a3c34cf20e9c50c21484b7a lq

In terms of influence, the fictional Walter White is even more incomparable. Liu Zhaohua is very famous in the global drug trafficking and drug production circles, and the Mexican drug lord “Shorty” Guzman, who was just released from prison in 2002, immediately sent his pals to inquire about the whereabouts of Liu Zhaohua, who was on the run, and wanted to pay a lot of money to seek cooperation.

In terms of life experience, Liu Zhaohua is also more legendary than Walter White in the movie and TV series.He has been a soldier and a bailiff. He has made meritorious achievements and received commendations. During his time in office, he was the backbone that every leader wanted to focus on training. If not engaged in drug trafficking, he has a bright future.

Of course, in terms of social harm, Liu Zhaohua is also worse, as he made 31 tons of methamphetamine. With his own power to influence the behavior of several industries in China, for example, the use of hydrochloric acid in some corporate factories, research institutions, schools, etc. need to be reported first.

American turned Dutch: Giving up US Citizenship

These are the same Russian submarines, which protected the Indian Navy by becoming a shield against America in the 1971 war.

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main qimg 3db5ea1f9fc15a2a0ef103073ed69a71 lq

A story that has almost been erased from the Indian history books.

50 years ago in 1971, the US threatened India to stop the 1971 war. Concerned India sent an SOS to the Soviet Union. When Pakistan’s defeat in the 1971 war seemed easy, Kissinger prompted Nixon to send the US 7th Fleet Task Force, led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, to the Bay of Bengal.

USS Enterprise, 75,000 tons, was the world’s largest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the 1970s with over 70 fighters. A moving monster on the surface of the sea. The Indian Navy’s fleet was led by Vikrant, a 20,000-tonne aircraft carrier, carrying 20 light combat aircraft. Officially, the USS Enterprise was sent to the Bay of Bengal to protect American citizens in Bangladesh, while unofficially it was to intimidate the Indian Army and prevent the liberation of East Pakistan.

Further, Soviet intelligence reported to India that a powerful British naval fleet led by the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle along with the commando carrier HMS Albion, along with several destroyers and other ships were approaching the Arabian Sea from the west in Indian waters.

The British and Americans planned a coordinated naval attack to intimidate India: British ships in the Arabian Sea would target India’s west coast, while the Americans would attack in Chittagong. The Indian Navy was caught between British and American ships. That was December 1971, and the world’s two major democracies were now threatening the world’s largest democracy.

An SOS from Delhi was sent to Moscow. The Red Navy soon dispatched 16 Soviet naval units and six nuclear submarines from Vladivostok to block the USS Enterprise.

Admiral N Krishnan, the chief of the Eastern Command of the Indian Navy, wrote in his book ‘No Way But Surrender’ that he feared the Americans would reach Chittagong. He mentioned how he thought of attacking the Enterprise in a do-or-die trick to slow it down.

On 2 December 1971, a task force of the US 7th Fleet led by the water giant USS Enterprise arrived in the Bay of Bengal. The British fleet was coming into the Arabian Sea.

The world held its breath.

But, unknown to the Americans, they were overtaken by submerged Soviet submarines.

As the USS Enterprise headed for East Pakistan, Soviet submarines came to the fore without warning. Soviet submarines now stood between India and American naval forces.

Americans_surprised_surprised_.

The 7th US Fleet Commander told Admiral Gordon: “Sir, we are too late. The Soviets are here!” no choice but to retreat. Both the American and British fleets retreated.

Today, most Indians have forgotten this huge naval chess battle between the two superpowers in the Bay of Bengal. It is important to know and remember.

Why ask questions that you know the answer to?

What are you, a sadist? Asking the same old questions day in, and day out. Hoping, praying, waiting, for some other tidbit of information that would make the reality easier to digest?

On paper, in theory, all of the 11 aircraft carriers that the United States fields (10 Nimitz and 1 Ford), could be destroyed by Chinese conventionally-armed DF-26 “carrier Killer” missiles. Given the flight times for the latest upgrades for the hyper-velocity versions of the DF-26 anticipated stopwatch from launch to destruction is within five minutes within the 4000 Km range.

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2023 06 10 15 46

They are very effective. And are designed to completely destroy Aircraft carriers.

From time to time, China takes them out as a warning to overly aggressive American neocons that are getting “too big for their britches”.

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2023 06 10 16 18

These units are not the ONLY weapons systems that are designed to destroy carrier flotillas, islands, and large bases like in Guam or Hawaii. There are many others. It’s just that the DF-26 is particularly good at it. Given the enormous numbers of launchers, and the insane levels of stockpiled munitions, one can only assume that all targets from land bases to submarines will be the prey for this missile.

The DF-26 appears to be designed specifically for high precision conventional strikes. The most likely target for the DF-26 missile would be Guam going by the range of the missile. Given the nature of the targets in Guam, which are mostly air bases (Guam has two large air bases where, as revealed by satellite imagery, B-52 squadrons are deployed), the DF-26 might be carrying specially designed cluster based bomb-lets to cause maximum damage to bombers spread out on the tarmac. In addition, there could be a specially designed deep penetration warhead for Hardened and Deeply Buried Targets (HDBTs).

Now, for the longest time, the USN and the ONI have been very quiet about the massive exponential increase in Chinese weapon lethality, survival-ability, and technology. The reports have been duly logged. The studies have been gamed out. The results and conclusions have been presented, filed and forgotten.

But it has only been during the last year that the USN admirals have become increasingly frenzied when dealing with hawkish Administration and Senate members. These people are not taking “no” for an answer, and want to find some edge; some justification, to “pull off” a “successful” war against China.

So, sometime, within the last nine months or so, the ONI through a number of key admirals, laid out the reality to the neocon “war hawks”.

And they are horrified.

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2023 06 10 16 19

The Chinese “just ran rings around us,” said former Joint Chiefs Vice Chair Gen. John Hyten in one after-action report. “They knew exactly what we were going to do before we did it.”

Dozens of versions of the above war-game scenario have been enacted over the last few years, most recently in April by the House Select Committee on competition with China. And while the ultimate outcome in these exercises is not always clear — the U.S. does better in some than others — the cost is. In every exercise the U.S. uses up all its long-range air-to-surface missiles in a few days, with a substantial portion of its planes destroyed on the ground. In every exercise the U.S. is not engaged in an abstract push-button war from 30,000 feet up like the ones Americans have come to expect since the end of the Cold War, but a horrifically bloody one.

And that’s assuming the U.S.-China war doesn’t go nuclear.

“The thing we see across all the wargames is that there are major losses on all sides. And the impact of that on our society is quite devastating,” said Becca Wasser, who played the role of the Chinese leadership in the Select Committee’s wargame and is head of the gaming lab at the Center for a New American Security.

“The most common thread in these exercises is that the United States needs to take steps now in the Indo-Pacific to ensure the conflict doesn’t happen in the future.

We are hugely behind the curve. Ukraine is our wakeup call. This is our watershed moment.”

So…

Please give me a break. Stop asking for answers that you do not want to hear.

If the United States drops one bullet inside of China, and Taiwan is China, the entire USN gets sunk. And the American losses in the first two hours will be absolutely horrific.

China issued a statement and the United States is left in mixed feelings.

https://youtu.be/I_GeZj3KZPM

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Passport bros and the African-American women that they enrage

I learned something today. Just stop talking to Americans on social media. They are angry, rude, insulting, and just real dicks. I think that in the future, the term “American” will be synonymous with asshole.

In other “news”…

My wife was in a minor accident. A teenager, without a drivers license, and driving an unlicensed scooter ran in front of her, and it was a minor fender bender. Luckily the location had a traffic cop right there. (It happened right in front of him.)

No harm done. Some scrapes. We declined to do anything about it, and so the kid just got back up on his scoot and hurried away to work.

It could of been worse. But wasn’t. Good thing.

Today’s post.

In 2015, a man named Joel Burger married a woman named Ashley King. Burger King decided to fully fund the ceremony:

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main qimg de1374821f35b1ddffa97cd26fa6b6d5 pjlq

Seriously…

What are the chances???

But things don’t stop there. The buzz was so much that the staff of the restaurant line decided to contact the couple and say that they would cover all the costs of the ceremony.

How not to love?

Joel and Ashley said in an interview that they have known each other since kindergarten and that they were even united because all of their classmates thought the union of their names was funny.

My 10-year-old daughter came home from school one day and walked into my office. I looked up, scowled and spat out, “And what do you want?”

She thought a moment and said, “You know, Dad, you sound angry. But you’re not angry at me. You’re angry for some other reason and you’re taking it out on me.”

That stopped me cold. When I thought about what she’d said, I knew she was right. And I knew that I couldn’t snap at her again, not without good reason. In fact, I couldn’t snap at anyone again, not without good reason, and that good reason would have to be very good.

And that changed my life.

Resistance is futile. Look at the map, can you find Taiwan? The only salvation is to surrender as fast as possible to avoid bloodshed. Longer the resistance the more bloodshed it will be. Look no further than Ukraine.

Nobody ever used the formal board room.

Well, that might be an exaggeration — technically the quarterly board meetings were held there, but that was it. And I always knew when those were happening because they were a Big Deal and required days of preparation on my part every time.

As the office manager for the Houston branch of a medium-sized oil & gas company, I knew everything that went on in that space. Every morning I made the rounds of the office — straightening chairs in the two smaller conference rooms that actually saw regular use, refilling drinks in the fridge, wiping down spots the janitorial crew had missed…that office was my domain and I maintained it with pride.

Every morning I poked my head into the board room and it was always exactly as I had left it, in pristine condition, because nobody had opened the door except me.

When my fibromyalgia started a major, weeks-long flare up I did my best not to let it affect my job, but by lunchtime each day I was exhausted and in a lot of pain.

My desk was in the reception area of the office and it would obviously look less than professional for me to put my head down or otherwise try to rest there, so I took to crawling under the 12 foot long conference table in the board room to nap through my lunch hour most days.

This would usually perk me up enough to make it through the rest of the day, and since nobody ever went in there, it was no different from me walking to a nearby restaurant for my lunch break. I kept a large shawl/scarf folded in my desk that I used to cover up if it was chilly, and my three-ring binder had a puffy cover that served well enough as a makeshift pillow. Anyone seeing me walk into or out of the room would see me carrying a folded up scarf and a binder; nothing unusual.

One day I was curled in a painful ball under the table, unable to sleep (as was often the case) but enjoying the chance to relax and recharge, when the unthinkable happened — the conference room door opened and I heard multiple male voices chatting loudly.

A Senior Vice President had invited a couple of friends to the office and was giving them the grand tour before leaving for lunch with them.

I froze and took stock of my position under the table and that of my belongings. There was a non-zero chance that, from the angle of the door, the intruders would think a few chairs were pushed away from the back side of the table where I had crawled underneath (bad enough in my estimation because I always kept the conference chairs perfectly spaced and aligned) but not realize anyone was in the room.

Alas…the SVP was one of those lovely execs who doesn’t think they’re too good to push in a chair. He walked around the table and when he leaned to straighten the first chair, our eyes met.

I gave him a panicked, “No, shhhh, nothing to see here!” gesture (probably looking like I was having some sort of seizure that involved slitting my own throat) and after a startled “Oh!” he proceeded to push the chairs closer to the table but not close enough to hit me.

He then smoothly guided his friends back out of the board room and a few minutes later I heard them leave the office. I shakily bundled up my stuff and returned to my desk, wondering if I would be in trouble when he got back and how I would explain myself.

Upon his return from lunch he asked very formally if he could please see me in his office for a minute. I grabbed my notebook and pen and followed him with my head down.

After closing the door he told me to sit down and then asked me in a very kind voice if I was okay, if there were problems at home, and if I needed anything.

Tears sprang to my eyes and I fought to keep from breaking down. He knew about the fibro — all of my bosses did, because sometimes during a flare up I walk funny and fibro fog

is a real thing — but he hadn’t realized how bad it was or how hard it could be to get through a work day.

He assured me that he wouldn’t say anything to anyone and I was free to continue resting in the board room anytime I needed to. He also told me that if there were days I was having a hard time, I should let him know and he would come up with a reason for me to arrive late or leave early from the office.

I’ve never forgotten his kindness. In a situation when he had every right to demand an explanation, he offered a sympathetic ear and support I didn’t expect.

Almost four years since we each left that company, I ran into him at Jason’s Deli a couple of weeks ago. We said we should have lunch; we probably won’t, but it made me smile to see him. There are indeed kind humans out there, even as corporate executives.

The Black Woman Was Weaponized To Destroy The Black Family

Watch this. See the other side.

When I was a student at Salford University I met a group of American exchange students from Detroit.

They wanted to see as much of the U.K. as they could whilst over here and one of the trips they booked was a coach tour around North Wales. Excitement started to grow when I told them Wales is another country, separate from England.

A couple of days before they were due to leave I asked if they’d managed to get their entry visas through in time. They all started to get very worried as it hadn’t occurred to them they’d need a visa.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “they hardly ever check them anyway and the coach probably won’t even stop at the border. Just wave your passport at the window as you drive past, they’ll see you’re American and everything will be fine.”

When they got back a few days later I had a massive roasting. Apparently the bus was full of Americans and the girls had asked the driver to let them know when they were approaching the border. As they drove through an entire bus full of Americans all waved their passports at the sheep in the neighbouring fields. The driver, so I’m told, didn’t stop laughing for the rest of their excursion.

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main qimg 9ea8abd8fcf05e58b5b79bbd37d8c289

A whirlwind of changes is taking place in the global financial markets threatening the superiority of the U.S. dollar. A handful of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe are looking to end reliance on the dollar and promote BRICS or their native currencies. Iraq banned the U.S. dollar, posing a hefty fine and jail term for anyone trading with the USD.

The Iraqi government banned entities from initiating business transactions with the U.S. dollar. Iraq aims to control the fluctuating black market exchange rate, that plagues the country for decades. The move is also positioned to strengthen the usage of the Iraqi Dinar in the Forex markets.

Offenders who trade in the U.S. dollar will face a penalty of up to 1 million Iraqi Dinar. Repeat offenders will also face a jail term of one year and have their business licenses overturned.

The South African BRICS ambassador confirmed that European countries have expressed interest to join the BRICS alliance. He did not reveal the names of the European nations but hinted that a global financial change is brewing. According to recent developments, all arrows point towards France and Belarus showing interest to join BRICS.

France settled an LNG gas trade with China by settling the cross-border transaction with the Chinese Yuan in March. French President Emmanuel Macron also called for the European Union to distance itself from the U.S. dollar.

Great question! He was WAY worse in real life compared to Gladiator.

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main qimg c598ccfe7d54001950dcd86948733699 lq

Gladiator portrays Commodus as this obsessive power-hungry monster concerned with the love of the people above all.

In reality, Commodus was a vain, sick, and evil bastard that caused tons of suffering to countless people and cared only for himself.


Commodus’s had a good father to learn from. His dad and Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, was a top-tier Emperor who worked very hard to maintain the strength of the Empire.

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When Marcus died and passed power to his son he was at the end of a years-long war against the Germanic tribes along the border, specifically the Marcomanni. These tribes had long been a serious problem and had been raiding the Empire constantly for centuries.

Marcus was closing in on victory when he died and made his son promise to finish the wars. Once Commodus was in power though he decided that he just didn’t want to spend any more time fighting the Germans and ended the war with a crappy peace deal.

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Back in Rome, there were problems. Commodus could care less though.

You see Commodus never wanted to be Emperor. He only ever wanted to be a gladiator.

So Commodus appointed his two best friends (both slaves) to run the Empire while he went off to be a gladiator.

This was bonkers FYI. Gladiators were slaves who died for the amusement of the people. To see an Emperor fight as a gladiator is like seeing the President walk the street as a hooker trying to turn tricks.

While Commodus trained and fought his buddies mucked it all up. Rome would experience a famine, economic hardship, and social upheaval all while Commodus played gladiator.

Commodus would nearly bankrupt the treasury his father had built up by throwing near-constant gladiator games. You see Commodus loved to fight in the ring, though his opponents had dull swords and could never win. Mostly though Commodus enjoyed killing animals.

Moreover, Commodus loved to kill people he deemed “weird”. This includes women, dwarfs, disabled people, mentally ill people- you name it. He really enjoyed making them suffer often slowly killing them to show off his sword or bow skills.

In the end, the idiot would leave a “people I am going to kill” list on his desk for his mistress to find. The chief name on the list was hers, Commodus’s trainer, and a number of Senators. They decided to strike first and Commodus was strangled to death in his bath.

This was just last week, I was waiting for my wife to finish shopping at the (OMG soooo expensive) Westminster Abbey shop, when a group of American girls reached the till, (checkout) for payment, one of them proudly presented her black Amex card. Now the spotty lad on the till who was doing his best to control the queue said “sorry, we don’t accept this card”. Now this is when things started to get interesting, the young girl, maybe 17 or 18 years of age, I say girl because she was no lady, screams at the boy, “of course you take it, are stupid?” Now the spotty lad kept his cool and showed her the card indicating the payment options and surprise, surprise, NO AMEX . Well the girl turns bright puce and makes another attempt to explain to ‘spotty’ he is wrong. Shouting quite loudly now she says, “you have to take it, because the brochure says ‘accepted in the best places all over the world’ Is London not one of the best places”? ‘Spotty’ said yes it is, but you still can’t use it here. The girl just looked at her friends, screaming like a two year old who has been told ‘No’ and stormed out of the shop. “You could hear a pin drop” until an elderly gentleman in the queue said “well done lad, bloody yanks think they own the place” this was greeted with murmurs of approval, and normal service was resumed.

Chinese experts have developed a bomber ammunition that resembles the Switchblade. The drone is called Yousun, but all parameters are being kept secret.

Here’s What is Known:

The hovering munition looks similar to the Switchblade drone developed by the US company AeroVironment. But the key feature of the Yousun is the ability to launch from ships and submarines.

As the drone can also be launched from under water. This will have major implications for China’s warfighting capabilities in East Asia.

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2023 06 06 20 54

The kamikaze drone is designed to destroy defensive fortifications. It is 2.5-3m long and equipped with folding wings. The video above shows the bomber unfolding its wings after launch.

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2023 06 06 20ds 54

This happened here in Mumbai.

A girl was being married against her wishes.

People thought she would kill her wishes for her parents’ happiness.

Here’s how she acted bravely:

(In Islamic law a jurist has to ask the bride and the groom if they accept each other, thrice.)

1st time…

When Kazi (Muslim Jurist) asked her, “Do you accept it?”

She was supposed to say, “Yes, I accept.”

She: “Mujhe Qubool nahi hy” (I don’t accept this).

2nd time…

Kazi (Worried): “Kya tumne Qubool kiya?” (Do you accept it?)

She: “Mujhe qubool nahi hy” (I don’t accept this.)

*Now her parents got worried* *Her parents took her in a separate room, cried, argued, did everything to convince her to say yes. Finally she agreed to say yes.*

3rd time (Final time)…

Kazi (Sweat running down his head): “Kya tumne Qubool kiya?” (Do you accept it?)

*After a pause*

She: “Mujhe Qubool nahi hy” (I don’t accept it!!)

“Damnnn..!!! girl what did you do?!?” crowd uttered from all sides. There was chaos.

She refused it thrice. Now as per Islamic law, a marriage is not possible between them.

Finally, her parents had to agree to let her marry her boyfriend (a different man).

Brave girl.

Lucky is that guy, her boyfriend, to have such a courageous girl.

USA Begs Mexico On Its Knees To Not Join BRICS

The Producers (1968) The Hitler Auditions

TWO (2) ***ACTIVE DUTY *** British Soldiers KILLED inside Ukraine

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2023 06 06 11 24

Last night in Ukraine, two British soldiers were killed by Russian Su-24 bombers which annihilated their multi-million dollar UK Storm Shadow missiles at Kropivnitskiy airfield in Ukraine.

In addition, at least one (1) critically injured ***ACTIVE DUTY** UK soldier was airlifted to Poland from that same strike scene.

Thus, active duty NATO military are, in fact, inside Ukraine where they do not belong, and now, they’re getting killed.

Why China Doesn’t Identify with the West, Explained

so I decided to walk over to them and I asked her ” how was the meeting today darlin? ” she looked at me and said ” it was good, I’ll tell you more about it when we get home in a few “. I replied with ” wonderful I’ll pick up your favorite for dinner”.

The two guys left in a hurry and she told me ” you have no idea how much that meant to me …. thank you.” I said “you’re very welcome ma’am …. you can never be too careful. “

I made sure the guys left before I walked back to my car and as I was walking back all I could do was think ” I hope a man does that for my future daughter one day”.”

~ Cody Bret

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main qimg c78a8b0131cc3075be5bb0008b1c011d

China is a far better place to live than the US!! They won’t admit it, though.

She’s right. Cashless is awesome!

BRICS is moving at a rapid pace to sideline the U.S. dollar and promote their native currencies for global trade. Around 41 countries have expressed their interest to join the BRICS alliance and accept the new currency for cross-border transactions.

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2023 06 06 20 50

Russia and China are convincing many other countries to enter the bloc to dethrone the U.S. dollar. The USD’s global reserve status is being challenged by developing nations and could send the greenback on a path of decline.

10 ASEAN countries have agreed to stop trading in the U.S. dollar and will use native currencies for cross-border settlements. ASEAN is a bloc of 10 countries compromising Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The ASEAN alliance put a declaration in place avoiding the U.S. dollar for settlements and advancing the local currency usage. The Eastern countries are taking steps to end reliance on the dollar and create a new global financial order.

On the other hand, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are following suit with the ASEAN bloc. Member nations of GCC Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have expressed their interest to join BRICS. In addition, Saudi Arabia is in talks to fund the BRICS bank, commonly called The New Development Bank (NDB).

If Saudi Arabia funds the BRICS bank, the alliance could receive an economic boost and sideline the U.S. dollar. The move could attract many other countries to accept the BRICS currency and stop trading with the dollar altogether. Read here to know more details on why Saudi funding the BRICS bank is dangerous to the American economy.

The decision to launch a new currency will be jointly taken in the next summit in South Africa in August.

“We have ALIEN craft in our possession” – Govt. UFO whistleblower admits BOMBSHELL

The USA needs a new enemy.

Below another bad news for US decoupling policy:

2023 04 25: Foxconn new headquarter open in China 郑州 (Zheng Zhou)

This is after experiencing the trouble in the Vietnam, India, and US factories, and APPLE transfers businesses to other Chinese manufacturers due to Foxconn other factories unable to operate smoothly in those countries as planned. So, 10 months ago, Foxconn decided to set up a second factory in Zheng Zhou.

Article HERE

UPDATED 9:50 PM EDT — Ukraine begins ‘large-scale offensive’ – Russian MOD

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2023 06 06 11 26

UPDATED 9:50 PM EDT — Ukrainian forces have attacked the Russian troops along five sections of the frontline in Donbass during their “large-scale offensive,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in the early hours of Monday.

According to the MOD, the assault began on Sunday morning. “The enemy’s goal was to breach our defenses in what they assumed was the most vulnerable section of the frontline,” the ministry said in a statement.

“The enemy has failed to reach its goals and was unsuccessful,” the ministry stated.

The MOD said that Ukraine had deployed the 23rd and the 31st mechanized brigade from its “strategic reserves,” which were supported in battle by other units.

“The Ukrainian Armed Forces have lost more than 250 service members, 16 tanks, three infantry vehicles, and 21 armored vehicles,” the MOD said.

The ministry released a video of what it said were strikes on Ukrainian military vehicles.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said on Saturday that Kiev was ready to launch its long-planned counteroffensive and that the military could not wait “for months.” The deputy head of his office, Igor Zhovkva, however, said the same day that his country had still not received enough weapons and ammunition to mount a successful campaign.

Kiev has recently stepped up the artillery and drone attacks on Russian cities, including a UAV raid on Moscow last week. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday evening that the troops had repelled an armed incursion into the Belgorod Region, which shares a border with Ukraine.

The Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and the ‘Freedom of Russia’ Legion – two pro-Kiev groups made up of fighters with neo-Nazi background – claimed responsibility for that attack and similar forays into Russian territory that took place throughout this spring.

Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gudkov wrote on his Telegram channel early Monday morning that a drone strike had started a fire on “an energy infrastructure site.” He added that there were no casualties and no power outages.

UPDATED 9:50 AM EDT —

Ukraine Army (UA)  forces have breached the first lines of defense near Velyka Novosilka, Southern Donetsk.

The villages of Neskuchne and Novodarivka have been liberated and russians have fallen back to reserve positions in Storozheve.

Assaults ongoing.

The Reason why Men are Walking Away from Dating (Ep. 347)

I don’t want to offend anyone.

I feel for the women, but see the men’s side of the story.

“Rainy Day In Ireland”

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2023 06 06 11 31

Pennsylvania Dutch Sour Cream Cabbage

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2023 06 06 16 15

Ingredients

  • 1 medium head cabbage, shredded
  • 1/2 cup vegetable oil (for frying)
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 2 cups granulated sugar
  • 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 pint (2 cups) sour cream
  • 2 cups distilled white vinegar

Instructions

  1. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat.
  2. Add cabbage, salt and pepper and cook until tender, 15 to 20 minutes.
  3. Mix sugar and flour together in a medium bowl, then add sour cream and mix well; finally stir in vinegar and mix well.
  4. Add mixture to cabbage and simmer all together until desired consistency is reached.

AFRICAN Woman DEFENDS Passport Bros And CLAPS Back At Black American Women

So much pain. Ugh.

The answer is in how you deal with it.

https://youtu.be/hPQG5LjuiJA

There was a journalist(s) on the Canadian warship. Experience tells us that the Jun3 incident was a plot by USA+Canada to give people an impression that China was aggressive. After all, in the 20th Defense conference, China Defense Leader talked to counterparts of many countries. Except USA.

Anyway, what is Innocent Passage under UN Convention of Law Of Sea? Below are my over-simplified points.

Innocent Passage ie friendly, thru the waters of coastal state means …

the passage does not harm the peace, good order or safety of coastal state.

The following action is NOT Innocent Passage (ie hostile) to the coastal state

1, do military

2, do military drill

3, do surveillance

4, do propaganda to harm the defense & safety

5, aircraft carrier with warplanes taking off or landing

6, shoot, load or unload artillery equipment

7, break custom, immigration or health-related eg illegal drug

8, cause pollution

9, fishery

10, research or survey

11, interrupt communication system

Coastal state has the right to prevent non-innocent passage, by …

1, set up its own laws

2, ban fishing

3, temporarily block Innocent Passage

4, self determine another seaway as Innocent Passage

5, set up a system to monitor the passing ships

6, patrol

7, to suspicious ships, coastal state can go on board, inspect, search, detain & take proper action

8, order to leave before certain date

Let us play judge re the Jun6 incident.

1, China has warned US+Canadian warships to leave. China said USA+Canada were non-Innocent Passage ie hostile. I have not heard USA or Canada refuted.

When a US warship sailed thru Taiwan strait the 1st time after Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, the artillery on the US warship pointed at the sky. Have US+Canadian warships done so this time? Or have they covered their cannonballs? Or more.

Tell us their friendly side, please. So that we can help them scold China.

2, UNCLOS says coastal state can set up its laws to prevent non-innocent passage. Plus point 7 re suspicious. That gives China lots of room to maneuver.

Like it or not, under ONE CHINA principle, Taiwan is part of China. Taiwan strait is an inner sea of China.

It is not up to USA to unilaterally say this or that. Today’s Latin American, Middle East, Africa or ASEAN do not take US order. Needless to say today’s strong China.

3, What is Freedom of Navigation in terms of dispute?

In short, it is another state challenging the Innocent Passage of the coastal state.

9 Filipinas CLAP Back HARD | They ❤️ Passport Bros

They do not want to be the scapegoat.

Only in the United States, the cradle of Democracy

This is Dianne Feinstein

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2023 06 06 16 22

  • she is 89 years old
  • she is a Senator
  • who almost never show up at the Senate
  • she is reported to have cognitive issues, similar to President Joe Biden
  • as well as suffering from some very painful disease
  • during the course of her tenure in office, she has amassed over $200 million in assets

Elected American officials are allowed to put their own interests and ego over the interest of the American people. Americans deserve better. They deserve leaders who can lead them to a better place.

Passport Bros Are WINNING With FILIPINA Women!

Again. They are sick and tired of being blamed.

On Saturday June 3, 2023, a historic event happened in the Taiwan Strait.

A Chinese warship intercepted an American destroyer. The USS Chung-Hoon claimed to have asked the Chinese ship to stay away from it but the Chinese responded "Move, or there would be a collision". Eventually, the USS Chung-Hoon changed course and slowed down to avoid a crash.

That's the right attitude and the right language when dealing with an international bully.

There is a time for diplomacy but there is also a time for right assertiveness. And right now, so-called diplomacy would undeniably be cowardice.

Tot Ziens ! Quan

Article HERE

You Can Talk About PA55PORT BRO5 But Don’t Talk About Them | LESSON LEARNED

Fighting back.

Russian Ministry for Civil Defense Has Got a Bizarre Honey Cake Employee Now

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photo 2021 08 21 17 31 55

In the city of Tula the Russian EMERCOM (Ministry of the Russian Federation for Civil Defense, Emergency Management and Natural Disasters Response) has got a new mascot and employee – the honey cake of Tula (which is the symbol of the city). Mr. Honey Cake even has his own offical ID and a medal for propaganda of the rescue work.

h/t: englishrussia

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photo 2021 08 21 17 32 12

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photo 2021 08 21 17 32 09

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photo 2021 08 21 17 32 07

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photo 2021 08 21 17 32 04

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photo 2021 08 21 17 32 02

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photo 2021 08 21 17 31 59

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bigpicture ru p phtdm28q4

The US Has NO CHANCE of Defeating China in Taiwan

Real.

Allies after allies now turned against the United States

The newly re-elected Government of Turkey’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, speaking to a crowd from a balcony promised that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would:

  • “wipe away whoever causes trouble” for Turkey “and that includes the American military.”
  • Earlier, he declared that those who “pursue a pro-American approach will be considered traitors.”
  • Keep in mind that Turkey has been a member of NATO AND the most critical NATO member after the United States

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2023 06 06 19 28

Personally, I wonder why this took so long

  • the US supported an attempted coup against Erdogan. The leader of the coup is based in the US; and
  • American proxies, based in Syria, have launched attacks in Turkey
  • however, it does NOT surprise me that it is the Muslim countries that are now strongly speaking out against the US because the US and its western allies have killed and dislocated tens of millions of them in just the last two decades alone

A powerful Muslim world is currently increasingly convalescing behind the BRI world and will provide decisive military support to China in any future conflagaration.

Biden Is ‘In Denial’ Over Collapse Of Empire – Economist Richard Wolff

Back in the early 2000’s I worked for Mega Evil Douchebag Corp (might not be the actual name, but that’s how I remember it…). MEDC main business was giving credit cards to people with bad credit. Seriously, you could have a single digit credit score and these people would say yes.

Due to the type of people this attracted, nearly 80% of people defaulted on their cards, usually after the first bill arrived and they realised it wasn’t free money. As staff, I also had a card, but with better rates and a considerably higher credit limit.

Because of the number of defaults, MEDC had a contract with a particularly belligerent debt collection agency. These debt collectors would come to the office once a month, go to the records room and be handed a pile of defaulted accounts. Every month they would leave with bin bags full of paperwork.

One day I had cause to go to the records room and I was amazed at what I saw. The room was exactly as the name suggests, a room full of customer records, but that’s as far as it went in terms of an accurate description. The records were everywhere. Piles on this desk, piles on that desk. Heaps on the floor. Boxes in no discernible order. It was a mess – and that’s being polite.

The debt collectors used to go into this room and were only supposed to take records from a particular desk. In fact, they took whatever they wanted.

One month, they managed to get my paperwork by mistake. This began more than six long months of letters, phonecalls, emails and debt collectors turning up at my door threatening me with bankruptcy and prison if I didn’t pay the full sum I owed them.

I didn’t owe them anything. My account was still open and my card in regular use. One of the conditions of having a card as a staff member was you had to pay the balance in full every month. I did, and could prove it.

Being debt collectors, and therefore not the brightest of individuals, they wouldn’t accept “go fuck yourself” as payment for a debt I didn’t owe, so I told them to take me to court. Eventually they did.

When I got to court I saw their solicitors huddling together, no doubt discussing how they were going to crush me under their mighty law degrees. I represented myself.

In the actual courtroom, I was sat on one side, on my own with just a glass of water and my wallet on the desk. They were sat on their side, all shiny briefcases, stacks of folders containing damning paperwork and expensive suits. I saw them look over at me a couple of times, knowing they were going to win. I just sat there quietly.

The judge walked in, introduced himself, and for my benefit, explained how this hearing would work. I sat, listened and nodded appropriately.

Before we started, he asked me why I was representing myself. I explained this was an easy case and I didn’t feel the need to waste money on a solicitor. I was also asked why I didn’t have any paperwork with me and I explained that I didn’t believe I needed any and was confident in my ability to defend myself, but that I would be asking the courts indulgence to break a minor rule during my defence, but I would explain at the time what I wanted to do, and why.

It was all very friendly. Then it was like he flipped a switch in his brain to turn “judge mode” on.

The debt collectors solicitors started as they were bringing the case against me.

According to them I had entered into a contract with Mega Evil Douchebag Corp for the supply and use of a line of credit, by means of a MEDC credit card. I had the benefit of that card (legal speak for “he used it”). I had failed to make payments as obligated by the contract, and payment demands. After a period of time, MEDC cancelled the line of credit, the card and the account, and sent the account to collections. Collections tried to contact me on many occasions, were unable to do so, and eventually sold the account to the debt collectors. The debt collectors then tried collecting the money owed over six months and were unable to do so, as I repeatedly refused to pay.

In evidence of their allegations they had the original MEDC card paperwork and all the account statements. They also provided copies of all the letters they sent me demanding payment, and proof of receipt of several of them. They stated that I told them over the phone I didn’t know who MEDC were, and that I never had a card with them.

It was a cut and dry, air-tight case. They had the contract, they had the letters, they had everything they needed to get a judgement in their favour.

In fact, they had nothing.

Now it was my turn.

I stood and immediately apologised for wasting the courts time. I opened my wallet and took out the obviously well used Evil Douchebag credit card and explained I never denied having one, or regularly using it. I then took out my company ID card, showing I was an employee of MEDC and then explained what that meant in terms of having one of their cards.

I asked for the statements being used against me and they were handed over. I showed the judge each and every time I had made full payment against the amount owed (which was every month as per the staff conditions). I then explained that the account had not been closed and sent to debt collectors as it was still open, and had been used that week to buy petrol.

The judge stopped me and asked the solicitors if my account was open or closed. They confirmed it was definitely closed.

He asked me to continue and it was at this point I asked to break the rules. I told the judge I could definitively prove their entire case was bogus by making a simple phonecall. I asked the clerk to call the customer services number on the statements the solicitors provided against me and the judge agreed. I went through security and connected to a customer rep. I asked for my current balance and the amount owed on the next payment. I then asked him to confirm if the account was listed as open or closed. He – of course – said it was open. I finally asked if he could check the notes screen for any Collections Dept activity and he said there was none. That’s where I ended the call.

I thanked the judge and quickly explained that since I studied law at A-level, there was something I had always wanted to say in open court, even though it wasn’t the done thing in the UK, and before he could say anything, I said “I rest my case”.

The judge just about went mental. He dismissed the case immediately, but refused to let the solicitors leave until they had explained why they were chasing me for a debt I very clearly didn’t owe. He wanted to know how their clients added fees were calculated, and exactly what was being charged for the “court fees” I was being charged too. He also told them that whilst I had no evidence of what was said when they visited my home and told me they would make sure I went to prison, he was inclined to believe me. Not only that, but he would now be watching out for cases involving their clients and be more inclined to accept verbal evidence than he normally would.

I just sat there and watched them squirm as they couldn’t answer any questions he wanted answers to. The judge told me I was free to leave if I wanted to, but the solicitors weren’t going anywhere until he had answers. As I left the courtroom, they were on the phone with their clients demanding those answers.

The judge told me “well done” as I left, smiling. I sincerely doubt the solicitors were smiling for quite some time afterwards.

General Ray Davis USMC fought the Imperial Japanese Army, North Korean People’s Army, Chinese People’s Volunteers, and the North Vietnamese Army during his storied career. He was awarded the Medal of Honor while commanding an infantry battalion in 1950 during the Chosin Reservoir Campaign. I had the pleasure to meet him one afternoon in Virginia. During our conversation, I asked him for his opinion on the combat performance of the various enemy armed forces he fought over the course of three different wars. His response is provided below.

  1. The Imperial Japanese Army was the toughest adversary he ever encountered on the battlefield. Japanese soldiers used their weaponry with great skill. Their camouflage and concealment was first rate. Their iron discipline and refusal to surrender made Imperial soldiers extremely difficult to defeat. They always fought to the death when overrun.
  2. Chinese People’s Army volunteers were good soldiers. A lot of them were former Nationalist soldiers who had received excellent combat training from US Army instructors during WW II. The communist cadre provided mostly excellent leadership. Most CPV command groups had worked together in combat against the Japanese and the Nationalists before the Korean War and were thoroughly trained and experienced in the art of war. But the average Chinese soldiers lacked initiative and Chinese commanders tended to double down on failure during offensive combat. If one attack failed, a second, third, etc attack would generally use the same avenues of approach and tactics even though every proceeding attack failed. Chinese weaponry was a mixed bag. Logistics appeared terrible. Uniforms were unsuited for winter combat in Korea. Thousands of Chinese died from exposure and inadequate food and medical supplies. If the cadre became casualties, Chinese soldiers tended to surrender or retreat. Overall, the Chinese were tough soldiers, but the average soldier wasn’t as committed as an Imperial Japanese soldier.
  3. The North Koreans were tough soldiers, but he only fought them briefly in Korea. Like the Chinese, North Korean units were prone to surrender or sudden withdrawals if their leadership cadre became casualties.
  4. The North Vietnamese Army was highly disciplined, well led, and wielded its weaponry with great skill. NVA commanders refused to allow their units to be wiped out in unequal battles against US forces. They knew how to hit hard and when to break contact. NVA commanders always realized it was better to withdraw and live to fight another day rather than be annihilated on the battlefield. The NVA and the NV government focused on fighting the long war and outlasting US political will. They succeeded. Nonetheless, Davis assessed that the Imperial Japanese soldiers were tougher overall adversaries.

I hope this post answers your question.

Being disabled and looking like I do there are two things I always get to overhear. Going through TSA my name comes up red flagged. Meaning check him completely.

A customs agent told me “it’s due to your Military career and past knowledge.”

What the hell does that mean? I’m in a wheelchair and have metal in my leg, shoulder, and back. I am a wand beep show. All hands pat downs in a wheelchair. You need two hips to stand, so I can’t stand. Any chance I am taking over the plane? Gunpowder tests on hands AND ARMS. OK so the Navy/CIA service made me an enemy of the state or something?

I think it is BS and it’s profiling but my wife said “no it’s not.”

Then you have people whispering when we get on first. “Bet they fake it to board first…”

I tore into a woman I heard say that. I yelled so loud the airport got quiet. Does it look like I’m faking it? I tried to get out of wheelchair and fell. Hurt. But I felt better with that. Maybe she’ll get it some day.

My wife wasn’t happy about my antics but I’m so tired of it. And she knows. On the plane though I overheard a mom telling their kid there is no difference between disabled people and us. Except a part of their body just doesn’t work like ours. She had me in tears. The best explanation of a disabled person I have ever heard explained. And plainly so a child could understand it. The kid kept asking me if I needed any help?

HURRAY FOR THAT MOM. YOU MADE MY DAY!

The F-35 stealth fighter’s Pratt & Whitney F135 engines have cost the Pentagon $38 billion of dollars in unexpected maintenance costs due, according to a new report by auditors from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)

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The engine’s cooling capacity in particular has been wholly insufficient to meet the power demands of the fighter’s sensors and electronics, with the F135 having been commissioned when the F-35 was still conceptualised as a much lighter and cheaper fighter with lower power demands closer to the size of its predecessor the F-16.

The engine has gained growing criticism over the past year, with its role being particularly critical for the US Military and for NATO more broadly as the F-35 is the only post fourth generation fighter in production outside China and Russia – and the only peer level challenger to the Chinese J-20 stealth fighter in terms of avionics, stealth and the integration of key next generation technologies.

The F-35 is relied on by the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marines and the services of multiple allied states from Japan and South Korea to Israel and a fast growing number of European NATO members, with a lack of remotely comparable competition from other Western fighters ensuring a very large market share.

The F135’s outstandingly low availability rates and excessive maintenance needs have nevertheless continued to ground F-35s at six times the standard rate of other fighter classes, with Pentagon officials having highlighted issues with the F135’s power module as a key cause for the fighter’s low mission capable rates.

The Producers (1968) – Springtime for Hitler

When a good friend, from the Marine Corps, was K.I.A., his eldest brother cracked open the deceased’s apartment, before the funeral had taken place. My friend’s widow, also deployed, hadn’t even been notified, yet. By the time she knew of the situation, their home had been ransacked by nearly twenty members of two families.

I called the brother, and offered him an out, which he blew off. Over the next ten days, I contacted each of the offending parties; only two responded, and not favorably. Then, acting on the widow’s behalf, I hired an attorney and filed police reports. I went to the D.A., who filed 98 separate charges against all of the perpetrators, including the management and owners of the complex.

After sixteen months of legal crap, nine of the family members(one was an attorney, another a university economics professor) were convicted of misdemeanors, spent between thirty and sixty days in jail, and paid both restitution and fines of $500.00–6,000.00. The eldest brother, an electrician and small-business owner, now a felon, spent eight months in jail; the widow sued him and won a $450,000.00 settlement. The apartment complex ended up terminating the managers; and, they paid the widow $2.9M.

Not one of these people had been a criminal, prior to the incident. They were simply ignorant, greedy assholes, who deserved everything they got.

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main qimg 7cb3e90d8447de35c2be7b2d51225a37

Updates: The German embassy in China also manages its official Weibo account from the United States.

After learning that they had become the laughing stock on Chinese social media, both the EU delegation to China and the German embassy in China quietly switched their IP addresses back to Beijing.

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main qimg 189e84567fb2ef393e316a176a6000ef

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2023 06 06 19 34

Pennsylvania Dutch Chili

smallchili
smallchili

Ingredients

  • 1 pound homemade noodles or 1 (12 to 16 ounce) bag wide egg noodles
  • 1 can baked beans
  • 1 cup spaghetti sauce or less (or 1 small jar)
  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 onion, chopped

Instructions

  1. Brown ground beef and onion.
  2. Cook and drain egg noodles.
  3. Combine everything. You may need additional sauce if you have leftovers and warm them up later. Chili should be thick, not soupy.
  4. Serve with crusty bread.

Nessie.

Let it be well understood that there is no hard and tangible proof that Nessie actually exists. Studies and efforts to discover this enigmatic creature has provided tantalizing glimpses of what might be a small colony of deep-dwelling marine crates that resemble a elasmosauros.

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main qimg e53d7e981cd00f2b8ad919477e4decf6

A plesiosaurus, while superficially similar to an elasmosauros, is much smaller, and does not fit the observed and photographs of this creature.

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main qimg 012407596cd8d211da0afc79220f85d9

Photographs of this creature taken underwater clearly show fin, neck and head structures that are in alignment with known anthropological evidence.

This is not the only instance of this creature surviving into contemporaneous history. From time to time, fishermen, and others have found, photographed, and even captured entire carcasses of this creature.

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main qimg 8da2774afc0a492a44ec67c84b43b17f

It is my personal belief that these are slow-moving bottom feeder creatures that inhabit the great depths of the ocean and enclosed seas. Over time, one day, absolute proof will be gathered that will end the mystery of Nessie once and for all, but until that happens, the interest in this OOPART borders on the “Science Fiction”.

NY Times admits they don’t like Chinese but they need Chinese talent to maintain the American hegemony.

2023 06 06 19 36
2023 06 06 19 36

The key word here is : DOOR-STEP

Door-step in this article means outside your property line. Not inside.

Let say I walk at your door-step. On the street which is a public area. I have not entered your property line.

I carry something that looks like a rifle to you. Bullet-proof vest & helmet.

I have a track record that I made trouble for other households in the society.

How will you react to my appearance at your door-step if it is daily?

Now …

replace “I” with “USA”. “my rifle” with “US warplanes/warships”. “me at your door-step” with “USA at the door-step of China”.

Remember I am outside your property line. Same for US warplanes/warships outside China’s borderline according to UNCLOS.

2, now replace “my daily” with “USA’s 1,200 times”

How will you react to my appearance at your door-step, daily?

If this is not DELIBERATE provocation & picking fights, what is it?

There is police/law to stop my malicious action towards you. If there is not, will you do everything to protect your family?

There is ICC & UN laws eg Non-Innocent Passage as I said in other articles. But ICC is believed to be “controlled” by USA. USA was not charged for war crime in the 2003 Iraq war.

Hence China must protect itself.

Now USA scolds CHINA BEING AGGRESSIVE ???

Only a bully or mafia is that unreasonable.

3, now replace “my freedom to walk on public street” with “US freedom of navigation”

Only a bully or mafia will turn the logic upside down & conveniently use Freedom as god.

It is this type of twisted logic that USA justified their action to instigate riots/coups/wars in the world 82 out of 100 times, since WW2. Causing millions of deaths & human suffering.

4, We must ask :

Why USA instigated riots/wars in Middle East for the past 20 years. OIL.

What about China? Rise of China that, in US words, threatens US status on world stage.

China works hard to better itself & thus achieves a lots. IMF said China contributes 30% of world GDP.

Am I not allowed to get A+ in my exam just because you get B- in yours?

Only sore losers have the type of mentality to contain others.

Search Quora for a question:

On 2023/6/3, a US destroyer & a Canadian cruiser sailed thru Taiwan strait. China warned them to leave but they did not. A Chinese warship sailed in front of the US destroyer & forced it to change direction. It was close to collision (137 meters apart). USA scolded China for dangerous sailing. China scolded USA for non-Innocent Passage. What is Innocent Passage under UNCLOS ?

I remember this situation when my children were little. I had two children in school. Grade three and grade two. The neighbour thought it was my children’s responsibility to take and protect her child to and from school. She said her child was the youngest, which she was not younger than my son. And she told my children that her child had to ride her bike in the center of the three children. My neighbour also told my children that they were not allowed to return home without her daughter.

I could not believe this when I heard my neighbour yelling all these rules to my children. I knew this would not last long as her child was a brat and the novelty of riding her bike would not last long. Right, as I was, after a week, this child cried to her mother and from then on, this child was driven to and from school. . . . However, my children were never offered a ride!

The only answer I can tell you is to be really bold like my neighbour was. Just tell your neighbour that it is not a convenient situation for you to be giving a ride to your child. Tell her straight that you do not want the responsibility of making sure her child gets home. It is a responsibility that is not yours and you no longer want to be giving rides to her child.

Explain to her that you enjoy having a good neighbour relationship, but anything to do with parenting and responsibilities has to remain within each home.

Be strong and whatever your neighbour says is not your problem. Know what you want for your children and your family. Fight for it.

There are outward signs, but there are very slight covert sneaky signs.

  1. They interrupt you quite a bit (they don’t care about what you’re saying or that you’re talking at all)
  2. They try to convince you of what you don’t believe – always wanting you to agree with them (in small ways they do this so they can go in for the kill on larger things later)
  3. As an addendum to #2, they try to convince you in random ways that you can’t think for yourself so they can later make you actually believe you cannot “human” on your own and you’re defective. Forget the fact that you’ve survived this long without even knowing them.
  4. They take your ideas and make them their own.
  5. They bait and switch you. They make you believe one thing in private, then do the opposite in public. They also will convince you to do something and then act like its the worst thing in the world after its done. For example, a husband finally convinces his wife to cut her hair short because she would look so sexy, chic, cute, fierce, all those adjectives. Maybe even that she’ll be his little Halle Berry kitten. Then in public or among friends, he’ll go on and on about how beautiful women are when they’re hair is long and how he looooooves long hair.
  6. They love bomb you. Anyone who flatters, says you’re they’re “soul-anything” right away or their “bestie” at an alarmingly fast rate, is setting you up for devalue. They love to put you on high so they can pull the rug from underneath you. Always remember flattery is dangerous. It’s akin to violence. Trust and believe that. And beware of the one who wants to know “all about you” and “I know you so well”, or “wow, You know me so well” before a natural passage of time.
  7. A person who doesn’t respect you will not take your No for an answer. They will question you, try to make you doubt yourself, and dismantle your sense of reasoning every time.
  8. They’re not interested in anything you’re interested in; on the flip side, they will feign interest to bate you in, and then show no lasting interest or no emotion. They shortly begin to act like they’re tolerating you or your interests, successes, etc. They also are not happy for you when you are happy about something.
  9. A person doesn’t respect you when they are short tempered with others but nice to you. Also, if you’re only good to be with in private but never in public, No respect for you.
  10. I’ll stop at 10 because the list goes on but over all the things, TRUST. YOUR. GUT. If your physiological responses are popping off in a negative way around this person, or you feel red flags, or just that something isn’t right….You’re right!

I hope this tiny little list has helped identify some of things you may possibly have experienced. There are things that we sometimes overlook in the spirit of being gracious or forgiving but the signs are there. We have to learn to manage them or we will end up all of a sudden like the guy who took a nap on a small raft- he eventually woke up and didn’t see land.

Stay awake and best to you

***Edit: Thanks to a commenter this list will be extended. By the time we’re adults, we all have observed or experienced some form of these things from the casual encounter with a stranger, to professional interactions, to that of our closest relationships. The things listed are meant to cover some of all of those kinds of relationships. So this might get a little deep but, here we go…

11. A person doesn’t respect you when you see or even detect that downward look, the roll of the eyes, that negative energy, or that smirk that communicates contempt. You don’t even have to be talking directly to them. You can see it from the corner of your eye- You are NOT imagining it. This is a real thing and they know you’re absorbing it.

12. They call you out without saying your name or reveal something very confidential in a public space (whether on social media or within a group of people). This is done without cause and whether this exposes you or not the point is, they know that YOU know they’re talking about YOU. Also, they will have you with them at public events and then actively ignore you. Provable only by you.

13. You tell them what hurts you and they use those very things to hurt you. They like to open up wounds.

14. They “collect” things you say to fire back at you at a later time, like ammunition. You get the sense that telling them things is unsafe even tho they welcome you to open up to them.

15. You have a strong feeling that there’s a hierarchy between you and them; them being superior and you being inferior/subordinate. When there is no employment situation, its disrespectful. (Even in employment, it can translate to subhuman treatment). But if this is a personal relationship its being done on purpose. They tend to find things you need help with or to make better. Sometimes they outright tell you that they want to mentor something in your life, or that they feel like your big brother/sister. Warning: they want you beneath them. In life, period; and they want you not trusting yourself.

16. They do not respect your boundaries. (addition to #7). For example: If you’re sick, somehow to them you’re not sick enough not to do the thing they want you to do or your level of illness is questionable to them when they want something. They have the overtone of making you feel better or cheering you up but really grooming you to do their bidding.

17. They do “nice” things for you as a deposit in the bank of “trust” so that they can get what they want out of you. Fake altruism.

18. They Do Not sincerely apologize.

19. They “joke” with you at your expense. Humiliating you. The same things they like you for, they hate you for. Disrespect on tap.

20. They rope in others to prove that you’re wrong about something that doesn’t merit right or wrong. Or to make you feel like you’re walking around looking and being foolish. In the meantime, they make you look defective to others. They will even get others to do their bidding and appeal to you; strengthening their claim that you’re just wrong.

21. They make a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to you. Always making things a right or wrong…fault or no fault, where there’s no merit for it. They make you feel like other people’s actions, the weather, a circumstance… is your fault too.

22. They make you feel obligated to cater to them. They don’t say it, but they clearly communicate it.

23. They do offenses with plausible deniability. For instance, they offend you in a way that if you complain about it, they can easily deny it. THEY know and YOU know they did it on purpose but its hard to prove. Anyway, its very damaging.

24. They give unsolicited advice. They use words like “why don’t you do..” and “you should…’

25. When they give unsolicited advice, they follow up to see if you’ve done it. Then treat you like you’ve committed a crime if you chose to do something else.

26. You are treated like the pet of a hot and cold owner; coddled and abused across the board.

27. They ask entrapping questions and double bind you; meaning they put you between a rock and a hard place- damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Numerous ways this can be done. Either way, your response or action will be wrong.

28. They create drama situations, vilifying you while they play the victim. They do NOT care about your discomfort, setting “standards” you can never reach and always raising the bar.

29. They will build you up to let you down. Telling you they will do something you’re depending on them to do and they have no intention of doing it all, while having you in wait and on hold.

30. They monopolize your time. They will insert themselves in your space if it serves them. They love to know your coming and going so they can influence what and when you do things. If you deviate, it throws them off and they WILL let you know it.

31. Silent treatment (plausibly deniable- but deserved its own place on this list).

32. You’re at the climax of a story and suddenly “wait, hold on…let me call you back” – or something of the sort. Something could legitimately come up but in this case its a trend that you notice. Not your imagination, not a coincidence. Even still, they can deny it. When you try to revisit it- the long deep inhale and hard loud exhale (Grrr).

33. You’ve worked hard on something your’e proud of or that they encouraged you to do and boom!- reaction of a corpse. Or they give the weakest of responses that actually speak loudly that they could care less; its nothing to them. Or they actually find a fault in it. Well how bout that?

34. They gaslight you, re-write history and have circular conversations where you cannot get your problem resolved. Then try to convince you that you are the one who cannot have a progressive conversation.

35. They say disrespectful things within earshot of you- but deny saying anything when you confront them.

36. They speak too low for you to hear them when you’re in personal quarters. Or they claim to have responded when they didn’t- saying you didn’t hear them.

37. When you ask them to clarify something they say “I just said it” or ‘I explained it to you”. And you’re to fend for yourself to figure it out. You’ll be wrong. They want it that way.

38. They twist your intent and badger you with noble things (rules, morals, principles)- when you’ve violated none of such things. Just a way to make you seem like you have because you haven’t given them their way.

39. They use their measure of “power” to sabotage your opportunities while flattering you for having those opportunities (keep in mind, flattery is akin to violence- its aggression).

40. They flat out tell you that ‘They don’t care’! Listen when they say this in any way, shape, or form that they say it. They’re having an honest moment with you. Don’t take it for granted. They mean it.

I’m interested in any additions to this list. It gets pretty intricate. But the heir of disrespect in so prevalent that it has become like the fabric of our everyday interactions, cloaked in normalcy. However, an ancient book does say that these days we live in are “critical times hard to deal with…men (people) will be lovers of themselves…haughty…unthankful, disloyal…not open to any agreement ” and so on. (2Tim. 3: 1–5 NWT)

Be kind, be on guard, and practice the Golden Rule. We all know how we want to be treated. Let’s extend that good treatment to others.

I wish the best to you all

Passport Bros Are WINNING With FILIPINA Women!

We are well on the way towards a new reality, and for many it WILL be a prosperous one

Still sick. Pretty nasty cold. Ugh.

As soon as my daughter got over one virus, another one hit, and of course…

I ended up getting both. Sigh.

What ever you do, stay away from sick people. All it takes is one inhalation.

Nice quote

2023 06 03 18 56
2023 06 03 18 56

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson

Seems like all of the American leadership these days are senile with dementia and should be in nursing homes.

2023 06 04 09 00
2023 06 04 09 00

Singa mengaum | Kung Fu Hustle

Chinese scientists have managed to improve the stability of CL-20, the world’s most powerful conventional explosive by a factor of 500%.

While extremely powerful, the use of CL-20 thus far has been limited because of its dangerous instability. Scientists from the Sichuan Military and Civilian Co-Innovation Centre for New Energetic Materials successfully developed new nanomaterials that greatly improved the stability of the explosive.

This opens the way for CL-20 to be used more extensively in applications such as rocket propellants that provide greater range for missiles, more powerful warheads and/or lighter and more compact missiles and bombs. The material also has lower observability when used as a missile propellant. CL-20 is also a key material used for increasing the range and reducing the size of ICBMS. Some analysts believe the recent Chinese war games that simulated hypersonic missile attacks on aircraft carriers assumed CL-20 warheads.

The origins of this material are a bit murky. In 1994 Professor Yu Yongzhong a Chinese explosives expert synthesised CL-20 for the first time in his lab and reported the discovery in Chinese scientific journals. A couple years after that, US military scientists reported discovery of the same material, but claimed they actually first synthesised it in 1987. Ironically, the “CL” stands for China Lake, the military facility where the American scientists worked.

The Terminator – Fat Boy – Harley-Davidson motorcycle

Yes. I went to a high school with a girl of Dutch extraction who did exactly this. It was hilarious in class one day because there was a girl there from Botswana and apparently they could communicate. We had this insane black history teacher who just started screaming at this girl for claiming she was African, and the girl from Botswana jumped to her defense(they were really good friends) and the teacher kept claiming white people weren’t African. Apparently the girl from Botswana started swearing and insulting the black teacher in whatever language these two spoke and the girl from South Africa was laughing hysterically after a few seconds. When I asked why later that day, it turns out that the girl from Botswana had said something like “you cotton pickers don’t know a thing about Africa or real Africans and so all you can do is pretend” later the two of them tried running for class office as the “African American” candidates.

United States Senator Diane Feinstein

She’s on a number of major policy committees and is one of the people handling America’s Geo-political posture. She comes, and represents California.

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AA1b4bnP

Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Oman will form a joint navy to guarantee the security of Persian Gulf.

2023 06 03 12 07
2023 06 03 12 07

The Persian Gulf region produces nearly one third of the world’s oil and holds over half of the world’s crude oil reserves as well as a significant portion of the world’s natural gas reserves.

Iran has always called on the Persian Gulf countries to participate in establish security in this important region.

Al-Jadid Qatar news website reported that the consultations of Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Oman have started with the coordination of China and with the aim of ensuring the safety of navigation in the Persian Gulf.

The US sphere of influence on Gulf states is wanning fast.

2023 06 03 12 07w
2023 06 03 12 07w

In a few areas, actually. First is infrastructure. The Chinese planned waaaaaaaaaay ahead while building. That’s why there were ghost cities. The developers built huge communities before they were needed, knowing that large factories were coming soon. Above that is public transportation. Smaller cities have buses available that will take you just about everywhere within the city and bigger cities have subways as well as buses. For going between cities and provinces, China has a high speed rail system in place that is more extensive than the American highway system! For example: I lived in a city called Nanjing in China – about 200 miles/300 km from Shanghai. I could take a high speed train from Nanjing to Shanghai in about 1.5 hours!

In contrast, I took an Amtrak train from Detroit to Chicago (about 300 miles/480 km) and it took over 8 hours!

Another area China wins at is public utilities. They provide electricity, water, and gas for billions of people for very affordable prices! I paid maybe a total of $20 (US) per month for all utility bills, whereas it cost me over $100 in America! Atop of that is wireless technology (which is considered a public utility in China). I paid 100 rmb ($15) monthly for 16 GB of 4G data, with 1000 texts and 500 minutes of talk (which pretty much meant unlimited everything for me). In America I pay $50 a month for my unlimited plan. Yes, the 4G is a little faster, but that may just be because I’m not trying to access the foreign web here…

A third area (kinda related to the second) is how the CCP controls markets and prices so everyone can live a comfortable life. I ate a big plate of food at a small restaurant for between 10 and 20 rmb… ($1.25-2.50). The government controls the means of production, so there is plenty of food for everyone!

I hope you enjoyed my answer!

When you decouple, it is liked cutting off the umbilical cord. There is no more that relationship. That’s something that US cannot afford as they still need China now and into the future. There is one and only China, no other country can replace China for that effective and cost-efficient supply chain and that best-in-class manufacturing capability that is too good to miss. The Americans had lost that art of manufacturing decades ago and they can’t just take it back to revive their industries and to make it competitive again.

When you de-risk which is actually what the Americans are currently doing, they can be selective on which items that they can use to suppress China where they think it hurts most and to slow down their economic-military growth and technological development and in areas where they pose the biggest threat to the American hegemony. But de-risking has to be clean and precise, it can backfire and cause even more harm to the American economy which is happening now – American semiconductor companies and their Korean/Taiwanese/EU/Japanese allies are seeing a sharp fall in revenue and may eventually lose the lucrative Chinese market which is the world’s largest consumer of semiconductor chips today.

Current silicon wafer technology has reached its technological limits and it can’t advance much without suffering lower production yields, higher production cost and lower reliability performance. Not all electronic applications require these <7nm semiconductor chips but low-voltage/power and high-speed processing consumer products like mobile phones do. But consumer type products are not a life or death type application, countries can still live without having such advanced technologies if they aren’t allowed to have them. I am still happily using an iPhone XR phone today.

China has its own self-sufficient ecosystem and has a huge domestic market consumption of its own products and services. So they can still exist and live life as per normal. Of course, China is investing and developing the next generation of advanced technologies as in the case of semiconductor applications – photonics chips, graphene chips, quantum computing chips etc…. and they are already leading the world in some of these future disrupting technologies.

So what does it mean to China? Nothing much. China had been isolated and humiliated for a century before. They do know how to survive with all the global sanctions and restrictions. But the world cannot live without China today.

Antony Blinken has a way with words. However, it would be nice if he could actually back up those words. Thus far, Blinken’s tough guy antics have only gotten US special operators slaughtered.

The latest blow came on the night of Sunday, May 21st. That night, American special operators from Delta Force, the 75th Ranger Regiment and other NATO special operations units were staying at a workshop in the Yuzhmash ICBM factory in Dnipropetrovsk. They were forward deployed in preparation for the upcoming Ukrainian offensive. A Ranger Battalion and a squadron from Delta Force were tasked with spearheading an assault on the nuclear powerplant at Energodar in the opening hours of the upcoming, Ukrainian counteroffensive. They were waiting in the ICBM factory for their orders to move out.

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main qimg ec57333ce272b5959000f649759cd4cd lq

However, it looks like the Rangers will be unable to complete their mission. On the night of the 21st, Russian KH-22 cruise missiles slammed into the workshop, killing all of the Rangers as they slept. After action reports from US military intelligence described it as “a burial for the living.”

It looks like as a result of the strike, the Ukrainians have been forced to call off their assault on the Energodar plant. Furthermore, it looks like that night’s attacks and other pinpoint strikes against command posts and arms depots have rendered Ukraine’s counteroffensive stillborn. That might help explain the mysterious delays behind the bold, Ukrainian counteroffensive.

It would be nice for a Western audience if Blinken’s words rang true. However, if the Russians are able to take out about 1,000 of the US’s best special operators in a night with a pinpoint strike, clearly they are the better side.

Representative Frank (NY)

He’s been reelected over and over again to the office ever since the 1950s.

2023 06 04 09 13
2023 06 04 09 13

Official Statements:

Peskov: relations between Russia and Poland are now at zero, if not at a negative level

“We have a rich history with Poland in our relations. Now, unfortunately, these relations are at zero, if not at a negative level,” Peskov said

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main qimg 80b03bc76d76eeae2191c3bd6b916b20

Cranberry Fritters

2023 05 28 17 14
2023 05 28 17 14

Ingredients

  • 3/4 cup fresh cranberries
  • 1 1/2 cups unbleached flour
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon milk
  • 1/4 cup dark brown sugar
  • Oil (for deep frying)
  • Confectioners’ sugar (optional)

Instructions

  1. Wash cranberries and dry on paper towels.
  2. Sift dry ingredients together and mix in milk gradually to form a stiff dough. With well-floured hands, pinch off 1 teaspoon of dough and make an indentation. Sprinkle a little brown sugar in the indentation and place a cranberry in the center. Roll dough around the berry. balls should be about the size of a large marble.
  3. Heat oil in a deep, heavy kettle until the temperature reaches 375 degrees F.
  4. Drop fritter balls into the hot fat and fry, turning, until they are deep golden brown on all sides. Drain on paper towels. If desired, shake confectioners’ sugar over the fritters just before serving.
  5. Serve hot.

This Mini Furniture Is Designed Just For Cats

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A campaign revealing mini furniture for cats is unveiled in Japan amid a new generation of craftsmen’s hopes to build upon a once-prosperous industry. The 60-second clip shows the feline friends-come-guinea pigs getting comfy on genuine furniture scaled down to their size.

The campaign, produced by Okawa City, hopes to promote the area in Fukuoka, a hub for professional craftsmen specialising in traditional crafts such as woodworking, hardware, glass and cutlery. The prefecture, which is is home to 150 furniture-manufacturing factories, once boasted a large industry for wedding furniture specifically made from Kiri, a light but strong japanese wood used for chests and boxes.

More info: Okawa City (h/t: designboom)

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1 18

Opening a cave and extracting a strange treasure with a metal detector

This is very interesting, but WTF did he find? What is it?

DM, can you identify?

By Aaron Good Published: Jun 01, 2023 08:03 PM

The war in Ukraine appears to be heading toward either a bloody stalemate or a successful Russian war of attrition. Against this backdrop, some argue that Washington’s worst geopolitical nightmare may come true due to the Ukraine war. To the extent this is true, and US elites have only themselves to blame. By all appearances, the US has entered a phase of decline when geopolitical gambits that are meant to forestall the end of imperial hegemony only hasten its demise.

When Russia launched the military operation in 2022, many on the left were surprised that Russia did it, as it did not seem to be in the Russian national interest to do so. There had been many alarms raised in the US warning of an impending Russian invasion. But after the Iraqi WMD and Russiagate hoaxes, it is easy to understand why many thought US officials and the corporate media were, as ever, lying.

One veteran journalist who clearly saw what was coming was Joe Lauria of Consortium News. This outlet was founded by the late Robert Parry, a legendary journalist who was forced to leave corporate media because his journalism routinely exposed the hypocrisy, duplicity, and criminality of US foreign policy.

In a February 4, 2022 article, Lauria wrote that, the US plans to weaken Russia by imposing punishing sanctions and bringing world condemnation on Moscow depend on Washington’s hysteria about a Russian invasion of Ukraine actually coming true.

There is a history of the US baiting adversaries into wars that the power elite believes will redound to the benefit of US hegemony. Such was the case when the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

There is much reason to surmise that the US thought similarly about a Russian war against Ukraine. The strategic importance of Ukraine to Russia was well understood. After Russian military operations began, it was eventually reported that prior to February 2022, US officials had held a grim assessment of Ukraine’s chances in a war that Zelensky was apparently not trying to avoid. The Intercept wrote, “The Central Intelligence Agency was so pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances that officials told President Joe Biden and other policymakers that the best they could expect was that the remnants of Ukraine’s defeated forces would mount an insurgency, a guerrilla war against the Russian occupiers.”

Months before the war, Yahoo News, citing CIA insiders, reported that the US “is training an insurgency, [teaching the Ukrainians how] to kill Russians.” Echoing some of the darkest elements of the Cold War, the CIA had undertaken “stay-behind force training” in Ukraine.

In hindsight, we can discern that the US pursued NATO expansion into Ukraine knowing that this was a red line for Moscow – just as a Russian military alliance with Mexico would be unacceptable for the US. We now know that US officials had a grim assessment of Ukrainian chances in a war that the US understood was likely to result from Ukrainian statements and actions. We see that prior to the invasion, the US rebuffed Russian diplomacy aimed at defusing the crisis.

Rather, the US apparently wanted to use the war to damage Russia by getting the country mired in a long occupation and bloody insurgency. The US also sought to establish a sanctions regime that would cut Russia off from foreign trade, especially with Europe. This context helps explain why the US and UK scuttled peace talks that could have ended the war in Ukraine back in April of 2022.

Because the crackpot realists of the US power elite so badly misjudged the military, economic, and diplomatic aspects of the conflict in Ukraine, the war has served to accelerate the demise of US hegemony. As professional US imperialist Fiona Hill recently acknowledged, “The war in Ukraine is perhaps the event that makes the passing of pax Americana apparent to everyone.”

US leaders have only themselves to blame. The pursuit of open-ended global primacy was always madness. In decades past, US leaders tried and failed to turn the US away from empire. Now that the curtain is falling on US global hegemony, can new post-Biden leadership succeed where these men failed?

Native American Ravioli

2023 05 28 17 19
2023 05 28 17 19

Ingredients

  • 3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon vegetable oil

Instructions

  1. Pour the flour into a mound on a flat working surface. Make a depression in the center with your hand that almost reaches through to the board. Crack the eggs directly into the well and, with a fork, whip in the salt and oil, mixing the flour in from around the edges. Mix and knead the dough with your hands for 8 to 10 minutes, until the dough has a smooth and elastic consistency. If the dough seems a bit dry, add a little water; add a little more flour if it seems too moist.
  2. Once you have obtained the desired consistency, cover the dough with plastic wrap and place it in the refrigerator for 15 minutes.
  3. Divide the dough into handsful and roll out each section to a very thin, even, almost translucent thickness. Use your imagination to cut the dough into any size or shape.

Any filling can be used to make the ravioli.

Blue Cornmeal Ravioli: Substitute a combination of 1 cup finely ground blue cornmeal and 1 1/2 cups flour for the flour in this recipe. Increase the number of eggs to 5.

“Our daughter is gone!” Abandoned French Palace with Tragic Story explored

IC chip wars

TSMC moves to America

Article HERE

TSMC can’t find the staff. But if you look deeper Western media already trying to come up with excuses for America’s impending failure to steal technology from one of their vassals.

Here is the real reason:

  • American education system has failed; American workers are too uneducated to compete.
  • America’s government is too corrupt at all levels to build any real infrastructure.
  • American society has outsourced its social safety net to rent-seeking middlemen. These leech productivity from society, actually productive industries, and workers. Making production in the USA unviable.

But it’s apparently the fault of the Chinese (RoC types are always labeled as Chinese when it’s convenient).

Why the Hunter Biden “laptop issue” is so significant

2023 06 04 06 58
2023 06 04 06 58

Is this a ‘Bot or for-real?

2023 06 04 09 17
2023 06 04 09 17

Velociraptors Long Grass

Persian Gulf States to Form Joint Navy in Coordination with China

When US lost the trade and technological war against China, and lost Ukraine war to Russia, the world no longer afraid of US because the “perceived US position of strength to force the world to obey” diminished. As a result, all the victims of the mafias suddenly and voluntarily joint china to endorsed the policy of mutual respect and win win. The crusader regimes will be down faster than imagination.
UAE withdraws from US-led Middle East Maritime Security Alliance | Al Mayadeen English
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/uae-withdraws-from-us-led-middle-east-maritime-security-alli
Persian Gulf States to Form Joint Navy in Coordination with China | National Review
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/persian-gulf-states-to-form-joint-navy-in-coordination-with-china/

Is this a ‘Bot or for-real?

2023 06 04 09 18
2023 06 04 09 18

Satanic Treasure 🔞 Where To Find The Hidden Treasure In The Old House of Satanists ❌ HUNTER

The world is catching on…

Well, Western media just going to write whatever BS, quote “anonymous sources”, publish rumors and innuendos, WHY do they even NEED to be at the meetings? Any meetings?

It seems the “meetings” would be a complete waste of time and money for the Western media folks. So, it’s only for their “human rights” that they do not be subjected to such “meetings”?

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2023 06 04 09 22

India, China, every BRICS and global south country needs to learn this.

Is this a ‘Bot of for-real?

2023 06 04 09 19
2023 06 04 09 19

Men In Black 3 (2012)

https://youtu.be/Rc507n76IaM

Stop Saying ’Sorry’ If You Want To Say ‘Thank You’: A Seriously Insightful Cartoon

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We often apologise assuming that people will appreciate our politeness and good manners. But in most cases, the other party is much more pleased to hear words of gratitude from you rather than an apology. Talented illustrator Yao Xiao, using everyday situations as inspiration, helps to explain why «thank you» is sometimes better than «I’m sorry» in this cartoon.

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Of course I can’t know for sure, but am encouraged by a video of George Galloway filmed last year in Belgrade by the remaining ruined buildings left by the US/NATO Winston-Smith-Memory-Holed bombing campaign against Serbia in which the Chinese Embassy was attacked. The former British MP said the world has changed since 1999 with BRICS outpacing the G7 and the Global South (the “world” that doesn’t exist on CNN, MSNBC, etc.) ditching the increasingly erratic US $: “Nobody’s going to bomb another Chinese Embassy now!”

Taiwan is beefing up its communications infrastructure to ensure that it remains connected to the rest of the world in case of any emergency. Cindy Wang reports on Bloomberg Television. (Source: Bloomberg)

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2023 06 04 14 25

China HUGE Breakthrough in Missile Chip Tech Amid US Chip Sanctions

https://youtu.be/6R3VG_BG4_I

Is this a ‘Bot or for-real?

2023 06 04 09 20
2023 06 04 09 20

We listed our house in 2016 during a red-hot sellers market. In the Pacific Northwest, houses were selling in 1–2 days. We were hoping to sell quickly because we’d just built another home and two mortgages would be a lot to handle.

When the house finally listed we had a full price offer of $275k on the first day and we were thrilled. We didn’t think twice about accepting it with only one contingency – a home inspection, which is common here. We arranged for the inspection which would take one week.

You know there’s often more to the story. *Image from CBS News.

We were a little concerned when the buyer asked to have an HVAC inspection using their own company instead of using the home inspector, but we gave our permission without asking why.

Their HVAC company did their inspection a few days before the previously-arranged home inspector was supposed to show up. We were presented with a quote for $15k to fix several problems: AC too small, gas fireplace won’t ignite, the furnace was not installed to building code, and the furnace didn’t work. The first words out of my mouth were “what the F?”.

Since it was springtime, we’d been running the AC and furnace on and off before showings so we knew they worked. We contacted the owner of our HVAC company who installed the furnace only three years before and he came out immediately to check on all these issues. We contacted the buyer’s realtor and we all went to our house to check out this mystery.

Our HVAC guy:

-measured the AC unit and determined it was sized properly for our home.

-the fireplace igniter was disassembled by “someone”. We put it together and it started right up.

-now the HVAC guy went into our crawl space where he confirmed the furnace was installed to code.

-we tested the furnace and it wouldn’t start. Our guy tested a few things and finally removed the steel face and found the igniter power wire had been unscrewed and the nut carefully set to the side for a quick reattach!

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Not my furnace but you get the idea. A nut was carefully removed and wire pushed aside. *Image from Google images.

We’d been sabotaged.

With the buyer’s agent standing right there, I asked why her client had done such an obvious job of messing with the system. She quickly became very nervous and near tears but I had a feeling she wasn’t involved. In her nervousness, she started telling us that she’d visited at least 20 houses with these people and they’d made many lowball offers, always sticking to prices that were too low. We assumed they had made a plan to buy and then demand price concessions after “inspecting” the HVAC. They probably had a family member that worked there or arranged for a kickback. In my head I’ve made the plot much more sinister over the years.

I told my realtor we weren’t going to work with this buyer. No deal. We’d take the property off the market before selling and if they pressed us they would regret it as we had a lot of evidence that they’d tampered with our HVAC systems. They walked away with their earnest money (pun intended).

Since we had offers so quickly we increased the price by $10k and removed the “pending” status. After a few days we had an all cash offer which we accepted.

So, the silver lining … a learning experience! I’m happy we had a trustworthy realtor on our side. He said he’d never seen a situation like this one.

Abandoned: Europe’s Largest Underground Airport explored

China exports to South Korea is 0.7% of Chinese GDP, exports to Japan is 0.94% of Chinese GDP. Both are great trading partners but still relatively insignificant.

Every Rodney Dangerfield line from Caddyshack

Many Americans think that Donald Trump resembles Rodney in this video.

Back in the late 90’s I worked on a net caffe back in Venezuela, and among other things we provided tech service. One day a client called about a computer she had that ate diskettes.

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These things for the younger folk.

So we asked her to bring it in, and I open it to see what’s up. She had a computer case that had a disketter opening, kinda like this one:

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but there was no diskette drive inside the hole, so she would push them and they’d fall into the case. There were 20 diskettes inside.

No more meetings, no more talks on the phone with chief Lloyd Austin

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INTRODUCTION

Experiencing a series of vicious acts, violence and provocations as well as the general lack of trust, China has now decided not to answer phone calls from Lloyd Austin, chief of U.S. defense ministry.

Prospects for a renewed high-level military dialogue between China and the U.S. remain dim, with Beijing saying their defense chief will not hold a bilateral meeting while both are attending a weekend security conference in Singapore.

Closely monitoring the moods of the PLA and comparing the other Chinese departments with their U.S. counterparts, Beijing believes that the Defense Department under Lloyd Austin is the weak link in the United States.

Beijing is now deeply concerned that US and China are most likely to trigger conflicts between the two armies of the world’s largest superpowers.

Traditionally, China has always been faithful to their policy of peaceful and cooperative relations with the US, especially the military wing, believing that any armed conflict can trigger a war which is beyond calculation.

The Chinese leadership has decided to take a peaceful and preventive measure by sending the message unmistakably to the American side, hoping to forestall a future war that they believe is down the road.

The Chinese have an adamant sense of history: They have in their hearts reserved a special place for their American friends, and how much hate they have for their “foes”, the barbaric Imperial Japanese Army.

Today, the Chinese are still “fighting” these Japanese “foes”; the non-stop production and viewing can testify that they watch anti-Japanese war movies every day.

The message? China’s trying to avert any military conflict, but it’ll fight back if provoked.

FM spokesperson Mao Ning blamed the U.S…

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning most recently blamed the U.S., saying Washington should “earnestly respect China’s sovereignty and security interests and concerns, immediately correct the wrongdoing, show sincerity, and create the necessary atmosphere and conditions between the two militaries.”

She gave no details, but tensions between the sides have spiked over and Washington’s military support and sales of defensive weapons to self-governing Taiwan, China’s assertions of sovereignty to the contested South China Sea and its flying of a suspected spy balloon over the U.S.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is scheduled to address the Shangri-La Dialogue on Saturday, while Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Li Shangfu will speak at the gathering on Sunday.

Austin met previously with Li’s predecessor, Wei Fenghe, at last year’s Shangri-La Dialogue – which appeared to do little to smooth relations between the sides. In his address to the forum, Wei accused the U.S. of seeking to contain China’s development and threatening to assert its claims to Taiwan by military force.

China refused to take a phone call from Austin… insisting that communications on the military level have yet to show signs of improvement

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden cordially met on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting of large economies last November in Indonesia. Unfortunately, contacts have proceeded only sporadically since then, with only side meetings on neutral territory.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a visit to Beijing in February after the U.S, shot down a Chinese “spy” balloon that had crossed the United States. He later met with the Communist Party’s senior foreign affairs adviser Wang Yi in Austria.

China refused to take a phone call from Austin to discuss the balloon issue, the Pentagon said. Always beset by mistrust and accusations, communications on the military level have yet to show signs of significant improvement.

Beijing was reportedly angered by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s April stopover in the U.S. that included an encounter with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. China’s PLA holds military exercises and sends fighter jets, drones and ships near the island “to advertise its threat to attack and wear down Taiwan defenses.’

Moreover, “China protests movements of U.S. Navy ships and aircraft through the Taiwan Strait and close to Chinese-held islands in the South China Sea, dispatching its own ships and planes and raising the possibility of confrontations or collisions.” (Source: MDT/AP)

CONCLUSION

Last century’s Sino-Japanese war might be over, but the aftermaths of horror of war – such as hard-feelings and the anti-Japanese sentiments are still here to haunt the nation.

Remarkably, Germany’s leaders did an excellent job in easing the pains inflicted by the atrocities of the Nazis. Remember the picture of Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling before the million Jewish victims massacred?

Japan’s leaders have never done that; they have even erased this memory by white washing the “rape of Nanking”, a genocidal chapter in their bloody acts of atrocity.

Western anthropologists have observed that the Americans are reality bound, whereas the Chinese are past oriented in culture.

Some American leaders are mistaken as they perceive China as a “threat” to American national security. False!

Chinese students pose a “threat” to their American competitors; they are culturally and genetically prone to “academic achievements – a syndrome pushing them to succeed.” True!

The American public are manipulated by media to the point that they believe the Chinese president got carried away with the “no limits” friendship with Putin, who’s invading Ukraine. If one goes by the number of Chinese students attending colleges and universities in the U.S., the picture’s crystal clear. They prefer America to Russia.

If unprovoked, no Chinese has ever and would never think of harming the Americans, who are held high in regard as “professors of great learning”; the Chinese see themselves as “learners in apprenticeship”. Such perception has been around since the end of WWII.

The Chinese are happy to see their leaders getting along well with their American counterparts, Katherine Tai, the Secretary of Trade and Commerce, and Janet Yellen, the chief of finance, just to name a few.

The Chinese just can’t accept Lloyd Austin; they fear that he might “lead or mislead” the two nations to the tragedy of “sleepwalking” into war.

Noble Family disappears: Time Capsule Château left Abandoned

Today?

Today, this June 2023, China is the dominant nation in the world.

In every metric, China dominates.

Some metrics are obvious and astounding. Where it is obvious that China is the predominant nation in the world in that particular role.

  • Lifestyle for it’s citizenry.
  • Destruction of poverty.
  • Elimination of air pollution.
  • Manufacturing ability.
  • New technologies.

And so on and so forth.

It is no mistake that the rest of the world (well, the nations that are not proxies of the United States, that is) turn to China. They turn to China for trade. For economics. For science, and manufacturing. They turn to China for help and assistance. They turn to China for guidance, and direction.

They turn to China.

Now that being the truth, you have a multi-billion anti-china funded effort. This effort is designed to keep the American public, and the citizens of the proxy nations, ignorant of reality. Anything positive or neutral is withheld, and colored with outrageous lies. There’s no other way to describe the war propaganda; it’s untruths, and lies that are the direct opposite of the truth.

And if you, the reader are not aware of this, shame on you.

The rest of the world is turning into a multi-polar world based on individual national sovereignty, They no longer use American currency, follow and obey American laws, rules and conventions, and are distancing themselves from the insanity that has gripped the United States and dragging it downward.

There are exceptions.

A “color revolution” in Thailand, and South Korea has placed “puppet governments” in power. And the first things that these puppets do is pull their nations closer to the United States, and then engage in a war where many of their countrymen are killed.

It’s the United States method of Geo-Politics.

But, back to the question about China.

Do you know what the United States will look like in 2040? Do you know the projections? What are the economic, social, scientific, and cultural changes that will manifest int he United States in 2040?

Well, you don’t know.

Because there just isn’t any writings, projections, or videos about this subject. The United States has no plans for this far in the future. Instead the United States fully intends to “kick the can down the road” and let someone else deal with the various messes and problems that are sprouting up left and right everywhere.

RAND studies are looking at regional wars, and proxy war and color revolutions well into the next decade. But NOTHING about building the American domestic society. Nothing about the future of schools, society, and infrastructure. It’s almost as if those issues are not important.

But…

China knows.

China knows what the world will look like in 2040.

I see a prosperous China. Where China is a wealthy nation. Far wealthier than anything in Europe today.

I see a vibrant, and healthy Africa. Crime being eliminated, and social services expanding as industry does as well.

I see South America growing and modernizing. And like Africa, a strong middle class.

I see Chinese bases on the Moon, and the start of a Chinese colony on the surface of Mars.

I also see some amazing breakthroughs in national governance across the world where nations restructure their nations to be more efficient like China, and to punish the evil and greedy like China has.

Yes.

I see a bright future ahead.

And it is all starting today with the global leadership of China.

The Ukrainian Military Is In Bad Shape

Erik Kramer and Paul Schneider are two former U.S. special operations soldiers who have been in Ukraine since 2022 to train Ukrainian troops.

At War on the Rocks they paint a dark picture of the state of the Ukrainian military. Their intent is to get money for more training, thus the real picture may be less dark than they describe. But even if one takes that into account it is still a sad state for an army that has been at war for more than a year. Some excerpts:

Based on our nine months of training with all services of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, to include the Ground Forces (Army), Border Guard Service, National Guard, Naval Infantry (Marines), Special Operations Forces, and Territorial Defense Forces, we have observed a series of common trends: lack of mission command, effective training, and combined arms operations; ad hoc logistics and maintenance; and improper use of special operations forces. These trends have undermined Ukraine’s resistance and could hinder the success of the ongoing offensive.

What ongoing offensive?

Under mission command, the German Auftragstaktik, the leader disseminates his intent (“to attack through the northern woods to take town x”) and authority to subunits that is passed down with the mission to empower subordinates at all levels. Each subunits can make its plans to coordinate and execute the mission as best as possible. The contrast is an order command where every detail of execution is ordered from the top down. Both have advantages but to have a mixed system, as Ukraine currently has, is the worst of all places.

In our experience, across many units and staffs, the Ukrainian Armed Forces do not promote personal initiative and foster mutual trust or mission command. As Michael Kofman and Rob Lee recently discussed on the Russia Contingency podcast, elements of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have an old Soviet mentality that holds most decision-making at more senior levels. Amongst military leaders at the brigade level and below, our impression is that junior officers fear making mistakes.

But to use mission command down to the lower levels of a Platoon one needs noncommissioned officers (sergeants) to run the show. Those the Ukrainian military had are by now probably dead:

Having trained every component of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, we have continually seen a lack of an experienced noncommissioned officer corps. It is common to see field grade officers running around during training counting personnel and coordinating for meals. In the United States, it takes years to develop just a junior noncommissioned officer.

The next big lack is combined arms training and use. Tanks protect the infantry, the infantry protects the tanks, the artillery covers the battlefield to allow tanks and infantry to maneuver, command takes care that all three coordinate their actions.

The armor/infantry relationship is supposed to be symbiotic, but it is not. The result is that infantry will conduct frontal assaults or operate in urban areas without the protection and firepower of tanks. Also, artillery fires are not synchronized with maneuver. Most units do not talk directly to supporting artillery, so there is a delay in call for fire missions. We have been told that units will use runners to send fire missions to artillery batteries because of issues with communications.Most of the military’s operations are not phased and are sequential. Fires and maneuver, for example, are planned separately from infantry units — and infantry units plan separately from supporting artillery. This mentality also carries over to adjacent unit coordination, which is either nonexistent or rare and causes high rates of fratricide. Unit commanders have concerns about collaborators and thus are hesitant to pass on critical information that can be used against them to sister units.

These issues are compounded by unreliable communications between units and with senior leadership. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have a hodgepodge of radios that are vulnerable to jamming. Further, battalion missions are mainly independent company operations that do not focus on a main effort coupled with supporting efforts. The armed forces do not combine effects, so operations are piecemeal and disjointed. The separate missions are not supporting each other, nor are the missions of lower level units “nested” under a higher level mission. Sustainment is not synchronized with operations, either.

Due to the wild mix of weapons and for lack of trained mechanics logistics and the maintenance of equipment are a mess.

This lack of coordinated maintenance and logistics also translates into medical care. Medical evacuation and care are haphazard. Experienced Ukrainian combat medics have repeatedly stated that many of the evacuees would have survived it they had reached definitive care in a timely manner. The Ukrainian Armed Forces can solve this issue with a systematic logistics process.

Ukrainian special forces are mostly used as infantry even as they should be used for more demanding missions. There also are gimmick missions:

Ukraine special forces units comprised of international volunteers shop around their services to conventional unit commanders without a mission being tied to a strategic or operational goal. One example of a mission was a conventional brigade commander who had reported to his command that he had occupied a village taken from the Russians. When he realized that the information he had was mistaken and they had stopped short, he asked the international special operations forces unit to go into the occupied village and take a picture of a Ukrainian flag placed on top of a building in the center of the village.

A suicide mission to hide the commanders false reporting …

The authors claim that most of the above problems could be fixed by more ‘western’ training which they are more than willing to sell. However, what has become of the last armies ‘western’ forces have trained in Iraq and Afghanistan? Both fell apart. An army must reflect the local society and culture. It can not be formed top down by outside forces.

Since 2015 the Ukrainian army has been build up and trained by U.S. and British forces. What the WotR authors describe is the result of that.

Posted by b on June 3, 2023 at 17:01 UTC | Permalink

Inside This Secret Masonic Crypt will Shock You! (R$E)

China is scaring America in several ways:

  1. China is about to overtake America as the world’s largest economy, probably by 2028.
  2. China and BRICS are creating alternative reserve currencies to the US Dollar. China is accelerating global de-dollarization.
  3. China is surpassing America technologically in most fields. In space exploration, China landed on the far side of the moon, China landed a rover on Mars, China built the Tiangong space station. China leads in 5G/6G. I could go on and on and on.
  4. China is gaining substantial diplomatic credibility and influence around the world. BRI, BRICS, RCEP, SCO…these things keep US officials up at night. China recently brokered the Saudi-Iran peace deal.
  5. China is modernizing its military with amazing military tech. Hypersonic missiles. J-20 and J-35. Type 003 Fujian with EMALS. Powerful destroyers and nuclear attack submarines. I could go on and on and on.
  6. China’s extraordinary manufacturing capacity means that China could outlast the USA in any war. Building ships, planes, tanks…you name it.
  7. China is such a crucial part of America’s supply chains, including military supply chains, China could strangle the United States.

US politicians are shitting their pants.

NATO INVADING SERBIA!!!!!

NATO will officially be invading Serbia, a non-E.U. European country even after protest by Belgrade.

A Staunch Chinese ally in the region.

“Wokeness” is the new COINTELPRO. Pink fascism is the du jour variety

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2023 06 04 08 52

Dr. Strangelove: Check List

Reactions and adventures

Once, when I was living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, my cat (a cute but smallish Maine Coon) named Phelie jumped on my bed at 4am. She took out her claw, and carefully… so very carefully… opened my eyelid. She wanted to see if I was alive.

I guess that (then, at that time) I must have slept deep.

Cats and dogs; our little buddies. Our pals. Well, they care for us. They worry about us. And if we have the opportunity, we should take care of them too.

Today, this article is going to be heavily laden with “reaction videos”. People listen to a song that they never heard before, and you listen to their reactions. You would be surprised how many of the younger folk (20s and so on) have never heard of the music that we all grew up with. And it’s a treat.

I suggest that you watch all of them, but if you are busy, then just watch the very first one, which is a compilation of reactions to an Opera, and the last one which is a reaction by an African woman to “Zombie”.

Enjoy today. And if you have the time, I strongly recommend watching all those videos. Most especially those with a “@” at the front.

First Reaction To Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody THE BEST BY FAR!

How would you stop people from walking across your lawn?

There was an older woman on my block growing up who disliked that a bunch of older boys kept walking on her lawn and garden. One day I watched as she called the biggest boy over. He was menacing and we all walked in fear of him. She said, “Son, I have a problem I am hoping you can help me with. I have all these kids who walk on my lawn and garden and I am trying to grow things. Do you think you could make sure no one tramples them since you are clearly such a leader in the neighborhood?”

From that day on not one person touched her grass or garden. That boy defended her turf like it was his own and with every fiber of his being.

All it took was a frail 80 year old woman with some wise rhetoric.

“Rebels beheaded, instigators arrested”? And this is not Prigozhin

From HERE

An audio recording appeared in one of the telegram channels of the Wagner group. Someone describes the situation with Prigozhin’s rebellion, prefaced his speech with the following words: “I ask you to put this on your information resources.” This person introduced himself as an officer of the Marine Corps of the Northern Fleet “from the Kherson direction.” He says that a unique KGB-style special operation was carried out – “lightning fast and deadly for the enemy.” And explains what it is.

The entry with the “officer’s” story, of course, may be stuffing and intrigues of enemies. And the fact that it was posted on the resources of PMC “Wagner” is not a guarantee of authenticity. First there was a recording, then its textual transcript. This “military” says that allegedly a group of rebels from the Ministry of Defense, the General Staff and the National Guard were going to remove Putin, but they did not succeed:

They are beheaded and destroyed. All the instigators, organizers, performers were handed over to the authorities that should deal with this. And they are already doing it hard.

He explains the role Wagner played in this:

Vladimir Vladimirovich turned to his loyal soldiers and his most trusted person, Prigozhin Evgeny Viktorovich. Special thanks to him for saving the country and people from the coup. He is a true patriot and deserves a second Hero star.

Next, the listeners are explained why the PMC units occupied Rostov-on-Don in the first place:

Because the headquarters of the Southern Military District is located there. The instigators-generals were sitting there. Some managed to escape to Moscow. In a panic, they gave orders to attack the Wagner columns with aircraft. But it did not bring results.

The narrator drew attention to the fact that the buildings of the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs were not occupied by the “Wagnerites”, but only cordoned off – because there was no need for this.

The generals who fled to Moscow could not believe that an uprising had been raised against them. They were really scared, because they don’t have combat-ready troops, everyone is involved at the front. They ran to the president: what to do?

Who is with the president?

Then there was Putin’s appeal to the people, in which he spoke about some rebels, but did not name “Wagner” and did not mention the name of Prigozhin. It was about the rebels, “who will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.” And the narrator emphasized in this regard that it was “precisely about the group of generals of the Ministry of Defense.”

Vladimir Vladimirovich is waiting after the appeal. The Federation Council speaks out for the fact that they are devoted to the Supreme Commander. Mayors, governors – too. President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko calls Prigozhin: “Zhenya, hang up.” Wagner divisions are leaving for their permanent locations.

Here a hint is made that we did not hear such assurances from some leaders of the army, and by this they betrayed themselves:

That says a lot… That’s what “Wagner” did. The most unique operation. The rebels are completely beheaded. The grouping has been destroyed. According to some information, the leaders have been arrested. I don’t know for sure, but we’ll know tomorrow.

Quick “palace coup”

The narrator also answers the question: “What would we expect if this operation did not take place?”

“Wagner” was going to be disbanded the other day, depriving the president of such a power lever, because everyone is at the front. There would be regular regroupings like Kharkov, Kyiv. Only already in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. Something would have happened in Crimea. Then the people would get excited. Here the generals would make a quick palace coup, taking their place (Putin. – Approx. ed.).

Also, according to the author of the entry, as a result of the coup, Russia would pay indemnities to everyone and “would go to hell”, and the new rulers would rule “this decaying and dying” country.

And, of course, our president, as always, was on top. Grandmaster!

Will the Tula governor go for a promotion?

Wagner also reports in its TG channels that the Prosecutor General’s Office allegedly found procedural inconsistencies in the FSB’s decision to initiate a criminal case against Yevgeny Prigozhin, and it was closed (later, a message appeared in Telegram channels, without any reference to specific sources, that Yevgeny Prigozhin remains under investigation in connection with the rebellion):

Prigozhin, Lukashenka and Dyumin will meet in Moscow. You will learn about the results, detentions with resignations from the media.

Also, according to the “Wagner” channel, soon the governor of the Tula region, Alexei Dyumin, will begin work at the headquarters of the Southern Federal District of the Moscow Region, where he will be presented in a new position. And he will bring to the final the goals and objectives of the special operation:

Surovikin will be the chief of staff, some of the PMC fighters will enter a separate structural unit of the Russian Defense Ministry. Only Alekseev and Yevkurov will retain their positions. Prigozhin will be engaged in a new large project on the territory of Belarus.

The public also “promises” that a part of defense enterprises and strategic projects will be withdrawn from the structure of Rostec . Some of the design work and enterprises will be taken away from Roskosmos to strengthen the satellite and aerospace group of forces. And they will appoint a new minister of industry.

As for all PMCs, the Ministry of Defense signs a contract with them, and they cease to be structures of state corporations. And the Wagner structure will receive a unique legal status, which “will allow it to be a subject in a dialogue not only with the authorities in Russia, but also with the governments of other states.”

These are the plans voiced by the anonymous speakers of the Wagner Group. How true they are, time will tell. If this is the case, then we will see the results very soon.

The word “throw” immediately comes to mind.

The political observer of Tsargrad Andrey Perla expressed the following opinion about the conspiracy theory voiced in this material:

I think that such texts do not improve the situation, first of all, for Wagner himself. Because these texts are an attempt to prove that although you retreated in front of everyone, in fact you achieved everything and won everything. There is a public in the world that can believe this, but this public is always in the minority. And can never influence the decision makers.

The second point that Andrei Perla drew attention to is that these words were not spoken on behalf of the PMC, but were expressed by an anonymous person who calls himself a marine, but does not disclose not only his name and rank, but even his call sign. This, of course, does not inspire confidence in him , but adds doubts about the authenticity of the text. And the word “throw-in” immediately comes to mind.

In any case, very soon we will understand how great the consequences of the “mutiny”. I think they are quite large. But the content of these texts has nothing or almost nothing in common with everything that happened.

– considers the observer of Tsargrad.

@ Black Reactors First Time Listening To Luciano Pavarotti Singing Nessun Dorma Pt 2

I was once driving my car from Indiana to visit my family in Pennsylvania. On the way, we had our three (x3) cats riding with us, when we hit this massive traffic jam near the “Liberty Tubes” outside of Pittsburgh.

It was hot. Miserable, and traffic was slow. All four lanes were at a standstill.

We were listening to public radio, and they put on an Opera. And as we sat there, I watched the hair stand on end on all my cats simultaneously. They all arched their backs and their ears perked up, and they stood frozen for the climax of the music.

Then one by one, they got down and came up to me and kissed me on the face.

Music. Universal.

‘Give War a Chance’ – A ‘War That Even Pacifists Can Get Behind’

Alastair Crooke

June 5, 2023

The West is now waking up to the reality of the emerging, polycentric and fluid global order, Alastair Crooke writes.

More than a year into Russia’s Special Operation, the initial burst of European excitement at western push-back on Russia has dissipated. The mood instead has turned to “existential dread, a nagging suspicion that [western] civilisation may destroy itself”, Professor Helen Thompson writes.

For an instant, a euphoria had coalesced around the putative projection of the EU as a world power; as a key actor, about to compete on a world scale. Initially, events seemed to play to Europe’s conviction of its market powers: Europe was going to bring down a major power – Russia – by financial coup d’état alone. The EU felt ‘six feet tall’.

It seemed at the time a galvanising moment: “The war re-forged a long-dormant Manichaean framing of existential conflict between Russia and the West, assuming ontological, apocalyptic dimensions. In the spiritual fires of the war, the myth of the ‘West’ was rebaptised”, Arta Moeini suggests.

After the initial disappointment at the lack of a ‘quick kill’, the hope persisted – that if only the sanctions were given more time, and made more all-embracing, then Russia surely would ultimately collapse. That hope has turned to dust. And the reality of what Europe has done to itself has begun to dawn – hence Professor Thomson’s dire warning:

“Those who assume that the political world can be reconstructed by the efforts of human Will, have never before had to bet so heavily on technology over [fossil] energy – as the driver of our material advancement”.

For the Euro-Atlanticists however, what Ukraine seemed to offer – finally – was validation for their yearning to centralise power in the EU, sufficiently, to merit a place at the ‘top table’ with the U.S., as partners in playing the Great Game.

Ukraine, for better or worse, underlined Europe’s profound military dependence on Washington – and on NATO.

More particularly, the Ukraine conflict seemed to open the prospect for consolidating the strange metamorphosis of NATO from military alliance to an enlightened, Progressive, peace alliance! As Timothy Garton Ash effused in the Guardian in 2002, “NATO has become a European peace movement” where one could watch “John Lennon meet George Bush”.

The Ukraine war is portrayed, in this vein, as the “war­ that even former pacifists can get behind. All its proponents seemed to be singing is “Give War a Chance””.

Lily Lynch, a Belgrade-based writer, argues that,

“…especially in the past 12 months, telegenic female leaders such as the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, have increasingly served as the spokespersons of enlightened militarism in Europe … ”

“No political party in Europe better exemplifies the shift from militant pacifism to ardent pro-war Atlanticism than the German Greens. Most of the original Greens had been radicals during the student protests of 1968 … But as the founding members entered middle age, fissures began to appear in the party – that would one day tear it apart”.

“Kosovo then changed everything: The 78-day NATO bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia in 1999, ostensibly to halt war crimes committed by Serbian security forces in Kosovo, would forever transform the German Greens. NATO for the Greens became an active military compact concerned with spreading and defending values such as human rights, democracy, peace, and freedom – well beyond the borders of its member states”.

A few years later, in 2002, an EU functionary (Robert Cooper) could envisage Europe as a new ‘liberal imperialism’. The ‘new’ was that Europe eschewed hard military power, in favour of weaponising both a controlled ‘narrative’ and controlled participation in its market. He advocated for ‘a new age of empire’, in which Western powers no longer would have to follow international law in their dealings with ‘old fashioned’ states; they could use military force independently of the United Nations; and could impose protectorates to replace regimes which ‘misgovern’.

The German Greens’ Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, has continued with this metamorphosis, scolding countries with traditions of military neutrality, and imploring them to join NATO. She has invoked Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s line: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”. And the European Left has been utterly captivated. Major parties have abandoned military neutrality and opposition to war – and now champion NATO. It is a stunning reversal.

All this may have been music to the ears of the Euro-élites anxious for the EU to rise to Great Power status, but this soft-power European Leviathan was wholly underpinned by the unstated (but essential) assumption that NATO ‘had Europe’s back’. This naturally implied that the EU had to tie itself ever closer to NATO – and therefore to the U.S. which controls NATO.

But the flip-side to this Atlanticist aspiration – as President Emmanuel Macron noted – is its inexorable logic that Europeans simply end by becoming American vassals. Macron was trying rather, to rally Europe towards the coming ‘age of empires’,hoping to position Europe as a ‘third pole’ in a concert of empires.

The Atlanticists were duly enraged by Macron’s remarks (which nonetheless drew support of other EU states). It could even seem (to furious Atlanticists) that Macron actually was channelling General de Gaulle who had called NATO a “false pretence” designed to “disguise America’s chokehold over Europe”.

There are however, two related schisms that flowed out from this ‘re-imagined’ NATO: Firstly, it exposed the reality of internal European rivalries and divergent interests, precisely because the NATO lead in the Ukraine conflict sets the interests of the Central East European hawks wanting ‘more America, and more war on Russia’ up and against that of the original EU western axis which wants wanting strategic autonomy (i.e. less ‘America’, and a quick end to the conflict).

Secondly, it would be predominantly the western economies that would have to bankroll the costs and divert their manufacturing capacity towards military logistic chains. The economic price, non-military de-industrialisation and high inflation, potentially, could be enough to break Europe – economically.

The prospect of a pan-European cohesive identity might be both ontologically appealing – and be seen to be an ‘appropriate accessory’ to an aspiring ‘world actor’ – yet such identity becomes caricature when mosaic Europe is transformed into an abstract de-territorialised identity that reduces people to their most abstract.

Paradoxically, the Ukraine war – far from consolidating the EU ‘identity’, as first imagined – has fractured it under the stresses of the concerted effort to weaken and collapse Russia.

Secondly, as Arta Moeini, the director of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, has observed:

“The American push for NATO expansion since 1991 has enlarged the alliance by adding a host of faultline states from Central and Eastern Europe. The strategy, which began with the Clinton administration but was fully championed by the George W. Bush administration, was to create a decidedly pro-American pillar on the continent, centred on Warsaw – which would force an eastward shift in the alliance’s centre of gravity away from the traditional Franco-German axis”.

“By using NATO enlargement to weaken the old power centres in Europe that might have occasionally stood up to [Washington] such as in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Washington ensured a more compliant Europe in the short-term. The upshot, however, was the formation of a 31-member behemoth with deep asymmetries of power and low compatibility of interests” – that is much weaker and more vulnerable – than it believes itself to be”.

Here is the key: “the EU is much weaker than it believes it to be”. The outset of the conflict was defined by a cast of mind entranced by the notion of Europe as a ‘mover and shaker’ in world affairs, and mesmerised by Europe’s post-war prosperity.

EU leaders convinced themselves that this prosperity had bequeathed it the clout and the economic depth to contemplate war – and to weather its reversals – with panglossian sanguinity. It has produced rather, the converse: It has put its project in jeopardy.

In John Raply and Peter Heather’s The Imperial Life Cycle, the authors explain the cycle:

“Empires grow rich and powerful and attain supremacy through the economic exploitation of their colonial periphery. But in the process, they inadvertently spur the economic development of that same periphery, until it can roll back and ultimately displace its overlord”.

Europe’s prosperity in this post-war era, thus was not so much one of its own making, but drew benefit from the tail-end of accumulations hewn from an earlier cycle – now reversed.

“The fastest-growing economies in the world are now all in the old periphery; the worst-performing economies are disproportionately in the West. These are the economic trends that have created our present landscape of superpower conflict — most saliently between America and China”.

America may think of itself as exempt from the European colonial mould, yet fundamentally, its model is

“an updated cultural-political glue that we might call “neoliberalism, NATO and denim”, which follows in the timeless imperial mould: The great wave of decolonisation that followed WW2 was meant to end that. But the Bretton Woods system, which created a trading regime that favoured industrial over primary producers and enshrined the dollar as the global reserve currency – ensured that the net flow of financial resources continued to move from developing countries to developed ones. Even when the economies of the newly-independent states grew, those of the G7 economies and their partners grew more”.

A once-mighty empire is now challenged and feels embattled. Taken aback by the refusal of so many developing countries to join with isolating Russia, the West is now waking up to the reality of the emerging, polycentric and fluid global order. These trends are set to continue. The danger is that economically weakened and in crisis, western countries attempt to re-appropriate western triumphalism, yet lack the economic strength and depth, so to do:

“In the Roman Empire, peripheral states developed the political and military capacity to end Roman domination by force… The Roman Empire might have survived – had it not weakened itself with wars of choice – on its ascendant Persian rival”.

The final ‘transgressive’ thought goes to Tom Luongo: “Allowing the West to keep thinking they can win – is the ultimate form of grinding out a superior opponent”.

Interesting!

What are your thoughts on the U.S. and China’s failure to restore military-to-military contacts?

There are a number of critical steps that occur before two nations engage in open warfare.

All of these steps have already been taken by China in response to American aggression and provocations.

China has taken the necessary steps. It’s all public knowledge, though you would have to perform some pretty deep sleuthing to find anything about any of it in the Western “news”.

  • Publishing a Casus Belli.
  • Dumping the other nation’s currency.
  • Stockpiling of precious commodities.
  • Military mobilization.
  • Severing military lines of communication.
  • Severing diplomatic lines of communication (touch and go presently)

It’s pretty “cut and dry”. Obvious to everyone.

China already has provided the “due diligence” and set up the “rules of engagement”. World War 3 will be on the Chinese timetable, following Chinese defined rules of engagement, and China will dictate the terms of Western surrender.

The United States is being run by ignorant idiots that have no clue as to what they are fucking with.

China’s time line is running HOT. And the “stop watch” is ticking.

Brace for impact.

FREAKING SHOOK!| FIRST TIME HEARING Faith No More – Epic REACTION

Why is the US blaming China for its fentanyl crisis? What’s the cause of America’s drug abuse?

In the rest of the world, fentanyl is a controlled and regulated substance and is used as medication. In the US, fentanyl has been turned into a recreational drug inspite of the obvious dangers.

There is no effective government in the US. It is that simple.

It is obviously stupid to blame China or any other country. Other countries do not run the US government.

Only US citizens can run and manage the US government.

CAMEO CANDY VIDEO REACTION

Can China survive on terms enunciated and dictated by the US and her allies?

Well, if you distill the terms presented by the United States and it’s proxy “allies” you have this…

  • All Chinese must die.
  • Chinese culture must be erased.
  • All history books must be rewritten to avoid any mention of China.
  • China to be broken up into parts.
  • China to be looted until nothing is left except junk and stone.
  • The surviving Chinese are to be used as slaves, servants, and sex toys.

Can China survive under these conditions?

Personally, I actually think that China can.

But it will not want to, and it will flatten the United States into a radioactive wasteland of ruin if the United States continues it’s moronic march towards “suicide by cop”.

SO CATCHY!… | FIRST TIME HEARING Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Come On Eileen REACTION

All aboard the gravy train: an independent audit of US funding for Ukraine

HEATHER KAISER, ANYA PARAMPIL AND MAX BLUMENTHAL

·JUNE 27, 2023

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President Joe Biden travels to Kyiv, Ukraine Monday, February 20, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

In the absence of official scrutiny of Washington’s spending spree on Ukraine, The Grayzone conducted an independent audit of US funding for the country. We discovered a series of wasteful, highly unusual expenditures the Biden administration has yet to explain.

During a recent discussion with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, touted her organization’s push to guarantee transparency for US taxpayer funds sent to Ukraine.

“We are involved in funding efforts at ensuring judicial integrity, which is intrinsically important to building Ukraine’s democracy and its integration plans to get into Europe,” Power declared, adding USAID’s work in Ukraine was “also really important in terms of assuring the taxpayer, the American taxpayer, that they’re resources are well spent.”

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While innocuous on the surface, Power’s comments revealed a great deception the US government is currently waging against the American public. In the roughly 16 months since Russia’s February 2022 escalation of the Ukraine conflict, the US government has approved several multi-billion dollar spending packages to sustain the Kiev military’s fight against Moscow.

Though many Americans likely believe that US dollars allocated for Ukraine are spent directly on supplies for the war effort, the lead author of this report, Heather Kaiser, conducted a thorough review of Washington’s budget for the 2022 and 2023 fiscal year and discovered that is far from the case.

US taxpayers may be shocked to learn that as their families grappled with fears of Social Security’s looming insolvency, the Social Security Administration in Washington sent $4.48 million to the Kiev government in 2022 and 2023 alone. In another example of bizarre spending, USAID paid off $4.5 billion worth of Ukraine’s sovereign debt through payments made to the World Bank — all while Congress went to loggerheads over America’s ballooning national debt. (Western financial interests including BlackRock Inc. are among the largest holders of Ukrainian government bonds.)

Though it is nearly impossible to calculate the total sum of US tax dollars sent to Kiev, Kaiser was able to perform an independent audit of Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine through a careful search of open source data available on the US government’s official spending tracker.

Kaiser reviewed all the funding allocations in which Ukraine was listed as the “Place of Performance” for fiscal years 2022 and 2023. Additionally, she discovered supplementary funds were sent to Kiev by listing Ukraine as the “justification” for spending, rather than the location where the money was physically sent.

Calculating the total dollar amount that the US has given to Ukraine is incredibly challenging for multitude of reasons: there is a lag in reporting expenditures; covert money given by the CIA (Title 50 Covert Action) won’t be publicly disclosed; and direct military assistance in the form of military equipment is not calculated in the same manner as raw cash. The Pentagon recently admitted to an accounting error revised up to 6.2 billion dollars. Despite this, Kaiser submitted a request to the Department of Treasury asking them to disclose the total dollar amount of US taxpayer support for Ukraine. Treasury has not responded at the time of publication.

Though Kaiser was able to search through pages of reported spending, the US government has yet to conduct an official audit of its funding for Ukraine. What’s more, there is currently no limit to how much Washington can send to Kiev.

In the absence of dedicated official scrutiny of Washington’s spending in Ukraine, The Grayzone has produced an independent audit of US tax dollar allocation in the country.

Among the many troubling contracts we discovered was a $4.25 million payment from the Pentagon to a military diving contractor that a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee has described as a “fraudulent company.” The US government asserts the payment covered the company’s delivery of explosives equipment to Ukraine.

So how exactly was that money put to use? And why has Congress so far refused to implement any program to track these shady weapons deals?

Unfortunately, the “justification” for contracts like these often consists of just a brief paragraph — or worse, a single sentence. Little little information is available that documents precisely how the funds were spent down to the dollar and item.

Beneficiaries of USAID’s Ukraine aid: Polish NATO lobbyists, a private equity firm, rural Kenyans, a TV station in Toronto

USAID awarded $21.8 billion

to Ukraine throughout fiscal years 2022 and 2023, roughly 41 percent of the 53.4 billion it spent during that period. Mysteriously, a portion of USAID funding earmarked for Kiev was sent to Kenya and Ethiopia via other agencies, with the award description stating projects in Africa were “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine supplemental funds.”

USAID sent $4.5 billion to Ukraine via the World Bank to pay off Kiev’s debt and fund various social programs, including government pensions. USAID made a total of $21 billion worth of direct payments to the World Bank in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 (9.1 Billion and 11.9 Billion respectively), more money than all of the funding Washington sent to the bank between fiscal years 2008 and 2021 combined. The $4.5 billion allocated for Ukraine funded programs directed by the bank’s International Development Association and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

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USAID supplied a $1 billion grant to the World Bank’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to subsidize projects “Ukraine cannot fund at this time.”

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USAID has supplied $20 million to “Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees” since February 2020. Recipients include a Polish think tank called the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, a Toronto-based Ukrainian TV channel, a collection of Ukrainian “anti-corruption” organizations, and other groups listed in the screenshot below. These awards were issued on top of $26 million worth of funds USAID sent these groups between 2016 and the February 2022 war escalation.

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USAID allocated $500,000 for the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in 2023 to fund a program dedicated to “advanc[ing] U.S. foreign policy objectives by supporting economic growth, agriculture and trade; global health; and democracy, conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance” in Ukraine. The funds were earmarked “to strengthen the International Center for Ukrainian Victory (ICUV) initiative in implementing international advocacy campaigns to keep high levels of international solidarity with Ukraine.”

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USAID’s support arrived on top of a $74,788

subaward the State Department granted to the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in June 2022 to “build capacity and policy formulating capabilities of the International Center for Ukrainian Victory (ICUV) and assisting Ukrainian civil society based in Poland.”

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According to their own so-called “Peace Manifesto,” the ICUV’s top priority is to admit Ukraine into NATO, a move that former US diplomats from George Kennan to Jack Matlock to Henry Kissinger and even current CIA director William Burns have described as a major provocation against Russia.

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USAID sent $3 million to the World Health Organization

(WHO) in 2022 “to improve health outcomes in drought affected areas in Ethiopia.” The description stated, “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine Supplemental Funds.”

USAID sent 30.9 million to Chemonics International, Inc. for the “Ukraine confidence building initiative (UCBI) 4. A private, for-profit aid contractor, Chemonics’ founder said he launched the company to “have my own CIA.” The Grayzone has documented Chemonics’ role in delivering US government funding and supplies to the Syrian White Helmets, which served as the propaganda wing of the Al Qaeda-tied armed opposition. Chemonics previously reaped a massive windfall

from the US occupation of Afghanistan, raking in as much as $600 million from USAID.

USAID sent $20.7 million to PACT, INC. for “USAID Ukraine’s public health system recovery and resilience activity and will strengthen the Government of Ukraine (GOU) capacity to address COVID-19 and other public health threats, sustain health services during a crisis, and protect the health of all Ukrainians including vulnerable and marginalized populations. According to its 2022 impact statement [PDF

], “In Ukraine, Pact’s work empowers citizens to push for transparent and democratic governance, advances gender equality and human rights for women and girls, and accelerates efforts to achieve HIV epidemic control.” The contractor’s work contributed to “172 people increas[ing] their net income,” according to Pact.

USAID sent $25 million to Horizon Capital Growth Fund IV

, a “leading private equity firm in emerging Europe, via the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), “to back high-growth tech and export-oriented [Small and Medium Sized Enterprises] succeeding globally, based on platforms in Ukraine and Moldova.”

USAID sent 7.6 million to UNICEF IDA

for emergency nutrition response in ASALs (Arid and Semi-Arid Lands) in Kenya. The description stated, “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine Supplemental Funds”

USAID sent $1.2 million to University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc.

located in Atlanta, GA to “support humanitarian information management through geographic information systems, data analytics and visualizations”. Ukraine was listed as the place of performance.

The Pentagon sponsors diving contractor with “history of fraud” to send mysterious explosives to Ukraine

The Department of Homeland Security sent 5.48 million to Gravois Aluminum Boats LLC

on June 8, 2021 for the following purpose: “PROCUREMENT OF TWO 38-FOOT FULL CABIN RESPONSE BOATS, FOUR 38-FOOT CENTER CONSOLE RESPONSE BOATS, TRAILERS, SPARE PARTS, AND TRAINING AS REQUIRED UNDER FMS LOA DB-P-LCL FOR THE COUNTRY OF UKRAINE.”

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The Department of Defense has transferred 4.75 Million to Atlantic Diving Supply, Inc. as of February 3, 2023 for “PRO SAPPER AND EOD EQUIPMENT [CONTRACTING SQUADRON] UKRAINE” and “Marine lifesaving and Diving Equipment.”

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Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) and sapper equipment is exclusively used to blow things up or clean up explosives. And Atlantic Diving Supply

is a military contractor originally founded to provide tactical gear to Navy SEAL divers.

When a company like this is tasked with a highly specific delivery of explosives gear to any foreign nation, including Ukraine, it should prompt questions about the mission, particularly when US intelligence is blaming Ukraine’s military for attacking the Nord Stream pipelines without the knowledge of President Volodymyr Zelensky. (The payment date does not necessarily correlate with the date of delivery from the vendor; in other words, the equipment could have been delivered at a prior date.)

Luke Hillier, the founder of Atlantic Diving Supply, paid a $20 million settlement in 2019 to resolve charges that he defrauded the Pentagon by falsely claiming his company was a small business. Atlantic Diving is consistently listed as one of the top 25 largest military contractors in the country.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=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%3D%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1362433588793380871&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fchinaworldleader.quora.com%2F%3F__ni__%3D0%26__tiids__%3D116011215%252C116010521%252C116010501%252C116010292%252C116010014%252C116007326%252C116007097%252C116006641%252C116005874%252C116005798%252C116004988%252C116002755%252C116002739%252C116000677%252C116000421%252C115999767%252C115998252%252C115994358%252C115993793%252C115993338%252C115992454%252C115991652%252C115991143%252C115991033%252C115988169%252C115985403%252C115984456%252C115984461%252C115982693%252C115982038%252C115980841%252C115979472%252C115978751%26__filter__%3Dall%26__nsrc__%3Dnotif_page%26__sncid__%3D41161125960%23anchor&sessionId=6a56fa8f326c7cdea064dc1c4393ff29b07cd102&siteScreenName=Quora&theme=light&widgetsVersion=aaf4084522e3a%3A1674595607486&width=550px

In 2021, Hillier raked in a massive $33 billion contract under the same program, prompting fresh accusations of fraud. This pattern of malfeasance prompted a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to bluntly denounce Atlantic Diving as a “fraudulent company.”

Hillier currently owns a $13 million mega-yacht in the Cayman Islands, $24 million worth of beachfront property in Hawaii, and two Bahamas-based companies with murky operations, according to the Project on Government Oversight

.

2023 06 28 06 18
2023 06 28 06 18

Atlantic Diving Supply founder Luke Hillier living his best life

The Department of Defense has paid 4.9 Million to BAE Systems GCS International as of September 12, 2022 for “UKRAINE LCS LW 155 SPARES” and “guns over 155mm through 200mm”. In Navy terminology, LCS means “Littoral Combat Ship,” while LW refers to the lightweight gun. And “155 SPARES” refers to the gun mounted on the ship’s main battery off the bow.

So what is the exact purpose of the LCS LW 155mm gun spares, why were they given to Ukraine, and where are they now? Is there a tracking mechanism in place to know where they are and how they’re being used?

Washington funnels cash to a private equity firm, Georgian finance corporation, a ‘private entrepreneur’ via Ukraine aid

US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) sent $25 million to Horizon Capital Growth Fund IV , a “leading private equity firm in emerging Europe, “to back high-growth tech and export-oriented [Small and Medium Sized Enterprises] succeeding globally, based on platforms in Ukraine and Moldova.”

US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) sent $1.5 million to the Gazelle Fund LP, another private equity firm, to relocate Ukrainian businesses to Georgia. Georgia does not border Ukraine, nor is it a primary location for Ukrainian refugee resettlement.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent $882,291 to a single individual described as an “private entrepreneur” in exchange for “overseas technical assistance program support services.” The private entrepreneur listed, Igor Lavreniuk, serves as the Program Coordinator for USAID’s Competitive Markets Program according to his LinkedIn.

2023 06 28 06 18h
2023 06 28 06 18h

The National Science Foundation sent 1.3 million to University of Illinois for faculty and curricular development in remote sensing. The place of performance is listed as Ukraine.

The Department of State has paid 8.3 million to Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to help “refugees from Ukraine meet their essential needs during initial displacement.” According to SpendingUS.gov, Catholic Relief Services is listed as having received a total of 657 million from the State Department in 2021, 5.7 billion since 2008 and 670 million during the last 12 months

.

Sponsoring “democracy” at Americans’ expense

Along with the blowback from their government’s gratuitous sanctions policy against Russia and other official enemies, Americans are feeling the impact of this overseas spending spree at grocery stores, gas stations, and everywhere in between. Meanwhile, rising generations are not only struggling with historic inflation, but concerns that Medicare and Social Security will be insolvent in the near future.

Washington and Europe have insisted that the flood of aid to Ukraine is essential to defending democracy against the existential threat of an authoritarian Russia. This framing is designed to shut down all debate by casting anyone who questions the ballooning price tag as fundamentally anti-American — if you are against funding the West’s proxy war with a nuclear power, you oppose the very ideals that define our nation.

Yet our inspection of US government spending in Ukraine demonstrates that Washington has prioritized its supposed fight for “democracy” abroad over the well-being of the American people.

As the war drags on, lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham have marketed military aid to Ukraine in increasingly grim terms. As the senator boasted

during a recent trip to Kiev, “The Russians are dying…it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.” Meanwhile, Congress has rejected any mechanism that would guarantee transparency on the billions sent to Kiev, and shunned a war powers debate over the US military’s presence on the Ukrainian battlefield.

President Joseph Biden, for his part, has pledged that official Washington will support Kiev “as long as it takes.” As the potential for blowback grows from Western pressure to push Ukraine into NATO, and a nuclear-armed Moscow is backed into an existential fight for its survival, while economic powers including China gradually decouple from the Western financial system, Americans can only wonder how much will this war cost them when it is finally over.

FIRST TIME HEARING Brad Paisley – He Didn’t Have To Be *TEARS*

Pennsylvania Dutch Apple Butter

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2023 06 28 06 24

Ingredients

  • 3 quarts sweet cider
  • 8 pounds ripe, well-flavored apples
  • 2 1/2 cups brown sugar, firmly packed
  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon allspice
  • 2 teaspoons cloves
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt

Instructions

  1. Cook cider over high heat, uncovered, about 30 minutes or until it is reduced to half.
  2. Wash, quarter and core unpeeled apples. Add to cider, and cook over low heat until very tender. Stir frequently. Work apple mixture through a sieve, returning the puree to the kettle. Stir in sugar, all the spices, and salt. Cook over very low heat, stirring almost continuously, until mixture thickens.
  3. Pour into sterilized pint jars and seal securely.

Makes 4 jars.

First Time Hearing Jay Chou (feat. Fei Yu-ching) “Far Away” Reaction

How To Plant Propaganda: “Putin has been weakened. Russia is crumbling.”

On Sunday the U.S.Secretary of State went on four morning shows to play the same distinct melody over and over again:

Secretary Antony J. Blinken With Margaret Brennan of CBS Face the Nation

SECRETARY BLINKEN: And it was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority. So this raises profound questions. It shows real cracks. We can’t speculate or know exactly where that’s going to go. We do know that Putin has a lot more to answer for in the weeks and months ahead.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: These create more cracks in the Russian façade, and those cracks were already profound. Economically, militarily, its standing in the world – all of those things have been dramatically diminished by Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. He’s managed to bring Europe together. He’s managed to bring NATO together. He’s managed to get Europe to move off of Russian energy. He’s managed to alienate Ukrainians and unite Ukraine at the same time. So across the board this has been a strategic failure. Now you introduce into that profound internal divisions, and there are lots of questions he’s going to have to answer in the weeks ahead.

Secretary Antony J. Blinken With Chuck Todd of NBC Meet The Press

SECRETARY BLINKEN: … So I think we’ve seen more cracks emerge in the Russian facade. It is too soon to tell exactly where they go and when they get there. But certainly we have all sorts of new questions that Putin is going to have to address in the weeks and months ahead.

This is just the latest chapter in a book of failure that Putin has written for himself and for Russia. Economically, militarily, its standing in the world – all of things have plummeted. We have a united NATO that’s stronger than ever before, a Europe that is weaning itself off of Russian energy, Ukraine that Putin has managed to alienate and unite at the same time. Now, with trouble brewing from within, this, as I said, just adds more questions that he has to find answers for.

Secretary Antony J. Blinken With Dana Bash of CNN State of the Union

SECRETARY BLINKEN: But we can say this. First of all, what we’ve seen is extraordinary, and I think you see cracks emerge that weren’t there before

We’ve seen this aggression against Ukraine become a strategic failure across the board. Russia is weaker economically, militarily. Its standing around the world has plummeted. It’s managed to get Europeans off of Russian energy. It’s managed to unite and strengthen NATO with new members and a stronger Alliance. It’s managed to alienate from Russia and unite together Ukraine in ways that it’s never been before. This is just an added chapter to a very, very bad book that Putin has written for Russia.

Secretary Antony J. Blinken With Jonathan Karl of ABC This Week

SECRETARY BLINKEN: But I think we can say this much: First, we’ve seen some very serious cracks emerge.

But we’ve seen, I think, lots of different cracks that have emerged in the conduct of this aggression, because everything Putin has tried to accomplish, the opposite has happened. Russia is weaker economically. It’s weaker militarily. Its standing in the world has plummeted. It’s managed to strengthen and unite NATO. It’s managed to alienate and unite Ukrainians. It’s managed to get Europe off of dependence on Russian energy.

In piece after piece, issue after issue, what Putin has tried to prevent, he’s managed to precipitate. And Russia’s standing is vastly diminished as a result. Now, add to that internal dissention. Again, we can’t speculate on where this goes. We have to remain and we are focused on Ukraine, but it certainly raises new questions that he’s going to have to address.

The very same (false) talking points, repeated over and over again, are a sure sign of lies and an organized propaganda campaign.

For the record. Progozhin was all alone in his mutiny attempt. Not one element of the Russian government or civil society joint him in his ride. So where are the cracks? There are none. Also Russia’s military is now larger and better equipped then before the war. Russia’s economy is fine and growing. Its standing in the world has increased.

But Blinken’s propaganda works well because the U.S. media are trained to pick up any sheet of music an administration hands out and to sing its tune over and over again.

I could quote dozens of participants in that game to make that point. But the Washington Posts has made it easier for me when it asked eight of its columnists to comment on the issues. All but one, a neocon who wants to see more action, repeat Blinken’s message: “Putin has been weakened. Russia is crumbling.”

Opinion What happened in Russia — and what happens next? Our columnists weigh in.

David Von Drehle: Even failed coups have consequences

Putin evidently had no more confidence than Prigozhin as to the outcome of the clash. Rather than test the loyalty and strength of government forces to crush the uprising, the Russian leader grabbed the first exit he was offered — a sign of weakness that might invite another attempt. … The bad news: A weakened Russia has weakened leaders and is spinning out of control. Putin has taken his country into a disaster, and there is no one in sight to save it.

Max Boot: Prigozhin has made Putin’s weakness clear to everyone

Putin, has now had his own legitimacy undermined by the revolt of Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercenaries. Whether the damage is fatal remains to be determined. … Even if Prigozhin is gone, the discontent he has revealed will remain an Achilles’ heel for Putin.

David Ignatius: After dodging the bullet, Putin will need to show he’s in control

Putin’s vulnerabilities were vividly on display last weekend, but so were his uncanny survival skills. He got inside Prigozhin’s conspiratorial plot and stopped it. … Putin will need to show that he’s in command now, after this near-death experience. That’s the bad news for Ukraine and Russia both.

Eugene Robinson: Putin is likely to survive this crisis

The revolt by the mercenary butcher Prigozhin did reveal Putin’s regime to be more brittle than it had appeared from afar.

Charles Lane: Prigozhin is the only Russian to publicly speak the truth

Vaclav Havel insisted that truth still exercised a mysterious, but latent, power.

It can unexpectedly “issue forth … in something visible: a real political act or event, a social movement, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside an apparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressible transformation in the social and intellectual climate,” Havel wrote. “And since all genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hidden beneath a thick crust of lies, it is never quite clear when the proverbial last straw will fall, or what that straw will be.”

Spy, oligarch, warlord — Prigozhin was an unlikely candidate to confirm Havel’s prophecy. But in a way, he did.

Jason Willick: Chances for escalation in Ukraine have gone up

Some observers might be overstating Putin’s weakness — he did suppress the mutiny quickly, after all — but the spectacle has clearly dented his image of control.

Josh Rogin: Prigozhin’s failed gambit is an opportunity for the West

Now that the Kremlin can no longer pretend Wagner is a separate entity, Russian government and defense officials must also be held accountable for Wagner’s worldwide crimes, which include credible allegations of mass murder, torture, rape and other atrocities.

Megan McArdle: Turmoil in Russia shows the fragility of illiberalism

Nominally, Putin controls a massive army, a substantial police force and a population that returned him to office in 2018 with a resounding 77 percent of the vote. But when push came to shove, those same folks were indifferent between him and a murderous warlord — or, at least, didn’t care enough about the distinction to risk getting shot. Putin survived, but the risk to his regime has risen now that it is clear how little actual support he has.

The overall tone: Putin did not fight the loon Prigozhin but found a peaceful solution. This shows that he is weak.

This bears a question. If eight columnists at one paper come to the very same (but false) conclusion, just issued in different words, why hire and pay all eight of them? Clearly, one would suffice.

Oh, that would show a lack diversity? The religious believe in individualism where all humans must differ – but for the opinions they are allowed to espouse?

Posted by b on June 27, 2023 at 15:43 UTC | Permalink

Rap Fans React to The Cult- She Sells Sanctuary REACTION

Having participated in the 2019 Hong Kong riots, can I still go to mainland China?

Use of your HK residency card might cause some problems for you. You will not have the same kind of treatment that you have grown accustomed to.

Oh, of course, the Chinese will smile and be so very polite. But, a “black mark” is a interruption of normal process, and will require an override by upper management.

Of course you can apply for a visa.

[1] If you are denied that visa, accept that reality. That reality is one of a perpetual “outsider” that will not be given the chance for redemption. If so, then you fucked up BIG TIME. Nothing worse than “missing the bus” for the global future.

[2] If you are granted that visa, you must accept the reality that you will be monitored absolutely. The duration of the monitoring will be at least ten years, and if you apply for work, there will be limitations on your applications. Certainly the housekeeping, and janitorial professions will probably be open to you, but forget about any skilled positions.

You made a very BIG and BAD MISTAKE.

But there’s always hope for redemption. If you can prove that you are reformed, you have a chance.

Finally…

If you do enter China, and you decide to break a law, or participate in NED sponsored color revolution activities, your fate will sealed (and very horrible). Ask the two-timers from HK that participated in the Shanghai protest last year. They will never leave China.

Don’t be like them.

FIRST REACTION! Wild Cherry – Play That Funky Music SHOCKED! THEY WHITE?

How can I raise a bilingual baby that speaks both Chinese and English?

Answered by MM. -MM

I have a young daughter in Kindergarten.

  • I speak English to her.
  • My wife speaks Chinese to her.

She speaks fluent Baby-Chinese, and completely understands my English. However, the only time that she uses English is when she is MAD. When she is angry, that is when she spouts off in English. And lordy, it’s a sight to behold.

At home, she watches a mix of Chinese and English age-appropriate shows. And she attends Kindergarten, Dance, and boxing classes all in Chinese.

Yes. She is absolutely bilingual.

Jay Chou – Fearless Official Music Video|Reaction

What is your opinion on China’s more militarized coast guard?

Starting last night and into today, Beidu is reporting that China has laid out defined rules on violation of Chinese air space and sea lanes. No longer will China issue a verbal warning to planes to leave, or for ships to exit.

They now are authorized to fire weapons with the intent to kill and destroy the intruder(s).

My opinion is that…

  • This follows the North Korean model of engagement. Which is why the United States avoids flying into to North Korea, but happily pushes into China’s.
  • This is a direct result of [1] the Canadian / USA naval transit in the Taiwan strait, and [2] the Spy Plane violations of air space. Now, if those events were to reoccur, there would be two sunk Naval vessels, and one destroyed spy plane.
  • Never the less, the rules are going to be violated by the United States. The American “leadership” are just itching for a war. Like I have repeatedly stated, “stupid beyond comprehension”.
  • People are going to die. No way to avoid this result.

WOW!| FIRST TIME HEARING Tears For Fears – Sowing The Seed Of Love REACTION

How serious is Western propaganda against China compare to China‘s propaganda?

Western media and political propaganda works very much to China’s advantage.

Chinese strategy ever since the time of Sun Tzu is based on deception, and namely on making the enemy underestimate China.

This means that the more the west thinks that they are ahead of China, the more they underestimate China, and the more China hides its true strength, the better it is for China.

This means that if the Americans think that they will defeat China in the end because of American exceptionalism, and because the US is the city on the hill shining the bright light of freedom and democracy, the better it is for China.

This means that in the end, if China strikes, it will strike to kill.

There will not be any of that Russian pussyfooting around in Ukraine in the early stages of the war which Russia did, and which ended in failure.

@ A MASTERPIECE!!! Emotional Reaction to CRANBERRIES – ZOMBIE | Difficult to Get Over This

What are the unexpected and interesting travelling experiences you have had?

Back in 2007 I had gone to Russia. Being an African American woman in braids, I pretty much stand out over there. I even had a police officer ask to see my passport because, well, there’s not a lot of black people there, and those that are there are usually European and African descent.

So we were visiting a type of flea market in Moscow to shop for souvenirs. I only know three or four Russian words, so I did my best to bargain (but it helped to have Russian students in our group translating for us).

This vendor suddenly stared grabbing my hand joyfully and kissing my hand and arm! He was saying something like “krasivaya” or something like that.

He was pointing to my arm and I realized he was enamored with the color of my skin.

One the students (or another vendor helping him, I’m not sure), knew English and translated for me, “He says, “You’re beautiful.”

It dawned on me he had never seen a black woman before.

That actually amused me —- I mean, who knew that, considering all the crap black people have put up with because of our skin color, having dark skin would elicit such a positive response?

@ THIS IS FIRE!!! THE CULT – FIRE WOMAN (REACTION)

Should we congratulate EM Jaishankar for his honesty? He recently said that India is inferior to China in every way.

Yep

Absolutely

main qimg df9a4fac3eb29a74fdfea38a27dc9093
main qimg df9a4fac3eb29a74fdfea38a27dc9093

His message was simple

China is too strong for India

It’s a simple message but 90% of Indians won’t agree

They simply won’t admit what Jaishankar admits

India can’t pick fights with China


Stupid to say India is exactly like China

That’s coping and it’s embarrassing

Stupider to say China manipulates it’s GDP and in reality it’s much smaller

That’s worse coping and it’s even more embarrassing

Jaishankar simply gave a dose of reality

That China is impossible to take on today by India in any sphere

Education, Technology, Diplomacy, War, Economy, Industry — They dominate in every one of these over us.


Nothing embarrassing here

China once was exactly like this compared to the US

They saw the US as advanced and ahead and decided to build themselves and develop themselves to reach that goal

We should do the same

Jaishankar did

Others?

Nope

The Average lunkhead still thinks somehow India is a superpower and that India can do this and that and Modiji is a god in disguise


Just read Quora answers and see how many people even acknowledge China is ahead of India without a “But…”

The Realist says

China is way ahead of India

India must slog and slog and stop lying, see their weaknesses and identify them and rectify them

How many Realists do you see?

Every one adds their own “BUT” that includes Tiananmen Square and a bunch of lies about the CPC gleaned from Western media


Jaishankar is a realist and that’s good

THIS WAS SO GOOD!.| FIRST TIME HEARING Tears for Fears – Everybody Wants To Rule The World REACTION

Have you ever purchased a home from an owner who left their belongings behind?

2023 06 28 10 23
2023 06 28 10 23

My parents built a cottage on Loon Lake in Ontario in 1965, Mum and I spent many happy summers there while Dad came up on weekends. Mum died in 1983 at age 60. Dad couldn’t stand going there anymore because “there was too much of Mum in it” so he sold it (with my knowledge and blessing) in 1986 fully furnished to include dishes, linens, two boats – everything. Apparently this is quite normal in that marketplace and situation.

Fast-forward to 2004; I took my wife and four sons to a rental cottage a couple lakes away. We took a boat trip to show the boys where I grew up. Fortunately the owner was there so we moved the boat over toward the boathouse (both boats were still there) where I turned off our boat and said, “My parents built this cottage when I was 10 years old.” His immediate response was, “Oh, you’re a Kuhs!” I was amazed. Not only were he and his wife the purchasers but they had owned the cottage – still named Cry of the Loon – for 17 years and he came up with our fairly odd name so quickly. They gave us the “grand tour”, Mum’s cottage was over 90% unchanged from the last day I saw it over 20 years before. Not a dry eye in the house!

We have lived on the upper Chesapeake Bay for 35 years so there’s no animosity.

Bee Gees – Stayin’ Alive FIRST TIME HEARING THIS!

What does the U.S. have that China doesn’t to become a superpower? What can China do to surpass the U.S. as a superpower? How long will this take?

China isn’t in a race to be better than the US or to surpass the US.

The Chinese are in a race to become the best version of themselves after being poor and politically divided for so long.

The problem is that when Chinese say this to Americans; US politicians and western politicians tend to think that the Chinese are lying to them, when in fact, the Chinese are not.

This means that the fate and destiny of the US is in the hands of the Americans themselves, not in the hands of the Chinese.

Americans have done great things in the past, and if they work hard and apply themselves, they can do great things again, such as landing men on the moon, and defeating diseases like polio.

To do this, Americans would have to give up some bad habits, and apply themselves the same way the Chinese have in the past forty years.

If the US competed with China this way, the world would become a better place because all of humanity would benefit.

Reaction To “Simple Minds Someone Somewhere In Summertime Live 1983” THE WOLF HUNTERZ Jon and Dolly

How do you interpret Secretary Blinken’s statement on re-establishing dialogue with China?

I don’t. I don’t interpret it at all because it is not sincere, either way. No sooner than Blinken met with Xi Jinping, Biden called Xi a dictator and Blinken quoted more foolishness trying to justify arms sales to Taiwan. The U.S. is not capable or interested in following China’s conditions. There is no sincerity. It is always speaking with a forked tongue out of both side of the mouth with my country. Don’t be surprised. His visit was all an elaborate show on the world stage.

On a positive note, China chewed him a new backside, so I’d say it was a win for China.

WERE SHOOK! | FIRST TIME HEARING Patsy Cline – Crazy REACTION

UPDATED 10:39 AM EDT — Russian Presidential Fleet Plane Enroute to Washington DC – Evacuating Diplomats?

World Hal Turner 27 June 2023

2023 06 28 10 30
2023 06 28 10 30

An aircraft from the Russian Presidential fleet is presently on its way from Moscow to Washington, DC.  It is now feared this plane is coming to evacuate Russian Diplomats prior to . . . well . . . what __could be__ the start of a war.

As of 6:16 AM Eastern US Time, the aircraft has left air space which is tracked by radar, and is now over the Atlantic Ocean being tracked by Satellite:

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2023 06 28 10 31

No word yet from anyone why this plane is coming to the USA.

The Russian Federation maintains Consular Offices in three locations in the U.S., Washington, DC is its main Embassy.  In New York City and in Houston, are Consulate offices.

Main Russian Embassy:  2650 Wisconsin Ave., N.W. Washington, DC 20007

Consulate New York City:  9 E 91st St, New York, NY 10128

Consulate Houston, TX:  1333 West Loop S Ste 1300, Houston, TX 77027

Folks in an around those cities may wish to take a drive by, and see if there are any obvious signs that staff are evacuating, or if there is dense smoke coming out of a chimney indicating the burning of documents.

 

BELARUS TO COMBAT ALERT

Belarusian President Lukashenko said that he has given orders to bring the army to full combat readiness against the backdrop of the events in Russia.

“If Russia collapses, we will remain under the rubble, we will all die” he said.

‘The threat of a new global conflict has never been as close as it is today.’“Once again, they are trying to blow up our country, our entire region, to disorient people. Shake up the situation by any means and, under this noise, impose your own rules, establish your own order.

An order in which there will no longer be either our countries or people.”

 

UPDATE 10:39 AM EDT —

The Russian Foreign Ministry has commented on this plane:

“A Russian plane is on its way to the United States to evacuate diplomats ordered to leave the country by US authorities, Zakharova said in her Telegram channel.According to the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, it is not a question of expulsion, but of restrictions on operations created by Washington.”

@ I DISCOVERED THE BEST SONG EVER! | Ram Jam – Black Betty (REACTION!!!)

All Sources inside Russia Have Gone “Dark” – Largest Submarine Sails with Poseidon Nuclear Torpedo

World Hal Turner 26 June 2023

2023 06 28 10 32
2023 06 28 10 32

A very troubling situation has developed inside Russia this morning, Monday, June 26, 2023.  All my intel sources have either gone dark or told me they have to go dark immediately.  Apparently ANYONE who expressed support for the Prigozhin Rebellion is being rounded-up and/or turned off violently.

More interestingly, Russia’s largest submarine, the “Belgorad” (K-329), set sail from its Arctic port in Severodvinsk, along with a support ship “Akademik Aleksandrov.”

This Support ship is associated with testing the “Poseidon” Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedo.

The sailing of the two vessels, together, plus other signs observed, may indicate that a Poseidon test launch is imminent.

The question becomes, is it a test or will it be live?

The Poseidon torpedo is autonomous.  It can be pre-programmed to travel almost anywhere in the world, silently, take up position off a coastline at a depth of 1-2 miles, and wait, undetected and undetectable.   

2023 06 28 10 33 1
2023 06 28 10 33 1

At the pre-programmed time, it can detonate its scalable 100 MEGATON nuclear torpedo, creating a radioactive tsunami that takes out the entire coastline of an adversary.  In some areas, the tsunami would come ashore as a 1500 foot tall wave of radioactive water, knocking down entire cities, and leaving them covered in a radioactive flood that would make the area uninhabitable for decades.

The submarine carries SIX such Poseidon torpedos.

It could place one off each coast of the UK, travel across the Atlantic, place one or more off the US East Coast, the travel down to the Gulf of Mexico, place another, and leave the US West Coast to typical Russian submarines.

None of us would have any idea at all that anything was wrong and then, suddenly, BOOM, all of them go off at once.  The US and UK would be completely crippled immediately, wiping out NATO.

Bad Company – Rock Steady REACTION

What steps can the US take to protect its research and intellectual property from being stolen by China through civilian research partnerships?

Don’t worry. The US Government and its loyal allies are already doing an absolutely fabulous job of this.

Chinese universities ranked above Oxbridge, Caltech in quality research

Xie Xiaoliang is latest Chinese scientist to give up US citizenship

China overtakes United States on contribution to research in Nature Index

British chair professor joins China’s hypersonic programme

Award-winning Chinese mathematician returns to Peking University from US

Chinese researchers in US ‘eyeing medical teaching jobs at University of Hong Kong’

China leads US in global competition for key emerging technology: study

China trounces U.S. in AI research output and quality

meanwhile back home…

Half of Americans think young people don’t pursue STEM because it is too hard

The Best Reactions to Black Sabbath “War Pigs” Compilation

A world where China is Number One

Kerry Brown’s new book notes folly of projecting Western values and a Manichean worldview onto China’s very different civilization and tradition

by Scott Foster June 28, 2023

2023 06 29 15 15
2023 06 29 15 15

The three key things about China we need to keep in mind are that

  • it is strong, not weak;
  • it has become a sea power; and
  • its values are both different from those of the West and not necessarily what Europe and America think they are.

“When we are discussing anything to do with the People’s Republic of China in the contemporary context, therefore, these three factors are good places to start,” writes Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese Studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London, in the first chapter of his new book, “China Incorporated: The Politics of a World Where China is Number One.”

The title reminds us of Japan Inc, the words used to describe Japan’s combination of industrial policy and mercantilism since the 1980s; and “Japan as Number One: Lessons for America”, the popular book by Ezra Vogel published in 1999. Brown’s book even has a chapter entitled “The Enigma of Chinese Power,” which echoes Karel Van Wolferen’s “The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation,” published in 1990.

But the book does not explain Chinese industrial and trade policies; it does not tell us what the West can learn from China’s rapid modernization; and it is certainly not about what the writer imagines is the hollow political center of a great economic power.

Rather, Brown examines the more important issue of how Western misunderstanding of Chinese thinking about the role of government and international relations has magnified the problem of dealing with a different civilization that has grown big and strong enough to reject our criticism and push back.

The misunderstanding has historical, cultural and political roots but fundamentally it can be attributed to the universalist, Manichean (good vs evil) worldview of what Brown refers to as the Enlightenment West – and the projection of that attitude onto a civilization that doesn’t share the same history.

“The distinctiveness of the intellectual and cultural history of inhabitants of the space now occupied by the People’s Republic of China is undeniable,” Brown writes. “In terms of language, modes of governance, economic behavior, and fundamental view about how the world operates and how society should be shaped, the Chinese tradition is a long, complex and sometimes (but not always) contrasting one to that which has created the Europe and North America of today.”

He continues, “The Western European proclivity has been to maintain the conviction, at least until recent decades, that there is a final, truthful, unifying vision of the world.”

On the other hand,

In the Chinese world where a notion of harmony in the abstract was privileged, the focus was on accepting different kinds of views and convictions for different spaces and occasions….

A syncretic worldview is the result – one that in the twenty-first century continues to puzzle and fascinate because of the ability of modern Chinese to place capitalism next to socialism while seeming under Xi Jinping to be proud of Confucianism as well as having as many as 200 million Buddhists in various sects and about half that number of Christians.

That description runs head on into democratically elected politicians’ abhorrence of one-party dictatorship and American alarm over perceived or potential subversion by Confucius Institutes, Huawei or any other Chinese organization under the sway of the Communist Party.

Brown does not dwell on the nature of the Communist Party, but points out that Confucius Institutes have often been their own worst enemies and that Huawei, due to its leading position in the telecommunications industry and the legal environment in which it operates, will never be free of suspicion.

After all, China’s National Intelligence Law stipulates that “all organizations and citizens shall support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with the law, and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of.”

Combined with the rapid growth of its military power, including the ever-longer reach of its navy, the globe-spanning infrastructure investments of the Belt and Road Initiative, allegations of hacking and the hot-button issues of the South China Sea, Taiwan and Xinjiang, this makes China for “a large number of American and European politicians … not just a problem, but the problem.”

The problem with this problem is its ambiguity. The Chinese military has never used more than a fraction of its power. No clear evidence of surveillance via Chinese telecom equipment has been publicly provided. The motives and capabilities are there, but there is no smoking gun.

As for the Belt and Road, which critics regard as a combination of debt-trap diplomacy and strategic threat, Brown asks, “How much longer do we have to wait till we see Beijing’s hand fully exposed? What if, in the end, it really was all mainly commercial?”

For centuries, the West has been working to remake the world in its own image. Its Enlightenment mind finds it logical to conclude that the Chinese are trying to do the same, regardless of China’s doctrine of non-interference in the affairs of other countries (rejected as duplicitous on the one hand and as unprincipled support for dictators on the other) and its cultural exclusiveness.

Western military and national security officials default to the worst-case scenario, while many politicians favor a simple narrative of evil communists oppressing the good Chinese people. But, as Brown writes, “one thing stands out – the complexity of the issues China poses, just being itself, and doing the kinds of things it does as an actor of its size and reach.

“Complexity alone is a vast problem, and one the Enlightenment West in particular, with its love of orderly frameworks and all-embracing tidy theories, clearly abhors. China upsets the epistemology of the West – it violates notions of universalism being universal.”

If economic prosperity either is contingent on the existence of multi-party government and Western style rule of law or inevitably brings these in its wake, this leads to:

  • China explanation number one – We are right; China is undertaking a huge con, and
  • China explanation number two – China has to democratize.

Otherwise, China will collapse. But it hasn’t collapsed since Gordon Chang’s book “The Coming Collapse of China” was published in 2001 and Brown now doesn’t expect it to collapse anytime soon. Rather, within a decade, “the world’s largest economy could well be an Asian country under a Communist government.”

If and when that happens, the West is likely to be a sore loser, angry and frustrated. In fact, it already is doing everything it can to slow China down and prevent that outcome.

At the same time, China

is certainly more frustrated and irritated than ever before at the outside world. This has reached such a level of intensity that there has been a formal policy response: “Dual Circulation” – a strategy in many Chinese people’s eyes to simply get whingeing, moaning, sore losing Westerners with their toxic social media, their crazy political systems, their moralizing and ignorance and arrogance, off China’s back.

Dual Circulation is an economic policy that puts priority on domestic consumption (internal circulation) while remaining open to foreign trade and investment (external circulation). Dependence on exports is to be reduced while technological independence is achieved through innovation. It is an answer to Western sanctions and protectionism, a sort of reverse decoupling or de-risking that is less ideological and more pragmatic.

Brown hopes that pragmatism will also take hold in the West. He states that, “Whether we embrace or have distaste toward China as it is politically today, we have no choice but to recognize that it is there and that it is as it is. We will not all wake up tomorrow, like protagonists in some fantasy film, and find China is no longer there, or that it has magically transformed to become somewhere we actually like and feel close to. We can console ourselves with the associated thought that exactly the same in reverse applies to China.”

There is a lot more to this book, which is informed by the author’s 30 years’ experience of life in China, where he has worked in education, in business and as a diplomat. He is the author of more than 20 books on China.

WHO DEY!!.. Guns N Roses Welcome – To The Jungle | FIRST TIME HEARING REACTION

China is ready to turn the tables on the US

32 Billion Chip Orders Canceled, Chinese Enterprise Installs First Domestic Lithography Machine!

2023 06 28 11 07
2023 06 28 11 07

The Chinese chip market is undergoing a transformation, and under US chip restriction rules, China has embarked on a self-sufficient development path. Not only has it set a goal of achieving a 70% self-sufficiency rate in chips and producing more chips domestically, but Shanghai Microelectronics is also increasing its research and development of lithography machines, and Chinese enterprises have moved in the first domestically-produced lithography machine.

China is the world’s largest chip market and spends a considerable amount on imports in the field of integrated circuits each year, especially for high-end chips imported to meet the needs of a range of consumer electronics products such as smartphones, computers, and tablets.

Chinese chip manufacturer SMIC is vigorously expanding its 12-inch wafer capacity for mature chips and significantly increasing its 28 nanometers chip shipments since China has its own domestically produced chips, its dependence on imported chips is not as great.

In the first quarter of this year China’s Imports of integrated circuits totaled 108 billion pieces a year on year, a decrease of 22.9 percent equivalent to a reduction of 32 billion chip imports from last year, a total of 32 billion chip orders were canceled, making it harder for overseas chip Giants to make big profits, more signs indicate that China’s chip industry’s self-sufficiency ability is constantly improving in the first quarter of this year.

In the 1st quarter of this year Chinese Enterprises moved in the first domestically produced lithography machine the advanced packaging lithography machine from Shanghai microelectronics was moved in by Chinese Enterprise conscience for a production line project.

Shanghai microelectronics is the only company in China that has mastered the production of complete lithography machines in the front-end lithography machine field.

Shanghai microelectronics has excellent capabilities and can produce 2.5 D to 3D Advanced packaging lithography machines perhaps many people do not know that there is a difference between front end and back end lithography machines.

The front end and back end lithography machines are two different steps in the semiconductor chip manufacturing process. Front-end lithography machines are mainly used to make lithographic masks in the chip manufacturing process that is to project the design chip patterns onto the Silicon wafer to form a pattern. While the back-end lithography machines are used to etch the patterns on the Silicon wafer to form the chip circuit component.

Front-end lithography machines usually require higher resolution and precision while back-end lithography machines require higher processing speed and stronger etching ability.

Relatively speaking the manufacturing difficulty of front-end lithography machines is greater, in that they require High Precision Optical systems, Precision mechanical systems and high stability control systems and require knowledge in multiple disciplines such as physics, Optics and Mechanics.

ASML can achieve high-end processes of five nanometers and below in the front-end lithography machine field and the most advanced EUV lithography machines are in short supply. The mass-produced process of domestic lithography machines in the front-end field is 90 nanometers and there is still a lot of room for improvement in the future.

The domestically produced lithography machine moved in by Chinese Enterprises belongs to the back end and is mainly used to meet the demand for chip Packaging.

Nevertheless advanced packaging is still of great significance for domestic chips this is because advanced packaging technology can improve chip performance power consumption and reliability while also reducing chip size and cost.

The use of advanced packaging technology can enhance the market competitiveness of chips attract more customers and partners and promote the development of China’s domestic chip industry therefore doing well in advanced packaging is of great significance for the development of domestic chips.

The frequent restrictions on Chinese Chips by the United States will only accelerate China’s self-sufficiency. China canceled 32 billion chip Imports and Chinese Enterprises moved in the first domestically produced lithography machine which is the best proof some foreign media have stated that Bill Gates is right.

Bill Gates has long said that the United States can never stop China from having powerful chips and restrictions will only make China self-sufficient while the United States will also lose many high-paying jobs.

The fact is indeed as Bill Gates said China’s chip industry shows signs of self-sufficiency while the U.S technology industry laid off 130 000 people from January to may this year with more than 410 000 layoffs nationwide, if the United States does not stop its restrictive measures it will only affect the profits of U.S companies and the number of layoffs will continue to swell.

Last week:

Go China go!

2023 06 28 11 08
2023 06 28 11 08

Baby Metal- Catch Me If You Can || Goth Reacts

This chip genius returned to China from the U.S. and created the “Starlight China Core Project!”

In today’s Information age the importance of chips is beyond doubt but as the crystallization of the world’s top technology the technical difficulty of Chip research and development is also very high.

China started late in the field of chips and many core Technologies and underlying Technologies are in the hands of the United States.

If China wants to independently develop chips it must start from the basics in addition to the difficulty of research and development the supply chain of the chip industry is also a problem just because chip manufacturing requires multiple steps such as photolithography etching cleaning and precipitation more than 10 kinds of semiconductor equipment are needed as well as chip design chip packaging and testing and other links.

The US just wants to slow down the development of Chinese Chips by excluding China from the world supply chain it’s just that this move by the United States is undoubtedly an invalid behavior and it will only lead to Market chaos in the semiconductor industry.

In any case if you want to develop Chinese Chips you need to rely on Independent research and development only by mastering the core technology can you avoid being stuck.

Many Enterprises and talents in China have devoted themselves to the field of chips and have made many important progress for the development of chips in China among them Deng Han and his Starlight China chip project are an important part of the history of China’s chip development.

It can even be said that China’s first self-developed chip came from Deng jonghan.

The young genius Deng jonghan left the US and returned to China. Deng Han who was born in 1968 not only founded vimicro group but also is an academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering and the commander-in-chief of the Starlight China chip project.

He has contributed a lot to the development of China’s chips and developed China’s first chip with independent property rights.

Since he was a teenager Deng Han has been full of curiosity an exploratory Spirit towards the world after he was admitted to the Department of Earth and space science at the University of Science and Technology of China Deng Han’s Talent was gradually discovered when he was in college Deng Han also pointed out the professor’s thinking deviation in solving problems and because of this he was favored by the professor and joined the project team after Deng junghan entered the University of Barkley he successively obtained a master’s degree in physics a doctorate in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in economics and management after graduation Deng Han founded an integrated circuit company in the Silicon Valley of the United States

Entrepreneurship was a great success and the market value of the company he founded once reached 115 million U.S dollars however at the invitation of chairman of the China Association for Science and Technology Deng Han resolutely gave up his company in the United States and returned to China to engage in chip research and development.

After returning to China Deng Han founded vimicro and started the Starlight China chip project officially entering the field of Chip research and development the Prelude to the rise of China’s chips has begun during the chip research and development process Deng Han’s conditions were very difficult and he could only conduct research and development in the warehouse and once faced the risk of capital chain rupture but in the face of many difficulties Deng jonghan did not give up lightly but faced up to the difficulties and solved one problem after another.

On March 11 2001 under the unremitting efforts of Deng Han and his R D team vimicro launched China’s first chip with independent property rights Ching Guang number one Starlight number one is a multimedia chip and it is also a large-scale integrated circuit chip.

After that vimicro launched the Starlight series chips into the market and successfully listed them in the United States which made the reputation of Chinese Chips and opened the Prelude to the rise of Chinese Chips himself became an academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering and a foreign academician of the American Academy of engineering it is not difficult to see from this information that Deng Han has provided a major boost to the rise of China’s chips.

With the development of time many top Chinese technology companies have entered the chip track one after another according to statistics from 2019 to the present the total of 40 000 companies in China have entered the chip related field it can be said that China’s chips are developing flourish and gradually rise with the support of national policies and the large investment of some top companies Chinese Chips have gradually made major breakthroughs in many fields such as huawei’s self-developed Korean chips and EDA industrial software which are also at the advanced level in the world.

Shanghai microelectronics has gradually come to the Forefront of the world and semiconductor Fields such as etching machines and lithography machines and can reach the top five in the world in terms of market share now China’s chip industry can be said to be flourishing and the entire chip industry chain has a Chinese layout but China should always keep in mind that it was Deng Han and his Starlight China chip project that opened the Prelude to the rise of China’s chips.

SQUEEZE – Tempted (By The Fruit Of Another) REACTION

What is the best thing that has ever happened to you for being nice?

I was going to a conference in Las Vegas to attend a huge convention. Hotel rooms were scarce, but I had made my reservations far in advance.

I got to the hotel after midnight after a long flight, and had just unpacked and was about to get ready for bed when the door opened. A weary-eyed man glared at me and showed me his room assignment. Same as mine. We had been double-booked by accident.

The man got on the room phone and started screaming at the assistant manager, demanding that he be given the room. The intruder then gave the phone to me, and the manager asked if I minded being moved. I did, of course, but given the white-hot rage of my accidental roommate, I said gently, “I understand. These things happen. I’ll take another room.”

I repacked my clothes and soon the manager arrived, full of apologies, and took my bag. The man who had “won” the room smiled triumphantly.

And then the manager took me to one of the hotel’s biggest suites, which had four bedrooms, a kitchen stocked with liquor and fruit, and a killer view of Vegas. It was worthy of Sinatra or Elvis, and it was all mine for the week-long stay, at the same price as the standard room I booked, the manager said.

I was dazzled. When I asked the manager why I was being given such a glorious upgrade, he explained that it was the only room left in the hotel. He had to make a quick decision as to who would get it, “and lady,” he said, “you were the nice one.”

The 70’s were a VIBE! 💃🏽🕺🏽| KC and the Sunshine Band – I’m Your Boogie Man [REACTION!]

What have you found on the Internet today that made you smile?

I’ve always had this almost irrational dislike for influencers. They’re just about the most self-obsessed, vain, terrible and entitled crowd of creatures alive on this earth. So whenever one of them gets his or her comeuppance, I’m quite pleased.

2023 06 28 11 34
2023 06 28 11 34

Apparently there’s some law where if someone steals just a small amount, you get a warning of a ‘slap on the wrist’ style of punishment. And that’s all they do to you. Whereas if someone steals a larger amount of value, a store can actually press charges and get the thief in serious trouble. Hence the store waited, patiently, as they wrote down all the things the little kleptomaniac was taking. Compiled a nice, neat, comprehensive list of all items stolen over the years…

…and called the cops. Who sent her to jail. These are the same entitled influencers who demand to eat at a discount in restaurants “because they will give a shout out on their channel” and act offended when the bill comes in and they have to pay the full amount. Nothing puts a smile on my face quicker than seeing such a person get arrested.

Rainbow “Gates of Babylon” REACTION & ANALYSIS by Vocal Coach / Opera Singer

Have you ever lost any respect for someone instantly?

Are you ready to hear a story about a friend I had for 32 years and would have done anything for, whom I met when I was 5 years old?

When I was about 5 I was walking around the corner of my street, it was only 3 houses down, to my friend mark’s house which was right after the culdesac immediately after the corner. As the further of the two end houses came into view, in the yard I saw a boy my age getting beat up by a slightly older boy, so I immediately ran to defend the boy. Next thing I knew, I was on my back on the asphalt with the older boy on top of me strangling me and bashing the back of my head against the asphalt. I remember the mother of the boy I tried to save yelling and the kid beating the crap out of me ran off.

next I’m scream crying as I run to my house and my mom sees the blood on the back of my head and we head over to the house of who beat me up and my mom verbally bitch slapped that woman and her kid. Never had any issues with him again.

anyway, the boy I tried to save became my best friend. As time went on, I started to notice that his mother was awful to him, constantly telling him “why can’t you be more like Joey?” and every time I went over there, his mom always made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with Peter Pan peanut butter and a glass of milk, always. I still love that peanut butter.

A short time later, my friend started calling me asking “Joey, can you please come over to my house and ask my mom for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” my friend did this because his mom would punish him by not feeding him when he got in trouble and my friend knew that his mom would always feed me, and so I would give my friend the sandwich and milk so he could eat.

This is just the beginning of the absolute madness that was this kid’s life.

His mom hated him and he knew it and she constantly told him that she wished he was like me, I was super polite and calm because I had to be or I got my butt whooped at my house. For our entire childhood I was always trying to suggest to my friend how he might want to try behaving because I thought that if he started acting like me, his mom wouldn’t hate him so much… my friend never listened and, in fact, he always did the opposite of what I suggested and he would cause chaos and get in trouble that I would always be there to help him out of.

I was always there for him, failed relationships, finding out that his mom was his adopted mom, when his real mom died from cancer, when he was homeless after becoming a methhead, the birth of his daughter, when the mother of his daughter left them… I was there for every single trauma he suffered, I was there for him…

I had been married 12 years and my son had been showing symptoms of autism and my then wife couldn’t handle that her son had autism so she left our boys and I and for the first time, I desperately needed a friend.

My friend ignored my phone calls for almost two months before he finally answered his phone and agreed to meet me so I could talk to him.

when I get to my friend’s girlfriend’s apartment, he was out of work and living with his girlfriend, I was devastated still and after I walked into the apartment and asked my friend what he has been doing that was so important he couldn’t answer my phone calls…

my friend said “I’m glad your life is falling apart, because now we are even.” He then walked outside on the porch to smoke and closed the glass door behind him.

I was shocked. I looked at his girlfriend who was right there when he said it and I asked “did he just say I’m glad your life is falling apart because now we are even?”

his girlfriend, who was also shocked said “yeah” after staring at me, or through me for a few seconds.

at this moment my friend was on his phone outside and that’s when I realized, that for my entire life, the friend who I was always trying to get back on his feet, the guy who I believed had an awesome potential, the guy I tried to train to become a martial arts instructor at my school but he quit before he became a black belt and he’d been trying to get me to quit, this entire time he had been hoping that my life had gone wrong because he was so envious of what I had… turns out, what my friend was doing on his phone was messaging my soon to be ex wife and trying to hook up with her…

for the entire 32 years I knew him, I never once wished harm or misfortune, in fact, this is the moment I realized that I’ve never once wished ill on anyone, despite the explosive drunken abuse I suffered from my family… I always wished that they would get better and stop destroying their lives and everyone’s lives around them. It was this moment that I have ever felt true hatred towards someone, this was the first time that I felt like if I ever see him again, I will beat his face in until he is mush.

I still wish him the best, I would never wish harm upon someone, but to this day, I know that if I see him, I won’t be able to stop myself…

I hope that answers your question… it was rough writing this, it brought up some seriously painful feelings. I’m getting tears…

Singer Reacts to BABYMETAL – Gimme chocolate!! (OFFICIAL) (ギミチョコ) *FIRST TIME*

Netanyahu set to visit China next month, likely to annoy Biden

Biden has made clear he won’t invite Israel’s premier in the near future.

2023 06 28 11 39
2023 06 28 11 39

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to visit China next month, signaling growing impatience with Washington, as Beijing increasingly throws its weight around in the region.

While there, the premier is slated to meet with President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders. Advanced contacts have been held in recent days between the two leaders’ offices to arrange the visit.

No dates for the trip were given and no plans for a visit have been announced by Jerusalem or Beijing. The Prime Minister’s Office said it had “no comment at present” when contacted. The Chinese embassy in Tel Aviv did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation.

Netanyahu is seeking some kind of assurance from Chinese, sort of an unwritten agreement on the similar lines as Russia with which Israel has strategic understanding involving Iran.

Israel does not want China or North Korea sell Nukes to Iran. It is Israel’s only and a prime concern because Israel is known as one bomb country.

But I think Iran should have nukes, this way there would be peace in the middle east. As it is, Israel has several (nukes) warheads of its own. Deterrence is the name of the game.

AC/DC – Highway to Hell – (REACTION!)🤟🏽🔥WE CAN’T BELIEVE IT WAS THEM THE WHOLE TIME‼️

What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?

Back in 1990, I was a Sales manager at a car dealership and was one of the winners of a sales contest for Sales Managers of all the dealers of that make in the Boston District. The bar was pretty low to win this contest and there was no big payoff for winning because I guess they just wanted to show some recognition and get the Sales Managers together to socialize, build communication, and cooperation between the dealerships which were located all over New England.

So we got to spend one night in a nice hotel in Boston, had a nice meal, and everyone received some recognition during the after dinner ceremonies.

But then came the after dinner fun. They gave us about two hours for a “Vegas Night”. Tables were set up just like in a casino: Blackjack tables, Roulette tables, and one Craps table.

The rules were they gave each of us $200 in chips that we could use to make bets. Whatever amount of chips that we had left at the end would be cashed in for real money.

Now, In the few years previous to that night, I had been to Las Vegas and Atlantic City a few times and found that Craps was my favorite game. I had played it enough and studied it enough that I was very familiar with the odds for every bet on the table and knew how to play the game.

So as soon as I got my $200, I headed for the craps table. Surprisingly, I was the only one who went to the Craps table.

And then, even more surprisingly, the person who was in charge of the tables came over and said to me and the dealers, “Just to make things simpler, we’ll pay out 2 to 1 on all the numbers bets.”

I don’t know why he said that. Maybe the dealers were inexperienced and he was trying to make it easier for them so they wouldn’t have to try to figure out the different odds for the different numbers, or maybe he figured that there was only one player at the table so not much damage could be done.

But as soon as he said that, I knew what he meant . . . and bells went off in my head . . . I knew immediately what I was going to do!

A Numbers bet is where you put a bet on one of the numbers: 4–5–6–8–9–10. You are betting that when the dice are rolled, they are going to add up to the number you bet on before they total 7. If the dice total 7, you lose. Different numbers normally pay different odds.

For instance, the 6 and the 8 have the best odds of coming up, but they normally pay the lowest odds because of that. Normally if you make a $6 bet on the 6 or 8, and you win, you would win $7.

What happened here was they changed the payout on that very same bet to $12. . . . Which drastically changed the odds in my favor. All I had to was make a pass line bet, roll the dice, then keep betting on the 6 and 8. The odds were in my favor!

What I didn’t do was say anything out loud. I didn’t want anyone rethinking that decision to change the odds.

So I started winning right away. But it didn’t look like much at first because I started with just $200. But as the money started coming in, I slowly raised my bets and the money started coming in faster.

After awhile, I was still the only player on the table when one of the other Sales Managers walked up and stood next to me at the table. I had previously talked to this guy a few times on the phone at work but didn’t really know him other than that. And then he decided to be chatty. He was started asking questions like, “Do you know how to play this game? I don’t know anything about it. Can you teach me how to play?”

Well, the last thing I needed right then was someone disturbing my concentration on the game. I knew that I only had a limited amount of time to take advantage of this unexpected loophole.

So I turned to him and said, “Listen, put your chips right up here and do exactly what I tell you to do. Don’t ask any questions. Just do it. I’ll explain it all to you later.”

He was kind of taken aback at that and I could see the confusion on his face while he was contemplating what I had just said . . . but then he said, “Okay”.

So I continued doing what I had been doing and started telling him where to place his bets, how much (how many chips) to bet, and what to say to the dealer when he placed a bet. He caught on pretty quick and followed my instructions very well, so I wasn’t slowed down too much, and he started getting more excited when he saw the money starting to roll in.

When the time was up, almost all of the players who played the other games were broke. They had lost their seed money. Very few players had any money left at all.

We were the big winners!

I won just over $3000 and my new best friend won just over $1500. Needless to say, he was ecstatic!

The funniest part was when other Sales Managers that he knew came over and asked him how he did it. His answer was, “I don’t know! All I did was do what he told me to do!”

It was a fun night!

I am so mad I haven’t heard this tribute until now: AC/DC – Back In Black (Official Video)

Where did the term “money laundering” come from?

From laundromats.

2023 06 28 11 43
2023 06 28 11 43

A 1920s laundromat

Back in 1920s, gangsters needed some way of showing their money came from legitimate sources. The solution was to invest into laundromats and show them as highly profitable enterprises. The bookeeping standards of the day made it quite easy to show 127 customers used their facilities in a single night, even though they only had 1 paying customer at the time. I will hazard a guess and say the term “money laundering” probably started as a joke.

The term stuck and now the process of showing illicit profits as coming from legitimate business is called “laundering money”.

I legitly cried😭| FIRST TIME HEARING LUCIANO PAVAROTTI – NESSUN DORMA REACTION

Watching these reactions, and reading the text really underlines THE MESSAGE.

What things should I never do?

  • Never (ever) touch someone’s laptop screen with your fingertip.
  • Never do this with someone’s book.
2023 06 28 11 45
2023 06 28 11 45

Please use bookmarks. Please.

  • Never take too much interest in someone else’s life, mind your own business.
  • Never believe on these types of Instagram quotes, “People having extraordinary creativity tend to have less sleep at night.” You’ll have less capacity to learn, you need deep sleep for deep insights.
  • Inspiration isn’t imitation. Don’t be a sheep, just because someone else is doing it, doesn’t mean it works for you.
  • “Never deduce that attraction is love.”
  • Never do something stupid just to fulfill your desire, know difference between desire and dream.
  • Don’t speak bitter words when you are angry, regret is unbearable.
  • Don’t rush. Never. If you’re late for office or college, it will make difference of a few seconds at most. Your life is far more valuable.

WHAT A SHOW!! Mötley Crüe – Home Sweet Home REACTION

What are some unknown psychological tricks?

Here are a few psychological tricks that you may find interesting:

1. The Power of Mirroring: Mirroring someone’s body language, gestures, and tone of voice can create a sense of rapport and connection. It can make the other person feel more comfortable and receptive towards you.

2. The Contrast Principle: When presenting options, strategically place a less desirable option before the one you want the person to choose. By comparison, the preferred choice will appear more attractive.

3. The Zeigarnik Effect: This effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. If you want someone to remember something, provide incomplete information or leave a task unfinished.

4. The Foot-in-the-Door Technique: Start with a small request and once the person agrees, follow up with a larger request. People tend to be more likely to comply with the second request if they have already agreed to the first one.

5. The Anchoring Effect: When making a negotiation or presenting a price, start with a higher number to anchor the person’s perception. Subsequently, any lower numbers will appear more reasonable and favorable.

6. The Halo Effect: People tend to associate positive qualities with someone who possesses one admirable trait. For example, if a person is physically attractive, others may assume they are also intelligent or kind.

7. The Primacy and Recency Effect: People tend to remember the first and last items in a list more accurately than those in the middle. When giving a presentation or conveying important information, place key points at the beginning and end for better retention.

8. The Ben Franklin Effect: Ask someone for a small favor or advice. This can create a sense of investment and liking, as people tend to rationalize their actions by thinking they must like the person they helped.

9. The Scarcity Principle: Highlighting limited availability or scarcity of a product or opportunity can increase its perceived value and desirability. People tend to place higher importance on items that are rare or in short supply.

10. The Power of Framing: The way information is presented or framed can significantly influence perception and decision-making. Presenting the same information in a positive or negative light can elicit different responses.

Use these psychological tricks responsibly and ethically, focusing on building positive relationships and improving communication.

@ Dio “Don’t Talk To Strangers” REACTION & ANALYSIS by Vocal Coach / Opera Singer

“I can’t get enough Ronnie James Dio. I hereby further profess that he is my vocal crush, and we’re digging into your next highest requested song “Don’t Talk To Strangers.” This is by far one of my favorite songs of all time. Its message, the vocal runs and how flawlessly Dio brings out that emotion is insanely captivating. He is a god.”

Can the US become a manufacturing power again, or is that just an unrealistic dream?

At the height of the United States being a “Manufacturing Giant”, there were clusters of industrial centers scattered throughout America. This is a fact that most Americans know, but few others understand. The United States was NEVER a homogenized Manufacturing Colossus. Instead, it was a nation that contained “manufacturing areas”.

A “Manufacturing Area” had the following characteristics…

  • Easy access to raw materials (Rail, roads, and canal, or ports)
  • Uninterrupted supply of electricity.
  • Access to water (to cool the machinery)

As these “Manufacturing Areas” evolved, they developed…

  • A series of suppliers (small industries) that served the major factories.
  • Housing for the workers.
  • A network of outlying communities.

Over time, These “Manufacturing Areas” would come and go as technology advanced. For instance, one of the first “Manufacturing Areas” was the Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts. They were big on Buggy Whips, and Corset Hoops. The canals in the Blackstone Valley delivered the products to the ports up and down the New England coastline for distribution to the population centers.

For our purposes, we will omit Blackstone Valley, and instead concentrate in the most recent clusters of “Manufacturing Areas” in the United States. These clusters are all that remains of the industrial might that the United States once was. These clusters were active from the 1930’s through to the 1970’s, with some migratory egress lasting into the 1990’s to places such as “Silicon Valley” and “Industrial Parks” located in the Southeast states.

At that time, the United States had (perhaps) five major “Manufacturing Areas”, and around twenty or so smaller “Manufacturing Areas”. They are all gone now.

The video tours of these areas are very telling…

  • Video tour of Pine Bluff AR (Clothing Hub) found HERE

.Video tour of the supporting towns surrounding Pine Bluff found HERE.Video tour of Jackson, MS (Household and commercial goods) found HERE.Video tour of Gary, IN (Automobile, heavy Industry) found HERE.Video tour of Chester PA (General goods, minor industry) found HERE.Video tour of California in 2023 (Western migration of Industry) found HEREVideo tour of Shreveport, LA (Oil, and light manufacturing) found HEREVideo tour of Pennsylvania (Steel and hard Industry) found HEREVideo tour of Kenningston PA (steel and manufacturing) found HEREVideo tour of Pasadena CA (High Tech Hub) found HEREVideo Tour of Steubenville OH (steel, automotive, and household) found HERE

I can provide many other videos. You take a camera and film yourself driving through these “Manufacturing Areas”. There are many of them, and they all look the same. Zombie empty cities. Ruined buildings, decayed infrastructure, crime, drugs, and many, many abandoned shopping carts.

The very few remaining “Manufacturing Areas” in the United States are very well dispersed. They are in these stand alone mini-clusters called “Industrial Parks”. Most American Industrial Parks house from five to up to twenty companies, and typically consist of an office building and a warehouse. Of those that provide any kinds of manufacturing, they tend to be primarily final assembly stations with people who unpack 40′GP shipping containers, re-box foreign-made items, and slap a “Made in the USA” sticker on them.

For the United States to regain ANY kind of major manufacturing role, it must focus on the basics.

  • Infrastructure. Infrastructure. Infrastructure.
  • laws and regulations that make it easy to create a supplier base to support manufacturing.
  • An educational system that encourages talented, and hard-working personnel.
  • A society that praises merit, fidelity, and an attention to detail.

I argue that of what remains in the United States today, the United States has a long, long way to go towards regaining it’s long lost industrial base. Do not be fooled by charts and figures that say otherwise. Anyone can lie and create bogus nonsensical charts and figures. Go outside yourself and look around.

American industry is dead.

What remains are either “soft industries” such as “Customer Service stations”, “Computer software coding centers”, or a handful of military and high-tech specialists. These types of industry are not providing “much needed” products and services to the United States domestic requirements.

Compared to China…

There is no comparison. China (which is large enough to house five complete United States inside of it) has over 2000 “Manufacturing Areas” supported by an amazing network of perhaps 10,000 smaller communities that provide first and second tier supply. All with everything needed to make, design, ship quality products globally.

So to answer the question; “Can American industry be revived to a point of serious competition against China?”

The answer is YES. But it will require a complete turnover of the American leadership class, a discarding of the American method of governance, a revamp of the American educational system, and a complete rebuilding of America’s infrastructure from the ground up. If the United States were to come to a full and complete screeching halt right now, and focus on this objective, you can see major changes in the “proper direction” with the next twenty years.

Otherwise, forget-about-it.

Ram Jam “Black Betty” Best of Reactions Compilation

Pennsylvania Dutch Brownies

Fudgy Brownies 2
Fudgy Brownies 2

Ingredients

  • 4 tablespoons butter or margarine
  • 1 (1 ounce) square unsweetened chocolate
  • 1/4 cup light molasses
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup plus 2 teaspoons granulated sugar
  • 1 1/8 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Grease 13 x 9-inch metal baking pan; set aside.
  2. In a 4-quart saucepan, melt butter with chocolate over low heat. Remove saucepan from heat. With wire whisk or fork, stir in molasses, then eggs.
  3. With spoon, stir in flour, ginger, cloves, baking soda, salt, 1 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon just until blended. Spread batter evenly in pan. Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until a wooden pick inserted 2 inches from edge comes out clean.
  4. Meanwhile, in cup, combine remaining 2 teaspoons sugar and 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon; set aside.
  5. Remove pan from oven; immediately sprinkle brownies with cinnamon-sugar mixture. Cool brownies in pan on wire rack at least 2 hours. When cool, cut brownies lengthwise into 3 strips, then cut each strip crosswise into 5 pieces. Cut each piece diagonally in half.

Source: Good Housekeeping Christmas Joys – Hearst Books

@ A Masterpiece! Cranberries – Zombie

So many Africans have been “moved”by this song and video. I guess all the wars in Africa really strike home.

U.S./NATO HQ in Kramatorsk Reportedly “Hit” by Russian Missile(s) – Conflicting Claims and Blame

World Hal Turner 28 June 2023

U.S./NATO HQ in Kramatorsk Reportedly "Hit" by Russian Missile(s) - Conflicting Claims and Blame
2023 06 28 21 32
2023 06 28 21 32

Late yesterday, June 27, 2023, reports began FLOODING out of Kramatorsk, Ukraine, that a Hotel/Restaurant had been brutally hit by “Russian” Missiles, and NUMEROUS American-English Speakers — and troops with American Flag patches — could be heard and seen in the aftermath.

Photos and video proved there was, in fact, a missile strike.  Those photos and video also PROVED American troop-type people were hit, some injured, some killed.

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2023 06 28 21 33
2023 06 28 21 33

Within an hour, Ukraine publicly claimed that innocent children and “American tourists” were the victims. 

“Tourists?” In military uniforms? 

 In an area 30 or so miles from the active front lines that is being shelled almost daily now, after the loss of Bakhmut??

2023 06 28 21 34
2023 06 28 21 34

Then, some damning pictures came out showing the remnants of a missile trail in the sky over the hotel, and worse, missile debris on the ground PROVING the missile was a British Storm Shadow missile.    Russians don’t use those . . . .

2023 06 28 21 35
2023 06 28 21 35
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This morning, the story has changed quite a bit – TWICE !

First there was a claim that the Ukraine Air Force “accidentally” targeted the hotel.  Well, that might certainly be possible and would explain the Storm Shadow missile debris.   It would also explain the extensive damage – it could, in fact, have been a Russian missile and then a Ukrainian missile by mistake.

But wait, the story changed yet again. 

Word is out this morning that officials are “looking for the people who betrayed the secret meeting taking place, to the Russians.”

Secret meeting? 

With Americans and other NATO troops, under arms and in military uniforms? 

Inside the war zone of Ukraine?

Pass the peas Marge…

China had banned Google, Amazon, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, Discord, WhatsApp, Whisper, and pretty much every single major US website. Then made a Chinese knockoff that gives the CCP complete access. Why should anyone defend TikTok?

China has banned nothing in China and in the world.

Amazon, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, Discord, WhatsApp, Whisper, and pretty much every single major US website refuse to follow the Chinese laws to operate their operations in China, thus they have not been approved by the Chinese laws for these businesses to operate in China.

It is the US who has blocked all the free international media and internet such as the free Russian international media and internet.

As a result, all Americans have been living in their totally isolated, completely censored and lying media. Americans know nothing about the free world, but the US style of democratic nonsense and disinformation.

@ LUCIANO PAVAROTTI sings NESSUN DORMA (Reaction)

Vietnam and your escape from the United States gulag

About depleted uranium: The main danger in DU is not it's radioactivity. The main problem is similar to heavy metals like lead, but much worse. 

It's inhaling the depleted uranium dust in to your lungs and digesting DU dust after it get absorbed by agricultural products or ends up lying in urban areas that makes DU extremely toxic. 

Heavy metals do much more to your body than "make you feel sick" they destroy the brain blood barrier and cause massive damage to the brain. 

They ruin the DNA of unborn fetuses which results in generation-wide genetic defects in society, they cause damage to many other parts and stay in the body forever. 

And heavy metals do not "degrade" they stay in the environment virtually forever, circulating and causing damage until quaranteed, like nuclear-power-plant waste (which is what DU is) is being stored.

Posted by: A200 | May 15 2023 18:25 utc | 26

Man oh man! The geopolitical situation is truly in flux.

And make no mistake, it is in Chinese favor.

Ah, meanwhile a “stealth war” is going on, but is not being reported at all. Instead it is being reported as something else…

Talk to random people.

  • Fellow passenger in public transport
  • Daily vendors
  • Store owners
  • Watchman
  • Peon of your office
  • Taxi drivers
  • Anyone you meet.

Remember, do not talk about yourself. Ask about them. And listen. I do that everyday and knowing people is amazing.

Here are some examples/ lessons I learned:

1. Got job offer from a real estate company owner

2. Made a friend during my journey home. I didn’t have return ticket but luckily I met the same guy again and we shared the railway berth.

3. Met a taxi driver whose wife works in some MNC (i guess it was GOOGLE, as a developer). After talking to him, my chauvinism went to drain.

EDIT: This conversation happened 3years ago in Hyderabad, and I don't remember what company exactly it was. But I do remember that while mentioning this, he pointed to some IT park where Google was written in bold.

4. Peon of my office gives me a distinct respect

5. Once a door to door vegetable daily vendor brought back my wallet which I dropped by mistake.

6. Some underprivileged children – whom I used to teach during my college send me “happy teachers day” card every year. And that is the most beautiful day my year.

7. I stay in Bangalore. The moment you approach a rickshaw either they will ask for 2times the meter or 20/ 30 extra over meter. But because I was listening to one of the rickshaw driver all my journey he kind of liked me, and he charged me as per meter. The meter was 74 and he took only 70 in spite Of my insisting.

8. Once in a restaurant a couple was struggling with their toddler. They were unable to eat. I was waiting for my meal so I started playing with the kid. The couple had meal in peace. By the time I left the restaurant it started raining cats and dogs. So the same couple saw waiting outside the restaurant under a shade and offered me a ride to the bus depot. During the ride we had great conversation and they decided to drop me till home.

9. I was waiting for my bus stop near the front door of the bus. So I started talking to the driver. For 20 mins we talked about topics ranging from girls empowerment to spirituality. And the drivers knowledge was surprising. His thoughts about “girl child” made me believe India is changing.

There are thousands of such conversations I can share. I learned that everyone is struggling with a fight which no one has ever fought, sometimes these conversations gives me hope, confidence, another perspectives to the different problems of life, when I am depressed it helps me feel privileged that I have such good life, parents and friends. It’s overwhelming to talk to people.

Most importantly the smile you get after listening to these people is just priceless. The life has become fast, and all one need is some ears.

Edit:

A lot of people have a question of “How to start a conversation?” Everyone can have there own way, but following is my two pence,

I have some pre-set ice breakers –

1. With Cab drivers (Ola/ Taxii for sure etc.) – “Is this your own, or you are hired?” Or “Don’t you feel frustrated with the traffic?”

2. Public Transport – Offer your seat to a lady/ old aged man. Ask when will your stop come? (even though you know when to get down). If someone is reading book – start talking about that book.

3. Coffee shop/ restaurants – Help (like I helped that couple). Or ask help in choosing dishes (this works during foreign trips).

4. If you see underprivileged child – ask if they go to school.

5. With your subordinates – Have lunch with them.

6. With roadside vendors – “How much business you make daily?” Or “do you pay some rent of this space” or “does xyz take some bribe for letting you stand here”

All in all the mantra is be observant. Understand what problem the other might have. Start talking about their problems/ situations/ likings etc.

Moving to Vietnam |BEAUTIFUL, CHEAP AND BOOMING|

This Is A Tiny Hamster Rides Her Own Personal Subway Train

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In 2009, Brooklyn photographer Victoria Belanger took Edie, her tiny hamster for a ride on her own personal subway train. Little Edie wandered throughout the car, checked out the distinctive orange and yellow seats and even had a chance to peek outside before having to “stand clear of the closing doors”.

“This train is really slow.” Edie rides the model subway. Fall 2009.

More: Victoria Belanger, Flickr h/t: laughingsquid

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Safeguarding Your Mental Health from the Harmful Effects of Western War
Propaganda Ten Top Tips


By
Geoffrey Roberts FRHistS, MRIA
Emeritus Professor of History

University College Cork

  1. Beg, borrow, or buy a copy of Robert H. Thoules’s Straight and Crooked
    Thinking. Pay particular attention to the sections on the manipulative use of
    emotive language (’Russia’s unprovoked, criminal, aggressive and genocidal
    war on Ukraine’), diversionary arguments (‘you can’t negotiate peace with an
    indicted war criminal’) and drumbeat repetition (‘Ukraine has won, is winning
    and will win the war’).
  2. Beware bait and switch articles. Promising pieces with headlines like ‘in
    reality, the Ukrainian are losing’ or ‘West exaggerates Russian losses’ often
    turn out to be Neocon opeds arguing for allout western military support for
    Ukraine whilst blandly asserting that Putin would be crazy to escalate the war.
  3. Get into the habit of scanning articles about the war before reading them. If
    you espy the words ‘Hitler’, ‘appeasement’, ‘Munich’ in the same piece bin
    it, unless it is written by a trustworthy historian with the initials GR.
  4. Unsourced casualty claims from the Pentagon or the British MoD are a no
    brainer: simply divide those for Russia by 10 and multiply those for Ukraine
    by the same factor.
  5. Keep to hand a stack of old Ritter and MacGregor interviews predicting that a
    storm of Russian armoured steel will soon sweep all before it and bring the
    war to a rapid conclusion.
  6. When things are going badly for the Russkies, mute the sound on reports from
    Weeb Union and the Military Summary Channel. Then close your eyes and re
    imagine the meaning of all those little arrows flickering across the screen.
  7. When things are going really badly, restrict your YouTube viewing to
    Alexander Mercouris’’s nightly vlog. Nothing is more reassuring than
    Alexander’s dulcet tones reminding us for the umpteenth time that he is not a
    military man before launching into a lengthy explanation as to why a 50metre
    advance by the remnants of the Azov Brigade may not be as strategically
    significant as some panicmongering Russian bloggers would have us believe.
  8. Goebbels was wrong. The Big Lie is not the most effective propaganda: it is
    the cumulative effect of little lies, evasions, distortions and misdirection. The
    best antidote is a daily dose of Responsible Statecraft supplemented by a
    generous dollop of Naked Capitalism, Moon of Alabama and Antiwar.com.
  9. If you don’t read Russian, invest in a machinetranslation programme that will
    enable you to follow Strana.UA’s sane and sensible coverage of the war.
  10. Subscribe to a curated list of links that at no cost to you filters out the most
    mentally damaging western war propaganda.

What’s Happening In Haiti Is Absolutely Beyond Belief!

Amazing!

Ukraine SitRep: Explosion in Khmelnytsky – Bakhmut Evacuation – Longer Range Missiles

In the early morning of last Saturday two large explosions (video) destroyed a large ammunition depot near the city of Khmelnytsky in west Ukraine.

 

khmelni3
khmelni3

biggerThis picture shows the depot before the strike:

 

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khmelni2

biggerThe explosion destroyed the whole depot:

 

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khmelni1

biggerThe depot sat at a rail line some 5,000 meter west from the city center. It is likely that the explosion destroyed not only a large amount of ammunition but also a large number of windows in the city and caused some casualties.

The city of Khmelnytsky, which has a population of 270.000, is named after a famous Cossack hetman (elected military leader) who in 1648 rose up against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that controlled the west of Ukraine.

While military operations continued inconclusively, and because Tatar support proved undependable at crucial moments, Khmelnytsky began to search for other allies.

He found those allies in Moscow:

Khmelnytsky secured the military protection of the Tsardom of Russia in exchange for allegiance to the Tsar. An oath of allegiance to the Russian monarch from the leadership of the Cossack Hetmanate was taken, shortly thereafter followed by other officials, the clergy and the inhabitants of the Hetmanate swearing allegiance. The exact nature of the relationship stipulated by the agreement between the Hetmanate and Russia is a matter of scholarly controversy. The council of Pereiaslav was followed by an exchange of official documents: the March Articles (from the Cossack Hetmanate) and the Tsar’s Declaration (from Muscovy).The council was attended by a delegation from Moscow headed by Vasiliy Buturlin. The event was soon thereafter followed by the adoption in Moscow of the so-called March Articles that stipulated an autonomous status of the Hetmanate within the Russian state. The agreement precipitated the Russo-Polish War (1654–67). The definitive legal settlement was effected under the Eternal Peace Treaty of 1686 concluded by Russia and Poland that re-affirmed Russia’s sovereignty over the lands of Zaporozhian Sich and left-bank Ukraine, as well as the city of Kiev.

The city is some 200 kilometer from the Polish boarder. The depot has likely held ammunition that was coming from the ‘West’ to go to the front line in east Ukraine. There are rumors that the depot held British ammunition for Challenger main battle tanks. The ammunition is filled with depleted Uranium. Some charts are circulating which claim to show a gamma ray spike in the area.

 

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khmelni4

biggerHowever the relevant map does not load for me and I have no way to verify it. The chart seem to show an increase in Gamma radiation but that increase happened during May 11/12, not in the early morning of May 13 when the explosion happened. The increase is also very small and the total is normal and not dangerous. Flying in a commercial airplane will typically expose you to some 2,000 nano-Sievert per hour [nSi/h]. Small background radiation variances happen all the time so the chart does not really tell us anything.

In other news the Ukrainian army seems to abandon whatever is left of Bakhmut city.

In today’s clobber report the Russian Defense Ministry reported the intercept by air defense of a British Storm Shadow cruise missile. This confirms that these are not some new wonder weapons. (The recent two Storm Shadow impacts in Luhansk city were against undefended targets and also accompanied by a U.S. delivered electronic warfare missile which probably can confuse air defense radar.)

Also taken down yesterday were seven U.S. HARM anti-radar missiles and ten HIMARS missiles.

The use of so many HARM missiles is unusual and points to a new campaign in preparation of the much hyped counteroffensive.

Posted by b on May 15, 2023 at 17:23 UTC | Permalink

The US is proposing a railway project to connect Gulf and Arab countries. But can it win favor from Middle Eastern countries?

Hmmm… doubt it…

2023 05 16 17 20
2023 05 16 17 20

What NOT to Eat in Vietnam, Why Banh Mi is so Famous? | Vietnam Culture Series: Eating

By Martin Jay

May 8, 2023

What the hell is going on in Mali? Many will be asking this question as to the future of the UN’s mission there, after Germany just announced that intends to withdraw its troops from the mission

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main qimg c25f003c5731b85d3baad88c03890aef

What the hell is going on in Mali? Many will be asking this question as to the future of the UN’s mission there, after Germany just announced that intends to withdraw its troops from the mission

According to newswire reports, the German government said on May 3rd it had decided to end its participation in the UN mission in Mali

by next May over problems, it claims, with the ruling junta.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s cabinet said Berlin would pull its 1,110 troops in the UN mission MINUSMA out of the West African country over the next year and pivot towards more humanitarian and development aid for the region.

“Whether we want it to or not, what happens in the Sahel affects us,” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in a statement.

“We are reorganising our engagement in the region and will let our participation in MINUSMA run out in a structured fashion over the next 12 months.”

But is it really true given Germany’s track record for its bare faced lies on the international circuit led by its odious chancellor Scholz who can’t even own up to Berlin’s role or knowledge of the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline? Is there another reason for Berlin getting out of Mali?

What was it doing there in the first place is also a good question. The truth is really not much to do with fighting terrorists in the Sahel but more about supporting France’s delusional ideas about its hegemony in Africa. Britain also sent 300 soldiers there initially to support Macron and his two-faced game in Mali of pretending to fight terrorism while really only interested in supporting French companies there and protecting French expats.

The UK pulled out those troops just months after France withdrew its soldiers in the summer of last year. Germany, it seems, is a little slow on the uptake of how shit happens in Africa and so its cumbersome political beast – a coalition of hypocrites, turncoats and dropouts – finally smelt the coffee and realised that its troops were a little isolated in a country they didn’t understand run by a junta which was aligned to Russia. Is it possible that Scholz suddenly woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and realised that his entire collation government would collapse if Wagner troops got a bit bored one day in Mali and decided to massacre the Germans as a way of sending a message that Russia is displeased with the commitment of Berlin to Zelensky?

It begs the question again in Mali, what are they European contingents doing now in Mali if none of them can get the junta there to stand in line and succumb to western elites’ needs and aspirations? Scholz clearly did the maths and realised that Mali is a ticking time bomb and his own troops were vulnerable to attack in the event of the Ukraine war stakes being raised this year.

And so the louche western media narrative is that Germany can’t get on with the military leadership in Bamako, which for anyone with an IQ more than 60 and who knows anything about how the world works, is of course nonsense. The heart of the problem for the regime in Mali is that they see no point of the Germans being there. If the Germans can’t get any results on the battlefield with the Islamic terrorists – and believe me, we would hear about it if they did – then the only other purpose for them would be to add a security later to the military leadership itself, politically.

If Germany is really there in Mali to fight the terrorists – which could/would take power in Mali if they could overpower the junta – then the thinking is why can’t they protect the elite there in any other way. The answer is because they are not there to neither fight terrorists nor prevent them from taking power in Mali. They were there to support Macron but now he and his boys have been kicked out it makes the Germans look like stupid teenage boys at the school disco all looking at each other with no girls in sight when the last dance begins. Uselessness is a word we should be comfortable with when talking about Germany and its army especially when it is lead by Scholz who is a buffoon on his best day and has led his own country into a direct conflict with Russia.

Misjudged military fuckwittery is actually a German speciality which keeps on repeating itself in history. Who could, after all, forget the initial jubilance of operation Barbarossa at the beginning of World War II which led to the German army being slaughtered when the soviets got their act together and took the battle to the next level? If the Germans themselves can’t explain to their own people what their troops are doing in West Africa, then it is hardly surprising they’re having troubles dealing with the military junta in Bamako who are proving to be “difficult”. Does anyone believe any of this bullshit from the UN press machine which recently went excrementally shite when it thundered that the UN chief was concerned about the fate of young women in Afghanistan and pledges to save them? This is the same UN chief who can’t even save his own UN staff from rape and sexual harassment on a grand scale in UN buildings?

What about shifting these $100s of billions spending countering Russia and China to take care your own citizens and economies back home?

Hundreds of billions, eventually a trillion dollars spend on playing geopolitics, that money could be used to build infrastructures, factories, lower energy cost, free housing, free education, feed the poor. Instead all wasted on geopolitics.

~3,000 Turn Out in Sydney AGAINST NATO – Pro-Russia

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2023 05 22 10 42

Video below shows about three thousand Australians turning-out in Sydney today, to protest NATO and show their support for Russia! The large group was peaceful and determined to let their country know their position: NATO is wrong, Russia is right, and the war in Ukraine must stop.

Here’s brief video:

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

Do you see how peaceful, calm, and orderly this is?   THIS is what should be taking place here in the United States and over in Europe.   Every day.

Here’s why:

What our governments are doing with the Ukraine situation is slow-walking ALL OF US into literal nuclear war with Russia.

The Russians are right; they have been provoked for years by more and more NATO bases, in country after country, surrounding Russia, and pointing missiles at Russia.  They were also provoked when the West funded, incited, and facilitated the forcible, violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-elected President, Viktor Yanukovich back in the year 2014.

Yanukovich had been previously contacted by the US and by the European Union (EU) about moving out of Russia’s sphere of influence, and becoming part of Europe.  Yanukovich thought about it. He consulted his government, his top business leaders, and his people.

When the time came for Yanukovich to decide yes or no to the US/EU offer, he politely told them “Thanks, but no thanks. Ukraine will remain with Russia.”

That was an answer the US/EU was NOT going to accept.

They began funding and facilitating protests and riots in Ukraine.  They paid almost a million dollars a day out of the US Embassy in Kiev, to keep the trouble going.

As the problems got worse and worse, there were shootings. Government buildings were being attacked and burned down.  It got completely out of hand.

Yanukovich had to flee the country, and Ukraine’s government collapsed.  When that happened, the US/EU was right there to fund a new, puppet government, favorable to the West.

When the new Kiev regime took over, Crimea, which had previously been part of Russia for over 300 years, but which had been “given” to Ukraine, by then-Soviet Union General Secretary Nikita Krushchev about fifty years ago, decided to have a referendum to secede from Ukraine and return to Russia.  They held that referendum and the vote was overwhelming; Crimea wanted to go home to Russia.

Of course, Russia, which had a naval base on Crimea, supported this effort, and was lambasted by the West for “illegally annexing” Crimea.   It was no annexation, Crimea voted!

When two other predominantly Russian oblasts (states) — Luhansk and Donetsk — wanted to also vote to secede, Ukraine sent its army to the border of those states and started lobbing artillery shells and mortars into the civilian areas to put down the move to secede.

Luhansk and Donetsk formed militias to fight-off the Ukrainians.  But they needed help.  Suddenly, “Little Green Men” started appearing in Luhansk and Donetsk.  Fully kitted-out soldiers, in green military uniforms, but with no patches.  No flags.  They were, of course, Russian troops.  They were clearly sent by Russia, to support Luhansk and Donetsk, whose people were being bombed by the Ukrainian army.

All this trouble, which really kicked-off from 2012, stopped dead in its tracks when Donald Trump won the US Presidency.   There was relative peace in Luhansk and Donetsk for four years, until Biden stole the US Presidency.

Within literally days of Biden taking office in January 2021, all the trouble in Luhansk and Donetsk started again.

By December, 2021, Ukraine had massed about 80,000 troops, over 1,000 tanks, multiple launch rocket systems, fighter jets and the like, all along the borders of Luhansk and Donetsk.   Ukraine was going to enter Luhansk and Donetsk and slaughter the civilians who wanted to secede.

Russia had no choice.  They HAD to protect the civilians in Luhansk and Donetsk.  In fact, under the United Nations (UN) Charter, Russia had a DUTY to protect!

The LIE Which Caused this Whole Thing

All this trouble and all this NATO effort with Ukraine is being done despite the fact that then-US Secretary of State, James Baker, assured then Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and then-Foreign Minister Eduard Shevrednadze that if Russia allowed East and West Germany to re-unite, “NATO will not move one inch eastward.”

Of course, NATO did not honor that promise, and began expanding eastward, right up to Russia’s border.

Country after country joined NATO, and got NATO missiles to aim at Russia. Many countries established NATO bases to rotate NATO troops in and out . . . . all with their eye on Russia.

When the same began with Ukraine, Russia made very clear to the west, Ukraine joining NATO is a red line for Russia.  They also explained why:

From Ukraine, NATO missiles, would have about a five minute flight time to Moscow.  They would also have a seven to ten minute flight time to Russia’s strategic nuclear missile silos.

While NATO claims these missiles are “defensive” with conventional warheads, missile technology has progressed so much that the warheads on these missiles can be “swapped-out.”  They can be changed from “defensive” (conventional) warheads, to OFFENSIVE, NUCLEAR warheads.  The swap takes about an hour.

So Russia would really have no way of knowing if the missiles being aimed at them were defensive or offensive.

And with a five minute flight time, Russia would have almost no viable defense.  They would never know peace or security.  This was completely unacceptable to them.

Russia tried to use Diplomacy, offering a Treaty to NATO which would provide Iron-Clad, legally enforceable, security guarantees to Russia.  They offered this in December of 2021.  NATO laughed at it; basically throwing the proposal in the trash.

About a week later, in January, 2022, Russia submitted the Treaty proposal again, only this time, they sent it via Diplomatic Courier, to the leaders of all NATO countries at their official residences (White House, #10 Downing Street, The Elysee Palace in France, and so on)

In this re-submitted proposal, Russia made clear, IN WRITING, if they cannot obtain iron-clad, legally enforceable security guarantees via Diplomatic means, they will obtain them by military or military-technical means.

So they TOLD EVERYONE this was going to become a military conflict!

NATO sat on this proposal for about two weeks, then rejected it again.

On February 23, 2022, Russia contacted Ukraine and gave them an Ultimatum: You have five hours to agree to not join NATO and that Crimea, which had seceded, was now permanently part of Russia, or Russia would take action.

Ukraine President Zelensky called the British Foreign Office and the US State Department.  Both told him to “ignore the ultimatum” which he did.

After the five hours expired, Russia waited another two hours and with no movement by Ukraine, they sent the Russian Army across the Ukraine Border.

We Were ALL Warned

Russia had previously told everyone — the whole world — that this situation was going to become military.   The world laughed.

They aren’t laughing now.

You see, when Russia speaks, they say what they mean, and they actually mean what they say.

It isn’t that way in the West.   Here in the West, we are caught in this phony “virtue signaling” where we say things that sound oh so good and nice, but we never actually DO.

Russia doesn’t operate that way.  If they say it, they mean it.

Which brings me back to the protests in Sydney, Australia, at the top of this story.

As the conflict with Ukraine has gotten uglier, NATO has been shipping billions of dollars worth of military gear to Ukraine.  More and more gear.  Better and better gear.

Along the way, Russia has REPEATEDLY warned they will use nuclear weapons to defend Russia.

As should be clear to even the most childlike intellect right now, when Russia says something, they mean it.  They have proven this over and over again!

Despite Russia’s warnings, the West continues to up-the-ante and, as you read this right this minute, the West had given a green light to providing Ukraine with fourth generation F-16 fighter jets.

Russia announced publicly THIS MORNING, they will shoot down any F-16’s they find in Ukrainian air space.

They also publicly accused the United States of trying to escalate the Ukraine conflict into a world war.   In this regard, it seems to me personally, Russia hit the nail right on the head.  The US __is__ trying to start World War 3, and it is our American government, and its’; NATO vassals, that are slow-walking you and me to our death via nuclear Armageddon.

Unless people in Europe and the United States, take to the streets PEACEFULLY, RESPECTFULLY, and in a DIGNIFIED MANNER, I personally believe we are going to get nuked. I say, this war in Ukraine must be halted NOW.   Right now.  Before it goes any farther.

If we fail to step-up and make known that this war must stop, then I believe we will be nuked. Soon.

Moving to Uruguay |ONE OF THE BEST LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES!|

Russian Bombers Airborne; Explosions Now in Odessa

.

Rusasian Bear Tu95 large
Rusasian Bear Tu95 large

Russian strategic aviation voice and morse net on frequencies 4397 USB and 5620 CW, indicate Russian Bomber Activity 3:30 PM EDT —

3 Tu-22 bombers airborne, possibly strikes in the coming hours.

3:51 PM EDT — More:  3 Russian Tu-95Ms strategic bombers have taken off.

Unidentified Object noted Airborne over the Odesa Region of Southern Ukraine; Air Defenses are reportedly Active.

Multiple Large Explosions heard across the City of Odessa; reports of a possible ongoing Shahed-136 Drone Attack.

3:54 PM EDT — It appears Russia has switched to radio silence mode. A massive rocket strike expected in Ukraine tonight.

 4:04 PM EDT — Explosions reported in Zaporozhye region and Odessa

Tu-95MS are moving to the area of the Caspian Sea, to the missile launch site.

Inaccurate intel struck-thru 

4:30 PM EDT — There is information circulating on the Internet that the Ukrainian military has just shot down a Russian Su-35S fighter over the Black Sea

4:40 PM — Ukrainian Sources are reporting that the Russian Pilot of the Su-35 was Killed in the Crash.

4:45 PM EDT — Explosions in the Dnepropetrovsk region In eastern Ukraine, an air raid continues, related to the work of Russian UAVs.

5:00 PM EDT — Officials of the Kherson Defense Forces confirmed the downing of a Su-35 of the Russian Air Forces over the Black Sea.

 

— Sirens in Kyiv, Gerans are headed its way.

— Mass MISSILE arrivals at Zatoka and Sergeevka to the coastal facilities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (there are camps for recruits and trainees)

— At least 7 Tu-22M3 Strategic Bombers and 4 Russian Naval Ships are reported to be currently approaching their “Launch Zones” over the Black Sea; these Aircraft and Ship are Armed with roughly 50 3M54-1 Kalibr Cruise Missiles.

— It is reported that at least 7 hits were made at AFU facilities in Odessa Region. There are also reports that a missile strike destroyed the bridge in Zatoka, through which the AFU was delivering reserves, fuel and equipment from Romania to Kherson and Nikolaev.

Ukraine confirms two Kalibr cruise missiles hits at Odessa port…  western equipment hit in Odessa region

FROM RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF DEFENSE:

A Ukrainian S-300 surface-to-air missile system has been obliterated near Zheltoye (Donetsk People’s Republic).

The command post of the 102nd Territorial Defence Brigade has been hit near Poltavka (Zaporozhye region).

Air defence forces have intercepted fifteen HIMARS, Uragan MLRS projectiles, and Storm Shadow long-range cruise missiles during the day.

In addition, nine Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles were obliterated in the areas of Lozovoye, Terny, Vodyanoye, Novoandreyevka (Donetsk People’s Republic), Chervonaya Dibrova (Lugansk People’s Republic), and Energodar (Zaporozhye region).

6:03 PM EDT — At least 7 Tu-95MS Strategic Bombers are noted to have taken-off from Engels Air Force Base in the Saratov Region of Russia heading towards their “Launch Zones” over the Caspian Sea; a Missile Attack against Ukraine appears to be Imminent once again.

CRIMEA HIT?

A Bright Light and Explosion were seen in the City of Sevastopol in Crimea, after which electricity went out:

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FwrjaGLXgAA98PP

6 things I WISH i knew BEFORE moving to VIETNAM…

This Guy Makes 3D Printed Helmets For His Cat

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Thanks to 3D printers going mainstream, more and more awesome things are popping up around the internet. We already featured T-Rex arms for chickens, now it’s time to meet Rémy Vicarini who likes to make tiny helmets for his cat.

More: Instagram h/t: sadanduseless

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cat helmet10

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MAJOR NEWS!!! TOP UKRAINE GENERAL “IN HOSPITAL”, Tactical NUKES ON F-16s? BELARUS Border Alert WW3

The damage isn’t just a general but key support staff. This was a decisive hit

Okay, I’m not European, but I think I may offer a tiny perspective as someone who spent most of last summer travelling all over Europe and who spent time in many, many European cities I’ve never been to.

I feel I really got into the lifestyle in Europe.

Sitting outside to eat on summer nights.

Walking and taking transit everywhere.

Seeing people outside everywhere just partaking in the city.

Enjoying the historic charm that is in abundance, feeling safe everywhere at all hours (Maybe with the exception of Marseilles and parts of London), etc.

I feel like the US in comparison is just… underwhelming.

I lived in Nashville for over a year and most of my life have lived in Los Angeles. I want to move to a new city but really don’t like any city in the US enough to be excited about going there. And it seems the only places in America that might give you a slice of that European lifestyle are prohibitively expensive, like San Francisco or NYC.

I feel like most American cities are bland, built around cars, have terrible transit, and are unsafe.

A few years ago I was walking through downtown Atlanta on a weekend in the afternoon, and was stunned that there were no people walking other than me. It was like the entire city had been essentially abandoned.

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I could not imagine the center of an European city being completely empty of pedestrians. There is more vibrancy in an European city of 200,000 than in an American city of two million.

After the architectural splendor of Prague and Edinburgh, the Mediterranean charm of old town Nice, eating in the medieval alleyways of Croatia, I come back to America and feel kind of depressed at the same old landscape of strip malls, drive-thru Starbucks, urban blight, sprawling suburbs with cookie cutter houses and no sidewalks or pedestrians in sight.

Maybe one little historic “old town” street downtown that you have to drive into and that’s full of souvenir shops and chain restaurants.

I guess I’m just ranting and experiencing post-vacation blues, but I’m missing the European lifestyle so much it hurts and I’m having difficulty adjusting to America.

I liked just about every European city I visited. There are very few American cities I’d bother visiting unless I had a specific reason to go there.

On the plus side, the variety of natural scenery in the US, particularly the western US rivals anything in Europe and maybe surpasses it. And increasingly I’d rather rent a cabin in some place like the Smoky Mountains or Sierras in California than visit the bland American cities.

Russia and China

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main qimg 75e23fca6297302b19348607a736e515 lq

Last thing both of them Care about now is the Dollar as Reserve Currency

The Two Nations now know they are on the Gunsights of the West and they also know luckily they were ignored for a bit too long a time and have become stronger than the West conceived possible while the West has been weakened

In 2008 – this wouldnt even have been a contest

Many things on Russia – China Agenda including:-

  • Technology Cooperation
  • Military Alliance – Russia and China need a Military Alliance especially a Nuclear Alliance
  • Economic Alliance – BRICS to be strengthened with Argentina being added
  • Resource Stability and Supply – China to ensure sufficient OIl and Gas and Coal from Russia
  • Yuan Transactions – Yuan to replace USD and Euro by 2035 as per Nabullianas Calculations as Russias Major Reserve Currency
  • Payment System – Global Payment System that can Rival SWIFT
  • Consumer Goods – To Replace Western Chains

You know you can go to China, right?

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“NO! SLEEP! TIL 葫芦岛市!!!”

I went back in 2007 and it was a great trip. Really opened my eyes to some of the BS you hear in the states. My hotel was reasonably priced, brand new, and in the same block as the Beijing Lamborghini and Ferrari Dealership.

You can go there right now.

2023 05 22 11 10
2023 05 22 11 10

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You can rent a car, drive around, talk to folks. no problem.

The point is, it would be really, really damn hard for them to lie about their economy. You would see it in the streets.

20 Best reasons NOT to retire to Vietnam! Don’t live in Vietnam.

Chili Queen Chili

This is, according to the legend, one of San Antonio chili queen’s original recipes.

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2023 05 22 11 21

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds beef, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
  • 1 pound pork, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
  • 1/4 cup suet
  • 1/4 cup pork fat
  • 3 medium onions, chopped
  • 6 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 quart water
  • 4 ancho chiles, seeds and stems removed, chopped fine
  • 1 serrano chile, seeds and stems removed, chopped fine
  • 6 dried red New Mexican chiles, seeds and stems removed, chopped fine
  • 1 tablespoon cumin seeds, freshly ground
  • 2 tablespoons Mexican oregano
  • Salt, to taste

Instructions

  1. Lightly flour the beef and pork cubes. Quickly cook in the suet and pork fat, stirring often.
  2. Add onions and garlic and sauté until they are tender and limp.
  3. Remove all pieces of fat.
  4. Add the water to the mixture and simmer for 1 hour.
  5. Grind the chiles in a blender or molcajete. Add to the meat mixture.
  6. Add remaining ingredients and simmer for an additional 2 hours.
  7. Skim off any fat that rises, then serve.

From Citizens to Serfs: How the Middle Class is Eroding in America

https://youtu.be/Ya0bG4_xRQg

Pepe Escobar
May 20, 2023

With G7 “leadership” mired in a sticky swamp of intellectual shallowness, predictably the only agenda in colonized Japan was more sanctions on Russia.

Let’s start with a graphic depiction of where the Global North and the Global South really stand.

1. Xian, former imperial capital, and key hub of the Ancient Silk Roads: Xi Jinping hosts the China-Central Asia summit, attended by all Heartland “stans” (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgzystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan).

The final statement stresses economic cooperation and “a resolute stand” against Hegemon-concocted color revolutions.

That expands what the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are already implementing. In practice, the summit seals that the Russia-China strategic partnership will be protecting the Heartland.

2. Kazan: the Russia-Islamic World forum unites not only religious leaders but top businessmen of no less than 85 nations. Multipolar Russia proceeded in parallel to the Arab League Summit in Jeddah, which welcomed back Syria to the “Arab family”. Arab nations unanimously pledged to end “foreign interference” for good.

3. Hiroshima: the ever-shrinking G7, actually G9 (adding two unelected EU bureaucrats), imposes a single agenda of more sanctions on Russia; more weapons to black void Ukraine; and more lecturing of China.

4. Lisbon: the annual Bilderberg meeting – a NATO/Atlanticist fest – takes place in a not so secret hotel completely locked down. Top item in the agenda; war – hybrid and otherwise – on the “RICs” in BRICS (Russia, India, China).

I could have been in Xian, or most likely Kazan. Instead, honoring a previous commitment, I was in Ibiza, and then scraped the idea of flying to Lisbon as a waste of time.

Allow me to share with you the reason why: call it a little tale from the Baleares, breaking the trademark pledge that what happens in swinging, sweaty deep house Ibiza stays in Ibiza.

I was a guest at a top business gathering – mostly Spanish but also featuring Portuguese, Germans, Brits and Scandinavians: ultra high-level executives – in real estate, asset management, investment banking.

Our panel was titled “Global Geopolitical Shifts and Their Consequences”. Before the panel, participants were invited to vote on what worried them most when it comes to the future of their business. Number one was inflation and interest rates. Number two was geopolitics. That prefigured a very lively debate ahead.

When a EU hagiographer goes berserk

Little did I – and the audience – know that would turn into a wild ride.

The first presentation came from the director of a “Center for European Politics” in Copenhagen. She bills herself as a political science professor, and is an adviser to EU Chief Gardener Borrell.

Well, I adopted a Cheshire cat stance after the tsunami of clichés spewed out about “European values” and evil Russkies, as well as her being “frightened” by the future of Europe.

At least immediate relief was provided by the impeccably diplomatic Lanxin Xiang, an adorable character, always with a cheerful smile on his face, and one of the very few leading experts on China who actually knows what he’s talking about, in fluent English.

Lanxin Xiang, among other accomplishments, is Emeritus Professor of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva; director of the Institute of Security Policy at the China National Institute for SCO International Exchange; and executive director of the Washington Foundation for European Studies.

This is a column I wrote about him and his work, published in October 2020.

Professor Xiang offered a masterly exposition on the American obsession to fabricate a “Taiwan problem” and how Europe, already squeezed by the U.S. proxy war against Russia, must be very careful when it comes to lecturing China.

When it was my turn, I went for the kill, dismissing all those EU press release platitudes as absolute nonsense, and stressing how Europe is already being eaten alive by the proverbial “American interests”.

As briefly as possible I explained the whole geopolitical background of the war in Ukraine.

Well, this was all delivered to top business people who consume The Economist, Financial Times and Bloomberg as their prime sources of information.

Their reaction would speak volumes.

Predictably, the EU-paid bureaucrat completely freaked out, and shrieking with outrage, went full pre-ordained script, from threatening to abandon the stage to accusing me of being “paid by the Kremlin”.

I asked her, point blank, to “contradict me, with facts”.

No facts were provided.

Just fear and bewilderment, mixed with intimations of cancel culture.

To his great merit the vastly experienced moderator, Struan Robertson from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, kept things civil, giving more time for Lanxin Xiang to explain the Chinese mindset and opening the floor for a sequence of very good questions.

In the end, the audience loved it.

Many came to personally thank me for information they will never have access to in El Pais, Le Monde or The Economist.

A minority in the room was simply stunned – but our debate at least must have left them musing over a lot of preconceived notions.

It’s the total merit of the key organizers, Jose Maria Pons and head of the program Cristina Garcia-Peri, to host such a debate in fabulous Ibiza, in Spain, prime NATOstan territory.

In the current situation, this would be absolutely impossible in France or Germany, not to mention Scandinavia or those demented Baltics.

There’s no way to counter-act the fabricated narratives parroted by EU-paid hacks and bureaucrats except for ridiculing them – in their faces.

They become livid and barely manage to stutter when their lies are exposed.

For instance, one of the questions from the floor, by a top of the line German businessman, enumerated a litany of dark facts about Ukrainian “democracy” that are absolutely verbotten by EUrocracy.

The G-Less Than Zero freaks out

What happened in Ibiza dovetails with what happened in U.S.-nuclear bombed Hiroshima – Hegemons don’t do apologies – and in that locked down Lisbon hotel.

With the G7 “leadership” mired in a sticky swamp of intellectual shallowness, predictably the only agenda in colonized Japan was more sanctions on Russia – imposed over third countries and on companies in the energy and military-industrial sectors; more weapons to the Ukrainian black void; and a ridiculous counter-productive new obsession of piling up on China “containment” for alleged “economic coercion.”

In the photo ops, by the way, it’s not a shrinking G7 that shows up: but a warmongering G9, artificially augmented by that pathetic couple of unelected EUrocrats, Charles Michel and Pustula von der Lugen.

As far as the real Global Majority – or Global South – is concerned, this looks more like a G-Less Than Zero. The more the senseless, illegal Sanctions Wars are “expanded”, the more the absolute majority of the Global South moves away from the collective West, diplomatically, geopolitically and geoeconomically.

And that’s why the top Bilderberg agenda at the hijacked Lisbon hotel was to revamp NATO/Atlanticist coordination in a war – hybrid and otherwise – against the driving force in BRICS; the RICs (Russia, India, China).

There were other items on the menu – from AI to the acute banking crisis, from “energy transition” to “fiscal challenges”, not to mention proverbial “U.S. leadership”.

But when you get in the same room people like NATO’s Stoltenberg; director of U.S. intel Avril Haines; senior director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council Thomas Wright; Goldman Sachs president John Waldron; Chief Gardener Borrell (whose minion was in Ibiza); vice chair of Brookfield Asset Management, Mark Carney (one of their executives also in Ibiza); Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Christopher Cavoli; and Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, among other Atlanticist shills, the plot is self-evident:

It’s a war against the multipolar world.

At least we can dance it away in Ibiza.

US Comes To Africa To Steal Natural Resources & Finish Off The Continent

Another one that every Finnish house has but at least judging by sitcoms US houses don’t: draught lobby.

No matter how small the house, there’s a draught lobby in Finnish houses.

It helps keep the warm air inside the house and cold outside.

In many houses (including ours) it is very small but it does its job working like an air lock of kinds (open first door, enter, close, open second door).

This is a typical draught lobby:

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5-Year-Old Says He Is a WOMAN Reborn As a Boy – The Ghost Inside My Child (S1 Flashback) | LMN

Chinese generals are a very SERIOUS sort.

In general, they will always look at the worst case scenarios. All of them. They will envision themselves losing, and all the terror, and horrors that will result from them. They will plan, and then plan, and then plan some more.

What we, as casual spectators, can see is that the United States is planning to attack China. This is obvious.

  • The excuse will be “Chinese invasion of Taiwan”, whether it happens or not.
  • Funding for this effort is well in progress.
  • Local supply depots and nation alignment is almost complete.
  • The United States in in process to turn Taiwan into a Pacific “Ukraine”.

If we can see this, so can the Chinese generals.

The Chinese leadership have two primary roles for it’s military.

  • Defensive in a tactical sense.
  • Offensive in a strategic sense.

As long as the United States does not cross any Chinese “red lines”, the Strategic offensive deterrent is working. But the “red lines” have been crossed, and once “red lines” are crossed, then that deterrence has failed.

And now, we know what the Chinese generals think.

You can be assured that the Chinese generals will eviscerate all invasion forces to China. (And yes. Taiwan is a province of China.) The tactical situation strongly favors China.

The real issue is the strategic nature of war.

China cannot engage in a war that has no outcomes.

A tactical war alone, is simply defensive only.

To end a war; any war, strategic forces and systems MUST be applied.

China has only ONE kind of strategic military system. (It is not like the United States with multiple strategic systems MAC, SAC, etc.)

China has invested and developed but only one strategic system…

  • Nuclear weapons mounted on hypersonic ICBM glide vehicles.

Let that sink in.

If a war occurs between the USA and China, then it must not, and can not, be tactical alone.

It must have a strategic component.

And no matter what pronouncements about never using nuclear weapons are, and treaties signed. The fact is that for China to survive a war with the US, it MUST use strategic weapons systems.

This means that strategic forces will plummet the mainland United States. Though there is some debate on where Chinese “clean” enhanced radiation nukes will be used, it should be well understood that a war with China will intimately affect the lives and quality of life of Americans.

To fight China is to fight to the death.

Chinese generals know this.

Why High Paid Americans Are Actually BROKE!

Zombie Apocalypse is REAL

Many inner cities across the country have now been turned into wastelands:

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2023 05 22 11 43

Having worked, lived and travelled extensively across the world, I have never seen anything remotely closed to what is happening in the United States.

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2023 05 22 11 44w

What is worst is that people who populate these places are essentially Zombies

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2023 05 22 11 4f4

It does not only affect poor blacks but also some of the richest and most powerful families. This included Hunter Biden, son of the current American President.

The United States could afford a military budget of over $800b and over 800 overseas bases which it uses to rain death and destruction on others but it cannot look after the welfare needs of its people.

Really SAD!!!!

China Just Found a MASSIVE Loophole to Survive US Sanctions!

Midwestern Pork Tenderloin Sandwiches

Midwestern Pork Tenderloin Sandwiches are extremely popular in Illinois and through the Midwest.

midwestern pork tenderloin sandwich
midwestern pork tenderloin sandwich

Yield: 4 sandwiches

Ingredients

  • 1 pound boneless pork loin (or boneless pork chops)
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
  • 4 large sandwich buns

Instructions

  1. Cut 4 (1 inch) slices of pork. Trim any exterior fat from edges and butterfly each slice by cutting horizontally through the middle almost to the edge so that the halves are connected by only a thick piece of meat. Put each butterflied slice between pieces of plastic wrap. Using a wooden meat mallet, or the side of a cleaver, pound vigorously until the slice is about 10 inches across.
  2. Mix together flour, cornmeal, salt and black pepper.
  3. Heat 1/2 inch of oil in a deep, wide skillet to 365 degrees F. Dip each slice of pork in water, then in flour mixture. Fry tenderloin, turning once, until golden brown on both sides, about 5 minutes total. Drain on paper towels and season to taste with salt and pepper.
  4. Serve on buns with desired condiments (mustard, mayonnaise, dill pickle chips, ketchup, sliced onion, lettuce).

The Ghost Inside My Child: 5-Year-Old Claims to Have DIED on the Titanic

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Don’t bet against it. America will print and prints and print it will create money without basis and backed by only word of the mouth trust. US dollar is a fake and a fiat currency. The U.S. debt is a time bomb that cast a long shadow on the real America.

To me the US economy is a dud and it is one humongous Ponzi scheme. From 2012–2022 a mere decade the U.S. debt increased from 10 trillion to 31.4 trillion today. Bush, Clinton, Obama Trump and Biden has released close to 20 trillion dollars into their economy of basically Monopoly money. That is haunting them with high inflation now.

China shocked me in Chongqing!

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When the bullshit is just too deep

In George Orwell's 1984, the totalitarian state would periodically rewrite the history books, making everything logical and correct. The old Soviet Union had a similar classical approach to propaganda. But modern western propaganda is more like avant-garde jazz: a whirlwind of noise and conflicting rubbish that drowns out all else. It's like using noise to jam a radar system. One can still find old books that are clearly written, there is no attempt to destroy the past, just bury it beneath a blizzard of garbage so that people don't even know it's there.

Posted by: TG | May 22 2023 15:37 utc | 17

China no longer talks with the US government. But it is in active and productive talks with United States industry and commerce folk.


There is obviously a serious disconnect in this matter, as it seems that the United States government does not represent the people, or the industry that it is supposed to.

China is recognizing that.

And dealing directly with the principals.


But if you live in the West, you will be oblivious to that fact, and the reaction to this reality is being of a hysterical nature.

Spewing forth of massive quantities of bullshit…

Everything in the West is bullshit.

It’s all lies. It’s all nonsense. It’s all so much garbage, that no one can possibly figure out what is real or a lie. Bills to restrict what you can say are named “freedom to speak law”, and taxes to pay for more  wars is titled “end the war tax”.

The food in the United States is GMO laden trash, filled with chemicals. The history books, if they are even read are filled with manufactured nonsense. The United States did not go to the moon, nor is Fort Knox filled with gold bars. There is no such thing as freedom in the Untied States, and the idea that Americans are well represented by “representatives” is laughable.

It’s lies after lies, and the “house of cards” is falling.

Right.

Now.

China warns the USA

Hit the brakes NOW, or face war.

They Cannot Hide It Anymore: China Refuses All Communication with U.S. – THREE Weeks Now!

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Sullivan large
Sullivan large

Since the end of high level meetings between the U.S. and China which took place in Vienna around May 10, China has cut-off all communication with the United States.

Chinese officials refuse phone calls, meetings, and any dialogue with American representatives says one high ranking State Department official.

This has gone on since the meetings in Vienna around May 10, which means it has now been THREE WEEKS since the two governments spoke with each other.  Heck of thing for the two largest trading partners on the planet.

So . . .  Who was it from the US that went to Vienna, met with China and clearly did something that smashed relations?    None other than, Jake Sullivan.

The US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and top diplomat from China, Wang Yi, had two days of intense meetings in Vienna.

OPINION

Now, I have long viewed Jake Sullivan as not only a pencil-neck geek, but, to be candid, I view the guy as having the intellect of a flea.

What he did is not yet known to me, but I expect to find out in short order.  When I do, I will report it.

In the meantime, the American people should know that relations between the U.S. and China are having a very large problem, and Beijing has cut off all contact.

When the talking stops . . . . well . . . .

…you know what generally comes next.

China still has some very sharp, unused arrows in the cabinets in the basement:

Imagine what will happen when tomorrow, someone will post a movie clip on TikTok with a Big Mac with a nail or an insect into it. The whole of McDonalds empire will implode. The same could happen with KFC, Subway, PizzaHut, Starbucks, Apple, Microsoft, … 

They’re all making more than half of their turnover in China. That could all be done and over with, in a mere couple of days.

________________________

Frans Vandenbosch  方腾波

US anti-China sentiment impedes resumption of high-level exchanges

Published: May 25, 2023 11:00 PM

As high-level communication between China and the US resumes, an anti-China vanguard groupuscule in the US House of Representatives is getting even more fidgety. By hyping some twice-told tales about the “big bad China,” they try to show their presence and sabotage the improvement of bilateral relations.

The US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the US and the Chinese Communist Party on Wednesday approved two reports regarding China’s Xinjiang and the island of Taiwan as its first set of policy recommendations, hoping some of its recommendations will become law this year.

Formed in January, the bipartisan committee and its members have constantly made provocative moves on China-related issues, trying to prove its value to the US Congress.

For instance, it has held several hearings in a fanfare way to attack China on various topics, such as TikTok, Taiwan, economic and trade, and human rights.

In April, the panel engaged in a table-top simulated war game exercise over a possible conflict in the Taiwan Straits. On the surface, it concluded that “nobody wins when deterrence breaks down,” as the committee leader, Mike Gallagher, put it. But, in fact, it was a disguised attempt to encourage the US to strengthen its military intervention in the Straits.

Later that month, members of the committee also traveled to California with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to meet with Taiwan regional leader Tsai Ing-wen, disregarding strong opposition from the Chinese side.

In some way, the panel works as a policy incubator for Congress. Its members aim to form some consensus in their small circle and then propose and promote it in other bigger and more important committees. It is like delivering bullets to other panels and the leaders of the House that strive to shoot at China all the time.

Besides, all the 24 representatives in this committee share one similarity: They hold an extremely negative and hawkish attitude toward China, making the group a veritable anti-China vanguard in Congress. Working as a small group means their anti-China endeavors can become more well-planned and well-organized. As important sources for the Congress’s possible agenda against China, these US lawmakers actually live off by bashing China and use China-related issues to gain more exposure in US public opinion and climb up the political career ladder further.

The contrast between the provocative House panel and the White House’s desire to ease the tension with China shows that some US lawmakers and government officials do not entirely agree with each other on China-related issues. At the congressional level, more emphasis was placed on the saber-rattling geopolitical competition with China with strong ideological hues.

Thus, it is no surprise that some Members of Congress are unwilling to see the stabilization of China-US ties. Their sensationalist political posturing reveals the sinister intentions to destroy China-US relations or to push the two countries into a new cold war.

Yet, even within the US government, it’s hard to find a common understanding of how to deal with China. The announcement of Rick Waters, the State Department’s top China policy official, stepping down and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman retiring underscore the divergences among officials in Washington over which path to take in relations with China.

Overall, it is rather challenging for US President Joe Biden to unify the administration’s opinion and approach to China. And even if he does, a Congress that advocates a tougher China policy will still hinder the implementation.

“The current situation also reflects the limitation of the Biden administration’s China policy; that is, pursuing dialogue and engagement with China while thinking about suppression and restriction is impossible. If Washington continues to adhere to these two contradictory mentalities, it will never achieve the result it wants, Zhang Tengjun, deputy director of the Department for Asia-Pacific Studies at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times.

As extremism in US politics has long hijacked the country’s policy toward China, we should not expect Washington’s China strategy to return to a rational and normal track soon. And it is a shame that US diplomacy, all along, cannot get rid of the aggravated interference and intervention of the extreme China hawks.

Big Vessel

The Dalian shipyard delivered a 460,000-ton (displacement) ship. The ship is an oil&gas floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel. It is the largest of its kind and one of the largest ships ever built.

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Sci-fi Movie in Reality: Beijing Subway Pilots Palm Scanning for ‘Empty-Handed’ Entry and Exit!

No need to swipe a card or scan a QR code. A Beijing subway line now allows passengers to enter and exit “empty-handed” by scanning the palms of their hands.

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A pilot program launched on Sunday to apply the new technology on the Daxing Airport Express, which links the Beijing Daxing International Airport, said the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport.

Passengers can show their palms to pass ticket gates at stops along the line after inputting their palm information at the station’s ticket machines and authorizing the use via WeChat, a popular messaging app in China. Fees are automatically deducted after exit.

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The ticket gates recognize the user’s palm print and veins without contact, said the commission. It can allow passengers to take subway trains if they do not have cash when their smartphones run out of battery.

The commission said data masking and encryption technologies have been applied to protect the user’s information.

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Half-Dead Senator Fully Propped Up By Democrats

Meanwhile back in the United States…

WTF! These are who is “running” the United States.

Describe Americans

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2023 05 22 16 52

Putin just ENTERED the most dangerous phase of the war

Two hours of what the fuck! The legislation originating out of the USA is frightening.

Media And Politicians Throw So Much Bullshit At Us That It Is Difficult To See Through It

Western media are feeding us bullshit. It is so strong that even western politicians, like the public, seem to believe in it. The reason is that it is increasingly difficult to detect the bullshit because there is just too much of it.

Gilbert Doctorow takes on the Western disinformation campaign especially with regards to the fall of Bakhmut:

[I]t is these censorious states and the mass media that carry their messages with stenographic precision into print and electronic dissemination who are the ones that day after day feed disinformation to the public. It is cynically composed and consists of a toxic blend of ‘spin,’ by which is meant misleading interpretation of events, and outright lies.The many months long battle for the provincial Donbas city of Bakhmut, or Artyomovsk as it is known in Russia, has been described variously from on high in Washington, London and Berlin. When the likely outcome was unclear, the defense of Bakhmut was called heroic and demonstrative of the brave fighting spirit of the Ukrainians.

Casualty figures issued by Kiev and then trumpeted from Washington suggested that the Russians were stupidly throwing away the lives of their fighting men by using WWI style human waves of attackers who were decimated by the defenders. Russian lives are cheap was the message. The fact that Russian artillery on site outnumbered and outperformed Ukrainian artillery by a factor of five or seven to one was freely admitted by the Western propagandists as they pleaded for increased supplies to Kiev. They, nonetheless, issued casualty reports for the Russians that inverted the force correlation. It was assumed, obviously with reason, that the public was too lazy or too uninterested to do the arithmetic.

I had earlier taken on the nonsensical casualty claims:

The Russian forces fire ten times the number of shells the Ukrainians can fire. In a modern war artillery fire causes 65+% of all casualties. It is thus impossible that Ukraine is losing less soldiers than the Russians.The total ratio may well be 7 to 1 but it will certainly be to the advantage of the Russian forces side.

The reporting on the alleged not-fall of Bakhmut in mainstream media is similar nonsensical:

The New York Times writes:

As Russia Claims Victory in Bakhmut, Ukraine Sees Opportunity Amid Ruins

Russia’s capture of Bakhmut would be a powerful symbolic success for Moscow. It would represent the first Ukrainian city it has seized since Lysychansk last summer, and be a setback for Kyiv, which expended precious ammunition and sent some of its most capable forces to try to thwart Russia’s devastating monthslong assault on the city. Thousands of troops from both sides are believed to have been killed in nearly a year of intense fighting there.

Bakhmut has fallen. Why then is the NYT writing in the subjunctive ‘would’? It does not make sense.

The Washington Post does likewise:

As hold on Bakhmut slips, Ukrainian forces push to encircle city

Ukrainian forces have been reduced to small footholds in the devastated eastern city of Bakhmut, which despite its limited strategic importance has emerged as the war’s bloodiest battlefield. But they have made gains on the Russian flanks, in a move to encircle the city and extend the fight there, according to Ukrainian officials and military personnel in the field.

Ukraine still holds slivers of the city, including the area around what has become a landmark of Ukraine’s last redoubt: a destroyed sculpture of a Soviet MiG fighter jet, according to multiple military personnel involved in defending the position, which Russian forces continue to contest.

No. Ukraine does not hold ‘slivers of the city’. Videos published yesterday evidently prove that:

Ukraine Control Map @UAControlMap – 10:50 UTC · May 22, 202346/48 Wagner flag raise in south west Bakhmut near the destroyed MiG statue
Coordinates: 48.57570907, 37.96475216
Map view: Google

‘Encircling the city’ is likewise a dream.

Situation in Bakhmut on May 8

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2023 05 23 12 14w


Situation in Bakhmut on May 22

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2023 05 23 12 14

The scale of the map is on the bottom right. From it we can tell that the Russian forces, under attack, have moved back some 1 or 2 kilometers from the difficult to defend fields towards better suited positions after Ukrainian forces wasted their lives to open a corridor for the troops fleeing from Bakhmut. That attack happened on May 11. On the following day the Russian Defense Ministry said that the Ukrainian side, during the last 24 hours, had lost 1,725 men, 9 tanks and 55 armored combat vehicles. That was so far the biggest reported daily loss in this war. The lines on the flanks of Bakhmut have since been stabilized.

So where please is the ‘encirclement’? The maps show no attempt of one.

Yves Smith points out that the disinformation allures have seemingly turned into the believes of those who issues them:

US Geopolitics: Believing Impossible Things

In corporate America, there’s a decent risk that fakery will get caught out by competitors, short sellers, whistleblowers, and just plain careful reading of audited financials.

By contrast, in politics, reality avoidance is routinely the key to a long and successful-looking career, witness Eurocrats’ fondness for “kick the can” strategies. And that propensity is particularly dangerous when leadership groups have become both selfish and short-termist. There really was once upon a time some people who went into government service for the service part, and not for the revolving door and networking.

But now, the well-honed effectiveness of propaganda has encouraged politicians and their media amplifiers/allies to go hog wild with selling Big Lies. And the worst is there are no consequences for the perps.

The wee problem with the war in Ukraine and the escalating US eye-poking of China is neither is going very well, to the degree that the propaganda started fizzling out very quickly in the Global South and is losing its potency in the West.

It’s hard to keep up the pretense of a great inevitable Ukraine victory with Ukraine losing Bakhmut, after Zelensky made it the centerpiece of his Congressional love-fest last December. Oh, but Ukraine is still trying to deny it is lost, as they did for Mariupol and Soledar until well after the fact.

The believe into impossible things is not only with regards to the war in Ukraine but also with the bigger view towards China:

Similarly, US officials may have told themselves that much of the world regarded China with suspicion due to its often-overheated rhetoric and hypersensitivity to slights. But these self-comforting beliefs about China’s position on the world stage got a big wake up call with China brokering a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and then Syria.

Now China is making more trouble by wandering into America’s back yard, as in Europe, and talking up its napkin-doodle Ukraine peace plan.

The extreme hostile G7 communique on China is simply another expression of western delusion:

According to the Financial Times, the G7 has issued its strongest condemnation of China, and most of the other international mainstream media also highlight that it “amps up pressure on China.” It seems that the only way for the G7 to catch people’s attention and show its sense of presence is to speculate on the issues related to China.As a “rich countries’ club” that once accounted for up to 70% of the global economy, the G7 has been facing a serious existential crisis in recent years as its economic weight has been declining, coupled with a decline in global population share and perceived attractiveness.

The louder the anti-China rhetoric from the G7, the smaller its actual impact will be, as this is a natural law. This is because it would mean that G7 serves the strategic interests of the US rather than the welfare of the international community, making it difficult to receive any “assistance” but more difficult to make progress. It is very likely that in the end, the G7 will find that it has expended a lot of effort, but the result is only spinning its wheels.

The Hiroshima summit seems to have given the G7 a sense of “shaping history,” but this illusion will soon be blown away by the winds of reality, since without internal prosperity and development, external displays of strength are only superficial.

Unfortunately many people in the west  believe the bullshit their politicians and media are throwing at them. As Caitlin Johnstone observes:

The problem that underpins most other problems in modern times is that human minds are highly hackable, and that the science of hacking them at mass scale has been advancing since Bernays over a century ago. This is what keeps people consenting to the destructive and exploitative agendas of the powerful against their own interests.

Many people, maybe even most people, are to some extent aware that our entire civilization is bullshit. Relatively few are able to describe exactly how and why it’s bullshit, though, because there’s so much bullshit it’s hard to get a clear view of how the bullshit is happening.It’s hard to understand how and why our civilization is bullshit exactly because our civilization is bullshit. It’s rife with lies, the teachers feed us lies, the algorithms feed us lies, and we’re trained to look for information in areas that will turn up lies.

In a civilization that’s made of bullshit, it’s rare to gain solid enough footing and high enough ground to be able to look around and clearly see how all the bullshit is happening. Everything here is geared toward preventing us from gaining that footing. It takes hard, diligent work, and more than a little luck.

Unfortunately her conclusion is right.

Posted by b on May 22, 2023 at 14:25 UTC | Permalink

How China Is Using Artificial Intelligence in Classrooms

Godfree points out…

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2023 05 23 15 48

Wagner Finds Antique Weapons In Ukraine’s Underground Weapons Cache

Why I refrain from social media…

Unfortunately, we need to suffer parrots who don’t understand a word of Mandarin or Hokkienese, who cannot place Taiwan on the map, who cannot tell Taiwan from Thailand, yet consider themselves the world authority on China/Taiwan issues simply because they can produce a Fox Cable News invoice. Pathetic!

My response below:


The US congress is loaded with chicken hawk draft dodgers, as is the US administration. All words and zero nerve. Whom are you kidding? Your backing by the US Congress is worth no more than human refuse. The Congress had better make sure it has enough money to tide over the end of May first before worrying about Taiwan. LOL.

You are showing total ignorance of history and international law. The fact that the US recognizes the One China Policy is due to the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Proclamation from WWII. Never heard of them, right? Not surprised. It was not borne of some “good relationship” or US love of China, but international law that everyone must respect, or admit being a thug. Come on, let’s have some “Rule Based International Order”, OK?

You are welcome to come to fight and die for Taiwan independence. The Taiwanese would love you, as none of them wants to fight, and they are all betting on idiots like you to come fight and die for them, so they can keep making money. Put your acts where your words are and don’t be a chicken hawk.

Come to fight and die for Taiwan independence, so the DPP president Tsai Ing-wen and 2024 DPP candidate Lai Ching-teh can escape to the US to reunite with their huge families there. They will thank you.

INSANE: Young Americans Don’t Know ANYTHING!

Monument To The Unknown Bureaucrat

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Several countries have monuments to the Unknown Soldier, but perhaps only Iceland has a sculpture honoring — and lightly satirizing — the thankless, anonymous job of the bureaucrat. The 1994 sculpture by Magnús Tómasson depicts a man in a suit holding a briefcase, with his head and shoulders subsumed in a slab of unsculpted stone.

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Raeisi: Iran, Indonesia agree to trade in local currencies to defuse dollar dominance – Pars Today

Article HERE

Did you know that Japan used to be a vassal of China?

The King of Na gold seal (Japanese: 漢委奴国王印) is a solid gold seal discovered in the year 1784 on Shikanoshima Island in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. The seal is designated as a National Treasure of Japan.[1]

The seal is believed to have been cast in China and bestowed by Emperor Guangwu of Han upon a diplomatic official (envoy) visiting from Japan in the year 57 AD.

The five Chinese characters appearing on the seal identify it as the seal of the King of Na state of Wa (Japan), vassal state of the Han Dynasty.[2]

The seal is currently in the collection of the Fukuoka City Museum in Fukuoka, Japan.

The seal is very well known in Japan, as its taught in Japanese history books to be a cultural asset which ascertains how Japan as a nation came into being. Its the first known textual record of Japan as a country.[3]

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2023 05 28 08 31

Richard Wolff: This Is the Worst Economic Period in My Lifetime

Deep-Fried Turkey

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2023 05 22 16 47

Ingredients

  • 1 (10 to 12 pound) turkey
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 2 teaspoons pepper
  • 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 4 to 5 gallons peanut oil

Instructions

  1. Rinse and dry turkey.
  2. Remove neck and giblet bag from small cavity in front and the large body cavity.
  3. Generously season inside cavity with salt and pepper. Use as much cayenne pepper as taste buds will allow.
  4. Heat oil in cooking pot large enough to submerse turkey in hot oil.
  5. Heat oil to 350 degrees F to 375 degrees F.
  6. When oil is hot, using a sling of strong twine or a lifter, lower turkey into hot oil.
  7. Cook about 5 minutes per pound or until meat thermometer inserted in thickest part of thigh reaches 180 degrees F.

Makes 10 to 12 servings.

RED ALERT! US GOVERNMENT ISSUING SATELLITE PHONES, RUSSIA EVACUATE NUCLEAR WEAPONS, F16s WILL BE WW3

America is sick, and needs therapy

It is getting more ludicrous by the day!

main qimg 819a50819527c8b4344f8cc55e8c6c41
main qimg 819a50819527c8b4344f8cc55e8c6c41

The debt ceiling crisis looms over the US. But guess what? Its politicians are crying wolf, warning that this crisis is “playing into the hands of China”.

These days, in shambolic America, everything problematic has a China angle, including debt ceiling.

They blame Chinese imports for their industrial decline.

Soon, they will blame China for their constipation or erectile dysfunction.

It’s Sino-phobia gone mad!

Unfortunately for China, irrational fear of China is the only thing that unites a bitterly divided Congress and country. Politicians speak the same language only when attacking China. Senator Patty Murray, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has gone so far as to declare: “The more we play with default….the more we prove that China and our competitors are right.”

Has US-China relations reached a point of no return?

Post-Trump, America is a hotbed for extremists.

So far, not a single official, elected or appointed, is brave enough to step forward to dilute the venom against a peaceful country whose only sin is outshining America.

China is busy supporting infrastructure projects in more than 150 countries, while the US has poured hundreds of billions into needless wars.

Insanely jealous, America finds in China its convenient bogeyman.

Then there is Republican Senator Susan Collins. She says: “The world faces an authoritarian government that seeks to regain its hegemonic past and dismantle the international order created by the United States and our allies following World War II.”

What a load of nonsense!

For two centuries, China was a humiliated, not a hegemonic, country. Where is this hegemonic past that Collins speaks of?

Her historical ignorance is alarming. As for “dismantling” the international order, look who’s talking? Who’s behind the military conflicts, big and small, in the last 75 years? China merely defended its territorial integrity. It has never disrupted the international order, whatever that is.

What then about the South China Sea?

Well, you are talking about China’s own backyard through which more than 50% of the world’s commerce flows.

It is a choke-point that China must either defend or be strangled by US encirclement.

Militarizing these islands is a must for self-survival.

Or else, China might as well sign its own death warrant.

What about Taiwan?

Under America’s one-China policy, it is a part of Chinese territory, and thus strictly a domestic issue, and in no way a slice of the global order. Ditto Hong Kong and Xinjiang. All internal affairs, all exclusively Chinese concerns.

Whipping up anti-China hysteria is America’s biggest con job, thanks to Trump the pathological con artist.

Want to know a little secret? China owes its stupendous success in the last 40 years, largely, to one thing: national unity.

While America is paralyzed by partisanship, and India is torn apart by genocidal village-burning religious or ethnic hatred, China promotes ethnic harmony and shared prosperity, bestowing preferential benefits on its minorities.

Free from division and distractions, ethnic peace is in China’s vital national interest.

That’s why, there is zero hate crime in every street across every city in China. Minorities coexist peacefully.

I totally discount the possibility of persecution of innocent Uyghurs.

Why should Xinjiang be a singularity? It’s illogical.

It’s unChinese. It rings untrue.

China doesn’t have a history of mistreating minorities.

Its respect for ethnicity is miles ahead of racist America.

China, however, won’t tolerate foreign-fomented Muslim terrorism. Like any country targeted by Islamic terrorists, China acts forcefully to contain them. There are re-education centers, yes, but they exist to re-absorb indoctrinated trouble-makers into society.

Discrimination runs counter to China’s pacific approach to inter-ethnic relations. If anything, there is reverse discrimination in favor of ethnic minorities.

I trust my own eyes.

I distrust American disinformation.

Pre-Trump, America used to enjoy a rosy and cozy relationship with China. Now it seems like a distant memory.

Today’s America is a troubled nation, angry at itself, and angrier at others who know how to govern. It’s no longer fit to be in the world’s driver’s seat.

The US is deeply troubled by China paranoia. Uncle Sam, you’d better book an appointment with your therapist, and have your head examined.

Americans Don’t Know Anything About America

There Are Now 3D Printing Spurs That You Can Attach To The Back Of Your Crocs

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Even outlaws need to sip their whiskey with a comfortable pair of Crocs on their feet, which is why today’s post is bringing out the inner-cowboy in all of us. Transport your heels to the Wild West with these Crocs spurs, which fit perfectly on the back strap of your favorite pair of Crocs!

More: Etsy h/t: sadanduseless

crocs spurs1
crocs spurs1

These spurs (or sprocs) currently fit the full size range of the regular Croc Clog. The All Terrain, Yukon Vista, and other wide strap Crocs models will not fit.

crocs spurs3
crocs spurs3

They’re made out of plastic and come in 5 different colors: black, white, silver, copper, and marble. The shop’s description also says to reach out to them if you’re looking for custom-colored Crocs spurs, as they can do additional colors, though they also include that these orders take a little longer to fulfill.

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crocs spurs5

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crocs spurs4

OMG – Exposed by CNN

  • Chinese hiding behind an American flag
  • apparently its name is ZPMC(振华 or 振華), literally meaning MAKE CHINA GREAT AGAIN in chinese – I have NOT been able to verify this
  • Apparently even the American flag is Chinese

If you are a despicable thief stealing from the rest of the world and when any country object to your thievery you bomb them and kill millions into smitten, you need to stage war after war after war.

And if you war monger and coerce either or both sides buys arms for you, war is very profitable.

If the side you picked wins you now have a slave vassal state and you can choose your puppet to run the nation for the benefit of US and UK, why won’t you trouble making and war mongering 24/7 and 365 days a year!

Why?

Any fool can see it benefits the US and UK to cause and create trouble all over the world.

The real question is that is it good for UK and the US in the long run.

I don’t think so.

why?

The trouble with the US and UK U.S. that it expects the world will be stupid and don’t see through their evil intentions.

They do.

And by 2023 180/195 nations don’t want and don’t allow the US and UK to manipulate and interfere in their nations anymore.

Today the US is very very very weak politically.

The Global South and most of Asia, And Eastern Europe are aligned to de-dollarise and move its economy away from the U.S. and UK.

So the net effect of fucking up the world may seem good when nations are poor and disorganized from 1945–2000.

But as nations progressed, people become sensible and clever the evil scheme is so very evident.

You mentioned China unites them, the truth they all jointly see no way out but to stop the US and UK excesses.

The world won’t allow 12.5% of humanity to rule the 87.5%! History will be told years from now the starting point is the Ukraine war.

Arms Stockpile in Ukrainian Salt Mine

China, US ‘candid’ trade talks in Washington pave way for addressing ‘core issues’ in ties

Exchange paves way for addressing ‘core issues’ in frayed ties
Published: May 26, 2023 09:39 PM Updated: May 26, 2023 11:11 PM
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China’s commerce minister met with US commerce secretary and US trade representative in the US on Thursday and Friday respectively and held “candid” talks in a move that Chinese analysts said could be a prelude to further high-level engagement between the world’s two largest economies and could pave the way for China-US trade and economic ties to play more of a ballast role to help improve frayed bilateral relations.

However, the resumption of high-level interactions comes with Washington’s provocations and attempts to crack down on China in many fields, prompting calls for the US to adjust to a rational, realistic perception of China and to respect China’s stance and bottom line.

China’s Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao met with US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in Washington on Thursday before attending the 2023 APEC Ministers Responsible for Trade Meeting in Detroit. The two sides had “candid, professional and constructive exchanges” of views on China-US economic and trade relations as well as issues of common concern, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said in a statement on its website on Friday morning.

The Chinese side expressed key concerns on the US’ economic and trade policies toward China, on semiconductors and export controls, as well as its outbound investment reviews, according to MOFCOM.

Wang also met with US Trade Representative Katherine Tai on Friday and the two had “candid, pragmatic and in-depth exchanges” of views on China-US economic and trade relations as well as regional and multilateral issues of common concern, according to MOFCOM.

The Chinese side expressed concerns regarding key issues, including the US economic and trade policies toward China, Taiwan-related topics in the economic and trade domain, the Indo-Pacific economic framework and Section 301 tariffs. Both parties agreed to maintain communication.

The meetings between the Chinese commerce minister and US commerce secretary and trade representative, along with the recent resumption of high-level engagements between Beijing and Washington, are one of the most important meetings between the two countries after the US shot down an unmanned Chinese civilian airship and hyped the “China threat”, which drove China-US relations to a new low. It also happened after China’s top diplomat Wang Yi and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met in Vienna and held “candid, in-depth, substantive and constructive” talks for more than 10 hours on May 10 and May 11.

“China and the US have been maintaining the necessary communication, but the key is that the US cannot engage in communication and cooperation with China while continuing to hurt China’s interests,” Mao Ning, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said on Friday, noting that the US should meet China halfway to bring China-US relations back to the right track of sound and steady growth.

Significant meeting

Chinese experts said the Thursday meeting is of major importance, as it takes one step further the pledge by the leaders of the two countries from last year’s Bali meeting to manage differences and disagreements and prevent confrontation and conflict.

It is believed that the meeting could help create an environment to solve, mitigate and manage differences in areas linked to trade and economic issues, the ballast of China-US relations, analysts said, holding the belief that such engagement could be a barometer of how much the two sides are heading toward the further restoration of high-level exchanges after months of recrimination.

The US’ crackdown and containment of China in the field of advanced technology must stop and “The concerns raised by Minister Wang are clear, detailed and to the point,” He Weiwen, a senior fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, told the Global Times on Friday.

The fact that the two ministers met for the first time since the pandemic in person in Washington showed that the working-level communications between the two sides have borne fruit, Gao Lingyun, an expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times Friday.

According to MOFCOM, China and the US agreed to set up communication channels to maintain and strengthen exchanges on specific economic and trade issues in addition to areas of cooperation, meaning “some new channels could be set up for issues that cannot be solved by existing ones,” Gao anticipated.

A readout from the US Department of Commerce said the discussions were “candid and substantive” and that the meeting was “part of ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication and responsibly manage the relationship.”

Chinese experts said that the core issues hindering China-US trade and economic ties at the moment are tariffs and the US crackdown on Chinese companies.

The US side has come to realize that bilateral trade grew despite the trade war and that trade with China has win-win results, experts said, noting that the meetings between the Chinese commerce minister and Raimondo and US Trade Representative Katherine Tai could lead to trade ties playing an expanded ballast role in bilateral relations.

Experts said the Chinese side is making sincere efforts to improve bilateral ties.

China’s new ambassador to the US, Xie Feng, who arrived at his post this week, said on his Twitter account that his mission is to enhance China-US exchanges and cooperation, and he looks forward to working with his American colleagues in the future.

Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen on Friday met with Colm Rafferty, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, and representatives from some American companies to exchange views on bilateral trade and economic relations, US companies’ operations in China and China’s business environment.

However, Chinese experts also warned against being overly optimistic about these meetings, despite the positive signals that came from them.

According to the US readout, Raimondo raised concerns about the recent spate of Chinese actions against US companies operating in China.

Chinese experts noted that legal action taken against some US consultancy firms and the cybersecurity review by relevant Chinese authorities on Micron’s products sold in China have been carried out in accordance with the law and are based on facts. They should not be confused with or compared to the US’ broad crackdown on Chinese companies under the pretext of national security.

The US has used national security as a pretext to put more than 1,200 Chinese companies and individuals on various lists and subjected them to all kinds of restrictions despite the lack of hard evidence of wrongdoing, spokesperson Mao Ning said at Wednesday’s routine press briefing, noting that such moves constitute economic coercion and are unacceptable.

Mao on Friday also called on all parties to jointly oppose the US’ economic coercion and bullying practices and safeguard the multilateral trading system following the US’ grouping of its allies to contain China.

No easy path

Despite the resumption of high-level interactions between China and the US in the economic and trade fields, Washington has not reined in its provocations and attempts to crack down on China in many fields.
The US played a major role in hyping China-related topics at the just concluded Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima. The communiqué and other documents adopted at the summit smeared China and brazenly interfered in China’s internal affairs.

Arms sales to the island of Taiwan continue as Taiwan media said the US $500 million sale through the Presidential Drawdown Authority had recently begun, and that FIM-92 Stinger missiles arrived at Taoyuan Airport on Thursday.

A bipartisan House committee on Wednesday adopted two reports recommending that Congress take action over China’s Taiwan island and the Xinjiang region. The committee will focus on human rights before shifting to military and economic concerns, media reported.

Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Friday that the US wanted to engage with China on economic and trade issues due to its own needs, but will not abandon containment in other fields.

The US still upholds the old method of dealing with China based on strength – ordering China to cooperate according to US needs and creating problems to maximize its bargaining chips, while not respecting China’s stance and bottom line, Li said.

The US’ hegemonic mentality and paradoxical behavioral pattern are the crux of the difficulties in China-US relations, said Li, who urged the US to adjust to a healthy, rational and realistic perception of China’s development, recognize that China’s growing influence will not constitute a “threat,” and handle China-US relations based on equality and mutual benefit, not hegemony and a new cold war.

Analysts acknowledge that due to the US’ imbalance in its mentality and policy, fierce competition and confrontation will not disappear and China-US relations will continue to be very complex with interests and conflicts intertwined.

As two major powers in the world, the most likely scenario would be to engage in certain areas of common interests while being cautious in managing differences and avoiding conflicts, Li said.

Dr Pepper Texas Chocolate Cake

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aeb494c2c5796cedafb5e435523f1103

Ingredients

Cake

  • 2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 cup dark brown sugar
  • 1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
  • 1 cup Dr Pepper
  • 1/2 cup chocolate chips
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 1 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Frosting

  • 3/4 cup butter-flavored vegetable shortening
  • 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
  • 4 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
  • 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1/4 cup Dr Pepper
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two 9-inch round cake pans, tapping out any extra flour.
  2. Cake: Sift together flour, granulated sugar, brown sugar, cocoa and baking soda into a bowl and set aside.
  3. Pour the Dr Pepper into a saucepan and add the chocolate chips. Heat on low, stirring often, until the chips are just melted. Remove from heat and set aside.
  4. Combine eggs, buttermilk, oil and vanilla extract in a mixer bowl and mix on medium speed until combined, about 2 minutes.
  5. With the mixer running, slowly pour in the Dr Pepper-chocolate mixture and continue beating until combined, about 1 minute.
  6. With mixer on low, gradually add the dry ingredients. Increase speed to medium and beat 2 minutes more.
  7. Divide the batter between the twp pans.
  8. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted into the center comes out clean.
  9. Cool the layers in the pan for 10 minutes, then run a knife around the edges and flip the pans over onto a cooling rack. Gently lift off the pans and let the cake layers cool completely.
  10. Frosting: Beat shortening and butter in a mixer bowl until soft and fluffy.
  11. Add the confectioners’ sugar and cocoa, and continue mixing until combined.
  12. Stir together the Dr Pepper and vanilla extract and very slowly pour it into the frosting, beating with mixer on high speed to thin it a bit. Continue beating until light and fluffy, about 1 minute.
  13. Set first layer, top down, on a flat plate. Spread 1 cup of the frosting on top.
  14. Top with the second cake layer and spread remaining frosting on the top and sides of the cake, making attractive swirls.

Yield: 12 servings

https://youtu.be/MPOsf_EpHxs

A free Patreon video for you all to enjoy

I posted this video up after repeated banning by you-tube.

It discusses the paper-trail of how COVID was developed, funded, patented, and used by the United States.

Five minutes.

 

Nazi running Europe by the Nose, brain-dead American “leadership” in “control” and the rest of us running terrified

Ugh.

I’ve been busy. Many changes. Not only Geo-political, but personal as well.

I made a driving mistake, and the AI road robot fined me. My bad, but I was unfamiliar with the road. Sigh.

It’s life.

Disappointing. Very.

But it’s better than what some others are experiencing.

We start with some depressing news…

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2023 05 07 08 20

You just cannot speak your peace in a Nazi regime.

Ah.

I hope he survives.

Meanwhile, Changes everywhere.

Embrace the change, and plan to surf the changes.

Go a surfing!

Russia Returns to Top-10 World’s Largest Economies First Since 2014

Russia Returns to Top-10 World’s Largest Economies First Since 2014.
Article HERE

I think that a great comparison can be had by using PPP-GDP.  By that metric (which is the preferred one for comparing nations),  Russia has been close to Germany for many years - it was slightly ahead of Germany before the sanctions began in 2014 and now it is slightly behind. 

And yet the West demeans Russia’s economy while it holds up Germany as an economic power house.  Only 5 of the 10 top economies now are G7 economies. Those that are in the BRI and BRICS+ have China’s economic engine to help them grow faster.

Article HERE

China: The Roots of NATO’s Madness

The Chinese are not only fully awake but fully cognisant of the Anglo-Saxons’ wiles in the debt, and semiconductor sectors, as well as in honey, Hello Kitty and all others.

“Let China sleep. For when she wakes, the world will tremble”. Although The Dictionnaire Napoléon attributes this apothegm not to the great Napoleon (who loved a good bon mot almost as much as he loved a good battle) but to British actor David Niven playing the British Ambassador during the Boxer rebellion in the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster 55 days at Peking, it matters not.

China has arrived and she is shaking up the world to a degree not even her Japanese neighbour achieved during Japan’s recent years of economic glory. That being so, we must gauge the force of this Godzilla who, horror of NATO horrors, is not only brokering peace in the Middle East but, more to the heart of this essay, is honey-laundering atop a mountain of debt that has our NATO overlords sweating bricks.

First stop is honey. China has agreed to annually import some 50,000 tonnes of honey from sanctions-struck Iran, which needs every nickel and dime it can scrape together. Because the Iranian bee industry, as this informative article explains, has huge upside potential, I am happy China is helping Iran’s 140,000 beekeepers stay afloat. Whereas in Western countries, bee-keeping is generally a side product some farmers engage in, in Syria, and I imagine, in Iran, bee-keepers follow their nomadic bees about as they migrate from one locale to the other; as Iran, for example, has over four times the amount of flower species Western Europe has Iran, like Syria, is a veritable heaven on earth for bees. Although NATO’s Syrian war of extermination has severely disrupted Syria’s bees and Syria’s bee-keepers, this Sino-Iranian deal shows there is hope for the bee-keepers of Iran, Iraq and Syria and, for that, I could not be happier.

Allied to that, China, the world’s largest honey producer, is accused of dumping its own honey onto the international honey market and thereby undercutting the EU’s 60,0000 bee producers and, crucially, Ukraine, against which Western countries have no hope of competing, at least on price.

But, in China’s defence, it must be said that such activities are part and parcel of today’s international “rules based order” systems of trade. Here, for example, is a report of Irish farmers managing Saudi Arabia’s massive cattle farms. Global beef production has changed and one either goes for the quantity that Saudi Arabia and Bill Gates’ own mega farms represent or one goes for quality, for such things as Kobe beef, Irish whiskey and French luxury goods.

Irish whiskey, which is a much finer product than the cough mixtures sister Scotland palms off to an unsuspecting world, is important to our analysis as Ukraine’s rotund Ambassador to Ireland has demanded Ireland boycott its own Irish whiskey, boycotting being a tactic the Irish not only invented but excelled at. Leaving aside that ignoramus and all other considerations, if Ireland can grab back some of the market in China (and Russia) from the Scots, that would be a good thing because China, whether the CIA likes it or not, is the new Roaring 20s Japan.

That means the Chinese have a lot of money to splurge on Irish whiskey, French luxury goods and Hello Kitty. As the Japanese, during their golden years, accounted for over 70% of Louis Vuitton’s global sales, Irish whiskey producers, French luxury goods’ makers, Iranian beekeepers and the custodians of Japan’s kawaii culture cannot ignore China.

The Chinese pay for all their Hello Kitty merchandise, their Scottish cough mixtures and their French perfumes by exporting stuff, things like bullet trains that they reversed-engineered from Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Because China is growing so fast, there are opportunities galore there in everything from honey and Kobe beef to Volkswagen cars and aircraft carriers, all of which China, with its reverse-engineering hacks, can pay for with its export surpluses or by taking on some debt.

As with honey, so also is China a major agricultural producer in her own right and her farms range from the very primitive to state-of-the-art wonders that match anything the Netherlands, or even Bill Gates’ sinister mega-ranches have to offer. China’s main constraint in this respect is its waters are in the wrong place and it is not at all clear that the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, its traditional water source, will cover its future needs.

To tackle that and countless other development bottlenecks China, to accommodate the growing expectations of her countless masses, must invest heavily on a scale the world has never previously witnessed. And it must borrow heavily too as borrowing is a means of spreading investments one might not otherwise be able to afford over longer terms.

And that brings us to China: The Root of Madness, the CIA’s 1967 Cold War documentary “explaining” China through the CIA’s prism. But China must be explained through a Chinese, not an American prism and, if CIA spy Theodore H White, who produced that garbage, had bothered to read Chairman Mao, he would have come across far more references to ancient Chinese dynasties than he would to Karl Marx or Freddy Engels.

Because White’s Anglo-Saxons fret far too much about China’s debt policies rather than their own, we will now compare and contrast one with the other. Traditionally, there were two basic economic systems, the German-Japanese system where banks and borrowing were the financial engines of their sure but steady growth and the Anglo-American system where the riskier, roller-coaster stock market ruled the roost. China’s approach to debt, yet again, is best described as Japan’s on steroids.

In the United States, to coin a Napoleonic bon mot, debt has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. The vultures’ Klondyke that was payday lending, where the Anglo-Saxon poor, living from pay cheque to pay cheque, paid unsustainable loan-sharking rates to their creditors, has been replaced with predatory smart phone apps, where poor Americans are now reduced to buying their meals on credit and paying through the nose for them, as Uncle Sam catches them in micro debt traps from which there is no escape.

At the macro international level, African and other nations have long been stuck in a similarly slick debt trap they too have no means of escaping, not least because the IMF and the World Bank, their supposed saviours, were tasked ab ovo with keeping them enslaved to Uncle Sam and his Anglo-Saxon partners in crime.

Whatever one may think about the Bible, Proverbs 22:7: gets it right when it proclaims that “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is slave of the lender”. That has certainly been the case in Africa, as it is now in tiny Ireland, which was forced, almost at gunpoint, to take on over 40% of the EU’s debt, and Ukraine, which is currently fighting Russia on a maxed-out credit card.

That credit card will have to be cleared by Ukraine handing over its crown jewels to BlackRock, Vanguard and its other creditors and by paying interest on the mountains of debt it has racked up to fight its unwinnable war. Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Halliburton and Uncle Sam’s other seasoned vultures are already in advanced discussions to run Ukraine’s energy industry and the leprechaun vultures of Vichy Ireland have pledged to exploit (“rebuild”, as they call it) Ukraine’s Rivne Oblast region as part of their reward for propping up Zelensky’s rump Reich and sniggering at those tens of thousands of young Ukrainians slaughtered to make these scams possible.

Rustem Umerov, who heads Ukraine’s State Property Fund (SPF), claims there are more than 3,500 companies which are listed as state-owned, with almost 1,800 of them bankrupt and non-functional. The list for a privatisation fire-sale to Zelensky’s Western allies includes distilleries and grain elevators, which could be of interest to investors, as well as hundreds of abandoned facilities, which will be given away for nickels on the dollar. Umerov is hoping to earn over $400 million by selling an elite set of companies ranging from a fertilizer producer to utilities, smelters and an insulin maker. Ammonia maker Odessky Pryportovy Zavod, titanium producer United Mining, Zaporozhye Titanium-Magnesium Plant, insulin manufacturer Indar, and power generator Centrenergo PJSC will be among the first to be sold at knock down prices and up to $200 million of state-owned land is ear-marked to follow shortly afterwards. Because Russian speakers have no rights in Ukraine, the Demurinsky Mining and Processing Plant, which develops reserves of titanium-zirconium sands and which is owned by Russian tycoon Mikhail Shelkov, is also scheduled to be sold. Rusal’s Nikolaev alumina refinery is also scheduled for “privatisation”, as is the confiscated property of Russians Vladimir Yevtushenkov and Oleg Deripaska.

The Chinese system, with its supposed Muslim, Tibetan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Hello Kitty issues, operates a trifle differently from Zelensky’s Ukrainian gangsters and there is no real point in getting our Chinese-made knickers in a twist about any of it. All of NATO’s faux Chinese concerns are blowbacks from the growth of China‘s economy and the end of the easy money that flowed from America’s property and dot.com bubbles. Because Easy Street is over, the Yanks must now re-discover The Zen of Working Hard even though, like their European vassals, they are no longer up to the task. The Chinese, like the Japanese workers of Toyota or the Koreans of Kia Motor Works, just plod on and on, accumulating wealth, Iranian honey and other delights for their children and, given her demographics, her children’s children. And good on them.

This is not to say that every Chinese, Japanese or Korean citizen has been a winner but their systems have been designed to give the greatest possible opportunities they can to the greatest number of their citizens. Though the Chinese love gambling, they have not followed Uncle Sam’s casino capitalism model but, like the post-War Japanese, they have instead worked hard and likewise pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.

And, just as Japan was once the major player in long-term sovereign debt, so now has that poisoned chalice passed to Beijing. If Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Zambia and Grenada wish to escape from the debt burdens Uncle Sam has saddled them with, they must look to Beijing. And while China has played hard-ball, they have been nowhere nearly as harsh as Elliott Investment Management and other American critics of China that picked Africa cleaner than might a flock of ravenous vultures.

But what of China, with its sweet tooth for Iranian honey, its Scottish cough mixtures and its Hello Kitty regalia? The Chinese government is tasked with allowing its citizens enjoy such fruits of their labour, whilst maintaining its armed forces to defend its citizens and instituting a system that allows China earn the wherewithal to pay for all such frivolities. Given China accounts for a fifth of the world’s population, that is a huge task, human resource and financial management on truly Biblical scales the world has never previously witnessed.

And, as with Japan during its golden years debt, albeit with Chinese characters, is an integral part of that process. Though personal, institutional and government debt in China are all huge, should we really be as concerned as our narcissistic Anglo-Saxon overlords are about it?

I think not. Debt, the Anglo-Saxon economists tell us, offers us more choice, the ability, for example, to get a mortgage loan on a house, rather than forever renting or living in a roadside wigwam. Debt, lots of it, allows Americans to send their kids to College which, depending on what they study, may or may not be a good investment. Of course, it also allows the Yanks to buy lots of Chinese goods from Walmart but let’s just take that as a given of Americans’ consumer fixations.

All the more so as China is also buying into the consumer craze. Chinese citizens are even hiring American women to bear their children which the CIA’s Heritage Foundation believe is a national security risk. Although it is fine and dandy for Americans to rent Ukrainian wombs, the burgeoning Chinese-American “rent-a-womb” industry, in which ageing Chinese couples draft fertile American women to give birth to offspring with U.S. citizenship is, they say, not playing to the CIA’s rules based order, whose lack of logic China’s economic ascent has placed under immense strain.

Surrogate babies are just one symptom. America is not only one gigantic debt mountain but its debt markets dwarf its stock markets, which are the world’s biggest. The Japanese (again) long saw this and that there were, for them, easy pickings to be had by lending to American states and cities on the correct presumption that the U.S. government would not allow those states and cities to go bankrupt. The Japanese who, like the Koreans and Chinese, are diligent savers, have been keeping the U.S. economy afloat for decades now with their soft loans which, like all loans, must be paid back eventually.

But what of the Chinese? U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen has acknowledged the threat China poses to U.S. hegemony (the rules’ based order as the Anglo Saxons call it) and the need to contain China by sanctions, by controlling intellectual property rights and by bad-mouthing them in NATO’s media over human rights and the plight of panda bears.

This is, again, a re-run of America’s post oil crisis attack on Japan because Japan has the art of car-making down to a tee. There is simply no way the Americans, the Germans or the Scandinavians can compete with the Japanese auto makers or, indeed, the Chinese, who are not only the new Japanese but who have entire armies of engineers improving the efficiency of cars and everything else they produce.

And that includes Taiwanese microchips, which Uncle Sam clings to as a drowning man might cling to a straw. As no country, from the Sumerians of antiquity to the Anglo-Saxons of our own era, has managed to monopolise a particular technology forever, Taiwanese microchips are, as the late Chairman Mao might have put it, a competitive paper tiger, childish Japanese origami that will vanish with a gust of divine wind.

Uncle Sam thinks differently and has ordered its Taiwanese and Korean colonies to stop selling semiconductor chips to China. America has also demanded that German companies Merck, and BASF, which supply Asian chip-makers with critical chemicals for production, follow the example of the Dutch who, on the Yanks’ orders, have severely restricted exports of their semi-conductors to the Middle Kingdom.

Though NATO, like Samson of old, hopes these export restrictions will cripple China’s ability to develop advanced technologies, as well as its capability to produce semiconductors, the tide of modern history, where competitive advantages cannot be held for long, suggest this pathetic boycotting will fail. Despite China being Berlin’s most important trading partner for the seventh year in a row now, because Germany remains a grovelling slave to America, we can assume the Pentagon will get their way here and further damage Germany (and the Netherlands). Talk about global supply chain hara kiri by those emasculated oafs!

NATO should, of course, have let China’s semiconductor industry sleep. Beijing has launched a national security review into Micron Dram, one of three dominant players in the global memory chip market alongside South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. As with Louis Vuitton, so also is it with Dram, where mainland China and Hong Kong generates 25 per cent of its $31bn annual revenue. If Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol accedes to Uncle Sam’s request to ban the sale of their microchips to China, then he is even more stupid than any Irish sniveller who boycotts Irish whiskey on the word of the obese Ukrainian grifter, who has the gig of loud-mouthed Ambassador to Vichy Ireland.

Although the Pentagon believes that their competitive edge in microchips will stave off the Chinese dragon, that is not where the true fight is. The fact of the matter is the United States and its puppet allies long ago exported the whole logistics chain to China and thereby made China the world’s logistical hub, its Middle Kingdom if you will. Not only is that almost impossible to undo but there are over a billion Chinese who have a vested interest in maintaining that emerging status quo that so upsets our Anglo-Saxon friends.

Gold, by way of illustration of that latter point, is the easiest of metals to work with and it is the first metal mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 2:11-12). And, though gold jewellery is almost universally popular, the North Italians are the world’s best at fabricating gold, simply because they have long held the logistical hubs, even from long before Romulus and Remus founded Rome.

Although American puppets like Ursula von der Leyen can threaten hell and damnation on the Chinese economy, German and French automakers are making more coin by producing cars in China than they are in Europe. Why? Because China has the logistical hubs and one part of China is not squabbling with another for the right to produce hub caps, as the various European states do with each other. Europe is an organisational mess and China, as with Japan’s Hello Kitty and auto industries, is not.

And, when we ask whether the Biden family’s control of the semiconductor industry can stop China, we have to conclude that it cannot and, again, Japan shows us why. When the Europeans first reached Japan, they brought muskets with them to The Land of the Rising Sun where such a technology was unknown but where the Europeans were amazed that Japanese steel was far superior to anything they had previously encountered in Borrell’s European garden.

The Japanese, who had never previously clapped eyes on a musket, not only solved the crucial European problem of how to stop rain destroying the gun-powder but, within six months of first clapping eyes on them, were exporting muskets throughout the rest of Eastern Asia. Following the 1904/5 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese determined that they would have to match the German Leica company in terms of lenses. Not only did the Japanese match them but they far out-paced them in less than half of the time they had allocated to that objective. If the Americans think they can stop the Chinese semiconductor tide, they best import some more Chinese or Japanese brains because it is plain as day they have a critical shortage of grey matter, as well as a profound ignorance on how inter-connected the intermediate industries of China, Korea and Japan are.

The Chinese economy, their national pay packet if you will, continues to increase, by an impressive 4.5% in the first quarter of 2023, as it happens, meaning it is in a better position to pay off or roll over any outstanding debt and, of course, to buy more whiskey, more French perfumes and more Hello Kitty kitsch.

Yankee land, meanwhile, just prints more dollar bills and spends a staggering $500 billion annually servicing their debt, even as they imagine China would not develop a debt market of their own and thereby sink the American smoke and mirrors economy. For the fact of the matter is China’s debt is not a problem and will not be a problem as long as China can manage it. And so far, as with Japan, there is no sign of a major crisis. For the Good Ship China, it seems to be steady as she goes and to hell with Moody’s and the other partisan naysayers.

To illustrate China’s strength, let’s once again turn our eyes towards Japan, whose currency is the yen. Upon hearing that yen meant circle in English, American war lord Douglas MacArthur decreed that there would be 360 yen to the Yankee dollar. It is currently trading at 135 to the dollar, which is well within its recent trading band. The Chinese yuan is at 7 to the dollar and it too is within recent trading bands. China, however, is in a much stronger position than the U.S. or any of its satrapies to push the yuan, and therefore the dollar, any way it pleases. The boot is, in other words, increasingly on the Chinese and not the NATO foot.

Here, in conclusion, is 1900 footage of a French damsel in Saigon throwing Vietnamese children grain, like they were foraging chickens. The Anglo-Saxons should know that those days are, thanks to the armed might of South East Asians and their allies, gone and, thanks to the economic might of those countries, they are not returning. The United States, together with its German, Dutch and other vassals, best acknowledge and live with that fact or be prepared to take a turn at foraging themselves when their own stupidity collapses their own side of the global economic system. As for the Chinese, they are not only fully awake but fully cognisant of the Anglo-Saxons’ wiles in the debt, and semiconductor sectors, as well as in honey, Hello Kitty and all others.

China: The Roots of NATO’s Madness

Gorflautorillas (Phoenix Suns Gorilla’s Flautas)

These are great topped with guacamole and served with Spanish rice and beans.

2023 05 07 09 17
2023 05 07 09 17

Ingredients

Flautas

  • 2 dozen corn tortillas
  • Vegetable oil
  • 5 cups Meat Filling

Meat Filling

  • 5 cups cooked, shredded beef roast
  • 1/2 cup chopped hot green chiles, peeled and seeded (fresh or canned)
  • Salt, to taste
  • Pepper, to taste
  • Garlic powder, to taste

Instructions

Flautas

  1. For each flauta, soften and heat 1 tortilla by dipping it into 2 inches of hot oil. With tongs, hold in heated oil several seconds, or until soft enough to roll.
  2. Spoon 3 to 4 tablespoons warm Meat Filling across center of soft tortilla; roll it.
  3. Arrange in casserole.
  4. Cover dish and place in 250 degrees F oven to keep warm until ready to serve.

Meat Filling

  1. Mix beef, onion and chiles in saucepan and simmer, adding a little water for moisture but not enough to make a sauce.
  2. Season with salt, pepper and garlic powder.
  3. Keep warm.

Why the crusader nation leaders keep doing meaningless things?

The Commemorating of Vietnam war is like the annual commemorating of the Anzac war: a failed invasion of Turkey resulting in massive lost of invader soldier’s lives
Vietnam's communist government has demanded Australia cease issuing commemorative coins that, it says, show the flag of the toppled US-backed South Vietnam, a claim Canberra has denied.

Key points:

Vietnam requested a halt to the coins' circulation

The Royal Australian Mint said the design reflects the colours of the ribbons of service medals awarded to Australians who served in Vietnam

More than 60,000 Australian soldiers served in the Vietnam War

Article HERE

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The USA hasn’t had democracy during my lifetime. It’s kind of complicated, we do vote and our vote matters, but it is money that determines what candidates we can vote for and the money mostly comes from oligarchs. So the US is really an oligarchy sliding toward plutocracy and not a democracy.

Human rights and freedom haven’t collapsed-yet though there is a fascist movement. Fascism had been a slow developing movement since the early 1950s but got some leads in 2016. Of Trump or one of the other fascists comes to power again they will attempt to suppress the democrats. Once there is only one real party, then is when Human rights in the US will cease to exist.

Will a fascist government in the US attempt to disconnect the public people from politics and otherwise allow freedom of self determination? Or, Will fascism become militarized and suppress civil rights like Stalin our North Korea? I don’t know.

Capitalism took a strange turn in 2007 where it constantly requires intervention by the central bank known as the Federal Reserve or just Fed. Does this mean that Capitalism US style has failed and it is being kept alive on something akin to a feeding tube? I don’t know.

Also, to what extent central banks in other countries rely on the US central bank? Foreign banks relied heavily on the fed during the recovery after 2007. There have been three recent bank failures which are concerning.

A recent and interesting turn of events is that the US together with Canada is not only self sufficient in Petroleum production, the IS has become the number one exporter of petroleum in the form of distillates up to the equivalent of 7 million barrels a day in Petroleum distillates. What this means for the world is that the US no longer cares so much about what happens in the Middle East.

Gas stations in the US are already noticing lower sales because of EVs. This means that, the US will have even more distillates to export in the coming years. These foreign sales will boost capitalism in the US and reduce reliance on printing virtual money. It will also reduce the impact of losing dollar hegemony.

I don’t know what it all means. Do words like economy, freedom, and democracy make sense as artificial general intelligence emerges? I’m old but I’m sticking around to see what happens.

This particular program is terrible with faces, but it shows great promise once you experiment with it a bit.

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Chinese researchers make a major breakthrough in 6G communication

Use terahertz frequency communication and achieve ultra-fast communication.

The technology used for this real-time data transmission has been dubbed as terahertz orbital angular momentum communication, the SCMP said in its report.

Terahertz refers to communication in the frequency range of 100 GHz and 10 THz of the electromagnetic spectrum. The higher frequency range of this technology enables faster data transfer rates and more information to be transmitted. Terahertz communication has also attracted interest for use in military environments since it offers high-speed and secure communication.

The other significant part of their achievement is the orbital angular momentum (OAM) used in the transmission. This encoding technology allows more information to be transmitted at once. The researchers used OAM to transmit multiple signals on the same frequency demonstrating a more efficient use of the spectrum.

While these technologies could take a few years to be put into everyday use, the researchers also demonstrated some advanced in wireless backhaul technology, which can be deployed soon.

In conventional cellular networks, data is transmitted from devices to base stations and then to core networks through fiber optic cables. As base stations are set to increase shortly, fiber-based transmission is expected to be more costly and time-consuming. By using wireless technology for backhaul, the researchers are looking to provide flexibility at lower costs, which can also be used for existing 5G communication.

In the future, 6G communication technology will also be critical for short-range broadband transmissions such as lunar and Mars landers and spacecraft. The U.S. government has taken cognizance of advances made by the Chinese communication industry and looking for ways to advance the technology at home and reassert U.S. dominance in the area, the Wall Street Journal reported.

2023 05 07 08 09
2023 05 07 08 09

SABOTAGE! 18 Gun Powder Warehouses ON FIRE in Russia

At this hour (4:43 PM EDT Saturday) in Pervomaiskoye, Russia, 18 gunpowder warehouses are on fire. An evacuation has been announced.

Explosions are heard from the gunpowder depots.

There is massive fire.

About 400 residents of the area will be evacuated.

Further details if they become available . . .

Jake Sullivan’s plan to defeat China!

Clueless. Idiot. OMG.

2023 05 07 08 26
2023 05 07 08 26

Green Chile Pork

2023 05 07 09 1t8
2023 05 07 09 1t8

Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 2 pounds lean pork, 1/2-inch cubes
  • 1 medium onion, finely chopped
  • 3 cloves garlic, mashed
  • 2 jalapenos, cored, seeded and minced
  • 1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
  • 1 (14 ounce) can tomatillos with liquid
  • 1 teaspoon salt

Instructions

  1. Heat oil in a heavy skillet; add pork and onion. Cook over medium heat until pork is browned.
  2. Add remaining ingredients, breaking up tomatoes, and simmer, covered, until pork is cooked through and tender (30 to 40 minutes).
  3. Taste and add more salt if desired.
  4. Serve with warm tortillas and lime wedges.

VIDEOS: Texas Driver Hits Migrants at Bus stop; 7 Dead, 6 Injured

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The driver of a car in Texas went up on the sidewalk for some unknown reason, and struck thirteen people standing at a Bus Stop.   Seven of those people are dead, six others are injured. We have GRAPHIC video of the impact itself,  other video of the aftermath, and video of the Hispanic Driver being arrested.

WARNING – EXTREMELY GRAPHIC (HORRIFYING) IMPACT VIDEOYou cannot Un-see this once you’ve seen it.

Video of the aftermath is utterly heartbreaking.  The video below is as rescuers are arriving on scene.  The carnage is vivid.  WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC IMAGERY

https://htrs-special.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Migrants-Run-Down-aftermath.mp4

Video of police taking the driver under arrest:

THIS IS WW3, They are PREPARING for what comes next!

https://youtu.be/ED7nlD65Yvo

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It is a new world that we are moving towards – no freedom to speak and a hidden reality denied you

Well, Tucker Carlson was fired at FOX. At the same time, the ax fell on CNN. Now blogger Gonzalo Lira is arrested and silenced.

Some one, probably a “leader / dictator” in the United States gave “the order”. Sort of like this…

The Sopranos ordering hits

Chile Verde

Yield: 4 servings

2023 05 06 10 59
2023 05 06 10 59

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic, chopped
  • 3 pounds pork shoulder (bite-size cubes)
  • 1 (28 ounce) can tomatoes
  • 2 (4 ounce) cans diced green chiles
  • 1 cup water
  • Salt to taste

Instructions

  1. Sauté onion and garlic in olive oil in a Dutch oven.
  2. Remove onion and garlic and brown meat in same pan.
  3. Return onion and garlic to meat, along with other ingredients.
  4. Cook slowly for one hour (or until meat is done).

Notes

This is best prepared a day in advance. To reheat, simmer 30 minutes.

RUSSIANS LITERALLY ***INCINERATING*** BAKHMUT

Within the past 60 minutes, Russian artillery surrounding what is left of Bakhmut, has begun firing Thermite Incendiery shells upon the **entire** area still occupied by Ukrainian troops.   Whatever is left of the city after months of fierce fighting, is being incinerated.

As of 6:30 PM EDT on 5 May 2023, it is not known how many Ukrainian troops remain in the city, or how **any** of them can survive this onslaught.

Video from a Ukraine military drone over Bakhmut:

UPDATE 7:58 PM EDT —

Social media Geeks have been geo-locating the video images.  Here’s what they’ve found:

 

 

And confirmed via NASA Satellite detection of the fires:

 

 

Video from Ukrainian soldiers ON THE GROUND as these shells hit:

 

Machaca (Shredded Beef)

2023 05 06 11 00
2023 05 06 11 00

Ingredients

  • 1 (2 pound) beef chuck roast
  • Water, to cover meat
  • 1/2 onion, sliced
  • Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1/2 onion, chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 can Ro*Tel tomatoes and green chiles
  • 1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1/2 teaspoon oregano
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • Flour tortillas

Instructions

  1. Simmer meat, onion and black pepper in water until very tender, about 2 hours.
  2. Drain, and cool until meat is cool enough to handle.
  3. Discard bone and fat; shred meat.
  4. Heat oil in large skillet over medium heat. Add onion and garlic; cook until onion is soft, 4-5 minutes.
  5. In a blender, puree Ro*Tel tomatoes (including liquid), tomato sauce, spices and salt. Add to meat. Simmer until meat absorbs most of sauce, 15 to 20 minutes.
  6. Serve with warm flour tortillas and sour cream, shredded cheese, shredded lettuce, diced tomato and salsa.

AI Takes Over Photography, Humans Forced to Find New Hobbies

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grown not made1

Who needs humans to make things when we have AI-generated photos? Apparently, even ice cream can grow naturally in this brave new world. But if you’re wondering why the ice cream harvest only happens at night, it’s probably because it’s too scared of melting in the sun. Or maybe it’s just a winter crop, who knows? One thing’s for sure though, if these pictures were real, we’d all be a lot chubbier. Thank goodness for AI, keeping us in shape while fooling us with its realistic imagery.

h/t: sadanduseless

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Military shake up after Prigozhin video

In my opinion, Jevgenij Prigozjin showed us a face of very serious human being , who in this very moment lost men unnecessarily, for idiot reasons. 

And I am sure that he is on the right side of the fence. 

He is a caring person and as I understand, both to civilians and to the enemies, trying to save as many as possible.  

A great man, in a really big anger and sorrow for losing his men. I think that many military are like him, but they don't show it in public. 

They take their own lives instead,

Indonesia rebuffs Australia, turns to Brazil for live cattle imports

Endless Greed, arrogant, selfishness, and stupidity will end up with no friend in the coming civilised world order. 

Australia’s monopoly on live cattle exports to Indonesia is coming to an end with Brazil expected to get the green light in coming months.

High prices for Australian cattle have prompted Indonesia to look for alternative supplies and Brazil, the largest exporter of beef worldwide, has promised to....

Article HERE

CLAIMS: UKRAINE “COUNTER-OFFENSIVE” TO “START WITHIN SEVERAL HOURS”

Rumors have been circulating most of today claiming the much-vaunted “Ukraine Counter-Offensive” would begin in earnest “very soon.”  Those rumors have now coalesced to statements that claim EITHER a) The counter-offensive will begin in several hours today, OR; b) It will begin this Sunday.

Here’s as snippet of what’s appearing all day on social media:

 

 

What is clearly factual is that Authorities in Russian controlled Zaporozyhe have ORDERED 70,000 civilians to “evacuate immediately.” 

That evacuation is now clearly evident in traffic jams leading OUT of Melitopol, heading into Crimea.  Worse, there are “miles long lines” at gas stations with people trying to put fuel in their cars to make the evacuation trip.   (As usual, the “masses” are totally unprepared and now struggling to do what is needed.)

 

 

The fact that citizens are being told to evacuate from RUSSIAN-CONTROLLED areas is both good and bad.  It is good to get the civilians out of the way if Russia KNOWS the battles will be fought there.   It is also bad because it signals big questions about whether Russia can defend the land it conquered.

ALLEGED INTEL

One source tells me that a map was ALLEGEDLY sent to him by Kyrylo Budanov showing the counter-offensive battle plan.  I am HIGHLY suspicious of this claim.

The map, shown below, seems to indicate a massive Ukrainian counter-offensive emanating from Zaporozhye, south:

2023 05 06 10 1e3
2023 05 06 10 1e3

It seems to me that no military leader worth his salt, would EVER reveal an operational plan to a “friend” before it began.

Yet, I can’t help but realize that stupid is, as stupid does, and if nothing else, the leadership of Ukraine and its military seem to me to be actually STUPID.

So I guess this map may be real.   Perhaps we’ll all find out, soon enough.

The supposed “ Plan” for the Ukrainian Offensive looks eerily like the same rough plan they tried in 2014 against the “rebels.”

When they hit stiff resistance in the cities (especially Tomsk) they will bypass it, and get caught just like in Debaltsevo in 2014.

Since the EVACUATION is factual and verified, clearly there is something “up” and we may all see the SHTF as early as tonight.  

‘Nearly A Third Of The World Economy Is Now Subject To Sanctions’

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) just published a study about:

The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions.

The results are as any observer of such acts would expect. Sanctions are used too broadly. They hardly ever serve their supposed original purpose and do not reach their aims. They hurt the poor more than the supposedly targeted leaders of this or that country.

These numbers though are astonishing:

Over the past six decades, there has been significant growth in the use of economic sanctions by Western powers and international organizations. Less than 4 percent of countries were subject to sanctions imposed by the United States, European Union, or United Nations in the early 1960s; today, that share has risen to 27 percent. 

The magnitudes are similar when we consider their impact on the global economy: the share of world GDP produced in sanctioned countries rose from less than 4 percent to 29 percent in the same period. 

In other words, more than one fourth of countries and nearly a third of the world economy is now subject to sanctions by the UN or Western nations.

Under international law only sanction imposed by the United Nations’ Security Council have legal standing. Sanctions by the U.S. or EU are under international law an illegal use of state instruments. The U.S. is using sanctions constantly to press under nations to do its bidding. Until the recent war in Ukraine the EU has used sanctions mostly to ‘do something’ because it had run out of ideas or diplomatic abilities.

The recent sanctions on Russia proved to be hurting the Russians much less than they are hurting the people living in the European Union. It was a catastrophic mistake by EU leaders to preemptively agree to the sanctions the U.S. had been pushing for before Russia entered the civil war in Ukraine on the side of its Ukrainian brethren. The consequences had obviously not been gamed out and thought through.

When nearly one third of the world economy is under sanctions the other two-third are losing out too. It would therefore make sense for everyone to abolish all sanctions that have not been issued by the UNSC. Even UNSC sanctions should only be used sparsely and in a very narrowly targeted manner. Sanctions that hit the whole economy of a country are inhuman and should be prohibited.

Posted by b at 15:31 UTC | Comments (45)

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Gonzalo Lira arrested by Ukronazis

Prolific Reporter/Journalist/Commentator Gonzalo Lira, whose videos from Ukraine about the ongoing war are viewed by millions, HAS BEEN ARRESTED by Ukrainian NAZI Secret Police.

SECRET POLICE VIDEO

The video above was recorded by Ukrainian Police.   IT was released by them; as a warning to other Journalists or even opinion commentators, to keep your mouth shut.

THIS is what “Ukraine” is.

THIS is what “Ukraine” does.

Anyone supporting Ukraine is a NAZI SYMPATHIZER or NAZI COLLABORATOR.

Start calling them those things.  Publicly.

UPDATE 2:18 PM EDT —

The Ukrainian Secret Police have issued a Statement which was auto-translated below:

2023 05 06 10 19
2023 05 06 10 19

TRANSLATED SBU Statement on Arrest
TRANSLATED SBU Statement on Arrest

His last video prior to his arrest

On The Hypocrisy Of The New EU Sanction Regime

Once upon a time the European Union rejected secondary sanctions which the U.S. used to press third party countries to follow its sanction regimes against other once:

Making use of the centrality of the US in the global economy, it has imposed ‘secondary sanctions’ on foreign firms, which are forced to choose between trading with US sanctions targets or forfeiting access to the lucrative US market. In addition, the US has penalized foreign firms for breaching US sanctions legislation.

To counter these extraterritorial measures the EU introduced a blocking mechanism:

The lawfulness of these sanctions could be contested before various domestic and international judicial mechanisms, although each mechanism comes with its own limitations. To counter the adverse effects of secondary sanctions, third states and the EU can also make use of, and have already made use of, various non-judicial mechanisms, such as blocking statutes, special purpose vehicles to circumvent the reach of sanctions, or even countermeasures.

Blocking statutes prohibit EU companies from complying with U.S. sanctions:

Pursuant to Art. 5(1) of the EU Blocking Regulation, EU operators are prohibited from complying “with any requirement or prohibition, including requests of foreign courts, based on or resulting, directly or indirectly” from a set of foreign sanctions laws deemed to apply extraterritorially by the European Union, “or from actions based thereon or resulting therefrom.” The laws in question are listed in the Regulation’s Annex; currently, all are US statutes. Art. 5(2) provides that the European Commission (the Commission) may, upon request, authorize EU operators to comply fully or partially with these laws, to the extent that noncompliance would seriously damage their interests or those of the European Union.In 2018, the Commission updated the Annex of the EU Blocking Regulation to include the (reimposed) US secondary sanctions against Iran. It also adopted an Implementing Regulation laying down the criteria that would be taken into account for the granting of compliance authorizations, and issued a Guidance Note on the application of the reactivated EU Blocking Regulation.

The blocking statute was used to reject sanctions the U.S. instated against Iran after the U.S. left the nuclear agreement.

Now however, the conflict in Ukraine has seemingly killed any resistance in the EU against illegal acts from the U.S. In fact the EU has now gone mad and is itself considering the introduction of extraterritorial measures against countries which do not follow its own sanction regime against Russia:

The European Union is discussing a new sanctions mechanism to target third countries it believes aren’t doing enough to prevent Russia from evading sanctions, particularly those that can’t explain spikes in trade of key goods or technologies, according to people familiar with the matter.The primary aim of the tool would be to deter countries from helping Russia and crack down on trade channels that Moscow may be exploiting, the people said. If that doesn’t work, the bloc would have the option as a second step of imposing targeted restrictions on key goods.

The new enforcement mechanism, aspects of which were first reported by the Financial Times, would give member states the authority to create two lists — one of affected third countries and the other of banned goods.

If the mechanism is approved by national governments, decisions on which countries and goods to list would be for member states to take unanimously, the people said. The measures were unlikely to target China at first, but focus mostly on nations in central Asia and Russia’s immediate neighbors, the people added.

Elsewhere, the proposed package would make it easier to sanction companies in third countries that are circumventing the EU’s sanctions.

The EU politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels are killing their own moral defense against the U.S. application of secondary sanctions against third parties.

How will they ever be able to again argue for their own blocking statute. Moreover what will they do when third party countries, like Turkey or China, introduce their own blocking statutes against secondary EU sanctions on their companies?

Posted by b at 15:31 UTC | Comments (51)

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Leopard Tanks Arrive By Rail in Odessa

Images (above and below) have appeared on social media showing either Leopard 2A4 or 2A6 tanks, on a train in Odessa.     Odessa is a terminal railhead for trains coming from Romania.

It is not known if these tanks are to be used for an Amphibious landing into Crimea, or if they will be used elsewhere, but here they are:

AIR RAID SIRENS IN UKRAINE

It appears Russia is commencing its retaliation for the Drone attack upon the Kremlin.  Multiple fighter/bombers and strategic Bombers are in the air. Air launched cruise missiles already inbound to Ukraine!  Live updates below . . .

Reports of several TU-95Ms bombers airborne. Seems to be flying in radio silence mode.

Kirovohrad region, air raid alert! – Regional Military Administration. Proceed to the shelters.

Ukrainian sources report on the launch of X-101 cruise missiles from over the Caspian sea, no missiles currently over Ukraine however.

Multiple Ukrainian sources are reporting missile launches from Russian strategic bombers.

CONFIRMED: 4 Tu-22M3s have taken off . . .

FILE PHOTO:

Tupolev Tu 22M3M 2
Tupolev Tu 22M3M 2

 

10:31 AM EDT —

Additional missile launches reported from the Caspian Sea. NOTE: It takes a while before these missiles reach Ukraine.

The Russian strategic bombers have switched to combat frequency.

Air raid sirens sounding in Kyiv. Head to the nearest shelter.

AirRaidSirensKiev
AirRaidSirensKiev

Residents report explosions in Kramatorsk, Donetsk region. We are waiting for the official information.

Kyiv city, Kyiv and Zhytomyr regions, air raid alert! – Regional Military Administration. Proceed to the shelters.

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FvYCpQQXgAEuNmZ

10:34 AM EDT —

An air alert declared in Kyiv and other regions of Ukraine.

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Ukrainian TG channels report RuAF missile launches from the area of the Caspian Sea

Missiles over Kharkiv and Donetsk oblast.

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10:38 AM EDT —

Russian strategic bombers are firing missiles at front-line areas in eastern Ukraine. Many explosions reported in Kramatorsk. I can’t remember this happening before.

More on air alerts in Ukraine: Ships with launch vehicles left the Black Sea. A massive launch on Ukraine is expected. There are already explosions in Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. Strategic aviation was also raised into the sky.

Reports of Russian Kh-22 missiles hitting Ukrainian targets Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in Donetsk.

 

10:48 AM EDT —

Loud speakers in the Zaporizhia region inform residents that they need to evacuate. An estimated 70,000 residents will be forced to evacuate.

It looks like Slavyansk and Kramatorsk were hit hard.

Kamikaze drones towards Kyiv and Poltava, not missiles.

 

11:34 AM EDT —

The head of the Nikolaev region, Vitaliy Kim, urged local residents not to film or post on the Internet the movement of Ukrainian military equipment in the region in the near future.

Russian Kh-22 missile hit the NKMZ machine-building and steel-making plant in Kramatorsk:

Ramzan Kadyrov says Chechen forces will replace Wagner in Bakhmut

Blast Off into Hilarious Sci-Fi with These Humorous and Creative Posters

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@SmallWorlds’ Twitter account is on a mission to make 2023 a little bit funnier with their daily sci-fi story idea posters. These clever and hilarious ideas will keep you entertained for the whole year. Some of the concepts may even surprise you (but not in a weird way, you pervert!). Check out our top picks below and get ready to blast off into a world of laughter and creativity.

More: Twitter h/t: sadanduseless

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British Army General: Britain Has only 22 HOURS of Ammunition for War

British General Rupert Jones publicly stated today “We have ammunition for only 22 hours of a great war. He warned that Great Britain and its allies are extremely UNPREPARED for a serious war.

One may have already gleaned that from the fact the entire British Army has only 77,000 troops; not even enough to fill Wembley Stadium in London!

This being the case, why is Britain poking the Russian Bear so aggressively in Ukraine?  Clearly Britain cannot defend itself.

It seems to most educated observers that the British seem to be trying to commit national suicide with what they’re doing in Ukraine.

Of course Russia is likely aware of the actual lack of British strength and has thus far not responded militarily to what the Brits have been doing with Ukraine.  In fact, it seems to even the village idiot that all Russia has to do is to ignore Britain and watch that nation kill itself!

Much the same can be said of ALL of the NATO nations.   With the exception of the US, much of NATO is nothing but a military paper tiger.

The US, though, is not in much better shape.   It has sent hundreds of tons of ammunition, countless rockets and missiles, and literal boatloads of military equipment; most of which Russia has already destroyed on Ukraine battlefields.

The much vaunted Ukraine “Counter-offensive” has yet to materialize in any meaningful way.  Ukrainian troops are surrendering en-masse in places like Bakhmut.

Ukraine has already LOST this conflict.  It should surrender. Today.

Zelenski’s Regime Is Finished

Yesterday’s drone attack on the Kremlin (and other installations) mark the end of the Zelenski regime. While Russia had so far refrained from regime change in Kiev it will now have to pursue it.

The former prime minister of Israel Naftali Bennet had reported that president Putin had promised him not to hit Zelenski:

“I knew Zelensky was under threat, in a bunker… I said to [Putin], ‘Do you intend to kill Zelensky?’ He said, ‘I won’t kill Zelensky,’” Bennett recalled in the interview, which was published on his own YouTube channel.

Bennett said he called the Ukrainian president immediately after the three-hour encounter with Putin, and told him, “I’ve just come out of a meeting — [Putin] is not going to kill you.“[Zelensky] asked me, ‘Are you sure?’ I said 100 percent. [Putin’s] not going to kill you.”

Bennett recalled: “Two hours later, Zelensky went to his office, and did a selfie in the office, [in which the Ukrainian president said,] ‘I’m not afraid.’”

Well, now he has very good reason to again be afraid, very afraid. As former ambassador MK Bhadrakumar writes:

Make no mistake, this is a tipping point; the clumsy attempt on Putin’s life jolts the kaleidoscope beyond recognition. The only comforting thought is that the Kremlin leadership is not going to be driven by emotion. The considered Kremlin reaction is available from the remarks by the Russian Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov:“How would Americans react if a drone hit the White House, the Capitol or the Pentagon? The answer is obvious for any politician as well as for an average citizen: the punishment will be harsh and inevitable.”

The ambassador went on to draw the bottom line: “Russia will respond to this insolent and presumptuous terrorist attack. We will answer when we consider it necessary. We will answer in accordance with the assessments of the threat that Kiev posed to the leadership of our country.”

I agree with Bhadrakumar that there will be no knee-jerk reaction from Moscow. But public opinion in Russia demands that there will be payback for the attack and against anyone involved in it.

Putin’s hands are tied beyond a point when the country is in rage and demanding retribution, as evident from the comments by former Russian President and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev: “After today’s terrorist attack, there are no options left except for the physical elimination of Zelensky and his clique.”

That Zelenski fled to Finland, then to the Netherlands and Germany after the drones hit the Kremlin is a sure sign of his complicity in the act.

When (if?) he comes back to Kiev it will be bunker life for the rest of his reign.

Posted by b on May 4, 2023 at 16:08 UTC | Permalink

Deputy Foreign Minister: “US and Russia on the Abyss of Open, Armed Conflict” and Washington “Should Think About Its Own Safety”

After the recent drone incident at the Kremlin, which Moscow has called a US-backed attempt by Ukraine to assassinate President Vladimir Putin, the US and Russia are on the verge of a shooting war with each other, a senior Russian diplomat has said.

“We are working on preventing a fall of our relations with the US into the abyss of an open armed conflict,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in a TV interview on Friday. “We are already on the verge of this abyss.”

Ryabkov described officials in Washington as “opponents” and “enemies” of Russia due to what he called Russophobic policies which are being pursued in spite of the risks.

“The anger and hatred towards Russia with which Washington acts in a situation in which it frankly should think of its own safety, is inexplicable,” he said.

At the moment, “no real diplomacy” regarding the Ukraine conflict is possible between the two nations, because the US “has bet on further escalation,” according to Ryabkov.

The deputy foreign minister said Washington tends to dismiss the statements of Russian officials, citing remarks made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken regarding Russia’s claim that Ukraine was behind the drone attack on the Kremlin.

“I would take anything coming out of the Kremlin with a very large shaker of salt,” Blinken told the Washington Post.

“We leave it to Ukraine to decide how it is going to defend itself,” he added. Kiev denies having any involvement in the attack on the Kremlin.

The US government is treating “any signals coming from Moscow as an element of a disinformation campaign,” Ryabkov said. Meanwhile, Russia is “literally ready to use any means at its disposal” to deter threats to its security and the safety of its leadership, he added.

He also reiterated the Russian claims that Washington shares responsibility with Kiev for the incident, which the US denies. Their statements of non-involvement are “not convincing anyone,” and are reminiscent of “how they attempted to pretty much blame us for the bombing of the Nord Stream,” Ryabkov said.

“IT COULD START IN HOURS”- Russian Official, EVACUATION Underway, Nuclear Plant Incident Likely

Chorizo and Cheese Empanadas with Avocado Crema

2023 05 06 10 57
2023 05 06 10 57

Empanadas stuffed with ground pork, chiles, onion and a superb mixture of spices. An avocado, sour cream, cilantro and lime sauce is the perfect complement to these empanadas.

Prep: 25 min | Cook: 2 hr | Marinate: 12 hr | Yield: 48 to 64 servings

Ingredients

Empanadas

  • 1 pound ground pork
  • 2 pasilla chile peppers, or other mild dried red chiles*
  • 1 guajillo chile pepper, or other mild dried red chile*
  • 1 onion, cut into large chunks
  • 4 tablespoons cider vinegar
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 tablespoon sweet paprika
  • 2 teaspoons dried oregano, preferably Mexican
  • 2 teaspoons salt, plus more to taste
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1 pound queso blanco, or other mild, semi-hard cheese, grated
  • Empanada dough, or store-bought empanada shells to make about 48 (6 inch) or 64 (5 inch) empanadas**
  • All-purpose flour, for the work surface
  • About 6 cups canola oil

Avocado Crema

  • 1 avocado, peeled, pitted, and quartered
  • 1 cup cilantro, roughly chopped
  • 3 tablespoons sour cream
  • Juice of 1/2 lime
  • Salt to taste
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil

Instructions

  1. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, toast the chiles, turning occasionally, until blistered and fragrant, 4 to 5 minutes.
  2. Transfer the chiles to a bowl of hot water, cover and set aside for 15 minutes.
  3. Remove the chiles from the water and stem and seed them.
  4. Place the chiles, onion, vinegar and garlic in the bowl of a food processor or the jar of a blender and process to purée, scraping down the bowl or jar as needed.
  5. Transfer the chile mixture to a large bowl and add the pork, paprika, oregano, salt, coriander, cumin, pepper and cinnamon, mixing until well combined.
  6. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
  7. In a large skillet over medium heat, cook the pork mixture, breaking it up with a spoon or spatula, until no longer pink, 5 to 6 minutes.
  8. Set aside to cool slightly.
  9. Meanwhile, in the bowl of a food processor, combine avocado, cilantro, sour cream, lime juice and olive oil and process to purée, scraping down the bowl as necessary.
  10. Add salt to taste and set aside in the refrigerator.
  11. Stir the cheese into the pork mixture.
  12. Arrange a 5- or 6-inch round of empanada dough or an empanada shell on a lightly floured work surface.
  13. Spoon 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons of pork mixture on top, moisten the edges of the shell with water, and fold the shell over the filling, pressing it with a fork to seal.
  14. Repeat with the remaining shells and pork mixture, flouring the work surface as ncessary.
  15. Heat the oven to 200 degrees F.
  16. Arrange two or three paper towel-lined baking sheets in the oven.
  17. Pour canola oil into a large, heavy saucepan or small stockpot to 1 inch deep and warm it to 350 degrees F over medium heat.
  18. Cook the empanadas in batches, turning occasionally and adjusting the heat to maintain 350 degrees F, until golden, 3 to 4 minutes.
  19. Transfer to the prepared baking sheets to keep warm.
  20. Serve the empanadas with the avocado crema on the side.

 

Notes

* Look for dried chiles in the ethnic section of your supermarket and at Latin markets.

** Use Michelle’s empanada dough recipe or look for empanada shells—preferably muy hojadrosa (“very flaky”) style—at Latin markets, at gourmet food stores, and online.

Empanadas make a deliciously different lunch or dinner and need nothing more than a crisp green salad on the side. They’re also perfect for parties, right at home with other hot or cold appetizers. To make this recipe more quickly, substitute Mexican-style chorizo for the meat mixture. If you prefer, you can bake the empanadas instead of frying them.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences has unveiled a new high-performance processor chip and a new operating system, based on the popular open-source chip design standard known as RISC-V.

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main qimg ab0540604c228eb81df8887c34f7e3ef

The chip has been named Xiangshan open-source high performance RISC-V processor, while the operating system is called Aolai.

These technological achievements represent China’s commitment to building an open-source chip ecosystem with a new blueprint to support its digital economy and promote international cooperation in chip development, experts and officials said on Friday.

For decades, computer chip designs have been expensive and hard to license. Global chip designers, such as Intel and ARM, have long kept their blueprints a secret, meaning consumers had to buy manufactured chips directly or pay more for a customized design.

RISC-V, which means an instruction set architecture rooted in reduced instruction set computer principles, has been open and free to use since its launch in 2010 and everyone can use it to design a chip tailored to their needs. As a result, MIT Technology Review named the chip design as one of the breakthrough technologies of 2023.

About 3,100 members worldwide, including companies and academic institutions, are now adopting the new design to build RISC-V chips, according to MIT Technology Review. “In a few years, RISC-V proponents predict, the chips will be everywhere,” the publication said.

Yin Hejun, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said during a session of the 2023 Zhongguancun Forum in Beijing that processor chips are the foundation of information technology and the digital economy.

Over the past four decades, open-source software ecosystems have revolutionized the global information technology industry.

Some notable examples include Bluetooth, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and PDF, all of which are based on open standards whose design specifications are publicly available, allowing consumers and product makers to access the same functions across various devices.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences attaches great importance to building open-source technology ecosystems. In 2018, the academy launched the China RISC-V Alliance to facilitate the construction of a RISC-V ecosystem.

In the future, the academy will continue to support innovations based on RISC-V, enhance international cooperation, and foster new industries and applications using the new design to strengthen the global chip supply chain and open-source ecosystem, Yin said.

Yu Yingjie, vice-mayor of Beijing, said RISC-V, x86 and ARM are becoming the three pillars of the global chip ecosystem, creating new opportunities.

The city will take advantage of its rich resources in human, policy and capital to create a high-quality open-source chip industrial hub that can yield innovation and contribute to the development of the global information technology sector, he said.

Sun Ninghui, a noted computer scientist and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said the Chinese Academy of Sciences had been developing open-source processor chips since 2015, achieving multiple breakthroughs and cementing China’s position as a global front-runner in open-source processors.

The Xiangshan chip and Aolai operating system are two notable achievements that showcase China’s commitment to strengthening the global chip supply chain and creating an open-source chip ecosystem that can benefit the world, he said.

5 MINUTES AGO, This is BREAKING news for the U.S.! with Clayton Morris

https://youtu.be/-QMpWJe5UJg

Relax and enjoy the entry into the new normal

Ah, the people of the United States, living in the manipulation bubble, cannot see what they are doing. They think that it is normal. Right. Just..

While we HAVE passed the crisis pivot point, we still must deal with 5 – 10 years of conflict that eventually evolves into grudging change.

So yeah. Nuclear bombs, military fighting, monetary collapse and all the rest are realities that are on the horizon. It’s just that the point where the West can do as it wants and successfully get away with it is well over. At this point in time, everything is lose-lose for the West. Everything.

And the sooner the “leaders” realize the hopelessness of the situation, the quicker change be implemented.

But…

They are high on egos, and drugs. They haven’t a clue as to how bizarre their actions appear to the rest of the world.

Australians need to wake up fast the US/UK is using it as a patsy to goad China, which is one of it main trading partners.

“The US government is permitted to have nuclear weapons in Australia. What’s more, Australians are not permitted to know whether or not this is happening. What’s more, not even Australia’s elected senators are permitted to know whether this is happening. It’s assumed to be none of Australia’s business whether there are foreign nuclear weapons in Australia.”

Article HERE

I Went To The Worst Place In Arkansas

Pine Bluff. Yeah. I attended ADC there.

US elites have plan to split Russia – security chief

The efforts are part of Washington’s desperate attempts to retain hegemony, Nikolay Patrushev has claimed
The US and its allies are seeking to preserve their power by dismantling Russia, with Western think tanks busy formulating the necessary plans, the secretary of Moscow’s Security Council has claimed.
In an interview published by the Izvestia newspaper on Wednesday, Nikolay Patrushev said the West was attempting to influence the global order through “the destruction of Russia or its weakening to the level of a third-rate country under foreign management.”

He cited a book published last year and titled ‘Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture’ as an example of academic work which suggests ways of achieving that goal for the elites in Washington.

The purported plan is to “support instability in nations neighboring Russia” and to conduct information warfare to “fan internal separatism,” Patrushev added.

The book was written by Janusz Bugajski, a senior fellow at conservative Washington-based think tank The Jamestown Foundation. The author made the case for the dissolution of Russia, claiming it had failed to become “a nation state, a civic state or a stable imperial state.”

Bugajski cited a range of factors that supposedly work against Russia, including a lack of economic growth, inequality, distrust in government institutions, the alienation of the population from the ruling elites, and “disbelief in official propaganda.”

The academic is a veteran critic of Moscow who has consulted the Pentagon and the US Agency for International Development, and according to his bio taught a course at the Foreign Service Institute at the State Department.

Patrushev claimed that the West is seeking to weaken Russian sovereignty to gain access to and exploit its vast natural resources. However, Moscow’s adversaries underestimate “the strength of our nation and the will of the Russian people to be independent,” the security official insisted.

He further alleged that Russia’s opponents are aiming to undermine the foundations of its national identity by promoting harmful ideas such as gender diversity and by attempting to revise history.

Patrushev argued that this policy actually alienates those in the West who value tradition and are not susceptible to anti-Russian propaganda. He suggested that these people are welcome to move to Russia and become citizens, as long as they respect local laws and culture.

Everyday Barbacoa Beef

This Everyday Beef Barbacoa is versatile and can be served on tortillas, chips or lettuce.

2023 05 04 18 55
2023 05 04 18 55

Ingredients

Beef

  • 3-5 pounds beef cheek or chuck roast, cut into 4 inch pieces
  • 1 cup orange juice
  • 1/2 cup lime juice
  • 1 cup water
  • 1/2 can chipotle in adobo, diced
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 5 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1 onion, diced

Optional

  • Tortillas
  • Cilantro
  • Onion
  • Lime wedges

Instructions

  1. Combine all ingredients into a large bowl. Cover and marinate for 2 to 24 hours.
  2. Add marinated beef and leftover marinade to cooker. Cover and cook on LOW for 7 to 8 hours or until fork tender.
  3. Carefully remove beef from cooker with little sauce as possible. Placing on a cutting board, shred beef with two forks and return to cooker. Cook for additional 10 minutes to absorb remaining liquid.
  4. If desired, crisp meat in a cast-iron skillet before serving.

Clutch Cargo: The Low-Budget Cartoon Phenomenon

The CIA used 5 methods to plan “color revolutions” in at least 50 countries

This is the most comprehensive report on the US intelligence agency CIA that I have ever seen. A masterpiece of investigative journalism.
The Paper (澎湃新闻; Péngpài Xīnwén, literally “Rising News” is a Chinese digital newspaper owned and operated by the Shanghai United Media Group.

In the meantime, China continues to work diligently on systems to recognize and counter the color revolutions organized by the CIA.

Entire Paper HERE

English translation:

Report disclosure:

The CIA used 5 methods to plan “color revolutions” in at least 50 countries

CCTV News 2023-05-04 12:05

Global News
Investigation report:
A large number of Trojan horse programs for cyber attacks on China are linked to the CIA

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a more well-known name than the National Security Agency (NSA), is one of the main intelligence agencies of the US federal government. It is headquartered in Langley, Virginia, USA. The Intelligence Division (DI), the Covert Operations Division (NCS), the Technology Division (DS&T), and the Support Division (DS) are four departments. Its main business scope involves: collecting intelligence information of foreign governments, companies and citizens; comprehensively analyzing and processing intelligence information collected by other US intelligence agencies; providing national security intelligence and security risk assessment opinions to high-level US decision makers; organizing implementation and Guiding and supervising cross-border secret activities, etc.

For a long time, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has secretly implemented “peaceful evolution” and “color revolutions” around the world, and has continued to carry out espionage and stealing activities.

Since entering the 21st century, the rapid development of the Internet has provided new opportunities for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to infiltrate, subvert and sabotage activities. Organizations and individuals using US Internet equipment and software products around the world have become (CIA)’s puppet “agents”, helping the agency quickly become a dazzling “star” in the cyber espionage war.

This series of reports starts with a large number of real cases that 360 and the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center participated in the investigation, reveals the main details of their network attack weapons, and discloses the specific process of some typical network security cases that occurred in China and other countries. It is comprehensive and in-depth. This paper analyzes the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s cyber attack stealing and related real-life harm activities, as well as its contribution to the United States becoming a “Matrix”, and provides reference and suggestions for victims of cyber attacks all over the world.

  1. Overview

From the impact of the international socialist camp in the 1980s, the upheaval in the Soviet Union and the East (“Velvet Revolution”) in the early 1990s to the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003, from the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004 to the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, From the “Arab Spring” in West Asian and North African countries in 2011 to the “Second Color Revolution” in Ukraine in 2014 and the “Sunflower Revolution” in Taiwan, China, they were all recognized by international organizations and scholars around the world as “color revolutions” dominated by US intelligence agencies. Revolution” typical case. There have also been attempted “color revolutions” in some other countries, such as the “Snowflake Revolution” in Belarus in March 2005, the “Orange Storm” in Azerbaijan in June 2005, the “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon in 2005, and the “Saffron Revolution” in Myanmar in 2007. “, Iran’s “Green Revolution” in 2009, and so on. If we count from the Cold War period, there are countless regime change events with the color of “peaceful evolution” and “color revolution”. According to statistics, over the past few decades, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has overthrown or attempted to overthrow at least 50 legitimate governments of other countries (while the CIA has only admitted 7 of them), causing turmoil in related countries.

Comprehensive analysis of various technologies in the above-mentioned incidents shows that information communication and on-site command become the decisive factors affecting the success or failure of the incident. These technologies of the United States are in a leading position in the world. Especially in the 1980s, the United States promoted the Internet to the world and was generally accepted by countries all over the world.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Albright once threatened: “With the Internet, we have a way to deal with China.”

This statement is true, many “color revolution” incidents have the shadow of Western powers fueling the flames with the help of the Internet. After the “Arab Spring” incidents in many countries in West Asia and North Africa, some large American multinational Internet companies actively intervened, invested a lot of manpower, material resources, and financial resources to all parties to the conflict, wooed and supported the opposition, and publicly challenged the legitimate governments of other countries that did not match the interests of the United States. Assist in the dissemination of false information, and promote the intensification of public protests.

One is to provide encrypted network communication services. In order to help protesters in some countries in the Middle East keep in touch and avoid being tracked and arrested, an American company (reportedly with a background in the US military) has developed a TOR technology that can access the Internet and is untraceable (“Onion head” routing technology, The Onion Router). The servers in question encrypt all information that flows through them, helping certain users to surf the web anonymously. After the project was launched by American companies, it was immediately provided free of charge to anti-government personnel in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and other countries to ensure that those “dissident youth who want to shake their own government’s rule” can avoid the scrutiny and monitor.

The second is to provide offline communication services. In order to ensure that anti-government personnel in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries can still keep in touch with the outside world, Google and Twitter quickly launched a special service called “Speak2Tweet”, which allows users to dial and upload voice for free Leave a message, these messages are automatically converted into tweets and then uploaded to the Internet, Twitter and other platforms for public release, completing the real-time report on the scene of the incident.

The third is to provide on-site command tools for rallies and parades based on the Internet and wireless communications. The RAND Corporation of the United States has spent several years developing a non-traditional regime change technology called “swarming”, which is used to help a large number of young people connected through the Internet join the mobile protests of “one shot for another place”, greatly Improve the efficiency of on-site command of the event.

Fourth, an American company has developed a software called “Riot”, which supports 100% independent wireless broadband network, provides variable Wi-Fi network, does not rely on any traditional physical access methods, and does not require telephone, cable or satellite connections. Can easily evade any form of government surveillance. With the help of the above-mentioned powerful network technology and communication technology means, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) planned and organized a large number of “color revolution” events around the world.

Fifth, the U.S. State Department regards the research and development of the “anti-censorship” information system as an important task, and has injected more than 30 million US dollars into the project.

  1. The CIA’s series of cyber attack weapons

On March 7, 2017, the WikiLeaks website disclosed 8,716 secret documents allegedly from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Network Intelligence Center, which involved the attack methods and attack operations of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) hacker team. Code names, technical specifications and requirements of attack tools, etc., WikiLeaks called the relevant documents “Vault7” (dome 7), which has aroused great attention worldwide.

In 2020, Qihoo 360 independently discovered an APT organization that has never been exposed to the outside world. It specifically targets China and its friendly countries to carry out cyber attack and stealing activities. The victims are all over the world. We separately number it as APT-C-39. There is evidence that the organization uses cyber weapon tools (including Athena, Fluxwire, Grasshopper, AfterMidnight, HIVE, ChimayRed, etc.) associated with the exposed “Vault7” (dome 7) data to carry out cyber attacks against victims in China and other countries. The earliest attack activities can be traced back to 2011, and related attacks have continued to this day. The attacked targets involve various countries’ important information infrastructure, aerospace, scientific research institutions, petroleum and petrochemical, large Internet companies, and government agencies.

In large-scale global cyber attacks, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used a large number of “zero-day” (0day) vulnerabilities, including a large number of backdoors and vulnerabilities that have not been publicly disclosed so far (some functions have been verified), Establish “zombie” networks and attack springboard networks around the world, and attack and invade in stages against network servers, network terminals, switches and routers, as well as a large number of industrial control equipment. We have successfully extracted several “Vault7” (dome 7) network attack weapon samples in the cyber attack operations that have been discovered specifically targeting targets in China, and several Southeast Asian countries and European partners have also extracted almost identical The samples mainly include:

2.1 Fluxwire (flux wire) backdoor program platform

A complex backdoor attack operation management platform that supports 9 mainstream operating systems such as Windows, Unix, Linux, and MacOS and 6 different network architectures. It can form a mesh network with many “broiler” nodes that can operate completely autonomously, supporting self-repair, Loop attack and multipath routing.

2.2 Athena (Athena) program

A lightweight backdoor program for the Microsoft Windows operating system, jointly developed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US company Siege Technologies (acquired by Nehemiah Security in 2016), which can be used for remote installation, supply chain attacks, and man-in-the-middle hijacking attacks It can be implanted by means of physical contact installation, etc., and resides in the form of Microsoft Windows service. All attack function modules are decrypted and executed in memory in the form of plug-ins. 2.3 Grasshopper (grasshopper) backdoor program An advanced configurable backdoor program for the Microsoft Windows operating system, which can generate malicious loads in various file formats (EXE, DLL, SYS, PIC), supports multiple execution modes, and can be concealed after being equipped with different plug-in modules. Stay and perform spy functions.

    1. AfterMidnight (after midnight) backdoor program

A lightweight backdoor that runs as a DLL service in the Microsoft Windows operating system. It dynamically transmits and loads the “Gremlins” module through the HTTPS protocol, and executes the malicious load in an encrypted manner throughout the process.

2.5 ChimayRed (Chimay Red Hat) Vulnerability Exploitation Tool

A vulnerability exploit kit for MikroTik and other brands of routers, which can be used to implant lightweight network device backdoor programs such as “TinyShell” with exploits. 2.6 HIVE (Honeycomb) Network Attack Platform The “Hive” network attack platform was jointly developed by a department of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a company owned by the famous US military enterprise Northrop Grumman (NOC). It provides the network attack team of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) A persistent attack stealing method with complex structure. It manages and utilizes a large number of lost assets around the world, forms multi-layer dynamic springboards and secret data transmission channels, and uploads user accounts, passwords and private data to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 7×24 hours (https://www. cverc.org.cn/head/zhaiyao/news20220419-hive.htm).

2.7 Other Derivatives In the process of attacking and stealing secrets through the above-mentioned “Vault7” (Dome 7) cyber weapon, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also derived and used a large number of attack samples other than “Vault7” (Dome 7) data, and the samples that have been extracted These include disguised phishing software installation packages, keylogger components, system information collection components, USB file stealing modules, and different open source hacking tools.

3. Functional Analysis of the Cyber Attack Weapon Samples of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

During the investigation of many typical cyber attacks in China, Qihoo 360 captured and successfully extracted a large number of data closely related to the Internet exposure of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “Vault 7” from the information network of the victim unit. Trojan horse programs, function plug-ins and attack platform samples. In-depth analysis found that most of the relevant program samples follow the Network Operations Division In-memory Code Execution Specification, Network Operations Division Cryptographic Requirements, and Network Operations Division Persisted DLL Specification in the “Vault7” (dome 7) data, etc. of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Malware development standards and technical specifications. These standards and norms respectively correspond to the loading and execution of malicious code, data encryption and persistence behaviors in cyber attack stealing activities, and relevant cyber weapons have undergone extremely strict standardized, process-oriented and professional software engineering management. It is reported that currently only the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) strictly abides by these standards and specifications to develop cyber attack weapons.

According to “Vault7” (dome 7) data, the above-mentioned cyber attack weapons belong to the EDG (Engineering Development Group) of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and its subordinate AED (Application Engineering Department) and EDB (Embedded Device Division) ) and other independent or joint research and development divisions. Most of these cyber weapons were born in a top secret internal network of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) called “devlan.net”. “devlan.net” is a huge network weapons development and testing infrastructure established by the Engineering Development Division (EDG) of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to the development log data of “devlan.net”, at least 200 engineers from EDG have been invested in the research and development of the “HIVE” (honeycomb) project alone.

Further technical analysis found that most of the backdoor programs and attack components of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) run in the form of memory-resident execution without physical files, which makes it extremely difficult to discover and obtain evidence for relevant samples. Even so, the joint technical team managed to find an effective solution to the forensics challenge. For the convenience of subsequent description and analysis, we temporarily divide the attack weapons of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) into 9 categories:

3.1 Framework platform classes. We discovered and captured attack samples and activities of Fluxwire (magnetic flux lines), Grasshopper (grasshopper), and Athena (Athena). Dome 7) The descriptions in the materials are confirmed one by one.

3.2 Attack module delivery class. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has used a large number of small malicious code downloaders with simple functions to load and execute more malicious codes and modules. The relevant samples have no special malicious functions and characteristics, but they cooperate with attack weapons such as framework platforms However, it can show a powerful secret-stealing function, and it is extremely difficult to attribute it to the source.

3.3 Remote control class. A variety of remote control plug-ins have been extracted, most of which are attack module components derived from framework platform attack weapons, and the two cooperate with each other.

3.4 Lateral Movement Classes. Among the large number of malicious program samples extracted, there are many backdoor programs installed and implanted by using Windows remote services with system administrator credentials. In addition, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also hijacked the upgrade programs of various security products on the intranet, issued and installed backdoor programs through the upgrade function of the intranet upgrade server, and carried out lateral movement attacks on the intranet.

3.5 Information collection and theft. The joint technical team accidentally extracted an information-stealing tool used by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). NSA) dedicated information-stealing tool. This situation shows that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US National Security Agency (NSA) will jointly attack the same victim, or share cyber attack weapons with each other, or provide relevant technical or human support. This adds important new evidence to the attribution of the identity of the APT-C-39 attackers.

3.6 Vulnerability Exploitation Class. The investigation found that since at least 2015, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has established a huge springboard resource for cyber attacks around the world, using “zero-day” (0-day) vulnerabilities to attack global IOT (Internet of Things) devices and Attack network servers indiscriminately, and convert a large number of lost devices into springboard “broilers”, or hide their own attack behavior, or blame network attacks on other countries. For example, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used a vulnerability attack kit code-named “ChimayRed” (Chimay Red Hat) to target multiple models of MikroTik brand routers, including a large number of network devices using such routers in China. During the attack, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) will first maliciously modify the router startup script, so that the router will still execute the backdoor program after restarting; then, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) will modify the router’s CGI program to block the (CIA) to prevent other attackers from re-invading and causing loss of authority; eventually, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) will implant “Hive” (HIVE) or “TinyShell” into the router, which only the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ) exclusive backdoor program that can be used.

3.7 Masquerading as normal software. According to the network environment of the attack target, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) customized and disguised the backdoor program as an unpopular software installation package used by the target with a small number of users, and carried out precise social engineering attacks on the target.

3.8 Attack and defense of security software. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has mastered attack tools specially used to attack commercial anti-virus software. Through these special tools, the process of designated anti-virus software can be shut down and killed remotely, so that the relevant anti-virus software can attack the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Behavioral or offensive weapons are ineffective.

3.9 Third-party open source tools. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also often uses off-the-shelf open source hacking tools to carry out attacks. The initial attacks of the CIA’s cyber attack operations generally target the victim’s network equipment or servers, as well as social engineering attacks. After obtaining the target authority, it will further explore the network topology of the target organization, and move laterally to other networked devices in the internal network to steal more sensitive information and data. The target computer controlled by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) will be monitored in real time for 24 hours. All keyboard strokes of the victim will be recorded, and information copied and pasted from the clipboard will be stolen. USB devices (mainly mobile hard drives) , U disk, etc.) will also be monitored in real time. Once a USB device is connected, the private files in the victim’s USB device will be automatically stolen. When conditions permit, the camera, microphone and GPS positioning device on the user terminal will be remotely controlled and accessed.

  1. SummaryThe cyber hegemony manipulated by the United States originated in cyberspace, covers the world, and affects the whole world. As one of the three major intelligence-gathering agencies in the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has already shown automation, systematization and intelligence in its cyber attacks against the world. characteristics. The 8,716 documents leaked from the WikiLeaks website alone contain many important hacking tools and cyber attack weapons of the U.S. intelligence agencies, indicating that the U.S. has built the world’s largest cyber arsenal. Through empirical analysis, we found that its cyber weapons use extremely strict espionage technical specifications, and various attack methods echo and interlock. It has now covered almost all Internet and IoT assets in the world, and can control other countries’ networks anytime, anywhere. Stealing important and sensitive data from other countries will undoubtedly require a lot of financial, technical and human resources to support it. The US-style cyber hegemony is evident, and the “Matrix” is well-deserved.

This series of reports attempts to disclose the long-term attacks and stealing activities of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) targeting network targets in China, and initially explores these network attacks and data theft activities.

In response to the highly systematic, intelligent, and concealed cyber attacks launched by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against my country, how can domestic government agencies, scientific research institutions, industrial enterprises, and commercial organizations quickly “see” and “handle” them immediately? “Particularly important. In order to effectively deal with imminent network and real threats, while adopting self-controllable localized equipment, we should organize and carry out self-inspection and self-inspection of APT attacks as soon as possible, and gradually establish a long-term defense system to achieve comprehensive and systematic prevention and control , against advanced threat attacks.

Editor in charge: Wu Zhichao
Picture editor: Shen Ke
The Paper: 021-962866

Why is China leading the World?

Russian Warships SUDDENLY Deploy to North Sea

A concentration of at least five Russian Navy warships, plus two auxiliaries, has formed in the North Sea.

If the Ukraine invasion teaches us anything, it’s that the axillaries are just as worth watching as the pointy ships.

All 5 warships are Kalibr cruise missile capable.

While there may be many explanations for this, it will likely get NATO attention.

The most likely explanation at this stage is an unannounced exercise.

Unusually the group includes a frigate from the Black Sea Fleet, which is prevented from returning to its base in Crimea due to the war. Turkey has closed the Bosporus to warships.  It is the Bosporus which is the only entry/exit between the Black Sea and ultimately, the Mediterranean Sea.

Russian Navy vessels identified in area:

  • Black Sea Fleet Pr.11356 Admiral Grigorovich class frigate, Admiral Grigorovich (494)
  • Baltic Fleet Pr.20380 Steregushchiy class corvette, Sbrazitelnyy (531)
  • Baltic Fleet Pr.20380 Steregushchiy class corvette, Stoikiy (545)
  • Baltic Fleet Pr.22800 Karakurt class corvette, Sovetsk (577)
  • Baltic Fleet Pr.22800 Karakurt class corvette, Odintsovo (584)
  • Baltic Fleet Pr.563 Goryn class tug, Yakov Grebelsky (MB-119)
  • Northern Fleet Pr.REF-675 Kaliningrad Neft class oiler, Kama

Saturday Morning TV Memories 1964 – 1976 !

Kremlin Publicly Accuses U.S. of Being Behind Drone Attack/Attempted Assassination of Putin

The Kremlin has accused the US of being behind an “assassination attempt” on Vladimir Putin yesterday.

According to President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, Moscow is considering “various” options in response to the Wednesday morning drone attack on the Kremlin, which it accuses Ukraine of orchestrating “under the dictate of Washington.”

Washington is “definitely” behind the alleged assassination attempt on Vladimir Putin yesterday, the Kremlin has said.

Moscow claimed two drones attempted to attack the Kremlin, but were disabled and failed to cause any damage.

Russia has multiple response options, it said, but declined to comment on whether Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a legitimate target.

The Kremlin claimed the US was selecting the targets and Ukraine was merely implementing American plans, without providing evidence.

John Kirby, the National Security Council’s Coordinator for Strategic Communications, called accusations from Russia that the US directed Ukraine to carry out an alleged Kremlin drone attack and assassination attempt on President Vladimir Putin “ridiculous.”

For Kyiv and Washington to try to disown the incident was “absolutely ridiculous”, the Kremlin said.

Mr. Zelenskyy has denied that Kyiv had anything to do with the incident.

Some experts have suggested Moscow itself could have created the incident as a false flag operation, intended to boost Russian support for the war.

Moscow warns of ‘imminent and inevitable punishment’ for alleged drone attack.

“Moscow is considering a variety of options for responding to the Ukrainian attack on the Kremlin, we can only talk about well-thought-out steps that correspond to the interests of the country. The attack of Ukrainian drones on the Kremlin is now being investigated.

Uncle Buck- Buck Finds Tia

U.S. to Deploy “THOUSANDS” of Troops to Taiwan; China said “Would be Invasion Causing immediate war”

“Multiple sources” are reporting that the U.S. will deploy “thousands” of troops on to Taiwan to defend the island from China.

Last year, China made clear that US troops deploying on to Taiwan will be viewed by Beijing as an “invasion” resulting in immediate war.

More info if I get it.

Sure some neocons wish for this, were this to be attempted, full on war would occur. -MM

2023 05 05 06 17
2023 05 05 06 17

Dreaming. Thousands of deployed soldiers would be killed by the thousands. -MM

3 China Massive Culture Shocks: frustration to fascination!

I like this girl.

On The Hypocrisy Of The New EU Sanction Regime

Once upon a time the European Union rejected secondary sanctions which the U.S. used to press third party countries to follow its sanction regimes against other once:

Making use of the centrality of the US in the global economy, it has imposed ‘secondary sanctions’ on foreign firms, which are forced to choose between trading with US sanctions targets or forfeiting access to the lucrative US market. In addition, the US has penalized foreign firms for breaching US sanctions legislation.

To counter these extraterritorial measures the EU introduced a blocking mechanism:

The lawfulness of these sanctions could be contested before various domestic and international judicial mechanisms, although each mechanism comes with its own limitations. To counter the adverse effects of secondary sanctions, third states and the EU can also make use of, and have already made use of, various non-judicial mechanisms, such as blocking statutes, special purpose vehicles to circumvent the reach of sanctions, or even countermeasures.

Blocking statutes prohibit EU companies from complying with U.S. sanctions:

Pursuant to Art. 5(1) of the EU Blocking Regulation, EU operators are prohibited from complying “with any requirement or prohibition, including requests of foreign courts, based on or resulting, directly or indirectly” from a set of foreign sanctions laws deemed to apply extraterritorially by the European Union, “or from actions based thereon or resulting therefrom.” The laws in question are listed in the Regulation’s Annex; currently, all are US statutes. Art. 5(2) provides that the European Commission (the Commission) may, upon request, authorize EU operators to comply fully or partially with these laws, to the extent that noncompliance would seriously damage their interests or those of the European Union.In 2018, the Commission updated the Annex of the EU Blocking Regulation to include the (reimposed) US secondary sanctions against Iran. It also adopted an Implementing Regulation laying down the criteria that would be taken into account for the granting of compliance authorizations, and issued a Guidance Note on the application of the reactivated EU Blocking Regulation.

The blocking statute was used to reject sanctions the U.S. instated against Iran after the U.S. left the nuclear agreement.

Now however, the conflict in Ukraine has seemingly killed any resistance in the EU against illegal acts from the U.S. In fact the EU has now gone mad and is itself considering the introduction of extraterritorial measures against countries which do not follow its own sanction regime against Russia:

The European Union is discussing a new sanctions mechanism to target third countries it believes aren’t doing enough to prevent Russia from evading sanctions, particularly those that can’t explain spikes in trade of key goods or technologies, according to people familiar with the matter.The primary aim of the tool would be to deter countries from helping Russia and crack down on trade channels that Moscow may be exploiting, the people said. If that doesn’t work, the bloc would have the option as a second step of imposing targeted restrictions on key goods.

The new enforcement mechanism, aspects of which were first reported by the Financial Times, would give member states the authority to create two lists — one of affected third countries and the other of banned goods.

If the mechanism is approved by national governments, decisions on which countries and goods to list would be for member states to take unanimously, the people said. The measures were unlikely to target China at first, but focus mostly on nations in central Asia and Russia’s immediate neighbors, the people added.

Elsewhere, the proposed package would make it easier to sanction companies in third countries that are circumventing the EU’s sanctions.

The EU politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels are killing their own moral defense against the U.S. application of secondary sanctions against third parties.

How will they ever be able to again argue for their own blocking statute. Moreover what will they do when third party countries, like Turkey or China, introduce their own blocking statutes against secondary EU sanctions on their companies?

Posted by b at 15:31 UTC | Comments (26)

Chinese Culture: The values that set them apart.

I really like her message here.

Zelenski’s Regime Is Finished

Yesterday’s drone attack on the Kremlin (and other installations) mark the end of the Zelenski regime. While Russia had so far refrained from regime change in Kiev it will now have to pursue it.

The former prime minister of Israel Naftali Bennet had reported that president Putin had promised him not to hit Zelenski:

“I knew Zelensky was under threat, in a bunker… I said to [Putin], ‘Do you intend to kill Zelensky?’ He said, ‘I won’t kill Zelensky,’” Bennett recalled in the interview, which was published on his own YouTube channel.

Bennett said he called the Ukrainian president immediately after the three-hour encounter with Putin, and told him, “I’ve just come out of a meeting — [Putin] is not going to kill you.“[Zelensky] asked me, ‘Are you sure?’ I said 100 percent. [Putin’s] not going to kill you.”

Bennett recalled: “Two hours later, Zelensky went to his office, and did a selfie in the office, [in which the Ukrainian president said,] ‘I’m not afraid.’”

Well, now he has very good reason to again be afraid, very afraid. As former ambassador MK Bhadrakumar writes:

Make no mistake, this is a tipping point; the clumsy attempt on Putin’s life jolts the kaleidoscope beyond recognition. The only comforting thought is that the Kremlin leadership is not going to be driven by emotion. The considered Kremlin reaction is available from the remarks by the Russian Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov:“How would Americans react if a drone hit the White House, the Capitol or the Pentagon? The answer is obvious for any politician as well as for an average citizen: the punishment will be harsh and inevitable.”

The ambassador went on to draw the bottom line: “Russia will respond to this insolent and presumptuous terrorist attack. We will answer when we consider it necessary. We will answer in accordance with the assessments of the threat that Kiev posed to the leadership of our country.”

I agree with Bhadrakumar that there will be no knee-jerk reaction from Moscow. But public opinion in Russia demands that there will be payback for the attack and against anyone involved in it.

Putin’s hands are tied beyond a point when the country is in rage and demanding retribution, as evident from the comments by former Russian President and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev: “After today’s terrorist attack, there are no options left except for the physical elimination of Zelensky and his clique.”

That Zelenski fled to Finland, then to the Netherlands and Germany after the drones hit the Kremlin is a sure sign of his complicity in the act.

When (if?) he comes back to Kiev it will be bunker life for the rest of his reign.

Posted by b on May 4, 2023 at 16:08 UTC | Permalink

Is China The American Dream ? : Chongqing China 重庆市

Tung Signa technology in Shanghai has two domestic lithography machines stationed in the production line

Recently Tung Signa technology in Shanghai has two domestic lithography machines stationed in the production line independently developed by Shanghai microelectronics

2023 05 05 09 25
2023 05 05 09 25

This represents a major advancement in domestic lithography machines highlighting that domestic lithography machines have rapidly replaced imported lithography machines

In the future the production capacity of 20 000 pieces of full process gold bumps per month can be realized

The introduction of the first domestically produced lithography machine this time is great news for China.

Shanghai microelectronics is the largest lithography machine company in China it has already mass-produced 90 nanometer lithography machines and is currently accelerating the promotion of 28 nanometer and 14 nanometer lithography machines

The lithography machine delivered this time is a packaging and testing lithography machine but this also represents a major progress in China’s lithography machine which means that the domestic 14 nanometers lithography machine will soon be mass produced

After the packaging and testing lithography machine is delivered it is expected to complete the debugging in May and complete the test and mass production next month.

It is expected that the production of twenty thousand chips per month will be completed by next year.

The first lithography machine of Shanghai microelectronics 20-year research was successfully delivered with move-in-ceremony held. This was the proud moment for China and its people.

The icing on the cake is the price of these lithography machines which is only one-seventh of the price of ASML equivalent lithography machines which shows the ultra low cost advantage of domestic lithography machines such a low-cost Advantage will help greatly reduce the cost of Chinese Chips.

lithography machines are not the only ones for making chips in addition to being divided into EUV, DUV and UV, according to the advanced level of the light source they can also be divided into front-end lithography machines for chip manufacturing and back-end lithography machines for packaging and testing.

This time the company introduced a gold bump packaging and testing lithography machine which belongs to the back-end lithography machine for packaging and testing in the field of packaging and testing lithography machines.

28 nanometers to 7 nanometers lithography machines are all immersion lithography Machine Technologies which means that China has successfully developed the 28 nanometers lithography machine to handle the key technology of immersion lithography machines.

Since the difficulty of developing 14 nanometers and 7 nanometers lithography machines has been greatly reduced, as a result ASML’s 1980 lithography machine will also lose its competitiveness.

If China successfully develops (front end) immersion lithography machine technology then ASML will lose a large chunk of market and may return to the days when it was lingering, so of course it is afraid.

This is the great news for China and a shocker for ASML who may want to change its attitude in the coming days.

50k Volts of Compliance Make Her Plank Like It’s 2011 – Florida Friday!

United States debt in comparison…

This was from last year, and does not include the massive increase in debt since December 2022.

massive debt
massive debt

The Sopranos – S06E06 – Spotted in a fag bar in New York – Allegedly!

Taking on China and Russia

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Two-front War
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Waging a two-front war usually ends in defeat. Just ask Hitler.

The US Anglo-Zionist Empire not only faces a two-front war against Russia and China, but as technology entrepreneur, publisher, free speech activist, writer, and journalist Ron Unz pointed out in his article, “Did the Neocons Save the World from the Thucydides Trap,” reckless neocon aggression helped create the Eurasian juggernaut.

Their war crimes aside, old-school arch-globalists like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger knew the strategic value of keeping Russia and China separated.

If the neocons wanted to take out Russia first, they should have offered China sweet trade deals, reaffirmed their support for the One China policy, and made Emperor President Xi’s birthday a public school holiday.

If China was the big prize, the neocons should have backed Nord Stream 2, promised Russia future NATO membership, and invited President Putin to Disney World.

Instead, the neocons tried to turn money laundering bio lab Ukraine into a NATO missile silo to threaten Russia while simultaneously antagonizing China using Pelosi bat landings and balloon shootdowns in hopes of making Taiwan a second Ukraine.

Like toxic foam that covers the surface of a polluted pond, in a neoliberal kakistocracy, the most venal depraved moronic scum float to the top. In addition, end-stage empires often act irrationally. Both conditions explain current US strategy.

For the record, I’m taking a bit of creative license with the term two-front war. I mean it in the sense of the US taking on a China-Russia united front, and the domestic, international, military, and economic implications that accompany that.

Technically, US vs China-Russia is a global conflict, with proxy wars raging in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and the likely future inclusion of the Latin American and Asian theaters.

Enough ethnoreligious hotspots exist to set off proxy wars across the planet. All that’s needed for conflagration is a CIA gas can and book of matches. The problem with that approach is the CIA can’t control what rises from the ashes. Any Phoenix will likely be China-Russia friendly.

Beyond proxy war lies the danger of direct superpower confrontation. With its forces on the ground in Ukraine, the US-NATO alliance comes close to crossing the line with Russia. US vs China is still in the nascent cold war stage.

For the neocons to wage an international two-front war, they also need to juggle a two-front anti-Russia/anti-China domestic propaganda campaign. The animosity between America’s “left” and “right” makes it difficult to bring both groups under a united war banner.

The “Russia-Russia-Russia” Blue and Yellow flag emoji weekly boosted knee-benders hate “Hitler-Putin” because he represents anti-wokeness and Western Civilization. However “liberals” lack visceral hatred toward China as Netflix programming has made it difficult for them to imagine a non-White villain.

While it would be easy to rile up “support the troops” Breitbart “conservatives” against the “godless Asiatic Chicoms,” many on the reactionary right view Putin as a defender of traditional values.

If the neocons managed to subdue their massive egos, they could put their two-front domestic psyops dilemma into one of Pentagon HAL’s simulation programs and follow the computer’s advice. Pentagon HAL could offer the following four suggestions:

HAL INPUT 1- Let the simulation program manage all components of the two-front war without “human” neocon interference. While this might prolong the life of the empire, it won’t prevent collapse, as the foundational rot is too far advanced.

HAL INPUT 2- When the US Ponzi economy crashes, blame it on a “Chicom-Putin/Hitler” financial cyber attack. Losing their bank accounts would unite both sides of the right-left divide into signing on to WW3. Under martial law, the US could transition into a wartime resource economy, issuing biometric ID food ration/vaccine cards and tent city housing vouchers.

HAL INPUT 3- Withdraw from Ukraine and declare victory. Then stage a military coup/civil war, crush the “wokies,” and replace the rainbow flag with the Cross.

In a divine revelation and post-sex scandal comeback, Pastor Jerry Falwell Jr. reveals that “China Flu” was a Chicom bio-attack and that the Chicoms also took down the Twin Towers, killed JFK, and buried Jimmy Hoffa under the Meadowlands Sports Complex. A unified US populace wages a “Christian Nationalist” crusade against “anti-Christ Chicomunism” to save Israel and usher in WW3 and the Rapture.

Falwell further states that after radioactive flames engulf the planet, Scotty beams up the Americans to Heaven, where they hang out with “Mushroom Cloud Jesus” and Ronald Reagan for all eternity.

HAL INPUT 4- Intensify the public dumb-down program. Soon every US citizen will be able to hold multiple opposing views while operating within the greater collective: “War with Eurasia. War with East Asia. War with Eurasia and East Asia. Who cares? Just give us our soma, cat videos,* and Soylent Green Doritos.” (*Cat videos really are funny. Ha ha ha.)

Propaganda in a full-spectrum totalitarian idiocracy would need to be even dumber than what’s currently produced by Deep State corporate media.

While I’m confident Pentagon HAL could provide other ideas on how to make the US public fall in love with a two-front war, no computer simulation can handle the real-world international challenge presented by a China-Russia alliance. And it’s not just China and Russia. They have allies. And future allies.

Before discussing the relations of the US and the China-Russia alliance in regards to the rest of the world, I’ll need to scale things down to a micro-fish filet. With infinite twists and turns, the unique complexities of each nation-state, and cosmic dice that may or may not be loaded, you could fill up the pre-nova Sarpeidon library with this topic alone.

Lacking access to Pentagon HAL forces me to plug everything into the Tao. A few small quirks in my operating system allow for a small margin of error. That said, it’s time to step into the transporter. Coordinates- Palace of Yamamah, Saudi Arabia. Beam us down Scotty. Hand phasers on stun.

China amazed the world with its brokered peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran. After FDR met with King Ibn Saud on the USS Quincy, Saudi Arabia became a vital US ally. So much so, that President Nixon made the Saudis a foundational component of the US petro-dollar.

While no fan of the House of Saud mafia crime family, I welcome their groundbreaking drift toward China. A black raven omen for Anglo-Zionist Middle East hegemony.

Except for its role as CIA prison black-ops site and buffer for Israel, Jordan has negligible value to the US. Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait exist as US military bases and will break free the first chance they get.

Egypt remains America’s last major Muslim ME ally. If a Nasser officer corps strongman with Sino-Russian leanings overthrows Egyptian zio-puppet Sisi, the US suffers the de facto loss of its Middle East empire.

Barring a few notable exceptions (who I’ll discuss later), most Asian (oriental) countries want good relations with China and Russia. I think if forced to choose, the majority Asian bloc, including West-friendly Thailand, go with China.

The Asian “stan” countries know their future lies with China and the BRI. The mighty Taliban’s victory over ZioCorp removed any doubts.

Pentagon’s AFRICOM controls a network of military bases and CIA-funded gangland militias that stretch across Africa. This gives America the ability to sow chaos throughout the continent, as well as sabotage China’s infrastructure and business projects. In the end, China wins, as Africa’s nation-states strongly favor a Sino-Russian alliance.

A long history of CIA-sponsored coups, assassinations, and corporate plunder destabilized and impoverished Latin America. The only Latin American nations loyal to the US are those ruled by CIA-backed oligarch families. The supermajority of Latin Americans prefer China and Russia over the US, and any successful populist coups will follow that sentiment.

While I think India likely favors a China-Russia future, I still consider it a wild card. A CIA-instigated Indo-China border dispute could push India toward the US.

Furthermore, in general, the H1-B US Brahmin* Big Tech class (and its associated professional class) is obsequiously servile to their Rothschild Zionist and corporate benefactors. I don’t know how much sway US Brahmin Big Tech scribes hold over their subcontinent counterparts.

(*I’m using Brahmin as a figurative ethno-power bloc descriptor in relation to domestic US ethno-hierarchy, and not criticizing individual Indians. I dug Aravind Adiga’s novel, “The White Tiger” and activist/scholar Vandana Shiva took on Bill Gates. The same applies for “Rothschild Zionist.” I’m not attacking innocent Jews.)

If most of the world aligns with China and Russia, what about the US Anglo-Zionist Empire’s major “true-blue” allies?” Where do Israel, the UK, Australia, NZ, Canada, Scandinavia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe (esp. Poland), Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Ukraine fit into the empire’s defensive framework?

To Israel, the US is a lobotomized goose that lays golden eggs. Should the goose ever get a hysterectomy, Israel would cut loose and try to negotiate its own China deal. If forced to choose between the Samson Option and a China-brokered two-state solution, I think Israel opts for the latter.

The UK’s hyper-corrupt Goldman Sachs Brahmin dork oligarch Prime Minister perfectly represents the nation destined to become a bankrupt Air Strip One. Or perhaps a multicultural Clockwork Orange. Beyond its use as an international banking and nuclear strike force hub and its SAS military advisors, the UK provides scant offerings in a global dogfight.

Vassal state Australia is captive to America’s China policy. As per journalist Caitlin Johnstone’s article, “Australia Pays Washington Swamp Monsters For War Advice,” US neocons hold official key positions in Australian military and state agencies, not unlike the Israeli nationals embedded in top US government slots. If WW3 goes down, frontline Australia could star in a real-world “Mad Max” sequel.

The best WEF-controlled New Zealand can hope for is to become a WW3 billionaire bunker.

Canada contains vast deposits of energy. Beyond its use as a police state gas station, I don’t place much stock in Canada’s military capabilities. Modern Canada is not D-Day “lumberjack” Canada.

In either a cold or hot war, I doubt Scandinavia poses much threat to the China-Russia alliance, as it’s currently in a cultural-spiritual-economic death spiral.

Finland’s entry into NATO represents the last spoonful of arsenic. As a NATO member, Finland will be forced to purchase overpriced and unreliable MIC weapon systems with its social welfare fund. Third-world police state dystopia follows.

Norway’s old-school NATO and in too deep to buck. Sweden’s screwed whether it joins NATO tomorrow or the day after. Goodbye ABBA.

Japan is a valuable asset to the US Anglo-Zionist Empire due to its geographical location and high-tech manufacturing capability. Retooled Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Toyota plants could certainly produce plenty of killer robots and next-generation drones. However, Japan can’t touch China’s production output.

Given its proximity to both Russia and China, if things go hot, Las Vegas odds say Japan commits harakiri for ZioCorp’s honor.

I hope a divine wind blows through Japan’s collective neural network before the “land of cherry blossoms” passes the point of no return.

Taiwan? Except for a few CIA brain-chipped suicide bombers, when PLA troops march through Taipei, the cheering crowds will welcome them with flowers. I think the Taiwanese are too smart to end up like the Ukranians.

As reported by Global Times, South Korea’s current President is a neocon-programmed automaton bent on wrecking his country for the glorification of ZioCorp. However, many S. Koreans loathe the prospect of another American-instigated Korean war and resent US military occupation and neoliberal debt slavery.

The South Korean flag displays the yin-yang symbol. The 5 tenets of taekwondo are courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, and indomitable spirit. If Tao knocks on South Korea’s door tomorrow, who answers?

Product of a looting dictator father and shoe-crazed mother, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is a well-compensated US State Department foreign contractor. Unlike Marcos, the previous president was China-Russia friendly. What if China started bankrolling Philippine political parties like the US does?

Western Europe, plagued by ziobankster austerity, forced MIC purchasing, deindustrialization, neocon terror attacks on vital energy infrastructure, hyper mRNA vaccination, and weaponized immigration, is on an Oswald Spangler death trip.

Brute force US military occupation, an EU surveillance state, and corporate media brainwashing keep Western Europeans in line. However, even worms like former Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron and neoliberal technocrat Olaf Shultz want to maintain good relations with China.

Like its US counterpart, Western Europe’s political class would airlift its entire native citizen-serf population into a giant volcano for a few extra bucks and an ADL head pat.

Even so, EU technocrats realize the US Titanic suffers from a breached hull. How much and fast the water is pouring in is a matter of debate. One solid bet. Before the US sinks, it throws Europe into the icy water.

Should Western Europe escape total annihilation, it will need a Chinese Sun Tzu / Marshall Plan to rejoin civilization.

If a major economic downturn forces the US to reduce its European military presence, Western Europe bolts to China. And despite “Putin is Hitler” mass hysteria, by default, to Russia.

We may one day witness a true Eurasian (Europe-Russia-China) bloc that extends from the beaches of Normandy to Shanghai.

As reported in Philip Giraldi’s article, “Perspectives from Eastern Europe,” the Polish-led Eastern European bloc stands with the US Anglo-Zionist Empire. A somewhat understandable situation, given Eastern European-Soviet history. However, the Poles and their friends need to realize that Putin’s Russia is not Soviet Russia. Beyond the historical trauma, Poland wants a chunk of Ukraine. Following WWI, Poland snatched Germany’s “Polish Corridor” and “Free City of Danzig.” That didn’t work out well for the Poles. Neither will their Ukraine land grab.

Ukraine is finished. Whatever is not seized by Russia in the east gets vacuumed up by BlackRock corporations in the west. To maintain appearances, the BlackRock western zone might keep the Ukraine name.

Using Zelensky as their corporate Kaganovich, the Rothschild Zionists manifested a second Holodomor. Mega-death WW2 started shortly after the first Holodomor. Are we entering another historical rhyme cycle?

The US Anglo-Zionist Empire’s foreign alliance rests on “gun to the head” diplomacy. By contrast, the China-Russia foreign alliance is a “coalition of the willing” in the true sense of the term. Except for Israel, the UK, Eastern Europe, and maybe Japan, the world’s nations want to join the China-Russia alliance.

But what about the US military as a stand-alone outfit? Can it take on China-Russia?

As exemplified by current Secretary of Defense and former member of Raytheon’s Board of Directors Lloyd Austin, the Pentagon’s top brass are incompetent bloated venal careerists who lack rudimentary military proficiency.

Chinese and Russian military leadership outshines its US equivalent by many suns.

The Pentagon/MIC top brass view the future of warfare as a purely technological affair, i.e., killer robots backed by drone jet fighters and battleships managed by AI Pentagon HAL, with human cog positions filled by undocumented “dreamers,” purple-haired gender fluid gamers, H-1B techies, and poor people seeking military food ration cards.

In a technology-driven war, the China-Russia scientific alliance infinitely outbrains Dr. Strangelove. China’s “Artificial Sun” just broke the world record for a sustained nuclear fusion reaction. (Fission bad- Chernobyl. Fusion good- how the sun generates energy.) Check out Russia’s hypersonic missiles.

War is more than weapons. Soldiers need boots, uniforms, knapsacks, medicines, and canteens. The US outsourced its manufacturing base to China. It could take decades to rebuild. To demonstrate the industrial chasm between the US and China, compare Amtrak to China’s high-speed rail network. The US builds tent cities. China builds trains.

In human warrior vs human warrior, the nationalist-motivated Russian and Chinese fighting man outmatches his globalist US counterpart.

While the lower US military ranks still contain some “warrior” types, that demographic is systematically being weeded out. Good. Only a moron would fight for ZioCorp.

In the weirdest ever case of mismatch, the war machine appropriated the rainbow flag for its official symbol.

That’s not to say gay guys can’t fight.

To borrow from the Rolling Stones’ “Memo from Turner,” openly gay National Socialist SA leader Ernst Röhm was a “lashing, smashing hunk of man,” and from my viewpoint, ‘homo thugs’ make the top 5 scariest muthas list.

But that’s not who the Pentagon/MIC is looking to recruit. They want the Pete Buttigieg type. A blue and yellow patched rainbow armband hundred times boosted PrEP popper who wants to swallow up nation-states in a child groomer-Goldman Sachs pincer movement.

If America’s humiliating defeat by the amazing Taliban offers any indication of US military prowess, I think the China-Russia alliance comes out on top in a conventional war.

As an aside, shortly before the collapse of the USSR, the Soviets lost Afghanistan. With America’s recent ejection by Taliban forces, are we witnessing another historical rhyme cycle?

Given America’s astronomical accruement of bad karmic debt, a US collapse would open the floodgates of hell not unlike the torrent of blood elevator from “The Shining.”

The only thing worse than collapse is if AI, killer robots, and other high-tech police state innovations allow a financialized aristocracy to rule over their lab rat epsilon subjects in perpetuity.

Factoring in ruling class cognitive limitations, the probability of complex system breakdown, the history of empire, the destruction of the education system, the pathological corruption, and the nature of entropy- I lean toward collapse.

The best last chance escape-hatch for America is either a military coup led by a benevolent populist dictator who retracts the US back to its continental borders or a quasi-peaceful breakup that splits the US into ideological and ethno states.

Both outcomes require dismantling the Federal Reserve and purging the current ruling class.

Enough hope porn.

What if the US starts WW3 and starts to lose? A desperate US Anglo-Zionist Empire could unleash a US version of the Samson Option. I don’t think that will happen- at least not intentionally, as most global elitists don’t want to spend the rest of their lives in underground bunkers.

However, a Skynet technical glitch could set off an accidental nuclear launch. Or maybe a rogue Dr. Strangelove wakes up with a head cold.

The international bankers know the empire is doomed. For them, the US nuclear arsenal serves as a “threat weapon” against China: “Let us in, or we shoot.”

If faced with the loss of global financial control, would the Rothschild-Rockefeller bank cartel blow up the planet? I don’t know. The US is the only country that ever dropped nuclear bombs on its enemy.

If it goes down, the radioactive cockroaches might get their shot.

Biggest Differences Living in China VS America

Half of U.S. Tax Payments from Income Tax Filing Day – SPENT! Treasury Down to $188 Billion

Americans filed their taxes for the year 2022 just two weeks ago . . .  and HALF the money they paid, is already spent!  According to data released by the US Treasury, the US Government is down to its last $188 Billion!  June 1, it all stops . . .

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen penned a letter to Congress last week telling them that unless the US Debt Ceiling is raised, the U.S. Government “will not be able to meet its commitments BY June 1.”

That’s not Hal Turner or some talking head saying that . . .  It’s the Treasury Secretary of the United States saying it.

A simple analysis of Yellen’s words makes clear it’s not just Debt servicing or interest payments they won’t be able to make, it’s all their “commitments” they won’t be able to meet.   What ARE those commitments?   Welfare, SOCIAL SECURITY, Medicare, Food Stamps, Obama phones, Section 8 Housing, and the like!

Worse, after June 1, the government will be in DEFAULT on more and more of its obligations, thereby smashing and wrecking the “full faith and credit” of the United States.

Who around the world will bother buying US Treasury Debt after we default?   No sane person!!!!

If this takes place, the cities will likely fall apart first.  It will be chaos as those with their hands out for money, don’t get any.  There will likely be food thefts, riots, roving gangs taking what they want by force.

As the cities are emptied of food, the roving gangs will move outward into the suburbs.

This could turn into a “Mad Max” scenario, in very little time.

Below is the chart released by the US Treasury showing they have only $188 Billion left, and that they have already spent HALF of the Tax Revenue Paid By Americans just two weeks ago:

 

Starship Troopers: Sgt. Zim takes all challengers HD CLIP

Russian Warships SUDDENLY Deploy to North Sea

A concentration of at least five Russian Navy warships, plus two auxiliaries, has formed in the North Sea.

If the Ukraine invasion teaches us anything, it’s that the axillaries are just as worth watching as the pointy ships.

All 5 warships are Kalibr cruise missile capable.

While there may be many explanations for this, it will likely get NATO attention.

The most likely explanation at this stage is an unannounced exercise.

Unusually the group includes a frigate from the Black Sea Fleet, which is prevented from returning to its base in Crimea due to the war. Turkey has closed the Bosporus to warships.  It is the Bosporus which is the only entry/exit between the Black Sea and ultimately, the Mediterranean Sea.

Russian Navy vessels identified in area:

  • Black Sea Fleet Pr.11356 Admiral Grigorovich class frigate, Admiral Grigorovich (494)
  • Baltic Fleet Pr.20380 Steregushchiy class corvette, Sbrazitelnyy (531)
  • Baltic Fleet Pr.20380 Steregushchiy class corvette, Stoikiy (545)
  • Baltic Fleet Pr.22800 Karakurt class corvette, Sovetsk (577)
  • Baltic Fleet Pr.22800 Karakurt class corvette, Odintsovo (584)
  • Baltic Fleet Pr.563 Goryn class tug, Yakov Grebelsky (MB-119)
  • Northern Fleet Pr.REF-675 Kaliningrad Neft class oiler, Kama

Vito Was Blowing The Security Guard – The Sopranos HD

What China Is Really Playing at in Ukraine

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Beijing is fully aware the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is the un-dissociable double of the U.S. war against its Belt and Road Initiative.

Imagine President Xi Jinping mustering undiluted Taoist patience to suffer through a phone call with that warmongering actor in a sweaty T-shirt in Kiev while attempting to teach him a few facts of life – complete with the promise of sending a high-level Chinese delegation to Ukraine to discuss “peace”.

There’s way more than meets the discerning eye obscured by this spun-to-death diplomatic “victory” – at least from the point of view of NATOstan.

The question is inevitable: what’s the point of this phone call? Very simple: just business.

The Beijing leadership is fully aware the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is the un-dissociable double of an American direct war against the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Until recently, and since 2019, Beijing was the top trade partner for Kiev (14.4% of imports, 15.3% of exports). China essentially exported machinery, equipment, cars and chemical products, importing food products, metals and also some machinery.

Very few in the West know that Ukraine joined BRI way back in 2014, and a BRI trade and investment center was operating in Kiev since 2018. BRI projects include a 2017 drive to build the fourth line of the Kiev metro system as well as 4G installed by Huawei. Everything is stalled since 2022.

Noble Agri, a subsidiary of COFCO (China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation), invested in a sunflower seed processing complex in Mariupol and the recently built Mykolaiv grain port terminal. The next step will necessarily feature cooperation between Donbass authorities and the Chinese when it comes to rebuilding their assets that may have been damaged during the war.

Beijing also tried to become heavily involved in the Ukraine defense sector and even buy Motor Sich; that was blocked by Kiev.

Watch that neon

So what we have in Ukraine, from the Chinese point of view, is a trade/investment cocktail of BRI, railways, military supplies, 4G and construction jobs. And then, the key vector: neon.

Roughly half of neon used in the production of semiconductors was supplied, until recently, by two Ukrainian companies; Ingas in Mariupol, and Cryoin, in Odessa. There’s no business going on since the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO). That directly affects the Chinese production of semiconductors. Bets can be made that the Hegemon is not exactly losing sleep over this predicament.

Ukraine does represent value for China as a BRI crossroads. The war is interrupting not only business but, in the bigger picture, one of the trade and connectivity corridors linking Western China to Eastern Europe. BRI conditions all key decisions in Beijing – as it is the overarching concept of Chinese foreign policy way into mid-century.

And that explains Xi’s phone call, debunking any NATOstan nonsense on China finally paying attention to the warmongering actor.

As relevant as BRI is the overarching bilateral relationship dictating Beijing’s geopolitics: the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership.

So let’s transition to the meeting of Defense Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) earlier this week in Delhi.

The key meeting in India was between Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Chinese colleague Li Shangfu. Li was recently in Moscow, and was received by Putin in person for a special conversation. This time he invited Shoigu to visit Beijing, and that was promptly accepted.

Needless to add that every single player in the SCO and beyond, including nations that are for the moment just observers or dialogue partners as well as others itching to become full members, such as Saudi Arabia, paid very close attention to the Shoigu-Shangfu camaraderie.

When it comes to the profoundly strategic Central Asian “stans”, that represents the six feet under treatment for the Hegemon wishful thinking of using them in a Divide and Rule scheme pitting Russia against China.

Shoigu-Shangfu also sent a subtle message to SCO members India and Pakistan – stop bickering and in the case of Delhi, hedging your bets – and to full member (in 2023) Iran and near future member Saudi Arabia: here’s where’s it at, this the table that matters.

All of the above also points to the increasing interconnection between BRI and SCO, both under Russia-China leadership.

BRICS is essentially an economic club – complete with its own bank, the NDB – and focused on trade. It’s mostly about soft power. The SCO is focused on security. It’s about hard power. Together, these are the two key organizations that will be paving the multilateral way.

As for what will be left of Ukraine, it is already being bought by Western mega-players such as BlackRock, Cargill and Monsanto. Yet Beijing certainly does not count on being left high and dry. Stranger things have happened than a future rump Ukraine positioned as a functioning trade and connectivity BRI partner.

WAR IS COMING, Putin just scored a DEVASTATING blow to the U.S. and Europe!

https://youtu.be/mwTQhwYa66c

Norway

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This Outer Limits Episode Is SO DISTURBING It Will Keep You Up At Night

Top 10 Best Coping Mechanisms for Mental Health

Creative expression

Creative expression allows you to explore and express your emotions in a healthy and constructive way. Whether through painting, drawing, writing, or dancing, creative expression is a powerful tool that can help you process your feelings and reduce stress.

If you’re new to creative expression, starting can be as simple as picking up a pen and paper and writing down your thoughts, drawing a picture, or dancing to your favorite song. You don’t need to be an expert or have formal training; just let your emotions guide you and allow yourself to be fully present in the moment.

Here’s how to get started with creative expression:

  • Choose your medium—from painting and drawing to writing or dancing; pick a form of creative expression that resonates with you.
  • Create a safe space—find a quiet and comfortable place to be alone and focus on your creative expression.
  • Let go of expectations—don’t worry about creating something perfect or meaningful; just let your thoughts and emotions guide you.
  • Be present in the moment—allow yourself to fully immerse in the creative process and let go of any distractions or worries.

Exercise

It’s time to dust off that gym membership you haven’t used since New Year’s.

When we engage in physical activity, our bodies release endorphins, natural chemicals that make us feel good. Exercise is not only great for our physical health but also for our mental health. It helps reduce stress, anxiety, and depression and improves mood.

Starting an exercise routine doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as going for a walk, taking a yoga class, or doing a home workout. The key is finding an activity you enjoy and can do consistently. Starting small and gradually increasing the intensity and duration of your exercise can also help you stick to it.

To get the most out of your exercise routine, make it a habit. Scheduling your workout time in your calendar, setting achievable goals, and tracking your progress can keep you motivated. It’s also important to listen to your body and give yourself rest days.

Mindfullness Mediatation

Mindfulness meditation is a powerful technique that helps you become more aware of your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations in the present moment. By cultivating this awareness, you can gain greater insight into your own patterns of thought and behavior and learn to respond to stress and difficult emotions more skillfully.

To start practicing mindfulness meditation, find a quiet and comfortable place to sit undisturbed for a few minutes. Close your eyes and focus on your breath, noticing the sensation of air moving in and out of your body. If your mind wanders, gently bring your attention back to your breath without judging yourself.

As you continue to practice, you can begin to expand your awareness of other physical sensations and thoughts that arise. Remember to approach these experiences with curiosity and openness rather than judgment or resistance.

Social Support

You don’t have to go through this by yourself—and you shouldn’t. Connect with others and receive emotional, informational, and tangible support. Whether through family, friends, or support groups, social support is a powerful tool that can help you reduce stress, build resilience, and improve your overall mental health.

Social support is an effective coping mechanism because it provides a sense of belonging and connectedness. It’s a chance for you to feel less isolated and alone. Involving other people in your mental health journey can motivate, encourage, and hold you accountable to stay on track with your goals and overcome challenges.

If you’re looking to build your social support, here are some tips to get you started:

  • Identify your support system—consider who you can turn to for emotional support, advice, or practical help.
  • Communicate your needs—be clear about what kind of support you need, and don’t be afraid to ask for help.
  • Nurture your relationships—make time to connect with your support system regularly through phone calls, text messages, or in-person meetings.
  • Be a supportive friend—remember that social support is a two-way street. Be there for your friends and loved ones when they need you, and offer your own support and encouragement.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, is one of the best coping mechanisms for mental health because it helps you identify and change negative thought patterns and behaviors contributing to your mental health struggles. CBT is a goal-oriented and structured approach that focuses on the present moment and helps you develop effective coping strategies to manage your symptoms.

If you want to start CBT, find a licensed therapist specializing in this approach. Together, you’ll work to identify your negative thought patterns and behaviors and develop practical skills and strategies to manage your symptoms.

Here’s a short guide to starting CBT:

  • Identify your goals—think about what you’d like to achieve through therapy and share this with your therapist.
  • Develop a plan—work with your therapist to develop a plan of action.
  • Identify negative thought patterns—learn to identify negative thoughts and beliefs contributing to your symptoms.
  • Challenge negative thoughts—practice challenging and reframing negative thoughts to reduce your impact on your mental health.
  • Develop coping strategies—work with your therapist to develop practical coping strategies to manage your symptoms in challenging situations.

Sleep Hygiene

This is not the time to skimp on sleep. Sleep hygiene refers to practices and habits that promote restful sleep. Poor sleep quality can seriously impact our mental well-being (hello, increased stress, anxiety, and depression!). But good sleep hygiene can help us get the rest needed to manage our emotions and maintain a positive outlook.

Quality sleep is essential for our bodies and minds to recover from the day’s stresses. When we sleep, our brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, and regulates our mood. Without sufficient sleep, we are more vulnerable to negative thoughts and emotions, making it difficult to cope with daily challenges.

To start improving your sleep hygiene, try implementing some of the following practices:

  • Set a consistent sleep schedule—go to bed and wake up at the same time each day, even on weekends.
  • Create a relaxing bedtime routine—wind down before bed with relaxing activities such as reading, meditation, or a warm bath.
  • Limit exposure to screens—avoid using electronic devices such as phones, tablets, or computers before bedtime.
  • Create a comfortable sleep environment—keep your bedroom cool, dark, and quiet.
  • Exercise regularly—physical activity can help promote restful sleep.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Progressive muscle relaxation is a powerful technique to manage stress and anxiety, reducing the muscle tension that comes with them. It works by systematically tensing and relaxing each muscle group in the body, helping to release physical and emotional tension.

When we experience stress or anxiety, our muscles tend to become tense and tight, which can cause physical discomfort and make our mental state worse. By consciously tightening and relaxing each muscle group, we can release this tension and create a sense of physical relaxation.

Here’s a short guide to practicing progressive muscle relaxation:

  1. Find a quiet and comfortable place where you won’t be disturbed.
  2. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, focusing on your breath as you inhale and exhale.
  3. Start at the top of your head and work your way down your body, tensing and then relaxing each muscle group for a few seconds.
  4. Take a few deep breaths between each muscle group, allowing yourself to fully relax and release any tension.
  5. Once you’ve completed the entire sequence, take a few moments to breathe deeply and reflect on how you feel.

Positive Self-Talk

Be kind to yourself—you’re going through a lot right now.

Positive self-talk involves intentionally replacing self-criticism with positive and encouraging statements, improving self-esteem, boosting confidence, and reducing anxiety and depression. One of the reasons positive self-talk is such an effective coping mechanism is that it can help shift our mindset from self-doubt and negativity to self-love and positivity.

Here’s a short guide to practicing positive self-talk:

  1. Start by becoming aware of your negative self-talk. Notice when you’re being self-critical and pay attention to the words and phrases you use.
  2. Challenge your negative self-talk by asking yourself if it’s true. Often, negative self-talk is based on irrational or unfounded beliefs.
  3. Replace negative self-talk with positive statements. For example, if you think “I’m not good enough,” replace it with “I am capable and deserving of success.”
  4. Practice positive self-talk regularly, especially when you’re feeling down or stressed. Repeat positive affirmations to yourself throughout the day to reinforce positive thinking.

Box Breathing

Box breathing, also known as square breathing, is a simple breathing technique to improve overall mental health. It involves taking slow and deep breaths, using a specific pattern of inhaling, holding, exhaling, and holding.

Box breathing helps regulate our nervous system, calming our mind and reducing the physiological response to stress. When we experience stress or anxiety, our body’s natural fight-or-flight response is triggered, causing an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and shallow breathing. By consciously slowing down our breathing and taking deeper breaths, we can activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes relaxation and a sense of calm.

Here’s a short guide to practicing box breathing:

  1. Find a quiet and comfortable place where you won’t be disturbed.
  2. Sit comfortably and take a few deep breaths, focusing on your breath as you inhale and exhale.
  3. Begin by inhaling slowly and deeply through your nose for a count of four.
  4. Hold your breath for a count of four.
  5. Exhale slowly and completely through your mouth for a count of four.
  6. Hold your breath for a count of four.
  7. Repeat this cycle for several minutes, gradually increasing the duration of each count as you become more comfortable.

Gratitude Practices

Gratitude isn’t just for Thanksgiving. It’s an excellent coping mechanism for mental health. Focusing By focusing on gratitude, we can shift our perspective and cultivate a positive mindset. One reason gratitude practices are so effective is that they help us appreciate what we have rather than strive for more.

A way to practice gratitude is to take a few moments each day to reflect on what you are grateful for. This could be anything from a warm cup of tea in the morning to a supportive friend or a beautiful sunset. Another way to practice gratitude is to keep a gratitude journal, where you write down three things you are grateful for each day.

Here’s a guide to practicing gratitude:

  1. Find a quiet and comfortable place to relax and focus on your thoughts.
  2. Take a few deep breaths and reflect on what you are grateful for.
  3. Write down three things you are grateful for, focusing on the feelings of appreciation and positivity that come with each item.
  4. Take a moment to appreciate what you have written down and feel the gratitude and positivity they bring.

Uncle Buck – Bug’s Apology (full scene)

How To Set Healthy Boundaries In A Relationship?

Are you a doormat? Do you lead your own, independent life? Are you in charge? Or, on the other hand, does your wife or girlfriend tell you exactly what to do?

If you’re giving her the reins to your existence, I’ve got news for you. You need to learn how to set healthy boundaries in a relationship.

 

In a romantic relationship devoid of these boundaries, you end up bending over backward to please your partner which might lead to problems and you being unhappy in your relationship after a certain point.

Stop being a ‘yes’ man.

There’s a common misconception here. You think that if you set a boundary with your partner, you’re blocking them out. Incorrect. If you want to have a healthy, high-quality relationship with her, you need to let her know where your boundaries lie.

It’s not about keeping her out or even keeping her at arm’s length. It’s about not self-betraying in order to please her.

If she’s the woman that you think she is, she will respect you and the boundaries you draw up. She will give you that level of respect.

I’ve worked with many men that have found themselves in relationships where the boundaries have gone out of the window. Since they failed to set these boundaries from the offset, their partner has walked all over them.

They’ve found themselves becoming stressed, angry, upset… and not been able to pinpoint the cause of their problems.

The reason is obvious to everyone but them: there are no boundaries in place. That’s why I wanted to share a guide on how to set healthy boundaries in your relationships.

Tending to this part of your love life doesn’t have to be a chore. Taking the time to do this can help you gain the respect, love, and trust that you deserve from a partner.

Within this guide, I will dispel some of the myths surrounding setting boundaries and why you should do it.

Breaking Bad – Diner Scene

10 Major Reasons Why a Woman Leaves Her Man: A Brutally Honest Guide

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Let’s face it. We’ve all been there.

You’re in a happy relationship and think you have everything under control. You’re crazy about her, and she’s crazy about you. And you genuinely cannot remember the last time you were this happy in a relationship.

You even begin to wonder if you found “the one.” At the very least, you fully expect it to turn into a long-term relationship; in the best-case scenario, you’ve found your life partner.

Then, you are blindsided. You get into a sudden argument, and—to your surprise—she walks. And there you are, left wondering just what went wrong. Even worse, you’ll probably never get a straight answer about what went wrong.

I’ve seen failed relationships like these destroy men. Many guys can’t recover from the heartbreak of their relationships ending so abruptly.

That being said, as a professional men’s coach, I can assure you that there are patterns to these things if you know how to look for them. 

Today, I will give you some objective observations about why relationships fail and take a deep dive into what you can do to prevent it from happening to you.

This knowledge should be used to improve yourself and become a more grounded man so that you can build stronger, healthier relationships going forward.

But first, let’s talk about how you shouldn’t handle these situations.

Look, rejection never feels good. I don’t care if we discuss a relationship or a job promotion. Being told that you’re not good enough for something just plain sucks.

Naturally, the first thing you may want to do when this happens is to seek the support of your friends or family. These people will often come together and take your side to make you feel better.

This is entirely understandable, but taking a moment and being introspective is essential. After all, a man who refuses to admit he’s done anything wrong is doomed to repeat his mistakes.

I can tell you that I see many men who, as a defense mechanism, convince themselves that the failed relationship was entirely their girlfriend’s fault. Usually, this isn’t the case.

The truth is many men are unaware of their shortcomings. They fail to realize what they did to cause the relationship to go south. I always advise my clients to take a moment and think about the history of the relationship and consider what warning signs they may have missed.

More often than not, the signs were there all along. Unfortunately, when many men realize this, it is already too late.

That being said, here is a list of the ten most common reasons why a woman will leave her man and some actionable tips you can employ right now to stop them from happening to you.

1. She feels a lack of emotional support and a feeling of connection

I still remember a man I met who was about to propose while on vacation with his girlfriend. The entire trip was carefully crafted to be as romantic as possible, and he was confident that she would say “yes.”

To his surprise, though, she said “no.” Not only did she reject his proposal, but a big argument ensued that ended the relationship then and there. She booked a flight back home, and he had four days to wallow in his failure.

I remember him giving me this big speech about how he felt a deep emotional connection with her that was unlike anything he had ever felt.

He told me he couldn’t comprehend why she said they felt their bond “wasn’t deep enough” for marriage.

He failed to understand that a feeling of connection is unique to everyone. It was a profound connection to my client, but to his partner, it wasn’t anything noteworthy.

It doesn’t mean either person was being untruthful in any way, simply that they had different expectations.

A woman needs to feel like she can confide in anything in you and that you are genuinely interested in her feelings. If she doesn’t, she’ll eventually seek that connection somewhere else. 

In the case of this particular client, after we talked it out, he realized that he was neglecting his girlfriend’s emotional needs—and that he had been for quite a while. There were noticeable clues that she was unhappy, but he failed to realize it.

Why?

Well, that leads me to my next point…

2. You are taking her for granted

My client had become so convinced that his girlfriend was deeply in love with him that he got lazy. The things he said and did that made her fall for him in the first place got put on the back burner.

He was overconfident and didn’t realize he wasn’t the supportive man she needed. In this circumstance, it seemed my client knew how to be emotionally supportive, but he just stopped prioritizing it.

Suppose you’ve been caught in a never-ending cycle of short-term relationships. Even though you want something long-term, those relationships never materialize, and you’re not sure why.

In that case, it’s probably because your partners aren’t getting the emotional support they crave.

Ask yourself, “Am I being lazy?” Because if you want your relationships to go the distance, you must put in the effort. It’s that simple. 

Despite what many people think, relationships aren’t that complicated. All you need to do is maintain the chemistry that sparked the attraction in the first place. The rest will take care of itself.

And this is what leads me to my next point:

3. You failed to level up your communication skills

Think back to when you first started dating your partner and the things you used to talk about. Generally, people don’t get into deep introspective conversations on the first date. For the most part, when two people are just getting to know each other, casual topics take center stage

This is fine in the beginning because there is a strong physical or sexual attraction driving the relationship. Your conversations don’t need to be the most profound because other factors keep you both interested.

But as the relationship progresses and that physical attraction begins to cool, women often look for deeper communication. And that is where I see so many men fall short.

Actively listening, empathizing, and expressing your feelings clearly and respectfully take communication to the next level.

For example, take a look at how the two of you argue. While I’ll be the first to admit that arguing is not an indication that there is something wrong with the relationship, you need to be aware of how your arguments get resolved.

If you constantly brush off her concerns and disputes and never have a resolution, she will feel like you aren’t listening to her and don’t value her opinions. I often see couples argue, stop talking for a while, and then drift back together once their tempers have cooled.

They don’t discuss the issue because they don’t want to deal with the stress and spark another fight. The problem is that when you do this, you’re not fixing the underlying problem. Just because you’re on speaking terms again, it doesn’t mean there isn’t resentment underneath.

If you can’t level up your communication skills in a way that is befitting of a serious relationship, then you’ll never have one. 

Admittedly, practical communication skills require years of practice and don’t come naturally to many men. If you think this statement applies to you, hiring a men’s coach to provide professional guidance might be the perfect solution.

4. You are jealous and/or insecure

While a bit of jealousy is natural—and arguably healthy—excessive jealousy that stems from personal insecurities can drive a wedge between you and your partner. If you constantly question or doubt her loyalty, it won’t be long until she grows tired of it.

As cliché as it is, trust is essential to any relationship, and if you lack trust, you need to examine why that is.

I understand that certain things can happen throughout a relationship that gives you reasonable cause for not trusting your partner, but I’m not talking about those here.

I’m talking about deep-seated insecurities that have nothing to do with your current relationship. These are issues that arise from past relationships or something else entirely, such as something that happened in your childhood.

Whatever the reason, it’s your job to work on yourself to become a trusting and confident partner. Besides, you will drive yourself crazy if you don’t, and your relationships will be guaranteed to fail. 

How do you do that? Well, it all depends on you and your unique circumstances.

For example, if a past partner cheated on you, and now you walk around with a lingering fear that every woman you date will do the same, you need to address that directly.

On the other hand, if your parents constantly put you down as a child, you may suffer from low self-esteem in adulthood. The causes are different for everyone, but the one thing you don’t want to do is bury or repress those emotions.

If you’re unsure what’s causing your problems, a men’s coach can help you get to the root cause of your jealousy and insecurities and teach you how to heal and move on.

5. You are neglecting your growth

It’s always important to prioritize self-improvement and personal growth in your life. To be a strong, grounded man—to be a true leader—you should constantly search for ways to become a better person and partner.

This can come in many ways, shapes, or forms, but generally, you need to show that you are willing to learn from your mistakes, take responsibility for them, and grow as an individual.

In other words: stop acting like a little boy and start acting like a man.

Unfortunately, many men fail to realize when they’ve become stagnant. If your partner is career-oriented, entrepreneurial, and ambitious, it’s only natural that she will seek a like-minded partner.

If you were at one point but have now lost that drive, it may be causing tension in your relationship.

In the end, she will lose respect for you, and then you will lose her. 

Again, it’s about not getting lazy in your relationships.

For example, just because you and your girlfriend decided to move in together and split half the rent doesn’t mean you get to sit on your ass and play video games all day.

Whatever expectations you have from each other need to be communicated to form a lasting relationship.

6. You are being financially irresponsible

Whether casually dating or building a life together, your finances will eventually intertwine. And yes, money isn’t everything, but financial stability is essential to a relationship.

If you’re reckless with your finances—even if that recklessness doesn’t personally affect your partner—it could be a red flag for her.

If a man fails to hold a steady job and bring home a decent income, it is often seen as a sign of weakness. And if you’re unwilling to contribute to shared expenses, she may view you as unreliable or untrustworthy.

Sure, you might have a five-year plan to become a billionaire, but it likely won’t matter to her if your actions fail to convey that. If you’re constantly overspending, racking up debt, and have no real plan to stop the financial bleeding, it’s completely natural that she’ll have concerns.

I should also note that I’ve seen the opposite be true, where a man has tons of money in his bank accounts but keeps it a secret because he wants to ensure the woman he is dating isn’t into him only for the money.

While this concern is valid, it doesn’t justify hiding things from your partner. In the end, this will only add distrust to the relationship.

The longer you stay together, the more your finances will become intertwined, so it’s better to be open with these things.

7. You are disrespectful or exhibit controlling behavior

This should go without saying, but no woman wants to be in a relationship with a man who disrespects or tries to control her. If you in some way try to insult or try to control your partner’s behavior, I can guarantee she won’t be hanging around for long.

Sometimes I’ll see guys who belittle or talk down to their women and act as if they’re doing so in a playful or joking manner.

They don’t realize that while it might all be fun and games to them, it would be highly offensive if the shoe was on the other foot.

Furthermore, if done in a group or social setting, it usually just comes off as a desperate cry for attention and makes them look like immature little boys.

If you need to boost yourself up by putting your partner down, that is a severe issue that needs to be addressed.

And in short, don’t do it.

Similarly, if you exhibit controlling tendencies, that’s another thing that cannot be ignored. As I mentioned earlier when I was talking about insecurities, behaviors like this usually stem from external factors, and they need to be remedied as soon as possible.

If you think you have a problem respecting your partner or have been accused of being overly controlling, you may need the help of a coaching expert who can help you bring the root causes to the surface.

8. You were guilty of infidelity

Infidelity is a common deal-breaker in relationships. Even if your partner has no concrete proof that you were cheating, just the suspicion alone is usually enough to cause severe tension that leads to the end of the relationship.

If you’re unhappy in your current relationship and develop an interest in someone else, it will save you significant stress and aggravation to break up.

Even if it truly is a one-time occurrence, cheating usually leaves lasting scars on the relationship.

Once a woman has a reason to doubt your honesty or loyalty, it probably won’t take long before she decides she’s better off without you.

I’ve met many men with girlfriends or wives who tolerated their cheating ways for years. They naively believed they were invincible, could walk all over their partners, and would tolerate it.

Then one day, when their wives or girlfriends suddenly packed up and left, they were left there twiddling their thumbs, trying to figure out what to do.

9. You do not satisfy her in the bedroom

This is probably the one item on this list that bruises more egos than others. The fact is, a healthy sexual relationship is a massive part of any romantic relationship, and it’s something you need to pay attention to.

If you’re the only one who’s enjoying sex and you routinely go through the motions and leave women unsatisfied, you’re just asking for trouble.

Sex, just like any other aspect of a long-term relationship, requires effort to maintain. Assumedly, your sex lives were pleasing at the start of the relationship—otherwise, you wouldn’t have made it this far—so ask yourself, what happened?

As difficult as it might be to admit, acknowledge if you are responsible for letting things stale.

And if you think to yourself, “Wait, she wouldn’t leave me just because of bad sex, would she?” well, what would you do if the roles were reversed?

What’s problematic here is that it’s doubtful you’ll find any conclusive evidence that bad sex caused a failed relationship. Nevertheless, if your past relationships lead you to believe this was the case, you need to address it moving forward.

10. She outgrew you (or you outgrew her

It’s just a fact of life: people grow apart. Their goals, aspirations, and interests change, and before long, whatever initially attracted two people to each other feels like nothing more than a distant memory.

Many things can cause these divisions, whether changing careers, having children together, or just realizing that you aren’t quite as compatible as you initially thought.

I often hear men say that that phrase—”We’ve grown apart”—was said to them, but they still don’t fully comprehend what it means.

Men often miss the subtle (or not-so-subtle) clues from their partners that something needs to change; they are given an ultimatum without even realizing it.

For example, if your girlfriend or wife tells you that the two of you should go to couples therapy, it’s a sign of serious problems. But beyond that, she believes the two of you are past the point of reconciling those problems on your own and now need professional help.

Some men dismiss the idea of couple’s therapy and are then surprised when she walks out on the relationship. This is another case where a failure to communicate quietly kills your chemistry, whether you realize it or not.

Simply put, in any long-term relationship, you will both change; that much is a given. The real test is how well you can adapt to that change.

Takeaways

If you’re reading this article, it means one of two things: either you were recently dumped, or you fear that you’re headed down that path.

Either way, just that you are here, reading this is a step in the right direction.

Becoming the best version of yourself is as much about you as it is about the people in your life. If you can’t reflect on your behavior and identify the areas where you need to improve, you’ll be caught in a vicious cycle of failed relationships.

If you’re feeling lost, confused, and unsure where to start, seeking help from a professional men’s coach is the best way to start. Having guidance and support from a group of men who have lived through the very things you’re struggling with can prove invaluable in the long run.

The thing is, you have to be willing to put in the work, and not everyone is. But if you’re one of those men out there who is genuinely ready for a transformative program that will change your life and allow you to achieve things you previously only dreamed of, there’s no better time to start than now.

So, if you believe you’re one of the select few who can handle the intensive, introspective training that I can offer you, why not prove it?

My team of coaches and I have created a “band of brothers” that provide tangible benefits as soon as you join. We are completely unlike other men’s mentorship groups out there and proud of it.

There are no whiners or little boys around these parts. Just serious men who are serious about becoming the absolute best versions of themselves.

If you’re ready to learn more, click the link below to get started.  I’ll see you on the inside.

Creamy Santa Fe Cutlets

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Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 pound 1/4 inch thick pork cutlets
  • 3 teaspoons oil
  • 1/2 cup salsa
  • 1/2 cup frozen corn
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1/4 cup reduced-fat sour cream
  • 1/4 cup chopped cilantro

Instructions

  1. Combine flour, salt and pepper; dredge pork cutlets in flour mixture.
  2. Heat 2 teaspoons oil in a nonstick skillet. Sauté half the cutlets 1 1/2 minutes per side until cooked. Remove to a side plate.
  3. Repeat with remaining oil and cutlets. Cover to keep warm.
  4. After removing cutlets from skillet, add salsa, frozen corn and water. Simmer for 1 minute.
  5. Off the heat, stir in reduced-fat sour cream and chopped cilantro.

Unexpected Finds In Houses

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BREAKING NEWS: KREMLIN ATTACKED *AGAIN*, RUSSIA PREPARING RETALIATION

The dangers of AI…

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It is evolving into a brand new world

As someone who ended up in the insolvency business, if you renage on your debt obligations then your fate is taken out of your hands. You are often screwed if even one creditor decides to make an example of you. Now I believe international debt is slightly different. In corporate or personal lending you can recover in 3 to 5 years. You mess with China and I'm thinking generations...

So anyone in charge of international debt restructuring needs to be similarly aware of the implications. One of those will be a flight from the USD$ if US controlled institutions are not seen to be equitable. Or even if they are. No one likes losing money.

We do indeed live in interesting times.

Posted by: marcjf | Apr 15 2023 18:38 utc | 11

I have been musing about coffee lately.

You know, I grew up with a percolator tin on the stove and really, really, REALLY extra black coffee that had been cooking all day.

Today, most people carry a cardboard cup of coffee to work. It’s good. But, you know, it’s nto the same thing as the kind of coffee that I grew up with.

I wonder…

How about someone saying something good about the 1960’s era style of coffee…

Woman Spewing Anti-China Propaganda Gets Rude Awakening!

Been trying to explain this for years to my peers. I'm a Black American, but went to a diverse high school from which one of my lifelong friends is Chinese. Through him I've met a lot of people who transferred here as students when we were in college. 

Dated a couple Chinese women, married one, and from these experiences learned a bit about their culture. 

What Varafakis says towards the end of the clip when he states that the Chinese are "patient investors" is right. 

From my personal experience (albeit anecdotal), I've learned and try to explain that they play the long game. Westerners are so greedy that they want their returns right away. 

Which is why they are SO destructive. Both at home and abroad. They're willing to blow the place up for short-term gains. Eastern nations, China, Japan, Korea...they value quality over quantity, and are willing to invest in long term projects.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde acknowledged “the tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting faster” and “we may see the world becoming more multipolar”, with the decline of US dollar hegemony, war in Ukraine, and rise of China.

By Ben Norton

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2023 04 23 14 40

The president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, gave a speech acknowledging that “the tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting faster” and “we may see the world becoming more multipolar”, with the decline of US dollar hegemony , war in Ukraine, and rise of China.

“We could see more multipolarity as geopolitical tensions continue to mount”, Lagarde added.

Geopolitical Economy Report editor-in-chief Ben Norton analyzed Lagarde’s speech with Radhika Desai, professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba and director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group:

In the April 17 speech, titled “Central banks in a fragmenting world

”, the European Central Bank (ECB) president cited the “growing rivalry between the United States and China”.

Lagarde stated:

So I decided to accept the idea, and I do that reluctantly, because I don’t think that it’s necessarily a pretty picture, but to accept the idea that we are moving towards a fragmented or a more fragmented world than we’ve had it, and that we are not necessarily in a completely bipolar situation, but that we might move in that direction.

We are witnessing a fragmentation of the global economy in two competing blocs, with each bloc trying to pull as much of the rest of the world closer to its respective strategic interests and shared values. And this fragmentation, as I have mentioned, may well coalesce around two blocs led respectively by the United States of America and by China, the two largest economies in the world at the moment.

In her presentation, Lagarde hinted that the European Union could potentially try to pursue an independent path, mentioning the “strategic autonomy agenda in Europe”.

This was a clear reference to a concept that French President Emmanuel Macron has promoted. This April, Macron visited China and publicly criticized US dominance of Europe

, arguing the leaders of the region cannot simply be “vassals” and “followers” of Washington.

Lagarde is one of the most powerful people in Europe. She was France’s former finance minister, before later serving as director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The current ECB president gave this speech in New York for the Council on Foreign Relations

(CFR), a powerful think tank with a close relationship with the US government, which essentially acts as the link between the State Department and Wall Street.

The politically connected Rockefeller oligarchs cultivated the CFR in the early 20th century, funding its influential War and Peace Studies Project during World War Two and collaborating with Washington to help plan the First Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Lagarde addressed the CFR just one day after the former Federal Reserve chair and current US secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, admitted

in an April 16 interview with CNN:

There is a risk, when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar, that, over time, it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar.

Of course, it does create a desire on the part of China, of Russia, of Iran to find an alternative.

Rising wages for Asian workers fuels inflation in Western economies

Professor Radhika Desai noted that much of Lagarde’s speech was about inflation.

“This point about inflation goes to the nub of the issue of multipolarity, which, ultimately, what is it but is diminution in the power of imperialism?” Desai said.

In her speech at the CFR, Lagarde acknowledged that, following the end of the First Cold War, the world was “under the hegemonic leadership of the United States”.

Lagarde said:

In the time after the Cold War, the world benefited from a remarkably favourable geopolitical environment.

Under the hegemonic leadership of the United States, rules-based international institutions flourished and global trade expanded.

This led to a deepening of global value chains and, as China joined the world economy, a massive increase in the global labour supply.

As a result, global supply became more elastic to changes in domestic demand, leading to a long period of relatively low and stable inflation.

That in turn underpinned a policy framework in which independent central banks could focus on stabilising inflation by steering demand without having to pay too much attention to supply-side disruptions.

In these comments, Lagarde was clearly indicating that the exploitation of low-paid Chinese workers by Western companies was a significant factor in reducing consumer price index inflation in the core of the imperialist world system.

Lagarde’s remarks were reminiscent of a confession by EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell, who admitted in Brussels in October that “our prosperity was based on China and Russia

”:

So our prosperity was based on China and Russia – energy and market.

You, US, takes care of our security. You, China and Russia, provide the basis of our prosperity.

This is a world that is no longer there.

Our prosperity has been based on cheap energy coming from Russia – Russian gas, cheap and supposed[ly] affordable, and secure and stable, which has been not the case.

And the access to the big China market for exports and imports, for technological transfer, for investment, and for having cheap goods.

I think that the Chinese workers with their low salaries has done much better, much more to contain inflation than all the central banks together.

So our prosperity was based on China and Russia – energy, a market.

Desai stressed that it is not true, as Lagarde claimed, that “the world benefited from a remarkably favourable geopolitical environment” under US “hegemonic leadership”.

“No, the First World benefited”, Desai countered.

How the hegemonic US dollar system hurt the Global South

Desai noted that this system of US hegemony, which was never really stable, was based on two things: “US military power on the one hand, but also equally importantly, the US dollar system”.

“And if we look a little bit more closely at it”, Desai said, “in practically every major respect, the dollar system has not been good for the Third World, not good for the vast majority of countries in the world, that are not Western, that do not have a place in the G7 where they can coordinate macroeconomic policy and make sure that US allies don’t get too badly burned by the US dollar system – although they have been badly burned by it as well, as we saw in 2008”.

Desai explained:

First of all, the dollar system systematically undervalues the currencies of the Third World.

And when you undervalue a currency, what you are doing is you are undervaluing the resources and the labor of those countries.

Precisely, this is the mechanism by which the West has managed to get access to the resources and the labor of these countries cheaply.

And that also means that the rest of the world has to sell their resources for a song and to work doubly hard, triply hard in order to sell – they have to sell a massive volume of goods, export a massive volume of goods to Western countries, in order to earn Western hard currencies, including the dollar, because their money is systematically undervalued in relation to this.

So that there has always been a big discrepancy between the volume of exports and the value of exports, which of course is artificially lowered by the bad exchange rate.

Secondly, the dollar financial system has given the world nothing but a series of crises after crises, a great deal of volatility.

An international medium of [exchange] ought to have a stable value, but the dollar’s value keeps fluctuating.

Another problem, and a large part of the volatility, and the tendency to crisis, comes from the fact that, whereas a proper monetary system should be based on sort of a balanced environment, the dollar systematically has required imbalances.

The chief among them, of course, being the vast US current account deficits, which the rest of the world has to finance.

But also the imbalances that are created by the US dollar-centered financial system, which has been on the one hand creating vast amounts of unsustainable dollar debt, indebting households, indebting businesses, and indebting governments around the world.

And, on the other hand, blowing up asset bubbles so that US financial institutions and high-net-worth individuals can make a killing with the inflation of asset values.

But this, of course, only leads to the crash of these, or the bursting of these bubbles, and this has created more problems.

Further, the Third World is told that the US has a very sophisticated financial system; it’s great, it’s going to provide you with the capital you sorely need for development.

But of course, in reality, the US-focused financial system offers the opposite of that, because capital for productive investment – which indeed the Third World and the rest of the world really needs – needs to be stable, long-term capital that is able to invest for a long period in infrastructure projects and projects that have long gestation periods, but eventually are very important and good for the economy.

But this is not the sort of capital that the US financial system offers. Instead, the US financial system offers short-term capital that only goes to inflate the value of existing assets, rather than investing productively in the creation of new goods and services.

So the rest of the world is told, you know, ‘Lift your capital account restrictions, allow free capital flows and you will get the capital you want’.

In fact, what the Third World gets is the opposite of that: the capital they don’t want – hot money that comes stampeding in when these investors, who are not particularly knowledgeable, think things are good, and hot money that stampedes out at the slightest sign of a problem, thanks to equally ignorant investors leaving behind financial crises, credit crises, currency crises, and, of course, economic crises.

A couple of other points that one should also add to this: Number one, this system, particularly debt crises, from the Third World debt crisis onwards, has enforced a system of debtor responsibility, completely ignoring that any credit relationship has two relatively equal parts, and if things go sour, if things go wrong, if a debt cannot be paid, both debtor and creditor are co-responsible for the problem.

Instead, all the weight of adjustment, the weight of repayment, etc. has been on the debtors.

And, as you know, this is the chief mechanism by which so much money is being drained out of debtor countries, which are the vast majority of countries in the Third World, and goes into the coffers of the rich countries.

And finally, one final point: Given that this system has been so awful, naturally, countries have wanted to leave it.

And what has the US done historically to countries that have wanted to leave it? It has essentially waged war against them.

Think of Saddam Hussein. Think of Moammar Qadhafi. What was crucial about these two leaders? It was the fact that one of their key projects in each case was a project to leave the dollar system and try to create an alternative to the dollar system.

And this is why they were essentially deposed and killed, in gruesome ways, in the case of Qadhafi.

And, of course, their countries have been left essentially prey to all sorts of military, political, financial, and economic instability.

So this is not a [stable] system.

And so, naturally, finally now, the rest of the world has alternatives. And the United States can’t even wage a war to force the Third World back to the dollar system.

Moroccan Chicken with Prunes,
Almonds and Couscous

This is a great dish for Rosh Hashanah.

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2023 04 15 07 35

Braising chicken in a sauce that combines cinnamon, nutmeg and honey with a hint of saffron might sound surprising, but this is a delicious, spectacular dish. Some people sprinkle the chicken with toasted sesame seeds as well. If you’d like a touch of green, you can garnish the dish with fresh basil.

Ingredients

  • 3 pounds chicken pieces
  • 2 yellow onions, minced
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • Freshly ground pepper
  • 1 stick cinnamon
  • 1 cup chicken stock, broth or water
  • 1/8 teaspoon saffron threads
  • 1 1/3 cups pitted prunes
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  • Freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1 (10 ounce) package plain couscous, cooked to package directions
  • 1/2 cup whole blanched almonds, lightly toasted

Instructions

  1. Combine chicken, onions, salt and pepper in a Dutch oven. Cover; cook over low heat, turning chicken pieces over occasionally, 5 minutes.
  2. Add cinnamon, stock and saffron. Heat to a boil over medium heat. Cover; simmer over low heat, turning pieces occasionally, until breast pieces are tender when pierced with a knife, 35 minutes. Transfer to a plate.
  3. Cook remaining chicken pieces, until tender, covered, 10 minutes.
  4. Transfer chicken to plate.
  5. Add prunes and honey to sauce; cook uncovered over medium heat until prunes are just tender, 5 minutes.
  6. Transfer prunes to a heated bowl; cover. Discard cinnamon stick.
  7. Cook sauce over medium heat, stirring occasionally, to thicken slightly, about 5 minutes.
  8. Add nutmeg. Taste; adjust seasoning.
  9. Return chicken to pan. Cover; heat over low heat 5 minutes.
  10. Fluff couscous with a fork; mound it on a heated platter.
  11. Arrange chicken around or over couscous; spoon sauce and prunes over chicken.
  12. Garnish with almonds.

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https://youtu.be/zoBPltOyCrg

Another Train Derails- this one in Maine. Haz Mat Released

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A train has reportedly derailed in the state of Maine and officials say they believe hazardous materials were on board.

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2023 04 17 18 14

“Train derailment with fire north of Rockwood, hazardous materials please stay clear!” The Rockwood, Maine Fire & Rescue posted on Facebook Saturday.

The Fire & Rescue team posted a photo of the incident that shows a derailed train and a fire burning in a snow covered forest area.

Rockwood Fire & Rescue did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

It is unclear if anyone was injured during the derailment.

Rockwood, Maine, is located on the western side of Moosehead Lake in the northern part of the state roughly 45 miles from the Canadian border.

The railroad tracks in that area of Maine are owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, Fox 23 Maine reported.

Canadian Pacific Railway did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hal Turner Opinion

We here in the United States have thought for a long time that we are the “be all” and “end all” of human civilization.   We were the best of the best and no else even came close.

Not anymore.

The numerous derailments of trains throughout this nation over the past couple months shows that we’ve descended to third world status in our infra-structure.

The condition of our highways, of our bridges, of our electric grid, all point to it.

Someone on the Internet summed it up quite succinctly with the image below. . . China versus USA:

Reality in two ics US v China
Reality in two ics US v China

The image reflects the reality. The reality . . . is an “effin” disgrace.

Instead of corporations doing stock buy backs, and giving huge bonuses, it’s long overdue they use that money to fix their infrastructure.

The damage to commerce, and to our environment, from these train derailments is far to high to sit back and allow business as usual. The sickening of people and destruction of private property by these derailments and the chemicals they release, is completely unacceptable. Things MUST change. These derailments have to stop.

https://youtu.be/LVHfwXtBIek

“Sweeteens”: Young Londoners Enjoying Freedom after the Lockdown

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Made from photographs taken in May of last year, as the UK’s first lockdown began to ease, photographer Laura Jane Coulson’s new book, Sweeteens, is a love letter to freedom, youth, and the green spaces of London. The book immortalizes friends of the photographer, mostly young people, enjoying these precious moments of freedom in such an absurd time.

More: Laura Jane Coulson, “Sweeteens” h/t: fubiz

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“In May 2020, at the end of an unseasonably warm spring, lockdown began to lift – and with it, to everybody’s surprise, the thrum of friction that soundtracks a city like London subsided. The percussive clang of discord, usually a constant companion from borough to borough, was temporarily silent. In its place, harmony hung like a low haze over the streets, sinking into the cracks between buildings and soothing their inhabitants. Permitted to spend time outside again, Londoners were drawn to the city’s green spaces to see their friends and family – from a distance, kind of.

The combination of proximity after months spent in isolation, the quiet joy of reunion, intimacy and idle chatter, the bittersweet recognition of what had been lost in a few short months all melded together, glued by heat, relief, a kind of raw, hopeful happiness. The atmosphere was defiant, gentle, bold and jubilant. It felt strangely calm. This is the city that Laura Jane Coulson captures, in the photographs that follow. A couple of weeks later, something in the air had changed again, and the spell was over. The cacophony returned, coarse and dissonant as ever. But that, of course, is part of the magic.”

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How the U.S. “Buys” its “Allies”

The U.S. is the only country that can print “unlimited” money and exchange it for real goods from other nations.  This is due to the US Dollar’s reserve status.
But do you know the U.S. can also extend this exorbitant privilege to an ally? Here’s how the scam works…

If you want to understand how the U.S. defrauds the world, you need to know how reserve currency works and how the US Dollar (USD)  gained that status.

The tool that allows the U.S. to extend its exorbitant monetary privileges to an ally is called ‘swap lines.’ ‘Swap lines’ are agreements that enable one country to exchange its currency with the currency of another. This is done through their respective central banks.

Let’s use the example of ‘swap lines’ between the U.S. & UK to illustrate how the scam works:
Countries are free to print their own currencies.
But only the U.S. can print “unlimited” amount of dollars without suffering hyperinflation due to the USD’s reserve status.

That means the U.S. can generate “unlimited” amount of dollars out of thin air & exchange them for:
– tangible goods from China
– resources from Africa
– oil from the Middle East

That’s “magic.”
No other country can do that… unless the U.S. grants them a ‘swap line.’

What if the UK wants a share of that “magic money”? The U.S. Fed can help. Here’s how:
The Bank of England prints 1 trillion GBP.  It then swaps that with the Fed for 1.25 trillion USD (the current exchange rate).
The UK has just indirectly printed 1.25 trillion USD!

Did you see the “magic” that just happened?

Unlike America, the UK cannot print GBP with impunity and allow all that excess “money” to enter the market. That would devalue the GBP & cause hyperinflation.
So it prints the GBP & swaps them for USD with the Fed instead.

In short, the U.S. defrauds the world with its USD, then uses ‘swap lines’ to share the spoils with its staunchest allies.

The U.S. can grant ‘swap lines’ to any country it wants.

Now do you understand why some countries are diehard supporters of the U.S. Empire?

Being a staunch US ally means they get to create money out of thin air thanks to the U.S.A.

Stunning Vintage Photographs Of The Early Teen Bicycle Messengers In 1908-1917

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In 1908, the National Child Labor Committee hired Lewis Hine, a New York sociologist and photographer, to document the exploitative working conditions of child laborers in dozens of occupations, from mining and manufacturing to farming and newspaper selling. Among the many workers he captured were bicycle messengers in several southern cities.

Almost immediately after the development of the pedal-driven velocipede in the 1860s, people began to use the bicycle for delivery purposes. David V. Herlihy’s 2004 book on the early history of the bicycle contains several references to bicycle messengers working during the late 19th century, including a description of couriers employed by the Paris stock exchange in the 1870s.

The photos that Hine took became the face of the child labor reform movement and ultimately helped push through the 1916 passage of the Keatings-Owen Act, which set age and shift length restrictions for young workers. While the act was struck down by the Supreme Court, it set the stage for lasting reform to be created during the New Deal of the 1930s.

Above: “George Christopher, Postal Tel. #7, 14 years old. Been at it over 3 years. Does not work nights. Location: Nashville, Tennessee”. November, 1910.

h/t: rarehistoricalphotos Photo credit: Library of Congress

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“Raymond Bykes, Western Union No. 23, Norfolk, Va. Said he was fourteen years old. Works until after one A.M. every night. He is precocious and not a little “tough.” He told me he often sleeps down at the Bay Line boat docks all night. Several times I saw his mother hanging around the office, but she seemed more concerned about getting his pay envelope than anything else”. June, 1911.

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Found Working Nuclear Bunker with Vehicles & Gear

Ruthless! U.S.A. Foments Coup d’etat in Sudan Just Two months After Russia’s Approach

Two months ago, on February 9,  Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited the African nation of Sudan.  One of the topics discussed: A Russian Naval Base on the Red Sea.   Here we are two months after that discussion, the U.S. has fomented a military Coup in Sudan.

Russia’s agreement . . . out the window.  That’s how utterly RUTHLESS the USA is.  It took our CIA just two months to make it all happen.

You see, when the USA cannot get what we want by peaceful means, or bribery, we foment the overthrow of an entire country’s government.

It comes down to power. The USA is the Top Dog of this planet, and the people running the USA are not going to “allow” anyone else to unseat us.

Whatever it takes to keep hold of our power, the people running our government seem willing to do.  Economic sanctions, trade war, election fraud, bribery, or, as we see with Sudan (and as we saw with Ukraine) the OVERTHROW of a government.

The USA will not be dislodged from its perch above the world and anyone who tries, gets crushed, ruined, destroyed, or dead.

That is what our country has become.

That is why much of the world is distancing itself from us, and from our currency.

Unless the American People step up to put a stop to the way our government is doing things, I FEAR our country will get stopped.  By Russian nuclear missiles.

What choice are we leaving the Russians?   We won’t leave them alone.  We’ve been surrounding their country for decades with more and more NATO members — all of whom then start aiming missiles at Russia.

We smash countries — like Syria — who are allied with Russia.  We takeover countries that we cannot induce to join NATO (i.e. Ukraine), and when Russia tries to peacefully negotiate a naval base on the Red Sea with Sudan, we are now overthrowing the Sudan government.

No matter what Russia does, we interfere.  Sometimes peacefully.  Sometimes legally.  Most times through Bribery and force.

Sooner or later, the Russians are going to realize that the USA simply will not stop; will not peacefully co-exist.

When that realization happens, there will be only one choice Russia has left: To either utterly destroy the United States, or capitulate to it.

The sleazy douchebags who infest the US Government think Russia will capitulate.   I think Russia will push the launch button.

Old-Fashioned Bread Pudding with Caramel Sauce

d726fe40478b2a6840768968104b47ab
d726fe40478b2a6840768968104b47ab

Yield: 6 servings

Equipment

  • Pressure Cooker

Ingredients

  • 4 slices day-old white bread
  • 4 tablespoons butter, divided
  • 1 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1 tablespoon brandy
  • 1 1/2 cups Half-and-Half
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 large egg yolks
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 cups water

Instructions

  1. Butter the bread with 2 tablespoons of the butter, then cut into cubes.
  2. Put the brown sugar in an even layer in the bottom of a 6 cup baking dish that fits comfortably inside the pressure cooker. Press any lumps from the sugar with the back of spoon.
  3. Cut the remaining 2 tablespoons butter into small pieces and dot over the sugar, then sprinkle with brandy. Add the cubed bread, but do not stir.
  4. Whisk the Half-and-Half with the eggs, egg yolks and vanilla extract. Pour over the bread, again without stirring.
  5. Cover the baking dish with foil so that no water can get inside. Pour 2 cups water into the bottom of the pressure cooker. Place the baking dish on a grid or in a steamer basket (whichever your cooker has) to get baking dish off bottom of cooker. Cover pressure cooker and bring up to medium pressure (10 pounds). Reduce heat to stabilize pressure and cook for 25 minutes. Release pressure and remove baking dish. Pour off any water that has accumulated on top of foil, then remove foil.
  6. Run a knife around the edges of baking dish to loosen pudding from the sides. Invert a serving plate over the top of the baking dish and quickly turn the two pieces over. Remove the baking pan. Serve bread pudding warm or at room temperature.
  7. When the pudding is inverted, you will see that the brown sugar butter and brandy have made a delicious caramel sauce. As there is no sugar in the pudding, be sure each serving gets a generous helping of the sauce.

Here’s a Liberal that actually “Gets it.” He really does!

I have found that rarest of ocassions where a Liberal REALLY DOES “get it” about the world, and what they’re heading into with Conservatives.  It ain’t pretty, but this guy delivers the ugly truth with terrific humor . . .

I especially like the part where he tells his fellow liberals “we’re gonna get butchered.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zPbA6Fr3Mo&embeds_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fhalturnerradioshow.com%2F&feature=emb_imp_woyt

Have You Noticed? NOTHING in the MSM about Ukraine

Clearly, “the word” has gone out.  Two days ago nearly 1 in 4 articles in the Main Stream Media (propaganda) feed were Ukraine stories.  Yesterday it dried up to under 1 in 20 articles as Ukraine stories.

Today: NOTHING.

The feeds haven’t been Ukraine-free like this for over a year.

It looks to me as though the memo went out; Ukraine is finished, no more coverage.

This entire Ukraine thing was clearly coordinated across the whole propaganda platform of MSM.   Very similar to the “mostly peaceful” coordination of Black Lives Matter riots in 2020. Also very similar to all MSM outlets being told to call the Waukesha Parade Massacre the Waukesha Parade Crash.

When every single outlet starts using the same ridiculous term at the exact same time . . . it was ordered.

When every single outlet drops the hottest set of propaganda stories about Ukraine at the same time . . . it was ordered.

Free press does not exist today.

Something is definitely up with Ukraine. They were pushing it at a thousand miles an hour and then it just slammed into a brick wall and we hear nothing at all.

One possibility is the story about Zelensky embezzling the $400 MILLION in Diesel fuel money.  That is definitely something the criminals in DC wish to keep out of the news.

Then too, it might also relate to the Classified documents allegedly released publicly by that 21 year old Airman via a Gamer chat forum.  Have you noticed the coverage . . . it’s all about “the leak” and not one word about the CONTENTS of the leak.

These documents PROVE the US and NATO have actual boots on the ground in Ukraine, engaged in actual fighting against Russia.   Not one peep about this from the MSM.  Why?

Because the government knows it has crossed the final red line with Russia by having boots on the ground, and government doesn’t want the American (or European) people to have any idea WHY Russia slams us, when that slamming takes place.  They want the public kept dumb.

Rabbit hole the whole thing then no one will know why Russia attacks the US.

Of course, Ukraine is losing to Russia even after the 100s of billions sent there by Biden . . . and . . . U.S. election campaigns for 2024 are getting ready to kick off.

How is Biden going to explain another Afghanistan debacle when the US/NATO tuck tail and run from Ukraine? So the MSM is quiet; thinking the country will focus on something else in the 72 hr news cycle.

Lastly, it could also be a lot more sinister. The PTB and NATO are about to escalate the war in Ukraine and they want no coverage while they start WW3.

US Rushes to Provoke War w/Growing Chinese Army: Admits Taiwan will be Destroyed

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2023 04 23 15 13

Welcome to the grand future that you are unprepared for

The United States is absolutely insane.

It is dragging the world towards a very serious crisis.

no no no
no no no

As much as believe that China has it’s act together, there is the worry that China will not have the stomach to do what is necessary to stop it.

Notice…

ALL American media is talking about a “war with China” after a “war with Russia”.

Sigh. They are FUCKING bat-shit crazy.

They are going to get us all killed.

crazy driver
crazy driver

China and Russia are NOT playing, and to me this is all a slow motion car wreck. It boggle my mind that Biden thinks that the United States will exist for his second term in office.

2023 04 27 06 53
2023 04 27 06 53

Today…

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Kizz Daniel, EMPIRE – Cough (Official Video)

African pop

UPDATED 4:10 PM EDT — Putin Rushed To Kremlin 10:00 PM Moscow Time

Something is happening with Russia as of 3:00 PM eastern US time, which is 10:00 PM in Moscow.  Russian President Vladimir Putin was rushed TO the Kremlin with full police escorted motorcade.   This is extremely unusual, indicating something has happened (or is happening) requiring the President.

RUMORS are already running wild.  One RUMOR is that Turkish President Recypt Erdogan, who fell ill during a TV interview in Moscow, may have been “poisoned.”

Another RUMOR is that Ukraine has begun using Depleted Uranium tank shells against Russian troops, which Russia previously warned would be considered a “Dirty Bomb attack upon Russia.”

No official word from any level as to the ACTUAL reason . . . . developing . . . . check back for updates.

UPDATE 3:58 PM EDT —

Turkish President Recypt Erdogan’s wife and family have been urgently told to come to the hospital.

ERDOGAN ALLEGEDLY “IN CRITICAL CONDITION”  — More RUMORS he may have been poisoned!

UPDATE 4:02 PM EDT — According to a statement issued by the presidency, Erdogan was taken to the hospital in critical condition and received treatment for myocardial infarction, commonly known as a heart attack.

UPDATE 4:15 PM EDT — 

Chinese state media claims Turkey president Erdogan has suffered heart attack and is in critical condition in the hospital

Big news hidden from you

Consumer Credit Drying-up — Banks HALTING Auto Loans!!!

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The past 10 days in Consumer Credit have been wild and the evidence is explicitly clear: Banks are now severely restricting Consumer Credit:

— Capital One shut off all dealer floorplans (aka inventory lines of credit)

— USA Auto Sales shut down 39 dealerships after losing its Ally Bank floor plan lines of credit

— Wells Fargo laid-off all its junior Auto loan underwriters and capped future loans

This is VERY serious.  This is real DOOM economically. Cars are one of the main pillars of the US economy.

Repos are rising as people can’t pay their high loan payments.  In fact, the increase in car repos…300% since new year.

With banks cutting off auto credit, it isn’t just car dealerships that will feel the pinch, manufacturers will too, of course.   BUT . . . . those manufacturers contract-out parts manufacturing to hundreds of smaller businesses nationwide.

All those smaller businesses will see orders dry up.  The auto sales and manufacturing sector in the US accounts for over 5 million employees

The “ripple effect” of credit withdrawal will affect the much wider economy and will do so VERY FAST.

KmengKhmer – ឆ្ងាយតែកាយ (Far Away) [Official MV]

Cambodian pop music

British Intel Source CONFIRMS Depleted Uranium Shells from UK have arrived in Ukraine

***** FLASH ***** – A source within British Intelligence has confirmed to me personally that thousands of rounds of tank shells were shipped to Ukraine as supplies for donated “Challenger” tanks donated to Ukraine.  Among those thousands of tank shells are . . .  DEPLETED URANIUM SHELLS!

Russia has repeatedly and explicitly made clear that if Depleted Uranium shells are fired at Russian troops, Russia will regard the use of the ammunition as being a “Dirty Bomb” attack against Russia, and will respond with radioactive weapons of its own.  They did not say WHICH radioactive weapons.

It is now positively CONFIRMED that the United Kingdom has, in fact, successfully delivered into the possession of the Ukraine Army, Depleted Uranium tank shells.

What this means is that now, it is only a matter of time before Russia detects that such shells have been used by Ukraine, and responds.

That response will likely come without ANY warning at all.

Readers are urged to have their preps (Food, water, medicine, first-aid gear, generator, fuel, and the like) topped-off . . . and to appraise their family members of this situation.

It’s really quite simple: When Ukraine hits Russians with Depleted Uranium shells, Russia will likely hit Ukraine with full blown nuclear weapons.  If that takes place, NATO jumps-in tot he war, and it’s nuclear immediately.

OR . . .

Russia may elect to strike at the UK directly for supplying such weapons. Obviously, if THAT happens, it’s also instant nuclear war.

In either case, the fight presently between Ukraine and Russia, will very likely go nuclear, and is extremely likely to involve NATO, meaning the outbreak of literal nuclear World War 3.

This can come at any time and without any warning.

Get right with God.

DU Explanation
DU Explanation

Hot Potato Salad with Bacon Specks (Mennonite)

2023 04 19 11 10
2023 04 19 11 10

Ingredients

Salad

  • 4 slices lean bacon
  • 1/2 cup finely chopped onions
  • 1/4 cup chopped celery
  • 1 tablespoon flour
  • 1/4 cup hot water
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 2 tablespoon Boiled Dressing
  • 1 tablespoon vinegar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
  • 4 cups diced, hot, boiled potatoes
  • 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley
  • 1 teaspoon finely chopped chives
  • Additional heavy cream (optional)
  • 2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced

Boiled Dressing

  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon dry mustard
  • 1/2 cup vinegar
  • 2 eggs, well beaten
  • 1 tablespoon butter

Instructions

  1. Salad: Cook bacon over medium heat until crisp. Remove and crumble. Drain off all fat except 1 tablespoon, return to medium heat, add onions and celery.
  2. Stir in flour to coat the vegetables. Add water, stir and cook until thickened. Remove from the heat and blend in the cream, boiled dressing, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Pour over the potatoes in a large bowl. Add the parsley and chives. Mix well to blend flavors. Add more cream if desired, taste, add salt if desired.
  3. Sprinkle crumbled bacon on top and garnish with the sliced hard-boiled eggs.
  4. Boiled Dressing: Combine sugar, salt, and mustard in the top of a double boiler. Add vinegar. Stir to combine.
  5. Add well-beaten eggs. Place over moderately boiling water. Stir until the mixture is creamy about the consistency of custard.
  6. Beat in the butter. Cool.

This dressing may be stored, covered, in the refrigerator, and will keep up to two weeks.

The internationalisation of EME currency trading

by J Caballero · 2022 · Cited by 6 — 

CNY trading rose by over 70% after adjusting for exchange rate movements, to $526 billion per day. This is unusually rapid.

Article HERE

Vuthea​ វុទ្ធា – អូនសាសន៍អី (Oun Sas Ey) ft. Siva [Remix]

Cambodian pop music

RESTORED 4:34 PM EDT — UKRAINE SPRING OFFENSIVE HAS BEGUN – ON FOUR OFFENSIVE FRONTS

1:02 PM EDT — Within the past hour, reports began filtering-in to me CLAIMING Ukraine’s Spring Offensive has begun.   Reports say there are four distinct lines of combat.  NOT YET VERIFIED . . . .

If these reports can be corroborated, more details will appear as Updates below.

Should these reports prove true, RIGHT NOW is the beginning of the most dangerous time for all of us.   NOW is when nukes might come into play.

I earnestly hope your “preps” are topped-off, you have cash money at home in case electronics (Credit/Debit)  all go offline, and your vehicles are all fueled-up, with spare fuel in cans safely at home.

UPDATE 2:04 PM EST — I have reached out to every source I know and I CANNOT VERIFY THESE REPORTS . . .  still checking.

UPDATE 2:43 PM — I am PULLING this story – I cannot verify ANY aspect of the incoming reports.

UPDATE 4:34 PM EDT —

From the Kiev Independent Newspaper:

 

 

“Citizen Of The Galaxy”: Amazing Digital Cyberpunk Art By Kuldar Leement

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0 6 1

“I’m a digital illustrator and graphic designer based in the Estonia. I have been producing personal and commissioned illustrations, digital paintings and web designs only a few years. Mainly I’m digital-painter, but You can visit my homepage and read about my education and other knowledge. If I’m working, I constantly trying to expand my range of abilities and i love to try out new techniques.”

More info: Kuldar Leement, DeviantArt, Vimeo, Society6, Behance, Facebook

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BOMBING IN SEATTLE – SECOND UNEXPLODED BOMB FOUND

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There has been a bomb detonation in downtown Seattle.   A second, unexploded bomb, has also been found at a Gas station at 1st and Denny St.   SWAT and Bomb Squad mobilized.

Additional Info:

EXPLOSION REPORTED IN AN APARTMENT BUILDING IN SEATTLE, WASHINGTON LEAVING ONE INJURED. SECOND BOMB IS REPORTED IN THE SAME BUILDING.

Evacuation of downtown in progress due to fear of more bombs.

 

 

Police and Fire on scene:

 

Seattle Bomb Squad is currently attempting to Defuse a 2nd Device near the Scene of 1st Explosion.

MORE:

 

https://youtu.be/gPuAthFARcI

Ham and Onions over Noodles

This is an old Mennonite recipe.

2023 04 19 11 11
2023 04 19 11 11

Ingredients

  • 6 slices ham 3 x 3 1/2 x 1/4 inches
  • 3 onions, sliced
  • 1/2 cup sour cream
  • Hot noodles

Instructions

  1. Fry slices of ham until nicely browned.
  2. Remove ham from pan and add onion slices. Cook until slightly browned.
  3. Add sour cream. Let come to a boil and pour over hot noodles.

Thị Mầu – Hòa Minzy x Masew | Official Music Video

Vietnamese pop music

9 Rules for How to Make a Perfect Cup of Coffee

Become a coffee guru with these simple steps on how to make a perfect cup of coffee at home.

Jeffrey Sachs Interview – China’s Reaction to US technology Containment

The 5 Best Mix-Ins to Add to Your Coffee

1. ¼ cup whole milk or oat milk

Whole milk is actually the #1 pick for the best coffee mix-in if you ask Rachel Fine, RD, a registered dietitian and owner of the nutrition counseling firm To The Pointe Nutrition in New York City. That’s because if you haven’t already, there’s no better time than now to change your tune about thinking low- and non-fat is always best.

“A splash of whole milk proves to me that we can enjoy the ‘real deal’ and benefit physically, mentally and emotionally from it,” Fine says, since it doesn’t make her feel like she’s restricting or choosing the “diet culture”-promoted option she doesn’t truly love. Since vitamin D (which is found in whole milk, but not skim) is a fat-soluble vitamin, your body benefits from the fat that the milk offers. Plus, “fat helps to satisfy us! When we feel satisfied, we’re more likely to cultivate a more mindful experience around food and beverages, even our coffee breaks,” Fine says.

Reaver is fond of adding the oat-based milk Oatly (buy it: $4.99 for ½ gallon, Target) to her coffee. “It has all the creamy goodness of half and half without the saturated fat,” she says, and is a great option for those who don’t do dairy.

2. ½ cup protein shake or 1 scoop of protein powder

For even more protein than either of the dairy “dos” above, try ½ cup of a premade protein shake, such as OWYN Protein Shake (buy it: $7.99 for four 11.15-ounce shakes, Target). A half-cup pour will add about 7 grams of protein and less than 1 gram of sugar to your coffee. Or try adding a scoop of chocolate protein powder like Vega Protein and Greens Chocolate (buy it: $25.61 for 1.8 pounds, Amazon) to your iced coffee. “This much will also add a lot of creaminess to your drink without relying on high-fat creamers,” Reaver says. As an added bonus, that more-than-an-egg-amount-of-protein will help you stay fuller longer after breakfast. (Because you’re eating a healthy one of those too, right?) “When we feel satisfied, we’re less likely to struggle with overwhelming cravings and obsessive thoughts around food,” Fine says.

3. 1 teaspoon sugar

If you’re in the mood for a hint of sweet to balance out the bitter notes in the coffee, add a small spoonful of sugar. Mary Poppins and dietitians approve of real sugar, in moderation.

“There’s a misconception about sugar in our culture,” Fine says. “But when used in ways to enhance flavor, a little can go a long way!”

A squeeze of honey or maple syrup would also do the job nicely.

4. 1 teaspoon cocoa powder

This is a cool weather seasonal favorite of Reaver, who says it’s a dreamy, antioxidant-rich way to stir up a makeshift mocha. Whether you enjoy it in your hot or iced coffee, you can rest easy knowing that this coffee mix-in can help lower your stress levels—research stands behind this!

To max out your health benefits, seek out a powder that’s 100% cacao and unsweetened. (We love Navitas Organics Cacao Powder; buy it: $7.82 for 8 ounces, Amazon)

5. 1 teaspoon cinnamon

On a similar note, you can crank up the antioxidants and add a warm, pumpkin spice latte-like note to your coffee by sprinkling on or stirring in a small spoon of cinnamon. Reaver enjoys this when she’s in the mood for a hot mug.

This is a VERY VERY BAD SIGN.

The 6 Worst Mix-Ins to Add to Your Coffee

Fine advises her clients to steer clear of any “fake foods” that are “products of diet culture and promote an overall less satisfying experience around coffee.” These include:

  1. Skim milk
  2. Artificial sweeteners
  3. Fiber powders

Both artificial sweeteners and fiber supplement powders “can cause stomach discomfort, gas, bloat and pain,” Fine adds, and skim milk is a less-flavorful, watery-tasting trade for whole milk.

Reaver councils her clients that “coffee should be a morning drink not a morning milkshake!” Just because the bulletproof trend that made waves in the early 2010s doesn’t mean it’s a nutrition-smart choice. So Reaver ranks her top three worst mix-ins as:

4. Butter

5. Half-and-half

6. Coconut oil

“Adding these three types of fats to your morning coffee may seem insignificant, but can add up to significant increases in your cholesterol levels. All three are high in saturated fats. Get this: Just 2 tablespoons of half-and-half in your coffee daily for one week is the equivalent in saturated fat to a full hamburger each week,” Reaver says.

Butter and coconut oil are both primarily the same saturated fats that can increase LDL, or “bad” cholesterol levels.

“These are easy things to skip with your coffee to reduce your risk of heart disease—the number one cause of death for Americans,” she says.

Worst foods for healthy blood pressure

The 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend eating no more than 2,300 mg of sodium per day, which is 1 teaspoon of salt. But, the American Heart Association has even stricter guidelines, recommending no more than 1,500 mg of sodium per day. The average American consumes 3,440 mg of sodium per day. Men consume more than women with an average of 4,240 mg of sodium per day compared to the average intake for women, which is 2,980 mg per day.

But don’t throw out the saltshaker just yet. Only 11% of sodium intake in the U.S. is from the salt used in the home. Most is from processed foods and eating out. Here are the biggest offenders.

Mixed Dishes

According to the Dietary Guidelines, 44% of the sodium that Americans consume comes from mixed dishes—21% from burgers and sandwiches, 7% from rice, pasta and grain dishes, 6% from pizza, 6% from meat, poultry and seafood dishes and 4% from soups.

Pizza

Two slices of cheese pizza can have more than 1,200 mg of sodium, nearly half the recommended daily max. Top your pizza with processed meats like pepperoni or sausage and you could be eating close to a day’s worth of sodium in one meal.

Red meat, processed meat and cold cuts

Speaking of processed meats, not only are they linked to a shorter lifespan, but they’re also one of the worst offenders for blood pressure and heart health, due to both sodium and saturated fat. Red and processed meats are the reason burgers and sandwiches top the list when it comes to sodium intake. These products can vary in sodium content, but here are some averages from the USDA database:

  • 2 sausage links: 698 mg sodium
  • 4 slices bacon: 660 mg sodium
  • ½ cup pepperoni slices: 1,090 mg sodium
  • 3 slices deli turkey: 783 mg sodium

Packaged grain mixes

Quinoa, brown rice and barley are heart-healthy grains packed with fiber and protein—but not if you buy them in a bag mixed with salty seasonings. Turn the bags over while shopping and check the nutrition label for sodium. Anything with a Daily Value of 20% or more is considered high in sodium. Choose products with a DV for sodium less than 20% when you can. The best option is to buy plain whole grains and season them yourself. Many brands and stores now carry shortcut options, like frozen brown rice and 10-minute barley, without added salt.

Canned soups

“Low sodium” or “no salt added” canned soups are the best options for healthy blood pressure. One can of minestrone soup can have over 1,500 mg sodium, more than the American Heart Association says you should consume in one day. One can of tomato soup typically has about 1,000 mg sodium.

Fast food

It’s no secret that traditional fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s serve foods loaded with salt like burgers, chicken fingers and french fries. But seemingly healthy restaurant chains like Panera, Subway and Sweetgreen, for example, serve foods laden with sodium too. Any time you eat food prepared outside your home—whether it’s Panera, Chinese takeout or a fancy restaurant—you’re bound to consume more salt than you would if you made it yourself. Of course salt is added to make foods tastier, but also be aware that larger portion sizes when you eat out contribute to higher sodium counts. Since many fast food restaurants list the nutrition online, check the menu before you go to pick out a lower-sodium option that you can enjoy.

Fried foods

Fried foods are bad news for blood pressure. They are typically full of saturated fat and also often pack in the sodium. Opt for boiled, broiled or roasted (or try your air fryer) to lessen the pressure on your vessels and heart.

Frozen meals

Frozen dinners, even ones advertised as “healthy,” are a culprit for raising blood pressure. Check the nutrition label for a Daily Value of sodium less than 20% for the meal. Meals with meat and cheese are higher in sodium. If you want to stock your freezer, buy plain frozen fruits and vegetables, which are low in sodium, as well as other single-ingredient frozen foods.

Salty snacks

Think chips, nuts and popcorn. For healthy blood pressure, choose unsalted or reduced-sodium versions most of the time.

Pickles

While two pickle spears only have about 6 calories and no fat, they typically contain more than 700 mg sodium. That’s 30% of the recommended daily sodium limit and doesn’t include the high-sodium sandwich you may be having alongside. Eat pickles in moderation for healthy blood pressure.

Alcohol

While alcohol isn’t high in sodium, drinking too much alcohol over time is associated with high blood pressure. The Dietary Guidelines recommend men drink no more than two drinks per day and women drink no more than one drink per day. A drink is defined as 5 ounces of wine, 12 ounces of beer or 1.5 ounces of liquor. There is no reason to start drinking alcohol if you don’t currently drink.

Best foods for healthy blood pressure

The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet is proven to reduce blood pressure and cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease compared to a typical American diet. The DASH diet, also called the DASH eating plan (as it’s more a way of eating than a diet), includes eating fruits and vegetables, low-fat dairy products, whole grains, chicken, fish, beans and nuts. It’s low in red meat, sugar-sweetened beverages and processed foods with added sugar and salt.

Potassium helps lower blood pressure by helping the kidneys flush out excess sodium. Men should consume 3,400 mg of potassium per day, and women should aim for 2,600 mg per day (2,900 mg/day if pregnant; 2,800 mg/day if breastfeeding). Potassium is listed on the Nutrition Facts panel, making it easy to see if you’re getting enough to maintain healthy blood pressure levels. See our list of high-potassium foods.

Calcium and magnesium are also important nutrients for healthy blood pressure, as they help blood vessels relax.

Bananas

One medium banana has 422 mg of sodium-flushing potassium. Mix bananas into oatmeal or top your toast with peanut butter and a banana for breakfast.

Potatoes

One medium white potato has 620 mg of potassium, while one sweet potato has 540 mg of potassium. Make your own french fries by slicing potatoes and roasting them in the oven with a little salt and other spices like pepper, paprika or rosemary. Drizzle them with olive oil for heart-healthy fats. Learn more about what makes potatoes healthy.

Beets

One cup of beets has 440 mg of potassium, while one cup of beet greens has 245 mg of potassium. Studies show that both beets and beet juice can lower blood pressure, due to their high concentration of nitrates, which help improve blood flow (learn more about the health benefits of beets).

Spinach

Three cups of raw spinach delivers 475 mg of potassium, and this veggie is super versatile so it’s easy to eat—make a spinach salad, scramble into eggs, throw into a smoothie, or sauté for a side dish. Leafy greens are also high in calcium and magnesium.

Beans and legumes

Beans and legumes are high in potassium and magnesium. One cup of white beans delivers 615 mg of potassium and 89 mg of magnesium. Men should get 420 mg of magnesium per day and women should get 320 mg per day. Just rinse beans if buying them canned to help reduce sodium.

Plain yogurt

Yogurt is naturally high in calcium; choose plain over flavored yogurts (and add your own fruit or a little bit of sweetener for flavor). Go for low-fat varieties most often to limit saturated fat intake. Most men and women should aim for 1,000 mg of calcium per day. Women over the age of 50 should get 1,200 mg per day. One cup of low-fat yogurt has 415 mg of calcium. Mix heart-healthy berries into plain yogurt or swap out sour cream for plain yogurt in tacos or chili.

Other tips for healthy blood pressure

  • Cook food at home more often instead of eating out.
  • Buy foods labeled as “low sodium,” “reduced sodium” or “no salt added.”
  • Buy canned foods less often and opt for fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables most of the time.
  • Rinse canned beans and vegetables before eating.
  • Read nutrition labels and choose foods with less than 20% Daily Value of sodium per serving.
  • Choose fresh meat and seafood more often than processed and packaged meats.
  • Buy unsalted savory snacks like nuts.

The Bottom Line

All foods can fit in a healthy diet, even a diet to help lower your blood pressure. Limit the foods on the worst-offenders list, like pizza, sandwiches and burgers, along with foods eaten at restaurants, processed meats, frozen meals and canned soups. The DASH diet is proven to help lower blood pressure. Limit processed foods and choose whole foods most of the time, like fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables, plain whole grains, beans and legumes, low-fat dairy, and low-sodium nuts and nut butters.

Vini Vici – Universe Inside Me 🎧 ….Africa Zaouli Dance 👍….Le Zahouly Danse

Consumer Reports Just Found Lead and Cadmium in Some Popular Dark Chocolate Brands

Here’s how to shop for safer chocolate brands and keep yourself healthy.

15 Biggest African Songs That Broke The Internet in 2022

The United States is going to get everyone killed

Yes it is.

2023 04 27 06 55
2023 04 27 06 55

The horror…

2023 04 27 06 56
2023 04 27 06 56

The Eagles – Hotel California – Reimagined on the Traditional Chinese Guzheng | Moyun

OK, so we’re all agreed she’s freaking incredible, right?

America Has Dictated Its Economic Peace Terms to China

By refusing negotiation over China’s rise, the United States might be making conflict inevitable.
Tooze-Adam-foreign-policy-columnist16
Adam Tooze
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How far will mounting tension with China be translated into the economic policy of the United States? After a rash of sanctions and overtly discriminatory legislation, with action on U.S. investment in China pending, and with talk of war increasingly commonplace in the United States, the Biden administration knows that it needs to clarify its economic relations with the country that is the largest U.S. trading partner outside North America.
From HERE

US sanctions China into its own self-destruction

Intel Corp. is expected to post its worst quarterly loss on record Thursday, and analysts are hoping it is rock bottom for the struggling chip maker.

Intel INTC is scheduled to report earnings after the close of markets on Thursday, and analysts on average expect the Silicon Valley giant to report a loss of more than $3 billion, or 76 cents a share, according to FactSet. That would be by far the largest quarterly loss on record for the company: In records dating back to 1993, Intel has never reported a GAAP loss of more than...


Jeffrey Sachs: “China JUST CHANGED EVERYTHING, THIS IS SERIOUS” in Exclusive Interview

https://youtu.be/Xm0IGDE52sk

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So close that your can feel the vibrations

Global changes are hitting hot and heavy. We are really in the thick of it.

While there is a chance that a nuclear world war 3 could occur, it is looking like the West hit a wall. China and Russia declared “checkmate”. And there is nothing the USA can do.

Every move it makes is a losing move.

The world is interconnected, to deny that is to risk economic destruction.

So what is going on is simple. If the USA plows ahead with a hard hot war, the systems in place will zero out all banks, and the Untied States, without resources, or much in the way of assets, will flounder and then try to tread water, but eventually it will sink down into the depths and drown. It’s over.

So relax.

Sure, there’s a chance in foolhardy actions, but I have faith in the American military. Not in the American “leadership”. All will be well.

Be prudent. Follow the aforementioned guidelines, but please stay optimistic. All is good.

In March 2023.

main qimg 02fb6165b91a30f51b633d3b4012c8e5
main qimg 02fb6165b91a30f51b633d3b4012c8e5

1. Saudi Arabia and China to build refinery for 83.7 billion Chinese Yuan ($12.2 billion)

2. China and France complete first LNG trade using RMB

3. Russia considers using Chinese Yuan as reserve currency.

4. China and Brazil agree to use Chinese Yuan to settle trade rather than US dollars

5. Saudi Arabia considers accepting Chinese Yuan for oil sales

6. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) announced development of a new currency

7. President of Kenya tells citizens to get rid of US dollars.

8. India says they will settle trade in Indian rupees with certain countries rather than US dollars

9. Chinese yuan passes Euro to become Brazil’s second-largest currency in foreign reserves

10. IMF data shows that Russia now has ~33% of all reverses in Chinese Yuan

11. China and Russia agreed to use the Chinese Yuan as a settlement currency

12. Over $225 billion has been withdrawn from US banks in just 2 weeks.

U.S. calls for joint G-7 action to prevent China’s economic bullying – Nikkei Asia

The trouble for US is that G7 is nothing to China economically and militarily. It’s “small potatoes”.

U.S. calls for joint G-7 action to prevent China’s economic bullying – Nikkei Asia

Article HERE

SMIC’s revenue grew 33.6 per cent year on year to US$7.2 billion in 2022, while net profits reached US$1.8 billion, both record amounts

R&D spending equaled 10.1 per cent of total revenue, down for a third year from 11.7 per cent and 17.3 per cent in 2021 and 2020, respectively

2023 04 02 19 38
2023 04 02 19 38

China’s top chip foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), which has been on a US trade blacklist for more than two years, said it posted record revenue and profits for 2022, thanks to strong demand for legacy chips in the world’s second-largest economy.

In 2022, the second full year the Shanghai-based company was restricted from importing key chip-making tools, SMIC saw its revenue grow 33.6 per cent year on year to US$7.2 billion, while net profits attributable to shareholders reached US$1.8 billion, both record amounts, according to its annual report released on Tuesday.

Its gross profit margin, a key indicator of profitability, reached 38 per cent last year, up from 30.8 per cent in 2021.

SMIC said it derived 74 per cent of its total 2022 revenue from China, up four percentage points compared to 2021, adding that the production capacity of its domestic fabs is still short of market demand, while its technology level lags behind global peers.

SMIC reportedly reached a technology breakthrough last year, producing a cryptocurrency mining chip at the 7-nanometre process node, without the need for cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet lithography machines from Dutch firm ASML. SMIC has never publicly commented on the reported breakthrough.

In its latest annual report, the foundry offered some technology insights, but stopped short of revealing details of its tech prowess, which is closely watched by analysts. FinFet technology, a type of 3D transistor that enables process nodes below 20-nm, was listed among its offerings, but the company did not disclose details of the process nodes it has achieved.

SMIC is the only foundry in China with 14-nm production capability.

As Finland Enters NATO, Revelations that NATO Nukes COULD Be put on Russia Border

In a move that could risk infuriating Russia, or turning Finland into another Ukraine, nuclear weapons could be positioned in Finland if the country’s application to join NATO is approved, according to a report from a Finnish newspaper.

Both Finland and Sweden submitted applications to join NATO in May, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to the Helsinki-based newspaper Iltalehti, the bill regarding potential NATO membership the Finnish government will put before parliament doesn’t include any opt-outs for nuclear weapons.

Speaking to the paper, defense sources said Finland’s foreign and defense ministers, Pekka Haavisto and Antti Kaikkonen, gave a “commitment” to NATO in July that they wouldn’t seek “restrictions or national reservations” if Helsinki’s application is accepted.

Foreign policy insiders told Iltalehti this means NATO nuclear weapons could transit through, or be based on, Finnish territory. Additionally, there are no restrictions on establishing NATO bases in the country.

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin told Yle, the country’s national broadcasting company, on Saturday why she had not ruled out accepting nuclear weapons on Finnish territory when applying to NATO.

“I’ve considered it very important that we don’t set these kinds of preconditions, or limit our own room for maneuvering, when it comes to permanent bases or nuclear weapons,” Marin said, although she added it was unlikely that nuclear weapons would be stationed on Finnish soil.

The U.S. already has around 100 nuclear weapons in Europe, positioned in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey according to the Federation of American Scientists.

Substack is the new Atlantic, New Yorker, Sunday Times

Godfree Roberts

If you write about anything, this is for you.

I write wonky, non-fiction books about China and publish an even wonkier newsletter for central bankers interested in Chinese governance.

It’s a niche market, you could say but though I specialize obsessively in an unfashionable topic, I have longed for popular recognition as much as any writer. Then a publisher friend to whom I complained suggested Substack. Distribution was free, he said, the interface simple, publishing takes seconds and, he added encouragingly, “Nobody reads your stuff anyway, so what have you got to lose?”.

I spent thousands looking for that audience on Google, Amazon and Facebook and none was cost-effective. But when I put my ravings on Substack, lots of people found them and even sent me money.

Substack is the most accessible, affordable medium for finding and creating an audience for non-fiction writers. If you write, write. Let Substack find your audience because it’s really good at that. Focus on your writing and, eventually, Substack will start pay you for the privilege of representing you.

Such a deal.

I think this is mostly happening without the knowledge of Americans. Literally, American and British news must be the shittiest news products on the entire planet. Saudi Arabia killed the petrodollar, the arrangement where oil contracts are settled in US dollars.

China just made an LNG deal with the UAE that will be settled in Yuans.

At least half of the business between Russia and China is now settled in Yuans.

Brazil and China just made a deal to settle trade in currency other than the US dollar.

When that happens, the dollars that are sitting reserve will be freed up and come back to where they can buy products and services, the United States and the broader West. US dollars will be concentrated in the West and will drive up inflation. Furthermore, as the US dollar loses reserve currency status, it will be much harder for the US to finance its massive debt. The Ukraine War will end the US dollars 77-year run as the world’s reserve currency. The BRICS Plus countries will have a larger economy than the West in a decade or so. In another answer to this question, someone else pointed out that even non-BRICS countries are ditching the US dollar as a reserve currency. Joe Biden huffed and puffed and blustered and blew down the American financial system.

US new shows are trying to tell Americans that China cannot produce computer chips without Taiwan in the foreseeable future. This is complete bullcrap, but Americans believe the US new shows that got Ukraine completely wrong. Americans believe new shows that couldn’t predict the economy yesterday.

Footnotes

The USA is left out…

India, Malaysia move beyond dollar to settle trade in INR – The Hindu. No longer will trade be conducted in the United States Dollar.

Article HERE

US Sanctions Belarus

Lukashenko’s aircraft, a Boeing 737 that he uses for international travel, was also designated for sanctions, which blocks its use in the U.S. Hum. I wonder how attractive these actions make for American-made products…?

Article HERE

The US Chips and Science Act

By now it’s clear that the Chips and Science Act — which includes a $52 billion splurge for the semiconductor industry — is unlikely to work as intended. In fact, its looming failure is a microcosm of all that’s wrong with America’s current approach to building things.

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2023 04 02 06 50

Passed last year with bipartisan support, the law was meant to revive US chipmaking capacity. Although America is a world leader in cutting-edge chip design, its share of global semiconductor manufacturing has declined from 37% in 1990 to about 12% Given the importance of such chips to the economy and especially to national security — the Defense Department needs about 1.9 billion of them a year — a more or less coherent case could be made for subsidies, prudently applied.

Yet simply writing checks was never going to be enough. Producing chips in the US still takes 25% longer and costs nearly 50% more than doing so in Asia. Significant policy changes would be needed for US-based manufacturers to be even remotely competitive. As things stand, they face three serious impediments — all inflicted by the government.

Chief among them is red tape. From 1990 to 2020, the time required to construct new chip plants (called fabs) in the US soared by 38%.

Clean Air Act permits can take 18 months. National Environmental Policy Act reviews take an average of four and a half years. A half dozen other federal laws may come into play, plus endless state and local variants. At every step, myriad agencies must be consulted and parochial interests must be heard.

Yet technology does not stand still for these bureaucratic tea parties; such delays only add expenses, discourage private investment, and prevent US manufacturers from seriously competing with overseas rivals.

Baked Ham in Foil

2023 04 01 09 11
2023 04 01 09 11

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1 (3- to 4-pound precooked boneless ham

Instructions

  1. Pour cup water into slow cooker.
  2. Wrap precooked boneless ham in foil; put into slow cooker.
  3. Cover, and cook on HIGH for 1 hour, then on LOW for 6 to 7 hours or until ham is hot.

Vietnam

2023 04 01 20 03
2023 04 01 20 03

The First Dinosaur Tail Discovered Is Preserved In Amber, 99 Million Years Old And Covered In Feathers

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A dinosaur tail with beautifully preserved feathers still attached to the bone has been found preserved in amber, and it’s one of the coolest things we’ve ever seen. It’s not the first time feathers have been found trapped in amber, but it is the first time that researchers have been able to definitively link them to a dinosaur. The discovery will provide invaluable insight into how dinosaurs’ feathers looked and evolved – something we’ve never been able to learn from fossils.

More info: Sciense (h/t: messynessychic)

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Brutan

Problems Brutan faces:
1) Brutan is a land lock country reliance on India to access the rest of the world.

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2023 04 02 19 24

2) geographically, they can only access (import/export /car/train) via India. So, India control Brutan economy, and they have to endure bullying from India.
3) brutan problem is like Nepal.
4) But, with the upgrade of the Chinese infrastructure building ability, the first road and bridges link between Nepal and China successfully completed through very difficult terrain, and hence Nepal no longer exclusively reliance on India to access the world , so in the past years, there are on going news of Nepal soldiers shooting at intruding Indian soldiers.
5) so, now, like Nepal, brutan working with China to access the world via infrastructure link to China
Indian influence collapsed once the project completed.

 

https://youtu.be/wrVbr76pCxg

“Facing Clear Evidence of Peril” in a Country of Lies

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Perhaps silence is the best response to the endless cavalcade of official lies that is United States history. The Internet and digital technology have allowed those lies to increase exponentially in number and frequency with the result that people’s minds have become like 7-Eleven stores, open 24/7 for snack-crap “news.”

But once you become conscious that it’s lies night and day, it sets your head aswirl and plunges your soul into depths of despair. You are tempted to retreat from such knowledge and talk of trees and trivia. But you are ashamed of your country. It’s hard to laugh. You feel you are drowning. You flounder and gasp for air. You look around and wonder why most people are able to go their merry ways believing the lies and whistling in the dark. Junk news nation, indeed.

Yes, there are alternative voices who tell the truth, but their audiences and monetary support are very small or non-existent compared to the corporate mainstream media and those who shout and scream across the Internet as they take in a lot of money from naive followers. The recent revelations about Alex Jones’s wealth probably don’t bother his diehard fans, but they should. Likewise, the funding sources for websites and writers of various persuasions are important to know, for they reveal possible biases in their work. Snake oil salesmen are commonplace, and there are many naive customers lining up for their wares.

Wealth and power are the main drivers of the media chicanery that has captured so many minds. Writers, of course, should be fairly paid for their work, but in this Internet age, most are not. As with the movies and book publishing, the income gap between the big names – the celebrity stars – and less well-known writers, even if their work is excellent, is huge.

Some sites and writers make a lot of money, but who they are is a guessing game. No one’s talking. Some regularly tell their readers that if they don’t receive enough contributions, they will be unable to continue to write or publish, even when the sites do not pay their contributors. Whether this is good marketing or income-by-threat is up for grabs. Whichever it is, it seems to work, as far as I can tell, for these writers and websites don’t disappear.

Money is the dirty secret of all news and commentary. To paraphrase someone: It is very difficult to get truth from writers whose income is dependent on pleasing those who fund them.

You may have noticed how many former military officers, CIA agents, mainstream journalists, pharmaceutical company executives, and sundry other government and corporate bigwigs appear in the mainstream and alternative media to support or oppose government policies. The mainstream ones doing the propaganda they always did, while the alternative ones appear as converts to the dissident faith. No one ever explains how and by whom these people are financed or how their lucrative pensions affect their consciences. “Former” is a funny word. Ha Ha Ha.

Confidence “men” come in all shapes and sizes with no one talking money.

So let me fess up. I received about $200 in support last year for edwardcurtin.com, my website. Nothing before that and not a cent over the last 5-6 years for many hundreds of articles that have appeared very widely across the Internet. Before the Internet, publications paid for work, mine and others. Not now, at least for me. How much money writers are receiving, and who is supporting their sites, is a taboo subject.

So I am thinking about selling mugs at my site with my name and mug shot on them and a line of supplements that will increase one’s testosterone and estrogen in equal measure to make sure no one takes offense in this era of delicate feelings. Ha Ha Ha. Yes, the joke is on us. I identify as a man since I am one. Don’t be offended.

Jokes aside, as Leonard Cohen sang:

“Oh, like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free”

If you are stubborn enough and have the good fortune to find inspiration from those brave dissidents who have gone before us and those who continue to lead us on, you realize silence is betrayal and that you must speak, even if all seems hopeless at times. Even when no one is paying you, or maybe more accurately, because no one is paying you. Even though it is hopeless, even though it isn’t. This is another secret. There are many.

It’s been twenty years since the U.S. brutally invaded Iraq. When George W. Bush, at a staged pseudo-event in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, as he set Americans up for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” no one laughed him out of the house. His claim was simply an evil joke that was reported as truth. It was all predictable, blatant deception. And the media played along with such an absurdity, which is their job and what they always do. I pointed it out at the time in a newspaper column, but who listened to a hick writer in a regional newspaper.

Iraq obviously had no nuclear weapons or the slightest capability to deliver even a firecracker on the U.S. But the mainstream media, Senator Joe Biden, politicians galore, celebrities like Oprah Winfrey with her guest, the eventually disgraced Judith Miller of the New York Times, the despicable Tony Blair, et al., all supported Bush’s blatant lies. Soon Colin Powell, the “hero” of George H. W. Bush’s 1991 made-for-TV Gulf War of aggression against Iraq, would do his Pinocchio act at the United Nations and the U.S. military was off to get Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden’s evil twin, both the latest Hitlers until Vladimir Putin replaced them. I guess I skipped some others such as Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar Al-Assad. New Hitlers proliferate so fast it’s hard to keep track of them. Ha Ha Ha. The joke is on us.

As everyone knows, or should, more than a million Iraqis died because of George W. Bush, but how many cared? How many cared when once Bush was gone, Barack Obama, aided and abetted by the cackling Hilary Clinton, destroyed Libya and ignited the war against Syria? You want examples? There are too many to name here. But let it be said these lies span all American administrations, whether it’s Bill Clinton continuously bombing Iraq and Serbia through Trump bombing Syria and Somalia, up to the present day with Biden attacking Russia via Ukraine, etc. All these presidents are liars, but their followers treat them otherwise. Biden says Jimmy Carter asked him to deliver his eulogy. What does that tell you? Shall we laugh? Sing?

On the clear understanding
That this kind of thing can happen
Shall we laugh?
Shall we laugh?
Shall we laugh?

Shall we laugh harder if I mention the Covid-19 propaganda and all those writers who have failed to even address it, as they have failed to question 9/11 and other obvious official lies? Is it not evident that if they did so, their money flows might dry up? Here and no further is a widespread rule, for they must adhere to the boundaries imposed by “responsible thought” and the “no go” zones with which they tie their own hands in order to keep their wallets full.

If you are lucky, as I was, when you are young you discover how fearful of free thought and how corrupt our institutional authorities are. You don’t spend decades feasting off the spoils of those institutions only to “wake up” once you have made your name and secured your fortune, which seems to be the way of so many wise luminaries of the Internet Age who are either trying to ease their consciences as they get ready to kick the bucket or are perhaps putting us on.

When I was twenty-four years-old, I accepted my first teaching job at a small Catholic college where I taught theology. I had been trained in the latest and best scholarly work of the most renown international theologians. Rather than indoctrinating my students with rote learning, I taught them to read widely and think deeply in the tradition of a liberal arts education. To seek out the best scholarship.

But doing so became quickly apparent to the college and Church authorities who were stuck in the inquisitorial age of obedience or else and no thinking allowed. Although my students loved my courses and felt freed up for the first time to think about their spiritual lives, I was hounded to correct my heretical teaching, which of course I refused to do.

At one point when I was at lunch in the cafeteria, a nun who was a professor, stole my brief case with my notes and left the cafeteria. One of my students saw her do this and chased her into the ladies’ room where the nun hid in a stall. The nun kept flushing the toilet to scare the student away, but the student wouldn’t let her out until she returned the briefcase. Ha Ha Ha. It sounds funny to recount but was an example of my experience at this college. Someone vandalized my office door and ripped down anti-war posters that were on it. I was gone from that college soon thereafter. It taught me a lot. Obey or else.

Heresy: The Latin word is from Greek hairesis, a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice.

At another teaching job a year or so later, I had a more chilling experience. I was known as an anti-war activist, a conscientious objector from the Marines, etc., and one day, a late Friday afternoon when few were around, an administrator asked to meet me on a deserted stairwell where he proceeded in hushed tones to try to convince me to join him in Army Intelligence to spy on others. He said I would be perfect for the job since I was known as an anti-war dissident. I told him to fuck off, but I was shocked by his double life and his request.

I have since learned that this guy the spy was not an anomaly, for government confidence men are widespread.

I’ve had many other such early experiences for which I am very grateful, even though when I was fired from jobs and lost income it was traumatic at the time. By my thirtieth year, I knew the system was corrupt to its core and subsequent experience has only ratified that conclusion. I got the joke.

I recount these incidents not because my experiences are singular and I’m special, for others have suffered the same youthful fate. But such good fortune can fortify you for life or break your spirit. If the former, you don’t wait to retire to push back against all the lies or regret your past. You find that it’s all good and life has set you on the heretic’s path of freedom and choice. You realize that what you went through is absolutely nothing compared to people around the world who have and continue to suffer at the hands of the U.S. military industrial complex. You realize your experiences are trivial in the larger scope of things and that your government’s conduct is beyond condemnation. It is an abomination. You feel ashamed to live in a land where killing is a game.

The sociologist Peter Berger puts it well in his little classic, Invitation to Sociology, when he discusses experiences that lead to seeing through the play-acting nature of social life:

Experiences such as these may lead to a sudden reversal in one’s view of society – from an awe-inspiring vision of an edifice made of massive granite to the picture of a toy-house precariously put together with papier mâché. While such metamorphosis may be disturbing to people who have hitherto had great confidence in the stability and rightness of society, it can also have a very liberating effect on those more inclined to look upon the latter as a giant sitting on top of them, and not necessarily a friendly giant at that. It is reassuring to discover that the giant is afflicted with a nervous tick.

Notice the giant George W. Bush’s clicking eyes as he delivers his “facing clear evidence of peril” lies for the invasion of Iraq. He and his presidential good friends are cardboard cartoon characters whose eyes reveal their evil intentions. “It’s a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be,” but it would all fall to pieces if it weren’t for you and me failing to see through all the bad actors, not just presidents but the whole cast of characters that populate the Spectacle of news and opinion.

The Russians are coming! Ha Ha Ha. Yes, Oliver, the joke’s on us.

But it’s not really funny, except in the most sardonic and dark way, for we now do really face clear evidence of peril as a result of Biden and his crazy predecessors who have run U.S. foreign policy for so long. They have brought us to the edge of nuclear war with Russia by surrounding Russia with NATO bases and nuclear weapons, while doing the same to China.

POISONING OF **OUR FOOD** BEGINS THIS MONTH – mRNA Going into Cows and Pigs

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The food supply of every American is going to start being INTENTIONALLY POISONED with mRNA genetic modifications being fraudulently called “vaccines.”

Lobbyists for the cattleman and pork associations in several states have CONFIRMED they WILL be using mRNA vaccines in pigs and cows THIS MONTH.   It will actually become “vaccine food” and sold to YOU without your INFORMED CONSENT.

Buying and eating this beef or this pork may adversely affect you.  In some cases, it may KILL you.

Attorney Tom Renz says “To be clear – at this point there are zero states requiring informed consent for “vaccine food”. While I would argue that it must be done under existing law . . .”

 

 

Renz goes on to point out, there is an article from the year 2000 about “edible vaccines”: (Article HERE)  The article demonstrates how hiding a “vaccine” in foods, is absorbed into the body:

EdibleVaxGraphic
EdibleVaxGraphic

The trouble with this particular circumstance is that, to this day, no manufacturer of an mRNA vaccine, has fully disclosed the medically-active contents of the so-called “COVID “vaccines.” Moreover, tens-of-thousands of people have already DIED after receiving these so-called “vaccines” and hundreds-of-thousands of other people have become very sick or permanently injured from them.

NOW, if you were one of the smart people (like me) who DID NOT take those COVID (death dart) jabs, we will be intentionally POISONED with the mRNA because they’re putting it in our food without our informed consent.

Lawsuits will be too late.  We’ll already be poisoned and dying.   The public is reminded that “immunity” only works in court.  It offers no protection to the people doing this, from street justice.

Forcibly stopping someone who is trying to poison you is legal self defense.

Budweiser Suicides “Bud Light” with new Trans Spokesperson

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BudLightTranny 2 large
BudLightTranny 2 large

Budweiser, “the King of Beers” appears to many people to have just committed “brand-suicide” for Bud Light, by bringing on a Trans as a spokesperson.  You can watch the suicide video below.

Why is this Brand suicide you ask?   Well, think about it: Now, every time a guy is seen holding a Bud Light, everyone’s going to think he’s a homo.  And everytime a girl is seen holding a bug Light, everyone will wonder if she’s _really_ a girl.  Result . . . . probable brand suicide.

Don’t fret, guys.   While we say R.I.P. to Bud Light, we can also say Hi to . . . .

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2023 04 02 19 35

Corona girl!

Cranberry Pork Chops

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2023 04 02 19 30

Ingredients

  • 6 bone-in pork loin chops
  • 1 (16 ounce) can jellied cranberry sauce
  • 1/2 cup cranberry or apple juice
  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 tablespoons spicy brown mustard
  • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 1/4 cup cold water
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • Dash of pepper

Instructions

  1. Place pork chops in a slow cooker.
  2. Combine cranberry sauce, juice, sugar and mustard until smooth; pour over chops.
  3. Cover and cook on LOW for 7 to 8 hours or until meat is tender.
  4. Remove chops; keep warm.
  5. In a saucepan, combine cornstarch and cold water until smooth; gradually stir in cooking juices. Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 minutes or until thickened.
  6. Stir in salt and pepper.
  7. Serve over chops.

Elon Musk Sounds the Alarm About the U.S. Dollar

The billionaire global CEO worries about the loss of the greenback’s influence which he attributes to the Biden administration’s foreign policy.
LUC OLINGAMAR 30, 2023 6:15 PM EDT

Elon Musk has become something of a watchdog over the actions of the U.S. government on the international stage.

The tech mogul gained influence in geopolitics by providing Starlink to Ukraine in the war with Russia. Starlink is an independent satellite internet service, developed by Musk's rocket company SpaceX. This service allows the Ukrainian Armed Forces to maintain secure communications on the front lines and Ukrainian civilians to stay in touch with the world.

This invaluable assistance to a country struggling for its independence has made the CEO of Tesla (TSLA) - Get Free Report one of the most powerful voices around the world on pressing issues facing the planet.

In recent weeks, the tech mogul has turned into a real headache for the Biden administration, which has reiterated its support for Ukraine in the war against Russia. This conflict, which has entered its second year, has still no end in sight. Musk advocates a peace solution that involves making concessions to Russia, which Ukraine and its allies categorically refuse.

Is the Dollar Losing Its Reserve Currency Status?

Washington and its European allies have thus tightened the sanctions against Russia. But the absence of an exit strategy from the Russian war has launched the debate about the American support for Ukraine via NATO. Critics blame the Biden administration for its tough line on Kremlin.

This debate is fueled by Musk and his friends who believe that the absence of a peaceful solution to end the Russia-Ukraine war has dealt a huge blow to American diplomacy and to the United States' place in the world. 

They say that evidence of this is the rapprochement between China and Russia, two of the main enemies of the United States. They argue that adopting a hard line toward Russia has undermined America's international and geopolitical standing and prestige.

Musk considers, for example, that U.S. diplomats have become warmongers, which has brought America's enemies closer together. One of the victims of this rapprochement could be the dollar, symbol of the economic power of the United States.

He has just issued an alert to warn that the dollar could lose its role as the world's reserve currency. The warning was issued in a thread on Twitter.

"The US dollar is losing its reserve currency status," Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA, a former small cap money manager, wrote on Twitter on Mar. 29, adding in another tweet that the U.S. dollar "has been the backbone of the global economy for decades. Several countries even use the US Dollar as an official currency, like El Salvador, Panama, and Ecuador."

Musk shares these concerns.

"Serious issue," the billionaire warned. "US policy has been too heavy-handed, making countries want to ditch the dollar."

In addition to foreign policy, Musk also attributes the weakening of the dollar to the federal government's fiscal policy.

"Combined with excess government spending, which forces other countries to absorb a significant part of our inflation," he added.

Russia and Saudi Arabia

The dollar is considered the reserve currency of central banks. This means that various national central banks, which hold reserves in foreign currencies, do so mainly in U.S. dollars.

This allows the United States not to have to hold foreign exchange reserves in currencies of other countries, and especially helps to finance the deficit of its balance of payments. This status of the dollar dates back to the end of the Second World War and symbolizes the power of the US on the global stage.

Central banks around the world hold approximately 60 percent of their foreign exchange reserves in U.S. dollars. Nearly half of international trade, loans and global debt securities are transacted in dollars. But the sanctions imposed on Russia, as a result of the war with Ukraine, have helped to encourage efforts to "de-dollarize" global trade, some experts say.

Russia is looking at the yuan to replace the dollar, and Saudi Arabia may follow, Fox News has reported.

For Musk, if we get there, it is because American diplomacy lost its standing during the Russia-Ukraine war.

BY LUC OLINGA
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Article HERE

Meet Mebaru, the Japanese Felt Artist Taking Instagram by Storm with Adorable Felted Cat Sculptures

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Mebaru is an artist who has gained a huge following on Instagram thanks to their incredibly realistic felted cat sculptures.

From playful poses to intricate depictions of specific breeds, these felted creations are sure to steal your heart. We invite you to take a look at these cute and realistic felted cats and get lost in the world of Mebaru’s creations.

More: Instagram h/t: boredpanda

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Hi.
I am an Australian who is married to an American and, due to the nature of my work, lived ALL OVER the US over a decade.

Half my family are American and many of my closest friends.
In short, I’m very fond of the United States and support my nation’s close affiliation with them.

So please forgive me if I’m blunt.
This is NOT an American bash, it’s an honest expression of the one thing that [SOME] Americans do that never fails to trigger me.

“We saved your asses in World War Two”.

Americans often tell us bluntly, over and over how they “saved our arses” in both World Wars.

I assure you, EVERY SINGLE Brit, Aussie, Kiwi or Canadian reading along can hear those words spoken in an American accent as they read them.

That’s how often we hear it.
Almost weekly.
Certainly once a month.

Wars that we ourselves stepped up and fought in the protection of others.
Wars that wouldn’t even have affected us directly.
Wars we fought for YEARS before the United States.

Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand particularly could have turned their backs on Western Europe.

Britain herself could have closed her borders and looked the other way.
Hitler had no designs on the UK – He admired them.
All they had to do was stand back and allow the holocaust to happen.

But of course, they couldn’t because fighting Nazi Germany was the right thing to do.

We didn’t make Britain wait 3.2 and 2.3 years to enter either great war.
We were there from day one.

We didn’t charge Britain for our goods or help.
We didn’t keep a tally and make them pay it back for seventy years.
We didn’t insist they realign their trade preferences to favour our markets setting their still very young colonies prematurely adrift or cost them their empire, wealth, dignity or preeminence as a world power.

We didn’t use Britain’s plight as a springboard for our own wealth and dominance or spend the following century diluting their culture with shallow consumerism.

CANZUK didn’t ask for anything.
We just went because we’re family and that’s what family does and despite what some of you are going to assert in the comments, yes, America, though you are the black sheep you are also family.

Speaking for Australia, from a population of six million (2/3 of which were women, children, the elderly and infirm), a full one million Australian men served in the military during the Second World war.

Let that sink in.

We had, from our far-flung nation gathered together the fourth-largest air force in the world and the fifth largest navy and lost so many men in every theater of both World Wars that we had a noticeable lack of them right into the late 1970s.
Indeed, by the time American boots had touched the ground in North Africa and Europe, CANZUK had already sacrificed literally millions of men.

It’s SO, rude.
I’m not even sure you understand just how disrespectful it is and how much damage it does [at street level] to our relationships with the US.
Honestly – it’s there in the pit of all our stomachs whenever we even engage with an American.

I will leave you with this quote from the memoirs of one of your own.
American journalist Ernie Pyle who was killed in action by the Japanese in April 1945.

His account of D-day and the liberation of Paris.

“One cannot help but be moved by the colossus of our invasion. It was a bold and mighty thing. One of the epics of all history. I hope that we can rejoice in victory but humbly. The dead men would not want us to gloat.”

Peace.

Dedicated to the memories of our grandfathers.
Those that never came home and those that came home altered.
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the United States.

Bhutan

First, a disclaimer: I’m not a Bhutan expert.
.
The China-Bhutan border agreement hasn't happened yet, but it does seem to be imminent. I'm just commenting right off my memory, which is as good as it gets. You can probably wiki and find a lot more details. China had long ago reached a treaty with Bhutan by an exchange of land. But India intervened at the last minute, forced Bhutan to overturn everything and start all over. Given that China ended up having to renegotiate its Bhutan border treaty with India, nothing happened ever since then. India has been perfectly happy keeping its soldiers in Bhutan, and keeping Bhutan a poor, undeveloped landlocked country completely dependent on India. I can understand how a lot of the people living in the "Land of Happiness" feel like they're trapped in the lowest level of Naraka.

When the Doklam brouhaha between China and India broke out, it was over the unsettled area between China and Bhutan. Theoretically, it had nothing to do with India, except that India had soldiers stationed in Bhutan, and was supposed to defend Bhutan. In any case, Bhutan never asked India to defend itself against China. This fact was never mentioned in any Western press, forget about the Indian press. Finally, Bhutan let the cat out of the bag, and India, somehow, thinks that they have been stabbed in the back. I remember at the time of the Doklam standoff, I checked out Bhutanese comments from various social platforms. Most of them had very little positive things to say about India. It looked hopeful at the time that Bhutan would soon become Nepal 2.0.

I don't usually follow Bhutan news. In any case, there are precious few channels talking about them. But I do follow a lot of India news channels (like a good detective, you can learn a lot from people's garbage), and there has been an outcry of India having been betrayed by Bhutan. It seems that after decades of nothing happening with the border treaty and wasting a lot of time with India in the way, China finally told Bhutan that if this mountain nation did not have authority to negotiate its own border treaty, then the two parties should just walk away, at least until such times when Bhutan is confident that it can decide its own sovereign issues. 

Bhutan is not stupid. They notice how things have been changing for Nepal. They don't want to be dead in the stagnant waters of India. They want to be connected to the world through China. As such China and Bhutan have been working steadily toward a common goal despite India. In January of this year, a Bhutanese delegation met with a Chinese delegation in Kunming to push forward the settlement of the China-Bhutan border. India was not invited. Needless to say, the Indians, acting like an overbearing overlord demanded to know the details of the meeting. This was expected, and confidential information would not be divulged. The roadmap likely included contingencies relating to how India would react. It may also include how Bhutan may allay India's fears, at the same time, gaining more concessions from Modi. 

It appears at this point that the China-Bhutan border settlement is a fait accompli. It's too late for India to interfere. The train has left the station and the ship has set sail. How do I know? By the Bhutanese letting the cat out of the bag. They made a mistake many years ago. They are not going to make it again unless they are very certain it's going to happen. So, very soon, China and Bhutan will establish diplomatic relations. There will be airports, highways, dams, 5G, Internet and tourists. Most importantly, at the right moment, Indian soldiers will be politely asked to leave quietly. 

At the end of the day, China does want to settle its border with India. Maybe it will help the Indians come to their senses.

PM 

This is something that AMERICANS need to UNDERSTAND. TikTok is only an EXCUSE to pass thru Orwellian legislation to control the type of information that Americans received so that they do NOT have access to alternate information other than the narrative that the state want them to believe AND to spy on them.

The legislation, Bill S686, is also known as the Restrict Bill. Here are the key points behind that legislation:

  • CURRENT foreign adversaries – America’s favourite bogeymen – which can CHANGE by definition are China, Cuba, Korea Iran, Russian Federation. More importantly, these definition can CHANGE at ANYTIME.
  • It covers hardware technologies such as modems, routers, cameras and virtual techs such as VPN if they are manufacture or use to contact “foreign adversaries”
  • Using VPN to bypass banned apps such as TikTok is made a CRIMINAL act under this bill with MINIMUM imprisonment of 20 years AND a minimum fine of $250,000 AND up to one million dollars if you knowingly do so.
  • It gives the federal government the authority to monitor any activity virtual or otherwise. Essentially they can monitor you 24/7 thru your routers, video games, smartphones, thermostat, cameras, etc.
  • EVEN more TERRIFYING, this will happen when the President appoint a Secretary of Communication who formed a group on their own without any voter input or oversight whatever, can meet behind closed doors and they can ban or monitor anything deemed inappropriate to security that goes thru the internet.

LET there be NO AMBIGUITY, this legislation is designed to control the information that Americans read and hear so that THEY can be EASILY MANIPULATED AND also designed to spy on Americans. Yes, the law also allows the state to spy on your teen or preteen daughters NAKED or in various stages of undress.

THAT Americans, deliberately bombarded by Messages of Hate, are NOW being HERDED towards war with China

EXCEPT that the United States will be fighting a war with against a powerful BRI Eurasian Alliance

IN a war that the United States will not win and will be defeated

CONSUMED by hate which devour their humanity, they will turn to the only thing they have left…..their nuclear weapons

IN their ATTEMPT to take the world down with them into the depth of the abyss

IN this world, in a country big and small, Haven is now preparing its favourite son to meet the challenges of the end of time AND the Force of Darkness.

VPN Users Risk 20-Year Jail Sentences in the US Under New RESTRICT Act

A bill dubbed the 'RESTRICT' act was submitted to Congress and could have severe consequences for VPN users in the United States.

Cajun Sausage Jambalaya

A slow cooker makes Cajun Sausage Jambalaya a snap. Be sure to check the last hour or two to keep the rice from overcooking.

2023 04 01 09 12
2023 04 01 09 12

Prep: 30 min | Cook: 6 hr | Yield: 8 servings (12 cups)

Ingredients

  • 1 pound boneless pork loin roast, cut into 1/2 inch cubes, lean
  • 12 ounces andouille sausage, cut into 1/4 inch slices
  • 2 1/2 cups water
  • 1 1/2 cups rice, medium-grain white
  • 2 yellow onions, chopped
  • 1 bell pepper (green, red, or both), chopped
  • 2 stalks celery, chopped
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 1/2 cup green onions, chopped

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients except green onions in slow 4 to 6 quart slow cooker. Cover and cook on LOW for 5 to 6 hours, or on HIGH for 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Watch carefully during the last 1 hour (LOW) or 1/2 hour (HIGH) of cooking to prevent rice from overcooking.
  2. Just before serving, check seasoning and add green onions.

The A-10 was not designed to be used in uncontested airspace, but it was designed for a time when people were more realistic about losses in war than they are now. The A-10 fleet was expected to be expendable planes thrown in to stop Soviet armored columns, but it was perfectly understood many would not survive that.

main qimg 735564d8aa0773639ae04f9842f2ccc0
main qimg 735564d8aa0773639ae04f9842f2ccc0

The A-10 were apparently expected by some in the US air force to face an attrition rate of 7% per 100 sorties. And would be expected to do 250 sorties in a day for the fleet in Europe. So within the first 24 hours of a conflict in the 1980s, the US expected over 15% of all A-10s in the theater to be lost.

Considering what was known and how they intended to use them, I would say that was a fairly conservative estimation. Soviet forces were littered with organic AA, and when the A-10 was made the BUK and S-300 missile systems were not really understood yet. The biggest fear was the OSA missile system with a 15km range. With the A-10 expected to visually see targets to engage them, this would be fairly difficult, especially using it’s gun, which is effective at about 1½ km. The original S-300 had ranges of 47–90km depending on variant, but this wasn’t known in the west at the time.

Either way, it was fully expected the A-10s would suffer enormous losses, but was still considered a valuable asset for attempting to disrupt and delay Soviet columns.

21 Life Lessons From Cats

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There’s a lot us, humans, can learn from our feline friends. 21 examples below from New York Times bestselling authors & illustrators Lisa Swerling & Ralph Lazar, who have just launched a new cats project called Tess & Lion.

h/t: boredpanda

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Kamala Harris in Africa to strengthen US diplomatic ties | DW News

By Dimbwe Maxala from Utube comments

I am from one of the countries on her tour.

I am not sure how the Ghanaians feel about this, but I can safely speak on behalf of Zambia and Tanzania, and say that they US is wasting its time. To get a better understanding of this, perhaps Kamala should travel from Dar Es Salaam to Lusaka Zambia, on the 1600km (1000 mile) railway line that the Chinese built ( and ceded free of charge) for the two countries.

The impetus for the construction of that railway line was that Zambia needed an outlet to the ocean, after the racist white regimes then ruling Rhodesia and South African decided to close off its access to the ocean because of its support for the liberation movements in those countries.

The Chinese who were then as poor as Africans stepped in and built the TAZARA railway line, which lifted that seige of Zambia, allowing the country to export its copper via Dar Es Salaam, rather than the ports of South Africa, as had always been the case.

The Chinese were there, as were the Russians, during the dark time.

Time after time, the US took the side of the racists.

When the negotiations for Zimbabwe’s independence were held in London in 1979, the US and the UK stood together with the brutal white settler regime of Ian Smith.

When the war for Namibia’s independence was going on, the US supported the continued apartheid South African occupation of the country, and blocking the implementation of UN resolution 435, that demanded that the South Africans leave Namibia.

Ronald Reagan insisted on a linkage of the white South African exist from both Namibia and Angola, with the leaving of the Cubans then militarily fighting against South Africa together with government of Angola.

People in Southern African have never forgotten their experience with the West, and Kamala Harris’ charm offensive is unlikely to achieve anything.

In western countries it merely matters to be SEEN as the good guy.

Your actions count a whole lot less.

In Asian countries what you DO matters.

Look at the Iraq genocide, they still think they’re the GOOD guys after mass murdering 10000s of Iraqis and Afghans. Because we meant well! It was a mistake so that totally absolves us!

Oh quite the Opposite

All of China will thank him for it one day

Private Tutoring Industry was becoming way out of control.

Initially Tutoring was a boon, it helped Chinese students understand concepts pretty well

However as time went by Tutoring slowly became more and more deeply seated into the Chinese Education structure and every student began to lazily depend on Tutoring which meant Private Tutors could demand more money

With time it became almost like without private tutoring no Urban Chinese student could survive or do without

And slowly Private Tutorial Groups began to rise in value, start IPOs, bloat up without any assets and claim to be worth billions.


Is that a Golden Goose?

Please tell me how many Students do you know in US who go to SAT Coaching or GRE Coaching?

Most Students self study or study in Groups rather than pay for a Tutorial course

Yet in China – students using Private Tutorials rose to nearly 88% by 2019.

They used Tutors for everything and the basic concept understanding that created the Excellent Chinese Students of the 1990s -2010s would slowly be eroded if this nonsense had continued

Spoonfeeding at its worst

And on top of this Most Tutorials became Industries of their own and began marketing and began to ridiculously boost their own valuations


No!!! said Xi Jingping

He had many discussions with Respected Professors and Teachers and fundamentally covered the three Points in 2020 May which included

→ Private Tutorials cannot replace conventional education

→ Students ability to think and learn on their own are being affected by Private Tutorials

→ Private Tutorials are grossly inflated and taking full advantage of the Lax focus paid to them in the early 2005–2010

So the CPC said – Let Students who dont understand use Tutors and Tutorials but let Students not become lazy

Thus he decided to formulate and regulate the industry

It was a Brilliant Move

Those who wanted to become Billionaires with Tutoring – scrambled

Those who made good money and genuinely impacted Students to think – stayed and continued to nurture and build more students


Even Today Private Tutoring Exists

Only thing is – the Industry is regulated

Ceiling on Valuation, Mandatory insistence on Registration of Tutors, Syllabus being overseen by the CPC Education Committee to ensure Students can still think and learn on their own, No IPO allowed until 2032, Minimum 15 years for a Tutoring Company, Valuation based on Asset Valuation not Speculative Valuation, No Overseas investment in Private Tution Companies

The Result – The Sharks are GONE or going really fast.

Genuine Tutors and Tutorials are very much here to stay and help students especially weaker ones while also ensuring future students learn on their own and dont get spoonfed

And best of all -Tutorials dont replace Schools and control a Robotic Destiny of Students.


Easily one of the Finest Pieces of Legislation by a World Leader in the 21st Century

https://youtu.be/-2fBSWfKHZs

What a circus of clowns! Sorry didn’t really want to insult the clowns. Better to compare them to a herd of charging ignoramus buffaloes, or some hungry anacondas, definitely social vermins of the worse kind.

Indeed, this is a question that many people are asking.

And precisely, because it is on many people’s minds, that I will answer it. Well, without a “crystal ball” perhaps, but in my own way.

So let’s look at the parameters…

[1] No actual leadership

President Biden is a figurehead. There’s no one “upstairs”.

This is not a political assessment. It’s an actual observation by anyone who watches the videos of him. He cycles in and out of clarity, and often appears to be suffering from pretty advanced dementia.

He goes though the motions. Read the teleprompters, and “kisses babies”.

But in the strategy briefing rooms, in high level discussions, and other important roles, he’s present but not proactive.

[2] Careening out of control

Without leadership, the “car careens wildly on the road”.

Financial opportunists place all sorts of bills and initiatives for personal profit “on the table”. These then “grow legs” and take on a life of their own. The Tiktok ban is one such example. Thus the Senate and Congress appears to be simply a forum for grandstanding while the “representatives” try to accept higher and higher piles of cash for their participation.

Congress more aptly resembles a shark feeding frenzy over a cow carcass.

There’s no real statesmanship, leadership, or forward planning. It’s all on “autopilot”, and being run by monied interests.

[3] The road is not empty

It wouldn’t be so bad if the “careening car” is on a wide and open empty highway. But it isn’t. There are many other cars on this road. There are cars with couples. cars with families, and school busses full of children.

It’s only a matter of time before the careening car smashes into someone else.

After smashing into Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, the car is now banging into a large clunky tractor-trailer; Russia. And, each time the tractor-trailer tries to get unstuck the car smashes again, and again, and again. It’s almost like the driver for the United States car has no brakes. It’s acceleration only. And Russia while dinged up, is still moving forward.

Now a big yellow bus full of school children looms up ahead. This is China, and it is enormous (being double-Decker), and powerful, and does not want to be hit.

And everyone around is terrified.

And what does the United States car do?

It “floors” the gas petal, and is zooming straight ahead. The driver seemingly wants to broadside the bus at high speed.

Conclusion

Is it no wonder why people are concerned? People are terrified.

At this stage of the game, and I am loathe to say this, there are only four (x4) things that can stop the upcoming disaster…

  • The car runs out of gas, and stops dead in the middle of the road. It sputters, and dies.
  • The people inside the careening car take control of the wheel. And then, carefully and slowly, ease it to the side of the road.
  • The crazy car drives off the highway on it’s own, and destroys itself without hitting anyone else.
  • The tractor-trailer and the bus full of children coordinate and with their combined mass, push the madman off the road on their own. And other cars, acting in good faith, help in whatever capacity they can provide.

OPEC+ oil alliance announces surprise production cuts

Good strategy to crush the Western  nations economy at a time when they are severely ill .
Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ oil producers have announced voluntary cuts to their production amounting to about 1.15 million barrels per day (bpd), calling it a “precautionary measure” aimed at market stability.

The 23-nation group had been largely expected to stick to its already agreed 2 million bpd cuts when its ministerial panel, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, meets virtually on Monday.

Article HERE

Operation Sandman and the plan to put the United States to bed

Big changes all around.

When I was married to my first wife, I started to notice some odd behaviors as she sunk into the madness of her illness. They were subtle, and after a brief spell of madness, she went back to normal.

Over time, her crazy behavior become longer in duration, and more frequent.

It took me time to realize that she was slowly losing her marbles. But eventually I started to notice that some of her behaviors (independent of her bouts of crazy-town) were fixed. And very, very unusual.

The very first thing that I noticed was she no longer knew how to pose for a picture.

Every time I would try to take her picture, she would face the camera and give me the “deer in the headlights” look. I’ll tell you it really pissed me off.

Even when I took the time to pose her, the moment, when I picked up the camera, she would face it, lose her pose and give me that “deer in the headlights” look.

Sheech!

So… the United States is now in serious long-term psychosis. And we (as generally sane people) see this every moment the “news” reports on some event…

China cut off lithium supplies when the United States sanctioned it. That means no batteries for cars, and cell phones, and all those nice cheap “green technologies”. The oligarchy class int he USA then decided to make a quick buck by seizing by hostile takeover, the lithium mines and operations in Mexico.

Nope. Said the President of Mexico.

So then what happened?

Oh, yeah! Congress is now pushing for the Untied States to invade Mexico.

Man, this is getting to be a cross of a horror movie, and a Tim Burton surreal movie. It’s all fucking wacked. Check this out…

President of Kenya Urges Citizens To Get Rid of U.S. Dollars – soon (Operation Sandman????)

.

The President of Kenya today announced to all citizens they should get rid of any U.S. Dollars they may be holding because they will become worth less within weeks.

William Kipchirchir Samoei Arap Ruto, Ph.D, CGH; is a Kenyan politician who is serving as the fifth and current president of Kenya since 13 September 2022.

Prior to becoming president, he served as the first deputy president of Kenya from 2013 to 2022.

Today, in a nationally televised speech in Kenya, Ruto said  “Those of you who are holding dollars, you shortly might go into losses. So you better do what you have to do because this market will be different in a couple of weeks.”

This stunning announcement gives credibility to a RUMOR that has been circulating for over a year, that 142 countries around the world have secretly agreed to what they call “Operation Sandman.”

According to the RUMOR, Operation Sandman will “put the US Dollar to sleep” by having all 142 countries repudiate the currency on the same day, and refuse to continue accepting it for payment in Trade.

Countries around the world began planning this when they witnessed the then-Democrat-Controlled US Congress, go on a spending spree of several TRILLION Dollars in Omnibus Bills. Those countries realized there is nothing backing the value of US Dollars and they saw that the US Congress has no plans at all to reign-in spending.

One country’s Finance Ministry recently told the US, “We are no longer willing to accept ones and zeros in a bank computer as actual payment for real goods.”

The countries agreed that holding US currency was becoming foolish because it was becoming worthless on its face, thanks to all the rampant over-spending by the US Government.

Now, it appears those countries may actually take action “within a couple weeks.”

If countries around the world repudiate the Dollar as payment for goods in trade, then they would halt providing manufactured goods or raw materials unless paid in some currency OTHER THAN DOLLARS.

Since the U.S. barely does any manufacturing at all anymore, thanks to the business nitwits who thought it was a good idea to convert the US economy to a “service economy” then products we buy in stores will simply run out and we will be unable to re-stock because no one will want our money.

Among the business nitwits are also those who pushed for “Free Trade” claiming it would improve sales of American-made goods overseas if America agreed to halt Tariffs on all imported items.  The government bought-into the idea, not realizing – or not caring – that these very businessmen weren’t at all interested in selling more American goods overseas.  What they were interested in was shipping American JOBS overseas, taking advantage of cheap labor, then shipping those exact same products back to the USA to sell at the same high prices . . . . while pocketing the profit from the new, foreign, cheap labor without having to pay Tariiffs.

The Businessmen, their corporate Boards of Directors, and Commerce Organizations who touted “Free Trade” were the ones who moved American jobs overseas and now, the country barely manufactures anything, anymore.

So here we are, years later, and thanks to those businessmen, and the federal politicians who foolishly believed their lies about “Free Trade,” we have almost no manufacturing. Countries around the world seem to be actually planning to stop accepting the US dollar as payment, so we won’t be able to buy anything because it’s all made overseas now!

Retaliation against the people who did this should be swift and ferocious when Americans can no longer buy even life’s basics because corporate titans and certain others stripped our country of manufacturing.

 

PREPARE NOW!

Readers should make a list for themselves of all the “Basics” we take for granted, and make certain you have a bunch stocked up.  Things like:

  • Underwear
  • Undershirts
  • Socks (White and colored)
  • Shoes (Dress and casual), Sneakers, Boots (Hiking & Work)
  • Belts (dress and casual)
  • Sweaters
  • Coats and jackets
  • Hats
  • Bathing suits/swimwear
  • Jeans / Dungarees / Pants
  • Casual and dress shirts
  • Ties
  • Suits and Sport Coats

Head out to your kitchen and see if you need any new:

  • Pots
  • Pans  (Cast iron and non-stick)
  • Mixing bowls
  • Dishware (Plates, Dishes, Bowls)
  • Utensils (Knives (Carving, Steak, and butter), forks, spoons, spatulas,  etc.
  • Drinking glasses, cups, coffee mugs
  • Cutting boards for use with slicing meats or breads
  • Placemats (if you use them at your table)

Do you have a Sewing Box or kit?

  • Needles and thread for sewing
  • Spare buttons for shirts
  • Maybe a spare zipper or two
  • Thimbles
  • Knitting and Crochet Needles and YARN

Guys, don’t forget:  TOOLS!

  • Hammers
  • Screwdrivers (Regular 1,2,3,4 — , Philips 1,2,3,4–, Torx, and Robertson (Square drive))
  • Pliers  (Regular, cutting, Vice-grip, tin snips, etc.)
  • Wrenches (regular and pipe (Monkey))
  • Ratchets and sockets (all sizes US and Metric)
  • DRILL BITS
  • Saws and/or saw blades (Wood, Miter, metal, chain)
  • Chisels
  • Grease gun and cartridges of grease
  • POWER TOOLS !!!  (Drills, saws, nail guns, and the like)
  • EXTENSION CORDS (For both inside a house, and long ones for working outside)
  • Gas can(s)

 

The list of everyday things we all take for granted is almost never-ending.  I’m certain I missed a whole slew of things, but you get the idea.

Almost NONE of these things are made here anymore and if you’re running low or your stuff is old and wearing out, you need to get these things in your possession while you still can!

If these foreign countries do what it seems the President of Kenya has hinted they ARE GOING TO DO, then all these things become scarce overnight and will remain scarce for . . . .  YEARS!

I’m sure there are many more things that you can think of.  What ever they are, GET THEM.  FAST!

China’s 3nm phototransistor development breakthrough with brand new technology never thought of.

The United States is trying to block the development of China’s technology starting from Huawei 5G sanctions to chip sanctions upon most Chinese companies. Facing the technological hegemony of the United States, China is also looking for a way to change lanes and overtake!

Recently Dai Ching’s team at the China National nanoscience Center has made an important achievement in the field of Polaritons based on the efficient excitation and long-distance transmission of polaritons. The team successfully created a photo transistor which realized the regulation of positive and negative refraction of light at the nanoscale and significantly improved the ability to manipulate light at the nanoscale.

You must know that phototransistors are the main basis for the development of photonic chips and China’s continuous breakthroughs in the field of phototransistors have made China a leader in the field of photonic chips and has led to the world’s leading level.

Earlier the Chinese Academy of Sciences also officially announced that it has broken through the research and development of 3nm Optical chip transistors and a tube chip production line has been built in Beijing ready to start production.

This news soon caused shocks in the industry. This is undoubtedly a qualitative breakthrough for domestic chips and it also verifies the possibility of China changing lanes and overtaking in the chip field.

So what are the characteristics of optical chips why will Optical chips become the main Lane for China’s semiconductors to change lanes and overtake. Even Huawei’s Rin Zhengfei said that Optical chips are the future of chips.

There are four reasons. First Optical chips have speeds that silicon-based chips cannot match if a photon and an electron are allowed to hit a clock at the same time the result is obviously that the photon must arrive first after all the speed of light is close to 300 000 kilometers per second which is unmatched by electrical signals, the optical chip uses light waves as the carrier of signal transmission and calculation unlike traditional silicon-based chips.

Photonic chips use Global new semiconductor materials such as InP and GaAs substrates which almost completely outperformed silicon-based materials in terms of cost and performance. According to the data given by the Chinese Academy of Sciences under the same conditions the computing power of optical chips will reach more than one thousand times that of silicon-based chips which can be described as an existence against the sky.

Second the optical chip has lower energy consumption less heat generation and stronger information carrying capacity, photons not only generate less heat electrons but can also achieve considerably higher data transfer rates than electrons in this way the volume of the optical chip device will be greatly reduced.

Third, Optical chips no longer need to rely on expensive EUV lithography machines, this means that in the field of optical chip development China does not have to worry about being stuck by the United States because in terms of aspects China and the United States are on the same starting line in the field of optical chips.

Even many Technologies in China have surpassed the US solving the problem of high-end chip shortcomings. China can produce high-performance chips by itself which is undoubtedly a disaster for American Semiconductor companies after the release of the U.S chip act U.S chip Giants Qualcomm Intel and Texas Instruments all suffered backlash and their performance fell sharply.

If China succeeds in the research and development of high-end ships it means that China will no longer rely on the U.S market in the future, the loss of the Chinese market is even more of a disaster for U.S companies, the excess chip production capacity cannot be sold and in the end they can only beg China to buy.

Although the optical chip has many advantages it also faces a new problem in the current development one is how to commercialize it and the other is how to make it smaller and use it in terminal equipment.

China has already started commercialization and assembly line production of quantum chips and quantum computers it will not be too far to solve the problem of optical chips.

China is vigorously promoting the substitution of domestic chips this stems from the tremendous progress made by Chinese Chips in just a few years China has made breakthroughs in memory chips analog chips GPU chips etc..

Recently Bill Gates once again stated in an interview with the British financial times that the US’s approach cannot stop the advancement of Chinese Chips but will instead cause more losses to U.S chips American chip companies.

Chinese chip industry has not flinched and has further cultivated its own chip system promoting the development of risk V architecture is exactly China’s approach to further enhance its independent research and development capabilities of chips, this will fundamentally get rid of the U.S chip system in the end of this race.

Western world with paltry 15% global population slice wont be able to withstand against the rest – most of whom are well entrenched in Asia which includes two great powers, namely; Russia and China.

Based on Remarks today . . . War it will be

Deputy Chairman of the Russian Federation Council (Senate) Dmitry Medvedev made remarks today that seem to confirm war with the West is the choice that has, in fact, been made.

When analyzing public remarks of any leader, one must always take into account errors in translation, and more importantly, nuances in culture/language that may exist in one culture, but do not precisely translate to other cultures.   So interpreting remarks of foreign officials is a delicate task that must be undertaken with very great care.

Having said that, sometimes the meaning of a foreign officials remarks translate very precisely, and say what we actually think is meant.  Such was the case today.

Today, Dmitry Medvedev said the following:  “The consequences of the collision of the world’s most powerful armies will be terrible and there will be no victor at all.”

Pretty hard to not understand the plain meaning of that.   Let’s dissect:

“The consequences of THE collision . . . .”  Not “a collision” but rather “THE” collision.  His use of the word THE rather than “a” indicates to me that a collision IS, in fact, coming.

“. . . WILL be terrible . . .”  Not “would” or “could” but rather “WILL.”  His use of the word “WILL” rather than “would” or “could” reinforces my interpretation above that the decision to go to actual war has been made.

Lastly,  “. . . there WILL be no victor at all.”    Again, his use of the word “WILL” is now double reinforcement of the reality that the decision for an actual shooting war is already made, and worse, since “. . . there will be no victor”  that tells me it is also decided that the coming war WILL be nuclear.   After all, a nuclear war is the ONLY war that has no victor.

Medvedev is not in any way careless with his use of language.  He is clearly a highly educated man, who says what he means and means what he says.

He went on: “Russia is not fighting the Ukrainian regime, but rather the 3.6 million-member NATO army.”

That.     That right there . . .  is the hideous, ugly reality.   Medvedev knows what’s what, and he just said it publicly.   When a top elected official of a country, publicly declares that war is being waged against his land by an identified combatant, the only expected course of action is for his country to engage that combatant directly.   So this remark reinforce my interpretation of earlier remarks above.

Medvedev’s choice of words today, terrifies me.  Not because I am afraid to die — I’m not.   But because his words seem to indicate (to me) that tens of millions of us are going to die, and our world will __never__ be the same.  The good will perish with the evil.  Cities and towns will be flattened.  Disease and death will run rampant.

This is a catastrophe that does not have to be.  Yet our U.S. government, and its NATO vassals, are pursuing this course to the exclusion of almost all else.  It seems like insanity to me.

In related news, Estonia’s Foreign Minister has decided to expel one Russian diplomat.  Moscow will respond to Estonia’s decision to expel Russian diplomat — Russian Foreign Ministry.

So what little is left of “Diplomacy” is also being intentionally wrecked by our NATO vassals.

Huawei update

Huawei Technologies Co said it has successfully developed electronic design automation, or EDA tools, for chips above 14 nanometers process by partnering with domestic partners, marking a crucial breakthrough for China’s semiconductor industry amid the US government restrictions.

Nicknamed the “cradle” of integrated circuits, EDA is software widely used in the sector and is of great importance to the entire process of designing chips.

Xu Zhijun, rotating chairman of Huawei, said the company has completed the localization of EDA tools above 14nm in the chip field and will complete comprehensive verification this year.

Huawei confirmed to China Daily on Friday that Xu made the remarks in a late February meeting.

China has long relied on US companies such as Cadence and Synopsys for high-end electronic design automation tools. EDA for 14nm chips are middle-end products, but it still marks a breakthrough.

The progress is part of a broader push by Huawei to develop domestic development tools for hardware, software and chips amid the US government’s lingering restrictions.

Xu said the company has replaced 78 software tools affected by Washington’s ban, which can basically ensure the continuity of its research and development efforts amid US restrictions.

Xu said that although the company has achieved many breakthroughs in product development tools over the past three years, it still faces formidable challenges.

Huawei will redouble its efforts to attract more global talents in order to achieve a strategic breakthrough in the area, he added.

Major Chinese insurance companies have also tailor-made insurance services to promote the use of domestically developed chip products such as EDA tools, people familiar with the matter told China Daily.

Such insurance services, which have already been used to support homegrown auto chip companies in 2021, can help Chinese semiconductor enterprises lower research and development costs, and accelerate efforts to achieve breakthroughs in core technologies, they said.

Silent Hill Promotional Event In Tokyo

Models dressed as bandaged nurses take part in a promotional event for the film “Silent Hill” on June 22, 2006 in Tokyo, Japan.

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Numerous Stratotankers Just Went Up Over Iraq . . . 20 Missiles Just Struck 3 US Bases in Syria

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Iran may be about to get hit. Three Strato-tankers just went airborne over Iraq. LIVE UPDATES BELOW . . .

-USAF KC135R 60-0365

-USAF KC135R 62-3533

-USAF KC135T 58-0069

Putting that much air refueling capability into action signifies a big air operation is about to take place. Something big is happening.

2023 03 26 18 02
2023 03 26 18 02

UPDATE 5:24 PM EDT —

Receiving Intel that upwards of Twenty missiles have struck at three different US Bases inside Syria:

the US Conoco Oil Field base in the outskirts of Deir ez-Zor

Three more US bases have been targeted rockets and artillery, including: Al-Tanf, Homs governorate Koniko Gas Field, Deir Ezzor governorate

MORE:

Missile strike continues at this moment and it is targeting the American base in the Koniko and Khasham field near the town of Al-Jafra, northeast of Deir Ezzor, which is used by US army.

 

US military official confirms to Al Jazeera that one of the American military bases in Deir_ez-Zor has been targeted by about 6 to 8 rockets, adding that “American forces are assessing casualties and damage”

UPDATE 5:28 PM EDT —

US AND Coalition war planes are now striking back.

“Strong and successive explosions were heard at the entrances to the city of Al-Mayadin in the eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor, coinciding with the flight of the international coalition aircraft over the area”

 

MORE:

Apache helicopters and US warplanes are flying in the sky of Deir Ezzor countryside now

 

UPDATE 5:31 PM EDT —

Warplanes are said to be taking off from the US base in Qatar. Planes are heading towards Syria. to hit Iranian militias

 

MORE:

U.S. and Iranian/Militia Forces in the Deir ez-Zur Region have reportedly been exchanging Rocket and Missiles Fire between each other for the last few hours; Coalition Aircraft have also been attempting to Strike the Iranian Launch Sites.

Heavy US Air Force activity over parts of eastern Syria after rockets were launched at a US base

 

UPDATE 5:40 PM EDT —

The 3 US bases in Syria are currently UNDER ALMOST CONSTANT artillery fire. Reports of damage and fire at the bases.

American planes are in the airspace of eastern Syria, some of which took off from the Persian Gulf, including the B52.

 

 

*****BULLETIN *****

5:42 PM EDT —

Preliminary reports indicate that some units of the Syrian Arab Army may be engaging US forces. It has also been reported that Syrian Armed Forces carried out attacks against Turkish forces in Syria

 

HAL TURNER INTEL — Speaking to some sources in Syria, the attack tonight on the US base is devastating by the sounds of it. High possibility of numerous American casualties…

Pro-Iran forces in Syria warn they may ‘respond to more US strikes’

 

UPDATE 5:52 PM EDT —

Pro-Iranian forces evacuated all of their HQs as they attacked several U.S. bases in eastern #Syria, fearing severe retaliation.

BREAKING NEWS: Russia Moves Ten (10) Aircraft to Belarus “Capable” of Carrying Tactical Nukes; WILL ALSO STATION NUKES IN BELARUS!

Russian President Vladimir Putin made a shocking surprise announcement today that “Russia has now positioned ten (10) aircraft inside Belarus capable of carrying Tactical nuclear weapons.”  He declined to say if such weapons are already on those aircraft.

Putin also announced that actual nuclear bombs “will be stationed in Belarus from now on.”

Developing . . .

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Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

2023 03 19 16 56
2023 03 19 16 56

Ingredients

Flaky Crust

  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons granulated sugar
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 2/3 cup chilled solid vegetable shortening, cut into pieces
  • 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoon chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces
  • About 10 tablespoon ice water

Filling

  • 3 1/2 cups 1/2-inch thick slices trimmed rhubarb (1 1/2 pounds untrimmed)
  • 3 1/2 cups strawberries, hulled and halved
  • 1/2 cup packed golden brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/4 cup cornstarch
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 large egg yolk, beaten, to blend with 1 teaspoon water (for glaze)

Instructions

  1. Combine flour, sugar and salt in a food processor or blender. Using the pulse feature, cut in shortening and butter until a coarse meal forms. Blend in enough ice water, 2 tablespoons at a time, to form moist clumps. Gather dough into a ball; cut in half. Flatten each half into a disk. Wrap separately in plastic wrap; refrigerate until firm, about 1 hour.
  2. Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Combine first 7 ingredients in a large bowl; toss gently to blend.
  3. Roll out 1 dough disk on a floured work surface to a 13-inch round. Transfer to a 9-inch diameter glass pie dish. Trim excess dough, leaving a 3/4-inch overhang.
  4. Roll out second dough disk on a lightly floured surface to a 13-inch round. Cut into fourteen 1/2-inch wide strips. Spoon filling into crust. Arrange 7 dough strips atop filling, spacing evenly. Form lattice by placing remaining dough strips in opposite direction atop filling, trim ends of dough strips even with overhang of bottom crust. Fold strip ends and overhang under, pressing to seal. Crimp edges decoratively.
  5. Brush glaze over crust. Transfer pie to a baking sheet.
  6. Bake for 20 minutes.
  7. Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees F.
  8. Bake pie until golden and filling thickens, about 1 hour 25 minutes.
  9. Transfer pie to a cooling rack to cool completely.

This is the problem with TikTok:

  • it is a Chinese company making a better product than its American equivalent
  • over 150 million Americans now used it ignoring their government warning of being spied on
  • amongst its MANY contents, it provided information that debunks the state narratives
  • it tells of corruption at the highest level of the American Government, provide concrete examples of how they are being manipulated and question why Americans are not living better lives – universal health care, better infrastructure, better education, etc
  • most of ALL it tells of the American public revulsion’s at the constant death, war and destruction that is waged against others in their name by the military industrial complex.

Therefore TikTok is a threat to those who are in power in the United States. They should fear for what they had done to the country and its people.

The attempt to ban TikTok in the United Stated have now galvanized the American TikTok community which makes up about half the American population AND this are younger Americans. More consequently and making their anger worst, as reported by the Washington Post, this action to banned TikTok was orchestrated and paid for by Meta

So it will be interesting if the State will proceed with banning TilTok.

Tacony dungeon: Linda Weston gets life plus 80 years for locking up and starving disabled people

2023 03 19 18 19
2023 03 19 18 19

A 55-year-old woman in the US has been sentenced to life plus 80 years in jail for locking up disabled people in basements and attics in order to steal their social benefit cheques. Linda Weston, the main accused, was convicted of keeping her victims locked in different US states from 2001 to 2011.

According to NBC News, when Judge Cynthia Rufe sentenced Weston to life in prison, she said: “Your acts were unconscionable. You are evil.”

She further said: “Ironically, in prison you will get three meals a day and medical and psychological services . . . something you didn’t do for your captives.”

Weston was saved from the death penalty following a plea bargain in September.

Weston was saved from the death penalty following a plea bargain in September. She pleaded guilty to 196 federal counts during the hearing and apologised for what she had done: “I am sorry. I believe in God and God knows what happened.” To which the judge, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, replied: “There are a lot of people in this courtroom who know what happened, too.”

Two of Weston’s associates — Eddie Wright and Weston’s daughter, Jean McIntosh — have pleaded guilty, while two others are awaiting trial. According to prosecutors, the group ran their operations in three other states. Back in 2011, four disabled adults were discovered locked inside a boiler room in an apartment building in a Tacony neighbourhood in Philadelphia. They were rescued by the police.

According to the prosecutors, Weston’s group tortured six disabled adults and four children by starving them. Some were even forced to drink their own urine and eat human waste. Others were encouraged to have children so the group could collect more benefits cheques.

Back in 2008 in Virginia, a woman in the group’s captivity died after suffering from meningitis, after being kept starving and locked in a kitchen cabinet for months.

Another victim died due to starvation in 2005. “You are evil and done a bad job on me. I’m trying to get over this and get this part behind me,” one of the victims, Drwin McLemire was quoted as saying by NBC.

Weston’s group stole more than $200,000 (£131,939) in social security benefits from victims, some of who were forced into prostitution, prosecutors said. “When the individuals tried to escape, stole food or otherwise protested their treatment, Weston and others punished them by slapping, punching, kicking, stabbing, burning and hitting them with closed hands, belts, sticks, bats and hammers or other objects, including the butt of a pistol,” US District Attorney Zane Memeger said in a statement quoted by The Washington Post.

This is absolutely correct.

  • Let me note which country is fully and unconditionally with the U.S. For me it is UK and Canada.
  • Next which country are trapped into fully supporting the U.S. For me it is the former colonial powers, France, Spain, Belgium and Netherlands.
  • Then there are those countries using the U.S. to balance and threaten Russia. For me these countries are Poland, Scandinavian nations. Sweden, Finland, Norway, Lithuania and some small Eastern European mainly former Soviet satellites nations needing counterbalance having poke Russia’s eyes constantly.
  • There are Anglo nations that has some blood bonds such as Australia and New Zealand. And finally there are 3 slave vassal states that essentially has no rights of their own effectively.

These countries today represent 13% of the worlds population and add up to 2 dozen nations or a mere 12% of world’s nations.

The rest of the world which represents 87% of the world’s population are totally aware of the evil nature of the U.S.

The U.S. game of impoverish these countries while hypocritically lying about human rights, democracy, freedom while ganging up with their cronies to threaten the world.

The Ukraine war is the one that break the camel back.

Today these 150–160 nations are openly and publicly opposing the U.S. hegemony. And fully backing the multi polar world.

To the world this is the only way forward to contained the US from threatening the world.

To me even these 13% of the world is also not fully supporting the oppression of the developing world. A good 50% of them don’t even support their government. Frankly the U.S. command less than 5% of the worlds opinion.

True these countries are rich but also true is that all these nation are failing and stagnating.

For me it us game over for the U.S.

Of course the U.S. and their hang ons partners won’t admit it and to me the harder they fight it the more they will be hurt. And more of their allies will leave them.

I don’t credit Russia or China.

They did not win it.

The U.S. lost it. By over interference, over exuberance, overspending, over estimating itself, over warmongering and underestimating the rest of the world.

The gathering storm

The crisis of American national power has begun. America’s economy is tipping over, and Western financial markets are quietly panicking. Imperiled by rising interest rates, mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries are losing their value. The market’s proverbial “vibes”—feelings, emotions, beliefs, and psychological penchants—suggest a dark turn is underway inside the American economy.

American national power is measured as much by American military capability as by economic potential and performance. The growing realization that American and European military-industrial capacity cannot keep up with Ukrainian demands for ammunition and equipment is an ominous signal to send during a proxy war that Washington insists its Ukrainian surrogate is winning.

Russian economy-of-force operations in southern Ukraine appear to have successfully ground down attacking Ukrainian forces with the minimal expenditure of Russian lives and resources. While Russia’s implementation of attrition warfare worked brilliantly, Russia mobilized its reserves of men and equipment to field a force that is several magnitudes larger and significantly more lethal than it was a year ago.

Russia’s massive arsenal of artillery systems including rockets, missiles, and drones linked to overhead surveillance platforms converted Ukrainian soldiers fighting to retain the northern edge of the Donbas into pop-up targets. How many Ukrainian soldiers have died is unknown, but one recent estimate wagers between 150,000-200,000 Ukrainians have been killed in action since the war began, while another estimates about 250,000.

Given the glaring weakness of NATO members’ ground, air, and air defense forces, an unwanted war with Russia could easily bring hundreds of thousands of Russian Troops to the Polish border, NATO’s Eastern Frontier. This is not an outcome Washington promised its European allies, but it’s now a real possibility.

In contrast to the Soviet Union’s hamfisted and ideologically driven foreign policymaking and execution, contemporary Russia has skillfully cultivated support for its cause in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The fact that the West’s economic sanctions damaged the U.S. and European economies while turning the Russian ruble into one of the international system’s strongest currencies has hardly enhanced Washington’s global standing.

Biden’s policy of forcibly pushing NATO to Russia’s borders forged a strong commonality of security and trade interests between Moscow and Beijing that is attracting strategic partners in South Asia like India, and partners like Brazil in Latin America. The global economic implications for the emerging Russo-Chinese axis and their planned industrial revolution for some 3.9 billion people in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are profound.

Inside presidential administrations, there are always competing factions urging the president to adopt a particular course of action. Observers on the outside seldom know with certainty which faction exerts the most influence, but there are figures in the Biden administration seeking an off-ramp from involvement in Ukraine. Even Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a rabid supporter of the proxy war with Moscow, recognizes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s demand that the West help him recapture Crimea is a red line for Putin that might lead to a dramatic escalation from Moscow.

Backing down from the Biden administration’s malignant and asinine demands for a humiliating Russian withdrawal from eastern Ukraine before peace talks can convene is a step Washington refuses to take. Yet it must be taken. The higher interest rates rise, and the more Washington spends at home and abroad to prosecute the war in Ukraine, the closer American society moves toward internal political and social turmoil. These are dangerous conditions for any republic.

100 Items You Need, That DISAPPEAR FIRST During War

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This list was made by a person who survived the Bosnian War. It shows the 100 items to disappear first in war.  As Americans decide whether or not the government of the State of New York should be allowed to continue to exist, over the pending Trump arrest, perhaps this list may come in handy if Civil War erupts.

It was written by a survivor of the war, they shared it with the world, now I share it with you.

Generators (Good ones cost dearly. Gas storage, risky. Noisy…target of thieves; maintenance etc.)
Water Filters/Purifiers
Portable Toilets
Seasoned Firewood. Wood takes about 6 – 12 months to become dried, for home uses.
Lamp Oil, Wicks, Lamps (First Choice: Buy CLEAR oil. If scarce, stockpile ANY!)
Coleman Fuel. Impossible to stockpile too much.
Guns, Ammunition, Pepper Spray, Knives, Clubs, Bats & Slingshots.
Hand-can openers, & hand egg beaters, whisks.
Honey/Syrups/white, brown sugar
Rice – Beans – Wheat
Vegetable Oil (for cooking) Without it food burns/must be boiled etc.,)
Charcoal, Lighter Fluid (Will become scarce suddenly)
Water Containers (Urgent Item to obtain.) Any size. Small: HARD CLEAR PLASTIC ONLY – note – food grade if for drinking.
Mini Heater head (Propane) (Without this item, propane won’t heat a room.)
Grain Grinder (Non-electric)
Propane Cylinders (Urgent: Definite shortages will occur.
Survival Guide Book.
Mantles: Aladdin, Coleman, etc. (Without this item, longer-term lighting is difficult.)
Baby Supplies: Diapers/formula. ointments/aspirin, etc.
Washboards, Mop Bucket w/wringer (for Laundry)
Cookstoves (Propane, Coleman & Kerosene)
Vitamins
Propane Cylinder Handle-Holder (Urgent: Small canister use is dangerous without this item)
Feminine Hygiene/Haircare/Skin products.
Thermal underwear (Tops & Bottoms)
Bow saws, axes and hatchets, Wedges (also, honing oil)
Aluminum Foil Reg. & Heavy Duty (Great Cooking and Barter Item)
Gasoline Containers (Plastic & Metal)
Garbage Bags (Impossible To Have Too Many).
Toilet Paper, Kleenex, Paper Towels
Milk – Powdered & Condensed (Shake Liquid every 3 to 4 months)
Garden Seeds (Non-Hybrid) (A MUST)
Clothes pins/line/hangers (A MUST)
Coleman’s Pump Repair Kit
Tuna Fish (in oil)
Fire Extinguishers (or..large box of Baking Soda in every room)
First aid kits
Batteries (all sizes…buy furthest-out for Expiration Dates)
Garlic, spices & vinegar, baking supplies
Big Dogs (and plenty of dog food)
Flour, yeast & salt
Matches. {“Strike Anywhere” preferred.) Boxed, wooden matches will go first
Writing paper/pads/pencils, solar calculators
Insulated ice chests (good for keeping items from freezing in Wintertime.)
Workboots, belts, Levis & durable shirts
Flashlights/LIGHTSTICKS & torches, “No. 76 Dietz” Lanterns
Journals, Diaries & Scrapbooks (jot down ideas, feelings, experience; Historic Times)
Garbage cans Plastic (great for storage, water, transporting – if with wheels)
Men’s Hygiene: Shampoo, Toothbrush/paste, Mouthwash/floss, nail clippers, etc
Cast iron cookware (sturdy, efficient)
Fishing supplies/tools
Mosquito coils/repellent, sprays/creams
Duct Tape
Tarps/stakes/twine/nails/rope/spikes
Candles
Laundry Detergent (liquid)
Backpacks, Duffel Bags
Garden tools & supplies
Scissors, fabrics & sewing supplies
Canned Fruits, Veggies, Soups, stews, etc.
Bleach (plain, NOT scented: 4 to 6% sodium hypochlorite)
Canning supplies, (Jars/lids/wax)
Knives & Sharpening tools: files, stones, steel
Bicycles…Tires/tubes/pumps/chains, etc
Sleeping Bags & blankets/pillows/mats
Carbon Monoxide Alarm (battery powered)
Board Games, Cards, Dice
d-con Rat poison, MOUSE PRUFE II, Roach Killer
Mousetraps, Ant traps & cockroach magnets
Paper plates/cups/utensils (stock up, folks)
Baby wipes, oils, waterless & Antibacterial soap (saves a lot of water)
Rain gear, rubberized boots, etc.
Shaving supplies (razors & creams, talc, after shave)
Hand pumps & siphons (for water and for fuels)
Soysauce, vinegar, bullions/gravy/soupbase
Reading glasses
Chocolate/Cocoa/Tang/Punch (water enhancers)
“Survival-in-a-Can”
Woolen clothing, scarves/ear-muffs/mittens
Boy Scout Handbook, / also Leaders Catalog
Roll-on Window Insulation Kit (MANCO)
Graham crackers, saltines, pretzels, Trail mix/Jerky
Popcorn, Peanut Butter, Nuts
Socks, Underwear, T-shirts, etc. (extras)
Lumber (all types)
Wagons & carts (for transport to and from)
Cots & Inflatable mattress’s
Gloves: Work/warming/gardening, etc.
Lantern Hangers
Screen Patches, glue, nails, screws,, nuts & bolts
Teas
Coffee
Cigarettes
Wine/Liquors (for bribes, medicinal, etc,)
Paraffin wax
Glue, nails, nuts, bolts, screws, etc.
Chewing gum/candies
Atomizers (for cooling/bathing)
Hats & cotton neckerchiefs
Goats/chickens

The Tiktok hearings are the beginning of the end of domestic contentment…

Watching the hundreds of videos all point to an element of great unrest.

  • The Congressmen and Senators are idiots who don’t understand the basics of life.
  • They want to ban a Chinese app that everyone uses, event though the CEO has been trying to accommodate their desires.
  • The app is bringing American together and this entire event is causing people to argue that the government does not represent the people.
  • No first Amendment rights.

Popular meme from this battle…

main qimg 94f028dc687e4d7fb3cb2200da490df3
main qimg 94f028dc687e4d7fb3cb2200da490df3

Uh Oh! Gold Jumps $64.30 an Ounce – TODAY

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The Spot Price of Gold Bullion jumped $64.30 per ounce today (+3.34%), reaching a cost of $1987.30 per ounce during regular market-day trading.   Once the market closed, Gold continued to rise, reaching $1993.70.  as of 5:42 PM eastern US Time (+3.68%).

This is taking place because people are pulling cash out of Banks and out of Stock Markets, and rushing to WHAT THEY ***THINK*** is the “safety” of Gold.   In fact, what most of them are doing is buying “Paper” Gold . . . . allowing someone ELSE to hold the actual metal for them.    If things in the financial markets continue NEXT WEEK, as they’ve been going this week, all those “Paper” Gold holders . . . . may find out the hard way, they have nothing.  Only people who took actual delivery and have the gold in their own hands, are safe.

According to a new study reported by the Wall Street Journal, one-hundred eighty-six (186) additional banks have the same issues that faced Silicon Valley Bank before it collapsed.

Given that this is now being publicly reported – albeit DELIBERATELY after the markets closed on Friday — this weekend could result in an actual “Black Monday” when markets re-open on the 20th.  (We will all have to watch pre-market conditions when futures trading opens up Sunday night.)

Fed BigBanks RegionalBanks
Fed BigBanks RegionalBanks

Given all the government activity last weekend, as Silicon Valley Bank and then Signature Bank collapsed, it is entirely feasible that government action may also take place this weekend.

What will YOU do if the government orders a “Bank Holiday” next week, and none of the banks can open?   What will YOU do if all the ATM’s, credit, and debit cards are OFFLINE for a Bank Holiday?   That could mean every store would be CASH ONLY;  No credit, Debit, or even EBT cards!   How will you eat?  How will you put fuel in your car?

You had better prepare while you still have a slim window to do so: This weekend.

RUSSIA TO “PRACTICE” SUB-LAUNCHED NUKE STRIKE AGAINST U.S.A. FROM SUBS IN PACIFIC OCEAN

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Russian SubmarineMissileLaunches large
Russian SubmarineMissileLaunches large

The Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy said tonight his government will “launch salvos of missiles from submarines . . . in the neutral waters of the Pacific Ocean, relatively close to the coast of the United States, equipped with imitation nuclear warheads.”

The date of this ‘exercise” is not yet known.

This will be Russia’s response to the United States sending B-52’s to within ten miles of Russian territory (an island in the Baltic Sea) wherein they practiced launching nuclear cruise missiles at St. Petersburg, Russia, earlier this week.  That incident, earlier this week, was reported HERE

From the Russian Foreign Ministry: “We urge the United States to think about the consequences of its increasingly aggressive actions fraught with direct military confrontation with Russia.”

Hal Turner Analysis

Things are not getting better, folks.  They’re getting very much worse.

Get right with God.

Southwest Skillet Pot Pie

2023 03 19 17 00
2023 03 19 17 00

Ingredients

Filling

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1/2 medium onion, chopped
  • 2 (15 ounce) cans mixed vegetables, drained
  • 1 (15 ounce) can black beans, rinsed and drained
  • 1 (4 ounce) can diced jalapeno peppers, drained (optional)
  • 3/4 cup water
  • 1 (1 1/4 ounce) package taco seasoning mix
  • Salsa and sour cream

Crust

  • 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup yellow corn meal
  • 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 (4 ounce) can chopped green chiles

Instructions

  1. Filling: In 10-inch skillet, brown and cook ground beef; drain thoroughly. Return meat to pan. Add onion; return to heat and cook until tender. Add mixed vegetables, beans, jalapeno peppers, water and taco seasoning. Cook over medium-high heat until most of liquid is gone.
  2. Crust: In medium bowl, combine flour, corn meal, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add milk, egg, oil and chiles; stir until flour is moistened. Spread evenly over top of meat mixture in skillet. Cook, covered, over low heat for 30 to 35 minutes or a wooden pick inserted into crust comes out clean.
  3. Serve hot with salsa and sour cream.

Serves 4 to 6.

You can also bake this in the oven. Using an ovenproof skillet, bake at 375 degrees F for 30 to 35 minutes, or until crust is lightly browned.

Peach Pie

This is a wonderful way to prepare pie the old-fashioned way in a cast iron skillet.

2023 03 19 16 58
2023 03 19 16 58

Ingredients

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 4 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/3 cup shortening
  • 1/3 to 1/2 cup milk
  • 8 fresh peaches

Instructions

  1. Sift flour; measure and add salt and baking powder. Sift again. Cut in shortening as for pastry. Add milk all at once, just enough to make a soft dough. Turn out on a floured board and roll a round piece 1/4 inch thick and several inches larger in diameter than the skillet used. Place dough in bottom of skillet, letting edges hang over the outside. Then fill with sliced peaches and sprinkle with a mixture of 3/4 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and 1 tablespoon flour. Dot with butter. Fold edges toward center to partially cover the pie. Leave center of pie uncovered.
  2. Bake at 400 degrees F for 25 to 30 minutes.
  3. Serve warm or cold.

U.S. Air Force Attacks Allegedly IRANIAN Assets Inside Syria; Numerous Dead

A U.S. Government Press Release reads as follows: Earlier today, a U.S. contractor was killed and five U.S. service members and one additional U.S. contractor were wounded after a one-way unmanned aerial vehicle struck a maintenance facility on a Coalition base near Hasakah in northeast Syria at approximately 1:38 p.m. local time.

The intelligence community assess the UAV to be of Iranian origin.

“At the direction of President Biden, I authorized U.S. Central Command forces to conduct precision airstrikes tonight in eastern Syria against facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC),” said Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III. “The airstrikes were conducted in response to today’s attack as well as a series of recent attacks against Coalition forces in Syria by groups affiliated with the IRGC.”

—————-

Hal Turner Remarks

And there’s your “False Flag” that now gives a green light to US Forces to attack Iran itself (perhaps along with Israel).

Did you catch the paragraph which read “The intelligence community assess the UAV to be of Iranian origin.”     OHHHHHHH!   The “Intelligence Community?”  Do they mean the same nitwits that came to a consensus that President Trump got elected through “Russia Collusion?”   Yea, that’s them.  The same nitwits who couldn’t figure out that the entire Russia Collusion nonsense came from the Hillary Clinton Campaign!  That’s the level of dingbat, and asshat, presently infesting the US “Intelligence Community.”  Soy boys and girly men most all of them, I think.

Here we go.   The US will use this as a pretext for attacking “nuclear sites” inside Iran.  Just watch.

In Moscow, Xi and Putin Bury Pax Americana

China is richer than the next 9 richest countries in the world! …

2023 03 25 20 27
2023 03 25 20 27

Famous Music Hits Turned Into Vintage Ad Posters

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2 70

David Redon wanted to take music hits and treat them like they were vintage ads, that the artist was the product and the title was the baseline. We can highlight the fact that David Redon adapted wonderfully every visual code of the first printed ads.

More: Instagram, Behance

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It’s Fake Nikes, Fake Reeboks, Fake Rolexes but Original Shoes

It’s the Brand that is Counterfeit

main qimg 00c4ed36e15a3358c84ea6ea6b43f7f5
main qimg 00c4ed36e15a3358c84ea6ea6b43f7f5

A Nike Factory works on the SAME MOULD and MATERIAL as a Factory making non branded shoes.

The Feet Energy Shock Absorber Pad is patented design from Nike and that’s the difference

Nike also has special color pattern dyes that are unique and custom made from Ohio

Nike also has Industrial stitch fasteners that are patented designs (Stitching the threads) and custom made threads

This FESA Pad costs 50% of the Manufacturing cost.

In China, they make Pads that are around 60% -70% of Nikes quality and the Pattern Dyes are 90% similar and made in China

China makes 90% of the Worlds Stitch Fasteners and Threads for shoes barring a few big brands like Nike Or Adidas. So they can easily get a fastener and thread at maybe 1/3 to 1/4 the price

Difference is the Cost per Pair for this Non Branded Shoe is 1/6th of what it costs to manufacture a Nike.

So a Nike costs 225 -400 Yuan to manufacture in China and retails for 650–1200 Yuan

A Fake Nike costs 62 Yuan to manufacture in China and retails for 190–270 Yuan

The Fake Nike is 70–75% the Quality of Nike

main qimg 0ccfbaca2b58d21dab8f81aaf1fedc48
main qimg 0ccfbaca2b58d21dab8f81aaf1fedc48

It has a roaring market of practical Chinese teens who want cool brands but dont want to pay the brand premiums or the cost of design related R&D

No Issues

It’s even encouraged

So Fake Nikes are pretty easy to make

The Same Mould , Materials, Similar Pads and Similar Dyes (Local Produce and not Imported from Akron Ohio) at 16–20% of a Nikes manufacturing cost

China has NO ISSUES


The Problem will come when the Fake Nikes ARE SOLD AS ORIGINAL

That is a Crime and Counterfeiting is charged and you face 3–7 Years Jail for First Offence and 5–15 Years for subsequent offense

So if a Fake Nike retails for less than 300 Yuan, no issues. Even Cops will buy some grinning. You have a problem? Go to the copyright commission

If a Fake Nike retails for 600–800 Yuan, that is the same or close to the retail price of an Original Nike, YOU ARE DEAD!!!

Our Chinese friends are very practical but they have their own codes when it comes to trade

They may cut corners but CHEATING is something they cannot stand

An Exporter who sells you Lead containing toys for 9 Yuan Retail ($ 1.20) that the Importer in US will retail for $ 4.99 , doesnt bother anyone in China

An Exporter who sells a Toy for 157 Yuan Retail ($ 24.40) with a ‘Special Fee’ and a No Lead additive guarantee, that the Importer in US will retail for $ 69.99 , will be Blacklisted and Jailed and fined massively

GIANT, SEA-BASED, EARLY-WARNING, NUKE MISSILE RADAR PLATFORMS DEPLOYING FROM HAWAII

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2023 03 26 17 5wt3
2023 03 26 17 5wt3

Something’s up. Several UNIQUE and very important vessels for early-warning-detection of nuclear missile launches, have been suddenly deployed from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Sea-Based X-Band Radar (SBX-1) a floating, self-propelled, mobile active electronically scanned array early-warning radar station.

2023 03 26 17 55
2023 03 26 17 55

The Sea-Based X-Band Radar (SBX-1) is a floating, self-propelled, mobile active electronically scanned array early-warning radar station is designed to operate in high winds and heavy seas. It was developed as part of the United States Department of Defense Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) Ballistic Missile Defense System.

The radar is mounted on a fifth generation CS-50 twin-hulled semi-submersible oil platform. Conversion of the vessel was carried out at the AmFELS yard in Brownsville, Texas; the radar mount was built and mounted on the vessel at the Kiewit yard in Ingleside, Texas.

It is nominally based at Adak Island in Alaska, but has spent significant time at Pearl Harbor in test status.   When it departed Pearl Harbor today, it was ***NOT*** on any heading back toward Alaska.  It seems to be heading out into the Pacific toward . . .  Asia.

MORE

Yesterday the U.S. Navy Mobile Aerial Target Support System (MATSS-1) IX-524 towed barge also left Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – March 22, 2023 as seen below:

2023 03 26 17fd 55
2023 03 26 17fd 55

The MATSS systems aboard this particular vessel provide advanced remote telecommunications capability that extends the reach of the 42,000 square-mile Pacific Missile Range, the world’s largest instrumented multi-environmental range capable of supported surface, subsurface, air, and space operations simultaneously.

AND THIS . . . 

SS Pacific Tracker (WQVZ) ballistic missile test tracker leaving Honolulu, Hawaii – March 22, 2023.

These types of vessels, there are only five of them in the world,  are maintained in ROS-5 status and this one has been activated by TOTE Services in response to a no-notice mission activation.

OUR MOST SERIOUS FIREPOWER TOO!

Lastly, an Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarine left Pearl Harbor directly from the Beckoning Point Deperming Facility – March 22, 2023, shown below:

2023 03 26 17 56
2023 03 26 17 56

Deperming, or degaussing, is a procedure for erasing the permanent magnetism from ships and submarines to camouflage them against magnetic detection vessels and enemy marine mines.

The Ohio class of nuclear-powered submarines includes the United States Navy’s 14 ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) and its four cruise missile submarines (SSGNs). Each displacing 18,750 tons submerged, the Ohio-class boats are the largest submarines ever built for the U.S. Navy.

They are the world’s third-largest submarines, behind the Russian Navy’s Soviet-designed 48,000-ton Typhoon class and 24,000-ton Borei class. At 24 Trident II missiles apiece, Ohio-class boats carry more missiles than either the Borei class (16, 20 by the Borei II) or the Typhoon class (20).

Like its predecessor Benjamin Franklin- and Lafayette-class subs, the Ohio-class SSBNs are part of the United States’ nuclear-deterrent triad, along with U.S. Air Force strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The 14 SSBNs together carry about half of U.S. active strategic thermonuclear warheads.

Although the Trident missiles have no preset targets when the submarines go on patrol, they can be given targets quickly, from the United States Strategic Command based in Nebraska, using secure and constant radio communications links, including very low frequency systems.

All of these unique and dangerous systems departed Pearl Harbor suddenly, within the past 24 hours.   Something BIG is up.  This is no joke.

Hal Turner Remark: Seeing this, I am convinced we are in the endgame and things are coming to an explosive end. We are all living on borrowed time now.

 

New Attack: U.S. Army Logistics Convoy Blown Up in Iraq

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2023 03 26 17 31
2023 03 26 17 31

A strike drone attacked a US logistics convoy in Babil Governorate (Iraq).

No word yet on deaths or injuries.   No indication if this is the start of large new attack(s).

Word from Intel circles is already saying “Iran.”

More if I get it, but not too much more is expected tonight.

“I Want More Squirrels in Gwent”: Fantasy Illustrations by Anna Podedworna

0 19
0 19

Anna Podedworna is a Polish artist, primarily known for her series of works for Gwent, Cyberpunk 2077, League of Legends and Magic: The Gathering. For fans of the “Witcher” universe Anna is a native person in general – she has drawn so many cool illustrations for the cards that they have long become icons of the series of games.

In a recent interview Anna shared an interesting story related to Gwent: “My favorite card is the recently released Squirrel. It was the last card I illustrated for Gwent. There’s even a little story about it. The first director of Gwent had a strong dislike for squirrels. After discovering this fact, I set out to collect as many squirrels in the game as possible.

My first attempt at implementation was the “Iorveth: Meditation” card, but of course that wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, many of my attempts were tragically thwarted. Later, when I already knew I was leaving the company, a decision was made: it was now or never. I illustrated the damn squirrel and left it to the developers. They did not disappoint.

Anna summed up the interview by saying, “I want more squirrels in Gwent.

More: Instagram, Artstation

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“China’s hyperspectral detection satellites oversee the Western Pacific battlespace and airborne lasers detect waves and temperature variations generated by moving targets.

The West Pacific Surveillance and Targeting satellite, along with fifteen Yaogan-30 satellites in low-earth orbit, operating as triplets positioned in close proximity, geo-locate military platforms by measuring the angular or time difference of arrival of their intercepted electromagnetic signals.

Below them, the Caihong-T4, a massive, solar-powered drone, loiters for months at a cloudless altitude of sixty-five thousand feet, while below, the fifteen-ton, one-hundred fifty-foot wingspan Divine Eagle High Altitude Stealth-Hunting Drone reads electronic signals from aircraft long before they approach their targets.

Below the drones are AWACS, whose solid-state detectors have twice the range of US rotating domes, relay targeting information to domestic and Russian-built S-400 anti-aircraft/anti-missile batteries.

Jin Canrong, the PRC’s senior defense policy advisor, says China has deployed weapons that can destroy in minutes every military base in its region, see all stealth bombers and submarines, and take out every aircraft carrier within two thousand miles of shore.

"The first salvo of 1,000 CJ-10 missiles would cripple seventy percent of US bases in the region and create a strategic dilemma for the White House. 

"Since no Chinese missile struck the United States, an American retaliatory strike on a target within China would be an escalation 

"Within hours, Seattle or Los Angeles would be destroyed – knowing that the US has no missile defense while both Russia and China have advanced systems".”

China Is Playing Her Hand, Moving to Save the World from the Satanic American Empire

A co-worker of mine figured out why her electric bill had tripled with the help of their neighbor’s cats. For three months one summer their electric bill suddenly went through the roof. They checked out all their appliances, air conditioning, etc. and couldn’t find the problem. Then one cool evening she looked out the window and noticed there were several neighbor cats lying on her driveway. This was an “Ah Ha!” moment. She had a driveway heater with a switch in the basement that was used very briefly when the driveway was icy in the winter. Turns out a workman who was doing a job in her basement was looking for a light switch and flipped on the driveway heater switch. When no light came on, the guy figured that light was broken and found a different light, The driveway switch wasn’t labeled (at least not then). So her driveway had been continuously drawing electricity all summer. Only the neighbor cats could detect the difference in temperature on the driveway and would “chill out” there on cool evenings. It took her 3 months to notice the abundance of cats lying on her driveway and connect that with the driveway heater and the high electric bill.

Head of Ukraine Central Bank Buys new Rolls Royce “Ghost”

2023 03 26 17 53
2023 03 26 17 53

.

Andrey Pyshniy, Head of the Central Bank of Ukraine was able to buy his Rolls Royce Ghost, worth $400,000.

How much of that was skimmed off US “military aid?”

Keep forking-over more money, America.  You can SEE all the good it’s doing in Ukraine.

What does a modern naval battle in South China Sea between China and the US look like?

Enjoy this little bit of truth…

  • Firstly, it will NOT occur in the South China Sea.
  • Secondly, it will be a missile war.
  • Thirdly, Aircraft carriers will not play a major role.
  • Fourthly, mainland America will get to become participants in the war.

I taught in the UK, in state schools back in the 90’s and a lot of time was wasted in pandering to the worst behaved students. The management teams were trying to avoid being too “autocratic” and focusing on rewarding the badly behaved students to bribe them to not misbehave. The well behaved and smart students were often neglected. There was a lot of politically correct propaganda too. Moving to China to teach adults was like Heaven in comparison.

In China, in general, society is more advanced and evolved than in the west. I don’t mean just based on infrastructure, technology or wealth. In Chinese society there is much more respect for humanity, family, community and society as a whole. There is a respect for sensible, considerate behaviour and not this egoistic, narcissistic extreme individualism that is prevalent in the west. Responsibility is championed. In the west, it is rights first, responsibility second.

In the west, and you can see it with the dreadful politicians, there is so much time wasted on self centred, emotional drama. It is as if society learns from the awful soap operas. “Me, me me” mentality.

In China; it is “Us, we can work together and achieve” and with no pathetic self centred, emotional drama. Look at the state of the west now; war and weapons all over the world. I am 100% certain that Chinese education, culture and society is far more advanced than the western ones; especially the UK and USA.

Saudi Arabia Unloading U.S. Treasuries; Lowest level in 7 years!

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Loss of confidence in the US Dollar is growing. Saudi Arabia has begun earnestly dumping US Treasuries, with the Oil-rich nation now having fewer US Treasuries than anytime in the past 7 years.

This trend with Saudi Arabia is being mirrored by many other countries which are fearful the US has already over-spent itself (into oblivion) and will NOT be able to actually repay the money it owes.

Other countries have also been unloading US debt notes.

As the US sees it’s hegemony over the world slipping away, they are becoming more and more warlike; seemingly TRYING TO START WW3.

Also known as "suicide by cop" -MM

Such a war would result in tens of millions of Americans killed, which is exactly, precisely what the US NEEDS TO HAPPEN, so they can cry for debt relief and get out of the debts they owe.

 

What is more important? Prosperity or Freedom? Which one puts a roof over your head, food in your belly, and purpose?

The house where I spent the majority of my time growing up in elementary school and High School was in the hills of Western Pennsylvania. It was a small town. Perhaps 6000 people total. And it was a great place to raise a family in the 1960’s.

2023 03 20 17 23
2023 03 20 17 23

It was safe, surrounded by woods, trees and farms. It had tons of places to hike and explore, with hills, springs and adventures all around the place.

stand by me desktop wallpaper
stand by me desktop wallpaper

Hot Summer days, walking down the railroad tracks though hills and rail-lines were a staple of my childhood.  And just like the movie “Stand by me” it was an important part of childhood.

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5905f436dad772b26d240aee977513df

A childhood that is now lost.

Enjoy today’s post.

One Word – ONE PARTY MERITOCRACY

main qimg 8b81bef8385b4ba2dab22b84a5756de2
main qimg 8b81bef8385b4ba2dab22b84a5756de2

Power only for those who are deemed WORTHY of it

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main qimg 7887c19019b22f3c0be9ead34c2e6f96

Each one doing what he is best suited for based on SHEER ABILITY

Talent identified and promoted regardless of any other criteria


The New Side to Autocracy that the whole world missed due to the Mismanagement of the USSR

The Principles of Chinese One Party Meritocracy includes:—

  • A Prosperous Populace is a Productive Populace
  • A Well Fed Populace is a satisfied Populace
  • Wealth that helps People grow and evolve, helps the economy grow and helps technology grow

You notice something?

No Mention of Freedom Or Equality or Gender and Race related politics

No Mention of Religion or Culture or Tradition

No Mention about Social Justice

It’s just Prosperity, Prosperity and Prosperity that is the primary goal.

Once Prosperity comes, everything else automatically comes naturally through evolution


Take USA?

It’s always Freedom, Equality and Diversity

That is a huge blow to meritocracy and ability

So Government couldn’t impose a good lockdown because people cried for Freedom to choose masks and 1.5 Million Americans died.

Researchers with amazing potential are finding that less talented researchers are landing good gigs because of Race and Gender

Thus there is Brain Drain for the first time since 1950


Take India?

It’s always Appeasement, Social Justice and Filthy Cesspit Politics

That is also a huge blow to Meritocracy

Again the Government couldn’t do anything during Covid II because an effective lockdown couldn’t be imposed due to Opposition Politics

Research is stifled due Casteism and Reservations


You see?

Every Decision in the Democracies is based on Politics, Elections, Appeasement, Power, Race etc etc

Nothing is based on PEOPLE and their WELFARE Or the COUNTRY and it’s PROGRESS

FWC Chimichangas

2023 03 19 17 02
2023 03 19 17 02

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons lard or vegetable oil
  • 1 (3 pound) chuck or pork roast
  • 1 (7 ounce) can diced green chiles, drained
  • 1 (15 ounce) can stewed tomatoes with juice
  • 1/2 package Goldwater’s The Senator’s Chili Mix *
  • 1 teaspoon minced fresh garlic
  • 2 tablespoons minced fresh onion
  • 3/4 tablespoon fresh cilantro
  • 1/3 teaspoon ground red pepper
  • 3/4 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1/4 teaspoon powdered Mexican oregano
  • 12 medium flour tortillas
  • 1 pound grated longhorn cheese
  • 1 pound grated Monterey jack cheese
  • Garlic salt and pepper, to taste
  • Oil (for deep frying)
  • Shredded lettuce
  • Sour cream
  • Guacamole
  • Salsa, to taste

* Yes, this chili mix will most likely always be available.

Instructions

  1. Wrap meat in foil and bake at 250 degrees F to 300 degrees F for 2 hours, adding a little water if needed.
  2. Cool until fat solidifies; skim. Shred meat and retain 3/4 cup of the meat juices.
  3. Combine meat and juices in large fry pan and add chiles, tomatoes, Goldwater’s Chili Mix and remaining spices. Cook slowly until moisture is gone, about 30 minutes.
  4. To assemble chimis, place 2 tablespoons longhorn cheese on each tortilla. Top with 2 to 3 tablespoons meat mixture. Add 2 tablespoons Monterey jack cheese. Season with garlic salt and pepper. Fold all sides in and secure with wooden picks to make a square.
  5. Deep fry in 1 inch hot oil until golden brown.
  6. Drain on paper towels.
  7. Top with remaining cheese.
  8. Serve on a bed of shredded lettuce, topped with sour cream, guacamole and salsa.

This is a recipe from the 1972 Faculty Women’s Club of the University of Arizona.

An apology

Not by me. -MM

After a few years of nothing but getting nagged at, a divorce I was exceptionally pleased to hear the beech ask for, then a load of stress trying to sort out the damage she's done to the kids, I am finally back in the world of not being a ratty sod with a short fuse and sharp tongue.

I moved back to Jakarta, took a job that pays a totally nutty sackload of cash every month, and still do a little consultancy work for a couple of people in unusual jobs. The kids are in a stupidly expensive school I can afford with ease, and are actually something like reasonable again. None are seeing a shrink a this point, and that's more than I can say when the sandy beech was in charge of their development.

The latest wife is lovely. As for marriage, I'm averaging just one every 30 years so I'll probably be a bit on the dead side before I get another chance. However, I try never to dismiss possibilities.

Hopefully I haven't upset anyone too much.

-Fred

Beef Chimichangas

2023 03 18 10 43
2023 03 18 10 43

Ingredients

  • 1 (3 pound) roast
  • 2 firm tomatoes, chopped
  • 3 to 4 scallions, chopped
  • Garlic
  • Salt and pepper
  • Comino (cumin)

Instructions

  1. Cook the beef in a crock pot for 6 to 8 hours with the seasonings.
  2. Cool and shred beef.
  3. Cook tomatoes and scallions and add to beef.
  4. Place meat mixture on flour tortillas and roll up. Drop into hot oil until golden brown. Drain.
  5. Top with green chiles, sour cream, guacamole, salsa and shredded cheese.
  6. Serve on a bed of shredded lettuce.

The year was 1977.

Yup.

She looked nothing like her photos. The conversation was terrible. She told me where to sit at the table as to not block her view of the door. When I ordered, she said, “Do you ever think about how many calories you are eating when you order?”

I went to the restroom. Took my watch off and placed it around my ankle. When I came back I told her my probation officer had just called and wanted to know why I was 15 miles from home. I pulled up the pants leg and showed her the watch strap. She said, “You better go!”

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main qimg 8a4e4a7eaac11e8486a00f8b1080b606 lq

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main qimg 6ed27f4690bfa13834e77ad0e9ac54c1 lq

She was totally understanding and did not protest.

I was Ghosted

afterwards. lol

I hope I left her with a good story!

Deluxe Machaca Chimichangas
(Chimichangas de Machaca Especial)

2023 03 18 10 45
2023 03 18 10 45

Ingredients

  • 4 flour tortillas, 12-inch diameter
  • 1 recipe Machaca
  • 2 cups mild Cheddar cheese, grated
  • 1 cup green chile, peeled, seeded, and minced
  • 1/4 cup pickled jalapeno chiles, seeded and minced
  • 1 recipe Basic New Mexico Chile Sauce
  • 1 cup sour cream
  • Shredded lettuce and chopped tomato

Instructions

  1. Heat vegetable oil in a deep fryer to 350 degrees F. Soften the tortillas. Place approximately 1/4 of the Machaca on each tortilla; then top each with 1/4 cup cheese (reserve the remaining cup of cheese for the final topping), 1/4 cup green chile, 1 tablespoon pickled jalapeno, and roll it up.
  2. Meanwhile, bring the chile sauce to a simmer.
  3. Fry the burritos one at a time until they are a crispy golden brown.
  4. Quickly drain the chimichangas and place them on individual serving plates. Cover the chimichangas with the chile sauce, sprinkle with the remaining cheese, and then top each chimichanga with 1/4 cup of sour cream.
  5. Garnish the plates with the lettuce and tomato and serve immediately.

The year was 1977.

This is the story about how my mother once and for all stopped setting me up with random guys.

I once went on a blind date set up by my mom. I was not really interested but my mom kept forcing me to meet the guy so I relented. I texted him to make plans and we decided to meet at a restaurant. That place was famous for their pizza so I ordered one and he immediately made a joke about my weight. I’m 5’5” and weighed around 138 lbs then, which is not skinny but definitely not overweight. I don’t think it’s funny when people make mean comments about someone looks and try to pass off as a joke. It is not a joke. You’re just an asshole. That was strike one but I let it slide. It was raining outside and I had already ordered my pizza so I decided to stay.

He started talking about himself and it went on and on. He told me about how much money he made, how his boss and colleagues are in awe of him, how he made more money than any of his friends, how he’s tired of all the women chasing him for his money. He told me about the expensive car he’s planning to buy, the 4 bedroom apartment he already has. He was not at all interested in getting to know me. It was all about him. At one point I wondered if I get up and leave now, will he even notice.

After all the money bragging ended he started telling me about his childhood and that’s where things really went south. He told me how much he hated dogs and how he used to chase them around with a stick when he was a kid. I love dogs but at that point I already knew there is not going to be second date, I decided not to comment on it. He took my silence as approval and told me how he once ran over a dog on the highway. I looked at him shocked and asked if it was real and was the dog okay. He just shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Who cares about that dog, I was worried about my damn car.” I called the waiter to split the bills, paid and left without even saying a word to him. He texted later complaining about how I overreacted and how it was all my fault. I didn’t want to argue with a narcissist like him so I blocked him.

Chicken Chimichangas

2023 03 18 10 48
2023 03 18 10 48

Ingredients

  • Soft taco size flour tortillas
  • 1 (16 ounce) jar picante sauce or salsa, divided
  • 7 cups chopped cooked chicken
  • 1 small onion, diced
  • 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons ground comino (cumin)
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons dried oregano
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 3 cups Cheddar cheese, shredded
  • Toppings: guacamole, sour cream, shredded lettuce, diced tomato

Instructions

  1. Combine 1 1/2 cups picante sauce or salsa and chicken, onion, cumin, oregano and salt in a Dutch oven. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring often, for 25 minutes or until most of liquid is evaporated.
  2. Lay each tortilla out flat. Spoon 1/3 cup of this mixture below the center of each tortilla; top with 2 tablespoons cheese. Fold in two sides of the tortilla to enclose the filling. Fold over top and bottom edges of tortillas, making rectangles. Secure with wooden picks. Place, folded side down, on greased baking sheets. Coat chimichangas with vegetable cooking spray.
  3. Bake at 425 degrees F for 8 minutes; turn over and bake 5 more minutes.
  4. Remove wooden picks; top with remaining picante sauce and desired toppings.

Whoa. 1974.

https://youtu.be/Dj0drevGOgA

Back in the 1990s – It was a favorite US Tactic to Freeze a Countrys Assets as a method of bullying and sanctioning.

In 2019 – Trump asked Pompeo and his advisors to explore the possibility of Freezing Chinese Assets in USA

The Reply drained the blood from Trumps Face

It was Mr President!!! We have three times more money in China than they have here. If they retaliate we will fall harder

Under Reagan or Bush Seniors – US Sanctions were used very judicially and cautiously. The Primary victim of such sanctions were only those who were militarily a threat to the United States and its Security. The World respected and admired this power of Sanctions.

Under Clinton and Bush Jr – The Sanctions began to be Abused. Slowly any country that did not “Obey” the USA could be sanctioned. Any Country that had a relationship with a country not in US Good Books could be sanctioned. This was the beginning of the bullying. The World began to hate the Sanctions but were powerless against it.

Then the 2008 Crisis happened – and the US crumbled economically. From 2008 – 2010 – There was a Window and CHINA utilized it magnificently. Billions and Billions of Dollars moved from US to China and were invested in Renewable Energy and other long term committed projects

Today under Trump and Biden – The Sanctions are a Joke. Iran was sanctioned and denied even PPE but China delivered openly without ten minutes hesitation as did Russia. Trump and Pompeo lost massive face. India has been sanctioned multiple times but has never been frazzled and has continued its relationship with Russia.

So as on date – Western Sanctions are no longer a tool. The Chinese have too many Nuclear Options to hurt the West.

A few years ago, when my mother had a heart attack, I visited her in the hospital. I didn’t even dress nicely or do my hair.

She looked so small and pale. She clutched my hand and told me how much she loved me, and how I mean the world to her. She didn’t critique my clothing or hair at all. She only praised me and told me how she wanted me to know she loved me so much.

Not nagging me broke my heart. I walked out of the hospital, bought myself a grilled cheese and sobbed until my throat was raw. This wasn’t my strong-willed and imposing mother. She had lost the will to control me. How ill was she?

The next day, I came and she immediately asked me how I could wear such an ugly sweater, what if a handsome single Jewish doctor came into the room?

I was overjoyed. She was going to live.

When I first set foot in China to work and live in Beijing, I think I still have quite a bit of uneasiness with how things are over there. I was cautious when I talk, cautious not to bring out the books that I read, which are mostly banned in the country.

As a foreigner, the place I lived was installed with all the international channels, and I only watched CNN and BBC for news. I had colleagues who had been through the TAM incident in June 1989, telling me that his old family house at the fringe of a hutong still has a bullet hole.

Still, he was too young and scared to go out, and information transmission was not that convenient back then. Much of the story he knew was from his school teachers and other kids. But he didn’t think it was as bad as what most foreigners told him.

It took me a year, at least, to realize that a lot of stories I heard outside of China didn’t really match what I saw. And there are just too many loopholes in those arguments. Contrary to the evil leadership and government that Western media tended to portray back then (and they still do till now), I had plenty of freedom that I enjoy, my colleagues and friends are happy and supportive of the government.

Of course, all would have a bit of grudge more or less, like the constant constructions, traffic jams, increasing cost of living, etc. But the speed of progress, the access to material goods, the latest technology, or even the latest information were tremendous.

I still remember back in 2001, a senior manager from my team who went to Singapore and met up with an old colleague who went there and settled in a few years ago. After her holiday in Singapore, she told me she couldn’t believe that she actually earns more than her ex-colleague in Singapore.

This realization made her gave up her plan of migrating overseas though she previously studied in a Western country and wanted to resume her old life outside of China. Fast forward about 10 years, she became the head of one of the 3 divisions in the company, which would not be possible had she migrated.

Those were the days of dial-up internet access, ICQ. And there was no algorithm to push contents that the website thinks you like to read/see just to make you stick.

You are free to make your own observations and judgments. But I also have friends from different countries who couldn’t get used to China because they were not willing to really experience China, holding on to their Western media indoctrinated belief about the country and using conspiracy theory to explain all their encounters. Most of them (if not all) dropped out after a few years and left China with a sour taste in their mouths.

So, those who have really spent years living and working in China would have appreciated that China has its own way of dealing with things, and the culture there would respect you and would not force you to agree or adapt their way. But somehow, with an appreciation of the somewhat different way of handling and approaching things, you’ll start to see the beauty of it. That will eventually make you question and rethink whether what the Western media told you about China are entirely true.

The reason you want a lawyer is to protect you.

I won a scratch ticket for $100,000 one hundred thousand. the accoutant handled the taxes.

After claiming my prize we had 2 weeks where different reporters were looking for pictures and wanting to do an interview with the store that sold the winning ticket.

churches and charities knocking on the door looking for a slice.

3 people i went to grade school with came knocking I had not seen them in 10 years.

Family calling wanting to get a share or asking for a loan they cant afford to repay. people were confused when I told them I spent it all.

I divided it up 3 ways and gave equal amounts to my 3 kids for their college funds.

If I ever hit another winning ticket I am getting a lawyer to deal with the bullcrap and I am gonna move to Alaska to a remote cabin in the middle of nowheresville with no phone or roads.

Lainey Molnar’s Empowering Art Challenges Societal Norms

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Lainey Molnar, a talented artist known for her thought-provoking illustrations, is back with even more empowering artwork. With her unique style, she explores and challenges societal norms surrounding femininity, body image, and other important themes.

More: Instagram h/t: boredpanda

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28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe204800291 700

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28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1d70a4044 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1d70a4044 700

28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1d40b62a1 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1d40b62a1 700

28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1d0b75561 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1d0b75561 700

28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1ce2a9c5b 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1ce2a9c5b 700

28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1cbd90621 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1cbd90621 700

28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1c92ae0d6 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1c92ae0d6 700

28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1c10a5dab 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1c10a5dab 700

28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1c3d051e7 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1c3d051e7 700

28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1be27b3aa 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1be27b3aa 700

28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1bbb38aac 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1bbb38aac 700

28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1b9f9178b 700
28 New Honestly Relatable Comics Revealing Societal Standards By Lainey Molnar 63fe1b9f9178b 700

Redneck Chimichanga

2023 03 19 17 03
2023 03 19 17 03

Ingredients

  • 2 ounces shaved steak (Philly meat)
  • 1/2 ounce red and green bell peppers
  • 1/2 ounce yellow onions
  • 1 slice American cheese
  • 1 tablespoon mashed potatoes
  • 1 large burrito wrapper (flour tortilla)

Instructions

  1. Cook the shaved steak then add the peppers and onions and sweat until soft.
  2. Put mashed potatoes in center of burrito wrapper then put shaved steak/pepper/onion mix on top of that. Add cheese. Fold in all four sides and secure with wooden picks.
  3. Deep fry until golden brown.

Gravy is the best type of dip for this.

Is it possible?

Yeah, that worked real well in Iraq.

Let’s repeat the entire 2003–2012 experience, only a country that has nukes and is our main trading partner and a critical component of the global economy and has the world’s largest standing army and is intensely nationalistic and is basically indirectly subsidizing our entire higher education system and has thirty times Iraq’s population and a hundred times its GDP.

What are the consequences of not blowing up China? They have control of their littoral? They start building up development banks that rival Bretton Woods and force them to iterate? What a goddamn nightmare.

No, the recipe for success in the US-China relationship is one rising power, stewed constantly in a thick broth of comprehensive engagement that keeps it totally submerged but not overdone, thoroughly marinated in expert and informed local-based intelligence networks, framed in a complex web of alliances with its neighbors and paired with a lovely arrangement of economic and military deterrents.

I don’t believe that America is permanently in decline, but if you wanted to make that argument you could find a shitload of evidence right now. The solution is not to make China the ultimate bugbear. It wouldn’t go anywhere militarily even if you could somehow make it work politically and economically.

Frankly, the much bigger danger than the risk of conflict with China (the Thucydides Trap) is the Kindleberger Trap

raised by Joseph Nye, which notes that the disasters of th

e thirties and WWII were not chiefly caused by the rise of Germany or its fear in Britain, but by the refusal of the United States to step in to fill Britain’s shoes as the economic hub of the world and its chief military peacekeeper—stopping Japanese expansionism, maintaining a global currency the way the British had, keeping Germany afloat and tied into the continent, organizing and maintaining alliances that would keep the balance of power.

It’s not in China’s interests or short-term abilities to do all the crap that the US does around the world right now. It would be very easy for them to collapse inward around the massive domestic economic and social issues that are at the heart of their highly productive yet still embryonic and insecure state and society, just as we collapsed into isolationism over our own issues in the twenties, while filling a very similar global economic role.

The US just isn’t big or rich or willing enough to manage the world. We could barely manage it when it was just us, western Europe, and the ex-European colonies. Now that they’re getting rich and numerous and loud and we’re very much starting to feel like 5% of the global population instead of 20% of global GDP, it’s becoming even more impossible. There has to be some kind of consensus by which multilateral organizations can provide public goods, and individual regional powers—the US, Brazil-Argentina, China, Turkey, Iran, Nigeria, South Africa, India—all make common commitments for public goods. That’s not what domestic politics are pushing for right now in America right now, but it’s what the world needs, and the failure of Brexit is making the alternative clear.

The parts of the world that are still shooting at each other in 2018 really suck.

The parts of the world that aren’t may not be paradise, but they’re a hell of a lot better than those that are.

Or were you looking for “a short, victorious war to stem the tide of revolution,” Minister Plehve?

Please ask the tsarists how that went.

Back in the 1960’s, it seemed like the world was a place of excitement and adventure. It seemed like anything was possible.

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sbm tf2

And so, as boys (and girls), we dreamed of great futures. We played and pretended. We had hopes. We had dreams. And for us, we had a future.

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b3510f172409bff618f7940e254b31a5

But now, today, after the government and woke agents taking over the internet, it seems like a fearful, a dreadful place. One that it would best to hide away from.

Is this intentional?

And if so, as I believe, the real story about the great changes in the United States. Keep the rabble divisive. Keep them sequestered, isolated, and stop all communication between them unless the government can control it. Like Vault 7, and like banning Tictok.

The only way to keep on track is to remember your roots. Remember.

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8f1b1440d413816176a5d0eb7ab022a1

Remember who you are, and don’t let others change your very being.

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dbf1b83aea9323dd73ae8f0ab19eb586

Listen.

Biggest changes but we are denied the view

We are over the transitional period. Over the next year or two, the dawning of understanding will creep into the collective minds of those that “lead” the West. How this will manifest can be anything, but I remain hopeful…

  • A scaling back of many policies.
  • Changes in the way that many things are done.
  • Some attempts (which will be failures) that will try to prevent the hemorrhaging of the Untied States.

However, I am often wrong, and I fail at least 50% of the time in my predictions. Though, I’m often quite correct on trend-lines. Outcomes. Not so well.

What outcomes?

  • Flipping the tables with global nuclear war.
  • Invasion of Mexico, Iran, or Taiwan.
  • Civil war in the United States

Who know what will happen. I don’t.

Have a great day.

Posted for the record.

Self explanatory.

Those of us who consume western msm are not delusional when we state there is an anti-China editorial policy in western newsrooms.

2023 03 14 14 46
2023 03 14 14 46

I always find with these stop-motion animation films that the wonderful Harryhausen creations always far out-act the human talent! Sadly, here is no different – Todd Armstrong in the title role and Nancy Novak as ” Medea” are as wooden as the Argo in this retelling of the ancient Greek myth.

It is still, however, an exciting action adventure though, with plenty of episodes to keep it moving along as Jason fights monsters and treachery to seek out the legendary Golden Fleece from the distant land of Colchis.

It’s got a decent enough, largely British, supporting cast with Honor Blackman standing out as his patron “Hera” and Nigel Green making for a wonderfully over-the-top “Hercules”, but the spoils definitely go to Talos, the Harpies and the skeleton battle is fabulous.

https://youtu.be/1c8NvctkSzs

No

Not even half as much!

Chinese people thinks the U.S. system and policies are daft and don’t work. They don’t hate the country and certainly don’t hate the people. There is very few who are racist like some Americans.

The Chinese people sees Americans as good customer and America as huge market. The treat customers well. They will never be submissive and subservient to you as to them they are a far more mature and intelligent person. You can think what you want but that what they think about themselves.

They saw through the manipulation and cheating of the so call international rules based international order and so does most others. And they will certainly not allow it to perpetuate. Quite rightly so. They still hope you guys comes to your senses soon before you implode.

The Chinese are at least 3 full steps ahead of Americans in thinking and response. You can rant and rave if you want but frankly it is not beneficial to hate the Chinese or China or CCP. The U.S. will lose more. If China maybe they can it means 100% it can be done. China will be either your biggest customer or your biggest competitor that U.S. your choice.

Milk in America and Canada underwent a major deterioration in taste in the early 1970’s. In the UK and Europe it happened in about 1980.

Milk undergoes significant and irreversible biochemical changes once it is heated above 64.5˚C. And these changes are readily detected as a deterioration in the taste.

Prior to 1980 in the UK, and roughly the early 1970’s in North America, milk was commonly pasteurised by heating it to between 63˚C and 64˚C and holding it in that temperature bracket for 30 minutes. It was a protocol developed in 1906 by Public Health officials in Massachusetts, who were desperate to persuade people to drink pasteurised milk instead of raw milk. But bringing milk close to boiling meant the wonderful rich taste of the milk when raw was lost. So the public bought raw milk by choice.

With what must have been a considerable amount of research, they found that by heating milk above 63˚C but below 64˚C, and maintaining the temperature for 30 minutes, the pathogens were killed, but the rich taste of the milk was not damaged. After WWII it became the widespread approach to pasteurising milk.

But in the 1970’s a far faster method was developed, which was to heat the milk to 73˚C and run it through pipework for just 15 seconds. The pathogens they were concerned about were effectively killed off by this method. And though the wonderful rich taste of the milk was damaged, the industry was persuaded to switch over to the new approach by the great cost savings it brought.

And since that switch in the mid 1970’s the per capita consumption of milk in the USA has declined by over 40%.

In movies from the 1950’s and 1960’s you often see a glass of milk at the dinner table. Look at movies made since 1980 and a glass of milk is a very rare sight. If you have never tasted milk produced using the old protocol, then you do not know what you are missing.

My wife is a dairy farmer, and we pasteurise and bottle our milk for sale through shops across Scotland. (In Scotland milk sold to the public has to be pasteurised.) Ours is one of the very few dairy farms in Scotland using the old approach. We tried (once) heating the milk to 73˚C but hated the way the taste was dramatically altered, in our view, damaged. And so we stick to the slower, older method. But we have noticed that, should someone forget to turn off the heating elements at the wrong point, and the temperature of the milk in the big pasteurising vessel goes above 64.5˚C, it then develops a “sticky” quality. We studiously avoid this happening, as that stickiness means the vessel is suddenly a nightmare to clean.

As milk goes above 64.5˚C the proteins are increasingly denatured. And the denatured proteins then coagulate with the butterfat. And this seems to be what causes the stickiness. I presume it is also involved directly in the alteration of the flavour of the milk.

And so the vast majority of the population on both sides of the Atlantic have no experience these days of good old-fashioned drinking milk. And that’s a big pity.

Addendum: there’s an important topic that is related to all the above.

Crohn’s Disease has surged in the years since the HTST process was adopted, and it appears there is a direct link between the two topics. There is a very widespread disease amongst cows & cattle called Johnes Disease, and it is caused by the Mycobacterium avium subsp. tuberculosis, commonly referred to as MAP.

The bacteria, once introduced to a herd, is nearly impossible to get rid of, as it can survive in the cow pats in fields for years.

There is currently no treatment for Johnes Disease, which is a wasting illness of the digestive tract. The symptoms of Johnes Disease and Crohn’s Disease are identical. While it is a simple matter to demonstrate that Johnes Disease is caused by MAP, there are ethical barriers which make a similar determination of MAP and Crohn’s Disease impossible.

We can’t have two groups of healthy people, and expose the folk in one group to viable MAP, and see what happens. But there is an enormous body of circumstantial evidence pointing to Crohn’s Disease being caused by MAP. Some 10% of supermarket milk sold in the UK (for example) has been found to contain viable MAP, i.e., 10% of milk on those shelves just might cause Crohn’s Disease in people who consume it on a regular basis.

The older process of 63˚C for 30 minutes is actually 10 times more effective at killing off MAP than the typical HTST process. Longer exposure to high temperatures are needed it seems, and this is why the HTST approach is a poor process for milk pasteurisation.

China’s Fujian air wing is slowly taking shape

China’s Fujian air wing is slowly taking shape, possibly making it the first carrier worldwide capable of launching 5th-generation stealth fighters from its decks.

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main qimg cc98cafb28d7059bbbf172286bcfd664

Few days ago it was reported that China might be preparing to deploy a new stealth fighter or perhaps a stealth drone from its Fujian aircraft carrier, incrementally building the combat capabilities of its third carrier and flagship naval vessel.

It is noted that the J-31/ FC-31 will complement the J-15, China’s only carrier-based fighter. It also mentions that the J-31 will be used for air supremacy missions due to its stealth characteristics, while the J-15 will be limited to ground and sea attacks.

However, the report notes that both the J-31/FC-31 and the Fujian are still not combat-ready, with the J-31/FC-31 still undergoing ground tests and the Fujian expected to perform sea trials later this year.

China’s J-31/FC-31 has a 2,000-kilometer estimated range, maximum takeoff weight of 28 tons, an operational ceiling of 15 kilometers and a top speed of Mach 1.8 or 2,205 kilometers per hour.

FH-97A Loyal Wingman drone is an AI-powered unmanned stealth aircraft designed to complement the J-20 stealth fighter. Unlike other loyal wingman drones, the stealthy FH-97A has a 1,000-kilometer range with a six-hour maximum flight time.

The FH-97A is designed for air-to-air operations, noting that it has a front-mounted EOTS and internal weapons bay for six infrared air-to-air missiles. Apart from air-to-air roles, the report mentions that it can perform secondary missions such as surveillance, suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) and electronic warfare. Considerations are being made to develop a carrier-based FH-97A variant featuring in-flight refueling capability.

A classic color revolution to disrupt the southern border of Russia.

Burial Bundles with Painted Bodies in Fabric Found in Peru Pyramid

burial bundles
burial bundles

Archaeologists in Peru have uncovered a monumental temple site where they discovered unique human burials wrapped in fabrics printed with bizarre zoomorphic designs. These bundles contain the remains of deceased individuals, as well as various offerings and personal belongings wrapped in multiple layers of textiles, often with intricate designs and patterns. Found in tombs and caves, many burial bundles have been preserved for hundreds, or even thousands of years.

High Status Ancient Burials

PAP reports that within one burial mounds, archaeologists identified the wrapped remains of a young boy whose skull was “ intentionally deformed .” Wrapped in a three meters (9.84 ft) long cloth which was decorated with “totally unique zoomorphic representations,” the researchers reported that the boy was born into a “high-status family.”

Cranial deformation was a common practice in Peru. The process involved binding the heads of infants to create a flattened or elongated skull , often with the intention of denoting social status or cultural affiliation.

Łukasz Majchrzak is a bioarchaeologist focused on pre-Columbian cultures in Peru, specializing in health, diet, and lifestyle. Majchrzak, said the boy’s wraps were covered with “unique” zoomorphic representations, and similar fabrics have never been found anywhere in the Andes mountains to date.

Dyed
Dyed

Dyed fabric found in a tomb at the top of the site, dated 772 -989 AD Photo: Łukasz Majchrzak

Painted And Wrapped for The Afterlife

The team of archaeologists were excavating what they describe as “a monumental temple” on the Cerro Colorado hill located near the city of Barranca in Peru, when they found the series of “unique tombs.” These were not ordinary burials because the people within the graves were painted and wrapped in high-quality fabrics.

Located near the coastal city of Barranca in Peru, Cerro Colorado is a famously red hill which is caused by high levels of iron oxide in the soil. With expansive panoramic views of the surrounding landscape, including the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, this important archaeological site features a sunken plaza and an amphitheatre, which were utilized in the pre-Columbian era.

The recent excavations were conducted by a team of archaeologists from the Jagiellonian University and St Mark’s University, in the Los valles de Barranca project. According to a report on Nauka W Polsce , four earthen mounds were excavated in 2022 and, amidst a monumental temple structure, four tombs were discovered containing painted human remains wrapped in high-quality fabrics that dated to 772 AD – 989 AD.

Peruvian
Peruvian

Cross-section of a Peruvian mummy bundle. Source: Juulijs / Adobe Stock

Unwrapping Ancient Burial Bundles

The above dating determined that the graves belonged to the Wari culture , whose legacy can be found at Castillo de Huarmey, located only 70 kilometres (43.5 miles) north of Barranca in the Huarmey district of Peru. Castillo de Huarmey is a 16th-century coastal fortress built by Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s brother-in-law, Jerónimo de Aliaga. The castle is known for its unique blend of Spanish, Inca, and Chimú architectural styles and contains numerous well-preserved murals depicting daily life in the region, and a Wari mausoleum.

On two of the newly excavated pyramidal mounds, the monumental temple was found to have been constructed using dried red clay bricks and stone blocks. This discovery inspired a large-scale excavation of the site which revealed the burial bundles, also known as “fardos funerarios”.

example
example

An example of a Wari burial bundle (Public Domain)

Revitalizing Ancient Holy Sites

Research revealed that while the burials dated to between 772 AD and 989 AD, the temple complex itself was built between 2500 and 2200 BC. This dating is derived from two of the four structures, with the remaining two not yet excavated, so the site might prove to be even older.

Majchrzak explained that such settlements, with “imposing architecture,” were built in the Andes during the third millennium BC. As agriculture spread, as a result of increasing interactions with communities residing in the Amazon, later Andean cultures established burial necropolises in abandoned deeply-ancient places of worship, believing their ancestors were buried within the timeworn pyramids.

Top image: Peruvian mummy bundles, representational. Source: Bayamin / Adobe Stock.

By Ashley Cowie

Buffalo Chicken & Pepper Grilled Cheese Sandwich

BuffaloGrilledChickenPic 570x766 1
BuffaloGrilledChickenPic 570×766 1

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons hot sauce
  • 1 tablespoon Cabot Salted Butter, melted
  • 1 cooked chicken breast, shredded (about 1 cup)
  • 4 tablespoons Cabot Salted Butter, softened
  • 8 (1/2 inch thick) slices LaBrea Bakery Take & Bake Garlic Loaf Bread or any garlic flavored bread
  • 4 roasted red bell pepper quarters (about 1 cup drained, jarred or 1 fresh roasted red bell pepper)
  • 4 ounces Cabot Pepper Jack, thinly sliced

Instructions

  1. Heat Breville sandwich maker until green light switches on, or two sided electric grill.
  2. In medium bowl, combine hot sauce and melted butter; add chicken and toss until well combined.
  3. Working in batches, butter one side of each bread slice and place bread on sandwich maker, or electric grill, buttered side down.
  4. Layer evenly with chicken, bell pepper and cheese.
  5. Cover with remaining bread slice, buttered side up.
  6. Close lid and cook for 3 minutes or until bread is golden crisp and cheese is melted. Alternatively, cook sandwiches in heavy skillet over medium-low heat for about 3 minutes per side.)

This reminds me of a scene from the 1960s movie “The Ugly American”.

2023 03 14 14 5sfd8
2023 03 14 14 5sfd8

It says in Chinese: emergency relief, 1 set.

The photo is from Türkiye, and relevant information has been censored on the US platform.

Look at how it was “reported”…

2023 03 14 14 58
2023 03 14 14 58

Then here comes the question: did the US military buy these materials or just “borrow” them from Syria? Shouldn’t there be a comprehensive public verification of the executors?

LOL.

Alastair Crooke
March 13, 2023

The West is too dysfunctional and weak now to fight on all fronts. Yet there can be no retreat without some de-legitimising humiliation of the West.

Just occasionally, a window is opened onto the truth of how the ‘system’ works. Momentarily, it stands naked in its degeneracy. We avert our eyes, yet, it is a revelation (though it shouldn’t be). For, we see clearly how tawdry has been the attire which clothed it. ‘Liberalism’s’ seeming success – almost wholly an ephemeral PR production – serves only to make its underlying internal contradictions more obvious; more ‘in your face’ – much less credible.

This unravelling speaks to a failure to satisfactorily resolve liberal modernity’s inherent contradictions. Or, rather its unravelling derives from the choice to resolve a waning legitimacy, through an ever more totalistic and ideological reaching for hegemony.

One such window has been the sordid affair of the UK pandemic lockdowns – as revealed by a paper trail leak of 100,000 ministerial WhatsApp messages, managing the lockdown project.

What did they show (in the words here of pro-government leading political commentators)? An ugly picture of how a western Establishment interacts in adolescent sniping at each other, and in its utter disdain for the populace.

Janet Daley writing in The Telegraph:

“It [lockdown] wasn’t about science, it was about politics. That was obvious as soon as the government began talking about following The Science – as if it were a fixed body of revealed truth … they were engaged in a deliberately misleading campaign of public coercion. The programme was designed to frighten – not inform – and to make doubt or scepticism appear morally irresponsible – which is precisely the opposite of what science does”.

“The model for the monumental government programme in which sitting on a park bench, or meeting with extended family, became a criminal offence – was the nation at war. Horrifying levels of social isolation were deliberately designed to present the country as mobilised in a collective effort against a malign enemy. Much of this went way beyond what we generally regard as authoritarianism: even the East German Stasi did not forbid children from hugging their grandparents, or outlaw sexual relations between people who lived in different households. Every other consideration had to be relegated in a heroic national struggle against an invading army whose objective was to kill as many of us as possible. And this enemy was particularly insidious because it was invisible”.
Sherelle Jacobs:

“We have been granted a rare glimpse of Power’s true nature away from the media gaze: how, in private, it schemes, swears, sulks and derides. On full display are all its dismal paradoxes: its fierce megalomania and constant seeking of reassurance from political aides; its tendency to groupthink and relentless sniping.

“One feels a new cold solidarity with 1970s [Watergate] America in its horror at the “low-grade quality of mind” that characterised their political class. But perhaps the strongest parallel with Watergate is that … the state’s operations seem suffused with humdrum nihilism. It is there in the amused crusades to “scare the pants” off people. It is in the deadpan mocking of holidaymakers locked up in quarantine [hotels] (“hilarious”). It is in the remorseless dedication to “the narrative”. 

“How zealously the state threw themselves into implementing draconian measures, once it had decided at HQ that lockdowns were the correct populist call. We have come to learn how Hancock (Health Minister) conspired to “sit on” scientists, who he denounced as “wacky” or “loudmouth” for defying the official lines. We must digest the knowledge that civil servants insisted the “fear/guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” during the dubious third lockdown. Just as unedifying is the revelation that, in the run up to this lockdown, politicians seized on a new variant as a tool to “roll the pitch with”. Perhaps most galling is Patrick Vallance’s (Scientific Adviser) advice that the Government should “suck up the media’s miserable interpretation of scientific data” to then “overdeliver” in an atmosphere of cranked up fear”.

Fraser Nelson:

“We see the PM appallingly served and briefed. Almost suspiciously so. At one stage, he is so in the dark about Covid’s fatality rate that he misinterprets a figure by a factor of one hundred. [Yet] the most revealing moment came in June 2020, when the mild-mannered Business Secretary, argued for certain rules to be advisory rather than compulsory. At this stage, Covid circulation had plummeted – deaths had fallen by 93 per cent from the peak: “Why is she against controlling the virus”, the minister complains. She is motivated by pure Conservative ideology! The Cabinet Secretary retorts [i.e., she is libertarian].

“The Lockdown Files include thousands of attachments sent between ministers. When I first came across them, I hoped to find high-quality top-level secret briefings. Instead, ministers were sharing newspaper articles and graphs found on social media. The quality of this information was often poor, sometimes abysmal”.

The ‘Lockdown Files’ – as published in the UK by The Telegraph – expose a toxic culture where any minister or civil servant asking “awkward” questions knew they were liable to be briefed against, sidelined or ostracised. ‘Off the boil’ Members of Parliament thought to oppose lockdowns were placed on a secret Red List, and the then Health Secretary’s aide wrote, “these guys’ re-election hinges on us: We know what they want”.

But the Files reveal something even more chilling. What was the overall public response to the publication of the files? Plainly said: It is that a majority of the people are so numbed and passive – and so in lockstep – as the state inches them through a series of repeating emergencies towards a new kind of authoritarianism, that they don’t fuss greatly, or even notice much.

To be clear, the Lockdown episode is iconic of this new schema of control effected through hegemony, ideology and tech. Autonomy for the individual – and his or her search for a life, lived with meaning – now is displaced by its opposite: The instinct to subjugate and dominate, and to impose order on an inchoate and seemingly threatening world.

The surveillance-based liberal managerial state has, as Arta Moeini has written, ballooned into “a totalistic and aspiring globe-spanning Leviathan”, fraudulently disguised in the feel-good casing of liberal democracy – the key liberational elements of which, having been long replaced by their antonyms, in an Orwellian inversion.

To be clear: All the excesses of state power that occurred in the UK during the pandemic were permitted within the realms of the Western political system. The state may at any time suspend the rule of law for what it deems the greater good. The pandemic merely exposed the workings in extremis of liberal democracy – channelling Carl Schmitt’s notion of a “state of exception” being the source-code to state ‘sovereignty’ over the populace.

In this ethical vacuum, and with the capsize of societal meaning, western politicians can only snipe coarsely at one-another, Lord of the Rings-style, whilst hoping to surf whatever ‘the narrative’ and the media ‘play’ of the day can ‘up their level’ in the power matrix. To be blunt, in its lack of any deeper guiding principle, it is purely sociopathic.

However, in pushing the pendulum of the liberal schema so hard over towards the hegemony extremity, it has caused the other end to the spectrum of the overall liberal schema to catch fire: The demand to respect individual autonomy and freedom of expression. This antithesis is particularly apparent in the U.S.

Liberalism was conceived during the early French Revolution as a project of systemic liberation from oppressive social hierarchies, religion and cultural norms of the past, so that a new order of liberated individualism could come into being. Rousseau saw it as a radical clean break from the past – a disembedding of the individual from family, church and cultural norms, so that he or she could better evolve as a unitary component to a redeemed universal governance.

This was the meaning to liberalism in its early phase. However, the subsequent Reign of Terror and mass executions under the Jacobins signaled the schizophrenic connection between ‘liberation’ and the desire to force compliance on society. The persistent appeal of violent revolution versus imposed (Utopian) ‘redemption of humanity marks the two oppositional poles to the western psyche which today is being ‘resolved’ through the tilt to ‘hegemony’.

This inherent tension between the radical liberation of the individual and a conformist ‘world order’ was to be resolved via ‘new universal values’: Diversity, gender and equity – plus restitution awarded to the victims for earlier discrimination suffered. This ‘liquid modernity’ was thought to be ‘globally neutral’ (in a way that Enlightenment values were not), and therefore could underpin the western-led World Order.

The contradiction inherent to this was too evident: The Rest of World sees the ‘liberal’ order as an-all-too obvious device to prolong western power. They refuse its ‘missionary’ underside (this aspect was never present outside the Judeo-Christian Sphere), and the claim that the West should determine what values (whether Enlightenment or Woke) by which we all must live.

The non-West observes rather, a weakened West and no longer feels the need to offer fealty to a global ‘overlord’. The meta cycle of enforced westification (from Petrine Russia, Turkey, Egypt – and Iran) is over.

Its mystique, its thrall is gone, and though lockdown compliance in the UK (and Europe) was indeed achieved through ‘project fear’, the success came at the expense of public trust. To be plain: the authority of Authority in the West increasingly is distrusted – at home, as overseas.

The crisis of liberalism’ contradictions and waning authority deepens.

Carl Schmitt’s other two mantras were firstly, to keep power: ‘Use it’ (or lose it); and secondly, configure an ‘enemy’ as polarising and as ‘dark’ as possible in order to keep power – and to keep the masses fearful and compliant.

Hence, we have seen Biden – lacking an alternative – resorting to radical Manichaeism to bolster Authority against his domestic opponents in the U.S. (ironically casting them as enemies of ‘democracy’), whilst using the Ukraine war as the tool by which to cast the West’s war on Russia too, as an epic struggle between the Light and Dark. These Manichean ideological source-codes for now, dominate western liberalism.

But the West has put itself into a trap: ‘Going Manichean’ puts the West into an ideological straight-jacket. It is a crisis of the West’s own making. Put bluntly, Manichaeism is the antithesis to any negotiated solution, or off-ramp. Carl Schmitt was clear on this point: the intent of conjuring up the blackest of enmities, precisely was to preclude (liberal) negotiation: How could ‘virtue’ strike a bargain with ‘evil’?

The West is too dysfunctional and weak now to fight on all fronts. Yet there can be no retreat (without some de-legitimising humiliation of the West).

The West has gambled all on its fear-led, ‘emergency-crisis’ managed ‘control’ system to save itself. It’s hopes now are pinned on its ‘Beware! The big boss has gone angry-mad’ act; he might do anything’, which it hopes will cause the world to back-off.

But the Rest of World is not backing off – it is becoming more assertive.

Fewer believe what the western Élites say; fewer still trust their competence. The West has recklessly ‘placed its bet’; it may lose all.

Or, more dangerously, in a fit of anger, it may kick over others’ gaming tables.

https://youtu.be/tcyVLMfsZ_4

“Memes of the Floating World”: Artist Recreates Favorite Memes In Japanese Print Styles

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According to an artist: “It started as a Christmas gift to my wife, who loves the “Woman Yelling at Cat” meme, and has unfolded into an art project called “Memes of the Floating World.” In this strange dream world, classic Japanese woodblock print art and legends mash up with memes, dead and living, and internet lore from the past and present.

I don’t know where this project will take us next, but it’s sure to be at least a little bit dank. Official art prints are available only at Society6, so make sure you can bring the weirdness into your home. Thank you for taking a look!”

More: Memes of the Floating World, Instagram, Society6 h/t: boredpanda

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Avocado, Bacon and Ranch
Grilled Cheese Sandwiches

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6564a0c205618f64ac39374c58ab2075

Ingredients

  • 8 bacon slices
  • 1/4 cup Ranch dressing
  • 8 slices white or wheat bread
  • 4 (1 ounce) slices Cheddar cheese
  • 4 (1 ounce) slices Provolone cheese
  • 1 large avocado, peeled, pitted and cut into 8 slices

Instructions

  1. Prepare bacon according to package directions then drain and set aside.
  2. Spread each slice of bread with 1/2 tablespoon of dressing. Top 4 of the bread slices with 1 slice of Cheddar cheese and 4 of the bread slices with 1 slice of Provolone. Top each Cheddar slice with 2 bacon slices and 2 avocado slices.
  3. In a hot nonstick skillet coated with cooking spray, cook the bread slices cheese side-up, over medium heat, until browned, about 4 to 7 minutes.
  4. Press Provolone-topped bread slices and Cheddar-topped slices together.
  5. Cut in half on the diagonal.
  6. Serve immediately.

China thrown out into the cold? I think the risk is more serious that the Western countries will be thrown out into the cold by the rest of the world, if things continue developing in the way as they do today. China is bigger than the whole west put together. And the forming camp that includes pretty much everyone else outside North America, Western and Central Europe, ANZ, Japan and S. Korea who aren’t interested at all in taking part in US-led sanctions, ideological, moral and cultural crusades is actually 80% of the world. The world is a very different place than a couple of decades ago…

The below graphic shows the most important trading partners by country in 2000 and in 2020…

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main qimg 93810b9e0f3e81bc76d0a18241290881

The US and the Western Allies would do much better if they wouldn’t push the rest of the world together into an anti-western coalition

EDIT: Following up on the comments about China being only a wobbly economy that is merely based on low cost manufacturing of poor quality “stuff”, and that is supposedly still very far behind the US and the west. I thought I would share a couple of interesting articles from the London-based The Guardian newspaper that will help to bust a few of these myths. I think it’s important that we don’t put our heads in the sand and have a clear picture about the reality

I’m from the US. I live in a part of the country that does not have public transit. We don’t even have Uber yet if that tells you anything. To live in my town you need a car. Plain and simple. You can’t even get a job here unless you have a car or someone with a car who will bring you to work. It’s literally a question on applications: do you have reliable transportation? If your answer is no, forget working there. We don’t have grocery delivery unless you use Amazon. (Well, my grocery store will deliver to me, but it’s not something they advertise to the general public.) And the way that the town is laid out, you can not just walk to the store, the doctors office, your job, or anywhere really.

That being said, some parts of the US like New York City, do have public transit. It’s in need of updating and some pictures of it make me seriously question the cleanliness of it, but it exists. And I’ve never assumed that only poor or low class people use it!

I went to Singapore last year. In Singapore it is painfully expensive to put a car on the road. It’s not like paying US $20 here for a drivers license. No, you won’t put a car on the road in Singapore without a significant expense. But fret not, because Singapore has an extensive, modern, clean, and efficient public transit system. Bus lines and MRT will take you most anywhere you want to go, and you can easily find a taxi or a Grab driver.

I certainly don’t think people in Singapore using public transit are poor or low class! Far from it, even actor Chow Yun Fat who married a Singaporean woman, uses it. It’s convenient and affordable.

China is another country with efficient public transit in many locations. They have high speed trains and were one of the first in the world to use them. I don’t think people in China are poor or low class for using public transport.

What we should remember is that many countries have the infrastructure to support public transit, making car ownership an option rather than a necessity. Perhaps one day the U.S. will realize that they should invest in better infrastructure, making car ownership unnecessary for us as well.

Harryhausen100 tribute H264

Divorce and nuclear war – Today’s time machine and lots of kitty cats

We start with poor Hal Turner talking about divorce and Nuclear War. Some people’s lives are truly a mess.

Don’t be like Hal Turner.

Nuclear Attack Message on Russian TV; Citizens told “Go to the shelters”

A nuclear attack message has been broadcast on Russian television stations "Nuclear strike has been conducted, please go to the shelter, take your calcium iodide pills"   The red alert in several regions of Russia broadcasted via TV and radio.   Video below:

 Video as seen on Russian TV stations just minutes ago (9:52 AM eastern US time)

UPDATE 10:30 AM EST --

RUMORS . . . . this is a computer hack.

No word from inside Russia . . .  at all.

No word if anyone is actually moving to shelters - or not.

My wife got her lazy, good for nothing, fat ass out of bed as this was happening.  I told her.  She shrugged it off.   Actually told ME "I'm not awake yet, I have to wake up."

I told her "I wanted us to be in Pennsylvania this week.  We should go now"  She waved me off like as if to say "It's all such a bother."

I've come to realize I hate this woman.  After 31 years, I feel nothing in my heart but disgust when I even look at her.  Totally, completely useless.  I don't even know why I've stayed.   Oh.  Wait.  I do know . . . . so I can pay for it all.

Now, I'm supposed to what. . .  wait until she wakes up?  

Maybe wait so she can get dressed or something . . . .

If this __is__ a computer hacking and a fake, I've just gotten a real eye-opener about how the real thing would go down in __my__ house.    I'd be vaporized waiting for my good for nothing wife because . . . . It's all such a bother.

I hate my life.  I hate what it's become.  I've got to get out of this.

2:24 PM EST--

I have arrived at my house in Pennsylvania.  Alone.

She told me "You have to leave me the car."  I replied "I'm taking my car towed behind the pick up truck."  She responded "I have to have a car."   I asked "For what, you never go anywhere?"   She said "You're not taking the car."

I wasn't going to bother pointing out that it's mine.  I don't want to bother fighting anymore.  I left her the car.  Fuck it.  I just have to be away from this toxic person.   

When I got  off the Interstate for the exit to my house, first thing I did was hit the bank and grab some cash; the small maximum I can withdraw daily from an ATM. If things go boom, nothing is going to work; no credit cards, no debit cards.  Cash would be king, so I got some.

Next stop, fuel-up the truck. It took 14.5 gallons.  If it all goes to hell, I'll at least have fuel.   Added DEF fluid too, which is the pollution control fluid that diesel vehicles must use in the USA along with fuel.   Now, at least I'm set with that.

I still have to unpack some stuff from the truck, crank the heat up in the house . . .  it's down at 60, so got to warm it up.

Will bring in firewood to have inside.  Supposed to get significant snow here tonight into tomorrow.  Then, off to the supermarket for last minute stuff.

I did a lot of thinking during the three hour drive.   Marriage is not a suicide pact.  My wife already made clear - quite recently - she has no desire to survive a nuclear war because it would just be so awful.   So in my mind, she's already given up.  I have not.

She may be willing to sit there and die.  I am not.

Maybe this is nothing -- I hope so. But I am not going to discount everything I have seen and heard, and just chalk this up to some computer hacker.  Things are wound too tightly now.  The possibility of an actual Russian nuclear strike upon us is very real, very near, and very JUSTIFIED.

I will not sit idly-by and wait to be vaporized.  She can.  I won't.

I told her I do not plan on coming back.  I told her I know she may need money help from time to time, and I will do what I can on that.  But as far as I'm concerned, this marriage is done.

It's ***NOT*** just what happened today.  It's years and years and years of a lot more.   There is no salvaging this marriage and worst of all - I don't even want to bother trying.  THAT . . . . is how far gone it is.

Sigh.

The people that you surround yourself with has the biggest influence on your life. Be careful, and wise. Choose carefully.

Today, we are going to step into a time machine.

We are going to a softer and calmer time. You know (why), to reset ourselves fromt he onslaught of fear-mongering and insanity.

We begin with a fine 1960’s era show…

Be the Rufus

A very old lady was at the register with a few things from the marked down grocery shelf. She was as clean as could be, with her snow white hair neatly combed. Her clothes were out of style 60 years ago, but they too, were clean and neat. She was in front of me at the checkout register. She had a loaf of day old bread for .50 and a box of generic corn flakes that was taped up, a bag of mixed bruised fruit, and a quart of milk. When her bank card was declined, she quietly said, “I will put these back.” I said no, and I paid for her items, and I added a package of Oreos, a Sara Lee pound cake, and a box of Red Rose tea bags that were in my pile that I had selected for myself. I know that dear, sweet old lady with the tears rolling down her face would never have bought those for herself. The cashier bagged the items and handed the bag to the woman. With her tear-stained face, she raised her hand to heaven, bowed her head and said, “by the glory of God, in Jesus name, thank you.” Like ships passing in the night, my path crossed hers, only that one brief time. I never saw her again.

I will never forget her.

Gabriel Khiterer Captures Majestic Portraits Of Stray Cats

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Gabriel Khiterer is a talented 19-year-old self-taught photographer from Vilnius, Lithuania who pays tribute to the stray cats live near his house.

More info: Facebook (h/t: photogrist, boredpanda)

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Tough battle-cats!

Now, for Gilligan’s Island.

Run With Us-Lisa Lougheed.

Clips from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968)

Swedish Meatballs I

Ingredients

  • 1 egg
  • ¼ cup milk
  • 1 pound ground beef
  • ¼ cup dry cream of wheat cereal
  • ¼ cup minced onion
  • 1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cream of chicken soup
  • 1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cream of mushroom soup
  • 1 (12 fluid ounce) can evaporated milk
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).

  2. In a large bowl, whisk together the egg and the milk. Add the beef, cream of wheat and onion and mix well. Shape into 1 inch balls. Place balls on a lightly greased baking sheet.

  3. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for about 20 minutes.

  4. Drain meatballs on paper towels, if needed. Then place meatballs in a lightly greased 2 quart casserole dish. In a separate medium bowl, combine the soups with the evaporated milk, stirring until smooth. Pour over the meatballs.

  5. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for another 40 minutes. Sprinkle with parsley before serving.

Love this show and everyone in it. Great wholesome comedy

Brandy Old-Fashioned Sweet

The concept of an old-fashioned dates back to the early 1800s and includes whiskey, bitters, cherry juice, sugar and water. This old-fashioned recipe, which is extremely popular in Wisconsin, uses brandy in place of whiskey and lemon-lime soda instead of water for a milder cocktail. —Taste of Home Test Kitchen

Brandy Old Fashioned Sweet EXPS TOHcom22 37101 P2 MD 01 05 11b v2
Brandy Old Fashioned Sweet EXPS TOHcom22 37101 P2 MD 01 05 11b v2

Ingredients

  • 1 orange slice
  • 1 maraschino cherry
  • 1-1/2 ounces maraschino cherry juice
  • 1 teaspoon bitters
  • 1/4 to 1/3 cup ice cubes
  • 1-1/2 ounces brandy
  • 2 teaspoons water
  • 1 teaspoon orange juice
  • 3 ounces lemon-lime soda

Directions

  1. In a rocks glass, muddle orange slice, cherry, cherry juice and bitters. Add ice. Pour in the brandy, water, orange juice and soda.

Sweet Brandy Old-Fashioned Recipe Tips

Do you use brandy or bourbon in an old-fashioned?

While this recipe calls for brandy (the classic Wisconsin choice), bourbon or rye whiskey are also delicious options. (Have leftover brandy on hand? Try mixing up one of these brandy cocktails.)

What bitters should you use in an old-fashioned?

Angostura bitters are the traditional choice for old-fashioneds, but craft bitters are flooding the market. Try orange, cherry or smoked cinnamon for an updated twist on this classic cocktail.

Does an old-fashioned have a cherry?

Yes—with classic old-fashioned recipes like this one, you begin by muddling a maraschino cherry with orange and bitters. You can opt for Luxardo cherries (the original maraschino cherries) as well. Also, the typical old-fashioned garnish is a speared cherry with an orange slice. A cinnamon stick is another classic complement.

How do you drink an old-fashioned?

Enjoy your old-fashioned on the rocks. If you have an extra-large ice cube tray, use it to make ice for this classic cocktail—big ice cubes help keep your drink from getting watered down. (If you want your old-fashioned extra cold, try these Frozen Brandy Old-Fashioneds.) For something to munch on while you sip, try these Spiced Mixed Nuts.

Research contributed by Catherine Ward

LOL

String Cheese Meat Loaf

“My daughter likes the cheese stuffed into this tasty meat loaf made with a blend of ground beef and Italian sausage. Served with a salad and sourdough bread, the meal is special enough for company. —Laura Lawrence, Salinas, California”

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2023 03 10 17 29

Ingredients

  • 1 cup meatless spaghetti sauce, divided
  • 1 large egg, lightly beaten
  • 1 cup seasoned bread crumbs
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1-1/2 teaspoons dried rosemary, crushed
  • 1 pound lean ground beef
  • 8 ounces bulk Italian sausage
  • 3 pieces string cheese

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, combine 1/2 cup spaghetti sauce, egg, bread crumbs, garlic and rosemary. Crumble meat over mixture and mix well.
  2. Press half into a greased 8×4-in. loaf pan. Place two pieces of cheese, side by side, near one end of loaf. Cut the remaining piece of cheese in half; place side by side on opposite end of loaf. Top with remaining meat mixture; press down firmly to seal.
  3. Bake, uncovered, at 350° for 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 hours or until meat is no longer pink and a thermometer reads 160°; drain. Drizzle with the remaining spaghetti sauce; bake 10 minutes longer. Let stand for 10 minutes before slicing.

Editor’s Note: Three ounces of mozzarella cheese, cut into four 1/2-inch sticks, may be substituted for the string cheese.

Be that Rufus!

The nice Latina lady ahead of me at the checkout was purchasing baby items: baby food, disposable diapers, formula, etc. And a few other food items.

Card rejected.

Tries another card. Rejected.

Another. Same thing.

She digs for cash. Some, but not enough.

She reddens. Tears. “Can I take some things back?”

Register clerk starts to pull away enough merchandise so what remains will be covered by her cash.

I, standing there in a kind of daze, just waiting my turn, suddenly wake up to what’s happening.

“Holy cow!” I said to myself. “This stuff is for a baby —maybe HER baby. No way she’s not taking this home…”

I gestured to the clerk, who I knew, and who knew me. “I’ve got this,” I said. “Just include it in my total.” He voids her sale, rings me up, including her stuff.

She tries to refuse. I listen politely, and tell her it is OK. “I will pay you back!” she insists, tears streaming down her cheeks, as we move toward the exit.

I replied: “Lady, if you continue to threaten me with repayment, I’m going to retaliate by paying off your car loan or your mortgage or your next month’s rent, and I know you wouldn’t want me to do that, right? So don’t deprive me of the opportunity to do something nice for someone.”

She stopped and just looked at me. Then whispered, “Thank you sir. God bless you.”

“God has blessed me,” I answered. “God had me in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to help someone in need. And we are both blessed.”

We parted ways.

[EDIT]: I am surprised, and I am honored, and I am humbled, by the comments which have expressed approval of my actions. And at the same time, I am, I confess, somewhat troubled by those who say they wish they could do the same as I did. And the truth is that all of us, no matter our material means, can do as I did, whatever your means. If not material, then by your identity and your values. The point is, give something. Anything, whatever you have to give. And when you do this, you put yourself in the place of the person whom you support. So just do it, with whatever you have.

Crazy (Cool) Cat Men: Ridiculous Studio Photos Of Men Posing With Their Beloved Cats

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It’s perfectly OK for men to post cute photos of holding cats in their arms, but these guys have taken it to a whole other level! They’ve been posing with their cats, just like probably many men secretly do, however, the thing is that their pictures came out and are funny as hell!

h/t: vintag.es

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Premier 1960s.

Jiffy Ground Pork Skillet

“Some people call it dinner hour, but many of us call it rush hour. Slow down the pace with this so-simple mouthwatering ground pork meal. The only thing you’ll have left over is time to share with your family at the table. —Brigitte Schaller, Flemington, Missouri”

exps25157 FM153592B03 18 12b 1
exps25157 FM153592B03 18 12b 1

Ingredients

  • 1-1/2 cups uncooked penne pasta
  • 1 pound ground pork
  • 1/2 cup chopped onion
  • 1 can (14-1/2 ounces) stewed tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 can (8 ounces) tomato sauce
  • 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
  • 1 medium zucchini, cut into 1/4-inch slices

Directions

  1. Cook pasta according to package directions. Meanwhile, in a large skillet, cook pork and onion over medium heat until meat is no longer pink; drain. Add the tomatoes, tomato sauce and Italian seasoning. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and cook for 5 minutes to allow flavors to blend.
  2. Drain pasta; add to skillet. Stir in zucchini. Cover and cook for 3-5 minutes or until zucchini is crisp-tender.

Can you freeze Jiffy Ground Pork Skillet?

Transfer individual portions of cooled pasta mixture to freezer containers. To use, partially thaw in refrigerator overnight. Heat through in a saucepan, stirring occasionally and adding a little tomato sauce if necessary.

Ground Pork Recipe Tips

What else is ground pork good for?

There are many ground pork recipes to try! We especially love these Beef ‘n’ Pork Burgers and Ginger Pork Lettuce Wraps.

Is ground pork healthier than ground beef?

Ground pork and ground beef are both pretty high in fat. (Let’s be real, that’s part of why they taste so good!) Ground pork can have a little less saturated fat and cholesterol than ground beef. But if you’re truly looking for a healthier alternative, try ground turkey.

How long does ground pork last in the fridge?

Ground pork doesn’t last long! Use it within 1 or 2 days before it goes bad.

What variations can I try for this ground pork recipe?

Try swapping ground Italian sausage or ground turkey for the pork. You can also add seasonal vegetables (such as spinach, broccoli or eggplant) and experiment with different pasta shapes.

Research contributed by Elizabeth Harris

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2023 03 10 15 56

Terrible Maps That Are So Bad They’re Good

Maps are very useful… usually. However, @TerribleMaps Twitter account proves that not all maps are created equal. Scroll down to see the best examples of hilariously pointless maps!

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Cheng Benhua

Cheng Benhua became famous for this photograph taken on the day of her death, when she faced her assassination with a smile.

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main qimg 37c46f547380976b3ddb7253c612d303 pjlq

In 1937, war broke out with Japan’s invasion of China. Cheng Benhua was part of the Chinese resistance. She was captured along with other comrades in 1938, when the Japanese arrived in her region. She endured an ordeal: she witnessed the execution of her comrades, was repeatedly raped and humiliated. Despite all this, Cheng remained impassive and defiant, demonstrating a steely spirit that would not be broken. The photo was taken by a Japanese correspondent before she was bayoneted to death at the age of 24.

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main qimg d685e52c43e0110e67e5097e68aac030 pjlq

In China she became an icon. The city of Nanjing has a 5-metre high statue of Cheng, the warrior who smiled at death, as a symbol of the indomitable spirit.

Be the Rufus!

This young mom if two was in chick fil à with her two young children in tow. You can tell she was having a very bad day she orders lunch for her two children. One of the children asked “mommy, where’s yours?” And she said she wasn’t hungry. She attempted to pay using her credit or debit card and it was declined. She asked to run it again and it was declined. She claimed she didn’t have any money on her and she couldn’t pay for the meals. Mom was in tears. She told her children she didn’t have the money to buy them lunch and started leaving. Now the children were in tears and were crying they were very hungry. I told the manager and said go stop her and give her the meals and I’ll pay for them. I also said add a number one meal for mom so she can eat as well.

When she found out what I did, she came up to me and hugged and profusely thanked me explaining how her husband died and she was unable to work because of her young children, one who is in the autism spectrum. I told her not to worry, and to enjoy her lunch.

She wouldn’t stop thanking me. Meanwhile everyone else there was complimentary of my actions. But not one other stepped up to offer what I did.

Chicken-Pepper Alfredo

When I want a lighter dinner, I use lean turkey bacon in this recipe. It gives the pasta that richness you want without all the extra fat. —Courtney Harris, Denton, Texas

exps42622 SD143207D05 30 1b 4
exps42622 SD143207D05 30 1b 4

Ingredients

  • 8 ounces uncooked linguine
  • 1-1/2 pounds chicken tenderloins, cut into 1-inch cubes
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1 teaspoon pepper
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1/2 cup sliced fresh mushrooms
  • 1/4 cup finely chopped red onion
  • 4 turkey or pork bacon strips, chopped
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • 1 jar (15 ounces) roasted red pepper Alfredo sauce
  • 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Directions

  1. Cook linguine according to package directions. Meanwhile, sprinkle chicken with garlic powder and pepper. In a large skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Add chicken, mushrooms, onion, bacon and garlic; cook and stir 8-10 minutes or until chicken is no longer pink.
  2. Drain linguine; add to skillet. Stir in Alfredo sauce; heat through. Sprinkle with cheese.

The USA’s biggest enemy is itself.

USA people know very little about anything beyond their borders. Their media is a massive brainwashing lying machine.

On Quora, the most abusive, hateful and stalking people come from the USA. It seems that any human on the planet with real life experience of the world can be abused for criticising the USA. Their posts are full of hate, advocacy of the destruction of entire nations and the massacre of millions all for fake morality based on spurious lies. What a horrid and miserable life it must be to be stuck in the USA and believe that your awful country has a right to spread misery globally. So as a human being from planet Earth (definitely not from the USA) I have every right to express my views based on real life experience and also to choose if I wish to engage for long with such hateful and ignorant people from the USA.

Existential Crisis Duck Night Light

It was, in all regards, an average day in duck’s average life when he suddenly asked himself: “Who am I?” Since then, he has given a lot of thought to the purpose of life, wondering if a duck can do something more than just quack and stuff its face with breadcrumbs. Is that’s all there is to life? It’s a feeling many of us can relate to, and it’s probably an origin story behind existential crisis duck night light. It’s a funny lamp with a silicone body which feels soft to the touch and gives out a warm glow which will turn off automatically after 30 minutes so you can drift off peacefully.

duck night light2
duck night light2

China is by far the superior civilised nation.

The US builds up its military whilst its people have no universal health care, live in growing poverty and in crime. The US tries to contain, hawk, and disrupt China’s development. Also they are willing to provoke wars all over the world to ramp up their out dated and globally unwanted hegemony. They have invaded, and bombed many nations and slaughtered hundreds of thousands and ruined the lives of millions. The vast majority of the people on this planet shun the USA now and want nothing to do with it. On this site the supporters of the US demonstrate ignorance of the world, of China and hateful feelings toward any nation that doesn’t comply with the USA’s narrative. The pro US Quorans also are prone to personally abuse any Quoran that criticises the USA as if all us people on this planet should LIKE the USA? After all it has done. The USA is a horrid, horrid, evil regime that needs to change or end. It should pull all its forces, spies and politicians home and leave the good people of this planet well alone.

China has brought itself out of poverty and the people live better than ever now. China offers peace and prosperity to the world. It has helped its own people live in a much more stable and pleasant society than the USA’s. I know this from being very fortunate to have lived there for years. I’m not merely a propagandist like so many lying hypocrites from the USA like to label me as. I know that China is a nation with a peaceful society, a civilised society and a vibrant culture, that supports its minority groups and all religions that exist there. Unlike the US people on this site who have never set foot like to rant; China is a free and happy society. It’s effects on Africa and Latin America and Asia are very positive. China is good for the world. The real evaluation of a civilised super power is with regard to its wisdom, civilised behaviour and that it benefits the world and it achieves all this peacefully. So China is the vastly superior nation to that vile…other one. May China continue to rise for the benefit of this planet. China is the future, China is the hope.

Mendacious menace

By ISHIDA RYUJI

Japan’s economy has been stagnant for nearly 30 years, yet it still has ambitions to be a military superpower

A joint strategy document was delivered after the Japan-United States Security Consultative Committee (2+2) meeting in Washington on Jan 12, 2023. It was based on three defense documents issued by the Japanese Cabinet in December 2022, namely the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Program Guidelines and the Mid-Term Defense Program.

The Japanese government has clearly taken China as a hostile country in these documents, indicating that its Self-Defense Forces will strengthen their cooperation with the US military to target China. To this end, Japan has hiked its military budget and improved its counterattack capability, which goes far beyond the established policy of its so-called purely defensive defense posture, since the capability to hit enemy bases is not allowed.

While claiming that the security environment is deteriorating, the Japanese government is attempting to change the status quo by force and is therefore doubling its military expenditure.

If the economic growth of countries in the “Indo-Pacific” region is regarded as a “challenge to the international order”, all the developed countries in the region should be regarded as a “threat”. Yet Japan’s rapid economic growth in the 1960s was praised instead of being seen as a threat. The so-called free and open international order pursued by the West would be neither free nor open if it did not include India and China. Only by positioning the fast-growing developing countries as emerging partners rather than threats, can regional peace and stability be effectively guaranteed.

Japan’s military build-up to counter China’s rise is in essence an attempt to create enemies unilaterally by not allowing the development of a new power that might threaten the vested interests of the West.

In this regard, the US and Japanese governments have always disregarded the fact that the Japan-US alliance has overwhelming military strength in the Asia-Pacific region. The US and Japan have sought to legitimize the reinforcement of their military presence by hyping up China’s “extensive and rapid military build-up”. However, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China’s military expenditure in 2021, which was the second highest in the world at $293.35 billion, was only about one-third that of the total military expenditure of the US, which was the highest at $800.67 billion, and Japan, which was ninth in the world at $54.12 billion. It is true that China’s military expenditure has been increasing since the 2000s, but it is necessary to put that in the context of the need to modernize its military and the continuous development of its economy. In fact, China’s military budget increases have remained in the range of 1.3 to 1.6 percent of its GDP since 1995, far below its economic growth rate.

There is no doubt that the US’ military spending is considerably greater than that of any other country in the world, with its military expenditure accounting for 3 percent to 4 percent of its GDP. Japan is now about to double its quota of 1 percent to 2 percent of its GDP, and will become the world’s third-largest military power. The country’s economy has been stagnant for nearly 30 years, yet it still has ambitions to be a military superpower. That is not commensurate with its economy. And the US military can take full advantage of its newest base on Okinawa, which is located at China’s “throat”. If there is any military threat in East Asia, it is not from China but from the Japan-US alliance.

China’s policy is not hostile to the US and Japan, and it has not formed any military alliances targeting any other country. Japan and the US, by contrast, no longer disguise the nature of their military alliance. Military alliances require enemies to be fabricated if there is no real threat, which is what the US did with the Soviet Union and what it is now doing with China. On the other hand, since the mid-1950s, China has always followed the diplomatic principle of non-alignment and pacifism and insisted on not having military alliances. In the face of containment and blockade, China did not take the initiative to identify the US and Japan as enemies and conduct a targeted military build-up. The containment and blockade of the US-Japan alliance are entirely unilateral hostility, which has never changed.

China’s Foreign Ministry on Feb 22, 2023, issued the Global Security Initiative Concept Paper, a vision of peace proposed by China to the world at a critical moment given the situation in Ukraine. Compared with the “strategy document “between Japan and the US in January, China’s aspirations for peace and the pursuit of global interests are evident.

In the process of promoting the implementation of the Global Security Initiative, China will adhere to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation. In contrast to the idea of forming military alliances that are hostile to or antagonistic toward specific countries, the Global Security Initiative embodies an aspiration of pursuing peace and a community with a shared future.

China and Japan signed their Treaty of Peace and Friendship in 1978. Although that treaty remains in force, the “strategy document” of Japan and the US made no mention of it.

Japan’s current policy blatantly ignores the first article of the treaty:

"The Contracting Parties shall develop relations of perpetual peace and friendship between the two countries on the basis of the principles of mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit and peaceful co-existence".

While China is strictly implementing the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, Japan and the US are building up their military force so as to intervene in the Taiwan question. It is they that are the greatest challenge to peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region.

Puking Cat Gravy Boat: The Most Disgusting Kitchen Item Ever

Choosing the right gravy boat is serious business. Sure you could go the traditional route, and select a regular boring gravy boat, but if you’re looking to just get downright weird, this puking cat gravy boat ought to do the trick. Made to look like the gravy is being puked out of the cat’s mouth, this unique sauce server was certainly made for the crazy cat lady out there. After all, what better to show your guests that you are completely unhinged than putting something like this on a dinner table?

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vomiting cat1

And now you know

 

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image 81

Yodeling Pickle: The Most Pointless Product Ever Created

Behold, the Yodeling Pickle! Truly a marvel of modern technology. It’s the perfect combination of two things that should never go together: pickles and yodeling. Yes, it’s actually a real thing you can buy online, and it’s completely, totally 100% pointless.

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yodeling pickle3

Be the Rufus

It was after work one day and I had to pick up some essentials from the grocery store. I’m tired and cranky and my back is hurting. I grabbed what I needed and got in line. The young woman in front of me had a toddler and a 3/4 year old, both whiny (like me🤣) trying to buy a package of spaghetti noodles, a cheap can of sauce and a small package of hamburger. Her card wouldn’t scan and she was visibly getting more and more distraught. I stepped up and said, ““Honey, I’ve been there. Let me get this” and I told the cashier I would pay. The woman stepped aside, now crying, and I added bananas, bread, milk, lunchmeat and cereal to her order and paid.

Partridge Family

If you are in need – ask for help!

My little sister once had a really horrific type of stomach cancer.

What made it worse was that my family was poor at the time she had the cancer, so we couldn’t afford high-quality treatments and hospitals for her.

Anyway, one year, my parents found a doctor in Massachusetts who they thought could treat (and save) my sister.

The doctor was extremely qualified and specialized in treating the specific type of cancer that my sister had.

So anyway, my mom took my sister to that doctor for treatment, and I and the rest of my family stayed home since we couldn’t afford travelling all together.

After months of my sister being treated in Massachusetts by that doctor, my sister’s condition one day got critically bad.

She was on the literal verge of dying, so I and my younger brother and my dad decided to urgently go to Massachusetts to be with my sister.

We packed our stuff up and took the first flight we could find. It was such an emergency that my dad didn’t find the time to buy the plane tickets online, so we had to buy the tickets directly at the airport. At the airport, however… my dad had selected the tickets and he was going to pay for it using his credit card, and… it pains me so much to write it, but the card was abjectly declined, because of insufficient funds. We all panicked and my dad rummaged through his bag, and he found my mom’s credit card, which she had forgotten to take with her. He tried that card to buy the tickets, and it was declined too — for the same reason.

I just started silently crying at that point. “What if she dies without us being with her?” I remember my brother fearfully asking my poor dad. My dad was so dejected at the situation that he couldn’t even say anything. Unfortunately, we never could purchase those godforsaken fucking tickets, and we missed our flight.

And my sister died without us being with her. We were only able to get to her and my mom after my sister had died. Regrettably, she died a grievously painful death, and my mom told me that she was constantly screaming for me to come to her, and asking why I wasn’t coming to her. She died saying something along those lines; she died saying how much she was missing me, her big sister. And she died without me.

It’s been years upon years since she died, and to this day, I’ve never recovered from the sheer trauma of that hellish experience, and I probably never, ever will.

Cardboard Cat Forts: The Ultimate DIY Project for Feline Fun

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cat forts1

Picture this: You’re sitting at home, surrounded by Amazon boxes that you’ve been too lazy to recycle. You’ve got some time on your hands, a cat on your lap, and you’re feeling a little bit creative. What do you do? You build a cardboard cat fort, of course!

h/t: sadanduseless

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cat forts2

But why do cats love cardboard so much? It’s not just because they’re weirdos (although that certainly plays a part). No, it turns out that there are some legit reasons why felines can’t resist the allure of a good cardboard box.

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cat forts3

First of all, cats are all about safety and security. They love small, enclosed spaces where they can hide and feel safe from predators (or from their pesky human roommates). Cardboard boxes provide that sense of protection that cats crave.

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cat forts4

But it’s not just about safety. Cardboard is also a great insulator, which means that it keeps cats warm and cozy. And let’s be real, who doesn’t love a good snuggle session in a warm, cozy box?

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cat forts5

Of course, there’s also the playfulness and curiosity factor. Cats are curious creatures by nature, and a cardboard box provides endless opportunities for exploration and play. They can jump in and out of the box, paw at it, scratch it up, and generally just have a grand old time.

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cat forts6

And let’s not forget about marking their territory. Cats have scent glands on their paws and faces, which they use to mark objects and claim them as their own. A cardboard box is the perfect blank canvas for a cat to make their mark and declare to the world, “This is mine!”

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cat forts7

So go ahead, build that cardboard cat fort. Your feline friend will thank you for it. And even if they don’t appreciate the intricate design work and clever architecture, at least you’ll have a good laugh watching them poke their little heads out of the various nooks and crannies.

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cat forts8

“You’re such an embarrassment.”

I’m at the grocery store, ready to check out. I keep glancing over my phone and scrolling through my Twitter feed while waiting for my turn.

“Yes, that too, what the hell? What in the world is wrong with you, woman!?”

I paused my scrolling feed for a sec, and glanced up to see the aggressive speaker.

From what I can tell, he was dressed up for a special occasion like a red carpet event or gala. Strange. I went back into my phone mode, and getting bored, switched from Twitter to my weekly planner. I had to pee, so I started slowly tapping my feet as a distraction.

“I am so sorry, son, I didn’t know…”
“Of course, my dear.” said the elderly mother. (It’s clear they are mother and son.) She spoke in a soft, shaky voice, and was hunch backed, with thin, grey hair. Her middle-aged son was twice her size.

The elderly woman spoke to the cashier, “Can you please add the two bottles of wine and the chocolate? And, let me see… Oh, is it too much to ask if you don’t mind, to remove the eggs, almond milk, and the peaches too? I am so sorry to cause everyone trouble.” She turned to me with a frown and sad eyes, obviously embarrassed. She whispered, “I am so sorry.”

I gave her a big smile and said, “Oh, not at all. You’re totally fine.”

“For crying out loud. Wow, you’ve managed to ruin my night. That’s it, I’ll be out in the car waiting with Joanna.” The son had one hand in his pocket, and the other rubbing his forehead in an irritated manner. He turned around and walked out of the store.

“What a douche bag.” I said to myself, and then went back to staring at my phone.

“Ma’am, can you please swipe again?” The cashier asked the sweet, elderly lady.

“Of course, my dear.” she said in her soft voice, her entire body shaking as if she was going to fall.

“What card is that? Oh it’s an EBT card. Ma’am we don’t accept that at this store.”

“Oh no… That’s all I have except some cash and change. Can you please cancel out the transaction? I’ll get the wine and the Ferrero Rocher chocolate. I’ll see if I can come up with the cash.” She began shaking even more, her voice starting to crumble as a tear slid down her cheek. She walked toward the Coin Star machine to get dollar bills to add to her cash so she could buy the things for her son.

I couldn’t take it anymore. My heart was ripped. I didn’t want to embarrass her, so I waited until she walked away.

“Hey, please don’t cancel the items. Also, can you please ring the peaches, almond milk, and the carton of eggs? While you do that, can I quickly get something?”

I ran to the gift card aisle. There was a $50 Visa and a $500 American Express. I picked the AmEx.

The elderly woman, at this point, was barely to the exit door.

“Please add $500 on AmEx and these two frozen pizzas.”

The cashier said, “Oh, wow, $500. Is it a special occasion? Someone is lucky!”

“Yes, I was very lucky, and I’m going to repay the kindness.”

I checked out, and walked toward the elderly woman. I asked, “Ma’am, what’s your name?”

Taken by surprise, she looked at me with her sad eyes. Still shaking, she said, “I am Laurie.” “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Laurie. You see, earlier today, my boss gave away $1,000 for a silly competition at work. I won, and I was going to give it to my mother. But today, when I saw you, you reminded me of her. If you would be so kind, would you accept this small gift and split it with my mother? I mean, if she were here, this is what she’d ask me to do, and sharing my award would make me happy, but sad if you don’t accept.”

“I can’t do that, my sweet angel.” she said, looking down and crying uncontrollably.

“Yes, you can. If you consider me your angel, you will do just that because knowing you won’t will make me sadder than you.” I don’t know why, but I started crying along with her.

After a few minutes of negotiating, she accepted but asked for my cell phone number and address so she could mail me a check. I gave her the wrong number.

I took out the AmEx card, and wrote, “You’re a lovely mother.”

I offered her my arm, and we walked toward a brand-new Mercedes Benz, where her son was waiting. I glanced through the window and saw him lounging, conversing with a woman who must’ve been Joanna.

He looked at me, shocked, and got out of the car. “I’m sorry, do I know you?” Turning to his mother, he said, “Mom, who the hell is that guy?”

Quickly, she became nervous, and I could tell she was embarrassed. “Please, it’s not like him, forgive his behavior.”

“I am Sonny,” I replied. “I am here to escort Ms. Laurie to your car. If you care enough, could you please let her in?”

The son mumbled, “Oh yes, sure. Whatever.”

I opened the door, and Ms. Laurie stepped inside. She spoke in her sweet trembling voice, “Thank you so much, angel, sweet boy. I expect to talk to you soon, I am in your debt.”

I said to her son, “Listen dude, whoever you are, I don’t give a fuck and if I see you again being rude to the elderly, I’ll be sure to call you out in public. You’re lucky I didn’t today.”

Fuck off got inside his car and drove off.

I wonder what the mother could have done so wrong to be worthy of her son’s rude behavior?

Does he know that 50 years ago this beautiful, young woman was busy wiping his butt, feeding him, and looking out for him? One must wonder what horrible things his mother may have done for him to be that angry; it makes me sick to see that he allows her to live on food stamps, and watched as she left her groceries behind so she can buy the two bottles of wine. She showed her love for him while he sat talking to a young girl who was half his age and looked like someone’s teenage daughter.

I went home and immediately called my mother. I started to cry as she said, “Kaise ho beta?” (How are you, my son?) I know that she’s old now, and that life is so short; someday she’ll be gone, and the thought of that caused an ache that made my voice choke. “Ahem… I am doing well Ammy (Mom). I just wanted to call to say I love you. That’s all.” I hung up and continued to cry.

The truth to the matter is that there’s no one like your mother, so spend time with her, love her, appreciate her because you never know when this very moment can be taken away from you.

Huawei Technologies Co has replaced more than 13,000 components in its range of products with local substitutes and redesigned over 4,000 circuit boards in the past three years, founder Ren Zhengfei said, offering a glimpse of its efforts to overcome years of US sanctions.

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2023 03 21 06 35

Founder Ren, 78, said the production of circuit boards has “stabilised” after the Chinese telecoms giant developed replacement parts from domestic sources. Huawei will launch MetaERP, its own resources planning system, next month and fully use its own operating system, data system, compiler and language.

Ren delivered the speech during a February 24 seminar to thank the public and academics who participated in the company’s search for solutions to its technology predicament. The transcript was also posted by Peking University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, among others.

Ren said until Huawei’s skirmishes with the US, he was an advocate of Western technology when he was young and still admired Western tech after he founded Huawei, adding that even now he is not “anti West”.

Meanwhile, Ren said Huawei spent US$23.8 billion (entire GDP of Macau) on research and development in 2022. After its smartphone business was impacted by the US sanctions, the company began looking for more opportunities in enterprise solutions.

The western media especially the U.S. media will have you believe that the U.S. has enormous influence and the biggest number of allies but the truth is this.

Due to the decades of abused of power the U.S. has lost the plot. All it has left are 4 groups. One, their fellow native slaughterers, two, their fellow despicable colonial powers, three their slave vassal states and finally four, some weak and small Eastern European nations that regularly poked Russia in her eyes and then needs to hide behind the U.S.

Together these U.S. dependents represent less than 20 nations out of 195 nations. In population it hardly exceed 5% of the world.

What about China. Let us look are real alliances such as BRI. 145/195 nations fully support China. Or we can take the various UN resolutions. China frequently has 160/195 nations supporting China. Why?

The Entire Africa, the entire South America, Middle East, Central Asia, Asia and some parts of Eastern Europe duly support China. That is why. The main reason China has such a following is easy to understand as long as you ignore the western narrative.

Think about China fully recognising each nation’s sovereignty. Think about China respecting the rights of each nation own path to their future. Think about China not colonialists, not interfering, not bullying, not forcing its way. China have real friends not the U.S. think of the countries supporting the U.S. out of need or no choice. It is not sustainable.

2023 03 10 19 07
2023 03 10 19 07

There are many historical figures who are not well-known but have accomplished remarkable things. It’s difficult to say who the most “badass” person in history is, as it’s a subjective term, but one person who could fit that description is Lozen.

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2023 03 10 19 49

Lozen was a warrior and spiritual leader of the Chiricahua Apache, who lived in the late 19th century. She was known for her exceptional horseback riding, sharpshooting, and strategic thinking. She fought alongside her brother, Victorio, and the famous Apache leader Geronimo, and was considered to be one of the most skilled warriors of her tribe. She also had a reputation as a powerful medicine woman, and many believed that she had supernatural powers.

Lozen actively fought against the U.S. Army and Mexican army for the preservation of Apache way of life, freedom and their land, and was known for her ferocity in battle and her ability to evade capture. She was also known for her ability to scout and gather intelligence for her people, which was vital in the Apache resistance.

Unfortunately, her story is not well-known, but she is remembered and honored by the Apache people and some historians as a powerful and respected warrior, leader and medicine woman.

A Sweet Little Photo Story Proving That True Love That Knows No Bounds

A fine end to this post which started with Hal Turner and Nuclear War.

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This brave cat overcame all the obstacles for the sake of meeting his beloved. And what would you be prepared to do in the name of true love?

h/t: brightside

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I was about 16 and a man in front of me was trying to buy a pack of ramen and cat food. He was probably 50 and looked completely overwhelmed and ready to cry. His card declined so he removed the ramen and bought the cat food. He then tried to buy the ramen using another card which then declined. He started to count change but was still short. I gave the cashier $20 for it and let the man keep the change. I’ll never forget the look on his face. It really struck me that he spent the little he had to make sure his cat was fed and would’ve gone hungry himself. He kept trying to have me take the change too which I also think spoke of his character. At that time my dad would just hand me money, I know spoiled, but the $20 didn’t mean much to me. it meant a lot to that man and I hope he’s doing okay.

As an Australian I, like many of my countrymen am appalled at our political class. It no longer matters which of the two major parties is in power, the policies are basically the same and have been derived from the WEF Globalist's play book. In particular, our subservience to the American war machine. We have given our sovereignty away and are the unofficial 51st State of America. They say "jump" we say "how high Sir". Our salvation might come when the American empire finally collapses. A collapse that is inevitable. The current financial crisis has no end, because it is built on a foundation as stable as desert sand. I am aware they have a massive nuclear arsenal, they may decide if they can't have the power, then they will take everyone else with them to the grave. We in Australia could well be among the first to die.

Both Putin & Xi have put out articles on the 🇷🇺-🇨🇳 relationship within the past 24 hours. Read

Forging Ahead to Open a New Chapter of China-Russia Friendship, Cooperation and Common Development

2023-03-20 06:21

Xi Jinping
President of the People’s Republic of China

At the invitation of President Vladimir Putin, I will soon pay a state visit to the Russian Federation. Russia was the first country I visited after I was elected President ten years ago. Over the past decade, I have made eight visits to Russia. I came each time with high expectations and returned with fruitful results, opening a new chapter for China-Russia relations together with President Putin.

China and Russia are each other’s biggest neighbor and comprehensive strategic partner of coordination. We are both major countries in the world and permanent members of the UN Security Council. Both countries uphold an independent foreign policy and see our relationship as a high priority in our diplomacy.

There is a clear historical logic and strong internal driving force for the growth of China-Russia relations. Over the past ten years, we have come a long way in our wide-ranging cooperation and made significant strides into the new era.

— High-level interactions have played a key strategic role in leading China-Russia relations. We have established a whole set of mechanisms for high-level interactions and multi-faceted cooperation which provide important systemic and institutional safeguards for the growth of the bilateral ties. Over the years, I have maintained a close working relationship with President Putin. We have met 40 times on bilateral and international occasions. Together we have drawn the blueprint for the bilateral relations and cooperation in various fields, and have had timely communication on major international and regional issues of mutual interest, providing firm stewardship for the sustained, sound and stable growth of China-Russia relations.

— Our two sides have cemented political mutual trust and fostered a new model of major-country relations. Guided by a vision of lasting friendship and win-win cooperation, China and Russia are committed to no-alliance, no-confrontation and not targeting any third party in developing our ties. We firmly support each other in following a development path suited to our respective national realities and support each other’s development and rejuvenation. The bilateral relationship has grown more mature and resilient. It is brimming with new dynamism and vitality, setting a fine example for developing a new model of major-country relations featuring mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.

— Our two sides have put in place an all-round and multi-tiered cooperation framework. Thanks to the joint efforts of both sides, China-Russia trade exceeded US$190 billion last year, up by 116 percent from ten years ago. China has been Russia’s largest trading partner for 13 years running. We have seen steady increase in our two-way investment. Our cooperation on major projects in such fields as energy, aviation, space and connectivity is moving forward steadily. Our collaboration in scientific and technological innovation, cross-border e-commerce and other emerging areas is showing a strong momentum. Our cooperation at the sub-national level is also booming. All this has brought tangible benefits to both the Chinese and the Russian peoples and provided unceasing driving force for our respective development and rejuvenation.

— Our two sides have acted on the vision of lasting friendship and steadily strengthened our traditional friendship. On the occasion of commemorating the 20th anniversary of the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, President Putin and I announced the extension of the Treaty and added new dimensions to it. Our two sides have held eight “theme years” at the national level and continued to write new chapters for China-Russia friendship and cooperation. Our two peoples have stood by and rooted for each other in the fight against COVID, which once again proves that “a friend in need is a friend indeed”.

— Our two sides have had close coordination on the international stage and fulfilled our responsibilities as major countries. China and Russia are firmly committed to safeguarding the UN-centered international system, the international order underpinned by international law, and the basic norms of international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. We have stayed in close communication and coordination in the UN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the G20 and other multilateral mechanisms, and worked together for a multi-polar world and greater democracy in international relations. We have been active in practicing true multilateralism, promoting the common values of humanity, and championing the building of a new type of international relations and a community with a shared future for mankind.

Looking back on the extraordinary journey of China-Russia relations over the past 70 years and more, we feel strongly that our relationship has not reached easily where it is today, and that our friendship is growing steadily and must be cherished by us all. China and Russia have found a right path of state-to-state interactions. This is essential for the relationship to stand the test of changing international circumstances, a lesson borne out by both history and reality.

My upcoming visit to Russia will be a journey of friendship, cooperation and peace. I look forward to working with President Putin to jointly adopt a new vision, a new blueprint and new measures for the growth of China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination in the years to come.

To this end, our two sides need to enhance coordination and planning. As we focus on our respective cause of development and rejuvenation, we should get creative in our thinking, create new opportunities and inject new impetus. It is important that we increase mutual trust and bring out the potential of bilateral cooperation to keep China-Russia relations at a high level.

Our two sides need to raise both the quality and quantity of investment and economic cooperation and step up policy coordination to create favorable conditions for the high-quality development of our investment cooperation. We need to boost two-way trade, foster more convergence of interests and areas of cooperation, and promote the complementary and synchronized development of traditional trade and emerging areas of cooperation. We need to make sustained efforts to synergize the Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union, so as to provide more institutional support for bilateral and regional cooperation.

Our two sides need to step up people-to-people and cultural exchanges and ensure the success of China-Russia Years of Sports Exchange. We should make good use of the sub-national cooperation mechanisms to facilitate more interactions between sister provinces/states and cities. We should encourage personnel exchanges and push for the resumption of tourism cooperation. We should make available better summer camps, jointly-run schools and other programs to steadily enhance the mutual understanding and friendship between our peoples, especially between the youth.

The world today is going through profound changes unseen in a century. The historical trend of peace, development and win-win cooperation is unstoppable. The prevailing trends of world multi-polarity, economic globalization and greater democracy in international relations are irreversible. On the other hand, our world is confronted with complex and intertwined traditional and non-traditional security challenges, damaging acts of hegemony, domination and bullying, and long and tortuous global economic recovery. Countries around the world are deeply concerned and eager to find a cooperative way out of the crisis.

In March 2013, when speaking at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, I observed that countries are linked with and dependent on one another at a level never seen before, and that mankind, living in the same global village, have increasingly emerged as a community with a shared future in which everyone’s interests are closely entwined. Since then, I have proposed the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative on different occasions. All these have enriched our vision for a community with a shared future for mankind and provided practical pathways toward it. They are part of China’s response to the changes of the world, of our times, and of the historic trajectory.

Through these ten years, the common values of humanity — peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom — have taken deeper roots in the heart of the people. An open, inclusive, clean and beautiful world with lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity has become the shared aspiration of more and more countries. The international community has recognized that no country is superior to others, no model of governance is universal, and no single country should dictate the international order. The common interest of all humankind is in a world that is united and peaceful, rather than divided and volatile.

Since last year, there has been an all-round escalation of the Ukraine crisis. China has all along upheld an objective and impartial position based on the merits of the issue, and actively promoted peace talks. I have put forth several proposals, i.e., observing the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, respect of the legitimate security concerns of all countries, supporting all efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis, and ensuring the stability of global industrial and supply chains. They have become China’s fundamental principles for addressing the Ukraine crisis.

Not long ago, we released China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis, which takes into account the legitimate concerns of all parties and reflects the broadest common understanding of the international community on the crisis. It has been constructive in mitigating the spillovers of the crisis and facilitating its political settlement. There is no simple solution to a complex issue. We believe that as long as all parties embrace the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, and pursue equal-footed, rational and results-oriented dialogue and consultation, they will find a reasonable way to resolve the crisis as well as a broad path toward a world of lasting peace and common security.

To run the world’s affairs well, one must first and foremost run its own affairs well. The Chinese people, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, are striving in unity to advance the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts through the Chinese path to modernization. Chinese modernization is characterized by the following features: it is the modernization of a huge population, the modernization of common prosperity for all, the modernization of material and cultural-ethical advancement, the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature, and the modernization of peaceful development. These distinctive Chinese features are the crystallization of our practices and explorations over the years, and reflect our profound understanding of international experience. Going forward, we will steadfastly advance the cause of Chinese modernization, strive to realize high-quality development, and expand high-standard opening up. I believe that this will bring new development opportunities to Russia and all countries in the world.

Just as every new year starts with spring, every success starts with actions. We have every reason to expect that China and Russia, as fellow travelers on the journey of development and rejuvenation, will make new and greater contributions to human advancement.

here ARTICLE

Be the Rufus

It was January in Toronto. I was in the grocery store with my then four-year-old son. We were chatting, teasing each other while going through aisles with giggles and smiles. There was a young mother shopping with her little boy who was about the same age as mine. So naturally we noticed each other and made some exchanges when bumping into one another from aisle to aisle. I overheard her denying a lot of stuff that her son wanted to buy by saying, “Sorry, Mommy didn’t budget for this.” Or “We don’t have money for that.” The little boy wasn’t asking for anything absurd. He was asking for fruits, yogurts, goldfish crackers and so on. So the boy would still put his choices in the shopping cart regardless of how much his mom said she wouldn’t buy them.

So we finished shopping around the same time and ended up at the same cashier, her in front of me. She started leaving out the items her son put in without permission. So the boy protested and then turned into a meltdown. The mother was tired, frustrated and clearly at the end of her rope when her debit card got declined. She started putting back more and more necessities like bread, milk, cheese and eggs. Then she apologized to the cashier after the last decline and wanted to dash out of the store due to embarrassment. But the little boy wouldn’t leave without a fight. So over the whole course of the mother trying to reason with the little boy, I pieced together the story. She is a single mom living with her handicapped mom. Her ex hasn’t paid child support, and she had to pay a psychiatrist’s bill — for her older son — which wasn’t fully covered by insurance. She works two jobs and was in a rush to get the shopping done so she can return home, drop off the kids at the babysitter and then go to work. And they are missing the bus because the little boy cried too long. So while she was taking care of the situation, I gestured to the cashier to ring through all her items and her little boy’s, grabbed a bunch of chocolate bars and added in and paid it quickly. I then gave her a lift to her place. (Thank God I had an extra booster seat for my nephew.) We chatted along the way and got to know each other a bit more. She insisted on asking for my phone number so she could repay me. When she called me a couple of days later, I casually asked if she was up for an office job. One thing led to another. She has been working here for five years now, and she is continuing with her post-secondary diploma through my company’s education assistance program. Her mom is working for us too as a part-time office administrator. I have received the most genuine friendship from her and her family since, which I am totally grateful for and didn’t expect, when I used my card five years ago. I often think back to the day we met and feel lucky that I had the opportunity to know her and have this wonderful experience.

Remember High School pizza?

Today’s…

"...For Confucian societies that value the family and the community more than the individual, people will be more willing to suffer a little bit to save the lives of the old and the weak. Whereas, for societies that value the individual rights and their freedoms, they will not care about the underprivileged that are more likely to die, and that is their freedom of choice. They must have their freedom and their economy. They have a million deaths yet they laugh at China with five thousand, in total. It is their freedom to be stupid and delusional." 

I guess you could classify 2023 as a settling down, begrudgingly by some, of new Geo-political realities. Things are shaking out. It will be choppy, but good!

Remember High School pizza?

City School Pizza

Yield: 24 servings

2023 01 30 16 34
2023 01 30 16 34

Ingredients

French-Style Pizza Crust

  • 2 packages dry or cake yeast
  • 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
  • 3 1/2 cups lukewarm water
  • 9 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon salt

Topping

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 tablespoon instant minced onion
  • 1 (8 ounce) can tomatoes, drained and chopped
  • 1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
  • 3/4 cup water
  • 3/4 teaspoon oregano
  • Salt
  • 3/4 teaspoon dried sweet basil
  • 3/4 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 3/4 pound ground or chopped luncheon meat
  • 1 1/2 cups grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

French-Style Pizza Crust

  1. Dissolve yeast and sugar in water.
  2. Add flour and salt. Knead until smooth.
  3. Cover and let rise until doubled in bulk.
  4. Cut into 2portions. Let rest 15 minutes.
  5. Pat or roll to even thickness in 2 (15 1/2 x 10 1/2-inch) jellyroll pans. Set aside.

Topping

  1. Brown ground beef and onion in a large skillet.
  2. Add tomatoes, tomato paste, water, oregano, salt to taste, basil, garlic powder and luncheon meat. Sauté until mixture comes to a boil. Simmer for a few minutes.
  3. Spread sauce on prepared French-Style Pizza Crust in pans. Sprinkle each crust with cheese.
  4. Bake at 400 degrees F for 30 to 35 minutes or until cheese layer is bubbly and browned.

Notes

Source: Los Angeles Times – 9/23/82

Marine Corps reactivates base on Guam

The U.S. Marine Corps reactivated a new base on Guam in a ceremony, Jan. 26, honoring the long-shared history of the Marine Corps and Guam and establishing a forward presence in the Indo-Pacific that will endure into the future.

USMC press release

Marine Corps Base (MCB) Camp Blaz is the first newly constructed Marine Corps base in 70 years and serves as a testament to the U.S.-Japan alliance. Guam was chosen as the location for the new base during the 2012 Bilateral Agreement between the U.S and Japanese governments, under the Defense Policy Review Initiative, which set the framework for the relocation of Marines from Okinawa to Guam. The base is named in honor of Brigadier General Vicente Tomas “Ben” Garrido Blaz, the first CHamorro Marine to attain the rank of general officer.

“Today is an important day that marks the future of the Marines on Guam, and it is also a day to reflect on the century-long history of the Marine Corps in this beautiful place we call home,” said Col. Christopher Bopp, Commanding Officer, MCB Camp Blaz. “On this island Marines and their CHamoru brethren have lived in peace and fought in war together and we are proud to carry on this legacy of honor and courage.”

Guam’s history is marked by the enduring partnership between the U.S. military and the people of Guam. Since the establishment of Marine Barracks Guam in 1899, the Marine Corps has had a nearly continuous presence on Guam. The Marine Barracks was reactivated after World War II and deactivated November 10, 1992.

During the ceremony at War in the Pacific National Historical Park, honors were rendered to the Honorable Lou Leon Guerrero, Governor of Guam; Commandant of the Marine Corps; U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations and Environmental; Japanese Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Defense and Parliamentary Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs provided remarks. The ceremony ended with a traditional pass and review.

From HERE

Gotta love this dude. Lives in a literal true warzone, was interrogated and held hostage by SBU and just brushed it like nothing, had bike accident, AGAIN BRUSHED IT LIKE NOTHING AT ALL, and just went full "anyyyyyway, look at those fools!" and started dropping truth-bombs like it's nothing, another day in our mundane lives.

It will worsen for one more president after Biden.

why?

Simple, the U.S. has been in a denial mode since 2014 all the time they underestimated China and China is happy to let the U.S. lulled themself into oblivion.

Biden ought to have woken up to know that China is no pushover but he is too old and too uninformed about China except for fear mongering by his handlers.

I think it needs about 15 years of adjustment by the U.S. to move from disbelief to denial to refusing to accept China is in most way bigger than the U.S. and that the more you contain or to control China the worst it is for America.

By the next president, they will be in a refusing to accept reality stage. That president will know China is really a big deal and the U.S. can hardly match China but for political reason it is better to still pretend that they are still weaker and we the U.S. can still tell them what to do.

But by late 2020s say after 2028 China’s strength is too big to pretend and denying it looks very daft and silly even as a U.S. president. Also by that time the U.S. dollar is a shade of it is even now. By that time it makes sense politically to move into reluctant acceptance stage and to try to benefit by China’s size and market beats trying g to contain China.

American pain will have been rather unbearable by then and it’s people will recognise that selling to China and cooperation with China and Asia is the way to go.

Not at the moment. Today the chest beater and the blind optimism of the U.S. group overwhelmed the realist. And politicians are smart. They know that politically it is still better to talk as though China can be beaten. And talking shit on China is still fashionable. I see 2028–2032 period as the time the realist becomes the majority in America.

A Secret Roswell Journal Becomes The Focus Of A New UFO Documentary

From HERE

A secret journal offers new clues about the nature of the alleged 1947 AD UFO crash at Roswell in the New Mexico desert, or does it? Before we kick off, this isn’t one of these Reddit stories that emerged from some basement decorated with posters of the Starship Enterprise and Chewbacca. Quite the opposite.

Live Science is one off the internet’s more respected academic media outlets and today they tell the story of a hitherto unknown personal diary belonging to Major Jesse Marcel, a head intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Air Field. The secret Roswell journal could change the narrative of this famous UFO event. In particular, the secret Roswell journal may contain secret coded observations that will help to “clarify” what really happened in Roswell in 1947 AD.

Marcel investigated the famous Roswell site in New Mexico where in 1947 a UFO is believed by many to have crashed. Furthermore, he claimed to have recovered some of the debris from whatever ditched in the desert that July night near the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). Newspaper photos at the time showed Marcel with pieces of metallic material and on the afternoon of July 8, 1947 AD he disclosed to the media “the crash and recovery of a flying disc.” However, the following day, an army official made a statement saying that a weather balloon had fallen to earth, “not a flying saucer.”

Will The Secret Roswell Journal Change Everything?

The Roswell story now takes a new turn since Major Marcel’s family revealed they had kept his personal secret Roswell journal which contains “hitherto unknown clues about the crash.” The secret diary and its equally secret contents will soon be presented on History Channel´s History’s Greatest Mysteries series in an episode called Roswell: The First Witness . The episode was released on December 12th, Saturday, 2020 AD. The show host, Ben Smith, is a former CIA operative and the show’s lead investigator. He thinks it is very unusual that the day after the government claimed they had recovered a UFO they switched stories and maintained it was merely “a weather balloon,” Smith told Live Science .

This story is another in a long line of recent reports pertaining to UFOs. According to The Guardian in 2017 AD a former Pentagon official confirmed the existence of a federal agency that had been “secretly investigating UFOs since 2007.” Then, in 2018, U.S. Navy pilots reported “three encounters with fast-moving UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena” better known to us civies as UFOs. And building up this emerging alien narrative, officially declassified videos of these occurrences were published in April of this year, as previously reported on Live Science .

Secret Roswell Journal: A Problem Of Might, May And Could

Let´s now return to Major Jesse Marcel, the author of the secret Roswell journal. He investigated the site at Roswell and recovered what he believed to be debris from a flying saucer . In 1997 AD, Time published an article saying Marcel told an interviewer at the time that “he believed” the object that crashed in the New Mexico desert had extraterrestrial origins. Now, a forensic analysis of Marcel´s secret Roswell journal “could reveal” coded messages that he wrote about the crash at the time that it happened, Ben Smith said.

This application of the word “could” will no doubt have skeptics raging, because they all know what’s most probably coming here. If the diary really contained any actual evidence that the Roswell incident was nothing more than a collapsed weather balloon we would certainly have heard about it by now. Unless of course thousands of unpaid interns and staff at the network have all kept quiet, doubters can argue. Perhaps the skeptics greatest argument is presented in plain sight in the newspaper photograph of Marcel on the evening of the crash. To all but the most committed believers in extraterrestrials it is perfectly clear that Marcel is holding a piece of a crumpled (crashed) weather balloon.

When the History Channel episode airs and unavoidably “no evidence” of extraterrestrials is offered, perhaps then maybe some “believers” will consider the content of the Ancient Origins news article I wrote about this only last month.

A team of Oxford University researchers recently applied statistics to the question “are we alone” and concluded that “life on earth is probably a unique universal phenomena, and that it´s ‘extremely unlikely’ that any other intelligent life exists anywhere else in the universe.” This is a profound claim that sceptics love and believers loathe.

And the same extreme opinions are likely to flood across social media channels when the details of Major Marcel’s secret Roswell journal are revealed.

Japanese Illustrator Suzusiro Puts Maids On Skateboards And We Can’t Complain

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If you’re a fan of Japanese manga and anime, you may have seen skateboarding characters before (Misaka Yata in K comes to mind), and there’s a very strong probability that you’ve seen maid characters before (Roberta from Black Lagoon, Ram and Rem from Re:Zero Beginning Life In Another World, etc.), but unless you’re a fan of Japanese illustrator Suzusiro, you’ve probably never ever seen the two of them combined!

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Bialys

What is a bialy? It’s a disk of dough with slight depressions in the center and topped with onions. These are as popular as the bagel is in the northeast. They are a great snack which tastes great with some cream cheese.

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2023 01 25 15 57

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 cups warm water ( 105 to 115 degrees F)
  • 5 teaspoons rapid rise yeast
  • 5 teaspoons granulated sugar
  • 5 to 5 1/2 cups unbleached bread flour
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
  • 1/2 cup dehydrated minced onion*
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons poppy seeds (optional)
  • 1 tablespoon coarse kosher salt for sprinkling (optional)
  • 1/4 cup cornmeal for baking sheet
  • 1 egg beaten with 2 tablespoons water for wash

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 450 degrees F.
  2. Whisk together warm water, yeast and sugar in a large bowl, stir in one cup of flour and salt. Add most of the remaining flour and stir with a wooden spoon to make a soft mass. To your mixer, attach the dough hook and mix 8 to 10 minutes or you can knead by hand.
  3. Cover the dough and allow to rest for about 45 to 60 minutes. Line 2 large baking sheets with baking parchment paper and lightly sprinkle with cornmeal.
  4. Place dehydrated onions in a bowl and add hot water and allow the onions to soak for 15 minutes. Drain the onions well, place in a bowl and add the oil and poppy seeds if using. Set aside.
  5. Punch down the dough and divide into two. Divide each half of dough into six equal pieces. Allow dough to rest 10 minutes.
  6. Roll of stretch each portion into a 4- or 5-inch oval or circle, being careful not to overwork the dough. Place bialys on prepared baking sheets, with your fingers make indentations in the center( do not go through the dough). Lightly brush the outer perimeter with the egg wash. Spoon about 2 teaspoons of prepared onion topping and a little sprinkle of salt, if using. Cover with a floured tea towel and allow to rise 30 to 40 minutes or until puffy.
  7. Bake until golden brown, approximately 25 to 30 minutes. (If the bialys are browning too fast, reduce heat to 425 degrees F).

Notes

* or you may substitute 1 cup finely chopped fresh onion, the dehydrated onions will stick better to the raw dough

If you like a thicker bialy (which is great for sandwiches) let the dough rise longer. For thin bialys, reduce the rising time.

Why The Bialy Is Better Than Any Bagel You’ve Ever Had

Onions, bro. Onions.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you didn’t boil a bagel before baking it? Have you ever wondered why bagels have a hole in the middle instead of more bagel? Have you ever wished that bagels contained more onions, were slightly more tender and weren’t the size of manhole covers? Guys, this unicorn exists, and it’s called a bialy.

The bialy is like the bagel’s older, less famous cousin who gets more handsome the longer you look at him. If you live outside of New York City, LA or a few very select spots in Chicago and Florida, you might have never even heard of bialys, but that should definitely change. Bialys show up anywhere there is a significant Jewish population — they’re Polish, by origin (from Bialystok!), but have been adopted by American Jews for just about as long as there have been American Jews. Here are a few reasons why bialys will always be better than bagels.

You’ll never have to unhinge your jaw to eat one. You’ll also never have to have jaws made of steel to chew them. You can eat one with your breakfast and you won’t feel so full you are going to die.

Biden Admin May Regret Shunning China’s FM as Ambassador

Shut him out for 500 days when he was “just” an Ambassador

“Through Fire And Water”: The Superb Concept Artworks Of Ross Tran

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Ross Tran is a concept artist and illustrator who attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Ross has worked for companies such as Walt Disney Studios, Psyop and Tyler West Studio.

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The USA is pretending it is not bankrupt.
Slowly, then suddenly as the observation attests.

If you can’t finance your trillions, with what medium of exchange will the goodies for military be paid?

Keep an eye on the trajectory of U$D. USG relies on its hegemony -the dollar as the global reserve currency -to finance its budget and trade deficits.

As the dollar is shunned…….Paul Craig Roberts former Assistant Sec. of U.S. Treasury, commenting on KSA’s recent announcement to accept other currencies in payment for oil…wrote

Article HERE

 

In recent years Washington has so abused the dollar’s reserve currency role with sanctions and asset seizes that many countries desire to settle their trade imbalances in their own currencies in order to escape Washington’s ability to threaten and punish them for serving their own interests rather than Washington’s. If Saudi Arabia abandons the petrodollar, the demand for dollars and the dollar’s value will fall.[.]

This is a major threat to Washington’s power and to the financial power of American banks[.]

 

Prime example of self-harm unfolding. Within hours of Blinkie’s (US Sec of State) departure:-

Egyptian parliament approves agreement to join the BRICS bank

 

Cairo, Jan 30 (Prensa Latina) The Egyptian Parliament approved an agreement adopted by the Government that allows the country to join the New Development Bank of the BRICS group, the Al-Ahram diary reported.
The vice-president of the Economic Committee of the House of Representatives, Mohamed Abdel-Hamid, affirmed that joining the institution benefits the country.

“We will benefit from the Bank’s financial and technical assistance in areas such as sustainable development, health, infrastructure, transportation, water, and telecommunications,” he said. “It represents a step in the fight against the dollarization phenomenon and opens up new markets for Egypt’s agricultural and industrial products,” he said.

Legislator Mervat Mattar, stated that “the BRICS group is an important forum that can divert the course of the international economy from US and dollar dominance.” He also welcomed the Russian central bank’s decision a week ago to add the Egyptian pound to its list of foreign currencies exchangeable for rubles.

Last December, the Egyptian Council of Ministers announced its decision to join the BRICS, after a proposal by President Abdel Fatah El-Sissi.

The addition of Egypt will also relieve the state budget of the pressure to find dollars to meet imports because members of that bank can use their national currencies in bilateral trade, he said.[.] (emphasis added)

LINK

 

BRICS founding members: Brazil Russia India China South Africa

Have you read the list of countries applying for BRICS membership?

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Morocco, Mexico, Iran, Argentina, Uruquay are among some 22 countries named to date.

Chicken with Olives and Feta Cheese

Chicken with Olives and Feta Cheese 1 of 1 600x900 1
Chicken with Olives and Feta Cheese 1 of 1 600×900 1

 Ingredients
  • 2 pounds chicken thighs with skin and bones
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 cup chopped onion
  • 2 large garlic cloves, chopped
  • 1 (14 1/2) ounce can diced tomatoes in juice
  • 3/4 cup Kalamata olives or other brine cured black olives, pitted, sliced
  • 1/2 cup dry red wine
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano or 2 teaspoons dried
  • 2/3 cup crumbled feta cheese

Instructions

  1. Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper. Heat oil in large skillet over medium high heat. Add chicken and sauté until brown, about 4 minutes per side. Transfer chicken to plate. Pour off all but 2 tablespoons drippings from skillet. Add onion to drippings in skillet.
  2. Sauté over medium heat 3 minutes. Add garlic and stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add tomatoes with juices, olives, wine and oregano.
  3. Return chicken and any accumulated juices to sauce; bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium low, cover and simmer until chicken is tender and cooked through, about 25 minutes.
  4. Transfer chicken and sauce to platter. Sprinkle with feta cheese and serve.

Yield: 6 servings

What’s It Like To Live In Finland, The Happiest Country In The World

Man, oh man! The United States is going full-on Mad Max…

Geo-Politics, out of the USA, is just a bunch of rich kids who inherited money, or got it easily and know nothing about diplomacy. Meanwhile the rest of the world are cautiously waiting for the Untied States to bleed out… finally.

It seems like a lot of bad stuff is up ahead. But, that is an illusion.

It’s going to be some uncomfortable contractions. But not catastrophic change. So relax on that account.

Keep in mind the basics…

  • Community
  • Local skills
  • Rufus and smiles
  • Network
  • Garden
  • Alternative transportation, and power.

Northwest Sweet Cherry Pie

Nothing kicks off the holiday season quite like a fresh Northwest Sweet Cherry Pie straight from the oven!

northwest sweet cherry pie
northwest sweet cherry pie

Ingredients

  • 2 pie crusts, prepared
  • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 2 tablespoons cherry juice, reserved from pitting (fresh) or from rinsing/rehydrating (preserved)
  • 7 cups (pitted) sweet cherries
  • 3/4 – 1 cup coconut sugar
  • 1 tablespoon almond extract or bourbon-vanilla bean infusion

Instructions

  1. Using a fork, whisk together the cherry water and cornstarch in a small bowl, then set aside.
  2. Stem and pit the cherries, if not already done.
  3. Fill pie dish with cherries and blend the remaining volume (about 2 cups or 1/4 the total volume) into a puree. Pour the remaining whole cherries into a mixing bowl and return to the refrigerator (if using frozen cherries).
  4. Using a heavy-bottom pan, gently heat the puree and sugar over low heat until the volume has reduced by 1/3 to 1/2. Constantly stir across the bottom to prevent burning.
  5. Once reduced, remove from the heat and stir in the cornstarch slurry until the mix regains translucency. Gently and briefly reheat if needed. Stir in the extract and let the mixture cool to room temperature.
  6. Pour the cooled mixture over the whole cherries, gently stirring to incorporate. Pour the final cherry mixture into a 9 or 10-inch prepared pie crust, and top with a second crust. Pinch, crimp and vent the top crust. Brush with a beaten egg if so desired and sprinkle lightly with coconut sugar.
  7. Bake at 375 degrees F for 55-60 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown and the filling is steadily bubbling. Aluminum foil may be used around the crust edges to prevent browning during the second half of the bake.
  8. Transfer the pie to a cooling rack, and most importantly, allow the pie to cool completely before serving (3-4 hours).

THIS IS GOING TO BE DIFFERENT. LEARNING TO LIVE WITH CHINESE POWER.

Hugh White is addressing quite skillfully but also assertively the 
central emotivo-cognitive dissonance lived by the majority of the 
Australian people and I would venture to extend it to most Westerners.

The title of Hugh White's video on Youtube : THIS IS GOING TO BE 
DIFFERENT. LEARNING TO LIVE WITH CHINESE POWER.

Hugh White, definitely not the average Westerner, was spot on.

I noticed that the title appearing during the lecture is a tad different
 : instead of DIFFERENT, we have INTERESTING.

IT'S GONNA BE DIFFERENT or INTERESTING (for sure !!!)

A GROUP ON THIS PLANET CALLED THE CHINESE HAS TRUE POWER. The kind of 
power the Western ruling class had exclusively for the last 2 centuries.

THE WEST IS GONNA HAVE TO LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT. And I predict that it 
will be a quite steep learning curve...

Not being the average Westerner, Hugh White truly understands, in spite 
of inevitable ups and downs, that China will not collapse soon and the 
CPC (the Communist Party of China) will not be overthrown by the Chinese
 in the foreseeable future.

I also like very much the less official CCP (the Chinese Civilization 
Party) coined by Professor Kishore Mabhubani and promoted 
enthusiastically if not wildly by me.

I dare predict that the CPC/CCP will last 350 to 400 years minimum.

The Red Dynasty ruling nowadays from Beijing is a great one, its first 
73 years (1949-2022) having all the hallmarks of a great Chinese 
Dynasty. Anecdotally, its founding father Mao Zedong was from a peasant 
family, like Liu Bang (Gao Zu 高 祖 Lofty Founding Ancestor of the great 
Han Dynasty) and Zhu Yuanzhang (Tai Zu 太 祖  Supreme Progenitor of the 
shining Ming Dynasty). A great Chinese Dynasty usually lasts 300 to 400 
years.

For those who might be shocked that I call the CPC/CCP the Red Dynasty, I
 would like to offer this down-to-earth and incontrovertible fact : the 
Chinese soldiers, sailors, airmen swear their oath of loyalty to the 
CPC/CCP, not to the Chinese Nation or to any other institution. The 
Chinese military men in the past also swore their oath of loyalty to the
 Emperor and to the Imperial House. As in all truly top-down societies, 
the military men are the servants of the group at the very top of the 
Chinese society at a given period of China's journey, those capable to 
understand deeply that China is an Eternal Idea having espoused History :
 the timocratic men (motivated by justice & honor) and the 
aristocratic men (motivated by discovery, inventivity, creativity and 
playful exploration); not the plutocratic men (motivated by profits, 
wealth and power) and certainly not the democratic men (motivated by 
hedonism, lex talionis, tribal affinities and their understanding of the
 inner and outer realities limited to senses perceptions).

But I added "minimum". Why ?
Because the present rejuvenated, meritocratic, authoritarian and 
paternalistic Confucian-style ruling class is much much much more 
capable to receive criticisms and suggestions from, to talk to, to 
discuss with the Chinese population (a more educated Chinese population 
much more capable having elaborate and fruitful dialogues with their 
rulers) than the former Chinese Emperors assisted by their meritocratic 
bureaucracy and a much smaller group of scholars/literati from the 
general population.

For the Chinese still wanting to protest, I remind everyone there are 
about 500 authorized public protests everyday in Mainland China seen as a
 legit mode of communication between the Chinese and their rulers.

That is precisely the core reason for the return of the Classical 
Education and Confucianism (+ the indispensable techno-scientific 
training, needless to say) in China. An endeavor favored and promoted by
 many in the ruling class but especially by State Councilor Wang Huning,
 the no 4 of the present Politburo Standing Committee (2022-2027).

Yes, "authoritarian" and "paternalistic" are not dirty words, at least 
not for me. The Chinese and the Asian societies
were and are archetypically top-down societies with a benevolent 
proclivity coming from the integrated teachings of Confucianism, 
Buddhism, Daoism. The integrated 三 教 (San Jiao : Three Teachings) were 
already a social reality pervasively present in all the layers of the 
Chinese society at least from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). It's true 
that if someone wished a career in the Imperial administration, 
Confucianism was a must but the general representation of the world in 
everyday life was buttressed by the INTEGRATED Three Teachings. And even
 under the rule of the CPC/CCP, that Weltanschauung is still valid. An 
authoritarian and paternalistic ruling class is not necessarily evil 
when a serious epistemological program is offered to ALL for 
self-improvement, learning skills, climbing the social ladder and 
contributing to the Nation.

Not forgetting the ongoing serious efforts to curb down corruption.

Not everything was dandy during the Chinese Empire, needless to say, but
 it was the most prosperous place on Earth for many many centuries 
before the arrival of the most nefarious KFC-AZAEL (Kakistocratic Feudal
 Conglomerate of the Anglo-Zio-American EstabLishment), not forgetting 
the Chinese complacency and decadence during the nineteenth century, 
obviously the root cause, the arrival of the most criminal KFC-AZAEL 
being only the triggering event.

It might be unfair to use vague umbrella concepts like the Westerners or
 the collective West (~12% of the global population). A fair question 
would be : is there truly a collective West ? Is it so uniform ? Is it 
so monolithic ?

I will try to be more precise in the expression of my thoughts.

So, in continuity with Pepe Escobar's trilogy concerning the 
irreplaceable trio CHINA-RUSSIA-IRAN which rightfully stressed that 
those three nations, that I personally label with the grandiose name 
Nations-Empires-Civilizations (NEC), are at the center of the unraveling
 of the colonization era made essentially by the most atrocious 
KFC-AZAEL (Kakistocratic Feudal Conglomerate of the Anglo-Zio-American 
EstabLishment).

I want to say that the West in question here is the colonial West, 
essentially expressed by the 2 contemporary forms of economic 
neo-colonialism and a most psycho-rigid mentality having at its core an 
unwarranted superiority complex. (eg, Josep Borrell's archetypical 
statement on "the Garden" vs "the Jungle". This example illustrates an 
extremely gross case, it might be much more subtler, obviously...). 
Let's not forget some extremely deep-rooted bad habits (and old habits 
die hard, to say the least) we call in this group the 6 E:
E.xpansionism, E.xtraction, E.xpropriation, E.nslavement, 
E.xtermination, E.vangelism.

Hugh White had the common sense to add at the end that China's return is
 not necessarily a threat to the USA's general interests. Of course, if 
the present US ruling class (the KFC-AZAEL : the Kakistocratic Feudal 
Conglomerate of the Anglo-Zio-American EstabLishment) adamantly desires a
 true global empire, China's return will definitely hobble that wild 
ambition but if the KFC-AZAEL is capable to be sincerely satisfied 
(satisfied or not satisfied...that is the question !!!...😉 ) with a 
regional empire (and frankly a big one !!! So they will still be at a 
quite exalted position in the global pecking order...), or in more 
refined/diplomatic words, a big zone of direct influence, China's return
 is not an obstacle at all.

The irreplaceable trio CHINA-RUSSIA-IRAN (that I promote unremittingly) 
is the comprehensive coalition of the last 3 
Nations-Empires-Civilizations (NEC) on Earth. If the USA cannot live 
with the option of being a truly big regional empire (even only paying 
lip service hypocritically for the time being because let's be lucid, 
the KFC-AZAEL will not be destroyed so easily), the 3 NECs will have to 
increase the PAIN-FEAR dial to make it understand that the global 
colonization era is really ending.

Phir Milate Hain ! Quan

https://youtu.be/t2396jbJjP0

Congressman Announces Investigation of Gen. Mark Milley and Nancy Pelosi

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Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona is leading the charge for Republicans in launching an investigation into General Mark Milley and Nancy Pelosi.

On January 7th Gosar tweeted

“Remember – we will conduct a real investigation into J6. The effort to attempt a coup between traitor Gen. Mark Milley and Pelosi will be reviewed and exposed.”

Gosar would continue

“Milleys treasonous sell-out to China will be investigated. Pelosi not warning members about intel of impending violence will be exposed.”

Gosar would continue his series of tweets by writing

“soon, we’ll know the truth.”

5 People Reveal What’s It Like To Live In Finland, The Happiest Country In The World

 

1. In Finland, things just simply work, promises are kept, life can be planned ahead and people keep their distance. It’s perfect. The darkness before the snow comes is pretty depressing, but it’s the cost of not having that many people around, and I’m willing to pay.

I’m not exactly a world traveler (and won’t be until they come up with carbon neutral airplanes) but from what I’ve seen, the only places I would live in besides Finland is Sweden or Norway. And even then I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t fit in as well as I do in Finland.

When I have gone south, the absence of forests somehow beats me down. Then I see the society and all the things that are better in the Nordics.

In Finland, even the poorest live in better conditions than I did when I was a child, and my childhood wasn’t bad at all, at least terms of being fed, clothed, kept warm and dry or gadgeted.

You just need to go to Germany and see street prostitutes, people living in very bad conditions, doing work but not making enough for food, and bad infrastructure.

I visited Spain two years ago, and oh dear. Not a single elevator in the metro stations of Barcelona was working, so any disabled or stroller pushing people were denied of public transportation. A lot of people were living on the streets, and I didn’t even have to see the living and working conditions of the immigrants in the fruit farms. And this was inside the relative safety and living standards of EU – I’m not even going to talk about what I saw in Thailand or Russia.

The rich have it good everywhere. With money, you can afford what the state doesn’t supply, be it housing, medical care, mobility, security, whatever.

But in Finland, even the rich use public medical care, because it’s that good. People leave their houses unlocked, because there are so little desperate people to burglar around. There isn’t a real class society (yet). We take so good care of our poor, that we can afford the luxury of not fearing each other. I feel bad looking at human suffering or environmental damage, and that is a big reason for me not to travel.

I haven’t looked at how they measured the happiness rating, but my guess is that because Finland takes care of everybody, a bigger portion of the people are happy, not just the rich.

We still have poverty, and even though the relative conditions our our poor are better than.. anywhere else really, they still feel unhappiness because they feel shunned upon and disconnected from society. This can be worked on, however, and it’s much easier to make people feel accepted and connected when the problem of organizing running water, heat and electricity has been solved half a century ago.

2. I find living in Finland quite peaceful and safe. Some may regard it also boring and lame (some comments I’ve read), but to me Finland means the life where I don’t have to worry for my life in the very basic level. This society won’t let anybody starve or freeze.

Finland is estimated to be the most stable country in the world. To me it tells that we have done something right, despite our current economic problems.

This is a society where everything is negotiated, different parties can express their views and the power is balanced so that any party can’t dominate the political field. Politicians are used to compromise with their adversaries. That’s why the Finnish politics may seem a bunch of horse trading. Always when you get something you must give something.

This prevents sudden changes in the society, causing as well stability as rigidity.

I think that most Finns like to live a pretty peaceful and quiet life. We are not a nation of big dramas either in politics or personal life. And this is probably what some regard boring.

I think that this is one of the middle-class societies: we put an effort to raise poorer people to the middle-class and since a big part of it is funded by the proggressive taxation, our filthy rich elite is quite small – and I guess they are not very rich in the international comparison.

3. As far as living in Finland, it all depends on which part. Northern Finland(Lapland) is dark and cold in winter, but it does have it’s beauty with the Northern Lights and the landscape. Avoid Kemi, depressing town. The more south you go the less long dark winters. I loved Vaasa, and I love Espoo too.

From an American ex pat perspective there are differences. Typical apartment bathrooms do not come with bath tubs, and there is nothing to separate the shower floor from the rest of the bathroom so you have to sweep the water to the drain. If you have a shower closet, those are quite small for the avg American. Everything is in smaller scale here. If you are over 6 foot tall the beds can be a problem.. Public laundrymats are unheard of. I know one place in Helsinki that is coin operated. Most apartment blocks have their own laundry rooms, and almost all apartments have hook ups for washers in the bathrooms. About 50% of apartments have clothes dryers. We are lucky that the owner included a washer dryer tower in our unit.

Mass transportation here in the metro area is excellent. You can get almost anywhere in minutes. It will be even more so once the metro extension to Matinkylä is completed. Our shops close at early hours, very rare to find markets or pharmacies open 24 hours. I can think of one or two in Helsinki.

Crime is very low. I feel very safe walking around at night time here. Because of the dark winters it is common to be out at night. There is a growing international presence in Finland. Because of the educated populace many companies are moving here to take advantage of the talented and skilled work force.

Learning Finnish is very hard. For native English speakers it is especially challenging. At some point it is good also to know Swedish because it is one of the official languages. Mainly in cities such as Vaasa, and parts of Espoo. Next year I will begin to tackle Swedish.

Ice hockey is HUGE here. Also a sport called salibandy (floorball). track and field is big. Finland is into fitness, but we do have our share of couch potatoes. Finland is one of the top consumers of coffee and also milk.

Finland has a very good social system, but our taxes are very high. Finland is one of the least, if not THE least corrupt nation in the planet. You can not run a social system successfully if you are corrupt. Also the success of our social system is due in part because Finland is a small country. The way we do things here is just not scale-able to a country of over 300 million.

4. Finland is well organised. Everything works, new technologies are used to the full and schedules are taken seriously.

Snow gets ploughed on streets and airports during the night for buses and planes to keep to the timetables in the morning, EU regulations are meticulously applied and officials can be trusted.

Maternity leave topped with the annual four weeks’ holiday adds up to eleven months, which can be divided between both parents and you can stay at home taking care of the baby till its third birthday and prefering to return to work or to study you are guaranteed a daycare place for the child.

Because of the relatively new independence ( Finland will turn 100 next year) Finns are patriotic and quite supportive of the national defence. The whole age class takes part in military service, women voluntarily.

Finns are work-oriented and even though not spending as many hours working (theoretically 37.5 hours/week), they are efficient and concientious.

To set the balance, they use about the same amount of alcohol as their fellow Europeans, but have their weekly dose concentrated to the weekend often with the aim of getting drunk.

The labour day, which is celebrated on 1st May together with the students’ Vappu celebration of the beginning of the summer season and use of the white student cap is a very wet party taking place on the streets and parks of the University cities.

A very different, although hardly drier celebration is Juhannus, Midsummer, around the 24th June, when cities are deserted and the longest day of the year is spent in the summer cottages grilling sausage and taking a plunge in one of the 187 888 lakes after sauna.

Drunkenness is not considered a social embarassment. Alcohol (over 6 %) is a state monopoly only sold in Alko stores to majors (>18). Nevertheless also teens drink alot.

Finns feel emotional about sports and are among the best sport audiences, turning up in crowds, which has together with the organizational capacities won Finland the management of many international championships. Not enthusiastic about football,which they are notoriously bad at, but field sports ( long distance, javelin), ice hockey and the motorsports.

The arts, theatre and opera are considerably less popular and favored mainly by the women. The construction of the new opera house of Helsinki was strongly opposed in the 1980’s as expensive and elitistic, even though Finland has produced a proportionally high amount of top conductors (Berglund, Salonen, Oramo, Saraste, Mälkki) and very good contemporary composers ( Sallinen, Kokkonen, Rautavaara, Lindberg, Saariaho).

5. This is the common man’s version of what’s it like…

Just yesterday, I went to a river near my house, took a dip in freezing cold water and went under the sun. In a few minutes, I was dry like new.

Summers are amazing in Finland. Short but amazing. The other day, I took a 5 Euro rent a cycle and completed the entire stretch surrounding the lake near by. And then took a nap under the trees. It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

Getting on to a healthy life style here is easy. There are walking and cycling paths everywhere. You can walk how much ever you want, any time any day, no one to bother. Some times I just take a bus to a distant place and walk all the way back. It’s fun.

Finland is not “touristy” kind of beauty. It will not just amaze you the moment you enter it. It’s grows onto you. After a few days of living, you will start enjoying the “not-so-flashy” things like the fresh fruit markets, the open air concerts, the bicycle rides, a nap in the park, international sports events, beer and food festivals.

In a way, Finland made me feel more connected to nature. You can run in the forest whenever you want. You can swim in the lake. You can go for fishing. Most of times you will see families spending time with their kids, pets, listening to live music, playing guitar, going for a walk – having a great time with simple things in life.

Many times, I feel like I live in a big village. A few weeks before, me and my wife were coming back to our home quite after midnight. We just chose a spot on the way and were talking for few hours. At no point we felt threatened or scared. We were just talking as if it’s in our courtyard.

Many of the people usually focus on the Winters of Finland. Yes, winters are cold, it can be depressing. But the summers make it worth while.

Once it snows, even winters can be fun. You can go for saunas, ice swimming or a walk on the lake (yes on the lake!)

If you have never been to Finland, plan for a month’s stay in smaller cities like Tampere during summer. You will not regret it.

Bizarre Paintings Of Mecha Robots And Werewolves Attacking East European Peasants Of The Early 20th Century

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The Polish artist Jakub Rozalski, who goes by the sobriquet “Mr. Werewolf,” has produced an amusing series of steampunk-ish canvases in which serene and idyllic rustic landscapes of what seem to be Eastern Europe (Rozalski’s very back yard, you might say) in the early decades of the 20th century feature the prominent and inexplicable existence of completely fictitious giant mecha robots.

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Various iconographies are jammed together, the imagery of peasant life in the early years of collectivization, the imagery of science fiction, the imagery of modern warfare…. add it all up and you might find yourself calling to mind, ohhh, the first few scenes of The Empire Strikes Back, set on the icy terrain of Hoth, perhaps?

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Rozalski’s intent is “to commemorate this sad and tragic period in history, in my own way, to light on this parts of history that usually remain in the shadows of other events… remember and honor the history, but live in the present.” He adds, “I like to mix historical facts and situations with my own motives, ideas and visions. … I attach great importance to the details, the equipment, the costumes, because it allows you to embed painting within a specified period of time.”

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The World of Scythe is a beautiful 105-page art book showcasing the work of Jakub Rozalski for the board game Scythe, one of the most successful games ever funded on Kickstarter. The book was only made available to backers during the Kickstarter campaign, and is now only available on ArtStation Shop.

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Howling at the Moon, a new book published in cooperation with Artstation, will transport fans into Jakub Rozalski’s mysterious worlds where history, folklore, and modernity harmoniously clash. Inspired by traces of imagination from his childhood on the Polish countryside, his incredibly breathtaking and unique artwork will pull you into his alternate fantastic worlds filled with colossal giants, ominous machines, werewolves, lonely wanderers and rural landscapes. Artwork is complemented by sectional text in English and Polish. Fans can learn more about the artist in the interview text in English and Polish. Renowned Director and Designer Brent Ashe has crafted every aspect of Howling at the Moon’s presentation to make it an art experience satisfying collectors with a fine eye. The special edition includes a stunning bold hardcover slipcase and an envelope of 6 exclusive prints. Digital art enthusiasts will also enjoy learning more about the artist’s creation process in tutorials at the end of the book.

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Blond Texas Sheet Cake with
Caramel-Pecan Frosting

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Ingredients

Cake

  • 1 (18.25 ounce) box white cake mix
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 1/3 cup butter, melted
  • 4 egg whites
  • 1/4 teaspoon almond extract

Frosting

  • 1 cup chopped pecans
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 cup light brown sugar
  • 1/3 cup buttermilk
  • 2 cups confectioners’ sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/4 teaspoon almond extract

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. To make the cake, beat the cake mix, buttermilk, butter, egg whites and almond extract together with an electric mixer at low speed for 2 minutes or until blended. Pour batter into a 15 x 10-inch jellyroll pan.
  3. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan on a wire rack for 2 hours.
  4. To make the frosting, place chopped pecans in a single layer in a shallow pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 6 minutes or until lightly toasted.
  5. Bring butter and brown sugar to a boil in a 3 1/2-quart saucepan over medium heat, whisking constantly, about 2 minutes. Remove from heat and slowly whisk in buttermilk.
  6. Return mixture to heat and bring to a boil. Pour into bowl of a heavy-duty stand mixer. Gradually add powdered sugar and vanilla and almond extracts, beating at medium-high speed until smooth. Stir in pecans.
  7. Pour immediately over cooled cake in pan and spread quickly to cover cake.

Serves 12.

Confessions Of A Golden Gate Bridge Jumper AND Survivor

 

What was so bad in your life that got you to the point of jumping?

It was a number of things! I’ve struggled with debilitating pain since I was 13 and depression, anxiety, and complex PTSD since I was 15 so that’s what the suicidal ideation was but two weeks before my psychiatrist at the time doubled my antidepressants (very bad idea) which threw me into a manic episode. I ended up dropping my savings on tattoos and then jumping off the bridge in a week.

Was there any particular reason why you chose the Golden Gate bridge?

I chose the Golden Gate Bridge first because of how effective I perceived it to be. The second reason is because my family wouldn’t have to deal with my body, I assumed only the Coast Guard would (also not true) don’t do it guys.

Did you hesitate or just go for the jump?

I didn’t hesitate I was afraid someone was going to notice me.

How long did it take to hit the water?

Seconds

What was going through your mind during the fall?

I didn’t really have any fully formed thoughts. I was feeling a lot.

How did you land in the water?

The wind turned me in the air so I landed slanted primarily on my left ankle which is why the most severe damage was to my ankle and the least severe was to my back.

What happened when you hit the water?

It’s like hitting cement. Pain was pretty much all I felt. I dissociated pretty heavily until I arrived at the hospital (and went into surgery immediately) but at no point did I lose consciousness.

When was the moment you realized “oh fuck I lived”

When I hit the water for sure. I processed the pain and then thought fuck I don’t want to drown.

You must be a fantastic swimmer

Hahaha once your body hits the water though there’s no way to move at all. I did it during the middle of the day with the intention to die on impact so when I didn’t a boat just ended up picking me up.

How did the boat come across you in the water? How did they get you on the boat?

They saw me when I fell because they were nearby. I’m pretty sure they threw something and then grabbed me but I don’t remember very well. I was dissociating a lot and my memory is spotty.

Do you know how long it took from when you jumped until the boat picked you up?

I didn’t have much of a conception of time so I couldn’t say for sure but not very long. I was treading water in the bay while bleeding with broken bones so it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes

What are the odds, you are so lucky, how far did you fall and did you get injured?

Yeah there’s like a 2% survival rate? The fall is 200 some odd feet. I shattered my ankle. Tore my perineum (requiring a colostomy bag and surgery though not as much as the ankle) and got compression fractures in my back.

I can’t imagine the pain

I couldn’t either. It was like nothing you could even grasp. Though the bone infection I got from my first ankle surgery was worse than impact I think

I read an article by someone else who survived the same jump. He said the moment he jumped he regretted the decision. Did you feel the same way?

No. I felt immediate relief. That was likely one of the reasons I survived because my body was very relaxed upon impact.

Could you explain the feeling of falling 200 feet? What could you compare it to?

The actual sensation of falling is pretty much like you’d expect. Like the out of control feeling when you trip but you can’t catch yourself but all you can see around you is water coming closer.

Did you realize at any point that all of your problems were fixable?

It was more of a gradual thing. I had really severe pain before my attempt and that wasn’t going away soon so I knew my shit wasn’t that flexible but I knew I needed to learn to cope because I couldn’t do that to my family again.

Who would you have missed the most?

I would have missed my family, the earth, and my future the most.

How did your friends and loved ones react?

With compassion and love and grief.

How are you doing today?

A lot better. Still struggling with my mental health but my medication is stable so now so am I.

Do you regret jumping?

That’s kind of a hard one. I try not to regret anything that made me who I am today. I think it was probably necessary for my path to recovery. I do however regret the trauma it caused my loved ones and the fucking medical bills.

Do you have a any long term injury from the fall?

I will never be able to walk normally. My left ankle has been fused after like ten fucking surgeries. I had a colostomy bag for five months but thankfully that’s been reversed. I broke my back too so there’s been pain and I’m not sure how longterm that is. Every person I know who has attempted said their body was just so dramatically aged in the process and that was my experience is.

Do you think, knowing what you know now, that you’d ever let your metal health get to that point again or would you reach out?

At this place in my life I have the tools (therapy, meds, a good support system) to reach out when things get bad before I get unsafe. I have a hard time with the word “let” because I feel like there’s the implication that it’s within someone’s control? Or implied fault somehow? I’m responsible for my actions (as we all are) but mental illness is a hard situation. I’m not in control of how bad it gets I can only control how I respond to it if that makes sense.

If you had died on that day, what have you experienced since then that you would have missed out on?

Honestly after this I put so much time and energy into recovery and I have gotten so far. I have started going to school for nursing and am in a beautiful housing situation with my best friend. I ended falling in love with myself and the world again as corny as it sounds. My insights are meditation is really important and therapy should be accessible and available to all.

Grocery Stores In New York City Are Considering Locking Up Food Because Theft Has Become So Rampant

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Food has become a prime target for thieves, and that should deeply alarm all of us.

Once upon a time, shoplifting was a minor nuisance for most retailers in the United States.  But today the game has completely changed.

Highly organized gangs of thieves are systematically looting stores all over the country, and this is costing retailers billions upon billions of dollars.

Authorities call it “organized retail crime”, but I call it complete and utter lawlessness.

Wild Wild West. A period of the complete collapse of society. -MM

When you have large groups of people storming retail stores all over the nation on a regular basis, that is a major crisis.

Originally, a lot of these gangs were primarily targeting goods that could be resold on the Internet very easily.  But now a lot of grocery stores are being targeted, and food is being stolen on a scale that we have never seen before.

In New York City, things have gotten so bad that some stores are thinking of implementing dramatic measures.  The following comes from a Fox News article entitled “NYC grocery stores consider locking up food due to rampant theft; workers are ‘traumatized’”

Shampoo, toothpaste, and razor blades are all items that grocery stores have increasingly started locking behind counters. Soon, that list might include food.

“People have no fear of coming to your store and stealing,” said Nelson Eusebio of the National Supermarket Association.

“Our employees are terrified,” Eusebio continued. “We have young people that come to work, young cashiers who work part-time, these kids are 16-17 years old. They’re traumatized.”

When I first started warning that we are becoming a “Mad Max society”, a lot of people thought that I was exaggerating.

Sadly, the breakdown of law and order just continues to accelerate in many of our largest cities.  In fact, it is being reported that grand larcenies “were up 80% in New York City last year”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has made a point of combating the repeat offenses. “Criminals believe our criminal justice system is a joke,” Adams said in comments referring to a serial intruder who was arrested and released 26 times. 

“Those arrested for grand larceny go to court, get released and on their way home from court, they’re doing another grand larceny.”

According to the New York Police Department, grand larcenies, thefts of over $1,000, were up 80% in New York City last year.

Only an 80 percent increase?

Yes, that sounds perfectly “normal” to me.

In other areas of the country, shortages are the big news right now.

I never imagined that Costco would totally run out of eggs in early 2023, but this has actually happened at many of their stores.

 

As I discussed yesterday, bird flu is one of the factors that is causing supplies of eggs to get tighter.

But as the farmer in this video explains, it is certainly not the only factor.

 

No matter how high interest rates go, people still need to eat.

So the Federal Reserve can hike rates to the moon, but food prices are still going to remain ridiculously high.

However, higher rates will crush many other areas of the economy, and some of the biggest names in the corporate world are now conducting mass layoffs

Goldman Sachs is just the latest firm to reduce its size in recent months. Morgan Stanley announced that it would cut two percent of its staff in December, Amazon plans to cut over 18,000 jobs, and Salesforce announced it would cut ten percent of its workforce and close some offices last week.

While white collar workers were less affected by the COVID-19 pandemic lock-downs than their blue collar counterparts, many jobs were simply done remote instead of being cut, professionals are now bearing the brunt of the economic headwinds America faces.

When are people going to finally understand that we have a major league crisis on our hands?

  • When Goldman Sachs lays off large numbers of workers, that is a red flag.
  • When Morgan Stanley lays off large numbers of workers, that is a red flag.
  • When Amazon lays off large numbers of workers, that is a red flag.
  • Facebook, Twitter, McDonald’s and Walmart are also laying off workers.

As they used to say in the 1980s, it is time to wake up and smell the coffee.

At this point things are so grim that the World Bank is warning that the entire global economy could plunge into a recession this year…

The global economy is just one more knock away from a second recession in the same decade, something that hasn’t happened in more than 80 years.

That’s the latest warning from the World Bank, which on Tuesday sharply lowered its forecast for global economic growth.

As economic conditions deteriorate, people are going to become increasingly desperate.

And desperate people do desperate things.

So if you think that organized retail theft is bad now, just wait until you see what is ahead.

The social deterioration that we have been witnessing over the past several years will soon accelerate significantly, and that is really bad news for all of us.

Many retail stores on both coasts have already closed due to the epidemic of theft that we are experiencing, and a whole lot more will soon be permanently shut down.

We really are in the process of becoming a “Mad Max society”, and we only have ourselves to blame.

4K 60Fps Video Shows Colorized Footage Of NYC In 1911

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Video editor Denis Shiryaev recently shared a video on his Youtube channel that shows colorized footage of New York City in 1911. The video is a restored version of the footage previously shared by a Swedish film crew from Svenska Biografteatern, which showed an old film slowed down to a natural rate with added sound for ambiance.

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Shiryaev worked on that source video and turned it into a 4K HD masterpiece that really brings the atmosphere from more than a century ago closer to us today.

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Along with the video, Shiryaev wrote: “Restored with neural networks 1911 New York footage taken by the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern on a trip to America: ✔ FPS boosted to 60 frames per second; ✔ Image resolution boosted up to 4k; ✔ Resorted video sharpness; ✔ Colorized – I am still unsure about this, but regarding to high request from the subscribers decided to test DeOldify NN on this video.”

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Genuine Texas Chili Bread

bread
bread

Ingredients

  • 3/4 cup hot salsa
  • 1/4 cup onions, chopped
  • 1/8 cup hot pepper sauce
  • 1 egg
  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 2 teaspoons granulated sugar
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 cup mashed kidney or pinto beans
  • 3 teaspoons fresh jalapeno, seeded and chopped (about 4 peppers)
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons yeast

Instructions

  1. Place all ingredients in bread pan, select a light crust setting, and press “start”.

Confessions Of A Not-So-Well Endowed Man

 

How small is your penis?

It is an innie when soft. Erect, and this was before the addition of all my extra weight, I’m a whopping 3 1/4 inches long (and that was pushing the ruler in as deep as I could) and under an inch in diameter which means short and very skinny.

Does it fit inside a condom?

I haven’t found a condom yet that isn’t like sticking my dick in a sandwich bag. They are that loose.

How old were you when you realized you were different? Were your parents supportive?

I kind of started to realize in high school, and that was during the early 90’s. I wound up seeing a Hustler or Swank or something and was horrified at the difference between me and guys in there. I started noticing bulges on guys at school and I had none. I’ve never talked about it with my parents but they really botches the whole sex thing and had me convinced that if I even kissed a girl I would go to jail for rape.

Ever tried penis enlargement pills or a pump? Did it help even temporarily?

I haven’t tried pills. All the science says they don’t work. The pump didn’t do much except swell it a little and it was very temporary.

I read somewhere that micro penis can be fixed slightly with an operation. is this true?

The operation involves snipping the tendon at the base of the penis. This lets it extend about another inch, but you also loose some of the ability for it to stick out perpendicular to your body. It is generally considered not worth doing.

Silicone injections look like a horror show and that just does width.

I have had to accept I just have to use what I have.

Is it hard to masturbate? Like can you use your whole hand? or just the thumb and pointer finger?

Yeah, thumb and pointer mostly and that is while laying back. I usually use a massager with a vibrating ball and it works pretty well. It gives me some extra reach and feels good at the same time.

Are you afraid to pee in public restrooms? Does the thought of it being seen terrify you in any way? What do you hate most about your condition?

It’s not that bad as long as there are stalls with a door. Otherwise I hold it and find facilities elsewhere. I have an amazing ability to hold urine.

What I hate most is the social stigma attached to having a small penis. The world pretty much considers you worthless.

Do you ever walk around with a strap on?

I have thought about it but never done it.

What was your first sexual experience like? How did she react?

College. Me 21, her 18. I had no self confidence as I had been rejected recently by two girls I had fallen hard for, and right in a row. So, we dated for a couple weeks and while we were watching a movie one night I heard her sigh in frustration and she grabbed my hand and put it on her boob. We finally moved to the bedroom and we fooled around for a while and then she put her hand in my pants and said, “Oh, its so….um…..hard.” She rubbed me for a while but it didn’t go anywhere and we went to sleep. Dumped me a couple days later.

Was that the worst? Are there any that really stick with you?

Yeah, it was the worst and I didn’t have another one until I was 29. However, I wound up with a totally psycho chick that litarlly only wanted oral. So 5 months of me eating her out and then her blowing me and swallowing. EVERY NIGHT. She was also on some sort of heavy birth control so no cycle. It was GLORIOUS….until the psycho came out.

How did you meet your wife react and how did she react upon finding out?

The internet is an amazing thing. As I basically became a hermit after college, staying online when I wasn’t at work, I started webcamming on places like Webcamnow. I would just sit there broadcasting my micropenis and some random women would start talking to me. I found out that there was a rather large group of women that like small penises. I had a hell of a lot of really hot cam on cam and phone sex over the years.

I met my wife online so she actually saw it by camera first and she likes the small size. It fits her mouth perfectly and she had a bad vaginal tear at some point that required surgery so she is extremely tight for a normal penis but perfect for mine.

Do you often attempt penetration with your wife?

Not often, maybe twice a month or so. But, we have lots of toys and the Hitachi magic wand has become her personal savior.

Penetration is really only possible with her laying on her back on the edge of the bed and me standing on the floor.

How exactly do the mechanics of sex work when you can’t penetrate that deeply? I imagine it’s kind of difficult.

My wife is the only woman I’ve had intercourse with so she technically took my virginity. The position we discovered that works well is with her on her back on the edge of the bed with her legs pulled back and me standing on the floor. It gets in and actually gives her pleasure because of prior vaginal surgery that makes her very tight.

The trick though is a Hitachi Magic Wand. We wedge it between us after she gets excited enough and orgasms just roll out. She usually stops after around 10 or so.

Side note – Anal is impossible for us. So many men are always going on about how they want anal and can’t get it. For us, my wife wants it and I can’t give it to her so she has to rely on her buttplugs for that.

I would say nothing is holding you guys back from a fantastic sex life.

It really is pretty good. She’s also got a pretty regular cycle so I can guess what days she is in the mood and when she isn’t. It makes things pretty easy and keeps her satisfied.

Are you with your wife because you were physically attracted to her, or because she accepted you?

Very valid question. At first, I was so desperate for companionship, I didn’t care. She was female, alive, and willing to touch me. I literally moved her across the country in the hopes that I might finally lose my virginity. She was willing to move because she was sick of living with her parents.

It was rather awkward in the beginning because while we had talked for over a year, we never got to date. So she would stay shut in her bedroom for the first couple weeks, only to come out and talk occassionally and get meals. Then one night she comes to my room naked and throws me on the bed. She climbed on and took my virginity.

Things improved once that hurdle no longer existed. We found out that we had a lot of common interests. Over a couple years we got to really know each other wound up getting along really well with each others families.

So now, yes, I am physically attracted to her. I also care very much for her and feel protective of her. I know I got very lucky because it was entirely possible that it wouldn’t work out. We beat the odds.

Given that you do have a small penis, but have found a woman so accepting of it, do you feel it’s overrated, having a large penis? What I mean is, is the love in your relationship stronger than feelings of inadequacy?

Yes, our love is stronger and it has greatly lessened my feelings of inadequacy. When you hear most small penis jokes, they still involves a relatively normal size, just on the smaller side. Me however, I was scared to date because if things went well, I couldn’t wear a condom and that whole scenario terrified me. So I just didn’t date and on the rare occasion that I did go out, I just ignored any signals and never let it progress.

I think society’s emphasis on penis size, and looks in general, is one of our worse attributes. I shudder to think how many people that could have gone on to great things faded away because of their personal inadequacies.

So let’s all hear a few of these highly educated black people have to say about China.

I trust they are qualified to comment unlike those who never stepped into China before and are immensely brainwashed by their own corrupted oligarchic regime who think the entire world revolve around their country thus they are entitled to whatever “exceptionalism” they were babbling about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBb8mWJ0qog

I had tears in my eyes watching this video! The poor cat was just lying there waiting to die – too weak to react when you picked her up. To see her alert and on her feet is amazing. YOU ARE A MIRACLE WORKER!

Warning: HAPPY ENDING!

Top general admits US is preparing a proxy war against China

Todays post is going to be a maze. Please note that at the end is a video about a guy who died, had a NDE and then returned back to life. His story is VERY INTERESTING. I would like for you all to tell me what you think about it.

Heres the thing – the Chinese follow Sun Tzu

Its ingrained in their blood

Not just mainlanders, even Chinese in Malaysia or Singapore – They always have secrets , Nobody knows the real extent of their actions

They always portray a far grimmer situation than what it really is

They always portray more pessimism than what is required

If you read something about their latest technology – trust me its not the latest – its usually at least one generation older

If you read some Chinese talking about how difficult it is to adapt to the Semiconductor Export Control and needing to go through the WHO – Trust me Its mainly an illusion and China have already anticipated this years ago and have a ready strategy. Its all Drama.

If the Chinese are making a lot of noise about India placing missiles on the border and the Agni V etc – They already knew this would happen a year ago and have made plans for the same.

So if you read it in the newspapers – even Chinese newspapers – Its definitely likely to be something China wants you to read.


As the Huawei CEO said – Being Sanctioned is the New Normal for China

You really think China sat down for 3 years after Trumps first actions ????

Of course not.

They would have anticipated far worse and would have acted on those assumptions. You would have shell companies emerging in HK , Singpore, Dubai and all over the world ready for such sanctions. You would have made a lot of worst case scenarios and planned for each one of them.

Huawei regsistered its first EUV Patent for both the Lithography Machine and the UV Tools

The First Nation in History to do so without US Assistance

Guess when they began?

10th November 2018!!!!

They already knew as early as 2018 that one day EUV Technology is going to be restricted and they began to work on the assumption.

They didnt just start this work after Bidens announcements.

Likewise most of their Chip related actions – must have already been anticipated well in advance and China must have worked out strategies for each and every one of them

So now experts estimate that as early as 2025 – China could commercially make EUV Machines that can manufacture < 7 nm Chips .

And if they have an EUV Patent – trust me they have DUV Technology rearing to go

Yet they will pretend to be in deep trouble so that US thinks it has China in a vice and doesnt think of new methods of targeting China. Meanwhile using this- China will make all other deals – like Qatar Gas Security or Saudi Oil Security or Brazilian Food Security.

You think the US is Hostile to China today?

The Chinese Leaders anticpated this day would come at least 15 years ago


So whatever will happen in China – China plays a much tougher game and a game that is usually 20 steps ahead of any other player.

Like i said – China plans for 10 years into the future. They would already be examining things like a Blockade of Malacca Straits, Trade Embargos of Chinese Goods, More Restrictions etc from the United States and how to respond.

Meanwhile the US will be bleeding badly with every such decision – while China pretends to bleed very badly but in fact has anticipated the decision long earlier and has made alternate arrangements

The Next 10 years will thus see China evolve to a very different China. No longer a Sweatshop and a Nation with core technologies and a stronger army than ever before and with a technological base

The US meanwhile will go more unreliable and untrustworthy in the eyes of half the world and would bleed itself dry with these Anti Chinese actions – thinking its hurting the Chinese economy

Then when US is weakened – China will reveal its aces and strike hard and strong

Its Sun Tzu all the time

I am a Black American. I lived in Beijing, China teaching English. I never had any negative interactions with Chinese people. My Chinese co-workers enjoyed working with me. We laughed and played, but still kept our focus on providing an excellent product for our adult students. After work, I enjoyed hanging out with my co-workers.

At my place of work, I taught adult students. Some of them asked me about racism and prejudice toward minorities in the USA. They were very concerned about visiting or moving to a country where they would encounter racism and prejudice. None of my students ever said one negative word about Black people.

In the streets of Beijing, I spent plenty of time walking, taking taxis, riding subways and buses, hanging out at markets and going shopping. I always received excellent treatment from everyone that I interacted with in public. I never felt fear or threatened. I would be outside late at night to go eat. I always felt like another Chinese citizen.

I remember fracturing my toe. I needed to get to the hospital. A Chinese friend of mine was a driver. He saw me in pain trying to get to public transportation. He quickly came over and offered to take me in his car. My Chinese is broken, but at the hospital my friend gave me his number and told me to contact him after I finished. I called him after I received treatment at the hospital. He had another friend come pick me up.

I had to wear a removable cast on my foot for a few weeks. Everywhere I went, Chinese people would ask me if I were okay. In fact, older women would come up to me, rub me on my back and tell me that everything would be fine. I never had so much concern shown for me at any earlier point in my life. I asked one of my Chinese women friends why people were so concerned about me. She told me it was because they cared about me. Later on, at home alone, I broke down in tears over the love shown for me.

Heartwarming how the mother cat retrieves her kittens one by one, spending time grooming each one before bringing the next one indoors. She’s really dedicated to her kittens!

Recently, the second largest chip manufacturing company in the United States, Ge-core confirmed that this month will lay off 800 employees, accounting for about 6% of its total workforce, and subsequent layoffs may continue, resulting in one of the reasons for its layoffs is the loss of Chinese chip orders, which also reflects the reduced revenue achieved in the Chinese market will have an impact on its chip industry.

Top general admits US is preparing a proxy war against China!

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main qimg 85ecc12d890a11dc0541db46f88650cb lq

“The US and Japanese armed forces are rapidly integrating their command structure and scaling up combined operations as Washington and its Asian allies prepare for a possible conflict with China,” says top Marine Corps general James Bierman.

“The US and its allies in Asia are emulating the groundwork that enabled Western nations to support Ukraine’s resistance to Russia,” he said.

Translation: Washington is actively seeking to launch a proxy war against China.

In regard to the build-up to the situation in Ukraine, he said: “A big part of [our success] has been because after Russian aggression in 2014 and 2015, we earnestly got after preparing for future conflict: training for the Ukrainians, pre-positioning of supplies, identification of sites from which we could operate support, sustain operations.”

This is a devastating admission!

It proves beyond a doubt that Washington was never interested in peace or Minsk 2. The US was preparing for war in 2014. The intention was always to use Ukraine as a proxy to bait the bear.

“Training Ukrainians, pre-positioning of supplies… We call that setting the theatre,” he said, adding that WE ARE SETTING THE THEATRE IN JAPAN, IN THE PHILIPPINES, AND IN OTHER PLACES.”

The US and Japanese armed forces are rapidly integrating their command structure and scaling up combined operations, Bierman continued. The two militaries have “seen exponential increases . . . just over the last year.”

As a result, Tokyo is now embarking on a “radical security policy shift that will include increasing defense spending & deploying missiles capable of hitting Chinese territory,” the general revealed.

Ultimately, this article removes any and all doubts over Washington’s China policy. The US is intent on war with China.

Normandy Chocolate Mousse

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47147b75ff527b757e3021eac9c37547

Ingredients

  • 12 ladyfingers, split
  • 3/4 cup butter
  • 1 3/4 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
  • 1/4 cup milk
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 teaspoon rum extract
  • 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted
  • 6 egg whites
  • 1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans
  • Whipped cream

Instructions

  1. Line 13 x 9-inch pan with wax paper. Arrange ladyfingers around sides and bottom of pan.
  2. Cream butter. Gradually add sugar, creaming until light and fluffy. Add egg yolks, one at a time. Beat until smooth after each addition.
  3. Blend in milk, vanilla and rum extracts. Blend in chocolate.
  4. Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry, and fold into chocolate mixture.
  5. Fold in pecans and pour into prepared pan.
  6. Refrigerate overnight.
  7. To serve, invert on serving plate; remove wax paper.
  8. Decorate top with whipped cream and cut into slices.

US once-in-a-century political chaos disturb the world: Global Times editorial

Published: Jan 05, 2023 12:35 AM

 

 

The US Capitol building is seen in Washington, DC., on November 4, 2022. Photo: Xinhua

Right before the second anniversary of the Capitol riots, on January 3, 2023, another political chaos, dubbed by CNN as a “horror show,” happened in the same place. US House of Representatives went through a “difficult labor” of a new speaker after three rounds of voting failed. The last time a House speaker vote went to multiple ballots was 100 years ago. Tuesday’s occurrence was truly a once-in-a-century phenomenon. During Capitol riots, American rioters shocked the building from the outside. This time, the stalemate was the result of conflicts from inside the Capitol. The two events are chaotic phenomena of spread and aggravation of the disease of US political system.

The one who failed to pass the three rounds of the votes for US House speaker is Kevin McCarthy. In the eyes of outsiders, he is a well-known ultra-conservative politician. He is against Clean Power Plan and the Paris Agreement, and promised to overturn a number of relevant legislations that Washington has passed. His crazy anti-China remarks also left a very bad impression on the Chinese people. However, astonishingly, McCarthy was not opposed because of his radicalism, but because he was considered not tough enough by some more radical congressmen in the Republican Party. It shows how severe the division and polarization in the US politics are.

What happened in the highest hall of “US democracy” is not a simple farce, but a political thriller with huge destructiveness, and a wide-ranging and far-reaching impact. This not only worries Americans, but also political observers from quite a few countries internationally.

While the antagonism between political parties in the US continues to escalate, the internal divisions in the Republican and the Democratic parties have become increasingly prominent. At this time, a completely irrational and dangerous tendency has surfaced in Washington: finding or creating an “enemy” outside the US to suppress, alleviate and divert political divisions within the country.

As a result, China, which is developing rapidly in economy and has a different political system and ideology from the US, is forcibly being established as an “enemy of the US.” Some lawmakers are scrambling to show their toughness toward China. The tougher, the better. They will gradually fall into collective self-hypnosis, and will keep a blind eye on the fact that the enemy of “US democracy” is actually the US itself.

The US House of Representatives will continue to vote on Wednesday, but to some extent the result is no longer important. McCarthy is intensely negotiating with his opponents in the Republican Party. To put it bluntly, it is a political exchange, and he is likely to make a more “tough” promise in the future. If McCarthy is still elected after some tossing and turning, then his extreme words and actions may intensify.

In fact, the current difficult status of China-US relations has a lot to do with US sick party politics. Meanwhile, the electoralization of political party functions, the frequent emergence of extreme issues, and the rise of veto politics has spilled over from the US to many countries and international institutions, causing widespread concerns and seriously hindering international cooperation.

History proves that political parties’ “being at daggers drawn” in the US Congress often indicates major turmoil.

Before this time, there have been 14 times in the history of the US that Congress was unable to elect a speaker in the first round of voting, 13 of which occurred before the Civil War, and the elections in 1855 and 1859 before the outbreak of the war were among the most voted – 133 and 44 times respectively.

Amid rising political animosity, 90 percent of Americans expect 2023 to be a year of political conflict in the US, according to the latest Gallup poll. More than 70 percent of Americans disapprove of the performance of Congress, according to a previous Gallup poll. This reflects a general disappointment in the US society with its domestic politics, and also shows that the “anti-democracy” in the US has developed to an advanced stage, and has caused it to be trapped in the cocoon of “veto politics,” losing the momentum of innovation, and will become more radical in the future. Such a US is dangerous to the world.

Faced with the political chaos in the US, Canada’s Globe and Mail raised a sharp question: whether the political class of the country is able to govern, and whether the internal conflicts and contradictions of one of the major political parties contaminate the entire system.

Another Canadian media quoted a research report saying that the toxic political culture in Washington and across the US was spilling over the border. “Canada is picking up the political radicalization bug from the US.”

It seems that as Canada is a close neighbor of the US, its feeling is very distinct. When such a US shamelessly claims the world cannot lose US leadership, isn’t that horrific?

What about the Taiwan Military Leadership?

What the western news doesn’t tell you (Well Bloomberg did but that’s entertainment not news).

This week, 6 RoC (Taiwan) military officers – 2 retired and 4 active duty, have been charged with spying for the PRC. This should really come as no surprise. The entire RoC military is compromised. A portion of the officer class, are pro China.

RoC military is so bad, that even the United States does not trust the RoC side and sees RoC as a used condom.

-RoC retired General Fu Weigu 傅慰孤 once said that when he was active duty, he asked the staff at the American Institute in Taiwan “What will USA do if there is a real problem in the Taiwan Strait?”. The Americans did not answer. General Fu then asked “What is the bottom line then?” Again the Americans did not answer.

This raises a question if the USA really considers RoC a trustworthy ‘ally’ and a “friend” why wont they clarify the position to General Fu in private? Because the USA does not respect RoC as a “friend” and instead considers RoC as a “puppet” . The USA sees no value in coordinating or communicating with their “Ally”.

-Why hasn’t the USA included RoC in the F35 program and sell the latest generation of American weapons and equipment? USA already claims to have troops in RoC and Beijing has not reacted, why not incorporate the latest generation of American weapons and equipment into the island? Because all of that technology will probably get lost to the Chinese Mainland. Some spies will probably funnel information over to the PLAAF , PLAN and PLA about its true capabilities. Either that or RoC is indefensible and they (Americans) dont want the best equipment to be destroyed in the first salvo

The RoC military community is very small group. The elders in the RoC military community have a lot of respect. Where did all these elders go? Lets see:

許歷農General Xu Ni long

Xu was the commander of the 1981 Taipei military parade, Commander of the garrison in Kinmen island from 1981 to 1983, in 2014 declared that he is no longer anti-Communist and is still committed to ” promoting reunification of China…The reasons for anti-communism have long ceased to exist”

羅文山 LT General Luo Wenshan

General who was the parade commander of the 1991 Taipei Military parade. In 2016, General Wen was accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and developing connections to a HK business man named Xu zhiming who is a member of the CPPCC in Beijing

陳廷寵 General Chen Ting Chung, who was the former army chief of staff in the Taipei “presidential office” in the 1990s, gave a speech at the RoC military academy in September 2020. General Chen declared that ‘I am Chinese and this is a symbol of pride. There are a lot of scum in our Chinese nation that are willing to sell out RoC to become a dog of Americans and Japan.”

王文燮 General Wang Wenxie (Recently died in car accident)

Former Deputy Minister of Defense of Taiwan said in 2019 ” both sides of the strait are Chinese and will be unified sooner or later”

LT gen Gao Anguo 高安國

“When PLA attacks, soldiers in Taiwan should help accomplish the sacred task of China’s unification and overthrow the DPP fraud regime”

In November 2016, 32 retired generals from RoC went to Beijing and listened to Xi Jinping’s speech on Sun Yat Sen. The 32 generals all rose for the PRC National Anthem. Among this 32 group was a LT General Wu Sz-huai 吳斯懷 who was a a serving member of the RoC legislature

Wu on the same year supported the PLA creating an ADIZ in the south china sea and criticized “democracy” in RoC . Wu Sihuai – “democracy is not really a good and perfect system”, “excessive democracy has caused restrictions on the development of free and democratic countries”, and emphasized that “we should try our best to talk to young people about the advantages of Chinese culture”

These people are all not chumps. These people were at the very top of the RoC government and army. They support unification!!!! Even the current minister of defense in RoC was a student of these elders when he was in the military academy during his youth!! When he was a cadet, Xu Linong was the teacher and principal!!!

10 Major Layoff Announcements That Have Already Happened So Far In 2023

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This is my rebuttal to those in the federal government and elsewhere that are attempting to claim that the job market is in good shape.  No matter how many workers get laid off, the Bureau of Labor Statistics always seems to find a way to post a positive jobs number each month.

We were told that the U.S. economy somehow added 256,000 jobs in November even though Challenger, Gray & Christmas determined that the number of layoffs in November 2022 was actually 417 percent higher than it was during the same month a year earlier.

And even though the tsunami of layoffs continued in December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is telling us that the U.S. economy somehow added 223,000 jobs last month.

It is almost as if there is a certain number that the BLS refuses to go below.

For each of the last five months, the number of jobs that the U.S. has “added” has miraculously come in between 200,000 and 300,000 each time.  But meanwhile large companies all over America have been laying off workers at a staggering rate.

Unfortunately, the pace of layoffs seems to be picking up speed during the early days of 2023.  The following are 10 major layoff announcements that have already happened so far this year…

#1 Salesforce has announced that approximately 10 percent of their workers will be canned…

Salesforce Inc. plans to cut about 10% of its staff as part of a restructuring plan, the software company said Wednesday.

The company will also exit some real estate and cut back on office space, it disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The plan is aimed to reduce operating costs, boost operating margins, and drive “profitable growth.”

#2 Vimeo says that “11% of the company’s workforce” will be permanently canceled…

Vimeo has launched another round of layoffs, a company spokesperson confirmed to Insider on Wednesday.

In an email to staff, Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud said the layoffs would impact 11% of the company’s workforce.

#3 StickFix is eliminating “about 20% of its salaried workforce” as the company starts to come apart at the seams…

StitchFix will cut about 20% of its salaried workforce, according to a statement published by the company on Thursday.

Along with the cuts, the company’s CEO is stepping down, the company announced in a statement.

The company will also close a Salt Lake City, Utah facility, they said.

#4 Their first round of layoffs was not deep enough, and so now Genesis is saying goodbye to “30% of its workforce in a second round of layoffs”

Cryptocurrency firm Genesis has cut 30% of its workforce in a second round of layoffs in less than six months, according to a person familiar with the matter, as pressure builds on crypto industry executives to cut costs in the wake of a downturn.

#5 Not to be outdone, Silvergate Capital is laying the axe to 40 percent of their workers

Amid a “crisis of confidence” across the cryptocurrency industry, crypto banking group Silvergate Capital will cut 40% of its workforce and abandon some projects—including a blockchain-based payment solution based on Meta’s abortive Diem project.

#6 SuperRare Labs has just announced that 30 percent of their workforce will need to look for new jobs…

SuperRare Labs, the company behind NFT marketplace SuperRare, became the latest crypto player to make job cuts on Friday, announcing it will reduce its staff by 30%.

The news came from SuperRare CEO John Crain, who tweeted out a message he sent to employees in Slack.

#7 More than a third of Biocept’s workers will be shown the door as the company struggles to survive…

Liquid biopsy firm Biocept said Friday that it is exploring strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value, and has engaged EF Hutton, a division of Benchmark Investments, as its financial adviser.

As this process moves forward, the firm is implementing a restructuring plan that includes reducing staff by approximately 35 percent.

#8 The first two rounds of layoffs didn’t do the trick, and so now Compass has decided to conduct a third round of layoffs

Compass is still coming back to earth — but this time possibly without its headquarters. On Thursday, The Real Deal reported that the real-estate company was looking to sublease its 89,000-square-foot office space at 90 Fifth Avenue near Union Square. The same day, Compass also announced it was conducting its third round of layoffs this year; in an SEC filing, the company wrote that layoffs would “allow for a path to achieve positive free cash flow in 2023.”

#9 It turns out that the layoffs at Amazon will be much larger than originally anticipated

Amazon said it is slashing a total of 18,000 jobs, a larger number of positions than it previously announced and the largest set of layoffs in the e-commerce giant’s history.

“We typically wait to communicate about these outcomes until we can speak with the people who are directly impacted,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a note to employees that the company made public on Wednesday. “However, because one of our teammates leaked this information externally, we decided it was better to share this news earlier so you can hear the details directly from me.”

#10 The Daily Mail is reporting that McDonald’s “will slash many of its 200,000 corporate staff in coming months” as it attempts to turn the business back in a positive direction…

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski has revealed plans to slash corporate jobs later this year to help the business grow.

In a letter to staff on Friday, the fast-food giant boss said there would be ‘difficult discussions and decisions ahead’ and warned that the company had become unfocused.

But don’t worry.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is telling us that everything is just fine.

You believe them, don’t you?

Sadly, it appears that a lot more layoffs could be coming very soon.  For example, Bed Bath & Beyond is in such bad shape that it may soon not have many employees left at all…

Now Bed Bath & Beyond “has concluded that there is substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” the retailer said on Thursday. This means Bed Bath & Beyond has to consider all financial options, including restructuring, selling assets or going through bankruptcy.

“These measures may not be successful,” the company added. Its stock price dropped more than 20% as soon as markets opened.

For years, our leaders have been desperately trying to prop up our “bubble economy”, and for a while their efforts were successful.

But now they can no longer hold back the economic catastrophe that has been building for more than a decade.

This generation was handed the keys to the greatest economic machine in world history, but those in power have wrecked it.

Now we stand at the brink of an unprecedented economic crisis, and the months ahead are likely to be quite brutal.

3 People Describe What It’s Like To Travel To Egypt

 

1. I just got home from a 2 week trip to Egypt where I went to Cairo/Luxor/Sharm El Sheikh with a group of friends.

Dear god, what a mistake. If this post can deter anybody from going and spending money in this country, it served its purpose.

I’ve never been anywhere where the general population was so misogynistic and disrespectful to women.

You are completely and blatantly lied to and ripped off by everyone everywhere – regardless of how “savvy” of a traveler you think you are.

When you are not dealing with that you are battling constant food poisoning despite “playing it safe” and eating in the higher end hotels (Sofitel, Marriott, etc). The street food in Southeast Asia is safer.

The joke is truly on the tourists who choose to come here.

Want to go to the Pyramids? Prepare to get harassed and haggled into getting on a dying horse that will be beaten and whipped to keep moving.

Want to go inside the Pyramids? Prepare to be cornered and shaken down for everything in your wallet.

The same goes for Karnak and The Valley of the Kings in Luxor.

Make sure you don’t go into any corners or tight spots because the people “working” there will block you and make you pay them.

Sharm El Sheikh? If you are a diver than the red sea is beautiful, everything else including the hotel is an absolute Russian wasteland (my wife is Russian I can say this).

Think it’s cheap? Speak English and your prices are pinged to the dollar.

Even the doctor at the Sofitel in Cairo will charge you $300 USD for a covid test (costs around $80 USD everywhere else).

I consider myself a savvy traveler and I have been all over the middle east, some places better than others. This is the worst place I have ever been to and I highly recommend you pick another destination.

A real tragedy for 50% of Egyptians who are nice people, because the other 50% have ruined the country. I am a male in my 30’s.

2. I don’t think I have been anywhere as intense as Cairo. I got hassled EVERY time I was on the street, constantly without exception.

It got to the point where I started living in this reality where nothing anyone said was real and everything was a complete utter lie.

I was with my (white, western) girlfriend and I felt like I was her hired security detail just to get her from site to site. I am Asian and I am not sure if that is what caused more attention or not.

Even when I was on the street without her, I got hassled by everyone except a select few who were wearing suits.

I would say it was still worth it to see the pyramids, because they are just on another level of majestic greatness. But, it required A LOT of everything. A lot of patience.

If they didn’t have Uber (or Careem) there, I would say this place would be 100% not worth to go. I can’t even imagine having to deal with scam taxi drivers on top of the scam hustlers everywhere else.

Literally, every restaurant, every salesmen on the streets, every person approached me even to just go to the grocery store was out to get to my wallet.

If I bought beer at Drinkies in Tahir Square, EVERYONE knew what was in the black bag and desperate to get me to buy them alcohol. (I was told that yes anyone is allowed to buy alcohol but they do not want to be seen purchasing alcohol.)

I had one guy BLOCK my elevator to beg me to buy him some beer and I had to physically move him out of the way and threaten him until he backed off. That’s how far they are willing to take it.

I had TWO people use their bodies to block my Uber to the pyramids to claim a guide is required and that they were the guy to take. Yes, you read that right they got HIT by my Uber driver’s car to force him to stop!

2. If my girlfriend was more than a meter away from me, she got SURROUNDED by local Egyptian men. Hassled. Groped. The moment I reappeared, they scurried away like rats. It was truly insane.

Morocco was Disneyland compared to this. I read that **99%** of Egyptian women have been sexually harassed. If I didn’t have a little imposing size and a trained fighter, I am not sure how I would feel walking around Cairo with a woman.

Unfortunately, ‘no’ was not accepted as an answer until I forced it to be the answer – I have never in my extended experience of traveling had to resort to being physical to get hustlers to back off.

Even a proper gift shop across from the Egyptian Museum tried to lie to me and give me wrong change scam! Just shameless.

So be warned, and nothing will truly prepare you for it. You can research it like crazy, like I did, but it barely gives you a head start of what you will experience.

Over 50 countries traveled and this left me in awe of how insanely shitty a culture can be towards guests.

3. 90 Percent of the time I spent at the Pyramids was not spent enjoying the scenery, however It was spent chasing off the scammers and sales people. It is a shame that the Egyptian government doesn’t do something about it.

 

Illustrator Reveals The Brutally Honest Life Truths

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Illustrator and author of “A Sticky Note Guide to Life“, Chaz Huton, perfectly sums up the realities of everyday life, and he does it all on brutally honest sticky notes.

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Will 2023 be Worse Than 2022?
Is Joe Biden willing to destroy the world to “weaken Russia”?

Even though one has become accustomed to seeing the United States government behaving irrationally on an epic scale with no concern for what happens to the average citizen who is not a member of one of the freak show constituencies of the Democratic Party, it is still possible to be surprised or even shocked. Shortly before year’s end 2022 an article appeared in the mainstream media and was quite widely circulated. The headline that it was featured under in the original Business Insider version read “A nuclear attack would most likely target one of these 6 US cities — but an expert says none of them are prepared.” The cities were New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and San Francisco.

The article seeks to provide information and tips that would allow one to survive a nuclear attack, repeating commentary from several “experts” in emergency management and “public health” suggesting that a nuclear war would be catastrophic but not necessarily the end of the world. One should be prepared. It observes that “those cities would struggle to provide emergency services to the wounded. The cities also no longer have designated fallout shelters to protect people from radiation.” It is full of sage advice and off-the-cuff observations, including “Can you imagine a public official keeping buildings intact for fallout shelters when the real-estate market is so tight?” Or even better the advice from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s “nuclear detonation planning guide” that for everyday citizens in a city that has been nuked: “Get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned.” Dr. Ron Paul asks “Are they insane? They act as if a nuclear attack on the United States is just another inconvenience to plan for, like an ice storm or a hurricane.”

The article argues that the six cities would be prime targets as they are centers for vital infrastructure. The bomb blasts would kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans with many more deaths to follow from radiation poisoning, but the article makes no attempt to explain why Russia, with a relatively sane leadership, would want to start a nuclear war that would potentially destroy the planet. Also, the targeting list of the cities provided by the “experts” is itself a bit odd. Surely Russia would attack military and government targets as a first priority to limit the possible retaliation while also crippling the ability of the White House and Pentagon to command and control the situation. Such targets would include both San Diego and Norfolk where the US Atlantic and Pacific fleets are based as well as the various Strategic Air Command bases and the underground federal government evacuation site in Mount Weather Virginia.

Reading the article, one is reminded of the early years of the Cold War that sought to reassure the public that nuclear war was somehow manageable. It was a time when we elementary school children were drilled in hiding under our desks when the air raid alarm went off. Herman Kahn was, at that time, the most famous advocate of the school of thought that the United States could survive the “unthinkable,” i.e. a nuclear war. An American physicist by training, Kahn became a founding member of the beyond neocon nationalist Hudson Institute, which is still unfortunately around. Kahn, who served in the US Army during the Second World War as a non-combat telephone lineman, started has career as a military strategist at the RAND Corporation. Kahn endorsed a policy of deterrence and argued that if the Soviet Union believed that the United States had a devastating second-strike capability then Moscow would not initiate hostilities, which he explained in his paper titled “The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence”. The Russians had to believe that even a perfectly coordinated massive attack would guarantee a measure of retaliation that would leave them devastated as well. Kahn also posited his idea of a “winnable” nuclear exchange in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War for which he is often cited as one of the inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr. Strangelove.

The appearance of the Business Insider article dealing with a cool discussion of the survivability from a nuclear war suggests that the nutcases are again escaping from the psychiatric hospital here in the US and are obtaining top jobs in government and the media. While one continues to hope that somehow someone will wake up in the White House and realize that the deep dark hole that we the American people find ourselves in mandates a change of course and a genuine reset, there is little daylight visible in the darkness.

My particular concern relates to the entangling relationships that have kept our country permanently at war in spite of the fact that since the Cold War ended in 1991 no potential adversary has actually threatened the United States. Now, the federal government appears to be in the business of cultivating dangerous relationships to justify defense spending and placing the nation on the brink of what might prove to be catastrophic. The current US mission to “weaken Russia” and eventually also China in order to maintain its own “rules based international order” includes such hypocritical and utterly illegal under international law anomalies as the continued military occupation of part of Syria to deny that country’s leaders’ access to their oil fields and best agricultural land. A recent UN humanitarian agency investigation determined that the Syrian people are suffering and even starving as a result of that and US imposed sanctions that the Biden Administration maintains against all reason and humanity.

At the present time, however, the most entangling of all relationships, even more than with Israel, has to be the engagement of the US in the proxy war being fought against Russia on behalf of Ukraine, which is exactly what threatens to turn nuclear if someone blinks at the wrong time. Billions of dollars in direct aid as well as billions more in the form of weapons stripped from arsenals in Europe and the US have been given to the corrupt regime of President Volodymyr Zelensky while Zelensky continues to work assiduously to milk the situation and draw Washington into a deeper war directly confronting Moscow.

In fact, by some reckonings the war has already begun, with the US and its allies clearly dedicated to crippling the Russian economy while also getting rid of President Vladimir Putin. The 101st Airborne is now in place in Romania next to Ukraine to “warn” the Kremlin while the Pentagon has recently admitted that some American military personnel are already in Ukraine, contrary to the denials by White House spokesmen. The British have also revealed that some of their elite Special Ops personnel are on the ground. And there are reports that more American soldiers will soon be on the way, ostensibly to “track the weapons” being provided to Zelensky, which will include US-made, Patriot Missile batteries some of which might even be placed in NATO member Poland to provide air cover over Western Ukraine, a definite act of war as seen by Russia, which has warned that such a move would mean that the US and its allies had “effectively become a party” to the war in Ukraine and there will be “consequences.” “Consequences” means escalation.

The soldier-“trackers” mission may be in response to reports that weapons provided by NATO have been corruptly sold or given to third countries by the Ukrainians. The several US initiatives taken together could produce a rapid escalation of the conflict complete with dead Americans coming home in body bags and an inevitable direct US involvement in combat roles that could lead anywhere, but at this point it is the Russians who are acting with restraint by not targeting the NATO and US “advisers” who are already active in Ukraine.

Suspicion is also growing that the United States “green-lighted” in advance recent cruise missile attacks carried out by Ukraine against military targets deep inside Russia. Since the attacks, the White House has declared that Ukraine has “permission” to attack Russia and has basically conceded to the unbalanced Zelensky the right to make all the decisions and run the war that the US is largely funding, which is a formula for disaster. It is already known that Ukraine is receiving top level intelligence provided both by the US and also other NATO states. The precision attacks on Russia suggest that the Ukrainian army was given the coordinates of possible active targets, something that the US would be capable of providing but which would have been beyond the abilities of Ukraine, which possesses no satellite surveillance capability. If it is true that the White House was involved in escalating the conflict it would be a very dangerous move, inviting retaliation by Moscow.

To be sure, some idiots in Washington, mostly of the neocon variety, continue to see war against Russia as something like a crusade for world freedom. Rick Newman, Yahoo’s top Finance Columnist, observes how “Budget hawks in Congress are worried about granting President Biden’s request for an additional $38 billion in aid for Ukraine to help defeat the invading Russians.” He concludes “They’re right. Thirty-eight billion isn’t enough. Make it $50 billion. Or even $100 billion. The more, the better, until the job is done.”

Apparently, the bellicose Rick does not quite get that Russia has made clear that if it is about to be defeated by force majeure it will go nuclear. And Congress and the White House don’t seem to get it either, with both the Republican and Democratic parties oblivious to the real danger that confronts the American people. Nuclear war? Sure! Just hide in your basement, if you have one, and tune in.

When The Killer Thinks The Cameras Are Off

Very interesting.

https://youtu.be/AEcCyFHNv2A

Twitter Files Show How The Deep State Conquered Social Media

Matt Taibbi provides a summary of the recent revelations of Twitter manipulations in service of partisan government entities. The publication of the ‘Twitter files’ came in several Twitter threads from writers, left and right leaning ones, who had been given access to the files and internal Twitter communication.

Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary

There have been 12 threads so far. Some of these are of special interest:

Twitter Files Part 1: December 2, 2022, by @mtaibbi

TWITTER AND THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY

Recounting the internal drama at Twitter surrounding the decision to block access to a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden in October, 2020.

Key revelations: Twitter blocked the story on the basis of its “hacked materials” policy, but executives internally knew the decision was problematic. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” is how comms official Brandon Borrman put it. Also: when a Twitter contractor polls members of Congress about the decision, they hear Democratic members want more moderation, not less, and “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”

We will later learn that it was the FBI, which had the Hunter Biden laptop material and knew it was real, which pushed Twitter to censor the story by claiming that it was ‘Russian hacked’ material.

Twitter censorship:

Twitter Files Part 2, by @BariWeiss, December 8, 2022

TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS

Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.

Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.

The above one is of special interest to me.

Until late 2021 my Twitter account @MoonofA, which I mostly use to promote my writings here, was not allowed to grow beyond 19,500 followers. There were also signs that tweets by me were not shown to users who were following me. After my account was released from the growth prison it rapidly grew to 47,500 followers in the fall of 2022. It then again went into growth prison for no discernible reason and without me getting any notice of it. Now anytime my follower count increases by 100 or so it will automatically be slashed back to 47,450 followers. There are also again signs that tweets from my account are again ‘shadowbanned’.

Yesterday @semperfidem2014 retweeted my latest:

Blue Check Brandon @semperfidem2004 – 21:27 UTC · Jan 5, 2023Well worth reading

Moon of Alabama @MoonofA · Jan 4New on MoA:
Ukraine – The Big Push To End The War
https://moonofalabama.org/2023/01/ukraine-the-big-push-to-end-the-war.html
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Then @New_Westphalian responded to @semperfidem2014;

New Westphalian @New_Westphalian – 21:47 UTC · Jan 5, 2023Replying to @semperfidem2004

If you hadn’t retweeted that, I doubt I’d have seen it. I follow MoA, never see a single tweet.
Not sure the cleanup has been entirely successful yet.

Well, I do not think that Elon Musk bought Twitter to do a ‘cleanup’. I believe he wants to use it for his own purposes whatever those may be. If it requires a new deal that gives government entities censoring access in exchange for whatever Musk’s wants or needs he will agree to that.

Back to Matt Taibbi’s summaries. Thread 3 to 5 were about Trump’s removal from Twitter. His account was locked despite the fact that he had not violated any of Twitter’s internal rules.

Thread 6 to 12 are about the government infiltration of Twitter from every angle, the Pentagon, the three letter agencies as well as various other entities started to censor free speech on Twitter:

Twitter Files Parts 11 and 12, by @mtaibbi, January 3, 2023HOW TWITTER LET THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY IN

and

TWITTER AND THE FBI “BELLY BUTTON”

These two threads focus respectively on the second half of 2017, and a period stretching roughly from summer of 2020 through the present. The first describes how Twitter fell under pressure from Congress and the media to produce “material” showing a conspiracy of Russian accounts on their platform, and the second shows how Twitter tried to resist fulfilling moderation requests for the State Department, but ultimately agreed to let State and other agencies send requests through the FBI, which agent Chan calls “the belly button of the USG.”

Revelations: at the close of 2017, Twitter makes a key internal decision. Outwardly, the company would claim independence and promise that content would only be removed at “our sole discretion.” The internal guidance says, in writing, that Twitter will remove accounts “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” The second thread shows how Twitter took in requests from everyone — Treasury, HHS, NSA, FBI, DHS, etc. — and also received personal requests from politicians like Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who asked to have journalist Paul Sperry suspended.

The big mainstream media have been quiet about the Twitter revelations. The New York Post and a few other right leaning outlets had a piece about the attempt to ban columnist Paul Sperry:

Dem Rep. Adam Schiff wanted journalist Paul Sperry’s account suspended over reporting on Trump whistleblower, Twitter Files reveals

The journalist in question was Paul Sperry, a Post columnist who in January 2020 wrote an article for RealClearInvestigations about the purported “whistleblower” behind former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, for which Schiff served as a House manager.In the article, Sperry said then-CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella was overheard talking in the White House with Sean Misko, a holdover staffer from former President Barack Obama’s administration.

A former official who reportedly heard the conversation told Sperry, “Just days after [Trump] was sworn in they were already trying to get rid of him.”

Misko later left the White House and joined the Intelligence Committee, which Schiff chaired, Sperry reported.

The email posted by Taibbi shows that Schiff’s office asked Twitter to take five specific steps that an unidentified company employee said were “related to alleged harassment from QAnon conspiracists.”

They included, “Remove any and all content about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff from its service — to include quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content.”

In response, another unidentified Twitter employee wrote, “no, this isn’t feasible/we don’t do that.”

Schiff’s office also asked for suspension of “the many accounts, including @GregRubini and @paulsperry_, which have repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies and harassed” someone whose name is blacked out.

The Twitter employee responded to that by writing, “we’ll review these accounts again but I believe [name blacked out] mentioned only one actually qualified for suspension.”

In an email Tuesday, Sperry told The Post, “I have never promoted any ‘QAnon conspiracies.’ Ever. Not on Twitter. Not anywhere.”

“Schiff was just angry I outed his impeachment whistleblower and tried to get me banned,” he said. “I challenge Schiff to produce evidence to back up his defamatory remarks to Twitter.”

The only major and good piece written about the Twitter revelations I know of is by Lee Smith in the otherwise not readable Tablet Magazine:

How the FBI Hacked Twitter
The answer begins with Russiagate

This one is well researched and well written. It shows that the whole manipulation by the FBI was and is done in partisan interest with the war-mongering parts of the Democrats being the main beneficiary. The piece is quite long but I recommend to read it in full.

You may think that the paragraph below is exaggerated. However, the evidence following it fully supports the conclusion:

In fact, the FBI’s penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector. The resulting behemoth, still being built today, is a public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organizations that has become the world’s most powerful spy service—one that was powerful enough to disappear the former president of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses.

All of this was build in secret. All of it can be secretly used against any target. It is also interesting that the fake issue of ‘Russiagate’, like the ‘Skripal affair’ in Britain, was to a large part the preparatory buildup to the current war in Ukraine.

While the Twitter files have now given us some knowledge of this they will not change anything. The Republicans are too weak, too corrupt and too susceptible to blackmail to seriously get into the depth of the whole issue.

Posted by b on January 6, 2023 at 17:26 UTC | Permalink

World War II poster, 1942

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Banana Caramel Custard

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Ingredients

  • 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar, divided
  • 2 medium-size slightly overripe bananas, peeled and cut into pieces
  • 8 large eggs
  • 2 (12 ounce) cans evaporated milk
  • 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
  • 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • Strawberries (optional)

Instructions

  1. Fill a roasting pan or a 13 x 9-inch baking pan half full of hot tap water and place on an oven rack in the center of the oven. Heat the oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. In a small heavy saucepan, heat 1/2 cup of the sugar over medium heat for about 5 minutes, swirling the pan occasionally until the sugar has melted and turns golden brown. Watch the sugar carefully after it liquefies. If it gets too dark, it will taste burned. Immediately pour the mixture into a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan so the sugar (caramel) covers the bottom of the pan completely.
  3. In a large bowl, beat the banana and remaining 3/4 cup sugar with an electric mixer on high speed until completely liquefied with no lumps. Or process in a food processor. Beat in the eggs until well blended. (If using a food processor, scrape the mixture into a large bowl.) Add the evaporated milk, vanilla extract, nutmeg and salt. Beat with a mixer on low speed or stir just until blended. Pour the mixture into the loaf pan. (Don’t worry if the caramel cracks.)
  4. Carefully place the baking pan in the center of the pan of hot water. Bake for 1 hour and 15 to 20 minutes, or until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean and the top is browned. Remove the pan from the water and set on a wire rack to cool completely. When cooled, cover and refrigerate for at least 8 hours.
  5. To serve, run a thin knife around the inside edges of the custard. Invert a serving plate over the pan. Invert the pan and plate together. Lift the pan and allow the syrup to run onto the plate.
  6. Serve right away or cover loosely with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to serve.
  7. Cut into 10 slices.

Nixon’s last meal at the White House, 1974

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I understand that ultimately the actual murderer is at fault. But what kind of people abandon their drunken friend without her phone or belongings or even a way home?

Remember. These are the kinds of people that are in control of the “levers of power” in the West; the United States, UK, and Europe.

https://youtu.be/Zrsb0nJzX2w

Are There Any U.S. Red Lines?

The Biden administration has so far refrained from sending longer range missile to Ukraine. It fears a severe Russian reaction should it change that policy. Some warmongers dislike such sensible restrain.

In today’s New York Times some former British diplomat, now working for a pro-war think tank, is arguing for the delivery of longer range weapons to Ukraine.

Putin Has No Red Lines

“What are Putin’s red lines?”This question, asked with growing urgency as Russia loses its war in Ukraine but does not relent in its aggressions, is intended to offer analytical clarity and to guide policy. In reality, it is the wrong question, because “red line” is a bad metaphor. Red lines are red herrings. There are better ways to think about strategy.

Red lines, where a consequence is threatened when an opponent does a specified escalating move, do not really exists, says the author. Red lines are movable, responding to a red line violation is a cost to the one who drew the line and red lines invite deceptions – says the author.

After spending several hundred words arguing that red lines are a useless concept the author argues that the ‘west’ should draw a big one:

Concerns about Russia’s “red lines” are driven above all by the fear that Russia might resort to nuclear escalation. The West should avert this by deterring Russia rather than by restraining itself — or pressuring Ukraine to do so — for fear of “provoking” Russia. It can do so by communicating the certainty of severe consequences should Russia use nuclear weapons.

For the record: Russia has never threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. It is a false assertion by the Biden administration that Russia did so.

Communicating that the ‘west’, i.e. the U.S, will do severe consequence X if Russia does Y is drawing as red a line as I have ever seen.

So what is the purpose of that red line:

Russia has no red lines: It only has, at each moment, a range of options and perceptions of their relative risks and benefits. It only has, at each moment, a range of options and perceptions of their relative risks and benefits. The West should continually aim, through its diplomacy, to shape these perceptions so that Russia chooses the options that the West prefers.America has done this before. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most dangerous nuclear confrontation so far, the Soviet Union’s position shifted in a matter of days, ultimately accepting an outcome that favored the West.

The former British diplomat obviously lacks a decent education in history. The Soviet missiles in Cuba were stationed there because the U.S. had stationed nuclear capable Juniper mid range missiles in Turkey and Greece. Those missiles threatened Moscow. They had crossed the Soviet red line. The missiles in Cuba were a counter threat to what the U.S. had done. When the Kennedy administration recognized that it negotiated the removal of its missiles in Turkey and Greece in exchange for the removal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba.

It were the Soviets who had won that round of the Cold War, not the U.S.

As he does not know the history of the Cuba crisis the author is drawing false conclusions from it:

While Russia is more invested in subordinating Ukraine than it was in deploying missiles to Cuba, the logic is the same. In 1962, America persuaded the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, that removing nuclear weapons from Cuba was, however unpalatable, a better choice than deploying them. Similarly, the West should now aim to persuade Mr. Putin that withdrawing his forces from Ukraine is less perilous than fighting.

To convince Russia to retreat, says the author, the ‘west’ should not restrain itself in weapon deliveries to Ukraine. It should increase sanctions on Russia to increase its costs. It should communicate that a retreat from Ukraine would not mean regime change in Moscow. (Even when that in fact is the obvious U.S. endgame.)

Pursued firmly and resolutely, these diplomatic “shaping operations” in support of Ukraine’s military campaign can ensure that Russia’s least-bad option aligns with what the vastly more powerful West wants. Such a strategy is the opposite of accepting red lines.

Mr. Putin [..] should not be allowed to define the limits of Western policy now. Strategy needs rigorous thought, not lazy metaphors.

A lazy metaphor is like arguing against red lines while drawing a new one. A lazy metaphor is like faking history to draw the intended but wrong  conclusion from it. The op-ed is not rigorous thought but muddled gibberish.

As soon as it becomes obvious to everyone that the Ukraine is losing the war, the Biden administration is likely to deliver more long range weapons to Ukraine with the advice to use them within Russia. Russia will respond to that. But most likely not in Ukraine, but in a place and at a time where it hurts the U.S. more than anything that can be done to it in Ukraine.

Posted by b on January 2, 2023 at 17:07 UTC | Permalink

 

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“Foxes Rushed Out Of The Book”: Beautiful Dreamy Illustrations Of Xi Zhang

Xi Zhang is a China-based illustrator and concept artist. She graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China.

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I totally believe this. I was in home healthcare, and one of my clients had a cat. I tended to both of them for 8 years! When my client passed away, I took the cat. A year later, I was suffering a terrible back ache and was very light-headed. I went outside to just lay in the grass. This cat came to me and started shoving his nose into my arm pits and various places in my body. He had never acted like this to me before. when I got up from the grass he started shoving his nose where I had just lain. I said out loud, something is very wrong with me. I packed up and headed for the hospital. When I arrived it was ascertained that I was having a heart attack. (3 Stents and 2 balloons) Several of the nurses and 3 doctors asked later, how did you know to get here when you did? I told them all, my cat told me. AND I believe he saved my life.

Emmanuel Todd On The Third World War

The French Le Figaro has an interview with the well known anthropologist Emmanuel Todd.

Emmanuel Todd: «La Troisième Guerre mondiale a commencé»

“The third world war has began” is his new thesis. Todd is quite famous for correctly predicting the devolution of the Soviet Union long before it happened. He was quite alone at that time.

I once had a piece on Todd’s later predictions for the U.S. and Europe which still seems spot on. I also quoted him in a piece on social decline as a national security issue.

Unfortunately the Figaro piece is paywalled. But Arnaud Bertrand has done us the favor of translating the gist. Here is his slightly edited thread:

Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand – 15:42 UTC · Jan 13, 2023Emmanuel Todd, one of the greatest French intellectuals today, claims that the “Third World War has started.”

Small 🧵 translating the most important points in this fascinating interview.

He says “it’s obvious that the conflict, which started as a limited territorial war and is escalating to a global economic confrontation  between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war.”

He believes that “Putin made a big mistake early on, which is [that] on the eve of the war [everyone saw Ukraine] not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a “failed state” in the making. […] I think the Kremlin’s calculation was that this decaying society would crumble at the first shock. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope.”He says he agrees with Mearsheimer’s analysis of the conflict: “Mearsheimer tells us that Ukraine, whose army had been overtaken by NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of the NATO, and that the Russians had announced that they would never tolerate Ukraine in NATO. From their point of view, the Russians are therefore in a war that is defensive and preventive. Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because since this is an existential question for them, the harder it would be, the harder they would strike. The analysis seems to hold true.”

He however has some criticism for Mearsheimer:

“Mearsheimer, like a good American, overestimates his country. He considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential, for the Americans it is basically only one ‘game’ of power among others. After Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, what’s one more debacle? The basic axiom of American geopolitics is: ‘We can do whatever we want because we are sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to us’. Nothing would be existential for America.

Insufficient analysis which today leads Biden to proceed mindlessly. America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system towards the precipice. No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the ‘economic power’ of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.

If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained, backed by China, American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to fund their huge trade deficit for nothing. This war has therefore become existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go. This is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other.”

He firmly believes the US is in decline but sees it as bad news for the autonomy of vassal states:

“I have just read a book by S. Jaishankar, Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs (The India Way), published just before the war, who sees American weakness, who knows that the confrontation between China and the US will have no winner but will give space to a country like India, and to many others. I add: but not to Europeans. Everywhere we see the weakening of the US, but not in Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of the imperial system is that the United States strengthens its hold on its initial protectorates. As the American system shrinks, it weighs ever more heavily on the local elites of the protectorates (and I include all of Europe here). The first to lose all national autonomy will be (or already are) the English and the Australians. The Internet has produced human interaction with the US in the Anglosphere of such intensity that its academic, media and artistic elites are, so to speak, annexed. On the European continent we are somewhat protected by our national languages, but the fall in our autonomy is considerable, and rapid. Let’s remember the Iraq war, when Chirac, Schröder and Putin held joint anti-war press conferences.”

He underlines the importance of skills and education: “The US is now twice as populated as Russia (2.2 times in student age groups). But in the US only 7% are studying engineering, while in Russia it is 25%. Which means that with 2.2 times fewer people studying, Russia trains 30% more engineers. The US fills the gap with foreign students, but they’re mainly Indians and even more Chinese. This is not safe and is already decreasing. It is a dilemma of the American economy: it can only face competition from China by importing skilled Chinese labor.”

On the ideological and cultural aspects of the war: “When we see the Russian Duma pass even more repressive legislation on ‘LGBT propaganda’, we feel superior. I can feel that as an ordinary Westerner. But from a geopolitical point of view, if we think in terms of oft power, it is a mistake. On 75% of the planet, the kinship organization was patrilineal and one can sense a strong understanding of Russian attitudes. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism.”

He continues: “The USSR had a certain form of soft power [but] communism basically horrified the whole Muslim world by its atheism and inspired nothing particular in India, outside of West Bengal and Kerala. However, today, Russia which repositioned itself as the archetype of the great power, not only anti-colonialist, but also patrilineal and conservative of traditional mores, can seduce much further. [For instance] it’s obvious that Putin’s Russia, having become morally conservative, has become sympathetic to the Saudis who I’m sure have a bit of a hard time with American debates over access for transgender women in the ladies’ room.

Western media are tragically funny, they keep saying, ‘Russia is isolated, Russia is isolated’. But when we look at the votes at the UN, we see that 75% of the world does not follow the West, which then seems very small.

With an anthropologist reading of this [divide between the West and the rest] we find that countries in the West often have a nuclear family structure with bilateral kinship systems, that is to say where male and female kinship are equivalent in the definition of the social status of the child. [Within the rest], with the bulk of the Afro-Euro-Asian mass, we find community and patrilineal family organizations. We then see that this conflict, described by our media as a conflict of political values, is at a deeper level a conflict of anthropological values. It is this unconscious aspect of the divide and this depth that make the confrontation dangerous.”

There you go. Is he right on everything? I don’t know, but Emmanuel Todd is certainly always a very singular and interesting thinker, with a vastly different analysis from the depressingly predictable bad takes that usually dominate French media.

Todd’s thinking rhymes well with that of Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson as reproduced at Naked Capitalism.

Economists Radhika Desai & Michael Hudson Explain Multipolarity, Decline of US Hegemony – Original here

Yves Smith introduces it:

Yves here. Some rousing weekend listening! Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are launching a bi-weekly talk show, Geopolitical Economy Hour. The opening segment gives an overview, starting with the breakdown of US dominance and how it has been accelerated ironically by self-defeating efforts to preserve the system. It seems trivial at this point to observe that American defense of its hegemony has helped forge a strong Russia-China alliance. But will this partnership wind up dominating other countries, and stymie the development of a truly multipolar order?

Good food for thought …

Posted by b on January 14, 2023 at 14:52 UTC | Permalink

 

Strange world, indeed. But not our problem

Today we are going to chat a tad bout really evil people.

We need to be reminded about these people, because these are EXACTLY the kinds of people who are running the show in Washington DC today.

By understanding this, we can then except the events that will occur later on towards the end of this year…

MM Geo-Political lesson 101

There is an easy and simple way to determine the relationships between nations.

  • Allies = Each have the others military forces stationed inside BOTH nations.
  • Friends = Neither have military forces stationed in the nations.
  • Proxies = One nation has their military forces inside the proxy nation.
  • Enemies = One nation surrounds another nation with it’s military forces.

Could Russia and China combined defeat the USA?

China is lowkey doing SO right now on its own! And has been for the last few decades???

China is singlehandedly dragging other nations up to another level! A level where its a level playing field with the US and the collective West!

The collective West are panicking now because EVERYONE ELSE is either on equal footing or at least progressing / catching up to them with the help of China to the point where EVERYONE can just say NO to the collective wests BS poking and prodding!

Without China Russia wouldn’t be so bold

ALL WITHOUT GETTING ANGRY AND FIRING ANYTHING

It sure aint the Chinese getting antsy

We’ll let the Pelosi thing go for now hue hue hue hue XD

AND YES a combined SinoRussia is undefeatable!

Thats 2 ancient civilizations with history and pedigree working together as one!

Its what we have right this very moment! China and Russia are right now an unspoken alliance

i think either Putin or Xi said the relationship was better than allies! that almost qualifies for friends and family discounts!

7 Confessions That Will Take You On A Rollercoaster Of Emotions

 

1. Me and my wife were having serious issues and then she got sick with cancer. That came like a mack truck. She said a lot of the grief she gave me was because she knew she was sick and was ashamed of burdening me and leaving me as a widow dad of four kids under 13.

I took care of that woman like she was one of my boys. That experience took 10 years off my life. Her death was easy compared to the aftermath.

I was going through her computer and saw that she had a separate email account which was odd. That was on purpose. This bitch was planning on blindsiding with a divorce and was going back and forth with different lawyers about making me a weekend dad, throwing me out of my house and even seeing if I’d pay her legal bills. This went on a week before she saw the doctor.

This slag used me to take care of her in her final days because no one else would. I won’t tell my kids…yet.

2. I was working for a company (out of many like this) dedicated to entirely manage OnlyFans accounts for girls. Basically these girls never did anything else than just taking the pictures and videos for us.

80% of workers were guys, 20% were girls, but it’s all fake. Even when you think that the person is real and is actually talking to you, she is not.

Even when the account is verified, it could be fake.

I feel bad because I talked to MANY guys who fell in love for a girl who doesn’t even know they exist and we had to take as much money as we could from everyone, that was the goal.

We were so good at it that our standards were 700-1000 USD per day with each account, and each worker had to manage 6 accounts, so imagine the amount of money we made monthly.

So my advice: only pay OnlyFans girls when they give you a live proof that they are real, like making an specific gesture with their hand on a selfie. Don’t trust videos where they say they are real, don’t trust audios, don’t trust pictures that seem taken at the same time… Or just watch porn.

Also: it’s a PPV site and therefore it’s just a business, so don’t be the guy who just wants free content, it’s annoying af, real or not 🙂

3. So I’m not sure exactly where to put this so I thought here would be an okay place. Lately I’ve been seeing in a lot more liberal groups especially, that saying poor people shouldn’t have children is eugenics and it’s wrong blah blah blah. But I feel like a lot of people saying this haven’t had to experience growing up poor. In poverty, and homelessness.

My parent’s were poor and could barley take care of themselves, they lived in a motel when they got pregnant with me.

My entire childhood was a horrible experience having to grow up and not knowing if you were going to get fed, or have a roof over your head, it fucking sucked.

It hurt even more since I lived in a town where eveyone was well off, so as a kid I never got to experience things a lot of other kids do, like going to camp, taking summer trips to Disneyland, or playing their games on their nice TVs.

Growing up being the oldest girl I raised both of my little brothers since my parents couldn’t afford childcare, which led to me missing out on opportunities with my peers, I was so socially awkward for not being around people my age enough that even to this day.

I am 21 years old and all my friends are in their early 30s late 20s because I feel like I cannot relate to people my age.

I feel like I was forced to grow up way to fast and I would be lying if part of me said I didn’t resent my parents for having me knowing they couldn’t afford to.

I dont know, if you’re someone who can barley take care of themselves, do yourself and your future child a favor and just put off having children until you can afford them.

I think a lot of people see having children as a right, instead of seeing a child as a human being that has rights.

And sorry if I hurt anyone’s feelings by saying this, but yes I truly believe if you’re poor you shouldn’t be having children, it’s not you who suffers, it’s the child.

4. Gave the short guy a chance and it was totally worth it

I started seeing this shorter guy, 5’5, and I really like him. I myself am 5’11, so there’s already a huge difference. He carries himself with so much confidence, he doesn’t even care if I wear heels which I have when we go out.

Phew, the sex is amazing too. Definitely the best I’ve ever had. I’ve never had someone fit between my legs so perfectly before.

Now whenever I see a shorter man, I wonder what they’re like in bed and I feel an instant attraction. Go short kings! Shoot your shot at the tall girls!

5. I unironically love Imagine Dragons

I get it. It’s “corporate rock.” They’re “sellouts.” It’s “fake” music.

But the surge of emotion I feel listening to “Birds”, and the way I bop my head with confidence to “Enemy” is very real.

Guys, we are ALL being manipulated by all forms of media, all of the time. Marvel is designed to be cinematic brain candy. Pop music is the same. We crave distraction and bursts of dopamine first, and meaning and profundity second.

And while I do love GOOD music too, I’m finally ready to stand up and say this. It feels like a weight has been lifted off me.

6. I’m 30 and my little brother is 24. He’s honestly the best brother I could have asked for. I still remember the day he was born and holding my newborn baby brother when I was a kid. As we grew up I always knew he was different but he’s my brother and I love him and I wouldn’t change him. He’s honestly one of my best friends and having a brother with downs syndrome, especially one like him has made me a better person.

Last month my parents went out of town for a few days and they asked if I’d stay with my brother and take care of the house. While he might have downs syndrome he’s not entirely helpless he just can’t really be on his own like that. So of course I agreed and brought my PS5 over and some games, snacks and beers, I called out of work for a few days and figured we’d have some fun just like when we were kids.

We were having a great time and were talking the first day while taking turns playing Elden Ring and my bro started the game and got to the part where the guy calls you “maidenless” and I said something like “Ooooo he called you maidenless bro…daaaaaaamn.” and my brother got super sad looking and I asked him what was wrong and he said, “I am maidenless. I’ll never have a girlfriend.” So we talked about that for a bit and he was actually feeling super depressed because he’s never had a girlfriend and didn’t think he ever would. We kind of talked it out and he was really sad and I decided fuck it we can find him a girl.

I called a couple people I knew who were into that sort of thing to see if they knew anyone. Well one of my buddies had a number of this girl so I gave her a call. She was actually super sweet and understanding about the situation and she said she’d be glad to show my brother a good time for her usual rate. She had a cousin with downs so she was very sympathetic.

I told my brother I’d pay a girl to come over and show him some fun on the condition that our parents will die without knowing I hired a prostitute to come to their house. He agreed.

So I made plans for her to come over, got my brother shaved and showered for his date. She showed up dressed up super nice she was also super hot. I’m no chef but I had picked up some food from Olive Garden for them. She was a genuinely nice person and was really good with him and I just left them to do their thing while I played the playstation in the livingroom. Eventually they passed by going upstairs to his room. I put my headphones on and kept playing.

Eventually they came back down and both had big smiles on their faces. She hung out with us a bit then it was time for her to go. I handed her the cash plus some extra as a bonus. She said my brother was a sweetheart and that I was a good brother to do something like that for him and that she had a good time. She handed me half the cash back.

Eventually my parents came back and thankfully are none the wiser as my mother especially would probably kill me. My brother is super appreciative and said it was the most fun he’d ever had.

I have no regrets.

7.I can’t really say this out loud to anyone in my personal life because it would hurt my family members and my friends would try to console me because they love me but honestly, my life has been ruined due to my ugliness.

I’m not overweight, I dress well and I do my best to treat others well but none of this matters because I simply have a very ugly face. No men have ever approached me or wanted to date me because why would any man want to date a hideous woman who doesn’t even look like a woman? I don’t blame them, I mean I could be dressed in the most feminine clothing and i would still not look like a real woman because of my face

My entire life, a lot of people have been mean to me (including some relatives) because of how ugly I am – it’s so sad but true that even little kids who are perceived as “unattractive” get treated worse by adults

I’m only in my 20s but it’s so painful to know that I’m never going to get married or have my own children with a spouse who loves me.

I understand that it’s not any one else’s job to try and make me feel better about the fact that I am ugly because it’s not like anyone intentionally did this to me.

I have siblings who are actually reasonably attractive people so it’s not even like my parents genetics are necessarily bad but I just ended up with the worst combination of their genes and honestly, what is the point of living like this.

I feel so alone in this experience because I’ve barely ever met any other women who are naturally unattractive. Every woman I know gets hit on by men and approached for dating. I wish I knew what it was like to have a man want me sexually

Angering…

14 People Reveal How They Found Out Their Partners Were Cheating

 

1. My wife tried calling and didn’t hang up once it went to voicemail. She accidentally left a 2:45 VM. The VM consisted of her and her BF talking shit about me and how much happier she was with him.

At the time I was home with our kids and I thought she was 1,800 miles away to be with her dying father. Two years later we are divorced and her father is still alive.

2. She needed a new phone so I put it in my name since I was working, 2 hours after leaving the store and having lunch with me joking about how excited she was to get married I found a photoreel full of pictures she had been exchanging with her ex whilst transferring her stuff to her new phone.

I put 2 and 2 together and opened her text inbox and surprise! She had been texting him for months and fucking him for a few weeks.

3. I counted the pictures.

This was in 2000, before everyone had a camera on their phone and you had to get your holiday snaps developed at the Walgreens photo lab.

She brought home the pictures of her vacation to see her “old high school friend” in Vegas, but there was something missing. See, back in the day the rolls of film were made up of exposures of 12, 24, 36 pics, etc. depending on the film you bought.

I went through the photos and it didn’t add up. Literally. The 24 exposure roll only had 18 pics. Eventually I found the remaining photos…her and the new boyfriend looking happy.

4. My super genius ex wife bitched about the cost of our joint cell phone bill. She told me I’m using it too much. I never used it except to call her phone which was free. So I looked over the bill and found the number to the dude she was cheating with.

5. iMessage linked to her computer. I was on her computer buying stuff off Amazon and she was sitting on the couch, feet from me, texting her ex. He was trying to get her to send him nudes and they were reminiscing about previous encounters. He was bragging about how he made her “leg shake” all the while I was watching the conversation in real time, right next to her. My adrenaline kicked in and I simply closed the computer and left the house without saying a word. This was over a year ago and I’m still fighting her for custody of our children.

6. She became more and more distant. Not just that, but also indifferent. She just stopped caring and it showed. I caught her because she claimed she was working OT, but her pay never reflected it. One day I got out of work early after a machine broke down in the department. I didn’t tell her. When I came home, I caught her red handed with someone in our bed.

7. I had a feeling for a while, it was always denied of course – directly and through a massive amount of gaslighting. Ultimately, the other woman was also married and her husband called me at work (found me via LinkedIn). Took everything I had to walk to my car to cry in private.

8. Back when cell phones had limited minutes, I got notified that we were over our limit. Checked the last bill and nothing but her and her boss talking at all hours of the day. Then she stupidly left her e-mail open on my computer and I got to read how he enjoyed touching her boobs a lot.

9. Just got on a flight in London headed to Vegas. Sitting next to my GF and she wants to show me something she has planned for the trip so gets out her phone.

It opens to the Messages and shows a chat with a guy (I know him) saying how much she is gonna miss him and how she doesn’t wanna go away with me anyway.

The doors close on the plane and that was a really fucking fun 10-11hrs…

10. I know this is cliche and I’ve definitely bitched about it before, but coming home from a 12 MONTH deployment to a BLACK baby when we’re both white were strike one and two. Strike three was telling me she had black relatives (whom I’ve never met) so that could be what happened, sure. Doesn’t matter what excuse You have there isn’t a magical 12 month gestation period. Makes me very fucking angry.

11. The dude told me. We used to go to school together. Saw him in Facebook and requested friendship. He asked me how I was doing and I told him that I was great. Girl and I were about to celebrate our anniversary. He apologized to me and said he had to tell me that they had been fucking for the last week. Said he didn’t know we were together and I believed him. He sent me screenshots of pages of text as proof. She got called out by the both of us and we are still very good friends, he and I. Fuckin lying skank.

12. I woke up in the middle of the night when she was in the bathroom. Used her phone as a light. Saw texts from her ex about how good it felt to cum inside her the day before.

13. She forgot to end the call, you know, press the red button. I heard them talking about who was going to shower first.

14. She was in the toilet. Her phone flashed up. The message notification read “Did you tell him?”.

Apparently the message was about something completely different, but after I bluffed her into thinking I know more than I do – a name and that something’s up, she “confessed”.

10 years relationship destroyed. No turning back. Easier to build up trust with a new person the. with someone that cheated on you. And in long term relationships, marriage, you have to trust each other.

Imagine living in such a mess that you don’t notice a leg of someone you murdered lying around.

https://youtu.be/F1oeZe6SET4

What’s It Like To Have Alzheimer’s?

This is an excellent question, and one I’ve considered often in the last decade-plus of working with such folks.

First, it depends upon the stage of dementia: mild, moderate, or severe.

In mild dementia, it seems to be like being a functional alcoholic’s day, as far as cognition goes. You’re able to do what you need to do, but some little things get missed, such as your T-shirt is on backward, but you don’t notice, or you can’t find the sugar bowl, so you start taking apart cupboards and end up going without coffee and the kitchen is a mess. Later, you swear you did not do that. You have no memory of doing it, and the more another person argues that you did indeed make that mess, the angrier you get. You did not. He or she is lying.

The whole day goes like this—close to normal, but not quite. Routines are easy, but anything new is more difficult. And, if asked about someone or thing from earlier in the day, you may or may not remember the event. By the end of the day, you’re tired of thinking, but your brain keeps throwing up odd thoughts and ideas—things like, “I can’t find the car keys. Someone must have stolen them! I need the car keys.” You may wander, rummage, pull things out of drawers for a couple hours, at the end of which you may be unable to tell anyone what it was you were searching for. Even more telling, you may not have driven a car for the past five years.

During moderate dementia, each day is more moment to moment, and routine is your friend. Anything that is routine is easier for you to experience. Breakfast, lunch, dinner—that’s how your day is scheduled. But something out of the ordinary, like a doctor’s appointment, can throw you. You may balk at going, at getting dressed and getting in the car and going. There’s so much mental stimulation involved in such a nonroutine event that you prefer to stick to what you know: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and maybe sitting in the sun, watching the world go by.

Activities like taking a shower can become difficult for you. If you think about it, a shower is an event that is very high in stimulation of all sorts. The bathroom is very separate from your normal living space—usually hard-edged and cold-seeming. Then you must take all your clothing off—that’s just a lot of stimulation itself, and the memories loosely associated with nakedness are also fraught with stimulation. The shower makes noise, the temperature difference is apparent, there’s soap and shampoo and the scrunchie thing, water in your eyes, your ears, the space is confined, and by this time someone is usually in there with you, “helping,” which is just weird, no matter how much you understand and accept that you need help. It’s one diagnostic sign of moderate dementia: You may start to not like to be washed and clean—shower or bath.

I remember a gentleman in the facility I worked at in Washington state. He was new and hadn’t been showered at the hospital, so on his first full day, the aides gave him a shower. He spent the rest of the afternoon in tears because, “They threw me in the corner and pelted me with rocks like a piece of trash!” That’s what he felt like. Another woman would walk up and down the corridors but stay far away from windows, saying “There’s Indians out there! They’re going to attack!” It took a long time to figure this one out. She would pace and pace and could not sit still, always talking about Native Americans shooting arrows at us. Finally a nurse asked her if she had been hit by an arrow. Yes, she said. Where’d they get you? Right here, and she clutched her low back: Arrggghhhh! It hurt so much! Going through her medical history a bit closer, we discovered she had been in a car accident years before and suffered a low back injury. She’d been telling us for weeks what was happening to her, but not in a way that made sense to us. To her, it made perfect sense: It felt like an arrow in her back. And who used arrows? American Indians.

You are losing words, but it doesn’t matter much since those around you ignore that loss and fill in the blanks. Sometimes you cannot understand what someone else said, like he is speaking a foreign language, and this can make you automatically refuse whatever is being spoken about—that, too, makes a certain amount of sense. Someone babbling to you in a foreign language and making “Come with me” motions is someone to view with suspicion, don’t you think? Moderate dementia is usually the longest part of the disease, which is why I’m spending so much time on it.

The slow slide into severe dementia is sometimes difficult to spot as far as an actual line of demarcation, but one sign is sleeping more and more often. Even during formerly pleasurable activities, such as familiar and enjoyed music, the damage to your brain is so profound that the stimulation is not enough to keep you awake. You sleep, perchance to dream, but we don’t know. We know that damage to the areas that are usually lit up like a Christmas tree during dreaming is profound, but since we don’t really understand sleep or dreaming, it seems rather cruel to take someone who doesn’t do well in new situations into a sleep lab and wire his brain for sound and color, stick him in a tube, and say, “Don’t move.” So we don’t know. But that is one of the things I’ve always wondered about; it seems to me by the time you are in severe dementia, the difference between awake and dreaming is invisible.

Speech is limited. You may have a full thought in your head, but only one or two words come out, if any. Caregivers learn to listen for the first two or so words and try to discern what the thought is from there, because that’s usually all we get. Eyesight is odd; you don’t know what it is you are seeing. My current furthest-along-in-Alzheimer’s resident recently did not recognize a puppy. She saw it, she gazed at it, I placed her hand on it, but she looked at her hand and not the puppy, and there was absolutely no engagement between her and the stimulation provided. She no longer hears music, which is a shame, because she loved music her whole life long. We still play it for her, and we still put on her favorite musicals, but there’s no engagement anymore. She does not hear or see any of it other than perhaps a fleeting spark of memory, now gone.

In severe dementia, everything is moment to moment. Routine means nothing anymore, because there is no past or future, only now.

And then you start your last slide into end-stage dementia; you sleep 23½ hours out of 24, and when you are awake, you may as well be dreaming. You do not meet anyone’s eyes. You do not react in any manner to much beyond very painful stimulation. You are almost gone. We try to feed you, but you don’t seem to know what to do with the food in your mouth, and you may choke, which could result in aspiration pneumonia—never a good thing. Your urine output drops, peristalsis decreases, and your body temperature may rise. And as your organs start to shut down, you sleep, and sleep, and sleep, and slip away, very peacefully. You’re gone.

That’s what Alzheimer’s-type dementia is like.

 – Jae Starr

https://youtu.be/S7zSa5VAu7Q

Stunning Vintage Pictures Of The London Underground Through The Times

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One of a series of photographs by Henry Flather showing the construction, undertaken between 1866 and 1870, of the Metropolitan District Railway’s (MDR) underground lines between Paddington and Blackfriars via Kensington. It shows Notting Hill Gate Station shortly before it opened in 1868.

The line laid by the MDR from the 1860s onwards was designed to provide a rail connection for travellers between London’s mainline railway terminals, situated in a ring around the city centre. It now forms part of the existing District and Circle Lines on the London Underground. The construction work, utilising the “cut and cover” technique, caused much disruption to London neighbourhoods. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

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Opening of the London underground metropolitan line in London, Britain, 1863. (Photo by Rex Features/Shutterstock)

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What’s It Like To Go Crazy

I went mad once. I even was institutionalized and put under anti-psychotics. I was conscious of it, at first, I guess it was because I’m introverted. I noticed my mind was working awkwardly, logical actions started to seem illogical. Things like Why am I stuck in this line when I could just walk over that table and get to the door?

Another symptom was that the stress was gone, things that normally worried me wouldn’t cause me anxiety. I felt so light, so good, so confident, full of energy (and I haven’t been sleeping well lately), and colors looked brighter. I’m a pretty shy person, but in that time I could talk to anyone of anything without feeling uncomfortable. I was concerned about this changes, so I told my parents that I believed I was going crazy. They told me that there was no way that I was crazy, because crazy people don’t know they are crazy. They told me that my extraversion was a sign of maturity.

Days passed and the symptoms worsened, I stopped sleeping because I found it unnecessary, and not only I kept questioning normality, but also I started questioning reality. If reality is just stimuli interpreted by my brain, then does objetivity actually exists? what is the difference between a dream and reality if both are dependent on the brain? what if reality is just like a non-lucid dream, what if it just had turned lucid, and now I’m able to control it? Maybe that is what people call awakening, maybe that is what people call enlightening, they got it all wrong!. And I googled it, and people talked about life being a dream, and it reinforced my theory.

And then I became a god.

Reality is a dream, and I’m the dreamer. What is outside the dream? Nothing. What is the sense of life? why did I create this? Why is there suffering in the world? Because I was bored. There is no good or wrong, it is just a game for my enjoyment. A simulation to learn about myself, the only one. I’ve created this setting, I’ve divided myself into different points of view, and I’ve made me forget everything to made it more interesting, to see how much time does it takes me to get the pieces together, and to see how my pieces interact. And then what? Then I start again, thanks to my ability to forget, I can play this forever.. While all this thoughts assaulted me I would continue with my rutine, I was quite distracted as you can imagine. Some friends thought I was high (I don’t do drugs).

From time to time, reality would feel real again, I would feel small, with no control over it. I would feel confident, because I knew the truth, I knew that nothing mattered. But then I remember a dream could become a nightmare, and a new concern assaulted me. My own fear could manifest as something bad, and I become scared of being scared. I would feel like I was in a horror movie, pretty much like the dark side of Silent Hill. I would feel a presence, and I would feel alone and helpless. And then I would swich back to the “normal” or god state.

Finally, four days after I told my family that I was crazy, they believed me, but I didn’t belive I was crazy anymore. They found out something was wrong because I skipped a class and went for a walk instead of taking the bus. And then I kind of explained them that nothing wrong could have happened because I controlled everything. We went to a clinic, I wasn’t scared, I thought it would be funny that I would win because I was right and everyone were ignorants. I would just play the game. I received like three different diagnoses, I think they were wrong because they were assuming a cronic condition when there was one occurence. I mean, one of the diagnoses was bipolar and I didn’t even had the second pole.

The meds didn’t make me stop believing life was a dream, but I stopped feeling powerfull. I only learnt to tell the doctors what they wanted to hear. Then my family noticed I was getting bad (no because of madness, but because of medication, they were overdosing me and I had a lot of secondary effects). They seeked for a different opinion and I got another diagnosis: psychotic break due to sleep deprivation(as I mentioned earlier I was sleeping badly, the week before everything happened I spent the nights online and sleept only 2 or 3 hours and then nothing at all). I went home, got some pills to sleep, I slowly dropped the anti-psychotic dose, and I never had another problem again.

It was hard to stop believing the things that made me feel awesome, but I had to do it. I’ve become a bit obsessive about not skipping sleep time, and I still have nightmares from time to time, sometimes I have lucid dreams and I freak out, because I fear I’m not dreaming and it is me going crazy. But appart from that I’m fine. The doctor said that if I didn’t have another episode within two years of dropping the meds then it wasn’t chronic (schizophrenia is chronic), it had been 4 years and I’m sane

The experiences of becoming insane is different for everyone, because every madness is different. But I think they all have in common getting obsessed on one single idea that redefines everything.

Such a heartbreaking story, I really thought the grandmother had something to do with it at first, she was so calm on the phone.. just goes to prove how everyone handles grief differently and of course she must have been on auto pilot due to the shock, I admire her for going to see him after he confessed.

https://youtu.be/IZTRNp715Mo

Mexican-Style Green Chile Chicken Casserole

“This casserole is even better the next day, that is if it even makes it overnight! —you may omit the jalapeno pepper if desired, we like onions so I always use two and lots of fresh garlic, you can increase the green chiles to whatever amount you desire, and use as much shredded cheese and cooked chicken as desired, the amounts listed are only a guideline, this also works well with cooked turkey, prep time does not include cooking the chicken — this is *very* good!”

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Ingredients

  • 2 -3 tablespoons butter
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 2 -3 tablespoons fresh minced garlic (or to taste)
  • 1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely chopped (optional)
  • 1 13 cups chicken broth
  • 1 14 cups canned green chilies, drained (can use more!)
  • 1 -2 teaspoon cumin
  • 2 (10 ounce) cans cream of chicken soup, undiluted
  • salt and pepper
  • 24 corn tortillas (you might use a couple less than 24, or use as many as needed)
  • 4 cups cooked chicken (or use cooked turkey)
  • 2 cups cheddar cheese (or to taste) or 2 cups monterey jack and cheddar cheese blend, shredded and divided (or to taste)

Directions

  • Set oven to 350 degrees.
  • Grease a 13 x 9-inch baking dish.
  • In a medium heavy pot or saucepan, heat 2-3 tablespoons butter over medium heat; add in chopped onion, garlic and jalapeno pepper, saute for about 3-4 minutes.
  • Add in the chicken broth, green chiles, cumin and chicken soup, season with salt and pepper; bring to a boil and simmer for about 3 minutes or until heated through and combined; remove from heat.
  • Spread about 1 cup of the soup mixture into the bottom of the prepared baking dish.
  • Arrange 5-6 tortillas over the soup mixture, then top with about 1 cup chicken, then about 1/2 cup shredded cheese (or to taste).
  • Repeat the layers (ENDING with the cheese).
  • Spread the remaining soup mixture over the cheese.
  • Bake uncovered for about 25 minutes or until hot and bubbly.

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2023 01 02 11 53

8 Guys Who Dated Models Reveal What Their Experiences Were Like

1. I dated a fitness instagram model type with 200k followers. Nice girl, but everything was about social media, constantly taking pics and checking her phone

Lots of weird problems around food, couldnt just relax. It was tough so I stopped seeing her.

2. I dated an ex model for about 6 months. There’s no way I would have approached her, instead she gave me her number. She later told me guys never make a move, I guess because they would feel intimidated.

The only thing that really differed from dating someone less attractive (that is less attractive than model caliber) was the number of guys who would double take/stare at her in public. It sometimes seemed like everyone was doing it. She said she was used to it and it began around the time she turned 13!

She had some problems which ultimately ruined the relationship. She asked me to propose to her a month in and she was clearly a hypochondriac. When I broke it off she claimed she was pregnant. Fun times.

3. She could silence an Italian restaurant by waking in, but was a dead fish in bed, had a personality like an oak tree, pretty much parroted Facebook opinions, and was anti anything fun. It was a good month, but I had to walk away

4. My girlfriend is a former model. She used to travel all over the world working shows everywhere. Eventually she transitioned to her own label which she sold off.

I’m not the best looking of guys. I don’t really understand how it was that we got together. I did stop to help her when her car broke down, she invited me to a friends of hers braai (BBQ) and then to her bed.

We have had our ups and downs. Both of us had a tough time with jealousy and suspicion of each other – both of us have been cheated on in the past. I see the way that others – both male and female – look at her, and sometimes flirt with her. I know now that nothing will come of any of it. We have both helped each other mature and grow into the beautiful, annoying couple that we are today.

5. I dated what I consider a 10 last year. Everything was great on paper and we made a good looking couple. That gets old fast though, you stop noticing or caring because it simply isn’t important to your overall happiness unless you’ve got some problems. I understood after a few months how people married to gorgeous celebrities end up cheating or breaking things off. She didn’t want to put as much work into the relationship, presumably after a lifetime of being pursued by men where she didn’t have to. In bed it was a mixed bag as well, very low effort on her behalf and not really meeting me in the middle. She also spent an ungodly amount of money on clothes/makeup.

So while it was cool to be admired by other guys for a bit, ultimately it didn’t work out. She was shocked when I broke things off but not in a good way, almost as if she thought she deserved to be the one doing it.

6. She gets hit on constantly, free drinks on nights out, even if Im standing right there.

Guys always stare just walking down the road. She often dresses intentionally like a slob if we are going for a quick shopping trip or something, just so she doesn’t get as many looks.

When she wants to look good though she is a perfectionists. Takes 3 or 4 hours to get ready sometimes. Different makeup, hair styles to go with different outfits.

Some days she feels unattractive even though she just isn’t and I cant see the difference.

My outfit apparently never goes together so she will pick out one that does.

7. Use to date a instagram model. She was blue ticked and had over 500k followers

Honestly, she was a nightmare. Biggest attention seeker i ever met, wanted to post me to her IG after literally a month of dating..

Safe to say it didnt last long before i ended things

8. I briefly dated a model, she was gorgeous and I’m a very average guy so this was strange for me.

We went to dinner one night and the manager was hitting on her, telling her how he could buy her things, she ended up kicking me under the table to get him to leave.

Others were a guy at the train station trying to hit on her so she kind of just leaned against me, we left. She was actually great, very humble, she moved away but if she hadn’t I’d of been all in.

Talked about trying to be in the same place in the future but it just wasn’t realistic.

Confessions of a Man Who Suffers From Narcolepsy

Do you have a fear of drowning when eating soup?

No, but I typically wear water wings just in case anything goes wrong.

How many times have you woken up with your face on a keyboard?

I can only really recall one or two times where I’ve legitimately fallen asleep on my keyboard (And even then, I more or less let it happen, I’m really lazy). Now, falling asleep while leaning back in my computer chair? That’s another story, I’ve done that countless times.

How long do you usually blackout for, what is the experience like?

The time depends. It’s typically like a short nap or I might just transfer into my night of sleep if it happens late enough (Such as during a movie in the later evening). It kind of comes out of nowhere, although it isn’t a sudden black out.

It’s hard to explain how it exactly happens (For one, because I’m super fucking sleepy when it does), but think of that kid in your class who keeps falling asleep and his head is bobbing. I desperately try to stay awake, but if I don’t actively get up and move around, I don’t stand a chance, I will fall asleep. Because of how sudden the onset of extreme sleepiness is, more often than not I will succumb to it at least for a bit.

Have you ever had any scares or been seriously endangered because of your narcolepsy?

I’ve never really managed to hurt myself. Although narcolepsy is portrayed in the media as a sudden blackout, this is not really the case. It’s more of a sudden onset of extreme sleepiness that can really only be fought through physical movement.

That being said, I’ve had my fair share of embarrassing moments. I’ve fallen asleep in movie theaters, a Subway, during kissy time, at work, and in class countless numbers of times (I’m the kid who does that hilarious head-bobbing thing in class when trying to fight the sleep onset).

Have had a couple scares on the road with dozing off, fortunately nothing bad happened.

Most recently I can recall a time where I was driving home from school to my parents house. They live a good 90 minutes away and almost the entirety of that drive is freeway driving so there isn’t a whole lot to it. I started dozing off and, almost immediately, came to and found myself in the middle of the two-lane highway. Fortunately the nearest car was about a quarter mile behind me. I made sure to turn on my blinker and switch lanes to play it all cool.

The good news is, since I’ve been taking the medicine, nothing like this has even come close to happening.

What was your most awkward blackout?

Typically speaking, I don’t “blackout” per say. Media and pop culture have done a nice job of exaggerating the effect of Narcolepsy in that, I don’t just suddenly drop to the floor asleep.

It’s more like an uncontrollable urge to sleep. For instance, falling asleep in class. I don’t really willingly go to sleep, I just don’t have much of a choice because I get so damn sleepy. I’m that kid in your class that always does the head-nod.

That being said, I fell asleep once while making out with a girl after a party. Not really sure what she ended up doing.

Before treatment, how often did you fall victim to your narcolepsy? Did you fall asleep multiple times a day?

I would usually have a bout once or twice per day. Typically once or twice during the school day and then once I got home a nap was almost inevitable.

What prompted you to get a diagnosis?

I went in to get checked out because I suspected I had some sort of sleep disorder – my first inclination was actually sleep apnea. I often had very fragmented sleep and even when I slept well through the night, I always had issues staying awake and focused. It was such a battle to stay awake, it didn’t really seem right.

What was the diagnosis like?

I met once with my doctor and discussed the symptoms I was having. My regular doctor happens to be a sleep specialist so fortunately it only took about 15 minutes for him to realize that I should get a sleep study. After the sleep study, he diagnosed me with narcolepsy.

What did he prescribe you?

My doctor prescribed me NuVigil (which is essentially identical to ProVigil if you’re familiar). It’s not an amphetamine but it’s actually classified as a “Stimulant-like” drug. I’m not entirely sure what that is supposed to mean, but it keeps me up and is in my system for roughly 12 hours.

Funny side note, when I first was prescribed the medication I was taking it too late in the day so it’d still be in my system at like 2-3AM. For about a week I slept for maybe three hours a night. Most productive week of my life.

I generally try to take it at about 7:30AM (Class at 8:00AM, fuck me) and I’ll generally notice it beginning to wear off in the later afternoon and by 7:00PM or so I don’t really notice it anymore. If I take the medicine later in the day, I occasionally will have issues sleeping at night. Ironically one of the symptoms of NuVigil/ProVigil is insomnia.

I don’t really ever feel jittery, but I’m on a lower dosage (150mg vs 250mg). I’ve heard that this is the case sometimes with other amphetamines.

Have you had to alter your lifestyle?

A lot of it actually boils down to things everyone should be doing anyways, it’s just that more important that I do them. I make sure to exercise pretty much every day as this helps me sleep at night. Diet is also very important. In addition to a balanced diet being important for a healthy lifestyle, I need to watch what I eat later at night. Heavier, fattier foods tend to disrupt sleep, but at the same time it’s important not to go to bed hungry as this might disrupt sleep as well. Going further, my caffeine intake is pretty much zero. In addition to taking about eight hours to get out of the body, there’s apparently a higher risk of negative side effects from the NuVigil if I have a high caffeine intake.

Perhaps the most important lifestyle (And one that I’m still working on keeping up with to be honest) is a regular sleep schedule. That is, waking up and going to bed at the same time every day. This helps to regulate my sleep cycle.

The general idea with the lifestyle changes is to ensure a full rested night’s sleep, so as to help with the sleepiness during the day time.

Have there been any surprise perks from your diagnosis?

As far as surprise perks go, now that I’m officially diagnosed, I have used it as an excuse in class for why I fell asleep. I actually told one of my professors from day one this semester that I might fall asleep because of my narcolepsy and he was totally cool with it.

Other than that, my friends get to make jokes about it all the time now and comedy is always a good thing.

How would one know if they were a narcoleptic?

The four classic symptoms of narcolepsy are Excessive Daytime Sleepiness (EDS), cataplexy, sleep paralysis, and hypnagogic hallucinations. Hypnagogic hallucinations simply refer to hallucinations experienced in the transfer period between sleeping and wakefulness.For me, I don’t experience cataplexy or sleep paralysis. I certainly have the EDS, and have had a few bouts of a weird, I guess “delirium”, immediately after waking up that make me suspect I also succumb to those hypnagogic hallucinations from time to time.Narcoleptics are also different in that their REM and NREM sleep are mixed up. That is to say, I’ll go directly into my REM stage when I fall asleep. Say I take a nap in class, I’m dreaming. Fall asleep in the car? I’m dreaming. If you find that you’re dreaming each time, or at least frequently when you nap, this is a sign that you are going directly into the REM stage. Tied to this, someone with narcolepsy will have a quick sleep onset time. Anything less than 8 minutes is considered quick. When I did my sleep study my onset time was on average between 3 and 4 minutes and I went directly into the REM stage in 3 of 4 naps, but I didn’t actually sleep in the fourth nap.If you’re seeing any of those four classic symptoms or you notice you’re dreaming whenever you take naps, I’d say it’s worth looking into for yourself.

https://youtu.be/U9AK4LI40KM

Pizza Casserole

“This is similar to many Baked Pasta dishes but with the distinct flavors of pizza. I created this recipe yesterday and took it to a dinner party as the main dish. It was a big hit and every woman there asked for the recipe. I decided that anything that popular should be posted here. You do not have to use the same kind of pasta I did…but should use a pasta which will remain slightly firm after boiling and baking so that it is not mushy. NOTE** I’ve had several people ask about when to add the spices…you can either add them to the sauce or to the sausage when you cook it. Either way works great! Since this recipe is an original creation of mine, it tickles me so very much that lots of people are enjoying it! Thanks everyone!”

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2023 01 02 11 56c

Ingredients

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Directions

  • Cook pasta in boiling water until al denté.
  • Cook sausage, garlic powder and oregano with onions until the juices run clear.
  • In a lightly greased 9x13x3 inch pan, pour a small amount of sauce to lightly coat bottom.
  • Layer ingredients in the order listed below.
  • 1st layer-1/3 of the pasta, 1/3 remaining sauce, 1 bag of mozzarella cheese, 2 Tablespoons parmesan cheese, sausage and onions.
  • 2nd layer-1/2 of the remaining pasta, 1/2 remaining sauce, 1 bag of mozzarella cheese, 2 Tablespoons parmesan cheese, ham.
  • 3rd layer-all remaining pasta, all remaining sauce, 1 bag of mozzarella cheese, 2 Tablespoons parmesan cheese,all the pepperoni(completely covering the entire top with pepperoni).
  • Bake at 375°F for 40 minutes.
  • Let sit for 5 minutes before serving.

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Confessions Of A Former Armored Truck Driver

How big is the risk? Is there a rough estimate on how big the risk is of being robbed?

Messengers being shot in the back of the head while loading cash into ATM is a common thing. Granted, your head needs to be on a swivel. If you allow someone to walk up on you like that…. that’s essentially you signing your own death certificate.

Did you get to carry any handgun you qualified on or did you have to use the shitty company guns?

Garda was issuing revolvers for the longest time. They sold them 1 year before I was hired. We qualified with our own personal firearms.

What would happen if someone steps out in front of the truck pointing an AR15 at the driver?

We were trained for such event. The Threat will be eliminated.

Our rules of engagement are:

•Prove intent: he’s pointing a Ar-15 at my driver •Prove opportunity: he took the time to figure out the general time of when we show up. •Prove means: he’s literally holding an Ar-15 and ready to fire •Prove ability: His finger is on the trigger •Did my driver attempt to tell him to stop?: yes he honked.

Let’s assume worst case. The Ar-15(s) are loaded with black-tip ammunition. The front windshield will hold up the best due to the angle of the glass; my driver would have plenty time to run your A*S over. My driver was under strict directions to NEVER shift the transmission into park, foot on the break; nothing else.

My concern would be the lack of any angle on the driver and passenger side glass. If you land black tip ammunition directly on top of each other…. it’s going to go through, usually within 2-3 rounds. It honestly depends on the age of the glass from my personal testing.

This scenario is why I made safety glasses and body armor mandatory on my truck. Shards of glass will certainty be flying everywhere.

If we were engaged while the messenger and I were in the truck we would always attempt to flee. We are in a moving bank vault after.

If the driver is engaged while the messenger and I are inside a bank or other contracted establishment. The company policy is that the Armored Truck drives away, leaving the crew leader and messenger to defend themselves. Yes you heard right…. the truck drives away! Under this circumstance we were contractually bound to defend the client. Our standard operating procedure would be to evacuate all employees to cover, or concealment, and wait for Law Enforcement. (This area would’ve been established during the clients first day of service, during our risk assessment walk through.)

Finally, if the truck is engaged while we are walking out, we would move to cover and eliminate the threat. I really make all of this sound easy, it’s not. It’s scary as hell, but our faces wouldn’t show it.

A somewhat similar event happened to my truck in 2016. No shots were fired. All three us noticed that a sedan had been following us for 15 minutes. We contacted Local Law Enforcement. By the time we arrived at our next client. The Leo’s swarmed the sedan. The driver fled, he had a pistol. The front passenger had a 12 gauge shotgun.

Say your guy gets out of the truck and walks into a high end restaurant with much less actual security than say a bank or a Walmart. As he is coming out with the deposit bag I just shot him dead and go for the bag. Is your response to protect the bag or protect yourself assuming I will continue into the truck?

Protect myself. At the end of the day, we’re just trying to get home safely.vb

Have you ever been attacked?

We never let anyone get too close to us. We were never physically assaulted. Before I was on a dedicated three man truck, I personally had a close call. The establishment was large and we delivered cash through the back door. When the employee opened the door, he had a very large monkey wrench behind his head ready to swing it. I dropped their cash delivery, quickly took a few steps back, I yelled “ drop the weapon at least 5 times.” I put my hand on my firearm. At this point I didn’t draw.

He quickly recognized the situation he put himself in and stopped. I asked him “ Bro are you serious?!” And he responded with “ nawwww, I’m just playin.” I told him to get his manager right now, or we are leaving.

The manager opens the door and I asked her where the other employee was and she said that he was serving food. I picked up their cash delivery and explained the situation to her. She said she would pass the information on and look at the cameras.

After handing the incident report directly to my supervisor, he honestly didn’t care. I went to my branch manager and he said he would look into it. One week goes by and my branch manager said that they won’t investigate it because the change order was delivered. This influenced my extreme sense of paranoia once I was promoted to a Crew Leader.

Is it true your coworkers are more likely to shoot you than a random robber?

I’ve been told that 9/10 times it Will be an inside job.

Does that get awkward?

Not awkward, it gets scary. If they’re a employee that’s been with the company for less than two years I was always on edge.

What would freak me out is when one of my other two crew members called of sick, we would get a new person. When that new person starts taking wrong turns while you’re in the passenger seat next to him. That’s a “ rest your hand on your gun moment.”

Coworkers on different routes called me paranoid, but I adopted a 3 strike rule. At any point during the day, if a new drive took 3 wrong turns, with clear verbal command. We returned to our branch to fill out an Incident report. It would put us a couple hours behind schedule, but I’m a firm believer in a paper trail.

How common are accidents with armored trucks?

This question absolutely hits a very sensitive nerve with me. I take medication because of these two stories.

During late 2017 my crew and I witnessed Another Armored Truck Company slide through an intersection and t-bone a small truck similar to a Ford Ranger. The elderly woman driving the small truck died at the scene. I took a picture as it happened because I knew Law Enforcement would ask around and find out that another Armored company witnessed it.

My last story is pretty personal. Before I met my wife (happily married and blessed with a 1 month old son). I was in a serious relationship with another Crew Leader. This was kept very quiet because the rules for relationships were very strict. Most people “kinda knew” because both of us would roll into the parking lot at the same time nearly every morning.

Anyways, I believe this to be early fall of 2015. It was business as usual. We rolled into the parking lot, pretended to hate each other in front of the other officers, load our trucks up and go our separate ways. She had a new-hire driving for her. This new-hire had all the pre-existing symptoms of undiagnosed sleep apnea and other crew leaders had reported him falling asleep behind the wheel on extended drives between contracts.

During this transit (90 minutes between contracts) the New-Hire fell asleep behind the wheel and rear-ended a Semi Truck at 65 Mph. The semi was fully loaded, so Gross weight of……65,000-80,000lbs? The impact was so forceful that my Significant Others’ seatbelt buckle snapped. The seatbelt flung to the side and she hit the Bulkhead door at 65mph. (The bulkhead door is a heavy door that separates the front cab to the rear. It locks open while in transit and stays closed while sitting on site. This is due to the side door the messenger uses to climb in out of the Truck.)

My route was running late that day. After we cleared my truck of all liability and parked it. I sent her a text message that went unanswered. Then, a phone call that went straight to voicemail. While sitting in my car, that’s when I saw the tow truck, and it was her Armored truck on the flatbed. In disbelief I waited for the tow truck to drop it in the back corner of the parking lot. That’s when my supervisor walked over to me, handed me some disposable gloves, and we spent 2 hours bleaching the entire rear of the Armored Truck. The insurance company refused to determine if the truck was totaled or not until all the blood was removed. I still have nightmares and I can’t seem to reconnect with her due to the event. Here is the pictures of what I think Reddit will allow.

The Truck was totaled. The driver survived, was fired, and she was airlifted to the closest hospital with multiple skull fractures, broken collar bones, broken ribs, wrist, and left arm. The only reason she didn’t die is because the entire crash was so abrupt, she had zero time to react. She was honorably discharged from the military, became one of our dispatchers, but soon quit and faded from existence. The Last I heard, she moved to a different state.

What are the hours like?

The average route day at my branch was 10 hours

How is the pay?

When I was hired in early 2013 the starting pay was $12.65 per hour, once promoted to Crew Leader it was $14.00. Great pay to protect a few thousand dollars of other people’s money, huh?

How about benefits?

401k sucks. No company matching. Health insurance is an HSA plan. You pay the first $2200 out of pocket. Then they cover 80% • life insurance has an added clause stating that if you perish while performing duties and you weren’t following any company policy. Your family won’t be paid out. An example of this is would be: requesting a company issued bulletproof vest and being fatally shot not wearing it.

Why is the pay so low?

Because no one has the balls to start a union.

What kind of mileage do you get on those trucks?

My typical daily route varied from 65-87 miles per day. My truck was gasoline driven, and at the end of the day we refilled around 13-15 gallons. Around 4-5mpg? I’m certainly glad we weren’t driving them on our personal dimes. Glug, Glug, Glug.

What if you literally are going to crap your pants…can you run into a local starbucks and leave the truck undermanned? Or once you’re in, you’re in?

I operated a 3 man crew. 1 officer had to have direct control at all times. That was my truck rule, once you’re in, you’re in.

However, Our policy was updated shortly before I left to allow “solo” trucks. Trucks with a sh*t ton of cameras inside and out, as well as a mandatory panic button you wore around your neck.

“solo Trucks” being defined as a crew of one officer that drove and left the truck to collect money.

My crew was drafted one day to drop off cash at The Federal Reserve. Another Armored company with maintenance standards lower than us were also there waiting. As I start chatting with their Crew Leader he mentions their “urinal.” It was a 3 inch hole in their floor, that had rusted out. Said Armored company had a 4-5 hour drive from their Vault to the Federal Reserve. So, while in transit. They would urinate into the hole. Adapt and overcome, right?

Why did you quit?

The BIGGEST reason why I left was because of the Workers Compensation claim I filed. They sent 5 copies of paperwork to me and over the first two months, they lost all 5. I would call the company who handles the WC claims and they would say they received it and a week later I’d call back to only hear they lost it.

Fast forward 10 months of back-and-Fourth with this company I made my usual phone call. The told me that I no longer qualify for compensation because I have not given them the correct paperwork to file. I was responsible for the entire bill. Which angrily paid over the following year.

The last straw was when my branch eliminated a couple routes and threw all of their contracts onto other routes. Everyone got at least 15 extra stops with a heck of a lot more miles to drive per day. When I received my list of new contracts I worked them into my route as best as I could. The following month my crew gets pulled into the Branch managers office. He then starts to tell us how we aren’t making a good enough effort to make sure that everyone receives service. With the extra stops on my route, no matter how I obsessively tried to make everything work, banks were closing before we could get to them.

I pulled my branch manager aside and asked if he could place my supervisor, the operations manager, or him on my truck to shadow us. His exact words were “ i specifically didn’t get my permit to carry so that corporate wouldn’t force me to help out the routes.” He also said that he wouldn’t let a supervisor or the operations manager shadow us because he “ needed them to do more important things.”

The following day I turned my termination letter. He never pulled me into his office to talk about it.

Would you recommend this career to others?

You’re absolutely F*cking crazy to even consider this industry as a “career.” It’s honestly a dead end job that quite possibly will kill you. Could you live with that?

However, the experiences I’ve had and the other officers I shared hardship with will stay with me for the rest of my life. We truly are a brotherhood. One of my crew members signed me and my wife’s Marriage Certificate. I honestly would take a bullet in the head for my crew and others I’ve worked with.

What are you doing now?

I’m now in a waaaay better job path. I’m a Union Steelworker. I get to weld and fabricate industrial equipment for factories nationwide. The benifits are stellar, I’m netting x3 more pay that the Armored Truck company, and the shop I work at bends over backwards for both their union and nonunion employees.

They even have a 3 week PAID paternal leave program. It was awesome being able to spend more time with my newborn child than others were able to.

Criminals, I mean really, are bad…

https://youtu.be/k4VHOmEJDTg

Terrible And Bizarre Pictures Taken By Real Estate Agents

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2023 01 02 10 59

What would your dream home look like? Would it be a rustic farm hidden deep in the woods or maybe a penthouse in Manhattan? Would the interior design be more traditional or perhaps a reflection of all the latest trends? While it is fun to think about the perfect house or flat, the reality of real estate listings is far harsher, and the choices are often really scarce. Thanks to a blog called Terrible Real Estate Agent Photos, we want to share with you how, ahem, creative some of the listings can get.

From horror movie-esque semi abandoned flats for rent to excessively unique home decor cases and very impractical architecture decisions, the real estate agents behind these funny ads didn’t even care to fix the places up before snapping the hilarious pictures. The caring levels were so low that there’s also a photo with a live bat in it, a huge pig laying around in the living room and feral horses relaxing in front yards. The most baffling part is that these funny photos were really used to advertise and show the good side of housings to possible tenants.

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Yes.

In 1947, in Poland, communist authorities began a series of trials of people accused of participating in mass murder at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The second of these trials, confusingly called “The First Auschwitz Trial” (Pierwszy Proces Oświęcimski), involved 40 defendants – most of them highly placed officers and administrators in the camp.

Out of the forty defendants, twenty-three were sentenced to death by hanging, six to life imprisonment, seven to 15 years imprisonment, and three to 10, 5 and 3 years imprisonment respectively.

One was acquitted of all charges.

This guy: Hans Wilhelm Münch, seen in the picture wearing the uniform that might as well be synonymous with “war criminal”.

main qimg 8d0f786063f95c3684bebeec488ca4c4 lq
main qimg 8d0f786063f95c3684bebeec488ca4c4 lq

As far as the evidence suggests, Dr. Münch was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party, having joined up out of either genuine belief in their ideals, or self-serving reasons to advance his own career as a doctor and bacteriologist.

In 1943, he was recruited by the SS and sent to assist with medical experiments in Auschwitz. But something strange happened there: the hardcore Nazi/selfish bastard refused to enable the crimes of his superior, Josef Mengele, and – at great personal risk – began assisting the camp’s inmates.

First, he outright refused to participate in the infamous “selections” at the railway platform, which determined who’d be put to work, who’d be experimented upon, and who would be put to death immediately.

Second, he kept Mengele’s victims alive by coming up with elaborate fake experiments, that in reality were just cover for providing people with actual medical treatment, and keeping them from being killed as no longer useful.

And, finally, when leaving the camp ahead of the advancing Red Army, he gave his personal revolver to a prisoner.


And so, in December 1947, while people with every right to hate Nazis described the crimes of 39 defendants in detail, they surprised all the judges and prosecutors by standing up for an SS man and member of the Nazi party who worked for one of history’s greatest monsters.

Nobody really expected that, but the testimonies were so earnest, consistent and came from so many inmates, that even communist prosecutors had to concede their charges were unsubstantiated, and thus Hans Münch was permitted to leave, return to Germany and live out the rest of his life practicing medicine.

So, to sum it up: Yeah. There was a single SS soldier whose turn from evil was so complete that he faced communist justice and lived to tell the tale.

Greedy, messed criminals are everywhere.

Bang, bang, bang it’s a new reality

It’s a new reality. Yes it is. One need not fear it. It’s change. And all change has good and bad aspects to it.

I remain optimistic. I believe that for most of us the changes will be on the up-tick.

However, the “news” can be more than a tad frightening, but you all should be ready for anything.

This is one of my more popular answers on Quora…

When I was a boy growing up in the ‘States back in the day, there were a couple of television shows that I used to watch. My favorites included Mayberry RFD, Pettycoat Junction, “Lassie”, “Green Acres” and a bunch of others. These shows depicted small town American life.

It was a life that so many of us could relate to.

Then, sometime in the 1970s the broadcast networks made a change in television programming, intending to adjust to changing demographics and decided to focus on urban programming and directed programs in that direction.

These new programs consisted of “Jula”, “The MOD Squad”, and “Welcome Back Potter”. And the old shows (and the life that they represented) was forgotten.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when I went to China and there saw all the old iconic symbology, and imagery that I grew up with as a boy!

  • A very relaxed Sloooooow pace of life.
  • Old ladies and “aunties” taking their time picking up vegetables and cuts of meats to take home for big family dinners.
  • Neighborhood clothing and shoe stores.
  • People playing sports in neighborhood lots.
  • Kids riding bicycles, and running and playing…

And so very much more.

Today, I want to talk about something NO ONE talks about.

I want to talk about Uncle Joe, and playing checkers.

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2023 01 05 10 42

You see, one of the iconic symbology used in such (former) American television shows (Green Acres, Mayberry RFD, Pettycoat Junction) is the “Uncle Joe”; a lazy old soul, who would sit in front of the local store either “cutting the breeze”, or playing checkers. And just being alike a big old lazy cat or hound dog in the community.

And yeah.

I’ve got a couple of “uncle Joes” right near my home.

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2023 01 05 10 42c

And I don’t know about youse guys, but I enjoy saying a word or two to my local “Uncle Joe” as he sits outside the MeiYeJia, and walk by the kids playing (Chinese) checkers with the “Uncle Joe” near the “Rabbit Package Store”.

And that is one of the things that no one in the West knows about China.

Japan Launches Official Investigation Into Millions of COVID Vaccine Deaths

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Japan has launched an official investigation into the unprecedented numbers of people dying after receiving the Covid-19 vaccination.

According to reports, Japanese researchers have been instructed to investgate the mechanisms by which experimental mRNA jabs could be causing deaths and severe adverse reactions.

Hiroshima University School of Medicine Prof. Masataka Nagao highlighted how the bodies of vaccinated persons he performed autopsies on were abnormally warm, with upwards of 100 degree F body temperatures.

Hiroshima University School of Medicine Prof. Masataka Nagao highlighted how the bodies of vaccinated persons he performed autopsies on were abnormally warm, with upwards of 100 degree F body temperatures.

“The first concern was that the body temperatures of the corpses were very high when the police performed the autopsy,” Nagao declared.

“The body temperatures were unusually high, such as 33 or 34 degrees celsius (91-93ºF).”

In other bodies, Nagao says “temperatures were very high at the time of death. Their body temperatures were above the normal temperature, more like over 40 degrees celsius (104ºF).”

Graphing the data, Nagao’s research team found there were significant changes to the genetic makeup of vaccinated autopsied patients’ immune systems.

The research has led Nagao to conclude the vaccine causes immune system abnormalities that prompt inflammation throughout the body, which is likely the cause of the high body temperatures at the time of autopsy.

“Based on the data and the circumstances alone, it is not possible to conclude that the vaccine was the cause of the deaths,” Prof. Nagao said, adding, “However, it is impossible to say that the vaccine was not the cause. We can only say that it is doubtful, but we believe that vaccination was sufficiently related to the immune abnormalities.”

In another report, dermatology expert Prof. Shigetoshi Sano of the Kochi University School of Medicine discussed discovering spike proteins at the site of skin lesions and other skin problems on patients who were vaccinated.

“The spike protein derived from the vaccine was found in the skin,” Sano explained, highlighting a slide showing a bright green region on a lesion made visible by a special dye.

Very Berry Sugar Cookie Cobbler

“A cobbler that is as easy as it gets, using frozen berries, canned apple pie filling and a topping of refrigerated sugar cookie dough. To make it the ultimate, serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.”

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2023 01 01 22 27

Ingredients

  • 2 (12 ounce) bags frozen mixed berries, thawed
  • 1 (21 ounce) can apple pie filling
  • 13 cup sugar
  • 1 12 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 1 (18 ounce) package prepared cookie dough

Directions

  • Preheat oven to 350°.
  • In large bowl, mix berries, pie filling, sugar and cinnamon.
  • Transfer fruit mixture to 9 x 13 baking dish.
  • Crumble cookie dough over fruit, covering thickly and completely.
  • Bake uncovered until cookie crust is golden and crisp and juices are bubbly, about 45 minutes.

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2023 01 01 22 28

A Situation That Every Guy Dreads

 

My wife didn’t come home last night. She went out with a couple of girlfriends, which is pretty normal for her. She’s normally back around 2AM on these nights, so I waited up. Around 2:30, I called to check in. She answered, and I could hear people in the background. She told me they went to a party but were leaving in a couple of minutes. She wasn’t home by 3 so I texted. It delivered, but no reply. Around 4AM I called again, it rang a couple of times before she sent me to voicemail.

My wife finally came stumbling through the door at 6:47AM this morning. I know the exact time because I was worried. She was wearing a dress she didn’t leave the house in, with mesh leggings I’ve never seen either. The leggings had clearly been torn, and her makeup was smudged.

My heart sank when I saw her. My immediate worry was that she had been assaulted. She only shook her head no when I asked her that. I asked her what she had been doing then. She only said that I knew what she had been doing, and that kind of confirmed what the voice in the back of my head had been screaming since she walked in. My wife cheated on me last night.

I asked her who it was, she shrugged almost casually and said it was somebody they met at the club. She went back to his house and hooked up with him, then Ubered home. She then said she didn’t want to fight and just wanted to sleep. So that’s what she did.

She’s still asleep now, and didn’t even take a shower before passing out. Suffice to say our relationship is over. We don’t have any kids, and we rent so it shouldn’t be an extremely complicated process. I keep trying to reason myself out of it, pretending there might be something to salvage here. I’ve always maintained that cheating would be a red line for me though. I think I need to stick to that now.

I am going to start a series of you-tube videos in my daily postings showing evil people, and people who have mental issues, when they are in police interrogations. The point of this is not for salacious reasons, but rather to “wake people” up to the reality that these people walk around us, and are in high concentrations in the West.

Highest concentration are in cities of power. Lower in other areas, but if you live in the United States you WILL encounter these people. If you live in Europe you MAY encounter these people.

You need to understand them.

These videos give you insight.

I hope you all benefit from them. I’ll be running them for about a two week period in the postings. It’s important to understand this now, because in about 6-9 months it will add clarity as to things that will transpire.

This woman is horrible. She’s an “evil stepmom”, and locked her step-daughter in a dog cage for around 4 years, until she starved to death. Then put the carcass in a storage locker…

https://youtu.be/aFUcRn00sPc

This Is What Disney Princesses Would Look Like As Pin Up Girls

Now for something light.

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What’s it like to be a man with a low libido?

I am a low libido male and I have struggled with dead bedrooms for about 15 years now.

I have taken loads and loads of abuse because of it over the past 15 years. I’ve had past girlfriends physical hit me because it made them feel so bad. I’ve had girls verbally abuse me. I had a girl cheat on me out of spite and another girl threaten me constantly that she will cheat as a way to get me to sleep with her. I had girls tell their entire family and friends that I’m a homosexual because of my lack of sex drive.

I’ve been called a pussy, not a man, pathetic etc.

Meanwhile, I have basically no guy friends I can talk to about it because most of them don’t understand it.

Every time I watch TV I get shown guy after guy being portrayed as the complete opposite of me and I constantly feel like I am not “man” enough.

I constantly fantasize about how if the situations were reversed and the girl was the one with the low libido it would be way more “accepted”.

The hardest part about all of it is the fact that it all feels so out of my control. Low libido is usually a symptom of something, it isn’t like I choose to have a below par sex life.

Unfortunately what happens is after years and years of verbal and rarely physical abuse in past relationships, sex has become the complete opposite of what it used to be for me.

Now there are all kinds of strings attached to it and I’ve completely lost touch with what I actually like about sex because for years I had sex because I HAD TO not because I wanted to.

Every time I have sex the only thing I am thinking about is how much the whole relationship is riding on this (no pun intended) and I better perform well or she might leave me. I don’t even get to sort through all of my personal demons enough to actually enjoy how good the sex feels, I’m too focused on the wrong things.

I also developed performance anxiety because tons of times I had sex when I wasn’t horny and didn’t perform and then took verbal abuse which just reinforced the performance anxiety. I get pissed thinking about how much easier it would be to be a low libido female because they can just fake it a lot easier than I can. It is hard to fake that I’m horny because she can PHYSICALLY SEE THAT I’M NOT DOWN THERE.

As silly as it sounds, I feel like as a guy I need to be horny for sex to happen because If I don’t get an erection then sex literally can’t happen so I feel like when I’m not horny all eyes are on me to get it up. Just one of the many screwed up thoughts that have developed over the years.

The other terrible part is the guilt.

I’ve had several relationships destroyed and I’ve seen 3 girls get their confidence torn to pieces all over something that I couldn’t really control (Or at least felt like I couldn’t control it).

The frustrating part is that I was attracted to all of them, just not in a horny way as often as they would like. Then after abuse I would stop being attracted to them all together and it had nothing to do with them physically, by that point I had lost attraction because of the way they treated me over my low libido.

The frustrating part is it took way too long to find what was wrong with me. I had very low testosterone levels when I got tested last year which contributed to my sex drive.

Now I have so many mental barriers that I need to break through that were created all of these years.

Every single time sex is initiated I completely freeze like an abused animal would when you go to pet them. Usually I catch myself doing it but by then it had been a couple minutes and the mood is ruined by then.

I’ve been to counseling many times and while it is nice that I am able to talk about my issues, it doesn’t really give me any direction as to how to solve the actual problem. I hate knowing that I am to blame for something being wrong with a relationship especially because I’m so thoughtful and confident in every other part of my life.

The hardest part is deep down I feel like I just want to be accepted for who I feel like I naturally am. Girls don’t accept who I am because it makes them insecure and guys don’t accept who I am because they don’t understand it. But at the same time I think is this who I am? or is this a defect and it actually isn’t ok for me to have a lower libido?

Deep down I know that it isn’t ok for me to want sex as infrequently as i do, especially when it makes my partners feel so bad. But at the same time I kind of get jealous because I feel like my partners are allowed to want sex as often as they want but because their libido just so happens to be on the high side, they are considered normal and I am basically the freak who needs to go seek therapy and change everything about myself.

To be fair, a lot of these thoughts are left over from before the testosterone discovery. My wife has been a little more understanding because she knows there is actually something physical going on and I can’t treat it because we are trying to have a baby (Testosterone Replacement Therapy makes you infertile). But these feeling don’t just go away just because things have been better recently, there is still some destruction left behind from the last 14 years.

“Vaxxident?” Pro Football Player Collapses in Cardiac Arrest During Televised Football Game

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A player for the Buffalo Bills football team, Damar Hamlin, made a routine tackle during a game against the Cincinnati Bengals, got up, then collapsed in Cardiac Arrest on the field last night.  He was given CPR, his heartbeat was restored, and he was taken by ambulance to UC Medical Center where he is said to be in critical condition.

playergoesdown NFL game large
playergoesdown NFL game large

The game was being televised live to a national audience when the incident took place.  Fans in the stadium were shocked at what they were seeing on the field.  Here is video showing how the incident unfolded:

 

 

The Buffalo Bills issued a statement:

“Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest following a hit in our game versus the Bengals. His heartbeat was restored on the field and he was transferred to the UC Medical Center for further testing and treatment,” the Bills said in a statement. “He is currently sedated and listed in critical condition.”

Medics at the game administered CPR for what is said to have been nine (9) minutes.  An ambulance was brought onto the field and took him to the local hospital where he was reportedly intubated to breathe.

The 24 year old player is in prime health condition and there seems to be no reason for this to have taken place. The tackle he engaged in was not particularly rough, and he got right back up after it.   As such, a LOT of people are wondering out loud, if this is yet another “vaxxident?”  Did the COVID-19 vaccine cause this young man to drop?

A very significant number of people around the world have been suffering “sudden death” after the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, which are not actual “vaccines’ but instead are experimental mRNA genetic manipulation.

Blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, and a variety of other incidents have spiked since the vaccines were rolled-out. Given the tyrannical effort to silence and punish anyone who questioned the new technology, Doctors have taken to saying they are “baffled” whenever a vax death takes place.

“Baffled” then converts to an obituary which says the person “died suddenly.”   In fact, it’s happening so often, people are even making memes about it:

DyingOfSuddenly
DyingOfSuddenly

 

No one ever points to the vaccine, when it seems clear as day it is actually the vaccines causing all this death and injury.

Of course the National Football League coerced players to get the brand new, experimental jabs, threatening to cut them out of professional football if they did not get the jabs.

Other employers did the same thing.

Thus, facing the loss of their jobs and their ability to earn a living, many of the coerced gave-in and took the shots.  Now, a LOT of them are dying.

It is a wonder if those who FORCED people to take these shots, ever stop to consider that they were wrong?  Did it ever occur to them that maybe they weren’t smarter than everyone else?  Or was their ego so inflated that they actually thought THEY knew better than everyone else?

At some point, the general public is going to start to realize that the COVID-19 jabs are what is killing so many.  When that day comes, the families of those killed may decide on their own, to stop-by and “thank” those who coerced their loved ones into doing something that killed them.

I suspect it will be a very bad day for those holier-than-thou corporate executives if families start coming for them and maybe beating them to death for what they’ve done.

UPDATE 7:47 AM EST —

Reports now coming in saying the federal government has set up some sort of command post facility near the hospital “in case the football player dies.”   WTF?

 

Maybe they don’t want people reacting badly to another – but widely publicized – vax death?

One casual observer to the situation wrote “This will all get special attention because too many people can see plainly it’s the vaccine (I believe he just got jabbed 8 days ago, the jig is up).”

Another commenter on a social media forum opined “They have been able to keep the pilots dying in-flight, out of the news. It’s hard to keep it out when players are going down on live television.  They can’t take the chance of many more.”

Maybe they fear Black people will decide the vaccines targeted THEM for genocide?

Want proof of how widespread this is now becoming?   The four minute video below shows how many young, healthy, athletes have dropped DEAD in 2022 as of November.   THIS IS NOT NORMAL.

YOU MUST watch this. -MM

Now, many of you may be wondering “If this is so widespread, why isn’t the mass media reporting it?”   Here’s why:

Jesus Christ the next video is horrific! -MM
https://htrs-special.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/SponsoredByPfizer.mp4

 

“Sponsored by . . . .” means big pharma is paying a ton of money to the mass media.   If the mass media reports on what the vaccines are actually doing, their sponsor money dries up.

 

Let’s take our hats off to the young man who was smart enough to have a tracker in his backpack! He just solved a lot of crimes.

The USA is completely bat-shit crazy.

In this video we see what a self-absorbed narcissist looks like. Do you all know anyone like her?

  • 10:29 her rights,
  • 11:20 outrage,
  • 14:01 fake distress,
  • 15:27 threatening violence,
  • 15:36 blameless,
  • 15:55 victim,
  • 16:01 virtue and goodness,
  • 16:39 tears,
  • 18:30 claims reasonableness,
  • 18:36 anger,
  • 18:40 innocence,
  • 18:49 injustice,
  • 18:55 rage and blame,
  • 19:06 hateful revenge,
  • 19:12 confidence in retribution,
  • 19:16 false legal belief,
  • 19:29 late concern over child tactic,
  • 19:35 accusation of police corruption,
  • 19:45 vague threat then discount statement and infer police malice,
  • 20: innocence of any threats (see 15:27),
  • 20:13 victimhood and false legal belief,
  • 20:25 martyrdom in the face of theoretical police violence,
  • 20:36 ulterior motive due to false legal belief,
  • 21:00 blame for situation and earlier possibility of better outcome,
  • 22:05 deny earlier threats (see 19:06),
  • 22:25 additional false legal belief,
  • 22:45 police conspiracy,
  • 23:00 virtue and plan to fight racism,
  • 23:33 victim alligator tears,

Cabbage Beef Bake

“Quick, easy, and inexpensive.”

2023 01 01 22 30
2023 01 01 22 30

Ingredients

Directions

  • Preheat oven to 350. Lightly grease/spray a deep 13 x 9 baking dish.
  • Place shredded cabbage in bottom of baking dish; set aside.
  • Brown and crumble ground beef (or turkey) with the onion and red bell pepper; drain and return to the skillet.
  • To the drained beef mixture, add the diced tomatoes (undrained), salt, pepper, sugar and caraway seeds. Stir together well and spread this mixture over the cabbage in the baking dish.
  • In a small bowl, stir together the tomato sauce and sour cream, blending well. Spread this mixture over the beef mixture in the baking dish.
  • Cover and bake for 1 hour.
  • Uncover, evenly sprinkle with the 1 cup of shredded swiss cheese and bake (uncovered) for an additional 15-20 minutes.

2023 01 01 22 31
2023 01 01 22 31

Finally, we enter a deeper mental illness. A Psychopath. The most dangerous of them all.

These people are in the positions of power in the United States.

https://youtu.be/25wC533f7dQ

Explorations into the greatly odd

Well… we are in 2023.

Of course there’s going to be doom-and-gloom predictions. It’s a very common enough thing to expect.

And you know, the regular narratives will continue. Bla. Bla. Bla.

Maybe some will come true. Maybe some will not. Who cares? What are you doing now? How about enjoying life, and having a great meal? Maybe with some friends, eh?

For about a week, I am going to add some you-tube videos of narcissist, psychopaths, and sociopaths who were arrested and interrogated after they had murdered and killed someone. The thing is no one ever interviews these people before they do something bad, and thus they run unchecked through society, eventually appearing normal, wealthy and powerful.

This week is going to be a slosh through some evil…

…in addition to our normal fare.

We start with a little bit of the old same-oh same-oh…

11 Ominous Predictions For 2023

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There is a growing consensus that 2023 is going to be a miserable year for the U.S. economy and for the global economy as a whole.  In fact, in all the years that I have been writing I have never seen so many big names on Wall Street be so incredibly pessimistic about the coming year.

Of course much of that pessimism is due to the fact that 2022 went so poorly.  The cryptocurrency industry imploded, trillions of dollars in stock market wealth evaporated, inflation became a major problem all over the industrialized world, and a new housing crash suddenly erupted.

Considering all of the pain that we have experienced over the past 12 months, it is only natural for the experts to have a negative view of 2023.  The following are 11 ominous warnings that they have issued for the year ahead…

#1 The IMF: “We expect one-third of the world economy to be in recession. Even countries that are not in recession, it would feel like recession for hundreds of millions of people”

#2 Bloomberg: “Economists say there is a 7-in-10 likelihood that the US economy will sink into a recession next year, slashing demand forecasts and trimming inflation projections in the wake of massive interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.”

#3 The World Bank: “As central banks across the world simultaneously hike interest rates in response to inflation, the world may be edging toward a global recession in 2023 and a string of financial crises in emerging market and developing economies that would do them lasting harm, according to a comprehensive new study by the World Bank.”

#4 Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan: “We’re going to have a shallow recession”

#5 Mohamed El-Erian: “Many ‘high-conviction’ U.S. recession calls are immediately coupled with the assertion that it’ll be ‘short and shallow.’ Reminds me of the behavioral trap ‘transitory inflation’ proponents fell into last year”

#6 Nouriel Roubini: “No, this is not going to be a short and shallow recession, it’s going to be deep and protracted”

#7 Larry Summers: “My sense is that it’s much harder than many people think to achieve a soft landing”

#8 Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon: “Economic growth is slowing,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said at the same conference. “When I talk to our clients, they sound extremely cautious.”

#9 Charles Schwab & Co.’s Liz Ann Sonders: “We have to take our medicine still, meaning a weaker economy and a weaker labor market. The question is, is it better to take our medicine sooner or later?”

#10 BlackRock: “Central bankers won’t ride to the rescue when growth slows in this new regime, contrary to what investors have come to expect. They are deliberately causing recessions by overtightening policy to try to rein in inflation”

#11 Michael Burry: “Inflation peaked. But it is not the last peak of this cycle. We are likely to see CPI lower, possibly negative in 2H 2023, and the US in recession by any definition. Fed will cut and government will stimulate. And we will have another inflation spike. It’s not hard.”

As you can see, there is a general consensus that things will be bad in 2023, but there is disagreement about just how deep the coming economic downturn will turn out to be.

If the worst of these forecasts turn out to be accurate, that will actually be incredibly good news.

Because the reality of what we will be facing in 2023 is likely to be significantly worse than any of these experts are currently projecting.

With each passing day, we continue to get even more numbers that indicate that big trouble is ahead.

For example, we just learned that luxury home sales absolutely cratered during the months of September, October and November…

Sales of luxury homes fell 38.1% year over year during the three months ending November 30, 2022, the biggest decline on record, according to a new report from Redfin, a technology-powered real estate brokerage. That outpaced the record 31.4% decline in sales of non-luxury homes. Redfin’s data goes back to 2012.

The luxury market and the overall housing market lost momentum in 2022 due to many of the same factors: inflation, relatively high interest rates, a sagging stock market and recession fears.

We haven’t seen anything like this since 2008.

And we all remember what the housing crash of 2008 ultimately did to the financial markets.

Normally, the beginning of a calendar year is a time for optimism.  As we look forward to a completely clean slate, it can be easy to forget the difficulties of the previous 12 months.

But this year things seem completely different.

On some level, just about everyone can feel that very challenging times are ahead of us.

Decades of very foolish decisions are starting to catch up with us in a major way.

Our leaders tried very hard to keep the party going for as long as possible, and to a certain extent they were quite successful in doing so.

Our politicians in Washington kept borrowing and spending trillions upon trillions of dollars that we did not have, and that definitely delayed our day of reckoning.

And the Federal Reserve kept the financial markets artificially propped up for years by endlessly pumping giant mountains of fresh cash into the system.

But such foolish measures only made our long-term problems even worse, and now our leaders are losing control.

All of the “mega-bubbles” are starting to burst, and the system is beginning to fall apart all around us.

It is time to turn out the lights, because the party is over.

We all had a lot of fun while it lasted, but now the bill is due and an extraordinary amount of pain is ahead.

Beer and Lime Marinated Salmon

“Salmon needs to marinate overnight, so prepare the day before.”

2023 01 01 14 00
2023 01 01 14 00

Ingredients

Directions

  • Combine lime juice, beer, soy sauce, ginger, and garlic.
  • Mix well.
  • Place salmon fillets in shallow glass dish and pour marinade over top.
  • Turn pieces several times to coat; cover and refrigerate overnight.
  • Preheat oven, broiler or grill.
  • Remove salmon from marinade; discard marinade.
  • Broil, bake or grill for about 10 minutes (for 1″ thick fillets) or until fish flakes in center.
  • Serve hot garnished with diced bell pepper, lime zest and pepper on top.

2023 01 01 14 02
2023 01 01 14 02

City of Gladiators Earthquake Shattered Fountain Flows After 2,000 Years

An ancient fountain that was destroyed in a 23 BC earthquake has been restored in Turkey’s “City of Gladiators.’ Now, the two millennia old water font is streaming drinkable water again, just as it did some 2,000-years ago.

Kibrya fountain
Kibrya fountain

Unearthing Turkey’s Ancient City Of Gladiators

The ancient city of Kibyra, or Cibyra Magna, is situated in the township of Gölhisar in the southwestern Burdur Province of Turkey. In ancient times it represented the capital city of an independent state known as Cibyratis, that lay just outside the north-western limits of the ancient province of Lycia, that thrived in Anatolia from 15-14th centuries BC, and as Lukka until 546 BC.

Strabo recorded Kibyra as having originally been settled by ‘Lydians,’ who were indigenous people in this region of Asia Minor. These people constructed over 100 stadiums and after the Roman general Lucius Licinius Murena defeated the ruler of Kibrya in 83 BC the city became part of the greater Roman province of Asia. Listed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List , ancient Kibyra is known as the “City of Gladiators.” Now, archaeologists have announced that “a colossal fountain” has been restored and that it will “flow with fresh water for the first time in 2,000 years.”

2023 01 03 15 18
2023 01 03 15 18

The restored fountain will flow again after a break of 2,000 years. ( MAKU)

Piecing Together An Ancient Masterpiece

Dr. Sukru Ozudogru, an archaeologist at Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, recently told Anadolu Agency ( AA) that his team of archaeologists have spent the past four months collecting “150 original fragments from the ruins.” Now, they have successfully “pieced the architectural masterpiece back together.” The “round-planned fountain” measures 15.24 meters (50 ft) in diameter by 7.92 (26 ft) high and after being built it was used for more than 600 years.

A report in Daily Mail says the team of archaeologists have also restored the original water supply system from the spring, so that the fountain now flows with drinkable water “just the way it did 2,000 years ago.”

Dr. Ozudogru described the water from the restored fountain as “spouting from the mouths of lion and panther.” Not only do these two animals feature heavily in Roman mythology but they are two of the animals that gladiators fought in the arenas. Incidentally, it was after the discovery of the “10,400-person stadium” that hosted hundreds of gladiatorial fights that Kibyra became known as the “City of Gladiators.”

Rebuilding What Nature Attempted To Destroy

Blending both Roman and Byzantine architectural styles, during the 1000 years of the Roman empire the city became famous for its blood-thirsty gladiatorial contests. However, a 23 BC earthquake almost flattened Kiybra, and if it were not for diligent citizens in the aftermath rebuilding the giant fountain it would have been lost in time long ago.

The AA article said the restoration of the fountain and its two pools required “68 original architectural pieces and 24 imitation blocks produced from the original stone type.” Furthermore, it was observed that the original fountain featured one large circular pool and the second pool was added decades later. Dr. Ozudogru maintains that when the fountain was functional, some 2,000-years-ago, the two circular pools supplied potable water to four different parts of the city.

Sticking With The Original Plan

As far as aesthetics are concerned, fragmentary remains informed the researchers the original fountain was detailed with “elaborate statues of animals, huge columns and embossed friezes.” The archaeologists used two moldings taken from original sculptures that were both unearthed during recent excavations, and the originals are currently being exhibited in the Burdur Museum.

The researcher explained that in Roman times “Water was a mythological hero” that flowed into the two pools from the mouths of “lion and panther” statues. Relating these two animals to Roman mythology “ Heracles lay on a panther skin and Dionysus, the god of wine, wore a lion skin,” according to the professor. However, both of these animals were fought by gladiators in the 10,400-person stadium in Kibrya, which Akkurnaz explained “was a building designed for an assortment of blood-soaked spectacles, including gladiator fights and wild animal fights”.

Artists Combine Classical Paintings And Halloween Pop Culture

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0 39

DesignCrowd was inspired as well to bring some scary and creative challenges for their designers. They decided on combining famous and classic paintings that we all know with Halloween pop culture, characters, and other fragments. The designers submitted some pretty spooky stuff and we bring you the best ones on this list!

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b13af61f 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b13af61f 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b8e33640 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b8e33640 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b7c3b5b9 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b7c3b5b9 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b06e139c 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b06e139c 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b5e16d69 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b5e16d69 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b4ced58e 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b4ced58e 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b3dea785 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b3dea785 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b2f662c2 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b2f662c2 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b2bcea20 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b2bcea20 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b2abad24 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b2abad24 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b002da04 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b002da04 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b1e5b45e 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b1e5b45e 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b1c8a749 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b1c8a749 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b1b50c0d 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b1b50c0d 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b1a52598 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b1a52598 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b01ec143 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b01ec143 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b0fb2f8f 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b0fb2f8f 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b0e76027 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b0e76027 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b0d0ec99 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b0d0ec99 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b0c164c4 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b0c164c4 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b0ada4f5 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712b0ada4f5 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712afe54047 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712afe54047 700

In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712afca5d00 700
In honor of Halloween Digital artists terrorize their skills in classic paintings 61712afca5d00 700

DHS Issues New Alert: “Al Qaida Planning More 9-11 Style Attacks in USA”

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued an internal memo alert about an upcoming terrorist attack. According to intelligence, al Qaeda is actively recruiting new suicide bombers to use aircraft in attacks on the United States that are similar to what took place on September 11, 2001. They will allegedly use different strategies and tactics, according to the DHS memo.

Perhaps if the USA was not actively working with and funding Al Qaeda inside Syria, the group would not be in any position to organize attacks again in the USA.  But our US federal government is now, and has been, using Al Qaeda inside Syria in its years-long effort to overthrow the Syrian government.  So if Al Qaeda does, in fact, carry out another attack here inside the United States, we can thank our own federal government for making it possible.

Interestingly, Judicial Watch recently highlighted how Federal Air Marshals who should be in the air prepared to stop such terrorist attacks are now re-deployed trying to help process illegal aliens at Joe Biden’s open border:

“While the nation’s Federal Air Marshals (FAM) are busy on the Mexican border providing illegal immigrants with welfare checks, transportation, and other basic services, Al Qaeda is planning attacks in the U.S. involving planes, according to high-level Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sources. Judicial Watch obtained from government sources a copy of the new intelligence alert, which was delivered on December 31, 2022, at 12:23:52 Greenwich Mean Time. The caption of the widely circulated warning reads: “Al-Qaeda says upcoming attacks on US, possibly involving planes, will use new techniques and tactics.”

The threat could not come at a worse time, as the Biden administration leaves aircraft at risk by sending 150-200 FAM monthly to the southern border to help deal with what it calls “a surge in irregular migration.” The deployments will continue indefinitely, according to multiple FAM sources, and the specially trained aviation security specialists are outraged. The agency works under the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which was created after 9/11 to prevent another terrorist attack. FAM is charged with protecting commercial passenger flights by deterring and countering the risk of terrorist activity. Nevertheless, in late October, the Biden administration began deploying the highly trained law enforcement officers to busy Border Patrol sectors to help with hospital watch, transportation, security and welfare checks at migrant facilities.

Days later the Air Marshal National Council, which represents thousands of FAM nationwide, accused TSA Administrator David Pekoske and FAM Director Tirrell Stevenson of violating federal law and overstepping their authority by assigning air marshals to assist the U.S. Border Patrol with the illegal immigration crisis.

In a formal complaint to the DHS Inspector General, the group also accused the Homeland Security leaders of fraud, waste, and abuse of authority. Sending air marshals to El Paso, Texas, San Diego, California, Laredo, Texas, McAllen, Texas, Tucson, Arizona and Yuma, Arizona to transport illegal immigrants and conduct welfare checks has no relation to TSA’s core mission of transportation security, the complaint states. “The statute does not give the Administrator any authority to deploy TSA or FAM employees to the southern border to perform non transportation security related matters,” the complaint to the DHS IG says. “Further, under section (g) the statute describes what the Administrators authority is if an emergency, as defined by the Secretary of Homeland Security, is declared.” The act makes clear that the legislative intent is to only allow TSA to exercise authority and deploy its assets for transportation security, the report to the DHS watchdog confirms.

8 Former Kids of the Foster System Share Their Experiences

1. I grew up in foster care from the age of 2-17. At 6 I became a permanent ward of the state. I honestly don’t remember how many foster homes I was in over the years, but more than 15.

The foster care system isn’t made to create well adjusted happy children. As soon as you are happy and/or comfortable in a place, they rip you out and put you in a new home.

Having most your belongings shoved into garbage bags when you were moved every few months made you feel like you were nothing. Sometimes they wouldn’t even wait for you to be at home to grab you and take you to a new home. Being pulled from class by your social worker and 2 cops is always such a healthy fun experience. Sure makes what few friends you might have been able to make want to stay contact.

I was considered a good foster kid, but because I wasn’t a baby, I wasn’t a desirable option and it was nearly impossible to find a permanent home. Which meant I had to stay in an over crowded underfunded group home, staffed by over worked and underpaid people who stopped caring long before I came along.

Group homes were the worst when it came to abuse of all kinds and neglect. After being in a particularly awful one at the age of 6, my social worker decided I had to be in an actual foster home or stay with a one on one care giver in a hotel.

The foster home after that was a fairly decent one, but my foster mom was more than alittle emotionally unstable.

When I left that one I was placed in home after home of people who seemed to think that I was a live in slave, a paycheck, or both. They felt proud of themselves for helping this poor little girl whose mother chose drugs and men over her kids.

On average I maybe saw my social worker, different ones throughout the years, 3 or 4 times a year. That includes when I was being moved from place to place.

When I was 17 I moved on my own and have been independent ever since. I had to be, at 18 they cut you loose, since you are legally an adult and no longer their problem.

I am now a semi successful 28 year old. I consider myself to be pretty well adjusted. When people find out I grew up in the system they are usually shocked and can’t believe that someone who seems so ‘normal’ was in foster care. My response is usually I am stubborn, I lived through my life and I wasn’t going to let myself be a victim.

 

2. My experience of foster care was pretty mixed. I had my fair share of crappy foster placements, most of which were spent on my own as my brother and I were separated.

My first placement was surreal. I arrived home from school aged 6 to find my mother had called SS and all my stuff was being packed in plastic trash bags. And off we went into the back of a car to live with some random family. I hated it. I wasn’t a difficult kid either bit they insisted on treating me like an outsider.

Most of the placements I went to ended up with me being moved on because they couldn’t understand how to deal with me. I just wanted to feel normal and liked by everyone but being in care resulted in me being bullied… Mainly because i went to a nice rural school where kids in care was uncommon.

Most of my carers have never taken the time to get to know me or make me feel a part of a family.. All except one, which I still contact regularly.

It blew my mind when I found out that the carers I’m still in touch with were never informed of my care/family history and just assumed it was a temporary placement in which I would go back to my family. In reality my history was pretty dark and deep and if they had actually known what happened to me as a kid they might have been able to help more.

I actually accessed my care records a few years ago and was stunned at all the events that had happened which I had forgotten about or I had been lied to cover up the truth.. I definitely wasn’t prepared for that.

 

3. Being painfully aware that the families I was staying with did not “take me in” for any reason other than money. Abuse and negligence was an everyday occurrence, and I had no idea that abuse wasn’t normal.

My (adoptive) dad has an anecdote from when I was around 5 and came to live with him for the first time. I opened the fridge, and with wide eyes, said in disbelief, “You have food in here?” So yeah, the whole foster care system is pretty flawed and fucked up. Happy I was able to get out.

 

4. Foster care was the best thing that could’ve happened to me as a kid. I was taken away from my drug using parents as an infant because they weren’t feeling my siblings and I. Had no one intervened, I wouldve likely died. I also showed some FTT.

I was never adopted out, but the volunteers who took care of my were some of the nicest people I’ll ever meet. They mightve favored me a but because I wasn’t really a lash-out problem child, just a quiet kid who needed some love. The volunteers, or workers, tried their best not to split me and my siblings up, which is why we were never adopted as it presented an all or nothing deal. But there was one caretaker, Paula who I was really close with. And I remember being about 3, and I had just thrown up everywhere. And I was crying, and she told me how she really wished she could adopt me. Happiest moment of little me’s existence.

We all were returned to my parents 6 years later. Meh. I wish I had been able to keep in touch with her. So, I guess I had a great experience with it.

 

5. The start of my story is somewhat standard. I was placed in foster care after turning in my parents for extensive abuse at 16. I was in three different foster homes in 1.5 years.

The first asked for me to be rehomed because they wanted a younger child since they brought in more money.

The second forced me into religious settings several nights a week, separated food for me versus their own kids, made me tell in detail about my therapy sessions (which were about extremely personal abuse), or they’d lock me in my room… I could go on and on.

The worst of this place, and the first, were their blatant discussion of my monetary contribution (or lack there of) in comparison to younger children. I felt like a pay check.

I managed through my third home, which was awkward but livable, until I turned 18 and they asked me to leave the week after, homeless for a few months until I could scrape together a place of my own.

Being that I lived in a small, rural county, I had come in contact with many of the local foster youth during my time in the system.

Where my story becomes unique, I believe, is the career I chose later on at 21. I started working for my local county sheriff department, primarily in the jail.

I will tell you, seeing all my fellow foster youth pass through the system again, only now as adults who were living a life of incarceration, was devastating to me. They all told me the same story.

Their feeling of worthlessness because of how they were treated, being aware of our monetary value, and overall feelings of abandonment from bad parents were all shared among us. And here I was, locking them up. It just wasn’t fair.

 

6. Former lifer here, I went in at 12 and aged out. No family to speak of so I’ve been on my own a long time.

Everything is out of your control and always your fault. You’re made to feel like you’re trash, and more than a few foster homes had a closet we were allowed to use that kept our stuff (towels, supplies that we had to pay for) separate from the rest of them.

I was used to my stuff getting stolen and no one cared, just got lectured on taking better care of it even when I had done everything I was supposed to do. I was in because I didn’t have anywhere to go, not because I was a juvy, but it didn’t matter, everyone is treated as BD regardless.

Teens are considered hard to place, so it pays more and we got packed in max sq footage, usually 2-4 beds (bunks) per room depending on their license.

I was very used to coming home after school and seeing my case workers car in the driveway. Time to move. New school again. New people again. New rules again. New perfect family again /s. I lost count how many times that happened. Never any warning because they worry kids will self destruct. So immediate disruption is safer … For the adults.

Lost in the cracks is a way of life. Sometimes I’d get 3 clothing vouchers in as many months and others it would be over a year between them.

I didn’t get vaccinated at all because they moved me faster than my records could keep up, and of course if I’m asked I learned fast how to name the boosters to make it sound like I’d gotten them.

Dental care was covered but follow up care required records, so that never happened and I have terrible teeth as a result. Shoes wore out and I only had one pair, which I wore. Didn’t cross my mind to have more than one pair even into adulthood – anything extra gets stolen fast.

There was no safety net when I became an adult. My foster home when I graduated didn’t keep kids past graduation, so instead of a graduation party I had to pack and go to another foster home (I graduated too young to emancipate) literally that day.

Then when I was old enough I had to move out from there the day court was over – they wouldn’t get paid past that so my family status expired with the check lol.

Since I had no family I had nowhere to go. Everyone tends to think you have similar support resources as they do, so it doesn’t cross anyone’s mind that you’re a dumb kid completely clueless.

I lucked out that I’m pretty quick with academics, so I did fine, but there was no continuity of care and I was flying blind after high school. I had no idea the resources available to me for college, and worked to put myself through paying cash to a state school.

 

7. In forster care since I was 9. It is and i cant stress this enough, Nothing like your family life.

Many of us were taken from our parents or outright ditched by them. Im the latter.

Some of us never and or never will meet our parents.

A lot of Foster families, ive been in some. Have no qualms about reminding you of the godly gift of the smallest, shittiest room in the building.

They are very quick to bring up the power to instantly evict you with just a single phone call with little to no justification for it.

Foster siblings, especially if they are teenaged and or used to being only children will constantly and not hesitate to take advantage of their parent’s favouritism over you.

But

Its not all hellish. I was eventually put into a very good placement. They went through hell to help me through the hell of my mind and emotions and help me balance out as a person.

They made sure i was aware of the pride they felt for me without me becoming conceited in anyway. They were so good to me they even allowed to stay and rent my room after i left the care system. There are good people as Foster parents. There just needs to be more.

 

Airline Employee Killed; Sucked into Jet Engine at Montgomery, AL Airport

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A ground crew employee was killed in what is being described as an industrial accident at a central Alabama airport on Saturday; he got sucked into – and through – a running jet engine.

The Montgomery Regional Airport (MGM) said an employee with American Airlines/Piedmont Airlines died in the accident at the airport around 3 p.m.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the employee was killed where American Airlines Flight 3408, an Embraer E175 twin-jet, was parked, according to Reuters. Data on FlightAware showed the flight was scheduled to depart from Gate 4 in Montgomery for Dallas-Forth Worth Saturday afternoon.

Reuters also reported two people briefed on the incident said the employee, who was a baggage handler, died in “an accident involving one of the airplane’s engines that was running.”

He got sucked into the running engine, ground-up, and spewed out in a spray of blood, torn tissue, and crushed bones.

MGM Executive Director Wade Davis said the airport is saddened by the tragic loss of a team member.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the family during this difficult time,” Davis added.

The airport initially grounded all outbound and inbound flights, but resumed normal operations at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday.

Passengers who experienced flight changes because of the accident were asked to check with their airline carrier for the latest updates.

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Damascus Airport temporarily shut down by alleged Israeli airstrikes

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Two Syrian soldiers were killed and two others wounded early on Monday morning in alleged Israeli airstrikes targeting Damascus International Airport, the SANA Syrian state news agency reported.

SANA added that material damage had been sustained in the strikes as well and that the main international airport in the capital was temporarily out of service as a result of the damage sustained.

The transport ministry said in an online statement that workers had removed debris from the strikes and that flights would resume by 9 a.m.

Prior to the Israeli air strike, NO ATTACKS against Israel had taken place. No threat of attack had been made. No one in Israel was injured or killed. No property in Israel was damaged, destroyed, or stolen.

Absolutely nothing took place, yet Israel launched an air strike against Syria.

Confessions of a Short Guy Dating a Tall Woman

How did you two meet?

Tinder actually! We first saw each other on there, and hung out over time before we started actually dating. I was extremely nervous when we first hung out because I knew about the height difference but it didn’t bother her at all

 

Did she know about your height before the first meet?

She did! She told me it wasnt a problem. As a tall girl she sort of opened her boundaries for shorty guys cause not all guys are as tall as her.

Was her dating history mostly short guys? Like was/is that her type?

It’s varied. She says I’m one of the shortest guys she’s dated though. She says all the tall guys were asshole because of their height, like that’s all they had to offer basically.

When you first started dating, was the height difference something you had to overcome or were you both comfortable with it immediately, that you were both aware she perhaps liked smaller guys and you preferred taller women?

For her it was no problem. For me it was admittedly something I had to get used to. Being so short, finding women that actually liked short guys is always difficult where I am at, so when I actually found one I halfway didn’t believe it. But I eventually got used to it of course!

Do people ever stare at you?

Every time we go somewhere we get interesting stares. And they’re different types of stare’s as well. Women stare at us differently than the guys do and you can tell, it’s quite funny actually. Especially when they see our daughter!

What kind of stares do you get?

So, for the girls, some of them are “awe”, but most of them are towards her, and to me give off a “why are you with a guy so short?” Kind of vibe.

As for guys staring, it’s “damn wonder how he pulled her”

Who’s on top when hugging ? I mean are you in her arms or the opposite?

Uhhh sort of… both? It depends on if we hug while standing or if she is sitting. Most of the time I’m wrapped up like a burrito in her arms and she and I both love it!

Does she like to wear chucks? Or even heels?

She occasionally wears platform shoes, she tries not to around me out of respect but I never care!

Are any sex positions difficult because of the height difference?

Uhhhhhh not that we’ve really struggled with? It’s pretty easy. She’s flexible.

Did she ever lift you up like a baby during an exciting moment?

She can’t lift me because of an accident she was in, I can lift her but she doesn’t like being lifted at all

How did you figure out you were right for each other?

Honestly, we just have never argued. The vibe and feelings between us are just impeccable. I love her tons.

And watching her become the mother she has become has just blown me away.

Do you predict your kid will grow up taller or shorter?

I pray she’s tall! I’d love for her to be as tall as her mother!

The Superb Fantasy & Sci-Fi Artworks by Michael Whelan

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Connecticut-based illustrator Michael Whelan is one of the world’s most renowned fantasy artists. His pieces can be seen in hundreds of books and album covers, as well as in galleries and private collections around the world.

Whelan’s paintings are rich in symbolism and offer many layers of meaning to be explored, but his lifelong passion has been to live up to his favorite quote from G.K Chesterton: “The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.”

giskard1
giskard1

fourdayplanet
fourdayplanet

elricinsinkingcity
elricinsinkingcity

dreamfall
dreamfall

dragonsbane
dragonsbane

dragonprince new
dragonprince new

dragonlord
dragonlord

dragonlake
dragonlake

dragonfire
dragonfire

doll
doll

deliriumsmistress
deliriumsmistress

daughterofregals
daughterofregals

darktowerlongroad1
darktowerlongroad1

darktowercrimsonking
darktowercrimsonking

crystalsinger
crystalsinger

chronos
chronos

chanurventure
chanurventure

chanurshomecoming
chanurshomecoming

chanursbreakout
chanursbreakout

catwhowalkedthroughwalls
catwhowalkedthroughwalls

catspaw
catspaw

buffo 1
buffo 1

brotherassassin
brotherassassin

boogeyman
boogeyman

backintohell 2
backintohell 2

assassinsapprentice
assassinsapprentice

arkady
arkady

amazons2
amazons2

amazons
amazons

amazingdragon
amazingdragon

aliens
aliens

2061
2061

0 wwwww15
0 wwwww15

The Year When Everything Started To Fall Apart

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It amazes me that so many people still cannot understand what is happening.  2022 was supposedly going to be a year when America entered a new golden age of prosperity, but that didn’t happen.  Instead, it was a complete and utter disaster.  Stock prices fell by the most that we have seen since 2008, the cryptocurrency industry came apart at the seams, inflation soared to absurd heights, and home sales just kept declining all throughout the year.  Without a doubt, 2022 represented a major turning point.  Americans have already collectively lost trillions of dollars, and many experts are telling us that 2023 will be even worse.

We warned over and over again that the party on Wall Street would eventually come to a very bitter end, but most people didn’t want to listen.

Well, the party has now ended, and the stock market losses that we have witnessed over the past 12 months have been absolutely staggering

As of closing time on Friday evening, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by nearly 3,500 points since the start of the year, a 9.4 percent drop.

The S&P 500 was also down by 957 points this year, with the tech-heavy index falling by almost 20 percent, capping off a brutal year for the tech industry.

Meanwhile, the Nasdaq sunk by more than 5,600 points, a nearly 34 percent decline in 2022.

More than a third of the entire value of the Nasdaq is already gone.

Just think about that.

Of course some stocks were hit much harder than others.

Tesla is down about 70 percent from the peak, and Elon Musk “has become the first person ever to lose $200 billion from his net worth”

Tesla CEO and Chief Twit Elon Musk has become the first person ever to lose $200 billion from his net worth, according to a Bloomberg report.

Musk, 51, previously became the second person ever to amass a fortune of more than $200 billion in January 2021, after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Musk has now seen his wealth drop to $137 billion following a recent drop in Tesla shares.

Musk saw his fortune peak in November 2021, hitting $340 billion, and held the title of the world’s richest person up until last month. Musk was ultimately toppled off the throne by Bernard Arnault, the CEO of French luxury giant LVMH.

You have to give him credit for holding up so well under the circumstances.

200 billion dollars is an amount of money that is so large that it is almost unimaginable.

Facebook also got monkey-hammered over the course of 2022.  At this point, Facebook stock has fallen over 64 percent from where it was last January…

On the last day of trading this year, Meta’s stock was down more than 64 percent compared to January, with prices sinking from over $338-per-share to now $120-per-share.

The company has lost more than $600 billion in valuation as it spend billions to make its controversial leap to virtual reality with its Metaverse, with the efforts continuing to come up short.

Perhaps Facebook shouldn’t have put so much effort into banning and censoring millions of their best users.

What an incredibly stupid thing to do.

When I go on Facebook these days, it just feels so incredibly dead.

There are still a few diehard users hanging around, but overall it is just a pathetic hollow shell of a social media platform at this point.

Speaking of implosions, 2022 was an absolute disaster for the cryptocurrency industry.  The following summary of what we witnessed over the past 12 months comes from Zero Hedge

Among all the chaos and downfall of many crypto exchanges and leading venture capital firms, the biggest losers are crypto investors. If the burn of the bear market was not enough, millions of crypto investors who had their funds on FTX lost their life savings overnight.

Terra was once a $40 billion ecosystem. Its native token, LUNA — now known as Terra Classic (LUNC) — was one of the top five biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. With millions of customers invested in the ecosystem, the collapse brought their investment to zero within hours. After the Terra collapse, crypto investors lost their funds on a series of centralized exchanges and staking platforms like Celsius, BlockFi and Hodlnaut. Crypto investors also lost significantly in the nonfungible token market, with the price of many popular collections down by 70%. Overall, crypto investors are among the biggest losers of the year.

The total value of all cryptocurrencies exceeded 3 trillion dollars at the peak of the market.

Now the total value of all cryptocurrencies has fallen to less than 1 trillion dollars.

Hopefully you got out before the crash happened.

2022 was also a year when we experienced really painful inflation.

Food prices, energy prices and vehicle prices all went completely nuts, and many compared what we were going through to the Jimmy Carter era of the 1970s.

But this shouldn’t have been a surprise to any of us.  Starting in 2020, our leaders absolutely flooded the system with new cash and the size of the money supply absolutely exploded.

fredgraph
fredgraph

Increasing the size of the money supply so dramatically was inevitably going to cause prices to go haywire, and anyone that thought otherwise was just not being rational.

In a desperate attempt to fight the inflation monster that they helped to create, officials at the Federal Reserve aggressively raised interest rates throughout much of 2022.

As a result, we now find ourselves in the midst of another horrifying housing crash.  Home values are now steadily receding all over the nation, and home sales have been falling month after month.

fredgraph 1
fredgraph 1

Home sales have already fallen by more than a third.

How much lower can they possibly go?

I don’t know, but we are being warned to brace ourselves for more hard times ahead.

In fact, even the IMF is publicly admitting that “the worst is yet to come”

“The worst is yet to come, and for many people 2023 will feel like a recession,” the IMF said in October, noting the slowdown “will be broad-based” and may “reopen economic wounds that were only partially healed post-pandemic.”

If only they knew.

We aren’t just heading into a temporary economic downturn.  Ultimately, the entire system is starting to fall apart all around us, and the years ahead are going to be incredibly challenging.

Our leaders have been making mistake after mistake for decades, and now we get to pay the price.

So buckle up and hold on tight, because 2023 is not going to be pleasant at all.

Ivan The Terrible And His Son, By Ilya Repin, 1885

Ivan el Terrible y su hijo por Ilia Repin
Ivan el Terrible y su hijo por Ilia Repin

Their relationship further deteriorated when on 15 November, the Tsar, after seeing his pregnant daughter-in-law wearing unconventionally light clothing, physically assaulted her. Hearing her screams, the Tsarevich rushed to his wife’s defense, angrily shouting, “You sent my first wife to a convent for no reason, you did the same with my second, and now you strike the third, causing the death of the son she holds in her womb.” Yelena subsequently suffered a miscarriage.

 

The Tsarevich confronted his father on the matter, only to have the topic changed to his insubordination regarding Pskov. The elder Ivan accused his son of inciting rebellion, which the younger Ivan denied, but vehemently stuck to the view that Pskov should be liberated.

Angered, Ivan’s father struck him on the head with his scepter. Boris Godunov, who was present at the scene, tried to intervene but received blows himself. The younger Ivan fell, barely conscious and with a bleeding wound on his temple. The elder Ivan immediately threw himself at his son, kissing his face and trying to stop the bleeding, whilst repeatedly crying, “May I be damned! I’ve killed my son! I’ve killed my son!”

The younger Ivan briefly regained consciousness and said “I die as a devoted son and most humble servant”. For the next few days, the elder Ivan prayed incessantly for a miracle, but to no avail, and the Tsarevich died on 19 November 1581.

Simply Oven Baked Pork Chops and Rice

“This is DH’s recipe. It is simple comfort food and is very versatile. You can use chicken quarters in place of chops or chicken broth in place of water. Feel free to experiment with different herbs. We never make this the same way twice. A side note: I would recommend using a bone in, fattier cut of pork and not loin chops in this recipe.”

2023 01 01 14 04
2023 01 01 14 04

Ingredients

  • 1 (10 3/4 ounce) can cream of mushroom soup
  • 1 12 cups water
  • 1 cup long grain rice (uncooked)
  • 14 onion, sliced
  • 14 teaspoon pepper
  • 3 -4 pork chops
  • salt and pepper (to taste)

Directions

  • Stir together soup, water, rice and 1/4 teaspoons pepper in a 3 quart casserole.
  • Add onions.
  • Salt and pepper chops and place on top of rice.
  • Cover and bake at 350* for 1 1/4 hours or until meat is done and liquid is absorbed.
  • Remove from oven and let rest 5 minutes.

2023 01 01 14 06
2023 01 01 14 06

12 Former Forever-Aloners Give Valuable Advice On How To Escape The Dark Abyss Of Loneliness

 

1. Keep putting yourself out there. You’re not gonna meet your future someone by sitting at home alone (unless it’s the food delivery person I guess). Even if you only have one friend (or none) who is available that day & can join you, still try to go to concerts, bars, bookstores, restaurants etc alone.

Also just because things don’t happen romantically with someone doesn’t mean cut them off. Sometimes people are meant to just be a fun friend/acquaintance and you can expand your social circle through them, and meet a romantic partner from that.

2. When you say you’re doomed to singlehood you make it sound likes it’s your destiny to be single when in reality it’s your choice. People aren’t going to just show up, you need to put yourself out there.

If you’re uncomfortable about the way you look do something. I know it’s hard and seems near impossible but it’s not. You have the capability within you to break your comfort zone, to go to the gym and to go out and meet people.

You won’t have a 100% success rate, but no one does. Social and physical skills take time and effort and you need to be willing to do it. External motivation is great but it’s a rare thing. You need to get the ball rolling, make that first step and the next and the next. Eventually it becomes second nature and then you’re on your way towards a happy and healthy lifestyle.

 

3. Work out, work out, work out, work out.

Get yourself out there, do painting classes or some shit where you can interact with and meet new people, get yourself a dating profile online.

Work on improving YOURSELF, if you are happy with yourself and take pride in your appearance, people will notice.

Your main target should never be “to be in a relationship” because desperation stinks and people don’t like that.

4. Get out of the house! People aren’t going to show up to your front door. The more social events/places you go to the better. I know people who complain about there not being anyone out there for them but they never give themselves the opportunity to meet new people!

5. I spent much of the last 5 years thinking I was done with dating, that I’d be single forever, that women my age weren’t interested in guys like me, etc. etc. etc. Make an excuse, I was probably telling it to myself.

I’ve tried online dating, I’ve tried getting “out there” and widening my social circles, doing new things. I’d had a few very brief trysts arise from my efforts, but real connections felt very scarce, which to me seemed preposterous. I live in a very progressive state, with TONS of smart, kind, witty, wild women who are involved, aware, and active. But for all my efforts to meet and hold the attention of one, I was only feeling more and more defeated over time.

The best thing you can do, I think, is to just do you. Find joy in your daily routine, in the aspects of your life that you choose. Be into you. Someone is going to notice. Confidence and comfort in your own skin is probably the most attractive quality one can project. Are you a little bit weird? Fucking go with it. Own it. Revel in it. Someone out there is gonna find your quirks adorable, even sexy. I’m 35 years old and I still have trouble believing myself to be an attractive individual. But I am also an incredibly harsh critic of myself, and I think many of us are, too. Just accept and love yourself, embrace and live the shit out of your life. Someone is going to want in.

6. I didn’t meet my wife until I was 30. My 20’s were quite lonely having had only one real girlfriend. Now that I’m married with 2 kids, my advice for anyone younger and trying to meet a partner in life, is that you need to be upfront about your feelings, and not be concerned about rejection. None of the rejection will matter when you get older. In the moment in can feel bad, but instead you should think, “oh well, they didn’t like me, I will go try another one”

7. Therapy helps. I’ve never had a social anxiety diagnosis but I used to be very shy and struggle with low self-esteem, so I did a few sessions of counselling and went on a group self-esteem course and they made a hell of a difference. I wasn’t happy with the way I looked either, so I tried a few types of exercise (running, kettlebell, yoga) and eventually discovered that I LOVE weightlifting. It’s made me look better and feel stronger and I’m much more confident because of it. All of that in combo has really boosted my self esteem and made me much more comfortable in my own skin, and that definitely comes across to potential dates. I’m still quiet, but I’m quietly confident and that’s pretty great.

So rather than worrying about whether you’re actively looking for a partner, I’d focus on changing the things about yourself that are dragging your self-esteem down – get help for your social anxiety, change your diet up and lose a few lbs, reconnect with friends and family so you don’t feel lonely. Once you’ve got a handle on all of that, THEN start putting yourself out there – get yourself on POF or OKC or Tinder and talk to people. Those services exist purely to make meeting someone easy for you so take advantage.

8. Try to do something that allows you to meet new people. And I don’t mean it in a romantic way like go on dates, but, you know hang out with people, get to know someone new. This way even if you don’t find someone to date, you can get to know someone and they will introduce you to someone else and so on.
I mean, I know it’s very easy to just sit at home and be like “Well, if it’s my fate, he/she will find me eventually”. Especially if you’re a girl (like me), it’s easy to think this way and not even try to put in any efforts. But it doesn’t work this way. Push yourself, be proactive, put yourself in situations where you might meet someone, even if they’re sometimes not so comfortable for you. Even statistically the more people you meet, the more are the chances that one of them will end up that special someone.

9. I was a shut-in ages 13-17 because of my family’s abuse and bullying in middle school. My therapist, family, family’s friends, etc. were all skeptical of my ability to live a “normal” life — I basically spent all day playing Runescape, procrastinating in online school, and roleplaying on weird niche websites. I had severe anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia, so any hallmarks of a “normal” life seemed totally out of the question. Especially romance and sex, because of the body dysmorphia.

Some stuff happened, and I ended up moving out at 18. Into my own apartment. Everyone thought this was completely insane, of course, but it worked.

I think the most important part was that I had to rely on myself, which involved, like, ordering at restaurants. Or buying vegetables at the farmer’s market (the closest market to my house). Or working on my laptop in a coffee shop because they had free internet and a good parfait. I don’t know — no one reacted to me like I was some crazy monster with a hideously wrong face. So I started talking to people, who mostly assumed I was a real person and not someone who until recently would go days at a time without bathing (alternatively: bathing 6 times a day), waking up only to play Skyrim, eating chips for every meal. I was mostly just so shocked each step of the way — shocked that people were reacting to me like I was normal — that I didn’t even really think about romance until it happened organically. And after that, I felt normal, because I had done lots of normal people things and I didn’t feel like I was pretending anymore. So, it was easier the next time.

It’s cliche, but I think the only reason any of this happened was because I put myself in a position where I had no option but to do a bunch of things that seemed terrifying and impossible before. And it’s easier to do things when you have to, and if everything is something that used to be completely impossible, there’s not that big a gulf between, like, buying a watermelon and talking to the person sitting next to you?

10. Stop trying too hard. It makes you seem needy. Instead, concentrate on getting your shit together and become a functional adult. That’s what serious women are looking for, or at least, the kind you want to build something durable. Looks come as a distant secondary concern. It should be the same for you, by the way.

11. FOCUS ON YOURSELF.

That’s the most appealing energy you can have. Doing you. Your goals, dreams, work, exercise.. everything for yourself. Once you radiate positivity and confidence the whole fucking world comes calling.

12. This is nothing revolutionary, but just putting yourself first, and grasping every opportunity that comes your way. One night when I was playing pool with a buddy, I missed an opportunity with a girl because I was too scared to do anything. The next night, someone asked if I wanted to go out for a few drinks, and I really wasn’t in the mood. I was still pissed off at myself from the night before, and was in full self-hate mode. But I decided I wasn’t going to miss out on any other opportunities and was just gonna do it.

So I went out, only thinking about having a good time; drinking beer, shooting pool, playing darts, all the good stuff. Then on the bus on the way home, some girl caught my eye. It was the same girl from the night before. It just seemed like a sign, and of course, I didn’t let that opportunity pass me by again. It’s only been 6 months, but we’re still going strong, and I feel lucky every day to be with her.

It still scares me that I very nearly didn’t go out that night. If I’d been mopey and miserable, I’d have missed out on the best thing that’s happened to me. So just get out there, try to do more things, and you will find someone when you least expect it. And when a friend asks if you want to do something, say yes. It could just be the best decision you ever make.

This is “bipolar” mental illness.

https://youtu.be/oquwsT-JNjo

Animals That Asked People for Help & Kindness | Best Moments Of 2022 !

Short and not my videos. but please start off the new year properly! Remember that your actions define your quality of life. Not just now in this life, but in all subsequent lives. Make a difference. help others.

Be THAT Rufus!

Animals That Asked People for Help & Kindness | Best Moments Of 2022 !

This poor kitten was struggling for his life in his last moments on a cold morning!

https://youtu.be/I3B-rxTCYMk

Kitten Stuck In Net Fights For His Life

https://youtu.be/iEMBXZJ8_DI

Man is ambushed by 13 homeless kittens

Best Inspiring Animal Rescues Of The Year

Bullied Cat Bursts Into Tears By A Man’s Love Who Became His First Friend

Paralyzed homeless cat makes an UNBELIEVABLE recovery! My mind was blown!

Homeless cat asks for help

Cat Abandoned When Owners Moved Jumps Into His Rescuer’s Arms

Random Acts of Kindness That Will Make You Cry !

The new year marches in and the old one gets cremated

Today, my little dog had to be put down. His name was PP, and he was a fine little mini-Bishon. We knew that he would eventually get sick and die, and so we were waiting for the date to arrive. And that date was today.

It wasn’t pleasant. He went into convulsions, and seizures, complete with tossing, and somersaults, whimpering, and foaming at the mouth.

We heard a commotion on the porch where is bed was. He was under the bed, whimpering, tearing at the underside and unable to get out from under it. We lifted the bed up, and tried to comfort him down, but he couldn’t stand up, he kept on collapsing to his side and rolling on the floor with foam in his mouth and an empty stare.

We took him to the nearest vet, and put him down. I can’t stand anyone, let alone a member of my family, being in pain. Mrs MM is in distress and shock, and I’m pretty subdued. And PP, well, he’s GONE.

Perhaps in the future, he will visit me. But for now. He’s completely GONE, as in “off this place”.

We had him cremated, and in all it ran us around 1000 RMB for the end of life hospice and cremation.

Life moves on…

Today will be a short post.

Jo Mama’s Beef Stew

“Hearty and delicious. My family’s favorite stew for over 30 years. If you prefer, you can substitute basil for the rosemary–I fix it both ways. Update: When I originally made this recipe, I would coat the beef pieces with a flour/salt/pepper mix by shaking them in a bag and then brown them in a couple tablespoons of oil. I eliminated this step to simplify and lower the calories and fat, but if you do it that way it makes for a thicker sauce. Good either way!”

2022 12 27 12 26
2022 12 27 12 26

Ingredients

Directions

  • Shake stew meat up in a bag with flour to cover.
  • Brown in vegetable oil in stew pot.
  • Cover with water and bring to a boil.
  • Simmer for 30 minutes or more. (I like to simmer until the beef is nice and tender).
  • Add remaining ingredients and add additional water to cover.
  • Bring to a boil again.
  • Reduce heat and simmer until vegetables are done, about 15 minutes.

2022 12 27 12 28
2022 12 27 12 28

Questioner took a time machine and arrived here still believing that China is stuck in 1950.

Chinese hospital and clinics do not use oxygen tanks. They use a plug that is built into the wall. This plug supplies three types of gas, of which one is oxygen.

main qimg 611c1215a228a6c33dc48b010f95f1e1 lq
main qimg 611c1215a228a6c33dc48b010f95f1e1 lq

I swear that the ignorance out of the West is reaching ridiculous lows.

Great news!

Huawei has filed a patent application covering an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography scanner, according to UDN. If the company builds such a scanner and achieves decent productivity, uptime, and yields, Chinese chipmakers could produce chips on sub-7nm-class technologies. The only question is when.

In mid-November, Huawei filed an application with the State Intellectual Property Office for a patent covering an EUV scanner and its key components. The patent application number is 202110524685X

The patent application appears to cover all crucial components of an EUV scanner, including a 13.5 nm EUV light generator (light source), a set of reflecting mirrors, the lithography system, and ‘control management technologies’, according to descriptions published by several media sources.

However, filing a patent is not equal to being able to build an EUV scanner, which is a highly complex machine featuring numerous state-of-the-art components that have to work perfectly in concert and for prolonged amounts of time. Furthermore, even with an EUV tool at hand, chipmakers still have to figure out the right pellicles for masks, resists, and many other things necessary for high-volume production.

An EUV scanner with a 0.33 numerical aperture is the pinnacle of today’s semiconductor production tools. Numerous companies attempted to develop such a tool, but only ASML succeeded after over ten years of development and with financial support from Intel, Samsung, and TSMC. Today, Samsung, SK Hynix, and TSMC actively use EUV tools from ASML, but Intel has yet to start high-volume chip production using these tools.

For now, only Intel, Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, and TSMC either use or plan to use EUV scanners. Moreover, only these five companies have developed (or plan to develop) process technologies sophisticated enough to take advantage of EUV scanners. Meanwhile, China-based SMIC could not get an already procured EUV tool to develop its own EUV-based fabrication process due to the Wassenaar arrangement. Therefore, it is evident that demand for EUV scanners potentially exists in China, and apparently, Huawei was eager to address it.

As a world-class high-tech conglomerate with some $100 billion in annual revenue, Huawei pursues different goals and develops many technologies. The company’s semiconductor production ambitions are well known, and they are not limited to chip production but also to building wafer fab equipment. Huawei’s WFE efforts are advancing pretty well.

With the NDAA, Biden Advances Towards Greater Conflict with Russia and China

Biden is doubling down on his pursuit of great power conflict with Russia and China. The international working class will suffer if we don’t exploit the weaknesses in U.S. imperialism.

Sam Carliner

December 23, 2022

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U.S. imperialism under Biden has come a long way since the humiliating military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August of 2021. The withdrawal, which constituted the administration’s first big foreign policy move, caused Biden’s approval rating to plummet by 10 percentage points in one month and set off a frenzy of international commentary about declining U.S. hegemony and military power.

Along with this display of U.S. decline and incompetence, Biden’s foreign policy agenda was limited by his difficulty re-establishing key alliances degraded during the Trump years. Then, in March 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Biden administration’s constant refrain of “democracy vs. authoritarianism” — a line as hypocritical as can be — held more weight. Facilitated by Russia’s invasion, the Biden administration has been able to move forward on one of its main tasks: re-establishing the international power of the United States in service of U.S. capital’s interests.

To restore U.S. global hegemony, the Biden administration is advancing a strategy to pursue long-term conflicts with an eye towards confrontation with China. Escalatory moves against regional powers like Russia can be understood as part of this strategy. This pursuit of long term conflict was advanced by the passage of the $858 billion 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed with bi-partisan support.

The task Biden faces and his successes so far are riddled with limits and contradictions. If 2022 has shown one thing, however, it is that no one should underestimate the survival of U.S. imperialism, or how far its leaders will go to remain dominant.

The War in Ukraine — Already a Victory for U.S. Imperialism

Putin’s invasion of Russia has been a gift for U.S. imperialism. The invasion quickly developed into a proxy war between Russia and NATO. By getting the Zelenskyy regime to lead the war effort, Western imperialist powers have been able to avoid the costs of putting boots on the ground, while still using their overwhelming forces to weaken Russia militarily. According to estimates by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the United States alone has sent more than $30 billion in military aid to Ukraine in what is now the largest arms transfer in U.S. history. Not only has the United States used the invasion to revive NATO, it has achieved a historic expansion of the military alliance.

All signs point to the United States continuing, and even increasing, its involvement in the proxy war. The just-passed NDAA allows the Pentagon to grant noncompetitive, no-bid, multi-year contracts to weapons manufacturers to produce weapons systems specifically for Ukraine. To be clear, this is an uncommon contracting arrangement designed for further militarization of U.S. policy: the Pentagon is eroding existing measures that limit military spending with a stated intention of increasing the military power of Ukraine to fight Russia. The United States has even established a new military command to oversee involvement in Ukraine, understood by military analysts as a sign of long-term commitment to this war.

Even if the war does end sooner, the U.S. advance in Europe will endure. From here on, Russia will neighbor a Ukraine armed to the teeth with NATO weapons. The U.S. military presence throughout Europe will remain, with hundreds of thousands of additional U.S. troops stationed in various European countries, including a new permanent base in Poland established as a result of this war. It is also likely that the war will end with NATO directly at Russia’s border, as Finland and Sweden are on their way to formally entering the alliance.

The Contradictions of Biden’s Ukraine Policy

Of course, NATO has its own weaknesses. From the start of the war in Ukraine, the United States has been unable to win the support of key allies such as India, Mexico, Brazil, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. In some cases, the war has even moved strategic partners of U.S. imperialism closer to Russia, most notably India and Saudi Arabia. Strong alliances are not guaranteed even on the European front. Underlying NATO’s presentation of strength and unity are conflicts between the countries of Western Europe like France and Germany — for which a continuation of the war poses a more existential threat — and the United States, which seems interested in going as far as it possibly can to militarily weaken Russia. These conflicts will deepen as Europe heads into winter with Germany, France, and other countries lacking heat now that they cannot rely on Russian gas. Additionally, many analysts predict that winter conditions will strengthen Russia on the battlefield.

Zelenskyy is also emboldened to flex his power, which poses a problem for NATO. This war has enabled Zelenskyy to crush the independence of Ukraine’s working class and achieve international prestige. Wielding this power, he has attempted to escalate the war beyond NATO’s interests. This conflict played out when a Ukrainian misfire hit Poland, killing two civilians. Even after Poland and the United States confirmed that the missile came from Ukraine, Zelenskyy publicly contradicted his allies, insisting the missile was from Russia. Zelesnkyy is also leading Ukraine in a more offensive approach to the war, recently attacking targets deep in Russian territory.

Continuation of the war risks greater conflicts within NATO, escalation beyond Biden’s interests, and greater instability leading to a possible rise in class struggle or the influence of the Far Right — both of which are already on the upswing in Europe. NATO now must also deal with the crisis created by Zelenskyy — the leader NATO tied its war aims to — attempting to drag the alliance into a more aggressive position. All this has sparked debate within U.S. imperialism, with some sectors calling for diplomacy and others urging for the continuation of the war.

However, within the debate among the imperialists, the more escalatory sectors hold the greatest influence over Biden’s Ukraine policy. General Mark Milley, one of the main representatives of the imperialists who prefer de-escalation in Ukraine, recently made public statements in support of negotiations with Russia. His remarks were met with a swift response from hawks, with pro-escalation figures writing a range of criticisms of Milley in the bourgeois press. But Biden does not need to read the bourgeois press to know that de-escalation remains an unpopular position among imperialists. Two of his top advisors, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, oppose the path of de-escalation.

How the war plays out over the coming winter will likely inform what course Biden’s Ukraine policy takes in 2023. But as it stands, the likelihood of the conflict continuing for some years is far greater than a turn to diplomacy. Continuation of war breeds escalation in a vicious cycle. At a certain point, it will be impossible for the United States to back out of this war even if that is more beneficial for imperialist stability. In fact, the United States may have already passed a point of no return.

Whatever happens, the advances already made by U.S. imperialism are emboldening the most hawkish of its sectors. This makes Biden more likely to take aggressive measures not just towards Russia, but also against U.S. imperialism’s primary adversary — China.

China — A Long Confrontation Advances

While different sectors of imperialism continue to debate how the United States should deal with regional adversaries like Russia, they are all in agreement that the United States must focus on containing China’s growth. China was the primary concern in Biden’s National Security Strategy and the Pentagon’s 2023 budget proposal. For the first time, NATO has also listed China as a “challenge,” though this is more a reflection of the United States’ goals than any serious commitment from the European powers. However, it cannot be denied that the United States is moving forward with a long-term strategy to more aggressively confront China. What does such a strategy require?

Before the United States can commit to direct conflict with China, it will need to decouple the two economies. Biden has moved forward on this task, spending billions to establish domestic chip manufacturing for essential economic advantage over China. However, more notable is an escalatory move Biden made this October, when the administration placed unprecedented restrictions on China’s ability to access semiconductors and the equipment used to make them.

The decoupling will be a long, imperfect process. Already, Biden’s economic moves against China have put him in conflict with important allies such as Germany and France, two countries that cannot afford economic conflict with China. Beyond U.S. relations with Europe, any economic instability the decoupling causes will fall on the working class, opening space for greater class struggle in the United States and internationally. There is no way for the United States to decouple without risking a greater crisis, but the Biden administration has chosen to take the risk and likely cannot turn back.

Biden has also pursued a strategy of military containment in the Pacific, relying on strong alliances with governments in Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, and the Philippines to keep China in check. The United Kingdom has also entered into the containment strategy through the AUKUS alliance. In strengthening its own military presence with U.S. forces and proxies in the region, the United States is escalating long-standing tensions that could set the region on an increasingly unpredictable path. A recent example of this dynamic was Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. This was an escalation towards China, breaking U.S. neutrality over Taiwan and signifying open hostility to Beijing. China responded with a series of military exercises around Taiwan.

Pelosi’s move and possible escalations to come can be better understood through the crisis of the two parties in the United States. Democrats and Republicans remain highly polarized; both are going to extremes to present themselves as the best party to serve the interests of capital. Despite the polarization, confronting China is one of the few positions where the two parties are in agreement. In fact, it is partially because of this agreement that the Democrats have taken a more recklessly interventionist posture towards China. They have to demonstrate that they, not the Republicans, are the party most willing to take on China. Since the Republicans became known for their chauvinist anti-China rhetoric and escalatory policies during the Trump years, the Democrats are forced to take even more aggressive positions.

Any weakness seen in China’s domestic political landscape or regional standing could embolden the United States to step up escalations to appease the most hawkish sectors of imperialism. The escalations around Taiwan are set to continue. DefenseOne reports that Taiwan is mentioned 438 times in the NDAA, far more than the 237 mentions of Russia or 159 mentions of Ukraine. In fact, the NDAA includes the Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act which provides the island with $10 billion in military aid over five years and includes measures to accelerate Taiwan’s procurement of weapons and develop programs to train its military forces.

Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping at the G20 summit indicated that despite all these escalations, neither the United States nor China are interested in direct conflict at this point in time. But the two powers cannot continue to grow indefinitely together. They are on a trajectory for greater clashes that would be of world historic proportions. The less the two economies are intertwined over time and the more U.S. militarization of the Pacific fuels regional conflict, the more likely a temporary flare-up like Pelosi’s inflammatory trip to Taiwan could spark another proxy war, or even advance the world towards a hot conflict between the two powers.

Contradictions of Imperialism and Prospects for Class Struggle

It would be a mistake to underestimate U.S. imperialism, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t real weaknesses that Biden will have to navigate. As noted above, every move he makes to escalate conflict comes with risks, some of which are unpredictable.

Already the war in Ukraine has greatly exacerbated the global economic crisis. While the United States has been relatively insulated from the worst impacts, a recession has long been on its way. The midterms demonstrated the Democratic Party’s capacity to recover popular support following the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but voters still noted inflation as their primary concern in exit polling. Republican leaders have already begun moving away (at least rhetorically) from “unlimited” support for Ukraine. Public support for weapons shipments to Ukraine remains high. A recent poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, however, indicates that support for indefinite aid is slipping, with 47 percent of Americans surveyed saying Washington should urge Kiev to settle for peace as soon as possible. It is not unlikely that by 2024 the inflation crisis could develop enough in the United States for Republicans to rally voters around opposition to the war and its economic toll.

Even before class anger over the war significantly impacts the political situation in the United States, Biden will have to respond to its consequences internationally. Already we are seeing uprisings against rising cost of living throughout the Global South, with massive protests from Sri Lanka to Haiti, and movements forming around opposition to the imperialist IMF. This state of affairs will create more challenges to broad stability of U.S. interests around the world.

Most notable, however, is the impact the war is having on Europe. The working class of Europe is already suffering, spurring various crises for the traditional parties of capital throughout Europe. In some countries, such as Italy, class anger has been used to strengthen the Far Right. But the war has also given labor movements and Leftists the ability to wage historic fights in some of the strongholds of neoliberalism, such as in the United Kingdom and France. With Western European capital facing its own crises, it is no wonder countries such as Germany and France are attempting to distance themselves from U.S. imperialism and have grown more critical of the United States’ desire to prolong the war in Ukraine and decouple from China.

Biden cannot restore U.S. hegemony without beginning the long process of preparation for conflict now. But this preparation will force him to balance U.S. diplomacy with necessary military and economic alliances, maintain stability for U.S. interests throughout the semi-colonial world, and keep the Democrats ahead within the crisis of the two party regime of the United States.

Under Biden, the United States is in a moment of relative strength compared to its position during the Trump years. However, 2023 leaves plenty of room for crises to develop for the Biden regime. The working class in the United States is growing in consciousness and militancy, and this, more than anything, has the power to disrupt the aims of U.S. imperialism.

Notably, class struggle in the United States, while disruptive to the aims of capital, is not inherently anti-imperialist. In recent history, U.S. labor activity has been chauvinist, with signs on picket lines calling to “Protect American jobs.” By and large, labor has focused on bread and butter issues for the U.S. working class while avoiding fights against systems of oppression at home and abroad. This lack of internationalism emanates, in part, from the traditional labor bureaucracy’s connection to the imperialist Democratic Party. Even “Socialists” like Bernie Sanders and the DSA lean into a U.S.-centric vision of labor power. But it is wrong to believe that the power of the U.S. working class can best advance through a labor movement that is only national in scope. Self-division of the working class by countries and borders undercuts one of its greatest strengths, the sheer numbers it has to fight as an international force.

For workers in the heart of imperialism to take advantage of our full power, we will need to unite with our class siblings mobilizing around the world. This means building solidarity with strikes in other countries, firmly denouncing chauvinist slogans from labor leaders, mobilizing in our workplace and in the streets against U.S. intervention throughout the world, and understanding the international nature of our struggle against inflation.

Because we cannot count on even the most left-wing elements of the Democratic Party or the union bureaucracies connected to the party, we need leaders from our class who put forward an internationalist, anti-imperialist perspective in the U.S. labor movement. Since the two parties of capital are also parties of imperialism and war, the United States needs a working class party that is firmly anti-imperialist and seeks to unite our struggle with workers around the world, especially countries targeted by the United States.

Without such a party or internationalist perspective in the domestic class struggle, it is likely that U.S. imperialism will remain emboldened and take ever more aggressive, destructive actions. However, the weaknesses of the regime are there. It is the task of workers and the Left to use the crises of capital and the weakness of U.S. imperialism to our advantage.

Medvedev: “World teetering on brink of World War III . . . Nuclear Catastrophe”

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Russia’s former president and current deputy chair of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev wrote a lengthy article for Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper, in which he summarized his thoughts on how the year 2022 has changed the world order forever.

“The only thing that stops our enemies today is the understanding that Russia will be guided by [the doctrine] on nuclear deterrence. And if there is a real threat, we will act,” Medvedev wrote in his article published on Sunday night – noting that in such a grim scenario there will be nobody left to argue about whether that was “a retaliatory strike or a preventive one.”

“Therefore, the Western world is balancing between a burning desire to maximally humiliate, dismember and destroy Russia, on the one hand, and the desire to avoid a nuclear apocalypse, on the other,” he explained.

Until Russia receives the security guarantees it has demanded, the world “will continue to teeter on the brink of World War III and nuclear catastrophe,” Medvedev wrote, noting that Moscow is doing and will continue to do “everything we can to prevent it.”

Last December, Russia presented a list of security proposals to the US and NATO, among other things urging the West to impose a ban on Ukraine entering the military bloc, while insisting that NATO should retreat to its borders of 1997, before it began to expand.

After the US and NATO flatly refused, saying they would only be interested in limited strategic arms control talks, it became obvious that Moscow has “no one to talk to and nothing to negotiate about” with the West, Medvedev argued. And when in February “Ukrainian junkies announced their desire to revive their nuclear arsenal,” Moscow had no other choice but to act, he added.

“Our world has changed, forever. And the main question remains… what kind of future begins today?” Medvedev wrote.

“New disarmament agreements are currently unrealistic and unnecessary,” the Russian official reiterated. “The sooner the guarantees of maximum security that suit our country are received, the sooner the situation will normalize.”

Earlier this month, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said that Moscow is willing to discuss the subject of security guarantees again, if the West is serious about it, but until then, Russia will continue to respond appropriately to any further NATO expansion. Since the conflict in Ukraine escalated in February, the bloc has moved to welcome Sweden and Finland into its ranks, though the expansion has yet to be finalized.

Why Do So Many Bad Things Keep Happening To Us?

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I suppose that this is a fitting way to end the year.  2022 has been a year of war, plagues, natural disasters, shortages and severe economic troubles, but up until this month we had not been able to add “an apocalyptic winter storm” to the list yet.

Unfortunately, what we have just been through over the last week definitely qualifies.  A “monster storm” that covered almost the entire country at one point brought blizzard conditions to much of the U.S. over the past several days.  Temperatures dipped down to minus 50 degrees in some areas, and extremely high winds and heavy snow combined to create truly nightmarish conditions in certain cities.  For example, we are being told that this was the “most devastating storm in Buffalo’s long storied history”

“We had to send specialized rescue crews to go get the rescuers,” Poloncarz told “CNN This Morning” Monday, adding it was the worst storm he could remember. “It was just horrendous, and it was horrendous for 24 hours in a row.”

“We’re used to snow here, we can handle snow,” he said. “But with the wind, the blinding views – it was complete whiteouts – and the extreme cold, it was some of the worst conditions that any of us have ever seen.”

The storm has drawn widespread comparisons to Buffalo’s famous blizzard of 1977. Poloncarz said in Monday’s news conference the current storm’s “ferocity … was worse than the blizzard of ’77.” And in a news conference Sunday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called this storm the “most devastating storm in Buffalo’s long storied history.”

Buffalo has had a lot of really bad storms over the years.

But this one takes the cake.

According to a local news report, Buffalo has already received about 4 feet of snow, and snow is going to continue to fall until the middle of the day on Tuesday…

The blizzard began Friday, dumping nearly 4 feet of snow in the Buffalo area and making many roads impassable.

The snow is still falling. Some parts of the county could see another 8 to 12 inches by 1 p.m. Tuesday.

I have never seen anything quite like this.

Of course I have been using that phrase a lot lately.

So far, at least 27 people have been killed by the storm in Erie County, and the overall national death toll from the storm is up to 55.

But both of those numbers will inevitably go much higher because right now there are countless drivers stranded in their vehicles on highways all over the United States.

What part of “don’t drive during this storm” did people not understand?

Many others are without power and are slowly freezing as they find themselves trapped inside their own homes by colossal mountains of snow.

Those that are in need of rescue could use our prayers right about now.

Sadly, it seems like whenever there is some sort of a major natural disaster in this country there are hordes of looters ready to take advantage of it.

On Monday, the rampant looting that we just witnessed in Buffalo made headlines all over the globe

Videos posted online show brazen thieves taking advantage of the chaos, trudging over mounds of snow to get into abandoned storefronts — like a Dollar General where shelves were overturned and items were scattered across the ground.

Residents filmed some of the thieves as they entered the store and left with handfuls of items like paper towels and toilet paper, as one shameless woman even posted a Facebook Live of her and her friends grabbing items from the store.

Others were filmed hauling televisions out of stores, and security footage caught one man breaking the glass of a liquor store door, where he allegedly stole $500 worth of goods.

Zero Hedge has posted lots of videos of the vicious looting, and those videos are prime examples of just how far we have fallen as a society.

As I have said so many times before, the thin veneer of civilization that we all depend upon on a daily basis is rapidly disappearing.

If a truly horrific long-term disaster were to erupt that causes law and order to break down on a widespread basis, we will devolve into a “Mad Max society” very quickly.

Speaking of crime, someone just attacked four more electrical substations in Washington state

Thousands of homes were left in the dark after four electrical substations in western Washington were vandalized on Christmas Day, local authorities said on Sunday, adding that it was unknown if the incidents were connected.

The attacks on Sunday cut power to more than 14,000 utility customers in south Pierce County, near Tacoma, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office said.

The burglaries were reported at two substations belonging to Tacoma Public Utilities and two belonging to Puget Sound Energy.

In a previous article, I discussed the fact that the number of these attacks has reached an all-time record high this year, and they are happening all over the nation.

Utility companies are going to have to start hiring 24 hour security to guard their equipment, because this is a problem that isn’t going to go away.

And that will mean even higher utility bills for all of us.

I truly wish that our society was not coming apart at the seams all around us.

But this is where we are at, and denying reality is not going to make things any better.

So why is our society in such bad shape?

And why do so many bad things keep happening to us?

The end of the year is often a time of self-reflection for individuals, and it should also be a time of self-reflection for our nation as a whole.

Because if we stay on the path that we are currently on, the pain that we will experience in the years ahead will be far more severe than what we have been through already.

Good decisions lead to good consequences.

And bad decisions lead to bad consequences.

Wake up America, because time is quickly slipping away.

I’ve lived here for 6 years, and yes, I do love China. Please recognize that ALL my comments reflect that of a foreigner in China – not natives. Here are my top reasons why I (and my wife) love living in China:

#1 – The people are great and the friendliest I have known in my world travels and international residencies. And, people are HAPPY!

#2 – The food is fantastic, fresh, and incredibly cheap! I especially enjoy buying fresh produce, at least 10 types of mushrooms at about 10% of USA prices. Our average precooked takeout 3 course dinner is around $3.00-$4.50 per person. Sometimes it is only about $2.00 per person (again, this is for fresh pre-cooked takeout, not for making our own dinner!).

#3 – There is no violent crime in Beijing, a city of 22 million people. Our teenage daughter attending high school here could be out until 2AM with friends, doing karaoke or whatnot, and we had no worries for her safety!

#4 – Incredible public transportation. Never need a car. My occasional city bus ride costs $.15! The high speed inter-city trains are amazing! This weekend I’m travelling by train from downtown Beijing to downtown Hefei – 1,000 KM by fast train – 4Hrs23Min. You could never make that time by plane!

#5 – The career opportunities are excellent, with salaries comparable or higher than the USA while cost of living is about 35% the cost of the USA. That’s why Chinese are able to save – not because they are so frugal! And, no age discrimination in employment!!

#6 – Vibrant, lively, and endlessly entertaining. Even after 6 years, walking down our street in Beijing is like attending “Cirque du Soleil.”

#7 – Thousands years old and ultra modern Art, culture, history, architecture – FANTASTIC!!

UKRAINE ATTACKS AIR BASE DEEP INSIDE RUSSIA – AGAIN

As of 10:00 PM eastern US time on Christmas Day (December 25) reports are flooding intel circuits saying Ukraine launched a Kamikaze Drone attack upon Russia’s ENGELS Air Base. This base is home of 121st & 184th Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiments.

One TU-95MS Heavy  Bomber is reported completely destroyed.

Ukraine used a long-range Kamikaze drone (modified Tu-141 reconnaissance drone) to carry out the attack.

The base is shown on the scalable map below so readers can see how far into Russia the attack took place:

2022 12 27 12 35
2022 12 27 12 35

D.A.R.P.A. Covid Memo: “. . . American-Made . . .”

DARPA memo Header 2 large
DARPA memo Header 2 large

Below is an image of a memo from the Commandant of the Marine Corps (Fellow) to the U.S. Inspector General, outlining that the SARS-CoV-2 is “. . . American-made” — that it’s origin documents have been “concealed,” that Masks and mRNA “don’t work very well” and that “curative” early treatments, were kept secret.

This content is for subscribers and is behind a paywall.

Massive Troop and Armor Movements Begin in Belarus – New Combat Designation: “K”

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As of 7:12 AM EST here in the USA, troops in Belarus are now on the move toward Ukraine and their tanks and other vehicles bear a new combat group designation: “K”

Word coming out of the region suggests (but does not confirm) that a new invasion of Ukraine will commence on (western) Christmas Day, December 25-into-26.

It is worth noting — in that part of the world, people do not celebrate Christmas on December 25, they celebrate Orthodox Christmas in early January.  So what is a solemn and holy day for us in the west, is not yet that same holy day for them.

New Combat Designation K large
New Combat Designation K large

It has been speculated for weeks that Russia had been massing troops in Belarus to launch a second offensive into Ukraine, in the areas near the Poland Border, so as to cut-off NATO supplies coming into Ukraine.

Whether or not a secondary invasion will take place, it seems clear from images and information coming out of Belarus, that at least _something_ big seems to be taking place right now.

Convoys of military troops and armor are on the move.  Whatever this is, could prove decisive in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine Special Military Operation.

If these troops move southward from Belarus, they would enter northwestern Ukraine in perfect position to halt weapons shipments from Poland.

In a rather unusual early-morning statement, the Russian Ambassador to the USA said early Friday morning “The risk of a clash between Russia and the USA is now high.”

Why a statement like that would be issued so early in the morning is not yet clear.  It is, however, unusual.

Chicken Soup and Homemade Noodles

“This is a wonderful homemade chicken soup with a light delicate flavor. My kids LOVE the chewy homemade noodles but you can use egg noodles to save time. This recipe takes time to prepare, but it’s worth the effort!”

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2022 12 27 12 23

Ingredients

Directions

  • In a 5 qt Dutch oven, combine chicken and water. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer 15 minutes.
  • Now is a good time to mix the noodles.
  • Basic Noodles: Lightly spoon flour into a measuring cup and level off. In a small bowl, combine flour and salt; blend well. Make a well in the center. Add water, oil, and egg. Gradually work the flour into the liquid to form a dough. On a floured surface, knead the dough 2-3 minutes. Wrap the dough in a plastic bag and let rest at room temperature for 1 hour.
  • Once the chicken has simmered 15 minutes, skim off any scum that has risen to the surface. Add bouillon cubes, 1/2 cup onion, salt, pepper, and bay leaf. Simmer an additional 35 to 45 minutes or until the chicken is tender.
  • Remove chicken from the broth to remove the meat from the bones; cut the chicken into bite-size pieces. Skim the fat from the broth. Return chicken to the pot. Stir in celery, carrots, and 1/4 cup onion. Simmer 15 minutes or until the carrots are tender crisp.

If you are making your own noodles:

  • While the vegetables are cooking; on a floured surface, roll out the noodle dough as thin as possible keeping the dough in a rectangular shape. Slice the dough into 1/4 inch slices into the length that you want. Hint: fold the rolled dough into thirds and slice through the thickness to save time.
  • Once the carrots are tender crisp, remove the bay leaf. Bring the soup back to a boil. Drop noodles into boiling soup. Cook uncovered 5 – 10 minutes or until noodles are tender, stirring occasionally.
  • Enjoy!

2022 12 27 12 24
2022 12 27 12 24

Are Americans known for their high intelligence?

I’ve been debating them for years in multiple platforms online and my conclusion is that most of them have brain damage.

Now whenever i see someone make a stupid comment online I’ll automatically assume that they’re american, and I’ll be correct 70–80% of the time

You’ll know you’re debating an American when

  1. He ( almost always male) doesnt know anything about the topic, you can see that from his 1st comment.
  2. He’ll call you brainwashed, lol see he doesn’t know anything about the topic but you’re the brainwashed one LoL
  3. He brags about his freedom, especially Freedom of information LoL, see he doesn’t know anything about the topic, he doesn’t bother to google it one bit, then he brags about his freedom of information LoL 😂 even freedom of information doesn’t help when you have a severe brain damage
  4. He thinks that calling someone brainwashed or wumao or CCP shill or whatever ethnic and religious slurs is a valid argument, thia type is pretty common like 50% of them dont even bother to argue they just call names lol 😂
  5. Try Debating them about american domestic issues then everything becomes fake news, CNN is fake news , MSNBC is fake news, fox news is also fake news, NYT, WSJ, ABC, BBC, daily mail every single domestic and foreign media all of them are fake news, LoL then try debating them about China, russia, islam and international stuff then all of those fake news media are now 100% valid news LoL 😂
  6. Suddenly talking about their genitals, this is quite common for american I don’t know why LoL
  7. And lastly severe outdated view of the world, this is perfectly describes by this question, most Americans think that china is dependent on their market, china cant innovate because china is not a democracy, and many other stuff that might be true in early 2000.

Garden war on China.
updated to 12/2022

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1959
CIA to Tibetans
You wanna kill some Chinese ?
———————————-

anglophone led white assault on Hans since the days of ENA continues unabated…

—————————————–
Faq
[work in progess]

FUKUS covert/overt wars on China since 1949 with bio war fares highlighted.

[Skipping the Opium wars and ENA]

10 years civil war,

8 years fighting jp invaders.

1950
Korean war forced on a China ravaged by 10 years of civil/defensive war, bioweapons used on NK., Chinese civilians

1955,
CIA/TW attempt at Zhou Enlai’s life airliner with 200+ people onboard plunged into the sea bed of SCS.

1959
CIA/RAW Tibet riot,
CIA recruiter to Tibetans

You wanna kill some Chinese ?

1962
FUKUS instigated Indo./sino war,

1963
CIA funded anti Chinese riots in BaNdung, iNDON.

1965
[CIA/MI6] orchestrated INdon genocide on ethnic Chinese.

1989
CIA/MI6 TAM, destabilisation/demonisation.

1993,
Chinese freighter Yinhe hijacked by USN, pirates at hight sea.
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/06/world/no-chemical-arms-aboard-china-ship.html

1998
CIA/MI6 orchestrated Indon pogrom , mass rapes on ethnic Chinese.

1999
BOmbing of Chinese embassy in ex Yugo,

2001
Hainan USAss spy plane provocation, Chinese pilot killed.

2001
Pro China Nepalese king Birendra entire family wiped out in CIA/RAW engineered palace putsch, right after his return from Beijing

2003
SARS1,
ethnic bioweapon targeting Chinese

2003
Iraq invasion,
Chinese embassy sacked by ‘rioters’
for FOUR days, right under the nose of
gringo occupiers .
oil contracts with Saddam nullified.

2004
Mystery shrouds murdering of 11 Chinese workers in Afghanistan, conveniently blamed on ‘Taliban terrorists’.

 

2006
regime change in Kenya
Chinese investments derailed

2007
Four Chinese killed in Kazakhstan

2008
Tibet riots, [CIA/MI6./RAW]
sobs declared ‘tibet genocide’

2009
Xinjiang bloodbath, [CIA./MI6]
sobs screamed uighurs genocide.

2011
21 Killed Before Chinese Bus Burnt Down in Kyrgyzstan

2011
Markets Closed After Chinese Traders Killed In Bishkek kyrg

2011
Kyrgyzstan Chinese-Uigurs Suspected of Consul Killing –

2011
Chinese murdered in angola

2011
Chinese sailors slain in ‘gruesome’ Mekong River murders
9 Thai soldiers charged with killing Chinese sailors subsequently exonerated.

2011
Libya REGIme change,
Tens of thousands Chinese workers forced to evacuate, economic loss hundreds of billions.

2012
Gunmen shot dead 2 Chinese workers in northeast Nigeria, region under assault by radical sect – The Washington Post

2013
Mali terrorism
Russian/Chinese rail executives slaughtered by AQ affiliated terrorists, who left a bunch of juicy gringo unmolested.

2013
TTP aka CIA IN Pak hunted down a group of tourists and executed the Chinese among them, get this….to avenge their bro death at the hand of great satan drone wars !

2013
Bird flu H7N9 hit China, Asia pivot

2014
Sudan balkanised
Chinese operated oil fields jeopardised.

2014
Ebola as pretext to ratchet up militarisation of Aftrica, target China.

2014
Another terrorists attack killed dozens of Hans in Xinjiang, HK riots, Mh370 mass murder, bubonic plague, Ebola, Dengue,

2014
BUbonic plague hit Chinese border town Yumen, barely one year after FUS Bubonic Lab opened in Kazakhstan across the border.

2015
China Demands Answers After 8 Hong Kong Tourists slained in Philippine Bus Hijacking

2015
FUKUS orchested Congo riots against Chinese .

2015
Sri lanka regime change by FUKUSIndia
Chinese investments torpedoed.

2018
Washington, with the backing of New Delhi, sponsored the ousting of pro-Chinese President Abdulla Yameen
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/31/pomp-o31.html

2018
bird flu, H7N9 hit china

2019
CIA ISIS mercs slaughtered 4 Chinese marine engineers in Sri Lanka

2019
HK riots , Xinjiang demonisation, swine flu, army worms, attack on Chinese food chain.

2020
SARS2,[c19] H5N1, locusts, hit China,.

2020
Chinese ambassador to Israel bumped off..
right after Pompass visit to torpedo Chinese investments in Israel

2021
Full spectrum smear campaign over Xinjiang , HK, covid, yellow peril.

FUKUS prepping for
Four fronts attacks at Lakdah, TW Straits, SCS, ECS !

2021
sleepy wily joe turned EU against China, arm twisted LIthuan to switch camp.
SK, Israel forced to join in the UIghur inquisition.

2021
coup in African GUinea,
Chinese investments on infrastructure and minerals in peril.

2021
FUKUSA AKA AUKUS orchestrated another pogrom in Solomon;s China town.

2022
FUKUSA engineered pandemic, lockdown,
fuel and food crisis claimed first sovereign victim in Sri Lanka
anglophone blames it on ‘China debt trap’, WARsj crows ‘our buddy India’s chance to displace China’

2022
FUKUSA AKA AUKUS
TTP and Baloch mercs massacred dozens of Chinese in Pakistan.

2022
Full spectrum provocation in TW straits,
sobs wanna force a Ukraine on the Chinese.

2022
color rev in Mongol, right after the PM visit to Beijing.

2022
Terrorists attack on Chinese in Afghan,
IS [aka CIA] CLAimed credits.

12/2022

2 Chinese workers dead, 5 seriously injured in Jakarta/Banduny railway mishap
foul play cannot be dismissed.

Gwadar port fire: Pakistani oil reserves allegedly blown up by Baloch rebels;

work in progress
—————————————
Tip of an iceberg

 

Hardly exhaustive.

Posted by: denk | Dec 25 2022 14:49 utc

The United States is living a film noir movie script. It’s true and tragic like a film noir scene.

Calling or writing to our elected officials is literally a waste of time. Over the last two years I have called frequently as well as written them. 

I always speak to some staff member who answers the phone and sounds like they are all of 19 years old. 

Always the same conversation, "thank you for your call and I will convey to the congressman/senator your concerns". 

The following month I received a form letter that often includes items that I did not even talk about. 

The only way you get to actually let your elected official to hear what you have to say is to be a relative or a big campaign donor with his cell phone number...otherwise it is a waste of time. 

Gone are the days of mountains of telegrams being delivered to the congressional offices, no longer do we hear independent editorials in the newspaper or TV/radio and the reason is they are all corporate controlled by a handful of corporations in the backpocket of the government. 

So folks, fate is already written, what will happen will happen and we are powerless just as the peasants of the middle ages against the Lords and Barons. 

The last two national elections are that same message.

The news out of the United States is far too distressing. Let’s enjoy elements of “The Maltese Falcon” as we explore the contemporaneous news of our daily fiasco.

Let’s start here…

Keep your eyes open when these Anglo-Saxons care about you.

  • When they cared about some natives, those natives got genocide.
  • When they cared about Africa, blacks became slaves.
  • When they cared about the Indian Subcontinent, well, that doesn’t count. Many Indians feel privileged about their colonial past.
  • When they cared about oil, we saw how many countries were destroyed in the Middle East.
  • When they cared about Ukraine, it got a coup and civil war lasted 8 years and is still bleeding for Anglo-Saxon interests.

Why do I know this secret?

  • Because China was cared about by them. Then opium was sold in large quantities in China. They called the Chinese the sick man of East Asia.

Now they care about China again and you see the “evil of China” every day in the media they control.

A few days ago, Americans announced that they are ready to help China on COVID-19 surge if China asks. It really freaked me out.

Maltese Falcon Opening Sequence

The best of the film noirs.

American opinions…

I say bring it.

I gave up on this country years ago. It’s all bullshit. The majority of the people are stupid as bricks and the rest just want “normal” back.

God’s gonna use our “enemies” (Russia ain’t my enemy) to bring His wrath down on us. Whether it’s EMP, nukes going off over many cities, a bioweapon or whatever doesn’t matter. It’s over.

Summits

There are two erstwhile ‘summits’ going on.
The first we can simply note and then let it go because it is of null value.  This is the December 13–15 US-Africa Summit, with 49 delegations from African states and one from the African Union (AU).  It is clear that this summit was called for one reason only.  This reason is to talk, bully and threaten the African states out of working with China and Russia, so, it is not really a summit at all and I get notes from the African side, who reports that there is a deficit of trust.  With the rest of the world, Africa saw that the collective west is non-agreement capable and at least in the Mali area, they kicked out the French.  The US will not get out of this summit what they hoped for, which is an African shift to the west.  

In somewhat of a segue, we see the same trajectory very clearly now in Peru, where the Peruvians are out on the streets, protesting, being killed, and not leaving.  The latest is that the military has been called in to try and establish order.  There are three demands from the Peruvians:  1) Closure of the right-wing congress 2) New elections 3) Free Pedro Castillo, and also a constitutent assembly to close the loopholes in the Peruvian establishment of congress, because this coup was the result of pure lawfare.  The pattern of deficit of trust is clear here as well and these countries.  Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Bolivia released a joint statement supporting Peru’s elected President Pedro Castillo, saying he is victim of “anti-democratic harassment,” following a US-backed coup. 

Back to the main topic.  The second 'summit' which cannot be classified as a summit per se, is the end-of-year gathering of the Valdai Club.  I've been catching as much of this as is possible.  The one paper that really caught my attention is titled: A World Without Superpowers.  It can be downloaded here:  DOWNLOAD

There are two presentations in this report that I would take issue with.  The one is on page three and reads as follows:  A new system is bound to take shape in a future stage of global politics, even if this is unlikely to happen any time soon.

I would consider this statement political as it does not really fit the rest of the presentation.  It probably was added as a type of soporific because the new system is making strides of progress.   I do know this will take time.
From <REDACTED>.

It is never time for anyone to decouple from China. Not even the U.S. China represent roughly 18% of world’s population but because of its high marginal propensity to spend and its high investment capacity, its share of world’s consumption is close to 40%. But what is worst is the fact that China is the manufacturing hub of the world!

So for quite a lot of stuff such as semiconductor micro chips, China alone represent 60–70% of the worlds market. I cannot even start to imagine what will happen to the U.S. manufacturer or supplier being told by some US government officials that they have to stop doing business China! I am a businessman and no one wants to lose 60% of the market. Usually it means going bankrupt.

I know that some people here in QUORA still think we are in 1945 and when the US says you are out , you are dead. Today in certain business US is really not a big player at all. In Semiconductor micro chip business the U.S. a a mere player amongst many many players and it is a nation amongst nation contributing towards the chip making. If America decouple with China, essentially it is decoupling from the world almost.

I hope the for the U.S. sake, the U.S. start to make sense soon.

U.S. Votes **AGAINST** United Nations Resolution to Combat “Glorification of Nazism”

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UN Anti NaZI vOTE hEADER
UN Anti NaZI vOTE hEADER

The United States of America voted today AGAINST a Resolution by the United Nations General Assembly, to “Combat the glorification of Nazism . . .”  The Biden Regime now officially supports NAZI ideology.

Out of the 180 countries present for today’s vote, 120 voted in FAVOR of Combatting Nazi ideology, 50 countries, including the USA, Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Germany, and Italy voted AGAINST, and ten nations abstained.

Here is the UN vote total chart:

UN Gen Assmbly Anti Nazi Vote 12 15 2022
UN Gen Assmbly Anti Nazi Vote 12 15 2022

This is a video that will set the pace for the rest of the past. Please enjoy.

China has surpassed USA a long long time ago as an economic powerhouse.

Today China’s growth alone is bigger than G7 put together.

Today China’s GDP in real purchasing value parity is very close to 1.4 times bigger than the USA.

Today China’s middle income is close to 700 million people or more than twice the size of the USA.

China’s consumption alone is close to 40% of the world, while the U.S. is a shade over 14% now.

When you measure Economy just like when you measure the health of a person you need to measure many different aspects such as BMI, heartbeat, weight, hypertension, blood sugar level….

Sure based on a highly inflated USD GDP, the U.S. is still 15% higher but one need to measure in different aspect and terms. To gauge the various aspect of growth.

For example. The disparity of wealth of the USA is diabolical and plain disaster. Imagine 400 people in America owns half of America while 1% of Americans owned 80% of America while 330’000’000 other Americans share the balance 20% of America. It is a credit to their media spin that there is no massive revolution there!

So anyone who knows basic economics knows that China has overtaken the U.S. for at least a decade by now and it is still growing 3 times the speed of the U.S. for another 3–4 decades to come.

It takes at least a week for US’s aircraft carriers to reach Taiwan.

However, it only takes a couple of minutes for missiles from mainland China to reach Taiwan.

Do the math.

Chef Jean-Peirre has become my absolute favorite Chef to learn from. I have massive respect for people like Marco Peirre-White, Jacques Pépin, Julia Child, and the long list of other amazing chefs. But there is just something wonderful relative to Chef Jean-Peirre’s style that is comforting. He reminds me of what my father would be like if he was a professional chef.

To me China is an adult and treats people respectively.

On the other hand we have the US who bullies everyone and works with the principle ‘do as I say not as I do’.

Look at the number of wars the US instigated and involved its allies.
I for one do not agree following the US into anymore wars.

Now look at the number of countries China has destroyed since WW2. None.

Actions always speak louder than words and the US certainly is ‘mouthy’.

Thats the Biggest Mistake you make

IT IS NOT 1 TRILLION DOLLARS

It is 6 Trillion Yuan!!!!!!

Thats the whole world of difference between $ 1 Trillion and 6 Trillion Yuan

6 Trillion Yuan Debt can be restructured 100 times – until the end of 2122 AD or 2222 AD also.

The Railways are Public Assets owned by the Chinese Public. The Debt is owned by the Chinese Public. So at the end of the day – the Debt is collateralized and even if its not a 1:1 Collateralization- The public have their own Trains, Rail Routes.

Thats the Beauty of Public Sector

Unlike the West and sadly my own country India where a few capitalists borrow from banks and build infrastructure and the Govt pays these capitalists also from Banks – Chinese Debt is entirely public.

As long as China and its economic growth continues -China can happily restructure even 50 Trillion Yuan with no issues whatsoever.

Since everything is Indigenous – all Suppliers , contractors and engineers and workers can be paid in Yuan ensuring the continuous transactional chain of Yuan related debt.


And China are also Upscaling

The Larger the Scale – the more efficient the smaller cogs.

$ 100 Million needs 15% Profitability, $ 1 Billion may need only 7% Profitability and $ 100 Billion may need only 4.25% Profitability.

China is reaching a scale where by 2025–2027 – 3.5% Profitability is sufficient to bring in a massive amount of money and also provide tickets at the cheapest cost.


So again this is Western Propaganda by a Group of Economists who still look at everything from the US angle where Capitalists own stuff and where Debt is always institutional and where Scale of Expansion is non existent.

China is simply doing what Rockefeller and Carnegie did in the early 1900s which US has forgotten

China has absolutely zero issues with this “Debt”

Chinas Railway Expansion is perfect Economics.

I live in Taiwan and I was in mainland China for several months this summer. I spent most of my time in Yunnan but also visited Beijing, Shanghai and Fujian.

*Major subjective generalizations ahead*

  • The first thing I noticed in China was that the frequency of ”不好意思“ dropped tremendously. 不好意思(bù hǎo yì si) is a Mandarin phrase that can be loosely translated to mean “excuse me”, “pardon me” or “I’m sorry”. Taiwanese use it when they bump into someone on the street, when they ask for a favor, when they are late, when they offend you, when they interrupt someone or any other time to express shyness, shame, politeness or a mild apology. Chinese seem to reserve this word for more severe offenses such as being very late to a formal meeting or bumping into someone so hard they actually stumble over and fall to the ground.
  • Chinese tend to be more nationalistic, patriotic and proud of their country. There is something of an identity crisis going on among young Taiwanese. Many young Taiwanese think Taiwan is a poor economic backwater that is not a “cool place to live”. This is very unfortunate because the quality of life here is really quite high and they take things for granted such as the high level of safety(particularly for women) and the affordable national healthcare system. When I told Chinese that I was leading a language immersion course for American high school students to learn Chinese, people were delighted and proud that people wanted to learn their language. When I told Taiwanese, they just asked why would anyone want to learn such a useless language when they already speak the ‘all-powerful’ English.
  • Chinese people are more likely to boast about China and compare it to other countries. Taiwanese love to complain about Taiwan and praise other countries. Chinese will proudly tell me that China is a very safe country and even make jabs about how America is dangerous with all the mass shootings and gun violence. Meanwhile, my Taiwanese relatives complain to me about how “dangerous” Taiwan is and that they live in debilitating fear riding the subways of Taipei. That is 100% insane because Taiwan is literally one of the safest countries on earth -definitely the safest country I’ve ever lived in. And no, not a single one of my relatives has experienced a single crime, not even a minor one, in the last three decades. (Crime was higher in the 1980s).
  • Many Chinese are highly critical of Japan, the US and South Korea; Taiwanese love fantasizing about moving to Japan, South Korea or the US. Even Chinese who do want to live abroad are still more critical.
  • Chinese are much more optimistic about the future of their country and sincerely believe living standards will continue to improve. Taiwanese are much more pessimistic, in fact, they are too pessimistic, saying things like “Taiwan is becoming a third-world country” or “there is absolutely no future here” or “we have the most corrupt government in the history of the human race”. There is indeed corruption in the Taiwanese government, especially during the time of former president Chen Shui-bian, but it is relatively mild by global and historical standards.
  • Older Chinese men love to pressure and coerce other young men into drinking hard liquor. If your glass if empty, they will pour you another drink and then you are obligated to 乾杯 with them. I’ve never experienced this in Taiwan except in aboriginal villages and even then the pressure was mild compared to rural China. Chinese also drink considerably more than Taiwanese.
  • Many Chinese men are heavy smokers. They smoke at home and they smoke in public. They smoke in restaurants, bars and markets. I was offered many cigarettes by strangers in China. I’ve never been offered cigarettes in Taiwan and there is less smoking in Taiwan(thank god).
  • Chinese have less respect for food preferences, diets, vegetarians or food allergies. I have G6PDD which means I could die if I ate fava beans but folks in Yunnan still insisted I eat their home-cooked fava bean meal. They seemed to just think I was being picky. In Taiwan, people understand allergies and will go out of their way to accommodate most food preferences.
  • I don’t know why this annoyed me but cafes in China always listed green and oolong tea under no-caffeine beverages which is incorrect. In Taiwan, a no-caffeine beverage is an herbal tea like rooibos or lemon ginger.
  • Chinese, especially in the Yunnan, are okay with eating just about anything. I ate all sorts of bugs and strange meats and fungi in China. I was told that people who are picky or do not eat certain foods, including crickets and worms, are just privileged. Young Taiwanese are appalled at the prospect of eating dog, insects, donkey or larva.
  • There is a higher percentage of Chinese who are rugged, tough and aggressive. Taiwanese tend to be more sheltered, non-confrontational and ‘nerdy’. I certainly met people in China that I wouldn’t want to mess with. I rarely meet such people in Taiwan.
  • Southeast Asian cuisines, and foreign food in general, is a lot more popular in Taiwan. There are several dozen pho restaurants in Tainan alone. I could not find a single pho restaurant in Kunming even though Yunnan literally borders Vietnam.
  • As a half-Asian, half-White person, I was much more likely to be seen as a Chinese or some other Asian in China. Taiwanese usually think I am a non-Asian foreigner – either American, Brazilian or Turkish. People I chatted with on the train in China were surprised I was half-White. Taiwanese, on the other hand, are surprised I am even half-Taiwanese and are often shocked I speak Chinese. My theory for this is that there is a broader spectrum of phenotypes and ‘faces’ in China that are considered Chinese whereas Taiwan essentially has two faces – Han and aboriginal(Austronesian). You can refer to my answer about Chinese minorities to learn more.
  • Chinese will openly and bluntly talk about people’s physical features. I chatted with two people on the train who began discussing with each other why my “nose was not right” or how my “eyes were abnormal”. Another time, I chatted for a while with an old man. When I mentioned that I was mixed, he looked at me with surprise and said ”你長得像中國人,真的是混血失敗“ which means “your mix was a failure because you look totally Chinese.” LMAO! Taiwanese are generally more polite about this.
  • Most Chinese do not value democracy, freedom of speech or freedom of the press. While many people I met used VPNs and complained about the censorship, most people still thought the Great Firewall was for the greater good. Taiwanese love their freedom of speech and freedom to demonstrate. Neither really care about privacy or surveillance however.
  • Despite the censorship and propaganda, I found Chinese to be generally more aware of geopolitics than Taiwanese. Many young Taiwanese are completely apolitical. Taiwanese media often focuses on bizarre things such as how handsome an interpreter is rather than the conference itself.
  • Blue collar and service jobs are filled by domestic migrant labor from poorer provinces in China. The same jobs are filled by Southeast Asian workers in Taiwan. Consequently, the “dirt cheap but delicious food” throughout China is Sichuanese hot pot whereas the equivalent in Taiwan is Vietnamese pho.
  • Taiwanese are more open-minded and tolerant of LGBT people compared with Chinese. Taiwanese are also less overtly racist towards Black people and South Asians. Outside the big cities, Chinese will stare shamelessly at foreigners – especially foreigners they see less often such as Black or Indian people. Taiwanese are curious to see foreigners too but will at least try and pretend they aren’t looking. Taiwanese will also smile to be polite whereas Chinese will often just stare blankly and say something like “Look! She’s black.” or “What is an Indian doing here?” or “Why is that guy so fat?”.
  • Taiwanese are slightly friendlier on average but the margin is not as great as I previously thought. I was told that mainland Chinese are rude and unfriendly but that was not my experience. If Taiwan gets a 9/10 rating for friendliness, then Yunnan and Fujian both get 8/10, Beijing, Singapore and Penang get a 7.5/10 and Shanghai a 6/10 while Hong Kong, Seoul and Kuala Lumpur all get a mere 5/10 – 不好意思!
  • Chinese have a more positive view of Taiwan than vice versa. I was genuinely surprised by the number of Chinese who had visited Taiwan or were planning to. People liked my Taiwanese accent and thought Taiwanese were cool. They also do not hate the pro-independence Taiwanese politicians but rather just think they are ‘silly’. China is a much more polarizing topic in Taiwan. For obvious reasons, Chinese do not see Taiwan as a threat whereas many Taiwanese see China as their greatest threat.
  • Finally, Chinese tend to be early-adopters of technology. Everyone from rural fruit vendors to beggars took payment via WeChat or Alipay. Almost every business in Taiwan is cash only, even the higher end places that take card only take certain types of cards and often the machine doesn’t even work. There is an app for everything in China and businesses are more integrated with the internet whereas many businesses in Taiwan are still off line.

Because they haven’t been in China long enough?

There is a joke among expats that goes something like this: Someone who visits China for a week is an expert on China. One who has been in China a year knows a lot about China, one who has been in China 5 years knows a little bit about China, and one who has been in China 10 years or more knows nothing at all about China. (I think this is said about foreigners in any country.)

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. When people know a little bit about something it is easy to see themselves as an expert, but the longer time they spend, the more they realize they don’t understand.

I’ve been in China 8 years, so I still think I understand just a little bit. Give me a couple of more years to fully realize I am truly completely ignorant.

The USA is 100% corrupt. Well stated.

China is not a consuming country?

If you visit China, you will find that Chinese consume A LOT and very conspicuously, even more conspicuously than Americans. When it comes to electric vehicles, digital services, 5G and other modern amenities, China is WAY AHEAD of everyone else because China and Chinese are not stuck in the past.

This is because the Chinese government does not allow the corporations of the past to dictate the development of the future.

Unlike in the west.

Oh we are coming directly for you, the US.

We are not that Hero that beats every henchmen then the boss, nope, we will just go directly for you.

Your first island chain is broken, 2nd island chain is almost broken, and then it’s gonna be Hawaii, then the mainland.

Get ready to be re-educated!

No, in actuality China already told you it’s territory claim from the very beginning, and that will be our claim. We really couldn’t give a fuk about others you see. Why should we take the effort to rule you, feed you and try to make you happy? You think administrating a country is fun? We are already in heavens when we see how incompetently you have ruled yourself for the past decades, you are doing a very good job running it into the ground, why would we help you correct that?

Former Spy Says Biden Is a “Controlled Asset” of the CCP – Biden’s Actions Show This Is the Case

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Can you doubt that the United Stats is corrupt? -MM

Gordan Chang said that we may never know if China has blackmail material on Biden.  However, former spy Sam Faddis is more direct and says Biden is a “controlled asset” of the CCP.

Just before the 2020 election, 51 former intelligence officials falsely claimed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation operation. Thanks to Elon Musk, we now know that Twitter colluded with Joe Biden’s campaign, the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and the FBI to prevent American voters from learning the truth —  namely, that the Democrats’ presidential nominee and his family had knowingly taken millions of dollars from Chinese intelligence officers.

A patriotic former U.S. spy named “Sam” Faddis — who recruited and ran foreign agents for America for many years — is convinced that, as a result of this collective betrayal of the public trust, we elected as president a “controlled asset” of Chinese intelligence.

The new House of Representatives must make exposing and evaluating the potentially catastrophic national security repercussions of such a dangerous penetration — and taking corrective action — its first order of business.

It’s not about helping Africa. It’s about containing China.

Deputy Speaker of Russian Senate: West Faces EXISTENTIAL CHOICE; Continue Suicidal Strategy or Engage Self Preservation

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Konstantin Kosachev, the Deputy Speaker of Russia’s Federation Council (Senate) said this week the West will soon face an EXISTENTIAL choice: It can continue with a SUICIDAL strategy (in Ukraine) or apply SELF PRESERVATION.  He’s talking about us all . . . being killed.

Western countries are standing at a crossroads and must decide whether they want to continue pursuing selfish policies that address only their own security, or recognize that this is a dead-end track, the vice speaker of upper chamber of the Russian parliament, Konstantin Kosachev, said on Tuesday.

Writing on Telegram, Kosachev, who also chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Federation Council, said that “sooner or later, the West will have to make an existential choice between catering for only its own interests, “or admitting that this suicidal strategy has exhausted itself.”

The senator noted that a return to the principle of “indivisibility of security architecture” was the only path forward. Kosachev explained that this means a “deliberate refusal to ensure one’s own security at the expense” of other countries, adding that it serves “as a cornerstone” for all complex diplomatic arrangements.

The vice speaker also claimed that there is a rift between Western countries on this issue. He pointed to the statements made by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the need for a new security framework after the Ukraine conflict ends.

According to Kosachev, these remarks “suggest that there are still remnants of common sense and a sense of self-preservation in France and Germany, which are behaving more responsibly.” That sentiment, however, is not shared by a number of other EU countries, including the Baltic nations and Poland, he stated.

Earlier this month, Macron expressed the view that NATO should prepare security guarantees for Russia after the Ukraine conflict is settled. Around the same time, Scholz noted that peace in Europe depends on the revival of post-Cold War security arrangements with Russia.

Reuters reported on Monday, citing sources, that the three Baltic states, along with Poland and Slovakia, had officially lodged their disapproval of the French leader’s remarks on making guarantees to Moscow. The same day, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski said that Russia should not expect such promises from other nations, arguing that Moscow has to ensure the safety of the EU, and not the other way around.

Hal Turner Analysis and Opinion

“Existential choice:” Whether we continue to exist.

“Suicidal Strategy” A strategy that is going to get us killed.

“Self Preservation:” Saving our own lives . . . .

The Deputy Speaker of the Russian Federation Council is talking about us existing no more because our strategy is suicidal and that only France and Germany show any sign of self-preservation.  These words are from a high ranking official in a country that can actually DO what he is talking about.

US and Western government public servants are leading us into our own deaths with their obsession over Ukraine and what they’re trying to do to Russia.  Russia is actually SAYING these words now; that’s how far this situation has gone.

Do YOU want to face the end of your existence because the US government and governments in Europe are acting so badly?  Do YOU have any clue their actions are so aggressive that Russia views them as almost being suicidal?  Do YOU have any sense of self-Preservation?  Because according to Deputy Speaker Kosachev, YOUR self-preservation seems to be at stake.

Words like this are not generally spoken in world affairs.  Yet these are, in fact, the precise words now being used by Russian leadership.

Were you even AWARE that the US and European Governments had pushed things this far?

You would do well to get up off your butt and start telling American and European officials their behavior is heading toward getting millions of us killed.

It was just Tuesday that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Russia-1 TV that Russia has arrived at a stop called “confrontation” and they are not shying away from that.

IT was later Tuesday that Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov said relations between Russia and the West has past “the point of no return.”

Folks, this is literally Doomsday language.  From three top Russian officials – none of whom is Putin.

Things are escalating out of control – fast.   Our governments are going to get a whole lot of us killed.

We, as regular citizens, must step-up for our own self preservation, and demand the US government and European governments cease their suicidal strategy.  It’s almost too late but there still may be time, if we all take action, now.

LOADING ICBMS INTO SILOS

To demonstrate just how serious the situation actually is, the Russian Ministry of Defense revealed this week that TWO Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM’s) were loaded into new silos in Kozelsk, Russia in the past two days!   Each “YARS” missile carries eight (8) nuclear warheads.  Each of those warheads has an explosive yield of 800 kilotons.  So between those two new missiles, Russia can vaporize sixteen separate targets!

loading-missiles-2022-12-16_16.27.48

This is not “posturing.” This is not a game. Those are real missiles and Russia is openly telling us in the West, we are coming to an “existential choice.” Our continued existence is rapidly becoming questionable.

Imagine that!

People who skipped their COVID vaccine are at higher risk of traffic accidents, according to a new study | Fortune

The Unrelenting paid propaganda…

Read this attempt at restablishing the narrative HERE

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I’ve lived here for 6 years, and yes, I do love China. Please recognize that ALL my comments reflect that of a foreigner in China – not natives. Here are my top reasons why I (and my wife) love living in China:

#1 – The people are great and the friendliest I have known in my world travels and international residencies. And, people are HAPPY!

#2 – The food is fantastic, fresh, and incredibly cheap! I especially enjoy buying fresh produce, at least 10 types of mushrooms at about 10% of USA prices. Our average precooked takeout 3 course dinner is around $3.00-$4.50 per person. Sometimes it is only about $2.00 per person (again, this is for fresh pre-cooked takeout, not for making our own dinner!).

#3 – There is no violent crime in Beijing, a city of 22 million people. Our teenage daughter attending high school here could be out until 2AM with friends, doing karaoke or whatnot, and we had no worries for her safety!

#4 – Incredible public transportation. Never need a car. My occasional city bus ride costs $.15! The high speed inter-city trains are amazing! This weekend I’m travelling by train from downtown Beijing to downtown Hefei – 1,000 KM by fast train – 4Hrs23Min. You could never make that time by plane!

#5 – The career opportunities are excellent, with salaries comparable or higher than the USA while cost of living is about 35% the cost of the USA. That’s why Chinese are able to save – not because they are so frugal! And, no age discrimination in employment!!

#6 – Vibrant, lively, and endlessly entertaining. Even after 6 years, walking down our street in Beijing is like attending “Cirque du Soleil.”

#7 – Thousands years old and ultra modern Art, culture, history, architecture – FANTASTIC!!

The Ukraine war will marked to beginning of the end of the lop sided world’s so call rules based international order. History will judge my statement but I am thoroughly convinced that history books in the future will note that the counter actions and arbitrary decisions made by the west on its sanctions and daylight robbery of its foreign currencies reserves marks the end of the blind trust the rest of the world gives to the western financial institutions and the U.S. dollar as a global trading currency.

This has very high consequence since as is the most vital weapon the west has to control and contain the world. Not to mention it benefit tremendously from this lever of control. No nation, not even U.S. very close allies will ever trust the U.S. to control its financial assets ever again. And the usage of the US dollars will reduced substantially from now onwards seeing t what the west did to Russia.

VIDEO: **AMERICAN** Troops Get Lost in Ukraine – Ask **RUSSIAN SPEAKER** for “Map”

.
Video has emerged from inside Ukraine showing AMERICAN troops, who got lost, going to the private home of a . . . . RUSSIAN SPEAKING CITIZEN . . . to ask for a “map” . . . . so they can go kill . . . . Russians.

This is how half-assed things are going over there.

Question #1: Why are AMERICANS bearing arms in Ukraine?

I thought it was illegal for private American citizens to take up arms on behalf of another country. I thought an American LOST his citizenship for doing so.

Question #2: Why are these “troops” not able to get support from Ukraine? ? ?

If they’re fighting on behalf of Ukraine, where’s the support?  Where’s the logistics?  Where’s the communications?

Question #3: How long will Russia tolerate AMERICANS killing Russian soldiers, before Russia starts attacking the US for our war-making inside Ukraine?

The US and NATO can only feign “not being party to the conflict” for so long.  Clearly, both the US and NATO __are__, in fact, parties to the conflict. This video is proof.

Since Congress has not declared war, or even authorized the use of military force, by virtue of what authority are these Americans waging war in a foreign nation (in our name by the way)?

How long do YOU think Russia will sit-by and do nothing, while American troops kill Russian soldiers?

Get right with God.  The federal corporation-in-lieu-of-government is going to get a lot of us killed when Russia has to start lobbing nukes at our port cities to force us to stop supplying the war in Ukraine.

Are American troops fighting in Ukraine?

Yes there are.

I do not know the force mix, nor the size of the forces. However, we are getting scattered reports of deployments of special force, technical specialists, entire airborne groups, and others.

I read a report out of Ukraine that claimed that 11,000 American troops have died in Ukraine as of 10DEC22, but I don’t know how accurate it is. It seems rather high, and well above “advisors” and “policing forces” that many of us (on the sidelines) assumed were in place.

These numbers suggest full-scale military intervention.

I can tell you that have watched all sorts of videos showing Americans in Ukraine. Here’s a typical one. In this one we have American Rangers wearing Ukrainian Nazi service patches, speaking in plain-as-day American asking for directions from a Russian!

https://youtu.be/zR1ehteFIDs

I suppose that you can argue that if there were actual Americans “on the ground” in Ukraine, that CNN and FOX “news’ would be reporting on it. But, that’s so 1990! Never will happen.

I have watched three American “retired” generals who were leading forces in Ukraine, paraded as captured assets inside of Russia, and their utility and roles are as clear as day.

To me, this absurd funding in billions and billions and billions of dollars and weapons into Ukraine, suggests something far more sinister than simply “helping a friendly country out”. Something ELSE is going on, and it ain’t being reported.

It smacks of Laos in the late 1960’s. It smacks of large scale warfare and if the American people get wind of it, there may be Hell to pay!

The United States is falling apart at the seams

In ten years all of this is going to be a distant memory, but for now, we are all sitting on pins and needles while the big-time crazy plays out.

You all have no idea what’s “next” for China.

After lifting up most of China out of poverty, the next two decades will be towards making the resulting middle class, a solid and long-duration class, and that means that the Chinese standard of living will surpass the upper middle class currently defined by the wealthy in the United States.

It’s gonna be brutal.

Of course, the USA is still playing the same old “games”. And we have endure this period of uncertainty…

The United States is “asking for it”

In response to the change in US nuclear weapons doctrine signed by POTUS on “No Fist Use, in a speech yesterday, Russian President Putin stated that the Russian Federation will change its defense doctrine and now will consider using nuclear weapons, even if only attacked by conventional weapons.

E.g. if we “detect that you are preparing to attack us, we will strike first with strategic atomic weapons.”

Navajo Ute Blanket

Sometimes, it is the simplest-looking objects that have the most astounding stories—and prices to match. This Navajo Ute blanket is finely woven with bands of white, black, and blue. Many people would walk right by it. But these so-called “chief blankets” can raise high prices.

The owner of the blanket seen on Antiques Roadshow had inherited it from his grandmother. As a young child, it was simply put on his bed and occasionally thrown over him on chilly nights. The experts on the Roadshow immediately recognized it for what it was. As an amazing example of Navajo weaving, it was estimated to be worth at least $350,000. The owner was left in tears because his grandparents had merely been poor farmers.

Another example of a blanket like this, which had once been used by a cat to give birth on, sold for $1.5 million. The owner of that blanket had been struggling to get by on $200 a month. So maybe check your attic for one of these.

1. The President of Peru, Pedro Castillo, has been arrested and is being held in the police station located on Avenida España in the city of Lima. This is following a vote by the majority right-wing congress to oust him in a legislative coup. Vice President Dina Boluarte is sworn in as President of Peru.

2. Argentina’s corrupt, heavily politicized judicial system absurdly sentenced left-wing former President and current VP Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to 6 years in prison on ridiculous “corruption” charges

2 coups in Latin America in 2 days:  Argentina’s Kirchner was banned from office on bogus charges by corrupt judges conspiring with right-wing media oligarchs Peru’s Castillo was overthrown by the right-wing-controlled congress Plan Condor 2.0 The capitalist class never sleeps

Apologists will make excuses for these coups. They always do

Sure, not every coup is as simple as a blatant Pinochet-style military coup

But these are a new kind of coups, using hybrid war, lawfare, 4th Generation Warfare

Don't let disingenuous appeals to "nuance" distract you

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 8, 2022

Operation Condor is not a conspiracy theory.

HERE

Operation Condor is (was … and is now re-implemented by the looks of things) a criminal conspiracy to forcibly disappear people across international borders.  Operation Condor coordinated repression among the countries of the Southern Cone.  There were court hearings in Rome and in Buenos Aires.  Eventually one of these ruled that Operation Condor was a criminal conspiracy and the Operation’s scope was proven in its full magnitude.

Only the methods by which to disappear people have changed. Now we create new leaders out of thin air and remove others via lawfare.  Why now? you may ask.  Simple, they could not get to Lula so they chose an area destabilization.

Let’s first take a look at the comments from other Latin American leaders. Leaders that resist a coup every day. Thanks to Ben Norton and Ollie Vargas for pulling this together so quickly.

Bolivia's leftist President Arce: "From the beginning the Peruvian right wing tried to overthrow a government that was democratically elected by the people, by the humble classes that sought more inclusion and social justice" "We send all our solidarity", and The constant harassment of anti-democratic elites against progressive, popular and legitimately constituted governments must be condemned by all. We advocate that democracy, peace and respect for Human Rights prevail for the benefit of the Peruvian people.


Bolivia's ex President Evo stresses: "The political crisis" in Peru "was provoked by the endless conspiring of the Fujimori-supporting right and right-wing media outlets against an elected government whose 'unpardonable crime' was representing the poorest"

Mexico's President AMLO says of Peru: It is "unfortunate that because of the interests of economic and political elites, since the beginning of the legitimate presidency of Pedro Castillo, there was an environment of confrontation & hostility against him"

Honduras' ex President Manuel Zelaya (who was himself overthrown in a US-backed right-wing military coup in 2009) says: "We energetically condemn the coup d'etat in Peru violating the sovereign will of the people, represented by President Pedro Castillo"

Lucho Arce, Bolivia:  The constant harassment of anti-democratic elites against progressive, popular and legitimately constituted governments must be condemned by all. We advocate that democracy, peace and respect for Human Rights prevail for the benefit of the Peruvian people.

Dilma Rousseff, previous leader of Brazil on Cristina Kirchner: The sentence, ultimately, is unfair and falls on Cristina Kirchner, who is one of the most important leaders in Latin America. Undoubtedly, it is a demand from the extreme right in Argentina, just as the condemnation of President Lula had a similar meaning in Brazil. She expressed solidarity with Kitchner as well as with all progressive leaders, militants and activists persecuted and unjustly condemned in recent history on our continent.

Lula da Silva:  "My solidarity with Argentina's VP Cristina Kirchner. I saw your statement that you are a victim of lawfare. Here in Brazil we know how much this practice can damage democracy. I support an impartial, independent justice system for all and for the people of Argentina."

It is fair to say that each of these people understands what has happened, understands how it happened, and knows with certainty that they are but a hair’s width away from similar action.

This is then the state of the fight in Latin America.

Peru is in chaos as the people actually voted for Pedro Castillo. As I said in my writing on Building Conflict , chaos is an acceptable outcome for the hegemon. If they cannot rule, chaos works for them while they attempt to snatch some victory out of chaos.

I posted some of the outlandish press on Brazil in the commentary. Take a look at the outcome of that press. It appears in Latin America, that we are now fighting the US Right and the crazy QAnon as well.

So much disinformation is spamming through US social media apps on Brazil that it's creating QAnon-like mass hysteria in Bolsonaro's most fanatical followers. I'm calling it #BRAnon. Here, a group of "patriots" reacts to a fake story on the arrest of a Supreme Court Justice. + pic.twitter.com/h1lZQLOT8Z

— BrianMier (@BrianMteleSUR) November 9, 2022

This is then the state of the fight in Latin America.

Every good leader is threatened with a coup on a daily basis and we fight the American right, convinced of their own manifest destiny, unable to do anything in their own country, and now they join the hegemon to destabilize Latin America. They have failed the political fight in their own countries, and now they want to carry it to the Latin American countries to continue the tenets of the Monroe Doctrine and to keep pillaging the Latin Americas.

The Latin American left brings change 'from below' through mass participation of majorities urban & rural. The pro-US right force change 'from above' through backroom deals among a select few in the capital city.

— Ollie Vargas 🧉 (@OVargas52) December 7, 2022

 

This is then the state of the fight in Latin America.

The Peruvian right-wing majority congress, who have just ousted Pedro Castillo, have an 85% disapproval rating. One of the worst in the region.

The decision of the Peruvian Congress to dismiss Pedro Castillo has been rejected by leaders and governments in Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia and Chile.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Perus-Crisis-Prompts-Reaction-From-Latin-American-Leaders-20221207-0021.html

Chile is a surprise. Of course, reactions are still pouring in and we will hear from Cuba, Caricom, and most everyone else in our ‘zone’.

Thing is, this is a little weird. Pedro Castillo was not highly regarded in the rest of the Latin American pink tide. He was known to be so centrist that he could not truly unite his cabinet. This is a lesson – internal stability must be there, otherwise the rot creeps in. And this is so much more relevant for Latin America. They have been harassed, couped, raped and plundered probably more than African countries. This is then why I say that they could not get to Lula da Silva, and decided that chaos in the region is called for.

Bolivia’s former President Evo warns of a “new assault by imperialism” against the Latin American left: “The right-wing enemies of the people don’t accept anti-imperialist governments”. “We must remain united and never surrender”.

Diego Rivera Painting

Diego Rivera was one of the most important Mexican painters of the 20th century. His large murals sparked a new style of artwork. His third wife, Frida Kahlo, may be better known today, but when an article was written about her in 1933, it was headlined “Wife of master mural painter gleefully dabbles in art.” Today their reputations may have reversed, but Rivera’s works are still highly sought after.

One of his early paintings was thought lost for decades. It was only when a man brought it into the Antiques Roadshow that it was recognized and brought back into public awareness. Called “El Albañil,” or “The Laborer,” it was estimated to be worth around $800,000 to $1 million. Not bad for a piece of art that was just hanging up behind a door in a family home.

It’s all smoke and mirrors for the public to give us the impression that they care. They don’t, never have and never will. The corruption is so entrenched, we have no real idea how deep and connected these scumbags are.

What an honorable fighter, accepts defeat, acknowledges the winner asking the audience to cheer even more for the winner! Love that!

Walt Whitman Letter

Walt Whitman was among the most influential poets that America has ever produced. His works were celebrated and vilified in his own time, but his stature has grown. Today, he is now recognized as part of the American literary canon.

What was brought into the Antiques Roadshow was not a rare copy of his literary works but something more personal. During the Civil War, Whitman helped wounded soldiers by taking dictation so that they could send letters back to their families. He apparently wrote many such letters, but few have survived, and even fewer where Whitman signed his name on them.

The letter was brought into the Roadshow not for its own merits but because it was part of a family’s store of Civil War-era items. However, when the experts saw it, they recognized how rare it was. The price put on it was $8,000-$12,000. After later speaking to a specialist on Whitman, the price was revised to maybe as much as $20,000.

Meet Barcelona’s ‘Amazon Tax’

Enough with the subsidies. Tax dominant delivery platforms instead.

For local communities, the opening of an Amazon warehouse causes a bunch of problems, including lower wages, fewer jobs, and more local businesses closing. But the issues local residents tend to be the loudest and most upset about, particularly in the short term, are increases in traffic, noise, and pollution that necessarily come with such facilities, especially for those who live closest to it.

Indeed, the spike in e-commerce, not just from Amazon, but across the board — and of course exacerbated by the pandemic — has driven up traffic congestion and pollution, not just in the U.S. but across the world. According to the World Economic Forum, in order to meet e-commerce demands, “the number of delivery vehicles in the top 100 cities globally will increase by 36% until 2030. Consequently, emissions from delivery traffic will increase by 32% and congestion will rise by over 21%, equalling an additional 11 minutes of commute time for each passenger every day.”

But traffic isn’t the only concern. The pace Amazon demands of its drivers makes them a danger to both themselves and others: Nearly one in five Amazon drivers was injured on the job last year, and they causes loads of accidents (for which Amazon itself can often avoid legal liability).

Finally, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been more than a little annoyed about having to navigate around a seemingly endless supply of Amazon vans double-parked in my neighborhood.

All in all, it’s bad news, even factoring in the consumer convenience of ordering something and having it arrive at your door the next day.

I’ve written quite a bit here about why its foolhardy for states and localities to subsidize the warehousing and logistics networks of big retailers, Amazon most prominently among them. But what about actually making them pay for some of these harms?

For a look at how to do that, we can look across the Atlantic to Spain, where one city is intending to take a delivery platform tax out for a spin.

Barcelona’s city council this week took the initial step toward implementing a tax next year on dominant delivery platforms. These are the large corporations, mostly in the e-commerce space, that deliver packages right to a consumer’s door. It has been dubbed the “Amazon tax” locally.

My Spanish knowledge is limited to what a few years of Duolingo can teach, so I may be mangling some details here (though at least some of the press coverage was in English), but it seems the tax will be applied to dominant delivery corporations above a certain revenue threshold, with exemptions for those that drop packages off at central locations where consumers can come pick them up, as well as those that deliver to other businesses. The goal is to levy a fee on the big corporations doing home delivery.

The city expects to raise 2.6 million euros, and says this would be the first such fee introduced at the local level in Europe.

Barcelona’s administration has given two rationales for the policy. First, it’s meant cut down on both damage to public spaces and emissions. “This planet cannot allow for a 300 gram package to be transported to your home in a vehicle that weighs more than a ton,” said city councillor Jordi Martí.

But second is to incentivize consumers to shop at local stores, since presumably the fee is going to, at least in part, be passed on to them in the form of higher prices. “We want local traders to have equal fiscal conditions compared to the major e-commerce platforms, who have a very high market share,” said Deputy Mayor Jaume Collboni, who added that the city wants consumers to “avoid the dominance of some platforms” and “favor local trade.” (Again, apologies for any mangled translations.)

There have been some nods at doing something similar in the U.S. — most prominently in New York City, where a $3 fee would have been applied on all packages and was thus a non-starter, and in San Francisco, where a ballot referendum to implement a delivery platform tax was scrapped this year due to drafting errors that would have applied the tax to many more businesses than intended — but as far as I know, no jurisdiction has actually gone ahead and done it. Seattle also had a tax that was derogatorily dubbed the “Amazon tax,” but that was levied per employee, and referred to that city’s dominant employer.

But a delivery platform tax is a good idea!

Here in the U.S., Amazon alone has received more than $5 billion in state and local subsidies, most of which has gone toward its warehousing and logistics network. And other big retailers and food corporations have also gotten into the game, having the state and the public build out their necessary infrastructure, and therefore receiving a leg up over local businesses that aren’t getting the same level of public support.

That should obviously be cut off, and there’s legislation out there for state leaders who want to deny subsidies to e-commerce corporations generally.

Meanwhile, at the local level, leaders can absolutely look for ways to make giant corporations pay for some of the harms they’re causing, and boost their own local businesses at the same time by levying a fee on the corporations that want to clog streets and belch fumes. Wins all around.

Lincoln Assassination Eyewitness Letter

There are few moments in American history as famous as the assassination of President Lincoln. Everyone knows how John Wilkes Booth entered the box in Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln and his wife were watching a performance of Our American Cousin. During a moment when the audience was laughing at a joke, he pulled out a pistol and shot the president. Wilkes then leaped from the box, landed awkwardly on stage, held up a dagger, and proclaimed, “Sic semper tyrannis!”—”Thus ever for tyrants!”

That’s the accepted version of events, but to people in the theatre at the time, it was a moment of confusion. That is why the letter brought into the Antiques Roadshow by one lady was so important. It is a contemporary eyewitness account of the assassination by her grandfather, who was there. He had gone to the theatre after hearing General Grant would be present. Instead, he saw one of the most momentous events of the 19th century.

According to the account given, Booth also announced from the stage, “I have done it!” and “The South’s avenged!” The letter was valued at $10,000-$15,000.

Lemon Chicken

“This is like the lemon chicken you get from your Chinese take-out place. The egg, cornstarch, and baking powder coating is extra light and crispy. No msg or flour involved! And remember, Zaar calculates fat and calories from the ingredient list…you won’t consume all the oil listed in the recipe! Note: Marinating time is included in prep time.”

2022 12 08 11 55
2022 12 08 11 55

Ingredients

Directions

  • Combine first 3 ingredients in a large zip-lock bag. Add chicken, and seal bag. Marinate for 15 minutes in the refrigerator.
  • Combine eggs, 1/4 cup cornstarch, and baking powder in a large bowl; stir well. Dip chicken into batter, coating well.
  • Pour 2 cups oil into a large heavy skillet. Fry chicken in hot oil over medium-high heat until golden, turning occasionally. Drain on paper towels. Cut chicken into 1 1/2 inch X 1 inch pieces. Arrange on a serving platter.
  • Combine chicken broth and next 4 ingredients; set aside. Place 2 tbsp oil in a large non-stick skillet; place over medium-high heat until hot. Add lemon slices, and stir fry 30 seconds. Add broth mixture, and stir fry 3 additional minutes or until sauce is thickened and clear. Pour over chicken. Serve immediately.

2022 12 08 11 56
2022 12 08 11 56

Jeff J. Brown on Press TV: Pentagon chief says China has both will and power to reshape US-dominated order-but now we have the B21 Raider bomber. Seriously?

2022 12 09 06 36
2022 12 09 06 36

HERE

Pentagon Chief Lloyd Austin on China: pivotal point in 21st century | Fortune

After rolling out new stealth bomber, Pentagon chief warns of pivotal point: ‘We’re aligning our budget as never before to the China challenge’. China is the only country with the will and power to “reshape its region and the international order to suit its authoritarian preferences,” Lloyd Austin said
Zero-sum mentality and single-way thinking is scary: whoever (white/black/yellow/brown) in the position of power in those lands control of the crusaders, their behaviour tend to be the same, if this is not culture/DNA? What is? 

The me-only, self-centered, dictatorial, and barbaric doomsday threats of the Bible culture must go, before the west can learn to coexist with the rest of the world and enter the civilised stage of human civilisation. 

Christianity is the most divisive forces in this world. They are used by the crusaders to destroy culture, and to divide a population. South Sudan, East Timor seperatists moment are just some examples. These brainless believer are blinded by the brutality of their God in the old testament, and their GOD disrespect for women and his own mother in the New testament. 

As a result, these brainwashed people failed to respect their parents dislike of Christianity and make prayer on dinner table while eating food prepared by their parents. 

HERE

Can the US Constitution be saved and updated?

Patrice Greanville – Chat @ Spike

As usual, Eric A. brings up many important questions to the table relating to the great tasks facing humanity these days, a humanity unfortunately still mired in the ugly muck of Western colonialist momentum, whose main global anchor remains the Anglo-American empire.

I say “momentum” because ideologies—including “manifest destiny”, “national exceptionalism” and “raw racism”—can persist for a long and highly dangerous time, and lose their grip on the shaping of history only when the underlying material forces that gave them currency at one point are no longer capable of supporting the visible edifice. This is of course, as you all know, an old Marxian insight.

The US as the globe’s citadel of capitalism is clearly facing its terminal decline. Much of this mess is—curiously some would say, but logical when closely examined—self-inflicted. America’s industrial infrastructure is shot, in critical sectors weak or nonexistent, and generally ridiculously overextended. The once resplendent garments are now a beggar’s attire, rags covered in pitiful patches.

Hard to believe, many would say, but we know why this happened. The ruling elites myopically offshored and destroyed the onetime awesome American industrial base through short-term thinking, “boardroom hyper-individualism”, and the unchecked pursuit of profit—all natural and inherent offshoots of the capitalist dynamic.

Since this process took years if not decades, it is necessary to ask, how did these people get away with this slo-mo industrial suicide without a popular backlash? After all, as city after city saw its core gutted, with millions deprived of a decent livelihood, this is a question that deserves a proper answer, but suffice it to say here that the ruling oligarchy used its tested mechanisms of social control via instigated social divisions, absence and denial of genuine representative leadership, and pervasive, unrelenting manipulation via a globalised media that shamelessly served only massive disinformation.

In this context, it’s useful to recall that the US ruling elites commenced this new phase of their old class war right after the end of WW2, when they launched their McCarthyite persecution of communists and populists across all possible spheres of political importance. This “purged” the nation of true agents of change while depriving the working class of all forms of effective self-defense organizations, starting with combative labor unions.

Quite ironically, the US elites very triumph in controlling the population via massive propaganda and clever forms of repression ended up insulating them from reality. This “soft” US-style totalitarianism built on lies and corruption eventually removed all the necessary and healthy social limits to their actions, at home and abroad. As a class, they got no penalties for their mistakes or even high crimes. Thus, like the person who no longer feels his feet due to neuropathy and thereby loses a limb due to an otherwise avoidable injury, the US ruling class grew accustomed—especially since the end of the USSR in 1991—to acting in what the French might call “capitalism a outrance”, a capitalism without limits, savage and irresponsible, uncooperative and fragmented at its core, and above all short-term thinking, consummately hypocritical, and therefore unwise. This is the beast that eventually spawned this latest brand of imperialism, “Woke imperialism”, the pathetic culmination of the Western liberals’ war on real class struggle. The hegemony’s rulers have always wanted to “freeze history”, for capitalism always reaches a point where it can advance no further, and is finally overwhelmed by its own innumerable ills, product of its incurable contradictions, of which the first and foremost remains the crisis of overproduction.

Given the above, it’s no surprise that when we look about, things look the same, albeit in a worsened, coarser iteration. The first major crisis of overproduction (brought about by “Fordism”) detonated the Great Depression, a period the US ruling class survived due to FDR’s coping socialistic measures and eventually a world war. The current great crisis—which engulfs the entire “West”—is, as we know so well, caused by ceaseless technological innovations aggravated by the computer revolution and the shenanigans of a reckless financial class for whom the well-being of society is at best a minor consideration.

Under such conditions, the US economy remains almost completely dependent on its “Pentagon sector”, a form of military Keynesianism evermore aggravated by unchecked, unquenchable greed, a lethal God that requires constant blood offerings, the latest being, of course, the Ukraine adventure.

Domestically, on the financial side, the capitalist deficits and gross imbalances in income distribution have been papered over by the extension of near universal retail credit, created in the postwar as a great “invention” to neutralise the dangerous effects of overproduction. The problem here is that consumer credit depends for its stability on stable jobs which in turn require a stable economy, but this economy cannot exist because by its very nature is unstable. So we are dealing here with the old house of cards dilemma. Incidentally, bourgeois economists like to insist that successive waves of invention create more job opportunities to compensate for job losses stemming from the efficiency of new technologies. This was their answer to “Luddite” critics, for example, but the facts speak otherwise. Today the world witnesses throughout the West a growing glut of “unneeded workers”, while the ruling class toys at its highest levels (i.e., WEF), with options such as massive “degrowth” and “depopulation”. A whole industry of lies and excuses (and probably biological tools) is also being created to justify such eventual measures.

Externally, an elaborate financial edifice grounded in the petrodollar is now crumbling—faster than anyone expected, especially among the the empire’s select counsellors—precisely due to the ineptitude and blind arrogance of the imperial mandarins. It’s a house of cards, a magic trick kept alive only by the implicit blackmail of a supposedly almighty military, but this last trick in the wizard’s bag is now also being exposed as a fraud by the war in Ukraine, where the West and and the Russian people are locked in an existential struggle.

Despite some early mistakes and miscalculations, in the pursuit of their intervention in Ukraine, the Russians are showing the rest of humanity (to their delight), that the arrogant, oppressive West—except for its nuclear submarine force—is, as Mao said, a paper tiger. Russia is showing the world what a real military superpower is capable of, one, to put it in technical terms, that possesses real “strategic depth”, something the West and its NATO mafia, can only dream of. Andrei Martyanov, a leading military expert, has repeatedly mentioned this sobering fact in his efforts to cool down the reckless hubris of Washington elites in their pursuit of imperialist dominance.

On Dec 5, 2022, the editor of Moon of Alabama published a piece confirming (again) this very point, the incapability of the West’s industrial base to produce and deliver on short order the massive level of ammunitions needed in a modern war between peer powers:

The Ukrainian war machine is running on empty because the ‘west’ can no longer provide weapons and ammunition in meaningful quantities. The chance to change that in any reasonable time frame is low:

“High-end conflict consumes a lot of munitions and a lot of weaponry,” Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s top budget official, said in an interview. “We are also looking at the supply chain limitations. We haven’t got this figured out just yet.”

Top Pentagon and industry officials maintain that efforts are finally ramping up to replace the weapons that the United States and its allies have shipped to Ukraine — depleting stockpiles that are deemed crucial to deterring China or other potential adversaries for years to come.

She cited recent deals for tens of thousands of 155mm artillery rounds that the Ukrainians are using up almost as soon as they arrive. By the spring, “we will be able to do 20,000 rounds a month,” she said.

But it will take time to manufacture enough of them, she said, adding that the U.S. will get that rate up to 40,000 rounds a month in the spring of 2025.

20,000 rounds is what the Russian army uses in Ukraine on a quiet day. 40,000 rounds per day may be the average consumption, 60,000 rounds per day are fired when things get hot. It also produces enough to replace those rounds.

(Ukraine – Crimea Bridge Repaired, No Ammunition, Drone Attacks In Russia—> https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/12/ukraine-crimea-bridge-repaired-no-ammunition-drone-attacks-in-russia-.html
(The bold italics are mine.)

That after so much huffing and puffing and so many expectations of a quick Russian collapse we have come to this realisation must be humiliating in some quarters in Washington. And this is perhaps the greatest irony in the current situation: the political hubris that has long dominated the thinking of London/Washington elites made their hegemonic impulse irresistible. So they picked what looks now like the empire’s “last war of choice”. Never mind this is still formal a “proxy war”. They forgot that this is not 1945 but 2022, and the world has changed, and, above all, they forgot that ganging up on Russia, that underestimating her, is an unpardonable error.

As things stand today, and no matter what the Western media say, there is no way the West can “win” the Ukraine war, let alone consign Russia to the status of a vassal nation. In fact, for a variety of quite sensible reasons, and because of the high level of toxic chauvinism that still permeates the American mind, Moscow is now probably engaged in NOT giving Washington too bad of a beating. Hence the slow pace of the military campaign, the underplaying of their own victories, and the gradual way in which they are introducing a new reality on Eastern Europe and the world at large. It’s more like a “slow gradual descent into the ground” instead of a brutal crash. The former spares the losing contender some of the humiliation.

Going now back to Eric A.’s questions.
I think it will be hard to make faster progress in the West, especially America, until we devise ways of neutralizing and defeating Washington’s massive propaganda power. Many things we wish to accomplish require us to “walk with both legs at once” as Mao once said, for there are many circumstances when one item’s presence determines the survival of another, both reinforcing each other.

As well, as long as the culture is bathed in narcissism, many things will escape proper examination.

In the war or clash of ideas, liberalism, for example, and one of its offshoots economic liberalism (aka libertarianism) has clearly run its course, historically speaking, that is. Liberalism was and remains an intrinsic part and pillar of the capitalist matrix; it gives rise, by normal evolution, to forms of extreme antisocial individualism. And while I appreciate that some libertarians clearly and bravely oppose the US criminal/imperialist foreign policy, I doubt they have seriously pondered the contradictions implicit in their favorite social and economic model.

For example, to this day, I have never found a libertarian that can accept how competition literally eats itself in a regime of perfect market freedom, yielding eventually enormous monopolies. Nor, how these monopolies eventually corrupt everything in sight, from the political class to all other major cultural institutions, including the press, the arts, academia, and so on. The proof is irrefutable and it exists in abundance in the history of the West, especially its Nirvana, that is, The United States. Finally, no libertarian that I know of has ever solved the problem of capitalist overproduction.

The bottom line is that, as the Ukrainian War has demonstrated, the stranglehold of hybrid power is choking history and may spell our demise as a species, along with much of the rest of life on this planet.

I think it is our duty to debate and exchange ideas on how to weaken and break this ideological wall. Difficult? By all means. Impossible? Not by a long shot.

Confessions of a Woman in an Arraigned Marriage

Where are you from and is it common in your culture?

I’m from Kuwait and yes its really common. Its even rare to find someone not in one.

Would you have rather chosen a husband yourself?

Well I don’t because I never dated but I think I got really lucky with my husband.

And I think it have saved me a lot of time and effort.

Did you have the choice to say “No dad, not this one, find someone else”?

Well I did the same thing with another guy before.

What made you decide to reject that man before your husband? How did your father react?

The three 3 times we met he just kept saying nice things about me. It was a marriage interview and he said nothing about marriage or our responsibility or children or anything important.

My husband understands the “ways” to get married.

Did you ever wanted to have a boyfriend or date someone you like?

Having a boyfriend? No never, I find it disgusting and gross. How could I sleep with a man who doesn’t hold an responsibility towards me and I don’t have responsibility towards him and I find it a risky thing.

How did the process work? Did you know your husband before you were arranged to marry?

Ofcourse, I had to know everything that happened.

He was the son of my father boss and I saw him couple times at events but never talked to him.

But afte my father came to me to tell me that I have marriage proposal and then I met him for coffee couple of time before we got engaged.

Was there any money exchange? Or any sort of exchange as sign of arrangement?

Yes there were a money exchange. The man had to pay the woman family a (jeza) and mine was 80k dollars .

A business contract? No but I had to sign a marriage certificate ( it means that I the woman approve of that man to be my husband)

How long have you been married?

4 years

Are you happy? Getting a good life?

Yes I am really happy and life have been treating me good.

Do you love him?

Do you love him?

What are the positive and negative aspects of your situation?

Positives: it was straight forward and it was good communication.

Negatives: that it felt like a job and he was at first like a business partner ( before we got engaged) and it felt like people was expecting something out of it.

Do you have a proper education or have you just been raised to be a wife?

Well a lot of girls are raised as future wives and to have education at the same time . So I was expected to study a lot and be a good caretaker.

But yes I have a master degree in math.

What are your career goals?

I stopped working after I got married.

But my life goal is to raise my son as best as possible and treat my husband with the most respect and make him feel like a king.

Will you push your children to be in arranged marriages?

Yes but I won’t be against him if come and tell me that he loves someone and wants to marry them.

What if ur daughter doesn’t want an arranged marriage

And that my friend a problem for future me

Would you want the same for your daughter, knowing the risk of choosing someone she would not be happy with?

I knew the risks when I first got on the “market” but I think it’s safer choice then the “western way”.

And yes her opinion matters.

To answer your question yes I want her to do the same

What do you think is unsafe about the Western way?

Like if my husband cheated on me I have to take half his money but in the west with dating he can cheat and nothing bad would happen to him. We have responsibility give by god to be a team.

And also what if i became pregnant with a man I don’t know who would take care of the baby. Those are my reasons.

Do you feel that you are judge by western people for being in such an arrangement. If so do you think there is any validity to their judgment?

Yes I do but i understand why. They want maximum Freedom to their life even if its lead to bad or good thing and what I did goes against what they believe. and they see me take part of it as the same as promoting it. But its human nature and I do the same. Like with drinking, you think drinking is working and not effecting you but it ruined alot of lifes. So I judge you for drinking because I see you promoting it.

I hope I explain it ( sorry my English is not good).

What will you do if your husband turns out to be physically abusive, does your father resolve that or it’s up to you? Are you allowed to file for divorce?

No it’s my father responsibility and mine to solve this maybe I can forgive him or I can go to the police or divorce him.

And yes physically abuse is one of the reasons for a divorce.

Is he allowed to have other wives?

Yes he is allowed to have more wives but we had an agreement that if he brings another woman I’m out.

When you and your husband have intercourse is it for enjoyment and pleasure, reproduction purposes, because your husband wants it, or all of the above?

It’s for lust on both sides. But I think in Christianity you do it for reproductive reasons only ( correct me if I’m wrong).

Bohdisattva Statue

Bronze statues can command high prices, but typically, they have to be in mint condition if they are to be truly valuable. When a slightly damaged bronze statue of a bodhisattva turned up on the Antiques Roadshow, it might not have been immediately obvious that it was worth much at all. The experts in Asian art, however, got very excited—even though it had lost one arm.

The owner of the piece had been shopping in an estate sale when she spotted it. Several antique dealers had already snapped up many of the best objects, but this statue had been ignored. The owner was able to buy it for around $100. The experts agreed she had got a bargain. They dated it to the early 15th century and suggested a retail estimate of $100,000-$150,000. It turned out they were wrong… on both counts.

When the statue was later auctioned, it was described as coming from the earlier Tang Dynasty. It eventually sold for $2 million at Sotheby’s.

Jesus. This is amazing.

China’s new 10 measures against COVID-19 are adherence to original intention, logic

By Global Times editorial (Global Times) 08:45, December 08, 2022
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After the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee held a meeting on Tuesday to set the tone for the economic work for 2023 and proposed to better coordinate COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control with economic and social development, the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council announced on Wednesday 10 prevention and control measures to further optimize COVID-19 response. This was widely recognized by the public. These new measures include lifting COVID testing and health code requirements for domestic cross-regional travelers and scrapping negative nucleic acid results and health code requirements for entering public places except for designated locations such as nursing homes, medical institutions and schools. They also clarify that asymptomatic carriers and mild COVID-19 patients are allowed to quarantine at home. Once again, China’s epidemic prevention and control work has again taken an important step toward precision and science.

We can say that we have come through the most difficult times. Nearly three years of an exceptionally difficult “national fight against the epidemic,” countless people have made sacrifices, endured hardships and paid an effort to win this battle. From the Alpha to Omicron variant, in these three years, we were forced to fight the “war to protect Wuhan” at one point. But step by step, today we can take the strategic initiative against the virus. We have ushered in a time for adjustment where the virus becomes weaker, but we grow stronger.

Looking back when the virus was at the most aggressive stage, China built a strong defense line against the virus again and again, becoming the country with the lowest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths among the world’s major powers. A report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that life expectancy at birth for the total US population was 78.8 years in 2019. It reduced to 77 years in 2020 and further to 76.1 years in 2021. In contrast, despite the large gap between China’s average level of medical resources and technology compared to developed countries, we have achieved a steady increase in average life expectancy, reaching 77.93 years in 2020 and increasing to 78.2 years in 2021. In the past two days, a large number of netizens have left messages to thank the country from the heart for three years of protection.

From a global perspective, China’s contribution to the world during the epidemic is also unparalleled. In 2020, China became the world’s first major economy to achieve positive economic growth. In 2021, China’s economy exceeded 110 trillion yuan ($17.3 trillion), with an average growth rate of 5.1 percent over the previous two years. In 2022, the Chinese economy has withstood pressure and is progressing stably. As China has effectively controlled the spread of the epidemic, the country’s manufacturing industry has not been greatly affected. Made-in-China products continue to dominate globally, and China’s strong supply capacity has significantly stabilized the fragile global supply chain. Meanwhile, China has also selflessly provided anti-epidemic supplies, including vaccines, to a vast number of developing countries, which has strongly supported the global joint efforts to fight against the epidemic. The international community is watching all of this.

China is a large country with a population of over 1.4 billion. Such a population base determines that the course of this enormous ship must be very stable, and a slight deviation may cause irreparable and heavy losses.

In the past three years, China has issued nine versions of epidemic prevention and control plans and diagnosis and treatment plans. Each revision reflects the country’s pragmatic attitude of seeking truth from facts and being proactive and prudent. It keeps progressing by taking small steps, with the starting point of being “people-centered.” China’s prevention and control policy has constantly been adjusted in the past three years, but its logic and original intention have never changed.

Our ability and confidence to fight the epidemic have also been strengthened during the process. Ability is the foundation of confidence, and confidence is the source which inspires ability. The virulence of the Omicron variant is greatly weakened. We have effective technologies and drugs for diagnosis and treatment, and our capablities, such as medical treatment, pathogen detection and epidemiological investigation, continue to improve. The complete vaccination rate of the whole population exceeds 90 percent. All these give us the confidence to face the virus directly and lay a solid foundation for further optimizing the epidemic prevention and control measures.

For the next step, we still need to make persistent efforts on how to implement the new 10 measures, concentrate resources to protect vulnerable groups in society, and obtain the optimal solution for coordinating epidemic prevention and control and economic development, so that this huge society can continue to move forward adapting to the new situation.

The rainbow comes after the storm. We have all expected a long time for this day to come out of the haze of the epidemic. To be more precise, every step we have taken in the past three years, no matter how difficult it is, is a step closer to this day or a preparation for this day. They are all meaningful.

In my opinion this is Jets finest movie! Some of the best fight scenes ever filmed and a truly heartbreaking ending! A truly beautiful film.

BBQ Marmalade Chicken

“This is a simple dish to make, very tasty. It can be made in a crock pot or the oven. This is delicious served with steamed broccoli and mashed sweet potatoes.”

2022 12 08 11 58
2022 12 08 11 58

Ingredients

Directions

  • In a medium-size microwave-safe bowl, stir marmalade with soy sauce. Microwave, uncovered, on high until softened, 1 minute.
  • OR melt in a saucepan, stirring often.
  • Stir in barbecue sauce.
  • Place chicken in crock pot. Pour in sauce. Stir to coat.
  • Cover and cook on high setting 4 hours or low 6 hours.
  • To bake, preheat oven to 350F (180C). Place chicken in a large, ovenproof casserole dish that will hold at least 16 cups (4 L). Pour sauce over chicken. Stir to evenly coat. Set on a baking sheet to catch any drips if it bubbles over.
  • Bake, covered, in centre of preheated oven until chicken feels springy when pressed and sauce is bubbly, about 1 3/4 hours.
  • To thicken sauce, remove cooked chicken to a large serving bowl.
  • In a small bowl, stir cornstarch with water until dissolved.
  • Carefully ladle liquid from slow cooker or casserole into a medium-size saucepan.
  • Set over high heat. Bring to a boil. Stir in cornstarch mixture.
  • Reduce heat to medium. Stir until sauce thickens, 2 minutes. Pour over chicken.
  • Note: I prefer orange marmalade, ginger marmalade can be substituted. Recipe yields approximately 3 cups of sauce.

2022 12 08 11 59
2022 12 08 11 59

Yes crimes against humanity.

I was giving a lecture to around 50 international high school students in my college at Oxford University.

I got drunk before the lecture. I just wanted the paycheck.

The lecture was called ‘Shakespeare 101’ or ‘An Introduction to Shakespeare’ or something equally uninspiring.

I arrived in the hall. Saw a bunch of faces beaming up at me. I put my feet up on a desk and began reading from my notes in a dull monotone. Completely shameless.

The students tolerated about 10 minutes of this crap before one Chinese girl put her hand up and said this:

“Excuse me, Teacher? I have a question. Can you make it less boring?”

Wow.

She was right. It was boring as hell.

Teaching is not about collecting a paycheck.

The onus is NOT on the students to make it interesting.

Good teaching is not just rattling off a bunch of facts while the students scribble down notes.

“You’re right,” I said. “This is boring. I’m so sorry. Here’s what we’re gonna do. I’ve got a script here for Hamlet. We’re all going to act this out line by line.”

I handed out a bunch of sheets and got the whole class up and acting. Actually acting. Saying the words with feeling.

The class livened up. The shy ones came out of their shells. We all laughed. We all became super enthusiastic. They asked me endless questions and I asked them questions back and we all had a great time.

Then at the end of the class, about 20 of them stayed behind for a photo and they all queued up to swap phone numbers with me.

So thank you to that girl who asked me to make my lesson less boring.

I then went on to make my living from teaching for the next couple of years and was never again told that my lessons were boring. In fact, my students all raved about how much fun they had and how I helped them to stay committed to their studies.

Teaching can be a hard gig but it’s damn rewarding when you do it properly.

main qimg 6f13f85d0ac48730788be7f39e6d39f7 pjlq
main qimg 6f13f85d0ac48730788be7f39e6d39f7 pjlq

China now accorded Highest Honors in Saudi Arabian Foreign Policy

2022 12 09 12 25
2022 12 09 12 25

Chinas growing stature as a Global Power was confirmed in Riyadh when Supreme Leader and President Xi Jingping was greeted by the Three Royal Party

A Three Royal Party consists of the Three Highest Ranking Royals below the King and Princes

So far only USA had a 3 Royal greeting while every other nation had either a 2 Royal greeting (UK) or a 1 Royal greeting (India) or a 0 Royal Greeting (Pakistan post 2013, Israel)

This was a subtle message from Saudi Arabia that China picked up and were grateful for.

A Second sign was when Four Saudi Jets flew to escort the Air China carrying the President. The Jets formally performed no loops indicate absolute trust in the incoming arrival into their airspace

They performed two loops when Bidens Aircraft came into Saudi Airspace.

In all earlier visits China had had a 2/1 Royal Party welcome into Saudi

Tang Marble Lion

The Chinese market for antiques and antiquities has never been higher. A newly wealthy generation of Chinese investors is spending their money to acquire art and artifacts that have left their country over the centuries. Objects that were once picked up by tourists have suddenly become hugely valuable.

One woman might have been somewhat disappointed when told that a marble lion that she had inherited from her grandparents was not from the Ming Dynasty as she had thought. But she should not have worried. The expert on the Antiques Roadshow realized that the exquisitely carved animal was actually from another golden period in Chinese history—the earlier Tang Dynasty. The expert was so impressed with the statue that he became emotional.

The marble lion was valued at $120,000-$180,000.

President Xi is making an epic state visit to Saudi Arabia and other friendly countries, the biggy before the year is over, wa !

Thrift Store Vase

2022 12 09 12 28
2022 12 09 12 28

Going to second-hand shops, thrift stores, and charity shops is always exciting because you never know what you might come home with. Plus, there is always the chance that you might stumble on something hugely valuable that was cheap.

One man on the British Antiques Roadshow brought in his small collection of ceramics to find out whether they had any age. Most had been picked up cheaply in charity shops. One, a square vase in pale green with a pierced pattern on the sides, had cost him just £7.99. It was this vase that got the expert most excited because it was an old Chinese design. It was also a technical masterpiece because the vase was actually two vases joined together during production. Having examined the object, the expert was in no doubt. This was a vase dating from the Ming Dynasty.

The owner was stunned. “Ming, really Ming?” he asked. His joyful reaction when told that it was worth between £5000 and £10,000 was one shared by viewers.

OPEC selling oil via BRICS currency…would leave the dollar in the dust. The EU would have no choice but to abandon the dollar..or come to a grinding & freezing halt. We have $35 trillion debt plus the ‘newly discovered’ $65 trillion in derivatives. I expect a black swan event soon to cover up the collapse.

Charlotte Brontë Ring

Charlotte Bronte Ring Roadshow
Charlotte Bronte Ring Roadshow

When a woman was rifling around in her attic, she found a grimy old locked box. After searching for the key, she was contacted by a relative who had found it. Once opened, she discovered a small ring inside. The ring was decorated on the outside, but the most remarkable thing was that there was a hinge on the edge. What was inside was even stranger—a braid of what looked like hair.

When taken to the Antiques Roadshow, the puzzle of the ring was uncovered. An inscription inside the ring bore the name Charlotte Brontë and a date—the date of the author’s death. The hair inside? Probably hair belonging to Charlotte Brontë. This would not have been uncommon in the 19th century. Mourning jewelry was often made to commemorate loved ones who had died. Other examples of mourning jewelry made of hair were known to have belonged to the Brontë family.

This ring was valued at around £20,000. Never leave a locked box unopened.

3 Tang Marble Lion

 

Tang Dynasty Marble Lion | Vintage Albuquerque | Preview

 

The Chinese market for antiques and antiquities has never been higher. A newly wealthy generation of Chinese investors is spending their money to acquire art and artifacts that have left their country over the centuries. Objects that were once picked up by tourists have suddenly become hugely valuable.

One woman might have been somewhat disappointed when told that a marble lion that she had inherited from her grandparents was not from the Ming Dynasty as she had thought. But she should not have worried. The expert on the Antiques Roadshow realized that the exquisitely carved animal was actually from another golden period in Chinese history—the earlier Tang Dynasty. The expert was so impressed with the statue that he became emotional.

The marble lion was valued at $120,000-$180,000.

2 Fabergé Flowers

 

Magical Faberge flower valued at £1 million – Antiques Roadshow – BBC One

 

Just like the word “Ming” sets the hearts of antique collectors racing, so does the name Fabergé. The master jeweler of the early 20th century worked extensively with the Russian royal family, including making Easter egg gifts for them. The jewelry expert Geoffrey Munn is famously a fan of Fabergé objects. He once mentioned on an episode that he had been informed that watchers who play a drinking game while Antiques Roadshow is on have to take a shot every time he mentions Fabergé.

Those drinkers must have been very drunk by the time he stopped talking about a delicate spray of blossoms he was shown. These were no ordinary flowers, however. The vase was made of solid rock crystal, the stem of gold, the petals were enamel, and a tiny drop of water on each bloom was a diamond. All were made by Fabergé.

When considering what such an object might be worth, the expert was forced to suggest that it could be worth over £1 million.

1 Bohdisattva Statue

 

Early 15th-C Chinese Bodhisattva Gilt Bronze | Extraordinary Finds: Extras | ANTIQUES ROADSHOW | PBS

 

Bronze statues can command high prices, but typically, they have to be in mint condition if they are to be truly valuable. When a slightly damaged bronze statue of a bodhisattva turned up on the Antiques Roadshow, it might not have been immediately obvious that it was worth much at all. The experts in Asian art, however, got very excited—even though it had lost one arm.

The owner of the piece had been shopping in an estate sale when she spotted it. Several antique dealers had already snapped up many of the best objects, but this statue had been ignored. The owner was able to buy it for around $100. The experts agreed she had got a bargain. They dated it to the early 15th century and suggested a retail estimate of $100,000-$150,000. It turned out they were wrong… on both counts.

When the statue was later auctioned, it was described as coming from the earlier Tang Dynasty. It eventually sold for $2 million at Sotheby’s.

Egypt joins BRICS bank – official

The country has reportedly been welcomed into the financial structure, further expanding the lender’s global reach

Egypt has officially become a member of the New Development Bank (NDB) of the BRICS group of major emerging economies, the country’s government announced on Wednesday.

The NDB was established by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in 2014 to finance infrastructure and sustainable development in member states and other emerging economies. Since 2016, the bank has invested in multiple projects, including $7.2 billion in India alone, according to the NDB.

Egypt, which has so far not joined BRICS, expressed an interest in becoming a member in July, along with Turkey and Saudi Arabia. It is now preparing to apply for membership, BRICS International Forum President Purnima Anand earlier said.

Card Table

John and Thomas Seymour were master furniture makers in the late 18th and early 18th century working in Boston. Their “Federal” furniture, made with expensive wood and richly decorated, can be found in museums across the country. This made it all the more unexpected when a table made by the pair was wheeled into the Antiques Roadshow upside down on a cart.

The owner of the table had picked it up at a yard sale for just $25 after haggling the price down from $30. Even then, she might not have purchased the table as her friend thought it was too wobbly to support a lamp. It was also filthy and covered in mold. The demi-lune mahogany card table was more than worth the price she paid and the effort of cleaning it. The experts estimated it might be worth $225,000. Had the owner given it too thorough a cleaning and destroyed the original patina, the price would have plummeted.

When the table was auctioned soon afterward, it sold for $490,000. With the buyer’s premium that is paid to the auction house, this made the final sale price $541,000.

My MM video on Hive and Matrix souls…

From my restricted archives. If you all haven’t seen this one yet, give it a chance.

Confessions of a 5-Star Hotel Concierge

What are some things we can use your services for without being assholes?

We can literally do anything! Don’t feel like you’re being an asshole we are there to make your stay as effortless as possible.

The best way to utilise us is restaurant recommendations, theatre tickets and taxis. We will get you the cheapest prices with VIP service!

Also if you want something different to do ask about local walks. We know all the local hidden treasures you wouldn’t find otherwise.

Do you guys have “training” for all the hidden stuff or are you hired specifically for your knowledge of the area?

No we learn as we go. It does help if you’re local! But more often than not it’s just experience. We have endless files on our computer though we don’t work entirely from memory! Don’t be too impressed!

What’s the craziest thing someone’s requested?

I had to get an elderly gentleman a toupee. He had never worn one before but decided he wanted one to go to dinner that night… not an easy task but we did it! (And he actually looked pretty good!)

How do you deal with illegal requests?

It depends on the request. Usually it’s just a case of turning a blind eye.. after all it’s up to the individual. Prostitutes are somewhat of a grey area! We will never advise a guest on where to find an escort nor will we arrange it for them. However if they ask us to send a car for ‘their guest’ we will!

So if I need some hash can you help a guy out or just hotel/travel stuff? Movies make it seem like you can ask you guys for seriously whatever they wanted.

No we can’t put you in contact with anyone but we will facilitate delivery.

I haven’t ever been asked personally but I was rooming someone once when a bag of white powder fell out of their pocket. They didn’t notice and I didn’t know what to do! When he turned round I just said ‘I think you dropped that’ bit awkward!

Say someone is staying at your hotel and on a whim wants to go to a sold out concert at a local venue. Can you get them in, and if so, do your connections get them regular ticket prices, or are they paying for crazy VIP rates? For something like that does the hotel buy the tix and then charge the guest room?

So we can usually get tickets for a sell out but in actual fact the venue was never really sold out. They have a certain amount of tickets for things like radio competitions or whatever. And of course for us to sell. We always try to negotiate the best price for the guest but the price is the price. The guest doesn’t have to pay upfront they can pay on check out. Money to the venue gets sorted through the accounts department I don’t know exactly how it works.

I’m not impressed with the restaurant and quite fancy a Gregg’s Sausage Roll or four, but all the local Gregg’s are all closed for the evening. What do you do?

Find the nearest Iceland store and buy the frozen greggs sausage rolls. Get the kitchen to bake them in the oven (not the bloody microwave) and send it to your room!

What’s the best way a regular person can enjoy things at the hotel only the rich and famous get?

Simply just ask! Always speak to the concierge not the reception staff. Reception can only do so much but the concierge team can get away with a lot of things.

When you arrive ask us about upgrading your room. If we can we will. If you’re eating in one of the hotel restaurants ask us if we could recommend a table, we’ll get you on a great table and and make sure the wait staff look after you well.

My best tip, though, to really feel like a VIP is call down from your room and ask us to run your bath! You might feel daft but we’ll run an awesome bath and we’ll bring you a bottle of wine to enjoy on the house! Do it! Just ask!

I would feel like such an asshole if I asked someone to come up to my room to run my bath. I mean it’s right there…

Haha yeah and we know you could run it yourself… you can also pour your own beer but you let the barman do it for you! It isn’t just running a bath it’s enjoying a bit of luxury and indulging yourself!

Are any of these people actually embarrassed or sheepish about some of their more outrageous or outlandish requests or demands? Examples?

Nope. The regular money just don’t care they ask for what they want and expect to get it.. the young couples who have saved up for a treat or the elderly couple coming in for afternoon tea.. they get embarrassed making the simplest request, because they don’t want to make work for anyone, they don’t want to be a pest! I’ll do everything I can to make their visit special! It’s a one off for them

How do I figure out what to tip the concierge? Is it a set price or do I do a percentage of what I’m getting etc?

Yeah it’s a bit different. We are built in with the price of your room. You wouldn’t tip us same as you wouldn’t tip reception staff. Save your tips for the bell hop and or wait staff. Of course it’s always nice to receive a tip and we appreciate the gesture but it isn’t expected like it might be in other roles in the hotel

Have there been times when you wanted to smack someone for being an ass/petty?

Yes! We hosted an Aston Martin car show a few summers ago. One guys Aston broke down on the hotels driveway. We called a local garage and left them to it. About an hour later he called the hotel and asked me to meet him at the garage… which I did. He expected us to pay for the repairs and when I told him that wasn’t possible he gave me a proper dressing down infront of everyone. I just had to suck it up and politely nod but I could have quite happily nutted him! Money does funny things to people

Are there any particular celebrities that were especially nice and easy to deal with?

Yeah. To be honest most of them are. It’s very rare you get a ‘diva’ that said TV personalities are generally nicer than pop stars. I’m not sure if you’ll know him but the nicest guy I ever met was Derren Brown! That’s my one name drop!

Who’s the most famous person you have ever met?

So i want to be as transparent as possible but discretion is rule 1 so I can’t give names. The two big ones though was a Prince in the British royal family and an American actor who made my missions quite impossible!

Worst thing a famous/rich person did?

One couple paid to stay in two separate rooms. The excuse ‘he’ gave was that his wife snored… the two nights they were there I showed three different women to his room, all at least half his age!

What is the protocol for handling the wife, when the husband is already checked in with his mistress?

So we never share that information. If the wife turns up and says ‘which room is my husband John smith in’ we say ‘sorry I can’t confirm that we have a John smith staying here tonight’ inevitably she says ‘ I know he’s here’ we say ‘have you tried calling him?’ And on it goes.

We will never tell another soul that you’re in our hotel we wouldn’t tell your own mother. We won’t even put a call through to your room unless you’ve ok’d it

How did you get into the business? how long did it take to work up to 5 star service?

I was really lucky tbh. I did all my training in the hotel I currently work at so I didn’t build up to it as such. I was barman in a different hotel before that. I’m currently working towards my golden keys though which will be a proud moment for me

This movie is so great. Not just the fighting, but the lessons Jin learns through this movie. Just amazing.

https://youtu.be/24Uwl360r78

What Is The Biggest No-No When Being Arrested?

Criminal defense attorney here. Allow me to share with you my personal top ten “don’t do these when being arrested” moments, all of which I have personally had to deal with from clients.

    1. Don’t resist arrest. When the handcuffs come out, you cannot talk your way out of the situation any more; cooperate, and things will be much better for you.
    2. Resist the temptation to “explain yourself” to the officer on your drive to the station. They are recording you — and this can be used against you. Just be quiet.

And some more…

  1. If you are being arrested for drunk driving, don’t refuse the intoxilyzer test. You will likely be much worse off for a refusal than a bad test number. Implied consent will screw you.
  2. Please remember to exercise your right to remain silent. There is nothing you can say that will help you in a meaningful way. Just stop talking.
  3. No one likes the guy who threatens to sue everyone in sight. Just request an attorney and stop talking.
  4. Routine booking questions don’t fall into the category of custodial interrogations, so please don’t refuse to give officers your real name. In many jurisdictions this can be a separate offense.
  5. For the love of all that is holy, do not use the following phrase when interacting with the police: “I’m drunk.” It is even less helpful when shouted at the top of your lungs.
  6. Do not, under any circumstance, ask the officer if he or she can “look the other way just this once” while holding out money in your hand.
  7. Sadly, most officers do not appreciate sarcastic remarks or observations about their weight or intelligence. Surprisingly, sentencing judges don’t particularly care for it either.
  8. Officers are not scared of attorneys. Don’t think that name dropping or threats of lawsuits will get an officer to leave you alone. Pro tip: it won’t.

Stephen Link, Attorney

Finally, a reminder…

Also one of my videos…

Some tales about what, where and why that the mainstream media refuse to report on

The world today is falling into an Abyss that was created by the United States, and many world “leaders” are deciding to either follow the United States, or to  get the Hell out of the way.

So we start with today’s installment…

Emperor Caligula the Sadist

Emperor Caligula of Rome is bound to top any list of crazy rulers. Caligula was a leader whose sadism and depravity seemed to have known no bounds. For a start, Caligula tried to instate his horse, Incitatus, as a consul. He appointed a priest to serve the horse and had a stunning marble stable built, complete with chairs and a sofa. This was more than a little eccentric.

Then there are the multiple tales of his sadism. For example, one day at the Circus Maximus, Caligula was enjoying the spectacle when suddenly it became apparent the organizers had run out of criminals to feed to the lions. Caligula simply had the first five rows of spectators dragged from their seats and thrown into the arena. Hundreds died.

Another time, when someone insulted Caligula to his face, he responded by having the man’s family executed in front of a crowd. It began with the man and his wife. Then the children followed, one by one. Eventually, only the youngest daughter, a 12-year-old, was left alive.

The crowd was outraged but had stayed out of morbid curiosity. Before the young girl could be killed, a spectator cried out that she must be spared as she was a virgin. The girl was crying hysterically, having watched her family dispatched one by one. Caligula responded by ordering the executioner to rape the young girl in front of the crowd before strangling her to death.

Caligula was also said to have been beyond debauched. He publicly had sex with his three sisters at public banquets and games, sometimes on the banquet table itself. It has also been claimed that he prostituted his sisters out to other men for his entertainment and slept with his brother-in-law.

Historically, much has been made of Caligula’s sadism. Some historians have claimed that some of the worst tales about Caligula were exaggerated or made up in an attempt to discredit him after his death. However, enough sources exist to paint a picture of an emperor who was mad, bad, and totally insane.

Caligula 0
Caligula 0

A young lady was at her parents, and the parents were fighting. Yelling, not anything physical. The wife says if the husband doesn’t shut up she was going to call the police. So, evidently he kept on, and she picks up the phone and dials 911. The daughter grabs the phone and puts it down, and told them both to behave like you would with your children. So, they do, and everything is back to normal when they hear the police knocking on the door. The daughter is arrested for interfering with a 911 call. When this went to court the state wanted her to get six months. We are all looking at each other, shaking our heads that something this stupid made it to court. Deliberation was very short, and of course she was found not guilty.

Soros has a deep hatred for China.

Because China has cost him billions of dollars twice.

2022 12 07 06 53
2022 12 07 06 53


Soros is a speculator who makes his money by shorting and other means of financial leverage.

Back in 1998, his speculation triggered the East Asian economic crisis.

But during this economic crisis, China held out and managed to snipe Soros in Hong Kong, inflicting huge losses on Soros.

In mid-July 1997, January and May 1998, the Hong Kong dollar was subjected to three massive speculative sell-offs, the Hong Kong dollar exchange rate was hit, the Hang Seng and futures market indices plunged by more than 4,000 points and the market was in a state of extreme panic. Western public opinion jokingly claimed that Hong Kong had become an ATM for international speculators.

According to the plan of Soros and others, they will first short the Hong Kong dollar in the currency market, forcing the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to resort to the old trick of pulling up interest rates, which will inevitably lead to a fall in the stock market and a parallel decline in HSI futures. The speculators could then sell short HSI futures at a lower price in the futures market, making both the currency market and the stock market profitable, with the intention of getting drunk on HSI futures.

In August 1998, after several trials, Soros came back with his strongest men and firepower. Vowing to end Hong Kong in one battle.

On August 14, the Hong Kong government suddenly took action, using the Exchange Fund and the Land Fund to enter the stock market and the Hang Seng Index futures market at the same time, causing the Hang Seng Index to rally by more than 560 points that day, up 8%, to close at 7224 points; Soros's army was instantly surprised, they did not expect the Hong Kong government, which has always boasted a free market, to really enter the market and fight.

Subsequently until the 24th, the Hong Kong government and Soros's speculator group has been back and forth between you and me, a short fight. But the Hang Seng Index slowly dampened the momentum of its previous wild slide and began to be in a state of oscillation.

27 August, the day before the settlement day. At 10am, the Hong Kong stock market opened. As soon as it started, speculators' selling orders came in like a mountain. Within the first 15 minutes, turnover reached HK$1.9 billion; in the second 15 minutes, it was HK$1 billion. And in the 15 minutes before the market closed, the battle went into a frenzy, with turnover reaching HK$8.2 billion! The state of affairs was so gruesome that it dazzled all the traders on the floor.

On this day, the Hong Kong Government used HK$20 billion to commission 10 brokerage houses to hound the 33 HSI constituent stocks. The Hang Seng Index closed at 7,922 points, up 88 points from the previous trading day, the highest since 4 Nov 97.

28 August, the settlement day of the HSI futures. This was Soros's last chance to short the Hang Seng Index, and it was up to this wave to see if the large amount of bearish futures he had previously purchased would make a profit.

At 10am, the duel was fought. The Hong Kong government and the short-selling group immediately engaged in a fierce battle over HSBC Holdings and HKT. While the speculators' sell-offs were rampant and overwhelming, the government's forces were able to buy all the shares without leaving a single one. In only 5 minutes after the market opened, the turnover was as high as HK$3 billion!

Before the market closed at 12 noon, the battle became fierce again, "Cheung Kong Holdings", "China Telecom" and many other blue-chip stocks were sold by speculators, the sea of stocks, the Hong Kong Government's frenzied efforts to save. The turnover at the close of the afternoon market was HK$40.9 billion. As the market opened in the afternoon, the battle became even tougher. As the speculators' sell-offs rolled in, the Hong Kong government used almost all the foreign exchange reserves it could muster to eat up the entire stock market and hold the entire line, with an average of $350 million worth of stocks changing hands every minute.

At exactly 4 p.m., the Hang Seng Index finally settled at 7,829!

Four thrilling hours later, the day's trading volume reached an all-time high for the Hong Kong stock market - HK$79 billion! HSI futures finally settled at 7851 points. In a total of 10 trading days back, the HKSAR Government used approximately the equivalent of HK$120 billion of foreign exchange reserves to pull the Hang Seng Index up by 1,169 points.

HKSAR Financial Secretary Donald Tsang Yam-kuen then declared that the Hong Kong government had won the battle against international speculators and in defence of the Hong Kong stock market and the Hong Kong currency.

On this "dueling day" in defence of Hong Kong, the stock market traded at a volume of HK$79 billion, about 10 times the usual volume.

Soros tried to move back into the fray in September, but on 7 September, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority issued new rules on foreign exchange, securities trading and settlement, which greatly restricted speculation by speculators. On the same day, the Hang Seng Index soared 588 points to the 8,000-point mark. The international speculators' losses were further exacerbated and they eventually had to retreat from Hong Kong in defeat.

The story further on is well known, as the Hong Kong market gradually recovered and the Hang Seng Index returned to above 10,000 points in 1999, with the Hong Kong government making billions of dollars by exiting the stock market altogether.

In 2019, Soros tried to short Hong Kong again while fomenting unrest in Hong Kong through the Open Society Foundations, but was once again sniped. Soros has been “shut down”.

Because of the turmoil in Hong Kong at the time, Hong Kong stocks fell and Soros bought a large number of short positions, expected to be no less than 200,000, to start shorting Hong Kong.

Data show that on August 13, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange futures and options total turnover and small Hang Seng Index futures turnover record high. At the same time, the Hang Seng Index experienced a sharp drop of more than 10% in a round of more than 3,000 points.

What Soros did not expect was the Hong Kong Government's move on 4 September which led to a single day gain of 4.3% for Hong Kong stocks, leaving Soros on the losing end of his first battle!

On September 5, the reluctant Soros again chose to throw a large number of short orders to fight to the death. As a result of this the Hang Seng Index took a dive in the afternoon and fell sharply.

But what Soros didn't expect this time was the suspension of trading in all derivatives markets in Hong Kong from 2pm that day, disrupting all his plans! Regarding this emergency closure of the HKEx, HKEx Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Li Xiaojia, said in an interview: "In any market, a market closure is a big decision, a decision that cannot be taken lightly, and the decision to suspend the market will only be made if we judge that the market is no longer operating in an orderly manner. orderly and therefore made the decision to suspend the market. Such judgements are never easy. We are continuing to investigate the root cause of the incident and will make an announcement to the market as soon as possible."

As a result, there was talk that the HKEx's move was to "shut the door" and give Soros nowhere to go!

The following day, when the HKEx resumed normal trading, the continued rise in Hong Kong stocks caused Soros, who had been a big player for many years, to "close the door on the dog", as expected, and to suffer heavy losses of over HK$2.4 billion!



After reading this, I think we understand why Soros is targeting China, right?

The reason is that he can’t benefit from the current China.

I think there are some “philanthropists” in support of the overthrow of the Chinese government, but not on the scale of Soros.

Tsar Peter III and his Toy Soldiers

Some rulers lose their minds over time, and some never had them in the first place. Tsar Peter III of Russia seems to have suffered from a kind of Peter Pan syndrome; he never grew up! Today, he is mainly remembered as the ruler whose wife, Catherine the Great , deposed him and ruled in his stead. But how did Catherine manage to get rid of her husband?

Well, it was widely believed that Peter was obsessed with toy soldiers. Catherine claimed that on their wedding night she was left disappointed when Peter had plans other than consummating their marriage.

Instead of undressing, Peter pulled a box of toy soldiers out from under his bed and forced his bride to play with them until 2am. Another time, Peter spent a substantial amount of time setting up a toy fort ready for a mock battle. He was left enraged when a rat happened to walk past and knocked over his toys. The rat was soon hung from the wall for ‘breaching military discipline’.

Catherine may indeed have exaggerated the stories of Peter and his toys as a way of discrediting and ultimately deposing him. However, there are enough sources that corroborate her claims to safely say that Peter was a few soldiers short of a full platoon.

Tsar
Tsar

“Can you please get me a cup of coffee?”

Innocuous and innocent, right? But it was the code word.

I worked in the Dean of Students office at a local college and my boss, the Dean, didn’t drink coffee. She did handle the occasionally out of control students. She told us that if we ever heard her ask for coffee, we needed to call security, police and lockdown the east side of campus. We did.

The student had her at knife point shortly after her cryptic message but the confrontation didn’t last long because she was able to get the innocuous warning to us. To this day, I don’t know if the irate student ever figured out how we knew.

This is an exceptional chat.

Excellent analysis by Charles Liu on China’s peaceful rise to help the Global South from poverty with its BRI policy.

CPC has a paternalistic inclination. Like looking after a large family, you’re motivated to help the extremely poor members and inculcate the responsibility of the very wealthy to share a bit. No man is an island, common prosperity is a common good, and nobody can claim to have generated their wealth alone external to the society

We Are Being Warned That The Global Economy Is Having “One Of Its Worst Years In Three Decades”

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Will 2022 go down in history as one of the most important economic turning points that we have ever seen?  All over the planet, economic activity is beginning to decelerate and uncertainty about the future is in the air.  Meanwhile, the cost of living continues to escalate and a very painful energy crisis has begun.  Unless there is some sort of an economic miracle, it appears that 2023 will be a very difficult year, and the long-term outlook beyond next year is even more ominous.  Suddenly, many of the talking heads on television are openly speculating about the hard times that are coming, and the word “recession” is being thrown around quite frequently.

But will we only be dealing with a “recession” in the months ahead, or will it be much worse than that?

At the moment, things are clearly heading in the wrong direction.  The following comes from a Bloomberg article entitled “World Economy Heads for One of Its Worst Years in Three Decades”

The world economy is facing one of its worst years in three decades as the energy shocks unleashed by the war in Ukraine continue to reverberate, according to Bloomberg Economics.

In a new analysis, economist Scott Johnson forecasts growth of just 2.4% in 2023. That’s down from an estimated 3.2% this year and the lowest — excluding the crisis years of 2009 and 2020 — since 1993.

The global economy is more interconnected than ever before, and so pain experienced on one side of the globe is often keenly felt on the other side.

Here in the United States, a huge wave of layoffs has now started.  On Tuesday, yet another major media company announced brutal job cuts

BuzzFeed is axing 12% of its workforce, or around 180 staffers, in a bid to cut costs as the digital media company faces headwinds including an ad-spending pullback and the completion of its integration of Complex Media.

The company informed affected employees via email Tuesday that they were being terminated. “In order for BuzzFeed to weather an economic downturn that I believe will extend well into 2023, we must adapt, invest in our strategy to serve our audience best, and readjust our cost structure,” CEO Jonah Peretti wrote in a memo to employees about the job cuts.

As the housing market crashes, the financial industry is being hit really hard as well.

In fact, it is being reported that approximately 1,600 Morgan Stanley employees will now be looking for new work…

Morgan Stanley cut about 2% of its staff on Tuesday, according to people with knowledge of the layoffs.

The moves, reported first by CNBC, impacted about 1,600 of the company’s 81,567 employees and touched nearly every corner of the global investment bank, said the people, who declined to be identified speaking about terminations.

Speaking of the housing market, we are being told that somewhere around 270,000 recent homebuyers in the U.S. are already underwater on their mortgages.

We haven’t seen anything like this since 2008 and 2009, but this is just the beginning.

If the Federal Reserve insists on hiking interest rates even higher, it won’t be too long before millions of homeowners will be underwater on their mortgages, and that will definitely be a nightmare scenario.

So many families are living on the edge of financial disaster in late 2022.  If you can believe it, approximately 20 million U.S. households are currently behind on their utility bills…

According to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), roughly 20 million households in the U.S. — one out of six homes — are behind on their utility bills.

As of August, these families owe about $16.1 billion in total, with an average amount owed of $788 — and the consequences of this could be dire, especially as home heat costs are expected to reach their highest level in over 10 years.

We are already in a state of economic crisis right now.

But don’t expect the White House to admit that any time soon.

Meanwhile, the cost of living just continues to go higher and higher.  Earlier today, I was stunned to learn that Walmart CEO Doug McMillon is actually admitting that double-digit price increases on packaged foods “are going to be with us for a while”

Walmart (WMT) is the largest retailer in the United States and has a gauge into consumer habits and a wide array of products.

McMillon said that inflation was “most stubborn” on packaged food. Double-digit price increases on these essentials “are going to be with us for a while,” he said.

So we are going to have rapidly rising prices and an imploding economy at the same time.

Yes, 2023 is going to be a whole lot of fun.

At this point, even the mood on Wall Street is shifting.

Stocks were down once again today, and now the S&P 500 has fallen for seven of the last eight trading sessions

The S&P 500 shed 1.44% to close at 3,941.26, while the Nasdaq Composite sank 2% to finish at 11,014.89. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 350.76 points, or 1.03%, to settle at 33,596.34.

Stocks added to Monday’s declines, with the S&P falling for a fourth straight day and its seventh negative session in eight. Tuesday’s moves bring the Dow’s two-day losses to more than 830 points.

Just a few weeks from now, 2022 will mercifully be over.

But if this year has been “one of its worst years in three decades”, what will the global economy look like a year from now?

As I have detailed above, the U.S. economy is really starting to deteriorate quite rapidly.

So how bad will things eventually get?

Let us hope for a “recession”, but let us also prepare for an economic nightmare.

Certainly.

In 1935, the great American novelist Sinclair Lewis (lived 1885 – 1951) wrote a classic novel titled It Can’t Happen Here. In the novel, a charismatic politician named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip runs for president of the United States on a radical populist platform, promising to give every American family $5,000 a year.

Windrip portrays himself as the champion of traditional American values, a true patriot, a lover of liberty and justice, and a pious Christian. He holds massive, energetic rallies. He portrays himself as a “man of the people” standing up for the “forgotten men” of the working class. He demonizes immigrants, minorities, intellectuals, and the press. He laments the decline of the United States and promises to restore the United States to her former glory. In chapter nine, he is described as follows:

“The Senator [i.e. Windrip] was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.”

“Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”

On the platform I have described, Windrip wins a landslide victory and sails right into the presidency. As president, he declares Congress an “advisory” organization and strips it of all its powers. Any members of Congress who object are promptly thrown in prison. Windrip then creates, arms, and trains a paramilitary force called “the Minute Men,” named after the militiamen who fought in the American Revolutionary War.

Windrip’s Minute Men work to enforce his agenda and force anyone who does not support Windrip into submission. Despite everything Windrip is doing, the vast majority of Americans continue to support him, insisting that everything he does is necessary for the restoration of American military power and economic prosperity. When confronted with the notion that Windrip’s regime may be fascistic, they say, “It [i.e. fascism] can’t happen here.”

You may notice some interesting parallels to certain contemporary politicians. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize that Trump is not Buzz Windrip. They may bear an uncanny resemblance to each other, but they are still different. The character of Buzz Windrip was modeled in part on Adolf Hitler, who was at the height of his power when the book was published, and in part on the Louisiana Democratic Senator Huey Long, who was at the time running for president on a populist platform.

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main qimg ce55c59ef75c4e3c12cdf2d97f5a58a4 pjlq

ABOVE: Image of an early edition of Lewis Sinclair’s novel It Can’t Happen Here

The truth is, I think it is possible for any country on Earth with any form of government to turn into a dictatorship. No country is completely immune to the charms of authoritarianism, not even the United States. We may pride ourselves on our love of freedom, but saying that you love freedom means nothing if your actions do not show it. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to recognize authoritarianism when it rears its ugly head and it is certainly possible for even the most ardent believer in democracy to support an authoritarian figure.

The only real question is not “Is it possible the U.S. will have a dictator?” but rather “How likely is it for the U.S. to become a dictatorship given the present circumstances?” Just because the United States could become a dictatorship does not necessarily mean that it will. If our institutions are upheld and all the powers of the presidency are held in check like they are supposed to be, then we can avert dictatorship.

There is nothing unrealistic about the United States electing a populist demagogue with authoritarian leanings; it has already happened. What I think is somewhat less realistic about Sinclair Lewis’s novel is his portrayal of the conversion of the United States from representative democracy to dictatorship. This conversion—if it does happen—probably will not happen overnight. It will only happen after years and years of norms being flouted and institutions undermined.

If the United States turns into an autocracy, it will probably happen a way similar to the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic was not overturned by one man; it took well over a century for the Republic to fully transform into the autocracy of Augustus.

Furthermore, even as late as the reign of the emperor Diocletian (ruled 284 – 305 AD), people were still pretending like “the Republic” was still a thing, even though it really had not meaningfully existed in any sense for over three hundred years. For those interested in the history of the decline of the Roman Republic, the 2018 book Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny by the American classical historian Edward J. Watts is an excellent and startlingly contemporary history of that time period. On page 281—the very last page—Watts offers this brilliant paragraph, which feels as close to home as any news report:

“Rome’s republic, then, died because it was allowed to. Its death was not inevitable. It could have been avoided. Over the course of a century, thousands of average men, talented men, and middling men all willingly undercut the power of the Republic to restrict and channel the ambitions of the individual, doing so in the interest of their own shortsighted gains. Every time Cato misused a political procedure, or Clodius intimidated a political opponent, or a Roman citizen took a bribe in exchange for his vote, they wounded the Republic. And the wounds festered whenever ordinary Romans either supported or refused to condemn men who took such actions. Sulla, Marius, Caesar, and Augustus all inflicted mighty blows on the Republic, but its death was caused as much by the thousands of small injuries inflicted by Romans who did not think it could really die. When citizens take the health and durability of their republic for granted, that republic is at risk. This was as true in 133 BC or 82 BC or 44 BC as it is in AD 2018. In ancient Rome and in the modern world, a republic is a thing to be cherished, protected, and respected. If it falls, an uncertain, dangerous, and destructive future lies on the other side.”

main qimg 21f04db24c0230bb2f1b75093007f405 lq
main qimg 21f04db24c0230bb2f1b75093007f405 lq

ABOVE: Cicero Denounces Catiline, painted between 1882 and 1888 by the Italian painter Cesare Maccari. If the United States ever falls into dictatorship, it will probably happen gradually. Over time, norms and institutions will be undermined until dictatorship simply feels normal and natural to most people.

I must end this answer with a question mark. I do not know if the United States will become a dictatorship. If the United States does become a dictatorship, I cannot say how soon it will happen. It could happen a century and half from now or it could happen a decade from now. All I am certain of is that it will take time. Gradually, norms and institutions will be undermined until dictatorship simply feels normal and natural to most people. At first, few will even recognize it as a dictatorship, but the truth of the matter will be made clear by time.

Unless, of course, we stop it from happening altogether.

4 People Describe What’s It Like To Have Bipolar

 

1. It’s the most amazing pile of beautiful misery to grace the hell of my divine existence! When your good, things are FANTASTIC! the other %80 of the time is spent trying to prevent your (percieved) justifiable suicide.

2. I have bipolar disorder type 2. It has affected me my whole life, though I didn’t realize it and didn’t get diagnosed until my late 30s.

I’m afraid of my own brain. I hyper analyze every mood and feeling, worried that I may be sliding into yet another episode of mania or bone crushing depression.

It sucks. I feel like so much of my life’s potential has been eaten up by the alternating bouts of depression, mania, and the guilt and shame I felt (and still feel) when I do have clarity. I lost my job, my marriage, and very nearly lost my life to bipolar. My ex tried to get my partial custody revoked because I am “crazy” but thankfully in my state that doesn’t hold water unless I demonstrate an inability to care for my kids.

I’ve also lost almost all of my friends, either due to manic or depressed behavior that alienated me from them, my ex’s embellishment of how insane I am, or my isolating myself after my last nervous breakdown. It took 18 months to be well enough to try working again, and every day at work seems like the day I will quit because I can’t take the stress and anxiety of it. But I go. And I keep going every day.

I can’t handle this illness anymore. But I take it a day, an hour, a minute at a time if I have to. And I take my medication religiously. At least I know without a doubt that I have done everything in my power to control this thing rather than let it control me.

3. Sometimes I’m very happy all of the time and I don’t need much sleep. I will start a lot of things and take up many new hobbies which rapidly develop into an obsession and then I’ll move onto something else.

It takes a lot of effort to get things complete because I will work on multiple tasks simultaneously. I was once cleaning the 2 bathrooms, sorting through laundry, cleaning the cooker and dishwasher, cleaning the patio doors, washing the floors, dusting bookshelves and sorting out the drawers under the bed all at once. I was running from task to task and became convinced my slippers were slowing me down. Our apartment at the time had a long, open plan living/dining room and kitchen. I grew convinced my slippers were slowing me down and kicked them across from the living room and into the kitchen.

I also suffer from memory problems during hypomanic episodes, which means that I only remember brief things once the episode has passed. An example of this is with my medication. I had gone to the pharmacy to collect my prescription, but they didn’t have enough and I said I’d call back in for the rest another day. They gave me a slip of paper and I went back a week later after running out of the meds I’d got the week before.

The pharmacist had said I’d been in the day after and collected the rest of my prescription, which I have absolutely no memory of, nor did I know where I would have put my medication if I had. She ended up doubting herself and went back to check the records and could show me that I’d been back in to collect the pills. Not even the time or date jogged any memory. I left to go back to my doctor and ask for another prescription but I had to go home for something. I got to the entrance of my apartment building and I couldn’t find my keys in my pockets and went hunting into my bag. While digging around I found a paper bag and found the remainder of my prescription that I’d picked the following day. I went back and told the pharmacist I’d found them and apologised for taking her away from her other jobs.

I also avoid going outside when I’m hypomanic. When I’m in large crowded areas, I pick up on people’s emotions and start feeling them as if they were my own. And it’s not just a single emotion I’ll feel at once, but a mixture of all emotions. Because people with bipolar’s emotions are already extremely elevated, this becomes intoxicating and I’ll end up very hyperactive and happy, but I’m also more prone to getting angry too. Because I’m hyperactive, I am doing everything faster and it feels like time around me has slowed down, so people walking in front of me, or having my way somewhere blocked makes me very angry.

If I do need to go into a crowded area, I’ll have to spend a few hours mentally preparing myself to go out. So I’ll make a mental map of the places I need to go, the route I’ll need to take to get the things I need in the most efficient way and I can’t deviate from that route as I’m more easily distracted when hypomanic and if I deviate from my route, then I’ll end up spending all my money on cheap tat because I felt like it would make my life a lot better at that time, and then not know why I got it.

My memory problems have also got me into debt several times too. I can buy things and forget I’ve purchased them, then remember I was wanting to buy it and go and buy it again. It’s not uncommon for me to buy 2 – 3 copies of the same thing, and shops rarely allow you to return them, so I end up just giving the multiples away to people.

I’m also prone to making rash, snap decisions. It’s not uncommon for me to randomly quit a job or take a sudden dislike to a close friend and remove them from my life. Due to the way bipolar works (depression and hypomania/mania), your job performance will drop while depressed, and then you can suddenly snap into a hypomanic/manic episode without knowing it and start irritating those around you. Because of how work places tend to treat those with mental health problems, they often won’t take you back if you quit because they see you as a liability.

But you tend to crash into one of the deepest depressions you can have when it ends. Like the saying goes “the higher you go, the further you have to fall”.

4. Some people say stupid things “yesterday I was feeling great and today I just feel normal, omg I’m like so bipolar lol”, don’t say this, it’s hard enough being a victim of it, and it becomes infuriating when people say things like this (this is pretty much true for all mental illnesses).

So what is it like being bipolar? Imagine swimming, swimming forever, you are not a particularly talented swimmer and to make things worse you have weights on your wrists and ankles. The heaviness of these weights change, with no real pattern, sometimes the weights are light enough for you to swim along with everyone else and it’s manageable and life is bearable. But sometimes the weights are heavy and just staying afloat becomes incredibly difficult, and sometimes the weights become even heavier than that, when the weights become too heavy you will eventually slip below the surface.

When you are under it seems like getting back up is impossible, sometimes the weights are so heavy you can’t get back up and you have to hold your breath until they get lighter but the longer you hold your breath the harder it is to not sink further leaving you to be in constant hope the weights become light enough to cope and get back up. For most the thought of giving up and letting go crosses their minds, once you’ve drowned you don’t have to struggle and cope anymore, because of this some people do. For some people the weights do get lighter and they can get back above the surface and continue swimming, some people don’t.

Friends are other swimmers, some have their own weights some don’t and it’s your friends who will rescue you when you sink under, they will help you swim carrying you along but they are also swimming and have to carry themselves, the more they help you the harder their own swimming becomes, some will move on and leave you, some will stay, and you will encounter more, replacing the ones lost.

Some use drugs to help with the struggle, drugs will temporarily make the weights lighter and it will be easier until they wear off but when they do wear off the weights will be heavier than before. Some people hurt themselves, doing this makes the weights slightly lighter but it makes the wearer weaker.

I can’t say bipolar does get better, certain medication will lighten the weights as will positive things in your life but you will always wear your weights. So why keep swimming? Everyone drowns at some point anyway so what’s the point? You want to get as far as you can during your swim, you want to experience the good things and you want to keep going, you want to beat your weights, you want to help carry others, you only get one swim, some people have it easier than others but it’s best not to waste it.

The true and actual number of weapons systems; nuclear and other is absolutely unknown. It’s useless to guess. What the pentagon thinks is probably incorrect.

https://youtu.be/ZLU6n9FyOSY

A Therapist Reveals Unusually Common Things They Often Hear, That People Are Hesitant To Disclose

 

1. I work in an older adults service for people with dementia and mental health problems. I see a lot of family members/Carers feeling ashamed of the fact that they are finding it incredibly difficult to care for someone that has dementia or a chronic mental health problem.

Carer burnout is a real issue and people need to know that it’s not easy to see someone you love struggling every day, or slowly fading away month by month. Carers and family members desperately need time for themselves and need to know that it’s okay to feel the way that they do.

No one is superhuman and we all have our own needs. It’s why we have therapy groups for Carers. It’s okay to struggle to look after someone and you should in no way feel ashamed of having those feelings.

2. Unwanted intrusive thoughts are normal and do not mean you are a bad person (yes, even intrusions of sexual/religious/moral themes).

By definition, these are thoughts that are unwanted bc they go against your own values and highlight what you don’t want to do (eg, a religious person having unwanted blasphemous images pop into their mind, or a new parent having unwanted sexual thoughts about their new baby).

However normal these thoughts are (over 90% of the population), the moral nature of these thoughts mean that often people experience a lot of shame and take many years before they first tell someone about them.

3. That they “hear voices”. I’ve found that a lot of people aren’t familiar with their own internal dialogue or “self talk” and that this is typically “normal” internal processing. A lot of people think that they are “hearing voices” and hallucinating. There are some pretty simple questions we can ask to determine if it’s hallucinating or just internal dialogue, and most often it’s the latter.

4. Clients become quite fearful of admitting that they weren’t successful since the last time they had a session. This could include not succeeding in using a coping skill that they’re learning about, or not being able to complete a homework assignment I gave them. Humans aren’t robots, and therapy is a lot of work.

That being said, I don’t expect people to be perfect as they start to work on themselves in a positive way. It takes time to really commit to change, especially in relation to trauma or conflicted views that an individual holds. I feel as if the client doesn’t want to let me down as their therapist, but these “failure” events are just as important to talk about as successful moments!

5. Intrusive thoughts about sex with family members or (in their mind ) “nymphomania” as a result of childhood sexual trauma (and adult). Hyper sexuality isn’t often discussed as one of the PTSD symptoms, so people walk around with so much shame about it.

6. A common one in the time I was a therapist was simply “I don’t know”.

You’d be surprised how reluctant people are to admit that they don’t know why they’re feeling how they are. But that’s exactly why you’re (or were, I’m not a therapist any more) sat there with me; so we can figure out why together.

It always put me in mind of a line from America by Simon and Garfunkel:

“Kathy, ‘I’m lost’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping. ‘I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why’.”

7. Some of the most common ones have been visual and/or auditory hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. I usually hear “I don’t want to be put in the hospital” or “I don’t want you to think I’m crazy”. Also, basically anything sexual. I’m not going to judge you for being into BDSM, fetishes, etc. Honestly, I’ve probably heard it before and I’m not here to judge you. Same goes with any non-consensual experiences (especially if we’re working through trauma).

8. Basically, anything having to do with sex. There’s so much shame. Sexual abuse. Sexual fantasies and fetishes. Erectile dysfunction. Infidelity. Becoming sexually assertive. I’ve been told that I have a good “psychologist’s face.” I try not to have a strong reaction to normalize the discussion. With adolescents, they are extremely anxious to tell me if they’ve relapsed or aren’t doing well. They cut one night or they were suicidal. They’re having a lot of negative self-talk or panic attacks. They’ll come in, pretending everything is okay. It’s usually in the last 10-15 minutes that they’ll say something. They’ll reveal that they worried they’d let me down. That I’d be disappointed in them. It usually turns into a discussion about policing other people’s feelings and tolerating emotions. I explain that I care about their well-being and it’s my job to monitor my emotions and reactions, not their role.

9. I’d say a common one is believing that there’s something innately, irreparably wrong with them that makes them unable to ever truly ‘fit in’. For a lot of people it’s such a deeply ingrained belief that it can be extremely painful to acknowledge or express, regardless of the level of personal success in their lives.

10. Two topics come up with regularity: when someone discloses to me that they were sexually abused as a kid, and/or when some is experiencing suicidal ideation. Both are something I hear from clients every single day, and so I don’t find it weird at all. But, when I have someone in front of me who’s talking about it for the first time, I know it’s important to validate the fact that even though I might be talking about this for like the fifth time that day, they have never talked about this EVER, and are in need of gentle care to feel safe.

11. That they haven’t had sex with their partner in years and don’t know how/if they will ever have sex with their partner again. There is so much shame around sex in the USA that a lot of people are scared to talk to their partner about their sexual needs. Time goes by, and suddenly they haven’t had sex in 3, 5, 10 years. It starts for a lot of people in their 40s and 50s.

A lot of people (falsely) believe there is something wrong with their marriage because they fantasize about people other than their partner.

12. I do a lot of trauma work. Many people who have experienced molestation or sexual assault feel ashamed and confused because their bodies responded.

Having an erection/lubrication or even an orgasm does not mean you wanted the sexual contact and it is still assault. Clients often hold a lot of shame and confusion about this.

They wonder if it means they wanted it or if there is something wrong with them. It is a tough thing to work through because of this. Assault is assault. Sometimes human bodies respond to sexual touch even when we don’t want that touch.

13. To name a few: “compulsive” masturbation, fears of being a pedophile/rapist (this is a common OCD fear), hoarding, sexual performance difficulties, history of sexual abuse or sexual assault (unfortunately it is VERY common), drug use, amount of money spent on various things, having an ASD diagnosis, going back to an abusive relationship / staying in an abusive relationship, grieving years and years after a loss, self-harm of all sorts, wanting to abandon their current lifestyle (for example, to have more sex, to escape responsibility or expectations), history of gang violence / crime, their sexuality (or asexuality), gender identity, the impact of racism / racial trauma, paranoia, hallucinations, feeling uncomfortable in therapy, not believing in therapy, difficulty trusting a therapist, fear of psychiatric medication, fear of doctors in general.

14. Recurring intrusive thoughts about harming others. Can be hurting/killing someone or sexual fantasies about children or relatives. Usually people take a while to admit those.

The reality is that if you are having them frequently you aren’t dangerous. You probably have OCD and are terrified that you might be dangerous.

Charles VI of France Believed He Was Made of Glass

Charles VI of France is remembered for two things: his crushing defeat at Agincourt against the British and the fact that he was really quite mad.

Charles’s bouts of psychosis are numerous and well-documented. In 1393, he forgot his name and the fact that he was king. When his wife came to visit in an attempt to help, he had no idea who she was either. He ordered his servants to look after her but also get rid of her.

Then from 1395-96, he began claiming he was Saint George . He recognized his servants and officers, but could not remember his wife or children. Around the same time, he took to running wildly around the corridors of his residence, Hotel Saint-Pol. It became such a problem that to keep him inside and safe, entrances had to be walled up.

Then in 1405, he refused to bathe or wear clean clothes for five months. After this last bout of madness, records of his mental illness become scarcer. It is believed this is not because he recovered but because his bouts of insanity became so numerous that people gave up keeping track of them.

Thanks to Pope Pius II , we know that at some point Charles began to believe he was made of glass . He became terrified of breaking and would let no one touch him. He would sit still for hours and even went as far as having iron rods sewn into his clothing to protect him. It’s common for powerful men to have fragile egos, but Charles took it one step further.

Madness 0
Madness 0

Could 65 Trillion Dollars In “Hidden” Derivatives Cause The Entire Global Financial System To Crash?

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If you thought that the collapse of FTX was something, just wait until the entire global financial system comes crashing down all around us.  Most people just assume that the system is being managed by rational people that behave in rational ways, but of course countless investors assumed the same things about FTX.  Sadly, the global financial system has slowly but surely been transformed into the largest casino in the history of the world.  It is a colossal Ponzi scheme, and once in a while authorities give us a little peek into what is really going on behind the curtain.

For example, this week the Bank for International Settlements released a report that warned that 65 trillion dollars in “hidden” currency derivatives could potentially be a major threat to the stability of the entire system

There’s a hidden risk to the global financial system embedded in the $65 trillion of dollar debt being held by non-US institutions via currency derivatives, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

In a paper with the title “huge, missing and growing,” the BIS said a lack of information is making it harder for policy makers to anticipate the next financial crisis. In particular, they raised concern with the fact that the debt is going unrecorded on balance sheets because of accounting conventions on how to track derivative positions.

Last year, the total value of all goods and services produced in the entire world was just 96 trillion dollars.

So we are talking about an amount of money that is almost unimaginable.

Everything will be okay as long as financial conditions remain relatively stable.

But BIS analysts warn that “the next time dollar funding liquidity is squeezed” we could have an enormous crisis on our hands…

“Off-balance-sheet dollar debt may remain out of sight and out of mind—but only until the next time dollar funding liquidity is squeezed,” the analysts write. “Then, the hidden leverage in pension funds and insurance companies’ portfolios . . . could pose a policy challenge.”

So let’s hope that such a scenario does not materialize any time soon.

According to the BIS report, banks outside the U.S. are particularly vulnerable

For researchers at the BIS, it’s the sheer scale of the swaps that’s worrying. They estimate that banks headquartered outside the US carry $39 trillion of this debt — more than double their on-balance sheet obligations and ten times their capital. Accounting conventions only require derivatives to be booked on a net basis, so the full extent of the cash involved isn’t recorded on a balance sheet.

“There is a staggering volume of off-balance sheet dollar debt that is partly hidden, and FX risk settlement remains stubbornly high,” said Borio, head of the monetary and economic department at the BIS.

When this thing finally implodes, there isn’t going to be enough money in the entire world to fix it all.

But don’t worry.

The “experts” are telling us that everything is fine.

Meanwhile, more of our largest corporations are planning layoffs.  According to the Wall Street Journal, this even includes PepsiCo

PepsiCo is reported laying off headquarter workers, The Wall Street Journal reports.

A person familiar with the matter told the Journal that hundreds of jobs are being cut in the head office of the North American snacks and beverages divisions.

Employees in Purchase, N.Y., Chicago, Ill. and Plano, Tex. are said to be impacted.

I thought that PepsiCo was doing well.

I guess not.

But don’t worry.

The “experts” are telling us that everything is fine.

This week some of the biggest names in the mainstream media have also announced layoffs

Hundreds of media industry staffers were laid off this week during a brutal period that saw Warner Bros. Discovery, Gannett and others slash headcount as economic uncertainty plagues news organizations.

Gannett, a newspaper juggernaut that owns dozens of local media outlets along with USA Today, began its latest round of layoffs on Thursday. The cost-cutting effort impacted roughly 6% of the company’s news workforce of about 3,440 employees.

I can’t remember ever seeing such a wave of layoffs at our largest media companies.

But don’t worry.

The “experts” are telling us that everything is fine.

Of course the truth is that everything is not fine.

Economic conditions are deteriorating all around us, and the ripple effects are being felt everywhere.

According to Fox Business, even Las Vegas is feeling the pain…

Inflation is taking its toll on Sin City as fewer tourists are visiting the gambling Mecca, and those who do spend less than usual, according to a new report.

The University of Las Vegas business school released a report forecasting the city’s economic outlook between 2022 and 2024 and noted that its economy turned grim in June of this year, according to Fox 5.

“Interest rates have gone up. And we know that we know that prices are going up as well. And that’s what the Fed is trying to get their hands around and solve. So it may be that the Fed’s policies is having an effect not only nationally, but it’s also affecting our economy locally,” one of the study’s authors, Professor Stephen Miller, told the outlet.

2008 and 2009 were incredibly difficult years for Las Vegas.

Now those that run businesses in Sin City are bracing for another extended downturn.

In all my years of writing, I have never been more concerned about the short-term economic outlook them I am right now.

It is very likely that 2023 will be a really hard year for the U.S. economy, and of course this comes at a time when the entire globe is being hit by crisis after crisis.

For ages we have been warned that a day of reckoning would eventually be coming, and now it appears that day of reckoning has already arrived.

There is certainly nothing wrong with hoping for the best.  But there is also wisdom in getting prepared for the worst.

I was at a family gathering the other day. My brother was tickling my 4 year old daughter. She was giggling, and as kids do when tickled, saying stop. She was being loud (as she was being tickled. That’s what kids do). Grandma then scolded my daughter for being loud. I said “She said stop”, my brother said, “She’s laughing, she likes it.”

Now, I am not saying anybody in my family was doing anything inappropriate. I suspect zero foul play, it was innocent fun. Still, objectively, I saw this happen:

  • I saw a girl, being touched, and saying stop.
  • Then, a man saying, see, she likes it.
  • Then another woman, a trusted adult, blaming the child for being to loud, silencing her protests.

Again, totally innocent situation.

But knowing what goes on in the world, I don’t like it. I don’t like the normalizing of “see, she liked it”.

How many molesters start with the tickling game. Get the kid used to you touching their arm. Then the shoulder. Then move inwards. That’s called grooming, and I’d bet a lot of that starts innocently enough.

Again, I am not saying the Uncle was doing anything wrong. But the actions that happened, in another context, could be very wrong.

We don’t play the tickling game anymore. And when my daughters say no, they will be heard.

Nero the Mother Killer

To be honest, you could write an entire list just of crazy rulers of Rome. The most famous of them is probably Nero. Nero appears to have begun his reign relatively sane, but increasingly fell into a paranoia that left him a little crazy.

bored
bored

Much has been made of Nero’s violent tendencies, but Nero had a softer side (which was also crazy). By the time Nero became the emperor of Rome at the age of seventeen, he had been trained in the arts and was a talented singer, musician, and reciter of poetry.

In Roman culture, professional actors and musicians were, socially speaking, barely higher than whores or slaves. But Nero loved to perform. As emperor, he hosted a range of events and competitions to play in public. He even went as far as entering the Olympic Games and forcing the organizers to include artistic competitions. Unsurprisingly, he won every event he entered.

He loved performing so much and played for so long that audience members came up with inventive means of escape. Old men would feign death and women would fake going into labor just to escape. When Nero died he stated, “What an artist dies in me.”

Also, he had a habit of killing the people close to him. It all began with his mother, whom he had killed. His reasons for having his mother killed are unclear, but it seems after her death Nero began to suffer from paranoia. If his own mother could turn on him, anyone could.

It is widely believed Nero had his first wife killed and killed his second wife himself. After his second wife, Poppaea, died, he had a young commoner who resembled his deceased wife castrated. He then dressed the young man as his wife and married him – truly the actions of a crazy ruler.

That’s right, China is not rising, China is regaining its former position it’s been having for at least 2000 years prior to Western aggression and colonization.

The West’s 200 years of domination is coming to an end whether it accepts it or not. The sooner the West learns to live and deal properly with the new multipolar world the better is for everyone.

If the West is not able to compete within its own trade platforms and continue to abuse its own financial systems, then they really shouldn’t blame China or other countries for creating new trade and financial platforms that would better serve the people of the developing world.

Qin Shi Huang’s Search for Immortality

Qin Shi Huang was a ruler who believed his own hype. At least in his case, it was somewhat earned. Qin Shi Huang rose to power as the first emperor of a unified China in the 3rd century BC.

Once Huang gained power, he rapidly became obsessed with keeping it. He had many enemies, and over the years he faced several assassination attempts. The idea that death was the only thing that could separate him from power caused him to lose his mind. He became obsessed with gaining immortality. He consulted doctors who prescribed him a healthy regimen of sex to maintain his vitality.

When this failed, he began taking pills full of mercury. These had the opposite effect. His health declined, and so did his sanity. As Huang lost more and more of his marbles, he turned to mysticism. His greatest adventurers were sent out to the ‘Islands of the Immortals’ to find a magical elixir that would allow him to live forever. Fearing evil spirits, he had a complex system of tunnels built that connected his 200 palaces.

Huang is best remembered for his magnificent tomb filled with its army of terracotta soldiers. They were meant to be an immortal army that would protect their supposedly immortal emperor. Huang died in 210 BC..

thought
thought

Eggnog Fudge

“Instead of giving away fudge, make the fudge look like a wrapped present!”

2022 12 07 16 36
2022 12 07 16 36

Ingredients

Directions

  • In a large pot on medium high heat, mix sugar, eggnog and vanilla. Stir until it begins to boil. Stop stirring and place candy thermometer along pots edge and allow to heat to 238 degrees. Once this occurs remove from heat and stir in butter, cinnamon and nutmeg. Mix until just combined and then pour into a parchment lined 10X10 inch tin and allow to cool completely.
  • Cut into various shapes and smooth any rough edges with a potato peeler. Pierce one end with a toothpick. Coat shapes in the candy melt color of your choosing and allow to set completely before decorating .
  • Mix frosting and scoop into a medium piping bag. Pipe decorative final ribbons. Paint after completely dry if desired. I found a small star tip makes for a perfect ruffle ribbon with one little squeeze.

Alex and Alexander are the best geopolitical analysts out there. Great to see them on your show Jimmy.

What’s It Like To have Narcissistic Personality Disorder

As an actual narcissist, I’m writing anonymously to avoid being exposed. I may not be officially diagnosed with NPD (nor I’d ever want to be), but two of my psychologists, including the current one, described me as “a narcissist”, and being a psychology student myself, I think it’s unfortunately accurate.

My self-image, it’s quite inconsistent. Sometimes, I do feel grandiose, but in many aspects I am objectively above-average, at least.

 

Since I’ve had episodes of serious depression, I’ll explain it in comparison to that.

When you are depressed, you view yourself as horrible by cherry-picking your worst qualities and experiences. It might be accurate – if a bit exaggerated – but you forget about the good things.

Now, narcissistic grandiosity feels like the opposite of that. You cherry-pick your best qualities and experiences. When you think of yourself, only your successes and capabilities come to your mind. (Part accurate, part exaggerated)

Now how does being a narcissist feel? I think the feeling i could most strongly attribute to being a narcissist, is the constant need to be important, respected and powerful. If people treat you with just a tiny little bit less respect, than you think you deserve, you get angry. And by angry, I mean internally consumed by rage.

That awful, bitter feeling started in my childhood (obviously). I’ll describe the process as well as I can.

So… I used to be a very kind, intelligent, but a bit spirited, and more than a bit aggressive child until my early teens. While I was always in the top quarter of the class, and pretty responsible for my age, there were those times, when I was told off, called cheeky, punished, ect…

For most people, this is a normal part of their childhood, but for me, it increasingly felt like being unfair to me, and I couldn’t accept that. I resented adults (and I still do) more than anything. Every mistake seemed bigger in their eyes when I made them, than when they did.

Swearing, wanting too much, becoming angry, speaking my mind had much more consequences for me, than for them. (I know, this is true for all minor mistakes of children, compared to that of their parents, but still. I couldn’t accept. I can’t.)

They spotted all my mistakes so well, so I began to spot theirs.

My parents were relatively sensible people, as far as parents go, but they were certainly no angels. They often shouted at each other, swore all the time, and talked to me and each other in a pretty rude way.

They smoked. They lied. (Who doesn’t?) They didn’t always do well in their jobs. Basically no serious, abusive stuff. But they (and other adults) were of course scandalized, if we, kids did any of that. I always asked them why, and they always reasoned with things like “It’s not your house, You live on your parents’ money, We know better, You should respect your elders…”.

And I just felt desperate and powerless. I was too young to work and unqualified anyway.

I couldn’t grow up instantly, but I often fantasized about that when we’ll get older, they would get it all back. They would be dependent on ME! And I would tell them off! I would be the boss. And most of all, I’d be BETTER than them. I’d show them that I’ve ALWAYS been!

But well, meanwhile I had to get my way somehow. I knew by that time that kindness and logic don’t convince everyone, honesty just gets you into trouble, and obedience makes your superiors have even higher expectations towards you. And that is where the narcissist’s best friend, manipulation comes into the picture.

I had to learn how different kinds of people react to different approaches. To use my words as a means to an end, rather than wearing my heart on my sleeve.

In some situations, i needed to tone my tactless, aggressive personality down. That was pretty difficult, but worth it. I genuinely became more patient because of this little self-control exercise.

In others, I needed to exaggerate my emotions. That came pretty naturally.

And by my late teens, I tended to switch from nice to furious in seconds. (It can baffle people into compliance.)

Guilt-tripping and directing the blame at others came as a family legacy. (Heh.)

All of this for that sweet, sweet feeling of power.

Still, I empathize with other people, and will be benevolent towards them, as long as they at least treat me like an equal.

But I’ll be hell-bent on humiliating those, who are condescending towards me.

Despite all of this, I think it’s possible to channel all these possibly harmful urges into something positive.

If you want to be admired and feel powerful, you can deceive yourself and others into thinking that you are, OR you can work towards being actually admired and powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do.

I used to go to a therapy group, where I realized that helping people gives me a rush of power that is much more satisfying than simple, selfish manipulation.

Honestly grateful “admirers” are much better than mislead ones. Thus, I found my place in the field of psychology….So that’s all.

You can be disgusted by me or think I’m a horrible person, but these are the feelings of a certain narcissist. And hey, at least I’m self-aware, and trying to better myself. And wrote this long text for your entertainment.

(So feel free to feel thankful and praise me. 😛 )

Rwanda, a tiny country in the eastern central part of Africa (it is there, in red) Rwanda

main qimg 71cc604d5ca049041c83f68b38dbc2cf pjlq
main qimg 71cc604d5ca049041c83f68b38dbc2cf pjlq

  • When visiting Rwanda, don’t bring any plastic bags as they are prohibited in the country. When you try to bring them, they will be confiscated right at the airport. Same goes with throwing waste in the environment, our country is very clean, and throwing any waste would be a shame for you, and the authorities can punish you for that.
  • Don’t openly discuss ethnic issues. 22 years ago our country had seen one of the most atrocious tragedies in human history 1994 Genocide Rwandan genocide
  1. you shouldn’t go around asking everyone what? where? how? who are you? The good way to learn this history is to try and visit some memorials which are rich in that history and it’s near the main city, Kigali and almost in every other city across the country.
  2. Don’t try to take pictures of everything you see especially people even young kids in the street without first asking. Yes, our country is still under development, you might see poor neighborhood, young street kids or some funny things you can make out of those pictures – taking photos of those vulnerable people without their permission is a sensitive issue in our culture.

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main qimg ada991ab5579c3815218d55b801b86c8 lq

  1. You shouldn’t be annoyed or irritated if someone didn’t make it on time. For many people being late “is just okay” one hour or 4 hours would still be okay 😉 so if you are meeting someone either for business or personal affairs just bear this in mind and be patient.
  2. Restaurant and other service businesses. You will be treated really well, in fact a special treatment will be given to you if you are a foreigner (Rwandans are very welcoming and we are naturally good to our neighbours), but don’t take advantage of it or think that they want something from you (i.e. don’t shout or raise your voice when you are not satisfied with the service, there is a good manner to bring the issue at hand).
  3. Rwanda is very safe and secure. Contrary to the popular belief or some perception of a country which has been in Genocide 22 years ago, you can move around anytime you want; even midnight. Don’t expect anyone to understand what you are talking about, even if you speak English or French, the majority of people only know one language; Kinyarwanda. Taxis, local traders, waiters, service providers, etc. they try hard to understand you but make sure when you are traveling to have a local guide with you (this will also help you pay less for everything, because you will not be overcharged cause you are a foreigner)
  4. Don’t bring cats or dogs to public places or smoke in public. This doesn’t mean Rwandans hate animals, it means they respect other people’s views almost on anything. There are also special places reserved for smokers.
  5. When you are a guest to someone’s home, don’t pay (or contribute) for the food or drinks offered unless asked to, this is rude or in some cases disrespectful.
  6. Don’t get annoyed if you are being called ‘muzungu’ everywhere. Literally muzungu means ‘a traveler’ but it is widely known as ‘white people’, even Asians are called ‘muzungu’ 😉 😉 Don’t think they are being racists or are they trying to insult you.

Welcome to Rwanda! The land of thousand hills.

This Rare Battle-Sword Just Found in Sweden Is “An Evolutionary Leap”

Kalmar battle sword
Kalmar battle sword

Researchers in Sweden were excavating a 400-year-old cellar floor when they came across this “rare” battle-sword from the Military Revolution.

Archaeologists from Arkeologerna were digging at the intersection of the Kungsgatan and Västerlnggatan roads in the city of Kalmar, in the southeast of Sweden on the coast of the Baltic Sea.

Best known for its Renaissance-style Kalmar Castle , with turrets and a drawbridge, in the old town cobbled streets lead visitors along corridors of well-preserved 17th- and 18th-century buildings.

The Arkeologerna researchers discovered a cellar floor which records suggested was part of a medieval farm that belonged to “Gotskalk Hulskede in 1368 AD”. The farm property was again mentioned in a 1483 AD text and it is known that it burned down in the summer of 1611 AD during the Kalmar War.

A report in Heritage Daily says the archaeologists discovered “two severely burned hand grinders, a pile of charred grains, and broken brick, stone, and wood” most probably from the top floors of the houses covering the cellar’s floor. And it was while they were removing collapsed roofing material that the “rare” Danish sword was discovered.

heavily 0
heavily 0

Two heavily fire-damaged hand grinders. ( Arkeologerna)

You Can Only Poke The Bear So Often!

The Kalmar War/Conflict was fought between Sweden and Denmark-Norway from 1611 AD to 1613 AD. Tensions began back in 1607 AD when King Charles IX of Sweden declared himself King of the Lapps, then taxed them, in what was traditionally Norwegian territory. Then, to get around paying tolls to Denmark and Norway for using the Øresund “Sound” strait, which separates the Baltic Sea and the North Sea , Sweden forged a new route via Lapland.

According to a report in TechTimes, this one toll “constituted up to two thirds of Denmark’s state income in the 16th and 17th centuries”. Not at all chuffed, i n April 1611 AD King Christian IV of Denmark and Norway declared war upon Sweden and invaded from the south with 6,000 Danish soldiers.

The city and castle of Kalmar were known as the “key to Sweden,” because they controlled the Kalmar Straight and all shipping access to the northern trade routes on the Swedish east coast, and Stockholm. The 6,000 invaders had their weapons trained on first taking control of Kalmar’s castle, then the entire city, but things didn’t go according to plan.

excavated 5
excavated 5

The excavated stone cellar in a Kalmar street, where the battle sword was found. ( Arkeologerna)

Lost in the Smoke of War

After several months of sieging, Danish forces successfully penetrated Kalmar’s city walls, but they failed to crush the Swedish forces and skirmishes continued until the death toll got to around 900 men (700 Swedish and 200 Danes). Eventually, England drew up peace terms which were guaranteed by King James I of England and VI of Scotland and the Peace of Knäred was signed on 21 January 1613 AD, bringing the Kalmar War to a close.

King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden’s victory over Denmark set him on the path that would see him build his territory and army into a major regional power. This is why historians regard the conflict as a turning point in the history of armed conflict in Scandinavia. And it was in the aftermath of this war that the cellar burned causing its roof to collapse, covering the “rare” Swedish sword.

Kalmar
Kalmar

Excavations in Kalmar revealed, in the now exposed 17th century basement, lay the lost weapons of a Danish soldier. ( Arkeologerna)

This Weapon Is ‘An Evolutionary Leap’

Arkeologerna said in a statement that at the time of the Kalmar War armies across Europe were experiencing “the military revolution.” An article in the defense publication, The Forge , explains the term ‘Military Revolution’ was originally coined in a paper delivered by Michael Roberts in 1955 to describe the period between 1560 AD and 1660 AD which saw new tactics and weapon systems being tested. These military changes brought about “significant transformation in warfare that contributed to the elevation of Western Europe as a center of world power,” according to Roberts.

Arkeologerna describes the rare sword as “an evolutionary leap” from the medieval sword , to more modern designs that would eventually dominate the 17th century battlefield. And symbolically, perhaps no better of an artifact could have been discovered to mark the Kalmar War, and Sweden’s first steps into the military revolution, than a broken and defeated Danish sword.

Top image: The Kalmar sword in situ where it was found. The tip is broken. Maybe in connection with battle?  Source: Arkeologerna

By Ashley Cowie

Too many.

A friend’s daughter is a flat-earther. I have another friend who is a U2/ER2 pilot. The pilot gave me pictures that he took from the cockpit at 65,000 feet that clearly shows the curvature of the Earth. The flat-earther immediately went into the “He’s lying.” “The cockpit is distorting the view making it look curved when it’s not.” and “It’s lens distortion.”

It’s like arguing with a log.

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main qimg dd96fbc5fff450394bcf28e9160dec70 lq

Confessions of a Man Who Shot Himself In The Head And Survived

 

What pushed you to do it?

A lot. Losing my girlfriend, the savings account we worked at for years, the business we created. Just exacerbated my anxiety and depression.

My ex really pushed me to get help in the times where I wasn’t struggling, so I became defensive and put it off. I shouldn’t have, because it would have given me the skills to get through the times I was struggling. Therapy is a bitch. I keep learning things about myself that I’m not proud of. Things I could have managed better for years. The more I learn, the more confident I become that I can better myself.

How long did you take to decide that you were ready to end it?

I decided the night before. It took about 12 hours for me to finalize it.

Did you think about your girlfriend before you did it?

She was in the house. I yelled that I loved her. Then I said Im sorry to my mom, and that I loved her (she wasn’t in the house). But yeah. For years, she was/is constantly my first thought.

What did it feel like when you shot yourself?

Nobody prepares you for what getting shot feels like. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t sting. It doesn’t ache. It just burns. Like fire in my head. And blood pouring from my mouth.

I think I was still in shock when I arrived at the hospital, but when they pushed the fentanyl, all that burning went away and I could recognize how much burning pain I was in.

I remember not being able to talk because my tongue hurt.

My pain the first month in the hospital got progressively worse, but high amounts of painkillers will trick you into that.

How did the shot not kill you? How did it “miss”?

I don’t fucking know. It went in by the corner of my left jaw, and came out above my forehead on the right side, taking most of the orbit of my eye with it. I fucked up.

What caliber did you use?

9mm Luger.

Maybe it wasn’t your time?

I wish. I don’t really believe in that mentality. Someone close to me said something along the lines of, “God wasn’t ready for you yet.” And my first thought was, “thousands of years of medicine research and a team of excellent doctors is the reason I’m here, but ok.”

I’ve read stories about how people who jumped off bridges (and survived) immediately regretted doing so and wanted to live more than anything as they were falling. Right after the moment, did you have regrets about doing it with a desire to live or maybe have disappointments that it didn’t work? Or maybe no feelings at all right after?

I woke up with a “what the fuck?” Mentality. I was more confused that I woke up. I didn’t really have feelings about it until a few months later when the drugs wore off.

What was the first thing your mom said to you afterwards?

I’m not sure what my mom said. I woke up post surgery and my whole family was there (they all had to fly in). I was very confused. (Now I know I was in surgery for 10 hours).

What was the road to recovery like for you?

It’s still ongoing. 2 months in the hospital/rehab, lots of follow up appointments, physical therapy, mental/emotional therapy.

Legal battles for custody and household items.

Lots of reintegration with my parents and immediate family, which has been great. It fortunately brought us all closer.

Before I did it, I can’t remember the last time my brother and I spoke on the phone even. It really shook my brother the most. I’m super grateful for his presence in my life now.

Physically, what are the long term consequences to your face and skull from shooting your self?

Physically, I lost my right eye. And I have a plate in my jaw forever. And my forehead is missing a piece of bone they took out during a bifrontal craniotomy. Beyond that, I’m pretty healthy.

Is your face messed up?

Pretty normal for a dude with one eye.

Are you dealing with chronic pain, nerve damage, headaches, etc.?

It’s alright. Headaches suck, mostly because only morphine is enough to dull them. Nerve damage is only in my jaw/tongue/cheek, which is frustrating, but I started vaping because it makes my tongue tingle, and I don’t bite it accidentally anymore.

Is she okay?

Probably not. But she won’t talk to me. I truly hope she is. Of all the negativity between us, I only hope that she’s doing well and that someday, sooner than later, we can sit down and have an honest discussion about it.

What’s something you would want to say to your ex-girlfriend?

This is something I think about all the time. Previously, I was very concerned with myself, and put myself into context when I didn’t need to. That’s something I’d change if I had an hour to sit down with her.

I’d really like her to know that I love her. To this day, nothing has changed. I’d like to have the conversation that I don’t hold anything against her, except for the fact that she knew and didn’t drag me to get help and stand by me, in ways I did for her, and leaving me in the worst of times.

I’d really like the opportunity to listen to her. I don’t know what she has to say, and I don’t need to hear anything. I wasn’t a very effective communicator during our relationship, and I’d like the opportunity to really hear her out, and share those emotions.

Do you still harbor thoughts about suicide?

They’ve mostly gone away. There are times I ponder it, but it’s more the idea of, whereas previously I was fantasizing the roadmap.

Did anything change about your personality or preferences on things as a result of the trauma? Something you would never expect that would change?

Not particularly in personality or preferences. I became a hell of a lot more forgiving and patient, which wasn’t much existent (except with my kids) before.

I think the thing that changed the most was having my emotional brain available. I wasn’t very capable of connecting with my emotions before, I genuinely thought I was broken. I really got down on myself when it came to my ex, because I couldn’t empathize with her when she experienced heightened emotions, and it put a wedge between us, or I did. Now I’m empathizing with commercials, and it’s really bizarre when I become mindful of it, even still.

Do you regret doing it?

I think a lot about regret. I don’t regret shooting myself. I regret the way I proposed to my ex. I regret the way I treated her and other people when they needed me. I regret losing sight of myself because I wanted to be someone else. I regret spending so much time looking for escape instead of looking inward. But I don’t regret shooting myself. It changed my world.

How are things going for you now?

It’s not really going better. I spent years developing a family and life. It’s going about exactly as I predicted before putting a gun to my head. But! On the other side of that, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about love, myself, and bettering myself mentally that I never could have without experiencing tragedy in my previous lifestyle.

And I get to share my story and hopefully help others, which is something I never cared much about.

Ivan the Terribly Crazy

So far, most of the crazy leaders discussed above, lived lives of luxury. Their madness was either the result of an insatiable ego or in Charles’s case, genetic. But Ivan IV, or Ivan the Terrible as he would come to be known, was different. He lost his mind due to the abuse he had suffered as a young man.

Ivan lost both of his parents at a young age. After the loss of his mother at the tender age of seven, Ivan was left defenseless. The elite members of the Russian government tormented and abused him. At an early age, Ivan began torturing small animals as a coping mechanism.

In 1544, at the age of 14, Ivan had had enough. He seized control of his country by having the head of the government fed to a pack of hungry dogs. He was crowned tsar two years later at the age of 16.

At first, it appeared being made ruler cured him of his insanity. He made a public confession and apologized for his various cruel acts. In the beginning, he was a good tsar. For example, he created laws aimed at creating class equality, so that no one would suffer as he had.

But it didn’t last long. He soon began massacring his own people, especially anyone who dared challenge his autocratic tendencies. As he got older, he became more unhinged and the paranoia and rage of his youth reappeared. This culminated in the murder of his eldest son, heir, and favorite, Ivan Ivanovich.

Ivan 1
Ivan 1

12 Guys Reveal The Red Flags They Ignored, For The Sake of Getting Laid

 

1. She legit stole my wallet the first time we hooked up. It had $200 in it

Sex was so damn good I just made sure I hid my wallet and valuables for rounds 2-4

2. That she was crazy. One of the first things she said to me while making out at a party was “they all say I’m crazy, but I’m really not.”

3. She said she had thousands of kids that telepathically communicate with her all at once.

I only talked to her for a few more weeks and slowly faded myself out since I was too afraid to just ghost her. That’s the type of crazy I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of. I didn’t pry too much more into it due to how uncomfortable I got.

4. The last girl I dated told me she liked holding a knife to her ex’s neck while he slept because she fantasized about murder and wanted to see what it felt like.

5. She showed up to my apartment without directions or asking. She was a friend of a friend, and knew the complex itself from talking with her earlier. Never crossed my mind to ask how she figured out my building or apartment until later, and when you wake up to a cute girl knocking on your door at 2 AM, it doesn’t really cross your mind.

We saw each other for a few months, til I figured our what was cute at first was stalkers and became upsetting when I need to sleep. Lesson learned, now I use an alias and safe house when I meet people.

6. 20 year old stripper whose husband was in jail. Husband got out and fire bombed my car in her driveway.

7. She told me she was a manipulative, emotionally unavailable, and controlling person. I still went in. She wasn’t lying lol but I think I maneuvered it well.

8. First day, she fell in love. Day two, she slapped me in the face. Day three, she broke into my house. Day 4, I learned she could squirt across the room. Day 5, she told me she had chlamydia. Day 6, I smashed one last time and didn’t pull out. Day 7, she brought me the pill that treats chlamydia and sucked my soul out right after. Day 8 and beyond, I ignored the rest of her calls and left her on read. I’m surprised my house didn’t get burnt down as it still stands today.

9. Hooked up with a girl near DC who was very into SpongeBob, which is cool I am too, but she was like SUPER into SpongeBob. Throw pillows, posters, stuffed animals everywhere. When we hooked up she made me do the laugh so she’d get off

10. Family gang ties. She would use that as a threat to prevent me from breaking up, cheating, or making her upset in general.

11. I met a girl on a bus and on our first date she told me that her father is always present and she can see him sitting right next to me. I thought she was joking or used a metaphor of him always watching her but she pointed where he was sitting (I should mention that he is alive and well). I proceeded to have a 2 year long relationship with her with lots of weird things happening in it.

English wasnt her first language neither was mine but we communicated in english. Sometimes she would say “we” when talking about what she did on a day and refuse to elaborate. Any kind of argument would end up with her trying to gaslight me about unimportant details (like she would say something and I would quote it back to her and she would say: “no thats what you said.”

She married a 60 year old man when she was 25. Really mysterious person – to this day I cant say how crazy she really is.

12. I get to her place, and it is like 4 things away from a trash heap. Seriously, piles of trash, clothes, dishes, books, etc. EVERYWHERE! Her couch looked like it was rescued from a dump. I have no sense of smell (luckily) and was down baaaaad so I was like whatever.

Then I hear a small critter noise, look over and she’s got a massive cage FULL of mice/rats. Like a ceiling to floor length cage, the kind you’d keep several toucans in. I cannot tell you the level of uncomfortable it is making out on a filthy couch, next to a pile of trash while being able to hear mice. Sex was amazing though, but I just couldn’t deal. She was a PhD student or something and the mice were retired lab rats, even still… Clean your place.

13. That she was 100% bat shit insane.

Met online. She opened with saying “wow what a dirty old white man. Whats with you white men?” She, herself, was white.

I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. She was dead ass serious about having a heated racial argument against her own race. I played along. Turns out, she does that as a “test” to see if people can “handle her”. Red flag, but she was one of the hottest people I’ve ever talked to. We continue on.

She is an artist/engineer. She tells me how big her house is and how she would LOVE to support me. She’d pay all my bills, etc. This seemed odd, as I just met her.

She insisted I come out to Detroit to see her. I was in Ohio. I have known her a day. Well, as my blood wasn’t in the right area of my body, I decided to go. I drove the few hours and showed up at what could only be described as a house used in movies to depict a trailer trash, dirty individual.

Her front yard was covered in an array of random objects. It looked like a bomb went off in the middle of a yard sale for stuff a goodwill wouldn’t accept. There was so much random stuff, I has to step on a chair and over a fence to get from her driveway to the front door. We continued on.

Her house was a mess. It was like a homeless person got a home and moved all their homeless essence into it. It wasn’t dirty, per say, just…so so so much clutter. We went to her room and i laid down. We proceeded to talk for a while, and we wound up in a moment of silence.

I brought up something I’d seen in a documentary recently and she got super serious, super fast. She looked at me and said “okay, and the point of that sentence was…?” I replied that I was just trying to make small talk. “Who fuckin cares about a documentary. Why do I give a shit?”.

I wasn’t sure how to respond , so I went with just explaining the concept of small talk. She interrupted me and said “you are boring as fuck. Why bother opening your mouth?”

I couldn’t understand what was happening. I never had an interaction like that before. She was now nitpicking everything I said and getting angrier by the minute. I tried so much to change the subject to something she’d like but I couldn’t manage.

I still decided to sleep over. The worst part was, no matter how I tried to initiate the sex that she was talking nonstop about having over text when we met, it never happened. We just..went to sleep. I spent the entire night staring at her ceiling instead of leaving because, well, tomorrow exists.

The last straw was when she got up, pretended I didn’t exist, walked to the bathroom and took the loudest, nastiest shit ive ever heard come out of a woman…with the door open. She didn’t wash her hands, or flush.

All that for a set of blue balls and hours and hours of wasted driving.

The CIA has been busy in China these days, eh?

Why would China be going to all these extreme measures to prevent outbreaks, if it did not suspect Bio-weapons? 

-Jeff

This is right after the entirety of the Western media has proudly announced that China is undergoing collapse. They argue that the protests being run by the NED is “bringing down” China.

Didn’t happen.

Won’t happen.

Such more silly wishful thinking from the clown-show known as the United States.

Bougatsa with custard vanilla cream

bougatsa thessaloniki 3
bougatsa thessaloniki 3

Thessaloniki is also known as a crossroads of flavors, a metropolis of tastes, a gastronomic capital. Nowhere else in Greece can one find so many different flavors combined on the same table: the Ottoman palaces heritage and traditions of Greek refugees from Asia Minor or Istanbul, with their own bold, rich cooking identity features, are combined with customs of the Balkan hinterland fashioning the distinct gastronomic profile of the city.

Bougatsa is delicious Greek breakfast, which became known in Thessaloniki when some traditional confectioners from a nearby area moved to the city. This luscious custard pastry became a much loved sweet snack and hundreds of special pastry shops opened where a sweet or salty with cheese, minced meat, or spinach bougatsa is served.

bougatsa thessaloniki 1
bougatsa thessaloniki 1

Here is Bougatsa recipe, as featured in the Gastronomic Guide of Thessaloniki, issued during Thessaloniki Food Festival.

Ingredients

1+ 1/2 liter milk
250 gr caster sugar
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
250 gr fine semolina flour
3 tablespoon unsalted butter
Pinch of salt
1 pack filo pastry
150 gr unsalted butter
80-100 gr icing sugar to dust
2 tablespoon ground cinnamon

Preparation

Combine the sugar and milk in a medium size saucepan. Place over a medium heat and bring to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Stirring constantly, gradually add the semolina and a pinch of salt and cook for

3 minutes until the mixture thickens. Add 1 tablespoon of butter and the vanilla extract and stir to combine. Pour the mixture into a bowl, cover the surface with baking paper and allow cooling completely. Melt the remaining butter and set aside. Unroll the filo pastry and place between two clean tea towels on the benchtop. Brush a 34 x 36 cm cake tin with butter. Brush a sheet of filo with butter and lay it in the tin with the edges overhanging.

Repeat with 6 more sheets changing the angle slightly each time as you lay the filo into the tin (this creates an even edge of filo around the tin). Spoon the semolina custard evenly over the filo. Cover the surface of the tin folding the overhanging sheets buttering one by one. Brush each of the remaining sheets with butter and fan the sheets over the tin to cover the surface.

Brush with butter on the top, place the baking tin in the oven and bake at 180 C for 30 minutes until golden. Allow to cool. Combine the icing sugar and cinnamon and generously dust the surface before cutting into slices.

bougatsa thessaloniki 2 1
bougatsa thessaloniki 2 1

The protests aren’t anti-Xi. Most of them are about the Zero-COVID restrictions, on the surface at least.

A lot of protests in China in recent years have a similar pattern – they start off as spontaneous grassroots movements; they are then infiltrated by external forces, and twisted till it becomes unrecognisable; the native Chinese don’t approve of this mutated freak show, and the protest goes out with a whimper.

It’s actually not that hard for those of us who are born and raised in China to tell if a protest is genuine or not:

main qimg 9b469849b958f7db5916844b65ea531e lq
main qimg 9b469849b958f7db5916844b65ea531e lq

The philosophy of protesting
This may come as a surprise to some, but Chinese people are allowed to protest. 

The thing is that the Chinese culture is very subtle, yet practical, and the way people protest is the same. They like to get straight to the point, and be honest and direct with their tone - people don’t like it when you’re enigmatic and caustic. 

If you want your scumbag boss to pay your outstanding wages, just say you want your boss to pay your outstanding wages. You don’t say “my boss isn’t paying me, fuck the government”. 

With westerners and western-funded protests, the way people protest is very odd and flamboyant from a Chinese perspective. They'd do things like holding specifically-colored flowers, paper, cloth or some shit like that, and chanting western-centric “politically-correct” keywords and phrases that are quite alien in the Chinese context. An example of this being "give me freedom or give me death”. Real Chinese people would simply say “fuck your mother and your pandemic measures, I need to feed my family”. 

The reason westerners protest this way is because it looks good in front of a camera (hence the term “virtue-signalling”). Western media loves eye-catching snapshots and emotion-invoking soundbites - it tells a better story in a shorter time. 

This might work in the western context, but it just instantly feels "off" to Chinese people in a way that's hard to describe. It's like when an alien infiltrator says “greetings, fellow humans”. There’s nothing technically wrong with that phrase, but it’s just not something people on earth actually say.

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main qimg d157261ac436eebeaf16852327092c76 pjlq

The wrong people at the wrong time
Just because we’re Chinese, doesn’t mean we all speak Mandarin. China has a very diverse array of cultures and dialects, and most people prefer speaking their own dialect when they’re in their hometown. Someone needs to tell this to whoever organizes these protests, because they keep making the same mistake of deploying protesters who didn’t speak the local dialect.

This happened last year with the protests in Chengdu, Sichuan after a student committed suicide on campus, and the school tried to cover it up. People were rightfully outraged, but then the protests got weird, as Mandarin-speakers with thick (Hong Kong) Cantonese accents suddenly started to show up at the rallies. That’s when the locals stopped attending them. 

Same thing has been noted with the ongoing protests in Shanghai, which is championed by people who either didn’t speak the Shanghainese dialect, or only spoke broken Mandarin. 

Imagine an anti-US, pro-China rally in Washington DC, where everybody speaks Cajun for some reason. Don’t you think that might raise a few questions?

main qimg 391fbc9cd76ffdcec49073e79c773c93
main qimg 391fbc9cd76ffdcec49073e79c773c93

Money cannot buy loyalty
Some say us Chinese are the Jews of Asia, and not just because of the way we’re persecuted everywhere we go. It’s because we love money more than anything else. 

Depending on where you are sent to protest, you could be paid hundreds of Yuan per day. This is a country where a lot of people make around 3,000 to 4,000 Yuan per month, so the prospects are very attractive. But the thing is word gets around quickly, and soon people will be talking about how someone’s deadbeat son got paid thousands by the US Consulate, just by holding a specific-colored candle, freeing his nipples or some stupid shit to make China look bad. 

And other people will say, “That dishonorable son of a bitch!”

“How dare he not cut me in!”

And when enough people know about it, it’s no longer a secret. That’s why there has never been a lack of evidence for foreign funding in local protests. 

What, you didn’t think all that “foreign aid” to China was for buying everyone sandwiches, did you?
From HERE… Britain gives China £51.7m foreign aid despite pledge to end handouts
Bottom line is, every society has its own issues. Regarding Zero-COVID, even its supporters (such as myself) have a lot to say about the way it was implemented.

But when outsiders try to take advantage of another’s domestic situation, by driving it out of control and creating chaos, they’re really helping no one, no matter how virtuous they might pretend to be.

People looked at Ukraine and shockingly decided they don’t want any of that.

Yes, Patrice, it was the NED:

Provided by <redacted name> within my e-mail feed. A great source who publishes great material on a blog, website and is well-known throughout the blog-a-sphere.

Video HERE

Published November 29, 2022

Video: US CIA & NED are the black hands behind the protest in China universities campuses, US & UK agents disguised as foreign press & many entered China through HK

Second VIDEO here

Today is November 28, 2022. The shocking news from different cities in the mainland last night kept coming from my mobile phone. At first I watched it and thought it was an old video from Hong Kong in 2019.

After communicating with netizens, I learned that it was the latest mainland video. Major cities live. When everyone was still spreading the news that Taiwan Province Tsai Ing-wen resigned as the chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party, it turned out that foreign forces had already deployed in the mainland.

Netizens who love the country and love Hong Kong immediately use the power of the Internet to investigate and track down these black violence promoters.

It turned out that one of them was an extreme anti-China element.

He was originally the leader of the Hong Kong gangsters.

Because of the relaxation of the epidemic prevention policy in Hong Kong, he quietly fled to Guangdong.

Announced that color revolutions were launched in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Urumqi, Zhengzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan and other places last night, inciting mainland citizens to gather and protest against the mainland’s epidemic prevention policies.

He also said that the Weibo account certified by the mainland publicly threatened and slandered him.

On the other hand, netizens in Shanghai have found out the WeChat accounts, names, and occupations of important contacts at the protest rally.

They are all reporters from foreign media organizations, including the New York Times and CNN. Many of them, as journalists, took advantage of the relaxed anti-epidemic policies between Hong Kong and Shenzhen to enter various provinces and cities in the mainland.

Mainland netizens have sent relevant information to the National Security Agency.

Based on my recent experience in Hong Kong, these reporters are very young.

They were sent by these media organizations to different think tanks and mainland organizations to inquire about news. At first, most of them used the interview method to extract information and pretend to report for you, but after many months, not a single report has been published, and you are required to provide more information on the structure and deployment of the mainland’s official agencies.

All discerning patriots know that these reporters are collecting information on behalf of foreign forces.

In addition, if you invite these journalists to participate in some patriotic activities, most of them will keep their distance and refuse, saying that they are media organizations, so they must be neutral, and it is inconvenient to participate in related activities.

Today, as long as everyone opens the news of these foreign media organizations, the headlines will all say that many places in China have erupted in protests due to epidemic prevention policies or social accidents.

Please everyone, when distributing news on the Internet, you must first objectively analyze whether the news is true, or whether someone is deliberately acting to challenge and incite public dissatisfaction with the epidemic prevention policy.

Secondly, please be more careful about the initiative and enthusiasm of journalists from foreign media organizations. Their superficial ignorance and stupidity are just to get your news and use your network to obtain more information.

Now is the troubled time, all patriots must be mentally prepared, another struggle has quietly begun. Please unite and send the information of the person in charge of the protest rally to the National Security Agency and other law enforcement agencies, so that they can have first-hand information and stabilize the overall situation of the country.

No time to translate.

I listened to this while having my dinner. Really good.

1) Both Shanghai and Beijing white paper protests very close to US embassies.

2) large number of people arrived in those protest cities from Hong Kong and Taiwan,

3) money was given to protesters , Beijing received the highest amount rmb1000, Shanghai rmb500, and other part of the cities with much lower amount.

Etc etc.

The only china model we should be following globally is the “uprising” Model there…

Strange meteorite that crashed into Earth contains two never-before-seen minerals

2022 11 30 12 35
2022 11 30 12 35

TWO minerals that have never before been observed on Earth have been uncovered inside a meteorite.

Dubbed El Alie, the 3,000lb space rock was found in Somalia in 2020 and is the ninth-largest meteorite ever discovered.

Scientists unearthed the two new minerals inside a single 2.5-ounce sheet of rock taken from the meteorite.

The two minerals have been named elaliite after the meteor, and elkinstantonite after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the managing director of the Arizona State University Interplanetary Initiative.

Researchers identified El Ali as an Iron IAB complex meteorite – or a type of space rock made of meteoric iron with specks of silicates.

And it was while looking at the meteorite sample that the scientists noticed the odd-looking minerals.

“In the course of doing the classification — describing this new rock for science — I came across some inclusions, some potential different, interesting minerals inside the meteorite,” Chris Herd a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta, told Global News.

“What we’ve now discovered is there are at least two new minerals in this meteorite from Somalia that have never been discovered before.”

“Most people in my profession will go through their career and not even find one new mineral. Here… we came across two,” Herd added.

The researchers uncovered the minerals by looking at the rock’s chemistry and the ratio of elements that are in there.

They then compared the minerals with versions that had been previously synthesized in a lab.

“Whenever you find a new mineral, it means that the actual geological conditions, the chemistry of the rock, was different than what’s been found before,” Herd said in a separate statement.

The two minerals were sent to the University of Arizona for official classification, and a third new mineral may be under consideration.

Should the researchers obtain more samples from the meteorite, there’s a possibility that even more minerals might be found, Herd said.

For now, the researchers plan to use the meteorite to help them better understand the formation of asteroids.

“That’s my expertise — how you tease out the geologic processes and the geologic history of the asteroid this rock was once part of,” Herd said.

“I never thought I’d be involved in describing brand new minerals just by virtue of working on a meteorite.”

Elkins-Tanton is also acting as the principal investigator of Nasa’s upcoming Psyche mission, which will investigate space rocks in the asteroid belt.

In China, there is a formula for ending protests:

  1. Local official/s are named, blamed and fired for not acting properly. They are fired by the central government. This is to show that the government has heard the protests and has acted.
  2. The central government then appoints new local officials to announce new policies and clean up the mess. If they are successful, they will make their careers through their actions by demonstrating they know how to handle a crisis.
  3. The security services review the video from the demonstrations, identify the leading troublemakers and arrest them in their homes. All done without announcements.

End of crisis.

It is because the ones who benefit from the absurd housing prices would sooner kill themselves before they allowed the prices to drop.

You think I am being hyperbolic, but I mean this quite literally.

Back when Tung Chee-hwa was still the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, he proposed what is known as the “85,000 Plan”, pledging to build 85,000 houses every year. This would have freed up lots of undeveloped public land, and ensured that more people would have had a proper home.

Sounds pretty decent, right?

“Fuck your mother”, said Hong Kong’s middle class.

It wasn’t just big property developers who were against this policy. The middle class (i.e. private landlords) also saw this as a direct threat to their livelihoods, since they have worked all their lives to be able to hold one or more residential apartments hostage for rent. As housing prices plummeted, so did their hopes of raking in crazy amounts of money just from sitting on their arses. I remember hearing about people committing suicide by burning charcoal or jumping off heights every day on the radio when I was a kid.

Not being able to exploit others financially so as to maintain a fragile bourgeois identity for ourselves, is literally worse than death to us. Let that sink in.

Tung Chee-hwa was endlessly ridiculed and cursed, and his name still carries a lot of baggage even to this day. So forget about opening up more land for property development, because as long as some people depend on the housing prices to be as ridiculously high as possible, things will never change.

And it’s not just undeveloped land. Property developers and the middle class are always pro-conservation and against land reclamation (i.e. creating new land from the sea), not because they give a shit about the dolphins or anything, but to preserve their own social status.

The so-called “Lion Rock Spirit

” is a joke and nothing more. If there is one trait above all that defines what Hong Kong is about, it is greed. The kind of raw greed that would make even Mr. Monopoly blush.

Italian Tomato Sausage Ragu With Penne

“I use Chianti wine for this recipe but any good dry red wine will do, this can be made using a mixture of ground beef and pork but Italian sausage meat is so much better — if possible prepare this a day ahead and refrigerate to allow flavors to blend just rewarm on top of the stove.”

Oh, and do NOT use cheap wine.

2022 11 30 15 56
2022 11 30 15 56

Ingredients

Directions

  • In a large skillet heat oil over medium heat.
  • Add in the sausage meat, garlic, oregano and pepper flakes; sauté until brown, breaking up the meat with a fork (about 7 minutes).
  • Add in finely chopped carrots, onion and celery; sauté for about 10 minutes.
  • Mix in chopped tomatoes; reduce heat, cover and simmer about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
  • Add in 1 cup broth and wine; simmer uncovered until liquid is slightly reduced (about 20 minutes).
  • Add in the fresh basil; cover and simmer until the veggies are very tender, stirring occasionally.
  • Continue to simmer for about 45-50 minutes, adding in more broth by about 1/4 cup if the liquid evaporates to quickly, and cook until the Ragu thickens to desired consistency.
  • Season with salt and pepper to taste.
  • Cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until just firm-tender; drain but reserve about 1/2 cup cooking water.
  • Return the pasta to the pot; add in the Ragu; mix to combine.
  • Add in about 1/2 – 3/4 cup Parmesan cheese and 2-3 tablespoons olive oil; mix to combine.
  • If the mixture seems too dry then add in some of the reserved cooking water from the pasta.
  • Season with more salt and pepper.
  • Divide on plates and top with more cheese.

2022 11 30 15 57
2022 11 30 15 57

Can westerners make up your mind?

You have been spreading lies that Chinese cannot protest for decades! And you guys repeat a million times China is draconian and authoritarian and now that your narrative is totally debunked you are concerned about the people’s protest?

So make up your god damn mind, do you want them to have freedom to protest or do you want to use the smallest protest to build a mountain out of a mole hill!

Your lying media needs to get a new instruction how to demonise China now that this angle of lack of freedom is gone! What do they do to hurt China’s reputation now? Kinda version upgrade on China demonisation instruction from state department!

Confessions of a Quadriplegic Man

What happened?

I was ran over as a kid. A truck backed over me when I was about four.

Did the driver face any repercussions?

He had a paralyzed son for the next 21 years, so I guess that counts. Nobody deserved repercussions though. It was just a freak thing.

 

Can you survive on your own?

I cannot survive on my own. I must be under watch 24/7.

Do you breathe on your own?

I cannot breathe on my own. I require a vent.

Do your arms work?

My arms don’t work.

What was the mental change like at that age? Meaning, how did you mentally and emotionally react to the event and dealing with the paralysis going forward?

I was a very angry child, lashing out at everyone in an attempt to regain control in my life. I didn’t cope well, but I could have always been worse. My teenage years is when it REALLY took its toll.

Since you’re paralyzed from the neck down how do you do simple tasks like type and stuff like that?

I have a stylus in my mouth and my phone is mounted.

How does peeing and pooping work? Can you still control the muscles or do you have a catheter and some other manual mechanism for number 2s?

I use a catheter, yes. As for number 2’s, I have to use adult diapers and make a schedule.

Who switches the diapers for you?

Nurse or family member.

Would you be able to feel sickness or infections in your body? For example a stomach ache?

Oh yeah. I can get sick to my stomach, have chest pains, stuff like that. Can’t feel kidney stones though, oddly enough

What happen if someone hit you in the legs?

If somebody hits my legs, I would feel the vibration through my body, but no sensation. No pain either!

How do you fill your time?

I play video games, write, use the internet. I have a fair amount of assistive tech that allows me to live a normal life, as long as it’s digital.

How does playing videogames work?

I have a device called a quadstick. I’ve used it since I was 7, and the device only continues to improve. The streamer and e-sports gamer RockyNoHands uses an identical device.

What’s your education level? Was school hard for you?

I have a Bachelor’s degree. School was not hard at all. I excel with structure and am remarkably intelligent, if my grades are an indicator of intelligence. Loved school. I was in the top 10 of my graduating class.

Are you able to work/have a career? If not, what is your financial situation like?

US Disability compensation is shit. You get enough a month to sit comfortably on the poverty line.

If I ever want to be financially independent, a job is required. Unfortunately, finding work is very hard when you have few skills, no experience, and can’t relocate.

Is it hard dating?

INCREDIBLY hard. I live in a remote community, so there’s not many social opportunities. Plus, you know, the disability

Ever had sex and if so do you still feel the orgasm?

I have never had sex. The orgasm part I’m unsure on. I’ve experienced intense arousal, but I don’t know if it went anywhere.

Do you think you’d be able to have sex (in other words, do you think you could get an erection and ejaculate)?

Yes, I do believe that I could have sex.

Please explain how.

When you lose feeling in your body like I have, where you can feel becomes far more sensitive. You get new spots that turn you on.

There’s also other methods of sex besides penetration. Even if you’re set on penetration, there’re methods to force an erection to be maintained.

I admit the orgasm is a mystery since I’ve not experienced one, but I don’t see it being impossible.

It’s a physiological reaction after all. I just wouldn’t expect the stamina before climax to be very impressive since you can’t hold it back.

When you meet new people, do you prefer when they acknowledge your disability and try to be careful with your needs or do you prefer to be seen as any other guy and not having people reminding you of your condition?

This is a tricky one. I want to be treated like any other guy. I’m a human first and a quadriplegic second. I’d rather be treated normally, but I don’t want people to be afraid to ever bring up my disability. It’s a part of my core identity and should be respected, but not focused on.

What’s something you wish people would change about the way they interact with you?

Not treat my needs like a burden. If I could move, I would get my own water or scratch myself if I itch. Don’t make me feel like my needs are lesser and make me wait for assistance. I can be patient, but only to an extent. I still want respected

Do you get sick and tired of being told what an inspiration you are and how brave you are?

I’m not an inspiration. At least not for my disability. I’m just a person tackling life’s problems in a different way.

If all your spoons are dirty and you have to eat cereal with a fork, it’s harder, but not impossible. That’s not inspiration worthy. Same with my life.

I’m in a chair, yeah, which makes me work harder than most, but I’m not achieving much. I’m not a famous writer or a world champion gamer or some rich playboy with girls all over him. I’m just me.

I’ll never see myself as inspirational, but if my story can positively affect even one person, well that’s an accomplishment that I can be proud of.

What’s something you’ve noticed others take for granted? In other words, what’s something most people don’t think about being hard or impossible to do when paralyzed?

Weight loss. Even getting off the couch or walking down the hall burns more calories than I do in a week. People don’t realize how carefully I have to watch my nutrition.

Do you ever have suicidal thoughts because of your situation?

I have my moments like that, but I’m good at identifying problems and tackling them instead of letting them fester.

You seem to have a very positive outlook on life. Was it always like that or have you had ups and downs over the years?

Oh no. I struggle with depression pretty bad, though not as bad as I used to. It used to dominate my life. Now, it doesn’t control my brain. It’s just a roommate.

When did that change happen?

For me, it was therapy. I’d been on a downward spiral for years and therapy saved my life and redeemed me. Now I tackle my mental health way differently.

Do you have anything you would say to somebody who is depressed?

My advice for a depressed person is to identify what’s wrong and fix it.

If someone is a negative influence on your life, cut them out. If you’re out of shape, do one workout a week. Problems don’t correct themselves.

You have to tackle them, no matter how intimidating they are. And if they’re big goals, set tiny ones. Recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. If you’re lonely, the goal isn’t to make friends.

The goal is to find a group online to participate in. Break your big goal into baby steps that allow you to feel accomplished.

If there was an experimental surgery that could heal your spine , would you apply for it?

Already working on it!

Do you have any hope of some kind of recovery some day?

Yes, I do have hope for a recovery. Not a lot of hope, but some.

E-mail train from China on the protests.

Very interesting.

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2.

3.

4.

Huawei HarmonyOS has more users than the entire US population!

Recently, Huawei held a series of press conferences, revealing too much information. To sum up, the number of users of the Hongmeng system has exceeded 570 million, and the localization rate of Huawei mate50 has exceeded 70%, showing that Huawei is still firmly promoting de-Americanization.

This is undoubtedly a huge blow to the US technology industry.

Recently, Huawei held the 2022 Huawei Developer Conference. The data released at the conference pointed out that the number of Huawei devices equipped with HarmonyOS has reached 320 million, and the shipment of Harmony Zhilian products has reached 250 million, both of which have achieved double-speed growth. Together, the two push HarmonyOS to 570 million users, further cementing its position as the world’s third-largest mobile operating system.

Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business, also announced that HarmonyOS will further enter the automotive industry, and cooperate with Celis, BAIC, and Changan to launch more automotive products equipped with HarmonyOS. This will provide new development impetus for HarmonyOS, and the number of users of HarmonyOS is expected to be further accelerated.

In terms of hardware, Huawei’s recently released pocket S and mate50 mobile phones are all using Chinese-made components as much as possible. The folding screen used by pocket S is made in China. Others such as radio frequency chips, power management chips, memory chips, etc. have all adopted Chinese domestic chips, and the proportion of domestic components in mobile phone components has reached 70%.

This shows that Huawei still insists on promoting the development of the domestic mobile phone industry chain. Industry insiders believe that once Huawei’s Kirin chips are mass-produced, Huawei’s mobile phones will be expected to achieve 100% localization, turning purely domestic mobile phones into reality, which will also be the first purely Chinese-made mobile phones.

It can be seen that Huawei is actively promoting localization of both software and hardware, and is striving to get rid of American technology, which highlights Huawei’s resilience. What happened to Huawei has prompted it to strengthen its determination to get rid of American chips. Although its revenue has declined in recent years, it still invests more than 100 billion R&D funds every year. Under its insistence, the research and development of chip technology is still continuing, and the chip stacking technology and superconducting quantum technology have all shown its technological breakthroughs in difficult situations.

Govt. Database Shows 10,000% Increase In Cancer Reports Due To Covid mRNA Vaccines

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A researcher who queried the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) discovered a 10,661.4% increase in cancer reports as a result of experimental Covid-19 gene-base vaccines as compared with all FDA-approved vaccines over the last 30 years.

Brian Shilhavy, who is the editor of Health Impact News, traced his steps in the search providing links to documentation of his various findings.

Having first queried the cases of ‘the most common cancers [that] had been reported following Covid-19 vaccines,’ he found “837 cases of cancer, including 88 deaths, 66 permanent disabilities, and 104 life threatening events.

He emphasized that even these numbers were not exhaustive, and the VAERS database could not handle the larger search of ‘ALL cancers listed in VAERS’ under this category of Covid inoculations. ‘Using the exact same search terms for cancer,’ he wrote, ‘I then searched ALL FDA-approved vaccines for the previous 30 years and found only 140 cases of cancer reported.’

‘That result is for 360 months (30 years), whereas the 837 cases following the experimental Covid-19 vaccines were reported in just 20 months, since the roll out of the Covid-19 shots beginning in December of 2020,’ Shilhavy wrote. ‘That is an increase of 10,661.4%!’ he concluded.

Shilhavy, whose organization is located in Texas, also made note of the significant number of the cancer cases in the database that were of young people, from age 12 up through many young adults in their 20s. Last October, a Swedish lab study found that the spike protein associated with the Covid-19 illness, and its experimental vaccines, enters the nucleus of cells and significantly interferes with DNA damage-repair functions, compromising a person’s adaptive immunity and perhaps encouraging the formation of cancer cells.

In March 2021, board-certified pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole reported that he was seeing a massive ‘uptick’ in various autoimmune diseases and cancers in patients who have been Covid-vaccinated. ‘Since January 1, in the laboratory, I’m seeing a 20 times increase of endometrial cancers over what I see on an annual basis,’ he said.

In regard to overall adaptive immunity, Cole describes, ‘post-vaccine, what we are seeing is a drop in your killer T-cells’ that ‘keep all other viruses in check,’ leaving the patient susceptible to a variety of illnesses.

In January, data leaks given by three ‘decorated high-ranking soldiers who are doctors and public health officials,’ in sworn declarations under penalty of perjury, showed enormous spikes in dozens of diseases following Covid vaccine uptake in the U.S. military.

These included:

  • Miscarriages — 279% increase,
  • Hypertension (high blood pressure): 2,281% increase,
  • Diseases of the nervous system: 1,048% increase, and
  • Cancer: 296% increase.

VAERS data released July 29 from the CDC reported 1,357,937 total adverse events in the United States after injections of experimental Covid-19 gene-based vaccines, including 29,790 deaths and 247,686 serious injuries between December 14, 2020, and July 22, 2022.

These also include 55,719 permanent disabilities, 50,739 cases of myocarditis/pericarditis, and 14,374 reported cases of shingles. As such figures are based on voluntary reports, it is important to note that they are very likely just ‘the tip of the iceberg’ in actual figures.

A 2010 Harvard-executed study commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) revealed that ‘fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events’ are reported to VAERS, and vaccine manufacturer Connaught Laboratories calculated at least a ‘fifty-fold underreporting of adverse events’ in a confidential study.”

How China is changing the world..

This is from Godfree Robert’s newsletter and I strongly suggest you all subscribe to it.

So China’s IC-chip industry is in tatters with the great Biden restrictions, eh?

China news that makes you think.

Cheap as Chinese Chips?

China is making a billion ICs daily..

Godfree Roberts
Before his election in 2012, planners warned President Xi of China’s vulnerability to restrictions on integrated circuit imports. Xi launched an internal crash program designed to put the country a generation ahead of the USA in ICs by 2030 then, in 2015, opened a $50 billion financial floodgate.The first fruits of the program will appear on the market next year, ten years after it began. Their quality and freshness suggest that China will beat its 2030 IC goal as easily as it will beat its 2030 Paris Accords goal.WorkforceChinese researchers utterly dominate global math, engineering and computer science, in both quality and quantity of their published papers, and will graduate 1.4 million engineers this year.America will graduate 197,000 engineers, 20% of whom will be Chinese, and five of whom will be super geniuses with IQ 160+. The kind of people who play viola in a symphony orchestra and invent new fields of engineering mathematics.China will graduate 40,000 of such smartypants – a numerical advantage it sustains across its entire workforce (who cost employers as much as Americans cost theirs). Together, as a coordinated teams of hundreds of thousands of young people, they planted, nurtured, and developed the products that are about to change our lives and their country’s future.First Fruits

  • Early this month, China lifted its chip manufacturing to one billion a day, up 44% on 2021. China leads the world with 8 out of 19 new fabs under construction.
  • At the high end, China’s own chips power its three exascale computers, with the fourth – of a promised ten – is under construction. The US produced one such machine, a year after China.
  • Shenzhen’s RoboSense launched the Holy Grail of self-driving sensors: the first automotive, flash, solid-state LiDAR chip. With a simple bill of materials and no moving parts, it excels in detection, cost, safety and reliability. Built in China with Chinese IP and protected by a thicket of patents.
  • Cambricon builds the fastest AI chip.
  • Biren’s BR100 GPU is 3x faster than NVIDIA’s A100
  • China dominates the exploding EV chip market.
  • Tsinghua University demonstrated the next generation of ICs, which it calls “Sidewall transistors”. Much smaller than current chips,  using one-atom-thick graphene sheet for gates, easily manufactured with current technology.
  • Recently, the CEO of Dutch etching company, ASML said, “A Chinese customer told us, “We make mature power ICs. We need your help building a 300-millimeter (wafer diameter) fab”. Chip guru Dylan Patel says 300 nm wafers have twice the yield of 200 nm wafers, so “ASML will teach China everything and they will destroy power semiconductors’ profitability for every US and European fab.”

ConclusionAfter banning Huawei and ZTE, the FCC banned CCTV leaders Hikvision and Dahua, and two-way radio maker Hytera.The USA is falling further behind China each year. US bans, intended to inhibit China’s development, inhibit America’s. ZTE, for example, provides better 5G coverage across Tibet than San Francisco’s. Americans pay tariff-driven higher prices for imports and, increasingly lack access to affordable, leading edge Chinese technologies.¹1National semiconductor tax subsidies are $150 billion and local subsidies larger with a 5:1 private-to-public investment ratio. The CHIPS Act ratio, which will reach 4.2:1, will only boost US semiconductor manufacturing value from 10.5% of to 14% by 2026, when China will exceed 20%. By 2030 the US will fabricate 10% of the world’s semiconductors and China will make 30%.‘Assuming a normal distribution, there are 10,000 Americans performing at +4SD, IQ 140+, and a similar number in Europe, the top few hundred high school seniors each year in each. Extrapolate NE Asian numbers to 1.4 billion Chinese produces more than 300,000 at this level, which is pretty overwhelming’. Asian-White IQ variance from PISA results.China has submitted the most accepted research papers at a prestigious international academic semiconductor conference, bumping the US to number two. Of 629 papers submitted, 59 from China were selected for presentation, 42 from the US, and 32 from South Korea.Guangdong IP Court hears more patent cases annually than the entire United States court system.Graphene is lightweight, two hundred times stronger than steel, with thermal and electrical conductivity and heat dissipation better than copper, for efficient batteries and more. China’s Graphene Copper Innovation Consortium is with bringing graphene to chip manufacturing, offering ten times the performance of silicon-based chips at one-tenth the cost.

The world today is surreal. It sucks, but let’s enjoy the ride.

However, we also cannot deny that the protests in some areas, such as Shanghai, have deviated from their purpose, showing very classic and traditional color revolution routines. In Hong Kong, in Ukraine, wherever there is turmoil and disaster, similar patterns of behavior are constantly being played out. NGOs, CIA, and the media used social incidents as an entry point, hired gunmen or instigators at the protest site to quickly intensify the situation, and even resorted to direct murder to promote confrontation.

For example, during the protests on Middle Urumqi road, traditional Chinese characters, which are basically not used in mainland China, were written on the banners hanging; those who first started chanting political slogans had obvious Hong Kong or Taiwanese accents. It is almost impossible to obtain explosives or guns in mainland China, so by elevating a social issue to a political issue is a common tactic used by American conspiracy agencies to incite color revolutions. As a native of Sichuan, I have witnessed similar tactics in the suicide incident of student in Chengdu 49 Middle School. Protesters from southern China, armed with symbols (flowers, like carnations), chanted slogans in unison. Their behavior constitutes all the necessary elements in a political upheaval.

The simultaneous protests in many places in China are essentially a farce of young and fearless students being manipulated and instigated by malicious foreign political forces. It took advantage of the public's dissatisfaction with the current epidemic prevention policy, induced student groups who did not have a deep understanding of national security to take to the streets to protest, and then tried to detonate social incidents into political incidents through extreme means at the scene. Another attempt at a color revolution.

However, there is nothing to worry about.

During major policy adjustments, instability or errors in implementation are quite normal. If you believed US propaganda that this was the standard for China's imminent collapse, then I'm sorry - as we've apologized to you many times - that but was your pipe dream.

Well, apparently not only is China collapsing, but it has already collapsed! Who would have thunk it?

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2022 11 29 09 34

Well, that’s what you might think if the ONLY news you read is from the United States.

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2022 11 29 14 51

I ask you all, does this look familiar to you? Does this maybe jog your memories, eh?

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2022 11 29 14 57

Yeah.

It’s called “projection”. You place what you know about yourself upon your enemies. Then you hype up the “weaknesses” of your enemies relentlessly.

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2022 11 29 14 59

Hey! It’s entering “Loony Town”. Now. Here’s Hal Turner…

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2022 11 29 15 03

LOL.

If China actually fired on protestors it would be all over everywhere; CNN, BBC and all the rest.

Keep in mind that Chinese police do not carry guns. Don’t you know. Those that do, well, they are lethal marksmen. If six shots were fired, then six people would be dead. Where are they?

I am very skeptical…

Let’s take and place bets.

I’ll bet you that Xi Peng is still running China, and Putin is still running Russia this time next Christmas. Any takers?

together
together

I’m going to do something new and unique in this post. I have a full movie. But it is in eight (x8)  small 15 minute portions. This is from you-tube, and it lends itself nicely to this experiment of mine for today.

I hope you enjoy it.

It’s a weird and wacky comedy from the 1980’s titled “Water”. It’s got a lot of Monty Python based jokes and sketches, major actors, and takes place on a tiny, backwater island in the Caribbean sea. It’s a fit for this strange period of time that we find ourselves in.

First up…

This is a forgotten comedy classic.

Those of you from the Caribbean islands would really appreciate this wonderful movie. It shows the strange world of a small island living.

This entire movie is presented in this post in 15 minute blocks. Here’s the first one.

https://youtu.be/Gmu80-AXrRs

A Christmas movie suggestion

2022 11 29 16fwe 20
2022 11 29 16fwe 20

CANCELLED! Nuclear Arms Treaty Talks Between U.S. and Russia

Meetings of the bilateral advisory commissions on the Strategic Offensive Arms Treaty between Russia and the US, scheduled for November 29 trough December 6 in Cairo, have been cancelled.

No word yet on who cancelled the talks, or why.

Just formal acknowledgement the talks will not take place.

Another Christmas movie suggestion

2022 11 29 16 20
2022 11 29 16 20

Gambas Pil-Pil — Chili Shrimp (Spain)

This recipe was found in the 2002 cookbook, Mediterranean Street Food.

2022 11 29 15 24
2022 11 29 15 24

Ingredients

Directions

  • In a large skillet, combine oil, garlic & crushed red pepper.
  • When oil is hot & starts to sizzle around the garlic, add the shrimp & fry for 1 minute on each side.
  • Remove pan from the heat & squeeze lemon juice over shrimp & sprinkle with salt, to taste.
  • Serve very hot!

China extends tariff exemptions on some US goods in ‘reciprocal’ move

Published: Nov 28, 2022 07:39 PM Updated: Nov 28, 2022 07:35 PM
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China will extend tariff exemptions for six months on some US goods subject to countermeasures against US Section 301 measures, according to an official announcement on Monday, in what analysts call a standard and reciprocal move after the US also announced similar exemptions.

Days after the US announced a tariff exemption extension on some Chinese goods, the Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council announced an extension of tariff exemptions on the ninth batch of US goods from December 1, 2022 to May 31, 2023, read a statement on the website of the Ministry of Finance (MOF).

According to a product list published by the MOF, the tariff exemptions are being extended on timber, agricultural products, lubricating oil, machine tools, forging machines, laser products and healthcare products.

On Thursday, the office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) announced tariff exemption extensions for an additional three months for 81 Chinese healthcare products, including blood pressure monitors and X-ray tables, in order to continue to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a statement by the USTR.

China and the US are waiving tariffs on some products that are urgently needed from the other side, Hu Qimu, deputy secretary general of the digital-real economies integration Forum 50, told the Global Times on Monday.

“The trade attitude and policies of the US toward China are unstable and change often. I believe that as long as the US offers to stop imposing additional tariffs on China, China will in return stop imposing additional tariffs on the US. But the US always goes back and forth,” said Hu.

What China shows is its reciprocal countermeasures against the US, Hu noted. “If you sanction me, I will definitely sanction you back. If the US relaxes its policies, China will do the same.”

Since September 2019, China has extended several exemptions for US goods subject to retaliatory tariffs, following extensions by the US of tariff exemptions.

The US-initiated additional tariffs on more than $350 billion worth of Chinese goods went into effect in July 2018 as part of former US president Donald Trump’s tariff war against China.

But China-US trade increased by 8.3 percent on a yearly basis in 2020 and expanded by 28.7 percent in 2021. In the first 10 months of 2022, trade between China and the US rose 5.1 percent year-on-year to $639.83 billion.

Meanwhile, US companies have not stopped investment in China even after the US launched a trade war. Cargill announced increased investment in China. ExxonMobil began construction of a major petrochemical project in Huizhou, South China’s Guangdong Province, which is the first major petrochemical project wholly owned by a US company in China.

The trade figures and investment decisions show that economic and trade ties between the world’s two biggest economies are impossible to halt, analysts said, noting that the next step is to find a specific path to solve problems based on the understanding that decoupling cannot be achieved.

China-US economic and trade relations are mutually beneficial in nature. Starting a trade war or a technology war, building walls and barriers, or pushing for decoupling and severing supply chains run counter to the principles of the market economy and undermine international trade rules, Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said last week.

The USTR also said in the Thursday statement that it “may continue to consider further extensions and/or additional modifications as appropriate.”

.

43a9a3b6 a804 4f2f 9ede 059aa993ff89
43a9a3b6 a804 4f2f 9ede 059aa993ff89

https://youtu.be/oy6OcJ9bZn0

Another Christmas movie suggestion

2022 11 29 1fqw6 19
2022 11 29 1fqw6 19

Look at this protest leader…

main qimg 07c1c91593b7be181c53f0f8caefb3bf lq
main qimg 07c1c91593b7be181c53f0f8caefb3bf lq

It says “ Pay attention to the conductor/commander when in the protest area.”

We know that the protest leaders are not Chinese.

Another Christmas movie suggestion

2022 11 29 16 1w9
2022 11 29 16 1w9

Water is a 1985 British comedy film directed by Dick Clement and starring Michael Caine.

It was scripted by Clement and Ian La Frenais.

The plot spoofs elements of the comedies Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1958) and Passport to Pimlico (1948) and the then-recent invasions of the Falkland Islands and Grenada.

Caine plays Baxter Thwaites, a Governor who has ‘gone native’ (similar to his role in The Honorary Consul), and Billy Connolly as local biracial activist Delgado, supported by the last performance of Leonard Rossiter, as Sir Malcolm Leveridge, and one of the last performances of Fulton Mackay.

The Singing Rebel’s Band consists of Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Ray Cooper, Jon Lord, Mike Moran, Chris Stainton and Ringo Starr, with backing singers Jenny Bogle and Anastasia Rodriguez. It spoofs The Concert for Bangladesh organised by Harrison in 1971.

The story is set in the fictional Caribbean island and British colony of Cascara. Widely ignored by the British Government, media, and general public, local Governor Baxter Thwaites is having an easy life in his small and peaceful colony. 

That peace is disturbed when an abandoned oil rig starts delivering water - at the standard of the finest table water brands (and laxative companies, as it contains a substance that makes you "shit like clockwork"). 

Different parties, including Downing Street, the Cascara Liberation Front, the White House, French bottled water producers, and Cuban guerrillas take interest in the future of the island and threaten to destroy the cosy way of life enjoyed by the island's inhabitants.

https://youtu.be/Fev6U7XOROY

Another Christmas movie suggestion

2022 11 29 16 1r9
2022 11 29 16 1r9

How organized is the NED in the protests inside of China?

Check out this…

main qimg 4c95cf3cc18de34bf554b5aa4627c324 pjlq
main qimg 4c95cf3cc18de34bf554b5aa4627c324 pjlq

If you mean the “protests” in various cities recently hyped up by the western media, I can tell you that in Beijing, people participating in the protests can get $140, in Chengdu it is $70, in Wuhan it is $40, and in Guangzhou it is poor $27.

We have laughed at Guangzhou for this all day.

Look, the "Voice of Democracy and Freedom" of the US has a price, and that price is $27.

In Beijing, people changed the slogan of the parade to “We need to do nucleic acid testing” and “We need to scan health codes”. In Chengdu, the accent of outsiders shouted “we want freedom”, while the locals laughed “you want your motherf**ker freedom”. In Shanghai, the leaflet even wrote traditional characters, and the writer could not write one of these characters.

Do you know what the people who really marched in Xinjiang did? They said they did not oppose the government, but only to express their condolences. At the end of the parade, they sang the Chinese national anthem, and three times of it.

Can you imagine that happening in the US or UK or any other country?

So if you’re daydreaming about China collapsing, you can stop now.

EXCLUSIVE: Official Documents prove Anthony Fauci & Bill Gates are responsible for developing the COVID Virus in a Biolab

The US government funded Peter Daszak’s ECO Health Alliance to the tune of $61,491,183 to make new coronaviruses that are infectious to humans.

It also directly or indirectly funds the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the tune of $7.4 million dollars to make new coronaviruses that are infectious to humans.

Meanwhile, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded Ralph Baric to the tune of $46,958,414 to make new coronaviruses that are infectious to humans.

This totals more than $114 million in the period from 2000 to 2020 to make new coronaviruses which are infectious to humans.

There is no question that SARS-CoV 2 (causing Covid-19) is man-made. Here’s the evidence…

From HERE.

Yes.

I could cite some dry statistics and display some graphs but plenty of other people have done that. I am going to give the perspective of a 52-year-old who has seen a great deal of change, some of it for the better, most of it for the worse. I am going to share what has led to my misanthropic nihilism and negativity concerning the current “state of affairs.”

  1. When I was growing up I literally never heard of mass shootings. This does not mean they did not happen. It means they were very rare. Now, they are so commonplace as to be discussed with barely a nod. “Ten people dead; sixteen injured. Pass the potatoes, please.” We must get to the root of this epedemic, and there are multiple causes. A solution is not easy. The non-glorification of violence would be a good start. Unfortunately, Americans are not only desensitized to the horror of violence and death; we are entertained by it. We have cultivated a culture of violence appreciation. I am further alarmed that so many people completely dismiss this phenomena because it hasn’t happened to them or someone they know. We have dismissed and accepted this with a shrug.
  2. Republicans: Beginning in the middle part of the 20th century, GOP conservatives went so far to the right that they no longer resembled their former somewhat progressive selves.They became increasingly less liberal and more racist. Dixiecrats saw this and were incensed. Going forward, more and more conservatives and racists joined the Republican Party. Ideologies flipped. Republicans became the party who swung to a racist extreme, enshrined guns to a bizarre extent, and demanded their religion be legislated into law. In addition, their every effort has been to take from the poor and give to the wealthy. This became abundantly clear during the absolutely ridiculous “trickle-down-economics” era of Ronald Reagan. The rich can never be rich enough. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social security are all in danger. The gulf between the poor and the rich widens every day. The time grows nearer when the 95% will not be able to put roofs over their heads, even as the very rich, who should be paying more, lounge on their sun-drenched pool decks contemplating their wealth. I do not advocate “taking their money away,” as so many people suggest. I advocate a fairer playing field where the poor and the wealthy pay a more equal percentage in taxes rather than allowing the wealthy unfair advantages that have them paying less. And, big news flash here; we need to tax everyone fairly across the board and bring down our overall spending to decrease the deficit, rather than cut social security, and Medicare. Why are the poor the first people we think of when we consider cutting costs? Even the legendary investing guru Warren Buffet once said that his secretary’s tax rate is higher than his own, and Buffet is a multi-billionaire. We are an oligarchy, folks. Republicans have now become the number 1 problem, as they have enabled and backed Donald Trump and begun destroying voting rights in the wake of his lost bid for reelection. Republicans have become a much bigger threat than Democrats ever since they refused to allow Dems to seat Supreme Court justices and proceeded to stack that and other federal courts with super-majorities. The Supreme Court has now become nothing more than a partisan tool. Many progressive rulings will be overturned in time. This is a terrible development.
  3. Democrats: ( I am just left of center myself) have swung so far out into fantasy land that we have to be careful of everything we say and do. Literally everything is offensive. We have taken equal treatment and turned it into some kind of weird Frankenstein’s monster. Everyone deserves equal rights but political correctness has run amok. I am on the liberal side, but we need to tone down the anger. SJWs care about the welfare of all but are often so angry they can’t even be engaged in a polite debate without wanting to call in a firing squad. Wokeness, cancel culture, and censoring free speech needs to stop. Fight bigotry and hate where it exists, but don’t see it in every corner, jumping to identifying it as such until you know for sure what it is. Treat everyone equally. Use common sense and learn to identify some extreme left ideas from fringe groups as the bizarre notions they are. Up to 100 different genders? Seriously? I am also very unhappy with my party’s new tendency to try to destroy individuals by digging up comments they made 35 years ago. All of us have said something risque’ or controversial at some point. Doing this is plain ridiculous. Even with all this said, at least the Democrats mostly shed their past racism (even as it was embraced by many conservatives) and have been the leaders in advancing minority rights for decades. They have made mistakes, but I fault them far less in current times than Republicans.
  4. Politicians are bought and paid for. They should be forced to wear the names of their contributors on their suits, like those ads that are printed on the sides of racing cars. I saw this suggestion on Facebook and it is so true. How can politicians properly serve the people when they are beholden to the wealthy benefactors and corporations who donate money to them? Capitalism isn’t necessarily bad but it must be overseen and regulated. Unchecked, it produces tremendous wealth inequality and political corruption, as noted above. We need strict limits on political donations and a restructuring of how they are made, perhaps with a government supplied stipend distributed equally.
  5. Religion still rules the masses, much more so than other highly developed countries of the world, allowing bigotry and anti-science to flourish on into the 21st century. Politicians (especially conservatives) pander to this because it is one way to ensure continued support. Give your voters a couple of the things they want most and they will overlook the crooked bigger things (like tax cuts favoring the super rich.) I am not against religion: I am against having it in politics. Separation of church and state has always been a nifty idea in America but has never been a real thing. That is sad.
  6. Housing costs are out of control. One must mortgage away many decades of one’s life to buy a house that is too large and too expensive. It’s ridiculous. Small, modest homes could be purchased for much less money, but that would meet with the dissatisfaction of city ordinances and neighbors. It’s a big, fancy house in many cases or nothing. The alternative is sky-high rent on an apartment. Gone are the days when renting was cheaper than owning. Now, even modest apartments are so expensive they leave little money left for food. No one seems to advocate rent control anymore because greed is master. A livable wage is not high on the agenda either. Meanwhile, more and more people are pushed out onto the streets and homelessness increases. We find it easy to put the blame on the victims. Yes, many homeless have made mistakes but not all of the onus is on them. We have a system that is, by its very nature, generating more and more of this problem.
  7. A college education has gone completely into the stratosphere with its exorbitant cost. It’s unbelievable. A text book can cost several hundred dollars and full-time tuition for a single semester well into the thousands. Small non-traditional for-profit “colleges” didn’t help the situation any either. Though some are at least somewhat legit, many are not, and nearly all are far too expensive, thereby producing many graduates with overpriced degrees that are not likely to be valued at what they cost. And what about the large percentage of dropouts who aren’t likely to benefit at all from what they have spent? In the 1980’s college was still affordable. I signed promisory notes and managed to pay the 4 or 5 hundred dollar costs by the time the term ended. I could not afford to go to college today. It would not be possible. People are exiting universities (not necessarily graduating) many thousands of dollars in debt. Even upon graduating, most students have depressingly low chances of landing jobs in their chosen fields. Competition is greater than ever. Young people are depressed. They are sarcastic and prematurely cynical; and they have every right to be. This generation is yet another that promises to perform more poorly, save less money, have less opportunity, and be more dysfunctional than their parents and grandparents; yet, the bulk of our politicians do not appear to care. A country that wants to offer hope to all people, grant a good standard of living, and preserve this standard for the future, understands the value of turning out well-educated citizens. Yet, we make it ridiculously expensive to become educated. Why are we doing this? We must take greed out of higher education. Should profit be the top priority? * I would also add that we need to stop housing students in luxury apartments while they attend college. Living in an efficiency or a dormitory is good for you. It builds character to live simply and humbly while going through school.*
  8. Infrastructure has begun to suffer. Our city roads aren’t built to withstand the burgeoning population. Roads most everywhere are in terrible shape, and bridges are a nightmare, old and deteriorated as they are, and in need of expensive care. I am amazed, after having traveled a fair amount, that many of our states have some of the worst roads in the developed world. The power grid as well is old and crumbling in many areas. This is embarrassing and we can do better. At least in 2022 we have a president willing to put a trillion or two into tackling infrastructure. Sounds expensive, but it’s grossly overdue. * as of April 2022, money has finally been allocated for this. Perhaps that will be one step in the right direction.*
  9. My newest edit in this piece is to mention the problem we have with illegal drugs in this country (and I do not refer to pot, which I consider less dangerous than alcohol). The illegal use of powerful, lab-created drugs has reached wide-scale pervasiveness both in cities and rural communities. It is a huge problem that ruins lives, costs a great deal of money, creates crime, violence, and too often results in death. Elderly folk lose their life savings (and sometimes their lives) to some charismatic stranger who cons them for drug money. Many addicted people will stop at nothing to get their fix. Drugs become these people’s lives. Only the lucky few benefit from some sort of intervention/rehab, while the majority do not. On top of this, it has now become harder for people who desperately need pain medications to be prescribed them because of the violence and crime that people are willing to commit in order to obtain, sell, and use them. One of our mistakes (in less violent cases) has been to over-incarcerate. With the exception of violent and murderous offenders, this hasn’t helped much, if any. Drug-users also enter the work force and cause constant problems. I have had the displeasure of working with them. In some industries this is dangerous. One thing we need to do is stop romanticizing drugs and to stop treating those of us who recognize the problem as being uncool nerds. Many of the other items on this list, such as cost of living and the political divide, cause depression and hopelessness, and these things make drugs more appealing. Reduce the pain caused by many of our other problems and you do, to some extent, reduce the desire to take drugs. We must examine the pharmaceutical industry as well and look into its marketing practices to determine the extent to which it has contributed to the problem.
  10. U.S. companies relocate to other corners of the world in order to pay their employees very little and government encourages this. Good employment opportunities domestically are shrinking and I am not talking about the many low pay service jobs. Many people who would have formerly held these higher paying skilled jobs are forced into the only careers available; retail, restaurants, and other service jobs where the pay does not meet one’s needs. While unions were desperately needed at one time, their demands grew out of control, demanding ever-higher pay and benefits even in sectors that were no longer profitable. They are partly to blame. We also need officer salary caps, especially on publicly traded companies. More profits need to be handed down to shareholders and lower tier employees rather than having officers make 100 million or more salaries. To the fat-cats of corporate America, this is a big grown-up game of Monopoly where they horde as much wealth as possible while everyone else suffers. I am not against capitalism, but (like any system) it has to be monitored and governed; otherwise, it becomes capitalism out of control, and that is what we have now. The operative word is GREED.
  11. Our health care is still unaffordable. The Health Care Act is a start but is flawed, largely due to the concessions that had to be made to pass it. Greed is absolutely rampant in this industry in which a simple pill can cost hundreds of dollars. The very sick must worry about medical bankruptcy while trying to battle their illnesses. Some of the most broadly advertised physician-prescribed medications are the most expensive ones still under patent. When was the last time you saw a commercial for an older unpatented inexpensive medication? Any minor move made on a patient’s behalf in the hospital is ridiculous in its cost. Greed is master above all else. Now, it is quite likely that Republicans will remove protections for people with pre-existing conditions as well as other features of the health care act. Additionally, a little-known consequence of the health care act is that it forces people who might otherwise retire early to remain in the work force into their late 60s in order to receive health care. Medicare and Medicaid will not kick in yet (in most cases) if you retire at 58 or 60. This is one item that tells me that the government is worried about the lack of enough workers in the next few decades.
  12. By the 2030s or early 2040s things will be gravely worse, with an ageing population and fewer people paying into social security than drawing from it. Thanks to government’s redistribution to the wealthy, the problem is exacerbated. We will initially lose a chunk of those payments and will eventually lose this and other programs completely. This initiates our entry into third-world status.
  13. I think what disturbs me most is the complete unwillingness of our two major parties to work together for the good of the nation. And yes, (due to individuals like the hateful obstructionist Mitch McConnell), I fault the conservative party more for this than the other, although fault lies on both sides. A few decades ago, we had some caring politicians who went to the table with honest intentions of compromising and reaching a solution, even when they strongly disagreed. Even with this disagreement, we often respected eachother. Now, we have a complete unwillingness to cooperate, even going so far as to refuse to allow the opposing party to put judges on the supreme court. This hateful divide hurts everyone. The parties have opposing views, but they should not be enemies. Their goal should be to unite in promoting as good a life as possible for all citizens. Additionally, we have tactics and tricks like gerrymandering and voter-suppression as well as the grossly outdated electoral college that suppress the will of the actual majority of people.

Even with our greater technology, I-Phones, computers, medical advances, and other luxuries, these problems lessen us every day, and not enough people care to do a damn thing about it. Obsessive greed is one of the things we most need to tackle, from big corporations to medicine and higher education. Money is important but we have allowed that obsession to get in the way of the higher interest of caring for all our citizens. Making all their needs more affordable and obtainable is a good start. I am thankful I do not have kids. I would grieve incessantly now to think of the world I have brought them into. I only hope that younger people are observing this disaster and that they will take the reigns and make some needed changes. It may be too late.

* To the few folks (including a lady who was so rude I deleted her comment) who think we should love the country as it is or “get out,” I say this. Such reactions are naive and juvenile. I love my country and I wish to see it become better. Civilizations do not progress through complacency. They advance when folks sound alarms and encourage change. That is why women and minority groups now have rights they would never have enjoyed had they just “loved it or got out.”

  • In response to people both in this thread and in their own answers who keep pointing out that the U.S. is a world leader, has a great military might, has abundant freedom and influence, etc.. this is my reply. I am largely talking about internal conflict here. I am discussing problems that are dividing us from within, and this includes the aforementioned two-party system of hatred and divide. There is more to being a success than having a great military or a high GNP or world influence. I am talking about the hate that has nearly taken us over, and of the increasing unaffordability of the cost of living. We are disintegrating. We still lead the world in many ways, perhaps, but even the rest of the world sees the problems we are experiencing that are collapsing us from within and are appalled. We lose the world’s respect more every day. Some of the horrendous politicians and presidential administrations of recent years (including Trump in particular) have greatly contributed to the problem. What one administration accomplishes, the other tears down with the next election. We can’t even be trusted to remain in a peace agreement or environmental agreement anymore. The two-party hate is palpable.
  • *Years later, I now look upon the blatant attempt by one narcissist and his legion of worshipers AND legislative enablers to overthrow our government to install a backward dictatorship and I am more pessimistic than before. Our representative democracy is in dire trouble and the unpleasant marriage of government and religion threatens to roll back decades of progress. What happened to us?

Another Christmas movie suggestion

2022 11 29 16 19
2022 11 29 16 19

https://youtu.be/_mOZUp4A6oI

Another Christmas movie suggestion

2022 11 29 16 1eqavs8
2022 11 29 16 1eqavs8

2022 11 29 14 14
2022 11 29 14 14

https://youtu.be/0Mx2pM0JhTE

Another Christmas movie suggestion

2022 11 29 16 1s8
2022 11 29 16 1s8

Manaquis Bil-Za’tar — Thyme Bread (Lebanon — Middle East)

This recipe combo was found more or less intact in the 2002 cookbook, Mediterranean Street Food. Preparation time does not include time needed for dough to rise.

2022 11 29 15 27
2022 11 29 15 27

Ingredients

Directions

  • FOR THE DOUGH: In a small container stir together yeast & 1/4 cup warm water, then set asde for 5-10 minutes.
  • In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour & salt, then make a well in the center & pour in the oil.
  • Work in the oil with your fingertips until completely absorbed, then add the yeast water & knead with your hands for several minutes.
  • Gradually add another 1/4 cup warm water & knead until dough is smooth & elastic, then form into a ball, cover with a damp cloth & leave in a warm place for 1 hour, or until doubled in size.

 

  • FOR THE TOPPING: In a skillet over medium heat, combine thyme, sumac & sesame seeds, stirring continuously until the aroma rises & the mixture is slightly toasted. Salt to taste & set aside to cool slightly.
  • In a small bowl, mix together all the topping ingredients.
  • Divide the dough into 4 equal portions & roll each into a ball.
  • Dip the first ball of dough in flour on all sides, then shake off the excess before rolling it into a thin disk about 1/8-inch thick.
  • Make a few dimples across the flat dough, pressing hard with the tips of your fingers (done to stop oil in the topping from running out during cooking), then spread a quarter of the topping over the disk of dough.
  • Place a nonstick skillet over medium heat & cook the dough in the skillet, topping side up, for 3-5 minutes or until bottom is crisp & lightly golden.
  • Repeat the procedure to make the rest of the breads.
  • Serve hot or warm, either plain or with some yogurt or . . .

Another Christmas movie suggestion

2022 11 29 16 18
2022 11 29 16 18

https://youtu.be/5mdSsQvSRxQ

Shawarma Djaj — Chicken Shawarma (Lebanon — Middle East)

This recipe comes from the 2002 cookbook, Mediterranean Street Food. Preparation time does not include the 3 hours needed for the chicken breasts to marinate.

2022 11 29 15 31
2022 11 29 15 31

Ingredients

Directions

  • In a mixing bowl, combine chicken breasts with 1/2 cup of onion, lemon juice, olive oil & spices, then add the thyme before adding the salt to taste.
  • Stir well & then let marinate, covered, in the refrigerator for about 3 hours, stirring occasionally.
  • Preheat oven to 350 degrees F, then place chicken breasts in a roasting pan & bake for 25-30 minutes or until done.
  • Remove from the oven & shred the chicken into slivers.
  • Open oval pitas at the seam to create a large pocket, then spread a tablespoon of garlic sauce on the bottom half before filling each pits with equal amounts of sandwich ingredients (i.e. chicken, tomato, onion, gherkins, mint & parsley).
  • Wrap the bottom of the ‘sandwiches’ with a napkin & serve immediately.

I think you are a fake!

I think you think we in QUORA are fools.

I think you are a white Caucasian Anglo Saxon who thinks your system is the best in the world.

I think you don’t know after stealing from the rest of the world for a century yet today you are highly indebted yet thinks others must be like you!

I think you just like to tell everyone that China is authoritarian to make your broken system good.

I think you don’t know how to think.

Good try but 97% Chinese thinks their system is far superior.

They think you don’t know how to think.

100 Million Dead Birds Are Just The Beginning, Because This Pestilence Is Far From Over…

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Did you know that an extremely vicious virus that is currently sweeping across the globe has already killed more than 100 million birds?  If you haven’t heard about this yet, don’t feel bad, because most people in the general population don’t know about this either.  Like so many of the other nightmares that we are facing right now, the mainstream media continues to downplay the bird flu crisis and continues to insist that authorities have everything under control.  But of course the truth is that they don’t have this outbreak under control.  Flocks are being steadily wiped out all over the planet, and prices for turkey, chicken and eggs just keep going higher and higher.  If the bird flu spreads even faster in 2023 than it did in 2022, it won’t be too long before we have some pretty serious shortages on our hands.

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, it was being reported that the official death toll in the U.S. has now reached 50.54 million.  That makes this “the worst animal-health disaster in U.S. history”

More than 50.54 million U.S. birds have died in what is the worst Avian flu outbreak in U.S. history, according to data from the Department of Agriculture, Reuters reports. It also marks the worst animal-health disaster in U.S. history.

But it is perfectly “normal” for tens of millions of our turkeys and chickens to be wiped out, right?

Unfortunately, this pestilence is not just limited to the United States.  In fact, the UK and the European Union “are also suffering their worst avian-flu crises”

Losses of poultry flocks sent prices for eggs and turkey meat to record highs, worsening economic pain for consumers facing red-hot inflation and making Thursday’s Thanksgiving celebrations more expensive in the United States. Europe and Britain are also suffering their worst avian-flu crises, and some British supermarkets rationed customers’ egg purchases after the outbreak disrupted supplies.

We have never seen anything like this before.

According to CNBC, the number of dead birds in the EU alone has reached “nearly 50 million”…

Governments across Europe have culled bird populations to limit the spread of avian flu. Almost six million birds have been killed in the Netherlands since October 2021, while Spain, Bulgaria, Denmark and France have also been badly affected.

Nearly 50 million birds have been killed in Europe this year as countries try to contain the disease, according to the EU’s Food Safety Agency.

Actually, that figure is a bit old, but I was not able to find an updated one.

But if you take that number and add 50 million from the United States, that gives us a grand total of approximately 100 million dead birds, and that doesn’t even account for the remainder of the globe.

For example, nearly 3 million birds have already been wiped out in Japan, and at this point the bird flu is beginning to spread like wildfire in that country…

Cases of the highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu, are spreading at an unusual pace in Japan, with 18 outbreaks confirmed this season through Saturday at poultry farms in 12 of the country’s 47 prefectures.

But that number is expected to rise further, in line with global trends.

This has truly become a worldwide crisis.

Past outbreaks have either greatly subsided or completely gone away during the hot summer months, but that did not happen this year.

In 2022, the virus “continued to fester” during the warmer months, and now authorities are concerned that things could get much worse during the cold months that are in front of us

“The virus has mostly impacted turkey and egg operations, sending prices to all-time highs and contributing to soaring food inflation. While the spread slowed during the warmer months, it continued to fester and now risks further spread as cooling temperatures prompt more birds to migrate,” Bloomberg said.

Of course this comes at a really bad time, because if you follow my work on a regular basis you already know that global food production is being hit hard from countless directions right now.

The UN has already been warning us that 2023 will be a year of famine in many areas of the planet, and so it would be very helpful if the bird flu were to disappear.

Unfortunately, that is not likely to happen any time soon.

And actually we have been extremely fortunate so far.

If the bird flu were to mutate into a form that humans can catch and spread easily, we would rapidly be facing a global health scare of epic proportions.

Up to this point, it has been rare for humans to catch the bird flu, but when it does happen the death rate can be as high as 60 percent

But when the bird flu does infect people, it can be quite severe, with a mortality rate estimated to be at approximately 60 percent, according to the CDC.

Can you imagine how frightened people would be if such a virus started spreading among humans in our major population centers?

The panic would be far beyond anything that we have experienced over the past few years.

So this is a story that we will want to keep a close eye on.

For years, I warned my readers that we were moving into an era of great pestilences.

Sadly, the times that I warned about have now arrived.

Of course what we have been through so far is just the beginning.

The pestilences that we are currently dealing with will continue to spread, and more are coming.

Millions upon millions of people have died up to this point, and tens of millions more will eventually die.

A lot of you have been waiting for life to “return to normal”, but that isn’t going to happen.

Global events have begun to spiral out of control, and things are only going to get more intense as we roll into 2023.

Another Christmas movie suggestion

2022 11 29 16 17
2022 11 29 16 17

Merry Christmas

christmas tree ornament8
christmas tree ornament8

PLA Southern Theater Command troops warn away trespassing US warship near Nansha Islands

Published: Nov 29, 2022 11:09 AM
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The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Southern Theater Command on Tuesday morning discovered that the vessel USS Chancellorsville had trespassed into waters around the Nansha Islands in the South China Sea without China’s authorization, and followed and warned away the guided-missile cruiser.

USS Chancellorsville
USS Chancellorsville

The US military’s actions are a serious violation of China’s sovereignty and security, and irrefutable proof of its hegemony in navigation and militarization of the South China Sea, Tian Junli, a spokesperson from the PLA Southern Theater Command, said on Tuesday, noting that such behavior fully reveals that the US is the provocateur against peace in the region.

China holds indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea islands and their nearby waters, and the PLA Southern Theater Command maintains a high state of readiness at all times to resolutely defend the country’s sovereignty, security and peace and stability in the South China Sea region.

In July, the destroyer USS Benfold sailed near the Nansha Islands in the South China Sea only a few days after it was driven away by the PLA from Chinese territorial waters off the Xisha Islands.

Consecutive provocations by the US expose not only its navigational hegemony, but also its anxiety in the face of the growing capabilities of the PLA, experts said.

https://youtu.be/oVBZR__BlPE

Merry Christmas…

christmas tree ornament12
christmas tree ornament12

It Is Beginning: 41 Percent Of All Small Business Owners Could Not Pay Rent In November

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Many experts are now warning that we could see the housing market and the commercial real estate market simultaneously crash in 2023.  If that were to happen, it would put an extreme amount of stress on our financial system.  The only way we will avoid such a fate is if the Federal Reserve starts reducing interest rates.  Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen.  In fact, officials at the Federal Reserve keep telling us that interest rates are going to keep going up.  This is literally a suicidal course of action, because higher rates are going to absolutely crush the economy.

If you doubt this, just consider what is already happening.

According to a new Alignable survey that was just released, 41 percent of all small business owners in the United States could not pay rent in November…

Due to high inflation, reduced consumer spending, higher rents and other economic pressures, U.S.-based small business owners’ rent problems just escalated to new heights nationally this month, based on Alignable’s November Rent Poll of 6,326 small business owners taken from 11/19/22 to 11/22/22.

Unfortunately, 41% of U.S.-based small business owners report that they could not pay their rent in full and on time in November, a new record for 2022. Making matters worse, this occurred during a quarter when more money should be coming in and rent delinquency rates should be decreasing. But so far this quarter, the opposite has been true.

In September, that same survey found that 30 percent of all small business owners could not pay rent.

Many were deeply alarmed by that figure, and then it jumped up to 37 percent in October.

Now we are at 41 percent, and if there is any time when small business owners should be able to pay rent it is during the holiday season.

When commercial real estate tenants cannot pay rent, it inevitably has a domino effect.

It appears that we will soon have millions of empty commercial spaces all over the nation, and many owners will soon be unable to make loan payments because sufficient rent money is not coming in.

If the Federal Reserve insists on raising rates even higher, I anticipate that we will eventually be facing a commercial real estate crash of unprecedented size and scope.

Meanwhile, the implosion of the housing market continues to pick up speed.

Existing home sales have now declined for nine months in a row, and the median price of a home in the U.S. has now fallen by about 7 percent.

Sadly, many experts are now warning that things will only get worse in the months ahead.  Here is one example

“In one line: Collapse in prices is coming,” wrote Kieran Clancy, senior U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

I told my readers that this would happen if the Federal Reserve aggressively hiked interest rates.

Of course home prices could soon fall a lot more.  In fact, Pantheon is projecting that they could ultimately fall by a total of 20 percent from the peak…

Pantheon estimates that existing home prices will keep falling, ultimately dropping by about 20% from their June peak of around $414,000.

If you are planning to sell a home, I would try to do it as quickly as possible before prices go way down.

Meanwhile, another troubled cryptocurrency firm has just filed for bankruptcy

Distressed crypto firm BlockFi has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey following the implosion of putative acquirer FTX.

So why is BlockFi in so much trouble?

Well, the truth is that there are a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest is the fact that they loaned 275 million dollars to FTX that will never be repaid…

In the filing, the company listed an outstanding $275 million loan to FTX US, the American arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-bankrupt empire.

I warned my readers that FTX would not be the last domino to fall.

And now another one has tumbled over.

Needless to say, there will be many more, because FTX “has more than 1 million creditors”

In a matter of days, FTX went from a $32 billion valuation to bankruptcy as liquidity dried up, customers demanded withdrawals and rival exchange Binance ripped up its nonbinding agreement to buy the company. Gross negligence has since been exposed. Ray added that a “substantial portion” of assets held with FTX may be “missing or stolen.”

FTX has more than 1 million creditors, according to updated bankruptcy filings, hinting at the huge impact of its collapse on crypto traders and other counterparties with ties to Bankman-Fried’s empire.

FTX was just one giant Ponzi scheme, but of course the entire system is just one giant Ponzi scheme.

The entire thing is eventually coming down, and a lot of prominent voices are trying to sound the alarm about this.

For instance, author Robert Kiyosaki tweeted the following just a few days ago

Many of you know I do not invest in equities, bonds, ETS or MFs. Please DO NOT listen to what I’m going to say next: “I would get out of paper assets.” The world economy is not a “Market.” I believe economy is the biggest bubble in world history.

Of course he is quite correct.

We have been living in the largest bubble in all of human history.

And once it finally shatters into billions of pieces nobody is going to be able to put it back together again.

So get ready for a massive adjustment in your standard of living.

With very hard times looming, the Washington Post is encouraging their readers to reduce food costs by eating bugs…

The Washington Post advised Americans Sunday that instead of a traditional season dinner, which now is unaffordable for a quarter of families, they should instead look to eating bugs.

Yes really.

In an article headlined Salted ants. Ground crickets. Why you should try edible insects, the Post stated “Consumers can already find foods like salted ants on Amazon and cricket powder protein bars in Swiss grocery stores.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t plan on ever eating bugs.

No matter how bad things get, I just couldn’t eat ants or crickets or beetles.

Unfortunately, most people are completely and utterly unprepared for the times that we will soon be facing.

A tremendous amount of economic chaos is on the way.

The Federal Reserve could help matters a great deal if they would just stop raising interest rates.

But that isn’t going to happen, and so it appears that 2023 will be a year of severe economic pain all over the nation.

Merry Christmas Early

I hope you all have your movies sorted out.

christmas tree ornament11
christmas tree ornament11

US Quietly Announces New Ukraine Command With 3-Star General

https://youtu.be/DoA8ViXedb4

China Keeps Aggressively Surrounding Itself With US Bases: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Caitlin Johnstone

Nov 29

Listen to a reading of this article:

Facts:

  • There are Chinese people with real grievances against their government.
  • The US empire’s propaganda machine will spin current protests in China to advance imperial agendas.
  • Western intelligence agencies will become more and more involved in these protests the longer they go on.

It still amazes me how many people who fancy themselves anti-establishment critical thinkers will spend all day mindlessly regurgitating mainstream media lines about China.

I cannot emphasize enough how little respect I have for anyone who parrots US empire narratives about China and how completely dismissive I am of all their attempts to explain to me that it’s actually right and good to do this.

Literally all of our major problems are because of the people who rule over us; if you’re buying into the narrative that who we should really be mad at right now is a government on the other side of the planet with no power over us, you’re a fucking loser. You’re a bootlicking empire simp. You’re worthless, bleating human livestock.

Why does China keep aggressively surrounding itself with US military bases?

US Military Set to Return to Subic Bay, Philippines to Counter China
The US closed its military base in Subic Bay 30 years ago
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave here

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) November 25, 2022

Everyone knows the US has invaded countries completely unprovoked very recently and will definitely do so again, but we still have to pretend that Putin is the worst thing since Hitler.

It’s disturbing how many people I encounter who claim Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is worse than America’s invasion of Iraq because Ukraine is a “democracy”. How fucked up do you have to be inside to believe human lives are worth less because of their nation’s political system?

Leaving aside the fact that a nation which bans political parties, shuts down opposition media, imprisons opposition leaders, and is vastly more accountable to Washington than to its own people is in no way a “democracy”, that’s just a profoundly disturbed way of looking at life. A mother holding the remains of a child whose body has been ripped apart by military explosives does not care whether her country is considered a “democracy” by the western governments who are invested in that country’s military outcomes.

 

Rightists correctly believe that liberals subscribe to an artificially constructed worldview designed by the powerful in the service of the powerful, but incorrectly believe that they themselves do not.

Common debates:

  • Which status quo party is best
  • Which side of the culture war is correct
  • How the western empire should act
  • What capitalism should look like

Uncommon debates:

  • Should status quo politics exist
  • Should the western empire exist
  • Should capitalism exist
  • Should class war replace culture war

And it is of course entirely by design that the former are common and the latter are uncommon. Keeping everyone debating how establishment power structures should exist, rather than if they should, ensures the survival of those power structures.

It’s actually a really big problem that the most visible “left” in the US is completely worthless on war and militarism. When Americans who are critical of those things look right and see people like Rand Paul and Tucker Carlson doing something then look left and see AOC and Bernie doing nothing, which side do you think they’ll choose?

And of course this is because the so-called progressive Democrats are not “left” in any meaningful way, but your average mainstream American doesn’t know that, and perception is reality. The US is the nation where antiwar sentiment is most important and the most urgently needed, and it’s been buried on the left. Americans are trained that Clintonites are “center-left” and AOC/Bernie are “far left”, and anyone further to the left than them on foreign policy is demonized by these progressives as a Russian agent. This creates the very understandable impression that the entire left is pro-war.

When you’ve got Ilhan Omar and AOC calling people who protest US proxy warfare at their rallies Russian operatives and antiwar leftists like Jill Stein branded as Kremlin agents, the message mainstream Americans come away with is that antiwar sentiment is only welcome on the right.

Again, I get this isn’t true and there’s lots of antiwar sentiment on the true left in the US, but nobody sees that left. It’s denied any media presence or political validity; mainstream Americans don’t know the difference between an anti-imperialist socialist and a Berner. This causes antiwar Americans to drift to the right; I’ve watched it happen in real time with some of my US followers. I do my best to make the case for the left, but I’m just one voice amid a surging deluge of messaging they’re getting that the real opposition is on the right.

Naming your war machinery after the Indigenous tribes your government genocided is the modern-day equivalent of wearing the skulls of your enemies on your war horse.

A lot of acceptance of the status quo worldview boils down to a failure of imagination. People literally can’t imagine the possibility that reality is as different as it is from what they’ve been told by their teachers, parents, pundits and politicians. It’s actually unfathomable to them, and that is because it’s so different. The world we’re trained to see by establishment perception managers is as different from the real world as any fictional world is.

The incremental normalization of police murderbots is probably nothing to worry about. HERE

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 26, 2022

The claim that capitalism is the best system for generating profits is basically correct; it’s hard to beat greed and starvation as a carrot and stick to get the gears of industry whirring. The issue here is that merely generating profits won’t solve most of the world’s problems, and in fact many of our problems come from the fact that capitalism is too effective at turning the gears of industry. Our biosphere is dying largely because capitalism values making lots of things but not un-making things; we’re choking our ecosystem to death because it’s profitable.

Capitalism has no real answers for problems like ecocide, inequality, exploitation and caring for the needful. Yes “let the markets decide” will generate lots of profits for those set up to harvest them, but profit-seeking cannot address those very serious problems. The “invisible hand of the market” gets treated as an actual deity that actually exists, with all the wisdom necessary to solve the world’s problems, but in reality the pursuit of money lacks any wisdom. It can’t solve our major problems, it can only make more stuff and generate more profit.

Find me a capitalist business plan for leaving a forest untouched. Find me a capitalist business plan for keeping someone free of illness, for ensuring that someone with nothing gets what they need, for giving resources to a struggling parent. You can’t. Capitalism can’t do this. These are the most important things in the world, and no possible iteration of capitalism has any solutions for any of them whatsoever, apart from “Well hopefully rich people will feel very charitable and fix those problems.” And how is that solution working out? It’s a joke.

The “Maybe the very rich will feel charitable and fix our problems for us” solution assumes that the very same people who are wired to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top of the ladder will suddenly start caring deeply about everyone they stepped on to get there. Capitalism elevates sociopaths, because profit-seeking competition-based systems reward those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead. That’s why we are ruled by sociopaths, and it’s why looking to “philanthropy” as a solution to our problems is a ridiculous joke.

When capitalism proponents tell socialists and communists “You don’t understand economics,” what they really mean is “You don’t understand that capitalism is the best system for generating profits.” But socialists and communists do understand this; it’s just that generating profits, in and of itself, is not sufficient.

If lack of wealth is your major problem, then capitalism can be a tool to address it; that’s what China is temporarily doing to keep up economically with the western forces who wish to enslave it. But such measures won’t solve ecocide, inequality, exploitation, and caring for the needful. For that other measures are needed.

If you want to make more of something (money, material goods), then capitalism can be a good way to do that. But if you need to make less of something (pollution, inequality, exploitation, sickness, homelessness, etc) it’s worthless, and other systems must be looked to.

You can say “But communist regimes are authoritarian blah blah” all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that capitalism has zero answers for the most important problems facing our species. This still needs to be addressed, and moaning about Mao and Stalin isn’t an answer. Don’t like the iterations of socialism we’ve seen so far? Okay. Then find another answer, and remember we’ve already established that capitalism is not an answer; it cannot address the problems we’ve discussed here. So we need to find an actual answer that does actually work.

Dismantling capitalism, if we ever achieve it, will be the most difficult thing that humanity has ever accomplished. As hard as everyone becoming a buddha, and essentially not much different. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is existentially necessary for us to do so.

We’ll either move from competition-based systems to collaboration-based ones, eliminating all the obstacles necessary for us to do so, or we will go extinct. We are at our adapt-or-die juncture as a species.

Merry Christmas.

christmas tree ornament13
christmas tree ornament13

So why is anyone in the United States even thinking of global warfare with Russia, China and Iran simultaneously?

Yes. Why?

It all begins with this Bloomberg article…

2022 11 27 16 56
2022 11 27 16 56

The idea that it should or can shows absolutely and positively the insanity that grips the United States today.

Check out today’s Drudge Report…

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2022 11 28 10 10

Yes, there is a massive push to destabilize China. This is part of that effort. Protests, and massive “news” coverage in the West. It’s a well established NED technique.

But keep reality in mind…

2022 11 28 10 08
2022 11 28 10 08

The protest did not take place in Urumqi, Xinjiang, but thousands of miles away in Urumqi Road, Shanghai.

The crowd at the Shanghai protest came from the “Nanjing Media College” in Shanghai, a private, third-tier university where the students are largely clueless and the teachers are particularly pro-American. No matter what time of year it is, students and young people are still the best people to agitate. The location of the protest was Urumqi Middle Road, less than 500 meters from the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai.

main qimg 7a9042c404dfcc07876acdef12d33138 pjlq
main qimg 7a9042c404dfcc07876acdef12d33138 pjlq

The linking of the “Urumqi fire” to “Dynamic zero-COVID Policy” has anti-China forces operating behind it.

It is definitely a conspiracy.

Shanghai Urumqi Road Protest…

main qimg 4f10b5b70d2f680e406c8fe767246eff pjlq
main qimg 4f10b5b70d2f680e406c8fe767246eff pjlq

Confessions of “protesting” students on site. Saying that if anyone gets caught, they must run to their nations’ embassy. (Yes, That’s right. They are not Chinese citizens.) It also says that the Chinese officials will not be nice, and to be careful about posting on Wechat.

main qimg 25149fb62e5b3949237e2510059738c8 pjlq
main qimg 25149fb62e5b3949237e2510059738c8 pjlq

The text of the Shanghai Urumqi Road protest is in Traditional Chinese. Not in mainland Chinese.

The only people that use Traditional Chinese characters are those living in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

main qimg 85b6bfd771126f466f12d4ec836876f9 pjlq
main qimg 85b6bfd771126f466f12d4ec836876f9 pjlq

Chengdu, a group of people with Hong Kong dialect shouted “Long Live Freedom, Long Live Democracy.”

Then a man with a local Sichuan accent shouted.” I want your fucking freedom!”

That’s when “the jig was up”. Everyone was aware that these “students” were not locals, and were not mainland Chinese. They couldn’t even understand the local dialect where they supposedly lived.

main qimg 10575a7c975fcc723926c2c4f731d6d2 pjlq
main qimg 10575a7c975fcc723926c2c4f731d6d2 pjlq

Two women confronted police in Guangzhou’s Haizhu Square and tried to agitate, shouting in Mandarin to the crowd behind them, “Guangzhou people are standing up!”

main qimg f6a91cce36cf8b9fec524e3b8c51f19e pjlq
main qimg f6a91cce36cf8b9fec524e3b8c51f19e pjlq

A group of locals scolded the two women in Cantonese.

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main qimg 3a5c3a5d45cb0ce9a8ea62bfa7af56bb pjlq

They didn’t even understand what was being said to them!

Faced with the Cantonese language abuse of the Guangzhou crowd, they acted unusually bewildered. How can local mainland Chinese not know Cantonese they wondered.

Even Hong Kong people know and can speak Cantonese. The only Chinese people who cannot are those from Taiwan, and a handful from the extreme Western Chinese regions. Cantonese is well spoken throughout China.

A member of the “Fifth Column” tweeted a question: Why do you tip 1000 in Beijing and Wuhan. 500 tip in Chengdu but only 300 tip in Guangzhou.

Referring, of course, to the “tips” of money from the CIA / NED to protest. These come in packages and sizes.

main qimg 42cb994a28e91e2a7faa60ee0cc825ec pjlq
main qimg 42cb994a28e91e2a7faa60ee0cc825ec pjlq

The people sent to Chengdu speak Hong Kong dialect;

People sent to Guangzhou, can’t understand Cantonese.

The CIA should have mobilized some locals to be more convincing.  They might as well have worn signs on their chests that say “I am CIA prevaricator”.

A1nYNISUL1500
A1nYNISUL1500

With or without Dynamic zero-COVID Policy, the U.S. will use various excuses to create color revolutions.

The Chinese National Security Agency is getting to work! Yeah. Another CIA agent arrested, and well… he won’t be alive too much longer.

main qimg 3ba5b1fa16f85f78767dc4277b1ba498 pjlq
main qimg 3ba5b1fa16f85f78767dc4277b1ba498 pjlq


Also the West has predicted wrongly.

As far as I know, it is not the CPC that supports the Dynamic zero-COVID Policy, but the grassroots in China, which is the mainstream public opinion in China.

Do you expect the CPC to go against the mainstream public opinion in China?

At least 80% of the people around me are supporters of the Dynamic zero-COVID Policy, and young people who use VPNs do not make up the majority of China, and these people who earn “tips” to protest are even less representative of mainstream Chinese public opinion.

China is “kicking butt”, and the United States is floundering.

2022 11 28 10 08 growth
2022 11 28 10 08 growth

Declan Hayes
November 27, 2022
.

Though the World Cup, like all similar tournaments, must return to their apolitical roots, the U.S. and its allies are the elephants in the room, the flies in the ointment, the mothers of all spoilsports.

MI5’s BBC news site recently led with the non-story that Chinese protesters are calling for President Xi to resign. How convenient, with the collapse of MI5’s Hong Kong protests, that these gulls are unwittingly acting as a fifth column for the Royal Navy and America’s Seventh Fleet, which stalk the Taiwan Strait! One wonders when the U.S. will arm these peaceful protesters, just as they have previously armed their confreres in Syria, Iran and Hong Kong.

The Chinese government have the two basic problems of multiplication and of division. They fear that a small, localized problem, if replicated across China, will quickly become unsurmountable and their problem of division makes them divide their national cake, such as it is, in 1.42 billion ways, whilst keeping their 1.42 billion citizens happy and hopeful for their future. Human resource management, in other words, on a Biblical scale.

China’s perennial problems of multiplication and division, spurred on by Perfidious Albion and her equally treacherous allies, are an unenviable headache China’s leaders must deal with. Witness the snows that blanketed all of China a few Chinese New Years ago, when more than 100,000 migrant workers stranded in Guangzhou Railway station vented their wrath at those hapless soldiers who drew the short straw and so had to explain to these angry hordes that the snow made thousands of km of rail tracks unpassable and that, as a consequence, all 100,000 of them, together with millions more of other stranded migrant workers, could not make their annual pilgrimage home to their rural villages.

Pity the freezing Chinese soldiers who had their own New Year ruined not only by the snow but by the understandable failure of the government to explain to hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens that they could not budge the billions upon billions of tonnes of snow that ruined their holiday. Now return to MI5’s BBC news site and ask why the Chinese authorities allow BBC to exploit these problems by picking and choosing who to interview in China, where the BBC clearly does not belong.

Pop over to Iran, whose citizens are still celebrating their team’s win over Wales and ask why the BBC does not highlight the hundreds of Iranian soldiers and citizens their peaceful protesters deliberately murdered.

Speaking of the World Cup, witness Carlos Queiroz, Iran’s manager, asking why the BBC ambush his players with politically loaded questions but never direct political questions at the managers and players of England or the United States, whose countries are bywords the world over for human rights’ abuses. And, given that Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which is hosting the tournament, are no slouches when it comes to abusing human rights, why are they not also targets for the BBC’s ire?

Although the German team did protest on behalf of their transgender colleagues, isn’t it odd these German jokers had nothing to say about whoever it was who blew up the Nordstream pipeline and thereby condemned thousands of elderly Germans to a cold winter and an early grave? Perhaps the German team are good only for vacuous virtue signalling and not much more. It certainly seems so.

Had the jokers of the German football team really wanted to protest, they could have ransacked Qatar’s Al Udeid air base, which houses tens of thousands of U.S., British and Australian marines and paratroopers. But that would have been haram. The sad reality is that not only Qatar but the entire Middle East is blanketed with American military bases and it is only those protests, which support Anglo American hegemony that are permitted.

Though the World Cup, like all similar tournaments, must return to their apolitical roots, the U.S. and its allies are the elephants in the room, the flies in the ointment, the mothers of all spoilsports. Irrespective of how NATO, the jokers of the German football team and their BBC apologists pink wash their own crimes, whilst eulogizing their Ukrainian Nazi death squads or their Qatari funded Syrian head hackers, the tide will soon turn when their fake protests run their course and become only targets of ridicule and derision. Though that process has already begun in Moldova, in the Netherlands and even in LGBTQ++ obsessed Germany itself, it will accelerate over the coming months as the destruction of Western Europe leads to its own explosive backlash.

I’d buy one.

daily picdump 5 9
daily picdump 5 9

I fucking hate being an American citizen and living in the U.S. I really do. I am ashamed I am a veteran of its armed forces, too. Being an American and living in this country is emotionally, intellectually, and physically exhausting because:

  • Guns. Fucking. Everywhere. And no one wants to do anything about it. Even as thousands of people are killed every year because of them, they want LESS restrictions on guns.
  • Voting is almost pointless at this point if you live in a conservative state. Trump is gaining steam to be a contender again in 2024, if you can believe that shit. In any other country in the world this would be impossible. Not America. In America, there is no rule of law and you can try to overthrow an election you lost and STILL get a chance to be president again, let alone be allowed to run or never be prosecuted.
  • A MILLION Americans dead from a global pandemic that obliterated the economy and devastated families, and Americans insist that listening to scientists and wearing masks and getting shots is for pussies. In fact, they SUE DOCTORS to force them to prescribe HORSE DRUGS to them.
  • The hostility towards science and affinity for faith is fucking unbearable. We have people — and there are a lot of people — who believe women should not be able to get an abortion, gay people should not be allowed to marry/adopt children, transgendered people should not be allowed to go to the bathroom, and climate change is just a conspiracy meant to kill American energy jobs…among other things. A sizeable portion of the U.S. (~40%) think God is in control and we should just submit to his will.
  • Poor people are treated like absolute shit, particularly minorities and immigrants. We treat people of lesser means deplorably here. It’s WAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY worse to be homeless and/or poor in the U.S. than it is in Europe, Asia, or Oceania. Americans were *CHEERING* when the Supreme Court said landlords could start tossing people left jobless out on their asses so they could bring in more profitable tenants. There’s zero safety net here, too. If you lose you’re job in America, your life is over.

I could go on.

Americans get more outraged that you won’t stand for the stupid flag than they do that police murder citizens for minor infractions or that the 99% are supporting the 1% of freeloaders at the top.

And the worst part is that it’s impossible to fix any of it, because the way the Constitution is written, all the states with no people control most of the government.

The Senate is split 50–50 when 50 of those Senators represent 35–40% of the population. To make any change to the Constitution you need 3/4 of states AND 2/3 of Congress, which is an impossible hurdle to clear in today’s environment.

They literally killed the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT because conservative states oppose it. They oppose EQUAL RIGHTS for fuck’s sake.

Yeah, America sucks. It’s a marginally better country than Russia or Brazil, but that’s a low bar to clear.

**UPDATE 10/31/2022**

Brazil had the common sense to eject their far-right leader. Bolsonaro is outta there now. It seems only America is fucking stupid enough to give the guys who attempted a coup power back…voluntarily…because of inflation…which is temporary.

What a shitshow of a country the U.S. is.

https://youtu.be/1s2NQMrtYNo

Beautiful Bagels – (using bread machine to make the dough)

“These are what I would describe as “best ever bagels”. They are crisp on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside. I’ve had this recipe for years – and was passed on to me by another bagel lover. They are especially nice eaten whilst they are still warm, spread with Philadelphia Cream Cheese, thin slices of smoked salmon, a good squeeze of lemon juice and some freshly ground black pepper!

2022 11 27 17 43
2022 11 27 17 43

Ingredients

Directions

  • Place all the above ingredients into bread machine, and select ‘dough’ cycle.
  • Stop the bread machine 40 minutes after the mixing starts (1 hour and 10 minutes from beginning of dough cycle).
  • Tip bagel dough out onto a lightly floured surface and gently knead by hand for about 1 minute.
  • Cut dough into 8 pieces.
  • Roll and’gently massage’ each piece into a snake.
  • Dampen and overlap the ends pressing firmly to form a ring.
  • Place each ring on an individual piece of baking paper already lightly sprayed with oil.
  • Cover all rings with a sheet of baking paper and allow to rest.
  • Meanwhile, bring a large pan of water to the boil.
  • Carefully lowering each bagel one by one (about 4 at a time) into the pan of boiling water, slide the paper from each bagel ring away.
  • Gently turn bagels allowing about 40 seconds on each side.
  • Lift each bagel out and drain on absorbent paper towels.
  • Place drained bagels on baking baking tray already lined with baking paper.
  • Brush each bagel with lightly beaten egg mixed with 1 tablespoon water and 1/2 teaspoon of salt and sprinkle with lots of poppy seeds or toasted sesame seeds.
  • Bake in hot oven (220’C, Gas mark 7) for about 15 minutes- or until a nice deep golden brown colour.
  • Remove bagels from oven and place on wire rack.

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2022 11 27 17 45

Very Cool

daily picdump 19 9
daily picdump 19 9

I Supplied the Coke, Guns and Cash for ‘Scarface’

From HERE

When it comes to movie sets at least, John Zemansky is a heck of a hookup. There is, in fact, almost nothing he can’t source — or manufacture. Case in point: He supplied Doc Brown with (faux) uranium. He bought the broom Mrs. Doubtfire famously rocked out on. And he provided Tony Montana with all manners of guns, cash and cocaine. Zemansky retired in 2007, but he still loves to talk about his time as a property master — whether it was helping bring Robert Zemeckis and the Back to the Future franchise into the Old West or securing a mountain of coke and weaponry for Brian DePalma and Al Pacino.

‘The plutonium Doc Brown used in the first Back to the Future picture? We just made that all up’

I grew up around the prop business. I didn’t really want to do it at first, but I decided to do it for a little while before figuring out what I really wanted to do. To my surprise, once I got into it, I really liked it.

I went to work in TV at first, but then I got lucky and got to work in features. I did 60-some pictures. My favorite projects were westerns, because I love antiques and I enjoy hunting for the real stuff. I did all the Back to the Future pictures, and the third one was my favorite because it was a western. I had to find Doc Brown’s gun, and then the effects guys added all the armatures on it.

A lot of prop guys like science fiction, but you can build anything. The plutonium Doc used in the first Back to the Future picture? We just made that all up. I doubt real plutonium looks anything like that, but how many people have seen plutonium anyway?

‘If Al Pacino didn’t feel like something was right, he wouldn’t move forward until he thought it was perfect’

Scarface was the second picture I did with Brian DePalma. DePalma was a very quiet guy — he was always thinking. Scarface was supposed to be a 61-day shoot, but it went to 120 days or something like that. We never seemed to be able to get started until 10 or 11 in the morning. I think some of that was Al Pacino.

If he didn’t feel like something was right, he wouldn’t move forward until he thought it was perfect. Also, he never worked past 6 p.m. — it was in his contract. The movie was running so far over that the studio wanted him to work later. But he found out that the studio executives were coming to the set to get him to work later, so he just didn’t show up to work that day.

‘The only gun on Scarface that wasn’t totally real was the one where Pacino says, ‘Say hello to my little friend’’

I have no idea how many guns I had to supply for Scarface. It was a lot. They were real guns, too. They’re props, but that doesn’t mean they’re not a real gun. It takes a real gun to fire a blank. The only thing that wasn’t totally real was the one where he says, “Say hello to my little friend.”

That was an M16 with an M203 grenade launcher under it. They used those in Vietnam, but you can’t really get your hands on one, so I had to get it manufactured.

Pacino must have fired a thousand rounds out of that gun, and it was hot. When Pacino got shot, he fell on the gun and he burned his hand very badly. They had to take him to the burn hospital to fix his hand, and we shut down for three to five days after that.

Also, for that final shootout, the scene was originally shot with pistols, shotguns and a few oddball rifles. We spent a week shooting it, but DePalma looked at it and hated it. He said, “Let’s get some machine guns in here!” So we shot the whole thing all over again with automatic weapons.

‘When you’ve got stacks of money, usually just the top bill is real, and the rest underneath is dummy money approved by the government’

Depending on the scene, we’d use all real money or just some real money. For something like a poker game, that’s all real cash because, at most, it’s probably only $5,000. When you’ve got stacks of money though, usually just the top bill is real and the rest underneath is dummy money approved by the government. Up close, it looks like dummy money, but from a distance, you can’t tell.

I did a picture where I needed $175,000 in $100 bills. That was Brewster’s Millions and that was the most I ever had to get. I can’t remember how much I needed for Scarface, but most of it was that dummy money because a lot of it was in stacks.

As for the cocaine, nothing fancy or real there — it was simply powdered baby milk that I bought at the market.

Russia Drops “FAB-500” Bombs in Ukraine Today

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2022 11 28 11 13

The Russian Federation has begun utilizing what they call their “FAB-500” munitions.   It is a 500 kilogram high explosive bomb enhanced with fuel to create a thermobaric shockwave. (“FAB” = Fuel Air Bomb)

No living thing (with lungs) can survive the shockwave, which can actually be SEEN, as shown in the video below.

 

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2022 11 28 11 15

Uncaring asshole landlord

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63725038a09fb xg9pxncp2cy91 png 700

I’m not American and I find that video heartbreaking! How American politicians are still walking this earth astounds me. They clearly don’t care about those who elected them.

Polish “Mercenaries” Open-Fire and KILL Ukraine Army Commanders Near Bakhmut

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2022 11 28 11 16

An altercation has taken place between Polish “Mercenaries” fighting FOR Ukraine, and Ukrainian Army officers commanding them.

The Polish Mercs and a grouping of about ten thousand Romanian “Mercenaries” also fighting for Ukraine, were allegedly ordered by Ukrainian Army officers to attack Russian positions around Bakhmut.

Fierce fighting has been going on there for weeks and Ukraine is losing.

The Polish “Mercs” told the Ukrainian Army Officers it would be suicide for them and the Romanians to go attack, everyone else who has done so has been slaughtered by the fortified Russian positions.

The Ukrainians then allegedly told the Polish either attack or WE will kill you for Mutiny, at which point the Polish drew their weapons and KILLED the Ukrainian commanders.

Details right now are very sketchy and people in-the-know are very unwilling to talk about this.  It’s all very hush-hush and likely to stay that way.

Address Be Like Left Testicle Dick No.7

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  • Libya has been in crisis since the fall of gaddafi in 2011
  • The country has become a hotbed of islamist extremists.
  • Militias had been clashing throughout since the fall of gaddafi
  • Immigrants from sub saharan african countries have been subjected to modern slavery and therefore libya has become a hotbed for the mediterranean immigrant crisis.
  • The country had two governments competing for power from 2014.
  • Libya was once a prosperous nation under gaddafi and later own became a war torn nation

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main qimg 9d4efe4be27d551ed68e146a2bed3169 lq

3 Idiotic Military Blunders That Lost Battles Before They Started

From HERE

War has changed greatly over the course of history, that much is obvious. From tactics to weapons to what exactly you’re allowed to do to the opposing forces without being considered a war criminal, those interested in seizing others’ lands in pursuit of liberation, loot, or the second masquerading as the former, follow a much different path than armies of old. I’m sure medieval armies would have loved to have a remote-operated, axe-wielding juggernaut drone that could charge the opposing castle’s champions like heavy-metal Pokemon instead of getting a mace to the face, but they never had such luck.

One constant through any generation of warfare, though, is something that doesn’t have to do with armies, their armaments, or whether or not poisoning is ok. It’s a limitation that ancient lords share precisely with modern generals: the human brain’s constant capacity to make an incredibly dumb decision. Pure brute strength can only ever carry you so far, and one ill-timed miscalculation can cost you infinitely more dearly than a number disadvantage or obsolete artillery. War is a game in which many lives are on the line, and unfortunately, it can be thrown just as easily as a round of League of Legends.

Here are 3 incredibly dumb, and massively devastating, military blunders in history.

The Battle Of Agincourt

For the first incredibly deadly oopsie, let’s look at the famous Battle of Agincourt from the Hundred Years’ War. To set the scene, we can imagine the general state of things before the battle was to begin. In this corner, we have a French army of 20,000 men, primed and ready to deliver a drubbing to the enemy. In the other corner, we have the 27-year-old King Henry V of England, with only 5,500 men, most of whom were currently suffering from dysentery. As you can imagine, the French army had pretty much already marked this as a W. With almost four times the men, and with far fewer of them having active, bloody diarrhea, they were almost celebrating in advance.

However, it was what stood between the armies that would make the biggest difference: a massive, recently plowed field, turned by rain into a sea of deep mud capable of drowning a pig. The English, understandably, didn’t want to fight in the mud, but Henry realized they might be able to goad the French into taking the disadvantageous ground with, basically, a large-scale, medieval version of shouting “HEY, I BET YOU GUYS CAN’T KICK OUR ASS!” His army threw up banners and marched only a small distance forward, but this taunt was enough to send the French Army, their minds filled with an Arnold Palmer of equal parts hubris and bloodlust, charging into a literal shitstorm. Their men and horses immediately got stuck in the mud and became a human shooting gallery for the English archers. By the time the battle ended, the French would surrender after losing nearly 6000 men. The casualty count for the English? Roughly 400. If only the French had played Darkest Dungeon.

The Charge Of The Light Brigade

Another human error resulting in massive human loss was the battle known as the Charge of The Light Brigade during the Crimean War in the year 1854. It’s a battle that even inspired a poem of the same name by Alfred Tennyson, dedicated to the heroism of those that would die in the battle. However, this heroism, and these deaths, were entirely and wholly unnecessary, caused by something that even a modern office worker is all too familiar with: miscommunication among management. Though one could also argue that hundreds of men dying because two big wigs couldn’t clearly communicate is itself a poetic treatise on war.
First, the loss that led to the situation that would go so deadly sour: the British and French, fighting the Russians, were forced back from the Causeway Heights, fleeing four fortifications filled with recently installed artillery. The Russian forces were repelled only a short distance later, but Lord Fitzroy Somerset Raglan decided he would really like all those guns they just left back. So he issued an order to try to take back those four fortifications to prevent the Russians from acquiring all that sweet, sweet, weaponry. Except that he didn’t say “Please go retake the four fortifications we just abandoned, to retrieve our guns.” He said instead, “advance rapidly to the front … and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns.”The guns he was talking about were the guns in the Causeway Heights. The cavalry he issued this order to, unfortunately, was not in sight of the Causeway Heights. What they were in sight of was a fully entrenched, absolute shit ton of Russian artillery, at the end of an open valley. For some reason, instead of maybe questioning the wisdom of an order that was basically “run down a hallway at a mounted gatling gun,” George Bingham and James Brudenell, the Earls of Lucan and Cardigan, respectively, shrugged their shoulders and basically went, “seems weird but ok.” They then charged their men into the valley, at which point they were shot at from THREE SEPARATE DIRECTIONS by Russian gunners. It was basically a horrific, deadly, real-life version of Tower Defense flash game. 670 men participated in the charge. 110 died, 160 were wounded, and 375 horses were killed. They did not win.

The Battle Of Karansebes

Though the two military blunders already covered might vary greatly in both time period and cause, they do share a single element that this final entry does not: an enemy. After all, in every fight, there is a winner and a loser (at least objectively), but it takes real talent to lose a battle in which no one else is actually participating. During the Austro-Turkish war, the Austrians managed to pull off this uniquely embarrassing feat in the “battle” of Karansebes. The tale starts, like many great mistakes, with a good quantity of alcohol.

Outside of Karansebes, a group of soldiers were getting good and soused off a supply of schnapps, now mostly known for making 18-year-olds puke at a house party. Another traveling group passing by asked to split the bottle, and were denied. Out of maybe a mixture of pride and a deep love for borrowed schnapps, this quickly turned into a fistfight. This fistfight between soldiers then resulted in a couple rogue discharged firearms.

Now, back in Karansebes, the rest of the army was on high, un-schnapps-filtered alert, and when they heard gunshots, they sounded the alarm, shouting “Turks! Turks!” believing themselves to be under attack. They shouted it loud enough for the drunken tusslers to overhear, who then, not knowing they were the false Turks in question, panicked themselves, and started charging back to camp to help protect it from… themselves.

At this point, we have two groups of Austrian soldiers. One, in Karansebes, fingers on triggers, looking for Turkish soldiers approaching from the horizon. The second, drunk group of Austrian soldiers were now quickly approaching from the horizon. You might be able to play the rest of this out in your mind. The soldier in the city fired on the group riding home. The group riding home assumed their camp had already been taken by the Turks, and fired back. And thus, that night began a battle between the Austrian army and the Austrian army that would result in thousands of casualties and included precisely zero enemies.

Even better, the real Turks did indeed arrive two days later, to find a greatly reduced, rag-tag army in the process of recovering from a battle against themselves. The city of Karansebes had rendered itself defenseless, and the Turks were then all too happy to capture it with minimal fuss. Teaching one of, perhaps, the most important military lessons of all time: don’t bogart the schnapps.

“Progress” Is Not Always A Good Thing

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This man is a genius. We call it comedy only because it’s difficult to accept that he’s right.

The idea of “helicopter parents” had not been invented or even considered. Parents expected us to be doing things on our own without any supervision. Since both my parents and any statute of limitations are long passed, it’s safe to speak about the currently unspeakable!

We would normally leave the house without telling anyone where were going. One time we all left the house, and the parental units left the house thinking we were there. We came home and the front and back doors were wide open, just the screen doors closed. We never told them, they never asked.

There were several large ravines about 1/2 mile away with pretty steep sand hills and cliffs which we climbed or even rode our bicycles down. Usually no problem, but on occasion, the front wheel of the bike would dig in and we would sail over the handlebars into the sand further downhill. If you had a good tumble, the next person might try and do it better! Some of these hills were used by adventurers on motorcycles, we were pioneers of bicycle moto-cross.

We would spend summers and warm weekends in the ravines, exploring and playing in the small river that ran through it, looking for frogs, fish, snakes, lizards or other interesting creatures.

Road hockey games, two or three to the street. Some kids had nets, and most of the time we used boots or garbage cans, or other vertical items as goalposts. A tennis ball was the “puck” of choice and as you played, the wooden blade of the hockey stick would wear down from the full 3″ height to a sharp point that could have been lethal if used with malice. At some point, one enterprising company sold plastic blades that could be attached to the stub of a hockey stick to extend its life. At the time though, regular sticks were around $5 and the blades were about $2, so you didn’t see too many. The cod word “CAR” caused the game to be quickly moved off the road. Mike Meyers grew up in a different part of the city, and a bit later, but it was a universal signal for a quick time out. We tried to play on streets that had curbs, they were much easier than the streets that still had ditches beside the road.

Firecrackers were still legal, but you had to be at least 12 to get them, so we had the older kids buy them for us. May 24th, Victoria Day, was one of the loudest days of the year. Kids would stand around and throw the 2″ ones at each other, and you’d have to duck. The only time you were ever hurt was when someone would jam one down your shirt from behind. If he could run fast, he might do it again. Mostly they were “convinced” by the rest of the guys not to do it again.

We took the bus, by ourselves to areas around town. I took swimming lessons that required 2 buses to get to, and the only thing my mom said was “make sure you get a transfer!” By the time I was 12, we’d take the bus and the subway downtown. No big deal.

We all discovered rockets and explosives, and since my dad was a chemisty prof, he had a copy of the “Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 1944” which contained so many things that would scare the willies out of Gen Xer parents!

Of course, the Estes rocket engines were great, simple and safe, but we wanted more! How about coloured flames? Check the book! Better propellent? Check the book!

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2022 11 28 16 01

I still have the book, and my dad even updated it to one that even had more current info! I used it in school for chemical compounds in photography. Needless to say, we lit up the nights at times. 😉

Speaking of photography, I began developing film in my early teens. Black and white chemistry is relatively safe, but the colour processes at the time included various acids and cyanide compounds, all availalble from Kodak at your local photography store. We were trusted with these poisons, and don’t forget, we usually were in the dark (actually and metaphically!) about the dangers.

We all survived. Nobody had a cell phone, nobody had to be home befpre dinner and if you were late, you’d end up eating cold leftovers.

I tried to bring my own kids up the same way, and mostly told them not to tell their Mom what we did. We’d go tobogganing on a hill with a 150′ drop, and a hill hat gave a jump at the bottom, and can remember my youngest, who was about 5 at the time flying off, spinning at least one 360 through the air and getting back up the hill for the next ride. We used to play “hockey” with a group of kids and the same young daughter, at 3 or so, had to have a stick and play. She learned to stop by crashing into someone or the boards, but would pick herself up and be giggling back into the fray. Two hours each Sunday and the kids couldn’t wait for the next week’s “game!”

Both daughters survived, one is 42 and the other 38, and those are the memories that I think they are proudest of.

What do I do when my husband gives me the ultimatum that it’s either him or my cat I’ve had for 12 years?

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main qimg 873df006949465a33b164ae621c78b73 lq

DEAR … CHOOSE THE CAT!

THIS IS THE MOST FREQUENT QUESTION FROM A FAMILY PSYCHOLOGIST-SEXOLOGIST.

FIRST HE WILL GET RID OF YOUR CAT, THEN HE OFFERS TO SEND YOUR MOM TO A NURSERY HOME.

WELL, AND THEN …….

HE WILL GET RID OF YOU!!!

MY ADVICE: DON’T AGREE!!!

LET IT ACCEPT YOU AS YOU ARE, OR LIVE ALONE …

When I was 14, I laugh cause it's funny. Now I'm 34, I laugh cause it's true.

Master of the keyboard

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daily picdump 32 9

We adopted a young stray tuxedo cat from my cousin who found him under her porch in the middle of winter. She already had her quota of kitties (didn’t know there could be to many kitties?) so had to find him a new home.

He was very skiddish as he had to fight to survive. (We live in central Alberta and December is very cold) He was to be our oldest daughter’s companion and 10th birthday gift as her birthday is right in between Christmas and New years.

She wanted to name him ‘Venus’ after the planet because she was really into planets and space at that time.

I told her to think about rhyming words that would go with Venus because they would become nicknames, and I didn’t want to call the kitty ‘Penis’ by mistake. Lol.

So she settled on ‘Mars’, God of War and it 100% suited him.

He is such a little fighter. The first few weeks he would steal any thing remotely food-like and try to hide it. Cat food, dog food, bread, muffins you name it. (He would try to eat the bread right through the bread bag!!)

The weirdest thing he stole was a small bag of potting soil. He but a hole in the corner of the bag and dragged it across the house. We had white carpets at the time so that was fun to try to clean up.

But all in all Mars (Marsie is a nickname) fits right in with our little family. He is extremely close to our daughter and he sleeps with her every night.

He has been such a wonderful companion for her especially her going through growing up and the ups and downs of that. I’m so thankful he came into our lives when he did, he certainly is a huge blessing.

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main qimg 1e654204c28b3e2331583e842d201c2f lq

Natasha Wright
November 26, 2022
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The Xi vs Biden meeting stood out a geopolitical mile for its vital importance or at least for its potential to make the world laugh at Biden’s faux pas.

At this point in time we are looking at the G20 Bali Summit behind us waving a half grim goodbye to it remembering the sorrowful sight at its very unofficial beginning. There obviously was both protocol and symbolism galore there. On one hand, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, set foot on Bali with the readily available red carpeted airplane steps to welcome him to the Summit, while on the other hand Bumbling Biden (who seem to have borrowed this adjective from his counterpart Bumbling Boris, who recently resigned from No 10) he descended down the bleak and bare airplane steps, though mercifully he did not trip over and fell.

The G20 Bali Summit 2022 was and still is in its wake ‘a battlefield’ between two global sides in an economical/financial and political war all in one: the Collective West and all the others. G20 countries were and are split in half and not much more than that should have been expected. The old world order doggedly refuses to leave the geopolitical arena whilst the new one is still in its fledgling stage. On one geopolitical front there were/are: the USA and its allies: EU, Germany, France, Italy, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea in one word: The Collective West. On the other one there are Russia and all the other members which have not imposed sanctions on Russia: ten of them in total. Let us try and remember the times when G20 was established in 1999. Admittedly, one couldn’t have possibly imagined the shape and form this list is in today. In this other /second group are Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey in alphabetical order of this formally informal alliance in terms of their cultural, historical, geopolitical values to say the least which would be an understatement on my part. This second group of countries tend to be in the long and arduous process of distancing themselves in an ever-growing alienation and saying goodbye to the Collective West because what binds them together within G20 at this point is economy only but there is a gaping hemorrhaging hole in between all of them in terms of their cultures, values and views on a multitude of other issues which keeps them split apart. If one looks at the economic/ financial forecasts and the parity of purchasing power by 2030, China is bound to have a two times bigger economy than the USA. Believe it or not, the USA will be only the third in the world and not one other country from the Collective West will be in the first ten by then.

To get back to the Bali Summit, there were a number of bilateral meetings at the summit but the Xi vs Biden meeting stood out a geopolitical mile for its vital importance or at least for its potential to make the world laugh at Biden’s faux pas.

Admittedly, the USA insisted on the talks with Xi for what it’s worth. It lasted for three hours or so and it was held in the Chinese official residence on Bali. One thing everybody seems to agree about is that it was a good thing that the talks did happen rather than not. A number of reputed political portals confirmed that this meeting came with a long-awaited sigh of relief. It was a positive signal for the rest of the world whatever they may have talked about during the meeting because the two (warring) sides (at least surely USA was and is at ‘war’ with China while China sits peacefully contemplating and operating affairs in their own ‘ways of their world’ not falling prey to US provocations in the form of, for instance, Crazy Nancy’s fleeting visit to Taiwan recently). At least Xi and Biden were able to sit together and talk and still manage their differences and promote cooperation one way or the other, given the circumstances.

Biden surely couldn’t hold his horses so he opted to bash China because of a long list of alleged issues coming from the Washington DC and their ‘whataboutism cookbooks’ such as: alas, you know Hong Kong, Tibet, encroaching upon human rights, only too forceful activities towards Taiwan and then market and economy practices and so on and so forth. I mean that is what the US and the Collective West do and keep doing all the time snapping at others like ‘mad dogs of media disinformation war’. Engrossed in an anti-Russia, anti-China naming and shaming mode, Blundering Biden added that the USA would continue to compete with (against? more like it) China in global markets. China, on the other hand, only made a politely mild comment with their interpretation of the Bali meeting with Biden that it was a good thing that happened. China also added that whenever the USA sets off a series of unilateral provocations against China, their relations sink and sour most terribly. Beijing ‘s officials present in Bali also kindly reminded the USA that they should do away with the illusion that the USA ‘ is always right’. Even the biggest US allies seem to be taking a sharp U – turn giving them a wide political berth now

The countries now ready and willing to merely blindly follow and join the bandwagon USA in ‘restraining China’ are few and far between at this point. Oh well, the USA has had this obnoxiously arrogant tendency ‘to restrain’ other countries which they deem as ‘naughty’. That mindset comes across as extremely immature with brutal consequences upon a huge number of countries globally for decades now. The bad ‘old’ days when Washington DC was able to achieve that sort of thing with ease in their whimsical political cauldrons are long gone. A quick look away from Blundering Biden, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi made sure they reiterate their stances that China and Russia are ready to create and promote a multipolar world.

At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s the next in royal transition to become king, Muhammad bin Salman did not meet with Biden at all but decided to give him a very politically well-deserved cold shoulder (bless ‘im:) but it is worth knowing that as early as next month he will offer a most warm welcome to Xi Jinping. The G20 Summit admittedly did not achieve what America has been craving for in their savage power hungry geopolitical appetites and hoping for desperately, which was the brutally harsh denunciation of Russia. The participants did condemn the war as such, because the ending of the summit had in its protocol a final resolution to wrap things up as per usual since the summit cannot be and should not be without one. The final document produced by the participants was to do with the war in Ukraine and without the undeserved adjective ‘Russian’ superglued to it unduly, which is how the Collective West puppets keep calling it in their childish histrionics.

In the final Declaration, there surely is a strong condemnation of the war as such and not of Russia as a country.

Reuters confirmed that the pressure from the Collective West did prevail for the duration of the whole summit but ultimately the Collective West managed to fall flat on their collective political noses. Arguably, the divide line right in the midst of their protruding political bellies of the G20 ‘being one rather awkward whole’ speaks volumes about the world we are living in.

One should well and truly not forget the brilliant Xi Jinping in his hapless close encounter with Justin Trudeau whom he met in passing in the G20 ‘alleyways’ and having the bravery to reproach the Canadian clown in his nothing but a fatherly way. One has to simply look in Xi’s eyes at that very moment and see his mature and almost fatherly smile and look in his kind eyes in addressing Trudeau about Trudeau leaking out their private conversation to the media and adding contrived and made-up details all along to suit his own political fancy. Trudeau being shameless Trudeau yet again. I myself still shudder with utmost disgust at Trudeau being the fascist Trudeau during the Truckers Protests in Canada this very winter and if one only casts a quick glance and listen to the utter nonsense in Trudeau’s arrogantly smirky response to Xi only to scuttle away an ostrich walk style, though he avoided burying his humiliated head in the sand while at it.

All in all, regrettably the Collective West may well remain the недоговороспоспобнные i.e. ‘incapable of making an agreement for quite a long while, which is what Sergey Lavrov famously called them using that Russian neologism adjective spot on and rightly so. Mercifully, the Collective West have failed miserably in trying to achieve things they were craving for in desperation all along.

One of the best cartoons as a kid. Those cartoons in the 1970s were classics and hard to beat with the ones airing now. I remember the Saturday morning cartoons were what kids woke up early for…. with only 12 channels on the TV.

https://youtu.be/1oDaHRbIDH8

People Getting Coffee vs. 30 People Enjoying Coffee

Think about it. Pause. Think.

6374de29629e7 downsides of modern development
6374de29629e7 downsides of modern development

One of the benefits…if you do enough time…is that you will not do anything stupid enough again to get yourself sent back to prison.

If you didn’t do much time the first time or two you’ll probably try something else and go back to prison.

I used to see those guys coming in and out, in and out. Again and again.

There are benefits to going to prison for a good jolt. But I guess it really just depends on the person.

I know some people who did just a little time and learned their lesson, and I know some who came back again and again and again and literally didn’t learn their lesson until they got struck out and received a life sentence.

Ukro-nazis preparing another batch of “Russian atrocities™”

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main qimg 6f374ac27385b3c8a4f319a3731c04be lq

Finian Cunningham
November 23, 2022
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For Western media to harangue China over its zero-Covid policy and to try to blame China for the failure of Western capitalism is beyond farcical. It is degenerate.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping recently reiterated that China would be adhering to its strict public controls against the Covid-19 pandemic, there was discernible disappointment in the Western media that the Asian giant was not conforming to a “let it rip” approach.

China is maintaining a zero-Covid policy with new guidelines on how to ease restrictions in a dynamic way calibrated to local conditions.

Western capitalist governments have all but given up on public efforts to control the Covid-19 pandemic. The attitude of “living with Covid” is motivated by the unspoken priority to restore capitalist business as usual. The result is a continuing widespread infection rate among Western nations, and, with that, a proliferation of immune-resistant strains of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. In Western states, a de facto laissez-faire policy amounts to the authorities seemingly being prepared to see their people not “living with Covid” but rather “dying with Covid”.

By contrast, China has maintained a zero-Covid public health policy using a combination of mass vaccination, society lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing and tracing. The upshot is that China’s death toll from the two-year pandemic is a tiny fraction (less than 0.5 per cent) of the numbers that have perished in the West. This is because China’s socialist government prioritizes protection of public health over commercial and short-term economic gains.

Therefore, it seems particularly grotesque that Western media are now cajoling China to abandon its zero-Covid policy, which they are distorting or are impugning as a “failure”.

This week saw an upsurge in Chinese infections from Covid-19 in the capital Beijing and other cities. There were three reported deaths from the disease. The China figures are still relatively low compared with infection and deaths in Western states. For example, in the United States, it is reported that deaths from Covid-related illnesses are about 1,000 per day, which is down from a high of 4,000 per day last winter.

Still, there is an unseemly tone of glee in Western media reports and comments that China’s zero-Covid strategy is allegedly failing to contain the disease. The Financial Times, the BBC and other media were peppered with accompanying chiding calls on the Chinese government to drop its “Communist controls” and to adopt a “living [dying] with Covid” approach.

Another tack being used to pressure China is to blame its anti-epidemic practices for the slowdown that is dogging Western economies.

A Reuters report this week attributed stock market losses in the United States and continuing problems of consumer price inflation on “worries” over China’s zero-Covid policy.

“All eyes are on China today and their Covid-zero policy. Traders are worried that China could expand their restrictions which could slow down growth and threaten higher inflation,” Reuters quoted John Doyle, vice president of dealing and trading at Monex USA, as saying.

This dubious viewpoint of blaming China for Western economic woes is based on the premise that Beijing’s pandemic control policies are stymying its own economic growth and reducing supply chains to Western nations which are then hit with higher inflation, stock market turmoil, job losses and general business downturn.

It is true that China’s zero-Covid policy has curtailed the country’s roaring economy from earlier years of double-digit growth. Nevertheless, the Chinese government believes the fundamentals of the economy are still sound for future recovery. In the meantime, however, the priority for the authorities is on protecting public health and preventing the sort of deadly epidemic outbreaks of Covid-19 that have occurred in the West.

One can understand that with a population of 1.4 billion – 20 per cent of the globe – and many people living in densely packed mega-cities, the Chinese authorities are right to be concerned about warding off a dangerous pandemic.

It is thus a matter of sovereign authority for China to choose whatever public health policies it deems necessary in order to protect its nation. The arrogance of the West is seen in its presumption to lecture China on how to handle Covid-19 and especially in advocating Beijing to adopt Western policies – policies that have been wanton in exacerbating the pandemic, deaths and illnesses. There is an echo here of the colonial Western arrogance seen during the 19th-century Opium Wars.

It is somewhat obscene that the Western media – as mouthpieces for their governments – are mounting a propaganda campaign to undermine China’s principled efforts to maximize the protection of public health and minimize deaths.

In the United States where over 1 million people have died from Covid-19 over the past two years – compared with China’s 5,200 deaths – the evident converse priority is to maximize private commercial profit by minimizing the protection of public health.

What is even more galling about Western remonstrations to China about abandoning its zero-Covid policy is that the economic failings in the United States and Europe are inherent, and have little to do with China.

The U.S. in particular is exporting its inherent economic problems to the rest of the world by endlessly printing dollars and artificially raising its exchange value against other currencies. This is having massive repercussions of soaring inflation for food and other commodities both globally and in the U.S.

Washington has also stoked huge problems with its unilateral actions of banning semiconductor exports to China and cutting off Russian energy supplies.

The systemic problems battering the U.S. and European economies should be branded “Made in America”. Yet the Western media are trying to blame China and, most recently in a particularly sickening spin, to try to label China’s anti-pandemic policies as somehow a negative practice causing problems for the West.

The callous lack of care shown by Western governments toward their people through the hands-off approach in dealing with the Covid pandemic – a let it rip, dying with Covid policy – is testimony to the vile nature of capitalism and its political administrators. These same sick and psychotic values are at the root of why capitalism is a failing economic system. The Western media play a big part in normalizing the horrendous death and disease that capitalist pathology engenders.

So, for Western media to harangue China over its zero-Covid policy and to try to blame China for the failure of Western capitalism is beyond farcical. It is degenerate.

Very sad

daily picdump 27 9
daily picdump 27 9

I purchased The Sunday NY Times.

I never read or bought The NY Times before that day. Today I’m an avid reader.

I am a firm believer in faith, Karma, destiny and a higher being. Just not the Church.

It was going on six months since losing my job at a CALDOR department Store (They went out of business). I became miserable and started a downward spiral into depression.

Here’s a pic for those too young to know.

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main qimg f5224ffd0f7ee9946cb8377ae5508fce lq

The job paid $4.35 per hour in 1998. And it was my full time job. I was going to auto tech school at night hoping for a better career one day.

I started drinking heavy. I didn’t care. It was bad enough that I was already poor, on welfare and housing assistance. But when all that misery combined with alcohol, my situation made me feel even more hopeless. And I was ready to let go.

But life turned into a blessing on that fateful Sunday. I got up around 7:00AM to go buy more beer. It used to be illegal to sell beer before 12:00PM on Sundays in NY. But because I’m a regular from the neighborhood, I was allowed to tuck the bottle in my jacket.

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main qimg cf01cbc8a9e99b310bd71268b393edd5 lq

(SOOOO EMBARRASSING!)

I started to walk out after my purchase when I decided to buy a NY Daily News. But it’s too early. No daily news, only The NY Times. So I grabbed one, handed over my $1.50 and walked out.

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main qimg 79fb8cb132b686ea0a030c1b8b5c2b1a lq

I immediately went to the help wanted ads when I got back in my apartment. And there it was. The biggest help wanted add on the page.

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main qimg ce54cde6442d75974ea525bc34c3d546 lq

$12 – $18 per hour.

For one day only 9AM-12PM. on that following Monday.

Doors close promptly at 12.

I was twenty-four years old and never came close to earning $5 per hour.

I woke up early that Monday morning. And gave myself two hours to get there for a trip that takes about one hour. I put on my Sunday best, grabbed some résumés and started my trip to the JFK Hilton.

I arrived and found the conference room and it was barren. There were only about fifty people in the conference room. It didn’t feel like a job fair. I almost turned around because I thought I was in the wrong place.

We were called in the order that we signed in. I watched as some people left after the short interview and some sat back down. I was one of the people that was told to sit back down after my interview.

Round two came as fast as round one. This company has this job fair thing down to a science. I’m called back up to the table by Mrs. Alexander. I will never forget her. She hands me a drug test cup and says follow me. A drug test! at a job fair. Probably the best way to weed out the druggies.

After that, I fill out all my employment forms. And then she says. “let’s go over some things while we wait for your results. Because of your experience and interests I have decided to hire you as a motor pool mechanic. This is your rate of pay, you will be on 90 days probation with random drug testing, report to this man at this location this time next Monday. Now read and sign your code of ethics booklet.”

(And with the most beautiful motherly I understand what you have been going through smile) Mrs. Alexander says “Congratulations Gerry and fix your tie.”

I’M HIRED! The whole process took all of 40 minutes. I went from $4.35 per hour. To $16.52 in 40 minutes. I walked out of that Hilton with tears in my eyes.

It only gets better from there. I start work and immediately fall in love with the company, the work hours, the people, and of course the pay. Life got good and was only going to get better.

I get great advice from an older worker. One can go anywhere in this company. Just get your Qualies (Qualifications) for everything, go to class for everything, read and study everything and then get your ass out of the motor pool.

So I did just that. I went from repairing company vehicles at the motor pool, to lineman electrician, and now my present position as a locomotive engineer earning six figures. Six figures with a high school degree and a technical school certificate. And I can honestly say that I do not mind paying taxes at the end of every year.

Being poor and uneducated gave me serious depression. And That Sunday NY Times was destiny.

  • If the NY Daily News was available that Sunday I wouldn’t have bought The NY Times.
  • The job fair had few people because poor people won’t pay $1.50 for the Sunday NY Times when the NY Daily News is only $ 0.75.
  • And NY Times readers don’t usually look at the help wanted ads.

Something was definitely pulling the strings behind the scenes for me. I was going the opposite direction of where I am today.

American Cookie Cutter Suburb: Autocentric, Boring, Dystopian, Void Of Soul, Void Of Culture, Void Of Happiness

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63725689069f6 d8nv0u32djk91 700

Very Serious Shortages Of Amoxicillin, Augmentin, Tamiflu, Albuterol And Tylenol Have Erupted All Over The United States

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Hospitals are filling up all across America, and there are extremely alarming shortages of some of our most important medications.  Health authorities are warning that RSV, the flu and COVID are combining to create a “tripledemic”, and there are simply not enough medications to go around.  Personally, I am most concerned about RSV.  It is spreading like wildfire from coast to coast, and we are being told that very young children and the elderly are particularly vulnerable.  I wrote an entire article about the RSV outbreak earlier this month, and since that time things have gotten even worse.  Our medical system is being absolutely flooded with sick kids, and this has caused very serious shortages of amoxicillin, augmentin, tamiflu and albuterol…

America is facing a shortage of four key medications used for common illnesses in children as virus season comes back in full force.

Officials have declared a shortage of first-line antibiotics amoxicillin and Augmentin, which are used to treat bacterial infections. Tamiflu, the most common flu medication in the US, and albuterol, an inhaler for asthma and to open airways in the lungs, are also in short supply, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

But we haven’t even gotten to the heart of flu season yet.

In fact, the beginning of winter is still about a month away.

So what will things look like by the time we get to the middle of January?

At this point, things are already so bad that we are also starting to see a very serious shortage of tylenol

A children’s Tylenol shortage currently affecting Canada has carried over into the United States, pharmacists in multiple American cities have warned.

The drug’s short supply, experts say, stems from a recent spike in pediatric sickness as seasonal bugs come back with a bang after being suppressed during COVID-related lockdowns.

This is nuts.

In all my years, I have never heard of a shortage of tylenol in the United States.

Unfortunately, we now have millions of people with compromised immune systems all over the country, and so RSV and the flu are hitting us extremely hard.

One doctor told CNN that “I’ve never seen anything like this”…

“In my 25 years of being a pediatrician, I’ve never seen anything like this,” pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Stacene Maroushek of Hennepin Healthcare in Minnesota told CNN. “I have seen families who just aren’t getting a break. They have one viral illness after another. And now there’s the secondary effect of ear infections and pneumonia that are prompting amoxicillin shortages.”

The reason for shortages is due to increased demand, especially with a surge in respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and flu cases. The combination of RSV, flu and COVID circulating has been called a “tripledemic.”

This is going to be one long winter for our medical system.

As I mentioned earlier, hospital beds are rapidly filling up all over the nation

These surges have filled children’s hospitals across these states. The Children’s Hospital of Alabama, the state’s largest pediatric hospital located in Birmingham – 91 per cent of beds are filled, according to official figures.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which includes the largest children’s hospital in Tennessee, is at 98 per cent capacity as of Tuesday.

And as I discussed in my article about RSV earlier this month, there are some hospitals that have already filled up all of their beds.

Of course most children that get sick don’t end up in the hospital.

Most of them just stay home and are cared for by their parents until they recover.

In October, more Americans missed work to take care of sick children than ever before

More than 100,000 Americans missed work last month – an all time high – because of child-care problems, many of which come down to sick children and sick daytime caregivers.

Sadly, we will almost certainly set another new all-time record this month.

It sure would be nice if the federal government would step in and help to ensure that everyone has enough medications to give to their children during this medical emergency.

But instead of doing that, the Biden administration has decided to give another 4.5 billion dollars to Ukraine…

The United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and in coordination with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Department of State, is providing an additional $4.5 billion in direct budgetary support to the Government of Ukraine. The funding, which will help alleviate the acute budget deficit caused by Putin’s brutal war of aggression, was made possible with generous bipartisan support from Congress. The Government of Ukraine will receive the funding in two tranches before the end of 2022.

In addition, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has just announced that the Ukrainians will be receiving another 400 million dollars in military aid…

Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a new $400 million military aid package to Ukraine on Wednesday.

The package will include “additional arms, munitions, and air defense equipment from U.S. Department of Defense inventories,” Blinken said in a statement, which didn’t provide many specifics on the weapons heading to Ukraine. It is the 26th time the administration is using the presidential drawdown authority, which allows the United States to take from its stockpiles and provide those weapons to Ukraine.

Rather than giving so much money to the Ukrainians, why can’t we spend it on some antibiotics for our children?

It seems to me that our priorities are really messed up.

The RSV outbreak that we are witnessing right now is really serious.  If you have young children, you will want to closely monitor developments in your local area.

After a couple of really tough years, a lot of people had been hoping that we would experience a “return to normal” in 2022.

But as I keep warning my readers, we have now entered an era of great pestilences.

This year we have seen the bird flu kill tens of millions of our chickens and turkeys, a global monkeypox epidemic has spread all over the globe, and now RSV and the flu are ripping across the nation.

We really are living in unprecedented times, and the challenges that we are facing are only going to get even greater as the months roll along.

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“SARMAT” Nuclear Missile Goes Into FULL Production

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missile
missile

Russia’s “Sarmat” strategic missile has gone into serial production.  What do you need to know about the powerful superweapon of the Russian Federation?

First.

This is the most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile in the world, surpassing the American ones in all respects.
– 1.5x range.
– by tripling the number of warheads.
– by take-off weight by 6.5 times.
– by the total power of the core charges by 7 times.
– by combat load by 9 times.

Second.

The Sarmat has Avangard hypersonic capsules that are totally IMMUNE to all known missile defenses, while the U.S. Minuteman III has no hypersonic capsules.

Third.

The Sarmat can also deliver a high-precision non-nuclear strike, in which the kinetic energy creates destruction similar to a nuclear explosion, but without radiation.

Fourth.

The Sarmat will be silo and mobile-based, while the U.S. Minuteman III is silo-based only.

Fifth.

The Sarmat is the latest rocket to enter service in 2022, while the U.S. Minuteman III entered service 50 years ago.

The Sarmat is one of six new Russian strategic weapons unveiled by Russian president Vladimir Putin on 1 March 2018. The RS-28 Sarmat made its first test flight on 20 April 2022, and the Russian government expects the missile is entering service in 2022. On August 16, 2022, a state contract was signed for the manufacture and supply of the Sarmat strategic missile system.

Egg Muffin sandwich

“Just like McDonalds, but you can control the ingredients. Great for work or breakfast on the go!”

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2022 11 27 17 40

Ingredients

Directions

  • Toast the english muffin.
  • In a microwaveable cup roughly the same diameter of the muffin, add the egg, a tablespoon of water.
  • Beat the egg, add the bacon (or sandwich meat, or nothing).
  • Microwave on high for 1 to 2 minutes (until egg is cooked) while muffin is toasting.
  • Assemble the muffin and let stand for a few minutes to melt the cheese.

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2022 11 27 17 42

Here’s a real treat. This is probably one of the best science fiction movies to come out in the last five years. But, it’s Chinese, and thus has been outright banned, and blocked and generally given the worst reviews ever…

Too bad. It is awesome.

Good basic science fiction fare. No transgender or woke anything. Good story-line, great subplots, and great special effects. And the woke folk that write reviews HATE it.

It’s on you-tube (much to my surprise), and you all had best check it out before (yet again) the neocon war-mongering cabal puts this movie on it’s “copyright protection” bans.

I suggest you all watch this movie, and have fun. It’s long at 2 hours and is in English. Dubbed, but well done, and it will be a great adventure to enjoy. Watch it if you can spare the time!

https://youtu.be/SFFY0_80M4E

There is also a Chinese version, HERE. If that version above has been banned for “national security” reasons.

Plunder and death delivered by USA proxy Ukraine Nazis

We start today’s review of the current American-led global cluster fuck with this bit of sad news.

This is very sad.

UKRAINE TROOPS MASSACRE SURRENDERING, DIS-ARMED, RUSSIANS LAYING FACE-DOWN ON GROUND

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Ukraine War Crime large
Ukraine War Crime large

Ukrainian Nazi troops have committed a war crime of slaughtering surrendering Russian Troops.  The Russians were dis-armed, laying face-down on the ground, when Ukrainian Nazis opened fire upon them, killing them all.  Video of the slaughter appears below . . .

According to sources on the scene, soldiers from the Ukrainian 80th Separate Airborne Assault Brigade, committed the murders.  According to eye witnesses, the names and surnames of the killers are known and the information has been passed to the Russian Army.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued a statement: “The Russian Federation demands, from International Organizations, to condemn the crime of Ukraine, with the Execution of Russian prisoners of war, and conduct an investigation.”

Here now is actual video of the Russian soldiers SURRENDERING.  CAUTION: GRAPHIC VIDEO SHOWING ACTUAL WAR CRIME DEATHS!   Viewers will see the Russians are dis-armed, and laying face-down on the ground, when the Ukrainians open fire and kill them all:

Bear in mind that the Ukraine Army is the one being backed by the United States and by the European Union.   That Ukrainian Army is carrying out cold-blooded murder, in the name of, and with the direct help of, the people backing them.

Is THIS what YOU thought your government was backing?   It is!

Well…

Speaking of what the United States is doing right now. Let’s look at Coronavirus; the US bio-weapon that no one dare talk about…

BBC Television: “Segment of HIV” Used to Create COVID-19 Vaccines !

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2022 11 19 06 38

The manufacturer’s of COVID-19 “Vaccines” now admit on TV that a “tiny segment of HIV” was used in the making of COVID-19 “vaccines.”  As most people know, HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.   Below is video proof with the direct admission, from BBC television.

As more and more people around the world got snookered into taking the COVID “Vaccine” we all got to see how more and more people started dying from strange ailments.  Young people started dying from Myocarditis and Pericarditis.  Middle aged people starting dropping dead from blood clots in the brain, in the lungs, or in their hearts.  Other people started dropping dead from “unknown causes” to such a large extent, they made-up a phony name to describe it: Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS).

Now, we finally have an idea as to why:  Manufacturers of the COVID-19 “vaccine” used segments of the HIV virus in the COVID “vaccine.”   For a lot of the people who got the COVID vax, it now appears to many that they actually gave you a tiny version of . . . AIDS.

This is what has been getting said since the very beginning. Indian scientists tried to publish a paper that stated they found HIV-like gain of function in Cov19 and were quickly silenced.  Turns out, the whole time, that has been the truth.

They knew.  They silenced anyone who found out.  They kept it as secret as they could until they jabbed as many as they could. The depravity of these people knows no limit!

  • All the politicians and “public health” officials, pushed this on you.  They pushed it on TV, on radio, in newspapers.
  • How about all the news media, both local and national?  They pushed this on you too.
  • How about the big-name Hollywood stars all telling their fans to “Get the Vax?”  They too, pushed this on you.
  • How about the Corporate Executives and Boards of Directors, who coerced you into taking this crap, by threatening to fire you from you job if you refused?  They forced this crap on you.
  • And now, a whole slew of people have died, and more are dying every day.

They killed you.

I wonder how many people are going to decide to return the favor?

Speaking of the United States “cluster fuck”, how about all the woke leftists with eyes full of glee over a new world order ruled by transsexual unicorns prancing in beautiful gleaming cities of gold…

Cheesy Mostaccioli

This recipe is from an old Pampered Chef cookbook. Simple and something my kids will eat. Freezes well.

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2022 11 19 09 51

This is AWESOME!!!! It's also SO easy to make! I used extra lean ground sirloin to cut down a bit of the fat in the meat and I added 2 small cans of sliced mushrooms. Other than that, I made the recipe exactly as directed and it turned out FANTASTIC!! I tripled up the recipe and served it for a party and ended up giving the recipe to 5 or 6 people! Hubby and kids also love it!! It's a definite keeper

Ingredients

Directions

  • Prepare the pasta according to the package directions; rinse and drain.
  • In a non-stick skillet, cook and stir the beef over medium-high heat until meat is browned; drain.
  • Add in spaghetti sauce, soup, pepper, and Italian seasoning; stir to combine.
  • In a large bowl, mix together the pasta, sauce, and 2 cups cheese.
  • Transfer mixture to a greased 4-quart baking dish.
  • Sprinkle remaining 1 cup cheese over the top.
  • Bake at 350° for 40 minutes or until heated through.
  • Note: OAMC instructions–To freeze: Complete recipe through step 6. Seal with foil or place in a zip top bag. Freeze.
  • To serve: Thaw in fridge overnight. Bake as directed.

Layoffs? You Want To Talk About Layoffs? Here Are 10 Major Announcements Which Have Happened Within The Past 10 Days

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Have you noticed that the pace of layoff announcements has gotten rather fast and furious lately?  Many of the biggest companies in the entire country are now conducting mass firings, and this is reminding many analysts of what we witnessed back in 2008.  During the “Great Recession”, millions of Americans ultimately lost their jobs.  Will we see a similar thing happen this time around?  Let’s hope not, but right now the signs are not encouraging.  The following are 10 major layoff announcements which have all happened within the past 10 days…

#1 Gannett (the owner of USA TODAY)

Gannett, the owner of USA TODAY and local news operations in 45 states, announced Thursday another round of job cuts in the company’s news division after a third-quarter loss and an earlier series of cost-cutting measures.

The company, which plans to cut 6% of its estimated 3,440 staff in the news division, will notify affected employees on Dec. 1 and 2.

#2 Roku

Roku is the latest technology and media player to slash jobs, revealing in a securities filing Thursday that it plans to reduce its workforce by about 5 percent, or about 200 jobs.

#3 CNN

CNN CEO Chris Licht had to speak to employees during a tense company town hall on Tuesday as the network faces layoffs by early December after he was tasked with finding ways to cut costs.

Licht, 51, addressed questions surrounding the cuts after he previously indicated during the summer that CNN would not face any need to fire staff.

#4 Cisco

Cisco Systems Inc.’s stock rose in extended trading Wednesday after the networking-technology company delivered better-than-expected numbers on the top and bottom line, and offered encouraging guidance.

Still, Cisco Chief Financial Officer Scott Herren announced a “limited business restructuring,” to be shared with employees on Thursday, that will right-size its real-estate portfolio and impact about 5% of its 80,000 workers worldwide — or 4,000 people.

#5 GE Appliances

Louisville-based employer GE Appliances is planning to lay off 5% of its salaried workforce in coming weeks, the company confirmed to The Courier Journal.

The cost of keeping the company running has risen for several reasons, according to GE Appliances spokesperson Julie Wood, which has caused the business to look into money-saving measures.

#6 Asana

The layoffs in the tech sector just keep piling up.

On Tuesday, project management software provider Asana announced “the difficult decision” to cut its workforce by 9% as part of a broader corporate restructuring program.

#7 Outside Media

Lifestyle media company Outside Media, which houses titles including Backpacker, Ski and Climbing, laid off 12% of its workforce Tuesday, according to a memo sent by founder and CEO Robin Thurston.

#8 Lyft

The layoffs that had been announced last week were confirmed Thursday at local tech company Lyft, raising questions about what the loss of jobs will mean for the wider Bay Area economy.

Ride-hailing app company Lyft confirmed the layoffs to KPIX. Lyft is eliminating 227 jobs.

#9 Twitter

After laying off 50 percent of the company’s employees, Elon Musk has turned his attention to Twitter’s contract workers. According to separate reports from Platformer’s Casey Newton and Axios, the social media platform began reducing its contingent staff on Saturday afternoon. After a period of uncertainty about the scale of the job cuts, Newton put the number at approximately 4,400 affected individuals.

#10 Amazon

Amazon workers were left in chaos after they learned they were the first of the expected 10,000 to be laid off in a 15-minute meeting with executives.

News of the coming layoffs broke on Monday, with employees getting a calendar invitation to the quick, scripted meeting with executives on Tuesday, specifically members of the Alexa voice assistant division.

In that list I didn’t even mention the layoffs at Facebook which could end up being the biggest of them all.

Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg.  If the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, what we will see in 2023 and beyond is likely to be far worse.

The U.S. economy is already slowing down dramatically, but the Fed seems determined to hike interest rates even higher.

They are committing economic malpractice right in front of our eyes, and what they are doing is going to severely hurt countless numbers of our fellow citizens.

Berlin Goes to Beijing: The Real Deal

From HERE

The Scholz caravan went to Beijing to lay down the preparatory steps for working out a peace deal with Russia, with China as privileged messenger.

With his inimitable flair for economic analysis steeped in historical depth, Professor Michael Hudson’s latest essay, originally written for a German audience, presents a stunning parallel between the Crusades and the current “rules-based international order” imposed by the Hegemon.

Professor Hudson details how the Papacy in Rome managed to lock up unipolar control over secular realms (rings a bell?) when the game was all about Papal precedence over kings, above all the German Holy Roman Emperors. As we know, half in jest, the Empire was not exactly Holy, nor German (perhaps a little Roman), and not even an Empire.

A clause in the Papal Dictates provided the Pope with the authority to excommunicate whomever was “not at peace with the Roman Church.” Hudson sharply notes how US sanctions are the modern equivalent of excommunication.

Arguably there are Top Two dates in the whole process.

The first one would be the Third Ecumenical Council of 435: this is when only Rome (italics mine) was attributed universal authority (italics mine). Alexandria and Antioch, for instance, were limited to regional authority within the Roman Empire.

The other top date is 1054 – when Rome and Constantinople split for good. That is, the Roman Catholic Church split from Orthodoxy, which leads us to Russia, and Moscow as The Third Rome – and the centuries-old animosity of “the West” against Russia.

A State of Martial Law

Professor Hudson then delves on the trip by “Liver Sausage” Chancellor Scholz’s delegation to China this week to “demand that it dismantle its public sector and stops subsidizing its economy, or else Germany and Europe will impose sanctions on trade with China.”

Well, in fact this happens to be just childish wishful thinking, expressed by the German Council on Foreign Relations in a piece published on the Financial Times (the Japanese-owned platform in the City of London). The Council, as correctly described by Hudson, is “the neoliberal ‘libertarian’ arm of NATO demanding German de-industrialization and dependency” on the US.

So the FT, predictably, is printing NATO wet dreams.

Context is essential. German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in a keynote speech at Bellevue Castle, has all but admitted that Berlin is broke: “An era of headwinds is beginning for Germany – difficult, difficult years are coming for us. Germany is in the deepest crisis since reunification.”

Yet schizophrenia, once again, reigns supreme, as Steinmeier, after a ridiculous stunt in Kiev – complete with posing as a unwitting actor huddled in a bunker – announced an extra handout: two more MARS multiple rocket launchers and four Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzers to be delivered to the Ukrainians.

So even if the “world” economy – actually the EU – is so fragilized that member-states cannot help Kiev anymore without harming their own populations, and the EU is on the verge of a catastrophic energy crisis, fighting for “our values” in Country 404 trumps it all.

The Big Picture context is also key. Andrea Zhok, Professor of Ethical Philosophy at the University of Milan, has taken Giorgio Agamben’s “State of Exception” concept to new heights.

Zhok proposes that the zombified collective West is now completely subjugated to a “State of Martial Law” – where a Forever War ethos is the ultimate priority for rarified global elites.

Every other variable – from trans-humanism to depopulation and even cancel culture – is subordinated to the State of Martial Law, and is basically inessential. The only thing that matters is exercising absolute, raw control.

Berlin – Moscow – Beijing

Solid German business sources completely contradict the “message” delivered by the German Council on Foreign Relations on the trip to China.

According to these sources, the Scholz caravan went to Beijing to essentially lay down the preparatory steps for working out a peace deal with Russia, with China as privileged messenger.

This is – literally – as explosive, geopolitically and geoeconomically, as it gets. As I pointed out in one of my previous columns, Berlin and Moscow were keeping a secret communication back channel – via business interlocutors – right to the minute the usual suspects, in desperation, decided to blow up the Nord Streams.

Cue to the now notorious SMS from Liz Truss’s iPhone to Little Tony Blinken, one minute after the explosions: “It’s done.”

There’s more: the Scholz caravan may be trying to start a long and convoluted process of eventually replacing the US with China as a key ally. One should never forget that the top BRI trade/connectivity terminal in the EU is Germany (the Ruhr valley).

According to one of the sources, “if this effort is successful, then Germany, China and Russia can ally themselves together and drive the US out of Europe.”

Another source provided the cherry on the cake:

“Olaf Scholz is being accompanied on this trip by German industrialists who actually control Germany and are not going to sit back watching themselves being destroyed.”

Moscow knows very well what the imperial aim is when it comes to the EU reduced to the role of totally dominated – and deindustrialized – vassal, exercising zero sovereignty. The back channels after all are not lying in tatters on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Additionally, China has not provided any hint that its massive trade with Germany and the EU is about to vanish.

Scholz himself, one day before his caravan hit Beijing, stressed to Chinese media that Germany has no intention of decoupling from China, and there’s nothing to justify “the calls by some to isolate China.”

In parallel, Xi Jinping and the new Politburo are very much aware of the Kremlin position, reiterated again and again: we always remain open for negotiations, as long as Washington finally decides to talk about the end of unlimited NATO expansion drenched in Russophobia.

So to negotiate means the Empire signing on the dotted line of the document it has received from Moscow on December 1st, 2021, focused on “indivisibility of security”. Otherwise there’s nothing to negotiate.

And when we have Pentagon lobbyist Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin advising the Ukrainians on the record to advance on Kherson, it’s even more crystal clear there’s nothing to negotiate.

So could this all be the foundation stone of the Berlin-Moscow-Beijing trans-Eurasia geopolitical/geoeconomic corridor? That will mean Bye Bye Empire. Once again: it ain’t over till the fat lady goes Gotterdammerung.

The End Of The Retail Industry As We Know It Today

Stores With Boarded Up Windows Unsplash 768x512 1
American Stores With Boarded Up Windows

Will this be the last “somewhat normal” holiday season for U.S. retailers?  Normally, the holiday season is the most profitable time of the year for our retailers, but it has become clear that holiday spending is going to be way down in 2022.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of long-term trends that won’t be going away any time soon that are squeezing the life out of the industry from both sides.  If those long-term trends cannot be reversed, we will soon see a lot more decaying buildings with boarded up windows where thriving retail establishments once existed.  The health of the retail industry is critical to the health of the overall U.S. economy, and right now the outlook for the future of the industry is not good.

Earlier today, I came across a brand new survey that discovered that more than a third of all Americans “plan to spend less on holiday shopping in 2022”

As inflation forces consumers to spend more on gas and groceries, about 1 in 3 Americans (34%) plan to spend less on holiday shopping in 2022 than they did last year, according to a new Clever Real Estate poll of 1,000 Americans.

Retailers have taken notice, hosting holiday sales earlier than normal and ratcheting up discounts to move merchandise. Stores want to draw attention to deals now before Americans decide to cut back further on nonessential spending — especially when 58% of the country already reports feeling worried about finances.

This is yet another sign that we are heading into a very serious economic slowdown, and it is extremely troubling news for our major retailers.

In fact, Target is publicly admitting that it has been forced to “lower its expectations” as we head into the holiday season…

Target’s profit fell by around 50% in its fiscal third quarter as it cleared through unwanted inventory and sales slowed heading into the holidays, prompting the company to lower its expectations for retailers’ most important time of year.

If all the industry was facing was a tough year or two, most retailers could survive that.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of long-term trends that are currently plaguing the industry that aren’t going to go away for the foreseeable future.

First of all, we are witnessing a tsunami of retail theft that just keeps getting worse year after year.

If you can believe it, Target just admitted that theft from their stores will “reduce our gross margin by more than $600 million for the full year”

The discount retailer told reporters on a call to discuss its third quarter earnings results that inventory shrinkage — or the disappearance of merchandise — has reduced its gross profit margin by $400 million so far in 2022 compared to 2021.

“At Target, year-to-date, incremental shortage has already reduced our gross margin by more than $400 million vs. last year,” Target CFO Michael Fiddelke said on the earnings call, “and we expect it will reduce our gross margin by more than $600 million for the full year.”

We aren’t just talking about somebody stealing a few candy bars.

600 million dollars is an enormous amount of money.

And a spokesperson for Target is attributing the bulk of the losses to “organized retail crime”

A Target spokesperson told Yahoo Finance via email after the call the shrinkage was mostly specifically attributed to “organized retail crime.”

At this point, organized retail crime has become a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States.

Highly sophisticated gangs of thieves are robbing our retailers blind all over the country, and things are particularly bad in states such as California where penalties for shoplifting are extremely soft…

This isn’t just a problem at big-box retailers, either. The California Retailers Association has decried the rampant theft, which is hurting Golden State businesses small and large. Theft has gotten so bad in some parts of San Francisco that it is beyond belief.

“I’m new to San Francisco,” Times journalist Thomas Fuller told a grocery store clerk shortly after moving to the city. “Is it optional to pay for things here?” 

It sounds like an absurd thing to ask, but Fuller explains that he was genuinely forced to wonder what was going on after he witnessed people walk into Walgreens and Safeway, grab stuff, and walk out.

Shoplifting is a crime against all of us, because more of our favorite stores are being forced to shut down with each passing day.

Unfortunately, there is not an easy solution to this crisis.  The moral foundation of our society is steadily rotting away all around us, and that means that even more young people are likely to pick organized retail crime as a “career choice” in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, the stunning decline of the middle class is also a trend that is really hurting our retailers.

As I detailed in a previous article, half of all workers in the United States made less than $3,133 a month last year.

Needless to say, you can’t live a middle class lifestyle in America today on just $3,133 a month.

More people are falling out of the middle class each month, and one recent survey found that close to two-thirds of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck

According to a LendingClub survey, the number of Americans living paycheck to paycheck is nearing record levels.

As of September, 63% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck. That’s just one percentage point below the record high of 64% last spring. To put it into perspective, the number of people feeling this kind of strain a year ago was around 57%.

Once upon a time, most Americans had at least some discretionary income to spend, and life was good for our major retailers.

But now all of that has changed.

On top of everything else, a major economic slowdown is staring us in the face, and prominent companies all over the nation are now laying off workers.

Sadly, it appears that list will soon include Disney

The company that once defined family entertainment is going from media giant to epic failure, suffering over $1.4 billion in streaming losses and a stock drop of around 39% for the year. And, it would appear that these financial declines are inevitably leading to employee layoffs.

Disney has put a freeze on hiring, it is limited employee travel and is also reviewing workers for efficiency with plans to introduce cuts as a means to make the company “more nimble.”

We live in such troubled times, and things are only going to get more difficult in 2023 and beyond.

So I would encourage you to enjoy your favorite retail stores while you still can.

Because as conditions continue to get even harsher for our retailers, many of them will soon be forced to close their doors for the last time.

Did you just wake up, Mr. Rip Van Winkle?

The US has been doing tons to try and “contain” China…

  • spread propaganda rhetoric and disinformation in an attempt to turn public opinion against China
  • interfere in Chinese commerce by banning Huawei and SMIC
  • interfere in Chinese politics using the CIA in Hong Kong and Xinjiang
  • abduct Meng Wanzhou on trumped-up charges, repeating the same thing that happened to Alstom executive, Frederic Pierucci, in 2013
  • apply trade sanctions and tariffs
  • intimidate China with several supercarrier battle groups operating off China’s coast

Unfortunately for the US, none of these tactics are working. So what is America’s next step? All-out war?

TWITTER Locks-Out all Employees; Suspends Access Cards until at least Monday

The radical leftists that infest Twitter as “employees” were locked-out of all company buildings around 7:30 PM last night, and will remain locked-out until Monday.  Concerns about employee sabotage over job cuts apparently was the motivating factor in taking this lock-out step.

Ah, it seems that it’s time for “clean up” of the sludge that inhabits the leadership and functional positions in the West…

Speaking about clean-up.

So a war-crime is committed by Ukrainian Nazi’s against Russia. American statements are all “Russia is evil. Every justification is acceptable.” so what does Russia do?

I’ll vote for China.

I have lived in China for a few years, and never drove, but took taxis and cars that had drivers, not only because it is not so easy for a foreigner to get permission to drive in China, but also because the dynamics of driving in China are very hard to get your head around if you aren’t Chinese.

The main thing to understand is the general, Chinese approach to negotiation. If you have been to China, or met Chinese people, you will have observed that it is different from the way of us westerners.

Let’s say the situation is one where two strangers walk towards each other on a sidewalk:

  • in a western country, one of the two pedestrians would be the first to slightly change course, so as to permit both to pass by each other with ease;
  • in China, it works like this: one pedestrian slightly changes course, which will cause the other pedestrian to also change to the same side; since this aggravates the situation, the second pedestrian will then quickly make a maneuver that accommodates the first pedestrian’s space requirements.

So you get a lot of situations, also in traffic, that feel like the other driver is actually going for you, when in fact, they are doing it to acknowledge you, followed by an overly pronounced swerve to give you space.

As weird as that sounds, it has to do with politeness, and being courteous enough to give people options.

For me, as a westerner, it just looks downright confrontational at first and suicidal directly thereafter, but there you go. Reflexes can’t easily be re-trained.

And then, you get a whole lot of other things that just don’t work, mentally, for guys like me:

  • double lane hogging; if you aren’t certain where to go, try to occupy as many lanes at the same time as you can so as to have as many options as you may need; you will see cars driving on the markings, solidly;
  • high intensity crawling; every now and then, in the middle of a twelve lane, Shanghai freeway, there is that Porsche Cayenne, lugging along at 3 km/h, with a driver clenching the wheel in a posture of absolute fixation on something nobody else can see.
  • stopping for no reason; many Chinese drivers drive as if they were walking through a supermarket. “Oh, look, almond milk! Shall we stop and get some?” And they will just stop, anywhere, without recognisable reason. I would probably rear-end a car a day.

Even sitting in a taxi as a passenger who participates visually is an exercise in keeping your stomach from churning, because there simply never is any steady flow of traffic. The dynamics of driving in China seem erratic and slow beyond comprehension.

The only place in China I ever enjoyed driving in was this one:

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main qimg 168dd26d272b28671f84383721950b76 lq

U.S. Consumers Are Doing EXACTLY What They Did Just Prior To The Crash Of 2008

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We never seem to learn from our mistakes.  Just before the financial markets crashed and the economy plunged into a horrifying recession in 2008, U.S. consumers went on a debt binge of epic proportions.

Mortgage debt, auto loan debt and credit card debt all skyrocketed, and so when the economy finally crashed all of a sudden there were millions of Americans drowning in bills that they were unable to pay.

Well, now it is happening again.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, during the third quarter of 2022 household debt increased at the fastest pace that we have seen since the first quarter of 2008

Households added $351 billion in overall debt last quarter, taking the total to $16.5 trillion, according to data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Tuesday. That’s an increase of 8.3% from a year earlier, the most since a 9.1% jump in the first quarter of 2008. The debt figures aren’t adjusted for inflation.

This is a recipe for disaster.

As I have been warning my readers for years, you want to have as little debt as possible when economic conditions get really bad.

Unfortunately, even though everyone can see that economic activity is slowing down all around us, consumers are piling on debt at a stunning pace.

In particular, mortgage debt and credit card debt both really soared during the third quarter

Most of the latest increase came in mortgage debt, by far the biggest liability on household balance sheets. It rose by $282 billion in the third quarter, and by $1 trillion from a year earlier, to $11.7 trillion. Mortgage and home-equity debt combined are up by $2 trillion since the pandemic began.

Credit-card debt also increased by the most in 20 years, with balances rising by 15% from a year earlier. The surge comes as the average interest-rates on card borrowing has climbed above 19%, the highest in data going back to the mid-1980s, according to Bankrate.

I really feel bad for those that purchased homes at or near the peak of the market.

So many Americans have overextended themselves to get the homes of their dreams, and as prices plummet in the months ahead millions of them will soon be underwater on their mortgages just like we saw in 2008 and 2009.

Even more troubling is the fact that Americans are racking up such huge credit card balances.

The New York Fed is telling us that there are now 555 million open credit card accounts in this country.

But only 329 million people live here.

That is madness.

Meanwhile, large companies all over the nation are starting to lay off workers.

In fact, we just learned that Amazon will be laying off approximately 10,000 employees

Amazon reportedly plans to lay off 10,000 corporate and technology employees as soon as this week.

The cuts would affect the company’s devices organization, retail division and human resources, people familiar with the matter told the New York Times.

This will be the largest round of layoffs in Amazon’s history, and Jeff Bezos is now giving out advice on how to best deal with the coming economic downturn…

The business leader offered his starkest advice yet on a faltering economy in an exclusive sit-down interview with CNN’s Chloe Melas on Saturday at Bezos’ Washington, DC, home.

Bezos urged people to put off expenditures for big-ticket items such as new cars, televisions and appliances, noting that delaying big purchases is the surest way to keep some “dry powder” in the event of a prolonged economic downturn. Meanwhile, small businesses may want to avoid making large capital expenditures or acquisitions during this uncertain time, Bezos added.

He also told CNN that we should “hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”.

Wow.

How many times have I said the same thing to my readers?

When Jeff Bezos starts sounding just like The Economic Collapse Blog, that is definitely a sign that it is late in the game.

Other big tech companies have been conducting mass layoffs as well, and that list includes Facebook and Twitter

Last week Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, revealed that it will cut 13 per cent of its workforce, while Elon Musk axed half of Twitter’s employees following his successful takeover of the social media site.

The announcements are the latest in a slew of job cuts across Silicon Valley, as experts warn the tech industry is facing a ‘triple whammy’ of a slowing economy, inflation and an end to pandemic-driven growth.

If the Federal Reserve does not start reducing interest rates, we are going to see a tsunami of layoffs in 2023.

And if the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, it is likely that we could eventually see millions of Americans lose their jobs.

Aggressively hiking rates at the beginning of a major economic slowdown is suicidal.

But the Federal Reserve is doing it anyway.

On the consumer level, piling up debt just as economic conditions are starting to really deteriorate is a really foolish thing for Americans to be doing.

Unfortunately, we just witnessed the greatest consumer debt binge since 2008 during the third quarter.

As I stated at the beginning of this article, we never seem to learn from our mistakes.

The times that we are moving into are going to be incredibly challenging, but reducing the amount of debt that you are carrying will make things a bit easier.

Sadly, most people out there aren’t going to take that advice.

Instead, most people are going to continue partying even as the system falls apart all around them.

In 2008 and 2009, countless Americans that had been living comfortable middle class lifestyles ended up losing almost everything.

You don’t want to be one of those victims this time around.

We are going to see so much financial pain in 2023, but much of it could have been avoided if people would have made much different decisions ahead of time.

There was a real hero in Hong Kong’s not-so-distant past.

Meet Joanna Tse Yuen-Man.

main qimg ed34b774dc29dc141910b7778a4391bc pjlq
main qimg ed34b774dc29dc141910b7778a4391bc pjlq

Born on 31st March 1968, Tse grew up in a 200 square foot apartment in Kwai Chung, part of a working-class family of “everyday Hong Kongers” — an everyday person who stood out because of her determination to become a doctor to help people, and because of the tragedy that marked her life, losing her husband to leukemia in 2002, just two years after they married.

But then, in March 2003, the SARS epidemic hit Hong Kong. It was devastating. Of the estimated 8,273 cases worldwide, 1,755 (21%) were identified in the city. Hong Kong also saw one of the highest mortality rates, accounting for 299 (40%) of 775 total deaths. Not only was it deadly, no one at the time understood the disease fully. The medical community had no idea what they were dealing with.

As patients stricken with SARS began flooding the city’s hospitals, doctors divided their teams into ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ teams, where dirty teams were responsible for treating SARS patients in the wards. Tse volunteered to join the dirty team. With her specialist training in respiratory medicine, she felt she should be treating these cases.

After resuscitating a SARS patient who later died from the disease, Tse began to experience symptoms of her own, including high fever. At first, she was optimistic, even assuring her family that she would celebrate her birthday with them after she recovered. But looking at her own lung scans, it was clear she was getting worse.

Joanna Tse died from SARS on 13th May 2003, the first of several medical professionals in Hong Kong to die from the disease.

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main qimg 4465ecf82284935d2ff6f98d33e12f14 lq

Funeral of Dr Joanna Tse Yuen-man in 2003, from South China Morning Post

Joanna Tse is an example of an ordinary, unprivileged person who sought to save others despite the potential cost to herself. As So Wing Yee, a doctor at Prince of Wales Hospital and a friend and classmate of Tse, said:

“She was quietly determined in what she wanted to do. Some people loudly declared they wanted to be heroes. She wasn’t like that.”

What made Dr Tse and other rescuers like her heroic was that they risked their lives and were willing to suffer for it. Joanna Tse knew the dangers of contact with SARS patients, yet she volunteered to work with them anyways without seeking glory or recognition.

Every day and in many walks of life, people go beyond the call of duty. But to go beyond the call of duty in an act that clearly endangers one’s life is an act of heroism.

Joanna Tse and others like her are real Hong Kong heroes.

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main qimg 784c5d001698d95b8803a344188055f3 lq

A statue of Joanna Tse in the Tai Chi Gardens at Hong Kong Park

Chicken Ring

This recipe is from an old Pampered Chef cookbook. Simple and something my kids will eat. Freezes well.

chicken ring from pampered chef
chicken ring from pampered chef

Ingredients

Directions

  • Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
  • Cook chicken in pressure cooker. Once it starts to giggle slowly turn heat on low and allow to giggle for 20 minutes.
  • While chicken is cooking, chop broccoli, onion, and parsley and combine in bowl.
  • Cook bacon and allow to cool, then crumble and add to veggie mixture.
  • Add cheese, mayo, mustard, and lemon juice to bowl and mix well.
  • Once chicken is done, shred and stir into your veggie mix. Set aside.
  • On a cookie sheet or large stone pan, unroll crescent rolls and mash together seams (join the 2 packets at the ends).
  • Spoon mixture down the center third of the pastry, cut horizontal strips on both sides and braid them over the mixture.
  • Separate egg, only keeping the white and brush over the top of braid.
  • Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until golden brown.

2022 11 19 09 57
2022 11 19 09 57

Ukraine – Switching The Lights Off

2022 11 19 06 48
2022 11 19 06 48

The careful destruction of energy systems in Ukraine continues.

From today’s clobber list as provided by the Defense Ministry of Russia:

On 17 November, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation launched a concentrated strike, using high-precision long-range air-, sea- and ground-based weapons, at the facilities of military control, defence industry, as well as related fuel and energy infrastructure of Ukraine.

The goals of the strike have been reached.

All the missiles have accurately stricken the assigned facilities.

I have no idea if the last line is true but it does not matter much.

The targeting of 330 kilovolt transformers in various switching stations has cut some 50% of the distribution capability of Ukraine’s electricity network. These transformers weigh up to 200 tons. There are no replacements. You do not buy them at the next corner but will have to order them with years of lead time. As far as I can tell Russia is currently the only producer of transformers of that type.

Isn’t it a war crime to destroy the infrastructure that supplies civilians?

It depends. If the infrastructure is used exclusively for civilian purpose the destruction is illegal. But the electricity and transport infrastructure in Ukraine is used for civilian AND military purposes. In a recent Politico piece Ukrainian officials are even confirming that:

Ukraine tells allies it may not be able to recover from more Russian attacks on energy systems:

An unreliable energy sector could have deadly consequences, Ukrainian officials say. In recent conversations, they’ve added that it could halt food production and transport operations — critical services needed to support military operations.

The clobber list also includes this curious item:

The strike has resulted in the neutralisation of the production capacities for nuclear weaponry.

I wonder where and what that has been:

One depot of artillery armament, delivered by western countries and prepared for being sent to troops, has been destroyed.

The redeployment of the reserve forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), and the delivery of foreign armament to operations areas have been frustrated.

The last sentence describes the real purpose of the attacks on the energy systems.

The lack of energy is degrading the railway network that brings weapons from the west to the eastern front. It makes redeployment of units from one front section to another very difficult and time consuming. It will give the Russian forces the advantage when they change the Schwerpunkt of their attacks from one corner of the frontline to another.

Another effect of the strikes on the electricity systems and the blackouts in the big cities that follow them is a renewed stream of refugees that will want reach western Europe. It will over time change the public opinion and the political priorities of those countries. If they fail to end the war they will have to carry the burden.

Posted by b at 14:37 UTC

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Instant Pot Bolognese Sauce

Just add pasta for a quick comforting dish.

2022 11 19 10 00
2022 11 19 10 00

Ingredients

Directions

  • Preheat Instant Pot to saute setting. Add olive oil and butter and swirl to coat. Add pancetta, pork, and beef. Season generously with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until liquid evaporates from meat and begins to brown, about 10 minutes. Add onion, carrots, celery, garlic, tomato paste, fennel seeds, red pepper flakes, and thyme sprigs. Season with salt and pepper and cook until softened, about 5 minutes.
  • Add red wine and cook until reduced by three-fourths, about 6 minutes. Add chopped tomatoes, stir to combine, and season to taste with salt and pepper before topping with lid. Set pressure to high and cook 35 minutes before releasing pressure naturally for 10 minutes. Release pressure automatically. Open lid and return Instant Pot to saute setting. Add heavy cream and stir to combine. Cook until slightly reduced, stirring frequently, about 15 minutes more. Season to taste with salt and pepper and use as desired.

2022 11 19 10 03
2022 11 19 10 03

We Are Being Warned That Meat Prices Could Go Up Another 40 Or 50 Percent

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If you have been to the grocery store lately, you have probably noticed that meat prices have gone up dramatically.  Unfortunately, we are being warned that things could get much worse in 2023.  All over the northern hemisphere, cattle ranchers are dramatically reducing the size of their herds due to relentless drought conditions.  Meanwhile, the bird flu has already resulted in the deaths of nearly 100 million chickens and turkeys in the United States and Europe.  On top of everything else, progressive politicians throughout the western world continue to be absolutely determined to get us all to start eating less meat.

So prices are likely to continue to go up for the foreseeable future, and supplies are starting to get really tight.

In fact, a meat industry insider in Germany is actually claiming that several months from now “we will have nothing on the shelves”

The German meat industry has warned of impending supply bottlenecks, especially concerning pork, and a board member is putting at least some of the blame on Germany’s current left-wing government, which is well-known for its attacks on meat and efforts to transition to a plant-based food supply.

“In four, five, six months, we will have nothing on the shelves,” predicts Hubert Kelliger, head of group sales at the large butcher Westfleisch and also a member of the board of the Meat Industry Association (VDF), according to Die Welt.

And Kelliger is also warning that whatever is on the shelves in 2023 is likely to cost “20, 30, or 40 percent” more than it does today…

“Whether that will be 20, 30, or 40 percent cannot be quantified today — but it will increase significantly again,” said Kelliger. Such an increase would already be on the back of already substantial increases. Germany has experienced an overall 40 percent increase in food prices this year, including a 73 percent increase in potatoes. Further price jumps ahead could be disastrous for German consumers.

Needless to say, we have been seeing similar price increases here in the United States.

The fact that so many U.S. ranchers have been slaughtering cattle due to the drought has helped to stabilize prices somewhat in the short-term, but as the size of the national cattle herd continues to decline the long-term outlook is not good at all.

In fact, some beef producers in Oklahoma are actually claiming that the price of ground beef could eventually go up to 50 dollars a pound

Thanks to the unending economic symptoms of the pandemic and 2022’s inflation double-punch, average beef prices are currently about twice what they were in 2019. Add in the deepening widespread drought, a shortage of hay and feed, skyrocketing prices, transport costs, and various other metrics, some Southwest Oklahoma beef producers suggest cheap ground beef could eventually top $50 per pound.

Even worse, while beef is the topic because Oklahoma is a beef-producing state, the same trend is happening to other raised proteins at the moment too. The answer won’t be “We’ll just switch to chicken.” Those prices are steadily climbing too, and let’s not get depressed together thinking about bacon and pork loin.

Ground beef certainly won’t be that expensive next week or next month.

But someday it will happen.

If you love ground beef, what will you do then?

Thankfully, the elite have already been working on a solution for you.

In fact, just this week the FDA announced that one form of “lab-grown meat” is now ready for public consumption…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first time cleared a meat product grown from animal cells for human consumption, the agency announced on Wednesday.

UPSIDE Foods, a company that makes cell-cultured chicken by harvesting cells from live animals and using the cells to grow meat in stainless-steel tanks, will be able to bring its products to market once it has been inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), said a release from the FDA.

Doesn’t that sound yummy?

And as I have covered previously, other companies are working on developing something called “beetle burgers”.

This is the future that the elite have planned for us, but the truth is that they aren’t going to be able to rescue us from the extreme global food shortages that are coming.

The UN is telling us that eight billion people live on the planet now.

As global food supplies get tighter and tighter, we aren’t going to be able to feed them all, and food prices will rise to levels that most people could not even imagine right now.

So Cambodia has done a deal with China to refurbish the Ream naval base. In response the US sanctioned the two top Cambodian guys there.

Consequently Cambodia banned all US visits.

The upshot is that because of their [1] lack of care /concern and respect in the first place and [2] their belligerent tone once things got away from them, the US has been kicked out of Cambodia and China is flat out building a navy presence there.

Which is pretty significant when you look at a map.

I just have to wonder how the US let Cambodia get away from them so easily. Having a quick read of the US government website they spent most of their time calling Cambodia out for human rights stuff and generally being a dick to the Cambodians.

Now it’s blown up in their face and PLAN is in the Gulf of Thailand and also with an emerging BRI deal to put a channel across Thailand to get access to the Bay of Bengal.

Go America…

Interesting speculative question. I don’t believe so. Unlike USA, China is not obsessed with global power. It has not exhibited any global ambition in over 4,000 years as the world’s oldest continuous civilization state.

China has always been a regional actor and an inward-looking nation. Even when it becomes the dominant power later this century, it won’t be by design. China is simply growing organically, thanks to an enormous population and excellent governance.

In other words, China will become the world’s largest economic and technological powerhouse by virtue of natural development. All nations wish to do this. It has nothing to do with imperialism.

And should China also have the world’s largest military, it will be for defence. Defending its territory. Defending its trade routes. Defending its economic interests situated with trading partners. China will NOT serve as the world police.

China will NOT export its political system by overthrowing foreign regimes and installing alternative governments.

China will NOT interfere in the domestic matters of other countries. Unless invited by the UN for humanitarian action (China has a significant peacekeeping force with the UN).

If China slips from first place, it won’t be a big deal. China doesn’t care. Its priority is always the welfare of its people.

Head’s up

2022 11 19 10 43
2022 11 19 10 43

FOURTH TURNING WINTER OF DEATH

From HERE

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. 

The sky darkens. 

Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. 

One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. 

Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. 

“Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years... 

Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. 

Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. 

History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” 

– Strauss & Howe The Fourth Turning

It was less than a year ago on December 16, 2021 when our dementia patient in chief was instructed by his handlers to lie, obfuscate and demonize critical thinking Americans who refused to become victims of the Big Pharma, Fauci promoted, untested, unsafe, ineffective gene therapy by declaring “we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated — for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm”.

Biden’s vaccine mandates were overturned in the courts.

The unvaccinated did not die from Covid.

Very few people died from Covid. Some really old and infirm people on death’s doorstep died with Covid. Some very unhealthy obese people died with Covid. But even 95% of the old and unhealthy survived Covid.

2022 11 19 10 17
2022 11 19 10 17

Virtually no one under 70 years old died from Covid. Biden was lying. Fauci was lying. Walensky was lying. Gates was lying. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was lying. Their paid-off medical industry was lying. Their highly compensated corporate legacy media talking heads were lying. Captured politicians were lying. The entire Covid scheme was nothing more than weaponizing the annual flu through fear propaganda, a billion-dollar advertising campaign, and enacting totalitarian measures on the world as part of the Great Reset Build Back Better New World Order plot orchestrated by our globalist oligarch overlords.

Every Fourth Turning has its own dynamics, chaotic current, political nuances, general confusion, antagonists, and event driven upheaval. We are currently in the 14th year of this Crisis and Biden’s predicted winter of death for the unvaccinated didn’t happen and death and illness is striking down the vaxxed in far greater numbers than the unvaxxed.

The perpetrators of the pandemic exercise to see how far people of the developed world could be pushed, abused, and turned into subservient vassals of the state are now demanding amnesty for themselves and their co-conspirators, as the consequences of their murderous escapades become impossible to cover-up and conceal.

Real data from the real world, not from their skewed manipulated models, is piling up, and despite the media’s tireless efforts to ignore, censor, and misinform, the truth is seeping out through the diligent digging of those who were right from the very outset of this scamdemic.

The complete and utter failure of these so-called vaccines has been evident from the very outset, as infections, hospitalizations, and deaths increased after the vaccines were rolled out as the savior of all mankind. The vaccines performed so atrociously the CDC had to change the definition of vaccine in order to obscure what a failure they proved to be. The narrative police can obfuscate and attempt to revise history, but the lies are all documented and available for anyone to see and hear.

Fauci said masks don’t work. Fauci said the vaccines would keep you from getting Covid, transmitting Covid, being hospitalized from Covid, and dying from Covid. Walensky, Birx, Biden, Trump, and a slew of other “medical experts”, Hollywood stars, famous athletes, journalists, and Sesame Street characters all mouthed the same “safe and effective” tripe non-stop about a vaccine that is provably not safe and not effective. The few brave medical professionals who dared question the narrative and provide alternative treatments (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) were censored, scorned, ridiculed, banned, de-licensed, de-platformed, and had their careers destroyed.

2022 11 19 10 20
2022 11 19 10 20

The initial anecdotal evidence about the vaccines being useless in protecting anyone from the flu is now backed up by hundreds of real scientific studies (not fake studies bought by Big Pharma) showing boosters having negative efficacy as these multiple shots degrade people’s immune systems, just as doctors like Korry, Malone, McCullough, Vanden Bosche, Cole, Zelenko, and many others warned would happen.

Antibody-dependent Enhancement (ADE) is now happening in millions of those who have gotten vaxxed.

Young people dying suddenly from heart attacks, myocarditis now becoming common in young men, athletes collapsing, cancer being activated by the spike protein, and the all-cause mortality skyrocketing across the world can no longer be denied.

Last week Service Corp Intl., the largest funeral home operator in the world, reported earnings far higher than they expected because non-Covid deaths were much higher than expected.

The CEO said they expected 1% growth over the 3rd quarter of 2019 and ended up with 15% unexpected growth.

Lincoln National, one of the largest life insurance companies in the country, reported terrible financial results as life insurance payouts on those between 18 and 64 years old soared 163%.

Both companies said these were virtually all non-Covid deaths.

2022 11 19 10 21
2022 11 19 10 21

As these horrific trends continue, the true impact of these Big Pharma multi-billion-dollar profit potions of death will become unequivocally apparent.

Biden will get his winter of death, but it won’t be the unvaxxed dying.

With 250 million Americans and another 5 billion people around the world having their immune systems weakened by the Big Pharma gene altering money makers, the coming winter months will be problematic for millions of the duped.

Expect hospitals to be overwhelmed and the media to remain silent about the true cause.

As more children start dying suddenly, retribution against the murderers Fauci, Bourla, Walensky and a passel of pernicious pandemic protagonists will be on the minds of those who have lost children, spouses, and other loved ones.

Anyone expecting the domestic or international environment to improve in the near future are foolish and living in a state of denial.

Fourth Turnings have ebbs and flows, but the intensity never diminishes until distinct winners and losers are patently unmistakable.

Think Yorktown, Appomattox, and Hiroshima. All three previous American Fourth Turnings ended after all-out war, bloody conflict, and death on a grand scale. There is absolutely nothing going on the world today indicating we are not headed for a similar bloody outcome of death on an epic magnitude.

Biden’s handlers have him conducting a proxy war in the Ukraine against Russia, blowing up their pipelines, bridges, and war ships. Funneling $80 billion, with more on the way, to Zelensky and the most corrupt country on the planet is an act of war.

At the same time, Biden’s amateur hour advisors continue to instigate China by actively supporting Taiwan independence. Alienating countries constituting half the population of earth is a recipe for global conflict.

UKRAINE THE UNITED STATES ARE NOW FIGHTING A PROXY WAR WITH RUSSIA 1
UKRAINE THE UNITED STATES ARE NOW FIGHTING A PROXY WAR WITH RUSSIA 1

The blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline by the U.S. and their U.K. co-conspirators has sentenced Germany to a winter of deprivation and desperation.

German citizens will die this winter due to the actions of an American Empire thrashing about in its final death throes of debt, deception, degradation, and denial.

This man made global catastrophe of supply chain calamity, raging inflation, energy crisis, and food shortages has been purposefully initiated by malevolent men who treat mankind like pawns in their game of global chess.

The global reset is real.

Schwab, Gates, Soros, Obama, Biden, Clinton, and their cohort of Davos billionaires, Wall Street shysters, and satanic legions will stop at nothing to implement their agenda of turning the world into a techno-gulag where they control the population through social credit systems, human microchips, 24/7 surveillance, and central bank digital currencies.

The peasants will own nothing and eat bugs, told they are happy under threat of the truncheon, while their overlords fly private jets, eat, and live like kings, owning everything and gleeful at their ability to control the world through psychological and technological manipulation of the willfully ignorant masses.

Domestically, the U.S. is contending with raging inflation, particularly in food, energy, shelter, and medical care – just the things needed by the middle class and poor to live their lives.

The reported inflation of 7% to 8% is a lie and everyone knows it, even if they are unaware of the Fed/BLS bullshit “adjustments” which purposely reduce the true level of inflation by 5% to 8%.

The manipulation of the data is to hide the truth from the masses.

Inflation is actually higher than it was in the early 1980’s when Volker needed to jack the Fed Funds rate to 18% to tame the raging inflation.

Tough guy Powell, described by the feckless mainstream media as the new Volker, currently has the Fed Funds rate at 3.75%.

Hysterically, the corrupt politicians and Wall Street cabal are demanding a halt to these “devastating” interest rate increases. And their demands will be met in 2023.

2022 11 19 10 25
2022 11 19 10 25

Our empire of debt ($31.2 trillion and rising by $6 billion per day) can’t handle much higher rates. Interest on the national debt was $399 billion in FY22, up from under $300 billion in FY16, and is now on track to exceed $700 billion in FY24. Powell and the Fed are now trapped by their own reckless kowtowing to their Wall Street owners and spineless political hack swamp rats in D.C.

They unleashed this inflationary wave across the globe purposely, while Biden and his handlers have exacerbated it with their green new deal and sanctions on Russian fuel, food, and fertilizer, leading to a looming global disaster on our doorstep. When people in 3rd world countries can’t afford food, they storm presidential palaces and hang their leaders. Revolutions have already begun across the world.

The middle and lower classes in the U.S. have already depleted their savings and maxed out their credit cards. They now need to choose whether they can eat, pay the utility bill, or pay for their prescription. Many have lived above their means, with McMansions “bought” with a $600,000 mortgage, $70,000 vehicles leased or financed over 7 years, and luxurious vacations on one of their 10 credit cards.

2022 11 19 10 27
2022 11 19 10 27

The poor didn’t benefit from the good times, but they are bearing the major burden of the food and energy inflation.

The chickens have now come home to roost, and the wave of foreclosures, auto repossessions and credit card defaults will begin in earnest this winter as corporations across the land begin laying off millions.

The downward spiral has begun and can’t be reversed.

The mid-term elections, which will go on until the democrat party of chaos is able to manufacture enough votes to retain the House, is being used as another psy-op to demoralize the masses, produce more civil strife and chaos, while ensuring the continued destruction of our society by the left-wing radicals relentlessly inflicting their lawless, immoral, communistic agenda upon a nation too cowardly, indoctrinated, and apathetic to fight back.

Throughout history the president’s party ALWAYS loses a significant number of seats in the House and Senate during midterm elections.

The Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and Trump all lost a significant number of seats after their 1st two years in office.

We have a dementia patient in chief with an approval rating below 40%, the worst inflation in 40 years, 75% of the country saying the country is on the wrong track, and politicians, generals, and media talking heads blustering about nuclear war, but we are being told by our overlords Biden’s party supposedly has picked up a seat in the Senate and has broken even in the House.

It’s so laughable only a liberal arts graduate or MSNBC bimbo talking head would believe it.

Anyone who argues these results were legitimately achieved are either brainless twits or part of the election stealing scheme.

The polls, which always skew positively for democrats, showed republicans leading in all the major swing state races.

Overall, the republicans received 7% more national votes than they did in 2020, but somehow managed to lose every contested Senate seat and squander most of the contested House seats in swing states.

They are trying to convince me Americans voted for inflation, recession, war, CRT in our schools, gender fluidity, mutilating children, pedophilia, open borders, masking and vaxxing children, lockdowns, mandates, dead guys, and brain damaged commies. That is not what happened.

They just used the exact same methods in the key races in the key states they used in 2020 to steal the elections. Why change if it works?

In the State of Florida, which implemented rational voting procedures and limited mail-in ballots, Ron DeSantis, who won in 2018 by 32,000 votes over a black, criminal, drug addict, deviant, won re-election by 1.5 million votes last week.

After two years of torturing our children, encouraging murder, rape, robbery, and destroying our economy, the Democrats should have experienced massive losses in the mid-terms.

In my home state of Pennsylvania, the polls showed a clearly brain damaged stroke victim, John Fetterman, losing by 2% to TV doctor Oz after a disastrous debate performance that proved beyond a doubt the guy should be in a medical facility and not in the Senate.

He cannot string ten words together in a coherent sentence.

In addition to his brain damage, he ran on freeing more criminals onto the killing field streets of Philly, eliminating fracking and coal jobs, and aborting babies up until the time of birth. Somehow this freak ended up winning by 4%, according to those who control the vote count.

2022 11 19 10 31
2022 11 19 10 31

The mail-in ballot scam used in 2020 due to the “Covid emergency” was kept in place, even though there is no emergency, because that is how Democrats can guarantee victory forever.

Over 1.2 million mail-in ballots were cast, with almost 70% from democrats and 20% from republicans.

It’s a two-pronged strategy.

In the corrupt urban ghettos of Philly and Pittsburgh, the mail-in votes are “harvested” by Soros paid “activists” who fill out the ballots on behalf of the busy crackheads and fentanyl fiends and do mass dumps of ballots into conveniently located lockboxes.

Who knows how many vagrants, illegals, and ne’er-do-wells are paid and transported to voting sites in Philly by the democrat machine, in addition to the dead voters casting ballots.

In the suburbs you have the left-wing soccer moms and cat ladies filling out the mail-in ballots for their basement dwelling prodigy too busy gaming and watching porn to actually vote.

Fetterman won this mail-in vote by over 500,000 and won the overall election by 234,000. This same formula was duplicated in Georgia, Arizona, New York, Nevada, California, and other Democrat run states.

This is why they are desperate to keep Kari Lake from winning in Arizona, as she will dismantle their cheating operation.

Those in control of this entire rigged system, including republicans like McConnell and Graham, don’t want anything to change, as they enrich themselves and their globalist benefactors no matter who is elected/selected.

This country and the world have become nothing more than a skimming operation, based on a Ponzi scheme, with the military as enforcers, media as propagandists, and alphabet agencies as the secret police eliminating dissenters.

All voting “irregularities” will be met with silence by the captured legacy media and all who question the results will be declared crazy conspiracy theorists by the totalitarians committing the atrocities. The truth doesn’t matter, but silence about the truth does.

quote great is truth but still greater from a practical point of view is silence about truth aldous huxley 14 0 082
quote great is truth but still greater from a practical point of view is silence about truth aldous huxley 14 0 082

The globalists calling the shots want you demoralized, indebted, fearful, freezing, starving, and angry at each other, as they methodically implement their Great Reset agenda without fear of retribution or even comprehension of what their diabolical scheme entails.

The chaos, uncertainty, anger, deviant behavior, and military conflict all dovetail nicely into the waning years of this Fourth Turning.

Domestic conflict which has for the most part played out in the media and political arena thus far, threatens to turn hot, as government agencies and media stoke the flames of discontent, resentment, and rage bubbling just below the surface of our civil society.

There is only so far good men can be pushed before they respond with an unanticipated level of violence against their antagonists. Once this response is triggered a grim determination will engulf the land, as a fight to the finish mentality will have been initiated.

Men who didn’t ask for this fight will be ready to die for their cause.

The debt, civic decay, and global disorder which catalyzed this Fourth Turning in 2008 have only grown larger and more untenable in 2022. The initial volcanic eruption of the Fed/Wall Street induced global financial crisis continues to flow along the predicted channels of distress.

The economic distress is palpable, as raging inflation is destroying the standard of living for most Americans and working people across the globe. Both government and consumer debts are mounting as interest rates are rising. Financial markets have become extremely volatile, with a downward bias.

The 2023 recession will trigger much higher unemployment and crashing stock, real estate, and bond markets.

This economic tsunami will exacerbate the already intense levels of social distress, as unemployed, broke, and angry Americans turn their wrath on the illegal hordes crossing our border and the politicians encouraging this invasion.

Biden’s incessant demagoguery against white MAGA supporters will ultimately achieve the pushback he is instigating, and it won’t be pretty. This absurd woke agenda of glorifying deviancy and abnormality will fall by the wayside as people will be forced to worry about survival as opposed to this trivial nonsense.

The political distress we’ve been experiencing since the 2020 election shows no signs of subsiding. Our governmental institutions have lost all credibility and appearance of serving justice.

The FBI and CIA have become the surveillance state arms of the Democrat party, conducting a coup against a sitting president, and falsely imprisoning protestors, journalists, and dissenters from the approved government narrative.

The stealing of the last two elections has created animosity on a grand scale between opposing political factions on the local, state, and federal level.

Biden has now twice used a bait and switch maneuver of overstepping his authority and the Constitution.

He and his handlers knew a national vaccine mandate was un-Constitutional, but declared it so, and intimidated employers across the country to force a medical procedure on their employees as a requirement of employment.

Many were fired and many more have been injured or killed due to this false mandate. The Courts were always going to overturn this executive order, and the tyrants knew it, but did it anyway.

The latest bait and switch came to fruition on the day after the election. What a coincidence. Biden declared he was writing off $500 billion of student loan debt by transferring the burden from gender studies college graduates to plumbers, landscapers, electricians, truck drivers and other hard-working Americans.

Pelosi is on tape saying Biden didn’t have the authority, but he did it anyway in a blatant illegal manner to curry the votes of the dumb indoctrinated youth.

And it worked. So now that the courts have ruled it un-Constitutional, the dumb remain in debt.

The purposefully instigated feud between Trump and DeSantis is designed to spur further discord in the political arena.

This is being cheered on by the left-wing media as they try to destroy republican chances to win the presidency in 2024.

The real distress in politics is having a bumbling, senile, child sniffing moron as president, cackling clown as vice president, and a cadre of low IQ seditious boobs in positions of power, all on the puppet strings of Obama, Soros, and their traitorous cabal.

If there has ever been a more recklessly irresponsible and incompetent group of dullards in control of a flailing empire, I would love to know about them.

If any group of imbeciles were capable of accidently triggering World War III through sheer hubris, lack of strategic foresight, inability to comprehend the consequences of their actions and sheer madness, it is those currently steering the U.S. Titanic into a global war iceberg of Russia and China.

They seem determined to have the American Empire go out with a bang rather than a whimper.

With all the nuclear posturing, supplying weapons to countries provoking Russia and China, ongoing NATO proxy war with Russia, and the Middle East powder keg poised to explode if Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or Turkey make the wrong move, the threat of a global conflagration has not been higher since World War II.

One misstep by someone could create a cascade of events which could end the world as we know it.

We are all stuck in this Fourth Turning and there is no escape, except through death.

Our society will be reshaped, the death of the existing social order and rebirth of a new social order might be better or worse depending upon the decisions we make as individuals and as a nation.

The outcome is unknown and future uncertain.

All roads appear to be leading to a real winter of death in 2023.

Most of the squalls which will coalesce into a perfect storm of death and destruction over the next few years have been set in motion and nothing any of us can do on an individual basis can reverse the course of these events.

Putting our faith in political figureheads as saviors who will fight our battles is a forlorn hope.

Voting has not and will not change the course we are on, which was charted by decisions and choices made since the start of this century.

Individual and community efforts at preparation for the coming storm and what follows is all we can do at this point.

As Strauss & Howe cogently point out, history offers no guarantees and things could go horribly wrong in a hurry.

Do not be fooled by the narratives being spun by those controlling the media messaging.

The stock market going up, GDP being reported as positive, BLS telling you inflation has dropped all the way to 7.7%, Ukraine is winning, vaccines are safe, and our elections are fair and honest, is nothing more than Bernaysian propaganda designed to control and manipulate you.

There are bad people doing bad things to the people of this world and only good people can defeat them.

2022 11 19 10 36
2022 11 19 10 36

You need to find people you can trust and make plans to help each other through the coming winter of death.

Being a loner during a Fourth Turning is not ideal.

If you can’t raise your own food, befriend a farmer.

Make sure you are sufficiently armed and do not trust anyone from the government or beholden to the government for their living.

Become physically and mentally prepared for what is coming.

Reduce your taxable footprint and help starve the machine.

Keep everything in perspective and decide what is really important.

Biden, Gates, Soros, and Schwab are nothing more than human flesh. They will die and meet their maker, just as we all will. Act as if the decisions and deeds you take in the next few years will determine how your children and their children will view your legacy.

Will you make them proud or ashamed?

The choice is yours.

There is a foreboding chill in the air as the storm clouds gather.

“History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. 

We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. 

Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” 

– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. 

Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” 

– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

 

Xi doesn’t even make eye contact with the Turd. Zero respect for the cockroach.

Big Nothing. Some of us Americans expecting Armageddon following mid terms got stores food fuel generators on ready but nothing. I wish the grand inevitable of whatever would just happen and be done with it!

Some might find today’s speech by Xi Jinping of value since it offers an alternative pathway for the planet.

Nothing newsworthy, however, for BigLie Media, which turned Trudeau into Xi Peng’s victim.

Xi Peng supposedly “humiliated” him when the headline should’ve called out Trudeau for lying again.

Don’t believe me?

Speaking of jokes, I have actually read a joke about the true meaning of western democracy:
Before dying, an American farmer asked his son, "The pigs complain about poor feed, the cows complain about too much work, and the chickens complain that the house is too dirty. What should you do?
The son said: "feed the pigs good fodder, cattle do light work, clean the henhouse."
The farmer shook his head and said, Don't do anything. Give them a vote and let them choose you or your wife rule them, and let them think they're the ones who call the shots in this house."
Better transport routes between Russia and China
Russia and China have opened traffic over the railway bridge across the Amur River....Russia and China have started traffic on the first railway bridge over the Amur River on the Nizhneleninskoye-Tongjiang cross-border section, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) said in a press release on Wednesday.

The bridge opens up a new transport corridor between Russia and China, removing a number of existing infrastructure constraints. The distance for the transportation of goods to the northern provinces of China will be reduced by more than 700 km compared to the existing routes,” RDIF noted.

Its opening will increase the competitiveness of Russian and Chinese companies and ensure a predictable schedule for freight and cargo traffic, affordable raw materials and energy resources, as well as increase the capacity of railway lines between the Russian Federation and China by 1.5 times.

From HERE

The G20’s Balinese geopolitical dance

From

by Pepe Escobar for the Asia Times and the Saker blog, posted by permission

Balinese culture, a perpetual exercise in sophisticated subtlety, makes no distinction between the secular and the supernatural – sekala and niskala.

Sekala is what our senses may discern. As in the ritualized gestures of world leaders – real and minor – at a highly polarized G20.

Niskala is what cannot be sensed directly and can only be “suggested”. And that also applies to geopolitics.

The Balinese highlight may have featured an intersection of sekala and niskala: the much ballyhooed Xi-Biden face-to-face (or face to earpiece).

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs preferred to cut to the chase, selecting the Top Two highlights.

1. Xi told Biden – rather, his earpiece – that Taiwan independence is simply out of the question.

2. Xi also hopes that NATO, EU and US will engage in “comprehensive dialogue” with Moscow.

Asian cultures – be they Balinese or Confucianist – are non-confrontational. Xi laid out three layers of common interests: prevent conflict and confrontation, leading to peaceful coexistence; benefit from each other’s development; and promote post-COVID global recovery, tackle climate change and face regional problems via coordination.

Significantly, the 3h30 meeting happened at the Chinese delegation’s residence in Bali, and not at the G20 venue. And it was requested by the White House.

Biden, according to the Chinese, affirmed that the US does not seek a New Cold War; does not support “Taiwan independence”; does not support “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan”; does not seek “decoupling” from China; and does not want to contain China.

Now tell that to the Straussians/neo-cons/neoliberalcons bent on containing China. Reality spells out that Xi has few reasons to take “Biden” – rather the combo writing every script in the background – at face value. So as it stands, we remain in niskala.

That zero-sum game

Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo was dealt a terrible hand: how to hold a G20 to discuss food and energy security, sustainable development, and climate issues, when everything under the sun is polarized by the war in Ukraine.

Widodo did his best, urging all at the G20 to “end the war”, with a subtle hint that “being responsible means creating not zero-sum situations.”

The problem is a great deal of the G20 arrived in Bali bent on zero-sum – seeking confrontation (with Russia) and hardly any diplomatic conversation.

The US and UK delegations avowedly wanted to snub Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov every step of the way. France and Germany is a different matter: Lavrov did speak briefly with both Macron and Scholz. And told them Kiev wants no negotiation.

Lavrov also revealed something quite significant for the Global South:

“US and the EU have given the UN Secretary General written promises that restrictions on the export of Russian grain and fertilizers will be lifted – let’s see how this is implemented.”

The traditional group photo ahead of the G20 – a staple of every summit in Asia – had to be delayed. Because – who else – “Biden” and Sunak, US and UK, refused to be in the same picture with Lavrov.

Such childish, un-diplomatic hysterics is profoundly disrespectful towards ritual Balinese graciousness, politeness and a non-confrontational ethos.

The Western spin is that “most G20 countries” wanted to condemn Russia in Ukraine. Nonsense. Diplomatic sources hinted it may be in fact a 50/50 split. Condemnation comes from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, UK, US and EU. Non-condemnation from Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkiye and of course Russia.

Graphically: Global South against Global North.

So the joint statement will refer to the impacts of the “war in Ukraine” on the global economy, and not “Russia’s war in Ukraine”.

The collapse of the EU economy

What was not happening in Bali enveloped the island in an extra layer of niskala. Which brings us to Ankara.

The fog thickened because on the backdrop of the G20, the US and Russia were talking in Ankara, represented by CIA director William Burns and SVR (Foreign Intel) director Sergei Naryshkin.

No one knows what exactly was being negotiated. A ceasefire is only one among possible scenarios. And yet heated rhetoric from NATO in Brussels to Kiev suggests escalation prevailing over some sort of reconciliation.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was adamant; de facto and de jure, Ukraine can’t and does not want to negotiate. So the Special Military Operation (SMO) will continue.

NATO is training fresh units. Next possible targets are the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant and the left bank of the Dnieper – or even more pressure in the north of Lugansk. For their part, Russian military channels advance the possibility of a winter offensive on Nikolaev: only 30 km away from Russian positions.

Serious Russian military analysts know what serious Pentagon analysts must also know: Russia used at best only 10% of its military potential so far. No regular forces; most of them are DPR and LPR militias, Wagner commandos, Kadyrov’s Chechens and volunteers.

The Americans suddenly interested in talking, and Macron and Scholz approaching Lavrov, point to the heart of the matter: the EU and the UK may not survive next winter, 2023-2024, without Gazprom.

The IEA has calculated that the overall deficit by then will approach 30 billion cubic meters. And that presupposes “ideal” circumstances this coming winter: mostly warm; China still under lockdowns; much lower gas consumption in Europe; even increased production (from Norway?)

The IEA ‘s models are working with two or three waves of price increases in the next 12 months. EU budgets are already on red alert – compensating the losses caused by the current energy suicide. By the end of 2023, that may reach 1 trillion euros.

Any additional, unpredictable costs throughout 2023 mean that the EU economy will completely collapse: industry shutdown across the spectrum, euro in free fall, rise of inflation, debt corroding every latitude from the Club Med nations to France and Germany.

Dominatrix Ursula von der Leyen, leading the European Commission (EC), of course should be discussing all that – in the interests of EU nations – with global players in Bali. Instead her only agenda, once again, was demonization of Russia. No niskala here; just tawdry cognitive dissonance.

Taco Tater Tots Casserole

“I found this on the Miserly Mom’s website and have cooked many times – my family loves it – especially my 11 year old!”

2022 11 17 17 48
2022 11 17 17 48

Ingredients

Directions

  • Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
  • Brown ground beef and onion together in skillet.
  • drain.
  • Add taco seasoning and water and simmer according to package directions.
  • In a 13×9 casserole dish spread taco meat on bottom of pan.
  • Layer the corn on top of it.
  • Then place tater tots in a single layer on top of corn.
  • Spread the salsa con queso on top of everything.
  • Cook in preheated oven for about one hour.
  • Good with sourcream on top.

https://youtu.be/eJUnA0DKsvg

No!!!!

There isnt.

#1 TANKERS

Germany alone needs 8.6 Billion Cubic Feet of Gas every day

Of this roughly 3.6 Billion Cubic Feet comes from Russia

An Average Single LNG Tanker can transport around 85,000 Tonnes of LNG which is equal to 4.13 Billion Cubic Feet

2022 11 17 09 53
2022 11 17 09 53

This means Germany would need 1 LNG Tanker every single day to fulfil its Gas Needs alone.

Even assuming Superfast Tankers – Thats still 50 Days turnaround time which means 49 Tankers

Lets take Europe as a whole.

Europe would need 127 Tankers of LNG with a 50 day turnaround capability.

Guess how many Tankers are available for LNG in the world?

Only 642!!!

Of this , 597 already have 14 year contracts , the earliest contract expiring in 2027

Another 25 have 7 year Contracts , the earliest contract expiring in 2023

There is a 99% chance that both contracts will be renewed

Thus only 20 Tankers are available for ferrying Gas to Europe

So Europe needs to build 127 Tankers or pay for 127 Tankers through a 30 yr lease method from China or South Korea

Divided over 10 Shipyards – thats still a minimum of 10 years to deliver such a fleet at a price of $ 65 – 70 Billion


#2 Liquefaction Infrastructure

Liquefying Natural Gas – then Gassifying them again post delivery is a Hugely Expensive procedure.

Yes for Countries with Large Populations like India and China where averages of 724 Million and 1091 Million people depend on the Gas – it becomes more economical. Yet for a coutry with 75.7 Million Gas Users like Germany – its enormously expensive on a per capita basis.

What would cost $ 9.2 per Capita per Year in India , at higher costs could cost $ 136 per Capita per year for Germany and $ 68 per capita for Europe. Thats $1.5 Trillion in Infrastructure investment for Europe.


#3 LNG Ports

Normal Ports cannot just unload LNG like its a Crate of Electronic Components.

You need specific Piped Structures to Load LNG from the Ships to the Ports and subsequently to distribute them across the Nation.

Today Europe has the LNG Port Structure for 11% LNG

Tomorrow to make it 55% LNG to replace Russian Gas- You will need to build 53 Ports or expand the existing Ports and build 19 Ports minimum


So there it is

→ 127 New Tankers

→ $ 1.5 Trillion Minimum Infrastructure Cost

→ 53 New Ports or UPgrades + 19 New Ports at around $ 650 Billion

→ Minimum 15 Years to finish all this

→ Plus Cost of LNG = 4.25 * Cost of Piped Gas ( 1 Tonne = 48700 Cft)

And Net Result?

The Average European is likely to pay 464% higher Energy Bills

Already yesterday a Man showed president Marcon how his 461 Euros energy Bill has risen to 625 Euros in a mere 8 months!!! Imagine paying almost 2300 Euros for the same energy!!!!


It is SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE

“Nuclear” Cruise Missile Shot Down Over Kiev This Morning

This story was previously LOCKED for Subscribers Only so they could know before the general public.  It is now unlocked. A Russian nuclear-capable X-55 cruise missile was shot down by Ukraine air defenses over the capital city of Kiev today.  A photo of the wreckage and identification of the actual missile model, and type, appears below.  The X-55 is designed specifically to carry a single, 200kt, nuclear warhead.

According to preliminary information, early this morning Ukrainian Armed Forces shot down two cruise missiles over the capital city of Kiev.

One of them was a Kh-55 model (Russian designation X-55) which was originally developed to carry a single, 200 kiloton, nuclear payload.

However, this specific missile did not contain any warhead at all – instead, it contained a dummy imitator of a nuclear warhead used for missile testing purposes.

Here is a photo of the downed cruise missile, with the dummy replacement warhead still intact, from Ukraine, this morning:

 

X 55 Nuke Cruise Missile Downed Kiev 11 17 2022
X 55 Nuke Cruise Missile Downed Kiev 11 17 2022

This was no accident.  This was no error on the part of Russia; it was, it seems, a Warning.

Covert Intelligence communications circuits are a literal blur, with all sorts of transmissions about this incident because this took place just three days after US CIA Director visited his Russian counterpart and explicitly told Russia of the consequences of using a nuclear device against Ukraine.

CIA Director Bill Burns met with his Russian intelligence counterpart, Sergey Naryshkin, in Ankara, Turkey on Monday as part of an ongoing effort by the US to “communicate with Russia on managing risk.”

By sending the X-55, which had to be specifically pulled out of the actual Russian nuclear arsenal (they do not use this missile with conventional warheads) – the Russians are explicitly telling the US and NATO to “go fuck yourselves” and warning Ukraine, “the end is very near.”  Put simply, today’s launch of this missile is Russia’s reply to the US CIA Director about “managing risks” and this reply shows the US they have some risk they better manage as well.

US Mass-media has previously reported that national security adviser Jake Sullivan has also been in touch with his Russian counterparts to warn them of the consequences should Russia use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.

Today’s deployment and firing of a Russian X-55 shows that both Sullivan and Burns have not made any valuable impression upon Russia.

Now, there is a conventional variant of the X-55, the kh-555. Russia had used Kh-555 missiles to strike Ukraine before – these are “regular” rockets loaded with non-nuclear explosives. Meanwhile, the Kh-55 missile is the original model designed specifically to carry nuclear warheads.

Simply put, Kh-55 and Kh-555 use basically the same rocket, but with a different payload. However, it is simply impossible for this to be an accident; the X-55 cruise missile itself would have had to be pulled from Russia’s separate and segregated nuclear storage.  They don’t have these missiles just laying around everywhere so someone could grab one by mistake.

This is, perhaps, the single most frightening display of Russia’s willingness to win, ever undertaken.  This incident changes everything for the US and for NATO because it makes clear the Russians will not back down, are not intimidated, and will not stop no matter what the US or NATO do.

Intel Circuits are blazing with the interpretation that this is a final warning to Kiev and to the US/EU/NATO.

It was just a couple weeks ago that news outlets in the US and EU reported word from a senior US Intelligence official that there had been “worrisome developments with Russia’s nuclear arsenal.”   At the time, the official would not say what those developments were.   Now, we know.

I like this statement:

“The US now fears it may lose a war with China over Taiwan, and China has impressive new weapons on display. This helped motivate Washington’s new emphasis on war avoidance.”

This is why, historically, the CCP often displayed new weaponries each time US displaying tendency in starting a war。

SunZi says: 不战而屈人之兵(caving/containing the enemy without a war)is the highest form of warfare.

War avoidance is always the best strategy for China..

Russia, India, China, Iran: the Quad that really matters

By Pepe Escobar cross-posted on PressTV and the Saker blog and posted with the author’s permission

Southeast Asia is right at the center of international relations for a whole week viz a viz three consecutive summits: Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Phnom Penh, the Group of Twenty (G20) summit in Bali, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bangkok.

Eighteen nations accounting for roughly half of the global economy represented at the first in-person ASEAN summit since the Covid-19 pandemic in Cambodia: the ASEAN 10, Japan, South Korea, China, India, US, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand.

With characteristic Asian politeness, the summit chair, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (or “Colombian”, according to the so-called “leader of the free world”), said the plenary meeting was somewhat heated, but the atmosphere was not tense: “Leaders talked in a mature way, no one left.”

It was up to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to express what was really significant at the end of the summit.

While praising the “inclusive, open, equal structure of security and cooperation at ASEAN”, Lavrov stressed how Europe and NATO “want to militarize the region in order to contain Russia and China’s interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

A manifestation of this policy is how “AUKUS is openly aiming at confrontation in the South China Sea,” he said.

Lavrov also stressed how the West, via the NATO military alliance, is accepting ASEAN “only nominally” while promoting a completely “unclear” agenda.

What’s clear though is how NATO “has moved towards Russian borders several times and now declared at the Madrid summit that they have taken global responsibility.”

This leads us to the clincher: “NATO is moving their line of defense to the South China Sea.” And, Lavrov added, Beijing holds the same assessment.

Here, concisely, is the open “secret” of our current geopolitical incandescence. Washington’s number one priority is the containment of China. That implies blocking the EU from getting closer to the key Eurasia drivers  – China, Russia, and Iran – engaged in building the world’s largest free trade/connectivity environment.

Adding to the decades-long hybrid war against Iran, the infinite weaponizing of the Ukrainian black hole fits into the initial stages of the battle.

For the Empire, Iran cannot profit from becoming a provider of cheap, quality energy to the EU. And in parallel, Russia must be cut off from the EU. The next step is to force the EU to cut itself off from China.

All that fits into the wildest, warped Straussian/neo-con wet dreams: to attack China, by emboldening Taiwan, first Russia must be weakened, via the instrumentalization (and destruction) of Ukraine.

And all along the scenario, Europe simply has no agency.

Putin, Raeisi and the Erdogan track

Real life across key Eurasia nodes reveals a completely different picture. Take the relaxed get-together in Tehran between Russia’s top security official Nikolai Patrushev and his Iranian counterpart Ali Shamkhani last week.

They discussed not only security matters but also serious business – as in turbo-charged trade.

The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) will sign a $40 billion deal next month with Gazprom, bypassing US sanctions, and encompassing the development of two gas fields and six oilfields, swaps in natural gas and oil products, LNG projects, and the construction of gas pipelines.

Immediately after the Patrushev-Shamkhani meeting, President Putin called President Ebrahim Raeisi to keep up the “interaction in politics, trade and the economy, including transport and logistics,” according to the Kremlin.

Iranian president reportedly more than “welcomed” the “strengthening” of Moscow-Tehran ties.

Patrushev unequivocally supported Tehran over the latest color revolution adventure perpetrated under the framework of the Empire’s endless hybrid war.

Iran and the EAEU are negotiating a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in parallel to the swap deals with Russian oil. Soon, SWIFT may be completely bypassed. The whole Global South is watching.

Simultaneous to Putin’s phone call, Turkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan – conducting his own diplomatic overdrive, and just back from a summit of Turkic nations in Samarkand – stressed that the US and the collective West are attacking Russia “almost without limits”.

Erdogan made it clear that Russia is a “powerful” state and commended its “great resistance”.

The response came exactly 24 hours later. Turkish intelligence cut to the chase, pointing out that the terrorist bombing in the perpetually busy Istiklal pedestrian street in Istanbul was designed in Kobane in northern Syria, which essentially responds to the US.

That constitutes a de-facto act of war and may unleash serious consequences, including a profound revision of Turkiye’s presence inside NATO.

Iran’s multi-track strategy

A Russia-Iran strategic alliance manifests itself practically as a historical inevitability. It recalls the time when the erstwhile USSR helped Iran militarily via North Korea, after an enforced US/Europe blockade.

Putin and Raeisi are taking it to the next level. Moscow and Tehran are developing a joint strategy to defeat the weaponization of sanctions by the collective West.

Iran, after all, has an absolutely stellar record of smashing variants of “maximum pressure” to bits. Also, it is now linked to a strategic nuclear umbrella offered by the “RICs” in BRICS (Russia, India, China).

So, Tehran may now plan to develop its massive economic potential within the framework of BRI, SCO, INSTC, the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), and the Russian-led Greater Eurasia Partnership.

Moscow’s game is pure sophistication: engaging in a high-level strategic oil alliance with Saudi Arabia while deepening its strategic partnership with Iran.

Immediately after Patrushev’s visit, Tehran announced the development of an indigenously built hypersonic ballistic missile, quite similar to the Russian KH-47 M2 Khinzal.

And the other significant news was connectivity-wise: the completion of part of a railway from strategic Chabahar Port to the border with Turkmenistan. That means imminent direct rail connectivity to the Central Asian, Russian and Chinese spheres.

Add to it the predominant role of OPEC+, the development of BRICS+, and the pan-Eurasian drive to pricing trade, insurance, security, investments in the ruble, yuan, rial, etc.

There’s also the fact that Tehran could not care less about the endless collective West procrastination on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as Iran nuclear deal: what really matters now is the deepening relationship with the “RICs” in BRICS.

Tehran refused to sign a tampered-with EU draft nuclear deal in Vienna. Brussels was enraged; no Iranian oil will “save” Europe, replacing Russian oil under a nonsensical cap to be imposed next month.

And Washington was enraged because it was betting on internal tensions to split OPEC.

Considering all of the above, no wonder US ‘Think Tankland’ is behaving like a bunch of headless chickens.

The queue to join BRICS

During the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Samarkand last September, it was already tacit to all players how the Empire is cannibalizing its closest allies.

And how, simultaneously, the shrinking NATO-sphere is turning inwards, with a focus on The Enemy Within, relentlessly corralling average citizens to march in lockstep behind total compliance with a two-pronged war – hybrid and otherwise – against imperial peer competitors Russia and China.

Now compare it with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Samarkand presenting China and Russia, together, as the top “responsible global powers” bent on securing the emergence of multipolarity.

Samarkand also reaffirmed the strategic political partnership between Russia and India (Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called it an unbreakable friendship).

That was corroborated by the meeting between Lavrov and his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar last week in Moscow.

Lavrov praised the strategic partnership in every crucial area – politics, trade and economics, investment, and technology, as well as “closely coordinated actions” at the UN Security Council, BRICS, SCO and the G20.

On BRICS, crucially, Lavrov confirmed that “over a dozen countries” are lining up for membership, including Iran: “We expect the work on coordinating the criteria and principles that should underlie BRICS expansion to not take much time”.

But first, the five members need to analyze the ground-breaking repercussions of an expanded BRICS+.

Once again: contrast. What is the EU’s “response” to these developments? Coming up with yet another sanctions package against Iran, targeting officials and entities “connected with security affairs” as well as companies, for their alleged “violence and repressions”.

“Diplomacy”, collective West-style, barely registers as bullying.

Back to the real economy – as in the gas front – the national interests of Russia, Iran and Turkiye are increasingly intertwined; and that is bound to influence developments in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, and will be a key factor to facilitate Erdogan’s re-election next year.

As it stands, Riyadh for all practical purposes has performed a stunning 180-degree maneuver against Washington via OPEC+. That may signify, even in a twisted way, the onset of a process of unification of Arab interests, guided by Moscow.

Stranger things have happened in modern history. Now appears to be the time for the Arab world to be finally ready to join the Quad that really matters: Russia, India, China, and Iran.

Because it’s not actually “cheap.”

A high-specced Mi 8 with a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 845 costs around $400. If you go to a country like, say Vietnam, $400 is enough for a person to live pretty comfortably, eating out at restaurants every day for a month. I could live lavishly for a month on $400 in my country.

main qimg 79dae3673a8aae487c62e6cb58f60786 lq
main qimg 79dae3673a8aae487c62e6cb58f60786 lq

It might not seem like much to, say, an American, but it’s not exactly cheap. Even an American who is down on his luck can easily live on $400 of groceries for a month. That’s beside the point, though.

How can Xiaomi afford to price this way? Easy. That’s because the cost to make the phone is actually way less than that. Does it cost $300? Nah. Probably way less. They aren’t thriving on a profit margin of just $100 per flagship. The phone itself probably cost less than $200 to make.

It’s not that Xiaomi is pricing their phones cheap. It’s just that other competitors are massively overpricing their phones to fill out their margins.

Galaxy S9 at $900? iPhone X at $1000? These phones probably cost around $300 to make. The S9 shares many parts with the Mi 8, so it probably is also cheaper than $300. One thing’s for sure, the S9 definitely doesn’t cost more than $400 to make, that’s the retail price of the Mi 8. Samsung is making at least $500 per phone here.

Xiaomi isn’t cheap. It’s just that Apple, Samsung and other competitors are just unreasonably expensive.

It’s not just that, though. Xiaomi does price aggressively. They can afford to do this because phones aren’t their only revenue source. Xiaomi — like Apple and Samsung — have other businesses where they make a lot of money. Their phones are just one way to funnel people to those businesses. Apple for instance actually makes a lot of their money from the iTunes ecosystem. They just choose to also make hefty margins off their hardware because they want to keep that premium exclusive status in their branding, unlike say Google who chooses to sell many products and services at a loss to funnel people into their search engine business.

Xioami uses their phones as a strategy to get people into their internet services business, which also contributes a decent chunk to Xiaomi’s revenues ($585 million last quarter). That said, Xiaomi’s biggest business is still phones sales ($4.5 billion last quarter — their next biggest business was selling TVs at $1.5 billion) — meaning they actually have huge margins on their “cheap” phones.

Xiaomi’s labor costs are definitely lower than Samsung’s and Apple’s overall, but the other big place they are saving on is advertising. Samsung and Apple spend billions on advertising and marketing. Xiaomi spends significantly less and only has very small online marketing campaigns.

Hugo Barra, Vice President of Xiaomi, also shared that their long phone product cycles lets them keep costs lower as they have more leeway in negotiating component prices, as they can keep using the same parts over and over instead of needing new and different parts for a new phone model. In addition, they keep a small portfolio of phones, so there’s not much need for variation in parts. Compare this with Samsung, that has tons of phones models available at any given time.

Combine all these with the better labor costs and closer sourcing components from Shenzhen, and they are able to save a lot and pinch much more pennies, savings which they pass on to the consumer.


EDIT: I wanted to add a little something to my answer. I dug up Xiaomi’s financials to make sure I wasn’t talking out of my butt. These are Xiaomi’s numbers from their first ever earnings call as a publicly-traded company.

Xiaomi Q2 2018 numbers taken from here

and you can get the actual data from Xiaomi in Chinese Yuan here

.

  • Net Profit: $2.1 billion
  • Total Revenue: $6.6 billion
  • Phone Sales: $4.5 billion (67% of all revenue)
  • TV and Fitness Bands: $1.5 billion
  • Internet Services: $585 million

Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s CEO, has famously said that they keep hardware margins at 5%

. However if you look at the financials this is clearly not the case.

They aren’t making $2.1 billion net profit if their phone margins are just at 5%. That would mean they only made $225 million off phone sales and $75 million on TV sales ($300 million total), that’s $1.8 billion shy of their posted profits. $585 revenue (not even profit) from Internet Services isn’t even close to making it. These are Xiaomi’s numbers, straight from the horse’s mouth, so don’t look at me.

It’s clear that they are making way more than 5% on phones. That $400 Mi 8 isn’t even close to cost. They are making way more on each phone. Assuming that $585 Internet Services revenue is close to full profit, that’s still about $1.5 billion missing profit ($2.1B net profit – $585M) that should be coming from the smartphone and TV sales divisions. According to the math, their profit margins on their phones are closer to 40% ($6B total revenue from Phone and TV divided by $1.5B profit).

So that Mi 8 that retails for $400 probably cost around $240 to make, including all costs and overhead — unless they are being “creative” with their accounting.

For the year 2022, the military budget for the US is over a trillion (10% of GDP)- 800 billion budget plus 200 billion for covert operations, 200 billion for Veteran care, 50 billion for the War in Ukraine, and 50 billion for NASA whereas China’s 250 billion(3.5% of GDP)- 230 billion, 5 billion for the space program, 15 billion for R &D for military hardware development. Why has China been able to catch up or sometimes even exceed the US in capability in the past 20 years despite the disadvantages in spending by 1:4?. Here are some of the reasons:

  • Everything is expensive in the US in labor, environmental regulation and material and 4:1 spending advantages are quickly evaporated.
  • America continuously engages in war around the world: The US spent 8 trillion dollars and 20+ years on the fruitless war in the mid-east by invading 3 countries with nothing to show but destabilize the whole region by creating thousands of dead and millions of refugees. As quickly as the withdrawal from Afghanistan, America now is engaging in another war in Ukraine and trying to goad China into another war over Taiwan. All these wars have been taking away the resources to upgrade its own military capability in competition against China.
  • America lost its industrialization capability by outsourcing most manufacturing overseas in the meanwhile China has become the manufacturing center of the world. Lacking general manufacturing also contributes to the increasing cost of military hardware. Case in point: F35 at 2 Trillion and 20+ years in development, nuclear submarine at 10 billion and 9 years to make, and littoral frigate and battleships at 3 billion and 3 years to make.
  • lack of engineering capability- China has been able to graduate 10 times more engineers than that the US during the past 2 decades. More engineers together with massive manufacturing capability propel China to move ahead in most weapon production with newer materials, equipment, and capability. Case in point- the ongoing Tiangong space station and more advanced Beidou GPS satellite system with 5g quantum communication for military usage.
  • high cost of the military-industrial complex. For years, American democracy are tightly intertwined with the ruling elites supported by the military-industrial complex where most hucksters are ex-government officials is not only expensive and loaded with political corruption but also inefficient for weapon system development.

Germany‘s Moral Collapse Inside China: Scholz‘s 11-hours Visit to Beijing Spells Catastrophe

By Thorsten J. Pattberg for the Saker blog

This is probably the darkest piece I have written on the subject. I hope you didn’t miss Part I and Part II. Maybe get yourself a physical copy as well.

So Olaf Scholz, High Chancellor of deindustrializing porkhole Germany, finished his Beijing ground trip in under 11 hours and counseled Mr. Xi Jinping hard on “the rule of law,” “free markets,” and “the rights for minorities.”

This sort of opportunity occurs only every 10 years or so for Germany’s “China experts”—they are the evil ones; the nice ones are called China-hands—to be led to the global stage and say their thing about unfair Chinese globalism and how Europe should stick it to the Xi dictator.

You won’t find Yours-truly anywhere in the German media. Total blackout. Even though I am basically the Confucius of Hamm Bockum-Hövel, the valley of flying daggers.

And even though Mr. Xi personally has touched my bike.

Look at his picture below and see if you can find my ugly square “Nazi face.” And you know what I studied at that Chinese university with all those Chinese Communists? That‘s right: I majored in Russian major and minored in Pure Land Buddhism, eat that!

2022 11 18 18 49
2022 11 18 18 49

IMAGE 1 (Fudan University Department for Foreign Languages)

Anyway, I was saying that the lazy China experts fall over each other on German regime tv, regime press, and anti-Chinese social media, laureating aeriform German stuff like unfreedom, German democracy, and holocaust guilt. And what are they demonizing? Of course, they are demonizing China’s evil trinity of poverty alleviation, superior technologies, and unbelievable material wealth.

Mr. Scholz wanted to be the first Western leader to meet Mr. Xi in person. He is a busy man. Mr. Scholz, I mean, not Mr. Xi. Mr. Xi is always in Beijing, fixing his own country and guiding his people. That wanker Scholz, on the other hand, has been, let me see, so far been to…. HOLY MOTHER!…. 47 foreign capitals in 2022 alone! What an Emperor of Man! What a Ruler of the Universe! Stoltz‘s AWESOME!!!

Germany depends on China’s industries A LOT. China might be the only nation that unconditionally keeps up with the German poop and still deals with the neonazis after Berlin started WW III with Russia this summer.

If the Middle Kingdom was Middle Earth [an Anglo-Saxon fantasy world], then the Germans would be the Balin dwarves toiling under the mountains. It would be good for cave king Stoltz to discuss steel legions, rare earth mining, and bolt-throwers. But maybe the German mines ran dry and empty, so the Stoltz people crawled back to the surface with this new business plan of… morally harassing orcses, wizards, and little Chinese girls alike.

Germany is a beaten, crushed, debilitated US-occupied nation. It should not exist in this form. But the victorious Western allies did not release these poor wretched people. Instead, they decided to chain them to the BRD regime [Federal Republic of Deutschland] and tell lies about how great it is to change from a glorious 1000-year-old Reich into a homo anal-fixated Iew-worshiping seepage. Watch any US movie and the villains are probably Germans. Also, watch gay porn, German’s best.

STAGE 1: Nearing 100 Years Of Humiliation

This century of humiliation went smoothly for roughly 60 years, from 1949 until 2009, before the World Wide Web took off and became unstoppable. Suddenly, Germans could share experiences online, check the facts, and compare historic accounts. Their country, they found, is a US strap dildo. Their mountain,… the misty mountain of Saruman the Schmuel. People started to expose this false US love bombing. Now the BRD regime is in trouble under a mountain of lies and make-beliefs: Deutschland was never a free, sovereign land since 1949.

Much of the economic figures coming out of Germany are foreign-based, and thus false, fictitious, and fabricated. This is mostly the normal proceedings during any colonial occupation: The conquerors imposed American-style statistics on the German colony, so the German economy always shined like Joe‘s sperm on Fräulein Gerda‘s flabby gut.

Example. When the film industry in post-war Germany was boosted as the greatest and most lucrative market in the world after Japan, that in reality meant that German and Japanese film industries were deliberately collapsed. Iewish Hollywood and the Iewish financiers in London now ran all major theater chains in America‘s colonies. A total take-over and the destruction of local culture is then reported as an “economic miracle.”

The underlying practicability of Anglo-Zionist Imperialism is that of a bombing back better: What is the amputation of our enemies but the exaggerated display of Zangwill’s melting pot—the freak shows and the human zoo.

So every couple of years, America cut away another German key industry:

1948 Defense, Foreign Policy, Interior

1949 Weapons, Machinery, Heavy Industry Production

1949 Basic Law, German Guilt, Holocaust Brainwash, Heteronomy (Foreign Rule)

1951 Patents, Inventions, Properties, Art, Collections

[The US started looting German intellectual properties and cultural artifacts; e. g. US Disney appropriates German fairy tales, US Princeton et. al. appropriate German physics, Albert Einstein, etc.]

1950s Heroes, Leaders, Stories, Histories, “De-Nazification”

1960s Radio, Public Broadcast, Film

[The consolation of pro-Iewish, pro-US propaganda tv and the lying press, e. g. ARD, ZDF, SPIEGEL, FAZ, ZEIT, Sueddeutsche. Result: zero free press.]

1960s Food Supplies, Energy Productions, Charity [War Reparations disguised as “foreign aid.”]

1970s Banking, Finance, Transactions, Currency

1980s Public Health, Pharmacy, Sports, Leisure

[Americanization of Europe, e. g. basketball, rap music, Levis jeans, aping of all US youth trends.]

1990s Newspapers, Universities, Schools, Education

[The dissolution of German Internate, Magister degrees, Guilds, and Fraternities; German as the language of science and history erased, American curriculum inserted.]

2000s Slavery, Human Trafficking, Brain Drain, Miscegenation

[High-IQ Germans emigrated, low-IQ POCS [People of Color] imported. Massive IQ loss [-4 points, from 102 to 98] in 20 years. Massive degeneracy, migrant crime, mixing of new mongrel races.]

2010s Transport, Communication, Computers, Space

[Germany missed the Electronic age, the Internet age, the Space age.]

2020s Language, Religion, Science, History

[Compulsory American language, American symbols, American beliefs, and American history is now in the brains of Germans.]

…you never heard about the tragic loss and decapitated German culture. Instead, you heard how German GDP grew like twice that of Britain or something, and how American the Germans had become, which could only be a good thing, right?

I just give you three facts that make your heart bleed.

Fact 1: The number of living German people since 1949 has actually fallen. There were 63 million ethnic German people in the German Reich before 1936. There should be 120 million Germans today, easily. 200 million, even. Today, under the American thumb, however, their number has been kept at 60 million. The other 24 million persons currently residing in Germany have a migrant background. Meanwhile, the earth’s population had quadrupled. Fazit: the US occupation has brought infertility and retardation to the Germans.

Fact 2: The Germans were tortured by Iews until their minds just popped. The Germans as a group are dead on the inside and never produced a single genius again. Just look it up. It is true. If a population is endlessly tortured, the will to live goes down and the geniuses disappear entirely.

Fact 3: Germany is not a great economy. If Germany really were the world’s 4th biggest economic power, how come in 2022 it doesn’t even have its own currency, its own army, its own global banks, its own global universities, a tech sector, a space station, many space stations? Scholz Germany is exactly as economically powerful as Uncle Joe says it is. Without American occupation, Germany is far less than Turkey, Vietnam, and Egypt, and perhaps only slightly more than Ukraine, without Ukraine‘s sovereignty that is.

IMAGE 2 German Airplane Full of Reich Companies
IMAGE 2 German Airplane Full of Reich Companies

IMAGE 2 (German Airplane Full of Reich Companies)

Let us demonstrate everything I just said by following Scholz and his airborne cavemen. Mr. Scholz was traveling to China with an entourage of Germany’s business CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) from Volkswagen (1937), Deutsche Bank (1870), Adidas (1949), Siemens (1847), BASF (1865), BMW (1916), Merck (17th century), and Bayer (1863). Please notice that all of them are basically pre-war German Reich family silver. Since 1949 and since the US occupation, NOTHING new emerged from Germany. I repeat this message because you finally have to hear it loud and clearly: Germany did NOT produce any 21st-century champions while under her 20th-century US occupation, and as a result, it lags behind 60 years in human progress and biological fitness.

So these pre-war Reich firms are all the substance that is left. The Americans could terminate those Nazi firms at any time by the way. Adidas, the gay soccer brand (just like the older brother, Puma) was permitted to rise in 1949 since it was founded in Bavaria, the US occupational zone. To this day, about 40,000 US G.I. Joes are stationed here. Bavaria is to America what Hong Kong was to Great Britain. So if you think that Adidas is just selling shoes in the world, you are a moron. And do the Germans see a single cent of the billions allegedly earned from… selling shoes… goes to benefit the German people? No, of course not. Billions of dollars go straight into the pockets of ”global shareholders.”

STAGE 2: The Collapse of Morality Inside China

German firms that do business with Americans, or with parties who do business with Americans, are subject to US law and regulations. On the other hand, no US firm is subject to German law and regulations. During the Cold War, Washington prohibited German companies from doing business with the enemies of the United States, which included China right up until 1978.

After the USA opened up China in 1978, Volkswagen came to China and bragged about it. It was the first German/European/Western company to do so! In reality, the West Germans did do shit to achieve that. It was the Americans who opened that door.

What Volkswagen did since then is easily explained. It sold outdated car models. The BRD regime had just introduced the catalytic converter for all petrol engines, starting in 1984. So all polluter models such as the Santana, Polo, and Passat were simply sold in Third World China. What you didn‘t know China had fewer regulations and lower emission standards?

As of all those Volkswagen “profits” made in China, none was flowing back into Germany. Its China operation, Shanghai Dazhong, is 100% Chinese, not German. Germany since the 70s and 80s stagnated. A German man in 1977 could become a police officer, marry a faithful housewife, build a house, raise his kids, and go on vacation twice a year. In 2022, all collapsed, two gay persons need to work three jobs to just rent a tiny compartment in Berlin Mitte, owned by US-Iewish BlackRock. The average German homo couple at most breeds one new Nazi for the world (if it’s a boy. There are no girl Nazis!).

Let’s continue with Deutsche Bank, the last and only “German bank” Germany can field internationally. Germany has no global banks. Even Deutsche Bank (DB) says this. She says “We have strong European roots.” She cannot say she has strong German roots because that would open a can of Iewish worms. DB’s real headquarters is in London. Berlin has no jurisdiction over DB, Washington has.

When Yours-truly saw DB agents taking up skyrise in Beijing‘s Chaoyang district where the ex-pats do their shady stuff, it was pretty much an invitation to take an eye on them. That started in 2008, and DB and the Germans had just dropped their initial plan to do wealth management and private banking. Beijing had warned that the private banking sector was off-limits. But of course, DB could hang around and do consulting stuff. So what the Germans did was commission this huge sky tower, hang around nude, and tickle their tiny gonads.

You see that a lot. Foreign conglomerates’ representation offices in Beijing that you have no idea what they are actually working on. Take Google China team in their high-rise rental tower in Haidian district. Wait, what, the media told you Google withdrew from China because of “human rights” issues? You, Sir, are a complete moron. The Americans were always here.

2022 11 18 18 51
2022 11 18 18 51

IMAGE 3 (Deutsche Bank Tower and Google Building in Beijing)

Since DB couldn’t do private banking, they bought Beijing and Shanghai art collections and starched them away on the 24th floor of their stain-glassed blue wizard Tower. And just two years later, China’s art scene had artificially increased by 800%. [Turns out, US Citibank and Google had done the same.]

Do the German people ever see a share of the wealth that German DB is creating in China? Nope, not a chance. On the contrary, Germany has no global financial centers. According to Statista, the global site for reliable governmental statistics, the leading financial centers in the world are New York, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Singapore, San Francisco, Beijing, Tokyo, Shenzhen, Paris, Seoul, Chicago, Boston, and Washington. No Frankfurt or Berlin in sight.

If you believe the lies in the media that Germany was a rich country, you are a moron. The Germans don’t have German tellies or even German smartphones. They have no German computers. And do you know why the government airplane Scholz is flying in is a French Airbus? Because the war loser Germany is prohibited from building its own airplanes.

Next, take BASF or Merck. These are ancient German forge dynasties. How did they get into China? They paid for it! You have read that correctly. German companies such as BASF or Merck, or Siemens, Bayer, and Bosch, produce great hair dryers and microwave ovens, right? China could have allowed them to build factories here. But they had to pay China to even have her consider to consider it. And that isn’t all there was to it. The Germans were so unwanted, needy, and unlikable… that they had to hand over 51% of their companies to made-up Chinese “joint partners.”

Why this abysmal imbalance? Well, China exports 600 key resources Germany absolutely depends on, such as rare earths, chemicals, and pharmaceutics. But China does not depend on 1 single German resource, none. Sure it can buy electric drills and trains, but it can also buy similar ones from Japan, Canada, England or France. That is why China is Germany‘s biggest trading partner and essential for its survival, while Germany is to China more like a hobby shop.

Even more imbalanced are human resources. German intelligence falls flat on high Chinese standard, so China needs few German brains. But Germany needs hundreds of thousands of Chinese brains each year to keep Germany‘s R&D (Research and Development), patents, and publications up.

German legacy companies have to cannibalize AND have to pay huge bribes just to be able to get an audition in Beijing that could lead to being able to sell their hobby products in China someday. That is why prices in Europe for the same products are so high. The Reich firms need to cream off money from Germans and other subhuman European stock and give it to China so that the Chinese can later buy the same products for much less money. Needless to say, the Chinese can produce the same stuff themselves and own the Sino-German production plants. Again, those German legacy companies do not increase the welfare and living standards of the Germans, they decrease them.

STAGE 3: The Last Days Of Western Materialism

Knowing all this background information, we return to our 2022 Olaf Scholz and his money buddies, all packed in a French-made government plane, in total desperation.

Germany is bankrupt. The Internet has exposed this fake country beyond reparation. The BRD regime certainly is the butt joke of the world. Mr. Xi did not even give Mr. Scholz a press conference. This was delegated to China’s Minister in Chief, Li Keqiang.

You will not read this in the Western press, but China totally owned the narcissistic Stoltz charade. The great decouplers had traveled 20 hours over the North Pole to Beijing and were stopped right there on the airfield track by yellow medical people wearing hazmat plague suits. The Germans were told unambiguously that if one of them tested positive for coronavirus, nobody would pass immigration.

Also, on no occasion whatsoever did Chairman Xi shake hands with Stolzi, who, oblivious to all social cues, went on babbling about “human rights” again, and on how “human rights is NOT meddling in domestic affairs.” Why is this wanker not discussing our mission to Mars, time travel, and cashless currencies? China is the world leader in over 170 areas, Germany in none. China has a better political system. It is more peaceful, stable, and productive.

Unlike defeated Germany, China has principles. Peaceful coexistence, national sovereignty, harmonious society, and the Chinese Dream, to name a few. Germany has none. Scholz reproduces American slogans “freedom,” “rules-based international order,” “LGBTQ rights”. These are not German principles, but the marching order of the New York Iews and Washington Neocons. Nobody can or should take Mr. Scholz seriously, ever. Just look at this anthropological exhibit below of Mr. Scholz next to Chairman Xi. Thank God, Stoltz didn’t bring along his wife…

IMAGE 4 Mr. SCHOLZ AND Mr. Xi
IMAGE 4 Mr. SCHOLZ AND Mr. Xi

IMAGE 4 (Mr. SCHOLZ AND Mr. Xi)

America is very annoyed that these shitty German Reich firms are giving China plenty of work. The Empire wants the Germans to decouple, asap. That’s when our wicked German China experts came out from their corrupt German “China Studies” and spilled their praise for Human Rights Stoltz on US platforms Facebook and Linkedin.

Decoupling is not going to happen. However, never underestimate those stupid narcissists. Decoupling would be the last conclusive step toward the total dissolution of Germany, and the beginning of something new. See, Germany has lost all her abilities to build roads, airports, cities, communication, transportation, and really everything. Begging China to send some real talent or buy some German ports or build some superhuman computers won‘t help. Please have a look at this degeneracy below. This is the German Green Party leader, the other is the winner of the European Song Contest, and the last is the winner of the German Book Price.

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2022 11 18 18 53

IMAGE 5 (Degeneracy German Art and Culture)

German leaders keep saying Germany has a Nazi problem, so let us believe them and say, China wants to keep political relations with Mr. Scholz and his Nazi collaborators to the bare minimum:

“No nuclear bombs over Ukraine!” the diverse couple jointly announce to the Iewish global media. As if that German midget could reach the door frame. There are fewer Germans in the world than Chinese in Henan. Could Mr. Scholz not perhaps discuss… I don’t know… a new thorium-reactor or G5 tower forests or some hovering seaports? No, he couldn’t. Because Germany cannot build none of them. It is over.

Which brings us to the great transformation of Germany and her new business model. I hope I have sufficiently demonstrated that the pre-war German Reich firms are all that Germany has left to her former glory, that those blood-and-soil firms have no homeland left to root for, and that they are spiritually disabled and historically castrated, and cannot do anything innocently for humanity and our shared future. They are tainted. Contagious.

Let me explain the likely political fallout over Mr. Scholz’s quick 11 hours blitzsummit that was completely unnecessary and pointless:

The German economic leaders are deeply offended to be called German, they hate their Germany association, they would rather be European (EU), American, or Chinese, they hate the BRD US regime, and they hate Scholz and this China charade. They really want to liquefy their pre-war Reich firm assets, to decouple from working, from manufacturing, from laboring for meager profits… and–just like the true Masters of this planet—to earn far greater amounts of fictitious money from aeriform properties. In other words, they want to rise in the Human Hierarchy.

Stoltz and his CEOs of Deindustrialisation AG want to disconnect Germany away from a physical, three-dimensional forge world of US-client factories producing for the Empire on cheap Asian labor.

They then want to re-connect Germany towards a new administrative global power grid under the Empire of Sanctions [and Lies] to extrapolate profits from all aeriform properties that belong to the Fifth Dimension (Difference): distance, privileges, hierarchies, regulations, tariffs, history, ideology, thoughts, ideas, and mind control.

STAGE 4: The Coming Of The Emperor Of Man

The Germans did not invent the core techniques to world domination [and neither did the Chinese]. They couldn‘t. However, they still can copy other progressive groups. The British East India Company ran much of Asia not by owning labor and production, but by administering all governments, trade organizations, and international standards. The American White House runs the entire Western hemisphere not by owning labor and production, but by administrating all information, governments, and decision centers.

The new Germans dream of becoming sideways Iews, ruling by first-men-in-the city decree, by manipulations, lies, fakeries, torture, exploitation, and learned psychopathy. Under this plan, the German ruling class and their CEOs could join the Anglo-Zionist administrator class of the world and become controllers of everything from people, materials, plants, animals, behavior, standards, and information. The job of the West will be collecting rent and fees from anyone daring to do anything on this planet.

And who is going to do the work for us in the future? It is going to be the poorest Europeans, the Africans, and, naturally, the hard-working Asians.

It is NOT another industrial revolution that is coming in Europe, but an administrative revolution. There is not enough money to be made in exploiting physical labor anyway. Karl Marx, Capitalism, free markets… were all lies. Materialism, that is the exploitation of the physical world, was a useful but primitive strategy. The core idea that “humans must work for a living” was a convenient con job to flock together the human races and enslave them. No leader has ever worked for a living.

When Yours-truly was a Peking University official, I got 347 invitations for banquets, think tanks, meetings–in a day. On average, 128 Western professors or companies emailed me, in a day, all begging me to work for us for free or pay for licensing or work. My director, the true leader, had 26,450 potential sources of income, at which stage money and material become meaningless. 2,000,000 China experts would give their limps to work for him. He gets 200 media requests on a good Saturday. Tens of thousands continue to work for him for free.

Global organizations and governments live off others, they earn while sleeping, they inherit, they print their own wealth, and they collect taxes and rents. They have created several parallel worlds for the gods so far: debt, digital, crypt, word, and meta. Labor… is for apemen. CEOs are god-like too. They take all the credit for millions of ghosts. But that was all yesterday’s injustices. Tomorrow’s injustices will break the back of everything we thought humanly possible. There is infinitely more wealth to be made in exploiting purely psychological relationships and the realms once neglected as fiction or non-reality.

IMAGE 6 Tribute to the Emperor of Humanity
IMAGE 6 Tribute to the Emperor of Humanity

IMAGE 6 (Tribute to the Emperor of Humanity)

That is the true explanation of why Olaf Scholz talks about “How human rights is NOT meddling into China‘s affairs,” and not about how to create fifty-eight new food formulas to feed the world’s hungry. The Germans want the hungry and the miserable. They couldn’t take over or control a China that was strong and resistant. But what is worth a thousand times more than creating fifty-eight new food formulas to feed the world’s hungry? You won’t believe this but it is the truth. Sit back. Read:

It is this photo shoot of Mr. Scholz with Chairman Xi. This photo shoot was the sole reason what this entire 11-hour drama trip was all about. This has more substance than fifty-eight new food formulas to feed five worlds! This probes the power of the Fifth dimension! They are testing it. They came to China (packed 40 hours flying back and forth, 11 hours stay) in a planesload worth 60 billion euros of CEOs doing NOTHING. They tested if it was true. These people are nothing, are worth nothing. They tested if they did NOTHING, they would grow in value. And they did, about 2 billion euros. I know it was a test operation, because I was on the 2012 Beijing test team that designed the first portals for Peking and Harvard. I hope you’ll be able to see more of it soon. You‘ll first notice our leaders‘ strange behaviors everywhere.

The physical space in Asia, China, does not register anymore with the German elites and their US masters who, in their minds, own the sensual brick-and-rock world already. They want to be seen as gods next. And gods are aeriform. Gods decide, Gods are worshiped.

We want. China must. This is not going to be about who produces the Siemens washing machines or Porsche cars. It is about who runs humanity in the 21st Century. So the Asians can produce all that, who cares. Cotton pickers and Giza pygmies. As if they’ll ever get credits for Holy Europe and the Land of Milk and Honey: The Human Hierarchy has been completed. Mr. Scholz visited his 48th foreign capital this year!

The Fifth Dimension is now being furnished. The aerifom age has begun. The Emperor of Man has not shown yet, but he will own everything his mind touches. He and his clients will administer everything and will never have to work or act in any way. The Empire of Man will expand not from productivity. It will expand through words.

Stolz is back in Berlin. His defeat for Germany he celebrates as a personal victory. Such is the dimension of unreality. “The coming Emperor of Man must be a Iew,” he chins. “This much is prophecy.”

“But all bets are off HE’S GOT TO BE A EUROPEAN…”

向人类皇帝致敬!

万能统治者万岁!

Hommage an den Imperator der Menschheit!

Es lebe der allmächtige Herrscher!

Tribute to the Emperor of Humanity!

Long live the Almighty Ruler!

END.

Easy Pizza Pasta Casserole

“This is a kid pleaser-very cheesy and topped with pepperoni. It makes 2 large (9×13) casseroles or 4 small ones; I often divide it in fourths and freeze 3. This originally came from TOH’s Quick Cooking.”

2022 11 18 18 24
2022 11 18 18 24

Ingredients

Directions

  • Brown ground beef, onion, garlic and seasoning in oil.
  • Drain.
  • While beef is browning, cook pasta according to the packaging
  • Stir in pasta, spaghetti sauce and 3 cups cheese.
  • Place mixture in 2 greased 9x13x2 inch baking pans or 4 square pans.
  • Sprinkle with remaining mozzarella.
  • Top with pepperoni.
  • Cover and freeze up to 3 months.
  • To cook now: Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes, until heated through.
  • To bake frozen casserole: Thaw in refrigerator overnight and bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes, till hot.
Yummy waaaay better than hamburger helper but just as easy. Our 2 year old loved it, too, and he is going though a picky phase. It was nice that it made 2 pans - we had one for supper and I'm bringing one to a church potluck tomorrow. I went basically with the recipe (but I added a bit more pizza seasoning and 2 more garlic cloves) because I wanted to keep it basic for the potluck, but I look forward to trying it again for home. I'll triple the pizza seasoning, put in 5 or 6 cloves of garlic, add some spinach, and use sausage instead of hamburger (or half and half)...maybe some mushrooms and black olives. Just like pizza, there are endless options. Thank you for the recipe! I need some simple standards (my husband is the main cook around here).

This was a huge hit with the family. I had to half the recipe and it still made more than enough for 3 hungry eaters. I added some mild italian sausage, green peppers and onions as additional toppings just like a pizza. I added some leftover pizza sauce to the sauce and my top cheese was provolone which melted wonderfully. We all agreed it was the toppings that made the dish taste like a pizza. Make sure to cook the pasta al dente. Will make this again soon and it will be my next carry in dish at work.

This is an extremely easy dish to make. The pepperoni on top was crispy and delicious. My only issue with this dish, and it's a slight one at that, is that the pasta underneath could use a little more pizazz for my taste. Maybe quartering up the pepperoni slices and throwing them into the pasta mixture maybe? Something that would give it a zing! There was plenty left over and my husband was able to have left overs for both a lunch a work and a snack at home over the next two days.

This was a big hit here and I love that there is another casserole waiting in the freezer. I used 1 lb ground beef, 1 lb Italian pork sausage, reduced the pepperoni to 7 oz (two of which I diced and mixed into the casserole), added about 5 oz sliced baby bella mushrooms which were sauteed with the onion, and reduced the mozzarella to 4 cups - spreading two cups on top of each casserole and not mixing any in.

Some major changes in the world right now and we must deal with it

I made a you-tube video on this subject today. It’s worth a watch if you haven’t already seen it.

Anyways, please have a good day, and here’s today’s postings…

Let me relate a few of my experiences:

This weekend, I was driving to a place about 175 km away, on an official holiday weekend with my kids. Hubby’s out of the country, so it was just the 3 of us. I had about SriLankan rupees 2000 with me, of which I used 300 for the highway toll.

About an hour away from my destination, I had a small accident. Stopped the car, and the lorry, with whom I had collided, stopped too. Called the insurance guys, who warned me it would take them about 45 minutes to reach there, as it was quite far from the nearest town. So the lorry driver told me he had no insurance, and since I agreed it was my fault, he requested me to pay him about 2000/- so that he could fix his damages. But still, he waited with me for an hour till the insurance issues were sorted out. At the same time, a shopkeeper there advised me to park the car at the side of the road, keep my parking lights on, go and wait inside the car till the insurance man came. He also helped in giving directions.

The lorry driver waited till I finished, and I had Rs.1600/- with me in change. He took that and said never mind, I will manage. I requested him to come to the nearest ATM so that I could give him more cash, but he refused.

So I reached my destination, and the next day, me and another friend / colleague suddenly decided to go to a famous temple nearby. Now remember, I had no cash with me, and she also didn’t have her handbag with her, as it was a sudden decision.

Going up to the temple, my daughter was told to wrap a shawl around her, as she was in sleeveless t-shirt. We didn’t have money to rent one even. So one of the sellers gave one for free, and requested us to return it. Similarly, when we came back to the car park, I had, 30/- in coins, while the ticket was for 50/-. The lady again said its okay, and refused the money.

While walking up, being large, I was panting a bit, and the hawkers supported me by encouraging and showing me the best path to walk.

This weekend, I was faced with so much kindness from the Sri Lankan people, that I am truly glad to be living here. I’m sure this is there in the rest of the world too, but I faced it continuously here.

That’s what its like to be in Sri Lanka.

Come to Hong Kong, the border is open and there’s no quarantine.

You will see this flag everywhere.

main qimg cfe1cc40906c2a3c96c34e52e00799bd lq
main qimg cfe1cc40906c2a3c96c34e52e00799bd lq

Along with this one

main qimg 8d09f5a34e3c198e3ff160e39eafd4bf lq
main qimg 8d09f5a34e3c198e3ff160e39eafd4bf lq

Does either of those flags look like the US flag?

He hasn’t broken any Chinese laws so why should we seize stuff? Or are you saying that US sovereignty extends into our borders?

Simply Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas

“Easy to assemble, deliciously creamy and a great choice for once-a-month cooking. And there is NO canned cream soup in my enchiladas — Hope you give them a try!”

2022 11 11 15 09
2022 11 11 15 09

Ingredients

Directions

  • In a frying pan, cook chicken and onion together in oil over medium-high heat until chicken is just done.
  • Divide cooked chicken evenly between 8 tortillas; add 1 1/2 tablespoons cheese to each tortilla.
  • Roll enchiladas and place seam-side down in a 9×13″ baking dish that has been lightly sprayed with no-stick cooking spray.
  • Melt butter in a medium saucepan; stir in flour to make a roux, stir and cook until bubbly, and gradually whisk in chicken broth then bring to boiling, stirring frequently.
  • Remove from heat; stir in sour cream and green chilies.
  • Pour sauce evenly over enchiladas.
  • Top with remaining 3/4 cup cheese (a baking dish may be double-wrapped and frozen at this point) and bake at 400° F for 20 minutes until cheese is melted and sauce near edges of baking dish is bubbly.

OMG! This is a MUST SEE. What the HELL?

Jesus H. Christ!

Andrea Kowch – Soiree (2019)

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wj7px5glhqt91

I’ve seen life in China and I’ve seen life in America. Life in China is a lot safer, a lot fairer, and a lot more peaceful. That pretty well makes the decision for me.

When I was in China, I felt very, very safe. I could walk out in the dead of night on empty city streets (in Beijing and Shanghai) and have absolutely no fear of being mugged or shot. Not so in America when I was in Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, and New York City.

Rampant gun violence and daily mass shootings are a genuine problem in America.

In China, health care is very affordable. Fees are very low. Not so in America where millions of Americans go bankrupt over medical bills because they can’t afford the insurance premiums.

In China, there is no homelessness. But I’ve seen homeless people in San Francisco and New York. And I understand there are many homeless people in every major city across the country.

China hasn’t fought a single war since 1979. But American soldiers have fought and died in many wars around the world in the same time period…Afghanistan, Bosnia, El Salvador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Yugoslavia, etc.

I think I’ve made my point.

Woman Describes What Life Is Like When You Are Ugly

First, you have to go back in time to when you’re a child. From a young age, you start hearing comments about your appearance. Random family members will say things like, “You may not be pretty, but you have brains. Being smart is so much more important.” Or, “Don’t worry, you’ll grow into you looks some day.”

Even starting preschool, you start getting mean comments. Kids call you names and point out any flaw you have. Kids don’t want to play with on the playground, and will tell you it’s because you’re too ugly. You get older and get used to mean comments and exclusion. But it gets even worse when you reach jr. high. The boys start making jokes about how gross you are, say things like, “I wouldn’t fuck her with a paper bag over hear head.” They laugh and make comments while other students join in. They pretend to ask you out, while laughing, and then run to their friends joking about how disgusting you are.

Mean girls make fun of your clothes, shoes and anything you do or wear. When the teacher assigns them to be partners with you on a group project, they act visibly disgusted, and beg the teacher for a new partner. The teacher then laughs and says, “In the real world you have to work with all types of people you don’t like, so get used to it.” Deep down you’re dying cuz all you do is act polite and normal, yet you’re hated and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Of course you make some friends, but they feel awkward and uncomfortable when they see you being bullied. They like you and feel bad, but there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s humiliating, because you don’t want your friends to pity you. You come home from school, sad and depressed.

You know the way you’re treated is because of physical features you can’t change. Your mom tries to comfort you by saying, “You’re beautiful the inside”. Your dad makes light hearted jokes to cheer you up, “Fuck those vapid mean girls, one day you’ll grow up to be rich , and you’ll be laughing at them.” Deep down you know this isn’t true, but you try and focus on other things.

You get older. Start high school and begin puberty. You see all the girls you are in school with look more beautiful than ever. Your body and face does not look like theirs at all. You see them in the locker room and they all look normal. Your saggy uneven boobs, and boxy body fail in comparison to them. You ask yourself why this happening. You ask god, why your body isn’t pretty like other girls! Why your boobs and body are misshapen! You didn’t do anything! You just grew wrong.

Every time you look in the mirror you want to die. Everyday you see girls better looking than you, and feel intense envy! You start to feel lonely. You see other girls getting boyfriends and going to dances. You realize no guy would ever want to date you, and those pretty prom dresses wouldn’t even look good on someone as oddly shaped as you.

Boys are still mean to you, or completely ignore your existence. You try and talk to a guy you have things in common with, but he acts uncomfortable and tries to leave the conversation immediately. You then see that same guy laughing and flirting with another girl, five minutes later.

Valentine’s Day is sin fuel. You see all the girls getting flowers, candies, and cards. You get nothing. You can only imagine what your life would have been like if you were genetically normal.

You want a boyfriend, but guys won’t even treat you like a human being. They either see you as a joke, or they don’t see you at all. You walk home from school, and you hear grown men yelling obscenities to you from their car windows. “Kill yourself fatty”, or “Damn that’s an ugly bitch”. This happens every time you go for a walk.

You graduate high school with very little social experience, a few friends that you hang out with occasionally. But they have other friends and party’s to go to, so they’re busy a lot. They don’t invite you, because they assume you won’t enjoy it. You don’t know why they think that, because you’ve never been to a party, so even you don’t know if you’d like it or not. You understand that it’s probably because your ugly, and you’d probably be excluded from conversations anyway.

You get a job and realize work and high school are weirdly similar. No one openly bullies you, but people treat you rudely and ignore you. The Beckys, Stacys, and Chads are treated better and given more respect. You are invisible and only a few people talk to you and are nice. You’re used to it though. You try and talk to your single male co-workers to see if maybe one of them may possibly be interested. Sometimes you forget you’re ugly for a moment, and think you have a shot. Nope, he’s not interested, and is a little insulted you even tried to flirt with him. He’s obsessed with a Stacy, that is in a happy relationship and barley knows he exists. Oh well you focus on your career.

You try internet dating. Tinder is a toxic waste dump, but you’re desperate. You get very few matches. When you match with someone, you text, “Hi, nice to meet you”, and then they unmatch instantly. Eventually you switch to bumble because you hear it’s less sleazy. You get a few matches to text back. Only one word answers. No effort. You don’t get asked out on dates, only Netflix and chill type deals. Also you have to drive to their place, and don’t forget to eat before you come, there won’t be food. You go. Remember no man has ever even had a conversation with you before.

You jump at any opportunity to get to know someone. You want a connection. You want to feel like a Prom Queen on Valentine’s Day. But you quickly realize that’s not going to happen. The men you meet are not nice. They don’t want to get to know you. They don’t care about your hopes, dreams, or career ambitions. They don’t even seem to like you. You try to get to know them, but every conversation turns sexual. You dodge, but then they get annoyed. They say oddly mean things like, “You’re not really my type”, or “I was hoping you’d look better than your photos”. They tell you, “you should leave before my roommate gets home”. You’re crushed because all you ever wanted was love and acceptance. You know that because you’re ugly, you’ll never find a good man that will love you, and treat you well. You’re lonely and it never gets better. The end!

Well, they got their ass well and thoroughly kicked and handed back to them on a silver platter. It’s bloody embarrassing. So they’re trying to change the narrative with not-so-subtle spin.

Pizza Hut unchanged

“The Pizza Hut in my hometown looks unchanged from the 1980s when I first came here.”

hey thats awesome 3
hey thats awesome 3

To be frank almost all American made electronics are manufactured in China or South Korea or Taiwan or Singapore barring some really high end ones.

The Ipods you used once to listen to music, they were made in Suzhou in China.

Likewise Iphones, Processors, Memory, Toys, Televisions, Consumer Electronics and Drones – regardless of who the designer is and the brand owner is, the odds that some or all of it was manufactured in China is close to 95%

Since both US and Chinese brands are manufactured in China, the difference in quality being due to Country of brand ownership is ridiculous.

The difference was initially in the Design

US Designs were more Aesthetic, Less Bulky and had a more efficient heat transfer mechanism

Plus US were masters at Branding

Thus US Products dominated the Top Markets and the High Bracket Consumers Globally and in China

Chinese Designs were less Aesthetic, bulkier and had a less efficient heat transfer mechanism

Yet they had the most attractive consumer attribute -Price!!

Plus China had no clue about branding

Thus Chinese Products dominated the Low End and Medium Bracket Consumers Globally and in China.

Slowly this began to narrow down very sharply in favor of China

China rapidly improved it’s designs and it’s bulkiness and it’s quality and today can be compared with on par with many US Products

Yet US could not improve their Prices and their Branding could not beat the Price to Quality advantage that China offered.

So China began to rapidly claiming market shares in the Higher Consumer Markets that were once the forte for Western Products and maybe Japan.

Now the West has to resort to underhand tactics to stay competitive against Chinese products.

Plus Chinese Products are slowly beating American Products hollow in the Domestic Markets and Asian Markets

Only Seven Global Brands -Intel, Qualcomm, Android, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla and Volkswagen are selling more than their Chinese Rivals today.

Sony, Samsung, Toyota, Panasonic, Electrolux and more than 60 Brands have all been overtaken by Chinese Products domestically and in many cases even within Asia.


So No

Chinese Products and American Products for the same segment today have very similar quality. US products have a mild edge on Quality, Chinese Products have a larger edge on Price.

Product quality depends on the Segment rather than Nationality of the Brand.

High Value Consumer Segments will be better quality than Low Value Consumer Segments

What Are The Downsides of Living In Japan?

Lots of mindless, pointless paperwork for everything. If you want a new phone contract, for example, come back in two weeks because the phone company had to contact the manager of the branch, who has to contact the district manager, who has to contact the regional manager, who has to contact the president of the company to approve it, and all of them have to hanko (sign via a special stamp) the documents approving you. (This may be slightly exaggerated, but only slightly.)

Houses are generally built on top of each other. Most places you can literally reach out your window and touch the next house… assuming you can find a house and not just a tiny apartment.

Houses are also not an investment here.

They’re more like cars–once you drive them off the lot, they depreciate in value immediately.

No one wants a “used” house, here.

After 30 years they just tear them down and build new ones. (Or they just keep living in dumps for years and years because of money/legal reasons.)

Land is what is valuable, but they have loads of rules about how much you can own, what you can build on it, and so forth. If you want a modest house with a big yard for your dog, don’t come to Japan. (Case in point, I live in a cute, tiny old run down Japanese house by myself.

All of my American friends, upon seeing photos, say, “It’s so cute and small!” All of my Japanese co-workers say, “Don’t you feel lonely by yourself in that big house?”)

No napkins or paper towels anywhere. Also, no trash cans. You have to carry your trash with you until you find either a convenience store or your house to throw it away. (Also they take recycling to an extreme here. Which I totally approve of. But making sure you’re properly washing and sorting your garbage and disposing of it on the right days can be an ordeal.)

Because I am not Japanese, I will always be a foreigner. Even if I live in Japan for 80 years and learn perfect fluent Japanese and have a Japanese spouse and Japanese kids, I will always be assumed to be an ignorant foreigner and treated differently as such. Obviously people I see every day would eventually know better, but it’s frustrating to say “konnichiwa” and have a stranger go “WOW YOU SPEAK SUCH GOOD JAPANESE” based on that single word. Or questions like, “Can you use chopsticks?” or “Can you eat sushi?” etc can get tiresome.

Not the end of the world, but worth mentioning.

The price of fruit is really high, usually. I suck it up and deal, but it is a downside, especially because I really like fruit.

EVERYTHING is “seasonal.” (Not EVERYTHING but almost everything.) If it’s not the season for corn, you pretty much can’t find corn in the supermarket. If it’s not the season for strawberries, forget it. If it’s not the season for grapes you can’t find them.

Some of it makes sense, some of it has taken a lot of getting used to. Japan LOVES it’s seasons, and really celebrates them with a changing menu. I’ve learned to embrace and look forward to the changes, but it can be frustrating.

Cars are expensive, parking cars is expensive, and toll ways/freeways are even more expensive. This isn’t an aspect I deal with much because I don’t have a car, but it is part of the reason why I don’t. Too expensive!

Gay rights are lagging behind the rest of the world, if that bothers you. The country isn’t very religious (and the dominant religion is not Christianity) so there isn’t bigotry for gays in the way that there is in America, but same-sex marriage isn’t recognized here, and it’s extremely rare to see openly gay people out and about. Partially due to Japanese intensely private home lives, but also due to a general attitude about gay people kind of just not existing. (Which is obviously false.) It’s getting better, but it’s still got a long way to go.

Censored porn. With the internet it’s not really a big deal, but it is still nevertheless mind-boggling.

Racism is real here. Not so much against blacks (though there is some of that), but against other asians. All Japanese seem to hate Chinese and Koreans. There’s good reasons for it too, considering the wars and the hoards of rude tourists from those countries… but it’s a blanket statement that tends to bother me. “I hate rude Chinese tourists” is very different than “I hate Chinese people”, you know?

Most of my elementary school aged students hate Korean and Chinese people–for no reason other than that their parents do.

Which leads me to the fact that individuality and critical thinking is not valued well here. Japan works well the way it does because of the “group think.” The reason people don’t steal your wallet is because they wouldn’t want someone to steal THEIR wallet. It’s a polite world where no one wants to stand out.

They have a saying that the “nail that sticks out gets hammered down” and so forth. Conformity is key. Don’t express your opinions, don’t stand out, don’t draw attention to yourself.

This is great when you’re on a super crowded train and everyone is quiet and polite and it’s almost peaceful despite the crowds. It’s not so great when you’re trying to encourage an eight-year-old to think for themselves, to express their opinions.

Even getting them to say what their favorite fruit is sometimes can be difficult. By the time they’re in junior high school, it’s impossible. They don’t want to ‘think’… they want to know the right answer so they can regurgitate it to me.

The education system here is all kinds of broken… but that’s true of America as well. They’re broken in completely different ways, but they are still both quite broken. The Japanese education system is maddening. Too much focus on tests and memorizing answers.

– JustVan

Strange death

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I have lived in China for 20 years, and I have never been to a restaurant serving dog meat, nor have I been invited to eat dog meat.

I believe that there are westerners who search out these places, then publicize them to get attention for themselves, and to make Americans think that this is something Chinese do on a regular basis.

It would be like a Chinese saying that white Americans shoot African-Americans for sport. The US has racial issues, but that would be an untrue claim.

Confessions Of An Asexual Woman

To be honest, it feels completely normal. I can’t imagine being any other way, therefore I can’t say definitively how it is so different from not being asexual. Not to say that I haven’t perceived some differences while growing up.

While in school, most notably middle school, when relationships were becoming more and more of interest with my peers, I always wondered what the point was. Because I felt no internal stirrings of being physically interested in anyone I misguidedly perceived that everyone else was feeling nothing, which lead me to wonder “Why”. It was hard for me to think of an end game.

Eventually, I realized that they were feeling sexual attraction which made sense to me, but oddly enough I never actually wondered why I wasn’t feeling it as well. My first question was answered and my quandaries kind of stopped at that point. I started reading more about sexuality and books with relationships, alright I admit it, with romances in them, and piece by piece I felt more and more clued into what I couldn’t directly experience. For the most part I supplemented my understanding of sexuality and relationships with various forms of media, and yeah that includes porn. Really who hasn’t seen it?

When I found out about someone having a crush on me I felt absolutely nothing. Most of the time I wondered why they felt I needed to know that bit of information since I couldn’t conceive anything resulting from that piece of knowledge. Whenever there was situation where it was an opportunity to think about myself in a relationship or in a situation where I was a participant in intimate activities, my mind just came up blank. Conceiving of other people in those situations, no problem. That is easy to imagine but myself, I couldn’t think of anything even if I tried.

So, slowly and surely I began to wonder why I hadn’t felt anything yet, or even imagined anything like that for myself. I eventually confided in a gay friend pondering that I might be gay since I couldn’t feel anything for guys, despite the fact that I also felt nothing for girls. But at that point, I like many people mistook thinking that being gay is at least an absence of feeling attraction for the opposite gender. But telling that friend was a big mistake since I believe he immediately told people that I was gay. Not that it changed anything, my high school was extremely tolerant. Our homecoming king was openly gay for god’s sake. So after that I stopped wondering if I was gay or not since I did realize that I also felt nothing for females.

Then I entered into the mindset that it will happen when it happens. Maybe from some of my mom’s trashy romance novels (Note the two adjectives: trashy and romance. I am not saying that all romance novels are trashy), I got the idea that my sexuality will one day be unlocked by some guy that comes along, or girl (I was still open to finding out that I was gay all along). That people only feel their sexuality as a response to other people rather than it being internally fueled. It kind of went against what I had learned but it was the best idea I could apply myself since otherwise I had no answers about myself. It was a stand in answer so that I didn’t have to many questions about myself.

Eventually I met a guy who was classically attractive, was interested in me and I found a bit interesting. Mostly, I was curious about dating. I couldn’t pick for myself so I let someone pick me. I was kind of shocked with the intensity this guy courted me. Never to the point that I felt in danger but just that I was surprised at the first hand experience of such intense attraction, or really any attraction to me. Eventually he asked if I was a virgin, and then when he found out that I was one he asked why. And still I couldn’t really give an answer. I didn’t have religious reasons, and after high school I had realized that I never had a crush either. I knew I wasn’t a prude. I just never felt like that towards anyone. Eventually I broke it off because I couldn’t really understand his quickly escalating feelings nor reciprocate them.

Eventually I got into a relationship, my longest with a guy who I actually liked, he wasn’t what I found aesthetically pleasing but he was intellectually stimulating. At first I just assumed that he was like me not as inclined to physical contact. When I was with him I never thought about kissing or any other intimate contact, which is why after three months of dating he just kissed me right after seeing a movie, I was surprised. But I didn’t feel anything really. And then again I questioned why I wasn’t feeling anything. I would try to give myself goals, to do things that I thought where just done in relationships. Like “Next time we go to the movies, lets make out.” But in terms of physical activities such as that in the moment I would never be able to think of it. It was like as soon as a person comes into the room it was nearly impossible for me to even think about sex.

But just because I had a hard time just thinking about sex or physical contact at certain moments, didn’t mean that someone else wasn’t thinking of it. Eventually started inquiring about more contact, eventually asked me point blank if I was a lesbian since I turned down all of his advances. Then I got into the mindset that I just needed to start doing it and then I would like, despite the fact that I knew sexuality didn’t work that way. But in the reality of no answer, I just defaulted on the same tired old explanations of female sexuality, which are flat out wrong. I started lying that “sure yeah” I liked this or that, just to get him to move on to the next thing or to just get it over with. But each time my hope that it would get better, was diminishing every time I did anything with him.

Activities with him became a bit stressful. I would be careful try to not use any sexual jokes, innuendos or wear anything that would remind him that he liked to touch my body. And I never knew when he would request contact. Some times it would be a great time with him, making fun of bad movies, cracking jokes at the expense of old co-workers, playing card games, and talking about our days. I would always breath a sigh of relief when he didn’t request contact on those days. But when he did request contact I froze and would request time to mentally prepare which was me sitting in the bathroom alone.

But then he started to become more morose and moody. He didn’t want to communicate with me what was wrong, and I was honestly so clueless about the fact that lack of sexual contact was really that distressing to most people. Also it was the obvious fact that his girlfriend clearly didn’t find him sexually attractive and visibly was distressed at the idea of sexual contact with him. He felt unloved and unwanted, he knew that I cared for him but still he couldn’t change the fact that my lack of reaction to him deeply effected him. He did try. He always asked me what I would like or want. That he was open to ideas for us to try, but at those times I always drew a blank.

I honestly felt like there was something wrong with me. I looked online for some type of female arousal medication, something that would make me want sex or any type of contact, but I didn’t find much. Compromise in this relationship didn’t feel like much of a compromise. I didn’t want to have sex or any touching, while he did.

Long story short, I was watching a show on the LGBT channel LOGO called 1 Girl 5 Gays (1G5G) and the host asked the question, “Do you think asexuality is real?” and I don’t know why I perked up at that question since how the question was answered it didn’t even explain what it was. So I looked it up, and felt so much relief that I could actually put a name to what I was feeling.

And long long story short. You know what happened we eventually broke up since building feelings of resentment and bitterness were starting to ruin genuine good memories I spent with person. We are still friends. I still use his Netflix and he can use my HBO GO account. That type of thing. We still talk, but now it is such a relief that I no longer have to be ever anxious to perform things I honestly could not keep doing any longer.

And long long long story short. Something happened that I never thought would. I actually met face to face another asexual, and not putting names to anything, but now having a close friendship with someone without the worry of having to deal with sexual attraction or sexual needs is so incredibly freeing. In this relationship I haven’t felt so relaxed before, I was beginning to think that it was somewhat impossible for me.

So now I hang out with a person in which I just feel totally normal. Other people looking into our relationship probably think it is a “normal” relationship that includes sex, we are well aware of this and we laugh it off. For the first time I am really optimistic about relationships.

So yeah, being asexual, it feels normal but you are aware that others are humming to a tune you can’t quite hear but you can hear everyone else humming. And people are expecting you to dance to this tune, and dance partners are frustrated that you can’t find the beat and/or that you don’t feel the need to dance. If you don’t know you are asexual, relationships can be difficult, confusing, and a bit painful. But once you know your orientation, things get much easier when you have to communicate what you can and can’t do in a relationship. The big thing is knowing yourself and not letting anyone else dictate to you what you are and what you really want and need.

Chloe Shani Malveaux

Two cats

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Anyone who cannot see the hypocrisy is either blind, deaf or dumb.

The US has been at war 250 out of 275 years of its existence, China has not been in a conflict for 43 years straight. During which time the US fought 20 nations but the joke is China is aggressive but US is not? What a joke. But the bigger joke is some westerners actually buys that lie!

The US and NATO screamed democracy and freedom of choice and when Sadam Hussein and Colonel Gadaffi chose not to trade in Dollar, they are murdered! Democracy is be submissive and subservient to us or we will carpet bomb you. If you are too strong or has Nukes we will sanction you so that your people die without medication or starve to death. Is this democracy? It seems very authoritarian to the world.

The US and UK steal and snagged hundreds of Islands by murdering the ruler and claimed China and Russia has ambition to occupy another land. In fact the US is stolen from the native Americans of doing genocide and murdering 25–50 million of them yet fictitiously call Chinas genocide even though the Uyghurs population grew by more than double.

The British is the most despicable colonialist racist people on earth yet is calls China a threat? Threat from what? Threats on not being able to slaughter natives at will? It’s really a joke and a sickening hypocrite. The Queen wears stolen jewel from India and South Africa at her funeral telling the world we are the thief so what can you do about it!

And they are the 5 eyes or shall I say 5 Anglo white eyes to watch who abused human rights. The slave torturer, the native slaughterers, the nation that murders 50 million since its birth a mere 275 years ago guard human right. The thought of this makes the world want to puke!

Two teenagers killed their Spanish teacher over bad grade

A pair of teenagers in Fairfield, Iowa are going on trial for murder — after they allegedly beat their Spanish teacher to death over a bad grade.

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Prosecutors say Jeremy Goodale and Willard Miller ambushed 66-year-old Nohema Graber while she was taking her daily walk in the woods in November of last year, beat her over the head with a baseball bat, then hid her body under a tarp and a wheelbarrow.

Goodale and Miller have both been charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder and will be tried as adults.⁠

In Iowa, the penalty for a first-degree murder conviction is life in prison. Iowa supreme court rulings require juveniles convicted of even the most serious crimes to be given a chance for parole.

Kekoa

When my wife and I decided to adopt Kekoa from the shelter, we first had to pick up the necessary supplies, get his room ready, and grab a quick lunch.

In between munches, we debated the different names to give him that matched his personality and his upbringing.

After much deliberation, we found that ‘Kekoa’ matched him best, which is Hawaiian for‘Brave and Courageous’.

Before he was brought to the shelter, he lived a hard life on the streets. He had wounds on top of wounds, and at one point, his tail had been broken in multiple places. Poor kitty!

Because of his rough life, we felt that Kekoa matched him to a “T”.

As best as the shelter vets, and our personal vet could determine, he was 7+ years old. Not much to go on, but it’s enough for us.

He’s now celebrating his ninth month with us, and his personality (and vocabulary) are enormous.

In the household hierarchy, he’s at the top of the Foodchain, followed by Her Royal Highness, the Princess Oreo, then my wife. Me, I’m the bottom feeder, LOL. 😹

His other attributes are that he’s VERY affectionate, playful, intelligent….almost to the point of being problem solving. He’s also extremely energetic and athletic.

He routinely jumps from the kitchen push-through counter to the living room coffee table, a distance of over seven feet, with ease. His landing may not be the most graceful, but it’s always extraordinary to see him do it all the time.

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“Who will benefit the most if the USA/China go to war?”

Seriously! What the hell is wrong with so many of you and this whole stupid “war” thing with China the US? Don’t you have anything better to do?

There will be absolutely no benefit to any country if the two countries were to (although highly unlikely) go to war with each other!

The financial losses would be catastrophic, not to mention the loss of human life too!

Get a grip of reality please, and stop asking such antagonistic as well as ill thought out questions!

15 American People Who Don’t Have A College Degree And Make Over $100k Reveal What They Do For A Living

1. I’m a welder, moved my way around and now in aviation and have been for a while now. I cleared $100k back in October, probably going to end the year around $120k at 26. What I do is weld main component parts for jet engines. Combustors, bearing housings, vane blades, so on.

No degree, but I did go to vocational high school. This isn’t the route you’d have to take either. People can learn it on the side, as welding is more of a “show us you can” type of work. My field requires multiple tests, both written and physical(which may require some schooling on welding basics) then weld various metal together, X-ray, cut apart, so on.

I’m very fortunate to be in a laid back environment, I have an area all to myself where I’m rarely bothered. Nothing I lift is strenuous, most of my work takes place in a chair. Love it though, wouldn’t want to do much else. Also to note, my job is union and I strongly suggest union to blue collar people. You’re not harassed by management, have a higher entity protecting your rights to do the job you do, and ONLY do that job and not someone else’s. And, unions pay way more, clearly.

2. My brother-in-law’s 3 sons are all journeyman electricians (dad is a master electrician). 2 of them are high school dropouts. 2 of them make over $100,000. The youngest makes about $85,000, but is gaining on his brothers.

3. Nuclear plant operations. You can get into an Senior Reactor Operator licensing class with certain experience or education. A huge number of the SROs are are ex-Navy nukes.

The Navy requires a HS diploma. Job pays usually starting of over 100K.

4. Bartender in a high end resort town. I work my ass off during the seasons but off season is easy.

5. Husband is a union tower crane operator. He dropped out of high school, got his GED at 25, joined the union at 29 and at 34 makes almost $200k a year. It’s a good gig as long as you don’t mind heights.

Best way to get into cranes is to call your local IUOE. Go through the apprenticeship program and work your way through your certifications. Build relationships with your peers and maintain your work ethic. You won’t see the out of work list, you’ll be requested for jobs.

6. I work in IT for a major telecom. No degree but several certs. A nice easy 9-5.

7. My wife made $290,000 last year, and is estimated to make $350K this year.

She owns a business that does like $1.5 million in sales of surgical device equipment to hospitals. She sells stuff like shoulder and hip replacements, the plates and screws used to fix broken wrists, nerve grafts, and even these crazy magnetic nail things that allow people with different length legs to have length added, or for people with dwarfism to add up to 4” of total height.

She does not have a college degree, but she joined the army and did a 1-yr program to become a radiologic tech. She did that job in the operating room during surgeries for a couple years, and meeting other sales reps is how she came into her job. She was such a high-seller that her first boss was afraid she would quit, and then his business would fail… so he offered her 50% ownership of the company. Since then she has started up a 2nd business selling other, non-competing products, so that she gets 100% of the profits, versus half.

8. I’m a freight conductor for a class one railroad in the United States. $108,000 a year. Never stepped foot in a college before, I’m 22 years old.

9. I work as a “B” Pressure welder in Canada. I have my own rig (Truck with welding equipment in it) and I average $125 / Hour.

Depending on the work available and how much time you’re willing to put in, you can make anywhere from 100k-400k. Last 3 years I’ve made 250k working 9 months of the year and taking 3 months off.

10. I’m a recruiter. No college degree or certifications. I had 5ish years of retail/food experience, ending that run with a “General Manager” title before getting into recruitment.

Pretty much anyone can get into a recruiting job if you apply to work at staffing agencies (Randstad, Adecco, Robert Half, Kelly Services, etc). Agency recruiting is a grind, but you can make a ton of money with the commissions – and the base salary without commissions is normally plenty to live on. And if you pay your dues with a staffing agency for a few years, you can transition into a corporate in-house recruiting job after that. My first year in staffing, my base was $40k and I made $70k total that year including commission. My second year, my base was $42k and I made $90k including commissions.

Then I moved into a corporate recruiting job with a well-known tech company. The base was much higher, but I took a bit of a pay cut overall in exchange for better benefits and work-life balance. My first year there, I was at $70k base and around $85k total including bonuses. I just completed 3 years there, going into my 4th year now – currently at $80k base and $100k including bonuses. I have a raise going effective in January to $90k base and $115k including bonuses.

If you go into recruitment, go with either healthcare (nursing or physicians, not allied) or tech recruiting. That’s where the money is. You won’t make much recruiting for more blue collar industries.

11. Own a private jet catering company, you’d be surprised what the richest 1% of people are willing to spend on stupid things…

12. Train Conductor. Pay pretty much fluctuates depending on how often I wanna work or not. All on the job paid training, with overtime. Pretty easy job all things aside, just have to live with being on call and being gone from home 2 days at a time.

13. Air traffic controller. Made over $160k last year, but that was with a lot of forced overtime.

Most of my co-workers are veterans who got into ATC in the military. Many people–whether they have military experience or not– don’t make it through training. My facility is sitting at abysmal success rate of about 20% right now.

14. Union plumber in NYC. Around 140k a year if you work year round steady benefits included.

Got the job by waiting outside the Local 1 training facility for 3 days until they gave out the 1000 applications. Happens once every 2 years and they accept on average 200 of the applications. Pretty lucky.

15. I’m a journeyman power lineman, and my base is over $100k. With tons of over time, (most of it double time) some guys pull in over $200k. 1

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There was a boy named Sid in my class in Secondary (High) school. He was an odd boy and a bit of a loner. He was the guy who’d always ‘kill the joke’ in class i.e. when when everyone in class starts making funny comments about someone or something, he was the one that would make an awkward, completely unrelated comment that killed and buried the laughter.

He was one of the few boys to have a full moustache at the age of 12 and the one day he shaved it off he looked like he came from another planet and was the laughing stock of the week.

I used to feel sorry for him but sometimes he’d say the darndest things that were so bizarre and unfunny that I couldn’t help but shake my head and sigh. Even some of the teachers would groan at some of the unfunny attention seeking statements that Sid would make.

Biology teacher: So that’s why female dogs produce multiple babies whereas female humans usually produce one.

Sid: So why didn’t God give female dogs multiple vaginas to make it easy on them.

These kind of statements, along with a collective sigh from the class would be the routine for years to come.

This was until suddenly I witnessed Sid make an unfunny joke and all of a sudden most of the kids in class started laughing.

Then I noticed the teachers started behaving favorably towards him; feigning laughter at his silliness and giving him special attention and help in class

Then I noticed two of the most desired girls in school were fighting over him, both of them vociferously declaring to be his true girlfriend.

Nobody made fun of him and even the worst bullies and class clowns made sure not to mess with him.

I wondered if the world had gone mad.

I discussed it with my friends and they explained it to me.

‘Didn’t you hear? Sid’s rich.’

As it turned out Sid’s father was a prominent lawyer in the country. Nobody realized this until he visited the school for a parent’s day. Having connections to a rich and powerful lawyer was something our dilapidated and poorly funded school coveted and as such Sid was now treated like royalty.

For his 16th birthday he was given a new car and he proudly drove it into the compound with his two girlfriends inside; the only boy in the school’s history to have that luxury.

However he was still as corny and awkward as ever but no one seemed to pay that any mind.

So the harsh truth I learned as a teenager was:

Money and power can make any donkey look like a stallion.

Pickle

I’ve loved all my cats over the years but my soul mate was Pickle who died 4 years ago.

When I bought his brother Ted, I felt sorry for Pickle because the seller said he wasn’t very attractive and no one wanted him.

On a whim I decided right there and then that I would buy him as well. I have never to this day had such an openly affectionate cat who wanted to be with me 24/7, cuddle me, and sleep on my pillow.

He would purr as loudly as a car engine and yes, he was little on the cuddly side. (He stole a pork chop from one of my neighbour’s bbqs one summer!).

I can honestly say that the day I had to put him to sleep was absolutely devastating.

His brother died shortly afterwards, and I think that was partly due to missing Pickle so much as they’d been inseparable.

I’m not religious but I think I’m quite spiritual so now when I see stars I think of Ted and when I feel the wind I think of Pickle.

I like to think of them together again, at one with nature, waiting patiently for me. What a wonderful reunion it will be.

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Found in a secret room

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Hilachas (Guatemalan Shredded Beef in Tomato-Tomatillo Sauce)

“Found online; posting for ZWT 7-Central America (Guatemala). Recipe states: Pair it with a side of rice and fresh corn tortillas for a full meal.”

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Ingredients

  • 2 lbs beef flank steak or 2 lbs skirt steaks, cubed
  • 5 cups water
  • 2 -3 tablespoons oil
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 1 cup tomatoes, chopped
  • 1 cup tomatillo, chopped
  • 2 -3 guajillo chilies, warmed over a flame, deseeded and chopped
  • salt and pepper, to taste
  • 1 lb potato, peeled and chopped
  • 2 -3 carrots, peeled and chopped
  • 12 cup breadcrumbs
  • 1 bunch cilantro, chopped

Directions

  • Place the beef, water and a big pinch of salt in a large saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, or until the beef is very tender.
  • Remove the beef to a bowl, reserving the broth, and set aside to cool
  • When cool enough to handle, shred the beef with your fingers and set aside.
  • While the beef is simmering, place the onion, tomatoes, tomatillos and chiles in a food processor or blender and puree, adding a little water if necessary.
  • Heat the oil in a large pot over medium flame. Add the onion-tomato puree and simmer until the puree is cooked down and darkens somewhat in color, about 10 minutes. Do not burn.
  • Add the shredded beef and about 3 cups of the broth to the onion-tomato puree and season with salt and pepper. Simmer for about 15 minutes.
  • Stir in the potatoes, onions and a little more broth or water if necessary Simmer until the potatoes and carrots are cooked through, about 15-20 minutes.
  • Stir in the breadcrumbs to thicken the sauce.
  • Then stir in the chopped cilantro, adjust seasoning and serve hot with corn tortillas or rice.
  • *Variations.
  • Use 1 or 2 shredded fresh corn tortillas to thicken the sauce instead of the breadcrumbs if you like. If the sauce has thickened enough while simmering, neither thickener may be necessary.
  • Add 2 teaspoon achiote seasoning to the onion-tomato puree for added flavor. Bricks of achiote seasoning can be found at many Latin markets.
  • The potatoes and carrots can be eliminated if you like.
  • Canned tomatoes and tomatillos work just fine in this recipe.
  • Two cups of chopped tomatoes can be used if you would like to eliminate the tomatillos.
  • If you can’t find guajillo chiles, use anchos or pasillas. Or substitute with 1 tablespoon of paprika and 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper.

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Frederic William Burton – The Meeting on the Turret Stairs (1864)

The Meeting on the Turret Stairs (or Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs) is an 1864 watercolor painting by Frederic William Burton. The painting is in the National Gallery of Ireland. The subject of the painting is the love story of Hellelil, who fell in love with her personal guard Hildebrand.
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meeting

Ignoramuses who accuse China of debt–trap diplomacy and insist Sri Lanka is a concrete example obviously fell asleep during the news last week. Sri Lanka failed to pay interest it owed to holders of overseas Sri Lankan government bonds. The country has fallen into default for the first time since independence in 1948. And it’s worse than that: it’s a full–blown economic emergency. 40% inflation, a plunging currency, rolling blackouts, and only some millions of dollars in reserves, not even enough to buy food and fuel supplies for the import–dependent island.

Sri Lanka needed money and it went to China asking for more loans. If China were ever interested in debt traps, this was a golden, once–in–a–lifetime opportunity for one. Sri Lanka is very dangerously broke and its negotiating position is zero. China could have named any price. It could have demanded and taken any national asset it wanted and laid conditions that would infringe on the island’s sovereignty, all for the cost of a few billion dollars which is nothing to the rising economic superpower.

China said no. For 3 reasons. #1, it didn’t like that Sri Lanka fell into default despite all of its assistance and policy guidance for the island to help it prevent that scenario. #2, China doesn’t like to lend money to countries that haven’t repaid, or clearly won’t be able to repay, previous Chinese loans.

So Sri Lanka will not receive any new Chinese loans. China is not taking advantage of this opportunity to increase its economic leverage over Sri Lanka. What “debt–trapper” would ever do that? The whole idea of a debt trap is to lend a country money that you know it can never repay, then use its debt to you as an excuse to take it over.

So is China a debt–trapper? OBVIOUSLY no. The hands–off Chinese response to Sri Lanka’s economic crisis is further proof of a point I made in one of my 400–something posts: China wants partner countries to be financially stable. It is in China’s business interest for partner countries to be financially stable.

(Reason #3 why China refused is geopolitical. It wanted to give India a gesture of goodwill by allowing India an opportunity to help Sri Lanka instead — thereby intentionally decreasing Chinese influence and enabling India to increase its influence in its own backyard.)


But you know what country EXCELS at debt–trap diplomacy? What country basically invented it and taught it to the US? Britain.

Educated citizens of the most indebted country in the European Union probably know this well. Any Greek who knows 2 atoms about his modern history knows that Greece began its independent existence in 1821 severely burdened with enormous loans it had taken from British banks to fund its war of independence against the Ottomans. Britain refused to ever abolish or reduce this debt. The result of this debt was tremendous British interference in sovereign and domestic Greek affairs. More importantly, this debt to Britain escalated into debt to other great powers, and it’s something Greece has never been able to get out of, to this day.

As one historian writes,

The 1824–1825 [British] loans should be considered as illegitimate and illegal because the terms in the contracts were unfair were unfair and the manipulations by the [British] bankers clearly deceptive. The 1833 [British] loan clearly falls into the category of odious debt…

The refusal of the creditors and the great powers to abolish or reduce the debt has produced long-term effects that maintain Greece in submission and prohibit real economic development.

The people of Greece have remained in the thrall of the odious debt that she was born with.

Put simply, this means that for the past 200 years Greece has had no choice but to be an Anglo pawn (especially in foreign policy) because the Brits did to Greece what France did to Haiti (long–term debt servitude from the birth of statehood) in the name of freeing her from the Ottomans.

In 1969 exiled Greek nationalist Constantine Tsoucalas wrote:

The Greek people have long been powerless to take their destiny into their own hands…

As a pawn of Western diplomacy when the Ottoman Empire was breaking up,

as a naval base essential for the control of the Dardanelles,

as a bastion of the ‘free world’ in its attempt to stop the expansion of Communism,

or as one of the very few secure bases for the strategic control of the ever-unstable Middle East,

Greece has always had to pay the price for the international interest she has provoked.


My modern Greek history is pretty good but I’m more qualified than any Greek to write about British debt–trap diplomacy, because I’m Egyptian.

The grotesque, brutal and humiliating nightmare that was the British occupation of my country from 1882 to 1919, and to a great extent still until 1956, all began out of money that Egypt borrowed from Britain.

Isma’il Pasha ruled Egypt from 1863 to 1879. He was an Anglophile and French–educated reformer who was extremely keen on developing Egypt to make her the equal of any Western European country. He built factories, bridges, railways, telegraph lines, harbour works, schools (primary, secondary, technical and vocational), theatres, the Egyptian National Library, the Khedivial Opera House… He hired 100,000 European expats and created a new quarter in the capital to accommodate them. He remodelled big parts of Cairo and Alexandria on Paris. He sent Egyptian students to Europe and the US on government scholarships, and even tried to rival European exploration by sending Egyptian explorers deep into the little–known Nile Basin. He partnered with a French company to build the Suez Canal, and borrowed to pay for most of its cost. During his rule, Egypt had the densest railroad network (the most kilometers of rail per habitable square km of land) in the world.

But he borrowed much too much money to pay for these modernization projects, plain and simple. Mostly from British banks. Egypt ended up owing £100 million and it couldn’t pay this back. Its yearly government revenue was no more than £8 million.

So what did the British do?

First, they demanded extraterritoriality — i.e. that Brits who committed crimes in Egypt be subject not to Egyptian law, but to British law and British courts. The Chinese understand extraterritoriality very well!

Then they demanded majority ownership of the Suez Canal.

Then they demanded that Isma’il Pasha reduce his monarchical powers, appoint a pro–British puppet as his prime minister (Nubar Pasha) and an actual British official as his finance minister (Charles Rivers Wilson). The puppet government imposed harsh austerity measures on the Egyptian populace in order to get Britain’s money back. (The British did not abolish these measures until 1940.)

At this point the people of Egypt began to see that their country was being taken over, and they staged a courageous popular revolt headed by the patriotic peasant army officer Ahmed ’Urabi. Isma’il Pasha tried to save the situation by meeting some of the demands of the protesters, i.e. by reversing some of the concessions he had made to the British. He even invited ’Urabi to become his new prime minister, dismissing the British puppet Nubar Pasha.

This was anathema to the British. In response they threatened and terrified Isma’il Pasha and demanded that he step down, leave Egypt, and give the throne to his 27–year–old son Tewfik, because Tewfik was young and inexperienced and easier for the British to control.

Under the weak leadership of Tewfik, Egypt was squeezed by the British more and more.

Finally — seeing that their puppet Tewfik was hated and seeing that the Egyptian nationalist revolt was continuing unabated and threatened to expel them from Egypt and dislodge it from debt slavery and colonial encroachment — the nefarious Brits simply brought a fleet and 50,000 soldiers to Alexandría and seized control of the entire country. Ironically, they made use of Isma’il Pasha’s very own railways and telegraph lines to facilitate their invasion. Nubar Pasha was reappointed prime minister. Ahmed ’Urabi was exiled to British–ruled Sri Lanka. We were lucky that he wasn’t publicly hanged, like many other Egyptian patriots were in the black year of 1882 and in the coming decades.

All of these events took just around 10 years to happen.

Egypt became a British colony until 1919 and a British puppet state until 1956.

All because of British loans.

THAT is debt–trap diplomacy EXPERTLY DONE! The Chinese know nothing about this and quite frankly are total amateurs. The BRITISH innovated debt–trap diplomacy and perfected it to a science and still practice it. (On the sly of course.)

They have also incorporated the advice of Goebbels into their foreign policy by constantly accusing China of doing what they have always done — debt–trap diplomacy — while they still do it, to sow extra confusion.

Be careful

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878563

Chai Spice Streusel-Topped Blueberry Muffin Bread

Switch out your usual coffee cake recipe for a tasty new treat! Cardamom, cinnamon and ginger put a chai-inspired twist on this streusel-topped blueberry muffin bread. Perfect for a holiday breakfast or brunch, this yummy loaf offers a great blend of warming flavors to complement the cooler weather.

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8c0d4096 2d99 4cde b1c7 41f12f17c380

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These Are Some The Questions That Google Asks Potential Employees During The Interview Process

 

Tech companies are notorious for testing applicants’ thinking skills with difficult interview questions. Although interview puzzles are less common these days–with Google demphasizing or doing away them–if you’re going for a job in Silicon Valley or just want to check out some interview brainteasers, here are examples of challenging interview questions that have made smart people feel very dumb.

How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

Job: Product Manager

How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

Job: Product Manager

In a country in which people only want boys…

…every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

Job: Product Manager

How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

Job: Product Manager

Why are manhole covers round?

Job: Software Engineer

Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco

Job: Product Manager

How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

Job: Product Manager

Explain the significance of “dead beef”

Job: Software Engineer

A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

Job: Software Engineer

You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct phone number…

…, but you cannot ask him directly. You must write the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?

Job: Software Engineer

You’re the captain of a pirate ship…

…and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive?

Job: Engineering Manager

You have eight balls all of the same size…

…7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?

Job: Product Manager

You are given 2 eggs…

…You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.

Job: Product Manager

Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

Job: Product Manager

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel…

… and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Job: Product Manager

Kobayashi Kiyochika 清親 – The Advance to Weihaiwei (1895)

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xcp16olcpcr91

Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes – the Best You’ve Ever Had

WOWZER!!! That is what I have to say. These potatoes were just awesome. They turned out very nice. I did not peel my potatoes, however that did not change the fact of how good they were. I really enjoyed these, the garlic was such a nice treat since I love garlic. I did have to add a bit of milk to get them to a nice consistency.

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Ingredients

Directions

  • Separate head of garlic into individual cloves.
  • Toss in olive oil and wrap tightly in small piece of aluminum foil.
  • Bake in 350°F (180°C) oven for 45 minutes.
  • When the garlic has cooled to the touch you should be able to squeeze it out of the ‘paper’ shell of the individual cloves.
  • Mash the roasted garlic with a fork, or force through a fine strainer.
  • If you use a ricer as recommended below, simply rice the garlic along with the potatoes.
  • Peel and boil potatoes in salted water until tender.
  • Force the cooked potatoes through a ricer (recommended) or mash by your usual method.
  • Put the riced potatoes, garlic, sour cream, butter, and salt and white pepper in a mixer bowl, and whip at medium speed until smooth.
  • Add cream or milk to adjust consistency.

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Mom Defends Her Son, Who Beat Up His Bully, in Viral Post: ‘Problem solved’

A Missouri mother’s unapologetic Facebook post defending her son’s decision to fight back against a bully has gone viral.

Allison Davis posted a selfie picture of her son, Drew, who was suspended from school for “beating up the kid that has been tormenting and bullying him since middle school.”

But rather than being “upset” over her son’s behavior, Davis said she was far from it.

“Not even a little bit,” she said.

“I know as a parent I’m suppose[d] to be upset with him for resorting to violence or getting suspended, but I’m not,” she wrote.

Davis said that her son had suffered bullying from the unidentified student for years and, despite repeated attempts to get the school to do something about it, nothing happened.

“When this kid has constantly threatened to beat Drew up along with several of his friends, the school did nothing,” Davis said. “When this kid followed Drew down the hall threatening him and making fun of him AND it was all captured on video, the school did nothing.”

The mother said the student’s bullying only got worse over time, including sending her son threats on social media, voicemails and text messages. Still, she said, the school did nothing.

“In middle school, Drew was afraid to walk down the halls because a swarm of this kid and his minions would make fun of and threaten Drew,” she said. “He quit talking to the adults about it because they never disciplined the bully and it just made the situation worse.”

Davis said she sent the school a “lengthy email” earlier this year and “begged” the school to intervene. Their solution, she said, was to have the two sign a “no contact” contract.

So when Drew ultimately took matters into his own hands, Davis said, he was left with no alternative. “Drew decided that he would quit relying on the school and the adults who are suppose[d] to protect him and HE would do something,” she wrote. “Three punches and his bully screamed like a baby, his minion friends shut up, and this morning the bully wouldn’t even look at him.”

“Problem solved,” she added.

Davis’ viral post has amassed more than 235,000 likes and more than 138,000 re-shares on Facebook. Many commenters applauded the post and Drew’s decision to stand up for himself.

“Well done. A human being will only take so much,” one Facebook user commented.

“Sometimes you just got to put your foot on someone’s back side,” another said. “That’s the only way to fix these kind of people. Refuse to be a victim.”

Andrew Wyeth – Marriage (1993)

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hey thats awesome 17

A Man’s Attractiveness Is Inversely Proportional To How Needy He Is

The less needy he is, the more attractive he will be to women on average. The needier he is, the less attractive he will be to women on average.

Neediness is when a man places a higher priority on others’ perceptions of him than his perception of himself. A needy man’s actions and words will therefore be primarily motivated by impressing and winning approval from others. Non-neediness is when a man places a higher priority on his own perception of himself than the perceptions of others. A non-needy man’s actions and words will therefore be primarily motivated by embodying his own values and desires.

Neediness, therefore, infiltrates all behaviors because it is what inspires and instigates all behaviors. A lack of neediness also infiltrates all behaviors for the same reason. Because it underlies all of your actions and words, to be non-needy is to be more attractive, in every way. It defines and resonates in everything you say and do, the way you stand, the way you smile, the jokes you tell, the people you associate with, the car you drive, the wine you drink, the jacket you wear.

When people say vague things like, “I like the way he carries himself,” or “you just need to believe in yourself,” or, “he just has ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is,” they are referring to a man’s lack of neediness. It exudes from him in everything he does. Paradoxically, a man’s lack of need for attention and admiration is itself a magnet for attention and admiration. A man’s comfort and acceptance of the possibility that some people will not like him makes people like him even more. A man’s respect for differing opinions makes those around him want to agree with him more.

A needy man is constantly investing in the perceptions others have in him. He is being extra nice and friendly when he doesn’t want to be because he believes he must do this to be liked and loved. He is buying a fancy watch and season tickets to the local sports team so that he will be admired and loved. He is coming up with fake compliments or pretending to be a bad ass because he thinks it will get him attention and love.

A non-needy man may still do these behaviors — he may still buy the season tickets or make the jokes. But his intentions are different. Whereas a needy man says and does these things for approval, the non-needy man does them simply for the pleasure of doing. The needy man tries to control what others think and feel more than what he thinks and feels himself. The non-needy man is more concerned with controlling his own thoughts and feelings rather than the thoughts and feelings of others. A needy man will be more invested in the woman he is with than in himself – he will be more concerned about her opinion, about him, about the weather, about everything other than what he actually thinks and feels. A non-needy man will be more invested in himself than the woman he’s with.

― Mark Manson

A giant  colossal boob

“A giant walk-in female breast to raise awareness about breast cancer in our local supermarket, from the Swiss Cancer League.”

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hey thats awesome 1

Not Apologizing When You Succeed Or Complaining When You Fail

“The greatest form of maturity is at harvest time. This is when we must learn how to reap without complaint if the amounts are small and how to reap without apology if the amounts are big.” — Jim Rohn

Don’t apologize when you succeed.

Don’t complain or blame when you fail.

Completely own and take responsibility for what you’ve attracted into your life. Said Dr. Stephen R. Covey, “We control our actions, but the consequences that flow from those actions are controlled by principles.”

You cannot change your situation until you own that you’ve contributed to your situation.

When you take responsibility for what is happening in your life, you’re no longer the victim of circumstances. You no longer have to be a reactive object being acted upon by your environment. Instead, you can proactively act as an agent who impacts and changes your circumstances.

Don’t Complain For Failure

Lessons are repeated until they are learned.

When you fail, don’t complain. There’s nothing good that will come out of it. When you complain or blame, you immediately shut yourself off to learning. You halt your own progress and will inevitably repeat the same blunder in the future.

Failure is feedback. Failure is what neuroscientists call “prediction error,” which is essential to learning.

You made a mistake. So learn from it. Be happy about it. You just stepped outside your small realm of understanding and now you have the opportunity to expand your worldview.

If you allow this learning to sink-in, you’ll be empowered to create better outcomes in the future.

In the book, The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge said:

“It is tempting to think that just because one understands certain principles one has “learned” about the discipline. This is the familiar trap of confusing intellectual understanding with learning. Learning always involves new understandings and new behaviors, ‘thinking’ and ‘doing.’”

If your behavior isn’t changing, then you’re not learning. True learning means you can produce a desired outcome. If you can’t consistently produce the outcome you want, then you haven’t learned.

According to Brain-scan studies, if you do not address a problem in 0.25 seconds after a mistake is made, you probably won’t do anything about it. You’ll brush-off the mistake and continue forward in the same manner you’ve been going. You won’t be learning from your experience, and thus you’ll continue moving into your future by recreating your past.

If instead, you would simply stop, address what just happened, and continue forward from a higher plane, you could then produce better outcomes in the future. You don’t have to live in your past.

This can only happen when you truly own when you’ve made a mistake. Rather than complaining for failures — or blaming the bad weather or something else — you learn from what is happening and adapt.

Check out the rest of the article HERE

Rage as a tool

Rage is an emotion, and as such it can be useful or dangerous. It’s up to us to figure out how to use it adequately. Many people would use other techniques to funnel their rage so that it wasn’t destructive.

Some would run, lift weights, or apply themselves in sports.

Others would internalize it, drink, brawl, or jut be an asshole.

Still others funnel that rage into music.

Those of us who are from the United States, or from the Domain, or have survived a broken marriage, a bad boss, or a corrupt government have all experienced real cold rage. I know I have. And I do my best to control it, least my “incredible hulk” comes out.

This post is going to be a tad different.

And it isn’t for everyone. What this post contains is some pretty harsh rock-n-roll music that has often served me (personally) in releasing and dealing with rage.

As such, it’s a bid dangerous and a tad toxic if you are not ready for it.

If you are not ready, then just skip this article and wait for a calmer and gentler post tomorrow. But if you are ready, or willing, or adventuresome, then have some fun…

BUT DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU

Here we go…

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The world spins while the United States sucks on it’s pacifier and goes goo-goo gaa-gaa

You know guys, I constantly talk about all the new construction that is going on in China, but you all just don’t quite get it. I could show you pictures of new buildings, and new bridges and all the rest. You all have no idea.

Here’s a picture that I took of my dash map in my car today. Look at all those construction icons. China is building everywhere!

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Of course, you will never really get the actual feel for what is going on unless you come here. And it’s really hard to get any information out to the West. It’s just one anti-China narrative after the other…

The western democracy fears the truth. It’s best to simply censor the truth.

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main qimg 1919f989259562f4d3dfebeeee96ea3a lq

Anyways, I’ve long questioned why some so-called China “experts” who (supposedly) live inside of China say some of the oddest things… such as…

  • There hasn’t been any changes in China since Coronavirus.
  • Wearing face masks isn’t all that popular. China is just like the United States in that regard.
  • “I rarely use public transportation.”
  • I never go to the malls or the parks, or any public spaces.

It’s like saying that you live in the United States but don’t eat cheeseburgers or pizza, and you don’t drive a car. Well, sure it’s possible

But, it’s very unlikely.

So, I approached one of these “experts” who claimed to live in China since 2014, and  has been saying oddball things about China. A decent enough mix. Some very nice things, and some very bad things. He claimed to live in Shenzhen. So I told him that I would meet him at Mix-C and buy him a coffee at Starbucks.

Dead Silence.

Crickets.

Yeah. I thought so.

Further investigation listed him as living in Hong Kong (as a professor / teacher) during the Trump-inspired “pro-Democracy” protests, and since then returned back to the UK.

If something feels wrong, it’s because it probably is.

Let’s continue in today’s installment.

When I was ten years old, I went on vacation with my grandparents. Now, a couple things you have to understand about my grandpa is that:

1. He was a trucker for 30 years
2. He grew up very poor.

Somehow, this manifested into him being all about gas station food and also insisting on eating every last bite of food he purchased for himself or anybody else. You waste nothing—ever.

Anyway.

We pull up to some random gas station in the middle of nowhere. I’m starving to death and see that on their menu they have BLTs, but not just any BLT, but THE MONSTER BLT. Being a stupid kid, I didn’t even read the description. I like bacon. So why not?

So I said, “Hey Gramps, will you buy me this BLT?”

In his rugged accent he says “I buy it, you eat it.”

I swear to God he sounds just like Clint Eastwood.

So I think well yeah I’m going to eat it. Why wouldn’t I eat it?

So a few minutes later, the gas station lady pushes something that looks like this across the counter toward me:

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main qimg 5cv88a5bcfbabf501 lq

My palms got sweaty. But I was up for the challenge. I actually believed my 60 lb. self could handle a sandwich of this magnitude.

About a quarter of the way into it, I was trying to think of ways to get rid of the thing. Maybe there was a dog somewhere? Maybe I could knock it in the floor. Surely my grandpa wouldn’t make me eat a BLT off a gas station floor…would he? Across the table from me, my grandpa sipped his coffee, eyeing my every movement. I had no choice but to eat on.

Finally, I swallowed the last morsel. And, to my amazement I didn’t barf.

I looked at my grandpa expecting some sort of congratulations.

He smirked and asked, “Got room for dessert?”

Today, my grandpa has Alzheimer’s, but this is one story he can recall on command.

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image 43

https://youtu.be/jLKNCkavhJ8

This Tsunami Of Tech Layoffs Could Soon Be The Largest We Have Ever Seen

AH. But I thought that the "CHIPS Act" will reverse this trend? - MM

This is starting to look like 2008 all over again.  For years, the tech industry was the strongest part of the U.S. economy by a wide margin.  The largest tech firms were raking in billions upon billions of dollars in revenue and their stock prices soared to unprecedented levels.  But now the tech industry has suddenly fallen on difficult times.  Many large tech companies are laying off huge numbers of workers, and we are being warned that even more layoffs are ahead.  If the most prosperous sector of our economy is experiencing this much trouble already, what is the outlook for the rest of the economy as we head into 2023?

As I write this article, the layoffs that Elon Musk is conducting at Twitter are making headlines all over the planet.  It is being reported that approximately half of all Twitter workers could lose their jobs, and the widespread layoffs are apparently happening “in departments across the company”

Twitter on Friday laid off employees in departments across the company, in a severe round of cost cutting that could potentially upend how one of the world’s most influential platforms operates one week after it was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk.

Numerous Twitter employees began posting on the platform Thursday night and Friday morning that they had already been locked out of their company email accounts ahead of the planned layoff notification. Some also shared blue hearts and salute emojis indicating they were out at the company.

Needless to say, a lot of these former employees do not plan to go quietly.

In fact, some of them have already slapped Twitter with a federal lawsuit

Twitter has been sued by multiple staff members over an alleged violation of federal law, with workers claiming they were not given enough notice regarding planned layoffs.

Employees who had worked at Twitter’s offices in San Francisco, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts filed a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco) on Thursday.

Sadly, Twitter is not alone.

Lots of other large tech companies are conducting mass layoffs, and in each case the current economic climate is being blamed.

For example, Lyft has announced that it will be laying off 13 percent of its workforce…

Lyft Inc. said it is cutting 13% of staff, or nearly 700 jobs, the latest technology company to say it needed to reduce costs ahead of choppy economic conditions.

Confirming an earlier report by The Wall Street Journal, Lyft co-founders John Zimmer and Logan Green announced the cuts to staff Thursday. “There are several challenges playing out across the economy. We’re facing a probable recession sometime in the next year and ride-share insurance costs are going up,” they wrote in the memo viewed by the Journal.

And it is being reported that Chime will be letting 12 percent of their workers go…

Chime is one of the latest private tech firms to announce layoffs amid a worsening economic outlook and a recent wave of cuts from both public and private companies.

A company spokesperson told CNBC that the so-called challenger bank – a fintech firm that exclusively offers banking services through websites and smartphone apps – is cutting 12% of its 1,300-person workforce, adding that while they are eliminating approximately 160 employees, they are still hiring for select positions and “remain very well capitalized.”

Not to be outdone, 18 percent of Opendoor’s workforce is about to get the axe…

Opendoor Technologies Inc. is laying off about 550 employees after higher mortgage rates cratered US housing demand.

The layoffs will reduce Opendoor’s headcount by about 18%, according to a company blog post. The cuts come after an abrupt shift in prices forced the company to sell homes for less than it paid for them.

In other cases, we are seeing companies that seemed to be doing really well let workers go.  As I discussed yesterday, Stripe has decided to “let go of 14% of its staff”

Silicon Valley payments giant Stripe announced that it has let go of 14% of its staff. Citing global economic challenges including inflation, higher interest rates and “sparse startup funding,” cofounder and CEO Patrick Collison said in an email to employees that Stripe needs to cut costs.

I guess Stripe isn’t doing quite as well as we all thought.

Meanwhile, we have also just learned that Dapper Labs will be reducing the size of their workforce by 22 percent

One of the biggest names in the non-fungible token (NFT) industry is dramatically reducing headcount as the crypto bear market continues to take a toll on Web3 companies.

Dapper Labs, which created the NFT marketplace NBA Top Shot, is laying off 22% of its staff, citing the “macroeconomic environment.”

But the economy is doing just fine, right?

Isn’t that what the federal government keeps telling us?

Well, if the economy is in such good shape, why does the tech industry keep laying off so many workers?

Even before this latest round of layoff announcements, the tech industry had already laid off over 52,000 workers so far this year…

After a banner year for tech, layoffs are here. In fact, as of late October, more than 52,000 workers in the U.S. tech sector have been laid off in mass job cuts so far in 2022, according to a Crunchbase News tally.

Tech companies as big as Netflix have slashed jobs this year, with some citing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and others pointing to overhiring during periods of rapid growth. Robinhood, Glossier and Better are just a few of the tech companies that have notably trimmed their headcount in 2022.

Of course it isn’t just the tech industry that is letting people go.

According to Reuters, Morgan Stanley is gearing up for “a fresh round of layoffs”…

Wall Street major Morgan Stanley is expected to start a fresh round of layoffs globally in the coming weeks, three people with knowledge of the plan said, as dealmaking business takes a hit due to rising inflation and an economic downturn.

So please don’t listen to any politician that tries to tell you that everything is going to be okay.

Everything is definitely not okay.  According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number of layoff announcements in the United States is far higher than it was last year at this time…

The job placement agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas released a report on Nov. 3, which revealed that American-based firms announced 33,843 job cuts last month, up from 29,989 in September.

This is higher than the same month last year, when 22,822 employees were laid off.

Hopefully your job is safe, because I believe that we will eventually see millions of Americans lose their jobs during this new economic downturn.

We are truly moving into unprecedented territory, but unfortunately most Americans simply do not understand what is ahead.

A lot of people seem to think that we will have some sort of a mild recession and then things will get back to normal.

I wish that was true.

Unfortunately, a day of reckoning is now upon us, and countless numbers of our fellow Americans are about to have their lives completely turned upside down.

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Cheboksary is the capital of Chuvashia Republic, a port on the Volga, longest river in Europe if you count Russia as Europe at your own peril.

Population last counted not correctly of course in 2010 was more or less 453,721. What transpired in terms of fertility and death rates in the last 12 years is anyone’s guesstimate. My guess, which is as good as yours – nothing positive.

Ethnic composition is mainly Chuvash, Turkic ethnic group. If you look for bride I advise Chuvashi and hurry up while their boyfriends are in Ukraine.

She cook good. Family is important. When I was child most of my street friends were Turkic – Chuvashi and Tartar because first there were many and second, their character dignified, not servile.

Your bride’s ancestor is Genghis Khan, the spiritual founder of Russian Empire, from the gene pool of intrepid warriors of Golden Horde with a tinge of Slavic blood via rape, who in 15th century were ultimately subdued by Vasily the Blind, grand prince of Moscovy, a pathetic imitator of Tatar-Mongol civilisation. The blind are still leading the blind if you know what I mean.

The region recently came into limelight when Chuvashi mobilised conscripts rioted in a training camp in Ulyanovsk (a city down the river where V.I. Lenin was born and educated at his father’s gymnasium – which means ‘school’ in Russian).

The head of the republic Oleg Nikolaev stole their one-time payments they were entitled to for getting off the couch. Brave Chuvashi warriors fight for money, not glory of Rusky Mir (Russian world).

Until 2020, the head of the republic was called “president” but Putin is terrified Turkic regions – Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Chuvashia – wanna secede so took away title ‘president’ from them.

There is only one president and his name is Vladimir. That’s the beef Putin has for Zelensky, whose name is too Vladimir and he too president.

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Another claim to fame of Chuvashia is a new VIP lounge in the Cheboksary International Airport, an important transportation hub in the region where a third of the population in Russia resides.

I checked the schedule: five low-cost flights to Moscow, two low-cost flights to St. Petersburg, twice a week to Sochi and twice a week to Surgut.

Airport is Named in Honor of Cosmonaut A.G.Nikolaev who was forced to marry first woman in space Valentina Tereshkova (currently, a senator) because she couldn’t stop sleeping with first man in space Yuri Gagarin who was the boss of A.G.Nikolaev at the time and for whose womanising escapades he (Gagarin) was finally assassinated.

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A new high-comfort lounge has been recently opened in Cheboksary ̶In̶t̶e̶r̶national Airport to wait comfortably for a flight in an administration building opposite the western terminal building. A nice Chuvashi woman awaits you in the reception. The price is 2,500 rubles.

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A VIP passenger can sit in a soft vintage armchair.

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And have a cup of instant coffee with sweets.

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Umbrella rack has been thought through.

Brutalsky or Not?

This author’s appraisal: brutalsky


I encourage you to subscribe to Truth About Russia space and my account to receive notifs as answers get restricted due to ongoing troll attacks which goal to suppress any information that paints Putin’s war against Ukraine in bad light. You can also support Brutalsky on patreon/mishafirer from $1 where I publish articles and photo guided tours in Moscow and elsewhere in Motherland.

Spicy Thai Peanut Chicken Curry

“This is a spicy dish, but the heat can be adjusted by reducing the curry and sambal oelek. It is quick and easy and it is so good. Time to cook rice is not included in prep time or cook time. Also…I often use lite coconut milk, it reduces the fat content and is still wonderful, just a little less rich.”

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2022 11 06 09 04

Ingredients

Directions

  • In a medium saute pan saute peanut oil, red curry and sambal over med. heat for a few minutes.
  • Add the chicken and cook through.
  • Add coconut milk, fish sauce, brown sugar and peanut butter.
  • Simmer about 10 minutes.
  • Serve over steamed Jasmine rice.
  • Top with fresh lime juice and crushed peanuts.
  • Tip: If you are worried about the heat, just add half of the curry and sambal in the first step. Try it after everything has been added and if it’s not spicy enough you can then add more curry. If then you want it more spicy you can add more sambal, the sambal is more spicy than the curry.

Boudicca: The Celtic Queen Who Unleashed Fury on the Romans

We British are used to women commanders in war; I am descended from mighty men! But I am not fighting for my kingdom and wealth now. I am fighting as an ordinary person for my lost freedom, my bruised body, and my outraged daughters.... Consider how many of you are fighting — and why! Then you will win this battle, or perish. That is what I, a woman, plan to do!— let the men live in slavery if they will.

These are the words of Queen Boudicca, according to ancient historian Tacitus, as she summoned her people to unleash war upon the invading Romans in Britain.  Boudicca, sometimes written Boadicea, was queen of the Iceni tribe, a Celtic clan which united a number of British tribes in revolt against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire in 60-61 AD.

While she famously succeeded in defeating the Romans in three great battles, their victories would not last. The Romans rallied and eventually crushed the revolts, executing thousands of Iceni and taking the rest as slaves. Boudicca’s name has been remembered through history as the courageous warrior queen who fought for freedom from oppression, for herself, and all the Celtic tribes of Britain.

Boudicca’s Early Years

Little is known about Boudicca’s upbringing because the only information about her comes from Roman sources, in particular from Tacitus (56 – 117 AD), a senator and historian of the Roman Empire, and Cassius Dio (155 – 235 AD), a Roman consul and noted historian. However, it is believed that she was born into an elite family in the ancient town of Camulodunum (now Colchester) in around 30 AD, and may have been named after the Celtic goddess of victory, Boudiga.

As an adolescent, Boudicca would have been sent away to another aristocratic family to be trained in the history and customs of the tribe, as well as learning how to fight in battle. Ancient Celtic women served as both warriors and rulers, and girls could be trained to fight with swords and other weapons, just as the boys were.

Celtic women were distinct in the ancient world for the liberty and rights they enjoyed and the position they held in society. Compared to their counterparts in Greek, Roman, and other ancient societies, they were allowed much more freedom of activity and protection under the law.

Life Under Roman Rule

In 43 AD, before the time that Boudicca reached adulthood, the Romans invaded Britain, and most of the Celtic tribes were forced to submit. However, the Romans allowed two Celtic kings to retain some of their traditional power as it was normal Roman practice to allow kingdoms their independence for the lifetime of their current king, who would then agree to leave his kingdom to Rome in his will.

One of these kings was Prasutagus, whom Boudicca went on to marry at the age of 18. Their wedding was celebrated for a day and a night and during this time they also gave offerings to the Celtic gods. Together they had two daughters, called Isolda and Siora.

However, it was not a time of harmony for Boudicca and Prasutagus. The Roman occupation brought increased settlement, military presence and attempts to suppress Celtic religious culture. There were major economic changes, including heavy taxes and money lending.

In 60 AD life changed dramatically for Boudicca, with the death of her husband. As Prasutagus had ruled as a nominally independent, but forced ‘ally’ of Rome, he left his kingdom jointly to his wife and daughters and to the Roman emperor. However, Roman law only allowed inheritance through the male line, so when Prasutagus died, his attempts to preserve his line were ignored and his kingdom was annexed as if it had been conquered.

“Kingdom and household alike were plundered like prizes of war.... The Chieftains of the Iceni were deprived of their family estates as if the whole country had been handed over to the Romans. The king's own relatives were treated like slaves.” — Tacitus 

Boudicca Seeks Vengeance

To humiliate the former rulers, the Romans confiscated Prasutagus’s land and property, took the nobles as slaves, publicly flogged Boudicca, and raped their two daughters. This would prove to be the catalyst which would see Boudicca demanding revenge against the brutal invaders of her lands. Tacitus records the words spoken by Boudicca as she vowed to avenge the actions of the Roman invaders :

“Nothing is safe from Roman pride and arrogance. They will deface the sacred and will deflower our virgins. Win the battle or perish, that is what I, a woman, will do.” 

And so Boudicca began her campaign to summon the Britons to fight against the Romans , proving that ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’.

On The Verge Of The Worst Homelessness Crisis In The Entire History Of The United States

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If you live in a major urban area, you may have noticed that “tent cities” are starting to pop up all around you.  The worst inflation crisis in decades has combined with the worst drug crisis that we have ever seen to create an unprecedented homelessness crisis.  Every night, even more Americans join the rapidly growing “unsanctioned encampments” that are taking up more and more real estate in our largest cities.  If things are this bad now, how many of our fellow citizens will be sleeping in the streets when economic conditions are much worse a year or two from today?  We are supposed to be the greatest nation on the planet, but with each passing day even more tent cities are established.  Our system is failing, and the widespread economic suffering that we are witnessing right now is truly difficult to comprehend.

Just look at what is happening in Sacramento.  It is the capital of the California, and tent cities are being established all over the place.

In fact, it is being reported that the number of homeless people in Sacramento has risen by nearly 70 percent just since 2019…

During the pandemic, the unhoused population has soared all over California, but the increase in Sacramento has been particularly stunning.

The region has seen an almost 70% rise in homelessness since 2019, now counting more unhoused people than San Francisco.

Needless to say, absurd housing prices are one of the main reasons why so many people are being forced out into the cold streets…

The primary force behind the dramatic rise, according to the 2022 point-in-time count, is the high cost of housing. The median home price in the county has surpassed $500,000 and the median monthly rent is $2,774, up more than 5% from last year. Some studios downtown rent for $2,000 a month, said Crystal Sanchez, the president of the Sacramento Homeless Union, while thousands of people sleep outside.

Most middle class families can barely afford to pay $2,000 or more for housing each month.

And those that are poor don’t stand a chance.

Conditions are very similar up in Portland, Oregon.  Housing prices have soared to insane levels, and homelessness is spreading like wildfire.

At this point, Mayor Ted Wheeler says that there are “nearly 800 unsanctioned encampments” spread throughout the city…

“Nearly 800 unsanctioned encampments spread out over the 146 square miles of the City of Portland,” Wheeler said. “Something needs to change.”

But many Portlanders have lost faith in city leaders.

In a recent poll conducted by The Oregonian, nearly 75 percent of Portland voters said the city is “on the wrong track.”

At this stage, it has pretty much gotten to a point where you simply cannot avoid the tent cities.

Things are so bad right now that there is a possibility that the state of Oregon could actually elect a Republican governor in November…

The race for the governorship remains a tossup, with a new poll showing a narrow lead for the Republican candidate in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican governor since 1982.

Republican Christine Drazan leads Democrat Tina Kotek in the race, 44 to 41 per cent, according to a new Nelson Research poll, KOIN reported.

That gives Drazan a 2-point lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average, having narrowly led in every poll this fall.

I thought that we would never see another Republican governor in that state.

It looks like I might have been wrong about that.

Washington D.C. doesn’t have as many “unsanctioned encampments” as Portland does, but the New York Post is reporting that the number of tent cities in the capital of our nation has now grown to 120

In the past two years, homeless encampments have exploded in Washington D.C., as both the city and federal governments lifted enforcement measures during the COVID-19 pandemic — and made it a no-brainer for itinerants to lay down roots by providing for their every need.

A tour by The Post of the district’s major tourist areas this week found at least 35 vagrants in residence at a National Park Service site two blocks from the White House; more than 20 in the green spaces surrounding the State Department complex; and five across the street from the infamous Watergate Hotel.

And these sites accounted for less than 5 percent of the estimated 120 tent cities in Washington D.C.

Over a decade ago, I worked in the heart of Washington.

And during my entire time there, I didn’t see a single homeless person living in a tent.

But now tent cities are all over the place.

Of course a rise in crime often comes along with an explosion in homelessness.

In New York City, the rape of a female jogger by a homeless man with 25 prior arrests is making a lot of headlines this week

Police said the victim was out by Pier 45, near West and Christopher Streets in the West Village, at around 5:30am, when the man, Carl Phanor, 29, grabbed her from behind and choked her until she passed out, the New York Post reports.

Phanor, who has 25 priors and who is wanted for at least two other sex crimes, then removed her clothes, raped her, and then fled the scene on a Citi Bike with her headphones, cell phone and wallet.

The shaken victim was spotted by a fellow jogger, and first responders took her to a nearby hospital.

Sadly, the homeless population just continues to rise in New York City with each passing day.

In fact, the problem has gotten so severe that the National Guard has now been called in to deal with the crisis…

New York City has called in the National Guard to deal with the rising migrant crisis that is overwhelming homeless shelters and facilities as staff are unable to cope with the surge.

National Guard reservists are being deployed to help with day-to-day operations at many shelters, including managing the capacity, distributing food and helping out with staff shortages.

There are over 62,000 people currently living in New York City’s homeless shelters – close to 13,000 of which are migrants, according to the Department of Homeless Services.

But this is just the beginning.

Over the next few years, I expect millions of Americans to lose their jobs.

And the truth is that it is already starting to happen.  Just today, we learned that Stripe will be laying off approximately 14 percent of their entire workforce

Online payments giant Stripe is laying off roughly 14% of its staff, CEO Patrick Collison wrote in a memo to staff Thursday.

In the memo, Collison said the cuts were necessary amid rising inflation, fears of a looming recession, higher interest rates, energy shocks, tighter investment budgets and sparser startup funding. Taken together, these factors signal “that 2022 represents the beginning of a different economic climate,” he said.

Yes, as I detail in my brand new book, a “different economic climate” is definitely ahead of us.

As economic conditions deteriorate, the number of tent cities will grow much larger.

So the cold, hard reality of the matter is that our homelessness crisis is only going to intensify from this point forward.

I know that may be difficult news to hear, but the truth is that these are difficult times.

This can only weaken the US and make its long-term position worse. China has the market and demand and as such, these chip restrictions can only force China to accelerate their tech independence. They are in a much better position to do so than we are in America and have been preparing for this years ago.

For example, we’ve been tracking China’s move towards 7nm and believed they were going to get there by 2025 or later. I was shocked to see that they had already hit 7nm.

China’s top chip maker said to reach tech level on par with global giants  SMIC took two years to achieve the leap from 14-nm to 7-nm, faster than TSMC and Samsung, TechInsights said.

I knew they could do it, and I believe western governments believed they could do it; but not this quickly.

When you look at their track record, forcing them to advance only helps them move even faster (see China’s space station) while we remain relatively stagnant.

If you are American and aren’t scared we’re going to lose this race, I don’t know what to tell you. I personally want a strong, competent America that is co-developing at pace with China. I want that because I have a personal stake in it. My family’s stakes are all in America and all I see is a future where that all crumbles away.

If we’re moving at pace with China, we’re also far less likely to start a war with them.

I don’t think anyone is really happy that this is happening, not even the Chinese. It puts them in a difficult position, but at least they have planned and are prepared for it. We’re making moves that seem to have no value for anyone, not even us.

Famous Last Words: “We Will Stay The Course Until The Job Is Done”

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The last time interest rates were this high, the U.S. economy plunged into “the Great Recession” and millions of Americans lost their jobs.  But the Federal Reserve is not going to stop here.  In fact, Fed Chair Jerome Powell is telling us that more rate increases are on the way and that officials at the Fed are determined to “stay the course until the job is done”.  If “the job” is to destroy the U.S. economy, they have already made a tremendous amount of progress toward that goal.  The housing market is completely and utterly imploding, and economic activity is steadily slowing down all around us.  But even though Powell can see the damage that is happening, he insists that the Fed will keep raising rates until the official rate of inflation returns to 2 percent.

But this isn’t the early 1980s.

Today, there are a whole host of factors that are working in unison to push prices up.

So the Fed can try to hammer demand as much as it wants, but getting inflation back under control is not going to be as easy as it was during the Volcker era.

And dramatically hiking interest rates at the beginning of a major economic downturn is literally suicidal.  Many of us have been pleading with the Fed to stop raising rates so rapidly, but we witnessed yet another 75 basis point rate hike on Wednesday

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday approved a fourth consecutive three-quarter point interest rate increase and signaled a potential change in how it will approach monetary policy to bring down inflation.

In a well-telegraphed move that markets had been expecting for weeks, the central bank raised its short-term borrowing rate by 0.75 percentage point to a target range of 3.75%-4%, the highest level since January 2008.

According to Fox Business, it was a unanimous vote, and this “marks the sixth consecutive rate increase this year”…

The three-quarter percentage point hikes in June, July, September and November underscore just how serious Fed officials are about tackling the inflation crisis after a string of alarming economic reports. Policymakers voted unanimously to approve the latest super-sized hike.

The widely expected move puts the key benchmark federal funds rate at a range of 3.75% to 4%, the highest since before the 2008 financial crisis, from near-zero in March. It marks the sixth consecutive rate increase this year and puts interest rates in firmly restrictive territory.

What we are watching is economic malpractice.

I don’t know how else to describe it.

Sadly, the Fed is telling us that “ongoing increases” will be needed until the overall rate of inflation is brought back down to 2 percent…

“The Committee anticipates that ongoing increases in the target range will be appropriate in order to attain a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive to return inflation to 2 percent over time,” the Fed said in a new sentence added to its post-meeting statement.

So more rate hikes are on the way.

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that Powell told the media that future rate increases may be smaller in size

“I’ve said at the last two press conferences that at some point it will become appropriate to slow the pace of increases,” Chairman Jerome Powell told reporters during a press conference in Washington. “So that time is coming. And it may come as soon as the next meeting, or the one after that. No decision has been made.”

But of course rates are now clearly high enough to crash the economy.

The housing market is already coming apart at the seams, and we just keep getting data point after data point telling us that the economy is really slowing down.

There is no way in the world that the Fed should be raising rates, but Powell insists that the Fed “will stay the course until the job is done”

‘My colleagues and I are strongly committed to bring inflation down to our 2 percent goal… We will stay the course until the job is done.’

I truly believe that those words will come back to haunt him.

Look, I can understand why the Fed is so spooked about inflation.  We haven’t seen anything like this in decades, and one recent survey discovered that 50 percent of Americans are “feeling their health suffer as a result of the cost-of-living crisis”…

Research at Toluna, a consumer insights firm, found that 50 percent of those surveyed were feeling their health suffer as a result of the cost-of-living crisis, with inflation currently running above 8 percent according to the consumer price index.

Among them, 37 percent said they were feeling more stressed, 21 percent said they were eating less healthily, 16 percent said they were smoking more, and 13 percent were boozing more often.

And we have just learned that approximately 29 million U.S. households “have been unable to pay their energy bills this past year” due to rapidly rising energy costs…

Some 29 million households have been unable to pay their energy bills this past year, according to a survey that says the cold winter weather and rising utility costs will only worsen the crisis.

Data from the US Census Bureau show that many more American families — 43 million households — have cut back spending on groceries, medicine and doctors’ visits, so they could settle an energy bill.

So I definitely agree that inflation is a major problem.

But killing the economy is not the answer.

If you doubt the severity of the crisis that we are heading into, just take a look at what is happening at Wells Fargo right now

Mortgage volumes at Wells Fargo slowed further in recent weeks, leaving some workers idle and sparking concerns the lender will need to cut more employees as the U.S. housing slump deepens.

The bank had about 18,000 loans in its retail origination pipeline in the early weeks of the fourth quarter, according to people with knowledge of the company’s figures. That is down as much as 90% from a year earlier, when the Covid pandemic-fueled housing boom was in full swing, said the people, who declined to be identified speaking about internal matters.

If Wells Fargo is already facing a 90 percent decline, what will happen as the Fed hikes rates even higher?

Sadly, the “housing recession” that we are now experiencing could quickly become a “housing depression”.

In my brand new book entitled “End Times”, I explain that the U.S. economy has been going through a housing market crash every 14 years.

There was a crash in 1980, there was a crash in 1994, there was a crash in 2008, and now a new crash has begun in 2022.

But if the Federal Reserve was not being so foolish, we could have likely avoided a severe crash this time around.

Unfortunately, our leaders never seem to learn from history, and the months ahead promise to be exceedingly painful.

Ouch! Germany is facing the reality.

I have actually written a book on this topic. Managing horse manure was the subject of great debate at the end of the 19th Century; in fact, it was called The Great Manure Crisis.

In 1898 there was the first urban convention of civic engineers and architects, held in NYC. It brought people from all over the world. The topics were to be the value of open spaces and the value of architecture in great cities but the meeting never moved beyond the manure crisis. The meeting ended with not much accomplished.

In the late 1800s there were over 300,000 horses in NYC alone, generating 2 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of horse urine every single day. Every. Single Day. Times Square was originally called “Longacre” and it was a massive field owned by John Astor where he sold horses; not soon after the meeting, Astor sold it to the New York Times and it became Times Square. (He later died on the Titanic.) There were even entire city blocks where manure was piled nearly 100 feet high because the city could not deal with it. When it rained, the cities filled with a disgusting mud of manure and filth. Urchins were paid by pedestrians to make a path before them as they walked. In some streets, the manure came up beyond the ankles; it was one reason there were steps up to the front doors of homes and the “mud room” was the place where people removed their boots before entering the house to not track in filth. The NY Times reported that 3 billion flies were bred in the filth every day.

In earlier times, manure was sold by the city for a profit to farmers who carried it to their farms in dung carts; most of Brooklyn was still open field in the mid 1800s. Then it was barged up north on the rivers to the farms. But as the city grew, the amount of manure increased beyond management and by 10AM it was no longer good for manure because so much filth was mixed with the manure that it was unusable as fertilizer. To make matters worse, the sanitation department was controlled by the Tamanny Organization, the biggest organized crime ring in America, and used for “no show” patronage jobs. Streets could be cleaned by extortion only. Richer city dwellers had to pay off the sanitation department to clean the streets, twice a week. And the cacophony of horses clopping was maddening. The rich paid to have their streets strewn with straw to cut down on the noise. The situation became so bad that the city paved some streets in wood, cut in wide blocks and laid with the grain up, to cut down on the noise – but the wood absorbed horse urine and stunk even more, and it rotted away within five years while sett blocks would last virtually forever. However, set blocks were uneven and people and horses would easily trip. A lame horse would be shot and left to rot for up to three months because there were no machines to haul away such heavy carcasses.

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The situation was so bad, that in conjunction with the gas plants and the giant phosphate plants and the oil refinery and slaughterhouses and glue factories that NYC published a “Stench Map” that showed where the prevailing winds would blow the stink. It was untenable.

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Teddy Roosevelt, before he became Commissoner of Police, hired to clean up the corruption in the police department, which had even fought a deadly civil war between competing departments, was first offered the job of cleaning the streets. He turned it down. “No one can clean up that mess,” he declared.

Even though it was illegal, the city pushed the manure into the harbor or onto barges and had it dumped at sea where it washed up on the beaches of Long Island, making the residents irate. The situation was so bad that bars of manure formed in the river that capsized ships and halted navigation requiring constant dredging. It was an absolute disaster.

The problem was solved in stages but it was actually the electric subway car and the invention of automobiles that saved the city, and cities worldwide, though in Europe, earnest efforts at sanitation had gotten the problem in hand long before the US. The automobile was in its infancy in 1898 with only a handful of electric, steam and gas cars but by 1908, half of all the horses in NYC had been replaced by cars. In fact, the impact on the horse market was so intense that people were frantically selling their horses for any price to the glue factories just to get rid of them. The last horse-drawn fire engine was retired in NYC in 1922 in a great ceremony where the last engine was called on a ceremonial fire call from a box, and they raced from the station for the last time, chased by their Dalmations, to a non-existent fire where the horses were relieved of their jobs, but preserved to live out their lives in a pasture as a reward for their service.

The automobile and a man named Colonel Waring saved NYC. Waring was given absolute dictatorial control over the clean up of the city and fired the Tammany no-shows and had his men dress in white uniforms as they shoveled the manure away, day and night. He even made it a patriotic duty to clean the streets and put in waste baskets and organized trash removal. He was so hailed by the city for his success that a ticker tape parade was held in his honor. But ultimately, it was the automobile that saved the city.

George E. Waring Jr. – Wikipedia
George E. Waring Jr. in 1883 Born ( 1833-07-04 ) July 4, 1833 Died October 29, 1898 (1898-10-29) (aged 65) Monuments Woodland Cemetery, Stamford Connecticut [Cenotaph memorial] Occupation Sanitary engineer , civic reformer Years active 1865–1898 Known for Advocate of sewer systems that keep domestic sewage separate from storm runoff George E. Waring Jr. (July 4, 1833 [1] – October 29, 1898) was an American sanitary engineer and civic reformer. He was an early American designer and advocate of sewer systems that keep domestic sewage separate from storm runoff. Early life [ edit ] Waring was born in Pound Ridge, New York , the son of George E. Waring Sr., a wealthy stove manufacturer. Trained in agricultural chemistry , he began to lecture on agricultural science [ where? ] . In 1855, he took charge of Horace Greeley ‘s farm at Chappaqua, New York . [2] Draining Central Park [ edit ] In 1857, Waring was appointed agricultural and drainage engineer for the construction of New York City ‘s Central Park . [2] This effort was considered to be the largest drainage project of its time. Prior to this time, much of the area of the proposed park was a wetland . He designed and supervised construction of the drainage system that created the scenic lakes and ponds of the park. [3] An enthusiastic equestrian, he and his horse “Vixen” would often use the park’s construction as jumping obstacles. [4] Civil War Service [ edit ] At the beginning of the American Civil War , Waring resigned from the Central Park project to accept a military commission as major. He departed New York in the early summer, and drilled for a month in Washington DC, occasionally meeting President Lincoln as he reviewed the troops. Waring departed Washington DC on July 4, 1862, and fought at Battle of Blackburn’s Ford . [4] He then joined John C. Frémont and headed to St. Louis, where he commanded the Fremont Hussars. His beloved mare Vixen died on campaign in November 1862, near Jefferson City . Waring acquired a new charger, Ruby, a chestnut described as “a picture of the most abject misery; his hind legs drawn under him; the immense muscles of his hips lying flabby, like a cart-horse’s; his head hanging to the level of his knees, and his under-lip drooping; his eyes half shut, and his long ears falling out sidewise like a sleepy mule’s.” [4] Despite appearances, Ruby was an uncommonly good jumper. He raised six companies of cavalry for the Union side in the State of Missouri . These units were eventually consolidated as the 4th Missouri Cavalry under Waring, who was promoted to the rank of Colonel in January 1862. He commanded this regiment throughout the war, principally in the Southwest . [2] Ogden Farm [ edit ] During the 18th century, Newport, Rhode Island ‘s wealthy merchants developed country agricultural estates in the outlying towns. Following the Civil War, with a romanticizing of rural, country and farm life by Andrew Jackson Downing and others, estate farms for the Newpor

Waring went on to die of Yellow Fever in Cuba but he had saved the city from manure.

TL:DR

For those who don’t like to read, skip this part.

It was much, much worse than I wrote about. In the late 19th Century NYC was a huge open air sewer. Houses on hills dumped their sewage onto the roofs of houses below and only rain moved it off. It was horrible. We still see the impact today – Standard Oil dumped so much oil into the soil that you can still pump it out of the ground today and oil sludge collapses subway tunnels.

The invention of actual indoor plumbing had a huge impact on the city, as well as other factors. The slaughter houses dumped the blood from their killings right into the streets and it traveled in rivulets for three blocks before it ran into the river. And tenements backed right up to the slaughterhouses. The cows were fed in the dark in breweries on brewery waste that led to the “Swill Milk Scandal” because the milk was so awful that plaster had to be added to make it look “white”.

NYC grew far faster than the supporting infrastructure. NYC was the last city to let pigs run wild in the streets where they bred fast on the filth and were impossible to control. Police were still finding live pigs living in the city and in people’s apartments until the early 1900s. Steer were run through the streets in massive cattle drives with cowboys on horses with pistols until the 1930s, from the train yards to the slaughter houses. Traffic had to be stopped to let them run. It was a mess, a real mess. Part of the High Line that still exists today was made to get the cattle off the streets and directly into the slaughterhouses.

Getting clean water was a challenge until the Croton Aqueduct in 1840 and even then, there was no piping it into the homes. It had to be carried by bucket or wagon. Chase Manhattan Bank got its start as a water carrier for the rich. The rich put 600 gallon cisterns on their roof, filled by rain or bucket brigade and had to be skimmed to get the dead squirrels, rats and birds out of the water that fell in and drowned. The cuffs of men’s pants and the hem’s of women’s skirts were always ringed by shit. Women carried parasols to keep off the piss that was thrown from the windows from the commode pans. People shit and pissed in the alleys. There was even pamphlet with etiquette on how to address people you knew and met in the alley pissing or shitting. Women didn’t wear panties until 1920 and just squatted in their dressed and pissed in the alleys. You can still see architectural elements, such as cones of concrete, built into the corners of buildings to discourage people from pissing there. Buildings were made with aprons to direct piss onto the pisser to discourage them from pissing there. There were still 100,000 public outhouses in NYC in 1940, all of which had to be mucked out weekly by “night soil men” who reported dead animals and people dumped into the sewage cisterns below them. People even put the dead out in the trash when they couldn’t afford to bury them. Everything smelled, it was god-awful and made worse by the steam locomotives that belched smoke and ash all over everything in sight. It was a horrible way to live.

Another man who helped clean up the city was William Phelps Eno, who became the world’s first “traffic engineer”. He was the man who invented the center line on roads, made traffic always ride on the right hand side of the road, invented one way streets and many other traffic inventions. He also was responsible for getting horses off the streets, having a law passed that horses couldn’t be parked on the street after dark but had to be liveried. Horses in the city died of neglect, bad water and overwork, having a life span of just 3 years while in the country they lived 25 years. One of the main reasons the ASPCA was founded was because of the absolute horrible conditions for horses in NYC.

Because they’re incredibly hard to make and it wasn’t possible. The bicycle is clearly the greatest invention. No other invention has enhanced the capabilities of a human being the way the bike has. It’s the most efficient for of movement on earth. That’s why there’s a billion of them today.

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main qimg fabddc4490407037d5c2e8bb262b62e5 lq

Here’s a chart showing the efficiency, nothing comes close. Now, you’re basically asking why they weren’t invented earlier.

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This is an early modern wheel. It weighs more than a modern bike. You’re really not going to be able to move two of them with the power of a person. But that’s not all, have you ever seen a bike chain up close? They require very accurate machining as do the gears and sprockets. These were really hard to make. Infact the early “bicycles” were called velocipedes and looked like this.

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This was invented in the early 1800s and it was quite popular but it wasn’t super efficient. Originally they didn’t have pedals at all and you’d just sit on it and run kind of like Fred flint stone in his car. To get more mechanical advantage they started making the front wheel with the pedals bigger and bigger making the commonly known penny farthing style bike appraoching the turn of the last century you’re probably familiar with. The chain driven bike that you’re familiar with finally became available in the 1890s after it was invented but they weren’t cheap this was high tech stuff. Each piece of the. Chain needs to be perfect and to exact tolerance which simply wasn’t possible before. People had tried shaft drives before this but it never really worked too well and it’s been the chain drive ever since. Part of the reason you think that the bike should have been invented earlier is a testimony to its brilliance. It just looks so easy to do and so intuitive you wonder why it wasn’t done earlier but that simplicity is really just perfect design that people rarely look deep enough to notice.

The Japanese have been producing wood for 700 years without cutting down trees. In the 16th century the extraordinary Daisugi technique was born in Japan. The Daisugi, in fact, predict that these trees are planted for future generations and not cut down but pruned like giant bonsai; applying this technique to Cedars, so the wood can be obtained uniformly, straight and without di, pretty much perfect for construction. An art pruning that allows the tree to grow and sprout using its own wood, without ever cutting it down.

Amazing technique.

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From the old grouch…

Love this guy... -MM

I got into a heated argument with her last Summer  when she was wanting me to load up the riding lawnmower she finally allowed me to get.

Come to find out the only reason she relented in the first place after I had been wanting one for five fucking years was so that I could drag the thing on a seventy mile round trip to go mow her Dad’s giant lawn. I told her these fucking ramps are dangerous, right after one of them tried kicking sideways on me, right in front of her.

I sent her this so she just maybe will get a fucking clue that I’m not talking shit when I say they are dangerous.

I drilled holes in the end of mine and matching holes in the tailgate. Then I drop a bolt into the holes so the damn ramps can’t spit back out like that. I also ALWAYS back up into the bed of the truck.

You gotta know that little ride fucked that old man up.

Lucky for him, the neighbor behind was watching, along with whoever was filming it, so they could drag him out from under the damn thing and call an Ambulance.

Axe-Wounded Visby Warrior Brought to Life Over 600 Years Later

From HERE

Visby warrior
Visby warrior

A medieval warrior’s skull, recovered from a mass grave outside Visby, a city on the Swedish island of Gotland, has been brought to life by a digital artist. Killed in the 1361 AD Battle of Visby, in which 2,500 Danish warriors, mostly heavily-armed mercenaries, massacred 1,800 peasant farmers wielding farming tools, the warriors brutally broken face reveals the horrors of what is regarded as one of the most violent battles in European history.

Scientists took the 3D scans of the skull revealing that his eye and cheek bones had been smashed with a pole weapon just before his mouth and nose was split open with an axe. Using these 3D scans, and genetic statistical data, a digital artist has now brought this warrior back from the dead by recreating his heavily-wounded head and face.

excavation 27
excavation 27

The first excavation of the mass graves from the Battle of Visby in 1361, led by Oscar Wilhelm Wennersten in 1905. (Julius Jääskeläinen / CC BY 2.0 )

Darkness Unfolding On the Fields of Gotland

On 22 July, 1361 AD, almost 2,000 residents of the Swedish town of Visby on the island of Gotland were slaughtered by 2,500 invading Danish troops. King Valdemar Atterdag of Denmark had just conquered the neighboring territories of Skåne and Öland, and he was greedy to subjugate Gotland.

A Gutnish yeomen army of peasant farmers and their families came head to head on July 27 with the Danish warriors outside Visby’s town walls, and around 1,800 peasant farmers wielding farming tools were quickly slaughtered. Historians often equate this event with the 1356 AD Battle of Poitiers, when a similar number of French were brutally killed by an Anglo-Gascon force commanded by Edward, the Black Prince, during the Hundred Years’ War .

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reconstruction 25

The digital facial reconstruction of the Visby warrior really brings the Visby massacre to life. ( Cicero Moraes )

A Third of the Visby Defenders Were Young and Elderly

Since 1905, five mass graves have been identified outside Visby’s medieval town walls. Most recently, archaeological excavations at one of these mass graves revealed the horrors of the slaughter when it was determined that “at least a third of the 1,800 poorly armed militia of farmers were children and elderly.”

Now, Brazilian digital artist Cicero Moraes has brought one of the Visby defenders back to life. Moraes built his reconstruction using a three-dimensional model of the skull which was given to him by the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm . His creation was published in the 3D computer graphics journal OrtogOnLineMag.

Charting Ancient War Wounds

It is thought that shattered bones above the warrior’s left eye and on his left cheek bone were most probably inflicted by a heavy pole weapon. Furthermore, the man’s mouth and nose were smashed by an axe. Once these bone wounds had been charted by digital scans, Moraes set “soft tissue thickness markers” across the entire skull. These pins determined the position of the warrior’s muscles and skin.

While the warrior’s skull forms the frame of the digital recreation, the sizes of his mouth, nose and eyes are approximations based on the averages given by statistical data. Moraes said that once the man’s face was defined, “approximations generated the most scientifically accurate image” in shades of gray, with eyes closed and without hair.

facial 1
facial 1

The facial reconstruction of the Visby warrior unearthed within a mass grave outside on the Swedish island of Gotland. ( Cicero Moraes )

The Townsfolk Gave Everything to Avoid Getting Axed

Attempting to stop the massacre, after the main Battle of Visby the militia of farmers and their families surrendered to the Danish warriors. To save their city from being sacked the Gotlanders they handed over a large amount of their wealth to the invading King Valdemar. However, Valdemar appointed sheriffs and one year later added King of Gotland to his list of titles.

According to John Keegan’s 1976 book The Face of Battle, about 2,000 of the bodies of these city defenders were “unusually, buried in their armor.” The author concluded that “hot weather and the great number of dead (2,000) inspired the Danish to strip them before decomposition began.” The site of the excavation, according to Keegan, has yielded “one of the most fearsome revelations of a medieval battle known to archaeologists.” Moraes’ facial reconstruction of an axe-wounded warrior brings this event to life.

By Ashley Cowie

Thai Spicy Basil Beef

“My version of Thai Beef Basil I usually get from take-out. If you can find Thai Basil and Thai Chilies that would be great. Otherwise, I’ve used regular basil and serrano or jalapeno chilies instead. I freeze the beef for 10 minutes to make it easier to thinly slice.”

2022 11 06 09 02
2022 11 06 09 02

Ingredients

Directions

  • Heat wok with oil, add garlic and chiles.
  • Add beef and stir fry for 1 minute.
  • Add onions and basil, stir for 1 minute.
  • Add remaining sauce: oyster sauce, fish sauce, sugar, and white pepper.
  • Stir fry until cooked, garnish with cilantro.
  • Server immediately with steamed rice.

What. The. Fuck?

The Twitter Massacre

I am amusing myself with watching the panic some people express over Elon Musk’s cleanup of Twitter.

Yesterday 3,700 of its 7,500 workers were fired. That is not good, but the company was losing money and making money is at the core of the capitalist game.

Of interest is what functions were eliminated. The Guardian provides this list:

From news reports and terminated employees’ announcements, here’s what we know so far about the teams that have been hit by the layoffs of thousands of Twitter employees:

  • The human rights team has been laid off, according to a now former employee, Shannon Raj Singh, who said the team worked to protect those at risk in global conflicts, including in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Ethiopia.
  • The ML (machine learning) Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team is gone, according to a tweet of a laid-off manager.
  • The “internet technology team”, which helps keep the site running, has been cut to “a skeleton crew”, two sources told the Times.
  • An accessibly experience engineering team has been cut, according to a laid-off engineering manager.
  • The curation team, responsible for the Moments feature on Twitter, has also been cut, former employees reported.
  • Twitter’s communications department is almost entirely gone, according to the Verge.
  • Other areas that have been heavily impacted, the Verge reported, include product trust and safety, policy, research and social good.

What were these teams actually doing?

The human rights team leader gave some hints:

Shannon Raj Singh @ShannonRSingh - 17:58 UTC · Nov 4, 2022

Yesterday was my last day at Twitter: the entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company. 

I am enormously proud of the work we did to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, and to defend the needs of those particularly at risk of human rights abuse by virtue of their social media presence, such as journalists & human rights defenders.

The human rights team was the ‘regime change’ force on Twitter. It intervened in conflicts where the U.S. preferred a certain side.

Jerri ☮️ @JerusWorld - 20:42 UTC · Nov 4, 2022
Replying to @ShannonRSingh

So you are the one that was censoring pro-Ethiopian and Eritrean voices in order to help the rebel group from Tigray. May Karma pay you back for thousands of lives perished in US/West proxy war.

Shannon Raj Singh had previously meddled in Afghan and other countries’ cultures:

Shannon Raj Singh is a Legal Counsel for SAHR, advising a Kabul-based team on sexual violence litigation in Afghanistan, which aims to end the invasive and discriminatory practice of female virginity testing.

She is an international criminal law attorney focused on victim-centered responses to mass atrocities. Currently based in The Hague, she has experience working with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and a number of human rights NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa. She has also practiced as a litigator in the United States, appearing in both state and federal courts and assisting with overseas corruption investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team was also fired. Machine learning, also glorified as ‘artificial intelligence’, is essentially an (often lousy) pattern recognition system. It can be trained with categorized data and, after that, can categorized other data it gets presented. All one needs to know about its ethics, transparency and accountability is is the old IT wisdom ‘garbage in garbage out’. If one trains the system with faulty categorized data it will fail to correctly categorize data. It does not need an extra team to learn that.

I do not know what the ‘Internet technology team’ was doing but the function obviously still exists. It was merely downsized.

The accessibly experience engineering team included at least five members. There task was to modify the Twitter app so it could be used better by people with disabilities. I find it weird that Twitter had a whole team for that. To teach designers to use colors that can be differentiated by color blind people takes about 90 minutes max. All other accessibility issues I can think of (fontsize, button size etc.) are an issue for the device and operation system, not for an application like Twitter that runs on top of those. Besides that, how big is the market of people with disabilities for a company like Twitter?

The ‘curation team’ ran the Twitter moments feature. It allows for blog posts about specific tweets. The feature never took off. I know of no one who has ever used it.

Many journalists are hostile to Musk’s takeover of their favorite hang out. The communications department was there to talk to the press. Why bother?

And the other functions? Product trust and safety, policy, research and social good? What were they actually doing? How has the ‘social good’ team helped the company to be successful?

The Washington Post laments that Twitter fired some people who were doing ‘election information’:

The mass layoffs Friday gutted teams devoted to combating election misinformation, adding context to misleading tweets and communicating with journalists, public officials and campaign staff.

The layoffs included a number of people who were scheduled to be on call this weekend and early next week to monitor for signs of foreign disinformation, spam and other problematic content around the election, one former employee told The Washington Post.

‘Foreign meddling’ is certainly an issue in U.S. elections as foreign money funneled through lobbyists can influence the votes. But ‘foreign meddling’ on social media is simply a myth promoted by Democrats as part of their great ‘Russiagate’ fake.

Twitter’s downfall into a ‘regime change’ outlet came in 2009 when it moved a maintenance window to help U.S. ‘regime change’ efforts in Iran:

The Obama administration says it has tried to avoid words or deeds that could be portrayed as American meddling in Iran’s presidential election and its tumultuous aftermath.

Yet on Monday afternoon, a 27-year-old State Department official, Jared Cohen, e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.

The request, made to a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is yet another new-media milestone: the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country. 

...

Twitter complied with the request, saying in a blog post on Monday that it put off the upgrade until late Tuesday afternoon — 1:30 a.m. Wednesday in Tehran — because its partners recognized “the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.”

That was an expensive mistake. Shortly thereafter Twitter lost access to the Iranian market.

Back to ‘regime change’ assistant Shannon Raj Singh:

chinahand @chinahand - 18:55 UTC · Nov 4, 2022 
Quoting @ShannonRSingh

Somebody should publish the pre Elon org chart. Judging by this twitter walked talked and quacked like an NGO which made it subject to banning in half the world

Twitter had become a ‘woke’ company that was mostly in the hands of the Democratic Party. By being ‘woke’ and by supporting ‘regime change’ efforts Twitter killed its own access to at least half of its potential market.

It Musk manages to make it a more neutral service, nationally and internationally, while keeping its original function alive, I am all for it.

Unfortunately that is unlikely to happen.

Posted by b on November 5, 2022 at 17:05 UTC | Permalink

See that Smile of Xi Jinging!!!!

That Smile is the ENORMOUS FACE China gained when Olaf Scholz was forced to Visit China

The Face that Xi Jinging lost when Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.

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The Fact is Germanys Business Community have told Olaf Scholz rather literally that the German Industry was being ripped apart – piece by piece in this Insane Sanctions War

The Business Community – that is responsible for all those shiny euros that Scholz keeps sending to Ukraine – told Scholz in no uncertain terms to ensure Germany didnt follow the Lunatic Von Der Leyen and end up decoupling with both Russia and China.

The Fact that Scholz travels right after Costco got a 25% Stake in Hamburg Port and right before the Mid Terms in US – sends a very strong signal that Scholz is finally growing a backbone

Might be too late for Olaf and i predict he wont last 3 more months or 6 at the most before they topple him with a tamer version of US Lackey (Maybe Habeck!!!)


What did Scholz Mean?

Simple.

He means – Business as Usual

He means – Taiwan will not become the source of any Business dispute. That Taiwan is Chinese and One China Policy rocks.

He means – Xi jingping should negotiate a Ceasefire in Ukraine by “talking with Putin”

Of course most of these Statements are for Public Consumption – to satisfy the Business Community that China and its money is there and to satisfy the Green Nutcases that Scholz is still toeing the EU line about not being fully dependent on China.

Everything else is wishful thinking – especially the Ukraine Part. Putin wont listen to Xi and Xi wont advise Putin.


Yet there may be another Reason for Scholzs Visit

The Bank of China holds almost $ 256.2 Billion of Euro Debt

China has been making a lot of noise about Alternate Currencies for sometime now

Dumping 257 Billion Dollars of Euro Debt at such a time – with the main Debt underwritten by German Banks (146 Billion) – could lead to Catastrophic Collapse of Germany and Europe.

So Olaf may have gone to request Xi Jingping not to hastily make decisions

Maybe this was behind the 25% Stake at Hamburg Port for a Chinese Company


And of course the Diesel and Petrol and LNG Sales

Germany wants continued supplies and maybe Scholz negotiated the same with Xi Jingping

They Won’t Be Able To Deny The Cold, Hard Reality Of What Is Happening To The U.S. Economy Much Longer

.

They are trying really hard to convince all of us that everything is just fine.  But close to one-fifth of the U.S. population is skipping meals because food prices are too high.  And nearly 40 percent of our small businesses couldn’t pay rent in October.  Our leaders are trying to put a positive spin on things, but the truth is that we are witnessing a tremendous amount of economic suffering all over the United States right now.  The core consumer price index just surged to “the highest level since 1982”, and this is putting an enormous amount of financial stress on American families and businesses.

This week, I was stunned to learn that a survey that was just released found that 37 percent of all small businesses in the United States could not pay rent last month…

The survey of 4,789 randomly selected small business owners saw more than half of respondents say their rent is at least 10 percent higher than six months ago.

If you go back seven months, the majority said their rents had increased by at least 20 percent.

Moreover, the study found that roughly 37 percent of small businesses – almost half of all Americans working in the private sector – were left unable to pay rent in October.

Prior to getting this news, if someone had asked me to guess the percentage of small businesses that are currently unable to pay rent, I would have responded with a figure that was far lower.

So often, things turn out to be even worse than I thought they were.

If those small businesses continue to be unable to pay rent, they will eventually be forced to shut down.

So what will our communities look like if millions of small businesses suddenly close up shop on a permanent basis?

Meanwhile, a different survey has discovered that 18 percent of Americans are now skipping meals because food prices have become so crazy…

Over the last 12 months, nearly two in five American households (40%) received food or goods from a food bank (22% for Millennials), and the same amount (17%) stopped buying healthier foods (organic or high-priced healthy foods).

Nearly one in five Americans (18%) say they skipped meals or didn’t buy groceries due to high inflation (including 28% of Gen Z and 23% of millennials).

Skipping meals can be a positive thing, because fasting is actually really good for your health.

But most of these Americans are not skipping meals for the health benefits.

In addition, the same survey found that many Americans are not taking medications or seeing their doctors because prices have gone up so much

Many have cancelled or postponed plans in the past 12 months to see a specialist (14%), take a prescribed medication (10%) or get an annual physical (11%) due to high inflation.

If things are this bad already, what will those numbers look like next year at this time when economic conditions are significantly worse?

The American people are going to become increasingly frustrated as our standard of living continues to plunge.

All of us have to eat, and so many of the products that so many of us buy on a regular basis have gone up dramatically in price

A year ago, a bag of potato chips at the grocery store cost an average of $5.05. These days, that bag costs $6.05. A dozen eggs that could have been picked up for $1.83 now average $2.90. A two-liter bottle of soda that cost $1.78 will now set you back $2.17.

Sadly, this is just the beginning.

Even though the Federal Reserve has declared war on inflation, food prices are going to continue to rise for a variety of reasons.

And as the cost of living keeps becoming more oppressive, more American families are going to struggle to make it from month to month.

Even now, nearly two-thirds of the entire country is currently living paycheck to paycheck

As rising prices continue to outpace wage gains, families are finding less cushion in their monthly budget.

As of September, 63% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck, according to a recent LendingClub report — near the 64% historic high hit in March. A year ago, the number of adults who felt strained was closer to 57%.

“Consumers are not able to keep up with the pace that inflation is increasing,” said Anuj Nayar, LendingClub’s financial health officer.

The worse things get, the more we will see people clamoring for the federal government to help them.

In fact, one recent survey actually discovered that 63 percent of all U.S. voters are in favor of “inflation stimulus payments”

A recent poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans are proponents of the federal government sending out inflation stimulus payments.

About 63% of eligible U.S. voters expressed some degree of support for federal inflation relief checks being distributed, the Newsweek poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies showed. Of those who agreed the federal government should do so, 42% indicated they “strongly agree” while 21% said “agree,” according to the poll.

Sadly, most voters don’t seem to understand that sending out more stimulus checks would create even more inflation.

There is always a cost when the government gives out “free money”.

If our politicians would have exercised discipline over the past several years, we would not be in the mess that we are in today.

But now years of very bad decisions are catching up with us in a major way, and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating.

At this point, the vast majority of the U.S. population can see this.  According to one recent Gallup survey, a whopping two-thirds of all Americans believe that economic conditions in this nation are getting worse.

So many people are talking about the possibility of a recession in 2023.

If all we have is a recession next year, we would be extremely fortunate.

Because right now the economy is starting to crack and crumble all around us, and the outlook for the months ahead is exceedingly bleak indeed.

Eerie. Just like today.

A homework from the UK. Imagine if it was a Chinese school doing this for the US or UK. Twitter China experts would have a field day and many writers on Quora would write “Xi is distracting people from internal problems.” This is what brainwashing looks like. Global Times is a joke compared to this.

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My dad raised my sister and I after our mother passed away in an accident when I was 6 and she was 8. Dad never spoke very much unless you asked him a question. He did not date he just went to work and came home and took care of us. I know my dad loved us and he always smiled but getting him to talk was like pulling teeth.

In HS I was a linebacker at our little HS and dad never missed a game. My sister played the flute in school and he went to all her concerts. All the other kids had outgoing parents and my dad was 5:10 140 pounds of quiet average and I used to really envy the laughter and camraderie the other guys had with their dads and mine was just smiling and so silent.

On weekends he went fishing and took us with him if we wanted to go. We were always welcome and though I know he loved us he never had anything to say. Trying to talk to dad was just a lot of 1–2 word answers and then “glad we had this talk son.”

After college I moved away to Nashville about 4 hours from dad and then after a number of years he was in his 70s and got sick and passed away. At the funeral there were few people in attendance just some guys from his work, my sister and I and our families and an Army General in full uniform who formerly saluted my father and then sat in the back and said some prayers and got up to leave.

At the door I introduced myself and asked him if he knew my dad? He said that he had been a Captain in France and your dad was my specialty sergeant and he stopped a German advance in its tracks and destroyed 2 gun emplacements and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. We lost 8 men that day but 25 of us survived that day because your dad was the bravest SOB I ever saw or knew.

Needless to say I was in shock. In a shoebox at home buried in a closet was the medal of honor and the duplicate they give you for ceremonies, the rosette, the citation signed by Truman in 1945, a silver star and the croix de guerre with palm from France.

God I wish I could have heard all this from Dad. Does he know how proud I am of him?

Me crying for my Obi as he enjoys the sun for the last time.

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main qimg 5a2a93a11f00cc110d9a254141070579 lq

Maria holding Obi for the last time too.

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main qimg 9c9f13140186248b4069ead27641474a lq

Obi with his grave goods. Buried next to his friends. Skink and Sophie to the left and Gris to the right. They are on the North side of our backyard garden path. Obi is sleeping on my red plaid flannel shirt.

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main qimg 109a002a80fb3d680e26847a62d168cd lq

He has well used cat toys with him. Fresh catnip from the garden. Flowers and a monarch butterfly wing by his ear. I found that wing while picking the marigolds. Some money for cat treats. A bowl that I threw on the wheel filled with his favorite cat food. Also a can of special cat food. There is a Nixie tube from my hobby included. All the cats got to sniff him and say goodby. Obi was a very special laidback quiet cat, he will be missed terribly.

https://youtu.be/6R7uRnhSIsk

.

A typhoon in Zhuhai and a frowning God viewing America with great distaste…

What a busy weeks and a crazy last couple of days. Remember (boys and girls) that if you conduct affirmation campaigns, and you are close to approaching your objectives, there’s a lot of changes that you must end up experiencing. Some are just disquieting and uncomfortable nuisances, while others are adaptations to changing environs, and still others are big “headaches” that you must resolve, but once you pass through the torrent of change, all is good.

Same with me. Changes are coming hot and heavy on my side. All is good, just disquieting.

As all with some of you all.

From DM (I don’t think he’ll mind sharing his story with you all)…

Thought you might be interested to know, I am just finishing up my affirmation dwell period. 

I took your advice and put in some food affirmations as a tell for when things started happening. 

One of the tells was ice cream....but not just any ice cream; we had this award winning ice creamery in town that had been there since before me and SD were even born. 

They just brought out this new flavour - vanilla cookie butter, which was basically like a yellow custard vanilla with caramel biscotti smeered through it - oh my fucking god MM, best ice cream you'll ever taste.....then about a month later they closed down for good. 

[Now, as LUCK would have it] We have this other ice creamery closer to us that had the same flavour, but i was getting annoyed at it never being in stock whenever we'd go there. 

So, obviously i put in my affirmations to be able to have it whenever I want. 

Then i go there one day and they have that particular flavour so i grab a scoop. 

I notice that they now have a fridge in the corner with tubs full of the award winning ice creamerie's icecream flavours (i knew they were going to be supplying to various companies around town, so wasn't a huge shock, but still, this was the first i saw it in their particular shop). 

Turns out they were being supplied by the award winning company this whole time, and i can order buckets of it through these guys whenever i want. 

That's not the best part. 

I just found out today that the biscotti stuff is now being sold at our local supermarket as a spread for breads, so now i have the option of smeering it through whatever icecream i want. 

I also was teaching the affirmation stuff to my kids, and my eldest son kept saying he wanted gold broughtto him....well, 2 days later, i shit you not, kids were randomly bring him dollars at the park. 

We go to the shop, and another kid says "I've got a spare dollar left over from my lollies and was just wondering if your kid wanted it to buy some of his own" (our dollars are gold coloured).

Yeah. It works, I’m telling you all.

I’ve had a couple of busy days, and MM was down, sluggish and just about impossible for a spell. Software upgrades and just terrible implementation issues. Been hit by numerous trolls who managed to cause me some personal grief, and get some Rufus videos on You-tube banned.

Sigh.

I did some volunteering at my daughter’s kindergarten, and I am so proud to be doing so. It’s our highest state of being to give our time, money, labors for others so that the society benefits. Ah, MM the Kindergarten cop!

Here I am with my sign telling everyone on a scooter not to ram the young ones. LOL.

2022 11 05 16 35
2022 11 05 16 35

By the way, one of the things that I really appreciate as a parent, is the “parent stalls” in both the men’s restroom and the women’s restroom. These are different that the “baby changing station” or the “disabled bathroom” that often sits outside in the hallway.

This is what those stalls look like…

2022 11 05 16 44
2022 11 05 16 44

Let’s continue with the standard daily fare…

interesting retro pictures 01
interesting retro pictures 01

NASA is pushing its human moon landing back to 2025, and its top official worries China will beat the US there

Loudspeakers: “Leave the city ** BY ** November 7”

Something is hugely wrong and it appears something wicked is truly in the works.  Cars with loudspeakers are driving all through Kherson, warning citizens they must evacuate the city “BY November 7.”

 

 

 

Evacuation of the city has been ongoing for over a week.  The main administration building took down its Russian flag as seen in the image below:

 

City workers have been going door-to-door telling citizens “the Ukrainian army is coming and you must get out immediately.”

Russian soldiers have either left – or been ordered to leave- their checkpoint posts in Chornobaivka, Stepanivka, Bilozerka and Korabelnyi district south of the Kosheva river. Map below shows the now-empty checkpoint locations:

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2022 11 05 19 28

 

There is already widespread and rampant public speculation – even in media – that this may be an attempt by Russia to create a 15 – 30km “no man’s land” to lure the Ukrainians into a trap.  The map below shows the region being emptied:

FgvndqQakAEdryl
FgvndqQakAEdryl

 

Other people are speculating — and I emphasize this is MERE SPECULATION – that Russia is going to lure the Ukrainians into this area, then vaporize it with Tactical nukes and tell NATO, if you enter Ukraine, your countries will get this too.”  These same speculations claim that Russia is planning to prove it’s point once and for all: that it WILL use nuclear weapons to defend “Russian Territory.”  Again, this is SPECULATION.

Whatever is actually taking place, the now established FACT that cars with loudspeakers are driving around Kherson telling citizens they must be OUT . . . BY NOVEMBER 7, plays right into the elections here in the USA.

U.S. MID-TERM ELECTIONS – Nov. 8

Many people have speculated the Democrats will do something to prevent their shellacking in the mid-term election on Tuesday, November 8.   If Russia nukes Kherson on November 7, there could very well be an actual nuclear exchange THAT DAY.

The Democrats would then use a nuclear war as an excuse to remain in power, even though there is no aspect of the US Constitution – or statute law- allowing such a thing.  The terms of office for members of Congress, EXPIRE.   Once the date in January arrives, they are all simply no longer elected office holders.  Their term ends.  Nothing they do, by “emergency” or “Presidential Order” can change the fact that the first week in January, their term is over and they are no longer elected officials.   Unless they try to force the issue through the barrels of guns.

Then, too, there’s the very fair question of why November 7?   Why would Russia play into a US election by picking that particular date?

It cannot be a coincidence.  There are no coincidences.

For quite awhile, some folks considered to be on “the fringe” have argued this is all theater.  COVID, the Ukraine war, all of it.   They argue it is all planned years in advance by the powers-that-be, as either bread-and-circuses for the masses, or a true effort to smash the world through catastrophe and fear into a “new world order.”

When you also factor-in that Russia went the full “COVID-19” with a vax and lockdowns, it seems now entirely possible that the very small group of people who have told us for years that all the big events on earth are “scripted” might be right.   If a nuke exchange takes place on Nov. 7, then it __is__ all scripted.

Whoever is right, all these things seem to be telling us all, that something wicked this way comes.

If true, we have until Monday, November 7.

Remember, Congress cannot extend its term of office under **ANY** Circumstance.   After the first week in January, they are no longer elected officials and they no longer have duly constituted power.  After the first week in January, if they remain in power without an election, it will be actual Tyranny.

interesting retro pictures 08
interesting retro pictures 08

This homemade meatball recipe is a Betty classic, and for great reason! For generations, home cooks have relied on this hearty meatball recipe to show some skills the kitchen. All it takes to achieve this meaty main dish is eight basic ingredients. Got them? Great! Now, if you have 15 minutes to spare and a foil-lined 13×9 pan, perfectly browned and tender meatballs could be the answer to tonight’s dinner jam. Yes, delicious doesn’t take long! In the meantime, prepare spaghetti or rice, veggies or salad, because this recipe goes with anything!

meatballs
meatballs

Ingredients

  • 1 lb lean (at least 80%) ground beef
  • 1/2 cup Progresso™ Italian-style bread crumbs
  • 1/4 cup milk
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 small onion, finely chopped (1/4 cup)
  • 1 egg

2022 11 05 09 04
2022 11 05 09 04

2022 11 05 09 05
2022 11 05 09 05

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interesting retro pictures 99

Giant Hedge Fund Warns Clients of “Global Societal Collapse”

Eh. I'm thinking that this is something unique to the West, and not to the globe. -MM
.

In a letter sent to investors by Hege Fund ELLIOT MANAGEMENT, the Florida-headquartered firm told clients that they believe the global economy is in an “extremely challenging” situation which could lead to hyperinflation and “global societal collapse.”

The firm, led by billionaire Paul Singer and Jonathan Pollock, told its clients that “investors should not assume they have ‘seen everything’” just because they have been through the peaks and troughs of the 1987 crash, the dot-com boom, and the 2008 global financial crisis, or previous bear and bull markets.

They added that the “extraordinary” period of cheap money is coming to an end and has “made possible a set of outcomes that would be at or beyond the boundaries of the entire post-WWII period.”

The letter said the world is “on the path to hyperinflation”, which could lead to “global societal collapse and civil or international strife.”

They estimated that markets have not fallen enough yet and equity markets could drop more than 50% would be “normal,” adding that they couldn’t predict when that would happen. The S&P 500 SPX, -1.06% has dropped 19% from its peak at the beginning of the year.

Elliott executives warned clients that the idea that “‘we will not panic because we have seen this before’ does not comport with the current facts.”

They blamed central bank policymakers for the current global economic situation, saying they had been “dishonest” about the reason for high inflation. They said lawmakers had shirked responsibility by blaming it on supply chain disruption caused by the pandemic instead of loose monetary policy imposed two years ago during the COVID-19 peak.

The London Financial Times reported that the hedge fund is posting 6.4% returns so far this year and has only lost money during two years of its 45-year history.

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interesting retro pictures 16

One of the many “smoking guns”

As per the Schiller Institute:

“The Russians have asserted that the UK was directly involved “supervising” the recently repelled drone attack on the Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol, and have demanded an explanation for the “It is done” text message that seems to have been carelessly sent by the already-former British Prime Minister Liz Truss, to U.S secretary of State Tony Blinken moments after the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. What is next?”

A Salute to Comrade Biden for handing over the world biggest chip market exclusively to Chinese chip companies.

The global semiconductor market is going through a tough time. The slowdown in demand and geopolitical challenges have contributed to a significant dent in the market’s value. Shares of leading semiconductor companies, including Samsung, continue to pressure downward.

The export restrictions announced by the Biden administration last week have further complicated matters. These measures cut off China from select chips made anywhere in the world with US technology and significantly limited American technology’s export to Chinese semiconductor companies.
From HERE

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interesting retro pictures 23

From a close-up crocodile to a crab fishing in a cave and a lizard navigating plastic waste, here is a look at a winning image in the Mangrove Photography Awards, run by the Mangrove Action Project.

I think that it is awesome.

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1 6

Great scene.

Up until the 1970s, you could enter business establishments without shoe and socks

interesting retro pictures 27
interesting retro pictures 27

MILITARY BLOOD SUPPLIES TAINTED WITH H.I.V. AND HEPATITIS “B” & “C”

The blood supply of the military has been found to be severely TAINTED with Human Immuno-Virus (HIV) – the virus which causes AIDS —  as well as tainted with Hepatitis “B” and “C.”   The discovery was made when Ukraine asked NATO for 62,000 liters of emergency blood supply.   NATO provided the tainted blood!

The Ukraine medical authorities tested the TWO BATCHES of blood supplied by NATO and found the following:

BATCH ONE

6.3% with HIV,

7.4% with #hepatitis B, and;

3.2% with hepatitis C.

 

BATCH TWO

5.9% with HIV,

6.8% hepatitis B, and;

3.1% hepatitis C

It is not yet known from which NATO countries the tainted blood came, or if it came from several (or all) countries.

It is also not known why military blood supplies were not tested for these diseases when Donors gave the blood.

It is widely known that any person who received blood tainted with any of these viruses, contracts the virus themselves.

HIV causes AIDS and even though the condition can be treated with vast and dangerous anti-viral drugs, person infected are never “cured.”

Those serving in the Military or those of you with family members or friends in the military, may want to alert them to reconsider their continued service given the reality that emergency blood supplies for the military are now known to be tainted with the virus that causes AIDS and other viruses which cause Hepatitis.

I am a business man. I am not sure what do you do? For me it is as simple as ABC.

All corporations big or small is set up to profit. Profit to a corporation is no different from blood to body. Without blood your body dies. Without profit corporation go bankrupt and ceased to exist.

To profit you need minimise cost, maximise sales and as such profit. Companies go to China for 3 reasons.

One to produce at a minimum cost and maximum efficiency, no where on planet earth can you do it except China. Workers are intelligent and hardworking, plant and infrastructure is first class and these corporation makes stuffs at a fraction of the cost to do it anywhere on earth.

Secondly, China is a humongous market. It’s Middle class is at least twice that of the US and growing rapidly. The demand in China alone is at least 40% of the worlds market. It is equivalent to the next 5 biggest market put together. Who is willing to sacrificed this market. None except perhaps a demented or extremely lousy businessman.

Worst, China is in close proximity to Asia which together represent close to 65% of world market. Producing in China allows access and competitiveness to this market. I dare say without this market many of these companies will ceased to exist.

Thirdly today’s manufacturing is the galvanisation of a thousand parts in a supply chain management made of of many companies from different nationalities and nations. 99% of them are based in China for the same reasons. Not being in China means huge disruption and very high logistics cost.

So imagine a US branded vehicles needs 900 parts made in China sent to a US plant and after it is assembled, it needs to be shipped back to Asia to sell. The vehicle will not sell. It will cost 50% more than its competitor.

So I dare say US businessman would rather sell of its corporation away than to adhered to the US nonsense to ship home and bankrupt itself. Biden can be a nut but your corporations owners are not. They will sell off their stake or they will change nationality if it comes to that.

Politics and business is like oil and water, it can never mix. There lies the politics of America. Case in point Apple. It must get a million request to move back to The US. It won’t. It can’t. It it does Apple will bankrupt in 5 years.

interesting retro pictures 39
interesting retro pictures 39

Giant Hedge Fund Warns Clients of “Global Societal Collapse”

In a letter sent to investors by Hege Fund ELLIOT MANAGEMENT, the Florida-headquartered firm told clients that they believe the global economy is in an “extremely challenging” situation which could lead to hyperinflation and “global societal collapse.”

The firm, led by billionaire Paul Singer and Jonathan Pollock, told its clients that “investors should not assume they have ‘seen everything’” just because they have been through the peaks and troughs of the 1987 crash, the dot-com boom, and the 2008 global financial crisis, or previous bear and bull markets.

They added that the “extraordinary” period of cheap money is coming to an end and has “made possible a set of outcomes that would be at or beyond the boundaries of the entire post-WWII period.”

The letter said the world is “on the path to hyperinflation”, which could lead to “global societal collapse and civil or international strife.”

They estimated that markets have not fallen enough yet and equity markets could drop more than 50% would be “normal,” adding that they couldn’t predict when that would happen. The S&P 500 SPX, -1.06% has dropped 19% from its peak at the beginning of the year.

Elliott executives warned clients that the idea that “‘we will not panic because we have seen this before’ does not comport with the current facts.”

They blamed central bank policymakers for the current global economic situation, saying they had been “dishonest” about the reason for high inflation. They said lawmakers had shirked responsibility by blaming it on supply chain disruption caused by the pandemic instead of loose monetary policy imposed two years ago during the COVID-19 peak.

The London Financial Times reported that the hedge fund is posting 6.4% returns so far this year and has only lost money during two years of its 45-year history.

interesting retro pictures 48
interesting retro pictures 48

Basically, yes. Frankly, its chicken-shit, Tonya Harding-style tactics for containing China are not working…

  • using propaganda lies and false accusations to turn public opinion against China — the hope is that nations will “decouple” from China
  • banning Chinese companies like Huawei and SMIC, as well as Chinese products like TikTok and WeChat — the hope is that China’s progress will be interrupted
  • fomenting political unrest in Hong Kong and Xinjiang using the CIA and NED affiliates — the hope is that there will be an internal uprising to weaken or overthrow China’s government
  • abducting Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in the same manner as Alstom executive Frederic Pierucci in 2013 — the hope is that China and Huawei will be distracted
  • operating two supercarrier battle groups just off the coast of China — the hope is that China will feel intimidated and worried

Unfortunately for the US, most countries continue to trade and do business with China.

Huawei still has the lion’s share of the international 5G market.

China is developing its own semiconductor industry and should catch up to America in a few years.

Hong Kong and Xinjiang are stable now. No more thuggery in Hong Kong, and no more terrorism in Xinjiang. Up yours, America.

I expect Meng Wanzhou to be released before the end of the year. The US never had a credible case against her.

China isn’t in the least bit intimidated by the US navy.

Instead of wasting time trying to contain China, the US should focus on solving its domestic problems and restoring its economic competitiveness.

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interesting retro pictures 55

Why will there be no winner in the US-China technology war disguised as the US-China trade war?

According to the Americans, there seems to be no winner from the US-China technology war disguised as the US-China trade war because some Americans are still happy the GDP of the US remains the world top just a little bit more than that of China.

However, according to the Chinese, China has been transformed from a backward country with the core high technology controlled by the foreigners to the international leader in 219 scientific and technological achievements. People can continue counting on more and more up-and-coming hundreds of the latest scientific and technological achievements in China.

China is leading the way in building 5G network infrastructure, but the places where the technology really takes off are factories, coal mines, shipyards and warehouses. Industrial sites aim to use 5G technology to help automate labor-intensive or dangerous industrial processes, with the hope of boosting productivity. These sites include 5G coal mines equipped with remotely operated drilling machinery, “smart factories” that automate production and quality control, and ports that process and count freight containers with the help of connected cameras. China’s 5G deployment is generally at the world’s leading level. According to data from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of the end of last year, there were more than 1.4 million 5G base stations in the country, accounting for 60% of the total number of base stations in the world.

The Chinese have managed to develop China into a world class leader in many technologies including 5G, AI, quantum computer and communications systems and industries producing solar panels, nuclear power plants, remote sensing satellites, …, etc.

China’s development is involved in almost all top high technology industries. The Chinese will shape the country into a big country with a perfect image and want China to be able to stand on the top of the world in every aspect. China’s development in just a few decades has made China so powerful that even some core technology industries are no longer subject to the restrictions of the other advanced countries because the field of China’s independent research and development has become more abundant and can fully support the development of related industries in China. Through the development of less than 100 years, China has transformed itself into a brand-new appearance. That has shocked the whole world and raised eyebrows.

On the surface, the semiconductor chip industry is a technology generation gap, but it is essentially a talent-intensive industry. China has a large enough market, talented people and capital. Then, the rest only takes a little time for the Chinese to make it the Chinese ways. China has accelerated its technological independence. Within 15 years or less, China will have everything.

In summary, it is becoming more and more clear whoever the winner is in a few more years.

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interesting retro pictures 58

“Return” of supply and marketing cooperatives? Media Focus: Why do many places recover and rebuild? What will it do?

供销社“回归”?媒体聚焦:多地为何恢复重建?将起何作用?

From HERE

My personal imagination of the rebuilding of supply and market cooperative as follows:

This is to improve the standard of living of villages across China, create employment, control cost of living, creating an inner economy to absorb the coming impact of another US created GFC.

In war time, such coorperative can turn into food and basic necessities distribution chains to ensure the entire population is properly feed.

China is rebuilding a real economy outside the Internet. Such massive cooperatives network will have the power to buy anything in bulk both domestically and internationally, effectively controlling inflation, ensure affordability, absorbing excess domestic production cause by the crusader's decoupling, and to ration foods and other basic supplies if the crusaders initiated a shipment blockage, or initiated a preemptive war.

Please note that 2 years ago, one of China minister (cannot remember who) openly claimed that China has enough food to feed the entire population for 2 years without food production or imports.

Xi is a great thinker and strategist , I believe that he will reunify Taiwan in his 3rd term and create a new and fairer world order outside the crusader bullying, and than he will retire in 5 year time.

He will be a world leader that many will cry when he leave the planet 🌏.

-Chua

 

What does the US-Taiwan 21st Century Trade Initiative say?

In June 2022, the DPP authorities in Taiwan made a high-profile announcement that they would launch the "Taiwan-US 21st Century Trade Initiative" with the United States. It would significantly enhance Taiwan's international status. However, has the dream of the DPP, Taiwan's ruling party, flying to the top branches as a phoenix, come true ?

What is behind the Unites States' conspiracy, trying so hard to push through this initiative? What exactly is the US-Taiwan "21st Century Trade Initiative"? To put it simply, it can be summed up in two words: consolation ceremony and lip service.

After the US officially announced the list of countries under the IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework), the DPP, which has always claimed to be the number one loyal follower of the USA, was dumbfounded. They were not on the list of IPEF participants! Amazement all around, but there was nothing they could do. They had to hide their disappointment with a smile. Embarrassed, the baby was displeased and bitter. But the baby he didn't cry, he didn't show his anger. 

Then, looking at the "21st Century Trade Initiative", this time, it looked like a candy given by a father to coax a child. The United States clearly did not want to bring Taiwan into the IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework) business, but at the same time the US didn't want to lose its "Taiwan card" in its strategy to contain China.

Needless to say, the consolation gift after the IPEF turmoil has indeed fooled Taiwan. Taiwan took this piece of sweet candy and regarded it as a steppingstone to independence. It can be said that it is hype and propaganda. The American trick achieves the greatest effect at the least cost. It is absolutely amazing.

It is not unreasonable to say that the "21st Century Trade Initiative" is just lip service. On the one hand, as stated before, the significance of this initiative is now that it is a cardinal for boasting and showing off, the perfect way for making a big fuss and the basis for self-hypnosis. At the end, this agreement that was eagerly signed after whitewashing the USA, will obviously be written in little Cài Yīngwén's (Tsai Ing-wen) performance book. On the other hand, the euphemistically called "initiative" is actually a lower-end existence than the IPEF "framework". 

At best, it is just a platform for dialogue between the two sides. The form is greater than the actual effect. Real outcomes will be impossible. As far as the United States is concerned, the economic significance of Taiwan's existence is only the semiconductor industry. When Taiwan is hollowed out, the United States will die. To put it bluntly, the United States is like a scumbag. It is all the time baking cakes for Taiwan, and Taiwan has to accept all the bills. 

Actually, the United States is very clear in its goals: talking about economic and trade actually means controlling Taiwan. If Taiwan performs well, the USA will talk, but if it does not perform well, the USA will drop Taiwan.

Henry Kissinger once said" "To be an enemy of the US is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal" Taiwan has to squeeze its head and rush forward. The "21st Century Trade Initiative" is a profitable, smooth road for the United States; I hope Taiwan will not turn it into its own road to destruction.

_____________________________________________

David Wang

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interesting retro pictures 65

“Here are the ingredients & the instructions to make the perfect burger! Although it may not be the healthiest, use medium ground beef for moistness & flavour. The leaner varieties produce burgers that are drier with a denser, tighter texture. Don’t use previously frozen meat as juices are lost during defrosting. If making ahead, cover with plastic wrap & refrigerate for no more than a day. Enjoy!”

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2022 11 05 16 19

Ingredients

Directions

  • Lightly oil grill& heat BBQ to medium.
  • Whisk egg in a bowl& add next 6 ingredients.
  • Add any of the “stir-ins” that appeal to you.
  • Crumble in beef& using your hands or a fork, gently mix together.
  • Handle the meat as little as possible – the more you work it, the tougher it gets.
  • Gently shape (don’t firmly press) mixture into burgers about ¾ inch thick.
  • Using your thumb, make a shallow depression in the centre of each burger to prevent puffing up during cooking.
  • Place burgers on the grill, close lid& BBQ until NO LONGER PINK INSIDE, turning once, about 6 – 8 minutes per side.
  • An instant read thermometer should read 160F.
  • Don’t abuse your burgers by pressing with a spatula, pricking with a fork or turning frequently as precious juices will be lost!
  • Tuck into a warm crusty bun& add your favourite toppings.

The claw

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interesting retro pictures 68

Breaking! News from friends in Shenzhen shows that China fighting an all out attack on its people. This is war.

From HERE.

Hello, everybody. I’ve got some really interesting news from Shenzhen. Of course, you probably know or maybe you don’t that I teach Chinese students online. My wife and I taught in international schools in China for nine years. Then one year, we had our own tutoring school called Professor Brown. No surprises there. So, I still teach these students because we went belly up in 2008 with the subprime rape of the middle class and poor people. Thus, I have to keep teaching and working to supplement our limited retirement income, because of all that happening.

Anyway, I talked to Chinese friends there along with my Chinese students. I just learned that Shenzhen, which is right north of Hong Kong, there is a river running between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. I’ve walked across the bridge many times. I’ve taken the bus across many times, the metro many times, the train many times. So, it’s very close to Hong Kong. And I found out that Shenzhen is really in super zero-covid mode. Everybody in Shenzhen that I know of is having to take a daily NAT test. NAT stands for nucleic acid test. It’s not as invasive as the ones they like to plunge up our sinuses here in Europe. They just swab the inside of your mouth.

 

However, Shenzhen is one of the most advanced technological cities in the world. It is the home of Huawei, ZTE, BYD, which is the world’s biggest electric car maker. Fourteen million people. And the government is asking, requiring students, workers, everybody to do a daily NAT test. My Chinese friends tell me they usually do it before going to work, or for the students during lunch, during lunch hour. And it’s not the nurse, it’s not the nurse at the school, or the nurse at the businesses that are doing all this. It is actually teams of government medical specialists every day going in to, likely thousands of businesses, schools, etc., in Shenzhen, testing for Covid. They also report to me that depending on what they’re finding, you have to show a 24-hour, negative NAT test to get into different places, restaurants, etc.

This is really draconian, yet I know why. The reason is that Baba Beijing would not be doing this to 14 million people just to be nasty. I know that Epoch Times and a lot of the many, many mainstream media Big Lie Propaganda Machine platforms that are Sinophobic, China hating, communist hating, socialist hating, want to believe that the government is doing the zero COVID policy to punish and control the people. Although Shenzhen’s is obviously one of the most extreme that I’ve heard of for right now, it is not because they’re tyrannical, that they are dictatorial, authoritarian and want to control everybody.

Can you imagine how much this is costing the Chinese government to do this? How many billions of dollars or euros or yuan, if you want. This is costing them –  how this is affecting productivity and also profitability in one of the world’s most important high-tech centers anywhere. We lived there for three years. It’s just an amazing city and they are doing this, not because they hate their people or because they are tyrannical and dictatorial and control freaks. They are doing this because they know that the Covid in China that is being spread around is a Western bioweapon.

I want you to read, I will give you the articles. I will post the articles on my web page, on China Rising Radio Sinoland. I did an entire exposé about how Harvard, all during the 1990s illegally and unethically harvested hundreds of thousands, maybe up to 2 million lung, throat and nasal DNA samples from Han Chinese for ten years. They did this. The Chinese, unfortunately, back then trusted them.

Of course, later the bioweapon source came out, which was patented by Pfizer months before it was released in southern China: SARS. Therefore, the Chinese know all this. They know these are bioweapons. And very, very likely we know that in 2019 Covid was released in Wuhan at the World Military games, by the by the U.S. team that went there, because they were awful (athletes). I even wrote a whole article about that. Just search World Military Games or soy sauce soldiers on my website to learn all about how the 312 soldiers that went over there were not athletes. They were bioweapons specialists.

We know that the variant released in Wuhan was the most virulent. All the other variants that were in the rest of the world were less deadly. There were five variants. There was the one in Wuhan, which was really, really dangerous. Then there was one in Iran, which was also very dangerous, killed lots of people. They targeted the leadership and a lot of the leaders and politicians were killed. The third, the third most virulent, was the one that was released in Europe, not as virulent as the others. And it just so happened that it all broke out around all the US/NATO military bases in Northern Italy. What a coincidence. And then the two that were that were released in the United States were highly infectious. But not deadly at all.

That being the case, the Chinese government, of course, can’t tell their people this publicly, because the that the people would demand retribution against the United States, and China does not want to go to war. That would be the only other option. Thus, they have to play the game that this is the latest, variant of Omicron, whatever. I am sure that these nucleic acid tests, they are able to go in, as they see these variants being released, that they can immediately, do the genomic profile on each of these variants that are coming in, and they can adjust to the nucleic acid tests immediately to test for those.

You’re asking well how can the United States get all this stuff in, or the United States’ Western vassals, get all these viruses into the into China? It’s very easy because they all have embassies and consulates and they have diplomatic pouches. And according to international diplomatic law, the host country can never request to look inside a diplomatic pouch. A diplomatic pouch is considered to be the property of that country. Therefore, countries can, if they want, embassies can bring in viruses, guns, drugs, money, whatever they want. And the host country cannot touch it. Of course, the United States has, I think, for four: Wuhan, Xi’an, Guangzhou, Shanghai, at least four and maybe a fifth, up in Shenyang, on the Korean border. Four if not five consulates that also have diplomatic pouch privileges. These test tubes full of bugs can be easily put in heavy Styrofoam boxes, protected. And then somebody at the embassy or the consulate who is qualified to handle this stuff can go out and drop it in a market or drop it in the subway or whatever.

I can promise you this is proof, the fact that what’s going on in Shenzhen is proof that Baba Beijing knows that it is being attacked with Covid bioweapons by the West. I can guarantee you, vassal Germany, France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, England, if they were asked by the United States to do this, they would have no choice but to do so.

It’s very interesting. I can now understand why my students are so stressed out. I even gave one of my students a 13-minute Buddhist meditation on compassion, which is helping him. They’re obviously feeling the strain. It cannot be fun doing this. I mean, we basically did it here in Europe for several months, too. But we didn’t have the daily nasal test. But, if we wanted to go into into a restaurant, we had to go get our sinuses jabbed with the swab, because my wife and I refuse to get the RNA genetic treatment.

Anyway, this is very, very interesting news. I think it tells us a lot about what’s going on. So, the next time someone talks about Chinese Covid versus American Covid, they’re not the same thing. They’re not the same variant. And the Chinese are reacting as such. For them, Covid being spread in their country is an act of war. Thank you.

interesting retro pictures 77
interesting retro pictures 77

NASA’s head warned that China may try to claim the Moon – two space scholars explain why that’s unlikely to happen

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NASA Administrator Bill Nelson recently expressed concerns over China’s aims in space, and in particular, that China would, in some way, claim ownership over the Moon and stop other countries from exploring it. In an interview with a German newspaper, Nelson cautioned, “We must be very concerned that China is landing on the Moon and saying: ‘It’s ours now and you stay out.‘” China immediately denounced the claims as a “lie”.

This spat between the administrator of NASA and Chinese government officials comes at a time when both nations are actively working on missions to the Moon – and China has not been shy about its lunar aspirations.

In 2019, China became the first country to land a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon. That same year, China and Russia announced joint plans to reach the South Pole of the Moon by 2026. And some Chinese officials and government documents have expressed intentions to build a permanent, crewed International Lunar Research Station by 2027.

There is big difference between China – or any state for that matter – setting up a lunar base and actually “taking over” the Moon. As two scholars who study space security and China’s space program, we believe that neither China nor any other nation is likely to take over the Moon in the near future. It is not only illegal, it is also technologically daunting – the costs of such an endeavor would be extremely high, while the potential payoffs would be uncertain.

China is limited by international space law

Legally, China cannot take over the Moon because it is against current international space law. The Outer Space Treaty, adopted in 1967 and signed by 134 countries, including China, explicitly states that “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means” (Article II). Legal scholars have debated the exact meaning of “appropriation”, but under a literal interpretation, the treaty indicates that no country can take possession of the Moon and declare it an extension of its national aspirations and prerogatives. If China tried to do this, it would risk international condemnation and a potential international retaliatory response.

While no country can claim ownership of the Moon, Article I of the Outer Space Treaty allows any state to explore and use outer space and celestial bodies. China will not be the only visitor to the South Pole of the Moon in the near future. The U.S.-led Artemis Accords is a group of 20 countries that has plans to return humans to the Moon by 2025, which will include the establishment of a research station on the lunar surface and a supporting space station in orbit called the Gateway with a planned launch in November 2024.

Even if no country can legally claim sovereignty over the Moon, it is possible that China, or any other country, would attempt to gradually establish de facto control over strategically important areas through a strategy known as “salami slicing.” This practice involves taking small, incremental steps to achieve a big change: Individually, those steps do not warrant a strong response, but their cumulative effect adds up to significant developments and increased control. China has recently been using this strategy in the South and East China seas. Still, such a strategy takes time and can be addressed.

Does China have the resources and capabilities?

China is investing heavily in space. In 2021, it led in number of orbital launches with a total of 55 compared to the U.S.’s 51. China is also in the top three in spacecraft deployment for 2021. China’s state-owned StarNet space company is planning a megaconstellation of 12,992 satellites, and the country has nearly finished building the Tiangong space station.

Going to the Moon is expensive; “taking over” the Moon would be much more so. China’s space budget – an estimated US$13 billion in 2020 – is only around half that of NASA’s. Both the U.S. and China increased their space budgets in 2020, the U.S. by 5.6% and China by 17.1% compared to the previous year. But even with the increased spending, China does not seem to be investing the money needed to carry out the expensive, daring and uncertain mission of “taking over” the Moon.

If China assumes control over some part of the moon, it would be a risky, expensive and extremely provocative action. China would risk further tarnishing its international image by breaking international law, and it may invite retaliation. All this for uncertain payoffs that remain to be determined.

Controlling the Moon is difficult

With a surface area of nearly 14.6 million square miles (39 million square kilometers) – or almost five times the area of Australia – any control of the Moon would be temporary and localized.

More plausibly, China could attempt to secure control of specific lunar areas that are strategically valuable, such as lunar craters with higher concentrations of water ice. Ice on the Moon is important because it will provide water to humans that wouldn’t need to be shipped from Earth. Ice can also serve as a vital source of oxygen and hydrogen, which could be used as rocket fuel. In short, water ice is essential for ensuring the long-term sustainability and survivability of any mission to the Moon or beyond.

Securing and enforcing control of strategic lunar areas would require substantial financial investments and long-term efforts. And no country could do this without everyone noticing.

Germany’s position in America’s New World Order

Ironically, or sadly, the Papacy's power stemmed directly from widespread fear of hell—eternal damnation.

My point is to emphasize the analogy with today’s U.S. sanctions against all countries not following its own diplomatic demands. Trade sanctions are a form of excommunication. They reverse the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia’s principle that made each country and its rulers independent from foreign meddling. President Biden characterizes U.S. interference as ensuring his new antithesis between “democracy” and “autocracy.” By democracy he means a client oligarchy under U.S. control, creating financial wealth by reducing living standards for labor, as opposed to mixed public/private economies aiming at promoting living standards and social solidarity.

Germany has become an economic satellite of America’s New Cold War with Russia, China and the rest of Eurasia. Germany and other NATO countries have been told to impose trade and investment sanctions upon themselves that will outlast today’s proxy war in Ukraine. U.S. President Biden and his State Department spokesmen have explained that Ukraine is just the opening arena in a much broader dynamic that is splitting the world into two opposing sets of economic alliances. This global fracture promises to be a ten- or twenty-year struggle to determine whether the world economy will be a unipolar U.S.-centered dollarized economy, or a multipolar, multi-currency world centered on the Eurasian heartland with mixed public/private economies.

President Biden has characterized this split as being between democracies and autocracies. The terminology is typical Orwellian double-speak. By “democracies” he means the U.S. and allied Western financial oligarchies. Their aim is to shift economic planning out of the hands of elected governments to Wall Street and other financial centers under U.S. control. U.S. diplomats use the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to demand privatization of the world’s infrastructure and dependency on U.S. technology, oil and food exports.

By “autocracy,” Biden means countries resisting this financialization and privatization takeover. In practice, U.S. rhettoric means promoting its own economic growth and living standards, keeping finance and banking as public utilities. What basically is at issue is whether economies will be planned by banking centers to create financial wealth – by privatizing basic infrastructure, public utilities and social services such as health care into monopolies – or by raising living standards and prosperity by keeping banking and money creation, public health, education, transportation and communications in public hands.

The country suffering the most “collateral damage” in this global fracture is Germany. As Europe’s most advanced industrial economy, German steel, chemicals, machinery, automotives and other consumer goods are the most highly dependent on imports of Russian gas, oil and metals from aluminum to titanium and palladium. Yet despite two Nord Stream pipelines built to provide Germany with low-priced energy, Germany has been told to cut itself off from Russian gas and de-industrialize. This means the end of its economic preeminence. The key to GDP growth in Germany, as in other countries, is energy consumption per worker.

These anti-Russian sanctions make today’s New Cold War inherently anti-German. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has said that Germany should replace low-priced Russian pipeline gas with high-priced U.S. LNG gas. To import this gas, Germany will have to spend over $5 billion quickly to build port capacity to handle LNG tankers. The effect will be to make German industry uncompetitive. Bankruptcies will spread, employment will decline, and Germany’s pro-NATO leaders will impose a chronic depression and falling living standards.

Most political theory assumes that nations will act in their own self-interest. Otherwise they are satellite countries, not in control of their own fate. Germany is subordinating its industry and living standards to the dictates of U.S. diplomacy and the self-interest of America’s oil and gas sector. It is doing this voluntarily – not because of military force but out of an ideological belief that the world economy should be run by U.S. Cold War planners.

Sometimes it is easier to understand today’s dynamics by stepping away from one’s own immediate situation to look at historical examples of the kind of political diplomacy that one sees splitting today’s world. The closest parallel that I can find is medieval Europe’s fight by the Roman papacy against German kings – the Holy Roman Emperors – in the 13th century. That conflict split Europe along lines much like those of today. A series of popes excommunicated Frederick II and other German kings and mobilized allies to fight against Germany and its control of southern Italy and Sicily.

Western antagonism against the East was incited by the Crusades (1095-1291), just as today’s Cold War is a crusade against economies threatening U.S. dominance of the world. The medieval war against Germany was over who should control Christian Europe: the papacy, with the popes becoming worldly emperors, or secular rulers of individual kingdoms by claiming the power to morally legitimize and accept them.

Medieval Europe’s analogue to America’s New Cold War against China and Russia was the Great Schism in 1054. Demanding unipolar control over Christendom, Leo IX excommunicated the Orthodox Church centered in Constantinople and the entire Christian population that belonged to it. A single bishopric, Rome, cut itself off from the entire Christian world of the time, including the ancient Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem.

This break-away created a political problem for Roman diplomacy: How to hold all the Western European kingdoms under its control and claim the right for financial subsidy from them. That aim required subordinating secular kings to papal religious authority. In 1074, Gregory VII, Hildebrand, announced 27 Papal Dictates outlining the administrative strategy for Rome to lock in its power over Europe.

These papal demands are strikingly parallel to today’s U.S. diplomacy. In both cases military and worldly interests require a sublimation in the form of an ideological crusading spirit to cement the sense of solidarity that any system of imperial domination requires. The logic is timeless and universal.

The Papal Dictates were radical in two major ways. First of all, they elevated the bishop of Rome above all other bishoprics, creating the modern papacy. Clause 3 ruled that the pope alone had the power of investiture to appoint bishops or to depose or reinstate them. Reinforcing this, Clause 25 gave the right of appointing (or deposing) bishops to the pope, not to local rulers. And Clause 12 gave the pope the right to depose emperors, following Clause 9, obliging “all princes to kiss the feet of the Pope alone” in order to be deemed legitimate rulers.

Likewise today, U.S. diplomats claim the right to name who should be recognized as a nation’s head of state. In 1953 they overthrew Iran’s elected leader and replaced him with the Shah’s military dictatorship. That principle gives U.S. diplomats the right to sponsor “color revolutions” for regime-change, such as their sponsorship of Latin American military dictatorships creating client oligarchies to serve U.S. corporate and financial interests. The 2014 coup in Ukraine is just the latest exercise of this U.S. right to appoint and depose leaders.

More recently, U.S. diplomats have appointed Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s head of state instead of its elected president, and turned over that country’s gold reserves to him. President Biden has insisted that Russia must remove Putin and put a more pro-U.S. leader in his place. This “right” to select heads of state has been a constant in U.S. policy spanning its long history of political meddling in European political affairs since World War II.

The second radical feature of the Papal Dictates was their exclusion of all ideology and policy that diverged from papal authority. Clause 2 stated that only the Pope could be called “Universal.” Any disagreement was, by definition, heretical. Clause 17 stated that no chapter or book could be considered canonical without papal authority.

A similar demand as is being made by today’s U.S.-sponsored ideology of financialized and privatized “free markets,” meaning deregulation of government power to shape economies in interests other than those of U.S.-centered financial and corporate elites.

The demand for universality in today’s New Cold War is cloaked in the language of “democracy.” But the definition of democracy in today’s New Cold War is simply “pro-U.S.,” and specifically neoliberal privatization as the U.S.-sponsored new economic religion. This ethic is deemed to be “science,” as in the quasi-Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences. That is the modern euphemism for neoliberal Chicago-School junk economics, IMF austerity programs and tax favoritism for the wealthy.

The Papal Dictates spelt out a strategy for locking in unipolar control over secular realms. They asserted papal precedence over worldly kings, above all over Germany’s Holy Roman Emperors. Clause 26 gave popes authority to excommunicate whomever was “not at peace with the Roman Church.” That principle implied the concluding Claus 27, enabling the pope to “absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men.” This encouraged the medieval version of “color revolutions” to bring about regime change.

What united countries in this solidarity was an antagonism to societies not subject to centralized papal control – the Moslem Infidels who held Jerusalem, and also the French Cathars and anyone else deemed to be a heretic. Above all there was hostility toward regions strong enough to resist papal demands for financial tribute.

Today’s counterpart to such ideological power to excommunicate heretics resisting demands for obedience and tribute would be the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF dictating economic practices and setting “conditionalities” for all member governments to follow, on pain of U.S. sanctions – the modern version of excommunication of countries not accepting U.S. suzerainty. Clause 19 of the Dictates ruled that the pope could be judged by no one – just as today, the United States refuses to subject its actions to rulings by the World Court. Likewise today, U.S. dictates via NATO and other arms (such as the IMF and World Bank) are expected to be followed by U.S. satellites without question. As Margaret Thatcher said of her neoliberal privatization that destroyed Britain’s public sector, There Is No Alternative (TINA).

My point is to emphasize the analogy with today’s U.S. sanctions against all countries not following its own diplomatic demands. Trade sanctions are a form of excommunication. They reverse the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia’s principle that made each country and its rulers independent from foreign meddling. President Biden characterizes U.S. interference as ensuring his new antithesis between “democracy” and “autocracy.” By democracy he means a client oligarchy under U.S. control, creating financial wealth by reducing living standards for labor, as opposed to mixed public/private economies aiming at promoting living standards and social solidarity.

As I have mentioned, by excommunicating the Orthodox Church centered in Constantinople and its Christian population, the Great Schism created the fateful religious dividing line that has split “the West” from the East for the past millennium. That split was so important that Vladimir Putin cited it as part of his September 30, 2022 speech describing today’s break away from the U.S. and NATO centered Western economies.

The 12th and 13th centuries saw Norman conquerors of England, France and other countries, along with German kings, protest repeatedly, be excommunicated repeatedly, yet ultimately succumb to papal demands. It took until the 16th century for Martin Luther, Zwingli and Henry VIII finally to create a Protestant alternative to Rome, making Western Christianity multi-polar.

The demand for universality in today’s New Cold War is cloaked in the language of “democracy.” But the definition of democracy in today’s New Cold War is simply “pro-U.S.,” and specifically neoliberal privatization as the U.S.-sponsored new economic religion. This ethic is deemed to be “science,” as in the quasi-Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences. That is the modern euphemism for neoliberal Chicago-School junk economics, IMF austerity programs and tax favoritism for the wealthy.

Why did it take so long? The answer is that the Crusades provided an organizing ideological gravity. That was the medieval analogy to today’s New Cold War between East and West. The Crusades created a spiritual focus of “moral reform” by mobilizing hatred against “the other” – the Moslem East, and increasingly Jews and European Christian dissenters from Roman control. That was the medieval analogy to today’s neoliberal “free market” doctrines of America’s financial oligarchy and its hostility to China, Russia and other nations not following that ideology. In today’s New Cold War, the West’s neoliberal ideology is mobilizing fear and hatred of “the other,” demonizing nations that follow an independent path as “autocratic regimes.” Outright racism is fostered toward entire peoples, as evident in the Russophobia and Cancel Culture currently sweeping the West.

Just as Western Christianity’s multi-polar transition required the 16th century’s Protestant alternative, the Eurasian heartland’s break from the bank-centered NATO West must be consolidated by an alternative ideology regarding how to organize mixed public/private economies and their financial infrastructure.

Medieval churches in the West were drained of their alms and endowments to contribute Peter’s Pence and other subsidy to the papacy for the wars it was fighting against rulers who resisted papal demands. England played the role of major victim that Germany plays today. Enormous English taxes levied ostensibly to finance the Crusades were diverted to fight Frederick II, Conrad and Manfred in Sicily. That diversion was financed by papal bankers from northern Italy (Lombards and Cahorsins), and became royal debts passed down throughout the economy. England’s barons waged a civil war against Henry II in the 1260s, ending his complicity in sacrificing the economy to papal demands.

What ended the papacy’s power over other countries was the ending of its war against the East. When the Crusaders lost Acre, the capital of Jerusalem in 1291, the papacy lost its control over Christendom. There was no more “evil” to fight, and the “good” had lost its center of gravity and coherence. In 1307, France’s Philip IV (“the Fair”) seized the Church’s great military banking order’s wealth, that of the Templars in the Paris Temple. Other rulers also nationalized the Templars, and monetary systems were taken out of the hands of the Church. Without a common enemy defined and mobilized by Rome, the papacy lost its unipolar ideological power over Western Europe.

The modern equivalent to the rejection of the Templars and papal finance would be for countries to withdraw from America’s New Cold War. They would reject the dollar standard and the U.S. banking and financial system. that is happening as more and more countries see Russia and China not as adversaries but as presenting great opportunities for mutual economic advantage.

The broken promise of mutual gain between Germany and Russia

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 promised an end to the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was disbanded, Germany was reunified, and American diplomats promised an end to NATO, because a Soviet military threat no longer existed. Russian leaders indulged in the hope that, as President Putin expressed it, a new pan-European economy would be created from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Germany in particular was expected to take the lead in investing in Russia and restructuring its industry along more efficient lines. Russia would pay for this technology transfer by supplying gas and oil, along with nickel, aluminum, titanium and palladium.

There was no anticipation that NATO would be expanded to threaten a New Cold War, much less that it would back Ukraine, recognized as the most corrupt kleptocracy in Europe, into being led by extremist parties identifying themselves by German Nazi insignia.

How do we explain why the seemingly logical potential of mutual gain between Western Europe and the former Soviet economies turned into a sponsorship of oligarchic kleptocracies? The Nord Stream pipeline’s destruction capsulizes the dynamics in a nutshell. For almost a decade a constant U.S. demand has been for Germany to reject its reliance on Russian energy. These demands were opposed by Gerhardt Schroeder, Angela Merkel and German business leaders. They pointed to the obvious economic logic of mutual trade of German manufactures for Russian raw materials.

The U.S. problem was how to stop Germany from approving the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Victoria Nuland, President Biden and other U.S. diplomats demonstrated that the way to do that was to incite a hatred of Russia. The New Cold War was framed as a new Crusade. That was how George W. Bush had described America’s attack on Iraq to seize its oil wells. The U.S.-sponsored 2014 coup created a puppet Ukrainian regime that has spent eight years bombing the Russian-speaking Eastern provinces. NATO thus incited a Russian military response. The incitement was successful, and the desired Russian response was duly labeled an unprovoked (sic) atrocity. Its protection of civilians was depicted in the NATO-sponsored media as being so offensive as to deserve the trade and investment sanctions that have been imposed since February. That is what a Crusade means.

The result is that the world is splitting in two camps: the U.S.-centered NATO, and the emerging Eurasian coalition. One byproduct of this dynamic has been to leave Germany unable to pursue the economic policy of mutually advantageous trade and investment relations with Russia (and perhaps also China). German Chancellor Olaf Sholz is going to China this week to demand that it dismantle its public sector and stop subsidizing its economy, or else Germany and Europe will impose sanctions on trade with China. There is no way that China could meet this ridiculous demand, any more than the United States or any other industrial economy would stop subsidizing their own computer-chip and other key sectors.[1] The German Council on Foreign Relations is a neoliberal “libertarian” arm of NATO demanding German de-industrialization and dependency on the United States for its trade, excluding China, Russia and their allies. This promises to be the final nail in Germany’s economic coffin.

Another byproduct of America’s New Cold War has been to end any international plan to stem global warming. A keystone of U.S. economic diplomacy is for its oil companies and those of its NATO allies to control the world’s oil and gas supply – that is, to reduce dependence on carbon-based fuels. That is what the NATO war in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine was about. It is not as abstract as “Democracies vs. Autocracies.” It is about the U.S. ability to harm other countries by disrupting their access to energy and other basic needs.

Without the New Cold War’s “good vs. evil” narrative, U.S. sanctions will lose their raison d’etre in this U.S. attack on environmental protection, and on mutual trade between Western Europe and Russia and China. That is the context for today’s fight in Ukraine, which is to be merely the first step in the anticipated 20 year fight by the US to prevent the world from becoming multipolar. This process, will lock Germany and Europe into dependence on the U.S. supplies of LNG.

The trick is to try and convince Germany that it is dependent on the United States for its military security. What Germany really needs protection from is the U.S. war against China and Russia that is marginalizing and “Ukrainianizing” Europe.

There have been no calls by Western governments for a negotiated end to this war, because no war has been declared in Ukraine. The United States does not declare war anywhere, because that would require a Congressional declaration under the U.S. Constitution. So U.S. and NATO armies bomb, organize color revolutions, meddle in domestic politics (rendering the 1648 Westphalia agreements obsolete), and impose the sanctions that are tearing Germany and its European neighbors apart—[without official acknowledgement of such acts].

How can negotiations “end” a war that either has no declaration of war, or is a long-term strategy of total unipolar world domination?

The answer is that no ending can come until an alternative to the present U.S.-centered set of international institutions is replaced. That requires the creation of new institutions reflecting an alternative to the neoliberal bank-centered view that economies should be privatized with central planning by financial centers. Rosa Luxemburg characterized the choice as being between socialism and barbarism. I have sketched out the political dynamics of an alternative in my recent book, The Destiny of Civilization.

Marlin Brando on the boat…

interesting retro pictures 78
interesting retro pictures 78

President Xi Jinping Meets with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz

From HERE

On the morning of 4 November, President Xi Jinping met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on his official visit to China at the Great Hall of the People.

President Xi noted that Chancellor Scholz is the first European leader to visit China after the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and that it is also his first visit to China as the Federal Chancellor. The visit will further enhance the mutual understanding and trust between the two sides and deepen practical cooperation in various fields. It gives the two sides an opportunity to plan for the growth of bilateral ties going forward.

President Xi stressed that China-Germany relations could not have reached today’s level without the extraordinary vision and political courage of generations of Chinese and German leaders. This year marks the 50th anniversary of China-Germany diplomatic relations. The five-decade journey shows that as long as the two sides follow the principles of respecting each other, seeking common ground while reserving differences, maintaining exchanges and mutual learning, and pursuing mutually beneficial cooperation, bilateral ties will keep going in the right direction on the whole and making steady progress. Noting the complex and fluid international landscape, President Xi underscored the need for China and Germany, two major countries with great influence, to work together in times of change and instability and contribute more to world peace and development. China will work with Germany for a future-oriented all-round strategic partnership and for new progress in China-Germany and China-Europe relations.

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W020221104662956083502

President Xi briefed Chancellor Scholz on the 20th CPC National Congress, with a particular focus on the essence of Chinese modernization. President Xi pointed out that modernization is an aspiration and goal shared by people in all countries. That said, countries should choose their paths to modernization in light of their own national realities. Chinese modernization has elements that are common to the modernization processes of all countries, but it is more characterized by features unique to the Chinese context. This is so because of China’s unique national conditions, because of China’s social system and governance philosophy, and because of understanding gained through decades of endeavors toward modernization. China has been upholding and promoting world peace through its own development. In this process, the development of China and that of other countries have become more interconnected and mutually reinforcing. China will stay committed to advancing high-standard opening up, keep to the right direction in economic globalization, promote an open world economy, and expand converging interests with other countries.

President Xi stressed that political trust is easy to destroy but difficult to rebuild and that it should be nurtured and protected by both sides. He cited a quote which former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt used and which he also appreciated, that political leaders should have the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can change, and the wisdom to distinguish between the two.

It is important that China and Germany respect each other, accommodate each other’s core interests, adhere to dialogue and consultation, and jointly resist disturbance from bloc confrontation and attempts to see everything through the prism of ideology.

Both sides should keep to the overall direction of bilateral ties from a strategic height, pursue the biggest common ground in a constructive manner, and advance practical cooperation with an open mind to create conditions for long-term and steady growth of bilateral ties.

There should be no self-imposed restrictions or unrealistic expectations. Noting the high degree of stability and consistency in China’s policy toward Germany, he called on Germany to follow a positive China policy for the mutual benefit of both countries.

President Xi pointed out that over the past five decades, bilateral practical cooperation has kept deepening, with two-way trade growing by almost 1,000 times, serving economic and social development in both countries. The two sides should make the pie of common interests still bigger. While exploring more cooperation potential in traditional areas, efforts should be made to energize cooperation in emerging fields such as new energy, artificial intelligence and digitalization.

China will work with Germany and Europe to further deepen aviation cooperation, conduct exchanges and cooperation on COVID-19, increase interactions and mutual learning on green development and ecological conservation, and encourage more people-to-people exchanges.

He called on Germany to join China in resisting protectionism so that the fruitful bilateral cooperation can deliver more benefits to the two peoples. [Another reference to the USA. -MM]

 

President Xi pointed out that China-Europe relations bear on global stability and prosperity in Eurasia and should be maintained and developed with efforts from both sides. China always regards Europe as a comprehensive strategic partner. It supports the strategic autonomy of the European Union and wishes Europe stability and prosperity.

China maintains that its relations with Europe are not targeted at, dependent on, or subjected to a third party. [USA, don’t you know. -MM]

The more complex and difficult the situation becomes, the more important it is for China and Europe to uphold mutual respect, mutual benefit, dialogue and cooperation.

China will work with Germany and with Europe to step up coordination and cooperation in international affairs and jointly look for solutions for such global issues as climate change, biodiversity and food security.

Chancellor Scholz expressed his pleasure to visit China in a year that marks the 50th anniversary of Germany-China diplomatic relations and have an in-depth discussion with President Xi on Germany-China relations and on important issues of mutual interest. He thanked President Xi for the update on China’s development outlook. He observed that in a complex and grave international landscape, Europe also faces unprecedented challenges. China is playing an important role on many global issues like climate change, biodiversity, COVID response and food crisis. Germany wants to maintain communication and coordination with China to better safeguard regional and global peace and security.

China is an important trading partner for Germany and for Europe as a whole. Germany firmly supports trade liberalization, supports economic globalization, and opposes decoupling. Germany stands ready for closer trade and economic cooperation with China, and supports more mutual investment between Chinese and German businesses.

On issues where the two countries’ positions diverge, Germany is willing to exchange views with China to increase mutual understanding and trust, and stabilize, cement and grow bilateral ties.

A multi-polar world is needed in which the role and influence of emerging countries can be taken seriously. Germany opposes bloc confrontation for which politicians should be held responsible. Germany will play its role in furthering Europe-China relations.

The two leaders also exchanged views on the Ukraine crisis. President Xi reaffirmed China’s support for Germany and Europe to play an important role in facilitating peace talks and to build a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture in Europe. Under the current circumstances, the international community should: support all efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis and call on relevant parties to remain rational and exercise restraint, start direct engagement as quickly as possible, and create conditions for the resumption of talks; oppose the threat or use of nuclear weapons, advocate that nuclear weapons cannot be used and that nuclear wars must not be fought, and prevent a nuclear crisis in Eurasia; work together to keep global industrial and supply chains stable and forestall disruption to international cooperation in energy, food, finance and other areas and consequent damage to global economic recovery, especially the economic and fiscal stability of developing countries; and make joint efforts to tide civilians in areas affected by the crisis through the winter, and improve the humanitarian situation to avoid a humanitarian crisis on a bigger scale.

After the meeting, President Xi held a banquet for Chancellor Scholz at the Golden Hall of the Great Hall of the People.

Wang Yi and He Lifeng were present at the events.

Ready for a tumble

interesting retro pictures 89
interesting retro pictures 89

Biden tells rally ‘we’re going to free Iran’

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President Joe Biden was "expressing solidarity" with protesters when he said at a campaign event late Thursday that "we're going to free Iran," a White House spokesman clarified on Friday.

The comment sparked an indignant response from the government in Tehran and went beyond the president's previous statements, which had been carefully worded so as not to suggest direct US involvement in the protest movement.

Biden told the California crowd: "Don't worry, we're going to free Iran, they're going to free themselves pretty soon".

Mickey’s surprise

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247086424 232203335489142 6135939571314395626 n 63570af2c756b 880

Unreported events in Ukraine, master craziness in the West, us locals trying to deal, and some great food

Ugh. The Biden administration, totally peopled with totalitarian dictators wanna-be neocons is on a Hell-bent mission to destroy the world. And fuck, man, we are all trapped on this fucking crazed roller-coaster from Hell.

The good news is that the Domain Commander confirms that it’s still small – to – medium “bads”. And that things are under control. Personally, I just cannot fathom how it is so optimistic. Sheech!

I WILL query the Domain Commander for some details. And I WILL post the results on my Patreon website. Please be patient. OK?

“L ≠k”

When my younger daughter was born, I missed a week of school. I gave my AP Chemistry students a PowerPoint every day with a practice problem. Students had to turn in their work to the sub.

One of the questions had to do with rate equations, and rate equations have a constant that is expressed using a lower case italicized ‘k’. When I returned to school, I noticed that every single paper had this equation solved for “L”.

At first I thought I must have accidentally typed “L” instead of “k”. They are right next to each other on the keyboard after all. But I looked, and the PowerPoint said “k”.

I was puzzled.

So I looked at the work of each student. They were all precisely the same, including this phantom “L”.

All except for one student – the best student in the class. She had written “k” … in cursive:

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but her pen had died in the smaller loop, making something that looked a fair bit like an L.

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All of the cheaters had followed suit.

The next day in class, I asked them how they had solved for “L”. Students gave me glowing answers of how they had worked together so hard and found “L” through considerable effort.

I played along.

I praised their dedication. I extolled the virtues of their morality in making sure they each did their own work. They were practically patting themselves on the back.

Then I put the PowerPoint back up.

I said “Hmmm, that’s odd…I wonder how you all got L instead of k.” Then I showed them the “bad pen” answer (I had taken a picture and added it to the PowerPoint).

The room got very quiet. I tried to talk to them. I tried to extol the virtues of honesty and integrity. I tried to tell them they were only cheating themselves.

But I just couldn’t say anything.

That class was never the same again. I was never the same again.

After that I stopped assigning homework altogether. I tried various other strategies – oral defense, all classwork, participation stamping. You name it. But kids always seemed to find ways to cheat, and always seemed to do so with impunity. When I finally found a way to essentially prevent cheating (a combination of oral defense and random call-back / question selection), students just stopped doing homework altogether. Their grades plummeted, and I got in trouble for failing too many students.

Sigh.

So now I occasionally assign homework. I collect it and grade it if it’s done or not. But it isn’t worth much, and it rarely determines a student’s grade. I write Python programs that create unique versions of tests for each student so that they cannot cheat. I’m working on that for homework, too, but it’s a lot of work.

I’m sad just thinking back on this incident – it was the day my innocence as a teacher died. I knew kids cheated before this, but until this day I had never watched a whole classroom lie right to my face like that. Losing homework as a tool weakened me as a teacher, and weakened our school as a place of learning. Most other teachers in my building have since come to the same conclusion, or else they just don’t care to look that closely.

Today, 10 years after this event, my students are chronically tardy and absent, often refuse to do even the most trivial work, and experience a diluted and simplified version of what I once taught. If I write something on the board, when I turn around a dozen phones have materialized and are actively being typed on. When I try to do fun things like labs and projects, the students complain and mope as if I was walking them to prison. They lament (out loud) how awful it is that they just can’t look up the answers like all the other classes. Mr. C. actually makes us do things, they say.

It makes me wonder how many diamonds in the rough I’ve missed. It makes me wonder how many students I’ve cheated by not having the heart (or the ability) to continue on as I did, pushing them all hard to find the few who are truly masterful. It makes me wonder what it’s like teaching in other schools where maybe things aren’t so bad.

It makes me wonder why I still teach.

The greatest threats to democracy are:

  1. Capitalism. The corruption and usurpation of the political process by the wealthy elite.
  2. Failure to deliver the goods to the people. Things like prosperity, equality, safety, and stability.
  3. The discovery of a better system that serves the people. In other words, a better alternative.

USA is the poster child for capitalist corruption.

USA is the prime example of failure to serve the people.

China’s system clearly demonstrates that there is a better way.

Those are two questions, and they are not even about the same thing.

An example for highest quality Chinese products

It is not true that Chinese products are always low quality. I am a knives collector. And especially when it comes to knives, Chinese ones have a bad reputation, to say the least.

I thought the same. I was literally of the opinion that Chinese knives not only by and large, but as a whole sucked. Boy, was I wrong. I was totally and absolutely wrong. Which I noticed when I had the pleasure of handling a WeKnife 905a “Scamp”:

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This knife is undoubtedly one of the best knives I ever had the opportunity and pleasure to put my hands on. The fit and finish is flawless, the design of the blade is brilliant, the steel is a “super”-steel (S35VN) and all other parts are made of titanium (except for the backspacer made of stainless steel, which makes absolutely sense in a slip joint) and personally I love the style.

You do not like it?

Well, they have several dozens of different models.

So, what do we have?

A knife made of the finest materials used in the industry, perfect execution in both art and craft, that must be exceedingly expensive, right? You will not be surprised to hear it is not. Do not get me wrong: it is not a cheap knife, by any means, coming in at around $180. For comparison: this is about the same as one of the better Thiers made Laguiole knives. But quality wise, we are talking almost of orders of magnitude in difference.

A more fair comparison would be with a Chris Reeve Knives “Impinda”: Same steel, same materials, both flawlessly executed. Seriously, if you would offer to gift me one of those two, I would have a hard time to decide which one to take. If I had to pay for them myself, the decision would be much easier: The Impinda has a street price more than double than that of the “Scamp”: around $450.

So is it just propaganda from the West that Chinese products have low quality?

No. Because a lot of Chinese products are built with a throw-away mentality in mind.

And now we ask ourselves who is to blame for that? As per the principles of capitalism, the market will just satisfy the demand of the customers. So imho, it is the demand for cheap products that causes low quality. If nobody would buy low quality products, they would not be produced.

Citizens of all walks of life are eligible to join the Party, regardless of their socio-economic status, ethnic background, or gender.

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Liu Xiuxiang with his mother (photo on the left) ; Liu Xiuxiang speaks during an interview at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing as a delegate to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (photo on the right)

Liu Xiuxiang made headlines in 2008 after he took his mother, who has a mental illness, from Guizhou to his college in Shandong province to look after her.

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Liu’s father died young, and his mother suffered mentally from the immense sorrow of losing her husband. After his sister and brother left home to work, Liu had to shoulder all the burdens of the family on his own.

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However, despite all the difficulties, he never gave up studying. While taking care of his mother, he completed his studies from primary school all the way to university.

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After graduating from college in 2012, Liu declined job offers from several companies and became a history teacher in his hometown Wangmo.

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However, he found that many students did not know why they needed to study and what education brought them. Many began working or got married after graduating middle school, he said.

Then Liu started a campaign to motivate and help rural students. He has spent lot of his spare time traveling to the homes of dropouts, persuading them to return to school.

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In the past 10 years, his campaign has helped more than 1,800 dropouts to return to school and got financial aid to more than 4,200 students.

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In 2012, only 70 students in the county were enrolled in college, but this year, that number soared to 1,300, with each village having at least one college student.

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Now he is a delegate to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and vice-principal of Wangmo Experimental High School.

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Speaks during an interview as a delegate to the 20th CPC National Congress, he said: “education has completely cut off the generational inheritance of poverty and enabled students in mountainous regions to enjoy more opportunities and better choices.”

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Silicon Valley and Chinese companies have fundamentally different approaches to solving problems.

The traditional Silicon Valley and American approach is that people are unpredictable, and are your highest costs, so in designing systems, they try to automate everything as much as possible, especially in replacing some of the boring and redundant jobs. This is why companies like YouTube, Facebook and Quora use algorithms to perform work which is usually done by human editors in publishing and in journalism.

In Facebook’s case, they are learning that editors and journalists cannot be entirely replaced, and in many instances, you must have them.

All of the leading Chinese media companies (Sina, Sohu, Netease, Tencent, Sina Weibo) rely very heavily on human editors and journalists to maintain high-quality content and prevent the spread of false rumors which can cause social unrest. In fact, these companies are now the largest employers of editors and journalists, surpassing the traditional media in China.

In China, labor is always very cheap, not in terms of monetary costs, but because it is always easy to find a smart person/s who can solve a problem, and then finding thousands, even millions, of laborers to build it. When Chinese have a challenge whether it is large or small, their first instinct is to throw a lot of people at the problem until they have a solution. People are used not only to solve low-cost, low-skill challenges, but high-cost, high-challenge issues.

I learned this lesson when I was involved in setting up an Internet company in China, and the local official asked me following my presentation: “How many thousand people do you need?”

No one in Silicon Valley has ever asked me a question like that, ever.

What does this mean? That means when you are in China, you are dealing with a whole different approach to scale which is completely different from the American approach. In simple terms, China is much BIGGER than anything the US has to offer.

It also means that when talking about “automation”, the Chinese and the Americans are talking about two completely different things: the Americans are talking about cutting out labor costs and employing fewer people, and the Chinese are talking about making the velocity of business transactions faster and more efficient. Automation in the US is about cutting supply-side costs, and automation in China is about stimulating demand-side purchases.

This partially explains why China has been so successful at transitioning to a cashless society ahead of the United States, using Alipay and WeChat Pay, and largely replacing debit and credit cards in the process.

My problem with the US Silicon Valley approach is that eventually the US will only have a very small and shrinking pool of consumers, which is exactly what is happening now. The rich get richer, and everyone else is poor and votes for extremist political candidates.

I taught for a while in one of Britain’s top private schools, so I feel I’m qualified to offer a definitive answer:

Tweed.

Seriously, ten years as a teacher and I never saw so much as a tweed dishcloth, but when I started working in private education suddenly the bloody stuff was everywhere. The teachers wore tweed (and the teachers were near-universally ‘old boys’ or ‘old girls’ whose parents could comfortably afford twice what most people earn in a year to get shut of their kids for most of it), the staff wore tweed, and the parents were dressed in tweed on a semi-permanent basis. I swear some of them slept in tweed pyjamas.

When they weren’t wearing tweed, they were cosplaying farmers, for some reason. This was irrespective of whether they lived somewhere in the cotswolds or the middle of London. Their farmer outfits were sometimes a bit worn, but always unnaturally clean.

So if I’m in the middle of the city and see someone wearing tweed or farming gear that’s never been within half a mile of a cow, that’s when know I’m dealing with the fourteenth Lord Bonkingly-Spinkle or some such.

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China is already the world’s largest market for Photonic Integrated Circuits, PICs, or photonic chips. Sales have grown from $800 million in 2017 to $2 billion today. Next year, they will explode.

As electricity displaces internal combustion in cars, photonic chips are displacing electronic chips in circuits. The switchover will accelerate when Sintone, a Beijing startup, opens. the world’s first photonic chip foundry next year, filling the high end gap created by US embargoes.

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Technological implications

In an electronic integrated circuit, electron flux passes through electrical components like resistors, inductors, transistors, and capacitors. In a photonic integrated circuit, PIC, photons of light pass through optical components like waveguides, lasers, polarizers, and phase shifters.

PICs are far superior to electronic chips, EICs, in speed, integration, heat generation, miniaturization, compatibility with existing mass manufacturing processes and cost, being produced entirely with Chinese equipment and IP. PICs increase bandwidth and data transfer speeds and reduce energy consumption in data centers, cutting cooling costs.

PICs make lab-on-a-chip (LOC) practicable, putting laboratories into doctors’ hands. Amazec Photonics  markets a sensor with photonic chips which enables high-resolution temperature sensing, so doctors can measure cardiac output and circulating blood volume from outside the body. EFI’s ‘OptiGrip’

offers greater control over tissue feeling for minimal invasive surgery.

PICs facilitate communication between vehicles and urban infrastructure to improve driver safety, and can detect quantities of pressure, temperature, vibration, acceleration, and mechanical strain. PhotonFirst uses PICs to measure shape changes in airplanes, EV battery temperature, and infrastructure strain.

PICs can measure variables beyond the range of our senses, detecting disease, ripeness and nutrients in fruit and helping farmers determine soil quality, plant growth, and CO2. MantiSpectra ’s infrared sensor fits into a smartphone and analyzes chemical compounds in plastics.

Financial implications

While US hawks insist the collateral damage is worth bearing, the sweeping expansion of US export restrictions, intended to isolate China, risks decimating US firms.

Nvidia, unable to sell its advanced AI chips to China, saw its market capitalization fall by $38 billion. AMD’s fell $16.5 billion. The combined market value of Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA Corp, US makers of electronic semiconductor equipment – has fallen $25 billion since the bans were announced. Synopsys and Cadence, US designers of electronic design automation software, are now worth $9 billion less.

Geopolitical implications

After President Xi’s 2015 warning about dependence on foreign technology, Beijing invested billions to leapfrog existing IP, including overcoming PIC manufacturing challenges. If the new fab opens on time and the chips perform as expected, it will further reduce the value of American IP (and the geopolitical value of TSMC) and turn the embargoes into a trillion-dollar catastrophe, like Ukraine.

The specific condition for US success is that the target of export controls must have a sufficiently weak political will to abandon its intention to develop the industry in question immediately … However, China has both the will and an unmatched capacity for industrial policymaking to drive and guide the development of its own alternative technologies. Chinese companies and industries have long since begun the production of related products but are currently in the uncomfortable position of being constrained by the superior and more mature products of US companies. The subtlety of US bans is that it is the US government, rather than the Chinese government, that has helped these companies to achieve the effective exclusion of their competitors from the Chinese market which will, allow Chinese companies, in the medium-to-long term, to grow even faster and invest even more in R&D. Shen Yi (沈逸) and Mo Fei

(莫非), Fudan University.

Future Implications

With PIC manufacturing commercialized, China has put up $10 billion to commercialize quantum computing – the last mile in a 100-year race. There are Nobel Prizes to be won, and post-docs from around the world are flocking to Chinese labs to join the fun.

Shenzhen International Quantum Academy has set up an Integrated Circuits and Electronics Centre, with advances in key components a top priority. Its team of cross-disciplinary researchers are focusing on IC design, radio frequency and microwave device development and issues crucial to the commercialization of quantum computing technologies, and planning to move into their new lab dedicated to quantum IC design and quantum cryoelectronics. SCMP

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Peperonata

“Peperonata is mostly viewed as a simple but flavorful accent dish frequently served alongside hardy meats and poultry. It is far more versatile, used as a topping for bruschetta, flatbread, crostini, as a pasta sauce, added to an antipasto platter, as a condiment, even a topping for eggs. My favorite is grilling it with fontina or asiago cheeses between slices of artisan bread with melted cheese oozing out. As the name implies, its dominant ingredient is sweet and colorful bell peppers. Flavors become wonderfully complex after simmering with onions, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, herbs, seasoning, and a hint of heat from a pinch of red pepper flakes. It’s finished either with red wine, northern Italy, or wine vinegar in the south. In addition to peppers, I also grill onions, use “fire roasted” tomatoes and “Pete’s Garlic Oil” (pan roasted garlic and flavor infused olive oil). Can be made well ahead and refrigerated and reheated to desired temperature. ”

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Ingredients

Directions

  • Peter’s Garlic Oil, add olive oil to a butter melting pot. Remove rough end of garlic cloves and slice each in half lengthwise.  Do not remove skin.  Place them in the pot with oil. Add Tuscany seasoning and red pepper flakes.
  • Place on medium heat until the olive oil begins to lightly sizzle.  Reduce heat, maintaining a low simmer.  It will take several hours before garlic richly tans and becomes soft and sweet.  You can hasten the process with slightly higher heat but be careful not to burn the garlic. Remove garlic skins when released.
  • Fully char peppers on all sides.  Start by placing peppers on grill grate top side down followed by bottoms then grill sides.  Be careful not to pierce peppers so all of their wonderful juices are retained.  Place in a tray with sides for additional protection while cooling.
  • Peel and cut onion in ¼ inch slices. Brush with garlic oil and char both sides on the grill.
  • When peppers have cooled, remove charred skin over a large bowl to capture juices released. Break peppers in half by hand.  Remove core and seeds.  Don’t be concerned when some fall into the liquid.  Cut peppers in ½ inch strips lengthwise.
  • Over medium heat with the oil from Pete’s garlic oil, finishing cooking onions by sauteing them in a large pot until translucent.  Add tomatoes, a few grinds of black pepper, the remaining pinch of red pepper flakes, vinegar, basil and juices from the pepper.  When mixture begins to boil, lower heat and cover, maintaining a simmer.  In about 15 minutes remove cover and stir in peppers and the pot roasted garlic cloves.  Stir occasionally until much of the liquid is condensed.  Salt to taste.  Cool to room temperature.  You can refrigerate, even overnight until ready to eat.  Serve at room temperature, warm or hot.

USA has a very, very serious problem here…

China’s hypersonic missiles as a strategic nuclear weapon are NOT the main problem for USA because nobody wants to fight a nuclear war.

China’s hypersonic missiles as an anti-ship weapon are the REAL problem for USA because it means that USA’s supercarrier strike groups dare not venture too closely to China in time of (conventional) war, say, over the Taiwan issue. USA will not risk losing several multi-billion dollar supercarriers to China’s hypersonic missiles.

Whatever missile defence system USA has (or will have) against hypersonic missiles cannot be 100% effective. In fact, nowhere close to 100%. And that’s a really, really BIG PROBLEM.

China can lob half a dozen DF-17s at the USS Gerald R. Ford and one of them will almost certainly hit its mark. You have my permission to crap in your pants.

Someone who can commit to a cat for 20 years. Regardless to whether the cat is easy to hold on to. You need to understand that if you need to move, the cat needs to move too. If you have less money to spend, the money that’s left needs to be split with the cat to get food, cat litter and go to the vet. When you are very busy you still need to play with your cat. When your cat starts to pee or scratches your furniture, you can’t just get rid of them.

Cats are living creatures, you can’t just throw them if there’s something you don’t like.

And next to all of this, make sure you know that you are not allergic before you get it. Cats get very hurt by replacing them (multiple times).

So most importantly, think twice!

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Chicken Agrodolce (an Italian Sweet and Sour Chicken)

“This is such a unique Italian chicken dish. Chicken breasts are briefly sauteed, then simmered in a sauce of honey, balsamic vinegar, wine, orange and lemon juice. Toss in a few toasted pignoli, and you’ve got a quick and delicious dinner with risotto or cappellini.”

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Ingredients

Directions

  • In a large plastic bag, combine flour and chicken breasts, toss to coat.
  • In a large skillet, saute floured chicken breasts in olive oil with the whole garlic, bay leaves and allspice berries until chicken is browned.
  • Remove chicken to a plate.
  • To the skillet, add honey, vinegar and wine; cook to reduce slightly, about 10 minutes on medium-high heat.
  • Return chicken to skillet, add orange and lemon juices, salt and pepper, and cook about another 20 minutes or until chicken is done and sauce is reduced slightly.
  • Remove garlic, bay leaves and allspice berries from sauce.
  • Add pignoli and heat through, another 5 minutes or so.
  • Delicious with angel hair pasta or a nice risotto.

Thanks for A2A

Living in North America people are bombarded daily by messages and images of the rest of the world. Accuracy of those images is slanted in large part because they originate in the news media.

We know news media focuses on bad news because it feeds the North American bias for negativity and generates more audience attention. Therefore negative type stories take priority in reporting or neutral stories can be spun to feed the bias.

In my many travels to other countries, I found the image North Americans are presented about many places to be exaggerations of negative social elements or outdated events.

Therefore before I arrived in China for the first time I had largely discounted parts of the western media’s image of China as typical bullshit.

What I was not prepared for:

  • Huge modern cities on par with North America,
  • The level of openness of the Chinese to accept foreigners on a one-on-one basis ……. provided you make an effort to engage with locals.
  • The spontaneity of the people.
  • The general lack of restraints placed on the people.
  • The lack of violence and anger in Chinese society.

After living in China an adjustment in perceptions will happen.

  • Culturally China is a Shame Society like Japan, Korea etc. It functions well as a way to control society without the need for state sanctioned violence.
    • There is a very low crime rate in China, and what there is either commercial crime or dumb crime like petty theft, pick-pockets and break-ins.
    • The regular police do not carry guns or high sticks. Maybe ⅓rd are women. Police are generally respected.
    • This a huge contrast to North America, where the judicial system tries to control society through punishment. Leading to crazy incarceration rates with no societal benefits in the end.
      • “Beatings will continue until attitude improves” is rarely a formula for success.
  • Individualism is contrary to social unity and stability
    • Chinese society is family centric and serves as the road map for how society functions from a governmental aspect (benevolent father) to the daily interactions between friends, family and co-workers.
      • You refer to good friends and co-workers as one’s brothers and sisters.
    • Social networks are very important in China for many reasons and it creates solid social foundation which counter-balances life’s challenges.
    • Guangxi is largely misunderstood by the West but is part of the social structure of building wide ranging relationships.
  • China provides a greater opportunity for upward mobility them some democracies.
    • China as no class structure ……… Unlike India with a regimented caste system or the US which has a permanent underclass and an elite class.
      • 99% of Chinese regardless of their current position are within 2 generation removed from being farmers.
      • There is no old money and old family dynasties in China.
  • Small C capitalism is alive and thriving in China
    • China has a business culture and people are opening up businesses every day, including many as a 2nd job. Anyone can open a business, with very exceptions.
    • Business operates 7 days a week from morning to night.
    • e-Commerce is miles ahead of the West.
  • Not everything is perfect in China. There are issues but it is a mixed bag.
    • There is still some poverty in the country, but it is no worse from that which I have seen in North America
    • There is voting in China but the system is very different, It is not direct representative like North America, but an indirect representative system
    • The people are happy, have a positive outlook and support the central government.
    • Chinese migrating to the West are doing so for economical reasons not political ones.
    • The educational system is tough and largely looked upon as inferior by the West, yet those students are the ones filling places in top western universities in STEM fields, if they cannot make the grade for acceptance in top Chinese universities.

There are many things have surprised me in the time I have been here, but only a few I would consider negative about China.

On the other hand ……. there is an old quote that goes like this …….” You can see your country a lot clearer from afar”.

In this context I have also altered some thinking about North America as well.

Since the surrender of Japan,after the end of World War ll, a large number of foreign troops have occupied Japan, giving many Japanese women a lifelong nightmare. A large number of rape cases suddenly broke out all over Japan. Many Japanese women were raped by Allied officers and soldiers. The number of rape cases once reached an average of more than 3,000 cases per day. Especially in Okinawa, more than 10,000 local women were rapes by the US military.

In order to cope with this situation, the Japanese authorities once set up a number of goverment run-brothels in various places to provide sexual services for Allied officers and soldiers. However in Okinawa,Misawa,Yokota and other bases of U.S. troops stationed in Japan, cases of rape of local women by US troops still occur frequently, especially in Okinawa which has the most stationed troops.

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Of course, wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. The Japanese are not so honest. In 1945, World War ll had come to an end, and Japan’s surrender had entered the countdown. Okinawians were afraid to death into thinking of what will happen to them when the Americans come.

In June 1945, the US military occupied Okinawa. When they entered the local village to conduct a search, they found out that almost all the young and middle-aged men in Okinawa had been mobilized into the army. So the US military began to rape Okinawan women recklessly.

Many US soldiers treated Japanese women with utter cruelty as tools of lust. A member of the US Marine Corps once recorded a scene they encountered on the road in Okinawa: they passed a village, and found a dozen American soldiers in a circle on the roadside. They went to check up and found out that these dozen American soldiers were gang-raping the local area.

The US military demanded anything from the locals, and the Okinawians have been silently enduring it.

The three African American soldiers story

There is a village of Katsuyama in Okinawa. Like other places they also ravaged this small village. The difference is that there are three black soldiers belonging to the US Marince Corps. They seem to have tagged the sweetness after messing around in this village, so every weekend, three black soldiers come to this village. Since they came to the village with weapons every time, the villagers didn’t dare to stop them and allowed them to wander around the village. After arbitrarily arresting a few local women, they took them to the mountains and ravaged them. Although the locals had no choice, they naturally hated these Black American soldiers in their hearts.

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After the battle of Okinawa, although the Japanese army was defeated, it did not die. Some scattered Japanese soldiers hid in the mountains, and from time to time they went to nearby villages to find food and other supplies. There were also two Japanese soldiers on the hills of Katsuyama, who were caught by the locals when they were looking for food in the village. Of course, the locals didn’t want to report the two deserters, they hope they would help get the three American soldiers who plagued the village every week.

The two Japanese soldiers also carried weapons. They hated the US military to the core, so they agreed to the request of villagers.

And so, another weekend came, and the three black men rushed to the village of Katsuyama, ready to enjoy their weekly joyous moment. At this time, the ambush locals and the two Japanese soldiers appeared in front of them. After a few shots, three Americans were killed.

The villagers hid their bodies in caves and called the caves “kuronbogama” which means “the caves of the black men”, after the local US military lost three soldiers, they included them to list of deserters since they couldn’t find them.

End result

The villagers kept this a secret for years until one guilty local reported the situation but nevertheless the US military and the Japanese Goverment didn’t charge the villagers for the crime since it happened long time ago.

Today as we know that the Okinawans are still suffering from these crimes every year, new reports of rape cases keep rising up and the military has always been a trouble to the Okinawans.

British Naval Intelligence HQ Destroyed by Russian Missile, Many Deaths (Deeply Censored)

From HERE

Illegally located in Ochakiv, Ukraine, British war planners and ‘operators’ die horrifically for their role in a censored false flag nuclear attack on Russia

Britain detonated a .5 kiloton nuclear weapon on a modified torpedo converted to ride in a Ukrainian naval drone.

The British naval intelligence center set up to manage operations against Crimea was destroyed in an attack by Russian drones. While planning of the operation was organized on Ukrainian soil by NATO operatives, another “redline” for Russia, the drones themselves were piloted by Americans operators at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

Russia responded to Ukraine’s attack on Saturday by ships of the Black Sea Fleet by hitting a training center for special operations forces of the Ukrainian Navy in Ochakiv with precision-guided weapons . According to the Ministry of Defense, the center has been destroyed.

and the capture of Makeevka. Summary 10/30/2022

The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported that strikes were carried out on the base of the Ukrainian Navy in Ochakovo. Earlier it was reported about the arrival of "Geranei" there. pic.twitter.com/VdoFgHwP3M

— Милош Павловић (@JSO_Kula) October 30, 2022

According to available information, the Russian Armed Forces carried out an attack on the Naval Forces of Ukraine base in Ochakovo, where the Training Center for the MTR of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is located, it is reported that the communications center and other facilities on the base were destroyed. Previously, Geran-2 kamikaze drones worked out at the Center. Earlier it was reported that Russian “Geran” went in the direction of Ochakov and Odessa, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine traditionally reported on their destruction, but apparently not all of them were destroyed.

According to the military department, it was at the MTR Training Center of the Armed Forces of Ukraine that British instructors trained Ukrainian servicemen to control naval drones, which were used to attack Sevastopol. By the way, the drones were also delivered by Britain. In general, the center in Ochakovo was built by the Americans and the British precisely for conducting special operations against the Black Sea Fleet, the presence of Ukrainian Navy units there was only a cover.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense reported that they had lifted from the bottom of the wreckage of naval drones used to attack ships on Saturday morning. According to the study of the remnants of drones, it was possible to establish that they were taken out along the “green corridor” for a grain deal, after which they changed the route towards Crimea. It is assumed that they were taken out on one of the civilian ships “chartered by Kyiv or its Western patrons for the export of agricultural products.”

From HERE

China is fully capable of encircling Taiwan and then banning all resources from entering Taiwan. Taiwan’s electricity resources, water resources and food are not self-sufficient, and it needs to rely on the input from the sea to maintain the basic needs of survival. But,China won’t do that! Because China is not as cruel as you think. The lives of 20 million Taiwanese people are very important to China.

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If China wants to cut off all Taiwan’s ports, airports, etc. in the way you said, Taiwan’s resources will be exhausted in just one week, and the people will be in a situation of no food, electricity, and extreme water shortage.

In my opinion, there are two main reasons why China has not cut off Taiwan’s survival path even though it is fully equipped to unify Taiwan in such a coercive way:

First, the way of starving the people of Taiwan is inhumane and will be condemned by the whole world.

As we all know, China has always been a peaceful and not warlike image on the world stage, and it has been affirmed by people all over the world. If China unifies Taiwan in such an inhuman way, the United States will definitely use this to hype China’s cruelty. At this time, China will stand in a vulnerable position of humanitarianism, which will be condemned by the people of the world.

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Moreover, in this case, the United States can completely use human rights reasons to conduct military confrontation with China. At this time, Japan, South Korea, India, the European Union and other countries will help the United States to fight against China, and China will definitely call on Russia to help itself, so that basically all the major powers in the world will participate in the war, which can easily cause WW3.China certainly does not want to be the provocateur of a world war, so China does not want to take back Taiwan through inhumane means.

Second, Taiwan is a part of China, and China is reluctant to let the people of Taiwan go hungry.In fact, there are not many Taiwanese who do not want to return to China. The reason why Taiwan’s international position is uncertain is mainly caused by a few politicians who resisted China. Most of the people in Taiwan strongly support the country’s early return to China. Therefore, cutting off resources indiscriminately implicates innocent people who want to return to China. China is very aware of their innocence, so it is unwilling to use inhumane methods to let Taiwan return.

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Third,China is fully capable of using the capabilities of a world power to attract Taiwan to return on its own. China’s current international status cannot be ignored. China’s infrastructure and manufacturing are world-renowned. Taiwan is also very aware of China’s weapon strength, and has recognized the weakness of being an island country. Therefore, Taiwan will one day because of China’s strong initiative to return to China. Just like this military exercise, China has easily surrounded Taiwan.

China is waiting for the day that Taiwan will come back. I am sorry to disappoint you that China will never recover Taiwan in this way.

This is…

YOUR life. Listen closely.

So Biden is going to sanction China into the dark Ages, eh? Don’t be so sure

Not a lot of people outside China took notice that the US Congress banned CNSA (China’s National Space Agency) to cooperate in the International Space Station program around 10 years or so ago.

The reason cited was fear that China will copy blablabla etc (the same old tired nonsense). Fast forward to 2022, China is about to complete all the modules of its very own space station Tiangong.

The only other one beside the ISS (which is fast approaching its retirement).

Basically China managed to build and launch a fully functioning space station from scratch without any help from other countries in a mere 10 years. Plus, it’s a more advanced, spacious and convenient space station than the ISS.

Same thing with its nuclear weapon program.

Same thing with high speed rail network. Back in 2007 China had none but now it has more than the rest of the world combined.

Same thing with its giant tunnel boring machines. China had to buy them from European countries but it now builds better versions of them domestically and dominates the export market that used to belong to those European countries.

Same thing with ship building. China just took the top spot from South Korea last year.

Same thing with 5G. In 4G era Chinese companies caught up quickly with their western competitors but now 1 Chinese company Huawei owns the majority of patents for 5G technology.

The list goes on and on. But you get the idea.

Betting on China not being able to manufacture anything is a losing bet. The US playing its little game with chips is delaying the inevitable and will only end up in US, Taiwanese and South Korean companies losing the Chinese market share forever to SMIC.

Newspaper: Pelosi’s Husband is Gay Alcoholic; Was “Assault” at Pelosi Home Gay Sex Gone Wrong

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Reporter Stan Greene, a Staff Writer for the Santa Monica Observer, reports that the recent assault of Nancy Pelosi’s Husband, at their San Francisco home, was likely an argument between Mr. Pelosi and a Gay Prostitute.

In his story,

“The Awful Truth: Paul Pelosi Was Drunk Again, And In a Dispute With a Male Prostitute Early Friday Morning.”

Greene writes:

As SF's gay bars closed at 2 am, two gay men met in a bar and went home together. Happens every night in the City by the Bay. Except one of these two men, was married to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

I might disappear for telling you the truth. If I do, you'll all know why. But here's what really happened early Friday morning in San Francisco. IMHO

According to SFPD "RP [Reporting Person] stated that there’s a male in the home and that he’s going to wait for his wife. RP stated that he doesn’t know who the male is but he advised that his name is David, and that he is a friend,” the dispatch official said. “RP sounded somewhat confused.”

It's been a rumor for years in SF that Paul Pelosi is gay. David Depape the alleged assailant, is said to be a Castro (neighborhood in SF) Nudist. "The lunatic who allegedly assaulted Paul Pelosi is a Berkeley resident and a 'Former Castro Nudist Protester' and hemp 'jewelry maker' ...sounds totally MAGA Republican to me. 🤣🤣" this from Twitter.

Ok, so here's the theory, as related to me by a source: "Castro Nudists are a group of really radical gay male prostitutes that parade around naked with c--k rings. 

First of all, the Police did not come in response to an alarm. They come in response to a "wellness check". So someone called them to check on Pelosi."

"When he didn't answer the phone, the cops broke the sliding glass door to get in. Pelosi was struggling with the suspect, who was in his underwear.

Pelosi owned the hammer. Not Depape. Or, the male prostitute was doing something Pelosi didn't like."

The web site seems to be experiencing trouble right now. I wonder why?

Greene goes on to write:

"And then there was the press conference when they didn't know the mic was on. During that, a reporter confirmed that the suspect was a gay Castro Nudist, but (authorities) told him he couldn't use it."

"Now tell me something. These people are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Nancy is third in line to the Presidency. You don't think they have the most amazing security? And by the way, when Pelosi was in that drunk driving accident, he had a young man with him, and that too was covered up by the police and the press."

"How would (suspect Depape) have been able to break a window that without triggering an alarm? He didn't. The police broke the window to gain entry. There was only one hammer, and it belonged to Pelosi. And only ONE cop quoted the perpetrator saying, "Where's Nancy?" None of the other sources said that happened.

Greene then points out:

"And one of them could easily have broken that window. Remember, there was no alarm triggered. How would (suspect Depape) have gotten into that house without doing that? The cops smashed the glass to gain entry."

Who called 911 to initiate a wellness check? Either Nancy or her staff, who hadn't hear from Paul all evening and suddenly it's 2 am. Or a neighbor, hearing a fight at the Pelosi residence.

Admittedly, David Depape is a known nutcase. He's an election denier, says mainstream media, who has posted conspiracy theories online. That may be true, but he also lives in Berkeley, where he is a 42 year old career student.

Greene wraps-up his story with this little gem:

"My law firm served a lawsuit against Paul Pelosi one time in SF after attempting to serve at other residences-Napa, Georgetown. They weren't home, but staff were, and multiple law enforcement officers were on the perimeter. Break-in is odd given this level of security." said Harmeet Dillon, Republican National Committee Chairman"

The more the US tries to restrict Сhina, the more stronger, resilient and self-sufficient Сhina is becoming. And we know that because that’s actually exactly what has happened every time the US has imposed a ban on Сhina to use a certain technology.

Here are a few quick examples: After such restrictions/bans went into effect, Сhina has build the first reactor to ever use the third-generation nuclear power technology, became the world leader in photovoltaic, drone, fintech and EV sectors, came at the forefront of quantum computing, created their BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, developed its homemade Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer chips, build the Tiangong Space Station, sent a rover on the dark side of the Moon and on Mars etc. etc. etc.

Have in mind that most of the examples above have occurred precisely after a U$ ban on Сhina to use certain technology.

And Сhina has not only caught up, but more often than not it actually got ahead of the US.

As they say, what doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger.

Learning from the modus operandi of the US, it will therefore continue to step over the Taiwan's red line. 

We may not read about it in the news, but they're stepping on and over the red line without remit on a daily basis. 

No bullets have been fired yet, but this is war nonetheless. 

It has been going on for over a decade at least, and it will not let up just because a new president is elected or the president says we want peace with China. 

Lies and damned lies. 

Believe habitual liars' endless lies at your own risk. 

The test for Germany is when China is forced to take action vis-a-vis Taiwan. 

If China does not have the right strategy and the means to reunify Taiwan without bloodshed and within twenty-four hours, watch how fast Germany has to act like a US puppy again. 

For those who are not familiar with how a war can be waged without firing a blunderbuss, which is what the US is doing, I refer to the Chinese historical example of the war between Wu and Yue during the period of Spring and Autumn of Eastern Zhou. 

Yue state's chief administrator and strategist Wenzhong devised seven stratagems to destroy its overlord of Wu state. 

Only three were needed to eliminate Wu from the face of the earth. 

One of the stratagems involved supplying the most beautiful woman Xishi to the Wu overlord to cloud his judgment, the other involved surreptitiously damaging Wu's food supply, and the third helped Wu destroy its own economy by encouraging profligate spending. 

The hubris of Wu state's overlord did the rest. Not a single arrow was fired in anger. 

Every Chinese child who was taught Chinese history knows this story. 

Now we know why Chinese people think differently. 

PM

Deng’s model was never intended to be permanent. It was simply the first stage in modern China’s evolution.

Today, China has successfully completed this first stage. It’s time to move to the next stage which Xi will pilot.

China is strong enough, economically, technologically and militarily, to take her place front and centre on the world stage. China has a grand view for herself and the world which Xi will execute.

If you want to know the details, just read the official documents from the 20th National Congress.

One morning a husband returns to the cabin after several hours of fishing and decides to take a nap.

Although not familiar with the lake, the wife decides to take the boat out, since it is such a beautiful day. She motors out a short distance, anchors, and reads her book.

Along comes a Game Warden in his boat. He pulls up alongside the woman and says,” Good morning, Ma’am, what are you doing”?

“Reading a book,” she replies, (thinking, “Isn’t that obvious”?)

“You’re in a Restricted Fishing Area,” he informs her.

“I’m sorry, officer, but I’m not fishing, I’m reading.”

“Yes, but you have all the equipment. I’ll have to write you up a ticket.”

“For reading a book”? she replies.

“You’re in a Restricted Fishing Area,” he informs her again.

“But officer, I’m not fishing, I’m reading.”

“Yes, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any moment. I’ll have to write you up a ticket and you’ll have to pay a fine.”

“If you do that, I’ll have to charge you with sexual assault,” says the woman.

“But I haven’t even touched you,” says the Game Warden.

“That’s true, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any moment.”

“Have a nice day ma’am,” and he immediately departed.

MORAL: Never argue with a woman who reads. It’s likely she can also think.

Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Pizza Margherita

“This is a great recipe for a simple, thin crust pizza. It’s from Jim Lahey (of no-knead bread fame) who now runs a popular NYC pizzeria called Co. The recipe was printed in New York Magazine (Jul 12, 2009). If you don’t have a pizza stone, this works well in a cast iron skillet. The recipe requires very little time and effort but the dough must be started the day before.”

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Ingredients

Directions

  • To make dough: In a large bowl, mix the flour, yeast, and salt. Add water and stir until blended (the dough will be very sticky). Cover with plastic wrap and let rest for 12 to 24 hours in a warm spot, about 70 degrees.
  • Place the dough on a lightly floured work surface and sprinkle the top with flour. Fold the dough over on itself once or twice, cover loosely with plastic wrap, and let rest for 15 minutes.
  • Shape the dough into 3 or 4 balls, depending on how thick you want the crust. Generously sprinkle a clean cotton towel with flour and cover the dough with it. Let the dough rise for 2 hours.
  • To make sauce: Blanch tomato for 5 seconds in boiling water and quickly remove. Allow to cool to the touch. Peel the skin with your hands and quarter the tomato. Remove the jelly and seeds, and reserve in a strainer or fine sieve. Strain the jelly to remove seeds, and combine resulting liquid in a bowl with the flesh of the tomatoes. Proceed to crush the tomatoes with your hands. Add salt and olive oil and stir.
  • To make pizza: Place pizza stone on the middle rack of the oven and preheat on high broil. Stretch or toss the dough into a disk approximately 10 inches in diameter. Pull rack out of oven and place the dough on top of the preheated pizza stone. Drizzle 5 generous tablespoons of sauce over the dough, and spread evenly. Try to keep the sauce about ½ inch away from the perimeter of the dough. Break apart or slice the buffalo mozzarella and arrange over the dough. Return rack and pizza stone to the middle of the oven and broil for approximately 6 minutes. Remove and top with basil, olive oil, and salt.

A Bit Nippy Here This morning . . .

As of 4:30 AM Sunday, it’s a bit nippy here in northeastern Pennsylvania; 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

I was so exhausted yesterday, I actually went to bed around 7:00 PM and slept right through to 4:30 this morning!

Emotional exhaustion from all the worry about what’s going on in the world, in the nation, etc.

Watching my country deliberately take steps that will result in a nuclear World War 3 with Russia, and/or China.

Watching our elected officials here in the USA openly steal the upcoming November elections . . .

For instance, here in Pennsylvania, they actually mailed out 255,000 election Ballots to “voters” whose registration information cannot be verified with the US Social Security Administration.

Clearly these are phony voters, and those 255,000 Ballots, can swing the elections statewide.  Again.   Just like happened in 2020.

It’s overt.  In our face.  And no one in the cops, or the Prosecutors Offices, does anything at all about it.

If we start getting the idea of taking the law into our own hands, and confronting these cheats, WE are the ones who end up getting arrested.

This all seems untenable.  It’s getting tiresome.

I can’t help but wonder if push is coming to shove?

A kitty story

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A friend asked me to take her to a local animal rescue place to drop off some supplies we had bought them.

She had been trying for ages to persuade me to get a cat for company.

She insisted we walk through the cages of cats waiting for adoption.

As we approached one particular cage a black and white cat started jumping up and down against the wire trying to attract attention.

The woman who ran the shelter said his name was Joe and he was only 9 months old, and that his twin sister Jenny was also in the cage, hiding in the sleeping area too scared to come out.

I talked to Joe for a minute then he walked back into the sleeping area and we could see him nudging Jenny, trying to get her to come out and meet us too.

Jenny eventually moved closer to the door of the sleeping area but wouldn’t come any further. She looked terrified and very unhappy.

My heart melted and so I welcomed Joe and Jenny into my life.

That was in 2008 and they are still with me and I love them both.

Putin is correct.

Russian Navy Ships Hit in Sevastopol Harbor – Ukraine Drone Attack

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Not just Saudi Arabia.

Argentina, Mexico, Turkey, And Iran are joining BRICS soon. It is a given that 3/4 of the world will join hands to stop the US financial and US Dollar hegemony and they WILL succeed. A new global order is here. Thanks to the Ukrainian war provoked and designed by the US and UK.

Think of the US dollar manipulation, the financial blockade of Russia, sanctions on Russia is the last throw of the dice by the US and the west. The demise of the US dollar use by 3/4 of the world will end the ability of the US to print money without recourse.

The BRICS will dwarf G7 by a big way! In population and in economic might. The US shot themselves in their feet the moment the west sanctions were declared. The world has lost all trust on the USD and the financial institutions. No rational and sane nation will ever allow itself to be contained and harm by the US and the West.

Not just in oil but in all trade, countries will do currency swap and use some BRICS denomination backed by real value minerals such as gold. Sure the 12 or so US vassal states, some former colonial powers, Anglo brothers and some tiny Eastern Europe nations will still trade in Dollar or Euro. So let them cheat and sanction each other!

Claim: Twitter Execs Fired FOR CAUSE — No “Golden Parachutes”

Twitter executives let go after Elon Musk took over the company, may not get their $20-$60 Million “Golden Parachute” payments because Musk allegedly fired them FOR CAUSE.

That means they were let go for a reason OTHER THAN Musk buying the company!

Being fired FOR CAUSE may negate the Golden Parachute payments!

When the Buyout Agreement between Twitter and Musk was negotiated, the top executives were assured they would get large payments if their leaving was simply a part of the takeover.

But apparently, Mr. Musk found out something the Executives may have done, or perhaps something they may have said/represented to him, which may not have been truthful, and Musk has now fired those executives FOR CAUSE.

Two sources familiar with the situation told the New York Times that would mean the Executives didn’t leave the company simply as part of Musk’s takeover, they were fired for justifiable reason.

While there will likely be heavy litigation over the matter, for the time being it looks as though none of those executives will get their multi-million dollar golden parachutes.

Young people 0yrs – 20yrs, all injected with the mRNA Vaxx are dying off. They are dying at an alarming rate. Zero flat lined up until March 2020. Then, boom, a steady increase.

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Check out the video before You-Tube takes it down.

Do you want to watch You-Tube videos about China?

More educational, on point and goes into great discussions. Then go HERE to the massive You-Tube video repository.

Drone Attack On Sevastopol

This morning at 4:20 local time the Russian fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol was attacked by nine unmanned aerial vehicles and seven autonomous maritime drones. Earlier a maritime drone that had run aground in Crimea and had been found and pictured.

 

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During today’s attack a large U.S. drone had flown circles south of Crimea. It likely relayed data from and to the drones.

The maritime drones are British and Russia alleges that British specialists had trained the Ukrainian navy in using them. It also says that British soldiers were involved in the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline.

The Ukrainians published two videos shot by the maritime drones while attacking. One of the video shows extensive gun fire impacts near the drone from a Russian helicopter that is attacking it.

The Russians say that all the aerial drones and 4 of 7 maritime drones were defeated before they could caused damage. They also say that one mine seeking ship was damaged in the harbor. It is possible that the damage is greater than Russia admits.

As a consequence of the attack Russia declared that the deal which allowed for grain exports from Odessa has been suspended. That deal had already been in danger as the ‘west’ had not fulfilled its part of the deal which would have allowed for the export for Russian fertilizer to third parties.

I find it likely that Russia will take additional measures to punish the Ukrainian navy for the brazen attack. Additional attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure is another possibility.

Meanwhile all recent attempts by the Ukrainian army to penetrate the Russian held lines have failed. It is notable that these are now much smaller in size with just a battalion or in some cases just two companies in the lead.

It is now definitely mud season in Ukraine during which it is impossible to cross most farmland even on feet. This will hinder the attacking forces on both sides until winter sets in.

Posted by b at 16:24 UTC | Comments (136)

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The American people are finally waking up to the fact that their government has not been taking care of them for many decades. For example,…

  • The top 10% of Americans own 70% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% own less than 2%.
  • Millions of Americans cannot afford health care.
  • There is a severe lack of affordable housing.
  • Over 500,000 Americans are homeless.
  • Over 1,000,000 Americans died from Covid.
  • Countless thousands of Americans die from random gun violence and mass shootings every year.
  • America practices mass incarceration — the highest number and the highest rate in the world.
  • America’s infrastructure is literally crumbling.
  • The minimum wage has barely risen since the 1960s. It is NOT a living wage.
  • The average real income of the bottom 50% of Americans has been steadily declining for decades.
  • Instead of helping Americans in dire need, the government is shipping billions upon billions of dollars to Ukraine.

No matter who they vote into office, nothing ever changes!

Julius Nyerere famously said, “The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

My Chicken Parmigiana

“This is a family favorite meal and one I make for special occasions, such as birthday dinners. The cooking method of this particular version is different from the conventional chicken parmigiana recipes I always used to make. Once I tried this much easier and moister version, I never went back to the “old” method. I often use homemade sauce in this, but a good-quality bottled sauce, such as Classico or Barilla, is perfectly acceptable as well. I serve this chicken atop mounds of freshly cooked pasta with some additional heated sauce. I have often chosen to replace the mozzarella with thin slices of Provolone cheese. NOTE: Edited to add that pounding the chicken is not necessary with this method. Part of what is unique about this recipe is that even the meatier pieces of chicken get so moist & tender as it braises in the sauce.”

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Ingredients

Directions

  • Beat egg and set into a rimmed plate.
  • Set bread crumbs in a second rimmed plate.
  • Dip chicken breasts into the egg, then into the crumbs,coating both sides and shaking off excess.
  • Melt butter or margarine over medium heat in a large, deep skillet. Add chicken breast halves to the pan and brown on both sides – just enough to brown the chicken, not to fully cook it yet.
  • Pour spaghetti sauce into the pan, immediately reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer until the chicken has cooked all the way through, about 15-20 minutes but the time will vary depending upon the thickness and size of your chicken breasts.
  • Sprinkle with parsley and cheeses, re-cover, and simmer just until cheese melts- about 5 minutes.
  • Serve with cooked spaghetti.

Here is the Thing

YES:-

China is the only Nation on Earth who can manufacture Photonic Chips Cost Effectively

No other Nation on Earth Can

US gave it up nearly 20 years ago

You simply cannot run a sustainable Profit

The Scale for which Profit is required is simply unsustainable

The Demand would need to be So Tremendous to justify a scale which would involve ENTIRE CITIES dedicated to manufacture Photonic Chips.

Its not the Technology. The Technology is available openly and readily.

LIke Hypersonic Missiles

The Technology was available in 2000 itself and was nothing new. The Theory was available. However manufacturing efficiently was not possible and US decided it was not worth it.

China and Russia later managed to use their Manufacturing Dominance (China) and Raw Material Haven (Russia) to ensure they could make efficienct Hypersonics and ensure that they now have or plan to have a cost effective Arsenal.

Likewise Photonic Chips Manufacture can be done by China at Effective Cost and on a Scale large enough to achieve sustainability for its own Internal Domestic Market.

That is the Good News!!!!


So All Good?

2023 is simply impossible

Developing the Basic Infrastructure for Indigenous Implementation of the Technology may take 5 Years and another 3 Years for achieving Commercial Dominance

Thats 8 Years or 2030

In the meanwhile China still has to keep targeting the 3nm or 5 nm Wafer Fabrications Indigenously and keep spending the massive Scale of Production

So you see the Problem

China could abandon the 3nm/5nm Manufacture Aim and move completely to Photonic Chips but that would mean a 8 Year Gap and after that – the Results could be screwed up or the Photonic Chips may not work as China expects to

That means a Waste of 8 Years

The Cost of which would be a Delay in Chinas AI plans, Robotics Plans, Upgrading Technology plans

China could stay with the 5 nm/3 nm Manufacture Aim and achieve Indigenous Manufacture by say 2025–2027 and dominate AI and Robotics and move to the next phase of Technology

That would be easier than developing and taking a risk on Photonic Chips

Its the same as Abandoning the Option of Manufacturing of J-20s to make it as good as a F-22 Raptor , and instead seeking to manufacture the Avengers version of Aircraft

Better to persevere and make aircraft like the F-22 in 4–5 years than totally abandon everything to hope to make Captain Americas Helicarriers

Can China do Both?

That would be the thing

However it would need a Huge Load of Investment


Huawei is in a perfect position to explore and work on Photonic Chips

Huawei has the Technological Edge and the Exponential Leap into cutting edge Research

SMIC

SMIC Meanwhile can continue to explore and keep targeting the Indigenous Supply Chain dominance of Chips within the Chinese Economy

Presently SMIC has achieved Commercial Production Capability of 14nm

And that was fast


So its a Lot of Hard Work and China shouldnt be like India

This “Ready to supply the World by 2023 and 1000 Times better”- this is Indian Language

Chinas language is always China Hopes to achieve indigenous control over its Chips and leave it there

Its Possible and if China can manage it – It would be incredible

Fingers Crossed!!!!

Canned Tomato Products Lover? Stock Up Now

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A Severe drought is crushing American California tomato crops and shortages are coming – fast.

Soup season is upon us, but one of the main ingredients for soups, chilis and stews may be in short supply: canned tomatoes.

We’ve been hearing for a few months now that a historic drought in California is impacting farmers’ tomato crop yields this year and unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the drought is going to end anytime soon.

The California League of Food Producers references a recent Reuters story that reports California’s current drought actually started in 2020.

Another news story published on today.com says that the drought is the worst the Golden State has seen in more than 1,200 years.

Just how bad is the drought in California? Drought.gov, a website managed by the National Integrated Drought Information System, reports that 99.8% of the entirety of California is suffering from moderate drought, while 91.8% of the state is in severe drought; 40.9% of the state is in extreme drought; and 16.6% of the state is in exceptional drought, hitting its agricultural belt hard.

In addition to the impact tomato crop shortages may have in fresh produce displays at grocery stores, the shortages will likely impact other household staples like canned tomatoes and tomato sauce.

“Ninety-five percent of the processed tomato products consumed in the United States comes right here from California’s Central Valley,” Mike Montna, president and CEO of the California Tomato Growers Association, told CNN.

“Mainly the tomatoes from the growers that I represent go to your ketchups, pizza sauces, your retail sauces that you see at the supermarket.”

Those of you who rely on canned tomato products,, whether it be whole, crushed, diced, Puree or Sauce, had best stock up now, while you can.

Kittencal’s Mini Meatball Minestrone Soup

“This is a delicious rich soup that will need a longer cooking time then most soups and tastes even better the next day it’s really a meal in itself, I serve it with garlic bread on the side — to save some time prepare the meatballs up to a day ahead, the meatball mixture may be doubled if desired, if you don’t use all the meatballs then freeze for another time and just drop them into the soup frozen — 1/4 to 1/3 cup dry red wine may be added to the soup :)”

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Ingredients

Directions

  • For the meatballs; in a bowl combine all ingredients until blended.
  • Shape into 3/4-inch balls; cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to add to the soup.
  • In a large pot heat olive oil over medium-high heat; add in garlic and saute for 2 minutes.
  • Add in onions, dried oregano and crushed chili flakes; saute for about 4 minutes, stirring.
  • Add in celery, carrots and tomato paste; saute stirring for 2-3 minutes stirring with a wooden spoon.
  • Add in chicken broth, tomato sauce, kidney beans, green beans, spinach leaves and zucchini; return to a boil.
  • Add in uncooked meatballs; bring to a simmer (do not stir for at least 20 minutes).
  • Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for about 1-1/2 to 2 hours (after about 30 minutes of cooking season with salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste).
  • Add in cooked pasta and 1/3 to 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese; stir to heat through (can add in more cheese if desired).
  • Ladle into bowls and sprinkle with more Parmesan cheese.

Russian Missiles Hit British Operations Center in Ukraine

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The Russian Army has struck the base of the Ukrainian Navy in Ochachiv, a city in the Nikolaev Region, with missiles.  This particular strike took out the Communications Center and Intelligence Department of the British Naval Operations Service.

We are told by sources in Ukraine that at least one Russian precision missile hit at the actual window sill of the Base Commander Office!

Said one knowledgeable source …

"Britain is responsible for the Kerch bridge attack, the NS1 and NS2 sabotage, sinking the cruiser Moskva and also for yesterdays attack on the Sevastopol Crimea naval base. If you are in UK, I would start thinking to move out. You not gonna like whats gonna happen next...."

Be the Rufus. Don’t look back.

 

Lifting the veil – watching what your are forbidden to observe

The United States government (and it’s proxy nations) are restricting all content, and information out of China. In it’s place they are placing propaganda, all designed as a prelude to war.

This post discusses one such event.

In October 2022, CGTN produced a video discussing the construction of a road system in South East Europe. This video is able to be viewed inside of China, but NO WHERE ELSE.

Even though they are using the American You-Tube platform. The video (even though in English) is ONLY viewable inside of China. Imagine that!

As shown by this screen shot…

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And even now, using a VPN I cannot access it.

I NEED to access it only from inside of China, as shown here…

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Well, MM recorded the video and put it up on the MM channel.

Please check it out and observe what you are forbidden to see and learn…

Watch it now before it is banned from my “channel”.

 

CPC 20th Congress aligns the world against the USA and the USA freaks out with a Chips ban

There’s a lot going on in the world right now. The seriously BIG news is not really being reported in the West.

This is the 20th CPC Congress.

And during it, the Chinese leadership has gathered the rest of the world (minus the USA and it’s toadies) together and are plowing forward aggressively, strongly resolute in a bight future.

This is freaking the USA out, as the November elections are to appear soon, and the messy USA political scene is about to go “crazy on steroids”.

Biden launched the Chip ban, and there’s a lot of bullshit “news” about it. But, don’t you all worry too much about that…

Biden has just about dealt a “death blow” to American electronics operations of all sizes and shapes. If you erase their customer base, the factories close shop and the workers go become baristas at Starbucks.

Fact. This.

Let’s go through the events during this period of time.

USA is a powerful, wealthy, developed, and great country. But this tells only HALF of the story…

Being a “great” country is not necessarily a positive thing. Great Britain was great because of the British Empire. France was great because of the French Empire. Spain was great because of the Spanish Empire. But these empires were built upon cruel colonialism, built on the backs of enormous human suffering.

And so it is with the American Empire. How much blood has been shed throughout its history?

There is a reason that most countries polled in December 2013 by Gallup called the United States the greatest threat to peace in the world, and why Pew found that viewpoint increased in 2017. But i…

But I want to be fair. All nations have checkered histories, especially if you look back far enough. Let’s focus on the recent past, say, the last 30–40 years, the period of time when we and our children are witnessing massive changes in the geopolitical landscape…the decline of the American Empire, the rise of modern China, and the recovery of Russia.

In the last several decades, we’ve seen USA fight dozens of wars, rack up a huge national debt, sanction dozens of countries, experience political chaos (e.g., the Capitol Hill riots), struggle with numerous social problems such as crumbling infrastructure, rampant gun violence, homelessness, opioid epidemic, mass incarceration, etc.

And let’s not forget 9/11, the longest war in US history (Afghanistan), and over a million dead Americans from COVID-19.

USA doesn’t sound so great anymore.

Contrast America with China…

  • China hasn’t fought a single war since 1979.
  • China rose from a totally impoverished nation into the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity.
  • China built the world’s most spectacular infrastructure of roads, bridges, high-speed rail, airports, etc.
  • China finally eradicated extreme poverty in 2020, elevating over 850 million people, according to the World Bank.
  • China is helping developing countries build their infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
  • China is forging positive alliances such as BRICS, RCEP and SCO.
  • China has the lowest Covid deaths among all the major economies (5,226).

So I leave everyone with one final question: What is great with USA today?

Isn’t it obvious???

The USA has bullied, destroyed and ruined countless nations who didn’t grovel and obey them.

China won’t grovel and obey that demon nation. She wants peace and is peaceful but with the USA’s evil and cowardly dishonest slander of China and the USA’s massive military presence all around China, then you really can’t blame China for defending itself.

You would be very stupid to criticise China in the shadow of the USA’s massive military spending. Especially as China has a much better health care system, infrastructure and society than the dying USA. The USA desperately needs to spend more on its population, but chooses to spend it on military instead. China has helped its population miraculously and is able to spend on self defence.

I see no argument against China here.

AOC HUMILIATED Over Funding Nuclear War

What’s Up with All the Blacks on Television?

This is what is going on in the USA today. The society is falling apart. America is in full collapse. A race war is raising it's nasty head.
America seems to be facing...
A race war, a pandemic, multiple nuclear wars with multiple nations, famine, and full collapse of the government. -MM

Yet despite the constant praise given to Blacks for their “achievements” and “culture” by a fawning media, they have produced nothing of real value in the world, at least in comparison to what Whites have produced over the centuries. Years ago, I discussed this very point with a Black gentleman who tried to persuade me of the great intelligence and ingenuity of Black people. He pointed to a host of modern skyscrapers and complex architectural designs found in some African countries. In his mind, this demonstrated the equality if not the superiority of Blacks over Whites. It didn’t seem to occur to him that all of it was the result of what Whites previously invented many years earlier and which they graciously shared with Blacks under their tutelage.

It’s important to remember that Africans in all their history never even invented a second story building let alone beautiful cathedrals and towering skyscrapers. The first Christian missionaries upon arrival on the Dark Continent were appalled at the ignorance, superstition and blood-thirsty nature of the Africans they encountered. Cannibalism was a common occurrence and was an integral part of African tribal existence. Moreover, Africans had not invented the wheel nor even a codified language. That came years later under the direction of White missionaries. Yet the sort of Wakanda mythology that prevails in America today has permeated the thinking of almost all Blacks and a sizable portion of the White population too. No fair-minded person wants to point out such uncomfortable truths about Blacks, but when complete lies and fabrications are spread about them, there is the need to set the record straight, especially because any shortcomings of Blacks are automatically attributed to White evil.

If one wants to get a perspective of just how ineffectual and backwards Blacks are in creating the kinds of societies that Whites take for granted, I’d recommend the documentary Empire of Dust (2011). It chronicles the frustrating and often futile efforts of Chinese workers to get Blacks in the town of Kolwezi (Congo) to mine the immensely valuable resources available to them. Lao Yang is repeatedly stunned at the level of incompetence, lack of organization and forethought of the Congolese Blacks to take steps in improving their country. The simplest tasks take weeks and even months to accomplish because of problems in the supply chain, mistakes that could have easily been avoided, unskilled laborers, language barriers, and constant bribery which grinds everything to a halt.

At one point, Yang complained to his Black translator and assistant, Eddy, as to why the Congolese people never improved conditions after French colonial rule. Yang tells him, “You went backwards, not forwards. You neglected the things others had left to you. What’s more, you completely destroyed them!” Eddy had no answers because he knew it was true.

What Yang finally realized after spending time with Blacks was the opposite of any Wakanda fairy tale. He discovered that Blacks accomplish very little in terms of productivity even when given the resources and direction they need. They tend to waste all that’s handed to them and, as Yang discovered, they destroy it too.

When apartheid ended in the early 1990s, for instance, the entire nation of South Africa that was previously ruled by Whites was handed over to South African Blacks. Yet it wasn’t long before they managed to turn it into a corrupt and criminal cesspool. Blacks don’t seem to understand the value of what is before them even when it’s shown to them. They are disorganized and embarrassingly incompetent. Is it any wonder why China has managed to mine the abundant natural resources of Africa rather than indigenous Africans themselves?

There is another documentary that likewise illustrates the rather primitive nature of Africans. It was released in 1966 by two Italian filmmakers and shot over a period of three years: Africa Addio (Farewell Africa). It’s a graphic portrayal of African Blacks and the chaos and bloodshed that ensued after colonial rule. The film illustrates the downfall that occurs when Blacks are left to their own devices. Their more primitive traits are unleashed with no restraint. This is not a movie for the fainthearted. Its value is found in showing how dependent Blacks are upon the White man if they want a civilized society with law and order – the very thing that Blacks historically have been unable to create on their own.

Thus, when America’s media and entertainment industry places Blacks on such exalted pedestals, it reveals how absurd things have become in this once-great nation. It exposes what complete fabrications we live under and which we as Whites are expected to believe without question.

What’s the purpose of so much overrepresentation of Blacks and racially mixed couples on television and in the movies? What is the end goal?

Corporate Profits

There is undoubtedly a financial motive involved. Manufacturers and corporations feel the need to keep up with the changing racial demographics of the U.S., and so they intentionally choose minorities to represent their products since it’s likely to have a broader public appeal. The bottom line for such corporations is understandably large profits. They want to reach as many consumers as possible in order to create great wealth for their shareholders. Thus, if there is a declining White population and a growing minority population, and since Whites don’t seem to mind being portrayed as relatively weak, unmasculine, and stupid, they will make whatever marketing shifts they need to in order to reach any new or increasing demographic. Since financial profits are the bottom line, any concerns over Whites being slowly erased from television sitcoms, commercials and movies plays no role in their marketing strategies.

Hollywood’s Promise to Rectify Past Wrongs

The increasing presence of Blacks and other minority groups is part of Hollywood’s promise to make television and movies less White. Their rational is that Black talent has been held back, that they have not been treated fairly throughout the movie industry’s history, so they are now trying to rectify past wrongs by giving Blacks a greater presence in all forms of entertainment. This is essentially how the motion picture industry frames it. I find it disingenuous at best.

Yet there are other reasons, ones that have a more sinister purpose behind them.

To Signal that a New People Have Arrived

The overrepresentation of Blacks and other minority groups on TV and commercials is intended to signal that a new people have arrived and that White America is history. No longer are Whites seen as the dominant and most important demographic in America. Blacks and an ever-increasing Hispanic demographic are the new Americans. This did not occur overnight. Instead, it played out over a period of about 60 years. It was the result of American corporations wanting cheap labor coupled with millions of apathetic Americans who chose to ignore what was occurring at their southern border. Both legal as well as illegal non-White immigration contributed to our current circumstances. All the while our elected representatives stood by and did nothing of any real significance to stop the flood of invading hoards. President Reagan, in fact, gave millions of them amnesty in 1986 which only exacerbated the problems we faced as a country.

In the past, when one conjured up the image of an American, they naturally thought of a Caucasian. One did not immediately think of a Black or a Mexican. This is no longer the case. We are taught that an ‘American’ is anyone who happens to land on U.S. soil regardless of whether he’s Hispanic, negro, Asian, Middle Eastern or whatever his racial ancestry might be. This, of course, stands in stark contrast to what our American founders would have thought about Blacks and Mexicans for in no way would they have viewed them as our equals or even as rightful citizens. Yet that matters little in today’s America where what our Founders envisioned for the country has been almost completely jettisoned.

To Demoralize Whites

The overrepresentation of so many Blacks on television is meant to demoralize Whites. Its purpose is to make us seem less and to even feel less than who we are. This explains why Blacks are always portrayed as cooler and smarter than Whites. Even our White women are portrayed as smarter than White males. None of it is accidental. All of it is meant to demean us racially, to make us feel inferior, and to condition the entire country to believe that White people are not needed. They are, at best, merely tolerated but even this won’t be for much longer if the anti-Whites have their way. This is why anti-White racism is so widely sanctioned in the U.S. No other racial group, other than Whites, is permitted such opprobrium and overt discrimination. It’s socially acceptable in the U.S. to denigrate White people. And the greater tragedy it is that Whites are more than happy to lead the charge! I can’t think of any other racial group — other than Whites — that works so hard to abolish themselves.

The degradation of Whites in all forms of entertainment becomes even more disturbing when one realizes that we are not being subdued or outclassed by a superior or more intelligent race of people, but essentially by sub-Saharan negroes and their descendants — a racial group that’s only slightly more intelligent than the lowest aboriginals! Talk about rubbing salt into the wound. The powers-that-be have made sure that not only are Whites gradually erased from the very nation their ancestors founded, but they are erased by a vastly inferior racial group — one that not only possesses on average significantly lower intelligence levels than Whites — but which has a long history of strong criminal proclivities and an inability to function in western civil society. It’s perhaps the ultimate insult. But this was its purpose all along.

To Promote and Normalize Miscegenation

The presence of so many racially mixed couples on television is meant to persuade us that marrying out of one’s own race is normal and a good thing. It’s intended to make us think it’s proper. Its ultimate purpose is to dilute our European bloodline. It’s intended to make us mutts, to have no real identity, no real culture, no deep-seated ancestral roots.

But mark this well: The push for racial miscegenation is only for White people. Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are permitted to retain their unique racial identities, including all that is distinctive of them as peoples. And they are encouraged to do so too. As Whites, we are encouraged to celebrate their racial identities and their cultural uniqueness but to loathe all that is unique to us as a people. That so many White people in America would subscribe to this way of thinking shows just how badly we have been propagandized for the past sixty years.

Who is Behind So Much of This?

The question naturally arises: Who’s behind all of this and why? There can be little doubt that a host of elite Jews and Jewish organizations stand as the central figures behind most of what’s occurring (along with plenty of White sycophants eager to please their Jewish masters) — especially plausible given the very prominent, even dominant role that Jews play in the media which of course is the main purveyor of these messages. This is not to say that every single Jew without exception has as his or her goal to deracinate White people and to make them minorities in their own countries. The average Jew, I suspect, has no such goals and may not even think in such terms, although most of them would likely support Third-World immigration into the West for perceived humanitarian reasons — the very thing they would not support if such immigration were occurring in Israel.

Yet there is a wealthy and powerful cabal of Jews throughout the West who have worked tirelessly to destroy all vestiges of White racial identity. It’s not so much “white supremacy” they fear (however defined) but organized White solidarity; the fear that Whites might unite on behalf of their own racial and cultural interests; and especially the fear that Whites might discover the culturally subversive ways of Jews and muster the courage to give them the final boot. It’s happened so many times in history that it’s naïve to imagine that perceptive Jews don’t think of it often. Their proclivities toward hysteria, overreach and a victimhood mentality help keep far too many of them in a constant state of paranoia over this very possibility.

There can be no reasonable denial that Jews largely run Hollywood, including the media and an array of social media platforms that guarantee the constant presence of Blacks on television and the movies. Countless names could be mentioned to confirm such an assertion, including Israeli-born billionaire and mega-producer, Arnon Milchan, Bob Iger (Chairman/CEO of Walt Disney Company), David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg (co-founders of Dreamworks SKG), Jason Blum (founder/CEO of Blumhouse Productions), Aaron Sorkin (prominent writer and producer), David Herzog (Viacom President), and the list goes on. Some Jews are quite proud of it, and they’re not afraid to admit it. Jay Michaelson is one such person. In an article he wrote titled, “The Oscars are Too White – and That’s a Jewish Problem” (The Jewish Daily Forward, February 1, 2016), he posits the following:

 “The Jews control Hollywood.” It’s one of those anti-Semitic tropes that, we all know, contains a certain grain of truth. “Control,” no — not with that ominous, conspiratorial connotation. But “helped create”? “Disproportionately populate?” Sure. From the founding of California’s motion picture industry (well documented in books like Neal Gabler’s “An Empire of Their Own: How Jews Created Hollywood”) to the present day, Jews have played an outsized role as its producers, agents, directors and writers.

It’s not just a myth. Which is why the at-least-equally disproportionate exclusion of people of color from the Academy Awards — the phenomenon hashtagged as #OscarsSoWhite — is a Jewish problem.

But it’s also a Jewish opportunity, because if Jewish leaders took the initiative to address the crisis proactively, the Jewish “elephant in the room” could instead be a powerful force for change . . . If the academy were an actual academy in the true sense of the word, it might recognize the present-day effects of historical injustices — part of what we call white privilege — and take affirmative actions to correct them. But the academy isn’t a real academy, it’s a club. Specifically, it’s like a 1950s private social club. Apart from Oscar winners, members must be referred in. Now, this situation is finally changing. The academy’s president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, is a woman of color. And, in response to the recent outrage, the governing board took some important steps: abolishing life membership, and doubling female and minority membership by 2020.

These steps are valuable, but the academy is a symptom of a larger, industrywide problem . . . Here’s where Jewish leadership could play a role. Suppose L.A.’s celebrity rabbis urged Jewish film makers to take the initiative in diversifying the industry as a whole, not just the academy specifically. Suppose those movers and shakers personally committed to more recruitment, more support and more training of women and people of color in the film industry at large. None of this would require government programs, quotas or race-based hiring. Rather, imagine if the Spielbergs and Geffens of L.A. endowed scholarships for minority students working in film, internship opportunities at their own shops, and proactive efforts to reach out to those from disadvantaged communities. And imagine if they did so as Jews — generally, in the case of Hollywood, non-practicing and non-religious Jews, but still members of what Justice Felix Frankfurter once called “the most persecuted minority in history.” If a public alliance of American Jewish filmmakers took personal initiative to fix this unjust, embarrassing and ugly situation, they could make a real difference. 

Michaelson not only concedes that Jews created and “disproportionately populate” the motion picture industry, but he publicly urges Hollywood moguls to recruit and hire even more minorities for leading roles. The result inevitably leads to the displacement of White actors in Hollywood — Whites, although underrepresented, are noticeably missing from Michaelson’s recommendations. Such blatant discrimination wouldn’t be tolerated in today’s racially correct climate if its subjects were Black or Hispanic, but no eyebrows are raised when the subjects are White.

The reasons behind Jewish cultural subversion remain the same whether it’s national immigration policy, the promotion of pornography, gay and LGBTQ+ rights, gay marriage, or the slow and steady erasing of Whites on television, commercials and the movies — namely, to make Whites a despised minority in the very country they’ve founded so that what occurred in Germany between the years 1933 to 1945 may never occur again. Jews may not at first agree with this point, but if you press them long enough, many of them will concede that White racial solidarity remains a constant fear of theirs.

Discerning Jews know they cannot rule when Whites are aware of their racial identity and are strongly connected to it. They oppose all forms of nationalism (other than their own) among Whites because it produces the very solidarity that threatens them and which they seek to destroy. Whites united and racially conscious of their heritage invariably creates the kind of society in which Jews remain as outsiders, and they know it all too well.

For Jews to be successful in our societies, they must sever our racial bonds and create division and strife among us. They use a divide-and-conquer playbook to dispossess our people. Yet panic erupts among them once we discover their playbook and make it known to others. That’s why even veiled public references about Jews are quickly denounced by Jewish activist groups such as the ADL (e.g., “rootless cosmopolitans,” “internationalists,” or even references to George Soros’s political activism). Consider as an example the recent overreaction by Jews over Kanye West’s statements in “naming the Jew” as responsible for originating cancel culture The general public, then, must at all costs be prohibited from learning anything negative about Jews lest they start to connect the dots and see for themselves.

Conclusion

For Whites in America, there is no easy way out of our problems. There is probably a multiplicity of paths that can be taken to help reverse current trends as opposed to one definitive plan. Yet I doubt any of it will prove effective so long as Whites remain divided and under the spell of so much propaganda and deception. Perhaps the greatest need now is for racially aware Whites to work on educating our people. Unless we work to awaken as many as we can about our racial and cultural concerns, little progress will result. Failure to get our people to think differently will only encourage them to side with our enemies.

Rory Gallagher – Shadow Play 1979 Live Video

MSNBC’s open race hate should worry you deeply

Yes it should.

This is the FOX network response to the last article. It’s all a sign of collapse.

What the hell is happening in Haiti??

The US is preparing a brutal, unjustified, unprovoked invasion of Haiti and virtually no one seems to be covering it.

Even in the “alternate media” circuit it’s just redacted with Clayton Morris who’s talking about it, not even Brian Berletic of new atlas, the Alex’s of the Duran, Gonzalo Lira, Scott Ritter seem to be aware.

Posted by: FieryButMostPeaceful | Oct 21 2022 16:02 utc | 2

Robin Trower – Extermination Blues – Seattle 1993

https://youtu.be/F_qEyzOfQ_8

Pork chop scene – Blood In Blood Out (1993)

Funny. We NEVER got porkchops at the ADC.

Energy problems solved

China announces deep water gas field discovery having “proven reserves exceeding 50 billion cubic meters.” China’s ability to develop ultra-deep- water platforms and associated expertise marks another area where it’s gained technological sovereignty.

Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 21 2022 16:37 utc | 9

OMG Mac ‘n Cheese!

“I took a recipe I found online and used it as the base for mine. This stuff is dynamite! This dish explodes with flavor…OMG Mac and Cheese has everything you want from mac and cheese: creamy, melty, stretchy cheese sauce with notes of cheddar, Colby Jack, and Monterey Jack. This makes a tender pasta/cheese with a topping of crunchy, toasted breadcrumbs. And OMG Mac ‘n Cheese is a dish where everyone will want your recipe! (bacon is optional) ”

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Ingredients

I like that there is a pound of bacon listed in the ingredients for no reason. I will get that pound of bacon, and I will eat that pound of bacon.

 Directions

  • Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
  • Grease a 9×13-inch casserole dish.
  • In a large pot of boiling, salted water, cook the pasta halfway through according to package directions.
  • Drain the pasta.
  • In a large skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of butter.
  • Add the breadcrumbs and sauté, stirring frequently, until toasty brown.
  • Pour the breadcrumbs into a bowl and set it aside.
  • In the same skillet, melt the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter.
  • Pour in the milk and cayenne.
  • Add the cheddar, Monterey Jack, and Colby Jack and melt until a smooth sauce forms.
  • Fold the pasta into the cheese sauce in the skillet.
  • Season the mixture with salt and pepper, but I like to let the person spice their serving with salt and pepper to their liking.
  • Pour the pasta and cheese mixture into the prepared casserole dish.
  • Top the mac and cheese with the panko breadcrumbs.
  • Cover and bake for 25 minutes, removing the lid for the last 5-10 minutes.
  • Let sit for 10 minutes before serving.

Staind – It’s Been Awhile (Official Video)

The real story on the US Chip ban

Serious Blowback for US Companies in Chip War is being reported by Global Times:

China is the world's largest market for chips, and it imported about $400 billion worth of semiconductors in 2021, accounting for nearly 60 percent of the global chip market. US high-tech companies are the biggest beneficiaries of the massive Chinese demand, which is their biggest source of profits. It is unthinkable for any chipmaker to lose such a large market. It would greatly affect their spending plans and in turn cause an indirect loss of sales for semiconductor equipment suppliers like Lam Research and Applied Materials.

With the global semiconductor sector facing a plunge in sales of personal computers and smartphones amid recession worries, Washington's latest chip ban has seriously destabilized the global industrial chain. The policy, which appears to completely ignore the impact on the wider chip industry, seems more like the Biden administration flexing its muscles and playing tough with China in the run-up to the US mid-term elections....

US restrictions will only accelerate the development of China's chip sector, because the Chinese market won't wait for the US to come to its senses. If the Chinese chip sector catches up quickly and no longer relies on imports, it will not be a $2.5 billion loss for a single US company, but hundreds of billions of dollars of loss for the chip industry.

Overall losses to western companies related to the New Cold War are already in the $billions, which also means loss of tax revenue and jobs/income for workers. It’s yet another way of deindustrialization. The D-Party’s Big Tech allies are going to hurt bigtime as the result will be the complete loss of the Chinese market which will be coupled with the shrinkage of domestic and European markets because of Biden’s policies. They’ll become the Bankers Dictatorship’s newest victims.

Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 21 2022 16:53 utc | 11

American Gangster: Diluting the brand (HD CLIP)

The 20th CPC party Congress

Global Times has published its Sixth installment in its series of articles related to the 20th Party Congress, which contains links to the first five. Here’s the article’s introduction:

Expounding on the "great socialist modern country" as "prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful", Xi noted at the opening session on Sunday the need to better tell China's stories, make China's voice heard, and present a China that is credible, appealing, and respectable."We will strengthen our international communication capabilities, make our communication more effective, and strive to strengthen China's voice in international affairs so it is commensurate with our composite national strength and international status," he said.

How will China realize its socialist modernization and present an image that is commensurate with this idea?

Observers said the country's international image and appeal are ultimately defined not only by the course of its progress, but also by its means of development and how it engages with and what it brings to the global community.

For those who have yet to read Xi’s address to the 20th Party Congress, here’s the link to the copy provided by Pepe Escobar in his latest article.

I suggest downloading the 64-page document for future reference and for comparing its content to the Joint Declaration made by China and Russia last February.

Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 21 2022 17:08 utc | 13

No Country for Old Men – Hotel Scene

Velvet Revolver – Fall To Pieces (video)

Russia prepares for next phase. Putin orders creation of special coordination council

Coordination

A video from China

This is from the CCP.

This is what real Chinese propaganda looks like. Not the typical fan-video made by residents. This is a professionally produced video.

But, please listen to the message.

As someone living in China, I can positively tell you that this video IS THE FEELING that most everyone in China has today.

I strongly; MOST STRONGLY, suggest everyone watch this very short video.

I come from the people, have my roots among the people, and I am dedicated to serving the people. Nothing can separate me from the 1.4 billion plus Chinese people.

My name is the Communist Party of China.

America is dangerous. It’s time for Australia to distance itself | The Canberra Times

Malcolm Fraser was right about “our dangerous ally”. In this article subtitled “The dangerous warmongering nation we need to avoid, and no it’s not China” writes that the United States is lethal to all who work with it. Indeed, the US is in the process of losing another Anglo-Saxon eye.
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Sorry, paywall
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Article HERE

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Temple Of The Dog – Hunger Strike

I think it’s a good thing. Nobody wants a weak leader. Xi is a strong, capable leader. He has accomplished a great deal during his tenure and we look forward to a lot more good stuff from him in the future.

  • Xi eliminated most of the corruption in the Chinese government.
  • Xi launched the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
  • Xi eradicated absolute poverty, finally!
  • Xi galvanized the world’s nations with peaceful alliances such as BRICS, RCEP and SCO.
  • Xi pursued diplomacy throughout the Middle East rather than bombing the shit out of the region.
  • Xi negotiated with the Taliban instead of invading and occupying Afghanistan for 20 years.
  • Xi launched China’s first supercarrier, the Type 003 named Fujian.
  • Xi launched China’s own space station named Tiangong.
  • Xi hosted the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.
  • Xi protected the population from COVID-19 with the lowest death toll (5,226) among the major economies. (USA had over a million Covid deaths!!!)

It is a fact of politics that all politicians seek to consolidate power. This is not necessarily a bad thing if the politician is intelligent, capable, fair, peaceful, and visionary.

Isaac Vs The Strongest Guy | The Orville S03E06

This photo was taken at the United Nations vote on the Syria issue in 2012. When the United States, Britain, France, led by the western countries insisted on military intervention in Syria. Only China and Russia voted against it.

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After China and Russia voted against it, Susan Rice stopped the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations Baodong Li and accused him of making her sick.

For China and Russia to veto the draft resolution on the issue of Syria, the permanent representative of the US in United Nations Susan Rice said “I AM VERY ANGER.” in the interpretation of the statement by the draft resolution was not passed。And she claimed that any further bloodshed shall be responsible for them(China and Russia).

We know what happened next. Now you tell me who was responsible for years of war and death in Syria.

War can not solve the problem. But once the war began, we must solve the problem once and for all. So in the beginning, China opposed the use of force to resolve the Syria issue. Because once the war began, it was broken up, whether military or civilian.

Last year, when the Syria army was ready to enter Aleppo. The West has called for a truce, and China has voted against it. Also for the people of Syria, The truce merely delayed the disease and did not solve the problem. The complete elimination of the enemy, in order to achieve a permanent peace.

Tell you a little story.

In 2012, China’s Middle East expert, war correspondent Guoxiang Wang was in Syria that time. He told the story after returning China.

After the United Nations voted for the Syria issue. The second day, he saw it on TV in the restaurant.

Suddenly a young man from Syria came up and asked, “are you Chinese?”.

He said: yes, I am.

The young man said: Can I give you a hug?

Guoxiang Wang: For what?

The young man said: Only China and Russia voted against it, thank you for not invading Syria.

Thank you for not invading Syria. You’re invading them!

Now you know WHY!

Best Judge Judy episode EVER. Evil Step mom. Sub!

“God Bless America (2011)” – Cinema Scene

30-Minute Veal Marsala

“This classic dish has incredible flavor plus in less than 30 minutes, you can enjoy it! VIDEO https://youtu.be/kCo0zRxapnQ”

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Ingredients

Directions

  • Preheat oven to 170ºF.
  • Season the flour with paprika, salt, and pepper; stir to combine and set aside. Just before cooking, dredge the cutlets on both sides with flour and shake to remove any excess.
  • In a large skillet over medium-high heat, add oil and 1 tablespoons butter. When it gets hot, add veal and cook until golden, about 1 to 1 ½ minutes per side. Place them on a baking sheet and transfer to the preheated oven to keep them warm.
  • Reduce the heat to medium and add the remaining 2 tablespoons butter to the skillet before adding the mushrooms; season with pepper. Cook until soft, 5 minutes. Add shallots and garlic; sauté for only one minute.
  • Add Marsala wine and broth, scraping the bottom of the pan to dislodge any brown bits. Increase the heat to medium-high and bring the mixture to a boil. Return the heat to medium and cook until the liquid is reduced by half, about 5 minutes.
  • Add heavy cream, rosemary and thyme; stir well. Return the cutlets to the skillet and spoon the sauce over; cook for 2 minutes. When serving, sprinkle on fresh chopped parsley. Serve with linguine or fettuccine.
  • FETTUCCINE:

  • After the noodles are cooked and drained, add some butter and a ¼ cup of Parmesan cheese. Stir well before adding the remaining ¼ cup of cheese and some fresh chopped parsley.

Drone Attack | The Bourne Legacy

It’s pretty obvious. The Chinese government thinks that American politics is broken, chaotic, and undemocratic.

  • Remember the January 6 Capitol Hill riots?
  • US Congress is essentially bought and paid for by the capitalist elite, in particular, the military-industrial complex. That’s why America fights an endless series of wars around the world.
  • The US government does not take care of its people, leaving many homeless, depriving them of affordable health care, allowing rampant gun violence, practicing mass incarceration, failing to protect them from COVID-19 which killed over a million Americans, and so on.
  • The US government has weaponized the US Dollar allowing it to sanction dozens of countries and causing untold human suffering in the process. It’s one of the biggest abusers of human rights in the world.

The Chinese government thinks it works much better than the US government. That’s hard to deny.

‘Peaceful Modernization’: China’s Offering to the Global South

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President Xi Jinping’s work report at the start of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) this past Sunday in Beijing contained not only a blueprint for the development of the civilization-state, but for the whole Global South.

Xi’s 1h45min speech actually delivered a shorter version of the full work report – see attached PDF – which gets into way more detail on an array of socio-political themes.

This was the culmination of a complex collective effort that went on for months. When he received the final text, Xi commented, revised and edited it.

In a nutshell, the CPC master plan is twofold: finalize “socialist modernization” from 2020 to 2035; and build China – via peaceful modernization – as a modern socialist country that is “prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious” all the way to 2049, signaling the centenary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The central concept in the work report is peaceful modernization – and how to accomplish it.

As Xi summarized, “It contains elements that are common to the modernization processes of all countries, but it is more characterized by features that are unique to the Chinese context.”

Very much in tune with Confucian Chinese culture, “peaceful modernization” encapsulates a complete theoretical system. Of course there are multiple geoeconomic paths leading to modernization – according to the national conditions of any particular country.

But for the Global South as a whole, what really matters is that the Chinese example completely breaks with the western TINA (“there is no alternative”) monopoly on modernization practice and theory.

Not to mention it breaks with the ideological straitjacket imposed on the Global South by the self-defined “golden billion” (of which the really “golden” barely reach 10 million).

What the Chinese leadership is saying is that the Iranian model, the Ugandan model or the Bolivian model are all as valid as the Chinese experiment: what matters is pursuing an independent path towards development.

How to develop tech independence

The recent historical record shows how every nation trying to develop outside the Washington Consensus is terrorized at myriad hybrid war levels. This nation becomes a target of color revolutions, regime change, illegal sanctions, economic blockade, NATO sabotage or outright bombing and/invasion.

What China proposes echoes across the Global South because Beijing is the largest trade partner of no less than 140 nations, who can easily grasp concepts such as high-quality economic development and self-reliance in science and technology.

The report stressed the categorical imperative for China from now on: to speed up technology self-reliance as the Hegemon is going no holds barred to derail China tech, especially in the manufacturing of semiconductors.

In what amount to a sanctions package from Hell, the Hegemon is betting on crippling China’s drive to accelerate its tech independence in semiconductors and the equipment to produce them.

So China will need to engage in a national effort on semiconductor production.

That necessity will be at the core of what the work report describes as a new development strategy, spurred by the tremendous challenge of achieving tech self-sufficiency. Essentially China will go for strengthening the public sector of the economy, with state companies forming the nucleus for a national system of tech innovation development.

‘Small fortresses with high walls’

On foreign policy, the work report is very clear: China is against any form of unilateralism as well as blocs and exclusive groups targeted against particular countries. Beijing refers to these blocs, such as NATO and AUKUS, as “small fortresses with high walls.”

This outlook is inscribed in the CPC’s emphasis on another categorical imperative: reforming the existing system of global governance, extremely unfair to the Global South.

It’s always crucial to remember that China, as a civilization-state, considers itself simultaneously as a socialist country and the world’s leading developing nation.

The problem once again is Beijing’s belief in “safeguarding the international system with the UN at its core.” Most Global South players know how the Hegemon subjects the UN – and its voting mechanism – to all sorts of relentless pressure.

It’s enlightening to pay attention to the very few westerners that really know one or two things about China.

Martin Jacques, until recently a senior fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University, and author of arguably the best book in English on China’s development, is impressed by how China’s modernization happened in a context dominated by the west: “This was the key role of the CPC. It had to be planned. We can see how extraordinarily successful it has been.”

The implication is that by breaking the west-centric TINA model, Beijing has accumulated the tools to be able to assist Global South nations with their own models.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, is even more upbeat: “China will become a leader of innovation. I very much hope and count on China becoming a leader for innovation in sustainability.”

That will contrast with a ‘dysfunctional’ American model turning protectionist even in business and investment.

Mikhail Delyagin, deputy chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, makes a crucial point, certainly noted by key Global South players: the CPC “was able to creatively adapt the Marxism of the 19th century and its experience of the 20th century to new requirements and implement eternal values with new methods. This is a very important and useful lesson for us.”

And that’s the added value of a model geared towards the national interest and not the exclusivist policies of Global Capital.

BRI or bust

Implied throughout the work report is the importance of the overarching concept of Chinese foreign policy: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its trade/connectivity corridors across Eurasia and Africa.

It was up to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin to clarify where BRI is heading:

“BRI transcends the outdated mentality of geopolitical games, and created a new model of international cooperation. It is not an exclusive group that excludes other participants but an open and inclusive cooperation platform. It is not just China’s solo effort, but a symphony performed by all participating countries.” 

BRI is inbuilt in the Chinese concept of “opening up.” It is also important to remember that BRI was launched by Xi nine years ago – in Central Asia (Astana) and then Southeast Asia (Jakarta). Beijing has earned from its mistakes, and keeps fine-tuning BRI in consultation with partners – from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Malaysia to several African nations.

It is no wonder, that by August this year, China’s trade with countries participating in BRI had reached a whopping $12 trillion, and non-financial direct investment in those countries surpassed $140 billion.

Wang correctly points out that following BRI infrastructure investments, “East Africa and Cambodia have highways, Kazakhstan has [dry] ports for exports, the Maldives has its first cross-sea bridge and Laos has become a connected country from a landlocked one.”

Even under serious challenges, from zero-Covid to assorted sanctions and the breakdown of supply chains, the number of China-EU express cargo trains keeps going up; the China-Laos Railway and the Peljesac Bridge in Croatia are open for business; and work on the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway and the China-Thailand Railway is in progress.

Mackinder on crack

All over the extremely incandescent global chessboard, international relations are being completely reframed.

China – and key Eurasian players at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS+, and Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) – are all proposing peaceful development.

In contrast, the Hegemon imposes an avalanche of sanctions – not by accident the top three recipients are Eurasian powers Russia, Iran and China; lethal proxy wars (Ukraine); and every possible strand of hybrid war to prevent the end of its supremacy, which lasted barely seven and a half decades, a blip in historical terms.

The current dysfunction – physical, political, financial, cognitive – is reaching a climax. As Europe plunges into the abyss of largely self-inflicted devastation and darkness – a neo-medievalism in woke register – an internally ravaged Empire resorts to plundering even its wealthy “allies”.

It’s as if we are all witnessing a Mackinder-on-crack scenario.

Halford Mackinder, of course, was the British geographer who developed the ‘Heartland Theory’ of geopolitics, heavily influencing US foreign policy during the Cold War: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

Russia spans 11 time zones and sits atop as much as one third of the world’s natural resources. A natural symbiosis between Europe and Russia is like a fact of life. But the EU oligarchy blew it.

It’s no wonder the Chinese leadership views the process with horror, because one of BRI’s essential planks is to facilitate seamless trade between China and Europe. As Russia’s connectivity corridor has been blocked by sanctions, China will be privileging corridors via West Asia.

Meanwhile, Russia is completing its pivot to the east. Russia’s enormous resources, combined with the manufacturing capability of China and East Asia as a whole, project a trade/connectivity sphere that goes even beyond BRI. That’s at the heart of the Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership.

In another one of History’s unpredictable twists, Mackinder a century ago may have been essentially right about those controlling the Heartland/world island controlling the world. It doesn’t look like the controller will be the Hegemon, and much less its European vassals/slaves.

When the Chinese say they are against blocs, Eurasia and The West are the facto two blocs. Though not yet formally at war with each other, in reality they already are knee deep into Hybrid War territory.

Russia and Iran are on the frontline – militarily and in terms of absorbing non-stop pressure. Other important Global South players, quietly, try to either keep a low profile or, even more quietly, assist China and the others to make the multipolar world prevail economically.

As China proposes peaceful modernization, the hidden message of the work report is even starker. The Global South is facing a serious choice: choose either sovereignty – embodied in a multipolar world, peacefully modernizing – or outright vassalage.

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Yes, without a doubt.

Others have pointed out that Xi must work within a collective leadership, that China does not have global military power projection, that China has little control over the developed nations in the G7. However, Xi is powerful because he has massive support within his party and within China’s population of 1.4 billion people.

Xi guided many key policies that protected the people from a pandemic, launched the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history (BRI), galvanized many countries in powerful alliances such as BRICS, RCEP and SCO, launched China’s first supercarrier (Fujian), built the world’s largest navy, launched China’s own international space station (Tiangong), eradicated absolute poverty, etc. Name one other leader who has accomplished so much in just two terms of office.

POTUS is powerful for two reasons only:

  1. The world’s largest military which USA uses to fight an endless series of wars around the world.
  2. The US Dollar as reserve currency which USA weaponizes to sanction dozens of countries and cause untold human suffering in the process.

This is not the kind of power China wants, and none of us should support it.

Xi Jinping is the most powerful leader in the world precisely because he is peaceful and benevolent, and he chooses diplomacy over warfare, and he makes friends with countries in Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Asia, and even in Europe. Thanks to Xi, BRICS is working on creating an alternative reserve currency to the US Dollar, so even this second pillar of US power will not stand for much longer.

The Authorities Are Our Enemies

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

The people who run things in this country don’t deserve your respect or allegiance. They are at war with you. They want you and your children dead.

Nation's capital being turned into 'fortress Washington' ahead of inauguration - ABC NewsWelcome to the New Age, where authority has no authority and does not deserve to act with any authority, but will act as if it does, anyway, and then lie to you about it. Nowhere is this quandary more vivid than in the racketeering operation formerly known as medicine.

As if there has not already been enough official fuckery over the lab-birthed Covid-19 virus, the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee voted on Thursday to add Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA shots to its childhood vaccine schedule. The vote was 15 to 0 — a final supreme gesture of contempt for the people of this land.

Had none of the committee members seen reports of mRNA-vaccinated children dropping dead from myocarditis induced by the vaccines? Or read about the effect of the vaxxes on the reproductive organs? Or the enhanced incidence of cancer? Or heard about the damage that the shots instigate in human immune systems? If not, that would be astounding. The news is all over the place (if not in the mainstream news media). Was any of this discussed in their deliberations? I don’t think so, but we may never know.

Adding the mRNA shots to the official vaccine schedule will make permanent the liability shield their makers enjoy under the current emergency use authorization (EUA). Pfizer and Moderna are now off-the-hook for any responsibility, unless fraud over the vaxxes is proven in a court of law. Given the vast evidence of harms done by these products, will that be a difficult thing to do? Consider: cases for fraud can be brought in any jurisdiction of the USA, not just in the notoriously corrupt DC federal district court, which does not recognize crime for what it is (crime).

This is the first time that a pharmaceutical under an EUA has been admitted to the childhood vaccine schedule. The Vaccine Advisory Committee said it was okay because it consulted with the Department of Justice’s Office of General Counsel, and the lawyers there said it was okay. One might ask: is it within the purview of the DOJ’s Office of General Counsel to review the medical criteria for such a decision? The answer must be no. How are they qualified? You may be certain they did not parse the drug trial data on the mRNA products, or study the official reports of deaths and injuries. In short, they know nothing. Their authority in the matter is vacated.

Since many states and localities go by the CDC’s vaccine guidelines, as well as pediatricians, then millions of children will be required to get the shots to attend school. So, the CDC has not only put an as-yet-untold number of kids on the road to disability, infertility, and death, but it may have coincidentally destroyed public schooling in America.
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The so-called “uptake” on mRNA shots for children has been paltry. Parents do not want their kids to get the shots. Do you know why? I’ll tell you: Because, unlike the experts who sit on the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee, many parents have actually read about the serious adverse reactions in young people who get the shots. And many more have heard enough horrifying rumors — despite the criminal delinquency of the major news media in ignoring any negative news about the vaxxes — prompting these parents to steer clear of vaxxing their children. Other countries have officially and altogether discontinued mRNA vaxxes for children. Do you think that’s for no reason?

If the schools require mRNA shots, then many parents will not send their kids to these schools. Parents have plenty of other reasons to want to withdraw their kids from public schools, not least the pervasive race-and-gender hustle that is replacing actual pedagogy in this country. The schools are now hostage to Marxist lunatics, launched from colleges and universities that are likewise captured by Marxist lunatics. They seek to overturn Western Civilization and its long train of accomplishments in discovering how the world works. They seek to replace all that with a set of wishful fairy tales that don’t comport with reality. Why would any sane parent subject their child to such a wicked regime? Might this not provoke a rebellion against paying the exorbitant school taxes all across America?

Beneath all of this lies the subterranean flow of enormous sums of money to the Pharma companies that virtually own the US public health bureaucracy. Anthony Fauci’s minions, dispersed among the various agencies under the US Department of Health and Human services, plus those in the ancillary CDC, have been pulling hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in royalties from patents associated with the mRNA products. And they’ve continued to haul in that schwag during the three-year fracas over the bad faith origins of Covid 19 and the deceitful introduction of these so-called “vaccines” — which do not stop the transmission of the disease and present manifold dangers to those who take them.

Everything the authorities tell you about all this is a lie. They are turning desperate because the time is at hand when they will actually have to answer for their crimes against the people of this country. They don’t deserve your respect and they surely can’t command your compliance.

Léon: The Professional: Still alive (HD CLIP)

Consider this: Since the Second World War, USA has not had one military victory against a powerful adversary. Not one victory in over 75 years!!! Think about that for a moment.

All USA can do is bully much weaker nations like Afghanistan, Bosnia, El Salvador, Grenada, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Yugoslavia, etc.

What can USA do against a military peer like China and Russia? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zippo.

Going to war with a nuclear superpower is suicide. Both China and Russia have massive militaries and massive nuclear inventories.

Look at the proxy war in Ukraine backed by USA and NATO. Russia is winning. (Don’t listen to Western mainstream media.) Despite all the money and arms that they’ve been shovelling into Ukraine, Ukraine is a dead man walking.

No, USA does not have enough confidence.

China’s fighting spirit diplomacy

Today’s Global Times recap ends with this editorial about China’s “fighting spirit” diplomacy.

Such words are refreshing to read:

The strongest reaction to the fighting spirit of China's diplomacy comes from the US and Western public opinion and some political elites. This shows that only those with sinister motives will be irritated. 

How many of China's partners feel threatened and uneasy from China's diplomacy? 

Even if Washington is sparing no effort to sow discord around the world, what other countries are concerned about is actually the consequences of such actions and the pressure from the US. 

Fighting is a necessary form of Chinese diplomacy, which is important means to seek cooperation and avoid conflicts, and often creates preconditions for cooperation in reality.

There is a mild, reserved and introverted aspect of traditional Chinese culture, which is meanwhile also embodied in the style of China's diplomatic work. 

However, self-restraint is in no way a sign of China's submission to powerful forces. 

Chinese people not believe in fallacy nor are we afraid of evil forces. 

We'll advance despite difficulties. 

The determination to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity and safeguard the fundamental development interests of the Chinese nation is unshakable and rock-solid. 

Dare to fight reflects the diplomatic understanding and will, while being good at fighting tests diplomatic wisdom and steadiness. 

The purpose and goal of China's foreign policy is very clear, that is, to maintain world peace, boost common development, and promote building a community with a shared future for mankind.

In fact, the international community understands and applauds the fighting spirit of China's diplomacy, because the fighting emphasized by China is a defensive one based on bottom-line thinking. 

For the vast number of developing countries that are deeply threatened by power politics, such a fighting is of universal significance. 

It is impossible for China's diplomacy to become hideous because of its fighting spirit. 

On the contrary, the grim face of US-style "offensive realism" diplomacy has been increasingly seen by the world. 

No matter how much makeup it puts on, it cannot be covered. 

The fighting spirit will make China's diplomatic image more vivid, richer and sincerer and give it more room for action.

As the world gathers together to combat the last Imperialist Power, China’s diplomatic stance provides a rallying point, and its goals provide a basic manifesto the RoW can agree upon.

I imagine we’ll continue writing/commenting on the New Cold War for the next several years.

Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 21 2022 17:26 utc | 19

They view democracy in the United States as a joke and a tragedy…

  • Last year, they had a near-insurrection with the Capitol Hill riots.
  • US politics is deeply divided and paralyzed.
  • US infrastructure is crumbling and decaying.
  • Millions of Americans can’t afford health care.
  • Homelessness is rampant in the major cities.
  • Gun violence is rampant across the country.
  • Blacks suffer from systemic racism.
  • USA practices mass incarceration.
  • USA suffers from a nationwide opioid epidemic.
  • During the pandemic, over a million Americans lost their lives to Covid.

What has democracy done for the American people???

The Chinese regard their own country as the most democratic in the world!

So I challenge the assertion that China is an authoritarian state.

DIO – Heaven And Hell (Live 1986)

Something even better has happened.

More than two million people from Taiwan have moved to live and work in Mainland China.

The value of trade between China and Taiwan is greater in value than that between China and the US.

China has set no deadline for a peaceful reunification.

It has clearly delineated two red lines that Taipeh has been very careful not to cross. But the US and its allies keep stirring the pot and encouraging some elements of the Taiwanese population towards a misstep.

Here’s a little-known fact: A lot of China’s historical artifacts and treasures were taken to Taiwan when the KMT escaped to the island after it was defected by the PLA. Visit the National Museum of Taiwan and you will see these on display. To view the full collection, you would have to visit multiple times assuming they change exhibits annually.

Some people in Taiwan readily acknowledge this. Some say it keeps them safe from a military attack that might see these priceless relics destroyed.

Oh, and the KMT took a lot of money too.

Conan the Barbarian – Conan vs Doom Warriors [HD]

Take away the hi-tech weapons, and it’s all the same.

Somme over the top

We have to remember what a horror war actually is.

The China/Taiwan Conflict, Explained From Both Sides

Fair and balanced. Two sides of the story. Not what you would see in the Western “news”.

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Death wish America

The United States has a DEATH WISH.

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China: Xi Gets Ready for the Final Countdown

President Xi Jinping’s 1h45min speech at the opening of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing was an absorbing exercise of recent past informing near future. All of Asia and all of the Global South should carefully examine it.

The Great Hall was lavishly adorned with bright red banners. A giant slogan hanging in the back of the hall read, “Long Live our great, glorious and correct party”.

Another one, below, functioned like a summary of the whole report:

“Hold high the great flag of socialism with Chinese characteristics, fully implement Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, carry forward the great founding spirit of the party, and unite and struggle to fully build a modern socialist country and to fully promote the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

True to tradition, the report outlined the CPC’s achievements over the past 5 years and China’s strategy for the next 5 – and beyond. Xi foresees “fierce storms” ahead, domestic and foreign. The report was equally significant for what was not spelled out, or left subtly implied.

Every member of the CPC’s Central Committee had already been briefed about the report – and approved it. They will spend this week in Beijing studying the fine print and will vote to adopt it on Saturday. Then a new CPC Central Committee will be announced, and a new Politburo Standing Committee – the 7 that really rule – will be formally endorsed.

This new leadership line-up will clarify the new generation faces that will be working very close to Xi, as well as who will succeed Li Keqiang as the new Prime Minister: he has finished his two terms and, according to the constitution, must step down.

There are also 2,296 delegates present at the Great Hall representing the CPC’s over 96 million members. They are not mere spectators: at the plenary session that ended last week, they analyzed in-depth every major issue, and prepared for the National Congress. They do vote on party resolutions – even as those resolutions are decided by the top leadership, and behind closed doors.

The key takeaways

Xi contends that in these past 5 years the CPC strategically advanced China while “correctly” (Party terminology) responding to all foreign challenges. Particularly key achievements include poverty alleviation, the normalization of Hong Kong, and progress in diplomacy and national defense.

It’s quite telling that Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who was sitting in the second row, behind the current Standing Committee members, never took his eyes off Xi, while others were reading a copy of the report on their desk.

Compared to the achievements, success of the Xi-ordered Zero-Covid policy remains highly debatable. Xi stressed that it has protected people’s lives. What he could not possibly say is that the premise of his policy is to treat Covid and its variants as a U.S. bioweapon directed against China. That is, a serious matter of national security that trumps any other consideration, even the Chinese economy.

Zero-Covid hit production and the job market extremely hard, and virtually isolated China from the outside world. Just a glaring example: Shanghai’s district governments are still planning for zero-Covid on a timescale of two years. Zero-Covid will not go away anytime soon.

A serious consequence is that the Chinese economy will most certainly grow this year by less than 3% – well below the official target of “around 5,5%”.

Now let’s look at some of the Xi report’s highlights.

Taiwan: Beijing has started “a great struggle against separatism and foreign interference” on Taiwan.

Hong Kong: It is now “administered by patriots, making it a better place.” In Hong Kong there was “a major transition from chaos to order.” Correct: the 2019 color revolution nearly destroyed a major global trade/finance center.

Poverty alleviation: Xi hailed it as one of three “major events” of the past decade along with the CPC’s centenary and socialism with Chinese characteristics entering a “new era”. Poverty alleviation is the core of one of the CPC’s “two centenary goals.”

Opening up: China has become “a major trading partner and a major destination for foreign investment.” That’s Xi refuting the notion that China has grown more autarchic. China will not engage in any kind of “expansionism” while opening up to the outside world. The basic state policy remains: economic globalization. But – he didn’t say it – “with Chinese characteristics”.

“Self-revolution”: Xi introduced a new concept. “Self-revolution” will allow China to escape a historical cycle leading to a downturn. And “this ensures the party will never change.” So it’s the CPC or bust.

Marxism: definitely remains as one of the fundamental guiding principles. Xi stressed, “We owe the success of our party and socialism with Chinese characteristics to Marxism and how China has managed to adapt it.”

Risks: that was the speech’s recurrent theme. Risks will keep interfering with those crucial “two centenary goals”. Number one goal was reached last year, at the CPC’s 100th anniversary, when China reached the status of a “moderately prosperous society” in all respects (xiaokang, in Chinese). Number two goal should be reached at the centenary of the People’s Republic of China in 2049: to “build a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious.”

Development: the focus will be on “high-quality development”, including resilience of supply chains and the “dual circulation” economic strategy: expansion of domestic demand in parallel to foreign investment (mostly centered on BRI projects). That will be China’s top priority. So in theory any reforms will privilege a combination of “socialist market economy” and high-level opening, mixing the creation of more domestic demand with supply-side structural reform. Translation: “Dual-circulation” on steroids.

“Whole-process democracy”: that was the other new concept introduced by Xi. Translates as “democracy that works”, as in rejuvenating the Chinese nation under – what else – the CPC’s absolute leadership: “We need to ensure that people can exercise their powers through the People’s Congress system.”

Socialist culture: Xi said it’s absolutely essential “to influence young people”. The CPC must exercise ideological control and make sure the media fosters a generation of young people “who are influenced by traditional culture, patriotism and socialism”, thus benefitting “social stability”. The “China story” must go everywhere, presenting a China that is “credible and respectable”. That certainly applies to Chinese diplomacy, even the “Wolf Warriors”.

“Sinicise religion”: Beijing will continue its drive to “Sinicise religion”, as in “proactively” adapting “religion and the socialist society”. This campaign was introduced in 2015, meaning for instance that Islam and Christianity must be under CPC control and in line with Chinese culture.

The Taiwan pledge

Now we reach the themes that completely obsess the decaying Hegemon: the connection between China’s national interests and how they affect the civilization-state’s role in international relations.

National security: “National security is the foundation of national rejuvenation, and social stability is a prerequisite of national strength.”

The military: the PLA’s equipment, technology and strategic capability will be strengthened. It goes without saying that means total CPC control over the military.

“One country, two systems”: It has proven to be “the best institutional mechanism for Hong Kong and Macau and must be adhered to in the long term”. Both “enjoy high autonomy” and are “administered by patriots.” Xi promised to better integrate both into national strategies.

Taiwan reunification: Xi made a pledge to complete the reunification of China. Translation: return Taiwan to the motherland. That was met with a torrent of applause, leading to the key message, addressed simultaneously to the Chinese nation and “foreign interference” forces: “We will not renounce the use of force and will take all necessary measures to stop all separatist movements.” The bottom line: “The resolution of the Taiwan issue is a matter for the Chinese people themselves, to be decided by the Chinese people.”

It’s also quite telling that Xi did not even mention Xinjiang by name: only by implication, when he stressed that China must strengthen the unity of all ethnic groups. Xinjiang for Xi and the leadership mean industrialization of the Far West and a crucial node in BRI: not the object of an imperial demonization campaign. They know that the CIA destabilization tactics used in Tibet for decades did not work in Xinjiang.

Shelter from the storm

Now let’s unpack some of the variables affecting the very tough years ahead for the CPC.

When Xi mentioned “fierce storms ahead”, that’s what he thinks about 24/7: Xi is convinced the USSR collapsed because the Hegemon did everything to undermine it. He won’t allow a similar process to derail China.

In the short term, the “storm” may refer to the latest round of the no holds barred American war on Chinese technology – not to mention free trade: cutting China off from buying or manufacturing chips and components for supercomputers.

It’s fair to consider Beijing keeps the focus long-term, betting that most of the world, especially the Global South, will move away from the U.S. high tech supply chain and prefer the Chinese market. As the Chinese increasingly become self sufficient, U.S. tech firms will end up losing world markets, economies of scale, and competitiveness.

Xi also did not mention the U.S. by name. Everyone in the leadership – especially the new Politburo – is aware of how Washington wants to “decouple” from China in every possible way and will continue to provocatively deploy every possible strand of hybrid war.

Xi did not enter into details during his speech, but it’s clear the driving force going forward will be technological innovation linked to a global vision. That’s where BRI comes in, again – as the privileged field of application for these tech breakthroughs.

Only this way we can understand how Zhu Guangyao, a former vice minister of finance, may be sure that per capita GDP in China in 2035 would at least double the numbers in 2019 and reach $20,000.

The challenge for Xi and the new Politburo right away is to fix China’s structural economic imbalance. And pumping up debt-financed “investment” all over again won’t work.

So bets can be made that Xi’s third term – to be confirmed later this week – will have to concentrate on rigorous planning and monitoring of implementation, much more than during his previous bold, ambitious, abrasive but sometimes disconnected years. The Politburo will have to pay way more attention to technical considerations. Xi will have to delegate more serious policymaking autonomy to a bunch of competent technocrats.

Otherwise, we will be back to that startling observation by then Premier Wen Jiabao in 2007: China’s economy is “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and ultimately unsustainable”. That’s exactly where the Hegemon wants it to be.

As it stands, things are far from gloomy. The National Development and Reform Commission states that compared to the rest of the world, China’s consumer inflation is only “marginal”; the job market is steady; and international payments are stable.

Xi’s work report and pledges may also be seen as turning the usual Anglo-American geopolitical suspects – Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman, Brzezinski – upside down.

The China-Russia strategic partnership has no time to lose with global hegemonic games; what drives them is that sooner rather than later they will be ruling the Heartland – the world island – and beyond, with allies from the Rimland, and from Africa to Latin America, all participating in a new form of globalization. Certainly with Chinese characteristics; but most of all, pan-Eurasian characteristics. The final countdown is already on.

IT’S ON! Biden just moved us closer to war with China

Perspective

Below are just a few commonly learned phrases in Chinese language lesson in school:

谋定而思动 : planned before thinking of taking action
三思而后行: think 3 times before action
不打没有把握的战 do not enter into a war without confident
谨言慎行: discipline in words careful in action

So, We can observed from the Chinese leadership all the above quality.

Whereas:

the crusaders teach their children "show and tell" in school, confidently say anything including bullshitting at will.

So, their politicians are good at bullshitting without sense of responsibility, discipline, and sense of shame.

Therefore, I believe that well spoken and habitual liars 🤥 in Western political and media establishment have got nothing to do with IQ but culture.

And the less well spoken but wiser Chinese leadership is also linked to culture and not IQ.

Russia: “No Point” to continued Diplomatic Presence in the West

In a shocking statement today, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said “Russia sees no point in maintaining diplomatic presence in the West.”

He continued by saying “It makes no sense, and we have no desire to maintain the same presence in Western countries. Our people work in conditions that can hardly be called human. They face constant problems, threats of physical attacks.”

Lavrov went on to reveal “the Russian foreign ministry is currently carrying out a “geographical reorientation” of its activities both abroad and in the central office” suggesting a potential downgrade of Russia’s diplomatic presence in the West.

Hal Turner Remarks

Will this be a pretext for quiet embassy evac before the nukes launch?

When Diplomacy is shut off, we all know what comes next.

You know, if the United States or its NATO allies had one shred of self-respect, or one grain of honor, this whole Ukraine thing would never have taken place.  But the people running the United States Government seem to me to have no honor – at all.   They gave assurances to Russia that NATO “would not move one inch eastward”  then later did the exact thing they assured Russia would NOT be done.  That set in motion DECADES of betrayal of Russia, which have no lead us to the brink of actual nuclear war.

Our assurance was given, and recorded in official US State Department Records, on February 9, 1990.   A portion of those records appear below.

The long and short of it is this: At a meeting in Moscow between  then US Secretary of State James Baker, then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and then Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Baker spoke about the then-pending re-unification of East and West Germany.  Baker expressly stated (Page 5):

“I want you to know one thing for certain: The president and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral advantage in this process.”

On the very next page (Page 6), Baker explicitly stated:

“We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the east.  If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.”

For all those ignorant morons cheering Ukraine, let me educate you with facts and evidence proving we in the west – and the government of Ukraine – are in the wrong.  Here are the official US State Department records proving the United States assured the Soviet Union upon the re-unification of East and West Germany, “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east:”

OK, so there you have it.  Official records from the US State Department.   At this point, I would like to ask YOU, when you read that, how did you interpret NATO not moving “one inch to the east?”

For me, I took this to mean exactly what it said.  No more eastward expansion.  How about you?

Well, guess how the US government under the NEXT President, Bill Clinton, chose to interpret it.

The US Government chose to interpret it as applying ONLY INSIDE RE-UNIFIED GERMANY.

Under Clinton, the position of the United States became . . .  the wider context of these assurances was not to expand NATO eastwards at all and that NATO should have stopped at eastern Germany. Sure, that was the context when the assurances were discussed. Yet no such assurances or promises were ever given, nor could they be given without consent of parliaments of NATO states. In western statesmanship you can’t bind a future government without an act of parliament (Congress, Senate or what have you) or a precedent by the supreme (Constitutional or what have you) court. Even if some sort of assurance was given to the Soviet Union or Russia, that assurance was only as good as the term of the executive that made it.

And that . . .  that right there  . . . is what set in motion the massive eastward expansion of NATO, right up to the border of Russia.

When Baker, Gorbachev, and Shevardnadze met, the nearest NATO base to Russia was 1200 miles away.   As you sit wherever you are right now reading this, the nearest NATO base to St. Petersburg, Russia, is only 100 miles away.   THAT’s how close NATO has gotten to Russia.

It went like this:

Re-unified Germany became a NATO member in 1990, as discussed between the men named above.

In December of the next year, the Soviet Union dissolved itself on Christmas Day.

Since the big, bad, Soviet Union no longer existed, there was -factually – no longer a reason for NATO to exist.   The reason NATO was created was to protect western Europe from Soviet Communism.  That all ended on Christmas Day 1991, and NATO should have ended with it.   It didn’t.

Nine years later, under President Bill Clinton, our “assurances” against NATO expansion, went right out the window.

In 1999, NATO admitted former Soviet States Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.

Then in 2004, under President George W. Bush, he undermined his own father’s Presidential assurances, and NATO admitted former Soviet states Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria.  (How’s that for “honorable?”)

With the admission of Estonia, NATO troops got onto bases only 100 miles from St. Petersburg, Russia.

Here’s a map/timeline of NATO’s expansion:

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The Russians balked. Loudly.  And that’s when they were told, show us the Treaty or your claims have no merit.  Right then and there, Russia found out that the word of a US President, was worthless.

And at the time, there wasn’t much Russia could do about it.   They were still repairing the damage of 70+ years of filthy Communist rule, and, by the way, still paying off the DEBTS of the former Soviet Union.

Bet you didn’t know that about Russia, did you?   RUSSIA HONORED ALL THE OLD SOVIET DEBTS.

Yet all that somehow wasn’t good enough for the West.  In 2009, NATO expanded again.  In 2014, the West overthrew the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, by financing and facilitating violent riots in the streets of Ukraine.   When Yanukovich was overthrown, the US and EU financed the election of pro-western puppets in Ukraine, to bring Ukraine into NATO, so as to be able to put US missile defenses inside Ukraine.

Russia flatly refused to allow this to happen.  Russia pointed out that US missiles in Ukraine would have about a five minute flight time to Moscow, and about a 7 to 10 minute flight time to Russia’s nuclear missile silos.   Russia made clear all the way back then, that Ukraine joining NATO was a “red line” for them that Russia would not tolerate.

NATO (The US and EU) ignored Russia.   NATO expanded again in 2017, and formally began considering Ukraine and Georgia (to the south of Russia) in 2019.

Russia balked over and over, and was ignored.

In late December, 2021, Russia put forth a Treaty proposal to obtain iron clad, legally enforceable security guarantees.   NATO laughed at the proposal and threw it in the trash.

Four days later, Russia delivered the same Treaty Proposal via Diplomatic Courier, to the White House, to #10 Downing Street in London, and to the Presidents/Prime Ministers of all NATO countries, making the exact same proposal but this time saying “If Russia cannot obtain iron clad, legally enforceable security guarantees via Diplomatic means, it will obtain them by military or military-technical means.

The US and NATO took about three weeks to respond, and when they did, the Treaty was again rejected out of hand, to the sounds of laughter.

About a month later, on February 24, 2022, Russia did exactly what they said they would do and began a Special Military Operation to De-militarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.

The West, stunned that Russia did exactly what they said they would do, erupted in a hissy fit, and started helping Ukraine.   And the meddling of the West has now gotten us to the point, where we are literally ONE MISTAKE AWAY from actual nuclear war.

All this because we in the West did not honor our assurances, then commenced an aggressive campaign to literally surround Russia with NATO troops, bases, and missiles.

If you were the Russians, how would you feel?  What would YOU do?

Diplomacy failed.

Russia has no choice but to act militarily now, and it is all because we in the West lied, broke our word, and surrounded Russia with missiles.

Now, it may be only weeks until nuclear war destroys us all.

All for lack of honor.  By us.

We are in the wrong here.

Jurassic Park (1993) – Nedry Gets Eaten Scene | Movieclips

Ready to “pull a Russia” on China…

After suffering from the economic consequences of BREXIT, looting Russian sovereign fund and private property boomerang energy crisis, inflation, mass poverty, and internal disintegration, the world most nasty crusaders still think they have the power to take on China as enemy... 

Now I understand how barbarian empire like the Roman empire can disintegrate into nothing more than a memory in school text book without being bullied.

Cross-party group of lawmakers ask UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to pursue action as a ‘pathway to introducing targeted sanctions’

Unlike the US, Britain did not issue sanctions against individual Hong Kong and mainland Chinese officials over controversial national security law.

Article HERE

Trisha Yearwood’s Crock Pot Pork Loin

The meat was so tender it just fell apart when I tried to cut it…But what set this recipe above the others was the gravy!!! I love anything smothered in gravy!

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Ingredients

  • 2 & 1/2 to 3 lb pork loin, trimmed of all visible fat
  • 1/2 tsp garlic powder
  • 1/4 tsp ground ginger
  • 1/8 tsp dried thyme
  • 1/4 tsp black pepper
  • 1 tbs vegetable oil
  • 2 cups chicken broth
  • 2 tbs lemon juice
  • 3 tsp soy sauce
  • 3 tbs cornstarch
  • salt and pepper, to taste


Instructions

  1. Season the pork loin lightly with salt. In a small bowl combine the garlic powder, ginger, dried thyme, and black pepper. Rub the seasoning over the surface of the pork loin.
  2. In a skillet heat the oil and brown the pork loin on all sides. Transfer the pork to the crock pot. Combine the chicken broth, lemon juice, and soy sauce; pour over the pork loin.
  3. Cover and cook on low heat for 8 to 10 hours, or on high for 4 to 5.
  4. After cooking, transfer the roast to a platter and keep warm.
  5. To make the gravy, pour the liquid from the crock pot into a measuring cup. Skim off the fat. Measure two cups of the liquid, adding water if needed. Transfer to a sauce pan reserving 1/2 cup of the liquid.
  6. Stir the cornstarch into the reserved liquid, then stir into the liquid in the sauce pan. Heat, stirring frequently, until the gravy is thick. Taste and season with salt and pepper, if needed. Serve the roast with the gravy.

Push for Liz Truss to resign. Economic crisis in France deepens

Russia Destroys Satellite Uplink Station outside Odessa, Ukraine – all NATO Gear inside

Russia has destroyed the Satellite Uplink Earth-station of the communications center of Ukraine.

To destroy it, a special operation was organized by the Russian Army. After first pinpointing its location, it was hit using high-precision weapons.

The destruction of this earth station – at least for the time being – has totally shut down Ukraine’s secure government communications network, and has stopped the flow of NATO intelligence to Ukraine’s government distribution network. Military planners are no longer able to get real-time intelligence via space satellite communications with NATO!

This creates extremely serious problems for the Ukrainian government to organize operations and secure communications.

“In the area of ​​Palievka settlement, Odesa region, the communications space station of the Government Communications Center of Ukraine was destroyed, ” the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation said during a routine briefing.

According to the Russians, “ the consequences of the impact will be seen after the last pass by the Sentinel-2 and WorldView spacecraft.

Intelligence community information is that the earth station was fully outfitted with NATO secure communications gear, and all NATO targeting data passed to the Kiev regime through this center. Its destruction is a massive blow to the Ukrainians.

Biden’s Empty Threats To Saudi Arabia Are Laughable

RUSSIA DECLARES MARTIAL LAW IN FOUR NEW REGIONS; PUTS ALL OF RUSSIA ON WAR-READINESS ALERT

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Martial law has been introduced in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions because all four regions are being attacked by Ukraine’s Nazi Army for voting to leave Ukraine and become part of Russia.

Martial Law takes effect at Midnight, local time, tonight.

Far more worrisome is a separate Decree issued by President Vladimir Putin this afternoon in Moscow.  That second Decree says:

A) In all regions of the Russian Federation, except for the center and south of Russia, a regime of “basic war readiness” is being introduced.

B) In Russia’s border regions a “medium level of war readiness” is introduced, AND;

C) In regions of the Central Federal District and the Southern Federal District a “high level of war readiness” is introduced.

This is precisely the type of alerting situation one might expect if the Russian nation goes to actual war.   The fact that the ENTIRE nation is put on “Basic” war readiness, is the giveaway.

One would expect the border regions to be on some level of alert and one would also expect the regions nearest Ukraine to be on a higher level of alert.  But to put the ENTIRE country on Basic war readiness alert is the undeniable signal that the situation with Ukraine is headed directly to an actual MASSIVE (think “world”) war.

. . .  soon.

Legislature: Secret Sessions

Yesterday, the lower House of the Russian legislature, called the “Duma” for the first time, went into “secret” session.   Live TV coverage, similar to C-SPAN in the USA, was ordered to shut off cameras and leave the Chamber.

Today, the upper house of Russia’s legislature, called the “Federation Council” (similar to the US Senate) met openlyu in the morning, where President Putin issued the Decrees mentioned above.  Then, Putin turned the session over to Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council, Dmitry Medvedev, and the chamber went into Secret Session, cutting off all cameras, and ordering media and spectators OUT of the chamber.

IMMORTAL (Official) – “ALL SHALL FALL” music video HD

UK in turmoil

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COVERT INTEL – URGENT

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My former colleagues from my years working with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force have told me why UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace flew urgently to Washington, DC yesterday.   This is an unmitigated disaster in the making .

Dorothy – Black Sheep

Ukraine Fires 6 HIMARS at Power Station/Dam trying to Flood Kherson – all Intercepted!

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The Ukrainian Nazi Army fired six (6) American-supplied HIMARS Multiple Launch Rockets at the Kakhovskyaya Hydroelectric Power Plant, shown above, in an effort to cause massive flooding of the Kherson region, for leaving Ukraine and becoming part of Russia. All 6 HIMARS shells were intercepted and destroyed.

The location of this power station is shown on the small map below:

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Had the Dam been hit and collapsed, all the water to the north of the Dam would have gone into uncontrolled release.  The flooding would have been forty feet deep in parts of Kherson located south of the Dam.

Yesterday, acting on covert intelligence, the Russians began evacuation of the civilian population in areas of Kherson likely to have been affected if the Dam was destroyed and flooding came in.   Upwards of sixty thousand (60,000) civilians evacuated, some of whom are shown in the news video below:

 

 

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces launched another offensive against Kherson, in the exact same locations as their prior failed attempts:

The Ukraine Nazi Army went on the offensive in the south, trying to break through to Berislav in the Kherson region. Ukraine has even brought a reserve into battle.  It appears it is not possible to for Ukraine to break through now.  The battlefield map below tells the story:  

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Russian Su-25 attack aircraft and Ka-52 “Alligator” helicopters are working on the Nazis and stopping them for now.

The fighting is described as “fierce.”

Aliens- Combat Drop Alternate Version

Godsmack – I Stand Alone (Official Music Video)

Poor Mans Prime Rib

This Poor Mans Prime Rib Recipe is seriously the best way to cook a roast. It makes an inexpensive piece of meat taste like prime rib! Tender and delicious!

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Ingredients

  • 3 pound beef eye of round roast
  • 1 tsp Garlic Powder
  • 1 tsp Onion Powder
  • salt and pepper to taste


Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F (260 degrees C). Season the roast with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder; and place in a roasting pan or baking dish. Do not cover or add water.
  2. Place the roast in the preheated oven. Reduce the temperature to 475 degrees F (245 degrees C). Roast for 21 minutes (seven minutes per pound) then turn off the oven and let the roast sit in the hot oven for 2 1/2 hours. Do not open the door at all during this time!
  3. Remove the roast from the oven, the internal temperature should have reached at least 145 degrees F (65 degrees C). Carve into thin slices to serve.

Alice In Chains – Rooster (Official HD Video)

Average Americans in New York City: So Ignorant, there’s almost no hope . . .

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So, we all know there’s a big military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, right? Typical Americans in NYC were asked to point to Ukraine on a map. Watch the level of intellect, education, and engagement of these “typical” Americans . . .

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Biden’s Tech-War Goes Nuclear

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The Biden administration intensified its war on China last week when it detonated a thermonuclear bomb at the heart of Beijing’s booming technology industry. In an effort to block China’s access to crucial semiconductor technology, Team Biden announced onerous new export rules aimed at a “comprehensive supply cut-off” of essential semiconductor technology which– according to one analyst– led to an “immediate operations paralysis.” The terror unleashed by the announcement was aptly summarized in a thread posted at Jordan Schneider’s Twitter account from a translated thread at @lidangzzz (See above quote)

Naturally, the Chinese government was blindsided by the draconian new rules which include “all Chinese advanced computing chip design companies” and will undoubtedly “ensure the elimination of all American products and technologies from the entire ecosystem.” The new sanctions regime will likely inflict significant damage on China’s thriving technology industry while causing considerable harm to US partners who were not consulted on the matter. But while the announcement was a complete surprise, it does fit with the much more extensive list of hostile US actions towards China in the last few months. Some of these include:

  1. Multiple US delegations (Nancy Pelosi and other sitting Congressmen) traveled to Taiwan to challenge the One-China policy that has been the cornerstone for normal relations between the two countries for the last 40 years.
  2. Two US warships sail through strait, BBC
  3. US-India maneuvers on the India-China border
  4. The Biden Administration’s persistent determination to provide South Korea with a lethal missile defence system that can be used for offensive purposes and which threatens Chinese security
  5. The relentless strengthening of an “anti-China” coalition
  6. Two U.S. carrier groups conduct exercises in South China Sea
  7. And, now–according to the Financial Times– The EU is being urged to rethink its China policy

While in no way exhaustive, the list should give the reader some sense of the uptick in belligerence that is presently aimed at Beijing. Hectoring China has become a full-time job which is not entirely unexpected as US-China “containment” policy dates back as far as the Cold War. What’s different now –as Biden’s 2022 National Security Strategy indicates– is that the US sees itself in the midst of a “great power struggle” in which the primary enemy is China who is regarded as “the only competitor with both the intent and, increasingly, the capability to reshape the international order.” (NSS) In other words, the Biden administration is admitting that we are at war with China and that we must use any means necessary to prevail in that conflict. As foreign policy analyst Andre Damon recently noted, the NSS is not a strategy for the defense of the Republic but a “blueprint for World War 3”.

Indeed, so containment alone will no longer suffice. What is required is increasingly provocative actions that will help to isolate, vilify and, ultimately, weaken China so that it becomes a “responsible stakeholder” in the “rules-based system”. In other words, Biden seeks a compliant vassal who will click his heels and do as he is told.

Sound familiar?

Biden’s onerous new export rules fit perfectly within this broader strategy of persistent confrontation and hostility. It also jibes with the oft-repeated neoconservative view that there is “no hope of coexistence with China as long as the Communist Party governs the country.” So, once again, we can see that the administration’s attacks on China are not merely designed to “contain” Chinese development but are also aimed at regime change. We believe that the recent ratcheting up of Biden’s Tech War has nothing to do with national security concerns (like “still-emerging fields of artificial intelligence and quantum computing”) but is actually another desperate attempt to preserve Washington’s loosening grip on global power. Here’s how author Jon Bateman summed it up in an article at Foreign Policy Magazine:

“The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced new… limits on the export to China of advanced semiconductors, chip-making equipment, and supercomputer components. The controls… reveal a single-minded focus on thwarting Chinese capabilities at a broad and fundamental level.... the primary damage to China will be economic, on a scale well out of proportion to Washington’s cited military and intelligence concerns….This shift portends even harsher U.S. measures to come, not only in advanced computing but also in other sectors (like biotech, manufacturing, and finance) deemed strategic. The pace and details are uncertain, but the strategic objective and political commitment are now clearer than ever. China’s technological rise will be slowed at any price.” (“Biden is Now All-In on Taking Out China”, Jon Bateman, Foreign Policy Magazine)

There it is in black and white. The US is going to do whatever it takes to preserve its top spot in the global order “come hell or high water.” And Bateman is right, there will undoubtedly be “even harsher U.S. measures to come, not only in advanced computing but also in other sectors (like biotech, manufacturing, and finance)” And that, of course, means more sanctions and tariffs, more disruption to vital supply-lines, and higher costs for everything. If you thought the war with Russia impacted energy prices, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” Winding back 40 years of globalization is going to be an excruciating experience tantamount to major dental surgery absent the Novocain. This is from Reuters:

“The U.S. is scrambling to tackle unintended consequences of its new export curbs on China’s chip industry that could inadvertently harm the semiconductor supply chain, people familiar with the matter said….as of midnight Tuesday, vendors also could not support, service and send non-U.S. supplies to the China-based factories without licenses if U.S. companies or people are involved. As a result, even basic items like light bulbs, springs, and bolts that keep tools running may not have been able to be shipped until vendors are granted licenses. And without the minute-by-minute support the foundries need, they could begin shutting down, one source said...

The U.S. planned to review licenses for non-Chinese factories in China hit by the new restrictions on a case-by-case basis, but even if approved that could create delays in shipments. Licenses for Chinese chip factories were likely to be denied.” (“U.S. scrambles to prevent export curbs on China chips from disrupting supply chain“, Reuters)

See what I mean? More supply-line disruption means higher prices, more battered household budgets, and fewer American families able to scrape by on their shrinking wages. Does anyone in Washington think about these things before they set the wheels in motion? The Biden administration is so obsessed with containing China, it is willing to send US standards-of-living off a cliff while bringing the world even closer to nuclear annihilation. Here’s more background from an article at the Asia Times:

The US measures won’t affect China’s sensors, satellite surveillance, military guidance and other strategic systems because the vast majority of military applications use older chips that China can produce at home…..The new US restrictions won’t stop China’s 2,000 surface-to-ship and surface-to-surface missiles from targeting US aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific, or US air bases in Guam and Okinawa, and they won’t prevent China’s more than 1,000 interceptors from aiming long-range air-to-air missiles at US planes…

It will also elicit an all-out Chinese effort to replace American chip-making and design technology. CapEx and R&D will shrink drastically in the US semiconductor industry while China allocates a massive budget to the sector.

On a five- or ten-year horizon, America’s technological edge in semiconductor design and fabrication is likely to vanish. As capital budgets collapse in the Western semiconductor industry, the damage to the US and other Western economies is likely to be greater than the harm inflicted on China...an all-out US ban on chip sales to China would eliminate 37% of the revenue of US semiconductor companies, lead to … the loss of 15,000 to 40,000 highly skilled direct jobs in the US semiconductor industry.”..

At worst, the damage to China’s economy is likely to be temporary… But the impact of the incipient depression in the Western semiconductor industry may well do permanent harm. (“China chip ban a US exercise in extreme self-harm”, Asia Times)

So, it could all backfire like the poorly thought-out sanctions on Russia that have thrust all Europe into an unprecedented energy crisis?

Yep, that’s what he’s saying. The new rules will cause China some short-term pain but—in the long run—they will only hurt American industry. It’s another classic example of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, which appears to be Biden’s MO on a great number of issues.

It’s worth noting, that the Biden plan is another giant leap towards “de-globalization. (which is the reimposing of cross-border trade barriers in order to prevent further economic integration and lower costs.) For decades, business and political leaders have been touting the virtues of offshoring businesses and outsourcing jobs as if that was the true expression of God’s divine plan. But now that China’s growth threatens US global hegemony, foreign policy elites have done a quick 180. Now the globalization genie must be drawn-and-quartered and shoved back into his bottle so the West can preserve its primacy by effectively divorcing itself from the Chinese powerhouse.

By the way, “decoupling” is the new buzzword among foreign policy wonks. What the word implies is that the US must implement “some degree of technological separation from China, but shouldn’t go so far as to harm U.S. interests in the process.” In other words, Washington is on track to selectively terminate many areas of commerce with China while trying not to shoot itself in its own foot.

Good luck with that.

So, where is all of this heading, you ask?

To more conflict, more confrontation, higher prices, lower standards of living and, eventually, a disintegration of the prevailing order. That much is certain. The problem, of course, is that the China hawks now control the levers of power in Washington which means that the attacks on China will intensify, decoupling will accelerate, and a massively-destabilizing international crisis will soon follow.

The Biden administration is squandering American power on unilateral actions it cannot enforce and that will no have meaningful impact on China’s development. They’d be better off looking for ways to ease the transition to a new world, then pathetically trying to turn back the clock to the bygone “unipolar moment”.

It is disheartening to read news out of the United States today

It is disheartening to read news out of the United States today. But, I know from my business dealings that businesses out of America are more keen than ever to work with China. What is the disconnect?

What I am seeing is a two caste system in the United States.

The ruled people; who own and operate businesses, and a ruling class who are crazy, delusional and on drugs with utopian ideological visions that have no basis on reality.

...I ask this because of the stubborn adherence to outdated (meaningless words). Because these guys claim they are "Communists"; the power of what they realize and what they say is down the drain.

"Oh that is just communist babble."

What the heck is communism?? I have asked that many times to this group. As far as I can see it is a theory or a fantasy that has never existed. Even all Soviet leaders stated clearly that "our system is just socialism - - - eventually leading to the true communism - - - ".

To western billionaires and all their main stream media, Communists are those evil people that we must kill by any and all means available. Any form of infiltration or terrorism is fair game when killing "COMMUNISTS". Any amount of budget is worth it, or don't even use a budget; we'll wink at every form of black money. It is what runs the world since 1917.

It is a lame word, meaning that the word does more damage than it communicates good intent. It is only for the "in-crowd".
Why not make up new terminology. But not:

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, or
Communism with Chinese Characteristics, or
Marxism with Chinese Characteristics, (for a new era).

Don't you have any words of your own? Why use the western words, honed to pierce your heart? And attempt to express your highest motivations with them?

And what is "Capitalism"? I call it the "Cult of Absentee Ownership". In other words, "I" get to Own ever last thing that you need to survive; I own your house, your job, your bank, your insurance, your hospitals, your doctors, your minerals and energy facilities, your farms, your food producers, all distribution of any goods, your refineries, your gas stations, your streets and toll ways, your electric transmission lines, your water systems, your sewer connections, your schools, your teachers, your parks and recreation, your entertainment, your Internet connection, your telephone service, all supplies of clothing, I own your closet.

Wake Up; ass hole. It is all mine, and the first thing when you wake up each morning, you MUST PAY ME, to live.

Why? Because I have my thumb on your neck, and it is going to stay that way. This is glorious FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY, (which I forgot to add, I own your democracy).

The United States today is a pile of oil-soaked shit, on fire,  and the “elected officials” are Hell-bent on spraying kerosene on it.

This crazy mix is not going to do the world any good, and WILL result in a great deal of hardship for Americans.

The Forbidden Thought

The dominating systems of our world require us to feel weak, afraid, and insufficient. They couldn’t continue if most of us didn’t feel that way. And so the friends and operators of these systems must oppose the opposite assumption: That we are not inadequate.

I’ve watched popular culture for a lot of years, and I can tell you that since the 1970s, one concept, above all, has been forbidden in intellectual circles: Man as a glorious creature.

If you’d like to prove that to yourself, say a few things like these at a cocktail party:

  • Western civilization has accomplished so many good things that it’s mind-blowing.
  • Most people are basically decent and don’t need to be controlled.
  • I see so much goodness in humanity.
  • Humanity is ascending toward the gods (or heaven, or whatever).

Then, if you’d really like to see a reaction:

  • The human race is magnificent.

The responses you get should be educational.

Why This Thought Is Hated

One reason why people respond so violently to this idea is simply self-defense: At this point, nearly every adult has built his or her world around the belief that people are bad: They’ve taught it to their children, showed their enlightenment by stating such things at parties and so on. To admit the opposite wouldn’t just be to admit they were wrong; it would tear down their infrastructure of meaning and status. Few people have the courage for such things.

Another reason is simply that they fear being shamed. People who say such heretical things are quickly ridiculed by holders of status. That’s tyrannical, of course, but it’s all too easy to stay inside the conspiracy of compliance. It’s dangerous, even if heroic, to defy powerful people.

Buckminster Fuller described the institutional necessity of inadequacy back in 1981:

There’s a built-in resistance to letting humanity be a success. Each one claims that their system is the best one for coping with inadequacy.

In other words, the dominance hierarchies running things all claim that theirs is the right way to fix human inadequacy. So, if you claim that humans are adequate, you’re also saying that those systems aren’t necessary… and ruling systems don’t like to be called unnecessary.

Promoting Darkness Is a Big Business

It’s also the case that the promotion of darkness is a huge business. News channels are little more than fear delivery systems, but they are a major business. Social media is considerably worse, and it delivers darkness in your own, internal voice.

And, obviously, advertisers need you to feel insecure. Ads that don’t make you feel insecure, inadequate or guilty don’t pull nearly as well as those which do. That’s just a human weakness that’s being scientifically exploited.

It can be interesting to see how all of this appears to outsiders. Back in the 1950s, the new president of Indonesia, Sukarno, visited the US and had this to say:

I find only one fault with Americans. They’re too full of fear. Afraid of B.O. Afraid of bad breath. They’re haunted by the fear that they’ll never get rid of dandruff. This state of mind I cannot understand.

And we shouldn’t understand it either. We are magnificent creatures… the only creatures in the known universe who create willfully and seemingly without limit. We’ve eradicated diseases, learned to feed billions of people, created machines that move us across the ground tremendous distances safely and reliably, created machines that fly us around the world and at incredible speed; we’ve harnessed the information stores of humanity and made them available to anyone, almost for free and almost anywhere.

None of that is arguable, and yet we still think we’re just a step above refuse.

Take An Honest Look

Turn off the TV, turn off your cell phone. Walk through a park for a while to let the stream of negativity subside a bit. Then take a fresh look around.

Yes, some dark things can still be found, but you’ll see most people simply going about their business: working, cooking, shopping, tending to children, driving their cars. They do these things well, or at least well enough, nearly all the time. Shouldn’t they get credit for that?

We are improving, unfolding, evolving creatures. Yes, much improvement remains, but we are moving in that direction.

And consider this, please: The sea of negativity that surrounds us is an anti-evolutionary poison. It serves stasis and sacrifice-collecting. It does not serve progress.

I’ll close with another quote (slightly edited) from Bucky Fuller:

I decided man was operating on a fundamental fallacy: that he was supposed to be a failure. I decided that man was, in fact, designed to be an extraordinary success. His characteristics were magnificent.

We are not inadequate, we’ve just been made to think so.

**

Paul Rosenberg

From Dusk Till Dawn: The bar is full of vampires

Russia Destroys Satellite Uplink Station outside Odessa, Ukraine – all NATO Gear inside

Russia has destroyed the Satellite Uplink Earth-station of the communications center of Ukraine.

To destroy it, a special operation was organized by the Russian Army. After first pinpointing its location, it was hit using high-precision weapons.

The destruction of this earth station – at least for the time being – has totally shut down Ukraine’s secure government communications network, and has stopped the flow of NATO intelligence to Ukraine’s government distribution network. Military planners are no longer able to get real-time intelligence via space satellite communications with NATO!

This creates extremely serious problems for the Ukrainian government to organize operations and secure communications.

“In the area of ​​Palievka settlement, Odesa region, the communications space station of the Government Communications Center of Ukraine was destroyed, ” the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation said during a routine briefing.

According to the Russians, “ the consequences of the impact will be seen after the last pass by the Sentinel-2 and WorldView spacecraft.

Intelligence community information is that the earth station was fully outfitted with NATO secure communications gear, and all NATO targeting data passed to the Kiev regime through this center. Its destruction is a massive blow to the Ukrainians.

We Were Soldiers – The Final Battle Scene

Chip war policy hurting US firms more than China

New Commerce Department chip and equipment bans against China are hitting US semiconductor company shares hardest
.

On October 7, the US Department of Commerce expanded licensing requirements for exports of advanced semiconductors and the equipment that’s used to make them to cover all shipments to China and not just shipments to particular companies.

The share prices of companies expected to be affected had already dropped, discounting previously announced sanctions and the downturn in the semiconductor cycle that was already underway.

From their 52-week highs to recent 52-week lows:

  • Intel (INTC) was down 56%;
  • Micron (MU) was down 50%;
  • Nvidia (NVDA) was down 69% (its products having been directly targeted by the Biden administration); and
  • AMD (AMD) (also directly targeted) was down 67%.

Among US semiconductor equipment companies:

  • Applied Materials (AMAT) was down 57%;
  • Lam Research (LRCX) was down 59%; and
  • KLA (KLAC) was down 45%.

Outside the United States, ASML (ASML) of the Netherlands was down 59% from 52-week high to 52-week low. Japanese equipment makers Tokyo Electron (TYO 8035) and Screen Holdings (TYO 7735) were down 50% and 44%, respectively.

Japanese semiconductor makers Renesas (TYO 5723) and Rohm (TYO 6963) were down only 27% and 28%, but they focus on automotive and industrial semiconductors, not the artificial intelligence and high-performance computing devices that obsess the Biden administration. Their 52-week lows were last March.

SMIC (HKG 0981), China’s top IC foundry, was down 40% while TSMC (TPE 2330) was down 43% – a relatively strong performance under the circumstances.

In terms of share price performance and investor returns, American companies and ASML have been hit harder than the Chinese. That might seem ironic considering the measures target China, but it is the market’s discounting mechanism at work.

US government policy is aggravating what was already shaping up to be a severe industry downturn – and friendly fire is a real problem.

On its earnings call on October 13, TSMC announced that it had decided to reduce 2022 capital spending to US$36 billion from about $40 billion due to falling global demand for semiconductors and rising costs.

Management had planned to spend $40 billion to $44 billion this year but said in July that actual spending would be at the bottom of that range. Compared with the $30 billion spent in 2021, projected growth has dropped from a maximum of 47% to 33% and is now 20%.

Mitigating factors for TSMC include a one-year authorization from the US government to continue with the expansion of its facilities in Nanjing and the possibility of a rebound in demand when China’s Covid restrictions are loosened. But TSMC CEO C C Wei also told the media that “We expect probably in 2023 the semiconductor industry will likely decline.”

At the end of September – when announcing results for its fiscal year 2022, which ended on September 1 – US memory chip maker Micron told investors that the company’s capital spending would be cut by a third, from $12 billion to about $8 billion, in the year ahead.

Construction spending should more than double, “to support demand for” the second half of the decade, “but spending on wafer fab production equipment is likely to decline by nearly 50% due to “a much slower ramp of our 1-beta DRAM and 232 layer NAND [the company’s newest and most advanced products] versus prior expectations.”

Furthermore, “To immediately address our inventory situation and reduce supply growth, we are selectively reducing utilization in both DRAM and NAND.” Reports from Micron and its South Korean and Japanese competitors indicate that memory chip production has been cut by about 30%.

Samsung’s approach to capital spending is similar to Micron’s. Its “shell first” strategy is to build clean rooms first so it can install equipment flexibly and rapidly when the time comes. On October 4, Samsung announced plans to launch a 2-nanometer foundry process (matching TSMC) by 2025 and a 1.4-nanometer process by 2027.

As the global economy weakens and US high-end decoupling from China accelerates, the outlook for semiconductor capital spending continues to deteriorate. Last March, market research organization IC Insights forecast a 23.5% increase to $190 billion in calendar 2022.

That industry capital spending figure was reduced to $185.5 billion in August but the announcements from TSMC and Micron point to a sharper decline. Handel Jones, CEO of American consulting firm International Business Strategies, estimates the figure at $160 billion, an increase of only 4% over last year’s $153.9 billion.

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IC Insights itself qualified its August forecast, writing that “a menacing cloud of uncertainty looms on the horizon. Soaring inflation and a rapidly decelerating worldwide economy caused semiconductor manufacturers to re-evaluate their aggressive expansion plans at the midpoint of the year. Several (but not all) suppliers – particularly many leading DRAM and flash memory manufacturers – have already announced reductions in their capex budgets for this year.

“Many more suppliers have noted that capital spending cuts are expected in 2023 as the industry digests three years of robust spending and evaluates capacity needs in the face of slowing economic growth.”

When the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, semiconductor capital spending dropped 55% in two years. The Lehman Shock triggered a 57% decline, also over two years. Now, capital expenditure is dropping back from an all-time record high, suggesting a decline of similar magnitude and perhaps duration.

On October 12, The Wall Street Journal reported that US equipment makers including KLA and Lam Research have halted installation and support of equipment at China’s Yangtze Memory Technologies Co (YMTC) while assessing the new US Commerce Department rules. The share price of Japanese NAND flash memory maker Toshiba (TYO 6502), which competes with YMTC, jumped 10% on the news.

YMTC’s NAND flash memory is good enough for Apple and there is no evidence that its technology was stolen, so this can be considered an escalation of US policy from the punishment of bad actors to an all-out attempt to stifle Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing and thus roll back the development of China’s economy.

Commencing immediately, the withdrawal of American support staff will crimp Chinese semiconductor production.

In addition, a new Commerce Department regulation that “restricts the ability of US persons to support the development, or production, of ICs at certain PRC-located semiconductor fabrication ‘facilities’ without a license” is already disrupting the operations of Chinese companies.

By forcing numerous executives and engineers of Chinese extraction to choose sides, it brings decoupling down to the personal level.

Data from Tokyo Electron show the company’s total sales of semiconductor production equipment up 2.6 times in the five years to March 2022 (the company’s fiscal year ends in March). The increase was led by a 5.7x increase in China, which grew from 12% to 26% of total sales.

In the two years to March 2022 alone, sales in China increased by 2.7x. That suggests that the Chinese semiconductor industry has purchased enough equipment to see it through the next two or three years, at least.

Tokyo Electron’s performance in other regional markets was not exceptional. Sales were up 2.7x in Korea, 2.6x in the US, 2.5x in Japan, 1.8x in Europe, 1.6x in Taiwan (which started at a high level), and 2.1x in Southeast Asia and other regions.

As Japan’s largest and the world’s third-largest maker of semiconductor production equipment, with a diversified product portfolio, Tokyo Electron is representative of the industry as a whole.

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Source: data from Tokyo Electron

The Chinese can no longer rely on US equipment suppliers and European and Japanese suppliers must follow US rules if their products incorporate US technology, so China will step up its import substitution campaign.

Sanctions on China have already caused large losses for American semiconductor and equipment companies, and more are probably on the way. Furthermore, in the next up-cycle, the China opportunity for foreign suppliers is likely to be much diminished.

Four rooms funny scene – japanese subtitle

Biden Is Now All-In on Taking Out China

The U.S. president has committed to rapid decoupling, whatever the consequences.

By , a senior fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
.

The United States has waged low-grade economic warfare against China for at least four years now—firing volley after volley of tariffs, export controls, investment blocks, visa limits, and much more. But Washington’s endgame for this conflict has always been hazy. Does it seek to compel specific changes in Beijing’s behavior, or challenge the Chinese system itself? To protect core security interests, or retain hegemony by any means? To strengthen America, or hobble its chief rival? Donald Trump’s scattershot regulation and erratic public statements offered little clarity to allies, adversaries, and companies around the world. Joe Biden’s actions have been more systematic, but long-term U.S. goals have remained hidden beneath bureaucratic opacity and cautious platitudes.

Last Friday, however, a dense regulatory filing from a little-known federal agency gave the strongest hint yet of U.S. intentions. The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced new extraterritorial limits on the export to China of advanced semiconductors, chip-making equipment, and supercomputer components. The controls, more so than any earlier U.S. action, reveal a single-minded focus on thwarting Chinese capabilities at a broad and fundamental level. Although framed as a national security measure, the primary damage to China will be economic, on a scale well out of proportion to Washington’s cited military and intelligence concerns. The U.S. government imposed the new rules after limited consultation with partner countries and companies, proving that its quest to hobble China ranks well above concerns about the diplomatic or economic repercussions.

In short, America’s restrictionists—zero-sum thinkers who urgently want to accelerate technological decoupling—have won the strategy debate inside the Biden administration. More cautious voices—technocrats and centrists who advocate incremental curbs on select aspects of China’s tech ties—have lost. This shift portends even harsher U.S. measures to come, not only in advanced computing but also in other sectors (like biotech, manufacturing, and finance) deemed strategic. The pace and details are uncertain, but the strategic objective and political commitment are now clearer than ever. China’s technological rise will be slowed at any price.

To understand the strategy behind these new controls, it helps to look at what preceded them. A multitude of U.S. measures have limited the flow of technology to and from China in recent years. Chief among these is the Entity List, which bars designated firms from importing U.S. goods without a license. The number of unique Chinese companies on this list quadrupled, from 130 to 532, between 2018 and 2022. Leading Chinese chip companies, supercomputing organizations, and software and hardware vendors have all landed on the list. Even so, BIS exercised its discretion to license large amounts of nonsensitive exports to listed companies.

Read the rest HERE
.

Funniest TV Show Ever!!

There are three possible scenarios;

[1] A draw. 55% chance.

A status quo is maintained. A polarized world results. A West and an East, and trade between them ends.

This is the “Cold War 2” scenario, and it appears that the world is approaching this situation. The length of duration is unknown.

What is known is that, historically, the cold war will end when one of the major nations undergoes domestic collapse. Then after that collapse, the cold war ends, and a new geopolitical reality takes hold.

The nation that survives is the nation with [1.1] high popularity of it’s government and leaders, that has [1.2] a large manufacturing base, that [1.3] has a strong network of geopolitical strengths, and [1.4] friends, and one that has [1.5] access to energy and [1.6] raw materials. As well as a [1.7] strong currency.

In this scenario, which is highly likely but not guaranteed, we see a decade or longer cold war.

We will see a continued collapse of the United States (and it’s proxy nations) domestically, and an inability to accomplish the simplest basic forms of governance.

There would be great swaths of illness, and death.

The American society would be in complete free-fall, American companies would be in conflict with the desires of the elected, and eventually the discord and turmoil would necessitate a serious change in what the United States is and what it represents.

China, on the other hand, would continue to grow and the growth would accelerate. The “Global South”; home of most of the World’s population, it’s resources, it’s energy and it’s manufacturing would be thriving. While the West; centered by the United States would be approaching mid-18th century level lifestyles.

[2] The USA wins the trade war. <10% chance.

A physical conflict occurs on all levels. The United States destroys China, and in the ruins, carves it up and plunders it. The rest of the world become American proxy nations.

This is the stated goal of both political parties in America, the government, and all the neocon publications. Though the actual words are softer with a great deal of rhetorical fluff.

It is also a fine descriptor for the tone and the pace of all documents out of the White house, and the various American government organs, as well as all of the conservative alternative news outlets.

The problem with this scenario is that it has been constantly tested, revised, tested again, and again, and again. In each and every test, and report, China always wins. The only scenarios that suggest the United States win is when ever Russia is completely destroyed, and reduced to a non-functioning entity, as well as China being isolated with zero support from any other nation.

At this time, because [1] Russia is not collapsed, nor is it in the process of collapsing, and [2] the accuracy of the RAND and War College reports have to be taken at face value, as well as [3] China is not alone, and has a large network of friends globally…

… this scenario appears to be unrealistic, and will probably not occur.

[3] China wins and ends up being dominant in trade. >35% chance

To achieve this scenario, a suppression of the aggressive elements in the United States is necessary. A physical conflict occurs at all levels. Hot hostilities are engaged and implemented by the United States against China in the belief that China is can be effectively suppressed via proxy and other events done in secret.

This scenario clearly shows that the United States mistakes “being peaceful” with “being a pacifist”.

China, a nation with over 6000 years of continuous warfare, takes preemptive action.

Large munitions, of new and novel type, are detonated within the United States geographical land mass. This aggravates an already unstable domestic situation.

China wins and allows the domestic problems internal to the United States to eat it alive. A new world order ensues, and it is modeled by the SEO model. The United States is broken apart into smaller nations. The United States becomes a footnote in the history books.

Contrary to what everyone in the United States believes, Russia and China are joined at the hip as in one brand new nation.

To fight China is to fight the entire SEO.

America doesn’t have the skill, the resources, the energy, the cred, the talent, the knowledge, the desire and the ambitions to accomplish such an enormous undertaking.

Summary

Everyone has opinions, and we all form our opinions based upon our experiences. You all must take note that the nations involved in this situation have better intelligence of what is actually going on rather than what is presented to the public. And because of that, they will act accordingly.

It is precisely this reason, why I have presented the percentage likelihood of scenario manifestation above. Cold war draw at 55% probability.

One last point…

When the CIA remote viewed the year 2025, from their offices in 2008, it was NOT the cold war draw that manifested.

Instead, scenario #3 was that they observed.

The US will collapse because of that. China will feel some mosquito bite for a few days and move on.

What the US did is to push away China’s friendliness and generous overtures to share a loaf of bread. China maturely thought to itself, if China does everything the US will have nothing to live on. Hence it allows room for the US to get a cut so to speak.

But the US, is so full of it fought that China will be cut off and stranded without key technology. Fat hopes. In 3 years China will match them, in 5 years China will be ahead. In 10 years the US will be sitting on a white elephant obsolete technology.

China has the market, the US don’t, China is sitting in Asia and East Asia, the most humongous market. US is straddle between Carribbean, Latin American market and a 30 million Canadian together their market size match a province in China!

The US never learnt, space center, the US cut China out, today it is assembling the most modern and tecnological space center in space, while the white elephant US space center is about to be demolished for good. GPS, China knew the US is unreliable it made a more accurate and higher resolution Beidou, today it commands 2/3 of the world’s market!

Thanks America the fool. You just commited suicide.

Samsung returns back to China!

From Vietnam BACK to China…

https://youtu.be/OYU4FsTHh_I

Cui bono? The Big Picture

by Eric Arthur Blair for the Saker blog

(note: the author is not Russian, knows no Russians and has never been to Russia)

Further to my last “Motive, Means and Opportunity” summary regarding who blew up the Nordstream pipelines (the USA), let us stand back and look at the bigger global picture today. Let us ask “Cui bono?” with regard to the entire Ukrainian debacle.

First of all, we need to be absolutely clear that this insane FUBAR Ukraine situation was 100% concocted, fabricated and engineered by the USA, certainly since the droolin’ Nuland / lamebrained McCain / CIA Maidan coup of 2014, but even dating back before that.

There are few situations in life where one party can be found to be 100% guilty and evil and morally bankrupt, and where the other party is 100% acting in self defence and self preservation.

However history will show that with respect to this Ukraine situation, the USA was 100% the evil aggressor and Russia was 100% acting in self preservation and in defense of civilian Russian speakers in Ukraine.

This is truly a war of good against evil and in case you still haven’t got the message yet, let me repeat: the USA Deep State is EVIL.

This reality is indisputably obvious to any semi-comatose person remotely interested in historical, documented FACTS. For those with any remaining doubts, they need to listen to this comprehensively researched three part podcast summary by a journalist and a military historian (both Anglophones). They actually obtained their information from Western mainstream media sources before those reports and articles mysteriously vanished from the Google search algorithms (or were relegated to 500th priority on the search list) after 24 Feb 2022.

It is unfortunate that the stupid sheeple of the West, probably 99% of the “golden billion”, believe the exact opposite of the Truth, which is testimony to the incredible effectiveness of the relentless lying propaganda pooped out from the AngloEuroZionist mainstream media sewer outlets ever since 24 Feb 2022.

Until the two recent terrorist bombings (Nordstream pipelines and Kerch bridge), Russia had been reacting in a highly restrained manner to the US and US proxy aggravations. The US started provocations many years ago and contemptuously rebuffed multiple opportunities for peaceful settlements. Russia will soon end it. How? With the humiliating defeat of Ukraine for sure, but more widely we will see the economic devastation of Europe (apart from those who buy energy in Rubles – eg Hungary and Turkey) and eventually the destabilization of the USA: perhaps with civil war and revolution in the USA, resulting from its own inevitable economic collapse. The latter two eventualities were never Russia’s intended goal, but will be unintended consequences of the malicious actions of the US and EU themselves, blowback or karma if you like.

So what motivated the USA to provoke Russia to invade Ukraine? What parties hoped to benefit from it (hint: definitely not the US public) and what were the short, medium and long term goals of the US Deep State? Context is everything and we need to view the big picture, which can be found in Andrei Martyanov’s excellent book which was nicely summarized in this review.

In short: US industrial, economic and social decay, all entirely self inflicted over the past several decades, have led to the decline of the USA as a functional society and hence to the impending loss of its unipolar global hegemony. This is a situation that the megalomaniacal “indispensable nation, shining beacon on a hill” ideologues simply cannot accept.

It is vital to understand exactly how this hollowed out mockery of a former empire continues to limp along in a moribund fashion right now, just prior to its complete self-inflicted collapse:

  • Most important is to understand how the US fraudulent “economy” works. The best commentator regarding this is the brilliant Real World Economist* Professor Michael Hudson whose works are too numerous for me to mention https://michael-hudson.com/ In brief, the US economy largely operates as a global blood sucking parasite, by extracting wealth from the rest of the world and by keeping weaker countries under the its jackboot (AKA economic Neocolonialism). The major mechanism for this is the exuberant privilege of the US dollar as the International Reserve Currency, a privilege no other country has.
  • This scam operates in tandem with other mechanisms that were contrived and designed and tweaked and refined to suit the US “rules based order” ever since Bretton-Woods in 1944 (which established the precursors to the World Bank, WTO and IMF, with the simultaneous designation of the USD as IRC), the abandonment of the gold standard in 1971 by Nixon and especially the US creation of the Petrodollar. This was a Godfather type “offer you can’t refuse” that the USA presented to the Middle Eastern Oil producers. It was a protection racket that the Gulf States sequentially signed up to and was completed by 1974. Oil, an essential commodity, could only be bought from the Gulf States in USD, all other currencies were refused. Where could a country get USD from? Why from the USA of course, in exchange for real world products. The Petrodollar enabled the USA to obtain limitless high quality imported products for free by simply electronically “printing” US dollars, quite apart from getting free oil. It was the first class ticket on a gravy train of unimaginable wealth far exceeding the wildest fantasies of the most avaricious, rapacious, greedy robber barons. If the US could get imported goods for free, why bother to fund US domestic industries? Why not offshore their industrial production? So that is exactly what the US did.
  • Petrodollar recycling involved the investment of excess oil profits from the Middle Eastern States in US debt securities / treasury bonds, which further propped up the fiat US dollar, even though the USD had no intrinsic value in itself. The value of the dollar was based entirely on the confidence of those who invested in those US “assets”. It was a confidence trick based on a protection racket. This is what enabled the US to rack up trillions of dollars in debt, backed up by the savings from foreign countries, to fund 800+ US military bases around the world. This is a debt that will never be repaid when this whole Ponzi scheme collapses.
  • All this is coming to an end. The Neocons believe that the only way such US global parasitism can continue to operate is to subjugate the “World Island” ie. Eurasia. To “regime change” Putin and Xi and to ultimately Balkanise the whole of Eurasia, each banana republic to be “led” by a US puppet dictator. This wet dream “strategy” is derived entirely from the well worn CIA playbook. Such actions had been repeatedly inflicted by the US on practically every state of Latin America (the “Monroe doctrine”) and on Global South countries over many decades. The US Neocons believe that the subjugation of Eurasia is the only way to resurrect the dead corpse of Bretton-Woods and the Petrodollar and to force the rest of the world to continue funneling their Real World valuable commodities and products to the USA for free.

Much has been written about the Mackinder declaration that “who controls the World Island controls the world“, a sentiment echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book ‘The Grand Chessboard’ and certainly adhered to by the US Neocons who run the Deep State. This is why the sock puppet Biden, or more specifically his handlers, have been provoking dangerous confrontations in Ukraine and in the East China Sea ever since Biden’s “election”. The US has gone back to its “gunboat diplomacy” historical roots, thuggish bastardry which worked in the past to bully other countries into compliance, but which cannot work today against nations that now possess hypersonic missiles. Such US behavior is a “hail Mary” pass, the last desperate act of a failing unipolar hegemon.

The above account describes the USA’s long term Grand View, better termed a Grand Delusion. Given the advanced state of decay of the US and the unstoppable rise of China and Russia militarily, industrially, economically and socially, there is zero prospect of the USA prevailing. There are only two possible outcomes: either the USA backs down or there will be global nuclear Armageddon. There is nothing in between.

Morally and ethically speaking alone, the only correct and proper and decent action is for “Exceptionalistan” to back down. They should count themselves lucky that the rest of the world has no appetite for revenge against the US after centuries of it perpetrating genocide, slavery, racism, foreign skulduggery and exploitation of the rest of the world. However the Global South is more preoccupied with their own well being, they will simply ignore the putrefying carcass of the USA, they are only interested in “win-win” interactions with partners who actually play fair, who abide by actual UN International Law and not by the US rigged “rules based order”.

What about short and medium term more limited perspectives? What specific parties hoped to gain from a war in Ukraine? The usual suspects: the Military-Industrial-Complex, the US fossil fuel industry and possibly the US banking/financial sector.

The MIC: How does the US MIC profit from perpetual war? By all rational accounts the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was a miserable failure. However the US persisted at it for 20 years, the longest war in US history. Why? Because was a massive financial windfall for the MIC, it was the gift that kept on giving. It funded numerous McMansions and luxury yachts for the MIC executives and MIC Washington lobbyists. Please refer to appendix two at the end of this document for the explanation of exactly how the Afghan debacle, and indeed all of the USA’s endless invasions and interventions, worked in financial favor of the MIC.

Today, sending “billions of dollars” worth of US ordnance to Ukraine (much of it outdated and obsolete) represents a massive financial windfall for the US MIC. It is the only way they could profitably dispose of stuff they could never legally sell. It does not matter if 30% of it goes missing (eg Javelin missiles to be sold by terrorists from car boots) nor if the rest gets blown up by the Russians. Of course, such obsolete ordnance will need to replaced with overpriced new versions to replenish the US inventory, which will be funded by ever larger sums of taxpayers’ money, to the detriment of US publicly funded roads, rail, schools, healthcare, libraries, etc, etc.

The US fossil fuel industry: In my previous “Whodunnit” article I mentioned that blowing up the Nordstream pipelines was the only way that super expensive US LNG could ever be exported to Europe.

US fracked LNG is far more expensive** than piped Russian conventional gas and far more environmentally destructive, with far higher carbon emissions. In order to understand why different energy sources incur vastly different expenses in their production and distribution, it is essential to understand the concept of EROI (energy returned over invested) as well as the full life cycles of the different energy sources: from extraction to processing to transportation to end user. Such explanation is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say that high EROI energy sources are cheap to harvest and deliver, however low EROI energy sources are expensive to harvest and deliver and indeed may represent a financial net loss. Such has been true for fracked US shale oil, another Ponzi scam which was never profitable at ANY oil price (even >$100 per barrel). It was a misbegotten project that was bulldozed through using market hubris, blatant fraud, low interest bank loans and inappropriate government subsidies. Such economic stupidity and fraud is also true for the overseas export of fracked US shale gas, even before considering the expensive energy requirements to liquefy it (cooling down to around minus 163 deg C), with continued energy needed to refrigerate it during transportation in specialist highly insulated tankers (now in short supply around the world) and the multi billion dollar investments required for specialist handling at purpose designed export and import terminals (not yet built).

The USA has depleted all its economically viable sources of oil and gas, all its remaining sources have woefully low EROI and hence are super costly (energy wise and hence price wise) to extract, process and transport.

Fracked shale oil is nothing like crude oil, it has the API index and volatility of paint thinner, which is why the trains used to transport it are called “bomb” trains. You cannot make diesel, the indispensable workhorse fuel, from fracked shale oil.

Russia, along with the Caspian area, has in aggregate gone past the peak of oil production, with declining EROI (with only a few fields pre-Peak eg Kashagan). However compared with the USA, the Eurasian oil and gas sources have a far higher EROI, which is IMPOSSIBLE for the US to economically compete with. The fact the the USA is now depleted of easy, cheap oil is the reason they are now stealing oil from Syria and also why they hijacked several Iranian oil tankers. Pipeline terrorism was the only way the US could sell uneconomic LNG to Europe, just as provoking a war was the only way the US could “sell” their obsolete old ordnance to Europe. Dirty tricks and devious skulduggery is how the US “free market” and “rule based order” operates, indeed how it has always operated.

The US financial sector: It was the drug crazed dream of the USA that sanctioning Russia would cause Russia to economically collapse which would then spur a coup d’etat against Putin. This goal backfired spectacularly after Russia demanded energy payments in Rubles, which caused the Ruble to appreciate beyond all expectations.

Sanctioning Russia’s fossil fuel exports only caused the European and global price of oil and especially natural gas to skyrocket, leading to a huge financial windfall for Russia, which by now has largely compensated for the US theft of $300 billion of Russia’s foreign reserves. In times of global uncertainty, many nations move their financial assets into US treasury bonds / securities as a default “safe haven” which has kept the US dollar value afloat so far. However those nations now also realize that their savings could be arbitrarily stolen at any time by the US “rules based order”, hence they are figuring out ways to shift their reserves. At present the European currencies have fallen against the USD, primarily as a result of their own energy sanctions against Russia which has caused the recession of their own economies. The European industrial sectors are poised to collapse from energy starvation. Once the BRICS+ currency arrangements and financial systems, which bypass the USD, get up and running, there will be massive flight of away from US bonds and securities and the massive international repatriation of US dollars back to the US, which will result in hyperinflation and devaluation of the US dollar, resulting in their inability to afford any imports. Along with the deindustrialised condition of the USA, resulting in no significant domestic manufacturing, that all spells extreme poverty for “Exceptionalistan”.

In summary: any initial hopes by the US banking/financial sector that they might benefit from the Ukrainian war have at best resulted in the USD remaining neutral so far, but will inevitably lead to the accelerated collapse of the USD.

CONCLUSION: The USA is screwed. Get over it.

Joe Dirt: Flirting at the fairground HD CLIP

COVERT INTEL: New Symbol and Tactical Armbands for “new” Troops into . . . Ukraine

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A new Symbol for military vehicles has been spotted near the Ukraine conflict, it is shown below: A triangle with the number “2” inside it. In addition, a new tactical band, is also now being observed on troops near the Ukraine conflict: Solid Red, as seen in the image above.

These symbols and red tactical arm bands are being observed on military vehicles and troops in Ukraine.

In letter to North Korea’s Kim, China’s Xi calls for communication, unity, cooperation

SEOUL – In a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ahead of a historic congress of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, Chinese President Xi Jinping said it was more important than ever that Beijing and Pyongyang enhance communication, unity and cooperation, North Korea’s state media reported on Sunday.

The letter was in response to congratulations Mr Kim sent for the congress, which is scheduled to begin on Sunday.

Mr Xi is poised to win a third five-year term as general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, the most powerful job in the country, at the congress.

Mr Xi expressed willingness to strengthen the relationship between China and North Korea, and “make a great contribution to providing two countries and their people with greater happiness and defending peace and stability in the region and the rest of the world”, North Korea state news agency KCNA said.

The reported expression of support comes as North Korea tested a record number of ballistic missiles and made preparations to resume nuclear testing for the first time since 2017.

North Korea says its latest military activities, which also included artillery drills and flights by warplanes, are in response to displays of force by South Korea and the United States, which have staged their own military drills to protest the North’s tests.

From HERE

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 | “My Name Is Buck” (HD) – A Tarantino Film Starring Uma Thurman | 2003

https://youtu.be/2JqFDdvZgHM

China won’t try to become a Western-style democracy. It tried in 1912 and it ended in total disaster.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for China to try again. It has nothing to gain. It’s not worth the risk.

There is nothing wrong with China’s current political system. It works well. It has delivered enormous benefits to the Chinese people…

  • China built the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity in just 35 years, starting from a totally impoverished nation.
  • China finally eradicated extreme poverty in 2020, elevating over 850 million people, according to the World Bank.
  • China built the world’s most spectacular infrastructure of roads, bridges, high-speed rail, airports, etc.
  • China built the world’s second largest military, including its own supercarriers (Fujian), stealth aircraft, and hypersonic missiles.
  • China is at the forefront of space exploration, having built its own navigation satellite system (BeiDou), having landed on the dark side of the moon (Chang’e 4), having landed a rover on Mars (Zhurong), having built its own space station (Tiangong).
  • China protected it population from COVID-19, keeping the death toll to an astonishingly low 5,226. Compare that to USA’s death toll of 1,090,802.

And China did all this without firing a shot. China hasn’t fought a single war since 1979. Western democracies have been embroiled in wars for decades (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, etc.).

The challenge for China, if there is one, is that the Chinese aren’t blind and stupid. They can see clearly what’s wrong with Western-style democracy.

Brilliant discussion of Germany’s announcement it knows who destroyed Nordstream BUT will not disclose…

Brilliant discussion of Germany’s announcement it knows who destroyed Nordstream BUT will not disclose it!! And Sweden will not begin an investigation of Nordstream‘s demise.

UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace takes “emergency trip” to US amid Nuclear war fears

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UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace cancelled his appearance in front of the House of Commons Defense Committee on Tuesday and flew to the US for “emergency meetings” in the Pentagon and White House.  The fact that he flew, rather than use secure communications, suggests the subject matter is actual nuclear war and they don’t want comms intercepted.

Armed Forces Minister James Heappey said Mr. Wallace was meeting with his US counterpart for “the sort of conversations that [are] beyond belief really, the fact we are at a time when these sorts of conversations are necessary.”

A defense source said: “The Defense Secretary is in Washington DC to discuss shared security concerns, including Ukraine. “He will be visiting his counterpart at the Pentagon and senior figures at the White House.”

[HD] Twin Peaks – Jimmy Scott sings “Sycamore Trees” in the red room

BMW to axe UK production of electric Mini and relocate to China | BMW | The Guardian

BMW is to axe all UK production of the award-winning electric Mini and relocate it to China, dealing a major blow to hopes that Britain could be a global hub for zero-emission vehicle manufacture.

BMW makes 40,000 electric Minis per year at its Cowley factory on the outskirts of Oxford.

In an article published by the Times on Saturday, it was confirmed that BMW Oxford’s production of electric vehicles will end next year as part of plans to reshape the carmaker’s lineup from 2024.

The move is a further blow to the UK’s ambition to become a leader in global electric car manufacturing, following Honda’s decision to quit Britain in 2016.

BMW’s joint venture with Great Wall Motor means their hatchback and small SUV models will now be made in east China, as will the next generation zero-emission Mini Aceman.

A new, electric version of the largest Mini model, the Countryman, will, BMW has confirmed, be manufactured at its plant in Leipzig.

The rest from HERE

Joe Dirt: You’re my sister! HD CLIP

Most definitely.

Let’s focus on the period from 1979 to today when China made its spectacular economic rise. China did not fight a single war, whereas USA fought dozens of wars and in the process caused unimaginable death and destruction. This is the very definition of evil.

During this same period, USA sanctioned dozens of countries for not complying with US foreign policy and in the process caused untold human suffering. This is the very definition of evil.

During this same period, USA ran the Guantanamo Bay camp which imprisoned around 780 Muslims and tortured dozens of them. This is well-documented and is the very definition of evil.

China has been accused of running “concentration camps” in Xinjiang. However, these camps were vocational schools that gave Uyghurs employment opportunities to live better lives and hopefully make them give up their separatist leanings. Even if you think they were coerced to attend, it’s a damn sight better than being tortured. The Uyghur participants were allowed to go home on weekends to be with their families. What horrors!

Over the past decade, USA supported an evil regime in Ukraine that practiced ethnic cleansing in Donbas. USA pushed Russia into fighting a proxy war thanks to NATO expansion that threatened the very existence of Russia. USA kept the war going, despite Russia’s and Ukraine’s desire for diplomacy, and in the process caused countless deaths. This is the very definition of evil.

Now, USA is trying to foment another proxy war, this time with China over Taiwan. China does not want war but USA is relentless. Pure evil.

What has China done that is so evil?

  • China is overtaking USA economically and technologically.
  • China is helping developing countries build their infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
  • China is forging economic and security alliances such as BRICS, RCEP and SCO.
  • China is inviting all nations to participate in its space station program, including the United States (which banned China from the ISS in 2011).
  • China is protecting its territorial integrity in South China Sea and Taiwan. To do this, China is building up its military.

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This kind of evil is nothing compared to American evil.

NATO Starts Nuclear Drill “Steadfast Noon” with 60 aircraft, B-52 bombers and other missile carriers

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NATO on Monday launched its regular nuclear deterrence drills in western Europe.

The 30-nation alliance has stressed that the “routine, recurring training activity” — which runs until October 30 — was planned before Moscow invaded Ukraine and is not linked to the current situation.

It will involve US B-52 long-range bombers, and up to 60 aircraft in total will take part in training flights over Belgium, the United Kingdom and the North Sea.

The nuclear drills – which do not involve live bombs – are taking place amid heightened tensions after Russia repeatedly threatened nuclear strikes in Ukraine following major military setbacks on the battlefield there.

“Steadfast Noon” is likely to coincide with Moscow’s own annual nuclear drills, dubbed “Grom,” which are normally conducted in late October and in which Russia tests its nuclear-capable bombers, submarines and missiles.

The drills that will involve 14 countries and up to 60 aircraft, including the most advanced fighter jets on the market and U.S. B-52 long-range bombers that will fly in from Minot Air Base in North Dakota, the statement said.

This drill takes place every year, like Russia does, but always over different countries and locations. This time it involves locations & training flights to be conducted over Belgium, Great Britain and the North Sea.

Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (5/12) Movie CLIP – Talk is Cheap (1991) HD

What is the situation with democracy in China?

It’s very good. China is a truly democratic nation. However, China’s democracy does not hew to the Western model of democracy which is sadly broken.

In fact, according to Latana’s Democracy Perception Index, the Chinese people regard their country as the most democratic in the world!

Major shift in Putin’s stance on Ukraine

Very interesting.

German companies pour more investment in China, as ‘decoupling’ hype wanes – Global Times

Despite some German politicians and media outlets that hype an industrial “decoupling” from China, German enterprises have been continuously investing in China, attracted by the enormous size of the Chinese market.

The latest example is Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), a German state-owned investment and development bank, which will lend 69.52 million euros ($67.75 million) for a railway project linking North China’s Tianjin city and Beijing Daxing International Airport. The loan term is 15 years, including a 5-year grace period, China’s Ministry of Finance (MOF) said on Sunday.

The total investment in the project amounts to 11.65 billion yuan ($1.64 billion), MOF said.

If a project is financed by German banks, chances are large that it is also a “sweet pastry” for the global capital markets, Chen Jia, an independent research fellow on international strategy, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Chen pointed out that Germany has been attaching great importance to China’s infrastructure sector when it comes to investment, because China’s infrastructure projects are well known for stable, long-term investment returns.

In the first half of 2022, German companies’ direct investment in China hit a record high, surpassing the level of tens of billions of euros, according to a report by the German Institute for Economic Research, more commonly known as DIW Berlin, which was released in August.

Full article HERE

Black Hawk Down: Help from above

Let me see.

I get five weeks paid holiday leave.

I am entitled to 9 months paid maternity leave, then 3 months unpaid, (men get 2 weeks paid paternity) my job would be waiting for me when I returned.

I was off sick for 4 months, I was paid full pay and I didn’t lose my job even though I couldn’t return to doing the work I did before, an alternative role was found for me.

My company can’t sack me as I am now disabled.

When I was off sick I spent 3 weeks in hospital, I had emergency surgery followed by care in hospital transfer by ambulance to a convalescent hospital to help me recover and since the physiotherapy and lots of medication, the only part of this I paid for is about £110 a YEAR to cover the cost of ALL medication.

I live in a country where religious nuts can’t make laws.

I live in a country where death by shooting is rare.

I live in a country where women can make choices about their own body

My country isn’t perfect but I am happy living here and I am definitely not jealous of people living in USA

Do they have a president for life now?

No. Xi Jinping can be voted out of office in the future if he fails to perform well.

China is not the only country with no term limits. There’s also Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and UK, for example. Tell me, is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau PM for life?

They’re STILL Doing it: BOSTON UNIVERSITY ‘CREATES’ NEW COVID STRAIN WITH ‘80% KILL RATE’

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With life returning to normal as Covid-19 wanes, a new Covid strain which has 80% kill rate has been CREATED in the United States.

A team of Boston University scientists claim that they have made a hybrid virus — combining Omicron and the original Wuhan Beta strain — that killed 80 per cent of mice in a study.

Experts have slammed the scientists for “playing with fire” and engaging in such “dangerous virus manipulation” research which has not been peer-reviewed.

Professor Shmuel Shapira, a leading scientist in the Israeli Government, said: ‘This should be totally forbidden, it’s playing with fire.’

There are theories that a virus manipulation research in China may have started the pandemic.  A lab in China’s Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first detected, carried out similar research on bat coronaviruses.

Dr Richard Ebright, a chemist at Rutgers University in New Jersey said the research is a clear example of gain of function research. “If we are to avoid a next lab-generated pandemic, it is imperative that oversight of enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research be strengthened,” he added.

Researchers extracted Omicron’s spike protein — the unique structure that binds to and invades human cells — and attached it to the original wildtype strain that first emerged in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic.  The scientists call this new hybrid virus “Omicron-S”

The researchers looked at how mice fared against the new hybrid strain compared to the original Omicron variant. “In…mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80 percent,” they wrote in the paper.

However, rodents survived and experienced only ‘mild’s symptoms when they were exposed to the standard Omicron strain.

“It is especially concerning that this new US-government ePPP research – like the previous US-government ePPP research on chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses at Wuhan Institute of Virology that may have caused the pandemic – appears not to have undergone the prior risk-benefit review mandated under US-government policies. If we are to avoid a next lab-generated pandemic, it is imperative that oversight of ePPP research be strengthened,” Ebright said.

We Were Lied To About Vaccines ADMITS Pfizer!

Forever…

Xi Jinping Breaks His Non-Militarization Pledge in the Spratlys

What's China supposed to do? Wait until the British gunboats return before starting to defend itself?

Earlier this week, satellite imagery released by a U.S. think tank shows, for the first time, evidence of military point-defense capabilities on various China-controlled features in the Spratly Islands. The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that “China appears to have built significant point-defense capabilities, in the form of large anti-aircraft guns and probable close-in weapons systems (CIWS), at each of its outposts in the Spratly Islands.”

From HERE

If so, why do people want to go to China if they don’t have the same freedoms as in the United States of America?

China provides different kinds of freedom. Frankly, US freedoms are worth shit.

Chinese freedoms:

  • freedom from dying in a pandemic
  • freedom to have food on the table and a roof over your head — in USA, over half a million Americans are homeless
  • freedom to have affordable health care and education
  • freedom from rampant and random gun violence — in USA, mass shootings on a daily basis!
  • freedom from systemic racism — in USA, BLM and “I can’t breathe”
  • freedom from mass incarceration — in USA, the highest number and the highest rate in the world!
  • freedom from opioid addiction on an epidemic scale
  • freedom to have a living wage — in USA, minimum wage is still stuck at 1960s level

So please tell me, what freedoms do Americans have that are worth anything?

Cheesy Hamburger Casserole

This Cheesy Hamburger Casserole is just as easy to make as Hamburger Helper, and you can control the ingredients. Great weekday meal and the kids love it!

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Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
  • 1 large onion, diced
  • 1 tablespoon canola oil
  • salt, to taste
  • pepper to taste
  • 1/2 teaspoon oregano
  • 2 cloves chopped garlic
  • 1/2 teaspoon paprika
  • one 28-ounce can pureed tomatoes, or your favorite sauce
  • 16 ounce box macaroni noodles
  • 1/2 cup each grated cheddar and mozzarella cheeses


Instructions

  1. Sweat the onions in the oil with a three-fingered pinch of salt. Add the beef and cook it, breaking it up as you do. Add another three-fingered pinch of salt or two, along with the dry seasonings. Add the tomatoes and bring to a simmer, then reduce the heat to low and cook for an hour.
  2. Cook the macaroni in boiling water till it’s half done. Drain it and add it to the tomatoes. (I wanted this to stretch into two meals, so I used the whole box, but if you want your dish to be very tomatoey and beefy, you might want to add only half the macaroni). Stir it into the sauce. Taste it and add cheese and cover or transfer it to a large baking dish and cover it with foil. It can be refrigerated for up to two days, or frozen a few weeks.
  3. If refrigerated bake it in a 400 degree oven till it’s piping hot (about 45 minutes if it’s cold to room temperature). Just before you’re ready to eat, remove the foil, cover macaroni with the cheese and broil till the cheese is bubbly.

US inflation numbers are really bad. Biden says everything is under control

Really bad.

Three Good Pieces On The War In Ukraine

I am busy with renovation work but here are three good pieces about the war in Ukraine:

> Plainly put, the Europeans have been nicely played by the Americans. India should take note of the US’ sense of entitlement. Basically, the Biden administration created a contrived energy crisis whose real aim is war profiteering. 

...

India should expect the defeat of the US and NATO, which completes the transition to a multipolar world order. <
> Increasingly, European publics are likely to blame the United States for policies that fuel inflation and bring on economic recession, especially as their currencies weaken against the dollar. The U.S. sanctions on Russia will be seen by many as self-serving attempts to dominate Western Europe.

A new iron curtain is now being imposed on Russia — this time by Western policy — even as the United States announces more measures to confront and “contain” an assertive China. This will result, inevitably, in more cooperation between Russia and China. Also, the increasing use of economic sanctions to achieve political purposes will encounter push-back with a greater volume of international trade conducted in national currencies other than the U.S. dollar.

As Europe is weakened and more countries suffer from U.S. sanctions, coalitions to resist U.S. dominance will flourish. Geopolitical competition will take precedence over action to deal with common problems, even as international conflict intensifies them.

What all the parties to the conflict in Ukraine seem to have forgotten is that the future of mankind will not be determined by where international borders are drawn — these have never been static in history and doubtless will continue to change from time to time. The future of mankind will be determined by whether nations learn to settle their differences peacefully. <
> What makes the "I stand with Ukraine" version of the Twitter mob unique is that it brings together two forces that used to be sworn enemies of one another—the woke Left and the neoconservative Right. It turns out they share many of the same loathsome ideological and personality traits, and have a similar "slash and burn" approach to political engagement. It's a new political marriage. 

...

This shift is disorienting, but on a purely tactical level, it makes a certain amount of sense. Neocons invented the cancellation game before there was even a Twitter board on which to play it. Neocons arrogantly dismiss the other side's point of view as argued in bad faith and not worth considering, and label anyone who dares question the cause as a heretic or traitor. 

...

Warping the debate in this way allows delusional and contradictory thinking to go unchallenged. Thus, we get the argument that Putin is a madman who will kill indiscriminately to achieve his aims—but he is also somehow definitely bluffing about using nuclear weapons. And he's only using that bluff because he's losing the war—but if he's not stopped in Ukraine, he will go on to conquer the rest of Europe. Putin's regime must fall because he has killed or jailed all the liberal reformers and yoked himself to a hardline Far Right, but somehow he will be replaced by a liberal reformer when his regime collapses.

It's nonsensical, and a real debate would expose some of the delusions in this thinking. But we aren't allowed to have one.

As long as this woke-neocon alliance is allowed to set the terms of the debate, we will continue to see a one-way ratchet toward greater and more dangerous escalation of this conflict. <
Posted by b at 16:22 UTC | Comments (94)
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Russia’s Medvedev Gets Blunt with Israel

Russia’s Deputy Chairman of its state Federation Council (Senate) had strong words for Israel about supplying weapons to Ukraine . . .

Dmitry Medvedev doesn’t post a lot on his social media (Telegram) account, but when he does . . .  Oh Boy!

Writing on his channel Monday, Medvedev put it blunty:

"Israel seems to be going to supply weapons to the Kyiv regime. A very reckless move. 

It will destroy all interstate relations between our countries. 

I'm not talking about the fact that the Bandera geeks were Nazis, and remained so. Just look at the symbolism of their modern henchmen. If they are supplied with weapons, then it is time for Israel to declare Bandera and Shukhevych their heroes..."

When Medvedev says “It will destroy all interstate relations between our countries.”  he means it.

Israel is sleepwalking right towards Armageddon.

Eggs Benedict

Hot buttered English muffins, Canadian-style bacon, and poached eggs are topped with a heavenly drizzle of hollandaise sauce. Breakfast does not get any better than a classic Eggs Benedict!

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FOR THE EGGS:
  • Salt
  • 2 Tbsp. white vinegar
  • 4 eggs
  • 2 English muffins, split
  • 3 Tbsp. butter
  • 4 slices Canadian bacon
FOR THE HOLLANDAISE:
  • 12 Tbsp. unsalted butter
  • 3 egg yolks
  • 2-3 tbsp. fresh lemon juice

 

 

  1. For the eggs: Bring a medium skillet of salted water to a simmer over medium heat; add vinegar. Crack eggs into 4 small dishes. Slip eggs into simmering water, turn off heat, cover, and cook until whites are just firm, 4 minutes. Transfer eggs with a slotted spoon to a bowl of ice water and set aside.
  2. Preheat oven to 200 F. Toast muffins, then spread with some of the butter. Transfer to 2-4 plates; keep warm in oven. Melt remaining butter in a medium skillet over medium heat. Fry bacon until browned, about 5 minutes. Place bacon on muffins; keep warm in oven.
  3. For the hollandaise: Melt butter in a small pan over low heat. Whisk egg yolks, lemon juice, 1 tbsp. water, and salt and pepper to taste in a heavy, nonreactive saucepan until pale yellow; then cook, whisking constantly over medium-low heat, until whisk leaves a trail in eggs, about 8 minutes. Remove pan from heat. Add butter 1 tbsp. at a time, whisking constantly, until sauce thickens; gradually pour in remaining butter, whisking constantly, leaving milky solids behind.
  4. Reheat eggs in a skillet of simmering water for 1 minute; transfer with a slotted spoon to paper towels to drain. To serve, carefully place egg on bacon, and spoon some hollandaise on top. Garnish with parsley, if you like.

It’s Official: It’s ALL a Lie | Redacted with Natali and Clayton Morris

What is interesting about this video is that it deconstructs the propaganda about Ukraine. It’s fascinating, and disgusting at the same time. The intro is LONG. Start around 37 minutes.

https://youtu.be/5leOO0C56Ug

Was ancient Rome run so poorly as the United States is today?

It’s a valid question. Yes it is.

No one, by any jumps or fantasy justifications can actually validate the United States as functioning AT ALL, let alone in some form of order. At this stage, it simply appears that the USA is one enormous criminal network… attacking everyone, fleecing everyone and everything, and just looting and pillaging at will while the vile evil villains joke and strut about proud and haughty in their seemingly untouchable state.

The United States is in a steep nose dive.

All evidence points in that direction.

Consider this next article. If the pandemic is the cause of ACT test results, then you would see a uniform drop across all college entrance tests in all the nations of the world. But that is not what is being observed. Only a drop in the American ACT tests.

Well… it must be the pandemic. Not the US system…

ACT test scores drop to lowest in 30 years in pandemic slide

Ah. Blame the pandemic. You notice that no one is providing proof that it is caused by the pandemic. Just a bold statement taken as truth.

-MM

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PHOENIX (AP) — Scores on the ACT college admissions test by this year’s high school graduates hit their lowest point in more than 30 years — the latest evidence of the enormity of learning disruption during the pandemic.

The class of 2022′s average ACT composite score was 19.8 out of 36, marking the first time since 1991 that the average score was below 20. What’s more, an increasing number of high school students failed to meet any of the subject-area benchmarks set by the ACT — showing a decline in preparedness for college-level coursework.

The test scores, made public in a report Wednesday, show 42% of ACT-tested graduates in the class of 2022 met none of the subject benchmarks in English, reading, science and math, which are indicators of how well students are expected to perform in corresponding college courses.

In comparison, 38% of test takers in 2021 failed to meet any of the benchmarks.

“Academic preparedness is where we are seeing the decline,” said Rose Babington, senior director for state partnerships for the ACT. “Every time we see ACT test scores, we are talking about skills and standards, and the prediction of students to be successful and to know the really important information to succeed and persist through their first year of college courses.”

From HERE

Ah. the USA is in freefall.

Consider the American economy. At what point is the “tolerance threshold” crossed and open revolt / fighting occurs?

Pause and think about it.

Pay attention to the first sentence in the next article…

Thanks Biden! This Is What “Stagflation” Looks Like, And It Is Going To Be With Us For A While…

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Normally, we shouldn’t have economic stagnation and rampant inflation at the same time.  But that is exactly what we’ve got.

U.S. GDP actually declined during the first two quarters of this year, and we are being warned that economic activity could slow down a whole lot more in the months ahead.  Meanwhile, we are in the midst of the worst inflation crisis since the Jimmy Carter era.  The cost of living has become extremely oppressive, and this is particularly true when it comes to food.  We just got some new numbers from the Department of Labor on Wednesday, and quite a few of them are absolutely stunning

  • Fresh and dried vegetables: up 15.7 percent for the month and 40.2 percent for the year.
  • Grains: up 10.7 percent for the month and 30.4 percent for the year.
  • Fresh eggs: up 16.7 percent for the month and 97.3 percent for the year.
  • Bakery products: up 0.8 percent for the month and 14.0 percent for the year.
  • Pasta: up 1.1 percent for the month and 34.1 percent for the year.
  • Finfish and shellfish: up 2.5 percent for the month and 2.9 percent for the year.
  • Processed fruits and vegetables: up 2.6 percent for the month and 16.0 percent for the year.
  • Dairy products: down 1.6 percent for the month but up 18.2 percent for the year.
  • Soft drinks: up 1.9 percent for the month but up 15.8 percent for the year.
  • Pork: up 5.5 percent for the month but down 2.0 percent for the year.
  • Fresh fruits and melons: down 1.2 percent for the month but up 20.7 percent for the year.
  • Turkey: up 0.5 percent for the month and 38.2 percent for the year.

This is crazy.

In my entire lifetime, I have never seen anything like this.

Everywhere you look in the grocery store, prices are rising to levels that are completely nuts.  If you can believe it, even Pepsi has raised prices on their products by an average of 17 percent over the past year…

The 12% increase it expects from full year organic revenue, noted by the Wall Street Journal this morning, comes at the hands of average prices rising an astonishing 17% from the year prior. The price hikes have also helped the company raise its profit outlook. It now expects per-share earnings growth of 10% for the year, the report notes.

The rise in prices has helped offset a “slight decline” in overall sales volume, the report says. This means that Pepsi is fighting the recession that the country is in with more inflation.

Has the size of your paycheck gone up by 17 percent during the past 12 months?

If not, you are losing ground.

Sadly, most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck these days, and more of us than ever are falling behind on our bills.  Just check out the results of a brand new LendingTree study
That’s according to a new LendingTree study, which found that 32% of Americans have paid a bill late over the past six months, and an overwhelming majority – about 61% – said it’s because they did not have enough money to cover the costs.

Another 40% of respondents said they are struggling more to afford their bills than they were just one year ago. Most said they fell behind on a utility bill, credit card payment or cable or internet bill.

“Life is getting more expensive by the day, and it’s shrinking Americans’ already tiny financial margin for error down to zero,” said Matt Schulz, LendingTree’s chief credit analyst.

At the same time that the cost of living is becoming excruciatingly painful, economic activity in the United States is really starting to slow down and big companies are starting to lay off workers.

In fact, we just learned that Walmart will be laying off almost 1,500 more workers

As Walmart continues making adjustments to the structure of its business plan, the e-commerce-based company has announced it will let go of nearly 1,500 employees by the beginning of December. The employees will all be laid off from one specific fulfillment center in Atlanta, Georgia. This may come at a bad time for all the employees with the holidays quickly approaching, but the company is doing this to ensure their future.

A recent blog post published by the Senior Vice President, Karisa Sprague, breaks down and shares details of just how they are developing their fulfillment network for the future. Essentially, the Senior VP says that Walmart is making necessary adjustments to provide the highest level of customer service that they can, as well as also doing the best by their employees. She goes on the mention that evolution is essential as times change.

And Crypto.com has just laid off approximately 40 percent of their entire workforce..

Crypto.com has laid off some 2,000 employees in one of the biggest downsizes in the cryptocurrency industry yet. The cuts account for about 40% of the DeFi exchange’s staff, according to CoinDesk. The current layoffs come after the exchange cut over 400 jobs in the middle of June.

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

Many more layoffs are coming.

And just like we witnessed in 2008, the U.S. housing market is really starting to implode.

Rapidly rising rates are scaring off buyers, and demand for new mortgages is absolutely plummeting

The average interest rate on US home loans has hit its highest level since 2006, as the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes to fight inflation continue to raise borrowing costs for homebuyers.

The average rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage hit 6.81 percent for the week ending October 7, the eighth straight weekly increase, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said on Wednesday.

Higher borrowing costs have sent home sales volume plunging. The MBA’s Purchase Index, which measures new mortgages to buy a home, dropped 2 percent from the prior week and 39 percent from a year ago.

This is what stagflation looks like.

And thanks to a series of colossal errors by our leaders, it is going to be with us for a while.

We were warned that an economic day of reckoning would eventually come, and now it is here.

If you are searching for someone to thank for this mess, you can thank Joe Biden, our free spending Congress critters, and the “experts” at the Federal Reserve.

Most Americans trusted them when they told us that they had everything under control.

Now we can see that it was all a charade, and the months ahead are looking exceedingly bleak indeed.

Putin’s CICA Summit Address

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr President of [Kazakhstan] Kassym-Jomart Kemelevich, Dear colleagues!

For 30 years, the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia has been discussing pressing issues related to strengthening security and stability throughout the vast Asian region.

Today's meeting is taking place against the backdrop of major changes in global politics and the economy. The world is becoming truly multipolar, and Asia plays a very noticeable, if not key, role in this, where new centers of power are growing stronger.

The countries of the Asian region are the locomotive of world economic growth. Such integration associations as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the Eurasian Economic Union are operating dynamically and with good returns.

Russia is also actively involved in all these processes. We stand for the development and prosperity of Asia and the creation for this purpose of a wide open space of mutually beneficial trade and investment cooperation, for the expansion and deepening of cooperation ties in various sectors of the economy.

Let me remind you that it was Russia that stood at the origins of the creation of the business council at the meeting, through which many successful conferences and seminars have been held over the past years on the entire range of economic topics.

And of course, together with other Asian states, we are doing everything to form a system of equal and indivisible security based on the universally recognized principles of international law of the UN Charter.

Our meeting and other regional associations have to deal with many acute problems, including the increased volatility of global prices for energy, food, fertilizers, raw materials and other important goods. This leads to a deterioration in the quality of life in developed and developing countries. Moreover, there is a real threat of hunger and large-scale social upheaval, especially in the poorest countries.

Russia, for its part, is making every effort to provide critical products to countries in need. We call for the elimination of all artificial, illegitimate barriers to the normal functioning of global supply chains in order to meet the urgent challenges of food security.

Like many of our partners in Asia, we believe that it is necessary to launch a revision of the principles of the global financial system, which for decades allowed the self-proclaimed so-called golden billion, which has closed all flows of capital and technology, to a large extent live at someone else's expense.

As a priority step, we see a more active use of national currencies in mutual settlements. Such measures would undoubtedly contribute to strengthening the financial sovereignty of our states, developing domestic capital markets, and deepening regional economic integration.

It is extremely important, together with other regional forums and organizations, to continue to work actively to resolve emerging crisis situations and conflicts in Asia, to strengthen cooperation between our states in countering the terrorist threat, identifying and neutralizing extremist groups, blocking their financial support, combating drug trafficking and suppressing the propaganda of radical ideas.

Unfortunately, Afghanistan remains one of the most acute security challenges for our region. Our colleagues have already spoken about this today.

This country, after more than 20 years of military presence of the United States and NATO, the failure of their policy, was unable to independently solve the problems associated with terrorist threats, which is confirmed by the ongoing series of bloody terrorist attacks, including the explosion near the Russian Embassy in Kabul on September 5.

In order to normalize the situation on the territory of Afghanistan, of course, it is necessary to jointly promote its economic reconstruction. But above all, we urge compensation for the damage done to Afghans during the years of occupation and the unfreezing of illegally frozen Afghan funds.

In the context of a settlement in Afghanistan, it would be useful to use the capabilities of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and its regional anti-terrorist structure.

We also invite all Asian countries to cooperate more closely with the International Data Bank for Countering Terrorism, established at the initiative of Russia.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that Russia, together with China, has drafted a joint statement at this summit on security cooperation in the field of information and communication technologies. We hope that it will be approved.

In conclusion, I would like to mention the importance of strengthening multilateral cooperation between the states participating in the meeting in the social, cultural and humanitarian spheres, in promoting inter-civilizational dialogue and contacts between people.

In particular, volunteer movements also require support. The acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic, which we have passed, has shown the undoubtedly useful role that volunteer and youth structures play in providing assistance and assistance to the population. Russia has a good, rich experience in these matters, which we are ready to share with interested countries.

On the whole, I would like to note with satisfaction that the joint work within the framework of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures is progressing in a positive manner. Russia will continue to develop multifaceted cooperation with all the parties represented at this meeting.

We support the initiatives of Kazakhstan's chairmanship.

Thank you very much for your attention.

With the latest acts of terrorism being performed by NATO, IMO it’s becoming clear that the term terrorism is becoming a cover term for NATO/Outlaw US Empire.

The anti-terrorism principle, which also includes the extremism present within Color Revolution attempts, is now a major part of Eurasian multilateral organizations’s aims.

Thus, while none of those organizations are overtly against any one nation or bloc, it’s clear that they’re against those that are responsible for Terrorism and Extremism, which as we know consist of the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals.

Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 13 2022 16:47 utc | 10

7 Legendary Cryptids that Turned Out to Be Real!

From HERE

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Cryptozoology is the search for and study of animals that mainstream science considers to be mythical or non-existent. Animals studied by cryptozoologists are called cryptids. Famous examples include creatures like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Yeti. Unsurprisingly then, there is quite a lot of derision aimed at cryptids in scientific circles. Cryptids are the stuff of low-level tabloid magazines and conspiracy theorists, right? Wrong! Many animals that experts once believed to be cryptids are actually flesh and blood living things.

Famous Cryptids that Aren’t Actually Cryptids Anymore

1.The Platypus

The platypus is a weird animal that seems to break a lot of rules. At the time of its first discovery by Europeans, it seemed to contradict everything they thought they knew about mammals.

The platypus is a furry, Australian mammal that lives in rivers. It has the feet of an otter and the tail of a beaver. So far, not that strange. Then one looks at the head, and it appears to have a bill of a duck, unlike any other mammal.

Even stranger still is the fact that it lays eggs. Only five living mammal species do so, the platypus and four kinds of echidna (spiny anteaters). Up until the discovery of the platypus, it was common knowledge that one of the things which defined a mammal was giving birth to live offspring.

On top of this, the platypus is venomous! Venomous mammals were basically unheard of. The male platypus produces venom from glands attached to its ankle spurs. It is believed these are used defensively against other males, especially during mating season.

It’s unsurprising then that European naturalists from the 18th and 19th centuries believed the platypus to be a hoax. When the first platypus corpses arrived in Europe from Australia, the experts weren’t sure what to make of them.

Many thought it to be the work of Chinese sailors, who had previously tricked them with the corpse of a supposed mermaid. It was believed the platypus corpses were just well-put-together amalgamations of other animals! It took nearly a century for zoologists to admit they were wrong and definitively confirm the existence of the platypus.

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2.The Giant Squid

Another poster child for famous cryptids that turned out to be real is the terrifying giant squid. Reports of the giant squid go back 2,000 years to the time of Aristotle. Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist, did a pretty good job describing the giant squid in his Natural History .

He got pretty much everything right, except the size. Showing that the giant squid was too massive even for the superstitious ancient writers to get right, Pliny only estimated the squid at 30 feet (9 meters) long, when in reality it’s over 40 feet (12 meters) long! Early run-ins with giant squid were likely the inspiration for several mythological sea monsters , like Norse mythology’s Kraken and the Scylla of Greek mythology.

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The giant squid remained a cryptid for so long because its existence was seemingly fantastical, and hard to verify. The sea is almost unfathomable in its size and depth. Looking for anything in the ocean, even something as huge as a giant squid, is like looking for a needle in a haystack. This is exacerbated by the fact that the giant squid is a deep sea creature, and humans haven’t spent much time down there.

The only chance early zoologists had to study and verify the giant squid was through carcasses that would very occasionally wash ashore. The problem with this was that hungry sea creatures had often begun eating the corpses before they washed ashore, meaning complete samples were rare. Added to this was the fact that the carcasses tended to rot extremely quickly, leaving little to work with.

The first recorded discovery of a mostly intact giant squid carcass was in the 1870s. However, it wasn’t until the last decade or so that we managed to take photos of a live specimen, cementing the giant squid’s status as a former cryptid.

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3.Sea Serpent Cryptids

Stories of dreadful sea serpents that dwell in the ocean date back thousands of years. Even the Bible makes references to a gigantic beast called Leviathan that roams the briny depths looking for prey. Much like in the case of the giant squid, for a long time, scientists thought these sea monsters were too huge to be real.

Cryptozoologists, however, believe that many sightings of these historic sea monsters are cases of real animals being misidentified, and then being given a fantastical, superstitious twist. One incredibly rare species is perhaps the likely culprit.

The oarfish is a long, bony fish with an elongated body that has been found to grow to at least 56 feet (17 meters) long. They are found in oceans all over the world, but usually live in the deep ocean. They have sometimes washed ashore during storms and occasionally come to the surface when near death.

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It seems likely that these giant fish are responsible for at least some of these early depictions of sea serpents. The first live oarfish wasn’t filmed until 2001, showing just how rare and hard to verify these fish were.

4.The Ultimate Cryptid: The Unicorn

Now obviously, unicorns as traditionally portrayed don’t exist. The unicorn is still very much a cryptid. Except it isn’t. Although no one has discovered a horned horse yet, we can go back 2,000 years and find the animals that likely inspired talk of unicorns.

Pliny the Elder described the unicorn two thousand years ago. He described it as having “the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse; it makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead, two cubits in length. This animal, it is said, cannot be taken alive.” That sounds suspiciously like an Indian rhinoceros.

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There is another contender for real-life unicorn inspiration. The second is a little stranger, however, seeing as it lives in the sea. The narwhal is a type of toothed whale that lives in the freezing waters around Greenland, Canada, and Russia. Its defining feature is a large protruding canine tooth, known as its tusk. This tusk is startlingly similar to the imagined unicorn horn.

Unicorn horns were an incredibly popular curio through the Middle Ages into the Renaissance period. These unicorn horns came from narwhals that the Vikings had hunted, selling their tusks for crazy prices as unicorn horns. When the English explorer Martin Frobisher led a Canadian expedition in 1577, he came across a dead narwhal. The name he gave it? The sea unicorn.

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5.The Komodo Dragon

Before 1910, any scientist claiming to believe in a giant lizard that looked like a dragon would have been laughed out of the room. At the time, it was widely believed that giant lizards were a thing of the past, and nothing on the scale of a Komodo dragon could exist.

When pearl fishermen returned from the Lesser Sunda Islands in Indonesia telling tall tales of giant ‘land crocodiles’, no one took them seriously. After all, fishermen are famous for exaggeration. Then, in 1910, an expedition from Buitenzorg Zoological Museum visited Komodo Island and produced the first scientific report on the creatures. Lieutenant Jacques Karel Henri visited the island and took home both a Komodo dragon skin and a photograph.

The Komodo dragon remained mostly a mystery until 1926, when a second expedition went in search of the dragon. Its leader, W. Douglas Burden, came back with twelve preserved Komodo dragon bodies, as well as two live animals. It was only then the Komodo dragon truly left the realm of the cryptids and entered the world of established science.

The 1926 expedition and discovery of an animal considered by many to be prehistoric went on to inspire the 1933 film King Kong .

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6.The Humble Gorilla

Sometimes an animal becomes so commonly known that it’s surprising it was ever considered a cryptid at all. For example, the humble gorilla was considered a cryptid until 1847.

The term gorilla comes from a Carthaginian explorer called Hanno the Navigator, who was exploring the African coast in 500 BC. He described coming across a tribe of “gorillae”, monstrous and violent humans. Although it is likely he actually encountered chimps or baboons, the name has stuck.

Reports of monstrous, hairy humans who would attack and overpower villages continue throughout the centuries but were never taken seriously by scientists. In the 16th century, an English explorer described ape-like humans visiting his campfire at night.

Gorillas in general remained cryptids until 1847, when Thomas Savage found gorilla bones in Liberia. With the help of a Harvard anatomist named Jeffries Wyman, he then released a formal description of the species dubbing it, Gorilla gorilla. Sadly, from this point onwards, other anthropologists began hunting gorillas in earnest, seeking to learn as much about the discovery as possible.

The mountain gorilla stayed a cryptid for a while longer. It wasn’t formally recognized as a species until 1902, when a German officer, Captain Robert von Beringe, shot one in the Virunga region of Rwanda and took it home to Europe.

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7.The Okapi

The okapi is an African mammal that resembles a cross between a zebra and a donkey. Their only bizarre feature is the two hair-covered, horn-like structures called ossicones that they have just above their eyes. These may sound bizarre, but actually, the okapi is from the giraffe family, and the ossicones are pretty much the same as a giraffe’s horns.

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The okapi isn’t especially peculiar, certainly not compared to the giant squid or platypus. Yet it was considered a myth until 1901. The problem was its central African habitat was already well-known to European explorers, and since they had never seen one, they did not believe the tales the locals told of the okapi.

Okapi inhabit incredibly dense forests and live quiet, solitary lives. Even the locals who told stories of them were unsure. Their knowledge of the okapi predominantly came from evidence the animals left behind, like tracks, rather than actual sightings.

In 1890, Sir Henry Stanley was the first European to describe the mammal after traveling in the region. However, he had no solid proof, and so the okapi remained a cryptid. It was not until 1901 that zoologist and imperial officer Sir Harry Johnston obtained a skull and some skins with the help of locals. With this physical evidence, the okapi’s existence could finally be confirmed.

The okapi wasn’t caught on film in the wild until 2008, which should give an idea of just how hard this beautiful animal is to track down.

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Conclusion

So, if these cryptids turned out to be real, what about Nessy or Bigfoot? Why are people who believe in them still mocked and derided in the scientific community? The animals above, and in fact, all former cryptids share at least one thing in common.

They come from remote, hard-to-explore regions of the planet. These animals stayed cryptids for so long because European scientists hadn’t had a chance to fully explore their habitats yet. Once they had, these animals stop being cryptids. The problem is, besides the oceans, most of the earth’s land mass has been pretty well studied by now. The likelihood of creatures as large as the okapi walking around undiscovered up to now is slim to none.

Another thing most cryptids have in common is that they were actually discovered ages ago. The okapi and mountain gorilla had been talked about by African tribes for centuries. Likewise, the indigenous peoples of Australia were likely familiar with the platypus.

The awkward truth is that the only reason these animals were never taken seriously is old-fashioned racism. For the most part, something remained cryptid until European scientists said otherwise, seeing it with their own eyes. Centuries of eyewitness accounts made by the locals didn’t count, because colonial-era European scientists lacked respect for the indigenous people of the places they were colonizing.

Although it is unlikely any more large cryptids will be discovered, there is always some hope. There are still far-flung corners of the world and the fathomless depths of the oceans we haven’t scoured yet. If we are now willing to listen to the people from these areas, who knows what we might discover?

PayPal’s censorship plan EXPOSED and it’s getting worse

This is horrific!

The USA is NOT NOT NOT the land of freedom and justice.

This is fucking horrific. Watch the entire thing to the very end!!!!

URGENT: RUSSIA ISSUES CIVIL DEFENSE INSTRUCTIONS TO ENTIRE POPULATION: “RADIATION”

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School children in every single city and town in Russia brought home official government notices today, telling families what to do in Civil Defense Emergencies like . . . radiation.

Poster boards are going up in mass-transit stations, at city halls, in shopping centers with the exact same message.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION:

“Civil Defense
The procedure for the actions of the population on the go signal when at work.
The signal “ATTENTION TO ALL!”
Accompanied by the activation of sirens with intermittent beeps followed by verbal information about the signal GO
* upon hearing the SIGNAL, turn on your radio or television set and listen to the message about the situation and how to proceed
* pass on the information you receive to your neighbors
* Act according to the messages you have been given.
Ways you should notify ALL!!:
* Television
* loudspeakers
* sirens
* bell
*radio
*Howls from businesses and vehicles
*phone, text message
* mobile sound-amplifying installations
* Information board
*social networks
Actions of the population
(inscriptions on the signs)
– Turn off lights, gas, water, heaters
– Close windows and doors tightly
– Cover gaps around doors, vents with a wet cloth.
– use personal protective equipment.
– Take cover in the nearest protective structure, buried room or other premises of the underground space, including the subway.
– Report to the assembly area
– evacuate to a safe area.
ACTIONS FOR:
* AIRBORNE ALARM
* CHEMICAL ALARM
* RADIATION ALARM
* THREAT OF CATASTROPHIC FLOODING
RESTRICTED SIGNAL
* Return to your place of work
* Be prepared for a possible repeat of the civil defense “ATTENTION TO ALL” signal.””

 

NEW YORK CITY DID SAME

The Hal Turner Radio Show reported to readers and listeners back on July 11 that New York City Emergency Management issued a Public Service Announcement for TV telling New Yorkers what to do when a NUCLEAR BOMB hits the city!   (Story Here)

Then New York City posted NUCLEAR ATTACK warning signs in Subway cars (Story Here)

 

NEW JERSEY TOO

The State of New Jersey also began warning its population of nuclear emergencies with large poster boards inside Shopping Malls (Story Here)

In September, New Jersey placed giant ads on the sides of all New Jersey Transit buses with the same warnings and instructions! (Story Here)

 

OTHER COUNTRIES TOO!

Just this week, the country of Finland told its citizens to get Potassium Iodide pills to take in a “Radiation Emergency”  (Story Here)

When the Russia-Ukraine thing went “hot” Romania knew what was coming . . .  and began handing out Potassium Iodide pills to its citizens (Story Here)

Poland began handing out Potassium Iodide Pills to its citizens just weeks ago (Story Here)

Back in April, the European Commission began construction of nuclear blast facilities for itself (Story Here)

 

GOVERNMENT KNOWS WHAT’S COMING

Governments don’t do things like this for no reason.  They do it because they either KNOW this is going to happen, or they believe strongly it may happen.

In this particular case, they KNOW . . . . because THEY are the ones causing it!

The only people who aren’t taking much of it seriously is the general pubic.  That attitude had better change real fast.

You need Emergency Food (canned, Boxed), emergency water (5 gallon containers for each person at home, minimum,  Extra supply of any medicines you need to live, first aid kit, portable radio with spare batteries, flashlights with spare batteries, and much, much more.

Even with these supplies, survival is questionable.  However, WITHOUT any emergency supplies, YOU and YOUR FAMILY will not stand any chance at all.

Prep.

NOW!

Finland Tells Citizens “Stock Iodine Pills” in case of “Radiation Emergency”

Fears of _actual_ nuclear war continue to grow over the Russia-Ukraine situation.  The latest example is Finland’s Ministry of Health which, today, told citizens to stock up on Iodine pills “in case of radiation emergency.”

The ministry presented the new recommendation at a media event on Tuesday.

The ministry said the recommendation was limited to people 3-40 years of age because of the potential risk radiation exposure poses to that age group.

The release of radioactive iodine from a nuclear incident into the environment, could build up in the thyroid gland. This is most harmful to children, who are at greater risk of developing thyroid cancer due to large doses of radiation,” the ministry’s statement read.

The statement noted that in case of such an emergency, sheltering indoors was the main way for people to protect themselves from hazardous radiation.

The ministry also noted that a single iodine tablet dose usually provides sufficient protection. It added that iodine rarely causes side effects, but that individuals who have thyroid conditions should use the substance with caution.

The recommended single dose for 12-40 year-olds in a dangerous radiation situation is 130 milligrams of potassium iodide. Children over 3 years of age are recommended to take half of that dose.

The ministry said that there are no iodine products suitable — nor available in Finland — for children under the age of three. However, the recommended dose for children under three years of age is 32.5 milligrams of potassium iodide, and for newborns half of this.

However, the ministry continues to recommend that pregnant women over the age of 40 keep a supply of iodine tablets at home, as fetal thyroid glands are significantly more sensitive to radioactive iodine than they are among adults.

“Public healthcare services will procure iodine tablets suitable for children under the age of three and will determine the best way to distribute them to the parents of such children and to pregnant women. Regional healthcare providers will inform people when such an iodine product is available,” the ministry’s statement read  (siirryt toiseen palveluun).

Iodine stocks sold out

On Tuesday afternoon, Finland’s largest chain of pharmacy outlets, Yliopiston Apteekki, reported stocks of iodine tablets had practically sold out nationwide following the issuing of the ministry’s statement.

Chief pharmaceutical officer Kati Vuorikallas told the STT news agency that the surge in demand has also been reflected in the increased traffic on the chain’s website, which has caused the site to slow down significantly or even crash for some users.

Efforts are being made to replenish the iodine stocks, Vuorikallas added, but there is no precise schedule on when this will happen.

CICA Conference

Here we have some of the results of the CICA Conference, “Astana Statement on the Transformation of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia”, my emphasis:

We, the Heads of State and Government of the participating States of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), meeting on 12-13 October 2022 in Astana on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of CICA, decided to chart the following course of our further cooperation:

 

[1]  We are launching a structured, comprehensive and transparent negotiation process on a gradual, step-by-step, consensus-based transformation of CICA into a full-fledged regional international organization.

[2]  The CICA transformation process will pursue the following main objectives: to identify key areas of future cooperation and to strengthen the institutional and institutional framework of our interaction.

[3]  We believe that the organization will contribute to ensuring dynamic, equal, comprehensive and balanced economic growth, interconnectedness, social and cultural development of the participating States. We will step up collective work within the organization in order to find joint solutions to the problems common to all of us of the XXI century. to ensure the security and prosperity of the region, the peaceful settlement of disputes in accordance with the UN Charter.

[4] Our organization will engage and cooperate in areas of interest to all participating States with other States, organizations and forums that share our objectives and principles to strengthen results-oriented and consensus-based multilateral cooperation in the region.

So, yet another multilateral organization aims at joining with other like-minded organizations thus knitting the region more firmly together. And as with the SCO, a big portion of the organization’s focus is on anti-terrorism efforts which are detailed in other adopted documents that can be found here.

Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 13 2022 16:31 utc | 8

Misguided Foreign Policies Against Russia And Others Damage The U.S. And Its ‘Allies’

Political corruption, a lack of knowledge, and irrational foreign policies have brought the U.S. to a point where it is loosing its primacy in the world.

In response to the 2014 U.S. coup in Kiev the Russian Federation supported ethnic Russian rebels in the Donbas region to resist that anti-Russian progroms with which the Nazi-controlled Kiev regime threatened them. This blocked U.S. plans to move Ukraine into NATO and to station U.S. missiles directly at the Russian border.

In 2016 the Democrats sought revenge by pushing fake claims of Russian interference in U.S. elections. To justify her loss in the presidential election Hillary Clinton created ‘Russiagate’, the false claim the Trump was somehow directed by Russia. She was supported by high ranking officials throughout the deep state and especially within the FBI. In hindsight their behavior was beyond belief:

An FBI supervisor repeatedly testified Tuesday that agents did not corroborate an explosive allegation from a former British spy of a “well-developed conspiracy” between the Kremlin and Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign before citing the claim as a reason to initiate surveillance of a former Trump campaign official.

The FBI used the unconfirmed report, Auten testified, to seek court approval of a secret surveillance warrant to monitor Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, and then successfully got that warrant reauthorized on three occasions, based in part on the same, uncorroborated claim.

Auten told the jury that shortly after receiving the first batch of Steele documents in the fall of 2016, a group of FBI officials met with Steele and offered him “anywhere up to $1 million” for information that would corroborate the claims in his reports. But Steele never did provide corroboration, Auten said in response to Durham.

Steele had been hired to produce reports by research firm Fusion GPS, which had been retained by a law firm that represented Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee.

‘Russiagate’ created a feverish anti-Russian atmosphere especially within the Democrats and their followers.

Adding to this was a serious ignorance of Russia economic and technological capabilities. U.S. politicians rely on biased media which created a false picture of Russia. I did my best to debunk that as often as I could:

The rest of the NYT piece is not any better than its very first paragraph. It simply repeats false stereotypes about Putin as an “autocratic leader” or about the non-existing Russian influence on U.S. elections.Nearly thirty years ago when the Soviet Union broke apart Russia had a deep fall. The liberalization of its economy had catastrophic consequences. But it has since reformed itself. It is now back to its traditional position in the world. A large Eurasian power which is in nearly all aspects independent from the rest of the world and able to protect itself. It must therefore be taken into account when one thinks of global polices. That is simply a fact and not the effect of a “mindgame” that Russia allegedly plays with the “west”.

That the U.S. still has problems to understand that is not Russia’s fault but the result of the skewed descriptions of it.

I wrote the above in December 2019(!). Ten month later I revisited the issue:

Over the last years the U.S. and its EU puppies have ratcheted up their pressure on Russia. They seem to believe that they can compel Russia to follow their diktat. They can’t. But the illusion that Russia will finally snap, if only a few more sanctions ar applied or a few more houses in Russia’s neighborhood are set on fire, never goes away.

Russia does not accept the fidgety ‘rules of the liberal international order’. Russia sticks to the law which is, in my view, a much stronger position. Yes, international law often gets broken. But as Lavrov said elsewhere, one does not abandon traffic rules only because of road accidents.Russia stays calm, no matter what outrageous nonsense the U.S. and EU come up with. It can do that because it knows that it not only has moral superiority by sticking to the law but it also has the capability to win a fight.

Russia is militarily secure and the ‘west’ knows that. It is one reason for the anti-Russian frenzy. Russia does not need to bother with the unprecedented hostility coming from Brussels and Washington. It can ignore it while taking care of its interests.

As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?

The answer to my question was revealed in mid of last year when the U.S. and the EU threatened Russia with ‘crushing sanctions’. The idea was to destroy Russia’s economy to then breakup the country. It was a very stupid one:

Russia is the most autarkic country in the world. It produces nearly everything it needs and has highly desirable products that are in global demand and are especially needed in Europe. Russia also has huge financial reserves. A sanctions strategy against Russia can not work.To use the Ukraine to gaud Russia into some aggression to then apply sanctions was likewise a rather lunatic attempt.

Instead of splitting Russia from China the U.S. has unintentionally done its best to push them into a deeper alliance. It was the most severe strategic error the U.S. could make.

Instead of a taking a new strategic posture that would support a pivot to Asia strategy the U.S. is now moving troops back to Europe.

The narrow-minded bigotry of U.S. decision makers, fed by a belief in U.S. exceptionalism while lacking any conception of real power, has led to this defeat.

The U.S., through NATO, had build up the Ukrainian army with the intent to use it against Russia. As NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg proudly claimed:

As you know, NATO Allies provide unprecedented levels of military support to Ukraine. Actually NATO Allies and NATO have been there since 2014 – trained, equipped and supported the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The recent war was launched by Ukraine on February 17 with artillery barrages against the Donbas republics. Massive sanctions against Russia were introduced. The Russia army finally marched into Ukraine.

It took only a few weeks to recognize that the sanctions, as I had expected, utterly failed. In the first days the Rubel fell only to come back much stronger. There were no shortages for Russian consumers. Russia’s industries kept buzzing along.

But the sanctions did crush the ‘west’ and especially its consumers.

Over the years the U.S. and the EU have held up sanctions against the oil producers Iran, Venezuela and Russia. They also destroyed parts of Libya’s oil industry. In total the sanctions have kept some 20% of global oil production either off the markets or made them more difficult to buy and sell. On top of this U.S. relations with major Middle East producers, especially Saudi Arabia, have cooled down.

In late 2021 consumer prices for hydrocarbon products exploded. When they threatened to derail the Democrat’s chances in the mid terms President Biden used tax payer money, in form of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to subsidize gasoline prices:

The United States and five other world powers announced a coordinated effort to tap into their national oil stockpiles on Tuesday, attempting to drive down rising gas prices that have angered consumers around the world.The move appeared to underwhelm oil traders, who had been expecting President Biden to announce a larger release from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is the biggest in the world with 620 million barrels.

The concerted effort, the largest ever for a release of strategic reserves across multiple countries, is meant to address fluctuations in supply and demand for oil, administration officials said. And it was a shot across the bow of OPEC Plus, the name for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as well as Russia and other countries. Mr. Biden has pushed those countries to increase production, but has been rebuffed.

The move could bring a response next week when the group holds its monthly meeting. While it could prompt those countries to increase production, it could just as easily push the cartel to restrict supply further and push global prices higher.

The SPR voter bribe has since continued:

Since 2021, the nation’s SPR has diminished by about 35%, with 2021 starting with 638 million barrels in inventory. By the end of the year, that figure had dropped to 594 million barrels. Today, there are 416 million barrels—and even more are set to be released.

The U.S. has not only sanctioned major oil producers, it also instigated a war against the third largest (Russia) and pissed of the second largest one (Saudi Arabia).

The peak of such stupidity was the idea to limit the price ‘allowed’ to be paid for Russian oil:

A sane actor would conclude that the sanctions were a mistake and that lifting them would help Europe more than it would help Russia. But no, the U.S. and European pseudo elites are no longer able to act in a sane manner. They are instead doubling down with the most crazy sanction scheme one has ever heard of:

[T]he European Union pushed ahead on Wednesday with an ambitious but untested plan to limit Russia’s oil revenue.

Under the plan, a committee including representatives of the European Union, the Group of 7 nations and others that agree to the price cap would meet regularly to decide on the price at which Russian oil should be sold, and that it would change based on the market price.

How do you make a big producer of a rare commodity sell those goods below the general market price? Unless you have a very strong buyers cartel that can also buy the product from elsewhere you can not do this successfully. It is an economic impossibility.

Russia has declared that it will not sell any oil to any party that supports the G7 price fixing regime. That is why neither China nor India nor any other country besides the EU and U.S. will agree to adhere to it.

A month ago OPEC+ finally fired back by decreasing its output aim by 2 million barrels per day. To some of them a price of oil around $80 per barrel is simply a budget requirement:

The quiet understanding emerging from [Biden’s] trip was that Saudi Arabia would increase its production by about 750,000 barrels a day, and that the United Arab Emirates would follow suit with an additional 500,000, pushing down gas prices and worsening President Vladimir V. Putin’s ability to fund a war that was stretching much longer — and with much higher casualties — than Mr. Biden had expected.But the production increases were fleeting. While Saudi Arabia boosted production significantly in July and August, it backed away from their promise to sustain those levels over the rest of 2022. Its leaders, and all of OPEC, worried that the specter of global recession was driving prices down, from $120 a barrel over the summer to below $80. Below that level, they fear, budgets have to be cut and social stability is threatened. So the Saudis decided they had to act.

The sanctions and the bad relations with Saudi Arabia mark a major failure of U.S. foreign policy writes M. K. Bhadrakumar:

The Biden Administration tempted Fate by underestimating the importance of oil in modern economic and political terms and ignoring that oil will remain the dominant energy source across the world for the foreseeable future, powering everything from cars and domestic heating to huge industry titans and manufacturing plants.

The Western powers are far too naive to think that an energy superpower like Russia can be simply “erased” from the ecosystem. In an “energy war” with Russia, they are doomed to end up as losers.Historically, Western nations understood the imperative to maintain good diplomatic relations with oil-producing countries. But Biden threw caution into the wind by insulting Saudi Arabia calling it a “Pariah” state. Any improvement in the US-Saudi relations is not to be expected under Biden’s watch. The Saudis distrust American intentions.

The congruence of interests on the part of the OPEC to keep the prices high is essentially because they need the extra income for their expenditure budget and to maintain a healthy investment level in the oil industry. The International Monetary Fund in April projected Saudi Arabia’s breakeven oil price — the oil price at which it would balance its budget — at $79.20 a barrel.

The budget point is an obvious one. But more important is that all of OPEC+ recognize the new sanction scheme as a potential attack on each of them:

Meanwhile, a “systemic” crisis is brewing. It is only natural that the OPEC views with scepticism the recent moves by the US and the EU to push back Russia’s oil exports. The West rationalises these moves as aimed at drastically reducing Russia’s income from oil exports (which translates as its resilience to fight the war in Ukraine.) The latest G7 move to put a cap on the prices at which Russia can sell its oil is taking matters to an extreme.

No doubt, the West’s move is precedent-setting — namely, to prescribe for geopolitical reasons the price at which an oil-producing country is entitled to export its oil. If it is Russia today, it can as well be Saudi Arabia or Iraq tomorrow. The G7 decision, if it gets implemented, will erode OPEC’s key role regulating the global oil market.Therefore, the OPEC is proactively pushing back. Its decision to cut down oil production by 2 million barrels per day and keep the oil price above $90 per barrel makes a mockery of the G7 decision. The OPEC estimates that Washington’s options to counter OPEC+ are limited. Unlike in the past energy history, the US does not have a single ally today inside the OPEC+ group.

Due to rising domestic demands for oil and gas, it is entirely conceivable that the US exports of both items may be curtailed. If that happens, Europe will be the worst sufferer. In an interview with FT last week, Belgium’s prime minister Alexander De Croo has warned that as winter approaches, if energy prices are not brought down, “we are risking a massive deindustrialisation of the European continent and the long-term consequences of that might actually be very deep.”

All this is the consequence of U.S. ‘Russiagate’ phobia, originally raised for purely domestic policy reasons. It is a consequence of misrepresenting and misjudging the size and importance of Russia’s economy. It is consequence of believing that Russian (and Saudi) interests can be ignored.

Russia’s aim is to de-NATO-size Europe. It will do this by using the sanctions against it to deprive Europe of cheap energy. Sustained over months or years it is all that is needed to make NATO fall apart.

The sanctions will finally split Europe from the U.S. and its failed foreign policy.

Some U.S. politicians still think they must continue to pile onto the mountain of failure that U.S. foreign policy has become:

The congressional backlash against Saudi Arabia escalated sharply on Monday as a powerful Democratic senator threatened to freeze weapons sales and security cooperation with the kingdom after its decision to support Russia over the interests of the US.Washington’s anger with its Saudi allies has intensified since last week’s Opec+ decision to cut oil production by 2m barrels, which was seen as a slight to the Biden administration weeks ahead of critical midterm elections, and an important boost to Russia.

Hitting out at Mohammed bin Salman’s decision to “help underwrite Putin’s war through the OPEC+ cartel”, Menendez said there was “simply is no room to play both sides of this conflict”.

“I will not green-light any cooperation with Riyadh until the Kingdom reassesses its position with respect to the war in Ukraine. Enough is enough,” he said.

Another Democratic senator and a member of Congress – Richard Blumenthal and Ro Khanna – expressed similar sentiments in an opinion piece for Politico that also accused Saudi Arabia of undermining US efforts and helping to boost Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The senators want to block weapon sales to Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman will rather happily buy Russian air defense system. In contrast to U.S. systems they have the advantage of actually functioning. Saudi Arabia’s Intermediate Range Missiles are from China. It will be happy to add more of those too.

Pissing off Russia, China and the whole Middle East – all at the same time – while condemning its ‘allies’ to a systemic economic crash and utter poverty, is the result of an irrational U.S. foreign policy.

I find it unlikely that the Biden administration with its librul ideology will be able to correct its own errors. The failures and mistakes will stay uncorrected and their consequences will multiply. It will take a regime change in Washington, and a change in its deep state ideology, to find back to some realistic view on foreign policies.

Posted by b on October 12, 2022 at 16:06 UTC | Permalink

Busy FBI

From HERE

 

On the other hand, the FBI apparently cherishes its dog whistle “racists” who are essentially agents provocateurs, most notably radio talkshow host Ted Turner.

More than a decade ago, I wrote:

Radio talk show host and blogger Hal Turner was an FBI trained agent provocateur, his attorney told reporters in Hartford [August 18, 2009]. The supposed white supremacist worked for the agency from 2002 until 2007. “His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest,” Michael Orozco told the Associated Press.

The article I wrote originally appeared on Infowars and Prison Planet. The above link in the byline of the repost now points to an ad for an old Alex Jones documentary. I am persona non grata at both websites and I imagine a lot of the work I did there has made it to the memory hole.

But let’s not wander off track.

As the case against Turner and the revelations of his attorney reveal, the government did not abandon its COINTELPRO tactics, as it claimed in the mid 1970s. The FBI, acting as the establishment’s political secret police, continues to undermine political movements the elite consider dangerous and a threat to their control and influence.

Recall, I wrote the above more than a decade ago, and since that time the situation has grown far worse, predictably so under the mentally compromised Joe Biden.

The FBI infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and 60s.

“During the 1960’s, the FBI’s role was not to protect civil rights workers, but rather, through the use of informants, the Bureau actively assisted the Ku Klux Klan in their campaign of racist murder and terror,” the authors of “COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story.”

Church Committee hearings and internal FBI documents revealed that more than one quarter of all active Klan members during the period were FBI agents or informants. However, Bureau intelligence “assets” were neither neutral observers nor objective investigators, but active participants in beatings, bombings and murders that claimed the lives of some 50 civil rights activists by 1964.

Bureau spies were elected to top leadership posts in at least half of all Klan units. Needless to say, the informants gained positions of organizational trust on the basis of promoting the Klan’s fascist agenda. Incitement to violence and participation in terrorist acts would only confirm the infiltrator’s loyalty and commitment. 

The report, nearly impossible to find on the internet, notes the FBI established “dozens of Klaverns, sometimes being leaders and public spokespersons. Gary Rowe, an FBI informant, was involved in the Klan killing of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker. He claimed that he had to fire shots at her rather than ‘blow his cover.’ One FBI agent, speaking at a rally organized by the Klavern he led, proclaimed to his followers, ‘We will restore white rights if we have to kill every negro to do it.’”

In other words, the FBI was a prime motivator in racist violence, same as it has more recently worked behind the scenes to fabricate Islamic terror groups.

Unless and until departments/agencies like CIA, FBI, Federal Reserve etc. are shut down USA will remain RINO (Republic In Name Only), a post-constitutional failed state with nuclear power and hosting an international credit cartel. Volatile mix.

Expecting such endemic corruption to be remedied by mid-term or Presidential elections in the current polity is a form of mental illness. USA is a pathocracy.

Posted by: Scorpion | Oct 14 2022 5:05 utc | 51

Energy problems

At his VK, Escobar provides an update on the protests in France that has an accompanying map lifted from Le Figaro:

“A nightmare. Major PORTS are blocked (see those red circles and red squares).

“Le Petit Roi’s goons are starting to introduce FORCED LABOR; if you don’t go to work, you will be fined or go to jail.

“You can’t get away with stuff like that in France. Blowback will be a bitch. Le Petit Roi can have his ‘transition economy’ and eat it too.”

Pepe also provides a link to this article, “Global finance vs global energy: who will come out on top?” by energy analyst Dr. Karin Kneissl, Austria’s Foreign Minister from 2017-2019. A tidbit:

“To really understand the core of the conflict in Ukraine – where a proxy war rages – one must break down the confrontation thus: The US and its European allies, who represent and back the global financial sector, are essentially engaged in a battle against the world’s energy sector.

“In the past 22 years, we have seen how easy it is for governments to print paper currency. In just 2022, the US dollar has printed more paper money than in its combined history. Energy, on the other hand, cannot be printed. And therein lies a fundamental problem for Washington: The commodity sector can outbid the financial industry.”

As you read, I’m not the only one who sees energy at the core of our conflict.

Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 13 2022 17:40 utc | 14

Oh No, something BIG is happening in Germany, the WEF is make it worse

Very interesting. And very dangerous.

Euribor rates.

For a graphical overview of the futility of sanctions have a look at the Euribor rates.

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From HERE

Head of Belarus KGB: “The West is considering the use of nuclear weapons against the country and the Russian Federation”

The KGB of Belarus knows that the West is considering using tactical nuclear weapons against the Belarus and Russia. This was stated on Tuesday by the head of the department, Ivan Tertel, on the air of the Belarus-1 TV channel.

“According to our data, which we obtain from the military-political circles of the West, they believe that in no case should they lose (in Ukraine – TASS note). Therefore, the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons is being discussed, among other things, which are created for direct aggression against our country and against our allies,” Tertel said.

On October 10, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said that the leadership of NATO and European countries is considering options for possible aggression against Belarus, up to a nuclear strike.

According to him, Belarus and the Russian Federation are beginning to use a joint regional grouping of troops in connection with the aggravation of the situation on the western borders of the Union State.

China cannot annex Taiwan — Taiwan is already part of China.

What China seeks is to reunify with Taiwan. Big difference.

America is an imperialist. It sticks its nose into things that are none of its business. Taiwan is China’s domestic matter.

America is using Taiwan as a pawn to undermine China, whose economic rise threatens America’s global hegemony.

RUSSIAN MILITARY RADIO BROADCASTS TO CITIZENS IN KHARKIV: “EVACUATE CITY NOW”

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The Russian Army is using regular AM and FM radio to transmit to Ukrainian citizens in the city of Kharkiv. The broadcasts are telling them to evacuate that city immediately.

The military high-powered radio transmitters are even broadcasting directly ON TOP OF what would be the traditional radio stations in that area. The military transmitters are simply over-powering the regular radio stations.

Over the past 48-72 hours, Russian troop build-ups are showing what appears to be “Special Military Operation -Season 2” . . . only with very much more men.

On the map below, the hand-drawn circles in red show the present build-up of Russian forces, and the circles in blue show Ukrainian force locations.

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Most of Ukraine’s forces are engaged in the southeast of the country. The Ukraine troops to the east of Kharkiv, are now finding themselves squished between two superior Russian force groupings; one in the Belgorad region of Russia itself, the other in Luhansk. They seem to be inside a perfect “Pincer” situation.

Ominously for Ukraine, the sudden and very large build-up of Russian troops in Belarus, to the north and northwest of Kiev, looks very much like what existed when Russia initially began its Special Military Operation into Ukraine. At THAT time, the troops in Belarus, north of Kiev, moved in a 47 mile long convoy toward the city, but stopped without attacking.

It turned out to be a feint; Russia did that so as to force Ukraine to keep essential troops in the north to protect the capital, Kiev, while they moved against targets in the south. This time, however, it seems quite clear that if/when those Russian troops come out of Belarus again, Kiev could be mince-meat.

In addition, the Russian forces toward the top left of the map, also in Belarus, is an interesting build-up. Would they swoop in against Kiev, or will they head due south to Lutsk, Rivne . . . or both?

Stay tuned . . .

Well, you do understand that Taiwan is part of China, right? China has every right to blockade its own territory and it is absolutely none of the Americans’ fucking business.

However, I’ll tell you what are the ramifications if the Americans interfere: war between China and USA. Very likely, a most devastating war.

So it behooves the Americans to keep their nose out of China’s business.

Obama Official Flip-Flops On Nuclear War w/ Russia

Jeeze!

ARREST VIDEOS: UKRAINIAN SBU AGENT CAUGHT WITH MANPADS IN MOSCOW; SECOND CAUGHT IN BRYANSK

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The Russian Federal Security Bureau (FSB) has released arrest video of a Ukrainian Intelligence Bureau (SBU) Agent, in Moscow, with MANPAD, shoulder carried surface-to-air missiles! A second video, shows another arrest in Bryansk, of a man with rocket-propelled grenades, to carry out a terrorist attack upon a logistics facility in Russia.

In the first of two videos below, an actual Agent of Ukraine’s SBU is caught driving a Volkswagon minivan, with two “Igla” MANPAD surface-to-air weapons. These are shoulder-fired weapons that can take down any aircraft at relatively low altitude, especially civilian air liners.

As you will see in the video, the weapons were hidden in a carefully constructed secret compartment, beneath the vehicle:

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Video

Since Moscow is not a gigantic military hub, it is initially thought this man was going to hit civilian airliners, to sew terror in the Russian civilian population:

SECOND ARREST: BRYANSK

In Bryansk, a second man was quickly taken down, and found to be in possession of some type of rocket-propelled explosive, allegedly to be used against a Russian Logistics center.   Video of that arrest, and of the device to be used, is below:

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A possible future for the United States

The forces that run the USA are misusing the financial institutions because as long as these institutions can be “s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d”, there are bundles of short term profit. If, (or when) it snaps, (so what), we have garnered $ trillions, and captured the majority of real assets. What will happen? The states will gain more power, as in federalism and some areas will break away. I say areas, because there are not going to be 50 new nations. States can’t sustain themselves alone. There will have to be regions. Even California (the fifth largest world economy) has no water resources. They are dependent on other states.

It is already happening with projects like “Greater Idaho”. It is not that Idaho has expansionist desires. The push comes from the outside.

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The way I interpret it is that states have political power, like their two senators. There is a rural / urban divide in America, but every rural state also has a very large city. Illinois and Chicago for example. It is a given that the urban population will cancel the rural vote and thwart their desires and programs. So rural counties want to get out of California and get away from Portland. This is not a break up of the USA, but it is a re-configuration of political power.

State governors could start to feel out the possibilities of regions, develop sharing with allied states. First share emergency services, pollution control, electrical power (which Texas does not do), emergency policing powers, maybe make agreements on the deployment of the national guard? They could make voter blocs in the US congress. Admittedly these are future developments.

Who will Alaska ally with? Russia is an obvious choice. A railroad tunnel would be built. Alaska would become a hub for the distribution of natural gas, when fracking runs dry. They would be a land based shipping center between Asia and the Americas.

I think that it is highly likely.

Joe Biden: “Two Words – Made In America”

Can he count?

The USA is so corrupt…

I learned from the reference below. that

On January 16, 1794, Congress passed a resolution that prohibited anyone who owned stock or held an office in a financial institution from being in Congress. also I learned that The original Thirteenth Amendment (1810) prohibited lawyers from functioning in Congress.. From HERE

It is becoming clearer and clearer that congress does not work for those it governs. What then are the governed to do?

How can the average members of the public in western prone nation states promote for their president and other members of their elected governments non pilgrim society members?

Membership in the society is secret; and i believe Epstein’s trial would have shown how threat, intimidation and blackmail keeps the affairs of secret societies secret and how such intimidation, is used to make government parties vote against the best interest of those it governs.

Over the years, nearly every president and high level member of governments seem to have been member of, or closely associated to one or more these secret organizations (mostly secret organizations seem to work by making government into a secret hidden arm of for profit influence on rule of law and formation and function of government institutions) operating both external to and embedded within the bureaucracies and working governments that govern us all.

IMO surveillance and secrecy are the feedforward feedback loop that allows special interest to carve out and profit from the privatization of monopoly powers. Surveillance and secrecy have captured “governed humanity” and surrendered it into “service of making oligarchs a profit”.

Rule of law created by biased or corrupt politics is a tool of tyranny; it converts government into an invasive imperialistic assault weapon capable to undermine human rights.

Posted by: snake | Oct 13 2022 16:07 utc | 6

The United States has lost it’s mind concerning China

What can you expect from strategy papers when you insist on lying to yourself about import facts? I was just about to read Global Times editorial on the subject, “US’ new national security report lack of creativity, full of viciousness,” and there’s an accompanying article too, “Biden’s national security strategy hypes ‘China challenge,’ full of outdated confrontational mentality”.

Here’s the editorial’s opening paragraph:

"The White House on Wednesday released its new National Security Strategy (NSS). 

This is a routine of every US government and an important document that reflects and guides the incumbent government's internal affairs and diplomacy. 

But after reading the 48-page document, the international community generally feels a strong sense of unease and concern. 

The 'national security' pursued by the US will come at the expense of the security of other countries. 

If the path and direction stated in the report is followed, the superpower of the US will sooner or later go to the opposite side of world.

Therefore, peace and stability, and the consequences will be unimaginable." [My Emphasis]

The writer continues:

"The release of the strategy report was delayed for several months due to the Russia-Ukraine crisis, but we did not see from the report that the US had deeply reflected on the root cause of the conflict, let alone learned any lessons. 

Instead, it further strengthened the camp confrontation and binary opposition mindset that led to the outbreak of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine." [My Emphasis]

The writer then concentrates on the portion devoted to confronting China.

But from just this little bit we can surmise that it’s more of the same old shit poured into a new can.

However, it appears that the writer needs to learn something about the Outlaw US Empire for he believes the Cold War ended:

"It has been 31 years since the end of the Cold War, but the political elites in Washington still have not learned to coexist with other countries in a new way."

IMO, it's China's fault for failing to realize the Outlaw US Empire will never give up its goal to dominate the world, and to also see that goal was inherited--if not stolen from--the Empire's Colonial mother: England. 

Why is it that China and other nations fail to see what they ought to be seeing?

Well, to be fair, the writer does see many things as this portion reveals:

"The new report is a mirror, reflecting the selfishness, ambition and the deepest fears of Washington's political elites. 

In all its national strategy reports, Washington emphasizes US' 'leadership.' 

There is nothing wrong with ambition, but what does the US want to do by 'leading' the world? 

The report shows that the US is still trying to rope in one group and fight another, creating division and confrontation in this world....

"In its quest to suppress and contain China, Washington has lost its mind." [My Emphasis]

The other article provided this summary regarding China:

"Chinese experts said that the Biden administration's national security strategy basically continues the Trump-era position on China, and is more of a summary of US action and intention.

"The strategy suggested that the US basically has three goals it wants to achieve in the future: 

[1] limit China's development in the high-tech field; 

[2] limit Chinese influence, promote ideological alliances, and prevent the success of the Chinese system from being widely recognized around the world; 

[3] and make further provocations over the Taiwan question to trap China, experts noted." [My Emphasis]

I’m curious to see just how the bolded goal above was described and how it’s to be accomplished.

Given the overall continuity, I doubt Biden had any direct input despite BigLie Media saying otherwise, as with this example:

"CNBC believes that the Strategy generally functions 'more as an aspirational expression of a president's values than as a blueprint for military plans.'"

If that’s actually the case, then Biden wants to become a War President; but then, he is already.

Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 13 2022 23:05 utc | 37

As Saturday normalcy returns, it’s a time for cleanups and rub downs

Gosh it’s a crazy time. The Drudge report is pure garbage. It’s all non-stop American war-propaganda. Check this out…

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Reading about Putin having brain cancer, and that he’s going to be jailed and replaced any day (now) gets old real fast. As does the endless stories of brave Ukrainian fighters and how they expertly use American HIMARS rocket launchers with only weeks training and how they have the Russians running scared. Ugh! Please spare me the endless bullshit.

It’s nauseating.

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I’d rather watch traffic lights turning red and green.

Don’t ya know…

Pay attention. The United States is at war. It’s engaging EVERYONE. And the entire domestic spiel is all about war.

Everyone is just flabbergasted in WHAT THE FUCK IS THE USA DOING?

PUTIN JUST WON

Just now? Nope. It’s all there.

https://youtu.be/iM_K3ivJdNQ

Sigh

Ok, so the Chinese holiday is ending. As is the unusual heat wave. No longer is Zhuhai an oppressively humid 34C (93F) but it is now a very dry 25C (78F or so). And so it’s pretty nice out.

I still have three days remaining on my “strikes” on you-tube because I provided “misinformation on coronavirus” in variance with “local law enforcement”. Uh hum. Sure.

I can just see the local Chinese baoan talking with the purple haired chicks about my videos on getting swabs. LOL!

Anyways, the value of the dollar keeps on raising against the yuan. This is a good thing. Not bad. Especially for me personally.

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Value of the yuan against he dollar. And exchange rates summary of the last year.

What do you think about the Chinese government killing and imprisoning CIA spies in China?

The answers…

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Well, the public opinion is running really anti-USA on this American forum…

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OK. Enough of that.

Moving on…

Russian nuclear war

Scott Ritter, who knows a bit about nuclear deterrence, has explained Russia’s nuclear doctrine:

NATO and Ukraine both believe that the Russian forces, even after receiving the 300,000 mobilized troops, will not be able to defeat Ukraine. This inability to achieve the desired objectives, they believe, will compel Russia to resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons on Ukrainian targets in order to break the will to resist on the part of the Zelensky government.

The reality, however, is that Russian nuclear doctrine does not allow for such a scenario. Indeed, there are only two conditions where Russian nuclear doctrine permits the employment of nuclear weapons.

No 1. “[I]n response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies,” the 2020 Russian Nuclear Posture document states, or

No 2. “in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.”

U.S. nuclear posture, however, does allow it.

All the war mongering talk and reports about Russia’s alleged threat of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine is totally unfounded. That ‘western’ media suddenly engage in it shows that it is part of a well directed propaganda campaign.

A upcoming false flag event?

One must ask what this propaganda campaign about a non existing threat is really about. Could it be in preparation of a false flag incident in which a U.S or British nuclear device is used in Ukraine to then blame it on Russia as the pretext of an all out military engagement in Ukraine?

Setting off a tactical nuclear weapon as a pretext for a direct US and Polish military incursion into Western Ukraine - perhaps to preserve a Ukrainian rump state there, in the event that Kiev looks likely to fall somewhere down the line in the conflict.

False flags and/or WMDs are after all the indisputable standard US MO and playbook for pretexts for military action from the Spanish American War, to Vietnam, to Iraq, to Syria.

The Pentagon has been openly and proudly developing and deploying what they call “more usable” battlefield nuclear weapons, specifically for use against Russia and China.

And the US is the only country in history to have used nuclear weapons in war on another state, on entire Japanese cities full of people, actually.

Or – possibly could this be dog whistle signaling to the Zelenskiy regime or NeoNazi forces in Ukraine about just how to generate the extremis conditions to allow the US to jump directly into the conflict, much like how the US did the same with jihadist forces and chemical  weapons “red lines” in Syria.

With Zelenski becoming increasingly unhinged the ‘west’ should be careful what it wishes for.

China says a few words…

China’s Global Times is editorializing about the US losing a nuclear war, and using nuclear weapons in space.

Note to the US – a nuclear war can be won by rivals

... there is no justification for responding to a non-kinetic EMP attack with the killing of millions in a kinetic nuclear counterstrike based only on unverified suspicion.

Nuclear war can be won, and Russia and other US competitors are well prepared to emerge as victors. 

Some advice for the US is don't allow a parochial political agendas or allies to manipulate its decisions.

From HERE

Nuclear weapons in space might not kill on earth but it would make space unusable for generations to come. Point made HERE

Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested that Russia is prepared to employ nuclear weapons in defense of its sovereignty. The US dismissed the warning as a bluff and threatened Russia by stating the use of such weapons would be met with unspecified “devastating” consequences.

The US retains faith in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction(MAD). MAD contributed to its Cold War victory, and it is assumed to still be effective today.

Under an umbrella of US MAD deterrence, Ukraine assumes it can now crush Russian aims with modern US conventional weapons and take back what it claims to be its own.

An emboldened Taiwan island could conceivably take a lesson from Ukraine and declare its independence from China.

However, even after Russia was lectured by the US, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, emphasized that Russia is not bluffing.

Considering the likelihood that the Biden Administration was misinformed, the sincerity of Russian leaders should be given the benefit of a doubt.

After the Cold War the US cashed in what it called a peace dividend. Funds were diverted from strategic capabilities as the probability of nuclear war seemed negligible.

Instead, the US appointed itself the task of world policeman, enforcing its foreign policy ideals with conventional general purpose and special operations expeditionary forces.

Sensing strategic neglect, in 2004 Congress became concerned for the unique threat posed by nuclear weapons-generated high altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

Experts contended that an EMP would cause nationwide electrical grid anomalies, cascading systems failures, and ultimately unravel the fabric of American society. Even non-state and rogue state actors could defeat the US with only a small number of EMP weapons.

Nevertheless, other funding priorities took precedence. US’ civilian and military systems remain vulnerable to EMP nearly two decades later due to Washington’s continued faith in MAD.

However, Russia and others remain skeptical of the new US-led world order.

Nuclear conflict was not only possible, but perhaps more likely.

Nuclear powers are repelled by memories of the US nuclear bombings in Japan that incinerated two cities and well over one hundred thousand people. Rational nations know that all humanity would suffer planetary devastation and a horrible aftermath in a kinetic nuclear war, and these aspects of MAD still serve as deterrence.

The assumed reliability of MAD has animated the US-supported Ukrainian leadership to disregard Russia’s perspectives.

With similar confidence in the US nuclear umbrella Secessionists on the Taiwan island pursue secession in disregard of China’s sovereignty.

Some may seek to minimize the risks of any nuclear weapons employment because all nations will suffer equally, reinforcing MAD deterrence. But the electrical infrastructure designs of Russia and others have spared no expense in applying Cold War civil defense lessons.

Command economies, long range planning, hardened grids, and stability of centralized leadership further aid their societies in surviving any potential EMP attack.

Given their histories and traditions, those cultures are probably more adept at continued functionality in the absence of amenities and infrastructure than the US.

Others will cite a nuclear adversary’s inescapable accountability for an attack through the positive attribution of a weapon’s launch or delivery.

A perpetrator will be immediately identified and targeted with a devastating counterstrike.

Positive attribution is crucial, but far from guaranteed.

At least 15 nations can access low earth orbit, and many have access to geosynchronous orbit. The real nature of every object launched cannot be known with certainty. Nuclear weapons can also be concealed in and called down from the clutter of the super-synchronous graveyard orbit for surprise use.

At best, positive attribution would take time, during which the EMP-debilitated US comes apart at the seams.

And there is no justification for responding to a non-kinetic EMP attack with the killing of millions in a kinetic nuclear counterstrike based only on unverified suspicion.

Nuclear war can be won, and Russia and other US competitors are well prepared to emerge as victors.

Some advice for the US is don’t allow a parochial political agendas or allies to manipulate its decisions.

Knowing that nuclear war can be won, the US should listen to, acknowledge and respect the core priorities Russia and China to de-escalate tensions in negotiations before it is too late.

The Sopranos – Badass Furio Giunta

Hardly Anyone In Washington Seems To Care About The Future At This Point

 

Our politicians in Washington are literally destroying our future.  But do you see anyone out in the streets protesting their calamitous policies?  By now, you have probably heard that the U.S. national debt has hit 31 trillion dollars.  To be more precise, as I write this article the U.S. national debt is currently sitting at $31,142,591,307,260.01.  It is the largest single debt in the history of the world, and given enough time it would completely destroy our economy all by itself.  Unfortunately, hardly anyone in Washington seems to care about our rapidly exploding debt at this point.

In the old days, the Republicans would at least put on a show for us.  They would huff and puff about the national debt but then give the Democrats virtually all of the spending that they wanted anyway.

But now they have figured out that such a charade is no longer necessary, because most of their constituents just don’t care.

So most of our politicians no longer even pretend to care about fiscal responsibility.  In recent years they have been on the biggest borrowing and spending binge in our entire history, and there are no indications that they ever plan to stop.

They borrow and spend trillions upon trillions of dollars, and they expect you, your children, and your grandchildren to pay it back.

Of course that will never happen.

We are never going to pay back the 31.1 trillion dollars that we have borrowed.

Instead, we are just going to push the accelerator all the way to the floor until we finally go off a cliff.

During the month of August alone, the U.S. government ran a $219.6 billion budget deficit

Some things never change — such as the federal government spending more money than it has month after month after month.

August was no different. The US government ran a massive $219.6 billion budget deficit last month, according to the latest Monthly Treasury Statement. That nudged out July as the second-largest monthly deficit in fiscal 2022.

Sadly, I didn’t hear of anyone in Washington giving a major speech when that happened, because the national debt is not even considered to be an important national issue today.

But our entire standard of living depends on the value of the U.S. dollar.  Having the default reserve currency of the world has been such a massive advantage for the United States, and now we are frittering it away.

The rest of the world can see what we are doing.

We are transforming our currency into toilet paper, and it is just a matter of time before it completely collapses.

Today, our politicians are stealing more than 200 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day.

Just think about that.

The old geezers in Washington know that they are near the end of the road.

So they know that they will never have to pay any of this money back.

But they get to spend it on whatever they want.

Of course it was inevitable that all of this borrowing and spending would eventually create rampant inflation, and now we are facing the worst inflation crisis in our history.

Yes, even worse than the Jimmy Carter era of the 1970s.

The Federal Reserve is rapidly hiking interest rates in a desperate attempt to get inflation under control, but that is causing all sorts of problems.

For one thing, the interest payments on our national debt will soon exceed a trillion dollars a year

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this is exactly what will happen. It projects interest payments will triple from nearly $400 billion in fiscal 2022 to $1.2 trillion in 2032. And it’s worse than that. The CBO made this estimate in May. Interest rates are already higher than those used in its analysis.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that the current system will survive until 2032.

Previous generations handed us the keys to the reserve currency of the world and the greatest economic machine that the planet had ever witnessed.

Sadly, we took those precious gifts and completely destroyed them.

As a society, we have lost all regard for long-term consequences.

Let me give you another example.  Joe Biden just announced that he will be releasing more oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

“At the president’s direction, the Department of Energy will deliver another 10 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the market next month as part of the historic 180-million-barrel release the President ordered back in March. And the President will continue to direct SPR releases as necessary,” she said.

What an incredibly foolish thing to do.

It is only supposed to be used in the event of a national emergency, and what Biden has decided to do is absolutely unprecedented.

The fact that things are not looking good for his party in November is not an “emergency”, and Senator Tom Cotton is not amused

Whoa, say critics, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

“Well, it’s called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It’s not the political petroleum reserve,” Cotton told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Wednesday night.

We are going to need that oil someday.

But thanks to Biden, most of it will already be gone.

If we found ourselves in the middle of a major war, the worldwide flow of energy supplies would suddenly be greatly restricted.  That is the sort of emergency scenario that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was designed for.

Sadly, thanks to the warmongers in the Biden administration we may soon find ourselves fighting wars with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran simultaneously.

Most Americans have no idea what is going on behind the scenes.  Things with North Korea are getting really, really tense, and a major war in the Middle East could erupt at any time.

World War 3 has already started, but thankfully we haven’t gotten to the part where billions of people die just yet.

Unfortunately, our current crop of leaders couldn’t care less about the long-term future of humanity.

So they continue to pursue policies that are incredibly self-destructive, and we are all going to pay a very great price for their foolishness.

November Surprise?

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Welcome to the season of chaos, sponsored by the Party of Chaos, America’s Democratic Party, owner and operator of the shadowy “Joe Biden” regime, dedicated to wrecking what’s left of the country — and the rest of Western Civ with it. Do you think I exaggerate? Consider for a moment that your personal ruin — the loss of your freedoms, your livelihoods, and your posterity — is at stake behind the more general demolition of our society.

We are barreling into an election that will determine the composition of Congress. There is much chatter about whether this election will be allowed to happen. Signs and portents point to a grievous loss of power for the Party of Chaos. Power is all they care about — certainly not the public interest or the common good — and a particular sort of power: the power to coerce, persecute, and punish.

It is obvious in everything they do, from the FBI swat-team home invasions of select opponents and the gross mistreatment of the January 6 defendants, to the craven censoring of public speech, to the imposition of medical tyranny and the deadly fraud of Covid shots, to the degenerate insults of their race-and-gender hustles, to their assault on the value of our money, to their sabotage of the oil-and-gas industries, to their treasonous abandonment of border control, to the deliberate perversion of policing and public order, to their promulgation of a faithless and unnecessary war, sharply against our national interests, in faraway Ukraine.

Adults understand that politics is a crooked business, but through the whole of US history until now filters existed in the public arena that allowed for enough sorting out of truth from untruth to enable the formation of a reality-based consensus — which, in turn, allowed daily life to operate coherently. The Party of Chaos has thrown the kill-switch on that crucial function by corrupting the news business and subverting the new social media. The result is a public culture of pervasive and immersive lying, and a stupendous institutional failure of the courts to correct any of that behavior.

Case-in-point: the John Durham Special Counsel Investigation on the origin of the RussiaGate fraud. It now apparently terminates in the prosecution of the tiniest minnow (Igor Danchenko) in that vast inland sea of corruption. Some of the figures who carried out the perfidious seditions of RussiaGate are still employed in the Department of Justice and the FBI, and to this day are active in the continued cover-up of the crimes committed to overthrow President Trump, notably: Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and others.

Mr. Durham is supposedly among the highest officers of the federal courts charged with enforcing a very particular region of criminality. His staff must be marinated in evidence of the RussiaGate misdeeds — reams of which have been independently documented in the public record, ranging from (just for example) the nefarious activities of figures like Nellie Ohr, wife of DOJ higher-up Bruce Ohr, working as go-between with Christopher Steele and the FBI, to the spectacular failures of Judge James Boasberg and his FISA court, not to mention the well-known machinations of Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, Rob Rosenstein, Dana Boente, James Baker, Andrew Weissmann, Jeannie Rhee, Aaron Zebley, Brandon Van Grack, Robert Mueller, and other top officials who worked sedulously against the public interest. All these remain apparently off-the-hook for their sketchy activities.

How did that happen? If the Party of Chaos loses control of its Congressional majority, Mr. Durham may have to answer that question. And until he does, American justice will remain a deeply broken institution that citizens can’t trust. In that light, how is our country any better than the most overt petty despotisms around the world? How does it deserve the citizens’ respect or even compliance?

The stakes in the midterm elections are huge for the Party of Chaos, and its worker bees may be capable of any duplicity to throw it off the rails. In my soon-to-drop next podcast, blogger Tom Luongo (of Gold, Goats, and Guns) introduces a surprising twist: the election takes place, he says, but the Party of Chaos finds a way to delay the announcement of the results via procedural shenanigans that go on for weeks after November 8, leaving the country in a state of anxious limbo. What an idea! Such a strategy would wreck the last shred of public trust in elections without having to cancel, postpone, or overtly overthrow the process. It would also invite just the sort of public protest that the Party of Chaos can spin into another insurrection narrative.

I’m strangely confident that there is a hidden column of people that love this country who will not allow this final insulting scam to succeed. Its appearance among us will shock and amaze the multitudes. The rule of the Woke Jacobin maniacs will end. And even though we’ll have to live through the wreckage they brought about, we’ll move about this strange new landscape of hardship in the light of reality-made-visible, seeing clearly what has happened and knowing what we must do to revive our country.

Pat Buchanan on Suicide of a Superpower

Oh yes! I emigrated to Australia and my buddy, Kaiser von Floppenschnorren, emigrated with me. However, whilst I was exempted from undergoing quarantine, Kaiser had to endure a full 30 days of it.

Let me tell you, when we went to get him released from the Big House, he was as pissed as could be! He shouted at me for the entire trip home and once there, proceeded to shout at me for another half-hour or so until he decided it was time to eat.

My wife took this photo as, like me, she’s had cats all her life, and had never seen such an angry kitty as Kaiser was on that day! He just sat there and shouted!!

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Yes, actually I didn’t buy it. I got it for free……. It wasn’t a car, But an RV…. Yes an actual RV. It was a 2002, 26 foot class A RV. It was in perfect condition.

Just didn’t run.

Inside was perfect. The RV only had 16000 miles on it. Generator only has 30 hrs on It. The RV was practically new.

The guy that owned it didn’t want it anymore.

He was paying storage to park it. He said he didn’t want to pay storage anymore for an RV that didn’t work. I guess it wouldn’t start one day.

He took it to a shop and they told him the engine was blown and he needed a new one. The cost would have been around $8,000.

Crazy.

So he just parked it.

So this guy who I didn’t know came to my work wanting to dispose of the RV. I said I would take it. I got the RV to my Mechanic.

He looked at it and replaced a $70 part on the fuel system…. RV started right up!!!!!

Ran perfect.

Took it to a smog shop and it passed in a few min. I couldn’t believe it.

I got an $25000 (today’s value, new was over $100k) RV for free!!!! Best RV ever. I have driven that thing all up and down California. Amazing. What a find….

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Reports of Mid-Air MISSILE INTERCEPT over Silver City, Yukon

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There are reports that today, Thursday, October 6, 2022, there was a mid-air intercept of an incoming missile, over the Yukon Territory of Canada.

Locals in Silver City, Yukon claim that about 8:30 AM local time:

" . . .  2 objects collided mid air high altitude. 

The first object looked like it came from the north and the second object came from the west. 

There was a notable boom that shook the windows in the shack I was working in. 

The one coming from the north wasn't moving that fast but the one from the west was hauling ass.

There's no mention on the news about a plane crash or anything but there's been a bunch of military helicopters most of the day in the area."

If a Russian vessel in the Arctic, fired a missile at the US, the trajectory could send it over that part of the Yukon Territory, “from the north.”

If US Missile Defenses in Alaska tracked it, they could have fired a missile interceptor, “from the west.”

Sounds like bullshit to me. -MM

One Crazy Summer – Godzilla

Roasted Tomato Soup

“Recently had an extra pint of cherry tomatoes on hand and was in search of comfort food. Devised this soup in a pinch and thought it was worth sharing. Mine was a quick soup for one but the recipe has been scaled up and uses the more economical Roma tomato. If you have lots of cherry or grape tomatoes — they have a sweetness that pairs beautifully with the vinegar — use them or do a mix with the roma tomatoes. If you are making this Kosher, skip the cheese or be sure to use vegetable broth.”

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Ingredients

Directions

  • Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.
  • Wash and cut tomatoes, placing in a shallow baking dish cut side down.
  • Add onion pieces, garlic, oregano and basil to the pan.
  • Drizzle vegetables with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
  • Season with salt and pepper.
  • Bake for 45 minutes.
  • Place roasted vegetables in food processor bowl or blender and begin puree. Slowly add broth or water until soup has desired consistency. Continue blending until smooth.
  • An immersion blender also works very well. (If you warm the broth first, the soup will be hot without reheating.).
  • Serve garnished with cheese if desired.

Rufus Story

Sitting in McDonald’s carpark waiting for an appointment, a gentleman who I later found out was named Tony, approached my car window.

He asked if I knew about the state of my tyres.

I explained that I knew I needed new ones but at the moment simply couldn’t afford it.

He asked me if I would follow him to Bridgestone Pimpama across the road to see what they could do for me.

This complete stranger, Tony explained he couldn’t live with himself if he walked away from the situation knowing they were about to blow at anytime.

Tony didn’t expect anything in return, just asking that one day when I’m in the position where I’m able to help someone that I pay it forward.

535 dollars, a lot of tears on my behalf, a few hugs, three brand new tyres, a wheel alignment and the offer to fuel up my car.

Then he left.

No last name, no contact number.

Just Tony the gentle giant with his two beautiful sons teaching them a life lesson.

Tony if this ever reaches you, thank you!

Thank you for your utterly selfless act, your kind words, for restoring my faith in humanity.

From the bottom of my heart thank you!

Also a big thankyou to Bridgestone tyres Pimpama for fitting me in on a fully booked out day and for the great service, you guys are champs!

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Credit – Tegan Langley

Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan #2 (1985)

My biggest regret EVER, is not doing it sooner. For so many years, I didn’t like cats…all for dumb reasons. This is my best friend in the world, the Captain. I like to think we both changed each others lives for the better.

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Saudi Arabia Cuts Oil Prices for Europe but Hikes Them for the US Again

Saudi Arabia is raising oil prices for US buyers, following a similar move a month ago.

Meanwhile, state-run Saudi Aramco lowered prices in Europe and left them largely unchanged for the Asian market.

The price moves come after OPEC+ slashed production quotas, which the White House said aligns the oil group with Russia.

Article HERE

Oh SH*T, something big is happening to our food supply thanks to the WEF

Quick Creamy Broccoli Soup

“Adapted from epicurious.com. This is a fantastic low-fat soup recipe that tastes very creamy. It is also fast and easy-a really great healthy soup for the broccoli lover!! I used my immersion blender to make it even creamier.”

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Ingredients

  • 3 cups frozen chopped broccoli (or fresh broccoli florets)
  • 1 onion, cut into quarters
  • 1 -2 clove garlic, peeled
  • 1 12 – 2 cups chicken broth or 1 1/2-2 cups water (or combination of the two)
  • 14 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup milk
  • 2 tablespoons flour
  • 12 – 1 teaspoon basil
  • 12 teaspoon parsley
  • 1 dash vinegar

Directions

  • In a large pot, combine broccoli, onion, garlic, broth (I used vegetable broth) or water, and salt.
  • Cover pot, bring to a boil, and then simmer for about 15 minutes, or until everything starts getting soft.
  • Use a ladle to transfer 2/3 of the soup into a blender.
  • Blend the soup until smooth. (I just used my immersion blender until I was happy with the texture.)
  • Pour back into saucepan and turn on heat to medium setting.
  • In a small bowl, combine milk with flour and whisk together until smooth.
  • Pour mixture into soup and stir.
  • Add basil and parsley and stir until soup begins to thicken.
  • Add vinegar, and salt and pepper to taste.

Desperately Seeking Susan (7/12) Movie CLIP – Into the Groove (1985) HD

U.S. Now Provoking North Korea Missile Launches

Poor kitty

This cat tried to come into my house at the end of June of this year while we were in the middle of a heat wave in WA.

It’s like she was saying, “I’m sick of being ignored! Someone has to help me!”

This is the cat after 3 months of living inside and being out of the elements.

I discovered the cat was very old, she has been declawed, so there was no way for her to catch any food for herself.

The cat was horribly dehydrated, had 104 temperature, she was skin and bones and yet she was so sweet and loving!

She also was microchipped but I never heard back from the original owners.

I took the cat to the vet immediately where she had x-rays, the vet said she has severe arthritis in her back.

Poor kitty could barely walk!

So this is quite a success story, I named her Ladybug and she is so much happier now!

You can tell she feels like someone’s pet again.

She loves to cuddle and gives back so much love, she didn’t deserve to be abandoned and left for dead.

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Chinese Movie ‘Home Coming’ Becomes National Day Box Office Hit China’s latest patriotic blockbuster ‘Home Coming’ focuses on Chinese diplomats as the saviours of overseas Chinese in times of trouble.

The movie is said to be based on real events but it is set in the fictional Numia Republic (努米亚共和国). 

According to Chinese state media outlet China.org, Home Coming is inspired by an evacuation event in Libya in 2011, when the Chinese embassy reportedly evacuated more than 30,000 Chinese nationals in a time frame of 12 days. 

At the time, Chinese official media called it “the largest such operation China had mounted abroad since the Nationalists fled in 1949” and Chinese nationals were evacuated from the war-torn Libya via land, sea, and air (Zerba 2015, 107). 

On Weibo, there are many reviewers giving Home Coming a five-star rating, with some saying the movie moved them to tears. 

“I needed four tissues,” one movie-goer said, while another person complained that they forgot to bring any tissues to dry their tears. 

In light of the movie’s premiere, photos of people crying while watching the film also circulated online.

Article HERE

HD】南征北戰NZBZ – 《生來倔强》巡迴演唱會_生來倔強 (Live)

https://youtu.be/b-qWq5-Kx5Y

Because on some level, it is the truth.

I’ve lived in Australia for 20 years, longer than I have had in China, and have seen lives on both sides.

I have this Aussie female friend, young, blonde, pretty and just getting to her late 20’s. A white collar, not high ups but she gets by well enough. She makes what, 80K AUD a year? That’s median up level for a average worker in Sydney. She drives a BMW M4, goes to professional race tracks every few weeks for fun. She’s not married, but in a stable relationship, boyfriend is also a white collar, makes less money than her but not by much. No mortgages because by god who can afford in Sydney anymore these days, so they rent. Every year she takes her 4 weeks annual leaves to Fiji or Europe or Hawaii or wherever she fancies, since she still wants to see the world before deciding to settle down. No plan for babies yet, god, that’s a huge responsibility isn’t it? Her parents sold their family home and moved to a regional city a few years back, to a nice picturesque little town near a lake, she visits them often. She has a sister, who apparently lives in another city but they are quite close. The plan is should the parents’ health fails, they would move into a nursing home close to home, with assisted living.

This is what many young Aussie’s life, you take away the names you can almost slot in any guy/gal you know in there and you wouldn’t call it out of place.

My wife has this Chinese female friend. Same age, just as pretty. She lives in China, has a stable job but highly stressful since she has KPIs to reach every month. She makes 5000 yuan a month, a respectable amount for a young Chinese professional, but still there’s not much left after paying off the monthly bills. She doesn’t have a car, and changes bus three times every morning to work. She got married last year, and the baby is on the way so she’s very stressed about the job and the finances. Husband is a hard worker, works three jobs, one regular during the week and two other jobs on the weekend. He’s a heavy smoker, to which I’m not surprised, on account of all the work he does on the side. They bought an apartment in a Tier 2 city last year before they got married, with their own savings, but I’m sure the parents contributed a fair amount as well. Parents on both sides got their own place, so at least they got that going for them. But her mother’s health is failing and she’s constantly worried about that. Oh the woes of being the only child ! They don’t entertain much because by gosh who has time. They prefer having hotpots with friends on a Friday evening in the alleyways behind their apartment building.

This is a typical young Chinese’s life. Same deal, put your friend’s name there you probably can’t tell who’s who.

Now you tell me which side of the two lives is easier?

China is getting there, but the price is paid via blood and sweat of this generation. The Aussies have already paid theirs. You don’t get to see it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. What the Chinese are doing today is making sure their kids can live a somewhat easier life in their future.

Gravitas: China reveals new nuclear submarine ahead of Congress

Americans fighting Russians directly by order of Joe Biden

Let’s try to relax and chill out. I don’t have too much to say today. Just that it’s now official, the USA is directly engaging the Russians directly in Ukraine. This is NOT going to end up good.

Just stating the obvious. Aside from that, well, have a good day.

Theme Song | The Green Slime | Warner Archive

The year is 1966. Rock on!

Americans are now fighting Russians in Ukraine directly!

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Ah, we knew this, but now it is clearly the case. Ugh!

My son was in 5th grade and the school bully loved picking on him. You see, my son is a ginger. The most beautiful color of red hair grows from his head. He is and always has been very handsome, but that story is for a different day.

This bully tried and tried everything he could think of to get a rise out of my boy. He was taught that; unless he is backed into a corner, violence is not the answer. And so it went.

The bully kept on and kept on. My son’s best friend was a tiny bit of a boy who also wore glasses. As a last ditch effort and after making derogatory remarks about me, his dad and him, the bully turned around and sucker punched this small child, my son’s friend, right in the nose so hard, the kid’s glasses broke as did his nose!

It was on! My son had had enough of this bully and started whaling on him, and he wasn’t going to stop before he had annihilated this bully! Well, it took the principal, one male teacher plus the janitor to get my son off him.

I get a call to come pick him up; he was expelled. What? My mind was racing, the school would not tell me anything else. My son may be a lot of things, but a troublemaker he was not. I got to the school and one look at my son told me had been in a fight.

The principal told me in no uncertain terms that my son had “beaten a boy to a pulp, a pulp! The boy’s father wants to press charges!”

I asked my boy, “Is this true?” Yes, he nodded. And looked so ashamed of himself. I asked him to tell me what happened. After he told me, I now understood. I told the principal, “And what is the other boy’s fate? Is he expelled as well? No? Why the hell not? This boy that supposedly is a victim had been harassing, teasing, hitting, and numerous other things to my son all year long!

And bullies usually don’t just pick on one person, they pick on anyone who they think they can, so Where in the hell do you get off awarding the bully, encouraging his father to press charges against my boy, and punishing the one boy in the whole school that whipped his ass? What is wrong with you, don’t you know I could very well sue you right now? You had better figure out why this isn’t going to work, and please call me to let me know what the outcome is going to be.”

I took my son and marched out of the building. On the way to the car, I asked my son if he had learned anything from this. He said, “Yeah. Next time don’t hit him on school grounds!”

Kids are great! BTW, the school board decided they had made a mistake, and after two days of suspension, my boy went back to school. The bully cooled his jets and was quiet and sullen from then on, and my son was the school hero!

Large US debt raises concerns about more extreme US policies and possible instability

Published: Oct 06, 2022 08:48 PM
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According to a US Treasury Department report released on Tuesday, the US’ gross national debt has surpassed $31 trillion, edging closer to the statutory ceiling of roughly $31.4 trillion put in place by Congress limiting the government’s ability to borrow, AP reported.

First, it’s clear that the US economy is in far less rosy shape than what many had forecast, with debt now trillions of dollars higher than its GDP, which was only about $23 trillion last year. Starting around 2013, US debt began to steadily outstrip GDP. After 2020, it jumped to about 125% of the year’s GDP, quickly soaring up to nearly 135% in 2021. As the rate of borrowing continues to climb, the unhealthy ratio of debt to GDP is expected to continue rising over coming years.

On the one hand, the Biden administration hopes to suppress inflation, which will likely drag down the US economy and employment. On the other hand, if the government chooses to stimulate the economy by increasing debt scale, investors will face greater pressure like rising capital cost, ultimately dampening economic growth prospects. It will be therefore difficult for the US government to balance economic recovery and runaway inflation, Bai Ming, deputy director of the international market research institute at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, told the Global Times.

“The US debt ceiling has been raised many times, which, to a large extent, will also have an impact on the US financial markets, objectively playing a negative role by adding fuel to the fire on top of interest rate hikes.”

Second, the total debt of $31 trillion also indicates that there will be more intense political combat on issues related to congressional appropriations in Washington, which means almost all major federal projects and initiatives will be difficult to deliver, affecting the country’s internal economic vitality and its external influence. In addition, Bai noted, the last time the US debt was this close to its ceiling, the government was nearly forced to shut down, and the increasingly high debt will also harm the basic operation of the federal government.

Third, an increasing debt burden will naturally raise concerns about the ability of the US government to service the debt, and even the possibility of extremes in future US internal and external policies, such as provoking volatility, unrest or even a war oriented foreign policy to shift or even find ways to renege on its debt, which has indeed happened in US history. This sentiment alone could potentially undermine the full faith and credit of the US.

The Congressional Budget Office earlier this year released a report on America’s debt load, warning in its 30-year outlook that, if unaddressed, the debt will soon spiral upward to new highs that could ultimately imperil the US economy, according to an AP report.

Moreover, the current level of inflation in the US should not be underestimated, coupled with high oil prices, the energy disputes between the US, Europe and Russia, as well as the Russia-Ukraine conflict and other complex international situations, the challenge of a $31 trillion national debt should be considered in the context of the risky crises currently facing Washington. If the persistent upward trend cannot be resolved, the attractiveness of the US as a global pool of capital and talent will be further eroded, hitting its strength in all aspects.

However, it’s important to note the reality that the US is accustomed to adopting various policies to deflect conflicts, leaving ordinary Americans and other countries to bear the ultimate cost. The US is not playing the role of a stabilizer in the global economy that a major power should do. Instead, it has repeatedly held others accountable for the consequences when it makes mistakes. As the birthplace of several post-World War II global economic crises, the US could once again become a chaos maker at the expense of economic development around the world, given that the debt as well as its economic and monetary policies all raise the possibility of another global financial crisis in the future.

Jackie Brown: Where’s the rest of the money?

When I walked into a cat room at the shelter and sat on the floor, sad, because my home cat just died the week before. I put my purse on the floor. this Ginger cat pranced up to me and immediately laid down on top of my purse. I thought he was telling me that he wanted to come home with me.

I visited this shelter 3 X and each time, he did the same thing.

When I brought in the cat carrier the third visit, I set it on the floor and he ran over to me and walked into the carrier. The shelter personal, said, “NO NO, you have to take him out so we can take the Success story “forever home” picture…so I took him out, held him, they took the photo. I set him back down on the floor and he immediately walked back into the carrier and said, “Ok, I am ready, take me to my new home.”

What are the chances of that? Special, I say !

I passed on a gorgeous 1 year old all white male with one blue eye and one gold eye, for an extraordinary, every day normal ginger that you see everywhere.

He is so worth it.

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Parmesan Sage Pork Chops

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Ingredients

  • 1 12 cups breadcrumbs (I use Progresso garlic and herb)
  • 1 cup grated parmesan cheese
  • 1 tablespoon dried rubbed sage
  • 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
  • 2 large eggs, whisked
  • 14 cup flour, seasoned with
  • salt and pepper
  • 4 pork chops, about 1 inch thick (can use bone in or out ones)
  • 1814 cup butter
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions

  • preheat oven to 425F degrees.
  • Mix in bowl, bread crumbs, grated parmesan cheese, dried rubbed sage and grated lemon peel.
  • Then, on a plate put flour seasoned with salt and pepper; coat chops with flour.
  • Dip in egg.
  • Then dip in bread crumb mixture.
  • Melt butter and olive oil in a oven-proof skillet.
  • Brown chops until golden.
  • Transfer to oven and bake until meat thermometer says 150 degrees, about 20 minutes.

ROBIN TROWER – Alathea (1975 UK TV Performance)

The rest of the world has chosen.

They chose China and Russia.

Don’t worry the US still has 3 slave nations Germany, Japan and Korea. But they are certainly rethinking.

The US can always depends on it blood Anglo brothers though NZ is certainly rethinking. UK, Canada and Australia will sink with the US.

They still have France, Netherlands and Denmark but the rest are not a certainty.

All of Africa, All of Latin America, All of Asia and all of middle east are with China and Russia.

This is the real headache for the US, it’s vassal and its cronies. If you stay with that way where are you selling things to?

Managing and owning a restaurant for over ten years I’ve ran into many rude customers but you’d be surprised how much one loyal customer is worth to your company so I’ve always tried to make any complaint right when I can.

However there have been two occasions when I’ve kicked people out, I’ll name the most satisfying one.

So it was a Sunday afternoon right after church and we were pretty darn busy. A lady left her jacket on a chair and I hustled out the door to bring it to her. As I was walking out to find her I passed a couple that was probably in their 60s. They were on their way in. I found the lady quickly and I turned around to walk back in. That couple may have had a 15 second head-start on entering the restaurant but no more than that. As I came in behind them I noticed my host was cleaning off a table, so being my manager self I took the initiative and walked up to them and this is how the convo went..

Me – “Hi folks how many do we have today? Just us two?”

Them – “Well we’ve been waiting here for 10 damn minutes, is your food going to be any better than this service?”

Now I was in shock as I knew they had not been there not even longer than 15 seconds let alone ten minutes. I decided to put a smile on and deal with it nicely so I said..

Me – “I’ll get y’all taken care of, would y’all like a booth or a table”

Them – “You’re not going to answer my question with another question, now answer me is your food going to be any better than your service?”

I was getting frustrated but proceeded to say..

Me- “Follow me I’ll get you taken care of.”

As I sat them down at our nicest and most comfortably placed booth I asked:

Me – “What can I get y’all to drink”

Again he said –

Them – “Now listen you’re going to answer my damn question and not answer it with another question, now is your food going to be any better than this awful service?”

I gave it one last try and said:

Me – “Sir I am going to take care of you. What can I get you to drink”

Them – He then tried again to say “You don’t know how to not answer a question do you?”

As he said that I ripped his menu out from his table and told him to leave the store. He got all big and puffy as he started walking out and ran up to the counter demanding to speak to the manager. THIS IS THE BEST PART!

My cashier said yes sir and pointed to me he walked back over to me and told me I want to speak to the owner I am gonna get you fired. It was at this moment I knew I had won the life time achievement award for handling an awful customer and I came back with “yes sir absolutely” I gave him the owner’s phone number and he right there in front of what had now been a decent-size crowd of people standing at the host stand and my employees pulled out his phone with this smirk on his face and called the number.

My phone in my pocket began to ring and I answered with “Hi this is Brandon Howard, owner of Smokin’ Joes how may I help you?” Everyone literally started clapping and he walked out in a fury.

It was glorious.

Observations from visiting Seattle WA container port.

A few weeks ago c1ue described the situation in Los Angeles’ container port facility. I found it useful, since container shipping bottlenecks were blamed for shortages, inflation, etc. effects on the economy. Would that happen this year, too?

This past weekend I was in Seattle, and had a few spare moments to visit Seattle’s container port on Saturday. I was able to walk along the road that runs beside the wharves. I spoke with Coast Guard, container storage-lot, and (adjacent) ferry operations personnel.

Here’s what I learned:

The port can simultaneously handle about eight ships (my visual estimate based on dock length and number of cranes). Only one ship was at-dock.

There were two other container ships anchored within sight offshore.

There was no activity at the wharves. Monday through Friday operations only at this time.

Empty containers are being collected at dock-side. There are tens of thousands of them, arriving at a rate of about a thousand per day.

There is a 1000+ person waiting list to become a longshoreman. The jobs pay in excess of $100K. There is no shortage of willing workers.

The longshoremen are union workers. The union hall (admin office and training facility) is dock-side.

Traffic at the port is expected to increase rapidly as the holiday season approaches

The port’s road infrastructure is not designed to efficiently move traffic off the major highways and into / out of the port. Roadways cross at-grade, and non-port-related commute/commerce traffic directly impedes port traffic.

BNSF’s railroad container terminal is located right beside the wharves. It is divided from the wharves by a two-lane road. The rail yard was active on Saturday.

From those observations I infer that:

a. there isn’t a labor shortage that’s impeding traffic
b. there is currently plenty of excess ship-loading capacity
c. there are plenty of empty containers ready to go to Asia
d. the port’s major throughput bottleneck appears to be poor highway design

Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Oct 6 2022 16:02 utc | 6

The Three Stooges Meet Hercules

“Kinderlandverschickung”

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Russian authorities in Kherson Oblast announced that all schoolchildren will be evacuated to Crimea, to “spend their Autumn holidays.”  In reality, this is, as the Germans called it,  “Kinderlandverschickung.”

Officials from the region say that schools will stay closed until the 21st of October for security reasons, which also necessitate evacuation.

It is described in C.S. Lewis’ “Narnia”-series. This means, that heavy bombardment of the cities is expected, and they’re moving the kids out before it begins

HIGHWAY TO HELL With no off-ramp.

This is what’s being shared by the overwhelming majority of Russian channels. Possibly leaked from a source way up in the command chain – and/or about to be established in a position of power.

Not necessarily the road map ahead. But certainly reflecting a consensus. Don’t expect any confirmation from the MoD.

Destroying Ukraine's power supply nodes.
Hitting rail and road logistics hubs.
Destruction of tunnels and bridges.
Destruction of all buildings housing government offices.
Elimination of Ukraine's political leadership.
Diversionary operations to undermine military supply, training, intelligence, etc. hubs in Poland, Germany, Romania, the Baltics, England... It should be a massive attack.
Internationalization of armed forces, involvement of allies: Vietnam, North Korea, armed formations from CIS countries, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa, etc.
Procurement and supply of troops at the expense of military allies. Nothing more to be embarrassed about.
Strikes on military satellites of western countries over Ukraine.
Air defense, a no-fly zone over Ukraine, REB.
Destroying strategically important dams.
Carrying out a tightly controlled, detailed, and coordinated offensive operation.

China hurt him badly when they intervened to support Hong Kong. Soros attempted to crash the HK economy in order to make a buck and failed. He did successfully crash Thailand though, sending an entire country into dire recession. Soros is a true bottom feeder who is willing to wreck peoples lives – entire countries just to make money.

Bryan Ferry & Robin Trower – I Put a Spell on You + Will You Love Me Tomorrow [1993]

My son built elaborate road systems – with masking tape! The roads wound through the dining room, kitchen and back room. I don’t know how many rolls of tape he went through (I bought it in batches of 20!), and I still need to refinish the wood floor, but it was worth it to see him create such amazing roads and play with his cars on them. Sometimes there were traffic jams and accidents, other times the roads were clear and race cars would speed down the highway, occasionally outrunning police cars. He had more fun with this than any track system I could have bought for him.

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LUCY Clip – “Learning’s a Painful Process” (2014)

https://youtu.be/UhqfvCKx7uA

From a Source in Europe:

This is from a source whose information seems to have a track record of reliability:

I wrote yesterday that the hysteria around the “use of nuclear weapons by Moscow” scares me. Unfortunately, there are other indications that there may be something behind it. Not 100%. Still… (coming soon)

https://t.me/craZybear2022/18779

https://stopbioweapons.org/imper/328-snbo-ukrainy-i-nato-gotovjat-jadernuju-provokaciju-dlja-obvinenija-rossii.html

I would very much like to draw attention to this post and maybe pass it on. Especially for journalists. A colleague of mine (a military expert, a citizen of a NATO country who served in the international armed forces) has just informed me that a nuclear provocation in the south of Ukraine may occur in the coming days. I believe this report, for reasons that I will explain in more detail below.

As a reminder, at the talks between the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine and the NATO command at the end of August, the use of tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) or radioactive (“dirty”) weapons in the south of Ukraine was discussed, followed by an accusation against Moscow. This should provide for a really deep breakthrough on the front and facilitate the emigration of the disloyal population of the region to Kiev. For the US, this is a pretext to aggravate the situation and force the EU countries to unite within the framework of NATO.

This could happen on October 5-10. Malka or Pion launchers, which should be available to Ukraine, could be used to shoot down the ammunition. (This option was worked out by military experts). Kiev insisted on the provision of TNW, but the “partners” were afraid that the ammunition could be stolen and insisted on making several “dirty” ammunition using radioactive material available to the AFU, possibly from Chernobyl, under the guidance of NATO advisers.

My colleague insists that the issue of a strike is decided, he just does not know whether it will be TNW or “dirty” ammunition. He personally fears that NATO will increase the deployment, and the incident could lead to a real confrontation with the use of nuclear weapons. So he writes about everything for me, maybe also for someone else.

Why is information still plausible to me:

-My colleague is a very serious person who, due to his experience and career, could have a lot of knowledge and be involved in the preparation of decisions in the military field;
-Some of my contacts in the EU independently told me that everything is being prepared for an event that will finally “kill” relations with Russia. One person wrote to me that this could be related to a nuclear threat;

-I know from open sources of persistent attacks on Zaporizhia NPP with the help of drones and long-range NATO weapons (probably with NATO calculations), i.e. the West and Kiev have undoubtedly been following a nuclear incident in the south for months;
-Hysteria is spreading in the West about Moscow’s “nuclear preparations”, and the White House has even announced its possible reaction. Taken together, these could be preparations for this kind of provocation.

I really wish that the information was inaccurate or that a wild plan of a nuclear provocation was discussed, but canceled. But I see only one way to prevent this – by writing.

To anticipate: I will not only publish this text, but also send it to Russian diplomats known to me. Whether it will help, I do not know. Unfortunately, I have no evidence and no details, and I can not name the name of my colleague – he gave his word and obviously has to face a prison sentence for trying to prevent a tragedy. 

So I can only inform about this threat. I urge bloggers and journalists to share this information. Those among your readers who have connections with foreign countries should try to convey this information to the public and the press.

Please grow up to understand reality.

Tiananmen is totally another of the US “colour revolution” a CIA and state department job using the western media lie to the world. And the death number if any is due to the US interference.

The CIA efforts failed and like they say the rest is history. China learnt a priceless lesson and ensure that not a single CIA operatives get to China and with that the China miracle rise started.

Do not believe even a word from the western media narratives meant to demonize China and Russia.

Do you know who this is?

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This is Audrey. Possibly one of the most spoiled brats ever.

It was her 16th birthday, and her mum bought her a brand new Lexus. A LEXUS.

And do you know what she did?

She started crying… “I didn’t want my car now!” “It’s not even the car I wanted!”

And this is what needs to be said.

There are children out there who are literally sewing your shoes together for less than a pound/dollar a day. There are children out there literally forced to drink bacteria-infested water every day, because it is all they have. There are children out there who have to walk miles, for hours, sometimes even barefoot, to go to school for a few hours a day, only to end up working on a farm when they are older, because it is all they have.

And here’s Audrey, crying about how she didn’t get the car she wanted.

It’s a disaster, Audrey!

First of all, China is not “supporting” Russia. China has friendly, cooperative, and mutually beneficial relations with Russia, as it has with most other nations in the world.

Why should China treat any country with disrespect like USA and NATO members do? China is not an arrogant, self-righteous prick.

Second, China does not condone the war in Ukraine. However, China is working hard diplomatically to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, two countries with whom China has excellent relations.

Third, China is deeply woven into the global economy. Cutting off your nose to spite your face is really, really stupid.

The CCP took strict measures to contain the virus because they wanted to save the lives of their people. People’s lives are more important than money. That’s it.

I cannot understand why Westerners, especially US citizens, are always thinking in terms of a competition. “Better than them”. Can’t you think in terms of cooperation instead?

U.S. Purchasing $290 MM in “Nuclear Emergency” Drugs

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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is purchasing a supply of the drug “Nplate” from Amgen USA Inc.   Nplate is approved to treat blood cell injuries that accompany Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) in adult and pediatric patients (ARS).

Amgen, based in Thousands Oaks, California, developed Nplate for ARS with support from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), as well as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.

BARDA is using its authority provided under the 2004 Project Bioshield Act and $290 million in Project BioShield designated funding to purchase this supply of the drug. Amgen will maintain this supply in vendor-managed inventory. This approach decreases life-cycle management costs for taxpayers because doses that near expiration can be rotated into the commercial market for rapid use prior to expiry and new doses can be added to the government supply.

ARS, also known as radiation sickness, occurs when a person’s entire body is exposed to a high dose of penetrating radiation, reaching internal organs in a matter of seconds. Symptoms of ARS injuries include impaired blood clotting as a result of low platelet counts, which can lead to uncontrolled and life-threatening bleeding.

To reduce radiation-induced bleeding, Nplate stimulates the body’s production of platelets. The drug can be used to treat adults and children.

Nplate is also approved for adult and pediatric patients with immune thrombocytopenia, a blood disorder resulting in low platelet counts. Repurposing drugs for acute radiation syndrome that also are approved for a commercial indication helps to sustain availability of the product and improves healthcare provider familiarity with the drug.

BARDA is using its authority provided under the 2004 Project Bioshield Act and $290 million in Project BioShield designated funding to purchase this supply of the drug.

Amgen will maintain this supply in vendor-managed inventory.

This approach decreases life-cycle management costs for taxpayers because doses that near expiration can be rotated into the commercial market for rapid use prior to expiry and new doses can be added to the government supply.‘

I am 43 and have lived in NORTH AMERICA (both US and Canada), SOUTH AMERICA (Colombia), EAST ASIA (South Korea, Japan), NORTH AFRICA (Morocco), EUROPE (Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary, Spain)

My dad traveled a lot so I grew up in a fairly international atmosphere, then I got a job that took me all over the world. My lifestyle has led me to have a rather international way of seeing things, to get to the point I don’t really feel that American and when around Americans I feel out of place.

Here is a list of things I dislike.

  1. CONFORMISM: A lot of people in the US lack intellectual curiosity, America is a nation of consumers, not of thinkers…. A lot of Americans think life resumes to working to pay bills, saving for retirement, having kids, and running the rat race destination nowhere!
  2. EXPENSIVE EDUCATION AND HEALTHCARE: I had a cavity that was killing me in the US. I waited a week to go back to Colombia (I lived in Colombia at the time) so that I could see a Colombian dentist. The Colombian dentist did just a SUPERB JOB much better than any dentist I have ever used in the US, and it costed me 40 bucks to get my tooth fixed. In America it would have been around 800 dollars or perhaps thousands.
  3. TAXING AMERICANS ABROAD: There are only TWO countries around the world that tax their citizens on worldwide earned income. The US and Djibouti in Africa. Djibouti does not enforce it unlike the US. (Ironically the US claims Djibouti is a dictatorship that infringes on human freedom)
  4. CHARACTERLESS AMERICAN CITIES: Too many suburbs, too much sprawl, everywhere you look you notice the landscape is dotted with cookie cutter suburbs, crappy generic malls, massive billboards advertising crap, and gigantic parking lots. American cities lack excitement. (There are only three cities in the US…. NY, San Francisco, and New Orleans. The rest is Cleveland!)
  5. RACE: Living abroad you realize that hate is universal, and while you might find racists and bigots here and there around the world, in America “Race” is a business! Race is such a monumental thing in America that it is almost illogical. In other countries race is a thing you think about once or twice in the span of a few years and for a few seconds, but in America race permeates and defines literally EVERY ASPECT OF THIS COUNTRY.
  6. TOO HOMOGENEOUS – COOKIE CUTTER: This is linked to the characterless, corporate like – Home owners association loving, ambiance of the country. From coast to coast everything is corporate and looks exactly the same. Restaurants are the same, coffee shops are the same, clothing stores are the same, foods are the same, people dress the same, architecture looks the same. All that sameness has an effect on the otherwise diverse demographics, who overtime become mind numbingly homogeneous.
  7. FOOD IS CRAPPY, GENERIC IN TASTE AND HEALTHY OPTIONS EXPENSIVE: How is it possible that in Colombia or Spain or Morocco or Vietnam I can buy some amazing fresh organic produce anywhere for a couple of bucks… but in America I have to go to whole foods and spend a good amount of money in healthy vegetables so that I can be sure they are free of GMO’s? Not only that, in other countries, food varies based on the restaurant. In America food tastes alike all over.
  8. YOU NEED TO DRIVE EVERYWHERE: Not sure why intelligent urban growth is not an option here. A nation this rich could afford to build efficient public transportation no? I was reading that a high speed train between Boston – NYC – Philly – Baltimore – DC would generate billions in revenue, cause co2 decline in the region, and decongest roads in the north East. The issue is corporate lobbies in DC won’t let it happen.
  9. TOO MUCH POVERTY: Not only monetary but intellectual. Ignorance of the world, prejudices, stereotypes of other cultures are ok and the norm. Americans have no damn clue of how the world works and live in an alternate planet called the American bubble! On this planet, all people do is work and work and work, many with crappy wages, shitty jobs, tons of people struggle and the government is absent or hardly cares. All the while Americans convince themselves or firmly and naively believe they are LUCKY because they live in the greatest nation on earth.
  10. PEOPLE WALKING AROUND IN PAJAMAS, OR SOCKS AND SANDALS: Make at least a fucking effort to look like you took a damn shower! Do you really need to go out in pajamas or socks and sandals like a fucking nasty troglodyte?
  11. EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD TODAY EITHER CAME FROM AMERICA OR IS EXACERBATED BY AMERICAN MEDIA: Political correctness, Feminazism, Racialism, Identity politics, toxic divisions, extreme conservatism, extreme liberalism, cancel culture, shitty flag waving patriotism.
  12. THE INTELLIGENT DO NOT CALL THE SHOTS, THE SHOTS ARE CALLED BY THE DUMB, LOUD, OBNOXIOUS, GROSS ON SOCIAL MEDIA! The louder and dumber you behave on Twitter, the more followers you get, hence the more power to change things your way you get because spineless politicians will jump on your boat in order to get votes.
  13. LACK OF GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING, IGNORANCE AND BACKWARDNESS ACCEPTED AS NORMAL: Americans self congratulate on things like having a woman vice president, or having a mixed race president and think it is groundbreaking. Ironically half the planet has already had females in charge for decades, and all sorts of people with all sorts of skin colors leading! Argentina already had transgender women on tv back in the 70s! In the US people think it is so forward because we finally have Ru Paul Drag race.
  14. GUNS GUNS GUNS AND THE IDIOTS THAT LOVE THEM: I tried teaching in CO but I gave up after realizing what mess our education system is. During a conversation with a fellow teacher she showed me her loaded gun. She proudly stated… “This is my girl, she keeps me safe!”. I do not know how safe I would feel to have my child go to school with an armed teacher, one day she goes crazy and there goes my child and his classmates! And this is blue state Colorado! Imagine the red ones! TOO MANY GUNS…. which takes me to the next point.
  15. TOXIC MACHO CULTURE COMPARED TO OTHER RICH WESTERN NATIONS AND EVEN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: From the college “bro” that thinks wearing pink is gay; To men desperate to belong to pointless stupid fraternities where they can hang out and get wasted with other “dudes”; To punks that think their assault rifles make them manly; To resentful pricks that want to shoot everyone because women won’t pay attention to them; To dickheads running the show that think it is their rightful place as old straight males to dictate whatever everyone else should do! This country breeds entitlement! It is overflooding with a bunch of pseudo-alpha male, “John Wayne” wannabes; absolutely convinced they are exemplary and wise beyond words because they are men!

— Notice the contributions of straight men in this country in the last decade : Mass shootings; right wing groups like the Proud Boys, the Alt Right and their douchebag hairstyles— This level of entitlement in straight men is surprisingly rare in many places abroad (Unless you are in the Middle East.) Granted that is changing quickly but for a so called developed nation, it is terribly backwater!

Chinese DEFCON

Unlike the Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON) used by the U.S. Armed Forces, which the U.S. forces were placed at DEFCON 3 when Egypt and Syria launched a joint attack on Israel.

China has a Combat Readiness Condition [戰備等級

] used for defense only. It’s divided into four levels:

(4) Normal – Adjust the PLA on duty, combat readiness inspection, strengthen patrols, enhance border, maintain normal communication.

(3) Mobilization – PLA on duty in standby state, strengthen communications, the implementation of reconnaissance, restricted access to military facilities, traffic, ready to expand the army, preparing for combat readiness, ready to set up positions.

(2) Training – PLA on duty to work overtime, strengthen communications, strengthen reconnaissance, expansion of the army, ready to mobilize reserves, prepare combat readiness, set up fortifications, combat training.

(1) Combat Ready – PLA on duty work uninterrupted, strengthen reconnaissance, emergency expansion of the army, mobilization of all reserve forces, ready to use ordnance, fortification position.

The Chinese Ministry of Defense will refer to the scale of foreign military operations’ impact on China, and the possibility of China being attacked to determine the levels of combat readiness. Different regions of the PLA (TCPLA

), as well as the different PLA Forces can have different combat readiness conditions.

x
x

China’s Combat Readiness Condition was raised several times to level 1 readiness:

  • China’s Xinjiang Kashi City, two consecutive violent terrorist incidents, the PLA implement martial law, and its combat readiness level was raised to a combat readiness.
  • 2001 Hainan Island incident –
  • US Navy EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft collided with a Chinese F-8II fighter jet in the South China Sea. PLA readiness level was upgraded to a combat readiness.
  • 2008 Taiwan presidential election

– The southern theater-level alert, the Navy South Sea Fleet, the Rockets and Air Force into the pre-war state; strategic nuclear submarine force into the first alert.

Holy SH*T, they just admitted US is ‘boots on the ground’ in Ukraine | Redacted w Clayton Morris

Easy Crusty French Bread

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x

Ingredients

Directions

  • MIX THE DOUGH & FIRST RISE (1 HOUR):

  • Combine yeast, sugar, and warm water in a large mixing bowl or in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook.
  • Let the yeast proof for about 5 minutes, until the mixture is foamy.
  • Add kosher salt and flour to bowl. Mix with your hands or a sturdy spatula, or mix on low speed with your stand mixer until all flour is incorporated and dough has just started to pull away from the sides of the bowl. For best results, mix until no dry bits of flour remain. Please note: This is a relatively slack (wet) dough, so it may seem a bit shaggy and sticky at this point. Don’t worry – it will become more smooth and elastic as we go!
  • Lightly flour all sides of your dough (don’t mix the flour in – it’s just to keep the dough from sticking!) and turn it over inside the mixing bowl to coat with flour on all sides. Cover with a clean tea towel and let rise on the counter for about 1 hour, until dough has doubled in size.

 

  • SHAPE THE DOUGH & FINAL RISE (30 MIN):

  • When dough has risen, lightly flour a large cutting board.
  • Tip the dough out of the bowl and onto the cutting board. DO NOT PUNCH THE DOUGH DOWN – you want to keep all those nice air bubbles intact so you have an airy, delicious loaf of bread. (Note: If the dough is sticking to the bowl a little bit, wet your hand with a bit of cold water and gently separate the dough from the bowl to get it all out).
  • Sprinkle a bit of flour across the top of the dough, then begin shaping it into a round loaf. Pull each corner of the dough in towards the center (like you’re folding an envelope) and repeat until the dough feels tight and begins to resist your folds. Flip the dough over and tap it into a round loaf.
  • Flour a proofing basket or a medium bowl and place your loaf into it seam-side down. Cover with a tea towel and let rise another 30 minutes or so while you preheat the oven.

 

  • HEAT THE OVEN :

  • While bread is rising, place an empty dutch oven (with the lid on) in your oven and heat to 460 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • BAKE!
  • When the oven is hot, you’re ready to go! Use oven mitts to pull the dutch oven out and remove the lid.
  • Lay a piece of parchment paper down on your counter or cutting board (optional – it makes transferring the bread easier!).
  • Tip your bread dough gently out of the proofing basket onto the parchment paper. Make sure the seam side is up this time – this is what will create those beautiful cracks on top of the bread!
  • VERY CAREFULLY (without burning yourself!) use the sides of the parchment to lift the bread up and place it into the hot Dutch oven.
  • Put your oven mitts back on, place the dutch oven lid back on the pot, and slide the whole thing back into your hot oven.
  • Cook bread for 30 minutes.
  • After 30 minutes, remove the lid from your dutch oven. The bread should be taller, crusty, and very lightly browned. Continue cooking the bread, uncovered, for 10-15 minutes more until the bread has deepened in color and you have a beautiful brown crust.
  • When bread is done, use oven mitts to pull the pot out of your oven.
  • Use a long spatula or the corners of your parchment paper to lift the bread out of the dutch oven and onto a cooling rack. Let cool for at least 30 minutes before cutting into it.

Bangkok Hilton – The Execution

What countries support China’s One Party Rule?

Why are people concerned about China’s governance of their country? Be it 1 party or not.

Democracy calls for mutual respect & coexistence with the different. We do not tell our neighbors how to manage their home, do we? Same for governance of a country. To force western values onto others who has a different situation & culture is DICTATORSHIP.

Why is the West paranoid (China-phobia) about Communist China? Vietnam is also communist. Why no paranoid about Vietnam?

Haha. Right away, we know US propaganda is at play.

Why USA bad-mouths communist China & communist N Korea? But not communist Vietnam. Because China is rising. It is militarily & economically challenging USA’s #1 status in the world. Not only does Vietnam not challenge USA, USA needs Vietnam’s geographical value as a stepping stone to create troubles for China.

N Korea also has geographical value to USA. But USA already has S Korea. That is why USA must bad-mouth N Korea too.

See, nothing scary about communism. Everything to do with US paranoid (China-phobia) & dictatorship.

Like religion, propaganda manipulates people’s mind. Look: all cultures have creators. All creators made the same sun, rain, humans, animals, plants etc. It is the same creators. Different wisdom will develop diff religious practices & myths. You use flour to bake cake. I make noodle. Diff wisdom. Diversity. But some religion propagates their creator is the true one. Others are false & evil.

Let say it was USSR who won over USA, ie communism/Marxism won over democracy. Then democracy will be propagated as evil.

A smart Quoran added an adjective “communist democracy” to settle an argument.

Communism & democracy are 2 different things. But we can put the 2 together by using an adjective eg communist democracy or democratic communism.

Communism/Marxism, socialism & capitalism refers to distribution of public fund/assets. Socialism is less extreme as communism/Marxism. Most western countries in Europe & Canada today are socialist who have a generous welfare system. In capitalist USA, a Harvard research revealed that 20% of Americans owns 80% of US assets. Among the 20%, 1% owns 25% (a lot). 20% of the middle-class owns 5%. 40% of the bottom poor owns zero. In some cases, the middle-class is worse than the bottom poor because their income may not pay off their debts ie negative asset while the bottom poor has zero asset.

Democracy has 2 parts: election & spirit. Democracy spirit calls for …

1, for mutual respect & coexistence with the different. We do not tell our neighbors how to manage their home, do we? Same for governance of a country. To force western values onto others who has a different situation & culture is DICTATORSHIP.

2, for compromise. Today’s political parties fight with each other for votes. Oppose for the sake of opposing. Never think for the welfare of the country as a whole. Each party acts like a dictator.

Not many countries practise 100% democracy. Hence, democracy generally refers to election.

All western socialist countries have elections. They are called socialist democracies. USA is a capitalist democracy.

A communist country can also run elections & should hence be called a communist democracy. Those who are less communist but have elections should thus be called socialist democracy eg Chile, Venezuela & more.

In China, the ruling party is called Communist. But they have evolved to have democratic elections. Regions below provincial level have general elections. Provinces or above have representative elections. At the same time they practice socialism with Chinese characteristics (ie mix of Marxism & capitalism). Therefore, instead of “communist China”, China should be called “socialist China” or socialist democracy today. Westerners have not updated their knowledge & think China is like a bible that never changes.

Why not just call “China”, without an adjective? Like we call USA, UK without an adjective.

We learn not to label people by religion, skin color or ethnicity, eg Muslim, black or Jewish. Can we do the same for a country?

Who call China a dictator despite China has election? The one who breaks democracy spirit ie the US-led West.

Democracy calls for respect & coexistence with the different. We don’t tell our neighbors how they should manage their home, do we? Same for governance of a country. To force western values onto other country who has different situation & culture is DICTATORSHIP.

If a country is a democracy, but the leader is not pro-USA, USA will say their election is fraudulent, or the leader is corrupted, Then declare the elected govt is illegitimate. Then incite a coup & put a pro-USA person as legitimate govt eg 2011 Egypt. 2014 Ukraine & more. … It is god of USA who chooses the leader for other country & not elected by local people. … US democracy = dictatorship

For countries that do not have western styled elections, all leaders are called dictators & evil & must be overthrown by USA. Except communist Vietnam who has geographical value to USA. Haha

… it is US benefits. Nothing to do with communism or democracy/dictatorship.

A Harvard survey that has been conducted regularly for the past 10 years shows that over 90% of Chinese approve their leader. It is not up to westerners to rate other countries if they truly believe in democracy. Democracy calls for respect & coexistence with the different. We do not tell our neighbors how to manage their home, do we? Same for governance of a country. To force western values onto other country who has a different situation & culture is DICTATORSHIP.

Democracy also calls for compromise. The 2 US parties oppose for the sake of opposing without compromise for the welfare of the country. USA looks more like a dictator by definition.

To be fair, China did have times when they used dictatorship. China’s 1st revolutionist who used democracy to overthrow the Qing emperor, Sun Yat-sen, was a dictator after revolution. Why? He (& his successor Chiang Kai-shek) has to unite a country that was divided during revolutions. Same for other revolutionist eg Mao Zedong. The only difference between Sun & Mao is the slogan. Sun shouted democracy. Mao shouted Marxism/communism.

France’s path to democracy also mixed with dictatorship eg emperor Napoleon.

To summarized: today’s China has elections & freedom. It is not a dictator. But because China is rising, the West is worried & thus propagated hatred & fear toward China. That is all.

Guest FREAKS OUT News Hosts With TRUTH About Pipeline Attack!

OPEC Snubs Illegitimate Biden; Cuts Oil Production 2MM B p/Day

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The Organization of Petroleum Export Countries (OPEC) met in Vienna, Austria and agreed to CUT oil production by two million barrels per day, despite strong input from the United States seeking an increase in output.

A group of some of the world’s most powerful oil producers on Wednesday agreed to impose deep output cuts, seeking to spur a recovery in crude prices despite calls from the U.S. to pump more to help the global economy.

OPEC and non-OPEC allies, a group often referred to as OPEC+, decided at their first face-to-face gathering in Vienna since 2020 to reduce production by 2 million barrels per day from November.

Energy market participants had expected OPEC+, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, to impose output cuts of somewhere between 500,000 barrels and 2 million barrels.

The move represents a major reversal in production policy for the alliance, which slashed output by a record 10 million barrels per day in early 2020 when demand plummeted due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The oil cartel has since gradually unwound those record cuts, albeit with several OPEC+ countries struggling to fulfill their quotas.

Oil prices have fallen to roughly $80 a barrel from more than $120 in early June amid growing fears about the prospect of a global economic recession.

The production cut for November is an attempt to reverse this slide, despite repeated pressure from U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration for the group to pump more to lower fuel prices ahead of midterm elections next month.

The White House said on Wednesday that ‘it’s clear’ the OPEC+ oil alliance ‘is aligning with Russia’ after it announced a massive production cut of two million barrels.

It stands to be a big boost for Moscow, despite the West’s efforts to choke off oil and gas revenues as a source of cashflow to fund Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Meanwhile American drivers could face another increase in gas prices in what could end up being a massive setback for the Biden administration.

Wait, what the F*CK did Bolton just say about Julian Assange?

The world is dumping the US dollar in droves in 2023. The world will avoid the western financial institutions in 2023. The world will move firmly and securely into a multi-polar world where the US and its few partners will merely be just one of them.

The world is going into a post US dominated world. The world is moving away from a western centric model in 2023. The Ukraine war is the final nail in the coffin for the US being the world’s biggest hoodlum.

In other words the world is going into a better place.

Butch DeConcini attacks Tony Soprano

https://youtu.be/nRNpOuVGh4U

SVARGA LOKA´s MUSINGS FROM GERMANY

Guest Post by Svarga Loka

1) Masks

It is getting old and boring to write about masks after all these years and months, but I figured that my observations might be interesting. I flew to Germany from Boston a few days ago to visit my family. This is the first time in 1.5 years that I did not have to get a Covid test either direction to fly. Masks were not required from Boston to Ireland, and only about handful of passengers out of 250 or so chose to wear one. Of note: the line for security at Logan was INSANE. It wrapped all around the perimeter of the terminal, which I have never seen before.

I am not sure if numbers of travelers are up, or if number of TSA officers are down. There were signs advertising that the TSA is hiring those (something along the lines of “Do a job that makes a difference”). The plane for the transatlantic flight was completely full. Since I was traveling with children, our entire party did not have to go through the side scatter scanner or whatever technology they use nowadays, which is what always happens when you have children with you. On other flights in the past when I was by myself, I always opt out of that.

 

To my surprise, when I got to the connecting flight from Dublin, Ireland to Germany, there were signs and announcements that masks were mandatory for the entire duration of the flight. In the waiting area, just like on the prior flight, only about 2-5% of the passengers wore masks. When boarding, all of them put their masks on, except me and my children. Our boarding passes were checked and we entered the plane. On the plane, again, multiple announcements that masks are required. I simply pretended to only speak Kroatian or something and I ignored the announcements. Of note, I carry a simply piece of paper with me, written by myself, that states “Mrs. Svarga Loka is not allowed to wear a face covering for health reasons.”, signed and stamped by myself.

I briefly considered to tell the flight attendant that I have an exemption and show her my paperwork, but I decided to just wait and see. None of the flight attendants ever said anything. Clearly, they have been instructed to not confront any non-masked passengers. Meanwhile, of course, I could feel the piercing, angry looks by the other passengers, but I have learned to not care.

Next on the journey: The train ride. Again, I knew that there is a mask mandate in the trains. There were signs that you will have to pay a 150 Euro fine if you are caught maskless and will not be warned and given a chance to put on a mask. We sat down and waited to see what happened. Other passengers giving us the evil eye again. A group of four, about 60 years old talked about how their friend or sister currently has Covid, that they are not as scared as they used to be any more, given that they are now vaccinated, but “no, they will not take the fourth shot any more”.

The conductor shows up and says “If you don´t have an exemption, please put on a mask immediately”. I tell him that, yes, I do have an exemption and give him my ticket along with the 4 pages of mask exemption. Then, he was OVERLY friendly, told me that I can feel free to put my luggage next to the other seats and the kids could lie down to sleep and wishing us a pleasant ride. My suspicion is that he was extremely relieved that I did not give him a hard time, had the right paperwork and therefore did not cause any trouble. The fact that he is asked to be an enforcer of rules he may or may not agree with must be the worst part of his job, and he never knows when someone gets confrontational.

Later, I figured, I should show my unmasked face to as many people as possible, so that other people may feel emboldened in the future. Even though I did not have to pee, I walked the entire length of the train toward the bathroom, so that other people would see me. I was kindof hoping that anybody would confront me, but nobody ever did. Whether it made anybody think, I will never know.

2) Cost

Naturally, I talked to my parents about the energy situation here. On the news, yesterday, they talked about a small business owner of a butcher shop, who needs to cool his sausages and cold cuts 24/7 and his electricity prices have gone up 10fold and he does not know how to pay the bills, but he went wrong by asking the government to fix it.

My parents live in a house that was built in the 1960s, poorly insulated. In the basement, there are two 1500-L oil tanks for a total capacity of 3000 liters. In a typical 12-month period, they go through about 2500 L. Last year, they paid 70 cents per liter, and right now it is 1.60 Euros (US $ and Euro are roughly at parity right now, which makes calculations easy). The high point for oil costs was over 2 Euros per liter in April 2022. So the total annual heating costs for my parents went from well under 2000 Euros per year to about 4000 Euros. I asked them what they will do when oil doubles in price and my Dad said “They can´t do that!” We shall see.

You have to realize that the typical income and cost of living in Germany are very different from the US. Certain items are much cheaper here and some are much more expensive.

I looked up the income for certain professions (per month, before taxes)
Hairdresser 1800
Car mechanic 2800
Nurse 3200
Software developer 5000
Physician 8000

The average governmental retirement benefit is 1600 Euros.

All these monthly salaries are before taxes. You will have to subtract roughly 50% for social security contributions, taxes and health insurance, so that the net pay is about half of what is listed above, although the lower incomes have no or little taxes and social security payments.

So if you know that a nurse might have about 1600 of “spending money” every month, you can easily see that it would be difficult to absorb an increase in heating costs by, say, Euros a month.

For retirees it is even more difficult. I do not want to disclose the income of my parents, but let´s just assume that they are average. Then, my Dad would get 1600 of monthly social security payment. My mother never worked and always stayed home with the children, so she gets nothing (unlike in the US, where someone like her who has never contributed would get 50% of her husband´s social security retirement). They could live on the 1600 Euros per month, but the increase in heating costs as described above from 2000 Euros to 4000 Euros would be a real hit for them.

If my Dad would die, it would leave my Mom seriously poor, because surviving spouse benefits are 60% of the benefits of the deceased, so 60% of 1600 Euros per month, which makes it very difficult to pay rent, food, electricity, water and heat.

As far as food costs are concerned, food has always been much cheaper in Germany than in the US, but I have noticed a marked increase in the last 6 months. A yoghurt went from 40 cents to 60 cents. A pound of apples from 50 cents to 80 cents. A pound of carrots from 30 cents to 50 cents. Meat is always much more expensive than vegetables, a pound of chicken breast now costs 5 Euros.

On the second day of our trip, we went to the local water park/swimming pool. It has a wave pool, lazy river and three slides. Think a smaller version of Great Wolf Lodge, but without the hotel. We always go to that water park when we come here, so I know when it is crowded and when not. Usually, it is really, really empty on school days in the morning, as expected. On weekends, it is crazy crowded, and on school vacation weekday, it is somewhere in between. Note that fall school vacation started this week, so when we went there on a weekday, I expected it to be at least moderately crowded. It was DEAD! Even emptier than I have seen on schooldays. I even said to the lady at the cash register that I was really surprised how empty it was. She answered that she is, too, but that people are probably travelling.

I doubt it. I think people are saving money and foregoing things like this water park, which cost me 21 Euros for the family ticket and 12 Euros for 3 fries. Total fo 33 Euros that many families do not have lying around any more.

Next day, I went to the local ice cream store. It is owned by an Italian couple who come to Germany selling ice cream during the season from May to November and spend the winters in Italy. They serve the most delicious Italian gelato, 45 flavors of it. I ordered our ice cream to go, and then told them that their ice cream is one of our favorite things to do when we are in Germany and that we live in the US. Essentially, I told them, we are flying half way around the world, in part for their ice cream, which made them smile. Then, I asked them how business was this year? Are they feeling it, that people are not flush with money any more? They said that, no, this summer was actually quite good because the weather was very hot, but right now, this month, is when they are noticing a marked downturn. I told them that I also think that it is NOW that people are starting to cut back.

Then, the wife asked me: “So what is it like in the US?”

How do you answer that? What IS it like in the US? In 2-3 sentences? (Please write your answers below)

I decided not to say “We are waiting for the apocalypse. Should be any day now”, but that, well, we are not as worried about our energy supply there, but (I decided to say something they can relate to) that it is strange to see that people appear to be hurting for money, and yet it seems to be impossible to find employees, across all types of businesses. The husband responded that he noticed that, too, that it was always hard to find waitstaff and restaurant help, but that now, every hairdresser, car repair shop and shoe store seems to not be able to find workers. Why is that? He didn´t know.

On Sunday, I am planning to take our kids to the local amusement park. For German income levels, it is expensive, at 30 Euros per adult and 25 Euros per child. If my theory is correct, it should be completely empty there.

My theory is as follows (it is not anything new, and not rocket science either): There was always that segment of the population which has barely enough money to make ends meet and put food on the table. Going to that water park was never an option for those. But NOW, we are experiencing for the first time since the economic boom of the 1950s-60s that those that were solidly middle class (nurses, accountants, small business owners etc) starting to be really worried about not being able to pay their bills, cut back on unnecessary expenses. They will not TELL you about it, even if you know them well, but you can see it by the emptiness of these businesses.

That waterpark had all sorts of Corona restrictions over the last 2 years. First, no mask but you had to leave your name and address for contact tracing. Then, masks but no contact tracing. Then, only vaccinated allowed. All of that time, to my surprise the pool was very crowded. Now, The corona measures are gone, and the pool is empty for economic reasons.

Mission accomplished by those that want nothing but to harm us by any means possible.

The Sopranos – Silvio And Adriana Go For A Ride

It’s all a lie.

You can see a boob with a nipple on TV.

If you need an abortion you can get one, you can also get contraception so you don’t need an abortion, all through Medicare and the PBS.

You can believe in whatever religion you want, or none, without social stigma.

You can go to bed with any other consenting adult you choose.

You can vote (and will at least turn up) in elections without obstacles being put in your way (unless you a currently serving a prison term of five years or more.)

You can also get and education or healthcare without being bankrupted, shot or denied because you can’t pay. As a side note I was flabbergasted when I realized that the victims of shootings in the US had to pay for their own care, I mean WTF!

You don’t have the right to incite hatred or violence, but then that supposed right impinges on other peoples more basic freedoms to live their lives free from persecution.

And yes you have to prove you are a responsible adult with the capacity to properly store a firearm as well as a sane reason to want one in order to own firearms.

You see we are grown ups like most of the rest of the world and believe that with rights come responsibilities; not toddlers who think they should be allowed to do whatever they want and hang the consequences.

We also don’t think the rights of the few to be mega-rich are more important than the rights of the majority to have their basic needs met.

We also think if you are old enough to get killed for your country you are old enough to have a drink if you want it.

You see we have freedom of thought having not being indoctrinated at a young age to believe we are both the best and freest in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. And we use this freedom to try and ensure we have what we actually need not get sold the pup of mythical freedom just because we can buy a handgun or automatic weapon.

 

Please!!!

This is China we are talking about

The Country is so layered that you have various levels of leadership all the way to Xi Jingping

Most of the Citizens care primarily about

  • Food Prices
  • Energy Prices
  • Consumption Prices
  • Cost of Money
  • Public Transport
  • Entertainment & Consumer Demand
  • Healthcare
  • Banking
  • Communications

The CPC has ensured that the above things are very comfortable for the Average Chinese Citizen.

Nobody gives a damn about Free Speech or Democracy or any of that stupid nonsense. These are concepts that the Average Chinese look at with scorn and contempt

The Chinese loves inequality, the competition , the fight to rise to the top and always acknowledge that Society is made up of Superiors and Inferiors. Thats 5000 years of Chinese Culture.

Not a Country that looks too kindly upon the theory that everyone is equal and a frocked homosexual with zero talent can be someones boss simply because of the homosexuality

Yes People are irked – Power Cuts, Covid Lockdowns etc

However most of those resolutions are made by Provincial or District Level committees and decisions are made by them too. So Anger if at all there is any will be directed towards the Regional Leaders rather than Xi jingping.

however the fact that People express their annoyance is proof that the People expect CPC to do something and most of the time CPC delivers near instant results.

Chinese Citizens have fullest faith in Xi Jingping and the CPC

SEINFELD | NBC Guy’s Daughter Molly | The CLEAVAGE Stare

I worked for a one- man gardening business. I came to work 5 minutes late on a Monday and was told I would lose an hours pay. On Tuesday, I was working miles from home and we worked an extra hour to get the job done, rather than coming back next day.

On the Saturday, the boss was going on his first holiday in more than 20 years., because he had never had anyone to cover his job’s. Friday night arrived and he had to pay me. He stopped the hour for Monday, but did not pay me my hour extra for the Tuesday, saying he does not pay overtime. I accepted my wages, wished him a great holiday, and left. He was flying to Spain at 11.00 hrs on Saturday . I phoned him at the airport, to let him know I was leaving and would not cover his contracts! That was his holiday gone, lost flights/ hotel etc. He was very unhappy, but as I told him, you treat your employees unfairly, this is what happens. I started with another company on the Monday.

BOMBSHELL – CLASSIFIED RAND Corporation Executive Summary Research Report January 25, 2022: Weakening Germany, Strengthening The U.S.

Damning and frightening.

Check it out HERE before it is deleted.

JONATHAN BANKS | Madrigal Electromotive | Better Call Saul

https://youtu.be/IWsUEMgD5ls

Movie on China’s evacuation of overseas Chinese leads National Day box office, shows national pride and confidence in turbulent world

Published: Oct 04, 2022 01:59 PM
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One movie that took the lead in both the box office and the viewers’ ratings for the National Day holidays was Home Coming. The movie tells a story of two unarmed Chinese diplomats delving into a rebel force-controlled area in a fictional war-wrecked African country to lead 125 Chinese citizens safely back home, and it has sparked a strong sense of national pride and confidence amid a turbulent world experiencing major changes.

Some moviegoers may have entered theaters expecting a Warrior Wolf-like movie, but were offered the cruelty of war and the most difficult part of diplomatic and consulate work in contrast to the traditional impression that diplomats are “clean and decent.” However, the two main characters’ deep love for their country and their people, strong sense of responsibilities and the greater group of Chinese diplomats in the new era they represent, touched many viewers.

The movie, starring veteran actor Zhang Yi and idol Wang Junkai, not only showed how the two diplomats, one seasoned and one new, protected their people with courage and wisdom, but also depicted different roles of common people, including stranded Chinese compatriots and locals in the fictional African country with whom Chinese people stationed there have developed deep emotional bond.

Some diplomats engage in fierce wars of words with their foreign counterparts, some are stationed abroad and interact with local communities on behalf of China, some have their life in danger in a war-hit country, but they all speak and work for the interests of China and the Chinese people, read one comment on social media platform Sina Weibo.

“There are not many cool action scenes, but thrilling in a sense that the story is in a fictional setting but not really fictional,” another Weibo user posted.

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x
x

Home Coming prompted many people to recall Chinese Embassy’s evacuation of more than 30,000 Chinese nationals from turmoil in Libya in 2011. Behind this sentence were many heroic stories and unswerving efforts of many Chinese diplomats. Many news reports have revealed some details of the eye-catching evacuation, and people are curious of how those touching moments can be translated into screen language.

A viewer, who gave the movie 5/5 on Chinese rating site Douban, recalled his personal experience 11 years ago of being evacuated safely from a different country “because of holding a Chinese passport.” “We are the lucky ones because we are well protected, because we have a strong motherland,” the viewer said.

The movie is not perfect in terms of some parts of the storytelling and acting, but it struck a chord among viewers at the timing of National Day holidays, Shanghai resident Gu Sen told the Global Times on Tuesday after watching.

The stronger the bond between Chinese overseas and local people in Numea (the fictional African country), the more tragic when the rebellion pushed friends’ fate onto two different paths, one to home and the other to homelessness and even deaths, the moviegoer said.

A comment liked many times on Douban reads, “Chinese passport might not get you anywhere you want, but it can always bring you back home.”

A Beijing-based movie critic who preferred not to be named told the Global Times on Tuesday that the “industry cold winter” has encouraged many insiders to make quality main melody works and such genre has been leading National Day holidays box office for many years.

The success of Home Coming not only proves big theme can be delivered by down-to-earth roles and stories, but is also attributed to the growing national pride and confidence Chinese have in their country at a time when unrest occur every so often worldwide, the critic said.

Home Coming has raked in 600 million yuan ($84 million), topping the National Day holidays box office ahead of newly released movie Ordinary Hero’s 90 million yuan and Steel Will’s 38 million yuan.

Some articles as the West tries to grapple with their fantasies

A bunch of “kids” or otherwise ignorant Americans are flooding Quora with all sorts of leading anti-China questions. It’s giving me indigestion.  AH. I just cannot wait until they find other things to preoccupy their lives with. Maybe like scrounging around for bits of coal, or fighting over a moldy turnip.

Here’s today’s installment. It will be short and quick.

I hate to get into the middle of this one as there are some real stories of legendary marksmanship told in here however my story is about me, so fuck it here it is. An honest to god no shitter and witnessed by 50+ people.

In the mid 80’s I was a genuine real life gunners mate guns with the United States Navy stationed onboard the USS Mount Hood AE-29. We were just finishing up a rare world cruise and the ship was allowing a “Tiger” cruise for the last 3 days. Google it but essentially it’s where the Navy lets any male over the age of 14 come aboard the ship and live with you and do what you do in the Navy for the last three days of the cruise. Think dad‘s, grandfather’s, uncles, brothers etc. It’s really a neat thing as a lot of times the “Tigers” are veterans themselves. Even WW II vets in some cases. We picked them up in SanDiego and for 3 days, and they ride the boat back to our home port of San Francisco.

I’m happen to be the senior enlisted GMG onboard at the time also serving as the ships armorer (in charge of the armory) and my GQ (battle station) was mount captain of the forward gun mount. We’re going to do a big gun shoot for the Tigers so we tape a huge man overboard flare to a 55 gallon drum and chuck it over the side then pull out about 3 miles and shoot at it with the ships main guns. So here’s my dad up in the forward gun mount, watching his son be the mount captain shooting at this 55 gallon barrel 3 miles away and I can see he’s really digging watching me up in the mount captains chair, sound powered phones on my head barking orders to the gun crew and shit. Very cool moment in hind sight.

We expend about 12 rounds so the Tigers can hear and feel the big guns go BOOM but we don’t hit the barrel directly obviously, because that would be bullshit, however the shrapnel from the 27lb. shells exploding all around it (because we’re fucking accurate boys) tears a few holes in the barrel but it doesn’t sink. It floats upright now about 1/2 sunk still spewing flame and smoke as the man overboard flairs are about the size of small SCUBA cylinder.

Now it’s against maritime law to leave anything floating in the ocean that could be seen as a navigation hazard. So the call comes down from gun control into my headset in the gun mount for me to send somebody to the armory and draw a weapon and report to the bridge wing to shoot the barrel so it’ll sink and we can be on our way.

Except my dad is with me so instead, I take him to the armory with me, as I’ve got the keys to it already and if anybody is going to shoot the barrel, it’s gonna be me in front of my dad……right?

Stay with me, this is awesome. So I’m in the ships armory with my dad and he’s looking at all the weapons I can pick from and he looks right at the rack of (2) M- 60’s we have and asks…can you take that??? For those of you that don’t know what an M-60 is, think John Rambo and that handheld, belt feed machine gun. 7.62 (.308) caliber he shot up that town with. I mean I could have taken a M-14 rifle, .45 cal pistol or a shotgun but noooo, not me. I grab the crowd pleaser and a 100 round belt of ammo for my dad to carry and off to the Starboard bridge wing we go.

We open the bridge wing hatch and who do I see sitting in his chair but the captain of the ship himself, who takes one look at me and the M 60…….and my dad carrying the 100 rnd. belt of ammo and shakes his head and says “only you Carpenter. you’re the only one that would think to bring that fucking thing up here”.

Now all of the tigers are out on the bridge wing with the captain as they’ve all assembled there for the shoot. So I lock and load the 60 and lay it up on the bridge wing railing and I’m all ready to let it eat. Then the captain,,,,realizing that this could look bad for any number of reasons, comes to his senses and right before I pull the trigger says “Single shot only please”. Now that particular weapon platform doesn’t have a single shot option…..at all. I’ll have to just squeeze it and then let it go instantly to try and get just 1 shot out of it as it’s built for full auto all the time. No selector switch, single fire, 3 round burst anything. It also doesn’t have any kind of scope or even a rear site of any kind, just a small little blade out on on the end. In short, It’s made for everything BUT accuracy and single shots. We’re easily 200–300 yards away from the barrel and I ask him if he could possibly move the ship a little closer in order for me to have a better chance but he skipper isn’t having any of that changing course and speed crap. He just mean mugs me and sais “just shoot the damn thing”. I mildly start to protest but here’s these 50 or so Tigers staring at me along with my dad and I realize I’m gonna have to just give it the old “Kentucky Windage” try so I dig in, get behind it and draw the best bead I can.

Now mind you this is in the open ocean boys and I’m 75’ above the waterline and the ships rolling and pitching as we’re doing about 6 knots and the 300 yard barrel is rolling and pitching as well although (mild seas) and it’s basically fucking hopeless. I say a quick silent prayer and it’s a fucking miracle. I somehow manage to squeeze off 1 single round. All you could hear was the faintest “ping” with no splash and the thing instantly sinks. All the while still spewing flame and smoke. I mean it disappears so fast if you blinked, you missed it. Like a magic act.

The entire bridge wing goes crazy!!! All these Tigers are high fiving me, the captain, the XO,,,,, everybody. It all happened so fast, I still can’t believe I hit it but I’m gonna take the win and walk out obviously. As I go to safe and clear the gun, the Captain asks me if I thought I could manage to burn the now 99 rnd belt up over the side without shooting the ship. I assure him I can, he nods his head and I proceed to burn up 99rds of full auto 10’ away from all these guys who really proceed to go crazy now. I mean it’s fucking pandemonium on the bridge wing. Then,,,,,as all the empty brass and links are piling up and as the smoke clears….all the noise is fading away, I happen to see my dad in the middle of the crowd collecting slaps and claps galore all while beaming at me like he never had any doubt that I wouldn’t hit it. It was like I had practiced that shot a hundred times and somehow he was responsible for it all in that brief 15 seconds of time

I just cradled the gun in 2 hands, collected a few hand shakes from several WW2 vets and walked off like I had done done exactly that. There was nothing left to say.

You know that was 35 years ago and my dad is 87 now. He still finds a way to tell that story once or twice a year to new unsuspecting folks that haven’t heard it in a way that still makes him beam at me……at least when he gets to the good part. All these years I never had the heart to tell him that it was just shit ass luck. Maybe part of me wants to believe there was a pinch of skill involved………..but I doubt it.

There’s lots of “better” feats of marksmanship in here to be certain. But how many young men will ever get the opportunity to even take a shot like that, under those circumstances with a belt feed full auto machine gun, on a US war ship in the open ocean and then pull it off ……in front of their dad?

Cheers boys.

John C.

Pork Goulash

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A lot of people think one-pots all taste the same. Not true! Especially with this recipe. Its blend of spices, pork, and cream sure taste special to me.

What You’ll Need

  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 1/2 pounds boneless single pork loin, cut into 1-inch cubes
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • 2 tablespoons paprika
  • 1 teaspoon dried dill
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 can (10 ounces) condensed beef broth, divided
  • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream

What to Do

  1. In a large skillet, melt butter over medium-high heat and add pork, onions, and garlic. Saute 5 minutes, or until pork is no longer pink on outside. Stir in paprika, dill, salt, pepper, and all but 2 tablespoons of beef broth.
  2. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer 20 minutes. In a small bowl, whisk together remaining beef broth and cornstarch; pour into skillet and stir until sauce has thickened.
  3. Slowly add cream and stir until warmed through.

Notes

  • Don’t overcook this once you add the cream because the sauce will separate. And then there won’t be any sauce left for spooning over some hot cooked egg noodles.

Will China be the new global power, despite everything that happened?

China is already a global power. Its strength is economics.

If by “new global power” you mean the sole superpower. The answer is no. It will not.

I am not sure what you have in mind about “everything that happened”. China has been on the growth and development road for a long time. US tried to contain it without success. This will continue. You will hear more and more bad things said about China. But China will be unperturbed and continues to pursue its own goals.

If you are shaken by the talks about the impending collapse of its economy, citing its zero-Covid policy and problems in the property sector. Don’t be. They are all nonsense. As for its Covid policy, no need to go further than to check the statistics of infections and deaths. As for the property sector, just know that it was triggered by the Chinese authorities to rein in the debt addiction in the industry. It is paying the price now to ensure that the sector will be strengthened and be able to grow without the dangers of financial over-leveraging. Give it 3 years.

Know that despite these problems, the Chinese economy is probably the strongest among the major countries. It had not poured untold quantities of cash to save the economy from Covid – it was not needed – and caused the inflation that are raging in the US and the rich countries. Notice the governments are helpless, leaving everything to the central banks to raise interest rates and sell their bond holdings. Politicians are engaged in their favourite sport of blame-game, while the people suffer.

Stock markets will drop another 40% as a severe stagflationary debt crisis hits an overleveraged global economy

NEW YORK (Project Syndicate)—For a year now, I have argued that the increase in inflation would be persistent, that its causes include not only bad policies but also negative supply shocks, and that central banks’ attempt to fight it would cause a hard economic landing.

When the recession comes, I warned, it will be severe and protracted, with widespread financial distress and debt crises. Notwithstanding their hawkish talk, central bankers, caught in a debt trap, may still wimp out and settle for above-target inflation. Any portfolio of risky equities and less risky fixed-income bonds will lose money on the bonds, owing to higher inflation and inflation expectations.

Roubini’s predictions

How do these predictions stack up? First, Team Transitory clearly lost to Team Persistent in the inflation debate. On top of excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies, negative supply shocks caused price growth to surge. COVID-19 lockdowns led to supply bottlenecks, including for labor. China’s “zero-COVID” policy created even more problems for global supply chains. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent shock waves through energy and other commodity markets.

From HERE

let me tell you about iran.

My father was a low level police officer when the Shah of Iran ( a puppet of USA) was the official leader of Iran.

when the revolution came – my Father fled with the others – I was 5–7 years old. I still remember my mother asking my father why we were fleeing our motherland, and his reply was that many officials who had committed atrocities will be executed.

my mother asked him why – “WE” were fleeing our mother land? and his reply was – Although he had not commited any atrocities – the revolution will not have the time or the patience to differentiate between the good and the bad. – so we all left.

you know – my father applied for American VISA – and he was rejected – because he was not important – then we fled to India because my father’s sister had married an Indian and we lived and settled in Delhi first then to Kolkata and then to Gangtok – Sikkim.

later I grew up and studied in China and then moved to the USA – that is a different story for another day, today is my father’s day.

Much of my Father’s life in India was spent selling dried fruits in Delhi then Kolkata and then in Sikkim, he left everything in one day and we arrived at India in just the clothes and two suitcases – our house, our land, our friends everything was left in one single day.

do you know why my father was not granted a USA VISA – he was too moderate – too by the book – too kind, he would not indulge in extra judicial killings – too soft on the revolution – too attached to his homeland – too patriotic.

but all those who killed others at the drop of a hat – who did not mind violating extra judicial killings etc – all of them got USA – VISA because they were considered assets who could be used against the State of Iran later.

My Father always told me – We are Iranians – no matter where we live – our identity is Iran – today we may not have a favorable wind but the winds will change and we will go back to Iran. We cannot hate our motherland just because we are paid some bribes to hate our motherland. we cannot hope for the destruction of our motherland because our motherland is our identity and we cannot allow our identity to be destroyed.

he also told me – The USA has no Identity – its history is just a few hundred years old and no matter how hard it may try it cannot create an identity as solid and firm as our – ASIAN civilization and IDENTITY – so never hate or attempt to destroy our IDENTITY. – the USA attempts to do this because it cannot match the history or identity of our past so it wants to bring all down to its present level by recreating definitions of identity etc.

in my belief Guo wengui is just one of the many stooges that the USA has used in the past – similarly you will find many such iranian stooges who work for the state department.

Can you guess what car this is?

Car interior 1…

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Car interior 1

I lived in Hong Kong for a year and Shenzhen for about five years.

I found Shenzhen to be more spacious and relaxed than Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong I found that there were a few incredibly rich people, many struggling and too many poverty stricken people.

In Shenzhen there were many rich people, a large and growing middle class and the poorer people there lived much better than the poor in Hong Kong. Housing is generally better, more modern and with more room for people to live in. Hong Kong has a more vibrant tourist industry, but that’s about it. It’s much better for people’s living standards to live in Shenzhen now.

U.S. Continues to Build Military Presence in Europe – Because Europe Must Be killed

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A decision was made inside the United States last year to “kill off the competition” and as a result, Europe must be industrially killed. War was the means chosen; Ukraine is the theater in which it is to take place.

Today, 12 US Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers, as seen in a file photo above, are expected to arrive in the UK.

In total, there are already fifty (50) F-35s.

For months, the world has watched as the U.S. and its NATO vassals, take deliberate steps to engage Russia in direct war.  Russia has not taken the bait . . . yet.

The reasoning behind the militant actions of the U.S. and NATO escaped most folks.  Sure, the whole “protect democracy” nonsense has been spewed endlessly and the dupes in the general public believe that, but slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people through war is never a good option.

So what is the __real__reason for the whole blow-up?

Well, Ukraine has a well-earned reputation for being the most corrupt nation in Europe and likely, the world.   Politicians launder “foreign aid” money through Ukraine, then filter it back to their own pockets through non-governmental organizations  and then into shell corporations they control.  So that’s a reason the powers-that-be want to keep Ukraine in existence; it feeds their cash.

Child sex trafficking is another reason.  Ukraine is a literal hub for kidnapped children being forced into the sex trade for deviant, degenerate, perverts that infest the so-called “elite.”  The upper classes of society have become so evil, so filthy, that rich perverts enjoy sexing children. So that’s another reason the rich and powerful want Ukraine in existence.

Cocaine and Heroin trafficking throughout Europe and into the USA is very lucrative and Ukraine is so saturated with illicit drugs that even their President has a reputation for being a coke-head.  So that’s another reason the rich and powerful want Ukraine around.

But while these activities and the cash they generate are sizeable, something much, much, bigger had to be in the works.

I have found out what that “something” is.

Europe Must Be Killed

The real goals of the US in Ukraine are the destruction of Europe and its economic leader: Germany.

Why?

Let’s describe the world situation at the beginning of 2022 (immediately note that I give inaccurate figures to do justice to MMI and @Spydell_finance, but the approximate figures do not affect the disposition itself or the conclusions):

China: GDP: $16.9 trillion. Industrial sector ~30.5%, or $ 5.1 trillion. Export economy 15.3% with an export degree of 1.35 (easily interchangeable, technologically not advanced, but massively price-elastic, requires low profit margins of producers and not expensive labor, as well as agglomeration of producers).

Germany: GDP $4.2 trillion USD. Industrial sector ~27-30%, or $ 1.1-1.3 trillion. 35% with the world’s highest export ratio of 2.07 (only Japan has an even higher ratio of 2.49). That is, exports are irreplaceable, technologically complex and therefore VERY HIGH MARGINS)

The EU as a whole. GDP 17 trillion USD (suddenly !!! more than China, or at least the same amount). Industrial sector ~25%, or $4.1 trillion. (suddenly a little less than China). Only this branch of industry, as already written above, is a high-tech sector, that is, a marginal area that allows rapid positive capital growth.

US. GDP $22.9 trillion USD. However, the industrial sector accounts for only 18%, or $ 4.1 trillion. (Suddenly less than China and just as much as the EU)!!! And the financial sector is over 20%, as is the entire service sector with 77% of the economy.  But even this industrial sector accounts for only 7.7% of exports and has an export development index (ECI) of only 1.57 (just like China).

To go back to the beginning of the year, the accumulated imbalances in Quantitative Easing (QE) by the federal reserve are accelerating inflation and could bury the entire dollar system.

The end of QE and the beginning of the Fed’s balance sheet reduction would guarantee the collapse of the services sector, the near-death of the financial sector and a large part of venture capital IT as zombie companies with negative revenue margins or without cache flow.

In order to survive, the United States urgently need to develop the real economy, i.e. industry.

However, since the world has become global, no new markets are foreseen. The system cannot conquer Mars and then sell to Martians, so therefore it will have to grow on intensive investments, which means negative capital work.  Since aggregated venture capital investments on intensive investments do not pay off, which has been obvious since 2009, the U.S. is staring at an economic dead end.

So what to do?

Kill the competition.

To get more industry, the US has to get it from somewhere it already exists.   Let’s look at each possible candidate for the US to grab industry:

Option 1: China.
But, firstly, China is a subject (sovereign), secondly, the Chinese and US economies are too intertwined, and thirdly, the development of an industry comparable to China means low profit margins, long payback periods and falling personal incomes. And a decrease in personal income is a revolution in the USA. The option is not suitable.

Option 2: EU.
Fits perfectly, no subjectivity and high margin business.

However, the business is so profitable because it is very technological, i.e. it has a high and long entry threshold. It takes decades of development, thousands of patents and the construction of a team of specialists.

But the patents, specialists and companies do not belong to the EU.

The US has to force these companies in their entirety to move to the USA, just as, for example, low-margin production migrated to China in the 90s.

To do this, you need to create unbearable conditions for the economy: war, hunger and cold.

Take a look at the EU now!!!

https://t.me/c/1417137205/16884

News 1:
German industrial production fell by 1.8% in the first 8 months of 2022 due to sanctions against Russia, and the German chemical-pharmaceutical sector (high gas dependence) recorded a decrease of 10.7%.

News 2:
The Wall Street Journal published a report on the mass relocation of large German companies to the New World on September 21.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-natural-gas-prices-push-european-manufacturers-to-shift-to-the-u-s-11663707594

News 3: Explosion at branches of Nord Stream 1 and 2.

To those watching closely, all these things are links in a single chain of events: The EU must be destroyed. At any cost.

It doesn’t matter how many people get killed, there’s $4+ TRILLION dollars a year (of real industry) at stake.

It doesn’t matter how many cities or even countries get wiped out, there’s $4 TRILLION dollars a year  (of real industry) at stake.

People will breed, so they can replace whatever war dead take place.  Cities and countries can be rebuilt.  But the $4 TRILLION a year (of real industry) absolutely, positively, must — and will — come to the US.

Period.  Full stop.

This war is about money.  $4 TRILLION a year in real industry.  Anyone who gets in the way of that will be steamrolled.

 

This is the main goal of the USA in Ukraine.

 

Bad Girls: Movie Posters of Dangerous Dames, Sizzling Sirens, and Gun-Toting Gals

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To be fair, it’s the US politicians that are animalistic and barbarian in their conduct and behavior. From my dealings and working together with Americans, I estimate at least 40% of them are fair-minded and reasonable people. And these 40% too hate their politicians, regardless of their party affiliations.

The question is then; why are US politicians so notorious? My observation is that:

  1. American politicians are absolutely useless and impotent in terms of the country’s development and progress. They are absolutely incapable of contributing to the growth and development of USA. The achieve of the country has been the outcome of research, study, innovation and investment by scientists, academics, thinkers, investors, etc. Just think about any field of achievement that America has made significant process; can you name a politician who was leading it, contributing directly to it, etc?
  2. So, American politicians are basically parasites, sucking the money/benefit out of the ‘democratic systems’ they prey and dependent on. And once they manage to get on a juicy position, they will fight against the next parasite in order to remain in that sucking position for as long as possible.
  3. Once the American politicians get on to some juicy position, their benefit is far, far, far beyond the official perks and incomes. They, again regardless of Democrat and Republican, will think of ways and means to create ‘legislations’ first to make life difficult for the productive segments of the society. Then, depending on who (after failing to content with the complexity of the myriad legislations) offer more bribes, will once again fight with other parasite to formulate/pass more legislations to make life a little easier for the bribe givers. Of course the in-position parasitic politicians are hugely rewarded in the form of bribes/kickbacks, etc
  4. This is the reason American politicians and their families are enjoying lifestyles way, way, way beyond what their official perks/salaries could afford. Again, both Democrats and Republicans are playing the same game, they simply take turns at the expense of regular Americans.
  5. Until and unless regular Americans wake up to this reality and overthrow the regime structure in Washington, their country will continue to go down the sewers of history.

F-35s Struggle To Fly! Frustrated South Korea Says Its US-Origin Stealth Fighters Marred By Defects

South Korea’s F-35 stealth fighter jets, which it touts as a critical component in deterring North Korean threats, appear to be experiencing severe maintenance challenges. 

The ruling People Power Party’s Rep Shin Won-sik presented Air Force data to demonstrate the issues the South Korean Air Force is encountering in making F-35s fully operational. He mentioned that the fighters were grounded 172 times during the timeframe.

He also noted 62 cases where the jets could fly but couldn’t complete specific missions. Shin revealed the information, highlighting the need for the South Korean military to exert significant effort in introducing and maintaining such cutting-edge weaponry.

“Grounded fifth-generation fighters could carry out missions for only 12 days on average last year and 11 days in the first half of this year,” Yonhap reported. In contrast, throughout the course of the 18 months, the older generation aircraft F-4E and F-5 were grounded 26 and 28 times, respectively.

However, the South Korean Air Force stated that the F-35As achieved their goal operation rate of 75%, which indicates that sustaining the readiness posture was not a problem.

The service admitted difficulties obtaining parts for defects in the newly launched model. It further noted that it would work to obtain them as soon as possible from the manufacturer.

It is important to remember that Australia made headlines when it intended to spend an astounding AUD14.6 billion ($10.87 billion) to maintain its Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II fleet until 2053.

From HERE

Can you guess what car this is?

Car interior 2…

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Mystery car interior 2

It is a completely groundless charge. Note that the US has never presented a single shred of credible evidence to support its allegation. Why not?

In the age of smartphones, there should be plenty of hard evidence.

For the US to criticize China on human rights is rich, for example:

  • recall the native American genocide
  • recall the Japanese-American internment
  • recall the use of Agent Orange on Vietnamese civilians
  • the US has mass incarceration — over 2 million Americans incarcerated, mostly for minor offences, for the highest incarceration rate in the world
  • the US has mass surveillance — recall PRISM as exposed by Edward Snowden
  • abuse and torture of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay

Pot. Kettle. Black.

China Warns U.S. of Grave Consequences if Ukraine Joins NATO

LOL. China warns the United States?

China warned the United States it could face severe consequences—including the prospect of nuclear war—if it allows Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), drawing the 30-member alliance into the country's conflict with Russia.

Article HERE

The Dodge Corporation Make Al An Offer He Can’t Refuse | Married With Children

Solomon Islands Insisted China References Be Removed Before Signing US-Pacific Partnership Declaration

Foreign Minister Jeremiah Manele explained why his government was going to refuse to sign the pact.

China’s human rights record is criticized from the Western perspective, based on the West’s value system. Why should China adhere to the West’s value system? What makes the West’s value system so much more desirable or righteous?

It’s not as if the West’s value system has a spotless record. This is a system that has supported waging endless wars around the globe causing unimaginable human carnage.

This is a system that has supported sanctioning dozens of countries causing enormous human suffering.

This is a system that has censored the West from presenting the other side of the story in the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

This is a system that has supported colonialism in Africa and Asia, enslaving millions of people, and robbing their countries of their natural resources.

In the United States, people are denied shelter and health care and protection from gun violence and systemic racism. Early in its history, USA slaughtered millions of indigenous people to steal their land.

China has a different value system based on thousands of years of history. China respects and honours its ethnic minorities, all 55 of them. China protects its citizens, even from themselves. China places a very high priority on harmony, safety and stability.

You don’t have to agree with China’s value system, but you cannot deny that it works extremely well. The Chinese people are happy and prosperous and safe. The Chinese people are very proud of their country’s progress.

Can you guess what car this is?

Mystery car 4…

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Mystery car 4

Finally, The victims of imperialism dare to stand up in solidarity against the USA

London | The global oil producing cartel OPEC on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT) agreed to cut output by 2 million barrels a day, driving up prices and creating a new economic and political headache for the West.

OPEC’s decision came just hours after the European Union had signed off a new Ukraine-related sanctions package on Russia that included a price cap on Russian oil....

Article HERE

Can you guess the make of this mystery car?

Mystery car 5…

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Mystery car 5.

Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia blasts Australia over US nuclear submarine deal

Singapore | Australia’s planned acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines has made armed confrontation in the South China Sea more likely, according to veteran Malaysian politician Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

In an exclusive interview with The Australian Financial Review, Dr Mahathir said an arms race in the region was inevitable after the creation last week of the AUKUS pact as part of Canberra’s decision to buy nuclear-powered submarines

He also fears the agreement could prompt China to match its claims with actions in the South China Sea.

“This agreement indicates you openly regard China as a possible enemy and that, if it comes to the crunch, you might even go to war. Just imagine what war would do to south-east Asia,” Dr Mahathir said.

His comments follow those of Malaysia’s Prime Minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob, who on Friday expressed concerns about the new security partnership.

According to a statement released by his office, Mr Ismail Sabri told Prime Minister Scott Morrison that Malaysia feared AUKUS could spark a nuclear arms race in the Indo-Pacific.

This would be the opposite of the peaceful coexistence on which AUKUS participants say the agreement is pinned.

Dr Mahathir, who dealt with three Australian prime ministers during his long first stint as Malaysian PM from 1981 until 2003, said Canberra had again proved that Australia identified as a European nation that just happened to be located away from Europe and the United States.

‘Australia looks west’

“Australia keeps talking about the region, and about being much closer to the region. Yet, every time there is a crisis or problem, Australia looks west. It seeks friends from the West, not from the East,” he said over Zoom from his office in Kuala Lumpur.

The 96-year-old said the AUKUS agreement, and Australia’s role in particular, had changed the dynamic.

“You have improved your capacity to fight. Even if these submarines are not carrying warheads, they will introduce nuclear capabilities to the region,” Dr Mahathir said.

“So you have escalated the threat. This will elicit a response from China.″⁣

China until now has permitted boats to traverse the contested waters of the South China Sea. This could change, Dr Mahathir said.

“China has declared the South China Sea belongs to China. But it has not stopped ships sailing through, even warships. So far, China’s claim has just been a statement; they have not really been carrying out what they claim is their right to do certain things.

“If you bring in military weapons in the region and the alliance is supplying them with weapons, I think that will elicit some reaction.″⁣

Dr Mahathir, who fronted a coalition that won an historic victory in 2018 only to lose it due to infighting less than two years later, noted the Malay states had co-existed with China for centuries before the Federation of Malaya was formed in 1957.

The bilateral relationship has its frictions. Along with Brunei, the Philippines and Vietnam, Malaysia claims sovereign rights that clash with China’s view that it owns 90 per cent of the South China Sea.

Like other claimant states, Malaysia’s preferred forum for dealing with this territorial issue is the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN). Since 2002, ASEAN has been working with China to develop a code of conduct for the South China Sea.

The long process shows no sign of resolution but for many involved, the process itself is successful if it keeps armed conflict at bay.

‘We ASEAN countries like to solve problems through negotiation.’

— Mahathir Mohamad, former Malaysian prime minister

“We ASEAN countries like to solve problems through negotiation,” Dr Mahathir said. “Malaysia is a small country; we are aware of that. We value China because it’s a big market for us, and they value us because they get some raw materials from us.

“We have to live next door to China, and we can’t be confronting them.” In Dr Mahathir’s view, Australia and the US are trying to push ASEAN states to take sides.

“You keep on trying to persuade ASEAN to confront China, to be unfriendly. We cannot do that. The United States has a lot to contribute to south-east Asia. But so has China,” Dr Mahathir said.

In his view, the idea of a balance of power, “that groups of countries are a threat to other countries” is “an old kind of thinking”.

He believes AUKUS is the latest sign the West has not adjusted to the rise of Asia.

“In the past, you were very comfortable because Eastern countries did not have the capacity that Europe and America had, but now many Eastern nations – Korea, Japan and China – have almost the same capacity as you.

“They want to send out rockets to outer space and so on. Let them do that. Compete there; that doesn’t hurt us. But don’t disrupt our market.”

Article HERE

DIY retro mini lawnmower

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Spring is here and the grass will need to be mowed soon. But if you have this sweet DIY retro mini lawnmower that looks like a vintage automobile, the job will surely be a satisfying one.

More info: Old Mini Bikes

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Forum user Jeep2003 chronicled his “Mini Push Mower” build project over at Old Mini Bikes (which itself is a fascinating community of people who ride and build mini motorcycles). The mower uses a two-stroke engine from an old snowblower and the deck comes from an old smoker grill. The tail lights are fantastic!

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Diamond Dredging Vessel – MV Pacific

I really enjoy these scale models of ocean vessels. Here’s a particularly nice and detailed one. From HERE.

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Politics By Other Means

Putin and Clausewitz

46 Trillion Dollars In Financial Wealth Has Already Been Lost During The Great Global Market Crash Of 2022

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In less than one year, 46 trillion dollars in financial wealth has been wiped out.  If that isn’t a “crash”, how would you define one?  Since last November, stocks and bonds have been plunging all over the globe.  When there is a good day like we saw on Monday, sometimes that can fool us into thinking that everything is going to be okay.  But in order to understand what is really going on we need to step back and look at the bigger picture.  And when we look at the bigger picture, it becomes exceedingly clear that we are in the midst of a historic worldwide market crash.  According to Bank of America, a whopping 46.1 trillion dollars in financial wealth has already been wiped out since last November…

It’s been a tough year for investors, with global stock and bond markets erasing $46.1 trillion in market value since November 2021, according to Bank of America.

The massive drawdown has led to forced liquidations on Wall Street, the bank’s chief investment strategist Michael Hartnett said in a Friday note, highlighting the recent break below 2018 support in the NYSE Composite Index.

When I first came across that number I could hardly believe it.

But it is accurate.

Stocks have been falling and falling and falling, and Bank of America is warning that this is one of the worst global bond market crashes that we have ever seen

Analysts at BofA liken it to going “Cold Turkey” and blame it for causing the third “Great Bond Bear Market.”

They calculate the 20% plus losses suffered by government debt investors over the last year are now a par with the post World War I and II years of 1920 and 1949, and the Great Depression rout of 1931.

The combined collapse in global stock and bond markets means global market capitalisation has been slashed by over $46 trillion.

That is an amount of money that is difficult to comprehend.

The total value of all goods and services produced in the United States last year was approximately 23 trillion dollars.

So we are talking about an amount of money that is roughly twice as large as our GDP for an entire year.

When the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world took the punch bowl away, it was obvious that something like this would happen.

Central bank intervention pushed global financial markets to absolutely absurd levels, and there was no way that they could remain there once the artificial support was removed.

Here in the United States, all of the major stock indexes have fallen for three quarters in a row, and tech stocks have been leading the way down

The S&P 500 Index closed on Friday at 3,586, down 25.6% from its intraday high on January 3, and where it had first been in November 2020.

The Russell 2000, which tracks small-cap stocks, is down 31.8% from its high on November 5, having thereby maintained its function as early warning signal.

The Nasdaq closed at 10,576, down 34.8% from its intraday high on November 22, the very day Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dumped 50.2% of his Microsoft stock in a bunch of frenzied trades, totaling $285 million. On the list of best-timed insider trades ever, he must be at the very top. Since then, Microsoft shares have plunged 33.4%, to $232.90, the lowest closing price since March 2021.

As I discussed a few days ago, the wealthiest tech tycoons have collectively lost 315 billion dollars over the past year.

Ouch.

The Federal Reserve giveth and the Federal Reserve taketh away.

The same thing is true for the housing market.  Fed policies created the largest housing bubble in our history, but now that bubble is bursting.

In fact, it is being reported that we just witnessed “the largest single-month price declines” since the last financial crisis…

… today Black Knight confirmed that the US housing market has turned decidedly ugly with the two biggest monthly declines since the global financial crisis.

According to a Monday report from mortgage-data provider, median home prices fell 0.98% in August from a month earlier, following a 1.05% drop in July.

The two periods marked the largest monthly declines since January 2009. In fact, at the current pace of declines, we may soon see a record drop in home prices, surpassing the largest historical slide hit during the global financial crisis.

The report noted that July and August 2022 mark the largest single-month price declines seen since January 2009 and rank among the eight largest on record.

If the Federal Reserve does not reduce rates, things will soon get really, really ugly for the housing market.

Unfortunately, the Fed is actually going to keep raising rates because Fed officials are scared to death of the raging inflation crisis that they originally helped to create.

Thanks to the Fed, grocery prices were up 13.5 percent in August…

We’ve seen the higher prices at the grocery store, and it looks like they won’t be coming down anytime soon.

New government data shows grocery prices climbed 13.5% in August from the year before. That’s the highest annual increase since March 1979.

Food producers say the surge is a result of paying higher prices for labor and packaging materials. They also point to extreme weather, disease and supply issues.

As long as we keep seeing numbers like that, the Fed is going to keep raising rates.

And the price of gasoline just hit another all-time record high in Los Angeles

Gas prices hit a record high in Los Angeles County of $6.466 per gallon on Monday morning, soaring past the previous record set during the nationwide price surge this past spring.

If you think that is bad, just wait until California residents are paying 10 dollars a gallon for gasoline.

The cost of living has become incredibly oppressive, and one recent survey found that 73 percent of Americans believe that their incomes are “falling behind inflation”…

Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day survey results on Ballotpedia also found that 73% of Americans say that over the past year, their income has been falling behind inflation. The survey’s sample size was 1,200 registered voters, and it was conducted online by pollster Scott Rasmussen on Sept. 15-17. The margin of error for the full sample is +/- 2.8 percentage points.

Until inflation is under control, the Fed is going to keep raising rates.

And inflation is not likely to be under control any time soon, because the vast majority of U.S. manufacturers are planning more price increases in 2023

In a new Forbes/Xometry/John Zogby Strategies survey shared with Secrets about the impact of inflation and the continued supply chain crisis under President Biden, 87% of manufacturing CEOs said they planned to increase prices in 2023.

Many cited the ongoing supply chain crisis, problems getting materials from China, and sellers taking advantage of the economic mess to jack up prices.

“Our margins are under pressure as costs creep up throughout the supply-chain network,” one CEO told the poll conducted by Jeremy Zogby, the managing partner of John Zogby Strategies.

So the Federal Reserve will not be riding to the rescue of the financial markets this time around.

Fed officials are absolutely petrified of high inflation, and so rates will continue to go up.

And that means that this financial bubble will continue to implode.  As Eric Peters has aptly noted, market crashes can take a long time to fully play out…

“It’s important to remember that the bursting of a bubble takes a long time to play out. It may feel fast and chaotic at various points in the process, but it isn’t really. Look at 2008. Everyone thinks of Lehman’s Bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, as the big catalyst for that crisis, but the S&P 500 had peaked the previous November. Bear Sterns failed on March 13th, 2008. From the Friday before Lehman’s bankruptcy to the end of that month, the S&P was only down 7%. The real weakness was in October with a local low in November.”

The final bottom wasn’t until March of the next year. “The bubble was bursting before Lehman Brothers.” That was just the large cathartic event that caught our attention, ignited our imagination. “And even after that it took months for the market to bottom. Markets don’t clear imbalances instantaneously. So we should be preparing ourselves for a marathon, not a sprint.”

We are still only in the very early chapters of this story.

As I have been relentlessly warning my readers, things are going to eventually get really, really bad.

The Federal Reserve and other central banks flooded the global financial system with money, and so now we are facing a horrific worldwide inflation crisis.

They are attempting to fix things by rapidly raising rates, but that is causing absolutely enormous problems for global financial markets.

This isn’t going to end well, and we have finally gotten to a point where this should be exceedingly obvious to everyone.

Very true. Absolutely true.

The 2019 Hongkong riot was actually a coup led by USA to put a US puppet as the HK Chief so as to destabilize China. USA has been destabilized the entire world since WW2.

USA almost succeeded by infiltration into every walk of HK life such as govt, education, court etc. They failed only after China handed down a national security law that targets secession, subversion, collusion & terrorism. Note all countries have similar security laws.

Why HK had no security law before? Simple. It was a plot by UK before they returned HK to China. In 1984, UK realized they must return HK in 1997. UK had a China-UK treaty to rule HK but China did not honor it. Because UK militarily forced China buy opium from UK’s colony India. Make Chinese addicted, so that UK could make money/silver. It was similar to US D Trump’s trade war in 2017. The only difference is that Trump used high tariff and UK used weapons.

UK then plotted HK rebellion from China, in name of democracy. Note that colonizer UK never gave HK democracy. Anyway, UK recruited HK traitors. Remove all the laws that dealt with riots & treason.

No place in the world has no security law to protect themselves. Five years after return, HK also introduced laws to deal with riots etc. Rebels rallied a mass protest & the security law was voted down by the democrat-traitors. Now looking back, it was part of the plot to leave HK unable to deal with a coup.

Later US took over from UK. In 2014, there was an Occupy Central in HK & an Occupy London in UK. UK suppressed the movement in 1 day. After investigation, UK reported that HK rebels were recruited by USA.

Occupied Central was a drill for a coup. The 2019 riot was for real.

There were always “white” (a politically incorrect word) people near the riot spot or on the vandalism spot. One got caught & has an ID card from CIA. Junior leaders were caught meeting US embassy officials in hotels & restaurants. A senior leader was caught meeting US ambassador/or top embassy personnel. The #1 HK traitor has a former CIA agent as his assistant/boss. And there was an unusually large number of US officials working in HK (the # has shrunk now).

There were many NGO, unions, organizations for human rights & animal rights etc. Most if not all were directly or indirectly funded by NED. Most if not all movement leaders have a large sum of money that they could not explain.

In Hongkong, NED has spent thousands of millions of dollars. Even “little” people got paid. Show up in a peaceful mass would get paid HK$200-300. Higher on riot spot. Injure or even kill a police also got paid. 1 person was so rich to buy 2 apartments, cash.

Old or pregnant women were used. It is always the police who pushed them to the ground. One pregnant woman was caught on CCTV that she lay on the ground before police approached her.

Fake news like the above drowned HK. They came out daily if not hourly to create & simmer hatred of HK govt, police & China. … fake news spread as fast as weed thru internet. … it is the 1st time I see ugly human nature can go that far. It is beyond a normal human can go that ugly.

Rebel-journalists on the riot spot took pictures on police so as to simmer police brutality. In fact, it was the other way round. Rioters were paid to injure police. $$$. Their brutality is animal type of brutality If I disclose their weapons & brutality here, Quora probably will ban me.

There was always a big group of people on the riot spot. Other than (rebel) journalists, there were (rebel) first-aid people too. Looking back, they were there to block the police from normal work to deal with the riot. One (rebel) journalist was only 12-13 years old.

There is a picture of a one-eye woman published by NYT. She claimed she was blinded by police. But, based on privacy reason, she went all the way to the highest court to block police from obtaining her medical report from the hospital that treated her injury. She has gone to Taiwan today but was caught having 2 bright eyes at HK airport. Why block police investigation? Don’t you want justice & compensation from police?

Because of this woman’s eye, HK has become lawless but rioters’ law.

Ordinary HKers dared not talk in public. Rioters used verbal & even physical violence against those who expressed different opinion. Once they (in a group) rounded up a scholar. I watched TV: 1 rioter lay on the ground but he said the scholar pushed him which is not true.

Rioters set fire on a by-standers who said he is Chinese. Or use bricks to hit the head of a worker (causing death) who was hired by govt to clean up the bricks scattered by rioters on the road. Or house arrest & beat up a journalist from China for days. Or bully & even beat up passers-by who did not speak Cantonese the HK dialect. One who could not speak Cantonese is a Japanese. Or block international air travellers.

Rebel-air hosts once released oxygen from aeroplanes, endangering the life of passengers.

Rebel-judge let go of arrested rioters. Righteous judges would receive death threats. It is lawless, said one retired righteous judge.

Rebel-doctor or nurse “torture” patients if the patient was a police or not on their side. One doctor prescribed medicine to harm the health of a policeman-patient. … medical staff is supposed to care for the patient. Professionalism is supposed to be above politics, Besides democracy calls for respect & coexist with the different.

Because it was a plot that started in 1980’s, one generation of HKers were brought up on hatred of authorities, being rude & violence (verbal & physical).

I saw on TV that 1 kindergarten teacher on the protest spot telling the kids police are bad people. A history expert who has power in HK education circle changed Chinese history by glorifying UK’s opium/trade war with China. Instead of saying UK militarily forced China buy opium from UK, he said UK was trying to help addicted Chinese to stop smoking opium. Some published picture books to depict the govt or police or China as wolves who bully them the lambs.

This generation made their own law. One university vice principal was cornered because rioter-students demanded university to drop Chinese language as a requirement to graduate.

There were school bullies who would bully those who did not agree to violence/riot.

Students who did not do well in school were recruited as leaders to mark a territory under their control. Similar to the underground organizations we see in a movie.

In court, rebel-lawyers always said “this rioter is mentally disadvantaged.” & hence should not go to jail but a place for re-education.

Rebels propagated that China is poor, uncivilized, dirty etc. But they have never visited China.

This propaganda happened in HK. And is also in Taiwan.

If you cannot imagine how people can be brain-washed that much, then …

Let us discuss human nature.

I study ancient civilizations. I find all cultures have creators. All creators made the same sun, rain, humans, animals, plants etc. It means it is the same creator. All humans are creator’s children.

Creator gives us different wisdom. It means creator designed a diverse world. You use flour to bake cakes. I make noodles. Diff wisdom. Diversity. So there should be many cultures & religions in the world.

Some spread their religion to other cultures & wipe out local religions. That is, they have damaged creator’s design of diversity. Yet they claim they love creator.

They suppress the god-given wisdom of creator’s other children.

They violate human right – indigenous people’s cultural right, according to article 8.2a in UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Yet they claim they love fellow humans ie creator’s children.

UN says all gods & religions are equal. When China asks them not to propagate that theirs is the only true one, they cry religious suppression.

China also asks them not to erect a big cross outside a building. Keep (small) crosses inside their private property. A cross was an old tool for criminals on death sentence. It damages local belief in Feng Shui. Again they cry religious suppression.

Lesson learnt about human nature:

Leaders work for POWER & MONEY. Love of creator is just a slogan to gather followers to build power.

Followers take leader’s word as truth. Lack independent & critical thinking. Dismiss different views right away. Stay inside box.

Another human nature: those who cry suppression are the ones who disrespect/suppress others, or break law. Bullies.

Human nature applies to politics too:

EU Pushes For More Sanctions Which Will Come Back To Bite It

On February 22, two days before Russian troops entered the Ukraine, the U.S. and the EU put reams of sanctions onto Russia. They also confiscated some $300 billion of Russia’s reserves that were invested in the ‘west’. The sanctions had been negotiated between the EU and the U.S. and prepared for over several months.

The idea was to bankrupt Russia within a few weeks. The deluded people behind those sanctions had no idea how big and sanctions proved Russia’s economy really is. The sanctions failed to influence Russia in any way but their consequences led to a shortfall of energy in Europe and increased the already high inflation rates. Inflation in Russia is sinking and its general economic numbers are good. The now higher energy prices generate sufficient additional income to completely finance its war efforts.

A sane actor would conclude that the sanctions were a mistake and that lifting them would help Europe more than it would help Russia. But no, the U.S. and European pseudo elites are no longer able to act in a sane manner. They are instead doubling down with the most crazy sanction scheme one has ever heard of:

[T]he European Union pushed ahead on Wednesday with an ambitious but untested plan to limit Russia’s oil revenue.

If the global price of oil remains high, it would complicate the European Union’s effort to impose a price cap on Russian oil that was expected to gain final approval on Thursday, after E.U. negotiators reached an agreement on the measure as part of a fresh package of sanctions against Moscow.Under the plan, a committee including representatives of the European Union, the Group of 7 nations and others that agree to the price cap would meet regularly to decide on the price at which Russian oil should be sold, and that it would change based on the market price.

Several diplomats involved in the E.U. talks said that Greece, Malta and Cyprus — maritime nations that would be most affected by the price cap — received assurances that their business interests would be preserved, the diplomats said.

The countries had been holding up what would be the eighth sanctions package the European Union has adopted since the Russian invasion of Ukraine because of worries that a price cap on Russian oil exported outside the bloc would affect their shipping, insurance and other industries, the diplomats said.

With oil prices at a high, Russia is raking in billions of dollars in revenue, even as it sells smaller quantities. The cap — part of a broad plan pushed by the Biden administration that the G7 agreed to last month — is intended to set the price of Russian oil lower than where it is today, but still above cost. The U.S. Treasury calculates that the cap would deprive the Kremlin of tens of billions of dollars annually.

How do you make a big producer of a rare commodity sell those goods below the general market price? Unless you have a very strong buyers cartel that can also that product from elsewhere you can not do this successfully. It is an economic impossibility.

To make the measure effective, and cut Russian revenue, the United States, Europe and their allies would need to convince India and China, which buy substantial quantities of Russian oil, to purchase it only at the agreed upon price. Experts say that even with willing partners, the cap could be hard to implement.

Russia has declared that it will not sell any oil to any party that supports the G7 price fixing regime. That is why neither China nor India nor any other country besides the EU and U.S. will agree to adhere to it.

The whole idea is crazy and way too complicate to achieve anything:

Under the new rules, companies involved in the shipping of Russian oil — including shipowners, insurers and underwriters — would be on the hook for ensuring that the oil they are helping to transport is being sold at or below the price cap. If they are caught helping Russia sell at a higher price, they could face lawsuits in their home countries for violating sanctions.Russian crude will come under an embargo in most of the European Union on Dec. 5, and petroleum products will follow in February. The price cap on shipments to non-E.U. countries has been championed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as a necessary complement to the European oil embargo.

Under the E.U. deal, Greece, Malta and Cyprus will be permitted to continue shipping Russian oil. Had they not agreed to place their companies at the forefront of applying the price cap, they would have been forbidden from shipping or insuring Russian oil cargo outside the European Union, a huge hit for major industries.

More than half of the tankers now shipping Russia’s oil are Greek-owned. And the financial services that underpin that trade — including insurance, reinsurance and letters of credit — are overwhelmingly based in the European Union and Britain.

This is of course an open invitation to other countries to enter the oil shipping and related financial services businesses at the cost of European companies.

China and India will both it to increase their market shares in those fields. Their ships will transport Russian oil to whoever wants to buy it for the market price minus the always negotiable Russian rebate. Greek ships will sit idle or will be sold off while Indian and Chinese and other Asian tankers will be very, very busy. China’s big insurance companies will happily join that new global services business.

That European bureaucrats agreed to his stupid U.S. idea, which will foremost hurt European businesses, is another sign that Brussels has given up on having any agency.

Today OPEC+ countries, the seller cartel for oil, reacted to the crazy sanctions idea and the upcoming global depression by agreeing to decrease their daily output by 2 million barrels. This was not done out of Saudi solidarity with Russia. Saudi Arabia needs oil at above $80/bl to finance its budget.

Brent Crude, which had fallen to $83/bl on September 26, has since risen to $93/bl.

The global demand for oil is around 100 million barrels per day. Should the demand stay up the 2% reduction in OPEC+ production will have significant price effects and $100 per barrel will be in easy reach.

But OPEC+ is committed to stable prices, not to significant price increases. During the OPEC+ session today the Saudi Prince Abdulazis showed this table:

 

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biggerSince the beginning of the year the prices for all forms of carbon based energy except crude oil have increased considerably. Abdulazis argued that the chart shows that OPEC+ is managing oil prices responsibly. The EU is certainly not doing similar.

The Biden administration has meanwhile nearly halved the content of the U.S Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This to keep U.S. pump prices down and the Democrats in power.

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Neither is a responsible step to take.

Posted by b on October 5, 2022 at 16:48 UTC | Permalink

What the hell, the light switches are backward!

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This switch is *ON*, when it’s pressed on the bottom.

The second thing I noticed was, “What the hell, I’m sure I plugged in my phone!” (but I hadn’t switched on the “electrical receptacle” — Australian power points are most often turned on and off at the wall plate or on the “power board” (power bar).)

The first thing my kids were confused by was which button to depress to flush the toilet. Every Aussie toilet I saw had a half-flush and full-flush option. And it’s not a potty, and it’s not in the “bathroom”. It’s a toilet.

There’s a drain in the floor of the bathroom where the tub or shower is. This is quite standard.

There are no “no shirt, no shoes, no service” signs. Quite a few people go barefoot.

!@#$!@ bindis.
Not the South Asian forehead mark. Not Steve Irwin’s daughter.
No, I mean these:

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They’re like little lawn caltrops. They’re painful. I don’t know why there are so many barefoot Aussies given these little nasties. (I was told they’re properly Bindii

(pronounced bindi-eye) but I rarely heard people call them that. They’re the seedpod of a vicious weed. I might have some strong feelings about them.)

You let entire flocks of these expensive birds fly around freely as if they were…

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…oh wait, right, this is where cockatoos are from.

Burger King has renamed itself:

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and despite their 1950’s diner decor, they don’t have any ketchup.

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ketchup for their french fries. Which would be “tomato sauce for their chips”, actually. Toh-mah-toe, not toe-may-toe. But seriously. THEY HAD NO KETCHUP FOR THEIR FRIES. (Not even Rosella, or any of the other local brands, which all taste far too clove-y and vinegary for my own taste, although my kids adapted.)

Also, shopping centers have amazingly short “trading hours” (that’s business hours, for us Yanks). Except for late closing day (and varies by state). Which is usually midweek. But otherwise the whole place may close down at 6:30 p.m. or earlier. Aussies take their work/life balance seriously.

Oh, and all the school age children are wearing uniforms. It’s like Hogwarts! But not always nearly so attractive:

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(No disrespect to the model. I don’t think there’s any issue of her being homely. Just her pinnie.) I haven’t been able to find any images that do justice to the disturbing “nothing fits any of these kids!” impression that an entire school’s worth of kids in these uniforms gives, with the two or three styles of hats, as well as the oddly fitting shirts and shorts on the boys. Every school has a different color scheme, and you can often tell the posh schools from the less affluent ones.

This is the default “sushi” around Oz.

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It’ll cost you somewhere between $2.40 AUD in Melbourne to $3.50 AUD in Sydney (per piece). Most common are avo-salmon or tuna-sweetcorn. The little soy sauce fish in the background of this image are ubiquitous, too.

Every. Single. Restaurant uses this particular style of takeaway container.

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Some are deeper or shallower (I saw three different sizes) but they’re all essentially the same. Except that the corner curvature varies, so if you use them as miserly substitutes for proper kitchen storage, you’ll go a bit mad.

Unless otherwise specified, a lemonade is something like this:

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Yes, it’s fizzy. It’s like a mostly lemony 7-Up or Sprite. (For the non-Americans reading this, in the U.S., a lemonade consists of lemon juice, sugar (or other sweetening) and water. Period.)

…and there’s an amazing barrage of traffic signs in Sydney. I’ll spare you the imagery.

Homemade Biscuits and Gravy

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This recipe will take your taste buds down South, to where good old-fashioned recipes are still king. Our Homemade Biscuits and Gravy recipe is full of so much down-home goodness, you’ll want to eat these homemade biscuits at breakfast AND dinner, which is perfectly all right by us!

What You’ll Need

  • 2 cups pancake and baking mix
  • 2/3 cup buttermilk
  • 1/2 stick (1/4 cup) butter, melted, plus 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 (16-ounce) package hot pork sausage
  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 1/2 cups milk
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper

What to Do

  1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
  2. In a medium bowl, stir baking mix, buttermilk, and the 1/2 stick melted butter until soft dough forms. Drop 8 equal spoonfuls of dough onto an ungreased baking sheet.
  3. Bake 14 to 16 minutes, or until golden brown.
  4. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, melt remaining butter; cook 1 to 1-1/2 minutes, or until browned. Add sausage and cook 6 to 8 minutes, or until no pink remains, stirring to crumble sausage. Add flour; mix well. Add Worcestershire sauce, milk, salt, and pepper; mix well. Cook 2 to 4 minutes, or until gravy thickens, stirring constantly.
  5. Cut biscuits in half and spoon sausage mixture evenly on bottom halves. Replace tops and serve.

I’m sitting on my bed, doing my math homework and simultaneously writing this whilst blasting no love again by taeyeon, in a quarantine facility in Guangzhou, China. I seem to be in no immediate danger of being arrested. When I opened my door earlier to take my covid test, I had red flavour by red velvet playing in the background – I was not arrested by the nurse and sent to a prison camp, and as far as I’m aware, my organs are all present and functioning perfectly fine inside my body.

Heck, I probably did not need to write all of that because if I was taken to a prison camp, I would not be posting this.

also note to whoever asked this question: in order for the sentence to be grammatically correct, I would suggest changing listen to listens, as with your current grammar I doubt you will make it far in the political field in which you seem to be so heavily invested in.

have a nice day.

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In shock over Velma

It is reported that Velma from the cartoon Scooby Doo is now officially a lesbian. The reporters in Hollywood are all giddy with joy.

“OMG LESBIAN VELMA FINALLY,” reads one tweet, which has over 100,000 likes.

As I get older, the more I realize that it’s not only the American leadership that are “bat-shit crazy”, but most of the population as well.

Sheech!

Velma was sort of a cartoon version of my (boyhood) dream girl. She was soft, nice, smart, talented, and wore a soft turtleneck cuddly sweater. Oh, and she wore nerd glasses before they were cool. And let’s not forget about her many discoveries and de-masking of the “bad guys”!

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My fantasies lie dead in the dust! Sigh.

Some people have always believed this but it didn’t become a mainstream idea until Ronald Reagan popularized it.

He said things like “The government is not the solution to our problems, it is the problem” and “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

Prior to Reagan most Republicans were for smaller government but still believed that it could be a force for good.

Republican president Eisenhower increased the minimum wage, expanded Social Security and created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and started large government projects like the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Interstate Highway System.

Republican President Nixon wanted to expand Welfare to a “living wage” system, proposed universal health care, signed Title IX guarantying equal educational opportunities for women, signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and formed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Reagan pushed previously fringe anti-government views into the mainstream.

The Three Stooges || You Nazty Spy 1940

This old skit reminds me of how the USA operates today. LOL

https://youtu.be/LvVPopDC9vA

Chinese Girl

The Monkees on The Johnny Cash Show 1969

China is a democracy. However, it is not a liberal Western democracy.

The West are not entitled to define what is and isn’t democracy.

In both democratic systems, citizens vote for their representatives. The only difference is that China is based on a one-party state while the West have multiple parties that compete with one another.

Bekah

My daughter Bekah passed away 1 year ago from an unexpected asthma attack causing her to go into cardiac arrest. She was alone in her apartment when it happened and dialed 911 herself.

They were quickly able to reach her and bring back a pulse but she coded a second time in the ambulance. After 9 days in the ICU she was totally unresponsive to any stimuli and they called a time of death although she was still “alive”. She was an organ donor and helped to save 5 people.

A friend of mine had a vivid dream of my daughter in where my daughter walked in the room looking very much alive.

He shouted to me “Bekah is alive” She looked at him and said “no, I’m here to give my heart.”

She then walked up to a child and handed her heart to her. My daughters heart did go to a child, a 12 yr old. I’ve struggled with the what if’s and feeling guilty that she was alone when she passed.

I worry that she was scared or that she felt pain. Hearing some of the stories on this group help to give me hope that she’s at peace and maybe she did choose to give of herself to help others.

I ask God daily to please give me a million signs of her presence until it’s my time to see her beautiful face once again. Bekah’s mom ~ forever 22

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Kitty chooses her “owner”

This little girl showed up at my back door on Christmas Eve three years ago. Per my estimate she was about 4 to 6 months old and about a quarter her current size.

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Since her belly was shaved (I assumed she was spayed) and she is a bit of a rare breed for where I live (she looks and has all the characteristics of a pure Russian Blue), I assumed she belonged to someone in my neighborhood.

She wanted attention (a sure sign she was raised by someone since feral cats do not crave petting and human attention).

I asked all my neighbors and they had never seen her before nor did she belong to anyone in the neighborhood, as I checked; she also had no chip for identification purposes. I waited over a week assuming she would find her rightful owner, as she might have just wandered off, but she kept hanging around and coming back, so I took her into my home and adopted her.

I have had cats before so I have experiences and other past cats as a comparison.

This particular cat is the most affectionate, happy (per her constant purring), and cuddly cat I have ever known, but only with me as she just hides when other people come around.

Sometimes she jumps up in the middle of a dead sleep and immediately looks over at me as if just wanting to know I am still there.

I can say with certainty this cat is afraid of being abandoned again and she is grateful to have been rescued/adopted.

Chinese Girl

Here’s Why The U.S. Blew Up Nord Stream Pipeline!

Growing up in the UK until migrating to Australia in the mid 1970s meat pies were popular but fairly limited and were either rather runny minced beef, or steak and kidney. I lived in Cardiff for a while and there was a round pie or a larger rectangular one. When I returned to Britain on holiday in 2000 I couldn’t find a proper meat pie anywhere. Most of the bakers seemed to do a rectangular ‘steak bake’ that was tasty and reminiscent of a pie but not really the proper article. They were also disappointingly small and you needed two.

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I spent a month in England, Wales, Scotland and failed to track down a proper pie. With two hungry teenage boys in tow we would have loved an Aussie style pie.

In Australia nearly every bakery has a big pie and sausage roll section with a hot cabinet and there are a lot of dedicated pie shops selling a huge range of pies. I’d guess pie consumption is far higher in Australia and every town has a signature pie outlet that is very popular and against which others are measured.

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Often there are up to 30 different varieties such as chunky steak, crocodile, chicken mornay, curry, vegetarian options etc. And most sit-down pie cafes accompany the pie with mashed potato, mushy peas and a generous dollop of gravy.

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That’s one I regularly have from the popular pie cart whenever I visit Lismore New South Wales. There’s a pie under there somewhere!

A pommie steak bake would scream in terror and run away down the street.

Globalists are pushing a nuclear attack, and Putin knows it

Historically, economies have grown under authoritarian control, for example,

  • the Roman Empire
  • the Ottoman Empire
  • the Portuguese Empire
  • the Spanish Empire
  • the Dutch Empire
  • the French Empire
  • the German Empire
  • the British Empire
  • the Soviet Union
  • Singapore
  • South Korea
  • Taiwan

Large democratic economies have only existed in the last half century or so. Note that USA is not a democracy (it’s a republic).

Authoritarian states tend to be more effective at economic growth because they face no opposition. They can create policies without compromise. They can execute policies without hindrance, especially in the long term. They can galvanize their populations to produce economic output. Tight control is the order of the day.

Sloppy governance leads to wastage and inefficiency.

Get Hard (2015) – Gangbanger Accountant Scene

True story.

My 15-year-old son’s best friend’s parents work at the Macy’s in our local mall.

I know that Macy’s is struggling, so I decided I would do some shopping there when I could. I really wanted my son’s friend’s parents to keep their jobs, because they don’t live close, and I’m worried that if they lose their jobs they will pull their son out of the school he’s in and my son will lose his friend. (They used to live in the neighborhood but moved to get a larger living space).

So I went over to the Macy’s to buy a throw rug. We have carpet in our house and the cats chew it up and I just wanted to buy a small throw rug to cover up part of the carpet.

When I got to the Macy’s, the escalator was broken. No big deal. I walked up three flights. I then found the rugs but they were incredibly expensive. The cheapest one was many hundreds of dollars.

The next problem was that I could not find anyone to pay for the rug! It was late on a Sunday and no one seemed to be around anywhere. I found myself wandering from department to department, carrying the heavy rug on my shoulder. I finally found an employee, but they said they could not help me. I needed to go back to the housewares department and find someone there.

I finally found myself getting so frustrated that I almost started shouting, “Is there noone here who can help me?!? I just need some help!”

But then I calmed down and realized that shouting like a lunatic was probably a bad idea. I put back the rug, left the Macy’s, walked back down the stairs, came home, fired up the Internet, and ordered a nice throw rug for $50 in a few minutes. It arrived at my front door a day later.

I think what’s happening is that, as brick and mortar stores bring in fewer sales, they are having to cut staff and cut spending. As they do so, the shopping experience becomes less and less pleasant. Which then drives more people online. Which then means the store must cut more people and more budget. It’s a vicious cycle. I’m going to miss having brick and mortar stores nearby when I need something urgently. But I don’t see how you stop it.

FULL INTERVIEW: The conversations turn on civil war in the US says Prof Richard Wolff

Take Evergrande!!!!

Why did so many Economists predict that Evergrande collapse would be huge etc etc????

Because they are stupid??? No

Because they are biased??? Maybe…but they are still reputed Academics who wont just tout propaganda

So Why????

BECAUSE THEY LOOK AT EVERYTHING FROM THE US ANGLE (And the European Angle and the Japanese Angle and the Indian Angle) or the US LENS


In the United States – The Shareholder is GOD

So any Collapse of a Company , leads to a blow in the Markets which causes massive massive massive losses and creates all the financial crises since 1929.

In China – The Investor is GOD

China believes that the Speculator is a Gambler. They restrict major funds from investing too much into the Stock market and ensure that the Common Citizens who invest in the stock market know that they can lose their shirt or win a pile of gold.

Instead their Focus is on the Investor - the ones who paid for the Houses, the ones who bought Bonds etc. They are to the Chinese - the backbone of Economics.

IN the United States – Rule of Law is Cumbersome but Absolute

This means - THE LAW Comes First. So whenever any Company Collapses - you have Chapter 11s filed , Protection of the Company Directors and Shareholders , Allowing the Company to file counter suits etc.

This means the Assets of the Company get wound up for an average of 46 months and by this time shares plummet to Zero.

Thus a Companys failure means failure for all its investors.

In China – The Public is Absolute or the Common Man

China puts everything including Freedom or Human Rights above the Common Man.

So in China when a Collapses - the System will first Force a company to pay back its investors.

The Law never interferes

The Company has to pay back its investors by selling Assets, swapping Assets etc.

This means Assets of a Company can be disposed off in weeks rather than months or years.

And thus Investors almost always get between 55% - 100% of what they invested

IN the United States – Value is all about Perception

US doesnt like the word ‘Assets’ or ‘Profits’

They like ‘ Potential’ or ‘Expansion’

This means many Companies in US are almost always heavily bloated with very little Real Assets

So in a sense US is mostly like India. They do nothing until a company folds and then its Chapter 11 and in some cases - FBI investigations or SEC investigations

So when a Company crashes - its Perception or Potential crashes and its Value crashes.

In China – Value is all about ASSETS

China doesnt like words like ‘Potential’ or ‘Closing a Deal’ etc.

They like Hard Core Assets - Land, Contracts, Trade Deals, Gold, Jade, Coal , Gas Pipelines are what they love.

So when a Company crashes - It always has Assets to back it up and these Assets manage to salvage a big chunk of Value

So thats what is helping China ignore Evergrande or even a Real Estate Crisis while if this was happening in US or even India – people would be scrambling for cover.

Yet while Economists are good – they simply dont think like a Chinese or know the Chinese System

My Associate Lawyer in Singapore told me how Westerners focussed on Huge Office Space whereas a CHinese office was a small 15X10 enclosure and yet you had 10 times larger deals floating through the same.

Likewise Most Western Personal Debts are based on paperwork etc. Most Chinese Personal Debts are given based on just the mans face and his Chop (Chop is a personalized Stamp like thing with Unique Chinese characters)


So those who make Predictions on China – Just don’t understand how China works

Its why Singapore never makes Predictions on China. They simply report the US Predictions and Laugh because They are Chinese too.

Likewise South Korea understands the Chinese Way as does Taiwan and even HK

That’s why South East Asia really didn’t care too much about Evergrande. They just reported what the West said but ignored it.

That’s why South East Asia scrambled in Panic when Lehman Brothers folded. They also know how US works and knew how big a crisis it was.


Just change your glasses and wear a Chinese one – and you will see just how different Chinese Business is compared to the Western models

They’re popular in New England, though they’re not the same.

Aussie/Kiwi meat pies (in my experience) are kind of their own thing. They’re made primarily with ground meat (usually beef,) onion and bbq/tomato sauce. They’re delicious (and plentiful.) Meanwhile the British eat more kinds of pies than I have managed to try.

Here in New England, we eat Shepherd’s pie and chicken pot pie, which I realise are popular elsewhere.

We also eat the style popular in the Canadian maritimes — this is the type my family have always eaten, and here’s how I make them. Note that these use “ordinary” pie crust, as you’d use for apple, top and bottom. This will make a 9-inch pie:

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 kg pork
  • 1/2 kg beef
  • 1 large yellow/Spanish onion
  • 2 tablespoons summer savory (or 1 ea. sage & thyme)
  • butter for browning meat
  • 1 and 1/2 russet potatoes
  • 1 tablespoon white lard
  • Pie crust

NOTE that I buy the cheapest cuts of meat available. No need for anything fancy; just whatever’s on sale.

Arrange your lower crust by itself in the pie plate and pre-bake at 125C until golden.

Dice your meat into 2.5 cm (one inch) cubes, and brown the meat in a bit of butter in a frying pan until it is seared on the outside.

Put the meat, onion, and savory (or sage & thyme) in a stew pot, and add enough water to just cover the meat. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to barely simmering, and simmer, covered, for 1.5 to 2 hours, checking every half hour to add water to keep the meat covered as necessary, until a piece of meat will just about fall apart when you squash it with a fork..

Remove from heat, and pour everything into a colander to strain it. Let it cool in the colander while you prepare the potatoes.

Peel and dice your potatoes, and boil them the same as if you were making mashed potatoes. When they’re done, strain out the water, add the lard, and then mash in the usual way. No lumps! Be thorough. Don’t add milk to these… just thoroughly mashed potatoes and lard. The potatoes are the binder that will hold your filling together. Canadian/New England pies don’t slouch and run the way some others do. They’re more like a pork pie.

Return to your cooled meat. Examine all your cooked pieces, and scrape away or remove any fat or gristle that remains (most of it will have boiled away.)

Now put the meat/onions in a mixing bowl, and start adding the potato/lard mixture, mixing/stirring as you go. Don’t worry that the meat falls apart as you mix. It will do that. But do try to keep it as intact as possible, so there are some big chunks in each slice.

Add salt and plenty of ground black pepper. When the filling is mixed, and tasting good, fill your (pre-cooked) lower crust, add your top crust, cut some vents, and bake at 175 deg C until the top crust is done, usually about 40 minutes or so.

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First, China has not been silent. Even before the war, China had been pressing for regional peace talks. But guess what, the West prefers to dig up dirt from the Beijing Olympics… I mean… I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The West should be like this: Who cares, we need the whole world to know the evil of the Olympic Games. Putin and Ukraine can wait.

Second, China knows better that internal affairs are usually better handled internally. The history between Russia and Ukraine goes back to 1991. Better to let Russia and Ukraine resolve these issues internally.

Third, I did not see the West upset when two US presidents destroyed three Middle Eastern countries in the space of 20 years, one of them for a bag of washing powder. Where were the ABC, BBC, CNN and the rest of the media when millions of refugees poured into the EU, hundreds of thousands were made homeless and countless civilians died? No, it’s all cool and normal 😀 They don’t even deserve to be in an entertainment column reporting on Brad Pitt’s facial (no offense, he’s a great actor).

Conclusion:

When things fall apart, blame China.

When things get better, talk down China.

When things are no longer things, guess what, China! 😀

I don’t know. You tell me.

I finished watching The Mandalorian last week.
To my surprise, I quite liked it.
IG-11’s sacrifice scene almost made me shed a tear.

But I still haven’t watched the last season of Game of Thrones.
Or Spiderman: Far from Home.

Most days I work from home from my laptop.
I go out for occasional walks in the park and in the evening I usually go for a run around the neighborhood.

I go to the nearest Tesco once a week to stock up on groceries. I find that on average, I spend about an average of €25 a week for groceries. But last week I broke my budget by €2 when I decided to get a jar of Ovaltine Light. * sad face *

Before I came to Ireland to do my Master’s, I had previously lived in several countries:

Australia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Germany.

I’ve also traveled to many more countries than that.
Iceland was a favorite.
I stayed a couple of days in a small town whose entire population is… get this… 200 people.

Last place I traveled to was London, in January 2020.

Five days. Had some Nando’s, tried the buffet at Pizza Hut (so-so), had too many quick meals at McDonald’s. And even had a chicken sandwich at a place called “Chicking” (I assume it’s Chicken + King)

Also, had a great haircut and dye job from a Singaporean hairstylist – there are wayyyyy more Asian hairstylists in London than Dublin.

I don’t think I live an isolated life, although Dublin is currently under Level 5 restrictions, so in that sense, you could say that I’m somewhat isolated because we’re not supposed to travel too far outside of our residence without a good reason (buying groceries would be a good reason, having a party with your mates who live 15 km away would be otherwise)

So, how did I do?

Do you think I’m isolated from the rest of the world?

Is it fair to say that the USA has gone from the greatest country on Earth to a near Third World country?

Yes, I think it’s fair to say that…

Did you know that America’s life expectancy this year dropped to below that of China’s? I’m not pulling your leg.

Life expectancy is one of the crucial factors that determine how well-developed a country is.

Another factor is the level of poverty in the country. In America, there are vast swaths of homeless people in all the major cities. For the supposedly richest nation on earth, this is unconscionable.

Millions of Americans suffer from food insecurity. Food banks are stretched to the limit.

Millions of Americans cannot afford health care, which is considered a fundamental human right around the world.

America has the some of the worst infrastructure in the world, literally crumbling and decaying.

Gun violence is so rampant in America that mass shootings occur on a daily basis! I’m not pulling your leg.

In 2020, 45,000 Americans were killed by guns, according to the CDC. This includes suicides.

Of course, wealthier Americans deny that USA is slipping in quality of life. They’re so insulated from the shit that’s going on around them, they have blinders on.

Chinese Girl

How long will it take for China to catch up to the United States economically and technologically?

Economically already surpassed on all parameters of consequence except one and that will also be reached in 2028–30 period. China is already the largest economy in PPP terms, the largest trading nation in the world, the largest industrial base, largest manufacturing capacity, largest tading partner to the most number of countries and it’s BRI project is the largest development and infrastructure project in history.

Technologically hard to tell whether China has already surpassed or has few years more to catch up. My guess is overall China is 95% of the overall US technology framework and architecture. This means in many technology fields China has already left USA behind in the dust and in some fields its at par while in few others its behind. So overall it’s 95% if we have to quantify it.

Sopranos and Lupertazzi’s Sitdown to discuss Ralph – The Sopranos HD

In my opinion, Adelaide, my home town, makes the absolute best pies. One of the downsides of living in the city of Melbourne is that the only meat pies or bakery items I can find are either made by large franchises, and therefore depersonalised, or sold in a packet.

In Adelaide, that is near sacreligious. There is at least one good bakery in the heart of each suburb, which makes everything fresh in store, and typically has upwards of 20 savoury bakery varieties, and even more sweet varieties.

One of my personal favourite locations is Enjoy Bakery on the Parade at Norwood, partially because it was within walking distance(1 hour or so) of my house, but also because they have a ridiculous range, not to mention delicious flavour.

Here is a visual aid:

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Of course, any true Australian would accompany their bakery meal with the following beverage:

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I happen to be holding one of these in my hand at this very moment!

You know someone isn’t Australian when something other than a meat pie comes into their mind when you say ‘pie’, it almost disgusts me that Americans would call a blueberry pie, ‘pie’ as if that were somehow acceptable.

Chinese Girl

My cousin’s daughter brought home a note from her teacher saying that the lunch she had packaged for her had been thrown away because it was unhealthy and that she owed the school money for the school lunch her daughter had been given. My cousin called her daughter’s teacher to find out what the issue was and apparently the school had banned lunchables so her daughter’s lunch of sliced turkey breast, cheese grapes and yogurt was deemed a lunchable and therefore unhealthy because it included whole grain flatbread. which the teacher insisted were crackers so it was a homemade lunchable and violated the rules . The teacher didn’t care that it was whole grain it was a cracker so it was unhealthy.

My cousin’s set up a meeting with the teacher and the principal and explained exactly what her daughter had brought for lunch including the nutritional information to prove that her daughter’s lunch was indeed healthy then asked provided the menu for the day her daughter’s lunch was throw away. Pizza, corn, a roll and fruit cocktail. The principal apologized and said that it wouldn’t happen again. A few days later letters were sent home explaining that the teacher would be gone for the rest of the year and the students would be getting a new teacher.

Come to find out that the school hadn’t banned lunchables or had any requirements on lunches brought from home but the teacher in question had tried imposing rules on what SHE felt was acceptable lunches and gotten in trouble for throwing away a student’s lunch the year before so she ended up getting fired.

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Nomar

I promised my cat Nomar that I would one day share her story, so here it is –

I was looking for a new cat since one of my others had recently passed on – it had left a void in the house, and he was sorely missed.

My nearby shelter (Paws) had quite a few up for adoption, and a small tuxedo cat caught my eye. When I first asked to see her, I was warned by the staff that she was a bit hostile toward people, but something told me to take a look anyway.

Well, they were more than correct as I was promptly scratched and bitten by the little thing. I was then told that she had arrived at the shelter a few months beforehand and was quite pregnant.

She gave birth to seven kittens soon after, all seven were quickly adopted out when they were ready.

It came to me quickly that Mom would definitely be difficult to find a forever home for. Well, (you guessed it) I could not allow her to sit in a cage forever and then possibly lose her life. My heart would not allow this – I adopted her.

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Once home, to my surprise, my other cat took a liking to her, and they got along very well.

But for myself or any other human – well, she wanted to rip us to shreds immediately.

To shorten things, it took over a year of patience before she began to trust me. Here’s the fun part – one day I awakened to a brand – new cat in my home. It was nothing less than astounding, Nomar had gone through some sort of transformation during the night.

My vicious little girl kitty had suddenly become more than friendly, more like a loving, secure, happy cat.

It came as a total shock to me – she was a changeling. Nomar must have come to a conclusion – accepting me and trusting me completely as her own, to have forever.

Later I found that she had decided to love everyone else as well, friends, neighbors, even total strangers.

If there is such a thing as a miracle, this was it.

Through the years the two of us were tight as a knot, always together. She was very intelligent, inventing her own games to play, learning constantly and just plain loving her life, and I sure never regretted bringing Nomar home, a very, very special cat indeed.

I often think of what might have been. This wonderful, happy, trusting kitty may never have existed.

Of course, someone else may have felt the same as I did and adopted her, but to me – I was the lucky one.

Her real personality came alive when she realized no one would hurt her, ever. I can’t imagine what a waste it could have been.

We loved each other tremendously until that awful day came when she left our world. But I will forever remember Nomar, the sweetest little creature in the universe.

I believe that I gave her the best 15 years that a cat could have. Rest in peace Nomar. Hope I did you justice with this.

I will love you until I die.

Ralphie Figured Out Who Told Johnny Sack Of The Joke – The Sopranos HD

Because you don’t know the first thing about China. You need to visit China before talking shit about it.

Your understanding of China is based on Western media propaganda garbage.

Millions of foreign tourists visit China every year. They see China as a magnificent and beautiful country.

There is no substitute for your own eyes and experience. Stop reading Western media rubbish and go to China!

Yes it is a land of free money. Since Bush they have given out over 10 trillion dollars to Americans and American companies to buy its own shares. That is 10′000′000′000′000 whic is no different from the communist regime in the 1950s giving out food stamps.

But the sickening thing is the Americans laugh and slur Communism and Socialism. They are doing what Communist and socialist no longer need to do 70 years ago!

The US is broke and bankrupt for at least 30 years now, and totally dependent on printing money like there is no tomorrow doing things no one needs nor wanted and certainly will not pay for. And spending money they do not have.

This will end now. The USD will be used only amongst less than 10 countries within a decade. And this madness will stop and so will America’s hegemony. Unless it wants a 5000% inflation!

Johnny informs Tony about Ralphie’s joke – The Sopranos HD

The Australian Traditional Meat pie!

“This is The Australian Traditional Meat pie! usually eaten for lunch for just watching the aussie rules footy. You can make 1 big meat pie or more little ones from this recipe!”

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Ingredients

Directions

  • Pre-heat oven at 220 degrees Celsius.
  • Brown meat and onion.
  • Add 3/4 cup of the water, bouillon cubes, ketchup and Worcestershire sauce, pepper, oregano, and nutmeg.
  • Boil and cover for 15 minutes.
  • Blend flour with the remaining 1/4 cup water until it becomes a smooth paste; add to the meat mix.
  • Let cool.
  • Grease a pie dish and line with puff pastry.
  • Add the cooled filling mixture; brush edges of pastry with milk or beaten egg; put the pastry top on; press edges down with a fork.
  • Trim edges and glaze top with milk or beaten egg.
  • Bake in a very hot oven, 220 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes.
  • Reduce heat to 180 degrees Celsius and bake for 25 more minutes, or until golden brown.
  • Serve with veggies, fries, or salad.

They’re basically making that choice now. Most of the world’s nations refuse to side with the white Anglophone countries (USA, UK, Australia, Canada) and most of the countries within the EU…

  • They refuse to follow Western sanctions against Russia.
  • They refuse to follow Western sanctions against China. They’re buying 5G equipment from Huawei, for example.
  • OPEC countries refuse to increase oil production at the West’s behest.
  • They continue to trade with China and do business with China.
  • They accept China’s offer to build their infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
  • They join alliances such as BRICS, RCEP, and SCO.
  • They are moving to de-dollarize, to move away from using the US Dollar.

The world is bifurcating into two distinct spheres…economically, financially, technologically, diplomatically.

The Sopranos – Tony And Silvio Talk About Ralph

Evil people make plans while the rest of us nervously prepare for the onslaught

I am in the middle of my Chinese national Holiday. You-Tube has penalized me to having a video “spreading medical misinformation”, and I am being tormented by a couple of ‘Merica! folk who want to “kick some slant eyed ass”.

Jeeze!

I just wanna smunch!

Wheezin’ The Juice!

A police officer was standing behind her and happened to hear the amount and saw she was using a cane, struggling to walk back to her car. He went outside and told her to sit in the car as he would pump the gas for her. After a few minutes of getting to know one another, he realized she was really struggling and didn’t have any gas or money left. The $3 will only get her so far. He told her to hang tight- came inside and put another $20 out of his pocket. He went back and finished pumping and she told him her husband had recently passed away and she’s stuck paying all their bills and is behind every month. This $20 really helped her! She would of most likely ended up running out of gas. Nowadays there’s so much negativity towards police officers. No one respects them. We hear all the complaints and “bad” stories. I’m not saying every officer is perfect, I’m sure some are at fault at times. We all make mistakes- but we should all respect, appreciate, and thank them for what they do. Leaving your family every day to try and make sure everyone else’s is safe can be tough. Think about it- who do you call when you’re in danger? Who’s running in harm’s way as you’re running away?

To all the men and women in blue, I THANK YOU for your service!”

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China has not opened up? I’m pretty sure anyone holding that view has not visited China recently.

Go to Beijing or Shanghai or any other big Chinese city. You will find malls that look not much different from Hong Kong or Singapore. They may even be built and operated by conglomerates from these port cities. American fast food, French bags, Swiss watches. Whatever you want you can have. Markets as open as any major international city today.

As for liberalization, more than 150 million Chinese travel abroad each year. That is an astounding number, greater than the population of Japan. Just 40 years ago, the numbers were negligible. But the more incredible number is this: more than 150 million Chinese RETURN HOME. There are no reports of millions of Chinese refugees seeking asylum overseas.

On to human rights. China is behind Singapore in terms of rule of law, and trust in the government internationally. But Singapore still get routinely trashed for the death penalty, caning, inequality and other human rights abuses. We are a common law democracy but there are always murmurs if not shouts of dynastic politics, non-democracy, high political salaries and other evils.

We can never please the west because we are not the west.

China is changing. Warp speed fast. But please temper any judgment with the fact China started from a very low base. China was at war for the better part of 100 years from 1850 to 1949, half of it without a functional central government. Can you imagine 3 generations of anarchy and destruction? What do they call it, dystopia?

The current generation of chinese youth enjoy far more freedoms and privileges than their parents did. The next will, too.

Paulie Gualtieri dethrones Tony Soprano

https://youtu.be/lN5XY-a7BCY

Last March, my family was visiting Southern California. They wanted to check out Venice Beach. My daughter loves to work out as much as I do so I suggested we leave the others at the beach and walk over to the original Gold’s Gym, the Mecca of bodybuilding. For the next hour and a half we lifted weights, toured every inch of the place, stared at all the pictures of the famous bodybuilders on the walls, and generally had a great time. We stopped at the gift shop and bought a couple of things to commemorate the day. I finished paying and looked up and pointed near the entrance.

“It’s Arnold,” I said. Sure enough, it was the Terminator himself. My daughter gasped, “Let’s get a picture!”

By the time we got to him he was talking to two guys who were in the gym but came out to meet him. Standing next to them we overheard their entire conversation. He was encouraging them and complementing them on their strength and size. When they left, my daughter asked for a pic with us.

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“Shu-uh”, he replied. We thanked him for his time and he wished us a good day before riding off on his electric bike. He honestly could not have been more gracious or down-to-earth.

Photos of American factories

According to Donald Trump and Joe Biden, American industries will eventually return, and when that does, the American industrial might will be unstoppable. Let’s take a look at some of the factories that will roar back into life.

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If there was ever a movie that relates to the crazy world that we live in today, it is the Peter Sellers movie “Dr. Strangelove”.

Dr. Strangelove LDRip test

And the USA is busy trying to “suppress” and “hurt” Russia…

Russian retail chain ‘DNS’ confirms hack after data leaked online

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Russian retail chain ‘DNS’ (Digital Network System) disclosed yesterday that they suffered a data breach that exposed the personal information of customers and employees.

DNS is Russia’s second-largest computer and home appliance store chain, with 2,000 branches and 35,000 employees.

According to the scant details provided in the announcement, a group of hackers residing outside the Russian Federation exploited a security gap in the company’s IT systems and accessed customer and employee details.

“We have already found gaps in the protection of our information infrastructure and are working to strengthen information security in the company,” says the DNS announcement.

While the firm has not provided details on what information was compromised, it clarified that the hackers didn’t steal user passwords and payment card data, as that data isn’t stored on their systems.

DNS data leaked on hacker forum

DNS’ disclosure of a security breach comes hours after a threat actor began leaking the company’s data on a hacking forum, allegedly stolen by a hacking group known as ‘NLB Team.’

The data was allegedly stolen on September 19 and contains full names, usernames, email addresses, and phone numbers of DNS customers and employees for 16 million people.

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Full Article HERE. CIA and NSA been really busy harassing Russia.

First of all, you’re talking about liberal Western democracy. This model is based on multiparty elections.

China has a different model of democracy, one that is based on a one-party system.

So it’s incorrect to say that China doesn’t have a democracy. It’s just not your model of democracy.

Second, China’s democratic model has proven to be far more effective for the Chinese. It has enabled China to rise from a totally impoverished nation in 1979 to the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity in just 35 years, an unimaginably short period of time! And it achieved all this without fighting a single war!

No other country in history has risen so large, so quickly, so peacefully. It’s truly an economic miracle.

Third, China did adopt Western democracy back in 1912 when the Republic of China was created. It turned into a colossal disaster. The country was ravaged by warlordism; it was in danger of flying apart at the seams.

Life was bad enough that the Chinese fought a civil war. The ROC was defeated and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) rose in its place.

Fourth, the Chinese have seen liberal democracy failing all around the world. Russia adopted democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union and it also turned into a colossal disaster. India’s democracy held back its economic development — by rights, India’s economy should be comparable to China’s today.

Taiwan adopted democracy around 1990 and its economy has suffered chronic wage stagnation ever since. Taiwan’s parliament is infamous for its brawls.

UK’s democracy allowed the country to be royally fucked by Brexit.

USA’s democracy is in total chaos as the country is plagued by endless social and political problems.

Germany’s democracy allowed the country to be fucked by fuel shortages.

Just about all Western democracies have suffered terrible losses from the pandemic.

Why on earth would China consider adopting liberal democracy again??? What would it have to gain?

Killing Heidi – Mascara

Not popular in the USA, but was in Campsie when I lived there. Take a time machine back to pleasanter times.

America Is Successfully Pursuing ESG = Extreme Shortages Guaranteed

Everything that needs electricity is made with the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. In an all-electric world, there will be nothing to power without oil.

Published Sept 22, 2022 at Heartland  From HERE

Ronald Stein  is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for Heartland, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.”

Energy growth, electricity AND the products made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil and the fuels to power ships, planes, militaries, and space programs, are directly linked to prosperity and well-being across the globe.

Today, most of the energy the world consumes is from hydrocarbons, with crude oil being the dominant source of transportation fuels. Today, crude oil is the ONLY source for the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil that makes more than 6,000 products for society.

President Biden’s U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projections are that world energy consumption of crude oil, coal, natural gas, electricity from renewables, and nuclear will grow by 56 percent between 2010 and 2040. Without any replacements or clones to what fossil fuels can provide the EIA forecasts that fossil fuels will continue to supply nearly 80 percent of world energy use through 2040

President Biden and Sacramento leaders, from Governor’s Brown, Schwarzenegger, and now Newsom, have supported reductions of in-state oil production. And all remain supportive of Biden’s pledge that “we are going to get rid of fossil fuels”.

Another way to interpret Biden and Newsom’s pledge for an all-electric world:

  • Biden and Newsom are oblivious to the reality that everything that needs electricity is made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. In an all-electric world with JUST wind and solar electricity from breezes and sunshine, there will be nothing to power.
  • Biden and Newsom believe that the products and fuels manufactured from fossil fuels, are supporting lifestyles and economies, are dangerous and polluting and is causing dangerous climate change.
  • Biden and Newsom believe that all the infrastructures developed in less than two centuries, from the products manufactured from crude oil, are not needed by future societies, such as medical, electronics, communications, and the many transportation infrastructures such as airlines, merchant ships, automobiles, trucks, military, the space program.
  • Biden and Newsom believe that an all-renewable electricity system from unreliable weather conditions, WITHOUT the products and fuels from fossil fuels, can work to support a modern economy.

America is in fast pursuit toward achieving President Biden’s stated goal that “we are going to get rid of fossil fuels.

Today, Biden supports and encourages banks and investment giants to collude to reshape economies and energy infrastructure with their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) divesting in fossil fuels  movement. ESG is an extremely dangerous precedent as the American people never voted to give banks this sort of control over our country.

With no known replacement for crude oil, Biden and the ESG believers need to be careful about eliminating “all” 3 fossil fuels!

America continues to contribute to China’s domination as divesting in crude oil, the same oil that changed the world after 1900, guarantees shortages and inflation in perpetuity of products supporting societies and economies.

It seems obvious that the efforts to cease the use of crude oil may be the greatest threat to civilization. Attempting to attain a decarbonized world like the one that existed in the 1800’s and before, could result in Billions of fatalities for the eight billion on earth from disease, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths, versus the projections of millions of fatalities from changes in climate.

The world leaders are experiencing a “dangerous delusion” of a global transition to “just electricity” that eliminates the use of the fossil fuels that made society achieve so much in a few centuries.

There were almost 700 oil refineries as of January 2020, but as a result on continuous over regulations and permitting delays and the worldwide support of the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) to divest in fossil fuels, the right operating model and level of integration will be crucial for survival and sustained profitability of refineries.

Consequently, one in five American oil refineries are expected to cease operations over the next five years. One in five is 20 percent, or almost 140 refineries expected to be shuttered worldwide, resulting in a 20 percent decline in the products manufactured to meet the ever-increasing demands form society. With the reduction in manufacturing capabilities, shortages and inflation in perpetuity are likely the new norm!

As of 2021, there were eighty-eight new facilities in planning or under construction in Asia and Europe is set to see an addition of twelve petroleum refineries.

The amount of oil fed through refineries in Asia has significantly increased in the past three decades as demand for petroleum products surged in developing countries such as China and India.

China is on track to succeed the United States as the country with the greatest oil refinery throughput.

Today, America’s energy policies support being held hostage to unstable Petro-powers and the vagaries of foreign crude oil supplies to meet America’s demands.

The key challenge is meeting the growing demand for energy in an environmentally friendly and safe manner. Energy supplies are crucial to economic growth in both developed and developing countries to power businesses and homes, connect communities across boundaries, provide safe water, move commodities, and ultimately promote human and economic development.

While renewables continue to underperform in the generation of electricity, subsidies continue for wind and solar power plants based on “nameplate ratings”. Wind and solar should be penalized when they cannot deliver that for which they have been permitted. And while America promotes the “nameplate farce” of wind and solar, crude oil continues to be targeted for elimination along with coal and natural gas, even though oil is seldom used for generating electricity.

The unintended consequences of attempting to rid America and the world of crude oil usage are being realized in supply shortages and soaring prices  resulting from the elimination of products and fuels manufactured from crude oil that support:

  • Asphalt for roughly sixty-five million miles of roads in the world
  • Tires for the 1.4 billion vehicles in the world
  • Fertilizers to feed the world on this increasingly resource-stretched and crowded earth.
  • Medical supplies that are primarily made from oil derivatives
  • Jets that comprise more than 50,000 for military, commercial, and private sector.
  • Merchant ships that comprise more than 53,000 that move products throughout the world
  • Vehicles that are mostly made of plastics
  • Renewables of wind turbines and solar panels that are made from oil derivatives

Simply put, the goal to “electrify everything” is a de facto energy tax on low- and middle-income citizens that could add more instability to already proven unstable power grids.

It is mind boggling that America continuously perpetuates greater reliance on foreign countries for the products demanded by society, and for the exotic minerals and metals to support wind, solar, and EV batteries. America is successfully pursuing ESG, i.e., Extreme Shortages Guaranteed and inflation in perpetuity that is associated with unreliable supplies to meet ever increasing demands.

“You’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company”

Crime Is Slamming NYC And Chicago

The NY Daily News, which has supported defunding the police, no cost bail, and all the other left wing soft on criminals policies, seems surprised

Violent, unprovoked attacks have New Yorkers on edge: ‘There is something profoundly wrong’

surprise surprise surpriseThey are the buzzwords of New York City crime circa 2022: Random and unprovoked.

A chilling spate of recent incidents involving innocent victims runs the gamut from a woman savagely beaten inside a Queens subway station to a 17-year-old Brooklyn girl killed by a stray bullet to a Mexican immigrant nearly killed by a sucker-punch outside a Manhattan restaurant.

The latest terrifying attack took the life of a veteran city EMS lieutenant on her way to grab lunch in Astoria this past Thursday, with a schizophrenic stranger knocking her to the sidewalk before stabbing her 20 times for no apparent reason.

“There’s something profoundly wrong with New York,” said Mary Hassler, 66, an Astoria resident and cosmetics sales person. “The number of these attacks are growing. There seems to be more and more all the time.

Hey, NYC residents voted for this when they voted in a Leftist mayor, leftist city council, and leftist District Attorney. They’re literally getting what they voted for. If you would have asked them if they supported defunding, no cash bail, etc, a few years ago they would have said “yes!”

But the department reports an uptick so far this year in 911 calls involving emotionally disturbed people. Through Sept. 29, police cited an 8% hike with the latest numbers at 131,199 — roughly 500 per day, up from 128,488 over the same stretch of 2021.

And in a year when the NYPD reported a nearly 12% drop in homicides, there was also a citywide 37% jump in robberies and a 43% increase in grand larceny as New Yorkers expressed their fears about the ongoing situation.

Like in California, criminals feel emboldened to do crime. And what does a city council member recommend?

 

I love the first section, where, under Direct, it’s recommended you “repeat the same statements until the person causing harm corrects their behavior or exits.” Right, right, that’s totally feasible. Of course, they could be exiting because they’ve already filled their bag with goods and it’s time to go.

And in Chicago

 

Defund the police push, liberal policies driving Chicago business exodus, hurting poor the most: experts

Several experts reacted to the CEO of McDonald’s suggesting his company could be the next to flee Chicago’s crime wave by telling Fox News Digital that progressive policies and defund the police rhetoric have created a dangerous situation that will cause even more businesses to flee and most negatively impact the most vulnerable communities in the city.

In a mid-September speech, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said Chicago is a “city in crisis” and that rising crime has made it more difficult to recruit employees to the company’s downtown West Loop headquarters with many scared to return to in-person work after the pandemic due to safety concerns. (snip)

Crime in Chicago, which has skyrocketed since the Black Lives Matter riots and defund the police rhetoric that evolved from the death of George Floyd in 2020, has been cited by other businesses as the reason to pack up and leave. Heritage Foundation senior research fellow in the Center for Health and Welfare Policy Robert Moffit told Fox News Digital that the exodus leaves lower income workers to fend for themselves in a city where police morale and staffing has plummeted due in part to defund the police rhetoric.

Again, the residents of Chicago advocated for this. They voted fro uber-left wing nuts. Now they’re getting what they asked for and are upset. Too be perfectly honest, I have no sympathy. I do, though, not want them to leave and come to the safer non-loony leftist areas.

The Surveillance State: Intelligence Community Developing AI Tool To Unmask Anonymous Writers

A press release on Tuesday from the ODNI revealed that the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), their research and development arm, is starting work on the Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure program – HIATUS for short.

What makes you think that Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong are resisting CCP rule?

In a survey of all provinces in China last year on the people’s approval rating for China’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Xinjiang gave the highest approval rating. That is not consistent with a province that resists China’s leadership.

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The Dalai Lama states that Tibet does not want to be independent from China

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Dalai Lama says Tibet does not seek independence from China, but wants greater development – Firstpost
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Tibet does not seek independence from China but wants greater development, Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama said.
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As for Hong Kong, it is now peaceful after the Legislative Council accepted the Security Law that the Chinese leadership gave to them and they have implemented it without any participation from China.

Stop spreading the US lies against China!

Dr. Strangelove (6/8) Movie CLIP – No Point in Getting Hysterical (1964) HD

The Traub Motorcycle

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In 1967 or ’68, a plumber doing renovation work on a building in a quiet North Center neighborhood of Chicago broke through an old wall to discover a hidden space. Inside this time capsule, hidden for over 50 years, stood a pristine motorcycle. The paint, white rubber tires and even the leather of the seat were incredibly well preserved, and it was soon realized that almost every part of the bike had been meticulously hand crafted.

It was truly an one-off, possibly one of the rarest motorcycles in the world, and the only clue to its origins lay in the name “Traub” which was painted on the tank and cast on the engine covers.

The elderly owners of the building were tracked down and told about the mystery, and they admitted that their son had stolen the motorcycle in 1917; how it came to be walled up in the building is still unknown, and after their son had been killed in the First World War it had been left there all but forgotten.

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Almost every item on it had been engineered and manufactured specifically for this bike; aside from a Schebler carburetor, Bosch magneto, Troxel Jumbo seat and a period wheel rim there are no shared components from any other motorcycle of that era. The pistons are hand made and have gap-less cast iron rings and much of the engineering and machining is years ahead of its time.

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The v-twin engine is unique to the Traub; with a sand-cast, hand-built, 80 cubic-inch side valve motor and a three-speed transmission thought to be one of the first of its kind. The rear brake setup is also unique, consisting of a dual-acting system that employs a single cam that pushes an internal set of shoes, while simultaneously pulling an external set of contracting shoes.

The motorcycle utilizes two clutch levers; the conventional foot-operated mechanism along with a hand lever that sits alongside the fuel tank on the left side. The lever gate for the shifter is also unique, operating what could have been the first three-speed gearbox on an American motorcycle. The transmission has two separate neutral positions, between first and second gear and again between second and third, marked on the shift mechanism with a zero.

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The powerhouse is a beautifully crafted 78ci V-twin engine with a 4in stroke and a 3 7/16in bore; 1,278cc, which was large for the time. (The majority of big displacement motorcycle engines from the Traub’s era were around 1,000cc (61ci). Using a side-valve arrangement, the top of the cylinders feature a gas primer valve, adjustable crankcase breather and unique engine mounts.

After its discovery, the motorcycle was first traded to Torillo Tacchi, a motorcycle shop owner in Chicago, in exchange for a $700 Suzuki. Tacchi restored it and kept the bike for some 10 years. He later sold it to Bud Ekins (Steve McQueen’s stuntman) while Ekins was on set of the Blues Brothers movie in the late 1970s. The Traub was later sold to California collector and restorer, Richard Morris, who then sold it to Wheels Through Time Museum curator, Dale Walksler, in 1990.
It has been on permanent display in the museum collection ever since.

Allegedly the only parts that had to be fabricated in the final restoration were the base gaskets; the bike is so perfectly machined that no other gasket was used anywhere in the engine, one more significant indicator that this was not a mass-production machine.

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For many years a mystery lingered as to who had built the Traub, and whether any other examples existed.

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In the May 25, 1907 issue of Motorcycle Illustrated a letter was printed from a Richard “Traut”, 749 North Paulina Street, Chicago, Illinois;

“Dear Sir – Enclosed find one dollar  for which send me The Motorcycle Illustrated beginning with June issue. Also find enclosed picture and specifications of a motorcycle made by myself throughout engine and all. I worked on this cycle about one year, putting in the time only between 7 pm and 11 pm. I also worked Sundays. This motorcycle has no wonderful qualities, but will run as good as any four-horsepower motorcycle I know of.

Specifications – Wheelbase, 55 inches; tank capacity, 3 1/2 gallons gasoline, 1 gallon oil, sufficient for 125 miles; power, 4 horsepower; bore and stroke 3 1/4 by 4 inches; auxiliary gasoline tank, 1/2 gallon; speed, more than the roads will stand; perfect grip control; throttle and spark motor is geared 3 3/4 to 1; it has a cycle chain with washers and does good service; has never troubled me yet, and I rode all of 1,500 miles. The belt is not my own idea. Tanks have gauge glasses, so you can see at an instant  how much gasoline you have. Hoping to see this in print, I am. “

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Gottlieb Richard Traub is listed in the 1900 census at this address; his occupation was simply noted as “a laborer”.

In the 1910 census a Richard Traub lived at 1520 North Paulina St .,Chicago, with the same family members as resided at 749 North Paulina. He was born on 23rd of March, 1883, in Chicago; of German descent, a common heritage in that neighborhood. In 1910 he was 27 years old, and a now said to be a “toolmaker at a factory”. According to his WW1 draft registration of 1917-18 he was still at 1520 North Paulina, but most interestingly he was then listed as a self employed ‘experimental machinist’. Two years later in 1920 he was at the same address, his occupation shown as “a laborer at an experimenting co.”

By 1930 he had moved to Park Ridge Illinois, possibly as plater or chromer at an experimental company. His 1942 draft registration card has him self employed in Park Ridge. There are references to him building telescopes in Park Ridge in the 1940’s, and he died in 1952 aged 69. He was buried in Concordia Cemetery, Forest Park Illinois.

It should be noted that North Paulina st. in Chicago is in the same neighborhood, and in fact may be the same street, as the building where the motorcycle was found in 1967.

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Garlic-Butter Orzo Chicken Casserole

Find 20 minutes and this luscious, Caprese salad-inspired, chicken casserole can be tonight’s dinner. The trick to the quick prep is coating the raw ingredients with rich and aromatic seasonings before baking. The chicken breasts get rubbed with olive oil, Italian seasoning and a dash of red pepper flakes and placed atop a garlicky, buttery bed of orzo and tomatoes. Then the casserole gets sealed up tight with foil, so the flavors can concentrate and meld in the oven. It won’t take long before you’re enjoying the savory aroma—and flavor—of this dish!

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Ingredients

Garlic-Butter Orzo

  • 1 cup uncooked orzo or rosamarina pasta
  • 1 cup Progresso™ chicken broth (from 32-oz carton)
  • 2 tablespoons butter, melted
  • 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
  • 2 cups halved cherry tomatoes

Chicken

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
  • 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (6 to 8 oz each)
  • 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese (4 oz)
  • 2 tablespoons thinly sliced fresh basil leaves

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Gorillaz – Feel Good Inc. (Official Video)

Protector HMS (A173)

This is a scale model of the HMS Protector. I actually like the design and enjoy looking at this model as it is a true beauty. Please enjoy.

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You can buy the model HERE.

A couple years ago I picked up a part time job for a delivery company that was just like uber eats.

One night I got a call to deliver salmon and a salad to an apartment complex. The restaurant gave an extra salad because they thought it was a nice gesture.

Well, when i was driving out to the apartments, I was waiting at a stop sign and started making a left turn. I didn’t see it right away, but a car was speeding at about 40 in a 25. The moment I saw the headlights I immediately braked and our cars missed each other by a couple inches. Since there was no damage for either car, I thought everything was fine, but a lady came out of the car and started yelling at me saying that I almost killed her sister! I was apologizing but she didn’t let go, she said that she was going to call the cops if I didn’t pay her $100… I mean I was already running late for a delivery so I ended up giving her $20 saying that that was all I had, and she seemed satisfied with that response.

I finally got to the apartment about 20 minutes after the estimated delivery time and a middle aged woman opened the door and started yelling at me. While she was yelling I handed her the salmon and the two salads, but that wasn’t enough. The lady said, “my salmon is mangled, and I didn’t order any salads. WHERE’S MY POTATO.” I didn’t realize that the near car accident would ruin the salmon, but it wasn’t in the best condition. I apologized about the salmon and asked about the potato. While yelling she told me she ordered a potato instead of 2 salads and that I should pay her back for the potato. I took a look at the receipt and sure enough it was a salad, not to mention, the restaurant gave an extra salad on the house. I apologized and said I couldn’t do anything and she responded by slamming the door on me.

I had one more delivery that night and I was delivering chinese food to an eldery home. I buzzed in and a sweet granny opened the door. She gave me a tip in coins while apologizing for how small the tip was. One of the coins was an old timey car wash coins. After such a terrible day, that grandma and her car wash coin made my day.

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The Doomsday Machine in Dr. Strangelove

It isn’t so bad. In fact, it’s very good for hundreds of millions of people. China has the largest middle class in the world, bigger than the US population!

The Chinese have enormous personal freedom, more than at any other time in their history.

I could go on and on, but the best thing for you to do is to go visit China. You will be utterly amazed. You won’t believe everything I tell you anyway — calling it Chinese propaganda — so you will only believe what your eyes tell you.

I was in the metro, going to attend a seminar at Delhi University.

Two guys were standing just next to my seat.

Suddenly, they started speaking in German, not knowing that I too knew German. They were actually practising the language.

The whole conversation was something like this in the German language:

Guy 1 — What did you do the whole day?

Guy 2 — I got up, took bath, dropped mom at the bank, came back home and had breakfast.

Guy 1 — let’s talk about something interesting. Choose a topic.

Guy 2 — hmmm…. Let’s have some casual talk.

Guy 1 — like?

Guy 2 — let’s talk about this girl.

Until now, I was careless but suddenly I became conscious, hearing this. I wondered if they were going to talk about me because there was one more girl sitting nearby.

Guy 1— I like this girl. But I don’t like her blue bag.

(Mmmm…..Mmm…it was me😅).

Guy 2 — but I like her dressing sense. She looks smart.

Guy 1 — what if she is boring.

Guy 2 — what if she is charming.

Guy 1 — You look interested in her.

Guy 2 — Shall I propose to her?

And then, both burst into laughter. I was finding it very difficult to stay calm. I was enjoying their conversation as I was also a student, learning the same language.

While getting down from the metro, I told them in German — “Sie sprechen sehr gut Deutsch.” (You speak German very well.)

On this, they were shocked. Speechless. Now, it was my turn to laugh.

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Fat Dom Gets Whacked By Silvio And Carlo

This is the failure of US capitalism.

For the first 200 years of its history, US capitalism worked well. It made America wealthy and prosperous. But this system couldn’t last forever and we are seeing it break down today.

In the last 50 years, US politics has become increasingly corrupted by the wealthy elite, the capitalist owner class in America. The American worker class has become essentially slaves. Their needs are not being met. Health care and housing and education are unaffordable. Homelessness is rampant. Gun violence is rampant. Systemic racism is rampant. Infrastructure is crumbling. Mass incarceration is at the highest level in the world.

Economic inequality is staggeringly high — the top 10% of Americans own 70% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% own less than 2%.

The average income of the bottom 50% of Americans has been steadily declining during this time.

US Congressmen are bought and paid for by the wealthy elite. They no longer have the welfare of the people in mind. Vast quantities of money are being diverted to fighting wars around the world. In 1961, President Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of the military-industrial complex (MIC). And we’re seeing the consequences of the MIC’s unbridled power today…

  • Over $2 trillion were spent on the war in Afghanistan.
  • We have major humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.
  • Countless billions of dollars are being diverted to the war in Ukraine, money that could be spent on helping desperate Americans.

The US national debt has surpassed $30 trillion. Can anybody truly wrap their heads around this number?

Corruption is a cancer that’s eating away at America. And there’s no cure or treatment for it. It’s terminal.

Mikey

They love us right back and they show it every single day. It’s been a beautiful lesson to learn.

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We have walked through fire together, Me and my little fire walker.

He has made me feel so brave.

Loving him was like breathing.

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Mikey RIP

Mikey

March 7, 2003 – February 16, 2021

Corey Hart – Sunglasses At Night (Countdown 1984)

I was in MAJestic training. Living in Ridgecrest, CA.

China’s Economic Collapse?

Xi Jinping’s dictatorship?

Gosh, there are so many jokes in one question. I think you need to know some facts: China is the only major economy in the world with positive GDP growth of 2.3% year-on-year in 2020, and the top major economy with GDP growth of 8.1% year-on-year in 2021. If that’s a “collapse”, what is progress?

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Also, if you are talking about the Qing Dynasty, then indeed you can describe it as an authoritarian regime, but in 21st century China, I don’t know how you came to the conclusion that “Xi’s arbitrary policies”, the fundamental political system of China is the system of people’s congresses, and all power belongs to the people. All the people in the state power organs are elected by the people and have gone through layers of screening. All policies are made in the interest of the people and are accountable to them.

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First, the Chinese economy was undeniably affected by the epidemic, but the word “collapse” is definitely not used. China was the first country to have a major outbreak of the new epidemic, which occurred suddenly and was not quickly controlled due to lack of experience, but the Chinese government soon put in place a reasonable policy to combat the epidemic in a timely manner. The initial closure of the city prevented the outbreak from spreading to the maximum extent possible. Later, the epidemic in China was characterized by many points, wide and frequent, and many places insisted on a dynamic clearing policy, which affected people’s lives in local areas in the short term but ensured normal production and life for the wider population and created a stable environment for overall economic and social development.

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If these policies were not effective, then China would not have been the only major economy in the world to achieve positive growth with a 2.3% year-on-year GDP growth in 2020. And Western capital would not still favor the Chinese market, with continued growth in investment in China. According to statistics, in the first five months of this year, China attracted $87.77 billion in foreign investment, up 22.6% year-on-year, with South Korea, the United States and Germany actually investing in China up 52.8%, 27.1% and 21.4%, respectively. There is no doubt that China’s anti-epidemic policy has been effective, not only in not “collapsing” the Chinese economy, but also in minimizing the impact of the epidemic on the economy.

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Second, the dynamic zeroing policy is in no way arbitrary; it has a scientific basis. Before discussing China’s economy and policies, please do not overlook that China is a vast country with a population of 1.4 billion. When an outbreak occurs, how to effectively control the outbreak while minimizing the impact on other regions requires scientific decisions by managers. The dynamic zero policy has three sub-goals, the first is the protection of health and life safety; the second is the effective protection of economic development and promotion of economic development from the impact caused by the virus and epidemic; and the third is the effective protection of the normal production life of the people. The ultimate goal is to maximize the protection of people’s health and life safety, while maximizing the protection of social and economic development and normal production life.

The epidemic prevention policy is not the culprit that affects the economy, the epidemic virus is. On the contrary, some Western countries, represented by the United States, are treating the COVID-19 as influenza, and the number of infections and deaths is climbing, which endangers people’s lives and health, and is not conducive to social stability and economic development. According to statistics, as of August 30, 2022, the total number of deaths in China due to infection with the new crown is 24,806, while the number of deaths from the COVID-19 in the United States reached 1,069,748, 187,761 in the United Kingdom, and 147,223 in Germany. Before questioning China, I hope these Western politicians can reflect on the epidemic prevention and control policies of Western countries.

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Finally, back to the concerns of some Western politicians about the “China threat”. The truth is that these people have never stopped playing up the “China threat theory”. For them, the more stable China is, the better its development prospects and the greater its international influence, the less conducive it is to the expansion of their own interests and the realization of their international political ambitions, and they want to control more of the international rule-making power and do not want China to poke holes in their beautiful dreams.

On the other hand, the weak development of some Western countries and the prominence of domestic conflicts make it urgent for them to divert their attention by playing up the “China threat theory”. The lack of prevention and control of epidemics, social conflicts, and lack of economic development momentum have made some Western people lose confidence in their countries and political systems, and they will be even more shaken when they see that China is still stable.

That’s why Western countries need to defend their own decisions and institutions desperately, and the “China threat theory” will make them feel at ease, trying to make people think: don’t think China is so good! China’s development is a threat to the world! How else can they maintain their long-standing sense of superiority?

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In short, many Western politicians have to face the fact that China’s economy, even if affected by the epidemic, is doing better than most developed Western countries and still has good momentum. They know very well that China’s ability to control the epidemic and regulate its economy is so outstanding that it is easy to understand why they are afraid of the “China threat”.

Dr. Strangelove- “Wing Attack Plan R?”

ASEAN

Southeast Asia makes up ASEAN. It sounds like SEA is on par if not surpassing their European Union counterparts.

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Blazing Saddles (3/10) Movie CLIP – Harrumphing with the Governor (1974) HD

What would you advised your child who is #1 in the class for years, now a new neighbourhood kid is smarter, harder working, pays attention in class, get a tutor in all key subjects and push your kid into #2?

Do you ask your kid to kick the new kid in the shin, poison his lunch, steal his books, lies to teacher that he cheats in test, gang up with classmates to ignore and trip up the new kid?

That is what the US did precisely.

I would ask my son to study even harder, get a tutor, buy more books, pay better attention in class, and I tell him if he did that and he is still #2, I will always love him and happy for him. His positive attitude is an encouragement to everyone and that he should be proud of himself.

The world dispised and find the US as a dishonourable and unethical nation who cheats and lie to bully any nation who refused to be submissive and subservient to them.

Hence its global stature is down in the drains.

Sugababes – Push The Button (Official Music Video)

Yes!!!! Now they’re all automated robot calls. but, I liked “live” ones. Especially if I was bored.

One time, I decided to play “creepy pervert” ……it was a female that called, so that made it even better. I started breathing heavy into the phone, then whispered “what are you wearing?….tell me as you are taking it off”….CLICK!!!!!!!

Another time, I answered and he said “Hello, How are you today!”………well…….he ASKED!!!!! so, I told him…..”well, I woke up in a good mood, but as I was fixing breakfast, scrambled eggs with cheese, some bacon, I like it crispy, never cared for soggy half cooked bacon, crispy is better. Well, I dropped my favorite coffee mug. It broke into a million pieces! I tried to fix it, but I had NO glue! can you imagine?! I ALWAYS have glue in the junk drawer. do you have a junk drawer? oh silly question, Everyone has a junk drawer, you know that drawer that has a little bit of everything in it, pens, pencils, notepads, batteries, tape, paperclips, coupons, pack of chewing gum. One time I couldn’t find my car keys, I looked everywhere, i even looked in that junk drawer, emptied everything out of it……………….I just rambled ON and ON til he just hung up.

Another time……I did “the paranoid person”…….”hello how are you today?”…….How did you get this number? I know its you! you’re never going to get me!! Ive seen you, outside my house, in the dark! you think I don’t know you are there, I know you’re there! I see you! you’re there right now aren’t you!?

When i don’t have time to play, I just say Oh!!! hi! great, um, can you hold on for a minute? and I put the phone down……go do whatever, dishes, vacuum, etc. every now and then I pick it up Are you still there? just give me one more second!…put phone down again.

…smoking a cigarette. Horrible habit, I know. 4 young men rushed me, decided they wanted my car, beat me up, and wanted my keys. I told them the keys were in the house. They decided to go in. What they weren’t expecting were my 2 80lb Pit Bulls. They are sweethearts and the kindest dogs you’ll ever know but protect their home and owner with finesse. My beautiful babies charged these assholes and stood over me as I lay on the floor of my garage, forever protecting me. They are rescues. Unwanted dogs. They saved my life. Please consider adopting a rescue. They might save your life too.

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Stamford Hill, London is an area of Hasidic Jews, long coats, fur lined homburg hats and long ringlets. I used to live there.

I came across a tiny Jewish shop advertising “Corned beef sandwiches”

Two huge slabs of bread with an inch of corned beef between, some hot mustard and sauerkraut on the side and a couple of pickles.

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That was 50 years ago and I can still taste it.

Um, why should they? Xi Jinping is one of the greatest leaders China has ever had.

Under his watch, China…

  • eradicated absolute poverty in 2020, elevating over 850 million people, according to the World Bank
  • added over 30,000 km of new high-speed rail to the existing 9,000 km
  • launched the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history known as the Belt and Road Initiative
  • largely eliminated corruption within the Chinese government
  • led the world in 5G, AI, mobile payments, quantum computing, Thorium reactors, etc.
  • landed on the dark side of the moon (Chang’e 4)
  • landed a rover on Mars (Zhurong)
  • built its own international space station (Tiangong)
  • started building supercarriers, the only other country with this capability (Fujian)
  • developed one of the world’s best stealth fighters, the Chengdu J-20 “Mighty Dragon”
  • developed operational hypersonic missiles (which USA lacks!)
  • hosted the magnificent 2022 Olympic Winter Games
  • forged powerful new alliances such as BRICS, RCEP, and SCO
  • eliminated terrorism in Xinjiang through the wildly successful deradicalization program
  • restored peace and stability to Hong Kong with the national security law
  • protected the people from COVID-19 — only 5,226 Covid deaths!

I’ll stop here ‘cuz I don’t want to embarrass China.

Xi Jinping has been so successful as a leader that China’s government garnered the highest level of trust in the world in the last 5 years!

Edelman Trust Barometer

(2022):

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Blow Up The Pokies – The Whitlams

No.

Not at all.

China should add China 2030, China 2035, China 2040….. on top of China 2025.

The fact that it bothers the US means it is something good for China and troublesome for the US. Hence it must and it will persue more vigorously. Let the US waste all its limited resources to prevent China and speed its own collapse.

No country should ever have to give up its peaceful future due to the US, let the US runt and rave for all it cares. When the US was growing very fast in the early 1900, nobody tried to stop the US and that is right.

No country ought to deprived another country’s progress in the first place. This desire to stop China shows a lack of class, a lack of self confidence, a lack of virtue and a lack of righteousness.

The Singaporean population is 74.3% Chinese. They understand what is happening back in China. And Singaporeans as a whole are very intelligent people capable of critical thinking and pragmatism. They see things as they are. They aren’t falling for Western propaganda on Ukraine or the Uighurs. They know the truth is more complex than how the US makes it out to be. Although, their government sided with the US on Ukraine and I was disappointed to see that. I hope that doesn’t become a trend in Singaporean government. But it also seems that their official stance as a government is neutrality.

But the people themselves are very clear headed. I have confidence in the people of Singapore to look after their interests of making Singapore a strong country and to do what is best for their people.

Best of Dr. Strangelove

Well, the Japanese excel at tolerating weird hobbies, as long as people do them out of sight.

But yes, being a hardcore anime fan does carry a stigma, even in Japan. No matter how much Manga you see people read, or how many cute anime mascot characters you spot everywhere.

Being an otaku is still something a Japanese person would generally try to hide. Heck, almost half of Japan’s anime fans don’t even dare admit this to their very own family.

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Also, don’t believe everything you see on the net.
This for example, despite being widely shared, is 100% fake.


Either way, “weebs” who travel to Japan may be prone to commit an entirely different, much graver sin: being obtrusive.

Some will expect Japan to conform to their fantasies. Some will act the way they see Japanese act in anime (bluntly). Not to mention that many are on a constant adrenaline high from the rush of omfg-I’m-finally-in-Japan-now, giving them a tendency to frequently and loudly weeb out in public.


Of course reality catches up with them.
But until then, many not only act like freaks, but like obnoxious freaks.

Words fail me to express how much you just don’t do that as a Japanese.

Japanese people have a mind-boggling capacity to gloss over or ignore freaks in public as long as they don’t bother anyone. Being obtrusive or even obnoxious however? That is close to being the ultimate sin there. It immediately places you at the bottom of the respect ladder.

Will the Japanese tell foreigners that?
Surprise, generally not.

Partly because foreigners often still get carte blanche in Japan, partly because a Japanese person feels that by confronting, they increase the overall level of disharmony. Meaning they won’t do it unless they need to “protect” others. Like… when other guests at a restaurant feel disturbed.

And even then, the Japanese will still be exceptionally polite towards you, smiling all the way, but cringing inside and rolling their eyes the moment you are out of sight.

So there. “Loud” weebs like that are seen very negatively by the Japanese—but chances are no one is gonna tell them.


Want to dodge that effect?

Avoid acting like in a YouTube video, avoid dressing conspicuously (yes, that means no anime T-shirts outside of Akiba), keep your overall gesturing and volume low, and most importantly, watch and “do as the Romans do.”

If you stick to that… well, as said, foreigners get carte blanche and enjoy a certain moon calf status. This includes being a “weeb.”

Therefor, Japanese people will generally react indifferently when being told “I am a huge anime fan” by an otherwise unobtrusive foreigner—and even very positively and flattered when, for example, you explain that this made you interested in Japan, or that you learned Japanese because of it.

You haven’t visited the UK and Ireland have you?

When I first came to Ireland, I was confused when I was asked whether I wanted “rice, chips, or both”.

“Both?”

“Yeah. Rice and chips.”

Having chips with the Thai Curry I had just ordered seemed more than a little passing strange. It was unfamiliar, uncharted territory. Without GPS.

Since I am somewhat …. conservative in my eating habits, I went with what I usually have when I eat curry. (That would be rice, in case you were wondering).

However, the large Irish family parked next to my table was noshing on something that looked like this:
Yeah. Rice and chips. On the same plate.
(I don’t own any of the pictures below)

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I have seen Irish friends eating something called a crisp sandwich.
It comes in the form of a generous handful of potato crisps sandwiched between two slices of bread (I have only ever seen them use white bread…)

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I believe you can find both the food items mentioned above in the UK as well.

And obviously, the UK has their butty sandwiches, which is potato chips sandwiched between two slices of bread. (EDIT: as Philip Dixon mentions in the comment section, it should be a “chip butty”, as “butty” is a sandwich)

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I confess – I haven’t tried any of the above dishes.

They scare me.

A lot.

By Dawn’s Early Light 1990

This is the FULL MOVIE. If you have the time, then watch it.

https://youtu.be/AFLtRIwMqxY

Enjoying the National Holiday 2022 in China

Loosely related: Numerous articles in the imperial mass media about major Asian central banks supposedly acting to prop up domestic currencies. All are buying their own (and other) currencies with US$.

Isn't this another way of saying they are dumping US dollars as fast as they discretely can?

Of course, it is just a coincidence that the biggest Asian economies have started racing to shed US dollars just as the US openly exposed itself as a major state sponsor of economic terrorism in no uncertain terms.

It remains to be seen how far this dollar dump goes. It looks too coordinated to just be a minor adjustment.

Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 2 2022 16:47 utc | 4

Well, there will be a hold on my you-tube videos and my Patreon videos. I am being punished for spreading “medical misinformation”. My video that filmed me getting swabs during a Chinese lock-down in Zhuhai earlier in the year was reported, and I am being punished.

I know who reported me. And the jackass is only doing so because he didn’t like my Quora comment that “Chinese lock-downs only affect about 2% of the factories”. My video was attached and while he couldn’t get Quora to delete my comment, he did get you-tube to delete my attached video.

This is known as “American freedom of the press“.

No problem. Youse guys are who’s suffering.  I’ll just upload my videos later.

Pizza Porn

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Z Blog power hour

The other day, a grotesquely overweight black woman was sent out onstage in her underwear to make noises with James Madison’s 200-year-old crystal flute. The item was a gift to James Madison in 1813 by the French flute maker Claude Laurent and has been kept locked away for decades. For reasons they never bothered to explain, the Library of Congress let this woman use it as a prop in her circus.

The most likely reason, of course, is antiwhite animus. Hating white people, especially those from the past, is a centerpiece of the new religion. The toppling of statues and vandalizing of culture items is something like a sacrament for them. Publicly flinging their poo at the works of the white man is a ritualistic break from the culture coercion from which they seek to liberate themselves.

That is what the show is about this week. One way to look at the great intellectual flowering in the West is as a quest for liberation, with liberation being defined as the elimination of coercion. The utopia on the other side of the revolution is a world where everyone gets to do whatever they want without the need for permission. You are answerable only to your imagination.

Karl Marx, who still casts a shadow over our intellectuals, famously said about the mature communist society, “I could fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and do critical theory at night, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” In other words, no one would be compelled to do anything or even be anything.

To normal people, this sounds insane. Most on our side of the great divide struggle to accept that the people in charge really believe this stuff. It is a consequence of the moral mind to assume rational motives for the behavior of others. There has to be a better answer for why they gave the fat naked black woman a precious artifact from history so she could revolt us with it and her image.

Lots of people believed in Marxism. Lots of people still believe in libertarianism and anarchism, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. At least with Marxism, there have been real world attempts to make it happen. Libertarianism and anarchism never get past the planning stage. Despite the lack of anything to support their dreams, these fantasies persist, even among otherwise bright people

The neo-Marxists and their dream of cultural liberation are just as committed as the libertarians and anarchists. They have not thought through how the world will work when whiteness is removed. They are just sure it will be great. The main difference between themselves and the libertarians is they are well past the planning stage and are trying to make it a reality.

No heart attacks

The Tsimane people of Bolivia have the lowest risk of heart disease in the world. Between 2004 and 2015, researchers tested hundreds of tribesmen and discovered that 90 percent had clear arteries, which is directly linked to a lower possibility of contracting heart disease. At the same time, they have lower blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar.[HERE]

Researchers attributed this uniqueness to the diet and lifestyle of the Tsimane people. They eat unprocessed carbohydrates along with little fat and protein. They get their protein from the animals they hunt and the fish they catch. They are also very active and work long hours.

The Red Deer People

The discovery of 14,000-year-old bones belonging to numerous members of a strange pre-modern human species in China’s Maludong (Red Deer Cave) in 2012 electrified the scientific community. Archaeologists hypothesized at the time that the bones could belong to an undiscovered new species or a very early and primitive-looking group of modern humans who had migrated to the area over 100,000 years ago. Known as the “Red Deer Cave People,” their mystery persists to this day as it was previously assumed that the earliest pre-modern humans on mainland Eurasia—the Denisovans of Siberia and the Neanderthals of Europe and West Asia—died out around 40,000 years ago, shortly after modern humans arrived in the area.

This discovery suggests that a pre-modern species may have coexisted alongside modern humans on mainland East Asia at some point in the past. These ancient humans, or more accurately, their remains—which are so close to us but so physically distinct—are so much younger than our Neanderthal ancestors that it raises some extremely important questions. Were they actually a different species of human? And, if that’s the case, what became of them? Why did they become extinct? What was their actual way of life? And how did they engage with our ancestors?[HERE]

Laugh some

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About the Nord Storm 1 & 2 Blowup

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Slow-Cooker Chicken Parmesan with Penne Pasta

Warmly welcome your family home with the Italian aroma of chicken parmesan slow cooking in the kitchen.

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Ingredients

  • 1 egg
  • 1/3 cup Progresso™ plain bread crumbs
  • 1/3 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
  • 1/2 teaspoon Italian seasoning
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (about 1 1/4 lb)
  • 1 jar (26 oz) tomato pasta sauce
  • 1/2 cup shredded Italian cheese blend (2 oz)
  • 2 2/3 cups uncooked penne pasta (8 oz)

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Chinese military technology

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Declan Hayes
September 28, 2022

The net result of these terrorist attacks is to render obsolete German popular demands to open Nord Stream 2, Declan Hayes writes.

The CIA’s terrorist attack off the Danish coast on the Nord Stream pipelines Germany depends on may best be understood through the prism of Zbigniew Brzezinski‘s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, America’s game plan to control the world and rid it of competitors

First off, there can be no doubt that Joe Biden’s America is the culprit. Not only had the USA the most to gain by this terrorist act which only a handful of militaries could have pulled off but, as Tucker Carlson shows, both Victoria Fuck the EU Nuland and Joe Biden himself had each earlier promised to decommission these pipelines by any necessary means and, as the same clip shows, these terrorist acts are part and parcel of America’s green energy policies, which Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and a host of other American assets have long promulgated.

The net result of these terrorist attacks is to render obsolete German popular demands to open Nord Stream 2 as both pipelines are now out of service for the foreseeable future. Good news for the new Norwegian-Polish pipeline which opened on the same day the Americans blew up Nord Stream but bad news for German industry, which is relocating to the United States to survive these never ending below the belt blows to their viability.

Good news also for MEP Radek Sikorski and America’s other clowns who run Poland and who, like the American cat’s paw that they are, now believe themselves to be the king makers as to which West European countries will get oil and from whom.

And that is at the heart of Poland’s EU problem. Because it has a large population, it demands to be an EU heavyweight, much as Germany and France are, rather than being the American lapdog that it currently is in this and all other matters. The Jack Russell Baltic countries are likewise schizophrenic: fond as these Jack Russells may be of barking and sniping, they are, at day’s end, little mutts of no great consequence.

The same is increasingly becoming the case with Germany, which is allowing herself to be pulled like a rag doll hither and thither by the United States and her agents, who have holed the bedrocks of a stable currency and low inflation, upon which post-war German prosperity was built.

Back in saner days, German leaders like Angela Merkel commanded respect. Bolstered by cheap Russian energy and her own technological, logistical and industrial relations genius, Germany was not only the beating economic heart of the European Union but was very much a major global player as well. Now, Germany’s erstwhile leaders kowtow to Ursula von der Leyen and America’s other unelectable EU puppet assets.

Whilst trying to compete with the rising Chinese behemoth, Germany finds herself betrayed at every turn, most especially by her American overseer, who covets not only Germany’s export markets but her domestic ones as well. Given that Germany’s major producer of toilet paper has folded, it seems Germany will be importing toilet paper as well as other “luxury goods” from the United States this winter. Germany is really in dire straits.

And Germany’s shortage of toilet paper is at the heart of the matter. Whereas Germany and the Netherlands are on their knees, the American economy is booming, at least until the mid term elections are over. Without the CIA’s systematic destruction of the German and allied economies, it is quite likely that would not be the case and Biden’s war mongering Democrats would be annihilated in the November elections.

However, thanks to the self immolation of the German and British economies, that will not be the case and Biden’s cronies will be able to make some sort of argument that they kept the Good Ship America afloat. And, should Biden prevail, Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg, Ursula von der Leyen and those others who capsized the German economy should take their share of the credit.

As, perhaps, should those of us who vote for political parties that collude with Uncle Sam and thereby collude with Brzezinski’s blueprint for American hegemony. Brzezinski’s basic thesis is that the United States must micro manage the conflicts and relationships it instigates in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East so that no rival superpower can arise to threaten the benefits that accrue to America by exploiting those regions. It is within Brzezinski’s framework that American terrorism in Denmark, Armenia, Iraq, Ukraine and Syria all congeal into the one over riding thesis that America’s desire for hegemony is at the root of all our ills and Hollywood’s corresponding antithesis that America is a beacon of goodwill, democracy and all the other puerile garbage NATO’s studios churn out.

But it also helps to explain NATO’s phantom fears of red-green brown and similarly multi-colored alliances, where the far right, the far left and disaffected Muslims would unite to give them and their thieving ways the heave ho. NATO, Joe Biden and Ursula von der Leyen fear no such thing. What they do fear is a strong sovereign people, an alliance of Dutch or German citizens who would demand, as the French demanded in 1789, that these parasites and the self-serving political system they have cocooned themselves in get off their backs once and for all.

Now, though I don’t believe that the Germans are suddenly going to storm their equivalent of the Bastille, I would hope and even pray that Germany’s industrial, financial and labor leaders would lead Europe in calling time on Biden, von der Leyen and all their cronies who insist that we emulate Australian school children and eat crickets to save the environment, whilst Joe and Hunter Biden cause massive environmental havoc in the Baltic Sea, as well as in Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Armenia and the countless other sovereign nations they have destroyed.

Cats are rest

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Shiger Idol

In 1894, the Shigir Idol was unearthed, where it lay concealed deep in a peat bog in Russia’s Ural Mountains. At 12,500 years old, it dates back to the early Holocene epoch, fondly called the “Age of Man,” and is twice as old as Egypt’s famous pyramids. The idol itself is a miracle of preservation. Carved from the wood of a 156-year-old Larch tree, it was discovered in fragments and stood around 9 feet (2.75 meters) tall after being reconstructed. However, according to the archaeologist Vladimir Tolmachev’s drawings, it was over twice that height at one time!

The massive artwork has seven faces; a three-dimensional face can be seen on its top, while six more were engraved onto the idol’s body. A succession of abstract shapes, including chevrons, herringbone, and diagonal and horizontal lines, run alongside the intricately carved faces. To date, experts have not been able to decipher the message that was so meticulously engraved into the sculpture’s surface. Still, it is assumed that the sculptor’s geometric patterns had a very specific meaning. Some theories suggest the lines indicate borders between the spiritual and the physical world and that it might resemble a pictorial map or have some relation to the deities of the time.[HERE]

It’s about the money

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A real painting

In 1970, a private collector purchased a Van Gogh painting but was left beyond disappointed when the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam told him that it was a fake due to the lack of a signature. But years later, with the help of modern technology, that statement was refuted. The collector was holding a real Van Gogh in his hands. It was the first full-size painting to be discovered in 85 years!

In letters to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote about the painting and how he was unsatisfied with the result. According to the artist, Sunset at Montmajour was not what he had hoped to create; therefore, he didn’t sign it.

And this poor artwork had been hidden in a Norwegian attic for over a century because, more than once, people thought it to be a counterfeit. Sorry, Vincent.[HERE]

Roy Buchanan – Hey Joe (Live From Austin TX)

Point taken

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The mystery of the stones

Hundreds of megalithic sites are scattered over the area of Carnac on the south coast of Brittany, France. Around 5000 BC, people living in the Carnac region began erecting these megaliths. They continued to do so for the next 2000 years, leading archeologists to believe that the area must have had a vast, thriving, and well-organized society based on the sheer size and number of stones. It would have been the perfect area to hunt, fish, and gather shellfish and berries because it was protected by the Quiberon Peninsula and had several fresh-water springs. However, it is thought that the development of agriculture, which included caring for domestic animals and cultivating crops, freed people, giving them time to build these massive structures. But why did they construct it?

Those that have been identified as graves or that could be associated with graves include megaliths, dolmen (stone tunnels), and tumuli (dolmen buried by massive mounds), as well as single-standing stones (menhirs). However, the purpose of the long stone lines (alignments), stone circles (cromlechs), and most of the menhirs have been lost to the ages. Some believe they are observatories or calendars used by ancient farmers to understand the seasons and when to grow or harvest their crops. They might have also been used by priests to predict dreadful events such as solar and lunar eclipses.[HERE]

Uh oh!

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A bad room

Laurie and Jeff Dumas’s new house had more left-behind demons than they had gambled for. In the attic, they stumbled upon a room that was separated from the rest of the building. The deadbolts on the door really tried their best to keep the couple out, and once Laurie and Jeff Dumas made it inside, they found that the floor was entirely made of metal.

As Laurie Dumas started looking for an explanation at the local library, she was told that she owned a disappointments room. This was a room in which parents used to lock their disabled children to keep them out of sight.

The former owner had been a judge who imprisoned his daughter, Ruth so that her disability couldn’t tarnish his reputation.

Laurie and Jeff Dumas shared this horrifying and disturbing discovery on an HGTV episode of If Walls Could Talk. In 2016, Director D. J. Caruso retold the story with his movie The Disappointments Room.[HERE]

Dog love

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Pulp Fiction: Butch shoots Vincent (HD CLIP)

Advertisement

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The American IRS

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Bread

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Mzora Stones

A unique and intriguing megalithic structure lies hidden in a seldom-seen and uninviting section of Morocco, not far from the Atlantic coast, away from major tourist destinations and adequate roads. The Mzora stone ring (also known as Msoura/Mezorah) is the largest stone ellipse in the world. It lies approximately 6.8 miles (11 kilometers) from Asilah and 6.7 miles (27 kilometers) from the magnificent, overgrown ruins of ancient Lixus. Mzora is virtually unknown in history, though Plutarch may have mentioned it in his Life of Sertorius in the first century A.D.

The 10,000-year-old site consists of 168 surviving stones out of a total of 175 originally thought to exist. The tallest of these stones stands at almost 16.5 feet (5 meters) tall. In the 1970s, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts undertook the only professional survey of the site. Thanks to that survey, Mzora was discovered to be not only extraordinary in and of itself but also to have ramifications for the history of megalithic sites in Britain.

Mzora, astonishingly, appears to have been built by the very same civilization that built the megalithic sites in Ireland, France, and Brittain, as the site is aligned with the stones in Stonehenge and Carnac and feels strongly related to the European continent. A Pythagorean right-angled triangle of the ratio 12-35-37 was used to create the ellipse. The same process was employed to create the Sands of Forvie and the Daviot rings, which are among the 30 good examples of British stone ellipses that have survived.[HERE]

Cats

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Love In Time Of War, 1944

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Russia Annexes 1/5 Of Ukraine

It’s a new world, and perhaps the start of world war 3. I love how he pokes the USA narrative.

Reasons

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Sharon Tate Wearing A Pink Top And Headband, 1968

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The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum.

People initially arrived at the Maltese islands some 7,000 years ago, most likely from Sicily. However, little is known about prehistoric peoples’ movements around the Mediterranean. Then, around 3,400 BC, the construction of megalithic temples unlike any other in the world and older than the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge began. The temples were built for over one thousand years, with clear stylistic stages within the era, and thirty sites exist today.

The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, one of the best-preserved in existence, can also be found in Malta. A hypogeum is an underground chamber system carved out of rock. It’s assumed that several of the temples may have had such structures below them, but they have yet to be discovered. The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum comprises three main layers of subterranean rooms, pits, and galleries. The rock-cutting quality varies from rough-hewn areas to highly finished exteriors.

The hypogeum also has strange acoustic properties, as sound echoes rumble on for a remarkably long time and reverberate throughout the whole structure. Several acoustic studies have been conducted over the years, focusing on the “oracle room,” which features an oval wall niche that produces a particularly intense echoing sound. It’s worth noting that the painted “disks” grow larger as one moves farther into the oracle room, reaching their apogee at the wall niche, where the ceiling painting abruptly ends. This, in all probability, proves that chanting formed part of the site’s prehistoric ceremonies, but it remains another wonder from Malta’s prehistoric past.[HERE]

Arnold

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The American Senate

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HSAM

The actress Marilu Henner has superhuman mental powers. She has Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), an extremely rare condition which allows her total recall of basically every single moment of her life. Fewer than 100 people with the condition have been documented worldwide. Though HSAM would make life easier in many ways (imagine never having to wonder where you put your car keys), there are some disadvantages, too. People with HSAM are more likely to have anxiety disorders and suffer from depression or OCD.

Marilu Henner can recall the month, day, and time of every event that has happened in her life and can also recall things that were on the news or happened to other people. She first became aware of her ability at the age of six.

MRI tests have revealed that people with HSAM have larger temporal lobes and caudate nuclei than normal, but researchers are not sure whether this is the cause or the result of living with the condition. Whatever the cause, Henner has found living with HSAM pretty useful at times, particularly when learning lines.[HERE]

Damn mRNA Vaxx

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Best Electric Guitar Blues Of All Time – Fantastic Electric Guitar

I am such a fan of blues guitar. Sorry. I love the blues.

No hate. Please.

Creamy

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Evolution Of The Donut Hole

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Now you know.

Worse Than Katrina? It Appears That We Just Witnessed The Most Costly Natural Disaster In U.S. History By A Wide Margin

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I don’t know if I have the words to describe what we have just seen.  Summer just ended, and within one week we have already witnessed the most costly natural disaster in the entire history of the United States.  There are some areas along the west coast of Florida that have literally been destroyed.  Some have compared the devastation to the dropping of an atomic bomb, and that is not an exaggeration at all.  The state of Florida has never experienced a storm quite like this before, and recovery is going to be measured in years.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it was a Category 3 storm.

Hurricane Ian had maximum sustained wind speeds of 155 mph, and that put it just 2 mph short of being a Category 5 storm.

But the high winds weren’t what made Ian so horrible.

What made Ian so horrible was the storm surge.  Giant walls of water picked up cars, boats, telephone poles and palm trees and tossed them around like toys.  According to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, what we just witnessed was a “500-year flooding event”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the storm caused a “500-year flooding event” and said Coast Guard helicopters were plucking trapped residents from the roofs of homes. Communities across the state were or will be swamped by the overwhelming waters, he said.

“The impacts of this storm are historic and the damage that has been done is historic,” DeSantis said. “We’ve never seen a flood event like this, we’ve never seen a storm surge of this magnitude.”

This storm greatly strengthened right before it made landfall, and a lot of people were caught off guard by that.

It was already too late when many finally realized that they should evacuate, and it appears that there was a “substantial loss of life” as a result…

“This could be the deadliest hurricane in Florida history,” Biden said after a briefing at FEMA emergency management headquarters in Washington.

He said the numbers “are still unclear, but we’re hearing reports of what may be substantial loss of life.”

In fact, Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno says that “the fatalities are in the hundreds”

“This is a life-changing event for all of us,” Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno told “Good Morning America.”

“I don’t have confirmed numbers — I definitely know the fatalities are in the hundreds,” he added.

“So far, confirmed in the hundreds,” he said, noting that conditions were too dire for his officers and other rescuers to get a true sense of the disaster.

Was he referring to just his county or the state as a whole?

Someone should ask him that question.

This is truly a historic tragedy, but some have decided that all of this chaos makes it the perfect time for a crime spree

Amid the chaos of Hurricane Ian, looting and other crimes have been committed in Lee County.

In coordination with Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno, County Commission, city managers and city councils, Dejarlais announced a 6 p.m. curfew for Lee County, which will be in place until further notice.

“To be sure, and I feel safe relaying this in on behalf of law enforcement, there’s going to be a zero-tolerance policy for looting and violence in this town,” Dejarlais said.

I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised that looting is happening.

Every time there is some sort of a major disaster, this is what some of us do.

It truly is disgusting.

This is a time when everybody should be pulling together.  According to one estimate, the economic damage from this storm could be somewhere in the neighborhood of 260 billion dollars

Experts expect the damages to cost up to $260 billion, though the clean-up efforts are currently unable to get underway as swathes of Florida remain underwater.

Prior to Hurricane Ian, the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history was Hurricane Katrina.

According to the GAO, Katina caused 170 billion dollars in damage…

Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, and Irma (selected hurricanes) caused costly damages and challenges for some populations in affected communities. In these communities, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated the cost of damages to be approximately $170 billion for Katrina, $74 billion for Sandy, $131 billion for Harvey, and $52 billion for Irma. These estimates include the value of damages to residential, commercial, and government or municipal buildings; material assets within the buildings; business interruption; vehicles and boats; offshore energy platforms; public infrastructure; and agricultural assets.

At this point, it appears that Katrina has been knocked out of the top spot.

Right at the end of September 2022, we have witnessed the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history by a wide margin.

And Ian is not done yet.

As I write this article, the city of Charleston is “bracing for a direct hit” very early on Friday morning…

Charleston is bracing for a direct hit from Hurricane Ian with storm surges of up to 7ft as it hurtles towards the historic city after barreling through Florida leaving swathes of the state decimated and at least 13 dead.

Monster tempest Ian has recharged from a tropical storm back into a Category 1 hurricane as it angles northwards towards South Carolina to pummel the state Friday morning, as well as neighboring North Carolina and Georgia.

Landfall in Charleston is expected around 8am on Friday, with the surrounding states also being issued with several extreme weather warnings.

When the damage to Charleston is factored in, the total economic damage from this storm could easily surpass 300 billion dollars.

This is not something that we are going to be able to bounce back from easily.

For years, I have been warning that unprecedented natural disasters would be headed our way.

Now it is happening right in front of our eyes.

The summer is over, the fall is here, and winter is coming.

We have been through so much already, but the rest of 2022 is inevitably going to have even more surprises for us.

Gus Meets With Don Eladio

Unbreakable

An unnamed family from Connecticut has been the center of much study by genetic scientists due to their unusually high bone density. Just like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable, the family has a genetic mutation that means their bones never break.

No one in the family has ever had a fracture, and it is thought that they have the strongest bones on the planet, which is impressive. It appears that the condition is genetic. Scientists tested 20 members of the family, with just under half of them being found to have extra dense bones. It is hoped that by studying the DNA of those family members with the condition, researchers will be able to more fully understand the factors affecting bone density, which could lead to treatments for osteoporosis.[HERE]

The condition means that the Connecticut family will never need a plaster cast, though they may find themselves spending a lot of money on plastic ponchos. (That’s an Unbreakable joke.)

Norman Parkinson Photograph Of Two People Running Up A Street In New York City In 1960

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Pedro Alonso López

In 1980, Pedro Alonso López was arrested for trying to lure a 12-year-old girl away while she was browsing through a market in Ecuador. This incident took place mere days after a mass grave of 53 young girls was uncovered in the area. After being taken into custody, López confessed to the murders of 300 girls. His MO was to pose as a salesman who had become lost and needed assistance to get back to his office. He would then lure young girls away from their distracted families and proceed to rape and murder them. He told police he committed the murders to ensure the girls could go to heaven.

Shockingly, this monster received a mere 16-year prison sentence and was released in 1994 after serving 14. An hour after being released, López was arrested again for illegal immigration and deported to Colombia. Here he was convicted of a murder he committed 20 years prior. However, he was declared insane and spent some time in a mental asylum before being released again in 1998.

In 2020, no one knows López’s whereabouts. He could be continuing his murderous streak unabated anywhere in the world. Rumors that he had died in a vigilante style killing have yet to be confirmed.[HERE]

March 2014

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In March 2014, Catrina McGhaw signed a lease on a North County ranch house. Her landlady was Sandra Travis. A few months after moving in, Catrina was watching a documentary on serial killers with a friend when they both suddenly sat up straight and looked at each other in alarm. The house being featured in various crime scene photos on the tv screen was the very one they were sitting in.

The house Catrina was living in previously belonged to serial killer Maury Travis, son of her landlady, Sandra Travis. Maury had built several torture chambers in the basement of the house and kept corpses there.

Catrina immediately went to Sandra and demanded she be let out of the lease. Sandra was unwilling to release Catrina from the lease until the St. Louis Housing Authority intervened. Only then did she agree to rescind the contract.

Maury Travis killed himself before he could be charged with the murders of at least 17 women.[HERE]

Fan Takes Selfie With Elvis Presley. 1960s

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Falling Down [1993] Hamburger Scene

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Surprise!

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After George Davis passed away, his family sorted through his belongings only to find a mysterious box in the attic. It held a small Fabergé figurine which experts later identified as a gift from none other but the Russian Czar Nicolas II to his wife, Empress Alexandra. The hardstone portrait figure was of Nikolai Nikolaievich Pustynnikov, a loyal personal Cossack bodyguard to the empress. The valuable item had little sapphires in the eyes, a little gold trim and gold braid, and elaborately inlaid and enameled double-headed imperial eagles.

They valued the 100-year-old figure at $800,000 but clearly underestimated the public’s interest. At the auction, a jeweler from London bought it for a whopping $5.2 million!

Surely, George Davis’s family didn’t see such an inheritance coming.[HERE]

Gus Meets With Don Eladio

https://youtu.be/rY7cr_UE8-E

Young Couples At A Formal Dance Dreamily Sway On The Crowded Floor Of Dim, Chandelier-Lit Ballroom, 1940s

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No Fingerprints

It is a universally accepted truth that we all have a unique set of fingerprints. Even identical twins differ when it comes to the minute whorls and loops on a set of dabs. Modern technology has made use of this unique property when it comes to things like cybersecurity, which must make Cheryl Maynard feel pretty invisible.[HERE]

Fingerprints are usually fully formed even before we are born. People with adermatoglyphia, however, are born with no fingerprints. (In the picture above, Cheryl’s finger is compared with a normal one.) It is believed that there are only four extended families in the world with this condition, caused by a genetic mutation.

The condition has left Cheryl Maynard feeling pretty invisible. Having no fingerprints has even made it difficult for her to get jobs. However, if she fancied a career as a criminal, she would have a head start.

Oh, how romantic it would be to find decades-old love letters!

When Phil Mathies decided to give his bathroom an upgrade in 2014, he involuntarily became the side character of a real-life rom-com. The contractor he hired ended up finding dozens of love letters that dated back all the way to 1918. The bizarre part? They were hidden inside the attic wall!

The letters told the story of a WWI soldier named Clement and his beloved Mary. When Phil Mathies tracked down Clement’s relatives, they were thrilled to receive the letters. As Phil learned, Clement and Mary did end up together and had their own family. It was true love.

But how the letters ended up in the walls of this Indiana home will forever remain a mystery.[HERE]

Falling Down (passing through golf course)

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Car Porn

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Super sight

In 1972, when Veronica Seider claimed to be able to see small objects 1.6 kilometers (1 mi) away, no one believed her. However, eyesight is pretty easy to test, so it soon became clear that Seider’s vision was truly exceptional. She was soon listed by Guinness World Records with eyesight 20 times more powerful than normal human beings.

Not only is she able to distinguish people and objects from 1.6 kilometers (1 mi) away, but she is also able to judge distance and position, which can be useful. And she can distinguish the individual colors that make up the color on a television set. Not so useful.[HERE]

James Dean Signing Autographs In His Car, 1950’s

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Gran Torino – Spooks _HD

https://youtu.be/SVjMzrCMW9Q

Lesson 230

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Way back in 1996 when the Communications Decency Act of 1996 was being contemplated, no one imagined the outsize role of the internet. In fact, few of the people debating the bill had ever seen this internet thing. The internet as we understand it was in its infancy and only tech savvy hobbyists were using it. Most homes did not have a personal computer at the time. The only thing everyone was sure about was that the internet had to be free to grow.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act made a lot of sense to all involved, because it gave the new internet companies relief from parasitic lawyers who were already sinking their fangs into the industry. Giving the public platforms protection from liability allowed them to host the public platform without having to edit everything the users posted on the platforms. At the time, the tech companies claimed they lacked the resources to monitor user behavior.

The logic made sense as long as that last bit was true. If the people creating these public platforms could not edit what was posted, then they could not reasonably be held accountable, as we do for newspapers and magazines. The New York Times controls its content, so in theory it is responsible for it. As a practical matter they are never held accountable and libel people daily as we saw with the Sarah Palin case a few months ago, but that is a topic for another day.

In a quarter century, much has changed. Not only can the tech platforms edit what is posted on their sites, they now aggressively monitor content. Not only that, but they also promote content on the platforms and they create their own content. The millions of bots used to boost some content over others is a form of content. It is similar to a newspaper making the editorial decision to post some stories on the front page and relegate the real stories to the back pages.

The Section 230 protections were specifically tailored on the assumption that the platforms could not control what was posted. Therefore, someone could not reasonably sue them for defamation. It would be like holding the building owner liable for something someone write on the walls outside. In theory, the platform, like the building owner, would take reasonable steps to remove the material. If the court asked, they would try to identify the person responsible.

Of course, we live in a different age and therefore the laws crafted for the prior age no longer make any sense in this age. No one in 1996 could contemplate a world where an oligopoly in Silicon Valley controlled political discourse. Further, no one imagined the oligopoly being controlled by crazy people. This is why the matter is working its way through the courts in various conflicting cases. In fact, it will probably end up in the Supreme Court in the next term.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld a Texas law barring companies from removing posts based on political ideology. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned a similar Florida law on the grounds that it violated constitutional protections for tech companies. The question is whether these private firms that get the same protections as all other private firms or are they private firms operating public accommodations and therefore can be regulated.

Morally, this would be a simple question if not for the racial double standard that has become nearly universal. Facebook regularly hosts livestreams of black people hunting a killing white people. This happened most recently with the Memphis spree killer who livestreamed his rampage on Facebook. On the other hand, a white guy uses the wrong pronouns when describing a public degenerate and he is banned. In the age of Jim Snow, everyone knows the score.

Before the Jim Snow laws, when Section 230 was created, no one imagined the sorts of double standards we now accept. In 1996, everyone agreed that a public accommodation had to accept everyone as long as they did the minimum that was required of the enterprise. Restaurants could require a dress code, but they could not ban people for holding the wrong opinions. If they violated their own rules, then they could be held accountable in the courts.

Ultimately, the court will have to fashion a new standard. If Facebook is a public accommodation, then what are the rules that define such a thing? If it is a private company, then how can it have special privileges? The simplest solution is to clarify how one can claim Section 230 protections. A platform that does not edit the content of users would qualify, while a firm that censors the users would not qualify. This would be the logical solution, which is why it cannot happen.

Instead, the court will end up supporting the tech companies, because the so-called conservatives will be so high from chanting “they are private companies” that the crazies on the court will write the decision. We will end up with a new standard that says private companies can viciously and aggressively discriminate, as long as it is not against protected classes. At this time, there is one class left unprotected in the law, which is the class known as while people.

In fact, there is a good chance that the court creates a new framework that requires public platforms to aggressively censor content in order to get the protections offered under Section 230. That would mean a site like Gab is wiped out unless they apply the same standards as Silicon Valley. It would also mean that hosting companies are required to monitor the content of their users. This would be the first example of “common good conservatism” in the law.

This sounds terribly negative, but it is realistic. Stalin allegedly said that it is not the votes that count, but who counts the votes. He probably never said it, but it is something he would have grasped. He was a communist, but he eventually came to see that who decides counts for more than how things are decided. That is what we see in the current age with things like censorship. It is not the rules that matter, but who is enforcing and interpreting the rules that matters.

If the tech firms were run by the same sorts of people who were running what passed for big tech in 1996, none of this would matter. The internet pioneers were civic nationalists and libertarians. They were on-line to get away from people who wanted to police free expression. They needed Section 230 to keep the internet open, but they were replaced with people who want to close it down, so one way or another, speech will be closed down on the internet.

Finally, this is a good reminder that when a society begins to debate the letter of the law, it no longer respects the spirit of the law. Put another away, if the people in charge are so corrupt that they need written rules to behave themselves, they are corrupt enough to find a way around those written words. This is where we find ourselves with the current ruling class. They see the rules like they see the truth. If they are useful, they enforce them. If not, then not.

Dumplings porn

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An extra apartment

Affordable living space is rare in New York City, so just imagine how Samantha Hartsoe must have felt when she found out that she had access to more rooms than expected.

It all started with cold air coming from behind her mirror. Once she investigated the draft, she found the entrance to an entire vacant unit! On her TikTok, Samantha Hartsoe documented her trip beyond the wall, and several million people joined her, waiting for what was behind the next corner. Why does this apartment not have its own door? And why is it connected to Smanatha’s flat through only a small hole.[HERE]

It appears that the person who used to own the apartment bought two apartments and turned one into a secret room; a place to hide and to hide others.

Fearless

Okay, well maybe this isn’t exactly like Deadpool, but a woman identified only as “SM” has a condition known as Urbach-Wiethe, which has damaged parts of her brain. As a result, she feels no fear. At all. Totally fearless.

The condition manifested first as a complete lack of fear from all external stimuli—such as the large, venomous spiders and snakes she picked up as a child. Once, when she was being held up at knifepoint, her attacker was so unnerved by her lack of fear that he let her go.

Like all superheroes, however, SM does have one weakness. After a barrage of tests where she had shown no fear responses, she was exposed to carbon dioxide and suddenly had a panic attack. Neurologists studying her brain hypothesized that impending suffocation finally produced a fear response where no other stimuli could. However, when the test was repeated, SM did not show any anxiety until the gas started to take effect, proving that her response had been a physical reaction to suffocation rather than a psychological manifestation of fear.[HERE]

It could be worse. She could be afraid of cows.

What would you do if you found seven grand inside an abandoned house? Be sneaky and keep it? Not on Dave’s watch!

Dave, an urban photographer, really only wanted to take some pictures of antiques for his blog. But what he found behind an old mattress probably made his heart jump. Stuffed inside a yellow Home Hardware bag was almost $7,000 in cash, tightly rolled up in bundles. The notes were held together by elastic bands, which marked dates from the mid-1960s to the 1970s.

Dave decided to track down the granddaughter of the previous owners to hand back the money. Naturally, she was thrilled and told the photographer that her grandparents likely earned the money with the fruit stand they owned. They must have collected it over decades.[HERE]

Cartel Meeting With Don Eladio [English Subtitles]

https://youtu.be/Qp4DOepxsB4

Surviving The War

There was a time when normal Americans thought about how to survive a nuclear exchange with the Russians. During the Cold War, this seemed like a real prospect, so there was a reason to think about it. Into the 1960’s school kids had to do the hide under the desk thing, which was mostly about conditioning people to accept permanent war, but it conditioned people to the idea of being nuked. How to make it through a nuclear war became something of an industry.

There were two schools of thought on the subject back then. One said that any hint of a nuclear attack by either side would result in a mag dump by both sides. The United States and the Soviet Union were in a prisoner’s dilemma. If either side showed restraint, then they risked the other side striking first and possibly making it impossible to retaliate, so logic said to send all of your missiles first. Both sides accepted this logic which is why a system was put in place to prevent it.

From a survival perspective, such a scenario made the prospects for anyone living through it extremely low. The arsenals at the time were larger than today and the assumption was they could wipe out all life on the planet. The initial blasts would kill most people, but the fallout and nuclear winter would kill the rest. Even if people survived somehow, the numbers would be tiny. There was simply no point in preparing for what would be instant death for almost everyone.

The other school of thought was more optimistic. War would escalate with an initial exchange that might not lead to a mag dump. Even if the will were there to send all the missiles, many people would refuse to push the button. The disruption from the initial strikes would also render communications useless. The example of Vasili Arkhipov seemed like proof that a full scale exchange was unlikely. That meant it was possible to survive a nuclear war if you were prepared.

Today, that last scenario is more plausible. Nuclear arsenals are much smaller than during the Cold War. No one is really sure that the antique systems on which these weapons rely would work under stress. The American ICBM system still relies upon 1970’s technology. The Russian systems are similarly antiquated. The most likely scenario is that the major powers are no longer functional after a nuclear exchange, so lots of people survive the event.

The first step in surviving a nuclear war is to avoid a direct hit. Washington DC will get several direct hits and the initial flash will vaporize most of the population. The shock wave will level most of the city. By now, the Russians and Chinese know to target Northern Virginia, so it will be a saturation bombing. The five percent that survive the initial blast will be radiated and die soon thereafter. Therefore, the first rule of nuke club is to be outside the target zone.

The safe bet is to be away from the coasts.

The Rockies or Appalachia are the best bet for making it through the first stage. Denver will be nuked, for sure, but the damage will be contained to that plateau. People in the mountains will escape the flash and the blast, even if Denver takes multiple strikes. The Green Briar will get hit, for old times sake, but most of West Virginia will be spared. There are lots of places to escape the flash and the blast in the mountains.

Once things settle after the final missile strikes, there will be four key things to surviving the aftermath. You will need water, shelter, food and a way to defend yourself from the people who were not prepared. Imagine a land ravaged by mask wearing Covidians and you get the picture. You will have to be prepared to kill a lot of people in order to avoid ending up like them. This means you need to pick a spot that has access to water, a food source and is defendable.

Since a post-nuclear America is going to look like the frontier as far as you are concerned, you are going to need frontier skills. You will need to know how to make a fire, provide yourself basic medical care and know how to hunt and fish. If your location is near a river, then you can initially get by with fishing and water from the river, but you have to boil the water and cook the fish. The ability to make fire without modern items like a lighter or matches is essential.

Once you have sorted the location and provided yourself with the frontier skills required to live in the wild, you need to think about the defense issue. A man alone is easy prey, even to desperate city people roaming the countryside. It would be better to have a tribe that can work together for common defense. That means you either need the skills to create a tribe from who is left or you have to create a tribe now.

One way or the other, survival will depend upon community.

This basic framework of preparedness is just scratching the surface, but it does provide the basis for building a survival plan. For example, you will not want modern firearms for defense in the post-nuclear world. Making your own gunpowder for modern ammunition is not realistic. You can make black powder from raw materials. That means the old fashioned muzzleloader is a good weapon to own and master. Of course, older range weapons like spears and bows are an option.

The same applies to tools. Creating your own electric for powering modern tools is possible, but not very practical. If you assume society takes generations to bounce back from the holocaust, then it makes no sense to rely upon modern tools. They will break and you will not be able to fix them. The same would apply to vehicles. Old cars need gasoline and lubricants. Even if you stock those, they will run out eventually and your vehicles become lawn ornaments.

This is why forming communities in advance of the holocaust is critical. You can plan for the two general scenarios. The first scenario is the world steps back to the pre-industrial age and does not bounce back. The other scenario is the people responsible manage to survive and quickly set about recreating the modern world by bringing things like the power grid on-line. Do you want to play a role in that rebuilding or do you want to seek vengeance on them?

Community building in advance lets you wargame these issues. It also makes survival much more likely. No one man can know everything or prepare for everything, so having help increases your odds of survival dramatically. It also provides the means for surviving what comes after the initial devastation. In a post-nuclear world, tribalism will be the key to survival, which means the best tribe wins. Of course, that is also why the world was blown up, but that is a story for another day.

Blueberry Cobbler

Make the most of summer’s fresh fruit and mix up an easy Blueberry Cobbler. With a tender topping and a berry filling, this easy Blueberry Cobbler with Bisquick™ Original Pancake & Baking Mix is a dessert you’ll be asked to make again and again. If you don’t have fresh blueberries on hand, frozen blueberries achieve the same, great taste. For this Blueberry Cobbler recipe, just make sure the total volume of fruit remains the same if using frozen blueberries. Spoons up and enjoy.

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Memelight

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Hamburger Porn

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Oh brother!

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Yes he does

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Sneaky

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Will The Collapse Of Credit Suisse Be Europe’s “Lehman Brothers Moment”?

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The parallels between 2008 and 2022 just keep getting stronger.  14 years ago, the collapse of Lehman Brothers sent a massive wave of panic through global financial markets and is widely considered to be the key event that plunged us into a horrifying financial crisis that we still talk about to this day.  Well, now an even larger bank appears to be on the brink of collapse, and analysts all over the world are deeply concerned about what that will mean for the global financial system if it does fail.

Right now, Credit Suisse is one of the most important banks in the entire world.  If you are not familiar with Credit Suisse, the following is some good background information that comes from Wikipedia

Credit Suisse Group AG is a global investment bank and financial services firm founded and based in Switzerland. Headquartered in Zürich, it maintains offices in all major financial centers around the world and is one of the nine global “Bulge Bracket” banks providing services in investment banking, private banking, asset management, and shared services. It is known for strict bank–client confidentiality and banking secrecy. The Financial Stability Board considers it to be a global systemically important bank. Credit Suisse is also primary dealer and Forex counterparty of the FED .

Credit Suisse is truly one of the central hubs of the entire international banking system.

If it were to fail, the ripple effects would be felt very deeply in literally every nation on the planet.

Unfortunately, it is being reported that Credit Suisse could be “on the verge of collapse” and we are being warned that if it does collapse it could cause “a shock similar to that caused by the bankruptcy of the U.S. bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008”

Speculation surrounding the future of the Swiss banking giant has been going on for several months in the markets, in business and political circles, as well as on social networks.

The No. 2 Swiss bank and one of the largest banks in the world is in deep trouble and is currently fighting for its survival. A negative outcome is likely to cause a shock similar to that caused by the bankruptcy of the U.S. bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008. This event triggered one of the most serious financial and economic crises since the Great Depression.

When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, it had 639 billion dollars in assets.

In late 2022, Credit Suisse currently has 1.5 trillion dollars of assets under management.

pic.twitter.com/mpAoIj7zdI

— SG (@GhoshSubhag) October 2, 2022

 

The collapse of Credit Suisse would create a wave of panic that would be unlike anything that we have seen since the last financial crisis.

But new CEO Ulrich Koerner insists that everything is just fine

There has been plenty of movement around Credit Suisse over the weekend. On Friday, CEO Ulrich Koerner sent around a memo saying that the bank had a “strong capital base and liquidity position”, whilst senior executives spent their weekend doing their best to reassure large clients, counterparties and investors, according to the Financial Times.

The memo from the CEO also noted that the bank was at a “critical moment” as it prepares for a restructuring, the details of which are the be revealed on October 27. Expectations are that some 5000 jobs could be cut, with assets sold off. Some analysts are saying it won’t be enough, however. According to a Bloomberg report, Credit Suisse is estimated to need a further $4 billion Swiss francs even after asset sales, to fund the restructuring, with a capital raise touted as the most likely option.

Are the markets buying what Koerner is selling?

Nope.

Credit Suisse credit default swaps just keep going the wrong direction, and that means that investors are starting to get really, really nervous…

Credit Suisse’s Credit Default Swaps, or CDS, a derivative instrument that allows an investor to swap their credit risk with another investor, surged on Friday, reflecting the market perception of increasing risk. It is now approaching the highs seen during the 2008 financial crisis, which saw U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers go bankrupt.
Houston we have a problem. Market cap of $CS is now a rounding error. 35x leverage. This and Deutsche Bank…a canary in coal mine.

CDS on Credit Suisse now at GFC highs. #btc pic.twitter.com/cVTOavkBv2

— FOSS – Lehman CDS at 9bps in ’06, 🇨🇦 now at 41 (@FossGregfoss) September 30, 2022

 

At this point, just about everyone can smell blood.

And it certainly isn’t going to take much to set off widespread hysteria.

Formal Announcement: pic.twitter.com/Pmygv369gq

— Credit Suisse Risk Department (@RammityCap) October 1, 2022

This is such an ominous time for Europe.  The EU is heading into the worst energy crisis that it has ever experienced, the bond market is starting to go bonkers, and now giant financial institutions such as Credit Suisse are being greatly shaken.

Martin Armstrong was recently interviewed by Greg Hunter, and he boldly declared that a “crisis in banking will start in Europe”

So, could Europe suck the rest of the world down the tubes? Armstrong says, “Oh, absolutely. Europe is the problem. . . . The crisis in banking will start in Europe. . . . The debt is collapsing. They have no way to sustain themselves. The debt market over there is undermining the stability of all the banks. You have to understand that reserves are tied to government debt, and this is the perfect storm. Yes, the (U.S.) stock market will go down short term. We are not facing a 1929 event or a 90% fall here. . . . Europeans, probably by January of 2023, as this crisis in Ukraine escalates, anybody with half a brain is going to take whatever money they have and get it over here.”

I am not as optimistic about U.S. financial markets as Armstrong seems to be.

Yes, Europe is currently in worse shape, but things are starting to unravel quite rapidly here too.

In fact, we just witnessed the worst month for U.S. stocks since the very early days of the pandemic

September was a horrible month for stocks. The Dow fell nearly 9%, its worst monthly drop since March 2020, when pandemic lockdowns started in the United States. The index ended Friday deeply in the red, too.

Overall, this is the very first time that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been down for three quarters in a row since 2015.

And it is the very first time that the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq have been down for three quarters in a row since 2009.

A lot of people out there still seem to think that things will “return to normal” very soon, and unfortunately all of those people are very wrong.

The truth is that we are right on the precipice of the sort of historic meltdown that I have been relentlessly warning was coming.

Our leaders kicked the can down the road for a long time, but now they are running out of road.

A day of reckoning has arrived for Europe, and soon a day of reckoning will arrive for us as well.

So buckle your seatbelts, because we are in for a very bumpy ride.

Firefox

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Journey to the Center of the Earth Stars: James Mason, Pat Boone, Arlene Dahl

This is the full movie, and it is a classic. Have a real vacation. Enjoy it! Please. Relive your childhood in the 1960s.

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Big bad changes unfolding in real time

Uh oh.

Things are advancing very rapidly. Very rapidly. I made up a video yesterday and the next two videos are explaining what is going on…

Check out these two videos. Both are important.

Putin’s historic speech finalizes referenda, infuriates Collective West

EMERGENCY! This is heading for ALL OUT WAR and Putin knows it.

How to get drunk

Ernest Hemingway, one of the 20th century’s most famous drinkers, once quipped, “I drink to make other people more interesting.” Perhaps you have found yourself thinking something similar when you’ve been stuck in an awkward conversation with a stranger at a bar, or when you’re out on a date which is filled with painfully long silences. Your immediate reaction might be to reach for the nearest bottle of wine until you can escape. But is there a better way to enjoy drinking? While alcohol should always be consumed in moderation, you can also get just the right amount of buzz so you can enjoy your evening, but won’t feel a sickening hangover in the morning.

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I suggest that everyone enjoy your moments this October with your family, pets and loved ones. Buy a good bash of food, and tie a good one one. Make this evening a notable one.

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Forget all the nonsense out of the news; this is what is REALLY going on today

Our incompetent officials are going to get us all toasted, while they sip champagne in protective luxury bunkers.

Yes. For certain.

Lets read what is actually going on. Shall we.

American officials believe they have, so far, succeeded at “boiling the frog” — increasing their military, intelligence and economic assistance to Ukraine step by step, without provoking Moscow into large-scale retaliation with any major single move.

Hum. Have they?

Well, keep the serfs dumbed down, poor, and controlled and then fill their minds with junk, while the wealthy continue to set up a throwback ruler / ruled society…

...income inequality in US & UK is so wide that while the richest are very well off, the poorest have a worse standard of living than the poorest in countries like Slovenia. Essentially, US & UK are poor societies with some very rich people. 

A thread:

Don’t you know…

Pilger:

"In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries."

“best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do."

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
.................

When I was a child, the word gay simply meant that person was happy. Like gay, the word democracy has been twisted beyond all extent of its original meaning.


Posted by: Peter AU1 | Sep 18 2022 12:19 utc | 3

Ah. It’s called reality.

And big things are happening. Don’t ya know.

De-dollarization is a process, not an event.

The biggest thing about the SCO meetings, to me, is that it is 100% clear that Russia is seeking to make NOPEC real - and furthermore to shift its exports from Europe to Asia. Not just China, but India and Pakistan.

This is a huge deal. It will make Europe energy poor even as it turbocharges these low GDP per capita economies.

And in the process, tie together Central Asia into a network of pipelines and natural gas (and oil) suppliers and consumers.

This is a serious "Manifest Destiny" type of movement, especially when added

Posted by: c1ue | Sep 18 2022 14:02 utc | 20

The SEO meeting was a gamechanger.

Is patience a virtue? Well, cooler heads are prevailing it appears. It’s a good thing that I’m not in government.

...as far as I am concerned, if it weren't for the incredible patience and prudence of V. Putin and S. Lavrov in particular, the collective Russian leadership would have already attacked all the command centers in Brussels and London with supersonic and hyper-sonic conventional weapons... or worse!... as co-belligerents in this war.

These guys in D.C. are living proof in the extreme vanity, narrow-mindedness and viciousness of Empire, alienated and unconcerned with the real world consequences of their escalatory and inhumane actions. They are living in their bubble fantasy world; they haven't slow boiled the frog, it just hasn't happened yet that the Russian leadership has really taken off the gloves - but when they do......!

Posted by: michaelj72 | Sep 18 2022 14:29 utc | 24

Don’t you know.

Other folk are seemingly getting with “the program”. Such as this quote…

China clearly believes Covid is a targeted bio weapon. They don't do unspeakable things to their citizens, They just practice their own form of disease control for when they have good reason to believe it is a dangerous pathogen.

About China

April 2022 China’s Global Security Initiative (hereafter referred to as “the Initiative”) for the first time. The Initiative champions commitments in six areas-

1) stay committed to the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, and work together to maintain world peace and security;

2) stay committed to respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, uphold non-interference in internal affairs, and respect the independent choices of development paths and social systems made by people in different countries;

3) stay committed to abiding by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, reject the Cold War mentality, oppose unilateralism, and say no to group politics and bloc confrontation;

4) stay committed to taking the legitimate security concerns of all countries seriously, uphold the principle of indivisible security, build a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture, and oppose the pursuit of one’s own security at the cost of others’ security;

5) stay committed to peacefully resolving differences and disputes between countries through dialogue and consultation, support all efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of crises, reject double standards, and oppose the wanton use of unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction;

6) stay committed to maintaining security in both traditional and non-traditional domains, and work together on regional disputes and global challenges such as terrorism, climate change, cybersecurity and biosecurity.

by Ambassador Liu Yantao copied from HERE

You know I used to believe all the China bashing. I used to think exactly what the American government and the mainstream media were saying about China.

The problem was that it got so frequent and in-your-face that eventually you either have to start questioning what’s being said, or you believe the stories so much that you essentially become stupid about it. Once that happens, you start really hating, and you can never see them as people; just something you have to get rid of because they are evil.

Essentially, you either eventually question or you eventually become the verry face of evil.

Just look at how many people want to punish, blockade, kill, and invade China. Why are these things even brought up?

Because they were fed so much China-bashing that all they know is to bash China. You can only bash what isn’t good. What isn’t good can be killed and destroyed.

That’s why such things exist as “China is curing cancer faster than anyone else in the world… but at what cost?”

“At what cost” is used to discredit even legitimately good things. We can’t even give them that when we even have a saying that curing cancer trumps all modern miracles. “He better be able to cure cancer!”

I remember a while ago there was a big hooha when the Huawei saga was underway and Americans went full-nuts over China potentially being able to gather American health data. The article’s thrust for why that was bad was because “China might be able to find cures to American health issues.”

I shit you not.

It’s terrible if China gets our health data because they might actually be able to find a cure for you. They wrote it in print that this was BAD!

We’re moving very close to war with China now; instigated by us, the American and western allies. People here have called me paranoid but I live in this region, and even Singapore’s top leaders can see where the winds are blowing.

He warned that rising tensions could easily result in near misses or accidents happening around the Taiwan Strait or in the South China Sea. Read more at straitstimes.com.

The thing is that Deputy Prime Minister Wong isn’t wrong. Neither China nor the USA actually want a war, but the constant barrage of bashing leads to dehumanisation and hate, and poor calculus that may eventually lead to war regardless of intentions.

It’s not paranoia. It is basic human psychology.

Once you are able to dehumanize the Chinese, you can do anything against them… thinking you are perfectly within the right for doing so.

From the time this question was asked to now, we are much closer to war than ever.

Best Buddies

This is my 17 year old daughter. She has struggled since she was young with depression, anxiety, PTSD and a personality/mood disorder, and this is Whisper, her best friend, soulmate and therapy cat.

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My daughter frequently tells us that Whisper absolutely without a doubt saved her life. But we all know she would give her life in a heartbeat to save her Whisper.

US life expectancy drops three years in only 18 months and we know why

You really have to be in a total state of denial about mRNA vax to not accept reality.

Read about the REALITY

The last time a population had a 3-year drop in life expectancy in only 20 months (when they rolled out the jab) was maybe France in WWI, Russia in WWII or Europe during the Plague. It boggles the mind. China’s life expectancy is now higher than the US’s, while the US’s plunges from 77.1 to 76 years!

I respect everyone’s reasons for getting the mRNA gene treatment, including my family members.

It has been mentioned that those that have taken the mRNA need to now take daily supplements. I pray all of you are taking lots of Vitamins C & D, getting losts of air, using antioxidants and cell maintainers like turmeric+piperine, glutathion, zinc, magnesium, selenium and an anti-coagulant like a daily baby aspirin to prevent micro-clots.

GR is now keeping track of athletes’ deaths, read HERE

This has nothing to do with China. And everything to do with the United States.

Concerning COVID

Speaking as a statistician, one needs to look at all the important variables.

  • Most importantly, China has universal healthcare.
  • China has a high standard of care in its nursing homes.
  • What percentage of elderly are concentrated in China’s nursing homes compared to the U.S.? A very small percentage.
  • Did China storehouse COVID cases in vulnerable nursing homes?No, it did not.
  • China also used highly effective early treatment with traditional Chinese medicine, according to PubMed.Both Western and Chinese medicines were used which greatly improved survival odds.
  • China did not lock down the entire country, but apparently only its largest affected cities, which was about 25% of its total population, thus not totally disrupting their economy.(This goes completely against the Western narrative.)
  • How did China count deaths: died from Covid vs. died with Covid. This is certainly different from the West; more exacting, and much more accurate.
  • Did China bribe hospitals to report covid cases and death the way the West did?No, it did not.
  • What test did China use to confirm Covid cases? It was a hard rule with double verification.
  • What is the comparison of effectiveness and safety is the Chinese vaccine compared to the West’s vaccine? Yes, the “dead host” vaccine compared to the Western experimental mRNA injection.
  • The first to get the vaccine in China were actual workers, not the elderly.
  • How do excess deaths in China compare to the West? Small compared to HUGE.

Remember what Mark Twain said about statistics?

DWP wrote:

I think the most fundamental question is what was the origin of the virus.

Most likely is that it came from a lab, as Jeffrey Sachs and others have concluded.

Then that opens up a can of worms that are most important:  why, when, where and who?

The “who” is most likely the U.S. as Sachs says.

Why?—was it a “blunder” as Sachs says or something more sinister.

Experts Warn US Is Falling Behind China in Key Technologies

Where were these “experts” for the last two decades?

At a gathering of current and former U.S. officials and private-sector executives Friday in Washington, concern was rampant that the United States has fallen behind China in the development of several key technologies, and that it faces an uncertain future in which other countries could challenge its historic dominance in the development of cutting-edge communications and computing technology.

From HERE

???

China hasn’t done anything to the US economy. The US is destroying its own economy…

  • amassing a crushing $30 trillion national debt
  • allowing its infrastructure to crumble and decay for decades
  • letting its manufacturing go overseas
  • spending trillions of dollars on useless wars
  • failing to educate enough STEM graduates

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Aircraft titanium alloy

The rapid development of additive manufacturing technology, laser forming technology for large and complex integral components of aircraft titanium alloy, in China can manufacture high-performance, difficult-to-machine complex and integral key components of large aircraft. The world’s only breakthrough in laser rapid prototyping technology for aircraft titanium alloy large-scale main load-bearing structural parts is available in China.

China has mastered the core technology of the world’s leading 32-way high-end fault-tolerant computer used in information network core areas such as finance and telecommunications. The world class top technology and production share of high-end network routers are developed and made in China.

I completely changed my view of Chinese women.

Like many foreigners, I somehow believed that women in “the West” were more liberated than women in Asia. After moving to China, I experienced a kind of culture shock upon seeing large numbers of Chinese women in scientific fields and positions of leadership. At my host university, the new Communist Party secretary (an important post) was a woman in her thirties, i.e. quite young. I met more female engineers, physicists, and chemists in three years in China than I have during thirty years in the West. I even saw female workers doing road repair and hauling rocks in Yunnan, the kind of hard physical labor that is almost exclusively done by men in the West.

This is in spite of the unapologetic sexism that still exists among many Chinese people — like the guy from Tsinghua University who took me out on a date, only to tell me that he expected to make all the important decisions if we got married. Not to mention the fact that all of the country’s top leaders are men. Yet I quickly learned that Chinese women are not the shy, retiring flowers of western stereotypes, but strong and often outspoken.

For the first time in my life, I experienced what it was like to take it for granted that I would receive intellectual respect. I was occasionally disrespected for my ethnic origins or my perceived status, but no-one ever questioned my intelligence and ability to think rationally on the basis of my gender.

These experiences not only transformed my understanding of China, but also the way I viewed my culture of origin. I realized that progress is not linear. We are not more “advanced” than other nations. I also realized just how much unconscious sexism there is in western universities and workplaces, how normal it is for westerners to talk down to women as somehow less cogent than men. I came away from the experience with more confidence in my intellect and a greater respect for Chinese culture, humbled to realize that my assumptions were wrong.

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(Me with a Chinese soldier, 2006)

The satellite orbit change technology of China

The satellite orbit change technology of China is at the world’s leading level to extend the life of satellites. Satellites in space descend 100 meters every other day, and if they don’t change orbits, they will crash into the atmosphere and burn up. Satellites also have to dodge junk in space.

A Foreigners impression of China

Well, before I came here in China I was as brainwashed as any other foreigner having heard from what is being told by people who never had first hand experience of visiting China and the media hoax around the world.

However, once I stepped in here, my perception about China assuming they would have been living in subjugation, poverty and in many problems really changed.

What I noticed is Chinese are well disciplined, modest and hard working people who happen to be very nice to foreigners and seemed to serve me with great hospitality.

I realized China has developed so fast for the last 30 years, economy has increased, industrialisation is expanding and whatever we happen to see most likely to be coming from China.

They strive and do their best in almost every walk of life and the result today is in their favor letting Chinese people to have good life, better future with name and fame.

Today, there are more number of billionaires in China than USA, is all because of their dedication and punctuality towards their goal oriented life since they have learned a lot from their past.

The most important thing people around the world hold a presumed notion about, is that “whatever is made in China we instantly put forward judgemental comments as if China itself is the name of manufacturing low quality products”.

But reality is totally different, I have happened to see many kinds of quality products from electronics to garments and sewing needles to piece of a paper.

China is industrially widespread in all kinds of manufacturing products again depending on what you can afford.

Quality comes with price, pay the price, get the quality is straight forward thing that someone holding something in brain can understand for sure.

How come we expect good quality for something that is of $100 and you wish to get it for $10?

I think we should be thankful to China that based on our financial affordability range, they are making products to help us enjoy almost same benefits, which I believe no other country has balls to do with such a massive production for almost all kinds of things we use in our daily life.

Why the United States Has Set Itself Up for Failure in the Semiconductor Race for Military Supremacy

From HERE

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Doomsday prophesising of how China’s days are numbered and that it is in the midst of an economic collapse could not be any further from reality.

The reasons for the spread of this sort of gossip is to keep up the belief (and thus investment) in the idea that the United States is secure in its alpha dog global status and that the world is better off siding with said alpha in its escalating and reckless, not to mention unnecessary, economic and geopolitical war against Russia and China. It is to intimidate any country foolish enough to throw too many of its eggs into the Russia-China basket with the thought that they will be left hanging in the wind once China collapses from the international stranglehold on its economy, which is touted as inevitable.

It is to convince the American people, that the further sacrifices they are about to make in their livelihood and standard of living will be worth it, perhaps to even go so far as to proclaim that this will be the necessary “new normal” all for the cause of world security, of course.

The reality of the situation which should be plain for everyone to see at this point, is that the United States’ sanctions and banning of various types of trade with Russia and China, meant to cripple their economies, is doing more damage to the world markets than anything else, including that of Europe and the United States.

These sanctions have brought the world into a very predictable energy and food crisis to which European and American citizens are told they must suffer through in the name of western security. A crisis which is gutting essential infrastructure required to sustain developed countries. A crisis from which there is no quick return to a first world living standard for its citizenry.

It was thought that such manoeuvres would cripple the Russian economy and cause internal unrest demanding for the removal of President Putin. Instead we see the Russian rouble stronger than it has ever been in large part due to the competent leadership of Sergei Glazyev (see his speech on Sanctions and Sovereignty) who is in the process of organising a “new economic order…[which] will involve a creation of a new digital payment currency founded through an international agreement based on principles of transparency, fairness, goodwill, and efficiency” as he explained in an interview with Pepe Escobar for The Cradle.

In other words, the world’s new monetary system, underpinned by a digital currency, will be backed by a basket of new foreign currencies and natural resources. And it will liberate the Global South from both western debt and IMF-induced austerity. What this means is that with this new system, the economic sovereignty of a nation will be protected; that a country rich in resources will finally be in a position to use the profits of these resources to strengthen their currencies and build infrastructure essential for any first world nation rather than be forcefully reduced to an indebted raw resource producer and nothing more as enforced by the policies of the IMF over the past several decades.

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Russia’s economy did not tank, and the alliance between Russia and China has only grown stronger. And despite attempts to isolate their markets, trade opportunities remain ample and in high demand while the United States and Europe who refuse to participate in these markets are pushing themselves further into a corner.

Instead of reassessing its position, the U.S., which clearly did not expect such an outcome, has instead decided to escalate this economic war with China, which will create further hardship for the world markets, in the middle of a very serious semiconductor backlog.

Semiconductors/chips are an essential component for any smart device, including automobiles and smart phones. They are essential in the production of AI, quantum computing, and microelectronics.

Semiconductors are also essential for advanced weapons systems, including hypersonic missiles.

Interestingly, the United States has shot itself in its own kneecap in the middle of a race for military supremacy since the crisis of the semiconductor/chips backlog (triggered by the United States), which has heavily hit the consumer market especially the automobile industry, has also hit the United States’ ability to churn out advanced weapons systems in mass quantity.

In December 2020, SMIC along with other Chinese firms were put on a U.S. blacklist for exports called the Entity List. This was an attempt to prevent SMIC, China’s largest and most sophisticated semiconductor producer, from importing the necessary material and equipment to manufacture 14nm and 20nm semiconductors/chips, which also ended up cutting off the world markets from China, the main supplier of these chips.

TSMC (Taiwan) and Samsung (South Korea) are the present titans in the cutting-edge semiconductor industry (that is 7nm and 5nm chips), however, China’s SMIC was the largest supplier of 20nm+ chips which are essential for the consumer market. When China was taken out of this market it created a bottleneck since TSMC and Samsung, who do not specialise in bulk manufacturing of lower grade chips, were already way above capacity. This created a massive global bottleneck in semiconductor/chip production. [East Asia is manufacturing about 75% of the chips in the world.]

Ironically, the United States would have had an easier time amping up production in their advanced weapons systems if they had left China as the main global supplier of 20nm chips.

Over the past month or so the U.S. State Department has been busy setting up weapon sales with countries such as Japan ($293 million deal, principally with Raytheon Technologies for 150 air-to-air missiles that can be loaded on F-35 fighters), Singapore ($630 million deal for laser-guided bombs and other munitions), Australia ($235 million deal with Lockheed Martin for 80 air-to-surface missiles), South Korea ($130 million for 31 lightweight torpedoes to use with MH-60R helicopters for anti-submarine warfare) and Germany (with a potential sale of over 35 F-35 fighters).

These are orders that presently are unable to be fulfilled by these companies in the short-term due to the semiconductor backlog of 1-2 years or more.

The United States is attempting to increase its onshore manufacturing capabilities so that it can control much more of the supply chain within its domestic market, rather than the present reality, which is that there are several countries dispersed throughout the world who are the specialised leaders of one of the approximately 50 steps, requiring high standard specialisation, in manufacturing cutting edge semiconductors.

The specialising process for all the components required for leading chip manufacturing is so costly (in the hundreds of billions) and precise that it is estimated that it would take at least 4-6 years or more to master each area of specialisation.

“If you want a resilient [self-sufficient] chip supply chain, you not only need chip plants, you also need a whole string of suppliers from critical chemicals and precision components all coming along,” said an executive at Japan’s Daikin, reported by NIKKEI Asia. “Building a semiconductor plant takes several years, but building chemical plants will take even longer given the extensive environmental assessments and regulations for handling chemicals.” [Refer here for a short video on how semiconductors are made.]

Presently, no country comes even close to this capability. Later on in this paper I will explain why if any country is to reach resilience, that is self-sufficiency in this market, it will be China not the United States.

The American Medical System

On Saturday night in June of 2019, I was just about to fall asleep in my bed when I woke up unable to breathe. My husband was away on a business trip so I called my sister to come help me. My 15 year old called EMS as I started having seizures.

Fortunately for me, a wise paramedic insisted that I was taken to UMASS Worcester as the hospital has a neurology department with surgeons. I had an MRI on Sunday morning thanks to the dedicated nursing staff that insisted I get in the queue ahead of scheduled patients. A large mass was found in my brain. It needed to be removed as the seizures were a warning sign that my brain was struggling. The difficulty breathing was believed to be a result of prior seizures that caused me to aspirate spit into my lungs were it progressed into pneumonia. I had to be healed from the pneumonia before the craniotomy could happen. I was admitted to the ICU.

I was 51 at the time working at as VP at a very large bank. I was the bread winner in the family with a good salary, a decent bonus, and full benefits including private health insurance. I did not skimp on the insurance plan I selected. I had no signs of disease beforehand and had completed a dual Masters in Finance and an MBA at Northeastern the summer before.

The neurosurgeon that I agreed to do my craniotomy with, had a difficult conversation with my husband because the after effects of the seizures and pneumonia left me weak. During the procedure, the surgeon could have guidance from equipment that would prevent damage to critical parts of my brain. The surgeon also knew most American insurance doesn’t cover the cost. My husband agreed to pay the extra $17,000 to make sure I could walk, talk, and be my old self eventually.

The pneumonia was healed with antibiotics and I was scheduled for the craniotomy on the Wednesday after the discovery of the mass. The surgery took all day. Apparently I sat up the first night post-surgery although I don’t remember it. By the next day I was able to get into a chair with help, sit, talk, and thankfully recognize my children. The surgery in my opinion is a true miracle of modern medicine. The surgeon got 92% of the mass out.

The private insurance company denied coverage for the $17,000 charge for technology that kept my brain function nearly intact. The denial was because it was determined not medically necessary to preserve brain function in a 51 year old working-mother. I guess alive is the standard of care.

The mass was analyzed and was determined to be brain cancer, a grade 2 astrocytoma. I needed radiation to destroy the remaining 8% of the cancer tumor. I was told at Mass General that traditional photon radiation would cause necrosis to brain tissue and that an alternative called proton would preserve more healthy brain tissue. I wanted to preserve my brain so I could be a mother, wife, and maybe even go back to work.

Insurance once again interfered in quality of life decisions. Proton therapy was denied as not proven to be superior to photon radiation. I was also shocked at the cost of chemo drugs in USA even with insurance. Private insurance is a scam and is inhumane as it doesn’t consider quality of life.

Medicare covers proton therapy yet private insurance is able to deny coverage in the USA. Why are prostates in America worth coverage in elderly men and healthy brain tissue in a middle-aged woman is not covered? A functioning elderly penis is more important in my culture that a functioning middle-aged parent. How can some Americans get access to better care via Medicare while working middle-aged people get ripped off by private insurance if they become sick?

I did get the proton radiation yet I had to leave the United States to get it and depend on my husband’s country. I am lucky to have married a good man that opened up his country’s healthcare when I needed it most and was willing to pay the $17,000 insurance did not cover.

I am more scared about American healthcare than bitter. I am grateful for the hard-working nurses and doctors that saved my life yet I fear they are just chess pieces in the game. What will happen to the future generations of Americans if healthcare isn’t made more equitable? Why aren’t the insurance companies required to cover the same standard of care as Medicare?

Beef Burritos

Enjoy these hearty beef burritos for dinner – ready in 30 minutes. Perfect if you love Mexican cuisine.

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Beef Burritos

Ingredients

  • 2 cups shredded cooked beef
  • 1 cup from one can (16 oz) Old El Paso™ Traditional Refried Beans
  • 8 flour tortillas (10 inch)
  • 2 cups shredded lettuce
  • 2 medium tomatoes, chopped (1 1/2 cups)
  • 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese (4 oz)

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Is China too far behind to catch up?

There has been a lot of persistence, perhaps in the belief that if one repeats something out loud enough times it will come true, that China is too far behind to be a contender in the semiconductor race. Since the U.S. ban on China purchasing certain essential materials for chip manufacturing in December 2020, in just the past year, China has experienced a 33% semiconductor growth output.

According to Bloomberg, China’s chip industry is the fastest growing anywhere else in the world, including the world leaders TSMC and Samsung, owning 19 out of the world’s 20 fastest growing chip industry firms over the past four quarters.

SMIC and Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd., the biggest contract chip makers, have kept their Shanghai-based plants operating at almost full capacity even as the worst Covid-19 outbreak since 2020 paralyzed factories and logistics across China, while other leading semiconductor industries, such as TSMC and Samsung, have been operating at 60% capacity or lower (due to the backlog in essential materials). SMIC recently reported a 67% surge in quarterly sales, outpacing far larger rivals GlobalFoundries Inc. and TSMC.

Despite the United States having already pushed the Netherlands to ban ASML Holding NV from selling China EUV technology (considered essential for manufacturing cutting edge semiconductors), at the time of writing this, it is now attempting to put further pressure on the Netherlands to ban even DUV systems (which predate EUV and are generations behind cutting edge lithography technology) to China in the U.S.’ desperate attempt to remove or at least contain China as a competitor. The U.S. has also attempted to put pressure on Japan’s Nikon (the only other DUV manufacturer at 5% market share) as well.

However, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said this past June he is against reconsidering trade relations with China and called for the EU to develop its own policies toward Beijing. China is the Netherlands’ third-biggest trade partner after Germany and Belgium. ASML opposes a ban on sales of DUV lithography equipment to Chinese customers because it is already a mature technology.

I suspect this sort of response will become the new normal for the United States if they continue along this line of thinking that everyone, and not just the U.S., should also be ready to shoot themselves in the kneecap or worse, in service of a self-sabotaing idea of U.S. hegemony.

You have to admit, it is a hard story to sell when China is increasingly one of the top trading partners of the majority of countries, while the U.S. seems to only ask that countries be willing to do frequent bloodlettings and be the first to poke their heads up from the trenches in reckless military posturing, all in service to the Anglo-American empire, who has consistently shown that they have not a care in the world for the future state of such countries.

And it gets much worse for American aspirations for global military supremacy…

China’s SMIC has had the capability of manufacturing 7nm chips since 2021, thought to be equivalent to Taiwan’s TSMC’s N7 (7nm chip) in yield optimization. [TSMC is capable of 5nm chip production and is expected to achieve 3nm chip production by the end of this year]. This puts China in the lead of the United States’ Intel, which has yet to achieve manufacturing capability of 7nm chips and hopes to reach capability by the end of 2022 or early 2023.

[Note: Presently, TSMC is banned from selling semiconductors to Huawei that have been made with U.S. technology. Huawei up until that point was the biggest client of TSMC.]

TSMC had already filed lawsuits in U.S. courts against SMIC for products made with TSMC trade secrets in 2003 and 2006, the latter which ended with a settlement. This was a rather controversial manoeuvre on the part of TSMC since the United States is not neutral ground and stands to benefit greatly by crippling what is now China’s no. 1 semiconductor producer. However, TSMC did decide to make a settlement with SMIC rather than attempting to go for the full jugular. Interestingly one of the terms of settlement was the transfer over of about 10% of SMIC’s stocks to TSMC.

There are no signs yet that TSMC is seeking another lawsuit against SMIC, however, even if they were successful, it were likely that China would be prevented from trading with unfriendly countries in 7nm chips but would continue its production and application within China and its trade to friendly countries. The U.S. is increasingly in no position to enforce anything further than this.

With the advent of SMIC’s N+1 and N+2 (7nm chips), China is now 4-6 years behind the leaders (TSMC, Samsung) in cutting edge semiconductor capability. HiSilicon and Huawei together will no doubt accomplish much with N+2 and are capable of massive output.

This is very big news.

Funny how western press seems to be rather silent on this massive breakthrough for China which has propelled it ever close to the front of the race. Instead, we seem to be told, with ever more vigor, that China’s economy is in the midst of a collapse…

China has accomplished what almost everyone thought to be actually impossible. Namely, it was thought an extremely difficult if not impossible task to produce 7nm chips with high yield optimization without EUV technology (to which China has been banned from using after the U.S. pressured the government of the Netherlands). China has also been banned from other thought-to-be key components and yet, have either found a way to bypass the requirement of such things or have successfully specialised in their production on their own.

In January 2022, legendary TSMC R&D Director Dr. Burn Lin mentioned in an interview that SMIC can even fabricate N5 equivalent chips with only multi-patterning no EUV necessary. (TSMC had also become quite good at making cutting edge semiconductors before the EUV technology had come out).

Thus, those simply accusing China of just “copying” TSMC N7 have no comprehension that to actually successfully manufacture TSMC N7 yield optimization level chips is akin to successfully building the Star Trek Enterprise and all its features with 60% of the parts and using technology thought to be about 20 years behind the requirement to build such a thing. You can understand why almost everyone thought this was an impossibility for China.

Instead of accusing China of merely copying, her critics should in fact acknowledge this impressive achievement for what it is. China is increasingly finding itself in the lead of the U.S., despite being the only country banned from full participation in this market.

I worked for a major rental car company that hurts to mention. Guy comes up, very very busy airport, late flights due to heavy storms, has no reservation, demands a luxury car. I ONLY had one in inventory, but we never rented it except to very rude customers.

That ONE Luxury car left in inventory had been rented when it was brand spanking new, and even a year later it had less than 500 miles on it. The very first person to rent it had driven 25 miles to a scenic spot, then killed himself on a hot summer day. Other than the smell of death, the car was pristine. It was cleaned, re-cleaned, even left with boxes of green apples, so only if it was left in the sun was the odor noticeable.

I offered new rude customer a mid sized sedan for the cheapest rate for the smallest cars. He refused because “don’t you know who I am”.

My manager comes over and takes over. Rude guy yells at my manager for a solid 15 minutes.

My manager finally says “I do have a new red Lincoln Town Car with only 500 miles on it that I’ll let you rent for the same rate as a subcompact car, but I warn you, the Town Car is haunted.

The guy smirks in satisfaction that he’d managed to bully his way into a luxury car fir the cheapest rate and says “ I don’t believe in ghosts.”

This was a cool summer night after thunderstorms, so everyone knew that car wouldn’t smell until the sun hits it the next day.

As he signed the contract you could see all 25 counter rental agents grinning ear to ear. We never rented that car until someone was so mean and nasty they deserved it. Think of Steve Martin’s character in “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles” at the car rental company.

We all knew that the next day rude guy would bring the smelly car back. We knew that managers would give gim a complimentary car rental. All managers knew that anyone with that car had been an exceptional jerk, and that only the most deserving asshats were ever rented that car.

We also knew that said jerk would have spend half a day going back to a congested International Airport, fighting traffic in a God awful smelly car. Said jerk would spend at least an hour yelling and screaming in front of other people and their kids. We all knew he’d get a free car for a few days, which didn’t matter.

Be nice to your flight attendants, be nice to your rental car representative, be nice to your hotel desk clerk. They ALL have ways to make your trip miserable without violating laws or company policies.

How the U.S. was the first to use the “Copy EXACTLY! Technology Transfer Method”

Before I go on to discuss where is the U.S. positioned in the semiconductor race, I thought it necessary to review a very important piece of history that everyone, but especially Americans, should know about in relation to their criticism of China.

In the 1980s Japan was the kingpin in cutting edge semiconductors production. This was especially the case relating to a specific type of memory chip DRAM.

Japan’s product was not only superior to that of what the United States was producing but it was also much cheaper, due to Japan’s investment in automation tools and processes. This resulted in much lower defect rates and higher yields.

It was also because Americans were dependent on NMOS for their DRAM technologies, whereas the Japanese had decided to go the more difficult and risky route with CMOS, that is, more expensive and harder to pull off. Rapid advances in lithography technology made the cost of CMOS far lower and became the industry standard.

American chipmakers were now the owners of outdated, expensive technology. And Japan became the kingpin of the semiconductor world.

In 1985 there was a recession in the computer market, with the microcomputer market seeing an 8% decline. This decline had massive reverberations down the supply chain. Prices collapsed by 60%.

Intel, DRAM pioneer, experienced the biggest crash in orders in over ten years, resulting in their exiting of the DRAM industry entirely. Leading U.S. semiconductor industries saw 14-17% decline in revenues. By 1986, the American DRAM industry had dropped from fourteen producers in 1970 to just three.

Complaints from certain quarters in the United States began criticizing Japan for “predatory” and “unfair” trade practices despite the recession in 1985 being a demand problem and not a competition problem. These complaints were primarily:

  1. That the Japanese were dumping semiconductors into the U.S. market at below fair market value.
  2. The Japanese were not providing foreign chip makers sufficient access to its domestic market

However, Japan’s semiconductor presence in the U.S. did not harm all American markets, IBM and AT&T greatly benefitted from these lower prices for DRAM.

Discussions began about implementing trade barriers, which would in turn make America an even more expensive place to make things, accelerating the electronic assembly off-shoring trend already underway.

In June 1985, Micron filed an anti-dumping complaint against Japanese exporters of 64K DRAM. Intel, AMD and National Semiconductor soon followed, doing the same for the EPROM market.

The Reagan Administration had filed a complaint of their own over 256K DRAM (64K DRAM was released by Japan in 1982 and 256K DRAM was released by Japan in 1984).

President Reagan, who was supposed to be all about free markets, in the spring of 1986 forced the U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Agreement with METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Japan).

Part of the conditionalities of this agreement were that the American semiconductor share in the Japanese market be increased to a target of 20-30% in five years, that every Japanese firm stop its “dumping” into the American market and the Americans wanted a separate monitoring body to help enforce all of this.

Many Japanese companies felt that their government had caved and had betrayed them. They had hoped for a simple fine. It was thought incredible, and rightly so, that their company trade data now needed to be submitted to a third party in order to be reviewed and judged in accordance to the demands of an American market competitor.

Not only this, but these Japanese companies were being asked to trade with American companies, regardless of whether the American product was the most superior or best priced from its competitors, to meet this U.S. demand for a 20-30% Japanese market share.

No surprise here, the Japanese companies refused to do this and METI had no way of forcing them to do so.

President Reagan responded by imposing a 100% tariff on $300 million worth of Japanese goods in April 1987. Combined with the 1985 Plaza Agreement which revalued the Japanese Yen the U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Agreement gave the U.S. memory market the extra boost it needed.

Of course, that boost was akin to pushing Japan’s head underwater for several minutes while a race was underway, however, rather embarrassingly, Japan would still maintain a lead.

The U.S. was in no position to beat the Japanese in its domination of the semiconductor industry. There was no choice but to…copy Japanese technology, in the name of American supremacy that is.

It appears no country has the right to earn its way to the top other than the U.S. in a world we are told benefits the smartest, most innovative and fastest growing industries. Apparently everyone at the end of the day works for a global boss, who reserves the right to determine your company’s fate and the rules are changed accordingly to what suits this global boss’ needs case by case, the world markets be damned.

Intel would be the first to implement vast copying of Japanese semiconductor technology in order to stay in the competition. Craig Barrett CEO (1998-2005) and Chairman (1968-2009) of Intel was the first to implement “Copy EXACTLY! Technology Transfer Method.” I think the title gives you a good enough idea of what that entails.

Again, if we have learned anything from the generous lessons bestowed on us by the great arbiter, the United States, it is to “Do as I Say, Not as I Do.”

Apparently copying is only an infringement on patents when other countries do it. I guess this is sort of similar to the American lesson that biological research facilities only turn into dangerous bio labs threatening world security when in the possession of the Russians, when in the possession of the Americans it is simply called biological research and entomology (the study of insects).

Yields at American fabs (semiconductor fabrication plant, also know as foundry), improved by 60% in 1986 to 84% in 1991. Over the same time the Japanese had gone from 75% in 1986 to 93% in 1991, decreasing the gap by 6% in the span of five years between the two competitors.

In 1984 the U.S. passed the National Cooperative Research Act, which among other things allowed for the revising of laws to permit partnerships between national research institutes and private companies and that these private companies could attain the exclusive rights of the generated research for five years or even longer.

This initiative was to partially mimic what the Japanese had done in terms of collaboration between companies and R&D, however, whatever came out of such partnerships were owned by the Japanese government. In the case of the United States, publicly funded research was to be the property of private companies who could choose to use whatever they learned from such research for their sole benefit or to even bury it if it was thought to be not “profitable” in accordance with their aims, whatever that might be.

In 1987, fourteen American semiconductor companies along with DARPA joined together to found SEMATECH. SEMATECH became the facilitator of relationships within the American semiconductor industry. DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.

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In case the chilling reality of this has not fully sunk in, what the formation of SEMATECH along with the National Cooperative Research Act meant, was that the U.S. Department of Defense was the sole proprietor of R&D research in practically ALL fields of science and engineering. In other words, the U.S. Department of Defense would be the sole conduit at the core deciding where funding goes, which projects should be prioritised and downgraded, and which projects should be killed in their cradle never to be talked about again with threat on your life.

For those who take issue in all advancement of technology because they are fearful that we are heading towards such dystopic visions as Terminator, the Matrix, or Bladerunner, this is not because this is what humans “naturally” do, it is not even fair nor accurate to say that this is what all countries will inevitably do. It is namely what a country will do if the military industrial complex is its sole reason for existing on this Earth. And it will feed this monster at the cost of the welfare and livelihood of its actual people, as we see so clearly occurring specifically within the United States.

And yes, this is specifically striking in the United States, especially since the 2007-2008 financial crisis, to which the U.S. has yet to do anything differently in terms of how it runs its finances, despite countless Americans losing their homes and more while the big banks have been repeatedly bailed out with taxpayer money.

Today, the U.S. continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on its military industrial complex and leaves the ever-growing poverty, suicide and drug abuse unaddressed while it loudly blares its woke priorities as to how to speak in such a way that no person could possibly be emotionally offended and in the process render anything you have to say entirely irrelevant.

People should wake up and realise that they are not mad because of this or that label, it is because your future was stolen from you, and it was done by the hand of your very own government.

Your oppression in situated in your lack of opportunity, in your lack of real choice for a better future. In today’s western world you are free to choose whatever avatar you like but you are not free to make any changes to the status quo that is governed by the military industrial complex, which keeps the American people in ever-increasing poverty and destroys entire nations. What sort of freedom is that?

This is the reason why no decent scientist can hope to accomplish great benefits for their society with any research they conduct in the United States. It is all about business at the end of the day, and there is no bigger business than the military business in the United States, except perhaps “biological research” which is drawing a close second, and technically speaking figures into the military business…

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Note that in the case of China in the above graph, this is an estimate.

In the case of China what we see is the very opposite to what is occurring in the United States. As the World Bank and BBC attest, surprise surprise, China is doing what they say they are doing in addressing poverty levels, you can read about it on the BBC news site. According to the World Bank, which draws a higher poverty line for upper-middle income countries, to reflect the economic conditions, China is now considered an upper-middle-income country according to the World Bank.

Therefore, China is able to not only compete with the American arms race (in self-defence to the clear war escalation), but it is also able to compete in other areas of more useful endeavours as well as raising its own people out of poverty.

China is not subservient to a military industrial complex and using the lazy logic that if it happened to the U.S. it will happen to China, is to not only disregard what is actually going on in China today but it is also to disregard the cultural orientation of its country and its people.

Now back to our story.

Intel, which would exit out of DRAM in 1985 would turn their focus on logic chips, which they are now a world leader in.

In 1991, the Japanese real estate bubble burst. The real estate bubble had inflated due to the Yen’s appreciation, triggered by the 1985 Plaza Accord.

In 1983 Samsung received a technology transfer from Micron (the company that launched the complaint suit against Japan that started this whole thing off) for 64K DRAM.

To the credit of Samsung, they utilised this technology transfer to maximum use and along with LG and Hyundai were able to produce the 4M DRAM, with their product hitting the market just 6 months after the Japanese.

Micron was one of the few American DRAM producers to have survived the 80s and had made adjustments making production very cheap for their lower-end DRAM chips.

While Samsung was beginning to compete for the lead in cutting edge DRAM technology with the Japanese, Micron in a pincer move flooded the Japanese markets with half-a-generation behind DRAM chips at a cost of $4 when Japan was selling them at $6.

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Japan’s semiconductor market was hit from the top by Samsung with their high-end products and at the bottom by Micron with their low-end products, known as the Micron Shock. The Micron Shock set into motion the fall of the Japanese semiconductor manufacturing industry.

128M DRAM prices collapsed by 50% in a single year. Fujitsu exited the DRAM market in 1998. Japanese companies Hitachi and NEC merged their operations together to create Elpida in 1999. They later took over Mitsubishi’s DRAM division in 2002. Elpida was later acquired by none other than….Micron Technology.

Japan’s semiconductor industry is still strong but they are much smaller players in the world market and no longer have a capability of developing cutting edge semiconductors. Companies such as TSMC, Samsung, SMIC, and Intel are much further in the lead. (for more on this story to which I largely drew from refer to Asianometry).

Today, the United States has reopened its arms to Japan in what is promised to be a loving embrace this time around, Japan will open an R&D center for next-generation 2nm chips by year-end under a partnership with the U.S., part of their efforts to establish secure chip supply chains amid tensions around industry leader Taiwan.

Perhaps Japan truly believes it will really be different this time around.

Best Homemade Giardiniera (Hot or Mild)

Not just for hot dogs and muffuletta sandwiches, add this giardinera to your burgers, nachos, pizzas, pasta salads and anything else your heart desires! This homemade giardiniera recipe is simply the best and once you’ve tried it you’ll be HOOKED for life!

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How To Make Giardiniera

Giardiniera, pronounced “jar-din-air-ah”, is one condiment you don’t want to be without.  And once you’ve tried it you’ll understand why.

Originating in Italy, these pickled vegetables were introduced to Chicago in the late 19th century by Italian immigrants and took their place as arguably the city’s most popular condiment.  It’s used on practically everything!  You name it, giardiniera is just what you need to bring your hot dogs, burgers, sandwiches, nachos, antipasto platters and pasta salads to life.  In Chicago you’ll even commonly find it served on pizzas and, of course, no Italian beef sandwich is complete without it.

Have you been to New Orleans?  Giardiniera is the magical ingredient in those mouthwatering muffuletta sandwiches.

In short, giardiniera is the ultimate pickled vegetable relish!

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The popularity of giardiniera has continued to explode in Chicago with more than a million pounds of it being sold annually. Still it remains relatively unknown outside of the Windy City except among those with strong Italian roots.

So if you’ve never heard of or tried it before, now is your chance to make some absolutely delectable homemade giardiniera that will bring new life and flavor to your favorite foods!

I’m also including recipes for canning giardiniera so you can store it long-term to enjoy all year round.

You can chop the veggies however large or small you prefer. In Italy the vegetables are usually left in fairly large pieces and that way it’s also more versatile. Left in larger pieces you have the flexibility of serving the giardiniera with your charctuerie/antipasto platters and when you want to use it for sandwiches, hot dogs, pasta salads, etc, you can simply diced up the finished giardiniera into smaller chunks.

But left large or diced small, you are simply going to LOVE this giardiniera!

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Let’s get started!

Chop up the veggies and place them in a large non-reactive pot or bowl.

If you’re wondering how to get the crinkle-cut carrots, use a mandolin slicer that has that ability.

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Pour 1/4 cup kosher salt over the vegetables.

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Pour enough water over the vegetables to cover them.

Let them soak in the salt water for at least 6 hours or overnight. This step is critical for drawing out excess water from the vegetables which would otherwise dilute the vinegar brine and lead to spoilage.

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To prepare the jars, place the spices into each of the jars.

I like to make some batches hot and some mild. Do that by using or omitting red chili flakes. For a true Chicago-style giardiniera you’ll want to make it hot.

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Thoroughly rinse and drain the vegetables before dividing them up between the jars. Pack the vegetables in as tightly as you can.

Place the garlic each jar.

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Now we’re making a vinegar solution to pickle the vegetables.

To play it safe Cooperative Extension Service sources recommend a 1:1 ratio of vinegar to water. Some other recipes may have a lighter vinegar brine but if you’re planning on storing your giardiniera for more than 2 weeks, we recommend this ratio to create enough acidity to prevent the risk of unwanted bacteria.

Bring the water, vinegar and salt to a boil.

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Pour the boiling brine over the vegetables leaving a little more than 1/2 inch headspace from the top.

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Pour the olive oil over the top.

Wipe the rims with a wet paper towel and seal the jars.

If you plan on using the giardiniera within two weeks let the jars sit at room temperature for a day or two and then transfer them to the fridge.

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If you’re canning the giardiniera for long-term storage, seal the jars with the lids and rims and prepare a boiling water bath.  Boil the jars for 10 minutes.  Carefully remove the jars and let them sit undisturbed for 24 hours before moving them.

Adjustments for high altitudes:

  • At 1,001 to 6,000 feet (305 to 1,829 meters) above sea level: increase processing time by 5 minutes.
  • Above 6,000 feet (1,829 meters) above sea level: increase processing time by 10 minutes.

If processed in the water bath, the giardiniera is best consumed within 6 months but will keep for at least a year.

**NOTE:  If you’re canning the jars for long-term storage it is critical to be sure you thoroughly wipe the rims of the jars to ensure no oil residue is on them, otherwise they will not seal properly.  Alternatively, you can omit the oil during canning and add it later to your giardiniera when you open the jar.

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Ingredients

  • 1/2 head cauliflower, chopped into small florets
  • 10 ribs celery , diced
  • 5 carrots , diced
  • 2 large red bell peppers , seeded and chopped
  • 1 cup sliced green pitted olives
  • 4 serrano peppers (or more according to heat preference) , sliced
  • Spices/Ingredients for EACH pint jar:
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds
  • 1/4 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds
  • 1/4 teaspoon fennel seeds
  • 1/4 teaspoon black peppercorns
  • 1/4 teaspoon red chili flakes (optional, for hot giardiniera)
  • 1/8 teaspoon celery seeds
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 clove garlic, cut in half
  • 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
  • For the Brine:
  • 4 cups white wine vinegar
  • 4 cups water
  • 2 tablespoons kosher salt

Instructions

  • Place the chopped veggies a large non-reactive pot or bowl. Pour 1/4 cup kosher salt over the vegetables and enough water to cover them. Let the vegetables soak in the salt water for at least 6 hours or overnight.
  • To prepare the jars, place the spices into each of the jars, reserving the garlic and olive oil until after the brine is added. (I like to make some jars hot and some mild by adding/omitting the red chili flakes).
  • Thoroughly rinse and drain the vegetables before dividing them up between the jars. Pack the vegetables in as tightly as you can. Place a clove of garlic (cut in half) in each jar.
  • To make the brine: Bring the water, vinegar and salt to a boil. Pour the boiling brine over the vegetables leaving a little more than 1/2 inch headspace from the top. Pour a tablespoon of olive oil over the top in each jar. Thoroughly wipe the rims with a wet paper towel, ensuring no oil or other residue is on them, and seal the jars.
  • If you plan on using the giardiniera within two weeks let the jars sit at room temperature for a day or two and then transfer them to the fridge. The flavor only gets better with time so wait at least 2-3 days before eating it. Will keep refrigerated for 2 weeks.
  • If you’re canning the giardiniera for long-term storage, seal the jars with the lids and rims and prepare a boiling water bath. Boil the jars for 10 minutes. Carefully remove the jars and let them sit undisturbed for 24 hours before moving them.

    If processed in the water bath, the giardiniera is best consumed within 6 months but will keep for at least a year.

    **IMPORTANT NOTE:  If you’re canning the jars for long-term storage it is critical to be sure you thoroughly wipe the rims of the jars to ensure no oil residue is on them, otherwise they will not seal properly.  Alternatively, you can omit the oil during canning and add it later to your giardiniera when you open the jar.

Common Prosperity

The overriding ideological shift coming from Beijing – of Common Prosperity and “houses are for living in, not speculation” – is intact
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From HERE

Oh they HATE it!
For the last year, all I have heard from China pundits is that its property market will eventually be saved. They have been non-stop wrong.

China’s property market has not bottomed. 

Authorities have been slow to react and did little when they moved. 

The overriding ideological shift coming from Beijing – of Common Prosperity and “houses are for living in, not speculation” – is intact. 

Even Worse, the underlying driver of the policy shift, deteriorating demographics, has only fallen away faster than expected.

Some months ago I declared that we are past the tipping point in this market adjustment. By that, I meant it was now self-fulfilling. Expectations and psychology are broken. Neither buyers nor developers have any desire to leverage up into an asset class that is being sat on by Beijing forever more, even if it is fed short-term stimulus.
Chua responds…
Reform always come with pain, initial stage of anti corruption also affect the economy, but in the long run, the pain is transitional and worth it. 

The time will come when:

1) whereone in China with a job will not be homeless 

2) Low property and rental cost will ensure affordability across the nation

3) with such attractive factors of doing business across China, the country will stay super competitive in retaining and attracting manufacturing and business investments both domestically and internationally 

4) when cost of living stress is under control, families will have the ability to have more children 

5) instead of spending most of the money on rent and mortgage repayment, the average Chinese population will have extra money to spend on everything else, the pillar of economy based on consumption will enhance, wealth will be more equally spread across the country with many mum and dad businesses benefited from 1.4b consumers spreading across the country. 

6) the crusader capitalists won't allow such thing to happen in their country as they want to suck in all the money from every individuals. 

Cheers 

Chua 

China will collapse because they care too much about their people!

They should be like America… Feed The Greed!

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American homeless in San Francisco. Most are working, but cannot afford a place to live.

Imagine you live in 19th century St. Petersburg. You are of noble birth, and you have a swanky townhouse, maybe even a baroque palace. You have a summer estate, where your serfs toil, within a couple of hours’ carriage ride from the capital. You go to all the best parties. You go to the dramatic theater every Tuesday and Thursday, and to the opera on Fridays. You’re friends with all the best people. Life is good.

But one day, you make an improvident joke in public, which gets written down and circulated, and the Tsar’s secret police has decided to exile you to Siberia. What does that mean?

Well, let’s say you’re dispatched to the classic destination of Beryozovo, where Prince Menshikov (and his daughters) died in exile in 1729.

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Alexander Menshikov in exile

Beryozovo is located at a distance of almost 2500 km (1550 miles) east-northeast of the capital. Your carriage ride, which you will undergo in the company of a rude guard with halitosis and smelly feet, will take weeks.

Every little comfort, every item you intend to take with you will require official permission. The Tsar’s police will actually go through your luggage, item by item, telling you what you can and can’t take with you. You will probably be allowed to pack just a couple of books, predominantly of a religious nature — a Bible, Lives of Saints, a psalter — that’s about it. You will be allowed to bring a few religious articles you need for worship, some clothes and a few personal items. A roll pillow, maybe? Beyond that, an official permission is unlikely to be forthcoming.

You will set out likely in late summer or early fall, when the mosquitoes have subsided, but the roads are still relatively dry (being dry is a luxury in Siberia, as you will soon learn).

One often overlooked aspect of Siberian exile is the psychological torture, which the Tsarist regime perfected into an art form. Your journey will be lonely. A hundred miles or so east of St. Petersburg, you will be entering the poorest, least developed part of Russia. You will spend your journey in a tiny, unheated carriage, in the company of an absolutely odious person, who will make your life a living hell. That person was likely assigned to accompany you to Siberia as a form of punishment for some transgression, and he will transfer all his anger and resentment onto you. He will pick his nose. He will take off his boots and rewrap his feet in the carriage. He will belch. Weeks, and weeks, and weeks, and weeks of this. No, you will not grow fond of this fellow, nor he of you.

Eventually, the road will come to a crude stone stele, leaning and in danger of falling over, where your guard will invite you to get out. This stele marks the border between Russia proper and Siberia. Prisoners heading to Siberia were routinely invited to stop at that spot and to bow towards Russia and pray. In case you’re confused about this, your guard will explain that there is a good chance this is the last time you’ll lay eyes on Russia, and so you should make your good-byes now.

As you head deeper into Siberia via an endless dirt road…

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your carriage will get stuck in the mud with increasing frequency. You will have to get out and walk through unimaginable muck, sometimes hip-high. Sometimes you will have to assist in pushing the carriage. You will get dirty. Within a week, every single item of clothing you possess will be covered in filth. Obviously, there is no laundry en route.

There will be fewer and fewer conveniences along the road. You will stay in awful, dingy, unheated rooms, sleep in broken beds on straw mattresses covered (if you are lucky) with dank and rotten bedding. You will eat hardtack, day-old cabbage soup and mushy buckwheat with grease.

Eventually, you will get to your destination — a town of rough-hewn, half-sunken wooden houses, where the mud in the main thoroughfare comes up slightly below the knee in the summer, and slightly above the knee in the winter. Your dwelling will look something like this:

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(Assuming you got the government’s permission for windows — yes, you had to have permission for those.) Except, the windows in your izba won’t have glass in them — they will be covered with calf’s skin, burlap or rags. Window glass is a high-level luxury in Siberia at this time, and you will almost certainly not be allowed to have it. Your izba will have an open hearth, which will fill the place with smoke — in Russian, this is called “black heating”. To have “white” heating, you would need official permission, and to get skilled artisans to come build you a proper petch with all the necessary guts.

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Russian petch with “black” heating, meaning smoke billows into the room.

Most likely, though, the government won’t authorize you to get a smokeless heating system, at least not right away. They’ll want you to suffer some, and won’t relent until “black heating” has done a number on your lungs. If you didn’t have consumption before, you’ll probably develop it. If you already had consumption (which was not unusual for the swampy St. Petersburg climate), it will get significantly worse. You’ll have blepharitis.

Even if you still have access to your family’s money, and can bribe your way into having conveniences, even luxuries — hell, Decembrists built their own wooden Siberian Paris, complete with a club — some things are just hardwired into the whole Siberian exile experience. Imagine a most remote, dusty town — only without the Internet, radio, television or most books. Food is seasonal, and awful. You will lose teeth, and you will have to consume deer blood or raw liver to avoid scurvy. The population is mostly soldiers, laborers, peasants and criminals, predominantly illiterate. Fully 50% of them, if not more, have syphilis. Nearly 100% of them are alcoholics. The two most sophisticated town denizens are a hard-drinking “doctor”, who is probably just a barber who calls himself doctor, and an equally hard-drinking priest, who is serving out his own punishment. The “doctor” is the only medic for hundreds of miles. Before every surgery or other procedure, he must imbibe at least 4 ounces of vodka; this is the only way he can stop his hands shaking long enough to perform an amputation. The only other medical professional in town is an illiterate medicine woman – slash – midwife who knows local herbs, mushrooms and berries. She can help you if you have a mild case of the runs, but not if it’s anything more serious than that.

You will be under constant surveillance by an alcoholic gendarme, who will rifle through your things every few days. All your letters will be opened, read and copied before you get them. Your guards will write regular reports to St. Petersburg, so you would be well-advised to be on your very best behavior.

There is really nothing to do. You have to devise your own entertainment — write your memoirs (which will, of course, be scrutinized), play with local children, learn gardening, pray.

The climate is insane. It’s brutally cold in the winter, but in the summer, it’s practically the Guatemalan jungle, with sweltering tropical heat, 100% humidity and merciless swarms of mosquitoes and midges that just devoir you alive, burrow into the corners of your eyes, take up residence in your ears. When this radical changeover occurs in the spring, massive flows of water on those great Siberian rivers push up against giant ice plugs further up north, in the Arctic, leading to stupendous flooding every spring. There is water everywhere, including your living room, followed by impassable oceans of mud (everywhere, including your living room). There isn’t a single minute of your existence when you aren’t uncomfortable — not a moment when you aren’t freezing cold, or sweating in the summer heat, or being swarmed by insects, or having itchy eyes and migraines from the smoke in your izba.

Hopefully, your family back in the capital is advocating for you and bribing court officials as needed. Perhaps you will eventually be allowed to move to a bigger town, or slightly closer to Russia. If you are lucky, in a few years you may be permitted to transfer to your baronial estate and remain there under house arrest. If you are super-lucky — like, if there is an actual regime change — you may be allowed back in the capital.

Unless you die first.

Is the U.S. too far behind to catch up?

Intel was scheduled to have its 7nm chips in production by 2021, instead one year later, Intel has yet to develop the capability of 7nm chip production which they hope to achieve by the end of 2022 or early 2023.

However, despite China having figured this all out in 2021, we are still supposed to believe that China is hopelessly behind the U.S. in the semiconductor race. Back in July 2021, Intel is still making big announcements of their comeback, now moved back to the year 2025

2025 is something that is almost lightyears away in the semiconductor R&D. Who knows what TSMC, Samsung and SMIC will have achieved by then, there may even be a new form of technology to replace the entire present way of doing things. Perhaps the U.S. is used to making these predictions assuming everyone else will remain stationary? Someone should tell them and their investors that this is no longer 1985.

With this set back in mind that things tend not to run on schedule in the semiconductor business, is it a feasible prospect of the United States to increase its onshore manufacturing capabilities so that it can control much more of the supply chain within its domestic market?

The short answer is no. But don’t take it from me, take it from Morris Chang, an elder statesman of the semiconductor industry who founded and formerly chaired TSMC, who put this smack of reality most bluntly in remarks addressed to the U.S. as reported by NIKKEI Asia:

“If you want to re-establish a complete semiconductor supply chain in the U.S., you will not find it as a possible task,” he said at an industry forum last year. “Even after you spend hundreds of billions of dollars, you will still find the supply chain to be incomplete, and you will find that it will be very high cost, much higher cost than what you currently have.”

Despite these words of advice, amidst what I think can be fairly called an economic recession if not depression, the United States has just recently passed the $52 billion CHIPS Act, with $39 billion planned to be spent domestically, to namely benefit, you guessed it, the military industrial complex.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned in a recent interview with CNBC while the CHIPS Act was being considered by Congress:

“If you allow yourself to think about a scenario where the United States no longer had access to the chips currently being made in Taiwan, it’s a scary scenario…It’s a deep and immediate recession. It’s an inability to protect ourselves by making military equipment. We need to make this in America.”

Notice the only concern she names by name? The military industrial complex. At some point Americans need to ask themselves, what is the point of all of this military equipment if the American people’s livelihood is not economically secure, in violation to the promise of freedom from want as one of the four core American freedoms. How is the American government providing the American people security if they do not even have enough food to eat and have no homes to live in but increasingly ghettofied communities living like an ant colony. Or Elon Musk’s ridiculous house box. They are literally selling boxes for homes as if this is some sort of luxury product.

Why is it ok for Americans to increasingly have no access to the most basic of basic needs while hundreds of billions of dollars are poured into Department of Defense Frankenstein projects?

In case you haven’t noticed, the Cold War has been going on for 76 years now. When has the military industrial complex ever been justified and not in fact based on conscious lies? President Eisenhower departed his office actually acknowledging that he left a monster growing in the basement and had no idea how to get rid of it in his farewell address:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex… The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”

Honestly, he might as well have gotten into a helicopter and left the country waving like Nixon did while the Americans all stared dumbstruck. But somehow we largely regard that speech as if it were something respectable. Let us call a spade for what it is. And what happened to the next President who was elected to address the matter? His brains were splattered onto the pavement in broad daylight on live television.

Anyway, I digress, back to the matter of American supremacy…

The U.S. is confident that it can once again unleash its jungle roar of supremacy with the help of TSMC. TSMC is scheduled to building fabs (semiconductor fabrication plants) in the U.S. and Japan.

Intel doesn’t expect its new fabs in Ohio to begin production until 2025. Intel is also building two new factories in Arizona expected to go online in 2024. That’s when TSMC and Samsung also plan to open new fabs in Texas and Arizona, respectively. What this means is essentially that they have agreed to share some of their trade secrets with the U.S.

This is likely not being done voluntarily, without some very scary threats.

As NIKKEI Asia reported Taiwan’s government is keenly aware that if TSMC were to move production sites it could weaken the island’s security position, analysts say. For many analysts, those factories and their role in the global economy act as an insurance policy for the island.

“The Taiwanese government will definitely hope TSMC keeps its most cutting-edge factories all in Taiwan,” said Su Tzu-yun, director of the Institute for National Defense Security Research in Taipei. “That could make Taiwan a safer place. No one would want to damage TSMC’s advanced chip production capacities, which are the hearts of many electronic devices…We don’t think the tension and competition between the U.S. and China will end any time soon…As a crucial supplier, TSMC may still face a tough issue later – choosing sides.”

TSMC is thus stuck in a very tight spot right now. What Taipei should also understand is that Taiwan is expendable to the United States, but it is not expendable to China. Rather, Taiwan is actually essential for China’s security. Taiwan needs to realise that words are words but actions are another thing. Independence for Taiwan is not a reality. It is not an economic reality. And it is not a political reality (not to mention cultural reality).

The United States will not stop until Taiwan becomes its own military base (added to the list of South Korea and Japan) and becomes an upholder to U.S. hegemony in the area, which pretty much runs counter to every country’s interest in South-East Asia. Or Taiwan can return to China and receive protection from America’s war mongering. China will do this one way or another, that is, defend their land against a U.S. invasion, but it would be nice if Taiwan had its head together if such a stand-off were to occur.

In case you have not been informed, Taiwan is internationally recognised, including by the United States as part of China. China has enough missiles to defend Taiwan without any issue. For more on China’s military capability refer to ex-Marine Brian Berletic’s New Atlas.

Thus, though Intel has high ambitions to somehow be in the lead in 2025 despite only being thrown scraps from the alley presently, the elephant in the room here is that the U.S. seems to have lost any ability to actually be an innovator in the field. The only thing keeping them in the game right now as a leading cutting edge semiconductor manufacturer is their use of intimidation and threat of force.

The writing is on the wall, as Russia and China gain in economic and military supremacy, South Korea and Taiwan will be free to conduct their business as they choose and not be obligated to constantly give the U.S. favors under uncomfortably tense situations threatening the very sovereignty of these companies let alone countries.

Another rather large factor to the U.S.’ miscalculation in their strive for supremacy is the matter of a little mineral called Fluorite.

Fluoropolymers are a key material for semiconductor production. Fluoropolymers are processed from fluorspar, also known as fluorite, a mineral of which China controls nearly 60% of the global production output, according to data from market research company IndexBox. China has long identified fluorspar as a strategic resource and back in the late 1990s limited exports due to its importance to industries from agriculture, electronics and pharmaceuticals to aviation, space and defense.

In a supply chain review paper published by the White House in 2021, the U.S. flagged the risks of critical materials subject to foreign domination and identified fluorspar as one in a list of “shortfall strategic and critical materials.”

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An independent commission established by Congress recently concluded: “If a potential adversary bests the United States in semiconductors over the long term or suddenly cuts off U.S. access to cutting-edge chips entirely, it could gain the upper hand in every domain of warfare.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reportsChina’s leaders have set a goal to build a ‘fully modern’ military by 2027 based on ‘informatization,’ ‘intelligentization,’ and ‘mechanization,’ investing heavily in technical areas which support such an approach, such as AI, quantum computing, hypersonics, and microelectronics.”

As the chair and vice chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) put it in 2021, “We do not want to overstate the precariousness of our position, but given that the vast majority of cutting-edge chips are produced at a single plant separated by just 110 miles of water from our principal strategic competitor, we must re-evaluate the meaning of supply chain resilience and security.”

U.S. dependency on Taiwanese production of chips for defense systems extends beyond AI. TSMC makes semiconductors used in F-35 fighters and a wide range of “military-grade” devices used by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

Interestingly, the CSIS report acknowledges that advances in semiconductor technology are primarily driven by the development of devices for commercial use.

Which is what China is exactly focusing on right now. Recall China was the number one world supplier of semiconductors for commercial use with 75% of all semiconductor production coming out of East Asia.

What China has done in fact is, to quote Pascal Coppens, set up an ecosystem in Shenzhen that will allow for top industrial focus on all levels of the semiconductor production line for commercial use, while SMIC, HUAWEI, and HiSilicon focus on the cutting edge semiconductor technology. As Pascal Coppens makes the point, China’s semiconductor ecosystem is in fact a form of decentralization, while the United States is approaching the semiconductor race from an approach of centralization (around the military industrial complex).

TSMC is bottlenecked due to the reasons already discussed above. TSMC is operating at around 60% capacity and to achieve 80% capacity would be considered an incredible achievement. China has the ability to correct the semiconductor shortage that is bankrupting western companies right now, including the automobile industry. And 90% of the chips needed to make the smart world will have to come from China. Recall, TSMC owns 10% of SMIC stocks, if SMIC is able to meet these demands, TSMC stands to benefit greatly, much above what they are capable of producing as output.

And everyone knows, there is no greater romance than a forbidden romance.


Button

I have a very odd 4 year old black cat called Button, he was the runt of a litter and I had intended to keep just 1 kitty but in the end only 2 lived so I kept both. He was so tiny for months but he almost caught up.

Anyway that’s not an answer is it.

Odd: he has done several odd things and still does, but 2 of the most clever/amusing things he does are 1) He hates rain, he also has never peed in the house. I was in the kitchen doing something and I saw Button had climbed into the sink, then we heard the trickle and saw the “peeing” stance, I was so shocked and both me and my mate stood mouth agape as he peed and jumped down and back to the sofa. I have had at least 30 cats over my lifetime and I have never witnessed this happen without it being trained (as much as one can train a cat). I so wish I’d had my phone on me but no.

His 2nd display of odd behaviour regards the cat flap.

All my cats use it, its operated by their chips, however when a cat comes IN the flap often doesn’t close properly, maybe an inch open so no biggie to me. Button however sees it as the most heinous crime and promptly walks over to the flap and closes it with one paw, satisfied, he then returns to my side and he does this EVERY timethe flap doesn’t close properly.

Now tell me that aint weird.

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Biden’s AMD and NVIDIA chip export ban just the start as White House set to attack China’s IC capability more aggressively

An indulgence in the unrelenting sanctions of the rest of the world. This article is on China. 

The US is now Shutting oneself out of the world biggest chip market, which happens to be China. Who are the US companies going to sell to now? Zambia, Nigeria, Brazil, France? How are their electronics industries?

Instead, this provides the Chinese chip industry with a wide-open opportunity.

It can now exclusively enjoy the $300b worth of annual chip import market among themselves and growth bigger and stronger. 

Thank you Biden. 
The White House is preparing to officialize the export ban of strategic processors and chip-making tools to China. The Commerce Department will soon publish a list codifying the restrictions on NVIDIA, and AMD AI processor as well as equipment for crafting sub-14nm processors.
Daniel Zlatev, 09/12/2022
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It looks like the White House is gearing to announce sweeping new processor chip-making tool export ban restrictions, claim insiders privy to the Department of Commerce plans.

After banning NVIDIA and AMD’s latest AI processor shipments to China, now the Commerce Department is set to expand the blacklist to include the actual equipment needed to produce sub-14nm chips…

Article HERE

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It won’t make much difference. China is already producing 7nm chips, as well s the home-grown equipment to make them.

The world’s first 6S50ME-B electronically controlled marine diesel engine

The world’s first 6S50ME-B electronically controlled marine diesel engine is made in China. The main engine has a bore of 500 mm and a single-cylinder power of 1,660 kW for a total power of 9,960 kW. Due to the adoption of the latest electronic control technology, the entire operation is controlled by a computer, with the best operating parameters, convenient and reliable control, and remote control and 24-hour unattended in the engine room. It meets the latest Nox emission standards from the International Maritime Organization (IMO). 1 horsepower / hour fuel consumption can reach the highest level of 170 grams. Compared with the other main engines of the same power, only in fuel costs, this main engine will save more than 1 million US dollars in fuel costs during the entire life cycle.

As a home flight sim enthusiast with thousands of hours in X-Plane and Microsoft Fight Simulator, I decided to give the real thing a try at the beginning of this year, flying a 1976 Cessna Skyhawk M out of a small non-towered field. I sat in the left seat with the right seat occupied by my flight instructor, a former Navy F-18 pilot and airline 737 captain who had eighteen-thousand flight hours of experience. The panel looked like this. Although it was an earlier model Skyhawk versus the newer versions in the sim, everything was immediately recognizable:

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A giddiness washed over me as I inspected the real versions of the simulated gauges. When we did the pre-startup checklist, it was the same as I’d done in the sim and I could almost execute it from memory. I was fairly certain I could have started the aircraft on my own with no instruction. The familiarity swelled my confidence. I’ve got this.

The first nibble at my confidence occurred shortly after I set my feet on the rudder pedals and started to taxi. Although I’d used rudder pedals in the sim before, the real pedals not only had resistance but also lag. They were physically linked to the Skyhawk’s nose wheel and, like a shopping cart’s wheels, when the wheel direction was not in line with the plane’s direction you needed to nudge it back to where you wanted. Taxiways have a yellow centerline for the nose wheel. Despite my best attempts, I painted a drunken s-shaped curve back-and-forth around that centerline. At one point, my instructor needed to take the controls to reset us.

Rolling out on the runway and taking off was very easy. As the ground fell away and the blue sky filled the cockpit windows, my left hand on the yoke and right on the throttle, a childish grin dominated my face. I am flying. I am really doing it.

Flying itself isn’t inherently difficult. The Skyhawk has stability designed into it and most of the time if you take your hands off the controls and literally do nothing it will tend to sort itself out. I found turns felt very much like the sim and in no time we were zipping around the practice area doing basic maneuvers. My confidence meter slowly ticked back up. When the instructor said, “Do you want to do some more maneuvers or head back to the field and try some landings?” I grinned. This is it! This is what I’ve practiced for. “Oh,” I chimed, “head back to the field and try some landings.”

So, here we were flying in the downwind with the field halfway up the left strut – just like in the sim – coming abeam the numbers, throttle reducing, my right hand pushing down a notch of flaps, the instructor’s voice guiding an endless stream of speed and control nudges, the horizon rotating right as the plane rolled left into the base leg. As I rolled out, the field stabilized over my left shoulder, the white runway numbers beckoning. Yes! We were going to do it. I was going to do it.

What I would learn much later on, after dozens of landings, is that things happen very quickly during the final phases of landing, and the difference between being able to land versus doing a go-around may be a second of inattention or an inch too much of back pressure during the flare. During the downwind to base turn, for example, simply letting your nose dip too much for a second or two can add ten knots to your speed which starts a cascade of corrections. Now, toss in the fact that the air is doing something unique every time you land and it’s a lot of variables. Variables which, despite how high-end the sim is, just aren’t modeled.

“Ground. Ground is coming up,” I’d said as the green patch of grass ascended alarmingly quickly towards the cockpit windows. “My controls,” the instructor said, bailing us out. I had gotten us within about fifty feet of the runway, but we were a non-stabilized mess that needed someone who knew how to react to all those changing variables, and that was not me. I admit, I was bummed. I’d built up that I was going to ace it, but reality was more complex. It’s not just the level of sim, either. Once I started taking flight lessons, I flew in the school’s Redbird simulator (which we used for simulated instrument flight) and it felt nothing like the real plane. In fact, I could land it fairly easily although I was still struggling with real-life landings.

I’d say it took me about ninety real-life landings before I was consistently landing well. Sure, I could land within the first few lessons, but there’s quite a difference between the controlled collision with the runway that comprised those early landings and what I’d be doing after much practice. So much of flying is by touch and landing in particular relies on your sight picture and feeling the plane’s energy state. I think as an engineer I found my difficulties particularly frustrating, because in my mind it should all be some equation to solve.

There’s a commercial pilot in my flight school who told me, “Landing will be a struggle, but one day you’ll wake up, you’ll do all the same things you did yesterday, but today you’ll just know how to land. After that, all your landings will be good.” Although I doubted him, after lessons of struggling, I came back on a Saturday morning and just started setting landing after landing down gently on the runway. “I don’t understand,” I’d said to my instructor, “I didn’t do anything different.” He smiled. “Don’t think about it. Just keep doing it.” And I did keep doing it. I still don’t know what changed that Saturday – maybe I finally trusted my sight picture or maybe I relaxed and trusted my training and intuition – whatever it was, it wasn’t something I found in the simulator.

The other thing I’d say is that the way I was landing in the simulator was different than the way I’d learn to land in real life. In the sim, I’d flare to arrest my descent rate, then ease the controls forward to set the plane down. The first time I did that in real life earned me an admonishment from my instructor. I recall seeing his entire posture stiffen in my peripheral vision as his hands reached for the controls. I realized that was bad.

Simming really helped – don’t get me wrong. Every now and then I stumble upon a pocket of expertise I’d gained from simming and that part of the lesson moves to easy mode. For things that rely upon feeling the plane, though, the only way for me to do that was to sit in the real plane and try it again and again until it clicked. I don’t doubt there’s someone with a ton of sim experience who could probably get it right on the first time, but for me I couldn’t even do it on my first try with an F-18 pilot sitting beside me and walking me through it.

Don’t include India in that. I doubt Japan and South Korea will want to fight China either. This is all hot air. Taiwan is being used by the US as a bait to provoke China. The Taiwanese who support US involvement, well the political elite, are in turn using the US for financial gain too. Its all a big game.

Good hearted people will hope that peace can prevail and no war occurs. Negotiation is important. Who wants another Ukraine?

If you want a war in Taiwan; enlist now and volunteer so you can fight in the front line. Otherwise if you are an evil coward who wants to witness war from behind your TV and computer screen thousands of miles away in the US, you can go to hell.

Kate talks about China

Four months in, and living in China is not at all what I expected. As an American who does not speak Chinese, I expected more struggle and confusion, more culture shock, more…difference.

My husband and I are in Nanning, in the southeast–just 100 miles from the Vietnam border. Yes, there’s an active vibe here–but also a laid-back one. I was surprised to discover that siesta isn’t just for Spanish-speaking countries; it’s a thing here, too. From noon to 2 p.m.-ish, the campus where I teaches virtually closes down as do many businesses. I’m beginning to get into the afternoon peace and quiet. I even nap now and then, not my usual forte.

Yes, of course, there are big differences between China and America. But they aren’t hard to handle so far. The language, for example. I have not had the time (okay, discipline) to focus on learning it the way I’d like. Still, my husband and I can jump in a cab and say the right phrase to get us home. Translator phone apps help. And we are learning tricks, like collecting business cards, taking pictures of the fronts of buildings, or having someone write down our destination in Chinese. Just show the card or picture to the cabbie, and you’re off. And there’s always body language and contextual charades!

People enjoy interacting with us. They love to stop and ask us questions (Where are you from? Do you like China?) and take pictures. Yes, sometimes all the attention is a bit unnerving. Like when strangers crowd around you, wrap their arms around your waist and take a selfie. And another and another…until you have to smile and say xie xie (thank you) and sidle away.

Sometimes I’m just standing somewhere talking with a friend, and out of the corner of my eye I see several people snapping our pictures. It’s only fair, though. I often take pictures of charming strangers. No double-standards here.

I thought this attention was all about my whiteness…until I met an African American guy who has lived in China for 5 years and said it constantly happens to him, too. In a city of 8 million people where 7,999,900 have straight black hair and are of a smallish stature, a tall blonde or an even taller black guy with a bright white smile is a total trip.

Living on campus is great. With its food courts and canteens, two farmers’ markets, sports fields, basketball and tennis courts, many apartments and dorms, it’s like a city within a city. Everyone who works for the university–students, faculty, and staff–lives here, including retired employees. There are people of all ages around, including elderly and children. And on campus are schools (from preschool through middle school) for the kids.

The Chinese love exercise. On my way to class in the mornings (a five-minute walk), I see retired people playing volleyball and badminton. There are big sports fields here where people play on the equipment, kick balls around, practice Kung Fu, walk, jog, stretch.

In the evenings, groups of (mostly women) gather to “square dance”–which is more like line dancing to a boom box that’s blasting anything like traditional Chinese music or pop songs.

People ride bikes and motorbikes everywhere, which adds to the feeling that China = movement. All motorbikes here, by law, are electric. This has the pleasant effect of keeping down air and noise pollution. Some days are hazy here, but for the most part, it’s pretty clean and green.

Even though they exercise a lot, how most of the Chinese people are so slender is a mystery to me, given the abundance of great, inexpensive food–especially noodles and dumplings. I also love all the readily available fresh fruits and veggies at open-air markets. The passion fruit, purple dragon fruit, and small creamy bananas are to die for.

We have not yet bought meat or fish at the open air markets. Perhaps our western sensibilities just aren’t ready to pick from the mountainous slabs of raw meat, or to face a woman pulling a fish from a bucket of water and clubbing it to death for our dinner. Usually we get already-cooked chicken and duck at the fantastic deli in the grocery story.

Early on, we were invited to a mid-Autumn festival meal, where everyone participated in making pork dumplings. All the food was delicious–except the snake, which according to Dave was too spicy. I couldn’t get past the fact that it still had the skin on. More suitable for boots than appetizers, if you ask me.

Okay, snake is one of my exceptions to my proclamation of “delicious food.” Other exceptions include duck and chicken feet (you see them everywhere) and insects-on-a-stick.

In contrast to what people had “warned” me about–that Chinese students are not creative–the students are writing inspired poetry, creating extraordinary video poetry interpretations, and taking lots of creative leaps. In my literature class, they love to perform scenes from the book.

For the most part, the students are eager, kind, and thoughtful. “Class discussion” isn’t what I’m used to; they don’t like to talk unless called upon. However, when I structure discussion and activities using my bag of tricks (such as letting them write or talk out ideas with a partner before talking to the whole class), they get into it. They also love games and role playing.

The only thing I don’t think I will get used to is calling students by their chosen English name–when they are Hamburger, Watermelon and Xylitol. (I’ve learned that many Chinese people who speak some English prefer to use an English name so that non-Chinese speakers won’t mispronounce their real name.)

It’s the connections with people that have been the most rewarding. I believe that if more people traveled (with a warm, open mind) there would be no more war–because we would KNOW we are killing people who are valuable, individual souls with loving families who, just like us, want lives of peace and happiness.

We’ve gotten really close to Tina, our student assistant. When Tina’s bike disappeared, we knew this was an opportunity to buy a useful and meaningful birthday present for this young woman who has done so much for us. At first she refused, saying it was too expensive. But I pulled out all the stops, telling her the dollar was strong, it wasn’t expensive for us, and we would be extremely sad if she said no.

To get to what everyone calls Stolen Bike Street, Tina perched sidesaddle on the back of my husband’s bike. I mentioned she looked so at ease on the book rack, even as we swerved in the traffic madness and hopped over speed bumps. That’s when she told me that when she was young, her family was poor. They had no car, just a bike. Her mother did not like leaving her and her brother, who was an infant, at home. So she would put the baby in the basket, and Tina sat on the back of her mom’s bike. (She added that her parents eventually started a profitable business and now have a car.)

After the purchase of the bike and the eating of lunch, Tina told us she had something she wanted to say, launching into what seemed to be a prepared speech about how much we mean to her. She had barely begun when tears started streaming down my face. She thanked us for being so friendly, for never losing patience when she’s trying to figure out something. She recounted the fun experiences we’ve had, and said, “You have taught me thing about life.” And she was especially touched when one day I told someone she was like our Chinese daughter. She really is. Truly, I love her with all my heart and am amazed China has given us the gift of her.

Where did anyone say cats “clearly” don’t need to be around humans? Domestic cats have as much need for a human as a dog does. Plus, if the shelters did happen to have enough room for the cats, but no one adopted them, they wouldn’t have room for very long. Cats need space, and not the tiny cages that shelters have to keep them in.
This is Loki:

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I adopted him today, just a few hours ago. That was him, at the shelter, crying and scratching at the glass door. He had a pretty big enclosure too. But he stood there crying, just because I was taking a picture of him instead of petting him right away.
This is him when we got home:

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He cries if we stop petting him for too long and pretty much just wants cuddles and naps.

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Just because cats are (typically) more independent than dogs, doesn’t mean they need human companionship any less. And they’re just as worthy of a home too.

Samarkand Declaration of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

Meaty article. Very good. Summary of what came out of the SEO meeting. This is what is going on outside of the western propaganda bubble. Big news. Great stuff. Totally unreported. -MM

Below Google translate , too long, you have to do the rest yourself. Summary…
 
1) member states seeking similarities but allow differences 求同存异

2) together we make a lot of money. 赚大钱

3) Worth your time to read in full to understand the civilised nations universal values of inclusiveness, real democracy, mutual respect, mutual prosperity, and working towards a new world order of win-win, peace and harmony. 

4) comparing the SCO declaration with the Western "me-only" International rule based order, one will easily understand the meaning of an "inferior civilization."

From HERE

Translation:

Samarkand Declaration of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

2022-09-17 09:44

The leaders of the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (hereinafter referred to as the "SCO" or "the Organization") held a meeting of the Council of Heads of State in Samarkand on September 16, 2022, and issued the following declaration:

...

The world today is undergoing global changes, entering a new era of rapid development and great change. The trend of world multi-polarization is intensifying, countries are increasingly interdependent, and the process of informatization and digitization is accelerating. At the same time, the current international challenges and threats are more complex, the international situation is gradually deteriorating, and regional conflicts and crises are emerging one after another and continuing to escalate.

The widening technological and digital divide, continued volatility in global financial markets, shrinking global investment, unstable supply chains, rising protectionist measures and increasing other barriers to international trade have all contributed to the instability and uncertainty of the world economy.

Global climate change and the ongoing spread of the COVID-19 pandemic pose new challenges to economic growth, social well-being, food security and the implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. To this end, new approaches are urgently needed to promote more just and effective international cooperation and achieve sustainable economic development.

Member states hold similar or identical positions on current international and regional issues, and reiterate their adherence to the generally recognized principles of international law, multilateralism, equality, commonality, comprehensiveness, cooperation, sustainable security, and diversity of cultures and civilizations. Under the coordination role of the United Nations Center Through equal and mutually beneficial cooperation among countries, we will build a more representative, democratic and just multi-polar world order.

Based on the principles of the SCO Charter, member states oppose the solution of international and regional issues through collective, ideological and confrontational thinking, and insist on coordinating responses to security threats and challenges in traditional and non-traditional fields. Taking into account the opinions of the SCO member states, all parties reiterated that it is of great practical significance to jointly promote the building of a new type of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness and justice, and win-win cooperation and a community with a shared future for mankind.

The member states advocate the right to respect the political, economic and social development path chosen by the people of all countries, and stress that the principles of mutual respect for sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, equality and mutual benefit, non-interference in internal affairs, and non-use or threat of use of force are the principles of sustainable development of international relations. The basics. All parties reiterated that differences and disputes between countries should be resolved peacefully through dialogue and consultation.

The member states reiterate that the SCO will not target other countries and international organizations, and will, based on mutual interests, proceed from a common position to resolve regional and global issues, and in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and the Charter of the SCO, as well as the norms of international law, Extensive cooperation with other countries and international organizations.

At present, the SCO, as an authoritative and influential multilateral organization, is committed to maintaining peace, security and stability, jointly responding to new threats and challenges faced by the region, and deepening economic, trade and people-to-people and cultural relations among SCO countries.

The member states stressed that the SCO Charter adopted 20 years ago is of historic significance, and it provides the basis for the member states to carry out close and fruitful cooperation on the basis of the "Shanghai Spirit" of mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, consultation, respect for diverse civilizations and seeking common development. All-round cooperation has laid the foundation. Member states believe that adhering to the above principles will help build a new model of regional cooperation and play a constructive role in consolidating multilateral and mutually beneficial relations in the Eurasian region.

The member states are willing to further strengthen policy communication, security cooperation, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and people-to-people bonds, so as to jointly build a peaceful, secure, prosperous and clean world and realize the harmonious coexistence of man and nature.

The member states stressed the significance of the 15th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty on Long-term Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation among the SCO Member States, and the leaders of the member states approved the "Outline for the Implementation of the Treaty on the Long-term Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation of the SCO Member States (2023-2027)" . The member states will continue to strengthen the SCO's efforts in maintaining peace and security, and advocate the peaceful settlement of international and regional conflicts through political and diplomatic means, so as to deepen the relations among the member states and pass on the friendship of the people of the member states from generation to generation

The member states believe that Central Asia is the "core area" of the SCO, and support the efforts made by countries in the region to ensure peace and prosperity, achieve sustainable development, and establish a space for good-neighborliness, friendship and mutual trust. All parties support the further role of the SCO in maintaining stability in the region and promoting economic and social development, and welcome the regular meetings of the Central Asian heads of state. Member States noted the successful holding of the Central Asian Leaders' Meeting in Chopon Ata, Kyrgyz Republic, on 21 July 2022.

The member states believe that strengthening the connectivity between Central Asia and South Asia will help to achieve the common goal of ensuring prosperity and security in the SCO region through the establishment of sustainable economic, trade, transportation and communication links, and the promotion of dialogue among different civilizations.

Member States express their deep concern over security threats arising from any form of terrorism, separatism and extremism, strongly condemn acts of terrorism taking place around the world, and stress the continued implementation of the "Dutch" signed in Dushanbe on September 17, 2021. The importance of the SCO Member States' 2022-2024 Framework for Cooperation in Combating Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism.

The member states reiterated that they will resolutely combat terrorism, separatism and extremism, and continue to take active measures to eradicate the breeding ground for terrorism, cut off terrorist financing channels, combat the recruitment and cross-border movement of terrorists, and curb extremism and youth radicalization. and terrorist ideology to eradicate lurking terrorists and their hiding places.

The member states pointed out that it is not allowed to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries under the pretext of combating terrorism and extremism, and firmly opposes the use of terrorist, extremist and radical organizations for personal gain.

Member States believe that it is important for the international community to work together to prevent attempts to recruit young people for terrorist, separatist and extremist activities, and attach great importance to combating the spread of religious intolerance, violent nationalism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, fascism and chauvinism.

The member states noted the effective work of the SCO regional anti-terrorist bodies in promoting cooperation among the competent authorities of member states in the fight against terrorism, separatism and extremism, stressing that joint measures are taken to enhance the potential for practical cooperation in these areas. important.

Member States will, in accordance with their national laws, work to develop common principles and positions on the basis of consensus on a unified list of terrorist, separatist and extremist organizations that are prohibited from operating in their territories.

The member states noted the results of the "Pabi-Counter-Terrorism-2021" joint counter-terrorism exercise by the competent authorities of the SCO member states and the joint frontier operations "Unity and Cooperation 2019-2021" by the competent authorities of the SCO member states' border agencies, as well as the results of India's 2021-2022 Effective work carried out during the Chairmanship of the Council of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorism Institutions in 2018.

The member states believe that it is necessary to implement the resolution of the Council of Heads of State of the SCO Member States "On Improving the Mechanisms of SCO Member States to Address Security Threats and Challenges" and to study the following recommendations: as a separate permanent body, in Duchamp.

Do not establish the SCO Anti-Drug Center (Republic of Tajikistan);

Upgrade the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Agency in Tashkent to the SCO Comprehensive Center for Security Threats and Challenges (Russian Federation); 

Establish on the basis of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Agency SCO Information Security Center (Republic of Kazakhstan); 

On the basis of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorism Agency, the SCO Center for Combating Transnational Organised Crime (Kyrgyz Republic) was established in Bishkek.

The SCO member states will be based on the Intergovernmental Agreement on Safeguarding International Information Security among SCO Member States, signed during the Yekaterinburg Summit in June 2009, and in accordance with the SCO Member States' Cooperation Plan for Safeguarding International Information Security for 2022-2023. ” and other WIPO documents, and continue to cooperate in safeguarding international information security.

Member States will strengthen cooperation among national authorities in the field of digital literacy to bridge the digital divide.

The member states emphasized the key role of the United Nations in addressing threats to the information space, and advocated the establishment of a safe, fair and open information space on the basis of respect for sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries.

Member States believe that it is important to ensure that countries have equal rights in governing the Internet and have cyber sovereignty.

Member States firmly oppose the militarization of information and communication technologies, support the formulation of universal rules, principles and norms for responsible state behavior in this field, and welcome the launch of a comprehensive international convention on combating the use of information and communication technologies for criminal purposes under the auspices of the United Nations . The parties will continue to cooperate within the framework of the relevant negotiating mechanisms of the United Nations and other international platforms.

Member States call on the international community to play the central role of the United Nations, fully implement the relevant resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy in accordance with the United Nations Charter and the principles of international law, strengthen global counter-terrorism cooperation, abandon politicization and double standards, and respect the sovereignty and independence of all countries. , and adopted the United Nations Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Convention on the basis of consensus.

Member States take note of the outcome of the International Conference on the 10th Anniversary of the Joint Action Plan for the Implementation of the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy by Central Asian States, held in Tashkent on 3-4 March 2022.

Member States take note of the high-level international conference held by the Republic of Tajikistan (Dushanbe Process), the co-organization with the United Nations in Dushanbe from 18 to 19 October 2022 on the "International and Regional Cooperation on Combating Terrorism and Preventing the Movement of Terrorists" Security and Border Control Cooperation” high-level meeting to promote multilateral cooperation to combat terrorism and terrorist financing in Central Asia.

Member States noted that the Republic of India, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Republic of Tajikistan are running for the UN Security Council for the 2028-2029, 2025-2026, 2027-2028, 2039-2040 and 2028-2029 respectively The non-permanent members of the Council, the Kyrgyz Republic and the People's Republic of China are running for members of the UN Human Rights Council in 2023-2025 and 2024-2026 respectively, the Republic of Kazakhstan is running for the presidency of the UN General Assembly in 2031-2032, and the Republic of Tajikistan is running for the United Nations Economic and Social Efforts made by Council members for 2024-2026

The member states took note of the outcomes of the meeting of the secretaries of the Security Council of the SCO Member States to be held in Tashkent from 18 to 19 August 2022, and reiterated their willingness to further deepen cooperation to address threats to the security and stability of the SCO region.

The member states noted the outcomes of the meeting of the defense ministers of the SCO member states to be held in Tashkent from August 24 to 25, 2022, and advocated further strengthening of defense and security cooperation. All parties stressed that it is very important to regularly hold "Peace Mission" joint anti-terrorism military exercises, which will help improve the level of cooperation in combating international terrorist organizations and armed groups and improve anti-terrorism methods.

Member States expressed concern at the serious threat posed by the growing production, trafficking and abuse of drugs, as well as the use of funds derived from illicit trafficking in narcotic drugs to finance terrorism. All parties stressed the need to form a common and balanced position on combating illicit trafficking in narcotic drugs and their precursors, and pointed out the importance of implementing international conventions and other relevant legal documents in the field of drug control

Member States noted that illicit trafficking in narcotic drugs and misuse for non-medical purposes seriously threatens international and regional security and stability, sustainable national economic development, people's health and well-being, and the exercise of fundamental human rights and freedoms. All parties stressed that joint efforts should be made to combat illicit trafficking in narcotic drugs and support continued active and practical cooperation in this field.

Read more...

上海合作组织成员国元首理事会撒马尔罕宣言 — 中华人民共和国外交部

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Please note: the United States, and the G7 (including the proxy nations Australia, Korea, and Japan) are all EXCLUDED. And the UN is considered, and treated as, a secondary body of influence.

Here’s the full text of Xi Peng’s statement to the SEO…

The truth of America’s GDP

Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today’s US unemployment rate is between 9 percent and 12 percent; inflation is 7 or 10 percent; economic growth since the recession of 2001 has been mediocre, despite a huge surge in the wealth and incomes of the super rich, and we are falling back into recession. A picture of our economy today, ex-distortion, would reveal a nation in deep difficulty, not just domestically, but globally. Numbers Racket. 

Kevin Phillips.

China calculates GDP by summing the value of what it produces. If it builds an airplane it adds the airplane’s wholesale price to its gross domestic product. If it builds a dam, it adds the dam’s cost to its gross domestic product. America calculates GDP by summing the cost of the airplanes it makes–then adding the imputed cost of services Americans provide for each other.

Most American GDP is generated by people taking in each other’s laundry: rent, tuition, healthcare, commissions, fees, and jailing millions of people. Are accounting, consulting, real estate commissions really ‘products’? Is Bitcoin? (Is prostitution? Britain says ‘yes’).

Services account for 61% of America’s GDP and 11% of China’s largely because of price inflation. Medical costs are 7% of China’s GDP and 19% of America’s because CT scans cost $2,000 in Kansas City, while a full physical in Shenzhen, including CT, cost 580 yuan, $92. My US cellular service, vastly inferior to Shenzhen’s, costs five times more. My San Francisco barber’s $85 haircut is indistinguishable from a $2 Kunming trim.

Japan doesn’t have a death wish, and it doesn’t think war with China over Taiwan is a good idea.

This is Japan right now.

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It’s a peaceful shopping day. The air’s a little still, because a typhoon’s on its way in.

The main thing on people’s minds is the 14% jump in prices that the Prime Minister announced will happen on October 1st. People are getting their shopping done.

No one here is thinking about war with Taiwan.

There was a gathering today in my local shopping street – not for “patriotic unity” or “standing against Chinese aggression.” Nope. It was titled “WorkShop,” and was about showing children various crafts. The local bank had a little table next to the children’s play space, walking parents through opening “My First Account” savings accounts for their children.

Domestically, the biggest political issue aside from prices is an examination of the political influence of the Unification Church in the wake of Abe-Sam’s assassination. Representatives are cutting ties to them and apologizing for accepting their help, on both the opposition and ruling party benches.

No one is thinking about war over Taiwan.

The average age of the Japanese military is 35. At 35 you can go without sleep, but you can’t be consistently stupid about it. 35-year-olds have families, mortgages, kids. They spend their weekends while on leave with their families at local festivals, opening “My First Account” savings accounts for their kids.

Japan is not thinking about war with Taiwan. It seems like the leadership of China is not thinking about war with Taiwan.

Why are you?

It’s a beautiful day. Maybe go open a savings account with a local bank. It’s probably a better use of your time than fantasizing about crushing the Japanese.

Full text of Xi’s speech at SCO Samarkand summit

SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan, Sept. 16 (Xinhua) — Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a speech at the 22nd meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) here on Friday.

The following is the full text of the speech:

Ride on the Trend of the Times and Enhance Solidarity and Cooperation to Embrace a Better Future

Statement by H.E. Xi Jinping

President of the People’s Republic of China

At the 22nd Meeting of the Council of Heads of State of The Shanghai Cooperation Organization

Samarkand, Sept. 16, 2022

Your Excellency President Shavkat Mirziyoyev,

Colleagues,

I am delighted to attend the meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). I would like to thank you, President Mirziyoyev, for your warm hospitality and thoughtful arrangements. I salute Uzbekistan for the great job it has done to promote SCO cooperation in various fields during its presidency over the past year.

Samarkand, renowned as the pearl on the Silk Road, witnessed the glory of the ancient Silk Road, a route that greatly boosted the flow of goods, spread of science and technology, interaction of ideas, and integration of diverse cultures on the Eurasian continent. Indeed, the ancient Silk Road has remained a historical source of inspiration for us SCO member states as we pursue peace and development.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the SCO Charter and 15th anniversary of the Treaty on Long-Term Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation Between the SCO Member States. Over the years, guided by these two founding documents, we have succeeded in exploring a new path for the development of international organizations, and there is much we can draw on from SCO’s rich practices.

— Political trust. Guided by the vision of forging enduring friendship and peace among the SCO member states, we respect each other’s core interests and choice of development path and support each other in achieving peace, stability, development and rejuvenation.

— Win-win cooperation. We accommodate each other’s interests, stay true to the principle of consultation and cooperation for shared benefits, enhance synergy between our respective development strategies, and keep to the path of win-win cooperation toward common prosperity.

— Equality between nations. We are committed to the principle of equality among all countries regardless of their size, consensus-based decision-making, and addressing issues through friendly consultations. We reject the practice of the strong bullying the weak or the big bullying the small.

— Openness and inclusiveness. We stand for harmonious coexistence and mutual learning between different countries, nations and cultures, dialogue between civilizations and seeking common ground while shelving differences. We are ready to establish partnership and develop win-win cooperation with other countries and international organizations that share our vision.

— Equity and justice. We are committed to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter; we tackle major international and regional issues on the basis of their merits, and oppose the pursuit of one’s own agenda at the expense of other countries’ legitimate rights and interests.

These five points fully embody the Shanghai Spirit, namely, mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, consultation, respect for diversity of civilizations and pursuit of common development. It has been shown that this spirit is the source of strength for the development of the SCO. It is also the fundamental guide we must continue to follow in the years to come. We owe SCO’s remarkable success to the Shanghai Spirit. And we will continue to follow its guidance as we forge ahead.

Colleagues,

Human society, like the natural world, has both sunny and rainy days in its development. Our world today is undergoing accelerating changes unseen in a century, and it has entered a new phase of uncertainty and transformation. The once-in-a-century pandemic has continued unabated. Regional conflicts keep flaring up. The Cold War mentality and group politics are resurfacing, so are unilateralism and protectionism. Economic globalization has encountered headwinds. Deficit in peace, development, trust, and governance has grown. Human society has reached a crossroads and faces unprecedented challenges.

Under these new conditions, the SCO, as an important constructive force in international and regional affairs, should keep itself well-positioned in the face of changing international dynamics, ride on the trend of the times, strengthen solidarity and cooperation and build a closer SCO community with a shared future.

First, we need to enhance mutual support. We should strengthen high-level exchanges and strategic communication, deepen mutual understanding and political trust, and support each other in our efforts to uphold security and development interests. We should guard against attempts by external forces to instigate “color revolution,” jointly oppose interference in other countries’ internal affairs under any pretext, and hold our future firmly in our own hands.

Second, we need to expand security cooperation. A proverb in Uzbekistan goes to the effect that “With peace, a country enjoys prosperity, just as with rain, the land can flourish.” The Global Security Initiative put forward by China is to address the peace deficit and global security challenges. It calls on all countries to stay true to the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security and build a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture. We welcome all stakeholders to get involved in implementing this initiative.

We should continue to carry out joint anti-terrorism exercises, crack down hard on terrorism, separatism and extremism, drug trafficking as well as cyber and transnational organized crimes; and we should effectively meet the challenges in data security, biosecurity, outer space security and other non-traditional security domains. China is ready to train 2,000 law enforcement personnel for SCO member states in the next five years, and establish a China-SCO base for training counter-terrorism personnel, so as to enhance capacity-building for law enforcement of SCO member states.

We should ensure that the SCO-Afghanistan contact group and the mechanism of coordination and cooperation among Afghanistan’s neighbors continue to play their roles; and we should encourage Afghan authorities to establish a broadly-based and inclusive political structure and remove the ground that breeds terrorism.

Third, we need to deepen practical cooperation. To deliver a better life for people of all countries in the region is our shared goal. The Global Development Initiative launched by China aims to focus global attention on development, foster global development partnership, and achieve more robust, greener and more balanced global development. China is ready to work with all other stakeholders to pursue this initiative in our region to support the sustainable development of regional countries.

We need to implement the two statements on safeguarding international energy and food security to be adopted by this summit and better protect energy and food security. China will provide developing countries in need with emergency humanitarian assistance of grain and other supplies worth 1.5 billion RMB yuan.

We welcome the Comprehensive Plan for the Implementation of the SCO Treaty on Long-Term Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation for 2023-2027 to be adopted at this summit. We should fully implement the cooperation documents in such areas as trade and investment, infrastructure building, protecting supply chains, scientific and technological innovation and artificial intelligence to be adopted within the framework of the summit. It is important to continue our efforts to achieve the complementarity of the Belt and Road Initiative with national development strategies and regional cooperation initiatives, expand sub-multilateral cooperation and sub-regional cooperation, and create more growth drivers in cooperation.

We need to ensure implementation of the roadmap for SCO member states to expand shares of local currency settlement, better develop the system for cross-border payment and settlement in local currencies, work for the establishment of an SCO development bank, and thus speed up regional economic integration. Next year, China will host an SCO ministers’ meeting on development cooperation and an industrial and supply chains forum, and will set up the China-SCO Big Data Cooperation Center to create new engines of common development. China stands ready to carry out space cooperation with all other parties and provide satellite data service to support them in agricultural development, connectivity and disaster mitigation and relief.

Fourth, we need to enhance people-to-people and cultural exchanges. Exchanges promote integration among civilizations, which, in turn, enables civilizations to advance. We should deepen cooperation in such areas as education, science and technology, culture, health, media, radio and television, ensure the continued success of signature programs such as the youth exchange camp, the women’s forum, the forum on people-to-people friendship and the forum on traditional medicine, and support the SCO Committee on Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation and other non-official organizations in playing their due roles. China will build a China-SCO ice and snow sports demonstration zone and host the SCO forums on poverty reduction and sustainable development and on sister cities next year. In the next three years, China will carry out 2,000 free cataract operations for SCO member states and provide 5,000 human resources training opportunities for them.

Fifth, we need to uphold multilateralism. Obsession with forming a small circle can only push the world toward division and confrontation. We should remain firm in safeguarding the UN-centered international system and the international order based on international law, practice the common values of humanity and reject zero-sum game and bloc politics. We should expand SCO’s exchanges with other international and regional organizations such as the UN, so as to jointly uphold true multilateralism, improve global governance, and ensure that the international order is more just and equitable.

Colleagues,

The Eurasian continent is home to us all. Upholding its peace and development is the shared goal of countries both in our region and the world at large, and the SCO shoulders an important responsibility in meeting this goal. In recent years, an increasing number of countries have applied to join our SCO family. This fully demonstrates the power of SCO’s vision and the widely shared confidence in its future. By promoting the development and expansion of the SCO and giving full play to its positive impact, we will create strong momentum and new dynamism for ensuring durable peace and common prosperity of the Eurasian continent and the whole world. China supports advancing SCO expansion in an active yet prudent manner, and this includes going through the procedure to admit Iran as a member state, launching the procedure for Belarus’ accession, admitting Bahrain, the Maldives, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Myanmar as dialogue partners, and granting the relevant applying countries the legal status due to them. We need to seize the opportunity to build consensus, deepen cooperation and jointly create a bright future for the Eurasian continent.

Here I wish to express China’s congratulations to India on assuming the next SCO presidency. We will, together with other member states, support India during its presidency.

Colleagues,

This year, facing a complex and challenging development environment both at home and abroad, China has stayed committed to the general principle of making advances while maintaining stable performance, and it has striven to ensure both effective COVID-19 containment, economic stability and development security. We have continued to respond to COVID-19 and promote economic and social development in a well-coordinated way. Thus, to the greatest extent possible, we have both safeguarded the life and health of the people and ensured overall economic and social development. The fundamentals of China’s economy, characterized by strong resilience, enormous potential, ample room for policy adjustment and long-term sustainability, will remain sound. This will greatly boost the stability and recovery of the world economy and provide more market opportunities for other countries.

Next month, the Communist Party of China will convene its 20th National Congress. It will be an important meeting to be held at a critical time as China embarks on a new journey toward its second centenary goal of building a modern socialist country in all respects. At this national congress, the Communist Party of China will fully review the major achievements made and valuable experience gained in China’s reform and development endeavors. It will also formulate programs of action and overarching policies to meet China’s new development goals on the journey ahead in the new era and the new expectations of the people. We will continue to follow the Chinese path to modernization to achieve the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and we will continue to promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind. By doing so, we will create new opportunities for the world with new advances in China’s development and contribute our vision and strength to world peace and development and human progress.

Colleagues,

Long as the journey is, we will surely reach our destination when we stay the course. Let us act in the Shanghai Spirit, work for the steady development of the SCO, and jointly build our region into a peaceful, stable, prosperous and beautiful home!

Thank you.

It is that bad if you don’t have insurance. As a Canadian visiting Florida, my wife had a dangerously high fever and was slurring her words and couldn’t get out of bed. I reluctantly called an ambulance. (not because I didn’t want her to receive medical help, but because we would have to take out a loan to pay for it). My wife is fine now, but listen to this:

To make a long story short, she was in Emergency for 4 hours before they released her, fever down and ok to go home. Total hospital bill: $17,000 USD ($24,000 CAD). Surprise Doctors bill 45 days later $2000. Ambulance bill $1000 and a later bill from “TeamHealth” for two ghost doctor visits for $1800. She had a catscan which I would presume is the big expense, a saline drip, antibiotics and sent home. Only the wealthy can throw that kind of money around. The rest of us need a loan or mortgage our home.

Our neighbor in Florida was in the hospital for 3 days and had a bill for $30,000. She had to sell her house and move in with her daughter. She won’t go back into the hospital as she can’t afford it.

If my wife or I need any medical assistance while in the USA again, we will hire a private jet and a nurse to fly us to Canada where we can get all the help we need. Far cheaper than visiting a hospital even for a few hours. (if it isn’t urgent, we could take a commercial flight for $500. A private jet would be up to $5000 but still far cheaper than any visit under the healthcare system of the USA)

Dixie

Dixie is not mean but is painfully shy, the cats that get adopted are the ones that come out and rub your legs or jump in your lap; Dixie would hide or try to crawl into her cat carrier. She was adopted, a few times but was brought back, not because she was mean but because she would never come out from under the bed.

She was in the shelter/foster home for 5 years; fortunately one that let cats roam free instead of being in a cage. While there the other cats (the outgoing ones), got all the attention so she remained shy around people.

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A little over 3 years ago I adopted her (she had been at the rescue shelter for 5 years), I was warned not to let her get under the bed, and sure enough she found the bed and would only come out at night while I was sleeping, to eat, drink and use the litter box.

I did not take her back to the shelter, instead I wooed and courted her and after about 2 months she became daddy’s little girl.

After about 6 months I put her in the carrier to take her to the vet for a routine (twice a year) checkup.

Dixie let out the most forlorn heart broken meow I have ever heard, it was obvious she thought she was being rehomed again and was begging to stay with me. I felt like the most heartless human being in the world, but since I want her to live a long healthy life it was off to the vet we went

Once we got home from the vet she ran under the bed again, but came out after a couple of hours and wanted a lot of scritching and loving and reassurance that she is my favorite girl in the world.

She still hates going to the vet, but now knows she will always be coming home. Now when we come back from the vet, she runs to the front room to be sure her food/water/and litter box are still where they belong.

Here she is telling me I should really put down the camera, and commence scritching the cat.

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Geopolitically, the SEO has organized and big changes are forecast for the world

It’s a very hot September weekend. I’m staying inside. Nursing a hangover, a head cold, and watching my kid make a lot of noise. It’s called “family life”. I’m throwing together this post, and I hope you like it.

Geopolitically, the SEO has organized and big changes are forecast for the world. The USA, however, is being left out, and they are trying desperately to disrupt the organization. Expect distant clamors in the near future.

Please enjoy.

Sleeping kitties

I’ve got a million pix of my cats sleeping, but I picked this one.

It makes me happy.

My husband, who I love more than anything. And the cat that I personally drove over an hour to adopt that shunned me and embraced my “I’m not a cat person” (now a devoted cat person) husband.

Just seeing my husband conked out after dinner, napping- and his beloved cat with him makes me so happy.

It’s so much MORE than just a picture of a cat sleeping.

It’s a picture of home.

Of happiness. Of having a life I never thought I’d ever have.

I know to many it may not look like much.

An older man in an (ugly😂) recliner with a non descript tabby cat.

But this my friends is heaven on earth.

It doesn’t get any better than this. Even my cat knows it (or should I say my husband’s cat knows it?).

But just so you know, I have my own fur baby.

This is his.

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Harry Nilsson – Coconut (1971)

This is a MUST watch.

An American talks about his experience in China

I had a very American-centric view; that is to say, I really didn’t give a ton of thought to China, which is kind of crazy. I see Americans now perceiving China in a way that’s hard to articulate but I think totally wrong. Let me give it a shot.

Americans are scared that China is going to ‘take over’ America in some meaningful way. Unless it’s important to your ego that the USA be the ‘greatest country in the world’, this is meaningless.

Might China’s economy beat the USA? Sure.

Might they be a military force to be reckoned with? Yep. But they are not our enemies unless we make them.

I only once encountered any form of anti-USA sentiment during my 4+ years there, and it was mostly just splash from anti-Japanese sentiment.

Almost everybody I met thought of America like the kind of wacky fun cousin. We make fun movies and are kind of crazy sometimes. America is a 200 year old country.

China is essentially a continent.

So the thing Americans miss is 5000 years of contiguous Chinese civilization. We’re forgetting that our biggest city is around 8–9 million; a small town in China.

You’ve never heard of the names of Chinese cities of 9 million, because they’re everywhere.

The Pearl-River-Delta is home to 148+ million people! That’s half the size of the entire United States.

There are vast swathes of China that are populated by Muslim populations, including ethnic groups with blue eyes.

There are tropical islands, and millions of miles of tundra.

Cities have their own unique dialects, and I don’t mean how southerners say y’all – I mean distinct languages with only minor cosmetic similarities.

So I guess I’ll say the biggest mistake I ever made about China, or misconception that I corrected, is that China is any one thing.

Classic Chicken Cacciatore

Chicken cacciatore—or chicken in the style of the hunter—is a warm and hearty stewed dish from the Italian-American culinary canon. This dish typically features browned chicken, herbs, garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms and other deeply flavorful vegetables. On a cold winter night, this chicken cacciatore recipe is perfectly wonderful and a total crowd pleaser!

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Classic Chicken Cacciatore

Chicken cacciatore has become a classic Italian favorite and it’s no wonder why.

The combination of chicken with vegetables, like peppers and tomatoes, makes this a warming and hearty dish.

In fact, cacciatore is Italian for “hunter” so this dish roughly translates to chicken cooked in the style of the hunter.

This does not mean the only authentic way to make this recipe is over a campfire in the woods, your stove will do just fine!

Rather, the key to making this dish is properly browning your chicken.

Classic chicken cacciatore involves lightly coating chicken in a flour mixture before cooking in an oil-slicked skillet over high heat.

Browning meat adds tons of flavor.

As your chicken cooks, the fat from the chicken renders, which provides a flavorful base in which to cook your vegetables.

Though it is recommended to drain off the fat after browning the chicken, your pan will retain flavor, which will be soaked up by the onions, peppers and tomatoes. If you’ve never tried chicken cacciatore, this five-star recipe is the perfect place to start,

Ingredients

  • 3- to 3 1/2-lb cut-up whole chicken
  • 1/2 cup Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 medium green bell pepper
  • 2 medium onions
  • 1 can (14.5 oz) Muir Glen™ organic diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 can (8 oz) tomato sauce
  • 1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms (3 oz)
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons chopped fresh or 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano leaves
  • 1 teaspoon chopped fresh or 1/4 teaspoon dried basil leaves
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • Grated Parmesan cheese, if desired

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Admiral McRaven Leaves the Audience SPEECHLESS | One of the Best Motivational Speeches

Good stuff.

Sad Satan

In 2015, a YouTuber named Obscure Horror Corner received an anonymous tip from a subscriber, only known as ZK. The YouTuber did a playthrough of the series, claiming the anonymous tip he received led him to a Dark Web forum with the game available for download.

The game consists of a first-person camera traversing a black and white maze, being chased by strange creatures. There is no plot, story, or mechanics. Random ends in the maze contain easter eggs, strange images, and cutscenes that are not discernable.

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The game gained popularity and a subreddit where internet gurus discussed the game.

Suddenly, on 4Chan, a user named ZK posted, claiming that Obscure Horror Corner did not play the “true” version of the game, which he included in a link.

This version of the game included a deadly virus and random cutscenes that showed gore, torture, and child pornography. Many sections also contain ASCII characters on the wall that translate to the phrases “I see you,” “You can’t escape me,” “I can track you,” etc. Given that the true version of the game was riddled with advanced viruses, these threats are likely actually true.

This game is riddled with easter eggs, containing child molester monologues in the soundtrack that are heavily stretched and processed in addition to the flashing video cutscenes depicting child abuse and murder.

The sheer amount of secrets, easter eggs, and other content hidden behind this seemingly plain game are mind-boggling and it is still poorly understood. To this day ZK and the true origins of this game are unknown.

These three mysteries are the most prominent in Internet history, although many many more exist, some of which involve child abuse, murder, and worse. While the internet contains lots of interesting things, you do not want to see everything it has to offer.

Dream On,

Jaiden

The Drew Carey Show – Auditioning Horndogs

The Dispilio Tablet and the Real Origins of Writing

Conventional archaeology claims that writing was not invented until some time between 3000 and 4000 BC in Sumeria. However, the discovery of a far older artifact in northern Greece appears to contradict this belief. Although the possibility of a previously unknown writing system during the Neolithic is an exciting prospect, why is it that so few people know about this discovery?

Breathing Life into Dispilio

Discovered back in 1993 by George Xourmouziadis, a professor of prehistoric archaeology, the Dispilio tablet was unearthed during excavations of a Neolithic lake settlement near the city of Kastoria in northern Greece. This ancient settlement was actually discovered back in 1932 during a dry winter when the water levels of Lake Kastoria were particularly low.

The site itself was occupied for many hundreds of years from about 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. The excavations unearthed several artifacts including tools, pottery, figurines and other personal ornaments. These have allowed archaeologists to piece together a picture of the economic and agricultural activities of the settlement, as well as proof of animal breeding and their dietary preferences.

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Dispilio in Greece is a prehistoric lakeside settlement and the location where the Dispilio tablet was found. ( Iraklis Milas / Adobe Stock)

Dating the Dispilio Tablet

The Dispilio tablet was one of many artifacts found in the area. However, the importance of the table lies in the fact that it was engraved with an unknown written text that goes back further than 5,000 BC. Researchers have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the date of the wooden tablet to about 5,260 BC, which would make it significantly older than the writing system used by the Sumerians.

The text on the tablet includes a type of engraved writing which probably consists of a form of writing that pre-existed  Linear B writing used by the Mycenaean Greeks . As well as the tablet, many other ceramic pieces were found that also have the same type of writing on them.

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Samples of the carved signs on the wooden Dispilio tablet and other clay finds discovered at the site (a) as compared to Linear A signs (b) and signs found on Paleo European clay tablets (c). (Yorgos Facorellis / CC BY 3.0 )

OFFICIAL – Somewhere Over the Rainbow 2011 – Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwo’ole

I hope you all appreciate this great version.

Deciphering the Dispilio Tablet

The fact that this wooden tablet was hidden at the bottom of the lake for so long and remained preserved so many years later is impressive in and of itself. Unfortunately, by the time the tablet had been excavated and removed from its original environment, contact with oxygen started the deterioration process and it is now under preservation.

So far, the ancient writing system evidenced by the signs and inscriptions on the Dispilio tablet have not been deciphered, and decoding the writing is going to be difficult if not impossible, unless a suitable ‘ Rosetta stone ’ is found. Nevertheless, Professor Xourmouziadis suggested that it could represent a form of communication and could mean anything, including some kind of ancient inventory of possessions.

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One of the most significant discoveries in history, the Rosetta Stone allowed researchers to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. (British Museum /  CC BY NC SA 4.0  )

Dispilio Tablet and the History of Writing

Sumerian cuneiform has gone down in history as the oldest form of writing. As explained in Greek Reporter , some scholars have questioned the resulting theory which claims that the ancient Greeks learned to write about 800 BC thanks to contact with the Phoenicians. They are unconvinced by the fact that the composition of literary works such as the ancient Homeric poems coincides with their supposed acquisition of writing skills.

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“It would be impossible for the ancient Greeks to write these poetic works without having had a history of writing of at least 10,000 years,” explains Greek Reporter . So, what this means is that Sumerian writing is actually the earliest writing system to have been discovered so far and the discovery of the Dispilio tablet, an artifact engraved with what appears to be a pre-Sumerian writing system , will undoubtedly not be the last find of its kind.

Conventional history dictates that these kinds of Neolithic discoveries are merely evidence of proto-writing, a term which refers to a way of communicating limited information, rather than proof of an entire language. But should additional artifacts comparable to the Dispilio tablet emerge, they could completely change the history of writing , and with it the story of humanity.

Chinese information technology and the Internet

In the field of information technology and the Internet, China can be said to be unique in the world.

China has also exploded in the development and application of supercomputing. In the future, communication technology, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things have also been deployed very early.

China has a clear leading edge in quantum technology and quantum communication. On May 3, 2017, the first quantum computer has been made. Its computing speed is 24,000 times that of its international counterparts, and the classical algorithm is also 10-100 times faster than the world’s first electronic tube computer.

For the first time, researchers in China have achieved atomic quantum state operations with a fidelity of more than 99.99%.

This breakthrough means that the fault tolerance rate of quantum computers has been lower than 0.01%.

My fathers desk

I didn’t purchase the furniture in question, but I hope you like my story. I found a secret compartment in my father’s desk, and a treasure that is worthless to the world but priceless to me.

If you’ve cleaned out a house, you know what a gloomy job it is. We were moving my mom to memory care, and my three brothers and I (along with my two sisters-in-law, bless them) were disposing of mountains—generations—of clutter. Stuff my mom had kept for decades. She didn’t keep track of it anymore, or even really care about it.

Every item involved a decision. Donate? Keep? Toss? We had our own houses overflowing with clutter, so we couldn’t keep much.

Finally we came to Dad’s desk. My brothers and I avoided each other’s eyes. No one had room for it. For my part, I already had my grandmother’s desk. To ship another heavy piece of furniture across the country made no sense. But I felt like I was betraying my dad—a loving but mostly silent man who died of melanoma when I was 24. I know my brothers felt the same.

I can see him in my mind’s eye, puffing his pipe, reading medical journals, drawing neat graphs of his stocks on graph paper, clipping articles and filing them in vanilla folders (as I thought they were called). When he wasn’t there, the space beneath the desk was a favorite hiding spot for me and Otto, the schnauzer.

I wiped down the desk, outside and in—it would go to Goodwill in the last of seven trailer-loads. I always feel I have to wipe down anything I’m donating, although certain men in my life have mocked me for this. Today, it paid off, because that’s how I found the secret section at the back of one of the drawers.

In it was a black, leather-bound journal.

The first entry was April 11, 1951, the day that Truman “fired” General McArthur, as my father noted. (“A change in tactics which will be for the better. I don’t think too many people share my view though.”)

The entries, intermittent over the next several years, cover college and his early twenties. They were written by someone I had never met, young enough to be my son. Do we ever truly believe our parents had lives before we were born?

The story begins in Iowa.

Home from college for the summer, he tells of excursions (“safaris”) with his friends: “We had a good time, cutting across corn fields and dodging farmers.” It’s fun to read about the concerts he attended, and to try to track down the musicians on YouTube. I found Eddie Peabody the “Banjo King,” but many are forgotten, even by the collective memory bank known as Google.

He writes cryptically of various girls (women, we’d call them now). He refers to one as “top flight.” Another he calls “the sweet little flower of the Springtime.” It wasn’t until my second reading that one brief paragraph caught my attention and I did a double take: “Before school was out the long-awaited for happened. I need no reminder as to the events of July 10—This is My Beloved.” Of course, I found the song on YouTube, a now-tedious ballad from the stage musical, Kismet. The identity of his companion on July 10 is left a mystery.

My mom, apparently, is just one of many, and he writes of his hesitation in committing to her (in her version, the one I had heard over the years, the hesitation was all on her side). “The less said about busts ups and so on the better,” my father writes dismissingly in 1951. “So I’ll just try to get her out of my system . . . I think I was more thrilled in 1948.” He’s obviously puffing away: “I wonder what she would say if she could see me right now—she who thinks it looks ‘silly’ for a young man to smoke a pipe. Ha!”

The two of them (Joe and Jody) weren’t “pinned” until 1953. I think of their rocky marriage, happy and unhappy, mostly unhappy when I knew it. What if one or the other had chosen a different path?

In a less reticent section, he writes of a dazzling trip to Montana, where his aunt and uncle lived and where he caught his first trout. He calls Bozeman a town of “friendly people, clean silver money, and clear air” (even their money is cleaner than in Iowa, apparently). He walks into the countryside at daybreak, and lavishly describes a dewdrop clinging to the lower edge of a bluebell. The sun “bursts over the horizon in loud fortissimo” and “sweet is the kiss Spring presses on Earth’s eager lips.”

Reading this stuff made me remember my own youth, when I could walk around in a poetic cloud without the ever-present mental to-do list (you know what I’m talking about) intruding upon my bliss. The Dad I grew up with loved the outdoors—hiking and raking leaves, for example—but this ardent young man, open to the ecstasies of nature, was a revelation. I wished I had known about him sooner. Would we have had different conversations if I had?

To my amazement, he even wrote poetry. There is a poem he wrote about my mom the year they were engaged, at the height (perhaps?) of his love for her. I often thought of reading it to her, but I never did. Because of her Alzheimer’s she didn’t remember him, or only vaguely, and any mention of her youth seemed to make her cry. Once I showed her an old photo of herself with a group of friends, all laughing after playing tennis, and she ripped it in half and threw it in the wastebasket.

So I didn’t show her the poem.

Now I wonder if I should have. I doubt it would have gotten much reaction—life is not a Nicholas Sparks novel. Still, maybe it would have been the right thing to do. She died of Covid in 2020 so now I’ll never have the chance.

The poem is carefully penned out in Dad’s scraggly cursive and includes the lines,

Kiss me ever so sweetly now

Till every burden is as weightless

As the closing of your eyes.

I close my eyes now and think of Dad, and of Mom.

Of connections and discussions we could have had. Of the rawness of youth and the burdens of age. I look at my own sons growing into young men—all that intensity, all those decisions, all that life ahead of them.

Enjoy each moment, I want to tell them.

Enjoy it and let it go.

Our moments on earth are more important than we think, and less.

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Chinese scientists make new breakthrough in quantum communication

HEFEI — Chinese scientists have made another breakthrough in quantum communication, demonstrating long-distance free-space quantum key distribution during daylight. In the past, long-distance free-space quantum communication experiments could only be performed at night, because sunlight, or sunlight noise, prohibits quantum communication in transmission under conditions of high channel loss over long distances. 

Therefore, the world’s first quantum satellite, Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) launched by China in 2016, can only send photons at night, and it takes at least three days for QUESS to cover all ground stations around the Earth. .

A team from the University of Science and Technology of China led by Pan Jianwei, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has overcome the sunlight noise issue and demonstrated free-space quantum key distribution over 53 km during the day. Pan’s team chose a wavelength of 1,550 nanometers and developed free-space single-mode fibre-coupling technology and ultra-low-noise upconversion single-photon detectors to achieve the daytime distribution. .

The new technology was announced on July 24 in the journal of Nature Photonics. “Our experiment has proved the feasibility of satellite-based quantum in daylight, and laid a foundation for a satellite-constellation-based global quantum network,” said Pan. 

Quantum communication is ultra-secure as a quantum photon can neither be separated nor duplicated. Accordingly, it is impossible to wiretap, intercept or crack information it transmits. 

China is striving to set up the first-ever global quantum communication network by around 2030, through linking a satellite constellation consisting of dozens of quantum satellites and ground-based quantum communication networks.

The wardrobe

I was living in a flat and needed some furniture, so down to the second hand shop, and bought a wardrobe for the bedroom and a set of matching drawers.

I got them back to the flat and was giving them a wipe over.

I found a false bottom in the wardrobe (I wondered why the guy at the second hand shop had not found it) , the screws were nearly invisible so that was probably why.

Anyways, I removed the bottom panel and found several old papers and bundles of cloth, so I thought as I didn’t know was in the cloth, time for some gloves.

The papers were very old (about 50 years), but due to the location they had not gone yellow.

They contained news of the day and advertisements, which I found very funny, you could buy a 3 piece suit, including extras(?) at a cost of £3.00 (about 4 dollars) and it was made to measure.

You could buy gas cookers for £4 (about 5 dollars and fifty cents) and lots of other items at silly prices, but when you think in those days the average weekly pay was about 10 shillings (about 60cents) if you were very lucky.

So I thought i would see what was in the bundles of cloth, (I’m glad I wore gloves for this one).

I unrolled the first one and it contained teeth, yep teeth, all tiny ones, (Obviously baby teeth), so to the next one, hoping this one was not teeth.

Well it wasn’t teeth, It was a pair of tiny baby shoes, hand stitched and still looked as though they had just been made, go on say it il’e wait. awwww.

To the next one, this contained personal items like combs, brushes, and hair clips? and a handkerchief, with initials on I think they were MA or something in that line.

At this point I started to think, that this looks alike a tragic episode in some ones life.

Reading between the lines, I had a feeling that the woman who’s items these were, had died shortly after giving birth to a child, the baby have survived for a while, then also died.

The next roll, this contained what i would call trinkets, bits of jewellery, buttons, hair slides (looked like they had been made from bone) and other little items, now down to the last roll.

This contained coins and rings, and weirdly shirt buttons, and collar studs, collar studs were used to attach the collar to the shirt, in them days they wore very stiff collars, that were starched and ironed flat, as shirts did not have collars attach, this was eventually changed, and the collars were attached to the shirts. so that was my collection.

What to do with it, I couldn’t chuck it in the bin, I did not want to keep it, so I donated the items to the local museum, they were on display a few weeks after.

I was invited to see the unveiling of the items, and the curator had some news about the items, the newspapers contained a story about a works accident at the local cotton mill, and it would appear the lady in question was trapped behind a spinning machine, and died of her injuries.

The husband had gathered her belongings and hidden them, for safe keeping in the wardrobe, a fascinating story of one family torn apart by tragedy.

All in a second hand wardrobe.

Developing countries are poor. China lends money to these countries. Therefore, they’re in debt. Duh!

You have no money. A bank lends you money to buy a car or a house. Then, you’re in debt. Duh!

China lends money to help these countries build infrastructure which will help develop their economy. So far, none of them have defaulted on their loan.

When a country struggles to pay back the loan, China tries to accommodate them by renegotiating the terms of the loan, or in some case actually forgiving the loan!

If you can’t make your mortgage or car payments, what will your bank do for you? LOL.

Because us Swedes have a very simple, equal, seethrough tax system. I pay 27% in tax on my salary, and 25% vat on anything I buy. That’s it!

I get a paper from the tax agency once a year with all figures for last year, check that I get back about as much as I have thought I’d get back (vague calculations in my head), and sign it electronically with my bnk-ID app. Takes me three minutes per year. The rest of the time I don’t think about the taxes, I’m just happy that I get as much as I get!

The tax agency is full of VERY kind and helpful people. I used to have my own company and every year after I had sent in my papers a person from the tax agency would phone me up and go through all faults I had done. I was fined ($1200) wrote them a letter explaining why I had done the fault (missing deadlines due to my chronic illness) and promptly got the whole fine back.

I love my tax, my tax agency, and my tax returns!

If I would be able to sum up ALL that I and my family recieve for the tax we pay… I would be overwhelmed! Never that we pay as much as we get back. Never!

Roads. Bridges. Roadsigns. Streetlights. Buses. Trains. Military. Police. Firefighters. Judges. Government. Parks. Nature reservs. Customs. EPA. Food administration. Schools. Childcare. Care for the old and infirm. Sewage treatment plants. Parental leave payment (1.5 years per child and I have 3), free healthcare during pregnancy, free baby delivery, free healthcare for the babis until they are 20 yo. Free healthcare for my whole life for my (and everybody else’s) Diabetes. Free dental care until 24 yo then subsidised. Subsidised kindergarten. Free school 0-9 (groundschool 6–16 yo children), free three year Gymnasium (16–19 yo), free University and both me and my husband and our daughter have a MSc AND a PhD as the first with degrees in my and hubbys families. Our 2 sons have about 6–8 years each at University with MSc in Economics AND Civil engineer degrees in IT.

All of us are accident prone with plenty broken legs and arms (skiing), my husband has had a massive stroke, I have had long Covid for 2.5 years, and when I sat fire on my garden (accident!) the firebrigade came before my house caught fire… When my sister in law had a broken artery (aorta aneurysm) she was flown in a hospital helicopter about 1 hour, wth two pilotes, one ER doctor an one ICU nurse. Her surgery took 12 hours, her heart was repaired, a new valve inserted, her aorta sawn together and strengthened and weeks at the hospital. Just that one trip with that helicopter… all he tax I pay for years (!) would not pay for that trip. And now she have done three such trips. Completely free!

I live an awsome life, with my and my family’s and all other Swedes basic needs provided for by all of us paying our taxes. It’s like having a safety net behind you and everything in front of you is WIDE OPEN making you FREE to realise all your dreams.

Yes, I found 20 stock shares of Apple…

No, I’m fooling.

I hope you get someone with a good story; I love the topic, too.

When I was little, I would explore old basements in Utah. People would build basements to live in while they saved up to build the houses above. These were abandoned, which is the next coolest thing, I think: exploring unused buildings. Anyway, we would go in these houses in the dirt—wallpaper tattered but still there. Sometimes we would find furniture. We were young, maybe ten, and this was back in the 1960s when you would still find such things.

About five years ago, I was doing an apartment and found an old pump organ from the turn of the 20th century. It was remarkable in that the old bellows worked. It was playable! Unique, too, because it was made by what would eventually be called Baldwin Instruments, one of the leaders of piano manufacturing.

I went through it carefully to talk about the condition with the buyer, and the idea of being able to play a song with it for him made it that much better.

As I was going through the hammers of the instrument’s front, I found a couple of prizes. The instrument was “imported” to where I am in Oregon—significant in that Oregon was a very spartan area at the turn of that century. Organs, while popular and plentiful in the east, were a novelty out here.

Mr. Rbt. Manning bought the organ in Chicago and had it shipped out on Feb. 21st, 1903. He paid $87.50 for it. Why all the detail? The receipt was in an instruction book of how to play the instrument, which was tucked into the framing on the instrument’s inside.

I had both out on display when I presented it to the new owner. I played a tune on the organ. It sounded horrible. Perfect tune—they never go out of tune—but it sounded more like impressionist jazz. It very well might need a tune-up after 117 years.

Thanks for the chance to relive the story.

Super Steel

China is the only country in the world that has realized the industrialized production of super steel, while the super steel of other countries has not yet come out of the laboratory.

As early as 2012, China’s microcrystalline steel (super steel) is in the leading position in the world.

The characteristics of super steel are low cost, high strength and toughness, environmental friendliness, saving of alloying elements and conducive to sustainable development, regarded as a major revolution in the field of steel production.

Super steel was developed by increasing the pressure to 5 times the usual pressure during rolling, increasing the cooling rate and strictly controlling the temperature. Its grain diameter is only 1 micron, which is 1/10~1/20 of ordinary steel, so it has fine structure, high strength and toughness, and can maintain high strength even without adding elements such as nickel and copper.

This major breakthrough will provide extremely important new lightweight materials for vehicles, ships, aviation, aerospace, construction and other fields, with broad application prospects and great strategic significance.

China is the only country in the world that has developed 2,200 MPa super steel, and the annual domestic production of super steel exceeds tens of millions of tons.

Whether it is a warship, an aircraft carrier or a nuclear submarine, it can be built with domestic 2,200 MPa super steel to save a lot of import costs.

For example, an aircraft carrier is such an important naval warship that needs only 800 MPa high-strength super steel.

Nuclear submarines need 1100 MPa super steel.

The domestic 2200 MPa super steel can indirectly improve the performance of these military equipment made in China.

In the field of infrastructure engineering, bridges and buildings built with super steel will have a longer lifespan.

The Ugly American

On a cruise from Honolulu to Sydney in late 2012, my wife and I (and everyone else on the ship) witnessed a nice American turn into an ugly American before sanity prevailed and she was transformed into an ignoramus.

The cruise we boarded in Honolulu had started its voyage in San Fransisco (I think) where a pile of yanks had boarded for the long trip to Sydney. My wife and I were pretty much the only Aussies on board and this was our first real contact with “mainland” yanks (Hawaiians think of themselves as just that – Hawaiian).

Over the first 2 days, we met and became friendly with a lot of yanks from all over the place – Montana, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Nevada, California, NY, NJ, New Mexico – a really nice mix of people that we got on really well with.

Right up until a British couple we met asked about their right to bear arms. The poms weren’t looking for an argument, they just didn’t understand. 99.9% of the yanks understood this and a lively, spirited conversation broke out with a surprising 50–50 split between the pro- and anti- yanks.

All good hearted, with some considered and thoughtful opinions throughout.

And then there was Elaine.

Elaine and her husband Barry (may the Gods have pity on your soul Barry) were from New York and, while they were nice enough as a couple, she was exactly what I had thought a loud mouthed New Yorker would be like.

Late to the conversation, she immediately ran roughshod over any opinion that didn’t match hers – which was “The 2nd Amendment guarantees my right to bear arms and you’ll have to prise my guns out of my cold dead hands” – I kid you not – that is a verbatim quote. The more adamant she became, the louder she got, obviously of the belief that volume = correctness.

Most of the other yanks looked a bit sheepish and even the pro- group was asking her to tone it down a notch or two. The more people tried to placate her the more vociferous she became. In the end, she opened her handbag and showed everyone her handgun and said anyone who felt up to it could try and take her gun away.

Almost everyone in the group asked her if it was loaded and she said “Why wouldn’t it be? Pretty dumb to have an unloaded weapon.”.

We all tried to tell her that she was not allowed to carry a loaded weapon on a cruise ship. We all tried to tell her that she was not allowed to carry a weapon (loaded or otherwise) on a cruise ship. She was now at the point of yelling at everyone and this attracted the attention of a couple of stewards.

We explained that Elaine had a loaded weapon in her handbag and I have never seen shit hit a fan faster.

A steward got on the radio and within 2 minutes we had 10 of the ships security surrounding the group with one putting his foot firmly on top of Elaine’s handbag. This prompted another round of screaming and yelling from Elaine. Barry, by now, was trying to shrink to the periphery of the group, leaving Elaine to her own devices.

Within another couple of minutes, the Captain arrived and was given an overview of what had happened. He asked Elaine if she really had a loaded weapon in her handbag. She said she did as she was an American and had every right to carry – she was licensed to carry, her constitution said she could and she was.

The Captain then informed her that the American Constitution only carried water in the USA. This started a whole new incredible round from Elaine as to why the American Constitution was valid wherever American were. This argument went round in circles with Elaine refusing to see that the American 2nd Amendment really only counted in America.

After 5 minutes, the Captain had had enough and asked Elaine if she wanted to see where on the ship the American Constitution was upheld. Thinking she had talked him round, Elain said “Sure – show me.”. The Captain then got his security team to calmly restrain Elaine and marched her off, while the guy that had his foot on her handbag the whole time opened her handbag and removed a rather hefty handpiece. Laying it on the table, he ejected the magazine and ensure there was no shot chambered. The ammo and the handpiece were then placed into a plastic bag that was sealed and handed to the Captain.

Sanity descended, the beer resumed and we were all wondering where Elaine had ended up (while hoping she would remain there for the duration of the journey). We bumped into Barry that evening and asked where his wife was. His reply was precious – “She’s locked up in the brig and is being put off at the next stop where she will be collected by US Embassy officials. I’m trying to make up my mind whether to get off with her or not.”

The rest of the trip was fantastic and we made some lifelong friends.

Elaine is not one of them.

Barry is.

Now that they’re separated.

Hidden Surprises

I’ve never found a secret compartment in any furniture, but I have found things hidden in things I have bought.

I have found nude photos taped to the bottoms of drawers, cash and jewelry in the pockets of clothes from a thrift store and a bag of very old marijuana hidden inside a record player.

The biggest find was in a 1970 Jaguar I purchased from a junk yard.

I was in the yard looking for parts for an old car I was rebuilding and spotted a 1970 Jaguar xj6 that was dirty but otherwise looked to be in excellent condition.

I negotiated with the yard owner and bought it for $700.

This particular yard specialized in American cars and the owner had just planned on sending it to the crusher.

I towed it back to my warehouse and began tinkering with it.

After draining and replacing all the fluids, and replacing a cracked distributor cap, it fired right up.

Happy with my purchase, it sat in the warehouse for a month or so before I messed with it anymore.

When I got back to it, I began cleaning it up and saw that the rear seat had some rips in the leather.

I decided to pull it and patch the rips until I wanted to reupholster it he car as a whole.

Upon removal of the rear seat I found a mess of Morgan silver dollars in coin protectors.

That got me curious so I decided to go ahead and strip the entire interior.

Hidden in every knock and cranny were more of the silver dollars.

By the time all of the interior was removed the total was a little over 1000 silver Morgan and peace dollars plus 25 krugerrand gold coins.

The title I got from the junkyard was the original title issued so I had to assume it was a one owner car.

I had one of the Private investigators I know track down the owner.

The investigator discovered that the owner of the car was a reclusive older man who had recently passed away with no living heirs.

The junkyard I got the car from had gotten the car when the decedents home had been sold and the buyer was removing the contents.

So in the end there was no one I could return them to.

The investigator had discovered that the decedent was a WWII veteran and donated every year to a veterans charity.

The price of gold and silver was much lower then, and the melt price totaled approximately $13,000. With no one to return the treasure to I made a $15,000 donation in the owners name to the one charity it was known he contributed to and put all of the coins in an old wood crate I had laying around the warehouse.

Over the years I have given away a couple of the gold coins to a silent auction at my kids school and a few of the silver dollars to my kids and their friends when they had opened the crate one weekend that I had them cleaning up the warehouse for me.

The majority of the find is still in the same crate I put it in over 20 years ago.

In estimating the find on current melt prices means that crate is worth around $70,000, plus I still have the old jag.

Not bad for a $700 investment.

Chinese scientists make breakthrough in super steel

WASHINGTON — Chinese scientists said on Aug 24 they have developed a super steel that has a high level of both strength and ductility, a breakthrough that may have a wide variety of industrial applications. 

Furthermore, its material cost is just one-fifth of that of the steel used in the current aerospace and defense applications, they reported in the US journal Science. Strength and ductility are desirable properties of metallic materials for wide-ranging applications, but increasing strength often leads to the decrease in ductility, which is known as the strength-ductility trade-off. 

A Hong Kong-Beijing-Taiwan mechanical engineering team led by Huang Mingxin from the University of Hong Kong adopted a new manufacturing technique called deformed and partitioned (D&P) to addressed the problem. 

“Steels have been the most widely used metallic materials in the history of mankind and can be produced with much higher efficiency than any other metallic materials,” the team said in a statement. 

“Therefore developing a strong and ductile breakthrough steel has been a long quest since the beginning of Iron Age in mankind history.” 

The team explained that it is very difficult to further improve the ductility of metallic materials when their yield strength is beyond two Gigapascal (GPa). 

Now, they made “a successful attempt in realizing the above dream” as the newly developed method yields a “breakthrough steel” that has the “unprecedented” yield strength of 2.2 GPa and uniform elongation of 16 percent. 

“The developed D&P steel demonstrated the best combination of yield strength and uniform elongation among all existing high-strength metallic materials,” the researchers said. 

“In particular, the uniform elongation of the developed D&P steel is much higher than that of metallic materials with yield strength beyond 2.0 GPa.” 

According to the team, the “breakthrough steel” belongs to the system of so-called medium manganese steel that contains 10 percent manganese, 0.47 percent carbon, 2.0 percent aluminum and 0.7 percent vanadium. 

“No expensive alloying elements have been used exhaustively but just some common alloying compositions that can be widely seen in the commercialized steels,” they said. 

Another advantage is that this steel can be developed using conventional industrial processing routes, including warm rolling, cold rolling and annealing. 

“This is different from the development of other metallic materials where the fabrication processes involve complex routes and special equipment, which are difficult to scale-up,” said the team. 

“Therefore, it is expected that the present breakthrough steel has a great potential for industrial mass production.” 

The research outcome was a collective contribution from scientists at the University of Hong Kong, University of Science and Technology Beijing, City University of Hong Kong, and a university in Taiwan.

Supernatural story

My mom’s mother died a week after my parents got married. Lung cancer. She was a habitual chainsmoker. I never got to meet her. My mom tells me she was a petite, fiery Southern woman who wore 5 inch heels till the day she died. I’m named after her.

Probably 8 years later, my pregnant mom was driving to pick my dad up from work. Two year old me was sitting in the backseat, happily blabbering away about anything and everything.

(For anyone who says that I can’t really remember these things, I was too young, my mom refuses to talk about what happened next. It gives her anxiety attacks, I think she suffered from PTSD from it for a long time.)

A bright red hummer rammed into the passenger side of our car doing sixty, trying to make the light that had long been red. Our car flipped over three times and, somehow, landed upright.

My mom was scraped up badly from flying glass. Her neck hurt so bad that EMTs strapped her to a back board and wheeled her away. My brother wouldn’t move for days inside of her, my parents feared the worst.

I didn’t have a scratch on my body.

The carpet from the front seat had, against the laws of physics, flown to the back and wrapped itself around me.

I heard someone with a strong southern drawl saying in my ear, “It’s okay. I have you.”

And I smelled old, stale cigarette smoke.

Dave Matthews Band – Cortez The Killer

Enjoy.

Keeping slim in China

My dad is originally from Shenyang and he was the one who taught me how to cook Chinese cuisines when I was a kid. Actually, he kind of tricked me into it, as he was wont to say “If you don’t learn how to cook, you’ll never find a wife.” No pressure.

I don’t eat “Chinese food” (or other Asian cuisines) for the purpose of being “slim and healthy” though. I eat it because that’s what I ate growing up, what I enjoy eating, what I know how to cook, and because to me, it is delicious. Of course, I am well aware that there are certain dishes that are healthier than others, and because I enjoy being healthy, I try to steer away from those that are not as healthy. For example, I cannot remember the last time I had 油條 (Yóutiáo, I am not sure what you call this in English. I think the closest food item would be a crueller?) or as I call it 油炸鬼 (oil fried ghost / devil… which might be an apt name, actually)

Am I “slim and healthy”? I think the “slim” part applies more to the ladies – I don’t aim to be “slim”. I think I am pretty average-sized, at 183 cm and currently 79 kg, but I used to be 83 kg. According to the Asian BMI calculation though, I am fat. Lol. Oh, dear. But if you see me in person, you’d probably say I am average-sized, or maybe even on the leaner side. I remember the doctor saying BMI isn’t that useful of a calculation for people who are athletic, but I can’t exactly remember why. Suffice to say, I make it a point to exercise at least 30 minutes every day, and so far, all my medical checkups have me in good health and shape, with % body fat levels about 14–16%, albeit a few years ago the doctor did say my uric acid level was a bit higher than normal.

There are as many Chinese diets as there are Chinese people in the world, what more when you apply it to all Asians, who make up 50-60% of the world’s population. I know. It may sound trite. But the truth is, Asia is a huge place. Each individual’s diet is going to be different to the next person’s.

Even in China alone, there are many different Chinese cuisines and schools of cooking, and people in different parts of the country eat differently. I remember watching a video on here, a while back, and there was a lady in a food establishment who was saying to a customer something along the lines of: “This will be great for you. You Guangzhou people like to eat X, X, X, etc. right?”

I’m not going to go through all the different Chinese cuisines because other people on Quora have already done it umpteenth times, and I think they have all done a fantastic job and knowledge-wise and they are very likely miles ahead of a lazy-in-research person like myself. I just know how to cook and eat.

If Chinese cooking was a degree, my major would be in 粤菜 (Cantonese cuisine) and 客家菜 (Hakka cuisine), with a minor in 潮州菜 (Chaozhou cuisine). I know some dishes from the other cuisines, but that’s about it.

Since I don’t eat Chinese cuisine for the purpose of keeping slim and healthy – and I am definitely not a nutritionist – I feel like I should leave it to others, perhaps non-Chinese folks, to tell you why Chinese cuisine might be helpful with that. Mr. Chris Ebbert has already done a good job at it, though I somewhat disagree with his assertion that even vegetables are served with plenty of oil (most of the time, in the cooking process, water comes out from the vegetable, like for example, if you cook spinach or tomatoes. That’s not oil.) I somewhat disagree because for me, the amount of oil depends on which Chinese cuisine. For example, I would say that 潮州菜, 粤菜, and 客家菜 all feature less oil than the other Chinese cuisines.

So instead, I’ll show you what happened when I attempted an eat-Chinese-food only meal plan a couple of weeks ago. I usually eat a mixture of Asian and Western food, and even for the Asian portion, I don’t stick to just Chinese. Why should I, when I can also cook Japanese, Korean, Thai, Singaporean, Malaysian, cuisine (I wish I knew Vietnamese cuisine better, though).

But, just for fun, I did try going all out Chinese-cuisines-only a couple of weeks ago.

You can look at what I ate – for one day – and you can make your own conclusions whether Chinese cuisines are healthy or not.

Disclaimer 1: Once again, I would like to repeat, I am just one person, who knows a tiny fraction about the great big world of Chinese cuisines and how to prepare them. I don’t claim to represent all Chinese people in the world, nor do I claim expertise in any Chinese cuisine, nor do I claim that what I cook is what “normal” people cook.

Note 1: I did take SOME pictures of the food I cooked, but not for everything. I mean, if you cook English or American-type food every day, would you be taking pictures of every dish, like the spaghetti dinner you had with your glass of wine?

So, most of these pictures are not mine – I just used them to illustrate what I cooked. I’m too lazy to mention which are mine and which are not. If it’s an ugly picture, it’s probably mine.

Note 2: These are bog-standard Chinese home-cooking dishes that probably to a Chinese person who eats Chinese food every day, would find utterly commonplace and nothing special, maybe even a little boring. I worked in Chinese restaurants previously so I know how fancy Chinese cuisines can get, but I don’t have the time, energy, money, inclination, or even the kitchen to replicate any of that. (Good luck trying to get “wok’s breath” on a mid-range induction stove…)

Note 3: Everything was cooked by me, to be eaten by me. I live alone. So it’s just a one-person portion, but usually with some leftovers, which are either eaten as a snack later on or in the next meal. To be fair, I think I might have a very healthy appetite. In my family, we tend to lose weight very fast, if we don’t eat above a certain amount everyday. Especially the men in my family. This is why I usually lose weight very fast during assignment or exam-season, because I eat less when I’m stressed,


Breakfast

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I made 燒賣 Siumai. With pork and prawns.
Please excuse the lazy wrapping technique.
Finished about three-quarters of this.


Mid-Morning Snack

釀苦瓜 Bittermelon / Bittergourd stuffed with pork and mushrooms.
This can be braised, but I also like just steaming it, and letting all that brothy liquid gather at the bottom.
I can eat 3 to 4 of these for a snack.

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Lunch

Not my picture but scarily accurate as to what I actually ate!
If I cook Chinese, I usually subscribe to the Three Dishes + 1 bowl of Rice setup because I’m too lazy to cook more than that. But adding the braised peanuts required very little effort.

From top to bottom:

粥 (Congee)
焖花生 (Braised Peanuts) – I just use the ones that come from a can.
炒菠菜 (Stir-fried Spinach) – Plain, with just garlic.
姜葱鸡肉 (Ginger Onion Chicken)
洋葱煎蛋 (Onion omelette) – great for lazy people. I like to let my onions caramelize a little before adding the eggs.

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Mid-Afternoon Snack

番茄炒蛋. Scrambled eggs and tomatoes.
Probably every Chinese person knows how to make this one.
I like this dish wet and juicy.
Because it’s meant to be “scrambled eggs” not “omelette”.
No leftovers. Ever.

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Dinner

Not my picture but again, very accurate to what I ate, except I didn’t have clams in my soup.

From top to bottom:

冬瓜湯 (Winter Melon Soup) – Whenever I make soup, I always try to make a big pot so that I will have soup for the next 1–2 days. Soup is love. Soup is life.
Rice
干煎味噌鸡 (Pan-fried Miso Chicken)
虾米炒四季豆 (Dried Shrimps with Beans)

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Dessert:

One to two mandarin oranges.
Eaten usually one to two hours after dinner.

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Bed-Time Snack

烤白薯 Roasted Sweet Potato.
I can usually eat two medium-sized ones before bed.

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After that snack, I go off to bed.

THE END

A secret surprise

I have found a secret compartment in a piece of furniture.

I inherited a scroll top desk from my family. It had been my grandfather’s. It had the year 1891 and the builder’s signature, if you took the center drawer out and looked up at the underside of the writing surface. He had been a lumber baron and general merchant in the Miramichi River area of New Brunswick, Canada during the early 1900s.

The desk looked a little like one of these –

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It had been pushed into a corner, so the right side was against a wall and couldn’t be seen without moving the whole desk. When I was taking the drawers out one at a time and examining them I didn’t notice at all until I had them all out that the dimensions weren’t quite right. Without the drawers, if you looked or felt inside and to the right you found a thin wall forming the interior. You would assume you were seeing or feeling the back of the outside side paneling surface of the desk. You wouldn’t notice that from the inside surface to the outside there was about an inch, unless you had all of the drawers out and were carefully examining it.

I moved the desk away from the wall and with a flashlight examined the side. Sure enough, there was a very small keyhole, one of what looked like several ventilation holes cut in a pattern around the edges of the panel.

I dug around through all the old papers, pigeonholes, inkwells, and detritus of a couple of generations and found one key to the scroll top and top drawers. The top drawers had locks and the top itself locked, so the writing area and pigeon holes were secure when the top was down. There was even an envelope mail slot on one of the sides of the work area so staff could push confidential or valuable mail into the desk without it being open. After a fair amount of digging, I also found another small key cut. Sure enough, I was able to open that side panel.

The space inside wouldn’t have held anything other than a few flat papers. There were a few old invoices or notes in there, but nothing I was able to recognize as having value.

A year or two later I had the desk disassembled and refinished. The restorer said one of his other customers offered $7,000 when he discovered it at the shop. That was around 1982 or so. The desk would have been around 100 years old at the time.

I still have it – it was worth more to me as a keepsake.

Electroslag remelting

Electroslag remelting is a method of smelting using the resistance heat generated when an electric current passes through the molten slag as a heat source.

Its main purpose is to purify the metal and obtain a clean, uniform and dense steel ingot.

The steel remelted by electroslag has high purity, low sulfur content, few non-metallic inclusions, smooth ingot surface, clean, uniform and dense, uniform metallographic structure and chemical composition.

On May 5, 2009, the world’s largest 450-ton electroslag remelting furnace was successfully commissioned and smelted for the first time.

The successful manufacture of China’s 450-ton electroslag remelting furnace will undoubtedly greatly enhance the manufacturing capacity of the large-scale forgings in China in the production of low-voltage rotors, generator rotors, and evaporators of steam turbines mainly used in second and third-generation million-kilowatt nuclear power plants.

Large nuclear power forgings such as tube sheets and electroslag ingots for large backup rolls have become a major leap in the domestic electroslag furnace smelting equipment technology.

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A family that hid things

I came from a family who used to hide things “to keep them in a safe place.” Diamond earrings might be in the bottom of a flower pot of nylon flowers. The heirloom silver I found in the attic in a box marked “old curtains.” Yes, it had old curtains, but it also had silver. Our son listened to all this as new discoveries were made.

With that background, our son got to work in our business when he turned 16. We paid him minimum wage, and he was told, “By the time you get out of high school, you’ll either love this business or hate this business. But either way, you’re working for us.” (By the way, he now lives several states away, and I think that was a wise move.) When he worked for us, he always did a conscientious job on everything he was given to do.

He was also the newest hired, and so he tended to get the worst jobs. We purchased a mobile home from the relatives of the old woman who lived there. It was still furnished, so we sent our son over there in the big truck to clear everything out after the large furniture had been moved. So, clear out all the drawers, closets, cabinets, and everything else he could find. Pitch it into the truck and then from the truck into the dumpster.

With his usual conscientious effort, he did just that, carefully looking through every garment, box, and paper. Way back in the closet, he found some of those gift boxes that department stores used to give out, the kind that fold flat for storage. As he went through the gift boxes, he found $500 in cash!

He finished the job, came back to the store and told his dad what he found. My husband said, “Well, the rule is that if you find something in a dryer you are fixing, then you get to keep it. (Dryers usually had less than a dollar in change inside.) The same applies here. Now it’s your money. Enjoy!” And that is just what he did!

Soft??? USA and EU have thrown every conceivable sanction at Russia. There’s nothing more they can do.

The international order is collapsing. We are seeing this happen in real time right before our eyes…

The Euro-American states are growing weaker and weaker, losing global influence, suffering high inflation and high fuel prices.

Major protests are breaking out across Europe, in Netherlands, in Czech Republic, in Germany.

They lost major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

They were unable to convince most of the world to sanction Russia.

They were unable to persuade OPEC to increase oil production.

Countries are starting to move away from the US Dollar. In fact, BRICS is creating an alternative reserve currency to the US Dollar.

The Euro-American states were unable to convince SE Asia to join in an anti-China coalition.

US politics is deeply and chronically divided. The country is practically in a state of civil war.

UK fucked itself with Brexit.

Germany fucked itself with anti-Russia moves.

Thank goodness for all this. We will finally see an end to all the fucking wars USA and NATO have been fighting for over half a century, wars that were absolutely pointless and useless.

A new multipolar world order will arise. We will see peace and prosperity for all.

Buried Loot

when I was in college a girl that lived in the same house I did bought a piece of furniture, it was like this super old weird shaped stacked drawer thing and after about 6 months of having it she was pounding on my door at 3am saying I had to come check this out.

I went into her room and she had found an envelope under a wooden lining of one of the drawers with a 9 page letter in it and it told the story of how this girls dad went to prison in the 70s when she was little and he had left her a map to a massive amount of cash hidden in an abandoned well but she never had the courage to go and get it thinking that she would somehow be taken to jail too for not turning it in.

It included her story, details, the maps he gave her, and names and dates. The location it gave was about 3–1/2 hours from us, so that weekend, 6 of us, all girls, loaded up and went on a treasure hunt.

To make a long story short, we found what we were looking for, we found the woman that wrote the note, and we found out that you don’t get to keep stolen money no matter how long it has been.

But we did get a reward, not much, but enough to pay our rent for the whole next school year.

And I know people are going to ask me, why didn’t you just keep it, well first off, it had a piece of steel that was about a 1″ thick and prolly 6 feet square laying on top of it that took 6 men and a backhoe to move, the rope that was tied to the bags had rotten and there was no way to pull them up with that, we had to go onto private property, so we basically had to share the story to get to do it, and there was no way possible for us to have taken the necessary equipment to the hole to retrieve the bags without a ton of people knowing.

So we basically just knocked on this woman’s door and said hey we think there is a ton of money in your backyard lol. Next thing we know, half the town including the fire dept was pulling bags of money out of an old dried up well.

Skillet Chicken Parmesan

Create a buzz around the dinner table, without all the fuss! Our stove top chicken Parmesan, made easy with Bisquick™, is the perfect weeknight meal or a satisfying date night surprise that brings delicious to the table every time.

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Skillet Chicken Parmesan

Ingredients

  • 3/4 cup Original Bisquick™ mix
  • 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
  • 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
  • 1 egg
  • 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (4 oz each)
  • 3 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil
  • 2 cups Muir Glen™ organic Italian herb pasta sauce (from 25.5 oz jar)
  • 1 cup shredded Italian cheese blend (4 oz)

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The Brass Bed

I had bought a brass bed when I was an antique dealer, and I personally used this bed for myself. It was my perfect size. My toes could touch the brass. It had very thick heads and feet columns. Often, I was looking at the columns and fantasized to myself that taking off those round caps, I could hide something in there, possibly in a soft cloth bag that I could send all the way down to the bottom with a little cord or chain. I played with this idea for months, but while living alone I could not share this fantasy with anyone else. My

kids were all married and living in their own houses. Having to tell someone else where I wanted to hide some special things bothered me.

Finally, the fantasy got the best of me and I decided to unscrew the cap from the left side. The interior of the brass column was clean and empty. Something, pushed me to do the same thing to the other side. My compulsion to do so, was unbelievable and voila’ , I managed to unscrew the other cap. To

my utter astonishment there was a string hanging in the column attached to part of a screw. The line extended to the bottom and there was a small black silk bag. I couldn’t believe that someone else had my same thought . My heart was beating to the sound of a locomotive in full speed. The excitement of finding some jewelry or money was leaving my breathless. I gingerly pulled the string which was light as a feather. I thought, it is too light to have something of value. I slowly brought the bag to the surface and I saw that there was a faded yellow paper. I smiled thinking that was someone’s love letters. I slowly opened the crumbled old paper. One single lonely line stood there staring at me: “Sorry, you are too late!”

The food only women can cook.

It’s not sexist, it’s Nyonya cuisine. The incredible precise techniques necessary to create the food that gives Nyonya cooking its revered status within Peranakan communities.

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Peranakan men are called Baba (uncle), women are Nyonya (auntie) – it’s not by chance that the spicy, piquant cuisine is named after the females. The matriarchal recipes are passed down from one generation to the next, and are expected to be mastered by the women in the family. I was made to cook some of the dishes when grandma lost her sight – I was 10yo.

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There were no recipes, it’s all in the head, by memory. Grandma barked instructions on the spot. Seemingly straightforward dishes like herbal rice required a precise blend of herbs and spices, pounded by mortar and pestle and mixed by hand to ensure the perfect temperature and consistency of the rice.

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Grilled fish were taken up a notch by being wrapped in banana leaves and grilled under hot charcoal to preserve the aromatics, and served with a sour, spicy sauce made from calamansi limes (juiced by hand of course) and belacan (shrimp paste).

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There were no juicer/blender then – even if we had, it’s not allowed – which is believed to compromise flavours. Instead, coconut milk was squeezed from hand-grated coconut meat by hand, and spice pastes are pounded in a mortar and pestle.

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Nyonya cuisine is slowly dying. Young Nyonya women are reluctant to learn old-school techniques, the technical practices that define Nyonya cooking – the endangered part of its culinary heritage.

Addendum:

Nyonya restaurants in Malacca (Melaka) – one of the major abodes for Peranakans – thrive to this day by tweaking recipes to cater to tourists and offering vegetarian dishes – which is unusual because most Nyonya dishes are meat based.

I have eaten at a few authentic Nyonya restaurants in the historical city and generally they are good, some dishes excellent.

Owner chefs are women of course, trained by their mothers and grandmothers in the kitchen in their youth – where “agak-agak”, the Nonya term for estimation of ingredients used, was an important part of cooking. Typical, no written recipe.

David Gilmour – Shine On You Crazy Diamond feat. Crosby & Nash (Remember That Night)

I hope that you enjoy this.

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The new world order is clearly taking shape

Lately I’ve been sick. I caught a small cold from my daughter, who caught it from Kindergarten. This coupled with the insane levels of change in my personal life, has made it very difficult for me to keep up. But, I’m still churning stuff out. I don’t know how, but yeah I am.

Now, of course, every step is taken to keep colds out of school, but little kids have bad habits, and no matter how had you try, sickness sneaks in.  And of course, my little daughter doesn’t yet know the importance of covering her face when she coughs.

Sigh.

Please enjoy this installment.

The reason why Telsa is unable to leave China (even with Biden incentives)

Telsa factories in China have 95% of their supply chain are localized. These supply chains also supply to the USA and the rest of the world. By leaving China, the supply chain disappears, and without parts, Tesla disappears.

〔財經頻道/綜合報導〕美國電動車大廠「特斯拉(Tesla)」近年來積極加速中國化。特斯拉全球副總裁陶琳(Grace Tao)近日接受媒體訪問時透露,目前特斯拉上海工廠產業鏈本土化率已達95%。

綜合媒體報導,特斯拉在2013年底正式進入中國市場,9年來,特斯拉持續擴大在中國的投資佈局。陶琳近日在接受媒體訪問時透露,目前特斯拉上海超級工廠產業鏈本土化率已達到95%,並在上海、蘇州、寧波、南通等長三角地區組建起「4小時朋友圈」,形成新能源汽車零組件的全生態鏈。

不僅如此,特斯拉也致力於加速對人才的可持續培養。陶琳稱,特斯拉上海工廠員工超過99.9%都是中國人,並稱目前特斯拉也已經培養起一線操作人員、技術高端人才以及新能源行業管理人才的全產業鏈人才儲備。

From HERE

Speaking of Tesla…

Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) is suspending plans to make battery cells in Germany as it looks at qualify for electric vehicle and battery manufacturing tax breaks in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel

Article HERE

Hey, let’s check out this nut-case!

Seriously! Look at this guy!

He makes money spewing this nonsense. Any day now, eh?

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It’s so easy to spew nonsense if your readership wants to read it.

It’s sort of like how people want to read how to lose weight by eating deep-fried pork fat.

China’s exports rose an additional 18%

China's July exports rise 18% to $333 bn, with trade surplus at record high

China's export growth continued to rise in July, sending trade surplus to a record high, according to government data.

China’s continued to rise in July, sending trade surplus to a record high, according to government data.

China’s exports grew 18% to $333 billion compared to the same period last year, and were up from 17.9% in June, according to data from China’s customs.

Imports, however, remained soft, growing 2.3% in July compared to a year ago. That was lower that economists’ estimates of 4%, and suggests weak domestic demand amid lockdowns across the country as China attempts to stem the outbreak of COVID-19.

China’s total trade surplus reached an all-time high of $101.3 billion in July, breaking the record set in June.

The country’s economy has rebounded from earlier in the year, when tough COVID-19 restrictions including a two-month lockdown in Shanghai and other measures across China disrupted manufacturing and logistics.

While manufacturing and supply chain issues have eased, recovery may be affected by fresh COVID-19 outbreaks, weak domestic demand and external uncertainties such as rising inflation in developed countries including Britain and the U.S.

The Monetary Fund in July predicted that China’s economy would grow 3.3% this year, below the ruling Communist Party’s target of 5.5% set in April.

From HERE

The United States is repositioning forces from Japan to Guam

Interesting.

As I write this, the US Department of Defense is ramping up the militarization of my homeland – part of its $8bn scheme to relocate roughly 5,000 marines from Okinawa to Guam. In fact, ground has already been broken along the island’s beautiful northern coastline for a massive firing range complex. The complex – consisting of five live-fire training ranges and support facilities – is being built dangerously close to the island’s primary source of drinking water, the Northern Guam Lens Aquifer. Moreover, the complex is situated over several historically and culturally significant sites, including the remnants of ancient villages several thousands of years old, where our ancestors’ remains remain.

‘Our children’s lives on the line’: the ongoing battle for Guam
The construction of these firing ranges will entail the destruction of more than 1,000 acres (405 hectares) of native limestone forest. These forests are unbearably beautiful, took millennia to evolve, and today function as essential habitat for several endangered endemic species, including a fruit bat, a flight-less rail and three species of tree snails – not to mention a swiftlet, a starling and a slender-toed gecko. The largest of the five ranges – a 59-acre multipurpose machine-gun range – will be built a mere 100 feet (30 metres) from the last remaining reproductive håyon lågu tree in Guam.

If only superpowers were concerned with the stuff of lowercase earth, like forests and fresh water. If only they were curious about the whisper and scurry of small lives. If only they were moved by beauty.

If only.

From HERE

Emperor Wang Mang

Among Chinese history fans, the Emperor Wang Mang of the short-lived Xin Dynasty is often jokingly referred to as a time traveller for having many surprisingly modern ideas.

He usurped the throne from the Han Dynasty and become the Emperor himself in 1 AD.

COINCIDENCE??? Actually, yes, probably.

(Correction: he became regent in 1 AD. Remind yourselves, dear readers, to never write about history purely from memory.)

Anyhow, Wang Mang tried to abolish slavery and serfdom, carried out land reforms, introduced egalitarian economic policies that can be described as proto-socialist, and even instituted a welfare system for the unemployed.

His monetary policy was also profoundly different from the conventions of the time as he issued coins face-valued at much higher than the actual value of the bronze coins, so much so that the face-value of these coins were totally detached from the value of the metal. In this way, the coins became abstract representations of value, which is how modern paper currency works.

Unlike all previous emperors who never care for such lowly things, Wang Mang encouraged the development of technology and even invented things like the sliding caliper:

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Wang Mang sought medical advances and commissioned a dissection of a rebel’s corpse in order to learn more about the human anatomy. This was the first ever recorded incidence of a dissection being carried out for medical purposes (Correction: No, it wasn’t. Read comments below). Han historical records are not kind to him about the incident, writing that Wang Mang only claimed the dissection was for the purpose of healing people; where as his true intention was to exact cruel revenge on the person whose corpse was being dissected. Maybe it was both; we will never know.

And in what was perhaps one of the biggest shockers of ancient China, Wang Mang’s wife once received court officials at their house wearing a short skirt that barely covered her knees.

Although that last one was probably an attempt by Wang Mang to demonstrate how frugal (rather than immodest) he and his family were.

Jane’s Addiction – Jane Says (Official Music Video)

Dreaming with my cat

I used to dream with my cat, literally.

The first time it happened, he was sleeping next to me, as we did, I was using his little rump for a pillow, and he had pulled my hand close to his head, laying it on my hand.

We were both asleep.

I had a dream (or he did) that a bird flew by, diagonally, from the lower left to the upper right. As the bird flew by, he startled me awake by waking up, shooting his head up and looking in the direction of the bird that I had just dreamed flew by.

I’ve never been so close to a soul in my life.

I lost him, at the young age of only 11, just 3 and a half weeks ago. His name was Makana. It means ‘gift’ in Hawaiian.

He certainly was.

I’ll miss you forever. 🙁

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Kitty dream time.

I’m curious where did you learn that China’s zero outbreak policy “failed” to contain infections?

Where is your basis?

As far as I know, China has never given up the fight against the new crown virus. With the help of the current efforts to overcome the epidemic, it has also achieved very good results. It has proved the necessity of the zero epidemic policy with practical actions.

Where does the term “failure” come from?

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China’s COVID policies is that the starting point is wellbeing of its people. The word “people” here does not specifically refer to the strong & young people or just the powerful class, but also including the elderly and infants, including the vast majority of people in both big cities and small villages.

Unlike America, where society is deeply divided, China cares about poor people’s lives. The overall death rate in poor counties was nearly twice as high as in wealthy ones, at one point reaching 4.5 times as high. In the top 300 counties with the highest death rates, an average of 45 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

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China cares about minorities’ lives. While The infection rate, hospitalization rate and death rate of American Indians were 1.6 times, 3.1 times and 2.1 times that of whites, respectively. African Americans were 1.1, 2.4 and 1.7 times as likely as whites.

China cares about older people’s lives. While in the U.S., three-quarters of COVID-19 deaths were among people 65 and older, and 93% were among people 50 and older.

China cares about children. While there are more than 250,000 “COVID-19 orphans” in the US who have lost parents to the pandemic. An average of one in 12 U.S. orphans under the age of 18 lost their parents to the pandemic, and an average of two students in every public school lost their guardians.

China’s policy focuses on the overall situation, putting people’s lives rather than economic interests first. Therefore, it is impossible for China to do European media’s calculation that “the death of hundreds of thousands of elderly people will save billions of dollars in pension”, let alone the American politicians who say that “the elderly should voluntarily sacrifice for the economy”.

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However, I am not saying that China’s policy is perfect, but it is capable of self-renewal and revolution. Since 2020, China has been adjusting and optimizing its policy, which has been widely understood and cooperated by the public. Now, thousands of permanent nucleic acid testing sites have been set up in Beijing, Shanghai and other places, indicating that social life will gradually return to normal after the end of lockdown and quarantine.

Each country needs to find COVID policies that suit its own national conditions. The important thing is not to always be right, but not to give up on finding the right path. The US can shrug its shoulders and say “c ‘est la vie” as the pandemic rages on, but one day China will vindicate its policy when reopening its ports, lifting its lockdown, getting its economy back on track and growing rapidly.

The wildlife situation around Chernobyl currently is something of a controversy in science. This 2016 paper

says that:

With few exceptions, wildlife in the zone shows a strong pattern of declining abundance

However, many other scientists say that the local fauna is clearly on the rise, and the popular media seems to have almost invariably gone with their conclusions.

In any case, since – as far as I’m aware – all the studies saying that Chernobyl’s wildlife is in decline are by the same two authors, whereas there are several different biologists who have written papers on increasing animal populations in the area, I’ll assume that the latter are correct for now.

Various camera trapping operations have revealed that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has grown a healthy population of large mammals, such as grey wolves:

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European badgers:

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Wild boar:

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Roe deer:

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And even moose:

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There are also abundant smaller mammals, including Eurasian beavers, least weasels and voles. Among the birds, there are some “flashy” species, such as the enormous white-tailed sea eagle (Europe’s largest raptor):

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And black storks:

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And that’s just the native wildlife. Since the disaster, people have released other Eurasian mammals into this involuntary oasis, including European bison:

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And wild Przewalski’s horses:

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There’s even evidence that animals not seen in the region for over a century are returning, including Eurasian lynx:

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And brown bears:

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It’s pretty amazing, and also rather sobering, to think that the sheer presence of humans was worse for the environment than a catastrophic nuclear disaster.

 

Ladies and gentlemen. Please fasten your seatbelts. We are about to depart to the end of the Carboniferous period, 359 – 299 million years ago. Our current time travel technology can only take us there one way. There is no going back.

  • Time travel is only the first temporal effect that the traveler would experience. His circadian rhythm would be severely disrupted and affect their life because the day length was only about 22 hours in the Carboniferous period. There would be insomnia, immune system dysfunction, increased risk of cancer, problems with the heart and even early death from all the above combined.
  • An additional factor that would shorten the life span of travelers would be the increased oxygen level in the atmosphere. It was about 28% at the beginning of the Carboniferous period, it dropped to about 24% in the middle and rose again to about 27% at the end. Over the lifetime, so much oxygen would damage the tissues and increase the speed of aging of humans not adapted to these levels and cause health problems that would cause even earlier death.
  • Another weird temporal effect would be noticed after landing. Animals would seem slower, more sluggish than us. At the time, they might have perceived reality in fewer frames per second than us on average. We do it at 60Hz after additional hundreds of millions of years of evolution of vertebrate animals. There were no warm-blooded creatures at the time yet, so there were no very active animals. They only had sprawling legs while walking, which made them slower. All of this lead to slower reaction times sufficient for survival. Insects might have been faster but even they only just evolved relatively recently. They weren’t as great at what they did at the time yet.
  • The air was filled with copious amounts of spores of various plants. Breathing might even result in death from an extreme allergic reaction, anaphylaxis. We are more adapted to pollen, which didn’t exist in the Carboniferous period.
  • This also means that there were no fruits and we need Vitamin C to survive. We would need to eat leaves, make teas from bark or eat buds of leaves of ferns, the fiddleheads.
  • The good news is that animals shouldn’t be that dangerous at the time and it might be easy to hunt them for food at least on dry land. They weren’t that big, fast or even smart yet. Although, many formidable crocodile-like and crocodile-size temnospondyl amphibians with massive teeth existed in aquatic habitats and widespread swamps. There were also giant, 2.5 m/8 feet centipedes. It’s hard to tell how dangerous they were but I’m learning they weren’t. They were outcompeted by reptiles soon and died out anyways. Large, flying, 0.7 m/2 feet insects similar to dragonflies shouldn’t have been dangerous to humans. A more significant danger might be venomous tiny animals like scorpions or spiders.
  • The travelers should better take a lot of metal tools with them because producing them in the Carboniferous period would be tricky. It’s hard to obtain high enough temperatures for working on metals without coal, which originated in this period and didn’t form underground yet.
  • The good news is that there might be less danger from diseases. It’s unlikely that many would affect mammals like humans. But who knows? There might be an odd outlier that could infect us. Maybe some mysterious virus. For bacteria, we should take a lot of antibiotics with us.

If we traveled in a time machine back to the late Carboniferous period, it should be possible to build shelter from trees, which evolved recently. Water should not be a problem. There would be an issue with obtaining a balanced diet because there were no fruits, which evolved less than 180 million years ago. The lifespan of the travelers would be severely shortened from all the issues described above.

We Just Witnessed Something That Hasn’t Happened Since 2008, And It Is Causing The Housing Market To Crash

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This didn’t have to happen.  The reckless behavior of the Federal Reserve and our politicians in Washington created a horrifying inflation spiral, and now the Fed is feverishly raising interest rates in a desperate attempt to get inflation back under control.  But everyone knows that rapidly raising rates is going to absolutely crush the housing market.  When the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates, that puts upward pressure on mortgage rates.  And as mortgage rates go higher, more and more potential homebuyers will be forced on to the sidelines.  With fewer potential homebuyers in the market, that will put downward pressure on home prices.  This is basic stuff that you would learn in an ECON 101 class, but Fed officials can’t seem to understand that what they are doing is going to be extremely destructive to the U.S. economy as a whole.

Do you remember the pain that we went through in 2008?

That entire crisis was precipitated by a collapse of the housing market, and now a similar scenario is starting to unfold right in front of our eyes.

In fact, something just happened that we haven’t seen in all of the years since 2008…

The average interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose above 6 percent for the first time since the financial crisis, according to federal data released Thursday.

The average mortgage rate for the benchmark home loan rose to 6.02 percent as of Thursday, according to Freddie Mac, up 0.13 percentage points from last week and 3.16 percentage points above its level a year ago. It’s the first time the 30-year fixed rate mortgage rate was above 6 percent since the week of Nov. 20, 2008.

When mortgage rates get really high, the wealthy can still afford to buy homes because many of them don’t even need mortgages.

But for the rest of us, much higher mortgage rates make a world of difference

Already, it has ushered in a sea change in the housing market by adding hundreds of dollars or more to the monthly cost of a potential buyer’s mortgage payment, slowing what was a red-hot market not so long ago. Higher rates are forcing some would-be buyers to continue renting. Since the start of the year, the average mortgage payment has risen 38.5% to $2,306 from around $1,700 at the start of the year.

Demand for mortgages is drying up really fast.

Last week, the number of mortgage applications was 29 percent lower than it was during the same week one year ago.

And the number of applications to refinance mortgages has seemingly dropped off a cliff

As mortgage rates rise and home prices remain high, home sales are slowing.

With rates essentially double where they were a year ago, applications for home loans have dropped and applications to refinance into a lower payment have fallen off a cliff, down 83% from a year ago, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

If you work in the mortgage industry, I feel really badly for you right now.

Of course everyone involved in real estate is going to be feeling a tremendous amount of pain in the months ahead.  According to the chief economist at Redfin, this is the “sharpest” downturn that we have seen since the meltdown of 2008…

“This is the sharpest turn in the housing market since the housing market crash in 2008,” said Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s Chief Economist.

Billionaire Barry Sternlicht is even more pessimistic.

He just told CNBC that he believes that the Fed’s policies will cause a “major crash” in the housing market, and he is also warning that we could soon find ourselves in a “serious recession”

“The economy is braking hard,” the chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital Group told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday.

“If the Fed keeps this up they are going to have a serious recession and people will lose their jobs,” he added.

Sadly, he is right on target.

Even if the Federal Reserve stopped raising rates right here, we would still have a real nightmare on our hands.

But the Fed isn’t going to stop.

Fed officials have repeatedly told us that they are going to keep raising rates until inflation is under control, and that could take quite a while.

In fact, we are being warned that next week we could potentially see “the biggest Fed rate hike in 40 years”, and that would really shake up the financial markets.

So what can we do to protect ourselves?

If you are selling a home, I would recommend trying to sell it as rapidly as you can while home prices are still ridiculously high.

If you are looking to buy a home, I would recommend waiting until home prices come down quite a bit.

And something that we can all do is to prepare for the “serious recession” that Billionaire Barry Sternlicht says could be coming.

During the crisis of 2008 and 2009, millions of Americans lost their jobs.  Without any income coming in, all of a sudden a lot of those people couldn’t pay their bills and many formerly middle class Americans also ended up losing their homes.

You don’t want to suffer the same fate.

So I have been encouraging my readers for a very long time to build up a sizable emergency fund.

A large emergency fund will allow you to continue paying your bills no matter what comes along.

And it will also keep you from losing your home.

In addition, I would encourage everyone not to take on additional debt at this time.

When hard times come, you will want your finances to be as “lean and mean” as possible.

Now is not a time to party.

Now is a time to batten down the hatches financially.

Very rough weather is headed our way, and everyone can see it coming.

The wise will prepare in advance, but those that are foolish will do nothing because they assume that our leaders have everything under control.

Russet Potato Salad

A twist on traditional potato salad with mustard flavor and plenty of celery for crunch.

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Russet Potato Salad

Ingredients

  • 3 lb Betty Crocker™ fresh russet potatoes, cut into fourths (about 4 large)
  • 1 cup mayonnaise
  • 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
  • 2 tablespoons coarse-grained mustard
  • 1/2 cup chopped fresh dill weed
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/2 cup chopped celery
  • 1/2 cup finely chopped red onion

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Washington Post vs this video: who is telling the truth?

What actually happened…

And how it was “reported“…

In a stunning public rebuke, India’s Modi challenges Putin over war in Ukraine – The Washington Post

Read HERE

Russia and China are ready to provide stability to the world: the results of Vladimir Putin’s speech and meetings at the SCO summit

This is the result of the SEO meeting. Not at all reported in the West. -MM
The summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was held in Samarkand for two days in a row, from 15 to 16 September
Oleg ADAMOVICH
During the two days of the summit, Vladimir Putin managed to personally meet with more foreign politicians than in the last two months combined. On Thursday alone, he had seven (!) official conversations.

But even though more than a dozen world leaders came to Uzbekistan, including the heads of India and China, no fateful decisions or statements were made. At least publicly. The main formal outcome of the summit: Iran became a full-fledged member of the SCO, and Belarus began joining the organization.

But on the other hand, this is not enough. One of the US's main enemies, Tehran, is now in an economic alliance with the US's main trading partner. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Washington's first allies in the Middle East, also became "dialogue partners". Countries outside the collective West are merging with each other without America's involvement.

By the way, the protocol meetings of Vladimir Putin also show quite well what kind of relations we have with different countries:

KYRGYZSTAN

We give them money to restore what was destroyed after the skirmishes with Tajikistan and to purchase rescue equipment, and in return they do not interfere with the study of the Russian language. They even build new Russian-language schools.

Such "soft power" means a lot when Turkey tries to subjugate the whole of Central Asia under the auspices of the revival of the "Turkic world".

TURKMENIA

Joint gas projects are developing well in this country. But now, when the pressure on our hydrocarbons will grow, non-primary ties are important for Russia.

- We aim to diversify our economic ties through other areas of interaction. This refers to agriculture, the textile industry. We are ready to increase the supply of non-primary products to the market of Turkmenistan, - said Vladimir Putin.

IRAN

Tehran is just glad that they will now deal with it normally. For too long the country has lived cut off from the developed world. Iran is ready to export to Russia whatever we want to buy from them. Basically, we are talking about replacing sanctioned Western goods.

- The first major business mission visited Iran in May this year. Many members of the delegation then told me about their impressions: they were pleased with what they saw at Iranian enterprises in terms of the development of high-tech areas. To be honest, we didn’t even expect it,” Putin admitted.

And yes: Iran categorically condemns anti-Russian sanctions and will never join them. Expected, but it needed to be said.

PAKISTAN

Islamabad is looking forward to two mega-projects. 

First: Russia is modernizing Pakistan's railways. Not the whole system, of course. We can supply inexpensive and high-quality passenger trains.

Second: the construction of a gas pipeline to Pakistan.

- This is also possible, part of the infrastructure in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan has already been created. We need to resolve the issue with Afghanistan. There are problems related to political stability, but, bearing in mind our mutual good relations with the Afghan people, I hope that this problem can also be solved, the Russian leader said.

Putin added that Pakistan could influence the authorities in Afghanistan to speed up the laying of the pipe.

CHINA

With China, Vladimir Vladimirovich is already ready to discuss the fate of the world. After all, the second economy in the world.

- The foreign policy tandem of Moscow and Beijing plays a key role in ensuring global and regional stability. We jointly stand for the formation of a just, democratic and multipolar world order,” Putin said.

- We highly appreciate the balanced position of our Chinese friends in connection with the Ukrainian crisis. We understand your questions and concerns in this regard. During today's meeting, of course, we will explain in detail our position," he added.

Xi Jinping is the first at the SCO summit to whom the Russian president promised to tell about the situation in Ukraine.

MONGOLIA

Mongolian politicians do not hide the fact that they want to make good money on transit from Russia to China. Now we are updating the railways of the Central Asian republic, which will significantly increase their throughput. There are also plans to build a gas pipeline through the territory of Mongolia.

INDIA

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi became the second person Putin promised to tell about Ukraine. Nobody touched this topic anymore.

- I know your position on the conflict in Ukraine, your concerns that you constantly express. We will do our best to stop this as soon as possible. Only the leadership of Ukraine announced its refusal from the negotiation process, stated that it wants to achieve its goals "on the battlefield." Nevertheless, we will always keep you informed of what is happening there,” Vladimir Vladimirovich said.

Modi responded by saying that he was particularly concerned about the food security of his own country. This has already led to an eightfold (!) increase in the supply of fertilizers from Russia. In the end, the politician, with the peacefulness characteristic of the Hindus, concluded that a bad peace is better than a good war.

- Now is not the era of wars. Democracy, diplomacy, dialogue - these are important tools for us to find solutions, the Prime Minister of India stressed.

TURKEY

Well, Erdogan openly earns on anti-Russian sanctions. Transit through Turkey is now exported and Russian grain and gas. Blue fuel goes to Europe along the Turkish stream. This is so beneficial that the republic was the first to agree to give up dollars if Moscow insists on it.

- We are ready to significantly increase our deliveries in all areas that are of interest to you. In the near future, our agreement on the supply of natural gas of Russian origin to Turkey with payment for 25% of these supplies in Russian rubles should come into effect, Putin reminded.

AZERBAIJAN

From the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, one thing is now needed: that he stop shooting at Armenia.

- Today, we are all very worried about the aggravation of the situation on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. It is good that the escalation was finally stopped by coordinated efforts, but, as far as I understand, it (the situation - Ed.) still remains tense, the Russian leader admitted.

- The main thing is that we managed to stabilize the situation and transfer it to a peaceful course. Now the main thing is not to destroy the beginning process of normalization of relations, but to move in this direction. We welcome the efforts of Russia aimed at this, - Aliyev answered diplomatically.

EUROPEAN EGOISM

Vladimir Putin, speaking at the Council of Heads of State, once again spoke about the fate of Russian fertilizers. The head of the country accused Europe of selfishness.

- It turns out that sanctions (against fertilizers - Ed.) have been lifted only for EU member countries. It turns out that only they can purchase our fertilizers. But what about the developing, poorest countries in the world? Taking advantage of the presence of the Deputy Head of the UN Secretary General, Ms. (Rosemary) DiCarlo, I ask colleagues in the European Commission to influence them to remove these obviously discriminatory restrictions, the Russian President urged.

By the way, after the end of the council, DiCarlo really approached Putin and talked to him for quite some time.


From HERE

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Clean Kitties

Cats are normally very clean animals. They spend a great deal of time grooming themselves. They groom to remove much of their scent. This helps them as they hunt prey. A prey animal can’t smell the cat easily

Most people would think a cat has very little smell. If you put your nose right in their fur, it tends to just smell clean and fresh.

A cat who can’t groom because of injury or health problems can start to smell. Some of these cats will require that you bath them to keep them clean

My mom had a cat, Cookie who lived to be 25 years old. During her last couple years, she had trouble grooming herself. My mom would gently bath her a couple times a week. Then mom would carefully brush her. My mom loved that cat.

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I don’t have a picture of Cookie but I found this picture online and it looks very similiar to Cookie. Cookie crossed the rainbow bridge about ten years ago. My mom has a new black cat named Herman now.

How have we not went to war with China yet? They brought fentanyl over here. Covid started there.

Firstly who’s we? I’m guessing an American? Secondly why would you be at war with China?

You can’t seriously be blaming China for your stupid government reaction to a pandemic, so not that. Also most people known the virus probably didn’t start in China anyway and was already circulating in Europe and the USA, but they were too inept to notice.

Let’s see. . Is it the old, “they’ve taken our jobs” story? Your government took those jobs away from you, not China.

What else? They’re not a democracy? Is that it?? Why should they be? Damn commies, not acting all civilised like us. Look at how well your democracy is working out, you’ve just had an election, and now your president is childishly throwing his toys out of the pram because he hasn’t won. Jesus.

Is it possible that’s it’s because they’ve improved their country more than you could possibly imagine in the last 40 years, whilst here in the west we’re still stuck with the same old sad infrastructure? How dare you improve yourselves! You were just supposed to make stuff for us but stay uncivilised and underdeveloped. That could be it, because they’re doing so well while we stagnate.

Do you know how many days China has been at war in the last 40 years? 0. None. And America has been at war constantly, do you know how much money that’s cost you? Trillions, that could all have been spent improving your education system, your trains, your roads and bridges, on you. Do you know how many countries you’ve been at war with, that have a nuclear arsenal?

Maybe that’s why you’re not at war with China. Firstly, you don’t have a valid reason for one, they’ve done nothing to warrant it. Even though America is doing its best to brainwash people into believing China is evil in every way it can, we don’t believe you. Look at Mike Pompeo for example, have you heard what he says? We all know he’s a professional liar, he admitted it stupidly on film. He’s desperate for you to think China bad, us good, but what he says looks bizarre to anyone with any real knowledge about China. How would it look to your average citizen to know China’s system is actually more democratic than yours, and is way more effective?

Secondly, China does have a nuclear arsenal, and if you try going to war with them you’re going to die. What a weird question.

John Mearsheimer put it best when he said that with regard to the issue of how to treat China, that the US will not tolerate the rise of any potential peer competitor. He listed four instances where this concept has manifested itself and also when the US prevailed:

        1. Imperial Germany
        2. Imperial Japan
        3. Nazi Germany
        4. the Soviet Union

China is just the newest challenger. In his writings and talks he makes it clear that there is no other reason, moral or otherwise, that the US should stop China’s rise. You cannot get more nakedly hegemonic than this.

Many others in the US, mostly influenced by the China hands at the Hudson institute, feel that the rise of China represents an existential threat to the united States. Which is actually true if and only if one can ONLY think of the US as number one. So their idea of existential threat doesn’t mean that the United States will disappear from the face of the earth, it just means we won’t be the biggest economy or the most influential culture.

China has no choice but to engage in whatever role we push them in. China is one-fifth of humanity, by comparison the United States is only one twentieth of the global population. Even if China has no ambition to replace the US as the global hegemonic power, if its only goal is to give China’s own citizens a standard of living comparable to the US, it will have to grow its GDP to roughly five times that of the US.

One cannot grow to become the biggest economy without protecting it.

China and India have experienced the consequence of not protecting their economies before, both were one and two by GDP until the 1870’s (the positions switched occasionally).

Naively, both India and China never thought to protect their economic interests from physical aggression and by the middle of the 19th century, naked aggression destroyed their people’s lives.

In India’s case, the subcontinent was colonized.

In China’s case, parts were colonized, then fought over in very brutal great power struggles.

By right, if China aspires to attain a standard of living equal to advanced industrialized economies (and it should or its leaders should be deemed derelict) it should also sought to protect its economy from the sort of aggression by Western powers and their proxies.

What does this mean for China? It means that Beijing should aim for building up bigger armed forces, protecting the sea-lanes (this one is counter intuitive to many) such as in the South China Sea routes, and opening up other trade routes such as the BRI or the OBOR, including oil and gas supplies overland such as from Russia.

China has no choice but to grow a very powerful armed forces that is at least powerful enough that the United States will not choose to be in direct military confrontation with it. Since World War II, the United States has not chosen to fight wars where the direct enemy is a much, much smaller force.

The United States will try to stop China’s rise by non-military means — proxy wars, economic decoupling, etc. — which really just means a cold war.

A hot war will be a last gasp measure in a hopeless cause.

Me and my wife adopted Aurora this year. She’s 5 (6 in a month!) and has been such a sweet cat. The PetSmart where we found a cat named “Jackie” whose cage had been labeled “male” with a note that said “I don’t like other cats.” Obviously, a cat who has a “no cats” policy is a deal breaker for most of the people who are adopting cats regularly, since they already have cats. Luckily, we didn’t have any cats so this wasn’t a deal breaker for us.

When I saw that she’d been there for over a month, it made me really sad. In hindsight, I think she’d been moved between different locations for much longer than that. The employee let me hold her and she grabbed me so tight and didn’t want to let go. My heart melted and we brought her home that night.

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At that time, we still thought she was a he and so we gave her the name “Augustus.” A few days later, while looking at her medical information, we noticed that her sex was clearly labeled “Spayed Female.” After a good laugh, we renamed her “Aurora.” She was shy at first but now she loves to curl up in our laps and enjoys plenty of pets.

I honestly don’t see any other explanation for why she remained unadopted for so long. She did hiss at the other cats in the caged area but she may have just been anxious because of the environment. It’s sad to see how much suffering can be caused by a seemingly helpful note. I don’t know for sure but I suspect that she would be able to adjust to living with another cat now that she’s comfortable.

Violence In California Reaches “Epidemic” Levels As Our Society Rapidly Deteriorates All Around Us

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I can’t understand why anyone would still want to live in California.  Yes, there are lots of high paying jobs and the weather is very nice, but crime is completely and utterly out of control.  As you will see below, a new report that has just been issued is warning that violence in the state has now reached “epidemic” levels.  The police are doing what they can to try to contain the violence, but at this point they are vastly outnumbered by the predators.  Sadly, this is the end result of literally decades of cultural rot, and what is happening in California is going to happen to the rest of the nation if we do not take urgent action to turn things around.

Originally, I was going to write about something else today.  Tens of thousands of rail and port workers are threatening to go on strike, and this could definitely cause some substantial economic disruptions…

America is bracing for chaos as tens of thousands of railway, port, and hospital workers look set to strike over the winter – plunging the country into further disruption.

As many as 60,000 railway workers, 15,000 nurses, and 22,000 West Coast port workers are plotting mass walkouts as they seek better working conditions.

Several US freight railroads said they were preparing for widespread strike and service interruptions Friday, a deadline set by two holdout labor groups in protracted talks with railroad carriers about better benefits.

But even though these strikes could cause severe short-term problems, they will eventually be resolved.

So in the greater scheme of things, they really aren’t a major concern.

On the other hand, our cultural decay is a massive ongoing crisis that isn’t going to go away.

As I mentioned earlier, a brand new report that was just released is warning that violence in the state of California has risen to “epidemic” levels

The Golden State is losing its luster. A troubling new report labels physical and sexual violence in pandemic-era California a statewide “epidemic.” To put it simply, violence is on an alarming rise.

According to the new annual report from the California Study on Violence Experiences across the Lifespan (CalVEX), violence statistics have seen a significant increase since COVID-19 emerged. The report, conducted by scientists at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, reports more than one in six Californians (18%) experienced either physical or sexual violence in just the past year.

If you live in one of the biggest cities in California, this isn’t news to you.

Once upon a time, the state was a place of great beauty and great tranquility, but now it has been transformed into a crime-infested hellhole.

I was particularly alarmed by the numbers on sexual violence in this new report

While more than 1.5 million adults in California admit to committing acts of sexual violence in the past year, men were more than two times as likely as women to report that they perpetrated sexual violence and intimate partner violence.

Women also showed greater mental health impacts and life disruptions due to violent experiences, with 82 percent of women reporting anxiety or depression as a result of physically aggressive, coercive or forced sexual behavior.

Of course much of this violence is being fueled by illegal mind-altering drugs.

Some of these drugs are so immensely powerful that they literally put people into catatonic states for an extended period of time…

 

I will never understand why people would willingly do that to themselves.

Today, we are facing the biggest drug crisis that we have ever seen in American history, and addicts will often do whatever it takes to get another fix.

Sadly, this is one of the factors that is contributing to skyrocketing rates of shoplifting all over the nation

We are all painfully aware of the huge rise in shoplifting and even violent robberies of stores. We watch the videos of thugs brazenly raiding stores, and read about the organized crime rings that have sprung up to profit from the trend. Shoplifting has become a big, if criminal business. Chances are that if you use eBay to purchase a wide range of products at reduced prices you have unwittingly purchased stolen goods. No good way for eBay to stop the practice.

One homeless man that originally came from Alabama recently admitted that he regularly shoplifts in order to fund his heroin use…

 

There have been homeless addicts in the streets of San Francisco for years, but now we have reached a point where they are seemingly everywhere.

The following is what one reporter witnessed during a recent journey through the city…

I saw complete hopelessness in the eyes of haunted souls dragging themselves down the street looking for their next fix.

I saw men and women of all ages hunched over on the sidewalks with open wounds all over their bodies.

I saw the filthy tent cities stinking with human excrement and strewn with needles and pipes.

I saw children staring in horror at people dying right in front of them.

At one time, such activity was limited to the bad portions of the city.

But now addicts that have been drugged out of their minds are pulling down their pants and crapping in the streets right in front of some of the most expensive real estate in San Francisco.

This has made the wealthy people really angry, and Mayor Breed says that she is finally going to “get serious” about this crisis.

Of course “getting serious” doesn’t mean arresting a bunch of people and throwing them into prison.

That just wouldn’t be very “progressive”.

Instead, authorities in San Francisco are getting ready to launch a “soft-touch” program that will seek to “interrupt” drug trafficking…

City supervisors released a resolution for a vague ‘soft-touch’ initiative called ‘San Francisco Recovers.’

And here’s the catch, and it’s a doozy: the plan is being touted as, ‘a way that nobody’s going to jail but we’re doing an effective job of interrupting the drug market and drug scenes.’

Is this a sick joke?

Yes, it certainly sounds like a sick joke to me.

Good luck with all that.

If major cities such as San Francisco actually want to have a chance of turning things around, they need to send the police out to round up all the drug dealers.

Unfortunately, police forces in many of our biggest cities are rapidly getting smaller.

In fact, a whopping 122 officers have left the Seattle Police Department in 2022 alone…

The liberal city of Seattle is losing police officers amid a major spike in crime, 770 KTTH reported.

“We’re screwed,” former King County Sheriff John Urqhart said, according to 770 KTTH.

In total, 122 officers have left the Seattle Police Department in 2022, including six that left in August, 770 KTTH reported, citing a police source. Since the city council voted to defund the police department in 2020, nearly 500 police officers have left the force.

I wouldn’t want to be a police officer in a major west coast city at this point either.

They are underpaid, the politicians treat them with tremendous disdain, and they are often hindered by absolutely ridiculous regulations which keep them from doing their jobs effectively.

We like to think that we are so “advanced”, but the truth is that if you compare video footage from major cities on the west coast from decades ago to video footage from today there is absolutely no comparison.

Our society is melting down right in front of our eyes, and if we stay on the path that we are currently on there is no future for our country.

But the politicians insist that people like me have it all wrong.

They continue to tell us that things are better than ever and that a glorious future for our nation is dead ahead.

You can believe that if you want, but the truth of what is really happening to our society is on display for the whole world to see.

America is dying, and we are quickly running out of time to turn things around.

My Video about being a Rufus!

I put it up and only got 25 views! Sheech!

Please check it out!

Graduation for some MM followers! This is my tribute for your accomplishments!

Graduation. Some people are (for certain) going home. Small steps open up to larger ones. A path is being formed. So many are on that path. i can see it. Congratulations all.

I know.

I know what is going on with some of you. Some have told me what is going on, and with others… well… I get “reports”. Ha! And you thought that I was out of the loop in these things, eh?

It’s like a big bolder that you finally got up and out of the graound and now you just started to push it down the hill. Yeah. It’s going so far, and then it hits a platform, a tree, or a level space.

Not to worry.

It’s a level completed.

It’s a graduation.

For some of you, you don’t need MM any longer. Though you are always welcome to visit and keep in touch. For others, just hang on loose.

A couple of you all have really reason to celebrate. You know where you are. And it should be on “that” plateau, level area. Many more to go… but you hit the first one.

Of course, remember. Do not be like Matilda. Do not be tricked. There is no “another chance once you do …”. Don’t be in a rush.

So many have or are reaching, that point. It is time to celebrate. But don’t be “big headed”…

  • Keep your affirmation campaigns.
  • Keep chatting with your mantids.
  • And keep on; going on.

I salute every one of you!

Here’s my celebration of your accomplishment. I hope you all enjoy it. Plus some normal day-to-day MM stuff.

Faith No More Epic, My Generation (With Klaus Meine & Bo Diddley) Live Wembley Arena 12/06/91

Dealing with a bully

When I was a kid I used to be bullied by a bigger kid that lived down the road. At the weekend – in Summer – my Mum used to make me wear a silly hat outdoors to protect me from sunburn, and he always made fun of it…as well as push me around.

One day I hatched a cunning plan…

I would put my silly hat out the front of my house with a rock under it. Said bully will ride down the road on his bike after school, spot my silly hat and run over the hat and rock – and maybe fall off on the grass… What could go wrong?

Well it kind of worked…

He spotted the hat and aimed straight for it – but instead of running over it, he decided that he would drop his foot and kick it/scoop it up…

Unfortunately neither the hat nor the rock moved and he smashed every bone in his foot!

His parents were on the warpath – screaming at my parents – blaming me…

I just said that I had been out front and put the hat over a rock to stop it blowing away – and I had forgotten about it…

I think that he was in plaster for months!

The family eventually moved away and he never bullied or laughed at me again…

Metallica – Master of Puppets (Live) [Quebec Magnetic]

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Well, coming from Portugal, people didn’t have electricity in the countryside until the late 70s/80s So in order to conserve the meat, my great-grandma (and every Portuguese people who weren’t rich) had a thing called “Salgadeira”, something like “Box of Salt”.

They had tons of salt and they would submerge the pieces of meat in the salt. A little context, Portugal was very, VERY, poor in the 40s, 50s, 60s. In late October, a pig would be slaughtered and EVERYTHING was prepared to be eaten in the future.

Belly, snout, feet, intestines (sausages and blood sausages), tail, ears, testicles, everything was used and all of that was put in the “Salgadeira” (Expect for the sausages, they had a special room called “Fumeiro”) and would stay there until the people decided to eat it.

Now you ask “Wasn’t it salty?”

Yes, of course.

That’s why the day before, the people would take out the piece and put it in a basin full of water during the night before and the whole day and it would be perfect to be cooked. This pig lasted a whole year and they had to make it count! I hope I helped and sorry for the extensive story. <3

Why does Pompeo do this? Because he’s trying to smear China’s reputation and prevent China’s rise. China threatens American hegemony.

Here’s the fundamental problem…

ANYTHING positive that is reported about China is regarded as Chinese propaganda and not to be trusted.

So you can show as many videos of Uyghur culture as you like, and they’re all considered fake.

You can show demographic data of the Uyghur population increasing for the past decade, and since they’re official Chinese stats, they must be fake.

The ONLY way to prove that Western media and Mike Pompeo are lying about the Uyghurs is to go visit Xinjiang and see with your own eyes.

Millions of foreign tourists already have. And do you know what they all see?

Happy Uyghurs. Uyghur culture flourishing. Mosques practically around every corner. Uyghur children playing in the streets. If China is committing genocide, either racial or cultural, she’s doing a very bad job of it!

Unless you think Xinjiang is one vast Potemkin village, you must conclude that Western media is lying.

But here’s the thing: most people in the West will never have the opportunity to visit Xinjiang or China. They either can’t afford to, or they don’t have the time nor inclination.

Mike Pompeo and his ilk are counting on this. They’re counting on most Westerners being unable to verify the truth. This is how they get away with propaganda lies.

P.O.D. – Satellite (Official Music Video) [HD]

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The incompetency, or rather, the inconsistency of competence, of the local governments of various levels.

First and foremost, the current Chinese government runs more or less on the principle of meritocracy, that is, the better you do on your job, the more likely you are to get promoted.

The result of which is that the central government consists of the brightest, most capable, and most experienced individuals of the entire Chinese political system, while the local governments – especially the lower level provincial and municipal governments – are more of a mixed bag.

It is not rare to see the local governments failing miserably at their jobs, people get angry, the central government had to step in and, as we would call it in China, “wipe their butts for them.”

And that’s also why the infamous system of petitioning (信访/上访) is…well, infamous.

Through the system of petitioning, officially known as public complaints and proposals, petitioners are, in theory, able to directly get into contact with the central government to report issues they have with the local government.

The problem is, in order to reach the central government, you must first petition with the local government.

And, naturally, when the issue of the petition in question is directed at you, the local incompetent official, you are not very likely to just allow the petitioners to go to the central government. And the end result would be rather grim for some of the more vocal petitioners.

Over the years, the central government is becoming more aware of the issue and, with more effort put into anti-corruption and power abuse since Xi, the central government is trying to achieve a balance between improving the petitioning system itself to allow petitioners to reach the central government, and improving the efficiency of the local governments so that the guys in the central can better focus on their actual jobs.

The 2016 Feng Xiaogang Film I Am Not Madame Bovary is a satire-comedy that criticized the petitioning system and the incompetence of lower level officials, and was well received:

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Definitely worth a watch if you’re interested in the topic.

I’m confident Singapore won’t have to suffer food shortages like Sri Lanka. We have invested billions over decades to diversify the entire supply chain to all corners of the globe, and centralized our stockpile, especially the climate controlled storage of key necessities.

The recent chicken export ban from key supplier Malaysia hardly ruffled feathers here.

I’m confident Singapore won’t have to suffer ruinous energy price increase in the multiples, like the UK and Germany. A severe recession is guaranteed given the rate hikes still to come. Cheap Russian energy cannot be easily replaced, especially the price point.

I’m confident Singapore won’t have to deal with currency devaluation and persistent high inflation. The Singapore dollar uses the exchange rate to control domestic inflation and it has shown remarkable strength next to the ntd, krw, jpy and cny, bucking capitulation in the rest of asean (bar Brunei).

The latest iPhone remains affordable, relative to wages.

I’m confident Singapore won’t have the headache of revolving door politics like we’ve seen in the UK, France, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and many more. Stability wielded by experienced, wise heads gave us the platform and latitude to navigate the treacherous curveballs hurled at us time and again by covid. The scorecard gave Singapore first dibs on returning business flow. Singapore remains the jewel of SEA, as investor confidence clearly demonstrate.

I’m confident racial and sectarian violence won’t break loose, particularly anti-chinese sentiment fueling hate crimes and witchhunts in the Anglophone first world. Singapore takes the constitution seriously. The pledge of one United people regardless of race, language or religion is taught in preschool. Tolerance, and respect, are values deeply ingrained in the Singapore psyche. Long may that continue.

Ultimately, Singapore’s size condemns us to be price takers. We will take material hits when the global situation deteriorates, especially if great power competition escalate into full blown war. But I’d like to think my tropical island home will preserve the last vestiges of sanity as the rest of the world devolve into anarchy.

But that’s just me.

What could be better for you than sitting down to a nice cold glass of fruit juice? I mean, after all, the word “fruit” is right there in the name. How could you go wrong?

Truth is, you might as well be drinking a can of soda with your breakfast. Ounce per ounce, fruit juice contains as much sugar and as many calories as a can of Coke. Maybe more.

Sure there might be some vitamin C and antioxidants in your juice, but that hardly makes up for all that sugar.

Let’s look at a comparison between apple juice and Coca Cola.

  • Coke: 140 calories and 40 grams of sugar (10 teaspoons)
  • Apple Juice: 165 calories and 39 grams of sugar (9.8 teaspoons)

Even if you are careful to pick up the juice labeled “100% Pure” and “not from concentrate”, that doesn’t mean much. In a commercial process, once the juice is squeezed from the fruit it is usually stored in massive oxygen-depleting storage tanks for up to a year.

This has the unfortunate effect of removing most of the flavor from the product. To make it palatable again, manufacturers have to add “flavor packs” to their product.

What is a healthier alternative? Just eat the actual fresh fruit itself. It will taste better and be better for you.

The Cult – She Sells Sanctuary

Beijing may use Anti-Secession Law to seek Taiwan reunification, Chinese foreign minister says

  • Wang Yi says if the law is violated, Beijing will take ‘resolute actions to safeguard the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity’
  • He also warns that US approach may have ‘subversive impact’ on ties, during meeting with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has said Beijing could invoke its Anti-Secession Law to seek reunification with Taiwan, in an escalation of rhetoric over the self-ruled island.

Wang also warned that Washington’s pro-Taiwan, anti-Beijing approach might have a “subversive impact” on US-China ties, during a meeting with former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger on Monday. Wang is in New York for the general debate of the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly this week.

It follows US President Joe Biden’s latest pledge to defend Taiwan if Beijing were to attack the island – the fourth time he has vowed to do so – and after the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022 cleared a US Senate panel last week.

From HERE

 

I know my cat chose me.

I was talking to my friend outside her apartment. There were cats all around, ferals and strays.

As we talked, I suddenly felt fur on my leg. I looked down and saw a beautiful black cat brushing past my leg, loving me, choosing me.

I sat down on the curb and petted her (by now I knew it was a girl).

She pushed her little head into my hand and licked me.

This was love at first sight for her.

A lady came out of her apartment and told me she feeds the cats and this little girl, and that she’d been a stray for many months.

Next day I took her to the vet where she got a wellness check, all of her shots and a pill to kill worms in her tummy.

She had no fleas or sores.

I took her home.

She hid under the couch until she got hungry and came out to eat. She found the litter box by herself.

Two nights later she began sleeping with me and has ever since. She’s the love of my life.

Here’s Charlotte

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Charlotte

My aunt and uncle were exceedingly generous people, and one of the things they liked to do was to take friends to new restaurants they had discovered. I used to tell them that once a restaurant had their seal of approval, it was like giving them a Michelin Star!

They once took a couple out, and were having a great time until the husband complained about the steak—after he’d eaten about half of it. The waiter comped his meal. My aunt put it down to the fact that not every dish that comes out of a kitchen can be 100% perfect all the time, and did not think any more about it.

Until a few months later when they took that couple to a different restaurant and the same thing happened—the husband ate about half his meal, complained to a waiter, got his meal comped. My aunt said something along the lines of how bad his luck was and how embarrassed she was that two of their restaurant choices had not pleased him.

He replied, “Oh, the meals were perfectly fine. Great, even. But I fill up on salad and bread and drinks, eat some of the entree, call a waiter over and then get the whole meal comped.” He bragged that no matter how nice the place, there was always something to “complain” about. Too cold, too salty, too spicy, not done enough, too well done, had an ingredient not mentioned on the menu, etc.

My aunt likened it to stealing and he just scoffed, “Look at it this way, I’ve saved you about $25 both times we’ve gone out.”

My aunt and uncle stopped taking this couple out to dinner after that.

CANDLEBOX – Far Behind (Official Video)

Anti-U.S. base incumbent Tamaki secures 2nd term as Okinawa governor

2022 09 11: Anti-U.S. base incumbent Tamaki secures 2nd term as Okinawa governor
KYODO NEWS KYODO NEWS – Sep 11, 2022 – 23:40 | Japan, All
Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki won a second four-year-term following Sunday's gubernatorial election, obtaining a renewed mandate for his efforts to discontinue a plan to relocate a U.S. base within the island prefecture.

Opposition-backed Tamaki defeated former Ginowan Mayor Atsushi Sakima, 58, who was supported by the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito. Sakima ran on a platform of pressing ahead with moving U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from the densely populated city of Ginowan to the Henoko coastal area of Nago.

Reviving the all-important tourism industry was also a focus of the election with the Okinawan economy having taken a heavy battering from travel restrictions put in place during the coronavirus pandemic

From HERE

Another political viewpoint dressed as a question.

The line of questioning implies China must bend to American pressure, otherwise her leaders are being foolishly stubborn, and dangerously so.

If America wants something bad, she never negotiates. She makes demands, and expects every other country to bow. In international affairs, the Chinese from the time of Mao and Deng called America a 超级大国 or a superpower. Superpowers dominate, bully and exploit people everywhere.

Blackmail, tariffs, media pressure, asymmetric pressure, all in an effort to force China into an unequal treaty that threatens China’s very sovereignty. And that is just the opening salvo. The Americans will never be satisfied once they’ve tasted blood.

Precedents are always begging to be reused.

China will not gamble her long-term internal stability and sovereignty without putting up a massive fight.

There are lots of tools in the Chinese arsenal. They have just not been used out of respect for the global hegemon. Just take a look at the strength of the Yuan relative to the rest of the BRICS. It may actually be a good time to cull the excesses in the Chinese economy brought about by the immense credit expansion post-financial crisis.

China isn’t being stupid. Neither is this a China-driven charade or Xi’s dictatorial decision. The Standing Committee exists to decide important affairs by vote.

 

I don’t know anyone who has visited China become or remain anti China. The anti China haters are, to my knowledge, people who have never been to China and who wish to hate China from a distance. Maybe they just want to hate. The US media creates lies about China to callously make money based on other’s suffering and to cover up the guilt of the USA. And to try and generate anti China sentiment. Their only hope is with the ignorant people.

I do firmly believe, that if any of these anti China people actually went to China, they would stop their ignorant thinking and become pro China.

The main problem is, that these anti China people don’t want to learn the truth and they wish to want to continue hating innocent people to blame their nation’s (usually the USA), weaknesses on someone else. Like the Nazis blaming the Jews, it all comes from fear of their own inadequacies and jealousy of other’s strengths.

All who visit China, I believe, will realise that China is a good country.

Def Leppard – Hysteria (Live)

Chocolate Silk Raspberry Tart

Smooth slices of this attractive tart combine the classic combination of chocolate and raspberries.

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Chocolate Silk Raspberry Tart

Ingredients

  • 20 creme-filled golden sandwich cookies, crushed (2 cups)
  • 1/4 cup butter or margarine, melted
  • 1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
  • 2 cups whipping (heavy) cream
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 package (8 oz) cream cheese, softened
  • 1 cup fresh raspberries
  • 2 tablespoons seedless raspberry jam

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Look, I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but cats don’t actually have owners. They have staff, and friends. They choose their staff, and their friends.

If a strange cat comes to you and decides that you’re their friend / staff, I personally choose to respect the wishes of the cat.

A cat that comes to me, comes inside my house, sleeps near me, eats my food… I really don’t concern myself with the previous “ownership” status of the cat.

This is Zeus:

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Zeus came to me while I was trying to befriend a feral cat. Zeus wanted pets, so I petted her. She wanted food, so I fed her. Three days later, she walks into my house, jumps into my bed, and falls asleep.

I’ve had her for about 5 years now. When I took her to the vet and found out she was chipped, I literally didn’t care; she’d picked me, and had AMPLE opportunity to “go home.”

The truth of the matter is that she found home. She likes me.

This is Sam:

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He was a neighborhood stray, who was eventually “taken in” (i.e. imprisoned in inhumane conditions against his will) by a local cat hoarder.

After 18 months he escaped; his fur was patchy, he’d lost like 25% of his body weight, he had a grotesque and untreated wound on his neck (9 stitches needed), and he came straight for me.

Straight to me.

I didn’t bother trying to find his “owner.”

He wanted in to MY house, he wanted ME to pet him and take care of him.

For the first 3 years I had him, he had an actual cat-door to the outside that was unblocked at all times.

Infinite freedom; he could come and go as he chose.

He’d go out and vanish for 8 hours at a time, but he always, always, always came back.

I don’t second guess cats.

If I have a cat and it leaves me, then I can be sad, sure… but it’s the cats decision.

If a cat shows up and wants me, I accept it, and care for it, and don’t concern myself with its past ownership history.

The cat chose.

I let the cat choose.

If I were you, I’d just let the cat in next time it shows up, and block the “owners” number.

It’s your cat now, should you so choose.

Vladimir Putin’s address

It is historic, significant and will shape what we will all experience in the near future. It is also BLOCKED in the West. Good luck finding it.

From HERE (mostly 404 if you are in the West)

Vladimir Putin: Dear friends! 

The topic of my speech is the situation in the Donbas and the course of a special military operation to liberate it from the neo-Nazi regime that seized power in Ukraine in 2014 as a result of an armed coup. 

Today I appeal to you, to all citizens of our country, to people of different generations, ages and nationalities, to the people of our great Motherland, to all who are united by great historical Russia, to soldiers and officers, volunteers who are now fighting on the front lines, are on the combat post, to our brothers and sisters - residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, and other areas liberated from the neo-Nazi regime.

It will be about the necessary, urgent steps to protect the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Russia, about supporting the desire and will of our compatriots to determine their own future and about the aggressive policy of part of the Western elites, who are striving with all their might to maintain their dominance, and for this they are trying to block, to suppress any sovereign independent centers of development in order to continue to crudely impose their will on other countries and peoples, to plant their pseudo-values. 

The purpose of this West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are already directly saying that in 1991 they were able to split the Soviet Union, and now the time has come for Russia itself, that it should disintegrate into many mortally hostile regions and regions. 

And they have been planning such plans for a long time. They encouraged gangs of international terrorists in the Caucasus, promoted the offensive infrastructure of NATO close to our borders. They made total Russophobia their weapon, including for decades they purposefully cultivated hatred for Russia, primarily in Ukraine, for which they were preparing the fate of an anti-Russian foothold, and the Ukrainian people themselves were turned into cannon fodder and pushed to war with our country, unleashing it, this war , back in 2014, using the armed forces against the civilian population, organizing genocide, blockade, terror against people who refused to recognize the power that arose in Ukraine as a result of a coup. 

And after the current Kiev regime actually publicly refused a peaceful solution to the Donbass problem and, moreover, announced its claims to nuclear weapons, it became absolutely clear that a new, yet another, as it had happened twice before, large-scale attack on the Donbass was inevitable. . And then, just as inevitably, there would have been an attack on the Russian Crimea - on Russia. 

In this regard, the decision on a pre-emptive military operation was absolutely necessary and the only possible one. Its main goals - the liberation of the entire territory of Donbass - have been and remain unchanged. 

The Lugansk People's Republic has already been almost completely cleared of neo-Nazis. Fighting in the Donetsk People's Republic continues. Here, for eight years, the Kyiv occupation regime created a deeply echeloned line of long-term fortifications. Their head-on assault would have resulted in heavy losses, so our units, as well as the military units of the Donbass republics, act systematically, competently, use equipment, protect personnel and step by step liberate Donetsk land, clear cities and towns from neo-Nazis, provide assistance to people whom the Kyiv regime turned them into hostages, into human shields. 

As you know, professional servicemen serving under contract take part in the special military operation. Volunteer formations are also fighting shoulder to shoulder with them: people of different nationalities, professions, ages are real patriots. At the call of their hearts, they came to the defense of Russia and Donbass.

In this regard, I have already given instructions to the Government and the Ministry of Defense in full and in the shortest possible time to determine the legal status of volunteers, as well as fighters of the units of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. It should be the same as that of regular servicemen of the Russian army, including material, medical support, and social guarantees. Particular attention should be paid to organizing the supply of volunteer formations and detachments of the people's militia of Donbass with machines and equipment.

In the course of solving the main tasks of protecting Donbass, our troops, based on the plans and decisions of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff on the general strategy of action, liberated from neo-Nazis also significant territories of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, and a number of other regions. As a result, an extended line of combat contact was formed, which is over a thousand kilometers. 

What I want to say publicly today for the first time. Already after the start of the special military operation, including the talks in Istanbul, the representatives of Kyiv reacted very positively to our proposals, and these proposals primarily concerned ensuring Russia's security and our interests. But it is obvious that the peaceful solution did not suit the West, therefore, after certain compromises were reached, Kyiv was actually given a direct order to disrupt all agreements. 

Ukraine began to be pumped up with weapons even more. The Kyiv regime has launched new gangs of foreign mercenaries and nationalists, military units trained to NATO standards and under the de facto command of Western advisers. 

At the same time, the regime of repression throughout Ukraine against its own citizens, established immediately after the armed coup of 2014, was strengthened in the most severe way. The policy of intimidation, terror and violence is assuming more and more mass, terrible, barbaric forms. 

I want to emphasize that we know that the majority of people living in the territories liberated from neo-Nazis, and these are, first of all, the historical lands of Novorossia, do not want to be under the yoke of the neo-Nazi regime. In Zaporozhye, in the Kherson region, in Lugansk and Donetsk, they have seen and are seeing the atrocities that neo-Nazis are doing in the occupied areas of the Kharkov region. The heirs of Bandera and Nazi punishers kill people, torture them, throw them in prison, settle scores, crack down on, torment civilians. 

More than seven and a half million people lived in the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions before the outbreak of hostilities. Many of them were forced to become refugees, to leave their homes. And those who remained - about five million people - today are subjected to constant artillery and rocket fire from neo-Nazi militants. They hit hospitals and schools, arrange terrorist attacks against civilians. 

We cannot, we have no moral right to hand over people close to us to be torn to pieces by executioners, we cannot but respond to their sincere desire to determine their own fate. The parliaments of the people's republics of Donbass, as well as the military-civilian administrations of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, decided to hold referendums on the future of these territories and turned to us, Russia, with a request to support such a step. 

Let me emphasize that we will do everything to ensure safe conditions for holding referendums, so that people can express their will. And we will support the decision about their future, which will be made by the majority of residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.

Today, our Armed Forces, as I have already said, are operating on the line of contact, which exceeds a thousand kilometers, they are confronting not only neo-Nazi formations, but in fact the entire military machine of the collective West.

In this situation, I consider it necessary to make the following decision - it is fully adequate to the threats we face - namely: to protect our Motherland, its sovereignty and territorial integrity, to ensure the security of our people and people in the liberated territories, I consider it necessary to support the proposal of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff to conduct partial mobilization in the Russian Federation.

I repeat, we are talking specifically about partial mobilization, that is, only citizens who are currently in the reserve will be subject to conscription, and above all those who served in the Armed Forces, have certain military specialties and relevant experience .

Those called up for military service will undergo additional military training without fail, taking into account the experience of a special military operation, before being sent to the units.

The decree on partial mobilization has been signed.

In accordance with the law, the chambers of the Federal Assembly - the Federation Council and the State Duma - will be officially informed about this today by letters.

Mobilization activities will begin today, from 21 September. I instruct the heads of regions to provide all necessary assistance to the work of military commissariats.

I would like to emphasize that Russian citizens called up for military service by mobilization will receive the status, payments and all social guarantees of military personnel serving under a contract.

I will add that the Decree on partial mobilization also provides for additional measures to fulfill the state defense order. The heads of defense industry enterprises are directly responsible for solving the tasks of increasing the production of weapons and military equipment, and deploying additional production capacities. In turn, all issues of material, resource and financial support for defense enterprises must be resolved by the Government immediately.

In its aggressive anti-Russian policy, the West has crossed every line. We constantly hear threats against our country, our people. Some irresponsible politicians in the West not only talk about plans to organize the supply of long-range offensive weapons to Ukraine - systems that will allow strikes against the Crimea and other regions of Russia.

Such terrorist strikes, including with the use of Western weapons, are already being carried out on the border settlements of the Belgorod and Kursk regions. In real time, using modern systems, aircraft, ships, satellites, strategic drones, NATO carries out reconnaissance throughout southern Russia.

In Washington, London, Brussels they are directly pushing Kyiv to transfer military operations to our territory. No longer hiding, they say that Russia should be defeated by all means on the battlefield, followed by the deprivation of political, economic, cultural, in general, any sovereignty, with the complete plunder of our country.

Nuclear blackmail was also launched. We are talking not only about the shelling of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which is encouraged by the West, which threatens a nuclear catastrophe, but also about the statements of some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction against Russia - nuclear weapons. 

To those who allow themselves to make such statements about Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries. And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. 

It's not a bluff.

The citizens of Russia can be sure that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be ensured - I emphasize this again - with all the means at our disposal. And those who are trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the wind rose can also turn in their direction.

It is in our historical tradition, in the destiny of our people, to stop those who strive for world domination, who threaten with the dismemberment and enslavement of our Motherland, our Fatherland. We will do it now - and it will be so. 

I believe in your support.

Yes, indeed. It’s arguable whether Chinese influence can match US influence but there’s no question that China wields considerable global power.

China is the economic engine and manufacturing hub of the world economy. China is the crucial link in nearly all nations’ supply chains.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is making many, many friends around the world. Over 149 countries have signed up to BRI — that 3/4 of the world’s nations!

China is forging powerful economic and security alliances in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation).

China is pursuing diplomacy throughout the Middle East rather than bombing the shit out of the region. Recently, she signed a 25-year cooperation deal with Iran.

China is negotiating with the Taliban instead of invading and occupying Afghanistan for 20 years.

BRICS is creating an alternative basket of currencies to rival the US Dollar.

China is a true and real superpower.

I’m not buying this narrative that Zero-COVID is a mistake.

One reason for this is that if Zero-COVID will lead to China’s collapse, as many have asserted, then it is curious as to why the west wouldn’t just let it happen.

Some new information has come to light recently, which somehow flew under everybody’s radar. Macau’s Health Code (which is an online system encompassing vaccination records, nucleic acid test results and such information, to help curb the pandemic) is recently shown to have been attacked over three million times in May alone, by hackers from Europe and North America.

Read HERE

And yet, this is nothing compared to the way the Beijing Health Code was attacked by hackers based outside of China, especially during the Winter Olympics and Paralympics.

Why would they actively sabotage Zero-COVID, if they are certain the policy is actually harming China more than any trade war or sanction? COVID is essentially a bad case of flu, right? So why not just let China destroy itself by overreacting to it?

Why interfere? Why would they actively do something to prevent China’s collapse?

Unless, of course, [1] COVID isn’t just some freaky flu, and [2] Zero-COVID really isn’t leading to China’s collapse any time soon?

China-Eurasia Expo kicks off in Xinjiang, rebukes US-led crackdown

Over 3,600 companies from 32 countries and regions attended the 7th China-Eurasia Expo, which was launched on Monday in Urumqi, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, as the region strives to build itself into a bridgehead of Belt and Road cooperation despite the US' economic suffocation of this strategically important region.

Underscoring China's commitment to make Xinjiang a core hub for the building of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the opening of the expo, expressing hope that all parties can take this opportunity to tap the potential of cooperation and drive toward shared prosperity.

Xi said that China is willing to work with other countries to promote the Silk Road spirit that incorporates peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning as well as shared benefits, with the China-Eurasia Expo being a platform.

In July, during an inspection trip to the autonomous region, Xi pointed out that as countries jointly push forward the BRI, Xinjiang is no longer a remote inland area but forefront of the opening-up.

The expo, which will last from Monday through Thursday, was held even though the US and some Western countries, together with anti-China forces, have smeared China's governance in Xinjiang and made groundless accusations of "genocide" or "forced labor."

On June 21, the US' so-called Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) took effect, which bans products made in China's Xinjiang, smearing the Chinese government over "oppression" of the Uygurs and other minority populations in its Xinjiang region.

The expo, held both online and offline due to a local epidemic flare-up, has attracted 3,600 enterprises to attend its online events, where nearly 17,000 exhibits of these enterprises from 32 countries and regions are to be shown.

It is expected that over 300 deals worth several hundred billion yuan will be inked during the expo, according to Urumqi Evening News on Sunday.

It comes on the heels of the recently concluded SCO summit, where countries agreed to foster energy sector cooperation, regional connectivity, financial cooperation featuring cross border settlement in local currencies and supply chain elasticity.

Analysts and exhibitors at the expo said the opening of the event and the efforts by Xinjiang to seek deeper cooperation with neighboring markets serve as a strong rebuke to the US' economic suffocation of the region.

Rebuke to the US... Read more...

From HERE

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After our first visit to Japan here are our “only in Japan” moments.

  1. After checking into our hotel, next morning I get a letter taped to the door. It read

x
x

2. My wife and I casually stroll past a tea tasting event. We showed the slightest of interest at one stall. There was a group of 4 already seated and only 1 empty chair. So we thought never mind, lets keep walking. The host tells us to wait 1 second. He runs, and I mean SPRINTS, about 20 paces to a truck. Grabs an extra chair and runs back to us. I thought this guy will do anything for a sale! So we sit down and try the teas, tastes good, lets buy some. He’s not selling! Turns out it was all part of some free educational event.

3. Maid cafes. Its a cafe, the waitresses dress like french maids. They act super cute like anime characters. Oftentimes sickeningly over the top, like calling me “master” and drawing cute animals on my food. But what surprised me were the people who didn’t work there.

It was not a busy period when we went. Besides us there was another table of tourists. There was a big guy with a deep voice dressed in FULL DRAG. He kept getting up every 10 mins and came back in a different outfit. There was a grumpy old man and a normal looking Japanese guy.

So before the dancing starts, they try to sell you some glow sticks and firecrackers for audience participation. They dim the lights. Disco ball lights up. Normal guy opens his bag and takes out his OWN glow sticks and bunny ears. Grumpy man’s face lights up like a child. Guy in drag gets up and starts stretching. The music starts, a candypop / eurobeat thing. The maids dancing is not bad but all the weirdos join in! They know all the moves, are more enthusiastic than the maids and they look ridiculous. One of them was trying to get us to join in. Only in Japan.

4. No taking calls on trains. If someone forgot to turn on silent and gets a call they will quickly reject the call. One time a guy sprinted to the place between carriages to take an important call.

5. We took a cable car up a mountain. On the way down a friend in our party left her sunglasses up there. A worker must have seen it and radioed the guys at the bottom. When we got out of the cable car, a worker informed us to wait while someone brings it down on the next cable car. Bravo.

6. We go to check into another hotel and behind the check in counter was this.

x
x

7. Construction zones. One place had a decibel meter to make sure the construction did not make too much noise (perhaps only during certain hours). If the construction blocked a sidewalk and you need to walk around, someone will be there to apologise for the inconvenience.

8. Airport security. You know how you can’t bring a bottle of water through most airport checks. Some Japanese airports have a machine that scans your bottle for flammable liquids. If it passes you can bring it. Just goes to show their attitude to not inconvenience you that they will invent a machine to do that. In Australia the attitude is more like “F*** that, we don’t care what’s in your bottle we’re confiscating it.” In China, they used to say “Are you sure its not a flammable liquid? Prove it, take a drink.”

9. Go to an arcade. Everyone has the reflexes of a ninja.

Japan is an amazing place where being polite and attention to detail are taken to the extreme. Thoroughly enjoyed our visit.

Head East: Never Been Any Reason (Live)

This answer will concern a pizza place I worked at. A customer came in and ordered 2 slices of “garbage pizza”. I asked him if he meant our ‘Everything slice’ which has 3 meats-pepperoni, ground sausage, ground hamburger, and green peppers, onions, olives, mushrooms, and extra cheese on top.

No.

He said “ I’ve gotten this before, just write it down, they’ll know…”. I’ve never heard of this and I’ve been working there for over a year, it’s the middle of lunch rush but Sure! Let me just throw a wrench into this smooth process!. I’m not sure what to write as the order, so I asked the cooks. They looked confused. The gentleman said that Joel made it for him. So, I went to the back and asked my manager, Joel, to come to the front. So up he comes, and upon seeing the customer and hearing the request he smiled hugely and said “I got this.”

He washes his hands & puts on an apron & gloves, jumps behind the line and starts layering ingredients on these slices. Now, our slices were large but this was a challenge! The finished slices contained: pepperoni, sausage, ground beef, ham, green peppers, onions, mushrooms, green & black olives, spinach, fresh garlic, fresh tomatoes, broccoli, pineapple, banana peppers, jalapenos, ricotta, feta, and mozzarella cheeses, and for the final touch…a mix of iceberg & romaine lettuce!

In to the oven it went, and a few minutes later out it came, smoking slightly more than normal, but we had a very happy customer! (And I had a long line to take care of, but that’s a different story, children.)

-Sara

Simply because it’s humiliating.

Check this out…

 

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You can read some comments on China on Quora and reddit. Many Quorans and even more redditors seem to think China is a “stone age” country.

In fact, Alex Mann is really funny he made a post a mere 5 months ago thinking that China still used bi-planes and that the F5 was STATE of the ART and could blow anything Chinese out the sky.

There are loads of people like that.

You see if they show stuff about China? It will make people question hold on. If a STONE AGE SOCIETY like them can manage stuff like that? Why can’t we do things like that too?

It allows a direct comparison.

Chinese high speed rail for instance.

In the UK HS2? Gordon Brown in 2006 announced it, with his oops we forgot to add VAT to the cost.  In that if we’re considered subhuman filth by the MASTER race westerners yet we can out do them on many things what does that make them?

Autograph – Turn Up The Radio

Because you just don’t make any sense as a country. You treat your citizens abysmally despite the fact you’re the wealthiest nation on earth. You prioritise the wealthy elites in the armaments industry ahead of the safety and right to life of your own children and adults. as well as people in other countries. You prioritise the bottom lines of the health insurance companies, big pharma and law firms ahead of the rights of your citizens to decent healthcare regardless of financial status. You prioritise owners of privatised educational establishments ahead of the need to properly educate your citizens and equip them with critical thinking, instead trying to ensure that they never gain the ability to think critically as that would endanger the brainwashing of the population. You prioritise the profits of private prison owners ahead of the rights of citizens to proper and fair justice.

You don’t allow your citizens real choice in how and by whom they should be governed – instead giving them just two options – invariably both supporting the status quo. Even within that choice of 2 leaders you will quite often make the one the people voted against POTUS. If anybody makes any suggestions around policies that would benefit the regular citizen ahead of the wealthy elite. you have brainwashed vast swathes of citizens to angrily denounce such notions as Marxist, communist, socialist with great disdain, demonstrating clearly that they have not the foggiest idea what any of those words even mean.

You are run by big business, by lobbying and by corruption. No country is exempt from this but you just bring to a totally different level. Almost 50% of voters deemed one of the most famously corrupt, cheating, lying, self-serving, delusional, mysogynistic, racist and morally bankrupt people on the planet to be an appropriate leader. First time round it was somewhat understandable that you might take a punt on someone hopefully representing a change from the status quo. After he had spent 4 years demonstrating that he represented everything that was worst about the status quo, but bringing it to new levels and represented nothing that was reasonably good about the status quo … after he had clearly demonstrated that his idea of “draining the swamp” was to become the biggest swamp rat of all – even more people and almost as big a proportion of voters decided that his behaviour, his essence was appropriate to lead the wealthiest nation on earth.

How can anyone expect us to take the US seriously? I mean we have to in the context of their wealth and their military might … but in terms of leadership, intelligence, morality, how can we possibly have any respect?

I’m referring entirely to the system here as opposed to the citizens. Even the citizens who somehow believe Trump, who somehow feel an archaic law for another time and other reasons to have the right to bear arms “trumps” the right for citizens, including innocent little children, to be safe and to live are only so warped in their thinking because of the brainwashing carried out on an ongoing basis by the status quo. Most Americans I’ve met have been equally as nice as people of other nationalities. Ok, we do struggle sometimes. particularly with those who have never travelled beyond the US, by their sheer ignorance about the rest of the world allied with their unshakeable belief that everything in the US is better than the rest of the world and that every other nation should be envious of them.

Apart from the incredibly corrupt and unrepresentative political system and the sickening brainwashing, I think that the main issue is the educational system. I mean you allow crazy people to teach creationism as fact to children in your schools. What hope is there really?

You have incredible entrepreneurial ability in your country. You have many positive things yet you typically allow your people a choice of being governed by two old, rich, white, “status quo” men, totally out of touch with the real world as experienced by citizens. You’re the richest nation on the planet yet you’re happy to have schoolchildren slaughtered because of your laws, happy to have people die because they can’t afford private healthcare or go bankrupt because insurers try to avoid paying out the cover for which they have paid. You’re happy to have widespread homelessness while your government ploughs billions into an army already multiple times more powerful than anyone else – guess who profits from that?

I feel almost as much sympathy for citizens of the US as I do for those of war-torn, drought-stricken African countries. Almost as much … but those poor folks would happily change their circumstances if they could – you folks just keep voting and accepting more of the same.

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I’m from Bangladesh and here are a few things that I find hard to explain to peeps back home.

– Fruits and vegetables are way more expensive than meat and poultry.

– That, generally speaking, the poor is more obese than the rich.

– That Americans in general are incredibly confused about the use of the apostrophe. Like seriously bad.

– A lot of couples adopt children, sometimes in spite of having their own, and treat them exactly like their own. (To me, this alone is a marker of a great people)

– By and large, people do not carry cash.

– That you address your boss (and some of your professors) by some abbreviated variation of their first name. And that applies to pretty much everyone, regardless of how much older they are than you.

– Parents can get arrested for physically punishing their children.

– Severe poverty, homelessness, etc., no matter how limited, actually exist. Even in America.

– A name as common and as easy to pronounce as mine is almost invariably incomprehensible to most Americans.

– America is literally HUGE. My home country is roughly the size of Florida, one of the fifty states.

– In spite of the society being openly hedonistic and liberal, the social norms and standards still have very strong conservative religious influences.

– People don’t really care about the FIFA World Cup even though USA qualifies.

– The importance of credit rating/ credit score.

– Return policy

– The history behind Thanksgiving

– Black Friday and the frenzy associated with it.

– Amazingly friendly, hospitable and helpful people. Yet, a very conveniently private lifestyle.

– That, American foreign policy is a very inaccurate reflector of public consensus.

– Grinding. The dance form.

– That you cannot purchase alcohol unless you are 21 but can purchase a gun if you are 18.

Kix – Don’t Close Your Eyes (Official Music Video)

It’s about the drugs!

x
He’s dead.

Peter Gardner : A New Zealand-born Australian.

If you are in China, for god sake, never do anything illegal related to drugs.

You can’t imagine how serious is the anti-drug moment in China. Narcotics Control in China is a very serious and comprehensive process.

x
x

June, 2020.

There is virtually 100% chance of being caught for drug related offences.

You might know the penalty already: capital punishment is a legal penalty in China.

x
x

Aug, 2020.

Frankly, drug abuse has been responsible for numerous social issues in China.

If you understand Chinese history, you will realize how drugs created trouble for China. Opium Wars (鸦片战争) are just an example.

Hence, the government is extremely serious about eradicating the drug offences.

We expect everyone to cooperate with law enforcement.

China is a beautiful country. You are welcome to visit China. Eat, drink, and have fun. Just keep in mind that you have to respect the law.

AC/DC – Jailbreak (Live at Donington, 8/17/91)

I was that patient.

I was completing an internship as part of post-graduate studies. I had two weeks left of my placement, and I was eager to get it finished, as I also had a small part-time business and a family.

Over the course of several years, I had developed what I described as a “cranky digestion,” requiring me to manage my diet carefully to avoid episodes of pain, nausea and diarrhea. This became a regular part of my life, and I had almost normalized it.

But while supervising a client with autism at his volunteer placement in a hospital laundry one day during my internship, I became aware of sudden, acute nausea, not quite like any nausea I had ever experienced before. I was also experiencing upper right abdominal pain, but the worst thing was this overwhelming, disorienting nausea. I found myself moaning and rocking, unable to stay still. Telling my client I would find someone to stay with him while I sought help for myself, I collapsed. Unable to stand, I began to crawl toward the employee health clinic, which was fortunately located on the same level of the hospital.

The employee health nurse who greeted me sent me immediately to the nearby acute-care hospital’s emergency department. I was, by now, in terrible pain, and the strange nausea was even worse.

I was quickly given IV morphine and dimenhydrinate, which got the pain and nausea to manageable levels.

Diagnostics indicated a badly diseased gallbladder and a large gallstone stuck in the common bile duct. I was admitted to hospital, where the plan was to break up the big gallstone and then, once my condition improved, remove the gallbladder.

My liver values were described to me as “terrible,” and I continued to feel awful for several days. But once the big gallstone was out of the common bile duct, I felt a fair bit better. I still wasn’t eating, but my pain and anti-nausea medications were able to be reduced, and I felt pretty much like myself.

I wanted to leave the hospital, finish my internship, and then get on the outpatient list to return to have my gallbladder removed. The residents and nurses kept telling me that was “not a good idea” and “it would be best to deal with the gallbladder right now.”

Well, sure. In a perfect world, that was true. But I wanted to finish my internship, graduate with my classmates, get back to work and take care of my family. If, as I had been told, my gallbladder had been diseased for years, surely it could wait a few more weeks or even months to be removed.

One day, the attending surgeon strode into my hospital room.

“I hear you want to go home,” he said, quite brusquely. “That’s a terrible idea. Why won’t you stay and deal with this now?”

“Well, I need to finish my program,” I said. “And then I can wait on the outpatient list for having my gallbladder removed, right?”

“Your gallbladder is in disgusting condition,” he said. “It should have come out years ago, and I’m planning to have a word with your family doctor about why you weren’t referred for your chronic pain and nausea. But the point today is that given the number and size of gallstones you have, you have a 100 percent chance of having another attack like the one that brought you in here, and a 25 percent chance that any attack will be fatal quite quickly. Your liver was failing when you came in through emergency. If you had waited until the next day to come in, I feel sure your family would have been planning your funeral.”

Right.

I agreed to stay as an inpatient and have my gallbladder out. The surgeon seemed a little surprised by my quick acquiescence.

But here’s the thing: none of the other medical personnel had explained the issue to me. I wasn’t trying to be difficult or heroic. I just didn’t know how sick I had been. I really didn’t understand the risk.

When the two residents and my regular nurses heard what the surgeon had said to me, they were scandalized. They assured me that he was an excellent surgeon, but had a terrible bedside manner.

As far as I was concerned, his bedside manner was just fine. I didn’t need platitudes, I needed facts. He told me what I needed to know to make the best decision for my health. I ended up spending nine days in the hospital. By a special arrangement, I was able to graduate with my class and finish my internship after the fact.

The surgeon came in to see me again just before surgery and again, briefly, the day I was discharged. I found he was consistently informative and blunt. No, he wasn’t warm and fuzzy, but I didn’t need a prom date, I needed a surgeon who would be honest with me. I am still grateful for his “terrible bedside manner.”

Queensrÿche – Jet City Woman (Official Music Video)

Absolutely nothing. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as the name suggests, is only responsible for North Atlantic defence. Asia, and in particular China, does not fall into NATO’s bailiwick. China has never threatened EU countries, only traded with them.

However, USA has coerced NATO into inserting itself into Asian matters. This is very dangerous. It opens the possibility for military conflict between China and NATO. In the worst case scenario, this conflict could lead to nuclear world war.

I have been to China many times. I understand what is happening in China. It is hard not to be impressed after landing at one of the world’s largest airports and taking the Maglev to Longyang Station at 430 km/hr. This is the fastest commercial ground transportation system on the planet.

x
x

Shanghai has huge and growing subway system. In the downtown area of Puxi, there are multiple levels of highways .

I went to Semicon China last year and saw a vending machine that only accepted WePay, no cash or credit cards. This simply follows the trend to allow everyone to accept payments phone to phone. Unlike with Square, there is no additional hardware required to use WePay, since your smartphone already has the ability to scan QR codes.

The high speed rail system connects the country in a way that makes the ICE, TGV or Shinkansen look small by comparison.

x
x

When I first went to China in the 1990s, little of this existed. There were no multi-level highways in Shanghai. There was no Maglev, nor Pudong airport. The subway was partially built but the high speed rail network was still a dream.

There may be people who believe that China is a poor country living in the last century without the benefits of modern technology. All I can say is that they should visit China and see the reality with their own eyes.

Cheech and Chong greatest hits!

That question can be easily answered when you take on the perspective of an American billionaire. How does an American become a billionaire and maintain her/his enormous wealth? By investing in enterprises that hold monopolies in their respective markets and supporting government policies that incentivize and subsidize such practices and by lobbying legislators, the President, governors, and judges to enact, enforce and safeguard those policies. All of these activities are perfectly legal in the United States. They are even enshrined as the pinnacles of plutocratic capitalism.

China, on the other hand, is a socialist country and its economic policies can only be best described as state capitalism. Because the Chinese Communist Party was founded on the principles of Marxism, it does not support monopolizing and profiteering from patents. As the British historian Adrian Johns succinctly put it: “[Patents] projected an artificial idol of the single inventor, radically denigrated the role of the intellectual commons, and blocked a path to this commons for other citizens — citizens who were all, on this account, potential inventors too. […] Patentees were the equivalent of squatters on public land — or better, of uncouth market traders who planted their barrows in the middle of the highway and barred the way of the people.”

China also criminalizes the practice of “influencing” public officials as bribery or grafting. President Xi Jinping was notorious for enforcing party disciplines with his signature anti-corruption campaign that resulted in the dismissal of several prominent incumbent as well as retired party members, including those within the Politburo Standing Commitee. His nationalistic policies have time and again antagonized many American corporations hoping to expand their market shares in China. President Xi’s growing popularity with his foreign policies advocating free trade and globalization is what irks American billionaires the most.

Imagine you are one of those American billionaires. Why do you love America so much? Because you have an obscene amount of money, you can buy off any political candidates you want through the use of PAC contributions. Because both the Democrats and the Republicans pander to your interests, you can readily “influence” them to provide you with tax cuts and subsidies for any investments that you may own. Because you can profit the most from monopolies and protectionism, you definitely do not want free trade. Because you want your bank investments to stay bullish, you are naturally opposed to banking regulations. Because the Chinese are promoting the Belt and Road Initiative with their own state-sponsored financing, your foreign bond investments are not going to be as lucrative as before. Moreover, the worst fear of all is your poorer fellow citizens are clamoring for socioeconomic reforms that lean toward a socialist system. That is the biggest threat to most American billionaires. The rest is just propaganda concocted to convince others to shun socialism.

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The story of Miller’s Pub in Chicago

Miller’s Pub in downtown Chicago is legendary, and I first visited in the 1990s.

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What I didn’t expect to find there were my favorite buffalo wings in America. I had eaten every famous buffalo wing in Buffalo, New York, from whence they first came. Although they were all spectacular, Miller’s (located more than 500 miles from Buffalo) was somehow superior!

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After discovering these chicken wings in 1999, I made an annual pilgrimage to Chicago just to eat them. And that was a 448-mile (721 km) drive from my house one way (nearly 900 miles round trip)! I brought a different friend each time I went up there, year after year after year. I think it was about 2008 when it all came to a crashing halt.

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A friend of mine had never had these wings, so off we went. I drove him 7.5 hours from Nashville to Chicago just to eat the wings at Miller’s Pub. That was the sole reason for the trip. They had been so magical, so complex, so perfect. Most importantly, they had been beautifully consistent over the years.

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Sitting at the table in rapt anticipation, the wings arrived from the kitchen. They looked different, far too red, and way too saucy. Miller’s had changed the recipe! Why? What we were served was akin to chicken wings tossed in ketchup. It was horrible!

And that was the end of my visits to Miller’s Pub in Chicago.

Remember The Name (Official Video) – Fort Minor

Classic Beef Stew

It’s hard to say what’s better, the aroma or the taste of this homemade beef stew. Our recipe is loaded with potatoes, meat and spices and is a savory dish your family will ask for again and again. It takes just four simple steps to make and only one bite for our beef stew to transport you to a cozy pub in the British Isles. If you’re lucky enough to have leftovers, our beef stew with potatoes makes for a wonderful lunch. Should you only have one serving left, there’s no shame in hiding it in the back of the fridge. This way, only you know where to find it. We would do the same!

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Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil or shortening
  • 1 lb boneless beef chuck, tip or round roast, cut into 1-inch cubes
  • 3 cups water
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon pepper
  • 2 medium carrots, cut into 1-inch pieces
  • 1 large unpeeled potato, cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces
  • 1 medium green bell pepper, cut into 1-inch pieces
  • 1 medium stalk celery, cut into 1-inch pieces
  • 1 small onion, chopped (1/4 cup)
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 dried bay leaf
  • 1/2 cup cold water
  • 2 tablespoons Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour

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Triumph – Lay It On The Line (Official Video)

I am ethnic Chinese, but I was born and grew up in Taiwan, and have never lived in China.

I want to give you a blatant example of what can make a Chinese person more patriotic after being in closer contact with the western society.

New York Times, the beacon of freedom and salvation to the world, and staunch champion of all under-privileged and exploited Americans, the poor, the Blacks, the Latino, the Muslim, the native Americans, against institutional and cultural repression, is more than happy to join the oppressor when it comes to the Chinese.

Take a look at this reader’s comment (July 24, 2020):

China Orders U.S. to Shut Chengdu Consulate, Retaliating for Houston

After several paragraphs of red-neck style China bashing, the last paragraph says:

“Can someone cite for me one world-changing innovation China has contributed in the last century? Or, for that matter, in the last five hundred years?”

in a thinly veiled racist attack, directed clearly not at a political entity, but at a culture, an ethnic group, a people.

I am not interested in disputing this nonsensical comment, but more alarmed by the following:

  • This comment was singled out from 228 other comments by the New York Times editor as “Times Pick”, clearly agreeing with and even cheering on the commenter for his blatant racist-minded ranting. I can almost see the smirk on the editor’s face for having someone else speak his/her mind without having to own it.
  • If you replace “China” in that paragraph with “Africa”, “Muslim world”, or “Mexico”, you can be sure the ultra liberal New York Times editor will not only disallow its posting (not to mention “Times Pick”!!), but will be all up in arms castigating this commenter for being the racist he is.

But hey, Chinese are fair game in America, lampooned and mocked and verbally abused by news media, entertainers, politicians, etc., who would otherwise be the most politically correct, the staunchest of champions for all underprivileged groups (except the Chinese of course), who would not in their wildest dreams imagine belittling Black culture or Hispanic culture!

So do you blame these Chinese expatriates for becoming more patriotic? They enjoy a position, ethnically and culturally, at the bottom of the ladder, fair game for everyone a few rungs up with impunity.

By the way, this is not only in America. It is pretty much in all the “enlightened” and “liberal” western societies. And as I mentioned, the behavior is not limited to right wing xenophobes, but to liberal beacons like New York Times or Der Spiegel.

Actually, the more liberal the media or person, the worse it gets. At least an American mountain man in the Appalachia may hate Blacks and Asians equally, without such discrimination.

Shame on you, New York Times!

The Black Crowes – Remedy

It certainly was common in my family in the 1950s, with one exception. No butter.

We had sticks of margarine which had a uniquely grainy texture when you tasted it.

That wasn’t bad as long as you had plenty of grape jelly to spread on your white Wonder bread. We knew this bread was extremely healthy and good for you—after all, it “builds strong bodies 12 ways.”

And at my grandmother’s house there was definitely bread and “butter” on the table for anyone to eat at any time. However one of my uncles did not use either butter or margarine.

He spread white lard directly on his white bread. No time to toast it. But he was also extremely healthy, or so it seemed. In his spare time he worked as a truck mechanic, but his regular job was Farmer. Picking up bales of hay and tossing them into the back of a pickup truck, lifting farm machinery, and working 12 or 14 hours a day must have burned a lot of calories.

This man was the most superbly conditioned human being I’ve ever seen.

He washed his white bread and lard down with plenty of black coffee. And let us just say that he drank liquor too—or that was the rumor. At age 10 or 11 the adults did not discuss such matters with me.

In later years when real animal lard got rare—he would spread Crisco on his bread.

He was very healthy as I said—although he also was a heavy cigarette smoker, as was nearly every man of the WWII generation.

He was outstandingly healthy right up to the day when he failed to get up from his chair on the front porch of his house one hot Sunday afternoon, and was found dead by his wife returning from church.

He had died of a massive coronary. He was, I think, about 60. Most of my uncles lived well into their 60s.

That white bread had several other important uses.

Meals at my grandmother’s house always involved meat, potatoes, and some kind of gravy. This gravy was so wonderful that we sopped-up and ate every particle of it on our plates. Using that same white bread.

A little later, when my cousins and I were on into our late teens and 20s, we would eat white bread in the early evening before partying.

This was well known to facilitate your ability to drink more. You laid down a base of bread in your stomach which then soaked up alcohol like a sponge—which is essentially what Wonder bread was.

Edible sponge.

Personally, I never noticed that this drinking strategy had much of a salubrious effect, but many of us swore by it.

And if you’re in a hurry to get to work, the ability to grab bread and slather something viscous on it on your way out the door—well it was a lifesaver.

In addition to grape jelly—homemade using mason jars and pectin and cans of frozen Welch juice concentrate—some of my uncles put molasses on their bread.

Sorghum molasses right out of a bottle. It had the consistency of honey but was less sweet and had a slightly sour/bitter “kick” that you had to get acclimated to.

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Do people still use white bread and butter this way today?

No one I know does. We eat egg white-only omelets with grilled asparagus and follow it up with a few slices of fresh fruit. Blood orange is a favorite of mine. I use butter in cooking but I no longer spread it—or anything else—on bread. In truth I very rarely eat bread.

Of all these things—the only one I really miss is my grandmother’s gravy. It must have had some secret ingredient because I’ve never been able to replicate it.

Or maybe it was the prospect of impending nuclear war that made all that food taste so good.

We were quite sure that the war was coming—soon!

No one was more surprised than me when it hadn’t happened by 1970 or at the very latest, 1980.

 

It’s unfortunate that vanilla — a very exotic flavor indeed — has come to be synonymous with plain, neutral. The low-risk default option least likely to offend anyone.

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But because its flavor is so agreeable, pleasing to so many, it’s the go-to choice when one’s aim is to pick a flavor that won’t meet with any serious resistance.

Other flavors (you name it, any kind of ice cream flavor you can think of, strawberry, chocolate, caramel, nut flavors, fruit flavors, etc.) will have strong defenders and advocates, an equal number on each side who like it, or strongly dislike it. You can’t please everybody.

Except, sometimes you can. Vanilla stands alone in being one flavor that rarely stirs up any disagreement. If you’re sent to the store to get ice cream for a party of 20 people, vanilla is the safe bet, the default choice to arouse the least displeasure. Not many people will say that they love vanilla. But very few people hate it. What’s not to like?

What makes vanilla special?

Vanilla is an orchid. The aroma and flavor is so complex, so mysterious, and so desirable, it’s become the most famous flavor in the world. The ubiquity of vanilla makes it easy to take for granted, or view as common.

I would personally like to see vanilla get more respect, more recognition for how unique and genuinely exotic it is. Every bit as exotic as the cocoa plant, perhaps more so.

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Here’s a segment describing a little about this unique plant.

It comes from the only orchid that bears edible fruit among thousands of orchid species, thriving only in tropical climates within 20 latitudinal degrees of the equator.

It’s earned a reputation for being the most labor-intensive agricultural crop in the world.

What’s more, it is estimated that between 250 and 500 distinct organic compounds make up vanilla’s beloved flavor and fragrance profile.

Whoever uses the term vanilla as a euphemism for ordinary is seriously misinformed.

That phraseology drives “Spice Boss” Tom Erd bonkers.

“Vanilla is a complex set of flavors. To say something is vanilla that’s plain just sticks in my craw,” he said ….

… If anyone knows vanilla, it’s Tom Erd. He compares the complexity and nuances of high-quality pure vanilla to those in wine or coffee.

His favorite? Madagascar. “I love the Madagascar flavor and aroma by far,” he said.

Describing the different vanillas merely using words can be difficult, according to Erd. The Mexican and Madagascar are similar, with the Mexican being a little spicier. Most people couldn’t pick up the difference in finished foods, he said.

The Tahitian is “way different,” he added, “more fruity. It reminds me of black cherries.”[1]

The word vanilla has even come to be a shorthand label for ho-hum dull people, personalities, tastes, or habits — including sexual tastes —- that are square, plain, and boring. This is really unfortunate, emblematic of how we modern people often take our unprecedented abundance of exotic things for granted.

Next time you hear the word used that way, remind them that the vanilla plant is an exotic orchid! It’s only because we live in a very fortunate time of advanced plant cultivation, spice trade, and increasing prosperity, that we are privileged to have such an exotic flavor available to us any time we want. This familiarity breeds, if not contempt, a casually dismissive disregard for how common and routine this once-rare flavor is.

The kind of exotic spices and flavors that we routinely enjoy today (including the cocoa plant) were once reserved for royalty and the elite aristocracy, who funded the efforts of explorers, merchants, and speculators, pioneering trade routes into distant corners of the world.

If you get a chance to have really good vanilla, scooped right from the bean, and used in recipes, you’ll know what I mean.

Footnotes

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I grew up in great comfort. I never knew what it was like to be cold because heat is too expensive, or what it is like to go hungry. If I needed to eat, I opened the pantry or the refrigerator. If anything, food spoilage was a bigger issue, because we had so much. I always had Ralph Lauren and expensive clothing. I couldn’t imagine shopping at Wal-Mart for clothing. It would be like going to a thrift store. Not that I was above it. It just wasn’t on the radar screen. It wasn’t part of my world.

Then I turned 17.

“You need to get a job!” my father commanded.

“Why can’t you just give me a little bit of money each week?” I said.

“You need to learn the value of a dollar,” he said. “Don’t be goddamn lazy.” He had a way with words.

So I did. I needed money to buy gas when I went out with my friends. And I needed spending cash. I got a job at a family restaurant, a corporate-owned business. It proved to be life-changing.

I met men and women who were older than me, 25+, who had limited education. Most had high school or almost-finished high school levels of education. Their lives were really hard. They were tired. A few lived in motels, where you pay by the day. One of the waitresses came to work, late. Her eyes were filled with tears.

“My car’s transmission went. $1,200. I don’t know what I am going to do,” she said.

She had a friend give her a ride to work. It might as well have been a million dollars, because she didn’t have it. I don’t recall her having it fixed. I think she ended up getting rides from people.

There was an older man named Russell. He was hunched over. Maybe he had ankylosing spondylitis. I don’t know. He had been a teacher for a few years. Now he worked as a salad bar stocker. He cut coupons. He did everything he could to save money. But he was fucked.

I saw how busy the restaurant was. The regional manager always dressed so nice, and had a BMW 700 series. On busy days, the restaurant was killing it. All of the workers were paid minimum wage, except for the managers, who were salary and did a little better. They were always working.

I got to see what it was like to be working class. It was hell. And no, these people weren’t going to go “learn computers,” as President Clinton and Hillary Clinton liked to glibly state. Not everyone is cut out for computers. Russell could barely check himself in and out using the buttons on the computer terminal.

I saw the horrors of what capitalism is all about. And it lit a fire in me that has only grown stronger through time. Can the rich know what it is like for the poor?

Yes, we can. And we should.

Message…

You only got one shot.  One shot.

Opportunity only comes once in a lifetime

Lose Yourself by Eminem | Eminem

This isn’t anything lewd, but my family still has a house in China.

A mansion.

And it’s just sitting there, in a little-known rural village, doing nothing.

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A house in outer Fuzhou (this is not the house I’m talking about; I’m showing this image from the internet to give you a rough idea of what our house looks like)

My father’s side of the family was originally from the rural outskirts of Fuzhou. They started coming to America as early as WWII, starting with my grand uncle who fought in the US military, and was able to bring other members of the family over — including my grandparents, who in turn brought dad over, who in turn brought mom (who came from urban Fuzhou) over, who then gave birth to me. As more and more members of my extended family immigrated, the village where they grew up shrank; it still exists, but it’s a shadow of what it once was, and half of its houses are abandoned and awaiting demolition.

But despite being in the US for decades, my dad’s side of the family, especially my grandparents, never 100% abandoned the village from which they came. They would visit the village every time they returned to China; moreover, they would invest in it from time to time, all in the name of “revisiting our roots” and giving back to the community. Their money went to a renovated ancestral hall, a basketball court (both public)…and a mansion, with three floors, a balcony, a fancy garage and security gate, just for us.

No one lives in the mansion, though. Not even our family; when we return to Fuzhou, we live in the city center with my mom’s side of the family. Our mansion, that we paid money to build and maintain, only gets a visit from us when we pay a visit to the ancestral village. We unlock the door, explore the house from bottom to top, make sure all the furniture is in place, re-lock the door, then leave. Here in America, my grandparents and parents are rentiers who make money from tenants. But we don’t bother making money from the mansion in China that belongs to us, that we don’t make any use of.

I used to think that the mansion was just a vanity project, something my grandparents wanted to build either because they thought it would look good, or because they wanted a vacation home…except they never actually lived there when they were on vacation. Or because they wanted a retirement home…except they’ve been retired for years and they haven’t moved.

Turns out the mansion was built for some other reason, and it’s not one that I like to think about.

My grandparents have always been low-key worried about an eventual military conflict between the US and China.

They’re American citizens, just like everyone in my family who lives in the US; the oldest in our family have been legally Americans for nearly half a century now; we have established ourselves here, some of us were born here, so we’re not supposed to be going anywhere (despite building a house in China, my grandparents seem to get that, as they’ve bought their graves in Pennsylvania…go figure).

But my grandparents, from day one, premised this assumption on our country of residence being at peace with our country of origin. Miraculously we managed to have that for quite a while, to the extent that we were ready to take it for granted, but the thought of the “unthinkable” happening never truly left the minds of our family. Somewhere inside, even during the “best” of days, my elders sensed that there was never a zero chance of total war, and as long as that was the case, a contingency plan was in order. They were convinced that if things do get to that point, it wouldn’t matter how long any of us have been in this country or have been its citizens — we wouldn’t be able to carry on our lives as usual, to put it diplomatically.

Which is where the mansion comes in. For whatever it’s worth, according to those who wanted it, the mansion is designed to function as a potential place of refuge for our family in case the United States goes berserk during wartime and targets ethnically Chinese people. China would therefore be the only place on Earth where we could blend with the crowd and not get beat. We’ll move into the mansion, and because it’s our property we will be able to live there for as long as we have to.

One reason I find the mansion to be silly is that I highly doubt we would be able to get out of America in the first place if the government or somebody else goes after us, and no one in our family is certain about the situation escalating to such a level, hence “contingency plan.” Besides, if the government is at war with China, how would we be able to travel to China anyway? Well, smartass, we would go to China via a third country! Or however many third countries it takes. The important thing is that we have a home outside of the US in case we can no longer call the US home.

I don’t think we’ll ever permanently reside in that mansion — I don’t want to think we’ll ever have to. Sometimes, I hear my family joke about moving into the mansion if war breaks out, so they don’t seem to take the idea that seriously either; they prefer believing, as I do, that China is no place for Chinese Americans. We shouldn’t have to live there unless we’re on vacation, or we’re too incompetent to live here.

But whenever I think about how my family put all that money into building a possible refuge from World War F****g Three, I’m not going to lie: I am spooked. Spooked that we could plan for something like this. More spooked when you consider the possibility of a conflict and realize they weren’t entirely paranoid. But also reminded of just how precious peace is.

My local butcher has the foulest mouth and the strongest opinions of anyone I have ever met in a customer-facing role. I think it’s hilarious.

I once bought some skirt steak from him, because I wanted to try making carne asada. First he tried to tell me I wanted sirloin, because it’s better and it’s the same price.

And I told him no, I’m doing a recipe and it needs skirt steak. And he asked what I was making, and I said carne asada, and he grudgingly admitted that should be made with skirt, so he goes and gets some skirt.

And as he’s cutting it up and weighing it he was moaning.

“It is fucking overpriced, this stuff. Overpriced, you know what the problem is, don’t you? It’s those bloody chefs. They get hold of it and put it on *waves knife* fucking Masterchef or something, and then everyone wants it and the price goes up. That about do ya?

Right, good. And then the wholesalers put the price up. And then I have to rip my bleeding customers off, don’t I? Fucking eleven quid a kilo! Nice bit of sirloin would cost you that. Here you go.”

I pointed out, laughingly, that in that case he ought to be grateful idiots like me watch Masterchef, or he’d never sell any.

“Yeah, yeah, true, well! Not as bad as this bloody woman who come in the other day, wanting ox tail. You know about ox tail? Why would anyone want ox tail? It’s been shat on it’s whole life. Ten quid a kilo, because of the bloody chefs, full of bones, and it’s been shat on it’s whole life.

Then again, she said she wanted fillet for a stew, so she didn’t know what she was talking about anyway.”

And as hilariously foul-mouthed as he is, there’s no arguing with his logic. Ox tail is ridiculously overpriced.

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Ox Tail

Nope, absolutely not.

China has the strongest economy in the world, even stronger than America’s, which is teetering on the edge. China’s economy is based on tangible things such as manufacturing and construction. America’s economy is based on stock market speculation and low-wage services.

And America carries a crushing $30 trillion national debt! Not to mention crumbling infrastructure.

Message…

It’s time. You all are so close now.

Graduation. Some people are (for certain) going home.

Motley Crue – Home Sweet Home (Live – Crue Fest)

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Power up for insanity while we rock out to 90s era music

Yeah. The United States pokes and provokes China left and right. Still, China remains peaceful. Not doing anything. Seems out of character for a “belligerent, aggressive, evil, authoritarian communist dictatorship” eh?

The pushing is turning into shoves. And China adroitly steps to the side, like a slow-motion scene out of the movie “The Matrix”.

Soon, the United States might need to make some real aggressive provocations. Worse than ever before. I see, though my spyglass, a False Flag incident in the Taiwan waters. Don’t you know.

Let’s go through today’s pile of dung…

Chinese delegation banned from attending Queen Elizabeth lying-in-state

A nation that supports Nazi's, is banning China because of made up lies. Natural for the dim witted morons of the West. -MM

LONDON – The Chinese delegation visiting London to attend Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on Monday will not be allowed to view her coffin at the lying-in-state vigil inside Parliament, the BBC reported on Friday.

Some parliamentarians had raised concerns about inviting representatives from China after several British lawmakers were sanctioned by Beijing for criticising alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang. China denies any such abuses.

The BBC said, without citing sources, that it understood the Chinese government delegation had been banned from attending the lying-in-state after the Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament had refused them access to Westminster Hall on the parliamentary estate due to the Chinese sanctions.

The Speaker’s office declined to comment. The House of Commons said it does not comment on security matters.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Liz Truss has said it is for Buckingham Palace to set out the guest list after taking advice from the foreign office, which, according to convention, invites representatives from nations with which Britain has diplomatic relations.

China is invited to the Queen’s funeral next Monday, with Chinese Vice-President Wang Qishan expected to represent the country, a British foreign office source said on Thursday.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Mao Ning told a briefing in Beijing that she had not yet seen the BBC report.

“What I want to say is the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II is an important event for the United Kingdom. Foreign delegations participating in the event upon invitation from the United Kingdom is a sign of respect to the Queen and the importance accorded to (relations with) the United Kingdom,” she said.

“As the host, the United Kingdom should uphold diplomatic protocols and proper manners to guests.”

World leaders, royalty and other dignitaries will attend the funeral.

Visiting dignitaries will be given a timed slot to attend the lying-in-state over the weekend.

Last year, the Chinese ambassador to Britain was banned from attending an event in the British Parliament because of the sanctions on the lawmakers.

From HERE

I’ve never heard anybody say Russia is a free democratic country. Who says that?

China is helping developing countries build infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This is a fact.

Over 149 countries have signed up to BRI. Thousands of BRI projects are under way. These nations are grateful for China’s infrastructure assistance.

Western banks have tried to help these countries as well. But IMF and World Bank loans come with onerous political strings attached.

China’s loans are string-free; they’re purely business. And China is producing tangible results. In fact, China builds infrastructure much faster than anybody else in the world.

You ask about ignorance. Who is the ignorant one here? You appear to have a very poor understanding of China’s BRI.

Fuel – Hemorrhage (In My Hands) (Official HD Video)

Swedish Media Outlet Publishes Claimed U.S. Document Outlining How to CRUSH Europe Economy thru Ukraine War Effort

Jeeze Louise! -MM
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Nya Dagbladet, a media outlet in Sweden, has published what it says appears to be classified US plans to crush the European economy by means of a war in Ukraine and an induced energy crisis.

Nya Dagbladet goes on to report as follows:

RAND Corporation’s think tank, which has a huge work force of 1,850 employees and a budget of $350 million, has the official aim of “improving policies and decision-making through research and analysis”. It is primarily connected to the United States Department of Defense and is infamous for having been influential in the development of military and other strategies during the Cold War.

A document signed RAND, under the opening heading of “Weakening Germany, strengthening the U.S.”, suggests that there is an “urgent need” for an influx of resources from outside to maintain the overall American economy, but “especially the banking system”.

“Only European countries bound by EU and NATO commitments can provide us with these without significant military and political costs for us.”

According to RAND, the main obstacle to this ambition is the growing independence of Germany. Among other things, it points out that Brexit has given Germany greater independence and made it more difficult for the United States to influence the decisions of European governments.

A key objective that permeates this cynical strategy is, in particular, to destroy the cooperation between Germany and Russia, as well as France, which is seen as the greatest economic and political threat to the United States.

”If implemented, this scenario will eventually turn Europe into not only an economic, but also a political competitor to the United States.”, it declares.

The only way: “Draw both sides into war with Ukraine”

In order to crush this political threat, a strategic plan, primarily focused on destroying the German economy, is presented.

“Stopping Russian deliveries could create a systematic crisis that would be devastating for the German economy and indirectly for the European Union as a whole”, it states, and believes that the key is to draw the European countries into war.

“The only possible way to ensure that Germany rejects Russian energy supplies is to draw both sides into the military conflict in Ukraine. Our continued actions in this country will inevitably lead to a military response from Russia. Russia is clearly not going to leave to the massive Ukrainian army’s pressure on the Donetsk People’s Republic without a military response. This would make it possible to portray Russia as the aggressive party and then implement the entire package of sanctions, which has already been drawn up”.

Green parties will force Germany to “fall into the trap”

The green parties in Europe are described as being particularly easy to manipulate into running the errands of American imperialism.

“The prerequisite for Germany to fall into this trap is the dominant role of green parties and European ideologies. The German environmental movement is a highly dogmatic, if not fanatical, movement, which makes it quite easy to get them to ignore economic arguments”, it writes, citing the current foreign minister of Germany, Annalena Baerbock, and the climate minister, Robert Habeck, as examples of this type of politician.

“Personal characteristics and lack of professionalism make it possible to assume that it is impossible for them to recognise their own mistakes in time. I will therefore be sufficient to rapidly form a media image of Putin’s aggressive war – and make the Greens into ardent and tough supporters of sanctions – a ‘war party’. This will make it possible to impose the sanctions without any obstacles”.

Baerbock is, i.a., well known for declaring that she will continue the suspension of Russian gas even during the winter – regardless of what her constituents think about the matter and the consequences for the German population.

– We will stand with Ukraine, and this means that the sanctions will stay, also in winter time – even if it gets really tough for politicians, she said at a conference in Prague recently.

“Ideally – a complete halt of supplies”

The authors express a hope that the damage between Germany and Russia will be so great that it will make it impossible for the countries to re-establish normal relations later on.

“A reduction in Russian energy supplies – ideally, a complete halt of such supplies– would lead to disastrous outcomes for German industry. The need to divert significant amounts of Russian gas for winter heating will further exacerbate the shortages. Lockdowns in industrial enterprises would cause shortages of components and spare parts for manufacturing, a breakdown of logistics chains and, eventually, a domino effect”.

Ultimately, a total collapse of the economy in Europe is seen as both probable and desirable.

“Not only will it deliver a devastating blow to the German economy, the entire economy of the entire EU economy will inevitably collapse.”

It further points out that the benefits of US-based companies having less competition on the world market, logistical advantages and the outflow of capital from Europe, would mean that they would be able to contribute to the economy of the United States by an estimated 7-9 trillion dollars. In addition, it also emphasises the important effect of many well-educated and young Europeans being be forced to immigrate to the USA.

RAND denies originating the report

RAND Corporation issued a press release on Wednesday denying that the report originates from them. No comments are made regarding what parts of the report are false or what is accurate, apart from simply writing that the content is “bizarre” and that the document is “fake””.

No. Australia won’t invade the Solomons. But first, some background:

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Did Australia’s new Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, know that China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi would arrive in the Pacific Islands just when she was touching down? Did she know that the Australian Government triggered riots

in the Solomons last year? Did she know that Solomons appealed to China for help because of the riots?

Apparently not.

Empty-handed, she hogged every camera and drew giggles promising to treat Pacific countries with respect. As if. And though Chinese development loans are famously free of strings and bankers’ forbearance saintly, Wong virtue-signaled by promising “a partner that doesn’t come with strings attached” and one that won’t impose “unsustainable financial burdens”. Not an edifying spectacle, even to us whiteys. Imagine how it looks to the Islanders.

Gift-Laden

Foreign Minister Wang, by contrast, was laden with gifts and bubbling with ideas, among which was a code of behavior:

  1. Equal treatment
  2. Mutual respect: “China has never interfered in the internal affairs of Pacific island countries. The country neither attached political strings, nor sought any geographical selfish interests in dealing with the island countries.”
  3. Win-win cooperation
  4. Openness and inclusiveness: “The South Pacific region should serve as a stage for cooperation, not an arena for destructive competition. China’s cooperation with the Pacific island countries does not target any country and it should not be disrupted by any country. China respects the contacts the Pacific island countries have already established with other countries. China, acting in the spirit of openness, is ready to conduct the third party market cooperation with other countries in and outside the region”

PM Sogavare thanked him for defending the Solomons at the UN Security Council, and hopes for more coordination with the Chines in international affairs. He said China’s direct investment in the PIC has risen

400% since 2016, to $4.5 billion, as did the fisheries industry. He explained

,

China has become the biggest cooperative partner of the Solomon Islands on basic infrastructure and a reliable development partner. Our thanks to China for providing anti-pandemic supplies, rapid-test equipment and sending medical teams to this country. We also appreciate the Chinese side for sending policing supplies and police advisers to help maintain social order in the Solomon Islands after the riot in Honiara. The Solomon Islands and China have conducted cooperation on the basis of equal treatment and mutual respect, and the connection in various fields has become increasingly close, bringing tangible benefits to the Solomon Islands people, the prime minister noted.

Then Mr. Wang unpacked China’s more tangible gifts, including a five-year, fully-costed and -financed action plan to unite all ten Pacific nations with a common data network, cyber security, smart customs, a Free Trade pact, support for action on health and climate change, ‘a balanced approach to technological progress, economic development and protection of national security’.

China and the PIC will accelerate duty-free, frictionless trade, and China will give the PIC a global digital platform for its environmental message, and global audience of billions of people to see and hear it. It will build the data uplinks, lay the ocean cables, and provide 2,500 government scholarships so that young people will help the Islands enter the digital age prosperous and united.

Says Chris Devonshire-Ellis , “In recognising the Pacific Islands Community as one body, China has given the group an identity and decision-making capability previously inaccessible through traditional channels. It provides the PIC with enhanced political strength and purpose – for most of the islands have similar needs which heretofore were addressed bilaterally, if at all”.

No. Chinese economy numbers are not fake. In fact, they are understated.

Some experts on Chinese stats:

  1. Understanding China’s Economic Indicators. Tom Orlik (FT Press, 2012).
  2. The quality of China’s GDP statistics
  3. . Carsten A. Holz, Stanford University. “While some believe that the collapse of China is inevitable, others see the emergence of a new superpower that increasingly poses a threat to the US”. Assuming there was no collapse, then “extrapolating past real GDP growth rates into the future, the size of the Chinese economy surpasses that of the United States in purchasing power terms between 2012 and 2015; by 2025, China is likely to be the world’s largest economic power by almost any measure” (Holz 2006: 1). Holz’s extremely accurate forecasts suggest economic growth between 2005 and 2015 in the range of 7 to 9 percent (Holz 2006: 9).
  4. Quality of China’s Official Statistics: A Brief Review of Academic Perspectives
  5. Arthur K. Kroeber – CHINA’S ECONOMY (2016):
“The unserious ones are those advanced by nonspecialists, typically analysts for hedge funds or other financial firms, alleging that Chinese data on GDP, or energy consumption, or inflation, or whatnot are falsified by the government in order to cover up some major problem. These claims, often hyped by the media, are best ignored. Economic data in all places are subject to various problems and distortions, which are addressed by the constant revision of published data and the underlying methods used by national statistical agencies, as well as by enormous volumes of academic econometric research that seek to refine our understanding of how numbers relate to reality. …Many serious analysts do believe that the government tends to smooth out the quarterly GDP growth numbers, underreporting growth when it is very hot and nudging the figures upward when it is cool. Most other data problems and inconsistencies can be explained by ordinary analytic econometric work, without resort to conspiracy theories about deliberate falsification.

“The falsification theory also fails a simple logical test. If the government publishes false data, it must either rely on this false data to make economic policy, or it must keep a secret set of true data. If it uses false data, economic policy will quickly run aground, as it did during the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, when reliance on bogus agricultural production numbers led within a couple of years to a catastrophic famine that killed tens of millions of people. …

This leaves the possibility that the government uses a secret set of true data to form policy, while feeding lies to the public. No evidence has ever been presented that such a secret data set exists. There are certainly a few data series that are not published but are reserved for the internal use of government officials. What is interesting is how boring these prove to be when occasionally they come to light through a leak—as, for instance, when a classified unemployment figure was accidentally disclosed at a press conference. The figure was 5 percent, compared to the published “registered unemployment” figure of 4 percent. In any case, if the government really kept a full set of secret accounts, the falsity of the published data could be exposed by the same statistical tests used by forensic accountants to prove chicanery in corporate balance sheets. These tests have been applied, and have failed to show any evidence of systemic falsification. …

The more serious claim, made by several economists, is that China’s long-run growth rate has been systematically overstated, not because China sought to bamboozle the world but because its statisticians employed faulty techniques. The most recent version of this argument is by Harry X. Wu of The Conference Board, who heroically reconstructed China’s national accounts for the sixty-year period 1952–2012 in order to arrive at a better understanding of long-term trends in productivity growth. Wu concluded that, thanks mainly to weaker than reported productivity gains, China’s average annual real GDP growth during the reform era (1978–2012) was 7.2 percent, well below the official figure of 9.8 percent. …

This is an interesting exercise, but it raises some conceptual problems. If we assume that the size of the Chinese economy was accurately measured in 1978, then the lower growth rate compounded over thirty-four years implies that China’s economy in 2012 was less than half as big as the official data say it was. This is impossible, because the economy’s present size is roughly confirmed by a wealth of information, including the government’s own economic censuses, and indicators including exports, foreign exchange reserves and consumption of physical items such as automobiles, oil, steel, and cement that are independently verifiable and not subject to falsification. If, on the other hand, we assume that the economy’s reported size today is correct, then the lower growth rate compounded back thirty-four years implies that China’s economy was more than twice as big in 1978 as the government believed it to be. This is slightly more plausible than the first case, but not much. Alternatively, we can try to pick values for China’s 1978 and 2012 GDP that are not so obviously incredible, for instance that the economy was two-thirds bigger than reported in 1978 and one-quarter smaller in 2012 (in which case we need merely explain away $2 trillion—an India’s worth—of phantom output). Any way you slice it, it is quite hard to reconcile the arithmetic of these alternative growth calculations with observed reality.

An easy way to check the quality of national statistics is by comparing them to wages–which are easy to verify. Here’s what that looks like:

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A story about Pizza

Boy do I have a story for you. This happened to a friend of mine. We’ll call him Austin.

Austin was a college student who worked at a small local pizza place, and got a delivery right before closing. When he took down their address he saw it was in a bad area of town and thought to himself jokingly, ‘I’m probably gonna get robbed.’ Their order was less than $20 but they asked if he could give change for $100, and he said no. ‘Well, I’m probably definitely getting robbed,’ he thought, still jokingly.

He drove to this neighborhood – not somewhere you’d want to be after 1am – and pulled up to the house. There were no lights on anywhere, but he could see an outline of two people sitting on the porch.

‘Oh my God, I might ACTUALLY get robbed,’ he thought to himself, less jokingly.

He walked up to the dark house and approached the two guys on the porch to deliver the pizza. One of them was comically short. ‘So you have change for $100?’ one of them said. Austin said no and reminded them he had told them this on the phone.

They said nothing, the short guy went inside the (still) dark house to get money.

Austin stood outside awkwardly with the other guy, who just stared at him wordlessly. 2 minutes passed, then 5 minutes, then 10 minutes. The pizza was starting to get cold. The house was still pitch black inside, the other guy just kept staring. Austin had a bad feeling and began to feel genuinely uncomfortable. He looked at his cell phone clock and saw his shift should have ended a little bit ago.

Feeling freaked out, he told the guy, ‘well, my shift is up, and I have to get home, consider the pizza free,’ he turned around and started to walk off the porch back to his car.

About halfway there, the porch light came on and he heard the door shut, and for a split second remembers seeing both their shadows, one long and one comically short.

A half second later he heard a swooping sound as they both leapt off the porch. A half second later, one guy grabbed Austin by the arm and pulled a knife on him, and the short one held his other arm.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he said.

The first thought to go through Austin’s head was that he was right about being robbed, the second was that this was a really crappy way to thank someone for free pizza. The third thought was a conscious effort not to crap his pants.

Now, Austin had taken karate lessons, but he had not had much practice. But being strong and stubborn, in the heat of the moment, he tore his arm free from the short guy and used his pizza bag as a shield against the knife, and turned and tried to do some kind of Mortal Kombat-esque move on the side of the guy’s face that, he said, seemed like a better idea in his head.

‘But I missed,’ Austin said at this point in the story.

Austin missed the side of his head and his fingers plunged straight into the guy’s eye socket. Austin freaked out at holding what felt like a grape and pulled his hand away, and inadvertently popped the guy’s eyeball out of the socket. You read that right.

All three of them started screaming at the same time, the one guy because his eye had just been torn from its socket, Austin because he realized what he had just done, and the short guy because he had just witnessed the whole thing -and ran screaming into the darkness somewhere behind the house.

Austin picked up the dropped knife and called 911 while the guy lay writhing on the walkway.

Upon telling the operator what had transpired, about five police cars show up and the officers think the situation is hilarious, calling the guy on the ground ‘pirate.’

They ask Austin to describe the short guy and he does, and one of them says, ‘hang on,’ and two disappear behind the house.

10 minutes later they come back with him.

They all know this guy, evidently they had been to that house many times before, and he was a repeat offender.

‘Mikey, we meet again! Didn’t you just get out of prison?’ one of them said.

Austin went to the police station to give a statement where several employees in earshot asked him to relay the story again.

Austin got a nice raise and worked at the same pizza place until he graduated.

The reasons are quite diverse:

  1. The US is now run by the wealthy elite, the capitalist owner class, who don’t give a rat’s ass about the nation’s welfare. Their sole objective is to line their own pockets.
  2. There is no profit in building infrastructure. To the wealthy elite, infrastructure is a money sink.
  3. The US prefers to spend the money on militarism to support its imperialism. It uses its military power to steal natural resources from other countries. It overthrows foreign regimes it doesn’t like.
  4. The US knows it can no longer build infrastructure like it used to in the 1950s and 1960s. It takes too long. It costs too much money. Look at the “Big Dig” in Boston, for example. Or the high-speed rail line in California. China can build infrastructure 10X faster and more economically!

Cats are so easy to care for. They eat a little food. They poop and pee a little in the cat box, and with the new, high-tech litter, you hardly even know it’s there. They have evolved into adorable beings, so that they don’t frighten us, and we’re in awe of their cuteness.

They have poses: bread loaf and Sphinx, which bring smiles to our faces.

They don’t love us to death, and we don’t have to walk them three times a day, causing harm to our arthritic knees.

We’re never to be seen walking shamefully behind them, picking up their warm, foul loaf with a plastic bag. Other than their “meaty breath,” they smell only of a warm lavender candle or fresh hay.

What’s the burden?

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This was crazy. It’s about one of these.

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In ~2003, North Central Ford of Richardson Texas agreed to sell me the lst 2004 Ford GT that they got, at MSRP. That was going to be ~$150K. At first, I had to explain to the Sales Manager what it was, show him the first picture of it that he’d seen, and a picture of the Prototype at Pebble Beach in 2002. He said he figured I was a legit buyer because I went there in my BMW Z8, a comparably priced limited production car, that he did actually recognize.

On my 2nd visit, I got the Sales Manager to sign a 1-page (3–4 sentence) agreement letter. Afterwards, I dropped in the dealership to see him about every 90 days to follow up on the car’s highly anticipated delivery, and to remind them of our agreement, which he always acknowledged verbally. On two such visits, I brought along a car-guy buddy as “witness” to our agreement. Some of these meetings were simply quick meet & greets in the hallways where the terms of my deal were discussed briefly.

In late ‘04, when I became aware that the 1st cars were being shipped and in transit, I went by the dealership again, for about the 5th time, but I was told that the former Sales Manager no longer worked there, so I asked to see the new Sales Manager, and someone took me upstairs to his office.

I made the new Sales manager aware of the details of the deal I’d made with the dealership before he worked there, and he said “well, that’s bullshit. There is no way we’re gonna do that. That car is all over the press. We are going to sell that car on EBay Motors for $300K.” I re-iterated that we had an agreement in writing signed by his predecessor, and, at his request, showed him a copy. He read it and said “Well, the agreement says what you said it does, but we ain’t going to do that.”

I said “Well, you leave me no choice but to pursue this by other means.” and he said “Good luck!”. As I turned to walk out of his office, I turned back briefly and said “I assure you, luck won’t have anything to do with it.” (I couldn’t resist)

I found a young freshly-minted SMU JD-grad lawyer, and when the car showed up 2 days later, my lawyer filed a lawsuit and got a judge to put a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) on the car. It prohibited the dealership from offering it for sale, removing any of the shipment protection materials, dis-allowing anyone (including their employees) from driving it, until further notice. Even the mechanics in the service department couldn’t put a wrench on it.

I went up there, and went to the service department where the Service Manager let me come in their shop in the back and look, but not touch. This was the 1st or 2nd Ford GT delivered in the DFW metroplex. This was a big deal. There was a story on the cover of the Dallas Morning News business section.

There were dozens of people back there in a service bay, ohh-ing and awe-ing, including a a new car salesman that didn’t know me. I told him I was ready to pay cash at MSRP, but he said that “the car has a little legal cloud hanging over it” but as soon as that was cleared up, he could sell it to me for $240K, and wrote that number on the back of his business card without even writing down my name. The car had the TRO court order taped to the driver-side door glass.

The judge in this case made us go to mediation before it could go to trial, and so me and my young lawyer met with the recommended licensed mediator (a former Dallas judge) and the dealership brought in 2 suits from the headquarters that owns the dealership – Sonic Automotive of Nashville, TN (same guys that own the Texas Motor Speedway Indy/NASCAR track in Fort Worth), not to mention owning about 200 other car dealerships. They claimed to be representing the 2nd biggest car dealership company in the nation, after Auto Nation.

After polite introductions in the main conference room, the parties were situated in separate conference rooms, and the mediator started playing shuttle diplomacy, going back and forth between us, giving the other party’s argument and pushing for a settlement. As one point she told me and my lawyer that they knew I had high-end cars, and at trial they would show that I was an “opportunist, not a genuine Ford product buyer, and and they would characterize me as just an exotic car flipper hoping to profit unfairly”.

I told the mediator to tell them that my rebuttal in court would be: “I have an 11 year old Jeep, a 6 year old BMW, a 4 year old BMW and a Yukon Denali. Furthermore, I haven’t sold but one car in the last 5 years. But at trial, and I will insist on a jury, I will characterize them as … car dealers … and as redundant as it may sound, dishonest ones at that. And I will make it stick.”

Suddenly it became a price discussion. I agreed unilaterally to add $10K (good faith, for a total of $160K), but they insisted on the $300K number. Then, I let them know that they had quoted $240K to me, and I could prove it. We went back and forth on whether or not that was a bone fide offer, and I then provided more information – that $240K was also what they quoted a friend of mine who went by to look like I did but later in the day. He would be called by me as a witness. They caved, and agreed that $240K was their “best & final” asking price. But I rejected the new offer. I wasn’t done with them yet.

After a few back and forth rounds about how rock-solid my MSRP deal was, they offered a cash settlement of $20K for me to just abandon my lawsuit and walk away. I said “Tell them no, and that if I see them again, it will be in a downtown Dallas County courtroom”. The mediator tried to talk me out of taking such a hard stand, but carried the message to them anyway.

She came back in about 10 minutes and asked if we could agree on a cash settlement somewhere in the middle, and I said yes, of course, but it would have to be smack dab in the middle between my best offer of $160K and their best asking price of $240K. In other words, we were $80K apart, and if they want to write a check for $40K, I’ll go away and abandon my claims to the car. Otherwise, I’d pursue my rights to buy the car for the $150K list price in my 1-page agreement.

The mediator came back and said we had a deal, and we signed a settlement agreement that they were able to prepare quite quickly. And two hot-shot Nashville lawyers went home with their tails between their legs, probably more concerned about catching their flight.

Three days later, I got a $40K check, and paid my lawyer $6K for about an hour of prep and 2 hours of an arbitration meeting that had left his head spinning.

And literally the next day, Ford recalled all the Ford GTs nation-wide due to upper-A-arm cracks, so the initial Ford GT owners had to put their brand-new cars back in the shop and wait about 6 months to get them retrofit with yet-to-be-designed beefier A-arms.

That was the best car deal I ever did. No tax, no title, no license, no insurance, no gas and a nice financial result for me (and my new lawyer buddy). I bought a 1/18 scale model Ford GT that’s on my trophy shelf, with the Sales Manager’s business card tucked under its tiny little windshield wipers.

Is that crazy enough?

Puddle Of Mudd – Control

Meanwhile in Spain…

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In our capital of Port of Spain we have a major homeless problem and it is advised that you don’t give them any money. This story is an example of why.


Some years ago there was a homeless man that would come in front of the bank pictured above and sit on the sidewalk. There is a taxi stand alongside that bank and the taxi drivers would watch as the man sat there convulsing and twitching in some sort of drug induced euphoria. He wore something that resembled a dirty loin cloth, that did little to cover his privates from being displayed to the public, which included parents walking with their little children.

A sympathetic taxi driver approached him and spoke to him gently telling him of the situation and that he needed to cover up for the sake of the children in the area. The taxi driver then went to his trunk and opened it. He was also a gardener and inside the trunk contained several gardening items which included a shovel and a pair of old jeans. The taxi driver gave the homeless man the jeans and told him that he would give him $20 to wear it from now on. The homeless man agreed and was happily rewarded with $20. He went his merry way and all was well for the rest of the evening.

However the following the day, the homeless man returned. This time he was stark naked. He sat on the pavement and proceeded to stroke his semi erect penis in full view of the public and the taxi drivers who stood in shock and disgust. He recognized the taxi driver from the day before who gave him the $20 and brandished a wide smile. It was as if he told himself that he found a good means to make money and the more obscene he behaved, the more repulsed he made people feel, the more money he could coerce people to pay him to stop.

The taxi driver calmly told him to come to him as he went and opened his trunk. Inside the trunk was the driver’s gardening items which included the shovel and another pair of jeans. The homeless man smiled, expecting to be given the jeans and quite possibly double the amount of money from the day before. Instead he watched as the taxi driver whipped out the shovel and in an instant he felt the searing pain of the back of the shovel as it whacked against his raw, exposed buttocks.

The homeless man ran off to the distance whilst the taxi driver hurled obscenities towards him saying that he would, ‘F**king kill him the next time he comes here with his p***k hanging out.’ The entire taxi stand and several pedestrians applauded the vigilante taxi driver. From that moment on the homeless was never seen near that area again.

Was it nice what the taxi driver did? No.

Was it justice? Damned right it was.

You have a highly Westernized view of freedom. China holds a different view of freedom, one that is much more practical than ideological.

China protects its people and keeps them safe. It knows that Western influence can be corrosive and harmful to society. Have you ever asked yourself why Western societies, for example, in America, are so fucked up?

And, by the way, the West also practice censorship, much more so than the Chinese. If you’re unaware, then you’ve not been paying attention. Or you have blinders on.

Puddle Of Mudd – Blurry (Album Version) (Official Video)

I am a Chinese citizen, 53 years old this year. I have been extremely anti-CCP since I was 15 years old, and until 2010, I was still a radical anti-communist.

After 2010, my anti-communist stance began to falter. I became a mild anti-communist.

By 2015, I was neither against the CCP nor for them, when I was neutral.

By 2017, I started to support the CCP a little bit.

By 2019, I had become a staunch supporter of the CCP.

When I was in college, my classmates were 100% anti-communist, we all participated in the protests that swept the country in 1989, and one of my classmates and I went to Tiananmen Square in Beijing to participate in the protests.

Throughout the 1990s, my classmates and I also adhered to an anti-communist stance. One of my classmates and I tried to form a secret political party to overthrow the CCP.

In the 2000s, some of my classmates began to change their views, and I was one of the last to change their views.

In China, many of my peers have gone through a spiritual journey similar to mine, from opposing the CCP to supporting the CCP.

So, when you ask “What actually happens to citizens of China who do not support the CCP?” I will tell you a fact: Most of the people who were once against the CCP have now become supporters of the CCP.

Based on my observations, my remarks probably represent the vast majority of those who have ever opposed the CCP.


In response to a request from some in the comments:

Many people ask me the reason for the change of opinion, but this question is difficult to answer completely, because so much has happened in 30 years, my change of opinion is the result of all the things that have happened in 30 years, a highly educated Mature-minded adults usually do not change their beliefs quickly because of a few events.

While I can’t list all the reasons that influence my opinion, there are two main reasons that led me to go from a radical anti-communist to a staunch CCP supporter:

1. I have seen with my own eyes the various changes that have taken place in China in the past 30 years;

2. I have visited Western countries many times and browsed a lot of Western media, so I have a more direct and in-depth understanding of Western countries.

I myself have been a news reporter for a few years, and I am very aware of the various methods used by the media to manipulate public opinion. Therefore, I will not unconditionally trust any media, nor will I be brainwashed by the media. I have my own means of checking the facts and all my opinions come from the facts and not any media reports.

It’s also not true that someone commented that I became less radical as I got older, from being an anti-communist to accepting and conforming to reality. In fact, the 50-60-year-old Chinese are still the group with the highest proportion of anti-communists among all Chinese people. People of this age are more supportive of the CCP than us. They did not become anti-communists because of their youth.

It will take China at least 45 minutes to take control of Taiwanese territory if war breaks out.

Taiwan is already deeply integrated with China, its main, most profitable trading partner and employer.

All China needs to do is announce, “”As of midnight tonight, all goods and personnel moving into and out of Chinese Taipei must clear China Customs and Immigration. The Taiwan Straits are now PRC domestic waters and all aircraft must observe reunited China’s combined ADIZ. The PLAN and PLAAF will patrol and enforce the orderly observance of this process”.

No power on earth can stop, or even delay, this process without being destroyed. Taiwan is visible from the PRC and, unlike Ukraine, has no contiguous neighbors.

And China’s army, navy, and air force are bigger and more powerfully armed than American forces in the West Pacific.

Everlast – What it’s Like (Official Music Video)

My first wife was very angry at our divorce.

We had 3 dogs—standard poodles that I adored. When I left the home and the marriage….she was adamant that I couldn’t take or see the dogs.

She took me to small claims court for….DOG SUPPORT!

The judge was measured….asking about all of the expenses and damages. I was sweating by the time the judge asked me what I had to say for myself.

I said simply that it would be one thing if I had access… but…

The judge interrupts and said….I agree.

Judgement for the defendant plus costs. As my ex wife was about to lodge a protest…the judge said… it’s about choices ma’am….you chose to block access… and ma’am….as much as dog lovers think their pets are kids….they don’t have the same standing as children.

As the judge stood up….he was looking down….shaking his head… and laughing.

I celebrated for a week!

“Why is Russia invading Ukraine?”

In our official propaganda, Ukraine has been a US springboard for future conquering, dismembering and enslaving Russia. An alleged “genocide” of ethnic Russians in self-declared states of Donetsk and Lugansk is a proof to that.

To prevent the ongoing genocide and future threats, President Putin sent the troops that now have been de-Nazifying and de-militarizing Ukraine for the last five days.

This move was based on a following set of working assumptions by our president.

Russia’s Top Five Assumptions for Invading Ukraine:

1. Ukraine is governed by a US puppet regime not embedded in the Ukrainian society.

2. The dysfunctionality of the Ukrainian state and political divisions between their oligarchs make it possible to overthrow them in a swift military operation.

3. Large parts of Ukraine secretly sympathize with Russia and are ready to embrace new pro-Russian rulers.

4. Civil society does not exist. Pro-Western activists are a small group of paid agents that can be chased out of the country, arrested, or killed.

5. The West is too weak and divided to stand up for Ukraine.


Below, one of our loyalist political cartoons by Yevgény Samóilov illustrating the core of President Putin’s assumptions.

A motley crew of Ukrainian nationalists are addressing an unenthusiastic public. To the right, mayor of the city of Kiev Klichko

. The person wearing a Stalhelm to the left is there to show a “Nazi presence” at the forefront in Ukrainian politics.

The hydra of Anglo-Saxon globalism manipulates all of them. The poster fixed to the pulpit says “Raise up, Ukraine!” The discarded ones on the floor say, “Raise up, Syria!”, “Raise up, Egypt!”, “Raise up, Libya”. This implies that the Arab Spring a decade ago was a product of American machinations, just like what happens now in Ukraine.

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We really can’t call those dirty work against China by US a “tactic”. Seriously. There is no wisdom at all in the actions, only malice.

Take us individuals as example, if you are the top student in your class, or the top staff in your company, and then suddenly you find another student or colleague is going to surpass you soon by studying/working hard and intelligently.

Then, as a normal and smart reaction, what should you do?

You may work harder to better yourself, to further improve yourself, anyway, you still have a lot of potential to be a better self.

Or, to join hand with the one catching up, to work harder together to create a better overall atmosphere for your class or company to achieve greater performance as a whole — we have seen reports of university students of the same dormitory helping with each other so that all of them passed the post-graduate exams here in China.

So this can be realistic and practical.

But, you may also place all kinds of obstacles to the one catching up, making his/her road as bumpy as possible, by threatening, coercing, bullying, smearing…by whatever dirty work you can come up with, just to ensure your win and the others’ lose.

And obviously, the US is taking the third road to contain China’s development.

(Why the US will gain nothing from seeking to contain China)

So, actually, the US not only does not improve itself to be a better one, instead, it is investing too many of its efforts to stop China’s development, meanwhile too few efforts to solve its piles and piles of domestic turmoils.

There is an ancient Chinese saying, “When you are sailing against the current, you’ll either go ahead or keep falling,” or “He who does not advance loses ground.”

This is exactly the case the current US is in — it was once advancing very fast, but today, it has stopped growing, for the US, stopping there means falling behind in a rapidly developing world of today.

Meanwhile, China has been focusing on its internal issues, including but not limited to: building better infrasctructure across the country, providing better education, medical care, more job opportunities, etc. for its people, alleviating millions and millions of its people out of extreme poverty, catching up in the high-tech fields, upgrading its industrial system, fostering closer and muturally beneficial relations with more countries, increasing trade and other exchanges with more countries, helping other developing and under-developed countries and regions to improve their economy, etc.

Though there are still lots of domestic issues to tackle with, Chinese leadership know clearly what they are, and are struggling to find better solutions to deal with them, for example, its fight against corruption which has indeed brought concrete results with thousands and thousands of corrupted officials being discplined, published, or even jailed; its fight against pollution, as a Beijing dweller for more than two decades, I have personally witnessed the deterioration of the air quality in the city, but now also the coming back of the blue sky and clean air. There are many other similar examples.

In short, the US has nearly stopped growing but is still investing too many of its efforts to “solve” its “enemies,” while China focuses more on its own business and is making more friends around with its sincere help and efforts. By comparison, even if China only makes small steps forward, it’s moving faster than the one who stands still, let alone China is taking strides, even with leaps and bounds, on its road of development.

Back to my metaphor, as two students in a class, or two colleagues in a company, who do you think will laugh to the last?

So, my suggestion to the US, is as always: choose to be a nice guy, instead of a demon, to take the second road I listed above, to join hands with China, to bring a better tomorrow for both the US and China, and to the whole class or the company — our Earth, who is already suffering.

But will the US listen to me? Unfortunately, NO!

I have had a few. All asked and answered in the United States by Americans.

Politics #1
Him “You got a democracy down there in Australia?”
Me “ 98% of people vote in every election – It is compulsory”
Him “That sounds like communism to me. “

Our government goes to a lot of effort to make sure everyone has a chance to vote.

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Aussies voting in the Australian region of Antarctica

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Aussies voting at the beach.

Politics #2
(Someone campaigning for an American electoral candidate.)
Her “Here is some information on Senator X”
Me: “Sorry we can’t vote here, we are Australian.”
Her “It doesn’t matter what state you come from, vote Republican!”
(Thanks to Peter and Sherry for this one)

Driving #1
Him: “You drive on the left? Hell that must be hard. “
Me “It isn’t really, most of us do it.”
Him “Still that’s gotta be hard”
Me “Not, really, the steering wheel is on this side of the car.”
Him “What? How do you get it over there?”
Me “Well some people pay the dealership to do it, but most of us buy a keg of beer, get a few mates over and do it ourselves. You can get a kit with videos and everything.”

Driving #2
(Actually asked in Hawaii.)
Him “How long did it take to drive here?”

Wildlife
Him “If I go down to Australia, can I bring me back one of those cola bears?”
Me “You mean koalas?”
Him “Yeah, like the ones in the Qantas ads”
Me “The Bald Eagle is your national bird right?”
Him (Puffs up with pride) “Sure is!”
Me “Can I bring one of those home with me?”
Him “I see your point.”

Language
Many people asked this one.
Him “You sure speak English good”
(In my head I’d reply “Rather better than you do.” But out loud I’d say “Thank you.”
Him “What language do you speak down there in Australia?”
Me “We speak Stralian mate.”
Him “Say something in Stralian”
Me “Javagoodweegend” [ Translation: Did you have a good weekend]
Him “What did you say????”
Me “It’s a traditional greeting we say on Mondays.”
Him “Only Mondays?”
Me “Yeah, unless Monday is a holiday, then on Tuesday we say ‘Javagoodlongwegend’ “

Then I’d get them to practice it.
JAVAGUD WE GEND.
There are many Americans wandering around today thinking that they can speak Stralian.
(I share credit with Derek for this one)

Edit:
I am not sure where I got this one from, it wasn’t asked of me, so I can’t claim it.
Him “So you drive on the left?”
Aussie “Yeah, all the time”
Him “ So you leave the freeway from the fast lane????”

Hi,

American living on the lower North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand here.

My lifestyle is different than when I lived in the US, and my quality of life is better.

Housing –

In the US I lived in a 3600 sq ft (~350 sq m) McMansion in an affluent suburb of Dallas. While it was a nice neighborhood there was a lot of pressure to put up a certain facade of just how successful I was. It cost a minor fortune to heat and more importantly, cool. It was filled with stuff that I rarely used and didn’t miss when I got rid of it.

In NZ, I live in a 110 sq m home (~1200 sq ft) home and I don’t have any pressure to outdo my neighbors. I heat my home with a wood stove using about $400 worth of firewood for a winter. To cool my home in the summer, I open the windows.

True, insulation and double glazed windows are only just becoming a “thing” in NZ homes, but we retrofitted for those when we bought the house.

Education –

Our eldest went to school in the US where the bulk of their time was spent in classroom learning so they could score well on a standardized exam.

Our youngest is in primary school in NZ and spends part of his day in classroom learning too, plus a good part of his day outside learning how to garden, care for animals, build things and swim.

Work –

I still work for the same company as I did in the US, where I worked 10-14+ hours per day and often on weekends I and while on vacation.

In NZ, in the same job, same company, I work 7.5 hours per day and more every once in a while. I’m encouraged to take my vacation and shut off while out of the office.

Food –

In the US we ate out a fair amount, but still less than most. We drank milk that was full of hormones and eggs that had been stripped of their protective coatings and required refrigeration. We couldn’t grow our own garden because it was simply too hot where we lived.

In NZ we have fruit and nut trees and a lovely garden that produces all year. Our milk is hormone free, our eggs are local and sometimes still have a few feathers stuck to them. We don’t eat out much, but prefer to have friends over, or go to their places.

Free time –

We are never too far from a beach or a mountain hiking trail in NZ, but in the US this would require a long drive in most places.

Security –

In the US I was always afraid that one misstep or accident would ruin myself and my family. Either a health issue or accident can bankrupt most Americans. I also worried that some idiot with a gun may shoot me or my family.

In NZ that is not something we worry about. If we have an accident, it will be covered by ACC. And we don’t have a litigious society, so I’m not worried that someone will maliciously try to ruin me. Plenty of people have guns here in NZ, but we use them sensibly and responsibly.

In summary, life is less complex in New Zealand, we have less stress and pressure, plus we get to live in some of the most beautiful land in the world. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Staind – Outside (Official Video)

Xiaosong Gao, a famous Chinese TV presenter and producer, once interviewed Yukimura, a Japanese chef. He asked Yukimura if he could use some simple words to summarize the difference between Japanese and Chinese cuisine. Yukimura said,

Japanese cuisine is Water, while Chinese cuisine is Fire.

Xiaosong said he got goosebumps on arms when he heard this.

I would say, so did I.

I’m not sure if this metaphor means anything to the people who’re not so familiar with Asian culture. Born and raised as a Chinese, I felt it mind-blowing. Water and Fire are always among the very basic elements in Asian culture. Yukimura’s summary does explain the difference between Chinese food and Japanese food just right. Let me show you some example of the dishes.

Chinese food – Chongqing Hotpot

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Chinese food – Mapo Tofu

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Japanese food – Nagashi sōmen

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Japanese food – Sushi

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I’m not saying all Chinese foods are spicy and hot or all Japanese foods are delicate and peaceful like what I’ve shown in the examples, but you get the idea.

As a Chinese, I know that there is a very important term in Chinese cooking is Huo Hou (火候, fire timing). It basically means the art of controlling the strength of fire and how the food are cooked on the fire (in a pot or not). But in fact this is the most hard-to-explain technique that a Chinese chef needs many years to master.

Most of Chinese food needs the perfect combination of different kinds of spice to be added or long time cooking so the taste of food can be stimulated and extracted out and dissolved in the broth or juice.

It’s just like fire, they are strong, shining, and you can’t help but to embrace them when seeing or smelling them.

On the other hand, most Japanese food are delicate, small-portioned, beautiful while at the same time using as little spice as possible. It’s just like water, they are pure, clear, making you comfortable. Like water can fit into whatever shape container, Japanese food can comfort you when you are in whatever mood or appetite.

Alice In Chains – Nutshell (MTV Unplugged – HD Video)

I hope you all “get” me.

New change at the Pentagon waters down focus on Taiwan

From Politico. Hum…

The Pentagon has made administrative changes in how it handles Taiwan policy, a shift that lawmakers and former officials say sends the wrong signal to Beijing as the Chinese military steps up drills around the self-ruled island.

The move — which involves placing the Taiwan portfolio under the office responsible for China policy — could provide a new line of attack among President Joe Biden’s opponents who claim he is weak on China.

The changes come as officials are increasingly worried about Beijing’s aggression toward Taiwan, particularly after a crisis erupted in the Taiwan Strait in August after China launched unprecedented military exercises, including sending missiles over the island, in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei.

“Anything that dilutes America’s focus on helping Taiwan to defend itself is a really bad idea,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) told POLITICO. “Pulling Taiwan back into a portfolio dominated by China sends the wrong signal to Beijing — that they can dictate our relationship with the island democracy. Or worse, it will facilitate consultation with Beijing on our approach to Taiwan’s security needs.”

From HERE

Chinese President Xi Jinping warns Central Asian neighbors against allowing CIA “color revolutions.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping warned his Central Asian neighbors on Friday not to allow outsiders to destabilize them with “color revolutions” and offered to set up a regional counterterrorism training center.

Xi’s comments at a security summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and leaders from Central Asia, India and Iran reflect official Chinese anxiety that Western support for pro-democracy and human rights activists is a plot to undermine Xi’s ruling Communist Party and other authoritarian governments.

“We should prevent external forces from instigating a color revolution,” Xi said in a speech to leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, referring to protests that toppled unpopular regimes in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.

Xi offered to train 2,000 police officers, to set up a regional counterterrorism training center and to “strengthen law enforcement capacity building.” He gave no details.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SEO) was formed by Russia and China as a counterweight to U.S. influence. The summit is part of Xi’s first trip abroad since shortly after the coronavirus pandemic began 2 1/2 years ago, highlighting the importance to Beijing of asserting itself as a regional leader.

The group also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Iran is an observer and has applied for full membership.

The one-day summit in the ancient city of Samarkand occurred against a backdrop of Russia’s attack on Ukraine and fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a “dialogue partner” of the group, attended the summit and planned to hold talks with Putin on the status of a deal under which wheat exports from Ukraine through the Black Sea resumed.

Xi is promoting a “Global Security Initiative” announced in April following the formation of the Quad by the U.S., Japan, Australia and India in response to Beijing’s more assertive foreign policy. Xi has given few details, but U.S. officials complain it echoes Russian arguments in support of Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.

China’s relations with Washington, Europe, Japan and India have been strained by disputes about technology, security, human rights and territory.

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Sleeping while interrupted by nightmare

It’s getting surreal. Ukraine is in flux. America continues to die. Pro-Russian bloggers are freaking out and pointing fingers every which way and starting to eat each other. American PSYOPS is in gleeful overdrive. China is grim, serious, and making sure that the dragon doesn’t have any chinks in it’s armor.

I just want to smunch. I just cannot take everything so serious for such a long extended period of time.

Encino Man – Dinner Scene

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history. It aims to help Global South countries, as well as some European countries, build their infrastructure. Over 149 countries have signed up. They include countries from Africa, Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

BRI reveals that China is a peaceful and benevolent world power, in stark contrast to the United States. Instead of waging wars, China builds infrastructure.

This makes USA look very bad. Desperate to prevent this global perception, USA is doing everything it can to diminish BRI and contain China. This includes creating competitive alternatives to BRI.

In recent years, we’ve seen a number of failed attempts…Blue Dot Network, Build Back Better World, Global Gateway, and now Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) is yet another try. I guarantee you that PGII will also flop.

Western nations are unable to get their act together. They are economically and politically inept.

Modern PSYOPs are more powerful than ever

You cannot believe ANYTHING and EVERYTHING said in the Western “news” media. It’s all “War Propaganda”.

From The Saker. Andrei makes great points.

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Andrei makes great points.

Cowboy Junkies – SWEET JANE (LIVE).

For anyone who’s ever had a heart.

NASA accuses China of intent to take over the moon, China rejects

Nothing new here…
"In April, he accused China of continuing to display a lack of transparency and willingness to cooperate with the US and other countries in space. Earlier he said in a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that "we want cooperation that has not been forthcoming from the Chinese government [but] it takes two to tango."

However, the absence of cooperation between China and the US is not a result of unwillingness of the Chinese side, but an act that the US enforced on itself - the Wolf Amendment passed in 2011, which essentially prohibits any direct cooperation between NASA and its Chinese counterparts. “

Russian Gazprom Doubles Export Revenue Despite Delivering 43% Less Gas To Europe

ZeroHedge - Sep 13, 2022, 10:00 AM CDT

This year, Gazprom supplied 43 percent less gas to Europe than last year, but raised prices by three times on average.

This translated to the company’s European export revenue increasing from $53 billion to $100 billion, wrote Olivér Hortay, head of the energy and climate policy research at Hungarian think tank Századvég Konjunktúrakutató, in his Facebook post in response to an article published in the Financial Times.

From HERE

Mazzy Star – Fade Into You – 10/2/1994 – Shoreline Amphitheatre

Russia has found a simple and economical solution to launch satellites

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Translated.

…that China continues to troll the US that no one supports hegemonic initiatives! This time, an official representative of the Chinese Foreign Ministry noted that 85% of the world's population did not impose anti-Russian sanctions, and he did not limit himself to facts, but decided to draw another conclusion, saying that "only the majority represent the international community."

Now this is a serious statement. In fact, China in a diplomatic form, avoiding harsh language, but stated two fundamental theses at once:

First, the countries of the West are not the majority, but the minority of the world. The statement is very far reaching! A minority can be treated with respect, its rights can be respected, but a minority cannot claim power - it must obey the will of the majority.

Moreover, if earlier the West could still say that we may have fewer people, but the world economy is almost entirely the countries of Europe, the USA + Canada, Australia and Japan. Yes, and the military force is also mainly the West, and therefore - there are many of you there, in Asia, Africa and other continents, or few - but you are freeloaders, so sit quietly on our necks. Now the Western world cannot say that: it is enough to sum up the economies of two countries, India and China, in order to put the entire West in its place! ..

Secondly, the phrase that "only the majority can represent the world community" suggests that the West has lost its right to leadership. That is, to come out and speak on behalf of all countries: that they condemn something, that they need something, that they are dissatisfied with something, or vice versa - they are very happy from some decision - the West cannot do all this anymore. His role is to be among the ordinary members of the community, but not to lead it.

Continues…

In fact, it is cruel: to tell the West directly that it no longer has the right to speak “on behalf of and on behalf of”, as they used to say in Soviet times, that now completely different people will speak on behalf of the world community, and America and Europe can only to express the opinion of their small sect, which is rapidly falling not only in economic and military, but also in technological, and most importantly, in human potential. In these countries, not only is there a powerful surge of depopulation, and most likely intentional and conscious, but at the same time there is also a monstrous degradation in education. In general, for many years there has been a joke that American universities are a place where Russian professors give lectures in mathematics to Chinese students. But if earlier it was possible for the United States to lure and bribe the best students, students and teachers,

An example of the scientific and technological backwardness of the West was demonstrated at the recent Army-2022 forum, but oddly enough, not at all in connection with the achievements of our weapons, but on the contrary, the achievements were in a purely peaceful sphere, moreover, in the field of space and its exploration , what they like to talk about in America now, and what they have made a fashionable topic.

As you know, Elon Musk has been appointed their official rock star, designed to convince the whole world that the United States in the field of space is ahead of the rest. But Elon Musk's methods are reminiscent of the technologies of the Soviet Union of the 80s: he still continues to struggle with the idea of ​​​​a partially returned in the form of separate stages of a launch vehicle in order to reduce the cost of space launches. At the same time, of course, even he cannot return the entire rocket anyway.

Elon Musk's business project is associated with the mass launch of small satellites into low orbits, and since the project promises to be very massive both due to the number of satellites and the fact that they will quickly fall into the atmosphere from low orbits in a year or two, and the satellite constellation will have to be regularly renewed. That is, technically, Elon Musk's project is a mass launch of inexpensive and fairly small satellites, and the payback is due to cheaper launches with the help of a partial return and the subsequent use of launch vehicle stages.

And then the unexpected happened: journalists from the American edition of Military Watch Magazine looked at the Army-2022 forum and found that these “crazy Russians” had found a much simpler, high-tech, and most importantly, cheaper and more economical solution to the same problem that Elon Musk, let's call a spade a spade, was just going to pour money on the principle of "there is power - no mind is needed."

At the Army-2022 forum, the Americans discovered that Russia had once again upgraded the MiG-31K fighter. Here is what they write about this car, we quote verbatim:

“The MiG-31 is the heaviest class of tactical combat aircraft in the world, and its long range, high payload, unrivaled speed and altitude have long made it the ideal launch platform for both satellites and anti-satellite weapons.”

Rocket Gibraltar 1988 Movie

Check out this preview. When present meets the past, and the future.

What, You Want To See My Shocked Face?

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No Way!

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So now you think I have Gomer Pyle running in a loop inside my head or something?

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‘Fraid Not.

That whole Conspiracy Theorist thing?

Yeah, it’s more like a Coming Attractions kind of thing ya know?

There were literally people trying to warn us about these Mrna Vaccines and the intention to use them for population reduction clear back in the 1990’s bub.

Thirty years ago.

Just because the government and some private companies have unlimited budgets to spend on just about any diabolical idea they can come up with doesn’t mean that those diabolical plans don’t get leaked to someone.

And eventually to someone else who knows who else to tell so that it gets out.

These so called Conspiracy Theories are more than usually well grounded in Truths That Weren’t Supposed To Be Leaked plus research, educated guesses and evidence.

What was it I saw a while back, that at least 25 “Conspiracy Theories” had been proven to be true?

Bet me there are way the hell more than that.

More than likely twice that.

Sure there are plenty of Whack Jobs out there with their Tinfoil Hats screwed on a little too tight,

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But you have to be WILLFULLY IGNORANT these days to dismiss some things you hear out of hand without doing at least a little checking.

Personally, I figure you have to have an above average level of intelligence and a great deal of patience just to be able to weed through all the BULLSHIT the damn Media and the Government puke out every damn day anyway, might as well open your mind a little and , at least briefly, entertain that because you know the Bullshit is being peddled at maximum velocity on purpose, that it might be because they don’t want you to even think about looking into WHAT THEY AREN’T talking about.

They work very hard at keeping everyone’s attention diverted, that is the Media’s entire purpose now.

I would much rather be challenged to find the things they don’t want talked about and hang out with people of like mind.

The alternative IS NOT AN OPTION for me.

China pumps another billion dollars into Australian iron ore

China’s biggest state-owned steelmaker will invest more than a billion dollars in a new Australian iron ore mine in the “spirit of sincere cooperation” in a sign that diplomatic tensions between Beijing and Canberra are not a complete barrier to commerce.

Baowu’s decision to invest in Rio Tinto’s $US2 billion ($2.96 billion) Western Range iron ore mine comes barely two weeks after the steel giant backed Chris Ellison’s plan to build a new iron ore province in the West Pilbara region of Western Australia...
I notice that Australia media has recently changed tone against China. Australia government also begin to approve mining investment from china
.

From HERE

Dido – White Flag (Live at Brixton Academy)

China’s life expectancy is now higher than that of the US

The US’s life expectancy continued its decline from 2020 to 2021, dropping sharply to 76.1 years.

With the latest decline, US life expectancy is now at its lowest since 1996, according to new data (pdf) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) National Center for Health Statistics. It also means that the gap in longevity at birth between people in the US and China has now widened to a full year.

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From HERE

 

Great question. This is one Quentin Tarantino often talks about. While he focuses on genre movies, this tip works in drama as well. The tip: don’t have the characters constantly talking about “the plot”. It becomes too much “hitting it on the nose”. Let the circumstances develop where the main characters speak more naturally or at least seem to.

If you watch the second scene of “Pulp Fiction” where the two hit men, Vincent and Jules, played by John Travolta and Samuel Jackson are bantering, they never talk about what they’re about do to. They discuss the names of McDonald’s hamburgers sold in Paris. Which completely makes sense. By not having the characters talk about their hits. When they engage in the hit, we realize they’ve been doing this a long time.

People who are engaged in the same kind of business for a long time don’t necessarily talk constantly about it. What’s the point? They’ve done it before. And by keeping the dialogue away from the “plot” it makes it seem more realistic.

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Is the War in Ukraine Part of a U.S. Strategy to Weaken Germany? RAND Says, “YES”!

War is a guilty, vicarious pleasure as long as you are not hunkered in a basement or trench praying that an artillery shell does not score a direct hit on your position. Rumbling tanks, screeching rockets and missiles and troops firing automatic weapons are the stuff that Hollywood trots out to entertain the masses that tune in to watch a war flick or, even better, live feeds from the front lines courtesy of intrepid reporters.

But the real damage from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is economic and will determine the outcome of this war. It is not only wreaking havoc in Ukraine, it is causing real damage around the world. Some believe that the United States and NATO are using Ukraine as a lever to weaken Russia and get rid of Putin. Putin’s crime? He refused to be the prison bitch of the west. But there is a RAND report from January 2022 that suggests something darker, even diabolical. More about that later. (NOTE–This may not be a genuine RAND report. Take it with a grain of salt. Regardless of its veracity, the sanctions on Russian are having a devastating effect on the German economy.)

The economic sanctions were designed to hurt all Russians–not just Putin and his key leaders. You remember the heady days early in the war when Russian assets outside of Russia were being seized, Russian oligarchs, including those who opposed Putin, had their property confiscated, and artists and athletes were treated like lepers with active Ebola. The west effectively declared a non-shooting war on Russia and sat back waiting for the Russian economy to collapse.

But that backfired and did so in a big, unexpected way. Rather than fold like a cheap tent in a hurricane, the Russian economy continued to chug along with minimal inflation because the smart guys and gals in Washington, London and Berlin failed to do their homework. They did not realize that Russia’s position as a major exporter of oil, gas, fertilizer and other critical metals and rare earth minerals insulated Russia from the pain the west wanted so desperately to inflict. And Russia pivoted to forging stronger ties with China, whose economy was in trouble, and accelerated the development of an alternative international reserve currency that would enable Russia to trade with other nations outside the NATO club.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost and it is bad news, not for Russia, but for Europe. Maybe you missed these recent reports:

The energy in crisis in Germany is turning into a manufacturing crisis, with an executive at the ArcelorMittal steel company saying that the German wing of the company can no longer compete due to soaring energy coasts.

“Production in Germany is currently no longer competitive,” said Reiner Blaschek, the CEO of ArcelorMittal Germany, which recently shut down two plants in the country. He is calling for quick political intervention, saying, “We need competitive energy prices for industry.”

Gas and electricity prices, which have soared in recent months due to sanctions and Russia’s decision to cut gas flows, have left many industrial companies with input costs too high to remain profitable, and many economic experts are forecasting further pain for Germany’s core industrial sector, which would have knock-on effects for the rest of the German economy.

From HERE
Did you catch that? ArcelorMittal already has closed two plants in Germany. That means unemployed, skilled workers. And that unemployment reverberates to other parts of the German economy. Those workers no longer have extra cash to spend in restaurants and bars. They don’t have the dough to buy new homes or remodel their kitchens or bathrooms. All of this a result of “soaring energy prices” that is a direct consequence of idiotic green policies and German hostility towards Russia manifested via sanctions. The surge in the price of gas and oil is not going to abate in the near term and Russia has tightened the screws on Europe by cutting off the gas supply from Nordstream.

Sweden, who recently joined NATO, is getting an economic punch in the nose as well:

Swedish appliance maker Electrolux AB announced a cost reduction program after reporting a plunge in demand for its home appliances across Europe and the US

The world’s second-largest home appliances manufacturer after Whirlpool said, “market demand for core appliances in Europe and the US so far in the third quarter is estimated to have decreased at a significantly accelerated pace compared with the second quarter, driven by the impact of high inflation on consumer durables purchases and low consumer confidence.” 

From HERE

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The European Union also is struggling to deal with strong economic headwinds unleashed by the sanctions on Russia:

Friday’s meeting in Brussels capped a frenzied week of government activity across the 27-nation bloc in which it became clear just how complex it is to forge a common response to the energy crisis given the breadth of challenges. . . .

Russia upped the ante just over a week ago, when Gazprom PJSC cut off gas deliveries to Europe via the Nord Stream pipeline indefinitely.

That sparked another round of budget-straining measures as governments announced additional aid to help people pay their bills. They were also forced to deal with a new financial threat from the crisis. As soaring energy prices leave some businesses struggling to find enough cash to meet margin calls, countries announced billions of euros in liquidity funding.

From HERE

Lurking behind the economic chaos in Europe is the unfolding economic disaster in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s economy is not producing enough cash flow to sustain its military effort.

It is now totally dependent on the largess of the United States and Europe.

So here is the critical question–how long will the governments of Europe, facing growing domestic unrest, continue to write blank checks to Volodomyr Zelensky and deplete their own military stockpiles?

One more trip back to World War II. The Soviet Union suffered catastrophic losses during the first year of the war with Germany. As the Nazi armies flooded east, the Soviets hurriedly packed up factories and manufacturing plants and shipped them to the east of the Ural mountains. Do you think the United States, if it had been invaded, could disassemble their automobile and aircraft factories in Illinois and ship those plants to Alaska, reassemble them and have them back on line producing within a year? Because that is what the Soviets did. While they suffered unimaginable losses in men on the frontlines and had villages and cities razed to the ground, the Soviet Union continued to operate a manufacturing capability and rebuilt their armies with new recruits.

Ukraine is not doing any of that. Ukraine cannot safely bring recruits to camps in western Ukraine for basic training without risk of being hit my Russian precision missiles. A large portion of Ukraine’s manufacturing centers are now in the hands of Russia. Remember Mariupol? Without secure military training centers and active factories, Ukraine cannot pull off the economic miracle that the Soviets did in World War II.

As long as Russia’s economy remains intact and it can sell its essential products to other countries not on board with backing Ukraine, Russia will prevail. Let me conclude by giving analysts at Rand some kudos. Rand issued a prescient report in January that provides some alarming insight into a nefarious motive that explains why Washington is goading Berlin into backing Ukraine and cutting ties to Russia:

The present state of the U.S. economy does not suggest that it can function without the financial and material support from external sources. 

The quantitive easing policy, which the Fed has resorted to regularly in recent years, as well as the uncontrolled issue of cash during the 2020 and 2021 Covid lockdowns, have led to a sharp increase in the external debt and an increase in the dollar supply.

The continuing deterioration of the economic situation is highly likely to lead to a loss in the position of the Democratic Party in Congress and the Senate in the forthcoming elections to be held in November 2022. 

The impeachment of the President cannot be ruled out under these circumstances, which must be avoided at all costs. . . .

The current German economic model is based on two pillars. 

These are unlimited access to cheap Russian energy resources and to cheap French electric power, thanks to the operation of nuclear plants. 

The importance of the first factor is considerably higher. 

Halting Russian supplies can well create a systemic crisis that would be devastating for the German economy and, indirectly, for the entire European Union.

APOCALYPSE NOW Clip – Ride of the Valkyries (1979) Francis Ford Coppola

G’day,

Yes, it is. I once drove from Coober Pedy to Laverton (828 miles) on the Anne Beadell ‘highway’ (Google it)

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on my way to the Western Australian coast. It took me 8 days. I didn’t see another vehicle, a person, or a building until the afternoon of the 8th day when a Range Rover passed going the other way. I averaged only 100 miles per day partly because I was there to enjoy the trip and partly because the ‘highway’ doesn’t support going very fast. And, as you will see from the map, this is a journey over less than half the width of Australia.

Clothing prices will be going up fast now

From HERE
You may consider stocking up at the goodwill and St Vinnies now.

Cotton prices are going to the moon because global crop failures and fertilizer shortage.

Which explains the high scrap PET soda bottle prices I am seeing over here on the tropical island.  It is now 67 cents USD per kilo at the processors north of Manila.

This is because PET soda bottles are ground up, washed, and then the flake is fed into extrusion machines with a spinner that makes fiber.  You ever seen a cotton candy machine?  Well that is exactly how it works except the machine is upside down so the fiber falls out of the machine continously, not gathered with a stick like at the carnival.  Temps are higher with plastic than sugar but not a lot.  

Ht Michael Yon, with the info that allowed me to put the two seemingly unrelated things together.

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How China Has Added to Its Influence Over the iPhone

Apple is taking small steps toward India. But the production of its latest phone, introduced on Wednesday, shows how difficult it will be to make big changes.

This fall, Apple will make some of its flagship iPhones outside China for the first time, a small but significant change for a company that has built one of the most sophisticated supply chains in the world with the help of the Chinese authorities. But the development of the iPhone 14, which was unveiled on Wednesday, shows how complicated it will be for Apple to truly untangle itself from China.

More than ever, Apple’s Chinese employees and suppliers contributed complex work and sophisticated components for the 15th year of its marquee device, including aspects of manufacturing design, speakers and batteries, according to four people familiar with the new operations and analysts. As a result, the iPhone has gone from being a product that is designed in California and made in China to one that is a creation of both countries.

The critical work provided by China reflects the country’s advancements over the past decade and a new level of involvement for Chinese engineers in the development of iPhones. After the country lured companies to its factories with legions of low-priced workers and unrivaled production capacity, its engineers and suppliers have moved up the supply chain to claim a bigger slice of the money that U.S. companies spend to create high-tech gadgets.

The increased responsibilities that China has assumed for the iPhone could challenge Apple’s efforts to decrease its dependency on the country, a goal that has taken on increased urgency amid rising geopolitical tensions over Taiwan and simmering concerns in Washington about China’s ascent as a technology competitor.

Chinese companies with operations in India will still play a key role in Apple’s plan to make some iPhones in the country. In Chennai, India, the Taiwanese supplier Foxconn, which already manufactures iPhones in factories throughout China, will lead Indian workers’ assembly of the device with support from nearby Chinese suppliers including Lingyi iTech, which has subsidiaries to supply chargers and other components for iPhones, according to two people familiar with the plans. China’s BYD is setting operations to cut glass for displays, as well, these people said...

Evanescence – Bring Me To Life

Domino’s trouble started when they tried to sell pizza to Italians.

Food is serious business in Italy. Meals are taken differently there than in America, foods are typically lighter, served in smaller portions and their preparations follow old traditions. Pizza is no exception.

This is an example of Margherita pizza in Italy:

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What you’re looking at is a thin crust pizza, baked in a super heated wood fired oven and topped with pureed tomato, fresh mozzarella and fresh basil leaves. It’s simple, delicious and relies on high quality ingredients and technique for its wonderful flavor and texture.

This is the Margherita pizza Domino’s was peddling in Italy:

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That’s an American style cheese pizza, baked in a conveyor belt oven, and insultingly topped with a single basil leaf. On a Friday night, in America, that’s a fun dinner for the kids, but that’s not what pizza is about in Italy. Domino’s was peddling the wrong product in the wrong market and they failed. I read they were hoping to attract tourists, but I think they had to be hoping for more. You have to sell a lot of pizza to make money and if you aren’t getting local business, you aren’t get regular business, in any town.

The problem here is obvious to me. KFC and McDonald’s went to Italy and offered a foreign product, meaning they had little local competition and few had preconceived notions about how that product should look or taste. Domino’s had the opposite experience. They went to Italy, tried to sell an Americanized version of a local specialty, and hoped that people with strong preconceived notions about that product would accept it. Not surprisingly, Italy laughed at Domino’s, so they packed it up and they left.

I find a lot of food-related questions – and answers – on Quora to be very Euro-centric.  For me, the premise of this question – that a variety of egg preparations (fried, scrambled, poached) did not emerge in “Asian” cooking, as opposed to in “the West” – borders on the ridiculous.

The level of silliness found in this premise reminds me of an answer I read last year, where a European woman on here (I’ve since forgotten where specifically in Europe) wrote a well-written answer about how octopus is consumed in her country but then marred her answer by stating, in an almost boastful way, that only the people from her country, and a few others in Europe, enjoy eating octopus. Which I found amusing seeing as how octopus is a common street-food back in my hometown of HK.

Then there was the chap who wrote that all chefs – at least those that are worth their salt – learn French cooking techniques because these techniques are the foundation for all cooking.

Ai yai yai!

”Are fried and scrambled egg common in Asia?”

Ai yai yai!

Just so I can have a bit of fun, I’m going to restrict myself and cite examples from only ONE region of Asia, specifically East Asia.
Asia is a huge place, and if one region of this huge place already makes use of all those “egg preparation” techniques listed in the question – and more – what more the whole of Asia?

And all the examples are just the ones off the top of my head.
If I actually had more time on my hands, I could probably list more.
But it’s my bedtime soon and I’m knackered, so off the top of my head it will be.
I’m pretty sure I’ll miss some obvious ones, but I’m sure some helpful soul will chime in with those that I’ve missed.

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Panzerlied – [Battle of the Bulge 1965 Ver.] Thai Subtitle

In honor of the Ukraine offensive against Russia. The Nazi’s seemingly set the Russians on the run.

Oh, so sad. So many things.

China/Crystal/Silver. Apparently, at some point in time, and for some segment of the population, there were frequent sit-down dinners with full court press where children learned how to eat, how to pass, how to serve. We never had them, but we did have an occasional holiday meal with the china, silver, and crystal. You had to have a big, imposing hutch in which to store and display it all. I was so happy to have my first home and throw parties with china, but I haven’t had one of those in decades. China can’t go in the microwave due to the gold/silver and they can’t go in the dishwasher, nor can crystal or silver. My first home had no dishwasher, so that was okay, but I’m not handwashing ten sets of anything anymore.

Antique linens! My grandmothers had wonderful, thick, sumptuous linens and matching napkins. They got stained and frayed and now remain out of sight, provoking happy memories for me when I see them but useless and will no doubt be thrown away when I am gone. I have new, no-iron tablecloths in multiple colors that I use. I am going to have some of the napkins made into angel Christmas ornaments.

Heavy furniture. It’s so sad, my grandparents were so proud to pass on their things to my parents to save them money. My parents still have the wonderful antique furniture, but I and my brother (and nieces and nephews and children) have our/their own furniture and we will have to discard those pieces when they are gone. In these days of Ikea and other planned-obsolescence furniture, people like to update furniture like curtains.

Same with the piano! My grandmother told me she would play the piano and the children would march around the house. Holidays and weekends were spent around the piano. Many a difficult day ended with the piano. There are many players in our family, and one cousin in particular would announce at seemingly every get-together that she would get the piano when Grandma passed because she deserved it the most: she played the best, she loved Grandma more than anyone. But when Grandma died, it cost more to move it than it was worth. No church or music school wanted it. We tried to sell it to no avail, then listed it for free. Finally, we had to pay to have it disposed. She would have cried to see it.

Books. My parents purchased a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica for us. I loved them. I loved reading about anything I wanted to. We had a dictionary that was eight inches thick. Decades later, I donated them to a homeless shelter. I bought a Grolier’s Encyclopedia on CD for the cost of a single book. Now, the Internet and Kindle have changed everything. When I downsized recently to move, I packed up masses of old books to donate to the library sale. Cookbooks, old mysteries I’ll never re-read, craft books filled with things I’ll never make, home-repair books that are obsolete. Many I just recycled.

Remember those old commercials where you could buy sets of books by various authors bound in leather, one book at a time? Yeah, I have a set of those classics collecting dust in a bookcase.

Commemorative plates. Enough said.

Crocheted anything. My Nana (great-grandma) crocheted giant bedspreads, doilies, and matching bureau scarves out of cotton thread. They are gorgeous. I marvel at the tiny stitches. No one wants them. No one puts bureau scarves or doilies on furniture anymore. I display the bedspreads on a rack with one of her handmade quilts. I know they’ll wind up in a thrift shop when I go. I only have one memory of my Nana, and only my father remembers her anymore. I wish I had a daughter to pass them on to, but even if I did, who knows if she would like them or want them?

China gave tens of billions in secretive ‘emergency loans’ to vulnerable nations, emerging as world’s major creditor and IMF competitor

In recent years, China has shelled out tens of billions in opaque “emergency loans” for at-risk nations, indicating a shift to providing short-term emergency lending rather than longer-term infrastructure loans.

It’s a (largely) unforeseen development from Beijing’s $900 billion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013.

Since 2017, Beijing has given a collective $32.8 billion in emergency loans to Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Argentina, according to AidData, a research lab at William & Mary University that focuses on China’s global financing activities.

China has also offered emergency loans to Eastern European nations Ukraine and Belarus; South American countries Venezuela and Ecuador; African nations Kenya and Angola; alongside Laos, Egypt, and Mongolia. Chinese overseas lending and credit relationships remain “exceptionally opaque,” according to World Bank researchers. “Chinese lenders require strict confidentiality from their debtors and do not release a granular breakdown of their lending,” they wrote.

From HERE

I owned a home that had a pretty little meadow (about 1–1/2 acres). The front portion was planted in native grasses that grew to about 1 ft tall. Then there was a bigger section of native wild flowers. Then there was our garden (surrounded by a deer fence). The upper portion of the meadow was lined with poplar trees.

One night one of our local yahoo teenagers decided it would be fun to do donuts in our meadow.

The next day I dropped a poplar tree (about 10 inch diameter) across the upper part of the meadow and carefully limbed it. I hid it in the grass as well as I could. We worked our tails off to recover as much of the garden as we could.

Sure enough a couple of weeks later, they were back. Except their pickup hit an unexpected obstacle that ruined the front end and it got stuck when it bounced over the tree trunk. When I woke up and saw what I had caught, I got a logging chain and padlocks and locked my “catch” to the tree trunk. Soon there were irate teenager that wanted their pickup back. My shotgun, German Shepherd and I disagreed with that idea. An irate father showed up and demanded I release my catch. I will be glad to release it when the upper and middle parts of the meadow are restored and I am compensated for all the vegetables that were ruined. That didn’t seem fair to him, so he left and came back with a sheriff’s deputy. The deputy listened to both sides of the story, told dad and son that what I wanted sounded reasonable. He then proceeded to inform me (in front of them) the process for claiming my catch and obtaining a clear title. He also told me what the impound fee was at the local impound lot, reminding me that the fee should be declared as income on my taxes. I was warned that if I dropped another tree across the truck, I was responsible for cleaning up any soil contamination. If that was what I chose to do, I should properly drain all the fluids from my “yard art.”

The kids started work the next day. When everything was repaired and they agreed to pay $200 per month until the next planting season, I released my catch.

Apple uses more suppliers from China than Taiwan for first time, data shows

The tech giant has become more, not less, dependent on the US’s superpower rival in recent years, according to analysis.

From HERE

I was involved in a road rage incident many years ago. An impatient driver had been aggressively overtaking people prior to getting to me and as he got to me the two lanes ended, merging into one.

This also coincided with a school zone and a significant reduction in the speed limit. He sat right on my tail, flashing his lights at me, trying to get me to go faster. This was distracting me and so I brake checked him.

That worked and got him off my tail, however at the next set of lights he got out of his car, came over to my car and punched me.

I reported this to the police as did the driver behind him and eventually we both ended up in court to testify against him.

On the courthouse steps, prior to going inside, his $1000 per day barrister came over to me and said, “I think you would be well advised to change your story and drop this whole thing. You do realise that you have broken the law by trying to cause an accident when you brake checked my client. I will make sure you are charged for that offence if you continue.”

I am not one to have a good come back straight away, normally I am brilliant half an hour later with what I wish I’d said. Today was different though and I replied, “Mate. You may have a more expensive suit than me but you don’t intimidate me. I’m sticking with what I did and why I did it.”

Sure enough this barrister managed to turn the tables and before it went in to court the prosecutor interviewed the witness and me. The interview was not going well for me until I said this, “I am driving through the school zone, doing the speed limit when a young child suddenly runs out in front of my car. I stop in time, however the guy behind me is driving so close that he can’t stop in time and he runs into the back of me pushing me into the young child. Who are you going to come look at first and how am I going to feel about having hit a child with my car? I did what I did for safety reasons and I would do it again.”

With that his whole demeanour changed and the tables turned back on to the guy who punched me. He lost big time. Huge fine and loss of licence.

I found out later the reason why he hired an expensive barrister. Actually his father paid for the barrister. He already had priors for assault, the worst being him throwing someone out of a hotel, through a window! I was lucky in comparison.

The other thing that I was told helped me that day was my good driving record.

Blind Melon – No Rain

Once upon a time, I was mattress shopping with my roommate, Erin (yes there were two of us).

While we were walking around the very empty store, we were greeted by this guy:

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This is Jason. He was the salesman.

We talked about mattresses, and engaged in small talk for a bit. He was incredibly kind and sooo easy to talk to.

At one point, he says, “hey, can I show you guys something?”

Realizing we’re completely alone in a huge store with this guy, I turned to Erin, who was already sauntering gleefully two steps behind him.

I love her, but if a bar had 1,000 awesome people in it and one serial killer, he’d be the one she’d be attracted to.

I followed her so she didn’t end up in some remote fortress behind his house in the middle of nowhere (or whatever serial killers are doing these days).

He went behind his sales counter and pulled out… a portfolio.

This was his first picture:

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He said it was a visual representation of a mathematical equation, drawn with a ruler and a pencil.

This was the next picture:

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And this was the third:

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There were several more, but I’ll continue with the story.

So, for the next hour, Jason talks about physics. He says everything he sees is a mathematical equation and every mathematical equation has a visual form, which I didn’t know. This man was absolutely fascinating (and luckily not a serial killer).

This guy could get anyone excited about physics. His passion was electric. He also said his dream was to teach Physics. I sincerely hope he got there.

I assumed he was highly educated and had just been brilliant his whole life, like people tend to be.

“Not at all. I was a C student in high school, kind of a slacker. Never been to college.”

How the hell…

Turns out, Jason was born completely normal. Average.

When he was in his early 20s, he was in a bar fight that left him with a brain injury.

This brain injury turned Jason into a savant.

So, while most geniuses are born, Jason was absolutely made.

I saw him on the news a year later and learned he was corresponding with MIT about some theory he came up with. He was also due to give a conference in Norway. It seemed his dreams were coming true, and I was really happy to see that.

You can read more of Jason’s story here:

A Beautiful Mind: Brain Injury Turns Man Into Math Genius

India stays out of USA’s ‘trade pillar’ at Indo-Pacific meet

India withdraw from the me-only US led trade talk.
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One should also note that, if we follow the Chinese news, we should notice news of new completed infrastructure here and there all across China. As well as elsewhere along the belts and roads. This is  on a virtually daily basis with footage and photos..
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However, in the crusader controlled countries, we notice a lot of negative talk against others, and anti-” this country” and “that country” with bills passing in Congress yet nothing is ever achieved.
India stayed out of the joint declaration on the trade pillar of the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework ministerial meet in Los Angeles, with Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal citing concerns over possible discrimination against developing economies

Article HERE

He became a pair of men’s shoes.

So this story would really be worth a western movie.

The train robber Big Nose George Parrott is the only man in American history who was turned into a fancy pair of shoes made of human skin after his death.

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The details were discovered when the outlaw’s remains were dug up in a barrel by construction workers on May 11, 1950.

Big Nose George was an outlaw and member of a gang of thieves who robbed train cars and stole horses in Wyoming.

On August 16, 1878, the gang planned to rob a Union Pacific train by derailing it beforehand.

However, as seven members of the gang hid in the bushes waiting for the train to arrive, a section crew passed by, discovered the tampered rails, and called the police.

The gang was soon tracked down by two law enforcement officers.

The gang shot and dismembered them.

As a result, the Union Pacific Railroad redoubled its efforts to track down the killers, and county authorities offered a $10,000 reward for their capture.

Several members of the gang were caught and sentenced to death. Dutch Charlie was the first to be apprehended, in 1879. On the way to his trial, however, he was dragged off the train by an angry mob in Carbon and hanged from a telegraph pole.

Big Nose George was arrested in Miles City, Montana, in July 1880.

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He had foolishly bragged about the attempted train robbery while drunk.

He was found guilty and sentenced to hang at Rawlins, Wyoming, on April 2, 1881. An escape attempt on March 22, however, hastened the whole thing.

A mob of over two hundred angry townspeople hanged George Parrott. They succeeded only after two futile attempts.

Several hours passed before the mortician cut George down and placed him in a pine box and nailed him shut.

Since there was no family to claim the body, it was taken possession of by doctors Thomas Maghee and John Osborn to examine his brain.

Osborn’s wife was mentally ill.

He hoped to find a cure for his wife by examining the brain of a criminal.

With their fifteen-year-old assistant, Lillian Heath, at their side, the doctors cut open George’s head. After roughly removing the top of the skull, they examined the brain and found no significant differences between George’s brain and a “normal” brain. At that moment, things took a bizarre turn.

Osborn began making a death mask of George’s face out of plaster. The mask has no ears because George’s ears had been lost when they struggled with the rope on him.

Osborn then removed the skin from George’s chest and thighs, including his nipples.

He sent those to a tannery to be made into a medicine bag and a pair of shoes. Although disappointed that George’s nipples had not been used, Osborn still wore his new shoes with pride.

The doctor continued his experiments and dissections for a year, keeping George in a whiskey barrel with a salt solution. When he was finished, Parrot’s remains were buried in the yard behind the practice.

The skullcap was given to Miss Heath, who later became the first woman doctor in the state of Wyoming.

Over the years, she used it as an ashtray and doorstop in her office.

This piece was used to identify the remains in 1950, followed by DNA testing.

Although she was over 80 years old, Lillian Heath was still alive and still in possession of George’s skullcap .

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Osborn became the first Democratic governor of Wyoming. He is said to have worn his special shoes at his inaugural ball in 1893.

He later became deputy secretary of state under President Wilson.

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Osborn

Big Nose George’s death mask, skull, and shoes made from his skin, along with the shoes he wore when he was “executed,” are now the main attraction at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins, Wyoming.

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The skullcap is in the Union Pacific Museum in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

The rest of Parrott’s remains were secretly buried in an unknown location.

The medicine bag was never found.

This is a story as wild, wilder than the wildest West.

Weird Science (1985) – Making a Girl with a Computer?

What about the man who turned his car into a motorbike?

It has always been said that necessity is the mother of inventions.

In 1993, Emile Leray was on a journey , enjoying his cruise across the Moroccan desert when he crashed his car in the middle of the desert.

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He was stranded and had to save himself or he would die in the desert. This was when his intelligence came to rescue him.

Emile Leray, a 43-year-old former electrician, had to rebuild his car, a Citroen 2CV into a motorbike using no special tools.

He built his motor bike in ten days using materials from his crashed car. He had no drills, no power tools or welding equipment, he screwed all the parts together.

He converted this:

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Into ;

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Using very basic tools.

He escaped the desert on his motor bike. When he was pushed to the wall, his creativity came to rescue him.

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US Lawmakers Concerned About Apple’s Decision to Use YMTC’s 3D NAND

Adding another 3D NAND maker to its supply chain is certainly something that is good for Apple, but U.S. legislators are not particularly happy that one of the world's largest consumer electronics companies will use memory from YMTC and thereby essentially help China's semiconductor industry to develop. Apple argues that it plans to use chips from Yangtze Memory only for iPhones to be sold in China.

From HERE

Portishead – Roads

A clip from the Roseland New York live DVD. One of the finest moment from the show, heartbreaking.

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Viking Funeral from movie ( excerpt) Rocket Gibraltar

A little known movie, but it is wonderful. This is the ending.

Andrei at the Saker suggests…

…The first phase was almost over in a few weeks, but then NATO began to print billions of dollars to inject into the war (reminder: the US alone is spending 228 million dollars PER DAY on the Ukrainians!).  Hence the “resurrecting” aircraft (rotary and fixed wing), artillery batteries, air defense systems, supplies, etc.

In terms of manpower, the Nazis can count on almost limitless “meat” to throw at the Russians, and they have successfully kept at least some well trained forces.  The most dangerous development, however, is that it appears that NATO countries have run out of properly trained “Ukrainians” (many of them are not), and that they have now decided to operate a lot NATO hardware by sending PCMs (not really new) and even NATO forces disguised as PMCs and “advisors”!

Oh I can hear the choice of sweet voices singing to me “but Kiev threw all they had at these suicidal counter-attacks, the entire NATO military (because that is what this is now) will crumble in days or weeks!!!“.  Hey, I SURE hope so.  But can we or, for that matter, the RGS “to bet the farm” on that?

I don’t think so.

Not only that, be all the evidence shows that the US and NATO are, indeed, “betting the farm” right now, and God only knows what these shaitans (literally) are capable of next!

There is no limit to their hate.  And they know they are betting the farm.

Now is the time to be more cautious than ever and not make rosy assumptions.

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No question that things are starting to get mighty warm, remember that hot comes next

Busy today. Trying to sort things out.

I hope that you are all having a nice late Summer. Enjoy some fine food, watch a good movie or two and spend some time with friends and family. Here’s today’s installment.

Good Grief! Why are you citing sources like BBC and Uyghur Human Rights Project??? They’re both well-known China haters. You can’t believe anything they publish.

There is no major Muslim country that opposes China’s treatment of the Uyghurs. None. Nada. Zilch.

In fact, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), consisting of 57 member states and representing 1.8 billion people, have praised China’s actions in Xinjiang. You can’t get better endorsement than that!

Day in the Life of a Kitchen, A (ca. 1960s)

Oh my! So dated. It’s so strange…

Are Asians Smart?

I can only speak for myself, but honestly, I don’t think I’m very smart.

I mean, if I were really smart, I guess I’d be working at NASA or some such agency by now. Or cracking codes … for fun, ala Russell Crowe’s John Nash in A Beautiful Mind or Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing in The Imitation Game.

And there are always a bazillion non-Asians out there who will constantly harp on how Asians are only good at taking exams in school and that Asian people are not creative at all and have very low critical thinking skills. They simply LOVE to pull that one out whenever someone even dares to mention that Asians are smart. The number of people who believe those canards are legion.

In my experience, both in real life and in Quora, Asians aren’t the ones who go around sharing their individual IQ scores with all and sundry like hormonal teenage boys showing off their genital measurements in the locker room.

I think most Asians put more focus on having a strong work ethic and a vast reservoir of grit and patience rather than on flaunting their intelligence/IQ score.

But those are just my observations.

After all, the meme below didn’t just spring out of nowhere.

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What Americans Think

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Denis Rader was a serial killer

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Denis Rader

But he lived a very normal life on the outside. He had a family, who he spent quality time with.

Secretly, he had all the makings of a killer, with one of the hallmark early signs: torturing animals as a kid.

His first murders happened in 1974, when he strangled an entire family of 4, one by one. He then took souvenires with him on the way out, which would be the signatures of his killing.

Over the coming years, he went on to murder 6 more people, most of whom were women, some elderly, strangling all of them.

Against the backdrop of this, he was a boy scout troop leader and living his normal life with his family, being an attentive husband, mowing his lawn.

And yet, continued leaving hints about his murders, and taunting police who couldn’t find him. But eventually, of course, they did catch him. (One of his letters eventually was traced to his address, his arrogance getting the best of him).

Without getting too graphic, but worth noting—at the crime scenes—homicide investigators sometimes found semen samples. All of his murders had been driven by a sexual fantasy to “bind, torture, kill”, which he acted on.

But strangely, they never found that the bodies of the women had been violated. The sex act had taken part separately.

Why?

Because Denis Rader said, he didn’t want to ”Cheat on his wife.”

Which is a strange purity test to give yourself while basking in such an inferno of morality.

Regardless of that, his wife and him are now divorced.

The judge even waived the usual 60-day waiting period. I guess he understood the wife’s sense of urgency.

Rader is now serving 10 consecutive life sentences. Though he probably deserves worse.

How To Make Fish in Parchment By Rachael

I love this “paper fish” in China. The spices just saturate the fish.

Tears for Fears – Shout (Live at Roskilde Festival 2019)

Blunt Warnings from Russia Foreign Minister and Federation Council: Nuclear War Coming

Ukraine’s sponsors have been given TWO tough ultimatums; One from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, the other from Russian Council Member Dmitry Medvedev . . .

"The one-time success at the front [Last week] is only beautifully shown in the press. The death toll along the entire line of clashes has exceeded ten thousand {Ukrainians], the wounded fill all hospitals, there is a shortage of ambulances. The [Russian] Allied forces put the Nazis in one fight by the hundreds. And then the political situation deteriorated. There were rumors in Ukraine that it was Russia who "retreated" to make a camouflage maneuver before something grandiose.

While the "patriots" were waiting for a respite, Russia hit the power facilities. Earlier, Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhny reported to Zelensky about the formation of a large naval group of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea, including amphibious assault ships.

The West fears that the failure of the grain scam is to blame. 

First, Putin pointed out at the WEF that Russia and poor countries were deceived in the grain deal. Then Erdogan admitted it. The UN Secretary General also had to admit this, although an attempt was made to wriggle out. In the USA, they said that everything was fine, but soon their experts still recognized the lack of proper effect from the increase in grain on the market.

Ukraine and more of its sponsors, apparently, have been given a tough ultimatum: either grain goes to Africa, and Russia opens an international food market, or the Russian Navy again blocks Ukrainian ports, but this time with the landing of [Russian] troops with the destruction of the entire port infrastructure. In parallel, the entire Ukrainian infrastructure will "lie down". How this will approximately happen has already been shown. It could be said that it was a hint about the consequences if Russia's interests were ignored."

                -- Sergey Lavrov

While Foreign Minister Lavrov focused on the Grain Scam, where out of 87 Cargo vessels filled with Ukrainian grain, only TWO vessels went to “needy” countries — the rest went to Europe –  below is a much more blunt warning from former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

As you will read, Medvedev is openly warning NATO that if they continue pouring weapons into Ukraine to kill Russians, then the borders of NATO countries will “disappear” and the Russian Army will commence operations!

Here is Medvedev’s statement:

The Kiev camarilla gave birth to the project of "security guarantees", which in fact are a prologue to the Third World War. Of course, no one will give any "guarantees" to the Ukrainian Nazis. After all, this is almost the same as applying Article 5 of the North Atlantic Pact (Washington Treaty) to Ukraine. For NATO, it's the same, only side view. That's why it's scary.

Our sworn friends – Western bosses of various calibres, to whom this hysterical appeal is addressed – must finally understand one simple thing. It directly concerns the hybrid war between NATO and Russia. If these idiots continue the unrestrained pumping of the Kiev regime with the most dangerous types of weapons, then sooner or later the military campaign will move to another level. Visible borders and potential predictability of the actions of the parties to the conflict will disappear from it. It will follow its own military scenario, involving new participants in it. It has always been so. (Emphasis added by HTRS) 

And then Western countries will not be able to sit in their clean houses and apartments, laughing at how they are carefully weakening Russia with someone else's hands. Everything will catch fire around them. Their people will grab grief in full. They will literally have the earth burning and concrete melting. We'll get a lot of it, too. It will be very, very bad for everyone. After all, it is said: "From these three plagues, from fire, smoke and brimstone coming out of their mouths, a third part of the people died" (Rev 9:18).

But while the narrow-minded politicians and their dim-witted think tanks, thoughtfully twirling a glass of wine in their hands, talk about how they can deal with us without entering into a direct war. Dull idiots with a classical education.

     -- Dmitry Medvedev

 

HAL TURNER ANALYSIS AND EDITORIAL OPINION

Medvedev makes no secret of his NUCLEAR threat.

When he wrote “Everything will catch fire around them” and  “They will literally have the earth burning and concrete melting.” he is clearly and unambiguously referring to exactly what takes place upon a NUCLEAR explosion.

We in the West are being warned, yet again, that the actions WE are undertaking, will result in US getting hit by Russian nuclear weapons! 

How much more forthright can the Russians be?

They are telling us what will happen.  They have warned us over, and over, and over again, since their Special Military Operations began in February, yet our Public Servants in government seem to laugh it all off as some sort of “posturing.”

In my assessment, it is not posturing – at all.

It seems to me the public servants of government here in the USA and over in Europe aren’t going to believe they are causing us all the possibility of nuclear annihilation, until an actual nuclear bomb flies through their window and blows their asses to Kingdom Come!

By continuing to supply ever more lethal weaponry to Ukraine, the public servants in government both here in the USA and over in Europe are going to get a lot of us killed.  They should stop what they’re doing and let Ukraine fall.

Yeah, and I came this close — > < — to getting busted.

I was working graveyard at a convenience store. It wasn’t the shittiest job I’ve worked at, but it wasn’t far from the shittiest either.

In California, liquor sales stop at 2 am. There aren’t many customers after that so the graveyard guy had to stock the cold cases and sweep and mop the store.

I had just finished mopping, around 5 am, when a car pulled up in front of the store and two old guys climbed out.

They were both dressed like they were going fishing. One of them went to the cold case with pre-made sandwiches, the other walked to the other side of the store and grabbed a case of Olympia Beer. They brought their selections to the register.

When I saw the case of beer I said, “Come on now guys, it’s 5 am, I can’t sell you that beer.”

The taller of the two played dumb and asked, “Why the hell not?”

I explained that it was against state law.

The tall guy’s buddy said, “Oh come on, man. Who is going to know? We’re going fishing up in the Delta. There’s not going to be anywhere to buy beer where we’re going.”

“Yeah,” the tall one continued, “can’t you just help us out here?”

These guys reminded me of my dad. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of fishing trips with my dad. Those fishing trips always started at 5 am. And my dad always brought plenty of beer for him and his buddies.

I was just about to say OK and sell them the beer when the short guy again asked, “Who is going to know? Who even cares?”

“The ABC cares,” I replied, referring to the California Department of Alcohol and Beverage Control.

“Who the hell are the ABC?” he shot back.

“They’re a bunch of assholes that have nothing better to do than bust people for selling alcohol after hours,” I answered without hesitation.

Both guys erupted in howls of laughter. I was bewildered.

Finally, the tall one reached in his back pocket and pulled out his badge.

They were an undercover team from the ABC.

I was a little embarassed I had just called them assholes to their faces. But all I could think about was how incredibly close I was to selling them the beer.

We talked for a while. They congratulated me on being a good employee and following the law.

They had no idea how close they were to an arrest.

But I knew.

This — > < — close!

SIMPLE STEPS HOW TO COOK BRAZILIAN RIBEYE STEAK

Military expert: “Under Balakleya we missed a blow, but we need to get up, dust ourselves off and move on”

Translated from Russian

Military expert: “Under Balakleya we missed a blow, but we need to get up, dust ourselves off and move on”

Can the breakthrough of Ukrainian troops in the Izyum direction be called a failure? Where are these hyped regional volunteer battalions and how do they show themselves? And will the Russian economy cope with industry?

Valentin ALFIMOV

We talked about this on Radio KP with an expert of the Center for Military-Political Journalism, the author of the Telegram channel Colonelcassad Boris Rozhin.

Kyiv WILL PUSH FOR ANOTHER COUPLE OF MONTHS

- Boris Alexandrovich, Ukrainian breakthrough in the Kharkiv region. Why did Ukraine suddenly go on the offensive so brazenly? Have you sharply accumulated strength or have nothing to lose and are running out of time?

- Preparations for this counter-offensive have been going on for quite a long time. Soldiers were trained by NATO countries, parts were re-equipped by NATO countries. It was generally developed and supervised at all stages by NATO countries. By the way, you are talking in vain only about the Kharkiv region.

- Wasn't the offensive near Kherson a diversionary maneuver?

- No, it's not a distraction attack. The enemy had a specific goal - to break through our defense line and reach the Dnieper. Only the attack on Kherson did not work out for them. They choked on blood, suffered very heavy losses. Even according to American underestimated data, the loss ratio was one to five in our favor. They also tried in Kharkov, but it didn't work there either. But under Balakleya it turned out. They broke through the front and brought in the accumulated reserves. And that is why ours had to regroup. Withdraw troops to the line of the Oskol River and now deal with the stabilization of the front.


Was this attack expected?


- To some extent. The West urged Ukraine on to do something. They need visible results from their deliveries, military aid, training. They got it and now they will try to continue further.

- How long will it last?

- The next couple of months - for sure.

- Why customize? To be in time before winter?

Europe is in a hurry because winter is coming. They want some kind of results. The Biden administration is in a hurry because there will be midterm elections in November, and local forecasts say they could lose control of Congress. Therefore, they urgently need some military-political successes. Therefore, Zelensky, regardless of any losses, costs, will try to drive forward.

We talked with the expert of the Center for Military-Political Journalism, the author of the Telegram channel Colonelcassad Boris Rozhin

FOREIGNERS MAKE THE WEATHER

- Ukrainians trained a whole corps over the summer - according to various figures, from 20 to 40 thousand people. Part was prepared in Poland, part in Germany. Did they go on the attack?

- There were brigades well known from Donbass - 92nd, 93rd, 25th. Naturally, they were replenished, including trained people, foreign mercenaries, and a reserve. But it is impossible to say that new brigades suddenly appeared from somewhere, which had never been there.

- That is, these 40,000 NATO-trained soldiers will appear somewhere else?

- In Ukraine, on the one hand, they are gaining a lot of cannon fodder for mobilization, on the other hand, they are trying to train some and make those units that can be used for offensive operation.

- The role of mercenaries is high or they do not make the weather?

- Definitely high. Against the backdrop of some kind of territorial defense, mercenaries can strengthen some areas. In addition to the fact that these are just soldiers with weapons, there are also specialists - drone operators, snipers, specialists in electronic warfare, cyber warfare. They can seriously strengthen in one direction or another. We saw this on the Balakleysko-Izyum sector of the front as well. It is important to understand that in addition to ordinary mercenaries, there are also active officers of various NATO countries who mimic mercenaries. This applies to the British SAS, Polish special forces, special forces from the Baltics.

THIS IS NOT A FAILURE

- Can the breakthrough of the Ukrainians to Balakleya and our subsequent regrouping with the withdrawal of troops be called a failure?

- The idea of ​​​​the enemy was to go to Oskol with a swift blow from different sides and surround our entire Izyum grouping. Under these conditions, the command acted in the only possible and correct way - it began to pull troops from the Izyum ledge and withdraw them. Yes, with losses, but the main group was able to retreat. The main idea of ​​the enemy, which was precisely in the environment, they could not realize.

- So this can be called a failure?

- This is something in the spirit of how it was in Syria - the loss of Palmyra. First we took it, then the militants recaptured it, then we took it again. In Syria, we also not only walked from victory to victory. This must be taken stoically, like a man. Yes, we missed a beat, got up, dusted ourselves off, moved on.

- And why did it happen? We don't have enough people, we don't have enough weapons?

We have a lot of weapons. Even the enemy talks about it all the time. From the people's point of view... Obviously, if you are fighting in the volunteer army mode, and the enemy is conducting a total mobilization, it is clear that he has superiority. And this makes it difficult to achieve the goals of the special operation. Therefore, there are constant discussions in society - “Is it necessary to carry out mobilization?”. At least limited, partial. To saturate the front with people.


VOLUNTEERS ARE NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR MOBILIZATION

- The Kremlin said that there was no talk of mobilization. But the State Duma was proposed to allow fathers with many children to sign up for the mobilization reserve. Is this the start of a mobilization?

- Not necessary. Various measures are constantly taken. Here are at least the same BARS (special army reserve battalions - ed.), which are recruited in the regions. This is like a measure, like a replacement for mobilization.

- Where are they? Are they already involved? Did they show themselves?

- The same Krasny Lyman held one of these BARS, and the men showed themselves perfectly. When the enemy thought to take Liman with a swoop, they stood there and held their sector. This suggests that with proper equipment, with solid leadership, they can very well become (and have already become, I think) a good addition to regular troops. There are also detachments of volunteers who train on the territory of the Chechen Republic - in the same Gudermes, in a training camp. Volunteers arrive, they are equipped there, they conduct classes, and then they are sent to the special operation zone.

- It is clear that volunteers will not achieve the same pace as during mobilization.


WHAT'S NEXT

- Let's talk about the future? What to expect in the near future?

- The enemy, after success near Izyum and Balakleya, will try to force our army out of the eastern part of Kupyansk, will try to break through to the north of Kupyansk and will try to push in the direction of Krasny Liman, Svyatogorsk. Some attacks are possible on the Nikolaev, Zaporozhye or Donetsk directions. That is, they will try to make another breakthrough with operational goals. The task of our command is to identify this attempt and stop it in a timely manner. And as the front stabilizes, it is necessary to carry out work to replenish units, increase the size of the existing grouping.

- And our command will reveal this "one more attempt"?

- Yes, the enemy does not hide the desire to attack. So it is a very responsible task and intelligence. On the other side, they are also on the alert - constant misinformation, spreading rumors: "We will advance there, no, right there." I think we understand this.

- Will ours go on the attack? People don't understand why everything stopped.

- What is the official goal of the second stage of the special operation? Liberation of the territories of the DPR. The offensive is going on in the area of ​​Soledar and Artemovsk. Now there will be fighting for Zaitsevo, in the industrial zone of Artemovsk, street fighting continues in Soledar. Gradually and slowly there is progress, and quickly they do not promise anything.

WE ARE NOT FIGHTING WITH NATSIKS

- The authorities of Zaporozhye are sounding the alarm - Ukraine is gathering a very large group under their belly. Do they still have enough strength?

- They pulled a lot to the Balakleya region. Now they can hastily transfer part of the forces along internal routes for reinforcement either to the Zaporozhye or Donetsk direction. Such a train of thought is quite conceivable.

- The head of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Danilov, said that they will not calm down until Russia exists in its current form. Is it about the very “decolonization” that the West dreams of?

- This is the usual barking of puppets. It is important to understand that the people who unleashed the war in Ukraine have not changed their goals since the time of Obama. Their task is to eliminate Russia as a subject of international politics. In fact, back in 2014, we were equated with ISIS and the Ebola virus. And our enemies, of course, are not these Nazis who played in the cargo cult of the Third Reich, but those who sponsor them. They stood in Syria behind the backs of ISIS and Al-Qaeda, here - behind the backs of the Ukrainian Nazis.

"CALIBROV" ENOUGH

Will our economy survive? Is there a margin of safety?

- In the West, there was clearly a hope that it would collapse in February-March due to serious sanctions, people would take to the streets, this would lead to a military-political collapse in the spring. But we see now that the problem of the Central Bank now is not a dollar for two hundred, but how to raise the dollar at least to seventy, because they went too far with stabilization. Economically, yes, the country is doing quite well. It is clear that there will be a decline this year, and there will be next, but not so big. If we have relied on a long confrontation, naturally, the tasks, in addition to actions at the front, are to play our economic cards. And at the moment they are played quite successfully, in my opinion.

- Will the industry cope? "Caliber" riveted?

- We were told that the "Caliber" will end in March, but, as we know, they still fly successfully today. It is clear that everything is not so simple

- it takes time to collect them, stocks are spent. But the pace at defense plants has increased, they work in three shifts. There may be interruptions with imported components. But for most issues, these issues are solvable. Yes, there may be plugs where we screwed up our production. Now we have to deal with the creation of enterprises from scratch. But we can do nothing.

DON'T WAIT FOR CHINESE AT THE FRONT

- And our partners can help us with something? Belarusians, CSTO, China.

- Certain help is being provided. It's just that it is not advertised in order to avoid additional economic consequences. It is important to understand that they all consider their own economic interests. Much remains behind the scenes.

- Is it some kind of technical assistance, intelligence or something else?

- Technical assistance, assistance in some issues that are important for the actions of the Russian Federation. For example, Belarus does not hide the fact that it provided great assistance in the logistics or treatment of our military on its territory.

- Can we see some Chinese division "Kun Lun" near Kharkov?

- I do not think that the Chinese will directly participate in the special operation. They have their own war on the nose, they are preparing for other things.
Read on KP.RU

My mom had me at 13 because she was raped by her dad and she lived in an area where abortion was greatly discouraged. Lived with her grandma and my grandma. She tried her best to raise me but she was just too young to do anything significant.

I remember with great remorse that she always worked 2 jobs to try and support me.

My mom was a saint, she treated me like the most precious thing of her life. I was very good academically compared to my peers , though I didn’t realize how much it made my mom happy that time. This was during my high school. I wanted to make my momma happy that’s all I cared for that time. She used to watch me study late nights till 2 in the morning though I had school on 9 am.

She told me “ Promise me that you will stay strong. You wake up every morning to fight the demons that left you so tired the night before, and that my love, is bravery “

Though I didn’t understand what was her thoughts that time, I told her not to worry about anything and go to sleep.

She was never abusive or strict towards me, she would often spoil me rotten, she loved me a lot and I loved her. My grandma died when I was pretty young and eventually we were on our own and it put a lot of stress on my mom. She was depressed and tired. Nothing had gone right in her life. She had no education or pension. She wasn’t able to find husband because her situation was really undesirable and she worked 6 days a week and just didn’t have time or energy to socialize. She didn’t have any friends and I was all she ever had but she never took it out on me.

Always she would find a way to make me happy. I remember one Christmas in particular she bought me a laptop and to do that she had to work overtime and skip meals half time. She was dangerously skinny that time.

After I graduated college and moved out, She killed herself. She said in her suicide note that she loved me more than anything and she would miss me but now I was a man of my own life

Tears rolled down my face. I was devastated.

She couldn’t live anymore. She didn’t have a reason to live anymore because she hated her life but she loved me.

Rest in peace, mom.

Every 3rd soldier in the Kharkiv offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is a citizen of a NATO country

The offensive operation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (and NATO) in the Kharkiv region was planned by the US military command. About 200 units of heavy military equipment and up to 9,000 soldiers were involved in last week’s offensive.

Reportedly, forensic examination of the dead bodies from the Offensive reveal that one in three soldiers operating under the Ukrainian chevron was a citizen of a NATO member state.

These forces were 4-5 times superior to the units of the DPR, LPR and Russia that were defending their positions in the region.

The main goal of the Ukrainian offensive was a flank attack, encirclement and subsequent destruction of the Russian grouping in the area of ​​Balakleya, Kupyansk and Izyum.

The Russian command predicted the offensive of large forces of Ukraine and NATO in this direction. It was aware that it would be extremely difficult to contain Ukraine’s offensive with the forces that Russia had there. It was also virtually impossible to move sufficient reinforcements in time without weakening other areas on other front lines. Having assessed the risks, the Russian military decided to leave the weakly fortified positions and withdraw troops to new lines and straighten the lines of communication.

Before the start of the Ukrainian offensive, civilians were evacuated from the threatened settlements, who agreed to move to the territory of the Russian Federation.

From September 6 to September 11, Russian units retreated in an organized manner under the cover of specially organized units. Using mobile defense tactics, the Russian military destroyed the plan of Kyiv and NATO to encircle the Russian group.

At the same time, obvious mistakes were made by the Russian military. The area in front of the forward positions was not mined. Units on the front lines de facto comprised no more than 30 percent of the enumerated military personnel. The soldiers were not properly provided with anti-tank weapons. There were also front-line reconnaissance failures. As a result, the artillery cover of the withdrawal was ineffective in the first days of the Ukrainian offensive.

Russian troops were withdrawn to new positions along the eastern bank of the Oskol River with minimal losses. Meanwhile, both sides confirm that Ukrainian and NATO units have suffered significant losses in manpower.

It is expected that, within days, the official assessment of the Russian Ministry of Defense will be publicly acknowledged that the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine has definitively escalated into a state of war between Russia and NATO, with unpredictable results for all parties to the conflict.

This assessment is important because the Ukrainian/NATO side is the first, so far at an unofficial level, to engage in NATO’s direct war against Russia, while Russia  continues to operate with the term “special military operation”, continuing to use limited forces and means.

Given the new reality that this is, in fact, an actual war between NATO and Russia, military analysts in the Russian Army have suggested it will be expedient to limit and complicate the provision and supply of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to the utmost. They have told their Russian bosses that all routes for the supply of weapons and material and technical means, bridges, railways and highways, places of concentration of troops and military equipment must be destroyed.

Key to the Russian military analysis is the assessment that the railway network of Ukraine must be completely de-electrified without the possibility of restoration.

It is widely understood within the Russian Ministry of Defense that no more offensive attempt by NATO forces should come as an unpleasant surprise to the Russian army. COVER INTEL reports that Mobile reserves of both ground forces and artillery, as well as aviation, must be created by Russia to instantly respond to emerging threats.

COVERT INTEL also reveals that the number of Russian troops should become consistent with the new threats that have emerged.

Steely Dan – Do it again (with lyrics) Restored video

Memory lane time.

When I was a teenager I waited tables at a pizza restaurant. One day, my sister came in with her friends. Her goal was clearly just to pick on me, knowing that I would have to serve her as the waitress.

My sister and I had never really gotten along. We were always fighting about one thing or another. Plus, it was a very small town and she was only one year older than me, so we had had to deal with each other all the time.

So, she came into the restaurant one slow afternoon with her group of friends and they all proceed to make my afternoon miserable. They kept insisting on changing tables. They kept insisting that I re-wipe down their table and then complain that it was now wet and that they needed to change tables again. They all wanted new silverware. They wanted extra silverware.

They wanted more paper place mats to color (we had the place mats with activities on the back for children). They wanted more crayons. They wanted un-used crayons. They wanted pens.

They all wanted drinks in child-sized sippy cups (which had unlimited refills) and then they all wanted re-fills every 2 minutes, because they were teenagers and could finish the cups in one gulp. They all wanted extra lids, which they played with and chewed on. They all wanted extra straws, which they then flicked at me.

Every time I turned my back, they flicked wadded up napkins or straw wrappers at me. They would try to sneak up behind me and untie my apron and laugh. They would purposely try to trip me while I was carrying their food or drinks.

My manager was beyond annoyed, and tried to talk to them about their behavior, but my sister kept insisting that the service was terrible and they wanted to complain about their waitress. My manager told me she would have given the table to a different waitress (she knew it was my sister), but I was the only one, since we were always so slow in the afternoons.

Finally they finished their food and I offered to box up the last slice of pizza remaining. I took the pan with the single slice, took it back to the kitchen and took an enormous bite out of it, before I boxed it up.

Before they finally left, my sister realized what I had done and went to complain to my manager. My sister took the box to my manager, Leslie, and I was sure I was going to get in trouble. However, Leslie looked at the the slice and immediately said “I’m sorry, I don’t see any bite mark.” My sister pointed to the huge chunk missing from the slice. “No, I’m sorry,” said Leslie, “I don’t see anything. Are you sure it was bitten, I simply can’t see anything there.”

My sister spent the next five minutes yelling at my manager and trying to get her to see the patently obvious bite in the slice of pizza before finally giving up and storming out. I never did get into trouble for it, not from my manager, nor from my parents, who my sister also complained to. They all seemed to think that she had gotten what she deserved.

Scientists claim Covid virus contains tiny chunk of DNA that ‘matches sequence patented by Moderna THREE YEARS before pandemic began’

  • Genetic match discovered in Covid’s unique furin cleavage site on spike protein
  • Matched genetic sequence patented by Moderna for cancer research purposes
  • Researchers say one in 3trillion chance Covid developed the code naturally
  • Critics of the study are sceptical of its author’s conclusions, suggesting that the sequence match is not as rare as has been claimed

Fresh suspicion that Covid may have been tinkered with in a lab emerged today after scientists found genetic material owned by Moderna in the virus’s spike protein.

They identified a tiny snippet of code that is identical to part of a gene patented by the vaccine maker three years before the pandemic.

It was discovered in SARS-CoV-2’s unique furin cleavage site, the part that makes it so good at infecting people and separates it from other coronaviruses.

The structure has been one of the focal points of debate about the virus’s origin, with some scientists claiming it could not have been acquired naturally.

The international team of researchers suggest the virus may have mutated to have a furin cleavage site during experiments on human cells in a lab.

They claim there is a one-in-three-trillion chance Moderna’s sequence randomly appeared through natural evolution.

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In the latest study, published in Frontiers in Virology, researchers compared Covid’s makeup to millions of sequenced proteins on an online database.

The virus is made up of 30,000 letters of genetic code that carry the information it needs to spread, known as nucleotides.

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There are no Uyghur human rights violations. This is a fabrication of Western governments and Western mainstream media.

The question you should be asking is why Western governments and Western media are lying about China.

The fact is Western governments are afraid of losing their global hegemony to China’s rise. So they must do everything they can to “contain” China, including smearing China’s reputation and turning world opinion against China.

There is not a single shred of credible evidence to support the accusation of Uyghur human rights violations. There is, however, a great deal of fabricated evidence. The West are very, very good at propaganda.

Guns N’ Roses – Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (Live At Wembley Stadium 1992) – HD Remastered

ARMENIA INVOKES ARTICLE 4 (COLLECTIVE SELF DEFENSE) OF CTSO TREATY – THE WORLD NOW HAS SECOND WAR FRONT

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Wednesday morning, the country of Armenia invoked Article 4 of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CTSO) which calls for all member countries to come to the military defense of Armenia as neighboring Azerbaijan commences military attacks against Armenia.  The world now has a SECOND war front, after the ongoing Ukraine front.

If one of the Member States suffers aggression (armed attack menacing to safety, stability, territorial integrity and sovereignty), it will be considered by the Member States as aggression (armed attack menacing to safety, stability, territorial integrity and sovereignty) against all the Member States of this Treaty.   Article 4 of the CTSO is akin to Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.

In case of aggression commission (armed attack menacing to safety, stability, territorial integrity and sovereignty) to any of the Member States, all the other Member States at request of this Member State shall immediately provide the latter with the necessary help, including military, as well as provide support by the means at their disposal in accordance with the right to collective defense pursuant to article 51 of the UN Charter.

The Member States shall immediately inform the United Nations Security Council on the measures taken on the basis of this article. When implementing these measures, the Member States shall adhere to the relevant provisions of the UN Charter.

(the article is as amended by the Protocol on amendments to the Collective Security Treaty of May 15, 1992, signed on December 10, 2010)

Azerbaijan commenced artillery shelling and mortar fire into Armenia about 48 hours ago.  Several hundred Armenian troops and Border Security force are already dead.

Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan stated the Armenian side has 105 killed in action with hundred more injured including civilians.

GEORGIA REFERENDUM ON WAR WITH RUSSIA!

Adding to the troubles, the country of Georgia is holding an actual public referendum on whether or not Georgia should re-open its war with Russia!

The leadership of Georgia can organize a nationwide referendum and ask the question: do the Georgians want a war with Russia.

Giorgi Kobakhidze, chairman of the party, made such a statement at a briefing in the office of the ruling Georgian Dream party.

“Let the people say whether they want to open a second front in Georgia against Russia,” Mr. Kobakhidze emphasized.

He promised that the authorities “will act as the people say.”

(HT NOTE:  At the time they spoke about this, the situation in Armenia did not yet exist, so Georgia was speaking as if THEIR country would become a “second” front.   Now, with the situation in Armenia, if the people of Georgia vote to open a new war with Russia, that will be a THIRD war front!)

The politician expressed hope that the Georgian people “will bring clarity, whether he agrees with the statements of Ukrainian politicians about the need to involve Georgia in the war or with the position of the authorities of his country.”

This is how Irakli Kobakhidze responded to the statement of Fyodor Venislavsky, representative of the President of Ukraine in the Parliament, who advised Georgia “to take concrete steps to liberate Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”

Earlier, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov, as well as advisers to the Office of the President of Ukraine Mykhailo Podolyak and Oleksiy Arestovich, publicly addressed Tbilisi with similar advice.

“They all directly said that the opening of the second front in Georgia is highly desirable,” the head of the Georgian Dream recalled at the same briefing.

Hal Turner Analysis and Editorial Opinion

All of this is the underhanded work of the collective West: in particular, the European Union and the United States/NATO.   Turkey backs Azerbaijan. So does Israel.  Turkey is a NATO member.  Israel being a welfare client of the United States, has to do what the US tells it or they lose their $3 Billion+ a year in free U.S. money and their little country, that can’t even sustain itself, fails.  So The trouble with Azerbaijan and Armenia is a direct result of Turkey and Israel doing what NATO and the USA instruct them to do.

Through Turkey and Israel, Azerbaijan got told to re-commence war attacks against Armenia BECAUSE Russia backs Armenia.  The US and EU  __want__ to bog Russia down in multiple wars.  As such, what is now taking place is all deliberate.  It is all the deliberate exacerbation of old grievances, into war.

Step by step, the US and EU are deliberately inciting, fomenting, and facilitating what will very soon become World War 3.

I have a suggestion: Maybe some of the people who are doing these things, should become victims of their own war?   They know who they are . . .  and so do we.  Maybe it could be like Seth Rich; they become a mugging victim that no one investigates?

Gavin Orlowski of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was crossing a bridge with his mother, Erin Brown, when he heard her gasp in horror. Someone in a van ahead of them had just tossed a gray tiger cat out the window. Before they could identify the van, it took off and disappeared into traffic.

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As Gavin jumped out of the car, the terrified cat began to scamper around between other cars. By the time Gavin managed to divert traffic, the cat was hanging off the overpass. He was able to grab him and get him back into the car before he was hit.

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The frightened cat was so traumatized that he huddled in Gavin’s coat, refusing to leave his side. His claws had been torn off and he had hurt his back in the fall from the van. Gavin and his mother decided to take him to Blue Pearl Animal Hospital.

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A friend on Facebook offered to cover the vet bill. Fortunately, the cat was otherwise unhurt and in good health. He quickly recovered.

5-min Quick & Easy Stir Fry Shrimp w/ Ginger & Spring Onion 速炒姜葱虾 Chinese Stir Fry Prawn Recipe

Most of Asia is On the Side of China and Not the U.S. in Growing Conflict

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After the megaphones of the West have already called for all-out economic war against Russia, the battle cry against China is now being heard, regardless of the consequences for the “common people.” The reaction of the Asian countries, however, is likely to disappoint the vociferous, self-righteous screaming sharks.

Article HERE

AC/DC – Highway to Hell (Live At River Plate, December 2009)

US-proposed Taiwan bill strongly opposed

This is the Chinese "broadcast" to the United States in regards to the Taiwan 2022 bill. -MM
Source
China Daily
Editor
Chen Zhuo
Time
2022-09-15 08:34:50

Draft would provide the island with $4.5 billion in security assistance

A Chinese mainland spokeswoman on Wednesday strongly opposed a possible Taiwan-related bill by the United States that aims to bolster the island’s “defense “capabilities against the mainland, saying that any attempt of “6 independence” will never succeed.

The US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations is set to review a draft of the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022 on Wednesday, which was described by its sponsors as “the most comprehensive restructuring of US policy toward Taiwan “since the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.

The bipartisan bill sponsored by US senators Bob Menendez and Lindsey Graham would provide Taiwan with about $4.5 billion in security assistance over the next four years and recognize the island as a “major non-NATO ally”.

The legislation would also allow Taiwan to rename its office in the US from the “Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office” to the “Taiwan Representative Office”.

Zhu Fenglian, the spokeswoman for the State Council’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said at a news conference in Beijing that the Taiwan question is purely China’s internal affair, which brooks no outside interference.

The drafting of the Taiwan-related bill by the US lawmakers seriously violates [1] basic norms governing international relations, [2] the one-China principle and [3] the three China-US joint communiques, she said. “We firmly oppose it.”

The ruling Democratic Progressive Party authorities in Taiwan have used every means to persuade some US senators to draft the bill for its attempt of realizing “Taiwan independence”, which will never succeed, she said.

Chiu Yi, a Taiwan-based cross-Straits expert, said in a post on his Facebook page, that once passed, the US would openly destroy its one-China policy, and relations between the US and Taiwan would be made official.

If that happened, the mainland would not sit idle and let the US manipulate “one China, one Taiwan” to undermine the status quo across the Taiwan Straits, he wrote.

Separately, Zhu denounced Chiu Tai-san, head of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, who claimed last week that the island doesn’t accept any arrangement to resolve the Taiwan question and urged easing the current situation in the Straits.

The remarks came after the People’s Liberation Army conducted military drills around Taiwan in response to a visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier in August, despite strong opposition from the mainland.

Zhu said Chiu made the remarks to hide the fact that it was the DPP administration who relied on the US to seek “independence” that caused tensions across the Straits.

Only by returning to the common political foundation of the 1992 Consensus that embodies the one-China principle can cross-Straits relations improve, and can peace and stability across the Straits be effectively guaranteed, she said.

No matter how the cross-Straits situation changes, the consensus that marked its 30th anniversary this year remains the anchor for cross-Straits relations.

I highlighted the key points.
[1] This document violates all three Chinese RED LINES.[2] It destroys the USA adherence to the One-China policy.[3] China will not sit by idle and do nothing.

-MM

年年有餘( 清蒸沙巴仔) Steamed Grouper Fish #賀年菜 #ChineseLunarNewYear #簡易宴客菜 (有字幕 With Subtitles)

Russia strikes Reservoir Dam; Sends water Surging downstream

The Russian army launched a missile attack on Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. There were two attacks, the local administration did not announce in which parts of the city the defeats took place.

Military observers tweeted that Tu-95MS strategic (and nuclear) bombers attacked dams and reservoirs in Ukraine with Kh-101 missiles, which have a range of 5,500 km and carry 500 kg of explosive warheads. The deputy head of the presidential administration in Kyiv, Kiril Tymoshenko, announced that a total of 8 rockets were fired at Kryvyi Rih.

Some missiles hit below the waterline of the dam across the Ingulets river.  The impact severely damaged the dam and the water level in the Ingulets river is now surging – severely as seen in the video below:

 

 

Electricity and fresh water is now cut-off in Kryvyi Rih.

This is now the second large demonstration of what Russia is capable of doing to Ukrainian infrastructure; the first being missile strikes against electrical stations a few days ago.

Unlike the electric grid, which was re-routed, there’s no way to make a quick fix to this dam.  

Crowded House – Don’t Dream It’s Over (Glastonbury 2022)

Al-Omar Oil Field in Syria Just Blown Up; U.S. Theft of Oil from there, halted

The Oil field at Al-Omar Syria has been blown up and is presently on fire.

This is one of the oil fields from which the United States has been stealing Syrian oil.

It is not yet clear what caused the series of explosions, but initial AND UNVERIFIED reports say it was Russian Air Force missiles.

Both Syria and Russia have repeatedly warned the US they are not authorized to be inside Syria and should leave.  In addition, both Syria and Russia have told the US, Israel, and Turkey, the theft of Syrian oil must halt.

The US, Israel, and Turkey have ignored those warnings.

Now, the oil field from which they have been stealing, is blown up.

Violence In California Reaches “Epidemic” Levels As Our Society Rapidly Deteriorates All Around Us

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I can’t understand why anyone would still want to live in California.  Yes, there are lots of high paying jobs and the weather is very nice, but crime is completely and utterly out of control.  As you will see below, a new report that has just been issued is warning that violence in the state has now reached “epidemic” levels.  The police are doing what they can to try to contain the violence, but at this point they are vastly outnumbered by the predators.  Sadly, this is the end result of literally decades of cultural rot, and what is happening in California is going to happen to the rest of the nation if we do not take urgent action to turn things around.

Originally, I was going to write about something else today.  Tens of thousands of rail and port workers are threatening to go on strike, and this could definitely cause some substantial economic disruptions…

America is bracing for chaos as tens of thousands of railway, port, and hospital workers look set to strike over the winter – plunging the country into further disruption.

As many as 60,000 railway workers, 15,000 nurses, and 22,000 West Coast port workers are plotting mass walkouts as they seek better working conditions.

Several US freight railroads said they were preparing for widespread strike and service interruptions Friday, a deadline set by two holdout labor groups in protracted talks with railroad carriers about better benefits.

But even though these strikes could cause severe short-term problems, they will eventually be resolved.

So in the greater scheme of things, they really aren’t a major concern.

On the other hand, our cultural decay is a massive ongoing crisis that isn’t going to go away.

As I mentioned earlier, a brand new report that was just released is warning that violence in the state of California has risen to “epidemic” levels

The Golden State is losing its luster. A troubling new report labels physical and sexual violence in pandemic-era California a statewide “epidemic.” To put it simply, violence is on an alarming rise.

According to the new annual report from the California Study on Violence Experiences across the Lifespan (CalVEX), violence statistics have seen a significant increase since COVID-19 emerged. The report, conducted by scientists at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, reports more than one in six Californians (18%) experienced either physical or sexual violence in just the past year.

If you live in one of the biggest cities in California, this isn’t news to you.

Once upon a time, the state was a place of great beauty and great tranquility, but now it has been transformed into a crime-infested hellhole.

I was particularly alarmed by the numbers on sexual violence in this new report

While more than 1.5 million adults in California admit to committing acts of sexual violence in the past year, men were more than two times as likely as women to report that they perpetrated sexual violence and intimate partner violence.

Women also showed greater mental health impacts and life disruptions due to violent experiences, with 82 percent of women reporting anxiety or depression as a result of physically aggressive, coercive or forced sexual behavior.

Of course much of this violence is being fueled by illegal mind-altering drugs.

Some of these drugs are so immensely powerful that they literally put people into catatonic states for an extended period of time…

 

I will never understand why people would willingly do that to themselves.

Today, we are facing the biggest drug crisis that we have ever seen in American history, and addicts will often do whatever it takes to get another fix.

Sadly, this is one of the factors that is contributing to skyrocketing rates of shoplifting all over the nation

We are all painfully aware of the huge rise in shoplifting and even violent robberies of stores. We watch the videos of thugs brazenly raiding stores, and read about the organized crime rings that have sprung up to profit from the trend. Shoplifting has become a big, if criminal business. Chances are that if you use eBay to purchase a wide range of products at reduced prices you have unwittingly purchased stolen goods. No good way for eBay to stop the practice.

One homeless man that originally came from Alabama recently admitted that he regularly shoplifts in order to fund his heroin use…

 

There have been homeless addicts in the streets of San Francisco for years, but now we have reached a point where they are seemingly everywhere.

The following is what one reporter witnessed during a recent journey through the city…

I saw complete hopelessness in the eyes of haunted souls dragging themselves down the street looking for their next fix.

I saw men and women of all ages hunched over on the sidewalks with open wounds all over their bodies.

I saw the filthy tent cities stinking with human excrement and strewn with needles and pipes.

I saw children staring in horror at people dying right in front of them.

At one time, such activity was limited to the bad portions of the city.

But now addicts that have been drugged out of their minds are pulling down their pants and crapping in the streets right in front of some of the most expensive real estate in San Francisco.

This has made the wealthy people really angry, and Mayor Breed says that she is finally going to “get serious” about this crisis.

Of course “getting serious” doesn’t mean arresting a bunch of people and throwing them into prison.

That just wouldn’t be very “progressive”.

Instead, authorities in San Francisco are getting ready to launch a “soft-touch” program that will seek to “interrupt” drug trafficking…

City supervisors released a resolution for a vague ‘soft-touch’ initiative called ‘San Francisco Recovers.’

And here’s the catch, and it’s a doozy: the plan is being touted as, ‘a way that nobody’s going to jail but we’re doing an effective job of interrupting the drug market and drug scenes.’

Is this a sick joke?

Yes, it certainly sounds like a sick joke to me.

Good luck with all that.

If major cities such as San Francisco actually want to have a chance of turning things around, they need to send the police out to round up all the drug dealers.

Unfortunately, police forces in many of our biggest cities are rapidly getting smaller.

In fact, a whopping 122 officers have left the Seattle Police Department in 2022 alone…

The liberal city of Seattle is losing police officers amid a major spike in crime, 770 KTTH reported.

“We’re screwed,” former King County Sheriff John Urqhart said, according to 770 KTTH.

In total, 122 officers have left the Seattle Police Department in 2022, including six that left in August, 770 KTTH reported, citing a police source. Since the city council voted to defund the police department in 2020, nearly 500 police officers have left the force.

I wouldn’t want to be a police officer in a major west coast city at this point either.

They are underpaid, the politicians treat them with tremendous disdain, and they are often hindered by absolutely ridiculous regulations which keep them from doing their jobs effectively.

We like to think that we are so “advanced”, but the truth is that if you compare video footage from major cities on the west coast from decades ago to video footage from today there is absolutely no comparison.

Our society is melting down right in front of our eyes, and if we stay on the path that we are currently on there is no future for our country.

But the politicians insist that people like me have it all wrong.

They continue to tell us that things are better than ever and that a glorious future for our nation is dead ahead.

You can believe that if you want, but the truth of what is really happening to our society is on display for the whole world to see.

America is dying, and we are quickly running out of time to turn things around.

Angel

Angel is a Bengali cat who travels around the world with her family. Due to the fact that two animals died during a flight – one because of the cold and the other because his cage was hit by other luggage – Angel has started a campaign for all animals to travel in the cabin.

The slogan is: “we are not luggage, we are living beings”.

Due to her large number of followers, this 15-pound cat hopes to make a change. For now, a good way to help her is to spread her campaign and her slogan …WE ARE NOT LUGGAGE, WE ARE LIVING BEINGS!

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A slow and easy slide into the new global reality…

A bunch of idiotic questions on Quora, and an equally large bunch of idiotic answers. Mostly Americans reinforcing ignorance with ignorance. It’s actually profoundly disturbing.

Anyways, in this article I am taking some of the better answers from the more thoughtful answers, (mostly Chinese) and placing them under the inept and amazingly moronic questions flooding my feed.

Have a good laugh and a fine stroll.

Let’s begin with this amazingly stupid question…

Is China the next United States ?

No. The United States is the World Police turning into a Bouncer for Hire. China’s aspiration is to be the Cook.

The United States was catapulted into Superpower during WWII, where its entire industrial base was turned into arms manufacturing. It could have disarmed after WWII, but one thing led to another, that was never done, and so here we are, with Mr. Trump selling protection and blackmailing other countries for protection money.

China is concerned about getting enough to “eat”, and she has figured out that the cook never starves, no matter who else might be starving. So she’s been going around cooking up iPhones, trains, pots and pans, and bridges for other people, and, well, making a tidy sum out of it, and feeding her own family with cents on the dollar (‘cause she makes the stuff herself, so no restaurant mark-up).

So what happened next, was that Mr. Obama calling China “a free rider for thirty years”, because she doesn’t do anything for “global security”.

But I think Mr. Obama failed to appreciate the fact that a cook can not look like a bouncer and going around cracking other people’s heads – who in the world will order dinner from a cook that looks like a bouncer?

Basically if you want to be the cook for the world, you have to be (or at least appear to be) AMIABLE to everybody!

China is friendly with both the US and Russia, both Iran and Saudi, both Israel and Palestine, all four different governments in Yemen, etc.

But if you are a bouncer, well, you’ve got to take sides (“Good vs. Evil”), show your muscle, and beat up somebody occasionally. And you need enemies, otherwise, how do you get customers coming to you looking for protection? Right? But if you are going to fight for the Saudis, the Iranians are probably not going to be buying iPhones and automobiles from you. C’est la vie.

So no, China is not the next United States, because a Cook doesn’t need any Enemies, only customers.

The Notorious B.I.G. – Mo Money Mo Problems (Official Music Video) [4K]

Have fun you all.

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The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – Those Were The Days

Bottle Service

“This is what my babysitter used for a teething toy for me.”

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This one still gives me nightmares.

When I was in college, I worked for the catering department as a bartender. So I would be there for everything from the college president’s dinners (where I was the only person who could mix the head of the board of trustees a proper martini) to debauched student parties.

I figured I was pretty good. I could handle anything, or so I thought.

One day the head of catering called me and asked if I could do a mid-afternoon shift. The college was hosting a local lawn bowling club. This would be a bunch of old folks who were having a drinks in the university club room after a round on the bowling field. It would just be me—no bar back—-because, well, old people. How much could a bunch of grannies and grandpas drink at 4 PM in the afternoon?

Turns out, quite a sh$t load.

So there I was on the day behind a big table with a demure white table cloth on it at 4 PM, with a bunch of beers and a few bottles of scotch, vodka and gin in the ice next to me. I had some limes and some lemons, soft drinks, a few mixers. I’m thinking this will be the biggest blow-off job of my life. I’ll mix a few G&Ts, chat with the old folks, snag a few tips, fill some water glasses, and be out of there by 6 PM.

I mean, these people were literally from the local rest home.

Things went wrong right away. First of all, they all ignored the food and the tables and came up to the bar. This was around a hundred old people. The usual requests started pouring in, but I was a little taken aback that they ALL wanted to drink, and they immediately started bitching to each other about the fact that “The damn college only put one kid at the bar? Where are the rest of them?”

They wanted things like shaken martinis…with olives or lemon zests. They wanted A LOT of Old Fashioneds. Do you know what an Old Fashioned is? You probably don’t because they drank them back in the days of Bing Crosby. Here is the recipe:

-1 sugar cube

  • 2 ounces ​bourbon (or rye whiskey)
  • Optional: orange slice
  • Optional: splash of club soda
  • Garnish: ​orange peel
  • Garnish: maraschino cherry

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You need to muddle the damn cherry (mush it up over a strainer). And I had to make DOZENS of these, using RYE whisky. You’ve probably never had Rye , either. I had to run back to the supply store to find a case of the stuff. It’s basically Canadian whisky. Yeah. Canadian. Americans started drinking lots of it during the prohibition in the USA and I guess they never stopped.

I mean, I had to find SUGAR CUBES and melt them.

And so I’m shaking martinis, I’m muddling the cherries, I’m melting the sugar cubes, and I’m also pouring G&Ts and Scotch and Sodas and I think I made a few Tom Collinses and some Cape Codders and a few screwdrivers. These are mostly drinks your grandparents drank because I was serving A BUNCH OF GRANDPARENTS. I’m popping beers and I’m pouring wine and wine spritzers and CHAMPAGNE SPRITZERS and the whole time they are bitching that the service is too slow.

And then I did the heinous math.

If you take a hundred people under the age of 40 and get them playing croquet or lawn bowling or whatever from 2–4 in the afternoon, and bring them to a bar at 4 PM, you might get HALF of them actually drinking alcohol, and a QUARTER of them actually into the hard liquor. Hell, I like to drink but I rarely have an actual neat scotch before six. THESE PEOPLE WERE HEADING OFF TO BED AROUND THEN…4 PM WAS THEIR HAPPY HOUR.

AND ALL OF THESE OLD PEOPLE WERE DRINKING. There was no “designated drivers” because they had come in a bus and nobody was trying to be good for the boss or trying to lose weight or being PC or just drinking coffee or having an issue with substance abuse or whatever. That World War Two generation might have been the Greatest Generation but my god they were also the Drunkest Generation. These were all slamming them back and then GETTING BACK IN THE LINE FOR ANOTHER ROUND. Finally I was yelling at them, “Listen, you get one drink apiece, not two at a time. That means you, sir.” Or “No, I am NOT making you people a pitcher of martinis!” or “Give me back that bottle of gin, ma’am, I’m not allowed to let you bring it to the table” and then “Give it back and don’t pretend you can’t hear me, lady!”

The more fucked up they got, the more they complained and demanded more booze. Plus, they were lighting up cigarettes in the no smoking building. It was literally getting out of hand. After the first hour my boss appeared and it was basically a drunken riot. The lawn bowlers felt they had a right to an all-you-can-drink bar and the college was ripping them off by only putting me on duty, I was shouting at them to get in line and stop acting like jerks and to bloody grow up and the place was a mess of glasses because there was no way I could bus glasses as well. The place reeked of smoke. He had to clap his hands for attention and they basically all told him to go to hell, they wanted more booze, and this pretty tough guy wound up serving these people next to me for the next hour. We totally ran out of all the hard booze and there was much unhappiness about this from the lawn bowlers, who swore they would never use our facility again.

Thank God.

After they left the two of us cleaned up in total silence. It was like a shared trauma. He paid me double in cash because I didn’t get one tip and then we went back to the store room and each smoked a cigarette (I don’t smoke).

He gave me a case of beer and told me never to tell anyone about this. I think he was kind of crying.

EDIT- WOW. Over 100,000 page views and over 10,000 upvotes in just a few days? THANKS!

Also, Canada is awesome. I edited the piece to make sure people understand that Canadian whisky is great, we just didn’t have lots of it in our college kitchen in 1989 and when I was 19 I didn’t know much about it. Didn’t mean to say anything mean about Canadian whisky! Go Canada!

Also, thanks for all the education about Old Fashioneds but I’m still too triggered to drink them!

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It’s laughable you even have to ask. I’ve been to China five times and it’s 100 times safer than the US. The cops often don’t even carry guns. You can walk around any city at 3am with your wallet glued to your forehead and nothing would happen to you. There really aren’t even that many scams for tourists compared to other countries, especially outside Beijing and Shanghai.

But this is why Americans are viewed as so insular and ignorant. Why did you even ask this? You just assume that China is some big bad evil communist country like the American media and society has brainwashed you into thinking?

True story: first time I went to China in 2010 I was literally blown away at how developed and advanced it is. It’s literally 30 years ahead of the US at least in terms of its infrastructure such as airports, bullet trains, subways, sidewalks, roads, etc. But my brainwashed mind had believed the American spin about China that it was some evil shithole. Oh and I also never found it was some police state. I could buy a beer at a store and drink it on the street and that was no problem, try that in America.

So anyway, if you have to ask if it’s safe to visit it probably means you should not even bother going because the real issue is your internalized American fear of the unknown.

Another — excuse me for the adjective I’m going to use — dumb question about China.

Why do people think that Chinese live in a tavern or something?

The Chinese are the people behind WeChat, one of the best applications in the world, and I’m not even exaggerating. It’s a combination of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and MORE into one app.

“Oh, so they just copy the applications that are actually banned in China”.

I also forgot to mention that you can buy almost anything through WeChat.

“Oh yeah, just like ApplePay?”

Yeah, except that when people got introduced with ApplePay, Chinese were enjoying that technology for YEARS already.

An absurd amount of things are done through phones in China, and they sure as hell don’t use Nokia to do so.

Oh and by the way, iPhone are produced in China 🙂

This post was Made in China.

Slow-Cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup

The best meals are the ones that take little effort while still earning that homemade label, and this Slow-Cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup is the perfect example. This easy-prep chicken tortilla soup recipe simmers for hours while you prep it in just 15 minutes. Come home to amazing flavors like green chiles, diced tomatoes, cumin, cilantro and tasty tortilla chips. Check out our step-by-step directions for how to make this tortilla soup in a slow cooker, and sit down to something delicious.

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Slow-Cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup

Ingredients

  • 1 carton (32 oz) Progresso™ chicken broth
  • 1 can (14.5 oz) Muir Glen™ organic fire roasted diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 can (11 oz) whole kernel corn, red and green peppers, drained
  • 1 can (10 oz) Old El Paso™ red enchilada sauce
  • 1 cup chopped onions
  • 1 can (4.5 oz) Old El Paso™ chopped green chiles
  • 1 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1 teaspoon chili powder
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 lb boneless skinless chicken breasts
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
  • 4 cups tortilla chips, coarsely crushed
  • 1/2 cup sour cream

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Samsung once had a big domestic market share in China

Now its been wiped out by Chinese players who are developing products which are comparable, even superior in quality.

As Chinas market has grown, Samsung is forced to move to the only other market where it can hope to establish a nexus – India

More and More Companies will try to move here because they have NO CHOICE.

Chinese Products are taking over the Largest Market on Earth – China.

Even Tesla and Volvo will be wiped out by Cheaper yet Similar Quality Chinese Brands and will be forced to come to India

It wont help us in the long run because we dont have the market for so many products or the economy.

Yet our Media write of this as a Major Victory .

"A recent UN report states that China may have committed human rights violations in Xinjiang."

China may have?

Look, f*ckwad**, either China did, or did not. The word “may” does not constitute anything factual.

Did China commit human rights violations? Yes or no.

If yes, then show us the f*cking evidence. Hard evidence, not bullshit evidence.

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It’s weird and it sucks. Take a look at this deli…

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When my dad moved to the US 30+ years ago he opened up a convenience store in a rough neighborhood in NYC just like this one, in a building just like this one. But instead of renting the commercial space he took out a loan and bought the entire property which had a few apartments on the floor above.

Long story short, the neighborhood where he bought this building slowly became gentrified, and the value of the property skyrocketed. My dad spent about $200k on the property which is was recently valued at over $2.5 million. The same thing happened with our family home as well, my dad bought a nice New England style colonial like the one pictured below for $300k in the early 90’s. Last year a real estate agent told us if we sold it we could get $2 million…

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What’s weird about the situation is that while on paper my folks are rich, and wealthier today than they have been at any point in their lives, they certainly doesn’t feel like they are. Although the prices of our properties have changed, our the properties themselves have not. The convenience store and the building is still as run down as it ever was, and our house hasn’t gotten any bigger either. Yet, each year the money gets tighter as the value goes up, so to do our property taxes, insurance, living expenses, and other bills. The reality we now face is that even though we’re ‘richer than ever,’ we’ll eventually be unable to live the way we’ve always been living.

Magnetic reversals

In Ngawha, on the North Island of New Zealand, an ancient tree has been discovered that contains a record of a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field. The tree – an Agathis australis, also known as the Maori name kauri – was found during excavation work for the expansion of a geothermal power plant.

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The tree was buried 9 meters deep and measures 2.4m in diameter and 30m in length. Carbon dating indicated that she lived for 1,500 years, between 41,000 and 42,500 years ago.

“There is none of this anywhere in the world. This Ngāwhā kauri is unique.”

The lifespan of the kauri tree covers a point in Earth’s history when the magnetic field nearly reversed. Magnetic north and south have shifted positions, but a complete reversal has not taken place. It was almost a reversal.

The Earth’s magnetic field is believed to be generated by the iron in the planet’s core. It produces electrical currents that extend into space as they move. The magnetic field is really like a barrier that protects the planet from the solar wind, which is a stream of particles from the Sun that could remove the Earth’s atmosphere, as happened on Mars. With the magnetic field, they are attracted to the poles.

When the magnetic field reverses, it weakens and the planet suffers more from the effect of the Sun’s radiation. Scientists have already linked extinction events to reversals of magnetic fields.

The rings of this kauri tree have a complete record of this near reversal, and this is the first time a tree that lived through the entire event has been found.

Scientists are now analyzing samples from the tree and are led by Chris Turney of the University of New South Wales, an expert in paleoclimatology and climate change for the past 40,000 years. The research is being funded by the Research Council of Australia.

Turney explained:

“The precious thing is that this huge lone tree grew for about 1700 years in a remarkable period in our planet’s history, when Earth’s magnetic field reversed 42,000 years ago, a period known as the Laschamp Excursion. We’re doing a detailed analysis of carbon-14 in the various rings of this tree.

In the last 83 million years, there have been 183 magnetic pole reversals.

This process takes about 7,000 years to complete. Monika Korte, scientific director of the Niemegk Geomagnetic Observatory at GFZ Potsdam, Germany, says:

“It is not a sudden movement, but a slow process, during which the strength of the field becomes weak, most likely the field becomes more complex and may show more than two poles for a while, and then it strengthens and aligns itself in the same direction. opposite direction.”

According to NASA, magnetic field reversals occur at random intervals, although over the last 20 million years it appears to have settled into a pattern, occurring once every 200,000 to 300,000 years.

The last total reversal took place about 780,000 years ago.

Recently, scientists announced that the magnetic north pole had moved unexpectedly.

Instead of constantly tracking from the Canadian Arctic towards Siberia, it sped up so much that researchers had to update the World Magnetic Model (WMM), which is a representation of Earth’s magnetic field. It is used extensively in navigation by the US Department of Defense, the UK Ministry of Defense, and many civilian systems – so knowing exactly where the north and south magnetic poles are is of utmost importance.

Are you thirsty?

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Are you thirsty?

Butterscotch Bars

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Directions

Cook butter and sugar over low heat until it bubbles; cool. Add eggs, 1 at a time; beat thoroughly after each egg is added. Add flavorings, then flour, salt, and soda, which have been added together, and coconut. Mix thoroughly. Bake in shallow greased 9×13 inch pan at 350 degrees F about 25 minutes. (This is heavy dough and should be spread evenly in pan.)

Robot Chicken – Trial of the Blockheads

Robot Chicken gave Gumby a new lease on life.

Robot Chicken | Delicious Gummy Bears | Adult Swim UK 🇬🇧

A rather dark humor.

Slow-Cooker Caribbean-Style Chicken Soup with Lime and Cilantro

Looking for a hearty slow-cooked dinner? Then check out this Caribbean-style soup featuring chicken, Progresso® black beans and chicken broth.

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Slow-Cooker Caribbean-Style Chicken Soup with Lime and Cilantro

Ingredients

Soup

  • 3 bone-in chicken breasts, skinned
  • 3 bone-in chicken thighs, skinned
  • 1 tablespoon salt-free Caribbean rub
  • 4 teaspoons vegetable oil
  • 1 medium onion, chopped (1/2 cup)
  • 1 teaspoon finely chopped garlic
  • 1 carton (32 oz) Progresso™ chicken broth (4 cups)
  • 1 tablespoon adobo sauce (from can of chipotle chiles)
  • 1 can (15 oz) Progresso™ black beans, drained, rinsed
  • 1/2 cup unsweetened coconut milk (not cream of coconut)
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 3 tablespoons fresh lime juice

Serve-With, if desired

  • Hot cooked rice
  • Fresh cilantro leaves
  • Finely chopped radishes
  • Lime wedges

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Are you thirsty?

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Are you thirsty?

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There are two ways to answer this question.

 

From a Western perspective, the answer is yes. The Chinese government imposes a society of mass surveillance on its population by forcing it to carry out a vacuum well framed in the rules enacted by the Chinese Communist Party.

For Westerners, this is something terrifying and inconceivable.

From the Chinese point of view, this closed system is perceived as a necessary evil. It is something that provides the stability necessary for China’s long-term economic development.

Over the past 40 years, the Chinese system has lifted 850 million Chinese out of poverty. This is unique in the history of mankind.

For all Chinese, the government is considered to be extremely successful. The majority of Chinese people love Xi Jinping. They accept the rules of the game, because China’s economic success reflects positively on their lives afterwards.

Besides, seeing China becoming the world’s leading power in the future brings them great pride.

As long as economic success is achieved in China, people will have no reason to question the Chinese government

. This is hard for Westerners to accept, but the Chinese do not want the democracy we love so much.

We must open our eyes and accept it.

  1. They won’t bow down to the West, never again after having suffered a century of humiliation in the hands of the imperialist West and Japan.
  2. They solve problems pragmatically, not ideologically, and they do it swiftly sans the politics.
  3. They prioritize collective welfare over individual liberties. This is where the Westerners fail to understand China because they’re individualists, not collectivists.
  4. They view human rights as a utilitarian and not a deontological concept. This is in line with the previous number.
  5. They further undermine the waning influence of the West in global affairs.
  6. They threaten America’s economic dominance.
  7. The Beijing Consensus provides a better alternative to the deeply flawed free-market model of the Washington Consensus.
  8. The Third World (Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and some parts of Asia) would rather work with China now than with the West.
  9. They won’t allow the SJW agenda to poison the minds of the Chinese people and make them purple-haired, easily-offended, man-hating bigots.
  10. Because the Western media tell you they are bad without giving you a fair and objective analysis of why China is China. Case in point: NYT.

I know for a fact that China isn’t perfect and I do find myself disagreeing with their policies from time to time. But in many cases, she’s indeed doing better than the West.

3 My Little Pony Moments | Robot Chicken | Adult Swim

The Great Cousins Photo of 1989

“We had a family photo of all the cousins (minus 2 who weren’t born yet) taken for my grandparents wedding anniversary.”

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Lordy!

I think my first thought reading this question is: Just how paranoid are you to think China secretly want to invade and conquer US? But sarcasm aside, I guess it is a reasonable question, so I’ll give a reasonable answer:

No, China don’t secretly want to invade and conquer US. Not even the most enthusiastic nationalists and militarists are seriously thinking about that. What are we going to do with a piece of land thousands of miles away from us (even the land is as fertile as North America, full of natural resources)? There’s no reason to go to war with the US and China won’t benefit from it even if we win. In a scenario of open war with US, especially when both countries have nuclear weapons, the result is always really bad for everyone.

So what does China secretly want with US?

1, US, could you please… I mean… please just leave us alone? Really? I think China would be happy if US won’t come and yell at us about our human rights issue and demand Tibet independence.

2, US, if we ever take back Taiwan, please don’t get pissed with us. China and US are so connected economically we really don’t want any problems. Just keep buying our shoes and appliances.

3, US, could you loosen up your immigration policy against China? People can’t even get a travel visa without jumping through 10 thousands loops and hoops. We really want to just visit New York and clear out your high end stores (like we did in Paris). And good Chinese students really want to go study in US. And I really want to have my friends visit me from time to time.

“A dictatorship that can kill 100,000 Americans but feel nothing happens will never care about the lives of the people of the two countries. The low human rights advantage of the United States makes us tremble. The corruption and madness of the US military let us know that we are facing an irrational opponent. The risk of war far exceeds the fool’s imagination.”

Very, very scared.

Especially seeing the combat capabilities of the US military on the Iraqi battlefield.

We have been silently preparing for this for 30 years. We know that one day you will stare at us.

For this we are prepared to use the world as a battlefield.

  • China is the largest trading country in most countries in the world. But we still think that we can only rely on ourselves at the critical moment.
  • China is the world’s largest industrial manufacturing country. But we still think that the military industry may suffer a huge blow in the crazy first round of attacks from the United States. For this, we have established a large number of spare factories in the mountainous areas.
  • We clearly understand that the sudden outbreak of modern warfare does not have enough time for us to mobilize for war. For this we prepare our own underground Great Wall and all-weather combat readiness system.
  • We know that our navy is so fragile, so we are actively developing land-based anti-ship missiles in order to block your entry in the Western Pacific.
  • We firmly believe that we will no longer be as lucky as the Korean War, and the Soviet Union has disappeared. You will definitely use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy the PLA without hesitation. So we have prepared nuclear weapons that are also miniaturized.
  • We firmly believe that no war is not terrifying, and all foreigners may be agents. Similarly, all Asian Americans may be terrorists with nuclear bombs. As the weaker side in the brutal war, we rely on 1.4 billion people for war, people’s war!
  • We firmly believe that you will use full-scale nuclear warfare as an option. Similarly, we must ensure Dongfeng 41 missiles can break through your local anti-missile system and strike all your cities with more than 100,000 people.
  • We are still developing submarine-launched ballistic missiles. JL-2 cannot hit the United States from the South China Sea. We need JL-3. H-6 performance is insufficient, we need H-20. We are still living under your shadow.

In the Second World War, the Chinese persevered under the Japanese invasion for 14 years, and finally won the victory. We sacrificed 11.4 million soldiers. 24 million civilians were killed.

In high-intensity modern wars, we believe that full-scale wars will continue for at least one year, with casualties likely to reach 500 million people within a year.

Therefore, we must establish a corps structure that can fight independently, and all combat units are their own commanders.

The form of war is rapidly changing, economic warfare, psychological warfare, and cyber warfare. We are still the weak side, and we have enough reasons to fear. This fear dominates us all the time.

A dictatorship that can kill 100,000 Americans but feel nothing happens will never care about the lives of the people of the two countries. The low human rights advantage of the United States makes us tremble. The corruption and madness of the US military let us know that we are facing an irrational opponent. The risk of war far exceeds the fool’s imagination.

I can’t help but ask:

When that day really comes, are we ready?

………………………………………………………………

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This is the reason for fear, and American people can’t tell right from wrong.

Democracy is not about letting people die in pursuit of profit. The understanding of democracy by Westerners has already been distorted. I don’t know when the concept of democracy became the private property of Westerners.

“Most American people when they travel abroad seem to make no attempt to get to know the locals, instead they travel in their own isolated groups. Is this an indication of the American preference for isolation from the rest of the world? Being scared of the China makes no sense to me, but indicates paranoia due to a lack of consciousness of how the world and democracy works.”

This gave rise to another kind of thinking. All the accusations were not because we did something wrong, but because of deep hatred towards us. The Chinese should work hard as your slaves, not travel and shop around the world. Even if the accusations of democracy are stopped, there will be accusations of human rights. You just need a reason to point your fingers.

……………………………………………………………….

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As you can see, it is human rights accusation. It may be late, but it will never be absent.

Believing in fake news or pretending to believe is your right, but I really believe that white immigrants in the United States carried out a genocide plan against Indians.

  • In the name of equality for all, trade in slaves.
  • In the name of anti-terrorism, bomb Afghan weddings.
  • In the name of democracy and freedom, seize the wealth of Iraqis.
  • In the name of the free market, let children die from hunger.
  • America has only one name in God’s eyes: Judas.

……………………………………………………

What scares us most is that you actually want to hate us in the name of democracy and human rights.

If we fail, their rule will be even more brutal.

The definition of democracy and human rights will be further narrowed. Just as the Soviet Union failed, the Western system became the only meaning of democracy. The United States became the liberator of Auschwitz. The world’s largest racist country has become a model of human rights.

Are we qualified to be treated as normal and equal human beings, not as demons?

We can’t breathe.

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Like many people, I once thought it was a misunderstanding. It’s time to abandon the fantasy. In fact, there is more hatred than misunderstanding.

Do so many economic and trade links deepen misunderstandings? Why do the western world misunderstand us more and more?

Conflicts of interest and racial superiority cannot be resolved by peaceful protests.

Abandon fantasy and prepare for struggle.

………………………………………………………………………….

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I think before blaming China you should shoot the intelligence officials who let China steal classified information again and again. Lest they treason again. If the FBI and the CIA are all shot to death, someone will be innocent, but if only half of them are shot, there must be an omission.

Remember, before credibly accusing China, please kill an intelligence officer first.

If we fail, the story you tell will become history.

Let me tell you something you don’t know.

In October 1931, US President Hoover gave a public speech in support of Japan’s invasion of the three northeastern provinces of China.

In 1936, the Japanese Army proposed a hugely costly “six-year combat preparation plan” (1937-1942) to deal with future wars against the Soviet Union and China. The United States believed that the plan was aimed at the Soviet Union, so it used various methods such as granting Japanese loans, exporting technology, and supplying strategic materials to provide support for the Japanese Army’s expansion and preparation for war. Among them, the American Ford Company provides Japan’s modern metallurgical technology, the Rockefeller Consortium helps Japan establish a new electrical industry, and the Mellon Consortium helps Japan’s aircraft manufacturing industry to further modernize. In fact, because the large-scale Soviet-Japanese war imagined by the Americans did not break out, the material and financial assistance provided by the United States to Japan eventually turned into guns and ammunition that killed Chinese soldiers and civilians.

According to US government statistics, 54.4% of the strategic materials imported by Japan in 1937 came from the US. 92.9% of copper, 91.2% of automobiles and 60.5% of oil, 59.7% of scrap steel, 48.5% of various machinery and engines, and 41.6% of cast iron are imported from the United States.

The famous writer and educator Tao Xingzhi delivered a speech when he was leaving the United States: “I will return to China to participate in the war of resistance. If one day I was killed by a Japanese bomb, please don’t forget that 54.4% of my body was bombed by your Americans!”

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Stimson, who has stepped down as the US Secretary of State, wrote in the “New York Times” that the US government only needs to prohibit the United States from supplying materials to Japan, and the Chinese can easily defeat Japanese aggression. 31 U.S. congressmen jointly pointed out: “We say that Japan has two allies, Germany and Italy. In fact, we are Japan’s best allies. Anyone will undoubtedly believe that we are actively participating in Japan’s war in China. “On May 4, 1938, at a rally of five thousand people in Los Angeles, US Congressman Scott said: “Please note that when Japan is currently killing 1 million people in China, 544,000 was killed by American capital, as an accomplice.”

Facing the pressure of public opinion, the US government had to make some official articles. On July 1, 1938, when China was about to enter the second year of the full-scale war of resistance, the US State Department notified the American Aircraft Corporation that the US government did not agree to sell aircraft and aircraft parts to countries that were carrying out indiscriminate bombing. This is the famous “moral embargo”.

What is surprising is that in 1938, when the “moral embargo” was implemented, the aircraft sold by the United States to Japan was worth 17.454 million U.S. dollars, which was 702.7% of the 1937 figure. The strangeness is self-evident. After collecting U.S. official data, U.S. economist Hu Dunyuan found that Japan’s acquisition of various strategic materials from the U.S. accounted for the proportion of its total imports from 54.4% in 1937 to 56% in 1938. This is the true attitude of the US government towards China’s war of resistance.

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Chinese will never forget your friendship between The Americans and the Japanese. As you said, we give you the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Let us forget the lies about friendship. Let us remember the truth of history.

The war entered into 1938. The huge consumption on the Chinese battlefield forced Japan to implement the “first munitions mobilization in the China Incident,” but the production and supplies of munitions still could not meet the needs of the Sino-Japanese war.

The satisfaction rate of weapons is 70%, ammunition 60%, aircraft 66%, tanks 27%, light armored vehicles 43%, gas masks 97%, sanitary equipment 90%, veterinary equipment 87%, and marine equipment 80%. From April 1, 1938 to March 31, 1939, Japan was forced to implement the second military mobilization plan, which comprehensively reduced the supply of materials for all industries unrelated to military supplies, and required the citizens to implement “conservation, rationing, recycling” war.

Ten major measures such as a simple life, stipulate that 32 kinds of materials such as steel, milled iron, gold, silver, copper, lead, etc., shall be subject to strengthened use restrictions. Even the coach rifles used in Japanese middle schools were taken back and used by the Japanese army. Under such circumstances, if the United States cuts off the supply of strategic materials to Japan, by the end of 1938, the full-scale war of aggression against China launched by Japan will not be able to continue due to exhaustion of resources.

Japan suffered a huge defeat on the Chinese battlefield. Forcing Japan to turn to resource-rich Southeast Asia to support its material needs. Let me be straight, the US-Japan “alliance” relationship has been challenged. But the United States chose to earn the last coin.

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According to statistics, in 1939, military supplies exported from the United States to Japan amounted to US$186.9 million, accounting for approximately 86% of the total US exports to Japan that year. Among them, the U.S. exports of scrap iron and steel to Japan that year were 9 times more than in 1938. In 1940, US military supplies exported to Japan amounted to 190 million U.S. dollars, accounting for approximately 84% of all US exports to Japan. From 1937 to 1940, the total value of materials exported from the United States to Japan was US$986.7 million, of which military materials accounted for US$703.9 million.

What irony, as potential allies, China and the United States import and export commodities mainly for civilian use. As potential hostile countries, the imports and exports of the United States and Japan are mainly military materials.

On September 23, 1940, the Japanese troops stationed in northern French Indochina, their strategic intention to abandon the northward attack on the Soviet Union and turn to resource-rich Southeast Asia was already very obvious. When its own interests were seriously threatened, President Roosevelt ordered on September 26 that year to control the delivery of scrap steel to Japan, but did not mention the issue of oil supply. At this time, the United States still had the illusion that Japan changed its course and went north to attack the Soviet Union. Therefore, it has always “opened the net” on the oil issue that is vital to Japan.

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Japanese aircraft rely heavily on petroleum products supplied by the United States.

In order to conceal the fact of supplying oil to Japan from the public so that the U.S. government is less criticized by public opinion, the U.S. Department of Commerce, in accordance with the requirements of the State Department, replaced “aircraft fuel” with the term “high-quality fuel for engines” in trade documents. In the first quarter of 1941, the US aviation gasoline sold to Japan was 131% higher than in the same period in 1940.

Until July 22, 1941, when Japanese troops began to occupy the southern part of French Indochina, the United States announced on July 25 that it would freeze all Japanese assets in the United States and imposed a comprehensive embargo on oil and scrap steel. But it was too late. Because in the first seven months of 1941, the pig iron, steel plate, and scrap metal exports from the United States to Japan increased by more than three times in currency terms compared to 1940.

Therefore, when the Japanese combined fleet attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, most of the aviation fuel that supported Japanese aircraft flying over Pearl Harbor was provided by the United States. Most of the materials needed to build airplanes and bombs also come from the United States. The United States called this day “the darkest day”, and President Roosevelt called it “National Humiliation Day.” But looking at what the United States has done since 1931, it can be said that this is the disgrace of the American policy of appeasement and the result of the greedy American capitalism. Blame it on its own, not worthy of sympathy.

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China bankrupted the Japan-U.S. strategic alliance through persistent resistance, making the United States compelled to join the anti-Japanese militarism camp in order to defend its strategic interests.

The Second World War is not a funny story about American heroes saving the world. You didn’t have this ability in the past. By now, you have lost even the ability to solve your own domestic problems.

Of course, the United States will never lack super-powered office officials who claim to be able to sink the Chinese fleet in a short time, trade officials who promote the US’s quick victory theory, and a president who cannot fulfill his campaign promises.

By the way, the great achievements of the U.S. military. Never in human history has an army achieved so many achievements:

  • Harassing pedestrians in South Korea.
  • Caused a major accident in Italy.
  • Gang rape of women in Japan.
  • Bombing children in Iraq.
  • Burning grain fields in Syria.
  • Agent Orange is used in Vietnam.
  • Contest to kill civilians in Afghanistan.
  • Armed police shot civilians wantonly in America.

Be proud.

When the U.S. military is constrained by China, guess who is their next target for robbery?

Maybe it’s Iran, maybe it’s Venezuela, maybe it’s Belarus.

But I think it is you Americans who are most likely to be robbed by the higher US military expenditures.

Wish you guys good luck.

Just a small point. They’re not.

You can see from the map that Vietnam has by far the most islands in the disputed area, some not even that close to Vietnam. Philippines has the next most, followed by Malaysia with China coming a distant last.

The narrative put forward by the US is that China is taking over SCS. Vietnam is about the only country in the area backing this fake news up, but their island claims are in a different league so we can assume they’re only doing it out of hate of China.

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China is claiming some islands to make a forward defensive post. They still remember the naval invasions, opium, century of humiliation etc and want to protect that border.

Waldo’s Last Stand (1940) OUR GANG

Enjoy.

Are you hungry?

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Hungry?

When was the last time China took over or invaded another country.

Now ask yourself the same question, but insert USA instead of China!

Nazi propaganda 101, accuse others of that which you are guilty!

The USA is currently a country at war with itself.

No one wants to get involved, because the only consistent export out of the USA is hypocrisy, the latest being a new set of tarrifs on countries not doing enough against global warming, lol the hypocrisy is appalling, it literally describes the USA, the world capital of climate deniers.

I swear that the USA believes that the rest of the world are stupid, it’s actually delusional in a national scale!

Mental illness and conspiracies are the USA’s enemy, not China.

Fleetwood Mac – The Chain (Official Music Video)

Enjoy this trip though the dusty past…

Yes

This is a fact that the West is unwilling to accept, simply because China’s system is different from the West. include:

1.Big government

CCP has 90 million people, plus 200 million people in its family. This means that every Chinese person has a close relationship with the government. Attempting to separate the Chinese government from the Chinese people is a very naive idea.

2. have power

The Chinese government controls all areas of China’s economy, education, military and justice. Banking, transportation, energy, heavy industry and other important industries are state-owned enterprises. There is little resistance from the government, but this does not mean that the Chinese government is dictatorship. They are true political groups, and the US government is a tool for capitalists without any independence.

3. People’s support

Chinese satisfaction with the government is much higher than in other countries. Every year, one million people take government exams to get jobs. Every year, 100 million people travel abroad and eventually return to China. Trying to prove that the Chinese are not free is just the job of Western media.

4. peace

Everyone who advocates the Chinese threat theory forgets that China’s last war was 40 years ago. China has the most peaceful government among the major countries.

5. Results

For political purposes, Chinese opponents will make the Chinese government notorious. But none of this can stop China’s progress. The Chinese government has made greater progress with these allegations.

Where the fuck are you getting this nonsense from???

China’s policy has not failed, far from it. It has worked spectacularly…

Total Cases

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Total Deaths

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Just yesterday, USA had 50,486 new infections, Japan had 134,743 new infections, Germany had 35,995 new infections, Taiwan had 35,064 new infections, France had 19,866 new infections.

China? 280.

Just yesterday, USA had 313 new deaths, Japan had 265 new deaths, Germany had 119 new deaths, Brazil had 99 new deaths, Italy had 89 new deaths.

China? A Big Fat Zero.

(Data from Worldometer at the time of writing.)

China vastly outperformed all major economies.

My dad was a farmer all of his life. One day, when he was about 50, he had a dental appointment. He came home, showered, and drove about 15 miles into town. He then entered the office and signed in. He was kept waiting for over an hour.

He didn’t say much when he was finally taken in, but he did write a letter to the dentist. In it he explained the importance of keeping to a schedule where farmers are concerned, since watering equipment needed to be moved and turned on at specific times throughout the day.

He also enclosed an explanation of what his time was worth. What REALLY caught their attention was a bill for the time he had been kept waiting!

What I found interesting was that the letter had been saved all those years and placed in his chart. Oh! The fee was credited to his account … and he was never kept waiting again!

The office manager was most impressed. She commented that sometimes people needed to be reminded that they are not the only ones whose time is valuable.

When it comes to cooking, the most simple test is usually the best one. When I was taking culinary classes, our final exam was to cook 2 things:

Perfectly poached egg

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Soft-boiled egg

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We had to do it without a timer on hand. It was all done through intuition. It may seem so simple but trust me, it’s not. It took me two tries to get the perfect soft-boiled egg (first one I took out too late). The egg continues to cook even after you’ve taken it out of the pot. We weren’t given a bowl of ice water.

We were only given 3 eggs each so thankfully, my poached egg came out nicely.

It was simple, cheap and tests the chef’s skill under pressure.

Tears For Fears – Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Live) 2022

Let’s end this post on a great note. This is from this year.

Boy oh boy is the world changing

Oh yes it is. Much of the changes are due to innovation (China), and strong people standing up to the bullies of the West (such as Russia, Africa, and of course China). Much is not being reported in the Western “news”. It’s stealthy, don’t you know.

Instead we hear about how the West is “crushing Russia”, and how the evil Republican MAGA folk are a danger to “our democracy”. And of course, the evils of the vile Chinese. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Huawei New cellphone

Wow! Huawei’s latest cellphone no longer needs cellphone towers to operate. It runs as a “Satphone”. Meaning that it can place calls anywhere in the world without using cell-towers.

This WILL NOT go over well in the United States, as the American government and “law enforcement” relies on cellphones to track people, what they are doing and who they are talking with. Especially what they say. There’s an entire branch of government devoted to this effort.

It’s called the NSA.

The new phone runs on the UNHACKABLE Harmony OS system. Making this phone pretty much impossible to eavesdrop on.

Check out this short clip.

You might think that the United States government would then disband the NSA as it is now rendered superannuated.

But I don’t think that is what will happen.

Knowing what I know of this cluster-fuck of moronic ignoramuses, they will double down in spades.

They will probably suppress all Chinese technology, and fully ban Huawei phones. Probably accompanied with a propaganda campaign blaming China for eavesdropping on American privacy, etc etc.

Perhaps even work with an American company (such as the iPhone) for a super-dooper secure private phone. Promoted as the “safest phone, and most private phone ever”. Maybe even offering a reward or prize if someone can hack into it.

With a NSA “backdoor” of course. LOL

Banned Google on ShaoMi phones

It has been widely reported that Xiaomi device owners in China are blocked from installing Google Mobile Services (GMS), the core infrastructure for Google’s services and proprietary apps. However, only two months ago, Xiaomi refuted these reports, calling it a rumor.

Xiaomi refutes rumor it no longer supports Google Mobile Services (GMS)
Xiaomi. Photo: VCG Chinese leading smartphone maker Xiaomi refutes rumors that it no longer supports Google Mobile Services (GMS) on its smartphones on Thursday.
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The company said it will no longer allow users to install the GMS by themselves but will provide more models with pre-installed GMS systems, according to a statement issued by the company on its official Weibo account on Thursday.
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The statement comes after some users who have purchased Xiaomi phones without pre-installed GMS started, reporting that they weren’t able to download GMS after recent updates. The company confirmed that it won’t affect certain domestic models with pre-installed GMS and international models which are all installed with GMS. Whether the phone is installed with GMS will not affect using non-Google platforms, said Xiaomi’s Director of the Smartphone Software Department, Zhang Guoquan, on Sina Weibo. “To pre-install GMS it needs to occupy 700M storage space and 200M of memory.
.
If the GMS communication is abnormal, it may cause excess heating and power consumption. That why some domestic versions don’t come with preinstalled GMS,” Zhang explained. “With the performance of processors, memory, storage space and batteries of new products continue to improve, we will definitely make the most beneficial choice for users under the premise of ensuring the using experience,” he added.

The fact is, all Google Mobile Services are banned in China. This has been repeatedly confirmed by Google, LLC. All smartphone manufacturers in China launch their mobile devices without GMS due to the indiscriminate ban.

It should be emphasized, however, that smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices can function completely normal without any of Google’s services or proprietary apps (YouTube, Gmail, Play Store, etc.). No matter what the “news” might lead to to believe otherwise.

For instance, Xiaomi has its own Android-based mobile operating system called MIUI, which receives consistent updates.

It is a common misconception that Google owns the Android OS. In reality, the Android OS is a fully open source mobile operating system platform maintained by the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Any manufacturer or developer in the world is free to use the Android source code to build their own Android-based OS. Google owns the brand name Android™, as well as the official Android™ logo.

In order for manufacturers to have their devices certified by Google and branded as Android ™ — and thus have Google’s services and proprietary apps preinstalled — these mobile devices must meet certain compatibility and specification criteria set forth by Google. Mobile devices with the Android™ branding are considered Google Certified (AKA “Play Protect Certified”).

So to fully answer your question, the answer is yes — Xiaomi (as well as other Chinese OEMs) is affected by the ban on Google Mobile Services (GMS), insofar as their inability to receive device certification by Google and thus preinstall GMS.

Xiaomi device owners in the US often install GMS and Google’s proprietary apps by way of sideloading APKs downloaded from third-party app repos and websites, such as The Open GApps Project

. Xiaomi device owners also flash their devices with a custom Android-based OS, such as LineageOS, followed by a pre-built Google services and apps installation package. As far as Xiaomi’s Android-based OS, MIUI, the manufacturer is in no way adversely affected by the China-wide ban on Google Mobile Services (GMS). Again, MIUI is regularly developed, maintained and updated by Xiaomi.

Bilateral trade as opposed to International trade

Currently, the RMB is only used for bilateral trades. And there are lots of examples of that.

China’s entire trade strategy is built on using a series of bilateral trades, which is quite different from the US strategy of using a multilateral organization.

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What is a Trading Bloc (Everything You Need to Know in 2019)

Take a look at the above image of trade blocs worldwide. Notice something unique about China? 🙂

You see, in a multilateral organization, such as a trade bloc, there are many nations, usually each with their own rules, including currency. Everybody wants to use their own currency, and nobody wants to use anybody else’s currency. Thus, the US Dollar is used as a compromise – it is nobody’s currency, so nobody gains an advantage over the other.

(Obviously the exception is the USMCTA, formerly known as NAFTA. The US is able to demand Canada and Mexico use US dollars because, well, the US is that much stronger)

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By contrast, this is China’s grand strategy – the Belt and Road Initiative. It is clearly not a trade bloc. All trade is done bilaterally. China and Kenya have an agreement. China and Djibouti have an agreement. But Kenya and Djibouti do not have an agreement.

When China and Kenya do business, they can exchange using RMB and Kenyan shillings. When China and Djibouti do business, they can exchange using RMB and Djiboutian francs. Or at least that’s the goal. If a country doesn’t want to do this, China and the bilateral partner will simply use the US dollar – at least for a time.

Thus, while the RMB is indeed part of the IMF reserve currency basket, and most major economies do hold a certain amount of RMB in their central banks to help facilitate trade with PRChina, those nations do not actually use the RMB for international trade.

Nothing there is absolutely nothing they can do… I mean there are 14 countries who want to completely decouple from China, they don’t say it outright, but their actions certainly confirm it.

The USA and those 14 countries hate the country of China, the CCP as the leadership, and by extension the Chinese people, because they are the party, the history, the ancestors to, the art and culture of China.

181 countries throughout the world are working with China on some of their largest infrastructural projects as well as shared technological projects, certainly the new Thorium Molten Salt Nuclear Power generation is going to be out there.

China is asking for those re-payments to be made in Digital RMB.

SWIFT and the USD as the international trading dollar is going down, whether you want to believe it… it is going to happen.

BTW, McKinsey & Co were just quoted on Bloomberg that China has officially passed the US as the richest country in the world.

SL-1

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Ever heard of SL-1?

According to a report by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, there were 60 criticality accidents

between 1945 and 1999. All told, these incidents claimed a total of 21 lives. Seven of these fatalities took place in the United States, and three of them occurred almost simultaneously on the night of January 3, 1961, at the site of SL-1.

Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One—“SL-1” for short—was a small experimental nuclear reactor built by the US Army. It was located at the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS), a remote facility 40 miles west of the town of Idaho Falls, Idaho. The reactor was undergoing tests to see if it could provide suitable amounts of heat and electrical power to remote army bases north of the Arctic Circle and in the DEW Line.

On the night of January 3, three technicians were getting ready to fire up SL-1 after it had been shut down for the holidays. Army Specialist Richard Leroy McKinley (27), a trainee, was observing the routine maintenance procedure, standing off to the side; Army Specialist John A. Byrnes (22) was the one actually performing the operation (standing on top of the reactor); and Navy Seabee Construction Electrician First Class Richard C. Legg (26) was supervising, likewise standing atop the reactor.

Something, however, went wrong. Badly wrong.

At 9:01 PM, an alarm went off at the NRTS security station. A heat sensor in the reactor room had detected an unusual spike in temperature. Six firemen immediately suited up to respond, though they probably weren’t expecting much: two false alarms had occurred earlier that day. As they approached the reactor site, the firemen noticed that steam was rising from the Support Facilities Building (where the reactor was housed), but that wasn’t unusual for a cold January night in Idaho.

The firefighters attempted to hail the technicians known to be working inside the Support Facilities Building, but received no answer. A security guard opened the gate for them. The firemen donned their Scott Air-Paks and went inside to investigate.

At first, nothing appeared out of the ordinary—except for the fact that McKinley, Byrnes, and Legg were nowhere to be found. Three still-warm mugs of coffee were sitting in the break room. Three winter coats still hung from their pegs. Puzzled, the firefighters moved on to the reactor control room.

That’s when they saw the radiation warning light glowing angrily on the control panel. That was the first sign of trouble.

As the firemen climbed the stairs towards SL-1’s reactor room, their handheld radiation detector suddenly roared to life. The indicator jumped beyond its maximum range—200 röntgens per hour (R/hr). Thinking (or perhaps hoping) that the device was malfunctioning, the firefighters returned downstairs and retrieved a second detector. The readings on this new machine also maxed out as they climbed the stairs. The firemen retreated once again.

At 9:17, a US Army health physicist arrived. He and the assistant chief firefighter, with oxygen tanks and masks, started for the stairs to the reactor room. Their radiation detectors jumped to 25 R/hr, and they briefly withdrew. Armed with a higher-range ion chamber detector, the two men attacked the staircase again. The detector registered 500 R/hr as they climbed.

When they reached the top of the staircase and peered into the reactor chamber, they couldn’t believe their eyes. The room was dim, and filled with steam. The floor was strewn with gravel, rocks, twisted metal, and other debris. There even appeared to be pieces of the reactor embedded in the ceiling. The two men saw nobody, either living or dead. Stunned, they went back downstairs to await the arrival of SL-1’s lead health physicist, Ed Vallario, and Operations Supervisor Paul Duckworth.

When Vallario and Duckworth arrived, they suited up, climbed the stairs to the reactor floor, and entered the reactor chamber proper. Poking through the wreckage, Vallario heard someone moaning in pain. He found McKinley, unconscious and in shock, his battered body all but buried under debris. Vallario and Duckworth located Byrnes soon thereafter, dead, his body likewise battered and bloody. Legg was nowhere to be found. Vallario and Duckworth decided to head back outside and get help for the wounded McKinley.

McKinley’s rescue took two hours, and several members of the rescue team were forced to strip off their masks and breathe contaminated air in order to save him. He was eventually retrieved from the reactor room and loaded into an ambulance, but before the vehicle could reach nearby Highway 20, McKinley breathed his last. He was pronounced dead at 11:14 PM.

As McKinley was borne away, four more men entered the reactor room to search for Legg, the third SL-1 technician. Eventually, they located him…above their heads. What rescuers had initially thought was debris embedded in the reactor chamber ceiling was actually the body of Legg, pinned to the ceiling. He had been impaled by one of the reactor’s shield plugs. He, like Byrnes, had been killed instantly.

It quickly became apparent that a horrific accident had killed McKinley, Byrnes, and Legg. SL-1, for reasons unknown, had apparently ruptured with enough force to spray radioactive steam and debris all over the reactor chamber and kill all three of its operators—pinning one of them to the ceiling like some sort of grotesque holiday decoration.

The investigation of the accident’s cause had to wait until the bodies of Byrnes and Legg could be retrieved. A team of men recovered Byrnes’s corpse, coated with blood and steel pellets, the following night. Legg’s body proved problematic, for obvious reasons. Not only was it difficult to reach, but it was by far the most contaminated by radioactivity. It took four days to plan the operation. First, a welder, working from a lead-shielded box attached to a crane, cut open the reactor chamber ceiling. On January 9, a ten-man team, working in relays of two (each relay only being allowed 65 seconds in the reactor room apiece), used long poles with sharp hooks at the ends to snag Legg’s mangled corpse, free it from the shield plug, and drop it onto an enormous stretcher suspended from a crane outside the building.

With the retrieval operation complete, investigators set themselves the task of determining what had caused the accident that had claimed the lives of three young men in so gruesome a fashion.

They initially doubted that this was a criticality accident. SL-1 and reactors like it were believed to be completely safe, and incapable of going critical in such a drastic fashion. But forensic evidence proved otherwise. Neutron-activated materials in the deceased men’s effects—copper-64 in McKinley’s cigarette lighter and the band of Byrnes’s wristwatch, and gold-198 in Legg’s wedding ring—conclusively proved that the reactor had gone prompt critical.

This, in turn, indicated that the reactor had undergone a power excursion. Investigators were later able to determine that SL-1, designed to operate at three megawatts, had jumped to a staggering 20 gigawatts in the span of four milliseconds. This power excursion—6,000 times what the reactor was rated for—had caused the event which subsequently killed the reactor’s three operators.

But what had caused the excursion?

A vital clue lay in the procedure which Legg, Byrnes, and McKinley had been performing the night of January 3, and the design of SL-1. The reactor was designed to have a large central control rod which was capable of greatly accelerating the nuclear reaction in SL-1’s core if it was removed too far. Part of SL-1’s pre-startup checklist required the technicians to pull this rod up four inches in order to connect it to its drive mechanism. Post-accident analysis, including examination of scratches found on the rod, revealed that the rod, instead of being withdrawn four inches from the reactor assembly, had been withdrawn twenty inches.

The results were catastrophic. With the rod withdrawn so far, nothing could stop the nuclear fission reaction going on inside the reactor from racing out of control. A 20-gigawatt power excursion ensued, sealing the three technicians’ doom.

From Wikipedia:

In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power excursion

caused fuel inside the core to melt and to explosively vaporize. The expanding fuel produced an extreme pressure wave that blasted water upward, striking the top of the reactor vessel with a peak pressure of 10,000 pounds per square inch (69,000 kPa). The slug of water was propelled at about 159 feet per second (48 m/s) with average pressure of around 500 pounds per square inch (3,400 kPa). This extreme form of water hammer

propelled the entire reactor vessel upward at about 27 feet per second (8.2 m/s), while the shield plugs were ejected at about 85 feet per second (26 m/s). With six holes on the top of the reactor vessel, high pressure water and steam sprayed the entire room with radioactive debris from the damaged core. A later investigation concluded that the 26,000-pound (12,000 kg, or thirteen short tons) vessel had jumped 9 feet 1 inch (2.77 m), parts of it striking the ceiling of the reactor building before settling back into its original location, and depositing insulation and gravel on the operating floor. If not for the vessel’s #5 seal housing hitting the overhead crane, the pressure vessel had enough upward momentum to rise about 10 feet (3.0 m). The excursion, steam explosion, and vessel movement took two to four seconds.

The spray of water and steam knocked two operators onto the floor, killing one and severely injuring another. The No. 7 shield plug from the top of the reactor vessel impaled the third man through his groin and exited his shoulder, pinning him to the ceiling.

(Did you see the part about the shield plugs being ejected at 85 feet per second? Jesus Christ. Poor Legg.)

Having established that Byrnes had withdrawn the control rod too far and caused the disastrous power excursion that killed him and two other men, investigators were left with only one question.

Why?

Why had Byrnes, a trained technician, made such an egregious breach of protocol and committed such a foolhardy and dangerous act?

Theories ranged from the mundane to the outlandish: suicide, murder-suicide, an attempt to smooth the rod’s transition in and out of the reactor, or simple clumsiness. The best theory investigators were able to come up with (based on post-accident experimentation) was that the control rod had become stuck as Byrnes withdrew it, and in his attempts to jar it loose, Byrnes accidentally withdrew it too far, causing the power excursion and the resulting movement of the reactor vessel.

But the truth is…we’ll never know.

The only three witnesses to the event—Byrnes, McKinley, and Legg—were either killed outright or died shortly afterward, denying us their testimony. There were no CCTV cameras which captured the event. We’ll never know exactly why Rod No. 9 was withdrawn twenty inches instead of the regulation four. The mystery of the SL-1 incident will never be solved.

Chili Chicken Soup with Cilantro Dumplings

Honorable Mention Bisquick® Recipe Contest 2010! Try a new take on delicious dumplings with chiles, cumin and cilantro to create an extra yummy soup.

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Chili Chicken Soup with Cilantro Dumplings

Ingredients

Soup

  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 1/4 lb boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1-inch cubes
  • 1 medium onion, chopped (1/2 cup)
  • 3 teaspoons chili powder
  • 1/2 to 1 teaspoon salt
  • 5 cups Progresso™ chicken broth (from two 32-oz cartons)

Dumplings

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As an American who has lived in China and wastes way too much time watching Douyin, I think I am qualified to answer this question.

Average people in China still idolize America and Americans quite a lot, and in my honest opinion, wayyyyy more than we actually deserve.

The average Chinese citizen is patriotic because their education does a decent job at conveying to them the legitimacy of their current government and the historical conditions that brought it to power.

At the same time, however, the opinions of the Chinese people have been colored, not by politics, but by the heavy contrast in the US cities they’ve seen in Hollywood movies versus the cities around them growing up.

The simple fact is, the US is a more developed nation, and for a developing nation like China, this is something to aspire to.

The average Chinese person does not have a highly politically-charged perspective of all things, and so they take it at face value — regardless of the amount of exploitation that might have taken place in order to get it to this point, the Chinese people still see the US’s development as a good thing.

Of course, Chinese cities are more developed now, so this sentiment will probably change pretty soon:

Even the better historically-informed of the Chinese population will indeed have a handful of reasons to like and respect the US: some of those being, the US assistance in the war against Japanese aggression, as well as a touching example of heroism in the form of Minnie Vautrin , a teacher in Nanjing who sheltered and saved thousands of Chinese women and children during the rape and massacre on the city by the Japanese in 1937.
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I’ve never had a negative reaction from a Chinese person on account of my nationality. To the contrary, I’ve been nothing but welcomed, invited to homecooked dinners, and treated with all the warmth and respect in the world. Now there are a handful of young people these days in China who have a much deeper grasp of geopolitics, and so they might take a more anti-US position. But these people are few and far between and even the most nationalistic among them would not try to pick a fight with you on the street or anything. They’d likely just be a bit more dismissive than everyone else.

All in all, Chinese people know their history and have confidence in their country — they have no reason to demonize others. Their primary goals are to see their own country and people thrive.

Because one day, a non-binary person unintentionally sabotaged the cause to a wreck.

This person is Arnaud Gauthier-Fawas, who appeared in the emission Arrêts sur images with four LGBT guests, presented by Daniel Schneidermann. A short video of the exchanges between the two persons became viral.

Arnaud looks like this :

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So, we have a person with squared jaws, a lumberjack beard, a man first name, first sign of calvitium and dressed as a man. When AGF was presented as an administrateur (masculine word in French), he agreed.

Then, Schneidermann talked about the fact that the four LGBT people that were invited were all men and why no woman would come.

Then suddenly, AGF disagreed to the notion that there was four men invited. He said :

“I don’t know why you say that, but I am not a man sir.”

Schneidermann was surprised.

“Your appearance.”

“You shouldn’t confuse gender identity and gender expression.”

“How do you define yourself?”

AGF replied that he defined himself as non-binary. We could see the LGBT guy on his left slightly refraining from laughter. Then he went into a passive-aggressive mode, complained about gender stereotypes and that Schneidermann mistook him for a man without asking him his gender first (but AGF himself called Schneidermann “Sir” without asking).

Afterwards, it was pointed out that everyone on screen was white.

Then suddenly, AGF disagreed to the notion that everyone was white :

“I’m not white, I’m half-Lebanese !”

This video would have been a sketch in the 90s. AGF became a meme, the video was parodied countless times. Even some non-binary persons would describe AGF’s behaviour as crazy.

It was clearly a case of narcissism. We could see psychological manipulation at play, with double-standards (“I am not a man sir.”), incoherency, passive aggressive behaviour, victimisation and borderline racism (“Lebanese” isn’t a skin colour) from a regular guy who wanted to feel special.

It’s not so much the non-binary cause that is the issue, but the way non-binary persons behave.

You can’t change society just like that because you say so. You can’t impose your own standards to everyone with manipulation like a spoiled brat. You can’t dictate your views on such a nebulous concept as gender without even any scientific credential.

You have to ask, you have to convince. That is how true progressivism works, and it’s never that easy.

Bending the knee to any whim because it makes you feel like a good person isn’t progressivism, it’s decadence.

Even the better historically-informed of the Chinese population will indeed have a handful of reasons to like and respect the US: some of those being, the US assistance in the war against Japanese aggression, as well as a touching example of heroism in the form of Minnie Vautrin, a teacher in Nanjing who sheltered and saved thousands of Chinese women and children during the rape and massacre on the city by the Japanese in 1937.

I’ve never had a negative reaction from a Chinese person on account of my nationality. To the contrary, I’ve been nothing but welcomed, invited to homecooked dinners, and treated with all the warmth and respect in the world. Now there are a handful of young people these days in China who have a much deeper grasp of geopolitics, and so they might take a more anti-US position. But these people are few and far between and even the most nationalistic among them would not try to pick a fight with you on the street or anything. They’d likely just be a bit more dismissive than everyone else. All in all, Chinese people know their history and have confidence in their country — they have no reason to demonize others. Their primary goals are to see their own country and people thrive.

China’s BYD signs land deal to build first EV plant in Thailand

Part of the belt and roads win-win program.
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Article HERE

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Indian here.

Here is the face of corruption in India which most other Indians on Quora have been fortunate to have never witnessed.

Previous answers by Indians have said so much about various aspects of corruption in India. Surely, almost everything that could be said has already been said.

Unfortunately, I can only wish that were the case.

Other answers by Indians have something in common… they are mostly written by reasonably well to do people who can write in English quite well and are able to write an essay length answer on Quora. This gives us a hint about the Indian demographic answering this question. Simply because of better education and sense of their rights, this demographic is largely isolated from the type of corruption that afflicts the others.

I belong to this group now… but I was part of a very different one during my childhood – the lower / lower-middle economic class. The corruption faced by the these classes is quite different, as you will soon see. I will only talk about those (skipping the usual all pervasive corruption related with driving license, passport, traffic tickets, etc).

A little background to set the ground work…

I come from a relatively poor, densely populated place in New Delhi (near Ambedkar nagar), where I had an exciting childhood growing up with a large number of friends (~25). I spent all my childhood mostly playing cricket. As one might expect, education was not a high priority. Only 7 of these friends stayed in school beyond 10th grade and just 3 studied beyond 12th. Everyone else dropped out for one reason or another, and their parents really didn’t care about it all that much. I was the only one who went on to get a masters.

A couple of my friends are bus drivers/conductors in commuter buses (red/blue line buses in Delhi) and a few others work as office peons – basically the Rs 5k-8k ($100) monthly salary bracket. My parents had emigrated to New Delhi 10 years before I was born, in search of a better life. Hindi and English were not their best languages, but they got by.

Here we go…

1. “Do not go to the police, no matter what”.

My sister was told by my parents – “In case of any incident (molesting, purse snatching, etc), DO NOT go to a police station – especially never after dark and never alone. Catch an auto rickshaw and come home right away…”.

This might be surprising to some… but enough incidences of poor young women being molested inside the police stations were known that this was just common sense of the place. Also, this is mostly a poor neighborhood issue. Policemen know enough not to try such atrocities in the more affluent neighborhoods.

I can hardly imagine the plight of the women who have been victims of a crime, and who go to the police station to seek some recourse, where they have to face further humiliation / molestation / injustice. Definitely makes them forget about the original problem in a matter of seconds.

2. “Do not report burglaries” or “Do not let the police know your economic status”.

This is a funny one, especially since its coming from the relatively poor.

When our house was burgled and the thief fled with a VCR and stereo (probably the TV was too bulky to run with), we did not report the incident to the police. Since bribery is such an integral part of life there, you don’t want the authorities to know your actual financial state (no matter what it actually is). If they don’t know your economic state, you can always plead that its worse than what they think – which we always did. But if they come to know that you owned a vcr/stereo or they see a 25″ color TV in the home, you are going to pay through the nose for the rest of your days. Also, the thief is not going to get caught anyway, and even if he is caught, you won’t get the stuff back… so no point in calling the police. This is another “common sense” rule of poor localities. Do not report burglaries and don’t let them see your house on the inside.

Of course, now you might ask, what happens if we catch a burglar in action? It seems that we would have to call the police in order to arrest the thief. Well… this depends on people’s disposition at that moment. Usually, people prefer to deal their own brand of justice to the thief and park him in the nearby doctor’s clinic rather than troubling the police (who would probably have beaten him worse – unless he was able to bribe his way out).

3. “In the land of the poor, the police are the mafia”.

When I was about 15, we used to play cricket in a park, which had a small illegally erected shack on one corner selling tobacco products ( staying in place by paying bribes to the police ). The person running this shack was never happy to see us play there. To this day, I fail to understand the root cause of his resentment – maybe he was just an unhappy person tormented by the system. Every time a ball was hit in the vicinity of his shack, he would give us angry looks, and tell us to go and play somewhere else. If a ball happened to fall harmlessly into his shack, he would make a hue and cry about it, give us dire warnings and we would never see the ball again.

One day, our ball hit a plastic candy jar kept on the edge of his shop, which fell to the ground. The guy flew into a rage, grabbed one of our bats, broke the stumps and we all got into a big argument. He called the cops and reported that we had broken things in his shack and roughed him up.

The cops, who are ever watchful for such an opportunity, promptly arrested the 3 kids they could get their hands on, bundled us into the gypsy (typical police car model in India) and took us to the police station. We tried to protest, for which, we got slapped sharply and were told to be quiet unless we wanted more.

At the police station, we were asked for our names, addresses, phone numbers and parent’s occupations, which were duly noted down (not an official FIR (crime report book), but in generic visitor log book). Then we were taken to a room which already had 3 other poor wretched looking men in a rooster (murga) position (for those who don’t know this stance, its an utterly self-disrespecting pose where the person completely bends over at the waist while the butt is held high suitable for caning – it becomes physically uncomfortable and painful after a couple of minutes).

We too were then asked to assume a rooster position until the Inspector was ready to deal with us. I now understand that they needed all our info to know how best to make a profit from this situation. From the addresses and parent’s occupation, the inspector deduced that our parents are too illiterate/ignorant to protest.

The officer came to the room where we were struggling to maintain the rooster stance. He kicked my friend who was a bit unstable, made him get up and slapped him viciously across the face. He grabbed a large lock of my friend’s hair and swung him around the room, saying… “You guys want to grow up to become dons… is it? Beating up the shop keeper and destroying his shop. Next, you will be asking for hafta (weekly ransom extracted by mafia).”. “No sir. We didn’t do anything. We were just playing cricket…” Of course, he knew that already. Silly us. Also, the irony of the situation probably didn’t dawn on the inspector – that he was doing exactly what he was accusing us of – taking bribes from the shopkeeper to let him run his business.

Each of us was slapped around by the inspector, and physically abused in a general manner for the next few minutes. And to further humiliate us, he told us to slap each other… we were forced to do it. He slapped me hard because I didn’t slap my friend hard enough. And we resumed slapping each other, harder this time, tears streaming down our faces.

In the meanwhile, they had also called our parents and summoned them to the police station to deal with the “grave matter”. They did not call all the parents at the same time, lest the parents get together and start protesting. They called each parent after they were finished dealing with the previous one. (This is my assumption of their plan – I can’t be sure if the cops planned it this way, or it just so happened that all the parents happened to arrive at the police station at separate times. From my other experiences with the cops, I believe it was planned.)

Once each kid’s parents arrived, they were told that releasing the kids for any amount of money was out of the question; the police have received a complaint from the shop keeper and the only thing they could do – for an appropriate price – was to “not beat the kids” while they were in the police station. ( This technically makes sense because what we received earlier is not really a Delhi police beating… they were merely “scolding” us. A beating usually requires hospitalization and leaves a person bed ridden for days.) Parents were told that the kids will be taken to a magistrate in 2 days time and they should arrange for a lawyer.

Of course, all of this was bullshit but our parents were too stupid to know it. All the talk was just to scare the parents to pay whatever they could muster. Our parents had seen cases to go courts and people not being able to afford the lawyer fees or the police and court bribes. Our parents pleaded and groveled in front of the police officer to take more money and let the kids go. The matter was finally settled for around 2000 per kid, which was a nontrivial amount for our economic state at the time (early 1990s).

This is not just a solitary incidence – there are tens of other similar horrific incidences endured by people known to me personally. The police are on the prowl for any hint of an activity which they can benefit from. We had a nickname for policemen… “sabse bada gunda” – “the biggest mobster/villain”. If they can’t make money from a person because the person is too poor, they physically abuse them for their own entertainment. I am sure every New Delhi resident has seen a poor guy being mistreated by a policeman (being slapped/kicked/beaten in public view). It’s usually assumed that the poor guy has deserved it and no more thought is given to the matter. You can see how this system can lead to alternative systems of justice like the ones depicted in the movie Sarkar (~Indian remake of Godfather).

4. “You can get slapped by a policeman at any time and for no reason”. There are too many incidences of getting slapped or beaten by policemen in the normal course of a day to be narrated here in detail. I do remember 2 incidences clearly, which I will describe below…

4a. This happened when I was about 20. I and a friend were hanging around late at night (11 pm), catching up on each other’s latest activities as we had been out of touch for more than an year (I had started college and was staying in the hostel, and came back home once every 3 months to visit). We were sitting at our usual get together spot where we used to wait for players to gather before going for playing cricket.

As we were happily talking away, I noticed a couple of policemen walking towards us. A dread took its grip over my mind, heart and throat. The policeman asked… “Who are you and where do you live?”. I took an audible gulp down my throat and answered “Right there Sir.”, pointing towards my house. “Go home and talk all you want in your house. I don’t want to see anyone loitering around here” he ordered.

Fortunately and unfortunately, the college scientific education was having an effect on me, where I was taught to not accept things without question. However, I didn’t realize that those teachings don’t quite apply outside the classroom. I mumbled “But sir, what has happened to warrant this? We have always spent tim…” BAMM!!! and he slapped me right across the face. “What did I just tell you? Move, else you will receive more.”

Why did the policeman slap me now while we had enjoyed that precise spot for years? I understood this the next day.

A new computer training shop had opened doors near my house about 6 months ago, and the shop owners had trouble getting girls to sign up for the training lessons. Apparently, some girls had been teased by boys loitering around the shop and the owner had paid the policemen to keep the area clear of loitering boys at all times.

4b. It is assumed by default that if you are roaming in a better location than where you belong, you are there for no good reason, or probably to plan a robbery. Incidences like the following one were repeated many times between the age of 10 and 17.

I was walking home from school one late evening after spending time at a friend’s house. I unfortunately managed to walk into 2 policemen on the way, while I was still in the “better” locality (I liked to walk this way because the houses and the roads were so nice). I am usually on the lookout for policemen while walking around, but this time, they sprung up on me as I rounded a corner. The expression on my face and the fear in my body language immediately gave it away that I was an outsider in this area, feared the police and have been at the receiving end of their abuse on earlier occasions. “I was one of those who feared the police on sight for no fault of mine.” I could not even make a run for it, though I did think about it for a second.

The next scene played out in a manner similar to how it had already played out many times on earlier occasions… “What’s your name and where do you live?”. I was so stupid and scared that I never thought that I could lie to these guys and slip away. Naah… if they ever came to know I had lied, they would beat me to death and I would have deserved it. Now, I can get away with a few slaps and only getting my hair pulled mercilessly, and promise to never come to this place again. Now that I think of it… I should have kept my hair cut really short – maybe get my ears clipped as well (the cops loved pulling those too) – basically keep all body parts inside the body.

5. “Authorities take extra advantage of poor/ignorant people”.

An answer by another Indian for this question claimed that poor Indians face lesser corruption in India (as compared to more affluent ones)… I laughed a little on the outside and cried on the inside. Only if they knew.

We (family of 5) lived in a tiny house having only 1 room and a total area of 200 sqft. As we kids grew up, some of us had to sleep on the roof in order to not bump into each other during the night. When it rained, all of us had to fit into the 1 room. Good times – I loved it.

My father had saved some money over a period of 15 years to extend the house (add a bedroom / bathroom), but the building laws and provisions did not allow for any construction/extension at all (or that is what we were told by the authorities and we were too dumb to read and understand all the laws. The fact that my parents were not fluent in English and Hindi made matters worse. And how can the authorities lie about laws?). They said we needed to file for special permission from the building authority for the new construction. That the procedure will take about 6 months to complete as the signing authority is extremely busy with other cases…. of course, for X amount of money, it can be done in a few days. Everyone else we knew around us was also equally dumb and was being taken for a similar ride by the authorities (hence, at the time, we didn’t know for sure that we were being fooled – we really thought that they were doing us a favour (for a price)). The poor have to pay bribes even for legitimate constructions.

We had no option – my father had to pay the bribe. Or else, stay in the 1 room for… eternity?

As soon as construction began, the police could smell some money being spent and they wanted their share. My father believed that the authorities and police were colluding and that the police had been informed about the construction by the building authorities. They came to inspect the building activity and demanded to see all the paperwork – today I know that the police had no business conducting such ‘inspections’, but the poor can’t question the police. Also, there are always some papers which you won’t have. Or they will make up some bullshit paper that you needed, right out of thin air. And while they are conducting their ‘inspection’ and negotiating the ransom, the construction work is halted, preferably with the concrete in a half poured state. They are good at their stuff. And you can’t complain to anyone because you are not smart enough to know that you might be right and have all the required paperwork. You can’t really complain about the police to anyone… what if the police come to know about it? They have arrested and beaten people in lockups on no/fake charges many times before… what’s going to happen if they knew you complained against them?

And even if you decide to complain, who are you going to complain to… and why would they take your side in this argument? From a poor man’s perspective, all authority is allied with each other. Every time you have dealt with authority in the past, each and every one of them, without exception, has tried to make more money off you. Its much more easier to just pay these guys to go away. It doesn’t even help to ask around if you really have made a mistake, because no one around you is smart enough to know all these details… because, if they were smart, they won’t be living around you. Only the authorities know this stuff and they are not on your side. Anyway… we paid again.

And we were forced to pay money again and again and again… whenever we had to deal with the authorities, for each and every thing that we didn’t understand. Sometimes we did know everything, but then, they would construct fake and arbitrary hurdles for us to jump over (they can tell who’s stupid). Its paying for your lack of education in real and hard currency. I think that’s the reason why my parents made sure that the kids got well educated despite it costing more. We were the only kids in the neighborhood who went to English medium schools (for the foreign readers – English medium school = language of tutoring is English rather than Hindi for all non language subjects like math, science, history, etc).

Cop in training:

I remember another childhood experience (~12 years old) where a novice policeman was practicing his bullshitting skills. I was riding my bicycle on a main road when a cop stopped me and asked me for my bicycle license. I had no idea that I needed a license and immediately felt stupid and guilty at the same time. I timidly said that I did not have it, whereupon he scolded me “You should know that you need a bicycle license to ride on a main road. Do you have any idea how dangerous it can be?”. He asked me to get off the bicycle, confiscated it and told me that I will have to pay the fine of Rs 20. (In case any non-Indian is wondering, there is no such thing as a “bicycle license” in India).

I started crying and I told him that I was very sorry and that I didn’t have any money. He told me to go and get money from my parents and then he will release the bicycle. I didn’t want to go and tell my parents that I had got into trouble for which they needed to pay money – they had previously told me to keep off the main roads while riding my bicycle – now I had done 2 bad things – didn’t listen to them and got fined. I spent the next half an hour crying, pleading, groveling and appealing to his merciful side to kindly let me go. Finally, realizing that nothing is going to come out of this, he let me go, probably making a mental note of what to change in his strategy the next time around.

A slice of my father’s struggles…

My father has endured much more abuse from authority in his life, but I never discussed these at length with him. However, I did see him struggle with this menace for most of his life. Throughout his life, my father worked hard and saved money to realize his dream of a better life for himself and the family. Once the kids became independent, he bought a plot of land on the city’s outskirts (greater noida) to set up a workshop to sew readymade clothes. He was 70 years old at this time and traveling ~80 kms everyday to get all the necessary clearances/paperwork and spending his hard earned money on bribes.

He was doing these trips in a beaten up old car that he had brought so he could do this quickly (he didn’t have much time or energy). Even though he was resigned to paying bribes, they made him run from pillar to post, so they could demand even more money than he was offering them upfront. For a 70 year old man, he was tormented in an inhuman way by the officials, but he persevered. I have no doubt he would have been able to pull off this project of his.

Unfortunately, he was finally broken by an untoward incident. One fateful day, a riot broke out (probably against police brutality) in a couple of villages/towns in the Greater-Noida area, where my dad was passing through on his way to the authority’s office. The rioters blocked the road and stopped the car, broke the windows, pulled my father out of it and set the car afire right in front of his eyes. He is the most determined person that I know, but he could not recover from that. What the government officials could not achieve with years of abuse and torment, was achieved by the rioters. He could fight the system… but now the general people had attacked him… it rends my heart as I re-live all this. I had not cried in the last 15 years, but remembering and writing all this brings back terribly painful memories.

Often in the movies, I had come across the question “If you knew that this was the last day of your life, how would you spend it?”.

Until the age of 20, my “perfect last day” was to get a machine gun and go around killing each and every policeman and government official that I could lay my bullets on. I had dreamt / romanticized about this so often in my mind that things could have easily gone in that direction, had life continued to be the hell that it was.

I once explained to a higher economic class friend about some of the pain that we had to go through. I must not have explained it very well because they said…

“You are trying to do things which you are not capable or smart enough to handle properly. If you don’t handle it properly, nobody else can help you out and you are paying for it. Suck it up!!”

Harsh, but it clearly brought into sharp focus one of the facts that life had been trying to teach us since the very beginning.

“I am the only person who can help myself. No one else can or will help me. In fact, everyone else will try to take advantage of me at every possible opportunity. It is my responsibility to become smart enough to avoid corruption”.

When we were in trouble, we were often looking for someone to help us out or to sympathize with our problems… the system, the government, the neighbours, and friends to a certain extent. Unfortunately, we were surrounded by vultures on most sides. And friends can only do so much before you feel that you are being a burden to them. We took our time to realize that we are on our own and only we can help ourselves. There is not much point in complaining or being pitied.

My dad understood this, at least at some level, but never had time to explain this to me properly (or maybe I was not smart enough to understand it then). It had been slowly dawning on me and the process took a long time to completely mature and it all made sense then.

Yes, I am that stupid.

I am Tanzanian.

China is not helping Africa. China is trading with Africa, and sometimes investing in Africa.

“Helping” is what Westerners pretend to do. But we know what their game plan actually is. It’s far from helping.

Westerners donate inconsequential amounts to fund things like “democracy”, “human rights”, “women empowerment”, “education”, “health”, “wars” etc. Things which have little impact to development, and are not sustainable (ie they don’t make money) so they’ll help Westerners create the myth of perpetual Africa aid.

The real deal in terms of economic development is industrialization, and not human rights, democracy, women empowerment, etc. Little things like those take care of themselves once there’s industrialization and the money is flowing in.

Western aid is mainly two things:

  • (If given directly to govt) A bribe to buy influence and certain leeways in Western extraction of Africa wealth.
  • (If done by NGO’s and charities) just a way for Westerners to milk their fellows in the West to fund their lavish lifestyles.

The West is also very big on war mongering, assassination of African leaders (you are Belgian so you should know what you did to Patrice Lumumba), meddling in African politics, creating wars, etc. The West generally has ill-will toward Africa and thinks of Africa as colonial land to date.

China doesn’t do aid.

It does things like this Kilamba New Town in Luanda (pictured below) whereby a new housing development was built in exchange for oil. This is a much better deal that paying for oil with cash as the cash is often squandered and very little goes into building the country.

This is trade.

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Building lots and lots of roads, railways, and bridges. China often offers the best value for money in such grand public works meaning they do quality work at low cost.

Examples:

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This is trade.

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Things like these are never associated with The West in Africa. They are associated with China. They help a lot in creating the good image of China in Africa.

And the kicker of it all, the govt of China doesn’t have a colonial mindset. It never tells African countries how to run our countries. They simply look for opportunities and trade.

Now don’t mistake this as “Africa depends on China”. No. We understand development is our own task. Understand this only in terms of geopolitics as each country in the world is involved in geopolitics.

Also many Westerners come off as extremely phony in how they talk about China relations with African countries, because they seems to be unaware on how their own countries are connected to China and how much trade they do with China.

It’s extremely phony that Westerners don’t see that. For instance USA seems not to notice they have more Chinese people in their country than all the Chinese people in all 54 African countries. They seem not to notice that they have Chinatowns and “eating Chinese” has become a TV trope in their TV shows.

It’s phoney that to the West “China in the West” is ok, but “China in Africa” is bad.

I lived in Shanghai for three years and worked at a university. I lived in an average apartment, in an average area of town, and took the metro to work.

I would say it was a pleasure.

Life in Shanghai is inspiring, friendly, and rewarding. I also regularly visited Beijing and Wuxi, which had a lot to offer, as well. What makes China a pleasure, in my opinion, is the following:

  • amazing food, and it is everywhere, and you will have the time to eat it;
  • the Chinese are great fun; energetic, witty, resourceful, and quick to share a laugh or a smile; I’ve had a blast with the people there! Even ended up taking one home with me, first to England, then on to Sweden.
  • interesting expats everywhere; you will meet much more interesting people in China than you could ever hope to meet at home; westerners who come to China are usually highly qualified people with unusual views, and it is great to hang out with them, and they will want to;
  • the cities are mindblowing; huge, glitzy, full of opportunity and strange things that will entertain you endlessly;
  • you can actually be someone in China; everything grows so fast, before you know it, you are the managing director of something, with your own team; China “made me,” I can say that for certain, because I was given opportunities there I never would have had at home.

I have lived in nine countries, and came to China from New Zealand. I had no expectations at the time, but was pleasantly surprised just the same.

Here some images from my very normal, Shanghai life that is quite attainable also by the Chinese, not just by westerners posted there on a contract (my apartment could have been rented by a normal, Chinese family, too).

My apartment:

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The entrance door to my apartment building:

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Where I worked:

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Traffic:

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A typical cafe:

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My favourite meal, Beijing duck, hot and sour soup, cauliflower and bacon:

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Yellow wine (a rice wine with about 12–18% alcohol), a pleasant drink I often enjoyed in the evening:

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China’s War On Pollution 2021 | 中国对抗污染

Xi Jinping is worth more than the combined total of Trump, Trudeau, Bush, Mitt Romney, Doug Ford, Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison, Shinzo Abe, Rajiv Gandhi, Silvio Berlusconi, and every other lavishly rich democratic leader who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, never had to do a day’s work in his life, never had to prove his abilities as an ordinary citizen or prove his merits as a leader even minorly through objective, competitive metrics, and never had to rise up the ranks of a meritocracy.

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All these leaders had to do was sail through the “cursus honorum” prepared for them by their families, as though they were crown princes getting groomed for the throne.

Usually this involves effortless admission into a prestigious university that their fathers and grandfathers studied at and donate to, graduation with lacklustre marks, and automatic employment in one lucrative, high—profile PR—like job after another, tripping on millions of dollars as they walk and erecting their political brand along the way.

A Western politician who is only worth a few million dollars is a pauper among his peers.

Rajiv Gandhi repeatedly failed his courses at Cambridge where he was “studying” to become an engineer, and later admitted that the reason was that he simply did not care. He was never in the mood to “muck it up” for his exams, as he later admitted. From his teens onward, everyone pretty much begged him to enter politics, because of his surname. He entered politics at 36, running for a seat in parliament that had formerly been occupied by his brother; the seat passed from brother to brother like a feudal estate. Four years later Rajiv became Prime Minister.

What kind of leadership is this? Government by celebrities?

The path of almost every US Senator is very similar. Born into a rich and prominent family, easily admitted into an Ivy League, was a poor student but very social, went into law or business (often the family business), and ran for his first office by his 20s without a record of actually having accomplished anything as a human. And unless he set an old lady on fire or got exposed as a paedophile, his political ascendance was assured. It’s kind of like your next 10 million dollars being easier to make than your first; after your first big election win, the rest practically land in your lap. You’re a brand, famous for being famous.

The exception is a fellow like Modi or Bolsonaro — from a plebeian background, but similarly unaccomplished and unproven. Instead of riches, he is enabled by the gift of having a big mouth and understanding the masses and knowing how to manipulate them. He is a masterful charlatan, actor and illusionist. Trump was so unique because he had both advantages.

This isn’t government “of the people” or “by the people.” It’s plutocracy and oligarchy, except when interrupted by mobocracy.

And once you observe what section of society is most loyally served by these politicians — even the reason they wage war so often — you learn that it’s not really “for the people” either.

Abe Lincoln’s words are dead and ring hollow.

Yeah, the more I see Western—style democracy in action, the more I fail to see the consecrated “of the people,” “by the people” or “for the people” part.

Japan’s leading statesmen are the grandsons of its leading statesmen from World War II and even earlier — some since the Meiji Restoration. You understand this? The same families in power for almost two centuries. This is called democracy, but in practice it’s rule by a tiny class of hereditary nobles. The US is almost the same.

A right—thinking man ought to respond with contempt when another man who has never sweated from his brow or proven his abilities is given leadership over him. For some reason, this is not the reaction from most populations.

It would very much be the reaction in China. Xi Jinping is respected and entrusted with leadership not because of wealth, birthright, privilege, a big mouth or the ability to whip the masses into a frenzy, but because of his history.

His proven track record as a man and ordinary citizen, a labourer, a leader of villages and communities who rolled up his sleeves like any peasant, climbing slowly up the ranks according to austere party officials who judged his performance, not according to masses who fell in love with his illusion.

When you really think about it, it’s illogical not to have more respect for the manager of any McDonald’s who got to his position ten years after peeling potatoes and scrubbing toilets, than for the leaders of Western—democratic countries who just had to come out of the right vagina or learn how to speak the loudest BS.

Rufus Story

“Rural coffee county Alabama. This teenager was filling up his Mustang when the older gentleman pulled up with his can for the mower and was patiently waiting.

The teenager noticed, pulled the nozzle out and said “sir will you please let me see your can?” He filled it up as the older gentleman objected but settled in to a story. When the kid finished, he put the nozzle back into his car to finish filling up his own.

He refused to take money from the gentleman and wished him a wonderful day. They are all over this country and they come in many shapes and colors. Don’t denigrate his generation. Train them to be like this. I can assure you, he was raised to say sir and ma’am. As he pulled out onto the blacktop he lit the tires up on his red stallion, smiling the whole time….. and so was I.”

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The definitive end of the Unipolar Era, 1992-2022

The definitive end of the Unipolar Era (by stopping the expansion of Nato/KFC-AZAEL : Kakistocratic Feudal Conglomerate of the Anglo-Zio-American EstabLishment) & the start of International Relations entering a New Era and Global Sustainable Development.
This has been declared in Beijing on Feb 4, 2022 in unambiguous words together and publicly by XJP & VVP.
The Feb 4, 2022 joint Sino-Russian declaration is also a written document.
The Chinese ruling class decided to wholly throw China’s geopolitical weight in Russia’s favor for the creation of a new World system.
And the rest is History in the making.
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Also take note why the neocon effort to induce famine in 2017 - 2018 failed. -MM
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Seeing is believing. Open your Google Earth and have a look at what is really going on in China from above. Western media won’t normally tell you about this.

I will guide you through and point you where to look at.

Here are the coordinates:

Location 1: Ningde Bay, Fujian, China (26°43’02.8″N 119°57’45.2″E)

Our first destination is the coastal area in Fujian province.

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If we zoom in, we can find millions of floating houses and cages on the sea surface.

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If you look around the coastline from Zhejiang province to Guangdong province along the 1000 miles, you can see those floating cages are virtually “everywhere”.

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What are those? They are actually Chinese “seafood farms”.

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Instead of going out to the oceans and catching wild seafood, why not stay in the same place and raise your own seafood? And you can actually make more money with much less effort from raising fish, shrimps, crabs, lobsters, clams, etc.

It is not just sea or ocean waters that are being farmed, Chinese farmers find any possible open water such as reservoirs, rivers, lakes for farming their seafood/freshwater food.

Imagine each of the cages contains tens of fishes and crabs. That’s A LOT of FISH!

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So how much seafood does China consume?

It is estimated that the global demand for seafood consumption is 143.8 million tonnes per year and China alone has the largest seafood consumption (65 million tonnes, 45% of global consumption), followed by the European Union (13 million tonnes), Japan (7.4 million tonnes), the United States (7.1 million tonnes) and India (4.8 million tonnes). (Source: EU SCIENCE HUB)

As we know, both China and India have a similar population but China consumes 12 times more seafood than India, despite the fact that India is in a better geographical position surrounded by warmer oceans in a tropical fishing-rich region.

Among the 65 million tonnes of seafood consumed in China, only 15 million tonnes are caught from the wild, the rest of 50 million tonnes are all raised by aquaculture “farming”. In contrast, 90% of Japanese seafood consumption is from wild catch. Thanks to seafood farming, normal Chinese families can afford cheap seafood in their daily meal. This is a typical family get-together dinner settings: You can see lots of them are seafood!

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Location 2: Nanxun, Huzhou, Zhejiang, China (30°46’14.5″N 120°09’02.9″E)

Our next destination is the vast flood plain of between the Yangtze River, Taihu Lake, and Qiantang River. Thanks to the abundance of fresh water carrying nutrients from the river upstream, this area is so productive that it has raised over 100 million people here. And it is one of the most densely populated areas of China. This area is very similar to the flood plains in Bangladesh, West Bengal in India, Saigon in Vietnam etc.

What have the Chinese done differently compared to other densely populated flooded plains in India and Bangladesh?

Instead of growing rice, the Chinese have been growing a variety of “water food” that can sell at higher prices and makes them become richer than if they were growing rice. If you zoom in, you will find millions of fish ponds instead of rice fields. Besides the fish ponds, you might identify lots of green trees grown around them.

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These trees are mulberry trees used for silkworm farming. Over the past two thousand years, the Chinese have developed many sophisticated and sustainable agriculture ecosystems around these areas. One most famous eco-cycle is the fish-mulberry tree-silk cycle as shown in the following graph:

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Chinese farmers have been exploiting the ecosystem in fish, silk farming for thousands of years without knowing the concept of “sustainable development”. Nowadays, it is evolved into multiple cycles of “recycling” on the same land:

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However, in order to raise more fish in the ponds, you need an aerator that pumps air into the water, otherwise, the fishes would not have enough oxygen to breathe. In the following picture, the aerator is the white dot in the centre of each pond.

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Having an aerator requires every fish pond to be connected to electricity. How to generate electricity for the aerators? Yes, you are right: have solar panels.

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From Google Earth, you can see that solar panel fish ponds are already taking over some of the traditional mulberry fish ponds in China. Some of the areas in Huzhou area have already installed solar panels.

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Above picture: The left is the traditional mulberry fish ponds. The right is the latest solar power fish ponds.

Local fishermen and farmers are actually forced to learn the latest solar technology and sustainable techniques provided by professionals from the local Chinese government.

Why are the local Chinese governments so eager to promote high tech to the local farmers? In order for an official to gain promotion to the next rank, he or she has to demonstrate their “government performance”. Solar panel fish ponds is one of the best indicators for “promotion” as it fits well in the sustainable development initiative.

From this, you might understand why China has dominated the world’s silk production (84%), and freshwater fish production (66%) and solar energy generation (25.8%). In the Zhejiang, Jiangsu area, rural people eat fish almost every day. Some say that’s why people from these regions are more clever than other regions of China.

Eco-cycle option 2: lotus root – fish

In some fish ponds, you can also grow other kinds of vegetables while raising fish. One of the most widely grown vegetables is the lotus root. China lotus root production is 11 million tonnes which accounts for 90% of world production and 60% of the world export. Not only Chinese people like to eat them, but most of the lotus root production is exported to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

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Lotus roots are one of my favourite vegetables too, I hope China can promote this delicious root for the rest of the world to enjoy as well.

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Eco-cycle option 3: canola oil – bee- fish & crab

You can also grow rapeseed using the same principle. Instead of using fertilizers, at each winter, Chinese farmers dig the “nutrient mud” from the bottom of the water and stack on the bank. And then they grow different plants such as rapeseeds or taros on the mud. After thousands of years of continuous cultivation, the field has become something like this:

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Location: Duotian(垛田镇), Xinghua, Jiangsu, China 32°56’51.9″N 119°51’50.4″E

There are no roads. You can only navigate around using boats. Of course, that is why China is also the leading world producer of rapeseed oil (22% of global production).

Not to mention the massive beekeeping industry that thrived on the rape flowers in China, China takes over 30% of the global honey production.

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Actually, one-third of the honey consumed in the US are directly or indirectly from China. To avoid tariffs from the US, Chinese honey exporters would first export their honey to India, Philippines and Malaysia. Then they change labels and alter them to domestic production and sell them to the US. I’m sure this happens to other products too.

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Besides honey, this area is also where the most famous Chinese mitten crabs are produced. They can sell at $60 per kilo, therefore only the middle-class Chinese can afford this.

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Location 3: Shouguang, Shandong, China (36°44’15.9″N 118°44’14.7″E)

Our third destination is the great plain area in Shandong province.

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If we zoom in, we can find millions of reflecting “shiny” houses on the plain area. Try looking around, it is “everywhere”.

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What are those? They are greenhouses designed to provide regulated and controlled conditions such as temperatures and humidity for vegetables and fruits to grow.

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In the greenhouse, you can grow all kinds of different vegetables and fruits several times per year regardless of the time of the year. That means you can get several times more vegetable and fruit yield compared to a normal field.

For example, you need at least 52 days to grow lettuce from seeds until you can harvest them in a greenhouse. That means you can grow 7 times each year. That is 7x efficiency.

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Therefore greenhouses can significantly improve agriculture output in a limited space, which sounds perfect to the Chinese. Eager for promotion, local Chinese government officials in Northern China have therefore forced their constituency —the local farmers to install greenhouses with loans from the “Chinese Rural Cooperative Bank”.

What’s worse, they also forced them to install IoT based surveillance system in their greenhouses. Farmers are forced to be taught in a “reeducation camp” to use their mobile phones to monitor the status in the greenhouse including CO2, light strength, soil temperature, etc.

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As a result, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation, the vegetable and fruit production and consumption of China is around 700 million tonnes, which is 40% of the world consumption. Compared to India (180 million), China achieved 3.8x the amount of vegetable and fruit production, despite most of the population in India claim to be vegetarians, and despite the fact that the arable land in China is less than India. The secret key is the greenhouse.

List of largest producing countries of agricultural commodities – Wikipedia

Thanks to greenhouses, Chinese people can enjoy cheaper and a bigger variety of vegetables than any other country in the world all year round. You can check Wikipedia, basically, China tops the chart in almost every kind of non-tropical vegetable production, far outpacing second place. There are vegetables that are not ranked because they are only specific to East Asia, such as the “garlic chives” (韭菜).

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Similarly, for fruit production, China tops the global chart in almost every kind of non-tropical fruit production, far outpacing second place as well.

I was once pranked and called as “racist” when I invited a black friend over for a summer BBQ with lots of watermelons. I proved my innocence by showing him these statistics:

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In Japan, a watermelon typically costs 2000 yen ($18) and in China, you can afford a much larger watermelon just in 10RMB ($1.5). And watermelons in China are sweeter if they’re grown in Xinjiang. If you love watermelons or any other melons, come to China, especially Kumul in Xinjiang.

Location 4: Lhasa, Tibet, China (29°41’52.3″N 91°09’18.6″E)

Our fourth destination is also about greenhouses but in Tibet. Use your Google Earth and navigate to any town in Tibet. You will always find greenhouses.

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I mean, the Chinese government has also forced Tibetans to build a massive amount of greenhouses on the Tibetan plateau. Those Tibetans have no time to go to temples for worshipping any more, instead, they have to work in the greenhouses taking care of tomatoes. This is why Dalai Lama is not so happy to hear this.

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As a result, the average vegetable price in Tibet has reduced by 90% over the past decade and they don’t have to import vegetables from nearby provinces anymore. Most of the Tibetans can finally afford to eat watermelons. Who doesn’t like eating watermelons?

You know that most Tibetans historically only eat yak meat, milk, cheese, and bread? They couldn’t grow anything in such a harsh climate. Only monks could have the luxury to eat vegetables. Now it is the solid proof that the Chinese government didn’t just destroy temples in Tibetan culture but helped them eat vegetables and fruits.

Location 5: Kokdala, Ili, Xinjiang, China 43°43’51.2″N 80°35’21.5″E.

Kokdala is a city in northern Xinjiang, China, bordering Kazakhstan’s Almaty Region to the west. And here is the satellite image of the border between China and Kazakhstan.

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And you can clearly see there are more green farms on the Chinese side. On Kazakhstan’s side, there is nothing but barren lands.

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And actually, these lands are just wasted land as their soils are too acid and there is limited water to grow any food. You can only count on the water from the melting glaciers in the surrounding mountains. For people in Kazakhstan, it is too expensive to grow and they don’t have a big market to sell their products. That’s why those Kazakhs in Kazakhstan decided not to cultivate on those lands.

On the Chinese side, all the barren lands are cultivated by the special division of the Chinese government: XPCC Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps – Wikipedia

. This is a state enterprise with a military background. XPCC has amassed 2.6 million employees and farmers including Uyghurs and Hans and operate as a giant organisation. Therefore due to its scale, the cost of operation can be reduced and their market can be directly connected to the whole Chinese market.

Since the past three decades, XPCC has been sending its agriculture professionals to Israel every year to learn Israeli’s most advanced agriculture technology in a similar desert climate. Those Chinese students then returned to China and started cultivating those lands using the latest technology such as drip irrigation etc. Once they found those technologies can actually mature into profits, they would sell some of the newly cultivated lands to local Uyghur, Han, and Kazakhs families or hire them directly in the cooperations.

Some of these Uyghurs, Kazakhs are sent to the reeducation camps and they are forced to learn Mandarin Chinese and the latest drip irrigation techniques to save water and reduce costs. Moreover, each village is assigned with one or more communist party members to guide them through to make sure that they don’t mess up the newly cultivated land.

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Yes, the drip irrigation technique can significantly reduce water usage and cost. Thanks to the Israeli and domestic Chinese technology, they make the barren land in Xinjiang more and more fertile and productive.

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So what are those people growing on the new land?

Tomatoes, chillies, melons, grapes, and cotton. All of them can sell at higher prices than wheat.

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Thanks to the strong sunlight and cold nights in Xinjiang, those products are normally sweeter and tastier, so that they can sell for higher prices to the markets in China and the world. In China, people prefer to buy fruits from Xinjiang than the rest of China because of its great taste and quality.

Actually, agricultural efficiency is so high in Xinjiang that it produces much more than the Chinese market actually needs. Instead of relying on the “free market” causing the prices to drop and hurt those Uyghur farmers, XPCC, as a state enterprise, is pushing to sell those products to the rest of the world at higher prices.

What if the rest of the country doesn’t want to buy the products?

The communist XPCC is relying on China’s “superpower” to force those customers from the rest of the world to buy using some terms and conditions that you can’t refuse. This strategy is learned from the U.S. agricultural business model. This is exactly what the US has been doing. And this is what “state capitalism” is about. Whenever Xi Jinping is visiting a country, he is also in charge of selling those products to the country by signing “free trade” agreement using carrots and “implicit sticks”.

If you are not convinced, let us move to the next location for more proof:

Location 6: Hejing, Bayingol, Xinjiang, China 42°18’36.1″N 86°36’15.4″E

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What are those “red” lands in the middle of the desert?

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If we zoom in, you can see it is actually the land of “tomatoes” — billions of tomatoes. You can imagine the amount by measuring the total area.

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Next time you enjoy Italian spaghetti, Turkish kebab, or spreading Heinz ketchup on your chips, think about the fact that you may be eating tomatoes from Xinjiang.

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It might not directly say the tomatoes are from Xinjiang. These tomatoes might be first exported to a third world country and then rebranded just as the honey was.

Your Ketchup Probably Came from Xinjiang | Xinjiang: Far West China

China produces 56.3 million tonnes of tomatoes and dominates 1/3 of the world’s tomato exports. Over 14 million are from Xinjiang. You can verify this by looking at the global top ten ketchup companies The World’s Leading Producers of Tomatoes

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  • COFCO Group (China) 2nd
  • Xinjiang Chalkis Co. Ltd (China) 3rd
  • Fuyuan Agriculture Products Limited (China) 6th
  • Heinz (United States) 7th
  • Xinjiang Tianye Co., Ltd. (China) 15th

These companies are more or less the redistributors from the XPCC and the Chinese government. These companies can actually return most of the profits back to the Xinjiang farmers. And just recently the Chinese government is trying to sell Xinjiang tomatoes to eastern Europe through the one belt one road initiative. As Xi Jinping just visited Italy this March 2019, I am not sure whether Italy is interested in Xinjiang’s tomatos or not after Xi Jinping’s visit at this time. The western media will never tell you.

Besides tomatoes and chillis, China is also the largest producer of grapes, accounting for 19.1% of it’s global production. And the best grapes are from Turpan, Xinjiang, which accounts for the majority of that percentage. However, China really sucks at making wines from grapes.

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Finally, let’s talk about the main crops such as rice, wheat, and corns in China. They are the most important foods of all, not only to human beings but also to animals such as pigs, chickens, and cattle that produce meat and milk.

Here is a simple comparison between the top four producers across the world:

Arable Land: China 1086 India 1579 EU 1091 US 1631 (1000 km2)
Rice: China 208.1 India 169.5 EU 3.1 US 9.2 (million tonnes)
Wheat: China 134.3 India 98.5 EU 150.2 US 47.3 (million tonnes)
Corn: China 257.3 India 26.0 EU 60.9 US 366.2 (million tonnes)

As you can see, China is an all-around top crop producer compared to the other three regions. However, for a population of 1.4 billion, this is enough to be “filling” but still far from enough if the Chinese want to achieve similar “well-fed” status in per-capita consumption in terms of the developed country standard just like the EU and US.

Currently, there is just not enough arable land for China to produce enough crops to raise 1.4 billion people to the well-fed status. And what’s worse, the arable land in China is quickly shrinking as more and more land has been used for industries and cities.

Location 7: Xingtai, Hebei, China 37°35’54.1″N 114°55’20.8″E

To show you how the Chinese were quickly using up their precious land, our next destination is the great northern plain of China. This is where the most crops are grown in China. (Picture scale: top to bottom 1500km)

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If we zoom in to any location in the plain, for example, the Xingtai city, a 4th tier city, a “small” city with 7 million people. (Picture scale: top to bottom 60km).

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This is actually quite scary to many people. The green fields are the farmlands. These white dots are actually villages. Each “dot” contains around 500 people. The larger white regions are towns with around 10k to 100k people.

As you can see, as more and more people are getting rich and building large houses on the farmlands, those green land would be running out gradually. It is estimated that China is losing around 3,000 km2 area of arable land every year. Those arable land would be turned into “white” and dead concrete land. This is obviously a disaster and the Chinese government has been trying every effort to regulate the land uses. However, you just can’t control the huge momentum of “urbanisation” so easily.

Location 8: Qingyang, Gansu, China 35°41’00.7″N 107°40’38.3″E

The lack of arable land has been a “top concern” ever since the CCP has governed China. From the era of Mao Zedong, the CCP has been organising massive cultivations on hilly lands on different parts of China. There are countless examples. Here is the most significant one: Loess Plateau

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This 640,000 km² plateau is actually not suitable for growing crops. But if you zoom in, you can see all the valleys, all the hills are converted to arable lands. From above, all the cultivated lands appeared like “roots”.

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Just zoom in to any place, you would find all the hills are converted to terraces.

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However, people have found that creating too much terraced land would cause land degradation and destructive mudslide during the monsoon season. From year 1999, the CCP realised that its previous massive cultivation campaign does not improve crop production significantly but instead has caused many floods and mudslides, then it halted the cultivation and proposed the “Returning Farmland to Forest Program (退耕还林)” campaign.

For those lands with low yield, farmers are forced to give up their land and they have to grow trees on them. And for the farmers who lost the land, the government would compensate the farmers with a fee that is equivalent to the field earnings.

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The above picture shows the impact of the forestation and afforestation. This is proof that after many lessons, the CCP has gradually grasped the key to sustainable development.

Xi Jinping once said: “China highly values ecological and environmental protection. Guided by the conviction that lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets, the country advocates harmonious coexistence between humans and nature, and sticks to the path of green and sustainable development.”

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These are not empty words. Every “word” is backed by actual actions. Many people outside China may wonder why mainland Chinese still prefer Xi Jinping. One of the reasons is that he restructured the old bureaucracy of China to be more “environment focused”. For example, the local environmental officials now have the authority to impeach local mayors if the region has done badly in sustainable development.

The outcome of “Returning Farmland to Forest Program” is definitely causing the reduction of the arable land in China. However, despite the arable land degradation, thanks to the huge investment in agriculture technology, agriculture efficiency still improves, making its domestic crop production still increase.

One example is the new technology that allows you to grow rice using salty sea water.

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An 87-year-old scientist may have just unlocked the secret to growing rice in saltwater

Chinese scientists may have just found a new way to feed 200 million people

Despite the domestic crop production increase, China is still not self-sustainable in terms of rice, wheat, and corn. It has to import 10% of its annual consumption from the rest of the world. However, most of them are not directly for human consumption.

Example 1: Beer and Baijiu production

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Since 2006, China has become the world’s largest producer of beer with 46.5438 million kiloliters, which is more than double that of the US. It has increased production by 4.9% annually. Besides wheat, China has to import most of the hop plant for beers from Germany and the USA.

And China is also the world’s leading producer of spirit alcohol. Most Chinese people don’t favor Whiskey or Vodka, but prefer drinking Baiju, which is more fragrant and rich in flavour. The Baiju production is around 13.6 million kiloliters, which is much more than western people consume. And the local rice wine made by individual Chinese households is not even counted!

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As a result, some parts of China has a much heavier drinking culture that the rest of the world is not even aware of. Let me tell you. It is much heavier than the British and the Russians.

Example 2: Pig and pork production

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Global pork production

The above graph just shows how do the Chinese love pork so much. Some of the pigs raised in China fed on the corns imported from the USA and Brazil. This also applies to the chickens, cattle and other animals raised in China.

Conclusion

China is able to provide enough food which includes foods other than just plain rice or wheat. The variety of foods offered on the Chinese table is much more diverse and cheaper than within most developed places in the world. This applies to “poor people” as well. This is based on my personal experiences and observations after traveling to many different countries in Europe, the US, and Japan.

For example, in China, a group of eight people can sit at a round table, enjoying 20 different dishes including different meats, vegetables, desserts, etc. They don’t have to worry about religious restrictions, allergic concerns, and personal spaces.

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In Shandong, the total of this dinner costs around $50. The same set of 20 dishes could cost $150 in Beijing/Shanghai/Taipei, or $300 in California/Japan/Hong Kong, etc. And we are not counting the beers and drinks. Actually, most people in California/Japan don’t have the luxury to enjoy 20 different dishes at all but it is more than common in China.

After this extremely long post, I hope that you have learned something new about China and also now know how the Chinese can feed themselves far beyond just “enough”.

Costanza & Son | Seinfeld

Enjoy.

Slow-Cooker Creamy Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

Take 15 minutes to toss 7 easy ingredients into a slow cooker, and you’ll have a warm and delicious soup to satisfy hungry appetites.

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Slow-Cooker Creamy Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

Ingredients

  • 1 lb boneless skinless chicken thighs (5 thighs), cut into 1-inch pieces
  • 1/2 cup uncooked wild rice
  • 1/4 cup fresh or frozen chopped onions
  • 2 cans (10 3/4 oz each) condensed cream of potato soup
  • 1 can (14 oz) roasted garlic-seasoned chicken broth
  • 2 cups frozen sliced carrots
  • 1 cup half-and-half

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Biedronek

Let me introduce Biedronek. The name is a bit complicated to translate, but relevant to his story, so please bear with me.

Biedronek was found as a little kitten in the parking lot of a shop named Biedronka (Ladybird in Polish). Since “biedronka” is a female word and our little ball of fur was definitely male, he was named “Biedronek” which would be a male version of “ladybird”. A “Lordbird” of a sort.

Unfortunately, when he was found, he was dying. He was either ran over by a car or chewed on by a dog. His skull was partially crushed, his right ear was missing, and his right eye was severely damaged. Some good people rescued him and took him to a local foundation which saves homeless cats and dogs. This is his first photo, still in veterinary clinic, but already stable and recovering:

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For some time, his doctors and foundation caretakers thought that he is permanently blind and deaf, but after several weeks it turned out he can see and hear after all.

This is Biedronek a little bit later:

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He looks cute here, but the damage to his head left him with a permanent scowl on his face, with his right canine and right side of the jaw exposed most of the time. This is probably why no one wanted to adopt him from the foundation for six months:

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And after those six months we were looking to adopt a new cat, and we took an instant liking for Biedronek and his ugly mug. This is his first photo in our home (with our other cat, Carmen):

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Biedronek is living with us for almost five years now, he witnessed our wedding, he moved with us to a new home, and was with us when our son was born. He is only a little disabled, his right eye does not work, and he lacks 3D vision, but compensates for it by memorizing every jump in the apartament. Now he looks like this:

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Despite being almost five years old, he is still playful like a little kitten, and they get along with Carmen and our son very nicely.

Watch “Michael Hudson | American Empire Repeating History”

This video definitely deserves some of your time !
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Says it all in 15 minutes.
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Michael Hudson offered us here 15 minutes of a scholarly, straight to the point, lucid speech discussing supremely well about the arch-overused rapprochement between the so-called US-China rivalry and what happened 25 centuries ago between Athens and Sparta : the proverbial Thucydides trap having kindled the infamous Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) Thucydides (~460~400) chronicled and clearly explained.
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Any imperialistic oligarchy will preferentially and mostly loot its opponents first, its allies second and its people last but the plundering of the 3 groups can be simultaneous, of course, but at different degrees. The stripping and corraling of its own population at a high intensity and using methods of control and repression from different registers are sure signs of sharp decline if not imminent end (I avoid the word ‘collapse’ because it’s uselessly spectacular.)
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In 2013, he launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history. Today, over 149 countries have signed up — that’s more than 3/4 of the world’s nations! BRI is making many, many friends for China. The Chinese are brimming with pride.

He cleaned up corruption within the central government which was a sore point for the people.

In 2020, he finally eradicated extreme poverty (as defined by the UN) in China. This has been the goal of China for thousands of years and it was ultimately achieved under his watch.

In 2022, he successfully hosted the Olympic Winter Games. In addition to the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, the Chinese are brimming with pride.

In 2022, he launched China’s first supercarrier, the Type 003 named Fujian. China is the only other nation capable of building supercarriers. The Chinese are brimming with pride.

In 2022, he put China’s own international space station, the Tiangong, into space and he invited all nations to participate in China’s space station program, including the United States (recall that USA banned China from the ISS). What a class act! The Chinese are brimming with pride.

He protected the people from COVID-19 with a stunningly low 246,618 total infections and 5,226 total deaths at the time of writing (data from Worldometer). For comparison, USA had 97,026,001 total infections and 1,075,338 total deaths. Let’s remind everyone that China has 4X the population of USA.

He made China the biggest pollution fighter on the planet:

He avoided the US trap of getting sucked into a proxy war over Taiwan. (Putin got sucked into a proxy war over Ukraine.) Xi Jinping was simply too damn clever for the Americans.

All of the above make Xi one of the greatest Chinese leaders who ever lived.

China’s World Domination Through Trade Networks

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Fathom 1967 Anthony Franciosa,Raquel Welch,Ronald Fraser,Richard Briers,Greta Chi,Elizabeth Ercy

A great 1960s era movie! If you have a few hours, check it out.

At the least, just check out the first five minute into for a taste of real 1960s reality.

DM parses the Tunnel of Light

Finally, please enjoy these two videos where DM parses the remote viewing of the Tunnel of Light system.

I know this town in Western Pennsylvania and this is so typical…

I know this town.

Yeah. It’s not too far from where I (once) lived, and I (even) used to have relatives living there. Like most of the old steel sections of PA, it’s dead.

Dead.

Dead.

Nothing is going on there except government offices and a flourishing drug trade. The video discusses something that is so typical of what America has become.

Watch this clip… soak it up.

Tucker Carlson: This is shocking

Yeah. It’s a mess, and it’s typical for Western Pennsylvania. This is a tale of the “kids of oligarchs” taking over and driving a disaster further into the ground…

This is the last photo of fitness coach Dmitry Stuzhuk, husband of the famous Ukrainian blogger Sophia Stuzhuk and father of three little children.

Dmitry posted this photo on his Instagram account shortly before he fell into a coma and died. The caption ran: “I got COVID-19.

After returning home from vacation in Turkey, Dmitry was tested positive with Coronavirus.

He was suffering from problems with the cardiovascular system.

Earlier Dmitry escaped from the hospital, deciding to continue treatment at home, because “they don’t feed their patients.

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…There’s a guy playing with his kids, working in a gym, posting pics on Instagram, and vacationing in a five-star resort in Turkey, and the next moment he is being buried in a closed casket.

This is a reminder that life is short, so don’t postpone things you have always meant to do.

Tell your loved ones things you have always meant to say.

Because tomorrow it might be too late.

Every moment needs to be enjoyed to the fullest because this moment is all we got.

Kirk & Scotty after the fight with Klingons

Scotty threw the first punch!

Protecting your car from being stolen

My mom’s 1965 Ford Mustang.

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That’s my mom on the right with the ‘Stang, a ’65 she bought from her brother who worked at a dealership in Hollywood back then. He arranged for 5 Mustangs to be painted in a Thunderbird color just so she could get her preferred color without paying extra. It’s a rare car.

(Next to her is her good friend Cindy and her Thunderbird, year unknown to me. More on her and that car in a moment.) [Edit: Thanks to Matthew Lallo I now know that a 57 T-Bird. Thanks, Matt!]

That Mustang was stolen three times in the 80s and 90s. Each time the thieves were able to get into it, pop it into neutral and push it down the block to a small cul-de-sac to try to get it running. Each time they failed. Each time we found the Mustang sitting there, lightly molested but otherwise intact. I think we had to replace the radio once.

The reason they were unable to start the car is simple. Dad installed one of these:

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A small toggle switch mounted under the dash, too small to be noticed easily, acted as a simple ignition interrupt. The thieves pulled the wires off the ignition switch but were unable to get a spark. They’d pop the hood and check the battery, but weren’t able to figure out why there was no spark. None of them noticed the little toggle switch.

Mom was religious about flipping that switch each and every time she parked, and it paid off.

As a side note, Cindy’s T-Bird was stolen a number of times, too, and each time foiled, but they were using much more sophisticated anti-theft devices. I think it even has a LoJack. I find it kind of funny that Mom’s cheap toggle switch was just as effective as Cindy’s more expensive devices.

Arnold Ziffel Tests his Civil Rights – Green Acres – 1967 & 1968

Enjoy!

Question:

What can we do if China sends their troops to Hong Kong finally?

Answer:

PLA soldiers already stationed in Hong Kong.

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Did you drop out of elementary school or something?

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Have you not seen the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Forces Hong Kong Building in Central? It’s right next to Victoria Harbour. You can’t miss it.

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Seriously, I doubt whether you’ve even visited Hong Kong, let alone live there, dear Anonymous.

Chris Cornell – Black Hole Sun Acoustic

Enjoy.

It Is Going To Take “Trillions” To Fix The Massive Derivatives Crisis That Has Erupted In Europe

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This thing in Europe is rapidly becoming rather serious.  Vladimir Putin’s decision to end the flow of gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline has caused an enormous derivatives crisis to erupt in Europe, and it is going to take a giant mountain of money to fix it.  Some are already referring to this as a “Lehman Brothers moment” for the European financial system, and authorities all over the EU are really starting to freak out.  We haven’t seen anything like this since 2008, and if the Europeans are not able to contain the damage we could soon see a tsunami of financial panic sweep across the entire globe.

It is being reported that energy trading in Europe “is being strained by margin calls of at least $1.5 trillion”

European energy trading is being strained by margin calls of at least $1.5 trillion, putting pressure on governments to provide more liquidity buffers, according to Norway’s Equinor ASA.

Aside from fanning inflation, the biggest energy crisis in decades is sucking up capital to guarantee trades amid wild price swings. That’s pushing European Union officials to intervene to prevent energy markets from stalling, while governments across the region are stepping in to backstop struggling utilities. Finland has warned of a “Lehman Brothers” moment, with power companies facing sudden cash shortages.

We aren’t talking about 1.5 million dollars.

We aren’t even talking about 1.5 billion dollars.

1.5 trillion dollars is a colossal amount of cash.

To put this in perspective, if you were able to create a stack of one trillion dollar bills it would be 67,866 miles high.

So a stack of 1.5 trillion dollars would be over 100,000 miles high.

We often use the phrase “a mountain of money” rather flippantly, but this really would be a colossal mountain of money.

The problem is not with the physical markets.  Rather, we are being told that 1.5 trillion dollars in “liquidity support” will be needed because derivatives trading has gone completely haywire…

“Liquidity support is going to be needed,” Helge Haugane, Equinor’s senior vice president for gas and power, said in an interview. The issue is focused on derivatives trading, while the physical market is functioning, he said, adding that the energy company’s estimate for $1.5 trillion to prop up so-called paper trading is “conservative.”

1.5 trillion dollars is the “conservative” estimate that we are being given right now.

That means that the final bill will likely be in the “trillions”.

Where is all of that money going to come from?

Over the years, I have done so many articles about the dangers of derivatives.

Is the inevitable global derivatives meltdown finally upon us?

At this point, one option that the European Commission is considering is the “temporary suspensions of derivatives markets”

The European Commission is also examining measures to help with liquidity. These could include credit lines from the European Central Bank, new products as margin collateral, and temporary suspensions of derivatives markets, according to a policy background paper seen by Bloomberg News.

If they actually decided to temporarily suspend the trading of derivatives, that would actually create even more panic.

This entire crisis could be solved if the war in Ukraine ends and Russian gas starts flowing back into Europe.

But that isn’t going to happen.  Neither side is going to back down, and there will not be peace any time soon.

And so this is going to be a very bitter and very cold winter for Europeans, and the Russians are openly taunting them

Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom has taunted Europe with a sinister video warning about a long winter with snow and ice sweeping across the continent.

The two-minute clip titled Winter will be Long shows how Europe will freeze amid the exorbitant energy prices caused by Vladimir Putin’s savage invasion of Ukraine.

The footage shows a worker turning off the supplies, sending the gas pressure needle to zero, as icy clouds ominously creep across the screen, interspersed with aerial shots of Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London.

 

This winter, we are likely to see shortages, mandatory rationing and insanely high energy bills all over Europe.

According to Zero Hedge, it is now being projected that energy bills in Europe will increase by a total of 2 trillion euros and will ultimately reach 20 percent of all disposable income.

Needless to say, we are now in unprecedented territory.

We have already started to see absolutely massive protests in major European cities, and Italian politician Matteo Salvini is openly admitting that this crisis has brought Europeans to “their knees”

On Sunday Salvini urged an end to Russia energy sanctions which are only leaving Europeans “on their knees” due to higher energy bills and lack of supply. “Several months have passed and people are paying two, three, even four times more for their bills,” he said in an interview RTL radio. “And after seven months, the war continues and Russian Federation coffers are filling with money.”

He explained that not only are the sanctions not working, but they hit Italy harder. While saying he stands in solidarity with Ukraine, he’s not willing to stick with something obviously counterproductive where the blowback is felt more in Europe, Italy in particular with its soaring energy import prices, and not the intended target of the Putin government.

The longer the gas stays off, the worse things are going to get.

So what happens if the Russians never turn the gas back on?

Already, companies are shutting down facilities all over Europe because energy costs have made it unprofitable for them to continue operating.  This includes the second biggest steel producer in the entire world

The second-largest steel producer in the world, ArcelorMittal, is the most recent business name to announce the closure of a factory in Europe as a result of rising gas and energy costs.

Due to the outrageously high surge in energy prices, ArcelorMittal is shutting down one of the two existing blast furnaces at its steelworks plant in Bremen of Germany, starting by the end of September until any further updates.

Many have warned that Europe is plunging into a “recession”, but the truth is that what the Europeans are facing is much more serious than that.

This is going to be bad.

And things are going to stay bad until there is peace with the Russians, and the truth is that peace with the Russians may not happen at all.

Months ago, western leaders were openly bragging that they were going to crush the Russian economy.

It turns out that Europe is the one being crushed instead.

Summer is almost over, winter is coming, and the Europeans are completely and utterly unprepared for what is coming next.

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A lot better than before.

When I was living in China, Uyghur induced acts of terrorism were just every day events. Dozens of police were killed in Xinjiang every week. I wanted to go and visit some of the beautiful places in the Chinese wild west, but Uyghur friends strongly advised against it. My life would be in danger every minute I was there. Daily news reports confirmed this.

I nearly lost a good friend who was almost in the wrong place at the wrong time due to Uyghur terrorist acts. A group of deranged Uyghurs stormed into a train station in Kunming (which is not in Xinjiang btw) with big knives and started killing random people. My friend had just left the station 10 minutes before.

Uyghur fanatics were pressing for an independent islamic state in Xinjiang, and were perpetuating numerous acts of murder and mayhem to get their way. They would show up in Beijing with the family vehicle, with wife and kids on board, and go plowing into crowds of innocent people, killing as many as possible until they were finally stopped.

In such an environment, it’s impossible to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys.

Previous dynasties would have quickly exterminated the entire Uyghur population. The CCP demonstrated extreme restraint by just gathering everybody up and sending them all to facilities where they would be taught to be polite neighbors. Of course, the normal aggrieved crybabies wept their crocodile tears over the oppression that prevented them from doing random acts of murder. Waah waaah waaaah.

Xinjiang is a beautiful and safe place to visit now. Try it sometime. I plan on doing so when the pandemic stuff calms down.

Look at it this way. How would the people of the US react to a large group of Muslims taking over an entire state and attempting to establish an islamic republic within our borders, while perpetuating bloody acts of terrorism all over America? Would the US government exercise any restraint at all? I think not.

Liam Gallagher – Champagne Supernova (MTV Unplugged)

Ohhhhhhh.

About my Siamese cat “Kiki”.

Five years ago at 4:41am she started yowling and crying and walking all over me and nipping my nose. I couldn’t figure out what her problem was until I heard the most devastating sound coming from my Bengal cat “Mouseman”. He was 20 years old.

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my Bengal cat “Mouseman”

The night before he could not walk anymore. He lost a lot of weight. He had no control of his bladder.

I had an appointment for that morning for the vet to come to the house to help my boy Over Rainbow Bridge.

Anyway I awoke to him gurgling.

He was asleep on a blanket next to my pillow. I picked him up and placed him on my chest.

Kiki kept nuzzling him as he took his final breath in my arms breaking my heart.

If it weren’t for Kiki I would not have been able to say goodbye to my heart.

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Kiki

China!

When I first came to China for work, most of what I had known about China was from the western media.

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Trump visited Beijing’s Forbidden City (Nov 2017).

However, after living here for a few years, I feel that there are lots and lots of junk information in the western media. It seems that a good number of journalists, who write articles about China, in all likelihood, have never been to China. 🙂

Well, China is a lot better place than what we typically read in the English newspapers. In fact, China is one of the safest place to live on this earth.

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Shanghai.

Here are some simple facts about China:

1. Don’t get into drug related crimes. Even the Spartans can’t save you.

2. In general, you don’t need to worry about safety. You can wander in cities and in the countryside. You can wander in days and in the nights. No issues. Just don’t touch the law.

3. Learn some basic Chinese if you are coming to live here for a long term. It’s really important.

4. Learn to use chopsticks. You’ll meet them on a daily basis.

5. China is huge. So many awesome places to explore. Travel in China. I prefer to go solo. It’s fun.

6. People are very friendly and willing to help you all the time. Make sure to strike a conversation as most of the locals are shy, especially if you only speak English to them.

7. Try some local food. Much affordable, and delicious. There are so many authentic local food. You don’t have to eat those western pizza and burger in China.

8. Public transportation is very efficient, and couldn’t be cheaper. Just RMB 2/ride in Shanghai buses, doesn’t matter how far you go. Further, if you buy the city smart card, you can save more.

9. Economy is doing great. Lots of foreigners in China for work and long term stay. So many expat communities.

Living in China has been a wonderful experience.

The unexpected danger in Australia, is how far everything is. The distances are huge.

In the outback desert especially.

Travellers die there with unnerving frequency. Foreigners die; urban Australians die; local aborigines die. They drive in cars, they think the cars can handle it, they think they have enough provisions, but no, no, no.

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Guess what this shows? It shows the Shelton family—Steve, Skye, their 4 children—in the middle of the Simpson Desert. If you magnify the photo (The Australian Magazine, 24–25 November 2018), you will find their 1998 Nissan Patrol GU, plus their camper-trailer with a blue awning attached, plus the 2008 Nissan Patrol of Rick Shea and his daughter, who came to their aid. But who couldn’t do much, apart from stay with them.

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The Sheltons left the Mount Dare Hotel on Wednesday, 5th September 2018. They were at the end of a 4-week driving holiday from their home near Brisbane, Queensland, across the Northern Territory.

The Simpson Desert is 175,000 sq km in area and between 550 and 715 kilometres wide, depending on which track you take. It consists of more than 1100 parallel sand dunes running north-south. The Sheltons began driving to Birdsville, 477 km away.

On Friday morning, the engine stalled on the crest of a dune. Uh-oh. They had brought lots of water, but the aluminium container stored under the trailer had burst: 110 litres were gone. They had 84 litres left.

They had a UHF line-of-sight radio. It did not reach far, what with the undulating terrain, but it did reach Rick Shea and his daughter, who were driving to Rockhampton, Queensland. They arrived.

Rick had an HF radio, which covers 1000’s of kilometres. Rick rang the Birdsville Roadhouse for its recovery service. Birdsville said to ring the Mount Dare Hotel, which was “closer”: 240 km away. Mount Dare wanted $5000 upfront.

About 10,000 to 15,000 tourists cross the desert every season, and many break down. Mount Dare effects 20 to 25 recoveries per season. If a camper-trailer needs rescuing, that requires 2 trucks (there and back), wages for the mechanics, money for fixing the trucks (they break down too and suffer terrible wear and tear). It does not come cheap. More like, $440 per hour.

The Sheltons had problems with their credit card; they eventually got $3000 from their parents. They were told the rescue trucks would arrive on Sunday. The trucks did not arrive on Sunday. One of the trucks had been in a crash, the other was waiting for a part. The replacement parts were being sourced by the Kulgera Roadhouse.

It is 1 day’s drive from Kulgera to Mount Dare. It is 2 days’ drive from Mount Dare to where the Sheltons were stranded.

Late on Tuesday afternoon—after 5 days of waiting, with dwindling water and food—2 Nissan Patrols crested the dune with, each, a mechanic from Kulgera. They unloaded 120 litres of water. It took them 4 hours, to find the broken sensor in the timing mechanism. They built a replacement.

On Wednesday morning, the mechanics accompanied the travellers for 50 km, then turned back for Kulgera. During the round trip, one of their trucks suffered a broken shock absorber, a shredded tyre, and a damaged fuel tank.
The Sheltons rolled into Birdsville on Thursday 13th September.
Their bill exceeded $10,000.

The moral of this tale is:
take a satellite phone and an emergency radio beacon; bring 7 litres of water per person per day; tell people when you expect to arrive; stay with your vehicle; and … make sure your credit card is active.

Super-Easy Chocolate Donuts Recipe

Yum!

Catherine Semochkina, Instagram blogger

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Many Russians are addicted to watching glamorous life unfold live on the social media. There is no shortage of individuals who are even more addicted to living and showing this life to them. It can lead to a tragic end.

Catherine studied at the Pirogov Medical School, and was a resident at the Department of Oncology. She was from a nice, middle-class family and had always been a good student.

Catherine’s friends spoke of her as a polite and positive person. One of of her friends, Julia, said in a TV interview that Catherine was “smart and always had a smile on her face.”

Catherine devoted a lot of time to her Instagram blog, although she never wrote or posted anything about her personal life.

Catherine had 84,000 followers on her Instagram account. She blogged about her studies in the medical school and travels.

Judging by the profile, the girl led a luxurious lifestyle: she traveled to Italy, France, and Dubai. She wore branded clothes, and visited the most expensive restaurants in Moscow.

In many photos on her Instagram, Catherine appeared in revealing outfits, swimsuits and underwear. She participated in Miss Maxim 2018 contest, and made an explicit photo shoot for the magazine.

All this gave rise to rumors that the girl provided escort services, and some subscribers openly expressed it in their comments.

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“Our short but fun trip to Corfu has come to an end. It was really great to escape torrential rains of Moscow to the Ionian Sea.”

That was her last Instagram post published on July 22, 2019.

After Catherine returned from her trip to the Greek island, she did not answer calls and messages from her parents. They were worried and asked the landlord to visit the apartment that Catherine rented from him.

When he entered the apartment, he saw a suitcase in the hallway. Catherine’s legs protruded from it. She was naked except for black, lace garters. There were stab wounds on her neck and chest.

A few days later, Maxim Gareev, a fan of plastic surgeries and a regular client of the elite prostitutes, was arrested. They called him Ken, because of his fixation on his appearance.

Mr. Gareev confessed that he spent a night with Catherine. In the morning he stabbed her five times, and tried to stuff her body into a suitcase, but the girl was too tall and didn’t fit in.

During the interrogation, Mr. Gareev said that Catherine constantly made fun of his sexual prowess and called him a “cheapskate”.

Mr. Gareev was tried and sentenced to nine years in prison.

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Maxim Gareev

This one!

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Those sneaky bastards!

LEGO Star Trek: The Trouble with Tribbles

Great fun!

What is going on in the West is unique to the West. Do not project it on the East

Inflation. Gas Prices. Food shortages. Popular unrest. Shootings, car jacking, diversity, racial protests. Anger. Collapse of this or that…

All of these items are fixtures of the United States and it’s proxy nations; known collectively as “The West”. Don’t project that on Russia. Don’t project that on China. Don’t project that on Africa. Etc.

Just a kind reminder to all of youse guys who fall for the idea that the “entire world” is going to suffer from famine, inflation and energy shortages. It’s not. Just YOUR NATION. The rest are doing just fine, thank you.

Thru’ with the Two Step (2006 Remaster)

Robert Plant. I hope that his resonates with you all.

A Cat Owner speaks out

I had a friend who suggested euthanizing my two Siamese cats, because of the cat hair on the furniture.

I took these two in as soon as I got my own place after my mom died. They were her cats. My stepfather barely took care of them. They got food and water but the litter box was very dirty and they weren’t vaccinated, or taken to the vet for check-ups. They didn’t get any love.

Back then I lived on 600e per month in an expensive tiny two room apartment, but the cats got the love they needed. One of them wasn’t spayed, so I took care of that as well.

They were so important to me. Suffice to say the girl who made that suggestion is not my friend anymore.

After my two beloved Siamese cats died of old age (luckily they had some years in a bigger home), I got two rescues. And then another Siamese.

I discovered I can’t do life without cats.

Don’t ever tell your friend who is a cat person that she should euthanize her cats. You will be removed, the cats will stay. I can promise you that.

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The Wild, Wild West s03e14

Please enjoy this great episode!

Matthew worked this evening and a homeless gentlemen walked in the restaurant with .50 cents and asked if there was anything on the menu he could buy. Matthew asked him what he would order if he could and the man said anything would help his hunger pains. So Matthew rung him up for a hearty meal and then used his own debit card to pay for the mans meal. He handed him the receipt and told him to relax and take a seat. The story could end there and It would be a happy ending, but apparently a women watched my son during his random act of kindness. Not only did she write the company to let them know about the caring employee they had working for them, she also rewarded my son with a very generous tip! ”So proud to be his mom and I can pat myself on the back knowing that I’ve played a part in raising this big hearted young man.”

What a wonderful young man! Wish there were more like him.

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Do I really admit to supporting the CPC?

From HERE

Most Chinese clearly understand that China’s current system is in fact the result of a passive choice, and a pragmatic one.

Many of the respondents here with Chinese cultural backgrounds mentioned the Chinese civil bureaucratic tradition, so I don’t need to explain it in detail, but I would add that China is probably the only country that had a strong civil bureaucratic tradition before modernization, and that the later system had to adapt to the civil bureaucratic tradition rather than the other way around, which leads to an innate limitation in terms of viable institutional choices for China now and even for the future.

I still have to mention two famous emperors, the first of course being First Emperor of Qin, Ying Zheng.

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Ying Zheng

It is well known that King Zheng did two main things in China, the first being that he de facto unified China, and the second being that he unified Chinese writing. These two crucial facts offered all subsequent Chinese powers that be the possibility that if their power was sufficient, he would definitely unify China. This led to a unique historical phenomenon, as the opening chapter of “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms” states, “That which is long divided must unify, and that which is long unified must divide.” This also led to the loss of the roots of China’s feudal aristocratic tradition similar to that of the West, and after numerous struggles and natural selection, you could only have one aristocrat, and that aristocrat was the emperor.

Well, we then introduce another emperor, Emperor Wen of Sui, Yang Jian.

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Soon, the emperors ruling China realized that any nobleman with a fief and a private army, whether he was a relative or a brother, was aiming to “unify China,” so all nobles would in fact become enemies of the emperor. A wise emperor, or Yang Jian as we call him, quickly figured out that if he did not rely on the nobility to rule the country, he would have to rely on the commoners. Obviously, making the commoners the ruling class would require teaching them the knowledge of the ruling class and setting the threshold for the best talent to become the emperor’s servants. From then on, Yang Jian set up the imperial examination system to give the commoners the possibility to leap up the ladder of the commoner class and to destroy the aristocratic tradition completely.

When the imperial examination system was established, there were several factors that needed to be noted.

  • The avenue of upward mobility for the commoner class was opened and could never be closed because the commoners had a strong desire to change their fate, the bureaucratic clique was extremely powerful, and no ruler dared to challenge this, which I think is easy to understand.
  • No matter how dynasties change, they only change the structure of the ruling class for a short time, and when power is rebalanced, it is still the same people who become the actual managers of this country through exams, and no matter who becomes emperor, those who have the ability and will to become civil bureaucrats always become civil bureaucrats, and they always make the same decisions.
  • A large number of the commoner class became part of the bureaucratic group by learning the knowledge of the ruling class, that is, the Confucian doctrine, which was the only way for the commoners to break through the class. This led to a near overlap between the intellectual and bureaucratic classes in China, and at the same time, it meant that in China, learning knowledge and preparing to be an official were equated, so there was no ground for the birth of natural science in China. In the West, the early scientists were usually aristocrats or missionaries, and there is a reason for that. Because they were provided for, they did not have to think about survival and had extra resources to complete their scholarship. Their Chinese counterparts during the same period, on the other hand, despite being no less talented and capable, needed to devote more energy to taking exams, handling government affairs, and completing their higher authorities’ KPIs, and when they did their jobs well, they would be promoted. There are always unfamiliar environments and more complex challenges waiting for them. Of course there were certain geniuses who did a better job of governance by summarizing techniques, such as Shen Kuo, but of course, technique is not the same as science.

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  • Since the position of officials in the bureaucratic group depends only on exams and KPI’s and has nothing to do with their own wealth, this leads to the fact that mercantilism has never appeared in China and capital has never been strong enough to confront the bureaucratic class, only because the former holds the economy and the latter holds the state apparatus, they may become allies for short-term interests, but once the interests go against each other, it is always the businessmen who are deprived of power. Thus, capital is always a vassal of the bureaucratic group.
  • The ruling class was constantly on the move because of examinations, and the official in a high position knew this, he had no other choice but to provide his offspring with better educational resources, however this did not guarantee that his family would always retain this advantage, so he had to try to reinforce the class advantage by buying land, therefore the fall of every Chinese dynasty was always due to excessive land annexation, which could not be avoided.

To be fair, a strong bureaucratic system is a double-edged sword. First of all, the system is extremely executive and feasibility, with every policy being passed from the center to every corner of the empire with the precision of a cog. At the same time, this system was always able to screen the most capable geniuses into the management system of the empire, which was the core advantage of China to remain competitive for thousands of years. However, people are always selfish, especially the geniuses who rise to power among the commoners always want to cash in on power as quickly as possible, which leads to shocking corruption. Once the country is in crisis and control decreases, officials will always prioritize their own interests, so they will quickly push the country into an irreparable abyss, as was the case in the late Ming Dynasty.

Because of the strong bureaucratic tradition you cannot reject and which will always exist, China’s attempts at Western-style democracy will always fail. The reason is also simple, because of checks and balances. As other respondents have said, the British Empire also borrowed from the Chinese bureaucracy to form a modern civil service, and it didn’t have problems. This is because their civil service system emerged after the aristocratic tradition, and elected officials were usually aristocrats because the established resources of the aristocracy gave them a higher probability of being elected, and even if they were not competent and experienced enough, they could use their original large resource system against powerful professional bureaucrats. The same is true in the United States, except that big capitalists have replaced the aristocracy. However, China’s aristocratic tradition has long been destroyed, and there has never been a mercantile tradition, so capitalists cannot get involved in politics. Elected officials with no roots and only speeches will only become puppets for powerful bureaucrats. When the power of the bureaucrats cannot be checked, the country will quickly be consumed by corruption and division.

This situation was clearly reflected in history after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, when Sun Yat-sen, the father of the nation, never effectively took control of the country and his governing philosophy was considered naive and impractical. Yuan Shikai, a representative of the powerful bureaucratic class, quickly took control of the country and proclaimed himself emperor. After Yuan’s death, the bureaucracy was completely out of control and warlords were formed, who in order to consolidate their power could only sell out the interests of the country in exchange for support from foreign powers… Until the most powerful warlord, Chiang Kai-shek, completed his nominal unification, at which point he met the Communists.

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The Communists were in some ways a natural fit with the bureaucratic tradition.

  • They are both anti-aristocratic but not anti-elite, and they both believe that the elite represent powerful productive forces, while the aristocracy are the assholes of society
  • Both encourage a strong government that runs the state with precision and science through smart policies and strong enforcement
  • The Chinese bureaucratic class, or intellectual class, has long been influenced by Confucianism and believes that “social commonwealth”, or egalitarianism, is the ultimate political ideal, which happens to be compatible with communism
  • Since China had no aristocracy and the capitalists had no power, there was no resistance to communism in China and it was easily accepted by the masses.

After that, the Communist Party naturally and unstoppably became the ruling party in China.

Of course, problems also in the early communist confrontation with bureaucratic traditions. Since the means of production, such as land, could not be bought and sold, the bureaucrats finally realized that their power cannot be turned into wealth and that the governor and the peasant did not get much difference, and they became dissatisfied.

Mao was keenly aware of this, who was a staunch communist with romantic and idealistic beliefs, could not tolerate the theft of revolutionary gains, so he launched the Cultural Revolution in an attempt to confront the bureaucratic tradition.

Contrary to the perception of most Westerners, Mao was not the same as Stalin, who had the ability to act because he had the power to do so. By the time Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, he had been out of control of the country for some time and was basically retired, with Liu Shaoqi as the country’s leader at the time. However, Mao used his great popularity among the people to overthrow the government in power with a single “big-character poster”, calling Liu Shaoqi and others “those in power who have taken the capitalist road” and reawakening the public’s vigilance of the bureaucratic class. As the officials in power feared Mao’s great prestige, the government dared not confront them as long as people held Mao’s quotations, so Mao’s quotations and the “loyalty dance” became the symbols of the era. Bureaucrats, elites, and intellectuals were beaten down and criticized, someone even went to college because he scored 0 on his exams, and Confucian doctrine was seen as evil and incomprehensible. It was the ultimate revolution against the bureaucratic tradition.

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As it turned out, when the bureaucracy collapsed, the country did not get better but fell into complete chaos, with schools closed, factories shut down, and the whole country in trouble, and the Cultural Revolution ultimately failed. Before his death, Mao became a “Don Quixote” type of brave man and took a huge blame, of course, he was responsible for it, but it should be admitted that it was not as he wished.

When the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping reorganized the country in ruins, he should have realized that if he couldn’t beat it, he should join it. In fact, Deng’s series of policies was to restore the tradition of civil bureaucratic since ancient times. He restored university entrance exams, civil service exams, land deals, and the top-down monitoring and assessment system… In this way the country started to function smoothly and China entered an era of rapid development, but of course, corruption followed.

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Until now, Xi Jinping has been able to control corruption through a series of powerful measures, and the bureaucracy and the state have once again reached a certain balance. If the bureaucracy is an unstoppable sword, then there must be a strong wielder of the sword to use it. After countless trials and errors, the Communist Party replaced the imperial power as the sword-bearer, and as most Chinese people perceive, this was the choice of history. Even if the Communist Party is overthrown, it will not change for the better, but will only bring chaos, until the next powerful sword-bearer appears.

Bureaucratic tradition and power politics, like the thorn apple, are both beautiful and dangerous, and as Chinese, we have no choice. Maybe the success of the CPC is just part of the cycle of governance and chaos that has been going on in China for thousands of years, maybe not. We don’t know, but most of us think it is not universal and that each nation should find its own path according to its own history.


Looking back at this answer after some time, I realized that this article seems to be more inclined to describe the negative aspects of the civil bureaucratic tradition. Obviously, I wrote this answer thinking from a Chinese perspective, and I tacitly assumed that people understood the advantages of the civil bureaucratic tradition, which may have been a small misunderstanding, and I am in fact neutral about the phenomenon. So I decided to make a small update, which I had mentioned in other comments, and I’ll post those here as well:

Earlier, I argued why the only form of politics that can eventually be stabilized in China is “bureaucratic dictatorship”.This means that you have to accept the tactics that any authoritarian regime would use, such as speech control, censorship, party bans… This is because authoritarian regimes do not have good enough mechanisms to release pressure, and holding all the power means taking all the pressure(With great power comes great responsibility), and the media is usually a multiplier of negative emotions, and when you receive bad news every day through all the information channels, especially in a country as big as China, the legitimacy of the regime will have no footing. When English becomes the de facto world language, China also de facto loses the ability and possibility to challenge the world’s mainstream political consensus, which makes a firewall at the national level inevitable.

Yet China’s political ecology is not anti-democratic, even if it is not Western-style democracy, it still has the core of democracy.

First of all, you need to acknowledge that any civilian, regardless of background, can prove his or her ability to become the ruler of the country in China through exams and hard work, and that ensuring this upward mobility is at the heart of Chinese culture. In the Chinese bureaucracy, this ability stratification effect is visible to the naked eye; almost every official at the appropriate level has the appropriate level of ability, and except for young people starting out, mature civil servants have a clear sense of the gap between their abilities and those of their superiors.

Second, officials are under constant pressure from both their superiors and the public, and if their performance is poor or causes more discontent, not only does he lose the possibility of promotion himself, but his superiors’ political careers are also affected. This is something that is endless in the Chinese political ecology (e.g. COVID-19, where hundreds of officials were dealt with for not performing up to expectations despite a natural disaster), so this accountability mechanism ensures that most of the time the interests of the officials and the people are aligned.

Third, because of the hierarchical promotion mechanism rather than elections, there is a greater preference for outcome justice rather than procedural justice to justify the bureaucracy in China. This forces officials to confront problems with more pragmatic strategies rather than empty promises.

In fact, our current system is more akin to a mega-corporation in which the shareholders are all the people, the National People’s Congress is the shareholders’ meeting, the Central Political Bureau is like the board of directors, and the general secretary is like the chairman. As a leader, Xi Jinping is not a “dictator” as Westerners think of him, but more like a coordinator of interests and political forces. You can easily understand how a company works, so you can understand how the CPC works. Obviously, there is not that much freedom in this system, you can’t get a position by simply promising it, you have to prove your suitability for a position through your working experience. If you somehow attack the leadership in the company, usually your career will also be affected…and the corporate system, which happens to be the most competitive form of the system that evolves through full business competition after survival of the fittest.

Of course, some people prefer the Western style of one-person-one-vote democracy and free social atmosphere, which is fully understandable and not to be criticized, and they can choose their preferred lifestyle through immigration. Those who are more pragmatic will choose to stay and build this huge country and make it better.

Horizontal Departure (2006 Remaster)

Robert Plant. Imagine. 1983. Fall.

F Troop – Fort Lee, Salutes Fort Courage

You all have some fun, why don’t ya.

The Book

Oh boy, do I have a story for you.

This “family possession” wasn’t something passed down through generations of my family. It was something I bought for around $12 at a thrift store back in 2012. Something I hoped to keep forever, and maybe share with my own children in the distant future.

It was a book, an old book.

Its cover was a gray-blue and almost marbled, like water on an overcast day.

Its pages were stiff with age, and the edges rough cut. They crackled ever so slightly every now and then as I turned them.

It had etchings covered in something like tissue paper, illustrations of moments and animals mentioned within its pages.

It smelled old, like quiet private libraries, caught in a fragment of time highlighted by dust motes floating in beams of late-afternoon sunlight and warm, velvet-lined armchairs.

From the moment I first touched fingers to cover, I was in love with this book. The real kicker was opening to the first couple pages and finding it had been published in the 1800s. I was holding a book that was around 150 years old. I was holding a physical manifestation of history.

It was a first edition Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I didn’t know then how much it could be worth; I trusted that the thrift shop knew how to properly research each potentially valuable item that came through their doors.

I debated for probably two seconds over whether or not I should buy it. At $12? Hell yes, I bought it!


Fast forward to 2014.

My fiancé and I were broke, living on our own in an apartment we couldn’t afford. He was working at a car dealership as a “trainee”, which — at least at this particular dealership — was code for “work twice as hard only to have to give your seniors most of your commission and hope for the best.”

He ran so low on gas that day, that he called me from the dealership 30 minutes away, trying to hide his own stress, to tell me that he didn’t think he could make the drive home.

Our account was down to the single digits.

We had no cash.

Can you tell where this is going?

I ransacked our apartment for anything of remotely any value. I texted him photos of various items, asking, “is this okay to sell?”

I had one of those digital TV antennae that don’t work as advertised, a beautiful wooden handled pocket knife, and a couple of other things.

I saw Walden. I didn’t want to sell it. I hadn’t even finished it yet — life just kept getting in the way and I had a hard time digesting the outdated language of the book. I will always regret that. I can always get a newer print of the book, but it just won’t be the same, so I hesitate still.

I shoved down my attachment to the book and sped down the street to the pawn shop.

I saved the book for last. The guy at the counter had been very uninterested up until that point — “what do you want for this? Ehh, that’s a little much.”

I brought the book up. “I’m sure it’s not worth much, but I love this and it’s all I have left.”

He takes one look at it and his eyes go from tired and uncaring to nearly predatory. I didn’t register it until after the book was tucked safely behind his counter.

“How much do you want for this?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I need $20.” I thought I was shooting high.

“Done,” he said, way too quickly.

And that, I’m afraid, was the last I saw of that lovely, ancient, beautiful book.


Fast forward to 2016.

I’m sitting in the living room at my parents’ house, recounting the tale of the oldest book I ever owned to my family.

I stop to wonder just how much that book was worth.

I did a google search, and I swear I nearly dropped in a dead faint.

This first edition book was selling online in a number of places for anywhere between $400 and $10,000.

Ten. Thousand. Dollars.

Doing a quick search now (because for the life of me I can’t remember the exact published year of my copy), I found the one that looked the most like what I had.

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There was another on the first page just now selling for over $6,000.

I’m not going to lie… I cried. I laughed and then I cried really freaking hard.

I wished that I had had the foresight to just take the book to an appraiser or something.

Actually, I wish I’d just kept it, honestly.

But the actual worth of that book would have helped us out a hell of a lot more than the $20 that went right into my husband’s gas tank.

And that was the story of my biggest regret to date. I will consider myself blessed if it remains so.

How To Make City Chicken

Some notes

  1. If you believe someone is lying to you, don’t say anything. If they continue to elaborate on what they are saying then they are lying.
  2. The worst feeling in the world is to know you were used and lied to by someone you trusted.
  3. If someone gives you advice, respond with “you’re right”. It sounds more diplomatic than “I know.”
  4. Psychologists say the key to confidence is walking into a room and assuming everyone likes you.
  5. When people say, “you’ve changed, there’s a 95% chance that you just stopped acting the way they wanted you to.
  6. A sleeping human brain can still understand the words being spoken around it.
  7. Having at least one “Lazy day” per week can help reduce stress, high blood pressure, stroke
  8. People who are more perfectionist are more likely to be depressed, because they stress themselves out so much.
  9. We tend to believe others pay attention to our behavior and appearance much more than they actually do. This is called the spotlight effect.
  10. We are more attracted to people wearing red because red triggers a basic, primal response in humans as a signal of sexuality, fertility, health, and status.
  11. The human mind spends most of it’s time replaying memories over and over with the desire to relive them.
  12. It’s impossible to remain angry at someone you truly love.
  13. Anger lasting for more than 3 days indicates that you’re not in love.
  14. the person arguing loses his temper and starts shouting, natural human tendency is to shout back. DON’T! Stay calm and reply in silence. This will piss them off even more. Try it! It works.
  15. Usually the people who are “too nice” get hurt the most.
  16. THE QUIETEST PEOPLE TEND TO HAVE THE LOUDEST MINDS
  17. Remember: The one that gossips with you. Will also gossip about you!
  18. If someone makes eye contact with you for 60% of a conversation they’re bored, 80% and they’re attracted to you and 100% of the time then they are threatening you.
  19. Your gut feelings are usually accurate and correct. If you truly feel there is something,chances are there is.
  20. Listening to sad songs creates positive notions, because it helps the person feel understood
  21. Feelings don’t die easily because we keep feeding them with memories. That’s exactly why it’s so hard to move on.

~Simran♡

Mr. Roarke vs Satan

Enjoy this short clip.

Oh, guys, it’s only just begun. What Putin and China are doing will change EVERYTHING

Reordering. A dangerous time. Listen up.

What Putin and China are doing will change EVERYTHING

Listen Up! Pay attention!

First 9 minutes are important, then the paid-for, for-profit segment begins. Just check out the first nine minutes.

Ukraine

This cartoon pretty much sums it up.

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Russia ‘Alarmed’ At Lack Of U.S. Visas To Attend UN General Assembly

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations has said it’s “alarming” that no one from the 56-member Russian advance team and delegation headed by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has received a U.S. entry visa to attend a UN General Assembly debate in New York later this month.

Article HERE

Many years ago a bank ordered the repossession (repo) of my Tahoe even though I had made all the payments on time. The repo person was nice enough to come in my accountancy business and inform me in case I wanted to get my belongings out of the vehicle.

I showed him my paid receipts and he said he had no choice because he had an order to repossess the vehicle. I asked would he wait while I called the bank and my attorney. He said sure no problem. We sat in my office as I first called my attorney. My attorney asked me to call the bank with him on the line and inform the bank that my attorney was on the other line.

Now we have the bank on the phone, and after 20 minutes of research and faxing over copies of my payment receipts, the bank had admitted that I had in fact made my payments on time every month. I said “Great — can you tell the repo person that everything’s is fine?” They said they could not because the legal department was closed and they were the only ones who could cancel the repo order. So the repo had no choice but to take my Tahoe. He said I was the first person he ever heard of and saw who had proof that he had had made all his payments.

It turns out the bank had misapplied all my payments as unfound cash. I asked what that was, and they said that’s when someone comes to the bank and gives them cash and leaves without telling them what it is for. I had one question, “How many people actually do this?” I also asked them, “Why do my receipts have the loan number on them?” They did not have an answer.

After the call, my attorney told me to let the repo guy have the vehicle and since he was sure my credit was damaged to apply for business loans the next day. I applied for a business loan of $250K at several banks. All of them had turned me down because I had a repossession on my credit.

Six months later — thanks to my attorney and the bank saying they did nothing wrong — I ended up receiving a brand-new Tahoe from my local Chevy dealer for free (paid for by the bank): the most expensive model I could find with all the bells and whistles and extended warranty and whatever else they could sell me. (Note I made one car salesmen very happy, as I didn’t even want a discount.) As a bonus my attorney also forced the bank to pay me $250k since they had destroyed my credit, preventing me from obtaining a business loan, therefore losing out on the opportunity to buy another accounting practice to expand my business.

Exactly one month after that, the veterinarian next to our business had ordered a new air conditioner (AC) for his business, but the AC company took ours instead and destroyed it in the removal process. I ended up with a brand-new $10k AC unit.

2004 was a very good year for me because of other people’s mistakes.

My wife came with a cat and neither me or the cat liked the other. One day while eating, that SOB clawed me at my ankle. I jumped up and told my wife that either the cat goes or i’m going. My wife looked at both of us and said that the cat wasn’t going any where and neither was i.

I looked at that damn cat and he looked at me and swear we both shrugged our shoulders and ended up becoming the best of friends.

Well, in my case, the CCP gives me:

  • a monthly stipend of $5,000
  • all the Chinese hookers I can handle
  • membership into the CCP (it’s really, really hard to get)
  • free transportation (flights, HSR) to anywhere in China (great for vacationing)
  • free accommodation in the best hotels in China
  • invitation to Xi Jinping’s dinner parties (I can hobnob with the cream of China’s politics)
  • tours of China’s naval vessels, especially her aircraft carriers (cool!)

Hey, it’s a tough job but somebody’s gotta do it.

And the nice thing is that my propaganda work is easy peasy. I can practically do it in my sleep.

China does speak up. Vociferously. But it doesn’t matter. The West has a total lock on censorship and propaganda in Western media.

Think about it…USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and EU have ganged up on China, one lone country. It’s a huge imbalance.

If these Euro-American nations are so gung-ho on starting a war with China, there isn’t much China can do about it. They can start a war but China will most certainly finish it.

  • China is a major nuclear power. She can certainly nuke America, Britain, Germany, Japan, Australia and Canada without breaking a sweat.
  • China has the world’s largest army, by far, and the world’s largest navy to boot. China has started to build supercarriers!
  • China has some of the most advanced stealth fighters in the J-20 and J-31.
  • China has operational hypersonic missiles. Even USA doesn’t.
  • And Russia has declared that it will come to China’s aid in the event of war.

You thought the Second World War was horrific? Fuck, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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China surpassed USA economically by purchasing power parity in 2013. China is expected to overtake USA by nominal GDP before the end of this decade.

But putting aside economic numbers, it is fairly obvious that China is already economically much more powerful than USA…

  • China is the economic engine and manufacturing hub of the world economy.
  • China has accumulated vast trade surpluses.
  • China is the king of infrastructure. In addition to building massive infrastructure within China, it’s also building infrastructure for countries all around the globe, thanks to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
  • China is so powerful that she is leading BRICS to create an alternative reserve currency to the US Dollar (the pillar of American power).

It’s also important to note that USA is declining. USA faces a crushing $30 trillion national debt fueled by endless money printing. The US Dollar is backed by thin air. This is unsustainable.

Al’s Labor Day Speech | Married With Children

Dancing with the Politicians

US Foreign policy has become a full-time comedy routine

If the non-stop dancing duo Biden and Blinken is seriously seeking to validate its view that the United States of America is and should be the world’s hegemon, they are going about it the wrong way. They should be taking their lead from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky by turning their press conferences into entertainments with dancing bears and scantily clad chanteuses pirouetting and singing across the stage. They would benefit from recalling how Zelensky rose to power through his performances of comedy routines in which he would be prancing around on high heels with three colleagues who appeared to be mocking what might be construed as gay mannerisms to amuse the audience? Or perhaps the rather more outre performance where Zelensky would play a piano with his penis? If one can remember all that it would most definitely help to understand the foreign policy that is somehow playing out in Ukraine, where Zelensky has transitioned into a serious, unsmiling guy who is adept at solicitations for money and weapons. His pleading has become a shameless full-time endeavor as he now appears on thousands of screens via video link all over the world, saturating the airwaves and dropping in on both major and minor gatherings. Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone recalls how he has appeared on “the Grammy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the World Economic Forum and probably the Bilderberg group as well, [while also] having meetings with celebrities like Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, and Bono and the Edge from U2. It’s as busy a PR tour as he could possibly have without having a discussion about the strategic importance of long-range artillery with Elmo on Sesame Street.”

Elmo might in fact be coming next as NPR is clearly one of Zelensky’s biggest fans. One also suspects that before the Ukrainian President is finished, he will be addressing a rotary meeting in Sioux Falls South Dakota. And Zelensky has even turned begging into a family affair, with his wife Olena welcomed by the President and First Lady at the White House while also going on to address the US Congress, entreating America’s Solons to provide plenty of cash and things that go bang to thwart the ambitions of one Vladimir Putin. As she put it, she is concerned lest her son and daughter be unable to return to school and university in the fall. She then observed that “We would have answers if we had air defense systems” which would enable a “joint victory in the name of life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.”

Indeed, a high point of the recent antics has to be the unique cover photo shoot by Vogue magazine, in which the lovey-dovey couple Volodymyr and Olena grin and hug before the cameras. Zelensky declares his undying affection . Vogue aside, the entire Zelensky performance, choreographed as it is by neocons inside and outside the administration, is perfectly color and image coordinated. Zelensky has an endless supply of olive drab t-shirts and he entertains in Kiev a steady stream of statesmen and even heads of government from Europe and the US, including the US Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has appointed a seasoned Justice Department “Special Investigations”, i.e. “Nazi hunter” investigator, named Eli Rosenbaum to look into possible Russian war crimes.

The Garland/Rosenbaum dynamic duo will not be looking into possible Ukrainian war crimes like the recent assassination of Darya Dugina in Moscow as it is not part of the mandate from Biden/Blinken and besides which the Ukes are America’s friends, just like the Israelis who are such great friends that they also get a pass on whatever they inflict on the Palestinians, including shooting or blowing up civilians. Indeed, Zelensky’s White House approved message is always the same: “give us money and guns and we will defeat the Russkies.” So Honest Joe Biden gives them the cash and the things that go bang in the night and in return they get a hearty hand shake when the bundles of Benjamins get transferred into the trunk of someone’s car. All of which leads one to wonder if Mr Z is the best reliable source for anything having to do with himself and the corrupt toadies that adhere to him, given the recurring reports that some donated weapons are already making their way into the black market just as quickly as the money goes into officials’ pockets. Zelensky has reacted to criticism by shutting down opposition parties and media, assassinating dissident politicians and firing or imprisoning any other official who might be inclined to disagree with him.

Apart from that, there is allegedly a war going on, which may not be evident from all the horse trading taking place at the presidential palace. It also would appear to be counter-intuitive that the Russians, blamed without much in the way of evidence for atrocity after atrocity, have apparently proven willing to let Zelensky entertain all his guests undisturbed. If you are truly committing a lot of war crimes, why not add one more to the list by blowing up the Kiev presidential palace and both killing Zelensky and probably ending the war at a stroke?

There are, in fact, two wars taking place simultaneously. There is, to be sure, fighting going on around Donbas, but the more important conflict is the phony war being waged by the Biden Administration and a number of European Chancelleries in support of whatever is actually taking place in Ukraine. This latter aspect of the war consists of perhaps the most stifling – and effective – propaganda effort the world has ever seen. It includes Joe Biden and his brigade of clowns, but it also has a supporting cast consisting of NATO, a number of European heads of state and virtually the entire western media. Social media has also joined in the struggle, banning Russian originating news stories and opinion, and using algorithms and other forms of manipulation to make reporting favorable to Moscow go away. The allied effort to defeat and destroy Russia relies on lies, half-truths, and out-and-out deception. But why bother to do it? It is because the war was preventable and avoidable, which is what the White House and other governments cannot admit to the public. It makes absolutely no sense and will benefit no one when it is over, and “over” might mean “really over” as nuclear weapons are on the table.

But what about the good old American exceptionalism which Biden-Blinken and that stalwart warrior Merrick Garland are supposed to be defending? Well, that seems to have taken a hit as much of the world, watching the fiasco unfold in Ukraine, apparently doesn’t appreciate the Anglo-Saxon sense of humor. To them, the war in Ukraine would never have started if the US and Europeans had invested in the tiniest effort as mediators to come to a negotiated solution. They have given up on the United States as a “force for good” and have rather concluded that Washington is a global bully and a regular aggressor.

Former US Air Force colonel and PhD Karen Kwiatkowski has an interesting tale to tell about how far the mighty have fallen. She writes “…I saw that the Solomon Islands refused (ignored really, which is even better) a US Coast Guard request to come to port, to buy fuel, like with real American dollars, y’all! Why was the US Coast Guard floating around the South Pacific – were they lost? After getting a fuller picture – they were looking for lawbreaking fishermen and that’s where their mission took them…” So what was the US response to this outrage, which was immediately blamed on interference by the Chinese? We need “a new embassy in the Solomon Islands… along with a new five year engagement plan in the Pacific.

During the Cold War before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a commonly heard comment was that the country had become economically and politically an “Upper Volta with rockets,” which implied that the USSR spent so much on weapons that the civilian economy was starved of resources. Well, welcome to the former United States of America. As the nation’s decline and fall will no doubt be facilitated due to the millions of mostly Latino “asylum seekers” flowing over America’s southern border, the US as a “Bolivia with nukes” might be more appropriate. The world is tired of Washington and its pretenses and the walls will inevitably come tumbling down when the Biden unsustainable trillions of dollars of added debt-surge brings on bankruptcy Argentina style. A sharp change in course might be able to fix some of the problems, but there is an election coming up which the White House is keen to win by flooding its cherished constituencies with funny money in exchange for votes, a practice which once upon a time would have been seen as corruption. Come to think of it, the US has become a banana republic run by an essentially criminal gang that alternates every few years to pretend to be a democracy. Can’t get much lower than that, but Biden sure is trying!

How to Make Mozzarella Cheese 2 Ingredients Without Rennet

OMG! Do you have any idea about the secret pizza message that I am laying down here?

If you mean desert greening (as a result of which the climate inevitably changes to a more humid and less severe one), then yes – they do it, and they have success. The Mu-Us Desert is clear evidence:

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China Used a Shijian-21 Satellite to Pull Another One Out of Its Orbit

Cool, huh? Well, the USA doesn’t think so. U.S. officials are concerned the technology could be militarized.

Article HERE

Evidence: US is not a democracy

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This is a MUST view video!

Walking though the clutter of a collapsing society

Yes. The USA has gone full-metal Mental Hospital City…

Can anybody else feel something in the air? A radical change overnight in the psychic barometric pressure? There’s a hurricane of crazy coming — and landfall is imminent.

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What the HELL?

Or is it just me?

The seismic ramifications of the V For Vendetta-laced optics and poison verbiage of the Biden speech a night ago continue to reverberate and gain exponential staying power in the mass collective.

Twitter became an echo chamber of whoop ass over it.

If Trump was a loose cannon, then this was a full-on, 21 gun salute of unhinged rampant and dangerous dementia.

Jesus. H. Christ.

Dementia paired with a fascist ideology running at full gallop. And it’s very hard not to see this as maliciously deliberate.

First, the visuals…

What the Fuck? What were they thinking?

It’s a cross between Hitler, Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, with a bit of Chucky thrown in for color.

It’s a real life, science-fiction depiction of Nazi Zombies coming to power.

All at those levels employ herds of optics and PR pros to meticulously select every visual and camera angle knowing exactly what they’re trying to get across covering every mindset and personality profile.

They chose what they chose for a reason.

To provoke, To incite.

They cover this kind of ground to the point of making someone like Kubrick look like a beginner.

There is ZERO chance this wasn’t entirely deliberate.

Think about that.

It’s obvious.

It’s really like “they” want a domestic war. Just like they want a Russia war, and a China war…

War.

War.

WAR!

What is the problem with these people?

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And where to begin with the rhetoric?

When you call out basically half the country as being domestic terrorists and imply that they will be dealt with accordingly, what do you think is going to happen?

Exactly what you want to happen — a situation you are plotting and planning for.

Other than the obvious V For Vendetta, guess what was trending on twitter all day long?

#pedohitler.

Spoiler alert: be not in the slightest surprised if another Reichstag fire event happens in the very near future.

One that will be rigged and engineered, steered and plotted, by the left to be blamed on the MAGA forces.

And one geared so that a full spectrum stranglehold can be ushered in. And I’m not the only one thinking so: Article Thread HERE

The only good thing about all this is in the saying so.

You would think.

I mean, the more word gets out that there is historical precedent, that this is a more than distinct possibility — the less likely it is to actually happen. Opening your mouth, calling their bluff, can stop a lot of things.

But, will it stop this train wreck during this catastrophic collapse of the mental-ward idiocy? One can only wish.

  • War on source of the vast bulk of natural resources – Russia.
  • War on the global manufacturing base – China.
  • War on the sole remaining brake on American totalitarianism – MAGA.

Hey, I’ve been using stills and screenshots from V For Vendetta for years now (at least since the Epstein arrest as I recall) to go along with the message that we are the majority, we’re actually in charge and the dominos are falling just as they should.

However, I know full well that these waters might be tougher to navigate without superhero revolutionaries being a real thing…

Maybe it could be that some Americans (and maybe even a handful of Europeans)  have strengths no one even realizes…

Ah. powers yet to be revealed that may even verge on the paranormal, quantumly entangled and expressed, ready for just the right time to show themselves.

Maybe.

Hopefully.

Perhaps.

And things like this actually give me hope: Article thread HERE

They want to kill us all but everyone is so damned stupid they might perhaps  possibly accomplish it. I just cannot believe.

Some people says that this is the answer. They say that the country needs right now, is this: This twitter thread

And this: Another twitter thread

In MM’s “heyday” when I still lived in the ‘States, and I still believed, I though that there would be a day of reckoning. I would argue that American needs 40+ more GOVERNORS like these 2 avid twitter repeaters.

Nobody at the Fed level needed. Don’t you know.

This is the design of our brilliant, beautiful Constitution that they have no answer for. EVERYTHING can be controlled at the State level. It’s the way it was designed: the government answers to the States, not the other way around.

But that was then.

I’m jaded now.

I’m a pragmatic realist. No longer a dreamer. No longer a believer. It’s called the hard-slap of reality, travel, and exposure outside of the prison complex known as the United States…

… where all the inmates shout how “free” they are.

Are you free? Look at who you elected with your “democracy”! How does that tasty “democracy” taste now? And don’t give me that the system was just corrupted. It wasn’t.

History warns, has warned, and was repeated in the Federalist Papers that all “democracies” become oligarchies, then military empires, and then they die a long painful death.

How’s those death throes kicking in for ya?

  • Meanwhile, the wolf is at the door in other aspects also: Article HERE  (I think we should be looking at Exhibit No.1 in the case against.)

It’s so easy to get sidetracked. STOP.

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FULL STOP.

Whoa.

Does it affect you? How, then?

What can you do?

Not much. So people, you either [1] pick up the torches and pitchforks or [2] you sit there and wait for the knock on your door.

It will not be televised.

It will not be reported.

It will happen with zero coverage, and any citizen bloggers posting anything will disappear from the Internet.

You won’t know what is going on until you are sitting deep down in the pile of shit.

There is a third option, of course. [3] You can flee. You can “pull a MM”. If you act quickly, you can avoid being a refugee, but don’t wait too long.

You are already electronically branded whether you are aware of it or not.

This will be the everlasting image of the failed, chaotic, treacherous Biden Administration. But always remember, it is emblematic of far worse. FAR worse. And nothing happens without the groundwork. Research and destroy. Because the weather forecast? Dark skies.

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Let’s cover these subjects and more.

MM style.

Throws off the trolls, the agencies, and the swam ‘bots, don’t you know.

Let’s talk about food.

How to Make Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza – Recipe

A personal favorite.

I got a long distance phone call in the middle of the night, from a friend in another country.

He had Intel that one of his close friends who was here in Thailand had been abducted, needed help, and I was the only one he trusted to do the job right. He could not front me any money or gear.

I asked him if she was worth the risk. He said “absolutely.”

I gathered what resources and friends I had here, and helped that woman in trouble escape her captors, get to the airport, and leave the country a few days later. She was pretty sharp. She had used a smart technique to get a message out to my friend.

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This was my secret smile, at dinner that day, because everything went smooth, no casualties. Lucky.

My question is why on earth would people who are anti-China want the Great Firewall torn down at all.

I have a bit of a “wumao” reputation on this site. You can see why if you checked out my Quora profile. That said, whenever I write something, I back it up with logical arguments and evidence. I don’t always do a good job at it, but I always try to.

But if you think I’m too toxic or controversial for you, if I’m making you uncomfortable, then wait till you face the onslaught of tech-savvy young Chinese people who are going to flood every comment section and social media page when the Great Firewall comes down. They will be exposing you to completely unfamiliar ideas and ways of thinking, hysterically insulting your mother, arguing with everyone about everything, spamming “NMSL

”, and hijacking threads and conversations, mostly through incoherent sentences written in broken and unintelligible English.

Not all of them have an education level of above middle school. Some of them are barely literate or mentally sound, but all of them have an axe to grind with the west, and they will outnumber you 10 to 1.

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Are you sure your puny mind can handle all this?


Let’s talk about why the Great Firewall existed in the first place.

Western countries, primarily the USA, pretty much own the internet because of massive capital behind their media, and the sheer quantity of information

.

The former is why American companies like Facebook and Google have a monopoly on various aspects of the internet around the world. Wanna make friends? Facebook. Wanna watch a video? YouTube. Wanna google something? Yahoo.

The latter is why American pop culture is seen as “default” in much of the world, including online. Meme culture is predominantly American. The most popular and readily available versions of anything tend to be in English, specifically American English. “Universal values

”are pretty much just popular American liberal values.

Basically, THIS.

It’s hard to live inside someone else’s culture war.

America’s control over the internet, and the narrative, is absolute. Any country that relies on American social media is taking a mighty big risk of having their government toppled due to populist sentiments, which is easily manipulated through social media – Twitter for example played a major role in the Arab Spring

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Considering the size of the population in China, and the fact that it is nuclear-armed, the same Twitter-fueled colour revolution in the country would likely result in catastrophe for the whole world.

By all means, reduce the authority of the Chinese government, or go ahead and overthrow it like in The Interview, and create a power vaccum. A new question arises – what should we replace it with? Oligarchy, as in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Anarchy and then theocracy, like Libya after Qaddafi got iced? Or maybe some foreign power should step in, and give us all the freedom, respect and human rights we deserve? If the only solutions you have are all worse than the problem itself, don’t try to solve it. Not until you can come up with something better and more practical, at least.

This is where the Great Firewall proves its necessity. It prevented the lowest-educated members of the Chinese population from being riled up like Trump supporters at Capitol Hill.

You see, the wall itself was designed to be extremely easy to climb over, so long as you possess at least some knowledge of technology and English, which are both required to use VPNs and navigate the American-owned internet. It’s kind of like a filter rather than strict censorship in this sense. If you’re smart enough to work your way around the Great Firewall, you’re probably also smart enough to see through the bullshit out there.

More importantly, the wall basically prevented American corporations from extending their monopolies to China, allowing for local social media and tech companies to develop and thrive to such an extent, that China is actually able to export social media to the west (e.g. TikTok). Name me another country, preferably a developing one, that is capable of doing that.

By preventing Chinese cyberspaces to be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of US-centric information and net traffic, it allowed for the Chinese people to cultivate their own unique online cultures and identities. The Chinese will never get used to the idea of learning about their own country through a foreign social media or news site, which is exactly what billions of people do around the world on a daily basis – in much of the developing world, the word “Facebook” is used in lieu of the word “internet”

Because of all this, the information quantity on Chinese cyberspaces is beginning to reach a volume so high that, should the Great Firewall ever be removed, it would drown out western cyberspaces like a bursting dam.

The question at that point wouldn’t be about Chinese citizens overthrowing the CCP after seeing pictures of the Tiananmen Square incident, but whether western cyberspaces are going to have to region-lock Chinese users, and whether it would be necessary for the American military-industrial complex to build a Great Firewall of their own, just to keep their own people in their designated echo chambers.

Start thinking about these questions now, because that day will come. Probably sooner than you think.

It’s really funny just to think about how the tables are beginning to turn. We thought we were building The Wall to keep out the White Walkers, only to find out The Wall was there to protect the White Walkers from millions of Stannis Baratheons.

Let’s revisit the issues of Bidenomics.

Previous editions of this series have focused on Biden’s dismal record with regards to subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, and red tape.

The assessment has not been positive, which shouldn’t be very surprising since Biden is basically a slow-motion version of Bernie Sanders.

Today, we’re going to look at Biden’s record on jobs…and that’s not going to improve the assessment.

The problem is employment rather than unemployment.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Eberstadt writes about the millions of Americans who have disappeared from the labor force.

Never has work been so readily available in modern America; never have so many been uninterested in taking it. 

…For every unemployed person in the U.S. today, there are nearly two open jobs, and the labor shortage affects every region of the country. 

…Why the bizarre imbalance between the demand for work and the supply of it? 

One critical piece of the puzzle was the policy response to the pandemic. …Washington pulled out all the monetary and fiscal stops….created disincentives for work as never before. 

…In 2020 and 2021, a windfall of more than $2.5 trillion in extra savings was bestowed by Washington on private households through borrowed public funds. 

…With pre-Covid rates of workforce participation, almost three million more men and women would be in our labor force today.

To be fair, bad pandemic policies began with Trump.

But Biden promised changes yet has delivered more of the same.

Why does this matter?

It’s not just a numbers issue. When people drop out of the labor force, that translates into a weakening of America’s societal capital.

Mr. Eberstadt explains.

The signs that growing numbers of citizens are ambivalent about working shouldn’t be ignored. Success through work, no matter one’s station, is a key to self-esteem, independence and belonging. A can-do, pro-work ethos has served our nation well. America’s future will depend in no small part on how—and whether—her people choose to work.

Thanks to a stronger work ethic and spirit of self reliance, the United States historically has had an advantage over other nations.

But it’s increasingly difficult to feel optimistic about the long-run outlook for America’s societal capital.

Ironically, Joe Biden seemed to understand this in the not-too-distant past.

The next shoe to drop: “Gun control” now wants to know and control what’s in your wallet

I am a Chinese citizen, 53 years old this year. I have been extremely anti-CCP since I was 15 years old, and until 2010, I was still a radical anti-communist.

After 2010, my anti-communist stance began to falter. I became a mild anti-communist.

By 2015, I was neither against the CCP nor for them, when I was neutral.

By 2017, I started to support the CCP a little bit.

By 2019, I had become a staunch supporter of the CCP.

When I was in college, my classmates were 100% anti-communist, we all participated in the protests that swept the country in 1989, and one of my classmates and I went to Tiananmen Square in Beijing to participate in the protests.

Throughout the 1990s, my classmates and I also adhered to an anti-communist stance. One of my classmates and I tried to form a secret political party to overthrow the CCP.

In the 2000s, some of my classmates began to change their views, and I was one of the last to change their views.

In China, many of my peers have gone through a spiritual journey similar to mine, from opposing the CCP to supporting the CCP.

So, when you ask “What actually happens to citizens of China who do not support the CCP?” I will tell you a fact: Most of the people who were once against the CCP have now become supporters of the CCP.

Based on my observations, my remarks probably represent the vast majority of those who have ever opposed the CCP.


In response to a request from some in the comments:

Many people ask me the reason for the change of opinion, but this question is difficult to answer completely, because so much has happened in 30 years, my change of opinion is the result of all the things that have happened in 30 years, a highly educated Mature-minded adults usually do not change their beliefs quickly because of a few events.

While I can’t list all the reasons that influence my opinion, there are two main reasons that led me to go from a radical anti-communist to a staunch CCP supporter:

1. I have seen with my own eyes the various changes that have taken place in China in the past 30 years;

2. I have visited Western countries many times and browsed a lot of Western media, so I have a more direct and in-depth understanding of Western countries.

I myself have been a news reporter for a few years, and I am very aware of the various methods used by the media to manipulate public opinion. Therefore, I will not unconditionally trust any media, nor will I be brainwashed by the media. I have my own means of checking the facts and all my opinions come from the facts and not any media reports.

It’s also not true that someone commented that I became less radical as I got older, from being an anti-communist to accepting and conforming to reality. In fact, the 50-60-year-old Chinese are still the group with the highest proportion of anti-communists among all Chinese people. People of this age are more supportive of the CCP than us. They did not become anti-communists because of their youth.

 

Most of the “Fact-Checking” Organizations Facebook Uses in Ukraine Are Directly Funded by Washington

Most of the fact-checking organizations Facebook has partnered with to monitor and regulate information about Ukraine are directly funded by the U.S. government, either through the U.S. Embassy or via the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

In light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an information war as bitter as the ground fighting has erupted, and Meta (Facebook’s official name) announced it had partnered with nine organizations to help it sort fact from fiction for Ukrainian, Russian and other Eastern European users. These nine organizations are: StopFake, VoxCheck, Fact Check Georgia, Demagog, Myth Detector, Lead Stories, Patikrinta 15min, Re:Baltica and Delfi.

“To reduce the spread of misinformation and provide more reliable information to users, we partner with independent third-party fact-checkers globally,” the Silicon Valley giant wrote, adding, “Facebook’s independent third-party fact-checkers are all certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). The IFCN, a subsidiary of the journalism research organization Poynter Institute, is dedicated to bringing together fact-checkers worldwide.”

The problem with this? At least five of the nine organizations are directly in the pay of the United States government, a major belligerent in the conflict. The Poynter Institute is also funded by the NED. Furthermore, many of the other fact-checking organizations also have deep connections with other NATO powers, including direct funding.

 

StopFake

Perhaps the most well-known and notorious of the nine groups is StopFake. Established in 2014, StopFake is funded by NATO’s Atlantic Council, by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Embassy in Ukraine and the Czech Foreign Ministry. It has also received money from the U.S. via the National Endowment for Democracy, although that fact is far from trumpeted by either party.

One potential reason for this was alluded to in a 2016 article reprinted by StopFake itself. As the article notes, “in the case of StopFake.org when opponents want to insult the project, they immediately invoke National Endowment for Democracy donor support as evidence of U.S. government and CIA involvement.”

In the wake of the Russian invasion, the NED pulled all public records of their Ukraine projects from the internet. Nevertheless, incomplete archived copies of those records confirm a financial relationship between the groups.

StopFake was explicitly set up as a partisan organization. As a glowing report on them from the International Journalists’ Network notes, the majority of StopFake’s fact-checks are on stories from Russian media, and the motivation for its creation was “Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea and a campaign to portray Ukraine as a fascist state where anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia and xenophobia thrived.”

While it is indeed incorrect to label Ukraine a fascist state, the country clearly has one of the strongest far-right movements anywhere in Europe. And unfortunately, StopFake itself is far from an apolitical bystander in that rise. Multiple established Western media outlets, including The New York Times, have reported on StopFake’s ties to white power or Nazi groups. When local journalist Ekaterina Sergatskova exposed these links, death threats from far-right figures forced her to flee her home.

Indeed, according to some, one of StopFake’s primary functions appears to be to promote the far-right. A long exposé by Lev Golinkin in The Nation cataloged what it called StopFake’s history of “aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence, including war crimes.”

Surely StopFake’s most famous former host is Nina Jankowicz. Jankowicz was briefly head of President Biden’s newly formed Disinformation Governance Board before public uproar caused her to resign. Dubbed the “Ministry of Truth”, both the board and Jankowicz generated strong opposition. Yet few mentioned the fact that, while at StopFake, Jankowicz herself had, on camera, enthusiastically extolled the virtues of multiple fascist paramilitaries.

In a 2017 TV segment about the Aidar, Dnipro-1 and Azov Battalions, Jankowicz presented the groups as heroic volunteers deafening Ukraine from “further Russian separatist encroachment.” As she stated,

The volunteer movement in Ukraine extends far beyond military service. Volunteer groups are active in supporting Ukraine’s military with food, clothing, medicine, and post-battle rehabilitation, as well as working actively with the nearly two million internal refugees displaced by the war in Ukraine,”

This framing jars with multiple reports from human rights groups such as Amnesty International, who claim that the Aidar Battalion is guilty of a litany of abuses, “including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion, and possible executions.” Amnesty also accuses Aidar and Dnipro-1 of “Using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”

Azov, meanwhile, is the most infamous organization of the lot. The group’s insignia is directly lifted from the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division, a unit responsible for carrying out some of the worst crimes of Hitler’s holocaust. The Azov Battalion also dip their bullets in pig fat before battle as a calculated hate crime, attempting to block Jewish or Muslim enemies from a better afterlife. Andriy Biletsky, the group’s founder, said in 2010 that he believes Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen” – the word Hitler used to describe Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and other peoples he designated for extermination.

In February, Facebook announced that it was changing its rules on hate speech to allow praise and promotion of the Azov Battalion. Was this on StopFake’s recommendation? MintPress asked Meta/Facebook for comment on their fact checking partner’s ties to far right groups and if StopFake had influenced their decision to allow pro-Nazi content on their platform, but did not receive a reply.

As Golinkin noted in his article for The Nation, StopFake has also defended C14, another fascist paramilitary, describing it merely as a “community organization”, citing C14’s own denial of its pogroms against Roma people as “evidence” of its innocence. This designation clashes even with the U.S. State Department, which classifies C14 as a “nationalist hate group.” The “14” in its name refers to the “14 words” white supremacist slogan.

 

StopFake has made a number of controversial claims, including that the rise in anti-semitism in Ukraine is “fake” – even going so far as to brand well-established outlets like NBC News and Al-Jazeera as printing fake news about the Azov Battalion’s role in this. In an article entitled “Russia as Evil: False Historical Parallels. Some peculiarities of Russian Political Culture,” it also insisted that Hitler’s concentration camps were modeled on Russian ones set up by Vladimir Lenin. In reality, the German government pioneered the use of concentration camps during their genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples between 1904 and 1908 in Namibia. The British and Spanish were also early adopters.

In addition, StopFake has close links with The Kyiv Post, a Ukrainian outlet directly funded and trained by the National Endowment for Democracy. Since 2016, the Post has published 191 StopFake reports.

Who is the NED?

Why receiving funding from the National Endowment for Democracy should immediately raise suspicions of any organization is because the NED was explicitly established by the Reagan administration as a front group for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Although it is funded by Washington and staffed by state officials, it is technically a private company and therefore not subject to the same legal regulations and public scrutiny as state institutions.

The CIA has used the NED to carry out many of its more controversial operations. In recent years, it has trained and funneled money to the leaders of the Hong Kong protesters to keep the insurrection alive, fomented a nationwide campaign of demonstrations in Cuba, and helped attempts to topple the government of Venezuela. Perhaps most importantly for this story, however, the NED was also involved in the 2014 coup that removed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych from power. Regime change is, in short, one of its primary functions.

The NED does this by establishing, funding, supporting and training all manner of political, economic and social groups in target countries. According to its 2019 annual report, Ukraine is the NED’s “top priority”. The agency has (officially) spent over $22 million in Ukraine since 2014.

In their more candid moments, NED leaders are explicit about the organization’s role. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Carl Gershman, NED president from 1984 to 2021 said, explaining why his organization was set up. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein agreed: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” he told The Washington Post.

VoxCheck

VoxCheck receives substantial monetary assistance from the U.S. government through both the NED and the U.S. Embassy. It is also funded by the Dutch and German governments. Incomplete NED records show VoxCheck receives substantial yearly grants and has accepted around $250,000 in total.

That sort of money goes an extremely long way in Ukraine, which is by quite some way the poorest nation in Europe. The country’s GNI per capita of $3,500 per year is well below that of even Russia, which stands at $10,700. One $15,000 NED grant given to a Ukrainian media foundation, for instance, was enough to pay for over 100 articles to be written.

Despite its funding, Western media portray VoxCheck extremely positively. The Washington Post, for example, describes them as “a small group of independent fact-checkers.” In common parlance, the word “independent” is usually reserved for any media group not owned or funded by governments (as if that is the only type of dependence). But even at this extremely low bar, VoxCheck falls.

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An NED document shows a 2020 grant given to VoxUkraine

In the article, the Washington Post describes VoxCheck’s fact-checking process, which largely consists of “sourcing credible news sources – such as a BBC article,” and then labeling Russian claims as false on this basis. In other words, the official state mouthpiece of the British government – one that was instrumental in promoting the lies which led to the invasions of Iraq and Libya – is considered sacrosanct.

What comes across in the Post’s glowing exposé is that VoxCheck staff have few pretensions about being neutral and see themselves as digital foot soldiers in a crusade against Russia. As one employee said, the mission is to “prevent someone from falling into Russian lies and manipulation.” Indeed, one of the staff quit his job to volunteer for the Ukrainian Army. Other VoxCheck employees revealed that they felt guilty for not doing so themselves and only contributing virtually to the fight.

Of course, Russia has lied constantly during this war; the entire invasion was based on a lie. Throughout the winter, Russian officials consistently repeated that they had no intention of invading Ukraine. Russian media, meanwhile, claimed that President Zelensky had fled the country in the wake of the invasion. But in war, all sides lie. And when a fact-checking operation constantly critiques only one side and stays largely quiet about the other, it has clearly taken a side in the conflict and is therefore acting in a partisan fashion. People interested in thinking critically should be scrutinizing claims made by all sides.

Fact Check Georgia

Fact Check Georgia describes itself as “an independent and non-partisan website which offers readers researched, verified and evidence-based information.” Yet it is bankrolled by a litany of dubious organizations, including the NED and the U.S. Embassy, the German Marshall Fund, the Dutch government and the European Endowment for Democracy, a European government-funded “private” organization explicitly modeled on the NED.

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Fact Check Georgia’s “About Us” section reveals just how independent the fact checking organization really is

Fact Check Georgia’s independence is potentially undermined by the fact that at the bottom of every page of its website, it displays the crests of both the NED and the U.S. Embassy in Georgia. This is accompanied by the disclaimer, “The views and opinions expressed on this website belong to Factcheck.ge and are not the views and opinions of project support organizations” – a sentence that would not be necessary to attach if an organization was truly independent.

Furthermore, some of its staff have notable backgrounds. The first person listed on Fact Check Georgia’s “our team” section was formerly the Deputy Minister of Defense for Georgia – a country that fought a war against Russia in 2008.

Myth Detector

Another Georgia-based company, Myth Detector, was funded by the U.S. Embassy to the tune of €42,000 in financial year 2021. German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle contributed €41,000. Also donating €41,000 last year, according to Myth Detector’s financial report, is a group called “Zinc.” This is quite possibly the Zinc Network, a shadowy intelligence firm that conducts information warfare operations on behalf of the U.K. and U.S. governments.

Demagog

Not only is the U.S. Embassy in Poland funding Demagog, it is also carrying out training in how to think. Demagog’s website notes that the embassy established a “fact-checking academy” on “how to deal with false information.” “Thanks to the [embassy] cooperation,” it notes, “classes were conducted for students and teachers on fake news, reliable sources of information and fact-checking.”

Alongside the U.S. government, Demagog also receives money from Polish government, European Union and European Economic Area organizations.

Together, these five organizations’ operations are all directly bankrolled by Washington. However, many of the other fact-checking groups Facebook pays to serve as content police on their platform have similarly close connections to Western state power. Indeed, the only one of the nine that appears relatively free from direct government collaboration is self-funded outlet Lead Stories.

Patikrinta 15min

Lithuanian outlet Patikrinta 15min insist that they are an independent, non-partisan group. As their “About” section states: “Sponsors of Patikrinta 15min cannot be political parties, politicians, state organizations or companies or organizations related to politicians.” They do, however, accept funding from the Poynter Institute, the journalism group that owns U.S. fact-checking organization Politifact. Since 2016, the Poynter Institute has sought for and received at least seven grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, totaling well over half a million dollars.

Notably, some of these grants are clearly a way of funneling cash to Eastern European fact-checking groups. As one NED grant summary for $78,000 notes, the goal of the money is to “promote the use of fact-checking websites as an effective accountability tool in Central and Eastern Europe, and strengthen the global fact-checking community.” The NED goes on to note that Poynter will bring over 70 journalists to a training summit and afterward continue to “train” “mentor,” “support,” and help them and their organizations with “capacity building.”

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One of several grants given to the ostensibly neutral Poynter Institute by the US State Dept’s NED

A cynic might conclude that the NED was simply trying to launder its money through Poynter. MintPress asked Patikrinta 15min to confirm or deny whether they were one of the Eastern European groups mentioned in the NED filings but has not received a response.

Like other groups, Patikrinta 15min’s non-partisan veneer frequently slips. This can be seen in headlines such as “Russian cynicism knows no bounds” and the fact that they frequently defend Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion.

Like StopFake, n 15min has argued that Azov’s use of the Waffen SS symbol is coincidental. It also presented Azov as an apolitical organization and has used quotes from Azov founder Andriy Biletsky – possibly the world’s most infamous living neo-Nazi – as “proof” that charges against it are Russian disinformation.

Re:Baltica

While there is no evidence that Re:Baltica has a financial relationship with the United States government, the lion’s share of its funding still comes from the West. As they note on their website, around two-thirds of their funding comes “from the institutions based in EU/NATO countries.” They also list “the Kingdom of the Netherlands” as one of their “friends” – i.e., donors.

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Re:Baltica is generously funded by western govt’s and NGOs, including George Soro’s Open Society Foundation

 

Delfi

Delfi is a major web portal in Eastern Europe and the Baltic. The company does not disclose if it receives foreign funding. It does, undeniably, however, have a close relationship with the NED. In 2015, Delfi interviewed Christopher Walker, a senior NED manager about the best way they could counter Russian propaganda. Two years later, NED President Gershman addressed the Lithuanian parliament, revealing that his organization had,

[W]orked with Lithuania in countering Russian efforts to subvert and destroy democracy in Lithuania, in Europe, and in Russia itself. We have supported the work of the Lithuania-based Delfi and the East European Studies Center in monitoring, documenting, and combatting Russian disinformation in Lithuania and the Baltic states.”

Later that year, Delfi teamed up with the NED to hold the 1st Vilnius Young Leaders Meeting, whereby handpicked young activists were invited to rub shoulders with journalists and spooks from across Europe and the United States, in the hope of building up a Western-friendly force in civil society.

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A chart showing the leadership structure of the EXPOSE network published as part of the Integrity Initiative Leak 7

Delfi, Re:Baltica and StopFake were all identified as proposed members of a “counter”-propaganda network hoping to be established by the EXPOSE Network. EXPOSE was allegedly a secret U.K.-government funded initiative that would have brought together journalists and state operatives in an alliance to shape public discourse in a manner more conducive to the priorities of Western governments.

As EXPOSE wrote, “An opportunity exists to upskill civil society organizations around Europe, enhancing their existing activities and unleashing their potential” to be the next generation of activists in the fight against Kremlin disinformation.”

“Coordinat[ing] their activities,” wrote EXPOSE, “represents a unique opportunity” for the British government in their fight against Russia. Unfortunately, they lamented, StopFake’s “monomaniacal fixation” on Russia had hurt its credibility.

Remarkably, EXPOSE also wrote that, “Another barrier to combating disinformation is the fact that certain Kremlin-backed narratives are factually true” – an admission that underlines that, to many governments and media outlets, “disinformation” is rapidly coming to simply mean “information we disagree with.”

The names of those individuals listed as potential employees of this network are a who’s who of state-linked operatives, including the Zinc Network, multiple individuals from NED-funded investigative journalism website Bellingcat and Ben Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson who is now head of global intelligence for Facebook.

 

Facebook’s Cyber War

Nimmo is only one of a great many former state agents now working in the higher echelons of Facebook, however. Last month, MintPress published a study revealing that the Silicon Valley giant has hired dozens of ex-CIA personnel into influential positions within the company, especially in security, content moderation and trust and safety.

Given how influential Facebook is as a media and communications giant, this sort of relationship constitutes a national security issue to every other country in the world. And this is not a hypothetical threat either. In November, Nimmo led a team that effectively attempted to swing the Nicaraguan elections away from the ruling Sandinista party and towards the U.S.-backed candidate. In the days leading up to the election, Facebook deleted hundreds of accounts and pages of pro-Sandinista media.

This action underlines the fact that Facebook is not an international company existing only in the ether, but an American operation bound by American laws. And increasingly, it is moving closer to the U.S. government itself.

Who will guard the guardians?

Fake news abounds online, and we as a society are wholly unprepared to counter it. A study conducted by Stanford University found that the vast majority of people – even the digitally savvy youth – were unable to tell factual reporting from obvious falsehoods online. Many will fall for Russian propaganda. Russian media is indeed pumping out misleading information constantly. But so are NATO countries. And if the fact-checkers who have volunteered to sort truth from fiction for us relentlessly attack Russia but are quiet on their own side’s spin, many more will fall for Western propaganda.

The implicit outlook of many of these fact-checking groups is that “only Russia lies.” This is the position of a partisan organization, one that cares little about truth and more about imposing control over the means of communication. And this is all being done in the name of keeping us safe.

Who is fact-checking the fact-checkers? Unfortunately, it is up to small, independent media outlets to do so. However, MintPress has faced constant suppression for doing so, being blocked from communicating with our 400,000+ Facebook followers, suppressed algorithmically by the Silicon Valley giants, and being removed from financial transaction services like PayPal.

The solution is to teach and develop critical media literacy. All media outlets have biases and agendas. It is up to the individual to learn these and constantly scrutinize and evaluate everything they read. However, governments do not want their populations thinking critically; they want their message to be dominant, one reason why the NED has been quietly bankrolling so many fact-checking organizations to do its work for it.

Feature photo | Graphic by MintPress News

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.orgThe GuardianSalonThe GrayzoneJacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

Brides in the Chechen Republic

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Brides in the Chechen Republic

Brides in the Chechen Republic often wear embroidered shawls in the same style as their dresses, instead of a veil. Sometimes, the bride may also wear a jeweled tiara over the headscarf.

As a rule, the dresses themselves are not only white, but in any pastel color: cream, light pink, golden, decorated with lace and gems. They can be both straight or very fluffy, with long plumes.

A Saturday Night In Starbucks

Several years ago, an unusual set of events found me at Starbucks on a Saturday night. It had been a reasonably decent day, but there are, as we all know, plenty of things in this world to be depressed about. And those things, as we also know, are massively amplified by the attention-seeking class. Somehow, the parade of negativity had its effect on me.

Sitting in the Starbucks cured me.

What I Saw

It was a very average Starbucks in a very average location. And the very average people sitting with me were a nearly perfect cross-section of the American demographic.

To my left was a middle-aged black man, doing something on his laptop. Just past him was a middle-aged white woman doing the same. Past her, in the corner, were three teenage girls – one black, one white, one Latin – studying together.

Behind me was another black man with a laptop and piles of papers, and past him a young couple falling in love over lattes.

At the big, center table was a 25ish woman, with multiple piles of paper upon which she was working very hard. After a while, her boyfriend showed up. She hugged him, laid her head on his shoulder, and they kissed. It was sweet. Then he got to work with her.

There were also people coming and going. They were more of the same: A cross-sectional American parade of people behaving quietly and well.

Watching these people, I decided that it would be far better to spend time helping them than to obsess over all the bad things in the world. These are the people who deserve our efforts.

What Would Help the Bright Side of Humanity?

That, of course, brought me to the question of how to help the bright side of humanity, and I decided that a great start would be to make one point very clearly:

Fear is a brain hack; a malicious and effective one.

When people want to get their hands on your time and money – and don’t want to be bothered with that pesky ‘reason’ thing – fear is how they do it… over and over and over. Fear works.

So, if we want to move the brighter side of humanity forward, the first thing we need to do is to inform them that fear is their greatest enemy. They need to understand – and remember – that when someone tries to make them afraid, they are being hacked.

Secondly, we need to assure the brighter side of humanity that their way is right… that they have every right to live their way; that they should not abandon their values to screaming political hucksters.

Power-seekers have always been with us, and they can succeed only by getting frightened people to line up behind them. They need us to adopt their slogans, respond to their fears, and run their stories through our minds.

Those story lines, of course, service dominance, power, and archaic models of lordship. They do not serve human advancement.

The people I saw in the Starbucks held a different and better set of ideals. They believed that everyone should be treated with respect; that coercion and fraud are wrong; that everyone should be left alone to do as they please, so long as they don’t intrude upon others.

This decent side of humanity needs to know that their ideals should never be abandoned for a political cause, no matter how Earth-shakingly urgent it seems.

The people I saw in the Starbucks, to be blunt about it, were morally superior to the powerful and the fear-peddlers.

Such people should hold to their values, stay with their own lines of reason, and believe in their own virtues.

And When They Do?

Once the people I saw at Starbucks start believing in themselves, the world will change, and massively.

These people – and there are untold millions of them – are productive and cooperative. Their problem is that they’ve been laying aside their virtues at the insistence of fear-peddlers.

The people in the Starbucks didn’t need edicts from potentates.

Once the “Starbucks people” decide that fear and subservience were contrary to life itself, they will move into a better age. Such transitions are difficult, of course, but once these people truly believe in their own ways, the ways of the fear-peddlers will pass away.

May it be soon.

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Paul Rosenberg
freemansperspective.com

Not War, But Murder: The Clash at Cold Harbor

Now for some American Civil War History. -MM

After crossing the North Anna River, Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces headed toward Cold Harbor.

By William E. Welsh

Private Augustus Du Bois marched forward at daybreak on June 3, 1864, along with hundreds of other members of the 7th New York Heavy Artillery regiment to a thin belt of timber a mile south of the key road junction of Cold Harbor. On the near side of the woods, the 1,700-man strong regiment halted to await the firing of a cannon that would signal the beginning of the charge. The regiment’s objective was a line of field fortifications that crowned a low ridge. Behind the breastworks, battle-tested Confederate soldiers were packed tightly together, waiting calmly for the attack to begin. If the Federals could punch through General Robert E. Lee’s line, it would enable the Army of the Potomac to march into Richmond and end the war. The Confederates did not expect them to succeed.

The lone gun boomed and the bluecoats advanced through the woods toward shoulder-high breastworks that jutted defiantly into no-man’s-land between the two armies. Once clear of the woods, Union officers gave the order to advance at the double quick, and the attackers swept forward, shouting, “Huzzah! Huzzah!”

Their opponents fired down into the advancing sea of blue soldiers. As the Federals struggled across the open ground, enemy cannon blasted deadly canister into the charging men, tearing huge holes in their ranks. Members of the 7th New York swarmed up the incline toward their objective. At the base of the fortifications, Colonel Lewis Morris and other officers reformed the regiment for a final assault over the barricades. The Confederates did not make it easy for them. “The enemy bravely stood their ground, not waiting for us to come over the works, but meeting us on the parapet,” recalled Du Bois. “They contested every inch.”

Du Bois and those around him fought their way onto the parapet, eager for a close-hand brawl. The top of the barricade was too narrow to accommodate all of the defenders, and some fought in the trenches while their comrades grappled above with the enemy. “As I reached the top of the works a brave fellow confronted us,” Du Bois wrote. “Standing below he thrust his bayonet into the comrade by my side, and was about to give me the same dose, but a charge from my gun changed his mind. It was a hand-to-hand fight to the finish. Clubbed muskets, bayonets, and swords got in their deadly work.”

The fighting spilled over to the defenders’ side of the fortifications. The contest was a grim one, but the Federals retained the advantage. Hundreds of graybacks were forced to surrender or lose their lives. The 7th New York of Brig. Gen. Francis Barlow’s 1st Division appeared to have pulled off a significant victory. The regiment had captured a portion of the first line of the enemy’s works belonging to Brig. Gen. John Echols’s brigade of Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge’s division. If the breach could be widened, two entire Confederate divisions, Breckinridge’s and that of Maj. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox, would be cut off from the rest of Lee’s army situated to the north.

Reinforcing For the Upcoming Battle

It was a promising beginning to the Union attack. Federal generals at all levels of command had been instructed by Army of the Potomac commander Maj. Gen. George Meade to heavily reinforce any local success, no matter how small, with fresh troops. If Meade’s generals heeded his advice, victory might be achieved under the hot summer sun. For nearly a month, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had held off Meade’s army, under the watchful eye of overall Union commander Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. With luck and determination, the Federals might end Lee’s unblemished record of tactical victories over the Federals in Grant’s ongoing Overland Campaign.

The Army of the Potomac had tried several times in the preceding month to slip around Lee’s right flank following the massive Battle of the Wilderness on May 5-6. Unlike his predecessors, Grant was determined to continue his drive south despite suffering heavy losses. Lee’s army, which had the advantage of shorter routes of march that enabled it to entrench before the Federals could get set for a fresh assault, fought its opponent to a standstill at Spotsylvania Courthouse and again at the North Anna River before the armies shifted southeast to Cold Harbor in late May.

As yet another major battle brewed, both sides sought to reinforce their depleted ranks. Grant had to deal not only with 40,000 battlefield losses, but also with the expiration of three-year terms of enlistment by many of the veteran regiments mustered into service during the first year of the war. Grant’s solution, supported by President Abraham Lincoln, was to pull entire regiments of heavy artillery units from Washington and Fort Monroe, Virginia, and convert them into infantry. These full-strength regiments, known as “Heavies,” received orders in mid-May to join the Army of the Potomac in the field. Once they arrived in camp, the regiments were inserted into veteran brigades as a way to offset their lack of experience. Altogether, the Army of the Potomac had received 33,000 replacement troops by the time it reached Cold Harbor.

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The dilapidated tavern at Cold Harbor was used by General Winfield Scott Hancock for his headquarters. The somewhat confusing place name was an old English term referring to a tavern that did not offer hot meals with its overnight accommodations.

When Lee learned that Grant had transferred Maj. Gen. William Smith’s 16,000-strong XVIII Corps from Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James to Meade’s army, he appealed to Confederate President Jefferson Davis for additional forces of his own. After nearly a week of wrangling between Lee and General P.G.T. Beauregard over the former’s desperate need for reinforcements, Beauregard finally relinquished Maj. Gen. Robert F. Hoke’s division on the night of May 30. Lee rushed them to Cold Harbor.

R0bert E. Lee’s Seven-Mile Battle Line

The crossroads at Cold Harbor was a dilapidated wayside tavern of no particular distinction. The somewhat confusing name was an English term that referred to the lack of a hot meal at an overnight accommodation. The value of Cold Harbor lay in its significance as a strategic crossroads midway between Totopotomoy Creek and the Chickahominy River. Lee prized it as a way to prevent Smith’s XVIII Corps from having an unobstructed path to Richmond, while Grant and Meade sought to deny it to the Confederates for use as a base from which to disrupt Federal supply lines.

On the afternoon of May 31, cavalry from both armies clashed at the crossroads. By the end of the day, the Federal cavalry had secured the crossroads and waited for infantry to relieve it. For the next two days, Lee and Grant steadily built up their infantry forces in a line that stretched several miles above and below Cold Harbor between the two waterways. By the morning of June 2, Lee’s line stretched for seven miles from Totopotomoy Creek in the north to the Chickahominy in the south. With each flank anchored on a riverbank, the only way for the Federals to reach Richmond was to fight their way through Lee’s army.

Lee shifted his forces as needed during the preliminary fighting at Cold Harbor, splitting Lt. Gen. A.P. Hill’s III Corps with one of its divisions placed on the left flank and two on the right. By the morning of June 3, the Confederates were deployed as follows: Maj. Gen. Jubal Early’s II Corps and Maj. Gen. Henry Heth’s division of Hill’s corps were on the left flank; Maj. Gen. Richard Anderson’s I Corps was in the center; and Hoke’s and Breckinridge’s divisions and two divisions of Hill’s corps were on the right.

Grant’s mistaken decision to postpone a major attack on the entire Confederate line gave newly arriving Confederate divisions ample time to improve their entrenchments. The Southerners labored tirelessly to build earthworks that were tall enough to stand behind and also were configured to provide interlocking fields of fire to catch any attacking units in a deadly crossfire.

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The 7th New York Heavy Artillery of Brigadier General Francis Barlow’s 1st Division made a spirited attack on the Confederate works at Cold Harbor. They overran the first line of Lee’s defense, capturing prisoners and turning captured guns on the Confederates before being pushed back when their success went unsupported.

The nearly manic effort the Confederates put into the construction of their defenses was readily apparent to the Federals opposite them. “We pass within apparently two hundred yards of the enemy’s lines, near which are a large busy corps of Rebel gray men cutting down trees; swinging their axes as if dear life depended upon their taking down a half a dozen trees at every stroke,” recounted a soldier from Smith’s XVIII Corps.

The Assault at Daybreak

Grant finally issued orders for a major assault on June 3 in the mistaken belief that the Confederates could not withstand a full-scale attack. Meade, who knew the Confederates were well entrenched, believed that such an attack was suicidal, but did not share those thoughts with Grant and instead passed along the order for the attack. Upon learning that a major assault was imminent, many Federal veterans wrote their names and addresses on slips of paper and pinned them on the backs of their coats the night before the assault to ensure that their bodies might be accurately identified and their next of kin informed of the time and place of their deaths. It was an ominous sign.

The main attack, scheduled for daybreak on June 3, was to be made by the three corps on the Federal left flank. Left to right, they were Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock’s II Corps, Maj. Gen. Horatio Wright’s VI Corps, Smith’s XVIII Corps, Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren’s V Corps, and Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps. The three corps on the left were to make the main assault, while the two corps on the right were to make a diversionary attack designed to prevent Lee from stripping units from his left flank to reinforce his right.

Hancock’s corps had a reputation for hard fighting, and his officers fully intended to live up to that reputation. Hancock ordered two of his divisions to attack in strength, with the third held in reserve. Barlow’s division, on the extreme left of the Federal line, and Brig. Gen. John Gibbon’s on the right were to assail the Confederate right; Maj. Gen. David Birney’s division was behind Barlow’s. The two divisions on the front line stacked their brigades two-deep, with four brigades in front and four brigades directly behind.

The Federal attack in the southern sector of the battlefield was scheduled to begin at 4:30 am. Fifteen minutes before that, Gibbon and Barlow each sent a regiment forward with orders to push back the Confederate pickets. At the arranged time, signal guns fired on Hancock’s front, indicating the beginning of the assault. Rain, which had been falling throughout the night, stopped as the assault began, but the damp ground gave rise to a thick mist that hugged the ground and made it difficult to discern distant objects. Any hope for the Federals to make a last-second observation of enemy positions was dashed by the foggy conditions.

At the far left of the Union line, Barlow’s men exited the woods and marched in crisp lines through fields of tall, damp grass. As they entered the field, they moved at the double-quick in hopes of surprising the enemy. Colonel Nelson Miles’s brigade on the left was advancing against two brigades of Wilcox’s division, while Colonel John Brooke’s brigade was heading for two brigades of Breckinridge’s division. On the far right of Brooke’s 4th Brigade was the oversized 7th New York Heavy Artillery. Eager to ensure that his attack was made with as much élan as possible, Brooke rode into battle on horseback at the front of his brigade.

Fighting For the Flag

Barlow’s brigades had the misfortune to attack entrenched enemy forces on slightly elevated ground. If properly led, these troops would be able to halt Barlow’s attack before it reached their breastworks. The downside for the defenders was that in many places the trenches behind their fortifications had flooded due to the heavy rains. The trenches occupied by Lt. Col. George Edgar’s 26th Virginia Battalion had filled with water during the night, and Edgar had given his men permission to sleep on drier ground to the rear, leaving only pickets to man the flooded battlements.

Rushing forward without firing their guns, Morris’s New Yorkers were able to reach the breastworks and engage Edgar’s pickets in hand-to-hand fighting. While some of the New Yorkers grappled with the pickets, others hurled themselves over the parapet and rushed into the lightly held fortifications. Realizing his blunder, Edgar rushed forward with the balance of his battalion to reinforce his pickets. In the ensuing melee, he was bayoneted in the shoulder and taken prisoner.

The soldiers of the 7th New York fought desperately to seize the flag of the 26th Virginia. Their own color bearer had fallen during the charge, and five of his fellow soldiers were killed trying to advance the colors amid the hailstorm of canister and bullets sweeping the landscape. The bluecoats shot the color bearer of the 26th Virginia, but before he died he managed to strip the colors from the staff and throw them to his fellow Virginians. A scrum ensued in which soldiers from both sides tugged at the prize. The New Yorkers won the tug of war and passed the prize back through their ranks to ensure that it stayed in their possession.

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Believing wrongly that the Confederates could not withstand an all-out assault at Cold Harbor, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant attacked at daybreak on June 3, 1864. Three Union corps made the attack. All failed.

To the left of Brooke’s brigade, Miles’s soldiers quickly lost heart after they suffered heavy casualties trying to advance across open ground west of the Dispatch Station Road. They came under the well-placed batteries of Lt. Col. William Pegram of Hill’s corps, whose guns atop high ground stopped Miles’s attack cold. The survivors of the first line retreated to the safety of the road, where they took cover in its sunken roadbed.

One regiment on the far right of Miles’s brigade performed good service. Colonel Charles Hapgood, commanding the veteran 5th New Hampshire Regiment, saw the success of the 7th New York and ordered his troops to execute a half-wheel right and attack the salient where Morris’s soldiers had broken through the enemy line. The combined weight of the Federal attack finally routed the 26th Virginia.

“We Fought Like Hell and Got Licked Like Damnation”

The Confederate regiments formed a second line to plug the breach. The 8th Florida Regiment of Brig. Gen. Joseph Finegan’s brigade charged toward the right flank of the 7th New York, screaming the high-pitched Rebel yell. They halted to fire two volleys into the New Yorkers and then charged, swinging their rifle butts and stabbing with their bayonets in an effort to retake the trenches. To the Floridians’ immediate south, 400 reinforcements of the 2nd Maryland Regiment counterattacked the 5th New Hampshire. Many of the Granite State boys tried to hide underneath or inside the main house and outbuildings of a nearby farm, but the Marylanders hunted them down and killed them where they hid.

When Brooke rode back to lead forward his second line, he was wounded by shrapnel. At that point, the attack began to fall apart. The 7th New York was driven out of the enemy’s trenches and forced to retreat 300 yards. The attack was costly for the New Yorkers, who lost about 25 percent casualties of the 1,700 men who had participated in the assault. The 5th New Hampshire suffered an even higher loss rate, with about 40 percent of its 550 men killed or wounded. “We fought like hell and got licked like damnation,” wrote Lieutenant Frederick Mather of the 7th New York. Despite the repulse, Barlow’s division captured 425 prisoners and six guns.

Robert Tyler’s Attack

Gibbon’s four brigades were arrayed in similar formation to Barlow’s brigades, with two forward and two directly behind. The right wing consisted of Brig. Gen. Robert Tyler’s 4th Brigade, with Colonel Boyd McKeen’s 1st Brigade behind it. On the left wing, Colonel Thomas Smyth’s brigade was in the front, supported by Brig. Gen. Joshua Owen’s 2nd Brigade.

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Soldiers of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock’s II Corps dig frantically with bayonets, tin plates, and bare hands to create earthworks before a Confederate countercharge.

Tyler’s brigade was composed of five regiments from New York bolstered by the 1,600-strong 8th New York Heavy Artillery led by Colonel Peter Porter. The brigade’s right flank rested on the Cold Harbor Road. The New Yorkers faced five Georgia regiments belonging to Brig. Gen. Alfred Colquitt’s brigade. To reach the Georgians’ fortified position, Tyler’s brigade had the unsavory task of traversing the muck of Boatswain’s Swamp. To the left of Tyler’s brigade, Smyth’s brigade faced Brig. Gen. James Martin’s North Carolina brigade. Forming a second line behind Hoke’s division were the five brigades of Maj. Gen. William Mahone’s division. All that could be reasonably expected of Gibbon’s men was that they capture the first line of enemy trenches in front of them.

Gibbon’s men went forward 15 minutes after Barlow’s soldiers began their attack. With bayonets fixed, the soldiers of Tyler’s brigade surged forward, making their way as best as they could through the swampy muck. Colquitt’s Georgians, formed in two lines, delivered a pair of strong volleys—one from each rank—when the New Yorkers were within range, then began firing at will. The Union attack was shattered before it reached its objective. “Balls commenced to literally mow us down,” recalled Lieutenant John Russell Winterbotham of the 155th New York. Tyler left the field after shrapnel mangled his ankle. Porter fell mortally wounded with a half dozen bullet wounds in his crumpled body.

The only success enjoyed by Tyler’s brigade occurred on the left flank. Because Tyler’s battle line was so long, Colonel James McMahon’s 164th New York overlapped the extreme left, which was held by the 17th North Carolina. The Tarheels were armed with older muskets that fired buck-and-ball and caused heavy casualties at close range. McMahon’s soldiers overran an advanced position held by the North Carolinians, netting 45 prisoners, and continued toward the main line. Despite heavy enemy fire, they reached the line and began fighting hand-to-hand before being driven back. McMahon was reluctant to break off the attack, even though he was outnumbered. When the Tarheels called on McMahon to surrender, he refused, and they shot him down at point-blank range. The 164th New York paid a heavy price for its bravery, losing 11 officers and 143 enlisted men.

Entrenching the Advance

After Tyler’s attack was repulsed, McKeen led his men forward against Colquitt’s steady line. The 29-year-old Princeton graduate accompanied his first line in its advance and was instantly killed. The lead elements of the brigade took cover in a depression 75 yards from the Georgians’ position. Command of the brigade fell to its senior regimental commander, Colonel Frank Haskell of the 36th Wisconsin. When the advance resumed, Haskell was shot in the head. At that point, the survivors of McKeen’s failed attack began to entrench.

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Sword-waving Major Christopher Crossman leads the doomed charge of his 1st Maine Heavy Artillery at Cold Harbor. Painting by Don Troiani.

On Gibbon’s left, the regiments of Smyth’s brigade encountered such galling fire that they halted and began digging in 50 to 100 yards from the enemy main line. Gibbon, sensing that different tactics were called for, ordered Owen to attack with his regiments in columns to provide depth to the attack. But seeing that Smyth’s troops had broken off their attack and were entrenching, Owen chose to do the same.

Hancock had established his quarters at Burnett’s Tavern in Cold Harbor. He was close enough to the battle that enemy artillery shells crashed around the crossroads and into the artillery park located nearby. Two of his staff were wounded by shrapnel. The battle-hardened corps commander was shaken to learn that he had lost eight of his colonels and 3,000 other soldiers in the failed attack.

Wright’s VI Corps, which was adjacent to Hancock’s right flank on the north side of the Cold Harbor Road, occupied a narrow front. Wright’s three divisions were almost on top of one another, and they were closer to the Confederate line than to other Federal units. Opposite Wright’s corps were six Confederate brigades, two of which belonged to Hoke’s division and four that belonged to Anderson’s I Corps.

The Confederates enjoyed an excellent defensive position. With Wright’s tacit approval,  his division commanders—Brig. Gens. David Russell, Thomas Neill, and James Ricketts—ordered a limited assault in which their troops were to advance within 80 yards of the enemy line and establish a new position. When they reached their stated objective, half the men in each forward regiment dug in while the other half returned the enemy’s fire. Although losses were light compared to those suffered by the frontline units of Hancock’s corps, Wright’s regiments still suffered significant casualties as a result of their exposure to artillery fire and enemy sharpshooters, the latter of whom enjoyed nearly complete protection behind log barricades.

Caught in a Deadly Crossfire

Smith’s well-rested XVIII Corps prepared to launch a major assault of its own. Whereas Hancock and Wright had launched their attacks on a wide front, Smith ordered his two divisions to advance in columns of massed brigades. Brig. Gen. John Martindale deployed his two brigades in column formation on the right, one on each side of a wooded swale. To his left, Brig. Gen. William Brooks deployed one of his four brigades in a single column. The attacking brigades were to advance through a belt of woods that Smith believed would furnish some measure of protection from fire.

Unknown to Smith and his division commanders, the Confederate line in that sector was configured to trap whatever Union troops charged into it. Generals Joseph Kershaw and Charles Field had deployed their troops in a horseshoe configuration that would allow them to catch assaulting forces in a crossfire. Behind the breastworks, the Confederates were arrayed shoulder to shoulder in two ranks.

Leading the Union attack on the north side of the swale was dashing 26-year-old Colonel Griffin Stedman, who waved his sword as he rode at the front of his brigade. Before the attack, his regimental commanders had requested permission to deploy into line of battle once they came under heavy fire, but Stedman had forbidden it. The woods along the swale furnished protective cover for only about 50 yards. After that, the enemy fire grew to a deafening roar and the landscape was quickly blanketed with dead or dying Federals.

Because of heavy battle smoke, the men in Stedman’s lead regiments could not see the faces of Brig. Gen. Evander Law’s Alabamians, who were firing steadily into their ranks. “To those exposed to the full force and fury of the dreadful storm of lead and iron that met the charging columns, it seemed more like a volcanic blast than a battle,” wrote Captain Asa Bartlett of the 12th New Hampshire, the lead regiment in Stedman’s attack. Stedman’s attack was easily shattered. The 12th New Hampshire alone lost 50 percent of its soldiers in the attack. When the other regiments behind it saw the fate of the 12th New Hampshire, they withdrew to the tree line and began to entrench.

“It Was Not War, it Was Murder”

On the south side of the swale, Martindale’s left column, led by Brig. Gen. George Stannard, fared no better. Twice Stannard sent his men against the Confederate breastworks, but they were easily repulsed. Once it became apparent to Kershaw that a major assault was under way, he ordered Brig. Gen. Goode Bryan to move his Georgians forward to reinforce Law’s men. There wasn’t enough room at the packed breastworks for the Georgians, and they passed forward loaded rifles to the Alabamians so the front-line troops would not have to reload. Law, in the thick of the fighting, shared the sentiments of many of his fellow veterans. “It was not war, it was murder,” he wrote.

On Stannard’s left flank, the lead regiments braved a storm of lead and iron in an effort to reach the enemy barricades. Lending firepower to the Confederate infantry were cannon belching forth double loads of canister that stopped the blue-clad infantry in their tracks. “There was a helpless mob, a swarming multitude of confused men,” wrote a Confederate artillerist who witnessed the assault. “They were falling by scores, hundreds. The mass was simply melting away under the fury of our fire.” Smith, on hand to witness the repulse, told the brigadier to reform his survivors at the tree line and entrench along the same line as Martindale’s two shattered brigades. Between them, Smith and Wright lost about 1,800 men.

“A Wanton Waste of Life”

From his headquarters in the rear of Wright’s corps three quarters of a mile north of Cold Harbor, Meade received regular updates from each of the three corps in the main assault. As soon as he received the dispatches, he forwarded them to Grant, whose headquarters was a mile behind the front line near VI Corps’ field hospital.

An initial report from Hancock at 5 am indicated that Barlow had seized the enemy works opposite him, but 15 minutes later he informed Meade that the attack had failed. From then on, the news was all bad. Two hours after the main assault had begun, it was over. All three corps commanders on the left wing of the Federal line reported to Meade that although their troops fought heroically, they had not been able to penetrate the Confederates’ first line of defense. At 6:35 am, Hancock requested permission to break off the attack. Meade fired back a stern reply: “You will make the attack and support it well, so that in the event of being successful, the advantage gained can be held. If unsuccessful report at once.”

Meade contacted Grant by telegraph at 7 am to determine whether the assault should continue. “The moment it becomes certain that an assault cannot succeed, suspend the offensive, but when one does succeed push it vigorously, and if necessary pile in troops at the successful point from wherever they can be taken,” Grant replied vaguely. Meade continued to press his corps commanders so as not to appear weak to Grant.

When the three corps commanders received Meade’s orders, they passed them along to their division commanders but simply looked the other way to avoid what Smith deemed “a wanton waste of life.” The division commanders had seen enough slaughter for one day, and they found a way to circumvent any further assaults. “To move that army farther, except by regular approaches, was a simple and absolute impossibility, known to be such by every officer and man of the three corps engaged,” wrote Colonel Martin McMahon, VI Corps’ chief of staff. “The order was obeyed by simply renewing the fire from the men as they lay in position.” Griffin Stedman was less restrained. “I will not take my regiment in another charge if Jesus Christ himself should order it!” he shouted.

Lee’s Last Great Victory

At 11 am, Grant arrived at the front to discuss with Meade whether to continue the attack. After hearing the discouraging reports, Grant issued orders to refrain from further attacks. Meanwhile, Robert E. Lee reported to President Jefferson Davis in Richmond that the Army of Northern Virginia had “repulsed without difficulty” an enemy vastly superior in numbers. In contrast to the more than 6,000 Federal casualties, the Confederates had lost at most 1,500 men. Said Lee: “Our loss today has been small, and our success, under the blessing of God, all that we could expect.”

Although the Federals remained in position for more than a week, the frontal assault on June 3 was the last organized fighting at Cold Harbor. For the next three days, the two sides clung to the ground within easy shooting distance of each other. Anyone foolish enough to climb to his feet was quickly shot down. “Thousands of men were cramped up in a narrow trench,” one Confederate officer recalled, “unable to go out, or to get up, or to stretch or to stand, without danger to life and limb; unable to lie down, or to sleep, for lack of room and pressure of peril; night alarms, day attacks, hunger, thirst, supreme weariness, squalor, vermin, filth, disgusting odors everywhere.” Neither Grant nor Lee was willing to allow a flag of truce for the removal of the rotting dead who lay between the two lines. One grievously wounded Union soldier ended his suffering by cutting his own throat with a pocket knife.

When the commanders finally agreed to a truce on June 7, there were few wounded men left alive to be rescued.

It remained only to bury the dead, which work parties from both sides accomplished by shoveling the bodies into shallow, maggot-filled graves. On June 12, the Federals began another march around Lee’s left flank across the James River to the railroad hub at Petersburg, where they dug new trenches and resumed static warfare.

Cold Harbor was Lee’s last major victory over a Federal army.

As for Grant, it was a sobering experience that steeled him to more hard fighting in the months ahead. Following the war, however, Grant had ample time to revisit the June 3 repulse. When he penned his memoirs two decades after the war, he expressed regret—the only one he admitted to having about the entire war—that his grand assault at Cold Harbor had cost so many lives for so little gain.

It was, he said, “the only battle I ever fought that I would not fight over again under the circumstances.” The men he had commanded at Cold Harbor no doubt shared that sentiment.

An Italian Tries Chicago DEEP DISH PIZZA

A fun video. Please check it out.

The name’s Pee-wee. Pee-wee Herman.

KCRW is making my dream of being a radio DJ come true!…

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The name’s Pee-wee. Pee-wee Herman.

The Pig Trap

Time for a revisit, I'd say. -MM

I had a very memorable and thought-provoking passenger a while back that I never wrote about because while I found him fascinating, he seemed a little too political for what was always intended to be a fun blog to read and some cheap therapy for your humble driver and writer. But in light of all the scandals that have erupted lately and the EpicClusterSharknadoFuck that is ObamaCare, I have been thinking about a few things he said to me, so I’m going to commit them to paper (or pixels), if only for my own reading. So if you just want to read about moron drunks and belligerent whores, skip this post…

But if you are interested in catching up on current events that just might personally affect you soon, please read on…

It was June of 2012, when I got a call to pick up a gentleman at a resort hotel at around 4 AM going to the airport. I was a little surprised to see “Mr. Wheeler” waiting for me in front of the lobby, five minutes early, standing by his suitcase. Generally, people keep me waiting on these calls, still half asleep, late coming down, trying to get checked out, dicking around with their luggage and what not.

He was in his late 50’s or early 60’s, fit, wearing a navy blazer and was obviously a business traveler, but he also had a certain posture and demeanor that made me think he was ex-military.

We load up his luggage and hit the road, and I am chatting with him as we are heading to the airport. I ask what kind of work he does, and he says he is in “executive security”. I said, “Oooh, that sounds interesting… you mean like bodyguard work?”

He says, “Something like that… executive protection, security systems, personnel screening, entry/egress control, things like that. It sounds much more interesting than it really is… I spend a lot of time shuffling paper around and reading emails.”

I said, “You have the bearing of a military man… am I correct?”

“Yes, Sir… 22 years in the Marine Corps.” I thanked him for his service, something I always do when I encounter a member of our armed services. My standard line is, “Thank you for your service. I think you should hear that every damned day for the rest of your life, and your first beer should be free anywhere you go.”

So we are chatting on the drive, and the story on the radio is Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress over the Fast and Furious fiasco.

I said, “Can you believe that shit? This asshole intentionally sends guns to Mexican drug gangs that will no doubt end up killing thousands of people, and then he lies and stonewalls the Congress? How is this deceitful douchebag not in shackles and an orange jumpsuit? And more to the point, how does someone like this ever ascend to the office of Attorney General?”

“He’s part of the Clinton machine… he knows low people in high places. He came up under Janet Reno… you know who that is, right?”

“Oh, yes, I know… the crazy dyke that gave the order to burn down the Branch Davidians in Waco. But what I don’t get is how they ever thought they could pull this shit off… people aren’t THAT stupid. If you say you are tracking guns, although you have no actual means of tracking the guns, that makes you look both dishonest AND moronic, and your cover story doesn’t make any sense. This didn’t have anything to do with illegal gun sales… any idiot can see that. So what was the REAL plan here?”

Mr. Wheeler says, “Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor?”

I said, “Yeah, I know it… the most obvious answer is almost always correct… but I don’t think we need an instrument that sharp. I think Occam’s Rubber Spatula would seem to indicate that this is a push to vilify guns and gun owners here in America, as a pretense to drive stricter gun control.

Obama was just on TV not too long ago with the President of Mexico, saying that American guns were responsible for the violence in Mexico, and now American weapons are showing up at crime scenes.

It seems to me that an organization with the money and resources of an international drug cartel certainly knows where to pick up weapons, even if all American sources dried up completely. I assume they could go south of the border to Central America and get all the M4’s and AK’s they want… most likely full-auto… am I correct?”

Mr Wheeler replied, “There is certainly no shortage of guns and corruption in Central America. If you have the means to smuggle a ton of cocaine, you can probably smuggle a ton of guns, too. But this was easier… the Justice Department and the ATF made the contacts and set up the networks, told the gun shops to cooperate, so all the Mexicans had to do was send in a straw buyer, make the purchase, and move the weapons south of the border.”

I said, “These people aren’t very smart… there are something like 300 million guns in America, and they have a robust shelf life. Even if all gun manufacturing stopped tomorrow, there would still be an abundance of guns in America for decades. The only way to disarm Americans is mass confiscation, and I feel pretty certain that would spark a civil war. I know several gun owners that would rather fight than give up their guns.”

Mr. Wheeler said, “Oh, I know dozens… perhaps hundreds that feel the same way. I really don’t think confiscation is something you need to worry about, because it will never work. There are simply too many of them, and too many people have guns that there is no record of. A confiscation program would only piss off the most dangerous people in America… the people who would shoot back. You are correct, a mass confiscation would provoke a civil war.”

I said, “Well, you are a military man… what would that look like?”

Wheeler said, “Well, it wouldn’t look like the first Civil War… no lines of men standing in ranks and shooting across a field at each other, no “North and South” or sharply defined state lines for friendly and enemy territories, at least, not in the beginning. No, it would look more like Iraq or Afghanistan, with house to house fighting, IED’s, snipers, small factions and independent militias operating on their own, refugees streaming away from battle zones in all directions…”

“But the first question to ask is who would the combatants be? I mean, the Army isn’t going to just roll out onto the street in tanks on day one, so my guess is that it would start out as a police action, with Federal agencies like ATF and FBI taking the lead, supported by local law enforcement. But once people start shooting back, they would have to ratchet things up, do things like institute curfews and roadblocks, and they would eventually try to press the various state Guard units into service. That’s where it all goes squirrelly, because both local law enforcement and the Guard will be riddled with people who support gun rights, regardless of what laws the politicians pass, and they won’t be crazy about having to police, and maybe even fight against, their own people. The Governors may well object to the state Guard units being activated and may not wish to cooperate…”

“And it is not clear to me how many LEO and Guardsmen would remain loyal to the government and how many would join the “rebellion”. My guess is that both sides would be riddled with defections, informants, and spies. But what if, say, the Gulf states like Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida secede, and they take control of all military bases and equipment, and you suddenly have gone from an insurgency with rifles to a breakaway nation, or maybe several breakaway nations, armed with fighter jets, drones, tanks, and a navy? Whoo, buddy… now all bets are off… kiss posse comitatus goodbye. This would be the ugliest thing this country has ever seen…”

I asked him several “what if” questions and let him riff on them… I just let him talk and wargame out the Second Civil War, there in the back seat of my car as we drove to the airport, and he painted a picture of horrific death and destruction. Once this conflict started, even the best-case scenarios he described sounded truly grim. He seemed to believe that civilian casualties would be extremely high, given how much fighting would centered in and around large cities, and that food would be used as a weapon, causing famine and starvation on a terrifying scale. Booby traps, IED’s, rampant bombings, drone strikes, snipers, local-level assassinations, mortars and shelling, death squads (both government and rebel), reprisal killings, torture… it sounded more like the Middle East than middle America.

Wheeler got quiet for a few moments, and then he said something that I will never, ever forget.

“These people are playing with matches… I don’t think they understand the scope and scale of the wildfire they are flirting with. They are fucking around with a civil war that could last a decade and cause millions of deaths… and the sad truth is that 95% of the problems we have in this country could be solved tomorrow, by noon… simply by dragging 100 people out in the street and shooting them in the fucking head.”

And lemme tell ya, he had the list… he rattled off 25 or 30 names of well-known, prominent politicians, mostly Democrats, but a few Republicans, several members of the current Cabinet, a couple of Obama’s “czars”, a couple of figures from the Bush administration and the Republican establishment, several media company executives and on-camera newscasters, reporters, and pundits, a couple of people who are active in leftist politics but not in elected office… he had obviously thought about this to some degree already.

I was struck by his cold, detached, matter-of-fact tone. I said, “Dude… that’s more French Revolution than American Revolution. Do you really think that is the way to go?”

Wheeler said, “I believe in efficiency and economy of action. You wouldn’t trade one hundred of those criminal bastards for ten million of your fellow Americans?”

I don’t remember if I actually answered out loud, but in my my head, the answer was, “Yeah, I probably would…”

The Beginning of the Endgame?

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NOTE: Most of what follows was written on Saturday, February 22 (2020). I lost several days while trying to find acknowledged cases of a pathogen ‘accidentally released’ from a Level 3 or 4 bio-lab. I was unable to find even one. This is vital, as you will see. (I realize that Lyme Disease, AIDS, Ebola, and others originated in biowarfare labs, but they were not accidentally released.)

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In thinking about Corvid 19 (‘The Bug’) I would urge you all to keep in mind the context of the situation, of current history. By that I mean, simply, that given the magnitude of the lies we’ve constantly been bombarded with — aside from the acts of horrendous violence inextricably tied to these lies — by what we have come to call ‘the PTB’… given the magnitude, we had better accept the fact that there is no limit, no line in the sand, no boundary of human decency, that will not be crossed in those powers getting what they want.

Sometimes, in the midst of a situation like that of the The Bug, we might actively recall some of the events we for sure know were perpetrated by those currently controlling the world’s science and technology, and the source of the official stories (the lies) about such, i.e., the mainstream media, plus most of the ‘alt’ or ‘independent’ media.

Before I get to the real point of this post, let’s just think for a moment about a couple (relatively) recent Biggies, and their immediate repercussions. I’m going to pick the obvious two, and please don’t sigh and mutter that you already know that stuff… I’m trying to force you to not only know but to remember, so you will understand the present-day implications.

JFK… once past the false histories, this coup (the violent overthrow of a legitimate government) directly resulted in 2 – 4 million deaths (that the known number is so vague is a great example of how unimportant are individual human lives), via the Viet Nam war. The branching repercussions (in terms of lives devastated or ended) are impossible to calculate. But the aggregate evil behind the event and the lies tied to it are in arguable.

Point being that we know that the powers behind the loosing of The Bug have no problem telling gargantuan lies and killing millions of humans. (And I could add that for sheer chutzpah-rife balls in the lying department, nothing tops the moon hoax. But, again, there were only four known deaths as a direct result, so we’ll let it slide…)

Addendum: the four deaths were the burnt-to-death astronauts of Apollo 1 (murdered), plus the NASA researcher, Thomas Baron, who was trying to spill the beans on cause of death. His car was hit by a train.

(If you have serious issues with what I’ve said so far, best you click some goddamn button on your keypad and move the fuck on.)

What I’m saying is that it’s very likely that The Chinese Bug is that Biggie. (Who knows if it’s actually a ‘virus’ or if viruses are actually pathogens). It has all the earmarks, but I’ll start with the matter always seen as paramount: The matter of Who did it? Whether it’s a Lee Oswald or an Osama bin Laden, what comes first is the fingering of the patsy, and The Bug is no different.

And as with the cited past examples (Lee and Osama) we recall that their names were all over the media within hours if not minutes of the events. In the case of a pandemic, the immediacy of the fingering is not as urgent; it takes a few weeks to even know something godawful is amiss.

But when the time came, the bastards were prepared: The Weird Animal Market!

The bat soup-slurping Chinese!

And hey, if that didn’t work: ‘The Wuhan Level 4 Biolab!’, which was conveniently minutes away from the designated ground (or patient) zero, at the Market. (Talk about convenient! As is the coincidence that the outbreak occurred in the midst of the ultimate Chinese travel week, the Lunar New Year. Yes, the better to spread not only The Bug, but the panic; and to make sure both spread world-wide, via air travel.)

But blaming the bio-lab would be a fall-back position; ever the optimists, the real perps were hoping mother nature as patsy would hold water, at least for a few months. (The PTB science contingent no doubt warned the top dogs that bat shit-as-culprit would not work in the long run, not with their useless eater brethren-scientists, i.e., those few who could not be intimidated into silence.)

Thing is, as with my other two examples of Biggies, to those few ‘honest’ scientists, the truth of the matter, the identity of the real culprit was… if not obvious, directly implied — assuming one, simple logical connection. Given the corruption (and fear) in the West, the first whistle was blown way far away, over in India, although the paper was quickly taken down (before it was reviewed); not before it had made its way onto the good old Net, though, and was archived for all to see:

Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag
Prashant Pradhan , Ashutosh Kumar Pandey , Akhilesh Mishra , Parul Gupta , Praveen, Kumar Tripathi , Manoj Balakrishnan Menon , James Gomes , Perumal Vivekanandan* and Bishwajit Kundu, Kusuma School of biological sciences, Indian institute of technology, New Delhi-110016, India. 2Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, New Delhi-110019, India
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Abstract:
 We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019- nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. 

Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV- 1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. 

Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute the receptor binding site. 

The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature. 

This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds light on the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important implications for diagnosis of this virus. [my emphasis]
A question: Why didn’t Western scientists notice this?
Anyone who claims the above is not clear or hey you don’t know who these Indian scientists are, or some bull shit, be advised that these are legit scientists with Ph.Ds, yet the media has refused to deal with the findings, let alone debunk them. Think about that. 
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A formal study saying that The Bug is a pedigreed bio-weapon — which is what the HIV gene means … and the media not only covers it up, but ridicules any theory that does not involve bat soup.
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Monday, Febraury 24 (two days later): It was at about this point in the writing of this post that I took a break and did some online searches to see if the media was still evading the issue of the HIV gene and what it means. As far as I could see, they were — they were still blabbing that any theory but the ‘bat soup’ version is a ‘conspiracy theory’ — but in my search I stumbled upon the name ‘Francis Boyle’, an esteemed bio-weapons expert, who has written definitive books on the subject, plus authored the International Bio-terrorism Act of 1989, which the U.S. (along with everyone else) had signed. His cv is as impressive as it gets in the field of biowarfare.
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Three weeks previous to this writing, Professor Boyle had fingered the The Bug as a bio-weapon, based upon the Indian study I cite above, and which he said was inarguable.
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A further search told me that Boyle had done another interview just two days ago, (unfortunately) with Alex Jones. (‘Unfortunately’ because Jones is a buffoon and an embarrassment to serious people.) Turned out Jones hit the jackpot this time, although his constant dumb-ass interruptions drove me to distraction.
I urge you to put up with Jones and listen to the whole interview, but to sum it up: A 2015 document Boyle unearthed fingers the Level 4 bio-lab (BSL 3) at the University of North Carolina as the U.S. participant in the engineering of the ‘COVID 19’ virus. Names are named, including the Chinese scientist from the Wuhan lab who bought and then transported the pathogen back to China. The deal was sponsored by the NIH (National Institute of Health) and the FDA (Federal Drug Administration), aside from the university bureaucrats. As Professor Boyle says, all involved should be prosecuted under the Bio-terrorism Act of 1989, which, again, Professor Boyle wrote.
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Smoking guns don’t come any hotter than this.
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An interesting observation was Boyle’s assurance that the official claim that bats were involved in the transmission to humans is ‘balderdash’, and that, given The Bug’s HIV gene envelope, animals of any sort are ruled out as spreaders. That the mainstream is outed on this provenance-related prevarication is extremely significant, for its implications. We obviously cannot trust them on any Bug-related matter.
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My only bone to pick with Professor Boyle is his theory that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab accidentally. I spent half the weekend looking into the protocols used by Level 3 and 4 labs and can assure you that an accident is no more likely here than in the Baxter scandal from 2009, which I described in a recent post. (For those who want to check my facts on this, see the quotes and links in the end notes to this post. It is quite important!)
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Although Boyle is an exceptional man, one of the few amongst top level scientists, he doesn’t understand the long range plans of those in power, nor does he realize the lengths they have and will go to. Boyle has shown courage in airing his views before: From his position as professor of international law he spoke out against the war in Afghanistan, a risk to his job and maybe his safety after 9/11, so I tend to doubt he (in effect) would false-champion the official story on the outbreak. It could be that — like most of us — he just cannot imagine ‘colleagues’ letting loose such devastation upon the world. As I say, he has some smartening up to do.
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See, the official story is slowly becoming ‘an accidental release’ from the Wuhan lab…
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This was inevitable, given the robustness of the evidence that it is a bio-weapon. (Listen to the goddamn link!)
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Professor Boyle’s theory that one of the scientists ‘somehow got infected’ while working on the virus and spread the virus after leaving the lab via ‘his normal life activities’ doesn’t stand up to minimal scrutiny, if one takes into account the story we’ve been fed since the outbreak was made public back in December.
You would think that China going DEFCON ONE, staying at DEFCON, and agreeing with Russia that the United States has been launching bioweapons against them would be a de facto RED FLAG, but you know, most of the Western bloggers only have American news to base their thoughts and opinions on. -MM

He continues on…

Read the link if you wanna deep dive.

Modern wedding dresses in the Republic of Tatarstan

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Modern wedding dresses in the Republic of Tatarstan

Modern wedding dresses in the Republic of Tatarstan are similar to European ones, but with some interesting ethnic details and, as a rule, they don’t have to be white. They can be purple, green or even blue, which are the national colors. On the head of the bride can be a scarf or a hijab or a veil with a diadem and a traditional Tatar cap – a fez. Before the civil registration of marriage, Muslims hold a wedding ceremony in a mosque and the bride must have her head covered. It is not rare that the bride chooses different dresses for the wedding and for the registration, for example, a strict white dress with a scarf in the same style and a colorful national dress.

Men, meanwhile, wear the most usual formal suits, but they put on a fez in the mosque.

I’d say that at least It’s true for me in some extent, but I don’t see myself as “very pro-CCP”, I’ve just learned to view things as more nuanced.

This was me years ago when I was traveling in India, notice the “save Tibet” shirt with snow lion flag?

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I got it in Bylakuppe which is the second largest Tibetan settlement in India. Yeah, I used to be an anti-CCP liberal who stood up against CCP’s “oppression” in Tibet.

In short, I was brainwashed by anti-China media and “overseas Chinese democracy activists”. I had exposed to tons of videos, articles about Tiananmen square protests and “human rights abuses in Tibet”. I had also read Dalai Lama’s biographies and firmly believed that Tibet should’ve been freed from the CCP. Although I had been to Tibet, I had seen people’s living conditions were relatively well and I had seen the extraordinary Qinghai-Tibet railway. That said, another voice in mind constantly reminded me that “they need freedom and democracy”.

It was so powerful and I had a firm belief of it. I would badmouth our GOV with every foreigner I met just like those China haters who can’t stop trolling me right now. I felt like I was both a “freedom fighter” and a “China expert”. How naive and ignorant I was back then. LOL

So when did I start to realize that I was brainwashed?

When western MSM began to lie about my hometown, Xinjiang in 2018. At first, I was still a little bit skeptical. I wasn’t sure it was true or not. In another word, I didn’t know I should trust my own eyes, my family, my friends, my common sense or their propaganda. Looking back, It was very hilarious but that was me in 2018. Fortunately, my rational thought overwhelmed anti-China propaganda. So why I’m telling you this story? I reckon some of you might be in the middle of my journey.

Sometimes, maybe you are confused that who are telling you the “truth”? Well, in today’s internet environment, don’t expect to HEAR the “truth”, because it’s not important in the eyes of media and online influencers. They just wanna get their content massive exposure in a very short period of time. That’s how they make money from you. So you need to FIND out the “truth” by yourself if you are really interested in it.

Biden’s Nuremberg Rally: He Is Literally Hitler Now

Chicago-Style Deep-Dish Pizza

What is Chicago-style pizza? It’s a lofty yeast dough topped lightly with tomato and generous portions of sausage and cheese.

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Chicago-Style Deep-Dish Pizza

Ingredients

  • 2 packages regular or active dry yeast
  • 1 1/2 cups warm water (105°F to 115°F)
  • 6 cups Original Bisquick™ mix
  • 1/4 cup olive or vegetable oil
  • 8 cups shredded mozzarella cheese (32 oz)
  • 1 lb bulk Italian pork sausage, cooked and drained, or 2 packages (3 1/2 oz each) sliced pepperoni
  • Vegetable toppings such as sliced fresh mushrooms, chopped green bell pepper or chopped onion, sliced green onions, sliced ripe olives, sliced pimiento-stuffed olives, if desired
  • 2 cans (28 oz each) Muir Glen™ organic whole peeled tomatoes with basil, well drained
  • 2 to 4 tablespoons chopped fresh or 2 teaspoons dried oregano leaves or Italian seasoning
  • 1/2 to 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese

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Preparing for civil unrest

From HERE

The most remarkable thing about American civil unrest is that there hasn’t been more of it.

Politicians are making a hash of this country and much of the rest of the civilized world. We know it. They know it. They know we know it. But we don’t feel we can do anything much to stop them.

That right there is the pre-condition for civil unrest when people are frustrated and politicians are nervous.

Worse, that was how things stood before last fall’s crash.

Before pols on both left and right launched the biggest mass transfer of wealth in history transferring our wealth (what we had left of it!) to their friends on Wall Street and in the banking industry. In other words, that’s how things were before things got bad!

Now everybody’s talking about the ongoing catastrophe (even if we are in a momentarily sunny mood). But almost nobody is talking about the logical maybe even inevitable consequences of cynical or desperate politicians abusing an already fed-up populace: civil unrest.

I mean people taking to the streets. Or mass resistance. Or crackdowns because the government fears we might do something to upset its apple cart. It’s going to happen. Somewhere. At some time. It’s going to.

One of the few VIPs to mention the matter openly was Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor and the ultimate insider’s insider. He commented on the millions of unemployed or soon-to-be-unemployed and the “…public awareness of this extraordinary wealth that was transferred to a few individuals at levels without historical precedent in America.” He told “Morning Joe” Scarborough, “Hell, there could be even riots.” I’d say that’s an understatement.

Although few in power are talking about it, rumors abound that governments at many levels are planning for civil unrest. One rumor is about a document supposedly being circulated right now among top federal officials. It’s called the “C&R Document” with C&R standing for “conflict & revolution.” The much-storied paper is said to be a plan for controlling the American people when we get out of hand. True? Who knows. But the very rumor tells us a lot about these times.

Other things are not mere rumor. When the federal government established a North American Army command in 2002, its purpose wasn’t to repel foreign invaders. It was domestic operations something long and rightly forbidden by the Posse Comitatus Act. In February of 2009, when military commanders in Canada and the U.S. signed a pact allowing their armies to operate inside each other’s country they didn’t even bother to get authorization from Congress an illegal and unprecedented move. And once again, the purpose was handling “domestic civil emergencies.”

For several years, the Centers for Disease Control tried to get states to adopt something called the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MEHPA). This act would allow state governments to become police-state dictatorships in event of any ill-defined health emergency vaccinating people by force, destroying or seizing property without compensation, and rationing medical supplies, food, and fuel. To their credit, most state governments rejected the act. A few adopted portions of it before a fervent opposition campaign caused the CDC to back off. However, the concept of a health dictatorship hasn’t gone away. Not hardly. Within days of the news that a new strain of swine flu had arisen in Mexico in April 2009, states were again considering legislation to give themselves martial-law powers in event of an epidemic.

And what of the dozens and dozens of federal agencies that now have SWAT teams? Seriously, what justifies the Bureau of Land Management or the Department of Housing and Urban Development having paramilitary units?

Now maybe you like the idea of an Army that watches over its own citizens. Maybe it makes sense to have a government seize total dictatorial power in event of a health emergency. Maybe you believe SWAT teams will never be used except against bad guys. But do you really trust these people?

After all, these are the same folks, and this is the same mentality, that not only spent $325,000 to produce a souvenir photo of a presidential 747 zooming low over the Statue of Liberty, but ordered the New York Police Department, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the New York mayor’s office not to tell the public. Never mind that they realized full well that passenger jets and military planes plunging low over Manhattan would evoke panic.

Still, peace reigns. Mostly. At least here in North America. But not everywhere. Not long ago, France was brought to its knees by night after night of rioting. In that country it’s become almost common for workers to hold their bosses hostage in hopes of winning economic concessions. Greece, too, saw its normal life and business shut down by days of rioting. So did Iceland a country that’s normally the picture of civility.

Can the U.S. be forever immune?

It might not take much and it could be something out of the blue, something impossible to anticipate to set us against each other and against the “Trust us; we’ll fix it” political crowd.

In a way, this national silence on a matter so many people are afraid of is similar to the silence about general preparedness issues before 9-11 or Hurricane Katrina. Only Mormons and us wingnuts spoke of preparedness way back when. Since then, of course, advice on preparedness is mainstream and common.

In another sense, this silence is different. Because when unrest finally erupts, it’s not going to be us merely taking care of ourselves. It’s going to be “us against them.” It might be workers against bosses. Or the poor against bankers. Or blacks against Hispanics. Or little folk against Big Men in public office. Or farmers against the USDA. Or xenophobes against xenophiles. But however it happens, the implications aren’t as Boy-Scoutish as just taking care of ourselves in an emergency.

Defining civil unrest

Look up “preparations for civil unrest” on Google and…What’s that echo I hear?—you’ll find nothing that’s going to help you. In fact, you won’t even easily turn up a good definition of what civil unrest is.

Like “indecency,” the definition seems to be in the eye of the beholder.

I wouldn’t consider a peaceful anti-war march to be civil unrest, for instance, but a police chief might. Similarly, I wouldn’t consider acts of localized non-violent lawbreaking (like environmental activists chaining themselves to a tree) to be civil unrest; but a timber company official probably believes otherwise.

Civil unrest occurs when anger, frustration, or fear turn disruptive on a mass scale. Or when government officials crack down because they anticipate such disruptions. Crackdowns can lead to further frustration, leading to further crackdowns and so on especially when the crackdowns look unwarranted and tyrannical.

In other words, civil unrest can arise from the anger of people or the folly of government or both together.

Anger over an unpopular policy, a new war, a collapse of the currency, panic over a pandemic, a food shortage, a bank run anything like that could cause civil unrest, especially in a population that’s already on edge and no longer trusts its authority figures.

Another thing you won’t find via Google is how various types or levels of unrest are likely to affect us and how we should respond, if we’re affected. Again, although the men and women at the top are quite concerned for their own sakes, they (and their media mouthpieces) would rather not talk about what we should do in event of civil panic.

But that’s not good enough for we independent-minded people, is it?

Here are my definitions of levels of civil unrest and a little bit about how they might affect us:

LEVEL ONE: The lowest level of civil unrest is when people turn on their own neighborhoods as happened during the race riots of the 1960s and the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. Level One civil unrest can be deadly and destructive, but primarily to people who live, work, or must travel in the immediate area. Level One unrest is spontaneous, Dionysian, is confined to a narrow geographical zone where the protestors live. Police response may be harsh, but it’s localized. Unless you’re in the middle of it, you’re unaffected.

LEVEL TWO: Level Two civil unrest may also be focused on a single area. But in this case, rioters or protesters have deliberately targeted a business district, a facility, a transportation system, or an organization to impose maximum disruption. One example: the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999; young people with violence in mind and rage in their hearts attacked an entire downtown, affecting hundreds of businesses and tens of thousands of workers who hardly knew what hit them. Another example: This spring, protesters in Thailand shut down the Bangkok airport, affecting who knows how many individuals and businesses. Level Two unrest is usually planned or semi-planned. The target is chosen deliberately. Although still focused in one area, Level Two can disrupt normal life and business in a whole region or country.

LEVEL THREE: Level Three comes when mass unrest or authoritarian crackdown causes disruption at state or regional level. Then, no matter what the original cause or location of the trouble, everyone in the region is affected. Effects might include travel restrictions, random ID checks, mass arrests, food and fuel rationing, controls on money and banking, roadblocks, and other harsh “emergency” restrictions.

LEVEL FOUR: Level Four is Level Three but on a national or even international scale. It’s martial law. If things ever get this bad, it’s likely that the government itself will be a far bigger threat to everyone’s well being than whatever the original cause of the clampdown was.

And of course, any level of civil unrest can lead to laws, regulations, and harsher police policies that end up affecting everybody in the long run.

Yes, it can involve us

We make a mistake if we think civil unrest is strictly an urban phenomena. It can happen anywhere.

When 400 government agents and soldiers descended on one isolated family in the Idaho mountains, the roadblocks, helicopters, Humvees, media presence, and furious protestors surrounded the Randy Weaver family and brought the normal life of Boundary County, Idaho, to a halt. The siege against the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas, wasn’t conducted in the inner-city, either. Yet both of these were large scale catastrophes with all the hallmarks of civil unrest individuals or groups resisting, government insisting.

I can easily envision strictly rural-based unrest that urban dwellers will never even hear about (except perhaps in highly distorted reports). What happens, for instance, if farmers, 4H families, owners of saddle horses, and holders of small chicken flocks decide to resist en masse the National Animal Identification System (NAIS)? It’s easy to imagine, in these crazy days, USDA SWAT teams descending on the countryside to make arrests, forcibly register or destroy non-compliant animals, and burn down non-registered facilities.

The future could see rural resistance to invasive census-taking, forced vaccination programs, land takings, water-rights policies, or the destruction of herds for real or bogus health reasons. As country people increasingly see governments as foreign organizations driven by the interests of city dwellers, pharmaceutical companies, and mega-agri-business, it wouldn’t surprise me.

If we ever have serious food shortages, expect rural areas to be besieged.

Even when civil unrest confines itself to the cities, airports, or highways it can affect us in crazy ways. Here’s a funny example of unpredictable (in this case mild) consequences. A friend was due to have her first book published in Canada. She was very excited then disappointed when weeks dragged by and the book didn’t appear. Turns out that a band of Indians was blocking a highway bridge the printer’s truck had to cross. The union truckers, in solidarity, refused to route around the protest. Just one small consequence. But you can see the unpredictability.

The simple truth is that we don’t know what kinds of unrest to anticipate. We don’t know when, or if, we’ll see civil unrest. But thinking about the problem and preparing ourselves mentally and physically to deal with it should be just another aspect of our personal preparedness.

What we can do

1. Keep standard emergency preps up to date. First thing to do is make sure all our typical household preparedness supplies and plans are current. As BHM readers know, backup food, water, and other supplies are our mainstay for everything from bad storms to long-term unemployment, from power outages to social breakdowns. During civil unrest, especially at Level Three or Four, we might not be able to get out to buy things we need or we might consider it more prudent to stay at home. On the other hand, if we ourselves are part of the unrest, we may need those supplies to sit out a siege.

2. Don’t fall into foolish complacency. We who live in the country tend to have an “it can’t happen here” attitude toward political violence or social upheaval. We see those things as urban pheonomena. And mostly, they are. But there’s no ironclad rule that says they have to be. If anything disrupts the supply chain, for instance, rural areas could be the first to be cut off from food, medicines, fuel, or other necessities. If government breaks down to the point where it can’t deliver food stamps, housing vouchers, social security, or bureaucrats’ pay, the rural poor and unemployed could become just as restive as their urban counterparts.

3. Watch your health. As I write this, the airwaves are shrilling about swine flu. This outbreak may fizzle; after all, perfectly normal flu kills many every year without causing panic, martial law, or incessant media coverage. On the other hand, it’s certain that one day some illness will rampage across the globe. Few things inspire public panic more quickly than contagious disease, and once again rural areas are not immune. Take all the standard recommended precautions like frequent handwashing. Make sure your preparedness kit includes surgical masks and disposable gloves as well as a selection of frequently updated medications. And be ready to lay low at home for a long time in the event a serious plague gets loose.

4. Make common cause with your neighbors. I’ve said it before, but establishing a strong bond with people in your community right now is vital to every sort of emergency preparedness. In event of a Level One or Two emergency, these are the folks who could come to your house to make sure you’re okay. They might give you a ride out or a place to sleep if you accidentally end up in a “hot zone” of riot or protest. In a deeper or more long-term emergency, they could pool resources with you to make supply runs. They can advise you if they’ve spotted a roadblock. They might let you cross their land to avoid a route that has become dangerous.

5. If you grow crops or raise food animals and the unrest is due to a food shortage (or something has driven city people out into the countryside), prepare to protect your resources day and night. Here again neighbors can do each other valuable services, like taking shifts guarding fields, barns, private roads, and gardens. Yes, this is an apocalyptic scenario. Not a likely one. But if it happens, it’s a Level Three or Level Four emergency delivered to your own front yard.

6. Get advance word on local conditions when traveling. We’re used to hopping into our vehicles or onto airplanes and going wherever we want to go. But as the worldwide economy deteriorates, it’s wise to keep an eye on our destination. Right now, this warning pertains more to overseas travel than jaunts within the U.S. If you plan to go abroad, visit online sites like Travelfish.org. They’ll have bulletins about adverse conditions in areas you plan to visit; you may even be able to receive alerts via email that will warn you about anything from political protests to disease outbreaks in places you plan to go.

7. Watch for signs of trouble when in an unfamiliar area. Sometimes the only advance notice you get is the notice your own senses give you. When walking, driving, biking, or otherwise traveling in unfamiliar places, stay in what gunfolk call “condition yellow.” This is different than the meaningless colored threat levels the Department of Homeland Security puts out. It just means “be alert!” Never simply allow yourself to slouch along obliviously. Always be aware of who’s nearby and what’s going on around you. If you spot trouble developing, turn. Avoid it if at all possible.

8. If you stumble into a “hot zone” of unrest, be prepared to think on your feet. Not many people are qualified to give you advice about how to behave if you unavoidably find yourself in the midst of trouble a riot, a mass protest that suddenly engulfs your familiar downtown, a spot where police are bashing heads or hurling tear gas seemingly at random. That’s because not many people have ever been there and every catastrophe is different. If street-level chaos surrounds you, do your best to keep a cool head, move away from the worst of it if you get the chance, and get inside if possible.

9. If you’re swept up in mass arrests during a riot or demonstration, the officers probably aren’t going to be listening to your protestations of being an innocent bystander. You’ll only tick them off and possibly get a charge of resisting arrest. The best advice I’ve received from my friends who’ve been busted during out-of-hand protests: Go along as best you can. Usually, all charges in such cases are either dropped or reduced once calm is restored. Only if we’ve reached the extreme point where police are rounding people up and throwing them into detention camps or “disappearing” them is fighting cops on the street likely to be worth it; then…fight like a demon.

10. Have a good lawyer and carry his or her card with you. Once again, in the heat of chaos it may not do you much good. But that card will come in handy later. Besides, if you and a police officer have an encounter in calmer circumstances, a lawyer’s card, along with your calm assertion of your legal rights, will help you to be taken seriously. Police officers are like anybody else; they’re more likely to go after easy targets than ones who are obviously knowledgeable and prepared. My lawyer has a helpful little list on the back of his card of the things you should do and not do when accosted by a police officer.1 I’d trust that more than my own nerves in a tight situation.

11. Be careful of roadblocks. This is a hard one. If we reach Level Three or Four of unrest, we may not only see the obnoxious police “checkpoints” we’re burdened with today. We might also see two other things. One would be expanded police roadblocks, with warrantless searches, harsh questioning, and possibly mass arrests. Another could be “freelance” roadblocks—roadblocks set up by anybody from political protesters to highwaymen. (Just as gangs of home invaders now masquerade as SWAT teams, highwaymen might masquerade as government officials to rob the unwary.) If it’s humanly possible, avoid roadblocks. It’s not illegal to turn away from them, as long as you don’t disobey any traffic laws. Police do consider it suspicious behavior and may come after you, even if you’ve done nothing wrong; but in a time of civil unrest, avoiding a roadblock could save your skin. Of course, both police and freelancers will set up their blockades to make them as hard as possible to avoid—all the more reason to be alert, know where roadblocks are likely to be, and have a mental map of alternate routes. If, in a time and place of unrest, you’re in a line approaching a roadblock, watch what happens to the people ahead of you. If you see any sign that the motorists ahead are being abused, get out of there.

So far, we’ve talked mostly as if civil unrest is something apart from us something we might have to be wary of, something we might stumble accidentally into. But the fact is that as our country becomes less free, we might of course be the civil unrest.

We might resist having our premises tagged for NAIS or having our herds slaughtered for real or bogus health reasons. We might end up fighting evictions (as farmers and many rural dwellers have for centuries during hard times). We might be the ones who say, “Hell no, we won’t go!” when the mobile vaccination van comes to town, or the ones who try to keep our neighbors from being rounded up and sent to camps. Times are uncertain. We simply don’t know.

But in every case, preparedness, foreknowledge, and a cool head will come in handy.

Some of us already have lines in the sand that would inspire us to resist abuses of authority. And that, right there, is something our would-be masters fear—our disobedience. What will happen? And when? Nobody has a crystal ball. But the combination of public frustration and governmental apprehension is an explosive one. Someday, somebody will light the match.

1 Here’s the copy on the lawyer’s card (capitalization his):

IF YOU ARE ARRESTED OR CONFRONTED BY THE POLICE:

1. FIRST, ask to call your lawyer.

2. Be courteous; do not resist.

3. Do not consent to search or entry.

4. Do not talk about anything; do not admit OR DENY anything.

5. Ask if you are free to go. If you are, GO.

I’ve had several different lawyer’s cards over the years that say similar, but slightly different things. Another great source of information on how to handle yourself when confronted by police is the DVD Busted: The Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters. It’s great because it shows very realistic scenarios and coaches you vividly on how to navigate them. Clips from “Busted” are online at the link above.

 

Some MM videos that slipped through the cracks

I’ve been so busy lately that I forgot to provide direct links to some of the videos on You-Tube. Uh oh. Bummer! Even though, of course, those who subscribe to the You-tube videos might be able to catch them. Here’s a couple of videos for your pleasure.

How Template Terminology can be used in affirmation campaigns

This is an Patreon video that I have made public for MM followers.

China’s imminent collapse this week!

It’s any hour now! Don’t you know!

Enjoy. It’s a couple of hour view time.

-MM

 

 

All evidence is suggestive of the USA eventually engaging both Russia and China simultaneously in a hot war

This fact is emerging.

The West is run by idiots. They aren’t stopping, and the rest of the world is terrified. However, the pragmatic ones: China and Russia, have made plans and have taken steps. This ain’t gonna be another Vietnam, Syria, or Ukraine you all…

The Wild West

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Yes, things are wilding up nicely in Western Civ as we bid farewell to summer and the elites return from their sacrosanct vacations to the task of crashing our world. You can feel it in every quarter of public and private life. Funny, especially, is the Party of Chaos trying to label their opponents as “fascists” — by which they mean anyone opposed to chaos, the “Joe Biden” regime’s preferred mode of existence.

The West’s biggest project these days, the war it provoked over Ukraine, turned out to be a giant Acme land-mine under the West’s collective Wile E. Coyote ass. As Russia advances implacably there and financial sanctions fizzle, behold the scramble in Europe now among citizens desperate to not freeze to death in the months ahead. This is the third time in a hundred-odd years that Germany has attempted suicide, and this time it looks like it’s going to work. Farewell nice German cars, machine tools, and other symbols of industrial might. In feckless Poland, the folks are out gathering lumps of coal and scouring the forest floor for firewood — they’re forbidden by law from cutting standing timber. Mr. Macron tells France she must accept “reduced living standards.” Looks like Brexit did not go far enough as the UK holds hands with the rest of NATO tromping into economic oblivion.

Think the USA is doing better? The summer rally in financial markets was just another frame in the Loony Tunes festival that American life has become. The Fed Chair, Mr. Powell, said all the parts out loud at the annual Jackson Hole banker meet-up last week: look out below, we’ve decided to take this sucker down (in the immortal words of George W. Bush), since pretending to stoke prosperity via Modern Monetary Theory only results in, duh, ruinous inflation. This raises the question, though, as to which is more politically damaging: inflation or depression? It is really only the difference between having plenty of worthless money or having no money at all.

The institutional rot eating away at our national underpinnings got more exposed last week when Mark Zuckerberg stupidly blurted to Joe Rogan that, yes, in the fall of 2020 the FBI warned Facebook — “came to the folks on our team,” he said — about a Russian disinformation campaign underway, wink wink. And so, Facebook turned the volume down to zero on certain news about a laptop belonging to one Hunter Biden stuffed with selfie porn (prostitutes included), video evidence of narcotics use, and deal memos about worldwide influence peddling involving the whole dang Biden family. FBI chief Chris Wray quickly jumped in to clarify that the FBI “routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats.”

Roger that. The part Mr. Wray left out was that he and everybody else on the fabled seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover building knew darn well that the Biden laptop story was not Russian Disinfo, raising the question: who do they now think is supposed to believe the FBI’s obvious bullshit? And why is Chris Wray still running the FBI? And, of course, Mr. Zuckerberg surely knew the truth of the matter as well — though at the time he was busy shoveling more than $300-million into election swing districts for the express purpose of changing-out local officials with his own crew to queer the balloting in favor of international grifter “Joe Biden.”

The inventory of lies retailed by the FBI is so vast and gross that the agency had to resort to raiding Mar-a-Lago three weeks ago in defiance of all known precedent and settled law regarding presidential records. The reason: Mr. Trump, the former president, had exactly such a cataloged inventory of the FBI lies used during his term in office to overthrow him with the Crossfire Hurricane nonsense, and was prepared to introduce said evidence in the lawsuit he has initiated in a Florida federal court against Hillary Clinton and a rogue’s gallery of campaign aides and allied federal officials who assisted in concocting the RussiaGate operation. The aim of the Mar-a-Lago raid: to un-declassify all that material — via a probably illegal order by “Joe Biden” — so as to prevent it from being introduced as evidence in the lawsuit. Somehow, the news media failed to report that part of the story, and even the alt media has missed that last detail.

And now, despite walking back their guideline Covid-19 policies this month, the CDC and its sister public health agencies are ready to push a new edition of Big Pharma’s Covid (so-called) “vaccines,” despite visibly rising all-causes death numbers across Western Civ that appear, more and more, attributable only to the “vaccines.” The vaxx-happy bureaucracy will not be stopped by the captive federal justice system but the attorneys general of fifty states could each act against the program, which has violated every module of the Nuremberg Code against human medical experimentation, as well as US law. It may be too late for the medical profession to redeem its lost sacred honor.

The catch here is that, at this point in the disgraceful story, only Woked-up liberals vying for the Darwin Award will fall for the new vaxxes. Everybody else is onto the scam and hip to the danger, and mandates have worn out their welcome. Liberal Wokery has turned out to be a form of stupidly booby-trapped, self-limiting neo-Nazism. There is your Party of Chaos in a nutshell.

It remains for Mr. Trump to renounce his support for the evil fruits of the Warp Speed operation he presided over. He must face the fact that he was played, and he may be forgiven, considering all the evidence coming recently from the likes of Deborah Birx and others that he was lied to and manipulated. But he doesn’t have much more time to get it right, or else his political career will be over well before the 2024 election. That may be all for the better.
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America probably needs a clean sweep of our desecrated political landscape. All in all, Mr. Trump was a good soldier, brave and resolute under tremendous adversity, but he’s not the only one who can lead our country back to itself.

Friends

My.husband struggles with PTSD

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Ps from serving in Iraq. HE is recovering alcoholic without Daisy as his companion he be hurting.

Yes he spoils her and she is very devoted to him. He rewards her with her favorite treats Temptations. She loves water with ice in it. He only gives her bottle water and every six months she sees the vet.

My husband loves her and she loves him ❤

Plan A, Plan B and Plan C

Space programmer, Margaret Hamilton was one of the reasons why the astronauts came home safely!

One day, her 4-year-old daughter, Lauren, was playing with the simulator’s display and keyboard until an error message appeared. Lauren crashed the system by launching a program called P01 while the simulator was in midflight.


There was no reason as to why an astronaut would do this, but regardless, Hamilton wanted to add code to prevent this crash from happening in space.

NASA disagreed with this idea, believing that the astronauts would not make any mistakes for they were trained to be perfect. So instead of adding code, she created a program-note that said:

“Do not select P01 during the flight!”

Ironically, this is the opposite of what happened!

Five days into the flight, astronaut Jim Lovell selected P01 mid-space. This wiped out all the navigation data! Without the data, the Apollo computer wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get the astronauts home.

Hamilton knew this was a possibility so she had a plan devised.

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Ready to go.


Back then, programming meant punching holes in stacks of cards. This would have been processed overnight in batches.

But she did it! In 9 hours she uploaded new navigational data and thanks to her, the astronauts came home safely!

Moral of the story?

A mistake may seem like a tragedy, but often, they’re one step towards your success. You mess up, you learn and you grow.

Never should you have one single plan; make a plan B, make a plan C.

Don’t dwell on the negatives but be prepared for the worst situation so that disappointments hurt less.

Think out of the box, be one step ahead. You are not perfect and you will make errors, but know that mistakes were never made to destroy you, but to lift you.

Hamilton implemented all four points and turned an event that could have been a historical disaster into a huge achievement.

Footnotes

Their Economy Is Collapsing All Around Them As Europeans Head Into An Extremely Cold And Bitter Winter

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Last winter, Europeans were looking forward to yet another year of peace and prosperity.  This winter, Europeans will find themselves right in the middle of an economic collapse.  It is often said that energy is the economy, and energy is going to be in very short supply in the months ahead.  Thanks to the war in Ukraine and a number of other factors, energy prices in Europe have shot up to levels that would have once been unthinkable, and several European governments are already preparing to ration energy.  This is going to have a tremendous impact on economic activity, and it is going to mean that this winter is going to be extremely cold and extremely bitter for millions upon millions of Europeans.

In Poland, many households usually use coal that is imported from Russia to heat their homes, but that won’t happen this year because of the war.

As a result, some desperate people are now standing in line for days just to have the opportunity to buy some coal…

According to Reuters, with Poland still basking in the late summer heat, hundreds of cars and trucks have already lined up at the Lubelski Wegiel Bogdanka coal mine, as householders fearful of winter shortages wait for days and nights to stock up on heating fuel ahead of the coming cold winter in queues reminiscent of communist times.

Artur, 57, a pensioner, drove up from Swidnik, some 30 km (18 miles) from the mine in eastern Poland on Tuesday, hoping to buy several tonnes of coal for himself and his family.

“Toilets were put up today, but there’s no running water,” he said, after three nights of sleeping in his small red hatchback in a crawling queue of trucks, tractors towing trailers and private cars. “This is beyond imagination, people are sleeping in their cars. I remember the communist times but it didn’t cross my mind that we could return to something even worse.”

Would you wait in a line for several days just to get some coal for your family?

I suppose if you were desperate enough, perhaps you would.

Video footage of Polish citizens lined up for coal is so bizarre that it is difficult to believe that it is actually real.

 

Unfortunately, this is not a bad dream.

This is the world that we live in now.

In the UK, countless consumers will be facing financial hardship this winter as energy bills soar into the stratosphere

Millions of households will see their energy bills rocket as the price cap is hiked to £3,549 a year, plunging many into financial hardship.

The record 80% October increase, announced by the regulator Ofgem, will see a typical default tariff customer paying an extra £1,578, laying bare the deepening cost of living crisis.

The rise follows a 54% increase in April, which saw average bills surge to £1,971 a year.

A third of all UK citizens are already having trouble paying their energy bills, and this new increase won’t even be implemented until October.

So how high will that figure be six months from now?

Will half the country be struggling to pay their energy bills at that point?

And as energy bills go higher and higher, even more people will be pushed out of the middle class.

Right now, poverty is on the rise all over Europe.

For example, just check out this video footage of people lined up for food in Italy’s wealthiest city.

 

This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen in Milan.

But it is happening.

And things are going to get a whole lot worse for western Europe if Russia decides to totally cut off the gas.

Already, Russia has reduced the amount of natural gas that it is supplying through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to just 20 percent, and one German official is entirely convinced that it will soon go to zero…

Germany faces the “bitter reality” that Russia will not restore gas supplies to the country, the German economy minister said on Monday, ahead of planned halt by state energy giant Gazprom of exports to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.

“It won’t come back … It is the bitter reality,” Robert Habeck said in a panel with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

If that actually happens, western Europe will suffer tremendously.

The Europeans never should have allowed themselves to become so dependent on Russian gas, and now “worst case scenarios” are staring them right in the face.

France is already preparing to ration energy this winter.

So is Germany, and so are a number of other large western European nations.

But it won’t be enough just to get through this winter.

According to the prime minister of Belgium, “the next five to 10 winters will be difficult” for those living in western Europe…

The country’s prime minister, Alexander De Croo, told reporters on Monday that fellow citizens can expect that “the next five to 10 winters will be difficult” due to the country’s worsening energy crisis exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“The development of the situation is very difficult throughout Europe,” De Croo told Belgium broadcaster VRT.

“In a number of sectors, it is really difficult to deal with those high energy prices. We are monitoring this closely, but we must be transparent: The coming months will be difficult, the coming winters will be difficult,” he added.

Yes, this is really happening.

And don’t think that you are going to get a free pass just because you are living here in the United States.

Energy bills are skyrocketing here too, and it is being reported that one out of every six homes is already behind on their utility bills…

According to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, roughly 20 million households in the U.S. — one out of six homes — are behind on their utility bills.

The consequences could be dire.

“I expect a tsunami of shutoffs,” Jean Su, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, tells Bloomberg.

The worst energy crisis in modern history is here, and it is going to get a lot worse.

This is just one of the reasons why I have been so adamant about becoming more independent of the system.

Many people believed that they would always be able to depend on the power grid to bring endless cheap energy to their homes.

But now energy bills are surging to ridiculous heights, and energy use will be severely restricted all over Europe this winter.

And even top European officials are admitting that things are going to be tough for many years to come.

The writing is on the wall, and I hope that everyone can see it.

The “tipping point” that so many of us have warned about has arrived, and the months ahead are going to be exceedingly painful.

Loki

After my dad passed away I was desperate for a companion so I went to my local animal rescue center to find a cat to help me combat my grief and loneliness. I hated coming home to a now empty house since Dad and I lived together.

There happened to be a bunch of kittens there and a few older kittens also like five months or six months and some four month old ones too.

At first I was going to take a young kitten and then I walked by the cage where a young brown and white tabby with green eyes was.

He was a recent arrival and had only been cleared to be adopted three days ago.

I paused to look inside the cage and he put his paw out and tapped me on the arm and meowed.

I asked to see him and the minute his door was open he jumped into my arms and began purring and kneading me.

The staff said they had never seen any cat respond like that to someone and when I set him down on the cat tree he meowed and rolled over to let me pet his belly.

It was quite clear he had chosen me and I didn’t dare not bring him home.

So home he went and here he stayed. I named him Loki for he is the prince among mischievous cats and it was the best decision I ever made.

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Loki

Cheddar Meatball and Pasta Skillet

This meatball and bacon skillet dinner will be an instant hit at the dinner table.

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Cheddar Meatball and Pasta Skillet

Ingredients

  • 4 strips bacon, cut in 1/2-inch slices
  • 1/2 cup chopped onion
  • 2 cups milk
  • 1 cup hot water
  • 1 box Hamburger Helper™ cheeseburger macaroni
  • 1 lb frozen cooked meatballs
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon Frank’s™ RedHot™ Original cayenne pepper sauce
  • 1 cup shredded Colby-Jack cheese (4 oz)

Steps

  • 1
    In 12-inch nonstick skillet, cook bacon over medium-high heat 5 to 7 minutes, stirring occasionally, until crisp. Remove bacon with slotted spoon; place on paper towel. Add onion to bacon drippings in skillet; cook over medium-high heat 3 to 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until tender.
  • 2
    Add milk, hot water and sauce mix (from Hamburger Helper™ box); stir to combine. Stir in uncooked Pasta (from Hamburger Helper™ box), frozen meatballs, black pepper and hot pepper sauce. Heat to boiling, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat; cover and simmer 9 to 11 minutes, stirring occasionally, until pasta is tender and sauce is thick. Remove from heat.
  • 3
    Top with cheese and bacon; cover and let stand 2 to 3 minutes or until cheese is melted.

Marcel Felix Petiot

Marcel Felix Petiot was a French serial killer who got his victims by offering to help them escape France through a non-existent secret route. They were majorly wanted people.

Once the victims agreed, he convinced them that they needed to be vaccinated.

Instead of giving them vaccine, he would inject them with cyanide and then rob them of their belongings.

On 11 March 1944, Petiot’s neighbors called the attention of the police to a foul stench in the area and large amounts of smoke billowing from a chimney of the house.

Fearing a chimney fire, the police summoned firemen, who entered the house and found a roaring fire in a coal stove in the basement. In the fire, and scattered in the basement, were human remains. It is believed he killed not less than 60 people this way.

He disappeared for a while, grew his beard and changed his name to Henri Valeri. He joined the military and was among those drafted to look for Marcel Félix Petiot. He was subsequently captured after someone recognized him.

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Marcel Felix Petiot

Quora Question: Why do Chinese want to immigrate out of China?

Top Answer:

The CCP propaganda constantly says that China is a communist paradise and that everyone is very happy with the CCP! They say that the US is a dying nation, with lots of poverty, crime, racism and violence!

CCP propaganda is full of lies, slanders of the US, half-truths and fake statistics.

An analysis and observation of history indicates that the USA hegemony has provided substantial benefit to humanity.

As even though the USA led hegemony is not perfect, it has regardless given the world the greatest economic, health, education, trade advancement in the history of humanity.

The US government and institutions have protected, managed and supported institutions, agreements that make up the framework of the international system.

These international institutions include the Bretton Woods system, International Monetary Fund, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, world bank, UN, International bank for Reconstruction and Development, United Nations Security Council, UN universal declaration and countless more.

The US uses their military to protect and maintain a safe and open flow of maritime and land trade routes while promoting positive concepts and ideas such as multi-ethnic societies and mass immigration.

There is a reason why the entire world including China gravitated towards the USA, instead of to the alternative word order promoted by the USSR.

It’s important to realise however, that the USA is not perfect. It has engaged in substantial atrocities such as the heavy bombings in Iraq, and Vietnam.

Yet, it’s achievements outweigh it’s poor actions.

China would have conquered the whole of Asia, and Russia would have conquered the whole of Europe if the US and NATO did not exist!

Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany tried to do this during WW2.

The whole quality of life in China is much worse than in the US!

That’s why people like Xi Jinping’s daughter live in the US and has a Green Card! She cannot get these human rights and freedoms in China despite her wealth and political connections!

In the US, she alike all Americans, have the Constitutional right of freedom of speech and expression which includes the right to burn the US flag, to burn or to trample and spit on the Quran or any religious book! That’s the amount of freedom we have! She certainly does not have this level of freedom in her China!

That’s why all the rich citizens of China are trying to emigrate to the West! They are not stupid! They know the truth about life in both China and in the US!

Personally, I think that he forgot to add “‘Merica! Merica! Merica!” at the end.

MM Answer:

Do you want to hear the truth, or do you want your ignorance to be reinforced? Take you pick.

[1] When China was very poor, yes, many Chinese fled China and moved to other nations for opportunities. They searched for a “middle class” lifestyle, and opportunity. They moved to places that had factories where they could work, and schools where their children could be educated, and where food was available in abundance. Great waves of Chinese left China for the West. They went where opportunities were.

[2] As China grew, became the manufacturing powerhouse, and it shook off the cloak of despair that the West had shackled it to, the flow of Chinese to the West decreased. Eventually, it reached a point, say 2008 - 2013, where there were more Chinese (who emigrated) returning back to China. This is because in the balance of things, China had more to offer than what the West had.

[3] Today, those that leave China for the West do so for functional purposes (to get an education, experience at a occupation, or to buy land) the majority return back to China.

So you can see that over the last forty years there has been different reasons for global migration of ethnic Chinese. This migration might, one day, change it’s vector again. Say, when manufacturing and cultural opportunities open up in Africa, or South America, or Russia for instance.

You see, we have to see things as they are. Not as we want them to be.

Remember, boys and girls, migration from one’s homeland is driven not by ideology, but rather by economic considerations. As China's economic situation evolved, so did it’s immigration profile.

Opinions of others

The novelist Michael Crichton, author of dozens of bestsellers such as Congo, Jurassic Park and The Lost World, tried an experiment as a Harvard undergrad back in the 1960s.

Tired of receiving C’s on his English assignments and having his writing style severely criticized by Harvard professors, he decided to submit an essay for an assignment on Gulliver’s Travels that had been published years earlier by the famed author George Orwell.

It was a risky experiment as the punishment for plagiarism was expulsion. But Crichton figured his professor was not only wrong about writing styles, but was probably poorly read as well.

Crichton received a B- for Orwell’s work.

At that point the young undergrad assumed that the Harvard English department was too difficult for him, so he switched to premed, eventually earning his M.D. from Harvard Medical School.

Although he never practiced medicine, he used his medical training to create the TV series ER in 1994.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on the Covid Origins Cover-Up

Captain

A couple of years ago, I did have the honor of adopting a wonderful cat, Captain Timothy (Starfleet), my first cat ever.

He was the perfect cat, in every sense.

Considerate, gentle, playful.

Every single time I came home from my shift at the hospital, he was there to greet me, standing on a couch, in an attentive position, as soon as the door was open.

Until one day, he didn’t and I knew something was wrong.

5 am, and he was crying on the hallway.

He had a renal lymphoma, and passed away 15 days after he was diagnosed.

Sometimes when I get home, I’m still wating for him to be there, waiting.

Waiting.

Rest in peace, Captain.

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Dan Bongino: We are going bankrupt

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Europe’s Economic And Social Suicide – Provoked by The U.S. And Helped Along By Europe’s Leaders

Due to the stupidity of Europe’s political leadership the U.S. has managed to push it towards committing economic and social suicide.

On February 8 Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, wrote about the then upcoming conflict in Ukraine which the U.S. was intentionally provoking.

Michael Hudson: America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies

The sanctions that U.S. diplomats are insisting that their allies impose against trade with Russia and China are aimed ostensibly at deterring a military buildup. But such a buildup cannot really be the main Russian and Chinese concern. They have much more to gain by offering mutual economic benefits to the West. So the underlying question is whether Europe will find its advantage in replacing U.S. exports with Russian and Chinese supplies and the associated mutual economic linkages.
What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment. If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need for NATO? And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors? 
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Instead of a real military threat from Russia and China, the problem for American strategists is the absence of such a threat. ... 
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The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27: “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The problem is to create a suitably offensive incident and depict Russia as the aggressor.

To provoke a war in Ukraine was easy as the movie production team ruling Ukraine was willing to sacrifice its people and country in a unwinnable war against Russia. The Ukrainian actor and president Vladimir Zelensky had already announced that the Ukraine would, by force, take back Crimea and the Donbas republics that were in the hand of a Russia aligned Ukrainian resistance.

On February 15 Professor John Mearsheimer gave a talk (vid) in which he documented how the U.S. had caused, and is responsible for, the whole Ukraine crisis.

Since last year about half of the Ukrainian army was positioned in the county’s southeast at the ceasefire line with the Donbas republics. On February 17 it opened preparatory artillery fire against the resistance positions. Over the next days the barrage steadily increased.

The observers of the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE), positioned at the frontline, counted and documented each artillery strike and published daily summaries on its website. From 80 artillery impacts on February 16 the attacks increased each day to over 2,000 per day on February 22.

The OSCE observers also provided maps of where the grenades exploded (here of February 21):

 

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biggerThe vast majority of impacts were on three areas east of the ceasefire line on resistance held positions. Anyone with a bit of military knowledge will recognize such intense artillery campaigns along distinct axes as the preparation action for an all out attack.

The leaders of the Donbas republics as well as of Russia had to react to this upcoming attack. On February 19 the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic asked the Russia government for help. Left alone they would have had no chance to resist against the Ukrainian army the U.S. and its allies, since 2015, had financed and built.

Up to this point Russia had insisted that the DPR and LNR were part of Ukraine but should receive some kind of autonomy as provided by the Minsk agreements. But it now had to take steps that would legalize Russian support for the Donbas. On February 21 Russia recognized the republics as independent states. The three parties signed cooperation agreements which included clauses for mutual military support:

Russia’s treaty with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) stipulates granting the right to build military bases on their territory and provide mutual military assistance, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko told a plenary session of the lower house of parliament on Tuesday.

"An important aspect: the treaty stipulates the intentions by the parties to interact in the field of foreign policy, the protection of sovereignty and territorial integrity and security provision, in particular, by way of rendering each other required assistance, including military aid, and granting the right to build, use and improve military infrastructure and military bases on their territory," the high-ranking Russian diplomat pointed out.

With the agreements in place Russian military help against the Ukrainian attack became (at least arguably) legal under Article 51 (collective self-defense) of the UN Charter.

On February 22, no Russia soldier had yet stepped onto Ukrainian ground, the U.S. and its allies imposed extreme economic sanctions against Russia. President Biden acknowledged that the U.S. had long prepared for this.

Over the last few months, we have coordinated closely with our NATO Allies and partners in Europe and around the world to prepare that response. We’ve said all along and I’ve told Putin to his face a mon- — a month a- — more than a month ago that we would act together and the moment Russia moved against Ukraine.

Russia has now undeniably moved against Ukraine by declaring these independent states.

So, today, I’m announcing the first tranche of sanctions to impose costs on Russia in response to their actions yesterday. These have been closely coordinated with our Allies and partners, and we’ll continue to escalate sanctions if Russia escalates.

On February 24 Russian forces entered the Ukraine to preempt the coming attack on the Donbas republics. (The Russian plan A was to press on Kiev to agree to a fast settlement of the crisis. That failed in early April after Boris Johnson’s intervention in Kiev. Russia switched to plan B, the de-militarization of Ukraine.)

The German government announced that the Nord Stream II pipeline, which is technically ready to deliver Russian gas to Germany, would not be launched.

On February 27 the German chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a hysteric and moralizing speech in front of the Germany parliament. It accused Russia of breaking peace in Europe.

The Minsk agreement, under which the Ukraine had committed to federalize and give some autonomy to Donbas, was not mentioned once. Germany and France were both guarantee powers who in 2015 had cosigned the Minsk agreement but had, over seven long years, done little to press for its implementation.

Instead of working for a fast ceasefire and a renewal of economic relations with Russia Scholz committed Germany to economic suicide.

On February 28 Professor Hudson published another deep analysis of the crisis:

America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century: The MIC, BARE and OGAM Conquer NATO.

In a forward to the piece Yves Smith summarized:

Michael Hudson expands on his theme on how the conflict in Ukraine is the result of much bigger forces at work, and not necessarily the ones you have top of mind. He argues that preventing European countries, particularly Germany, from developing deeper economic ties with China and Russia is what’s really at stake.

Here, Hudson describes the hold key US interests have on foreign policy and how they see conflict as a way to hold off a possible fall in their status and power.

The Hudson piece is quite long and deep. I recommend to read it in full.

The U.S. idea is to isolate Europe from its Eurasian hinterland, to move Europe’s industries to the U.S. and to buy up the rest for cheap.

To take Nord Stream II out and to get European countries to boycott Russian energy the U.S. had promised that it would ‘help’ by selling its (quite expensive) Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to Europe. But when natural gas prices started to rise in Europe free market forces set in and they also started to increase in the United States. High energy prices threatened to damage Biden and to tank the Democrats in the midterm elections.

Then a mysterious accident happened:

An explosion at a liquefied natural gas terminal in Texas has left nearby residents rattled and is taking a substantial amount of the fuel off the market at a time when global demand is soaring.

Freeport LNG will be offline for at least three weeks, the company said Thursday, following a fire in its export facility. 
...
Most of Freeport LNG's exports were going to Europe, according to Rystad Energy. Europe may be able to offset the lost volume with increases from other facilities, said Emily McClain, vice president at Rystad. Europe gets about 45% of its LNG from the U.S., and the rest comes from Russia, Qatar and other sources, she said.

Three weeks was too short to lower U.S. natural gas prices. The U.S. regulator for such plants, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), stepped in and prolonged the restart process:

The second-biggest U.S. liquefied natural gas export facility hit by fire earlier this month will not be allowed to repair or restart operations until it addresses risks to public safety, a pipeline regulator said on Thursday. 
...
U.S. natural gas futures tumbled 15% on Thursday due to the report and on a continued inventory build, contributing to a 33% price drop in June, the biggest monthly drop since 2018. 
...
"The actual process (of reviews, repairs and approvals) will take longer than three months, and potentially take six to 12 months," said Alex Munton, director of global gas and LNG at consultants Rapidan Energy Group.

There was also some news of sudden ‘problems’ at other LNG facilities.

It is not only natural gas but also petroleum products that the U.S. is withholding while Europe is in need:

The Biden administration is warning refiners that it may take “emergency measures” to address fuel exports as stockpiles of gasoline and diesel fuel remain near historically low levels in the Northeast.

Fertilizer making plants in Europe have shut down because of way too high natural gas prices. Steel and aluminum smelters are following. Glas production in Europe is severely endangered.

In a long piece today Yves Smith is looking at the economic and political consequences for Europe. In a breach of Betteridge’s law</A she headlines:

Will Europe Go Down to Defeat Before Ukraine?

We will be so bold as to posit that not only has the sanctions war against Russia backfired spectacularly, but the damage to the West, most of all Europe, is accelerating rapidly. And this is not the result of Russia taking active measures but the costs of the loss or reduction of key Russian resources compounding over time.

So due to the intensity of the energy shock, the economic timetable is moving faster than the military. Unless Europe engages in a major course correction, and we don’t see how this can happen, the European economic crisis looks set to become devastating before Ukraine is formally defeated. 
...
As we’ll explain, this shock will be so severe if nothing is done (and as we’ll explain, it’s hard to see anything meaningful enough being done), that the result will be not a recession, but a depression in Europe. 
...
In theory, the EU could try to make up to Russia. But the time for that has passed. It isn’t just that too many key European players like Ursula von der Leyen and Robert Habeck are too deeply invested in Russia-hatred to retreat. Even if there were blood in the street come December, they wouldn’t be turfed out quickly enough.

It is also that Europe has burned its bridges with Russia beyond just the sanctions. Putin has repeatedly offered the EU the option of using Nord Stream 2. Even with Russia now using half its capacity, it could still fully substitute for former Nord Stream 1 deliveries. Putin did warn that option would not stay open for all that long, that Russia would start using the rest of the volume. 
...
So the outcome seems inevitable: many Europeans businesses will fail, leading to job losses, business loan defaults, loss of government revenues, foreclosures. And with governments thinking they’d maybe spent a bit too freely with Covid relief, their emergency energy fillups will be too little to make all that much difference.

At some point, the economic contraction will lead to a financial crisis. If the downdraft is rapid enough, it could be the result as much of (well warranted) loss of confidence as actual losses and defaults to date.

The U.S. has, out of purely egoistic reasons, dragged Europe, and especially Germany, into a trap that will lead to its economic and social destruction. Instead of recognizing the danger, and taking the necessary countermeasure, the European and the German ‘leaders’ committed themselves to help with the process.

The best thing for Europe and Germany would of course have been to avoid the crisis. That failed because of a lack of insight and effort. But now, as Europe is deep down in a hole, the politicians should at least stop digging. It is in Europe’s and especially Germany’s obvious interest to keep the crisis as short as possible.

But the lunatics who are ruling over Europe are still doing the opposite:

Germany will keep up its support for Kyiv "for as long as it takes", Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday, calling for an enlargement of the European Union to eventually include Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. 
...
Germany had undergone a "fundamental change of heart" in recent months on its military support for Ukraine, he said.

"We will keep up this support, reliably and, above all, for as long as it takes," he told the packed university audience.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed the "as long as it takes" promise to Kyiv in a speech in Slovenia, calling for "a new strategic thinking" to uphold European values.

As those ‘leaders’ seem to see it, affordable energy, warm homes, sufficient food, jobs and pensions of Europe citizens are not part of the ‘European values’ they intend to uphold.

The economic and financial breakdown of Europe will be much faster than the obviously necessary political change of its third rate leadership.

The only political sector that will not be damaged by all this, at least in France and Germany, is the far right. That in itself is also a danger.

Posted by b on August 29, 2022 at 17:38 UTC | Permalink

A mega project/plan to move 500,000 Japanese elderly to retire in China.

Uh oh!
Now that such plan is uncovered, I don’t think so the CCP will allow.

These people will eventually become a social burden to china hospital system.

The other question is , once this project is successfully, will there be the second, third such project?

Earlier, China uncovered Japanese schools in China, with a secret plan to train Japanese children with parents working in China as future agents merging into all sectors of the Chinese society. These Japanese schools exclusive to Japanese students only. No one know what they taught, everything in secret.

In 100% won’t trust Japan; this is Asia's most warmongering nation.

50万日本老人将赴中国养老!首批接收城市曝光!|养老院_网易订阅


Article HERE in Chinese

Clayton Morris: We are watching the West collapse right before our eyes, and it’s all their fault

Pretty good.

The announcement of a New Taiwan reunification organization in the name of China revolution army

The leaders with a title “commanding general” and “deputy commanding general”. Very interesting. Open and aggressive anti CPP (America) and Pro-reunification with China.

Video HERE

Important speech from China about the Nancy Polaski visit

Speech by Professor Zhang Weiwei 张维为 and professor jin chanrong 金灿荣 re pelosi Taiwan visit and China strategic response within minutes of pelosi landing in Taiwan includes


1) announcement of large scale military exercise surrounding Taiwan and
2)a 6000 words official statement

These moves showing the CCP has planned long time ago how they will take back Taiwan, and only waiting for the (stupid) American to provide the right opportunity and atmosphere.

I added the (stupid).

Unfortunately, it is in Chinese, for those who understand Chinese , the speech by this two CCP members, former Deng xiaopeng translator 张维为 and senior advisor to the CCP 金灿荣 are very informative. 

Worth your 42 minutes time to listen the full content.

Video HERE (in Chinese)

Still remember how former Singapore minister George Yao describes China as a panda bear with claws.

If the coalition of crusaders led by the US; and defeated by a backward China in the Korean war in the 1950s is of any lesson to learn...

(military might no match for brain power plus strong will), 

Any Nations that dare to start another war over Taiwan in the 21st century will not have a "chance in Hell" (to win).

China is formidable. (advanced Chinese military, training, quality and quantity,  plus brain power and will power.)

U.S. Business Leaders Not Ready for the Next U.S.-China Crisis

May 16, 2022 From HERE

It is no exaggeration to conclude that U.S.-China ties have deteriorated to depths not seen since the late 1960s, when the two had no diplomatic ties and were actually shooting at each other in Vietnam. China has long since stopped fomenting revolutionary wars, but from Washington’s perspective (which is increasingly shared by others in Europe and Asia) Beijing’s promotion of state capitalism, disregard for human rights, irredentist claims, and support for Putin collectively represent a deeply dangerous challenge to the existing world order. To Beijing, a declining United States is trying to use every tool in its toolkit to undermine and isolate Beijing and keep China from achieving its rightful resumption as a world power, which is driving China’s approach increasingly in a zero-sum direction.

While the Biden administration has expressed a desire to manage competition, the two governments are barely on speaking terms and when they do talk, it is usually an exercise in frustration. President Biden’s phone call with Xi Jinping in early March was most noted for the warnings the U.S. side issued against Chinese support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai has said her conversations with Beijing have yielded no progress on commercial differences. And when the United States recently announced the departure of nonessential personnel from the Shanghai consulate, the Chinese Foreign Ministry accused the United States of not trying to protect lives but of politicizing the pandemic.

There will be no easy exit from this new chapter of Sino-American strategic competition—a chapter that arguably started with Xi’s moves against the South China Sea and neighboring states seven years ago, as the Obama administration was still exploring modalities for a productive bilateral relationship. No political leader in Washington will now argue for returning to that earlier hopeful period in bilateral relations and the thrust of the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy is properly to strengthening alliances and partnership to deal with a more coercive and ambitious China. Yet at the same time, the current trajectory in the bilateral relationship bodes ill for the ability of Washington and Beijing to manage crises that might emerge in the coming years. Both sides regularly assume the worst intentions of the other: Beijing’s anti-Western social mobilization campaign continues unabated, the quiet dialogue mechanisms that once allowed strategic exchanges between the White House and Zhongnanhai have been replaced by lecturing megaphones.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, natural disasters, Covid-19, and extensive supply chain challenges, corporate leaders have become adept at preparing for “black swans” and the continuity of business contingencies, embracing “just in case” over “just in time” and learning to prepare redundancies and protect key technologies. But the current dynamics in U.S.-China relations suggest that there may be a need to prepare for a new bevy of potential black swans from technology competition to major military contingencies.

Thinking the Increasingly Probable and No Longer Unthinkable

The impediments to war between the United States and China—from the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons to the trillions of dollars in possible economic damage—remain robust. But the escalation ladder from current “gray zone” coercion and diplomatic jostling up towards cyber, technology decoupling, and even military threats is also closer at hand for Beijing, and therefore Washington. In the Taiwan Strait, Chinese military overflights that cross the midline or circle the island are now a regular occurrence. Although there is reason to doubt that Xi Jinping has set a firm deadline for reunification, Beijing may increasingly believe that force is their only option. An accidental collision between ships or jets in the South China Sea is not only possible—it has also occurred. The nuclear submarine USS Connecticut’s collision with an unknown underwater object in October 2021 is a case in point. This incident did not spiral into a larger conflict, but it easily could have. There is now greater commercial and military traffic in the South China Sea than ever, but the United States and China have very few crisis management mechanisms, with insufficient ways to communicate at an operational level in real time.

The U.S. and Chinese economies have become so intertwined over the last 40 years that when Trump first launched his trade war, the idea of decoupling seemed absolutely impossible. Even the restrictions on Huawei looked like a pebble of decoupling in an ocean of connectivity.

Not so anymore. The woven threads of commercial ties have already started to fray. Total merchandise trade has held steady, but processing trading, which highlights movement of goods within supply chains, is down. Equity investment from the United States to China has only dropped a little and U.S. companies still report being profitable, but their angst at their treatment is on the rise. Venture capital deals have steadily fallen. Meanwhile, all manner of Chinese investment to the United States has plummeted. Overall financial flows are still quite high (and perhaps larger than ever), but the storm clouds are gathering, with the 250 Chinese companies on U.S. markets poised to be delisted, and growing concerns in the United States about the downsides of U.S. institutional capital in Chinese markets. Travel is down to a trickle of businesspeople willing to endure lengthy quarantines. The growth of sudden lockdowns, represented most shockingly by Shanghai, is certainly another deterrent to travel.

It is now entirely conceivable that commercial ties could substantially unravel. One route is through the expansion of defensive regulatory measures that would raise the costs of doing business. Both sides have instituted a range of restrictions and are pursuing analogous programs to achieve supply chain resiliency and reduce their dependency on the other. There are now nearly 1,000 Chinese companies penalized in one way or another by the United States for national security or human rights reasons. The final China bill that emerges out of the Senate-House conference may very well start to require U.S. investments to China to undergo national security reviews the same way the U.S. screens inward investment. And China could start to use, among other tools, its Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law and its own Unreliable Entities List to punish U.S. companies that do not toe Beijing’s line.

The other pathway to reduce ties would be an unintentional escalation of penalties. For example, imagine how Washington might react if Beijing suddenly shut down the cloud computing services of Microsoft or Amazon Web Services (AWS) on the excuse that some customers were inappropriately transferring data abroad in contravention of their data localization rules. The Biden administration would likely have no choice but to retaliate, leading to a potential spiral of ever-growing restrictions that would reduce existing activities and ward off future business.

The possibility of a security crisis and economic decoupling have only been magnified by the war in Ukraine. While U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine may in some ways strengthen deterrence against an attack by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on Taiwan in the near term, it may also eliminate any hope Beijing had of achieving unification peacefully and further reduce the likelihood of some sort of negotiated settlement. And the radical expansion of Western commercial restrictions against Russia may be a test run for greater limits on ties with China, particularly if Beijing does not further distance itself from Putin and the invasion.

Everyone should take notice when U.S. treasury secretary Janet Yellen, not known as an über-hawk, highlighting this possibility, recently warned: “The world’s attitude towards China and its willingness to embrace further economic integration may well be affected by China’s reaction to our call for resolute action on Russia.”

Business Is Not Ready

This transition has occurred so fast that global companies that have thrived on doing business with China are not well prepared to adapt to this new normal or to try and stem the tide.  Extended interviews and in-depth crisis scenario exercises with dozens of companies and investors, including to an elite group of participants in the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, about these issues over the past few months, have revealed an unexpected combination of overconfidence and resignation in their views.

When faced with the prospect of a military crisis, some companies believe that they could use their connections to be fully informed and potentially even shape the thinking of decisionmakers so that they avoid the worst outcomes. The cold reality is that once a crisis erupts, the economic policymakers get tossed out of the room and the circle of decisionmakers narrow to those who prosecute war. Companies will be forced to operate largely in the dark, or at least be no better informed than Joe Q. Public, and hence, will have to focus on short-term issues such as protecting their most directly affected employees, bank accounts and other assets, and then just hang on.

When it comes to decoupling, we found both rosy optimists and deflated pessimists. Some assert that commercial decoupling is simply not possible because of the continued extent of ties and the obvious economic harm the West would inflict on itself—lost markets, access to resources and opportunities to innovate—that would come from such steps. In contrast to this view that business needs to do little more than remind Washington the benefits of ties, the alternative view—that there is no use in making this argument because no one will listen—is equally if not more prominent. At the end of the day, most companies are highly risk-averse and want to avoid getting on the wrong side of officialdom.

Although some business associations have taken up the challenge, it is hard to find individual companies that are willing to strongly advocate in Washington for continued engagement or push hard on Beijing to liberalize and constrain state capitalism (let alone push on its actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong). The result is that global businesses are for the most part keeping their heads down, hoping their China opportunities do not dry up, and aiming for greater home government support to relocate some of their supply chains. The war in Ukraine and the concomitant shift in thinking about China in Washington and like-minded capitals in Europe and Asia only reinforces this posture.

What Is to Be Done?

The good news is that almost all business leaders the authors have engaged on these scenarios were already used to thinking about black swans. Few fought the scenarios even if they had not considered them. The bad news is that very few corporations engaged in China have contingency plans or long-term strategies to hedge against the downside risks of growing geopolitical competition. However, there are few good places to start.

First, corporations should not assume that their immediate corporate, regulatory, or political counterparts in China will necessarily be able to protect them against a national-level crisis. Those relationships might help, but they are no guarantee that business operations will survive.

Second, corporations which tend to keep their head down on geopolitics for obvious reasons will now need to engage both governments more actively on the consequences of our inability to manage crises. This will be far more effective if done collectively through business associations. And the effort will only be effective in Washington if the premise is that there will be geopolitical friction and U.S. national interests matter—but that management of that competition is critical. Fighting the premise will mean that corporations do not get a hearing in the Biden administration or Congress on either side of the aisle right now.

Third, corporations need to think about their operating environment the way geostrategists now are—which is to say that there are multiple players shaping relations with China that have weight in Washington and Beijing. U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific and Europe are increasingly aligning with Washington on the necessity of pushing back against Chinese coercion and mercantilism However, all these allies from Japan to Germany also seek careful management of U.S.-China relations. U.S. corporations and business associations rarely align their efforts with counterparts in Tokyo or Brussels, but they need to do so now.

Fourth, corporations need to press for a regional economic strategy that stabilizes U.S.-China relations. Before the Trump administration withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, the strategy of the United States and its allies was to build a rules-based order in the region that would increase all their leverage vis-à-vis Beijing and offer strong incentives for China to play by the rules. The unilateralist U.S. approach to economic statecraft since then has alienated close allies and left room for Beijing to expand its ambitions for regional hegemony—thus adding to geopolitical friction and uncertainty. The administration’s new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) is a well-intentioned effort to fill that vacuum, but it still falls short of what is needed to substantially restore faith in U.S. economic policy leadership and curb China’s own ambitions to replace the United States as the primary rule-maker in the region.

Finally, corporate leaders need to engage in the kind of scenario exercises that the U.S. military regularly employs. These scenario games are not meant to be predictive, but rather to stress-test current assumptions and point to measures that might be useful in a crisis (for example, who would CEOs need to know in the event of a major technology or military contingency that threatened their operations). No plan survives first contact with the enemy, but no leader succeeds in a crisis if they have not been forced to consider how exogenous shocks would impact their plans.

What is the USA thinking?

A disturbing video. Please check it out. It concerns mRNA injections that are touted as “vaccines”. This is NOT the same thing as a “dead host” vaccine such as used in Russia and China.

Video HERE

The United States has the dubious honor of being the first nation to attack Taiwan. This happened in 1867. The United States then supported and Armed Japan in invading China, via Taiwan, in 1874. This happened during the Mudan incident.

China has NEVER forgotten the “Rape of Nanjing”, and the “One Hundred years of humiliation” that resulted DIRECTLY from the United States actions, efforts, funding and military actions.

To think that China has forgotten simply because you are unaware of history is a dangerous mistake.

China is a peaceful nation, but they are ready, have been ready, and are fully willing to slap the United States back to the stone age if it persists in trying to repeat the last American induced “suppression”.

US Sub That Hit Undersea Mountain Previously Hit Pier: Investigation

So we are supposed to believe that the USN is full of klutz's. And nothing else. Just an article in supportive of the bullshit narrative of hitting an undersea mountain. -MM
The US Navy submarine USS Connecticut ran into an underwater mountain in the South China Sea last October.  Months earlier, in April 2021, the submarine hit a pier in San Diego. The command investigation said the submarine’s leadership failed to learn from the first incident.

Article HERE

China Disputes British Sovereignty Over Falkland Islands; Rattles Both The UK, US With ‘Historic Deal’ With Argentina

With China trying to boost its presence in South America, Argentina has emerged as a valuable partner for Beijing. In a recent development, Argentine President Alberto Fernandez laid a wreath on the mausoleum of former Chairman of the Communist Party, Mao Zedong.

In America’s Backyard, China To Set Up A Massive Nuclear Power Plant Using Its Indigenous ‘Hualong One’ Tech

The deepening association between China and Argentina, which is participating in the ongoing Beijing Winter Olympics, is not free of controversy though.

In a move that has angered London, the Chinese embassy in the United Kingdom stated that Beijing’s position on the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands problem is consistent and that it strongly supports Argentina’s rightful claim to complete sovereignty over the islands, Global Times reported.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Argentine President Alberto Fernandez on the sidelines of Beijing Olympics (via Twitter)

Malvinas Islands is the Spanish name of the Falkland Islands that are controlled and administered by the British.

The Chinese embassy’s spokesperson made the remarks, which were published on the embassy’s website on February 8. The remarks came after UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said on Twitter that China must respect the sovereignty of the Malvinas Islands, which she considers to be “part of the British Family.”

 

After Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández met China’s President Xi on the fringes of the Beijing Winter Olympics, the foreign secretary stated that “China must respect the sovereignty of the Falklands”.

According to a statement on the Chinese embassy, the two leaders spoke of their “deep friendship,” and Argentina joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a state-backed effort for global influence, stated The Guardian.

They did, however, also sign an agreement in which China reaffirmed its support for Argentina’s Falkland Islands claim, while Fernández endorsed Xi’s one-China policy, which claims Taiwan as a part of the mainland. The statement said Argentina should be able to “fully exercise its sovereignty over the Malvinas (Falklands) Islands issue”.

 

But Truss said: “We completely reject any questions over sovereignty of the Falklands. The Falklands are part of the British family and we will defend their right to self-determination. China must respect the Falklands’ sovereignty.”

Even though this has triggered a diplomatic row between the two countries that already remain embroiled in tensions on various issues, this is not the first time when China has backed Argentina’s claim over the islands.

In June of last year, a Chinese envoy had called for worldwide efforts to abolish colonialism and outlined China’s position on the Malvinas Islands.

 

Beijing-London relations have deteriorated considerably in recent years, with the two nations battling over trade, Hong Kong, and human rights. It is ironic though that China which asserts its sovereignty over the self-governing island of Taiwan does not endorse UK’s control over the Falkland Islands.

Beijing’s stand could be seen as a message to the West. Several western countries support Taiwan’s democracy and independence and oppose the Chinese belligerence and pressure tactics over Taipei.

Hundreds of Argentine troops landed in the Falkland Islands, also known as the Islas Malvinas in Argentina, on April 2, 1982.

The islands were a British overseas territory located 400 miles east of Argentina and 8,000 miles south of the United Kingdom. The islands were the subject of a long-running dispute between Britain and Argentina, despite their modest size and limited population.

After numerous heavy firefights, the small British garrison surrendered on April 2 in the afternoon. It was a much-needed success for Argentina’s military junta, which intended to divert attention away from its brutal rule and other domestic concerns.

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Image via-Wikipedia

The junta assumed that Britain, which was dealing with its own domestic difficulties, would not strike back from afar. However, Britain dispatched 15,000 men to retake the islands over the next 74 days, aboard warships, logistical ships, and even cruise liners.

After failed discussions over control of the islands, the conflict began in earnest on May 1, 1982. Argentine planes fired the first shots in the air, seeking to intercept a Royal Navy task force dispatched to prepare the area for the invasion force.

However, the British military was able to steadily advance and gain an advantage with each passing day with its superior air and naval power. Finally, on June 14, the Argentines, surrounded by all sides, surrendered.

Although China’s military was not involved in the Falklands conflict in any manner, its analysts have studied it extensively, owing to the many parallels that may be found in a conflict over Taiwan, according to a previous article of Business Insider.

Why China Cares About Falklands

Argentine President Fernández has improved his country’s ties with China, which surpassed Brazil as Argentina’s top trading partner in 2020. Bilateral trade increased by 56 percent from 2007 to 2019, reaching $15 billion. Argentina joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in March 2021, and now finally, it has formally joined China’s BRI.

 

As China aims to expand beyond its immediate region of influence and forge economic relations with South American countries, its support to their stated territorial position is expected to deepen the partnership between them to China’s benefit. It has been interpreted as a plan to occupy space in a region that the United States has traditionally treated as its own backyard.

Further, Beijing has repeatedly chastised Britain’s “colonial mindset” in relation to the Falkland Islands, which overwhelmingly opted to remain a British overseas territory in a plebiscite in 2013.

Last June, China’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Geng Shuang, spoke on decolonization and advocated for the abolition of all forms of colonialism. Argentina attempted to begin negotiations with the United Kingdom regarding the sovereignty of the islands during the same session.

“But it’s OK for the UK to question China’s sovereignty in the South China Sea by sending navy vessels?” Chen Weihua, a journalist for China Daily, an English-language publication owned by the Chinese Communist Party, said in response to Britain’s outrage against the Chinese-Argentine statement. “At the very least, China has not sent its navy to the Malvinas, or the Falkland Islands.”

Recently, China also reaffirmed its support and friendship with Russia. In a joint statement with Russia, it called on the West to “abandon the ideological approaches of the Cold War” as the Russian build-up on the Ukrainian border remains at an all-time high.

The modus operandi has been the same. In the joint statement with Russia, China rebuked the US for encouraging protests in Hong Kong and indirectly supporting independence for Taiwan while Russia expressed its discomfort with NATO expansion.

With the Falkland issue, Beijing is probably doing a tit-for-tat with the West.

Tucker Carlson: Things are falling apart every quickly

Very, very interesting. Worth a watch.

Cheesecake-Stuffed Pumpkin Bread

This easy pumpkin and cake mix bread gets an eye-catching swirl when it’s stuffed with a creamy, cheesecake filling.

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Cheesecake-Stuffed Pumpkin Bread

Ingredients

Pumpkin Bread

Cheesecake Filling

  • 6 oz (from 8-oz package) cream cheese, softened
  • 1/3 cup sugar
  • 3 tablespoons Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 egg

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The Taiwanese are getting pretty darn upset with the current Taiwan government

A famous Taiwanese (indigenous) actress, and a long time law maker 高金素梅 did the unthinkable! She read the full content of an article (written by a former high ranking government officer 杨志良) titled “to survive, people will need to need with a revolution! ” (求生存最後必革命)
The content is directed squarely against the DPP government in Taiwan.
It criticized the current regime as dictatorial, and corrupt.  It outlined in great detail of their endless scandals, corruptions, and the hardship and risk created by them to the people of Taiwan.
The article also criticized the current political system keep electing low quality corrupt politicians, and criticized the nationalist party as uselessly incompetent as well.
So The conclusion is to survive, people will NEED to have a revolution to toss out the current DPP government.

 

US pushing war on China: Malaysia’s ex PM explains imperialism’s roots in capitalism

Malaysia. Listen what is being stated here.

The party and the ox

A man killed a big ox, lit the grill, and said to his daughter: “Daughter, call our friends, family and neighbors to eat with us… Let’s feast!”

His daughter went out into the street and started screaming, “Please help us put out a fire in my father’s house!”

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After a few moments, a small group of people came out; and the rest acted as if they hadn’t heard the cries for help.

Whoever came ate and drank until they swelled up.

The stunned father turned to his daughter and said, “I don’t know any of the people who came, I’ve never seen them before. Where are our friends and family?”

The daughter said, “These people came out of their homes to help us put out fires in our house, not for the party. These are the ones who deserve our generosity and hospitality.”

Conclusion – “those who don’t help you during your fight, shouldn’t eat with you at the victory party”.

More poking the Dragon, and Outrage in Ukraine. What’s next?

Let’s begin with this screenshot to keep us grounded.

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Ignorance abounds in the West.

Hey, do I LOOK fucking Chinese, you dumb fuck, piece of shit, asshole, jack-off, idiot.

The anti-China propaganda is so complete that it appears that [1] A war is imminent, and [2] A dumbed down American population will be unable to innovate at any appreciable level.

Fuck this shit. Let’s go through today’s mix of stuff.

That depends on where you got your information from.

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SKP mall, Beijing

SKP mall, Beijing

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Xin Tiandi, Shanghai

Xin Tiandi, Shanghai

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XuJiaHui, Shanghai

XuJiaHui, Shanghai

Apparently real-world Chinese are living in an alternative reality where they are having normal Christmas as usual.

While the Chinese from known anti-China medias are suffering under ‘Chinese authority’s Christmas ban’. LOL. You have to be an IDIOT to believe the bullshit that flows out of American “news”.

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Photo from Epochtimes supposedly depicting authority’s repression of the public.

Photo from Epochtimes supposedly depicting authority’s repression of the public.

Next time when you want to get news, avoid American and Western media. News reporting isn’t on their agenda.

Political attacks and information manipulation are.

I’m Algerian so I think I’m qualified to answer this. Short answer: I love them and many other Algerians do too.

What I like the most about Chinese people is the way they do business with us. They come, they build whatever they were told to build ,and when they finish, they leave. You might be wondering what’s so special about that? Well, this is not what we are used to. France has been our biggest “partner” for a long period and it has been tough for us. Let me explain – when France decides to do business with us we always lose.

France: Oh you want to produce cars – Renault can help you .

Algeria: Oh cool.

France: Oh – by the way, no other car manufacturer is allowed to produce cars in Algeria for 3 years.

Algeria: Ok cool.

France: …and while we are at, if we don’t sell all our bullshit cars, that no other country accepts, the Algerian government should buy them.

Algeria: Sure mom – it’s people’s money anyway.

France: by the way I don’t like how religious your country is. Change that – now.

Algeria: Sure mom – anything else?

France: I heard you are expanding your train network. Here’s a bankrupted train company that can sell you train wagons three or four times their actual price.

I know I shouldn’t be blaming France for everything since France is just exploiting our corrupt government. But France helped them become our leaders and France is always trying to tell us what to and what not to do.

Sorry for the long answer.

Time to go

For our beloved cat, it was terribly hard to decide what was best. Aside from a bit of arthritis, for 18 years old, she was physically in good shape.

But we started to notice that she was acting rather oddly. She would go behind doors, then seem to get “stuck”, and not know how to get out. She would forget where her cat box was, or where her food was.

And then later, she would sleep all day, but when the sun went down, she would pace, and howl frantically. Nothing we did would calm her.

We had the mobile vet in several times. The vet said that our cat probably had senile dementia. We tried everything the vet recommended, but our poor cat was either frantic and agitated, or so drugged and groggy that we had to carry her to the cat box. We knew it wasn’t a good life for her.

So the vet made a last visit. We sang to our cat, and told her how much we loved her. We gave her poached shrimp, her favorite food. We said good-by, trying not to upset her by crying. The vet gave her a shot, which sent her into a deep sleep. We stroked her, and said that very soon, everything would be OK. Then the vet gave her a last shot, and she went to her eternal sleep.

I often imagine her in the cat version of Valhalla. She is young and healthy again, running over green hills. She plays forever, without ever getting winded. And when she sleeps, she dreams of catching dragons. And maybe of us, the humans who loved her so much.

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Simple Lox & Bagel Recipe

There’s lox & bagels and then there lox and bagels. And a couple, simple changes make this one outstanding.

Serves 2

The food of my people doesn’t get much better – unless you change it up a bit and go with an inspired yogurt/dill/caper thing instead of the usual cream cheese.

Ingredients

  • 4 tablespoons Greek yogurt
  • 2 tablespoons capers, drained
  • 1/2 tablespoon dill (dried or fresh)
  • Juice from 1/2 lemon
  • Pinch of Kosher salt & fresh ground pepper
  • 2 whole wheat bagels
  • Red onion, thinly sliced
  • 4 ounces lox
  • 1 large, beautifully ripe tomato, sliced into 1/8 inch rounds

Directions

  1. Put yogurt, capers, dill, lemon juice, salt & pepper in a bowl and mix well to combine
  2. Slice bagels in half and either toast, then butter – or butter first then grill on a non-stick surface until golden brown (grilling is better)
  3. Spread yogurt mix on 2 of the bagels, then add tomato, some onion, season with a little more pepper, lots of lox and finish with bagel top
  4. Slice and eat

Why Are So Many Bad Things Happening To America In 2022?

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Have you ever wondered why we just keep getting hit by one thing after another?  I grew up during a time when it seemed like America was endlessly blessed, but now everything around us seems the opposite of blessed.

Our economy is imploding, inflation is out of control, the housing market is starting to crash, our weather patterns have gone completely nuts, the western half of the nation is enduring the worst drought in 1,200 years, we are dealing with three major pandemics simultaneously, we are losing our proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and it looks like war with China is just around the corner, and on top of everything else our political system is failing because liberals and conservatives deeply, deeply hate one another.

And if you think that there is hope on the horizon, you are going to be severely disappointed.

The current crop of politicians in Washington is the worst that we have had in our entire history, and all of the “solutions” they give us just seem to make matters even worse.

This weekend, I came across a very intriguing article in the Jerusalem Post entitled “Is God punishing the United States of America?”

It was authored by a prominent businessman named Sherwin Pomerantz, and it really got me thinking.

Could it be possible that there is a common thread that connects all of the bad things that are constantly happening to us?

In his article, one of the points that Pomerantz makes is that America’s political system is coming apart at the seams right in front of our eyes

Politically, whether people want to admit it or not, the country is in the midst of a civil war, though for the moment, not one where both sides have taken up arms, one against the other (although that, too, could eventuate).

Sadly, he is right on target.

There is so much politically-motivated hatred in our country today.  Liberals deeply hate conservatives and conservatives deeply hate liberals.  It would seem that it is only a matter of time before the entire system shatters.

On another note, Pomerantz believes that it is no coincidence that our weather patterns have gone totally haywire and that our nation is being constantly hit by natural disaster after natural disaster

Then there is the weather. On average, the US experiences fewer than 1,500 tornadoes a year. Through June, there have already been 940 reported tornadoes there, which means the country is on track to see 2,000 or more, a 33% increase year-on-year.

The nightly news out of the US for the past few months shows tens of millions of people under extreme weather risk every day, often in three different areas of the country simultaneously (upper Midwest, East coast and the Southeast region). In the west, a long period of drought has been drying up reservoirs and spawning massive forest fires. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) statistics show that as of July 5, 34,478 fires have already burned 4,582,301 acres. This is above the 10-year average of 27,346 fires, and twice the average of 2,026,917 acres burned. The odd thing is that very little of this occurs just north of the US in Canada, or just south in Mexico. It all seems to be centered in the US.

I did find it odd that Pomerantz only briefly mentioned the drought, because it is actually a really big deal.

At this moment, the western half of the nation is in the midst of the worst multi-year megadrought that the region has experienced in 1,200 years, and this is having an absolutely devastating impact on agricultural production.

For example, we are now being warned that a very serious shortage of tomatoes could soon be coming

As endless supply chain-related food shortages force people to adjust their grocery lists, another essential ingredient is becoming scarce. Along with avocados, cream cheese, chickpeas, and olive oil, the supply of tomatoes has started to dwindle. But this time it’s California’s catastrophic drought conditions denying farmers the water needed to grow the versatile vegetable that’s to blame. Due to the shortage, the price of byproducts like ketchup, salsa, and spaghetti sauce has started to surge.

Speaking about the tomato shortage, Head of the California Tomato Growers Association Mike Montana said the golden state desperately needs rain. “We are getting to a point where we don’t have inventory left to keep fulfilling the market demand,” he told Bloomberg News. California, which grows a quarter of the world’s tomatoes, is in the middle of a historic drought that has stoked massive wildfires while drying up reservoirs. It has also become a major threat to the agriculture industry.

When I was growing up, I never once imagined that there could ever be a shortage of tomatoes in this country.

But things have changed, and life in the U.S. will never again be like it was when I was a little boy.

Although to be honest I am having flashbacks to the 1970s with all of the inflation we are witnessing right now.

In fact, if the inflation rate was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would be higher than anything that we experienced during the Jimmy Carter era.

Over the past couple of years, our politicians in Washington have gone on the most dramatic borrowing and spending binge in human history, and the “experts” at the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of fresh dollars into the financial system.

Of course that was going to cause inflation, and now we have a colossal mess on our hands.

I really like how Steve Bannon recently summed up what we are now facing

Every time you get a paycheck you’re falling behind because of inflation. 

Your real wages, sixteen months in a row (now let me think, how long has the Biden Administration been around here – about 18 months). Every month since they’ve been here real wages are down.

Ok so you’re losing, your treadmill, you’re losing every day in your wages and now the little bit of equity you have in the world, the little bit of net worth you’ve got in the world, the bottom’s fallen out on that.

Ok. You are screwed. 

Let me be blunt. 

Let me do some Harvard Business School math for you – You’re screwed.

The Federal Reserve is recklessly hiking interest rates in a desperate attempt to battle inflation, but everyone knew that this would inevitably cause a housing crash.

And as I pointed out last week, a housing crash has already begun.

This July, new home sales were about 30 percent lower than they were last July…

The plunge in home sales is just stunning. Sales of new single-family houses collapsed by 12.6% in July from the already beaten-down levels in June, and by nearly 30% from July last year, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 511,000 houses, the lowest since January 2016, and well below the lockdown lows, according to data from the Census Bureau today.

Sadly, this is just the beginning.

If the Fed keeps raising rates, things will get far worse.

Meanwhile, we find ourselves battling three major pandemics all at once.

Despite everything that our health authorities have done, COVID is still with us and will be with us for many years to come.

If that wasn’t bad enough, a bird flu pandemic has erupted this year which has resulted in tens of millions of our chickens and turkeys being wiped out.

On top of that, a new monkeypox outbreak continues to spread at an exponential rate all over the planet.

Is it just some sort of a bizarre coincidence that we are now facing three major pestilences simultaneously?

Of course this article would not be complete unless I talked about the war.

We are now deeply involved in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and it is not going very well.

And if both sides continue to escalate matters, we could eventually find ourselves in a nuclear conflict with Russia which would have the potential to ultimately kill billions of people.

In addition, the warmongers in the Biden administration have also brought us to the brink of a war with China.  More U.S. politicians keep flying over to Taiwan, and at some point the Chinese are going to decide that they simply cannot take any more provocations.

Also, it is just a matter of time before Iran and Israel go to war.  And once that happens, the U.S. will inevitably decide to intervene.

In this article, I have covered war, plagues, economic collapse and natural disasters among other things.

Could it be possible that all of these things are happening at this specific moment in human history for a reason?

And could it be possible that we were warned in advance that all of these things would be coming?

My hope is that this article will get people thinking.

All of human history has been building up to a grand crescendo, and we get to be here for it.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the population has no idea what is ahead, and so most of them are going to be absolutely blind-sided by the cataclysmic events that are rapidly coming our way.

Cats know more than you think

A:That I was pregnant.

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5 years ago now my old man my DLH tuxedo was just acting so odd. He was obsessed with my stomach; would sleep on top on it every chance he got. The final straw was when I put down wet food and he chose to go lay on my stomach instead. That was weird he loved his wet food.

I dragged him to the vet for a check up; everything checked out fine he was completely healthy. A few days later it clicked for me. I called my best friend told her about the cat and thinking maybe he was right; so she got me a pregnancy test and what do you know that cat WAS right.

He knew our twin daughters were coming well before we did. After they were born he chose to be their guard cat. He would sleep outside their bedroom door every night. He would lay in between the two cribs on the floor for naps just to make sure his babies didn’t need anything. He never once tried to get in with them but always made sure he was watching them.

Our girls are 4 now and my old man is a much older man but he absolutely lives for them. He still sleeps in the hallway every night in between their rooms. Just in case they need anything.

I know now when he’s trying to communicate with me I need to listen and I do.

BP Refinery in Whiting Burns – ENERGY EMERGENCY DECLARED

The U.S. Department of Transportation has declared a regional emergency for Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin after a fire shut down the BP oil refinery in Whiting, Ind., the largest in the Midwest, though there hasn’t been an impact on gas prices so far.

I believe 25% of the fuel for Michigan comes from that facility, this could really make things interesting.

The fire took place in the refinery’s power house and led to a loss of cooling water that could potentially damage equipment, according to Bloomberg, but the extent of the problems are reportedly limited to a small area of the facility, and no injuries were reported.

The shutdown comes at an inopportune time, just ahead of the harvest in much of the Midwest, and U.S. gasoline supplies are at their lowest August levels since 2015, according to the Energy Information Agency.

The Whiting refinery is a major storage place for crude oil used to make gasoline, and its supplies could be moved to Cushing, Oklahoma, in the event of a long-term closure, according to Bloomberg.

BP PLC shut two crude units at its 435,000 barrel-a-day Whiting, Indiana, refinery after a fire.

When a group is persecuted, what will happen to them?

  • genocide
  • Verbal violence, physical threats
  • Forced to renounce his religious beliefs
  • Forced to accept other beliefs and customs.
  • Be evicted, scattered, tost their homes.
  • Can’t own land, can’t accumulate wealth,
  • Images are perpetuated in a negative way, just like Jews were once seen as the embodiment of greed.

Am I right? If you agree with that, then let’s see whether Tibetans are being persecuted in China.

First, let’s look at a set of data comparison.

Population: in the first national census in 1953, the local government of Tibet reported a population of 1 million. In the second national census in 1964, the population of Tibet was 1.251 million, including 1.209 million Tibetans; In 2018, the statistical population of Tibet was 3.4382 million, with a net increase of more than 2million.

Education: There was no modern school in old Tibet, and the illiteracy rate of young and middle-aged adults was over 95%. There are now 2,995 schools of various types in Tibet, including 7 ordinary colleges and universities with 841,500 students, forming a complete modern education system. In the past 10 years alone, China has invested more than 165.6 billion yuan in education funds in Tibet.

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Education in Tibet.

Political participation: In 2016, in the general election of deputies to the county-level people’s congress of the Tibet Autonomous Region, more than 1.81 million voters participated in the voter registration, and more than 1.72 million voters participated in the voting elections, with a turnout rate of over 95%. Currently, the Tibet Autonomous Region has 35,963 deputies to people’s congresses at all levels, of which Tibetans and other ethnic minorities account for 92.8%.

Participation in government.

Medical and health care: There were only 3 Tibetan medical institutions in old Tibet and no hospital bed. At present, Tibet has formed a four-level modern medical and health service system of autonomous regions, cities, counties, and townships, with 1,661 medical and health institutions of various levels and 18,942 beds.

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Medical care in Tibet.

Transportation: There was no regular highway in old Tibet. At present, Tibet’s highway mileage has reached 118,800 kilometers. The Qinghai-Tibet Railway, Sichuan-Tibet Railway (part of it), and Lhasa-Japan Railway have been opened to traffic. There are 5 navigable airports, 130 domestic and international air routes, and 61 navigable cities. Tibet has formed an extensive network. A comprehensive transportation network with roads, railways and aviation as the main body.

  • Life expectancy per capita: 35.5 years in 1951 and 71.1 years in 2020.
  • GDP: 129 million yuan in 1965 and 190.2 billion yuan in 2020.
The above data are extracted from the "general introduction to the local history of Tibet", the national white paper and the Tibet Daily, etc.

In addition to that, the Tibetan people also enjoy full freedom in terms of culture and belief. For example, there are 1787 temples and other places for religious activities in Tibet, with 46000 monks living in temples. Major traditional festivals and religious activities, such as the Tibetan new year, the sheaton Festival, the wangguo Festival, the Sagadawa Festival, and the summoning of the Dafa society, are normally carried out.

In Tibet, both Tibetan and Chinese characters are used in education, public places and social activities. There are 55 national key cultural relics protection units and 616 district level cultural relics protection units in Tibet. The Potala Palace, loprinka and Jokhang Temple are listed in the world heritage list. Tibetan opera, Gesar Epic rap and Tibetan medicine bath method are included in the world intangible cultural heritage list.
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Therefore, ethnic massacres, verbal violence, personal threats and religious oppression have never occurred to the Tibetan people. On the contrary, Tibet is developing vigorously. How can you think that China is persecuting Tibetans? How can you think that China is persecuting Tibetans?

Let me tell a story. I have a Tibetan friend. One day I made a video call with her. I found her background was like a palace, very magnificent. I was really shocked when she said that this was her home. I was completely fascinated by the unique cultural symbols and decorative styles of Tibetans. I can’t help but sigh, will anyone not love this shocking and fascinating culture? We should protect this precious minority culture! Fortunately, this is exactly what China does.

I also have a few friends who have traveled by car in Tibet for half a month. They would share with us pictures of the beautiful scenery and food in Tibet every day. I found that Tibet’s infrastructure is perfect, the streets are lively and beautiful, and the people are at ease with smiles on their faces.

After my friend came back, he said to me, “This land is really magical. Faith seems to be rooted in their bones. It is romantic and touching.” So those who have really been to Tibet have seen the true face and essence of Tibet. The people who demonize Tibet on the Internet are based on imagination and stereotypes.

In short, persecution does not exist at all. No matter which ethnic group it is, it is equal and taken care of in China. Let me put some more pictures about Tibet. Language is not as powerful as real photos. You are welcome to fall in love with this pure land, and you can come here one day to travel.

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Tibetans are a happy minority.

Because some cats love sharing the shower with their parents. And only cats know why they do what they do. We humans are only guessing the reasons and pretending that there are some logical explanations.

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The Futility of Dialogue With Idiots & Liars

The entire crisis could have been avoided with much less loss of life if the NATO powers had responded to Russia’s long-held security concerns.

Two weeks ago, the Strategic Culture Foundation proposed an urgent, simple test: stop the artillery shelling on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant. The ZNPP – Europe’s largest nuclear power station – continues to come under military attack thereby risking a nuclear catastrophe.

It is an incredible siege situation. And one that illustrates – for anyone willing to see it, that is – the profound criminality of the NATO-backed war in Ukraine against Russia. There is nothing that the NATO powers and their lying media will stoop to. In a related illustration, the British would-be next Prime Minister Liz Truss this week said she was willing to use nuclear weapons even if it caused global annihilation. This is the same psychopathic mentality that the world has to endure from such Western regimes.

This week, Russia’s envoy to the United Nations presented photographic evidence to the Security Council that showed irrefutably that the ZNPP is being shelled by the NATO-backed Kiev regime. The trajectory of fire is from the territory held by the Ukrainian military and the weaponry includes M777 howitzers supplied by the United States.

The Kiev regime’s claims are patently absurd. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claims that Russian forces are attacking the ZNPP despite the obvious fact that the Russian military took over the station in early March, days after it launched its security operation on February 24 to neutralize mounting NATO threats from Ukraine. The Western governments and news media continue to indulge Zelensky’s blatant lie by amplifying the perverse accusations of “self-sabotage” by Russia. The United Nations’ chief António Guterres has also shamefully indulged the nonsense by pretending to “not know the truth” about “conflicting claims”.

There are no “conflicting claims”. It is starkly evident that the NATO-backed Kiev regime is engaging in nuclear terrorism by willfully attacking the ZNPP. NATO and its Ukrainian proxy are using the threat of nuclear catastrophe to demand that Russian forces withdraw from the ZNPP. It is entirely fortunate that Russia’s military secured the ZNPP at an early stage. Otherwise, the Kiev regime and its NATO handlers would have had a free hand to use nuclear blackmail.

Not for the first time, this week the Western powers abused the Security Council by allowing the Ukrainian leader to address the forum. The Council’s rules stipulate that addresses can only be made by in-person attendees. Yet, for the second time, Zelensky was permitted to speak to the Council via video link. His speech was a travesty of lies, accusing Russia of nuclear terrorism among other hysterical claims of causing world hunger and global inflation.

When Russia’s ambassador Vassily Nebenzia took his turn to set the record straight at the Security Council hearing, the Ukrainian leader refused to listen, his video link conveniently cut off.

Nevertheless, the Russian envoy presented the evidence of NATO-backed military strikes on the ZNPP and went on to cogently state that the crisis in Ukraine has been systematically instigated by the NATO powers and its Kiev proxy over the past eight years since the CIA-backed coup in 2014. Nebenzia remarked on how Western powers and the Kiev regime are living in a “parallel reality”.

It is common to hear these days how the world is subjected to a post-truth condition. In plainer language that means a world of lies, falsehoods, distortions, misinformation and disinformation. The crisis in Ukraine, the NATO powers and the Kiev regime are an embodiment of this fiendish reality.

Western regimes accuse Russia of unprovoked aggression in Ukraine. (The same regimes that have slaughtered their way through Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and continue to illegally bomb Syria, to name but a few victim nations.) They declare they are defending sovereignty and democracy. This is a preposterous charade that flies in the face of facts that the Western powers weaponized a Nazi regime in Ukraine to destabilize Russia. (An echo of how they weaponized Hitler’s Third Reich for the same purpose more than eight decades ago.) The Kiev regime has been killing its own people for eight years and committed countless war crimes. The relentless attacks on the ZNPP are totally consistent with the depraved conduct. Elsewhere, the NATO-backed regime has shelled chemical and oil plants in the Donbass territory. The Western media decline to report on these violations because that would reveal the criminal mentality and practice of the Kiev regime and its NATO sponsors.

Russia’s military operation to neutralize the growing NATO threat in Ukraine has been effective. The poisonous boil has been lanced and NATO’s decades-long aggressive expansionism against Russia has been checked. Yet Western media – the propaganda ministry that it is – claim that Russia’s intervention has been a failure. The United States and its NATO allies continue to flood Ukraine with offensive weapons even while the Kiev regime is using nuclear terrorism with these weapons and while Russian forces are destroying the Ukrainian military. That’s not a contradiction; it is a green light for more war and profits for the American military-industrial complex that underpins U.S. capitalism.

The entire crisis could have been avoided with much less loss of life if the NATO powers had responded to Russia’s long-held security concerns. But that assumes the NATO powers would have been interested in avoiding war. The damning conclusion is that the United States and its imperialist allies have always wanted the present war in order to pursue a geopolitical ambition of confronting Russia. In the same way that the U.S.-led axis wants to precipitate a war with China over Taiwan and other bogus issues.

American-led Western capitalism is addicted to war for its own ghoulish survival. A world of peaceful relations is fundamentally anathema to Washington and its vassals. But the ruling regimes can’t very well admit that pernicious motive, so they have to cover up their criminal agenda with deceptions about democracy, rules-based order, human rights and other laughable pretensions. Western media provide the necessary cosmetics for the ghoulish reality. The fact is wars and destruction are the oxygen for U.S. global power and its imperial lackeys. Dozens of wars since World War II waged by the U.S. and its international crime syndicate of NATO accomplices, especially its British henchman, attest to that naked, ugly truth.

The Ukrainian comedian-turned-president Zelensky is a liar and idiot. But he is only a bit-player in a bigger circus of imperial kabuki. His regime has used human shields and civilian centers as cover for its despicable ends. It has committed false-flag massacres in a vile attempt to blame Russia. It has diverted Russian gas from European markets while refusing to pay its energy debts. And it continues to extort Western taxpayers to foot the bill for its depredations – all too willingly obliged by Western regimes. To pay for the global-scale extortion racket, the Western public is being told to take cold showers and get used to “the end of abundance”, as France’s President (and former bankster) Emmanuel Macron haughtily advised this week.

The farce this week at the UN Security Council in which Western powers brazenly snubbed the evidence of their own criminality while giving a platform to Zelensky to peddle his ridiculous lies demonstrates a profound dilemma. Any attempt to engage idiots and liars through reasoned dialogue is doomed to fail. When dialogue and diplomacy are made futile then conflict is made all but inevitable. That dilemma has been a constant hallmark of relations with Western powers for many years. The present crisis in Ukraine is the tragic outcome. Lamentably, more such crises can be expected because the idiots and liars never stop.

Western regimes are collapsing from their own inherent loss of legitimacy. That loss is entirely due to their lies becoming more manifest despite their servile media facade. Collapse can be good. It is incontestably good in the case of ending endemic corruption. The ineffable danger, however, is what Western elites will do to avoid historic collapse. As the NATO-backed Kiev regime is demonstrating through its nuclear terrorism and as Britain’s idiotic politician Liz Truss revealed by her demonic embrace of global annihilation.

How To Make Perfect Pot Roast (From the Stovetop To the Oven) | A Roast Beef Dutch Oven Recipe

Savory, fork-tender PotRoast smothered in a rich brown gravy just might be the most wanted comfortfood dish of all.

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Delicious Pot Roast.

This one, in particular, shines far above the rest thanks to a few simple steps other recipes are leaving behind.

This is everything you need to know to make a killer Pot Roast every single time.

Today, in addition to a must-have recipe, we’ll cover the simple formula for a foolproof, perfectly tender pot roast, how to know if you’ve been searing all wrong, easy steps to add more flavor to your roast, and lastly, how to take your gravy from good to great without a reduction!

Start with a chuckroast and pat it dry so you can get a really good sear!

Then, add the seasoning.

Rub it all over and make sure you get all around the sides too, allowing for flavor in every single bite.

Sprinkle the roast with flour next — this will help to develop a nice crust on the roast.

Dice up your pot roast veggies — carrots, onions, and garlic is all you need.

We’re keeping it simple for this braise! Braising means that you are cooking something under low heat, for an extended period of time, partially submerged in liquid.

This method of cooking can be used for all different sorts of proteins and even vegetables, but it also happens to result in the most tender, most flavorful roastbeef ever!

We’ll be braising the beef in a Dutchoven, a great cooking vessel that goes from the stovetop to the oven in one fail swoop.

After the beef is seared, the vegetables go in the pot, and then it’s time for the gravy to come together.

Look out — this one is fairly incredible!

It’s loaded with red wine, beef broth, and fresh herbs. No need to reduce it later; the flour will take care of that right off the bat! Transfer the roast to the oven to finish cooking.

Once you try this roast beef recipe, you will never go back! Enjoy!

THE SECRET TO PERFECTLY TENDER POT ROAST

When it comes to making a perfect, fork-tender pot roast, it’s all about cooking the right cut of meat low and slow, at the right temperature, in the right amount of liquid…for the right amount of time. When all of these factors come together perfectly, you are guaranteed a fork-tender pot roast every single time. The best cut of beef for a fork-tender pot roast is beef chuck shoulder roast, and a three-hour braise is perfect for a 4-5 pound chuck shoulder.

Braising sounds technical, but all it means is that you are cooking something partially in liquid (not necessarily submerged), in a covered dish. Dutch ovens are going to be your best friend for this cooking process.

COOKING ROAST BEEF IN A DUTCH OVEN

Dutch ovens are by far the best product out there for braising meats, which is exactly how we are going to be cooking our pot roast. Using the Dutch oven for cooking your roast beef allows you to build an incredible amount of flavor in just one vessel. It is also an excellent even-heat distributor because of its thick cast iron makeup. Here is a simple overview of how we will cook out roast beef in the Dutch oven:

  1. Season and sear the meat.
  2. Sauté the vegetables.
  3. Add in the braising liquid and the roast.
  4. Cook low and slow for 3 hours.

ARE YOU SEARING THE WRONG WAY?

The perfect pot roast recipe is all about building flavor, and the sear is where the flavor begins. After the roast is seared, it leaves behind a plethora of savory fats and juices on the Dutch oven floor. Then, the vegetables take a turn in all that beefy goodness, picking up on all those left-behind flavors. Once the vegetables have softened slightly, a bold braising liquid goes in, picking up on everything both the beef and the vegetables had to offer.

But, before we can get to the end, we must start at the beginning, and as I said before, it all begins with a proper sear.

2 ESSENTIAL TIPS FOR SEARING MEAT

  1. To prepare the roast, you should first pat it dry with a paper towel to remove any excess water from the cut of beef. This step is essential to getting a good sear on the roast before braising, which in turn, equals flavor.
  2. When searing a roast, you want to be sure that your meat is not going into the Dutch oven ice-cold. For the best sear, allow your roast to sit out at room temperature for about 30 minutes.

DON’T FORGET TO SEASON LIBERALLY

Once the excess water has been removed, season the beef liberally with your favorite seasoning. Adding the seasoning directly to meat will help to build flavor. I use my personal favorite, TAK House Seasoning. It’s a mix of Kosher salt, black pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder, and it’s perfect for beef.

In addition to a fair amount of seasoning, we’ll also coat the roast in flour before searing.

THE OIL MATTERS AND THIS IS WHY

The type of oil you use for the process of searing is important. To get a good sear on the meat you must work with medium-high to high heat. Canola oil has a high smoke point, which means that it does not quickly burn, or quite literally begin to smoke as fast as let’s say, butter, which has a low smoke point. You can use an oil other than Canola, just make certain it has a smoke point of 400° or higher.

KEEPING THE VEGETABLES SIMPLE

After a nice crust has been developed from searing, the beef goes out, and the vegetables go in for a quick sauté. This is an elegant, yet simple pot roast, and calls for only onions and carrots from the vegetable department. The carrots add a subtle sweetness to an otherwise savory dish, and they’re absolutely perfect coated in a thick and luscious pot roast gravy.

A GRAVY THAT REQUIRES NO REDUCTION

To achieve a thicker consistency for your pot roast gravy, adding just a little flour to the vegetables before adding in your braising liquid is key. This approach also eliminates the need for any sort of stovetop reduction after the pot roast has finished its stint in the oven.

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OMG! Pot Roast.

WHY YOU SHOULD USE WINE IN YOUR BRAISING LIQUID

Earlier, we touched upon a couple of things throughout the searing process that would help us to build flavor in our pot roast. Now, we’ll bring that flavor full circle with a perfect ending of red wine, beef broth, and fresh herbs. A bold red wine like merlot or cabernet sauvignon will enhance the flavor of your pot roast and take it from good to spectacular.

After you’ve added your braising liquid to the mix, your roast goes back in, the Dutch oven is sealed, and it will need to cook for three hours total. Half-way through the cooking process, you’ll turn your roast, ensuring both sides are picking up on all of those amazing flavors.

Remember, the braise is quite likely the most important part of the whole recipe, and allowing your pot roast to cook low and slow for the right amount of time will ensure a perfectly tender pot roast every single time.

As soon as the cold winds finally start to drift into Texas, we gladly welcome them with open arms. And naturally, I begin to yearn for those hearty and warming dishes we love so much, and I don’t know that there is another meal in existence that speaks more loudly to this craving than this here very pot roast.

Braised low and slow until fork-tender, smothered in a rich and savory gravy, and variegated with soft, sweet carrots. It is the epitome of comfort food. It’s a recipe that requires only simple preparation, time, and a hearty appetite.

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Is The 1008 Point Stock Market Crash A Sign That Another 2008 Is Coming?

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In 2008, we experienced a nightmarish financial crisis that was felt in every corner of the globe.

Is such an event about to happen again?

On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,008 points as panic swept through Wall Street in the aftermath of Jerome Powell’s dramatic speech in Wyoming.

Powell made it exceedingly clear that interest rates are going to continue to go up, and that deeply alarmed investors.

Some very vocal influencers in the financial community had been anticipating that the interest rate hikes would be ending soon, but now Powell has completely dashed those hopes.

Wall Street is going to have to finally face reality in the weeks ahead, and it isn’t going to be pretty.

When I heard that the Dow had fallen 1,008 points on Friday, the last two digits immediately stood out to me.

We all remember what happened the last time a year ended in “08”.

Could this be a sign that another 2008 is coming?

Before you dismiss such a notion, there are other times when a stock market crash has seemed to have been a sign of things to come.

For example, on September 29th, 2008 the entire world was stunned when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 777 points.  That was a new all-time record, and fear swept through Wall Street like wildfire.  The following comes from a CBS News report that was published in the immediate aftermath of that market crash…

Wall Street watched Washington with shock and fear as the bailout package flamed out on Capital Hill.

And as that $700 billion financial rescue plan went down, the Dow went down like a sub, hurtling the Dow Jones industrials down nearly 780 points in its largest one-day point drop ever, reports CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason.

“Nobody could believe it,” said Ted Weisberg of Seaport Securities. “The fact that it did not get done is just mind-boggling.” The result on Wall Street was a history-making 777-point nosedive. The Nasdaq plunged almost 10 percent.

Many thought that it was rather odd that the stock market would fall 777 points just as a 7 year Shemitah cycle was ending and a new 7 year Shemitah cycle was beginning.

Rosh Hashanah started on the evening of September 29th, 2008, and all throughout history we have seen really big things happen on or around the times of major Biblical festivals.

Ultimately, the weeks following September 29th, 2008 were some of the most difficult that we have ever seen for Wall Street.  A great financial crisis shook the entire planet, and the U.S. economy plunged into what would become known as “the Great Recession”.

7 years later, there was another stock market crash in 2015.  It was immensely painful at the time, but not a lot of people remember it today.

Now another 7 years have passed, and it appears that we are on the verge of yet another major panic on Wall Street.

Interestingly, another cycle seems to be repeating as well.

As I discussed the other day, this is the 14th anniversary of the housing crash of 2008.

But what most people don’t remember is that there was another housing crash 14 years before that in 1994.

And if you go back 14 years before that, you will find that the U.S. housing market was crashing in 1980.

Now the U.S. housing market is crashing again, and this one could turn out to be the most painful of them all.

If the Federal Reserve would just stop raising interest rates, we may have had a shot at avoiding a complete collapse of the housing bubble.

But that isn’t going to happen, and Jerome Powell made that exceptionally clear on Friday morning

In a keynote speech at the Federal Reserve’s annual Jackson Hole Economic Symposium Friday morning, Powell said that the path to reducing inflation would not be quick or easy, adding that the task, “requires using our tools forcefully to bring demand and supply into better balance.”

“Using our tools forcefully”?

That doesn’t sound good at all.

And during his speech he actually seemed to promise that “some pain” would be coming for U.S. households and U.S. businesses…

“While higher interest rates, slower growth and softer labor market conditions will bring down inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses,” he said. “These are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation. But a failure to restore price stability would mean far greater pain.”

Even with four consecutive interest rate hikes, including two back-to-back 75-basis-point increases, Powell stressed that the Fed is not in a place to “stop or pause” — an unwelcome sign for investors who were predicting a rate cut next year.

So more interest rate hikes are coming.

Will it be a half a percentage point next month or will it be three-quarters of a point once again?

Only time will tell, but either choice will accelerate the collapse of the housing market and will bring even more pain for Wall Street.

Something that I will be watching very closely is the derivatives market.  As Alasdair Macleod recently explained, the derivatives bubble has expanded to a size that is almost unimaginable…

By far the largest problem in a period of credit contraction is to be found in over-the-counter derivatives. These are unlisted contractual agreements between counterparties, including commodity contracts, credit default swaps, equity linked contracts, foreign exchange derivatives, and interest rate derivatives. According to the BIS’s database, in December 2021 the notional amounts outstanding of all contracts was $610 trillion. These positions are the total of seventy dealers’ returns in twelve jurisdictions, capturing an estimated 94% of the total covered in the BIS’s triannual survey, suggesting that the true total outstanding is closer to $650 trillion.

Once this derivatives bubble finally bursts, it will be an event that will be absolutely cataclysmic for the global financial system.

I have been specifically warning about the dangers posed by the derivatives bubble for many years, and it is only a matter of time before it comes crashing down.

Unfortunately, what Jerome Powell and his minions at the Fed are doing threatens to greatly destabilize financial markets.

Wall Street is not prepared for an interest rate shock, and I believe that Fed officials are making a tragic policy error.

Sad discovery

My uncle Don was an odd guy. It wasn’t until my teen years that I really understood that. When I was younger, he was friendly to me, so that was enough. He was a loner, particular, moody, intense, especially after he divorced and separated from his wife.

No kids.

My uncle’s mother, (my grandmother), was tough by many standards both flattering and not. She was Catholic, with a big crush on the priest of the local church, Father Kramis.

During Don’s growing up, she was, as my dad called it, “a barmaid”. A title chosen specifically for its implications. Clients became husbands. Husbands chosen from the Petri dish of a low-end bar. She was married three times. It was something she was bad at, and her choices in men got worse over time. My uncle’s father was the second, after my father’s. A violent drunk, I heard. Life for Don growing up held a lot of misery.

At maybe 15 years old, Don was sent to the seminary in Kenmore Washington. For his mother, ”priest” was the highest honor and greatest social standing one could attain. No doubt, a play on her part to both make him a better child than his birth order or genetics established but also to get out of the burden of his care. She was no cook, no housekeeper, he probably felt lucky if she gave him any positive attention at all.

So jump forward a few decades to my uncle, a trucking mechanic, living alone in the Industrial District, South of Downtown Seattle. An area a little like a truck stop, although more sprawling, with a house or two sprinkled in as legacies. It was an oddly promiscuous area. Eerily quiet late, yet with random singular people as if aliens on a poignantly desolate background. Devoid of trees, cars, open businesses, with wide open streets for long haul trucks to easily navigate. At one point, the Green River killer had his heyday with prostitutes near here.

Don had been an alcoholic for years, but AA helped him find sobriety. He was a private guy, with a lot of idiosyncrasies. He was passionate about music and keeping his tools in order, but a wreck of a guy in many indescribable ways, looking back on it now.

When I was young, I never really gave all this a second thought, just accepted it as his nature, less curious to explore the whys and why-nots. My father and uncle, step brothers, were at turns friendly and estranged, year to year. My father would occasionally stop by to visit, but Don would never let my dad in. One time dad got a peek into the interior and it was a hoarders glory, piled high to the ceiling, so he knew it wasn’t personal.

Years pass. My uncle, when he was maybe in his late 50’s, was swindled out of his life’s savings. He loaned his long-term, “like-family” boss and his wife $20K to help them float heir truck repair shop. Come to find the money was more like a nest egg for their future. Soon after, they ran off, leaving him broken and unemployed.

It was a lousy life filled with sadness, failure, misplaced loyalty, an inability to nurture relationships. Eventually it became obvious he was sick with something terminal, we didn’t know what because he never saw a doctor in his adult life. So with much sadness, and no way to reach him physically or emotionally, he died facedown in the dirty shag carpet hallway of his apartment. My dad received a call from someone we didn’t know two or three days after the fact.

This story has two punch lines.

When my parents went to clean out his home, among the heaps and mounds of a rotten life were dozens and dozens of high heeled shoes, both well- and never-worn, women’s clothing, size XL, and a sturdy noose. It was a revelation that brought clarity to a lot of things: the solitude, the neighborhood, the sadness. I recall my parents both deeply rattled from the experience. Like someone might feel after watching a dog being hit by a car, traumatized, yet removed and either unable or unwilling to describe it in greater detail.

Something that had occurred to me at various points in my adult understanding of people, was that Don had been in the seminary at the height of its pedophilia reign, when it ran wild and unchecked. Soon after Don died, I researched online with some odd stake in what I might find.

Sure enough, Don was a student at St. Edward’s Seminary. I found Father William Queenan’s name in a database of abusive clergy with multiple accusers. The more I searched, the more certain and sad I became that this was the culminating experience that robbed Don of his ability for successful self determination. It was one of those moments of total clarity. Everything crashed into place.

When my parents had cleaned out his home, they collected a couple of small boxes of his life, things some unknown bystander might judge as valuable, stored now in the cold basement of their house. For who, and why, I have no idea. Inside one box was Don’s high school yearbook from the seminary. On a visit soon after my new-found knowledge I discovered the book, the page with Don’s photo, a few scattered dispassionate autographs, and on the page where Father William Queenan‘s name had been, a slightly jagged yet precise, almost cross-like hole where the picture of him as well as Rev. John Sproule and the Rev. Adrian Mercier had been. Surgically removed by my uncle.

I thought of all the junctures in what I knew of Don’s life, every disconnect and question fell one to the next with bizarre clarity. He died at about 60, finally free from a world that showed him little mercy.

Even though I wasn’t born when I believe he was being preyed upon or was too young to have understood his pain at the time, I feel I failed my uncle. I have such admiration for the victims of priests who have been able to move past abuse in those formative years to regain some sense of happiness and success in life. Because that would be no easy thing. That much I really understand now in a way I hadn’t before,

I’m sorry Don, I hope you’re in a better place. You are an inspiration to me now as I raise my children with as much love as I can give them, and I do my best to protect them from what can be a cruel world.

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Accidental Porsche Customer

This happened in a suburb of Detroit, MI circa 2014. I was in the market for a SUV, as my 2007 Civic was recently totalled in an accident (not my fault). The insurance gave me a car for one month for free and I had to get a new vehicle by the month’s end.

A little personal background about me. I am an Indian citizen from Tamil Nadu but living here in the US for 12 years. I am economically stable and only 2 years back I had bought a brand new house in a nice neighborhood. I think twice before I spend and check the pros/cons of the purchase. I had no intention of indulging in luxury cars. But, the accident changed everything. Since the Civic was a daily driver, I needed to make up my mind fast and get a new one. Since this is Michigan, I opted for a new 4WD SUV for the harsh winters. Now that I am flush with cash from the insurance for the totalled Civic, I contemplated a mid-level luxury SUV.

I wanted a Porsche Macan since it was touted as a sports car/CUV in ads, but it had a wait list of 6 months.

So, I had the BMW X3 -M package or Audi SQ5 as my best alternatives.

I called the local BMW dealer and asked for an appointment at 12 PM on a Saturday. This was totally unnecessary because you can just walk-in and see the cars in any dealership. But, I just did this.

Yes, I do have the Indian accent and yes, my surname is long.

So, the dealership knows whom they are expecting. In the call, I made myself very clear that I am looking for a brand new BMW X3. No used models or old versions.

Dealership-1

I went to the dealership the following Saturday, 5 minutes early. Yes, I was decently dressed. I was greeted by the employee at the desk and was politely asked to wait for my sales representative who it seems was dealing with a customer. There was a couple of customers just looking around and 3 sales reps ALONE in their offices. I waited for 15 minutes and became restless. Once again I approached the desk and asked for my rep. I was told it will take approximately 30 more minutes for him to come see me. I did not show my impatience and asked if any other employee can talk to me. They said everybody else was busy. I told them that I was highly disappointed with them and I will take my business next door to Audi. They said good luck sir and bade me goodbye.

The Audi dealership

The Audi dealership was very professional, but I didn’t like the model. So, I came back home contemplating what to do next?

The next day, I got a call from the BMW dealership (not the same Sales rep) who apologized and invited me back.

Although I was upset and did not want to go back, the draw of BMW was too great, and I desperately need a car to my work. So, I got appointment for the following Saturday.

This time Ms. X greeted me and the customer experience was pleasant. She had recently joined BMW from a different brand, and I can see that she doesn’t have any airs associated with her. I took the X3 for a test drive, and I liked it. We came back to her office and crunched the numbers for payment.

She took me through their online website, specced up the X3 to my liking with accessories and came up with a number. I had done this many times before through their website, same webpage, and I know what the number is going to be. I have not started my negotiation yet.

At that instant, her Manager butted in. He introduced himself and started talking. He told me point blank that whatever the numbers offered by Ms. X were final and only for this day. Take it or leave it. Ms. X was horrified. I asked politely, saying that I need more time to think over the number. He reiterated that the deal stands for only today. I said that I am not going to commit to anything right now, and after that he bade me goodbye.

Ms. X apologized a lot on the way out and asked me to think it over. But, I made up my mind to go to another BMW dealer in another neighborhood.

Dealer -2

This was the worst experience ever.

Now that I already have a number in my hand, I thought that it would be easy.

The second dealership was bigger than the first. I was dressed in a suit. The Sales rep went through all the initial hoops, and I told him that I had done this before in Dealership-1 and asked him to give me a fair deal.

He went to talk to his Manager, who literally stormed into my room where I was sitting. He asked what my profession is, and what I do for living. I said that I work for X company in top management and live in X affluent neighborhood.

Since he was blunt and had no qualms asking questions to gauge my financial conditions, I put away all my pretensions and did what I came to do. Point blank, I asked how much deal he can give me. He got agitated and pointed that they won’t undercut another dealership and asked me to take my business elsewhere.

It was totally ridiculous. Right on his wall, there was a big poster proclaiming, “Whatever deals Audi give, We give Better!!”

I came out frustrated and thought of taking the Audi.

As a last resort, I contemplated Porsche, even though I knew I couldn’t get it immediately.

Fortunately, there was a Porsche dealer in the same building with Audi (as both are VW subsidiaries) in another suburb.

Immediately, I went there.

Porsche dealer

There were only 2 guys in the dealership that afternoon. One of them took care of me immediately even though I didn’t have any appointment. That was the best experience ever. They confirmed that 4 new Porsche Macans arrived only the previous day from Germany. He enquired whether i would like to have a test drive immediately. I took it. The Sales guy was very calm and answered every question.

Once inside his office after the test drive, he showed the brochures. Once in a while, other employees passing by his office said hi, and told me how lucky I was to get a Porsche and how sporty it is. Of course, I negotiated the price, and they gave me a fair deal. I told them that I would need one more day because I wanted to show it to my wife. He accepted gladly.

The next day my wife test drove it, loved it, and we brought a black Porsche Macan Sport home. It was 20 grand more than BMW but it was worth it. For the next week, I called him many times if I got any queries. He was happy to talk to me. Every time I go for servicing, I see him and talk to him.

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After all these days, the one thing I remember clearly is the warm welcome I received from Porsche the moment I stepped inside. I felt that I belonged there.

Yes, my next car is going to be a 911.

Has WWIII Started?

The fact that NATO is stepping up its combat support for the Ukrainian military in Britain and on other member states’ territories is clear proof that the U.S.-led axis is at war with Russia. This is no longer a proxy war, but rather a full-scale multi-level war.

“We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine.” So said U.S. President Joe Biden back in March this year while also bragging at the same time about pumping Ukraine with lethal weapons to ensure that the NATO-backed Kiev regime would not be defeated.

Biden’s nationwide speech added with a foreboding intonation: “A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War Three, something that we must strive to prevent.”

We should have expected that appalling, fatuous contradiction to sooner or later become manifestly untenable. Indeed, the American people and the world have been conned by a warmongering puppet in the White House.

In reality, it looks like the Biden administration and its NATO partners have done everything to strive toward making war against Russia happen. This American president’s words (like those of his predecessors) have no credibility. Despite his apparent grave warning about preventing WWIII, the manikin in the White House has facilitated this very outcome in the abject service of U.S. imperialist interests. Biden has been a loyal servant of American warmongering for over 50 years, supporting every criminal war that U.S. imperialism has waged. However, it’s a mistake to blame Biden personally, a so-called Democrat. He is but the figurehead for a system that needs war in order to function. If for talk’s sake, Donald Trump or some other Republican politician happened to be in the White House, we would no doubt see the same despicable dilemma.

There are increasing reports of military attacks on Crimea and other parts of the Russian Federation. The Belgorod Region neighboring Ukraine has been bombed several times with villages being evacuated. A Ukrainian drone also reportedly tried to attack the Kerch Bridge which connects the Russian mainland with Crimea. The 19-km bridge was opened in May 2018 by Russian President Vladimir Putin at a cost of $3.7 billion.

It is not clear yet what are the exact causes of these explosions. Initially, Russian authorities claimed they were accidental fires, but now they are admitting acts of sabotage being committed. Western media reports claim U.S. and NATO missiles or drones are involved. The United States is increasing its supplies of long-range offensive weapons as well as C-4 explosives for sabotage operations. Up to $40 billion worth of munitions has been pledged by the U.S., Britain, Poland, Germany and other NATO powers to support the Nazi-infested Kiev regime in its war against Russia. Ukraine has descended into an orgy of Western militarism.

The Kiev regime’s military conduct is being overseen by American and British intelligence. Attacks on Crimea and presumably other parts of the Russian Federation are approved by Washington and London.

In addition to an unprecedented flood of NATO weapons into Ukraine, it is increasingly apparent that the U.S.-led axis is training Ukrainian forces.

This week it was reported that Ukrainian soldiers are being trained in Britain to go fight. At a Copenhagen conference last week, British recruitment and training programs for Ukraine were supported by other NATO members including Denmark, Canada, Poland and the Baltic states. The U.S. and its NATO allies have been running combat training in Ukraine for years. That was partly the reason why Russian forces went into Ukraine in February this year to neutralize a growing national security threat.

The fact that NATO is stepping up its combat support for the Ukrainian military in Britain and on other member states’ territories is clear proof that the U.S.-led axis is at war with Russia. This is no longer a proxy war, but rather a full-scale multi-level war.

Another ominous development was the deployment of American B-52 long-range bombers to Sweden this week. The Nordic country is a soon-to-be new member of NATO along with Finland. The combined move is intended as a calculated threat to Russia’s Arctic region. The Arctic has long seen increasing NATO forces menacing Russia, but the first-ever deployment of nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to Sweden is an “important signal”, as Sweden’s Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist gloated.

All of this shows a heinous, relentless logic for war. Biden’s public misgivings about World War Three were just contemptible piffle. The United States has been gearing up for hostilities against Russia since at least the CIA coup d’état in Kiev in 2014. It really doesn’t matter who sits in the White House. Obama, Trump, Biden, like others before them, are all just message boys for U.S. imperialism. The American ruling regime has a desperate addiction to war to revive its diminishing global power and failing capitalist economy. That’s why Washington is hellbent on recklessly stoking dangerous tensions with Russia and China, as Russia’s Putin pointed out this week.

The sheer array of military involvement in Ukraine and the new, dangerous phase of striking Russian territory means that the U.S.-led NATO axis is de facto at war against Russia. The axis consists of 30 nations (not including Sweden and Finland) plus other non-NATO allies such as Australia and New Zealand. Weapons of increasing long-range offensive capability, as well as training of military forces, are flowing to Ukraine from all of these U.S.-led nations.

Last December, Russia appealed for a diplomatic resolution of long-held strategic security concerns regarding NATO and Ukraine. Those appeals were arrogantly shunted away by Washington and its vassals. Earlier apparent reservations among NATO members about sending lethal weapons to Ukraine have been jettisoned too. Evidently, so too abandoned are erstwhile reservations about starting an international conflict.

The United States, Britain and other imperialist powers are callously turning on the taps to make a bloodbath in Ukraine. The fascist regime they are backing in Kiev is wantonly using nuclear terrorism by attacking the largest nuclear power station in Europe at Zaporozhye. And yet the Western sponsors continue to double down on the provocations to Russia, provocations that now appear to include military strikes on Russian sovereign territory.

Moscow has repeatedly warned that “decision-making centers” will be targeted if its territory is attacked. That warning implies Western capitals are vulnerable. Russia has also warned that if its national security is threatened then it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons for defense. The unthinkable is becoming thinkable. Western states are in thrall to a warmongering agenda and media system that acts like a propaganda ministry for war. Shamefully, there are scarcely any political voices in the West calling for diplomatic negotiations for peace.

The madcap U.S.-led Western powers do not seem to recognize any boundaries. The whole conflict over Ukraine demonstrates the relentless logic of belligerence towards Russia that the Western ruling regimes are addicted to, in the same way as they are towards any other nation that is perceived as an obstacle to global power ambitions. The Western regimes are helplessly, hopelessly charted for war regardless of the democratic interests and wishes of their populations or the constraints of international law. So much for rules-based order! Western rulers and their puppets in office are leading their people and the rest of the world over the abyss.

Incredibly, it seems, the same vile political and economic forces that created two previous world wars are salivating again. And they are unleashing their apocalyptic desires with the same lies and self-righteous deceptions.

Nigeria is just like the United States

In Nigeria, there is a local means of transport called Okada. Essentially, it is a motorcycle functioning as a taxi. It gets around fast. Lagos has some insane traffic and whenever encountered, I park the car and take an Okada to my destination. Gets there fast and saves hours of time. Last Wednesday, I took one to make it to a 12 o’clock meeting. And we got hit by a car. My arm split into two but I wasn’t the most injured. My Okada driver had his tummy ruptured by the bike’s handle bars, his foot got stuck in the bike’s wheels so it got chewed and he hit his head on the asphalt. There was blood every where. He was in bad shape.

The car that hit us belonged to an Uber guy. He had a passenger in the back. A young lady that had a birthday present to deliver. I got into the car and asked him to drive us to the nearest hospital. The lady insisted we drive her to her destination first so she can deliver her present or she will lose money, the uber guy obliged. Well, because she was paying for the trip and we weren’t. So we burnt an extra 30 minutes with a guy bleeding out and me, with a broken hand. Basically running errands.

When we got to the hospital, they blatantly refused to attend to us unless if we fill in a form and make a down payment of the equivalent of $150. I had the money on my card, so I paid. The Okada driver didn’t. And they refused to touch him. With blood everywhere and the guy passed out, I begged them to, amidst the pain and confusion, I offered to pay for him and before the payment and form filling was complete, he died. Most probably from bleeding out.

I managed to get some first Aid and then proceed to a different hospital where I had the surgery. I was more angry than in physical pain. As I witnessed total decay of all humanity. Even from a hospital. Simply because of….

MONEY.

What is wrong with our society today is how much power we have given money.

Money is the new God. And we are all its relentless worshipers.

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Smashed arm.

A Rufus Santa

I am a professional Santa; I do TV commercials and movies.

It was Christmas morning, and I was just leaving a local hospital where I delivered presents to people that were confined in the hospital. As I was leaving, a young girl approached me with tears in her eyes and said, “Santa I think you forgot my family.” I asked the child, “Have you been here all night?” She told me yes. Her mother was very sick. I walked over to the father and asked him what was going on. His wife was terminally ill and he was working two jobs to try to make ends meet. I asked if he was going home any time soon. He was just leaving to go feed his four children.

I watched as he left, and his car was leaking water. I went to a local store where I purchased $1000.00 worth of presents to deliver to two local hospitals. I talked to the manager. Her name was Fatima; she said, “I thought you were done shopping already this year.” When I told her what was going on, she chipped in $250.00 for presents and got me a discount on everything I bought. I told her I was off to deliver the presents; she asked if she could tag along. She disappeared to get her coat and came out dressed as an elf.

We delivered the presents and left. The father wanted an address to send a thank-you note. I smiled and said, “The North Pole, of course.” Fatima went to the hospital alone and gave the mother an Android pad. I think Fatima is an awesome, giving, and kind person. She restored my faith in people.

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A Rufus Santa.

Diplomatic Immunity, American-Style

Forky

This is Forky.

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My sister found him in the trash, thus his name. She couldn’t keep him. He didn’t get along with her cat—or I should say her cat did not tolerate baby behavior. She asked if I would take him, and I couldn’t leave him behind.

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Here he is just after I got him home.

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And a more recent picture. He’s almost a year old, but never reached full adult cat size. He’s healthy, but blind in one eye, likely a result of an injury sustained as a baby.

He’s my first cat. Or rather, he’s the first cat that is truly mine. The others I have were either dumped here or left behind by a dead relative.

I didn’t intend to keep him, but after a few days with him I knew. He’s supposed to be here.

Võ Thi Thang

Võ Thi Thang smiling after being sentenced to 20 years hard labor in a prison camp by the South Vietnamese government. After being sentenced she reportedly smiled at the judge and said “20 years? Your government won’t last that long.” – 1968

She was released on 7 March 1974 under the Paris Peace Accords, having served less than six years of her sentence.

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Võ Thi Thang

Atlas

When I got my cat Atlas three years ago, she was sick. We probably got ripped off, but we took her to the vet and she eventually got better.

The poor girl was probably sick of being alone in the empty vet, so when we got her home, she quickly warmed up to us, namely, me and my dad.

Since she was my cat, I took care of her food, water, and litter duties. This probably helped her decide her favorite human, but somehow my dad won her over. She would come to him for scratches instead of me, sit on his chest instead of mine, and listen to my dad’s ‘stay’ command. He still jokes about how he’s the alpha.

However, during the following years, she got closer to me. She would nap in my room, follow me around occasionally, and ask me for pets. I heard that blinking slowly meant “I love you” in cat language, so I started doing that while whispering “I love you,” “Good girl,” and other things. She still chooses to ignore my calls to her, but her favorite human is probably a tie between me and my dad.

So, I think if you want to be your cat’s favorite human, you have to: do all her chores consistently, not be pushy when wanting to pet her – just let her come to you – talk to her often, especially when petting her, and just be patient. Sorry if my answer was a bit irrelevant lol. Here’s a pic of Atlas to make up for it

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A Down Under tale

I live in Australia, which is famously full of animals that can kill you. This is of course exaggerated to folk lore status. However..there is one serious danger which should never be underestimated…..do not ever swim in rivers in the Top End. There are warning signs everywhere, They are usually a simple very obvious pictogram, but frequently look like this

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Note the warning is written in English, German and I’ll say Chinese, but I’m not sure. In my travels round Australia I met a lot of German tourists, lovely people every one of them, but if anyone is going to cool off in a river on a hot day, despite warnings, it seems to be a German.

This was the case as we were camped by a river in the Kimberley area, close to a group of German backpackers, and sure enough one went for a swim. He was fine, but I encouraged him to get out, and warned him about crocs.

He was sure they only lived in the Northern Territory, and thought I was a panic merchant. The next morning there was a croc sunning on the opposite bank, and I pointed it out to him, and told him..”it (http://him….it) knows where you swim, and is waiting for you to go in again”. That’s why the signs are in German.

 

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Lines are being created, and the world splits in two halves

The world has split, and the rest of the world is just starting to recognize it. The United States is “punting”. A world War III would end the United States, so a “cold war” of isolation is being set in motion. Stand by.

Let’s go through the “news”…

YES!

Then I made it my life’s mission to make her miserable. I am a volunteer firefighter and paramedic. I was signed up to cover a shift, but instead of waiting at the fire station, I brought the paramedic fly car home with me. You know, so I could selfishly be home, in my own house. with my family, while I did what would otherwise be a $50,000 a year job for free. The fly car in question looked kind of like this:

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It is a fire-engine-red SUV, with the fire dept name and PARAMEDIC ADVANCED LIFE SUPPORT on it. It has a “Star of life” in the windows, and the heart rhythm going down the stripe. It has 911 painted on it, and it has “GOVT EXEMPT” license plates, too.

My dipshit neighbor, who was the ultimate definition of “a Karen,” even though her name is Debbie, called not just the HOA, but the POLICE. You are not allowed to have a commercial vehicle with lettering in your driveway after six pm. I told the HOA guy, that’s not a Commercial Vehicle, that’s a GOVERNMENT vehicle, an EMERGENCY VEHICLE, and it can be anywhere it needs to be, and until 8 a.m., it needs to be at my house unless somebody in this town does something that begins with, “Hey y’all watch this!” before then. I showed the HOA guy the GOVT EXEMPT plates, and then the cops basically told them the same thing.

Well she kept pushing…. and pushing…. Calling the police chief, the fire chief, the captain of EMS (GEE, WONDER WHO HE WAS, YOU DIDNT NOTICE THE LAST NAME????). Eventually the fire district lawyer firmly put his foot down, making it clear that anyone authorized to be in possession of a district vehicle can take them anywhere in the district for any purpose at any time, and anything other than quiet acceptance of this constitutes “Interference with governmental administration” and/or “obstruction of a public safety official.”

She fumed and bitched and passed around petitions. It was hilarious because the OTHER neighbors kind of dig the idea that a paramedic response is like a minute and a half away. Like when the guy across the street had his heart attack, I was literally “On Scene” before the tones went out, because the teenage kids ran and fetched me while the mom was calling 911.

She just did not seem to get it, “What, is he above the law?” YES.

“So what you’re saying is the law doesn’t apply to him?” YES.

God you’re finally getting it, you’re not nearly as stupid as you look, Debbie. LOL

But now that I knew it bothered good ole Debbie so much, and because she persisted in giving me the stink eye, I decided to be a total prick and sign out the fly car whenever it was not otherwise covered. I also enacted an “open house” policy for any other emergency personnel.

Any time, day or night, if the lighted Dalmation is on the porch, come on by for coffee and a snack. Just park whatever you are driving – Engine 302, Ladder 305, Rescue 308, ya’ll come on down. I have coffee, and popcorn, and little pizza snacks, and Backdraft, Ladder 49, AND Bringing out the Dead. Look, guys, I have the ENTIRE “Emergency!” DVD box set – all six seasons. 122 episodes of Roy and Jonny and the adventures of Engine 51.

She was sooooooo pissed.

European Natural Gas Prices Are 6 Times Higher Than Last Year, And This Is Sparking Widespread Civil Unrest All Over Europe

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This is going to be a bitterly cold winter for a whole lot of people.  In particular, things are likely to get really uncomfortable in Europe.  Soaring energy prices and concern about potential shortages are causing anxiety all over the continent, and widespread protests have already started to take place.  The cost of living has become extremely painful for those on the bottom of the economic food chain, and people want their governments to do something.  Of course this is what always happens when nations embrace socialism.  There is an expectation that those in charge will solve any and every problem, but this time around the limitations of the socialists running Europe will become very clear.

Thanks to the war in Ukraine and a number of other factors, the price of natural gas in Europe is now approximately six times higher than it was last year…

European natural gas prices are taking a breather amid further signs that soaring energy costs are crippling economic output, heaping pressure on politicians to resolve the crisis with winter just a few months away.

Benchmark futures retreated after settling at a record high on Monday. Prices are still about six times higher than they were at this time last year, with the panic spreading across nations ahead of peak winter demand.

Needless to say, many in Europe are being completely stunned by the size of their energy bills, and a massive backlash has been brewing.

In fact, we are already starting to see very large protests in a number of different countries

British grassroots group “Don’t Pay UK” is calling for people to boycott energy bills from Oct. 1, while the trade union-backed “Enough is Enough” campaign kicked off a series of rallies and actions in mid-August calling for pay rises, rent caps, cheaper energy and food, and taxes on the rich.

A worsening cost-of-living crisis across Europe has already seen workers in France, Spain and Belgium go out on strike in the public transport, health and aviation sectors, pushing for higher wages to help them cope with rocketing inflation.

But this is just the beginning.

As supplies get even tighter this winter, energy costs are only going to go higher.

And a lot of officials in Europe are extremely concerned about the potential for shortages and blackouts.

Even now, this energy crisis is forcing some big companies to significantly curtail activity

The list of industries that are curbing output is growing. Poland’s biggest chemicals company, Grupa Azoty SA, has stopped making some of its key products and trimmed production of ammonia because of record gas prices, it said in a statement on Tuesday.

Unless the war in Ukraine comes to a speedy conclusion, this crisis is not going away any time soon.

So the people of Europe are going to be asked to make additional sacrifices in the months ahead.  This week, French President Emmanuel Macron actually used the phrase “end of abundance” to describe what citizens of his country would soon be facing…

Emmanuel Macron has warned the French they are facing sacrifices and what he called the “end of abundance”, at his government’s first cabinet meeting after the summer holidays.

The president, speaking before ministers at the Élysée, said the country was at a “tipping point” and faced a difficult winter and a new era of instability caused by climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Based on the anger that we are already witnessing, I don’t think that the people of Europe are going to handle the “end of abundance” too well.

Meanwhile, energy prices in the U.S. continue to skyrocket as well.  At this point, the price of natural gas in the U.S. has risen more than 150 percent in 2022…

U.S. natural gas prices briefly hurdled $10 per million British thermal units (BTUs) on Tuesday, the highest since 2008. They are up more than 150% this year.

Approximately half the population uses natural gas to heat their homes.

So this is really troubling news.

Energy bills in this country are going to be absolutely obscene this winter, and we have already reached a point where about one out of every 6 of us are behind on our power bills

At least 20 million households — or about 1 in 6 American homes — are behind on their power bills as soaring electricity prices spark what is said to be the worst-ever crisis in late utility payments, according to Bloomberg, citing data from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada).

Neada said electricity prices had increased significantly since 2020 after a decade of stagnation. The steep rise has resulted in billions of dollars in overdue power bills.

In state after state, the percentage of customers that are behind on their energy bills just continues to go higher and higher.  Here are a couple of examples

California’s PG&E Corp. has seen a more than 40% jump since February 2020 in the number of residential customers behind on payments. For New Jersey’s Public Service Enterprise Group, the total is up more than 30% for customers at least 90 days late—and that’s just since March.

If things are this bad already, what will the numbers look like if energy bills go up another 50 percent or more this winter?

We are being warned that a “tsunami of shutoffs” is coming, and that is not an exaggeration at all.

In both the United States and Europe, there are going to be millions upon millions of people that cannot afford to heat their homes.

And when there are vast numbers of people that cannot even afford to pay for the essentials, that is a recipe for civil unrest.

According to one professor that tracks these things, we have already seen approximately 10,000 protests of an economic nature around the world since last November

Whichever route they choose, the coming winter is set to be plagued by social unrest, warned Naomi Hossain, a professor of development politics at the American University in Washington D.C. who is studying energy, fuel and food riots.

At a conservative estimate, 10,000 such protests have taken place worldwide since last November, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation – with more expected in an uncertain future.

For years, I have been relentlessly warning that unprecedented civil unrest would be coming.

Now it is here, and it is only going to get worse.

I would very much encourage you to do what you can to become more independent from the power grid.

Energy bills are headed to heights that would have once been unimaginable, and this is going to cause excruciating pain all over the western world.

President of Belarus Announces “We have nuclear weapons”

The President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, announced today that the Su-24 fighter jets that his country has, have been modified to carry nuclear weapons.

According to information, however, Belarus did not PREVIOUSLY have operational Su-24s or nuclear warheads.

This means that Moscow has delivered nuclear bombs to Minsk.

Lukashenko also added that Minsk will react immediately if the West causes any problems.

This move coincides with Putin’s plan: Belarus will enter the war against Ukraine and further tighten the situation in the Suwalki Corridor on the way to Kaliningrad and the Baltic.

If the Poles attempt to block the Belarusian forces on the way to Ukraine, specifically to Lviv and Kyiv, then the use of tactical nuclear weapons will follow.

“Nothing will save you”

Lukashenko said he had agreed to modernize Belarus’ military aircraft with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarusian news agency Belta reported.

“They must understand that if they provoke an escalation, neither helicopters nor planes will save them,” Lukashenko was quoted as saying.

“Everything is ready,” he said, referring to work on modifying military aircraft to be able to carry nuclear weapons.

“It is not a good idea to escalate things with Belarus because this could be an escalation with the Union State (of Russia and Belarus) which has nuclear weapons.

If they start creating problems … the response will be immediate ,” the Belarusian president said.

Nebby Neighbors

We own a home on the water in WA state. It includes ownership of the tidelands in front of the property out to the low low tide mark. One day my mother in law was out on the beach digging clams. She is a non English speaking Asian woman and is dressed similar to this:

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After half an hour she comes up and talks to my wife and says the neighbor guy who has always been a grumpy old cuss has been yelling at her saying she can’t dig clams here. My wife went down with her to resume digging. He comes charging out onto my tidelands and demands they stop and to see fishing licenses. He says he was a retired Fish and Game officer and that he was going to call F&G and report them. The wife is upset but just ignores him so he stalks off to his house and they continue to collect the tasty bivalves.

I got home a short while later and am there a few minutes when I hear a knock the door. I answer and a F&G warden is standing on my porch. I ask what’s up. He says he has a report of illegal shell fishing on the beach. I call the wife and MIL up and ask what is going on. They tell of their encounter with Mr. Grumpy pants including his claim to have been a F&G warden. The F&G officer asks the key question “ Is this your property?” Yes. “ Do you own the tide lands?” Yes.

Thank you very much, because you own the tidelands all the shellfish in the tidelands belong to you and no license is required to harvest them. Sorry to bother you. He then walks next door and proceeds to read the riot act to my neighbor including threatening to haul him in for impersonating a State official. Never had another issue with the old cuss.

The last laugh is the best laugh.

Bacon, Chile and Cream Cheese-Stuffed Chicken Breasts

Jalapeño poppers are the inspiration for these addictive, crispy baked chicken breasts.

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Bacon, Chile and Cream Cheese-Stuffed Chicken Breasts

Ingredients

  • 2 slices bacon, chopped
  • 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
  • 1 poblano chile, cored, seeded and diced
  • 4 oz cream cheese, softened
  • 1/2 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese (2 oz)
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (6 to 8 oz each)
  • 1/4 cup butter, melted
  • 1 cup Progresso™ plain panko crispy bread crumbs

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New Capital City for Egypt

Note: China has being cashing her US dollar treasury debt to help the developing countries across the world. A new world order with mutual destiny, mutual respect, and win win culture are slowlying spreading. The world is in the process of winning back their freedom from the crusaders bullying, looting, bombing and control.

Below from CNN:

Egypt’s new capital city moved a step closer to reality with the announcement that Chinese developers will largely fund the megaproject.

The China Fortune Land Development Company (CFLD) agreed to provide $20 billion for the currently unnamed city, after a meeting between heads of the firm and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi. This follows a previous commitment of $15 billion from another Chinese state-owned company, bringing the project close to its $45 billion budget requirements for phase I.

Egypt is getting a new capital — courtesy of China – CNN Style

New Nuclear Power Plant for Egypt

South Korea signs US$2.25 billion deal with Russian nuclear energy company | South China Morning Post

  • Nation has contract with Russian state-run firm to provide components and construct turbine building for Egypt’s first nuclear power plant
  • South Korea said US was consulted, and technologies supplied by Seoul would not clash with international sanctions against Moscow over war

From HERE

Saved Kitty

When I was living with my ex girlfriend she heard a coworker basically bragging that she was surrendering her 1.5 year old cat to be put down because he was “stupid, hyper and destructive “ she told me and the following morning we went on a rescue mission and came home with this poor scared underweight cat (he was just under 9 pounds) you could see his rib cage and spine.

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To be killed.

its been just over two years and I am no longer with that woman who convinced me to drive myself to this cats rescue. He was given a fresh chance at life. He is now a happy and healthy 13 lbs 3 year old mackerel tabby. And he is my best friend. I am so close with and love this rescue cat that I cannot fathom not knowing that hes in my room as I go to bed.

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Rescued and alive and well.

New York Sees Sharpest Drop in Life Expectancy in the US

“New data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Tuesday showed New York experienced the largest drop in life expectancy in the nation for its residents in 2020.

The life expectancy for New Yorkers dropped by 3% from an average age of 80.7 in 2019 to 77.7 in 2020.

The shocking 3-year drop represented the sharpest decrease between the years out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the CDC’s new National Vital Statistics Report.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Hawaii saw the smallest decline in life expectancy in 2020 – just .2% from 80.9 years to 80.7 years.”

The Disposable Cigarette Lighter as an insight into manufacturing

Many people have no idea about modern manufacturing.

有什么廉价但是技术含量很高的东西? – 知乎

This link is a Zhihu answer about “What is something cheap but also contains quite some technologies?”

The answer says “disposable lighter”.

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Retailing price 1~2 RMB (0.16~0.3 USD) each, whole selling price 0.2~0.5 RMB (0.03~0.08 USD) each.

It:

  • is a small pressure container, which contains liquid butane under 0.25Mpa pressure.
  • has a small piece of piezoelectric ceramic which could generate 6000V and several microamp of current.
  • flame is about 1300 degress at the outter layer of the flame.
  • contains about 20 compartments.
  • is made through over 10 process and dozens of equipments are involved.
  • is easy to use, even for kids. (but keep them away from kids)
  • is reliable, and usually could keep functioning till the gas is out.
  • is adjustable on the flame length, from 1 cm to over 10 cm.
  • fulfills almost all requirements.
  • is designed by considering calculations of phase transition, gas spread, burning conditions, flame control, etc.
  • costs almost nothing.

Such a lighter in the west usually costs 1 USD or even more. So what’s the secret about keeping it low priced? Not forced labor, because America has too many prisoners as forced labors.

It’s delicate designing and full supply chain coverage.

In 80’s, Japanese and Taiwanese could make much better disposable lighters, and that’s how they were trying to do in mainland China. They brought their design, invested their factories, and produced their product. However, a disposable lighter doesn’t need to last for years, but only long enough till the gas being used.

To lower the cost, mainland factories began to alter the design and look for a better solution. It’s not just lowering every spec, that would cause massive lawsuits. It was to minimize the cost, while still maintain over 3000 times lighting and 2 minutes continued burning period. People use such a lighter mostly for a cigarette, 99% of the time it would be missing before being totally used out, and no one would light a cigarette for over 2 minutes.

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A lighter has plastic, metal, chemical, and some other materials. So it would be unwise for a factory to produce them on itself. It requires several partners to focus on making one or several parts, just to reduces the cost and stablize the quality.

To support all the factories, local government must maintain a steady environment, such as water, electricity, and education, since educated and skilled workers are needed to operate machines.

Local government also needs to ensure a long period policy.

To move all the parts into the final assembally factory, it requires a functional logistics network, which is supplied by massive infrastructure investment, fast truck repairing, and a active logistics market.

Last but not least, steel plants are needed for metal parts, refinaries are needed for the gas, etc.

Behind a cheap lighter, there is a whole industrialized country.


If you think about this question again, just exactly which country has the ability to take over China’s role?

I mean the US is still the leading country in high-end technology research and product manufacturing, but what only counts a small part of the whole manufacturing industry.

Robots would solve some of the educated labor issue, but that’s not everything manufacturing industry needs. Educated people, strong infratructure, stable policy, fuctional logistics, supply chains.

Many probably don’t know that many so called “moved to Vietnam” business still require parts imported from China.

New York Governor Tells Trump Supporters “Leave the State”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, took aim at GOP gubernatorial nominee Rep. Lee Zeldin, saying he and other supporters of former President Donald Trump should leave the state.

Gov. Kathy Hochul sparked controversy Monday night by saying “Trump and Zeldin and Molinaro — just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong. OK?

Get out of town. Because you don’t represent our values”

 

 

Kathleen Hochul is an American lawyer and politician serving as the 57th governor of New York since August 24, 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, she is New York’s first female governor, as well as the first governor from upstate New York since the 1930s.

The West’s Dangerously Simple-Minded Narrative About Russia and China

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The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy.

Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine.

The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy. The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”

The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.

President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.

The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts. A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.

Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy. Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria. The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.

Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticized Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticized China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.

The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandizement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.

Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive, so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.

At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 percent of the world compared with 41 percent in the BRICS.

There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. It’s past time that the US recognized the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.

Above all, at this time of extreme danger, European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations, certainly including Ukraine, but also including Russia, which continues to resist NATO enlargements into the Black Sea. Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine. At this stage, diplomacy, not military escalation, is the true path to European and global security.

When things go wrong

The worst year of my life… 2008

  • I was developing a 72 unit condo in a vacation area

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  • With a huge pool at the roof top
  • Everything was done
  • Building permits
  • Financing
  • Marketing
  • Even pre-sales
  • I was happy

Then… while we were at the peak of our sales season

A Category 2 Hurricane passed through the vacation area

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  • Complete devastation

The area was without power for several weeks

We lost a few pre-sales


  • As if things couldn’t get any worse

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  • The 2008 Financial Meltdown destroyed my dream…
    • Took 100% of my investment money… lost everything
    • Took almost 3 years of my life invested into this project
    • Took my investors trust
    • Took my friends for money issues
    • Took my reputation
    • Took my pride
    • Took my joy

The entrepreneurial life is not easy.

But this didn’t stop me.

Strangely… this is a way of life.

I can’t quit… I won’t quit.

Lesson?

As an entrepreneur… don’t expect one problem

I should add:

  • Tough Finances
  • Family Sacrifices
  • Depression and getting back up
  • Misunderstood and called crazy
  • Pains of failure
  • Execution problems
  • Bad partnerships
  • Deceived, tricked, robbed, backstabbed
  • etc… etc… etc…

  • “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”

Raising a little girl

My daughter was being bullied in high school by a few other girls. More than once they ganged up on her, slapped her around, embarrassed her. The school wouldn’t do anything but make excuses. So during summer break between her freshman/sophomore year I got her outside and taught her how to box. Gloves, punching bag, jumprope, the works.

To be honest, I really didn’t technically teach her how to box. I showed her how to get her wind up, keep her chin down, and taught her how to hit. How to punch through, to counter punch, and put together combinations. Put her shoulder behind it, and her hip into it.. And she done well. Before summer was over I had the bruises to prove it.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea. I told her to walk away when she could. I made her promise. But if she found herself jammed up, don’t just stand there and let herself get beat up.

Well, once school started it was only a few weeks before the phone rang. They told me my daughter was alright. Then right away, off to the principal’s office I went. The same three girls had jumped on her again in one of the bathrooms. When I got there the first thing I saw was two girls sitting in the outer office wearing bloody clothes. The secretary showed me right into the principal’s office, and there sat my daughter without a scratch on her. The story was she whipped two of them and the third girl ran away.

So we got through all of that, warning about this, threats of suspension if it happens again, blah, blah. About halfway through the school year, and my phone rings again. This time it’s my wife. The school called, my little girl’s been fighting again.

Her best friend is a gorgeous sweet heart of a young girl, whose only physical flaw is she had been a breach birth. It damaged her hips, and she walks with a severe limp. They were in the school cafeteria and a couple boys were picking on my daughter’s friend. Apparently it was more than she could stand, because my little girl got up and beat the snot out of both of those boys before anybody could stop her. Then when I got to the school there they sat, in the same spot, bloodied up worse than the girls before. Now she had started beating up the boys, two at a time. After the dust settled she was suspended from school for three days.

I don’t regret teaching her to defend herself, and if I encouraged her that’s alright too. Since she was in the right (mostly) I took her side just as I promised I would. We left the school and had pizza buffet for lunch, I wasn’t angry.

I’ll tell you what though, don’t think that girl can’t hit. But maybe I should have taught her how to wrestle instead.

Troop Notification – Fort Campbell, KY

The Hal Turner Radio Show received an email overnight which read as follows:

Son in law just got the call.
He's army ranger airborne copter munitions specialist.

All hands on deck.
Deployment ASAP.
Kiev.

Getting even against bullies

Oh this one is going to be good, the story of sweet, sweet revenge 🙂

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I used to train skiing and there was one guy that was sort of bullying everyone. Since he was a lot taller and bigger nobody really fought back, and every time he tried made it look like a joke while really humiliating the victim.

One day we were sitting in a large dining hall eating, when he decided it would be fun to try to push my head in the bowl of pasta bolognese.

Now, he did it just enough to keep my head really close without me really touching the food.

While this was happening I looked him in the eyes and said “watch this mother******” , and I put my head into the bowl of pasta covering my full face and started complaining loudly so that the trainer heard me.

This was the point when he knew he was done.

The trainer ran over, and immediately started screaming at him. He then called his parents to come to pick him up, but… but…

But not before he had the worst training of his life, including 15km run, up hill sprints, push ups etc.

And it lasted for as long as he didn’t puke!

The best part of this story is that he knew I set him up, but he couldn’t do anything to stop it, and as a result I never had problem with him again.

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One day a street cat in an extreme cold went under the window of a fire station trusting that individuals would help her.

Someone at the Steinbach Fire Department in Canada was greatly amazed when he strolled by and saw a little feline gazing out the window at him.“

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It was a frosty evening and she was stopping outside of the window. At the point when one of our firemen headed outside, she ran directly to him.”

The feline didn’t go anywhere and kept on sitting under the window. Obviously, she had no place to go.

Firemen let the feline into the room, worrying that in the evening in an extreme cold it would freeze.

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In the glow, the feline should have been visible better, it turned out to be foul and truly needed to eat. Simultaneously the feline quickly reacted with a purr.

The fire boss Kelvin, who already had four felines at home, proposed to briefly take it to his home. He called her Amber and took her to the vet for assessment the following day.

Aside from mild frostbite on the tips of the ears, the veterinarian viewed the feline as very sound.

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“I sent her photograph and story on Facebook, possibly somebody lost her. Yet, when for a considerable length of time nobody reacted, we again took her to the vet, where she was immunized and tracked down ear parasites on her, from which we quickly started to remedy her.”

During these assessments, Amber didn’t avoid by any means, yet appeared to appreciate human consideration.

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A few firemen wished to make Amber a station feline, yet it worked out that the station has days off when there isn’t even a duty official and there will be nobody to take care of the feline at that time.

Then, at that point, they chose to track down a forever home for her. We posted her photos on Facebook and it seems as though we’ve find out a forever home for her,” Kelvin said.

Source: Save Earth

Bullied Special needs kid

Let me preface this post by saying my son is the SWEETEST kid in the world. That is not hyperbole. My son is quite possibly the sweetest child on the planet.

And he’s been through a LOT in his 8 years on this ride called “Life”. More than I ever could’ve predicted when he was born. From his father being in an accident that left me considerably disabled (I’m doing alright now, thank God) to his mother abandoning him to pursue the elusive “White Dragon” and everything in between.

Couple all that trauma with a speech impediment and a delay in his motor skills, and you’re left with a shy socially awkward little boy with an absolute heart of gold.

The past two summers, I sent my son to a day camp. I wanted him to overcome his social anxieties and make some damn friends.

But this year, on the very first day, he was beaten up by two boys on the bus ride home. They were brothers. One his age, the other a few years older.

He didn’t want to tell me when he got home. But I quickly recognized when he walked in the door that something was off. I had to really prod him to get him to open up.

He said the boys had started ganging up on him so he went to the bus matron, but she sent him back to his seat. She may have had trouble understanding him if he was upset or flustered, but she should have had some patience and figured out what was happening.

I called the camp supervisor immediately and was assured it would be handled.

A few days later, it happened again. This time with a third participant joining in the bullying.

I told my son, who is a very big strong kid (he’s 5 feet tall and weighs 130 lbs.) that if the staff is failing to protect him, then he has to defend himself (being as big as he is, but as shy as he is, with his speech impediment, he’s always a target for bullies. So he takes martial arts classes just in case…) but he said “No dad, fighting is against the rules and I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

I’m getting a bit choked up just thinking about that conversation… and those brats are damn LUCKY my boy is so kind because he could SMASH kids his age if he wanted!

“Besides dad, they can’t hurt me because I’m bigger than them.”

God damnit, imagining anyone taking advantage of my son’s big heart makes the fighter in me want to go do to their parents what the parents failed to teach their kids NOT to do. I know that wouldn’t solve anything, but I would definitely feel vindicated to some degree…but I digress.

A few days later, somebody made fun of him for not being good at soccer while they were playing. Again, no adult stepped in. So my son left the game and went to sit by himself in the lunch area. When he sat down, one of these boys snuck up behind him and dumped a cup of dirt over his head. Then another boy ran up and shoved him and ran off.

When he told me this, I lost my shit. It was a Friday so my family advised me to wait until Monday to call the supervisor, after I had a chance to calm down and THINK.

I called first thing Monday morning, a half hour before his bus pickup, leaving myself ample time to cancel the bus if the call didn’t go well enough that I felt he was ‘safe’.

We’re getting close to the original question now. If you’re a parent, especially of a special needs child, be prepared to be FUCKING OUTRAGED.

The supervisor (she’s lucky I don’t believe in “doxing” people. Sometimes it requires great restraint to remain composed and responsible) asked me what the three boys’ names were. I told her I didn’t know, but asked why SHE didn’t know yet!?! After all, this was our FOURTH discussion about the same serious issue!!

She said, “If you can’t give me the boys’ names, what am I supposed to do? Besides, this happened on FRIDAY, and you’re just calling me NOW?”

I said, “I did you a FAVOR by not calling on Friday, because I would not have been able to control myself on Friday. So I’m calling you TODAY. And my son doesn’t KNOW the boys’ names, but I was under the impression YOU had figured that out by now!” to which she replied, “Your son has been taking the bus with these kids for three weeks. How does he not know their names by now??”

I wasn’t sure if she was insinuating my son was LYING or she was ridiculing him. Both scenarios would’ve incensed me equally.

I replied, “My son doesn’t know their names because he has social anxiety due to his speech! So it’s hard talking to kids he doesn’t know, because he’s ashamed of his speech impediment.” I continued, “I explained these issues to you before I paid you the three grand for the camp! You assured me you were qualified and adept at caring for special needs kids. If that wasn’t the case, you should have told me so from the start!”

She replied, “Look I’ve tried talking to your son about the beatings and the bullying. I couldn’t understand anything he said. So if your son can’t talk clearly enough to tell me what’s going on, I don’t know what to tell you!”

I hung up on her.

I scoured the internet to track down the man who OWNS the camp.

When I called him, he said he’d already spoken to his supervisor and she informed him that “it sounded like Mr. Pinto and his son need a break from camp.” The $3000 plus lunch, trip fees and supplies camp. Yeah, she thought we needed a break from THAT.

But the owner is a ‘real’ professional caregiver. He wanted to hear my side of the story.

So I filled him in on what happened. And he wasnt very happy.

He informed me that he was a special needs child too, and he was bullied for it, and he knew first hand the long term damage it can do. He apologized and said “This type of crap has NO PLACE in my camps!”

Then he asked if he could call me back…

because he had to “Go deal with some people”.

He called me back two hours later and informed me those boys were no longer members of the camp, and his staff would be undergoing training again. He also called the bus company and said special needs children are never to be out of the sight of the matron, and if they can’t adequately monitor the children, he’d use another company…

He even picked one of the college aged counselors to be my son’s “buddy”. The kid went everywhere with my son (as a “buddy”, not a chaperone) and helped him assimilate into a group of friends. This really helped my son open up and socialize the last two weeks.

And there was never an issue again. Just like that.

Two hours; problem solved. ‘Real’ caregiver.

Amazing how simple it was to eliminate the problem once somebody gave a damn.

Bullying is a serious issue and should be treated as such.

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You never know…

My father was a carpenter and cabinetmaker. He built our house and all the furniture in it. It was his joy. But in addition to being a carpenter he was also something of an asshole and a strict and often violent father. As a result I grew up to despise and hate him. My brothers and I were often called to help him on a job – which we had to do for free. One entire summer we worked framing a house from May until September, for which we were paid a grand total of 100 dollars. So I swore that when I grew up I would never, ever pick up a hammer again. Ever.

And so it went. Unless I was forced to do something with wood, I refused to do it. And then my dad died and I inherited his cabinet making shop. It stood idle for years until one day, out of curiosity, I visited the shop. The smells of my childhood sprang instantly back to me as I opened the door. The building was dark and silent, the old sawdust rotting on the floor, the tools lined up in racks, rusting away, the machines sitting idle. As I strolled around the shop I suddenly had the desire to make a wooden box. My father always said that almost every project starts with a box. And without thinking I picked up a pencil and a square and laid out a box. Over the next few weeks, I made a really nice blanket box that I still have. But what was more, I found myself increasingly interested in making things at the shop.

At about that time I had a girlfriend who liked to travel and one of the places we visited was Mystic, Connecticut where there is an entire museum town and shipyard representing life in the whaling period of New England in the mid to late 1800s. After an interesting and educational visit we went to the gift shop, because she also liked to buy things, and there was a book of plans for boat and shipbuilding. She loved the architectural diagrams and wanted me to frame some of the builder’s diagrams of ships and boats for art. So she bought the book and handed it to me.

Later I took the book to the shop with the intention of cutting out the scaled-down diagrams and putting them in a nice frame for her. I started flipping through the book for the best and most complicated drawings. By then my carpentry skills and curiosity had grown enough that I was interested in how things were made and I paid particular attention to the boat joinery. I knew I could never make a boat – that took skill that was far, far beyond me, but the way that the compound angles and joinery of ship making was incredibly fascinating. Instead of making the picture frame, I pulled out some lumber and formed the stem of a boat – just to see how the wood worked together. I had no intention of going further. But the next time I went to the shop I cut out a keel… and attached it to the stem. And soon I was attaching ribs. I had never done anything like this before and many times I pulled out the chainsaw to cut it into firewood before someone saw the embarrassment. But I kept coming back to it. The plans in the book were like 1/6 scale – if you wanted to build a full size ship, they were willing to sell you the entire kit for some amount of money, I forget how much now, but I said, “Screw that. I’m not buying plans for a boat I will never build. I simply don’t have the skill.” So instead I took a protractor and a compass and a set of dividers and I scaled the plans up directly onto some plywood, which I cut into strakes and thwarts and screwed onto the ribs.

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Within a few months, to my amazement, there was a giant boat in my shop. I say “giant” with a bit of sarcasm. When I started, I figured the thing might be 8 or 10 feet when I was done – but when I was finished, it was almost 20 feet long. To me, that was enormous. And I kept saying, “I can’t do this – I just don’t have the skill,” especially when it came time to fiberglass the hull and cracks and so on. I used the West System and I was terrified. I had heard so many horror stories from old timers about its combustibility, about how fast it set, about how hard it was to work with, about how dangerous it was, that I moved timidly though a batch that would fit in a Dixie cup while wearing a full face mask and respirator and long rubber gloves and a leather apron. Imagine my amazement when it went on like rubber cement and dried to golden amber. The next time I made a bigger batch in a coffee can and eschewed most of the safety gear. The fiberglass filler filled up every crack and mistake the way frosting makes an ugly cake beautiful and the fiberglass mesh was stronger than steel when it dried. In another month the shell was complete. I was completely awestruck. I had made a boat. I painted it in vibrant colors and because it was such a heartache to me every time I made a mistake through lack of skill and knowledge, I hung the name on the transom – “Little Beeyotch”. I stepped a mast and put on all kinds of lines and a little pirate flag and then I towed it 150 miles to my house in Maine. I was absolutely certain it would go straight to the bottom when it was launched.

On a cloudy spring morning a neighbor helped me launch. The boat slid off the trailer, banged into the ground and slid into the water. And then it started to float away while I stood on the shore in surprise. It was floating. I couldn’t believe it. But now it was too far away to wade out to – I had to swim for it. When I grabbed the thwart, I went to pull myself into the boat, looking inside for the spraying fountains of water I expected from a dozen leaks. But the boat was bone dry. The West System had proved itself. “I could make a cinder block seaworthy with that stuff,” I marveled. And I grabbed the oars and went for ride around the lake. I had made a sailboat – and it survived for more than ten years.

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Lu Xiulian: When Taiwan becomes a battlefield, the next step is to become a cemetery – yqqlm

From HERE

China Taiwan Net, August 24th, according to the Hong Kong China Review News Agency, a few days ago, former deputy leader of Taiwan Lv Xiulian attended an island think tank forum. She said that the two sides of the strait are distant relatives and close neighbors. Everyone applies wisdom to prevent war. “When Taiwan becomes a battlefield, the next step is to become a cemetery.”

Lu Xiulian said that how to avoid war and seek peace between the two sides of the strait is very important. We should use more wisdom, compassion and courage to face and solve problems.

Lu Xiulian said that when the United States continues to stir up troubles in the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan may become a battlefield for others. It is foreseeable that when a conflict breaks out in the Taiwan Strait, the first sacrifice will be Taiwan, so Taiwan must use its wisdom to get out of trouble. The two sides of the strait are distant relatives and close neighbors. Don’t fall into the dilemma of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. “When Taiwan becomes a battlefield, the next step is to become a cemetery, which should never be the case.”

Lu Xiulian emphasized that peace will come not just by shouting the slogan “We want peace”, but to try to resolve the contradictions between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Recent polls have clearly shown that the Taiwanese people do not want war, nor do they want to ” Resist China”, because “anti-China” cannot “protect Taiwan”, everyone should adjust the current disadvantages on the premise of peace and the happiness of the next generation. (Editor/Reviewer Yin Sainan/Gauss)

A fresh start

I had been homeless for nearly a year. There was a bench I liked sitting on where I could scowl at the people driving by. There was a stop light right on the corner so I had them captive for a couple of minutes or so. One day, someone rolled down the window in their car and asked me if I was interested in working. I recognized the lady from the community college I had attended many years before. She handed me a business card and drove away. She was the station manager of a nearby radio station. I called her later from a payphone and she asked me to come to work the next day. I showed up not knowing what to expect. She gave me a few radio scripts to read in the control booth. A couple of other people had gathered to listen and as I was reading, I saw smiles and then nods. The station manager called me back into her office. She handed me three hundred dollars in cash and said I’ll see you back here tomorrow. Go get cleaned up.

This was me the next day:

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Creamy Chicken One-Pot Pasta

When the craving for a creamy, cheesy pasta strikes—but you still need to bring some protein and veggies to the table—this one-pot meal is your simple solution. Chicken, bell peppers and green onions make this a dinner that’s complete, comforting and little grownup all at the same time.

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Creamy Chicken One-Pot Pasta

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 to 1 1/4 lb boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut in 1-inch pieces
  • 1 cup diced yellow bell pepper (about 1 large)
  • 1/2 cup sliced green onion whites
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 carton (32 oz) Progresso™ chicken broth
  • 1 cup heavy whipping cream
  • 12 oz uncooked rotini pasta (3 3/4 cups)
  • 1 cup frozen sweet peas
  • 2 cups shredded sharp Cheddar cheese (8 oz)
  • 1/4 cup sliced green onion greens

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The Layoff Tsunami Has Begun: 50% Of U.S. Companies Plan To Eliminate Jobs Within The Next 12 Months

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If half of the firms in the entire country really do cut jobs over the next year, what will our economy look like afterwards?  All over America, companies are anticipating that a major economic downturn is coming in 2023, and a lot of them are already planning to shed workers in order to cut costs.  Of course this sounds so much like what we went through back in 2008 and 2009.  Millions of Americans lost their jobs during the “Great Recession”, and it was truly a very dark time in our history.  So are we right on the verge of seeing a repeat?

Let hope that isn’t the case.

Unfortunately, a brand new survey that was just released has discovered that 50 percent of all U.S. companies plan to eliminate jobs within the next 12 months.  The following comes from CNBC

Meanwhile, 50% of firms are anticipating a reduction in overall headcount, while 52% foresee instituting a hiring freeze and 44% rescinding job offers, according to a PwC survey of 722 U.S. executives fielded in early August.

These are executives’ expectations for the next six months to a year, and therefore may evolve, according to Bhushan Sethi, co-head of PwC’s global people and organization group.

Can those numbers be accurate?

I knew that things were bad because I write about this stuff on a daily basis.

But I didn’t think that half of the firms in the entire nation were already looking to cut workers.

Wow.

At this moment, I am at a loss for words.

It’s going to get bad out there.  If you have a good job right now, try to do whatever you can to hold on to it.

Sadly, some of the biggest names in the corporate world have already started to lay off workers.  For example, Ford Motor just announced that it will be laying off “roughly 3,000 white-collar and contract employees”

Ford Motor confirmed Monday it is laying off roughly 3,000 white-collar and contract employees, marking the latest in its efforts to slash costs as it makes a longer-range transition to electric vehicles. Ford sent an internal email Monday to employees, saying it would begin notifying affected salaried and agency workers this week of the cuts. The email was viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Wayfair has also decided that now is the time for mass layoffs…

Home goods company Wayfair decided to cut approximately 870 workers to help manage operation costs and “realign its investment priorities” following the coronavirus pandemic, the Associated Press (AP) reported this week.

I thought that Wayfair was doing quite well.

I guess not.

In a desperate attempt to stay afloat, Peloton has also chosen to lay off “hundreds of workers”

Seeking to cut costs and end a flood of red ink, Peloton is planning to raise prices on key products, shutter stores and lay off hundreds of workers, according to a memo from CEO Barry McCarthy.

And even Groupon is getting in on the act.  500 of their workers will now be updating their resumes…

Chicago-based Groupon today laid off more than 500 of its employees — 15% of its 3,416-person headcount — according to posts from former employees on social media. The reduction impacted workers in teams including merchant development, sales, recruiting, engineering, product and marketing.

Other big names that have announced layoffs in recent weeks include Best Buy, HBO Max, Shopify, Re/Max and Walmart.

Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

As this new economic downturn deepens, countless more Americans will lose their jobs.

And as that happens, all of a sudden there will be vast numbers of people that can’t pay their mortgages or make their rent payments, and that will make our new housing crash even worse.

We are now very clearly past the peak of the housing bubble, and the ride down is going to be really painful.

Last year at this time, the housing market in California was extremely hot, but now the numbers are definitely heading in the other direction

Sales volume of single-family houses (SFH) in California plunged by 14% in July from June, seasonally adjusted, and by 31% from a year ago, the 13th month in a row of year-over-year declines, according to the California Association of Realtors.

Sales volume of condos plunged by 18% in July from June, and by 36% from a year ago.

Prices eventually follow volume: The median price of single-family houses dropped 3.5% in July from June, down for the second month in a row, slashing the year-over-year gain to just 2.8%.

If you are trying to sell a house right now, I would encourage you to try to get that done as quickly as possible before prices fall precipitously.

Speaking of declines, the Dow was down another 643 points on Monday…

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply Monday, in its worst day since June, as the summer rally fizzled out and fears of aggressive interest rate hikes returned to Wall Street.

The Dow fell 643.13 points, or 1.91%, to 33,063.61. The S&P 500 dropped 2.14% to 4,137.99, and the Nasdaq Composite tumbled 2.55% to 12,381.57, respectively. It was the worst day of trading since June 16 for the Dow and the S&P 500.

I think that a lot of people want to get out of the market before the summer ends.

Needless to say, there are many out there that are anticipating that the last few months of this year will not be kind to the financial markets.

On September 29th, 2008 the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 777 points.  That was a brand new record at that time, and it was a spark that set off mass panic on Wall Street.

Could we see something similar once summer is over?

Only time will tell.

But what we do know is that the U.S. economy is really starting to implode, and the stage is being set for the sort of historic economic meltdown that I have portrayed in my books.

At this point, everyone should be able to see that really hard times are on the horizon.

Those that are prudent will do what they can to get prepared in advance.

American Homeless

Having lived in Southern California my whole life, I’ve had lots of time to observe the homeless. This is my city, San Diego:

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To give my opinion of the homeless, first I must tell you there are a few distinct kinds:

  1. The Invisible Homeless: these people were previously middle or working class, and have fallen on hard times. You can find them at the public library, freshly showered from the gym (they have enough in their account to pay membership fees, but not enough for rent), filling out job applications, or just browsing reddit on the computers. At UCSD, I was shocked to learn that one of my fellow philosophy majors was sleeping in his car, because he couldn’t afford housing. He was always well dressed, and doing great in class. He had a van and a family in another city so he wasn’t that bad off, but technically still homeless.
  2. Pariah Homeless: these unfortunate souls are usually extremely mentally ill, addicted, victims of childhood abuse, and/or were imprisoned early in their lives for petty crimes, and never recovered. These are the people who have been allowed to fall through the cracks in our Neoliberal economy. They should be in state facilities receiving medical care and counseling, not sleeping under the freeway. However, they’re not very sympathetic because they can be dangerous, delusional, and impossible to have a conversation with. They have no job skills, nor the ability to acquire any, so you have no illusions of being able to give them “a leg up”. Therefore, most of us just ignore them, to our shame.
  3. Sane Homeless: these are the hardest to ignore. They face all the same challenges as the Pariah homeless, but are fundamentally sane, sober, normal people. They’re often very kindhearted, having nothing else to rely on but their human relationships. This makes you really feel bad for them. The upshot is that they have the potential to escape homelessness, and can do well when given assistance. When you help them, you feel you’re actually accomplishing something.
  4. Hobo Homeless: these people choose homelessness of their own free will. Often they enjoy a vagabond lifestyle, or are simply too restless to hold down a job. You have less sympathy for these people, because they can be a drain on resources meant for the Pariah and Sane homeless. They’re often antisocial and criminally minded, so you can’t trust them at all. However, I don’t take issue with the hobo lifestyle in and of itself, and I accept that some people are simply not wired for this modern world.

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I have never stayed at shelters to start with but I couldn’t right now if I wanted to, and believe as cold as it is I wish I could. My work hours and schedule make it so I have to choose between keeping my job or being warm at night.

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There is my current camp. If you are lucky you have a car but it’s impossible to give you advice without knowing the area, I have been homeless for 7 years now and know plenty about how to stay alive out here. Hopefully I’ll get my motorcycle back from the shop sometime and then I can get into a place to live.

Just thought I’d add a edit because it seemed like some people might be interested. I had to move my camp because they were clearing the woods around me.

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This is how I left the woods were I was staying, so you can see that not all homeless people leave places trashed. Were I’m at now is a place I had noticed awhile back and wasn’t very sure about it but I told my friend about it and he has been here for about a month. It’s really quite unusual or interesting. It’s gated and right off the main road but nobody has complained about us being here. The cops stopped once and asked who owns the land and we told them that we don’t know and asked if they did and they don’t. So we have a little gated homeless community, locked gate and all.

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As you can see I got my vehicle back and that is his tent and area.

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 And that is my tent and my view out like I said right on the main road. I have never seen anything like this in the years that I have been homeless but it’s convenient and we have picked up the trash that was here so hopefully it will last long enough for me to get into a place.

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Woman adopts 20-year-old cat because she didn’t want him to spend the end of his life in a cage

September 22, 2021. Photo: Shelter staff :

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Later, on reddit:

Remember that woman a few months ago who adopted a 20-year-old cat from a shelter because she didn't want him to alone ? Looks as though they are both doing fine.

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The woman has not been identified. There have been no further updates, but this sweet kitty and all others like him should be loved and cherished until the last day of life.

The mysterious disappearance of the crew of the L-8

Ghost ship in the sky: The mysterious disappearance of the crew of the L-8
by SOFREP May 26, 2020. This article was written by Alex Hollings and originally published in 2017. 

Here is a short blurb of an article about a mystery. Please take a moment and enjoy the mystery presented here. Savor it. It will make good conversational discussion with some friends at the pub, or at the water fountain at work.

Stories of ghost ships adrift in the vast expanses of ocean have survived since man first took to the sea. Legends about ships like The Flying Dutchman, which was lost under the leadership of Van der Decken near the Cape of Good Hope as they traveled toward the East Indies, continue to spring up in reports given by sailors claiming to see the cursed vessel ever continuing on its voyage.

Another famous ship, the Mary Celeste, was found adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872, completely unharmed and in good working order, but missing its crew, a lifeboat, and the captain’s logbook. All of the crew’s possessions remained on board, as well as its untouched payload of 1500 barrels of alcohol, prompting a number of theories ranging from mutiny to poisoning to sheer madness.

The two-thirds of our planet covered by water has always been ripe with mysteries, thanks in large part to its ability to swallow ships, airplanes, survivors, and wreckage into its depths, never to be seen again. Without any evidence left behind to help us to understand what happens on ships like the Mary Celeste, the mystery proves enduring, and like a fine wine, mysteries often get better with age. But not every ghost ship is lost at sea. Some ghost ships, in fact, are of the airborne variety.

Nazi U-Boats proved to be a significant threat to allied naval efforts throughout World War II, prompting a number of novel approaches to spotting and combating submarines before they could sneak up on our ships. One such approach was the use of L-Class blimps, which could float above the ocean and spot submerged enemy vessels.

On the morning of August 16th, 1942, Lieutenant Ernest Cody and Ensign Charles Adams climbed aboard their L-8 Airship, a former Goodyear Blimp that had been procured by the Navy in April of that year to deliver equipment to the carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) while at sea. Their mission was simple: head out to sea from their post on Treasure Island in California and look for any signs of enemy submersibles.

Prior to the August flight, Lt. Cody had flown the L-8 out to the Carrier Hornet to make one last delivery as the ship, and sixteen B-25 bombers, headed across the Pacific, bound for Tokyo. (National Archives)
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A little over an hour into their patrol, the two men radioed that they had spotted an oil slick on the water and were moving to investigate.Read Next: USS Independence Completes its Last Voyage – Towed to Brownsville Texas

“We figured by that time it was a submarine,” said Wesley Frank Lamoureux, a member of the Navy’s Armed Guard Unit who was aboard the cargo ship Albert Gallatin. “From then on, I am not too positive of the actions of the dirigible except that it would come down very close over the water. In fact, it seemed to almost sit on top of the water.”

According to his testimony, the blimp dropped two flares and circled the area, which was in keeping with protocol when investigating the possibility of a German sub. The Albert Gallatin cargo ship, believing the blimp could have located a U-Boat, sounded the general alarm, manned their guns, and made a hasty exit from the area. It would be the last time anyone would see the L-8 operating under the controls of its crew.

A few hours later, the massive air-ship approached the quiet town of Daly City, California. The sagging blimp eventually came to rest after getting snagged in power lines and crashing onto Bellevue Avenue. Crowds quickly amassed in the chaos and a number of people approached the wreckage in hopes of saving the crew… only to find the cabin empty.

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The pilot’s parachute remained where it had been stowed before the trip, the lifeboat was still there as well. The pilot’s cap sat atop the instrument panel, and its payload of two bombs was secured. A briefcase containing confidential documents the crew had orders to dispose of if compromised also remained on board. The only things out-of-place were the blimp itself, and its missing crew.

Like the Mary Celeste, the L-8’s crew had seemed to vanish without a trace, prompting its own slew of theories.

  • Some assumed both the pilot and ensign had simply fallen out of the vessel, though it would have been nearly impossible to do so without both crew members leaving the cabin of the ship while it was still airborne. If there was something damaged that required both men to address on the external hull of the vessel, there was no evidence to suggest what it was in the wreckage.
The blimp finally came to rest atop Richard Johnston’s freshly waxed car in Daly City, Calif. just South of San Francisco. (National Archives)
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  • Another theory postulated that the two men, were taken prisoner. They supposed that in the course of investigating the oil slick, lowered their blimp enough to be taken prisoner by the crew of the U-Boat or a Japanese vessel.
  • Still, others postulated that the two men were embroiled in a love triangle that drove one to kill the other and then escape by diving into the sea.
  • Other suppose a UFO was involved and either Reptilians or other dangerous extraterrestrials abducted them for heinous experimentation.

Despite a thorough investigation, no conclusion could ever be drawn.

 

And we thought that we had things under control…

Concerning the United States and the American culture…

We are a lost society, ruled by emotions, captured by technology, misinformed, uneducated, indifferent, fearful, passively accepting of whatever government and media tell them is true, and entranced by materialism funded by debt.

We are a sick dying culture where common community standards, self-responsibility, hard work, kindness, and manners have been superseded by the worship of abnormality, celebration of degeneracy, living off the government, spreading hatred, and waging undeclared wars across the world.

There is an empty shallowness to our civilization, with the vacuum filled with gadgets, pathetic displays of fake affluence, trivialities like social media, and superficial displays of virtue signaling regarding the latest woke craze shoved down our throats by those controlling the levers of society.

Yup. Even I can smell the sickness of festering rot from way, away here at the other end of the world. Let’s continue with our daily narrative and thus I present this post for your enjoyment and pleasures.

Chinese police in Serbia

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Yes, it is true, they are here. They are in Belgrade and Novi Sad and mostly in city centres. They don’t have any authority, their main mission is to overcome the language barrier with Chinese visitors and tourists and offer their help to both Serbian police and Chinese citizens in that sense.

Chinese officials stated that they sent only those who are fluent in English which I understand. Numerous times I had issues with people from China when we talk in English. Most of the time I could not even recognise that they were speaking English because of their accent and the way they pronounce words.

Anyway, I like the idea. It became an attraction.

Doug Casey on the Rise of Alternatives as the US-Led Global Order Falters

Guest Post by Doug Casey

International Man: Since the invasion of Ukraine, we’ve seen the US and its European allies institute unprecedented sanctions on Russia. In a bold move, the US government also froze the US dollar reserves of the Russian central bank.

In response, Russia demanded payment in rubles in exchange for its energy.

What’s your take on this new phase of economic warfare?

Doug Casey: It’s a massively stupid and destructive move on the part of the US. There’s no upside to what the US is doing in fighting this economic war against Russia—or, for that matter, in backing the Zelensky regime in the Ukraine—but huge downside from every point of view.

Essentially the US and Western powers have confiscated hundreds of billions of dollars of assets from the Russian government, as well as individual Russians. It’s theft, pure and simple. It acts as a warning shot to everybody in the world: Your assets are not safe in Western countries. It’s a reason to get out of the US dollar and use something else.

It’s backfired on the US. It’s helping devastate Western economies by cutting off the flow of Russian oil, and especially natural gas, to Europe. Further, the Russians now demand payment in rubles. The ruble is now a much stronger currency because, in order to pay the Russians, the world has to buy rubles. The Russians have taken a page from the US playbook. Decades ago, the Saudis said they would only accept US dollars in payment for oil. And so, people had to buy dollars if they wanted Saudi oil.

The US is acting to destroy confidence in its currency, as well as the stability and perceived honesty of the dollar-based system. That’s extremely dangerous for a currency that rests on nothing but confidence. Something like this can cause confidence to blow away like a pile of feathers in a hurricane.

The issuer of the dollar, the bankrupt US Government (or its facilitator, the Fed), will give you nothing specific in exchange for them. But they can issue unlimited numbers of them. The dollar has been an IOU nothing for many years. But the charade is approaching an end. The US Government is now like a poker player “on tilt.”

International Man: Recently, Vladimir Putin traveled to Iran. As a result, Iran’s National Oil Company announced a $40 billion energy deal with Russia’s Gazprom. It’s safe to say they won’t be using the US dollar in their transactions.

What does this mean for future geopolitical alliances and economic dealings that undermine US dominance?

Doug Casey: The US is in serious decline—financially, economically, and sociologically—and the world knows it. Only a fool wants to hold the unsecured liability of a bankrupt government, especially one that’s so arrogant as to believe it can confiscate assets arbitrarily.

The major export of the US now, as it’s been for the last 40 years, is US dollars. We don’t really produce that much anymore. We ship people dollars. In return, they ship us vast amounts of material goods. Ships arrive in US ports full of products; they “dead head” on the return trip, mostly empty. The US has transformed itself from a nation of producers and creditors into a nation of consumers and debtors.

Our major export is dollars, not wheat and Boeings. Meanwhile, the US government is creating more dollars by the trillions in order to prop up the domestic economy. This is going to end very badly for the dollar’s use in international transactions.

Even though domestic prices are rising at something like 15%, the dollar has been quite strong in recent months against other currencies. The reason for that paradox is debt. Almost all of the world’s debt is denominated in dollars. And in order to service those debts, especially with interest rates now headed up, people need dollars.

So there’s been a scramble for dollars to service all the debt. It’s really rather perverse.

International Man: Russia and China recently announced their interest in developing a new reserve currency with other BRICS countries.

What would this mean if there was a serious rival to the US-led system?

Doug Casey: It’s been in the cards for years.

Countries that are our adversaries—like Russia and China—use the US dollar to trade between each other. Why? It’s quite strange, since those hot potato dollars all have to clear through New York. The reason is that the Russians don’t really trust the Chinese yuan, and the Chinese don’t trust the Russian ruble. They’re both fiat currencies, of little value outside the borders of the countries that issued them. It’s the same with the Indians, the Iranians, the Brazilians, the South Africans, and everybody else—they can’t use each other’s currencies. They’ve basically used dollars since the end of WW2.

All of the world’s currencies- every single one—are “fiat” units, essentially political footballs, whose numbers and values can fluctuate radically and randomly. The dollar is just the biggest and best of the bunch. It won’t be replaced easily, because the whole world has gotten so used to using it. Nobody wants to use a unit controlled by Washington, but what’s the realistic alternative? Flakey Third World governments run by sociopaths are incapable of putting together a new super fiat currency—that just adds another layer of risk and complexity. They can all see that even the euro, an artificial Esperanto currency, is on the edge of imploding. None of these governments have the same interests, and they certainly don’t trust each other.

What’s going to happen? They’ll default to gold for settling accounts among each other. I’m not saying they’ll allow their subjects to save in and trade in gold—that’s most unlikely. But I think it’s inevitable for settlements between governments. The only alternative is barter—”I’ll trade you a thousand tonnes of cocoa for two used tanks, 500 cows, and 100 tonnes of wool.” A flea market transaction that’s not very likely in a complicated industrial world… That’s why money was invented.

The world is going back to gold. Not because any government or economist wants to—rather just the opposite. But it’s not likely to happen except at much higher prices of gold unless there’s a credit collapse and scores of trillions of dollars of stocks, bonds, bank deposits, and other debt are wiped out. On the bright side, the approximately 6 billion ounces of gold that now exist will still be here.

Current events are leading to the end of the US dollar system. And when the US dollar is not needed or wanted for international trade, everybody will dump it. All those dollars will flood back to the US, where they must be accepted by law. Nobody’s going to want them abroad. Or not much more than they desire the Indian rupee, the Colombian peso, or the Ukrainian hryvnia.

They’re going to come back to the US to buy US real estate, US shares, and US businesses.

All those dollars that we’ve been exporting for decades have held down domestic inflation because they’ve been floating around abroad, driving up foreigner’s prices. They’ll come back to the US. Domestic prices will skyrocket upwards at the same time the dollar collapses, and the title to US assets are transferred to foreign citizens.

All those dollars being exported for decades resulted in an artificially high standard of living for Americans. When they come back—and they will come back as the world stops choosing dollars—the standard of living in the US will drop substantially.

International Man: The US dollar, the euro, the Russian ruble, the Chinese yuan, and the rest of them are all fiat currencies.

That being said, what advantages do countries with valuable commodities have over others as all fiat currencies continue to lose value?

Doug Casey: It’s great to have valuable commodities, but you can’t use oil for money. If that’s all there was to it, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, and Kazakhstan would be among the world’s richest countries. The same is true for every other country with valuable commodities. In fact, the countries with the most mineral wealth tend to be the poorest and most unstable. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Money is not wealth in itself. But it represents wealth. It represents an excess of production over consumption. A good money has got to have certain characteristics.

It has to be durable; that’s why we don’t use wheat as money. It has to be divisible; that’s why you don’t use artwork as money. It has to be convenient; that’s why you don’t use lead as money. It has to be consistent; that’s why you can’t use real estate as money. And it has to have some type of use value in itself; that’s why you can’t use paper as money.

That’s why the world is going to go back to gold. There’s a case that can be made for silver and a case that can be made for Bitcoin. And that’s about it. We’ll see how things sort out in the chaotic world we’re facing. And here is a statement to shock the average reader: Government should have no involvement with money. Money—like banking, interest rates, the markets, and the economy—should be totally divorced from politics. That’s why gold, not paper, is real money.

Where is the price of gold going? Relative to bushels of wheat, or pounds of coffee, or pounds of copper, my guess is that it’s about right at the moment. In fact, I’ve been saying for several years that gold is reasonably priced, at an equilibrium, relative to dollars. It’s not at giveaway levels like it was in 1971 at $35 or in 2001 at $260.

If the dollar is going to survive, it should be redeemable with a fixed amount of gold. They say the US owns 265 million ounces of gold. But how many dollars are there? Like the dollar itself, that number is something of a floating abstraction. Guesses vary. Especially because there are many definitions of what money is—not to mention near-money and credit. Numbers are bounced around from $6 trillion to $80 trillion. The number is probably academic and possibly unknowable.

Divide 265 million into any of the figures “economists” conjure, and you come up with a very large number. Just to finance a typical approximate annual US trade deficit of about $500 billion, the entire gold horde would immediately disappear even if gold were priced at $2,000. Maybe the price of gold should be $20,000 or more.

So what’s going to happen? I think the answer is chaos. The world’s going back to gold because we’re headed for a chaotic financial situation, and gold is the only financial asset that’s not simultaneously somebody else’s liability. And it’s an understatement to say none of these governments trust each other or each other’s paper currencies.

International Man: How do you see the world’s geopolitical chessboard changing in the coming years? What are the investment implications?

Doug Casey: If you look at various times in history—the world’s map changed tremendously from, say, 1910, when everything was mellow and prosperous, to 1920, when most everything was unrecognizable. The world looked one way in 1940 and totally different in 1950. My guess is that the world of 2020, which has already changed immensely, will be hugely different by 2030, 8 years from now.

Beyond 2030 we’re looking at a science fiction reality. There’s a good chance we’ll have something like a civil war in the US. And/or serious secession movements.

It’s even more likely that Canada will break up. The same thing is going to happen to Mexico and Brazil. All of Africa will restructure. Many European countries are likely to break up—Spain and areas of France. Italy only became a country 170 years ago. Germany only unified 150 years ago. Russia is likely to break up into smaller ethnic countries for sure.

Like it or not, people will migrate from Africa and the Middle East to Europe by the scores of millions.

Millions of Chinese will migrate from China to Africa, and the Africans won’t much like it. People from everywhere, not just Latin America, will flow into the US and Canada.

The colors of the map on the wall are going to be running in the years to come. That’s going to have profound investment implications. Among them, a lot of currencies are going to dry up and blow away.

It’s going to start happening in this decade. So buckle up.

China urges U.S. not to miscalculate resolve to defend sovereignty, territorial integrity

Source
Xinhuanet
Editor
Li Jiayao
Time
2022-08-19 23:19:47

BEIJING, Aug. 19 (Xinhua) — Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Friday urged the U.S. side not to miscalculate China’s firm resolve to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Wang made the remarks at a daily news briefing, in response to what the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink had said about China’s response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

“Regarding Pelosi’s provocative visit to China’s Taiwan region, the context, cause and course of events are crystal clear,” Wang said.

It is the United States that has gone back on its commitment to the one-China principle and undermined China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, not the other way round. It is the U.S. leaders who went to Taiwan to support “Taiwan independence” separatist activities, not the Chinese ones who went to the United States to support Alaska’s “independence,” Wang added.

Wang said that China’s firm response to the U.S. provocation is reasonable, lawful and justified, which has been widely understood and supported by the international community. For the U.S. side, the only solution for the problem is to return to the three China-U.S. joint communiques and the one-China principle, instead of shirking responsibility and deflecting blame, still less acting recklessly to create a bigger crisis.

“We are firmly determined to safeguard our national sovereignty and territorial integrity. We urge the U.S. side not to miscalculate on this,” Wang added.

Soviet grannies delight with this zucchini and pepper salad

By Yulia Mulino

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Russian zucchini and pepper salad

Specially prepared for wintertime, this canned salad was one of the most popular in the Soviet Union. But you can also try it warm immediately after cooking!

“Get your sleigh ready in summer and your cart in winter,” is a famous Russian proverb that meansit’s necessary to stock up ahead of the cold months. Today’s highlighted salad made of zucchini, carrots and peppers is a perfect example of this. And it’s also a spicy flavorful vegan snack that can be eaten immediately.

I remember how when I was a child, the zucchini crop was so plentiful that it was impossible to eat it in a season. So, my grandmother and my mother made a salad with all the zucchini grown in their garden.

These vegetables do not have a strong taste and smell, but other vegetables can improve it. Carrots are added to the salad for sweetness, tomatoes for color, and peppers for spicy flavor.

I still remember the smell coming from the kitchen when the canning season started. We always got a bowl for dinner of leftovers that didn’t fit in the cans. Fresh and rather warm, I love this salad just as much as I love canned salad.

That’s why I’m making it now for dinner. The most delicious thing is to serve it with potatoes, whether mashed or boiled. Or keep it for winter.

Ingredients for 10 servings, or a 0.8 liter jar:

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Ingredients

  • Medium zucchini – 2 pcs
  • Sweet bell pepper – 2 pcs
  • Carrot – 1 pc
  • Onion – 1 pc
  • Tomatoes in their own juice – 500 ml
  • Garlic – 4 cloves
  • Parsley – bunch
  • Salt (not iodized) – 2 tsp/ to taste
  • Sugar – 1 tbsp
  • Black pepper to taste
  • Vinegar 9% – 2 tbsp
  • Sunflower oil for frying

Preparation:

1. Peel and slice the carrots and onions; fry them in sunflower oil.

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2. Cut the peppers into julienne strips.

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3. Let them stew for about 15-20 minutes.

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4. Shred tomatoes and pour sauce on vegetables. Braise for 20 minutes.

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5. Slice the zucchini and add it to vegetables.

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6. After 15 minutes add salt, sugar and pepper.

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7. Then squeeze in the garlic cloves.

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8. Add parsley and vinegar. Braise for 5 more minutes.

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9. Place into jars that have been sterilized and are suitable for canning, or leave as a side dish or snack.

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10. Serve warm or chilled with potatoes or as a topping on a crouton.

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Don’t judge a book by its cover

In March of 2019, I was so busy at work that my girlfriend Jessica took to the Book to try and find me some help for a few weeks.

Saturday afternoon, Jess placed an ad that said something along the lines of: “Looking for a painter to help with a project. Must be drug-free.”

We got a phone call that night from a lady who said her live-in boyfriend was interested but didn’t have a driver’s license. Jess scheduled an informal interview for the next day and asked the lady to be at the interview also.

The plan was for me and Jess to meet the lady and her boyfriend, Lee, at a local restaurant for lunch at 1:00 pm.

The cool part about interviewing someone with their significant other present is it cuts down on a ton of bs. The anxiety and nervousness which is normal to experience during an interview and can help keep someone on their best behavior, fades quickly in the company of someone they’re comfortable with. And if I’m going to have someone on my jobs, I want to know who they really are.

Jess and I got to the restaurant at 12:30 pm. We got a table in the corner and waited.

At 1:00 pm, Jess got a text. “We’re one minute away, sorry!!”

What the heck? Who shows up late to an interview?

Strike one.

At 1:01 pm this guy walks through the door:

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I can’t even tell you how disappointed I was. It’s not like I can have some murderer on my jobs. Let’s be real about this. Teardrops=killer. And this guy has three bodies — hell no. Strike two.

A third strike wasn’t even needed when I extended my hand to shake his. But here it is — strike three.

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Now that I’ve officially judged this book (Lee) by his cover, let’s get through the interview process so I can find a better fit for my company.

I have no problem being straight up, so the first question I asked was: “Why did you murder three people?”

With unwavering eye contact, he said: “I’ve never killed anyone. Each teardrop is for a friend that died.”

He explained that he was put into foster care at twelve years old.

At fourteen he started inking himself. When his friends died, he’d get a tattoo to memorialize them.

He answered every question that I asked in detail.

This guy knew all the right things to say. He was articulate, funny, charismatic and charming. Just a joy to be around.

So, I handed him a cup. I told him to go pee in it. He passed a drug test and swore he was trying to rebuild his life. I melted for him. I understood.

I hired him on the spot. I couldn’t help it. When I hired him, he hadn’t worked in six months. No one would give him a shot. He didn’t have glasses and couldn’t see, nor did he have a driver’s license.

I set deadlines for him to get glasses and a license.

He got his glasses last month. And this week he’s taking his driver’s test.

He also is a writer and a rapper (bonus points!).

Don’t judge a book by its cover means: Making a decision about all that something is, based on what you see is a mistake.

I needed a painter, but I saw a murderer.

In reality, he is a father, a poet, a rapper, a writer and a painter.

Today, he is also my friend.

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A dolphin story

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The famous Italian diver Enzo Maiorca dove into the sea of Syracuse and was talking to his daughter Rossana who was aboard the boat. Ready to go in, he felt something slightly hit his back. He turned and saw a dolphin. Then he realized that the dolphin did not want to play but to express something.

The animal dove and Enzo followed. At a depth of about 12 meters, trapped in an abandoned net, there was another dolphin. Enzo quickly asked his daughter to grab the diving knives. Soon, the two of them managed to free the dolphin, which, at the end of the ordeal, emerged, issued an “almost human cry” (describes Enzo). A dolphin can stay under water for up to 10 minutes, then it drowns.

The released dolphin was helped to the surface by Enzo, Rosana and the other dolphin. That’s when the surprise came: she was pregnant! The male circled them, and then stopped in front of Enzo, touched his cheek (like a kiss), in a gesture of gratitude and then they both swam off.

Enzo Maiorca ended his speech by saying: “Until man learns to respect and communicate with the animal world, he will never be able to know his true role on this Earth.”~

Yuan overtook the dollar in trading volume on the Moscow Exchange

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The “de-Dollarization” by the world continues unabated, with more and more countries turning their back on the US Dollar, in favor of Chinese and Russian currencies.

On the Moscow Exchange, the volume of trading in yuan amounted to 26.3 billion rubles, for the first time exceeding the volume of trading in the dollar (25 billion rubles).

By 13:03 Moscow time, the dollar was trading at the rate of 59.7 rubles/$, having lost 1.05 rubles. from the opening of trading, euro – 60.4 rubles / € (-1.25 rubles). The yuan exchange rate against the ruble amounted to 8.77 rubles / yuan, depreciating from the opening of trading by 0.12 rubles.

On July 6, the turnover of yuan trading on the Moscow Exchange exceeded the turnover of euro trading. Interest in the yuan is observed against the backdrop of Western sanctions in response to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.

Price and outcomes.

The US has incredibly expensive health care. I mean incredibly expensive. Health care is one of the biggest for-profit industries in the country. A long time ago, some enterprising capitalists figured out that if you sell a product that people have to have or they will literally die, if you conceal the price of the product, and if you design the product in such a way that people can’t comparison shop, you can charge any price you want.

As a result, well…

A few weeks ago, I slipped with a razor knife and cut myself at the base of my thumb. I needed four stitches.

The stitches were removed two days ago. It really wasn’t that big a deal.

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So far, I have received two bills.

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This for four stitches and a tetanus booster. Total price (so far):

$2,603.45.

I don’t have insurance. I do qualify for subsidized insurance under the ACA. My price for a basic plan is $570/month with a $6,000 deductible.

Conservatives blather about how the US has such expensive healthcare because it’s sooooo good and American hospitals have the best equipment and Americans do all this research and…

Ah HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Some of them, they…they actually…BWAH ha ha ha…they actually believe that.

This torrent of money doesn’t go into healthcare. A huge volume of it goes into health insurance profits. Every dollar an insurance company takes in profit or overhead is a dollar that isn’t going to treatment and isn’t going to pretty shiny machines that go beep and isn’t going to research.

Libertarians love to talk about how the market promotes efficiency. Which is true. It promotes efficiency at making profit, which is not necessarily the same as efficiency at delivering goods and services.

The outcomes of this system are plain:

  • Shorter lifespan than other developed countries
  • Higher infant mortality than other countries

Evidence demolishes ideology. If the US had cutting edge healthcare, you would expect it to be expensive but effective.

It’s not. It’s expensive but delivers inferior results.

Part of that is the unequal access, of course, but part of it is by design. Because the goal of American healthcare is profit, not treatment, it discourages preventive care and regular checkups, which are low-margin services, in favor of dramatic interventions for serious conditions, which are high-margin services.

This isn’t a grand conspiracy. It’s the natural consequence of a system tuned to maximize profit instead of maximizing number of people cared for.

Edited to add: It’s now several months later and the bills are still coming in. Since posting this answer, I’ve received yet another bill, this one for $816.25.

That brings the total bill (so far) for four stitches to:

$3,419.70

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China beats US in most-cited science papers, moving to top of new rankings

  • China accounts for 27.2 per cent of the world’s most-cited papers, while the US contributes 24.9 per cent, according to report
  • The idea that Chinese research is lacking in quality, though abundant in quantity, is ‘short-sighted’, says policy expert

China has surpassed the United States for the first time to lead the world in the number of most-cited papers, a key indicator of scientific influence, according to a new report.

Between 2018 and 2020, China contributed 27.2 per cent of the world’s most-cited papers – those ranking in the top 1 per cent in terms of citations – while the US accounted for 24.9 per cent, said the “Japanese Science and Technology Indicators” report released on August 9.

Some have pointed to the report as evidence of the rapid rise in the quality – in addition to quantity – of Chinese research.

From HERE

Baked potato with bacon

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A quick dish equally good for cozy family get-togethers and shindigs with friends. Using the most affordable ingredients and a little culinary magic, you can turn ordinary potatoes into finger-licking fast food.

How to prepare: Wash a medium-sized potato, peel and dry. Make several pleat-shaped cuts so it looks like a mini-accordion. Cut bacon into thin slices, and use a knife to put them in the slits. Place the potato on a sheet of foil. Melt butter and add dill, parsley, salt, and pepper to it. Pour the aromatic butter over the potato and wrap in foil. (A homemade option is to grate a little garlic.) Place the potato in a preheated oven at 180C for 30 minutes. Then remove, sprinkle with grated cheese, and put back in the oven for another 10 minutes. If cooking several potatoes, pick ones of equal size so they take the same time to cook. If a potato is large and looks “unbakeable,” you can pre-boil it for 10-15 minutes beforehand.

Danny Trejo

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Danny Trejo

Danny Trejo, known for countless tough-guy roles (and a few soft ones), often cast by his second cousin Robert Rodriguez.

But his first role wasn’t even supposed to be in front of the camera.

Trejo served time in Soledad prison for 11 years, and during that time he did two things to keep himself together. 1) He memorized and recited the script for Wizard of Oz while in solitary confinement, and 2) he started training as a boxer. The latter pastime got him more recognition, as he started winning boxing matches both before his release, and after. He was counseling others on how to break drug addiction and stay clean, when a friend called and asked him for support on a movie set. So he ended up on the set of the movie “Runaway Train”, a prison escape film starring Jon Voight and Eric Roberts.

I walked on that movie set as a drug counselor. I was helping this kid I was counseling. He called me up and said, "Hey, there's a lot of blow down here." It was 1985, and cocaine was running rampant in the movie industry. It was crazy. You'd walk into production and there'd be lines on the table. He just asked me to come down and support him, because that's what I did. I still do it. I'm going over on an intervention right now to one of our Hollywood actors. I went onto this movie set, and he was a PA, and I thought it was cute.

I had never been on a movie set in my life. All these guys were dressed up as inmates, and they were all trying to act tough. They all had these fake tattoos. I kept smearing these tattoos. I had to say, "Oh shit, I'm sorry. That stuff smears." This guy asked me if I wanted to be in a movie, and I said, "What do I gotta do?" And he said, "Do you want to be an extra?" And I said, "An extra what?" And he said, "Can you act like a convict?" I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard. I'd been in every penitentiary in the state. I looked at him and I said, "Well, I'll give it a shot." He gave me a blue shirt, and I took off my shirt, and I have that big tattoo on my chest. He said "Leave your shirt off."

Then this other guy comes over and says, "Hey, you're Danny Trejo. I saw you win the lightweight and welterweight title up in San Quentin." And I go, "Yeah. You're Eddie Bunker [Edward Bunker

].” I had been in prison with him. And he was a writer. We started talking, and he asked, “Are you still boxing?” And I go, “Well, I still train.” And he said, “Do you want a job? We need someone to train one of the actors how to box.” And I said, “I got a job. They’re going to give me 15 bucks for acting like a convict. What’s this pay?” He said, “It pays $320 a day.” So I said, “How bad do you want this guy beat up?”

And he goes, “No, you have to be really careful, this actor’s really high-strung. He’s already socked a couple of people.” I said, “For $320, man, give him a stick. I’ll fight Godzilla for 320 bucks.” I started training Eric Roberts

how to box. Eric wanted to learn how to box, and I think he was scared of me, so he’d do whatever I told him to do. Andrey Konchalovskiy, the director, saw that he would do whatever I told him to do. I guess Andrey had some problems with it. So Andrey comes over and hires me. He says, “You be in the movie. You fight Eric in the movie.” And that’s where it started. From that day until right now, I’ve got 183 movies. – IMDB

So from heroin addict/armed robber, to convict, to drug counselor and boxer, to fight instructor, to actor, then to director and writer. “Everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else. Everything.”

Vareniki with mushrooms and potato

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Vareniki with mushrooms and potato

Chanterelles, agaric honey, or plain white — the choice is yours. They are great when fried with potatoes, cooked in an open mushroom pie with smetana filling, or stewed in ragout (pronounced “ragoo”). And then there are vareniki dumplings stuffed with mashed potato and mushrooms. Best served with smetana and fried onions. Resistance is futile.

Strange Corporate Decisions This Week

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Earlier this week, I received two reports that WALMART had allegedly “canceled billions of dollars in orders.”

I was **not** able to get more info such as specific types of products or specific suppliers, or specific country of origin, so since I couldn’t verify it, I didn’t report it.

Minutes ago, I got this:

"My wife works for amazon web services (AWS) and they just canceled 40% of the marketing budget, froze hiring, and canceled all employee travel today"

It was done on a video call about 50 minutes ago.

I am endeavoring to verify it, so treat it as RUMOR right now  . . . but here’s the thing:

If these claims prove true, this is a major indicator of bad shit coming.

Especially the travel part. AWS has assets in China, Taiwan, and Eastern Bloc countries.

UKRAINE

World Hal Turner

Two days ago, I got word that the US/NATO shipped four (4) nuclear ARTILLERY shells to Ukraine.

Word was that the Ukrainians were to use those shells to hit the Zaporazyhe Nuclear Power Plant.   A nuke artillery shell would certainly be able to penetrate a Reactor Containment building, and even a relatively tiny nuke blast would rupture a reactor, causing a radiation leakage disaster.   BUT . . . they claimed . . .  the fact that a nuke artillery shell was used will be MASKED by the reactor leaking radiation.  So Ukraine would blame the Russians for mishandling the reactor causing it to blow up when, in reality, Ukraine caused it.

I thought this was a bit over-the-top, especially since the US unilaterally ended their nuclear artillery manufacturing and dismantled all their nuclear shells in the year 2004.   HOWEVER, not all NATO countries did the same.

So it is possible that there are a few nuclear artillery shells still around, and if the US/NATO are actually the madmen that I believe they are, then some numbskull might have actually come up with a plan like this.  Plausible deniability with a leaking reactor being blamed for radiation caused by the blast of nuclear artillery.

But since I could not verify **ANY** component of that story, I did NOT report it, either.

Which brings me to Ukraine, today.

There is a MJAJOR offensive taking place in Ukraine since yesterday.  Russian Artillery was literally pounding from every part of the 150km long front line.

Today, Ukraine hit back inside Russia itself, with blasts in Belogorad. Then we had numerous reports of Ukraine missiles fired at the Kerch Strait Bridge. Then, no additional info — at all.   Weird.

Two hours after the alleged missile attack against the Kerch Strait Bridge, air raid sirens sounded in Kiev.  Then . . . nothing.

All this is getting too weird, but I tell you these things because I have now found out that, this afternoon (eastern US Time) Russia told its people at the Zaporazhye Nuclear Power Plant they “are not to go to work tomorrow.”

I HAVE VERIFIED THIS CLAIM.

So now, I look at the alleged WALMART order cancellations, the AWS 40% marketing budget cut, hiring freeze, and employee travel ban, along with what I’ve verified about Russians at the Nuclear power plant being told to stay home tomorrow, and I start to wonder to myself, is the intel I got about nuclear artillery shells factual and is tomorrow (or this weekend) when the plant at Zaporazyhe gets hits?

It’s certainly within the realm of possibility that big boys got a quiet warning to scale down ahead of something major.

WALMART is incredibly connected with government and might have gotten a sort of “heads-up” that everything is going to shit this month” so they are planning accordingly . . . and maybe canceled Billions in orders?

And AWS has hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts, so maybe they too got a sort of heads-up, and decided to cut the marketing budget and halt employee travel etc.?

Then too, it was just this month that no less than Henry Kissinger told a media outlet that “things will escalate in mid-August.”  Here we are.

I run all this past you so you can get a small glimpse into the info pouring in to me, and how hard it is to sift through apparently unrelated things, to come up with a picture of what might actually be.

“Dad, I want to make money. Can I work for you?” My 10 year old boy asked me.

“We don’t work for money son. You must come up with a creative idea to make money through a business.”

“Oh, let me think,” he paused for a moment and said, “I have an idea! I could mow the lawn for the neighbors!”

“That’s not a business son!”

“Well, I could wash cars or walk their dogs over the weekends!”

“You’re still exchanging time for money son! That’s NOT a business. I want you to come up with a business idea!”

“I don’t understand dad!”

“I don’t want you to exchange time for money. Think how to solve this!”

Three days later…

“Dad, dad! I have an idea, what if I plant some vegetables in our backyard, grow them and sell them!”

“Now, THAT sounds more like a business son! Can you tell me the difference? How many hours will you invest to keeping up with your plants?” I asked.

“I need to water the plants every day after school.”

“What else?”

“Watch out for bugs eating my veggies?”

“Correct! How much time will you invest doing that?”

“Well, dad… nothing, maybe minutes!”

“So what is the difference between your veggie business and working for me or for the neighbors?”

“I’m going to save time!”

“Good! Now you have a new problem… You need to invest some money on your vegetable garden! How much money will you invest?

We went to Home Depot to buy stuff. He had his cash savings in his pocket.

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”Dad, look! If we install this automatic water system I will be making money even while we’re on vacation!” He said excited after identifying a special hose to connect to his new pots.

“I will buy organic soil so my cucumbers and my tomatoes will be organic. I can sell them at a higher price to my neighbors and my friends.”

I smiled proudly as I could see how he was getting his business mind together.

We purchased everything. He negotiated a $50 dollar loan from me. We agreed that he will pay me interest.

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Business is an art, not a science.

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My boy is developing his entrepreneurial skills. He is learning everything that schools don’t teach him like [1] how to invest, [2] how to sell, [3] how to keep track of money.

He will learn the pains of paying interest of a loan, and after this winter, he’s learning the pains of losing money and having to start over again!

Most importantly, I’m teaching and developing his mindset!

Entrepreneurship is an art, an understanding of how to make money, it needs to be learned, not taught.

My cat tried to warn us

June 2015. My son Elliot is born.

From that day, my cat Juliette was not the same. She didn’t like the fact she was getting less attention.

And she let us know! She wasn’t nice with our baby and started to pee on the carpet in the basement. Always at the same spots.

How come this great cat became such a pain?

I had started to cough more often in the last couple of months. I had absolutely no explanation for it. I was running my small business from my basement.

A nurse told me it could be allergies. I never had allergies before. It seemed like allergies could start later in life. It sucked… but it is what it is, I guess. I didn’t make a big deal out of it.

In August, Juliette peed one last time in the basement. I had enough.

I decided I would remove the whole carpet during the weekend and redo the floor. I was tired of cleaning the mess every time it happened. Making the odor go away was not an easy task.

The following weekend, I started to remove the carpet… and found mold at every spot Juliette had peed in the past. It seemed like water and humidity were stuck under the floor and in the walls.

I can’t know for sure if it was her way to let me know why I was coughing so badly and why I felt so exhausted every time I tried to exercise.

Water was coming in and there was mold all over the basement.

We had to remove everything: floor, walls and ceiling. A company came with specialized equipment to decontaminate the basement. We had to redo everything inside… but also outside of the house to make sure water would not come back.

What started as a “weekend project” to stop a cat from peeing on the carpet ended up with a 6 months project that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Since that, my health has been back to what it was before. No coughing, no exhaustion.

Thanks to Juliette for this. She unfortunately passed away a year later.

Here she is with Elliot…

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I’m truly grateful for the mess she made in my basement because the whole family could have suffered of permanent breathing issues…

“I’m Worried We’re Becoming A Thought-Controlled Dystopia, Like China!”

Caitlin Johnstone

Aug 20

John: I’m worried about China.

Jane: Oh yeah? What about it?

John: Well more I’m worried about the example they’re setting, and that western governments will start implementing their technocratic oppression style to turn us all into a bunch of brainwashed, homogeneous obedience machines.

Jane: What makes you think Chinese people are all brainwashed and homogeneous?

John: Oh my God, don’t you watch the news? Have you not heard of their social credit score system? The state censorship and propaganda those people are subjected to? The CCP literally doesn’t let them have access to western social media platforms because our free thought and democratic values might interfere with their conformity policing. How have you not heard about this? It’s in the news constantly.

Jane: Constantly?

John: Oh yeah, it’s like a major news story all the time. All across the political spectrum, too. Fox News, CNN, The Washington Post. Alternative media too like Infowars and The Epoch Times; even lefty YouTubers like Vaush talk all the time about how bad it is in China.

Jane: So because you’re being given the same message by all the western media you consume, you’re worried about the enforcement of thought conformity in… China?

John: Yeah. Of course.

Jane: And this is why you’re worried that, at some point in the future, that kind of brainwashing and homogeneity might someday be inflicted upon us by powerful people in the west?

John: I mean yeah, if the CCP doesn’t do it to us first. Did you know they’re trying to take over the world?

Jane: They are?

John: Oh yeah! The Chinese want to take over the world and give us all a social credit score so we’ll all think the same. How do you not know about this? Don’t you ever watch TV?

Jane: How do you know it’s true though?

John: That they want to conquer us and give us a social credit score? Come on! Open your eyes! Have you seen how they treat their own population? They’re genociding the Uyghurs as we speak! Millions and millions of them in Nazi-style extermination camps! Plus they deliberately released the Covid virus to hurt us after cooking it up in a lab, they’re taking over Hollywood and infiltrating our political and academic institutions, and they’ve colonized the entire continent of Africa! Of course the CCP wants to rule us! Don’t you ever watch Tucker Carlson? They’re truly, deeply evil, and we’ve got to do something to stop them.

Jane: Sounds like you’ve got this China thing all figured out. You’re right, that sounds really scary. I can’t imagine what it would be like, living in a thought-controlled dystopia where your rulers are brainwashing everyone into obedience and making sure everybody thinks the same way about stuff.

John: Yeah! Finally you get it! I’m glad you’ve come around. Honestly you’re the first person I know who didn’t already understand these things about China.

Jane: I’ll bet.

John: So do you think it will happen? Do you think our government will implement a social credit score system to make us all believe lies and propaganda, like the Chinese?

Jane: You know, I wouldn’t worry about it.

The doll

At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, walked through the park in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully.

Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her.

The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter “written” by the doll saying “please don’t cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures.”

Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka’s life.

During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.

Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin.

“It doesn’t look like my doll at all,” said the girl.

Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: “my travels have changed me.” the little girl hugged the new doll and brought her happy home.

A year later Kafka died.

Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written:

“Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.”

FADING SMILE OF A DYING EMPIRE

From The burning platform blog

We moved to our corner of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania twenty-seven years ago. We raised our three boys here. We spent hundreds of hours on local baseball fields, in hockey rinks, in school gyms for basketball games, concerts, plays and donuts-with-dads. It’s still a nice place to live, with virtually no crime, decent roads, and reasonable property tax rates. But I would have to say there has been a degradation in the overall quality of life in my community, which is consistent with the downward spiral of our society in general. When we planted our roots in this community it was still more farm-like than suburban. Family farms and open space were more prevalent than housing tracts, strip malls, fast food joints and cookie cutter commercial buildings. A beautiful farmhouse a few miles from our home, freshly painted white, proudly displayed the iconic yellow smiley face. It symbolized good times.

We’ve been driving on this road for twenty-seven years on the way to baseball games, hockey practices, the car dealer for service, and lately to our gym, as we try to fend off father time. Driving by that barn in the early days would always brighten your day. A bright yellow smiley face against a white background represented a positive, happy view of the world.

We moved to this area in 1995 while Clinton was president, unemployment was 5.6%, CPI was 2.8%, GDP growth was 2.7%, the annual deficit was $164 billion, the national debt was $4.9 trillion, the Fed balance sheet was $500 billion, the U.S. population was 263 million, total household debt was $4 trillion, you earned 5.5% on your money market fund, the U.S. bailed out Mexico, the Oklahoma City bombing happened, and OJ Simpson was found not guilty of killing his ex-wife. The military industrial complex was being starved by lack of wars and the stock market soared by 33% as the beginning of irrational exuberance began under the reign of Greenspan and his Put.

A lot has happened over the last twenty-seven years and the faded, barely visible smiley face, on a now mold ridden decaying barn, is truly representative of a society, culture and economic system dying a slow torturous death, as apathy, technological distraction, myopic indolence, and the greed of powerful elites combine to ensure the eventual collapse of the short-lived American Empire. Much of this quarter century of decline is borne out in the change in economic numbers noted above.

The unemployment rate is reported as 3.5% today with 158 million out of 264 million working age adults employed. That leaves 106 million not employed, or 40% of working age adults not working. Back in 1995, 125 million out of 199 million working age adults were employed, leaving 74 million not working. Over a quarter century we’ve added 65 million people to our population, but only 33 million to the employment rolls. Either we’ve devolved into a nation of freeloaders on welfare/disability, or the BLS is lying about the 3.5% unemployment rate, or both.

The BLS currently tries to convince the ignorant masses inflation is only 8.5%, up tremendously from the 2.8% in 1995. Since the Fed/Wall Street induced financial crash of 2008, the government had been reporting inflation of between 0% to 3%, when in reality, as measured the way it was measured in 1980, it had been between 7% to 10%. Today’s actual inflation rate is 17% in case you were wondering. Revealing the true cost of living to the peasants might induce a revolting outcome for our overlords. The government prefers to treat the math challenged masses like mushrooms, by keeping them in the dark.

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The corrupt Fed, feckless politicians, media mouthpieces for the empire, and Wall Street shysters were shocked I tell you by skyrocketing inflation after the Fed increased their balance sheet from $3.7 trillion to $8.9 trillion and the D.C. swamp creatures increased the national debt from $23.2 trillion to $30.7 trillion since the beginning of 2020. This generated inflation in financial assets for the global elite and their minions, while destroying the finances of the middle and lower classes. The rot grows like a cancer in this empire of debt.

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The annual deficit of $164 billion in 1995 was racked up in 17 days in 2021. We have run annual deficits of $3.1 trillion in 2020 and $2.8 trillion in 2021, and the scumbags in Washington just keep passing $700 billion spending bills, writing off student loan debts for gender fluidity majors and sending billions in weapons to the most corrupt regime on the planet – Ukraine.

The degradation and downward trajectory of this empire of debt, delusion and despair can be most clearly defined by comparing our GDP growth since 1995 to the growth of debt by both our government and the populace.

Total U.S. GDP in 1995 totaled $7.6 trillion and today checks in at $24.8 trillion. That is a growth of 326% over twenty-seven years.

The national debt has grown by 626%. Seems unsustainable, but why question our glorious leaders.

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The Fed balance sheet has grown by 1,780%. Household debt has grown by 400%. Median household income in 1995 was $34,000. Today it is $73,000. That is a 214% increase over 27 years. With real inflation averaging over 10% per year during this time frame, average working Americans have seen their standard of living methodically decline, replacing the income with debt. The only beneficiaries of debt are the banking cabal and the mega-corporations selling their cheap Chinese crap to clueless dupes who believe driving a leased BMW and living in a cookie cutter McMansion with an $800,000 mortgage makes them wealthy.

The selfie generation is too distracted checking in on Facebook, posting pictures of their food on Instagram, doing a dance routine on Tik Tok or counting their likes on Twitter to realize how badly they’ve been screwed over by those pulling the strings of this society. The propaganda and psychology of fear utilized by the powerful interests has reached a level that would make Edward Bernays burst with pride, as manipulating the masses to believe falsehoods is a key requirement in implementing their Great Reset agenda.

This entire charade seems to be bursting at the seams, with raging inflation, a recession in process (despite Biden’s lackeys trying to redefine recession), a Green New Deal Great Reset agenda purposely creating energy and food shortages, government agencies running roughshod over the Constitution, and a tyrannical administration attempting to crush their political adversaries using any means necessary. Smiles are fading as we head into either a hyperinflationary depression or a deflationary depression, with some world war mixed in.

 

The economic decay is easily provable, but our cultural and societal degeneration has exceeded our economic deterioration.

Just as the Roman Empire exhibited particular traits of a dying culture, the American Empire displays similar characteristics, such as: concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth; obsession with sex and perversions of sex; art becoming freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original; widening disparity between very rich and very poor; increased demand to live off the state.

Of course, our dying culture has also been turbocharged by the climate cult attempting to destroy our fossil fueled economic system by purposely sabotaging our energy and food systems as the driving force for their Great Reset. Weaponizing the annual flu as a means to inject billions of people with a DNA altering, sometimes lethal, concoction is part of Bill Gates’ depopulation agenda. They have taken the sex and gender perversion to new levels of child abuse, grooming and mutilation. The rampant pedophilia and child trafficking by the global elitists is the most despicable aspect of our cultural degeneracy. Anyone with a conscious can no longer be proud of this country and should be desperately concerned about its future.

“A growing sense of unease presently pervades the American consciousness. Americans are no longer as confident in their nation and self-assured as they once were. 

A sense of frustration and anger underscores American consciousness. 

Americans are looking over our shoulder at other emerging economic juggernauts and wondering if we can still be world’s social, political, and economic leader when Congress cannot even manage to balance the national budget. 

The thought that we are diminishing in stature in the eyes of the international community constantly torments Americans. 

Faded glory strikes a crippling blow to the American psyche. 

Analogous to an aging beauty queen, America might still possess a golden crown, but she lost her luster. 

In an eroding empire, Americans feel like second-class citizens in the union of nations.”Kilroy J. Oldster

The terms modern and progress have become warped and used as an excuse for destroying localization, small businesses, what worked, what was good, and what benefitted society, replacing it with globalization, mega-corporations, complex technology, profits at any cost, and benefits accumulating to the few with suffering borne by the many.

Two examples come to mind within a few miles from my home. Just a couple miles from the fading smile barn is a property that was once a thriving family farm. I snapped a picture last week as I was driving past.

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The decaying abandoned farmhouse, dilapidated barn, and rusting farm machinery are being engulfed by weeds, as the memories of a productive useful family farm fade like that yellow smiley face. I don’t know why it was abandoned, but I’m sure the corporate farming conglomerates and the corporate meat processing plants were a major factor. When you can buy cheap meat at Wal-Mart produced in China or some industrial farm, why pay a little more for fresh non-GMO meat sold by a local farmer?

Gone are the roadside vegetable stands and buying fresh meat from your local farmer neighbor. Maybe the patriarch of the homestead got too old, and his sons had been indoctrinated by the government schools to get corporate jobs in some of the commercial office campuses that have replaced open space and farmland. Whatever the reason, it provokes melancholy about a better simpler time whenever I pass by.

The governmental actions taken in the early 2000s still irk me to this day. The area around the intersection of Forty Foot Road and Sumneytown Pike in the late 1990s was still reminiscent of simpler times, before smart phones, hyper-consumerism, and proliferation of big box retail. Small businesses were important and viable. There was a family run diner near the turnpike entrance where all the locals ate breakfast and talked sports and politics.

Township police were friendly, driving older basic vehicles and housed in a small unassuming one-story township building. Nicely kept older homes lined one side of Forty Foot Road and the other side was an eclectic mixture of old-time baseball fields, with no lights and little to no ground’s maintenance, and the old Henry Sprecht grade school, built in 1909 to honor a long-time educator and local historian, which had been replaced by newer schools and creatively repurposed into a quaint antiques mall.

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We spent many a summer evening watching my oldest son play little league baseball on those fields while trying to keep our four-year-old and three-year-old sons from getting into trouble. We loved wandering through that antiques mall as individual vendors selling all manner of antiques, hand crafted woodwork, baseball cards, toys, occupied nooks, and crannies in this ancient school. We bought a handcrafted cabinet by a local artisan for our kitchen, which we still employ today in our storage area.

My fondest memory was at Christmas time when it would become a Christmas wonderland and I would take the boys there to see the spectacular miniature train show, where local train aficionados would set up amazing displays. The kids were mesmerized. There was also a family-owned home center in Hatfield called Snyder’s that sold everything for your home and also had a great train display at Christmas for kids to enjoy. All this unpretentious delight ended abruptly in the early 2000s, as progress, commercialization, and greed took hold of the country and our little community.

As you may remember, Greenspan coined the term irrational exuberance in 1996 to describe financial markets, then turbocharged stocks by cutting rates, causing the dot.com bubble and responded to the stock market crash by cutting rates and causing the biggest real estate bubble in history, until now. These ephemeral paper riches caused local government bureaucrats to use phantom tax revenues to envision delusions of grandeur by building useless unnecessary projects.

This is exactly what the government drones running Towamencin Township did. They produced a grand master plan, gave it a fancy name, spent tens of millions of our tax dollars, and produced an embarrassing mess. They used eminent domain to acquire homes, forced the dozens of small business owners out of the antique mall and flattened the building, closed off the baseball fields to little kids, and closed Forty Foot Road for over a year to build a glorious $13 million bridge to nowhere. This bridge stands as a tribute to all those Chinese ghost cities, as it serves no purpose except as an example of government incompetence, wastefulness, and misuse of taxpayer funds with no consequences for the government drones.

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Rather than wait for actual retail tenants to sign on to their glorious project, the government geniuses built the bridge knowing they would come. They never came.

The real estate retail bubble popped. It’s now fifteen years later and those four baseball fields are still sitting there, untouched, undeveloped, and unused.

They stuck a Walgreens where the charming antique mall once sat. No pedestrians cross the pedestrian bridge because there is nothing on either side. A four- story commercial building was built on spec a block from the bridge and stood vacant for five years.

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The family-owned Snyder’s home store was driven out of business by the Home Depot and Lowes built within a few miles. There are now cookie cutter townhouses where Snyder’s stood. Another successful retail center in the 1990s up the road, anchored by a family owned Genuardi supermarket and a Sears Hardware, along with a pizza place, drugstore, Blockbuster, and kids play center has been vacant and rotting for over a decade, as bankruptcies, mergers, and the relentless downward economic spiral made it untenable.

In addition to wasting taxpayer money on the ghost bridge to nowhere, these financial government geniuses decided their police station built in 1975 no longer met the needs of their fast-growing police force in a township with no crime, because it is 88% white/Asian. They built themselves a complex three times the size of their old station. Lucky, because they now have a police force of 23 officers, all decked out with souped-up brand-new SUVs.

You need that level of manpower and firepower for all those speed traps, fender benders and writing tickets for illegal basketball nets. There hasn’t been a major crime in Towamencin in over a decade, but the taxpayers pay over $1 million per year to be harassed and pay for their donut budget This level of government waste is happening in every locality and state in America. And the Feds put them all to shame with their corrupt, wasteful, traitorous spending, bribing, and war mongering across the globe, to the tune of trillions.

The decline I’ve personally seen in my local community is not just a localized cancer but has metastasized across the land and around the globe. As our economic system accelerates towards inevitable implosion, either as a planned demolition or due to the hubris of central bankers, the fraying social fabric of our civilized society is unmistakable, as the moral state of our country has deteriorated to a level seen only in debauched empires on the brink of failure.

The global elite and their moral depravity have engulfed the world, as their ravenous greed, insatiable appetite for dominion over the masses, immoral deceit, manipulative use of propaganda, and satanic decadence have created economic, social, political, and military distress across the globe. As Toynbee and Solzhenitsyn note, the lack of morality and courage among those who profess to be leaders has permeated throughout society, leading to a dearth of citizens taking civic responsibility for the path of the country.

“Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee

We are a lost society, ruled by emotions, captured by technology, misinformed, uneducated, indifferent, fearful, passively accepting of whatever government and media tell them is true, and entranced by materialism funded by debt.

We are a sick dying culture where common community standards, self-responsibility, hard work, kindness, and manners have been superseded by the worship of abnormality, celebration of degeneracy, living off the government, spreading hatred, and waging undeclared wars across the world.

There is an empty shallowness to our civilization, with the vacuum filled with gadgets, pathetic displays of fake affluence, trivialities like social media, and superficial displays of virtue signaling regarding the latest woke craze shoved down our throats by those controlling the levers of society.

There is an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness, fear, and foreboding mood of impending doom, as this Fourth Turning accelerates towards its bloody denouement.

The aura of pessimism about the future and fear that our superpower status, only in existence since 1946, is rotting from within permeates the psychology of those actually willing to think critically and see what is really happening. The existing social order will be extinguished during the waning years of this Fourth Turning. We are in the interval between the decay of the old and formation of the new, whatever that may be.

This transition will be one of uncertainty, turmoil, miscalculation, fanatical misrepresentations, war (civil & global), false prophets, bloodshed, and clear winners and losers. Decay and death of empires have happened for centuries and are necessary to expunge the excesses and abuses which always occur as empires expand and its leaders exhibit a hubristic arrogance towards their people and the world.

“Just as floods replenish soil and fires rejuvenate forests, a Fourth Turning clears out society’s exhausted elements and creates an opportunity.”The Fourth Turning

It is hard to believe the prognostications of Strauss & Howe a quarter century ago, just after I moved to my community, could be so eerily accurate. But, when you are sure of the catalysts: debt, global disorder, and civic decay, the volcanic eruption of distress can only flow along certain channels, preordained by choices made over decades by our leaders and ourselves.

“Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake. All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:

    • Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)
    • Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities
    • Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders
    • Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction” 

This Fourth Turning has created tremendous distress in all four categories noted by Strauss & Howe. With over $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities, the country is already in default, but unwilling to admit it. The Social Security fund will run out of money in a few years. State and local pension funds are underfunded by trillions. With Powell and his minions in control, hyperinflation and deflationary depression are on the near-term horizon, with financial assets crashing once again, for the fourth time this century.

The social distress has been initiated and promoted by the global elite through their complete control of the media propaganda outlets. They are attempting to spur violent upheaval, as this will give them the excuse to disarm and electronically imprison dissenters and Great Reset resisters. Class, race, religion, and gender are all being used to stoke unrest.

The political distress is the biggest gaping wound in our national body today. If critical thinking individuals didn’t acknowledge the existence of a Deep State before, they surely can’t deny its existence now. It has existed for decades, but has been forced out into the open, as threats to their power and control multiply due to their arrogance, ineptitude, wickedness, and avarice.

Anyone who dares to deviate from their directives and threatens their fiefdom is either killed, neutered, or destroyed (JFK, RFK, George Wallace, Perot, Assange, Trump). Russiagate, two impeachments, J6 witch trial, and now the rogue DOJ/FBI raid on Trump’s compound has driven the political stress to heights not seen since 1860. The desires of the globalist elites for a Great Reset into a new world order where you own nothing, and they own everything is the goal of all this engineered chaos.

The military distress may be the most concerning and potentially most destructive aspect of this Fourth Turning as we enter the normally bloody phase. The flailing U.S. empire is provoking and stoking global conflict to keep feeding the Deep State military industrial complex. The Ukraine conflict was initiated by the U.S. in 2014 and is being used as a justification to fight Russia without getting our hands dirty.

Continuing to poke the nuclear armed bear, has the potential to escalate the conflict to a point of no return. Throwing fuel on the fire by provoking China over Taiwan’s independence is irrationally reckless and the mark of a desperate empire seeing the sun setting on its 76-year reign as the one global superpower, and willing to risk global war in a fruitless effort to remain king.

The U.S. can let its empire expire with a whimper (e.g. British Empire) or a bang. Based on their ham-handed, stumbling, absurd endeavors to maintain their dominance over the world, they have initiated global food and energy shortages, caused unbearable economic hardship upon the middle and lower classes, and have pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war with countries run by serious men. While we are supposedly led by an ancient fossil lost in a fog of dementia and unable to string two coherent sentences together, even with a teleprompter. Obama, the Deep State, and a plethora of diversity hire apparatchiks are really calling the shots.

The smile has faded on this empire of debt, delusion, denial, and destruction, just as it has on the barn near my house. The coming trials will require levels of courage, fortitude, and sacrifice which many might think they are not capable of summoning, but we have no choice. You can’t sit out Fourth Turnings. Sides will need to be chosen and life or death decisions made. The future of this country and the world hang in the balance.

Choosing your allies and forming local communities of like-minded people with the skills to survive and thrive in the world created after the coming conflict is resolved, is all you can do at this point. Preparation may not be enough, but not preparing guarantees a bad outcome for you and your family. Whatever you do, put absolutely no faith in any government solution to our predicament. They are the enemy and you can’t vote your way out of this.

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I hope after this is over to see a fresh coat of white paint applied to that old barn and a brand-new yellow smiley face resurrected on the same spot, marking the start of a new High.

URGENT: US on verge of becoming party to Ukrainian conflict, Moscow warns

Washington’s continued support for Kiev during Moscow’s military operation has put the US on the verge of becoming party to the Ukrainian conflict, Russia’s deputy Foreign Minister, Sergey Ryabkov has said.

“We don’t want escalation. We’d like to avoid a situation, in which the US becomes a party to the conflict, but so far we don’t see any readiness of the other side to take these warnings seriously,” Ryabkov told Rossiya 1 TV channel on Friday.

Moscow rejects Washington’s explanation, that providing Ukraine with weapons and other aid is justified by Kiev’s right to self-defense, he pointed out.

“Excuse me, what kind of self-defense is it if they are already openly talking about the possibility of attacking targets deep in the Russian territory, in Crimea?” the deputy FM wondered.

According to Ryabkov, such statements are being made by the Ukrainian side “not just under the blind eye of the US and NATO, but with the encouragement of this kind of sentiment, approaches, plans and ideas directly from Washington,” Ryabkov insisted.

The ever more obvious and deeper involvement in Ukraine in terms of countering our military operation, in fact, puts this country, the US, on the verge of turning into a party to the conflict,” he reiterated.

The US has been the strongest supporter of Kiev amid its conflict with Russia, providing Kiev with billions of dollars in military and financial aid, as well as intelligence data. Washington’s deliveries to the Ukrainian military have included such sophisticated hardware as HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, M777 howitzers and combat drones.

Reuters reported on Friday that US President Joe Biden is about to announce another lethal aid package for Kiev of around $800 million.

An unnamed official from the Biden administration told Politico on Thursday that the White House had no problem with Ukraine attacking Crimea, which became part of Russia after a 2014 referendum staged in response to a violent coup. The US believes that Kiev can strike any target on its territory, and “Crimea is Ukraine,” the American official insisted.

There have recently been a number of explosions near a Russian ammunition depot and at a military airfield in Crimea, which the Defense Ministry said were acts of “sabotage.” However, Ukrainian authorities haven’t officially confirmed involvement in the attacks.

Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”

In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.

A Major Food Crisis Coming In 2023? – “Prices Will Be On Steroids After The Election”

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We are being warned that food prices in the U.S. are going to go absolutely haywire after the election in November.  I am taking such warnings very seriously, and I believe that you should too.  Global officials have been telling us over and over again that we are heading into an unprecedented global food crisis, and I have been writing about this again and again in recent weeks.  But so far, the vast majority of the population doesn’t seem to be taking this seriously.  Agricultural production is going to be way below expectations all over the planet in 2022, and that means that there will be far less food to go around in 2023.

Let me give you a perfect example of what I am talking about.  Just within the last couple of days, it has been reported that there will be crop losses “of up to 50 percent” in the German state of Baden-Württemberg…

Crop losses of up to 50 percent are now expected in parts of Germany due to drought, farmers in affected regions have claimed.

Up to half of the crops in parts of the German state of Baden-Württemberg are likely to be lost due to drought, farmers in the region have claimed, with problems to do with the prices of fuel, fertiliser, and pesticides connected to the green agenda and war in Ukraine also reportedly causing problems for those in the region.

These are crop losses that haven’t happened yet.

These are crop losses that will happen in the fall if sufficient rain does not arrive soon…

With the losses expected to materialise in the autumn, the farming chaos may end up being another crisis facing Germany’s floundering political class as fuel shortages combined with a freefalling economy hit a public already suffering from officials’ poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Just within the past week, I have written about how authorities are also projecting similar crop losses in key areas of the UK, France and Italy.

And here in the United States, 37 percent of farmers in the western half of the country say that they will be killing their own crops because there is no chance that they will come to maturity due to the endless drought.

All of these crop losses haven’t hit the food system yet.

So none of these crop losses are reflected in grocery store prices yet.

That won’t happen until the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023.

With all of that in mind, I would like to share with you a comment that was just posted on one of Southern Prepper’s videos

Just a heads up. I have a family member who works in the corporate pricing department for groceries. This company has been in business 40 years. 

Meeting was called 1 day ago and they were told prices will be on steroids after the election. Owner said he’s never seen what’s headed our way in 40 of business. They just hired 10 more people and can not keep up with data input.

All hands on deck and overtime. included. Get your house in order. Buy Holiday grocery products while you can find and afford them. 

Boss told employees to stock up now. 

Please pay attention folks.

It would be easy to dismiss that comment because we don’t know who it is from and so we can’t verify the specific claims that are made.

But this is entirely consistent with everything else that I am hearing.

Food prices have been rising rapidly in recent months, but the really big deal is all the food that is not being grown right now.  This lack of production is going to push prices to levels that would have once been unthinkable.

Most people simply do not realize how much our farmers are hurting right now.  Just check out these numbers

Nearly three quarters of US farmers say this year’s drought is hurting their harvest — with significant crop and income loss, according to a survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation, an insurance company and lobbying group that represents agricultural interests.

The survey was conducted across 15 states from June 8 to July 20 in extreme drought regions from Texas to North Dakota to California, which makes up nearly half of the country’s agricultural production value. In California — a state with high fruit and nut tree crops — 50% of farmers said they had to remove trees and multiyear crops due to drought, which will affect future revenue.

This is going to affect all of us.

If farmers and ranchers don’t produce our food, we do not eat.

Things are even worse in western Europe, and the war in Ukraine is greatly restricting the flow of agricultural goods from eastern Europe.

In 2023, there is going to be a mad scramble for whatever food that is available, and global prices are going to go nuts.

We have already started to see food riots and civil unrest is some areas of the globe, but I anticipate that things will get much worse next year.

Even here in the United States, I expect that there will be a lot of anger and frustration.  And as we have seen, it certainly doesn’t take much for our major urban areas to explode.

Things aren’t even that bad yet, and already we are seeing people behave in ways that are extremely bizarre.  For example, just consider a very strange incident that just happened in Los Angeles

The gang of people ransacked the store while shouting, completely destroying the COVID-19 safety screen that had been set up to grab as much as they could in Los Angeles, California.

A group entered the convenience store near Figueroa Street and El Segundo Boulevard, with surveillance footage showing the looters shouting at each other, on August 15.

They can be seen running across the store and grabbing drinks, cigarettes, lottery tickets, bags of chips and other items.

Approximately 100 young people were involved in the violence.

When I read about this sort of a thing, it makes me very sad.  I have been strongly warning that such unrest would be coming to America, and eventually it will get completely out of control.

As food prices surge to crazy heights, those at the bottom of the economic food chain will not be happy.

The coming food crisis will be a difficult time for our nation, and for the world as a whole.

If you understand what is coming, it gives you an opportunity to get prepared.

Sadly, most of the population doesn’t want to listen to the warnings, and that is extremely unfortunate.

‘Flurry’ of retail bankruptcies coming, former retail CEO warns

Retailers on life support may go the way of the dinosaur in early 2023 should the economic slowdown cause a lackluster holiday shopping season.

“I think we will see a flurry of bankruptcies likely in the first quarter of 2023 if this holiday season is anything less than completely robust,” Mark Cohen, former longtime CEO of Sear Canada and current Columbia University professor of retail studies, warned on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “I don’t think it will be, by the way.”

Retail bankruptcies — which picked up in droves at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — have fallen by the wayside as consumers returned to stores to stock up on apparel and other items coming out of the pandemic.

Only three retailers filed for bankruptcy in the second half of 2021 versus 20 in the same period in 2020, according to a report from BDO. There were no new retail bankruptcies filed from mid-September 2021 through mid-February 2022, the report found.

“There is no question as business becomes tougher to manage, weak players fall by the wayside,” Cohen said. “They are particularly vulnerable to inflationary pricing and inflationary costs.”

The bad news in retail continues to mount as the economy slows, calling into question how even the strongest in the sector would navigate a potential recession in 2023.

In early June, Target kicked off concerns about the retail sector’s health with a shocking decision to liquidate massive amounts of slow-moving inventory and take a more cautious view on near-term profits.

Since then, discretionary retailers such as RH, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Kohl’s have issued financial warnings for their second-quarter results.

 

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

We are at risk of an accelerating hyper-collapse as people massively cut back spending due to things like inflation and fear. Most of our economy is based on optional purchases that can be put off or not made at all. Once people get into survival mode, the accelerating hyper-collapse will kick in, with spending dropping significantly, unemployment skyrocketing and bankruptcies happening on a regular basis.

I saw a forum where people in my NJ home town were talking about rent increases of $200, $300, even $500

Good luck having any money left to spend at retail with rent increases like that.

I mean seriously if your rent went up 300 dollars would you be out shopping, going to shows, eating in restaurants, taking a weekend road trip?

The worst part of all this is that NONE of it had to be.   This is all taking place because of Russia economic sanctions that should not have been imposed if our government would have minded its own business.

US has doomed EU to hunger and cold – Russia

The United States has doomed the EU to hunger, cold and isolation by pressuring the bloc to cut its ties with Moscow, Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said on Friday.

He wrote on Telegram that Washington would “stop at nothing to cling to its power over the world as it throws under the bus the citizens’ welfare and the economies of European countries to achieve this end.”

He noted that natural gas in the US costs $333 per 1,000 cubic meters. “At the same time, Washington sells it to Europe for a price which is 7.3 [times] higher, rendering the EU economy uncompetitive,” he wrote, adding that the eurozone’s annual inflation rate had hit a record 8.9%.

Volodin said Europe had been hit by a heatwave that triggered huge problems in the agriculture sector, as well as an energy crisis which had seen prices soar six times in one year.

The EU’s decision to phase out Russian energy supplies and cut economic ties with Moscow “have been made under Washington’s pressure,” the State Duma speaker claimed.

US policies in Europe are enforced by England that has left the EU high and dry, as well as by a number of countries that are sovereign in name only – Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine – with Poland, the Czech Republic and Finland joining this Russophobic coalition in the hopes of getting an American handout,” Volodin wrote.

His comments come as the EU is plagued by an energy crisis due to rising global prices. Earlier this month, the bloc approved a plan that would see its member states reduce gas consumption by 15% in a bid to tackle the crisis.

Another factor that has exacerbated the energy crunch was the EU’s decision to wean itself off natural gas from Russia, as the bloc considers these supplies to be unreliable. However, President Vladimir Putin has rejected accusations that Moscow could cut off gas supplies to the EU, stating that Russian energy giant Gazprom is “ready to pump as much as necessary” but that the bloc has “closed everything themselves.”

U.S. urged to stop attempting to contain China with Taiwan: spokesperson

Source
Xinhuanet
Editor
Li Jiayao
Time
2022-08-11 10:33:51

BEIJING, Aug. 10 (Xinhua) — China will resolutely make a fightback each time the United States makes a serious provocation that encroaches upon China’s sovereignty and interferes in China’s internal affairs, a foreign ministry spokesperson said on Wednesday.

“China will never allow its national sovereignty and territorial integrity to be wantonly trampled upon and undermined,” spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a regular news briefing, urging the United States to stop its attempt to contain China by using Taiwan.

Wang pointed out Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visit to China’s Taiwan region is a major political provocation which upgrades exchanges between the United States and Taiwan.

Pelosi’s visit violated relevant commitments by the U.S. side in the China-U.S. Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, the one-China principle widely accepted by the international community and confirmed in the UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, and the principle in international law of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, which is enshrined in the UN Charter, he said.

Disregarding China’s dissuasion and warnings concerning Pelosi’s visit, the United States has chosen to pursue the wrong course of action, Wang said, noting that it is the United States, not China, who has reneged on commitments.

“It is the United States that infringed upon China’s sovereignty, not China violating the sovereignty of the United States. It is the United States who connived at and supported ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist activities, not China conniving at and supporting separatist activities in the United States,” Wang added.

Wang said the United States is going down the path of obscuring, hollowing out and distorting the one-China principle, while accusing China of changing the status quo.

“The United States carries out over a hundred military drills in China’s adjacent waters every year, but accuses China of overacting,” Wang added, “Neither China nor the international community will accept such a gangster logic.”

If the United States truly hopes to abide by international law and uphold national sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries as it claims to, it should return to the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiques, Wang said.

He urged the United States to refrain from reckless moves and stop attempting to use Taiwan to contain China and do right things and take concrete steps to facilitate the sound development of China-U.S. ties and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

Challenging America’s Lords of Illusion with a Million Contrary Rumble Views

In Roger Zelazny’s classic 1967 science fiction novel Lord of Light, humans on a distant planet have employed technological devices to establish themselves as gods of the Hindu pantheon, each having particular aspects and attributes. Mara is the Lord of Illusion, able to reshape the perceived world in the minds of all those around him. Such an ability is powerful but not invincible since the physical reality remains unchanged, and Mara is slain in the very first chapter.

I think that story stands as an effective metaphor for America’s strengths in today’s world. Our country is so utterly dominant in the distribution of information and propaganda, including the electronic and social media, that we can easily persuade most of the world to accept as truth our manufactured illusions. But we cannot alter the underlying reality, perhaps leading to disastrous ultimate consequences.

Russia possesses a nuclear arsenal equal to our own and its revolutionary hypersonic weapons provide it considerable superiority in delivery systems. Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov serves as the head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces, and a couple of weeks ago he held a public briefing at which he suggested that elements of the American government had probably been responsible for unleashing the global Covid epidemic.

I mentioned his explosive accusations in a column, but otherwise they seem to have been almost entirely ignored in both the American mainstream and even alternative media. Instead, the only significant American response was that Twitter suspended the official account of the Russian Foreign Ministry after it distributed the remarks of that top Russian general.

 

Once again, except for a column of my own, the censorship Twitter had suddenly imposed upon the Russian government for such accusatory statements passed almost entirely unnoticed by American mainstream and alternative media outlets alike.

Major declarations by top Russian military leaders surely receive extensive coverage in Russia’s own domestic media, so I’d assume that a substantial fraction of the Russian population now believes that the Covid virus which has killed more than 15 million people worldwide may have been an American product, engineered and released by our national security apparatus. But a near-total media embargo—extending to alternative outlets—has ensured that such notions remain completely excluded from American minds. Apparently, our editors follow the principle “What we don’t know can’t hurt us.”

Over the last couple of years I have been repeatedly struck by the complete unwillingness of virtually any mainstream or alternative Western journalist to take notice of the very strong evidence of America’s culpability in the Covid epidemic, evidence that I have presented in a long series of articles first beginning in April 2020.

Earlier this month I sent this plaintive note to a member of America’s elite establishment with whom I’ve been friendly for many years:

 …the whole situation just staggers the imagination.

For the same of argument, let’s assume I’m correct and there’s at least a pretty good chance that the blowback from an unauthorized biowarfare attack has now killed a million Americans.

Can you think of anything in the history of the world let alone the history of America that’s comparable to that? As I argued in one of my recent articles, it’s probably 1000x a greater worldwide disaster than Chernobyl.

And the notion that absolutely no one is willing to discuss it is just unbelievable. It’s not like Stalin’s NKVD will ship them off to the Gulag if they say anything. I mean it’s one thing if people are fearful of being shot, but it’s another thing if they’re merely fearful of being criticized on Twitter…

I just can’t understand why absolutely no one is willing to take a public stand on this issue. Once all the facts came out more than a year ago, I assumed the dam would break any week. 

And his reply:

 It is quite amazing. 

From the very beginning of the epidemic, our media and propaganda organs, whether mainstream or alternative, have successfully insulated the American public from the crucial information that might allow them to properly understand what had happened in their lives. As I noted in my original April 2020 article:

 As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hated Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence? 

In a later article I emphasized that Iran’s top leadership had certainly recognized these obvious facts at the time:

 By early March 2020, the Iranian general overseeing his country’s biowarfare defense had already begun suggesting that Covid was a Western biological attack against his country and China, and a couple of days later the semiofficial Iranian news agency FARS quoted Iran’s top Revolutionary Guards military commander as declaring:
 Today, the country is engaged in a biological battle. We will prevail in the fight against this virus, which might be the product of an American biological [attack], which first spread in China and then to the rest of the world…America should know that if it has done so, it will return to itself. 
Soon afterward, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei  took the same public position, while populist former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became especially vocal on Twitter for several months, even directing his formal accusations to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Just a single one of his numerous Tweets drew many thousands of Retweets and Likes. 

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 Iranian radio and television and its international news service repeatedly carried these stories, backed by supportive interviews with a top political aide to Malaysia’s former prime minister. But America’s overwhelming domination over the English-language global media ensured that this major international controversy never came to my attention at the time it occurred.

The blockade preventing these Iranian charges from reaching the English-speaking world was further facilitated by American control over the basic infrastructure of the Internet. Just one month earlier, Iran’s PressTV channel for Britain had been deleted by YouTube, following the earlier removal of its main global channel. Most recently, the American government took the unprecedented action of seizing PressTV‘s Internet domain, completely eliminating all access to that website. 

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The original Covid outbreak had struck Wuhan at the height of China’s confrontation with the United States. By March 2020 official Chinese media was reporting that the virus might have been brought to that city by American military personnel when they participated in the World Military Games held there, with an official spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry creating a diplomatic incident when he Tweeted out those accusations.

I’ve been told that such theories of American responsibility have become endemic on Chinese social media, and last year China’s second largest official news agency briefly summarized my own views on its website.

Similarly, Sputnik News, a mainstream Russian media outlet with 20 million visits per month, recently published a short interview with me regarding the likely origins of Covid. Around the same time, a leading Iranian television channel interviewed me for five hours in preparation for a series they plan to broadcast in the near future.

Government officials and the general public of Russia, Iran, and China both seem increasingly aware of these important facts and the controversial scenario they suggest, so I find it difficult to understand how legitimate American national interests are served by keeping that same information away from the American people. Yet this continuing climate of near-absolute censorship has been maintained not only within the mainstream media but also by nearly all alternative journalists and outlets. Even when American figures of the greatest public stature and credibility have broken their silence, their statements have been ignored across almost the entire alternative media landscape.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University is the very high-ranking American academic who had served as the chairman of the Covid Commission established by the Lancet, a leading medical journal. In May he co-authored an important article in the prestigious PNAS journal arguing that the virus had probably been produced in a lab and calling for an independent inquiry into its true origins.

This bombshell declaration, which should have reached the front pages of the New York Times, was instead ignored by virtually every mainstream and alternative media outlet.

The following month, he reiterated his views while speaking at a small think-tank gathering in Spain, and a short clip of his remarks went super-viral, being retweeted out more than 11,000 times and attracting over a million views.

 

With the exception of an article in the London Daily Mail, this further bombshell was again entirely ignored by all outlets in both the mainstream and alternative press.

Finally, earlier this month he gave a lengthy and remarkably candid interview to Current Affairs, a small alternative media webzine, in which he focused on the strong evidence he had encountered of an apparent cover-up of Covid’s possible origins by individuals associated with the American government:

Once again, virtually no alternative journalist reported those astonishing allegations by the academic figure who had been best placed to make them.

When I brought his recent interview to the attention of several prominent mainstream individuals whom I personally know, they found it absolutely stunning. But apparently nearly every journalist in America thought otherwise, so its impact on the public debate has been almost nil.

Last week I published an account of the shocking McCain/POW scandal uncovered by the late Sydney Schanberg. Despite his stellar journalistic reputation and the mountain of evidence he had accumulated, his findings were totally ignored by the entire media, including by the Times, where he himself had previously served as one of the top editors. This notion of a story being too big or too dangerous for the media to cover certainly applies to the origins of the Covid epidemic.

Furthermore, the strategies used to suppress challenges to establishmentarian dogma may have grown much more sophisticated and effective. A couple of weeks ago I discussed this possibility in the aftermath of the Alex Jones trial, suggesting that techniques of “cognitive infiltration” may have been deployed against alternative organizations and activists, diverting them into blind alleys that dissipate their energies and severely damage their public credibility:

I speculated that the huge, sudden rise of a massive anti-vaxxing movement in America might be an example of this. A couple of years ago, vaccine issues were almost invisible, but soon after questions arose regarding the true origins of the Covid virus, the vaccination controversy moved to the absolute center stage of American public life, completely dominating the thoughts of most of those willing to challenge official orthodoxy on any other matter.

As a result, I suspect that a thousand times as much time and effort has recently been devoted to debating the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines than to investigating the true origins of the disease that made them necessary. And individuals or organizations who proclaim their fear that Bill Gates is the architect of a diabolical plot to exterminate most of the human race are hardly likely to be taken seriously by credible journalists or academics on any other matters.

The difficult year or two of lockdown conditions under which so many Americans had suffered fostered the social isolation that naturally allowed even the most fantastical ideas to take root among the fearful. Such an environment would have been ideal for the successful promotion across the Internet of debilitating nonsense promoted by organized propaganda-operatives.

Thus, since early 2020, the likely reality of an event of monumental historical importance—the unauthorized release of a military bioweapon that has killed so many millions worldwide—has been successfully suppressed within America and the rest of the West. In the past, other dramatic events such as the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks quickly sparked large-scale movements of citizen-activism challenging the questionable official narrative, but there currently exists no similar “Covid Truth Movement.”

Despite this unfortunate situation, there are some signs of hope, indications of a few embers that might eventually burst into flame.

First, growing coverage in the Russian, Iranian, and Chinese media may help pierce the wall of silence maintained by Western outlets, especially because the latter have become so severely discredited by their extremely skewed coverage of the conflict in Ukraine and the confrontation over Taiwan. At the very least, alternative journalists may finally gain the necessary courage to begin seriously exploring the origins of Covid.

In addition, Jeffrey Sachs, an extremely senior figure in the mainstream Covid firmament, has seemingly become willing to break the conspiracy of silence and raise issues that have been suppressed for more than two years. Although media outlets have scrupulously avoided publishing his statements, his public stature raises the possibility of successfully circumventing such gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, the facts are still out there. I recently reread my original April 2020 article that first raised these issues, and although more than two years have passed I found little in the text that I would wish to change.

Just days after that piece ran, our entire webzine was banned by Facebook and all our pages were deranked by Google. But although those harsh actions successfully suppressed what had been the viral spread of that article, they also underscored the potential importance of the arguments being made.

Over the next two years, I greatly expanded that first work into a lengthy series of articles, comprehensively covering the topic. Taken together, those pieces have now been viewed more than a half-million times, and the entire collection is now available both as a freely downloadable eBook and also as an Amazon paperback.

Even more heartening has been the growing viewership of my video presentations. Back in February, just before the outbreak of the Ukraine war diverted all attention in a different direction, I was interviewed several times by small podcasters, and these shows have attracted considerable audiences. Totaling around four hours of discussion, they have now accumulated over a million views on Rumble, with more than half of these coming during the last few weeks. Circumventing media gatekeepers is a crucial step in piercing the veil of ignorance maintained by the West’s reigning Lords of Illusion, and recognizing the reality of our global disaster.

Kevin Barrett, FFWN • February 16, 2022 • 15m

Video Link

Geopolitics & Empire • February 1, 2022 • 75m

Video Link

Red Ice TV • February 3, 2022 • 130m

Video Link

Related Reading:

The “experts” nail it again!

Guest Post by Simon Black

In March of 421 BC, after years of escalating conflict, Athens and Sparta finally decided to bury the hatchet and coexist peacefully together in the Mediterranean.

The two powers had been at odds for decades. Athens had ballooned into a regional empire, and Sparta itself was a rising power.

The two sides came to blows on multiple occasions. And even when they agreed to keep the peace in 421 BC, tensions were still high. All it took was one idiot to screw it up.

His name was Alcibiades, a Greek politician of noble birth. Alcibiades was pretty infamous in Athens; he was known for being corrupt, deceitful, disloyal, arrogant, and short-tempered.

I’m serious. There are numerous accounts from ancient historians who wrote in excruciating detail about what a terrible person Alcibiades was. Plutarch tells us, for example, about a time that Alcibiades cheated in a wrestling match by biting his opponent (to no one’s surprise) and how he mutilated his own dog.

Even poor Socrates tried, and failed, to teach Alcibiades about ethics and morality.

But despite his horrendous reputation, Alcibiades still managed to catapult himself into positions of high power… and to remain there… primarily due to his political cunning.

In fact Alcibiades was essentially the Speaker of the Athenian Assembly, with the power to dictate the day’s agenda and influence the outcome of votes.

Alcibiades was so powerful that, during the summer of 418 BC, he decided (without any approval from the government) to pay a visit to the Peloponnese in southern Greece– territory that was claimed by Sparta.

There was absolutely zero upside in Alcibiades doing this. It was just a big circus act for him to show off his power and prestige. He didn’t care if Sparta would be outraged, or if his actions had consequences for Athens. All that mattered to Alcibiades was that people were talking about him.

Naturally his actions did have consequences.

Smaller city-states in the Peloponnese were emboldened by Alcibiades’ trip to the region, so they forged a fledgling alliance and attempted to seize a strategic settlement located at Sparta’s southern border.

With their border security threatened, Sparta sent an army to push away the invaders; the resulting battle was a massive victory for Sparta and a huge embarrassment for Athens. But Alcibiades blamed one of his political opponents for the defeat, so he never took the fall for his own mistake.

The conflict quickly escalated further, and soon Athens and Sparta were once again in a full-blown war with each other– one that Athens would ultimately lose to its rival.

I’m writing this, of course, at a time when US Speaker Nancy Pelosi has just touched down in Taiwan.

But she’s not stupid. She knows there are consequences. The Chinese have made it very clear that they do not want Pelosi going to Taiwan. Tensions are already high between the US and China, and this trip certainly won’t help.

Now, obviously it’s not up to China to dictate US policy or actions. But like Alcibiades’ trip to the Peloponnese in 418 BC, there is absolutely zero benefit in Pelosi going to Taiwan.

The US economy is in a tailspin. Parents can’t find baby formula for their infants. Inflation is raging. People are suffering.

What exactly does this woman hope to achieve? Will her visit to Taiwan somehow make inflation miraculously retreat? Will baby formula suddenly appear on the shelves?

Of course not. So if there’s no benefit for Americans, then why go at all?

On the flip side, the trip does present a number of risks. China doesn’t want to look weak, and whatever retaliatory action they take probably won’t be positive for the US.

China’s initial response has been predictably swift. They’ve already kicked off live-fire military exercises, i.e. real weapons and munitions, and have essentially encircled Taiwan by sea. Apparently these military exercises will include missile tests off Taiwan’s east coast.

The US, meanwhile, has positioned at least two naval vessels and several fighter jets close to Taiwan’s east coast, increasing the potential for conflict, or even just an accident.

Hopefully nothing catastrophic happens. But, again, what exactly is the point of this trip? It’s all risk and no reward… just so that Pelosi can showboat in front of the cameras before her retirement next year.

You’d think that someone with decades of political experience– an ‘expert’ in international diplomacy– would understand such a simple reality, and then rationally choose the course of action which will benefit her country the most. But that’s a laughable proposition.

Pelosi has a multi-decade track record of deceit, disloyalty, cowardice, and arrogance. She’s even despised by prominent members of her own party.

Ironically, the only reason Pelosi even has a job is because a mere 73,815 voters in the San Francsico Bay area chose to send her to Congress. That’s a tiny fraction of the US population in a tiny corner of the country.

Seriously, more people voted to elect the mayor of Denver, Colorado than voted for Nancy Pelosi. Yet somehow Pelosi has enormous power and influence in global politics.

Something is clearly wrong with this system that produces such bizarre, lopsided outcomes from serially corrupt and incompetent candidates.

Pelosi is just one of countless examples– a #mefirst, self-centered hypocrite who has become the modern day Alcibiades.

And she’ll most likely go down in history with a similar reputation as he did.

Kindness

“I just went to buy a Samsung washer and dryer from a guy that was asking $500. I told him that I just had a baby and asked if he could take $400, that I would be really grateful. When I got home and hooked everything up, they both worked great. I opened up the dryer to check the lint filter and was shocked to find my $400 in there. I got a message from him saying ‘check the dryer, a gift for the new baby’. Man words can not describe how grateful I am right now.

I feel so blessed right now I felt I had to share, big shout out to the man David! Thank you so much!” – Chris Blaze

Kindness makes the world a kinder place.

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The world is full of interesting stories, but we are living in tumultuous times

This article contains the full text of the Chinese white paper on the Taiwan reunification issue. We also cover various other interesting and curious side issues, stories and themes that have become a staple on MM, such as food and ambulatory fungus. I hope you all enjoy this article.

Muesli

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Muesli

This is my cat. His name is Muesli. He may look cute with his heart shaped blob on his nose, but in reality he is a South London geezer cat who wants to bite me all of the time.

He doesn’t, but he wants to.

He is my boy & I prefer him to most people.

He is also a hopeless cheese addict & even becomes temporarily strokable if given lightly fried fresh mackerel.

He is very spoilt but he deserves to be as he had a rough start in life & would have no doubt been put down at an early age due to his “challenging” behaviour.

I have been his dad for over 10 years now & would not swap him for anything.

Harsh life truth

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A taste of America

Check out these views of America…

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Evaldas Rimasauska

The story of Evaldas Rimasauska’s crazy – but surprisingly successful – plan to steal $120 million from Google and Facebook is worth telling.

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Evaldas Rimasauska

At the start of 2013, Rimasauska registered a company in Latvia called Quanta Computer, which is identical in name to that of a Hardware manufacturing company from Taiwan. A bit suspicious, right?

Then, over a period of two years, he repeatedly sent invoices (complete with fraudulent stamps, signatures, and a very large amount of corporate and legal jargon) to google and Facebook for products from his fake company that he had never sold. Sounds like a pretty stupid idea. Surely a company with some of the best legal and financial minds would just discard these fake invoices?

Well, as you probably guessed, they did not.

Seemingly without questioning it, two of the biggest tech giants around transferred millions and millions to Rimasauka. He’d keep sending them fake invoices, and they would always pay up. Eventually, Rimasauska racked up a lot of cash, taking $23 million from Google and $99 million from Facebook.

He didn’t stay rich for long though.

Almost inevitablely, people soon caught on to him, and he is now spending five years behind bars for wire fraud.

People will always associate financial fraud with large scale, complicated and elaborate schemes — perhaps hacking into servers, or stealing confidential documents. But the interesting thing about this case is it shows that huge companies can still fall victim to such simplistic methods.

Be the Rufus

On a day in 2005, the fifth year in to our fruitful career after a hard time of the past 10 years.

A man called me informing that a very good piece of land was on urgent sale. After I heard about the location I headed towards it, as by coincidence my wife and I were in the city and just nearby. We visited the land.

It was one of many empty lands around there.

We decided to meet the owner, though the price seemed to be a bit of high. But the land seemed potential.

The man was a retired high ranked public servant and genuinely a gentleman, living in his rented apartment. He looked tired and mentally distressed, but my eyes did not miss that he was pretending “all is ok.” The plot on sale is what he got allotted by the government to make his home, as a reward for his lifelong services to the nation.

At the opening on the deal, I asked, “What’s the best price you can offer us, sir?” Very impatiently he responded, “No, I can’t reduce the price at all! You can think over and call me someday later.”

To make the situation easy and light, I curiously asked, “That’s a lot of money, what are you going to do with that much money, sir?”

He could not keep it undisclosed any longer. Very restlessly he uttered, “My 11-year old son is a cancer patient, at early stage. My younger daughter is in Uni. I need lot more than this money.”

We were not ready for such an answer.

My wife and I got just mute, like we had no word to say again. Looked at each other, stunned. Then we got into an awkward silence for few long moments, but that made the man seemingly more impatient.

My wife, a graduate in Marketing in contrast to my liberal arts background, is extra-careful on spending as I occasionally make mistakes (in her definition!). She had warned me on the way that it was she who would negotiate the price and I should just keep quiet! Yeah, it was obviously a big money for us at that stage. Decision had to be very calculative.

Now I set my eyes onto her. But this time she held on in a confused, stubborn silence. A silence I was familiar with, though.

Well, silence is approval, as I took it to be. I turned to the man.

“Well sir, alright, we confirm the deal at your price.”

The gentleman, and the broker at his beside, seemed to be having difficulty to understand my words. He tried to end the meeting up here, “Okay, think and let me know later.”

Now my wife took the lead, “Sir, it’s confirmed. We’ll get the deal go through tomorrow morning itself. Give me your bank details.” He seemed to have fallen from the sky and found the world to be a joke on the ground.

We instructed the broker to prepare the papers the next day and confirmed that we would go to the Registry Office after lunch.

We accomplished the deal that day, as planned.

Almost 13 long years had passed by. As we live in overseas and were very occupied with our occupations, we did not think much about that land through all those years.

During a visit in 2017 to our home country we went to see the land.

All the surrounded lands were now filled with high rise (6–7 stories) residential blocks, the area was now within the Capital City’s extended diplomatic zone.

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Then US$85,000 land, now valued at more than US$3.5 million.

It is like a holy dust turned to diamond to our luck.


Readers, by the way, you might be anxiously waiting to know what happened with that man and his children at last?

Despite we were busy in overseas, I have kept in touch with him. But I never let him know what led us to make a hasty purchase that day at that high price he demanded. And I really do not wish to spell it here as well. I’d like to let it remain as it has been— a deal, from which wenhave barely benefited, and my two growing children will benefit in their life.

His son recovered from cancer. The daughter completed her university. They are all fine now. The gentleman, Brig. Gen. Khijir Mohammad (rtd.), is now at his 80’s and spends the mornings walking with his friends and most of the rest of his time in gardening.

We wish him a long and healthy life, and all the best for his family.

Brandon Grimshaw

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Brandon Grimshaw

For 13 thousand dollars, Englishman Brandon Grimshaw bought a tiny uninhabited island in the Seychelles and moved there forever. When the Englishman Brandon Grimshaw was under forty, he quit his job as a newspaper editor and started a new life.

By this time, no human had set foot on the island for 50 years. As befits a real Robinson, Brandon found himself a companion from among the natives. His Friday name was René Lafortin. Together with Rene, Brandon began to equip his new home. While René came to the island only occasionally, Brandon lived on it for decades, never leaving. By oneself.

For 39 years, Grimshaw and Lafortin planted 16 thousand trees with their own hands and built almost 5 kilometers of paths. In 2007, Rene Lafortin died, and Brandon was left all alone on the island.

He was 81 years old. He attracted 2,000 new bird species to the island and introduced more than a hundred giant tortoises, which in the rest of the world (including the Seychelles) were already on the verge of extinction. Thanks to Grimshaw’s efforts, the once deserted island now hosts two-thirds of the Seychelles’ fauna. An abandoned piece of land has turned into a real paradise.

A few years ago, the prince of Saudi Arabia offered Brandon Grimshaw $50 million for the island, but Robinson refused. “I don’t want the island to become a favorite vacation spot for the rich. Better let it be a national park that everyone can enjoy.”

And he achieved that in 2008 the island was indeed declared a national park.

Quick Chicken Quesadillas

If you’ve been on the hunt for an easy chicken and cheese quesadilla recipe, congratulations—you’ve found it! With a few simple shortcut ingredients, you can have warm, cheesy and easy chicken quesadillas on the table in less than half an hour. Talk about a fuss-free dinner!

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Quick Chicken Quesadillas

Ingredients

  • 6 oz refrigerated cooked Southwest-flavor chicken breast strips (from 9- or 12-oz package)
  • 1/2 cup Old El Paso™ Thick ‘n Chunky salsa
  • 1 package (11 oz) Old El Paso™ Flour Tortillas for Burritos (8 Count)
  • Cooking spray
  • 2 cups finely shredded Colby-Monterey Jack cheese blend (8 oz)
  • 1/4 cup sour cream

Steps

  • 1
    Cut chicken into bite-size pieces. In small bowl, mix chicken and salsa.
  • 2
    Spray 1 side of 1 tortilla with cooking spray; place sprayed side down on work surface. Layer with one-fourth of the chicken mixture and 1/2 cup of the cheese. Top with another tortilla; spray top of tortilla with cooking spray.
  • 3
    Cook in 10-inch nonstick skillet over medium heat 4 to 6 minutes, carefully turning after 2 minutes, until golden brown. Repeat with remaining tortillas, chicken mixture and cheese. To serve, cut quesadillas into wedges. Serve with sour cream and, if desired, additional salsa.

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The Stermer Family

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The Stermer Family

The Germans invaded Ukraine in 1941, and they began to order Jews to the ghettos. Esther Stermer, the matriarch of her family, refused to bring her family into the ghettos. The Stermers lived in Korolowka when the Nazis arrived in fall of 1942. The Gestapo began to force the Jews of the city into trucks to transport them to the concentration camps. Over the next few weeks, the Germans found the remaining Jews left in the city and forced them to dig their graves before killing them.

The Stermers and five families fled the town in the middle of the night and found shelter in a cave. For a year and a half, the families lived underground, hiding from the Germans. In all, thirty-eight people were living in the cave. They stayed hidden during the day, and they would come out at night for food and supplies. Eventually, the Germans found the cave in which they were hiding.

When the Germans found the cave, Esther confronted the soldiers. She reportedly said, “What are you afraid of here? The Fuhrer is going to lose the war because we live here?” The German SS soldiers left the cave and never came back. When the Russians liberated Ukraine in 1944, the families were able to come out of hiding.

The Stermers and the five other families successfully remained in hiding for eighteen months, the longest underground survival event in history. After the war, Esther Stermer wrote a memoir of their experiences called We Fight to Survive.

Photos: The Stermer Family

Bottom: The cave they hid in

Ilha da Queimada Grande

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Have a look at Ilha da Queimada Grande. Located in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil. Looks like a normal island, right? Until I say something.

This island has snakes (it is also called “Snake Island”). And, I mean a lot of snakes; one snake to every metre square. It’s like walking 3 feet and discovering another snake.

What makes it more intimidating is this creature:

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The Golden lancehead viper.

The Golden lancehead viper. They are found nowhere else on Earth but here. It is estimated that there are 2,000 to 4,000 of them. Its venom is so strong that human skin can melt when it comes in contact with it.

There is a lighthouse in the island and it is believed that a family used to control it. But, one day the snake entered through open window and the family were bitten to death. Terrifying story just to think of.

Humans are barred to go into the island which is absolutely relevant and valid. I believe we shouldn’t be trying to intrude into the island and disturb their ecosystem. They’re there as they are and so it should be.

Harsh life truth

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Growing old

The  social worker in charge of my mother’s case told us we had to either place my mother in a locked memory care facility, or she would be involuntarily committed to the state mental hospital.

Mom had tried to run over two police officers with her car and had violently resisted arrest.

She was a danger to herself and to others.

This is Mom during her modeling days.

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It all started with a call from a neighbor in the small mountain town where Mom had lived for almost 25 years. Mom’s beautiful home and garden, which had been a feature on the local garden club’s spring tour for years, had become neglected and cluttered in the space of a few months. I live about 4 hours drive from where Mom lived. I visited with my husband and kids or on my own every few months. My mother had always been eccentric. So, when she started behaving in a way that would have been strange for other people, we just thought it was standard Mom eccentric behavior.

I always thought that dementia presented as forgetfulness and confusion. But my mother had a form of dementia called frontotemporal dementia (FTD), that presents with personality changes rather than memory problems. By the time someone with FTD becomes forgetful, the disease has progressed to phase 2. FTD starts much younger than Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia. Basically, what happens is that the frontal lobe of the brain, which acts kind of like the adult voice in our brain, starts to atrophy. The frontal lobe also plays an important role in creating our personality. The stuff that makes you you in your brain, is destroyed by FTD.

It is difficult to diagnose because it can manifest as early as the forties. Most doctors start considering dementia as a diagnosis only in people over 65, and only look for Alzheimer’s symptoms. People with FTD can look like someone going through a mid-life crisis.

The behaviors FTD produces are so dangerous and often violent, many don’t survive the first phase. If my mother had been anyone but an attractive upper middle class older white woman, I do not know if she would have survived her violent encounter with the cops, or any of the other dangerous situations her FTD created.

After the neighbors called to let me know what was happening, I visited and immediately realized something was wrong. Mom agreed to move close to us. We found her a house nearby, and I somehow convinced her to give me financial power of attorney so I could take care of the real estate transactions. My mother was a widow and I’m an only child. Other than me, her only family is her brother in Kansas.

It took many trips to the emergency room after she moved to her house near us before a doctor finally recommended we see a neuropsychiatrist. Mom had a CT Scan after a fall that showed significant atrophy of the frontal lobe. By the time we finally got a diagnosis about a year after she moved, Mom was in the advanced phase of FTD. The doctor who diagnosed her told us the following:

  • Someone with the level of FTD my mother had was incapable of making adult decisions.
  • telling her about her diagnosis would be counter productive. Her memory was still intact, so she would remember the diagnosis and be upset and confused by it.
  • She needed daily care, which would quickly turn into 24/7 care. At that point, I would not consider memory care or assisted living. But the doctor said that was coming, and coming fast.
  • as bad as things were at that moment, they were about to get a million times worse.

My beautiful mother who had been a renowned hostess and fundraiser for charity, had turned into a kleptomaniac who cursed like a sailor and had a thing for handsome Black guys in their twenties. I cannot imagine how awful it must have been for these young guys who are just doing their jobs or walking down the street to be sexually harassed by someone’s grandma. She was violent, mean, profane, and inappropriate on every level.

I want to note here that even as our country and society seems to be devolving into nastiness, everyone we encountered while Mom was in her FTD crazy town phase as I called it, was wonderful. The cashiers at Walmart who understood when I brought back plants she had stolen. The young man who worked in hospital billing who was just trying to do his job while Mom hit on him, was kind and understanding. The sales lady who did not make a fuss when I returned the $200 cashmere scarf Mom had stolen. The cops who picked her up wandering the country roads in our town. The staff and customers in the coffee shop where Mom let loose a string of profanity at me in front of my kids and other families that would make a gangster rapper blush, were so kind when I explained about FTD.

Even the young police officer who cried on my shoulder about how hard he tried not to hurt her while she attacked him, was wonderful. He was covered with bruises and scratches and my mother did not have a scratch on her. He and his partner had pulled over Mom for driving erratically. She tried to run them over with her car when they asked her to get out. Then when she finally got out, she fought them hard, biting and scratching and kicking.

After the trying to kill the cops incident, the social workers at UNC told us it was 2 weeks of memory care or the state hospital. She was in the UNC psychiatric ER for 72 hours on an involuntary hold and released to memory care. I still didn’t want to take her out of her home after her mandated two weeks in memory care were over. I know. Who’s the crazy one here? So, we hired 24/7 nurses. Mom was so violent and aggressive and sexual, I could not have her living with us and our young children. The nurses lasted a couple of months. But Mom was violent with them and snuck out while they were sleeping multiple times.

Finally, here is the answer to the question about how I made my decision to send Mom to a facility:

  • the social worker at UNC kept following up and telling me she needed locked memory care.
  • the social worker assigned to us in Chatham county where her house was told us Mom needed locked memory care.
  • the 911 dispatcher called me after our fourth wandering pickup and said we needed locked memory care.
  • the cops who dropped her off after she had been wandering told us she needed locked memory care.
  • I started seeing a therapist at the recommendation of Mom’s neuropsychiatrist. She told me Mom would not be safe without memory care. She also told me that I needed to prioritize the health and safety of my children and myself. Mom was taking all my energy, emotional bandwidth and time.

Honestly, it was not until the therapist told me how this was hurting my children that things finally clicked for me. Mom’s care took so much out of me. I was a mess and unable to parent well. Looking back, I wish I had placed her in memory care once we had the diagnosis. But I don’t know how I could have done it. She would have acted out violently if I tried. And I still wanted to keep her in her home. Mom was fiercely independent and always needed a lot of alone quiet time. Being in a group facility would have been her worst nightmare before the FTD hijacked her brain. By the time she got there, I’m not sure she understood where she was or why.

After 18 months in a lovely memory care facility that cost $9,400/month, Mom passed this April. I try to remember the beautiful eccentric brilliant person who raised me. FTD took her away years before she died.

I don’t have any advice beyond remembering that you have to value your kids and your family and yourself as much as you value your loved one who needs care beyond what can be provided at home. Safety is the first priority for everyone. I hope she would approve of the decisions I made. None of it easy. None of it.

Some views of America

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Full text: China’s white paper on Taiwan and reunification
By Xinhua

BEIJING – The Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council and the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China published a white paper titled “The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era” on Wednesday.

The following is the full text of the white paper:

The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era

The People’s Republic of China

The Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council and The State Council Information Office

August 2022

Contents

Preamble

I. Taiwan Is Part of China - This Is an Indisputable Fact

II. Resolute Efforts of the CPC to Realize China's Complete Reunification

III. China's Complete Reunification Is a Process That Cannot Be Halted

IV. National Reunification in the New Era

V. Bright Prospects for Peaceful Reunification

Conclusion

Preamble

Resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China’s complete reunification is a shared aspiration of all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation. It is indispensable for the realization of China’s rejuvenation. It is also a historic mission of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The CPC, the Chinese government, and the Chinese people have striven for decades to achieve this goal.

The 18th National Congress of the CPC in 2012 heralded a new era in building socialism with Chinese characteristics. Under the strong leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Xi Jinping at the core, the CPC and the Chinese government have adopted new and innovative measures in relation to Taiwan. They have continued to chart the course of cross-Straits relations, safeguard peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits, and promote progress towards national reunification. However, in recent years the Taiwan authorities, led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), have redoubled their efforts to divide the country, and some external forces have tried to exploit Taiwan to contain China, prevent the Chinese nation from achieving complete reunification, and halt the process of national rejuvenation.

The CPC has united the Chinese people and led them in fulfilling the First Centenary Goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects as scheduled, and in embarking on a new journey towards the Second Centenary Goal of building China into a modern socialist country.

The Chinese nation has achieved a historic transformation from standing upright to becoming prosperous and growing in strength, and national rejuvenation is driven by an unstoppable force. This marks a new starting point for reunification.

The Chinese government has published two previous white papers on Taiwan. One was The Taiwan Question and Reunification of China in August 1993, and the other was The One-China Principle and the Taiwan Issue in February 2000. These two white papers provided a comprehensive and systematic elaboration of the basic principles and policies regarding the resolution of the Taiwan question. This new white paper is being released to reiterate the fact that Taiwan is part of China, to demonstrate the resolve of the CPC and the Chinese people and their commitment to national reunification, and to emphasize the position and policies of the CPC and the Chinese government in the new era.

I. Taiwan Is Part of China – This Is an Indisputable Fact

Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times. This statement has a sound basis in history and jurisprudence. New archeological discoveries and research findings regularly attest to the profound historical and cultural ties between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits. A large number of historical records and annals document the development of Taiwan by the Chinese people in earlier periods.

The earliest references to this effect are to be found, among others, in Seaboard Geographic Gazetteer compiled in the year 230 by Shen Ying of the State of Wu during the Three Kingdoms Period. The royal court of the Sui Dynasty had on three occasions sent troops to Taiwan, called Liuqiu at that time. Starting from the Song and Yuan dynasties, the imperial central governments of China all set up administrative bodies to exercise jurisdiction over Penghu and Taiwan.

In 1624, Dutch colonialists invaded and occupied the southern part of Taiwan. In 1662, General Zheng Chenggong, hailed as a national hero, led an expedition and expelled them from the island. Subsequently, the Qing court gradually set up more administrative bodies in Taiwan. In 1684, a Taiwan prefecture administration was set up under the jurisdiction of Fujian Province. In 1885, Taiwan’s status was upgraded and it became the 20th province of China.

In July 1894, Japan launched a war of aggression against China. In April 1895, the defeated Qing government was forced to cede Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan. During the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-1945), China’s Communists called for the recovery of Taiwan. Talking with American journalist Nym Wales on May 15, 1937, Mao Zedong said that China’s goal was to achieve a final victory in the war – a victory that would recover the occupied Chinese territories in Northeast China and to the south of the Shanhai Pass, and secure the liberation of Taiwan.

On December 9, 1941, the Chinese government issued a declaration of war against Japan, and proclaimed that all treaties, conventions, agreements, and contracts regarding relations between China and Japan had been abrogated, and that China would recover Taiwan and the Penghu Islands.

The Cairo Declaration issued by China, the United States and the United Kingdom on December 1, 1943 stated that it was the purpose of the three allies that all the territories Japan had stolen from China, such as Northeast China, Taiwan and the Penghu Islands, should be restored to China.

The Potsdam Proclamation was signed by China, the United States and the United Kingdom on July 26, 1945, and subsequently recognized by the Soviet Union. It reiterated: “The terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out.” In September of the same year, Japan signed the instrument of surrender, in which it promised that it would faithfully fulfill the obligations laid down in the Potsdam Proclamation. On October 25 the Chinese government announced that it was resuming the exercise of sovereignty over Taiwan, and the ceremony to accept Japan’s surrender in Taiwan Province of the China war theater of the Allied powers was held in Taibei (Taipei). From that point forward, China had recovered Taiwan de jure and de facto through a host of documents with international legal effect.

On October 1, 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded, becoming the successor to the Republic of China (1912-1949), and the Central People’s Government became the only legitimate government of the whole of China. The new government replaced the previous KMT regime in a situation where China, as a subject under international law, did not change and China’s sovereignty and inherent territory did not change. As a natural result, the government of the PRC should enjoy and exercise China’s full sovereignty, which includes its sovereignty over Taiwan.

As a result of the civil war in China in the late 1940s and the interference of external forces, the two sides of the Taiwan Straits have fallen into a state of protracted political confrontation. But the sovereignty and territory of China have never been divided and will never be divided, and Taiwan’s status as part of China’s territory has never changed and will never be allowed to change.

At its 26th session in October 1971, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758, which undertook “to restore all its rights to the People’s Republic of China and to recognize the representatives of its Government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations, and to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place which they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it”. This resolution settled once and for all the political, legal and procedural issues of China’s representation in the UN, and it covered the whole country, including Taiwan. It also spelled out that China has one single seat in the UN, so there is no such thing as “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan”.

The specialized agencies of the UN later adopted further resolutions restoring to the PRC its lawful seat and expelling the representatives of the Taiwan authorities. One of these is Resolution 25.1 adopted at the 25th World Health Assembly in May 1972. It was clearly stated in the official legal opinions of the Office of Legal Affairs of the UN Secretariat that “the United Nations considers ‘Taiwan’ as a province of China with no separate status”, and the “‘authorities’ in ‘Taipei’ are not considered to… enjoy any form of government status”. At the UN the island is referred to as “Taiwan, Province of China”[1].

Resolution 2758 is a political document encapsulating the one-China principle whose legal authority leaves no room for doubt and has been acknowledged worldwide. Taiwan does not have any ground, reason, or right to join the UN, or any other international organization whose membership is confined to sovereign states.

In recent years some elements in a small number of countries, the US foremost among them, have colluded with forces in Taiwan, to falsely claim that the resolution did not conclusively resolve the issue of Taiwan’s representation. Puffing up the illegal and invalid Treaty of San Francisco[2] and disregarding the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation and other international legal documents, they profess that the status of Taiwan has yet to be determined, and declare their support for “Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the UN system”. What they are actually attempting to do is to alter Taiwan’s status as part of China and create “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan” as part of a political ploy – using Taiwan to contain China. These actions in violation of Resolution 2758 and international law are a serious breach of political commitments made by these countries. They damage China’s sovereignty and dignity, and treat the basic principles of international law with contempt. The Chinese government has condemned and expressed its resolute opposition to them.

The one-China principle represents the universal consensus of the international community; it is consistent with the basic norms of international relations. To date, 181 countries including the United States have established diplomatic relations with the PRC on the basis of the one-China principle. The China-US Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, published in December 1978, states: “The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.” It also states: “The United States of America recognizes the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China. Within this context, the people of the United States will maintain cultural, commercial, and other unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan.”

The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, adopted at the Fifth Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress (NPC) in December 1982, stipulates: “Taiwan is part of the sacred territory of the People’s Republic of China. It is the inviolable duty of all Chinese people, including our compatriots in Taiwan, to accomplish the great task of reunifying the motherland.”

The Anti-Secession Law, adopted at the Third Session of the 10th NPC in March 2005, stipulates: “There is only one China in the world. Both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China. China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity brook no division. Safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is the common obligation of all Chinese people, the Taiwan compatriots included. Taiwan is part of China. The state shall never allow the ‘Taiwan independence’ secessionist forces to make Taiwan secede from China under any name or by any means.”

The National Security Law, adopted at the 15th meeting of the Standing Committee of the 12th NPC in July 2015, stipulates: “The sovereignty and territorial integrity of China brook no violation or separation. Safeguarding national sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity is the common duty of all Chinese citizens, including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan compatriots.”

We are one China, and Taiwan is part of China. This is an indisputable fact supported by history and the law. Taiwan has never been a state; its status as part of China is unalterable. Any attempt to distort these facts and dispute or deny the one-China principle will end in failure.

II. Resolute Efforts of the CPC to Realize China’s Complete Reunification

The CPC has always been dedicated to working for the wellbeing of the Chinese people and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Soon after its founding in 1921, the CPC set itself the goal of freeing Taiwan from colonial rule, reuniting it with the rest of the country and liberating the whole nation, including compatriots in Taiwan. It has made a tremendous effort to achieve this goal.

The CPC is committed to the historic mission of resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China’s complete reunification. Under its resolute leadership, people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits have worked together to de-escalate tension across the Straits. They have set out on a path of peaceful development and made many breakthroughs in improving cross-Straits relations.

After the founding of the PRC in 1949, China’s Communists, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, proposed the essential guideline, underlying principle, and basic policy for peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question. The CPC prepared and worked for the liberation of Taiwan, thwarted the Taiwan authorities’ plans to attack the mainland, and foiled attempts to create “two Chinas” and “one China, one Taiwan”. Through their efforts, the lawful seat and rights of the PRC in the United Nations were restored and the one-China principle was subscribed to by the majority of countries, laying important groundwork for peaceful reunification. The CPC central leadership established high-level contact with the Taiwan authorities through proper channels in pursuit of a peaceful solution to the Taiwan question.

Following the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee in 1978, with the establishment of diplomatic relations between the PRC and the United States, China’s Communists, led by Deng Xiaoping, defined the fundamental guideline for peaceful reunification in the vital interests of the country and the people and on the basis of the consensus for peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question. The CPC introduced the creative and well-conceived concept of One Country, Two Systems, and applied it first in resolving the questions of Hong Kong and Macao. It took action to ease military confrontation across the Taiwan Straits, restore contact, and open up people-to-people exchanges and cooperation, opening a new chapter in cross-Straits relations.

After the Fourth Plenary Session of the 13th CPC Central Committee in 1989, China’s Communists, led by Jiang Zemin, made eight proposals for the development of cross-Straits relations and the peaceful reunification of China[3]. The CPC facilitated agreement across the Straits on the 1992 Consensus, which embodies the one-China principle. It initiated cross-Straits consultations and negotiations, resulting in the first talks between heads of the non-governmental organizations authorized by the two sides of the Straits, and expanded cross-Straits exchanges and cooperation in various fields. The CPC took firm action against separatist activities led by Lee Teng-hui, and struck hard at the separatist forces seeking “Taiwan independence”. It ensured the smooth return of Hong Kong and Macao to China, and applied the policy of One Country, Two Systems, which had a constructive impact on the settlement of the Taiwan question.

After the 16th CPC National Congress in 2002, China’s Communists, led by Hu Jintao, highlighted the importance of peaceful development of cross-Straits relations. The CPC pushed for the enactment of the Anti-Secession Law to curb separatist activities in Taiwan, hosted the first talks between the leaders of the CPC and the Kuomintang in six decades since 1945, and defeated attempts by Chen Shui-bian to fabricate a legal basis for “independence”. The CPC effected profound changes in moving the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations forward by promoting institutionalized consultations and negotiations that produced fruitful results, establishing overall direct two-way links in mail, business and transport, and facilitating the signing and implementation of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement.

After the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, China’s Communists, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, took a holistic approach to cross-Straits relations in keeping with changing circumstances, added substance to the theory on national reunification and the principles and policies concerning Taiwan, and worked to keep cross-Straits relations on the right track. The CPC developed its overall policy for resolving the Taiwan question in the new era, and set out the overarching guideline and a program of action.

At its 19th National Congress in October 2017, the CPC affirmed the basic policy of upholding One Country, Two Systems and promoting national reunification, and emphasized its resolve never to allow any person, any organization, or any political party, at any time or in any form, to separate any part of Chinese territory from China.

In January 2019, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and president of China, addressed a meeting marking the 40th anniversary of the release of the Message to Compatriots in Taiwan. In his speech, Xi Jinping proposed major policies to advance the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations and the peaceful reunification of China in the new era. These are: first, working together to promote China’s rejuvenation and its peaceful reunification; second, seeking a Two Systems solution to the Taiwan question and making innovative efforts towards peaceful reunification; third, abiding by the one-China principle and safeguarding the prospects for peaceful reunification; fourth, further integrating development across the Straits and consolidating the foundations for peaceful reunification; fifth, forging closer bonds of heart and mind between people on both sides of the Straits and strengthening joint commitment to peaceful reunification.

The CPC and the Chinese government have thereby adopted a series of major measures for charting the course of cross-Straits relations and realizing China’s peaceful reunification:

– The CPC and the Chinese government have facilitated the first meeting and direct dialogue between leaders of the two sides since 1949, raising exchanges and interactions to new heights, opening up a new chapter, and creating new space for cross-Straits relations. This is a new milestone. The departments in charge of cross-Straits affairs on both sides have established regular contact and communication mechanisms on a common political foundation, and the heads of the two departments have exchanged visits and set up hotlines.

– Upholding the one-China principle and the 1992 Consensus, the CPC and the Chinese government have facilitated exchanges between political parties across the Straits, and conducted dialogues, consultations, and in-depth exchanges of views on cross-Straits relations and the future of the Chinese nation with relevant political parties, organizations, and individuals in Taiwan. These efforts have resulted in consensus on multiple issues, and promoted a number of joint initiatives exploring the Two Systems solution to the Taiwan question with all sectors of Taiwan society.

– Guided by the conviction that people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits are of the same family, the CPC and the Chinese government have promoted peaceful development of cross-Straits relations and integrated development of the two sides for the benefit of both the mainland and Taiwan. We have also refined the institutional arrangements, policies and measures to promote cross-Straits exchanges and cooperation, designed to advance the wellbeing of the people of Taiwan. These include the delivery of water from the coastal province of Fujian to Kinmen Island, electronic travel passes for Taiwan residents to enter or leave the mainland, residence permits for Taiwan residents, progressively ensuring that Taiwan compatriots have equal access to public services so as to facilitate their studying, starting businesses, working and living on the mainland, and an ongoing effort to pave the way for Taiwan to benefit first from the mainland’s development opportunities.

– While countering interference and obstruction from separatist forces, the CPC and the Chinese government have called on the people of Taiwan to promote effective and in-depth cooperation and people-to-people exchanges in various fields across the Straits. Having overcome the impact of COVID-19, we have held a number of exchange events such as the Straits Forum, and maintained the momentum of cross-Straits exchanges and cooperation.

– Resolute in defending state sovereignty and territorial integrity and opposing separatist activities and external interference, the CPC and the Chinese government have safeguarded peace and stability in the Taiwan Straits and the fundamental interests of the Chinese nation. We have taken lawful action against and effectively deterred separatist forces. We have handled Taiwan’s external exchanges in a sound manner, and consolidated the international community’s commitment to the one-China principle.

Under the guidance of the CPC, great progress has been made in cross-Straits relations over the past seven decades, especially since the estrangement between the two sides was ended. Increased exchanges, broader cooperation and closer interactions have brought tangible benefits to people across the Straits, especially of Taiwan. This fully demonstrates that cross-Straits amity and cooperation are mutually beneficial.

The volume of cross-Straits trade was only US$46 million in 1978. It rose to US$328.34 billion in 2021, up by a factor of more than 7,000. The mainland has been Taiwan’s largest export market for the last 21 years, generating a large annual surplus for the island. The mainland is also the largest destination for Taiwan’s off-island investment. By the end of 2021 Taiwan businesses had invested in almost 124,000 projects on the mainland, to a total value of US$71.34 billion[4].

In 1987 less than 50,000 visits were made between the two sides; by 2019 this number had soared to about 9 million. In the past three years, affected by COVID-19, online communication has become the main form of people-to-people interactions across the Straits, and the numbers of people participating in and covered by online communication are reaching new highs.

The CPC has always been the spine of the Chinese nation, exercising strong leadership in realizing national rejuvenation and reunification. Its consistent efforts over the decades to resolve the Taiwan question and achieve complete national reunification are based on the following:

First, the one-China principle must be upheld, and no individual or force should be allowed to separate Taiwan from China.

Second, it is imperative to strive for the wellbeing of all Chinese people, including those in Taiwan, and to realize the aspirations of all Chinese people for a better life.

Third, we must follow the principles of freeing the mind, seeking truth from facts, maintaining the right political orientation, and breaking new ground, and defend the fundamental interests of the nation and the core interests of the state in formulating principles and policies on work related to Taiwan.

Fourth, it is necessary to have the courage and skill to fight against any force that attempts to undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity or stands in the way of its reunification.

Fifth, extensive unity and solidarity must be upheld to mobilize all factors to fight against any force that would divide the country, and pool strengths to advance national reunification.

III. China’s Complete Reunification Is a Process That Cannot Be Halted

Against a backdrop of profound and complex changes in the domestic and international situation, our cause of complete national reunification is facing new challenges. The CPC and the Chinese government have the strength and the confidence to deal with complexities and overcome risks and threats, and the ability to take great strides forward on the path to national reunification.

1. Complete Reunification Is Critical to National Rejuvenation

Throughout China’s 5,000-year history, national reunification and opposition to division have remained a common ideal and a shared tradition of the whole nation. In the modern era from the mid-19th century, due to the aggression of Western powers and the decadence of feudal rule, China was gradually reduced to a semi-feudal, semi-colonial society, and went through a period of suffering worse than anything it had previously known. The country endured intense humiliation, the people were subjected to great pain, and the Chinese civilization was plunged into darkness. Japan’s 50-year occupation of Taiwan epitomized this humiliation and inflicted agony on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. Our two sides face each other just across a strip of water, yet we are still far apart. The fact that we have not yet been reunified is a scar left by history on the Chinese nation. We Chinese on both sides should work together to achieve reunification and heal this wound.

National rejuvenation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation since the modern era began. Only by realizing complete national reunification can the Chinese people on both sides of the Straits cast aside the shadow of civil war and create and enjoy lasting peace. National reunification is the only way to avoid the risk of Taiwan being invaded and occupied again by foreign countries, to foil the attempts of external forces to contain China, and to safeguard the sovereignty, security, and development interests of our country. It is the most effective remedy to secessionist attempts to divide our country, and the best means to consolidate Taiwan’s status as part of China and advance national rejuvenation. It will enable us to pool the strengths of the people on both sides, build our common home, safeguard our interests and wellbeing, and create a brighter future for the Chinese people and the Chinese nation. As Dr Sun Yat-sen, the great pioneer of China’s revolution, once said, “Unification is the hope of all Chinese nationals. If China can be unified, all Chinese will enjoy a happy life; if it cannot, all will suffer.”

In exploring the path to rejuvenation and prosperity, China has endured vicissitudes and hardships. “Unification brings strength while division leads to chaos.” This is a law of history. The realization of complete national reunification is driven by the history and culture of the Chinese nation and determined by the momentum towards and circumstances surrounding our national rejuvenation. Never before have we been so close to, confident in, and capable of achieving the goal of national rejuvenation. The same is true when it comes to our goal of complete national reunification. The Taiwan question arose as a result of weakness and chaos in our nation, and it will be resolved as national rejuvenation becomes a reality. When all the Chinese people stick together and work together, we will surely succeed in realizing national reunification on our way to national rejuvenation.

2. National Development and Progress Set the Direction of Cross-Straits Relations

China’s development and progress are a key factor determining the course of cross-Straits relations and the realization of complete national reunification. In particular, the great achievements over four decades of reform, opening up and modernization have had a profound impact on the historical process of resolving the Taiwan question and realizing complete national reunification. No matter which political party or group is in power in Taiwan, it cannot alter the course of progress in cross-Straits relations or the trend towards national reunification.

International Monetary Fund statistics show that in 1980 the GDP of the mainland was about US$303 billion, just over 7 times that of Taiwan, which was about US$42.3 billion; in 2021, the GDP of the mainland was about US$17.46 trillion, more than 22 times that of Taiwan, which was about US$790 billion.[5]

China’s development and progress, and in particular the steady increases in its economic power, technological strength, and national defense capabilities, are an effective curb against separatist activities and interference from external forces. They also provide broad space and great opportunities for cross-Straits exchanges and cooperation. As more and more compatriots from Taiwan, especially young people, pursue their studies, start businesses, seek jobs, or go to live on the mainland, cross-Straits exchanges, interaction and integration are intensified in all sectors, the economic ties and personal bonds between the people on both sides run deeper, and our common cultural and national identities grow stronger, leading cross-Straits relations towards reunification.

The CPC has united the Chinese people and led them in embarking on the new journey of building China into a modern socialist country in all respects. Following the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the mainland has improved its governance and maintained long-term economic growth; it enjoys a solid material foundation, a wealth of human resources, a huge market, strong resilience in development, and social stability. It therefore has many strengths and favorable conditions for further development, and these have become the driving force for reunification.

Grounding its effort in the new development stage, the mainland is committed to applying the new development philosophy, creating a new development dynamic, and promoting high-quality development. As a result, the overall strength and international influence of the mainland will continue to increase, and its influence over and appeal to Taiwan society will keep growing. We will have a more solid foundation for resolving the Taiwan question and greater ability to do so. This will give a significant boost to national reunification.

3. Any Attempt by Separatist Forces to Prevent Reunification Is Bound to Fail

Taiwan has been an integral part of China’s territory since ancient times. Moves to separate Taiwan from China represent the serious crime of secession, and undermine the common interests of compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Straits and the fundamental interests of the Chinese nation. They will lead nowhere.

The DPP authorities have adopted a separatist stance, and colluded with external forces in successive provocative actions designed to divide the country. They refuse to recognize the one-China principle, and distort and deny the 1992 Consensus. They assert that Taiwan and the mainland should not be subordinate to each other, and proclaim a new “two states” theory. On the island, they constantly press for “de-sinicization” and promote “incremental independence”. They incite radical separatists in and outside the DPP to lobby for amendments to their “constitution” and “laws”. They deceive the people of Taiwan, incite hostility against the mainland, and obstruct and undermine cross-Straits exchanges, cooperation and integrated development. They have steadily built up their military forces with the intention of pursuing “independence” and preventing reunification by force. They join with external forces in trying to sow the seeds of “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan”. The actions of the DPP authorities have resulted in tension in cross-Straits relations, endangering peace and stability in the Taiwan Straits, and undermining the prospects and restricting the space for peaceful reunification. These are obstacles that must be removed in advancing the process of peaceful reunification.

Taiwan belongs to all the Chinese people, including the 23 million Taiwan compatriots. The Chinese people are firm in their resolve and have a deep commitment to safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the fundamental interests of the Chinese nation, and this resolve and commitment will frustrate any attempt to divide the country. When Taiwan was invaded by a foreign power more than 100 years ago, China was a poor and weak country. More than 70 years ago, China defeated the invaders and recovered Taiwan. Today, China has grown into the world’s second largest economy. With significant growth in its political, economic, cultural, technological, and military strength, there is no likelihood that China will allow Taiwan to be separated again. Attempts to reject reunification and split the country are doomed, because they will founder against the history and culture of the Chinese nation as well as the resolve and commitment of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people.

4. External Forces Obstructing China’s Complete Reunification Will Surely Be Defeated

External interference is a prominent obstacle to China’s reunification. Still lost in delusions of hegemony and trapped in a Cold War mindset, some forces in the US insist on perceiving and portraying China as a major strategic adversary and a serious long-term threat. They do their utmost to undermine and pressurize China, exploiting Taiwan as a convenient tool. The US authorities have stated that they remain committed to the one-China policy and that they do not support “Taiwan independence”. But their actions contradict their words. They are clouding the one-China principle in uncertainty and compromising its integrity. They are contriving “official” exchanges with Taiwan, increasing arms sales, and colluding in military provocation. To help Taiwan expand its “international space”, they are inducing other countries to interfere in Taiwan affairs, and concocting Taiwan-related bills that infringe upon the sovereignty of China. They are creating confusion around what is black and white, right and wrong. On the one hand, they incite separatist forces to create tension and turmoil in cross-Straits relations. On the other hand, they accuse the mainland of coercion, pressurizing Taiwan, and unilaterally changing the status quo, in order to embolden these forces and create obstacles to China’s peaceful reunification.

The important principles of respecting state sovereignty and territorial integrity as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations are the cornerstones of modern international law and basic norms of international relations. It is the sacred right of every sovereign state to safeguard national unity and territorial integrity. It goes without saying that the Chinese government is entitled to take all measures necessary to settle the Taiwan question and achieve national reunification, free of external interference.

Behind the smokescreens of “freedom, democracy, and human rights” and “upholding the rules-based international order”, some anti-China forces in the US deliberately distort the nature of the Taiwan question – which is purely an internal matter for China – and try to deny the legitimacy and justification of the Chinese government in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. This clearly reveals their intention of using Taiwan to contain China and obstruct China’s reunification, which should be thoroughly exposed and condemned.

These external forces are using Taiwan as a pawn to undermine China’s development and progress, and obstruct the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. They are doing so at the cost of the interests, wellbeing and future of the people of Taiwan rather than for their benefit. They have encouraged and instigated provocative actions by the separatist forces; these have intensified cross-Straits tension and confrontation, and undermined peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region. This runs counter to the underlying global trends of peace, development and win-win cooperation, and goes against the wishes of the international community and the aspiration of all peoples.

Shortly after the PRC was founded, even though the country itself had to be rebuilt on the ruins of decades of war, China and its people won a resounding victory in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-1953). We defeated a powerful and well-armed enemy through gallantry and tenacity. In doing so, we safeguarded the security of the newly founded People’s Republic, reestablished the status of China as a major country in the world, and demonstrated our heroic spirit, our lack of fear, and our will to stand up against the abuse of the powerful.

China is firmly committed to peaceful development. At the same time, it will not flinch under any external interference, nor will it tolerate any infringement upon its sovereignty, security and development interests. Relying on external forces will achieve nothing for Taiwan’s separatists, and using Taiwan to contain China is doomed to fail.

Tranquility, development and a decent life are the expectations of our Taiwan compatriots, and the common aspiration of those on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. Under the strong leadership of the CPC, the Chinese people and the Chinese nation have stood upright, won prosperity, and grown in strength. A moderately prosperous society in all respects has been built on the mainland, where a large population once lived in dire poverty. We now have better conditions, more confidence, and greater capabilities. We can complete the historic mission of national reunification, so that both sides of the Straits can enjoy a better life. The wheel of history rolls on towards national reunification, and it will not be stopped by any individual or any force.

IV. National Reunification in the New Era

Taking into consideration the overall goal of national rejuvenation in the context of global change on a scale unseen in a century, the CPC and the Chinese government have continued to follow the CPC’s fundamental guidelines on the Taiwan question and implement its principles and policies towards Taiwan, and have made concrete efforts to promote peaceful cross-Straits relations, integrate the development of the two sides, and work towards national reunification.

1. Upholding the Basic Principles of Peaceful Reunification and One Country, Two Systems

National reunification by peaceful means is the first choice of the CPC and the Chinese government in resolving the Taiwan question, as it best serves the interests of the Chinese nation as a whole, including our compatriots in Taiwan, and it works best for the long-term stability and development of China. We have worked hard to overcome hardships and obstacles to peaceful reunification over the past decades, showing that we cherish and safeguard the greater good of the nation, the wellbeing of our compatriots in Taiwan, and peace on both sides.

The One Country, Two Systems principle is an important institutional instrument created by the CPC and the Chinese government to enable peaceful reunification. It represents a great achievement of Chinese socialism. Peaceful reunification and One Country, Two Systems are our basic principles for resolving the Taiwan question and the best approach to realizing national reunification. Embodying the Chinese wisdom – we thrive by embracing each other – they take full account of Taiwan’s realities and are conducive to long-term stability in Taiwan after reunification.

We maintain that after peaceful reunification, Taiwan may continue its current social system and enjoy a high degree of autonomy in accordance with the law. The two social systems will develop side by side for a long time to come. One Country is the precondition and foundation of Two Systems; Two Systems is subordinate to and derives from One Country; and the two are integrated under the one-China principle.

We will continue working with our compatriots in Taiwan to explore a Two Systems solution to the Taiwan question and increase our efforts towards peaceful reunification. In designing the specifics for implementing One Country, Two Systems, we will give full consideration to the realities in Taiwan and the views and proposals from all walks of life on both sides, and fully accommodate the interests and sentiments of our compatriots in Taiwan.

Ever since the One Country, Two Systems principle was proposed, certain political forces have been misrepresenting and distorting its objectives. The DPP and the authorities under its leadership have done everything possible to target the principle with baseless criticisms, and this has led to misunderstandings about its aims in some quarters of Taiwan. It is a fact that since Hong Kong and Macao returned to the motherland and were reincorporated into national governance, they have embarked on a broad path of shared development together with the mainland, and each complements the others’ strengths. The practice of One Country, Two Systems has been a resounding success.

For a time, Hong Kong faced a period of damaging social unrest caused by anti-China agitators both inside and outside the region. Based on a clear understanding of the situation there, the CPC and the Chinese government upheld the One Country, Two Systems principle, made some appropriate improvements, and took a series of measures that addressed both the symptoms and root causes of the unrest. Order was restored and prosperity returned to Hong Kong. This has laid a solid foundation for the law-based governance of Hong Kong and Macao and the long-term continuation of One Country, Two Systems.

To realize peaceful reunification, we must acknowledge that the mainland and Taiwan have their own distinct social systems and ideologies. The One Country, Two Systems principle is the most inclusive solution to this problem. It is an approach that is grounded in democratic principles, demonstrates good will, seeks peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question, and delivers mutual benefit. The differences in social system are neither an obstacle to reunification nor a justification for secessionism. We firmly believe that our compatriots in Taiwan will develop a better understanding of the principle, and that the Two Systems solution to the Taiwan question will play its full role while compatriots on both sides work together towards peaceful reunification.

Peaceful reunification can only be achieved through consultation and discussion as equals. The long-standing political differences between the two sides are the fundamental obstacles to the steady improvement of cross-Straits relations, but we should not allow this problem to be passed down from one generation to the next. We can phase in flexible forms of consultation and discussion. We are ready to engage with all parties, groups, or individuals in Taiwan in a broad exchange of views aimed at resolving the political differences between the two sides based on the one-China principle and the 1992 Consensus. Representatives will be recommended by all political parties and all sectors of society on both sides, and they will engage in democratic consultations on peaceful development of cross-Straits relations, integrated development of the two sides, and the peaceful reunification of our country.

2. Promoting Peaceful Cross-Straits Relations and Integrated Development

Peaceful cross-Straits relations and integrated development pave the way for reunification and serve to benefit our people on both sides. Thus, both sides should work together towards this goal. We will extend integrated development, increase exchanges and cooperation, strengthen bonds, and expand common interests in the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations. In this way, we will all identify more closely with the Chinese culture and Chinese nation, and heighten the sense of our shared future. This lays solid foundations for peaceful reunification.

We will explore an innovative approach to integrated development and take the lead in setting up a pilot zone for integrated cross-Straits development in Fujian Province, advancing integration through better connectivity and more preferential policies, and based on mutual trust and understanding. Both sides should continue to promote connectivity in any area where it is beneficial, including trade and economic cooperation, infrastructure, energy and resources, and industrial standards. We should promote cooperation in culture, education, and health care, and the sharing of social security and public resources. We should support neighboring areas or areas with similar conditions on the two sides in providing equal, universal, and accessible public services. We should take active steps to institutionalize cross-Straits economic cooperation and create a common market for the two sides to strengthen the Chinese economy.

We will improve the systems and policies to guarantee the wellbeing of Taiwan compatriots and ensure that they are treated as equals on the mainland, and we will protect their legitimate rights and interests here in accordance with the law. We will support our fellow Chinese and enterprises from Taiwan in participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, major regional development strategies, and the strategy for coordinated regional development. We will help them integrate into the new development dynamic, participate in high-quality development, share in more development opportunities, and benefit from national socio-economic development.

We will expand cross-Straits exchanges and cooperation in various fields and overcome any obstacles and obstruction. We will encourage our people on both sides to pass on the best of traditional Chinese culture and ensure that it grows in new and creative ways. We will strengthen communication among the general public and the younger generations on both sides, and encourage more fellow Chinese in Taiwan – young people in particular – to pursue studies, start businesses, seek jobs, or live on the mainland. This will help people on both sides to expand mutual understanding, strengthen mutual trust, consolidate a shared sense of identity, and forge closer bonds of heart and mind.

3. Defeating Separatism and External Interference

Separatism will plunge Taiwan into the abyss and bring nothing but disaster to the island. To protect the interests of the Chinese nation as a whole, including our compatriots in Taiwan, we must resolutely oppose it and work for peaceful reunification. We are ready to create vast space for peaceful reunification; but we will leave no room for separatist activities in any form.

We Chinese will decide our own affairs. The Taiwan question is an internal affair that involves China’s core interests and the Chinese people’s national sentiments, and no external interference will be tolerated. Any attempt to use the Taiwan question as a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs or obstruct China’s reunification will meet with the resolute opposition of the Chinese people, including our compatriots in Taiwan. No one should underestimate our resolve, will and ability to defend China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

We will work with the greatest sincerity and exert our utmost efforts to achieve peaceful reunification. But we will not renounce the use of force, and we reserve the option of taking all necessary measures. This is to guard against external interference and all separatist activities. In no way does it target our fellow Chinese in Taiwan. Use of force would be the last resort taken under compelling circumstances. We will only be forced to take drastic measures to respond to the provocation of separatist elements or external forces should they ever cross our red lines.

We will always be ready to respond with the use of force or other necessary means to interference by external forces or radical action by separatist elements. Our ultimate goal is to ensure the prospects of China’s peaceful reunification and advance this process.

Some forces in the US are making every effort to incite groups inside Taiwan to stir up trouble and use Taiwan as a pawn against China. This has jeopardized peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits, obstructed the Chinese government’s efforts towards peaceful reunification, and undermined the healthy and steady development of China-US relations. Left unchecked, it will continue to escalate tension across the Straits, further disrupt China-US relations, and severely damage the interests of the US itself. The US should abide by the one-China principle, deal with Taiwan-related issues in a prudent and proper manner, stand by its previous commitments, and stop supporting Taiwan separatists.

4. Working with Our Fellow Chinese in Taiwan Towards National Reunification and Rejuvenation

National reunification is an essential step towards national rejuvenation. The future of Taiwan lies in China’s reunification, and the wellbeing of the people in Taiwan hinges on the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, an endeavor that bears on the future and destiny of the people on both sides. A united and prosperous China will be a blessing for all Chinese, while a weak and divided China will be a disaster. Only China’s rejuvenation and prosperity can bring lives of plenty and happiness to both sides. But it requires the joint efforts of both sides, as does the complete reunification of the country.

Separatist propaganda and the unresolved political dispute between the two sides have created misconceptions over cross-Straits relations, problems with national identity, and misgivings over national reunification among some fellow Chinese in Taiwan. Blood is thicker than water, and people on both sides of the Straits share the bond of kinship. We have great patience and tolerance and we will create conditions for closer exchanges and communication between the two sides, and to increase our compatriots’ knowledge of the mainland and reduce these misconceptions and misgivings, in order to help them resist the manipulation of separatists.

We will join hands with our fellow Chinese in Taiwan to strive for national reunification and rejuvenation. We hope they will stand on the right side of history, be proud of their Chinese identity, and fully consider the position and role of Taiwan in China’s rejuvenation. We hope they will pursue the greater good of the nation, resolutely oppose separatism and any form of external interference, and make a positive contribution to the just cause of China’s peaceful reunification.

V. Bright Prospects for Peaceful Reunification

Once peaceful reunification is achieved under One Country, Two Systems, it will lay new foundations for China to make further progress and achieve national rejuvenation. At the same time, it will create huge opportunities for social and economic development in Taiwan and bring tangible benefits to the people of Taiwan.

1. Taiwan Will Have a Vast Space for Development

Taiwan boasts a high level of economic growth, industries with distinctive local features, and robust foreign trade. Its economy is highly complementary with that of the mainland. After reunification, the systems and mechanisms for cross-Straits economic cooperation will be further improved. Backed up by the vast mainland market, Taiwan’s economy will enjoy broader prospects, become more competitive, develop steadier and smoother industrial and supply chains, and display greater vitality in innovation-driven growth. Many problems that have long afflicted Taiwan’s economy and its people can be resolved through integrated cross-Straits development with all possible connectivity between the two sides. Taiwan’s fiscal revenues can be better employed to improve living standards, bringing real benefits to the people and resolving their difficulties.

Taiwan’s cultural creativity will also enjoy a great boost. Both sides of the Taiwan Straits share the culture and ethos of the Chinese nation. Nourished by the Chinese civilization, Taiwan’s regional culture will flourish and prosper.

2. The Rights and Interests of the People in Taiwan Will Be Fully Protected

Provided that China’s sovereignty, security and development interests are guaranteed, after reunification Taiwan will enjoy a high degree of autonomy as a special administrative region. Taiwan’s social system and its way of life will be fully respected, and the private property, religious beliefs, and lawful rights and interests of the people in Taiwan will be fully protected. All Taiwan compatriots who support reunification of the country and rejuvenation of the nation will be the masters of the region, contributing to and benefitting from China’s development. With a powerful motherland in support, the people of Taiwan will enjoy greater security and dignity and stand upright and rock-solid in the international community.

3. Both Sides of the Taiwan Straits Will Share the Triumph of National Rejuvenation

The people of Taiwan are brave, diligent and patriotic, and have made unremitting efforts to improve themselves. They revere their ancestry and love their homeland. Working together and applying their talents, people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits will create a promising future. After reunification, we Chinese will bridge gaps and differences caused by long-term separation, share a stronger sense of national identity, and stand together as one. After reunification, we can leverage complementary strengths in pursuit of mutual benefit and common development. After reunification, we can join hands to make the Chinese nation stronger and more prosperous, and stand taller among all the nations of the world.

The people separated by the Taiwan Straits share the same blood and a common destiny. After reunification, China will have greater international influence and appeal, and a stronger ability to shape international public opinion, and the Chinese people will enjoy greater self-esteem, self-confidence and national pride. In Taiwan and on the mainland the people will share the dignity and triumph of a united China and be proud of being Chinese. We will work together to refine and implement the Two Systems solution to the Taiwan question, to improve the institutional arrangements for implementing the One Country, Two Systems policy, and to ensure lasting peace and stability in Taiwan.

4. Peaceful Reunification of China Is Conducive to Peace and Development in the Asia-Pacific and the Wider World

Peaceful cross-Straits reunification is of benefit not only to the Chinese nation, but to all peoples and the international community as a whole. The reunification of China will not harm the legitimate interests of any other country, including any economic interests they might have in Taiwan. On the contrary, it will bring more development opportunities to all countries; it will create more positive momentum for prosperity and stability in the Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world; it will contribute more to building a global community of shared future, promoting world peace and development, and propelling human progress.

After reunification, foreign countries can continue to develop economic and cultural relations with Taiwan. With the approval of the central government of China, they may set up consulates or other official and quasi-official institutions in Taiwan, international organizations and agencies may establish offices, relevant international conventions can be applied, and relevant international conferences can be held there.

Conclusion

Over its 5,000-year history, China has created a splendid culture that has shone throughout the world from past times to present, and has made an enormous contribution to human society. After a century of suffering and hardship, the nation has overcome humiliation, emerged from backwardness, and embraced boundless development opportunities. Now, it is striding towards the goal of national rejuvenation.

Embarking on a new journey in a new era, the CPC and the Chinese government will continue to rally compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Straits, and lead the efforts to answer the call of the times, shoulder historic responsibilities, grasp our fate and our future in our own hands, and work hard to achieve national reunification and rejuvenation.

The journey ahead cannot be all smooth sailing. However, as long as we Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Straits devote our ingenuity and energy to the same goal, let there be no doubt – we will tolerate no foreign interference in Taiwan, we will thwart any attempt to divide our country, and we will combine as a mighty force for national reunification and rejuvenation. The historic goal of reuniting our motherland must be realized and will be realized.

Notes

[1] United Nations Juridical Yearbook 2010, p. 516.

[2] Between September 4 and 8, 1951, the United States gathered a number of countries in San Francisco for what they described as the San Francisco Peace Conference. Neither the PRC nor the Soviet Union received an invitation. The treaty signed at this meeting, commonly known as the Treaty of San Francisco, included an article under which Japan renounced all rights, title and claim to Taiwan and the Penghu Islands. This treaty contravened the provisions of the Declaration by United Nations signed by 26 countries – including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and China – in 1942, the fundamental principles of the UN Charter, and the basic norms of international law. The PRC was excluded from its preparation, drafting and signing, and its rulings on the territory and sovereign rights of China – including the sovereignty over Taiwan – are therefore illegal and invalid. The Chinese government has always refused to recognize the Treaty of San Francisco, and has never from the outset deviated from this stance. Other countries, including the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Mongolia, and Vietnam, have also refused to recognize the document’s authority.

[3] In his speech titled “Continue to Promote the Reunification of the Motherland” on January 30, 1995, Jiang Zemin, then general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and president of China, made eight proposals for the development of cross-Straits relations and peaceful national reunification. He emphasized, “Adhering to the one-China principle is the basis and prerequisite for peaceful reunification”, and “in not promising to renounce the use of force, we are in no way targeting our Taiwan compatriots, but rather foreign forces conspiring to interfere in China’s peaceful reunification and bring about Taiwan independence”. (See Selected Works of Jiang Zemin, Vol. I, Eng. ed., Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 2009, pp. 407-412.)

[4] This figure does not include reinvestment by Taiwan investors through a third place.

[5] From the statistics of the April 2022 edition of the World Economic Outlook databases of the International Monetary Fund.

READ MORE: China releases white paper on Taiwan question, reunification

A fine Rufus

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She told the receptionist she had no family or ride home. I was saddened to see some (not all) of the employees lack of concern as to how she would get home.

All of the sudden this AMAZING gentleman who had been waiting with his wife approached the lady and told her he would gladly take her home.

This man not knowing her or having a clue where she lived volunteered his time to care of this lovely woman.

She offered to pay but he kindly declined like any good man would. As he went to get his truck I wheeled her out and put her in the vehicle.

As I watched them drive away my only thoughts were ‘there are still great people in this world’ ‘and ‘We have to care for our elders like this nice man.’

Harsh Life Truth

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Barry Kidston

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Barry Kidston

Barry Kidston was a 22-year-old chemistry student in Maryland, USA, in 1976, and he had one major interest and life’s passion: making narcotics that he and his buddies could legally consume.

When a new recreational drug is manufactured, it does not become instantly illegal because it has not been classified yet. Even if a new drug produces the identical effects of an existing illegal narcotic, so long as its chemical structure is different, no laws are being broken if produced and sold.

There is, thus, a lag time for people to manufacture and sell “designer drugs” when they are first discovered, and Barry Kidston wanted to climb through that loophole.

Kidston knew about an opiate called desmethylprodine (also called MPPP) which was first discovered in the 1940s but never classed (and therefore not illegal), so he attempted to cook up a batch.

However, he made a mistake in the process and ended up manufacturing a substance we now call MPTP, a drug which is stripped of the anaesthetic properties of MPPP …. and also destroys the brain’s ability to produce dopamine.

Kidston injected himself with a dose of this drug. Within a few days he began experiencing symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, a neurological condition that is linked to lack of dopamine production.

Kidston was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and continued to struggle with the impact of the condition. Two years later, on 5 September 1978, he died of a cocaine overdose at age 24.

But something good did come from Barry’s experiment: MPTP has turned out to be an extremely valuable tool in Parkinson’s disease research.

Zhang Baige and her 75-year-old father

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Zhang Baige and her 75-year-old father

One day in 1997, on his way home after work in Luoyang, Henan province, 50-year-old Zhang Shuangqi picked up an abandoned baby girl beside the road.

Unmarried and with no children of his own, Zhang took the girl home and raise her as his daughter. He named her Zhang Baige, taking the only early picture of her.

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Zhang Baige

“My father’s family is not wealthy, to raise me actually added to his burdens,” Zhang Baige said. “He also did not have any experience raising a child. It was hard for him, but he insisted.”

The man took on several jobs simultaneously to make a living — collecting waste, digging plants to be sold, herding sheep and working at construction sites.

“As a teenager, I remember being ashamed of him collecting waste. To respect my feelings, my father would do it late at night so I wouldn’t know.”

Although Zhang Baige did not attend college after high school, she worked hard — as a waitress, a cashier and peddler — until she opened her own cosmetics company in Guangzhou and made a fortune.

To spend more time with her father, who is now 75 years old, Zhang Baige ended her business in Guangzhou to travel around the country with him. He always likes to see the world outside home.

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Zhang Baige and her 75-year-old father

Zhang bought a motorhome with about 660,000 yuan ($97,500), and from May last year the two have journeyed from Henan province, traveling through Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces, an then to the Tibet and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous regions. They typically spend a month in a province.

People are touched by their story after watching a series about their journey, which has been shared by Zhang Baige online.

Netizens are impressed, with comments such as, “A kind father and a grateful daughter”, “You’re unfortunate but lucky at the same time.”

Back in Luoyang in February, Zhang Baige determine to settle down for a while and record more of the precious time she spends with her father.

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Relief

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This one absolutely gives me the chills and you won’t see many like it.

Any guesses on what you are seeing?

They are jewish prisoners being liberated from a death train in 1945. They were en route to concentration camps. They would have likely all been killed, many of them almost immediately.

Allied soldiers intercepted it and let them all free.

This train appears to be mostly women and children. Although 6 million Jews were killed, many millions more were also offed because of the insatiable hatred of one man and his supporters.

By the time this photo was taken, the passengers knew exactly what this train meant.

You are staring at “the moment” these people realized they wouldn’t be dying in a group execution.

It’s an incredible photo. And I can’t even fathom the relief they felt. Relief isn’t even a good enough word.

Presence of mind

Teacher addresses a student and asks: “How many kidneys do we have?”

“Four!”, The student responds.

“Four? Haha,” The teacher was one of those who took pleasure in picking on his students’ mistakes and demoralizing them.

“Bring a bundle of grass, because we have an ass in the room,” the teacher orders a front bencher.

“And for me a coffee!”, the student added.

The teacher was furious and expelled the student from the room.

The student was, by the way, the humorist Aparicio Torelly Aporelly (1895-1971), better known as the “Baron de Itararé”.

On his way out of the classroom, the student still had the audacity to correct the furious teacher:

"You asked me how many kidneys ‘we have’. We have four: two of mine and two of yours. ‘We have’ is an expression used for the plural. Enjoy the grass.”

Life demands much more understanding than knowledge. Sometimes people, because they have a little more knowledge or ‘believe’ that they have it, feel they have the right to underestimate others.

Son and cat relationship

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Generally my cat and my son have a one-way relationship. My son tries to love the cat (a little too roughly) and the cat escapes his grasp and goes and sits up high in the cat tree while glowering. I try to run interference in case one day my cat loses patience but so far I had been in luck and my cat was relatively passive.

My son came down with the flu and had the hardest time falling asleep because he couldn’t breathe and would wake up crying every half hour.

My husband and I were exhausted and cranky and slowly losing our minds.

One day as I tried to put him down for a nap on our bed our cat jumped up too.

Not wanting to deal with another fur tussle with my son I tried to kick him off. He just sat there resisting all my attempts to shove him off.

My son sat up and wrapped his arms around my cat and instead of running off like he normally does, he lay flat and curled his tail around my son.

Thanks to the combination of warmth and purring, my son was asleep in 30 seconds.

My cat stayed in that position for two hours as my son slept for the first time in days.

It may not seem like such a huge deal to most but I know that this tired mom was eternally grateful to the love my cat showed my son.

Good Deeds Should Be Remembered

The incident occurred in Texas, at Viterford Prison. One of the guards who guarded the cells on that floor suffered a heart attack. As a result, eight prisoners managed to pick the lock and open the cell door to help him.

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Handcuffed, some of them tried to help the guard with first aid, while others screamed and banged on the walls to draw attention to themselves . Finally they succeed, an ambulance arrived quickly and the man survives.

When asked why they did this, the prisoners said that the guard was a “good man.”

Fiasco Horror!

On Sunday our washing machine broke down. On Monday my husband went to Lowe’s and purchased this new front load washing machine. We thought it was the “new and cool” type of washing machine and didn’t think anything of it. We spent that evening installing it with the kids underfoot. We told them several times that they were not to touch it. They all replied “OK.”

Early Tuesday morning we were woken up by our four-year-old son who was crying so hard he could barely talk. As I was trying to understand what he was saying, my husband flew out of bed and down the stairs. It was then that the realization hit.

He had said: Kloe. Inside. Washer.

By the time we reached the laundry room in the basement, my three-year-old daughter Kloe was LOCKED inside the airtight washing machine. It was tumbling and filling with water. She was screaming but you couldn’t hear her.

We were able to quickly stop it and unlock the door and get her out. Aside from a couple of small bumps on her head and wet clothes, she was fine.

After going through all the “what if‘s” and “could have’s” we know we are very blessed and God had mercy on our sweet daughter.

I post this because I can honestly say we did not realize the danger of this machine. We are continually surprised at the new, inventive ways our kids come up with to try and die. And this was definitely a new one.

I took this picture after we secured the door shut with a child safety lock.

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We also found a child lock feature on the settings that, as long as it is engaged, will not allow the washing machine to start. But it does not lock the door. We hadn’t even used the machine yet so we hadn’t looked at any of the settings. Also, it obviously took two curious kids to pull this off. I want to encourage anybody who has this type of front loading washing machine and small children, or even grandkids who visit, to lock the door with a child safety lock and always keep the child lock setting on!

I realize that there are ways we could’ve prevented this from happening. This is the season for swimming pool accidents and kids being left in hot cars and all sorts of other horrible accidents. And that’s what most of them are. Accidents. Shaming the mom doesn’t do anyone any good. We need to be open and honest about our mistakes to help one another keep our kids safe. And trust me, that mom is already beating herself up enough.”

More views of America

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How to make things happen

Asleep on a stranger’s driveway.

Sleeping on a pile of hoses.

That’s how we found our 15 year old son, Micah, earlier this week.

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Asleep on a stranger’s driveway.

Micah decided to open a power washing service. He took $500 he’s saved from birthday money and chores and bought a nice power washer. He wanted to get paid according to his efforts during his work this summer. He can’t drive yet so he had to figure out transportation. We told him we can pick up and drop off.

He planned to knock on doors all day on Saturday and gets the “yeses” while wading through the sea of “no’s”.

Monday to Friday he does one to two jobs per day. He built a spreadsheet to track the revenue. His buddy helped open a sign-up genius webpage for customers. He’s built a journal of all the reasons people say ”no” and we talk at night about the way to politely answer them. He started jotting them down and memorizing them.

We’ve talked a lot about the heart behind selling a service with integrity versus just closing deals.

It’s a deep belief in your service. Memorizing ways to overcome objections by giving new information versus manipulating.

But here’s the the thing that’s an encouragement for us all.

Millions of people get great training.

Millions of people have great ideas.

Millions of people whiteboard the ideas.

Millions of people buy equipment.

Millions of people set goals and get excited.

Millions of people have “motivation”.

Few people take time to wake up early and go put in a full day of work. Then a full week of work. Then a full summer of work.

Beefy Greek Pita Folds

Enjoy these delicious pita bread sandwiches packed with ground beef and veggies – Greek dinner ready in just 20 minutes!

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Ingredients

  • 1 lb lean (at least 80%) ground beef
  • 1 small onion, cut in half lengthwise, sliced
  • 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 cup sliced ripe olives
  • 1/2 cup finely chopped peeled cucumber
  • 1/2 cup chopped seeded tomato
  • 1 cup Yoplait® All Natural Fat Free plain yogurt (from 32 oz. container)
  • 1 teaspoon dried dill weed
  • 4 soft Greek-style pita breads (6 or 7-inch), heated

Steps

  • 1
    In 10-inch skillet, cook ground beef, onion, garlic, oregano and 1/4 teaspoon of the salt over medium-high heat 5 to 7 minutes, stirring frequently, until beef is thoroughly cooked. Drain. Stir in olives.
  • 2
    Meanwhile, in medium bowl, stir together cucumber, tomato, yogurt, dill and remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt.
  • 3
    On each of 4 individual serving plates, Spoon 1/4 of beef mixture on half of each pita. Top each with yogurt mixture; fold other half of pita over filling. Serve with remaining yogurt mixture.

Physarum polycephalum

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Physarum polycephalum

Pictured above is Physarum polycephalum, also known as the “many-headed slime”, a type of protist, and, specifically, a slime mold. The term “slime mold” doesn’t refer to a specific single group, but it is a broad term for several kinds of eukaryote which behave similarly.

Anyway, Physarum has – astonishingly – a basic form of intelligence, despite having no brain and only comprising a single many-nucleic cell. Here are some of the amazing things this slime can do.

  • It can solve mazes. A P. polycephalum placed in a plastic maze will extend forth hundreds of tendrils, exploring all possible paths until it finds one which leads to food. It then retracts all the tendrils leading to dead ends. Moreover, it knows which way is quickest. If there are multiple routes to the reward, it’ll retract the (even slightly) longer one.

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  • It remembers. When the mold is solving a maze, it leaves behind a trail of slime wherever its tendrils reach. Using this slime, the Physarum avoids the paths it has already taken. This is essentially a creative, albeit rudimentary, analogue to memory – one that is in external, material form.
  • It mimics transport networks. A P. polycephalum was placed in a plastic enclosure the shape of Tokyo, Japan. Bits of food were placed where the major transport hubs would be in real Tokyo, and the slime mold – knowing which ways were fastest, created a replica of the city’s rail networks using its tendrils.

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  • It learns and keeps track of time. A team of scientists – including the one who did the maze experiment, put this slime mold into a long groove, letting it move along the groove. However, every 30 minutes – they decreased the temperature and the humidity (slime molds thrive in hot, moist conditions). The mold slowed its pace to use less energy. After a while, the scientists stopped. Sure enough, the polycephalum kept slowing every 30 minutes, showing it could both learn and keep time.
  • It’s a healthy eater. Another experiment had the slime molds in the middle of a circular clock face. At each mark in the clock, a different food was placed. However, some of them were made up of the healthiest ratio of carbs to protein, while others weren’t. All of the slimes selected the optimal foods.

An astonishing organism if there ever was one. So unusual that this creature is so obscure, for it certainly has some amazing stories to tell.

Messages

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“My husband would send me flowers on my birthday every year.

I’ve had a very hard time with his passing. I knew he wasn’t going to be around this year for my BD and I was “okay” with that, I knew I wasn’t going to receive my flowers… two days before my birthday there was a knock on my door and yes, I got flowers.

My brother-in-law had a dream that my husband told him that he needed to get flowers for me.

He says he woke up and said “ok you want flowers for your lady I’ll get her, her flowers” .

He didn’t know my husband would do that for me.

My brother-in-law lives in another city so he didn’t know it was going to be my birthday either.

I had fresh flowers on my 40th birthday from heaven, back in April’22″

Bryan Ferry Nuits de Fourviere Live in Lyon – Like a hurricane HD

Enjoy this rendition of the Neil Young classic.

The world continues to evolve, but cats stay the same

"Why did the majority of Taiwanese vote for the DDP?"

Excellent question !

I'll have to meditate deeply before giving you an acceptable & palatable answer...

I suggest for now that they have been mesmerized by the so-called shining liberal world

because they drunk the Kool-Aid especially prepared for them by the spin doctors of the KFC-AZAEL (Kakistocratic Feudal Conglomerate of the Anglo-Zio-American EstabLishment) who are truly geniuses in that domain. But I'm aware of the weakness of that answer because it's tantamount to write that they have been stupid. Alas ! Let's say that they are waking up slowly since the graduated answer by Beijing since August 3, 2022 and keeping on...

But I persist, The Taiwanese are waking up and realize that their future is with Beijing !

Arrivederci ! Quan

I’m just swamped. This is going to be a tad unusual post. Heavy on cats. Light on food. Hopefully no one will get too upset with me.

Jorge Guinle died of old age after burning all his money on fun, basically. He once said that he lost all his money because he thought he’d last about 70 years but he only died at 88.

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In fact, he was no longer a billionaire after his family lost the concession of the Port of Santos in 1972. He was still very rich for years, but no longer had a steady source of income.

In his final years, after selling everything he had, he lived for free – as a favor – in Copacabana Palace, a famous luxury hotel formerly owned by his family. He got a very small pension from the government and would work as a tourist guide and sometimes appear in advertisements.

I know people who knew him and told me he would happily pay for other people’s bills in restaurants and nightclubs and do things like send trucks full of flowers to women he was interested in.

He had no regrets though.

His life was well lived, he studied philosophy in Paris, dated famous actresses in Hollywood (including Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth), met and befriended his favorite jazz musicians, who he’d fly to Rio to attend his parties.

Not only that, he had a semi-official role during and after WWII as a liaison between the United States and Brazil. He was asked by Nelson Rockefeller, working for the US government, to help influence Brazil towards the American side and away from the influence of the nazis.

Meanwhile, he’d also work for the Brazilian government spreading the word in the US about Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. He’d advise Hollywood studios about Brazil, fixing scripts that mentioned the country and so on. He was room mates with Errol Flynn and partied with Orson Welles, Howard Hughes and Ronald Reagan.

A fascinating character. People say he was a genuinely nice, interesting, sensitive person, not just a flashy playboy.

They don’t make playboys like that anymore.

Titan

I knew Titan loved me one day after my ex broke things off.

She’d cheated on me (multiple times I later learned) and was both shacking up with her new guy but still living in my house. Needless to say I was stressed, depressed, and a bundle of nerves.

Titan had always liked my ex (we’d adopted him and her cat at the same time so he’d known us both his whole adopted life). But he was MY GUY and I knew it unequivocally when Erika tried to pet him about a week after the whole mess came down.

He hissed and ran away from her…straight to me for comfort and snuggles. He knew she was the reason I wasn’t doing well and he wasn’t about to put up with it. She moved out a couple days later. When even the animals think you’re a terrible person it’s hard to stay there.

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He’s been my best buddy ever since.

Fox News

 Former President Trump on Monday said that his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida was “under siege” by a “large group” of FBI agents conducting a search warrant.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” Trump said. “It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections.”

“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before,” Trump said, alleging that the FBI agents broke into his safe. 

Thomas Lucipurr Lipshaw

Yes, this is my cat, Thomas Lucipurr Lipshaw, he is now 4 years old but this happened when he was 1 1/2. An ex of mine was working with this woman who was bragging at work about having her cat put down for being destructive, i was called about it ten minutes later, i got the information told my then girlfriend id be making a call and after work id fill her in. Called the vets office she surrendered the cat to. No clue why i did this, i never really interacted with cats before. Well i got them to agree to hold him for me until tomorrow morning.

Next morning this was what came home with us, his name Thomas, he supposedly weighed 9 lbs but he was way too skinny, i could feel his vertebrae and see a few ribs.

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his first day with me was spent under the couch while i chatted with him, peeked under now and again to check on him and offer some tasty morsels.

well turns out he was abused, and then my now ex was mean to him a LOT. so after a lot of drama i threw her out, and he became my cat and mine alone. My son of fur fang and claw, hes a daddy’s cat, he will actually hit me if i begin getting worried about stupid shit, he will put a paw on my arm or hand if i am crying, he sleeps on my bed with me, and always wants to be held.

Here he is today…

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WWII redux: The endpoint of US policy

The threatened peoples of East Asia and Europe can stop the US drive to restore its global domination
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Found HERE

“This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.” So spoke Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just days after berating the US for beating the drums of war.

It is not hard to imagine how Zelensky’s words must have fallen on those European ears that were attentive. His warning surely conjured up images of World War II when tens of millions of Europeans and Russians perished.

Zelensky’s words echoed those of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on the other side of the world at the eastern edge of the great Eurasian landmass:When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled flat.” We can be sure that Duterte, like Zelensky, had in mind World War II, which also consumed tens of millions of lives in East Asia.

The United States is stoking tensions in both Europe and East Asia, with Ukraine and Taiwan as the current flashpoints on the doorsteps of Russia and China, which are the targeted nations.

Let us be clear at the outset. As we shall see, the endpoint of this process is not for the US to do battle with Russia or China, but to watch China and Russia fight it out with their neighbors to the ruin of both sides.

The US is to “lead from behind” – as safely and remotely as can be arranged.

To make sense of this and react properly, we must be very clear-eyed about the goal of the US.

  • Neither Russia nor China has attacked or even threatened the US.
  • Nor are they in a position to do so – unless one believes that either is ready to embark on a suicidal nuclear war.

Why should the US elite and its media pour out a steady stream of anti-China and anti-Russia invective? Why the steady eastward march of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization since the end of the first Cold War?

The goal of the US is crystal clear – it regards itself as the Exceptional Nation and entitled to be the No 1 power on the planet, eclipsing all others.

This goal is most explicitly stated in the well-known Wolfowitz Doctrine drawn shortly after the end of the first Cold War in 1992. It proclaimed that the United States’ “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet union or elsewhere….”

It stated that no regional power must be allowed to emerge with the power and resources “sufficient to generate global power.” It stated frankly that “we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global power” (emphasis mine).

The Wolfowitz Doctrine is but the latest in a series of such proclamations that have proclaimed global domination as the goal of US foreign policy since 1941, the year before the US entered World War II. This lineage is documented clearly in a book by the Quincy Institute’s Stephen Wertheim, “Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy.

Target No 1: China

China’s economy is No 1 in terms of PPP-GDP (gross domestic product based on purchasing power parity) according to the International Monetary Fund and has been since November 2014. It is growing faster than the US economy and shows no signs of slowing down.

In a sense, China has already won by this metric, since economic power is the ultimate basis of all power.

But what about a military defeat of China? Can the US with its present vastly superior armed forces bring that about? Historian Alfred McCoy answers that question in the way most do these days, with a clear “no”:

“The most volatile flashpoint In Beijing’s grand strategy for breaking Washington’s geopolitical grip over Eurasia lies in the contested waters between China’s coast and the Pacific littoral, which the Chinese call ‘the first island chain.’

“But China’s clear advantage in any struggle over that first Pacific island chain is simply distance.…The tyranny of distance, in other words, means that the US loss of that first island chain, along with its axial anchor on Eurasia’s Pacific littoral, should only be a matter of time.”

Certainly the US elites recognize this problem. Do they have a solution?

Moreover, that is not the end of the “problem” for the US. There are other powerful countries, such as Japan, or rapidly rising economies in East Asia, easily the most dynamic economic region in the world. These too will become peer competitors, and in the case of Japan, it already has been a competitor, both before World War II and during the 1980s.

Target No 2: Russia

If we hop over to the western edge of Eurasia, we see that the US has a similar “problem” when it comes to Russia. Here too, the US cannot defeat Russia in a conventional conflict, nor have US sanctions been able to bring it down. How can the US surmount this obstacle?

And as in the case of East Asia, the US faces another economic competitor, Germany, or more accurately, the European Union with Germany at its core. How is the US to deal with this dual threat?

One clue comes in the response of President Joe Biden to both the tension over Taiwan and that over Ukraine. Biden has said repeatedly that his administration will not send US combat troops to fight Russia over Ukraine or to fight China over Taiwan. But it will send materiel and weapons, and also “advisers.”

And here too the US has other peer competitors, most notably Germany, which has been the target of US tariffs. Economist Michael Hudson puts it succinctly in a penetrating essay: “America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies: The US aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia.”

Postwar rise to power

Such “difficulties” for the US were solved once before – in World War II.

One way of looking at that conflict is that it was a combination of two great regional wars, one in East Asia and one in Europe. In Europe the US was minimally involved as Russia, the core of the USSR, battled it out with Germany, sustaining great damage to life and economy. Both Germany and Russia were economic basket cases when the war was over, two countries lying in ruins.

The US provided weapons and materiel to Russia but was minimally involved militarily, only entering late in the game. The same happened in East Asia, with Japan in the role of Germany and China in the role of Russia.

Both Japan and China were devastated in the same way as were Russia and Europe. This was not an unconscious strategy on the part of the United States. As Harry Truman, then a senator, declared in 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”

At the end of it all, the US emerged as the most powerful economic and military power on the planet. McCoy spells it out:

“Like all past imperial hegemons, US global power has similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, now home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. After the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan failed to conquer that vast landmass, the Allied victory in World War II allowed Washington, as historian John Darwin put it, to build its ‘colossal imperium … on an unprecedented scale,’ becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points ‘at both ends of Eurasia.’

“As a critical first step, the US formed the NATO alliance in 1949, establishing major military installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to ensure control of the western side of Eurasia.

“After its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts in the region with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia, and so acquired a vast range of military bases along the Pacific littoral that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia.

“To tie the two axial ends of that vast landmass into a strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the continent’s southern rim with successive chains of steel, including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam.”

The US was able to become the dominant power on the planet because all peer competitors were left in ruins by the two great regional wars in Europe and East Asia, wars that are grouped under the heading of World War II.

If Europe is plunged into a war of Russia against the EU powers with the US “leading from behind” with materiel and weapons, who will benefit? And if East Asia is plunged into a war of China against Japan and whatever allies it can drum up, with the US “leading from behind,” who will benefit?

It is pretty clear that such a replay of World War II will benefit the US. In World War II, while Eurasia suffered tens of millions of deaths, the US suffered about 400,000 – a terrible toll certainly but nothing like that seen in Eurasia.

And with the economies and territories of Eurasia, East and West, in ruins, the US will again emerge on top, in the catbird seat, and able to dictate terms to the world. World War II redux.

But what about the danger of nuclear war growing out of such conflicts? The US has a history of nuclear “brinksmanship,” going back to the earliest post-World War II days. It is a country that has shown itself willing to risk nuclear holocaust.

Are there US policymakers criminal enough to see this policy of provocation through to the end? I will leave that to the reader to answer.

The peoples of East and West Eurasia are the ones who will suffer most in this scenario. And they are the ones who can stop the madness by living peacefully with Russia and China rather than serving as cannon fodder for the US.

There are clear signs of dissent from the European “allies” of the US, especially Germany, but the influence of the US remains powerful. Germany and many other countries are after all occupied by tens of thousands of US troops, their media heavily influenced by the US and with the organization that commands European troops, NATO, under US command. Which way will it go?

In East Asia the situation is the same. Japan is the key, but the hatred of China among the Elite is intense. Will the Japanese people and the other peoples of East Asia be able to put the brakes on the drive to war?

Some say that a two-front conflict like this is US overreach. But certainly, if war is raging on or near the territories of both Russia and China, there is little likelihood that one can aid the other.

Given the power of modern weaponry, this impending world war will be much more damaging than World War II by far. The criminality that is on the way to unleashing it is almost beyond comprehension.

China’s top chip maker SMIC beats earnings estimates despite threat of more US sanctions

  • Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp reported revenue growth of 41.6 per cent for the June quarter
  • Net profits were down 25 per cent from the same period last year, as gross margin rose to 39.4 per cent

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) reported better-than-expected earnings for the June quarter, as China’s top chip maker faces up to rising risks of harsher US sanctions.

The company reported on Thursday that revenue during the three-month period rose 41.6 per cent year-on-year to reach US$1.9 billion, slightly better than Bloomberg’s consensus estimates of US$1.89 billion.

Net profits came in at US$514.3 million under global accounting standards, down 25 per cent from the same period last year, compared with US$447.2 million in the previous quarter. This was better than Bloomberg’s consensus estimates of US$469 million.

Article HERE

China Creates Its Most Powerful General-Purpose GPU: Meet Biren BR100 With 77 Billion Transistors on 7nm, Faster Than NVIDIA Ampere In AI

Birentech, a small enterprise based in Shanghai, China, has released the country’s most powerful General-Purpose GPU, the Biren BR100.

China Makes Its Most Powerful General-Purpose GPU To Date, The Birentech BR100 With 77 Billion Transistors

The Birentech BR100 is the flagship General-Purpose GPU that China has to offer, featuring an in-house GPU architecture that utilizes a 7nm process node and houses 77 Billion transistors within its die. The GPU has been fabricated on TSMC’s 2.5D CoWoS design and also comes packed with 300 MB of on-chip cache, 64 GB of HBM2e with a memory bandwidth of 2.3 TB/s, and support for PCIe Gen 5.0 (CXL interconnect protocol).

Article HERE

The Majority of U.S. Voters Cannot Find Taiwan on a Map

Most American people are uneducated and simply accept the crusader media propaganda to like or hate a country , a religion, and people. This make our mission to spread the truth very important. 

In an Aug. 6-7 survey experiment conducted during heavy media coverage of Pelosi’s trip to the island, 34% of U.S. voters could find Taiwan on a blank map of Asia. That’s the same as the share of voters who said they heard “a lot” about the California Democrat’s trip there last week. It’s also the same fraction of the electorate that could identify Ukraine on a map when asked a few weeks before Russia’s invasion of the country.

Those who could identify Taiwan were more likely to have heard news coverage about the island recently, with 86% saying they had heard at least something about Pelosi’s trip — though the story did manage to break through to 71% of the general electorate. 

Those who could find Taiwan were also significantly more likely to have heard details of China’s retaliation, with more than three-quarters hearing about China’s missile launches as part of naval drills and dispatching of fighter jets across the middle of the Taiwan Strait, compared with 60% and 56% of all voters, respectively, for those developments.

-Chua

Article HERE

Ukraine Using American-Supplied Weapons to ATTACK NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

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Ukraine Using American-Supplied Weapons to ATTACK NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

The Ukrainian Army is using American-made and supplied Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS) to fire shells at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which is occupied by Russian Troops.

The image above shows a blast fragment from an American GMLRS shell “Actuator” recovered after it exploded on the grounds of the Nuclear Plant Thursday.  The English language on the Actuator manufacturing label shows the part number, serial number, the date of manufacture, and says “Actuator Module Assembly” on it.

The Russian Army won control of the Nuclear Power Plant early in its Special Military Operation to de-militarize and De-Nazify Ukraine.  The nuclear power plant is the largest in Europe, with six nuclear reactors.  Russia conquered it in March of this year, and has safeguarded the plant ever since.

The reason Russia took the plant is that if there was a nuclear accident with that plant, radioactive contamination would be carried by local prevailing winds, directly into Russia.  The Russians don’t want any radiation floating into their country.

But early this week, Ukraine began doing the unthinkable: Deliberately firing artillery shells  at the plant; then made the absurd claim that Russia was firing – at their own Russian troops!

Russia even invited the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to come to the plant with inspectors to see exactly WHO it is that is firing at the plant.  Russia said they will bring the inspectors in safely and allow them to see for themselves who is attacking the plant.

Then things got an order of magnitude worse:

Russia publicly stated that Ukraine is attempting to hit the spent fuel cooling facilities on the grounds of that plant which will cause what they described as a “nuclear catastrophe worse than Chernobyl.”

By doing this, Russia says Ukraine is attempting to use the plant as a sort of Tactical Nuclear Weapon.   If  Ukraine can cause a nuclear accident, the levels of radiation would be very much akin to the detonation of a battlefield tactical nuke.

SO . . . . .

Russia has told Ukraine and the rest of the world that “If Ukraine causes a nuclear catastrophe by shelling the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, Russia will consider such an act to be “nuclear terrorism” and, under Russia’s long-established military doctrine, such nuclear errorism would require a Russian nuclear response; Russia will respond to Ukraine’s “nuclear terrorism” by firing Russian Tactical Nuclear Weapons at Ukraine.”

Readers may recall that early in the Special Military Operation, illegitimate president Joe Biden publicly commented that NATO would not get involved in the Russia-Ukraine situation “unless Russia uses Biological, Chemical, or Nuclear weapons.”   If such weapons are used, the US and NATO say they will immediately go to war in Ukraine.

Hal Turner Analysis and Opinion

We in the West are now sitting on a sort of ticking time bomb.  Russia has made its position crystal clear.  If Ukraine causes a nuclear catastrophe, Russia will treat it as nuclear terrorism and hit back with tactical nukes.

The US/NATO has said they will enter the Ukraine war if such weapons are used.   And so, as you read this, the only thing standing in the way of the outbreak of actual nuclear world war 3, is some dumb Ukrainian, firing GMLRS at a nuclear power plant.

Forgive me if I think we’re all doomed.

Witold Pilecki

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Dude was already a war hero before he decided to sneak into Auschwitz. As a young man, Pilecki had been a decorated officer in the Polish-Soviet War of 1918.

After the war, Pilecki moved to the Polish countryside, married a schoolteacher, and had two kids. He enjoyed riding horses and wearing fancy hats and smoking cigars.

Life was simple and good.

Then that whole Hitler thing happened, and before Poland could get both its boots on, the Nazis had already Blitzkrieged through half the country.

Poland lost its entire territory in a little more than a month. It wasn’t exactly a fair fight: while the Nazis invaded in the west, the Soviets invaded in the east.

It was like being stuck between a rock and a hard place—except the rock was a megalomaniacal mass murderer trying to conquer the world and the hard place was rampant, senseless genocide.

Early on, the Soviets were actually far crueler than the Nazis. They had done this shit before, you know—the whole “overthrow a government and enslave a population to your faulty ideology” thing. The Nazis were still somewhat imperialist virgins

In those first months of the war, it’s estimated that the Soviets rounded up over a million Polish citizens and sent them east. A million people, in a matter of months, just gone. Some didn’t stop until they hit the gulags in Siberia; others were found in mass graves decades later. Many are still unaccounted for to this day.

Pilecki fought in those battles—against both the Germans and the Soviets.

And after their defeat, he and fellow Polish officers started an underground resistance group in Warsaw. The Secret Polish Army

In the spring of 1940, the Secret Polish Army got wind of the fact that the Germans were building a massive prison complex outside some backwater town in the southern part of the country. The Germans named this new prison complex Auschwitz.

By the summer of 1940, thousands of military officers and leading Polish nationals were disappearing from western Poland. Fears arose among the resistance that the same mass incarceration that had occurred in the east with the Soviets was now on the menu in the west. Pilecki and his crew suspected that Auschwitz, a prison the size of a small town, was likely involved in the disappearances and that it might already house thousands of former Polish soldiers.

That’s when Pilecki volunteered to sneak into Auschwitz. Initially, it was a rescue mission—he would allow himself to get arrested, and once there, he would organize with other Polish soldiers, coordinate a mutiny, and break out of the prison camp.

It was a mission so suicidal that he might as well have asked his commander permission to drink a bucket of bleach. His superiors thought he was crazy, and told him as much.

But, as the weeks went by, the problem only grew worse: thousands of elite Poles were disappearing, and Auschwitz was still a huge blind spot in the Allied intelligence network. The Allies had no idea what was going on there and little chance of finding out. Eventually, Pilecki’s commanders relented.

One evening, at a routine checkpoint in Warsaw, Pilecki let himself be arrested by the SS for violating curfew. And soon, he was on his way to Auschwitz, the only man known ever to have voluntarily entered a Nazi concentration camp.

Once he got there, he saw that the reality of Auschwitz was far worse than anyone had suspected. Prisoners were routinely shot in roll call lineups for transgressions as minor as fidgeting or not standing up straight.

The manual labor was grueling and endless. Men were literally worked to death, often performing tasks that were useless or meant nothing. The first month Pilecki was there, a full third of the men in his barracks died of exhaustion or pneumonia or were shot.

Regardless, by the end of the 1940, Pilecki, the comic book superhero motherfucker, had still somehow set up an espionage operation.

Over the course of two years, Pilecki built an entire resistance unit within Auschwitz. There was a chain of command, with ranks and officers; a logistics network; and lines of communication to the outside world.

And all this went undiscovered by the SS guards for almost two years. Pilecki’s ultimate aim was to foment a full-scale revolt within the camp. With help and coordination from the outside, he believed he could stoke a prison break, overrun the undermanned SS guards, and release tens of thousands of highly trained Polish guerrilla fighters into the wild. He sent his plans and reports to Warsaw. For months, he waited. For months, he survived.

But then came the Jews. First, in buses. Then, packed in train cars. Soon, they were arriving by the tens of thousands, Stripped of all family possessions and dignity, they filed mechanically into the newly renovated “shower” barracks, where they were gassed and their bodies burned.

Pilecki’s reports to the outside became frantic. They’re murdering tens of thousands of people here each day. Mostly Jews. The death toll could potentially be in the millions. He pleaded with the Secret Polish Army to liberate the camp at once. He said if you can’t liberate the camp, then at least bomb it. For God’s sake, at least destroy the gas chambers. At least.

The Secret Polish Army received his messages but figured he was exaggerating. In the farthest reaches of their minds, nothing could be that f*****. Nothing.

Pilecki was the first person ever to alert the world to the Holocaust. His intelligence was forwarded through the various resistance groups around Poland, then on to the Polish government-in-exile in the United Kingdom, who then passed his reports to the Allied Command in London. The information eventually even made its way to Eisenhower and Churchill.

They, too, figured Pilecki had to be exaggerating.

In 1943, Pilecki realized that his plans of a mutiny and prison break were never going to happen: The Secret Polish Army wasn’t coming. The Americans and British weren’t coming. And in all likelihood, it was the Soviets who were coming—and they would be worse. Pilecki decided that remaining inside the camp was too risky. It was time to escape.

He made it look easy, of course. First, he faked illness and got himself admitted to the camp’s hospital. From there, he lied to the doctors about what work group he was supposed to return to, saying he had the night shift at the bakery, which was on the edge of camp, near the river. When the doctors discharged him, he headed to the bakery, where he proceeded to “work” until 2:00 a.m., when the last batch of bread finished baking. From there, it was just a matter of cutting the telephone wire, silently prying open the back door, changing into stolen civilian clothes without the SS guards noticing, sprinting to the river a mile away while being shot at, and then navigating his way back to civilization .

Beijing metro replace English with pinying

北京地铁站的英文标识已经改成汉语拼音了,这才是大国的样子
Article HERE

Russian airports replace English with Chinese? – iNEWS

Article HERE

Her name was Blue

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I once had a cat that I found feral in the woods, living off mice in a neighbor’s junk pile. Eventually I coaxed her out with some food, and after a few days, into the house, where she eventually made a home. She was a good cat, and a good companion to my brother’s cat, and after I got out of college, became a favorite of my wife’s.

She lived with us a long time before the tumors appeared. Twice, we had them cut out and gave her a little extra love and tried to appreciate her remaining time.

Then one day, she wasn’t at the door when I came home. I found her in a back room, laying paralyzed in a puddle of urine, pleading with her eyes for help. I had waited too long.

I held her as the needle went in. She winced, and I rubbed her head like I always did when I comforted her. She snuggled against my hand, the fear and the pain left her eyes, and just for a moment, she was herself again.

I held her till she stopped breathing, then went outside and cried a good long time, not for the loss of a pet, but for having failed an animal what depended on me utterly, for having stubbornly denied my duty to her and let her suffer longer than I should have.

Her name was Blue.

She was regal and sleek, and deserved a more dignified end. She knew she was dying, but needed me to let her go.

When I finally did, she was relieved.

I’m sure that when it comes time for your loved ones to go, they will be ready.

Chinese tech firm launches GPU chip it claims marks ‘new era’ for computing

Biren Technology says the peak performance of its 7-nanometre chip – made by TSMC – is three times better than equivalent products on the market. It will be used in large-scale, cloud-based AI training in data centres and the company aims to partner with firms such as server provider Inspur.

Article HERE

I knew he was special.

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I saw hime and knew he was special…

I walked into a cat room at the shelter and sat on the floor, sad, because my home cat just died a mere one week earlier.

I put my purse on the floor.

This Ginger cat pranced up to me and immediately laid down on top of my purse. I thought he was telling me that he wanted to come home with me.

I visited this shelter 3 X and each time, he did the same thing.

When I brought in the cat carrier the third visit, I set it on the floor and he ran over to me and walked into the carrier.

The shelter personal, said, “NO NO, you have to take him out so we can take the Success story “forever home” picture…so I took him out, held him, they took the photo.

I set him back down on the floor and he immediately walked back into the carrier and said, “Ok, I am ready, take me to my new home.”

What are the chances of that? Special, I say !

I passed on a gorgeous 1 year old all white male with one blue eye and one gold eye, for an extraordinary, every day normal ginger that you see everywhere.

He is so worth it.

MM Comment. Cats share bodies. Her previous cat entered the boy of this cat at the shelter. I'll bet you with a 95% certainty. -MM

In Actual Russia, No Sign of Sanctions

It’s time to get real. It’s been time to get real. Russia has won its war against Ukraine.

This outcome comes as no surprise. Anyone with access to a map could see that the chances of Ukraine prevailing against Russia were slim to none.

The only way Ukraine could have emerged victorious — which would, according to the Ukrainians themselves, mean pushing it out of Crimea and deposing the separatist pro-Russian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk — would have been if the United States and its Western allies had been willing to launch nuclear weapons, which would have led to global annihilation. Once the decision was made not to start World War III, Ukraine’s defeat became inevitable. This, everyone sane knows, is for the best.

Determinative to this conclusion was an unusual pair of motivations. Normally, when a war is fought on one country’s territory, the invaded country fights harder than the invading forces. Paradoxically, despite suffering damaged infrastructure, the invaded state enjoys the home advantages of complete knowledge of the battlefield and much shorter supply lines. Aside from sporadic cross-border missile strikes, this war has been fought entirely on Ukrainian territory.

This conflict is different because Russia has to win; it cannot walk away. Ukraine has a 1,200-mile border with Russia, it wants to join an anti-Russia military alliance and its government was openly hostile to Russia before the war. And when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, its armies came through Ukraine, where the Nazis were greeted as liberators. Unlike America, which could bring its troops home after losing on the other side of the world in Afghanistan and Iraq and shrug off its imperialist misadventures and could leave Vietnam after pretending that more political will on the home front would have resulted in victory, Russia sees its military operation as existential. Ukraine isn’t a misbegotten side project. It’s as essential in the same way the United States would respond to a Canada that turned hostile to the U.S.

Unfortunately, and dangerously, American media consumers are being pounded with an endless deluge of propaganda promoting the ludicrous idea that Ukraine is winning and/or will ultimately prevail militarily. This fantastical assertion props up political support for shipping $60 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine, with more on the way — never mind the 70% that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wildly corrupt government sells on the black market and the Javelin missile systems that wind up for sale on the dark web. (Christmas is coming! Don’t forget your favorite political cartoonist and columnist.) By way of comparison, the U.S. Department of Health of Human Services estimates that we could abolish homelessness here for $20 billion.

We’re also being told that Russia is crumbling under the crushing blow of vicious Western sanctions deployed as part of the White House’s openly stated war aim that it wants “to see Russia weakened.” The Russian economy, it is said, is collapsing. Russian elites, they say, will soon overthrow President Vladimir Putin.

Let me tell you firsthand: There is zero sign of economic distress in Russia.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Russia’s two biggest cities. Stores are bustling; people are spending; unemployment is low and still falling; there are lines at ATMs and whatever else is happening, the economy is anything but bad. The Galeria Mall across the busy street from my hotel in Saint Petersburg has a few closed stores shut down by Western chains, but the majority remain, and consumers are shopping like mad. European and American tourists are few and far between, but it’s exactly the same here in sanctions-free Istanbul where I’m writing this. Westerners stopped coming at the start of the COVID-19 lockdown two years ago and still haven’t returned. If Russians are unhappy with Putin — and they’re not — it’s not because of the economy.

I know from bad economies; where I live in New York, crime is out of control, homeless people go untreated for an array of mental illnesses and some are killing people, and being killed, and many storefronts have been empty and boarded up since the beginning of the pandemic. Any New Yorker would or should happily trade places with their Muscovite counterpart, who lives in a city with clean streets and subways that don’t serve as rolling homeless shelters and where life feels as if COVID-19 was never a thing. News stories that claim Russia is on the ropes are a giant magnificent pile of lies so over-the-top that I can’t help but be impressed by their glorious audacity and easily debunked mendacity. All you have to do is go to Russia, as I did, and see for yourself that it’s all bull — but hey, that’s a lot of trouble — because of sanctions that seem to be hurting us more than them.

Self-delusion is more fun.

Who, after all, should you trust? The same U.S. state media that told you Saddam Hussein had WMDs? Or some cartoonist-columnist who told you, well in advance, that the U.S. didn’t stand a chance in Afghanistan, Trump would win in 2016 and that he would attempt a coup d’etat to remain in power?

Billy the cat

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I had a very sad day recently when I met a cat whom I’ll call Billy.

He had been found as a stray by a good client of the clinic where I was working.

He was a black and white male cat who had been recently neutered.

The odd thing was that all of his white paws were colored pink as if with magic markers. When I asked what the pink paws meant, I was horrified to find out that this is the way people who run dog fights mark cats they’ve acquired. This is so that when they throw the cats in the ring with the dogs, the spectators can tell the cats apart and bet on which one will last the longest.

I did not know that this practice even existed and I am sad and angry that animals are treated that way.

Billy must somehow have escaped the fate intended for him.

He initially weighed only six pounds, but he was eating and drinking like a champ. We checked him out thoroughly and found to our dismay that he had a greatly enlarged kidney and signs of severe kidney disease.

After all Billy had been through, the new owner, staff and I weren’t going to give up. We pulled out the stops and treated for what we hoped was a kidney infection and Billy responded!

After one week in the hospital, he went home and is doing well —a victory for the kitty with the pink feet!

Sun Gang

Sun Gang is a truck driver. His truck caught fire during maintenance. At that time, he was in a downtown area, and there was a gas station nearby. In order not to put others in danger, he drove the truck for 5 kilometers until there was no one. Not long after he got out of the trunk, the fuel tank in the car exploded. The newly bought truck became scrap metal.

He said that the truck was like a big stove at that time. He was very scared, but there was no other way. He didn’t want others get hurt.

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His heroic action was widely viewed on the Internet. Many people were moved by his bravery and kindness. A few days later, two companies presented him with a new one.

Sun Gang had a new truck and continued to deliver goods to earn money.He donated the money he earned from the first transportation to the nursing home , saying that kindness should be passed on.

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I recalled this news published 2 months ago because I saw similar videos today. A truck carrying wheat straw caught fire, and the driver drove it one kilometer to ensure the safety of nearby villagers.

The act of saving others but putting himself in danger is so typical of China.

Maine Coons

I have three Maine coons, and have had other cats, and I have to say that they act differently than other cats.

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My cats have always been very spoiled – they get a lot of attention; they basically have the run of the house, receive the best food, etc. etc.

So my last three cats (littermates) were wonderful, but could be skittish and sometimes lashed out when they were overstimulated. They were interactive, of course, but spent a lot of time on their own.

My Maine coons are giants, can’t stand to not be in the same room with me, never bite, nip, scratch, or anything else.

If they get tired of me petting or snuggling, they just push me away and rearrange themselves.

They LOVE people.

I had a plumber here today – you’d think I’d hired a magician to entertain a room full of kindergarten kids.

They sat in the tub and watched him, followed him to the door and watched him go to his truck – never said a peep or tried to touch him – just wanted to see what was up.

I think it’s the general disposition of the breed to be confident, friendly, and outgoing.

When my doorbell rings, they line up like the staff at Downton Abby, waiting to greet our guest.

They are very, very smart, so any new interaction is very exciting for them.

Shavarsh Karapetyan

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Shavarsh Karapetyan

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The trolley bus sank 80 feet offshore at a depth of 33 feet. Shavarsh immediately dove in and swam to the bus and despite zero visibility, managed to kick in the back window, injuring himself in the process.

He proceeded to save twenty people trapped in the bus, one at a time, for hours.

The combined effect of the cold water and his inquiries from breaking the glass window led to his hospitalization for 45 days after the incident, during which time he developed pneumonia, sepsis, and lung damage which ended his athletic career.

For years, his story wasn’t known, until an article about the event identified him by name in 1982.

In 1985, he happened to pass by a burning building and rushed inside, again saving people trapped inside one at a time until he collapsed. He was again hospitalized with severe burns and lung damage.

He’s still kicking it at 66.

Just an awesome person, a real Rufus.

Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Other American Myths

The Myth of American Competitive Supremacy

German GDP Could Fall 10% If Production Brought Home from China

A move to restore domestic production of key goods in Germany – mostly from China – could lead to a gross domestic product decline of almost 10%, a recent paper has suggested.

Near-shoring to neighbouring countries would also have a clearly negative effect of a comparable magnitude, the report published by the IFO Institute for Economic Research said.

Article HERE

Tough little momma

My parents owned a convenient store back in the 80’s. It was located in Denver Harbor a.k.a. 5th Ward (when you call an area a WARD, you know it’s not the nicest or safest of areas). It was a Saturday, my brothers and I did not have school so we were there helping. This man walks in with a gun and robbed my mom of all the money in the register, runs out and hops in his van that he had backed into the parking lot.

My mom ( petite Asian woman) grabs her gun and runs after him.

She starts shooting at his van and he shoots back. She gets down on all fours and starts crawling to hide behind his van, all while shooting! He couldn’t get his van started so he escapes on foot running towards the freeway!

My mom was unaware that he had taken off on foot and she’s still playing crouching tiger, hidden dragon by his van. Cops apprehended the guy running on the freeway. Bring him over to my mom and said, “Is this the guy that robbed you?”

Before she could answer, the robber says, “ I’m gonna sue you lady for shooting at me!” ( Yeah…I know).

My mom was so pissed he said that so she hocked a loogie and spit in his face and told the police, “Yeah, dat him!”

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More stories about my mother and her convenient store “hey days”—

My mom got a 2nd store in 92. It was dry (no alcohol). We were about to close. But a couple of wanna be cholas (gang members) comes in. One opens up the pickle jar and tried to reach in with her hands to get a pickle.

My mom yells at her and tells her not to do that. She would get it for her.

Girl curses out my mom with all kinds of profanity so my mom tells her to get out but she won’t and is still cursing and yelling do my mom pulls out the gun and told her to get out and don’t come back again.

Girl leaves but threatens my mom with more violence.

We start closing up.

My mom goes to the dumpster and has her steak knife to cut up boxes. Out of the blue she is jumped by the girl AND girl’s mom!!!

Yes! She brought her mom as reinforcement!

In my mom’s defense, she swings the steak knife and cuts the girls arm.

Her mom calls 911 and my mom is taken to jail for assaulting a minor!

Girl was 16… mom spent night in jail and made friends with her cell mates…they were all concerned for her due to being diabetic and in jail without her meds.

When we were able to post bail and get her, she was hugging on each one saying her good byes…Charges were eventually dropped against my mother because not even a week later, said girl and her mother were involved in an altercation with each other.

Girl and mother had a rap sheet so long that it wasn’t worth it for prosecutors to go after my mom.

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Sheldon

Not an MM story, but great anyways. -MM

I used to hate+fear cats (childhood trauma from cat attack) and I’m also very, very allergic.

About five years ago I was entering my car at night, in the rain, with my wife when I saw a messy, furry lump of hair reminiscent of the movie “the ring” streak around the corner of the car. I went out to look and there was this gnarly black feline looking back at me. I was like… eugh… and went back into the car. But the darned thing followed me and crawled up my lap, up along my arm up towards my shoulders all while I’m all but screaming “WHAT THE FUCK IS IT DOING??!?” to my wife, who I knew had a lot of experience with cats. The cat, that was obviously in a bad state, proceeded to lie down around my neck like a nasty, wet scarf and passed out with a huge sigh. Weirdest thing ever.

Despite my aversions against cats, especially one that had just punctured my leg, arm and neck in about a hundred spots with its nasty, infected claws – we decided to walk down to the vet, cat around my neck, to get advice on what to do with it (and also to have it safely removed from the vicinity of my carotid artery :D)

The lady who worked there was involved in a local animal support group and offered to do her best to find the owners and said the cat could live there for now – in a small cage, in a dark corner until the owner could be found or if not – be sent off to the shelter.

I suppose that was where love won out over hate, fear and allergies, so I asked if it wouldn’t be better for the cat if we took it home to try and care for it for the time being.

The cat was dirty, had ticks, fleas, skin infections, ear infections, worms and was in obvious psychological distress.

Long story short, the owners were found – but because they’d had kids and the kids were beating up the cat they decided to kick the cat out instead of teaching their kids manners. The cat was homeless and given the previous owners mentality, probably hadn’t gotten much love or attention.

So we decided to give him a fighting chance and spent a minor fortune (no insurance = expensive) getting him the help he needed, removing ticks, cleaning out fleas, daily skin care, minor ear surgery, vaccinations, anti-worm medication, intensive care diets, castration and whatever “love” I was able to muster. My allergies were terrible, but I pushed through. This was not a fun experience for any of us, but the cat never, ever tried to hurt us despite being put through weeks of painful and likely terrifying medicinal procedures as well as my constant, ear shattering sneezing.

In time (many months), my body started getting used to having “cat” in the air all of the time and my allergies started to slowly fade, in straight opposition to what doctors have always told me should happen. Not just my cat allergies, mind you. My dog and generic fur allergy, pollen allergies (hay fever) and contact allergies all improved significantly over the next two years!

Today, five years later, I could not imagine living without Sheldon. He is the perfect pet – with beautiful, soft and glistening black fur. He’s one of those cats who never do annoying “cat things” like topple things over, attack from behind a corner or walk all over the keyboard when you try to work, and when I lie down in the couch in the evenings he comes over with a slight meow, as if to ask if it’s okay to hang out, and when I move over he jumps up and snuggles up right next to me for hours on end. When I go for a walk he will follow me around wherever I go. He keeps the house and garden free of mice and rats. Warns us when something is awry. Hangs out with the pet rabbits my wife keeps in the yard or when we are outdoors he will run around the neighborhood playing and jumping up and down trees and fences. When we are away he spends most of the day comfortably resting in bed, only to come running to us like a dog when we get back. Every time we open a door for him, or give him food, he will first take the time to turn around and give us a gentle stroke against the leg, before proceeding about his business.

I can now go outdoors in the summer without being destroyed by allergies, the family has gained a wonderful friend and Sheldon gives us more than enough love to go around. These are the gifts we were given for deciding to love, when we could’ve just walked away – and certainly had our reasons to do just that.

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California’s Paul Gonzales, 45

I was watching a TED talk by a woman called “Cracking the Online Dating Code” or some such about how she found her husband online. It was pretty interesting, but she told several stories about initial “dates from hell”, including one man who took her to a “white tablecloth” restaurant, ordered copious amounts of food, and multiple bottles of wine, all the while saying, “Have whatever you want! It’s on me!” and then of course, went to “go to the bathroom” and never returned.

“That dinner,” she mused, “cost me a month’s rent.”

People aren’t putting up with con artists anymore…

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This is Los Angles, California’s Paul Gonzales, 45, nicknamed the “dine-and-dash” dater for asking women out to restaurants, eating and drinking, then leaving with bills unpaid.

He was sentenced to 120 days in jail and three years of probation, and was barred from using dating apps or websites.

Prosecutors said he had defrauded at least 10 women of more than $950. Eight of the women said they were forced to pay, twice the restaurant picked up the bill. I hope they sued him in civil court.

When someone leaves, and “it’s not your fault” it’s still their bill.

It’s not a “prank,” it’s theft.

Have the police called.

Pay for your portion (always bring some cash and a credit card on a date) and give them enough information to pursue the thief.

I also think that if you call the police, it’s less likely that the restaurant will try to force you to pay for his half, with happened to the women above.

Twitter Cancels Russia Over Covid Biowarfare Accusations

I was two weeks old

I was two weeks old and when my owner stopped at a stop sign.

And he hurled me out of the window into the woods.

Luckily for me the guy who took this photo thought it looked odd and was behind my previous owners car.

He stopped to see what was thrown out.

And even though my eyes were not open I had a hell of a pair of lungs, and even though I could only squeak my squeak was loud enough for me to be found .

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My new owner took me home , against his instincts to find my previous owner and beat them to a pulp, and fed me some nice warm milk with some honey in it .

After a few days my eyes opened fully and I could focus on this really nasty looking guy who without a doubt would have beaten my previous owner to a pulp.

I recognized his smell and the warmth I had felt as he kept me close for a few days and for a week or so afterwards I learnt how to eat for myself and to not annoy his much bigger cats too much.

Now I’m a big guy myself and follow my new owner about everywhere .

Hes a pretty cool dude for someone who looks like he could rip your head off…..but I like him .

He tells me he doesn’t like humans much but I have no idea what that means .

India dumps US dollar for UAE dirham, Chinese yuan in Russian coal trade

Article HERE

Tokyo and Seoul embarrassed by Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan

The atmosphere surrounding Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Japan on Friday, August 5, is like the sky over Tokyo: stormy. After a visit to a defiant South Korea, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives is making a stopover in a worried, even discontented, archipelago. Japan is the last stop on an Asian tour marked by a visit to Taiwan, which is embarrassing for the US’s two main allies in East Asia who are reluctant to upset their Chinese neighbor.

The issue dominated Ms. Pelosi’s breakfast with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and her meeting with Japanese Lower House Speaker Hiroyuki Hosoda, as angry China is conducting live ammunition military maneuvers around Taiwan through August 7. “They will not isolate Taiwan by preventing us from going there. We had high-level visits, senators in the spring, in a bi-partisan way… and we will not let them isolate Taiwan,” Ms. Pelosi said in a press conference in Tokyo….

Article HERE

Everything Wrong with the West in 55 seconds

On numerous radio shows, I have told my audience that kids today are “spoiled lazy.”  Parents worked their butts off trying to give their kids a better life, but those kids have now turned out to EXPECT everything from mommy and daddy.

Many of them won’t work, and yet think the world owes them comfort and convenience.

The video below proves this in 55 seconds:

Worth a big watch!

 

I do not understand how our nation or our world will survive if THIS is the generation that’s coming into adulthood.  The level of self-centeredness, immaturity, and sense of entitlement, is utterly astounding.

The Point: Exclusive with Chinese KMT ex-Chair

Talking about the Chinese “white paper” with the former chairperson Taiwan political party. Well worth the first 5 minutes, then you can go unless you live here in the region.

At the end

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This old woman raised her cat since it was a kitten. On her death bed, the cat refused to leave her side to stay with her. Guarding, comforting and accompanying her on her final journey. Such loyalty and unconditional love.

Fur babies are the best!

The time to transcend the vaccine mind cage is NOW

Some thoughts.
“Americans today fear that linearism (alias the American Dream) has run its course. Many would welcome some enlightenment about history’s patterns and rhythms, but today’s intellectual elites offer little that’s useful. Caught between the entropy of the chaoticists and the hubris of the linearists, the American people have lost their moorings.” 

– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
The following is from a MM influencer. I think that it is worthy of printing, and applies not only to nations, but to Magick, and other PSI issues. Please check it out. All credit to <redacted>.

A coincidence?

Is it a coincidence? Last night, before news broke out that there is a new deadly virus in China, I had asked Deirdre, Nathan, and Skwisgar why no one has thought to continue research on why some resident bacteria act as "first responders" or "resident aliens who signed up to be soldiers" (like Samoans signing up for the US Military to gain citizenship) in some people's bodies. I remembered reading this article so many years ago, when I was still in the US. Some women were getting around (a lot) and never got any STDs. It wasn't their native immune system that was protecting them, it was the resident microbiome in their bodies. I mean their native immune system is fine, but what attacked these pathogenic organisms were the entrenched "friendly" bacteria in their bodies. I also asked the repeat question about the lack of research in virophages and bacteriophages. So I woke up this morning and got your messages. And I know about the recent outbreak in Sanya.

We are all weary about these constant outbreaks. the masks, vaccines, travel restrictions, quarantine, etc. Right now, we have vaccines, masks, disinfectant chemicals, quarantine procedures. It's quite primitive and very inconvenient. Vaccines are slow, and masks will exert negative health effects (restricted air flow that leaves you breathing recycled old air is not good for your lungs or skin). 

I can tell you that there is some kind of mind block going on. This mind block is preventing the evolution of technologies that will really revolutionise the way we protect our health. You also know the Domain policy of waiting until you develop the gumption to ask. If you don't ask, you'll never get the answer. They're not gonna lay it out for you just because. 

So, how many American biolabs are there in this world? Do we have the time to make vaccines for each and every pathogen they store in those damn labs? It takes years to test and perfect vaccines. The fastest way and best way to protect the body is to harness the resident bacteria, viruses, and fungi in the body and recruit them as active attackers for the host immune system. The immune system is the "military" or "police" of the body, which serve as the nation state in our analogy. Right now, bacteria in our gut act as "factory specialists" who help break down food and extract the necessary nutrients out of it. Their wages are a "cut" of the food that we eat. They are good "permanent residents", working and paying taxes. But they are still civilians. Usually, in most bodies, only the body's actual cells (i.e. natural born citizens) are eligible for law enforcement and military (immune system, killer T-cells and macrophages). Now, the immune system knows to recognise the friendly microbiome and not hurt them (permanent resident civilians who work and pay tax).    But you see there's a missed opportunity...

Why can't the body recruit some of these resident bacteria/virus/fungi into active military service? Our body is their home, their nation. if they want to pick up arms and protect their home, well why not? Don't we need all the help we can get? Frankly, there would be no better soldiers for detecting enemy bacteria, viruses, and fungi. In the natural world, these micro-organisms know how to cooperate, protect each other, and even wage war. What are biofilms? Well this is protein goop made by groups of bacteria to protect themselves from chemical warfare (antibiotics). Yes, all bacteria know how to make antibiotics. even the ones in your gut. They know how to kill unfriendly bacteria if necessary. The human DNA has already incorporated some viral DNA (it's viral DNA that actually enables the viability of pregnancy through the placenta 

Now, we get this viral DNA that lets us make a protein that fuses things.” Once a viral protein, the virus essentially morphed or evolved into what we now know as syncytin. This protein gives baby the ability to fuse cells into a wall — the placenta — that connects mom and baby but also keeps them separate.

So clearly, our bodies have the capability to "naturalise" foreign organisms and make them a part of us, or at least convince them to work on our behalf, since we provide a stable home for them and their children. Well OK, you ask, so how do we convince more resident micro-organisms to do this to serve as our first line of defensive immunity? 

There is technology for this, most likely a hormone. And perhaps a device that sends/delivers the correct frequency. hormone is chemical communication, but also vibrations/frequencies of light and sound are forms of communication. Yes, the technology involves these. We already use light frequencies to heal bacterial infections, and sonic frequencies and radio frequencies to induce cells into healing themselves. 

You know, if human scientists are able to harness these technologies to recruit the microbiome as active soldiers for our immune system, we will never have to deal with vaccines or wear masks on a hot day ever again.  REMEMBER--these pathogenic organisms are MASTERS OF HIJACKING OUR CELLS, but they are not masters of killing other microorganisms like them. The reason they wreak havoc on our bodies is because most of our microbiome are "civilian" residents, and are therefore "standing on the sidelines" as our bodies are attacked. These civilian residents don't fight for our behalf, they let our killer T-cells and macrophages do all the fighting. This is a BIG MISTAKE. They watch as our killer T-cells fail, and their home (which is our body) is destroyed by these rogue pathogens before their eyes. But does it have to be that way? NO. 

I'm not making this up. The therapy technology to induce our microbiome to serve as active soldiers for our immune system really does exist, it really can be done--if we can break out of our self imposed cognitive cage. We are currently asking the wrong questions, forever thinking that vaccines are the only solution for enhanced immunity. Because we are so over focused on our own immune systems, we have overlooked the best soldiers for the fight against pathogenic microorganisms. They were always within us all along (figuratively and literally). 

FREQUENCY. THAT'S THE KEY. frequency is communication. This is by far the best protection against the current environment of lab grown bioweapons. Our microbiome has EVERYTHING it needs to manufacture the weapons for killing these frankenpathogens. 

This is kind of how Domain society operates. I won't get into it now, because that's another email altogether. It's a complex topic. 

The past nuclear damage from millions of years ago may play a role in the current mind blocks human scientists have at this moment. The mental cages we put ourselves in also keep us inert without us realising it. It's possible that the past nuclear damage has severely lessened our body's ability to communicate with our microbiome, limiting cooperation, and leaving our bodies more vulnerable to infection. There are so many factors on Earth that exert bad effects on human health, but I guess I would have to write a book about it. 

I sincerely hope that some connected scientists in China and Russia wake up and ask for Domain guidance on developing techniques beyond vaccines. I'm tired of these stupid outbreaks. Creating and injecting a zillion vaccines isn't the answer, not in the age of bioweaponry. 

This latest virus has no vaccine and a high fatality rate. I'd say that the time to transcend the vaccine mind cage is NOW. Maybe a brilliant Chinese or Russian scientist will get vibrational tremors of these thoughts due to "morphic resonance".

Why Is Walmart Laying Off So Many Workers?

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If brighter days are eventually coming for the U.S. economy, why would Walmart be so eager to lay off corporate employees?  Of course the truth is that brighter days are not coming.  Yesterday, I posted an article in which I listed 11 big companies that are laying off workers.  After I completed that article, I discovered that Walmart is also letting people go.  If a seemingly unshakable giant such as Walmart already feels compelled to eliminate jobs, what is the outlook for employees of companies that are far smaller and far weaker?

When Walmart announced that it would be laying off nearly 200 corporate employees, it rapidly made headlines all over the nation

Walmart let go of almost 200 corporate employees on Wednesday amid the economic downturn and rising inflation, according to a person familiar with the development. The company said in a statement that these layoffs are a part of updating its structure.

Yes, they are “updating their structure” because they know that really hard times are coming.

And the projections that the company recently released confirm this

Walmart said it now anticipates adjusted earnings per share for the second quarter and full year to decline around 8–9 percent and 11–13 percent, respectively. Previously, the retailer had predicted a 1 percent fall it had previously forecast for the full year.

“Food inflation is double digits and higher than at the end of the first quarter. This is affecting customers’ ability to spend on general merchandise categories and requiring more markdowns to move through the inventory, particularly apparel,” Walmart said.

I also just learned that SoundCloud has decided to lay off “approximately 20% of its global workforce”

SoundCloud will be laying off approximately 20% of its global workforce citing “a significant company transformation” and the current economic and financial landscape.

“During this difficult time, we are focused on providing the support and resources to those transitioning while reinforcing our commitment to executing our mission to lead what’s next in music,” reads a statement by a rep for SoundCloud.

Just like in 2008, the pace of layoffs is beginning to accelerate at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking.  If you missed my article from yesterday that contained many more examples, you can find it right here: “It’s Happening: Here Is A List Of 11 Big Companies That Have Announced Layoffs Within The Last 2 Weeks”.

As more Americans lose their jobs, the number of people filing new claims for unemployment benefits will continue to go up.

In fact, the number for last week was up to 260,000

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits edged higher last week, hovering near the highest level of the year — the latest sign that the historically tight labor market is starting to cool off.

Figures released Thursday by the Labor Department show that applications for the week ended July 30 rose to 260,000 from the downwardly revised 254,000 recorded a week earlier. That is above the 2019 pre-pandemic average of 218,000 claims and just narrowly missed topping the eight-month high of 261,000 recorded in mid-July.

Meanwhile, inflation continues to spiral out of control and that is causing immense hardship for millions of American families.

According to Zero Hedge, the Misery Index in the United States just hit the highest level since 2011…

Although the White House seems to believe that things are pretty OK, the US’s misery index suggests they’re not.

June’s misery index (a composite of unemployment and CPI inflation) has risen to 12.5. That’s the highest since September 2011 when the US economy was experiencing a time of very weak job growth and economic growth following the Great Recession. At the time, the yield curve almost inverted, and there were fears of a new recession.

June’s misery index is also above the index from the 2007-2009 recession when the index peaked at 11.4 percent.

So many people are hurting out there right now.

Many Americans are working as hard as they can, but it still isn’t enough to pay the bills because inflation has been absolutely eviscerating our standard of living.

As a result, more people are falling out of the middle class and into poverty with each passing day.

The lines at our food banks are getting longer and longer, and many of those that are now showing up for assistance were once solidly part of the middle class.  Here is one example

The first time Kelly Wilcox drove her 2017 Dodge Grand Caravan to the food pantry near her home in Payson, Utah, she immediately noticed one thing that surprised her: new models of Toyota and Honda sedans and minivans. “I saw a bunch of other people with cars like me who had kids in their cars,” she said.

The mother of four young sons didn’t know what to expect when she made an early visit to Tabitha’s Way Local Food Pantry this spring. She knew that she needed help. Her husband had lost his job. He soon found a new job as an account manager, but that wasn’t enough with inflation.

Can you identify with Kelly Wilcox?

When I was growing up, I lived in a middle class neighborhood and I went to a very large school that was packed with middle class kids.  At that time, I can’t remember encountering a single family that was truly impoverished.

But these days it seems like almost everyone is struggling.

For years I have been writing about the disappearance of the middle class.  Now we have gotten to a point where the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us is greater than ever.

One recent survey found that nearly half of the country has cut back spending on food because the cost of living has become so oppressive.

That is frightening.

But the pain that we are currently experiencing is just the tip of the iceberg.  As I have been warning for a long time, much worse is ahead.

So please try to enjoy this summer while you still can.

Compared to what is eventually coming, the middle of 2022 is actually a time of rip-roaring prosperity.

Ms. Leung

Ms. Leung was for years one of the most valued assets the U.S. had. She started off as the manager of an import-export company that was facilitating illicit technology transfers to the PRC in Los Angeles. She left this job just as the FBI was closing in on the company to shut it down.

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FBI Special Agent James Smith opened an investigation into her, found that she was vulnerable, and eventually turned her as an asset for the FBI.

Katrina’s information proved to be invaluable. She was codenamed “Parlor Maid” and provided information on the PRC for 20 years. Much of her information was corroborated by multiple sources. She became one of the best sources on the PRC and traveled to and from China often, always coming back with good intel. Smith’s career was set, he had a high-performing asset, and was on-track for promotions and accolades for his work.

Special Agent Smith just happened to also be carrying on a 20-year extramarital affair with Katrina as well.

To add to his issues, Special Agent Smith also had a habit of talking about things that he shouldn’t have in front of Katrina. Smith would discuss ongoing operations she had no business knowing about, share files with her, and generally break every rule on handling assets.

Things started to go downhill in the early 90s. Katrina was noted on a recording talking to a known MSS operative regarding the FBI’s counterintelligence program. Telling Smith that the MSS had found out about her activities and she was giving them information to save herself.

The only problem was that this was a lie. Katrina had always been a double-agent, just for the Chinese, not the U.S.!

Somehow, miraculously, she remained an asset for 10 more years!

It all started to topple in 2001 when the FBI got warrants to look into her. They found an FBI telephone directory, information on an ongoing FBI counterintelligence operation at Lawrence Livermore Labs (Royal Tourist), and other classified materials in her home.

In 2002, they found that she had likely transmitted photos of FBI agents to Chinese intelligence, and copied a Top Secret document Smith had checked out overnight.

When Leung was arrested in 2003, she was already deemed one of the most damaging spies in FBI history. Some compared her to Hanssen (many consider him worse than Aldrich Ames).

The biggest fail?

Leung walked away free on espionage charges due to prosecutorial misconduct. She was eventually convicted on, of all things, tax evasion. She received a slap on the wrist.

The magnitude of all of these fails was impressive in scope.[1]

  • Leung’s disclosures to MSS should have disqualified her immediately. Instead, she stayed on board for 10 more years.
  • SA Smith was never questioned about his handling of Leung. He was seen as “above reproach.” He routinely deflected and ignored threats to Leung.
  • Derogatory reporting on Leung was never followed up. Multiple times.
  • SA Smith knew about her disclosures and hid them because he was afraid of his relationship with her being exposed.
  • In 1992, the FBI had information on a PRC double agent named Katrina that was working with an FBI agent. An inexperienced analyst left out the identifying information. Smith sat in on the debrief of this source and deflected the informer as a misogynist and liar.
  • FBI managers were reluctant to confront Smith. Leading to the tail wagging the dog, as Smith insisted that Leung was the FBI’s best PRC asset.
  • FBI Management repeatedly toned-down language regarding Leung, and refused to compel her to take a polygraph or be subject to more rigorous vetting.
  • SA Smith treated Leung like a member of his squad, often providing her information she had no business knowing.

There’s more, but that gives you an idea of the cluster that this was.

The effects of this case are still echoing through the FBI today. What started off as a classic counterintelligence operation, with excellent results, turned into one of the biggest counterintelligence failures in U.S. history.

Vintage Pictures of Snow King Chairlifts without Any Safety Bars that Look Very Unsafe, 1950-1970

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These vintage photographs of Snow King chairlifts taken between the 1950s and 1970s show people riding in a very unsafe way without deploying any safety bars or other protections.

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While these chairlifts were actually dangerous, there’s also a forced perspective component that makes the lift look much higher than it actually was.

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Snow King Mountain winter resort is located in Downtown Jackson, Wyoming and the original 1936 ski hill was on the southeast edge of the city. It was the first ski area in Wyoming.

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The first chairlift was installed in 1946, a converted ore tram from Colorado. It had four stations, with the first starting where 1 town hill apartments are located.

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In 1981, The resort replaced the now 40-year-old “Snow king Chairlift” with a new Doppelmayr/Garaventa CTEC Double chair, Which started about 200 ft to the east of the old lift. This new lift ran a lift line that crossed the old about 3/4 of the way up the mountain.

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Living in Paraguay

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For me, the best thing about living in Paraguay is that you are really off the radar. Or perhaps the rest of the world is off your radar?

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In any event, you are truly elsewhere when you are in Paraguay.

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This is a place where you no longer know what year you are in, and you don’t care what happens in the rest of the world.

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You’re detached from the buzz and the craziness and the worries that throw you, day after day, elsewhere.

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Especially if you live in the countryside. It’s all farm life, red soil, seasonal pace, and life with nature.

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Paraguay is a complete “Time Out” from the world.

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It’s a world where focusing on the immediate here and now is good enough and the most important thing.

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And you get to enjoy the wonders of life without distraction, and at a fantastically slow pace.

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Of course, everyone experiences places differently. But for me, this is Paraguay.

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You may want to view the following photos while listening to music by Luis Alberto del Parana, perhaps his songs Recuerdos de Ypacarai or Amor, Amor or Sirena del Parana.

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CAUTION: You will want to live in Paraguay.

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One Of The Most Tragic Things That I Have Read In A Long Time

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Things have never been harder for America’s farmers and ranchers than they are right now.  Their relentless hard work keeps us fed, but now many of them are being financially ruined by forces beyond their control.  Prices for fertilizer, farm equipment and diesel fuel have spiraled to absolutely absurd heights, and meanwhile extremely bizarre weather patterns are making it almost impossible to operate successfully in many parts of the nation.  A lot of farmers and ranchers have already gone out of business, and many more will go out of business in the months ahead unless some sort of a miracle happens.

Back in 1900, there were approximately 5.7 million family farms in the United States, but at that time the total population of the country was just 76 million.

Today, there are only about 2.2 million family farms in the United States, but the total population of the country has grown to 329 million.

Agriculture is slowly but surely being consolidated, and the big fish have far more power than the little fish do.

It has gotten to a point where it has become nearly impossible for many small farmers and ranchers to survive.  To illustrate this, I would like to share something that a farmer named Sheila Payne Blackburn recently posted on Facebook

I am the last one left on our farm and ranch here in central Texas. It has been in our family and in our blood for over 150 years. I was raised to never back down, never give up, get back in the saddle, cowgirls don’t cry, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, hang tough, and every other cowboy expression you can think of.

I have watched my great grandparents, grandparents and my parents die young. Their bodies run down and weak, their minds overwhelmed with stress, and their bank accounts empty. They gave everything they had for our way of life.

I have survived drought, floods, excessive heat, -4 degree winters, broncs, bulls that want to kill you, and death of beloved livestock.

But today – today, I think I’m finally broken. Today my body, heart, spirit, and strength are gone.

When my dad left this world, he left me holding the bag. He didn’t want to! But he did. Massive debt, tractors that won’t run, old broken down equipment, pickups that barely make it through a pasture. But he also left me the land that I love, the cattle, my heritage, my dream, my knowledge, and passion.

But I feel I can’t go up from here.

Our government wants to destroy us. I can’t buy another 20 year old tractor at $120,000 for something that will not even probably make it a week.

I can’t afford the diesel to fill up that tractor for $600 to just have to do it again tomorrow.

I can’t afford the fertilizer, the seed, the oil, the grease, the parts. Why should I spend $700 an acre to plow, plant, fertilize, weed kill? A grand total of $140,000. To only lose it in a drought. And really never make that money back! Hell my calves will only bring $800 to $900 a piece. But that same whole beef will cost the consumer $5,000 at the grocery store.

Today my pride means nothing to me anymore! Today I want to live to see my grandchildren grow older! Today I am tired of the heat, the wind, the drought! Today I know that it is only me, and no one will probably take over! Today I wonder what I’m fighting for! Today I am weak. Today I think I am through.

I know I am not the only one that feels this way anymore!

Say a prayer for your farmers. Some of us are barely hanging on.

That is truly one of the most tragic things that I have read in a long time.

Small farmers and small ranchers are the backbone of this country, and without them we don’t eat.

Unfortunately, hardly anyone seems to notice that more of them are going under with each passing day.

Many Americans simply do not care about the plight of our farmers and ranchers right now, but they will definitely start to care when the price of beef doubles or even triples.  The following was recently posted on Facebook by a rancher named Brad Allison

$125 a roll, crap is getting real. The cattlemen doesn’t have a chance. Lick tubs almost $140 a tub, cubes close to $14 a bag. We are getting priced out of existence… Pray for your ranchers to be able to hang in there. Meat prices at the grocery is not their fault, it’s above their head, they surely are not making the profit. 10,000 head of cattle sold in three counties here in the last three weeks from cattlemen drowning. Middle age cattle going to slaughter because we can’t afford to feed them.

This is a very serious national crisis, but most Americans don’t realize it yet.

But once these cost increases start showing up at the grocery store in 2023, everyone will finally realize what we are facing.

For decades, we have been able to take our farmers and our ranchers for granted.

Now everything is changing, and a trip to the grocery store will soon be far more painful.

Double-Chocolate Muffins

Whole wheat flour and high-fiber cereal are the goodies tucked in a chocolate-lover’s sweet muffin.

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Ingredients

  • 1 cup Fiber One™ original bran cereal
  • 1 1/3 cups buttermilk
  • 1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil
  • 1 egg
  • 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup Gold Medal™ whole wheat flour
  • 1/2 cup Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup unsweetened baking cocoa
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/3 cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips

Steps

  • 1
    Heat oven to 375°F. Place paper baking cup in each of 12 regular-size muffin cups. Place cereal in resealable food-storage plastic bag; seal bag and crush with rolling pin or meat mallet (or crush in food processor).
  • 2
    In medium bowl, mix crushed cereal and buttermilk; let stand 5 minutes. Stir in oil and egg. Stir in remaining ingredients except chocolate chips. Stir in chocolate chips. Divide batter evenly among muffin cups.
  • 3
    Bake 15 to 20 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Immediately remove from pan. Serve warm.

Omayra Sánchez.

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A girl of thirteen.

It’s November 1985. A Colombian family are living peacefully in the agricultural area of Armero, with mother and father supporting the family on the modest income they pull together by working diligently at their jobs. The mother, Maria, is a nurse and has had to leave home to go on business.

Whilst she’s away, a local volcano explodes into life.

Come nightfall and Omayra, along the rest of her family, are still wide awake. They can’t sleep because the unfurling ashfall is keeping them in a state of nervous anticipation. Things are much, much worse than they could ever imagine though. The volcanic eruption has triggered lahars, a violent type of mudflow, and one of them steamrolls its way through Armero, engulfing the town and killing thousands of its residents:

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Omarya’s father, who had spent his life gathering rice and sorghum to support his family and protect their livelihood, along with the girl’s aunt, are amongst those who perish immediately.

By grace of God or the devil’s depravity though, Omarya herself survives. Initially, she’s trapped completely under the rubble, but is a fighter, so breaks open a gap just big enough to slide her hand through, allowing her to gain the attention of the rescue team.

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They manage to free her up more, so that her head at least was able to see the light of day above the cold, muddy water. However, there was a glaring problem — her legs were trapped. Keeping them anchored was sections of a wall, an iron bar stuck in her hip and her dead aunt, whose hands were clutched tightly onto her legs.

For sixty hours, rescuers did absolutely everything within their power to keep her alive, and to try to free her:

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Omayra was immensely brave throughout the whole ordeal; she sang songs, chatted with the workers and asked for sweets and soda. As the end of that time frame approached, it became increasingly clear that saving her was an uphill battle though. To do so would require amputation of her legs, and doctors decided they didn’t have the necessary equipment to ensure she’d survive that procedure within these conditions.

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She then began falling in and out consciousness and hallucinating, saying she couldn’t be late for school and mentioning a Maths exam. This, along with the fact that her eyes had turned red, her face bloated and her hands whitened, forced the cold reality of the situation upon her and the people who’d been trying to save her — she was going to die. Shortly afterwards, she slipped out of consciousness for the last time.

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The kicker is that she needn’t have died, if the authorities had properly heeded warnings about the volcano and/or had adequate resources and supplies in place ready for such a disaster. They didn’t though, and even necessities like shovels, cutting tools and stretchers soon ran out. Omayra died only as a result of other people’s poor planning and devil-may-care attitude. To think, she would have been forty-eight this year, a woman still well in the prime of her life, living it the way she wanted, and yet that future was snatched away from her.

China Just Made A Move That Could Literally Provoke A Major War With The United States

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If the Chinese don’t end their blockade of Taiwan, the Biden administration will be under immense pressure to respond.  So let us hope that cooler heads prevail in China and that a decision is soon made to end the pointless “military exercises” that the Chinese are currently conducting.  When the live-fire drills were first announced, we were told that they would last for only four days.  That was supposed to be it.  On Monday, they were supposed to go home.  But that didn’t happen.  Instead, on Monday the Chinese announced that the military exercises in the waters off Taiwan would be extended, and no new end date was given…

China said Monday it was extending threatening military exercises surrounding Taiwan that have disrupted shipping and air traffic and substantially raised concerns about the potential for conflict in a region crucial to global trade.

The exercises would include anti-submarine drills, apparently targeting U.S. support for Taiwan in the event of a potential Chinese invasion, according to social media posts from the eastern leadership of China’s ruling Communist Party’s military arm, the People’s Liberation Army.

This move by China crosses a very important line.

The Chinese have essentially established a “maritime and aerial blockade” around Taiwan, but it was only supposed to last from Thursday to Sunday…

The Chinese military designated six closure areas, one of which is merely 12 miles from Taiwan’s southern shipping hub of Kaohsiung. Beijing also warned commercial airliners to avoid wide swaths of airspace around Taiwan, in what amounts to a no-fly zone over major flight routes. Even though China portrays this as a step short of total encirclement, Taiwan’s defense ministry describes it as “a maritime and aerial blockade.”

A four day blockade wouldn’t have been that big of a deal.

But a full blown “maritime and aerial blockade” that lasts for weeks or even months is clearly an act of war.

Taiwan relies on food and essential supplies from the outside world.  If commerce is severely restricted or cut off completely, life on the island will radically change.

And the pressure on the Biden administration to “do something” will become enormous.

Of course it is still possible that the Chinese could decide to go home at some point this week.

And let us hope that actually happens.

But right now both sides continue to escalate matters.

For example, in response to the Chinese “drills”, the Taiwanese have decided to conduct live-fire exercises of their own

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s official Central News Agency reported that Taiwan’s army will conduct live-fire artillery drills in southern Pingtung county on Tuesday and Thursday, in response to the Chinese exercises.

The drills will include snipers, combat vehicles, armored vehicles as well as attack helicopters, said the report, which cited an anonymous source.

That certainly won’t ease tensions.

And members of the U.S. Senate are publicly calling for more economic and military aid for Taiwan

In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) backed the House speaker’s travel to Taiwan and tied the two foreign policy issues together — warning that China is watching how the U.S. continues to respond to Russia’s attack on Ukraine as the war nears its sixth month.

Graham directed his message directly at China and pushed for the passage of the bipartisan Taiwan Policy Act, which is aimed at bolstering Taiwan economically and militarily.

The Chinese are going to interpret this as a threat.  It has become quite obvious that many prominent members of Congress consider Taiwan to be analogous to Ukraine, and that is definitely not going to help matters.

On top of everything else, it has been announced that U.S. forces will actually be participating in war games very close to India’s disputed border with China later this year…

The US will participate in war games with the Indian military in an area of India that is less than 62 miles away from the country’s disputed border with China, known as the Line of Actual Control (LAN).

The drills will be held from October 18-31 and will be the eighteenth iteration of annual exercises between the two militaries known as Yudh Abhyas, which is Hindi for “war practice.” They will be held in the Auli area of the Indian state of Uttarakhand in the Himalayas mountain range.

For years, I have been relentlessly warning that a war with China was coming, but my hope is that cooler heads will prevail and that this current crisis can be resolved peacefully.

Because a shooting war with China would instantly change all of our lives for the worse.

If we go to war with China, shipments of the thousands upon thousands of products that we currently receive from China would immediately cease.

And if the Pacific Ocean becomes a war zone, trade with other Asian powers such as Japan and South Korea would be paralyzed as well.

In addition, Taiwan produces more of our microchips than everyone else in the world combined

In particular, Taiwan’s position in the world of semiconductor manufacturing is a bit like Saudi Arabia’s status in OPEC. TSMC has a 53% market share of the global foundry market (factories contracted to make chips designed in other countries). Other Taiwan-based manufacturers claim a further 10% of the market.

As a result, the Biden administration’s 100-Day Supply Chain Review Report says, “The United States is heavily dependent on a single company – TSMC – for producing its leading-edge chips.” The fact that only TSMC and Samsung (South Korea) can make the most advanced semiconductors (five nanometres in size) “puts at risk the ability to supply current and future [US] national security and critical infrastructure needs”.

If China invades Taiwan, the global flow of microchips would permanently be reduced to a trickle.

I don’t think that I even have the words to describe what that would do to the global economy.

The stakes are incredibly high, and our leaders should be doing all that they can to avoid a needless war with the Chinese.

Unfortunately, our leaders are not exactly what you would call “competent” at this point, and we could soon find ourselves involved in pointless conflicts with the Russians and the Chinese at the same time.

The way Americans see Africa

The way American people see Africa! Wow!

So I’ve met an African American from GTA Online a few weeks ago and we became friends.

Yesterday,we’ve been playing GTA Online and he asked me where I’m from.

I told him that I was from Tunisia. Since,Tunisia isn’t that well-known,I told him that it is in Africa.

He seemed pretty shocked and asked me:

“You have internet in Africa?”

“Yes,why wouldn’t we?”

“I don’t know,I thought you didn’t have clean water.”

what!?

We don’t have clean water!?

I had to explain to him many…many stuff…

I went to the internet to check out how people see Africa and it was totally the same way he saw it…

Africa is like any other continent,it has its poor countries and its rich ones. But even its poorest countries have access to internet and clean water,mostly.

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Durban,South Africa,Africa.

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Malabo,Equatorial Guinea,Africa.

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Casablanca,Morocco,Africa.

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Addis Ababa,Ethiopia,Africa.

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Tunis,Tunisia,Africa.

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Lagos,Nigeria,Africa.

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Port Louis,Mauritius,Africa.

Greek Yogurt Blueberry Muffins

Fat free, Greek honey vanilla yogurt is the secret to delicous homemade blueberry muffins.

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Ingredients

  • 1/3 cup milk
  • 1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil
  • 1 container (6 oz) Greek Fat Free honey vanilla yogurt
  • 1 egg
  • 1 3/4 cups Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 cup fresh or frozen (do not thaw) blueberries

Steps

  • 1
    Heat oven to 400°F. Grease bottoms only of 12 regular-size muffins cups, or line with paper baking cups.
  • 2
    In large bowl, beat milk, oil, yogurt and egg using wire whisk or fork. Stir in remaining ingredients except blueberries, until flour is moistened. Gently stir in blueberries. Divide batter evenly among muffin cups.
  • 3
    Bake 16 to 18 minutes or until golden brown. Cool 5 minutes; remove from pan.

FOURTH TURNING DETONATION

This article is 2 years old, but is pretty much spot on. -MM

From the Economic Collapse Blog

“The ancients believed that each cyclical extreme, mirroring the hopes and fears of the other, helps generate the other. The night longs for the day, the day for night. In war, people yearn for relief from strife, leading to peace. In peace, people yearn to champion what they love, leading to war.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

When I started thinking about my annual beginning of the year article in early January, I tried to formulate a catchy title. Knowing we have entered the thirteenth year of this Fourth Turning, with the intensity of the crisis reaching an unparalleled level since November 4, I decided upon Fourth Turning Detonation. I immediately thought that might be too dire and figured I would change it later. After the first few weeks of the new year, I now think it might be grossly inadequate to describe what is coming in 2021.

It is easy to get distracted by the daily gyrations, ceaseless media propaganda, political theater, false narratives, and delusional beliefs of both the left and right, as this military empire built on debt and deceit spirals towards its fiery cataclysmic climax. Opposing forces have gathered themselves into position focusing on defeating their domestic enemies, with the left seeming to have strategic advantage but led by hubristic dullards, while numerous foreign adversaries circle like hungry vultures ready to pounce on the dying beast of an empire.

Last January I wrote a two-part article called 2020 – Year of Living Dangerously which harkened back to another article I had written eight years before 2012 – Year of Living Dangerously. I lamented the fact I had not understood Fourth Turnings will take their own sweet time on the way to a climax, with twists and turns which will differentiate it from previous Crisis periods in U.S. history. My impatience for the great battle to resolve this struggle has not and will not impact the timeline, but the three elements driving this Crisis remain firmly in control, as they have since 2008: debt, civic decay, global disorder.

My belief regarding the subtext of what has happened and is happening in this country has not changed. I certainly underestimated the lengths these psychopaths in suits would go to in 2020 to further pillage the world’s wealth while using a pandemic as cover to further their agenda of hegemony and turning the world into a virtual prison camp under constant technological surveillance. Despite the timing, I still believe that which is unsustainable will not be sustained.

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“It seems I always underestimate the ability of sociopathic central bankers and their willingness to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions to benefit their oligarch masters. I always underestimate the rampant corruption that permeates Washington DC and the executive suites in mega-corporations across the land. And I always overestimate the intelligence, civic mindedness, and ability to understand math of the ignorant masses that pass for citizens in this country. It seems that issuing trillions of new debt to pay off trillions of bad debt, government sanctioned accounting fraud, mainstream media propaganda, government data manipulation and a populace blinded by mass delusion can stave off the inevitable consequences of an unsustainable economic system.”

I used to try and make specific predictions about the new year generally centered upon economic chaos, stock markets crashing, global conflict, and various other doom-like events. But those running this clown show somehow convince the masses all is well, the economy is healthy, inflation is non-existent, debt does not matter, college makes you smart, we’re energy self-sufficient, 100 million working age Americans not working – but unemployment was 3.5%, the stock market hitting all-time highs is good for you even though your real wages haven’t gone up in a decade, and America was great again.

It is amazing to me how effective propaganda is when multiple generations have been indoctrinated and socially engineered in the government school system and decades of boob tube fake news has been programmed into their pliably ignorant brains. Edward Bernays created the game plan and the techno-oligarch despots currently running the show are executing it to perfection.

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“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” – Edward Bernays – Propaganda

This Fourth Turning likely has another 5 to 10 years before some sort of convulsive resolution, unless it is accelerated like the Civil War Fourth Turning, with similar tragic consequences and mass casualties. Predicting the actual events which will occur over a short-term time frame is a fool’s errand, so I prefer to try and discern the direction and amplitude of the ongoing Crisis to gauge how we should prepare for what is coming.

I do admire writers like Jim Kunstler who really go out on a limb and make extremely specific forecasts for the coming year, like he did on January 1 with his Forecast 2021 — Chinese Fire Drills with a side of French Fries (Jacobin-style) and Russian Dressing. If even 25% of his predictions had come to fruition, 2021 would have gone down as one of the most earth shattering in history. But here we are a few weeks later and all his predictions about Trump going to war with the Deep State and winning a glorious victory for the American people failed to materialize. Trump is golfing at Mar-a- Lago, while the Deep State remains firmly in control and in the midst of consolidating their power by crushing dissent through Domestic terrorism legislation and complete control of social media platforms.

Even Kunstler acknowledges the Fourth Turning as a generational dynamic driving the events pushing the country and the world towards armed conflict. My high-level prognostications for 2020 certainly did not include a global pandemic used to introduce an Orwellian global dystopia and justification to steal a presidential election through mail-in ballot fraud and voting machine rigging.

Of course, Bill Gates predicted the pandemic in 2018 and his buddy Fauci, in 2017, said there was “no doubt” Donald J. Trump would be confronted with a surprise infectious disease outbreak during his presidency. I wonder why he had no doubt. Fauci, an unknown lifetime government bureaucrat, is now a media darling, despite being wrong about everything. And Gates’ wealth has soared during this plandemic. My big picture guesses last year were colored by the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on January 3, expecting Middle East conflict to erupt. These were my main conjectures for 2020:

  • The Fed will continue to run their electronic printing presses at warp speed until the inevitable banquet of consequences is served to all.
  • We have entered the extreme greed phase of this debt-based Ponzi scheme. The stock market is in the blow-off stage, where earnings, valuations, and rational thinking are meaningless. Momentum and a delusional belief in the infallibility of the Fed are all that matter. Who knows how far it will go, but fear will eventually rear its ugly head, and a cascading collapse will make a lot of useful investing idiots very angry for the third time in the last two decades.
  • The Democrats and their Surveillance State co-conspirators have determined the best way to cover-up their treasonous acts are to stay on the offensive by impeaching Trump on bogus charges.
  • The social distress I noted last year continues unabated today as the glorification of abnormality reaches new heights. The flames of division and disarray are fanned unceasingly by the left-wing media to distract from the true desperate financial situation of the country.
  • Israel quietly foments discontent and turmoil across the region to keep the focus off itself. Russia and China support Iran economically and militarily to offset Americans dominance of the region. Confusion reigns.
  • Anyone with an ounce of critical thinking skills knows none of this is about freedom, democracy or doing the right thing. It’s about oil and it’s about the military industrial complex requiring enemies to keep the profits flowing.
  • The shale “miracle” is just another delusion built upon easy money pumped out by the Fed. No one can make profits on shale oil at $60 per barrel.
  • The months leading up to the election will be a circus. Propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies will be spread like manure. Of course, voting will not alleviate the issues which will continue to drive this Fourth Turning towards its climax – debt, civic decay, global disorder.
  • No matter the result of the upcoming election, neither side will accept the outcome.
  • There are no viable political solutions to our current dilemmas. It is just a matter of when and where the conflict goes hot and blood is spilled.
  • I do not know what events will dominate the coming year, but I do know the intensity of hate and vitriol will increase. I do know military conflict in the Middle East will expand. I do know the political machinations in this country will surge as the election approaches. I do know the Deep State will do everything in their immense power to undermine Trump. I do know the Fed will QE and Trump will cheer every new stock market record. I do know I will be lied to and propagandized by the mainstream corporate media.

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I knew 2020 had the potential to be a chaotic year, but didn’t anticipate a flu with a 99.7% survival rate being used by totalitarian minded politicians to destroy the global economy, usher in Orwellian police state lockdown measures across the globe; a stock market crash followed by Fed created bubbles still growing ever bubblier through $4 trillion of money printing; adding $4 trillion to the national debt (with another $3 trillion on the way in 2021); paying millions to sit at home eating Cheetos and watching Netflix; destroying a few hundred thousand small businesses while enriching mega-corporations; putting a nail in the coffin of the 1st Amendment through censorship of conservative speech; and blatantly stealing a presidential election.

The globalist elite want to keep the fear at a high level to institute their global reset, where you will own nothing and be happy, or you will be brought to heel by the truncheon. This was the year it became crystal clear, the world is filled with good people, governed, and manipulated by bad people.

By delaying this article until after January 20 I allowed the Qanon Psyop of Trump using the military to rescue the country to pass into history as another delusion of hope over reason. I truly do not know whether the Qanon phenomena (it was not widely known by Trump supporters or most people) was just a LARP being played by former Dungeons & Dragons keyboard warriors or an FBI/CIA counter-intelligence operation designed to keep a segment of the population distracted and ever hopeful their white knight would rescue them from the clutches of the evil Deep State. I am reminded of the quote about hope from President Snow in the Hunger Games.

The elevation of Trump to president and the spark of hope he would truly drain the swamp, arrest the traitorous Deep State coup co-conspirators, lead his legions to victory over the forces of evil, and make America great again, kept half the people in the country hopeful for the last four years.

Meanwhile, the military industrial complex raked in hundreds of billions more from the American taxpayer; Wall Street bankers gorged on the trillions of free money, manufactured by their captured puppets at the Federal Reserve; the Silicon Valley despots consolidated their hold on commerce and communication; and the average American saw their standard of living continue its 50- year decline. The question is whether those constituting the “invisible government” allowed too much hope and needed the engineered pandemic to re-introduce fear as their primary control technique moving forward.

They believe they have contained the spark with their fraudulent election victory; installation of an empty senile vassal as their conduit for the great reset; having their media mouthpieces propagate the falsity of a right wing white supremacist insurrection at the Capital; crushing dissent by censoring the truth through totalitarian social media conglomerates; proceeding with an impeachment farce based on Trump telling his supporters to peacefully protest the fraudulent election outcome; and threatening to destroy the lives of all vocal Trump supporters.

I am highly doubtful they have contained the spark. I believe there are smoldering embers just waiting to be stirred into a conflagration which will engulf the entire world in a fiery purging of the existing social order, which has exhausted itself and needs to be cleansed. Jefferson understood the nature of Fourth Turnings two hundred years before Strauss & Howe put it to paper.

“Try to unlearn the obsessive fear of death (and the anxious quest for death avoidance) that pervades linear thinking in nearly every modern society. The ancients knew that, without periodic decay and death, nature cannot complete its full round of biological and social change. Without plant death, weeds would strangle the forest. Without human death, memories would never die, and unbroken habits and customs would strangle civilization. Social institutions require no less. Just as floods replenish soil and fires rejuvenate forests, a Fourth Turning clears out society’s exhausted elements and creates an opportunity.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

In Part Two of this article, I will examine the concept of the Grey Champion, their role in Fourth Turnings, and make some speculations as to the course of 2021 and the remainder of this Fourth Turning.

Ginger

A nice story found on the internet. -MM

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About a 2 years ago I was pulling into my garage and heard a meow.

Not a kitten meow more like “ Hey I am here, Do you see me?”

And right there next to my trash can was a beat-up malnourished Tom Cat.

I walked past him and went inside.

The next morning, there he was again, same spot.

I reached down to pet him and he did not run or even seem scared. So I went inside grabbed him a bowl for food and water. I laid outside close to him and went on to work.

This went on for a good month or so and the beat-up malnourished cat became my friend.

Now I could not bring him inside because for one he is full grown and had not been raised with dogs.

I am the mama of 2 Pitbulls and also 2 rescue cats, but my cats came into my home when they were kittens so they had been raised around my dogs.

So he became my outside/Garage cat.

As much as I did not want to admit it, he became my cat.

And then I named him and we all know what happens when you name them, they become yours whether you like it or not.

I named him Ginger.

7 months later we decided to move.

During the 7 months I had learned from the neighbors he had belonged to a lady down the street who had moved and abandoned him.

During our move he was watching us sitting in the garage.

As I go to get in my car he follows me.

I open my door and he jumps in the car with me.

As if to tell me “ You are not leaving me”.

I smiled, because as much as he did not know, I was not going to leave him.

Ginger is still in the garage with his own door to come and go as he pleases.

He loves to sun and is a little territorial when it comes to the possums.

I have had to break apart a few fights between him and a possum.

He is ok being an outside cat.

He gets tons of attention from the little ones and enjoys his new home.

The reason I am telling you this is cats are by far one of the easiest animals to take care of.

Yes you should feed him, Yes you will get attached, yes it will make you feel good on the inside , Yes you will more than likely fall in love.

A smile will come across your face when he comes to you and trusts you because you saved him.

He will forever be grateful.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Ten Truths That Can’t Be Published in the United States

I am forced to have a small post for today. But it’s a good one. All credit to Eric. Brilliant write up…

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Ten Truths That Can’t Be Published Under The U.S. Regime

1. The overthrow of Yanukovych in Ukraine in February 2014 was a U.S. coup, and definitely not a democratic revolution there.

2. The U.S. Government and its ‘news’-media lied — didn’t merely “err” — to deceive the U.S. public to believe the “Saddam’s WMD” falsehoods that were used to ‘justify’ criminally invading Iraq on 20 March 2003.

3. The U.S. Government and its OPCW lied — didn’t merely “err” — to say that Assad was using chemical weapons, so as to ‘justify’ America’s criminal invasion and occupation of Syria.

4. The war between Russia and Ukraine is actually the war by America against Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine and started not on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine but even well before America’s criminal February 2014 coup in Ukraine and was already secretly in the planning stages in the Obama Administration by no later than June 2011.

5. The claim that Taiwan isn’t and hasn’t even been a part of China is a blatant lie about history, to deceive U.S.-and-allied publics and aiming to enable the U.S. regime to grab China too.

6. U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media lie constantly so as to deceive their publics to support their criminal invasions, coups, and sanctions, against countries that the U.S. regime is aiming ultimately to conquer, even countries (such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine) that never threatened, nor posed any threat to, U.S. national security.

7. The U.S. repeatedly shows up in international polls as being overwhelmingly a bigger threat to peace in the world than is any other nation. Whereas Americans don’t know it, foreigners certainly do.

8. The termination of American democracy, and the decision by the U.S. Government to ultimately conquer the entire world, occurred on 25 July 1945, and the Cold War excuse — that it was about communism, instead of about ultimate global conquest by the U.S. — was, and remains, a lie.

9. The U.S. regime’s statements that it had not in 1990 promised to Russia that its ending its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance would mean that NATO itself would not expand “one inch to the east [toward Russia’s border]” is a historical lie, and the U.S. regime started on 24 February 1990 secretly to inform its ‘allies’ (vassal nations) that it was a lie and that on America’s side the Cold War would continue until Russia itself becomes under its control.

10. The U.S. regime’s being a regime — a dictatorship instead of a democracy — has been repeatedly proven, and is an established fact, to the contrary of all the lies and liars. Calling it “the U.S. regime” is effectively prohibited, though it is certainly true. In fact, a good case can be made that the U.S. is the world’s #1 police-state.

On August 2nd, U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s speech upon landing in Taipei, Taiwan, said “Our congressional delegation’s visit to Taiwan honors America’s unwavering commitment to supporting Taiwan’s vibrant democracy.”

An earlier retort

NOTE: A reader of this article commented on it by saying: “Actually US democracy did not end in 1945, as it never existed in the first place. The authors of the Constitution deliberately made it a republic, not a democracy.” To this, I replied:

A “republic” IS a “democracy”: they are synonyms for a nation in which the government REPRESENTS the public, instead of being some dictator or (more commonly) dictatorial class of people who DON’T represent the public.

You got balled-up in words instead of thinking about WHAT THE WORDS REPRESENT. “Democracy” and “republic” represent the SAME THING.

(There supposedly are also nations that are ‘direct democracies’ in which the government is ‘direct’ from the voters instead of entailing any voting for representatives; but none such actually exists today, because a direct democracy is possible only for tiny nations, “city-states,” and even most of those do and have had representatives. In the real world, “democracy” and “republic” are the same thing.)

It is because of such confusions by, and gullibility OF, the public, that politicians such as Pelosi, Biden, and Obama, and such as Trump, Bush, and Reagan, can so easily fool the public to accept them as BEING representatives of the public, INSTEAD OF as being representatives of the billionaires who funded their political careers — which they actually are and have been.

Oh, by the way…

Here is how You-Tube automatically selects the title splash images for my you-tube videos. No wonder I am forced to generate my own…

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You-Tube suggestions.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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The dragon starts to move

You need a stiff drink to watch the apocalypse unfold. 

-Gonzalo Lira

I can tell you that many Chinese are upset that the PLA did not blow the plane carrying Nancy Poliski out of the sky. There’s all sorts of thoughts on this. In general, the mood in China is one of great seismic shift.

Things are forever changed.

That being said, the USA and the Western press is having a field day proclaiming the “victory dance” for “democracy” and all the rest. Mainstream “news” coverage is announcing how the USA “showed who’s boss”.

Do not be so sure.

I think that the Chinese strategy is to move (geopolitical) pieces in place. Whether it involves this particular person or not, is of no consequence. What has occurred is that NOW China has the pieces lined up to solve the “Taiwan Issue” once and for all.

Let me explain.

What has occurred (with Nancy Poliski) is a MAJOR violation of Chinese national sovereignty. China knows who the aggressors are. China knows the systems used. China knows the operational situation, and China understands what will come next.

Thus, you can expect the following to be truisms that the Chinese realize;

  • America is not only poking China, but it is goading it towards war.
  • The attacks will only get worse.
  • The main “pressure point” is Taiwan.

Now, China has the excuse to lock Taiwan down.

Now, China has the excuse to get rid of the American-sponsored Taipei government.

Now, China can argue “we did not attack American forces”.

And now China can seize Taiwan once and for all. Let America howl. But you know, it will do nothing. It will stand by and watch. Of course, it will then impose “sanctions from Hell.” Which, or course, China is fully ready to rub the American face in the shit it created.

We begin with how this affects Taiwan…

China Halts Exports of . . . SAND . . . to Taiwan

China has ordered a complete halt to the export of natural sand to Taiwan.   At first glance, most folks would say “Sand? So what!”  But Taiwan makes computer chips and the silicone to make those chips comes from . . .  Oh, yea . . .  sand.

Moreover, Chinese Battery Manufacturer CATL has announced they are “freezing” the opening of a $5 Billion battery plant in the USA.  The plant was supposed to supply batteries for Tesla and Ford.

We have also received reports CLAIMING (but not yet verified) that Chinese suppliers to APPLE have suspended all product and parts deliveries; allegedly crippling APPLE.

These changes took place within hours of Nancy Pelosi violating China’s demand that she not visit Taiwan.

Things will likely get much worse from this point as China retaliates for violation of its Diplomatic demands.

I am not alone in believing the consequences of this action…

From FOX “news”.

Tucker Carlson. He’s actually in agreement with me.

Errol Flynn

Legendary swashbuckler Errol Flynn would never have survived #MeToo had he been born sixty years later. The man was wild. And wildly immoral. He was like Charlie Sheen times a million. Orgies, everywhere. Underaged lovers. Drunk parties with multiple nude starlets and Erol, playing piano butt naked with his erect penis hitting all the right keys…

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No, this man was something else. And even in the era he lived, full of fixers and more forgiving of scandals when involving a man and his various sexual conquests… Flynn was still ‘a bridge too far’ for many people. He was scandal and intrige personified.

Drugs. Alcohol. Copious amounts of all sorts of pills, potions and powders known to man, many of it no longer in production. Fights, everywhere. With everyone. Sex with everyone. And with everyone’s wife, everyone’s daughter… Flynn was a tireless beast of seductive burden.

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See that lovely lady above? Her name is Beverly Aadland. They started ‘seeing each other’ when she was fifteen. And when I say ‘seeing each other’, I mean ‘banging the everlasting daylights out of each other’. As I said, the man was wild. And he didn’t care about age. Or legality.

It was in the presence of Aadland that Errol Flynn died on October 14, 1959… Flynn was fifty, Beverly just 17. He still got a heroes burial and a funeral worthy of a king. He was never cancelled and lived his depraved life full of debauchery free as a bird without a care in the world.

Quick Pepper Steak

When I need a speedy skillet supper, this pepper steak comes to my rescue. The tender meat is slightly sweet, with a hint of brown sugar and molasses. —Monica Williams, Burleson, Texas

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Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 2 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 2 tablespoons minced fresh gingerroot
  • 3/4 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1 can (14-1/2 ounces) beef broth
  • 3 tablespoons reduced-sodium soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon molasses
  • 1-1/2 pounds beef top sirloin steak, cut into 1/4-inch strips
  • 1 tablespoon canola oil
  • 2 large green peppers, cut into 1/2-inch strips
  • 1-1/2 cups sliced celery
  • 3 green onions, chopped
  • 4 teaspoons lemon juice
  • Hot cooked noodles, optional

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the cornstarch, brown sugar, ginger and garlic powder. Stir in broth until smooth. Add soy sauce and molasses; set aside.
  2. In a nonstick skillet or wok, stir-fry steak in oil for 4-5 minutes; remove and keep warm. Stir-fry peppers, celery and onions until crisp-tender, about 5 minutes. Stir broth mixture and add to the vegetables. Return meat to the pan. Bring to a boil; cook and stir until thickened, about 2 minutes. Stir in lemon juice. Serve over noodles if desired.

The Clacton Spear

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The oldest man made object on earth, sits in a display in the Natural History Museum, London.

This stunningly well preserved spear point is by far the oldest known wooden tool ever found, it was made over a hundred thousand years before anatomically modern humans first appeared on the scene, by some early ancestor of our species, a clever Hominin with a penchant wood carving.

Made from Yew wood, skilfully carved by razor sharp worked flints and shaped into a stout spear, a tool made for hunting the large prey of the land bridge between Britain and Europe.

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Perhaps this stout spear was made for hunting Giant Irish Elk, which roamed the area this spear was found, or maybe Mammoths or wild boar.

As someone who actively uses the wood of Yew trees to make Longbows, I’m acutely aware that this incredible unique wood has been used by ancient humans since the beginning of time, for making the finest heavy draw weight bows, strong staves, clubs, handshafts and spears.

Anyway, in 1911, an amateur prehistorian named Samuel H. Warren, was busy searching for prehistoric artefacts at low tide on the shoreline near his home, he had previously found worked stones and all manner of Neolithic trinkets, but then one day he spotted what looked like a muddy stick peeking out from just beneath the surface of the Palaeolithic sediment, he pulled it out and quickly realised it was something special and took it home to clean and preserved it. A few years later, Samuel Warren casually walked into a stuffy society of scientific research and upended their long held academic beliefs regarding the inability of premodern humans to manufacture such well made tools.

The 420,000 year old Yew spear that lay resting beneath the waves for almost half a million years.

  1. When you sign up for anything online, put the website’s name as your middle name. That way when you receive spam/advert email, you will know who sold your information.
  2. If you’re on a first date and aren’t connecting with the other person or feel they’re dull, ask them what job they’d choose if money wasn’t an issue. It initiates a talk about one’s passions, which are rarely dull and are simple to connect.
  3. If you want to be an effective communicators, let others talking about themselves and their interests – it’s as rewarding as sex.
  4. Do not try to be the man your father would want you to be. Be the man you would like your son to be be. It more clearly defines your own convictions, desires, goals, and motivates you to be your best.
  5. Pay Attention to the smell of your home when you come back from a trip – that’s what it smells like to guests all the time, you just get used to it.
  6. When a friend is upset, ask them one simple question before saying anything else: ‘Do you want to talk about it or do you want to be distracted from it?’
  7. No matter how much your workplace pushes “team building” and “family culture” – remember, they’re not your friends and it’s still a workplace.
  8. If you’re stuck on an annoying call, put your phone on airplane mode instead of just hanging up. The other person will see “call failed” instead of “call ended”.
  9. If you want to learn a new language, figure out the 100 most frequently used words and start with them. Those words make up about 50% of everyday speech, and should be a very solid basis.

King Louis XV

Louis XV had several lovers, some very young like those he kept in his “parc aux cerfs”, the place where his younger lovers stayed because they had not yet been officially introduced as official lovers.

Louis XV was always a very sensual person, and that is why he sent Mariana Victoria, his fiancée, back to Spain because she was too young to marry and consummate the marriage.

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Mariana Victoria of Spain.

At the age of 15, he married a Polish noblewoman who did not have a very prestigious lineage, but who was older and more experienced than him, as well as being relatively attractive: Marie Leszczynska. During their wedding night, it is rumored that he consummated her marriage “seven times”.

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Queen Maria van Loo.

And as for their sexual habits, it is unlikely that they were extraordinary. With the exception of Du Barry, her mistresses had little experience of the subject, as they were generally married women, often to other aristocrats (they only had experience with their husbands), or young virgins.

The King revealed to the Duke d’Ayen that Jean du Barry, his last lover and former prostitute, “had helped him discover things that he thought did not exist”, to which the nobleman replied that it was because “he had never been in a brothel ”.

The Duran Agrees with MM

Well, sort of. Mr. Barnes feels that China will not make a military move on Taiwan. I disagree. The entire nation of China, all 1.6 billion people are all ready to flood into Taiwan right now. The overall feeling is “enough is enough. It’s time to stop this nonsense!”.

Anyways…

Check this out.

Japan

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The Queen of Purza

My father did not really like cats.

I moved back home in 2013 to care for him, he was 93 at the time, and adopted a kitten 3 years later.

Dad was bedridden the last 3 months of his life so I made sure his door was securely closed to keep Purza out.

One day I heard Dad moaning in pain over the intercom, so I hurried to get his meds.

While I was getting them, Dad stopped moaning, which scared me because it was usually 30 minutes or more after his meds before he would quiet down.

I ran to his room and noticed his door was open.

What I saw in his room makes me cry even though it’s 4 years later.

Dad was in his bed with the head of it slightly raised, and laying beside him with her head right by his ear, was Purza and she was purring away.

She has a very loud purr.

Dad had his hand on her, a look of peace on his face, and he was sound asleep.

That was the first time he’d fallen asleep without pain meds in over 6 months.

I had named my kitten The Queen of Purza but right then I seriously thought of changing it to The Angel Purza, because that’s what she was.

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The Queen of Purza

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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Taiwan is being used as a casus belli

In the first half of this year, the US economy shrank, contracted, got smaller. That is two quarters of contraction which clearly puts the US in a technical recession. Although, the Democratic party are desperately trying to redefine what a “recession” is.

In contrast with all the supposed difficulties of the Shanghai lock-down in the second quarter, the Chinese economy did NOT shrink. It’s true that it barely grew, but grow it did.

As for the rest of China, well, in the first quarter China’s economy grew at a bit over 4% if memory serves.

Time for some perspective. The United States is shrinking. While China is growing.

And what about inflation?

China continues to keep inflation in the realm of 2%. The US was at 9.1% for June (the last month available at this time of writing).

This was in the region of 7% for a long, long time before it took a turn for the worse during the last few months!

  • United States- recession and inflation.
  • China- growth and stable prices.

Of course China has <6000 deaths due to Covid. The US has well over 1 million.

In the Western media China always does badly in the PREDICTIONS. But in REALITY China always does better than the US.

I attribute this to many things, but in this case, it is the end results which matter.

Taiwan as a distraction

From HERE

By Amarynth for the Saker Blog

The current hot war of words regarding Nancy Pelosi’s announced visit to Taiwan is reaching a dangerous nexus and threatening to spill over into military action.

China considers this belligerent approach as a threat to their stated One Country, Two Systems policy as well as a threat to the 1992 consensus. The two sides of the Taiwan Strait reached the consensus in 1992 that “both sides belong to one China and will work together toward national reunification”. It defines the fundamental nature of the cross-Strait relationship and lays the political foundation for its development.

Taiwan is being used as a casus belli (an act or an event that either provokes or is used to justify war) in the very same way that Ukraine was used and is currently used. A war of media, tremendous even brutal propaganda to their own citizens to paint the enemy as evil to justify their own actions, continual accusations using a human rights platform, and doubling down! We see fantastical accusations that Huawei equipment sitting atop poles is spying on the US, China is infiltrating the US Fed, and in professional statements and documentation, China is the second biggest enemy of the US.  The latest are threats to attempt to impose sanctions on Russian oil supplies to China.

The trajectory is exactly the same toward China, using Taiwan as the hot button, as what we observed during the run-up to the Russia SMO with the Ukraine as the hot button.  It is:

blatant and intentional provocation and total denial of International Law.

Another point of convergence is that while professing ‘support for Taiwan’ (the very same as for the Ukraine), they are actually harming Taiwan (the very same as for the Ukraine).

A short history of the current dangerous brouhaha is:

  • Nanci Pelosi announced a visit to Taiwan in April, and China said NO! Pelosi developed Covid.
  • During May, June and July, timeframe, the US announced a 5th sale of weapons to Taiwan and China delivered strong demarch on the US to cancel this. There was also a continual stream of US dignitaries and ex-dignataries e.g., Pompeo, visiting Taiwan in some or other professional capacity
  • Pelosi announced a new visit to Taiwan in August,

The Chinese are not simply saying no, they have handed this matter to their Military. Whereas their foreign office spokesperson comments, we now get the commentary from the Chinese military spokesperson.

Our army will not sit idly by if U.S. House Speaker Pelosi visits Taiwan, will take decisive measures to curb foreign interference – Chinese Defense Ministry

The Taiwan question is the most important of China’s core interests. Safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity is the bounden responsibility of every Chinese, and no one, force or country should dream of separating Taiwan from China – Chinese SC & FM Wang Yi:
  • The latest is that US President Biden & China’s Xi Jinping will hold bilateral talks today amid this crisis because the Chinese see this as a direct assault on One Country, Two Systems, as well as the 1992 consensus between China and Taiwan.

If Pelosi tries to visit Taiwan, the Chinese will respond militarily.

Asked to comment on a recent Financial Times report which suggested Beijing would respond military should the speaker of the House visit Taiwan, China’s government confirmed the contents as true.

“We are seriously prepared,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said in regards to the article.

“If the US side is bent on going its own way, China will take strong measures to resolutely respond and counteract. The United States should be held responsible for any serious consequences,” the official added.

We do not know what kind of military response, but at the moment, the American aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its strike group, including a guided missile destroyer and a guided missile cruiser, set out from Singapore on Monday heading northeast towards the South China Sea, according to ship-tracking information provided by Beijing-based think tank the South China Sea Strategic Probing Initiative.  The US military has not disclosed its final destination, but the route would bring the carrier group to the Taiwan Strait if it continues in the same direction.

The US administration fears that China could introduce a no-fly zone over Taiwan ahead of a possible visit by Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to the island to disrupt the plans of the American side – CNN

These provocations are a threat to the whole world, as are the provocations to Russia. Yet, the US and its cronies have failed to overthrow Hong Kong, they have failed to create an economic disaster in Xinjiang to destabilize this crossroad on the Belt and Road, and they failed in the Tibet Autonomous Region which is now a thriving region with no abject poverty or slave ownership of serfs and with protected religious and social mores, they failed the Trump trade war, and they will fail in Taiwan. They are failing in Latin America, they are even failing in Panama to safeguard their neoliberal democratic ‘free world’.

While failing everywhere, they live in virtual reality and most seriously believe that the world belongs to them.

“China will not allow “sanctimonious preaching” or bullying from foreign forces, and anyone who tries “will find themselves on a collision course with a steel wall forged by 1.4 billion people”.  Xi Jinping:

Taiwan is a distraction and a belated and hopeless but dangerous attempt at ongoing relevance from the US.

Caitlin Johnstone epitomized their dilemma:

Russia: Don’t cross our red lines in Ukraine or we’ll take action. 
US politicians: They’re bluffing. Cross those red lines. 
*Russia invades.* 

China: Don’t cross our red lines in Taiwan or we’ll take action. 
US politicians: They’re bluffing. Cross those red lines. 
*****

We wait to see the outcome and it will be China’s national reunification with its recalcitrant province on China’s terms, not imposed terms.  Bear in mind that Taiwan is not a candidate currently for independence. The current government does not dare to call for a referendum as 75% roughly of Taiwanese will vote for remaining with the Chinese mainland.

China Daily reports: For National Reunification we are willing to go to war.

Here are some actual historical facts from Nathan Rich:

Finally, Russia and China will coordinate actions.  Today in Uzbekistan:

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China Sanctions Nancy Pelosi; Refused Entry into China and Taiwan

Reports are coming in from Asia as of 4:09 AM eastern US Time, claiming that the People’s Republic of China has “Sanctioned” U.S. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.   The reports also claim that as a result of being Sanctioned, Pelosi is DENIED ENTRY into China and into Taiwan.

These reports are coming from media persons on the ground inside Asia, but their media outlets have yet to report these claims.

Pelosi departed the United States on Saturday, allegedly aboard a U.S. Air Force C-40 transport aircraft, which allegedly7 had TWO fighter jets as escort.

The plane was tracked across the continental U.S., out into the Pacific, and then landed in Hawaii to refuel.

Pelosi’s office tweeted a statement from her:

Later that same aircraft took off from Hawaii, but tracking of it was then BLOCKED, claiming the plane was no longer being tracked because of engine trouble . . . which is a complete non-sequitur; it made no sense at all.

As of 4:09 AM EDT Sunday, it is not known where Speaker Pelosi’s plane is, or if has perhaps landed elsewhere in Asia, as her itinerary did mention stops in Singapore, Malaysia and elsewhere for this trip.

Why the US Speaker of the House is engaging in foreign travel is also a mystery.  Generally, that’s why the U.S. has a Secretary of State.

More details as they become available.

UPDATE 9:17 AM EDT —

It turns out that when Pelosi’s aircraft developed engine trouble and it’s tracking was turned off, it returned to Hawaii.   Pelosi spent the night there.

This morning, the plane took off from Hawaii out westward into the Pacific.   At this hour 9:18 AM EDT, it is landing at Guam.

For what it’s worth

Getting Reports that Pelosi WILL Land in Taiwan this week . . .

There are now NEW reports, **claiming** US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, will land in Taiwan sometime this week.

No “official” word on this, but the reports are going around and getting louder.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) staged military exercises and published propaganda videos of various weapons, including an alleged “aircraft carrier killer,” on Sunday and Monday in anticipation of Pelosi (D-CA) arriving in Asia and potentially visiting Taiwan.

Pelosi landed in Singapore on Monday and has since met with its president and prime minister, bringing along a congressional delegation. Pelosi’s office confirmed the delegation would also visit Malaysia, South Korea, and Japan. Rumors for weeks have indicated that Pelosi had long been considering a surprise stop in the sovereign, democratic nation of Taiwan – defying the Chinese Communist Party, which claims Taiwan as a rogue “province” and dismisses its government as an illegitimate separatist entity.

Most striking about China’s public remarks about Pelosi visiting Taiwan, and that visit being a major incident against which China will respond, was China’s statement “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

That particular statement is of very troubling history;  China has only uttered that statement to another country THREE times in its history:

The first time in 1962 just prior to its border war with India;

The second time in 1979 just before it invaded Vietnam, and;

two days ago . . . to the USA

 

US Military: Extraordinary Activity

The United States military is already on the move, perhaps in relation to China’s ominous message.

The USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier Strike Group is now moving into position near Taiwan, as shown on its travel map below:

 

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Moreover, inside the continental United States, as of 1:49 PM eastern US time on August 1, 2022, ALL (every single one) of the planes shown on the FlightRadar24 map below, are US military aircraft over the Continental USA.

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That’s an awful lot of movement.  Rather unusual.

Perhaps they are preparing for . . .  something . . . .

PLA not to sit idly by if Pelosi visits Taiwan: Chinese spokesperson

From HERE

BEIJING, Aug. 1 (Xinhua) — China on Monday once again warned the United States that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will not sit idly by if U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian made the warning at a daily news briefing.

China has repeatedly stated to the United States its grave concern over the issue and the solemn position of resolutely opposing Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, and stressed the severe consequences if Pelosi visits Taiwan, Zhao said.

“The will of the people cannot be defied, and those who play with fire will perish by it,” Zhao said. “It is believed the U.S. side is fully aware of China’s strong and clear message.”

China is closely following the itinerary of Pelosi, Zhao said. “A visit to Taiwan by her would constitute a gross interference in China’s internal affairs, seriously undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, wantonly trample on the one-China principle, greatly threaten peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, severely undermine China-U.S. relations, and lead to a very serious situation and grave consequences.”

China once again warns the U.S. side that China is on high alert, the PLA will never sit idly by, and will surely take resolute and strong countermeasures to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity, Zhao said.

The United States should strictly abide by the one-China principle and the stipulations in the three China-U.S. joint communiques, honor U.S. President Joe Biden’s commitment that the United States does not support “Taiwan independence,” and not arrange for Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the spokesperson added.

 

White House Says Speaker Pelosi has the right to visit Taiwan: Taiwan Cancels All Troops Leave “Prepare for war”

Just moments ago, the White House officially confirmed the American position that the Speaker of the House “has the right to visit Taiwan.”

Routine Diplomatic practice for decades has been that if an official from any country wishes to visit Taiwan, they must get permission from Beijing, then fly into Beijing, then fly to Taiwan.  That decades-old practice is being ignored, and Taiwan is being treated by the USA as if Beijing no longer matters.

Beijing seems ready to show the US, and the world, they actually do matter . . . .

Video of the White House spokesman saying it:

 

Taiwan Cancels all Military Leave

Taiwanese defense officials have canceled the leave of soldiers and officers “to immediately prepare” for the chance of war in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Asia this week, according to local reports.

China warned early Monday that its military would not “sit idly by” if the House speaker visits Taiwan during her trip this week, echoing similar comments from Chinese President Xi Jinping last week that the United States should not “play with fire.” Pelosi is expected to stop in Taiwan during her visit this week, although the island is not listed on her itinerary.

“Her stature as the No. 3 U.S. official means a trip would be highly sensitive,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters Monday. “As to what measures, let’s wait and see whether she insists on this visit.”

If Pelosi travels to Taiwan, she’ll be the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the island since former House Speaker Newt Gingrich made the trip in 1997. It’s not clear when Pelosi will arrive in Taiwan, but the House speaker is expected to stay there overnight, officials told CNN.

UPDATE 2:20 PM EDT —

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to visit Taiwan as part of her tour of Asia, according to a senior Taiwanese government official and a US official, despite warnings from Biden administration officials, who are worried about China’s response to such a high-profile visit.

The stop — the first for a US House speaker in 25 years — is not currently on Pelosi’s public itinerary and comes at a time when US-China relations are already at a low point.

The Taiwanese official added that she is expected to stay in Taiwan overnight. It is unclear when exactly Pelosi will land in Taipei….

China again warns of ‘serious consequences’ over Pelosi’s potential Taiwan visit

From HERE

China will take firm and strong countermeasures to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian on Monday, warning that the Chinese military will not sit back if U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan.

His remarks came amid the high tensions across the Taiwan Straits. Pelosi’s Asia trip schedule, announced on Sunday, includes Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan with no mention of Taiwan.

“The Chinese side has repeatedly made clear to the U.S. side our serious concern over Pelosi’s potential visit to Taiwan and our firm opposition to the visit,” Zhao told a regular news briefing.

“We are fully prepared for any eventuality,” he said, adding that it is the U.S. that has been distorting and hollowing out the one-China principle and making irresponsible remarks on the Taiwan question.

China demands that the United States honor the promise of President Joe Biden that it would not support “Taiwan independence” and should not arrange Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, he stressed.

During his phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday, Biden reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to the one-China policy.

Policing the World Is a Full-Time Job

China pushes back against US-led military intervention in Asia

Every leader and top official now in power in the so-called Western World seems to have forgotten that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded in 1949 as an alliance that was ostensibly defensive in nature, intended to counter the expansion of Soviet style communism in Europe.

That role continued to be the raison d’etre of the organization until communist governments themselves collapsed in both Russia and in the Eastern European states that collectively made up the Warsaw Pact during the 1990s. After that point, NATO no longer had any reason to exist at all as the alleged military threat posed by the Kremlin and its allies vanished virtually overnight.

But clever politicians were quick to put the alliance on life support instead of simply dismantling it.

Lacking the threat posed by the Warsaw Pact, NATO was forced to come up with other reasons to maintain military forces at levels that could quickly be enhanced and placed on a wartime footing. Washington and London took the lead in this, citing the now shopworn defense of a “rules based international order” as well as of “democracy” and “freedom.”

And fortunately for the national defense industries and the generals, it soon proved possible to find new enemies that provided justification for additional military spending.

The first major engagement outside the obligations defined by the original treaty took place in Europe to be sure, but it was in the Balkans where of NATO during the 1995 Operation Deliberate Force. The war ended after the signing of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Paris on December 14th 1995. Peace negotiations were finalized a week later but fighting resumed between Kosovo and Serbia in the following year, which led to another NATO intervention that eventually ended with the restoration of Kosovo’s autonomy and the deployment of NATO forces, which bombed the Serbs to compel their compliance with a draft cease fire agreement.

NATO also played a role improbably enough in the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, which was justified by claiming that an Afghanistan free to set its own course would become a hotbed of terrorism which would inevitably impact on the United States and Europe. It was a paper-thin argument, but it was the best they could come up with at the time and it also eventually involved soldiers from additional friendly countries like Australia.

As we have subsequently seen, however, it was all an argument without merit as Afghanistan became a money pit and a graveyard for thousands of locals and foreign soldiers. It is now again in the hands of the Taliban after a bungled withdrawal of US forces and the collapse of the puppet government in Kabul that Washington had installed.

Turn the clock forward to the present. As everyone but President Joe Biden has recognized, the United States and NATO are currently engaged in a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which many observers already believe has some of the attributes of World War III. As Russia neither threatened nor attacked any NATO member state, the argument that the response in arming and training Ukraine was defensive was rendered irrelevant. Nor can it be credibly be claimed that Russia is a haven for terrorists, quite the contrary. Nevertheless, Biden has stated that the US will be in the fight on behalf of Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” Does he mean years, and all done without a declaration of war by Congress as required by the US Constitution?

And more appears to be coming. Joe Biden, during last week’s trip to Israel, made clear that the United States is “prepared to use all elements of its national power” to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and has signed a pledge with the Israeli government to commit itself to do so.

If Biden presses the argument that Iran is an international threat due to its impending development of nuclear weapons, will he appeal to NATO to support a joint military option to disarm it? I believe he just might do that.

And he might just want to consider how the entire set-up and framing of the issue by Israel is somewhat of a trap. Israel considers Iran’s current nuclear program to be intended to create a weapon, which “they continue to develop,” and there are plenty in the US Congress who would agree with that.

So, if Iran is clearly creating a thermonuclear device, the time to strike is now, isn’t it? And bear in mind how the US/Israeli campaign to condemn is multifaceted. Shortly before the meetings held by Biden and his crew with the Israelis, US government sources set the stage for what was to come by going on the offensive regarding reports that Iran may be selling highly capable offensive drones to Russia for use in Ukraine as well as subsequent claims coming out of Washington that the Iranians are seeking to assassinate senior US officials in revenge for the killing of Revolutionary Guards General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. One wonders why they waited so long and why the White House has chosen to publicize these stories at this point.

And the US and NATO are also getting involved with China’s geopolitical policies, on a path that Beijing is warning is extremely hypocritical and which might lead to armed conflict. The signs that the Chinese might be targeted by NATO, possibly over the Taiwan independence issue, came following a stark warning by US Secretary of State Tony Blinken delivered at the NATO summit in Madrid at the end of June. Blinken accused China of “seeking to undermine the rules-based international order,” the same type of critique recently leveled against Russia and Iran. Blinken’s comment was elaborated on by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who observed how “China is substantially building up its military forces, including nuclear weapons, bullying its neighbors, threatening Taiwan … monitoring and controlling its own citizens through advanced technology, and spreading Russian lies and disinformation.”

Stoltenberg’s indictment of China was followed by a NATO issued “strategic concept” document last that declared for the first time that China poses a “systemic challenge” to the alliance, alongside a primary “threat” coming from Russia. The document copied Blinken’s language, citing “The deepening strategic partnership between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.”

Finally, the US and British governments collaborated to condemn China as the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” The declaration came in a July 6th joint news conference in London, where Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, accused China, like Russia, of interfering in US and UK elections. Wray also warned the business leaders in the audience that the Chinese government has been “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian initially responded a few days after the NATO summit, observing that the “so-called rules-based international order is actually a family rule made by a handful of countries to serve the US self-interest,” adding that “[Washington]observes international rules only as it sees fit.” Addressing the issue of the role of NATO specifically, Zhao accused Blinken of using NATO to “hype up competition with China and stoke group confrontation.” He added that “The history of NATO is one about creating conflicts and waging wars…arbitrarily launching wars and killing innocent civilians, even to this day. Facts have proven that it isn’t China that poses a systemic challenge to NATO, and instead it is NATO that brings a looming systemic challenge to world peace and security. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, [NATO] has not yet abandoned its thinking and practice of creating ‘enemies’ … It is NATO that is creating problems around the world.”

China has a point. What NATO is threatening is war, as it is a military alliance. The Chinese appear to understand that NATO is the world’s largest military bureaucracy which has developed since 1991 an overriding institutional commitment to ensuring its permanent existence, if not expansion, even after it has clearly outlived its own usefulness. So Beijing might justifiably wonder, how does China – on the other side of the globe – fit into NATO’s historic “defensive” mission? How are Chinese troops or missiles now threatening Europe or the US in ways they weren’t before? How are the Americans and Europeans suddenly under military threat coming from China?

The Chinese appear to understand that if there is no threat to “defend” against, then a threat must be manufactured, and that is precisely what we are seeing vis-à-vis Russia, China, Iran and even Venezuela. Washington has become addicted to war and NATO is the chosen tool to give those wars the patina of legitimacy. To launch those conflicts requires either inventing an imaginary threat, or, as in the case of Russia, provoking the very threat the “defensive” bureaucracy was designed to deter or thwart. All indications are that NATO – now embracing 30 countries – is doing both and the results could easily be disastrous for all parties involved. Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard particularly abhors the cynical recklessness of the Biden Administration driving the process, explaining how “The reality is, President Biden, members of Congress, leaders in our country, the wealthy, they will have a safe place to be in the event of a nuclear war that they are behind causing while the rest of us in America and Russia, people around the world, will be decimated from this event.”

Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges has also defined the unthinkable that is at stake, and it is past time for Americans and Europeans to take note and stop the madness.

Hedges opines that “The massive expansion of NATO, not only in Eastern and Central Europe but the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia, presages endless war and a potential nuclear holocaust.”

One might also note that New Yorkers are now being informed about what to do if there is a nuclear attack.

Yes, that is precisely the problem – we have an administration in Washington that should be protecting the people living in this country, not setting up scenarios that might lead to their slaughter.

Will someone please point that out to Joe Biden?

Will the West’s Suicide Bring World Peace?

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In The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski speculated about the American unipolar hegemon’s ultimate geostrategic nightmare: “a new ‘antihegemonic’ coalition, formed around the three powers with the greatest geopolitical stake in reducing America’s primacy in Eurasia.” Those three powers, of course, are Russia, China, and Iran. Such a development, Brzezinski observed, would “bring together the world’s leading Slavic power, the world’s most militant Islamic power, and the world’s most populated and powerful Asian power, thereby creating a potent coalition.”

Such an alliance would require “a renewal of the bilateral Sino-Russian connection, capitalizing on the resentment among the political elites of both states over the emergence of America as the only global superpower.” That seemed unlikely when Brzezinski was writing in 1997 because, as he put it, such a coalition could only develop if the US were stupid enough to antagonize all three nations simultaneously.

Brzezinski should have known never to underestimate the stupidity of American foreign policy elites. As I write this in late July 2022 (Dhu’l-Hijjah 1443 AH) the neocon-led west is committing strategic suicide by doing exactly what Brzezinski warned against: not just antagonizing, but massively antagonizing Russia, China, and Iran all at once. The inevitable result will be the collapse of American pretensions to global leadership, sooner rather than later.

The US under Donald Trump blew up whatever shred of credibility it had with Tehran by tearing up the JCPOA and assassinating Gen. Qassem Soleimani after luring him to Baghdad with a fake peace offer. Moving the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem/al-Quds, deeming Israeli land-theft legitimate, and sponsoring the anti-Iran anti-Palestine Shaitan Accords (misnamed the “Abraham Accords” in a horrific insult to sayyidna Ibrahim alaihi as-salaam) was just the icing on the cake. After those actions, Iran had no choice but to face the reality that the US is, as the Russians say, non-agreement-capable.

Around the same time the US attacked Wuhan with COVID-19, inadvertently (?) unleashing a global pandemic. This came on the heels of suspected American bio-attacks on China in 2017 and 2018 that decimated the Chinese meat supply in the midst of Trump’s red-hot trade war. Immediately after exploding out of Wuhan, COVID suspiciously jumped 3600 miles to Qom, disproportionately infecting Iran’s political and clerical leadership just weeks after the US had murdered Gen. Soleimani. The Rahbar, Imam Sayyid Ali Khamenei all but accused the US of perpetrating a biological attack, and Iran formally complained to the United Nations.

The US COVID bio-attack on Wuhan and Qom was presumably designed to be blamed on China in order to foster anti-Chinese hysteria and trigger the supply-chain decoupling that would be necessary during the lead-up to military escalation. Though elements of China’s leadership dropped many hints that they knew the score, Beijing apparently calculated that playing coy as the pandemic “returned to sender” was wiser than launching formal accusations and sparking domestic outrage that could force a premature hot war.

While angering China and Iran with such reckless mistreatment, the US would have been well-advised to play nice with Russia. Instead, the neocons did the exact opposite: They orchestrated the 2022 war on Russia through Ukraine. After installing a neocon-run puppet government in the 2014 Maidan coup, the US built a huge NATO-armed-and-trained “Ukrainian” army—and, in early 2022, sent it to attack the Donbass and Crimea. Russia’s pleas to respect the Minsk Accords and negotiate limits on NATO expansion were brutally rebuffed as US-Ukrainian biological warfare labs on Russia’s borders ramped up their suspicious activities. All of this was intended to trigger a pre-emptive Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it succeeded.

To win its proxy war on Russia, the US needs to isolate Moscow. To that end it slapped sanctions on Russian energy, banking, and raw materials. Washington’s obsequious European vassals meekly obeyed, depriving themselves of Russian natural gas and thereby committing economic suicide. But most of the world is defying the sanctions, and China and Iran are leading the way. As the US propaganda service Radio Free Europe recently whined, “China’s growing appetite for discounted Russian oil has made it the leading financier of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine by giving Moscow a reliable revenue source that blunts the impact of tough Western sanctions against its economy.” (Why would China kowtow to US orders even as Biden breaks with US policy and announces his readiness to go to war with China over Taiwan, which the US has officially deemed a province of China for half a century?)

Meanwhile the Rahbar of Iran brought Russian President Putin and Turkish President Erdogan to Tehran on July 19 to plan the eviction of the US from Syria while forging a Eurasian partnership that will eventually see all three nations working with China to build an alternative non-US-authorized trade and security order. According to al-Jazeera “The two leaders (Imam Khamenei and Putin) also reportedly discussed bilateral relations and gradually removing the US dollar from bilateral trade.” By accelerating the erosion of the dollar as global reserve currency, Russia and Iran, along with China and other Eurasian partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, will undercut Washington’s ability to print the unlimited currency it uses to finance its military occupation of much of the world.

Also at the Tehran conference, Russia announced its investment of $40 billion in developing Iranian gas and oil fields, while the two leaders jointly agreed to proceed with plans for enlarging Russia-Iran-China joint military exercises (which are already happening around the world including in Latin America, Washington’s “Monroe Doctrine” backyard). The multipolar alliance’s move into Central and South America has been facilitated by a wave of left-wing election victories empowering Latin leaders who never much cared for US dominance of their half of the hemisphere.

And even as Turkey was joining Russia and Iran in Tehran in a pointed rebuke to Biden’s visits to Tel Aviv and Riyadh, Pakistan’s Imran Khan won a smashing election victory in Punjab, signaling the Pakistani people’s refusal to accept the US-IMF coup that deposed Khan in April. Other Central Asian nations are also leaning toward the new multipolar axis based on the Russia-China-Iran tripartite alliance.

These developments, together with Russia’s victory over the US in Ukraine, suggest that the “new American century” has ended 78 years early. The boundless arrogance of America’s neocons, who seized power in their 9/11/2001 coup d’état and proceeded to squander America’s soft and hard power in a series of ill-advised adventures, has created the very nightmare scenario that all serious strategic thinkers, including Brzezinski, had insisted on avoiding at all costs.

Ironically, the Americans may be inadvertently preparing the groundwork for world peace even as they blunderingly bestride the globe waging bloody, counterproductive wars. By forcing Eurasia to unite both commercially and militarily, the US may have accidentally created the conditions for a more stable world order. Eurasia, after all, is the center of the “grand chessboard” and ground zero in the competition for land and resources that tends to erupt into war. As Eurasian nations band together into an anti-American alliance, they may be forging enduring ties that will eventually facilitate the emergence of more peaceful world bound by economic, intellectual, and spiritual exchange rather than military competition and plunder.

Is Taiwan’s Independence Worth War?

When a man knows he is about to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully, said Dr. Samuel Johnson.

If there is any benefit to be realized from the collision between China and the U.S. over Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proposed trip to Taiwan, it is this: America needs to reflect long and hard upon what it is we will fight China to defend in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

China, after all, is a nuclear-weapons nation with a manufacturing base larger than our own, an economy equal to our own, a population four times ours and fleets of warships larger in number than the U.S. Navy.

An air-naval-and-missile war in the Western Pacific and East Asia would be no cakewalk.

A massive barrage of anti-ship and hypersonic missiles launched by China could cripple and conceivably sink the U.S. carrier Ronald Reagan now in the South China Sea. The Reagan carries a crew of thousands of sailors almost as numerous as the U.S. casualty lists from both Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the worst attacks in and on the U.S. outside of such Civil War battles as Gettysburg and Antietam.

What in East Asia or the Western Pacific would justify such losses?

What would justify such risks?

Since President Richard Nixon’s trip to China, and President Jimmy Carter’s abrogation of the mutual defense treaty with the Republic of China on Taiwan in 1979, the U.S. is not obligated to come to the defense of Taiwan against China, which claims that island the size of Maryland as “part of China.”

Our military posture has been one of “strategic ambiguity.” We will not commit to go to war to defend Taiwan, nor will we take the war option off the table if Taiwan is attacked.

But if the U.S. went to war to defend Taiwan, what would it mean?

We would be risking our own security and possible survival to prevent from being imposed on the island of Taiwan the same regime lately imposed on Hong Kong without any U.S. military resistance.

If Hong Kong, a city of 7 million, can be transferred to the custody and control of Beijing without resistance from the U.S., why should it be worth a major U.S. war with China to prevent that same fate and future from befalling 23 million Taiwanese?

The retort comes instantly.

Allow China to take Taiwan without U.S. resistance, and our treaties to fight for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand become suspect.

Belief in the U.S. commitment to fight for the nations of East Asia and the Western Pacific would dissipate. The entire architecture of Asian defense against Communist China could disintegrate and collapse.

If we allowed Taiwan to be taken by China without intervening, it is argued, the value of U.S. commitments to fight to defend scores of allies in Europe and Asia would visibly depreciate. U.S. credibility would suffer a blow as substantial as the loss of South Vietnam in 1975.

The fall of Saigon was followed by the loss of Laos and Cambodia to communism, the overthrow of the shah, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the strategic transfer of Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Grenada to the Soviet bloc, and the rise of Euro-communism on the Old Continent.

Pelosi’s prospective visit to Taiwan, and the bellicose reaction of Beijing, should raise other relevant questions.

If this should lead to a U.S.-China war, what would we be fighting for? And what would victory look like?

A restoration of the status quo ante? Permanent independence for Taiwan, which would require a new and permanent war guarantee by the U.S. and a new U.S.-Taiwan defense pact?

Would a permanent commitment to fight to defend Taiwan from China be acceptable to an American people weary of commitments and wars?

Again, why would we risk our own peace and security for Taiwan’s freedom and independence, when we would not risk our own peace and security for the freedom or independence of Hong Kong?

And after our victory in the Taiwan Strait, how would we secure indefinitely the independence of that nation of 23 million from a defeated power of 1.4 billion, bitter and bristling at its loss?

After the United States has a victory against China? Seriously? Let me remind you of the Korean war, and the MASSIVE American rout with the enormous causalities taken against poorly armed peasants and farmers. -MM

Consider: China, in this 21st century, has grown massively, both militarily and economically, and in both real and relative terms, at the expense of the United States.

Nor are the growth trends for China, with four times as many people as there are Americans, favorable to the USA.

What guarantees are there that 2025 or 2030 will not bring a more favorable balance of power for China in what is, after all, their continent, not ours?

Unlike in the Cold War, time is not necessarily on the side of the United States and its allies when all three of the nuclear powers in East Asia — China, Russia, North Korea — are hostile to the USA.

Smokey

“my grandmother moved away recently, and one of my cats, Smokey, was very fond of her. They would cuddle together on the couch and watch my grandmas favorite shows.

When she left, Smokey wouldn’t stop looking for her best friend.

She always waited by the door as if she would come back any day. She sleeps in the now guest bedroom every night, and curls up in their spot every day. We’ve tried to make her feel better with new toys and treats, but she is very sad.

She meows at all hours of the night begging for her best friend to come home.

There’s a happy end to this though!

My grandma is coming home for thanksgiving and she will be taking Smokey back with her! We are all very happy she will be with her best friend again!”

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Update 2: Thank you everyone for reading! there is good news and bad news. I’ll start with the bad. My grandma had to have surgery, and she needs constant doctor visits to make sure she’s still ok. I’m not very good with medical terminology, but I know its bad. Good news is she’s going to stay here, and Smokey is very happy that she doesn’t have to leave her siblings.

CHINA WARNS USA: Will not accept *any* excuse for Pelosi Landing in Taiwan . . .

The People’s Republic of China today explicitly warned the United States against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi trying to travel to Taiwan.

They said “We will not accept any excuses for Nancy Pelosi trying to land in Taiwan, including any kind of emergency.  If problems with the plane occur, we will allow landing in Hainan, not Taiwan.”

So the stage is set for actual confrontation.

According to sources in Asia, the Hal Turner Radio Show can report that Nancy Pelosi’s aircraft is scheduled to land in Taipei, Taiwan, at 22:20 Hours local time TONIGHT.

Meanwhile, THREE United States Air Force B-52’s, with their transponders OFF, are presently in Taiwan air space.  As of Monday, Japan-based USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier strike group is in the Philippine Sea after transiting the San Bernardino Strait on Saturday following a port visit to Singapore and operating in the South China Sea. California-based USS Tripoli is in just south of Okinawa. Tripoli has been embarked with up to 20 F-35Bs.

China has just CANCELED all civilian flights into or out of Fujian Province . . . the mainland province directly opposite Taiwan.

China will conduct military drills in some areas of South China Sea Aug. 2-6 and will ban ships from entering the areas.

 

 HAL TURNER ANALYSIS

The Democrats need a big change to prevent carnage at the midterm elections. The so called “defeat of Russia” is simply not happening. It all backfired into economic disaster.

So the thing to make everyone forget the past failures would seem to be a new war with China.

The timing of this situation has all been dictated by Nancy’s trip, which means the US and allies are dictating the timing. China has responded as expected with brinksmanship threats- paraphrasing from memory… “Play with Fire and Die by Fire, We WILL RESPOND MILITARILY, Prepare for war”, etc.

China has put themselves on a path with no turns at this point. Can’t back out now without losing face.

One of the last times the US chose the timing to start a major war was Bush Sr’s 1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq. Saddam woke up that morning to the largest armada of aircraft and ships imaginable, launched from a huge consortium of the willing allies. 31 years ago. How time flies.

One thing that tends to be the case, from past observations. Whatever you think is the situation is wrong. The fog of war, or whatever you want to call it typically surrounds the opening moves. Silly reports of a half trillion dollar F-35 program being grounded because they “forgot to put the charge into the ejection seats”. Something that supposedly happened in April and is now being broadcast as a headline. Right before a major military engagement. riiiight.

Whatever the opening of this new war looks like is will certainly be interesting to watch if you overlook all the death and destruction. Biden obviously has nothing to do with the plans or strategy being a mental vegetable and all.
The Deep State war machine in running the show.

Hard to imagine the “Nothing will happen” scenario at this point, but I suppose anything is possible. Maybe China will try to save face by making some claim about their altruism and desire for world peace. They have been having big problems at home as well from what little I have gleaned from the interwebs. Financial problems, and a population that seems 30 seconds away from a full scale revolution.

May we live in interesting times. The old Chinese curse.
Both sides make public claims about the immense power of their militaries.

As Patton used to say, or I think he did, as I mis-remember and smoosh together his various quotes, something like, “War is the crucible of truth. Truths are reaffirmed, and lies are burned away to ashes.”

Times have changed in the last 31 years.

The US has abused its friendships around the world. Allies have been coerced and manhandled to the point that the great “political capital” that existed for the 2 Iraq wars has been spent and squandered.

Any coalition of the willing against China will be borne not of any love for America but for simple self preservation.  A China dominated world would be a lot worse than one dominated by the US, even on our worst day.

Obviously he has never been to China. -MM

I guess we don’t really know who the allies of the US will be in this conflict, but it is safe to say most or all of the following list: Japan, Australia, S. Korea, with some possibility of India, Vietnam, The PI, and a few NATO allies like the UK and France. Russia should have been our ally as well, but Biden has burned that bridge rather completely, which is the reason I have been rather vocal in opposing the doomed Ukraine conflict from the beginning.

 

UPDATE 8:09 AM EDT —

Taiwan is preparing eight Mirage-2000 fighter jets to escort Nancy Pelosi’s aircraft into Taiwanese airspace.

Meanwhile, China is NOW moving armor into Fujian Province near Xiamen.  This video just-in from Fujian Province showing the armor:

 

 

Strangely, for some reason, China is also NOW deploying what appear to be artillery onto the Beaches along the Taiwan Strait!   The artillery cannot reach Taiwan, cannot shoot down US planes, and there is no actual “invasion” of China planned, so it is not known what China will accomplish with this . . . but it is taking place as seen in the video below:

 

China shows what the USA can look forward to.

As punishment for pelosi visit, China suddenly bans more than 100 Taiwanese food companies export to China. More economic punishment to come…

From HERE

Ashley

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THis is Ashley. I was broke , I had bought her cat food with my last few rands , and it was 2 days from pay day. There was no food in the house. I went to bed hungry , and next morning i made her breakfast , and this beautiful creature looked at me , turned around and went out the window. I was thinking , great abandoned by the cat as well , and then i heard a Muffled Rowl. That sound i know , she came jumping through the window with a pigeon she had just caught , and dumped it by my feet. She looked at me and battered her eyes and cleaned herself. It was like she knew i was hungry , so she went and caught me something to eat.

What a beautiful soul …

CHINA DEPLOYS **NUCLEAR** ICBM’S

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China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is now actively moving nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM’s) in Fujian Province near Taiwan.  These missiles can reach the United States.   All this over a confrontation about Speaker Nancy Pelosi entering Taiwan when she was told she could not come, by Beijing.

VIDEO:

The images below are from the roads of Fujian Province, taken today:

The short and sweet of the DF-5B appears below:

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NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wants to visit China to ‘seize new opportunities’

NZ PM is the only smart Anglo-Saxon leader.
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From HERE

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Crystal Brown

When I was 16, I started dating my first real boyfriend…whom I ended up marrying, then divorcing because that’s what sometimes happens when you marry your first ever boyfriend.

The first time at their home, we pulled up to their old, shabby home in dire need of paint and repairs.

He opens the door and his mom greets us. Hugs him, hugs me.

I felt so awkward. I couldn’t recall ever getting a hug before?

We watched a movie together. Afterwards we decided to run down to the store a mile away to get some snacks & his mom said ‘Be safe! I love you!’

I was awestruck. They say ‘I love you’ every time they leave the house? I couldn’t recall ever being told ‘I love you’. I was 16 years old and never had anyone to ever say the words ‘I Love You’.

They didn’t have much. The house was shabby. They lived paycheck to paycheck. Old clothes. But they were happy. Loving. A family.

They talked about their feelings. They talked about their emotions. They talked through fights, even if they were yelling.

When we married, his parents welcomed me with open arms even though we were young. I was 17 and pregnant. His mom took me in as I was kicked out. Bought my maternity clothes. Took me to doctor appointments. And even through my awkwardness, my crying fits because of hormones & family issues, and the only way I knew how to handle that, was anger…they loved me. They hugged me. They told me they loved me. No matter how awkward I was, no matter how much anger I showed because I didn’t know how to show pain, no matter how hard it was for them…they loved me.

They taught me how to be a good mom. How to be a good person.

Even now, being divorced for 15 years, I still keep in contact with them. I still send Christmas cards and text them. My ex mother in law still calls me ‘her daughter’.

It enabled me to tell my children that I loved them on a daily basis. To tell them how wonderful they are. How they can do anything. To give them hugs nightly, to talk to them, show emotion and teach them to show their emotions.

I’ll forever be grateful. She helped me break the family cycle.

Jimmy Carter on why there is only ONE CHINA

1979 US president Jimmy Carter full public statement Re The people republic of China as the only legitimate government of china.
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Saddest last words

“The presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet has sentenced you and your family to be shot…” Yakov Yurovsky had loudly announced. He had rehearsed his speech hours before.

The Tsar whose face was blanched with horror and incomprehension, interrupted Yurovsky, “I don’t understand. Read it again…”

After Yurovsky re-read the death sentence, the Tsar turned back to his family, pointedly looking at his sickly son, the Tsarveich Alexei before turning back to the executioners.

The Tsar’s final words was a weak stutter.

“What? What?”

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These words are simple but it resonates all of his momentary feelings of horror, terror, and incomprehension. He and his family were blind to their tragic fates.

Unlike popular belief, the death of his family was not a fast execution. It was a murderous blood bath. Quick warning, the rest of my answer is going to get detailed about the murder.

As the shooting took place, every single Bolshevik in the room wanted to take a shot at “bloody” Nicholas. Therefore, he was the only family member to receive a quick death.

Just as Tsaritsa Alexandra was crossing herself, she was shot in the skull. Alexandra was the second death.

Dr. Botkin, who was hit twice in the abdomen and crawled toward the Tsar, was fatally shot by Yurovsky. His was the third death.

Alexei, too weak from his illness, didn’t budge as the shooting took place. Still covered in his father’s blood, he was too petrified to move. Yurovsky quickly finished him off with a bullet to the head. Alexei was the fourth death.

When they realized that the daughters were still alive, a second frenzied shooting took place but unbeknownst to the executioners, the daughters had unintentionally made bullet-proof vests by sewing layers of diamonds into their clothes.

After the smoke had cleared, Yurovsky’s men noticed Olga and Tatiana cowering in the dark corner of the basement and clutching tightly to each other. As Yurovsky approached, Tatiana struggled to her feet but was shot in the back of the head. Hers was the fifth death.

Olga, who witnessed her sister’s death, was frantically screaming before being shot in the jaw. Olga was the sixth death.

Anastasia and Maria, who were crouched against a wall, were the last Romanovs alive. The executioners decided to finish them off with bayonets, but the stabs would not go through the layers of jewels. Maria and Anastasia were shot in the head but only Maria died. She was the seventh death.

The maid Demidova awoke after fainting and cried out, “Thank God! I am saved!” Her proclamation was short-lived and she was stabbed with a bayonet. Hers was the eighth death.

Anastasia, the most mythologized of the sisters, had suddenly awoken as she was being carried out. Anastasia cried out and thrashed her arms but was clubbed in the back of the head. She was the last of her family to die.

I’ve always wondered what thoughts run through Tsar Nicholas’s head as he looked back at his family for the last time.

Did a sudden realization dawn on him that he was the cause of his family’s misfortune and tragic end?

Were his last regrets on his inability to protect his family?

Was he preoccupied with thoughts on how to withhold his family’s demise?

We’ll never know. All I could say that after his final words, an unimaginable violence took place that night that shattered innocence and allowed chaos to take its place.

Pelosi Plane has landed in Taiwan! . . . Now, CANNOT TAKE-OFF! – No-Fly Zone

The US Air Force plane carrying Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is now below 18,000 feet in altitude, and is on final approach to Tapei, Taiwan, in direct vioolation of Beijing’s order that she not enter.

Plane is now physically over land, no longer over Pacific Ocean.

Altitude 16,300 feet as of 10:32 AM eastern US time.

As of 10:38 AM Pelosi plane now at 8300 feet altitude.  China’s Global Times newspaper says Chinese Air Force fighter jets moving across Taiwan Strait to intercept.

10:39 AM EDT — Plane altitude 6400 feet.

10:40 AM 5600 feet.

5175 feet

4800 feet

Pelosi’s plane safely landed and Pelosi has deplaned.

 

UPDATE 12:16 PM EDT–

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian made an official statement.

“Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan will be a gross interference in China’s internal affairs, and will lead to very serious events and dire consequences,” Lijian said.

 

China’s Economy Ministry has stopped HALTED hundreds of food product shipments to Taiwan amid Pelosi visit

 

China vows ‘targeted military actions’ in response to Pelosi Taiwan visit.

 

12:28 PM EDT — 

Reuters confirms, the Air Space over Taiwan Straits is now closed.  China fighter jets are flying all around Taiwan.   AIR RAID SIRENS are sounding in southern CHINA:

 

 

Chinese military PLA Eastern Theater Command announced it will start military “exercises” in the coming hours around Taiwan Island in response to Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

 

UPDATE 5:04 PM EDT —

China’s military exercises block the air and sea around Taiwan.   All of it.

China Central Television announced the start of military exercises in three areas around Taiwan. These maneuvers demonstrate the dissatisfaction of the Chinese ruling party with the actions of the United States, in particular with Pelosi’s statements on “democracy” in Taiwan.

Until the PLA completes the live-fire exercises,  Pelosi can’t LEAVE.   Her plane can’t take-off else it may “accidentally” be hit by live fire from the “exercises.”

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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The United States plan to conquer China and Russia has been unveiled

Picture above. Chinese “stealth aircraft” in a carrier launch configuration.

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was seen in a luxury hotel in Moscow today.

Hum… Germany. Russia.

Ok. Things to ponder about. Obviously things are afoot.

I’m in the heat of my move. So things are going to be scattered and thin for a while. Please don’t get upset. It’s called life.

Now something absolutely frightening

The highlight of this collection (of misc bits and pieces) is a brilliant summary of the plan for the United States to conquer both Russia and China. It is comprehensive.

It is clear. and lordy is it frightening.

Heaven help us all.

Let’s begin with some odds and ends…

Crazy but true

The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849) was a huge catastrophe that resulted in one million dying from starvation and one million leaving their homeland, mostly for North America.

It’s really hard to put into words how scarring this famine was for so many Irish people and the suffering was tremendous. The psychological scars still impact Ireland’s psyche today.

It almost sounds like a fairy tale to hear how a Sultan from a far away land heard of this tragedy and went out of his way to send ships crammed with food and medicine to the Irish people dying from hunger and disease.

When Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid heard of the suffering from his Irish dentist, he felt great compassion and sorrow for the plight of the Irish. The Sultan originally wanted to donate 10,000 pounds to the starving populace but British diplomats were aghast to hear this because Queen Victoria had donated a small sum of 2,000 pounds.

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Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid

The British Government refused to accept the large donation so he only donated a measly sum of 1,000 pounds, but he secretly sent five ships loaded with food!

As you can imagine, the British government wasn’t happy to hear of this and the navy attempted a blockade to stop the aid from arriving. The ships made it through the lines and arrived at Drogheda, Ireland where they dispersed the food.

The people of Drogheda were so thankful that they had the Islamic and Ottoman symbols added to their city’s coat of arms.

It really does read like a fairy tale and is a gesture of great empathy.

It’s easy to imagine how happy the starving people were to see those Turkish ships arriving with food. According to James Hack Tuke, people were, “living, or rather starving, upon turnip-tops, sand-eels and seaweed, a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal.”[1]

But the story does not end there.

During the Crimean War, Britain joined the Ottoman Empire in their fight against the expanding Russian Empire. About 30,000 Irish soldiers served in the war and it was noticed that the Irish people served enthusiastically in defense of the Sultan who had helped them during their greatest times of need.

This highest form of compassion was even remembered during the First World War. It was reported that British officers complained that the Irish lacked the will to fight against the Ottomans who remembered stories of the Ottoman Empire helping during a famine when no one else would.

Sultan Abdulmejid is a model of faith in humanity being restored.

Footnotes

On Speaker Pelosi’s potential visit to Taiwan, we are fully prepared for any eventuality.

China does not play. If the USA is that STUPID, they deserve exactly what will happen afterwards…

US military may be afraid China will shoot down Pelosi’s plane over Taiwan, Pelosi says

During a press conference on Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the U.S. military may be concerned about her plane getting “shot down” by the Chinese military if she decides to travel to Taiwan.

US military may be afraid China will shoot down Pelosi’s plane over Taiwan, Pelosi says

Related:

Meanwhile on vacation…

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US To Assassinate Zelensky?

Rumors are now exploding that the US has decided to assassinate Ukrainian President Zelensky; he’s not useful to them anymore.

The rumors began after US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan made a remark at the Aspen Conference this weekend.   That conference is basically a get-together of spooks and intel people.

At the conference, Sullivan remarked “I have concerns about the safety of President Zelensky’s life.”

When a remark like that, gets made by a guy like Sullivan, it is a signal . . . a projection . . .  of what has been decided.  It tells the intel community that Zelensky’s end is nigh.

Speculation surrounding Sullivan’s remark is already off the charts.   There is speculation that the US will kill Zelensky, likely while he is meeting with the top Generals of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Taking them all out with a missile strike is a simple task for the US, and it can be BLAMED on Russia!

That . . . .  that right there . . .  is RUMORED to be the new plan.

They kill Zelensky and maybe a couple of his top Generals, which will instantly implode the Ukrainian government and its armed forces.  There would be immediate chaos.   What’s left of the Ukrainian armed forces would disintegrate within hours.

Then, the RUMORS say, Sullivan and the Intel Community come out with all sorts of  (ahem) “evidence” allegedly (ahem) “proving” it was Russia that did it.

The mass-media in the west will dutifully make it the top news for a week or more, to lock-into the public mindset that it was Russia that did it.

This leaves Russia holding the bag of blame, making them a pariah state in the mind of the general public.

The conquest of the complete rest of Ukraine will be a simple task for Russia at that point but here’s the rub:

What Russia will “conquer” will be a rump welfare state.  A failed land area, incapable of supporting itself.

The whole thing will have to be reconstructed and that will be a gigantic financial burden upon Russia, not to mention the saboteurs, terrorists,  and troublemakers that the west will undoubtedly utilize to make things all that much harder for Russia.

The “war” will be over.   Russia will have won.   But the victory will be made as sour as possible by the West.

 

U.S. Game-Plan To Conquer Russia & China Is Clarified

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On 27 September 2021, the brilliant geostrategic analyst Brian Berletic headlined “US War Plans with China Taking Shape”.

He linked to and analyzed the then-latest draft of the U.S. Government’s detailed plans to conquer China. (The plan had been drawn-up in 2016, but sounds like today.)

The objective of these plans is for the U.S. Government to continue into the indefinite future the U.S. Government’s dominance over the entire world, and to do this by conquering first Russia, and then China.

Conquering both of the now-rising superpowers simultaneously.

And thus, not only extending its presently existing global dominance, but even increasing that, with the ultimate goal being for the U.S. to become the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire.

(by crippling both Russia and China).

I have personally checked and verified each one of Berletic’s linked-to sources there.

All of them are authentic, and reflect accurately the U.S. Government’s actual decisions and actions.

Right up until today, which fact (the U.S. Government’s doing all of these things) suggests that those are the U.S. Government’s operative plans.

These are the U.S. Government’s plans for China.

Berletic excerpted from the draft-plan its most crucial passages, and all of them have been U.S. foreign policies ever since 27 September 2021 (actually, even since 2016).

They accurately represent U.S. foreign policies toward, in fact, both Russia and China, as-of today.

They describe the ways in which the U.S. Government is hiring proxy-forces throughout the world.

They describe the purpose of these proxy forces, in order to destroy China’s Belt & Road Initiative before it can even become operative.

They describe the U.S. Government’s employing proxy forces and agents in order to defeat Russia in the opening battlefield of World War III, which is Ukraine.

It’s the function which Ukraine is serving for the U.S. Government.

Berletic makes clear that he does not believe that the U.S. Government expects things to extend so far as getting into a direct nuclear conflict between the U.S. and either Russia or China.

The decision makers in the United States are firmly convinced that no nuclear weapons will ever be used against America.

I have published elsewhere evidence that at least ever since 2006, the U.S. Government has abandoned the prior (mutually shared, both U.S. and Russia) “Mutually Assured Destruction” or “M.A.D.” meta-strategy.

This policy formerly had guided both countries’ nuclear-weapons strategy and designs.

M.A.D. was the meta-strategy in order to prevent such a nuclear war from ever occurring.

In America, it has been replaced by what is unofficially called “Nuclear Primacy”.

Nuclear Primacy is the design and deployment of nuclear weapons so as to win a nuclear war against Russia and/or China: aiming for all-out nuclear-war victory by the U.S. Government. It is a first-strike policy where the United States strikes Russia and China before they are able to launch counter attacks.

Such ‘victory’ would be defined as consisting of the United States being destroyed less than any of its nuclear-war opponents would be destroyed.

It is a policy of accepting minor nuclear destruction as long as Russia and China are both completely ruined by major nuclear damage.

They say that “the benefits of nuclear primacy may exceed the risks” (the destruction to the American side). The USA would rule a destroyed world, but it would still rule.

Among the possible “benefits” mentioned would be to “stave off the emergence of a peer competitor,” and to be “forcibly exporting democracy.”

The U.S. Government’s “Nuclear Primacy” meta-strategy says that there are ‘acceptable’ levels of destruction of America in a nuclear war against Russia and/or China.

It is a measure of acceptable damage so long as America ‘comes out on top’ globally, at the end.

Berletic unfortunately just assumes that the U.S. Government remains committed to the M.A.D. meta-strategy.

To me, that is instead an open question.

In fact, existing evidence (such as I have linked to) indicates that the U.S. Government is now guided by the “Nuclear Primacy” meta-strategy: arming to win a nuclear WW III, not to prevent one.

On 19 July 2022, Russia’s RT News bannered “Julia Melnikova: World War Three is off – why NATO can’t afford to have Russia as its main enemy”.

They basically seconded Berletic’s viewpoint that America probably wouldn’t go all the way to nuclear war, instead relying on the belief that the destruction of Russia and China can be accomplished through conventional means, and that Russia and China would not dare use nuclear weapons against America.

Her commentary alleged that the U.S. Government had only recently been intending to conquer post-communist Russia.

Naturally, NATO’s new strategic document differs from previous entries in the series. 

The 1991 concept noted a reduction in the security threat due to the change in the balance of power in Europe, but also noted the need to take the legacy of the Soviet Union’s military potential into account. 

The 1999 edition characterized Russia, Ukraine, and the Republic of Moldova as partners for dialogue. 

The installment from 2010 finally attached strategic importance to relations with Russia and was aimed at deepening them on issues of mutual interest.

That “partners for dialogue” and “deepening … issues of mutual interest” never has reflected the U.S. Government’s real attitude toward Russia after the Soviet Union ended in 1991.

I have documented that the plan by America’s Government was instead to fool Russia’s Government to believe that America ended the Cold War on our side at the same time when Russia ended its side of the Cold War in 1991.

But that the U.S. Government was actually planning instead to surround Russia by increasing NATO, right up to Russia’s borders.

As well as doing it in such a way so that by the time Russia recognized that this was the case, it would already be too late for Russia to be able to defend itself against the fait accompli.

And so Russia would then become swallowed-up by the U.S. Government.

That RT analysis remains deceived by the U.S. plan, which didn’t even start to become disclosed, even to America’s vassal-nations (such as the EU), until 24 February 1990.

Russia’s Government shouldn’t continue to publish affirmations of lies that America’s Government had privately admitted to its own vassal nations are lies, as early as 24 February 1990.

Why does it do that?

Does it make any sense continuing to do that?

Consequently: the U.S. game-plan is, as Berletic documented, to defeat Russia before defeating China.

And this is the reason why the U.S. Government is so determined to win the opening battle of WW III, which is on the battlefields of Ukraine.

(The U.S. Government was, in fact, so bold in the planning of their 2014 coup that took Ukraine, that it had even included their replacing Russia’s largest naval base, which was (and still is) in Crimea ever since 1783, and to turn it into another U.S. naval base, but that part of the plan failed.)

If Russia wins its objectives in Ukraine, while the U.S. fails to win its objectives there (which are simply to defeat Russia there — so that this is a zero-sum “game”), this would, in and of itself, end the U.S. empire.

This Empire started on 25 July 1945, when U.S. President Harry S. Truman decided (on the basis of the advice that he had received from his hero, Dwight Eisenhower), that if the U.S. wouldn’t take over control of the world, then the Soviet Union would.

Ergo, and so, America must take over control of the world.

It was either “us” or “them,” Truman was told; and he decided that it WOULDN’T be “them” that will win this zero-sum game.

And President GHW Bush secretly informed America’s ‘allies’, starting on 24 February 1990, that it STILL wouldn’t be “them” to continue equally with “us” in peace.

Meaning now Russia to be a “partner” except as being a continuing adversary.

Because “To hell with that!” (meaning real peace with Russia.)

“We prevailed, they didn’t” (and “they” still need to be totally and humiliatingly defeated, by “us”; “they” need to become conquered).

That is the reality.

It is the U.S. Government’s pure zero-sum-game mentality.

It is which Brian Berletic’s article documents to be the case regarding the U.S. Government’s plan regarding China.

And (as I have documented) it applies ALSO regarding Russia.

(Yet, Berletic seems to believe that it’s not being applied in U.S. thinking about the conflict in Ukraine.)

The Governments of both nations (Russia and China) would do well to publicize that it applies throughout the U.S. Government’s international-affairs policies, instead of continuing to promote the U.S. Government’s lies to the contrary.

This is the reality.

No myth.

America’s foreign policies are laser-focused on crippling, if not destroying, all possible competitors.

Destroying Russia absolutely, and completely.

Destroying China absolutely and completely.

Especially, all nations in Europe need to know this, and to reverse course because of it.

Because, if they don’t, then Europe’s economies will be crushed this coming winter, in order to keep up the U.S. Government’s lies.

It’s their choice.

Either continuing as American vassal-nations, or else making a fundamental turn, toward freedom and justice.

Freedom and Justice:  the breakup of the U.S. empire, and emergence of a real democracy and equal rights, in the relations among the world’s nations.

It’s their choice, to make, one way or the other.

Thus far, Europe’s leaders have been virtually suiciding their nations.

How, and how well, is the U.S. Government bribing them to do that, to their nations?

Or, are they actually that stupid, to be ignorant of what they are doing, or why, or whom the beneficiaries of it are?

Of course, the press has also played a role, but it’s serving the same group of ultimate masters.

How can European publics ever wake up?

Before it’s too late?

MM Comments…

Many assumptions on the US side…

  • China and Russia will NEVER use nuclear weapons.
  • The wars will be completely fought by US proxies.
  • Supplying an endless stream of weapons to the proxy nations require a USD with value.
  • Manufacturing has no bearing on the outcome.
  • Energy has no bearing on the outcome.
  • There will be little to no American domestic unrest.
  • Prodding and poking Russia and China can continue without consequence.
  • Both Russia and China will fight the proxy nations; never America directly.

Somehow, if I were a strategist, I would consider these assumptions as weaknesses, and attack them as they are unexpected.

No wonder the United States is doubling down, and planning to get rid of their stooge: the “President” of Ukraine…

RUSSIA DECLARES NEW GOAL: OUSTER OF ZELENSKY REGIME FROM UKRAINE

Early Sunday morning this web site published a story indicating a “major escalation” was coming by Russia in Ukraine, with trainloads of armor and troops arriving, bringing almost three times more Russian firepower to Ukraine.   Today, the world learned why:  Russia is going to oust the Zelensky regime.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking to envoys at an Arab League summit in Cairo late Sunday, said Moscow is now targeting the “absolutely unacceptable regime” of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“We will definitely help the Ukrainian people to free themselves from the regime that is absolutely anti-people and anti-history,” Lavrov said.

Zelenskyy was unbowed, pleading to win “this war for independence” and to keep Ukraine on a course toward full membership in the EU and becoming one of the most modern states in the world.

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

In one fell swoop, Russia completely undermined speculated western plans to get rid of Zelensky and blame it on the Russians.  Our earlier story (HERE) reported comments by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the Aspen Conference last week.  Sullivan remarked that the US “Is concerned about the safety and the life of President Zelensky.”

This was viewed by many in attendance at the Aspen Conference, as being a “projection” of what the US has now decided to do — then blame it on the Russians.

Now that Russia has publicly declared they plan to remove Zelensky, they’ve pulled the rug out from beneath the west.   The west can no longer howl that “Russia did it” if Russia now publicly says they’re going to do it.

Now, the tables are turned.

Since Russia says they are going to oust Zelensky, the west is now forced into the untenable position of having to protect Zelensky.  IF all the intelligence apparatus and the military ight of the west cannot protect Zelensky, then who can it protect?

This announcement by Russia completely up-ended any western plans to kill Zelensky (because he knows all the dirt) and thereby make a pariah state out of Russia.

And if the Russians actually do manage to oust Zelensky in spite of the west . . . NATO will likely fall apart because all the smaller countries in NATO will know that NATO “protection” isn’t worth the paper it’s written on!

What a Diplomatic / Geo-Political coup!

Regime Change; it’s not just an American thing anymore!

WAIT!  WAIT! It gets better . . . 

Think for just a second about the position Zelensky is in.   The two most powerful nations on earth now want him dead.   

The Russians say it bluntly; the Americans were plotting and scheming secretly.

So seeing as Zelensky doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving . . . what is the best (and only) thing HE can do?

He can go to the Russians, offer to give them all the proof of all the shenanigans, all the payoffs, all the Biolabs, in return for . . . . oh this is priceless . . . Asylum in Russia!

He’d screw everybody with that!

Wow has this situation with Russia-Ukraine taken some wild turns.  This is better than a soap opera.

UPDATE 12:35 PM  EDT —

Below is the full, official transcript of Foreign Minister Lavrov’s speech to the Arab League, from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs web site:

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Transcript

UPDATE 8:31 PM EDT —

From the south of Ukraine, I am now receiving Intelligence reports saying a “massive transport” of Russian troops towards Kherson. is taking place.

The Armor and troops are being seen in Melitopol and Novooleksiivka…

Daddy going to work…

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America must destroy Russia in the Ukraine. At all costs!

$270 million in new military aid to Ukraine; Officially Considering Supplying US War Planes

The United States on Friday signed off on another $270 million in military aid to Ukraine including four new Himars precision rocket systems.

The fresh aid will bring to 20 the number of M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems sent to Ukraine and also includes up to 500 new Phoenix Ghost tactical drones, White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

Kirby also confirmed publicly the United States Air Force is considering donating U.S. A-10 “Warthog” ground-attack aircraft to Ukraine.   This was reported verbally on the Hal Turner Radio Show a full 48 hours ago, but only now — 2 days later — is the Pentagon publicly confirming that earlier report.

Poland Announces 400,000 Man Army with 1,000 Main Battle Tanks

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The Poland Ministry of Defense announced today that Poland will increase the size of its Army to 400,000 supported by one thousand (1,000) main battle tanks.

The tanks will be as follows:

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HAL TURNER PERSONAL OPNION

AN ARMY OF FOUR-HUNDRED-THOUSAND MEN.

If that sounds kind of small to Americans, it is, given the size of the US Military.

But wait, if what they plan to have is 400,000, and that is “small” then what do they have right now?

7500.

Yes, you read that correctly, the country of Poland has, right now, seven thousand five-hundred deployed armed forces troops.

Tiny!

And why is Poland doing this?   Russia!

OK, so we know that right now, Russia has eight-hundred thousand active duty troops and over ten thousand tanks.

What does Poland think it’s going to achieve bringing their army to half the strength of Russia, and only one-tenth (1/10) of the main battle tanks of Russia?

This is a joke, right?

. . . . . Inquiring minds want to know . . . .

Trainloads of additional Russian Armor Arriving against Ukraine – Giant Escalation Coming – Zelensky Assassination???

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Videos of Russian trains arriving with additional armored war machines, have been published on various social media the past three days and one thing has become clear: There is a GIANT escalation coming against Ukraine – and maybe NATO.

One such video, below, shows armor, on a train, as far as the eye can see:

This new echelon of armor is literally more than DOUBLE what Russia initially sent to Ukraine, before the Special Military Operation began.  If all of it is going into Ukraine, then Russian army strength in Ukraine will increase three-fold!

The Ukrainians can’t manage what Russia already has there, never mind three times more.

As things stand right now, July 24, 2022, Ukraine is losing the war very badly despite all sorts of weapons, ammunition, and intel, being supplied by the US/EU/NATO.   A new deployment of this scale by Russia will be a literal steamroller, and it will roll through the rest of Ukraine like a hot knife through butter.

 Hal Turner Analysis and Editorial Opinion

In my personal assessment of the situation, everyone has about 8 days until things go very HOT!

July 31st  -Aug 1st is the transition point into the next phase.   In fact, I am on record as saying I believe between July 28 and August 5, there __could be__ a nuclear exchange – not a full blown nuclear holocaust — between Russia and the US/NATO.

Right now, I assess that the Special Military Operation “Z” will intensify to levels of ferocity and speed yet unseen.

I personally perceive that the Deep State (NATO) forces will begin operations overtly and also with increased violence. It is my personal belief the US will cross “the line” via the proxy, Ukraine, and that action could start at any time now.

From August 1st to the end of this year the world will experience turmoil, disruption and violence that has not been seen since WWII.

Anyone with half a brain knows that Ukraine will never win this war.

There will never be peace. Russia will never be able to trust any so called security guarantees that NATO/US may come up with. Too many red lines crossed, too many broken promises.

Russia does not want to be an occupying force in Ukraine, but Ukraine, if it continues to exist AT ALL,  cannot be left to it’s own devices. Ukraine will end up being a buffer as a military no-man’s land between Russia and an encroaching NATO.  An uneasy truce if anything.

Recommendations:

1. If you live in the US or UK brace for possible attack.

2. If you live in any nation on the Russian “Unfriendly” list prepare for massive shortages and disruptions.

3. Wherever you live, get your preps in order NOW.

Note: Possible attack modes could range from Cyber, EMP, Nuke attack and or Tsunami Bomb attack. Therefore, all coastal areas, decision making centers, financial centers and military installations of the UK and US are at risk.

Prepare for possible loss of:

Electricity, Banking, Fuel, Internet and Cell Phones.

Of course, food and medical services availability will be GREATLY affected.

This is not a drill…

This is not a game.

May God protect the innocent and may the wicked…get what they deserve.

Best of luck to all.

How bad is it in the United States…?

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China’s top chip maker SMIC may have achieved tech breakthrough, experts say

  • Researchers at a Canadian tech analysis firm concluded that Shanghai-based SMIC has been able to produce 7-nanometre chips since last year
  • SMIC’s advanced capability would put the company ahead of American and European peers, but it could also spur further US sanctions, analysts say

From HERE

China’s top chip maker has likely gained the ability to produce 7-nanometre chips, according to a Canadian tech analysis firm, marking a significant breakthrough as the world’s second-largest economy pushes towards technological self-sufficiency to counter US sanctions.

Researchers at TechInsights made the conclusion after they reverse-engineered a sample chip made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), extracted from a cryptocurrency mining machine.

Analysts and industry professionals believe it is technically possible for SMIC to produce 7nm chips with existing deep ultraviolet (DUV) systems, under the leadership of co-CEO Liang Mong Song, a chip-making expert who was previously an executive at industry-leading Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. However, they are surprised that the Chinese were able to do so at this date.

Staged Incidents as the Western Approach of Doing Politics

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Lavrov

By Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister – Jul 18, 2022

Today, the Russian Armed Forces, together with the self-defense units of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, are delivering on the objectives of the special military operation with great resolve to put an end to the outrageous discrimination and genocide of the Russian people and eliminate direct threats to the security of the Russian Federation that the United States and its satellites have been creating on Ukrainian territory for years. While losing on the battlefield, the Ukrainian regime and its Western patrons have descended to staging bloody incidents to demonize our country in the eyes of the international community. We have already seen Bucha, Mariupol, Kramatorsk, and Kremenchug. The Russian Defense Ministry has been regularly issuing warnings, with facts in hand, about upcoming staged incidents and fakes.

There is a distinctive pattern that betrays the provocations staged by the West and its henchmen. In fact, they started long before the Ukrainian events.

Take 1999 – the village of Račak in Serbia’s Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija. A group of OSCE inspectors arrived at the site where several dozen corpses dressed in civilian clothes were discovered. Without any investigation, the mission head declared the incident an act of genocide, even though making a conclusion of this kind was not part of the mandate issued to this international official. NATO immediately launched a military aggression against Yugoslavia, during which it intentionally destroyed a television centre, bridges, passenger trains and other civilian targets. Later, it was proved with conclusive evidence that the dead bodies were not civilians, but militants of the Kosovo Liberation Army, an illegal armed group, dressed in civilian clothes. But by that time the staged incident has already taken its toll, offering a pretext for the first illegal use of force against an OSCE member state since the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. It is telling that the statement that triggered the bombings came from William Walker, a US citizen who headed the OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Mission. Separating Kosovo from Serbia by force and setting up Camp Bondsteel, the largest US military base in the Balkans, were the main outcomes of the aggression.

In 2003, there was the infamous performance by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in the UN Security Council with a vial containing white powder of some sort, which he said contained anthrax spores, alleging that it was produced in Iraq. Once again, the fake worked: the Anglo-Saxons and those who followed their lead went on to bomb Iraq, which has been struggling to fully recover its statehood ever since. Moreover, it did not take long before the fake was exposed with everyone admitting that Iraq did not have any biological weapons or any other kinds of WMDs. Later, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was one of the masterminds of the aggression, recognized that the whole affair was a fraud, saying that they “may have been wrong” or something like that. As for Colin Powell, he later tried to justify himself by claiming that he was misled by the underlying intelligence. Either way, this was yet another provocation that offered a pretext for delivering on the plan to destroy a sovereign nation.

There was also Libya in 2011. The drama had specifics of its own. The situation did not go as far as direct lies, like in Kosovo or Iraq, but NATO grossly distorted the UN Security Council resolution, which provided for a no-fly zone over Libya in order to “ground” Muammar Gaddafi’s air force. It did not fly to begin with. However, NATO started bombing the Libyan army units who were fighting terrorists. Muammar Gaddafi died a savage death, and nothing remains of the Libyan statehood. Efforts to put the country back together have yet to succeed, with a US representative once again in charge of the process, appointed by the UN Secretary General without any consultation with the UN Security Council. As part of this process, our Western colleagues have facilitated several intra-Libyan agreements on holding elections but none of them materialized. Illegal armed groups still reign supreme on Libyan territory, with most of them working closely with the West.

February 2014, Ukraine – the West, represented by the German, French, and Polish foreign ministers, de facto forced President Viktor Yanukovich into signing an agreement with the opposition to end the confrontation and promote a peaceful resolution of the intra-Ukrainian crisis by establishing a transitional national unity government and calling a snap election, to be held within a few months. This too turned out to be a fraud: the next morning, the opposition staged a coup guided as it was by anti-Russia, racist slogans. However, the Western guarantors did not even try to bring the opposition back to its senses. Furthermore, they switched immediately to encouraging the coup perpetrators in their policies against Russia and everything Russian, unleashing the war against their own people and bombing entire cities in the Donbass region just because people there refused to recognize the unconstitutional coup. For that, they labelled the people in Donbass terrorists, and once again the West was there to encourage them.

At this point, it is worth noting that, as it was soon revealed, the killing of protestors on the Maidan was also a staged incident, which the West blamed either on the Ukrainian security forces loyal to Viktor Yanukovich, or on the Russian special services. However, the radical members of the opposition were the ones who were behind this provocation, while working closely with the Western intelligence services. Once again, exposing these facts did not take long, but by that time they already did their job.

Efforts by Russia, Germany, and France paved the way to stopping the war between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk in February 2015 with the signing of the Minsk Agreements. Berlin and Paris played a proactive role here as well, proudly calling themselves as the guarantor countries. However, during the seven long years that followed, they did absolutely nothing to force Kiev to launch a direct dialogue with Donbass representatives for agreeing on matters including the special status, amnesty, restoring economic ties, and holding elections, as required by the Minsk Agreements which were approved unanimously by the UN Security Council. The Western leaders remained silent when Kiev took steps which directly violated the Minsk Agreements under both Petr Poroshenko and Vladimir Zelensky. Moreover, the German and the French leaders kept saying that Kiev cannot enter direct dialogue with the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, and blamed everything on Russia, although Russia is not mentioned in the Minsk agreements even once, while remaining basically the only country that kept pushing for the agreements to be implemented.

If anyone doubted that the Minsk Package was anything but yet another fake, Petr Poroshenko dispelled this myth by saying on June 17, 2022: “The Minsk Agreements did not mean anything to us, and we had no intention to carry them out… our goal was to remove the threat we faced… and win time in order to restore economic growth and rebuild the armed forces. We achieved this goal. Mission accomplished for the Minsk Agreements.” The people of Ukraine are still paying the price of this fake. For many years now, the West has been forcing them to accept an anti-Russian neo-Nazi regime. What a waste of energy for Olaf Scholz with his calls to force Russia to agree to an agreement guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. There already had been an agreement to this effect, the Minsk Package, and Berlin with Paris were the ones who derailed it by shielding Kiev in its refusal to abide by the document. The fake has been exposed – finita la commedia.

By the way, Vladimir Zelensky has been a worthy successor to Petr Poroshenko. During a campaign rally in early 2019, he was ready to kneel before him for the sake of stopping the war.

In December 2019, Zelensky got a chance to carry out the Minsk Agreements following the Normandy format summit in Paris. In the outcome document adopted at the highest level, the Ukrainian President undertook to resolve matters related to the special status of Donbass. Of course, he did not do anything, while Berlin and Paris once again covered up for him. The document and all the publicity accompanying its adoption turned out to be no more than a fake narrative promoted by Ukraine and the West to win some time for supplying more weapons to the Kiev regime, which follows Petr Poroshenko’s logic to the letter.

There was also Syria, with the 2013 agreement on eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles in a stage-by-stage process verified by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), for which it received the Nobel Peace Prize. After that, however, there were outrageous provocations in 2017 and 2018 staging the use of chemical weapons in Khan Shaykhun and Duma, a Damascus suburb. There was a video showing people calling themselves the White Helmets (a would-be humanitarian organization which never showed up on territories controlled by the Syrian government) helping alleged poisoning victims, although no one had any protective clothing or gear. All attempts to force the OPCW Technical Secretariat to perform its duties in good faith and ensure a transparent investigation into these incidents, as required by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), failed. This, however, did not come as a surprise. The Western countries have long privatized the Technical Secretariat by having their representatives appointed to the key positions within this structure. They contributed to staging these incidents and used them as a pretext for US, British, and French airstrikes against Syria. Incidentally, they carried out these bombings just a day before a group of OPCW inspectors arrived there to investigate the incidents at Russia’s insistence, while the West did everything to prevent this deployment.

The West and the OPCW Technical Secretariat it controls demonstrated their ability to stage fake incidents with the would-be poisonings of the Skripals and Alexey Navalny. In both cases, Russia sent multiple requests to The Hague, London, Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm, all left without a reply, even though they fully conformed with the CWC provisions and required a response.

Other pending questions have to do with the Pentagon’s covert activities in Ukraine carried out through its Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The traces that the forces engaged in the special military operation have discovered in military-biological laboratories in the liberated territories of Donbass and adjacent areas clearly indicate direct violations of the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons (BTWC). We have presented the documents to Washington and to the UN Security Council. The procedure has been initiated under BTWC to demand explanations. Contrary to the facts, the US administration is trying to justify its actions by saying that all biological research in Ukraine was exclusively peaceful and civilian in nature – with no evidence of any of this.

In fact, the Pentagon’s military-biological activities around the world, especially in the post-Soviet countries, require the closest attention in light of the multiplying evidence of criminal experiments with the most dangerous pathogens in order to create biological weapons conducted under the guise of peaceful research.

I have already mentioned the staged “crimes” of the Donbass militia and participants in the Russian special military operation. There is one simple fact that clearly shows how much these accusations mean: having shown the “Bucha tragedy” to the world in early April 2022 (we have suspicions that the Anglo-Saxons had a hand in setting the stage for the show), the West and Kiev have not yet answered the very basic questions about whether the names of the dead were established and what post-mortem examinations showed. Just as in the above-described Skripals and Navalny cases, the propaganda production has premiered in the Western media, and now it’s time to sweep it all under the rug, brazen it out, because they have nothing to say.

This is the essence of the well-worn Western political algorithm – to concoct a fake story and ratchet up the hype as if it’s a universal catastrophe for a couple of days while blocking people’s access to alternative information or assessments, and when any facts do break through, they are simply ignored – at best mentioned on last pages of the news in small print. It is important to understand that this is not a harmless game in the media war – such productions are used as pretexts for very material actions such as punishing the “guilty” countries with sanctions, unleashing barbaric aggressions against them with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, as it happened, in particular, in Iraq and Libya. Or – as in the case of Ukraine – for using the country as expendable material in the Western proxy war against Russia. Moreover, NATO instructors and MLRS aimers are, apparently, already directing the actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and nationalist battalions on the ground.

I hope there are responsible politicians in Europe who are aware of the consequences. In this regard, it is noteworthy that no one in NATO or the EU tried to reprimand the German Air Force Commander, a general named Ingo Gerhartz, who got carried away higher than his rank and said NATO must be ready to use nuclear weapons. “Putin, do not try to compete with us,” he added. Europe’s silence suggests that it is complacently oblivious of Germany’s role in its history.

If we look at today’s events through a historical prism, the entire Ukrainian crisis appears as a “grand chess game” that follows a scenario earlier promoted by Zbigniew Brzezinski. All the good relations talk, the West’s proclaimed readiness to take into account the rights and interests of Russians who ended up in independent Ukraine or other post-Soviet countries after the collapse of the USSR turned out to be mere pretense. Even in the early 2000s, Washington and the European Union began to openly pressure Kiev to decide which side Ukraine was on, the West or Russia.

Ever since 2014, the West has been controlling, hands-on, the Russophobic regime it brought to power through a coup d’état. Putting Vladimir Zelensky in front of any international forum of any significance is also part of this travesty. He makes passionate speeches, but when he suddenly offers something reasonable, he gets a slap on the wrist, as it happened after the Istanbul round of Russian-Ukrainian talks. At the end of March, it seemed that light glimmered at the end of the tunnel, but Kiev was forced to back off, using, among other things, a frankly staged episode in Bucha. Washington, London and Brussels demanded that Kiev stopped negotiating with Russia until Ukraine achieved full military advantage (former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tried especially hard, and many other Western politicians did too, still incumbent, although they have already proved just as inept).

EU foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell’s statement about this war having to be “won on the battlefield” by Ukraine suggests that even diplomacy has lost its value as a tool in the European Union’s staged performance.

In a broader sense, it is curious to see how Europe, lined up by Washington on the anti-Russian front, has been hardest hit by the thoughtless sanctions, emptying its arsenals to supply weapons to Kiev (without even asking for a report on who will control them or where they go), and freeing up its market only to subsequently buy US military products and expensive American LNG instead of available Russian gas. Such trends, coupled with the de facto merger between the EU and NATO, make the continued talk about Europe’s “strategic autonomy” nothing more than a show. Everyone has already understood that the collective West’s foreign policy is a “one-man theatre.” Moreover, it is consistently seeking ever new theaters of military operations.

One element of the geopolitical gambit against Russia is granting the status of an eternal EU candidate country to Ukraine and Moldova, which, it seems, will also face an unenviable fate. Meanwhile, a PR campaign has been initiated by President of France Emmanuel Macron to promote the “European political community,” which offers no financial or economic benefits, but demands full compliance with the EU’s anti-Russia actions. The principle behind it is not either/or but “who is not with us is against us.” Emmanuel Macron explained the gist of the “community”: the EU will invite all European countries – “from Iceland to Ukraine” – to join it, but not Russia. I would like to stress that we are not eager to join, but the statement itself showcases the essence of this obviously confrontational and divisive new undertaking.

Ukraine, Moldova and other countries being courted by the EU today are destined to be extras in the games of the West. The United States, as the main producer, calls the tune and devises the storyline based on which Europe writes the anti-Russia screenplay. The actors are ready and possess the skills acquired during their tenure at the Kvartal 95 Studio: they will provide a voice-over for dramatic texts no worse than the now forgotten Greta Thunberg and play musical instruments, if needed. The actors are good: remember how convincing Vladimir Zelensky was in his role as a democrat in the Servant of the People: fighter against corruption and discrimination against Russians and for all the right things in general. Remember and compare it with his immediate transformation in his role as president. It is perfect Stanislavsky Method acting: banning the Russian language, education, media and culture. “If you feel like Russians, then go to Russia for the sake of your children and grandchildren.” Good advice. He called Donbass residents “species” rather than people. And this is what he said about the Nazi Azov battalion: “They are what they are. There is plenty of such people around here.” Even CNN was ashamed to leave this phrase in the interview.

This prompts a question: what will be the outcome of all these storylines? Staged incidents based on blood and agony are by no means fun but a display of a cynical policy in creating a new reality where all principles of the UN Charter and all norms of international law are attempted to be replaced with their “rules-based order” in an aspiration to perpetuate their dwindling domination in global affairs.

The games undertaken by the West in the OSCE after from end of the Cold War, where it considered itself a winner, had the most devastating consequences for the modern international relations. Having quickly broken their promises to the Soviet and Russian leadership on the non-expansion of NATO to the east, the United States and its allies nevertheless declared their commitment to building a unified space of security and cooperation in the Euro-Atlantic region. They formalized it at the top level with all OSCE members in 1999 and 2010 within the framework of a political obligation to ensure equal and inseparable security where no country will strengthen its security at the expense of others and no organization will claim a dominating role in Europe. It soon became evident that NATO members do no keep their word and that their goal is the supremacy of the North-Atlantic Alliance. Even then we continued our diplomatic efforts, proposing to formalize the principle of equal and inseparable security in a legally binding agreement. We proposed this a number of times, the last one in December 2021, but received a flat denial in response. They told us directly: there will be no legal guarantees outside NATO. Which means that the support of the political documents approved at the OSCE summits turned out to be a cheap fake. And now NATO, driven by the United States, has gone even further: they want to dominate over the entire Asia-Pacific region in addition to the Euro-Atlantic. NATO members make no effort to conceal the target of their threats, and China’s leadership has already publicly declared its position regarding such neo-colonial ambitions. Beijing has already responded by citing the principle of indivisible security, declaring its support for applying it on a global scale to prevent any country from claiming its exclusivity. This approach fully coincides with Russia’s position. We will make consistent efforts to defend it together with our allies, strategic partners and many other like-minded countries.

The collective West should come back to Earth from the world of illusions. The staged incidents, no matter how long they go on, will not work. It is time for fair play based on the international law rather than cheating. The sooner everyone realizes that there are no alternatives to objective historical processes where a multipolar world is formed based on respect for the principle of sovereign equality of states, fundamental for the UN Charter and the entire world order, the better.

If members of the western alliance are unable to live according to this principle, are not ready to build a truly universal architecture of equal security and cooperation, they should leave everyone alone, stop using threats and blackmail to recruit those who want to live on their own wits and acknowledge the right to freedom of choice by independent self-respecting countries. This is what democracy is all about, the real democracy, not one played out on a shabbily built political stage.

An interesting test

Here’s a great book called “The Psychopath Test” by Jon Ronson which has a particularly interesting case:

A man, Tony, was on trial for a violent assault on another man.

As part of his tactic to avoid doing time in prison, he came up with an idea.


Imagine you are sitting at a table, a psychiatrist is at the other end. She is asking you questions that run 360 around your entire life and your frame of mind.

At one point, you begin telling her:

“I enjoy watching people die.”

“I get sexual pleasure from seeing people scream in pain.”

And on and on. Every dark thing you can imagine.

Tony had a goal; to convince the court-appointed psychiatrist that he was mentally ill and thus unfit to go to trial.

He succeeded.

He was then shipped off to Broadmoor High Security Psychiatric Hospital.

Where he was quickly introduced to a life he didn’t want.

Strict controls, forced medication, and sedatives, smaller cells, a stifling atmosphere, surrounded by…highly unstable people.

He then began frantically telling everyone he’d lied about being crazy and that he’d made a mistake. He would rather go back to prison. When he finally got them to listen and he explained everything…

…the resident psychiatrist said the type of person who would lie about being mentally ill is actually someone who is mentally ill (a psychopath). And thus – he remained stuck at the mental institution.

Henk Heithuis.

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Henk Heithuis.

And I am warning you ahead of time, his story is absolutely gruesome and terrifying. Heithuis was born in the Netherlands in 1935 and placed in the foster system, to be cared for by Catholic priests. Now priests had a tendency of abusing young children under their care, there have been many such cases… but Heithuis was not like most victims… he was about to go public.

Usually, the abuse was quietly pushed aside, shrugged off, swept under the rug. It’s been that way for centuries. Victims stayed quiet out of shame and fear. Not Henk Heithuis. He decided to make a stand. For himself and for all those others he had known who were abused, molested, raped. So he went to the police, and officially accused the priests of sexual abuse. This was revolutionary, and absolutely unheard of in the 1950s!

What Heithuis had not anticipated, is the absolute cruelty and the far-reaching power of the institution he was about to face. Since he was still legally a minor at the time of the abuse, and at the time he made his accusation, Heithuis was still a ward of the state, unable to make his own decisions, the court argued.

He insisted, however, that he was raped. The priests then came forward and denied this. Instead, they instead, Heithuis was a homosexual boy who had “seduced the priests”, can you imagine their audacity? The young victim vehemently denied the accusations, maintained he had been raped and that he was, in fact, heterosexual — he even had a girlfriend he hoped to marry as soon as he reached the age of maturity.

The church, however, had quite a bit of influence with the courts. They convinced them that Heithuis was, in fact, homosexual. And in the 1950s, homosexuality was still illegal in the now-so-liberal Netherlands. The treatment consisted of either years in an institution, chemical castration, or physical castration… with Heithuis, no rebuttal was allowed, no second opinion considered and no option given — he was to be castrated immediately. Which he was.

They drugged the teenaged abuse victim, drove him to a clinic down South and strapped him to a table where they surgically gelded him. After the operation they kicked him to the curb… Heithuis was broken. Mentally. Physically. He abandoned his friends and his fiancée and became a sailor. He made it as far as Japan, when he broke down and, when on shore leave, found his way to the Dutch embassy. Here, he told his story to a diplomat who took pity on his fate. He even showed his scars, and explained how his hormones were now out of control, his body no longer felt like his and he was suicidal.

“Please tell my story…” Heithuis insisted, “make notes, remember it. They may come for me. They may kill me.”

Surely it wouldn’t be so bad, his friend, Cornelius Rogge, assured him. Surely they would not have him killed. How could they? But Heithuis was sure of it. Arrangements were made with the shipping company to have him brought back home to his country.

When he returned, Heithuis, helped by his friends who knew his story, once again pressed charges. This time for forcible castration, lying about his sexuality and mental health problems as well as slandering his good name. Still a fiery chap, still refusing to surrender, he wanted justice, he wanted his good name restored.

But in 1958, shortly after pressing charges, Henk Heithuis got into a car accident and died on the spot.

The police confiscated all his personal belongings and material provided to them by the deceased. All material was destroyed on the day of his death.

When the Globalists Crossed the Rubicon: The Assassination of Shinzo Abe

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First published by Global Research on July 14, 2022

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To read this article in Japanese, click here

この記事を日本語で読むには、ウェブサイトの翻訳ドロップダウンウェブサイトをクリックしてください。

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July 8 was a muggy day in the ancient capital of Japan. Shinzo Abe, the most powerful figure in Japanese politics, was delivering a stump speech for a local Liberal Democratic Party candidate in front of the Nara Kintetsu railway station when suddenly a loud bang rang out, followed by an odd cloud of smoke.

The response was incredible. Among those in the unusually large crowd gathered, not a single person ran for cover, or hit the ground in terror.

Abe’s body guards, who stood unusually far away from him during the speech, looked on impassively, making no effort to shield him, or to pull him to a safe location.

A few seconds later, Abe crumpled and collapsed to the ground, lying there impassive in his standard blue jacket, white shirt, now speckled with blood, and trademark blue badge of solidarity with Japanese abductees in North Korea. Most likely he was killed instantaneously.

Only then did the body guards seize the suspect, Yamagami Toruya, who was standing behind Abe. The tussle with Yamagami took the form of a choreographed dance for the television audience, not a professional takedown.

Yamagami was immediately identified by the media as a 41-year-old former member of the Maritime Self-Defense Force who had personal grievances with Abe.

Yamagami told everything to the police without hesitation. He did not even try to run from the scene and was still holding the silly hand-made gun when the bodyguards grabbed him.

Even after Abe was lying on the pavement, not a single person in the crowd ran for shelter, or even looked around to determine where the shots came from. Everyone seemed to know, magically, that the shooting was over.

Then the comedy began. Rather than putting Abe in a limousine and whisking him away, those standing around him merely called out to passersby, asking if anyone was a doctor.

The media immediately embraced the “lone gunman” conclusion for this attack, repeating entertaining tale of how Yamagami was associated with Toitsu Kyokai, a new religion started by the charismatic shaman Kawase Kayo, and why he blamed Abe, who had exchanges with that group, for his mother’s troubles.

Because Toitsu Kyokai has followers from the Unification Church founded by Reverend Moon Sun Myung, journalist Michael Penn jumped to the conclusion that the conspiracy leading to Abe’s death was the result of his collaboration with the Moonies.

Although the mainstream media accepted this fantastic story, the Japanese police and security apparatus did not manage to squash alternative interpretations. Blogger Takashi Kitagawa posted materials on July 10 that suggested Abe was shot from the front, not from the back where Yamagami stood, and that the shots must have been fired at an angle from the top of one, or both, of the tall buildings on either side of the intersection across from the railway station plaza.

Takahashi Kitakawa’s postings:

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Kitagawa’s analysis of the paths of the bullets was more scientific than anything offered by the media that had claimed, without basis, that Abe had only been shot once until the surgeon announced that evening that there had been two bullets.

The chances that a man holding an awkward home-made gun, standing more than five meters away in a crowd, would be able to hit Abe twice are low. The TV personality Kozono Hiromi, who is a gun expert himself, remarked on his show “Sukkiri” (on July 12) that such a feat would be incredible.

A careful viewing of the videos suggests that multiple shots were fired by a rifle with a silencer from atop a neighboring building.

安倍晋三元総理大臣暗殺について 言明します from Emanuel Pastreich on Vimeo.

The message to the world

For a figure like Shinzo Abe, the most powerful political player in Japan and the person to whom Japanese politicians and bureaucrats rallied in response to the unprecedented uncertainty born of the current geopolitical crisis, to be shot dead with no serious security detail nearby makes no sense.

Perhaps the message was lost on viewers at home, but it was crystal clear for other Japanese politicians.

For that matter, the message was clear for Boris Johnson, who was forced out of power at almost exactly the same moment that Abe was shot, or for Emmanuel Macron, who was suddenly charged with influence peddling scandal for Uber, and faces demands for his removal from office, on July 11—after months of massive protests had failed to sway him in any way.

The message was written all over Abe’s white shirt in red: buying into the globalist system and promoting the COVID-19 regime is not enough to assure safety, even for the leader of a G7 nation.

Abe was highest ranking victim so far of the hidden cancer eating away at governance in nation states around the world, an institutional sickness that moves decision making away from national governments to a network of privately-held supercomputer banks, private equity groups, for-hire intelligence firms in Tel Aviv, London and Reston, and the strategic thinkers employed by the billionaires at the World Economic Forum, NATO, the World Bank and other such awesome institutions.

The fourth industrial revolution was the excuse employed to transfer the control of all information in, and all information out, for central governments to Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Google, SAP and others in the name of efficiency. As J. P. Morgan remarked, “Everything has two reasons: a good reason and a real reason.”

With the assassination of Abe, these technology tyrants, and their masters, have crossed the Rubicon, declaring that those dressed in the trappings of state authority can be mowed down with impunity if they do not follow orders.

The Problem with Japan

Japan is heralded as the only Asian nation advanced enough to join the “West,” to be a member of the exclusive G7 club, and to be qualified to enter into collaboration with (and possible membership in) the top intelligence sharing program, the “Five Eyes.”

Nevertheless, Japan has continued to defy the expectations, and the demands, of global financiers, and the planners within the beltway and on Wall Street for the New World Order.

Although it was South Korea in Asia that has constantly been berated in Washington as an ally not quite up to the level of Japan, the truth is that the super-rich busy taking over the Pentagon, and the entire global economy, were starting to harbor doubts about the dependability of Japan.

The globalist system at the World Bank, Goldman Sachs, or the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University has a set track for the best and the brightest from “advanced nations.”

Elites from Australia, France, Germany, Norway or Italy, learn to speak fluent English, spend time in Washington, London, or Geneva at a think tank or university, secure a safe sinecure at a bank, a government institution, or a research institute that assures them a good income, and adopt the common sense, pro-finance, perspective offered by the Economist Magazine as the gospel.

Japan, however, although it has an advanced banking system of its own, although its command of advanced technologies makes it the sole rival of Germany in machine tools, and although it has a sophisticated educational system capable of producing numerous Nobel Prize winners, does not produce leaders who follow this model for the “developed” nation.

Japanese elite do not study abroad for the most part and Japan has sophisticated intellectual circles that do not rely on information brought in from overseas academic or journalistic sources.

Unlike other nations, Japanese write sophisticated journal articles entirely in Japanese, citing only Japanese experts. In fact, in fields like botany and cellular biology, Japan has world-class journals written entirely in Japanese.

Similarly, Japan has a sophisticated domestic economy that is not easily penetrated by multinational corporations—try as they do.

The massive concentration of wealth over the last decade has allowed the super-rich to create invisible networks for secret global governance, best represented by the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program and the Schwarzman Scholars program. These rising figures in policy infiltrate the governments, the industries, and research institutions of nations to make sure that the globalist agenda goes forth unimpeded.

Japan has been impacted by this sly form of global governance. And yet, Japanese who speak English well, or who study at Harvard, are not necessarily on the fast track in Japanese society.

There is stubborn independence in Japan’s diplomacy and economics, something that raised concerns among the Davos crowd during the COVID-19 campaigns.

Although the Abe administration (and the subsequent Kishida administration) went along with the directives of the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization for vaccines and social distancing, the Japanese government was less intrusive in the lives of citizens than most nations, and was less successful in forcing organizations to require vaccination.

The use of QR codes to block service to the unvaccinated was limited in its implementation in Japan in comparison with other “advanced” nations.

Moreover, the Japanese government refuses to fully implement the digitalization agenda demanded, thus denying multinational technology giants the control over Japan that they exercise elsewhere. This lag in Japan’s digitalization led the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. to invite Karen Makishima, minister of Japan’s Digital Agency (launched under pressure from global finance in September, 2021) so that she could explain why Japan has been so slow to digitalize (July 13).

Japanese are increasingly aware that their resistance to digitalization, to the wholescale outsourcing of the functions of government and university to multinational tech giants, and the privatization of information, is not in their interest.

Japan continues to operate Japanese-language institutions that follow old customs, including the use of written records. Japanese still read books and they are not so enamored with AI as Koreans and Chinese.

Japan’s resistance can be traced back to Meiji restoration of 1867. Japan set out to create governmental system wherein Western ideas were translated into Japanese, combined with Japanese concepts, to create a complex domestic discourse. The governance system set up in Meiji restoration remains in place to a large degree, using models for governance based on pre-modern principles from Japan and China’s past, and drawn from 19th century Prussia and England.

The result is feudalistic approach to governance wherein ministers oversee fiefdoms of bureaucrats who carefully guard their own budgets and who maintain their own internal chains of command.

The Problem with Abe

Shinzo Abe was one of the most sophisticated politicians of our age, always open to make a deal with the United States, or other global institutions, but always cagy when it came to making Japan the subject of globalist dictates.

Abe harbored the dream of restoring Japan to its status as an empire, and imagined himself to be the reincarnation of the Meiji Emperor.

Abe was different from Johnson or Macron in that he was not as interested in appearing on TV as he was in controlling the actual decision making process within Japan.

There is no need to glorify Abe’s reign, as some have tried to do. He was a corrupt insider who pushed for the dangerous privatization of government, the hollowing out of education, and who backed a massive shift of assets from the middle class to the wealthy.

His use of the ultra-right Nihon Kaigi forum to promote an ultranationalist agenda, and to glorify the most offensive aspects of Japan’s imperial past, was deeply disturbing. Abe gave his unflinching support for all military expenditures, no matter how foolish, and he was willing to support just about any American boondoggle.

That said, as the grandson of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, and the son of foreign minister Shintaro Abe, Shinzo Abe showed himself to be an astute politician from childhood. He was creative in his use of a wide range of political tools to advance his agenda, and he could call on corporate and government leaders from around the world with an ease that no other Asian politician could.

I remember vividly the impression I received from Abe on the two occasions that I met him in person. Whatever cynical politics he may have promoted, he radiated to his audience a purity and simplicity, what the Japanese call “sunao,” that was captivating. His manner suggested a receptiveness and openness that inspired loyalty among his followers and that could overwhelm those who were hostile to his policies.

In sum, Abe was sophisticated political figure who was capable of playing one side against the other within the Liberal Democratic Party, and within the international community, while appearing to be a considerate and benevolent leader.

For this reason, Japanese hostile to Abe’s ethnic nationalism were still willing to support him because he was the only politician they thought capable of restoring global political leadership to Japan.

Japanese diplomats and military officers fret endlessly about the Japan’s lack of vision. Although Japan has all the qualifications to be a great power, they reason, it is run by a series of unimpressive, University of Tokyo graduates; men who are good at taking tests, but are unwilling to take risks.

Japan produces none like Putin or Xi, and not even a Macron or a Johnson.

Abe wanted to be a leader and he had the connections, the talent, and the ruthlessness required to play that role on the global stage. He was already the longest serving prime minister in Japanese history, and had plans for a third bid as prime minister, when he was struck down.

Needless to say, the powers behind the World Economic Forum do not want national leaders like Abe, even if they conform with the global agenda, because they are capable of organizing resistance within the nation state.

What went wrong?

Abe was able to handle, using the traditional tools of statecraft, the impossible dilemma faced by Japan over the last decade as its economic ties with China and Russia increased, but its political and security integration with the United States, Israel and the NATO block proceeded apace.

It was impossible for Japan to be that close to the United States and its allies while maintaining friendly relations with Russia and China. Yet Abe almost succeeded.

Abe remained focused and cool. He made use of all his skills and connections as he set out to carve a unique space for Japan. Along the way, Abe turned to the sophisticated diplomacy of his strategic thinker Shotaro Yachi of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to assure that Japan found its place under the sun.

Abe and Yachi used contradictory, but effective, geopolitical strategies to engage both East and West, making ample use of secret diplomacy to seal long-term deals that put Japan back in the great powers game.

On the one hand, Abe presented to Obama and Trump a Japan that was willing to go further than South Korea, Australia or other India in backing Washington’s position. Abe was willing to suffer tremendous domestic criticism for his push for a remilitarization that fit the US plans for East Asia.

At the same time that he impressed Washington politicians with his gung-ho pro-American rhetoric, matched by the purchase of weapons systems, Abe also engaged China and Russia at the highest levels. That was no small feat, and involved sophisticated lobbying within the beltway, and in Beijing and Moscow.

In the case of Russia, Abe successfully negotiated a complex peace treaty with Russia in 2019 that would have normalized relations and solved the dispute concerning the Northern Territories (the Kuril Islands in Russian). He was able to secure energy contracts for Japanese firms and to find investment opportunities in Russia even as Washington ramped up the pressure on Tokyo for sanctions.

The journalist Tanaka Sakai notes that Abe was not banned from entering Russia after the Russian government banned all other representatives of the Japanese government from entry.

Abe also engaged China seriously, solidifying long-term institutional ties, and pursuing free trade agreement negotiations that reached a breakthrough in the fifteenth round of talks (April 9-12, 2019). Abe had ready access to leading Chinese politicians and he was considered by them to be reliable and predictable, even though his rhetoric was harshly anti-Chinese.

The critical event that likely triggered the process leading to Abe’s assassination was the NATO summit in Madrid (June 28-30).

The NATO summit was a moment when the hidden players behind the scenes laid down the law for the new global order. NATO is on a fast track to evolve beyond an alliance to defend Europe and to become an unaccountable military power, working with the Global Economic Forum, the billionaires and the bankers around the world, as a “world army,” functioning much as the British East India Company did in another era.

The decision to invite to the NATO summit the leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand was a critical part of this NATO transformation.

These four nations were invited to join in an unprecedented level of integration in security, including intelligence sharing (outsourcing to big tech multinationals), the use of advanced weapons systems (that must be administrated by the personnel of multinationals like Lockheed Martin), joint exercises (that set a precedent for an oppressive decision-making process), and other “collaborative” approaches that undermine the chain of command within the nation state.

When Kishida returned to Tokyo on July first, there can be no doubt that one of his first meetings was with Abe. Kishida explained to Abe the impossible conditions that the Biden administration had demanded of Japan.

The White House, by the way, is now entirely the tool of globalists like Victoria Nuland (Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs) and others trained by the Bush clan.

The demands made of Japan were suicidal in nature. Japan was to increase economic sanctions on Russia, to prepare for possible war with Russia, and to prepare for a war with China. Japan’s military, intelligence and diplomatic functions were to be transferred to the emerging blob of private contractors gathering for the feast around NATO.

We do not know what Abe did during the week before his death. Most likely he launched into a sophisticated political play, using of all his assets in Washington D.C., Beijing, and Moscow—as well as in Jerusalem, Berlin, and London, to come up with a multi-tiered response that would give the world the impression that Japan was behind Biden all the way, while Japan sought out a détente with China and Russia through the back door.

The problem with this response was that since other nations had been shut down, such a sophisticated play by Japan made it the only major nation with a semi-functional executive branch.

Abe’s death parallels closely that of Seoul’s mayor Park Won Sun, who went missing on July 9th, 2020, exactly two years before Abe’s assassination. Park took steps in Seoul City Hall to push back on the COVID-19 social distancing policies that were being imposed by the central government. His body was found the next day and the death was immediately ruled a suicide resulting from his distress over charges of sexual harassment by a colleague.

What to do now?

The danger of the current situation should not be underestimated.

If an increasing number of Japanese come to perceive, as the journalist Tanaka Sakai suggests…

…that the United States destroyed their best hope for leadership.

…And that the globalists want Japan to make do with an unending series of weak-minded prime ministers who are dependent on Washington.

As well as other hidden players of the parasite class.

This is serious, and such a development could bring about a complete break between Japan and the United States, leading to a political or military conflict.

It is telling that Michael Green, the top Japan hand in Washington D.C., did not write the initial tribute to Abe that was published on the homepage of CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), his home institute.

Green, veteran of the Bush National Security Council and Henry A. Kissinger Chair of the Asia Program at CSIS, is the author of Line of Advantage: Japan’s Grand Strategy in the Era of Abe Shinzo. Green was a close associate of Abe, perhaps the closest of any American.  

The tribute to Abe was drafted by Christopher Johnstone (the Japan chair at CSIS and former CIA officer). The weird choice suggests that the assassination is so sensitive that Green instinctively wished to avoid writing the initial response, leaving it to a professional operative.

For responsible intellectuals and citizens in Washington, Tokyo, or elsewhere, there is only one viable response to this murky assassination: a demand for an international scientific investigation.

Painful as that process might be, it will force us to face the reality of how our governments have been taken over by invisible powers.

If we fail to identify the true players behind the scenes, however, we may be led into a conflict in which the blame is projected onto heads of state and countries are forced into conflicts so as to hide the crimes of global finance.

The loss of control of the Japanese government over the military the last time can be attributed in part to the assassinations of prime minister Inukai Tsuyoshi on May 15, 1932 and of prime minister Saito Makoto on February 26, 1936.

But for the international community, the more relevant case is how the manipulations of an integrated global economy by the Rothschild, Warburg, and other banking interests created an environment wherein the tensions produced by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28, 1914 were funneled towards world war.

Hong Kong students must learn China security law to graduate

From HERE

HONG KONG (BLOOMBERG) – Students at Hong Kong’s most prestigious university will be required to take a course on Beijing’s national security law in order to graduate, the latest sign of China’s growing influence on the city.

The online course, titled “Introduction to the Constitution, the Basic Law and the National Security Law,” will become a graduation requirement at the University of Hong Kong from the coming school year, according to a spokesperson for the school.

“This course will be conducted in a self-directed learning approach. Students can take the course in any semester throughout their period of study,” the university said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg.

The new course offers no credit but signals an effort to explain the controversial law – and the consequences for running afoul of it – to a demographic that was at the forefront of the 2019 street protests that prompted the legislation.

The law, which criminalises subversion, secession, colluding with foreign forces and terrorist activities, purged the political opposition and led to the closure of the city’s biggest pro-democracy media outlets.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University will also be offering national security classes, Ming Pao reported.

The newspaper said schools can plan their own courses.

Soylent Gates

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Hong Kong wants foreign English-language teachers to take oath of allegiance

From HERE

HONG KONG (AFP) – Foreign English-language teachers working in Hong Kong government schools will need to swear allegiance to the city, officials told AFP on Saturday (June 11), as fears grow about the territory’s ability to retain educators in the face of increasing restrictions.

Hong Kong’s Education Bureau said that native-speaking English teachers (NETs) and advisers working in government-run schools must sign a declaration by June 21 in order to continue working in the coming school year.

Since 2020, Hong Kong has applied oath-taking requirements to an increasing number of jobs, mainly those in the public sector, as a way to fulfil Chinese government demands of loyalty.

NETs must declare they will bear allegiance to Hong Kong and uphold the Basic Law – the city’s constitutional text – as well as be responsible to the government.

“Neglect, refusal or failure” to sign the declaration will lead to contract termination, the authorities said.

The new declaration will “further safeguard and promote the core values that should be upheld by all government employees” and ensure effective governance, a government spokesman said.

NETs are normally hired on renewable two-year contracts, with monthly salaries that begin at around HK$32,000 (S$5,660) and can go as high as HK$74,000.

Phishing Attacks On WordPress Site Owners Disguised As Copyright Infringement Warnings

Last year, we discussed how malicious actors on the internet were using fake copyright infringement notices in order to get people to click links that downloaded malware onto their machines. While there have long been these sorts of malware scams, what was notable about this one was that copyright culture and the fear of infringement had made this sort of thing viable. Putting the notices of a copyright troll and someone looking to infect machines with malware side by side, they’re basically the same thing in terms of tactic: scare the shit out of people over copyright infringement to get them to hastily do something they wouldn’t otherwise do. In some cases, that’s pay a settlement fee regardless of guilt. In other cases, click a link and get infected with malware.

Phishing Attacks On WordPress Site Owners Disguised As Copyright Infringement Warnings

Chinese general warned, PLA will take action should Nancy pelosi dare to visit Taiwan

This is a SERIOUS violation of the “one China policy” and will result in dangerous and lethal military action. China does not bluff. There are those saying that ships will be sunk, but rather I think economic discord will be the result rather than raw military action.

Video HERE.

An interesting coincidence…

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It’s just a coincidence.

The system is hacked: Leonkov explained why the US will no longer supply Ukraine with HIMARS MLRS

From HERE

The Russian military delivered an unpleasant surprise to the Americans by quickly hacking into the simple system of using HIMARS and learning how to crack them like nuts.

The four American installations destroyed in Ukraine are just the beginning. It was a kind of test pen for a secret system of counter-battery combat, which Russia has not yet used in the zone of the special operation. New challenges required new means and the allied forces were promptly equipped with some products that no one in the world knows about yet.

The news, unpleasant for the American military-industrial complex and the Ukrainian military, was reported in the studio of Vladimir Solovyov by military expert Alexei Leonkov, ironically noting that perhaps that is why Washington refused to supply modernized and more long-range MLRS, not so long ago promised to Ukraine. HIMARS has already received powerful anti-advertising lately – at first it turned out that Russian air defense systems are doing an excellent job of intercepting, and then the news came about the destruction of four installations at once. Now it is simply pointless to drive them to Ukraine – it is better to sell your useless iron to someone than immediately write it off for scrap, throwing it against much more advanced weapons.

“I once said that we have learned to recognize not only air targets, but also the places where these vaunted HIMARS take off. 

Their maximum range is 85 kilometers. 

Our counter-battery systems did not work at such a distance, so the Americans at first took advantage of this advantage, and even wandered constantly - quickly moving from place to place between launches. 

Everyone has already fired. 

The American system has been hacked. 

And our secret development will be deployed in all directions. 

It's a good system, I still can't name it, but it works. 

We now work at much greater distances and instantly fix the launch site. 

For the Americans, this was a very unpleasant surprise. 

They will no longer supply their over-praised “wonder weapon” to Ukraine, ”the expert expressed confidence.

Leonkov also noted that the United Kingdom and the United States have recently become confused in the information coverage of what is happening in Ukraine. British propagandists continue to announce the defeat of Russia, arguing that material exhaustion in the troops is already affecting.

The Americans are looking at things more sensibly and are warning their Ukrainian puppets that Russia is preparing a massive offensive. But they don’t know in which direction, since powerful strike groups are concentrated on several at once. US military analysts are seriously afraid of a simultaneous attack in different regions and state that the weakened Ukrainian army will not hold back such a strike.

Formerly Ukrainian politician Dmitry Vasyletstold how Russia responds harshly to the strike by UAF drones on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.

Bots are pushing the need for a Vaxx narrative…

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Busy Bots.

NYC Emergency Management Now Telling New Yorkers to Have a “Go Bag” and Be Ready to EVACUATE

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Just two weeks after releasing a Public Service Announcement telling New Yorkers what to do if a nuclear bomb hits the city, that same agency is now telling New Yorkers to pack a “Go Bag” and be ready to EVACUATE New York City.

According to the official government web site for New York City Emergency Management, New Yorkers should:

Go Bag

Everyone in your household should have a Go Bag — a collection of things you would want if you have to leave in a hurry. Your Go Bag should be sturdy and easy to carry, like a backpack or a small suitcase on wheels. You’ll need to customize your Go Bag for your personal needs, but some of the important things you need in your Go Bag include:

  • Bottled water and nonperishable food, such as granola bars
  • Copies of your important documents in a waterproof container (e.g., insurance cards, Medicare/Medicaid cards, photo IDs, proof of address, marriage and birth certificates, copies of credit and ATM cards)
  • Flashlight, hand-crank or battery-operated AM/FM radio, and extra batteries
  • List of the medications you take, why you take them, and their dosages
  • Contact information for your household and members of your support network
  • Cash, in small bills
  • Notepad and pen
  • Back-up medical equipment (e.g., glasses, batteries) and chargers
  • Aerosol tire repair kits and/or tire inflator to repair flat wheelchair or scooter tires Doctors’ names and phone numbers
  • First-aid kit
  • Toiletries
  • Child care, pet care, and other special items
  • Supplies for your service animal or pet (e.g., food, extra water, bowl, leash, cleaning items, vaccination records, and medications)
  • Portable cell phone chargers

If you have children, pack child care supplies as well as games and small toys.

If you’re older or have any special medical needs, consider including these items:

  • Instructions and extra batteries for any devices you use
  • Aerosol tire repair kits and/or tire inflator to repair flat wheelchair or scooter tires
  • Back-up medical equipment
  • Items to comfort you in a stressful situation

If you have a pet or service animal, you need to pack a Go Bag for them:

  • A current color photograph of you and your pet/service animal together (in case you are separated)
  • Copies of medical records that indicate dates of vaccinations and a list of medications your pet/service animal takes and why he or she takes them
  • Proof of identification and ownership, including copies of registration information, adoption papers, proof of purchase, and microchip information
  • Physical description of your pet/service animal, including species, breed, age, sex, color, distinguishing traits, and any other vital information about characteristics and behavior
  • Animal first aid kit, including flea and tick treatment and other items recommended by your veterinarian
  • Food and water for at least three days
  • Food and water dishes
  • Collapsible cage or carrier
  • Muzzle* and sturdy leash (*Note: Nylon muzzles should only be used temporarily as they can restrict a dog’s ability to pant)
  • Cotton sheet to place over the carrier to help keep your pet/service animal calm
  • Comforting toys or treats
  • Litter, litter pan, and litter scoop
  • Plastic bags for clean-up

Include items that can help protect you and others from COVID-19, including hand sanitizer, and face coverings for each person.* (*Face coverings should not be used by children under the age of 2. They also should not be used by people having trouble breathing, or who are unconscious, incapacitated, or unable to remove the mask without assistance. Learn more from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC))

Avoid panic buying. Buy supplies slowly to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to buy what they need. Report overcharging and price gouging to the City

If that isn’t blunt enough, Emergency Management then goes on to tell New Yorkers about EVACUATING

Evacuations

Evacuation should be addressed as part of everyone’s planning efforts. City officials will tell you when to evacuate through the media and direct warnings. Evacuation is used as a last resort when a serious threat to public safety exists. If you must evacuate, your first plan should always be to stay with friends or family.* In a planned evacuation, such as for a coastal storm, the City will advise residents of which areas are impacted and provide guidance on how the evacuation will proceed. In the case of coastal storms, designated routes have been identified throughout the city to effectively get people from low-lying hazard areas safely to higher ground. To find out whether you live or work in a hurricane evacuation zone, use the Hurricane Evacuation Zone Finder, the City’s evacuation mapping tool.

  • *Ask friends or relatives outside your area if you are able to stay with them. Check and see if they have symptoms of COVID-19 or have people in their home at higher risk for serious illness. If they have symptoms or people at higher risk in their home, make other arrangements.

In an unplanned evacuation, such as for a hazardous material spill, officials will advise affected residents to leave the immediate area until the danger can be removed. Always have your Go Bag prepared and easily accessible in case of any evacuation. You may not have time to assemble your belongings, and you may not be allowed back until the danger has passed.

Evacuate immediately when you:

  • Are directed to do so by an emergency official.
  • Are in immediate danger.

Be Prepared to Evacuate

  • Determine whether you live in a hurricane evacuation zone by accessing the Hurricane Evacuation Zone Finder, or contact 311 (212-639-9675 for Video Relay Service, or TTY: 212-504-4115).
  • Know evacuation plans for all the places you and your household members spend time. Often buildings have floor marshals who are responsible for evacuation plans.
  • Make alternate transportation plans; the means of transportation you usually use may not be available.
  • Practice plans through regular drills. People who practice escape drills can evacuation with greater ease than those who are unfamiliar with the procedures.
  • If you have pets, consider what you would do if you cannot return home to them. Pet owners should read Ready New York: My Pet’s Emergency Plan for more information.
  • Residents of high-rise apartment buildings and basement apartments may face special risks and should be prepared to evacuate if needed. (Basements are vulnerable to flooding.)

What to Do When You Evacuate

  • If there is time, secure your home: close and lock windows and doors, and unplug appliances before you leave. Authorities will instruct you if it is necessary to turn off utilities.
  • Wear sturdy shoes and comfortable, protective clothing, such as long pants and long-sleeved shirts.
  • Bring your Go Bag with you.
  • Do NOT use an elevator during a fire or other emergency unless directed to do so by emergency personnel. If power goes out or is shut off, you may become trapped.
  • Remember, evacuation routes change based on the emergency so stay tuned to the local news, access NYC.gov, or contact 311 (212-639-9675 for Video Relay Service, or TTY: 212-504-4115) for the latest information.
  • Go to the nearest safe place or shelter as soon as instructed.
  • If you must go to an evacuation center or shelter, remember to follow the latest guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for protecting yourself and family from COVID-19.

Disaster Sheltering

If you are directed to evacuate, make arrangements to stay with friends or family outside the affected area whenever possible. For evacuees who have no alternative shelter, the City will open shelters throughout the five boroughs. Disaster shelters may be set up in school, municipal buildings, and places of worship. They provide basic food and water. If possible, bring clothing, bedding, bathing and sanitary supplies, medications, and your Go Bag to shelters. Bring a face covering for each member of your household to the shelter. Maintain at least 6 feet of space between you and people who aren’t in your immediate family.

 WRITING ON THE WALL

For anyone so dense that they cannot see the writing on the wall, New York City is preparing their citizens to be hit by a nuclear bomb and be forced to Evacuate.

And lest you think this is hyperbole, or exaggeration, the notion that New York City isn’t going to exist much longer seems to have struck a chord at the United Nations.

Interior space is now up for sale inside the UN Headquarters . . . .

Seems like a couple countries . . .  are leaving!

In America…

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Spetsnaz Commander: “NATO is the army of the Anti-Christ; Russia is the army of Jesus”

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A Chechen commander of Spetsnaz was on Russian television last night and he laid things out quite bluntly: NATO is the army of the anti-Christ; Russia and its allies are the army of Jesus.

It is quite interesting historically, to see Russia has returned to its Christian roots.  It is building thousands of churches and its society is prospering no matter what plots are formed against it, while the west has become a blood-soaked, authoritarian, empire.

Here is the Spetsnaz commander from Russian TV last night:

 

Tucker Carlson: This is bizarre

The United States justice system has collapsed.

Marilyn vos Savant

Marilyn vos Savant has the highest IQ ever recorded at 228.

She worked in her family’s general store, attended community college, then two years of state college before returning to work for her family.

She’s a kind, down-to-earth person, whose extraordinary intellect has done a lot of good in the world.

A passionate writer, Marilyn has written books on the power of logical thinking to clarify problems and make life better.

When news of her astonishing intellect got around, folks started writing her for advice.

Her surprising answers revitalized ossified areas of mathematics and logic, and generated interest in the power of logical thought.

Some famous exchanges:

  1. The Monty Hall Paradox
    
    Dear Marilyn,
    
    Suppose you’re on a game show and you’re given a choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say number 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say number 3, which has a goat. He says to you, “Do you want to pick door number 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch doors?
    
    Craig F. Whitaker, Columbia Maryland
    
    Dear Craig,
    
    Yes, you should switch. The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance. Here’s a good way to visualize what happened: Suppose there’s a million doors, and you picked door number 1. Then the host, who knows what’s behind the door and will always avoid the one with the prize, opens them all except door number 777,777. You’d switch to that door pretty fast, wouldn’t you?
    
    Marilyn vos Savant
    
    For this answer, Marilyn received more than 10,000 letters from outraged mathematicians at prestigious universities and research centers, accusing her of contributing to American innumeracy by refusing to understand basic math. 
    
    Whether you change your choice or not, they said, the odds are exactly the same.
    
    It took a team of MIT mathematicians and multiple computer simulations to show the doubting experts she was right.
    
    2. The gross inaccuracy of “accurate” tests
    
    Dear Marilyn,
    
    A particularly interesting and important question today is testing for drugs. Suppose 5% of the general population uses drugs. You employ a test that is 95% accurate. A person is selected at random and given the test. It’s positive. What does such a result suggest?
    
    Charles Feinstein, PhD
    
    Dear Charles,
    
    Given your conditions, once a person has tested positive, you may as well flip a coin to determine whether s/he’s a drug user. The chances are only fifty-fifty. …
    
    Marilyn vos Savant
    
    She again received a storm of outraged letters, this time from statisticians. She explained her reasoning: 
    
    Suppose the general population consists of 10,000 people and 95% of them (9,500) are nonusers and 5% of them (500) are users. Of the 9,500 nonusers, 95% of them (9,025) will test negative, as the test is 95% accurate. This means 5% of them (475) will test positive.
    
    Of the 500 users, 95% of them (475) will test positive. So there are 475 false positives and 475 true positives. 
    
    When we find an individual in the positive group, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that s/he’s a drug user. 
    
    It again took teams of experts in the testing field and the CDC to corroborate her conclusion. 
    
    This is why randomly testing the general population for anything results in a very high percentage of false positives.

Some folks are saying her answers are a trivially easy application of Bayesian reasoning, and they learned these answers in the 7th grade.

Vos Savant was born in 1942; these exchanges are why your 7th grade teacher reviewed these problems, and everything looks easy in retrospect.

The MIT mathematicians who agreed with Vos Savant said they initially disagreed strongly and needed a week to sort it out.

The world-famous mathematician Paul Erdos also vehemently disagreed and had to retract.

The inaccuracy of random testing was known, but not widely. Top experts, including some working at the CDC, had to write in and corroborate.

For further information, see Vos Savant’s books, or the mathematician Martin Gardner’s extensive commentary on her answers.

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If you build it they will come…

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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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The movie that we are living in is now reaching the climax scene

My understanding of the latest Xi policy to talk to foreign leaders; he bluntly asks the them : "Do you regard China as friend or enemy?"

If not friend, than there is nothing to talk about.

I’m still in the middle of a move. Please mind the conditions that I am producing under. I hope that you enjoy this daily update.

Mamoudou Gassama

His name is Mamoudou Gassama

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His name is Mamoudou Gassama

He saw a baby dangling off a ledge and climbed four floors of the apartment like Usain Bolt would run a 100-meter race.

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He was an illegal immigrant from Mali, but after this incident he was made a French citizen and had many job offers.

He became famous, the video of his heroic act was rapidly shared on the internet, and he made news headlines. Everyone talked about him.

He was hosted by presidents:

  • Mamoudou with the president of France, Emmanuel Macron:

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In his new job in the fire service:

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In the twinkling of an eye, Mamoudou Gassama’s life was turned around. All for being a Rufus.

What he did was selfless. I thought, “What if he had fallen and died while trying to save another person?”

I am happy he was greatly rewarded for his kind act.

Truly, fortune favors the bold.

Fleet of nuclear submarines will be sent by Britain to Australia as a warning to China

  • Britain is to send a fleet of nuclear submarines to Australia port of Perth 
  • Deployment is seen as a warning to China in the Asia-Pacific region 
  • Move is part of AUKUS (Australia, UK and United States) security alliance

Britain is to send a fleet of nuclear submarines to the Pacific in a decisive move to thwart Chinese aggression in the region.

The dramatic decision could see UK subs based in Australia until 2040, operating within striking distance of China.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the head of the Armed Forces, will agree the arrangement at a naval conference in Sydney next week. Assigning submarines to patrol the South China Sea will be Britain’s most assertive move yet against Beijing.

According to reports in Australia, Royal Navy submarines would be based at Perth on the country’s western coast and Australian submariners would be incorporated into British crews to improve their skills.

Basing the Royal Navy boats thousands of miles from UK shores is part of the AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom and United States) security alliance.

AUKUS was set up last year primarily to confront Chinese military expansionism in the Indo-Pacific. Australia has become embroiled in a trade war and diplomatic stand-off with China. The deepening of defence ties with the UK is likely to cause further outrage with the Communist regime, which is vehemently opposed to AUKUS.

The Royal Navy declined to say last night how many of its submarines could be relocated to Australia, as all operational details surrounding Britain’s sub-surface fleet are classified.

The ‘Pacific tilt’ was signalled last year as part of the MoD’s Integrated Review.

The review set the target for the UK to become ‘the European partner with the broadest and most integrated presence in the Indo-Pacific’.

But given that China possesses the world’s biggest navy, some questioned the merits of such a deployment, arguing Britain’s boats would be massively outnumbered and outgunned.

Last night the MoD said: ‘It is UK policy that we do not comment on matters relating to submarine activity or operations.’

A brilliant solution!

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“According to a news report, a certain private school in Washington recently was faced with a unique problem. 

A number of 12-year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom. 

That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick they would press their lips to the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints. Every night, the maintenance man would remove them and the next day, the girls would put them back. 

Finally the principal decided that something had to be done. She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man. 

She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night. 

To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required. 

He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it. 

Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror. There are teachers, and then there are educators...”

The Washington Post believes that the USD is here to stay!

From HERE

China and Russia announced a joint pledge to push back against dollar hegemony

Last month, the United States broadened financial sanctions against China while simultaneously promising to prolong Ukraine sanctions on Russia and impose further ones for election interference, the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the SolarWinds hack. In a rare joint statement in late March, China and Russia doubled down on earlier pledges to upend the global reliance on the U.S. dollar, and the long-standing global financial system that enables the U.S. to strong-arm them.

Will the Sino-Russian strategy succeed? My research suggests “dollar hegemony” is stable for many reasons, primarily due to the United States’ financial centrality and ability to secure investments. The measures announced so far, such as de-dollarization, renminbi digitalization, and alternative financial settlement and messaging systems, are unlikely to kick the dollar to the curb…

Which "secure investments" is WP talking about? We have just watched the USA completely seize all of the assets and wealth of Russia. How is this "secure"?

Additionally, we have watched for decades as wealth has been squandered, and the American people, and those in the West live destitute lives... 

Now, there is a one trillion dollar MILITARY budget while Americans fight against dangerous levels of inflation during a recession. How is the USD secure? How are American banks secure? Are they backed with gold? Silver? Heck... copper? No. They are not.

So what the fuck makes them "secure"?

What are they smoking?

-MM

Noela Rukundo

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Noela Rukundo.

In 2015, the Australian Noela Rukundo (who’s the lady in the photo) went to Burundi to attend the funeral of her stepmother who passed away only a couple of weeks back.

Straight after the funeral when she was going out to get some fresh air, she was quite suddenly kidnapped at gunpoint and shoved into a vehicle. She was blindfolded and driven to a safe house somewhere in the country.

Inside the building she was tied up, and a sack put on her head and was asked by her captors:

“You woman, what did you do for this man to pay us to kill you?”

“Wh-what are you talking about?” said Noela, she was shaking uncontrollably.

“Balenga (Noela husband) sent us to kill you.”

“What? My husband will never do that, y-you’re lying!”

Her captors smirked and giggled. She then heard a phone dialling and a voice coming from a loud speaker:

“Kill her”

It was her husband. Noela fainted.

She was woken up much much later by her captors on the side of a road and they told her she was free. The men explained they didn’t believe in killing women, and they knew her brother and was friends with him. But they would keep her husband’s money and tell him that she was dead.

Not only was she freed, she was given a phone, recordings of the captors’ phone conversations with her husband and all the evidence she needed to take Balenga to court.

Although pretty messed up and a little dizzy, with the help of the Kenyan and Belgian embassies, she got a trip to Australia, where she planned her revenge.

Meanwhile back in Australia her husband had told everyone she had died in a tragic accident and all her friends mourned her at her funeral at the family home. On the night of February 22 2015, just as the Balenga waved goodbye to the last of his neighbours who had come to comfort him, Noela approached him.

“Is it my eyes?” screeched Balenga. “Is it a ghost?”

“Surprise! I’m still alive!” said a very angry Noela.

“ oh my god oh my god, I’m sorry for everything please forgive me” replied a rather shocked Balenga.

But Noela took none of his apologies. The police swooped in and captured Balenga, who ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine years in prison for incitement to murder.

During the investigations, it was found out that Balenga wanted to kill Noela because he thought she was going to leave him for another man, which apparently was not going to happen.

Balenga was sent to 9 years of prison while Noela lives with her 8 children somewhere in Melbourne, Australia.

US Navy aircraft carrier USS Reagan enters South China Sea

Getting ready for the Nancy Poliski visit, eh? -MM

From HERE

The ship was accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Shiloh and the guided-missile destroyer USS Halsey in a ‘routine mission’.

A US aircraft carrier group led by the USS Ronald Reagan has entered the South China Sea as part of a routine mission, the US Navy said, at a time of rising tensions between Washington and Beijing, which claims most of the disputed waterway.

The carrier is being accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Shiloh and the guided-missile destroyer USS Halsey, the US Navy said on Tuesday.

China frequently objects to US military missions in the South China Sea, saying they do not help promote peace or stability, and the latest mission comes after China condemned the Group of Seven (G7) nations for a statement criticising Beijing over a range of issues.

“While in the South China Sea, the strike group is conducting maritime security operations, which include flight operations with fixed and rotary-wing aircraft, maritime strike exercises, and coordinated tactical training between surface and air units,” the US Navy said.

“Carrier operations in the South China Sea are part of the US Navy’s routine presence in the Indo-Pacific.”

China has ramped up its military presence in the South China Sea in recent years, including building artificial islands and air bases, where it has installed missile systems and other equipment.

The South China Sea has become one of many flashpoints in the testy relationship between China and the US, with Washington rejecting what it calls unlawful territorial claims by Beijing in the resource-rich waters, which are also claimed by Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia.

In a show of force against the Chinese claims, US warships have passed through the South China Sea with increasing frequency in recent years, invoking “freedom of navigation” rights.

Lufthansa Cancels 1000+ Flights as Ground Crews Walk-Out

Changes in Germany. -MM

Deutsche Lufthansa AG will cancel almost ALL (over 1,000) of its flights from the main hubs of Frankfurt and Munich Germany because of a strike by Ground Crews.

Labour union Verdi had called for the walkout, which is due to run until 6 a.m. (0400 GMT) on Thursday, over its demand for a 9.5 per cent pay hike for around 20,000 workers and warned that more industrial action could be on the cards.

The strike has caused Lufthansa to cancel nearly all flights at its Frankfurt and Munich hubs for Wednesday.

Strikes and staff shortages have already forced airlines including Lufthansa to cancel thousands of flights and caused hours-long queues at major airports, frustrating holidaymakers keen to travel after COVID-19 lockdowns.

Lufthansa said on Wednesday it was “a sad day” for holidaymakers who were unable to catch their flights due to the strike, adding that the walkout was unnecessary and out of proportion.

A really bad feeling…

Interesting tale. Not by MM.

When I was younger, my boyfriend & I were eating at Bob’s Big Boy. Suddenly, he said that we had to leave because we’d be late to where we were going.

A little later, while driving away, I noticed that the little pinky ring with a dangling heart on it that he’d given me was missing from my finger. I freaked out, and begged him to drive back to the restaurant to look for it. He told me that he just couldn’t due to us being late.

I had noticed that when we were leaving the restaurant, there were 2 men in the parking lot walking towards the door that looked scary, but, at that moment, I really didn’t think more about it.

Soon after, every single news channel had the most disturbing story on…

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Those 2 scary men I’d seen walking in to the restaurant had gathered all the employees & customers at gunpoint, made them go into the walk-in freezer then shot & killed them.

If we had stayed longer or gone back, we’d be dead too..

STUNNING! Massive Escalation of Ukraine War

Getting ready for the big stuff. -MM

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Today an elected official from Donetsk, announced the latest plan for Ukraine and it marks the single most stunning change since Russia began its Special Military Operation (SMO).

Denis Pushilin is a politician from the Donetsk region who has served as Head of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) since 2018.

He had previously served as Chairman of the People’s Council, and became the acting Head of State following the assassination of incumbent Alexander Zakharchenko amidst the conflict in the east Ukraine region. He successfully ran for election to a full term in the 2018 elections.

That being said, when Pushilin speaks, he speaks with authority; he’s “in-the-loop” as it was his administration that asked for — and got — protection from Russia through the ongoing SMO.

This morning, Pushilin made the following announcement:

“Today it’s time to liberate again Russian cities founded by Russian people: Kiev, Chernihiv, Poltava, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Lutsk”

This announcement is likely the single most dramatic change since the Russian Army crossed into Ukraine back on February 24. The escalation of warfare necessary to accomplish this, now seems to fully explain why so many more trainloads of Russia troops and armor poured into the theater of war all last week, nearly TRIPLING the amount of Russian firepower available (but not yet deployed) inside Ukraine.

The war is about to escalate in ways no one thought possible.

Guess Who Bought-Up Ukraine Farmland Since 2014 Coup?

For those of us who have been scratching our heads as to why the US and EU are so bent on “helping” Ukraine, I found something out today:

Since the 2014 Coup which overthrew Democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovich, and put a puppet regime, favorable to the west, in his place . . . .

three giant corporations — Cargill, DuPont and Monsanto — bought seventeen million hectares of Ukraine agricultural land.   That’s sixty percent (60%) of the total agricultural land in Ukraine!

Thought you’d be interested in that.

Hundreds of Chechen Soldiers; Uniform Patches say “To Kiev”

Obvious or psyops? -MM

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Hundreds of new Chechen soldiers are boarding aircraft from Chechnya, wearing black police-style uniforms with large patches on the shirt back saying “To Kiev.”

It appears Russian strategy and tactics are escalating severely against Ukraine . . . exactly as has been reported on the Hal Turner Radio Show for days.

UPDATE 8:42 AM EDT —

Video is now available showing the troops:

 

Australian anti-drone jamming technology has been helping the Ukraine Nazi’s fight Russia

Australians in unified brotherhood with Nazi's. Who would have thought? -MM

From HERE

Australian-built drone jamming guns are helping protect Ukrainian
military units from Russian attacks.  Sydney-based technology company DroneShield told 9news.com.au it had been supplying Ukraine with its equipment as part of a military aid contract.

The company was founded seven years ago with the aim of producing technology to counter civilian drones adapted for military uses.DroneShield chief executive Oleg Vornik said the use of drones by Ukraine and Russia in the war had propelled the unmanned aerial vehicles into the media spotlight. 

"Small drones were used against Saudi Arabia, in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict and the Syrian conflict," he said. "But drones largely stayed off the front pages in those conflicts until the Ukrainian conflict came along and drones were front and centre."

Since the Ukraine war started on February 24, drones have been used by both sides to pinpoint enemy positions, guide artillery strikes, track troop movements and jam opposing forces' communications. 

Vornik said his company's Drone Gun and hand-held radio-sized units have proven effective in Ukraine because many Russian drones used Western componentry. "Even Russian military-grade drones use commercial parts ... our gear is quite effective in detecting and defeating those drones," he said.

China has been shipping 7nm chips for over a year now

But, "experts" have been telling us that China is at least two decades behind in this technology. Don't you know. -MM

From HERE

SMIC has been shipping a 7nm chip for a year, says TechInsights which has reverse engineered the device and says “initial images suggest it is a close copy of TSMC 7nm process technology.”

Although it is a couple of nodes behind Samsung and TSMC, it is seen as an impressive achievement by SMIC because it is confined to using DUV lithography tools.

Although Samsung and TSMC made 7nm ICs using DUV in 2018-9, it involved using quadruple patterning.

TechInsights does not see the SMIC 7nm process as a true 7nm process but says it shows they’re getting there.

“This low-volume production product may be the steppingstone for a true 7nm process that incorporates scaled logic and memory bitcells,” says TechInsights, “since bitcoin miners have limited RAM requirements, they likely do not feature the typical bitcell memory that the true 7nm technology definition requires (both scaled logic and bitcell adoption). This chipset likely demonstrates the logic part but not the bitcell aspect." 

-SMIC said it had taped out a 7nm Innosilicon IC in 2020.

The chip TechInsights looked at was made for a Bitcoin mining company called Minerva.

China’s leading IC testing company Leadyo completes world’s first 3nm chip test

What was that about 7nm? Two decades, eh? Now China is readying for 3nm. You just can't make this stuff up. The neocons in Washington DC are either shitting in their pants, are living in a cocaine haze. -MM

From HERE

By Li Panpan

China’s leading IC testing company Leadyo(利扬芯片) said it completed the test and development of the world’s first 3nm chip.

The company based in Dongguan of southern China’s Guangdong Province shared this information in its investor relationship management platform of the Shanghai Stock Exchange on July 7.

They say that with rich experiences in testing 8nm and 5nm chip products, it would advance mass test of 3nm chips in an orderly manner.

Leadyo was founded in February 2010 and listed in the STR Market of Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2020. It has tested 44 categories of 12-inch and 8-inch chip products of various process technology.

It has increased investment in testing and R&D of high-end chips, especially the computing power chip testing technology, with a complete set of testing solutions for the discrete problems of advanced manufacturing processes.

Its testing solutions are widely used in chips for 5G communications, computers, consumer electronics, automotive electronics, biometrics, MCU, AIoT, and industrial control.

South Korea reluctant to join US-led chip alliance

"Join us begs the United States. Don't have anything to do with China. We have lots and lots of money to give you" -MM

From HERE

South Korea on Wednesday said it would not take any decision in a hurry to join the proposed US-led chip alliance, local media said.

The country’s Science and ICT Minister Lee Jong-ho said Seoul should be cautious about joining the chip alliance proposed by the US to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, Yonhap News Agency reported.

His remarks came after the US reportedly asked Seoul to decide by the end of August whether it is joining them or not.

Apparently, South Korea is avoiding going into conflict with China as the US also involved Taiwan in its proposed chip alliance.

“I believe we need to be cautious in deciding on the chip alliance matter,” the agency quoted Lee as telling reporters in Seoul.

“If a problem arises (from the decision), it could affect not only the semiconductor industry but also affect other industries,” Lee said, adding he sought suggestions from people who do business with China.

China currently supplies raw materials to the South Korean chip industry.

However, on Tuesday, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the proposed alliance would help build more stable supply chains and reduce dependence on China, according to the agency.

The US proposed the alliance in March to chip manufacturing powerhouses in the Asia-Pacific region – South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan – to strengthen cooperation throughout the chip-making production chain.

Graft Investigators Target Regulatory Official Linked to Henan Bank Scandal

From HERE

Oh, and about those "banking riots" that is supposed to undermine, and topple Xi Peng...-MM

What’s new: An official once responsible for overseeing village banks in Central China’s Henan province has been placed under investigation by anti-graft agencies in the wake of a multibillion-dollar banking scandal.

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Li Huanting

Li Huanting, an inspector at the provincial branch of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC), is suspected of serious violations of law and Communist Party discipline, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said in a statement Sunday, without offering further details. Such announcements typically allude to corruption.

Li, who is around 60, joined the Henan branch of the now–defunct China Banking Regulatory Commission in 2003. From January 2012 to October 2018, Li led the branch’s division that was in charge of supervising village banks, according to the CCDI.

Two of the four local village banks being investigated for freezing tens of billions of yuan in customer savings since April were set up during Li’s tenure.

The background: The four Henan lenders, along with another two in neighboring Anhui province, have been subject to scrutiny since customers complained in mid-April that they couldn’t make withdrawals online. The scandal triggered protests in June that turned violent.

Police in Henan have arrested at least two batches of suspects in the scandal, according to their statements since June. Authorities have been looking into the links between the banks and Henan Xincaifu Group Investment Holding Co. Ltd., a private company that colluded with bank executives and used online platforms to illegally take public deposits.

Plans have been announced by the CBIRC’s Henan office and the provincial government-run financial regulatory bureau this month to repay depositors in stages.

Trolling? Or Truth? Medvedev Shows “New map of Ukraine”

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Medvedev.

Ukraine is more likely to be reduced to Kiev and its surroundings than to ever re-encompass Crimea and the Donbass republics, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on his Telegram channel on Wednesday.  Is he just Trolling, or is this the simple truth?

The one-time president and long-time prime minister who now heads the national security council also posted two maps helpfully illustrating his argument.

The first map showed Ukraine in borders prior to the US-backed coup in 2014, including Crimea and the two eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk. A month after the militants backed by Washington seized power in Kiev, Crimea voted to rejoin Russia, while the two Donbass regions declared independence.

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Ukraine before the US backed-coup and installation of a puppet regime by President Obama.

“In the mind of the president of Ukraine, damaged by psychotropic substances, this is what the map of his country’s bright future will look like,” Medvedev wrote on Telegram.

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Ukraine after the collapse of the USA installed puppet regime.

On it, “Ukraine” is reduced to Kiev and its surroundings. Seven regions in the West have been annexed by Poland, and three in the southwest by Hungary and Romania, respectively.

Everything else is marked “Russia.”

He did not specify which Western experts may have envisioned such a partition.

The Ukrainian government has repeatedly rejected any possibility of territorial concessions, insisting that Kiev’s objectives were a “capitulation” of Russia and “reintegration” of Donbass and Crimea.

 Medvedev served as president of Russia between 2008 and 2012, and then as prime minister until 2020, when he was put in charge of the national security council. Over the course of the conflict in Ukraine, he has made a name for himself with colorful Telegram posts. Just this month, he warned Kiev of “Judgment Day” if they attacked Crimea and offered a list of “Russian sins,” followed up by those of the West.

Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”

In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.

The Sampoong Shopping Centre Collapse.

During South Korea’s economic boom in the 1980s, Sampoong was erected in Seoul. Originally planned to be an apartment complex, a new boss by the name of Lee Joon decided midway that he wanted it to become a shopping centre instead. This required changes to the plans, most notably the removal of several support columns so that escalators could be installed.

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Due to serious constructional concerns, the construction company refused to carry out these changes, leading Lee to fire them and bringing in his own builders.

His further demands meant there were other issues with the completed building too; there was no steel skeleton or crossbeams, which meant that load couldn’t be transferred across floors. He also ordered the floor columns to be reduced to below the safe thickness, to maximise floor space, and had them spread further out—increasing the load on each—for the same reason. Three air conditioning units weighing fifteen tonnes each were installed on the roof, exceeding the load capacity by four times.

Cracks in the building started to appear just a few short years after opening, after the air conditioning units were dragged across the roof, causing cracks. By April 1995, more cracks were beginning to appear on the fifth floor too. Lee and the management’s only response was to move merchandise from the top floor to the basement.

Just a couple of months later, the cracks multiplied dramatically.

The management’s response was to close the top floors. They invited civil engineers to inspect the building, who quickly came to the conclusion that the building was at risk of collapse. The directors suggested to Lee Joon that the building be evacuated, but Lee angrily rejected the idea, saying he didn’t want to lose revenue. It was very much “one rule for them” though, as Lee was more than happy to evacuate himself alongside the other executives. Do you know who was working in the building at the time? His daughter-in-law.

He didn’t even tell her.

At 5PM on the 29th June 1995, the fifth floor ceiling began to sink. Still, Lee did not close the store or order any emergency repairs. Nearly an hour later, audible cracking sounds filled the building, prompting staff to sound the alarms and evacuate the customers. However, it was too late. The roof collapsed and the air conditioning behemoths dropped through it, smashing through each and every floor. The main columns buckled and within less than twenty seconds, the south wing of the building came crashing down, killing over 500 people and injuring over 900 more.

It took a days long rescue effort to free the trapped survivors, some of whom surviving the contemporaneous hot weather by drinking rainwater. By contrast, some of the trapped victims survived the collapse but drowned to death because of the water used to suppress the fire.

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The collapse was investigated by one Professor Chung, a civil engineering professor. During his interrogation of Lee, the latter disregarded the victims and stated his primary concern was the financial damage suffered by his company. He was ultimately arrested, convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. He only served seven but died shortly after release anyway.

Lee Joon turned ruthlessness into an art form. He was utterly selfish and devoid of humanity; it’s an incredibly rare time when I say this of anyone, but I’m glad that waste of air is dead.

US fingerprints all over Hong Kong’s recent disturbances

From HERE (paywall)

Leung Chun-ying said the government had no need to reveal evidence of foreign forces interfering in Hong Kong affairs and undermining security. The former chief executive made the claim while speaking at a book launch last week.

That was a mistake. He makes it sound like the government and officials, including former ones such as himself, are making claims they can’t back up with evidence.

There is overwhelming evidence of interference in Hong Kong over many years, especially by various agencies of the US government, and not just during the unprecedented anti-government protests and riots in 2019.

Leung should have said such evidence was readily available as public records and anyone could just google the original sources, as well as news reports and numerous exposés over the years.

Those US agencies or Washington-funded entities have openly acknowledged it, either through their own documents, financial statements and other public records, or through US congressional testimonies.

I leave aside clandestine operations by secret services such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency, which by definition we could have no knowledge of.

However, revelations relating to spying on Hong Kong by Edward Snowden in 2013 did make some eye-opening reading…

Chinese Meat Pie (Xian Bing)

Traditional Chinese meat pie(馅饼) with beef, large scallion and onion.

This is my FAVORITE street food in China. Outstanding, and so very delicious. It is sort of like a deep fried hamburger encased inside of a bagel. It’s so smunching delicious!

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Traditional Chinese meat pie(馅饼) with beef, large scallion and onion.

Traditional Chinese meat pie provides a crispy wrapper and savory filling. There are in fact many types of meat pie popular across the country. The fillings differ from one house to another. You can use pork, lamb, beef etc. This is a popular beef and onion version.

Ingredients

Filling

  • 300 g beef , with 15% to 20% fat
  • 2 large scallion , finely chopped
  • ½ tsp. Sichuan peppercorn powder
  • ½ tsp. salt
  • 2 green onions
  • 1 thumb ginger , sliced
  • 1 tbsp. light soy sauce
  • Pinch of fresh ground pepper
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tbsp. oyster sauce
  • 1 tbsp. sesame oil
  • ½ tsp. sugar
  • 1 tbsp. Shaoxing cooking wine
  • ½ middle size white onion

For the dough

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour (300 g)
  • ½ cup hot water over 90℃ (120ml)
  • 60 ml room temperature water , plus 10ml more for adjusting
  • 1 tbsp. vegetable cooking oil
  • pinch of salt

Instructions

Beef filling

  • Add beef, ginger, scallion, salt, sugar, Sichuan peppercorn powder and white pepper powder. Blend 10 seconds.  Add egg, light soy sauce, sesame oil, Shaoxing wine and oyster sauce. Blend for another 10 seconds.  Stir the filling by hand for minutes until sticky.
  • Spread large scallion white on top and then drizzle around 2 tablespoons of hot oil. Mix in chopped white onion. Mix well, cover and set in fridge.  For beginners, I recommend set the filling until slightly hardened. The filling is for 2 batches, 20 pancakes. However the dough is for 10 pancakes each time. If you want to use all of the filling once, double the dough.

Dough

  • Add salt in all purpose flour and then add hot water firstly. Gently stir the hot water in. And stir in cold water too.  Roughly knead to form a dough. No need to be smooth. Cover and set aside for 30 minutes.
  • Re-knead the dough, it should be smooth very quickly.  Cut into 50g portions (10 pancakes from this batch) and then roll out to wrapper. Seal it completely. Avoid the edges meeting the filling, otherwise the sealing work is hard to complete.

Frying

  • Place the pancakes in a pan with oil, slightly press the center so the bottom can contact with the pan in better ways.
  • Heat until the side becomes crispy.  Then turn over and fry the other side. Once the two side becomes well browned, slow down the fire and over with lid and let the pancake heat for another 3-5 minutes. This can further cook the inside part and make sure the inner part is well cooked too. Then remove the lid and heat both side for another 30 seconds separately until the surface turn crispy again.
  • Transfer to oil paper to remove extra oil and enjoy!! Meat pies are always a little bit salty, so make sure you match it with some light and healthy vegetable soup.

Notes

The Nutrition Facts is based on each single pancake.

The filling is for 20 pancakes, namely two batches. If you want to sue all of the filling, double the dough and make a 4 cups flour batch.

Cook’s Note

About the filling: flavors of the filling decide whether the pancake is delicious or not.  I highly recommend adding Sichuan peppercorn powder, which is widely considered as the best spice for beef in China in the filling to enhance the aroma.   In order to make the filling juicy, usually water, stock or other liquid content is added. I use egg this time to increase the viscosity of the beef filling.

About the dough : the dough contents a larger amount of water, compared with other regular dumpling wrapper dough, so you will find it is very easy to knead and wrap because of the softness. There is just a little bit kneading needed in the process.

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Steps

To make the filling.  Add beef, ginger, scallion, salt, sugar  sichuan peppercorn powder and white pepper powder. Blend 10 seconds.  Add egg, light soy sauce, sesame oil, shaoxing wine and oyster sauce. Blend for another 10 seconds.  Stir the filling by hand for minutes until sticky.

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Spread large scallion white on top and then drizzle around 2 tablespoons of hot oil. Mix in chopped white onion. Mix well, cover and set in fridge. For beginners, I recommend set the filling until slightly hardened if you have enough time.

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Add salt in all purpose flour and then add hot water firstly. Gently stir the hot water in. And stir in cold water too. Roughly knead to form a dough. No need to be smooth. Cover and set aside for 30 minutes.

Re-knead the dough, it should be smooth very quickly. Cut into 30g portions (doubled size from dumpling wrappers ) and then roll out to wrapper. Seal it completely. Avoid the edges meeting the filling, otherwise the sealing work is hard to complete.

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Place the pancakes in a pan with oil, slightly press the center so the bottom can contact with the pan in better ways.

Heat until the side becomes crispy. Then turn over and fry the other side. Once the two side becomes well browned, slow down the fire and over with lid and let the pancake heat for another 2 minutes. This can further cook the inside part and make sure the inner part is well cooked too. Then remove the lid and heat both side for another 30 seconds separately until the surface turn crispy again.

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Transfer to oil paper to remove extra oil and enjoy!! Meat pies are always a little bit salty, so make sure you match it with some light and healthy vegetable soup.

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U.S. Sends F-22’s toward Russia

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Six US Air Force fighter jets have arrived in the United Kingdom at Suffolk’s RAF Lakenheath base in preparation for supporting NATO’s European Air Shielding mission.

The F-22 Raptors are from the 90th Fighter Squadron, 3rd wing, and are en route to Łask, Poland, from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska.

Following their departure from Lakenheath Thursday morning, the aircraft will join NATO’s Air Shielding strategy, which seeks to provide a near-seamless shield from the Baltic to the Black seas.

USS Ronald Reagan Strike Group Enters South China Sea for Pelosi’s Taiwan Visit

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China and the United States are building up their military strength around the Taiwan Strait as tensions rise over US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s possible visit to the island.

The American aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its strike group, including a guided missile destroyer and a guided missile cruiser, set out from Singapore on Monday heading northeast towards the South China Sea, according to ship-tracking information provided by Beijing-based think tank the South China Sea Strategic Probing Initiative.

The carrier strike group includes the Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), the embarked Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 5, and embarked staffs of Task Force 70 and Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 15, as well as the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam (CG 54) and the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Higgins (DDG 76).

While in the South China Sea, the strike group is conducting maritime security operations, which include flight operations with fixed and rotary-wing aircraft, maritime strike exercises, and coordinated tactical training between surface and air units. Carrier operations in the South China Sea are part of the U.S. Navy’s routine operations in the Indo-Pacific.

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will not sit idly by if Pelosi visits Taiwan island, the Chinese defense ministry warns; indicating the PLA ‘fully prepared’ for all scenarios

"Chinese analysts said the strong warnings from the Chinese military meant that the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) is well prepared for all the possible challenges if Pelosi visits the island, and they advised the PLA Rocket Force to conduct drills with new missiles targeting any possible US aircraft carriers and other large military vessels that may be involved in Pelosi's visit."

A Chinese ministry of defense spokesman has warned that the People’s Liberation Army would “take strong measures” if the speaker “insisted on going ahead”.

US officials have told media outlets that if her visit goes ahead, the U.S. military will increase its movement of forces and assets in the Indo-Pacific region.

They said U.S. fighter jets, ships, surveillance assets and other military systems were likely to be used to provide overlapping rings of protection for her flight to Taiwan and when she arrives on the island.

So not only will the Speaker of the House enter China air space without China permission, to land in China (Taiwan) without permission, her flight will be protected by US fighter jets! 

Reports describe a scenario that China could send aircraft to “escort” her plane and prevent it from landing if she visits Taiwan, possibly on a US military aircraft, and a US official said the scenario is a legitimate concern.

Hu Xijin, a commentator for the Global Times newspaper, the official mouthpiece for the China Communist Party, said that he expected to see PLA’s aircraft flying together with Pelosi’s plane into the airspace of Taiwan island. That would set a great precedent for the PLA to patrol above the island, which would be far more meaningful than Pelosi’s visit.

Sooner or later, the PLA’s aircraft will enter the airspace above Taiwan in a legitimate and righteous move to manifest China’s sovereignty over the island, he continued.

"To do this, we need an opportunity which could prompt the international community to better understand the mainland's move is natural rather than a provocation. 

Pelosi's potential visit to the island will lead to major changes on the situation in the Taiwan Straits.

The PLA's strong reaction is in line with the expectation of the international community and the visit will offer PLA a good reason to send aircraft over the island"

Hu said.

"So, the ball has come to Pelosi and the Biden administration that is cooperating with her and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on the island. 

We have to make full preparations this time for a showdown to them. 

If they dare to take a small step, we will take a major step to fiercely crack down the US and the DPP's arrogance and provocation," 

Hu said.

Xin Qiang, deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, told the Global Times that the US executive branch is very worried that this potential visit will cause a conflict to break out between China and the US.

“Pelosi doesn’t care that she might make a big mess of US-China relations, because the executive branch and the military will be the ones forced to take the consequences and deal with the aftermath,” he said.

Conclusion

China is not stupid.

They are completely aware that the powers (in the United States) has created this event. That Nancy Poliski is NOT acting alone, but rather than acting under orders.

The Chinese expect this event to fulfill some kind of global geo-political objective. Of some type. Of some consequence. Of some benefit to the United States.

What the United States is unaware of, or I would be surprised if they are aware, is that a very HARD response will be forthcoming.

My thoughts are that the expected results will NOT be the same as what the actual results will be.

I’ll leave this statement for you all to ponder.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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The Wentian spacestation module, a new global currency, and assorted life stories worthy of great interest

The big news is that China and Russia have created a new reserve currency, and the entire rest of the world (minus the USA and it’s proxies) are rushing to use it. This will have a stunning influence on the American economy. So we will start with this stunning development right now…

Putin and China just did the unthinkable and the West is in big trouble

It’s 11 minutes long. Watch it.

China launches second space station module, Wentian

July 24, 2022

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China launched the second of three modules to its permanent space station, in one of the final missions needed to complete the orbiting outpost by year’s end.

A live feed on state broadcaster CCTV showed the 23-tonne Wentian (Quest for the Heavens) laboratory module launching on the back of China’s most powerful rocket, the Long March 5B, at 2:22 pm from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan.

Space agency staff cheered and applauded when the Wentian separated from the rocket about 10 minutes after the launch.

The launch was “a complete success”, CCTV reported shortly after.

China began constructing the space station in April 2021 with the launch of the Tianhe module, the main living quarters, in the first of 11 crewed and uncrewed missions in the undertaking.

The Wentian lab module, 17.9 meters (59 feet) long, will be where astronauts can carry out scientific experiments, along with the other lab module yet to be launched – Mengtian (Dreaming of the Heavens).

Wentian features an airlock cabin that is to be the main exit-entry point for extravehicular activities when the station is completed.

It will also serve as short-term living quarters for astronauts during crew rotations on the station, designed for the long-term accommodation of just three astronauts.

Mengtian is expected to be launched in October and is to dock with Tianhe, forming a T-shaped structure.

They are slated to return to Earth in December with the arrival of the Shenzhou-15 crew. — Agencies

A lesson for all of us…

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Jews going to the cattle cars.

Angel, a Jew, owner of the most famous bakery in Germany, often said: “Do you know why I’m alive today? I was still a teenager when Nazis in Germany killed Jews mercilessly. Nazis took us to Auschwitz by train. Last night in the ward was deadly cold. We were left for many days in cars without food, without beds, which means without the possibility to warm up somehow.

It was snowing everywhere. The cold wind frozen our cheeks every second. There were hundreds of us on those cold, horrible nights. No food, no water, no hiding. The blood is frozen in the veins. Next to me was an elderly Jew who was very loved in my city. He was all shaking and looking terrible. I wrapped him with my hands to warm him up.

Hugged him tight to give some warmth. Rub his hands, legs, face, neck. I begged him to stay alive. I cheered him up. This is how I kept this man warm all night. I myself was tired and frozen. Fingers crossed, but I kept massaging this man’s body to warm him up.

So many hours have passed. Finally the morning has come, the sun has started to shine. I looked around myself to see other people. To my horror, all I could see was frozen corpses. All I could hear was the silence of death. Frosty night killed everyone. They died of cold.

Only two people survived: the old man and me. The old man survived because I didn’t let him freeze, and I survived because I made him warm.

We NEED each other. We NEED to be part of a community.

US warns losing access to Taiwanese chips could break the economy

Stark warning of a 'deep and immediate recession' if China takes over

Taiwan controls most of the world’s chip manufacturing capacity, and that worries US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Raimondo believes the US would go into a “deep and immediate recession” and face great security risks if it lost access to the island nation’s chips

The Commerce Secretary made the warning in a Wednesday interview with CNBC as part of her plea for Congress to aid a major US semiconductor manufacturing expansion by passing the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, which would unlock $52 billion in subsidies for new plants and research efforts.

“If you allow yourself to think about a scenario where the United States no longer had access to the chips currently being made in Taiwan, it’s a scary scenario,” Raimondo told CNBC. “It’s a deep and immediate recession. It’s an inability to protect ourselves by making military equipment. We need to make this in America.”

The issue is that Taiwan has faced ongoing aggression from China, which claims the self-governing island nation as its own and has not ruled out using military force to “reunify” the two. This has sparked fears that China could invade Taiwan and seize its manufacturing plants, which are run by, among other chipmakers, three of the world’s largest contract chip manufacturers – it hte fabs aren’t deliberately destroyed first.

This scenario would spell big trouble for the US because Taiwan produces 90 percent of the leading-edge chips that are bought by the country, according to Raimondo.

She is likely referring to TSMC, which Reuters said controls 90 percent of global output for such chips, citing industry estimates. This includes chips designed by companies such as Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm, and they are used in everyday devices such as smartphones, PCs, and servers. And then there’s the whole military kit issue.

These concerns around Taiwan’s security and independence are why the Raimondo believes it’s important that the US rebuilds its semiconductor manufacturing base through the CHIPS Act.

“We need a manufacturing base that produces these chips, at least enough of these chips, here on our shores because otherwise we’ll just be too dependent on other countries,” she said.

Even if the CHIPS Act gets passed, which is moving along after the Senate voted on Tuesday to advance the legislation, it will take years before new manufacturing plants in the US start producing chips.

Intel, for instance, doesn’t expect its new fabs in Ohio to begin production until 2025. The company is building two new factories in Arizona too, and those are expected to go online in 2024. That’s when TSMC and Samsung also plan to open new fabs in Texas and Arizona, respectively.

While the new factories will expand US chip manufacturing capacity, research firm TrendForce believes that they won’t make much of a dent in Taiwan’s industry dominance in the short term. By 2025, the firm said, Taiwanese chip manufacturers will still hold 44 percent of the global foundry market, 47 percent of the 12-inch wafer capacity, and 58 percent of capacity for advanced manufacturing processes.

MM Comments

Much hype. China is now producing 7nm chips. 5nm is on the way. There’s no problem. The US can (of course) always buy them directly from China.

China’s SMIC Is Shipping 7nm Foundry ASICs

The Most Advanced Foundry In The World After TSMC And Samsung

SMIC, China’s largest foundry has slowly been catching up to TSMC, Samsung, and various western foundries in process technology. They are rapidly approaching position as the world’s 3rd largest foundry and have higher margins than the current number 3, GlobalFoundries. SMIC has achieved this through a combination of large subsidies from the state, poaching TSMC talent, and tremendous home-grown expertise. Their chips ship in large volumes to a variety of use cases from smartphones to the world’s fastest supercomputer. The foundry has now quietly released and started mass production of their 7nm process node dubbed N+2.

We say quietly as this didn’t come directly from SMIC, but rather the reverse engineering and teardown firm TechInsights who purchased the chip on the open market and sent it to their labs. SMIC likely has not discussed this publicly on earnings reports as they are afraid of blowback. To be abundantly clear, China’s SMIC is shipping a foundry process with commercially available chips in the open market which are more advanced than any American or European company. While the US has high hopes for Intel to be the savior, there are no Intel 7 class foundry chips commercially available for purchase currently and they still have to build out their foundry operations. The most advanced American or European foundry produced chips are based on GlobalFoundries 12nm.

Initial images suggest it is a close copy of TSMC 7nm process technology.

TechInsights Product Brief

SMIC’s 7nm just like TSMC’s 7nm and Intel’s 7nm class technologies does not use EUV lithography. TechInsights has more information in their 3 detailed reports titled “ASIC Digital Floorplan Analysis,” “(SMIC 7nm) Advanced CMOS Process Analysis,” and “(SMIC 7nm) Process Flow Analysis.” We recommend people check those out for more details.

This is a groundbreaking discovery because the US Department of Commerce was supposed to be restricting export licenses for any equipment which can be used on technologies more advanced than 14nm. Of course, the department of commerce handed out export licenses like candy as they always do. Furthermore, almost all equipment that is used on SMIC’s 14nm FinFET can be used on their 7nm process technology as well. While SMIC likely cannot develop beyond 7nm without EUV, they still should be able to ramp their 7nm over time to very large volumes. The US government is asleep at the wheel as Lam Research off-shores production and Intel uses subsidies to import equipment used to manufacturer chips from China. Government policy is why the US will lose semiconductors.

SMIC’s foundry customer, MinerVa states this chip has been in production since July of 2021. On September 22nd 2021, MinerVa’s website was updated with information about the product and the image above. It is a small 19.3mm2 chip used for mining cryptocurrencies, but in the future, this process technology could be scaled up and adopted for high end supercomputer and consumer applications. Their miner ships with 120 chips per board with 3 board per miner and a total power consumption of 3300W.

My generation as an American…

I am not young (fast approaching 60), but I still remember the phone call I took when I had gotten home after school that day, from a classmate whose 16th birthday it was. He had gotten home (about 3 miles from my house) to find his mother had packed his things and they were on the doorstep.

She was blunt with him. Get a job, now, or an offer of one starting after this semester, and pay rent, or don’t come back. He was due to take his examinations in a few weeks’ time, and had a school place sorted for next year in a very good school (as had I).

This was before many folks had cars, but moms were still stay at home moms. My mom and I drove over to pick him up and brought him back to our house. She then called my dad. He stopped by at my friend’s house and, by all accounts, had a furious argument with his parents. They would not relent.

My dad came home more than a little upset. He made some calls to colleagues early that evening and sorted my friend an apprentice position starting in September, with funded evening school at a local community college, and a temporary job for the June to August summer period.

My friend’s parents took him back that night. He lost out on an excellent school place, and the likely opportunity to go further. He moved out as soon as he was 18, old enough to get his own home. He has not spoken to his parents since. They have never seen his family, they were not invited to his wedding, and they have never met their grand children or great grand children.

I learnt a lesson that day, on my friend’s 16th birthday. Children are not a burden to be moulded into what we want them to be. They are to be loved and nurtured.

South China Sea: Chinese permanent rescue and maritime offices stationed on disputed Spratly Islands

  • China’s three biggest man-made islands in the Spratlys will host a new flying squadron, as well as maritime rescue and administration staff
  • There have long been calls to upgrade search and rescue capabilities ‘to enhance China’s dominance over South China Sea affairs’

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Chinese structures and buildings at its man-made island on Mischief Reef at the Spratlys group of islands in the South China Sea. Photo: AP

Beijing has stationed permanent rescue forces and maritime administrations on its artificial islands in the disputed South China Sea.

A new flying squadron and maritime resuce and administration staff will be stationed on the Fiery Cross, Subi and Mischief reefs, China’s three biggest man-made islands in the Spratlys, state broadcaster China Central Television reported.

This boosts a regular on-call rescue ship deployment into a permanent institutional presence that could greatly improve the coverage of the southern area of the South China Sea.

God puts you where you need to be…

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“Last night, I left from pulling two 14 hour shifts. Stopped by the grocery store to grab food for dinner and as I was checking out a woman started crying in the next checkout line. Her daughter asked her what’s wrong and she said we can’t afford to eat tonight. A person behind her gave her a couple dollars and she bought her daughter a Kids Cuisine tv dinner. I told her to grab what she wants, ill pay for it. I NEVER stop at this Wal-Mart. I’m simply saying GOD puts you where he needs you to be WHEN he needs you to be there.”

Credit: Bear Taliferro Jr.

Of 29 Pregnant Women That Had Received Pfizer’s COVID-19 Inoculation, Only One Had a Baby That Lived

I Am In Shock

Dr. Byram W. BridleJul 22

The United States Food and Drug Administration (US-FDA) had requested 75 years to release the documents that they reviewed from Pfizer prior to issuing emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b mRNA ‘vaccine’ (Comirnaty) against SARS-CoV-2, which can cause COVID-19. However, a judge over-ruled this and issued a court order that the documents be released in large monthly installments.

Today, an absolutely shocking set of data were brought to my attention. They are not new. They are from a document that was in the data dump released back in May of this year. However, I want to help my fellow scientists in making sure that this science gets widely distributed throughout the world. This is for the sake of ‘fully informed consent’, something that regulatory agencies, public health officials and too many physicians seem to have abandoned over the past couple of years.

For a long time I have been arguing that our children need to be left out of the massive conflicts over the science underpinning COVID-19. In my opinion, adults can conduct their own risk-benefit analyses regarding whether they want to receive one of the current COVID-19 inoculations.

However, far too many adults are making these decisions based on pseudo-science, data from flawed studies, misinformation, and outright disinformation being propagated by physicians and public health officials, many of whom are unqualified to opine on anything in the field of vaccinology.

I have never felt comfortable about these injections being used in ‘children, adolescents and young-adults of child-bearing age’. This was the precise terminology I used in a parent’s guide to COVID-19 vaccines that I wrote more than one year ago.

The highest quality data for assessing a novel medical product are derived from clinical studies. This is because these types of experiments in people are typically well-controlled and include what is known as ‘active monitoring’; there is follow-up to assess safety and efficacy.

This is why the clinical testing phases should never be compromised. With this in mind, let’s explore a stunning set of data that Pfizer provided to the US-FDA. Here is the relevant document…

The data in this document were accumulated up until February 28, 2021. Notably, on page 9, safety concerns based on the US Pharmacovigilance Plan included “missing information” on “Use in Pregnancy and lactation”.

The data that had accumulated up to the end of February, 2021 were from too small of a sample size (i.e., # of pregnant or lactating women) to justify its use in these populations. However, here are the data that were available at that time regarding outcomes in pregnant women that had received Pfizer’s COVID-19 inoculation; this is quoted from the top of table 6 (I have italicized and/or bolded the most important points)…

Pregnancy cases: 274 cases including:

    • 270 mother cases and 4 foetus/baby cases representing 270 unique pregnancies (the 4 foetus/baby cases were linked to 3 mother cases; 1 mother case involved twins).
    • Pregnancy outcomes for the 270 pregnancies were reported as spontaneous abortion (23), outcome pending (5), premature birth with neonatal death, spontaneous abortion with intrauterine death (2 each), spontaneous abortion with neonatal death, and normal outcome (1 each). No outcome was provided for 238 pregnancies (note that 2 different outcomes were reported for each twin, and both were counted).

Apparently, outcomes will never be known for 88% (238/270) of the pregnancies. Why was the follow-up rate on these cases so abysmal?

NutriTruth has a great graph on their website that summarizes the results from cases for which follow-up data were available…

It appears that data would be available for five of the pregnancies, but these outcomes were still unknown at the time that Pfizer’s document was written. As such, there are solid data available from 29 pregnancies. One out of 29 of these pregnancies resulted in a ‘normal’ outcome.

This means that 28 out of the 29 babies died! That is a 97% death rate. I don’t care which trustworthy data set you look at to determine a ‘background’ death rate, none of them come close to 97%.

Spontaneous abortions are more common than many people appreciate, but, again, they are nowhere near the rate in this study. Even in the case of the ‘normal outcome’, this means there was an apparently healthy baby.

However, one cannot be certain that the outcome was ‘normal’, until the baby has had all of their physiological systems fully mature, which means early adulthood.

I have looked at Pfizer’s pre-clinical reproductive toxicity data and they are fatally flawed. Issues included ‘vaccinating’ the females only; apparently it was forgotten that ‘it takes two to tango’.

Also, the rodent models that were used express the low-affinity version of the receptor for the spike protein encoded by the ‘vaccines’. People express the high-affinity receptor. This means the rodent models aren’t capable of revealing toxicities that might be associated with the spike protein.

In short, the pre-clinical studies could provide no assurance whatsoever that Pfizer’s vaccine would be safe in the context of pregnancy. Now there is proof that data were in the hands of regulatory agencies that suggested the potential for a 97% fatality rate for babies from ‘vaccinated’ women.

I have collaborated with scientists and physicians about the post-rollout ‘real-world’ studies on pregnancy and the COVID-19 shots. They are highly flawed. I co-authored a paper about this, but have yet to find an editor that will even allow it to undergo peer review (I have had no problems with this for any of my cancer- or basic virology-focused papers).

Regardless, many other reputable scientists and physicians have been addressing this. Further, these ‘real-world’ studies should never have been authorized based on the data presented here.

Many countries have pushed Pfizer’s COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ on pregnant women, often via mandates. This was been done with the full blessing of their societies for obstetrics and gynecology. Are obstetricians and gynecologists going to continue to make these recommendations with these data in-hand?

At the end of the day, couples experiencing pregnancies or who wish to do so must make it their own responsibility to educate themselves to facilitate fully informed consent. Too many obstetricians and gynecologists are either too superficially trained in the immunological sub-discipline of vaccinology or are too afraid of contradicting a narrative for which dissent is punished. Some physicians are starting to speak up about this.

Unfortunately, their singular personal observations are simply deemed anecdotal. However, as a scientist, I have been trained to observe the cumulative nature of these reports; to not dismiss them out-of-hand, and to use them to formulate legitimate scientific questions.

If you or your baby have experienced any issues post-inoculation, please report these to your physician. They are obligated to submit an adverse event report, without opining on whether or not they think it might or might not be related. The accumulation of these reports is the only way scientists can help identify safety signals during a public rollout of a novel medical product.

A 97% death rate among babies from pregnant mothers that were ‘vaccinated’ is appalling. And this was from Pfizer’s own clinical trial data. This suggests a massive breakdown in the health regulatory process. The public, whom health regulatory agencies are to be serving, should demand accountability from these government-run institutions.

If I were a regulatory scientist assessing the pregnancy outcome data from Pfizer, there is no way that I would ever have supported the use of their inoculation in pregnant women. And I would never have allowed ‘real-world’ data from flawed studies to replace proper pre-clinical and clinical trials. Nor would I remain silent about this knowledge. Regulators who know better need to start speaking up.

An old lady

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An old lady.

This old lady handed her bank card to the teller and said “I would like to withdraw $10”.

The teller told her “for withdrawals less than $100, please use the ATM. The old lady wanted to know why…

The teller returned her bank card and irritably told her “these are the rules, please leave if there is no further matter.

There is a line of customers behind you”.

The old lady remained silent for a few seconds and handed her card back to the teller and said “please help me withdraw all the money I have.”

The teller was astonished when she checked the account balance. She nodded her head, leaned down and respectfully told her “you have $300,000 in your account but the bank doesn’t have that much cash currently.

Could you make an appointment and come back again tomorrow?

The old lady then asked how much she could withdraw immediately. The teller told her any amount up to $3000.

“Well please let me have $3000 now.”

The teller kindly handed $3000 very friendly and with a smile to her.

The old lady put $10 in her purse and asked the teller to deposit $2990 back into her account.

The moral of this story is…. Don’t be difficult with old people, they spent a lifetime learning the skill.

Italian Cheese Calzones (Folded Pizza)

Cheese calzones are an Italian classic. A calzone is a cheese stuffed pizza pocket (AKA folded pizza). Any toppings you like on pizza can be baked into these cheese calzones! Serve with homemade marinara.

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Cheese calzones are quick to make for a weeknight dinner, as a game-day snack, on a weekend date night, or as a fun activity with the kids! Last weekend, the hubby Eric was craving calzones, which we’d typically get from our local pizza joint. But we decided to try our hand at making calzones at home! It turns out they are SO easy and fun to make. My 3-cheese blend takes them to a whole other level, along with any other fillings of your choice!

Ingredients

  • Pre-made pizza dough – buy good quality pre-made pizza dough in the grocery store or at your local pizzeria. If you prefer, you can make your own pizza dough from scratch!
  • Ricotta cheese – ricotta cheese is essential in calzones. It’s the creamy goodness! I use whole milk ricotta cheese but you can also use part skim.
  • Mozzarella cheese – mozzarella cheese adds gooey, stringy cheesiness!
  • Parmigiano-reggiano cheese – parmigiano-reggiano (or parmesan) cheese adds depth of flavor.
  • Extra virgin olive oil – olive oil is brushed on the top of your calzones to help them bake to golden perfection.
  • Sauce for dipping – you can make or buy marinara, or a different type of dipping sauce! See dipping sauce ideas below!
  • Fillings of choice – want to fill your calzones with something more than cheese? See the list below for calzone filling ideas!

Ingredient Substitutions

  • Parmigiano-reggiano (parmesan) cheese – substitute grana padano or piave for parmesan cheese.

How to Make Calzones (The Brief Version)

  1. Shape the dough

    Form a roughly 8-ounce dough ball. Stretch the dough ball into a thin, large circle.

  2. Mix together cheese (and other fillings)

    In a bowl, mix together ricotta, mozzarella, parmigiano and a pinch of salt. Mix in any other fillings, or place on top of cheese mixture.

  3. Assemble

    Add cheese/filling mixture to half of the dough round, leaving a small border as a crust. Fold over the other half, on top of the cheese mixture, to create a pocket. Tightly pinch closed your calzone pocket.

  4. Bake

    Brush the top of the calzone with a bit of olive oil, and bake for 8-12 minutes until golden brown.

Difference Between Calzone and Stromboli

Calzones are basically folded pizzas whereas strombolis are rolled pinwheel pizzas. They’re both made with similar ingredients, except strombolis are rarely made with ricotta cheese like calzones. The major difference between the two is the shape and technique to assemble them before they’re baked!

How to Reheat A Calzone

Brush calzone lightly with olive oil. Place on baking sheet and heat until hot at 400 degrees, about 20-25 minutes. Of course, calzones are always best freshly baked!

Calzone Fillings (Mix-Ins)

If you want to fill your calzones with something more than cheese, here are some ideas!

  • Diced Veggies: sweet onion, garlic, peppers, roasted peppers, mushrooms, broccoli, spinach, tomato, broccoli rabe, potatoes, corn
  • Cooked Meats: crumbled sausage, salami, pepperoni, ham, bacon, chicken, ground beef
  • Miscellaneous: olives, basil, other herbs, black beans

Sauces for Dipping

The classic way to serve an Italian cheese calzone is with marinara. You can buy jarred marinara or make your own grated onion marinara or a traditional marinara. For traditional marinara, simply stir together a 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes, 2 minced garlic cloves, handful fresh chopped basil, 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil and salt. Heat on the stove until hot!

Substitute marinara for homemade vodka sauce, BBQ sauce, Buffalo sauce, or Ranch! Basically any sauce you can put on a pizza, you can dip your calzone in!

Summary

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  • Homemade marinara: 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes, 2 minced garlic cloves, handful fresh chopped basil, 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil and salt, heated on the stove until hot.

A story about the Yakuza

Despite what we hear about Yakuza in Japanese media, their lifestyle appears to be different from what most of us think. (myself included.)

Here is a story I heard from my father-in-law.

My-father-in law, Den, has been running a small restaurant in a rural area of Japan for the past 30 years. It’s located in the remote part of the town.

Because of the restaurant’s location, many customers come to avoid the crowd in the city for a nice, quiet sit down meal (food is very good, by the way).

Naturally, and eventually, some Yakuza members discovered this quiet establishment, for they, too, needed a place to eat lunch and dinner to avoid crowds. So, they started to come to the restaurant frequently.

Now, my father-in-law is quite a big man for his generation: at the age of 80, he is 183 cm (6’1″) tall and weighs 100 kg (220 lbs). Thanks to his physical feature, he is not easily intimidated, even by the Yakuza.

When one of the Yakuza members noticed his missing pinky finger, their mood suddenly changed. A missing pinky is a sign of the Yakuza – whenever they commit a serious mistake (among their organization), it’s their custom to cut their finger off.

“Hey grandpa, what did you do,” one of the Yakuzas asked.

“What do you mean,” Den asked.

“Your index finger.”

“Oh this? My finger got caught in the electric winch on my boat.”

“Your boat,” The Yakuza asked.

“Yes, I am a fisherman also. I go and catch fish and sell, when the restaurant is not so busy,” Den said.

“You are not ex-Yakuza,” The Yakuza asked.

“No. Are you?”

“Yes, we are. We thought you were because your index finger is missing. We thought you slept with your boss’s wife or girlfriend. That’s when we must cut our index finger. We normally cut our pinky for the mistakes. We thought you were reckless and courageous, worth admiring.”

“Really? Why courageous,” Den asked the Yakuza.

“Because you are reckless, we thought.”

“Why is it good to be reckless?”

“Because we cannot be. Police know what we are doing and where we are. They always have their eyes on us. Ordinary people put a petition together and force us to move out of the town. We cannot go to ordinary stores and Onsens (Japanese public hot springs prohibit a person with a tattoo to enter the bath because many of Yakuza members have tattoos.)” the Yakuza explained.

“How about all the other crimes and drug dealing we hear on the news,” Den said.

“Those are committed by the younger guys. They have too much energy and ambition, and they will do almost anything to prove their worthiness. They become Yakuza because they don’t want to deal with the rules set by the “ordinary” world, and the fact is, there are some rules in the Yakuza world, our own rules. We’ve been living in this world, and we learned and adapted to those rules, so we know better than to commit a small, stupid crime you hear about and see on TV. We almost never kill ordinary people or other Yakuza family members because, as I said, police are watching every move we make. Once we kill someone, they will know, so, it’s hard to kill someone without getting caught. In fact, the police can arrest any of us any time and shut us down by arresting the majority of our members. We think that’s harassment. We need as many members as we can to survive as a Yakuza organization. We never deal drugs because, for one, it’s really difficult to import into Japan. Even if we could, it’s hard on the buyers/users because drugs destroy their lives and, quite often, their families too. In fact, it’s hard on us. Think about it. Your product kills your customer. How would you feel to serve your food, knowing it’s going to kill us for sure? That’s hard as a person to watch.”

“Really? It sounds like you guys live in a very restricted world,” Den said.

“Yes, it’s very restricted. The challenge is that at the same time, we have to behave in the way to meet people’s expectations,” the Yakuza replied.

“What expectations,” Den asked the Yakuza.

“Well, most people who do not know Yakuza think we are loud, reckless and dangerous, like running around loose and engaging in all kinds of illegal activities. In fact, that’s not what we do. We do jobs ordinary people don’t want to do. Things that are in the “gray area” can turn either legal or illegal, and someone has to do them. Ordinary people come to ask us to perform those jobs because, for whatever reason, they are unable to do the jobs themselves, like extortion. That’s where we come in. Also, because of people’s expectations, in the view of the general public, we have to pretend and act like the stereotypical image of what Yakuza should be: loud, fearsome and reckless. We have to throw loud parties in our office so that people will notice us and be fearful of us. But, most of the time, we live quietly because otherwise, there will be no more places for us to live. Truth be told, many of us actually do live in fear, as we feel being separated from society.”

“Sounds like it’s a tough life,” Den said quietly.

“Yes, it’s tough, and probably tougher than yours. So, that is why I’d never recommend anyone to become a Yakuza,” the Yakuza said to Den.

When My Cat Feels Sad

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Love Child

My father joined the Navy in 1942 at the age of 17 and went to war on diesel submarines in the South Pacific. After WW2, he was assigned to duty in Japan as part of the occupational forces. There he met a local Japanese girl he wanted to marry, but it was prohibited to do so until the early ’50s when President Truman allowed it. Dad went back to Japan and married the girl he met during the occupation of Japan.

Dad was also involved in the atomic bomb tests in the South Pacific islands of Bikini Atoll in “Operation Crossroads.” Dad passed away in 1998, from lung cancer, and I submitted a claim to VA for a service-connected death and it was approved in record time. My mother lived until 2015. After mom passed away, my sister and I took our time to clean out our parents’ home. I stumbled on photos of my father with a young female child. There was nothing else associated with the picture. In my mother’s possessions were letters written in Japanese that we thought were from family members. During one trip to the house, there was a letter from Japan in the mail box. My sister decided to get the letter interpreted. To our surprise, the letter was from a Japanese woman who claims to be the daughter of my mother and father that he had during the occupation of Japan. The Japanese woman wanted to know why her mother hasn’t written her or responded to her phone calls. It was after this revelation that we decided to get all the letters mother had saved and get them interpreted. One of the letters had an email address so I used an app called Google Translate and wrote a letter to the Japanese woman. I learned that my mother and father had a child during the occupation of Japan in the late 1940s. This woman whose name was Terri had pictures to prove that she was a daughter of my parents. To my horror, Terri said our parents abandoned her because she lived with our mother until age 7 when dad returned to Japan and married our mother and brought her back to the USA. I learned that Terri was put up for adoption and the names of the birth parents were falsified thereby making it impossible for my parents to bring Terri back to the USA. Since my father was a career Navy Master Chief Petty Officer, he did not want the love child to hurt his career since fraternization during the occupation of Japan would result in a court martial. So, my parents made the decision not to adopt their real daughter and bring her back to the USA.

In my many Google Translate emails to Terri, I learned that our mother was one of six (6) children. Of the 6, two were female, mom and Terri (if Terri is her daughter, she can’t be her sister as well) and four (4) were boys who I was told were soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army and fought Americans in the South Pacific and all were killed. I learned that my mother was disowned by her family for marrying an America military man when her brothers died fighting Americans. I continue to write Terri and we are trying to organize a reunion but haven’t decided on when or where.

I would have never imagined that my parents had a love child while dad was involved in the occupation of Japan but short of a DNA test, I am convinced that Terri is my blood sister. To this day, my sister and I are amazed that our parents never told us that they had a daughter and abandoned her in Japan after WW2. I think that this story would make for a good book. This is something I have been wrestling with so I can get the money to have a reunion with my long-lost sister in Japan. This is a true story.

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A life hack

As a kid, I remember watching a cartoon in which the hero is arrested and imprisoned in a tower.

There’s an elderly man there who has spent his entire life in prison.

The gate opens as the hero requests to be let out. The hero exits the room. “You mean all I had to do was ask?” the old man mutters as he looks at the open door and then turns to the audience.

I used to giggle at this as a youngster, but as I think on my life, there have been many times when I’ve felt like that old man.

I had a three-year crush on someone I never spoke to, I never asked questions in meetings, and I never pushed for promotions.

I’ve tried with doing what the hero in the tower did and asking for what I want over the last five years.

And, in many cases, the door did really open, precisely as it did in the cartoon.

This can range from minor requests such as not having olives in my salad to more significant demands such as getting 20% of my work time to pursue self-directed activities.

You’ll be surprised how far simply asking for things will get you whether you’re honest and generally skilled.

A policeman recounts a “it doesn’t seem right” moment…

Back in the 90s as a young Police constable working in the Home Counties I decided to do a welfare check on a woman who had been the victim of domestic stalking and harassment. I had arrested her estranged husband and after interview he had been charged with harassment and bailed to magistrates court with conditions not to contact his wife.

Anyway, it was a quiet afternoon and I was in the area so I thought it would be a good idea to pop round and update her on the case and make sure she was ok.

On approaching the front door I could hear the sound of crying children inside. I knocked on the door repeatedly but there was no reply. I announced that it was the police and that I would force entry if I wasn’t allowed in as I was concerned for the welfare of the children. The woman opened the door and asked me what I wanted, which I found strange so I asked her if she was OK? She replied that she was and I should go away. I said that I wanted to see the kids to make sure they are ok. The woman called the kids to the door at which point I pulled them outside. I then grabbed the woman by the wrist and dragged her through the door as well. At that point the estranged husband appeared, from behind the front door. He was holding his right hand behind his back. I punched him in the solar plexus as hard as I could and he dropped to the floor groaning, as he did so he dropped an 8 inch kitchen knife.

I quickly handcuffed him to the rear and called for backup to transport him to the nick. I dragged the husband to the living room and sat him on the sofa and waited for my colleagues. As we waited I saw him glancing at a large black hold-all bag sat on the floor in the middle of the room. I opened the bag and inside was an axe, another knife, a large amount of plastic sheeting, a set of disposable coveralls and latex gloves.

The husband had basically turned up five minutes before I had with a ‘murder kit’. I honestly think that if I hadn’t knocked on the door when I did then he would have murdered his wife and children.

I’m glad that I followed my instincts and I’m glad that I am 6 foot 4 and 18 stone and he was 5 foot 7 and 12 stone otherwise the result could have been very different.

I love this man.

There is this guy, who is sitting on a subway with different, fake book covers. I find this so funny, so here are a few more. Enjoy! 🙂

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Swiss Steak

Swiss Steak is not Swiss. “Although many might think Swiss steak comes from Switzerland, in reality, the name comes from the ‘swissing’ technique for tenderizing meat,” according to The Spruce Eats. “Tough cuts of meat go through a mechanical tenderizer, or a swissing machine, and come out the other end with cube-shaped indentations.”

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This recipe for Smothered Swiss Steak is pure comfort food at its finest. It’s at the top of my list for when there is a chill in the air, and I’m looking for something warm and cozy for supper.

And although you can prepare this Swiss Steak recipe by simmering it on the stovetop, I like to braise it in the oven for a few hours. Because when it’s cold and blustery outside, it just makes my kitchen extra warm and inviting to have a pot full of something delicious slow-cooking in the oven. Also, can I just say that while these Swiss Steaks are in the oven simmering away, the whole house will be just amazingly fragrant with the aroma of home-cooked goodness!

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But I do tend to think of this recipe as something a bit old-fashioned (in a really good kind of way). This dish is something from my childhood, that my mom or grandma would prepare for supper on a cold fall or winter evening. Back in those days, growing up in Pennsylvania, fall was just magical to me (and still is to this day!) Hearty, warming foods were standard fare on those crisp autumn, after-school evenings, and were definitely a part of the magic.

Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon granulated garlic
  • 2 pounds cubed steak (cut into serving-size pieces if necessary)
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil (or other high-temperature cooking oil)
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 1 stalk celery, diced
  • 1 green bell pepper, thinly sliced
  • 8 ounces of cremini or white button mushrooms, sliced
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 3 tablespoons tomato paste
  • 1 (15-ounce) can diced or stewed tomatoes (or use 1 pint of home-canned tomatoes)
  • 2 cups beef broth
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 1 pinch celery seed (optional)
  • 2 tablespoons of water + 2 tablespoons cornstarch

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 325° F. In a large resealable plastic bag, combine flour, salt, pepper, and granulated garlic. Add steak, a few pieces at a time, and shake to coat.
  2. On the stovetop, heat oil in a cast-iron Dutch oven (or other heavy, oven-safe pot) over medium-high heat. Brown steak in oil on both sides. Remove steaks to a plate.
  3. To the same pot, add the onion, celery, bell pepper, and mushrooms. Turn the heat down to medium, and cook and stir for 6-7 minutes, or until vegetables are beginning to soften. If needed, add a little extra oil. Add garlic and tomato paste, and cook for 1 additional minute.
  4. Stir in diced tomatoes, beef broth, Worcestershire sauce, thyme, sugar, and celery seed. Scrape the bottom of the pot with a spatula to release all of the flavorful bits. Return steaks to the pot, making sure they are covered by the gravy.
  5. Cover and bake 1 1/2 to 2 hours, or until meat is tender. At this point, remove the pot from the oven and place it on the stovetop. Remove the steaks to a plate, leaving the gravy in the pot.
  6. In a small bowl, combine corn starch and water into a paste; stir into gravy. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring continuously, until gravy has thickened. Serve steaks with gravy, and mashed potatoes, egg noodles, or cooked white rice.

What are the ingredients for Smothered Swiss Steak?

Aside from being a nostalgic kind of recipe, though, I think it’s also a bit of an old-fashioned because I use cubed steaks for this dish, a cut of beef that I really don’t see too often in modern recipes.  I really believe these steaks deserve a revival, though, because when properly cooked low and slow, cubed steaks are just oh-so-tender. And as an added bonus, they are also typically very inexpensive. Often I can find cubed steaks on sale for less than the price of regular ground beef. But if you can’t easily find cubed steaks, just go ahead substitute thin-cut top round steaks.

And the gravy for these steaks? It’s a beefy-tomato gravy, filled with tender bell peppers, onions, celery, and mushrooms. And here comes the “smothered” part – this rich, thick, savory gravy is just begging to be smothered, not just over the steak, but also over a scoop of mashed potatoes, egg noodles, or even rice. Truly down-home comfort food!

Meet Shirō Ishii – a serious piece of shit

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Shirō Ishii

This guy was a Doctor and microbiologist- and a rather smart one at that. He was regarded as a brilliant person for nearly his entire life. He was well educated and joined the army as a doctor. While there he caught the eyes of his superiors and was sent for further education at Kyoto Imperial University.

During WW2 he was placed in charge of Unit 731 and this is what he was known for.

What was unit 731? Well, they were a scientific unit that conducted experiments and thought up new ways to win the war. Some examples of things they did include

  • Imprisoning women, raping them until they got pregnant, and then running horrid painful experiments on them just so they could see how certain poisons affected pregnant women.
  • They would infect people with syphilis and then cut them open (while alive and awake) so they could see what their bodies did as the infection progressed. Women, men, and even children were forcibly infected
    • This is called vivisection- its the practice of cutting someone open while alive to see what their body is doing and its typically done when experimenting on animals. In unit 731 they did it to people without anesthesia- always resulting in a slow agonizing death for the person.
  • Injected people with animal blood to see what happens (bad way to die)
  • Placed people in centrifuges and spun it until they died
  • Deprived prisoners of food and water to see how long it was until they died
  • Placed people in low-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out
  • Burned people alive to see how long they would live
  • Injected people with saltwater to see what would happen
  • Poisoned people to see the effects
  • gave people radiation poisoning to see the effects
  • Leave 3-day old babies in the cold just to see how long it took them to freeze to death
  • Tested flamethrowers on live people
  • Tested grenades on live people
  • Removed organs for fun. For instance, they would remove someone’s stomach and attach their esophagus to their intestines directly.
  • Tested hundreds of diseases and biological weapons on people

In all, around 10,000 prisoners were killed by Unit 731 and as many as 20,000 were tested on. The biological weapons produced by this unit were used to kill as many as 500,000 civilians

On a side note not even the Nazis used chemical weapons in WW2 (they only did in concentration camps). The ONLY nation to employ chemical weapons against civilian and military targets in WW2 was Japan.

You may wonder what happened to Shirō. I mean we caught him and put him on trial for war crimes right?

Nope

He was given full immunity in exchange for full disclosure of his tests. American microbiologists stated that Shirō’s findings were extremely valuable and impossible to replicate unless the experiments were done again. He was protected by the United States, provided with an ample salary, and sent off to the United States to live a life in luxury.

Shirō lived out the remainder of his life a free man in the United States, and traveled frequency to Japan where he was treated like royalty. He died in 1959.

Si Kaddour Benghabrit

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Si Kaddour Benghabrit

He was in charge of a mosque in Paris during World War II. He was originally born in Algeria before immigrating to France.

When World War II broke out, Germany began deporting Jews from France to concentration camps.

Si Kaddour began offering shelter to lots of Jews through willing Muslim families in the area.

When German inspectors came, he would lie about the records of Jews, saying that they were Muslim. He eventually had cellars and basements in mosques where he would allow the Jews to hide during the war. He also gave them fake certificates that would certify that they were Muslim, enabling them to escape certain death.

He had an open-door policy as well at his mosque. If any of the attendees had Jewish friends in need of refuge, they could bring them with them.

Si Kaddour saved 500 Jews by the end of the war. He risked his life in the process. And most people don’t even know of him.

A love bomber…

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A Love Bomber.

      • Day 1: “Dang you’re gorgeous.”
      • Day 2: “I feel like we have so much in common.”
      • Day 3: “I really like you.”
      • Day 4: “I feel like we’re soul mates.”
      • Day 5: “I love you.”

Love bombing is an attempt to influence a person by giving them affection and attention. Cult leaders like David Koresh used this tactic to control their followers.


Having experienced this before, the only way I can describe it is as if a sun is shining on you constantly for days, weeks and months. You’re blinded not by love, but by the idea of being wanted.

The love bomber makes you feel like you’re in a trance. They shower you with compliments, buy you gifts, promise a future and bombard you with romantic texts. It seems too good to be true because it’s an illusion.

Love bombers feed you this attention to gain something in return. Whether that’s money, power, control or sex.

They can’t love you because they don’t know you to love you.

They can’t love you because they don’t understand the meaning of the word.


Relationships take time. Boundaries, opinions and space need to be valued. Relationships that start off by resembling a romantic movie is an instant red flag.

It’s easy to create an attachment with a love bomber.

It’s harder to escape.

Get out before it becomes emotionally abusive.

Easy Buttermilk Drop Biscuits

Drop biscuits are one of the easiest baked goods to make.

Despite being so easy to make, these biscuits are tender, flaky, buttery, and one of the single best things you’ll ever put in your mouth.

And, by the way, they go GREAT with real salted butter.

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I’ve been nicknamed the “Biscuit Queen” by my family, because whenever we go out to eat for breakfast, the first thing I look for is biscuits. If there’s a biscuit on the menu, it’s going to be eaten.

Creating this recipe was the best AND worst decision. Since I’m a biscuit’s #1 fan, I feel like I’m well-qualified to tell you how good these little things are. Since I want to make them every week, my biscuit obsession can get a bit unhealthy…HA!

Serve with My Mom’s Homemade Strawberry Preserves.

What Are Drop Biscuits?

Drop biscuits are easy to make because they are made by simply dropping dough onto a baking sheet as opposed to rolling out and cutting dough into biscuits. No need for extra time or dishes!

Ingredients for Drop Biscuits

You need only 6 ingredients to make the most incredible drop biscuits:

  • All-purpose flour – flour is the base for our biscuits!
  • Cold buttermilk – buttermilk is the key ingredient for fluffy, flaky, tender drop biscuits. It also helps your biscuits rise.
  • Cold butter – butter gives biscuits flavor and moisture.
  • Baking powder – a combination of baking powder and baking soda helps drop biscuits rise and have a flaky, tender texture.
  • Baking soda – see above!
  • Salt – salt adds flavor.

Why COLD Butter and Buttermilk for Biscuits?

Cold ingredients, especially butter, are essential in biscuits. The cold butter pieces in the dough will produce steam when placed in the oven, creating moisture pockets and yielding a tender, flaky biscuit.

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How to Make Easy Drop Biscuits

Making drop biscuits is SO easy. You can make the dough and bake them in just 30 minutes! FULL instructions are in the recipe card below (this is just an outline!).

  1. Combine dry ingredients.

    In a large bowl, use a whisk to combine flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.

  2. Add cold butter.

    Add in cold butter chunks. Use a fork or pastry/biscuit cutter to cut the butter into the dry ingredients to form a fine crumble.

  3. Add buttermilk.

    Add buttermilk and mix until just combined. The dough should be just wet enough to form a loose ball. Add a splash more buttermilk if the dough is too dry to form a loose ball.

  4. Form drop biscuits.

    On a greased baking sheet, use a ¼ cup measure to drop dough balls about an inch apart.

  5. Bake.

    Bake for 11-16 minutes at 425 degrees, until just golden.

What to Serve With Drop Biscuits

These buttermilk drop biscuits are absolutely AMAZING alone. But here are a few ways you can serve your biscuits to make them extra special:

  1. With 20-Minute Pumpkin Butter
  2. With My Mom’s Homemade Strawberry Preserves
  3. With Homemade Honey Peanut Butter
  4. As a dessert with Hot Fudge Sauce
  5. As a Pulled Pork Biscuit Slider

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How to Store Biscuits

Drop biscuits are best stored in an airtight container. They will keep well for 3-4 days!

Refresh them by heating them in a foil package in the oven at 350 degrees for 5-10 minutes.

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Keanu Reeves

He was abandoned by his father at 3 years old and grew up with 3 different stepfathers. He is dyslexic. His dream of becoming a hockey player was shattered by a serious accident. His daughter died at birth. His wife died in a car accident. His best friend, River Phoenix, died of an overdose. His sister has leukemia.

And with everything that has happened, Keanu Reeves never misses an opportunity to help people in need. When he was filming the movie “The Lake House,” he overheard the conversation of two costume assistants; One cried because he would lose his house if he did not pay $20,000 and on the same day Keanu deposited the necessary amount in the woman’s bank account; He also donated stratospheric sums to hospitals.

In 2010, on his birthday, Keanu walked into a bakery and bought a brioche with a single candle, ate it in front of the bakery, and offered coffee to people who stopped to talk to him.

After winning astronomical sums for the Matrix trilogy, the actor donated more than $50 million to the staff who handled the costumes and special effects – the true heroes of the trilogy, as he called them.

He also gave a Harley-Davidson to each of the stunt doubles. A total expense of several million dollars. And for many successful films, he has even given up 90% of his salary to allow the production to hire other stars.

In 1997 some paparazzi found him walking one morning in the company of a homeless man in Los Angeles, listening to him and sharing his life for a few hours.

Most stars when they make a charitable gesture they declare it to all the media. He has never claimed to be doing charity, he simply does it as a matter of moral principles and not to look better in the eyes of others.

This man could buy everything, and instead every day he gets up and chooses one thing that cannot be bought: To be a good person ♥ ️

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Fred Flintstone steak, Pot Roast, Monkey Pox Potato Peeling, and a lack of topsoil in todays installment

Please enjoy this selection of tidy morsels. have fun. Enjoy  the read, and have a great day!

I’m still busy in my move. Sorry that this post is so scant. I know that I should do better.

The Banquet of Chestnuts

The Catholic Church does not like to talk about the infamous Banquet of Chestnuts.

Allegedly, on October 31, 1501, a truly filthy sex orgy took place at the pope’s official residence in the Vatican. The host was Cesare Borgia, a cardinal and, to top it off, the son of Pope Alexander VI.

No less than 50 prostitutes are said to have been present. At first, they danced with the guests in full dress. Later in the evening, the candlesticks were placed on the floor and many chestnuts were scattered on it.

The naked prostitutes crawled across the floor on all fours, trying to pick up the chestnuts with their mouths, while the guests, including the Pope, watched them and enjoyed themselves.

There was even said to be a questionable contest. The guests who were able to perform the act with the prostitutes the most times were honored with valuable prizes, for example silk tunics or shoes.

The main source for this rather interesting claim is the Liber notarum, the ceremonial diary of Johannes Burckard, who was the Vatican’s master of ceremonies at that time.

The veracity of this source is increasingly doubted by today’s historians. However, this has not prevented various artists from using this peculiar dinner as inspiration for their works.

The German painter Heinrich Lossow was known for his illustrations for works by Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller. But he also published some pornographic works that were received as extremely piquant at the time.

His most scandalous work was undoubtedly The Sin.

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The Sin

This particular painting is based on the events at the Banquet of Chestnuts. Heinrich Lossow was criticized by critics and the people for this work, but the church went one better. It accused the artist of all mortal sins at the same time.

Go East, My Son!

By Marwan Salamah for the Saker Blog

American nineteenth-century folklore tells of a young man asking his elders’ advice on what calling he should take up. The answer was a firm “Go West my son and grow!”, or to that effect. The gist of the advice was that the American West was at the time viewed as virgin, not yet settled and built up by the European immigrants. In fact, most of those who headed West did succeed, subject to exhibiting diligence, persistence, hard work, and some luck.

But today, in the twenty-first century, circumstances have changed. The West has matured, competition has increased, and returns have shrunk. Endless series of bubble booms and busts continue to occur and at ever shorter intervals. Classical economics concepts have gradually changed away from a real production economy to a paper economy which is considered by some to be fictitious, unreal, and unsustainable.

Today’s Western economy is dominated by the FIRE sectors (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) plus the military industry, all of which have usurped the bulk of the economy’s wealth and income, leaving far too little for the other sectors to survive let alone grow. The result is an alarming rise in extreme inequality with, it is claimed, the top 1% (or 10%) of the population owning the bulk of the wealth and income.

Other sectors have also grown, most prominent are those related to IT and services. But these are highly volatile and high-risk businesses and not all who enter them succeed or remain and prosper. Quite a few have turned into Zombie companies that absorb endless bouts of capital increases in the millions and even billions of Dollars but fail to show a profit.

The great western industry has all but disappeared. It has migrated to China, Asia, and elsewhere, as a result of an erroneous application of the famous economic edict of “maximizing profits”. It was applied exclusively to the short-term with total disregard to its negative long-term implications on both the companies themselves as well as the economy as a whole. The result, among other things, was the stripping of the West’s industrial capability, increasing its balance of trade deficit, creating endless supply chain bottlenecks, and increasing its vulnerability and reliance on the outside world.

Despite the negative description above, the US, so far, remains the biggest and strongest economy and the US Dollar remains the main trade currency, the main reserve currency held by the world’s central banks, and the number one safe haven currency. Also, we should by no means ignore the huge American agriculture capacity that has fed and continues to feed a substantial number of the world’s population.

But at the same, we cannot disregard the huge and important changes that are rapidly occurring elsewhere in the world, especially as most of these changes seem intent on competing directly, commercially and economically with the US and the West. Nor can we disregard the well-published data signaling a shrinkage in the West’s global market share and the gradual erosion of the US Dollar hegemony.

And once we add the increasingly belligerent geopolitical tug-of-war between the US and its allies against Russia, China, and part of the Global South, it quickly becomes apparent that the world is on the verge of a major historic and permanent split into two or more camps.

Regardless of who fares better in the coming split, it is clear that the economic development that began a few years ago in Russia, China, Eurasia, the Far East, and the Global South has been positive and impressive, and is likely to be more so if it continues – and all indications point to its continuity.

On this basis, it is logical to assume and expect a huge growth of business and investment opportunities in those changing countries (East and South), both quantitative and qualitative. Bear in mind that those markets are still more or less virgin in that they have not reached their market or financial peaks and have ample room for additional growth. The crown jewel here is that most of the available business and investment opportunities are in the “real” economy and not fictitious paper or pencil-pushing based. Many comprise opportunities in the industrial and agricultural fields and are thirsty for smart capital. The services, trading, and real estate sectors are similarly poised for development by those with proven know-how and expertise.

It is therefore not surprising to see Turkiye begin, a few years ago, to turn its attention Eastwards, especially after a decades-long frustrating wait for the glorious EU membership approval that never arrived.

But the true attention head-spinner is Iran’s resetting of its compass from West to East. After more than two millennia of looking West, Iran has at long last realized that its future lies in the East. Obviously, the US and West’s animosity, accompanied by an endless series of harsh sanctions, and the unlikelihood of a return to the nuclear agreement has not only tipped the Iranian scale away from the West but pushed it firmly eastwards where it sees a much brighter and mutually beneficial future.

As such, Iran began a couple of years ago with a mega multi-year investment agreement with China worth approx. $400 Mill to develop and upgrade its oil and industry sectors. It then joined several segments of the Belt & Road Initiative (the new Chinese Silk Road) as well as signed a joint venture agreement with India to develop Iran’s Arabian seaport of Chabahar as a main trade transit hub. In the process, it has significantly increased its trade with its northern, eastern, and southern neighbors and the trend appears continuing. On another front, it has recently jointly inaugurated the north-south route from Saint Petersburg through Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea all the way to the Arabian sea and henceforth to India and Asia. This is claimed to be a very fast and economic route and is another potential competitor to the Suez Canal. And finally, only last week, it signed a batch of agreements with Russia, including one with giant Gazprom to develop its many gas fields.

On the international organizations’ side, Iran joined last year the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO), which is an important Asian economic and security cooperation organization. Turkey is a Dialogue Member and new applications are expected from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt. Similar developments are in progress in other Asian and Global South international organizations.

It is clear that the chess board layout is rapidly changing, and opportunities are aplenty. There is no logical reason not to head East and South… remember the early bird is usually well rewarded.

Just a few guns…

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American.

You may have heard on the news about a Southern California man who was put under 72-hour psychiatric observation when it was found he owned 100 guns and allegedly had 100,000 rounds of ammunition stored in his home. The house also featured a secret escape tunnel.

By Southern California standards, someone owning 100,000 rounds is considered “mentally unstable.

BUT…

In Michigan, he’d be called “the last white guy still living in Detroit.”

In Arizona, he’d be called “an avid gun collector.

In Arkansas, he’d be called “a novice gun collector.”

In Utah, he’d be called “moderately well prepared,” but they’d probably reserve judgment until they made sure that he had a corresponding quantity of stored food.

In Kansas, he’d be “A guy down the road you would want to have for a friend.”

In Montana, he’d be called “The neighborhood ‘Go-To’ guy.”

In Idaho, he’d be called “a likely gubernatorial candidate.”

In Georgia, he’d be called “an eligible bachelor.”

In North Carolina, Virginia, WV, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina and Minnesota he would be called “a deer hunting buddy.”

AND,OF COURSE,

In Florida , he’d just be “a guy who’s a little short on Ammo.”

Doomsday Approaches: Scientists Say That The Earth Will Run Out Of Usable Topsoil In 60 Years

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What will we do when we inevitably run out of topsoil?  This month, I have written a number of articles that show that the clock is ticking for humanity.  We are systematically destroying the planet that we live on, and we are already witnessing mass extinctions of plankton, insects and birds.  Our food is full of poisons, our water is full of poisons and the air that we breathe is full of poisons.  And it gets worse with each passing year.  But one thing that I haven’t talked about recently is the loss of our topsoil.  95 percent of the food that we eat comes from the soil, and so if we have no soil we have no food.  This is a crisis that has been building for decades, and now we are rapidly approaching a major crisis point.

The amount of land that is used for agriculture all over the world has been steadily climbing for decades, and the intensive farming techniques that have been employed have resulted in a staggering loss of topsoil

But beneath the feet of Iowa’s farmers, a crisis is unfolding. The average topsoil depth in Iowa decreased from around 14-18 inches (35-45cm) at the start of the 20th Century to 6-8 inches (15-20cm) by its end. Relentless tilling and disturbance from farm vehicles have allowed wind and water to whisk away this priceless resource.

The same picture is seen on farms worldwide. Soils are becoming severely degraded due to a combination of intensive farming practices and natural processes. As the layer of fertile topsoil thins, it gets increasingly difficult to grow crops for food. Without altering agricultural practices and urgently finding ways to preserve soil, the global food supply starts to look precarious.

According to Time Magazine, “soil is being lost at between 10 and 40 times the rate at which it can be naturally replenished”, and the outlook for the future is extremely bleak.

Sadly, this is even true here in the United States.  When early Americans first started to settle in the Midwest, a very thick layer of extremely dark topsoil was there to greet them.

But now that topsoil is rapidly disappearing, and what remains is soil that is “often much lighter in color”

The soil that’s darkest in color is widely known as topsoil. Soil scientists call this layer the “A-horizon.” It’s the “black, organic, rich soil that’s really good for growing crops,” says Evan Thaler, a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

It’s full of living microorganisms and decaying plant roots, also called organic carbon. When settlers first arrived in the Midwest, it was everywhere, created from centuries of accumulated prairie grass. Plowing, though, released much of the trapped carbon, and topsoil was also lost to wind and water erosion. The soil that remains is often much lighter in color.

I remember the thick, black soil that I could dig my hands into when I was a child.

I would love to experience that again, but the soil in the Midwest is far different today.

In fact, it is being estimated that the Midwest has lost 57.6 billion metric tons of topsoil already…

Since farmers began tilling the land in the Midwest 160 years ago, 57.6 billion metric tons of topsoil have eroded, according to a study published recently in Earth’s Future.  The loss has occurred despite conservation efforts implemented in the 1930s after the Dust Bowl, and the erosion rate is estimated to be double what the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says is sustainable. Future crop production could be severely limited if it continues, reports Rachel Crowell for Science News.

“Future crop production could be severely limited” is a nice way of saying that everyone is going to starve if something doesn’t change.

And that could happen a whole lot sooner than many people think.

According to the UN, all of our topsoil could be gone “within 60 years”

Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday.

About a third of the world’s soil has already been degraded, Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told a forum marking World Soil Day.

Maria-Helena Semedo actually made that statement back in 2014.

So that means that we don’t actually have 60 years left.

If that projection is accurate, we only have 52 years remaining until all the topsoil is gone.

And one expert recently told CNBC that there are actually some places in the world that “have already lost all of their topsoil”

“There are places that have already lost all of their topsoil,” Jo Handelsman, author of “A World Without Soil,” and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CNBC.

The impact of soil degradation could total $23 trillion in losses of food, ecosystem services and income worldwide by 2050, according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

2050 is only 28 years away.

Of course horrifying global famines will inevitably arrive long before we get to that point.

And we are actually hastening the demise of our soil by our own behavior.

Today, agricultural lands all over the planet are being saturated by trillions upon trillions of microplastics.

The amount of plastic that we produce continues to rise at an exponential rate, and that means that the amount of microplastics raining down on our farms will continue to rise at an exponential rate.

As the level of plastic in the soil keeps going up, it is going to become increasingly difficult to grow much of anything.

I know that the information in this article is difficult to take in, but it is vital that you understand what is ahead of us.

We aren’t just facing an economic collapse.

The truth is that what we are actually facing is the collapse of everything.

When I say that the clock is ticking for humanity, I am not exaggerating one bit.

Unless something really dramatic happens, we are heading into a future that is going to be far more horrible than most people would dare to imagine.

How Americans take care of their elderly..

I am 82 years old, I have 4 children, 11 grandchildren, 2 great-grandchildren and a room of 12 square meters.

I no longer have a home or expensive things, but I have someone who will clean my room, prepare food and bedding, measure my pressures and weigh me.

I no longer have the laughter of my grandchildren, I don’t see them growing, hugging and arguing. Some come to me every 15 days, some every three or four months, and some never.

I no longer work in the winter, I don’t bake cakes, I don’t dig up the garden. I still have hobbies and I like to read, but my eyes quickly hurt.

I don’t know how much longer, but I have to get used to this loneliness. Here at home, I lead group work and help those who are worse than me as much as I can. Until recently, I read aloud to an immobile woman in the room next to me, we used to sing together, but she died the other day.

They say life is getting longer. Why? When I’m alone, I can look at photos of my family and memories I brought from home. And that’s all.

I hope that the next generations will understand that families are born to have a future (with children) and that they do not forget about the family even in old age.

Please don’t show this to my children.

Grandma Maria loves you.

Chinese live in multi-generational homes…

From HERE

Many families have a growing number of multi-generational members, and the housing costs that can accompany such a large population can add up quickly. In these situations, Multi-Generational Homes can be a great option. These properties are usually built with several different floor plans in mind. For example, young adults often move home with their parents after college, but they don’t necessarily need a place to live. In many cases, the home will be used by the whole family, and the members of each generation can enjoy the same living space.

home builder

Many family members find that living in a large house offers several benefits, including easy home financing. In addition, because the family will be living under one roof, financial obligations and responsibilities can be shared among the various members. According to a former mortgage broker, multi-generational homes are particularly advantageous for managing property expenses. For example, you can share utility and insurance bills with each other, and two construction loans can be merged into one.

Many Asian cultures have multi-generational homes as a natural part of everyday life. South Asians have a common saying that the kids are their parents’ retirement plan. In many cultures, grandparents are a central part of family life and teach respect for the elderly. In addition, they pass on cultural traditions and a connection to their ancestry. But with rising housing costs and limited real estate, more families are opting for multi-generational homes.

Multi-generational homes can provide financial benefits during challenging times and allow family members to stay close to one another. They are also more flexible than traditional single-family homes and can accommodate multiple uses. So, whether you have multiple generations or only need space for one family, these homes are the ideal solution. There are several benefits to having this type of home. And they don’t have to cost a fortune. And, as long as you have the land and the financial means, you’ll be happy with your choice.

Having several generations in a household can be difficult. It’s essential to have separate living spaces for each generation. Those with older relatives will appreciate the privacy and independence of their aging parents. Children will appreciate privacy. A multi-generational home can also provide financial benefits when the elderly need extra help. The benefits of these homes are many. They can provide comfort to multiple generations and help their families avoid expensive medical costs.

For those with aging parents, multi-generational homes are an ideal compromise. While their parents are still independent, the adult children can live with them and save for a new apartment. Likewise, a multi-generational home can also be a transitional home for a college student. This type of home is often the right choice for your family. And it can also be a great financial benefit if you have elderly parents.

Building a multi-generational home is a smart choice for many reasons. First, the financial benefits are immense. A multi-generational home can be ideal for parents and their adult children to live. A single-family can enjoy the freedom and security of a single home while having the convenience of two separate homes. Finally, the multi-generational structure will allow your parents to live closer to their elderly parents if your family is older.

Multi-generational home is an excellent choice for aging families. A multi-generational home can be a wonderful investment for all family members. The added benefits of a multi-generational home include the convenience of having a large space for the elderly. In addition, they can be a good fit for all of your family members. There are also several benefits to living in a community with multiple generations.

Having a multi-generational home allows you to enjoy the benefits of a single home for your family members. It is also beneficial for the elderly, who may want to live close to their parents, as they will not have to worry about finding someone to care for them. Having a multi-generational home will also avoid the costs associated with multiple mortgages. A multi-generational home can also help you save on taxes, as your income will be more stable.

Police constable Neman Ashraf tells his story…

On June 1st, at around 2 in the morning, we received information of an eight years old girl brought to a private hospital, unconscious, injured and bruised. The man who had brought her left the premises without staying after only informing that the girl works at his home as a maid.

Police responded immediately upon learning of the news.

Condition of that girl was critical, a few officers remained at the hospital and others left to find the suspect or any pieces of information about him who had fled the scene.

His name is Hassan, a young man living at a posh and decorated housing society, well off family, rich people. Husband, wife and their child… an infant. They were keeping the girl “maid” whose name is Zahra as “help” to take care of their son.

But as the doctors shared medical reports of the victim, we learned that the girl beaten but physically “sexually abused” too as there were signs of bleeding. She was raped.

City’s Police Chief took notice of the matter right away and ordered registration of a case against the offenders with charges of attempted murder, rape and more. There was no complainant, no family of that girl present as her parents lived hundreds of miles away and had willingly gave their daughter in service of those people in return of money.

Police became complainant, and registered the case.

Minutes after that, the girl passed away.

Hunt was on, dozens and dozens of cops were dispatched to trace out the culprits and within a day, both of the accused, the husband and his wife were arrested, murder charge had been added to the case as of now, and this is where I personally and most probably my colleagues too went into shock of a lifetime.

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Arrested for the repeated rape, murder, and death of a 8 year old girl who was their slave.

Confessions, so horrific that make me say “May lord have mercy”.

That man abused the child to death as a “punishment”, for what you ask? For mistakenly opening their parrot cage that led to one of their parrots flying away.

That is it.

Wow. I mean… is that all there is to make a child subject of such gruesome endless torture and abuse?

There were videos found in his mobile phone that depicts the true horrors of what happened, the pain and misery the little Zahra went through, and all of this done by someone we’d otherwise consider a perfectly fine sensible person by his appearance.

12 injuries including vital injuries at the private parts, folks. I won’t share the images out of respect for the dead as well as for some of you will drop everything and feel like your heart skipping its rhythm. An eight years old baby girl. At such age, children giggle and roam free of worries, don’t they?

Of course, I’d consider her parents responsible of this despicable atrocity equally, as It was their duty to ensure their safety and well-being of their child. I can understand, that people are poor, needy and that people do let their children work in other people’s home for money.

Very respectfully, I don’t agree with that, and consider it insanely wrong. No matter how poorer or needy I get, I’d never let my child be on the mercy of another soul, I’ll never let my child be in service of a master simply because that’s a child we’re talking about for goodness sake!!! Those who do find it feasible, I’m not going to criticize them, they may have their reasons, but I fail to see a good one and I condemn the practice strongly.

So yea,

Zahra is gone.

I feel like she is up there in heavens, very contented of finally getting rid of all those who pained her.

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We are committed to ensure justice for the little angel, Sternest conviction and befitting punishment to be ensured. We the cops; owe it to her at the very least.

Tomahawk Steak

Tomahawk steak is the classic steak that Fred Flintstone ate, according to Omaha Steaks. It’s an over-the-top, larger-than-life, bone-in ribeye steak, meant to impress. It’s similar to the Cowboy Steak with one difference: The Tomahawk has a larger bone.

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This Reverse Seared Smoked Tomahawk Steak is slow smoked to perfection and then reverse seared over a hot griddle and served with a delicious garlic and herb butter compound. The result is an incredibly juicy and tender steak with a crisp outer crust that is packed with smoky flavor!

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Why You’ll Love This Recipe

  • The reverse sear method – Reverse searing is the process of cooking (or in this case smoking) steak slowly and at a low temperature before searing on a hot griddle to finish it off. This results in an incredibly tender and delicious piece of meat with a nice crust on the outside. A Blackstone and pellet grill works great for this recipe, but additional searing options are listed below.

 

  • Great for special occasions – A tomahawk steak is a rather expensive cut of beef but the next level flavor and all around presentation make it a fantastic cut of meat for a special occasion.
  • Garlic and herb butter compound – This tomahawk steak recipe is served with a delicious butter compound made up of fresh herbs and garlic that adds even more flavor to this cut of meat.

Tomahawk Steak vs Ribeye Steak

A tomahawk steak is essentially a fancy bone-in ribeye steak. This thick cut of meat is butchered leaving at least 5 inches of rib bone in tact on the steak. A cowboy steak, also a bone-in ribeye, has a shorter bone than the tomahawk.

A tomahawk ribeye typically has great marbling (meaning more fat throughout the meat muscle). In addition, it’s an extremely tender cut of beef. Because the rib bone of the tomahawk is left in tact, much of the juices are preserved helping to give it its fantastic flavor!

Ingredients Needed

For Smoked Tomahawk

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For Butter Compound

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For Butter Compound

Ingredient Notes

  • Tomahawk Ribeye Steak – You’ll often find this cut of meat at your local butcher rather than the regular grocery store. Look for thick steaks (approximately 2 inches) with good marbling.
  • Avocado oil – this helps the dry rub spices adhere to the steak. You can also use olive oil.
  • Butter or Ghee – Sear the steak in butter or ghee for even more flavor! Ghee is a fantastic paleo alternative to butter.

How To Smoke A Tomahawk Steak

  • Pat the steak dry with paper towels and apply a thin layer of the avocado oil over the entire surface of the steak.
  • In a small bowl mix the sea salt, pepper, granulated garlic, and dried thyme. Rub dry rub all over the outside of the steak including the sides of the steak, and press it in.
  • Set your tomahawk steak aside and allow it to come to room temperature for approximately two hours prior to beginning the cooking process. This will ensure a more even cook.
  • Preheat the Traeger or other pellet smoker to 250 degrees F when ready to cook.

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  • Insert the temperature probe of the meat thermometer into the thickest part of the steak. Place the steak directly on the hot grill grates and smoke at 250F until the internal temperature reaches 115 degrees F and then remove the steak from the smoker. (The time will vary based on the size and thickness of the steak).
  • While the meat smokes, mix all ingredients for the herbed compound butter in a small bowl. Place the bowl in the fridge until ready to serve.

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  • When the steak is nearing the end of the cook, add the ghee (or butter) to a preheated cast iron skillet or a preheated blackstone griddle and allow it to melt (being careful not to let it burn).
  • Add the steak to the hot griddle and sear for 2-3 minutes per side until the internal temperature of the steak reaches 135F or your desired doneness.
  • Let the steak rest on a cutting board for 5 minutes before serving topped with the compound butter.

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  • When the steak is nearing the end of the cook, add the ghee (or butter) to a preheated cast iron skillet or a preheated blackstone griddle and allow it to melt (being careful not to let it burn).
  • Add the steak to the hot griddle and sear for 2-3 minutes per side until the internal temperature of the steak reaches 135F or your desired doneness.
  • Let the steak rest on a cutting board for 5 minutes before serving topped with the compound butter.

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Recipe FAQ’s

Why should I let the steak rest?

Resting steak after cooking makes a big difference as it allows the juices in the steak to redistribute throughout the meat rather than drain out upon cutting immediately.
The internal temperature will continue to rise as your steak rests which is why it’s important to remove steak from the heat source prior to it reaching the internal temperature you desire.

At what internal temperature is steak done?

The USDA suggests an internal temperate of 145 degrees F plus a 3 minute rest for steak. However, cooking times and temperatures will vary based on your desired degree of doneness. I always recommend using a meat thermometer, like the meater+.

In addition, steak should be removed from the heat source when the internal temp is about 5 degrees lower than your desired level of doneness to prevent it from overcooking as it rests.

Rare – 125 degrees F
Medium Rare – 135 degrees F
Medium – 145 degrees F
Medium Well – 150 degrees F
Well Done – 160 degrees F

Source: certifiedangusbeef.com

Can I make this steak on a charcoal grill?

Yes! While the process differs slightly, you’ll still get a great charcoal smoke flavor on a grill without an electric smoker. The process involves cooking the steak over indirect heat before a hot sear with more airflow. This is a great article on How to Reverse Sear a Tomahawk Steak on a charcoal grill.

A Disease That Can Make It Feel Like Someone Is Peeling Your Skin With A Potato Peeler Is Spreading At An Exponential Rate

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I would highly recommend that you take this new global monkeypox outbreak very seriously.  On May 6th, there was one case.  Now it has spread to 78 countries and there are 14,945 cases.  In nation after nation we have seen monkeypox cases take off at an exponential rate, and that includes the United States.  Monkeypox cases have now been confirmed in 45 U.S. states, and the total number of U.S. cases has jumped to 2,102.  Any chance of containing this disease is gone, and that is really bad news.

Many have pointed out to me that this virus has been spreading primarily among those that are engaged in certain types of risky sexual activity, but that is not the only way that it spreads.

A bartender in Dallas named Luke Shannahan recently got monkeypox, and he is not quite sure how he contracted it

He’s not sure exactly how he got it, but Luke was contacted by the Dallas Health Department who told him he may have been exposed to monkeypox.

“I was at bars. I was going to pool parties. I did attend a music event over the weekend and recently all of those people have been becoming positive,” Luke said. “Apparently it was a contact tracing phone call.”

It is entirely possible that he was engaged in sexual activity that he is not admitting.

But if it is true that a lot of people that were at the same music event ended up contracting monkeypox, that would suggest that it is spreading fairly easily even in casual settings.

After the call from the Dallas Health Department, he was given a monkeypox vaccine, but that didn’t prevent what came next

Shannahan was administered a monkeypox vaccine after he was diagnosed, but still became bedridden for two days and felt so ill he feared for his life.

I keep making the same point, but most people out there still don’t seem to get it.

This is not the same monkeypox that we have dealt with before.

Scientists are telling us that there are approximately 50 key mutations that set this virus apart from previous strains of monkeypox…

But in the new study, when microbial genomics researcher João Paulo Gomes of Portugal’s National Institute of Health Dr. Ricardo Jorge (INSA) and his colleagues compared 15 virus samples from the current outbreak with viruses isolated from people who traveled to West Africa in 2018 and 2019, they found that the present-day virus had mutated about 50 times in just four years.

So the truth is that we may be starting from square one because this virus is radically different from anything that we have previously faced.

And as I have warned in previous articles, this is a virus that you definitely do not want to catch.

According to Shannahan, any time that one of the sores on his skin touched something, it felt like “someone is taking a potato peeler to your skin”

Revealing his illness, Shannahan told KHOU 11: ‘It’s just the most traumatic experience I’ve ever had. It’s the worst sick I’ve ever been.

‘You have these blisters that are inflamed and anytime it grazes something or touches something, it literally feels like someone is taking a potato peeler to your skin.’

It turns out that Shannahan has also had COVID, but he says that monkeypox is “100 times worse”

‘The pain and tenderness was constant,’ he said.

Asked whether it was like Covid, he said: ‘Oh, 100 times worse. this was a totally different level of extreme fatigue.’

If the number of cases continues to rise at an exponential rate, it won’t be too long before monkeypox is literally everywhere.

So what will we do then?

If it can spread among people gathered at a music festival, then it can also spread at a church, at a store or at a school.

Will health authorities ultimately decide that extended lockdowns are necessary?

And will the general public start clamoring for such lockdowns?

Let’s hope not.  Personally, I don’t want to see lockdowns in the United States ever again for any reason.

But once people start to understand the sort of pain this virus causes, there will be a lot of panic among the general public.  Shannahan says that during his worst days it was as if “someone took a ball of needles and kept on stabbing you with it”

“The pain and tenderness was constant,” Shannahan said. “It’s like if someone took a ball of needles and kept on stabbing you with it.”

Of course Shannahan is not the only victim that is speaking out.

Another victim named Gabriel Morales says that he spent eight days alone in his apartment in “excruciating pain” after he contracted the virus…

Although he was covered with lesions, it took four hours of phone calls, and then five hours in a Harlem emergency room, for Gabriel Morales to be tested for the monkeypox virus earlier this month. And that was just the beginning of his wait.

Mr. Morales was sent home and told the Department of Health would call with his results in less than a week. The call never came.

He spent the next eight days alone in his apartment in what he described as excruciating pain, trying to find someone to prescribe him pain medication and a hard-to-access antiviral drug.

Doesn’t that sound fun?

If this virus is not contained, we could soon have millions upon millions of victims suffering through the most intense pain that they have ever experienced in their entire lives.

And just about everyone else could be in a state of full-blown panic because they are so fearful of catching the virus themselves.

There is a very real possibility that this plague could cause even more panic than COVID, and so it is absolutely imperative that authorities get this thing under control.

Unfortunately, many experts are now entirely convinced that it will be impossible to do so

It has been a mere nine weeks since the United Kingdom announced it had detected four cases of monkeypox, a virus endemic only in West and Central Africa. In that time, the number of cases has mushroomed to nearly 13,000 in over 60 countries throughout Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, new parts of Africa, South Asia, and Australia.

The growth in cases and the geographic spread has been rapid and relentless.

Now, even as global health officials race to curb spread of the virus, most experts polled by STAT said they don’t believe it will be possible to contain it.

For the record, I specifically warned that something just like this would happen.

Now that day has arrived.

I am still hoping that the numbers will start to level off and that this crisis will start to fade.

But I have been closely watching the numbers each week and so far that has not happened.

In fact, I believe that the WHO will soon officially declare that we have another global pandemic on our hands.

An era of great pestilences is here, and none of our lives will ever be the same again.

American Host REACTS to FACTS about CHINA

"China is run by engineers. - We're fucked."

This is a fun video. Please check it out.

Yankee Pot Roast

Pot roast has been a long-time popular dish in New England, especially appreciated on long, cold winter nights. Food world icon James Beard claimed that the dish’s roots can be traced back to France—apparently, French immigrants displayed their cooking method, à l’étouffée, for tenderizing meats, and thus the pot roast was born.

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Pot Roast

This pot roast recipe is an easy and absolutely delicious dinner! The trick? Canned onion soup! This recipe has been in my family for decades, passed down from generation to generation – and it’s the absolute best!

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Pot Roast

My grandmother came up with this pot roast recipe, simply using a big beef chuck roast, cans of condensed onion soup, potatoes and veggies. That’s it! Assembly takes just a few minutes, before you pop your pot roast in the oven and let it slow cook for four hours. For tender, flavorful pot roast, follow these steps. It can’t get easier!

Ingredients for Pot Roast

  • Boneless beef chuck roast – boneless beef chuck roasts make the best pot roast! I do not recommend chuck shoulder roasts for pot roast. A shoulder roast is a different cut of beef that is leaner and doesn’t shred as well as boneless chuck!
  • Canned French Onion Soup – onion soup will flavor your roast in a delicious premade oniony beef broth without the extra effort of making your own broth! My grandma always used Campbell’s Condensed French Onion Soup because of its rich flavor. It’s delicious. This is not an ad!
  • Fresh herbs (optional) – I like to add fresh herbs like rosemary and thyme to my onion soup broth for aromatics. It’s the perfect extra touch! This is optional.
  • Potatoes and root vegetables (optional) – although this step is optional, why not cook your sides in the broth with your pot roast? I like using baby red potatoes and baby carrots. You can also add cubed rutabagas, turnips, pearl onions or shallots!

How to Make Pot Roast

  1. Choose the right piece of meat in the grocery store! You want a 3 to 4 pound boneless chuck roast. A chuck shoulder roast is not the same thing! Make sure the size of your pot roast is between 3-4 pounds so the cooking time listed below gives you the best results!
  2. Place your chuck pot roast in a roasting pan. I use my 12x10x2 inch roasting pan. You’ll want a pan that’s large enough to fit your roast and deep enough to fit the broth!
  3. Add 4-5 cans of onion soup, so your roast is mostly submerged in liquid. I usually end up using five 10.5 ounce cans.
  4. Add as many potatoes, carrots and other veggies that can fit without the soup overflowing out of the pan! If your potatoes or vegetables are large, cut them into rough cubes.
  5. If you want to add in some herbs, pinch off a small handful of rosemary and thyme from the sprigs. If you only have dried herbs, you can use them instead!
  6. Cover your pan tightly with foil and place your pot roast in a preheated 300-degree oven for 4 hours. You might want to place a baking sheet or a few sheets of foil on the bottom rack of your oven to catch any juices that overflow!
  7. Let your pot roast slow cook for those 4 hours, untouched! At 4 hours, your roast should reach an internal temperature of at least 190 degrees for tender pot roast. Carefully take your roast out of the oven and enjoy, with lots of spoonfuls of that delicious onion soup broth.

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Pot Roast

Ingredient Substitutions

  • Fresh herbs – substitute dried herbs for fresh herbs.
  • I do not recommend using dried onion soup mix!

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Use 4-5 cans of soup so that the pot roast is mostly covered in onion soup broth.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the best cut for pot roast?

Boneless beef chuck roast is the best cut of meat for pot roast. A chuck shoulder roast is not the same thing! A shoulder roast is a different cut of beef that is leaner and doesn’t shred as well as boneless chuck roast. The shredded texture of chuck pot roast is unmatched!

Is pot roast beef or pork?

Pot roast is a beef dish, made by slow cooking (braising) an inexpensive, typically tough cut of beef in liquid. The liquid is usually a rich broth that not only tenderizes the beef but flavors it! Looking for slow-roasted pork instead? Try this Pulled Pork recipe!

What are the best potatoes for pot roast?

The best potatoes are baby red potatoes. They fit well in a roasting pan without cutting them, and baby red potatoes have a thin skin and a waxy texture that stand up well to slow-cooking.

What to do with leftover pot roast?

My favorite way to use leftover pot roast is to make a pot roast sandwich! Use rye or your favorite bread, slather with mustard, and stack with shredded hot or cold pot roast. There’s nothing better in the world!

How long is pot roast good for?

A cooked pot roast should last for up to 5 days in the refrigerator.

How to reheat your pot roast?

Reheat your pot roast by shredding it into small pieces in the broth, covering with foil, and heating in the oven at 350 degrees until hot. If you’re really in a pinch, place shredded pot roast, broth and veggies in a microwave safe covered dish and heat in increments of 30 seconds until hot.

Can you freeze pot roast?

Absolutely! Pot roast freezes very well, although the veggies might get mushy. I recommend using frozen pot roast within 3-4 months.

What to Serve with Pot Roast

One of the best parts about this pot roast recipe is that it’s easy: your veggies and potatoes (the side dishes) go right into the pan to slow cook with your roast for a complete dinner!

Root vegetables like carrots, turnips and rutabagas are classic accompaniments for pot roast. I love using a blend of veggies, along with baby potatoes and pearl onions or peeled shallots. They’ll absorb all the rich flavors of the onion soup broth, which is just AMAZING!

You can also serve your pot roast with Homemade Yeast Rolls, Buttery Crispy Potatoes Anna, Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes, or Roasted Carrots & Leeks.

From the ex-con forum…

I did 15 years in prison and when I got out it was like being on another planet. Everything had changed so much and it was so overwhelming, I couldn’t even walk into a store or just be around everyday people without panicking and sweating, words couldn’t describe how I felt… I stayed at a men’s shelter for 11 months and did any kind of work I could do. I got a car, got my own place and met a woman who changed my life. I’m a plumber, but I had been gone so long and so much had changed that I was scared to get back into plumbing, plus I had 20 years probation. I was blessed to be given the greatest Probation Officer in the world, who after time had faith and believed in me. Don’t get me wrong, when I screwed up and/or got too cocky she let me know who was in charge and hammered me!! But I kept proving myself and she would give me a little more and a little more lead way which also built my confidence in myself. That’s how a P.O. should act and treat you, especially as long as I had been down. I would not have or be in the situation that I’m blessed with if it wasn’t for having the Probation Officer I was given…. Thank you Kimiko..

My P.O. gave me the ok to work at a plumbing Company and I was rusty as hell and felt stupid but I stuck with it. Plumbing prices had gone up 4 to 5 times higher from when I got put in prison and it blew my mind. I made. 40 cents an hour in prison and now I was making $20 an hour and I was in heaven. I kept giving people breaks on the jobs I did, especially the elderly and it wasn’t going over good with the company and we butted heads over me doing this where I finally said that I think I can do better on my own and the owner laughed and said, “ Good luck “… They just thought I was a crazy old long hair and didn’t know what I was talking about…

So I talked with my P.O. and she gave me the green light to start my company. I hit the ground running. I contacted the Contracting Board , took the written part of the test and had to go before a 6 member panel and prove to them verbally and with documentation that I had turned my life around, because I was a felon. So I spoke (and I can talk) for 45 minutes and… they unanimously agreed to give me my Plumbing License…Ha!!!😎😎😎 . Just another thing all the know- it-alls said that I wouldn’t be able to get and/or do…I had built my credit up and got a $15,000 loan and started hitting up property management companies and started getting jobs and worked 12 to 14 hour days… that was 4 years ago and I haven’t looked back!! I let all the companies that I work for and all my long time regular customers know that I was in prison. All the stories you heard from the guys who got out and came back saying, “nobody will hire you or you can’t get a job”.. I don’t believe it!!! People LOVE the underdog and come back stories, you might get a few who are ignorant, but for the most part people WANT to see you succeed and go out of their way to help you anyway they can….

I just bought my 3rd house , I have 2 guys working for me and the work just keeps coming in… i don’t advertise, only the artwork on my van and business cards …word of mouth is the best. At my 5 year mark of being out I got a lawyer, petition the court to consider letting me off probation and the judge granted my motion and terminated the 15 years of probation I had left.. which rarely happens and guess who said THAT would never happen….the haters.…I was a drug addict and I was a hot mess and I wouldn’t have any of this if it wasn’t for my God and my Sobriety. I promised my God, myself and my daughter that I would do everything I could not to be that person that I was, if he could just help me make it out of prison alive. God kept up his end of the bargain and I have been sober since the day they put handcuffs on me on December 23rd 2000… And the woman I met… She’s my best friend, my beacon of light and loves me to death and she went and married me and it will be 4 years this December of 2021 and I’ve never been so happy!! It’s like a dream come true. I get to open my eyes every morning seeing this angel …. Thank you God!!

I was released from prison June 12th, 2015….

The reason I’ve written this long ass post is to try and pass on …it CAN be done!!! Don’t listen to the know-it-alls that got out and kept coming back inside saying how “you can’t do this, or you can’t do that”.. they didn’t want to put the work in!!! I did EVERYTHING they all said that I wouldn’t be able to do..I didn’t write all this to brag, I wrote this to let y’all know your dreams can come true after you get out no matter what you did… go for it!

An event at the Kroger Grocery Store…

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“I went to Kroger tonight wearing one of my husband’s sweatshirts. I got in line to check out and the man in front of me asked if the sweatshirt was mine.

I said ‘oh no, it’s my husband’s.’ It caught me pretty off guard, to say the least. He then asked if Austin was with me so he could say thank you and I just said ‘thank you, but unfortunately, he’s deployed right now.’

The man then, without hesitation started putting my groceries up on the belt with his and told me he was paying for my groceries tonight.

I was speechless.

The only thing I could get out was, ‘oh my gosh, are you sure, thank you so much’ almost a dozen times. He said, ‘that place over there almost took me away from my wife and my four kids. Promise you’ll stay true and honest to him while he’s gone and love him like you’ve never loved him before when he gets home.’

I’m still in shock over an hour later.

There’s still so much good in the world and we need to start focusing on that rather than focusing on all the bad.”

Oligarchy or Patriarchy? Rule by the Few or Rule for the Many?

By Batiushka for the Saker Blog

Introduction: Capitalism or Communism?

A commentator on this site recently accused me of being ‘a visceral anti-Communist’! I was quite amused (but also grateful, as he has inspired this essay). Such an accusation goes back to the old twentieth-century apparent abyss between ‘Left and Right’. Actually, although I have always been a social conservative, I have also always been for social justice, as I have said elsewhere. This would make me, I suppose, both left and right. Indeed, I have elsewhere (in the USA) been accused of being a ‘Socialist’, though it does not take much to be accused of Socialism in the USA. The word ‘justice’ alone is usually enough.

How do we square the circle, reconcile the apparently irreconcilable difference, as it seemed in the last century, between left and right? Let us look at the two systems of governance in today’s world, the Western system of the 13%, which is in effect rule by the few, in Greek called ‘Oligarchy’, and the system of the world’s 87%, rule for the many, which I will call ‘Patriarchy’. (Here I blatantly ignore the stereotypical feminist rejection of such a word, because it means something quite different to what hidebound Western feminists, imprisoned by their ideology, understand by it).

Oligarchy

Oligarchy (1) is simply Neo-Feudalism, rule by robber-barons, in this case, the financial barons who live in their contemporary castles. This is why Oligarchy is Anti-National, Anti-Sovereign, Anti-Traditional Religion, Anti-Traditional Culture, Anti-National Infrastructure and Anti-Family (2). This is why Oligarchy, through its CIA and other assets, has over the generations brought down so many monarchies and national governments, like that of De Gaulle in France in 1968. It does not mind fictitious monarchies, as in the UK, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Spain, as they are simply businesses, manipulations of the masses for large sums of money.

The Oligarchy does not like national identity, it destroys nation-states, as in the EU, for it wants ‘World Government’, which is code for World Dictatorship. This is the Dictatorship of the uprooted, which is why the Jewish component in it is strong (Jews have been uprooted ever since the Romans uprooted them in 70 AD). Oligarchy is based on the priority of accumulating money and therefore guarantees corruption, instability and the boom-bust cycle, because it rules by the financial sector. Hence the importance of Wall Street in New York, The City in London, Frankfurt in Germany and La Bourse in Paris. Hence the importance in all these countries of financial indices, which, so strangely, are always announced in their national news by their media.

Although Neo-Feudalism is also called Neo-Liberalism and is more commonly still known by the euphemism ‘Democracy’, it is run on the base profit motive, known by the euphemism ‘Monetarism’. It is certainly not Democracy because political parties are controlled by ultra-wealthy ‘donors’ and ‘lobbies’, that is, by the Oligarchy. This is why Democracy is also unfairly called ‘Demonocracy’, the choice for voters between a moron and a cretin. Very sadly, judging by recent leaders of the US/UK/EU, perhaps that is not so unfair, for most Western leaders are indeed oligarchs (Bush, Trump), or else the puppets of oligarchs (Macron, Draghi). The Oligarchy’s aim is always to preserve its elitist privileges.

No wonder there are so many conspiracy theories around covid, for example, that the Oligarchy invented covid because it wanted to kill off or zombify seven billion plus in order to create more resources for itself. By definition the profit motive of Oligarchy has no interest in the majority of the world because it wishes to strip their natural resources. Another word for this is ‘Parasitism’. The Oligarchy plunders the rest of the world. This strategy is enforced very aggressively by militaristic crusades (just as in the twelfth century, except now with high tech), forcing others to sell off (‘privatise’) their land, mineral resources, utilities and infrastructure to the Oligarchy’s agents.

This is why the Oligarchy is dominated by two sectors: finance and militarism, by its aggressive economic and military warfare against the rest of the world. Any who resist are threatened by economic sanctions or bombing (‘back into the Stone Age’). This is why the USA has 750 foreign military bases, spread across 80 nations. (After the USA is the UK, with one fifth of the US population, so with ‘only’ 145 bases) (3). Therefore the Oligarchy creates clients around the world wherever it can. These vassals follow exactly what the Oligarchy tells them to do. In other words, they are ‘zelenskyised’, for the Oligarchy has as its strategy looting the rest of the world, as in the Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc etc.

Patriarchy

‘Patriarchy’ is rule for the benefit of the people. Patriarchy, exactly the opposite of Oligarchy, is Pro-National, Pro-Sovereignty, Pro-Traditional Religion, Pro-Traditional Culture, Pro-National Infrastructure and Pro-Family. The four great traditional religions of the world, Orthodox Christianity (and its cousin of Latin American, African and Asian Catholicism), Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, are Patriarchal. The bulk of the world, over 6 billion people, Russia, most of Asia (China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam…), Africa and Latin America, confess Patriarchy, ‘throne, altar and cottage’ (4). Thus, in the Tsar’s Russia, the State ran the economy through private investors, competing for contracts granted by the State.

Today, China, ruled by Chinese Nationalism, even though it is called Chinese Communism, does much the same, though shunning the central planning that discredited Communism in the Soviet and Chinese past. India does the same. They let people get rich by being creative, by being productive, but add a component of social and national responsibility through reference to the national religious/philosophical ideology. Wealth is to be used widely, for the Nation is a higher value than mere lucre. Although we can find exceptions of corrupt oligarchs, they are the exceptions that prove the rule. When the exceptions get caught in China and Belarus, at least, they are taken out and shot, in China in prison yards, in Belarus in the forest And oligarchs do not always have an easy time of it elsewhere.

The Patriarchal countries of Iran, pre-invasion Iraq, Libya and Syria, Russia and China are the enemies of the Oligarchy because they create industrial development by creating their own infrastructure, they provide everything to help do business and create the conditions for the potential prosperity of all. Patriarchy also provides free education and healthcare. This is exactly what ‘autocratic’ Prussia and Russia did five and six generations ago, with free education and healthcare, social insurance and pensions. Patriarchy provides the infrastructure for the basic human needs of the working people.

The Oligarchy called Patriarchy ‘Autocracy’ (Moghul India, Imperial China, pre-1917 Russia), and now call it ‘Socialism’ or ‘Communism’, because these are the opposite of their elitist ‘Democracy’. Their ‘Democracy’ is what is dictated by Oligarchy. Any country that goes its own way or develops the potential power to go its own way, such as China and Russia, is called a ‘Dictatorship’ by the Oligarchy’s paid hirelings in its propaganda mouthpieces, which it calls ‘the Western media’. For Oligarchy sells off State services like education, healthcare, schools, universities, hospitals, roads, railways and public utilities, water, electricity gas and telecom, in order to pay dividends to shareholders. This is why countries like China and Russia are the Oligarchy’s enemies.

Patriarchy is any country that is strong enough to make its own investments in its national infrastructure, any country strong enough to tax or control the financial sector. Patriarchy keeps banking in its own hands, so that it can finance the creation of infrastructure. It does not create money to lend to speculators to increase their profits, it creates production. So the chief public utility to be kept under the control of the Patriarchy is the banking system and credit creation. Patriarchy promotes just economic development. It prevents people from getting rich merely because they do not provide any productive service.

Conclusion: Why is Oligarchy Supporting the Ukraine?

Today the Ukraine is the battlefield where these two systems, Oligarchy and Patriarchy, are competing. The future of the whole world is being decided there. The Oligarchy has become embroiled ever more in its proxy war there because it intends to destroy Russia so that it can then destroy China. However, in order to do this, the USA must first finish off Russian-supplied Europe. The European elite has followed the Oligarchy’s dictates because its leaders are all only other ‘zelenskies’, whose strings are also pulled by the Oligarchy’s same puppeteers.

This is why the dollar has recently been rising against the pound sterling and the euro (and also the yen). However, seeing this, other countries are seeking alternatives and the USA is threatened with dedollarisation. There is no end game in the Ukraine for the Oligarchy. Meddling in Russia and Europe has meant heading towards economic meltdown. The Oligarchy is now pulling down an iron curtain on the Western world, not to protect it from some imagined foreign military attack, but to imprison the peoples of the USA, UK, EU, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. As those peoples cotton on, this will end badly for the Oligarchy.

The Ash Street Shoot-out.

This event honestly sounds like something straight out of a 90s action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Our story begins with US Army Ranger Bill Foulk.

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Sgt Foulk (the guy with the glasses in the center) with some of his Ranger buddies

In 1989, Foulk decided that he wanted to make plans for his life after service; maybe settle down, marry a nice girl, start a family. Live the American Dream. In order to start, he bought a small house on Ash Street in Tacoma, Washington for $10,000 ($23,572 today).

 While all that was happening, this handsome lad, Ronald Reagan, was the 40th president of the United States. During his presidency he had many ideas, and one of them was his infamous War on Drugs. You see, in the 1970s, drug use had become a huge problem in the United States, so Reagan proposed that we should crack down on drugs through eradication, interdiction, and incarceration.

However, this backfired. Spectacularly.

Drugs became an even bigger problem, and they facilitated the rapid rise of street gangs, including the notorious Crips. As they expanded, they moved from their original territory in California all the way up to Tacoma, Washington.

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The Crips, a notorious street gang that operated in the West Coast

As they moved into Tacoma, they decided that Ash Street would be a good place to do business. Soon, the entire neighborhood had basically become an open-air drug market.

Neighbors repeatedly called 911 on drug dealers and buyers, but to no avail. The Tacoma Police Department was hilariously underfunded, outnumbered, and overstretched. They could do little but watch as the gangs took control of the streets.

This was the situation when Sergeant Foulk returned to his house after participating in Operation Just Cause in 1989. He quickly became annoyed with the drug problem and began videotaping the buys. Neighbors started doing the same. Eventually, an article was published in The News Tribune on September 21, 1989.

“A group of a dozen neighbors who live in the area of South 23rd and Ash streets said they are on the verge of vigilante action because police have failed to curtail drug dealing around their homes.”

In order to show solidarity, Foulk invited his neighbors to a barbecue.

Foulk also called a couple of his buddies from the 2nd Ranger Battalion. Oh, and he also mentioned to them that they might want to bring their guns. You can probably see where this is going…

On September 23, 1989, the Saturday barbecue began. While the meat was grilling and the neighbors were talking, a car full of Crips drove by. As they did, all of them pointed finger guns at Foulk and his guests.

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The finger gun.

The meaning was clear; “we’re going to smoke you tonight.”

As it got dark and the neighbors left, Foulk and his Rangers took up defensive positions around his house. At some point, a car pulled up and two gang members got out. One of them took BB gun shots at the video camera Foulk had set up.

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Gangbangers

Foulk, fearless, stood up and walked across the street to the two hooligans and calmly requested that they leave his house alone. Probably high on drugs, they decided to respond by getting in his face and yelling that Foulk didn’t know who he was dealing with.

Foulk responded by saying that no, it was them who had no idea who they were dealing with.

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Army Rangers in Panama during Operation Just Cause

The gang member responded with, “You’re history, bitch!” As they walked away, Faulk heard one of them say, “I’m gonna shoot that Army SOB.”

Shortly after, he returned to his house and turned out the lights, signaling to his Ranger buddies to get ready. And then, at 9:20 pm, all hell broke loose.

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Imagine being so stupid that you think attacking these guys is a good idea

Dozens of Crip gang member surrounded the house and opened fire. The Rangers returned fire. In just 10 minutes, over 300 shots were fired.

The Crips had entered the night laughing and high, probably expecting an easy target. Instead, they ended up having to run for their lives. None of the Rangers were injured.

The incident drew national attention. The Tacoma police department finally got the resources they needed in order to effectively fight the gangs.

And the most legendary part? Bill Faulk, who is now retired and married at 67 years old, still lives in the same house: 2319 Ash Street.

From HERE

Brendan Fraser

A cocktail of circumstances contrived to make Brendan Fraser one of the most universally liked people on the planet right now.

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Brendan Fraser

Firstly, in his career he literally came out of nowhere and starred in a run of some of the defining movies of many peoples childhoods. In those movies such as ‘George of the Jungle’, ‘Dudley do-right’, ‘Blast from the Past’ and of course the ‘Mummy’ franchise, he almost invariably played the intensely likeable, funny, often naive, handsome, hero role. As a result people still mainly remember him in those terms.

Secondly, he has a tragic backstory. After his prime in the early naughties, he more or less disappeared off the face of the earth, appearing in less and less movies and becoming more famous for his dramatic weight gain than any acting roles:

For a while he was mocked for this in the press, however it has since come out that in 2003 he was the victim of a sexual assault by a very senior Hollywood player (allegedly Phillip Berk, the head of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association). At around the same time, his wife divorced him and the judge imposed crippling $900,000 dollar per year alimony payments on Fraser, which he was unable to make, and his mother died. He also suffered serious injuries from the many stunts he had performed over the years, leading to a knee replacement, major spine surgery and vocal chord surgery (he legally died for 18 seconds on the set of ‘The Mummy’ when a hanging stunt went wrong and he was hanged for real). All of these events sent Fraser into a deep depression which caused his weight to spiral out of control and his choice to speak out against his powerful abuser caused his career to stall. With this outrageous run of bad luck, it’s not hard to see how Frasers story inspires sympathy.

Thirdly, perhaps surprisingly considering his experiences, he seems like a genuinely nice guy. Despite his financial troubles, he donated his entire salary from the 2013 film ‘Gimmie Shelter’ to the woman’s shelter featured in the film, he always seems to have time for fans and no one ever seems to have a bad word to say about him, which is quite an accomplishment for someone who has spent 30 years in Hollywood.

All in all, Fraser comes across as a nice guy whom a large majority of people think fondly of whom has had an amazingly bad run of luck, and obviously many people are happy to see him come out the other side of that. The fact that he’s still a pretty great actor with a charismatic screen presence helps as well. He’s currently experiencing a strong career resurgence on TV with more movie roles coming along the tracks, and he actually seems pretty happy. People like to see people they like coming back from adversity, it’s like watching a friend or family member you had been worried about finally sort their life out and seem like everything is going to be ok.

Tales of America…

“I thought someone else would do something…”

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March 13, 1964. 3 a.m

Catherine’s friends called her Kitty.

She was young, just twenty-eight, and petite. Tiny really.

And on this particular night, she was screaming for her life, as loudly as she could. After all, there were people all around. Someone would have to hear her.

Right?

Her shouts went on for thirty minutes, as her killer sliced her, mutilating her body.

38 neighbors heard her scream.

38.

How many tried to help her? How many called the police?

None.

Why?

“I thought someone else would do it.”

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April 28, 2010. 5:30 a.m.

Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax, a homeless man in Queens, New York, threw himself into action as he saw another man trying to mug a woman.

He was stabbed, several times and collapsed, lying on the sidewalk.

His wounds were bad, but they shouldn’t have been lethal.

He laid there for an hour before bleeding to death.

Video footage showed 20 people pass his body.

20

One rolled his body over and just walked away. Another snapped a photo of him bleeding out but couldn’t be bothered to call an ambulance.

When help finally arrived. Hugo was dead.

Why did no one stop to help?

“I thought someone else would do it.”


What are the most deadly, most horrible words?

“I thought someone else would do it.”

The bystander-effect is this idea that we assume someone else will react, that they’ll do something, so we walk on, literally to the point of ignoring murder.

It’s a cycle too: we don’t react and we assume because others are calm too that nothing was ever wrong in the first place.

“I thought someone else would do it.”

That string of words is responsible for more losses, more deaths, than we can possibly imagine.

Tales of China…

Be the Rufus. It’s our highest calling.

Just some Rufus videos taken in China. I put them on you-tube. Hopefully they will not be banned. Imagine that! Videos that you can watch in communist China are banned in the USA. Who would have thought!

Finally,

I am officially banned from LinkedIN. All efforts to recover my extensive account, and work history is not accessible.

But it’s a shrug of the shoulders and a “Meh. So what” moment.

It’s probably for the best.

But, you know, it’s a sign of the times.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Questions of our times, and BANG, a new reserve currency is announced by China and Russia today

“They should have understood that they (The United States and it's proxy nations) have already lost from the very beginning of our special military operation, because its beginning means the beginning of a radical breakdown of the World Order in the American way. 

This is the beginning of the transition from liberal-globalist American egocentrism to a truly multipolar world – a world based not on selfish rules invented by someone for themselves, behind which there is nothing but the desire for hegemony, not on hypocritical double-standards, but on international law, on the true sovereignty of peoples and civilizations, on their will to live their historical destiny, their values and traditions and build cooperation on the basis of democracy, justice and equality. 

And we must understand that this process can no longer be stopped.” 

-Putin

Guys, I’m in the middle of a move from my one house in JiDa to Zhongshan, so things will be a bit scarce. I will try to keep things a flowing, but don’t freak out by the density of the work.

American “Democracy”

American democracy
“Democracy” American style.

$270 million in new military aid to Ukraine; Officially Considering Supplying US War Planes

The United States on Friday signed off on another $270 million in military aid to Ukraine including four new Himars precision rocket systems.

The fresh aid will bring to 20 the number of M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems sent to Ukraine and also includes up to 500 new Phoenix Ghost tactical drones, White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

Kirby also confirmed publicly the United States Air Force is considering donating U.S. A-10 “Warthog” ground-attack aircraft to Ukraine.   This was reported verbally on the Hal Turner Radio Show a full 48 hours ago, but only now — 2 days later — is the Pentagon publicly confirming that earlier report.

Fork-Tender Pot Roast in the Oven | Roast Beef Recipe

Savory, fork-tender Pot Roast smothered in a rich brown gravy just might be the most wanted comfort food dish of all. This one, in particular, shines far above the rest thanks to a few simple steps other recipes are leaving behind. This is everything you need to know to make a killer Pot Roast every single time.

Today, in addition to a must-have recipe, we’ll cover the simple formula for a foolproof, perfectly tender pot roast, how to know if you’ve been searing all wrong, easy steps to add more flavor to your roast, and lastly, how to take your gravy from good to great without a reduction!

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THE SECRET TO PERFECTLY TENDER POT ROAST

When it comes to making a perfect, fork-tender pot roast, it’s all about cooking the right cut of meat low and slow, at the right temperature, in the right amount of liquid…for the right amount of time. When all of these factors come together perfectly, you are guaranteed a fork-tender pot roast every single time. The best cut of beef for a fork-tender pot roast is beef chuck shoulder roast, and a three-hour braise is perfect for a 4-5 pound chuck shoulder.

Braising sounds technical, but all it means is that you are cooking something partially in liquid (not necessarily submerged), in a covered dish. Dutch ovens are going to be your best friend for this cooking process.

COOKING ROAST BEEF IN A DUTCH OVEN

Dutch ovens are by far the best product out there for braising meats, which is exactly how we are going to be cooking our pot roast. Using the Dutch oven for cooking your roast beef allows you to build an incredible amount of flavor in just one vessel. It is also an excellent even-heat distributor because of its thick cast iron makeup. Here is a simple overview of how we will cook out roast beef in the Dutch oven:

  1. Season and sear the meat.
  2. Sauté the vegetables.
  3. Add in the braising liquid and the roast.
  4. Cook low and slow for 3 hours.

ARE YOU SEARING THE WRONG WAY?

The perfect pot roast recipe is all about building flavor, and the sear is where the flavor begins. After the roast is seared, it leaves behind a plethora of savory fats and juices on the Dutch oven floor. Then, the vegetables take a turn in all that beefy goodness, picking up on all those left-behind flavors. Once the vegetables have softened slightly, a bold braising liquid goes in, picking up on everything both the beef and the vegetables had to offer.

But, before we can get to the end, we must start at the beginning, and as I said before, it all begins with a proper sear.

2 ESSENTIAL TIPS FOR SEARING MEAT

  1. To prepare the roast, you should first pat it dry with a paper towel to remove any excess water from the cut of beef. This step is essential to getting a good sear on the roast before braising, which in turn, equals flavor.
  2. When searing a roast, you want to be sure that your meat is not going into the Dutch oven ice-cold. For the best sear, allow your roast to sit out at room temperature for about 30 minutes.

DON’T FORGET TO SEASON LIBERALLY

Once the excess water has been removed, season the beef liberally with your favorite seasoning. Adding the seasoning directly to meat will help to build flavor. I use my personal favorite, TAK House Seasoning. It’s a mix of Kosher salt, black pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder, and it’s perfect for beef.

In addition to a fair amount of seasoning, we’ll also coat the roast in flour before searing.

THE OIL MATTERS AND THIS IS WHY

The type of oil you use for the process of searing is important. To get a good sear on the meat you must work with medium-high to high heat. Canola oil has a high smoke point, which means that it does not quickly burn, or quite literally begin to smoke as fast as let’s say, butter, which has a low smoke point. You can use an oil other than Canola, just make certain it has a smoke point of 400° or higher.

KEEPING THE VEGETABLES SIMPLE

After a nice crust has been developed from searing, the beef goes out, and the vegetables go in for a quick sauté. This is an elegant, yet simple pot roast, and calls for only onions and carrots from the vegetable department. The carrots add a subtle sweetness to an otherwise savory dish, and they’re absolutely perfect coated in a thick and luscious pot roast gravy.

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A GRAVY THAT REQUIRES NO REDUCTION

To achieve a thicker consistency for your pot roast gravy, adding just a little flour to the vegetables before adding in your braising liquid is key. This approach also eliminates the need for any sort of stovetop reduction after the pot roast has finished its stint in the oven.

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WHY YOU SHOULD USE WINE IN YOUR BRAISING LIQUID

Earlier, we touched upon a couple of things throughout the searing process that would help us to build flavor in our pot roast. Now, we’ll bring that flavor full circle with a perfect ending of red wine, beef broth, and fresh herbs. A bold red wine like merlot or cabernet sauvignon will enhance the flavor of your pot roast and take it from good to spectacular.

After you’ve added your braising liquid to the mix, your roast goes back in, the Dutch oven is sealed, and it will need to cook for three hours total. Half-way through the cooking process, you’ll turn your roast, ensuring both sides are picking up on all of those amazing flavors.

Remember, the braise is quite likely the most important part of the whole recipe, and allowing your pot roast to cook low and slow for the right amount of time will ensure a perfectly tender pot roast every single time.

As soon as the cold winds finally start to drift into Texas, we gladly welcome them with open arms. And naturally, I begin to yearn for those hearty and warming dishes we love so much, and I don’t know that there is another meal in existence that speaks more loudly to this craving than this here very pot roast.

Braised low and slow until fork-tender, smothered in a rich and savory gravy, and variegated with soft, sweet carrots. It is the epitome of comfort food. It’s a recipe that requires only simple preparation, time, and a hearty appetite.

The You-Tube Video

And, here’s the video on how to make the above…

We arrested a father just after he had killed his own adult brother that was living with the family. A doctor and the arrestee’s 11-year-old daughter’s statement made it clear that the uncle had raped the child many times over the last several months resulting in her getting pregnant, which is why she was taken to the doctor.

The family had been told to call us when the suspect got home, but the father got home first and shot his brother in rage when the suspect arrived. The father then called us, said he had killed his brother, made no effort to run, and was standing in front of his house with his hands up when officers arrived. We had no legal choice but to arrest him.

The result was that the case was carefully walked through the district attorney’s office to obtain a DA reject and the father was released the next day, no charges filed. I still smile when I think about the instant justice of this case and how the father was treated with empathy since any father would want to kill someone who had raped his 11-year-old daughter.

The low part of the trip to Vietnam

Imagine that! Americans surprised that they are not imagined as heroes, and Rambos…

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Czeslawa Kwoka, Polish Catholic, 14 years old.

She died in the Auschwitz extermination camp on 18 February 1943 with an injection of phenol into her heart.

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She died in the Auschwitz extermination camp on 18 February 1943 with an injection of phenol into her heart.

Shortly before the execution, she was photographed by the prisoner Whilem Brasse, who testified against the executioner of Czeslawa, a woman who, before the photo was taken, hit her in the face, as the haematoma on her lip shows.

We only see the face of a terrified little girl, who did not even speak their language and who had lost her mother a few days earlier.

She was one of about 250,000 children and minors murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The photo, originally in black and white at the Oświęcim Memorial, was coloured by Brazilian professional photographer Anna Amaral, who was impressed by Czeslawa’s photo and decided to make it available to everyone in colour.

Russia And China Officially Announce A “New Global Reserve Currency”

And once again, as happens often with consequential news in the United States and the West, no one has noticed and no one seems to care.

If you’ve blinked over the last month, you may have missed it…

China and Russia are taking their shot at the U.S. dollar. And as often happens with consequential news in the United States and the West, no one seems to notice or even care.

Since the beginning of the year, I have been writing about the possibility of Russia and China challenging the US dollar’s global reserve status. Now, it’s happening.

It shouldn’t be any surprise to those paying attention that Russia and China are strengthening their economic ties amidst continued Western sanctions on Russia as a result of the country’s war in Ukraine.

What may surprise some people, however, is that Russia and the BRICS countries, including Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, are officially working on their own “new global reserve currency,” RT reported in late June. Nobody even seemed to notice.


“The issue of creating an international reserve currency based on a basket of currencies of our countries is being worked out,” Vladimir Putin said at the BRICS business forum last month.

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And of course, as Russia has been cut off from the SWIFT system, it is also pairing with China and the BRIC nations to develop “reliable alternative mechanisms for international payments” in order to “cut reliance on the Western financial system.”

In the meantime, Russia is also taking other steps to strengthen the alliance between BRIC nations, including re-routing trade to China and India, according to CNN:

President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia is rerouting trade to "reliable international partners" such as Brazil, India, China and South Africa as the West attempts to sever economic ties.

"We are actively engaged in reorienting our trade flows and foreign economic contacts towards reliable international partners, primarily the BRICS countries," Putin said in his opening video address to the participants of the virtual BRICS Summit.

In fact, “trade between Russia and the BRICS countries increased by 38% and reached $45 billion in the first three months of the year” this year, the report says. Meanwhile, Russian crude sales to China have hit record numbers during Spring of this year, edging out Saudi Arabia as China’s primary oil supplier.

“Together with BRICS partners, we are developing reliable alternative mechanisms for international settlements,” Putin said.

Putin continued, stating last month: “Contacts between Russian business circles and the business community of the BRICS countries have intensified. For example, negotiations are underway to open Indian chain stores in Russia [and to] increase the share of Chinese cars, equipment and hardware on our market.”

In June, Putin also accused the West of ignoring”the basic principles of [the] market economy” such as free trade. “It undermines business interests on a global scale, negatively affecting the wellbeing of people, in effect, of all countries,” he said.

Do not leave in a world consumed by hate…

Her name was Rebecca Miller. She was the younger sister of a high school friend, and she and I became good friends as well.

She was always a bit awkward, and until she met me, she had no other friends except her sister (my friend). She took every bit of criticism or pushback as a hostile attack. She never dated in high school, but she asked me out on a date once, to go bowling, and then she asked me to go to her senior prom (I was already in college in state, and still living at home). I found out years later, she did not ask me to go bowling because she liked me; she asked me as a test to see if I would be a decent date for the prom).

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1987. Rebecca came to visit December 25, because she hated her parents and didn’t want to spend Christmas with them. We are Jewish and don’t celebrate Christmas. I told her that, and she didn’t care. I think she actually had a nice visit.

She hated everyone. I was still inferior in her eyes, but she wanted to go to the prom. She used to joke that she had a list of people she hated, that went all the way back to her kindergarten years.

After high school (and one year of a local college for me) all three of us wound up at the same university in California. The two sisters shared a dorm, and I was in a neighboring dorm. We were very close throughout college, but I always had to be careful about what I said or did. Not only was she hateful, but extraordinarily judgmental.

She was an outspoken atheist, and I am Jewish. I wasn’t extremely religious (I’m still not), but I loved my community and culture, and spent a lot of time at the Hillel Jewish Center at my university. I couldn’t talk about any of that with Rebecca or even mention the center at all, or she would call me things like superstitious (which couldn’t be further from the truth). She also called me a cult member a few times.

Looking back, I wish I had had the backbone to break off our friendship, but that would have meant losing her sister’s friendship as well (Rebecca controlled who her sister was allowed to be friends with).

Toward the end of my senior year in college, I stopped hearing from Rebecca and plans kept getting cancelled. It turned out that I had made her hate list. Her sister was not allowed to tell me why or see me again.

As difficult as Rebecca was, I was a little sad, because we did have some good times together. I saw the two of them almost as relatives.

Then I got a 19 page letter from Rebecca, telling me what a horrible person I am. Here are some of the reasons she gave for hating me:

  • I was a sexual pervert for ogling women all the time in front of her (I am gay, and I wasn’t out then, but I never ogled women).
  • I practiced a religion (Reform Judaism) which she equated with being ignorant and superstitious.
  • I wasn’t as smart as she was (She was in MENSA; I took the MENSA test and only scored in the 96th percentile, missing admission by 2 percentiles)
  • I majored in linguistics, and she majored in chemical engineering. She didn’t want to hang out with non-scientists.

So she disappeared from my life for a few years. About 5 years after graduation, I received another multi-page letter from her asking for forgiveness. She had been seeing a therapist and was all better now. Dummy me, I forgave her and agreed to pick up our friendship where we left off.

It went a little better this time,except that she and her sister lived together in California and I was back home in Las Vegas. They came to visit a few times, and I visited her and her sister once.

Then…out of the blue, I got another huge letter. This one was more brutal than the last. I don’t remember all the points of this letter, but I do remember her accusing me of lying about having cancer (I really did have cancer) and she mentioned that she suspected I was gay, but it seemed more of an attack rather than a real suspicion. Some of the things she said in her letter indicated that she was somehow spying on me, which was bone-chilling.

This letter was around 2000 or so, and that was the last contact I had with her. Later I found out what happened to her.

Her sister found me on facebook around 2010, and told me that Rebecca had committed suicide, after a decade of really hostile, bizarre behavior.

It seems she became deeply involved in the occult. Then she became a born again Christian. She tried to convert her sister (also an atheist) with no luck, and eventually cut ties with her, other than bombarding her mailbox with religious literature for 10 years.

Then one day, the sister was notified of Rebecca’s death. Rebecca had specifically put in her will that her family was not to be notified, but apparently that was against California law. The sister did not cry any tears. Their mother was destroyed over it though.

Rebecca had planned her death meticulously. She found homes for her two dozen cats, and went online to research the chemicals and methods needed for asphyxiation.

The funeral had only two people there: The clergy and Rebecca’s mother. Rebecca’s sister waited in the car.

I felt a little sad over the whole thing, but also free.

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United States “defense” spending

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China’s official government point of view.

Please use this understanding in all discussions about “what will China do, or how will China react to American XXXXX”

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The Story of Netflix

Netflix is just the latest victim of a highly predictable cycle which has been going round and round for decades that entertainment companies for some reason seem completely unable to learn from.

  • Company introduces a service people like
  • Industry gets greedy and overexploits the model, increasing prices for everyone
  • Consumers find a way around paying ridiculous prices
  • something new comes along that re-engages customers and starts the cycle again.

When TV was first introduced, everything was basically free at the point of watching. Then cable and satellite came along and started putting certain premium programmes behind a paywall. At first people were OK with it, they were paying but also getting a decent service, however the cable services diversified further and further, segregating movies, sports, and everything else behind further and further paywalls. In the early 2000’s, I remember my friend working out that if he wanted to see all the sport he wanted to watch on TV it would cost him £200 per month in various cable and satellite services. A lot of money in 2005.

As a result, people started stealing cable. In the 90’s and 2000’s it was incredibly common for people to steal cable, almost everyone knew someone who could set you up with a dodgy set top box or a cable hookup. This acted as a bit of a brake on the cable companies who knew that if they pushed too hard, more consumers would just jump to stealing it.

Then the internet came along and blew the doors off the system. The problem with internet piracy is that its effectively unstoppable and there’s approximately zero chance of consequences. 20+ years since it first became a major issue, governments and corporations are still basically powerless to stop it. The only things stopping people from streaming everything is that:

  1. People don’t like stealing. And,
  2. Its a pain in the ass. It’s often difficult to get a good stream to the show you want and it takes a while.

Then Netflix came along around 2010 and seemed to offer a solution that worked for everyone – for a low monthly fee you got legitimate access to a huge array of movie and TV services all packaged in a slick and easy to use format. It more or less removed the motivation to pirate for a huge majority of people, and people got out of the habit.

Now however, the exact same thing that happened with cable has happened again. Companies have seen the kind of money that can be made from streaming and are now taking their shows off Netflix and segregating their content behind more and more paywalls on their own subscription platforms. We are basically back where we were 20 years ago with cable where you are paying £200 for access to a dozen platforms if you want to access a similar level of content that early Netflix offered, only now there is an even easier way to steal content. What do they think is going to happen?

U.S. Attempts To Make China An Enemy Require A Lot Of Fantasy

The U.S. weapon industry needs U.S. enemies. Without those it is hard to justify an ever growing war budget. The most lucrative enemy, besides Russia, is of course China.

But there is a problem. China has no interest in being a U.S. enemy and certainly not in being THE enemy. In its view that only takes away resources that are better used elsewhere.

That is the reason why China avoids talks with the U.S. about military and strategic issues.

CIA columnist David Ignatius thus laments:

China wants to ‘reduce misunderstanding’ with the U.S. It could start by talking.

ASPEN, Colo. — Chinese Ambassador Qin Gang assured a foreign policy gathering here this week that Beijing wants “to reduce misunderstanding and miscalculation” with the United States. If that’s true, why does China continue to resist a U.S. proposal to discuss “strategic stability” between the two increasingly competitive countries?

What have talks about ‘strategic stability’ to do with reducing misunderstanding and miscalculation? The later can be achieved in very simple low level talks between ambassadors or politicians. There is nothing ‘strategic’ needed about them.

President Biden said on Wednesday, before his covid-19 diagnosis was announced, that he expects to talk with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the next 10 days, and a senior administration official said the president’s agenda will include a renewed emphasis on the risks in the relationship, and the need to establish better communications. But, so far, the official said of the Chinese, “they haven’t taken us up” on a U.S. proposal for the stability talks.

The Chinese do not see and do not want instability so there is no need to talk about it. What they sees is a U.S. trick that would make it possible to designate China as an ‘enemy’.

Ignatius’ next paragraph demonstrates that:

This difficulty in developing a Sino-U.S. dialogue about strategic issues has frustrated the Biden administration. An important lesson of the Cold War was that nuclear-armed superpowers must communicate to avoid dangerous mistakes. But China has resisted arms-control talks even as it expands its nuclear arsenal, and as a result, it hasn’t learned a common language for crisis management in the way the Soviet Union did.

China is not in a Cold war with the U.S. It does not see itself as a U.S. enemy. There is no reason then to talk in Cold war language:

Biden first proposed the talks in a virtual summit with Xi last November, saying the two countries needed “common-sense guardrails to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict,” according to a White House statement at the time. Items on the agenda for such talks would include expansion of a 1998 agreement for avoiding maritime incidents, measures to avert dangerous military activities, and plans for a hotline and other crisis communication measures, the administration official said.

If there were more agreements over incidents and military activities would the U.S. be more or less aggressive in its action against China?

Why does the U.S. want a hotline and crisis communication? Would they not help the U.S. in provoking more incidents than it dares to do without them?

Rather than embracing what former Australian prime minister and China scholar Kevin Rudd calls “managed strategic competition” in a new Foreign Affairs article, Beijing insists the United States should return to its old policies of supportive engagement, which facilitated China’s rise. Like nearly every other Chinese diplomat I’ve encountered over the past decade, Qin often repeated the phrase “win-win cooperation,” which China sees as a cure-all for its increasingly testy relationship with Washington.

What is bad with a ‘win-win cooperation’? Why replace that with ‘strategic competition’?

China wants to have it both ways as a superpower: flexing its muscles without being seen as a bully. Xi has been explicit in his “Made in China 2025” plans for dominance of major technologies. But China “has difficulty in recognizing the relationship [with the United States] as competitive,” the senior administration official said. Instead, it responds to criticism from the U.S. and Asian regional powers with a wounded tone, as though to say, “Who, us?”

Lots of countries have lots of plans to have dominance in major technologies. The Netherlands (and German) have such a dominance in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, needed to make modern computer chips, as well as in several other fields. Other countries, France, South Korea, Japan, Russia, the U.S., have other industry sectors in which they are globally dominant. That is just the normal way of global capitalism in which countries seek to do their best not in all fields but in those in which they are better.

Framing a strong and sustainable U.S.-China policy remains the Biden administration’s biggest long-term challenge, despite the current preoccupation with the war in Ukraine. Beijing is the only competitor that could genuinely challenge the United States militarily, officials believe. But Ukraine has complicated U.S.-China policy — for both sides.

Now we come to the point. How please could China genuinely challenge the United States militarily? By invading Mexico and Canada or with a big landing force that threatens Los Angeles and New York? Why would China want do that?

Xi was surprised that the Biden administration, which the Chinese expected would be weak and ineffective abroad, has been able to rally global support for Ukraine. But despite Xi’s wariness of incurring sanctions, he remains firmly aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the senior administration official said. Hopes that the war might encourage a break between Beijing and Moscow were misplaced.

Ignatius has forgotten to take his meds. The ‘global support’ is the NATO, EU and the 5-eyes spying cooperation. Those are some 34 countries out of the 193 UN member states. Why did anyone expect that China would not take the neutral stand that the majority has taken? Those who did should be send back to school to learn a bit about rationality.

Enough with that blubber. Ignatius, like many other people in the Washington DC bubble, does not understand China and makes no effort to learn about it. These people just mirror what they think the U.S. would do and project that on a country that thinks in very different terms.

Another example of these ‘thinkers’ is Elbridge Colby:

Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial offers a blueprint for containing and combating China’s rise in order to preserve American freedom, prosperity, and security—emphasis on security. The argument turns on a very specific vision of China’s plans, which Colby does not attempt to link to actual Chinese policy or strategy for achieving hegemony in East Asia. The resulting prescriptions, although they’ve been lauded by some, are fatally flawed.

Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 to 2018, believes that China could pursue a “focused and sequential strategy” of threatened or executed “wars against isolated coalition members,” starting with Taiwan. He fears Beijing would do this in such a way that does not trigger a regional war but culminates in Chinese hegemony in Asia.

To prevent this, Colby believes the United States must pursue a “strategy of denial” to preserve U.S. dominance in Asia.

The problem is that there is no evidence that there is an actual ‘Chinese policy or strategy for achieving hegemony in East Asia’.

Colby provides no sources that claim such. He made up the ‘threat’ because he things that is what the U.S. would do if it were China.

The most glaring flaw is that Colby works off what he thinks China’s strategy should be, not the evidence about what it actually is. This is a particularly bad approach to analysis, because it makes mirroring or speculation easier to smuggle into predictions of adversary behavior.

A good defense strategy requires an understanding of how the expected adversary plans to fight. Yet he does not engage with Chinese military doctrine, Chinese strategic thought, or the robust debate in the United States about Chinese strategy and ambitions. Instead, he argues that because of uncertainty about China’s strategy, the United States should simply focus on China’s “best strategy” for winning Asia. In Colby’s words, “a state’s best strategy does not ultimately depend on what the state’s leaders think it is” because it relates to “objective reality.”

In consequence of his ‘garbage in’ process Colby’s output is likewise garbage.

Building a response according to an adversary’s “best strategy” also makes you much more likely to miss what that adversary is actually doing. Colby defends his approach of strategizing based on China’s “best” strategy by claiming that “Defeating a bad strategy is easier and less costly than defeating a good one.” Therefore, if the United States prepares for China’s best strategy, any real Chinese strategy should be even easier to handle.

In reality, the defense posture and investments needed to defeat an adversary’s “best” strategy might be significantly different from those needed to defeat an adversary’s second-best strategy.

Colby’s book is not about strategy but about spending as much money on a U.S. position of aggression towards China as possible:

Colby proposes that an American-led coalition impose a strategy of denial on China, blocking China’s ability to traverse the 80 miles of the Taiwan Strait. How to put the bell on the cat?

“Defending forces operating from a distributed, resilient force posture and across all the war-fighting domains might use a variety of methods to blunt the Chinese invasion in the air and seas surrounding Taiwan.”

The US and its allies might “seek to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft before they left Chinese ports or airstrips. The defenders might also try to obstruct key ports; neutralize key elements of Chinese command and control … And once Chinese forces entered the Strait, US and defending forces could use a variety of methods to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft.”

Colby leaves what means we might employ here to the imagination.

Like the first reviewer of Colby’s book this one also criticizes his factless starting position:

It isn’t so much that Colby gives the wrong answers. He fails to ask pertinent questions about Chinese intent and technological capability. Instead, he gives us a pastiche of generalities that obscure rather than clarify the strategic issues at hand.

In brief, Colby depicts China as an expansionist power eager to absorb territory, citing alleged Chinese designs on the Philippines and Taiwan on a half-dozen occasions – as if China’s interest in the Philippines were equivalent to its interest in Taiwan.

Garbage input producing garbage output topped with militaristic fantasies do not create a good strategy.

The problem is that in the next republican administration Colby will likely have another high Pentagon position.

That makes such dumb thinking a danger for the world.

Posted by b on July 22, 2022 at 15:59 UTC | Permalink

Pepe Escobar July 22, 2022
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NAM 2.0 drive – of which China is a key player – stands in stark opposition to how the Empire of Chaos – and Lies – wove its toxic net, via the war on terror, since the start of the millennium.

Those were the days, in 1955, at the legendary Bandung conference in Indonesia, when the newly emancipated Global South started dreaming of building a new world, via what became configured later in 1961 in Belgrade as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

The Empire of Chaos – and Lies – would never allow a starring role for NAM. So it played dirty: everything from hardcore subversion and bribing to military coups and proto-color revolutions.

Yet now, the Spirit of Bandung lives again, via a sort of NAM 2.0 on steroids: a Newly Aligned Movement, with the leaders of Eurasian integration at the vanguard.

We just had a taste of which way the geopolitical wind is blowing at the gathering of a new power troika in Tehran. Unlike Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in 1943, Putin, Raisi and Erdogan did not meet to carve up the world. They met essentially to discuss how another world is possible – through bilaterals, trilaterals, multilaterals and an enhanced role for an array of relatively new geopolitical and geoeconomic institutions.

Russia – and China – have been on the forefront of all recent key decisions. Their diplomacy has brought Iran to join the SCO as a full member. Their pull is attracting key Global South players to join BRICS+. Russia has all but convinced Turkey to join BRICS+, the SCO and the EAEU, and facilitated the re-approximation of Tehran and Ankara as well as Tehran and Riyadh. Russia has largely influenced the remake/remodel process across West Asia.

This NAM 2.0 drive – of which China is a key player – stands in stark opposition to how the Empire of Chaos – and Lies – wove its toxic net, via the war on terror, since the start of the millennium. The Empire tried to subdue what it described as MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) on the basis of two invasions/occupations (Afghanistan-Iraq); a total devastation (Libya); and a protracted proxy war (Syria). All eventually failed.

And that brings us to the stunning contrast between these two foreign policy approaches, graphically illustrated by the spectacular failure of the teleprompter-reading “leader of the free world” in his visit to Jeddah – he was not even allowed to go to Riyadh – compared to Putin’s performance in Tehran.

Not only we are witnessing the lineaments of a Russia/Iran/Turkey informal alliance; we are witnessing the alliance reading a soft riot act to the Empire: leave Syria, before you suffer yet another humiliation. And with a Kurd-directed corollary: keep away from the Americans and recognize the authority of Damascus before it’s too late.

Ankara could never admit it in public, but the fact is Sultan Erdogan – as much against US troops in Syria as Putin and Raisi – even seems to have swiftly calibrated his previous designs on Syrian sovereign territory.

The much-debated Turkish military operation in northern Syria in the end may be restricted to taming the YPG Kurds. The heart of the action will in fact revolve around how the Russia/Iran/Turkey/Syria alliance will make like impossible for Americans stealing Syrian oil.

As Russia is now on “take no prisoners” mode when facing the collective West – the mantra in every intervention by Putin, Lavrov, Medvedev, Patrushev – and on top of it firmly aligned with China and Iran, it’s inevitable that every other player across West Asia and beyond is giving undivided attention to the new game in town.

Go Caspian, Young Man

Interconnecting West Asia and Central Asia, the Caspian Sea has finally reached the geopolitical and geoeconomic limelight – complete with the groundbreaking consensus reached by the five littoral states at the Caspian Summit in late June to officially ban NATO from these waters.

Moreover, the leadership in Tehran in no time realized how the Caspian is the perfect, cost-conscious corridor from Iran to the heart of Russia along the Volga.

So it’s no wonder that Putin himself, in Tehran, proposed the construction of a key stretch of highway on the St Petersburg-Persian Gulf route, much to the delight of the Iranians. Cue to the nostalgic Great Game crowd in that former “rule the waves” island getting serial heart attacks: they could never imagine the Russian “empire” finally having full access to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf.

So we’re back to the absolutely crucial re-engineering of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC) – which will play for Russia and Iran a parallel role the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) plays for China. In both cases, it’s all about multimodal Eurasia-wide trade and development corridors immune from interference by the imperial Navy.

And here we see the renewed importance of the hyper-strategic liberation of Mariupol and Kherson by the Russian and DPR forces. The Sea of Azov is now configured as a de facto Russian lake – and the same will eventually happen to what is bound to remain of the (currently Ukrainian) Black Sea coast, Odessa included.

So we have the ultra-strategic Caspian-Black Sea maritime corridor – via the Volga-Don canal – seamlessly connected to the Black Sea-Mediterranean, and up north, all the way to the Baltic and the fast developing Atlantic-Pacific connector, the Northern Sea Route. Call it the Russian Heartland Water Roads.

The NATO/Five Eyes/Intermarium combo has absolutely nothing to counteract these (overland) facts on the (Heartland) ground except to throw a pile of HIMARS into the Ukrainian black hole. And of course, keep de-industrializing Europe. In contrast, those across the Global South with a keen sense of history – as in the grand debate of ideas in a Hegelian sense – and also versed in geography and trade relations are busy getting ready to hit (and profit from) the new groove.

Have strategic ambiguity, will travel

As much as it’s a blast to survey all the instances of Russia playing strategic ambiguity to levels capable of baffling the entire, bloated “Western intel” apparatus, what is coming to the forefront is how Putin – and Patrushev – are now willfully turning up the pain dial to tactically exhaust not only the Ukrainian black hole but the whole of NATOstan.

Western governments are collapsing. Sanctions are being ditched – practically in secret. A Deep Freeze winter is a given. And then there’s the incoming economic/financial crisis, the Definitive Monster from Hell, as Martin Armstrong has made it quite clear: “There is no way they can get out of this other than default. If they default, they are worried about millions of people storming the parliaments of Europe…This is really a tremendous financial crisis that we are facing. They have been borrowing year after year since WWII with zero intention of paying anything back.”

Meanwhile, Moscow may be revving up the turbines to launch – this coming Fall? In the middle of Winter? Next Spring? – a multi-spectrum Mother of All Offensives, capitalizing on a rolling series of interconnected strategies that have already rendered dazed and confused every NATOstan “analyst” in sight.

That would explain Putin looking like he’s cheerfully whistling JJ Cale’s Call Me the Breeze in most of his public appearances. In his crucial intervention at the Strong Ideas for a New Time forum, he enthusiastically promoted the advent of “truly revolutionary” and “enormous” changes that would lead to the creation of a new, “harmonious, fairer and more community-focused and safe” world order.

Yet that’s not for everyone: “only truly sovereign states can ensure high growth dynamics.” What that implies is that the unipolar world order, followed by states in the collective West which are hardly sovereign, is condemned to fail, as it’s “becoming a brake on the development of our civilization.

Only a self-confident sovereign who does not expect anything constructive from the collective West can get away with describing it as “racist and neo-colonial”, bearing an ideology that “is becoming increasingly more like totalitarianism.” In the old NAM days these words would be met with an assassination.

So will the “rules-based international order” be preserved? Not a chance, argues Putin: the changes are “irreversible.” For those about to rock, NAM 2.0 salutes you.

Living in an Asian country I realized that modern Western values of “rugged individualism” are silly… There’s a certain charm to it, but the multi-generational households of many non-Western nations are far superior in my view. I know many elderly Western people who take great pride in how “they’re still living independently on their own at eighty!” or whatever.

Then they turn, say, 85, 86. Their health begins to worsen. Children and grandchildren stage some sort of mini-intervention and… grandpa or grandma gets sent off to the retirement home. Is visited a few times a year, sometimes more, sometimes less. Withers away. Dies in about a year or two, tops.

In non-Western countries, I see elderly people living with their sons and daughters. They grow old surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Some manage to hold a great-great-grandchild before they pass. Children, cousins, nieces and nephews live in houses nearby. Old friends at a walking distance.

And I don’t know, but these old people who simply rely on family, to whom a thought of wanting to be “super independent” never occurs, who aren’t ashamed to “bother anyone” and live and die surrounded by younger relatives… they seem happier. More vibrant.

My grandfather wanted to die the moment he got old to the point of losing some of his mental powers, his physical prowess, his skills. He lessened and had to rely more on others and he was always taught from an early age: “sink or swim”. He told me of old inuit walking into a snowstorm and freezing to death because they were “useless” and how he’d wish to get lost in a blizzard somewhere and die in a white blaze of glory…

It’s immensely sad to me that he couldn’t have shared a household with me or one of my siblings and our kids. In another culture he might never have felt like a failure when Alzheimer’s hit him and he ‘lost it’. But in the West, he did.

Russia and America compared…

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Real life “John Wick”

I present to you Julian Sinanaj (pronounced Youleean Sea-nah-naay), an Albanian contract assasin that worked as a lone wolf. Trained by the Russians, he operated initially in Greece and later in Albania. In the first page of his notebook he wrote “Don’t say anything to anyone or you’re going to get killed”.

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He operated for 15 years in Athens where he comitted over 20 assassinations. When he felt threatened by his clients there, he decided to move to Albania where he comitted another 6 assassinations, until he was cought by the Albanian police in 2014.

All it took to organize a hit was to write a Gmail address named after the children’s socialist era movie “Beni walks by himself”. His nickname was “the cleaner”. Julian could shoot with both hands, with the same precision. In Albania he also took a full course on criminology in order to avoid detection and capture. (It didn’t work out that well)

Julian also had some rules he went by. He did not accept commissions out of anger. Or he would not attack the target when accompanied by his wife and children. You know, the “clean conscience” affair.

His capture was organized as an ambush when he lowered his guard, without an exchange of fire (which is how Albanian police usually operates). When the agents went to grab him, he offered quite a resistance despite being much smaller and thinner.

As a trained assassin he remained silent but his girlfriend buckled under pressure. She gave them his address and there they found weapons, explosives and a notebook with detailed information about his targets, including pictures.

Julian Sinanaj was able to avoid life in prison by confessing to everything. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Italian writer Andrea Galli wrote a book about him titled “Sicario. How to become a killer. A true story”

The rules of the brotherhood…

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UK Agency Re-working Law to ALLOW INSECTS as Human Food!

The United Kingdom “Food Standards Agency” has announced plans to review using INSECTS in — and as — human food.

Earlier this month, the Food Standards Agency put out this public notice:

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The fact tthat any government, anywhere, is even THINKING of this, is astonishingly bad.

In 81% of the “edible insects” studies have found parasites of which at least 30% are known to be potentially harmful to humans.

Not only that, but these insect parasites literally mess-up your gut bacteria, also known as your microbiome.  You can read that lengthy (and highly technical/boring) study  HERE

There are also stories claiming that earth’s TOPSOIL is fading fast, and “will be gone in 60 years” thereby necessitating that humans develop new food supplies You can read that story HERE.

There are also alerts coming out now that levels of Plankton in the Atlantic Ocean have fallen so dramatically, that the Atlantic Ocean is all but “dead” from a Plankton food perspective, and that without Plankton, the supply of fish will quickly dwindle to zero, because Plankton are the base of the entire sea food chain.

An Edinburgh-based research team says plankton, the tiny organisms that sustain life in the seas, has all but been wiped out. The team’s spent two years collecting water samples from the Atlantic and in a dire warning says this means the Atlantic’s ‘pretty much dead’.

At the bottom of the food chain, plankton is consumed by the krill which are fed on by the fish that, in turn, provide nutrition for terrestrial animals including billions of humans.

You can read about that study, HERE.

All in all, the world seems to be going in a very dire direction on many, many, levels.

Domino’s Pizza

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Lemon-Pepper Ribeye Filets with Roasted Tomatoes

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Ingredients:

  • 4 beef Ribeye Filets, cut 1 inch thick (about 4 to 6 ounces each)
  • 2 cups red and yellow grape or cherry tomatoes, cut in half
  • 2 teaspoons olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1-1/2 teaspoons lemon pepper

Cooking:

  1. Heat oven to 400°F. Combine tomatoes, oil, thyme, garlic and salt in medium bowl; toss to coat well. Arrange tomatoes, cut sides up, on metal baking sheet lined with aluminum foil. Roast in 400°F oven 30 to 35 minutes or until skins are wrinkled and begin to brown.
  2. Meanwhile, press lemon pepper evenly onto beef Ribeye Filets. Heat large nonstick skillet over medium heat until hot. Place filets in skillet; cook 10 to 14 minutes for medium rare to medium doneness, turning occasionally. Remove to platter; season with salt, as desired.
  3. Serve filets with tomatoes.
  • Wash hands with soap and water before cooking and always after touching raw meat.
  • Separate raw meat from other foods.
  • Wash all cutting boards, utensils, and dishes after touching raw meat.
  • Do not reuse marinades used on raw foods.
  • Wash all produce prior to use.
  • Cook beef until temperature reaches 145°F for medium rare steaks and roasts 160°F for ground beef.
  • Refrigerate food promptly.

Questions of our times…

Is this just someone’s opinion or is it objective fact?

"Truly revolutionary transformations are gaining momentum more and more. They are, of course, irreversible. Both at the national and global levels, the foundations of a more just, socially oriented world order are being worked out. An alternative to the existing unipolar world, which is becoming a brake on civilization. The model of total domination of the "golden billion" is unfair! Exclusivity based on the illusion divides peoples into first and second class, and therefore is racist and neocolonial. And globalist ideology is increasingly acquiring the features of totalitarianism. It seems that the West simply cannot offer the world its model. The West did not accidentally became powerful, but it gained its position largely due to the plunder of other nations. Therefore today its elites are panicking that other centers may present their own development models."

Hum…

Some of these statements are absolutely true. “We’re in for Truly Revolutionary Transformation”. And it is Irreversible.

And we’re all hoping that it will be “the foundations of a more just, socially oriented world order”. I for one believe that the root of ALL conflict IS perceived Injustice. It is very broad, and perhaps even difficult to know where to start. I think it is most important to start internationally. But we are completely at effect of various ministries of foreign affairs, many of which have a term of 4-5 years. Five years is too long to maintain “wrongheaded” policies, in these fast moving times.

So the populations are precluded from effective action by this bureaucratic momentum. The western nations, being of origin Christian, are all hoping for a savior. Now, Russia has been given this savior role, (in our minds), because they have finally stood up to western billionaires. It will crack a lot of nuts.

But will Russia take on this role to save the world? I highly doubt it.

Why should NOT Europe and America, and the other pipsqueak Australians and Canadians stew in their own juices? All of their acquiescent populations have failed to clean out the “corruption of conflict and violence” that runs their country, and sequesters their wealth to destroy peace on earth. Most often, increased stress is met with increased repression.

It is only billionaires that benefit from conflict. But it is always you that has to pay their way, in both gold and in blood.

Will the western populations make a move? It is not that they are asleep and could eventually wake up. They can’t. They are in 100’s of years of “going with the flow”, and avoiding all risks.

They were forced into 2 world wars with false flags and skewed reporting, but I am talking about the population’s inner desires.

The best way to avoid these risks is with blinkers, (those things they put on a horse to limit its peripheral vision). They put them on themselves. To try to change those 100’s of years of acquiescence will only produce immense
befuddlement, and lashing out.

Acquiescence is a social stage when reliance on “Our Laws” has been
achieved to uphold our present state of well-being, (for that part of
the majority that enjoys control).

In itself it is not necessarily bad or wrong. But movement from one social stage to another is very slow, even when conditions on the ground warrant it. Actually Russia was in the very same predicament, but then fortuitously the one word, NAZI, triggered a 70 – 80 year reset, and they are now fully willing to take
action.

The risk (of not taking any risks), is that the savior won’t come. You have to do it yourself. So no matter how positive armchair generals view Russian tactics and progress, and their potential against NATO: NOTHING IS ASSURED.

I view these discussions of an inevitable move toward social justice as dis  empowering diversions, that keep the billionaires in power.

Alastair Crooke  July 18, 2022
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Putin’s policy of cleansing the Augean Stables of ‘predatory western capital’ is music to the ears of the Global South, Alastair Crooke writes.

Of course, the conflict, to all intents, is settled – though is far from over. It is clear that Russia will prevail in the military war – and the political war too – by which is meant that whatever emerges in Ukraine after the military action is complete will be dictated by Moscow on its terms.

Plainly, on the one hand, the regime in Kiev would collapse were it to have terms dictated to it by Moscow. And, on the other hand, the entire western agenda behind the Maidan coup d’état in 2014 would implode, too. (This is why an off-ramp, short of a Ukrainian rout, is next to impossible.)

This moment thus marks a crucial point of inflection. One American choice might be to end the conflict – and there are many voices calling for a deal, or a ceasefire, with the understandably humane intent of ending the pointless slaughter of Ukrainian young men sent to ‘the front’ to defend indefensible positions, only to be cynically killed for no military gain, merely to keep the war going.

Though rational, the argument for an off-ramp misses the bigger geopolitical point: The West is so heavily invested in its fantastical narrative of imminent Russian collapse and humiliation that it finds itself ‘stuck fast’. It cannot move forward for fear that NATO might not be up to the task of confronting Russian forces (Putin has made the point that Russia had not even begun to use its full force). And yet, to cut a deal, to move back, would be to lose face.

And ‘losing face’ roughly translates to the liberal west losing.

The West thus has made itself hostage to its unrestrained triumphalism, posing as info-war. It chose this unrestrained jingoism. Biden advisers however, reading the runes of the war – of relentless Russian gains – have begun to scent another foreign policy débacle fast heading their way.

They see events, far from reaffirming the ‘rules-based Order’, rather the stark laying bare before the world of the limits to U.S. power – giving front of stage to not just a resurgent Russia, but one carrying a revolutionary message for the rest of the world (albeit a fact to which the West has yet to awaken).

Moreover, the western alliance is disintegrating as war fatigue settles in and as European economies stare at recession. The contemporary instinctive inclination to decide first, and think later (European sanctions), has landed Europe in existential crisis.

The UK exemplifies the wider European conundrum: The UK political class, frightened and in disarray, first ‘determined’ to knife its’ leader, only to realise afterward, that they had no successor to hand with gravitas to manage the new normal, and no idea how to escape the trap in which it is ensnared.

They dare not lose face over Ukraine and have no solution that meets the coming recession (except a return to Thatcherism?). And the same can be said for Europe’s political class: they are as deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming fast vehicle.

Biden and a certain network which spans Washington, London, Brussels, Warsaw and the Baltics view Russia from a height of 30,000 feet above that of the Ukraine conflict. Biden reportedly believes he is in an equidistant position between two dangerous and ominous trends engulfing the U.S. and the West: Trumpism at home and Putinism abroad. Both, he believes, present clear and present dangers to the liberal rules-based order in which (Team) Biden passionately believes.

Other voices – mainly from the U.S. Realist camp – are not so besotted with Russia; for them, ‘real men’ take on China. These want just to keep the Ukraine conflict at a face-saving stalemate, if possible (more weapons), whilst the pivot to China is activated.

In a speech at the Hudson Institute, Mike Pompeo made a foreign policy statement that clearly had an eye to 2024 and his taking the Vice-President spot. The gist of it was about China, yet what he said about Ukraine was interesting: Zelensky’s importance to the U.S. was contingent on his keeping the war going (i.e. saving western face). He did not explicitly refer to ‘boots on the ground’, but it was clear he did not advocate such a step.

His message was weapons, weapons, weapons to Ukraine, and ‘move on’ – through pivoting to China NOW. Pompeo insisted the U.S. recognise Taiwan diplomatically today, irrespective of what occurs. (i.e. regardless of whether this action triggers war with China.) And he rolled-up Russia into the equation by simply saying that Russia and China effectively should be treated as one.

Biden however, seems moved to let pass the moment, and to carry on with the present trajectory. This is also what the many participants in the boondoggle want. The point is that Deep State views are conflicted, and influential Wall Street bankers certainly do not warm to Pompeo’s notions. They would prefer de-escalation with China. Carrying-on therefore is the easy option, as U.S. domestic attention becomes fastened on economic woes.

The point here is that the West is comprehensively stuck: It cannot move forward, nor back. Its structures of politics and of the economy prevent it. Biden is stuck on Ukraine; Europe is stuck on Ukraine and on its belligerence towards Putin; ditto for the UK; and the West is stuck on its relations with Russia and China. More importantly, none of them can address the insistent demands from Russia and China for a restructuring of the global security architecture.

If they cannot move on this security plane – for fear of losing face – they will be unable to assimilate (or hear – given the ingrained cynicism that attends any words spoken by President Putin) that Russia’s agenda goes far beyond security architecture.

For example, the veteran Indian diplomat and commentator, MK Badrakhumar writes:

“After Sakhalin-2, [on an Island in the Russian Far East] Moscow also plans to nationalise Sakhalin-1 oil and gas development project by ousting U.S. and Japanese shareholders. The capacity of Sakhalin-1 is quite impressive. There was a time before OPEC+ set limits on production levels, when Russia extracted as much as 400,000 barrels per day, but the recent production level has been about 220,000 barrels per day.

The overall trend of nationalising the holdings of American, British, Japanese and European capital in Russia’s strategic sectors of economy is crystallising as the new policy. The cleansing of theRussian economy, freed of Western capital, is expected to accelerate in the period ahead.

Moscow was well aware of the predatory character of Western capital in Russia’s oil sector — a legacy of the Boris Yeltsin era — but had to live with the exploitation as it didn’t want to antagonise other potential western investors. But that is history now. The souring of relations with the West to almost breaking point rids Moscow of such archaic inhibitions.

After coming to power in 1999, President Vladimir Putin set about the mammoth task of cleaning up the Augean stables of Russia’s foreign collaboration in the oil sector. The “decolonisation” process was excruciatingly difficult, but Putin pulled it through”.

Yet that’s just the half of it. Putin keeps saying in speeches that the West is the author of its own debt and inflationary crisis (and not Russia), which gives rise to a great deal of head scratching in the West. Let Professor Hudson however, explain why much of the rest of the world sees the West having taken a ‘wrong turn’ economically. In brief, the West’s wrong turn has led it to a ‘dead end’, Putin implies.

Professor Hudson argues (paraphrased and rephrased) that there are essentially two broad economic models that have descended through history: “On the one hand, we see Near Eastern and Asian societies organized to maintain social balance and cohesion by keeping debt relations and mercantile wealth subordinate to the general welfare of the community as a whole”.

All ancient societies had a mistrust of wealth, because it tended to be accumulated at the expense of society at large – and led to social polarization and gross inequalities of wealth. Looking over the sweep of ancient history, we can see (Hudson says)that the main objective of rulers from Babylonia to South Asia and East Asia was to prevent a mercantile and creditor oligarchy from emerging and concentrating ownership of land in their own hands. This is one historic model.

The great problem that the Bronze Age Near East solved – but classical antiquity and Western civilization have not solved – was how to deal with mounting debts (periodic debt jubilees) without polarising society and ultimately impoverishing the economy by reducing most of the population to debt dependency.

One of Hudson’s key tenets is how China is structured as a ‘low cost’ economy: cheap housing, subsidised education, medical care and transport – means that consumers do have some free disposable income left over – and China as whole, is made competitive. The financialized debt-led model of the West, however, is high cost, with swathes of the population becoming increasingly impoverished and bereft of discretionary income after paying debt servicing costs.

The Western periphery however, lacking the Near Eastern tradition, ‘turned’ to enabling a wealthy creditor oligarchy to take power and concentrate land and property ownership in its own hands. For public relations purposes, it claimed to be a ‘democracy’, and denounced any protective government regulation as being, by definition, ‘autocracy’. This is the second grand model, but with its overhang of debt and now in an inflationary spiral, it too is stuck, lacking the means to step forward.

That latter model is what occurred in Rome. And we are still living in the aftermath. Making debtors dependent on wealthy creditors is what today’s economists call a ‘free market’. It is one without public checks and balances against inequality, fraud or privatization of the public domain.

This neoliberal pro-creditor ethic, Professor Hudson asserts, is at the root of today’s New Cold War. When President Biden describes this great world conflict aimed at isolating China, Russia, India, Iran and their Eurasian trading partners, he characterizes this as an existential struggle between ‘democracy’ and ‘autocracy’.

By democracy he means oligarchy. And by ‘autocracy’ he means any government strong enough to prevent a financial oligarchy from taking over government and society and imposing neoliberal rules – by force – as Putin has done. The ‘democratic’ ideal is to make the rest of the world look like Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, where American neo-liberals had a free hand in stripping away all public ownership of land, mineral rights and basic public utilities.

But today we deal with shades of grey – there is no truly free market in the U.S.; and China and Russia are mixed economies, albeit ones leaning to prioritising a responsibility for the welfare of the community as a whole, rather than imagining that individuals left to their own selfish devices will somehow result in maximising national welfare.

Here is the point: Adam Smith economics plus individualism is ingrained in the western zeitgeist. It will not change. However, President Putin’s new policy of cleansing the Augean Stables of ‘predatory western capital’ and the example set by Russia of its metamophose toward a largely self-supporting economy, immune to dollar hegemony, is music to the ears of the Global South and to much of the Rest of the World.

Taken together with Russia and China’s lead in challenging the West’s ‘right’ to set rules; to monopolise the means (the dollar) as the basis for settling inter-state trade; and with BRICS and SCO steadily acquiring ‘bottom’, Putin’s speeches reveal their revolutionary agenda.

One aspect remains: How to bring about a ‘revolutionary’ metamorphosis, without incurring war with the West. The U.S. and Europe are stuck. They are unable to renew themselves, as the structural political and economic contradictions have locked their paradigm solid. How then to ‘unstick’ the situation, short of war?

The key, paradoxically, may lie with Russia and China’s deep understanding of the flaws to the western economic model. The West is in need of Catharsis to ‘unstick itself’. Catharsis can be defined as the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed, emotions attached to beliefs.

To avoid military catharsis, it seems that the Russian and Chinese leadership – understanding the flaws to the western economic model – must then visit the West with an economic catharsis.

It will be painful, no doubt, but better than nuclear catharsis. We may recall the ending to CV Cafavy’s poem, Waiting for the Barbarians,

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

Australian Reasoning…

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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Steaks, cats, human experience, life and Ukraine. A nice mix.

Here’s a mix of some news, and a bunch of human stores. It describes the behaviors of bad people, and the good people. Some good ‘ol Americana thrown in. I hope that you enjoy the articles, the little history lessons, and the thoughts regarding others.

Oh, and be the Rufus!

NATO Boss Whines Citizens Should STOP COMPLAINING about costs of Backing Ukraine

“Our citizens must suffer for Democracy!”

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NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg says that citizens of the west need to “stop complaining” about increased prices for food and fuel because these are necessary to support Ukraine.

Stoletenberg expressed his views in Brussels on Tuesday, telling assembled media he sees support for Ukraine as a moral issue; as if politicians have morals.

Give ear to this two minutes of political rationalizing to justify the unjustifyable. Almost everything he says is a worldview which is NOT based in reality:

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

Clearly, to me, he is trying to ‘guilt’ hundreds of millions of scared/threatened/angry EU citizenry. Did you know he left a position with Klaus Schwabb/WEF to assume the helm as NATO spokesperson?

I don’t have enough spit for this creature.

Classic Steak Diane

First things first. Who’s Diane?

According to What’s Cooking in America, Steak Diane was a popular dish in the 1950s/early 1960s, especially in New York City—in upscale restaurants, it was often prepared tableside with all the theatrics you’d expect from the flambéing of the cognac that is used to make the sauce.

The iconic dish was supposedly named after the Roman goddess, Diana or Diane. Diana was the Goddess of the Hunt and also Goddess of the Moon, and Steak Diane was originally a way of serving venison.

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Classic Steak Diane.

Looking for a classic steakhouse dinner? Steak Diane is the answer. Served with a creamy pan sauce made with mushrooms, shallots, Dijon-style mustard, and brandy, this recipe will have you skipping reservations more often.

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Classic Steak Diane.

Ingredients:

  • 2 beef Strip Steaks, Boneless, cut 1 inch thick (8 ounces each)
  • 1 teaspoon grated lemon peel
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 pound sliced mushrooms
  • 1/4 cup minced shallots
  • 2 tablespoons brandy
  • 1/3 cup whipping cream
  • 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
  • 1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

Cooking:

  1. Combine lemon peel, salt and pepper in small bowl; press evenly onto steaks. Heat large nonstick skillet over medium heat until hot. Place steaks in skillet; cook 12 to 15 minutes for medium rare (145°F) to medium doneness (160°F), turning occasionally. Remove steaks; keep warm.
  2. Add mushrooms and shallots to same skillet; cook 3 minutes or until tender, stirring occasionally. Add brandy; cook and stir 1 to 2 minutes until browned bits attached to skillet are dissolved. Stir in cream, lemon juice, mustard and Worcestershire sauce; cook 3 to 5 minutes until sauce is heated through and slightly thickened. Spoon sauce over steaks.
  • Wash hands with soap and water before cooking and always after touching raw meat.
  • Separate raw meat from other foods.
  • Wash all cutting boards, utensils, and dishes after touching raw meat.
  • Do not reuse marinades used on raw foods.
  • Wash all produce prior to use.
  • Cook beef until temperature reaches 145°F for medium rare steaks and roasts 160°F for ground beef.
  • Refrigerate food promptly.

COVID mRNA “Vaccines” Compromise the Immune System

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Recently, The Lancet published a study on the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and the waning of immunity with time. The study showed that immune function among mRNA vaccinated individuals 8 months after the administration of two doses of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals.

According to European Medicines Agency recommendations, frequent COVID-19 mRNA booster shots could adversely affect the immune response and may not be feasible.

The decrease in immunity can be caused by several factors such as N1-methylpseudouridine, the spike protein, lipid nanoparticles, antibody-dependent enhancement, and the original antigenic stimulus. These clinical alterations may explain the association reported between COVID-19 mRNA vaccination and shingles.

studies suggest a link between COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and reactivation of the virus that causes shingles [1213]. This condition is sometimes referred to as vaccine-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (V-AIDS) [14].

As a safety measure, further booster mRNA vaccinations should be discontinued. In addition, the date of vaccination should be recorded in the medical record of patients.

Several practical measures to prevent a decrease in immunity have been reported. These include limiting the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, including acetaminophen to maintain deep body temperature, appropriate use of antibiotics, smoking cessation, stress control, and limiting the use of lipid emulsions, including propofol, which may cause perioperative immunosuppression.

In conclusion, COVID-19 mRNA vaccinations is a major risk factor for infections in critically ill patients.

 

Friends & Friendship

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New Zealand Statesman denounces Five-Eyes/NATO Pacific war plan

A former New Zealand Cabinet Minister has warned that the actions of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in tying their two countries to NATO is pushing the Pacific towards war.

Matt Robson was a Cabinet Minister in Helen Clarke’s Labour-led Coalition government, and served as NZ’s Minister for Disarmament and Associate Minister for Foreign Affairs, with intimate knowledge of Pacific affairs.

He is also a barrister with extensive experience in international law.

In a striking new interview with the Australian Citizens Party’s Citizens Insight program on YouTube, Matt Robson takes on the manufactured consensus regarding supposedly virtuous NATO standing against authoritarian Russia and China, which is being used to undermine NZ’s commitment to banning nuclear weapons and an independent foreign policy, and turn Australia and NZ into extensions of NATO in the Asia-Pacific, for confronting China.

For Australia, Anthony Albanese is continuing his predecessor’s policies, which is bad enough, demonstrating Australia’s complete lack of independence on foreign policy; for NZ however, Ardern is actually destroying her country’s foreign policy principles, including its independent commitment to nuclear disarmament, by taking NZ under NATO’s nuclear umbrella.

To see a NZ statesman say what no serving major party politician in Australia or New Zealand would be game to say today.

Please click here to watch CITIZENS INSIGHT – New Zealand Statesman denounces Five-Eyes/NATO Pacific war plan – Matt Robson.

The story of Cambodia

Cambodia used to be a prosperous country. After the end of the Indochina War (1945–1954), under the leadership of King Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012), the economy of Cambodia rapidly went up for the next twenty years, with remarkable achievements.

In 1960, the GPD per capita of Cambodia was US$ 111,34 and it was even higher than both North and South Vietnam at that time (with US$ 51 and US$ 105, respectively).

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Cambodia in the 1960’s.

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Cambodia in the 1960’s.

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Cambodia in the 1960’s.

During the 1960s, while Vietnam was stuck into a devastated war, the economy of Cambodia continued to develop rapidly.

The capital of Phnom Penh was among the “pearls” of the oriental world, where notable figures of the world such as French President Charles De Gaulle (1890–1970) and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) had their visits.

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Phnom Penh was among the “pearls” of the oriental world…

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Phnom Penh was among the “pearls” of the oriental world…

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Phnom Penh was among the “pearls” of the oriental world…

However…

The fate of Cambodia was sealed on 18 March 1970, after the coup d’état against King Norodom Sihanouk, which was organized and implemented by the United States CIA.

Since then, Cambodia was mired in a bloody civil war during the next five years (1970–1975), with hundred thousand deaths.

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Cambodia civil war.

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Cambodia civil war.

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Cambodia civil war.

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Cambodia civil war.

Unluckily, the end of the Cambodian Civil War in 1975 did not mark the beginning of the new peaceful era for Cambodian nation. On the contrary, it subsequently marked the beginning of the Maoist genocidal regime of Khmer Rouge, as one of the most brutal dictatorships in 20th century.

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Pol Pot

With Cambodian Maoism in his mind, in just four years Pol Pot rapidly transformed his country into a massive “killing field”, where 2.0 to 3.0 millions of “counter-revolutionaries” or 1/3 of Cambodian population were exterminated!

Historically, it was called the “Cambodian Genocide”, in which the whole country of Cambodia was returned to the “Year Zero” (Année Zéro).

From a prosperous country during the 1960s, Cambodia became a constant famine-stricken and also one of the poorest countries in the world under the rule of Khmer Rouge regime.

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The Khmer Rouge regime believed in a Marxist Utopia.

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The Khmer Rouge regime believed in a Marxist Utopia.

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The Khmer Rouge regime believed in a Marxist Utopia.

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The Khmer Rouge regime believed in a Marxist Utopia.

The whole economic structure of Cambodia was totally bankrupt to the root when Pol Pot decided not to use the paper money anymore!

The city of Phnom Penh subsequently became a “ghost city”.

There were no more French-style coffee shops, no more luxury cars, no more beautiful lights of neon at night, but only the so-called “people’s communes” located around the country, where people were forced to work until their last breath.

These below pictures were about the city of Phnom Penh under the rule of Khmer Rouge.

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The city of Phnom Penh under the rule of Khmer Rouge.

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The city of Phnom Penh under the rule of Khmer Rouge.

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The city of Phnom Penh under the rule of Khmer Rouge.

The “Cambodian Genocide” was finally ended on January 1979, when the Cambodian national uprising together with the Vietnamese offensive finally overthrown the rule of Pol Pot and his henchmen.

During the next twenty years (1979–1999), together with the Vietnamese military assistance, the new government of Cambodia under the leadership of Hun Sen continued the fight against the remaining Khmer Rouge guerrillas until the death of Pol Pot in 1998 and the total disband of the Khmer Rouge faction in 1999.

Since 1993, Norodom Sihanouk officially returned as a King of Cambodia. Meanwhile, all of the former leaders of Khmer Rouge regime were charged with their crimes against the humanity.

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The Khmer Rouge is defeated by joint Vietnam and local Cambodian forces.

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The Khmer Rouge is defeated by joint Vietnam and local Cambodian forces.

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The Khmer Rouge is defeated by joint Vietnam and local Cambodian forces.

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The Khmer Rouge is defeated by joint Vietnam and local Cambodian forces.

Nowadays, although Cambodia is not a rich country, but the revival process is going on, the whole country of Cambodia is again going up rapidly from zero and obtains average GDP growth about 7.5% annually.

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Cambodia today.

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The Khmer Rouge is defeated by joint Vietnam and local Cambodian forces.

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Cambodian GDP.

Confidence

Confidence is the degree to which you can trust yourself.

We tend to confuse confidence for skill: we see someone who’s a great speaker, a serial entrepreneur, a daring athlete, and think “I wish I could be like them”. Able to show up and just do it.

What we don’t see is the hundreds of times they tried and it didn’t work out.

That’s how they built their skills: by having the confidence to show up again.

Confidence is not knowing that you will win at whatever game you choose to play; it’s the certainty that you can take a punch (or a few).

That, when things won’t go the way you want them to, you will keep showing up and take another one on the chin. And again. Because that’s the best way to learn and get that level of skill where things work out great most of the time.

Confidence is not about results, it’s about effort: do you trust yourself to keep showing up? Or will you give up and stop doing it?

That’s why my hack to build confidence is to get used to doing things I don’t want to be doing.

I used to hate cold water, so I took a cold shower every day.
I wasn’t a great runner, so I ran a marathon with 4 weeks of training.
I used to be uncomfortable talking to women, so I talked to 300 in a year.
I didn’t feel confident speaking in public, so I joined a speaking group.
I was scared to write online, so I started writing weekly.

I now feel confident at all the above, and more.

And that’s how I built my confidence.

By showing myself that I can trust me.

No matter the result, I’m going to show up.

– Matt

Russian Objectives “Have Changed” in Ukraine

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Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov announced just minutes ago “The geographical objectives of the special operation have changed, now it is not only the DPR and LPR, but also a number of other territories.” Lavrov said that Luhansk and Donetsk are not longer the sole objective of the Special Military Operation; other areas are also now an objective.  He did not specify which areas, but observers suggest that everything east of the Dnieper River . . .  meaning the entire eastern half of what is now Ukraine, may now be the actual objective. Lavrov also said “If the West continues to supply Kiev with longer-range weapons, the geographical objectives of the special operation in Ukraine will move even further than they just have.”

Lavrov – Extended Range Weapons In Ukraine Will Lead To More Loss Of Its Land

Today the foreign minister of the Russian Federation, Sergei Lavrov, announced the extension of the land in Ukraine that Russia intends to capture.

It will depend on the maximum weapon range of the systems the Ukraine will have under its control.

Via RIA Novosti (machine translation):

Lavrov: deliveries of long-range weapons to Kyiv will expand the geography of the special operation

MOSCOW, July 20 – RIA Novosti. If Ukraine receives long-range weapons from Western countries, then the geographical tasks of the special operation of the Russian troops will change, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT and the Rossiya Segodnya media group. “The President said very clearly, as you quoted him – denazification, demilitarization in the sense that there are no threats to our security, military threats from the territory of Ukraine, this task remains,” the minister stressed. At the same time, he recalled that during the meeting of the negotiators in Istanbul at the end of March, the situation on this issue was significantly different. “Now the geography is different. It is far from being only the DPR and LPR, it is also the Kherson region, the Zaporozhye region and a number of other territories, and this process continues, and continues consistently and persistently,” the head of Russian diplomacy added. He pointed out that as the West, in impotent rage or in a desire to make the situation as bad as possible, pumps more and more long-range weapons into Ukraine, for example, HIMARS, the geographical objectives of the special operation will move even further from the current line. “Because we cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Zelensky will control or whoever replaces him to have weapons that will pose a direct threat to our territory and the territory of those republics that have declared their independence, those who want their future decide for yourself,” he concluded.

Note to Washington: If you deliver HIMARS missile to Ukraine with an extended (300km instead of 80km) range, Russia will have to move further into Ukraine to secure its own and the Donbas republics borders.

This comes after calls in Ukraine to hit the bridge over the Kerch street that connects Crimea with Russia with extended range HIMARS missiles. The nearest point of the area which the Ukraine still holds is some 260 kilometer away from the bridge.

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There are also rumors that the Ukraine has already received such missiles. Via Naked Capitalism:

Zelensky Orders Troops to Hold Siversk Despite Heavy Losses, Purges More Officials; Putin in Tehran – Alexander Mercouris. Note in particular starting at 10:10, Mercouris reports that DPR official Eduard Barsurin has stated that Ukraine has received the 300 km missiles for the HIMARS. Ukraine has made clear it intends to hit targets in Crimea, which Russia regards as Russian territory, particularly the Kerch bridge. Mercouris thinks it would take an awful lot of missiles to do that, as in more than Ukraine has now, but any strikes at Crimea would lead to very forceful retaliation by Russia. Ukraine is smoking something strong if it thinks that will lead the West to do meaningfully more for Ukraine than it is doing now.

Mercouris is wrong when he claims that the long range HIMARS missile would only have a small warhead as it must be fired out of one of the 6 tubes of the regular HIMARS canister. The long range missile is the ATACMS. It comes in a different canister which has only one tube for a missile with a diameter of 610 mm. It can be fired by all systems that usually fire the 6 missile canister.

 

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The version of the MFM-140 ATACMS missile that would most likely be used is the M57 (ATACMS TACMS 2000):

It carries the 500 lb WDU-18/B penetrating high explosive blast fragmentation warhead of the US Navy's Harpoon anti-ship missile, which was redesignated as WAU-23/B when used in ATACMS.

It is not the ideal warhead to attack a hard target but it is significant enough to at least heavily damage the Kerch bridge.

If it should be used Ukraine will lose all land that is within 300 kilometer of Crimea, the Donbas and Luhansk oblasts and Ukraine’s northern border with Russia. Odessa is only 180 kilometer from Crimea and Kiev some 200 kilometer from the nearest Russian border. If we take Lavrov’s words seriously those cities would come under Russian occupation should an extended range HIMARS missile be used.

Lavrov named several Ukrainian oblasts that are already on Russia’s wish list:

It is far from being only the DPR and LPR, it is also the Kherson region, the Zaporozhye region and a number of other territories, ..

The number of other territories will have to include the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts to protect the border of Donetsk and Luhansk from longer reaching weapons. Mykolaiv and Odessa may have to be taken to protect Russia’s oil and gas installations west of Crimea. The Ukraine has already attacked those with longer range weapons.

 

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If I were a Ukrainian decision maker I would take Lavrov’s threat very seriously.

The longest reaching weapon that the U.S. and Great Britain have delivered to Ukraine so far is the Harpoon anti ship missile with a range of 124 kilometer which is near to the 120 kilometer range that Ukrainian Tochka-U missiles have. The Russian defense ministry had previously claimed that at least two Harpoon launchers had been destroyed. According to its daily report another one was eliminated yesterday near Usatovo in the Odessa Region.

Posted by b on July 20, 2022 at 13:18 UTC | Permalink

Sam Hunt – Water Under The Bridge (Official Music Video)

Artist Draws Disney Animals As Humans While Keeping Their Unique Personalities In Tact

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Ever wondered what Lady from Lady And The Tramp would look like if she were human? Maybe, maybe not, but artist s0alaina has given it a lot of thought. S0alaina has recreated many of Disney’s most iconic animals as humans, and the results are pretty awesome!

S0alaina writes via Bored Panda, “I’ve often wondered what these animals would look like if they were human and I have enjoyed others’ illustrations of this concept. But I noticed that most of these versions lacked character consistency thus making them not quite as believable and lovable.”

In order to stay true to the original Disney animals, s0alaina keeps them in the context and style of the movie they are from.

“I decided to draw them in the styles of their movies, and keep consistent shape language and features to interpret the character in a more thorough and believable way… I had LOADS of fun doing this!”

Enjoy taking a peek at what Disney animals would look like if they walked upright on two-legs and talked too much.

Aristocats

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“I think this one was harder, because O’Malley’s such a bulky character, in face and build, so he makes kind of a funny looking human. And maintaining the 1900-1910s look was hard to do for Duchess because her hair would look much better as a 20s girl~ but I found an appropriate hairstyle.”

The Lion King

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Bolt

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Tarzan

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Jungle Book

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Lady And The Tramp

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Webb telescope suffered ‘uncorrectable damage’ in micrometeoroid hit, NASA report says

·5 min read
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(NEXSTAR) – A micrometeoroid caused “significant uncorrectable damage” to NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Telescope, a new report explains. While experts say the impact was small, it has prompted further investigation.

At 21 feet, Webb’s gold-plated, flower-shaped mirror is the biggest and most sensitive ever sent into space. It’s comprised of 18 segments, one of which was smacked by the bigger than anticipated micrometeoroid in May. Micrometeoroids are fragments of asteroids that are usually smaller than a grain of sand, according to NASA.

At the time, Paul Geithner, technical deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center explained it was known that Webb would have to survive the harsh environment of space, including micrometeoroids.

In a newly released report, Webb’s commissioning team said that while the mirrors and sunshields on the telescope are “expected to slowly degrade from micrometeoroid impacts,” the impact to one specific segment, known as C3, “exceeded prelaunch expectations of damage for a single micrometeoroid.”

Despite this, Webb’s team has determined the overall impact on the telescope is small. Engineers were able to realign Webb’s segments to adjust for the micrometeoroid’s damage.

“Bidenvilles” Popping-Up All Over America – The country is being wrecked

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Bidenville.

A worrisome icon of decades past has resurfaced and is worsening. Unregulated shantytowns persist around the nation — made up of tents, tiny houses, RVs or ramshackle shelters. The trend could be identified with President Biden, some say.

“It is just a matter of time before signs start sprouting up in the homeless areas of America proclaiming the existence of Bidenville,” advises presidential historian and author Craig Shirley.

Bidenville?

“We had widespread destitution under Herbert Hoover, just as we do today under Joe Biden. The poverty was indescribable. The world looked to be all black and white. No green. No sunlight. No hope. The dark humor at the time led newspaper writers to call them Hoovervilles. Utter destitution. Every day was worse than the previous, just as under President Biden,” Mr. Shirley tells Inside the Beltway.

“Shantytowns of grinding poverty were spread across America in the late 1920s and into the 1930s. John Steinbeck wrote about them as did other Depression-era authors. Millions of people huddled together, eking out a miserable existence. Sickness, homeless, disease and starvation spread, just as today. The plight and suffering was widespread — and it lasted for years,” Mr. Shirley continues.

“Mark Twain was right. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, he once said. Mindless liberalism has led to the new Bidenvilles,” the historian advises.

Hal Turner Remark:  Joe Biden is a monster. All Americans are in grave danger under this deranged lunatic and his mentally ill democrat cohorts.

Hooverville Life

Homelessness was present before the Great Depression and a common sight before 1929. Most large cities built municipal lodging houses for them, but the depression exponentially increased demand. The homeless clustered in shanty towns close to free soup kitchens. A “Hooverville” was a shanty town built by homeless people during the Great Depression. They were named after Herbert Hoover, who was President of the United States during the onset of the Depression and widely blamed for it.

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Dwellers in Circleville’s Hooverville, central Ohio.

The Bonus Army, a group of World War I veterans seeking expedited benefits, established a Hooverville in Anacostia in the District of Columbia in 1932. At its maximum there were 15,000 people living there. The camp was demolished by units of the U.S. Army, commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

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Hooverville of Bakersfield, California. A rapidly growing community of people living rent-free on the edge of the town dump in whatever kind of shelter available.

These settlements were often formed on empty land and generally consisted of tents and small shacks. Authorities did not officially recognize these Hoovervilles and occasionally removed the occupants for trespassing on private lands, but they were frequently tolerated or ignored out of necessity. The New Deal enacted special relief programs aimed at the homeless under the Federal Transient Service (FTS), which operated from 1933–35.

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Hooverville. Portland, Oregon.

Some of the men who were forced to live in these conditions possessed construction skills and were able to build their houses out of stone.

Most people, however, resorted to building their residences out of wood from crates, cardboard, scraps of metal, or whatever materials were available to them. They usually had a small stove, bedding and a couple of simple cooking implements.

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Hooverville- 1938.

Most of these unemployed residents of the Hoovervilles used public charities or begged for food from those that had some housing during this era.

They blamed President Hoover for this, and named the town after him. Democrats coined other terms, such as “Hoover blanket” (old newspaper used as blanketing) and “Hoover flag” (an empty pocket turned inside out).

“Hoover leather” was cardboard used to line a shoe when the sole wore through.

A “Hoover wagon” was an automobile with horses hitched to it because the owner could not afford fuel; in Canada, these were known as Bennett buggies, after the Prime Minister at the time.

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Life in a shanty town 1938.

After 1940 the economy recovered, unemployment fell, and shanty eradication programs destroyed all the Hoovervilles. Hoovervilles have often features in the popular culture, and still appear in editorial cartoons.Movies like My Man Godfrey (1936) and Sullivan’s Travels (1941) sometimes sentimentalized Hooverville life

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Huts and unemployed in West Houston and Mercer St by Berenice Abbott in Manhattan in 1935

The China threat: Dutton is dragging Australia into dangerous waters

Jan 13, 2022

The Defence Minister is stoking anti-China sentiment in Australia – a foolhardy stance that is damaging our economy and putting us at risk of military conflict. 

On November 23, shadow foreign minister Penny Wong said that the Morrison government’s constant

“amping up the prospect of war against a super-power is the most dangerous election tactic in Australian history”.

She is right that it is extremely dangerous, but the ploy has been used before. The difference this time is, of course, that China is a nuclear superpower.

In the 1960s the Coalition government terrified the Australian public with the prospect of the ‘Yellow Peril’ of Chinese communism toppling all the ‘dominoes’ in South-East Asia and wiping out Australia’s democratic way of life, unless it was halted in its tracks in Vietnam. So we joined the US in its ‘war of aggression’ in Vietnam (Daniel Ellsberg 2002) .

Following the destruction of cities and rural environment by more bombs than were dropped by all sides in WWII, with the attendant slaughter of 3.8 million people (Robert McNamara 1999) and the maiming and deforming of countless more by Napalm and Agent Orange, we were finally defeated in 1975.

Unsurprisingly the ‘Yellow Peril’ did not come flooding down to Australia, because the Vietnamese national liberation movement which won the war, was as opposed to Chinese intervention as it was to American intervention. It is delusional to believe that Vietnam would support an American war against China.

Wong said that Defence Minister Peter Dutton was “wildly out of step with a strategy long adopted by Australia and our principal ally” which was the “bipartisan adoption of a One China Policy and advocacy to deter unilateral changes to the status quo”.

But is Dutton really out of step with US strategy? On the contrary, he appears to be implementing the “strategy of denial” detailed in the book of that name by Elbridge Colby, a book he keenly read (Troy Bramston, The Australian, December 15).

Colby served as the lead official in the development of the 2018 National Defence Strategy (NDS). He served with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003 and the 2004-05 President’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, making him adept in campaigns of vilification through misinformation.

He is committed to the pursuit of the ‘Wolfowitz doctrine’ of maintaining US primacy in the world by military force.

He believes a ‘limited war’ between China and Taiwan would serve the US objective of inhibiting China’s rise.

The 2018 NDS has not been significantly revised under President Joe Biden.

In it Colby recommended that US allies Japan, India and Australia should be drawn into a coalition (like the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ against Iraq) to contain China.

Two years later, under Biden, the QUAD and AUKUS were formed.

Step 1: Vilification

In line with Colby’s strategy of demonisation, Dutton is generating fear of China by characterising its efforts to protect its national territorial integrity in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan as ‘aggressive expansionism’. These are specious examples, since all four provinces have been part of the sovereign territory of China since well before Australia existed as a nation state.

He seems unaware that China has never invaded another country for territorial gain, whereas the US has attempted the overthrow of 60 countries since WWII, succeeding in the case of 25 elected democracies.

Dutton said he had to speak the truth about China’s military build-up, but failed to mention the US ‘pivot to Asia’, which ranged 60 per cent of American naval capability along the coast of China. To the Chinese, this must have looked like a potential blockade of its most  economically vital ports, and provoked the acceleration of military counter measures.

He cited China’s construction of military bases in the South China Sea as a further sign of ‘expansionism’, but failed to mention that Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and even Taiwan had similar bases.

He did not acknowledge the possibility that China saw its bases as a counter to the constant  incursions by the US and its allies (especially Australia) into waters vital to its interests, through ‘freedom of navigation operations’. He made no mention of the fact that China has one base outside its own periphery, compared to over 800 US bases around the world, many of them encircling China.

To further stoke public fear, he pointed out that China’s navy was many times the tonnage of Australia’s and their missiles were capable of striking any target in Australia as far south as Hobart.

Step 2: Goad China to act

Colby argued that after a campaign to vilify it, China could be goaded into starting a military conflict over Taiwan and thus be portrayed as the aggressor. The US has already taken a number of steps in this direction, apart from stationing the bulk of its naval power off the coast of China. These include:

  • “Freedom of navigation” and combat exercises in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait;
  • Visits by senior US officials using US military aircraft;
  • Creation of a putative “air defence identification zone” extending well over mainland territory and then alleging Chinese violations of it;
  • Secretly providing military training personnel (while denying it);
  • Including Taiwan in the Summit for Democracy (December 8-10), implying it is a separate country.

Dutton is further goading China by reassuring Taiwan that Australia would “inevitably” come to its defence in the event of a military move against it from the mainland.

He is increasing the possibility that Taiwan will feel emboldened to declare independence from China and thus upset the status quo and provoke the war that Colby recommends.

Daniel L. Davies, a retired lieutenant-colonel and senior fellow at Washington think tank Defence Priorities, has argued that “refusing to be drawn into a no-win war with China over Taiwan will see our comparative advantage over China increase dramatically.

Their military would be seriously degraded … while ours … would be at full strength”.

The Taiwan Relations Act 1979 imposes a legal requirement on the US to “provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character”. There is no treaty obligation for the US to intervene to defend Taiwan. According to Davies, the US should not risk any of its own military assets, but should push Taiwan to invest more in its self-defence capabilities. Colby has suggested that the US should not provide air defence to Taiwan, since widespread civilian casualties would whip up world anger against China.

Under the strategies proposed by Colby and Davies, China would become bogged down in a  drawn-out conflict that would severely deplete its armed forces and deflect its resources away from economic development and international infrastructure co-operation. It would also satisfy the insatiable appetite of the US military-Industrial complex for never-ending arms sales.

The ANZUS Treaty is a non-binding collective security agreement. It provides only that an armed attack on one of its members would  constitute a danger to the others and require consultations on measures to meet the threat. It does not bind the US to intervene to protect Australia should Australia attack a third party.

In the light of the Colby-Davies strategy for Taiwan, the US would be unlikely to risk its own military assets or any of its homeland territory in direct defence of Australia. It would increase arms sales to bolster Australia’s self-defence, at great cost to the budget and great profit to the military-industrial complex.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan promised that America would not leave Australia ‘alone in the field’ in its trade dispute with China. Instead of taking supportive action, however, the US leapt in to snatch up the markets lost by Australia’s ‘standing up to China’. This does not encourage confidence that the US would actively intervene in support of Australia in a military clash with China.

Commitment under AUKUS to heavy expenditure on nuclear-powered submarines, to arrive in the next 20 years or so, offers little  reassurance if Dutton’s ‘war with China’ erupts in the next five years.

Dutton has disingenuously asserted that the ASEAN countries would support Australia. He has failed to acknowledge that such support is far from certain, since ASEAN on November 22 renewed its Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with China. Each of its members has ongoing infrastructure projects under China’s BRI, which they would not wish to put at risk. They have all expressed varying degrees of disquiet at ‘increased power projection’ into the region through AUKUS.

The effectiveness of the QUAD in defence of Australia is also highly questionable, given that India has security obligations with China through its commitment to the Charter of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. India is also dependent for its armament on Russia, which has a “better than treaty relationship” with China. Russia seems unlikely to equip India to fight China.

The Colby strategy has not been formally adopted by the Biden administration, but there are signs that it is gaining increasing traction in policy-making circles in Washington. There are also strong voices in Washington in favour of direct US military involvement in defense of Taiwan, arguing that if it failed to do so, the US would lose international credibility as the ‘protector of democracy’.

Fortunately, President Biden has opted, for the time being, for continuation of the policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ (if somewhat weighted towards reassurances to Taiwan), eschewing the two competing, more aggressive scenarios.

In either scenario, the result for Australia would be the same: – If Australia were to join in the battle to “save democratic Taiwan”, as proposed by Dutton, then, judging from his own assessment of China’s capabilities, the Australian navy would be obliterated in short order and command-control centres in Australia destroyed (especially Pine Gap, in the unlikely event that US forces were involved).

The strident anti-China policy of the Morrison government has positioned Australia as the enemy of China, which is increasingly reluctant to trade with the enemy.

Hence the China trade would not be available to buffer Australia from the worst effects of the next global financial crisis (which many economic analysts believe is imminent), as it did in the 2008 GFC. Australia would be considerably weakened economically and much less able to sustain a military engagement with China.

Dutton’s pronouncements, however, are edging Australia inexorably towards outright warfare with China.

Australia needs instead to align itself more clearly to Biden’s public posture by unambiguously reaffirming (to both China and Taiwan) its adherence to the One China principle and its commitment to a peaceful, negotiated resolution of the ‘Taiwan problem’.

I’m 77. I created four successful businesses, married two beautiful women (one at a time) have two great sons, and retired at 49. My life has been full. And it really doesn’t matter – none of it. I wish I’d known that in the beginning – that it all wouldn’t matter. I beat myself up most of my life trying to accomplish success and I could have had a much easier time of it. I was chasing someone else’s dream, not mine.

No 14 hour days, six days out of the week. No heart attacks. No ulcers. No enemies. I could have learned the piano, painted, sculpted, read more books, learned to dance the salsa, had more dogs.

At the end of life, and mine is just around the corner, the important stuff is the stuff I didn’t have time for. I can’t speak for all wealthy people, but the ones I know are pretty damn empty. We come into the world naked and we leave pretty much the same way – and there are no “Mulligans”.

If you don’t get it right the first time, too bad for you. I’m too old to climb the mountains I always wanted to climb, too old to buy a dog, too old to learn to surf, too old to learn the piano. All the good stuff is behind me. Don’t get stuck in a life that isn’t yours.

Best relationship advice…

One afternoon a long time ago (we must have been around fourteen years old) a friend of mine was talking to his dad.

“I am in love with a girl” he said, “and I’d like to know how to keep her by my side.”

“You can’t” his dad said. “You can’t keep her. The best you can do is give her whatever she lacks.”

“Like, gifts? Like what?”

“No, no” said his dad. “I am not talking about stuff. I am talking about how she feels about her place in her life. Does she go through a lot of uncertainty? Give her stability. Does she feel in any way trapped? Give her freedom. Does she feel she does not matter? Give her the best quality of your attention. Does she feel things are always turbulent? Give her peace.”

I have thought about this advice for decades, and the distinction between “completing” someone and providing a counterpoint in their life.

The most fortunate relationships are a natural match between what a person lacks and what the other cannot wait to give.

Life in the “free” West

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Walker Hayes – Y’all Life (Official Video)

A little bit about living life in the USA… Small town… Friday Night… teenager life.

Bad Parents and a Rufus Grandmother

These things happened to me in the late 50s.

I think it’s different now with so many groups and even teachers who are trained to notice different behavior. I was 6 years old and cried all the time away from home. I cried at church, at school, on the playground, and in our neighborhood. Not one person asked what was wrong. I would look at leaders and teachers, almost begging with my eyes to get them to ask if things were okay at home. I waited outside until the last child was called inside the house, hoping we didn’t have to walk inside the cold, dark house alone. I told my brother it was an adventure. We had no food many times, so I found some dry cereal and gave it to him and then started his bath and made sure he was in bed. The following day, we dressed, and I was worried about lunch money. I would scour around and find enough change for milk and lunch money for my brother. I didn’t want to be different at school so not having lunch money was a big thing. At this time, my mother and stepfather told us absolutely to not call our grandmother. I think so she wouldn’t know they were gone most of the time.

I would say for my brother and me; it was the sadness on our faces that never left. You can’t pretend laughter or joy. I recently found a picture of us about that time and we neither smiled and both looked down. Whereas, my baby brother smiled and enjoyed visiting at times.

It was also never passing a class and doing homework. We were the ones that never did our homework. We were fearful, but we were more afraid of my mother, and we knew she didn’t care what happened to us. I was the child that didn’t want to make anyone sad because of me. I worried if I would make my teachers upset if we didn’t do our homework. Yet, my little brain had so much crammed inside it that I barely made it day by day.

If you notice a child looking sad, fearful, and especially crying, ask if they are okay. I imagine now it would be more watching to see if a child goes alone or with someone else alone. Do they have clean clothes or shoes to wear that are the right size? Are they hungry when you get your snack or lunch, but the child isn’t eating? Do they walk in the bitter cold or the blistering heat without shoes? Do they come to school late, or do they get into trouble so someone, somewhere, will pay attention, even if it’s bad attention? These are just a few of the issues I had as a little girl.

Thankfully, our grandmother got my two brothers and me at 73, and we were almost 6, 4, and 1 years old. My baby brother was very sick, and my grandmother happened to stop by, a “God thing,” I like to refer to it. My grandmother asked where the baby was, and I told her he was cold because he kept shaking, and I covered him in his crib.

Long story, she took the three of us with her, and he was hospitalized for German Measles and almost died. The Pediatrician told my grandmother later that he would have passed away if she hadn’t brought him to the hospital within an hour. We are so thankful God allowed him to live.

Our grandmother was a strong Christian, and when my parents divorced, they also told the Judge they didn’t want us. He was going to put us in foster care, but my dear grandmother stood up and said she would take the three of us and provide. He asked her questions, and she assured him she would be fine in taking three. He talked to me privately, and I told him we loved our grandmother and would be happy to be there.

She was our Angel.

Many wonder how hard it must have been for her to raise us at 73. She was born in 1890 and became a school teacher and taught in a one-room schoolhouse for years. She rose early and rode her horse to get to the school early enough to build a good, warm fire. She was very energetic and remained very active and told us we kept her YOUNG. I doubt that, but she kept us alive and whole. God allowed her to live to be 96.

I have no words to express how much I still miss her even after 30 years. she taught us about God and His love that would always be there if she died.

I’m enclosing the last picture of the 3 of us and our dear grandmother as adults many years ago. She is always in our hearts.

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CLOWN WORLD: Pentagon Spox Says Climate Change Caused fighting in Syria

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Pentagon Spokesman John Kirby proved the Pentagon has become a clown show, by telling reporters during a Press Briefing that it was Climate Change that caused the military hostilities in Syria.

 

 

How does a person with idiotic views like this, even get near the Pentagon for employment?  One would think that being reality based would be an important criteria for the Pentagon to hire someone.

Clearly, John Kirby, based on his remarks above, lacks being based in reality.

The entire federal government seems to be Clown World.

A tragic Incident

In a middle school of South Korea an incident occurred which completely disgusted me!

In the school it was a rule that “No phones during class hours”. So, students gives their phones to their homeroom teacher when the classes begin.

Once, “Student X” (let’s call her that) asked her teacher Mr. Song if she could take her phone for a work on her Science Homework. Mr. Song agreed and gave her the phone but he forgot that he gave permission. So, when he was looking at the students doing their work, and saw Student X with the phone, he scolded her. Student X got very upset about it…so she raised her voice, cried and stormed out of the classroom. When she was going…Mr. Song tried to stop her and held her arm. And unfortunately, this was the worst thing he did for Student X. She pulled her arm out and stormed out of the school.

She went to her home and being afraid to tell her parents about her behaviour and coming back from school soon. She said that Mr. Song sexually abused her and that he did bad things to her. Student X’s parents immediately informed it to the police. Soon, police started to investigate and question Student X and she told that Mr. Song sexually abused her and her friends. Then, the policemen questioned all the students and they took Student X’s side and said that Mr. Song hits them.

Mr. Song was questioned about it and he denied it but still police wanted to take him to jail and when Student X saw that it was getting out of hand, she claimed that she lied. The police case was soon closed but Board of Education still pressured the incident and was pressuring Mr. Song to admit that he abused the students. They wanted to ban him but students started to protest. They said “Mr. Song never raised his hands on us. He always pat our shoulder whenever we do a good job. He is a wonderful teacher. Please return him to us. We are sorry for accusing him.”

But still the Board of Education didn’t let it go. They said to Mr. Song “If the students really lied and accused against you, then they did a crime and we are going to punish them.”

Mr. Song wanted to save his students so he said that he did actually abused them. And thus he was banned from the school and people started to attack him with saying hateful things. They hated him and said:

He calls himself a teacher?

This gives me chills. What a horrible teacher!

I wonder how he would react if his children were involved.

How dare he call himself teacher!

This went on and on until Mr. Song took his own life in his garage. Mr. Song’s family tried to sue the North Juolla Province but the case was soon shut down by the prosecution of “Finding no legitimate ground” to investigate the Board.

This tragic incident of Mr. Song’s death remains a controversy in the Board of Education. It is heavily criticized for handling the situation like this. People not only blame Student X’s irresponsible lie but also the carelessness of the Board which caused the death of Mr. Song.

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Mr. Song

President of Chechnya: First Demilitarization of Ukraine, Next the same for NATO – Poland first

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The President of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov says that he and his people are glad to support Russia’s demilitarization of Ukraine. He went on to say they are “developing a plan to demilitarize NATO. After the capture of Kiev, next is Poland.”

Given the reality that:

1) Ukraine had the largest standing army in all of Europe, which was trained, equipped, and certified by NATO,

AND;

2) Given the reality that the Russian Army is now chewing-up and spitting out the Ukraine Army, defeating Ukraine in almost every confrontation, it appears to many observers that NATO training and certification makes them only a paper tiger.

This paper tiger has been roaring at Russia for decades, and now may face being swept away by the very Russians they have demonized for decades.

A fucked up life

I was taken in by a same sex couple after my little brother and I were abandoned by our mom.

This couple completely ruined me.

They had their own son by the way, but anyways, I was the target for their abuse. From 2011 up until march 14, 2014, I was physically, emotionally, verbally, and sexually abused by them.

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These are the women I once called “my moms.”

I was taken in by them when I was I around three or four. Initially they seemed like a very nice couple they treated me and my little brother well. But they then started changing the way they treated me specifically when I was about six. I’m not sure why I was their target. Till this day I find myself wondering if I did something wrong for them to treat me like they did?

It was Christmas Eve of 2011 and they allowed me and my brothers to open one gift that night. I don’t remember what I got but I remember what my youngest brother Eraca’s son got. It was a little computer that taught you the letters of the alphabet and I grabbed it from him to look at it. When I did that Christian scolded me and asked me why I hit my little brother with it. I was really confused because I know I didn’t hit him with anything. That night I was thrown outside and had to sit on the porch in the cold for hours. That was the night everything changed for me.

Eraca was gone Monday through Friday so that just left us kids with Christian to care for us, she was a stay at home mom. Christian is the one who basically did everything to me. She had many different torture methods for me everyday while ‘her sons’ watched Cartoons and got to play outside. She would throw me into cold baths and put ice cubes in it and made me lay in it for hours. When she was feeling really good she liked to hold my head under water and attempt to drown me. I was only fed once a day, and if I didn’t do a chore right she wouldn’t feed me at all. Sometimes I went a whole week without receiving any food. It came to the point were in the middle of the night sometimes I would sneak into the kitchen and eat almost a whole entire box of cereal because I was so hungry.

One night I got caught stealing food and Eraca and Christian decided that since I liked to steal food I should be chained up. So the next day they went to home depot and purchased a dog chain for me. When we got home Eraca drilled the chain into the wall and chained me by my ankle. I was chained up everyday unless they had something they needed me to do, or if Christian was in the mood to do something crazy to me.

It came to the point were I was scared to ask if I could go to the restroom so I would constantly piss myself and poop on myself. I started doing it almost everyday and it became a habit but it was also disgusting to me because sooner or later I started smelling bad and Christian would just make me walk around like that while I did my chores. When I did sometimes get the courage to ask to use the restroom Christian would punch, kick me and drag me to the restroom.

They would have my little brothers pee on me, and Christian would sometime make me drink her pee. I was starting to get very weak from not eating and I started to have little black outs while doing chores. Just for the hell of it they would sometimes have me bathe in bleach and it came to a point were the skin on some of my toes was falling off. Christian would also put lemon juice on the missing flesh of my toes before sending me to sleep. That was one of the worst pains I’ve ever felt. They put me through more torture everyday that I just don’t want to think about.

I was saved on March 14 2014 ,and from there my biological brother and I were adopted into a Family. They changed our names and now my last name is Ochinang. I call them the Ochinangs since that’s their last name. When I got adopted I really thought I was safe and wouldn’t have to go through abuse again but little did I know.. For five years their biological son who was only two days older than me molested me and I never said anything because that’s what I learned to do best at Christian’s house. The parents never believed me and when I told them the mom said I was lying for attention. They never really supported me, and the mom also didn’t accept the fact that I was bisexual so she was always telling me I wasn’t normal and that I was going to hell.

I finally reported the sexual abuse to authorities on November 2018 when I was in the eighth grade. I got removed from my adoptive home, and since then I’ve been in this horrible foster system. I’m only fifteen-years-old and I have gone through the worst of the worst and I’m still here fighting for the love of a family. I’m in a group home at the moment until a family wants me. But I am a troubled teenager and most families see me as a bad kid. That’s how its been since May 2019. So right now I’m still going through a very bad time, but I’m still going to continue to be strong for myself. I just wanted to share my story with everyone..

Emily

(Insta- retr0.angel)

I just wanted to say thank you so much for everyone’s support! It means a lot to me

This is me btw..

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Update!!!—So I have found a very great family who is taking me in I’m very happy and i’ve always waited for this moment i’m truly blessed.

I also wanted to say that I recently found my bio mom after 13 years of looking for her.

It turns out when I was younger those two women that abused me kidnapped me and my little brother from my bio family when I was younger!!!

My mom was in tears when we found each other.

Deserving Respect

November 25, 2011

In the waiting room of Taiyuan Railway Station, China. An older man fell asleep on a bench and did not move.

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A passenger went up to try to wake up the older man. It turned out that the older man had already passed away! At this time, people are watching and panicking.

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At that moment, a Buddhist monk dressed in yellow sea green walked up to the older man, calmly bent his waist and Paying tribute to the dead. The monk folded his hands and, chanted the sutra for the old man and compassionately hold the hand of the deceased.

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Netizens have expressed that this monk pulled up not only the hand of the older man. More is to pull up the conscience and kindness of this indifferent society.

Be the Rufus

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Rufus Father

My grandfather died in a work accident when my Dad was 12. Some lady upset my grandmother by calling 3–4 times a day crying about my grandfather dying and hanging up. My Dad spent an entire day knocking on every door in a 3 block radius. Asked for the lady of the house and then asked them point blank if they were calling his mother. No one admitted to calling but the calls stopped.

My sister came home crying in the 4th grade because her teacher was too lazy to learn her name (Not a difficult name at all). Kept calling her, “you” during roll call. Dad found out where he lived . Sat outside his house until he came out. Told him if he doesn’t learn my sister’s name he was coming back. Teacher learned her name.

I got robbed by 3 older guys while in middle school. My Dad told me to find out where they lived (see a pattern?). Showed up at the first guy’s house at 6am on a Saturday. Basically kidnapped him and took him to the 2nd guy’s house. Rinse, repeat and off to the 3rd guy’s house. Took all their money and retrieved my stolen BB gun. Left them on the other side of town and threatened to kill them if he ever saw them again.

Group of guys broke in my Dad’s house. Hit him in the head with a pipe and tried to cut his Airborne ring off his finger. He managed to run them out of the house. Recognized one of the guys, a neighborhood teen. Went to his house and basically kidnapped him. Scared him into telling him who and where the rest were. Called the police and had them arrested.

My Dad was in his 60s when a wannabe neighborhood criminal was terrorizing the older folks in the neighborhood. Made the mistake of setting fire to my father’s car in the driveway. Dad waited till one of those cold, wet nights and destroyed the guy’s car. He then made good on his escape down the alley through the woods and pond, up his alley, over his 6’ fence and through his basement window. (see diagram). Never had any problems after that.

 

I don’t agree with some of his methods but I can’t argue with his results. RIP, Dad.

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My Dad was probably like a lot of fathers in the 60s and 70s who worked hard and had very little patience for foolishness. I started to edit the kidnap parts but I think most can tell the difference between a father grabbing young punks by the scruff of the neck and squashing a situation vs. an actual kidnapping. Some comments were like, “If your father did that to me I would blah, blah, blah…” To you I say something you already know:

Don’t mess with another man’s kids or his stuff.

There are stories that are not mine to share during that time period that make my Dad’s 5 stories over 50 years seem like fairy tales.

He was an Army vet, worked 20+ years at the same job. He spoke very little to my mother after they divorced but for 30+ years after their breakup, the first thing out of his mouth when we talked was, “How’s your momma doin?” He obviously thought the names we picked for his grandkids were trash and called them BrightEyes, Peaches, Amber & Amir instead.

He was a good, fair, tough, outspoken man that brought giant packs of toilet paper instead of food when someone passed away (You’re gonna run out of shit paper with all those people at the house), gave EVERYONE free cookies (retired from a large cookie company) and in his later years would call me every time Cheaters came on TV.

As one of the commenters said, if your father is still around, please pick up the phone and enjoy talking to him.

Grilled Cowboy Steaks

Giddyap! David Lewis runs a small kitchen, micro-bakery, and coffee roastery from his hometown in Alabama, and is the founder of Kitchen Ambition. And he knows a thing or two about a good cowboy steak.

“There are few meals more legendary in American lore than cowboys flipping steak over a campfire at the end of a long day on the range,” says Lewis. “If you want to saddle up your own inner cowboy, cooking cowboy steak is fun and easier than you might expect.”

For preparation over a campfire, you’ll want to pick a steak with high fat content so that it doesn’t dry out over the flames while you’re cooking it, he says. Try a ribeye with the bone in, at least 1.25 thick and with visible fat marbling, he says. “Choosing the right steak makes all the difference.”

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Streaked with gorgeous marbling, as juicy as they come, and equipped with a bone that translates into big steak flavor, Bone-In Ribeyes (a.k.a. Cowboy Steaks) are almost as impressive before they hit the grill as they are coming off of it. But, make no mistake, this particular cut of beef is as unforgettable as it is mouthwatering when it hits the dinner plate, and there’s nothing that satisfies an appetite quite like this hunky, flavorful Steak.

In addition to the best Cowboy Steak Recipe and cooking method, we’re talking all the essentials, and any questions you may have? Well, they’ve already been answered. You’ll find out:

  • How to pick the perfect steak!
  • How to properly season a thick-cut steak.
  • Degrees of doneness and time guidelines for cooking Bone-In Ribeyes.

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Cowboy Steak.

HOW TO PICK THE PERFECT RIBEYE

At the meat counter, you’ve likely noticed the same cut of beef comes in multiple grades with very different price tags. So what determines the quality of grade and that great big swing in price when it comes to steaks? Marbling.

Prime beef (numero uno) has more marbling, which is the fat running throughout a cut of meat, and when it comes to ribeyes, marbling is everything. These streaks of fat not only add a great deal of flavor, but they also help to keep the steaks moist and tender throughout the cooking process. Note, for good marbling, look for thin streams of fat running across the ribeye.

If you want a Cowboy Steak, be sure to get bone-in ribeyes. For an impressive presentation, you’ll want to look for a nice, thick, hunky bone. And, if you’d like the bone showing, ask your butcher to french it before you leave the meat counter.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

Beef doesn’t need a whole lot of help in the flavor department, but most especially ribeyes. Because of their heavy marbling Ribeyes are packed with flavor. Also because of their heavy marbling, no oil is needed before these bad boys hit the grill.

To simplify matters even further, the only seasoning you’ll need for this cut of steak is good old-fashioned salt and pepper. However, you’re going to need a lot of it.

These steaks are thick, so naturally, more salt and pepper is needed, but you should also consider that a great deal of your salt and pepper rub is going to fall through the grates of the grill. Point of the story? Don’t be afraid to season very liberally.

So just a recap, for your Cowboy Steaks, you will need:

  • Bone-In Ribeyes
  • Kosher Salt
  • Coarse Black Pepper

We promise — simple as has never tasted so good.

HOW TO MAKE COWBOY STEAKS

When it comes to cooking this particular cut of beef, nothing beats an open flame, and these hunky, gorgeous steaks deserve nothing but the best.

  1. Set out the ribeyes at room temperature 30 minutes before grilling.
  2. Prep the grill and bring to medium-high heat.
  3. Season steaks liberally with salt and pepper.
  4. Grill about 4 minutes on each side for medium-rare.
  5. Allow to rest 5-10 minutes, serve, and enjoy!

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STEAK DONENESS COOKING GUIDELINES

Note, there are multiple factors that go into the degree of doneness of a cooked steak, and it goes far beyond cook time and the temperature of the grill. For example, the internal temperature of the beef when it hits the grill, the amount of marbling, and the thickness of the steak will all affect cook time.

Therefore, these suggested cook times should be used as “guidelines,” for grilling accuracy, nothing beats an instant-read thermometer.

  • For rare steaks, cook for about 3 minutes on each side. Pull when the internal temperature reaches 120°.
  • For medium-rare steaks, cook for about 4 minutes on each side. Pull when the internal temperature reaches 130°.
  • For medium to medium-well steaks, cook for about 5 minutes on each side. Pull when the internal temperature reaches 140° – 145°.

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Cowboy Steak.

COWBOY STEAK Q & A

WHAT IS A COWBOY STEAK CUT?

A Cowboy Steak is a Bone-In Ribeye.

WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?

A Cowboy Steak comes from the ribeye which is from the primal rib section of a cow, or the Prime Rib.

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WHY IS IT CALLED A COWBOY RIBEYE?

Some sources say Bone-In Ribeyes are referred to as Cowboy Steaks because cowboys would hold on to the bone like a handle. Others say it is because thick-cut ribeyes are big, hearty, and ultra-rugged, ensuring they would satisfy any hard-working cowboy’s appetite.

The heartiness of the steak is the most likely explanation, coinciding with the etymology of both Cowboy Cookies and Cowboy Casserole.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A COWBOY STEAK AND A TOMAHAWK STEAK?

A Tomahawk Steak has an impressively long, frenched rib bone, whereas a Cowboy Steak would likely be thinner cut than a Tomahawk Steak and if there is a bone extending out of the steak, it would not be nearly as long.

HOW BIG IS A COWBOY RIBEYE?

This is completely dependent on the size of the cow and how thick the steak is cut. These steaks can range anywhere from 14 to 24 ounces.

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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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It’s all Putin’s fault! Well, that is the American narrative, don’t you know!

It’s all Putin’s fault. Don’t you know!

The United States has absolutely, and without question has tried THREE (x3) times to absolutely destroy and crush Russia. Three times. Now, on the eve of attempt four, by surrounding Russia with nuclear missiles, there should be no question that Russia has every RIGHT and every justification to launch a first-strike nuclear salvo to ERASE the United States.

And then there is China.

America has tried five times (x5) to topple, collapse and destroy China (within the last six years). And China, being what it is, just keeps on ticking along.But make no mistake, if you trip the on/off switch that is China, the fury and pain that will be unleashed upon the United States will be difficult to comprehend.

Truth.

Meanwhile the USA is a twitching, moaning, vomiting, and groaning. Ai! It’s in it’s death throes, and it is hemorrhaging. Money flowing out. Now Ukraine is asking for $20 billion dollars a month!. Heck one billion would get rid of homeless, and poverty. But that is not on the agenda for this brain-dead “clown show” that is driving American into the abyss.

Ok. Now you know everything that you need to know about the global political situation today. Wasn’t that simple?

Number of foreign mercenaries killed during the Ukraine Military Action as of 06/17/22

The Russian Ministry of Defense even presented a summary table, which showed how many mercenaries arrived, how many were destroyed and how many returned to their homeland with nothing.

Moreover, the department also showed the dynamics of the number of foreigners. It is expected that the representatives of Poland in this indicator belong to the palm. In the last three weeks alone, 166 militants have been killed. Another 71 fled in disgrace. Many mercenaries also come from Georgia and Great Britain. There are even Guineans, Liberians and three Peruvians.

Article from HERE

Poland – 544
Romania – 123
UK – 124
Croatia – 84
France – 73
Bosnia and Herzegovina – 53
Estonia – 56
Kosovo – 69
Albania – 51
Lithuania – 60
Portugal – 20
Germany – 37
North Macedonia – 24
Finland – 20
Ireland – 26
Italy – 21
Switzerland – 17
Netherlands – 13
Sweden – 5
Czech – 15
Spain – 6
Latvia – 8
Norway – 6
Belgium – 3
Denmark – 2
Austria – 2
Greece – 1
Montenegro – 1
Nigeria – 38
South Africa – 10
Senegal – 4
Guinea – 4
Equatorial Guinea – 1
Gabon – 2
Liberia – 2
Canada – 177
USA – 220
Colombia – 14
Bolivia – 15
Brazil – 19
Australia – 2
Georgia – 170
Syria – 94
Turkey – 21
Israel – 10
Republic of Korea – 4
Azerbaijan – 1
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“Soldiers of Failure”: Captured American mercenaries spoke about the Ukrainian army and propaganda. Alexander Dryuke and Andy Hyun are American mercenaries who were captured by our military during the battle near Kharkov. KP special correspondents Dmitry Steshin and Alexei Ovchinnikov managed to communicate with the prisoners. From HERE

The Inflation Monster That Our Leaders Have Created Is Voraciously Eating Away Our Standard Of Living

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The purchasing power of the dollar is not nearly as strong as it once was, and as a result our standard of living is rapidly going down.  The overall rate of inflation has been rising faster than our paychecks have been for quite a while, and this is causing a tremendous amount of pain for millions of U.S. consumers.  Unfortunately, this isn’t going to change any time soon.  The inflation monster that our leaders have created will continue to rage even as our economy plunges into a severe recession.  I relentlessly warned that the trillions of dollars that our leaders were pumping into the system would cause enormous problems down the road, and now we are trapped in an economic nightmare with no easy way out.

On Wednesday, we learned that the rate of inflation in the United States jumped even higher last month…

Shoppers paid sharply higher prices for a variety of goods in June as inflation kept its hold on a slowing U.S. economy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday.

The consumer price index, a broad measure of everyday goods and services related to the cost of living, soared 9.1% from a year ago, above the 8.8% Dow Jones estimate. That marked the fastest pace for inflation going back to November 1981.

Of course the way that inflation is calculated today is much different from the way that it was calculated back in the 1980s.  If the way that inflation was calculated had not been changed, the official inflation rate would be much higher right now.

But even if you want to take the 9.1 percent figure at face value, it is still extremely high, and last month energy and food prices were two of the main reasons why we witnessed such a dramatic surge…

  • Gas: 59.9%
  • Electricity: 13.7%
  • Food at home: 12.2%
  • New vehicles: 11.4%
  • Food away from home: 7.7%
  • Used cars and trucks: 7.1%
  • Shelter: 5.6%
  • Apparel: 5.2%

Let’s focus on that “food at home” category for a moment.

Every single one of us needs to eat, and so this is something that is deeply affecting all of us.

And right now we are seeing rapid price increases in almost aisle of the grocery store

  • Cereals and cereal products: +15.1%
  • Beef and veal: +4.1%
  • Pork: +9.0%
  • Poultry: +17.3%
  • Fish and seafood: +11.0%
  • Eggs: +33.1%
  • Dairy and related products: +13.5%
  • Fresh fruits: +7.3%
  • Fresh vegetables: +6.5%
  • Juices and nonalcoholic drinks: +11.6%
  • Coffee: 15.8%
  • Fats and oils: 19.5%
  • Baby food: 14.0%

Has your paycheck gone up by a similar amount over the past year?

If not, you are losing ground and your standard of living is declining.

Overall, real wages in the United States have now fallen for 15 months in a row.

In all the years I have been writing, I have never seen anything quite like this.

According to one expert that was interviewed by the Daily Caller, “American families are being crushed” by the inflation tsunami that we are witnessing right now…

Under the Biden administration, skyrocketing fuel costs and exploding inflation are hurting everyday Americans the most, according to an economist at the Heritage Foundation.

“Energy prices are trickling down into everything and American families are being crushed,” E.J. Antoni, a research fellow for regional economics in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Antoni also says that the average worker in the United States has “lost the equivalent of almost $3,400 in annual income” due to declining purchasing power since Joe Biden entered the White House

“The average worker has lost the equivalent of almost $3,400 in annual income since Biden took office,” Antoni explained.

Real average hourly earnings decreased 3.6% from June 2021 to June 2022, according to recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a decrease of 0.9% in the average workweek resulted in a 4.4% decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.

“This is catastrophic, $3,400 is some people’s food budgets for a year,” Antoni continued.

The good news, if that is what you want to call it, is that the inflation rate will probably subside just a bit during the next few months.

I have to admit that I agree with Jay Hatfield’s assessment of the situation

Jay Hatfield, CEO at Infrastructure Capital Advisors, says this may signal the peak. “We forecast that this print will mark the peak of inflation as the Fed’s 15% shrinkage of the monetary base, which is the fastest decline since the great depression, will curb inflation as the QT has caused the dollar to appreciate by over 12% this year which has caused commodities to plummet by over 20% since the measurement period for June CPI.”

We are starting to see the size of the Fed’s balance sheet go down, and the Fed is likely to continue to aggressively raise interest rates in the months ahead.

Both of those moves are likely to add significant momentum to our economic slowdown, and demand will be suppressed.

Meanwhile, economic conditions will rapidly deteriorate as we plunge into an excruciatingly painful recession.

Won’t that be fun?

Unfortunately, even a deep recession will not be enough to tame the inflation monster, because our Congress critters continue to spend money like drunken sailors.

And I am entirely convinced that global supply problems will continue to escalate for a variety of reasons.

So even though demand will be suppressed, inflation is not going away.

I would encourage you to get prepared for the very painful years that are ahead of us while you still can.

You may think that economic conditions are bad now, but the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

The entire system is starting to crumble, and our clueless leaders seem to be all out of answers at this point.

The disappearance of the 9th Roman Legion

Founded sometime before 90 BC, the 9th Legion was legendary. In 58 BC they fell under the authority of Julius Caesar and from there their legend would grow.

  • They would become one of Caesar’s veteran legions, fighting with him in all of his famous battles like at Alesia
  • They would fight with Caesar in his Civil War against Pompey- being involved in both battles vs Pompey Magnus
  • While Veterans were settled after Caesar’s victory, the Legion was reinforced and soon fought for Octavian against Mark Antony in the final Civil War of the Republic
  • Then 9th found in Hispania, winning Octavian a much-needed PR boost
  • They then fought in Germania in Augustus’s Germanic Wars. They were not involved in any of the disasters but they were stationed there regardless
  • They were involved in the Roman conquest of Brittania
  • The 9th fought the legendary Boudica and were badly defeated
  • They were a major part of the invasion of modern Scotland

After almost 2 centuries of service, the 9th Legion had truly become legendary. Sometime around 104 AD to 108 AD they were stationed on the Rhine. The last records we have of them date from the year 120 and they were confirmed to no longer exist by 197. So from 120–197 they disappeared.

What happened to the 9th Legion?

Well, there was a theory for a while that the 9th Legion was wiped out by the Britons in Northern Brittania. We knew there was a disaster up there where a legion was wiped out around 110s AD. Hadrian building his famous wall was a response to the catastrophe.

This was the leading theory but then things changed. In 2015 we found a record of the 9th Legion existing in 120 AD. The record is complicated but it proved the 9th existed and that officers of the 9th were going on to have distinguished careers.

So now there are 2 new theories

  1. They got wiped out during the Jewish Revolts. The 22nd Legion was recorded to have fought in Judea and similar to the 9th Legion, all records of them disappear after AD 120.
  2. From 161 to 166 Emperor Marcus Aurelias fought a war against Parthia. During this period an unspecified legion was surrounded and annihilated according to historians Cassius Dio.

The problem is that neither of these events records the death of the 9th Legion and you think they would. So, somehow, the most famous Roman Legion in history disappeared.

Confessions of a Woman With a Photographic Memory

Is studying super easy for you?

Studying? What is that?

How easy is it for you to take tests?

Absurdly easy. It’s actually pretty great, I never have to study. People at my university get a little pissed off sometimes by that.

I have never had anything but an A or a perfect score on any test (excluding math and my current studies in Russian). I chose not to skip any grades because I didn’t want to be “abnormal,” and my talent isn’t something that I reveal to most people.

How long does it take you to remember something you’ve read a year ago?

Instantly.

Have you ever tried to memorize the dictionary?

No, I have not. I got bored.

Are you able to scan quickly through a book, then “read” it later in your head?

No, I can’t. I have to actually read it the first time. That would be pretty sweet though.

Can you recall by Title/Page Number?

Title, yes, without fail. Page number is more sporadic, because I have trouble with numbers.

So how far back do your memories of things you have read go?

My earliest memory is from reading the book “Goodnight Moon” when I was in kindergarden, the first book I ever read.

How fucking easy were english classes?

Haha English classes are a fucking joke. I had to make a tough decision when I got to college; be an English major and do NO work, EVER, or actually pick something I’d need to try in.

Has anyone ever thought you cheated on a test or something like that?

YES. Sometimes during tests, teachers ask questions that come directly from the book. When I was younger if I wasn’t paying careful attention, I would accidentally just regurgitate the direct answer from the book, word for word. I didn’t mean it to be plagiarizing, I was just trying to be as precise as possible. After a few visits to the principal’s office and having to explain and prove that I wasn’t cheating, I learned to be much more careful when I take tests like that. I much prefer multiple choice.

How’d you prove to the principal?

In middle school, the first test I was sent to the principal for was given to me again verbally. After that, my teachers gave me my tests verbally for a while until they were convinced. They then sent a note in to my high school when I got older, explaining the situation.

Does your understanding of the material have any effect? ie, quantum mechanics. Do you have complete recall of writings you don’t understand?

No, my understanding is completely normal. If I read a book about quantum mechanics, which I have never studied, I would understand it precisely as well as someone who had also never studied it. I’d still have complete recall, though, and I could read other, more basic descriptions of quantum mechanics and slowly understand what I read previously based on that.

Could you in theory read a complex book then go ponder on it later without the book in hand? Then go and refer to other passages in the book or other relative books and piece it together pretty easily this way?

Yes. That’s sometimes how I do it when I read a book out of my depth.

When you are deciding on a book to read, does the fact that the memory off the book will be permanent influence you decision? I guess i’m asking if memory of garbage writing (tabloids, twilight) is a burden.

Yes and no. I don’t read magazines, ever, but I don’t mind reading books on the bestseller list or anything. Generally books like Twilight have no value or interest for me whatsoever, and subsequently kind of go away after I’m done. It is a problem when people constantly bring them up though, because then the entirety of the text floods my brain and I want to jump off a bridge.

Does this ability extend to words you hear?

No, I have poor listening comprehension. If I was ever going to suffer in a class, it would definitely be a lecture class with no textbook. I remember things I’ve heard or watched exactly as well as anyone else with moderately poor listening comprehension.

Is there every anything you remember that you wish you could forget?

Yes, absolutely. I’ve gotten some pretty nasty text messages/facebook messages, and the like. I really, REALLY wish that I could forget those sometimes.

Are there ever times it becomes a burden to remember so much? Perhaps something that you remember that you wish you didn’t have to?

YES. Sometimes it’s really lonely/upsetting to have so much wandering around in my head. If I’m happy and in a good mood, it generally is okay, but if I’m upset it can be terrible.

Are you autistic?

No, I am not autistic at all, I lead a pretty normal social life. I probably drink more than the average college student. I do have a fairly extreme case of OCD, which I’ve theorized might have something to do with my memory. I’ve heard of people with OCD who have super autobiographical memories, who can remember with extraordinary accuracy and in extraordinary detail the events of their lives and the days on which they occurred.

Has this affected your social abilities any?

Um, to an extent, yes. When I was younger I was extremely combative. There is NOTHING teachers and adults hate more than a child who constantly corrects them, and who is right in that correction. I was very depressed for a long time, because I never had anyone to talk to who understood. It was in high school that I realized that my memory was not unique. Knowing you aren’t the only one makes all the difference in the world, and I’ve become pretty normal socially since then.

Has this affected your love life?

I’ve had two boyfriends for two years each. The first was fairly docile and didn’t pick arguments with me; we had a low-key, nonargumentative relationship that ended due to him leaving for college. My second boyfriend was the most religious person I have ever encountered, and judged me deeply for my beliefs and failed to acknowledge anything I said. We fought continuously and we broke up due to college and also because we just didn’t get along. Now, I try to just opt for friends-with-benefits situations or one night stands. I’m not the most emotional person, and unless something really extraordinary happens, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Do you encounter any mental problems?

YES. I am CONSTANTLY inundated with random information. I’ll be talking to someone, and a quote from a book will pop into my head, and then another related quote will pop in, and it becomes an endless stupid chain. My current roommate discovered my ability through this once; I was very drunk and just went off on a quote chain like that, and basically gave her a running monologue of my train of thought. It gets pretty annoying sometimes. Also, if I am sad/upset/in any kind of negative mood at all, I feel like my head is a very unpleasant place to be.

Have you ever used your ability for profit?

Not yet. I’ve used it for my personal gain, such as academics, but that’s it as of now.

Do you want to use your talent for the better or follow your passion, or a combination of both?

Sort of a combination of both. I plan to attend law school after my graduation from college, which I have wanted to do since I was a child. I want to be a public defender, and I hope that my extensive memory can be put to good use there.

What is the most interesting thing you can remember reading? Favorite books, authors?

My favorite thing, and probably the most useful thing, that I have ever read has been the Bible. I am an atheist, and though I am less combative than I used to be as a young teenager, there is nothing more disconcerting to someone trying to convince me to be Christian than being able to recite the entire book back to them. Aside from this, Nietzsche, Sartre, Nabokov, Updike, and Dostoevsky are my favorite authors. My favorite book is The Possessed (also titled Demons and Devils), by Dostoevsky.

What is your favorite line of text you’ve ever read?

The poem Annabel Lee by Poe, and 2) “It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky.” -Dostoevsky, White Nights

An American Special Forces Ranger talks about South East Asia…

I found the Vietnamese to be arrogant and that they felt superior to all of the different races found in the Nam. I did not like working with them. The South Vietnamese had Special Forces in their Army LLDB but we tagged the LLDB with a different set of words ‘Little Lousy Dirty Bastards’. Every payday they would shake down our Cambodian troops even to a point of taking personal items from our Cambodians. One of our teammates gave one of his Cambodian soldiers a watch only to see one of the LLDB soldiers wearing the watch.

The Cambodians were a beautiful race. They were short but well built and very brave. Many times during a firefight I had too yell for them to get down; he was showing everyone his bravery. When I proved to them that I was worthy they would come up next to me and hold my hand while we were moving toward a contact. They were always smiling with beautiful teeth and large round eyes all contained in a beautiful personality. My interpreter told me that the three guys standing near us have pledged to be my body guard. I told the interpreter to thank them but I couldn’t thing of jeopardizing their life to protect mins. The interpreter said, “you must accept or they will lose face.” So I walked over to the three and thanked them through my interpreter.

While dug in on the Nam side of a canal that separated the Nam from Cambodia there was a primitive village behind our position. Huts with dirt floors, to the left and right side once inside a hut were two platforms used for sleeping, cooking and every activity. Not wanting to take a dump in their area I asked SSG Lott (Lott was on his fourth year in the Nam without a break) where should I go to take a dump. He informed me that their was an outhouse behind the village. When I walked around doing to the back of the single row of huts I saw a reservoir approximately 50 yards long and 25 yards wide. Built close to the edge was a platform. I started walking to the structure gingerly not knowing if tThe board would hold my weight. Once on the platform I saw it was a three seater but there were no seats just three holes with worn down areas on each side of each hole. I undid my pants and squatted down to do my business. When my first load hit the water there was considerable thrashing about with water reaching up to the hole. I looked down and fish were eating my waste. As I was leaving I saw an elderly men fishing. At first you’d think damn these people are just one generation removed from the Stone Age but they built the perfect recycling system. The poop was broken down by the fish, the water would then be used in their rice patties beyond the reservoir; but also a source of food. One evening the village chief invited Lott and I to join his family for dinner. The dinner was rice and fish. I knew that I had to eat the rice and fish knowing from where the fish came from; it was a gift and could not be refused.

The one thing about the Special Forces training that is crucial to conducting guerrilla warfare, you must immerse yourself and study the local customs and respect their customs to maintain their trust. Before an ODA is deployed to a foreign country the team will study the Area Study so as to respect their traditions and culture. We didn’t like the Regular Army units coming through our area because they never respected the customs of the local people.

All of the people we were around were Buddhist and I learned that when you go to the bathroom you don’t take your Buddha with you; there will be a hook to hang your Buddha on. I was given a Buddha which I wore with my Crucifix. It must have worked came through without a scratch. When a nephew was being sent to Afghanistan I gave him the Crucifix and Buddha to him and again not a scratch after two tours.

When calling someone over you NEVER point and wave them over; you gesture with your palm down at waist level and motion them over. You only point to animals and wave them over. A kiss is simply placing your lips against their cheek and sniff once and that’s all. The French in the Nam taught them the lips on lips.

Layered Greek Dip

You’ve probably had this at a summer party in the past, and we think it’s time to bring it back – not only is this dip with hummus, feta, olives, and fresh veggies tasty – but it’s a showstopper if you get the layers just right. It’s also easy to make ahead and the flavors set into the layers to make the dip so savory!

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Ingredients

Ingredient Checklist

Directions

Instructions Checklist
  • In medium mixing bowl beat cream cheese, lemon juice, Italian seasoning, and garlic with electric mixer on medium speed until smooth and combined.

  • Spread cream cheese mixture into a deep 9-inch pie plate, or shallow serving dish. Evenly spread hummus on cream cheese layer. Top with cucumber, tomato, olives, feta cheese, and green onions. Cover and refrigerate 2 to 24 hours. Serve with pita chips and/or multigrain tortilla chips. Makes about 2-1/2 cups dip (16 servings).

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U.S.-led Imperialism is the World’s Leading Purveyor of Chaos

13 Jul 2022
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To say that the West, currently led by the dictates of U.S. imperialism, is in trouble would be an understatement.

  • U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned on July 7th amid an escalating political crisis of legitimacy .
  • Three weeks before Johnson announced his departure, Emmanuel Macron’s so-called centrist alliance lost its parliamentary majority in France.
  • U.S. President Joe Biden continues to face his own crisis of legitimacy in the form of declining favorability ratings and public humiliation from Democratic loyalists such as Debra Messing .

For the West, political crisis is undergirded by an unprecedented level of system chaos which has given the vast majority of workers and oppressed people little confidence in the future.

That chaos was compounded by the murder of Japan’s former Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe on July 7th. Abe was an imperialist, a neoliberal, and the highest expression of what it means to be a puppet of the American Empire . Abe’s so-called Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was a literal creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Other detestable qualities of Abe include his worship of Japan’s fascist war criminals, his membership in the fascist cult Nippon Kaigi, and his unapologetic defense of Japan’s history of brutalizing and super exploiting “comfort women” from its colonies. Most important to the United States, however, was Abe’s unquestionable loyalty to the New Cold War and the military encirclement of China.

Abe’s murder and the attendant political crises in the West are a clear demonstration that U.S.-led imperialism is the world’s leading purveyor of chaos in the world.

At the economic base, the U.S. and the E.U. continue to prolong their proxy war with Russia through massive arms transfers and sanctions that have boomeranged back to spur shortages and inflation. Inflation has come with political costs. Already unpopular capitalist regimes in the West are finding themselves increasingly exposed as incapable of addressing the rising cost of living.

It doesn’t help matters that the so-called military superiority of the United States and its imperialist partners is also being challenged by Russia’s successful special military operation in Ukraine.

Thanks to the U.S. obsession with NATO expansion, the future is bleak for Ukraine’s U.S.-backed coup government established in 2014. Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine has made immense progress in the Donbass region. An already fragile and privatized vassal Ukrainian economy can only look forward to more pain once the U.S. and its junior partners in NATO come looking for repayment on its exorbitant aid packages. And Ukraine is just the beginning. The recent admission of Sweden and Finland into NATO is yet another declaration of war with Russia which opens the door to future conflicts even more destructive than the ongoing U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.

It is an undeniable fact that chaos follows U.S. imperialism wherever it goes. In Latin America, stability exists only where leftist governments have secured sufficient sovereignty .

In Africa, the spread of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has led to widespread destabilization and political insecurity in the aftermath of the U.S.-NATO-AFRICOM invasion of Libya in 2011.

In Asia, U.S. militarism has facilitated war in the West and attempted to organize a coalition of vassal states against China in the East. U.S. meddling in Taiwan has created a dumping ground for defense contractors and prompted Joe Biden to articulate on three occasions that the U.S. is willing to militarily intervene to “defend” the island , a guaranteed nuclear exchange scenario.

U.S. militarism is the principal barrier to political stability around the world which is a prerequisite to addressing global challenges such as climate change and poverty. U.S. and E.U. sanctions murder thousands of people in poorer, non-white countries. U.S.-sponsored color revolutions and “soft power” maneuvers are preludes to regime change. So-called U.S. “soft power” strengthens the most reactionary forces in the world. The far right and fascistic Contras in Latin and Central America , ISIS in West Asia, and the Azov Regiment in Ukraine are all outgrowths of U.S. interference disguised as “soft power.”

A dialectical relationship exists between the U.S.’s domestic and foreign policy. U.S. imperialism is an advanced stage in the system of capitalism predicated upon slavery, colonialism, and racism. Jayland Walker’s brutal murder at the hands of Akron police is a near daily occurrence in the United States. Black Americans and Indigenous peoples have been subject to the cruelest forms of racist violence for centuries. The U.S.’s endless wars are an expression of this violence turned toward imperialist ends.

The chickens of chaos have come home to roost.

The Euro-American imperialist world order is suffering from terminal contradictions. Political instability reigns supreme. Another economic crisis is said to be looming but is more than likely already here. Imperialist wars no longer hold any prospect for any real “victory” without serious consequences for the war-maker.

While material conditions are pregnant with possibilities, there is no organized and independent left challenge to the supremacy of U.S. capital and its armed guards of the state. That is the task ahead of the people’s movement residing in the belly of the imperialist beast. In the face of the unprecedented chaos produced by its leading purveyor, the United States, this is no doubt the most difficult one that the working class and oppressed in the long and storied history of resistance. But such a task is not a choice. It is forced upon us by the weight of imperialism bearing down on our necks.

We must not rest until we get the boot off by any means necessary.

Singaporean Artist Depicts How Strange She Feels In Japan

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Being silent on a train or not seeing a trashcan anywhere are just some of the things you can only experience in Japan. After spending some time there, the Singaporean artist Evangeline Neo decided to demonstrate the differences between the Japanese culture and her homeland.

More: Evangeline Neo, Instagram, Facebook h/t: playjunkie

“I studied in Tokyo during 2010-2014 and noticed a lot of cultural differences between Japan and my country so I started to draw these comic strips about them to deal with my culture shock,” the artist shared on Bored Panda. “I hope my comics will help more foreigners to understand Japan and Japanese better, as well as to increase awareness and change how we behave.”

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William Hartung, Call It the National (In)security Budget

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Yes, Afghanistan went down the drain and Washington’s global war on terror ended (more or less) in disaster 20 years after it began. But the urge to militarize the planet? Not a chance in an American world where, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung lays out in striking detail today, the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex plan to continue ruling the roost in Washington for time eternal.

So, war, what is it good for? Absolutely something! In that sense, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a horror of the first order, has been anything but bad for the Pentagon. Just in case you hadn’t noticed, three decades after the old Cold War ended, with a distinct helping hand from Russian president Vladimir Putin, the Biden administration has been playing its part admirably in ramping up this country’s newest version of the old Cold War into an ever more militarized set of confrontations.

It’s not just the CIA operatives in Ukraine or the sending of U.S. troops to neighboring Poland early in the Ukraine war. Only last week, at a NATO summit, President Biden announced that this country would ramp up its military presence in Europe yet again on land, sea, and in the air. (Keep in mind that, since the war in Ukraine began, Washington had already dispatched an extra 20,000 troops to Europe, raising its forces there above 100,000.)  At least 3,000 more combat troops are now heading for Romania, two F-35 squadrons for Great Britain, U.S. naval ships for Spain, and the U.S. 5th Army Corps will establish a sizeable permanent base and headquarters in Poland, while there will be unspecified “enhanced” deployments in the Baltics and American forces will be upped in Germany and Italy, too.

And this isn’t just happening in Europe to face down an outrageous Russian invasion of Ukraine. An increasingly militarized commitment to Asia, especially Taiwan, and a new Cold War with China has been in the cards for a while now. I’m sure you remember our president upping the ante there by responding to a reporter’s question about whether the U.S. would ever get militarily involved in defending Taiwan this way: “Yes, that’s the commitment we made.” True, his aides walked him back on the subject, but from sending American naval vessels through the Taiwan strait and into the South China Sea to ramping up naval war exercises with allies in the Pacific, everything seems to be getting colder and colder in ways that seem hotter and hotter.

The world may look more ominous to some of us, but not, it seems, to the Pentagon. In terms of what matters to our military leaders, things — think: funding — are only (and eternally) on the upswing.  Keep all of this in mind as you read Hartung’s latest yearly look at our national (in)security budget and how, in a world with so many other problems, it continues to go through the roof. Tom

Something That We Have Been Waiting For Just Happened, And It Is A Really Bad Sign…

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There has been a lot of talk recently about “the death of the dollar”, but the truth is that the euro is in far bigger trouble.  Inflation in the eurozone has risen to truly frightening levels, and the war in Ukraine threatens to plunge the major economies of Europe into a very deep recession.  Russia holds the key, because if Russia completely cuts off the flow of natural gas to Europe it really will cause an unprecedented economic nightmare.  Even now, energy prices in Europe have already soared to absolutely insane levels, and the Russians could make things much, much worse with a single decision.  The Europeans should have never allowed themselves to become so dependent on Russian energy, and now they find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.

So with everything that has been going on, it shouldn’t be any surprise that the euro has been steadily falling.

In fact, on Tuesday the euro reached parity with the dollar for the very first time since 2002

The euro hit parity with the U.S. dollar on Tuesday for the first time in 20 years, meaning that the currencies have the same worth.

The euro fell to $0.9998 against the dollar, it’s lowest level since December 2002, as the euro zone’s energy supply crisis and economic woes continue to depress the common currency.

For years, I have been warning that the euro would eventually fall so low that it would be at parity with the dollar, and now that day has arrived.

And I have also been warning that such an event would be a really bad sign for Europe, because I always felt that hitting parity with the dollar would be an indication that a collapse of the European economy had begun.

In the short-term, everyone is going to be watching for what Russia does next.  On Monday, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline was shut down for a regularly scheduled 10 day period of maintenance

Fears of a recession have grown in recent weeks due to rising uncertainty over the bloc’s energy supply, with Russia threatening to further reduce gas flows to Germany and the broader continent.

Russia temporarily suspended gas deliveries via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline on Monday for annual summer maintenance works. The pipeline is Europe’s single biggest piece of gas import infrastructure, carrying around 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea.

Many analysts in the western world are greatly concerned about what will happen if the Russians don’t turn the gas back on when the 10 day maintenance period is over.

If it doesn’t get turned back on, we are being warned that Europe could actually be facing a “doomsday scenario”

As such, DB’s Jim Reid said that July 22, the day gas is supposed to come back online, could be the most important day of the year: “while we all spend most of our market time thinking about the Fed and a recession, I suspect what happens to Russian gas in H2 is potentially an even bigger story. Of course by July 22nd parts may have be found and the supply might start to normalize. Anyone who tells you they know what is going to happen here is guessing but as minimum it should be a huge focal point for everyone in markets.”

Fast forward to today when, one day after the start of the scheduled 10-day shutdown period which has already sent flows through to NS 1 pipeline to basically zero…

… and the market is now focusing on the worst case scenario: what happens if Russia cuts off all gas on July 22, the day even Bloomberg has now dubbed Europe’s “doomsday scenario.”

So let’s watch and see what happens on July 22nd.

If the Russians decide that it is time to completely cut off the gas, European financial markets will go completely haywire.

Of course energy prices in Europe have already gone completely nuts, and authorities in Germany are preparing to use “sports arenas and exhibition halls as ‘warm up spaces’ this winter”

Cities across Germany are planning to use sports arenas and exhibition halls as ‘warm up spaces’ this winter to help freezing citizens who are unable to afford skyrocketing energy costs.

Bild newspaper reveals how the the nation’s Cities and Municipalities Association has urged local authorities to set aside public spaces to help vulnerable citizens in the colder months.

This isn’t how things were supposed to play out.

The “green energy revolution” was supposed to have totally transformed Europe by now.

But that hasn’t happened and it isn’t going to happen.

On the other side of the Atlantic, we continue to get more signs that the U.S. economy is headed for serious trouble as well.  For example, we just learned that home sale cancellations have risen to the highest level since the early days of the COVID pandemic

Approximately 600,000 home purchase agreements fell through in June, according to a new analysis by Redfin.

The figure is equivalent to 14.9% of homes that went under contract during the month, an increase from 12.7% in May and 11.2% a year ago.

And as the greatest housing bubble in our entire history starts to implode, companies in the industry continue to lay off more workers

Another lender is resorting to layoffs as the mortgage market shrivels.

Tucked in near the end of a business plan released Tuesday morning, loanDepot announced it would shed 4,800 people, or 42 percent of its workforce.

About 2,800 of them have already been sent packing as the firm slashes headcount to 6,500 from 11,300.

The last housing crash was really painful, and this one is going to be even more bitter.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is warning that we are about to see another huge inflation number

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Monday said the administration expects a high inflation number when the new Consumer Price Index (CPI) is released Wednesday, but downplayed any fault of President Biden in the matter.

“On Wednesday, we have new CPI and inflation data, and we expect the headline number, which includes gas and food, to be highly elevated, mainly because gas prices were so elevated in June,” Jean-Pierre said. “Gas and food prices continue to be heavily impacted by the war in Ukraine.”

The Biden administration has lost control, and Joe Biden’s approval ratings continue to sink to horrifying new lows.

The Federal Reserve has lost control as well, and if Fed officials continue to raise interest rates they are going to greatly accelerate this new economic downturn.

If you are waiting for our leaders to rescue us from the economic nightmare that is now staring us in the face, you are going to be greatly disappointed.

The great “unraveling” that I have warned about for so long is here, and it is going to be exceedingly unpleasant.

I hope that you are doing your best to get prepared for the road that is ahead, because we are in for a really bumpy trip.

Chicken Fried Steak

Something about sitting outside with a plate of chicken fried steak and a nice slaw sure reminds us of summer at Grandma’s house. While it’s a labor-intensive meal to make, the crowd-pleasing crunch is worth it.

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Chicken Fried Steak:

Gravy:

Directions

  1. For the steak: Begin with setting up an assembly line of dishes. Mix the milk with the eggs in one; the flour mixed with the seasoned salt, 1 1/2 teaspoons black pepper, paprika and cayenne in another; and the meat in a third. Then have one clean plate at the end to receive the breaded meat.
  2. Work with one piece of meat at a time. Sprinkle both sides with kosher salt and black pepper, then place it in the flour mixture. Turn to coat. Place the meat into the milk/egg mixture, turning to coat. Finally, place it back in the flour and turn to coat (dry mixture/wet mixture/dry mixture). Place the breaded meat on the clean plate, then repeat with the remaining meat.
  3. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the butter. Drop in a few sprinkles of flour to make sure it’s sufficiently hot. When the butter sizzles immediately, you know it’s ready. (It should not brown right away, if it does, the fire is too hot.) Cook the meat, 3 pieces at a time, until the edges start to look golden brown, about 2 minutes each side. Remove the meat to a paper towel-lined plate and keep them warm by covering lightly with another plate or a sheet of foil. Repeat until all the meat is cooked.
  4. After all the meat is fried, pour off the grease into a heatproof bowl. Without cleaning the skillet, return it to the stove over medium-low heat. Add 1/4 cup of the grease back to the skillet and allow it to heat up.
  5. For the gravy: When the grease is hot, sprinkle the flour evenly over the grease. Using a whisk, mix the flour with the grease, creating a golden-brown paste. Add more flour if it looks overly greasy; add a little more grease if it becomes too pasty/clumpy. Keep cooking until the roux reaches a deep golden brown color.
  6. Pour in the milk, whisking constantly. Add the seasoned salt and black pepper to taste and cook, whisking, until the gravy is smooth and thick, 5 to 10 minutes. Be prepared to add more milk if it becomes overly thick. Be sure to taste to make sure gravy is sufficiently seasoned.
  7. Serve the meat next to a big side of mashed potatoes. Pour gravy over the whole shebang!

Artist Modernizes Disney Characters By Placing Them In All Sorts Of Interesting Scenarios

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While some are sworn haters of everything Disney, most of us enjoy a good Disney theme here and there. And then there’s a vast number of Disney fans that love everything related to it.

Well, today’s post was specially made for the latter group. Have you ever wondered what if Disney characters did cameos everywhere? Or if they lived a normal modern life? An artist that calls herself OneFairyFail on Instagram satisfies all of those needs for hardcore fans of Disney, and puts them in all kinds of weird situations. It gives a glimpse of how they would react, what they would do in certain scenarios, and satisfies such “what if” curiosity to the tee.

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One reason why Americans are fucked…

As I said, America is a land with a million tiny hands in your wallet. Check out this graph, clearly showing the numbers of “indians” compared to the number of “chiefs” in the medical industry…

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America’s $1.4 Trillion “National Security” Budget Makes Us Ever Less Safe

This March, when the Biden administration presented a staggering $813 billion proposal for “national defense,” it was hard to imagine a budget that could go significantly higher or be more generous to the denizens of the military-industrial complex. After all, that request represented far more than peak spending in the Korean or Vietnam War years, and well over $100 billion more than at the height of the Cold War.

It was, in fact, an astonishing figure by any measure — more than two-and-a-half times what China spends; more, in fact, than (and hold your hats for this one!) the national security budgets of the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. And yet the weapons industry and hawks in Congress are now demanding that even more be spent.

In recent National Defense Authorization Act proposals, which always set a marker for what Congress is willing to fork over to the Pentagon, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees both voted to increase the 2023 budget yet again — by $45 billion in the case of the Senate and $37 billion for the House. The final figure won’t be determined until later this year, but Congress is likely to add tens of billions of dollars more than even the Biden administration wanted to what will most likely be a record for the Pentagon’s already bloated budget.

This lust for yet more weapons spending is especially misguided at a time when a never-ending pandemic, growing heat waves and other depredations of climate change, and racial and economic injustice are devastating the lives of millions of Americans.  Make no mistake about it: the greatest risks to our safety and our future are non-military in nature, with the exception, of course, of the threat of nuclear war, which could increase if the current budget goes through as planned.

But as TomDispatch readers know, the Pentagon is just one element in an ever more costly American national security state.  Adding other military, intelligence, and internal-security expenditures to the Pentagon’s budget brings the total upcoming “national security” budget to a mind-boggling $1.4 trillion. And note that, in June 2021, the last time my colleague Mandy Smithberger and I added up such costs to the taxpayer, that figure was almost $1.3 trillion, so the trend is obvious.

To understand how these vast sums are spent year after year, let’s take a quick tour of America’s national security budget, top to bottom.

The Pentagon’s “Base” Budget

The Pentagon’s proposed “base” budget, which includes all of its routine expenses from personnel to weapons to the costs of operating and maintaining a 1.3 million member military force, came in at $773 billion for 2023, more than $30 billion above that of 2022. Such an increase alone is three times the discretionary budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and more than three times the total allocation for the Environmental Protection Agency.

In all, the Pentagon consumes nearly half of the discretionary budget of the whole federal government, a figure that’s come down slightly in recent years thanks to the Biden administration’s increased investment in civilian activities. That still means, however, that almost anything the government wants to do other than preparing for or waging war involves a scramble for funding, while the Department of Defense gets virtually unlimited financial support.

And keep in mind that the proposed Biden increase in Pentagon spending comes despite the ending of 20 years of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, a move that should have meant significant reductions in the department’s budget.  Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn, however, that, in the wake of the Afghan disaster, the military establishment and hawks in Congress quickly shifted gears to touting — and exaggerating — challenges posed by China, Russia, and inflation as reasons for absorbing the potential savings from the Afghan War and pressing the Pentagon budget ever higher.

It’s worth looking at what America stands to receive for its $773 billion — or about $2,000 per taxpayer, according to an analysis by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. More than half of that amount goes to giant weapons contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, along with thousands of smaller arms-making firms.

The most concerning part of the new budget proposal, however, may be the administration’s support for a three-decades long, $1.7-trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles (as well, of course, as new warheads to go with them), bombers, and submarines. As the organization Global Zero has pointed out, the United States could dissuade any country from launching an atomic attack against it with far fewer weapons than are contained in its current nuclear arsenal.  There’s simply no need for a costly — and risky — nuclear weapons “modernization” plan. Sadly, it’s guaranteed to help fuel a continuing global nuclear arms race, while entrenching nuclear weapons as a mainstay of national security policy for decades to come. (Wouldn’t those decades be so much better spent working to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether?)

The riskiest weapon in that nuclear plan is a new land-based, intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).  As former Secretary of Defense William Perry once explained, ICBMs are among “the most dangerous weapons in the world” because a president warned of a nuclear attack would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war based on a false alarm. Not only is a new ICBM unnecessary, but the existing ones should be retired as well, as a way of reducing the potential for a world-ending nuclear conflagration.

To its credit, the Biden administration is trying to get rid of an ill-conceived nuclear weapons program initiated during the Trump years – a sea-launched, nuclear-armed cruise missile that, rather than adding a “deterrent” capability, would raise the risk of a nuclear confrontation.  As expected, nuclear hawks in the military and Congress are trying to restore funding for that nuclear SLCM (pronounced “Slick ‘em”).

The Pentagon budget is replete with other unnecessary, overpriced, and often potentially dysfunctional systems that should either be canceled or replaced with more affordable and effective alternatives.  The most obvious case in point is the F-35 combat aircraft, meant to carry out multiple missions for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. So far, it does none of them well.

In a series of careful analyses of the aircraft, the Project on Government Oversight determined that it may never be fully ready for combat. As for cost, at an estimated $1.7 trillion over its projected period of service, it’s already the most expensive single weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon. And keep in mind that those costs will only increase as the military services are forced to pay to fix problems that were never addressed in the rush to deploy the plane before it was fully tested.  Meanwhile, that aircraft is so complex that, at any given moment, a large percentage of the fleet is down for maintenance, meaning that, if ever called on for combat duty, many of those planes will simply not be available.

In a grudging acknowledgement of the multiple problems plaguing the F-35, the Biden administration proposed decreasing its buy of the plane by about a third in 2023, a figure that should have been much lower given its poor performance. But congressional advocates of the plane — including a large F-35 caucus made up of members in states or districts where parts of it are being produced — will undoubtedly continue to press for more planes than even the Pentagon’s asking for, as the Senate Armed Services Committee did in its markup of the Department of Defense spending bill.

In addition to all of this, the Pentagon’s base budget includes mandatory spending for items like military retirement, totaling an estimated $12.8 billion for 2023.

Running national (in)security tally: $785.8 billion

The Nuclear Budget

The average taxpayer no doubt assumes that a government agency called the Department of Energy (DOE) would be primarily concerned with developing new sources of energy, including ones that would reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels to help rein in the ravages of climate change.  Unfortunately, that assumption couldn’t be less true.

Instead of spending the bulk of its time and money on energy research and development, more than 40% of the Department of Energy’s budget for 2023 is slated to support the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which manages the country’s nuclear weapons program, principally by maintaining and developing nuclear warheads.  Work on other military activities like reactors for nuclear submarines pushes the defense share of the DOE budget even higher. The NNSA spreads its work across the country, with major locations in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Its proposed 2023 budget for nuclear-weapons activities is $16.5 billion, part of a budget for defense-related projects of $29.8 billion.

Amazingly the NNSA’s record of managing its programs may be even worse than the Pentagon’s, with cost overruns of more than $28 billion during the last two decades.  Many of its current projects, like a plan to build a new facility to produce plutonium “pits” — the devices that trigger the explosion of a hydrogen bomb — are unnecessary even under the current, misguided nuclear weapons modernization plan.

Nuclear budget: $29.8 billion

Running (in)security tally: $815.6 billion

Defense-Related Activities

This catch-all category, pegged at $10.6 billion in 2023, includes the international activities of the FBI and payments to Central Intelligence Agency retirement funds, among other things.

Defense-Related Activities: $10.6 billion

Running (in)security tally: $826.2 billion

The Intelligence Budget

Information about this country’s 18 separate intelligence agencies is largely shielded from public view.  Most members of Congress don’t even have staff that can access significant details on how intelligence funds are spent, making meaningful Congressional oversight almost impossible. The only real data supplied with regard to the intelligence agencies is a top-line number – $67.1 billion proposed for 2023, a $5 billion increase over 2022. Most of the intelligence community’s budget is believed to be hidden inside the Pentagon budget. So, in the interests of making a conservative estimate, intelligence spending is not included in our tally.

Intelligence Budget: $67.1 billion

Running (in)security tally still: $826.2 billion

Veterans Affairs Budget

America’s post-9/11 wars have generated millions of veterans, many of whom have returned from battle with severe physical or psychological injuries. As a result, spending on veterans’ affairs has soared, reaching a proposed $301 billion in the 2023 budget plan.  Research conducted for the Costs of War Project at Brown University has determined that these costs will only grow, with more than $2 trillion needed just to take care of the veterans of the post-9/11 conflicts.

Veterans Affairs Budget: $301 billion

Running (in)security tally: $1.127 trillion

International Affairs Budget

The International Affairs budget includes non-military items like diplomacy at the State Department and economic aid through the Agency for International Development, critical (but significantly underfunded) parts of the U.S. national security strategy writ large.  But even in this category there are significant military-related activities in the form of programs that provide arms and training to foreign militaries and police forces.  It’s proposed that the largest of these, the Foreign Military Financing program, should receive $6 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, the total requested International Affairs budget is $67.8 billion in 2023.

International Affairs Budget: $67.8 billion

Running (in)security tally: $1.195 trillion

The Homeland Security Budget

After the 9/11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established by combining a wide range of agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Agency, the U.S. Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard.  The proposed DHS budget for 2023 is $56.7 billion, more than one-quarter of which goes to Customs and Border Protection as part of a militarized approach to addressing immigration into the United States.

Homeland Security Budget: $56.7 billion

Running (in)security tally: $1.252 trillion

Interest on the Debt

The national security state, as outlined so far, is responsible for about 26% of the interest due on the U.S. debt, a total of $152 billion.

Interest on the Debt: $152 billion

Running (in)security tally: $1.404 trillion

Our Misguided Security Budget

Spending $1.4 trillion to address a narrowly defined concept of national security should be considered budgetary malpractice on a scale so grand as to be almost unimaginable — especially at a time when the greatest risks to the safety of Americans and the rest of the world are not military in nature. After all, the Covid pandemic has already taken the lives of more than one million Americans, while the fires, floods, and heat waves caused by climate change have impacted tens of millions more.

Yet the administration’s proposed allocation of $45 billion to address climate change in the 2023 budget would be less than 6% of the Pentagon’s proposed budget of $773 billion.  And as noted, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are slated to get just one-third of the proposed increase in Pentagon spending between 2022 and 2023. Worse yet, attempts to raise spending significantly to address these urgent challenges, from President Biden’s Build Back Better plan to the Green New Deal, are stalled in Congress.

In a world where such dangers are only increasing, perhaps the best hope for launching a process that could, sooner or later, reverse such perverse priorities lies with grassroots organizing. Consider, for instance the “moral budget” crafted by the Poor People’s Campaign, which would cut Pentagon spending almost in half while refocusing on programs aimed at eliminating poverty, protecting the environment, and improving access to health care.  If even part of such an agenda were achieved and the “defense” budget reined in, if not cut drastically, America and the world would be far safer places.

Given the scale of the actual security problems we face, it’s time to think big when it comes to potential solutions, while recognizing what Martin Luther King, Jr., once described as the “fierce urgency of now.” Time is running short, and concerted action is imperative.

10 Lessons Learned From A Lifetime Of Bodybuilding Naturally

1) “Lift weights like there is no tomorrow.”

I have this in quotes because, word for word, this was one thing a bodybuilding judge, who I really respected, told me after a show and it has stuck with me through the years. It’s extremely simple, almost stupid, advice…. But it has really defined how I’ve approached this journey.

Too many people, I think, worry about which exercise is better, high reps or low reps, high volume or low volume, overtraining or undertraining, etc. I know I’ve done it… But honestly… Just go in there, lift weights as intensely as you possibly can.

Whether you choose high reps or low reps, just be intense, put your all into it. Don’t over think and don’t over complicate things.

Lift lift lift. And STAY CONSISTENT! Do it day in and day out, don’t stop lifting weights, you’ll figure out everything else as you go along. You’ll figure our your diet and you will continue to fine tune it with time, you will figure out what you need to do if you want to compete, but no matter what, just keep going into the gym.

Do machines, do free weights, do hammer strength, switch it up, try different things and see how you respond. But just keep doing whatever you need to do to get in the gym and get that work out in.

2) Consistency is the single most important factor when it comes to natural bodybuilding

This is piggybacking on that first item… but that includes being consistent with your training, with your diet, with your recovery, with everything pertaining to how you build your physique.

How many of you have had that friend that goes into the gym for a number of weeks and actually makes some decent progress, really packs on the gains, then takes a few months off and vanishes… then starts training again, and back and forth, back and forth, on and off, on and off.

In the end they just end up being stuck in the same cycle without really anything to show for it.

Bodybuilding can get extremely boring sometimes, and it takes foreverrrrrrr… Especially in natural bodybuilding…. It takes forever to move that needle and really make some significant gains, especially if you have been at it for a number of years.

But you have to find a way to make it fun and you have to love it to keep on going. You have to be passionate about it if you are going to stay consistent.

While there is still a lot of flexibility in the lifestyle, flexibility with the diet, with the training, etc… holistically you have to stay consistent.

You don’t need to put your life on hold to be a successful bodybuilder. But at times you will need to make some sacrifices.

I’ve turned down parties and dinner plans because I was prepping for a show, or needed to get up early to work out, I’ve also partied and went out clubbing until 5 am and found some time to train the next day.

You shuffle things around and you find a balance. Some mornings I get up and I don’t feel so good, I think to myself, I can skip and make it up another day, but then I think, what if I feel even worse tomorrow.

Sometimes I’ve gone in when I was sick, and left feeling so much better, sometimes I’ve gone in when I was sick, and I leave feeling worse.

Sometimes I’ve gone in when I was sick, and cut my work out short because I just felt like death. Everyday is different.

Mike O’Hearn once said in a video of his…. “Do your best for that day, not for your lifetime, but do you very best for that day.” We’ve all had days when we are sooooo unmotivated to go in, try not to cave to that… sure it’s ok to take some time off, but don’t abuse it. Consistency is key!

3) There is not one single exercise that you ABSOLUTELY have to do to get bigger.

This is blasphemy in some bodybuilding circles, but I truly believe it. There isn’t any specific exercise that you HAVE TO DO in order to avoid being doomed to eternal scrawniness.

Now, there are some exercises that are certainly more effective than others, but that doesn’t mean you have to do them if you don’t like them or if they make you uncomfortable, etc.THERE IS ALWAYS AN ALTERNATIVE.

Don’t like squats, leg press, don’t like barbell bench press, try hammer strength, don’t like barbell rows, try a seated wide grip rowing machine.

About 10 years into training I decided I would only do exercises that I enjoyed. This came at a time when I think I may have been getting burnt out, so I went in everyday only doing exercises I enjoyed.

Don’t get me wrong, I still kept everything balanced, and found ways to hit all the muscle groups, but I just focused on the things I love, and I go to the gym and do what I love, and I put my heart and soul into it!

4) Do not confuse motivation with discipline.

Even more piggybacking on the note about consistency… I know there are days we could be REALLY unmotivated to go train, and its fine to take some time off every now and then, but at I’ve said it’s also really easy to abuse this.

Something I do if I’m COMPLETELY unmotivated is what I call “Fuck around in the gym day” – basically I’ll just go in and train completely haphazardly… light weight just to get the blood flowing, random exercises with absolutely no structure or sense. just hop around from machine to machine just trying different things, eventually my competitive nature kicks in, and I start to go heavier, I start to get a good pump, I start to instinctly put some structure into the work out.

There have been times I walked into the gym extremely unmotivated and I end up leaving 2 hours later having completed a phenomenal work out, a switch happens at some point and I get into a good swing.

5)  I am still unsure if my dirty bulks throughout the years helped or hindered me.

But I have some thoughts… I would say that I have spent the majority of the last 20 years walking around looking more like a linebacker than a bodybuilder (Unless I was prepping for a show)…. Maybe an Offensive lineman when I got up to 275 lbs lol!

Nowadays, I’m more focused on staying lean but I’m still making great progress with respect to strength and even size.

Many have asked me if I think my several years of heavy bulking attributed to my progress and size today and I honestly don’t know. Would I have made the same progress if I stayed lean and built size slowly? It’s hard to answer that, but surely there has to be a middle ground somewhere.

It was cool to get up to 275 lbs and I was strong as a freaking ox… at the same time I think a big mistake is that I stayed at that weight for way way way too long, and I started to get sloppy, and lazy, People could always tell I worked out, but I was certainly a permabulker, and folks wondered, is this guy just a powerlifter? a wannabe sumo wrestler? You compete in bodybuilding? what? how? etc.

Did getting so big have it’s advantages in building muscle and my current form, sure I think so, but I think there would’ve been a ton of advantages if I just stayed a bit leaner as well. Maybe not as lean as I am now, but somewhere in the middle.

6) Having simple taste and not drinking has made things easier…

I don’t drink, never have, and I have never been drunk in my life, I think that has made things much more manageable on me with respect to bodybuilding.

I also have fairly simple taste, I’m not a big sauce and condiments guy in general, and actually enjoy plain food, this has also made things easier for me whenever I needed to cut down, or even bulk up…. I never needed to cook elaborate meals to get by.

On the other hand…. I have a major sweet tooth (see past post from a few weeks ago when I outlined one of my refeed…..er….. cheat days). This has made it hard hahahaha I’ve never been that guy that eats clean all the time. Now I do, and people think – wow I must love eating all this low calorie food… no not really… I love looking the way I do, that’s why I do it, but trust me, I’d much rather be chowing down on a bunch of chocolate chip cookies, then some chicken and broccoli. Just have to engage the suck if you want to stay lean lol

7) Don’t overcomplicate and overthink things.

And despite saying that, I have often over complicated things throughout the years, and I still do from time to time, but I’m learning that I don’t need to. Not always at least.

You need structure, you need to be scientific about it, you need to understand things, but there can still be a balance. Don’t sweat every single little detail but at the same time, don’t be overly lax, find a balance. Everything you can do to make progress, even by 1%, is worth it, but don’t beat yourself up about it.

8) I’ve always been a very high protein consumer

And I think that was a factor in how my journey has played out, but it’s not something I continue to do… So when I say high, I’m talking, around 300 to 400 g of protein… HOWEVER, only in the last year and a half did I do a dramatic cut, and now take anywhere from 160 to 180 g of protein.

This transition happened because I wanted to try a new approach to dieting and essentially cutting weight and getting lean while still eating up to 270 g of carbs on some days… It worked, and I keep asking myself why I didn’t cut my protein this low sooner, I’m energized, I’m lean, I’m still strong as hell, and still making progress with the weights. It’s been great.

But then I ask myself the same question as the earlier point about extreme bulking, Would I have made all this great progress through the years if I kept protein lower? I can’t answer that. But I can tell you that based purely on the last year and a half, I wish I had done dropped it sooner.

I’ve tried so many different diets. All of my contest preps were pretty much high protein , moderate fat, and low to no carbs depending on the point in time during my prep. I gradually decreased the carbs as I got closer to the show. But as I mentioned at the very top, now I only take in around 1 g per lean body mass.

9) I’m really glad I never crossed over to the dark side…

I shouldn’t really call it the dark side because I don’t really care if people use steroids or not… plus if you count my one time stint with M1T over 10 years ago then i guess you could say I did cross over once… but what I’m trying to say is that I’m so glad that I’m currently a natural bodybuilder and that steroids were never a staple or a necessity in my bodybuilding career.

There were many reasons I never fully went into it, first it was the legal aspect… But for a number of years I lived in countries where it was legal and still, I chose not to do it… It eventually became because of health concerns, then stigma, then I don’t even know why… I just didn’t want to add yet one more thing to have to worry about or think about.. but now it’s purely a pride issue.

And yes, I am fully aware users work just as hard as us naturals, some even harder especially when you get into the top ranks of the NPC or the IFBB… But still… for one reason or another, being natural is something that makes me so proud. I always joke with my wife and tell her I’m am more proud of my bodybuilding accomplishments than I am of my PhD. Bodybuilding and my physique is something that I literally built myself, with my bare hands, hard work, discipline, and tremendous consistency. But this is a good Segway to my last point.

10) It doesn’t feel like it sometimes but there are so many things in life that are much more important than bodybuilding

That’s right… I hate to admit it, because I certainly don’t practice what I preach… But putting things in perspective, unless you are a top 5 Olympia competitor in which this is your livelihood, most likely this is just a hobby… Or better yet…. a lifestyle that you’ve chosen and dedicated yourself to.

Again… Even I find it very hard to accept this… take for example our current situation with the Coronavirus… I think the number one thing I have complained about has been the gym being closed (and obviously I understand why and support the decision)… thankfully I have enough to get by at home for now… But in retrospect I should probably be worried about other things….

Will the kids manage without in-person schooling for this long? Is my job at risk? Is our mental well being going to be impacted by this? Will we get Coronavirus? Will someone we know get it? I should probably be thinking about any of these things… But no… I’m thinking… How long will it be until I get back to the gym. And maybe it’s a good distraction, but again….putting things into perspective, that’s fairly low priority.

Another example for you, in 2014 I had Thyroid cancer, and I had to have surgery to get it removed, my first question to the doctor as I was coming out of anesthesia… When can I start lifting again? Meanwhile my awesome wife was asking the important questions, what are the follow up procedures, risk of spreading to lymph nodes and recurrence, medication needed, etc etc. And here I was logging onto bodybuilding forums from my hospital bed to read about the latest bogus work out fad or the latest contest results.

There are many many many things in life that are so much more important than bodybuilding, maybe I’m writing this as a reminder to myself… But this doesn’t mean that we all should have to go and give up this sport or lifestyle that we love, it just means that we have to find the right balance so our life is complete holistically and full in all areas beyond just how big our muscles are.

– BIGACH

The Trains Could Stop Running In The United States Literally One Week From Now

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Did you know that an absolutely crippling national railroad strike could potentially start on July 18th?  If this actually happens, the historic supply chain crisis that we are experiencing right now will rapidly become far worse.  Each year, trains in the United States transport approximately “1.7 billion tons of raw materials and finished goods” to their ultimate destinations.  If that suddenly stops happening, our economy goes into the toilet.  I realize that may sound a bit crude, but that is the reality of what we are potentially facing.  So we better hope that national rail carriers and the unions representing the workers can come to an agreement before next Monday

Railroad freight traffic across the United States could come to a screeching halt July 18 if progress isn’t made on a labor contract between national rail carriers and their unions.

Union officials stressed they do not want to go on strike, but argued they are being forced to consider the option in a bid to get better benefits, wages and staffing.

We aren’t just talking about a partial paralysis of rail traffic.

This would be a nationwide strike, and the entire system would suddenly be frozen.

At the moment the two sides are in a “cooling off period”, but that “cooling off period” will be over at 12:01 AM on July 18th

The two sides were forced into a 30-day “cooling off period” after failing to reach an agreement working through the National Mediation Board. The cooling off period prevents unions from striking or railroads from locking out their workers while they continue to negotiate.

That cooling off period ends at midnight on July 18, and a coalition of unions could choose to go on strike at that point, said Sheet Metal Air Rail Transportation union president Jeremy Ferguson.

At this point, it appears that there will be a strike unless Joe Biden uses his powers to intervene.

And that is precisely what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is asking him to do

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is calling on President Joe Biden to help resolve a dispute between the country’s Class 1 railroads and 12 rail unions to avert a possible rail strike beginning July 18.

In a letter sent to the White House on Wednesday, U.S. Chamber President Suzanne Clark warned that the decision last month by the National Mediation Board (NMB) to release the railroads and unions from mediation and begin a 30-day cooling off period “presents a new challenge to the U.S. business community, which is already navigating a difficult environment.”

Unless the administration acts, either party is free to exercise “self-help” options — including a strike beginning at 12:01 a.m. on July 18, when the 30-day cooling-off period ends.

One way or another, this labor dispute will eventually be resolved.

Let us hope that it is sooner rather than later.

But the truth is that our planet is ultimately facing long-term economic problems that are far more severe than any sort of temporary supply chain disruptions.

It has been said that “energy is the economy”, and it takes a tremendous amount of energy to power the standard of living that we are enjoying today.

And with each passing year, the size of the global population continues to go up.  In fact, the UN just announced that the population of the world will hit 8 billion in 2022…

The world’s population will reach 8 billion in November, United Nations researchers said Monday, marking a milestone moment even as the global growth rate continues a long-term slowdown.

The Earth’s 8 billionth inhabitant will be born on Nov. 15, according to the U.N.’s latest World Population Prospects 2022 report, released to mark World Population Day.

Meanwhile, the amount of energy that we are producing has started to decline.

As Chris Martenson has pointed out, 2018 may have actually been the year when we hit “peak oil”

It all comes down to the amount of oil that’s available because oil is the KING of all energy sources. And the king is weak and fading…it’s entirely possible that we’ll never again see as much oil come out of the ground as we did back in 2018.  That might have been the actual peak…

There are warning signs everywhere that oil supplies are extremely tight and that spare capacity simply doesn’t exist at the moment. Someday oil will forever be in the rearview mirror and this is why an economic collapse is inevitable.

From this point forward, it is going to be increasingly costly to get energy out of the ground.

And that means that our standard of living will inevitably keep going down.  Please take 20 minutes and watch this video in which Chris Martenson goes into great detail about all of this.

 

You may have noticed that energy prices have been rising very aggressively over the past couple of years.

And energy prices have a direct impact on what literally everything else costs.

As food and other essentials continue to spike in price, that is going to cause societal breakdowns all over the globe.

In fact, just this week we have seen extreme civil unrest in Sri Lanka and Albania.

Sadly, what we have witnessed so far is just the tip of the iceberg.

What is eventually coming will be so much worse.

Here in the United States, everyone still has plenty of food for now.

But food prices have been going up and up and up.

Even Costco has had to raise prices substantially.  Needless to say, a lot of people out there aren’t exactly pleased to be paying quite a bit more for chicken and soda at their food courts now…

According to Business Insider, the national price hikes on its chicken bake and 20-ounce soda were confirmed by a location in Rochester, New York, as well as food courts in other locations.

The chicken bake now sells for $1 more than in June, at $3.99.

The price of the soda has increased by 10 cents, up to $0.69.

A lot of people out there still seem to think that the economic symptoms that we are currently experiencing are just “temporary”.

I wish that was true.

Unfortunately, a “return to normal” is simply not in the cards, and global energy supplies are going to continue to get tighter with each passing day.

Chris Craighead

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Chris Craighead, retired, at that time active duty SAS operator. On 15 January 2019, he singlehandedly stormed DusitD2 hotel complex in Nairobi, Kenya, fighting off Al-Shabaab terrorists that killed more than 20 innocent.

Craighead, who was in the country to provide training, while being off-duty that day, reportedly rushed to the scene, cleared the complex, shot at least two of the attackers, helped to coordinate Kenyan’s GSU rescue efforts, was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross for extreme bravery.

His undesired fame forced him to give away his identity, facing multiple death threats afterwards.

He is currently authoring a book depicting events of that day.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

There is very little that a central banker can do when the West has declared a war, basically, a war on a country that is completely isolated.

The response has come from President Putin and from Foreign Secretary Lavrov. And they pointed out, well, how is Russia going to trade and get what it needs. And this is what the recent meetings of the BRICS are all about.

Russia realizes that the world is now broken into two halves. America and NATO have separated the West. Basically you have a white people’s confederation against all the rest of the world.

And the West has said, we’re isolating ourselves from you totally. And we think you can’t get along without us.

Well, look at the humor of this. Russia, China, Iran, India, Indonesia, and other countries are saying, hah, you say we can’t get along without you? Who is providing your manufacturers? Who is providing your raw materials? Who is providing your oil and gas? Who is providing your agriculture, and the helium, the titanium, the nickel?

So they realize that the world is breaking in two, and Eurasia, where most of the world’s population is concentrated, is going to go its own way.

The problem is, how do you really go your own way? You need a means of payment. You need to create a whole international system that is an alternative to the Western international system. You need your own International Monetary Fund to provide credit, so that these Eurasian countries and their allies in the Global South can deal with each other.

You need a World Bank that, instead of lending money to promote U.S. policies and U.S. investments, will promote mutual gains and self-sufficiency among the countries.

So already, every day in the last few weeks, you have had meetings with the Russians about this, who said, ok, we’re going to create a mutual trading area, starting among the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

And how are we going to pay? We can’t pay in dollars, because if we have money in a dollar bank, or a euro bank in Europe, they can just grab the money, like they grab Venezuela’s money. They can just say, we’re taking all your money because, essentially, we don’t want you to exist as an alternative to the finance capital world that we are creating.

So essentially, Russia, China, and these other countries are saying, ok, we’re going to create our own international bank. And how are we going to fund it? Well, every member of the bank will contribute, say, a billion dollars, or some amount of their own currency, and this will be our backing. We can also use gold as a means of settlement, as was long used among countries.

And this bank can create its own special drawing rights, its own bancor, is what Keynes called it. It can create its own credit.

Well, the problem is that, if you have Brazil, for instance, or Argentina, joining this group, or Ecuador, that sells almost all of its bananas to Russia, how is it going to get by?

Well, if there is a BRICS group or a Shanghai Cooperation Organization bank, obviously the Western governments are not going to accept this.

So Russia realizes that as a result of Biden’s Cold War Two, there is going to be a continued rise in energy prices. You think gasoline prices are not high now? They’re going up. You think food prices are not high now? They’re going up more.

And in Europe this is especially the case, because Europe now cannot buy Russian gas to make the fertilizer to make its own crops grow.

So you’re going to have a number of countries in the Global South, from Latin America to Africa, being squeezed and wanting to trade with the Eurasian group.

And the problem is Russia says, all right, we know that you can’t afford to pay. We’re glad to give you credit, but we don’t want to give you credit [where] you’re going to simply use the money you have to pay your dollar debts that are coming due.

Because one of the effects that I didn’t mention of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates is there is a huge flow of capital from Europe and England into the United States, so that if you’re a billionaire, where are you going to put your savings? You want the highest interest rates you [can get]. And if the United States raises interest rates, the billionaires are going to move their money out of England, out of the euro, and the euro is going back down against the dollar. It’s almost down to a dollar a euro.

The British pound is heading downwards, towards one pound per dollar.

This increase in the dollar’s exchange rate is also rising against the currencies of Brazil, Argentina, the African countries, all the other countries.

So how are they going to pay this summer, and this fall, for their food, for their oil and gas, and for the higher cost of servicing their dollar debts?

Well, for Eurasia, they’re going to say, we want to help you buy our exports – Russia is now a major grain exporter, and obviously also an oil exporter – saying we want to supply you and give you the credit for this, but you’re really going to have to make a decision. Are you going to join the U.S.-NATO bloc, or are you going to join the Eurasian bloc?

Are you going to join the White People’s Club or the Eurasian Club? And it really comes down to that. And that’s what is fracturing the world in these two halves.

Europe is caught in the middle, and its economies are going to be torn apart. Employment is going to go down there. And I don’t see wages going up very much in Europe.

You’re going to have a political crisis in Europe. But also you’ll have an international diplomatic crisis over how are you going to restructure world trade, and investment, and debt.

There will be two different financial philosophies. And that’s what the new cold war is all about.

The philosophy of US-sponsored finance capitalism, of making money financially, without industrialization, and with trying to lower wages and reduce the labor force to a very highly indebted workforce living on the margin.

Or you’ll have the Eurasian philosophy of using the economic surplus to increase productivity, to build infrastructure, to create the kind of society that America seemed to be growing in the late 19th century but has now rejected.

So all of this is ultimately not simply a problem of interest rates and central bank policy; it really goes beyond central banks to what kind of a social and economic system are you going to have.

And the key to any social and economic system is how you treat money and credit. Is money and credit going to be a public utility, or will it be a private monopoly run for the financial interests and the 1%, instead of a public utility run for the 99%?

That’s what the new cold war is going to be all about. And that’s what international diplomacy week after week is trying to settle.

Butter Burgers

Midwesterners know, that the best burger is topped with a dollop of butter. It gives the meat a little extra umami and juiciness. You don’t really need a full recipe, just add a teaspoon of butter while the meat rests and let it sink in.

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Ingredients

Directions

  1. Preheat the broiler. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a large cast-iron skillet over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until translucent, 6 to 8 minutes. Add 1/3 cup water, cover and continue cooking until the onions are golden brown, about 15 more minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Transfer the onions to a bowl and wipe out the skillet.
  2. Divide the meat into 6 loose balls, then gently flatten into thin patties. Heat the skillet over high heat. Add the patties to the hot skillet, smash them flat with a spatula and season with salt and pepper. Cook, flipping once, until well done, about 3 minutes per side.
  3. Meanwhile, toast the buns under the broiler. Put the patties on the bottom buns and top each with 1/4 cup sauteed onions. Smear 2 tablespoons butter on the cut side of each top bun, then put on top of the burgers. Slice in half and serve immediately.

The four Valenzuela sisters

The four Valenzuela sisters had enough. They were tired of poverty, tired of their abusive father, and tired of being harassed by villagers who hated their father even more than they did.

Bye to El Salto de Juanacatlan, Jalisco, forever, and on to San Francisco del Rincon to start their lives over.

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The four Valenzuela sisters

The year was 1945. Prostitution in Mexico was a respectable business. The sisters weren’t talented and weren’t educated, but they certainly were not lacking in ambition. With few available choices, the Valenzuela’s set up their business. “Rancho El Ángel” was a bordello featuring, you guessed it, the four sisters. An attached bar was added to increase the allure.

Business was good, but the sisters wanted to expand. None of them were attractive. They knew what was needed. An advertisement was placed in the local papers: House maids needed; free room and board, plus good wages. Young females only.

The response was great. Those who showed up, and there were plenty, did get free room and board. But, no wages. They were to work as sex slaves, never to step outside.

Despite their booming business, the sisters wanted to expand even further. They hired mercenaries to kidnap girls along the border with the United States. Virgins who were brought in were set-aside for special customers who paid higher rates to perform the “deflowering”.

More bordellos were set up. First one, then another, and another, and another. But the prostitutes, never saw a dime for their dreadful duties. They were all enslaved, forced to take heroin and cocaine.

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The girls.

If someone got sick, she was killed. If someone tried to run away, she was killed. If someone refused to work, she was killed. If someone wasn’t popular with the customers, she was killed. If someone got noticeably pregnant, the fetus was pulled out with a hanger; any complications and the mother was killed. If a patron had a lot of money, he was killed.

After almost a decade, police picked up one of the kidnappers, a woman who attracted the bait to the men that would overpower the victims. She talked. Police searched the property and found the bodies of eighty women, eleven men, and several fetuses.

When asked for an explanation, one of the sisters reportedly said, “The food didn’t sit well with them.” Most of the bodies weren’t even on the property. Police estimated the total number killed at more than 150 and likely over 200. And the victims were not killed in a humane way. Locked in an isolated chamber, they would be starved to death. Those who were lucky got bludgeoned to death.

Tried in 1964, the Valenzuela sisters were each sentenced to forty years in prison.

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One of them, pictured above, died in prison. Her body was dragged outside by the guards and fed to the village rats. Several weeks later, the remaining bones were thrown in a nearby trash can.

Human trafficking remains a major issue in the world today.

Harpers Declares It’s Over – The ‘American Century’ Is Gone

From MoA

This month’s Harpers title is astonishing.

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To declare that the U.S. century is over, without a question mark, is in the mainstream view still heresy. Sure the American Conservative has already done that years ago. But Harpers is positioned on the more liberal side of things and there the view is rarely expressed.

The lead essay in the edition, by one Daniel Bessner, is headlined:

Empire Burlesque
What comes after the American Century?

For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States confronts a nation whose model—a blend of state capitalism and Communist Party discipline—presents a genuine challenge to liberal democratic capitalism, which seems increasingly incapable of addressing the many crises that beset it. China’s rise, and the glimmers of the alternative world that might accompany it, make clear that Luce’s American Century is in its final days. It’s not obvious, however, what comes next. Are we doomed to witness the return of great power rivalry, in which the United States and China vie for influence? Or will the decline of U.S. power produce novel forms of international collaboration?

In these waning days of the American Century, Washington’s foreign policy establishment—the think tanks that define the limits of the possible—has splintered into two warring camps. Defending the status quo are the liberal internationalists, who insist that the United States should retain its position of global armed primacy. Against them stand the restrainers, who urge a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. approach to foreign policy, away from militarism and toward peaceful forms of international engagement. The outcome of this debate will determine whether the United States remains committed to an atavistic foreign policy ill-suited to the twenty-first century, or whether the nation will take seriously the disasters of the past decades, abandon the hubris that has caused so much suffering worldwide, and, finally, embrace a grand strategy of restraint.

At Consortium News Andrew Bacevich provides additional background and offers a mild critique of Bessner’s essay. He seems to largely agree with it.

Me? I have always been for a policy of restrain, not just for the U.S., but for all countries on this planet. People are too different in personal believes, history, tradition and social surroundings to be put under one form of government or to submit to one peculiar form of economic organization. Attempting to do such is, as Michael Hudson provides, ruinous for those who try.

It is also a question of personal capacity. The U.S. does not have the leadership, and has not had it for some time, to be successful in such an endeavor.

Even Democrats have recognized that their current president is not up to the task. The New York Times writes Most Democrats Don’t Want Biden in 2024, New Poll Shows. The Washington Post adds Democrats are skeptical of Biden in 2024. Will the party’s left finally win?. Other have also chipped in with a NYT columnist outright declaring: Joe Biden Is Too Old to Be President Again.

Matt Taibbi calls this political signaling:

Along with companion outlets like the Washington Post and The Atlantic (as pure a reflection of establishment thought as exists in America), the paper in this sense fulfills the same function that Izvestia once served in the Soviet Union, telling us little or even less than nothing about breaking news events but giving us comprehensive, if often coded, portraits of the thinking of the leadership class.

The Democrat ‘leadership class’ has declared that Biden is now a lame duck president and that he better signal that he will not run again before the likely catastrophic results in the midterms election come out.

I agree with that view but it is not just Biden’s mental fragility that is the matter here but the incompetence of the people around him who essentially set his policies. The Sullivans and Blinkens of this world or what Ray McGovern calls the Effete Elite:

The questions posed led me to comment candidly on the regrettable state of Western statesmen like EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Yes, the same Blinken who, in one breath excoriates China and the “systemic challenge” it supposedly represents, and in the next makes a pathetically quixotic attempt to cajole his Chinese counterpart to abandon Beijing’s lockstep with Russia on Ukraine.

Blinken’s anti-China policy is, to say it mildly, not a success:

Washington has devised a series of plans to counter China, but few of them have won firm support in the region.

A coalition between the United States, Japan, Australia and India, known as the Quad, is meant to show solidarity in the Asia-Pacific region, but India buys huge quantities of oil from Russia; a new U.S.-led economic group of 14 countries, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, received a lukewarm reception from its members since it fails to offer tariff reductions for goods entering the United States; and an agreement for the United States and Britain to share technology to help Australia deploy nuclear-powered submarines remains vague.

This ‘elite’ who thought out those policies is now baby sitting Biden to prevent him, but not themselves, from making more ‘mistakes’.

Dan Cohen @dancohen3000 - 14:57 UTC · Jul 12, 2022

2 days ago, the NYT reported that the White House is so concerned by Biden's age that it delayed his trip to the Middle East by a month so he could rest. Now we learn that Blinken will accompany him. Another daily reminder that Biden is a figurehead and his advisors run the show.

Biden’s and Blinken’s current Middle East trip is also likely to add to their collection of failures:

President Biden is traveling to Israel on Wednesday for a four-day trip to the Middle East to try to slow down Iran’s nuclear program, speed up the flow of oil to American pumps, and reshape the relationship with Saudi Arabia without seeming to embrace a crown prince who stands accused of flagrant human rights abuses.

All three efforts are fraught with political dangers for a president who knows the region well, but returns for the first time in six years with far less leverage than he would like to shape events.

A month ago Biden declared that he will not meet the Saudi clown prince:

"I am not going to meet with MBS. I am going to an international meeting, and he is going to be part of it," Biden told reporters at the White House. 
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However, a Saudi statement announced that MBS and Biden: "Will hold official talks that will focus on various areas of bilateral cooperation and joint efforts to address regional and global challenges."

We will likely soon see photos with Biden and MBS shaking hands. Biden needs higher Saudi oil production and lower prices at the pump to lessen the Democrats midterm losses. He can hardly condemn Mohammed Bin Salman for killing the ‘journalist’ and lobbyist for Qatar Jamal Khashoggi while at the same time ignoring the Israeli murder of the U.S.-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

The return to the nuclear agreement with Iran was botched by Biden and Blinken when they dithered for months after their inauguration before starting talks. They then made new demands that Iran was obviously unwilling to fulfill. They are now left with contradicting their own arguments:

In the early spring, Mr. Malley and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said there were just weeks, maybe a month or so, to reach a deal before Iran’s advances, and the knowledge gained as it installed advanced centrifuges to produce uranium in high volume, would make the 2015 agreement outdated.

Now, four months later, Mr. Biden’s aides decline to explain how they let that deadline go by — and they still insist that reviving the deal is more valuable than abandoning it.

Following various financial crises and too high spending U.S. financial leverage is gone. As it has proven in the Middle East, and now in Ukraine, its hyper expensive military is unable to win wars against small and big competitors.

The U.S. role in international institutions has been diminished by China’s and Russia’s competing efforts like the Belt and Road program, the Asian Development Bank, Russia and Iran’s North-South Transit Corridor.

The Harpers title is correct. The U.S. century is indeed over. As the Harpers lead essay concludes:

The American Century did not achieve the lofty goals that oligarchs such as Henry Luce set out for it. 

But it did demonstrate that attempts to rule the world through force will fail. 

The task for the next hundred years will be to create not an American Century, but a Global Century, in which U.S. power is not only restrained but reduced, and in which every nation is dedicated to solving the problems that threaten us all. 

As the title of a best-selling book from 1946 declared, before the Cold War precluded any attempts at genuine international cooperation, we will either have “one world or none.”

One world, in which the individual countries refrain from boundless greed and provide for the common good, is certainly the better choice.

11 Minutes of Unvarnished Truth – The Most Blistering Assessment of the USA Ever Aired on Radio

As most Americans remain blissfully unaware that nuclear war is likely just weeks away, Love him or hate him, The Hal Turner Radio Show aired the most blistering assessment of the situation ever spoken on radio.

It is eleven minutes of absolute radio gold.  Truth for the ages.

"The USA has become a woke cesspool of 3rd world slums, meth/herion junkies, rabid feminists, and neutered femboys. 

Am I really supposed to care if 90% of it is annihilated in a nuclear fire? 

But, people say, but "muh freedums . . . 'mercia, fuck yeah!"

 Well, that place has been dead a long time. Maybe it's time its rotting carcass be put on a funeral pyre."

There’s more . . . much more.

Here is the most ferocious, brutally honest, political/social/cultural assessment ever spoken on radio:

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Delicious Chili, oil pipe lines connecting Iran with Russia and China’s BRI, and the howling of idiocy from the United States

Potentially, the most dangerous scenario [for America] would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. Joe Biden has finally managed to create that.

The world is STARTING to indicate that it is taking a multi-polar direction, and that the uni-polar; American ruled – “Rules based Order” is not going to happen. The issue herein is actually how long will it take for this realization to dawn on the “Leadership” of the west.

Depending on your opinion of the “leadership” oligarchy it can be anywhere from NEVER to “maybe some time this year”.

The real issue is how high the “pain dial” must be turned up by Asia to “bitch slap” the West into compliance. I guess, for most of us, it’s going to be a wait and see.

Let’s take our time and enjoy this snapshot of history…

Seven Life tips

1. Sometimes the weight you need to lose is not on your body.

2. Life is short. Smile while you still have teeth.

3. The struggle is real, but so are the rewards.

4. No body watches you harder than the people that don’t like you. Give them a show.

5. Don’t worry about being lonely at the top. It can be lonely at the bottom too.

6. Enjoy this moment of your life before it becomes a memory you wish you hadn’t taken for granted.

7. Accept your past without regret, handle your present with confidence, and face your future without fear.

China tests hypersonic missile with multi-mode engine

China is reminding the world that it is very much in the race to deploy hypersonic missiles, with a team at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Northwestern Polytechnical University successfully launching the Feitian-1, a Rocket-Based Combined Cycle (RBCC)-propelled vehicle, in northwestern China.

Even though it is one of the top three contenders in the race to develop a practical hypersonic weapons system, getting solid data about China’s hypersonic program is frustratingly difficult.

Like Russia, but more so, China tends to keep its cards very close to its chest and what little information is released comes through the country’s state-controlled media, or is couched in claims such as that a test was for an orbital spaceplane.

What is particularly interesting about the launch of Feitian-1 is that it uses an RBCC engine to propel it to speeds in excess of Mach 5.

An RBCC engine is a combination of an air-breathing ramjet, air-breathing scramjet, and ducted rocket.

As the vehicle accelerates, the engine transfers from one mode to the next, allowing it to cope with air hitting the intake at greater and greater speed, and then becoming a pure rocket at top speed and very high altitudes.

School of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Northwestern Polytechnical University

Such an engine has a number of advantages, chief of which is that it doesn’t have to carry as much oxidizer as a pure rocket because it can harvest oxygen from the air like a conventional jet engine.

This allows it to carry more fuel or a larger payload.

In addition, the Feitian-1 can burn kerosene-based aviation fuel.

According to the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Northwestern Polytechnical University, such an RBCC engine is the first in a hypersonic flight vehicle.

It says the July 2 ground-launched flight test made a smooth transition from one mode to the next and carried out the expected thermal throat adjustment and ultra-wide flight envelope combustion.

Pirate Queens of the High Seas: Anne Bonny and Mary Read

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Female pirates.

When it comes to pirates, most people think of iconic names like Blackbeard, Calico Jack, or William Kidd . But what about female pirates? Although female pirates are less well-known, they did exist. Female pirates were not nearly as common as male pirates due to standard ship contracts which prohibited women and children from joining the crew. This “official” contract wasn’t enough to stop some women, though. Famous female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read found their way around these contracts, choosing lives of piracy over their domestic lives on land.

But how did Bonny and Read get around these contracts, and what did they accomplish as pirates?

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Female Pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read by Benjamin Cole. (Copper engraving coloured, from Defoe, Daniel; Johnson, Charles (1724) A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates )

Anne Bonny’s Preparation for Piracy

Anne Bonny was born in 1697 in Cork, Ireland. Though not much is known about her early life, it is known that she was the illegitimate daughter of William McCormac, a reputable lawyer, and his servant, Mary Brennan. After Anne’s birth, her father moved to London to escape the watchful eyes of his wife’s family. As Anne aged, her father would dress her as a boy and train her as his clerk. Once this ruse was discovered, his wife and her family stopped sending him money, prompting him to move to the Province of Carolina with Anne and her mother.

Upon moving to the Province of Carolina, Anne’s father changed their last name to simply Cormac to blend in better with the locals. They also struggled financially for a time, due to the halting of his wife’s money, but he was soon able to continue working as a lawyer, which eventually paid for a townhouse and a plantation. Although finances were challenging at times, he eventually joined the merchant business and built his wealth back up.

Unfortunately, Anne’s mother died when she was only 12. After this, Anne began displaying rebellious and aggressive behavior. It was even rumored that she had stabbed one of her servants to death with a knife when she was only 13 years old. The good news for Anne was that while she was known around town for her temper, she was also known for her good looks, which helped her find favor in the eyes of James Bonny, a poor sailor who dabbled in piracy. Anne was disowned by her rich father because of her choice of husband, which removed her rights to his estate after his death.

After being disowned, Bonny and her husband moved to New Providence Island, near a pirate sanctuary called the Republic of Pirates . While it was not an official republic, it was known for being a safe place for those turning from privateering to piracy. Anne’s husband James took advantage of this location and allegedly switched from sailing and piracy to becoming an informant for the governor of the region, reporting any pirates that did not turn themselves in for the king’s pardon. This led to many pirate arrests, as well as Anne’s distrust of her husband.

Because of this wariness, Anne started spending more time with pirates in secrecy. She would normally head to the taverns in the evening to mingle and try to protect them from her husband’s position. At some point, she met the famous pirate John Rackham, also known as Calico Jack, and started having an affair with him. Eventually, their love grew to the point that Jack offered money to Bonny to divorce Anne, but he refused and threatened Jack. Calico Jack then had Anne join his crew and they ran away together.

Because of pirate standards, women were not allowed to become a part of the crew. For this reason, Calico Jack had Anne disguise herself as a man so she could blend in. This worked until she became pregnant and could no longer hide her identity. Anne Bonny gave birth to a son, married Jack on his ship, and they continued their life of piracy together. After some time, she eventually met Mary Read, another female pirate.

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Famous Pirate Mary Read.

The Mischievous and Magnetic Mary Read

Mary Read was a bit older than Anne Bonny, and was born in England in 1685. She was the offspring of a woman and a sailor who died at sea soon after Mary was born. Mary was her mother’s second child; the first had been a boy, but he died soon after his father did. Mary’s mother, not wanting to lose the financial support of her husband’s family, dressed Mary as a boy to pass her off as her dead son. Soon, though, the family discovered the truth and cut them off financially.

Once they were on their own, Mary’s mother continued to dress her as a boy and would rent her out as a servant to make money for them to survive. She excelled at any task thrown her way, and even earned the position of “powder monkey” during the War of Grand Alliance, which required her to deliver bags of gunpowder to gun crews. She later served in both the infantry and the cavalry, where she eventually revealed her true identity and married one of her bunkmates, who died soon after they were married.

Once again on her own, she continued living her life disguised as a man and joined piracy on a Dutch ship set for the West Indies . On the trip, the boat was captured by English pirates, who took Mary as a prisoner. As it turns out, the ship belonged to the one and only Calico Jack.

On the ship, Anne revealed herself to be a woman to seduce Mary to get her to join the crew, not knowing Mary was also a woman. Mary then revealed that she, too, was a woman, and Anne promised to keep Mary’s secret if she joined the crew. She joined, and it is speculated that they became secret lovers during their time together, though it is not confirmed. Jack, jealous of his wife’s relationship with Mary over time, sought to kill Mary in her bed-chamber one day, where she revealed her identity to him as well. Impressed by her cunning (as well as her ruthlessness as a pirate), he spared her and continued to treat her as an equal.

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Anne Bonny: Real Female Pirate of the Caribbean.

Anne Bonny & Mary Read: A Deadly Duo

No longer having secrets between them, Anne Bonney and Mary Read sailed the high seas together with their pirate lovers. Around other pirates, they would dress in their men’s garb of loose tunics and wide trousers, often with their swords and pistols at their sides. They would often fight together as well, wielding their weapons and proving themselves as tough as any man on board.

One of their victims once wrote that they, “… wore men’s jackets, and long trousers, and handkerchiefs tied about their heads: and… each of them had a machete and pistol in their hands and they cursed and swore at the men to murder her.” She also noted that she recognized them as women because of the size of their breasts.

Their ruthless piracy eventually came to an unfortunate end. In 1720, Calico Jack’s crew was attacked by Jonathan Barnet, a privateer under the commission of the governor of Jamaica, Nicholas Lawes. There was little fight, as many of the pirates were drunk at the time of the attack, leading to a quick surrender.

Anne and Mary, never ones to back from a fight, continued to fight for their lives. According to legend, Mary yelled down to her crew during the fight, “If there’s a man among ye, ye’ll come up and fight like the man ye are to be!” When no man chose to fight with them, she shot through the door and killed one. Both women were captured soon after that.

Exchanging Gangplank for Gallows

Those captured were sentenced to death by hanging . Records state that Anne Bonny’s last words to Calico Jack, true to her character, were, “Had you fought like a man, you need not have been hang’d like a dog.”

Both women pleaded not guilty, but were found guilty in court. They were sentenced to be hanged; however, both were able to avoid execution as it was soon discovered they were each pregnant. Although they avoided hanging, Mary died in prison from a “fever,” likely caused by infection after childbirth.

Anne’s fate remains unclear. She survived childbirth, but there is no record of her execution or release. It is believed she either died in prison years later or perhaps escaped, though nobody is certain.

Either way, it’s clear these two female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read , gave their male counterparts a run for their money. Though they both met an untimely end, there’s something to be admired about the ferocity of a female pirate.

A bad date…

We were seated at the restaurant, chose our meals and I excused myself to go to the restroom. Upon returning we started talking. You know, all the small talk. At one point he mentioned that he knew I had a dog. My dog was a big boy, about 115 pounds. I said yes, he’s a rescue and a very nice dog. He sort of frowned and said, “well I have a cat and if we end up together the dog has to go.” Huh? I wasn’t sure I had heard correctly, after all this was a first date. Then the waiter showed up with our food. He set a lobster in front of me. I looked at the waiter and said, “Oh, I’m sorry but there has been a mistake: I ordered chicken.” My date, “no mistake, I’m not cheap; I changed your order.” Me: “I don’t like lobster.” Him: “just be grateful and eat it.” I didn’t say another word, just picked up my purse and walked out.

Make up some delicious “copycat” Chili…

When you need to feed a crowd and dish out a spicy kick, this retro stew can please any crowd. With roots tracing back to cowboys and cattle drives, few classic 1950s dishes evoke a similar image of the hardworking spirit that defines the U.S. Serve up a hot bowl of chili to warm up any cold night with an easy recipe and deep combination of flavors can make any home cook happy.

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Chili.

While I do love Wendy’s spicy chicken nuggets and chocolate frosty (usually enjoyed together), another classic order I like to snag at the restaurant is a small cup of their homemade chili. It’s the epitome of comfort food on a cold, winter day, which is why I decided to make a copycat Wendy’s chili recipe I could cook up at home.

Thanks to a clear list of ingredients on the Wendy’s website, it was easy to put together this recipe. According to the list, the Wendy’s chili has a chili base, tomatoes, chili beans, pink beans, kidney beans, onions, celery, green peppers, ground beef, chili pepper, garlic powder, and spices. While the recipe also has sugar and modified corn starch in it, I know that you can have a delicious chili without either of those additives, so I didn’t bother adding them into my version.

The trick to a delicious copycat Wendy’s chili

It may be surprising to you, but for my chili base, I like to use my homemade taco seasoning for the recipe. I like to have a jar of it prepared in my cupboard, so it’s easy to throw into the pot.

My trick to making the chili flavorful is to let it simmer for a long period of time. This recipe calls for a 30-minute simmer, but to be honest, you’ll get the best flavor if you let the chili sit for an hour—even two! Just make sure to stir it occasionally.

Don’t have garlic cloves? Try this instead

I also personally like the flavors that come from freshly minced garlic versus garlic powder, which is why I put it in this recipe. However, if you would rather use garlic powder, you can substitute the minced garlic for 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder.

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Copycat Wendy’s Chili

Ingredients

1 garlic clove, minced
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
2 celery stalks, diced
1 green bell pepper, diced
1 lb. ground beef
1 tablespoon taco seasoning
1 10 oz can. pinto beans
1 10 oz. can kidney beans
1 10 oz. can tomato sauce
1 10 oz. can diced tomatoes
Shredded cheddar cheese, for topping
Sour cream, for topping

How to Make It

  1. Heat up a dutch oven or a stockpot over medium heat. Add in the olive oil, minced garlic, onion, celery, and green bell pepper. When the vegetables start to become soft (about three minutes), add in the ground beef.
  2. Using a wooden spoon, break up the ground beef and stir in with the vegetables. When the ground beef is no longer pink, using a spoon, drain the grease into an excess can.
  3. Add in the beans, tomato sauce, and diced tomatoes into the dutch oven. Sprinkle in the taco seasoning and mix together.
  4. Turn the chili on simmer, and let it cook for at least 30 minutes, stirring once in a while so nothing burns at the bottom. The longer you let it sit, the better the flavors will become.
  5. Serve with shredded cheese and sour cream, if desired.

Bruce Lee has some things to say…

Bruce Lee once wrote, “To understand and live now, there must be a dying to everything of yesterday, die continually to every newly gained experience and be in a state in the choiceless awareness of what is.”

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He means that you must allow your identity to constantly die and evolve. But this is painful. It requires surrender. And the reward is wisdom.

Meanwhile, fragile egos live in orbit of their insecurities. Information must first pass through a filter bubble. It blinds them to feedback that could improve their life.

If you learn to lose or have your mind changed, you become liberated.

Cute kid

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Today’s insanity from Yahoo “news”…

It’s outrageous! Yet what is even more outrageous is that many Americans BELIEVE this vomit.

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Crazy 1.

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Crazy 2.

Artist Imagines How Disney Characters Would Look As Oil Paintings, And You’ll Want To Hang Them In Your Room

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Merida.

American self-taught artist Heather Theurer has been observing people, environments, animals, and textiles for decades. She studying renaissance greats and pre-Raphaelities of the late 19th century, as well as modern artists and she feels she just couldn’t learn as much and see as much in the classroom.

In her works, you’ll recognize symbolism, fantasy realism, equine and wildlife, and below of course Disney reanimations. Her goal was to search for the meaning and emphasize the character’s struggles, hopes, and pride. Her work often includes many layers of paint and glazes, even up to 20. This is the way she gets the depth and detail she wants. Obviously, her amazing work and talent had to be recognized by many great organizations and it was. Awards were flying from everywhere including Lucca Comics & Games, Art Renewal Centar, Artist’s Magazine and Spectrum, and many more.

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Mulan

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Lilo & Stitch

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Elsa, Anna And Olaf

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Tiana

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Dumbo

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Alice

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Belle

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Ariel

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Rapunzel

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Cinderella

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Peter Pan And Wendy

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Mr. Toad

 Scammed in Rome

This is a true story.

What do you see in this picture ?

If you are like 99% of people I know, you may interpret this picture as a feel-good picture of a man cracking jokes with tourists. This is Rome. A city that looks and feels like a living museum. Every street corner seems to have a historic monument. It’s an amazing and enchanting place!

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External Image Source: Getting Scammed in Europe!

And, you are right. In fact, he is not only cracking jokes with them, he is offering them free gifts – bracelets and trinkets – gifts that he is going to give away to the tourists as a show of kindness.

You refuse but he walks up and ties it on your wrist. “Take it, my friend, this is for you!” In fact, he will not only tie you a friendship bracelet, but if you listen to him for at least 15 seconds, he will want to offer you a second and then another. It’s all for you to keep. And all he wants is for you to be happy. He has had a tough life and he sells items on the roadside to help his young family who live in poverty. Chances are, you’ll be at a point now to feel obliged to give him ‘something’. By human nature, we are too prudent to simply take (forced to receive rather, in this case) items for free.

“No, sir, please … don’t bother,” says he.

“Let me give you something …, ” you say, feeling even worse at this point that you are receiving “gifts” from someone who is exponentially more needy than you.

So you take out your wallet. At this point two things can happen –

The first, and I hear this is the most common – he will demand money and you better pay up. You’ll suddenly become aware that he has friends all around. You didn’t notice them because you were too lost in your feel-good moment of helping this fellow. But they are there. I realised this once I reviewed some videos I had taken and observed many – many other tourists being approached the same way.

The second – and the one I can relate to is the following. I’d add that this may be an exception, but this is exactly what transpired –

As you open the wallet, in a swift, completely unexpected, chilling, moment, he will snatch everything out of your wallet – EVERYTHING – the cash you kept on your way to the Colosseum from the hotel, US Dollars, Euros – everything. Gone. You stand there – trying to process what just happened. After two seconds, you ask him to give it back and he starts screaming that you are taking his money!

There are tourists all around you. But you are not getting it back. He will keep the money and he and all his friends are ALL armed. A second ago he was a kind-hearted, jovial, cheerful fellow with a difficult life trying to share happiness with the world. A second later – you are staring into the face of a vicious and angry man – his eyes have turned red – his voice has changed, the smiles are gone. You’ve been brought back to reality from a utopian world!


This ‘scam’ is apparently known as the “African Bracelet Scam”. This site on Rome Vacation Tips

explained the factors that make this one of the most successful scams anywhere – “

This scam works by preying on the natural human instinct not to be impolite: not to brush off a friendly greeting, not to drop an unwanted gift on the ground.

You’ll pay dearly for being compassionate towards someone and you’ll regret it. That gift is something way more sinister in disguise (See the comments to this post from so many other readers who have experienced the same situation)


Many of the individuals are Africans from war-torn countries who take a dangerous trip to Europe. Countless stories in articles such as, One Migrant’s Harrowing Journey From Senegal to Italy

, talk of the harrowing tales. Unfortunately, the actions of a few leave a stigma on the entire population from the respective countries. Based on the comments, it also seems that these scams are perpetrated by organised groups based in Italy, not just migrants.

These incidents also raise an ethical dilemma. If you call the cops the individual might get deported back to where he came from and might not survive. If you don’t, he would continue to scam other tourists. It’s a hard choice that you have to make in that brief, fleeting, animated moment!

Several commentators have also mentioned being forced to wear the bracelets and in one case with the other person brandishing sharp object. Once they put it on your wrist, they oftentimes do not let go of your hand until you pay them.

As you may observe from the comments, these incidents are not just common, it is the — norm — believe it or not. If you visit any Roman site, you’re bound to be approached by someone with bracelets in a majority of cases. Every traveller to Rome should be aware of this and avoid becoming a victim.

Why the United States has such an insane level of propaganda right now…

The smoke-filled room experiment

This study takes place in two stages.

First, the subject is placed in a room, completely alone, and is asked to fill out a questionnaire of some kind.

After a few minutes, smoke begins to spread through the room from a nearby door.

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On average, the test subject noticed the smoke within 2 minutes, got up and left the room.

Anyone would have done the same, right?

But that’s where it gets interesting (and scary).

The experts repeated the experiment, but this time filled the room with more subjects. They also included 2 accomplices who were instructed not to react when the smoke appeared in the room.

The result?

Only 10% of the subjects left the room or warned other participants that there was something unusual happening.

9 out of 10 people quietly continued to fill out their questionnaire (while rubbing their eyes because of the smoke).

This experiment, similar to Milgram’s or Ash’s, proved that human become more passive and easily influenced in the presence of other people.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Source: 4 Smoke Filled Room Experiment – 28 Psychological Experiments That Revealed Incredible And Uncomfortable Truths About Ourselves

Faith in humanity

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I know just what you mean.

I call it “The Interdimensional Lapse” (IDiL).

Sweden is one of those rare places that seems to be not entirely present in this dimension. Part of it is still… somewhere else.

A homeopathist friend of mine from Germany who has visited repeatedly has given me this very good picture: “Most of the world is in D-potency, homeopathically speaking. Sweden though is in a C-potency.”

Make of homeopathy what you will, I think it describes it very well. Homeopathic potencies describe how earthly vs. how ethereal something is. D is most like an actual substance of this Earth, while C is already a bit higher up the ladder of mirror images of reality.

I think there are perfectly robust explanations for this impression, of course, nothing esoteric:

  • Chronemics; the dynamics of interaction in Sweden are strangely delayed. Interacting with a Swede has an extra step built in you don’t normally see (anymore, perhaps?) in most of the world: The Pause. They will always wait before answering you, to make sure you really have finished speaking. That can give outsiders a strange sensation of “uh-oh, is he/she actually going to respond?”
  • Acoustics; I’ve said it often, and people don’t understand it until they’ve been here: Sweden is quiet. For some reason, everything here is somehow muted, as if on snow. The people speak more quietly, the cars are going slower, in a higher gear, the buildings seem to swallow more echo… you may feel like there’s something off with your hearing.
  • Lighting; due to its latitude, which is comparable to that of Alaska, the sun stands much lower in Sweden all the time. You are living in a perpetual morning- or evening atmosphere. Shadows are long and light, and the light has a mellow, golden tinge.
  • Colours; again due to the low sun angle, and the clear air, you will see colours that have higher saturation than elsewhere. As a photographer, I regularly go positively bonkers here because of that. I can measure that in my digital colour charts when I do my image management. Swedish blues and greens are unbelievable. Like in an old, Florentine painting.
  • Levity; the architectural style, together with the warm colour spectrum, give an impression of the built environment being of lower weight and less substance than it is. Swedish houses seem to be sitting on the meadows as light as doll’s houses that can just be picked up and carried away. Just because of the way they look.
  • Femininity (as opposed to Masculinity, according to Geert Hofstede’s index); the roar of the alpha male never comes. There is no final grumble of bearded approval, like in most other places. Sweden is a feminine place. Even though there are plenty of men here, it has a matriarchal touch.

So there you are. Simple, natural explanations, but still, not something you find in that combination easily, if at all.

Here some photographic evidence of some of the points above:

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I’ve heard this otherness described in many ways over the decades, and it is one of the main factors that kept pulling me back to Sweden all these years. It’s like a break from the world.

An Australian friend of mine once said “that place just seems magical.” An American I met at an airport described it as “strangely unreal.” A French colleague described it as “like meeting a beautiful fairy.”

I’ve been happily away with that fairy for quite some time now.

In The Multipolar World Iran Will No Longer Fear U.S. Sanctions

From the brilliant MoA

When U.S. president Joe Biden recently held a number of talks in the Middle East Iran was one point on his agenda. The U.S. has made it clear that it does not want to reenter into the nuclear deal with Iran. It is instead again attempting a ‘maximum pressure’ strategy to pressure Iran into additional concessions.

Iran has made it clear that there will not be any more then those it had made in the original agreement. Biden then tried to form an anti-Iran coalition out of Israel and the Gulf regimes. The Gulf Cooperation Council states rejected that:

[T]he Saudi foreign minister poured cold water over any imminent normalization with Israel, saying this was not a precursor to further steps. He said Riyadh was not part of any discussions on a Gulf-Israeli defense alliance to counter Iran.

All GCC are talking with Iran to normalize their relations.

Iran will benefit from the new multi-polar world. It has been seeking to ally itself with the Russia and China block with added relations to a neutral India. Last year Iran became a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This year it applied for membership in BRICS.

Last month Iran’s foreign minister visited India:

Amir-Abdollahian also called on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a privilege not accorded to all visiting foreign ministers. Tweeting on the meeting, Modi highlighted how “relations have mutually benefitted both the countries and have promoted regional security and prosperity.”

The official statement released by the Ministry of External Affairs highlighted the exchange of views on important issues like the Iran nuclear deal, the Ukraine conflict, and the situation in Afghanistan. India “appreciated the role of Iran in facilitating India’s medical assistance to Afghanistan, including supply of COVID-19 vaccines to Afghan nationals residing in Iran.” In addition, all bilateral issues including cooperation in the field of regional connectivity and the progress made at the Chabahar port were reviewed. Exuding confidence at the outcome of the visit, the Iranian foreign minister said that “preparing a roadmap for strategic cooperation between Iran and India can regulate long-term relations and protect it from the impact of destructive factors.”

A few moth ago Iran signed a new transport agreement with its northern neighbor Azerbaijan. It will be good for both sides:

On 11 March, Azerbaijan and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on establishing railway, highway, communication, and energy supply lines connecting Azerbaijan’s East Zangezur economic region and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic through the territory of Iran. According to the document, there is a plan to build four bridges over the Araz River and two railways and develop communication and energy supply infrastructure to establish a new corridor.

The better relations with Azerbaijan will also open a rail corridor towards Russia.

Another new trade route was finally opened to connect India via Iran with Russia.

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This project has been on and off for many years but this month it was finally activated:

An India-bound cargo sent from Russia using the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) reached the Sarkhas railway station in Iran on July 13. From the railway station, the cargo will go to Bandar Abbas port in southern India and then come to India via the Arabian Sea.

The cargo left Chekhov station in Russia on July 6 and it was received by a team of Iranian ministers

What is INSTC?

INSTC is a 7,200 km-long transportation network offering the shortest connectivity route to its member states. It was established on September 12, 2000, by Iran, Russia and India. The corridor encompasses sea, road and rail routes.

The main purpose of the corridor was to reduce carriage costs and transit time between India and Russia. The transit time is expected to reduce to almost half, once the corridor becomes fully functional.

In future the route will go from India to Chabahar, a port in south east Iran that India had helped to build. From there the goods will go by rail up north to the Caspian Sea and then by ship directly to Russia. This will shorten the route even more and will also end any dependency on other partners.

But the greatest news for Iran is a new deal with Russia’s Gazprom that was signed today:

The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and Russian gas producer Gazprom signed on Tuesday a memorandum of understanding worth around $40 billion, Iran's oil ministry's news agency SHANA reported.

The deal was signed during an online ceremony by the CEOs of both companies on the day Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Tehran for a summit with his Iranian and Turkish counterparts.

Gazprom will help NIOC in the development of the Kish and North Pars gas fields and also six oil fields, according to SHANA. Gazprom will also be involved in the completion of liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects and construction of gas export pipelines.

Iran sits on the world’s second-largest gas reserves after Russia, but US sanctions have hindered access to technology and slowed development of gas exports.

Gazprom is a strong partner and can not be hindered by U.S. sanctions. Iran will finally be able export more of its plentiful gas. Russia will also have a chance to work with Iran to keep the prices at a certain level. With such a large deal will also come protection. Iran will be able to call on Russia should someone start hostilities against it.

When Iran produces enough gas it can also revive the old project of a pipeline to India. This could either go through Pakistan or, as India would probably prefer, through an undersea pipeline:

A 1,300-km undersea pipeline from Iran, avoiding Pakistani waters, can bring natural gas from the Persian Gulf to India at rates less than the price of Liquefied Natural Gas available in the spot market, proponents of the pipeline said on Tuesday.

Releasing a study on the Iran-India gas pipeline, former oil secretary T.N.R. Rao said natural gas imported through the over $4 billion line would cost $5-5.50 per million British thermal unit at the Indian coast, cheaper than the rate at which some of the domestic fields supply gas.

Despite U.S. sanctions Iran is again becoming fully integrated into its region. It is a great success and the gas and transit deals will help its economy to make some gains even as the U.S. adds new sanctions. Russia, India and China are partners who can and will ignore those.

Iran now also has the capability to produce sufficient nuclear material for a number of bombs. It will not use this capability as its religious ideology prohibits the making and use of such weapons. But it is a latent threat that can be used to deter Israel and the U.S. from any attack.

That Trump left the nuclear deal was dumb. That Biden did not revive it immediately after taking office was even dumber. To now stay out of it, only to keep some stupid sanctions against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corp, is the dumbest step I can think of.

Washington has yet to understand that it has lost its mono-polar position that made the international sanctions which led to the nuclear deal with Iran possible. In the multi-polar world that exists now Iran can develop as it likes. Others will now ignore U.S. or EU sanctions and the threat of them is no longer useful. More countries under U.S. isolation, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba and Syria, will also find new ways and alliances to better their positions.

In his book The Great Chessboard the former National Security Advisor of the United States Zbigniew Brzeziński wrote:

Potentially, the most dangerous scenario [for America] would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.

Joe Biden has finally managed to create that.

Life Lessons

  1. Cooking and cleaning is a basic life skill and not a gender role.
  2. If you don’t clear your misunderstanding in time, they became the reason for distance forever.
  3. If you want it, work for it. It’s that simple.
  4. The gap between the life you could live and the life you are living is called focus.
  5. If you’re not dating to marry, then you’re dating for heartbreak. Let that sink in and be in serious relationship.
  6. Stop comparing yourself with who started 10 years before you. Focus on your own journey.
  7. Confidence is not “I’m better than them”, confidence is “I’m great, so are they”
  8. Every time I lower my frequency to meet someone on their level I end up paying for it. That’s a lesson I really don’t need to learn anymore. Rise up to meet me.
  9. Real growth is when you start checking and correcting yourself. Instead of blaming others, you take your power back by being responsible for your life.
  10. You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
  11. Being kind to yourself is the best medicine.
  12. And there is always, always, always something to be thankful for.

And now it’s “Monkeypox”…

Monkeypox. Don’t you know…

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GAME OVER, EUROPE

Russia’s state-owned Gazprom does not plan to resume natural gas supplies via Nord Stream 1 after the planned maintenance of the pipeline is completed on July 22.   No more natural gas for Germany or most of Europe.  Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
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Game over.

Haunting 100-Year-Old Chalkboard Drawings Discovered In Oklahoma School

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Emerson High School in Oklahoma City was the site of an amazing discovery last week when contractors renovating the school found several 100-year-old chalkboards hidden in the walls. The chalkboards, dating back to 1917, haven’t been touched for almost a century, and perfectly preserve the work of students and teachers from that era.

The images and writing on the boards include an unusual mathematics lesson where a wheel is used to teach multiplication tables.

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The students were also taught music…

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… and basic hygiene.

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“The penmanship blows me away, because you don’t see a lot of that anymore,” Emerson High School Principal Sherry Kishore told the NewsOK. “Some of the handwriting in some of these rooms is beautiful.”

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Several references to the pilgrims were also made.

 

 

A school district spokesperson says they are working with the city to preserve the chalk drawings.

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Joe Biden’s Secret War in Ukraine

American soldiers are already “boots on the ground”

The White House keeps insisting that it will not directly involve American soldiers in the war in Ukraine, but it keeps taking steps that will inevitably lead to a large-scale open combat role for the US against Russia.

Among the most recent moves to increase the pressure on the Kremlin, Biden revealed at a NATO summit meeting in Madrid on June 29th that the US will establish a permanent headquarters in Poland for the United States Fifth Army Corps, maintain an additional rotational brigade of thousands of troops in Romania and bolster other deployments in the Baltic states.

Also, the number of US troops in Europe, currently approaching 100,000, will be increased. Biden also was pleased to learn that Turkey had been enticed to drop its objection to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

On the way to the NATO summit aboard Air Force One, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan advised that

“By the end of the summit what you will see is a more robust, more effective, more combat credible, more capable and more determined force posture to take account of a more acute and aggravated Russian threat.” 

Presumably Sullivan was reading from a prepared script, but the objective surely seemed to be to heighten tension with Moscow rather than attempt to reduce it and come to some kind of diplomatic settlement.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also did his bit. In an astonishing display of derriere kissing, he responded that the new US force posture commitments were demonstrative of Biden’s strong leadership.

What Stoltenberg did not mention was that Biden has been lying for some time about the presence of US military personnel in Ukraine.

He let the cat out of the bag back in March, when he told troops belonging to the 82nd Airborne division in Poland that they would soon be going to Ukraine, observing that “You’re going to see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see —”

It was an admission that US forces are already in place inside Ukraine even though the White House quickly did damage control, asserting that the president continues to be opposed to American soldiers being directly engaged in the fighting.

Biden also claimed that the US was working to “keep the massacre [of Ukrainians] from continuing.”

Again, the language was hardly designed to make some room for a possible accommodation with Russia to negotiate an end to the fighting.

And now there is a New York Times report entitled

Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say: A secretive operation involving US Special Operations forces hints at the scale of the effort to assist Ukraine’s still outgunned military.”

The article describes a more active US role in Ukraine than the Biden Administration has been willing to admit publicly.

Back in February, before intervened in Ukraine, the US reportedly withdrew its own 150 military instructors, many of whom were training Ukrainian soldiers on newly acquired American produced weapons.

However, some Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitary operatives and special ops troops continued their service in the country secretly, directing most of the intelligence flow the US is sharing with Ukrainian forces.

In addition to that, special ops soldiers from Washington’s NATO allies have been managing the movement of weapons and equipment into Ukraine and providing some specialized training.

It has also been reported that British SAS commandos are actually guarding President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The NYT specifies, citing American and other Western officials, that the soldiers and CIA officers are currently not on the front lines with Ukrainian troops.

Also according to the Times, even though the US and NATO member states have not acknowledged the presence of their paramilitaries soldiers in operational roles in Ukraine, Russia and other intelligence services around the world are aware of this.

The New York Times report appears to be generally correct, though it does omit some details, some of which I have been hearing from former colleagues in the intelligence services.

There has been considerable overt training at the Grafenwoehr German army base as well as at the Ramstein US Air Base to familiarize the Ukrainians with the new weapons arriving.

Other NATO countries are also participating in the training.

Meanwhile, the cadres of special operations soldiers and intelligence personnel operating primarily in western Ukraine are not in uniform and many of them are working under various contrived cover designations, including sometimes loose affiliations with foreign embassies and NGOs.

There are also a conventional CIA Station, a group from the National Security Agency and a Military Attache’s office in the recently reopened US Embassy in Kiev.

All of the above means that Biden and other western leaders have been dissimulating regarding their active participation in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Apart from his possible gaffe, Biden will not admit that there are American boots already on the ground, but they are there and are playing a major role in both logistics and intelligence sharing.

The potential downside for the president could come when some of these soldiers in mufti get killed or, worse, captured and start to talk about their role.

Retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, observes that deploying plausibly deniable non-uniformed personnel

“is completely typical of the initial stages of a US-backed long war, and for long-term political manipulation of the target country. 

This is the future that neoconservative ‘strategists’ in DC and their British and European allies imagine for Ukraine. 

Rather than a negotiated conclusion, with a new Ukrainian role as a neutral and productive country, independent of both Russian and US political influences, the US government and CIA see Ukraine as an expendable yet useful satrap in its competition with the Russian Federation.”

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson sees the activity in stark terms, while also commenting that the CIA has not won a semi-clandestine insurgent war in forty years.

He observes that “Ukraine is a proxy; the West is trying to destroy Russia, it’s that simple.

It would be one thing if Russia was the most evil, oppressive, authoritarian regime in the world.

It’s nowhere even close.

Even though the West keeps trying to portray Russia as such.

The fact of the matter is, the West wants the resources that Russia has and it wants to control Russia. [But] Russia is not about to be controlled.”

In other words, Washington might be seeking an unending war entangling Russia and limiting its options globally.

The Biden Administration has staked its reputation and possible political future on enabling Ukraine to survive without succumbing to Russian territorial demands.

It is a risky and even dangerous policy, both in practical terms and politically.

The persistence of the Ukrainians in their defense is largely a product of US and Western Europe guarantees that they will do all that is necessary to support Zelensky and his regime, which is already seeking $750 billion in aid for “reconstruction.”

If western military casualties begin to surface, the political support for the Ukraine war will begin to fade in Washington and elsewhere and there will be consequences in the upcoming midterm US elections in November.

A final comment on the Times piece is in response to the question why it has appeared at all at the present time.

The mainstream media has been a cheerleader for aggressive US support of Ukraine and Zelensky, but now it is beginning to step back from that position, as have also the Washington Post and other media outlets.

Perhaps they are becoming convinced that the game plan being promoted by Washington and its European allies is unlikely to succeed at great cost to the respective economies.

Larry Johnson puts it this way:

“I think the purpose of this article coming out now is just to lay the groundwork for why we can’t put or shouldn’t put any more US military personnel or even CIA personnel inside Ukraine because continuing to put US personnel…inside Ukraine to train is becoming too risky because of Russia’s success on the battlefield.” 

One might also add that it is exceptionally dangerous. A misstep or even a deliberate false flag coming from either side could easily make the war go nuclear.

Check this out…

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Coffee-rubbed steak

You may have seen meats coated with a coffee rub and wished you could cook something similar at home. Look no further than this recipe.

Coffee-rubbed steak is not only easy and quick, but it pairs with almost any roast vegetables you can imagine, making it the easiest main dish to make if you’re serving dinner for a big family.

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Coffee and steak might seem like an unlikely partnership, but the flavor of beef is actually heightened by the robust notes of java.

This coffee-rubbed steak dish would be perfect with grilled vegetables and a side of black or pinto beans, or heat up a few corn tortillas and pass them out so everyone can make their own little tacos.

Either way, be sure to let the beef rest (even if it actually makes this 10-minute meal a 12- or 13-minute meal); cut into it too early, and all the still-hot juices will bleed onto your cutting board, instead of being reabsorbed by the meat.

Patience is a virtue, and so is a home-cooked meal that will save you some serious calories compared to the fast-food version.

You’ll Need

1⁄2  Tbsp finely ground coffee or espresso
1⁄2  Tbsp chili powder
Salt and black pepper to taste
1 lb flank or skirt steak (Skirt and flank are among our two favorite cuts, but any steak—strip, tenderloin, ribeye—would benefit from this coffee treatment)
Pico de gallo
1 lime, quartered

How to Make It

  1. Preheat a grill, grill pan, or cast-iron skillet.
  2. Combine the coffee grounds with the chili powder, plus a few generous pinches of salt and pepper.
  3. Rub the spice mixture all over the steak. Cook the beef for 3 to 4 minutes per side, depending on thickness, until slightly firm but still yielding.
  4. Let the steak rest for at least 5 minutes, then slice thinly against the grain of the meat. Serve with a big scoop of pico de gallo and a wedge of lime.

Eat This Tip

Steak and coffee isn’t the only unconventional pairing that yields surprisingly excellent results. Try any of these tantalizing teams for a jolt to your taste buds:

Oscar Wilde Quote

“Give a man a mask, and he will show you his true face.”

The end…

Death sentence carried out.
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This morning, three foreign mercenaries from the UK (Eidin Aslin, Sean Pinner) and Morocco (Saadoun Brahim), who were sentenced to death for crimes in the DPR, were shot.

Cats are awesome!

And some sunshine.

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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Boston cream pie and a very strange plane crash

I am falling a little bit behind right now. I have a ton load on my plate. Do not freak out if I go quiet for a few days. Please continue to check out the MM You-Tube channel, and the MM Patreon channel, as I am making regular contributions there.

In the meantime, please enjoy this daily post.

Anyone Else Want To Bring Back Kitchen Phones With The 10 Ft Cord?

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Anyone Else Want To Bring Back Kitchen Phones With The 10 Ft Cord?

Russia Announces Civilian Drills for NUCLEAR ATTACK

Moscow is announcing to its citizens the city will be conducting NUCLEAR ATTACK CIVILIAN EVACUATION DRILLS, complete with Outdoor SIRENS, TV and Radio Interruption Warnings, instructing citizens to proceed to nuclear attack shelters.

The dates of these “Drills” are not yet known, but the citizenry is being told the Drills will be upcoming and there will be SEVERAL of them.

Citizens are also being advised to have an evacuation bag with some clothing, medicines, money, ID, and hygiene products in it, so they can grab-and-go.

Beef Stroganoff

The rich and creamy combo of beef and noodles packs so much savory flavor in every bite, one taste will send your tongue on a trip down memory lane and can please anyone looking for a hearty meal. Indulge in this dish that has come to represent the cultural melting pot of American cuisine.

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Delicious.

Beef stroganoff may be Russian in name and origin, but it’s since become a global go-to, finding a home everywhere from Iran to Brazil to Australia. Only the best dishes inspire this type of universal love, and the ease and innate deliciousness of stroganoff is clearly why Americans have embraced it as their own. Though sour cream is normally stirred into the sauce at the last second, we tested this dish several different ways and found Greek yogurt tasted every bit as good for fewer calories. Just make sure to remove the pan from the heat before adding, as high temperatures can cause the yogurt to break, jeopardizing the smooth, velvety sauce you really want in this beef stroganoff recipe.

You’ll Need

1⁄2 Tbsp canola oil, plus more if needed
12 oz white or cremini mushrooms, stems removed, halved
1 lb. sirloin, cut into thin strips
Salt and black pepper to taste
1  yellow onion, minced
2  cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp flour
3⁄4 cup red wine
1⁄2 cup low-sodium beef stock
1 Tbsp tomato paste
1⁄4 cup 2% plain Greek yogurt
Chopped fresh parsley

How to Make It

  1. Heat the oil in large sauté pan over medium heat.
  2. Add the mushrooms and cook for about 5 minutes, until softened and caramelized.
  3. Remove and reserve.
  4. Season the beef with salt and pepper.
  5. In the same pan, adding more oil if necessary, cook the beef for about 5 minutes, until well-browned all over.
  6. Remove and reserve with the mushrooms.
  7. Add the onion and garlic to the pan and cook until the onion is translucent.
  8. Stir in the flour until it evenly coats the vegetables, then add the wine, stock, and tomato paste, scraping the pan to release any flavorful bits stuck to the bottom.
  9. Turn the heat down to low and simmer for about 12 minutes, until the liquid thickens and reduces by about half.
  10. Return the mushrooms and beef to the pan and heat through, then remove from the heat.
  11. After the liquid cools just slightly, stir in the yogurt. (If the heat is too high, the yogurt will separate.)
  12. Serve over buttered noodles or steamed rice and garnish with parsley.

A truly British story…

Not mine. -MM

My wife and I were walking with our youngest over the old bridge between Lichfield Cathedral and the market place. A lovely spring day. I’m British, my wife isn’t.

A young man came dashing past the end of the bridge, a police officer in hot pursuit. They both vanished from view rapidly.

We stopped to read the information board about the historic bridge. A few minutes later, the suspect and the copper came walking back, a little out of breath. We overheard their conversation.

Copper: “Sorry for running after you like that, mate. But you were running away.”

Suspect: “Yeah, sorry about that, mate. I shouldn’t have run, but I didn’t want to get caught.”

My wife stood open-jawed. I didn’t quite see why it was so unusual. I mean, just because they’re trying to arrest you doesn’t mean police officers should be rude or unsympathetic. Just because they may have done something the law may forbid doesn’t mean someone has to be abusive.

We continued to eavesdrop.

Copper, leading suspect to a park bench, where they both sat down, “Are you ready to give me your name and address, or do you want a bit of a breather first?”

Suspect, “You don’t have a cigarette, do you?”

Copper, pulling a packet of fags from his breast pocket and handing it to the suspect, “Here you go.”

As he lit the man’s cigarette, the police van arrived. Copper: “Just finish your smoke and we’ll finish the details at the station.”

I told my wife there was a good chance the cop didnt smoke, but kept a handy packet to help put people at ease.

She’s told friends and family in several countries about that. It is, she says, absolutely the most British thing she’s witnessed: a cop apologising for arresting someone who apologised for trying to run away.

If this story has failed to entertain or amuse, all I can say is sorry. And what could be more British than that?

Do you remember?

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Bazooka Joe Gum

The very mysterious crash of a aircraft…

Strange.

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Plane Crash

It seems to be covered up and the entire story is just STRANGE. Looks like something really serious is going on. Everything about this is just ODD.

Satellite Image Reveals China Blew Up Mock Japan Warplane Amid Taiwan Invasion Fears

Saturday, Jul 16, 2022 – 10:00 AM

There’s increasing concern a possible Chinese annexation of Taiwan would fundamentally challenge Japan’s security and result in a broader conflict.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) understands an invasion of Taiwan would likely result in conflict with Japan because only 110 kilometers (68 miles) is Japan’s westernmost inhabited island of Yonaguni.

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Japanese leaders have linked Taiwan’s security with Japan’s, enabling the country to play a role in Taiwan’s defense. As a result, the PLA launched a missile(s) at mock Japan Self-Defense Forces (SDF) aircraft in a desert area in northwest China called Xinjiang, according to Nikkei, citing a report from Planet Labs.

Nikkei examined photos taken by Planet Labs, a U.S.-based satellite operator. Photographs of the same location in mid-May showed an object shaped like an E-767, an airborne warning and control system (AWACS) used by the SDF, a runway and buildings resembling a tarmac. A July 13 photo shows the destroyed object, along with debris and black burn marks.

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Previous satellite photographs showed the object was still in place as of July 2. The precise timing is not clear because of weather conditions that prevented photography on some days, but it appears that the object was destroyed in early July. It is the first time that an object mimicking an SDF aircraft is known to have been destroyed. -Nikkei

“I think we can safely conclude this was a test of a ballistic missile of some sort,” said Jeffrey Lewis, professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and a specialist in the military analysis of satellite photos, referring to what appears to be a mock Boeing E-767 AWACS used by SDF.

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Tom Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, also reviewed the images and concluded a missile might have been used:

"If the purpose of the mock target was to test the ability of a missile warhead to recognize and strike specific high-value aircraft, and that capability was in fact tested successfully, then deployment of such a weapon could improve the PLA's ability to strike key aircraft like the E-767." 

It’s unclear precisely what the PLA used to target the mock AWACS or surrounding aircraft. Kiyofumi Iwata, former chief of staff of the Japan Ground SDF, said there are no impact craters, suggesting the “AWACS object may have been set ablaze, rather than hit by a missile.”

PLA forces also built a mock U.S. Navy aircraft carrier and two Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers last year in the same desert area for weapons testing. Nikkei said the “aircraft carrier was found to have marks that experts said were made by missile impacts.”

If an invasion of Taiwan is planned, it seems China recognizes that Japan and the U.S. could be drawn into the fight. That’s why China and Russia aligned and conducted a joint military exercise last month between the island of Yonaguni and Taiwan.

Pizza Hut…

Do you remember this cup?

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Pizza Hut cup. Usually filled with Coke-cola.

Vintage Photos Of 12 Crazy Wooden Homes On Wheels From The Early 20th Century

There is no formal definition of a house car but in the early 1900s, Americans want to take to the roads and explore. Some creative Tin Can tourists decided that they’d rather bring their home with them rather than have the tent attachments on the sides of their Model T’s, so they built larger structures that resembled houses onto the frames and off they went. It really is the earliest example of what we commonly call a mobile home.

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The superb bus of Ray Conklin, president of the New York Motorbus Company in 1915.

Mobile homes often look blocky and sterile, but these wooden houses look like gingerbread Victorian houses on wheels. Check out how people have hammered and sawed their own homes onto cars.

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Gospel Car No. 1, built by William Downer in Glassboro, New Jersey, late 1910s.

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Dr. A. A. Foster and his family in an auto tourist camp, ca. 1920.

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A Ford Model T from the early 1920s.

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On a Ford TT chassis.

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A cute German country house on wheels in 1922.

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A traveling minister with a tiny church car, with a tiny organ inside and a foldable rooftop steeple, 1922.

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A fancy homebuilt motorhome, built on a Ford Model TT truck chassis in Ohio, 1924.

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W. M. O’Donnell and his family in their “bungalow auto”, 1926.

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The Burn Family (June and Farrar) and their moving house, 1929.

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The homebuilt car of Charles Miller with a nice bit of lawn, 1930.

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Ford Model A Traveler, 1931.

 

Do you remember this…

Paper Plate Holders.

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Paper Plate Holders

The West is Experiencing a Contraction of its Power

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

The strategists of the hegemonic country of the West, the US, without realizing the flagrant contraction, show unlimited ambition.

What Westerners call the West or Western civilization is a geopolitical space that emerged in the 16th century and expanded continuously until the 20th century. On the eve of World War I, about 90 percent of the globe was Western or Western-dominated: Europe, Russia, the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and much of Asia (with the partial exceptions of Japan and China). From then on, the West began to contract: first with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the emergence of the Soviet bloc, and then, from mid-century onward, with the decolonization movements. Terrestrial space, and soon after, extraterrestrial space, became fields of intense disputes.

Meanwhile, what Westerners understood by the West was changing. It began as Christianity and colonialism, then changed to capitalism and imperialism, and then metamorphosed into democracy, human rights, decolonization, self-determination, and “rules-based international relations”—it was made clear that the rules would be established by the West and would only be followed when they served its interests—and finally into globalization.

By the middle of the last century, the West had shrunk so much that several newly independent countries made the decision to align themselves neither with the West nor with the bloc that had emerged as its rival, the Soviet bloc. This led to the emergence, from 1955-1961, of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). With the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991, the West seemed to go through a time of enthusiastic expansion. It was around this time that former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev expressed his desire for Russia to join the “common home” of Europe, with the support of then-US President George H. W. Bush, a desire reaffirmed by Vladimir Putin when he took power in 2000. It was a short historical period, and recent events show that the “size” of the West has since shrunk drastically. In the wake of the Ukraine war, the West decided, on its own initiative, that only those countries applying sanctions against Russia would be considered part of the pro-Western camp. These countries comprise about 21 percent of the UN member countries, which constitute only 16 percent of the world’s population.

Questions

Is contraction decline? One might think that the contraction of the West works in its favor because it allows it to focus on more realistic goals with greater intensity. A careful reading of the strategists of the hegemonic country of the West, the United States, shows, that on the contrary, without apparently realizing the flagrant contraction, they show unlimited ambition. With the same ease with which they foresee being able to reduce Russia (one of the largest nuclear powers in the world) to a vassal state or bring it to ruin, they foresee neutralizing China (which is on its way to becoming the first world economy) and soon provoking a war in Taiwan, (like the one in Ukraine) to achieve that purpose. On the other hand, the history of empires shows that contraction goes hand in hand with decline, and that decline is irreversible and entails much human suffering.

At the current stage, the manifestations of weakness are running parallel to those of strength, which makes analysis very difficult. Two contrasting examples help understand this point more clearly: The United States is the largest military power in the world (even though it has not won any wars since 1945) with military bases in at least 80 countries. An extreme case of domination is its presence in Ghana where, according to agreements made in 2018, the United States uses the Accra airport without any control or inspection, US soldiers do not even need a passport to enter the country, and enjoy extraterritorial immunity, meaning that if they commit any crime, no matter how serious, they cannot be tried by Ghana’s courts. On the other hand, the thousands of sanctions on Russia are, for now, doing more damage in the Western world than in the geopolitical space being defined by the West as the non-Western world. The currencies of those countries that seem to be winning the war are depreciating the most. The looming inflation and recession led JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon to say that a “hurricane” is approaching.

Is contraction a loss of internal cohesion? Contraction can mean more cohesion, and this is quite visible. The leadership of the European Union, i.e., the European Commission, has in the last 20 years been much more aligned with the US than the countries that make up the EU. We saw this with the neoliberal shift and with the enthusiastic support shown by former President of the European Commission, José Manuel Durão Barroso, for the invasion of Iraq, and we are seeing it now with the current commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who seems to be operating as the US undersecretary of defense. The truth is that this cohesion, if it is effective in producing policies, can be disastrous in managing their consequences. Europe is a geopolitical space that since the 16th century has lived off the resources of other countries that it directly or indirectly dominates and on whom it imposes unequal exchange. None of this is, however, possible when the United States or its allies are its partners. Moreover, cohesion is made up of inconsistencies, as seen in the conflicting narratives about Russia. After all, is Russia the country with a lower GDP than many countries in Europe? Or is it a force that wants to invade Europe, and serves as a global threat that can only be stopped with the help of investments provided by the United States for arms and security to Ukraine—already around $10 billion—a distant country of which little will remain if the war continues for a long time?

Does the contraction occur for internal or external reasons? The literature on the decline and end of empires shows that, besides a few exceptional cases in which empires were destroyed by external forces—such as the Aztec and Inca empires with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors—internal factors generally dominate in bringing about contraction, even though decline can be precipitated by external factors. It is difficult to distinguish the internal from the external, and the specific identification is always more ideological than anything else. For example, in 1964 the well-known American conservative philosopher James Burnham published a book titled Suicide of the West. According to him, liberalism, then dominant in the United States, was the ideology behind this decline. For the liberals of the time, liberalism was, on the contrary, an ideology that would enable a new, more peaceful, and just world hegemony for the West. Today, liberalism is dead in the United States (neoliberalism dominates, which is its opposite) and even the old-school conservatives have been totally overtaken by the neoconservatives. That is why former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (for many, a war criminal) upset the anti-Russia proselytes by calling for peace negotiations while talking about the Ukraine conflict during a conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos in May. Be that as it may, the Ukraine war is the great accelerator of the West’s contraction. While the West wants to use its power and influence to isolate China, a new generation of nonaligned countries is emerging. Organizations like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Eurasian Economic Forum are, among others, the new faces of the non-Western states.

What comes next? We don’t know yet. It is as difficult to imagine the West occupying a subordinate space in the world context as it is to imagine it in an equal and peaceful relationship with other geopolitical spaces. We only know that for those leading the Western states, either of these hypotheses is either impossible or, if possible, apocalyptic. Therefore, the number of international meetings has multiplied in recent months—from the World Economic Forum meeting that took place in May in Davos to the most recent Bilderberg Meeting in June. Not surprisingly, in the latter meeting, of the 14 themes discussed, seven were directly related to the West’s rivals.

Do you remember?

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McDonald’s Ash Tray

Some words of advice from an older person…

  1. Loneliness doesn’t stop when we are surrounded by people. It stops when we are seen for who we truly are.
  2. Actions and words both have value, it’s when the two don’t align that the value is lost.
  3. Our partner cannot fulfill our needs, and it’s not their job to do so.
  4. If it doesn’t bring peace, profits, or purpose, then don’t give it your time, energy, or attention.
  5. A lot of conversations need to be had in person. Tones need to be heard, facial expressions need to be seen.
  6. Your greatest test will be how you handle people who mishandled you.
  7. You can mute people in real life too. It’s called boundaries.
  8. Never lose your self-respect for someone who doesn’t care about your feelings and emotions.
  9. Some people will always be important, with or without a conversation.
  10. When you care for someone more than they deserve, you get hurt more than you deserve.
  11. The people we choose to spend time with will shape who we become.

This Proxy War Has No Exit Strategy

Sunday, Jul 17, 2022 – 03:30 AM

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America has released a statement opposing the US government’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, saying the billions being funneled into the military-industrial complex “at a time when ordinary Americans are struggling to pay for housing, groceries, and fuel” is “a slap in the face for working people.”

The statement advocates a negotiated settlement for peace, saying continuing to pour weapons into the country will “needlessly prolong the war, resulting in more civilian deaths” and that it “risks escalating and widening the war — up to and including nuclear war.”

In response to this entirely reasonable and moderate position, the DSA is currently being raked over the coals with accusations of Kremlin loyalty and facilitation of murder and bloodshed by blue-checkmarked narrative managers on Twitter. This is because the only acceptable positions for anyone of significant influence to have about this war range from supporting continuing current proxy warfare operations to initiating a direct hot war between NATO and Russia.

That’s how narrow the permissible spectrum of debate has been shrunk regarding this conflict: status quo hawkish to omnicidal hawkish. Anything outside that spectrum gets framed as radical extremism. As Noam Chomsky said: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

This spectrum of debate has been shrunk on the one hand by imperial spinmeisters continually hammering home the message that any support for de-escalation and diplomatic solutions is “appeasement” and indicative of Russian sympathies, and on the other by hawkish pundits and politicians pushing for the most freakishly aggressive responses to this war possible. By forbidding the spectrum of acceptable debate to move toward peace while shoving it as hard as possible in the direction of warmongering extremism, imperial narrative managers have successfully created an Overton window wherein the only debate permitted is over how directly and forcefully Russia should be confronted, with calls for peace now falling far outside that window.

Which is a problem, because both direct NATO hot war with Russia and continuing along the empire’s current course of action in Ukraine are stupid. Direct conflict between nuclear powers likely means a very fast and very radioactive third world war, and the status quo proxy warfare approach isn’t stopping Russia as more and more territory is taken in the east in cool defiance of western claims that Ukraine is bravely vanquishing its evil invaders. Biden administration officials have told the press that they doubt Ukraine will even be able to reclaim the territory it has lost already. Unless and until something significant changes, Ukraine has no apparent path to victory in this war anytime soon.

In short, there is no exit strategy to this proxy war. There are no plans in place to deliver Putin a swift defeat, and the Biden administration remains steadfastly dismissive of even the slightest gestures toward diplomacy with Moscow. Boris Johnson has reportedly been buzzing around admonishing Ukraine’s President ZelenskyFrance’s President Macron and who knows who else not to work toward peace in Ukraine. The doors to ending this war quickly by either winning it or negotiating a peace settlement are both bolted shut, all but guaranteeing a long and bloody slog.

Which as it turns out suits Washington just fine. Biden administration officials have stated that the goal is to use the Ukraine war to “weaken” Russia, and the US already has an established pattern of working to draw Moscow into costly military quagmires as we saw in both Afghanistan and Syria. Continuing to pour weapons and military intelligence into Ukraine while working to cut Russia off from the world stands no chance of ending the war in a timely manner, but it does stand a pretty good chance of bleeding and weakening Moscow.

And since this is the course of action that has been taken by the empire, we can only assume that this is its desired outcome: not victory, not peace, but a long and gruelling war.

One of the major recurring criticisms of the Iraq invasion was that Bush rushed into it without an exit strategy, without a plan for ending the war once it had been started. This proxy war with Russia not only lacks a strategy for ending the war, it apparently only has strategies for not ending the war.

No exit strategy is the strategy.

Whenever you point out the insanity of this approach you’ll get useful idiots of the empire objecting that by criticizing US proxy warfare and supporting a negotiated settlement you are guilty of “appeasement” and exactly the same as Neville Chamberlain, because the only argument empire apologists ever have is to compare every US-targeted government to Nazi Germany.

According to these propaganda-addled empire automatons, having the story of not compromising with Putin-Hitler and not committing the sin of “appeasement” is worth sacrificing everyone in the entire nation of Ukraine for. They will happily throw every Ukrainian life into the gears of this war while they sit safe at home eating Funyuns and tweeting, just so they can have that “we didn’t compromise with Putin” story hanging on their mental mantlepiece.

How many more lives are such people prepared to feed into an unwinnable war which the west knowingly provoked? How many more of other people’s children are they prepared to sacrifice? How long does the bloodshed need to drag on before their “no appeasement” story loses value to them? How long until people wake up from their propaganda-induced comas and realize we’ve been manipulated into supporting a proxy war which benefits ordinary people in no real way, and in fact impoverishes us and threatens our very lives?

There is no morally consistent argument for continuing this proxy war in the way it has been going. If you actually value life and peace, the only way out is through negotiation and compromise. I point this out not because I believe it will happen, but to hopefully help a few more people open their eyes to the fact that we are being deceived.

Kim Ung-Yong

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Kim Ung-Yong at five years old.

One of the smartest, perhaps the smartest person on the planet, Kim Ung-Yong, was doing calculus and speaking five languages before age five. By age eight he was doing math at NASA and finished his Ph.D. prior to age fifteen.

It’s all a bit over the top.

None of this was by his own decision. After the discovery of his genius, an I.Q. of over 200, he was placed on an ultra-fast track program for his life.

After accumulating a mind numbing pile of academic accolades, he worked at NASA for years until he abruptly quit.

Here you have the smartest guy in the world, someone whose intelligence dwarfs most Harvard students’, and he walks away from it all.

Why?

He wasn’t happy.

It was all too much intensity for him. He felt like a machine and just wanted something normal.

He now works in a normal university faculty position as a professor. A prestigious job for most people. But for him? Not so. Kim is still periodically targeted by Korean news outlets for being a “failed genius”. With all of his gifts he was expected to change the world and innovate within several science fields.

It begs the question, who decided Kim was supposed to change the world? It certainly wasn’t him.

Mr. Kim might not be someone most of us can relate to. But he is analogous, ground zero even, for the problems intelligent people face with regards to “potential.” Just because someone is smart, strong, creative, doesn’t mean they want to be king of the world.

Some people are happy with a low key life. Happiness is the great equalizer. If they are happy, your expectations no longer matter.

Embassy: “All Americans Should LEAVE Ukraine Immediately” — U.S. Nuclear Bombs Being Moved! – GAZPROM Declares “Force Majeure”

The United States Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, has increased its Alert status and is now publicly advising all Americans to get out of Ukraine IMMEDIATELY.  All Embassy functions will be transferred to Lviv, in western Ukraine.

This seems to coincide with a report issued yesterday (HERE – Subscribers Only!) which outlined that an ULTIMATUM had been given to Kiev by Moscow.

This also seems to coincide with intelligence reports saying Ukraine plans to use new HIMARS MLRS to attack Crimea.

Crimea is Russian territory now.   Russia has previously stated that if U.S. long range weapons are used against “Russian territory” then Russia will declare the US an active combatant, and will take military action.

The US says that Crimea is “Ukrainian territory” and so the Ukrainians can use HIMARS against it.

Over the weekend, former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev publicly spoke about possible Ukrainian attacks on Crimea, and said: “If something like this happens, Judgment Day will happen to all of them”

Overnight, the Russian Navy began moving several ships OUT of Crimea to their port at Novorossiysk.  The Russian Black Sea fleet pulled anchor and left Sevastopol, for the Kuban.  Clearly they suspect a missile attack on the port facilities. If this should happen, many observers think there will be war.

 

“FORCE MAJEURE”

This morning, Russian energy giant Gazprom declared force majeure on gas supplies to at least one major EU customer RETROACTOVE TO JUNE.

According to a document from inside the company, Gazprom tells a large client it cannot fulfil its supply obligations due to “extraordinary” circumstances outside its control.

REUTERS News Agency now reports that its sources are saying that the letter was referring to supplies to Germany via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.  The letter makes clear that GAZPROM cannot supply __any__ natural gas via Nord Stream One pipeline, until further notice.

The route is currently undergoing planned annual maintenance which is due to be completed on Thursday, however many in Germany fear that the flow will not be resumed.  Given today’s declaration of a “force majeure” it now appears certain that natural gas flows WILL NOT RESUME.

Without the flow of Russian natural gas, Germany and other European nations had to begin drawing-down on stored natural gas reserves in their countries as of July 11.  Those reserves are finite, and will run out.   Various countries in Europe have various amounts of gas in storage, but none of them have more than a few months worth.

As natural gas runs out, there won’t be gas to power the steam boilers in gas-fired electric generating plants.  No boilers means no steam.  IF there is no steam, that means nothing to turn the turbines.  No turbines means no electricity.

       UPDATE 2:05 PM EDT — With regard to GAZPROM’s declaring a “force Majeure” this is now explicitly CONFIRMED.  The company has thus decided to void itself from all contractual obligations. Gas will stop flowing to Germany through Nord Stream 1 indefinitely.   

So right now, July 18, 2022, many differing issues are all coming to a head at about the same time.  If Ukraine attacks Crimea using U.S.-supplied HIMARS, then Russia may declare the US an active combatant and use military force against the US.

If Russia refuses to restore natural gas flows to Europe, then Europe will run out of natural gas, and its economy will utterly stop.

If Europe’s economy stops, then two weeks later, the US economy stops.

These are things that cause nations to go to actual war.

In that regard, Russia announced today it will be holding NUCLEAR ATTACK CIVILIAN EVACUATION DRILLS so its citizens can become accustomed to where they have to be in such a situation.

The Russia-China Polar Silk Road Speeds Ahead

The Dancing Man Story

“Spotted this specimen trying to dance the other week. He stopped when he saw us laughing.”

Worth the Share! #DancingManStory

Source : Man Fat-Shamed Online Gets VIP Dance Party in L.A.

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Dancing Man. Stopped dancing.

He stopped dancing. was ashamed with everyone laughing, and went home sullen.

This was then published…

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The girls get organized.

A hunt is on!!!

Action is taken!

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Invitation.

Support pours in from all over the internet…

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Support.

Big names get involved. Such as “Moby”…

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Support from Moby.

And, you know what?

He got the message!

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He got the message!

Then it actually happens!

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Dance!

Go ahead enjoy yourself.

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Having fun!

Dance, dance, dance!

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Life is too short. Have a good time. Enjoy yourself!

Satellite Imagery Shows Global Crop Declines – Except For Russia And China

Sunday, Jul 17, 2022 – 11:00 AM

Infrared satellite imagery designed to measure moisture levels and the health of farmlands suggests that staple crops such as wheat are in poor condition and in sharp decline among major exporters including the Ukraine, the US and India.  Two countries do have bumper crops so far though; namely Russia and China.

It is hard to say which governments and institutions monitor this data, but a few months ago a multitude of political leaders and global banks issued simultaneous warnings of a “global food shortage” and an impending crisis.  Such institutions included the IMF, World Bank, the BIS and even the White House.  So far, a perfect storm of stagflation, supply chain disruptions and poor weather conditions have combined to disrupt food production around the world.

Price inflation due to central bank stimulus measures has been enough to do incredible damage to the many national economies, but a single bad year for crops on top of this could spell disaster.

Russia and China, on the other hand, are enjoying a strategic advantage.

As we entered spring of this year, the mainstream media heralded the end of the Russian economy and the swift collapse of their war efforts in Ukraine.

Today, Russia is selling more oil and exporting more commodities than ever before, and both Russia and China now have the most healthy staple crops in the world.

It’s almost as if the public in the west has been deliberately misled about our economic strength.

Sadly, many people in the west have forgotten the importance of commodities, industry and energy in terms of geopolitical leverage.  Without dominance of these three arenas there is no chance for a nation or group of nations to dictate terms to a country that has such advantages.  Economic warfare is about independent production and adaptability; these are two things the US and Europe do not have right now.

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With declines in crop exports, food prices will rise even further this year and there is also the possibility that Russia could cut off the EU and other nations from access to their agricultural market.  Though the Kremlin says this will not happen, given the right trigger event it remains a legitimate threat.  Already this month Europe is on the edge of an economic cliff as they wait to see if the Russian “maintenance shutdown” of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline is actually temporary, or the beginning of a full bore energy crisis that will last for years.

In other words, the temptation for the eastern nations to use food as a weapon against NATO countries will be just as high on their list as oil and gas.  With food and energy stability in doubt there is also a considerable danger of civil unrest.  Third world nations are likely to see the worst of the shortages, but price inflation in necessities is here to stay for first world countries as well.  And along with that comes all the associated economic problems, including rising crime, rising unemployment and rising poverty.

A cat story

Not mine, but adorable anyways. -MM

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Found my cat as a little kitten (about 6 weeks old) left to die in a box near a container. I warmed her up with my own body temperature on the way home, she was almost half dead. When I got her home and dry (because it was rainy October and I live in cold Scandinavia), she had a stable and semi-strong pulse.

I took her to the acute vet, I’m a student and I didn’t have much money, but I would rather eat oats for two-three weeks than let another living creature die. I ended up bottle feeding her every 2 hour every night and rushing home to bottle feed her in my school breaks.

That little thing is my child, all that bonding in the night when I bottle fed her. I have PTSD, and because of her, I don’t suffer from nightmares anymore.

When it was bad, she would panic and wake me up so I didn’t have to suffer through them. Even a year after I had my last nightmare, she still sleeps with her nose on my neck or cuddles with my hand and keeps her nose on my wrist to check my pulse so she can wake me up the instant she detects any distress.

The Only Real Solution Is Default

Saturday, Jul 16, 2022 – 10:30 PM

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The destruction of ‘phantom wealth’ via default has always been the only way to clear the financial system of unpayable debt burdens and extremes of rentier / wealth dominance.

The notion that the world could always borrow more money as long as interest rates were near-zero was never sustainable. It was always an unsustainable artifice that we could keep borrowing ever larger sums from the future as long as the interest payments kept dropping.

The only real solution to over-indebtedness since the beginning of finance is default. There are pretty names for variations on default that sound much less gut-wrenching–debt jubilees, refinancing, etc.– but the bottom line is the debts that can’t be paid won’t be paid and whomever owns the debt as an asset absorbs the loss.

Every default is a debt jubilee for the borrower. Whether the default is informal or formalized in bankruptcy, the debt payments are no longer being paid to the lender / owner of the debt.

Every debt jubilee is a default that forces the owner of the debt to write the value down to zero and absorb the loss. The jubilation of the owner of the debt is rather muted unless the state swoops in and passes the losses onto the taxpayers via bailouts / transferring the losses to the public’s balance sheet.

Every default is a refinancing–to zero. We’ve refinanced the debt so the borrower pays zero and the value of the loan / debt is now zero.

Very few ordinary households own other people’s debts as assets. It’s the wealthy few who own most of the student loans, vehicle loans, mortgages, government and corporation bonds, etc.

Yes, ordinary households may own other people’s debts through pension plans or ownership of mutual funds, but by and large debt is a favored asset of the rentier class, i.e. the wealthiest few.

We’re constantly told that mass defaults would destroy the economy, but this is flim-flam: mass defaults would destroy much of the wealth of the rentier class which has been greatly enriched by the global expansion of debt, while freeing the debtors of their obligations.

Recall that debt is the transfer of income from the borrower to the owner of the debt. Borrowing money is like every other form of consumption: when it’s cheap and abundant, we over-indulge. The costs are only apparent after the banquet has been cleared.

The illusion that the global economy could effortlessly add trillions in debt to fund living large forever was based on a brief historical anomaly of zero interest rates enabled by low inflation. There’s a long lag between the vast expansion of debt / consumption and the eventual consequences on supply, demand, risk and price discovery.

The lag time is up and now the consequences are finally visible: the tide of rapid growth in consumption and income required to fund ever-greater burdens of debt has ebbed, and so the global burden of debt–$300 trillion or so– is no longer sustainable / payable.

The favored solutions of the state–printing money or transferring the losses to the public–are no longer viable. Now that inflation has emerged from its slumber, printing trillions to bail out the wealthy is no longer an option. The public, so easily conned into accepting the bailout of the wealthy in 2008, has wised up and so that particular con won’t work again. (“Bail out the super-wealthy now or your ATM machine will stop working!” Uh, right.)

The state is the protector of the wealthy, and so defaults that actually impact the wealthy are anathema. The wealthy will demand the state absorb their losses (recall that profits are private, losses are socialized) The only equitable solution is to force the losses on those who bought the debt as a rentier income stream.

I’ve been exploring the Core-Periphery dynamic for a decade. ( The E.U., Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model May 24, 2012). This dynamic plays out in a number of ways on a number of levels.

Defaults will play out along the lines of Core-Periphery asymmetries. Some states will be able to “print their way out of default” but most will not, as unrestrained printing of money on such a vast scale would devalue the currency, triggering an even more destructive systemic default.

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Debt is a double-edged form of power. Being able to borrow and spend huge sums is an absolutely fabulous way to expand corruption, bribes, exploitation of the powerless, bridges to nowhere and mindless over-consumption, but the habits formed by mindless expansion of debt to fund soaring wealth inequality don’t serve the indebted entities very well when default removes borrowing as a way to pay and play.

Living within one’s means–i.e. net income–is the only solution there has ever been to the end-game of over-indebtedness, i.e. default. Those with relatively secure, diversified net incomes (i.e. the Core) will do much better than those with unstable, limited income.

The destruction of phantom wealth via default has always been the only way to clear the financial system of unpayable debt burdens and extremes of rentier / wealth dominance. Let’s guess that a bare minimum of $100 trillion of the $300 trillion mountain of global debt will default far sooner than most expect. The only question is who will absorb the $100 trillion in losses. Choose wisely, as defaults of debt that are transferred to the public end up bringing down the entire system via political overthrow or currency collapse.

A bad father story

By Jessika Halitski

Not my parents just my father. The only thing i will never forgive is that when I was 13 I was just released from a psyche hospital for troubled kids.

I told my mother (sole guardian) I wanted to leave and be with my dad.

So she emailed him and they worked out a plan.

One weekend right before summer break was over my mother and grandparents drove out to my dads. It was like 14 hours or something, We get to my dads house, I am outside saying good bye to my grand parents and my mother.

I am nervous I can feel my heart racing.

I was so excited.

So my mom was helping me grab my stuff out of the trunk.

While trying to call my dad, he wont answer, so she tells me to go knock on the door. I listen and go knock.

I can hear whispering but not what they are saying.

I keep knocking and nothing. A short time later, im still knocking and I hear a car pull up behind me, I just keep knocking.

My mom calls me over and I see two cops standing with her.

She looks mad. I walk over, slowly.

The cops ask me why I am TRESPASSING and that the property owner called me in for harassment.

I was so mad I just started to cry.

My mother begins to explain why we are at this house.

The one officer goes to the door and asks for my father.

He comes out I breathed a sigh of relief thinking that he would sort this whole mess out, the cop in front of my mother is still looking over the emails my mother had printed the other officer called me over and asked my father ‘is this your child did you agree to take her from the mother’ my fathers reply broke me ‘shes not mine I have never seen her before’ .

I was floored.

My mom heard it and I could feel the anger coming off her but she breathed and called me back to the car told me to get in and she shut the door.

I saw her arguing and yelling at him and the police.

Then she gets in and tells my grandfather to drive.

I did not speak to anyone for about a week.

Following this I had 15 failed suicide attempts.

It wasn’t till a while later that I realized that I had done nothing wrong that I slowly started to cope with it.

It still hurts to this day he calls and will try to pretend this never happened but, every time I hear his voice I can hear him saying those same words over and over again…

Is A US-Russia War Becoming Inevitable?

Saturday, Jul 16, 2022 – 11:40 AM

Authored by Pat Buchanan,

At the NATO summit in Madrid, Finland was invited to join the alliance. What does this mean for Finland?

If Russian President Vladimir Putin breaches the 830-mile Finnish border, the United States will rise to Helsinki’s defense and fight Russia on Finland’s side.

What does Finland’s membership in NATO mean for America?

If Putin makes a military move into Finland, the U.S. will go to war against the world’s largest nation with an arsenal of between 4,500 and 6,000 battlefield and strategic nuclear weapons.

No Cold War president would have dreamed of making such a commitment — to risk the survival of our nation to defend territory of a country thousands of miles away that has never been a U.S. vital interest.

To go to war with the Soviet Union over the preservation of Finnish territory would have been seen as madness during the Cold War.

Recall: Harry Truman refused to use force to break Joseph Stalin’s blockade of Berlin. Dwight Eisenhower refused to send U.S. troops to save the Hungarian freedom fighters being run down by Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956.

Lyndon B. Johnson did nothing to assist the Czech patriots crushed by Warsaw Pact armies in 1968. When Lech Walesa’s Solidarity was smashed on Moscow’s order in Poland in 1981, Ronald Reagan made brave statements and sent Xerox machines.

While the U.S. issued annual declarations of support during the Cold War for the “captive nations” of Central and Eastern Europe, the liberation of these nations from Soviet control was never deemed so vital to the West as to justify a war with the USSR.

Indeed, in the 40 years of the Cold War, NATO, which had begun in 1949 with 12 member nations, added only four more — Greece, Turkey, Spain and West Germany.

Yet, with the invitation to Sweden and Finland to join as the 31st and 32nd nations to receive an Article 5 war guarantee, NATO will have doubled its membership since what was thought — certainly by the Russians — to have been the end of the Cold War.

All the nations once part of Moscow’s Warsaw Pact — East Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria — are now members of a U.S.-led NATO — directed against Russia.

Three former republics of the USSR — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — are now also members of NATO, a military alliance formed to corral and contain the nation to which they had belonged during the Cold War.

Lithuania, with 2% of Russia’s population, has just declared a partial blockade of goods moving across its territory to Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave on the Baltic Sea.

To Putin’s protest, Vilnius has reminded Moscow that Lithuania is a member of NATO.

It is a dictum of geostrategic politics that a great power ought never cede to a lesser power the ability to draw it into a great war.

In 1914, the kaiser’s Germany gave its Austrian ally a “blank check” to punish Serbia for its role in the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne. Vienna cashed the kaiser’s check and attacked Serbia, and the Great War of 1914-1918 was on.

In March 1939, Neville Chamberlain issued a war guarantee to Poland. If Germany attacked Poland, Britain would fight on Poland’s side.

Fortified with this war guarantee from the British Empire, the Poles stonewalled Hitler, refusing to talk to Berlin over German claims to the city of Danzig, taken from her at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler attacked and Britain declared war, a war that lasted six years and mortally wounded the British Empire.

And Poland? At Yalta in 1945, Winston Churchill agreed that a Soviet-occupied Poland should remain in Stalin’s custody.

Putin is a Russian nationalist who regards the breakup of the USSR as the greatest calamity of the 20th century, but he is not alone responsible for the wretched relations between our countries.

We Americans have played a leading role in what is shaping up as a Second Cold War, more dangerous than the first.

Over the last quarter-century, after Russia dissolved the Warsaw Pact and let the USSR break apart into 15 nations, we pushed NATO, created to corral and contain Russia, into Central and Eastern Europe.

In 2008, neocons goaded Georgia into attacking South Ossetia, provoking Russian intervention and the rout of the Georgian army.

In 2014, neocons goaded Ukrainians into overthrowing the elected pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. When they succeeded, Putin seized Crimea and Sevastopol, for centuries the home base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

In 2022, Moscow asked the U.S. to pledge not to bring Ukraine into NATO. We refused. And Putin attacked. If Russians believe their country has been pushed against a wall by the West, can we blame them?

Americans appear dismissive of dark Russian warnings that rather than accept defeat in Ukraine, the humiliation of their nation, and their encirclement and isolation, they will resort to tactical nuclear weapons.

Is it really wisdom to dismiss these warnings as “saber-rattling”?

Poverty is not measured by the amount of money you have.

I thought we were well off when I was young. We had a house, 2 older but functional cars, and we always had food. I did not understand why my dad was always away, or why my mom was always nervous and irritable. I did not notice that it was always the same food, and there were no pictures on the peanut butter, vegetables, or cheese. I didn’t know other people didn’t drink powdered milk. I didn’t realize a lot of things.

One day, in school, I noticed that my lunch tickets were a different color than the ones the kids around me had. I asked why the office gave them that color, and why they did not have to initial theirs. They said they got their tickets from their parents every week. They had no idea what I was talking about. My mom deflected the question when I asked. I got curious. I noticed we did not go to the store to get clothes. I always got boxes of clothes I tried on at home. Whatever didn’t fit just wandered off. My shoes didn’t have the same logos, and my coats had none. My dad always wore the exact same pair of boots to work, and I had happily chiseled the crusted blacktop off of them so they looked nice over the years. I began to see that our cars were rustier than most, and little losses were devastating to my mom. I saw the overall quality of what we had was shabbier than my classmates’ things. It all began to make sense.

There was no “aha” moment. It was a slow dawning realization. We were poor. Not absolutely, but relative to our community. I would guess we were one automotive breakdown, one major home repair, or one medical catastrophe from being homeless at any point in time. My mom figured out I knew before my dad did. My demeanor didn’t change, but my behavior did. I asked for less. I didn’t ask for anything for Christmas that year. Or any year after. I asked to have small birthday parties at home. I was never big on clothing trends, but wore clothes until they fell apart or I had completely outgrown them. I stopped asking for money for a donut and milk at the bakery across from the school (they were day olds the manager kept for me without me knowing.) I walked to school more and asked for rides less. I paid attention to prices when we went grocery shopping, and asked for less big ticket items. I did not tell my brother. I shared more with him. I accepted more invitations when my friends parents offered dinner or to stay over. I asked my friends to stay over less often. I learned to repair my bike, to sew, and to garden. I seldom turned on my lights, took short showers, bundled up in the winter, and avoided the TV aside from a few shows.

I understood that which my parents had hidden from me. I adjusted. They accepted that I was helping in my own way. To their credit, they would offer to buy clothes, try to tempt me with the Toys’r’us catalog, and would pay attention to everything I would eyeball at the mall and Farm&Fleet. They would not let me avoid the school book fair, since they knew my great love was reading. I still have that love. What they fostered grew. I am still frugal, weigh the cost of items against their value, buy mostly from thrift stores, and live simply. I cherish experiences and people more than objects. I try to constantly keep learning and growing. I learned I was never truly poor. I just lacked money.

Grandma’s “Afghan”

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The Blanket That Was Set Over Every Grandma’s Couch

We Are About To Experience An Absolutely Epic Housing Crash The Likes Of Which America Has Never Seen Before

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You may not want to buy a house right now.  What goes up must eventually come down, and we have just entered the “down” side of that equation.  Over the past two years, home prices in the United States have gone up nearly 40 percent.  Now mortgage rates are rising at a pace that is truly frightening, and they are likely to go even higher in the months ahead as the Federal Reserve continues to fight a relentless war against inflation.  Needless to say, higher mortgage rates mean higher potential mortgage payments for prospective home buyers, and so millions of Americans are being priced out of the marketplace right now.  The only thing that is going to bring those buyers back into the marketplace is for home prices to go down, and that is already starting to happen in some areas of the nation.

We were already in a historic housing bubble heading into 2020, and over the past two years we have witnessed another housing bubble develop on top of the previous housing bubble.

Overall, home prices in the U.S. rose 37 percent between March 2020 and March 2022.

That is insane.

Of course our incomes have not been going up as fast as home prices have.  In fact, it is being reported that “home prices have gone up four times faster than incomes” over the past year…

Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas put the real estate industry on edge this spring after they published a paper titled Real-Time Market Monitoring Finds Signs of Brewing U.S. Housing Bubble. Why the renewed concern? Over the past year alone, home prices have gone up four times faster than incomes. Simple economic theory, which dictates that neither home prices nor incomes can outgrow the other for very long, tells us that isn’t sustainable.

There is no way that this could continue for long, and we have reached a point where home prices in the United States are “overvalued” by almost 25 percent

The analysis conducted by Moody’s Analytics aimed to find out whether economic fundamentals, including local income levels, could support local home prices. On a national level, Moody’s Analytics finds U.S. home prices are “overvalued” by 24.7%. In other words, U.S. home prices are 24.7% higher than they would historically trade at given current income levels.

Does this mean that home prices will come down by 25 percent?

Well, it all depends on what the Federal Reserve chooses to do.

If the Fed decides to stop raising interest rates by the end of this year, the damage could potentially be minimized.

But if the Fed continues to raise interest rates throughout 2023, we are likely to see carnage that is unlike anything we have ever seen before.

Personally, I have been stunned by how rapidly mortgage rates have risen.  According to Peter Schiff, the last time that average 30 year mortgage rates crossed the 6 percent threshold was just before the last housing crash…

Average 30-year mortgage rates have pushed to nearly 6.4%. The last time we saw mortgage rates over 6% was right before the housing crash of 2008. Until mid-April, mortgage rates were in the 4% to 5% range. Just one month ago, rates were 5.49%.

Lower-income homebuyers have already been priced out of the market by spiking mortgage rates. The houses that are selling tend to be in higher price ranges.

Officials at the Federal Reserve can see what is happening, but they consider taming inflation to be a much higher priority right now.

So the housing bubble will inevitably continue to implode, and the numbers for the industry will just get even uglier.  Here is more from Peter Schiff

Air is hissing out of the housing bubble faster and faster every week.

Pending sales plunged in June and the inventory of homes on the market jumped as mortgage rates continue to rapidly rise.

Pending home sales plunged by 16% year-over-year in June. This follows on the heels of a 12% drop in May and a 9% dip in April. June marked the 10th straight month of year-on-year declines in pending sales.

Some of the hottest markets in the country have started to cool off really fast.

For example, just look at what is happening in California

The pace of California home sales plunged 21% in June from a year earlier as soaring mortgage rates took a bite out of buyer interest, the state Realtors group reported Monday.

And what we are witnessing in Boise is really alarming.

Boise was once one of the hottest markets in the entire nation, but now sales are dropping faster than Joe Biden’s approval rating

Before governors relaxed stay-at-home orders two years ago, white-collar professionals were already fleeing their exorbitantly priced apartments in cities like San Francisco and Seattle. The biggest beneficiary of that WFH homebuying wave was undoubtedly Boise—where home prices skyrocketed 53%. You could even call it the poster child of the pandemic housing boom.

But that Boise honeymoon is over. While spiking mortgage rates have pushed the overall U.S. housing market into a slowdown, it has delivered a particularly hard blow to the Boise housing market. That has seen both Boise home sales plummet—down 28% on a year-over-year basis—and inventory levels surge—up 161% this year. It’s also chipping away at home values. According to Zillow, the median Boise home sales price fell 3.5% in June.

This downturn is going to have enormous implications for home builders as well.

Sales are falling, and a key measure of home builder confidence just declined for the seventh month in a row

The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, which measures the pulse of the single-family housing market, fell for the seventh consecutive month to 55, the lowest level since May 2020. It is the second-biggest, one-month decline in the survey’s 37-year history.

The only time that the index has fallen more in a single month was during the very early stages of the COVID pandemic.

National Association of Home Builders CEO Jerry Howard fears that things will continue to get worse in the months ahead, and he is warning that “we’re going to go into a recession” unless something dramatic happens…

“For the last seven straight months it has been going down and this is a huge drop – and I think all it says is, ‘Somebody do something or we’re going to go into a recession,’” Howard said.

I am sorry to tell you this Jerry, but we are already in a recession right now, and it is going to get really bad.

Our leaders have been making decisions that have been mind-numbingly bad for a long time, and now we are all going to suffer the consequences.

If you are searching for an easy way out of this mess, you can stop looking, because there isn’t one.

What we are heading for is going to make 2008 and 2009 look like a Sunday picnic, and it will shake our nation to the core.

Memories

Television memories…

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Big Wood Grain Console TVs…

Boston Cream Pie

The Parker House Hotel in downtown Boston has bragging rights as the place where Boston cream pie was invented in 1856. It’s technically not a pie, but a yellow butter cake or sponge cake with a sweet rich custard and thick chocolate glaze.

According to Historic Hotels of America, the popular dessert was known as Chocolate Cream Pie, and became a Betty Crocker boxed mix in 1958. It is still a sought-out fave on menus in Boston and throughout New England. In fact, in 1996 the Boston cream pie was declared the official state dessert of Massachusetts.

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Boston Cream Pie

Check out this you-tube video…

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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The forms we take as we escape

This is a Patreon video first released in early Summer 2022. It’s a very complex subject and discusses the quantum forms that are aligned upon the moment of death. Feel free to visit the MM Patreon site at any time to see the entire pile of in-depth videos that cover these most unusual subjects.

I hope that you get something out of this video.

Do you want more?

The Metallicman patrion page has daily videos and articles for the hard-core influencers and supporters. Here’s the really valuable stuff. Basic membership is only $5 a month. Great stuff here. It’s where I present the “secrets of the universe”…

MM Patreon Website

Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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President Biden is Hell bent on destroying the world (its a fact)

My long term observations is that:

These bankrupt nations/failed States have caused a sudden drastic currency depreciation, outflow of capital, and massive inflation (cost of living stress), stock and property price drop etc. They are all linked to the United States (incredible and reckless) massive money printing. As well as the Unites States reserve Bank's interest rate rise.

This is how (in the past) the American regime would end up periodically looting the world. Not just the world, but friends and enemies alike,  including its own allies. Doing so without any military action.

This is a complex topic.

Now, the Chinese CCP studied how this US policy works.  And now, this time, China is so well prepared that there are basically no inflation in China. At all.

This time, when the US regime ran this old technique again, the EU is seriously and badly affected.

What are they to do? Well, it's obvious. Watch the outflow of currency. Indeed, a large portion of EU money is flowing to China as safe heaven instead of to the USA. 

As a result, the United States suffered catastrophic inflation domestically...

... and, in regards to China, it completely lost it effectiveness as a tool of chaos, control and power.

Cheers
Chua

Here we go through the motions as our idiotic Western governments invite nuclear war upon the world.

President of Serbia: “All Hell is About To Break Loose in Ukraine” – World War 3 is Already happening

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The Ukraine conflict is in fact already a world war, given that the West is fighting Russia via its proxies in Kiev, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told local media on Wednesday.

We should understand that amid the world war – because all the talks that it is a regional or a local war must be dropped – the entire Western world is fighting against Russia via Ukrainians. It is a global conflict,” he said in an interview with Pink TV.

The president said that the ongoing global war is what concerns him the most, and, in his view, it will only get worse. He also added that the conflict in Ukraine is taking its toll on the Balkans, reiterating that Serbia would do its best to keep the peace in the region.

Moreover, Vucic believes that after Russia gains some more ground in eastern Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin will approach the West with a certain “proposal.”

I know what awaits us. As soon as Vladimir Putin has done his work in Seversk, Bakhmut and Soledar, after reaching the second line Slaviansk-Kramatorsk-Avdeevka, he will come up with a proposal. And if they [the West] don’t accept it, – and they won’t – all hell will break loose,” he predicted, without providing any details on the would-be initiative.

The Serbian president also offered the reminder that his nation maintains close relations with Russia and China, adding that pursuing such policies does not come easy for Belgrade right now.

Vucic’s comments come after Serbian Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin said in early July that the West should apologize to Belgrade for the 1999 bombing campaign instead of forcing it to become a “NATO foot soldier” in the conflict with Russia.

Threads – 10 minutes of the bunker scenes

Yeah. This is the real deal. Soak it up.

Tender and Militant: Artist Sung-Choul Ham and His South Korean Fantasy Worlds

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Sung-Choul Ham is an artist from South Korea, he draws illustrations and concepts (mostly fighting anime girls) for games and movies. He’s currently working at Majors Studio where he’s developing characters for South Korean fantasy MMORPGs and he’s doing a great job.

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U.S. Railroad Strike Begins July 18 – Trains will stop

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) voted by a margin of 99.5 percent to authorize a strike if such action becomes legal and “necessary to secure a contract worthy of their consideration.” A strike like this threatens to halt all train movement across the country.

In a statement, BLET National President Dennis Pierce said that this is the first nationwide strike vote since 2011, but that it is necessary because railroads “used and continue to use their economic strength to steamroll their employees, their customers and the nation, all for the sake of their bottom line, and it is clear that they have no intentions of changing.”

In the third year of the national contract negotiation process, he added, “the rail carriers have never made a contract proposal to our union that their employees, our members, would accept.”

The moment trains stop, all the supply-chain issues previously experienced by Americans, will grow worse by orders of magnitude.

Egg Salad

This salad takes some work, but if you don’t mind peeling a few eggs, you can enjoy this family-friendly, budget-conscious hearty salad. Mustard and paprika give it that extra kick.

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Egg Salad.

Ready for something fantastic and easy? You’re in luck! This is a classic egg salad recipe, just like Grandma used to make! Sit down with it for a quick lunch … or chow down for dinner at any time as the weather gets warmer.

I know what you may be thinking … “This is such a classic! I have my own recipe passed down through the generations. Doesn’t everyone?!” To that, I answer, tradition is wonderful, but just give this one a try! It’s my own perfected egg salad recipe that you’ll simply adore. You may even use it to tweak the recipe that’s been in your family forever! It’s that amazing: creamy, eggy, and full of crisp onions and celery. So good!

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Delicious.

And if you’ve never made egg salad before? Don’t despair!! This egg salad recipe is very, very easy. In fact, there are only a few steps: five steps to hardboil the eggs and three steps to put together the salad itself. The ingredients are the kind you can find at any store, and it lasts 3-5 days in the fridge (if you’re lucky enough to have leftovers!). If you’re someone who doesn’t have a traditional family egg salad recipe, well, here you go with your new family recipe!

Egg Salad Recipe

  • large eggs
  • mayonnaise
  • yellow mustard
  • green onion
  • celery
  • salt
  • ground black pepper
  • paprika

Note: Make sure your eggs are fresh for this recipe! Expired eggs will float to the top of the water when you try to cook them, but a fresh egg will sit neatly at the bottom of the pan on its side.

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Delicious and healthy ingredients.

How To Make Egg Salad

Time needed: 30 minutes.

How To Make Egg Salad

  1. Add the eggs to a medium saucepan. Add cold water to a level where it is just covering the eggs.

  2. Bring water to a boil and immediately remove from heat. Cover and let the eggs stand for 15 minutes.

  3. Remove the eggs to a large bowl with ice water and let the eggs cool.

  4. Peel and chop the eggs and place them in a medium bowl.

  5. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well.

  6. Spread the egg mixture on your favorite bread or crackers, or serve on lettuce or in a wrap!

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Sandwich on plate.

I am in Pennsylvania . . .

I am at the house I inherited in Pennsylvania.  My wife did not come.

We’re trying to work things out.

Maybe she’ll come up next week.

I told her I feel that Russia is going to attack the United States with a nuclear first strike over our helping Ukraine kill Russian soldiers.

I told her that I believe New York City is a major target for such a first strike, because it will cripple the nation’s banking industry and stock markets.

I told her that Russia uses what they call the “YARS” missile for such attacks, and that each missile carries a warhead with an eight hundred kiloton (800kt) yeild.

I explained that such bombs are usually air-burst about 2900 meters (1.5 Miles) above a target.

With our condo being located just 3 miles west, southwest of the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan, our condo would not survive and neither would anyone in it.

At the initial blast, the bright, white, flash would instantly cause temperatures outside our front door of over one-hundred-thousand degrees.  The entire building would burst instantly into flames.  Then comes the blast wave from the air being pushed by the explosion.  Thousand mile per hour winds  causing an “over-pressure” of about 30,000 p.s.i. would crush the building into a burning pile of rubble in seconds.

I told her there is no way any of us would have any chance at all of surviving; that we would die a horrible fiery and crushing death within seconds.

I also showed her the PSA put out this week by NYC Emergency management, telling people what to do if a nuke hits NYC., and I showed her the new warning signs going up in shopping centers in New Jersey warning people of what to do in a “Radiation Emergency.”

I told her that the US Dept. of Homeland Security is the one paying to put those signs up because they KNOW what’s coming.

She said she has some things to do and some Doctors to see, but maybe she’ll come up later next week.

I said, fine, I just want you to understand that if Russia launches, their missiles can get here before I can get from Pennsylvania to New Jersey.  I won’t be able to save her.

She understood.

So that’s where we are.

I won’t go into the marriage issues that caused such an upheaval last Friday that I couldn’t do a show.  Suffice it to say things are bad.

How bad?

I took off my wedding ring.

That bad.

Hal

I feel really bad for this guy. I hope that things calm down and settle down. Be good to each other, and remember that it is your family and friends that are you greatest strength during these times of great stress. -MM

A most Japanese thing…

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Ready for an Interview.

Japan has a strict rule when you’re job hunting, especially for university students.

They all have to wear what is called recruit suit.

This is the basic black suit, white shirt, black business bag and black dress shoes. It has to be the standard design and length. Hair should be dyed black. There is a range of color of black dyes that are acceptable. For women, hair should be tied into a ponytail. For men, it should be cut short and professional-looking.

Clothing shops selling suits and businesswear sell these recruit suits every hiring season. You’ll see ads and posters all around Japan.

You should blend in together with the rest of the applicants. It will be disastrous for your application if you stray from these rules.

Very Japanese thing.

In Eurasia, the War of Economic Corridors is in full swing

Mega Eurasian organizations and their respective projects are now converging at record speed, with one global pole way ahead of the other.

By Pepe Escobar, posted with permission and cross-posted with The Cradle

 

The War of Economic Corridors is now proceeding full speed ahead, with the game-changing first cargo flow of goods from Russia to India via the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) already in effect.

Very few, both in the east and west, are aware of how this actually has long been in the making: the Russia-Iran-India agreement for implementing a shorter and cheaper Eurasian trade route via the Caspian Sea (compared to the Suez Canal), was first signed in 2000, in the pre-9/11 era.

The INSTC in full operational mode signals a powerful hallmark of Eurasian integration – alongside the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and last but not least, what I described as “Pipelineistan” two decades ago.

Caspian is key

Let’s have a first look on how these vectors are interacting.

The genesis of the current acceleration lies in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent visit to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan’s capital, for the 6th Caspian Summit. This event not only brought the evolving Russia-Iran strategic partnership to a deeper level, but crucially, all five Caspian Sea littoral states agreed that no NATO warships or bases will be allowed on site.

That essentially configures the Caspian as a virtual Russian lake, and in a minor sense, Iranian – without compromising the interests of the three “stans,” Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. For all practical purposes, Moscow has tightened its grip on Central Asia a notch.

As the Caspian Sea is connected to the Black Sea by canals off the Volga built by the former USSR, Moscow can always count on a reserve navy of small vessels – invariably equipped with powerful missiles – that may be transferred to the Black Sea in no time if necessary.

Stronger trade and financial links with Iran now proceed in tandem with binding the three “stans” to the Russian matrix. Gas-rich republic Turkmenistan for its part has been historically idiosyncratic – apart from committing most of its exports to China.

Under an arguably more pragmatic young new leader, President Serdar Berdimuhamedow, Ashgabat may eventually opt to become a member of the SCO and/or the EAEU.

Caspian littoral state Azerbaijan on the other hand presents a complex case: an oil and gas producer eyed by the European Union (EU) to become an alternative energy supplier to Russia – although this is not happening anytime soon.

The West Asia connection

Iran’s foreign policy under President Ebrahim Raisi is clearly on a Eurasian and Global South trajectory. Tehran will be formally incorporated into the SCO as a full member in the upcoming summit in Samarkand in September, while its formal application to join the BRICS has been filed.

Purnima Anand, head of the BRICS International Forum, has stated that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are also very much keen on joining BRICS. Should that happen, by 2024 we could be on our way to a powerful West Asia, North Africa hub firmly installed inside one of the key institutions of the multipolar world.

As Putin heads to Tehran next week for trilateral Russia, Iran, Turkey talks, ostensibly about Syria, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is bound to bring up the subject of BRICS.

Tehran is operating on two parallel vectors. In the event the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is revived – a quite dim possibility as it stands, considering the latest shenanigans in Vienna and Doha – that would represent a tactical victory. Yet moving towards Eurasia is on a whole new strategic level.

In the INSTC framework, Iran will make maximum good use of the geostrategically crucial port of Bandar Abbas – straddling the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, at the crossroads of Asia, Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

Yet as much as it may be portrayed as a major diplomatic victory, it’s clear that Tehran will not be able to make full use of BRICS membership if western – especially US – sanctions are not totally lifted.

Pipelines and the “stans”

A compelling argument can be made that Russia and China might eventually fill the western technology void in the Iranian development process. But there’s a lot more that platforms such as the INSTC, the EAEU and even BRICS can accomplish.

Across “Pipelineistan,” the War of Economic Corridors gets even more complex. Western propaganda simply cannot admit that Azerbaijan, Algeria, Libya, Russia’s allies at OPEC, and even Kazakhstan are not exactly keen on increasing their oil production to help Europe.

Kazakhstan is a tricky case: it is the largest oil producer in Central Asia and set to be a major natural gas supplier, right after Russia and Turkmenistan. More than 250 oil and gas fields are operated in Kazakhstan by 104 companies, including western energy giants such as Chevron, Total, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell.

While exports of oil, natural gas and petroleum products comprise 57 percent of Kazakhstan’s exports, natural gas is responsible for 85 percent of Turkmenistan’s budget (with 80 percent of exports committed to China). Interestingly, Galkynysh is the second largest gas field on the planet.

Compared to the other “stans,” Azerbaijan is a relatively minor producer (despite oil accounting for 86 percent of its total exports) and basically a transit nation. Baku’s super-wealth aspirations center on the Southern Gas Corridor, which includes no less than three pipelines: Baku-Tblisi-Erzurum (BTE); the Turkish-driven Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP); and the Trans-Adriatic (TAP).

The problem with this acronym festival – BTE, TANAP, TAP – is that they all need massive foreign investment to increase capacity, which the EU sorely lacks because every single euro is committed by unelected Brussels Eurocrats to “support” the black hole that is Ukraine. The same financial woes apply to a possible Trans-Caspian Pipeline which would further link to both TANAP and TAP.

In the War of Economic Corridors – the “Pipelineistan” chapter – a crucial aspect is that most Kazakh oil exports to the EU go through Russia, via the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC). As an alternative, the Europeans are mulling on a still fuzzy Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, also known as the Middle Corridor (Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey). They actively discussed it in Brussels last month.

The bottom line is that Russia remains in full control of the Eurasia pipeline chessboard (and we’re not even talking about the Gazprom-operated pipelines Power of Siberia 1 and 2 leading to China).

Gazprom executives know all too well that a fast increase of energy exports to the EU is out of the question. They also factor the Tehran Convention – that helps prevent and control pollution and maintain the environmental integrity of the Caspian Sea, signed by all five littoral members.

Breaking BRI in Russia

China, for its part, is confident that one of its prime strategic nightmares may eventually disappear. The notorious “escape from Malacca” is bound to materialize, in cooperation with Russia, via the Northern Sea Route, which will shorten the trade and connectivity corridor from East Asia to Northern Europe from 11,200 nautical miles to only 6,500 nautical miles. Call it the polar twin of the INSTC.

This also explains why Russia has been busy building a vast array of state-of-the-art icebreakers.

So here we have an interconnection of New Silk Roads (the INSTC proceeds in parallel with BRI and the EAEU), Pipelineistan, and the Northern Sea Route on the way to turn western trade domination completely upside down.

Of course, the Chinese have had it planned for quite a while. The first White Paper on China’s Arctic policy, in January 2018, already showed how Beijing is aiming, “jointly with other states” (that means Russia), to implement sea trade routes in the Arctic within the framework of the Polar Silk Road.

And like clockwork, Putin subsequently confirmed that the Northern Sea Route should interact and complement the Chinese Maritime Silk Road.

Russia-China Economic cooperation is evolving on so many complex, convergent levels that just to keep track of it all is a dizzying experience.

A more detailed analysis will reveal some of the finer points, for instance how BRI and SCO interact, and how BRI projects will have to adapt to the heady consequences of Moscow’s Operation Z in Ukraine, with more emphasis being placed on developing Central and West Asian corridors.

It’s always crucial to consider that one of Washington’s key strategic objectives in the relentless hybrid war against Russia was always to break BRI corridors that crisscross Russian territory.

As it stands, it’s important to realize that dozens of BRI projects in industry and investment and cross-border inter-regional cooperation will end up consolidating the Russian concept of the Greater Eurasia Partnership – which essentially revolves around establishing multilateral cooperation with a vast range of nations belonging to organizations such as the EAEU, the SCO, BRICS and ASEAN.

Welcome to the new Eurasian mantra: Make Economic Corridors, Not War.

You’re a disaster

An outstanding commentary by a former Pentagon Advisor to the US President, commenting on what he would tell President Biden…

The story of emperor of China, “Wu of Jin”

At the end of his reign as emperor of China, “Wu of Jin” brought more than 5,000 women to his palace.

From that moment on, the emperor concentrated on celebrating and enjoying women, rather than on important matters of state.

It was said that there were so many beautiful women in the palace that he literally did not know who he should have sex with; therefore, he came up with a rather… “particular” solution.

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Every day he walked inside the palace in a small wooden carriage powered by goats, if the goats stopped in front of any woman, that was the one the emperor chose.

Because of this, many of the women planted bamboo leaves outside their bedrooms, in order to attract the goats.

This, I assure you, will not appear in any of your history books.

I’m 23 and I’m from California, USA but I’ve lived in Barcelona collectively for a year now. I work remotely with clients across Europe and the States.

There are quite a few things that keep me here.

Socially, I’m less isolated, less alone, more included despite my horrific Spanish.

I noticed immediately when I moved here how much more social and communal my days became. I had lived in New York City before coming here. One of the most crowded, diverse cities in the world and proclaimed ‘city that never sleeps’, made me feel the most isolated.

Anytime there is free time here, every night of the week, there is someone inviting me to just sit and get coffee or a drink. In the US, it would take me three weeks to see as many friends I catch up with here in three days. Plans are easy and people take time to interact. I’ve noticed how much happier everyone else is, including myself.

The more relaxed mentality counteracts my workaholic bs.

Both my parents are entrepreneurs as am I. I went to a competitive business school in Dallas, Texas. Stressed is a default setting for me. And to some degree, that’s been beneficial. But moving here and being surrounded by people who will tell me I’m over doing it and need a drink is absolutely priceless. I’ve actually noticed a difference in how I physically feel and physically how the day “looks” to me; more light and not so impacted even if I am still working a lot. A collective, calmer energy around me is really helpful.

They dress better and now I dress better.

Where I’m from, the standard look is work out clothes everyday and if you put on even so much as jeans people ask you where you’re going. My university in Texas was worse. Here, an actual adult outfit is what’s expected. Everyone looks nice. Of course, within about three days I went shopping and got my shit together. I actually feel more confident and put together when I’m here because of that social standard.

They eat better and now I eat better.

I find it so much easier to eat healthier here. The mediterranean diet is inescapable. At home, there is kind of this half-assed healthy/convenience diet everyone, myself included strives for. You might know what I’m talking about. I’m no longer living off Diet Coke and protein bars. Which is great. Meal time is taken a little more seriously here so I cook and put a lot more conscious thought into my food.

Social barriers we have in the States do not exist.

I have friends who are senior managers at Deloitte that are also best friends with waiters. No one cares. No. One. Cares. Career is not the main topic of conversation or what people align their lives around. It’s simply how you make money to be able to go out and drink with your friends whoever they may be. This was way different for me. My whole life is my business and I came from cities where everyone’s social circles revolves around their jobs. I really love it. There are more perspectives and understanding.

Anyways, I just spent a few months back in the US getting a new visa. Of course there are things about the US that are very much engrained in me that I believe have made me who I am and I love that. There will always be things I love about home. Right now, Spain is showing me things about myself and other perspectives I can really appreciate.

We’re learning more than ever about war from the Ukraine

By <name withheld>

That is, if you follow closely what is happening.

We see that it is brutal beyond our imagination. Our imagination fails
because for the last 30 years the Western Media’s main job was to
Ignore, Deny and Justify the daily carnage dealt out to “Brown-Skins”.
There were some Eastern Europeans in there too, but call them Commies.

Now the Western Media job is to report every nuance, and even invent
most of the stories to give their “reporting” a flare. Every atrocity
they report has already been happening for 3 decades, but the official
position is that we really didn’t care. Let “Democracy” do its work.

We see that the worst travesty on earth is what they call the proxy
war. Opposing “great” powers hire third world discontents to perform a
chicken (cock) fight, and the powers sit on the sidelines making their
bets. The person could probably make $10/day in their home country.
(Like the Ukraine average), If they can get an honest job. Or they can
push drugs and engage with crime and make more (like in Ukraine).

But on the battle field they are promised $50/day, sometimes even
$100/day, (but then are usually paid less). All they have to do is kill
some people. And most of the times it’s unarmed civilians. It is kind
of like a sports club or a fraternity. Make a few IED’s. Not quite the
same in today’s war.

In the Ukraine one side is proxy, (with their own people of course, but
with proxy armaments). The Ukrainian military is not paid any premium,
but their pay is sent in by proxy. And the other side, Russian allies,
are working for their own security against the proxy sponsors. (It is
a very interesting dynamic, that I can comment on, but not in this piece.)

The Ukraine used to have all the cities except those occupied the LPR
and DPR. They had 8 years to fortify them and stock military supplies,
according to their battle plan. Now they have lost much of that
territory plus a land bridge from Russia to the Crimea, Kherson and the
like. Therefore we can conclude by this movement, that Russia is on the
offensive and Ukraine on the defensive. Today I am not counting Russia’s
drive toward Kiev. Maybe it was just an experiment to see if things
could happen easy, without much loss of life. I find it honorable.

The offensive side controls the battle plan and the speed and direction
of the attacks. The defense has to absorb what the offense doles out to
them. The offense can easily go back and forth, with the objective to
save their lives. The defense cannot go back (unless they must), and
the lives lost can make NO DIFFERENCE.

Too many commenter’s claim the battle is stalled out. So Russia must be
hurting, because it doesn’t go forward according to MY (the commenter’s)
CONCEPT. Not to Russia’s plan? But if you look closely, on each day
that the front lines don’t move, many hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers are
killed, (each day) and many dozens of their heavy equipment destroyed.
It is through stand-off artillery not face to face combat, so the losses
are not equal. It is said that 50% of Ukrainian BTG’s have heavy
losses, one up to 80%. Can you imagine what it feels like to be in a
BTG of 900 soldiers and now there are only 180 left? Unfortunately, in
war, many countries understand only body counts. I think the USA is
like that.

So the mistake is to judge the war only by movement on the front. Asking
what major cities have been taken?

So far this war is to liberate the Ex-Russian, the Russian speaking
population from under the fascist regime. So the goal is to preserve
their lives, and allow them to build a productive society in the
future. We won’t know about the non-Russian speaking population until
they get there. You can’t just take a poll to ask what they think.
They are not allowed to express any doubt, under severe fascist
penalties, including death. If they are liberated, many might choose to
live far away from the Kiev regime. So you don’t want to kill or maim
those civilians either. Maybe by the time you get to Lvov, you can
take off the kid gloves.

1. Not all relationships will lead to marriage, some will help you discover new restaurants.

2. It’s not selfish to make your happiness your main priority.

3. Stay away from “still” people. Still broke, still complaining, still hating, still nowhere.

4. Anything that costs you your mental health is too expensive.

5. Make sure you’re not the only one who actually values the connection.

6. You don’t have to be liked by everybody. You don’t even like everybody.

7. People may be upset when you choose you over their mess. Choose you anyway.

8. Listen, that move you are scared to make, might be the game changer.

9. There is a past version of you that is so proud of how far you have come.

10. If someone’s absence brings you peace. You didn’t lose anything.

Sherry Cam.

Iran, Argentina apply to join BRICS bloc after recent summit: Report

Ahead of the summit, Saudi Arabia too expressed interest to join the grouping, according to reports.

From HERE

Every nation is "abandoning the USD" and "abandoning the West" and getting on board with the united Asia. -MM

and have applied to join the mechanism, the Russian state media reported, days after a summit of the five-nation bloc during which the leaders agreed to continue to discuss the possibility of admitting new countries to the grouping on the basis of “full consultation and consensus.”

and have applied for joining (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was quoted as saying by the state-run Tass news agency.

It reported that Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said on Monday that Tehran has applied for membership.

Tehran filed the application for accession to the BRICS, he said.

The diplomat expressed hope that “ will be able to contribute to the BRICS’ operation and benefit the organisation.”

Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez said at a BRICS+ meeting last week that his country wants to become a full member of the association, the Tass report said.

Ahead of the summit, Saudi Arabia too expressed interest to join the grouping, according to reports.

The issue of expansion of the BRICS bloc was figured in the June 23 virtual summit hosted by China, which is this year’s chair.

The declaration issued at the end of the summit said the leaders will continue to discuss the possibility of admitting new countries to the five-nation grouping on the basis of “full consultation and consensus.”

Asked for his reaction at a media briefing here on Tuesday about Iran and applying to join BRICS, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said many countries have expressed their interest to join the five-member bloc of emerging markets.

“BRICS countries agreed that it is important to step up cooperation with other emerging markets and developing countries to improve the representativeness of the BRICS mechanism and make it loudly heard on major issues so that we can better rise up to challenges and uphold the interests of emerging markets and developing counties,” Zhao said.

“We have noted that many countries including Iran and Argentina have expressed their willingness to join the BRICS family. As the chair of the BRICS this year China actively supports BRICS countries to start the membership expansion process to expand BRICS Plus cooperation,” he said.

Zhao said that at the 14th summit held on June 23 the BRICS leader made a unanimous voice on the expansion of the BRICS mechanism and they supported discussion, standards and procedure for the expansion.

“China will work with BRICS partners to move ahead with the expansion process steadily so that like-minded partners can join the BRICS family,” he said.

“We shall continue to set clear priorities in our wide-ranging cooperation, on the basis of consensus, and make our strategic partnership more efficient, practical and results-oriented,” the declaration said.

“We support promoting discussions among BRICS members on BRICS expansion process. We stress the need to clarify the guiding principles, standards, criteria and procedures for this expansion process through Sherpas’ channel on the basis of full consultation and consensus,” it said.

In Case You Were Wondering Why Inflation Has Started To Spiral Wildly Out Of Control…

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When you keep making horrible decisions, eventually the consequences are going to catch up with you.  That is true for individuals, and it is also true for entire nations.  Here in the United States, previous generations handed down to us the strongest and most stable national currency on the planet.  Having the default reserve currency of the world has been a great blessing, because it has enabled us to enjoy a standard of living that is far greater than we actually deserve.  But instead of doing their best to preserve and protect our currency, our leaders have decided to systematically destroy it instead.  As a result, the rate of inflation has gotten completely out of control, and many experts are extremely concerned about what lies ahead.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why we have such a problem with inflation at this point.

The money supply has ballooned to levels that were once unthinkable, and this is going to cause massive problems for the foreseeable future.

Let me show you what I am talking about.  The following chart of how M1 has changed over the years comes directly from the Federal Reserve

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The giant spike that you can see on the chart started during the early stages of the COVID pandemic.

Our leaders abandoned any pretense of restraint, and we went “full Weimar” for about two solid years.

I warned over and over again that what we were doing was absolutely insane, and now we are starting to experience the consequences.

Many people believe that M2 is a much more accurate measure of the money supply than M1 is, and so let me show you a chart of how M2 has changed

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This chart certainly looks better than the previous one, but it is still extremely frightening.

We are rapidly destroying the stability of our currency, and as a result our standard of living is being absolutely shredded.

I’ll give you an example.  A young lady down in Texas went viral this month when she revealed that she was living in a shed in a desperate attempt to save money

A young Texas woman who moved into a shed that she purchased for just $2,000 in order to save money amid the housing crisis has opened up about her desperate struggle to cope with the summer heat while living in the property – which has no AC or shower.

Is this what they mean when they tell us that we are going to “own nothing and be happy”?

Apparently she was promised that the shed would be “fully livable”, but she quickly found out that wasn’t exactly true

However, in a video shared to her TikTok, which gained over one million views, Elizabeth revealed that she was ‘ripped off by the builders’ because she was under the impression it was a fully livable shed and is ‘dying’ in the Houston heat while thinking about how ‘nice’ a shower would be.

The good news is that her father came down from South Carolina and installed lights and air conditioning.

So now Elizabeth and her boyfriend will be able to cool off during the summer months.

But they still have no way to bathe.

Sadly, the truth is that they are far better off than hundreds of millions of others around the globe right now.

As energy costs and food costs go absolutely haywire, we are starting to see widespread civil unrest in various parts of the world.

For example, check out what is currently going on in Sri Lanka

The political crisis triggered by months of socialist economic collapse in Sri Lanka continued on Wednesday with violent clashes between protesters and soldiers, resulting in upwards of 80 people hospitalized in one day and the military announcing soldiers were “empowered” to attack civilians if deemed necessary.

The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, governed for the better part of the past two decades primarily by the populous Rajapaksa family, began to run out of food, medicine, oil fuels, natural gas, and nearly every other basic good in March, the result of lavish government spending and the imposition of “green” policies that banned chemical fertilizer use.

They promised us that the “green revolution” would change everything, and they were right.

Things are starting to get really crazy in Albania too.

 

And what we are witnessing in Panama right now is extremely alarming.

 

All over the globe, energy and food are traded in U.S. dollars.

When interest rates rise in the U.S., the dollar tends to go up relative to other global currencies, and that makes things much harder for those at the very bottom of the economic food chain.

Unfortunately, in a desperate attempt to get inflation under control in the U.S., the Federal Reserve has been aggressively raising interest rates.

And we are now being warned that the Fed could raise rates “by a full percentage point” at the next meeting…

Investors see a growing probability that the Federal Reserve could hike interest rates by a full percentage point at its next meeting for the first time in the modern era. In June, the Fed raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, which it hadn’t done since 1994.

Considering the fact that we are plunging into a recession, it would be absolutely insane for the Fed to do such a thing.

But they seem quite serious about making another big move.

In fact, the head of the Atlanta Fed just publicly told us that “everything is in play” at the next Fed gathering…

Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank President Raphael Bostic said Wednesday that “everything is in play” when asked about the prospect of the central bank raising interest rates by a full percentage point later this month, expressing concern over the morning’s news that inflation hit a fresh 40-year-high in June.

Bostic told reporters he still needed to study the “nuts and bolts” of the latest data, but said he felt “today’s numbers suggest the trajectory is not moving in a positive way.”

The Fed seems to be obsessed with trying to tame inflation here in the U.S., but in the process they will essentially be exporting a tremendous amount of inflation to the rest of the globe.

Food and energy will become significantly more expensive all over the planet.

And since much of the debt that poor countries owe is denominated in dollars, we also run the risk of sparking an unprecedented global debt crisis.

The total amount of debt in the world has crossed the 300 trillion dollar mark, and if that bubble bursts we will suddenly be facing the sort of historic financial catastrophe that I have been warning about for years.

Our leaders thought that they could endlessly flood the system with money without ever suffering any serious consequences.

Russia’s Plan To Cut Off Kazakh Oil Supplies To Europe

  • The European oil market is already incredibly tight and will soon face a supply crunch as its embargo on seaborne Russian oil imports comes into effect.
  • Last week, the EU’s oil supply was squeezed yet again as a Russian court ordered the closure of a Black Sea oil export terminal.
  • The export terminal in question is the largest outlet for Kazakh oil, a non-Russian oil supply that Europe will be eager to secure.

The European oil market just received another supply shock ahead of the looming EU embargo on seaborne Russian oil imports. A Russian court has ordered the closure of a key Russian Black Sea export route, through which most of Kazakhstan’s crude oil passes to Europe.

The Russian court ruling further complicates Europe’s efforts to procure non-Russian oil in a tight physical market. It also highlights the fact that Moscow could go to any lengths to stifle oil supply to “unfriendly” countries which are banning imports of its oil, analysts say.

The move from Russia is a threat to Europe that the Kremlin will continue using oil and gas as a weapon as it looks to destabilize European economies and the EU’s unity in imposing and enforcing sanctions on Moscow for the invasion of Ukraine.

Targeting Kazakhstan’s oil is “Putin’s new weapon of mass disruption,” Bloomberg oil strategist Julian Lee says. But how did that new disruption in the global oil market happen?

Last week, a Russian court ordered the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which operates the key export route for two-thirds of Kazakhstan’s crude oil, to suspend activities for 30 days, citing environmental violations.

The exports take place from the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, and although it’s in Russia, its exports consist of 90 percent crude from Kazakhstan and just 10 percent of Russian oil.

The 1,500-km CPC pipeline from the giant Kazakh oilfields to Novorossiysk moves over two-thirds of all Kazakhstan export oil along with crude from Russian fields, including those in the Caspian region, CPC says. The consortium said in response to the court ruling that it “acts within the legal framework of the Russian Federation and is forced to execute the court Ruling.”

An appeal was heard on Monday, and the court overturned the ruling for a 30-day ban on oil deliveries from Kazakhstan.

Analysts also say it’s no coincidence that last week’s ruling of the Russian court came days after Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev offered the EU the chance to buy more oil from Kazakhstan instead of Russia.

The Kazakh president “expressed concern about the risks to global energy security and emphasized Kazakhstan’s readiness to use its hydrocarbon potential to stabilize the situation in the world and European markets,” according to the website of the president, who had a telephone conversation with the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, last week.

On Thursday, after the Russian court ruling suspending CPC, Tokayev said Kazakhstan needed to diversify its oil export routes. The president ordered a study into a project for bypassing Russia by building a pipeline across the Caspian Sea.

“The Trans-Caspian route is a priority. I instruct KazMunayGas [national oil and gas company] to work out the best option for its implementation, including the possibility of attracting investors to the Tengiz project,” Tokayev said as carried by The Astana Times.

While Kazakhstan is looking to diversify its crude export routes away from Russia, the European Union is scrambling for non-Russian oil supply as its embargo on Russian seaborne oil and product imports will enter into force at the end of the year.

Per tanker-tracking data that Bloomberg has compiled, crude exports from major suppliers to Europe, including the North Sea, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, West Africa, and Libya, declined by over 1 million bpd in June compared to May. With Libya’s oil supply expected to further decline amid protests and political bickering over who should control and distribute its vital oil revenues, a loss of another 1 million bpd supply from Kazakhstan due to the Russian court order is another blow to European and global oil supply.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com


The Japanese Invasion of Korea is the one I am thinking of now, largely because it shows the crucial importance of supplies and proper logistics.

In the late 1500s, Japan was engulfed in a period of Civil War known as the Sengoku Jedai. This is the famous period of Samurai fighting Samurai that people envision when they think of feudal Japan.

The wars ended when a man named Toyotomi Hideyoshi united Japan (for the most part) under his rule.

Hideyoshi had a problem though. Years of war left Japan a militarized island waiting to burst. So Hideyoshi decided to invade China to keep the massive Samurai armies distracted. In order to invade China Japan needed to conquer Korea.

Conquering Korea wasn’t seen as a big deal. Korea at this time was a very weak State. The limited Korean military just defended the border from raiders and that was about it. Japan meanwhile was bursting with warriors, skilled Generals, and professional armies.

Japan invades Korea and the Korean Army is crushed. Korean forces never stand a chance and are pushed back to the Chinese border. However, Japan didn’t yet win.

On the seas, a Korean Admiral named Yi Sun-Shin had taken a handful of Korean ships and laid waste to Japanese supply lines. Entire Japanese war fleets had been sunk and eventually, Japanese supply lines were shattered completely.

It’s hard to overstate Admiral Yi’s success. He was always outnumbered and outgunned and yet he won dozens of insanely one-sided victories. For instance, he once faced down 200+ Japanese warships with only 13 ships. Not only did he win, he didn’t lose a single ship.

The entire Japanese invasion had to be halted while Yi was dealt with. Japan threw more and more fleets at him and yet never defeated him.

Finally after years of their invasion being stalled China entered the fray. They began to push Japanese forces back and support Yi with their own fleet. Yi would smash the Japanese in 1 final battle, forcing them to surrender their campaign and retreat in disgrace.

Yi would die in this final battle- his final words to his son were “We are at the height of battle. Don’t let anybody know about my death!”. A warrior until the end.

Now Japan had EVERY advantage going into this war

  1. Their armies were larger
  2. Their armies were infinitely more experienced
  3. Their armies had more advanced weapons
  4. Their economy and society were built around warfare
  5. Their economy was drastically larger
  6. They had way more manpower to draw upon
  7. Their government was more stable

Korea shouldn’t have even been able to put up a fight and yet they ended up winning- all because of supply and logistics.

Sound familiar?

Russia and China haven’t even started to ratchet up the pain dial

by Pepe Escobar and posted with the author’s permission

The Suicide Spectacular Summer Show, currently on screen across Europe, proceeds in full regalia, much to the astonishment of virtually the whole Global South: a trashy, woke Gotterdammerung remake, with Wagnerian grandeur replaced by twerking.

Decadent Roman Emperors at least exhibited some degree of pathos.

Here we’re just faced by a toxic mix of hubris, abhorrent mediocrity, delusion, crude ideological sheep-think and outright irrationality wallowing in white man’s burden racist/supremacist slush – all symptoms of a profound sickness of the soul.

To call it the Biden-Leyen-Blinken West or so would be too reductionist: after all these are puny politico/functionaries merely parroting orders.

This is a historical process: physical, psychic and moral cognitive degeneration embedded in NATOstan’s manifest desperation in trying to contain Eurasia, allowing occasional tragicomic sketches such as a NATO summit proclaiming Woke War against virtually the whole non-West.

So when President Putin addresses the collective West in front of Duma leaders and heads of political parties, it does feel like a comet striking an inert planet. It’s not even a case of “lost in translation”. “They” simply aren’t equipped to get it.

The “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” part was at least formulated to be understood even by simpletons:

“Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield, well, what can I say, let them try. We have heard many times that the West wants to fight us to the last Ukrainian – this is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people. But it looks like it’s all coming to this. But everyone should know that, by and large, we haven’t really started anything yet.”

Fact.

On Operation Z, Russia is using a fraction of its military potential, resources and state of the art weapons.

Then we come to the most probable path ahead in the war theater:

“We do not refuse peace negotiations, but those who refuse should know that the longer it drags, the more difficult it will be for them to negotiate with us.”

As in the pain dial will be ratcheted up, slowly but surely, on all fronts.

Yet the meat of the matter had been delivered earlier in the speech: “ratcheting up the pain dial” applies in fact to dismantling the whole “rules-based international order” edifice. The geopolitical world has changed.

Forever.

Here’s the arguably key passage:

“They should have understood that they have already lost from the very beginning of our special military operation, because its beginning means the beginning of a radical breakdown of the World Order in the American way. 

This is the beginning of the transition from liberal-globalist American egocentrism to a truly multipolar world – a world based not on selfish rules invented by someone for themselves, behind which there is nothing but the desire for hegemony, not on hypocritical double-standards, but on international law, on the true sovereignty of peoples and civilizations, on their will to live their historical destiny, their values and traditions and build cooperation on the basis of democracy, justice and equality. 

And we must understand that this process can no longer be stopped.”

Meet the trifecta

A case can be made that Putin and Russia’s Security Council are implementing a tactical trifecta that has reduced the collective West to an amorphous bunch of bio headless chickens.

The trifecta mixes the promise of negotiations – but only when considering Russia’s steady advances on the ground in Novorossiya; the fact that Russia’s global “isolation” has been proved in practice to be nonsense; and tweaking the most visible pain dial of them all: Europe’s dependence on Russian energy.

The main reason for the graphic, thundering failure of the G20 Foreign Ministers summit in Bali is that the G7 – or NATOstan plus (American colony) Japan – could not force the BRICS plus major Global South players to isolate, sanction and/or demonize Russia.

On the contrary: multiple interpolations outside of the G20 spell out even more Eurasia-wide integration.

Here are a few examples.

The first transit of Russian products to India via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) is now in effect, crisscrossing Eurasia from Mumbai to the Baltic via Iranian ports (Chabahar or Bandar Abbas), the Caspian Sea, and Southern and Central Russia. Crucially, the route is shorter and cheaper than going through the Suez Canal.

In parallel, the head of the Iranian Central Bank, Ali Salehabadi, confirmed that a memorandum of interbank cooperation was signed between Tehran and Moscow.

That means a viable alternative to SWIFT, and a direct consequence of Iran’s application to become a full BRICS member, announced at the recent summit in Beijing.

The BRICS, since 2014, when the New Development Bank (NDB) was founded, have been busy building their own financial infrastructure, including the near future creation of a single reserve currency. As part of the process, the harmonization of Russian and Iranian banking systems is inevitable.

Iran is also about to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at the upcoming summit in Samarkand in September.

In parallel, Russia and Kazakhstan are solidifying their strategic partnership: Kazakhstan is a key member of BRI, EAEU and SCO.

India gets even closer to Russia across the whole spectrum of trade – including energy.

And next Tuesday, Tehran will be the stage for a crucial face-to-face meeting between Putin and Erdogan.

Isolation? Really?

On the energy front, it’s only summer, but demented paranoia is already raging across multiple EU latitudes, especially Germany. Comic relief is provided by the fact that Gazprom can always point out to Berlin that eventual supplying problems on Nord Stream 1 – after the cliffhanger return of that notorious repaired turbine from Canada – can always be solved by implementing Nord Stream 2.

As the whole European Suicide Spectacular Summer Show is nothing but a tawdry self-inflicted torture ordered by His Master’s Voice, the only serious question is which pain dial level will force Berlin to actually sit down and negotiate on behalf of legitimate German industrial and social interests.

Rough and tumble will be the norm.

Foreign Minister Lavrov summed it all up when commenting on the Declining Collective West Ministers striking poses like infantile brats in Bali to avoid being seen with him: that was up to “their understanding of the protocols and politeness.”

That’s diplo-talk for “bunch of jerks”. Or worse: cultural barbarians, as they were even unable to respect the hyper-polite Indonesian hosts, who abhor confrontation.

Lavrov preferred to extol the “joint strategic and constructive” Russian-Chinese work when faced with a very aggressive West. And that brings us to the prime masterpiece of shadowplay in Bali – complete with several layers of geopolitical fog.

Chinese media, always flirting with the opaque, tried to put its bravest face ever depicting the over 5-hour meeting between Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Secretary Blinken as “constructive”.

What’s fascinating here is that the Chinese ended up letting something crucial out of the bag to slip into the final draft of their report – obviously approved by the powers that be.

Lu Xiang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences went through previous readouts – especially of “Yoda” Yang Jiechi routinely turning Jake Sullivan into roasted duck – and stressed that this time Wang’s “warnings” to the Americans were “the sternest one in wording”.

That’s diplo-code for “You Better Watch Out”: Wang telling Little Blinkie, “just look at what the Russians did when they lost their patience with your antics.”

The expression ”dead end” was recurrent during the Wang-Blinken meeting. So in the end the Global Times had to tell it like it really is:  “The two sides are close to a showdown.”

“Showdown” is what End of Days fanatic and Tony Soprano wannabe Mike Pompeo is fervently preaching from his hate pulpit, while the combo behind the senile “leader of the free world” who literally reads teleprompters actively work for the crashing of the EU – in more ways than one.

The combo in power in Washington actually “supports” the unification of Britain, Poland, Ukraine and The Three Baltic Midgets as a separate alliance from NATO/EU – aiming at “strengthening the defense potential.” That’s the official position of US Ambassador to NATO Julian Smith.

So the real imperial aim is to split the already shattering EU into mini-union pieces, all of them quite fragile and evidently more “manageable”, as Brussels Eurocrats, blinded by boundless mediocrity, obviously can’t see it coming.

What the Global South is buying

Putin always makes it very clear that the decision to launch Operation Z – as a sort of pre-emptive “combined arms and police operation”, as defined by Andrei Martyanov – was carefully calculated, considering an array of material and socio-psychological vectors.

Anglo-American strategy, for its part, lasers on a single obsession: damn any possible reframing of the current “rules-based international order”. No holds are barred to ensure the perpetuity of this order. This is in fact Totalen Krieg – featuring several hybrid layers, and quite worrying, with only a few seconds to midnight.

And there’s the rub. Desolation Row is fast becoming Desperation Row, as the whole Russophobic matrix is shown to be naked, devoid of any extra ideological – and even financial – firepower to “win”, apart from shipping a collection of HIMARS to a black hole.

Geopolitically and geoeconomically, Russia and China are in the process of eating NATOstan alive – in more ways than one. Here, for instance, is a synthetic road map of how Beijing will address the next stage of high-quality development via capital-driven industrial upgrading, focused on optimization of supply chains, import substitution of hard technologies, and “invisible champions” of industry.

If the collective West is blinded by Russophobia, the governing success of the Chinese Communist Party – which in a matter of a few decades improved the lives of more people than anyone, anytime in History – drives it completely nuts.

All along the Russia-China watchtower, it’s been not such a long time coming. BRI was launched by Xi Jinping in 2013. After Maidan in 2014, Putin launched the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) in 2015. Crucially, in May 2015, a Russia-China joint statement sealed the cooperation between BRI and EAEU, with a significant role assigned to the SCO.

Closer integration advanced via the St. Petersburg forum in 2016 and the BRI forum in 2017. The overall target: to create a new order in Asia, and across Eurasia, according to international law while maintaining the individual development strategies of each concerned country and respecting their national sovereignty.

That, in essence, is what most of the Global South is buying. It’s as if there’s a cross-border instinctual understanding that Russia-China, against serious odds and facing serious challenges, proceeding by trial and error, are at the vanguard of the Shock of the New, while the collective West, naked, dazed and confused, their masses completely zombified, is sucked into the maelstrom of psychological, moral and material disintegration.

No question the pain dial will be ratcheted up, in more ways than one.

“Blow Up to Be the Size You Want!” – Vintage Inflatable Bra Ads From the 1950s and 1960s

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What was a woman to do if she wanted to boost her cleavage in the days before Wonderbra was on the market and the more drastic measure of plastic surgery wasn’t so readily available? The answer is by wearing an inflatable bra that the wearer could blow up to the size they desired themselves.

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The “Trés Secret” inflatable bra went on sale in the early 1950s. Each cup contained a small plastic pouch that could be inflated by the wearer with an accompanying mouthpiece. Its makers promised the bra could give any woman “a boost to bosom beauty” with their advert adding, “Do it yourself. Make the most of you. Blow up! To be the size you want.”

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Shopping Mall Signs Warn of Nuclear War Emergencies

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The Menlo Park Mall in Edison, New Jersey is just one of many large shopping malls in upscale areas publicly warning people about what to do if a Nuclear Bomb Hits!  They have been told by government to begin warning people . . . because Nuclear War with Russia is not only a possibility, it has become a likelihood.

The horrifying reality that would be a nuclear blast is becoming so likely now over the Russia-Ukraine/NATO troubles in eastern Europe that governments and now private sector industries are warning people about what to do when a nuclear bomb goes off!

Below is a full image of warning signs now installed at the Menlo Park Mall in Edison, New Jersey:

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These signs, and a new Public Service Announcement (PSA) from the New York City Office of Emergency Management which came out earlier this week (Story Here) are all instructing people that if a nuclear bomb goes off, GET INSIDE.

The reason this effort is underway is that government knows it has caused such terrible troubles with Russia, over the Ukraine situation, that it is now LIKELY we are going to be attacked by Russia with nuclear bombs.

MISINFORMATION

While the first trouble is, of course, that this is a problem of our government’s own making, the second major problem is that the advice is utterly stupid.

they tell people to get inside.   Good advice . . . if there’s anything left standing to actually get inside of!

Russia uses the YARS intercontinental ballistic missile to launch nuclear attacks.   Those missile are equipped with an eight-hundred kiloton (800kt) warhead.

The blast map below is a scientific model from Nuclear Secrecy.org showing the actual scientifically-modeled blast effects of a single, 800kt nuclear bomb air bursting over New York City.

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The inner smaller yellow area in the center show the initial blast area, all of which is vaporized.  Absolutely nothing will be left.   No people, no buildings, no vehicles.   Nothing.

The next area is a grayish circular area.  Everything in this area will be physically knocked down and on fire.  Not even the strongest concrete and steel buildings will remain standing.  And everything — all of it — will be on fire.

The next circular area toward the outer edges of the blast circle, will be THERMAL DAMAGE.   Things in this area may be severely damaged or knocked down but SOME structures might remain standing as they erupt in flames.  As for people in this area, anyone who was outside, and who sees the bright, white, flash, will have third-degree burns all over their body.

The final light gray area is where there will be light blast damage.  Most structures will remain standing but windows are likely broken.  People in this area will be injured from flying blast debris.

The signs then advise people  “If you were outside when the blast hit, take off all clothes, shower and shampoo to wash the radiation off immediately.”

Trouble is THERE WON’T BE ANY RUNNING WATER.   The water mains will be ruptured from the blast and the electric that powers the water pumps will all be off for miles.

But wait, there’s more . . .  idiocy . . . . the signs tell people “stay tuned to local media and don’t go outside until authorities tell you it’s safe.”  THERE WON’T BE ANY LOCAL MEDIA.  It will all be blown up.  All the TV and radio transmitters will be wiped out!

THERE WON’T BE ANY CELL PHONE SERVICE. The towers will all be knocked down, the transmitters fried by electro-magnetic pulse, and the electric will all be out.  THERE WON’T BE ANY INTERNET SERVICE. All the Internet lines will be blown up and the wireless all offline from EMP or no electricity!!!

Yet even though the advice is utterly useless, the signs have gone up anyway.

Government doesn’t do things like this for no reason.  They are putting out these PSA’s and asking large retailers to put these signs up because government KNOWS what’s coming.  After all, it is government that is causing it all.

Unless Americans mobilize right now, and tell federal officials we will not tolerate them starting a nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine, we’re all dead.

You, me, our wives, husbands, kids, extended families . . . . will all be dead.

Pick up your phones and start swarming members of Congress and the Senate, telling them we refuse to allow them to start a nuclear war with their economic sanctions.

There is very little time left to act.   It may already be too late.

But we have to put forth the effort or all of us will be killed.

The Battle of Saragarhi.

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The Battle of Saragarhi.

In the 1890s, the British were trying to conquer Afghanistan and it was becoming a severe challenge. As the Russians and Americans would learn, Afghanistan is not a place easily conquered.

A revolt breaks out towards the end of 1897 and Afgan tribesmen rally in the tens of thousands to the rebel banner. They begin to march towards British forts to push them out of their home.

Soon a rebel army arrives at a series of British forts and the fight begins.

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It’s the morning of September 12, 1897, and the British see an army on the horizon.

The British forces are locked away in Fort Lockhart and from there they see a massive army on the horizon—numbering some 10,000-12,000. The British are dangerously outnumbered and they prepare for a siege.

A signaling outpost some miles away, called Saragarhi, is manned by 21 Sikh warriors. The Sikhs are informed that an army numbering 10,000 is quickly approaching. The Sikhs request help, but the British inform them that they cannot assist, as they cannot leave the fort unguarded.

The Sikhs could run or surrender—the Afgan tribesmen would show them mercy. But the leader of these brave men, Ishar Singh, tells his men they will stay and fight.

The board up the gate, get ammunition stockpiled, and prepare to defend their small compound from an overwhelming force.

The Afgan army approaches and the fighting begins.


The Afghans send a massive charge to overwhelm the fort but disciplined and accurate rifle fire from the Sikh warriors is enough to break the charge and send the Afgan warriors running.

A second charge appears. This time the Afghans come in even greater numbers. The Sikh fire is unable to break the enemy lines and before too long, the Afgan tribesmen are climbing over the walls. A tough melee fight ensues with rifle butts, swords, and bayonets.

Again though the Sikhs hold, killing hundreds. They turn back the massive force and maintain control of the fort.

By this point, the Afgan forces have taken significant losses, considering this is a lightly manned signaling post. But several Sikhs have died as well.

Bhagwan Singh is the first to be killed in the fighting and his body is taken to the courtyard. Another warrior named Lal Singh is wounded and out of the fight.

One thing to note—this is all known not only from secondhand accounts but also the signalman, Gurmukh Singh. While all of this was happening he continued to send reports to the British at Fort Lockhart.

Now the Sikhs are down to 18 fighters the battle continues.


The Afgan army offers terms of surrender. They offer wealth, safety, power, and whatever else the Sikhs could want if they will just lay down their arms. The Sikhs boldly refuse.

The Afghans light fires to the hillside clouding everything in smoke. The signalman soon gets word that a formation of Afgan warriors is approaching the fort from the side, hidden by the smoke.

It’s too late—the Afgan warriors are in the compound.

Ishar Singh along with a few of his men charge the Afghans and another round of brutal hand-to-hand fighting breaks out inside the compound. The Sikhs are relentless and skilled, killing hundreds of attackers and holding their own despite being overwhelmed.

The Afghan warriors keep coming, though, and the Sikhs are being worn down. Pretty soon the outer walls crumble and the Afghans capture that portion of the compound.

Ishar Singh knows things are desperate. He orders his men back to the inner compound to mount a defense. He knows that if they turn their backs and run they will be cut down.

In a moment of utter bravery, Ishar Singh orders his men back and then single-handedly charges the approaching Afghan army. He cuts down warrior after warrior with his sword and pistol, cutting through the ranks of the surprised Afgan army.

After a few seconds, Ishar Singh is overwhelmed and killed—but he has bought his men the time they needed to fall back.


The Sikhs are now defending their fallback point, but the situation is hopeless. The Afghans start chopping at the wooden gate with axes and swords. Before too long they break through and thousands of them come pouring into what remains of the compound.

The Sikhs continue to fight bravely but hopelessly.

At this point, the signalman Gurmukh Singh signals the British to ask permission to abandon his post and take up his rifle. The order is approved and he calmly puts away his signal gear, takes up his rifle, and fixes the bayonet.

By now, he is the last living Sikh in the compound. The British look on as he moves to defend the door to the small building he was stationed in.

The door breaks and enemy charges in. The British watch in awe as Gurmukh Singh cuts down one, then two, then three, and then finally eighteen Afghan warriors. The men retreat and Gurmukh Singh continues to hold the building.

More charge in and he kills another twenty Afghans as the British cheer him on, watching his final battle from the fort using telescopes.

Alone and cut off, Gurmukh Singh killed 40 ENEMY WARRIORS in only a few minutes. What a total and complete you-know-what.

The Afghans are terrified by this. Unwilling to try and take the building again they set it on fire.

As the building burns, Gurmukh Singh shouts his battle cry over and over again.

“Bole so Nihal sat sri akal”

“Bole so Nihal sat sri akal”

“Bole so Nihal sat sri akal”

Shout aloud in ecstasy, true is the great timeless one.


The battle was over—the compound was taken and the Sikhs had lost.

Yet like Thermopylae and other hopeless battles, the deeds of these heroic and ferocious warriors live on in history as one of the great moments of bravery and valor.

The 21 Sikhs had sold their lives at a high cost. While all 21 died, they took 1,400 enemy soldiers with them while injuring thousands more. Estimates from most sources list 600-1400 fatalities, with many more wounded. Either way, these 21 men took a heavy toll on their enemy.

Every Sikh there that day killed 28-50 enemies. This is an insane feat and only shows how skilled and dedicated these men were.

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The brave who died.

 

Marinated Tomatoes

Use up all those extra tomatoes with this easy make-ahead recipe – simply shake ingredients in a jar and pour over the fruit to marinate.

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Ingredients

  • 3 large or 5 medium fresh tomatoes, thickly sliced
  • 1/3 cup olive oil
  • 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
  • 1 teaspoon salt, optional
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/2 garlic clove, minced
  • 2 tablespoons chopped onion
  • 1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley
  • 1 tablespoon minced fresh basil or 1 teaspoon dried basil

Directions

  1. Arrange tomatoes in a large shallow dish. Combine remaining ingredients in a jar; cover tightly and shake well. Pour over tomato slices. Cover and refrigerate for several hours.

Some things I learned when I became old enough to get Social Security Insurance…

1. If you think you’re fat, you probably are.

2. Best friends see each other 3 times a year and may have no pictures together.

3. If you text, call, and still get ignored, just walk away.

4. Your hair was put on your head to remind you that you can’t control everything.

5. No one talks about how lonely healing can feel.

6. Don’t let your loneliness make you reconnect with wrong person. Meet better people here.

7. True relationship comes when the silence between you two is comfortable.

8. Go where your energy is reciprocated, celebrated, and appreciated.

9. You still haven’t met all of the people who are going to love you.

10. If today is not your day, remember there’re 365 days a year.

Sea Monkeys, X-Ray Specs, and the Twisted Secret Behind Vintage Ads from American Comic Books

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American comics first came to Glasgow as ships’ ballast. In the sixties it seemed every other corner shop had a stash of these glossy-covered comics displayed on carousels or placed beside their tamer British counterparts like Beano, Topper, or Dandy. With comics like Thor, Hulk, Superman and co. it was difficult to keep collecting consecutive numbers as it was pot luck as to what arrived in the shop every month.

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The clues were in the comic-book adverts for X-Ray specks, with which you could see the bones beneath your skin, or what was hidden under a layer of clothing; Sea Monkeys you could train who would entertain for hours; a mini-Polaris Nuclear Submarine with which to patrol local waterways; Aurora movie monster kits; and reinvent yourself like Charles Atlas or Arnold Schwarzenegger so no-one would kick sand in your face.

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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Coming clean while the world is covered in filth

A wise man from China observed that in the US you can change the party but you cannot change state policy.

In China you cannot change the party but you can change state policy.

The Chinese government is much more sensitive to the will of the people. In the west the people are ignored apart from those brief periods called elections where they are all lied to.

-Sushi | Jul 12 2022 16:18 utc | 30

Coming clean while the world is covered in filth. Yes. The American led world order is over. The Western societies are now collapsed, the governments are running around and acting completely crazy, and yes. Here we are. Brace for impact.

The American led world order is over.

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The American led world order is over.

Make sure that you have a wood stove. Have wood. Solar panels. Try canning and make sure that you have a water filter, and a fully stocked larder.

Now, just move forward and enjoy this post.

The Superb Provocative Digital Art By Doping-Pong

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Based in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, Doping-Pong is a digital art-project started in 1997 by Dima Mishenin, Lova and Anna Maugli. Doping Pong are the pioneers of digital art in Russia.

The digital art world of Doping Pong is incredibly diverse. It is closely linked to contemporary visual culture and pop aesthetics. In the 90ties, te first digital works of Doping Pong were featured in popular youth magazines “Ptyuch” and “Om”. The late works of Doping-Pong are inspired by a realistic tradition, in which there is a place for both heroism in the spirit of socialist realism and everyday, idyllic romance of the late 60s.

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The American led world order is over.

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The American led world order is over.

Calm Before the Tempest?

Let’s start by stipulating the obvious: no one knows the future, and most of the guesses–oops, I mean forecasts–will be wrong. Arguing about the forecasts now won’t make any difference as to which ones are correct and which ones are wrong. Time alone will tell.

That said, here’s a scenario that fits the dynamics I see as most consequential: Core-Periphery and the demise of the waste is growth / financialization / globalization model as the reigning model of how the global economy should work.

Core-periphery dynamics are pretty simple: unraveling starts on the periphery and seeps toward the core. The core actually strengthens in the process as capital and talent seek havens where they’re treated well, and the core became the core by treating capital and talent well.

The periphery responds to the unraveling of financialization / globalization by tightening its grip on whatever capital and talent is still available, incentivizing the flight of capital and talent to the core.

A great many people think there are many core economies. In my analysis, there is only one, due to the qualifying requirements: 1) issues a reserve currency, i.e. not pegged to another currency 2) liquid global markets for securities, debt, commodities, etc., i.e. anyone anywhere can trade in size in the core markets 3) transparent market and governance mechanisms, i.e. no overnight devaluations, expropriations, capital restrictions, etc. 4) diverse economy not dependent on exports or imports for its well-being and 5) ease of flow: capital, talent, enterprises and employees all have essentially unlimited freedom of movement within the core.

We can argue about which nations qualify as core but it won’t change the outcome. Capital and talent will make their own decisions about risk, safety, exposure to devaluation and expropriation and where the odds of being treated fairly are highest. It’s a good exercise to put yourself in the shoes of a manager of a $10 billion fund and go through the decision tree of where to put this $10 billion to preserve its purchasing power first and foremost, and secondarily generate a return.

Would you really gamble $10 billion on a 15% return on the bonds of Timbukthree, whose currency has fallen 20% against the U.S. dollar this year? Or Timbukfour, which is dependent on exports of commodities in a shrinking global economy? Or Timbukfive, which is dependent on imports of commodities and exports of consumer goods in a shrinking global economy?? If you answer “yes,” you’re not actually playing like you are responsible for $10 billion.

As the periphery unravels financially, it also unravels politically and socially. Bordering states are at risk of destabilizing, and any entity with large exposure to the unraveling debt or markets starts unraveling, too. The destabilization spreads to second-tier nations whose exposure to the dynamics of unraveling are structural.

As all these dominoes fall, eventually those closest to the core also crumble, and then core itself is finally destabilized.

Humans have an interesting talent for adjusting to new circumstances, i.e. habituating to new conditions. Those households consuming 14,000 gallons of fresh water a month may well scream that they can’t possibly get by on 12,000 gallons, but then if circumstances change and all the water we have is what we can carry in buckets a kilometer over rough terrain, we find that we can live on the few gallons we can carry a kilometer.

The amount of waste in developed economies is beyond easy measure. It’s estimated 40% of all food in the U.S. is wasted. Energy, food and fresh water have been treated as if low cost and abundance were birthrights rather than brief explosions of excess. While we’re screaming about energy costs, empty buildings are brightly lit, water taps are left running and one individual per idling vehicle in a traffic jam frets about rising costs.

When the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake closed the Bay Bridge across San Francisco Bay, the main artery between San Francisco and the East Bay, economic doom was predictably predicted. Yet people quickly managed via extra BART (subway) trains that rain beneath the Bay and carpools with four people per vehicle rather than one occupant.

Is it possible that all the predictable predictions of economic doom are somewhat exaggerated by the thrill of sensationalism and projections of past trends, as if people can’t possibly make consequential adjustments to their behaviors and consumption?

Systems have constraints, and so there are limits on what adjustments can be made without altering the structure, but in many cases, we’re far from reaching limits on basic conservation work-arounds.

Is it possible that things will prove less dire than currently expected? It seems little credence is being given to the potential to adjust to new conditions.

Is it beyond conception that the core actually strengthens for a length of time before the unraveling reaches it? In my crystal ball, it seems not just possible but likely. This will be the calm before The Tempest, when the unraveling reaches the core and structural changes are finally required.

New York City Begins Preparing Population for NUCLEAR ATTACK

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The New York City Office of Emergency Management has issued a video TRAINING NEW YORKERS FOR WHAT TO DO WHEN A NUCLEAR BOMB HITS.

The ninety second video was released this morning, July 11, 2022, appears below.  It is widely believed they have put out this video because THEY KNOW what’s coming . . . . because it is the government that intends to cause it.

They are pushing Russia so far with economic sanctions over Ukraine, that the Russians will have no choice but to launch a full nuclear attack because what we are doing is now an existential threat to Russia.

Rather than stop what we’re doing, they intend to keep pushing and THEY KNOW what the result will be.

Here’s the video:

 

IDIOCY

In the video, they tell New Yorkers to get inside.   Good advice . . . if there’s anything left standing to actually get inside of!

Then, in the height of utter stupidity, they tell New Yorkers “If you were outside when the blast hit, take off all clothes, shower and shampoo to wash the radiation off immediately.”   THERE WON’T BE ANY RUNNING WATER.   The water mains will all be ruptured from the blast and the electric that powers the water pumps will all be off for miles.

But wait, there’s more . . .  idiocy . . . . they tell New Yorkers “stay tuned to local media and don’t go outside until authorities tell you it’s safe.”  THERE WON’T BE ANY LOCAL MEDIA.  It will all be blown up.  All the TV and radio transmitters will be wiped out!

As if to add insult to injury, they tell New Yorkers “Sign up to NYC-alerts”  (with your cell phone). . . THERE WON’T BE ANY CELL PHONE SERVICE. The towers will all be knocked down, the transmitters fried by electro-magnetic pulse, and the electric will all be out.  THERE WON’T BE ANY INTERNET SERVICE. All the Internet lines will be blown up and the wireless all offline from EMP or no electricity!!!

THEY KNOW WHAT’S COMING

Government does not do things like this for no reason.   In this case, THEY KNOW what’s coming because it is government that is causing it.

They’ve been planning a “take-down” of Russia, for decades.  They expanded NATO when they promised Russia they would not move “one inch eastward” upon the re-unification of East and West Germany.  They broke that promise in stages, moving little by little closer to Russia’s borders.

When they got to Ukraine, they wooed then-President Viktor Yanukovich with promises of riches and wealth for Ukraine if they departed from Russia’s sphere of influence, and joined Europe and the United States sphere of influence.

Yanukovich thought about it.  He consulted with his government officials.  He spoke to businesses in Ukraine.  He spoke with many average Ukrainians.  In 2013, Yanukovich told Europe and America “Thanks, but NO THANKS.”  Well, that was an answer that Europe and America just wouldn’t accept.

So the US and Europe began pouring money into Ukraine to foment and facilitate violent protests; riots in every major city.  Within a year, in 2014, rioters burned government buildings. Snipers were shooting people on both sides to foment more violence.   It got so bad, that Yanukovich had to flee the country and the Ukraine government collapsed.

Who was right there to finance new political candidates?   Europe and America.  So they were able to install a puppet government favorable to the West.

When Russia saw this taking place, they were stunned.  This was happening right at their own border.  The west was overthrowing Ukraine’s government because they need Ukraine in NATO.   You see, they want to put American missile defenses on Ukraine territory.   By positioning our missiles there, they would have a flight time of only about five minutes to Moscow.  They would also have a flight time of only 7-8 minutes to Russia’s strategic nuclear missile silos.

Russia had to act in its own defense.

They did what our own President, John F. Kennedy did, when Kennedy found out the then-Soviet Union had placed medium range and intermediate range nuclear missiles in Cuba, with a flight time of only 5 minutes to Washington, DC:  Kennedy blockaded  Cuba and began massing troops for an invasion.

Thankfully, both sides negotiated a peaceful settlement to what became known as the “Cuban Missile Crisis.”   That was in 1962-63.

Today, the situation is exactly reversed; it is the West trying to put missiles within 5 minutes flight time of Moscow, and Russia said No.

When Ukraine decided they were actually going to join NATO, and allow those missiles . . . and even began preparing for a NATO naval base on the Black Sea, Russia had enough.

By November of last year, NATO had trained the Ukraine Army for eight years under the West-installed puppet government.  The Ukrainians had also massed about 80,000 troops on the borders of the eastern states of Luhansk and Donetsk (collectively called “The Donbas”) – and both states directly border Russia.   So Russia knew Ukraine was prepping its military and its land for a confrontation.  Russia thus had to strike first.  Russia entered Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Instead of backing off, the West upped-the-ante . . . they imposed crippling economic sanctions upon Russia specifically designed to crush Russia’s economy.   The sanctions backfired and are harming the west more than harming Russia.

So what is the west doing now . . . . massing troops in NATO countries along Russia’s border.

Russia has said that if NATO and Russia go to war, NATO has superior conventional forces.  Russia admits that.   But Russia also said “Russia is a nuclear power and Russian nuclear forces are superior to NATO.”  President Vladimir Putin said publicly, “It will be a war that no one will win.”

The only war that “no one will win” is a nuclear war.

NOW, the NYC Office of Emergency Management is publicly telling New Yorkers what to do when a nuclear bomb hits.

WHY?

Because they know what’s coming . . . . because our own government is the cause of it. That’s why, in the first few seconds of the video above, they actually tell you ‘don’t ask why, or how . . . .”   BECAUSE IF YOU START ASKING WHY, YOU’LL FIGURE OUT THAT IT IS OUR GOVERNMENT THAT IS CAUSING THIS! ! ! ! !

It is now clear that the US intends to engage in a nuclear war with Russia.  THAT is why NYC OEM is putting out these warnings.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

I cannot even begin to describe to you, the heat I have taken over the past few months, for warning my web site visitors and radio audience that nukes are going to fly.

I was called “crazy” by the public.   My stories were smeared as “click bait.”   My sources were derided as “fear mongers.”  My radio show was attacked as “scaring the public.”

So now that  the New York City Office of Emergency Management is actually telling New Yorkers what to do when a nuclear bomb hits, I wonder if folks might figure out that I’ve been right all along?

Skirt Steak

As delicious as a Bloody Mary is as a drink, it makes an even better marinade. That’s because the mix of sweet and salty from the tomato juice, the heat from the horseradish and Tabasco, and the acid from the lemon work together to both tenderize and energize an otherwise normal piece of beef. This marinade could do magic on chicken and pork as well, but the bold flavors of a Bloody seem to pair best with a hunk of grilled beef. Serve with grilled asparagus and roasted potatoes for a near-perfect meal. It is an easy brunch or simple dinner idea when you want a nice mix of protein, vegetables, and healthy carbs. Plus, it requires very minimal prep work for a big boost in flavor.

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Skirt Steak

You’ll Need

2 cups tomato juice (spicy V8 works best)
2 Tbsp prepared horseradish
4 cloves garlic, minced
Juice of 1 lemon
1⁄2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
10–15 shakes Tabasco sauce
Black pepper to taste
1 lb skirt or flank steak

How to Make It

  1. Combine the tomato juice, horseradish, garlic, lemon juice, Worcestershire, Tabasco, and pepper in a baking dish and use a whisk to thoroughly mix.
  2. Add the steak and turn to coat.
  3. Cover with plastic wrap. Marinate in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours or up to 12.
  4. Preheat a grill.
  5. Pour off the marinade and discard.
  6. Use a paper towel to pat most of the marinade from the steak.
  7. When the grill is very hot, add the steak and cook for 3 to 4 minutes per side for medium-rare.
  8. Let the meat rest for at least 5 minutes before cutting into thin slices against the grain of the meat.

Eat This Tip

Skirt and flank steak are both thin cuts of beef that offer huge flavor and a pleasantly chewy texture at a relatively cheap price tag. Because they’re thin, you’ll want a very hot grill to ensure you develop a nice char before the interior is overcooked, so keep that in mind when you fire up the grill!

No, Iran Will Not Deliver Armed Drones To Russia

In March this year we were treated to an onslaught of obviously false claims that China would deliver weapons to Russia for the fight in Ukraine.

Russia seeks military equipment and aid from China, U.S. officials sayWashington Post – March 13, 2022

Russia has turned to China for military equipment and aid in the weeks since it began its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, did not describe what kind of weaponry had been requested, or whether they know how China responded.

The development comes as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan plans to travel to Rome on Monday to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi.

“We are communicating directly, privately to Beijing, that there will absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions, evasion efforts or support to Russia to backfill them,” Sullivan told CNN.

Russia is an exporter of military weapons and China is one of its biggest customers. There is nothing in the Chinese arsenals that Russia can not and does not produce itself.

The claim was false from the get go but Sullivan, the mediocre National Security Advisor of the Biden regime, planted it to put pressure on China. It of course did not work.

China denied that it had received any request from Russia or that it was in any way willing to ever fulfill one if it would come:

No Chinese weapons have been seen in Ukraine.

Now an equally stupid claim was launched by the very same liar who launched the fake Chinese weapons claim.

White House: Iran set to deliver armed drones to RussiaAP – Jul 7, 2022

The White House on Monday said it believes Russia is turning to Iran to provide it with “hundreds” of unmanned aerial vehicles, including weapons-capable drones, for use in its ongoing war in Ukraine.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said it was unclear whether Iran had already provided any of the unmanned systems to Russia, but said the U.S. has “information” that indicates Iran is preparing to train Russian forces to use them as soon as this month.

“Our information indicates that the Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with up to several hundred UAVs, including weapons-capable UAVs on an expedited timeline,” he told reporters Monday.

Russia has for some time build mass production facilities for its own drones.

A decade ago, the Russian Armed Forces possessed fewer than 200 UAVs, and now this figure stands at over 2000, and each year is replenished by 300. Furthermore, the Russian defence industry is conducting R&D on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in UAVs, with the ambition of enabling them to perform as unified “swarms of drones” in combat zones. Sources claim that this was already tested in 2020, during the Kavkaz-2020 military exercise.

Russia has absolutely no need to buy drones from Iran. Besides that it is dubious that Iran would be able to deliver some and certainly not ‘several hundreds’.

Gregg Carlstrom - @glcarlstrom - 6:18 UTC · Jul 12, 2022

Does Iran even have "hundreds of weapons-capable drones" to export? It has limited production capacity; would be surprising (to say the least) if it could churn out hundreds, let alone hundreds of useful weapons systems rather than worthless tchotchkes.
Esfandyar Batmanghelidj @yarbatman - 23:14 UTC · Jul 11, 2022

1. @jakejsullivan's claim that Iran is set to send "several hundred" drones to Russia doesn't make sense. Data is spotty, but it's unlikely Iran even has that many operational drones in its own fleet. It also has no experience exporting drones at scale.
2. The Defense Intelligence Agency's 2019 report on Iranian Military Power does not assess that Iran has the ability to mass produce and export drones. Hard to believe things have changed dramatically in three years.
3. From the report: "Despite advances in its UAV manufacturing capabilities, Iran remains reliant on Western manufactured engines and components to support its UAV production. Iran is developing a domestic UAV engine but is struggling with quality issues."
4. @RUSI_org's database seems to suggest that Iran has 50 operational drones in its fleet (cc @Justin_Br0nk). Also most of Iran's drones are rudimentary. These are not Bayraktars and would be of little value.
Perhaps someone can check the Jane's estimate.
5. Last year, @bellingcat reviewed satellite images and video footage "showing over 154 drones." But there's widespread agreement among analysts that these displays of air power probably include drones that are not fully armed or operational.
6. Sullivan's statement is also odd because he says that it is "unclear" whether Iran has already exported any drones. He was weirdly responding to a broader question about Russian capabilities. This export might happen, but I'll believe it when I see it.
7. The only explanation I can think of is that Sullivan believes Iran’s new drone JV in Tajikistan is primarily intended to supply Russia. But I am doubtful production can ramp up that quickly. Plus can’t the US just lean on Dushanbe if concerned?

The Washington Post notes the weird timing of Sullivan’s claims thereby hinting that it was made for purely political purposes which have nothing to do with Russia:

The revelation comes as President Biden prepares to depart for the Middle East, where he is expected to confer with key allies on a unified regional policy toward Iran. Tensions between Washington and Tehran have been further strained in recent weeks, amid faltering nuclear talks and an uptick in rocket and drone attacks on U.S. military installations in the Middle East, conducted by militia groups armed and funded by Iran.

The whole issues is just a talking point designed to put Iran and Russia into the same ‘baddies’ binder for Biden’s talks in the Middle East. The countries there may not like Iran but they will certainly not allow for a condemnation of Russia. The whole idea is, as many others Sullivan had, stupid to begin with.

So no, there will not be any Iranian drones going to Russia or fly over Ukraine.

Posted by b on July 12, 2022 at 9:32 UTC | Permalink

The Aquarium Tiger Shark that vomited up a human arm…

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In 1935 in a Sydney aquarium a tiger shark that had just been taken to the aquarium vomited up a human arm, at first it was believed to be that of an unlucky swimmer, but soon the police realized that this case went further.

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The shark that had vomited up the arm was not the same one that had eaten it. I mean, the tiger shark had eaten a smaller one and that was the one that had eaten the arm in the beginning.

It turns out that despite the damage to the limb, it was possible to know whose it was, in part because it had quite striking tattoos and because the fingerprints were still in good condition. Along his arm there were cuts produced by a sharp object, a razor or a knife. This indicated to the police that it had not been an accident.

The arm belonged to an amateur boxer and fellow criminal named James Smith, who had been missing since April 7, 1935.

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Where COVID came from…

Suppressed info…

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Ron Unz has written an EXCELLENT article on this subject. I strongly recommend you read it, if you are so inclined and want secondary confirmation that the USA is the culprit behind the world-wide bio-weapon attack. Article HERE.

Putin extends fast-track Russian citizenship to all Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Monday expanding a fast-track procedure to receive Russian citizenship to all Ukrainians, in yet another effort to expand Moscow’s influence in war-torn Ukraine.

From HERE

Stunning Illustrations By Michal Lisowski That Will Make You Think How Fragile Our Life Is

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Gorgeous and distinct illustration and digital paintings by the Polish artist Michal Lisowski based in Warsaw. Michal paints in both traditional and digital ways working already for clients like Ubisoft, Disney or NVIDIA. We are very glad to can present you some of his works and please have a look at his incredible portfolio.

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Michael Hudson: The End of Western Civilization – Why It Lacks Resilience, and What Will Take Its Place

Yves here. Below is the text of a new Micael Hudson speech for China’s Global University, which he delivered Monday morning. It’s already gotten 200,000 views in China and is getting coverage in the Chinese press. It focuses on how neoliberalism is a major culprit in the West’s wrong turn. Michael has graciously given us the first English transcript.

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is The Destiny of Civilization. Originally published at his website

The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria– love of money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak.

The Greek concept of hubrisinvolved egotistic behavior causing injury to others. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the debtor against the creditor.

That protection is what rulers were expected to provide in serving the gods.That is why rulers were imbued with enough power to protect the population from being reduced to debt dependency and clientage. Chieftains, kings and temples were in charge of allocating credit and crop-land to enable smallholders to serve in the army and provide corvée labor. Rulers who behaved selfishly were liable to be unseated, or their subjects might run away, or support rebel leaders or foreign attackers promising to cancel debts and redistribute land more equitably.

The most basic function of Near Eastern kingship was to proclaim “economic order,” misharumand andurarumclean slate debt cancellations, echoed in Judaism’s Jubilee Year. There was no “democracy” in the sense of citizens electing their leaders and administrators, but “divine kingship” was obliged to achieve the implicit economic aim of democracy: “protecting the weak from the powerful.”

Royal power was backed by temples and ethical or religious systems. The major religions that emerged in the mid-first millennium BC, those of Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Zoroaster, held that personal drives should be subordinate to the promotion of overall welfare and mutual aid.

What did notseem likely 2500 years ago was that a warlord aristocracy would conquer the Western world. In creating what became the Roman Empire, an oligarchy took control of the land and, in due course, the political system. It abolished royal or civic authority, shifted the fiscal burden onto the lower classes, and ran the population and industry into debt.

This was done on a purely opportunistic basis. There was no attempt to defend this ideologically. There was no hint of an archaic Milton Friedman emerging to popularize a radical new moral order celebrating avarice by claiming that greed is what drives economies forward, not backward, convincing society to leave the distribution of land and money to “the market” controlled by private corporations and money-lenders instead of communalistic regulation by palace rulers and temples – or by extension, today’s socialism. Palaces, temples and civic governments were creditors. They were not forced to borrow to function, and so were not subjected to the policy demands of a private creditor class.

But running the population, industry and even governments into debt to an oligarchic elite is precisely what has occurred in the West, which is now trying to impose the modern variant of this debt-based economic regime – U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism – on the entire world. That is what today’s New Cold War is all about.

By the traditional morality of early societies, the West – starting in classical Greece and Italy around the 8thcentury BC – was barbarian. The West was indeed on the periphery of the ancient world when Syrian and Phoenician traders brought the idea of interest-bearing debt from the Near East to societies that had no royal tradition of periodic debt cancellations. The absence of a strong palace power and temple administration enabled creditor oligarchies to emerge throughout the Mediterranean world.

Greece ended up being conquered first by oligarchic Sparta, then by Macedonia and finally by Rome. It is the latter’s avaricious pro-creditor legal system that has shaped subsequent Western civilization. Today, a financialized system of oligarchic control whose roots lead back to Rome is being supported and indeed imposed by U.S. New Cold War diplomacy, military force and economic sanctions on countries seeking to resist it.

Classical Aantiquity’s Oligarchic Ttakeover

In order to understand how Western Civilization developed in a way that contained the fatal seeds of its own economic polarization, decline and fall, it is necessary to recognize that when classical Greece and Rome appear in the historical record aDark Age had disrupted economic life from the Near East to the eastern Mediterranean from 1200 to about 750 BC. Climate change apparently caused severe depopulation, ending Greece’s Linear B palace economies, and life reverted to the local level during this period.

Some families created mafia-like autocracies by monopolizing the land and tying labor to it by various forms of coercive clientage and debt. Above all was the problem of interest-bearing debt that the Near Eastern traders had brought to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands – without the corresponding check of royal debt cancellations.

Out of thissituation Greek reformer-“tyrants” arose in the 7thand 6thcenturies BC from Sparta to Corinth, Athens and Greek islands. The Cypselid dynasty in Corinth and similar new leaders in other cities are reported to have cancelled the debts that held clients in bondage on the land, redistributed this land to the citizenry, and undertaken public infrastructure spending to build up commerce, opening the way for civic development and the rudiments of democracy. Sparta enacted austere “Lycurgan” reforms against conspicuous consumption and luxury. The poetry of Archilochus on the island of Paros and Solon of Athens denounced the drive for personal wealth as addictive, leading to hubris injuring others – to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis. The spirit was similar to Babylonian, Judaic and other moral religions.

Rome had a legendary seven kings (753-509 BC), who are said to have attracted immigrants and prevented an oligarchy from exploiting them. But wealthy families overthrew the last king. There was no religious leader to check their power, as the leading aristocratic families controlled the priesthood. There were no leaders who combined domestic economic reform with a religious school, and there was no Western tradition of debt cancellations such as Jesus would advocate in trying to restore the Jubilee Year to Judaic practice. There were many Stoic philosophers, and religious amphictyonic sites such as Delphi and Delos expressed a religion of personal morality to avoid hubris.

Rome’s aristocrats created an anti-democratic constitution and Senate, and laws that made debt bondage – and the consequent loss of land – irreversible.Although the “politically correct” ethic was to avoid engaging in commerce and moneylending, this ethic did not prevent an oligarchy from emerging to take over the land and reduce much of the population to bondage. By the 2ndcentury BC Rome conquered the entire Mediterranean region and Asia Minor, and the largest corporations were the publican tax collectors, who are reported to have looted Rome’s provinces.

There always have been ways for the wealthy to act sanctimoniously in harmony with altruistic ethics eschewing commercial greed while enriching themselves. Western antiquity’s wealthy were able to come to terms with such ethics by avoiding direct lending and trading themselves, assigning this “dirty work” to their slaves or freemen, and by spending the revenue from such activities on conspicuous philanthropy (which became an expected show in Rome’s election campaigns). And after Christianity became the Roman religion in the 4thcentury AD, money was able to buy absolution by suitably generous donations to the Church.

Rome’s Legacy and the West’s Financial Imperialism

What distinguishes Western economies from earlier Near Eastern and most Asian societies is the absence of debt relief to restore economy-wide balance. Every Western nation has inherited from Rome the pro-creditor sanctity of debt principles that prioritize the claims of creditors and legitimize the permanent transfer to creditors of the property of defaulting debtors. From ancient Rome to Habsburg Spain, imperial Britain and the United States, Western oligarchies have appropriated the income and land of debtors, while shifting taxes off themselves onto labor and industry. This has caused domestic austerity and led oligarchies to seek prosperity through foreign conquest, to gain from foreigners what is not being produced by domestic economies driven into debt and subject to pro-creditor legal principles transferring land and other property to a rentierclass.

Spain in the 16thcentury looted vast shiploads of silver and gold from the New World, but this wealth flowed through its hands, dissipated on war instead of being invested in domestic industry. Left with a steeply unequal and polarized economy deeply in debt, the Habsburgs lost their former possession, the Dutch Republic, which thrived as the less oligarchic society and one deriving more power as a creditor than as a debtor.

Britain followed a similar rise and fall. World War I left it with heavy arms debts owed to its own former colony, the United States. Imposing anti-labor austerity at home in seeking to pay these debts, Britain’s sterling area subsequently became a satellite of the U.S. dollar under the terms of American Lend-Lease in World War II and the 1946 British Loan. The neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair sharply increased the cost of living by privatizing and monopolizing public housing and infrastructure, wiping out Britain’s former industrial competitiveness by raising the cost of living and hence wage levels.

The United States has followed a similar trajectory of imperial overreaching at the cost of its domestic economy. Its overseas military spending from 1950 onwards forced the dollar off gold in 1971. That shift had the unanticipated benefit of ushering in a “dollar standard” that has enabled the U.S. economy and its military diplomacy to get a free ride from the rest of the world, by running up dollar debt to other nation’s central banks without any practical constraint.

The financial colonization of the post-Soviet Union in the 1990s by the “shock therapy” of privatization giveaways, followed by China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 – with the expectation that China would, like Yeltsin’s Russia, become a U.S. financial colony – led America’s economy to deindustrialize by shifting employment to Asia. Trying to force submission to U.S. control by inaugurating today’s New Cold War has led Russia, China and other countries to break away from the dollarized trade and investment system, leaving the United States and NATO Europe to suffer austerity and deepening wealth inequality as debt ratios are soaring for individuals, corporations and government bodies.

It was only a decade ago that Senator John McCain and President Barack Obama characterized Russia as merely a gas station with atom bombs. That could now just as well be said of the United States, basing its world economic power on control of the West’s oil trade, while its main export surpluses are agricultural crops and arms. The combination of financial debt leveraging and privatization has made America a high-cost economy, losing its former industrial leadership, much like Britain did. The United States is now attempting to live mainly off financial gains (interest, profits on foreign investment and central bank credit creation to inflate capital gains) instead of creating wealth through its own labor and industry. Its Western allies seek to do the same. They euphemize this U.S.-dominated system as “globalization,” but it is simply a financial form of colonialism – backed with the usual military threat of force and covert “regime change” to prevent countries from withdrawing from the system.

This U.S. and NATO-based imperial system seeks to indebt weaker countries and force them to turn control over their policies to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Obeying the neoliberal anti-labor “advice” of these institutions leads to a debt crisis that forces the debtor country’s foreign-exchange rate to depreciate. The IMF then “rescues” them from insolvency on the “conditionality” that they sell off the public domain and shift taxes off the wealthy (especially foreign investors) onto labor.

Oligarchy and debt are the defining characteristics of Western economies. America’s foreign military spending and nearly constant wars have left its own Treasury deeply indebted to foreign governments and their central banks. The United States is thus following the same path by which Spain’s imperialism left the Habsburg dynasty in debt to European bankers, and Britain’s participation in two world wars in hope of maintaining its dominant world position left it in debt and ended its former industrial advantage. America’s rising foreign debt has been sustained by its “key currency” privilege of issuing its own dollar-debt under the “dollar standard” without other countries having any reasonable expectation of ever being paid – except in yet more “paper dollars.”

This monetary affluence has enabled Wall Street’s managerial elite to increase America’s rentieroverhead by financialization and privatization, increasing the cost of living and doing business, much as occurred in Britain under the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Industrial companies have responded by shifting their factories to low-wage economies to maximize profits. But as America deindustrializes with rising import dependency on Asia, U.S. diplomacy is pursuing a New Cold War that is driving the world’s most productive economies to decouple from the U.S. economic orbit.

Rising debt destroys economies when it is not being used to finance new capital investment in means of production. Most Western credit today is created to inflate stock, bond and real estate prices, not to restore industrial ability. As a result of this debt-without-production approach, the U.S. domestic economy has been overwhelmed by debt owed to its own financial oligarchy. Despite America’s economy’s free lunch in the form of the continued run-up of its official debt to foreign central banks – with no visible prospect of either its international or domestic debt being paid – its debt continues to expand and the economy has become even more debt-leveraged. America has polarized with extreme wealth concentrated at the top while most of the economy is driven deeply into debt.

The Failure of Oligarchic Democracies to Protect the Indebted Population at Large

What has made the Western economies oligarchic is their failure to protect the citizenry from being driven into dependency on a creditor property-owning class. These economies have retained Rome’s creditor-based laws of debt, most notably the priority of creditor claims over the property of debtors. The creditor One Percent has become a politically powerful oligarchy despite nominal democratic political reforms expanding voting rights. Government regulatory agencies have been captured and taxing power has been made regressive, leaving economic control and planning in the hands of a rentierelite.

Rome never was a democracy. And in any case, Aristotle recognized democracies as evolving more or less naturally into oligarchies – which claim to be democratic for public-relations purposes while pretending that their increasingly top-heavy concentration of wealth is all for the best. Today’s trickle-down rhetoric depicts banks and financial managers as steering savings in the most efficient way to produce prosperity for the entire economy, not just for themselves.

President Biden and his State Department neoliberals accuse China and any other country seeking to maintain its economic independence and self-reliance of being “autocratic.” Their rhetorical sleight of hand juxtaposes democracy to autocracy. What they call “autocracy” is a government strong enough to prevent a Western-oriented financial oligarchy from indebting the population to itself – and then prying away its land and other property into its own hands and those of its American and other foreign backers.

The Orwellian Doublethink of calling oligarchies “democracies” is followed by defining a free market as one that is free for financial rent-seeking. U.S.-backed diplomacy has indebted countries, forcing them to sell control of their public infrastructure and turn their economy’s “commanding heights” into opportunities to extract monopoly rent.

This autocracy vs. democracy rhetoric is similar to the rhetoric that Greek and Roman oligarchies used when they accused democratic reformers of seeking “tyranny” (in Greece) or “kingship” (in Rome). It was the Greek “tyrants” who overthrow mafia-like autocracies in the 7thand 6thcenturies BC, paving the way for the economic and proto-democratic takeoffs of Sparta, Corinth and Athens. And it was Rome’s kings who built up their city-state by offering self-support land tenure for citizens. That policy attracted immigrants from neighboring Italian city-states whose populations were being forced into debt bondage.

The problem is that Western democracies have not proved adept at preventing oligarchies from emerging and polarizing the distribution of income and wealth. Ever since Rome, oligarchic “democracies” have not protected their citizens from creditors seeking to appropriate land, its rental yield and the public domain for themselves.

If we ask just who today is enacting and enforcing policies that seek to check oligarchy in order to protect the livelihood of citizens, the answer is that this is done by socialist states. Only a strong state has the power to check a financial and rent-seeking oligarchy. The Chinese embassy in America demonsrated this in its reply to President Biden’s description of China as an autocracy:

Clinging to a Cold War mentality and the hegemon’s logic, the US pursues bloc politics, concocts the “democracy versus authoritarianism” narrative … and ramps up bilateral military alliances, in a clear attempt at countering China.

Guided by a people-centered philosophy, since the day when it was founded … the Party has been working tirelessly for the interest of the people, and has dedicated itself to realizing people’s aspirations for a better life. China has been advancing whole-process people’s democracy, promoting legal safeguard for human rights, and upholding social equity and justice. The Chinese people now enjoy fuller and more extensive and comprehensive democratic rights.[1]

Nearly all early non-Western societies had protections against the emergence of mercantile and rentieroligarchies. That is why it is so important to recognize that what has become Western civilization represents a break from the Near East, South and East Asia. Each of these regions had its own system of public administration to save its social balance from commercial and monetary wealth that threatened to destroy economic balance if left unchecked. But the West’s economic character was shaped by rentieroligarchies. Rome’s Republic enriched its oligarchy by stripping the wealth of the regions it conquered, leaving them impoverished. That remains the extractive strategy of subsequent European colonialism and, most recently, U.S.-centered neoliberal globalization. The aim always has been to “free” oligarchies from constraints on their self-seeking.

The great question is, “freedom” and “liberty” for whom? Classical political economy defined a free market as one free fromunearned income, headed by land rent and other natural-resource rent, monopoly rent, financial interest and related creditor privileges. But by the end of the 19thcentury the rentieroligarchy sponsored a fiscal and ideological counter-revolution, re-defining a free market as one free for rentiers to extract economic rent – unearned income.

This rejection of the classical critique of rentierincome has been accompanied by re-defining “democracy” to require having a “free market” of the anti-classical oligarchic rentiervariety. Instead of the government being the economic regulator in the public interest, public regulation of credit and monopolies is dismantled. That lets companies charge whatever they want for the credit they supply and the products they sell. Privatizing the privilege of creating credit-money lets the financial sector take over the role of allocating property ownership.

The result has been to centralize economic planning in Wall Street, the City of London, the Paris Bourse and other imperial financial centers. That is what today’s New Cold War is all about: protecting this system of U.S.-centered neoliberal financial capitalism, by wrecking or isolating the alternative systems of China, Russia and their allies, while seeking to further financialize the former colonialist system sponsoring creditor power instead of protecting debtors, imposing debt-ridden austerity instead of growth, and making the loss of property through foreclosure or forced sale irreversible.

Is Western Civilization a Long Detour from Where Antiquity Seemed To Be Headed?

What is so important in Rome’s economic polarization that resulted from the dynamics of interest bearing debt in the rapacious hands of its creditor class is how radically its oligarchic pro-creditor legal system differed from the laws of earlier societies that checked creditors and the proliferation of debt. The rise of a creditor oligarchy that used its wealth to monopolize the land and take over the government and courts (not hesitating to use force and targeted political assassination against would-be reformers) had been prevented for thousands of years throughout the Near East and other Asian lands. But the Aegean and Mediterranean periphery lacked the economic checks and balances that had provided resilience elsewhere in the Near East. What has distinguished the West from the outset has been its lack of a government strong enough to check the emergence and domination of a creditor oligarchy.

All ancient economies operated on credit, running up crop debts during the agricultural year. Warfare, droughts or floods, disease and other disruptions often prevented the accrual of debts from being paid. But Near Eastern rulers cancelled debts under these conditions. That saved their citizen-soldiers and corvée-workers from losing their self-support land to creditors, who were recognized as being a potential rival power to the palace. By the mid-first millennium BC debt bondage had shrunk to only a marginal phenomenon in Babylonia, Persia and other Near Eastern realms. But Greece and Rome were in the midst of a half-millennium of popular revolts demanding debt cancellation and liberty from debt bondage and loss of self-support land.

It was only Roman kings and Greek tyrants who, for a while, were able to protect their subjects from debt bondage. But they ultimately lost to warlord creditor oligarchies. The lesson of history is thus that a strong government regulatory power is required to prevent oligarchies from emerging and using creditor claims and land grabbing to turn the citizenry into debtors, renters, clients and ultimately serfs.

The Rise of Creditor Control Over Modern Governments

Palaces and temples throughout the ancient world were creditors. Only in the West did a private creditor class emerge. A millennium after the fall of Rome, a new banking class obliged medieval kingdoms to run into debt. International banking families used their creditor power to gain control of public monopolies and natural resources, much as creditors had gained control of individual land in antiquity.

World War I saw the Western economies reach an unprecedented crisis as a result of Inter-Ally debts and German reparations. Trade broke down and the Western economies fell into depression. What pulled them out was World War II, and this time no reparations were imposed after the war ended. In place of war debts, England simply was obliged to open up its Sterling Area to U.S. exporters and refrain from reviving its industrial markets by devaluing sterling, under the terms of Lend-Lease and the 1946 British Loan as noted above.

The West emerged from World War II relatively free of private debt – and thoroughly under U.S. dominance. But since 1945 the volume of debt has expanded exponentially, reaching crisis proportions in 2008 as the junk-mortgage bubble, massive bank fraud and financial debt pyramiding exploded, overburdening the U.S. as well as the European and Global South economies.

The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank monetized $8 trillion to save the financial elite’s holdings of stocks, bonds and packaged real estate mortgages instead of rescuing the victims of junk mortgages and over-indebted foreign countries. The European Central Bank did much the same thing to save the wealthiest Europeans from losing the market value of their financial wealth.

But it was too late to save the U.S. and European economies. The long post-1945 debt buildup has run its course. The U.S. economy has been deindustrialized, its infrastructure is collapsing and its population is so deeply indebted that little disposable income is left to support living standards. Much as occurred with Rome’s Empire, the American response is to try to maintain the prosperity of its own financial elite by exploiting foreign countries. That is aim of today’s New Cold War diplomacy. It involves extracting economic tribute by pushing foreign economies further into dollarized debt, to be paid by imposing depression and austerity on themselves.

This subjugation is depicted by mainstream economists as a law of nature and hence as an inevitable form of equilibrium, in which each nation’s economy receives “what it is worth.” Today’s mainstream economic models are based on the unrealistic assumption that all debts can be paid, without polarizing income and wealth. All economic problems are assumed to be self-curing by “the magic of the marketplace,” without any need for civic authority to intervene. Government regulation is deemed inefficient and ineffective, and hence unnecessary. That leaves creditors, land-grabbers and privatizers with a free hand to deprive others of theirfreedom. This is depicted as the ultimate destiny of today’s globalization, and of history itself.

The End of History? Or Just of the West’s Financialization and Privatization?

The neoliberal pretense is that privatizing the public domain and letting the financial sector take over economic and social planning in targeted countries will bring mutually beneficial prosperity. That is supposed to make foreign submission to the U.S.-centered world order voluntary. But the actual effect of neoliberal policy has been to polarize Global South economies and subject them to debt-ridden austerity.

American neoliberalism claims that America’s privatization, financialization and shift of economic planning from government to Wall Street and other financial centers is the result of a Darwinian victory achieving such perfection that it is “the end of history.” It is as if the rest of the world has no alternative but to accept U.S. control of the global (that is, neo-colonial) financial system, trade and social organization. And just to make sure, U.S. diplomacy seeks to back its financial and diplomatic control by military force.

The irony is that U.S. diplomacy itself has helped accelerate an international response to neoliberalism by forcing together governments strong enough to pick up the long trend of history that sees governments empowered to prevent corrosive oligarchic dynamics from derailing the progress of civilization.

The 21stcentury began with American neoliberals imagining that their debt-leveraged financialization and privatization would cap the long upsweep of human history as the legacy of classical Greece and Rome. The neoliberal view of ancient history echoes that of antiquity’s oligarchies, denigrating Rome’s kings and Greece’s reformer-tyrants as threatening too strong a public intervention when they aimed at keeping citizens free of debt bondage and securing self-support land tenure. What is viewed as the decisive takeoff point is the oligarchy’s “security of contracts” giving creditors the right to expropriate debtors. This indeed has remained a defining characteristic of Western legal systems for the past two thousand years.

A real end of history would mean that reform would stop in every country. That dream seemed close when U.S. neoliberals were given a free hand to reshape Russia and other post-Soviet states after the Soviet Union dissolved itself in 1991, starting with shock therapy privatizing natural resources and other public assets in the hands of Western-oriented kleptocrats registering public wealth in their own names – and cashing out by selling their takings to U.S. and other Western investors.

The end of the Soviet Union’s history was supposed to consolidate America’s End of History by showing how futile it would be for nations to try to create an alternative economic order based on public control of money and banking, public health, free education and other subsidies of basic needs, free from debt financing. China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was viewed as confirming Margaret Thatcher’s claim that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to the new neoliberal order sponsored by U.S. diplomacy.

There is an economic alternative, of course. Looking over the sweep of ancient history, we can see that the main objective of ancient rulers from Babylonia to South Asia and East Asia was to preventa mercantile and creditor oligarchy from reducing the population at large to clientage, debt bondage and serfdom. If the non-U.S. Eurasian world now follows this basic aim, it would be restoring the course of history to its pre-Western course. That would not be the end of history, but it would return to the non-Western world’s basic ideals of economic balance, justice and equity.

Today, China, India, Iran and other Eurasian economies have taken the first step as a precondition for a multipolar world, by rejecting America’s insistence that they join the U.S. trade and financial sanctions against Russia. These countries realize that if the United States could destroy Russia’s economy and replace its government with U.S.-oriented Yeltsin-like proxies, the remaining countries of Eurasia would be next in line.

The only possible way for history really to end would be for the American military to destroy every nation seeking an alternative to neoliberal privatization and financialization. U.S. diplomacy insists that history must not take any path that would not culminate in its own financial empire ruling through client oligarchies. American diplomats hope that their military threats and support of proxy armies will force other countries to submit to neoliberal demands – to avoid being bombed, or suffering “color revolutions,” political assassinations and army takeovers, Pinochet-style. But the only real way to bring history to an end is by atomic war to end human life on this planet.

The New Cold War Is Dividing the World into Two Contrasting Economic Systems

NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the catalyst fracturing the world into two opposing spheres with incompatible economic philosophies. China, the country growing most rapidly, treats money and credit as a public utility allocated by government instead of letting the monopoly privilege of credit creation be privatized by banks, leading to them displacing government as economic and social planner. That monetary independence, relying on its own domestic money creation instead of borrowing U.S. electronic dollars, and denominating foreign trade and investment in its own currency instead of in dollars, is seen as an existential threat to America’s control of the global economy.

U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by “freeing” the wealthy classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of wealth, and ultimate decline and fall. Imposing trade and financial sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries that resist U.S. diplomacy, and ultimately military confrontation, is how America intends to “spread democracy” by NATO from Ukraine to the China Sea.

The West, in its U.S. neoliberal iteration, seems to be repeating the pattern of Rome’s decline and fall. Concentrating wealth in the hands of the One Percent has always been the trajectory of Western civilization. It is a result of classical antiquity having taken a wrong track when Greece and Rome allowed the inexorable growth of debt, leading to the expropriation of much of the citizenry and reducing it to bondage to a land-owning creditor oligarchy. That is the dynamic built into the DNA of what is called the West and its “security of contracts” without any government oversight in the public interest. By stripping away prosperity at home, this dynamic requires a constant reaching out to extract an economic affluence (literally a “flowing in”) at the expense of colonies or debtor countries.

The United States through its New Cold War is aiming at securing precisely such economic tribute from other countries. The coming conflict may last for perhaps twenty years and will determine what kind of political and economic system the world will have. At issue is more than just U.S. hegemony and its dollarized control of international finance and money creation. Politically at issue is the idea of “democracy” that has become a euphemism for an aggressive financial oligarchy seeking to impose itself globally by predatory financial, economic and political control backed by military force.

As I have sought to emphasize, oligarchic control of government has been the distinguishing feature of Western civilization ever since classical antiquity. And the key to this control has been opposition to strong government – that is, civil government strong enough to prevent a creditor oligarchy from emerging and monopolizing control of land and wealth, making itself into a hereditary aristocracy, a rentierclass living off land rents, interest and monopoly privileges that reduce the population at large to austerity.

The unipolar U.S.-centered order hoping to “end history” reflected a basic economic and political dynamic that has been a characteristic of Western civilization ever since classical Greece and Rome set off along a different track from the Near Eastern matrix in the first millennium BC.

To save themselves from being swept into the whirlpool of economic destruction now engulfing the West, countries in the world’s rapidly growing Eurasian core are developing new economic institutions based on an alternative social and economic philosophy. With China being the largest and fastest growing economy in the region, its socialist policies are likely to be influential in shaping this emerging non-Western financial and trading system.

Instead of the West’s privatization of basic economic infrastructure to create private fortunes through monopoly rent extraction, China keeps this in public hands. Its great advantage over the West is that it treats money and credit as a public utility, to be allocated by government instead of letting private banks create credit, with debt mounting up without expanding production to raise living standards. China also is keeping health and education, transportation and communications in public hands, to be provided as basic human rights.

China’s socialist policy is in many ways a return to basic ideas of resilience that characterized most civilization before classical Greece and Rome.

It has created a state strong enough to resist the emergence of a financial oligarchy gaining control of the land and rent-yielding assets.

In contrast, today’s Western economies are repeating precisely that oligarchic drive that polarized and destroyed the economies of classical Greece and Rome, with the United States serving as the modern analogue (for Rome).

1940s Guide Shows How To Kiss Correctly

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LIFE magazine published this guide for actors in 1942, but it may still come in handy today. According to these romantic pictures from the magazine, there are some vital basic steps to follow to achieve the perfect clinch. First, the how-to guide recommends that kissers should not stand too far apart – pointing out that actors doing this on stage look ‘juvenile if they are so stand-offish’.

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“WRONG: They look too juvenile if they are so stand-offish”

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“RIGHT: Boy and girl should stand close together and not hold each other too tightly”

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“WRONG: Sprawling all over the chair is considered ungraceful”

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“RIGHT: Girl should sit on arm of the chair and boy should hold her firmly but lightly”

Watch: NYC Unleash Nuclear-Attack Preparedness PSA

Tuesday, Jul 12, 2022 – 05:45 PM

With COVID-anxiety having waned, America’s leaders need something to stoke the fear and make us more malleable.

In the case of New York City, it appears they turned the fearmongery up to ’11’ this week as they launched a nuclear attack preparedness public service announcement, saying it’s best to be prepared even if such a strike is unlikely.

“While the likelihood of a nuclear weapon incident occurring in/near New York City is very low, it is important New Yorkers know the steps to stay safe,” the city’s Emergency Management Department said in its announcement.

According to the PSA, there are three important steps to take – just do as you’re told and “get inside” a building fast and move away from windows, “stay inside” while removing and bagging all outer clothing to keep radioactive dust or ash away from your body, and “stay tuned” for the ‘experts’ and ‘officials’ to tell you what to do.

Oh, and don’t forget to wear your snugly-fitting N95 mask if you are forced inside a building in close confines with other humans… you can’t be too safe, right?

As Audacy reports, Emergency Management didn’t say if any factor in particular prompted the new PSA, but Commissioner Zach Iscol said in a statement, “As the threat landscape continues to evolve, it is important that New Yorkers know we are preparing for any imminent threats and are providing them with the resources they need to stay safe and informed.”

Watch the full PSA below:

Be afraid America, be very afraid…

Now An Outbreak Of The Marburg Virus Has Begun

Monday, Jul 11, 2022 – 05:30 AM

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Why are so many unusual outbreaks of disease suddenly happening all over the planet?  We were already dealing with a seemingly endless global pandemic coming into 2022, and so far this year a bird flu pandemic has resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of our chickens and turkeys, the worst monkeypox outbreak in history has spread like wildfire in the western world, and now it is being reported that there is an outbreak of the Marburg Virus in Africa.  We have already lost our opportunity to contain monkeypox, and that is really bad news.  But if authorities are not able to successfully contain this new Marburg outbreak, we could potentially be facing a scenario that is downright apocalyptic.

The new outbreak of the Marburg Virus is happening in Ghana.  The two victims that have died so far did not know each other, and officials believe that this is evidence that “the disease is spreading more widely”

Two people are believed to have died from the extremely deadly Marburg virus in Ghana as officials gear up for a potential outbreak.

The patients, from the country’s southern Ashanti region, were not known to each other, suggesting the disease is spreading more widely.

Initial tests came back positive for the virus and the samples are being reanalysed by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Global health authorities have always warned that the Marburg virus is a good candidate for a horrifying global pandemic because it can have a very long incubation period.  The following information comes from the World Health Organization

The incubation period (interval from infection to onset of symptoms) varies from 2 to 21 days.

Illness caused by Marburg virus begins abruptly, with high fever, severe headache and severe malaise. Muscle aches and pains are a common feature. Severe watery diarrhoea, abdominal pain and cramping, nausea and vomiting can begin on the third day. Diarrhoea can persist for a week. The appearance of patients at this phase has been described as showing “ghost-like” drawn features, deep-set eyes, expressionless faces, and extreme lethargy.

All of that sounds terrible, but the next stage of the disease is truly nightmarish

Many patients develop severe haemorrhagic manifestations between 5 and 7 days, and fatal cases usually have some form of bleeding, often from multiple areas. Fresh blood in vomitus and faeces is often accompanied by bleeding from the nose, gums, and vagina. Spontaneous bleeding at venepuncture sites (where intravenous access is obtained to give fluids or obtain blood samples) can be particularly troublesome. During the severe phase of illness, patients have sustained high fevers. Involvement of the central nervous system can result in confusion, irritability, and aggression. Orchitis (inflammation of one or both testicles) has been reported occasionally in the late phase of disease (15 days).

In fatal cases, death occurs most often between 8 and 9 days after symptom onset, usually preceded by severe blood loss and shock.

The largest previous outbreak of the disease was in 2005.

During that outbreak, 88 percent of the victims died…

The largest outbreak to date was in Angola in 2005, when 374 caught the virus and 329 died – a fatality rate of 88 percent.

A disease that has a death rate of way less than one percent ended up paralyzing much of the planet for months on end.

So what do you think will happen if the Marburg Virus becomes a true global pandemic?

Needless to say, the panic would be off the charts, and there is no cure and no vaccine

The Marburg virus is a top concern for public health officials who are worried about the next pandemic. It has the potential to cause serious public health emergencies but there are currently no vaccines or antiviral treatments approved to treat the virus.

Meanwhile, the number of monkeypox cases continues to rise at an exponential rate.

When I wrote about monkeypox yesterday, there were 7,534 global cases.  Unfortunately, Friday was the worst day for this outbreak so far by a very wide margin, and now there are 9,109 global cases.

I had been hoping that this outbreak would fade after the initial spike of cases, but instead it seems to be rapidly picking up momentum.

Here in the United States, it has already spread to 39 different states and the total number of cases has now risen to 790.

If the number of cases continues to double at a very fast pace, it won’t be too long before we have a major national crisis on our hands.

Let us hope that doesn’t happen, because this is a disease that you definitely do not want to get.

This highly mutated version of monkeypox causes extremely intense pain In fact, one victim that was interview by NBC News said that it was “the worst pain in my life”.

Since monkeypox causes very ugly sores on the skin, many have suggested that this sounds eerily similar to a future scenario that I described in my books.

But we don’t know if monkeypox will become a true global pandemic yet.  We will just have to wait and see what happens.

Of course COVID has been a global pandemic for a long time, and now it is being reported that a new subvariant that is becoming dominant in the western world is “the worst so far”

The latest subvariant of the novel coronavirus to become dominant in Europe, the United States, and other places is also, in many ways, the worst so far.

The BA.5 subvariant of the basic Omicron variant appears to be more contagious than any previous form of the virus. It’s apparently better at dodging our antibodies, too—meaning it might be more likely to cause breakthrough and repeat infections.

Despite everything that they have tried, authorities have failed to stop this pandemic.  Our planet has been hit by wave after wave, and now hospitalizations in the U.S. are spiking once again

Eighteen states reported more cases in the week of June 30-July 7 than in the week before, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins University data.

That has also led to a rise in hospitalizations, with hospitals in 40 states reporting more COVID-19 patients than a week earlier. Thirty-eight states had more patients in intensive care beds, and 17 states reported more deaths than a week earlier.

Personally, I am far, far more concerned about monkeypox.

If the number of monkeypox cases continues to explode like it has been, it won’t be too long before there is widespread panic among the general public.

And if the Marburg Virus starts getting loose in the western world we will be facing a scenario that is absolutely unthinkable.

So hopefully authorities in Africa are on top of this, because the death toll from a full-blown global pandemic would be off the charts.

Roast Beef

The Sunday roast has captured the imagination of anyone who wants to recreate the classic American meal, but how many of us take the time to try out this classic recipe? With slow-roasted flavors and a recipe anyone can easily tackle, taking a stab at these classic 1950s dishes should take a spot on any cook’s bucket list. Combine the roast with some sides of mashed potatoes and roasted carrots, and weekend meals are sure to transform forever.

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Roast Beef

Whatever happened to the days when the 6 p.m. dinner bell would ring and Mom would pull a beautifully browned roast from the oven? Well, plenty of things: microwaves, pizza delivery, the narrowing of the gender equality gap. Although it should be said that the pay-gap has nowhere near narrowed. So why don’t we make a new tradition with this favorite meal? Point is, we miss the roast, and there is no reason dads (and brothers, and boyfriends!) shouldn’t endeavor to make a roast beef every so often. That’s right, guys, you can do it. It’s as simple as turning on the oven, putting in the seasoned beef, and pulling it out when it’s ready. This type of roast beef recipe magic should be timeless (and genderless, too.)

You’ll Need

3 lb rump roast
8 cloves garlic, peeled and halved
2 Tbsp olive oil
1⁄2 Tbsp chopped fresh rosemary
Salt and black pepper to taste

How to Make It

  1. Remove the roast from the fridge at least 30 minutes before cooking.
  2. Preheat the oven to 250°F.
  3. Use a small paring knife to make incisions into the roast and gently insert garlic clove halves all over.
  4. Rub the roast with the olive oil and season all over with the rosemary and plenty of salt and pepper.
  5. Place on a rack on a baking sheet and place in the middle rack of the oven.
  6. Roast for 90 minutes.
  7. Turn up the heat to 475°F and roast for another 15 minutes, until the beef has developed a deep-brown crust and an instant-read thermometer inserted in the thickest part registers 140°F.

Eat This Tip

No baking rack? No problem. Many recipes call for baking racks to allow the warm air to fully circulate around the meat, but you can simulate the effect very simply with no extra equipment.

  • Position one oven rack in the middle of the oven and another immediately below it.
  • Prep and season the meat, then place it directly on the middle rack.
  • Place a rimmed baking sheet below to catch the juices as they fall from the meat. (Those precious juices can be turned into gravy with a bit of flour and broth!)

Michael Hudson: The End of Western Civilization

Let me recommend to everyone the speech Michael Hudson has held on Monday for China’s Global University. It digs to the core of the illness that has taken over ‘western’ societies.

The issue is debt which historically was largely forgiven by the king or high priest in case of hard times. But during the time of the Greek and later Roman empires oligarchs took over and demanded to pay back all debt in full and even in hard times. This split societies into a rich rentier class and indebted plebs. Each empire that followed that path, from the Roman to the British one, eventually came down due to over-indebtedness.

The U.S. is the current global empire which is way down on this path. It is hostile to all societies that do not open their financial markets to be robbed by U.S. oligarchs. This is at the core of the current global conflict as China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela developed from different traditions and reject to give in to U.S. demands. The U.S. is used to solve such ‘problems’ by force but is now likely too weak to achieve that.

Naked Capitalism is the first to publish the English language version of Hudson’s speech:

Michael Hudson: The End of Western Civilization – Why It Lacks Resilience, and What Will Take Its Place

The core paragraphs are probably these:

The United States through its New Cold War is aiming at securing precisely such economic tribute from other countries. The coming conflict may last for perhaps twenty years and will determine what kind of political and economic system the world will have. At issue is more than just U.S. hegemony and its dollarized control of international finance and money creation. Politically at issue is the idea of “democracy” that has become a euphemism for an aggressive financial oligarchy seeking to impose itself globally by predatory financial, economic and political control backed by military force.

As I have sought to emphasize, oligarchic control of government has been the distinguishing feature of Western civilization ever since classical antiquity. And the key to this control has been opposition to strong government – that is, civil government strong enough to prevent a creditor oligarchy from emerging and monopolizing control of land and wealth, making itself into a hereditary aristocracy, a rentierclass living off land rents, interest and monopoly privileges that reduce the population at large to austerity.

It will be necessary to bring down the rentierclass. To recommit to a strong state that owns the public goods and services and does not hand them over to private interests. The coming malaise may well help to achieve that.

Posted by b at 14:00 UTC |

Russian Ministry of Defense: “We are on the verge of an immediate armed conflict with the United States”

The Russian Ministry of Defense issued a very late night Press Statement saying “We are on the verge of an immediate armed conflict with the United States” after Ukraine used U.S.-supplied HIMARS weapons to attack a Russian base.  As of 7:12 PM EDT, at least 7 Russian troops are dead and at least 40 are injured.  Those numbers are rapidly rising and changing fast.

In addition to the Russian MoD, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also issued a statement:

The United States and its allies are teetering on the brink of an open military conflict with Moscow, which would be fraught with nuclear tensions, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement on Tuesday.

“After provoking an escalation of the Ukrainian crisis and unleashing a violent hybrid confrontation with Russia, Washington and its allies are dangerously teetering on the brink of an open military confrontation with our country, which means a direct armed conflict between nuclear powers. Clearly, such a confrontation would be fraught with nuclear escalation,” the statement reads.

 

UPDATE 7:19 PM EDT —

Henry Kissinger just said on Fox News that we should expect direct conflict with Russia by mId-August.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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Getting tired of this tedious Bla Bla

The “news” from the collective West (led by the United States) is a complete “cluster fuck”. It’s one set of ugly “news” after the other. It’s so very difficult to gleam truth amidst all the lies.  Here’s some selected (more accurate) “news” items that describe what’s going on, as well as some trivial subjects to interrupt the paid trolls and software compliance ‘bots. I hope you enjoy it.

Russia has made a decisive break with the West and is ready to help shape a new world order

Russia is now focusing on developing its ties with Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

By Russia Today

Just before the G7 leaders met at Elmau Castle in Bavaria, last week, their counterparts from the five BRICS countries held an online summit under the Chinese Presidency. Russia had been discussed as a threat at the G7 gathering but was a key participant in the latter.

Long gone are the days when Moscow could straddle the divide between the West and the non-West. Following the 2014 Ukraine crisis, the G8 reverted to its previous G7 format; in the wake of the Russian military action in Ukraine last February, Russian-Western confrontation degenerated into a full-blown “Hybrid War,” complete with an actual confrontation – if so far a proxy one.

Having tried, after the end of the Cold War, to become part of the new West, and having failed at that endeavor, Russia is now focusing on developing its ties with Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

This is both a difficult and a necessary task, for a number of reasons. First, there is a powerful inertia from the past. At least since the days of Peter the Great, Russian elites have looked westward, adopting western ways of appearance and behavior (while remaining distinctly Russian beneath the garb and manners); adapting western institutions (even if often only superficially); borrowing western patterns of thinking (while creatively developing them, as with Marxism); seeking to become a great European power; then, in Soviet days, a global superpower; and, more recently, a key component of a greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

This is a pathway hard to wean off from. Yet, now, for the first time ever, Russia is facing a united West, from North America, the European Union, and Britain, to Japan and Australia. What’s more, there are no allies in the West that Moscow can turn to – even notionally neutral states such as Finland, Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland, have all ditched their neutrality. Russia’s political rupture with the West is thus complete, and any new norm of relations between them can only emerge as a result of the “Hybrid War,“ which will take years, if not decades, to fight out.

Second, Moscow’s economic relations have been largely built with the West. Historically, Russia has been a resource for Western European industry; a breadbasket of the continent; and a major importer of industrial products and technology. Until recently, Russia’s trade with the European Union alone accounted for more than half of Russia’s foreign commerce, and Germany was the lead exporter of machinery and technology to Russia. Since the early 1970s, oil and gas pipelines from Russia to Western Europe have formed the backbone of economic ties and provided for general stability on the continent, even in the dangerous decades of the Cold War and in the turbulent times of the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. This, too, is on the way out, however.

The severe sanctions imposed on Russia by the US, EU and the UK will not be lifted even when the actual fighting in Ukraine stops, and the painful experience of foreign exchange and asset seizures will leave a huge imprint on any future Russian approach to economic ties with the West.

Third, in cultural terms, Russians have traditionally identified themselves with the rest of Europe. Christianity; the legacies of Ancient Greece and Rome; the ideas of French Enlightenment and German philosophy; European literature and the arts, music, and dance – all of this helped shape and form Russia’s own culture, giving it a powerful stimulus for self-development. Despite the recent political rupture and the geo-economic shift, the foundations of Russian culture remain definitely European.

However, a number of elements of today’s cultural scene in the West, particularly the dominant cult of individual self-expression, runaway liberalism that is turning increasingly oppressive, the erosion of family values and the proliferation of genders, jars with the more traditional cultural code of the majority of the Russian population.

That said, the obvious necessity for Russia to now look beyond the West means it can probably overcome the historical inertia, the legacy of previous geo-economic priorities, and cultural affinities. With the West shunning Russia, trying to isolate and sometimes “cancel” it, Moscow has no choice but to kick its old habits and reach out to the wider world beyond Western Europe and North America. In fact, this is something that successive Russian leaders vowed to do repeatedly, even when relations with the West were much less adversarial, but the Europe-oriented mindset, the apparent ease of trading resources for Western goods and technologies, and the ambition to be accepted into Western elite circles prevented that intention from turning into reality.

It has been noted, however, that people start doing the right thing only when there are no other options. And certainly, capitulating to the West is no option for Russia, at this point. Things have gone too far.

Beyond the necessity of an overhaul of Russia’s foreign relations there are real opportunities to pursue. Since the end of the Cold War, the leading countries of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have risen spectacularly in all respects, from economically and politically to technologically and militarily.

Even before the outbreak of the “Hybrid War,” China had overtaken Germany not only as Russia’s principal trading partner, but also as the leading exporter of machinery and equipment to Russia. India, a traditional importer of Soviet and Russian weapons, is now emerging as a major technology partner for Moscow. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are Russia’s principal partners in regulating oil output in the OPEC+ format.

Turkey and Iran are major independent players in a key strategic region. The fact that the vast majority of non-Western countries refused to condemn Russia for what it is doing in Ukraine – many of them despite strong US pressure – is most encouraging for Moscow. In the sense that those who are not against us could be considered to be with us.

From Indonesia to Brazil, and from Argentina to South Africa, there are many dynamic and ambitious countries that Moscow is seeking to engage.

To be able to do that, Russia’s foreign policy needs to come up with an appropriate strategy. Above all, it needs to give relations with non-Western countries priority over the de facto firmly frozen ties with the West. Being an ambassador to Indonesia should be more prestigious than an ambassadorship in Rome, and a post in Tashkent should be viewed as more important than one in Vienna.

There needs to be an audit of potential economic and other opportunities for Russia in the BRICS countries, and a plan to work on them. Apart from economics, student exchange programs should be expanded, and Russian tourism encouraged to move east, and south. The Russian media would be right to increase coverage of developments in the key non-Western nations, educating the Russian elite and the broader public about the economic realities, politics, and culture of those nations.

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Monkeypox Outbreak DOUBLES in NYC . . . One Week After “Gay Pride” Parade

The number of confirmed monkeypox cases in New York City has doubled in the past week, according to data from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.  This increase in cases comes after the NYC “Gay Pride” Parade on June 26.

The department said in a tweet on Tuesday that 111 people had tested positive in New York City so far, up from 55 a week prior. The tweet states that the city is expecting to receive additional doses of the monkeypox vaccine in the coming days and will make appointments available soon.

The department announced last month that men who have sex with men and have had sex with multiple partners or anonymous partners in the past two weeks would be eligible to receive the vaccine. The vaccine, the Jynneos smallpox vaccine, is administered in two doses four weeks apart from each other.

The city’s health department website states that most people infected with monkeypox in New York City have had mild illness, have not been hospitalized and have recovered on their own.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that monkeypox cases have been confirmed in 33 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

When it became blatantly obvious around the world that this outbreak was taking place in the Gay community, because 99% of cases have been Gay men, the CDC was asked if people should avoid Gay Events and the CDC said “no.”   So here we are, on July 6, just ten days after the NYC Gay Pride Parade . . . and the outbreak has doubled.

It’s not that Gay people can’t control their behaviors . . .  it’s that they won’t.

Why the West has failed to get the rest of the world on board to support its confrontation with Russia

The US-led bloc no longer offers the only viable model for development, which means its ability to impose its will is fading.

By Fyodor Lukyanov

The recent festival of big Western politics – which began with a meeting of the European Council, continued with the G7 Summit, and ended with a major NATO gathering – provides plenty of food for thought about the fate of the world.

On the surface, what we have seen is impressive: The West is showing unprecedented unity in the face of the Russian campaign in Ukraine.

America has gathered almost all of its allies. Right now, from Australia to Norway, from Singapore to Portugal, and from Japan to Iceland, the agenda is the same – to prevent the success of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who represents a rejection of the so-called ‘rules-based order’.

The brutality and irreversibility of what is happening in Ukraine gives the situation the character of a moral choice. Almost all statements from Western leaders refer to a confrontation between “civilization and barbarism”. Accordingly, they believe, there should be no doubt about which side to take.

The Western community has now reached maximum capacity – its European flank (EU and NATO members plus Ukraine and Moldova), its Asian club (South Korea, Japan, and Singapore stopped wavering and took the ‘right’ side), the Oceania pairing, and of course, North America. The ‘free world’ has never been so vast.

This raises a serious question, however. Has the West reached its natural limit beyond which expansion is no longer possible? And if so, what does it mean?

In fact, the topic of the limits of Western influence stems from the notorious concept of the ‘end of history’, which is already so worn out that it is even inconvenient to bring it up. Nevertheless, it is appropriate in this context. Francis Fukuyama’s reflections (he was recently banned from entering Russia, as it happens) led him to conclude that with the collapse of the communist alternative, the only question that remained was how soon and how painlessly the Western economic and socio–political model – which had proved its virtues in the showdown with the USSR – would spread to the rest of the world. The author admitted that it would not be without snags, but in general, the direction was determined once and for all.

How things actually played out after the collapse of the USSR is well known, and despite the fact that numerous crises in developed countries have dimmed the view of the expected path of development, the system has been preserved – and no one has yet come close to the Western world in terms of well-being and comfort. And the Western media still has a near-monopoly on determining the picture of what is happening on a global scale. This means it has a huge head start. But the limit seems to have been reached.

Perhaps the main surprise resulting from the events of recent months is that the West has failed to engage so much of the world in a united front against Russia – the exceptions being those who are already part of the West and a few who passionately want to join the club.

This is unexpected, since few people approve of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Moscow is dealing with problems that are seemingly irrelevant to anyone but itself, and the harsh methods and humanitarian consequences of the conflict do not elicit much sympathy from outside. In other words, objectively, the West has an excellent chance to win over most of the rest of the world by taking the line that its cause here is about opposition to barbarism.

But this is not happening. Why? There are perhaps three main reasons.

Firstly, the non-Western world knows perfectly well that wars on the planet have never stopped, including in the last 30 years, and statements from the EU states about the era of ‘harmony and prosperity’ that Putin interrupted are perceived as both selfishness and hypocrisy. Telling people in the Middle East, for example, that Russia has violated every conceivable moral standard is, to put it mildly, difficult in light of what the region has experienced since the Cold War ended.

Secondly, most in the former third world see the current events as the culmination of a long-standing conflict related to the assertive policies of the US and its allies regarding the territories directly adjacent to Russia. Their attitude is something like: ‘What did you expect would happen when you provoked the tiger?’

Finally, the reaction of the majority of the planet illustrates their irritation with the West as a whole. It is perceived as a hegemon with a colonial history which is always abusing its powers. The reason is not support for Russia’s actions, but opposition to the West’s attempts to impose its will on others, which often harms their own interests. Also, schadenfreude over America’s failed attempts to impose its will compensates for any doubts about the legitimacy of Moscow’s actions.

In other words, it’s not about sympathy for Russia, but antipathy to the West.

Western leaders are both surprised and alarmed by this situation. If the initial calls to join the boycott of Russia amounted to orders, now the demands have been replaced by exhortations and attempts to promise something in return. The selection of the G7 Summit guests – the presidents of India, Indonesia, Senegal, Argentina, and South Africa – is indicative.

The invited parties were warmly welcomed. Everyone was in a hurry to tap Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the shoulder and give him attention. But apart from general statements, nothing happened. And almost in parallel with the events in Europe, Modi participated in a virtual BRICS summit, and Argentina, it seems, together with Iran, has applied to join this emerging association.

The position of non-Western states is dictated not only by anti-colonial instincts, although they do exist. More importantly, in the new conditions, it is difficult for the West to offer the leading countries of the rest of the world anything that would force them to radically change their positions. There are now alternative sources of resources for development – ​​a number of members of the former third world today have money, skills, and to some extent, technology. The West is still ahead of them in many ways, but – and this is fundamentally important – it has now completely lost the desire to share its advantages.

Simply because it now fears competition from them – the experience of American support for the development of China is considered a mistake by the current elites.

Developing countries are of course interested in Western investment, but the nature of interaction is also changing. To put it mildly, the former third world is becoming more demanding and picky, and the West’s ability to impose its own conditions has weakened amid large-scale global changes.

The series of meetings in Europe was intended to show that the West is still the undisputed vanguard of the world, which has both the right and responsibility to lead others. For instance, NATO is once again attempting to become a global organization rather than regional.

The bloc’s most recent experience of this kind – in Afghanistan – ended in embarrassment. But now the approach is more natural – opposition to Russia.

As they see it, Russia is a threat to Western European security (as it was in the glory days of NATO), but it is also a dangerous pariah for all mankind, so opposing it will help expand the US-led club globally. Moreover, the specter of China looms – a systemic competitor to the West and, even better, an accomplice of ‘the Russians’.

How much the Western world itself is united for the full implementation of such a mission is a topic for another article. There are a lot of nuances here. However, even assuming that this is the case, there is no reason to think that NATO’s ambition will meet with understanding beyond its borders.

As a consequence, the broad refusal to recognize the right of the West to lead means there will no longer be a world order based on Western rules.

So People Are Buying Inflatable Jesus Now…

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In today’s epizode of “Weird stuff people buy” we have Inflatable Jesus blow-up doll that people are actually buying (for some strange reason). Maybe they choosing to have Jesus in their lives in a more literal way…

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Easy to inflate, Jesus is 50cm (19.6 inches) tall, looks super lifelike with long locks, hipster beard and flowing white robe. He promises not to punish you with flood or famine if you do something remiss.

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He’s very friendly and will serve as a reminder to go out and do good in the world. If you need proof that he’s the messiah he even floats (walks) on water! This Jesus also deflates for easy storage when you need a break from the Lord.

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This might be a pretty good gag gift for someone who is not afraid to burn in hell, or for your Christian friend you wish to piss off. As you can see from the Instagram posts below, people are really spending their hard-earned money on this thing, and hanging out with it:

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U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve Being EXPORTED – We are Being Sold-Out

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More than 5 million barrels of oil that were part of a U.S. emergency oil reserves release aimed at lowering domestic fuel prices . . . were exported to Europe and Asia last month, according to data and sources, even as U.S. gasoline and diesel prices touched record highs.

The export of crude and fuel is blunting the impact of the moves by U.S. President Joe Biden designed to lower record pump prices. Biden on Saturday renewed a call for gasoline suppliers to cut their prices, drawing criticism from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

About 1 million barrels per day is being released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) through October. The flow is draining the SPR, which last month fell to the lowest since 1986.

U.S. crude futures are above $105 per barrel and gasoline and diesel prices above $5 a gallon in one-fifth of the nation https://gasprices.aaa.com/. U.S. officials have said oil prices could be higher if the SPR had not been tapped.

The fourth-largest U.S. oil refiner, Phillips 66, shipped about 470,000 barrels of sour crude from the Big Hill SPR storage site in Texas to Trieste, Italy, according to U.S. Customs data. Trieste is home to a pipeline that sends oil to refineries in central Europe.

Atlantic Trading & Marketing (ATMI), an arm of French oil major TotalEnergies, exported 2 cargoes of 560,000 barrels each, the data showed.

Phillips 66 declined to comment on trading activity. ATMI did not respond to a request for comment.

Cargoes of SPR crude were also headed to the Netherlands and to a Reliance refinery in India, an industry source said. A third cargo headed to China, another source said — even though China is buying oil directly from Russia and ignoring US Sanctions upon Russia!

At least one cargo of crude from the West Hackberry SPR site in Louisiana was set to be exported in July, a shipping source added.

“Crude and fuel prices would likely be higher if (the SPR releases) hadn’t happened, but at the same time, it isn’t really having the effect that was assumed,” said Matt Smith, lead oil analyst at Kpler.

The latest exports follow three vessels that carried SPR crude to Europe in April helping replace Russian crude supplies.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

The United States of America is being intentionally weakened and drained of resources vital to our survival and to our national security.

Almost one-third of our military weaponry/ ammunition, and armor, has been exported to either Europe (for NATO) or donated to Ukraine.

Now we find that OUR emergency oil reserves are not being used here in the USA, but instead, being shipped OUT OF THE COUNTRY.

If the U.S. is attacked or, God forbid, invaded, we won’t have enough weapons or ammunition, and now, we won’t even have enough of OUR OWN OIL!

This is an intentional weakening of the nation; perhaps to make us ripe for takeover.

Remember who the people are in charge, who are doing these things, so they can be held personally accountable.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s statement and answers to media questions at a joint news conference with Foreign Minister of Belarus Vladimir Makei following talks, Minsk, June 30, 2022

Esteemed Mr Makei,
Ladies and gentlemen,
As my colleague and friend has just said, our talks took place in a truly friendly atmosphere of trust and were very substantial, as they should be between allies and strategic partners. First, I would like to thank our Belarusian friends once again for their traditional hospitality in the wonderful city of Minsk and for the brilliant, streamlined organisation of our work.

The visit is timed to an important historical date – 30 years of diplomatic relations (June 25). Of course, this is just one more, albeit important, landmark in the centuries-old history of our truly fraternal nations. To mark this occasion, we have just cancelled postal envelopes specially issued for this date and signed an anniversary joint statement that I hope you will read. It is worth it.

We emphasised that in the past few years we have traversed a long road in developing our integration. The foreign ministries of Russia and Belarus provide diplomatic support for implementing 28 union economic integration programmes endorsed by the Supreme State Council of the Union State in November 2021.

Today, we reviewed topical bilateral issues. We also discussed the schedule of forthcoming contacts, including preparations for a joint meeting of the foreign ministry collegiums of Russia and Belarus, scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year. We reviewed implementation of the plan for foreign ministry consultations in 2022-2023.

We believe we have managed to achieve remarkable success in trade, and economic and investment cooperation. Last year, bilateral trade reached about $40 billion. Major joint projects, such as, for example, the construction of the Belarusian nuclear power plant, are underway. Industrial cooperation is on the up and up, paving the way for new industrial and logistics chains.

We have a high opinion of the vigorous and broad development of interregional ties. Today, the 9th Forum of Russian and Belarusian Regions is to kick off in Grodno, where contracts worth an estimated $1 billion, a record-high amount, are expected to be signed.

We spoke at length about regional and international matters and agreed to continue enhancing foreign policy coordination and stand up together for the interests of our two countries in the world arena, in keeping with the two-year programmes on coordinating our actions in foreign policy.

We supported further steps towards more active cooperation in multilateral associations, primarily, in the EAEU, CSTO and the CIS. We have almost identical views on how Eurasian cooperation should develop in the future.

We agreed that we would also continue to coordinate our approaches in other multilateral formats, first and foremost, at the UN and the OSCE. We discussed the progress on the projects that are being carried out in Belarus under the auspices of the United Nations, many of which are being funded by the Russian side. We will vigorously continue to oppose any attempts to politicise human rights issues. We see hopeless attempts like this being made at the UN and the OSCE. The West keeps making them with enviable persistence.

We are seriously concerned about NATO’s activities in close vicinity to our borders, primarily in the Baltic states and Poland. We share the opinion that these activities are openly confrontational and tend to lead to more tensions, as well as the division of the European security and cooperation space, that is, they are producing the results which the establishment of the OSCE was supposed to help prevent. Now they are dismantling all this with their own hands, waiving, among other things, the principle of indivisible security, which was publicly declared at the highest level in the OSCE in the late 1990s and in 2010, when it was said that no country should enhance its security at the expense of others. The West’s actions have buried this principle.

In the light of the manifestly unfriendly steps taken by the United States and its satellites towards our countries, we reaffirmed that we are firmly determined to further preclude any attempts by the West to interfere in our domestic affairs. We agreed to continue to join efforts to oppose illegitimate unilateral actions by Washington, Brussels and their allies in the international arena.

We advised our colleagues of our assessments of the special military operation in Ukraine. We maintain regular dialogue on these issues. Our presidents discussed this topic at a top-level meeting in St Petersburg on June 25.

We are grateful to our Belarusian allies for completely understanding the causes, goals and tasks of the special military operation. President Vladimir Putin discussed these issues in his remarks yesterday concerning the results of the Caspian Five Summit in Ashgabat.

We focused on biological security, while exchanging opinions on strategic stability and arms control. We agree that US activities on post-Soviet space are quite dangerous and non-transparent. The activities of Pentagon’s biolabs in Ukraine highlight the risks they bear. We exposed these facts but failed to obtain a US response. So, we initiated a process, stipulated by the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, in full compliance with its Article 5. We sent inquiries to countries, parties to this important international treaty. We perceive threats to the national security of Russia and Belarus, the reluctance of the United States to ensure the transparency of its military-biological activities in many countries on post-Soviet space, primarily those around Russia and Belarus. We have an agreement, within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, to establish close and transparent interaction on these issues, in order to counter attempts to advance such projects (that cause concern in our countries) behind the scenes and without due transparency.

We are also cooperating in order to counter the dirty information war unleashed by the collective West against our countries. We agreed to expand and upgrade Russian-Belarusian media cooperation, and you should be particularly interested in this issue.

We are satisfied with the results of the talks. They help advance our foreign policy coordination still further on the basis of allied and strategic partnership for the benefit of our countries and fraternal nations.

Question:  A risky redivision of the world’s energy sector is taking place. What are the United States and the EU counting on, while renouncing Russian imports?

Sergey Lavrov: I believe that everyone understands what they are counting on. They have no misgivings about openly discussing this issue. They noted this once again yesterday, at the NATO summit in Madrid. They are expecting all other states to unfailingly obey their will, reflecting their selfish interests, primarily those of the United States. We have repeatedly been convinced that modern Europe, in the form of the EU, is losing its independence or even the signs of independence that it once had. Europe completely obeys positions that the United States imposes on it, including those in the sphere of economic sanctions. It is renouncing Russian imports and demolishing logistic and financial chains that had taken decades to create.

Look at the current list of sanctions. I suggest that you conduct this interesting analysis. Compare restrictions that European countries are imposing on Russia and Belarus with the relevant US restrictions. The United States is sparing itself and is trying not to encroach on various spheres that could seriously damage its own economy. Yes, the United States is also experiencing negative effects from this activity, but Europe is suffering much more. I believe that, apart from “punishing” our countries, the United States wants to weaken the European Union as its rival.

Question: At the Madrid summit, NATO stated that Russia was the main threat to the Alliance according to its new strategic concept. Following this statement and their decision to fortify the eastern flank, does Moscow consider itself bound by its commitments under the Russia-NATO Founding Act, or has this document lost its validity?

Sergey Lavrov: In the legal sense, the Founding Act continues to exist. We did not initiate the procedure for terminating this agreement. In the run-up to the summit, NATO had lengthy and vocal discussions about whether they still needed the Act or whether they would be better off abandoning it. As a result, they decided to let this matter be, but their decisions grossly violate the Founding Act, primarily with regard to NATO’s commitment not to permanently deploy significant combat forces on the territory of new (Eastern European) Alliance members.

We will analyse the situation and decide on our further moves depending on how and in what form NATO will move forward with the decisions it adopted and announced.

Question: Will it be possible to restore more or less acceptable political and diplomatic relations with EU countries in the future? Will there be another Iron Curtain? Do we have a bloc like NATO or the EU?

Sergey Lavrov (adding after Vladimir Makei): I agree with almost all of that. As for our relations with the EU, Russia has not had them since 2014. Brussels swallowed the humiliating move by the opposition forces which perpetrated a coup in Ukraine in defiance of EU guarantees. In response, the Crimea residents refused to live in a neo-Nazi state. Ukraine’s eastern regions did the same, and the European Union failed to muster enough courage to talk sense into the putschists who carried out an illegal power grab, and in fact began to support them in their attack, including physical, on the people of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. When the referendum took place in Crimea and the DPR and the LPR were proclaimed, the European Union, instead of pushing for compliance with the agreements between President Yanukovych and the opposition it had co-sponsored, sided with the ultranationalist and deep down neo-Nazi regime which proclaimed fighting the Russian language and culture as its goal. In the years that followed, the regimes led by Poroshenko and Zelensky proved Kiev’s loyalty to this particular course.

In 2014, when it all happened, the EU, feeling powerless and aware of its own inability to enforce implementation of its own proposals, said the Russian Federation was to blame. It imposed sanctions on our country and cancelled the Russia-EU summit planned for June 2014, destroyed every other mechanism that it took us decades to create, such as biannual summits, annual meetings between the Russian Government and the European Commission, four common spaces that underlay four road maps, 20 sector-specific dialogues, including a dialogue on visa-free travel and much more. All of that was ruined overnight. Relations have been non-existent since then. There were occasional technical contacts, but nothing major. No wonder there are no relations now, but we never close ourselves off. From now on, we will never trust the Americans or the EU. We are doing our best not to depend on them in the sectors that are critically important for survival of the state, the people and our security. When and if they get over their obsession and come back with some kind of a proposal, we will see what exactly it is about. We will not play along with their self-serving plans. If it comes to resuming the dialogue, we will push for a level playing field for everyone and a focus on balancing the interests of all participants on an equal footing.

With regard to the Iron Curtain, it is already on its way down. They should make sure they don’t get anything caught in it as it goes down. In all other matters, we have a straightforward position: we are for things being fair.

In 2014, our “partners” refused to hold a summit amid serious events, including a coup, a referendum in Crimea, and a radical change in the situation in the Black Sea region. If you were serious about searching for solutions, this meeting was the way forward. It could have been used to have a candid discussion about the complaints and the counter questions the partners in the Russian Federation had for the EU. The withdrawal from all contacts that took place after March 2014 only goes to show that the EU is not interested in a dialogue, and does not want to understand our interests or listen to what we have to say. What it wants is for everyone to agree with the Brussels’ decisions which are a carbon copy of the decisions made in Washington. We have been able to see that in recent years.

Question: Norway has refused to allow Russian cargo, including food, medicines, and necessary equipment, to Spitsbergen. What steps will be taken to resolve this issue? What might our response be, if any?

Sergey Lavrov: First, we want to see Norway respond to our reaction that immediately followed the incident. We sent an official request demanding clarification as to how this move aligns with Norway’s commitments under the Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920. I hope they will respond promptly. Then, we will analyse the situation. And we will act quickly.

Russia Demands Israel Stop Sovereignty-Violating Airstrikes on Syria

Russia issued a statement Monday, warning such attacks are “categorically unacceptable.”

By Jason Ditz

Over the weekend, Israel carried out attacks against a poultry farm on the Syrian coast, wounding two civilians. Russia issued a statement Monday, warning such attacks are “categorically unacceptable.”

Russia has positions on the Syrian coast, and has warned Israel away from the area before. The latest attack came from the coast, and conspicuously Russia didn’t comment when it happened.

The Russians say it violates Syrian sovereignty, and is against international norms. Those are plainly true things, but have never stopped Israel before.

Israel has shown time and again they’re willing to keep attacking over objections. If Russia decides to flat out stop them militarily, they clearly could, but so far that’s not been the case.

Instead Russia has tried to deter further attacks with air defenses. That’s allowed Syria to intercept more Israeli missiles, but not stop them outright. This warning sounds serious, but so did the last few without any action to stop the attacks.

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EURO CURRENCY PLUNGING AGAINST U.S. DOLLAR

The EURO currency is plunging in value against the U.S. Dollar all day Tuesday, as the world realizes what absolutely must happen as a result of Russia’s announcement they will no longer sell vital commodities to “unfriendly nations.”

At the start of currency trading in the world Tuesday, it took 92 “EURO cents” to buy one U.S. Dollar.    As the day wore on, the value of the EURO plunged so that it now takes 105.552 EURO cents to buy one U.S. dollar.   That’s a plunge in value of 14.47% in one day!

The chart below shows the plunge of the EURO in trading today:

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The reason this is happening has to do with a Decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, July 4.   In that Decree, Russia declared it will no longer sell vital commodities to “unfriendly nations.”

Since March, Russia decided that they would allow European countries to deposit EUROS into Russia’s GAZPROM Bank, the bank would convert the money into Rubles (Russia’s national currency) and those Rubles would be sent into Russia to pay for goods and services.

The reason Russia did that was because Europe SEIZED / CONFISCATED upwards of $285 BILLION in Russian Sovereign Wealth Funds that had been held on deposit in European Banks.   The money was grabbed by Europe as “Sanctions” against Russia for entering Ukraine militarily.

Put simply, Europe stole Russia’s money.

The Russians, unwilling to be robbed again, then established the trade policy outlined above, depositing EUROS in GAZPROM Bank branches IN EUROPE, having them converted into Rubles, and then sending the Rubles into Russia to pay.   Through this method, Europe was unable to seize any more Russian money.

In the ensuing months, the Europeans have literally doubled-down on Sanctions, grabbing the yachts of Russian wealthy oligarchs, cutting off transit of goods from Russia into its exclave state (oblast) of Kaliningrad.

So now, Russia has decreed that they will no longer sell vital commodities — at all — to unfriendly nations.

This means, among other things, no gas, no oil, no wheat, no barley, no chemical neon gas, etc.

Well, Europe NEEDS those things to exist.   Without Russian oil and gas, European industry won’t be able to operate.  Plants will shut down.  Jobs will be abolished.  Products won’t be manufactured.

Without gas, European power plants won’t be able to generate enough electricity to keep businesses running.  There also won’t be enough gas for common citizens in Europe to heat their homes this coming winter.

Without Russian Wheat and other agriculture, Europeans will go hungry.

This is the future of Europe: Cold, hungry, no jobs, no industry.

Europe thought they could literally break Russia’s economy with Sanctions over Ukraine.  Instead, what actually happened was Russia’s economy got through a tough hit and survived, but now Europe’s economy is the one being actually destroyed; by their own Sanctions.

Because the money class sees that Europe cannot survive economically, or agriculturally, they realize the European Currency will likely collapse and be worthless.  So they’re SELLING EUROS to get rid of them while they still have value.

The chart below show the gains by the U.S. Dollar against the EURO today:

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Thus, today’s plunge in value of the EURO versus the U.S. Dollar.

Trouble is, as Europe goes . . .  so goes the United States about two or three weeks later.

Of course, the US has it’s own oil and natural gas, so while it will be amazingly expensive, we’ll still be able to get it.

And the US is a large producer of Agriculture, despite the fed Gov doing it’s best to order farmers to plow-under their fields due to greenhouse gases, carbon emissions, and environmental concerns.  So while food will get stunningly expensive, there will still be food in America.

There may not be, in Europe.

The real impact upon the U.S. will come as European industry closes.  THAT is what will hit U.S. industry very hard, and whether it survives . . . is a real question.

As of today, what Europe absolutely, positively, without doubt and without fail, WILL SUFFER, can only be compared to the Great Depression and conditions during World War 2.

They WILL suffer this, by the end of 2022.  No way to avoid it.  At all.

What the U.S. will end up suffering will be somewhere between the great depression and the 2008 financial crisis.   Closer, though, to the Great Depression.  Because without products and services from Europe, the US will see wide swaths of its industry, crippled.

Thank all those people who pushed “free trade” in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.  They are personally to blame for what’s coming because they outsourced so much production to foreign entities, so they could personally pocket the money saved by reduced labor costs of foreign lands, while keeping prices for goods the same as they had previously been.

They sold out America to line their own pockets.  THAT is what the “free trade” crowd did.

The Question of Ancient Kings: Cerdic of Wessex, First Saxon King of England?

Historians of the ancient world face a myriad of challenges when studying the past. Centuries of legends and myths become intertwined with recorded facts, leaving behind a complex web of mystery. Such is the case with Cerdic of Wessex. Was he an ancient Saxon conqueror, or a British ealdorman? Did he do battle with King Arthur, or was he the legendary wielder of Excalibur himself? Did Cerdic of Wessex even exist?

Cerdic of Wessex and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , Cerdic of Wessex did, indeed, exist. The Chronicle was the first attempt at an official record of English history, written around 890 AD and edited up until 1100 AD. It tells us that Cerdic was a Saxon (referring to people of Germanic descent who occupied central and northern Germany) chieftain who landed at modern-day Hampshire in 495 with five ships full of warriors.

By 519, Cerdic and his son, Cynric, had laid claim to swathes of land through a series of battles with the Britons. After his victory at the Battle of Cerdic’s Ford, Cerdic established the Kingdom of the West Saxons (Wessex) with himself as king.

Cerdic is thought to have died in 534, yet his influence lasted for centuries. Some genealogies of the English monarchy claim that every monarch of England except for Canute, Hardecanute, the Harolds, and William the Conqueror descended from Cerdic.

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South Britain in the early 6th century, which more or less corresponds to when Cerdic of Wessex lived. (my work / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Cerdic of Wessex: King or Ealdorman?

Here is where the historical record becomes complicated. First, scholars have noted that “Cerdic” is a British name , not Saxon. Additionally, the Chronicle refers to Cerdic and Cynric as ealdormen, not kings. If they were leaders of an invading party from the continent, why the title of ealdormen, which suggests they were appointed officials in some capacity?

Finally, ancient sources differ and conflict in their account of Cerdic’s life, reign, and lineage, and the Chronicle, our primary source of evidence regarding Cerdic, was written 350 years after the events described.

Still, while the accuracy of the record cannot be completely trusted, Cerdic is referenced in numerous works. Additionally, three locations in England bear his name: Cerdicesford, Cerdicesleaga, and Cerdicesbeorg. We can presume that these places were named after an influential person, and that that person was Cerdic.

Theories Regarding Cerdic’s Name

Rodney Castleden, author of numerous well-respected history books, posits that Cerdic may have been a Briton whose family was entrusted by the late Roman Empire to defend a portion of the Saxon Shore (a series of fortifications put in place along both sides of the English Channel). Cerdic may have decided to expand his territory and initiated his invasion from his family’s holding. This would explain the title of ealdormen as well as the British etymology of the name and is supported by the lack of Saxon architecture in the area.

Castleden further argues that Cerdic may have been neither Germanic nor a local of what would later be called Wessex; he may have come from Sussex as an advance party. Cerdic’s arrival along the Southampton coast in 495 coincides with Aelle’s (King of the South Saxons) consolidation of his kingdom and would be a logical strategic maneuver. The name “Cerdic” may have been a nickname given by other residents of Sussex and adopted by Cerdic, as Saxons taking on British names was not unprecedented (Castleden points to Caedbaed, an Anglo-Saxon king who took a British name). But while these are historically logical explanations of some aspects of Cerdic’s aura of mystery, what of his relation to King Arthur ?

Arthurian Legend and Cerdic, King of Wessex

First, historical consensus is that there is no evidence King Arthur was a real person. The two primary descriptions of Arthur, Nennius’ history of Arthur’s 12 battles and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the King’s of Britain, are based primarily on poetry or a long-lost manuscript that Monmouth supposedly had access to. Each presents a series of physical impossibilities. For example, Nennius’ 12 battles were so geographically widespread it is unlikely Arthur could have participated in all of them. Additionally, the only surviving contemporary historic record of a battle between the Saxons and Britons (Badon Hills) does not describe Arthur at all. How, then, did Cerdic become involved in the myth and legend of Arthur?

Details regarding the life and exploits of Cerdic are hardly available, which likely lead to historians “filling in the blanks” over centuries of writing. In his 1862 book, The Manual of Dates, George H. Townsend references a battle fought in 520 between Cerdic and Arthur. Yet, if Arthur, who supposedly never lost a fight, won a resounding victory over Cerdic of Wessex, why was Cerdic allowed to conquer so much territory and establish a kingdom? While much of Arthur’s supposed life is shrouded in total mystery, at least portions of Cerdic’s are accepted as fact, including his successful invasion of the Isle of Wight in 530, just a few years after he was supposed to have been defeated by Arthur. Thus, even if Arthur existed, it seems highly unlikely the two ever met on the battlefield.

Silent Hill Promotional Event In Tokyo

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Models dressed as bandaged nurses take part in a promotional event for the film “Silent Hill” on June 22, 2006 in Tokyo, Japan.

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Are Cerdic and King Arthur One in the Same?

Historians John and Joseph Rudmin noted a number of similarities between the Arthur of legend and the Cerdic of history (who they posit was also known as Ceredig Vreichvras). They examined several writings regarding both figures and created a table comparing them side-by-side, revealing striking parallels. The paper makes for fascinating reading and argues that King Arthur and Cerdic were actually the same person, which the authors claim resolves a number of the problems surrounding Arthur’s potential presence in history. Others, however, have pointed out that these conclusions rest on the shaky foundations of assumption and lack the kind of hard historical evidence necessary to draw a firm conclusion.

Ultimately, modern historians must grapple with the fact that history has often been used as a political tool. For centuries (and yes, even today) historical narratives served to bolster nationalism, to push political ideals, to boost the reputation of leaders, or to minimize dark deeds.

This fact, when combined with the often ill-recorded details of the ancient world, leads to figures like King Arthur and Cerdic of Wessex, people shrouded in mystery whose lives were mythologized by successive chroniclers of history weaving stories to suit their needs.

We may never know the actual truth of who Cerdic was, why he was so influential, or whether he may have inspired Arthurian legend, but to be honest, the mysteries of history are half the fun.

This is what “Diversity” Actually Is . . .

The politically-correct, and the weak-minded have, for years, told us that “Diversity is our strength” when reality shows it is just the opposite.  Want proof? Watch the two minute video of “Diversity” attacking in New York City . . .

The video below is from Bel Fries in New York City.   The three women were told that the fries they ordered would cost $1.75 more for the extra sauce they wanted.   The women didn’t want to pay the $1,75 . . . . so they did this:

THIS is what “Diversity” actually is:

The New York City Police Department has confirmed the arrests of the three women: Pearl Ozaria , 27, Chitara Plasencia , 25, and Tatiyanna Johnson , 23.”

Ahhhhhh “Diversity.”   Had enough yet?

The U.S. is welcoming Finland and Sweden to NATO. That’s a mistake.

Instead of lowering the chances of war, the membership of the two Nordic countries increases the risk for the entire alliance.
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When NATO alliance members meet in Madrid this week, one of the featured agenda items is Finland and Sweden’s request to officially join the alliance. The NATO leadership has welcomed their ascension, with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg saying the two countries’ “membership in NATO would increase our shared security.” Though member state Turkey originally signaled it objected to the idea, it lifted its opposition after a breakthrough on Tuesday that clears the way for the Nordic states.

While enlarging NATO might seem like a wise thing to do in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it doesn’t take much sober analysis to conclude that adding yet more NATO members is likely to have the opposite effect of what the secretary general hopes.

Instead of lowering the chances of war, the membership of Finland and Sweden would increase the risk of future conflict for the entire alliance; adding two more triggers for Article 5 — the provision in the NATO charter that stipulates that an attack on one is an attack on all — would add to the risk of war for the entire alliance. That would be an unwise course in any case, but it’s particularly ill-advised given that it would make Finland and Sweden more vulnerable, as well.

But there is an even more fundamental reason to oppose expanding the alliance at present: It isn’t needed. Russia has exposed itself as being shockingly weak in conventional military power, and it is now clear, beyond any question, that Russian ground forces don’t even possess the capacity to invade the NATO alliance. It isn’t entirely clear that Moscow will be able to capture the entirety of the Donbas region, in the single country of Ukraine, directly on its border. Russia is constrained in its ability to project power beyond its country by systemic flaws in its logistics system. It is very difficult to get supplies beyond more than 180 miles away and virtually impossible beyond that without dedicated rail links.

It is understandable that people who live near Russia would be afraid that one day Russia might invade them as it invaded Ukraine, and that, no doubt, led Sweden and Finland to make a sudden U-turn on their long-held preferences for neutrality. But an unemotional evaluation of their neighborhood shows their fears are misplaced. Sweden and Finland are at no clearer risk of an attack from Moscow than they have been for the past 70 years.

Though the U.S. has also recently shown itself eager to expand the alliance to these countries, the accession of Sweden and, especially, Finland could hardly be said to further the American national interest. Finland shares a roughly 800-mile border with Russia that NATO would be committed to defend, and this defense — or the stationing of NATO military infrastructure in Finland — would risk antagonizing Russia.

Washington should at least be clear that if Finland becomes a NATO member, it expects that the Europeans would be tasked with defending Finland’s border, as the U.S. itself is already doing too much for the defense of wealthy and capable European countries.

None of this is to say that Russia doesn’t pose a danger to Europe, however. It does.

But the nature of the threat isn’t conventional military power; it’s the massive Russian nuclear arsenal that could nearly wipe out the U.S. and Europe in an Armageddon-type scenario.

Have Breakfast Ready in 60 Seconds Each Morning with these Freezer Friendly Breakfast Burritos

This is a SUPER IMPORTANT video. Check it out.

“Partnership in Blue Pacific” to Turn Pacific Islands into Anti-China War Zone

If world war III in Europe isn’t enough, they want it to also occur in the Pacific.

Finland and Sweden’s joining NATO is the ‘opposite of what President Putin wanted,’ says former Ambassador Bill Taylor

June 29, 202200:42

Russia poses no realistic threat to Sweden or Finland. Since World War II, Russia hasn’t exhibited the slightest interest in territorial acquisition in either country, and in fact, Finland and Russia were on friendly terms during the Cold War. In contrast, Russia was consistently and emphatically clear for 15 years that it regarded any NATO expansion along its border in either Ukraine or Georgia as an existential threat that it would use force to prevent — and in fact has done so twice (Georgia 2008 and Ukraine 2014). Thus Georgia and Ukraine had reason to fear a Russian attack. Finland and Sweden don’t.

Extending NATO membership to these two countries wouldn’t only burden the U.S., which would be expected to go to war on behalf of these two Nordic states if they are attacked. It would saddle Helsinki and Stockholm with troubles, as well. Up to now, if a war ever broke out between NATO and Russia, both Finland and Sweden would have been protected by their neutral status. If membership were extended to both, that protection would be gone.

If the two became NATO members and the alliance went to war with Russia in the future, both countries would be thrust almost immediately into an armed conflict whether they wanted to be or not — and even if their national interests weren’t otherwise threatened. Given their status as NATO members, the Kremlin would almost certainly attack airfields and ports in both countries to prevent other allies from using their facilities to stage attacks against Russia.

Federal Agents Personally Delivering “Cease and Desist” Letters for Social Media Postings about Gov’t

It's American "freedom" don't you know!

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Four (4) federal Agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, paid a personal visit to Madeline Walker of Texas, to warn her, in writing, that her “harassing and threatening” social media posts about government ” are unnecessary and unwelcome” and if she doesn’t stop, they will arrest her under 18 USC 115.

Now, Ms. Walker is a radical leftist, pro-abortion person.   In a recent social media post on Twitter about the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, she wrote:

“Burn every fucking government building down right the fuck now.  Slaughter them all. Fuck you god damn pigs.”

Ms. Walker then found four federal agents banging on her Texas home’s front door early this morning.   Among those agents was:

Joshua H. Henry, Special Agent, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, National Protection and Programs Directorate, Federal Protective Service  out of Houston, TX, who questioned her about her posting and handed her this letter:

For what it’s worth, the Statute they cite is the precise statute under which I was personally convicted, after THREE trials in US District Court back in 2009 and 2010.

First trial in December, 2009, resulted in a Hung Jury.  Second trial in March, 2010 also resulted in a Hung Jury.   By the third trial, I was Bankrupt from having been held without Bail for writing an Editorial they didn’t like, filed bankruptcy because I could no longer afford to pay my attorneys – or anyone else- having been held in jail for 119 days without bail, and was given a  public Defender.  He did such a poor job that, at trial three in August, 2010, I was convicted.

I was Sentenced to 33 months in federal prison, for including in my Editorial about a Gun Control case in Chicago, my opinion that “these judges deserve to be killed.”

I was held in the Communications Management Unit (Terrorist Unit) at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana.  Tighter security and fewer privileges than Super Max!

So, in short, I said someone “deserves” to be killed and got 33 months federal terrorist prison.  She told the world: ““Burn every fucking government building down right the fuck now.  Slaughter them all. Fuck you god damn pigs.” and she got a hand delivered cease and desist letter.

So right-wing conservatives like me get prison, while left-wing maniacs get a cease and desist letter.   Same criminal statute!  How’s THAT for “equal protection of the law?”

Oh and about the letter above, this is how they intend to intimidate Americans into shutting up.   Calling protected speech “Harassment/threats” is deliberate intimidation by them.

Such is the state of “liberty” in the USA.

Pathetic.

Rationing Has Already Started In Europe As The Entire Globe Plunges Into A Horrific Economic Nightmare

If countries in Europe are already beginning to ration certain things due to “supply problems”, how long will it be before it starts happening in the United States?  Up until the past couple of years, many of us in the western world always considered shortages to be something that only “unsophisticated” poor countries on the other side of the planet had to deal with.  But the last couple of years have shown us that painful shortages can happen to wealthy countries in the western world too.  At first we were told that they were “just temporary”, but the months went by and we just kept having more shortages.  In fact, in 2022 “supply problems” have become so serious that many supermarkets in Europe have been forced to strictly ration essential items at various times.  For example, it was being reported that due to the war in Ukraine flour, sunflower oil and sugar were all being rationed by stores in Greece

After limiting the sale of some flours and sunflower oil online, Greek supermarkets are turning to rationing the sale of sugar as well, now including in their stores, over supply problems.

The AB Vassilopoulos is setting a maximum limit on the purchase of all brands of corn and sunflower oil and of flour per customer while Mymarket put a ceiling on sunflower oil purchases and Sklavenitis has added sugar to the rationed sales of corn oil through its online store, with a maximum of four packs, the products in high demand from restaurants, some of which said they have to stop selling french fries and other fried foods.

Over the past few months we have seen similar measures implemented in other major European nations as well.  For example, the war in Ukraine prompted some pretty severe rationing in Spain

Sporadic shortages of products like eggs, milk, and other dairy products also hit Spain since the war in Ukraine began. And major supermarkets including Mercadona and Makro began rationing sunflower oil earlier this month.

Now, stores will temporarily be allowed to limit “the number of goods that can be bought by a client,” according to information in the Official State Gazette published on Wednesday.

Looking forward, natural gas rationing is the next big thing that many people in Europe are talking about.  The flow of Russian natural gas into Europe has been cut back, and it appears that this may soon cause widespread rationing in Italy

Italy may start rationing natural-gas consumption to certain industrial giants, after Russia’s Gazprom halved supplies on Friday.

On the weekend, the newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that the Italian government and energy industry would meet Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss the crisis, with the likely outcome being the introduction of a state of alert under the country’s gas emergency protocol.

And CNN is reporting that Germany is “one step closer to rationing supplies” now that Russia has decided to reduce the flow of natural gas going to that country…

Europe’s biggest economy is now officially running short of natural gas and is escalating a crisis plan to preserve supplies as Russia turns off the taps.

Germany on Thursday activated the second phase of its three-stage gas emergency program, taking it one step closer to rationing supplies to industry — a step that would deliver a huge blow to the manufacturing heart of its economy.

Of course there are other parts of the globe that are dealing with problems that are far, far more serious than what Europe is facing right now.

As I discussed in an article that I posted earlier this week, significant numbers of people are starting to literally drop dead from starvation in portions of eastern Africa.  Global food supplies just keep getting tighter, and the head of the UN is openly telling us that the world is heading into an “unprecedented global hunger crisis”.

So if you have plenty of food to eat tonight, you should be thankful.

Here in the United States, economic conditions are deteriorating fairly rapidly, and most Americans are completely and totally unprepared for any sort of a major economic downturn.  Earlier today, I came across yet another survey that shows that about 60 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck

“We find that consumers in all income brackets — including those who make more than $100,000 annually — are living paycheck to paycheck. PYMNTS’ research finds that 61% of U.S. consumers were living paycheck to paycheck in April 2022, marking a 9 percentage point increase from 52% in April 2021, meaning that approximately three in five U.S. consumers devote nearly all of their salaries to expenses with little to nothing left over at the end of the month.”

So what is going to happen when those people start losing their jobs in large numbers?

Already, we have seen the number of tech layoffs greatly accelerate over the last couple of months.

Sadly, the layoffs will get much worse in the months ahead.

And as inflation continues to systematically eat away at our standard of living, Americans are turning to credit cards at a record pace

As Americans grapple with the highest inflation in 40 years, the number of new credit cards have surged as more Americans rely on them to keep up with high prices. According to a recent report from the Federal Reserve, revolving credit (credit cards and lines of credit) increased by 19.6% from the previous year to $1.103 trillion.

Going into credit card debt is not a solution.

At best, it can buy you a little bit of time.

And it is especially a bad idea to go into credit card debt as we plunge into a recession.

At this point, almost everyone realizes that things are going to get bad.  According to one recent poll, a whopping 85 percent of all Americans believe that the U.S. is “headed in the wrong direction”

The national dissatisfaction is bipartisan. Most Americans, 85%, say the country is headed in the wrong direction. A majority of Republicans have been unhappy with the direction of the country since Biden’s election. Democrats had been positive about how things were going, but now 78% say the country is headed in the wrong direction.

I was astounded to see that 78 percent of Democrats believe that the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction with a Democrat in the White House.

I have never seen a number like that ever before.

But this is just another indication that the hour is late and that things are about to start getting really crazy out there.

For the moment, life is still at least somewhat normal in the western world.

Sadly, it won’t stay that way for long, and so I would recommend using your time wisely.

Neil Oliver: This supposed utopia we’re having rammed down our throats isn’t working

Well said. I really like Neil.

Pfizer fraud admitted

In an interview with The Defender, the lawyer representing whistleblower Brook Jackson said Pfizer is arguing the court should dismiss Jackson’s lawsuit alleging fraud in Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trials because the U.S. government knew about the wrongdoings but continued to do business with the vaccine maker.

lawsuit filed by whistleblower Brook Jackson alleging Pfizer and two of its contractors manipulated data and committed other acts of fraud during Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trials is paused following a motion by the defendants to dismiss the case.

In an interview with The Defender, Jackson’s lawyer said Pfizer argued the lawsuit, which was filed under the False Claims Act, should be dismissed because the U.S. government knew of the wrongdoings in the clinical trials but continued to do business with the vaccine maker.

Under the False Claims Act, whistleblowers can be rewarded for confidentially disclosing fraud that results in a financial loss to the federal government.

However, a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision that expanded the scope of a legal principle known as “materiality” resulted in a series of federal court decisions in which fraud cases brought under the False Claims Act were dismissed.

As interpreted by the Supreme Court, if the government continued paying a contractor despite the contractor’s fraudulent activity, the fraud was not considered “material” to the contract.

Pfizer is a federal contractor because it signed multiple contracts with the U.S. government to provide COVID-19 vaccines and Paxlovid, a pill used to treat the virus.

“Pfizer claims they can get away with fraud as long as the government would write them a check despite knowing about the fraud,” attorney Robert Barnes said.

The other two defendants in the case are Ventavia Research Group, which conducted vaccine trials on behalf of Pfizer, and ICON PLC, also a Pfizer contractor.

In an attempt to strengthen the False Claims Act’s anti-retaliation provisions and install new safeguards against industry-level blacklisting of whistleblowers seeking employment, Congress in July 2021 introduced the False Claims Amendments Act of 2021.

In December 2021, Pfizer hired a well-connected lobbyist, Hazen Marshall, and the law firm Williams & Jensen to lobby against the bill.

Pfizer previously was heavily fined in connection with the False Claims Act. As part of a 2009 settlement, the company paid $2.3 billion in fines — the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice — stemming from allegations of illegal marketing of off-label products not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“Pfizer, one of the most criminally fined drug companies in the world, wants to weaken the laws that hold them accountable,” Barnes told The Defender.

Congress has taken no action on the False Claims Amendments Act since November 2021, when the bill was added to the Senate’s legislative calendar.

Barnes said the outcome of Jackson’s case against Pfizer is significant not just for his client, but also for the American public.

“This case will determine if Big Pharma can rip off the American people using a dangerous drug that harms millions without any legal remedy because they claim the government was in on the scam.”

Jackson was a regional director for Ventavia for a brief period in 2020 but was fired after she notified the FDA about issues with Pfizer’s vaccine trials.

After she was fired, she gave The BMJ a cache of internal company documents, photos and recordings highlighting the alleged wrongdoing by Ventavia.

The documents she provided contained evidence of falsified data, blind trial failures and awareness on the part of at least one Ventavia executive that members of the company’s staff were “falsifying data.”

Jackson’s documents also provided evidence of administrators who had “no training” or medical certifications, or who provided “very little oversight” during the trials.

Jackson filed her complaint in August 2021, in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division, alleging Pfizer, Ventavia and ICON “deliberately withheld crucial information from the United States that calls the safety and efficacy of their vaccine into question.”

A district court judge in February unsealed Jackson’s complaint, which included 400 pages of exhibits.

According to the complaint, Jackson, who had more than 15 years of experience working with clinical trials, “repeatedly informed her superiors of poor laboratory management, patient safety concerns and data integrity issues” during the approximately two weeks she was employed by Ventavia.

“Brook [Jackson] brought a Qui Tam action and a retaliatory discharge case against Pfizer and others for fraud on the people concerning Pfizer’s false certifications to the U.S. Department of Defense about the safety and efficacy of their COVID-19 vaccine,” Barnes said.

A Qui Tam case refers to a provision under the False Claims Act that allows individuals and entities with evidence of fraud against federal programs or contracts to sue the wrongdoer on behalf of the U.S. government

“She was part of the clinical trials, witnessed extraordinary malfeasance, blew the whistle, and was quickly fired after she blew the whistle.”

Barnes said his legal team will in August file its opposition brief to Pfizer’s motion to dismiss, and the judge may rule on the motion to dismiss by fall 2022.

Full article HERE

We Are Witnessing A Stunning Breakdown Of Law And Order, And The Overwhelmed Police Seem Powerless To Stop It

Violent crimes are on the rise in six of America’s major cities and set to outpace the already historic levels of 2021 violent crime.

Baltimore, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and New York City are all on pace to break their 2021 levels of violent crime halfway through this year, with the nation’s largest city leading the group, according to crime data reviewed by Fox News.

At this point, violent crime is up 25.8 percent in New York City compared to the first half of last year.

That is staggering.

Of course New York City still has a way to go before it gets as bad as Chicago.

In the Windy City, there are hundreds of thousands of “high-priority emergency service calls” each year, and last year there were no police available to respond to those calls 52 percent of the time

New data uncovered by Wirepoints through public records requests to the Chicago Police Department (CPD) reveal that in 2021 there were 406,829 incidents of high-priority emergency service calls for which there were no police available to respond.

That was 52 percent of the 788,000 high-priority 911 service calls dispatched in 2021.

So if you are the victim of a violent crime in Chicago, your odds of having a police officer available to help you are about the same as guessing a coin flip correctly.

The following is a partial list of “high-priority emergency service calls” for which no police officer was available in 2021…

  • 14,955 – assaults in progress.
  • 17,828 – batteries in progress.
  • 16,350 – person with a gun.
  • 5,210 – person with a knife.
  • 12,787 – shots fired (reports from people, not the city’s automated “Shotspotter”)
  • 1,352 – person shot.
  • 887 – person stabbed.
  • 14,265 – domestic battery.

Despite numbers such as these, there are lots of people out there that are relentlessly calling for the police to be “defunded”.

Do they want total anarchy?

Because that is what would happen.

Our streets are already bad enough.  As you can see from this video, police in Chicago are having a really difficult time even protecting themselves at this point.

But Chicago actually doesn’t have the highest murder rate in the nation.

That honor goes to New Orleans

It’s no secret that New Orleans struggles with violent crime, but new statistics paint a grim picture of the Crescent City being on pace to be the murder capital of the United States if trends don’t change in 2022.

According to data from AH Datalytics, compiled using the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, New Orleans has a per capita year-to-date homicide rate of 72 per 100,000 residents. The next three U.S. cities behind New Orleans are Birmingham with a per capita homicide rate of 59 per 100,000 residents and Baltimore and St. Louis, each with a per capita homicide rate of 58 per 100,000 residents.

So far this year, the murder rate in New Orleans is up 44 percent.

But the corporate media is trying to convince us that all of this is perfectly “normal”, aren’t they?

Do you believe them?

One man that will never be fooled is World War II veteran Carl Spurlin Deke.  He just turned 100 years old on June 29th, and when he was interviewed by a local news outlet he boldly declared that the U.S. “is going to hell in a handbasket”

Deke’s gratitude for his life quickly turned into an emotional confession about his concern about the entitlement and ungrateful grievance erupting from younger generations saying, “People don’t realize what they have. They b*tch about it. And then nowadays, I am so upset because the things we did, the things we fought for, and the boys that died for it, it’s all going down the drain.” Deke began weeping as he added “Our country is going to hell in a handbasket. We haven’t got the country we had when I was raised, not at all.”

The 100-year-old WWII vet cried for those growing up in America today saying, “Nobody will have the opportunity I had. It’s just not the same. That’s not what our boys, that’s not what they died for.”

Sadly, he is 100 percent correct.

We are in an advanced state of decline, and it is getting worse with each passing day.

If things are this bad now, what will this country look like once economic conditions deteriorate quite a bit more?

Previous generations of young Americans were equipped to handle adversity.

This generation of young Americans is not.

The thin veneer of civilization that we all used to be able to take for granted is steadily disappearing, and our society is evolving into a horror show that would have been unrecognizable to previous generations.

If we would have done things differently, we could have gotten much different results.

Our choices have consequences, and now most of our major cities are being transformed into crime-infested hellholes right in front of our eyes.

Are there any old “Mad Magazine” fans out there?

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Buying FLOODED Supercars at Salvage Auction for CHEAP!

Oh My God! Don’t ejaculate on your screen!

U.S. Generals Have Been Wrong on Ukraine. We Shouldn’t Be Shocked

Frederick B. Hodges, former commanding general of U.S. Army-Europe, claimed last month that Ukraine’s forces would soon slow Russia’s advance and, the New York Times reported, begin “to roll back its gains by late summer.” Hodges said his confidence was based on his belief that “the Ukrainian logistical situation getting better each week while the Russian logistical situation will slowly degrade.”

Such claims, however, are in contradiction to observable reality on the battlefield – and continue a disturbing, decades-long trend of poor and misleading advice given by America’s top military officers.

Listening over the past four months to what America’s retired generals and admirals have said on TV, one would be forgiven for believing that Ukraine is winning its war with Russia, that Putin’s troops and leaders are incompetent, and that soon Ukrainian troops will begin rolling the Russians back.

Such belief, however, would be badly misplaced, as substantial evidence indicates virtually the opposite.

A Rosy Look at the Brutal Battle in Ukraine

Rosy, optimistic – and inaccurate – assessments from U.S. flag officers have unfortunately become the norm over the past few decades. While some current and former generals give excellent and accurate assessments, there are far too many that don’t. The consequence to American policy has often been severe. It is time to reassess how much credibility we should place with American generals and admirals.

As I have chronicled on these pages, the conditions and military fundamentals clearly evident for years have strongly suggested that Ukraine could not win a war with Russia, and that both Kyiv and Washington should have made different policy choices based on that reality, both before and since Russia’s illegal invasion. But as graphically detailed below, active and retired flag officers have continually claimed that – ignoring clear evidence to the contrary – Ukraine has a chance to win the war.

Encouraging Ukraine to Keep Up the Fight

Such unwarranted assertions have led policymakers and the American public to believe, improperly, that we should continue encouraging Ukraine to maintain its fight against Russia. American official policy has been to provide Kyiv with substantial armaments to defend itself and overwhelming emotional support.

If the generals were right, if Ukraine were indeed close to winning the war, and if the aid we have offered could tip the scales in Kyiv’s favor, then our policy might make sense. But it doesn’t. Ukraine isn’t winning the war and isn’t even close to parity, much less superiority, to Russian forces.

In my most recent piece at 19FortyFive, I detail many of the practical, military reasons Ukraine is losing the war and is likely to continue losing. In my assessment, if Kyiv continues refusing to seek a negotiated settlement with Russia – something that is understandably repugnant to many Ukrainian citizens and government – they are in danger not merely of sliding into a long-term stalemate, but of outright losing the war.

I do not hesitate to admit that I can’t guarantee an outcome in this war. There are too many variables and information I don’t have, and do not have access to the secret council of either the Russian or Ukrainian general staff, or that of the western NATO leaders. A number of things could change the dynamics and trajectory of the war, which are not publicly known. Of course events that have yet to happen could result in major course changes.

But as I have laid out in detail, the current trends and military fundamentals reveal Ukraine is unquestionably losing this war. For the conditions to change dramatically enough to make an eventual Ukrainian military victory possible, as many generals continue to claim, would require a radical shift from today’s realities. Beyond mere rhetoric, there is no evidence such a radical shift is forthcoming. It is therefore irresponsible, I argue, to tell the American people that the desired outcome is possible when all evidence screams that it’s not – and downright cruel to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and civilian population, to foster a belief that they have a chance.

Should Washington Change Course?

To have the best chance to protect America’s vital national interests and save as many Ukrainian people as possible from being killed, Washington must change course and begin to form policy based on a frank and honest assessment of the combat, economic, and diplomatic realities of this war. It will be hard to get to that rational place, however, unless we first recognize the consistently rosy pictures painted by America’s flag officers over the past few decades have been atrocious.

My 21 years of active service in the U.S. Army, including four combat deployments, has put me in a position to personally observe many of the mistakes and bad judgments of both active and retired generals. The cumulative result of their frequently flawed advice has been uniformly bad for our country, resulting in some of the worst military and foreign policy decisions our country has made.

Whether it was routine claims, made over a 20-year period, of success in the Afghan War when events conclusively proved it was always a disastrous failure, or perpetual claims of success during and after the 2003 Iraq war – before the Iraqi Security Forces the U.S. trained melted away at the first contact with the Islamic State – senior American military leaders have consistently misled the American public on the true state of affairs.

Since virtually the beginning of the Ukraine-Russian war, American active and retired generals have consistently claimed that Russian troops were incompetent, that their troops were ill-disciplined, arrogant, unmotivated, and sometimes rebelled against their leaders and refused to fight. The Russians, many generals claimed, could not win, with Gen. Hodges claiming that Ukraine would begin rolling back Putin’s troops before the end of this summer.

Yet Russia controls more than 20 percent of Ukrainian territory and continues conquering urban center after urban center in the Donbas, killing upwards of 200 troops per day, wounding another 500 in the process.

Russia outguns Ukraine 20-1 in howitzers, 40-1 in artillery shells and Rockets, and has a significant advantage in air power. There is no rational basis upon which to claim that Ukraine can stop the Russians, much less roll them back.

 

It is appropriate, in light of the awful record active and retired general officers have amassed over the past few decades, that both the media and public should give more scrutiny to future claims made by generals. It is understandable why many would give blanket trust to the word of a senior commander: they typically have 30-plus years of experience and have served at the highest levels. But evidence confirms that this trust has been misplaced and it is up to the generals to earn that trust back. Telling the truth and giving honest assessments would be a good place to start.

Unboxing & Testing My Chinese “$2,000” ELECTRIC Truck!

A great fun and interesting video.

Some important Jeff Brown transcripts

TRANSCRIPT: USDems + Ukraine + BW + BigRx + BLPM = Evil squared.
HERE

TRANSCRIPT: Evidence in Ukraine is piling up against Westerners for the anticipated Moscow War Crime Trials. HERE

TRANSCRIPT: Does Ukraine equal Taiwan? Do they mean World War III?HERE

TRANSCRIPT: More war crimes uncovered in NATO’s Ukraine: organ harvesting behind the Red Cross.
HERE

TRANSCRIPT: $40 billion to arm Ukraine? It couldn’t happen before 1950. How the military-industrial complex took over the USA. HERE

TRANSCRIPT: Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh – Why they won. HERE

How to make French Baguettes at home

So very inspirational!!!!

Conversation with American Mercenary, DPR POW: “Be Better Informed”

NEW YORK, JUNE 28TH, 2022- Last week, two Americans who came to fight for the Ukrainian International Legion were widely reported as having been captured by the forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the breakaway republic in Eastern Ukraine which is allied with Russia in the ongoing conflict in the region. Alexander John-Robert Drueke, 39, and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27, both residents of Alabama, were apparently captured amidst fighting in the outskirts of Kharkov, and to this point, had not had any contact with American press.

This afternoon, my phone rang as I was driving home out in Eastern Long Island, and a Russian number appeared on my Caller ID. It was a number that had previously been used by British POW Aiden Aslin to contact me, as the DPR administration had my information from my time reporting in Donbass. Mr. Aslin, a British national who had been living with a family in Ukraine and was a regular in the Ukrainian marines, was sentenced to death in the DPR, for the crimes of being a mercenary and killing civilians, and is currently waiting to see if a prisoner exchange can be facilitated for his release, though current reports do not look good for him. The DPR, unlike the Russian Federation, has not banned capital punishment, and per my discussions with Mr. Aslin, the lack of footwork on his behalf on the part of Ukrainian and British authorities is the reason his exchange has not been prioritized.

This time, however, when I answered, the caller identified himself as Alexander John-Robert Drueke, accompanied by his DPR state-provided lawyer, from his captivity site in Donetsk, DPR. Alexander is from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and served 12 years in the U.S. army reserve, including two deployments to Iraq, though neither put him into active combat. Above all, he is similarly seeking a prisoner exchange, but he described to me in relative detail how he ended up in his current predicament, and some of his perspective on the situation.

He said that early this year, he had extensively watched American and other western news reports on the developing conflict in Ukraine, and was particularly affected by images of Ukrainians fleeing their homes. He is retired, was living on VA benefits, and he said that he felt that he “had to do something to help, not necessarily fighting, but whatever I could do.” He had no prior arrangements with the Ukrainian Armed Forces or the regime in Kiev, before flying to Warsaw, Poland from Atlanta, GA on April 12th of this year, hoping to find his way to Ukraine.

On the 15th of April, he rode by bus over the border into Lvov, Ukraine without incident. There, he was quickly interviewed by the Ukrainian International Legion, who signed a contract with him to work in a training role with a unit in Lvov, an arrangement which only lasted 8 days. Alexander said he was “dissatisfied” with this unit, for reasons he’s not at liberty to share, due to a Non-Disclosure Agreement he signed in his contract, and by early June, he had signed paperwork to transfer to a recon unit across the country, in Kharkov. This unit was presumably overseen by the SBU, the primary Ukrainian Intelligence agency. Alexander and his friend, Mr. Huynh, arrived in Kharkov on June 7th, and on June 9th, they were sent into a combat mission, something Alexander said he didn’t expect to happen, and separated from the rest of their unit. They were both apprehended by a DPR patrol, and brought back to Donetsk for detainment; they have not been officially charged as of yet, but Alexander understands they are to be charged with being mercenaries, and presumably eligible to face the death penalty, though their charges are likely to be less severe than their British counterparts.

Mr. Drueke’s captivity, as he described it, has been calm, and he has been well-treated, given the obviously uncomfortable broader context. He says he has been provided with food and water regularly, is in a cell by himself, and has not had any contact with his fellow American POW or any other prisoners, though for over a week now he has had access to phone calls, including to his mother, Lois Drueke, and has been contact with his lawyer every other day. He maintains a very close relationship with his mother, and she appears to be working tirelessly on his case; I have reached out to her for her comment, and have yet to hear back.

The DPR authorities, per Alexander, are extremely willing to negotiate for his release in a prisoner exchange, and are generally motivated to secure safe return for their own people. While he has been in contact with the U.S. State Department (he named one Michael Abbott as his contact; I was not able to track this person down), and while the U.S. government has told Alexander and his mother that they are “doing what they can,” he told me that “the U.S. is not technically a combatant in this fight, and they have no one to exchange with the DPR, so what they can do is limited to pressuring Kiev.” Whether the Ukrainian authorities were working on his case was not clear to him, and he has had no contact since his capture with anyone in the Kiev government.

When I asked him about his perspectives on the conflict now, versus when he made the decision to come over, his repeated emphasis was that he had been “extremely uninformed” when he was still in Alabama and relying on the narrative being spun by western media. “I can tell you that I was very surprised to see most women and children still at home and living normally in all the major Ukrainian cities I went to, and when I was detained here in Donestk, it was the first time I had been able to speak to any Russians or Russian-speakers from Donbass. There’s a side of the story that we’re not getting in America.” He noted that even from his cell in Donetsk, he had been hearing constant explosions, every day, coming from Ukrainian shelling of the city, something he had never anticipated, adding that “nothing in the western media shows you that this is a Civil War, and one that’s been going on a long time.” He didn’t go as far as disavowing the Ukrainian state, or endorsing the Russian Special Operation, but he repeatedly said to me, “if I had known the truth about what was going on over here, I would never have made the decision to come. I regret it.”

While feelings of sympathy for a man in a life-and-death predicament, who at face value seems to have been duped into his decision, above all else, are completely understandable, some on the Donestk side of the conflict aren’t shedding many tears for him, or similar detainees. Russell “Texas” Bentley, an American-born veteran of the DPR armed forces since 2014, and a resident of Donetsk, shared with me his thoughts on Mr. Drueke and those like him: “Yeah, a lot of these punks were just too big for their britches, and that’s almost forgivable, but what they wanted to do was come here to kill, and if the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn’t have hesitated. I was behind Ukrop [Ukrainian] lines twice, and didn’t fire a shot either time. Every single battle I was ever in was defensive. We held a position, and the Ukrops came to attack us, and they’d have killed us all if they could have. So, it will be an educational experience for them, hopefully give them a bit of a head start in their next life.”

My inquiries to the U.S. State Department and Ukrainian Military press contacts have yet to yield any responses; Alexander remains adamant that the DPR is eager to arrange his release, and hopeful that his government is trying to facilitate that, but says that “time is starting to run out.” Portuguese journalist Bruno Carvalho, with whom I worked in Donetsk, and who remains there on assignment, suggested that one of the hold-ups in these prisoner exchanges with DPR may be that a foreign government, such as the UK or US, agreeing to negotiate such an exchange might be tantamount to a recognition of the Republic, which on a diplomatic level, could have major ripple effects. After all, Russian President Putin’s recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics proved to be the great harbinger of the recent escalation in what many see as a western proxy war against Russia.

Before we hung up, I assured Alexander that I would at the very least write about our conversation, and I asked him what he might say to others who were caught in the fever of U.S. propaganda, and might have the same instincts to fly across the ocean and sign-up to fight for Ukraine.

“As I said, I did not have a full understanding of what was going on, and if I had, I wouldn’t have made the decision that I did. What would I say to someone else? Do your research, look at sources outside of the West—be better informed.”

Are You Willing To Suffer Through A Recession For The Good Of “The Liberal World Order”?

How much are you willing to sacrifice for “the future of the liberal world order”?  As you will see below, the Biden administration is trying to convince us that supporting the “liberal world order” is far more important than any short-term economic pain that we are experiencing right now.  So are you willing to pay ridiculously high gas prices for the foreseeable future and suffer through a very serious economic downturn in order to put pressure on Vladimir Putin and Russia?  Some Americans would be willing to do that, but most would not.

On Friday, we learned that the U.S. economy is heading in the wrong direction a lot quicker than most of the “experts” had anticipated.  The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model is currently projecting that economic growth for the second quarter of 2022 will be negative 2.1 percent

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2022 is -2.1 percent on July 1, down from -1.0 percent on June 30. After this morning’s Manufacturing ISM Report On Business from the Institute for Supply Management and the construction report from the US Census Bureau, the nowcasts of second-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth and real gross private domestic investment growth decreased from 1.7 percent and -13.2 percent, respectively, to 0.8 percent and -15.2 percent, respectively.

U.S. GDP growth was negative during the first quarter, and if U.S. GDP growth is negative again in the second quarter that will mean that we are already in a recession right now.

The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model should be taken very seriously, because it has a very strong track record of accuracy…

“GDPNow has a strong track record, and the closer we get to July 28th’s release [of the initial Q2 GDP estimate] the more accurate it becomes,” wrote Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research.

If it is confirmed later this month that we are already in a recession, it won’t exactly be a surprise, but the good news is that so far this new economic downturn is not that severe.

Unfortunately, we continue to see more signs that things will soon get much worse.

The pace of layoffs is really starting to accelerate and this is especially true in the tech industry.

At this point, even Facebook is looking to thin the ranks

In addition to the hiring freeze, Zuckerberg also noted the company was leaving some vacant positions at the company unfilled and “turning up the heat” on performance management to weed out staffers who are unable to meet certain KPIs.

“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said, adding, “Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me.”

Meanwhile, we are seeing Americans cut back on their spending at a frightening pace.

In fact, one recent survey discovered that a whopping 83 percent of all Americans have “slashed personal spending due to soaring prices”

Provident Bank, based in New Jersey, found that 83% of respondents slashed personal spending due to soaring prices of food and gasoline, with 23% indicating they had to make “drastic changes” to their spending for financial survival. 

According to the survey results of 600 adults, 10.5% of respondents eliminated all non-essential purchases, and nearly 72% said they made at least some changes to personal travel habits.

And Wall Street seems to have finally gotten the message that very hard times are ahead.

The first half of 2022 was the worst first half of a year for the S&P 500 since 1970, and the index has now plunged into bear market territory

This all came a day after the S&P 500 posted a more than 16% quarterly loss – its biggest one-quarter fall since March 2020. For the first half, the broader market index dropped 20.6% for its largest first-half decline since 1970. It also tumbled into bear market territory, down more than 21% from a record high set early January.

The Biden administration is openly admitting that more economic suffering is on the way, but we are being told that it is necessary.

On Wednesday, CNN interviewed a key economic adviser to Joe Biden named Brian Deese, and what Deese said during that interview is making headlines all over the globe

CNN anchor Victor Blackwell interviewed Deese on Thursday and cited that Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Wednesday the war between Russia and Ukraine could be a “grinding struggle” for years.

Blackwell said, “I think everybody understands why this is happening, but is it sustainable? What do you say to those families who say, listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years? This is not sustainable.”

Deese – who was formerly the global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock – replied, “What we heard from the president today was about the stakes. This is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm.”

No thank you.

I don’t want anything to do with a “liberal world order”, and I am sure that most of you don’t either.

In the old days they called it a “new world order”, but that phrase now has so many negative connotations to it that they decided to come up with something new.

Will someone please tell them that “liberal world order” is even worse?

These guys really stink at branding.

Why do we even need to have a “world order” in the first place?

Why can’t we just try to get along with everyone instead of trying to force our twisted values on the entire planet?

I really wish that the U.S. and Russia would have just left Ukraine alone and would have allowed them to determine their own fate.

Needless to say, that was never going to happen, and now the U.S. and Russia are engaged in a horrifying proxy war and countless Ukrainians are being sacrificed like pawns on a chessboard.

If both sides continue to escalate this conflict, it could ultimately bring us to the brink of nuclear war.

But at least we will be supporting “the future of the liberal world order”, and isn’t that what is really important?

Many of us have been relentlessly warning about where all of this foolishness will eventually lead us, but most of the population doesn’t want to listen.

Sadly, many will just continue to support “the current thing” no matter what the consequences are.

The first half of 2022 has been full of surprises, but I am expecting global events to accelerate even more during the second half of this year.

So hold on to your hats, because I believe that things are about to start getting really, really crazy out there.

BOOM! Nordstream One Gas Pipeline Being Shut Down by Russia in 6 Days

BREAKING NEWS: In exactly six (6) days, Germany will be completely cut-off from Russian natural gas.

The Nordstream One pipeline will cease all natural gas flows into Germany in Six days.

By Presidential Decree signed by Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, Russia will no longer sell any “vital commodities” to “unfriendly nations.”

Without natural gas from Russia, the German economy will . . .  stop.

When Germany’s economy stops, the economies of other European countries, which also got their natural gas via the Nordstream One pipeline, will also . . .  stop.

About two weeks after the European economy stops, the U.S. economy will be forced to shut down for lack of goods and services.

The West has reached “The End” thanks to its own Sanctions against Russia.

The only thing left for the West to do either lift all Sanctions from Russia and HOPE they respond favorably; or go to war against Russia.

The economies of western nations cannot now be saved from collapse without cheap Russian energy.

Lift the Sanctions or declare war.  There are no other options.

Oh, and by the way . . . how would the west wage war without cheap energy to power it?

DUUUUHHHHHH.

The Sanctions imposed by the West against Russia have now backfired massively.  They have destroyed the economy of the West.

Russia has won.

The west has lost.

The facts are not in dispute.

Brilliant Cross Stitches

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When you think of cross stitch, you probably thing of Bible quotes hanging off the walls at your grandma’s house. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for those of you who want a little more from your embroidery, check out these hilariously brilliant examples.

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The West is a Man with no Plan

They are just not serious.

For as long as I can remember (and that’s quite a while now) there’s always been a country or countries poised to eat the lunch of the Anglo-Saxons, and more recently of the West generally. And with Covid and Ukraine, we are now finding out that, apart from a few crumbs, the West has nothing much left worth eating. Why is that? How did it happen?

Let’s start with Italy. Yes, Italy. In the 1960s, there was excitement everywhere about what the Italians called Il Sorpasso: the overtaking of British GDP by Italy, according to some measures at least. Italy was admired then not just for its art, its history, its style, its cooking and its fashion, but for its engineering and industrial design. Above all, the Italians were rapidly modernising their country, with the new autostrade and train systems, while the British were just getting round to thinking about it. Later, it was the French, with their space-age TGVs and their prototype Internet, the Minitel. After the Oil Crisis, the French took a look around, and said, merde, we’d better go nuclear. The state-owned energy industry was just told to Do It, and reactors started coming on line every quickly, while the British regarded actually setting up a public enquiry into one as an achievement in itself.

Then, of course, the Japanese – they of the High Speed Trains – came along and effortlessly obliterated the European and American consumer electronics and motor industries, followed by shipbuilding and heavy engineering. In the nineties, the Koreans started to challenge the Japanese in some areas, and now, of course, just about everything is made in China, while western publics were stunned to discover that paracetamol and medical masks have to be imported from Asia. And just look: in Ukraine, western military technology and doctrine is being shredded by the Russians even as I write. Even organised crime is dominated by non-western groups these days. Can’t we do anything right?

It’s tempting, if not very intelligent, to try to relate this to the outcome of some Grand Plan. Films have been made over the last forty years about sinister asiatic conspiracies, although rather fewer these days, given where most of the world’s cinema-going population lives. But it’s actually a lot simpler than that, and in the simplicity actually lies the problem. The West has forgotten how to do simple things well, and has inevitably lost out to those who can. At bottom, economic and political success is about relative, not absolute, qualities. Just as wars are won by the side which makes fewest  mistakes, so economic struggles and often won by those who are least inefficient.

But to succeed, you need some idea of what you want, and how to get there, and it’s at that point that western thinking has increasingly broken down. There’s nothing magical about it: mostly, it’s just applied common sense, and a willingness to do a bit of forward planning. So after 1945, the French looked at the wreckage of their country, and a ruined industry that had no incentive to invest, and said, right, what are the priorities? We need steel, so for that we need iron ore and coal, so let’s go and sort that out first. Other things can take their turn. The Japanese, with a culture of attention to detail and the most demanding consumers in the world, realised they could export quality products, some of them taken and improved from foreign models. From cameras to mopeds (where Honda started), to motor bikes, to small cars, to large cars, to luxury cars to heavy engineering equipment and trains, every step building off the previous one. They were devious and subtle enough to offer western consumers things that worked well, at prices they were prepared to pay. Then there were the Koreans (as I was once proudly told by a civil engineer in Seoul many years ago), wanting to get into the construction industry. First they sent unskilled workmen abroad who came back and trained others. Then they sent skilled workers abroad, who came back and trained others. Then they sent people abroad to study at university. Well, you get the idea.

So why couldn’t Anglo-Saxons ever do this? Why have most western countries stopped being able to do this? There isn’t a single, simple, answer unfortunately, but there are a few pointers. One is simply being first, or early, and not having to struggle. Britain was built on coal and iron ore, and had a banking and credit system before most other nations. The Industrial Revolution wasn’t inevitable, but it was easy. The United States had every natural resource you could ask for, effectively unlimited space, and a constantly growing population. It would be hard not to become a major industrial power in the circumstances.  But the problem was precisely that all this was easy. In Japan, on the other hand, there were few resources, and there was barely enough food to go round. Britain was an island, and the United States was effectively one, as well. Neither was at any serious risk of invasion, or even interference. The Japanese, on the other hand, for all that they were islands too, realised in a sickening moment of clarity that unless they got themselves organised pretty sharply, they would become another western colony. So they got themselves organised.  As did others. Prussia had no natural resources except coal, and no effective natural borders. It had to work hard to survive, and did so: by the time of the Great Exhibition off 1851, the British were already finding the Prussians snapping at their heels industrially.

In Britain, and later in the United States, survival was never an issue, except perhaps at certain moments in the two Wars of the Twentieth Century. So a national consensus around a need to survive, plan and implement never formed because it wasn’t necessary. The Empire and the Royal Navy kept Britain’s problems at arms length. After the Second World War, the United States wound  up dominating much of the world, not because it was strong or clever, but because most of the rest of the world was in pieces. If you’ve never really had to work for something, you inevitably lose out to those who know what hard work is.

This consensus has to involve the elites, or it’s not going to be effective. And in Britain, which famously never had a revolution, elites never took any interest in planning, unless it was planning the family inheritance. As in any aristocratic society, social status came precisely from not working, because you had no need to. You could employ people to do actual physical tasks, while living off rents and dividends, and doing whatever it was that such elites actually did to pass the time. This attitude persisted right up to modern times: scientists enjoyed a certain wary tolerance, but engineers and craftsmen were distrusted and not allowed into polite company. To become an engineer as late as the 1960s in Britain was to accept a permanently lower status than that of, say, an accountant. (There are no more engineers today, of course, so the problem has solved itself).

If your income comes from land or inherited wealth, then planning is really a question of financial optimisation, and you can pay people to do that for you. Other than general political stability, which often means obstructing change, you have no real political objectives at all. In Britain, and then in the United States after a few generations, this was the mentality that triumphed. Planning, designing, building, maintaining … all this was difficult and complicated, took years and required specialist training. If you could generate the same profits by some clever financial engineering, why not do so?

What’s depressing is that this attitude has spread to countries where engineers and technology had a high social status. France is an especially bad case: the country’s finest engineers were trained at the Polytechnique , established by Napoleon (a very long-term thinker). These days they all seem to go into politics, like the current Prime Minister. Nobody makes things any more.

The result is a culture common to large parts of the western world which is ultimately Not Serious. Now by “serious,” I don’t mean the opposite of “frivolous”: or perhaps I do mean that as well, because the attitudes of the ruling classes of most western countries towards the problems of the present, never mind the future, could be described reasonably as “frivolous.” That’s to say the belief that they are not real problems, but essentially problems of news management and internal politicking, and don’t require actual practical solutions. But there’s also the more serious sense of “serious,” used as a compliment. Seriousness means taking the time to research and think about issues, and then deciding what to do and carry it through. No serious political system, for example, would have lurched into Brexit as the British did, without any thought for even the short-term consequences. No serious political system would have dealt with Covid as western ones did. For all the emotional attractiveness of conspiracy theories, it seems rather to be the case that most western governments hadn’t realised that medicines aren’t produced here any more. They hadn’t understood that the government capability to manage such crises no longer existed. Nobody told them that running down health services could lead to bad outcomes. And no serious political system, individually or collectively, could have staggered like a drunk into the mess that is Ukraine.

Ah yes, Ukraine. My point here is simple enough. The West was surprised because it never had a long-term plan for its relations with Russia, and didn’t realise that Russia had a long-term plan to reset those relations.

Let’s take those in order.

The Cold War ended too quickly for the West to understand what was happening, and to even begin to adapt to it. Not only did the strategic landscape change overnight, it also threw up a whole set of massive unexpected problems, and then became enmeshed with a whole variety of other issues, from the former Yugoslavia to Iraq to the future of Europe. The result was that there was never the time, or really the inclination, to develop a proper policy and think through the consequences. And too many actors and too many institutions were involved. Throughout the nineties, policy was entirely improvised, usually responding to the evanescent needs of the moment. NATO enlargement, one of the triggers of the current conflict, was never a real strategic plan: each case seemed to be individual, and had a different set of arguments. Same for the EU. So in typical fashion, we arrive somewhere we don’t like, and think: how did we get here?

The Russians know how we got here. But then they do unsporting things like develop long-term strategies, with the necessary economic and military components. They integrate these with a political strategy, and with clearly defined objectives. None of this is particularly difficult: it’s not they who are strange, it is us, for not thinking that way. And really, if you don’t understand Russian military-strategic thinking, or how they approach the operational level of warfare, then it’s a good idea to refrain from hopping between TV stations telling the world who’s winning and who’s losing.

The final irony is that most of the world actually doesn’t realise how unserious the West is. I can’t remember how many times, in Africa, in the Arab world or in parts of Eastern Europe, educated professional people have excitedly harangued me about the Master Plan of the West (sometimes just the US) to remake the world, destroy China or Russia, recolonise Africa or whatever. “Don’t you realise” they will say urgently, thrusting into my hand a poor photocopy of an obscure journal article from twenty years ago “it was all planned.” If only it was. If only we could.

10 unmistakable signs your cat really loves you

I hope this puts a smile on your face.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

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Greek fire paradox, delicious food, and breath-taking read from an Egyptian who studied China

The Western “news” continues the same kinds of bullshit, but there has been a very significant slide into a new kind of reality that the rest of the world recognizes. It’s a different world; a Chinese world, and the West is just simply dying.

What’s going on?

Well, for one thing, the “Greek Fire Paradox” is. And that involves the combined strength and developments of both Russia and China together against the “might” of the unified West (led by the United States).

“Greek Fire Paradox”.

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The Greek Fire was a substance created by the Byzantine Empire. Nobody knows exactly what it is about: it is considered the best kept military secret of all time. It is speculated that, during those ages, only two people knew its formula at the same time. In some cases, only a father and his son would know how to make it.

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It was a liquid stored in a kind of giant syringe, which ignited on contact with air; basically, a primitive type of flamethrower that worked more or less like the illustration above.

The paradox is this: although the Byzantines managed to keep the secret for hundreds of years, this super-weapon had a curious and unexpected side effect: messing with the enemy’s mind. Because of that Greek Fire, the enemies of Byzantium had to look for more powerful weapons. Eventually, they would discover gunpowder (which later would evolve into the cannon, and so on).

What the history tell us is that, even if a country or entity holds a very powerful weapon, in the long run, your enemies will come up with much better and more efficient war technology, and eventually use it against you. And vice-versa.

Once the Pandora’s Box is open, there is no way to close it.

The funny thing is that, until now, nuclear weapons have functioned more as an instrument of peace rather than war, thanks to the MAD – Mutual Assured Destruction. This doctrine ensures that if one country uses nuclear weapons against another, that other country will respond with its entire nuclear arsenal, and so on, until all belligerents (or human kind) are destroyed.

Of course, nobody wants that. MAD therefore ensured a more peaceful world: without this doctrine, the world would probably have seen more bloody conventional wars. This is true for almost every nation in the world.

The current (and future) problem is that the older a particular technology becomes, the more accessible it becomes. And thus the greater it’s risk of use.

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It becomes necessary for those “other” nations to come up with new, novel methods, technologies and techniques to render the strength of the old “power weapon” useless.

Florida Man Charged In $1 Billion Fraud Scheme Of Counterfeit Cisco Devices

Saturday, Jul 09, 2022 – 07:20 AM

A federal grand jury indicted a Florida man for trafficking over $1 billion in counterfeit Cisco networking equipment on Amazon and eBay stores between 2014 and 2022.

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According to the Department of Justice (DoJ), Onur Aksoy, aka “Ron Aksoy” and “Dave Durden,” 38, of Miami, operated at least 19 companies formed in New Jersey and Florida that sold counterfeit Cisco networking equipment through 15 Amazon storefronts and ten eBay storefronts and multiple other entities (collectively, the “Pro Network Entities”).

Attorney for the US Vikas Khanna, District of New Jersey, and Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite said Aksoy’s scheme worked by importing network devices from China and Hong Kong (HK is de facto China) that were older models but modified to appear to be authentic versions of new, enhanced, and more expensive ones.

"The fraudulent and counterfeit products sold by the Pro Network Entities suffered from numerous performance, functionality, and safety problems. Often, they would simply fail or otherwise malfunction, causing significant damage to their users' networks and operations – in some cases, costing users tens of thousands of dollars. Customers of Aksoy's fraudulent and counterfeit devices included hospitals, schools, government agencies, and the military," the DoJ wrote in a media release Friday morning.

Aksoy generated over $100 million in revenue after selling more than $1 billion in fake networking equipment. The government alleges the Florida man “received millions of dollars for his personal gain” from the scheme.

DOJ has charged Aksoy with conspiracy to traffic counterfeit goods and mail and wire fraud, and both carry hefty sentencing times and fines.

This indictment sheds light on an entire underground economy devoted to scamming consumers on Amazon and eBay.

Terrifyingly, the counterfeit Cisco networking equipment could’ve been installed in critical systems for companies and or even government agencies, making them more vulnerable to a ransomware attack or unexpected performance issues.

FOX News Media presentation

Please check out the dress color coordination, the seat positioning, and the diversity presentation.

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Country Captain (Southern-Style Stewed Turkey with Curry, Dried Fruit, and Almonds)

This colonial dish speaks to North America’s deep historical ties to the Indian Subcontinent.

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Country Captain is an iconic Southern, Low Country dish with direct, unadulterated link to India.

It traces its roots to a time when Savannah, Charleston, and other Southeastern ports were the North American gateways for spice trade with the East Indies.

These towns were the entry points for black pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cardamon, sugar, and other ingredients that would eventually make their way into the cuisine of the American South.

Many of the dishes that use these flavorings are more “Western” in inflection—the spices are subtle with little connection to the dishes of their mother lands.

Not so with the Country Captain.

Even in its most Southern avatar, this is clearly an Indian American dish. I am forever grateful to Chef Currence for introducing me to this historical recipe, for every time I make it I am reminded that we have much in common—we need only to look at what we are cooking.

*This recipe is often made using chicken; feel free to swap out the turkey for other poultry, or even pork chops or veal cutlets.

Featured in: “On Curry Powder and Colonialism.”

Yield: serves 6
Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

Ingredients

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • 12 turkey cutlets* (about 3 oz. each), about ½-in. thick
  • ¼ cups ghee
  • 2 tbsp. unsalted butter
  • 1 strip thick-cut bacon, finely chopped (¼ cup)
  • 2 large yellow onions, finely chopped (2 cups)
  • 4 medium carrots, peeled and finely chopped (1⅓ cups)
  • 1 large red bell pepper, finely chopped (1 cup)
  • 1 large yellow bell pepper, finely chopped (1 cup)
  • 4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
  • 2 tbsp. minced fresh ginger
  • 2¼ cups canned crushed tomatoes
  • 2 medium tomatoes, finely chopped (1⅓ cup)
  • ½ cups dried currants (or substitute dried cranberries or raisins)
  • 2 small dried red chilies (such as árbol) stemmed and broken in half
  • 2 tsp. Madras curry powder
  • 1½ tsp. garam masala
  • ½ tsp. Kashmiri chili powder
  • ½ cups chicken stock
  • 2 tbsp. finely chopped parsley
  • ¼ cups toasted silvered almonds
  • Steamed white rice or grits upma, for serving

Instructions

  1. Line a large rimmed baking sheet or platter with paper towels and set it by the stove.
  2. In a large, shallow bowl, season the flour to taste with salt and black pepper, stir, and set aside.
  3. To a large, high-sided skillet over medium-high heat, add the ghee. Working in batches, lightly dust the turkey cutlets in the seasoned flour and, when the ghee is hot, sear lightly, about 20–30 seconds on each side. Transfer the cutlets to the lined baking sheet and set aside.
  4. Using paper towels, wipe the skillet clean and set over medium heat. Add the butter and bacon and cook, stirring frequently until bacon begins to brown, about 3 minutes. Add the onions and continue cooking, stirring frequently, until they’re translucent and very soft, 6–8 minutes. Add the carrots, bell peppers, garlic, and ginger, season lightly with salt and black pepper, and cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are tender, 6–8 minutes. Stir in the canned and fresh tomatoes and another pinch of salt and black pepper, lower heat to medium-low, cover, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes start to break down and thicken, about 20 minutes.
  5. Stir in the dried currants, dried chiles, curry powder, garam masala, and chile powder, then add the stock. Turn the heat up to medium to bring the mixture back up to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until the currants are plump, about 5 minutes. Slide the reserved turkey cutlets back into the skillet and cook until the meat is heated and cooked through, 4–6 minutes.
  6. Garnish with chopped parsley and toasted slivered almonds and serve hot, with steamed white rice or grits upma.

The Idea MUST be to weaponize the world!

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on July 5 that the cumulative amount of weapons and equipment provided by the West to Ukraine has reached 28,000 tons, and many of these military materials have flowed to the Middle East and even the black market for trading. In a program broadcast on Russia Today TV a few days ago, Russian media reporters found that weapons provided by some Western countries to Ukraine were sold at low prices on the “dark web”.

Article HERE

United States “pledges” to “shut down” Chinese IC manufacture

The US Secretary of Commerce recently repeated the remarks, naming SMIC for “shutting down” China’s largest chip manufacturer if it ignores US sanctions and supplies chips to Russia.

SMIC responded today that “there has never been a Russian customer.”

On June 28, the U.S. government blacklisted five Chinese companies for allegedly supporting Russian military and defense industrial bases.

This is the first time since the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February that the US side has taken action against Chinese enterprises.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on June 29 that U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo would shut down China’s largest chipmaker, SMIC or other Chinese semiconductor companies, IF they were found supplying chips to Russia, according to central news agencies today.

She pointed out that since the United States and allies imposed export controls on Russia because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, global chip exports to Russia have plummeted by 90%.

According to the it of the land media IT home, some investors asked SMIC whether there were Russian customers on the e interactive platform today, and SMIC replied: “The company has always adhered to compliance operations and has never had Russian customers.” ”

Article HERE

Banana lore from Indonesia

Never ever go to the local market and say that you just want to buy “Banana” ( Pisang in their local language).

The seller will be confused and will ask for the details of what kind banana you want?

Its different if you go to the Super Market. You will meet only the Cavendish Banana or the Western known Banana.

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Cavendish Banana

BUT… in the local market, especially the fruit stall, there are so many kinds of Bananas. In Indonesia it depends on what you need to do with that Banana.

These are a variety of the famous banana that you can find in the local market.

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Banana Stall

  1. Horn Banana (Plantain) / Pisang Tanduk

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Horn Banana (Plantain) / Pisang Tanduk

This massive banana is not sweet and the texture is hard. It tastes good when fried and the local also add chili sauce or sweet sauce.

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Fried Plantain

2. Kepok Banana / Pisang Kepok

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Kepok Banana

These look like pressed fat bananas, they’re sweet but very hard if they aren’t ripe. The local use it to feed their pet birds and mainly to eat in a sweet soup dish, Kolak.

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Kolak sweet soup

3. King Banana / Pisang Raja

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King Banana / Pisang Raja

They’re big. This banana is mainly eaten raw; it’s big, sweet and has a soft texture.

4. Milk Banana / Pisang Susu

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Milk Banana / Pisang Susu

The size is medium. This sweet banana is good to eat raw. This banana’s skin is rather thin when compared to the other bananas.

5. Ambon Banana / Pisang Ambon

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Ambon Banana / Pisang Ambon

They’re big. This banana can be found in two colors. The taste is medium sweet.

6. Lady Finger Banana – Gold Banana / Pisang Mas

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Lady Finger Banana – Gold Banana / Pisang Mas

 

This banana is so small and the taste is sweet.

All of the bananas have their own unique taste and texture. Just buying a banana in Indonesia can make you stressed.

Oh… and have I mention that there are some jungle bananas that you can rarely find too? Like the Red Banana or the Crazy Big Musa Ingens Banana?

Happy Eating Bananas in Indonesia 😀

China Holds War Drills Around Taiwan “Directed” At US Senator’s Visit To Island

Saturday, Jul 09, 2022 – 11:20 AM

China is again conducting major military exercises in waters around Taiwan, according to state media reports, which further decried US support to Taiwan separatist forces as “futile”.

China’s Defense Ministry was cited in Reuters as describing the drills as a warning aimed at the visit of a US senator. It said “China firmly opposes the visit by a US senator to Taiwan which severely damages the relationship of the two countries and two militaries, while it added that the drill near Taiwan is directed at US and Taiwan provocation.”

US Senator Rick Scott of Florida arrived in Taiwan on Thursday afternoon for a two-day visit. Importantly, his visit marks no less than the seventh US senator to visit the democratic-run island this year alone. This after a group of six senators made an unannounced visit in April led by chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez, which Beijing also vehemently denounced.

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Sen. Scott visited Taiwanese envoy to Lithuania in April. Image: Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania

“Scott is scheduled to meet with President Tsai Ying-wen and Premier Su Tseng-chang during his visit, the ministry said, adding that Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu was to host a banquet to welcome him,” regional sources detailed of his trip.

Meanwhile a top China official who overseas cross-strait affairs on Thursday declared that “reunification” of the island remains at the center of national rejuvenation plans.

According to The South China Post:

In an article published in People's Daily on Thursday, Liu Jieyi, head of the Taiwan Affairs Office, said one focus of the strategy would be preventing and resolving major risks and hidden dangers in the Taiwan Strait, creating a "favorable environment" for national rejuvenation.

"Our growing comprehensive strength and significant institutional advantages continue to be transformed into efficiency in work related to Taiwan issues and push forward the process of national reunification," Liu said.

The concept of “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan has been pushed by Beijing for decades; however, Liu in his op-ed reiterated that China has never ruled out the option of using force.

Top Beijing officials have also recently gone on record to say that US stoking “independence forces” remains a bright red line which could result in war. But in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine over the last more than four months, the Biden administration has been wary that President Xi could borrow from Putin’s playbook and stage a ‘shock’ blitz of the island.

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Prior PLA exercise, via Chinamil.com.cn

Taiwan has condemned the fresh PLA military drills as a “provocation” and has put its forces on high alert, as China sends fighter jets across the strait as part of its typical messaging. Taiwan’s air force in turn scrambled fighters to intercept and warn off the Chinese aircraft.

Indonesian Artist Dhany Pramata Creates Comics That Most 80s-90s Kids Will Relate To

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Indonesian artist Dhany Pramata creates comics that most 80s/90s kids will relate to. Dhany Pramata, an Indonesian artist reflects upon his childhood days with nostalgic and funny illustrations. I find some of these comics extremely relatable and if you are an 80s/90s kid, you might find them relatable too.

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Don’t Make Assumptions

We have the tendency to make assumptions about everything. The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth. We could swear they are real. We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking — we take it personally — then we blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our word. That is why whenever we make assumptions, we’re asking for problems. We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing.

Making assumptions in our relationships is really asking for problems. Often we make the assumption that our partners know what we think and that we don’t have to say what we want. We assume they are going to do what we want, because they know us so well. If they don’t do what we assume they should do, we feel so hurt and say, “You should have known.”

Another example: You decide to get married, and you make the assumption that your partner sees marriage the same way that you do. Then you live together and you find out this is not true. This creates a lot of conflict, but you still don’t try to clarify your feelings about marriage. The husband comes home from work and the wife is mad, and the husband doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s because the wife made an assumption. Without telling him what she wants, she makes an assumption that he knows her so well, that he knows what she wants, as if he can read her mind. She gets so upset because he fails to meet her expectations. Making assumptions in relationships leads to a lot of fights, a lot of difficulties, a lot of misunderstandings with people we supposedly love.

In any kind of relationship we can make the assumption that others know what we think, and we don’t have to say what we want. They are going to do what we want because they know us so well. If they don’t do what we want, what we assume they should do, we feel hurt and think, “How could you do that? You should know.” Again, we make the assumption that the other person knows what we want. A whole drama is created because we make this assumption and then put more assumptions on top of it.

China rallies support for Kylin Linux in war on Windows • The Register

Good thing that I am running Limus Mint. -MM

China’s efforts to end its reliance on Microsoft Windows got a boost with the launch of the openKylin project.

The initiative aims to accelerate development of the country’s home-grown Kylin Linux distro by opening the project up to a broader community of developers, colleges, and universities to contribute code.

Launched in 2001, Kylin was based on a FreeBSD kernel and was intended for use in government and military offices, where Chinese authorities have repeatedly attempted to eliminate foreign operating systems.

In 2010, the operating system made the switch to the Linux kernel, and in 2014 an Ubuntu-based version of the OS was introduced after Canonical reached an agreement with Chinese authorities to develop the software.

The openKylin project appears to be the latest phase of that project, and is focused on version planning, platform development, and establishing a community charter. To date, the project has garnered support from nearly two dozen Chinese firms and institutions, including China’s Advanced Operating System Innovation Center.

These industry partners will contribute to several special interest groups to improve various aspects of the operating system over time. Examples include optimizations for the latest generation of Intel and AMD processors, where available; support for emerging RISC-V CPUs; development of an x86-to-RISC-V translation layer; and improvements to the Ubuntu Kylin User Interface (UKUI) window manager for tablet and convertible devices.

Simple Minds – Hypnotised

A great classic and great fun too!

China’s love-hate relationship with Microsoft

China’s efforts to rid itself of Redmond are by no means new. As far back as 2000, Chinese authorities ordered government offices to remove Windows in favor of Red Flag Linux.

However, in the case of Red Flag Linux, those efforts ultimately went nowhere after the project failed to catch on. The org was ultimately dissolved, and the team terminated in 2014. Despite its collapse, the project appears to have been rebooted, with a release slated to launch later this year.

This is a story that would repeat on a regular cadence, fueled by periodic spats between Uncle Sam and software vendors.

It’s safe to say the Chinese government has something of a love-hate relationship with Redmond. In 2013, Chinese authorities urged Microsoft to extend support for Windows XP, on which the country still relied heavily.

However, a year later, the Chinese government banned Windows 8 in much of the public sector, just months after Microsoft ended support for Windows XP.

Today, Microsoft controls roughly 85 percent of the desktop operating system market as of June 2022, according to Statcounter.

Some of this can be attributed to the launch of Windows 10 China Government Edition in 2017, which was developed in collaboration with the China Electronics Technology Group.

It doesn’t appear those efforts bought Microsoft’s American partners much in terms of goodwill, with Chinese authorities directing government agencies to throw out all foreign-made personal computers this spring.

Article HERE

Hiroshima – One Wish

Some nice 1980s jazz.

Australian bank Volt collapses urging 6000 customers to withdraw funds; 140 jobs lost

An Australian bank that collapsed has urged its 6000 customers to withdraw $100 million worth of deposits before it starts closing accounts from next Tuesday.

Volt, a digital bank called a neobank which was launched in 2017, announced it was handing back its banking licence to the regulator on Wednesday.

It was the first start up to gain the banking licence in January 2019 after the government sought to increase competition in the sector.

The bank’s demise means 140 staff have lost their jobs after the board made the decision to close the business. It said it failed to raise enough funds to support its plans to write mortgages.

Article HERE

are particularly sad, particularly because they shed away all the myths of “noble savages” and the wishful thinking of “war as a result of the power struggles of unequal civilizations”, and thus they reinforce the ever stronger conclusion that human societies have been brutal and insanely competitive since a very long time ago. It gives us a terrifying glimpse on what the “demographic changes”, “genetic replacements” and “ethnic shifts” that we often hear about as we study the history of a given place really meant back then, in the raw reality (of course this is not the whole story, but it’s surely an awful part of it).

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So what’s it about? Around 5,000 years ago, in Poland, 15 people were carefully buried together in a mass grave. Most of them belonged to the same extended family, part of a closely knit patrilineal clan, and there were four nuclear families related to each other. All of them had died by heavy blows onto their head, killed simultaneously in the same way.

The individuals who buried them certainly knew them pretty well, because they placed the bodies together with their closest relatives: women with their respective children, siblings close to each other, wives with their husbands.

The slaughtered victims are mainly adult women (one of them was 50–60 years old) and their young children, including children, teenagers and two babies, one aged 1.5 years, and the other 2.0–2.5 years (whose parents were not buried in the mass grave). They were certainly not a major “threat” to any neighboring tribe or clan.

Apart from those with familial relationships to each other, there was also one young woman who had no genetic relationship with anyone else in the extended family, but was buried close to a young man with no children, so she might’ve been his girlfriend or just married wife.

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Intriguingly, with the exception of one male adult interred alongside his wife and son, no older men were found in the tomb, which points to several possibilities, but one of them is particularly sad to me: perhaps most of the adult men were away in their herding activities, in a hunting expedition, or maybe in a war campaign, and some rival tribe took advantage of that moment to wipe all the inhabitants of a small family farm/village. As the scientists concluded, “the nature of the injuries and the near absence of parry fractures (i.e. injuries sustained to the upper limbs) suggest that the individuals were captured and executed, rather than killed in hand-to-hand combat”. In other words, they had no chance to defend themselves and counter-attack, so they were murdered gratuitously. How shameful and cowardly is that!?

That would explain why, after such a violent death, the villagers were buried with such care. Maybe the men came back only to find their entire family, all the cherished ones they had left behind murdered cowardly in their absence, including the youngest among them.

Cruel though as that was, other archaeological evidences found to date suggest that such things were far from unusual and shocking in ancient warfare, even well before the stakes became much more complex, like conflicts over big empires and vast riches.

That family wasn’t even taken captive, enslaved or anything else. It was like they were “clearing the land” for their own people: nobody should be spared. The adult males probably survived just because they weren’t present when the slaughter took place, otherwise we wouldn’t expect the burial to have been made by someone who clearly took the care to make sure the dead relatives would have their eternal rest together with their most loved ones. I wonder what those males did after they saw what their enemies had done to their family, but I’ll assume it wasn’t pretty.

Unfortunately much of human history, even very recently, even now, is made up of really sad and very often appalling events like that one. What’s particularly worrisome is that, as archaeologists do their work, they increasingly find out that the despicable things that humans make when they’re in conflict were ubiquitous in all places, in all ages, in all sorts of different social and economic organizations. To me what that might tell us about humankind is what’s saddest in this story.

Wang Yi Talks About China’s Six Measures to Benefit Mekong in the Next Stage

Unlike the crusaders lip service, when China talk about assistance, the detail is clear with timeline, objectives, and targets.

Wang Yi Talks About China’s Six Measures to Benefit Mekong in the Next Stage

July 05, 2022 05:38 | Source: Xinhuanet

  Xinhua News Agency, Bagan, Myanmar, July 4 (Reporter Zhang Dongqiang) On July 4, 2022 local time, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced when chairing the seventh Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Bagan, Myanmar, that China will We have launched six major Mekong-benefiting measures to share cooperation dividends with Mekong countries and increase development momentum.

  The first is to implement the "Million-Ten Thousand Action Plan for Lancang-Mekong Agricultural Cooperation". Carry out 100 agricultural technology extension projects for Mekong countries, train 1,000 leaders of agricultural prosperity, and build 10,000 hectares of demonstration fertile land.

  The second is the implementation of the "Lancang-Mekong Water Rejuvenation Program". Strengthen the sharing of hydrological information, build hydrological and meteorological forecasting stations, speed up the construction of photovoltaic water-lifting irrigation, rural water supply demonstration, and small watershed management demonstration construction, provide safety examinations for 20 reservoirs and dams, and ensure flood control, food, water supply and ecological security for 70 million people in the basin .

  The third is to implement the "Lancang-Mekong Digital Economy Cooperation Plan". Build cloud computing innovation centers in Mekong countries, promote digital TV R&D demonstrations, develop modern information technology systems, and carry out digital economy skills upgrading cooperation.。。。

Article from HERE

Manipur: Kuki: Indians who claim to be Chinese, refuse to marry with Indian, and do not learn Hindi, Indian festivals

Population 30 million. Their flag is like China but with 6 stars. Not five.
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From HERE

when i was in darjeeling, what i noticed, at least this was my perception
the people overwhelmingly resembled more so chinese. and hardly at all indians to the south.

-Kim
There are dozens of tribes in Manipur living peacefully with each other. That part of the world right next to China has got nothing to deal with India.

The bloody English crusader occupied a large area surrounding India and later simply classified them as India. That is the problem China and many countries across the world are having after the crusader withdrawal.

Anyway, Manipur people blocked India access to their region, and live independently from the India government. Actually there are other part of India with their own armies blocking access by the Indian government. If china behave like the Anglo-Saxon crusaders, China would have funded and armed those forces inside India to split the country.

-Chua

Rodney Dangerfield Has Dom DeLuise Rolling On the Floor Laughing (1974)

This guy is great!

Iranian-flagged tanker moves to recoup cargo seized in Greece

Looting gets harder, in a multipolar world, the victims fight back:
An Iran-flag aframax tanker released from detention in Greece last month is now moving into position to take its seized cargo back.

If it succeeds, the way will be open to resolve an acrimonious stand-off between Iran and Greece in which about 70 seafarers have been caught up in tit-for-tat tanker seizures over the past three months.

According to vessel trackers and sources familiar with the issue, the 115,400-dwt Lana (built 2003) was towed last weekend from its former arrest location at Karystos in the Aegean, to the Piraeus anchorage.

Article HERE

Jeffrey Sachs: Covid-19 may have originated in US biolabs

An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calls for an independent investigation of information held by U.S.-based institutions that could shed light on the origins of Covid.

JEA: VT has published numerous articles pointing out that there is strong evidence that suggests that Covid 19 could have originated in US biolabs. Now we have enough evidence which confirms this theory.

By Sharon Lerner

IN AN ARTICLE published Thursday, economist Jeffrey Sachs called for an independent investigation of information held by U.S.-based institutions that could shed light on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sachs and his co-author, Neil Harrison, a Columbia University professor of molecular pharmacology and therapeutics, said that federal agencies and universities possess evidence that has not been adequately reviewed, including virus databases, biological samples, viral sequences, email communications, and laboratory notebooks.

Sachs and Harrison also highlighted a tantalizing scientific detail that may be an indication that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, originated in a laboratory: a sequence of eight amino acids on a critical part of the virus’s spike protein that is identical to an amino acid sequence found in cells that line human airways.

Sachs and Harrison are hardly the first to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 might have been created in a lab. Since its genetic sequence was first published in February 2020, scientists have puzzled over the furin cleavage site, an area on the virus’s spike that allows it to be cleaved by a protein on the membrane of human cells and makes the coronavirus particularly dangerous to people.

Once split, the virus releases its genetic material into the cell and reproduces. While attaching to cells and spike cleavage is part of how all coronaviruses work, SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of its class, sarbecoviruses, that can use furin for the cleavage.

As with past discussion of a possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, this latest theory has already been met with considerable pushback. Even some scientists who are open to the idea that a lab accident could have sparked the pandemic remain unconvinced by the particular trail of evidence laid out by Sachs and Harrison.

The journal article offers a scientific road map for how this unusual sequence of amino acids could have made its way into the furin cleavage site, or FCS, of the virus. Sachs and Harrison acknowledge that the sequence could have arisen naturally. But they also lay out another possibility: that scientists might have purposefully inserted this particular string of amino acids into a bat coronavirus in the course of their work. They focus particularly on scientists who submitted an unfunded grant proposal to a division of the Defense Department called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, laying out plans to insert a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus.

“We do not know whether the insertion of the FCS was the result of natural evolution — perhaps via a recombination event in an intermediate mammal or a human — or was the result of a deliberate introduction of the FCS into a SARS-like virus as part of a laboratory experiment,” Sachs and Harrison write. “We do know that the insertion of such FCS sequences into SARS-like viruses was a specific goal of work proposed by the EHA-WIV-UNC partnership within a 2018 grant proposal (“DEFUSE”) that was submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA).”

EHA is a reference to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research group based in New York City that has received more than $118 million in grants and contracts from federal agencies. WIV, or the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is a Chinese research organization that collaborated with EcoHealth Alliance in the past and was listed as a subcontractor on the DARPA grant. UNC is mentioned because Ralph Baric, a molecular biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was to have conducted part of the work pitched to DARPA. The grant proposal touted Baric’s “two-decade track record of reverse engineering [coronavirus] and other virus spike proteins.”

The intent of the DARPA proposal was to prevent emerging pathogenic threats, but the work, if conducted, could have created a novel virus capable of infecting humans. “We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and [human airway epithelial cell] cultures,” the proposal stated.

Several scientists interviewed about the DARPA proposal in September told The Intercept that scientists often begin research before seeking funding and thus that some of the experiments described in the proposal could have already been completed. But when asked about that possibility in an interview, Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, rejected it: “The DARPA proposal was not funded. Therefore, the work was not done. Simple.”

A Rational Choice

s Sachs and Harrison note, the part of a protein on the cell membrane that shares its amino acid sequence with the bat coronavirus is critical for lung function. Known as an epithelial sodium channel-alpha, or ENaC-alpha, it is found in human airway cells, as well as in human kidneys and colons. Intriguingly, like SARS-CoV-2, ENaC-alpha, which facilitates the absorption of fluid in cells, is also activated by the unusual furin cleavage site. Harrison, a physiologist affiliated with Columbia’s Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics, studies ion channels, the larger category to which ENaC-alpha belongs.

Other scientists have already pointed out the match between the amino acid series in the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 and the ENaC-alpha found in human airways. In 2020, a team from the biomedical company Nference suggested that the overlap between the virus and the sequence found in human lungs is part of the reason that Covid-19 is so damaging to the respiratory system. Those scientists described the sequence as having evolved naturally.

Sachs and Harrison, in contrast, suggest that researchers may have inserted the string of amino acids into a bat coronavirus precisely because of its known importance to lung function. “For a research team assessing the pandemic potential of SARS-related coronaviruses, the FCS of human ENaC — an FCS known to be efficiently cleaved by host furin present in the target location (epithelial cells) of an important target organ (lung), of the target organism (human) — might be a rational, if not obvious, choice of FCS to introduce into a virus in order to alter its infectivity, in line with other work performed previously,” they write.

Such a choice, they point out, would have been in keeping with another viral research project on which EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and UNC’s Baric collaborated: a 2014 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that involved increasing the transmissibility and pathogenicity of bat coronaviruses.

Growing List of Coincidences

The intriguing theory of viral engineering hinges on two observations: that the amino acid sequences match and that experts in both the ENaC-alpha furin cleavage site and the insertion of genetic sequences into bat coronaviruses happen to work at the same academic institution: the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Baric, whose work aims to prevent and create treatments for viral outbreaks, has previously inserted segments of DNA and RNA into viruses and created an infectious clone of SARS using his own patented “No See’m” method of inserting genetic materials without a trace. He has also collaborated on coronavirus research with scientists from a center for lung studies at UNC-Chapel Hill who are knowledgeable about ENaC-alpha. In one 2016 study, the scientists created a new virus using the spike of a bat coronavirus that had been isolated and characterized by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The experiment found that the new virus “replicated efficiently” in human airway cells that were cultured in a lab.

In another paper, published a year earlier, Baric, along with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli and a lung expert at UNC-Chapel Hill’s lung institute, described creating a hybrid virus using a SARS-like virus from a bat and a “mouse-adapted” coronavirus. The new virus caused mice to get sicker than those exposed to the original virus. The goal of these experiments was to prepare for the possibility that a virus might jump naturally from animals to humans, as SARS had in 2003. But even before the pandemic, the experiment drew criticism from other scientists, who were concerned because the researchers had created a virus that was able to spread in humans.

Sachs and Harrison note that the scientists who co-authored the DARPA grant proposal would have been aware of research on coronavirus furin cleavage sites, including one 2006 experiment in which a furin cleavage site was inserted into a coronavirus. “The research team would also have some familiarity with the FCS sequence and the FCS-dependent activation mechanism of human ENaC, which was extensively characterized at UNC,” they write.

Still, both the overlap in the amino acid sequence and the fact that experts in the furin cleavage site of the ENaC-alpha and insertion of genetic material into bat coronaviruses work at the same university could be coincidental, as Harrison and Sachs acknowledge. Some virologists, though, say that the coincidence strains credulity.

“Could be,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote in an email to The Intercept when asked about the possibility that these things are both chance occurrences. “But the list of coincidences is getting verrrrrrrrrrry long.”

Ebright, a proponent of investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and of investigating both natural-spillover and research-related-spillover, whom Harrison and Sachs thank “for helpful commentary on the manuscript,” spelled out some of the other Covid coincidences that he considers questionable, including its initial outbreak in a city that, well before 2019, had already been pegged as a biosafety risk. Ebright also noted Wuhan’s 1,000-mile distance from the nearest wild bats that carry the type of SARS-related coronaviruses that caused the pandemic. And he pointed to the particular coding of the amino acids in the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV2.

“The sequence encoding the FCS of the pandemic virus contained two consecutive CGG arginine codons,” Ebright explained in his email. (A codon, or a combination of three nucleotides, supplies the genetic code for a single amino acid, though most amino acids can be represented by multiple different codons. Each nucleotide is represented by a letter — for RNA, either A, C, U, or G.) “This codon usage is unusual for a natural bat SARS-related coronaviruses (for which fewer than 1 in 30 arginine codons are CGG) but is optimal for humans (for which most arginine codons are CGG codons).”

Still, Ebright said that at first he didn’t see the identical amino acid sequences as particularly suspicious. “I had known for more than a year that there was a perfect match to an eight-amino acid sequence present in human ENaC. What I had not known was that the sequence was known to be a functional furin cleavage site and that it was a sequence extensively studied at UNC,” he said. “The crucial point that the ENaC sequence was a known functional site, not just that there happens to be a match to a protein that happens to be in humans. … That suddenly turned it from what I thought to be largely irrelevant to being a logical and obvious choice to proceed.”

Ralph Baric and the University of North Carolina did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Name Calling

Other scientists dismiss the idea that the ENaC sequence might have been purposefully inserted into a coronavirus. Scientists who are already convinced that the new coronavirus emerged naturally are unlikely to be persuaded by Sachs and Harrison’s article, which appears in the opinion section of the esteemed journal. Over the past year, many scientists involved in the debate over the origins of the pandemic have settled into an increasingly acrimonious, coarse, and unyielding opposition.

Some proponents of the natural origin theory became particularly dismissive of those open to the possibility of a lab leak after the February release of two pre-print studies mapping the early spread of the virus at the Huanan market in Wuhan. Angela Rasmussen, one of a team of virologists who worked on the project, described it on Twitter as “dispositive evidence of a zoonotic origin” that will “drive those with personal interest in the lab leak hypothesis out of their goddam minds.” In another tweet, Rasmussen referred to proponents of the lab-leak theory as a “pack of ghouls, who through gullibility, stupidity, & conspiracist thinking have decided this is their thing despite zero expertise.”

Although the pre-prints had not been peer-reviewed and may have simply illustrated the spread of the virus rather than its original outbreak, the New York Times ran a front-page story about them that quoted an epidemiologist as saying that the origins debate “has been settled with a very high degree of evidence.” The story, which was announced by a push notification from the paper, also noted a lack of direct evidence for a lab leak.

Meanwhile, Kristian Andersen, another co-author of the pre-prints and a virologist at the well-regarded Scripps Research Institute, used the “poop” emoji to criticize a deeply researched article by Katherine Eban about EcoHealth Alliance. On Twitter, Andersen tarred Eban, New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci, and others reporting on biosafety issues that could have led to the release of SARS-CoV-2 as “deep in conspiracy theories” and on the other side of “a clear split” from journalists who dismiss the possibility of a lab origin, whom Andersen referred to as “science-based.”

Even some scientists who have been vocal about the possibility that the pandemic may have been sparked by research have expressed skepticism about the theory suggested by Harrison and Sachs. “The pandemic virus might have been genetically engineered. However, this could have been done in various ways not limited to the specific theory by Harrison and Sachs. I’m not convinced that their hypothesis is the most plausible one,” said Alina Chan, a scientist who laid out a number of possible routes for how the coronavirus might have emerged through research-related incidents in her recent book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.”

While she is open to the possibility that the furin cleavage site might have been purposefully inserted into the coronavirus, Chan said there was no reason to think that researchers would mine humans for such material. “These scientists literally had access to hundreds of SARS-like viruses and sequences,” said Chan, referring to the vast collection of coronaviruses from bats and other animals that researchers amassed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “There’s no need for them to go hunting inside the human protein catalogue to look for cleavage sites to put into viruses.”

Jack Nunberg, a virologist at the University of Montana, was also not immediately persuaded by the theory of engineering suggested by Sachs and Harrison. “It’s possible,” Nunberg said of the idea that the ENaC segment was inserted into a bat coronavirus as part of research designed to gauge the pandemic potential of a virus. “But I don’t find their evidence on ENaC compelling because furin cleavage sites have a lot of common amino acids, and therefore it may just have happened by chance.”

Others say that the article adds noteworthy information to the public conversation about the origins of the pandemic. “The defenders of the natural origin indicate that the virus on which this type of experiment could have been done — the backbone — has never been published and that specialists in the furin cleavage sites would have chosen a more commonly used furin cleavage site like RARR rather than PRRAR. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article contradicts this argument and indicates that specialists knew that the RRAR’SVAS site was efficiently cleaved by furin,” Etienne Decroly, director of virology research at the Aix-Marseille Université in France, wrote in an email to The Intercept.

Decroly added, “It is impossible to decide on the basis of the information currently available and it is urgent that the WHO Special Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens investigate this question.”

On the suggestion of an investigation, Nunberg is in agreement. “You can’t argue with that,” he told The Intercept. “Who’s going to argue for burying one’s head in the sand?”

For their part, Sachs and Harrison emphasize that they’re not saying laboratory manipulation was involved in the emergence of the pandemic virus, only “that it could have been.” They also give a nod to other possibilities, including that an airborne virus might have infected a laboratory worker. Rather than argue that any of these conceivable scenarios happened, they present the clues of the matching amino acid sequences to argue for an independent and transparent scientific investigation of the U.S.-based evidence related to the origins of the virus.

Among the institutions that Sachs and Harrison list as possibly having “knowledge of the detailed activities that were underway in Wuhan and in the United States” are the National Institutes of Health; the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which has provided grant funding to EcoHealth Alliance; the Department of Homeland Security; DARPA; the U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded the $200 million PREDICT program that catalogued potential pandemic viruses; and the University of California, Davis, which participated in that program.

The authors suggest that EcoHealth Alliance and UNC may have particularly important untapped resources. “The exact details of the fieldwork and laboratory work of the EHA-WIV-UNC partnership, and the engagement of other institutions in the US and China, has not been disclosed for independent analysis,” they write. “The precise nature of the experiments that were conducted, including the full array of viruses collected from the field and the subsequent sequencing and manipulation of those viruses, remains unknown.”

A Reversal

The publication in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences marks a reversal of sorts for Sachs, the chair of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission who, in November 2020, appointed Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance president, to lead a task force to investigate the origins of the pandemic. Earlier that year, Daszak had signed on to a public statement published in The Lancet on behalf of scientists who said they “condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

Yet that early certainty about the pandemic’s origins — and the sense of shared civic responsibility among members of the Lancet task force — soon disintegrated. In February 2021, emails revealed that Daszak coordinated the public statement in The Lancet tamping down suspicions of a lab leak. And by June 2021, Sachs was expressing his openness to the possibility of a lab origin, writing that NIH-funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “deserves scrutiny under the hypothesis of a laboratory-related release of the virus.” Three months later, he disbanded the task force that had been organized to “carefully scrutinize the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus” in the hopes of preventing future disease outbreaks, explaining that he had concerns that several members of the commission had conflicts of interest because of their ties to EcoHealth Alliance.

After leading the mainstream scientific inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, Sachs is now skewering it. “A steady trickle of disquieting information has cast a darkening cloud over the agency,” he and Harrison write of the NIH, going on to accuse the entire federal government of not doing enough to explore the possible role of its grantees in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and investigate “overlooked details” such as the matching amino acid sequences.

Noting that the NIH has insisted that “the pandemic virus could not have resulted from the work sponsored by” the agency, Sachs and Harrison write that “blanket denials from the NIH are no longer good enough.”

Arrested in Japan

I was arrested in Japan after only being there for 42 hours. I thought I was there for a wedding, turns out my traveling companion had other plans.

My travel companion had decided it would be a ‘fantastic idea’ to mail drugs to our hotel room (without my knowledge). When I got the call from the front desk that there was ‘luggage’ for us at the front desk, I assumed he had forgotten something downstairs. I was unaware of what was going on when he instead brought up a small envelope package. He opened it immediately, and it included drugs (I won’t go into specifics, but let’s just say they were the bad kind).

Five minutes later 10 Japanese police officers burst into the room and went through all our luggage, took our passports and put us both in handcuffs. The entire time I had a horrified look on my face, and kept saying ‘What is going on??’. No one answered me. *Interesting side note: when they plopped me down in front of an investigator who spoke English (while I was handcuffed to the chair), she asked if I had any questions for her. My brain was in such a state of shock all I could think to ask was “Do you think I’ll miss the wedding?” She answered “Yes, I think you will”. Then I started crying.

I was unable to contact any family or friends after being arrested. This is applied to everyone, no matter what the charge.

Then began the worst travel experience of my life. And it lasted for 35 days. I will make a long story short in saying that it took 35 days, 2 high powered lawyers from Tokyo and becoming semi-fluent in Japanese to be released without charge. The same cannot be said for my traveling companion, who ended up in jail for much, much longer.

The biggest takeaway here (this should be a no-brainer, but just in case!): never, EVER EVER bring, or smuggle, or mail, or otherwise bring drugs into a foreign country!!! Research the country you are going to be visiting!!

Although I had nothing to do with this case of smuggling, it still took a very long time for me to prove I was innocent. And believe you me, they left absolutely no stone unturned in their investigation. Japan has a 99.5% conviction rate. The fact that I was released without charge further proved my innocence.

I lost 25 lbs, and when I returned home I lost most of my hair from the sudden weight loss and stress.

I have not let this hinder my love of travel though! Not even a year after the incident, I went back to Japan (without the companion) to explore what I did not get to experience the first time. I will keep traveling till the day I die, and I will tell this story to my grandchildren, along with all the other amazing stories I have collected along the way 🙂

Here is a picture of me enjoying tea ceremony at Hikone castle near Osaka (with no thoughts of the jail cell I spent so much time in)

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Edit: this is my most prized document, received from my lawyers after I returned home – my Notice of non-prosecution! I started planning my return trip to Japan the day I received this.

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Edit #2/Update: So many many thanks to Graham Healey for his wonderful translation of my document above – my first translation was a badly computer generated version.

Chiba District Prosecutor’s Office Number 2

Notice of Non-prosecution

9 January 2014

[To] Ms Krysta Lee Storer

[From] Public Prosecutor [name removed], Office of Public Prosecutions, Chiba District

At the request of Defence Attorney [name removed], I [hereby] notify you as follows:

With regard to the matter of your having been detained on suspicion of (a) infringement of the Law Relating to Special Cases Under the Control of Narcotic and Psychotropic Drugs Law Aimed at the Prevention of Actions Abetting Illegal Actions relating to Controlled Drugs under International Cooperation, (b) infringement of the Cannabis Control Law, (c) infringement of the Narcotic and Psychotropic Drugs Control Law and (d) infringement of the Tax Law, I disposed of this matter on 25 December 2013 with a decision not to initiate a prosecution because of insufficient evidence.

I was released on Christmas Day, 2013. Best Christmas Ever.

If you are interested in reading more about my experience in jail, please see my Quora space: Krysta’s Misadventures. Thank you for reading!

Falco – Rock Me Amadeus (Official Video), Full HD (Digitally Remastered and Upscaled)

Another great BLAST FROM THE PAST!

The reign of Pertinax

The reign of Pertinax was perhaps the biggest “oh sh%t” moment in Roman history thus far. It’s a ridiculous saga that’s almost hard to believe.

Let me set the stage. You all know who Commodus was right? The Emperor in the movie “Gladiator”?

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Well, Commodus was a bad Emperor, perhaps even the worst Emperor. He drove the Empire to bankruptcy by throwing near-constant gladiator games where he himself fought as a gladiator and was the main attraction. Sometimes he showed off bow skills and killed animals, other times he killed people.

His reign saw famine, economic decline, inflation, and political instability. Eventually, he was assassinated and replaced as usually happens with bad Emperors.

The new Emperor was the opposite of Commodus. His name was Pertinax and he was an old wise politician who actually cared about the Empire.

Pertinax took over and immediately realized how screwed Rome was. Simply put, the treasury was nearing empty and Rome’s spending habits were out of control.

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Now when an Emperor took the throne it was customary to give a “donative” (basically a bonus) to the Praetorian Guard. This was a huge sum of money- something like hundreds of millions of dollars in modern money.

Pertinax realized that the Empire lacked the funds for a large donative. So, Pertinax paid out a smaller donative than was customary.

The Praetorians were livid and brought their case to Pertinax, demanding more money. Pertinax said no and moved on with his reign.

The Praetorians responded like this.

  1. They killed Pertinax with no heir in place.
  2. The Senate was upset but afraid and couldn’t appoint a new Emperor
  3. The Praetorians decided to give the throne to whoever could pay them the most. There was a bidding war between 2 rich men named Sulpicianus and Didius Julianus. Didius promised 25,000 sesterces to every Praetorian and thus won the auction for the throne.

Think about how INSANE this is. The throne of the largest Empire on earth was literally auctioned off so that the bodyguards could cash in a big payday. Can you imagine the Secret Service auctioning off the US Presidency after murdering the prior President over the size of their bonus?

The Praetorians were pleased with themselves but nobody else was. This action was so far over the line it’s hard to fathom. Romans were shocked, dismayed, and horrified by what had happened.

When Didius Took the throne he went to the Senate and reminded them he had served with them for years and was actually a good choice. Nobody in the Senate house said a word and moved a muscle- Didius would find no friends there.

So Didius got his throne and the support of the Praetorians. The Senate and People of Rome hated him but oh well.


Off on the Rhine River at this time was Septimius Severus- commander of the Rhine legions.

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Now the Rhine legions saw the most action and they were hardened warriors- serious badasses. The Rhine Legions were the crack troops of the Roman Empire at this time.

When Septimius heard about Didius buying the throne and demanding his submission he laughed hard, had his men proclaim him Emperor, and marched to Rome.

The Praetorians tried to march out and put up a fight but they were not suicidal. They realized they would be slaughtered and just opened the gates to Severus.

Didius was then killed without ceremony. His last words were

“But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed”

The Senate and People of Rome proclaimed Septimius their Emperor and damned the memory of Didius Julianus.

Gotta feel bad for the guy- he really wasn’t a bad dude.

Septimius then got rid of the Praetorian Guard…. kinda. Every member of the guard was stripped of their rank and position and exiled from Rome itself. Then Septimius formed a new Praetorian Guard made up of his veterans from the Rhine legions.

Septimius honored Pertinax for various logical reasons.

  1. He was the rightful Emperor that had been viciously and illegally murdered by greedy Praetorian Guards. This was Septimius’s justification for marching on Rome after all.
  2. Pertinax was a decent Emperor who had the right idea. He just lacked political IQ.

Septimius was politically savvy. He was trying to frame himself as the savior of Rome, who had marched on the city to overthrow a tyrant and the murderers that had killed the rightful Emperor.

Was this true?

Yes- mostly it was. Septimius would actually go down as one of the better Emperors in Roman history and the Praetorians really were murderous thugs.

American ICBM Test Rocket Exploded Seconds After Launch, Briefly Setting Fire To California Base

Imagine that! I wonder... -MM
Friday, Jul 08, 2022 – 12:45 AM

A late night ICBM missile test in California ended in disaster, as it exploded just seconds after lift-off on Wednesday.

Officials with the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Lompoc, California confirmed that “The Minotaur II space launch vehicle exploded approximately 11 seconds after launching off the test pad at 11:01 p.m. local time, Vandenberg,” which was announced Thursday morning.

The incident resulted in a fire on base, though officials noted that debris from the blast didn’t stray outside of the “immediate vicinity” of the launch bad. The local Vandenberg Fire Department responded and was able to put out the fire before it threatened other areas of the base. No injuries were reported.

A cause of the failed test was not immediately clear, and it’s under investigation. Local reports, citing military press releases, say the test was originally slated for Thursday morning but was moved up to late Wednesday night for unknown reasons.

“The military base was testing the U.S. Air Force’s new missile rocket, which is expected to be used with the future LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile,” one area report details.

“Both are being developed by the Air Force’s Nuclear Weapons Center to will replace the aging Minuteman missiles that have previously been tested at the Central Coast base, located near Lompoc,” the reported added.

According to a defense journal the launch was intended to demonstrate the vehicle’s “preliminary design concepts and relevant payload technologies in operationally realistic environments,” based on an Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center statement.

The precious comments from this article…

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The biggest shame for ancient Rome was the loss of the “Eagle Standard”

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Every legion had an eagle standard and it was the embodiment of Roman power and might. The Roman legions and Roman citizens nearly worshipped the standard.

When Crassus marched off to fight the Parthians he lost the standards. This was a horrible humiliation for Rome. To lose so many standards to an enemy was an insult to Rome itself.

Decades later Augustus became the first emperor of Rome.

Augustus wanted a big win against the Parthians and he sent his right hand man and greatest general of the age Agrippa to deliver.

So what did Agrippa and Augustus want? To conquer Parthia? To take the capital? No

They merely wanted the legion standards back.

Agrippa did what Agrippa does and found a way to negotiate for the standards back.

When they were returned to Rome it was a party. The Romans flooded the streets and partied like Rome had won some grand victory. To them getting the standards back was a victory.

Losing a battle was never great- but losing the standards was a true defeat. As long as the eagle stood strong Rome stood strong.

The Shot President

On October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was planning on giving a speech.

He started by saying, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible.”

He was then shot.

“I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot,” Roosevelt continues.

Much to the crowd’s shock, Roosevelt unbuttons his bloodstained shirt.

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“It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” Roosevelt assures the crowd.

Roosevelt takes his speech papers out of his coat pocket. There was a bullet hole straight through all fifty pages. The papers had saved his life.

Luckily for his speech, Roosevelt had a self-claimed photographic memory. He went on to give a ninety minute speech even though his aides insisted that he go to a hospital. Only with the speech completed did he agree to visit the hospital.

He was fifty-three at the time.

What a bad-ass.

Roosevelt’s face later that day:

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Why Are Girls Attracted To Assholes?

From elsewhere. I did not write this piece. -MM

The first time I fell in love, I was 13. I wanted her to like me back so much I was prepared to do anything. I did my best to be nice, kind and giving – but none of it worked.

So I spent 2 years watching my first crush date asshole after asshole. She’d fall for the cheaters, the jerks and the guys who disrespected her. Every time, I was the one she cried to when things went wrong for the Nth time.

I didn’t get it.

Here I was, giving her so much and ready to give more; we’d be great together… But she kept choosing them over me. She wasn’t the only one; over the years, many of the girls I liked ended up with assholes.

So when I finally decided to get with women, the first thing I wanted to know was, “why do girls like assholes so much?” – and whether I had to become one to be loved.

Here are the answers to those questions.

1. Girls Like Assholes because They’re Strong

Assholes have tough, dominant personalities. They’re not afraid to assert themselves over other people – in fact, they rarely show fear at all. They take what they want from life and don’t care what anyone thinks of them.

This is incredibly attractive because girls want to be with men who make them feel safe and protected. They like strong guys who know what they want and aren’t afraid to take it. Assholes have all those qualities – and so women choose them.

2. Girls Like Assholes because They Have Other Priorities

Women like successful, accomplished men. Just look at how they act around rockstars, actors, etc; success is an incredibly powerful aphrodisiac.

As an extension of that, girls are also attracted to guys who’ll be successful in the future. And what kind of man has the capacity to succeed? One who feels passionate and ambitious about his life’s goals, of course.

On the other hand, a man who puts his woman first is unattractive. There’s no challenge to him, his life has no great purpose: nothing sexy or interesting there.

By putting their women second, assholes project the potential for success. This is the second quality that makes them so attractive to women.

3. Assholes Create Emotional Ups & Downs, a.k.a. Chick Crack

A girl can talk to her friends for hours, whining about a guy who keeps being hot & cold; complaining how she can’t figure him out. (Some even make funky songs).

But at the end of the day, she’s talking about him, isn’t she?

Women are attracted to drama, mystery and challenges. They might not enjoy emotional ups and downs, but they’re attracted to the men who create them. Assholes are real good at that, which is the third reason chicks dig them.

4. Assholes are Direct

One of the most unattractive things about “nice guys” is how murky they are about what they want. They’re so busy trying to protect themselves from rejection that they don’t show the girl what they want from her.

This is extremely confusing to a woman. Try to put yourself in her position – imagine someone is being nice to you for no reason at all.

A stranger starts being nice to you on the street. You suspect he wants something – maybe money, maybe to sell you something – and so his niceness comes across as an act. You don’t know his intentions, which puts you on guard.

That’s how women feel about men who aren’t clear about what they want.

Assholes are always direct. They may not be nice, but at least they’re real – which is infinitely more attractive. This is the fourth and final reason women like them so much.

5. Main Point… You don’t have to be an asshole to be ANY of these things.

I spent so many years thinking girls like assholes… But I was wrong. After spending years talking to thousands of women, I can tell you that much for sure.

Look back at the previous four points. Do you really have to be a bad person to have any of those qualities?

You can be strong; you can have things going on in your life; you can learn to know when it’s time to keep your distance; you can be direct… And still be a great guy.

All the most attractive men I know are incredibly kind and generous. Being an asshole isn’t sexy or manly; when given a choice between a good guy and a bad guy with all of the above qualities, women will always pick the good guy.

Girls don’t like assholes. They like strong, challenging men with exciting lives. You don’t have to be a jerk to have all those attractive qualities – great news if you’re like me and enjoy being nice to people.

Yes, a very small minority of women confuses cruelty with strength. They’ll always be attracted to men who mistreat them – but you don’t want those girls anyway.

The ones you do want will appreciate your niceness and love you for it. Find them, attract them with your awesomeness and don’t be an asshole!

by George P.H.

A contract killing in China

I don’t know if it is true, but it makes a great story…

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A businessman hired an assassin to kill an enemy. He gave her two million yuan to do the job (just over $280,000). The killer decided it was better to keep half the money, and give the other half to someone else to kill him. Repeat the operation a few times, and you have five contract killers.

The killer at the bottom of the pyramid was given 100,000 yuan and decided it wasn’t enough money to kill someone, so he decided to contact the target and told him to fake his death.

Days later, the victim reported the incident to the police, and the five killers and the businessman ended up in jail.

Big Tech Isn’t Woke… It’s Totalitarian

Friday, Jul 08, 2022 – 03:30 PM

Authored by Michael Senger via ‘The New Normal’ Substack,

In the mid-18th century, a secretive political group began spreading dangerous conspiracy theories throughout Britain’s colonies. British subjects had long enjoyed the freedom of expression, but these radicals abused novel communication platforms to churn out seditious literature not often grounded in fact, even resorting to threats and violence that endangered those around them.

According to their wild theories, a series of modest taxes levied by Parliament actually represented an incremental process to strip away their rights. They had no evidence to back their claims. After they arranged one of the costliest acts of vandalism in the history of the Empire, Parliament very reasonably invoked a state of emergency to protect the public. Yet, characteristically, rather than raising their objections through proper legal channels, these extremists co-signed a document penned by one of their most wily and manipulative agitators, falsely claiming to speak for all the colonists in declaring themselves above the law.

In a helpful rebuttal, Governor Thomas Hutchinson thoroughly debunked the document, outlining the many “false and frivolous” claims in this “list of imaginary grievances,” its signatories relying on spurious overtures to “what they called the natural rights of mankind” to evade substantive argument. Hutchinson noted the signers’ racism, “depriving more than a hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty,” discrediting their appeals to so-called “natural rights,” as well as “the absurdity of making the governed to be governors,” a laughable contradiction. Moreover, the document was misleading. “The real design was to reconcile the people of America to that Independence.” The signers even referred to their sovereign as a “tyrant,” a profanity for which “indignant resentment must seize the breast of every loyal subject.” The Empire had always been about saving lives, after all—even if it occasionally fell a bit short.

In this story, most readers now recognize the birth of the world’s oldest democracy and the modern constitutional republic. But perhaps those who presently govern the mega-platforms collectively referred to as “Big Tech,” on which most online discourse now takes place, take it as a warning of what can go wrong if citizens are permitted to freely express their beliefs.

As strangely low an ethical standard as it was, the days of “Don’t be evil” appear to have been left far behind. Big Tech platforms now routinely side with raw state and corporate power, showing a disregard bordering on outright disdain for the rights and welfare of the human beings whom their actions affect. The recent history of Big Tech is a history of repeated usurpations, all demonstrating as their direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the people.

Big Tech platforms openly disavow any role in abiding by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, to which all American citizens owe a duty and to which any person who chooses to become an American citizen must swear an oath to uphold and defend. They censor centuries-old news organizations for publishing true, factual, and timely information.

Big Tech platforms routinely censor the legal speech of citizens, concealing the rationale behind their decisions and applying their terms of service selectively, if at all. They mislead the public as to the scale and scope of this censorship, systematically silencing the most articulate voices on one side of any given debate unbeknownst to the vast majority of the public.

Big Tech platforms openly collude with governments to suppress the speech of their own people, while overtly abusing the legal system and paying massive settlements to conceal the evidence of their collusion. They craft the false illusion of consensus on political issues of their own choosing, a power unprecedented in our democracy and historically held only by the most despotic regimes, promising in every instance to wield it for good, but falling short every time.

Big Tech platforms deploy artificial intelligence to censor and de-boost citizens and opposing viewpoints with increasingly inhuman detachment and efficiency. They retain as leading AI experts—on their boards of directors—personnel with deep and well-documented ties to the militaries of the world’s worst dictatorships.

Big Tech platforms routinely apply fact-check labels to true stories and information based on unrelated contextual issues, manipulating political narratives by deceiving the public into believing that the pertinent information is itself false. Meanwhile, they ignore large-scale bot and astroturf campaigns affecting political outcomes all over the world—despite harrowing accounts from whistleblowers—while misleading the public as to the frequency, scale, and purpose of these bot and astroturf campaigns.

Big Tech platforms censor the voices of the most well-qualified citizens under the Orwellian pretext of combatting “misinformation,” drowning out their views with those of disinformation agents and bots. Meanwhile, they anoint as “experts” those who hold no relevant qualifications in the designated field other than a groveling deference to the viewpoints of Big Tech, who then regularly publish falsehoods without retribution.

Big Tech platforms employ managers who accept bribes to censor political dissidents fighting against the world’s deadliest regimes, to whom they show obsequious deference. They bear a growing resemblance to organized crime syndicates, submitting false statements to the highest courts of law while hiding behind an unlimited legal budget and cutesy PR campaigns replete with amorphous birds and round, lower-case letters to escape legal scrutiny.

This is no far-off dystopia. As rapidly as they’ve transpired, these things are already happening, and this is the reality of the world that Big Tech has created today. Given their systematic suppression of dissent against lockdowns, which ultimately killed over 170,000 Americans and countless millions more around the world, it’s hard to think of any ostensibly-private enterprise since the British East India Company that’s been responsible for more widespread human suffering. Much of this behavior is surely being coerced by the federal government, just as the East India Company was largely doing the bidding of the British Government. But Big Tech might want to ask how well “just following orders” worked as a defense in 1945.

I conclude with the words of another individual who ultimately came to sign that radical 18th-century document, but other than whom no man ever fought harder for peace.

“Look upon your Hands! They are stained with the Blood of your Relations! You and I were long Friends. You are now my Enemy—and I am Yours.”

The Simpsons – Planet Of The Apes Musical – Dr. Zaius

Now have some fun!

Russia’s Medvedev Warns US Trying To Punish A Nuclear Power ‘Risks Existence Of Humanity’

Thursday, Jul 07, 2022 – 11:15 PM

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday warned the US against trying to punish Russia for its war in Ukraine, saying that doing so would risk humanity since Moscow has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

“The idea of punishing a country that has one of the largest nuclear potentials is absurd. And potentially poses a threat to the existence of humanity,” Medvedev wrote on Telegram.

Medvedev, who currently serves as the deputy of Russia’s Security Council, had warned earlier in the war that if the US destabilizes Russia like it did Iraq and other countries, it could lead to a nuclear “dystopia.” As of 2020, Russia was estimated to have 6,375 nuclear warheads, and the US said it possessed 5,750 warheads.

Even though it’s widely believed that a direct conflict between the US and Russia could quickly turn nuclear, it doesn’t appear to be a factor in the Biden administration’s response to the war in Ukraine. Instead, the US is pouring billions of dollars in weapons into the country and continues to escalate its involvement in the war.

In his Telegram post, Medvedev also called out the US for hypocrisy for trying to put Russia on trial for war crimes, citing the millions killed by the US since World War II in countries like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many others.

“So who’s going to give us a show trial? Those who kill people and commit war crimes with impunity, but do not meet real condemnation in the international structures financed by them?” Medvedev said, according to a Google translation of his Telegram post.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland recently visited Ukraine and pledged support for international efforts to investigate alleged Russian war crimes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened an investigation in Ukraine, but the US is not a party to the court and has impeded its effort to investigate alleged war crimes committed by the US and Israel.

The lost bag

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It’s 1989. I am nineteen working as a tour guide in Tokyo. It’s my first job.

The bus stops at the large service area parking lot filled with cars and people overlooking beautiful mountains.

I rush to the nearest phone booth to make a phone call to our next stop: lunch at a traditional Japanese restaurant. My job is to report the exact number of the guests, and estimate time of arrival. I only had five minutes before all the guests come back to the bus.

“We have 45, arriving at 12:15 pm,” I say over the phone.

“I got it,” the manager responds to me.

Relieved, I walk back to the bus and wait for all the guests to come back.

After confirming everyone hops onto the bus, we leave the service area and head for the restaurant.

The traffic is smooth on the highway considering it’s “Golden Week.” Everything is going smooth.

I open my bag to check the schedule for the rest of the trip.

Wait.

The bag feels light. Too light.

Then, I realize I am missing something: Cash bag.

It has ¥100,000 (roughly US$700) in cash, and some voucher for the restaurant.

I must have left the bag in the phone booth.

My heart almost stop. I am screaming inside “Stop. Turn around the bus and go back to the service area now!” But, I couldn’t tell it to anyone. I have to pretend as if everything is going OK.

The voucher is for the lunch to pay to the restaurant. What would I tell them? The cash is for the emergency use, so didn’t have to have it to complete the trip, but then, if lose, how would I pay back?

All these questions are circling in my head until we arrive at the restaurant.

I want to run to the phone at the restaurant, but have to greet our guest first. Then, grab the phone and made a quick call to my company office.

“I think I left my bag at the last stop,” I tell my boss. “Cash and voucher was in.”

“Ok, relax,” my boss says. “First, apologize and tell the restaurant manager we will mail the voucher later. Tell them you forgot to bring. As for the cash, call the police and tell them you left at the service area.”

I realize it’s not as bad as I thought. Not definitely the end of the world.

I call the police and file a lost and found report. Obviously, it’s too early for my bag to be turned in, but I am not yet giving up the hope.

I finish the trip without cash and voucher.

Three days, later, I receive a phone call from a police.

“A gentleman found and turned in your bag.”

“Really?” I yell over the phone.

“How much was in the bag?”

“¥100,000” I reply.

“Looks like it’s all in there,” the policeman says.

A few days later, I go to the police station near the service area to pick up the bag. I meet the man who found my bag.

“Thank you,” I say to him and hand him an envelope containing some cash as a token of appreciation.


Postscript

I suppose the moral of this story is, “Do onto others what you’ve have them done to you,” or “What goes around, comes around.”

The story illustrates a custom, a simple teaching embedded in the Japanese culture. I was taught this growing up in Japan. After this experience, it is embedded in me more than ever.

I’ve been living in the US for over past 30 years now. Every time I see a “lost” object in any public places – streets, cafes, public transportation, offices, I turn it in. I do this regardless of where I am. I’ve done it in Japan. I will continue to do so.

My hope is that everyone reads this story will do the same and by doing so, perhaps, the world will be a better place.

Charles Joughin

As everything was going to shit, Charles Joughin was remarkably calm.

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When the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg on April 14, 1912, even the ship’s staff was in a state of panic. No one stepped up to the plate to take charge. In fact, most of the staff were running around just as frantically as the passengers.

So, our boy Charles stepped in.

Charles was head baker and fittingly, his first order of business was sending loaves of bread to the lifeboats so people would have food to last until they were rescued.

He continued by helping others onto their boats until he reached his own. Only instead of hopping on, he forced a group of women and children on, saving their lives.

The icy water filled the ship quickly and Charles was fully aware that his chance of survival was slim at best, so he did what any person would do: get drunk out of their mind.

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He went to his cabin and got as much whiskey as he could. On his way, he threw chairs into the ocean for people to use as flotation devices.

And then he jumped off the ship, into the freezing water.

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He spent hours in the unforgiving Atlantic ocean.

Most died in minutes.

The alcohol coursing through his body fought off the cold and kept him alive.

“I was just paddling and treading water,” he said.

As dawn broke, he found a lifeboat and swam towards it, only to find that there was no space for him.

Luckily, another nearby boat had room and he managed to climb on. They were rescued soon after and there was no illness or injury to even prove he’d been in the water.

Charles would go on to join the Navy and died at 78, living a full life thanks to some whiskey.

China Dominates The Antibiotics Market

Of course. Antibiotics are not a highly profitable product. So they are ignored by Wall Street, but the Chinese think differently that the self-centered capitalists. -MM
Friday, Jul 08, 2022 – 10:40 AM

Global exports of antibiotics originate predominantly from China – as Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below based on data from the International Trade Center (ITC).

China currently accounts for 42.4 percent of global antibiotic exports by value. Italy, India and Switzerland follow far behind.

For years, experts have been warning of the EU’s dependence on antibiotic supplies from abroad, especially China and India.

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Statista

This dependence is not only limited to antibiotics, but affects – also for many years – a wide range of pharmaceutical products, including cortisone, for example.

In addition, the world is facing another, increasingly significant problem: More and more bacteria are developing resistance to common antibiotics.

As a result, there is now a pressing need for drugs that are specifically effective against resistant germs. Most of the antibiotic classes introduced in the 21st century do just that. However, research into these active substances is often not profitable and risky for the industry; because drugs that specifically act against resistant germs are not used across the board, but only as so-called “second-line” or “last-line” antibiotics (reserve antibiotics) – as a last resort when the established drugs are no longer effective.

Russia: New Weapons Based on New Physics; U.S./NATO Missiles Would Never Leave Their Silos

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The government of Russia has developed new weapons technology, based on new physics principles, that if used, would prevent U.S. and NATO Nuclear Missiles from ever leaving their launch silos.  Russia has nothing to fear from US nuclear weapons.

BY:  Military expert Kulikov D. V.

“Russia has come close to creating weapons based on new physical principles” – V. V. Putin, 2018.

These were not empty words and cartoons, as the United States tried to convince the whole world. In 2022, the Russian Federation put on display the laser systems, which we wrote about earlier.

It’s time to reveal a conceptually new weapon based on new physical principles that only science fiction writers dreamed of in their works!

The ALABUGA complex is a high-frequency high-power electro-magnetic generator (EMP), capable, in the truest sense of the word, of burning all electronics within a radius of 4 kilometers.

“In modern warfare, the one who first blinds and destroys the enemy’s electronic eyes wins.”

All data on this complex is classified as Top Secret! But today we will reveal a little the veil of secrecy.

Russian designers managed to create a compact EMR – a generator that can be easily placed in the body of any Russian missile, in the place of the warhead (“Caliber”, “Zircon”, “Onyx”, “Dagger”, “Iskander”, “Petrel” and others ).

It is assumed that the rocket, being at the right height and above the right place, produces an explosion, forming an electromagnetic impulse as a shock wave, while the manpower and buildings remain intact.

“Alabuga” – disables any enemy electronics, such as a tank platoon, an airfield with aircraft, and even simple mobile phones, computers and other household appliances. After that, the enemy will simply have no choice but to surrender and give all their weapons to the advancing units of the Russian army as trophies” – A high-ranking specialist of the Rostec concern, who wished to remain anonymous.

And if EMP “Alabuga” are placed on the missiles “Petrel”, which have an infinite range, and “land” this missile somewhere in the United States, next to the launch silos of nuclear ballistic missiles, the coordinates of which are known, then it is possible to activate the generator at the right time, thereby disable the “atomic fist” of the United States.

The very idea of an Electro-Magnetic weapon is not new, and arose during the first Nuclear tests, because the EMP Wave is one of the damaging factors. For example, in 1962, when testing atomic weapons, the United States blew up at an altitude of 400 kilometers, a charge with a capacity of only 1.4 megatons.
The result was amazing. Unexpectedly for themselves, they disabled 2 Soviet satellites and 4 of their own.

Knowing these facts, the Alabuga complex looks like a more than realistic project.

There are many more surprises waiting and someday we will be able to tell about it!

Black Forest Cake

This German-born dessert is an exercise in seeing how many ways you can infuse one cake with cherry flavor.

It’s composed of layers of chocolate cake that have been thoroughly soaked with kirsch (a clear cherry spirit) and topped with maraschino cherries, while some versions even have sour cherries stuffed between the layers.

Though it was first invented in 1915, its popularity soared stateside in the 1970s.

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What is Black Forest Cake?

This is my rendition of the traditional German black forest cake aka Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte. Today’s towering beauty has 4 parts:

  1. My go-to chocolate layer cake
  2. Dark sweet cherries
  3. Fluffy vanilla whipped cream
  4. Dark chocolate ganache

Chocolate Cake

The cake recipe comes from this tuxedo cake, which was adapted from my favorite chocolate cake. It has a cake crumb so moist and chocolate-y, it sticks to your fork and melts on your tongue.

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Curious about the ingredients used? Hop on over to that recipe for detail. One thing I’ll mention because it’s worth repeating: hot liquid is a must in this cake batter. Why? The hot liquid encourages the cocoa powder to bloom and dissolve instead of just sitting there. For the hot liquid, I recommend coffee which will deepen the chocolate flavor. The cake will not taste like coffee, I promise! Or you can use hot water.

Cherries & Whipped Cream

Grab a couple cans of dark sweet cherries that are soaked in heavy syrup (the can is sold as such). Reduce the syrup down on the stove as the cakes bake. Have any cherry liquor around? Add a splash and brush the mixture all over the cakes while they’re still warm. This cherry soaking syrup guarantees the moistest, most flavorful chocolate cake you will EVER taste. Think of the best chocolate cake you’ve ever eaten. This one’s better and we have the cherry- soaking syrup to thank.

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Those cherries from the can? They’ll be layered right into the cake, seeping their magenta juices into the vanilla whipped cream. Swirled pink, the whipped cream is light, billowy, and doesn’t weigh down the cake. While this black forest cake is certainly decadent, it’s not overly heavy. A breath of fresh air considering most chocolate cakes are dense as bricks!

Most of vanilla whipped cream is layered inside the cake, but be sure to reserve some to lightly spread on top and around the cake. This seals in the cake’s moisture. Have I mentioned this cake is moist?

How to Make Chocolate Ganache

Black forest cake is traditionally finished with chocolate shavings, but I took it a step further and opted for chocolate ganache. The crowning glory is a layer of dazzling chocolate ganache that gently drapes over the sides for mega drama. (Because when it comes to chocolate cake, there’s gotta be drama!) Made from heavy cream and pure chocolate, there’s no garnish more appropriate for this cake masterpiece.

I’m so excited for you to try this black forest cake, a recipe that came to life from the one who inspired me to get in the kitchen.

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Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (177°C). Grease three 9-inch cake pans, line with parchment paper, then grease the parchment paper. Parchment paper helps the cakes seamlessly release from the pans.
  2. Make the chocolate cake: Whisk the flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and espresso powder (if using) together in a large bowl. Set aside. Using a KitchenAid stand mixer fitted with a flat beater, beat the oil, eggs, sour cream, buttermilk, and vanilla together until combined. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, add the hot water or coffee, and beat it all until the batter is completely combined.
  3. Divide batter evenly between 3 pans. Bake for 21-25 minutes. Baking times vary, so keep an eye on yours. The cakes are done when a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove the cakes from the oven and set on a wire rack. Allow to cool for 30 minutes in the pans, then remove cakes from pans and set on a cooling rack. Be careful and use two hands when handling the cakes.
  4. After the cakes have cooled, use a large serrated knife or cake leveler to slice a thin layer off the tops of the cakes to create a flat surface. Discard (or crumble over ice cream!).
  5. Prepare the syrup: Drain the cherries, reserving 3/4 cup (180ml) of the heavy syrup. Set cherries aside. Simmer syrup and cherry liquor in a small saucepan over low heat until reduced down to 1/4 cup (60ml). Brush reduced syrup all over the cakes, reserving any leftover syrup.
  6. Slice the cherries in half, leaving a few whole cherries for garnish. Set aside.
  7. Make the ganache: Place chopped chocolate and corn syrup, if using, in a medium bowl. Heat the cream in a small saucepan until it begins to gently simmer. (Do not let it come to a rapid boil– that’s too hot!) Pour over chocolate and let it sit for 2-3 minutes to gently soften the chocolate. Slowly stir until completely combined and chocolate has melted. Set aside to cool for 10 minutes as you prepare the whipped cream.
  8. Make the whipped cream: Using a KitchenAid stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, whip the heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla extract on medium-high speed until soft peaks form, about 3 minutes.
  9. Assemble the cake: Place 1 cake layer on your cake stand, cake turntable, or serving plate. Spread 1 heaping cup of whipped cream evenly on top. Dot with half of the halved cherries and drizzle with a spoonful of reduced syrup. Top with 2nd cake layer and evenly cover the top with 1 heaping cup whipped cream, the remaining halved cherries, and another drizzle of reduced syrup. Top with the 3rd cake layer. Spread the remaining whipped cream on top and all around the sides in a thin layer using an icing spatula. Use a bench scraper to smooth out the whipped cream on the sides of the cake.
  10. Pour chocolate ganache on top of the cake. Spread to the edges of cake allowing it to gently drip down the sides. Top with whole cherries. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before slicing and serving.
  11. Cover and store leftover cake at room temperature for 1-2 days or in the refrigerator for up to 1 week.

Notes

  1. Make Ahead Instructions: The cake layers can be baked, cooled, and covered tightly at room temperature overnight. For the cherry syrup, cool then cover and refrigerate overnight. The whipped cream can be prepared, covered tightly, and refrigerated overnight. Chocolate ganache can be prepared, covered tightly, and refrigerated for up to 3 days before using. Let ganache sit at room temperature to soften or microwave for 5-10 seconds before using. The assembled cake can be refrigerated for up to 1 day before slicing and serving. The frosted cake can also be frozen up to 2-3 months. Thaw overnight in the refrigerator and bring to room temperature before serving.
  2. Why Room Temperature Ingredients? All refrigerated items should be at room temperature so the batter mixes together easily and evenly. Read here for more information. Instead of sour cream, try using plain yogurt. The cake won’t taste as rich, but it’s a fine substitution.
  3. Cocoa Powder: Use natural cocoa in the cake, not dutch-process. Here’s the difference between natural cocoa powder and dutch-process cocoa powder.
  4. Espresso Powder: Espresso powder and coffee will not make the chocolate taste like coffee. Rather, they deepen the chocolate flavor. I highly recommend them both. If coffee isn’t your thing, you can leave out the espresso powder and use boiling hot water instead of the hot coffee.
  5. Buttermilk: Buttermilk is required for this recipe. You can make your own DIY version of buttermilk if needed. Add 1 teaspoon of white vinegar or lemon juice to a liquid measuring cup. Then add enough whole milk to the same measuring cup until it reaches 1/2 cup. (In a pinch, lower fat or nondairy milks work for this soured milk, but the cake won’t taste as moist or rich.) Stir it around and let sit for 5 minutes. The homemade “buttermilk” will be somewhat curdled and ready to use in the recipe.
  6. Cherries: Canned dark sweet cherries in heavy syrup (they are sold as such) are imperative to the recipe. The syrup will be reduced down. Do not use fresh dark sweet cherries, sour cherries, or maraschino cherries.
  7. Cherry Liquor: The cherry liquor is optional, but really gives the soaking syrup (step 4) that over-the-top delicious flavor setting this black forest cake apart from others. You can also add a splash to the whipped cream!
  8. Corn Syrup: I like to add a touch of light corn syrup to the ganache to give it some glistening shine. This is an optional ingredient.

Pretty Anime Girls by The Artist Little Thunder

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Little Thunder is an artist from Hong Kong who draws illustrations with adorable anime girls. She works in digital as well, but she mostly draws in watercolor – it gives the pictures an incredible tenderness, but without losing the richness of the colors. Watching Little Thunder’s work is like lying on a huge soft marshmallow. It’s a real pleasure.

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An important and breath-taking read from an Egyptian who studied China

Amazing insight and conclusions for someone who only studied China for one year. But in the end, he doesn’t know how China does it. He doesn’t know why everyone else fails while China succeeds. Do you know the answer? Read on.

AS an Egyptian, I have been studying China intensely for the past year — its government, society, history, and transformation.

I’ve spoken to hundreds of Chinese and China-haters and heard everything they had to say. By now I’ve learned roughly as much about China as anyone can learn without knowing the language or living in the country, and I’ve reached my conclusion. China attracts a lot of haters, know-nothings and armchair experts.

The truth is that China is the greatest country on the face of the earth. It makes all other countries look insignificant and contemptible. It is the most brilliant, most industrious, most ambitious, most educated, meritocratic and technocratic, most modern, sophisticated, and civilised, and best-governed by far.

It is the first nonwhite, non-Western country to reach this status since the 1600s. The determination of this country is indescribable. Supernatural. There is no force that can stop it from accomplishing anything it wants to do.

Forty years ago a flush toilet in China was a luxury. Today it has its own Space Station. This is a tiny example of China’s capabilities.

It doesn’t matter who we are. Egyptians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Indians, Africans, even Americans. Next to the Chinese, we are pathetic. We can’t do what they do. We would have a mountain, an Everest of changes to make, and we would whine and bicker and fail at every one of them. China’s story since the 1980s has been one of an almost divine metamorphosis.

Next to China the entire Western world from Alaska to New Zealand has stagnated. Next to China the entire developing world from Brazil to Madagascar has progressed only at a crawl.

China is the mother of all gargantuan bullet trains. Every day it manages to create something new and astonishing. And unlike the United States, unlike the British Empire, unlike the French, Dutch, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese or any other Western nation that had its turn at being a superpower in the past four centuries, China doesn’t need to run anybody over or take something from somebody else, to rise majestically.

China is also standing up to the West all by herself. The West can’t believe their four-hundred-year-old global supremacy is being challenged. They hoped that the more China developed, the more it would submit to their influence, interests, and leadership. That didn’t happen. So now they will do anything possible, short of a nuclear war, to make China end.

Their goal is to destroy this country. That’s why, although the United States has killed several million people and turned several regions of the earth into hellscapes.

China is the worst fear of our planet’s Western masters. They want you to despise and dread a country that’s done nothing to you, that hasn’t invaded anyone, bombed or sanctioned anyone, that hasn’t overthrown any foreign government, or used its military on anything since 1979.

China is the only major country in the nonwhite developing world, to stand up to the West. To look it in the eye when challenged or threatened.

The Global South are simply Western puppets who submitted long ago. Even the most powerful ones. Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India.

The 1500s—1000s BC were Egypt’s time. Antiquity belonged to the Greeks and Romans. The 1700s belonged to France, and the 1800s to Britain. From 1945 to the present, the world has been under American overlordship. And they call it the Pax Americana but there isn’t much Pax in it.

There’s plenty of Pax if you’re in Europe or Australia. But the Middle East? Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran and Yemen in the past 20 years. Latin America? They’ve destroyed that part of the world beyond any hope of recovery. Africa? It’s only been spared because of disinterest. The US sees Africa as nothing. The whole West does.

But in the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the rise of China. We are decades away from China becoming the greatest power on earth. This will be China’s time, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Attack China all you want, curse her and monger rumours and hysteria — but the truth is that none of your accusations are backed up by evidence. The Western press is under the thumb of Western governments that want to stay on top of the world for eternity. And the truth is that China is not affected by the noise and maneuvers of her enemies.

For her first thirty years, from 1949 to 1979, China was basically blockaded and isolated economically and politically by the West. It didn’t even have a seat in the UN General Assembly. And it was dirt-poor in those days, barely a speck of the global economy, a tiny fraction of Japan’s or Germany’s GDP — not even able to prevent famine. And it still didn’t submit to pressure or take any orders. Why on earth would it do that now?

China will be the next global power. There’s nothing that can be done about that. The first stage is that its economy only needs to grow at 4.7 percent per year to become the world’s largest by 2035. That means the usual, historical bare-minimum of 6 percent is already overkill. The US can build as many bases as it wants, slap as many sanctions as it wants, recognise whatever bogus genocides it wants. That’s what it’s been doing all along. Has any of it made a difference? China can adapt to any situation. It took China a mere ten years to go from being barred by the US Congress from participating in the “International” Space Station, to building its own Space Station from zero.

See, the US has an $800-billion war budget, 800 military bases, 13,000 aircraft, 500 warships, 6,000 nukes — but it doesn’t have what China has: invincible national resolve. It takes the US about 5 years to renovate a bridge, and it takes China 43 hours. There’s simply no competing with that.

China doesn’t need to be a military superpower or empire. That was never part of the plan. US troops, God bless their souls, will continue sitting in their bases, scratching their balls, costing their government $800 billion a year to do nothing. Meanwhile, China will continue to actually develop.

That’s the part of the equation that America totally missed, because it has barely developed since Reagan’s day. China is a better place to live today than at any time in its previous 5,000 years; Americans saw their highest standard of living in the 1960s and those days will never come back.

So yes, China will be the next global power, and the Chinese are vastly superior to us in every way. This is a fact that everyone can attack but that nobody can change, like the theory of evolution.

Look at you silly buggers, talking about China like it’s going to be the next Nazi Germany. Even many Middle Easterners I know fit in this foolish category. Did you notice when the US invaded or overthrew the governments of 20 countries in the past 32 years (my lifetime)? Did you even know? You think just because you’re ready to forget all that because of Beyoncé and Game of Thrones and Snapchat and other US cultural exports, it didn’t happen.

The US is feeding me terror-bytes about Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Great Leap Forward! I don’t see any dead bodies, I can’t show you one invasion or one example of Chinese regime change, I can’t even find Hong Kong on a map or tell you one factual detail about Tiananmen Square, but the US State Department and all its media are telling me CHINA BAD!

Aren’t you at least curious to see what a world with a nonwhite, non-Western leader might look like, after 400 years? Because God knows that leader won’t be us. It won’t be Brazil or Africa, or the Middle East or India or Indonesia or Nigeria or Pakistan. We’re a mess.

China was a mess too. But we remain a mess many decades after we achieved independence, and the Chinese went their own way, disentangled their mess and created their destiny. We’re not made of what the Chinese are made of.

I see China as hope. Hope that a colonised, brutalised, primitive and humiliated country, can rise above its past — refuse to be weak any longer — rebuild itself from nothing, with iron resolve, and become too strong to be overrun by the West again!

Hope that a nonwhite, non-Western country can look deep within itself and find its own solutions to its problems — proving that (foolishly) trusting the West to guide us isn’t necessary! Proof that if we can do what the Chinese did, there will be no limits for us.

Imagine a world where the US, France, Britain, Australia, are no more important than Uzbekistan or Paraguay.

A world where the World Court might be headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, the World Bank in New Delhi, the United Nations in Jakarta, the IMF in Cairo.

A world liberated from the US banking system and the dollar as its reserve currency, so that Washington can no longer tell 200 other countries who they can and can’t trade with.

A world where an American can be tried for war crimes at the Hague, not just an Iraqi or Liberian or Serb.

A world where we don’t hear about a non-Western-made vaccine and grunt to ourselves, Oh, it must be poison. A world where we don’t have to immigrate to the same countries that turned ours into hellholes, to work as sales clerks or taxi drivers, or even if we’re brilliantly employed — to drain our brains from our homelands in the best of cases, and use them to reinforce Western riches and supremacy in exchange for a fat paycheck, instead of using them to make our own countries semi-habitable.

When I hear that China has built its own Space Station, landed a rover on Mars, ended extreme poverty, built the Earth’s biggest city, dam, telescope, 5G network, highway, air purifier, or whatever the heck it is that will come tomorrow — I feel the same pride as if I were Chinese.

It’s not happening for all of us, but it’s happening for one of us and that’s a start. There’s got to be such a thing as developing-country nationalism — a common nationalism for all the countries that were colonised and plundered, and remain economically and politically captured by their ex-rulers.

A nationalism for the Global South. We are too divided, too brainwashed, too fooled and weak — most of us still worship the countries that destroyed us, are non-Western on the outside and Western on the inside, are hating and fearing and buying all the lies about the only one of us that’s made it, and are leaving our countries in droves to let them burn while we “make a better life for ourselves” in the West.

Do you want to live on a Western-dominated Earth for another 400 years? If you do, keep doing what you’re doing. But I don’t!

You know what’ll happen for all of us if America’s sick wishes come true and its global thuggery does make China collapse? Nothing. Eternal repetition of the status quo. More enslavement, hijacking of our resources and weak corrupt governments, neo-colonialism, invasion, regime change, sanctions, MISERY.

Haven’t we already seen this? Libya, Cuba, Venezuela, Yugoslavia, Belarus, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Soviet Union. Rest in peace. Even FRANCE and JAPAN for God’s sake. What does the United States do when any other country says NO, or simply becomes too powerful, too good at honest competition?

Japan was a Western-style democracy crawling with US troops, with a US-authored pacifist constitution and almost no military and an extremely pro-US government and populace, and it STILL got crushed when it looked like it would become the #1 economy in the 80s.

I remember 10–15 years ago when China was still relatively poor and impotent, and Bush and Obama would talk about China as sweetly as swans. Obama happily had dinner with Xi Jinping in late 2015, called China a crucial partner of the United States, and said the US welcomed China’s rise; it was all horseshit. Today Biden, who was there with Obama in late 2015 as Vice-President, angrily rebukes a reporter who merely said that Biden and Xi were old friends.

America has taken off its mask.

China made it, it wasn’t supposed to make it, so now it must die. What a difference 5 years can make. China went from “crucial partner” to “number one threat.”

We should be helping and supporting China to keep climbing to the top, and giving her some serious solidarity as she withstands the new Cold War of Western imperialism. It’s been a long 400 years. China is the first non-Western country to even come close to reaching a status of ultimate global importance. She is akin to the the first member of an impoverished family to go to university. That is our family of nations.

And when China gets to the top, believe me, it won’t be a repeat of the French, British, or American Empire. Not a single developing country on earth will be worse-off because of China becoming #1. There will be something good in this for all of us, so let’s wake up.

– Ismail Bashmori is an Egyptian China watcher

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

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Shooting in Japan, Russia ready to flatten Lithuania, America resembling the fall of Rome and some delicious High School Pizza

There’s a bunch of “news” going on, but it’s pretty obvious (to the world) that the collective West are just crazed, corrupt appointees that are running their nations to the ground. So while we will cover some of the news events, we will focus, rather, on the human experience throughout history. And take a particular note of what happened during the collapse of the Roman empire. Enjoy and have fun.

We start with this….

BREAKING NEWS: Russia Issues Final Warning to Lithuania: They have only a “few days” to stop blocking rail traffic to Kaliningrad

Russia has completed its preparations and is ready to respond to the Lithuanian blockade of Kaliningrad if something does not change in the next few days, said Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry.

She did not specify what Russia has planned, but one thing is certain: When Russia tells another country they are going to do something, Russia does what it says.

Lithuania is a NATO member.

This could get very ugly, very fast.

The Myth of Persephone and Hades

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When Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, gave birth to her first child, Persephone, she looked into her baby’s face and realized she would grow up to be beautiful.

This was a problem. As a beautiful woman herself, Demeter knew from experience that beauty brought trouble. And so, holding the crying Persephone against her chest, Demeter vowed to protect her daughter at all costs.

Years went by, and, just as Demeter had feared, Persephone grew up to be a lovely young woman. This made Demeter even more determined to keep her daughter safe. She would bring Persephone with her everywhere she went, whether she was producing a fruitful harvest to a group of villagers, or making plants flourish across the countryside.

But as Persephone grew older, the girl became curious about the world beyond her mother’s watchful gaze.

“Why don’t you let me go out on my own?” she asked Demeter one afternoon, after a long day of watching her mother bring pomegranate trees to bloom. “I’m old enough to do things by myself.”

But Demeter disagreed.

“Darling,” she said chidingly, plucking a pomegranate from the tree and handing it to her daughter. “The world is a dangerous place. You’re so much safer here with me.”

Persephone was doubtful, but took the pomegranate from her mother and munched on the seeds. Pomegranates were, after all, her favorite fruit.

But as they headed home that afternoon, they didn’t notice that someone was watching them from the shadows of the mountains.

It was Hades, the God of the Underworld, on a rare trip up into the world of the living. He had been traveling through the shadows when he looked up and froze in his tracks. Out in the dimming sunshine was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. But while the girl’s face shone with vitality, her head was lowered, obediently trailing after a woman Hades immediately recognized as Demeter.

Hades watched the pair from his safe place in the shadows, feeling his heart sink in his chest. He realized that the beautiful girl had to be Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, meaning there was no way he would be able to meet her. Demeter had grown a reputation among the gods as being highly protective of her daughter.

But as the days went by, Hades couldn’t stop thinking about Persephone. He found himself going up into the world of the living again and again, seeking out the beautiful girl, fascinated by her zest for life, her laughter, the flowers that grew in her hair.

Finally, Hades couldn’t wait any longer. He went up to Olympus to find Zeus, the King of the Gods, and asked him for his permission to marry Persephone.

Zeus was doubtful. While he thought it would be a good match, he knew Demeter would not be happy with the idea of her daughter leaving her. But, ultimately, he agreed.

That was all Hades needed. He got on his chariot and went searching for Persephone, and when he finally found her, he couldn’t believe his luck. Persephone had finally convinced her mother to let her go off on her own, and she was relaxing in a field with only a few attendants present.

Seeing his chance, Hades swooped in on his chariot, grabbed Persephone, and pulled her down into the Underworld. It all took place so quickly, none of the attendants saw what happened.

Persephone was horrified. One minute, she was picking flowers in the sunshine. The next, she was in the arms of a strange man, being brought down into an unfamiliar place that was dark and cold.

When the chariot finally arrived at Hades’s palace, Persephone pulled away from him.

“Who are you?” she cried. “Why did you take me here?”

Hades tried to explain to Persephone that he was in love with her and wanted to marry her, but Persephone wasn’t having it. She ran away from him, looking desperately for a way out of this strange world that was full of darkness and the dead.

While this was happening, Demeter learned from Persephone’s tearful attendants that their mistress had gone missing. She immediately went into a panic, scouring the surface of the earth in search of her daughter. Because Demeter was so filled with grief and worry, she neglected her duties as the goddess of the harvest, and plants all around the world began to wither and die.

Back in the Underworld, Hades had been trying desperately to win Persephone over. He showered her with gifts: wreaths of dead flowers, gems that were frigid to the touch. But Persephone spent most of her time sitting alone in his palace garden, silently wiping the tears from her eyes.

Finally, Hades had an idea. He knew Persephone was intelligent, and capable of more than being the meek daughter of Demeter. And so, he offered Persephone a throne of her own to rule beside him as an equal over the Underworld.

At first, Persephone was hesitant. She had barely been allowed to make decisions over her own life when she was living with Demeter. But as the months went by, Persephone realized she enjoyed her new responsibilities. She even created Elysium, the place where the best of mortals could go after death.

But above in the world of the living, things were still going terribly. Humans, without the help of Demeter, were beginning to starve without their crops. Even when Helios, the Sun God, confessed to Demeter that he had seen Hades take Persephone, she refused to allow plants to bloom until she was reunited with her daughter.

Zeus saw all of this, and immediately sought out Hermes, the messenger of the Gods. He told him to fetch Persephone and bring her to his palace on Olympus.

Hermes went down into the Underworld and found Persephone soon enough, standing alone in the palace garden beside a pomegranate tree. He told her Zeus had given him orders to take her away, and Persephone reluctantly got on his chariot to soar out of the Underworld and up to Olympus.

When they finally arrived, Persephone saw her mother waiting for her in the palace hall, and the two embraced with cries of delight. But as Demeter hugged her daughter, she looked down and saw Persephone was holding a pomegranate. Immediately, she stiffened.

“What’s wrong?” Persephone said with a laugh, drawing back to regard her mother.

But Demeter couldn’t speak. The pomegranate in her daughter’s hand was missing several seeds. And as she looked back up into her daughter’s face, she heard Hades come up from behind them.

“She can’t leave,” Hades said calmly. “She’s eaten from my palace garden.”

This was true. Once one ate anything from the Underworld, they were forced to stay there forever.

Demeter felt her face flush with anger. Immediately, she accused Hades of tricking her daughter, even as Persephone tried to convince Demeter that she was in love with Hades, and was happy living as the Queen of the Underworld.

Suddenly, Zeus entered the room. He listened to Demeter and Hades argue, and then silenced them so he could hear Persephone’s side of the story.

In the end, Zeus made a decision for all of them.

Persephone, because she had eaten three seeds from the pomegranate, would stay in the Underworld for three months out of the year. For the other nine months, she would live with her mother.

While everyone accepted the deal as only fair, Demeter wasn’t as pleased with the agreement as Persephone and Hades.

Therefore, during the three months when Persephone is away from her mother, ruling alongside Hades as the Queen of the Underworld, Demeter allows the plants on Earth to weaken and die. That’s why we have winters.

But when the snow melts and the flowers bloom, know that it’s because Persephone and Demeter are, once again, together.

Elon Musk TERMINATES Twitter Deal

Elon Musk has announced he has TERMINATED his deal to purchase Twitter.

Long story short: Musk says Twitter is in material breach of the Merger Agreement by failing to disclose vast amounts of information concerning phony accounts, bots and more.   Here is the official Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Notice of termination of the deal:

Official Notice found HERE

Rectangle Cafeteria Pizza

A High School “copycat”. Make it for some fine memories.

From HERE. Please enjoy!

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My early school years took place primarily in the 90’s, and I remember the cafeteria serving up super cheesy rectangles of pizza on a thin crust every Friday. Everyone looked forward to Pizza Friday! As I grew older, I realized that “rectangle pizza” was a more widespread thing that existed in many schools other than my small lil’ educational establishment in East Tennessee.

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While I’m sure school cafeterias had their own standardized way of preparing these pizzas on endless, massive sheet pans to be sold to hungry kiddos, you can create a very close substitute of school cafeteria pizza at home to help relive some childhood memories.

To keep things easy, I used a ball of premade dough that I found at my regular grocery store (Kroger). I recommend you do the same if you don’t want to make a homemade dough. You technically could use the canned pizza dough, but because this pizza is made in a large 10×15″ baking sheet, the dough from the cans will be very, very thin when pressed into the pan.

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As far as toppings, I remember my school mostly serving the plain cheese variety, though on some days there were meat varieties offered. You can stick to those basic options for your homemade school lunch pizza, but you can also load it up with any of your favorite protein or veggie toppings.

To me, one key feature of classic school rectangle pizza is the fact that there is very little visible crust around the outside. To achieve an authentic look, spread the sauce and toppings allll the way to the edge of the crust.

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Want to make things a little healthier? Consider a whole wheat crust to increase the fiber and complex carbohydrate content. Use a part-skim mozzarella and use a lean protein such as cooked chicken or lean ground turkey.

Even if you’re not seeking a hit of nostalgia with this meal, it’s also just an easy way to make a big and simple pizza for the family for your own at-home Pizza Fridays. Enjoy this school pizza recipe!!

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Vladimir Putin: They want to defeat us on the battlefield. Let them try!

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Vladimir Putin: They want to defeat us on the battlefield. Let them try!
After the end of the spring session of parliament, Vladimir Putin met with the heads of the Duma factions. The president, in the best traditions, flashed his eloquence. Here are his main phrases:

- We have many parties, but one homeland.

- Yes, they (the authors of Western sanctions - Ed.) create difficulties for us. But not the kind that the initiators of the economic blitzkrieg counted on.

- They tell us: we started a war. Not! It was unleashed by the collective West, supporting the coup in Ukraine.

- Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield , well, what can I say, let them try!

- The beginning of the special operation is the demolition of the American world order. It is the beginning of a multipolar world.

- Today the West is degenerating into totalitarianism, censorship and the closure of the media.

- The war to the last Ukraine, which is being waged by the West , is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people. But that seems to be where it all comes from. But we haven't really started anything yet.

- We did not refuse peace negotiations , but the further, the more difficult it will be to conduct them.

- The idea of ​​integrating Russia into NATO seemed absurd to the members of the alliance. And why? Because they do not need such a Russia.

- The sanctions had a goal : to sow discord, but it did not work and will not work!

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The Death Of A Capable Revisionist

From MoA

Last night some man with a self build gun killed the former prime minister of Japan Shinzo Abe.

Adhering to family tradition Shinzo Abe has been an Japanese imperialist. As Peter Lee wrote about him back in 2013:

Myth: Shinzo Abe is a leading member of the team of world and Asian democracies standing up to China in the name of universal values like “freedom of navigation” and to help ensure the shared peace and prosperity of Asia.

Reality: Shinzo Abe is a revisionist nationalist using friction with China to pursue Japanese national interests, put Japan on the right side of a zero-sum economic equation opposite the PRC, maximize Japan’s independence of action as a regional hegemon, hopefully peacefully, but if not...

Mission for the Western media: Manage the cognitive dissonance between comforting myth and disturbing reality for the sake of its faithful readers.

Challenge: Explain away Prime Minister Abe’s Boxing Day visit to the Yasukuni Shrine.

Some of the most monstrous Class A war criminals of the second word war, which include Abe’s grandfather, were buried at the Yasukuni Shrine. The shrine and its attached museum are off-limits for most Japanese politicians. But Shinzo Abe prominently visited it because he carried the ideology of those who are buried there:

The core of Abe’s historical revisionism is not just that the bandit-infested territories of China and Korea demanded Japanese tutelage in the 1930s and 1940s, but also that the Japanese Empire was leading the fight of the oppressed peoples of Asia against British colonialism and American imperialism—in other words, the real war crime of World War II was U.S. aggression against Japan. The United States, and its pretensions to moral superiority over Japan, as well as China and Korea’s presumptuous claims to virtuous victimhood, were a target of Abe’s Yasukuni visit.

His policies of furthering militarism and conflict, especially with China and both Koreas, while making nice with Russia were born out of that ideology.Shinzo Abe’s last stint as prime minister lasted eight years. That was astonishing long as prime ministers in Japan only rarely serve longer than one year. It requires special qualities to politically survive as long as Shinzo Abe did.Gun crimes in Japan are extremely rare. Of the dozen a year that actually happen most are between rivaling groups of the Japanese mafia, the Jakuza.The Japanese police will likely find that the gunman was a ‘lone individual’. That may well be, but there are certainly others who will gain from the incident. As William Pesek writes in Asia Times:

Though the motives and longer-term implications of this attack are impossible to assess, one political dynamic may have been altered: Prime Minister Fumio Kishida may now have greater latitude to stay on past his one-year mark in office come October.

Even though the Abe camp denied it, Tokyo was abuzz with chatter that Abe, who stepped down in September 2020, might toss his hat in the ring for a third stint as leader. Abe first served as premier from 2006 to 2007, then from 2012 to 2020.

Abe had been playing a behind-the-scenes kingmaker role since resigning. Speculation was rife that he was unhappy seeing Kishida walk back Abe’s signature efforts at detente with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Abe also reportedly disliked the optics of Kishida pledging to reform, at long last, Asia’s No 2 economy, the implication being that so-called “Abenomics” failed to put Japan on a more vibrant path.

Japanese prime ministers don’t tend to last more than 12 months. Abe’s eight-year run was a stark outlier. Suffice to say, Kishida will not need to be looking over his shoulder at Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) powerbroker Abe. This Sunday’s upper house elections are likely to give Kishida a firmer grip over his factional party, allowing him to emerge from the shadow of leaders past.

Kishida’s policies are otherwise mostly in line with Abe’s. He wants a strong militaristic Japan that can project power abroad. The U.S. is furthering that as it helps with its anti-China policies. But it should be careful what it wishes for.

Japan is a latent nuclear power as it has stored quite a bit of uranium and plutonium:

Japan has 47.8 tons of high sensitive separated plutonium., 10.8 tons of which are stored in Japan, enough to make 1350 nuclear warheads. In addition, Japan also has about 1.2 tons of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) for research reactors.
The country has the knowhow to handle such material. In a crisis situation it could quickly build nuclear bombs. Japan has long range delivery vehicles due to its space program. Once unleashed a revisionist Japan would be a danger, not only for its immediate neighbors, but for the U.S. itself.Chian and both Koreas will be relieved that Shinzo Abe, the capable revisionist, is gone.I wonder at which shrine his ashes will be buried.

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TSA Orders Employees to Undergo “C.O.G” Training “Immediately”

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The US Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration has ordered any Employees who have NOT already undergone the “Continuity of Government (COG)” and “Devolution” training, to “Do so immediately.”

The TSA COG program was created in the year 2012, and most TSA employees hired during and after 2012 have already gone through the program.  But as with all new training programs, quite a number of existing TSA employees did NOT go through it when the program came out.

This week, TSA began contacting each employee who has NOT yet undergone the COG program, and ordered them to “do so immediately.”

The Continuity of Government program exists so that government operations can continue even though some massive disaster, catastrophe, or attack, has taken out most government functions.  the “Devolution” aspect of COG is that important decisions no longer MUST be made by Washington.  Regions can make their own decisions.  Authority devolves to lower levels when the upper levels are either cut-off, or destroyed.

It is sort of a Doomsday Plan to try to keep a government running even when much of it – or much of the country – has been destroyed.

Now, **WHY** would the TSA insist that any employee who has not yet taken the training, “do so immediately?”

What does government think is coming, that might cause their employees to NEED TO KNOW THIS?

War with Russia, perhaps?

Nuclear war with Russia, perhaps?

You’re a smart person . . . put two and two together.

Confessions of a Man Who Shot Himself In The Head And Survived

What pushed you to do it?

A lot. Losing my girlfriend, the savings account we worked at for years, the business we created. Just exacerbated my anxiety and depression.

My ex really pushed me to get help in the times where I wasn’t struggling, so I became defensive and put it off. I shouldn’t have, because it would have given me the skills to get through the times I was struggling. Therapy is a bitch. I keep learning things about myself that I’m not proud of. Things I could have managed better for years. The more I learn, the more confident I become that I can better myself.

How long did you take to decide that you were ready to end it?

I decided the night before. It took about 12 hours for me to finalize it.

Did you think about your girlfriend before you did it?

She was in the house. I yelled that I loved her. Then I said Im sorry to my mom, and that I loved her (she wasn’t in the house). But yeah. For years, she was/is constantly my first thought.

What did it feel like when you shot yourself?

Nobody prepares you for what getting shot feels like. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t sting. It doesn’t ache. It just burns. Like fire in my head. And blood pouring from my mouth.

I think I was still in shock when I arrived at the hospital, but when they pushed the fentanyl, all that burning went away and I could recognize how much burning pain I was in.

I remember not being able to talk because my tongue hurt.

My pain the first month in the hospital got progressively worse, but high amounts of painkillers will trick you into that.

How did the shot not kill you? How did it “miss”?

I don’t fucking know. It went in by the corner of my left jaw, and came out above my forehead on the right side, taking most of the orbit of my eye with it. I fucked up.

What caliber did you use?

9mm Luger.

Maybe it wasn’t your time?

I wish. I don’t really believe in that mentality. Someone close to me said something along the lines of, “God wasn’t ready for you yet.” And my first thought was, “thousands of years of medicine research and a team of excellent doctors is the reason I’m here, but ok.”

I’ve read stories about how people who jumped off bridges (and survived) immediately regretted doing so and wanted to live more than anything as they were falling. Right after the moment, did you have regrets about doing it with a desire to live or maybe have disappointments that it didn’t work? Or maybe no feelings at all right after?

I woke up with a “what the fuck?” Mentality. I was more confused that I woke up. I didn’t really have feelings about it until a few months later when the drugs wore off.

What was the first thing your mom said to you afterwards?

I’m not sure what my mom said. I woke up post surgery and my whole family was there (they all had to fly in). I was very confused. (Now I know I was in surgery for 10 hours).

What was the road to recovery like for you?

It’s still ongoing. 2 months in the hospital/rehab, lots of follow up appointments, physical therapy, mental/emotional therapy.

Legal battles for custody and household items.

Lots of reintegration with my parents and immediate family, which has been great. It fortunately brought us all closer.

Before I did it, I can’t remember the last time my brother and I spoke on the phone even. It really shook my brother the most. I’m super grateful for his presence in my life now.

Physically, what are the long term consequences to your face and skull from shooting your self?

Physically, I lost my right eye. And I have a plate in my jaw forever. And my forehead is missing a piece of bone they took out during a bifrontal craniotomy. Beyond that, I’m pretty healthy.

Is your face messed up?

Pretty normal for a dude with one eye.

Are you dealing with chronic pain, nerve damage, headaches, etc.?

It’s alright. Headaches suck, mostly because only morphine is enough to dull them. Nerve damage is only in my jaw/tongue/cheek, which is frustrating, but I started vaping because it makes my tongue tingle, and I don’t bite it accidentally anymore.

Is she okay?

Probably not. But she won’t talk to me. I truly hope she is. Of all the negativity between us, I only hope that she’s doing well and that someday, sooner than later, we can sit down and have an honest discussion about it.

What’s something you would want to say to your ex-girlfriend?

This is something I think about all the time. Previously, I was very concerned with myself, and put myself into context when I didn’t need to. That’s something I’d change if I had an hour to sit down with her.

I’d really like her to know that I love her. To this day, nothing has changed. I’d like to have the conversation that I don’t hold anything against her, except for the fact that she knew and didn’t drag me to get help and stand by me, in ways I did for her, and leaving me in the worst of times.

I’d really like the opportunity to listen to her. I don’t know what she has to say, and I don’t need to hear anything. I wasn’t a very effective communicator during our relationship, and I’d like the opportunity to really hear her out, and share those emotions.

Do you still harbor thoughts about suicide?

They’ve mostly gone away. There are times I ponder it, but it’s more the idea of, whereas previously I was fantasizing the roadmap.

Did anything change about your personality or preferences on things as a result of the trauma? Something you would never expect that would change?

Not particularly in personality or preferences. I became a hell of a lot more forgiving and patient, which wasn’t much existent (except with my kids) before.

I think the thing that changed the most was having my emotional brain available. I wasn’t very capable of connecting with my emotions before, I genuinely thought I was broken. I really got down on myself when it came to my ex, because I couldn’t empathize with her when she experienced heightened emotions, and it put a wedge between us, or I did. Now I’m empathizing with commercials, and it’s really bizarre when I become mindful of it, even still.

Do you regret doing it?

I think a lot about regret. I don’t regret shooting myself. I regret the way I proposed to my ex. I regret the way I treated her and other people when they needed me. I regret losing sight of myself because I wanted to be someone else. I regret spending so much time looking for escape instead of looking inward. But I don’t regret shooting myself. It changed my world.

How are things going for you now?

It’s not really going better. I spent years developing a family and life. It’s going about exactly as I predicted before putting a gun to my head. But! On the other side of that, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about love, myself, and bettering myself mentally that I never could have without experiencing tragedy in my previous lifestyle.

And I get to share my story and hopefully help others, which is something I never cared much about.

Ukraine Soldiers SOLD U.S. HIMARS to Chechens . . . who were Russian Army Intel

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Reports are coming in CLAIMING (not yet verified) that Ukrainian Armed Forces members SOLD a United States “HIMARS” Multiple Rocket Launcher System (MLRS) to men they thought were “Chechens” for one million dollars.

The “Chechens” turned out to be Russian military intelligence.

According to the CLAIMS, the money was delivered to the families of the soldiers and when the families told the soldiers that strange men had come and dropped off money, the soldiers turned the HIMARS over to the “Chechens.”

According to unverified reports, the Russian Army is now studying the HIMARS system to be able to either duplicate it, or defeat it on a battlefield.

More details if I get them, but I emphasize that these claims are, as yet, UNVERIFIED.

How HIMARS works

Nice graphic.

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Ignoring China’s infrastructure assistance, Brazil insisted on cooperating with Japan, but the bridge collapsed before it was used

Another sign of a dying Japan. 

In recent years, Made in Japan is increasingly symbolized inferior quality. From car safety scandal to bridge collapsed , train breakdown... The scandals keep coming: Ignoring China's infrastructure assistance, Brazil insisted on cooperating with Japan, but the bridge collapsed before it was used - iNEWS

Article HERE

I’ve Seen The Saucers – Elton John (1974)

A trip down memory lane, and a well done you-tube video. I really love the way the vintage 1950s science fiction video was used.

NATIONWIDE CANADA OUTAGE OF ALL CREDIT/DEBIT CARDS

As of 9:35 AM EDT Friday. reports are now flooding-in that ALL credit and Debit card processing in Canada is OFFLINE.   Also receiving reports that numerous Cellphone carriers are suffering service outages NATIONWIDE.

More details as I get them.  (This is why I so often encourage readers and listeners to my radio show, to HAVE CASH MONEY.)

 

UPDATE 9:51 AM EDT —

APPARENTLY IT’S NOT JUST CREDIT/DEBIT CARDS AND SOME CELLULAR CARRIERS . . . . IT’S EVERYTHING.  ALL COMMS SEEM TO BE AFFECTED.  LOOK:

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ROGERS Canada confirms it is having massive network issues and is working on it.

Brazilian wandering spider

Seen here is a Brazilian wandering spider nursing its young under a bed.

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Its Latin name is Phoneutria fera. This spider is aggressive and highly poisonous.

It appeared in the 2007 Guinness Book of World Records for being the most poisonous animal.

It is one of the few really dangerous spiders for us.

The spider itself reaches 5 cm in size, but the legs can be 15 cm long.

Wandering spiders are hairy and have eight eyes, two of which are large.

And they move very fast.

It is called a wandering spider because it moves on the tropical forest floor and not in a burrow or web.

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This makes it so dangerous.

Because it looks for dark shelters that can be houses, clothes, cars, boots, boxes and piles of logs.

You could accidentally disturb him and this is not a good idea.

He can also be found in a bunch of bananas, because he likes them.

But in general he likes meat. Crickets, mice or even lizards are part of their prey.

If this spider bites you, you may see and feel something like two pricks.

Or you may feel strongly poisoned.

But in both cases you have to seek the help of doctors, because you are in serious danger.

The spider has a powerful neurotoxin, which means it attacks your nervous system.

But its venom is also the most painful and excruciating of all spiders due to its high concentration of serotonin.

And these spiders are among the ones that bite humans the most.

There are certain countries, where it is better not to move too much alone, without a guide, in nature.

Europe is doing quite well in this regard.

That’s good.

Photographer Asked some Artists To Draw His Portrait Photos In Their Own Style, And The Result Is Fabulous!

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Mathieu Sten is an experimental portrait photographer who asked 16 artists to draw his portrait photos in their style. The results are fabulous. It never ceases to amaze me how artists nowadays always strive to find different and unique ways of expressing their art. Some of these portraits are super realistic, some are cartoon-ish, some look like out of a Korean comics series, a fantasy series or super-digitalized movie animation, while others are digitally painted or completely illustrated from scratch. You should take a look below, but first, let’s share some information about the initiator of this artistic collaboration.

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Mathieu Stern is himself an artist who uses vintage lenses, DIY lenses and other techniques which might seem a little strange, to create images that help you look at the world in new and extraordinary ways. Mathieu also likes to go on YouTube and explain his artistic experiments and discoveries. You can look him up on YouTube if you want to find out more. So far, we’ll concentrate on his collaboration with 16 artists who redid his portrait photos in their way.

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“I decided to first contact an illustrator asking if they wanted to redraw one of my portraits in their own style. I told her that I would create a YouTube video about the process and create the first episode with a team of my favorite artists. She said yes and the result she sent me was so amazing that I started to contact every illustrator I liked on Instagram. One month later, I had 16 participants and I had a great looking video of their processes,”

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US Hypersonic Missile Test Fails For A Second Time

The missile prototype, known as "Conventional Prompt Strike," has never even got off the launchpad back in October 2021.  When it failed to launch mere days after China completed a hypersonic missile test so successful that it literally traveled all the way around the Earth.

In 2019, Russia became the first country to successfully complete a launch of these next-generation missiles that can reportedly travel up to a whopping 27 times faster than the speed of sound and dodge whatever defense systems attempt to block their way.

Though the American military has had setbacks when it comes to these dystopian missiles, it have successfully launched at least one hypersonic weapon, DARPA's Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept — though as reports at the time indicated, that one "only" goes five times the speed of sound. Not the 25 times the speed as sound like China's and Russian missiles.

Article HERE

The Killing Has Begun: Former Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ASSASSINATED

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The scam of COVID, the damage and death of the COVID vaccines, and the plummeting economy have finally prompted someone to KILL a political leader.  Former Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot and killed last night while on the campaign trail in Nara, Japan.

Former Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated in Nara on Friday while campaigning for the upcoming election.  The 67-year-old world leader was rushed to hospital in grave condition, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in an address to the nation. A suspect has been taken into custody.

The Nara city fire department said that Abe was in cardiopulmonary arrest before he was taken to the hospital.

Photographs published by the Japanese agency Kyodo showed Abe lying face-up on the street by a guardrail, blood on his white shirt. Some showed people crowding around him as he lay unconscious.

Nara city’s emergency services said he had been wounded on the right side of his neck and left clavicle.

The incident occurred at around 11.30 am (8 am IST). Abe was making a campaign speech on a street outside the train station ahead of Sunday’s election to the upper house of Japan’s parliament.

Two witnesses — an NHK reporter and a female attendee — told NHK that they heard two gunshots. The woman said that though the first gunshot was loud, she did not see anyone fall. But after the second shot, she saw ex-PM Abe collapse to the ground.

The alleged shooter was tackled and taken under arrest as seen in the social media posting below:

 

 

 

He is believed to be an ex-military member — a former maritime self-defense force member, reported Fuji TV.

A witness to the attack told NHK that the apparent shooter did not attempt to escape after the shooting. He instead laid down the gun and remained on the spot as he was caught by security personnel.

Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, was known for his hawkish foreign policy and a signature economic strategy that popularly came to be known as “Abenomics”.

A conservative nationalist by most descriptions, the 67-year-old Abe led the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to victory twice.

His first stint as prime minister was brief – for a little over a year starting in 2006 – and controversial. But he made a surprising political comeback in 2012, and stayed in power until 2020 when he resigned for health reasons.

Japan was in a recession when he began his second term and his economic policy – built on monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reforms – was credited with helping growth return to a faltering economy.

He also oversaw Japan’s recovery from a massive earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku in 2011, which killed nearly 20,000 people and led to a meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactors.

UPDATE 10:01 AM EDT —

Video of the actual shooting has surfaced on Social Media.  In the video below, notice how the crowd just stands there after two apparently shotgun-type blasts.   This type of crime is so rare in Japan, the people there didn’t react the way you would see in places like the USA.

In the USA, people would be stampeding to safety.

 

NATO admits it’s been preparing for conflict with Russia since 2014

Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that increases in deployments and military spending were done with Russia in mind.

By Russia Today

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Wednesday that increases in military spending and rising numbers of troop deployments in Eastern Europe since 2014 were carried out in anticipation of a conflict with Russia.

Speaking after a meeting of NATO members and partner states in Madrid, Stoltenberg accused Russia of “using force in the eastern Donbass since 2014,” despite the fact that Kiev’s forces have shelled cities in the region ever since the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics declared independence from Ukraine that year.

Nevertheless, Stoltenberg said that the US-led military bloc decided in 2014 to start beefing up its forces in Eastern Europe.

“The reality is also that we have been preparing for this since 2014,” he stated. “That is the reason that we have increased our presence in the eastern part of the alliance, why NATO allies have started to invest more in defense, and why we have increased [our] readiness.”

According to NATO figures, the alliance’s European members and Canada have increased their military expenditure by between 1.2% and 5.9% every year since 2014. However, only 10 out of 30 NATO states currently meet the bloc’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defense.

The increase in expenditure has been most noticeable in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, with Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania all meeting the target for the first time in 2022.

Earlier on Wednesday, NATO members agreed to adopt a new Strategic Concept. This policy blueprint sets out the alliance’s stance toward partners, non-members, and adversaries, with the 2022 iteration naming Russia as the “most significant and direct threat” to the bloc.

On the other hand, Moscow has labeled NATO’s expansion into former Soviet states since the end of the Cold War – which Western leaders explicitly promised in the early 1990s would not happen – as a threat against its own security. NATO’s official position on Ukraine, set out in the 2008 Bucharest Declaration, is that it and Georgia “will become members of NATO” at an unspecified future date. Russia has cited Ukraine’s pursuit of NATO membership as a key factor behind the current conflict.

Despite the alliance’s post-Cold War march into the former Eastern Bloc, Stoltenberg claimed on Wednesday that “NATO has strived for a better relationship with Russia for decades.”

7 Confessions That Will Take You On A Rollercoaster Of Emotions

1. A dying wife

Me and my wife were having serious issues and then she got sick with cancer.

That came like a mack truck. She said a lot of the grief she gave me was because she knew she was sick and was ashamed of burdening me and leaving me as a widow dad of four kids under 13.

I took care of that woman like she was one of my boys. That experience took 10 years off my life.

Her death was easy compared to the aftermath…

I was going through her computer and saw that she had a separate email account which was odd.

That was on purpose.

This bitch was planning on blindsiding with a divorce and was going back and forth with different lawyers about making me a weekend dad, throwing me out of my house and even seeing if I’d pay her legal bills.

This went on, for months up until a week before she saw the doctor and found out that she had terminal cancer.

This slag used me to take care of her in her final days because no one else would.

I won’t tell my kids…yet.

2. Manager for OnlyFans

I was working for a company (out of many like this) dedicated to entirely manage OnlyFans accounts for girls. Basically these girls never did anything else than just taking the pictures and videos for us.

80% of workers were guys, 20% were girls, but it’s all fake. Even when you think that the person is real and is actually talking to you, she is not.

Even when the account is verified, it could be fake.

I feel bad because I talked to MANY guys who fell in love for a girl who doesn’t even know they exist and we had to take as much money as we could from everyone, that was the goal.

We were so good at it that our standards were 700-1000 USD per day with each account, and each worker had to manage 6 accounts, so imagine the amount of money we made monthly.

So my advice: only pay OnlyFans girls when they give you a live proof that they are real, like making an specific gesture with their hand on a selfie. Don’t trust videos where they say they are real, don’t trust audios, don’t trust pictures that seem taken at the same time… Or just watch porn.

Also: it’s a PPV site and therefore it’s just a business, so don’t be the guy who just wants free content, it’s annoying af, real or not 🙂

3. Growing up from a bad childhood

So I’m not sure exactly where to put this so I thought here would be an okay place. Lately I’ve been seeing in a lot more liberal groups especially, that saying poor people shouldn’t have children is eugenics and it’s wrong blah blah blah. But I feel like a lot of people saying this haven’t had to experience growing up poor. In poverty, and homelessness.

My parent’s were poor and could barley take care of themselves, they lived in a motel when they got pregnant with me.

My entire childhood was a horrible experience having to grow up and not knowing if you were going to get fed, or have a roof over your head, it fucking sucked.

It hurt even more since I lived in a town where everyone was well off, so as a kid I never got to experience things a lot of other kids do, like going to camp, taking summer trips to Disneyland, or playing their games on their nice TVs.

Growing up being the oldest girl I raised both of my little brothers since my parents couldn’t afford childcare, which led to me missing out on opportunities with my peers, I was so socially awkward for not being around people my age enough that even to this day.

I am 21 years old and all my friends are in their early 30s late 20s because I feel like I cannot relate to people my age.

I feel like I was forced to grow up way to fast and I would be lying if part of me said I didn’t resent my parents for having me knowing they couldn’t afford to.

I dont know, if you’re someone who can barley take care of themselves, do yourself and your future child a favor and just put off having children until you can afford them.

I think a lot of people see having children as a right, instead of seeing a child as a human being that has rights.

And sorry if I hurt anyone’s feelings by saying this, but yes I truly believe if you’re poor you shouldn’t be having children, it’s not you who suffers, it’s the child.

4. Short Guys

Gave the short guy a chance and it was totally worth it

I started seeing this shorter guy, 5’5, and I really like him. I myself am 5’11, so there’s already a huge difference. He carries himself with so much confidence, he doesn’t even care if I wear heels which I have when we go out. Phew, the sex is amazing too. Definitely the best I’ve ever had. I’ve never had someone fit between my legs so perfectly before. Now whenever I see a shorter man, I wonder what they’re like in bed and I feel an instant attraction. Go short kings! Shoot your shot at the tall girls!

5. Imagine Dragons

I unironically love Imagine Dragons

I get it. It’s “corporate rock.” They’re “sellouts.” It’s “fake” music.

But the surge of emotion I feel listening to “Birds”, and the way I bop my head with confidence to “Enemy” is very real.

Guys, we are ALL being manipulated by all forms of media, all of the time. Marvel is designed to be cinematic brain candy. Pop music is the same. We crave distraction and bursts of dopamine first, and meaning and profundity second.

And while I do love GOOD music too, I’m finally ready to stand up and say this. It feels like a weight has been lifted off me.

6. Prostitute from my kid brother

I’m 30 and my little brother is 24. He’s honestly the best brother I could have asked for. I still remember the day he was born and holding my newborn baby brother when I was a kid. As we grew up I always knew he was different but he’s my brother and I love him and I wouldn’t change him. He’s honestly one of my best friends and having a brother with downs syndrome, especially one like him has made me a better person.

Last month my parents went out of town for a few days and they asked if I’d stay with my brother and take care of the house. While he might have downs syndrome he’s not entirely helpless he just can’t really be on his own like that. So of course I agreed and brought my PS5 over and some games, snacks and beers, I called out of work for a few days and figured we’d have some fun just like when we were kids.

We were having a great time and were talking the first day while taking turns playing Elden Ring and my bro started the game and got to the part where the guy calls you “maidenless” and I said something like “Ooooo he called you maidenless bro…daaaaaaamn.” and my brother got super sad looking and I asked him what was wrong and he said, “I am maidenless. I’ll never have a girlfriend.” So we talked about that for a bit and he was actually feeling super depressed because he’s never had a girlfriend and didn’t think he ever would. We kind of talked it out and he was really sad and I decided fuck it we can find him a girl.

I called a couple people I knew who were into that sort of thing to see if they knew anyone. Well one of my buddies had a number of this girl so I gave her a call. She was actually super sweet and understanding about the situation and she said she’d be glad to show my brother a good time for her usual rate. She had a cousin with downs so she was very sympathetic.

I told my brother I’d pay a girl to come over and show him some fun on the condition that our parents will die without knowing I hired a prostitute to come to their house. He agreed.

So I made plans for her to come over, got my brother shaved and showered for his date. She showed up dressed up super nice she was also super hot. I’m no chef but I had picked up some food from Olive Garden for them. She was a genuinely nice person and was really good with him and I just left them to do their thing while I played the playstation in the livingroom. Eventually they passed by going upstairs to his room. I put my headphones on and kept playing.

Eventually they came back down and both had big smiles on their faces. She hung out with us a bit then it was time for her to go. I handed her the cash plus some extra as a bonus. She said my brother was a sweetheart and that I was a good brother to do something like that for him and that she had a good time. She handed me half the cash back.

Eventually my parents came back and thankfully are none the wiser as my mother especially would probably kill me. My brother is super appreciative and said it was the most fun he’d ever had. I have no regrets.

7. Ugly. Ugly. Ugly. Girl.

I can’t really say this out loud to anyone in my personal life because it would hurt my family members and my friends would try to console me because they love me but honestly, my life has been ruined due to my ugliness.

I’m not overweight, I dress well and I do my best to treat others well but none of this matters because I simply have a very ugly face. No men have ever approached me or wanted to date me because why would any man want to date a hideous woman who doesn’t even look like a woman? I don’t blame them, I mean I could be dressed in the most feminine clothing and i would still not look like a real woman because of my face

My entire life, a lot of people have been mean to me (including some relatives) because of how ugly I am – it’s so sad but true that even little kids who are perceived as “unattractive” get treated worse by adults

I’m only in my 20s but it’s so painful to know that I’m never going to get married or have my own children with a spouse who loves me.

I understand that it’s not any one else’s job to try and make me feel better about the fact that I am ugly because it’s not like anyone intentionally did this to me.

I have siblings who are actually reasonably attractive people so it’s not even like my parents genetics are necessarily bad but I just ended up with the worst combination of their genes and honestly, what is the point of living like this.

I feel so alone in this experience because I’ve barely ever met any other women who are naturally unattractive. Every woman I know gets hit on by men and approached for dating. I wish I knew what it was like to have a man want me sexually

In Ancient China, after the emperor died, he needed a group of people to follow him to another world and continue to serve him, so there would be some people buried alive with him.

Most of his entourage were concubines.

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When the grave was excavated, the discovery shocked the entire Chinese archaeological community. A total of 186 people were buried with the emperor!

Many people believe that the 186 martyrs who were in the Qin Cemetery were buried alive for Duke Mu of Qin.

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In fact, according to archaeologists, 160 of them died voluntarily. The rest were probably prisoners of war or concubines.

2. Chinese archaeologists found an ancient tomb. There are about 80 corpses of grave robbers (those who dig graves to steal artifacts or personal objects in tombs) inside.

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These are called quicksand graves, which the ancients used to deter grave robbers.

This mechanism takes advantage of the instability of the sand. The craftsmen poured some quicksand over the tomb chamber. Once the grave robbers entered the grave through the hole, quicksand mixed with sharp stones would plug the hole quickly, and then kill the tomb robbers or trap them in it.

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Archaeologists sent excavators to clear the sand, and the next discovery shocked everyone.

At the bottom of the tomb chamber, there were 80 corpses inside.

According to research by experts, 80 people who died in the graves were grave robbers. They are trapped in a tomb that is always filled with quicksand. The tragedy at the tomb cannot be forgotten.

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While the quicksand grave mechanism seems cruel (uh), stealing the contents of the grave itself is also wrong.

Such tombs could protect the owner of the tomb from outside disturbances, and at the same time, they could also preserve the cultural heritage contained in the tomb, which made one admire how wise the people of that time were.

Real data about the possible spread of Bio-warfare agents

Russia currently has some 6,000 or more Ukrainian war prisoners. Many of
these men are wounded, and all of them have had health checks. This
comes from the Russian MOD, at the end of a long article on Telegram
about the bio-labs. (I did not absorb the total article.) But this
conclusion is interesting:

I would like to present real data on the health condition of the
voluntarily surrendered Ukrainian servicemen. This dispositive presents
the data on presence of antibodies to contagious disease agents without
mentioning personal data of these servicemen.

The results are as follows: 33% of the examined servicemen had had
hepatitis A, over 4% had renal syndrome fever and 20% had West Nile
fever. The figures are significantly higher than the statistical
averages. In view of active research of these diseases held by the
Pentagon within the Ukrainian projects, there is reason to believe that
servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) were involved as
volunteers in experiments to assess the tolerance of dangerous
infectious diseases.

The current lack of therapeutic effect of antibacterial medication has
been reported during in-patient treatment of AFU servicemen in medical
facilities. High concentrations of antibiotics, including sulphonyl
amides and fluoroquinolones, have been detected in their blood.

This fact may indicate preventive use of antibiotics and preparation of
personnel for operating in conditions of biological contamination, such
as cholera agent, that indirectly proves the information of the Russian
Defense Ministry that Ukrainian special units were planning to use
biological agents.

The data will be included in the U.S. military-biological dossier and we
will continue to examine it and keep you informed.

It is the western media which is blaming them for everything that goes wrong on our planet.

You must remember that in the US, the for-profit corporate media is owned by only six corporations, and they are dependent on several major advertisers for most of their income. These advertisers are all American, and they want to weave a narrative about the US and the world which they and the American government can support:

  • “America is the greatest country in the world, and you should be proud to live in it because you have freedom and democracy!”
  • “Freedom and democracy are under threat in the rest of the world from Russia and China who want to spread dictatorships all over the world, and are against everything Americans stand for!”
  • “You must support everything the US stands for without question because if you don’t, you are a bad person who supports Russia and China and what they are trying to do!”
  • “Don’t ask any awkward questions. We have told you everything you need to know, so just shut up!”

Now, these corporate media types hang out with their billionaire globalist buddies and their government minions at Davos and other venues, where they make deals and pat each other on the back about what a good job the West is doing running the world.

Or was doing running the world because things are going pear-shaped pretty fast in 2022.

So the problem is that while most Americans and Europeans have no trouble buying into this narrative, many other countries are not. Example: Many governments are not supporting or enforcing the Western sanctions against Russia. Some of them are significant countries like China, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Argentina and Saudi Arabia.

They have decided to stay neutral over the Ukraine matter and continue to do business with Russia while most of NATO Europe does not do business with Russia.

This should make you, dear reader, ask the question “Why am I getting such a different view of Russia in the west from those other countries and governments?”

The answer is simple: Those countries do not rely only on the Western media to tell them what to think. In those countries, their governments usually have control of the media, not private for-profit media corporations. Their governments want their people to have a very different worldview than what Americans have.

So, instead of seeing Russia and China as nation-states which do not deserve to exist, they see Russia and China as having governments which are no longer content to have the west dictate the terms of world affairs unilaterally.

Which is why Russia and China founded BRICS. They have now positioned BRICS as an alternative to G7 and are asking other nations which share their views to join it.

That is what is going on.

I remember my first night before battle.

The Croats in Bosnia had assembled almost 20.000 troops, which was about half their army, to make a decisive attack against the positions of the Bosnian army. My unit was right in the middle. Preparations had already started days before the attack. Nobody told us that there would be an attack, but this wasn’t necessary, we saw the signs everywhere.

At first a reconnaissance unit from Croatia came to our base and started to observe the territory with some big binoculars. The next day some high ranking officers arrived and were discussing their plans over maps and aerial fotos.

Two days before day zero a mortar unit set up a dozen of 82 mm mortars in our backyard. And finally, when there was only one day to go, a complete mechanized infantry brigade from Croatia arrived. As my unit was our brigade’s intervention unit, the freshly arrived Croats sent their intervention unit to join us. We would attack together with them.

It was all very busy and crowded at our camp during these days. People coming and going. Trucks bringing ammunitions and weapons.

Finally all preparations came to an end and the support and logistics troops left us in the afternoon. Dusk settled in and everybody knew that the next morning would be the day. Some alcohol was served and we were reminded not to drink too much of it. One of my comrades didn’t listen and passed out somewhere. Another one started vomiting, not from the alcohol, but from stress and anxiety.

Most soldiers were busy preparing their gear, cleaning their rifles and getting ammo for their guns.

Around midnight a blue cotton ribbon was given to each soldier. We were told to put them on our uniforms to easily recognize each other as friendly troops. This was necessary as our enemy had very similar uniforms to ours.

After midnight an eerie quiet settled in. All weapons were cleaned, checked and double checked. Everybody was prepared and there was nothing left to do then wait. You can clean your weapon only that many times and puke your guts out only once.

In these last moments most soldiers preferred not to talk to each other, but to stay for themselves. I saw some of them praying. Others tried to sleep, but most of us were just laying down on our flak jackets, staring holes into the night sky and smoking one cigarette after another.

This moment reminded me of all the soldiers and armies in history who found themselves in the same situation. From ancient Germanic tribes , the French in Dien Bien Phu to our own enemy who was just a couple of hundred meters away. They must have felt the same thing. Being part of a big army going into combat you feel big and tiny at the same time. Fate is out of your hands and you can just hope and pray that tomorrow at the same time you will still be alive. You look around and watch your comrades. To see how they cope and to remember their faces. Some of them won’t come back.

My squad leader interrupted my thinking. We were called to pick up our gear and to advance to our starting positions. As our base was practically in the center of the attack, we just had to sit there and watch the other units to leave, wondering what will happen to them.

Then came our turn. We walked a few meters to our trenches to await the final signal for the attack from there. It was now absolutely quiet and dark. No talk, no cigarettes. Everybody’s eyes were directed towards enemy territory.

Then a small “blop” sound behind us, seconds later a sound over our heads, like a gush of wind or a swarm of wild geese flying over us and finally a big explosion in front of us, right in the middle of the enemy’s positions.

The waiting was over and the game was on…

What happened next?

We left the trench in small groups of five or six soldiers. I was the last soldier to get out. This was my first “big” battle and I decided to take it slowly. We were walking in single file, because the first soldier had to keep us clear of the mines. We had mined the whole area around our base just a couple of weeks before and although nobody had made any maps that could show us where the mines were, the guy we had put to walk in front had a good memory and knew which places to avoid.

Our own artillery now started a massive barrage. As we advanced so did our artillery fire, constantly hitting targets about two or three hundred meters in front of us.

After about two hundred meters we came to the first buildings of an enemy village. There was nobody there. We had expected some resistance, but not a single shot was fired at us. There were not even the unavoidable dogs around to bark at us. The village was totally dead, so we thought. We slowly passed through it and nothing happened.

Behind the village were several railroad tracks. We were about to enter a big industrial area. In the upcoming light of dawn I could make out warehouses, an oil refinery with several huge oil storage tanks and a lot of smaller buildings, like pump stations and office buildings. There were plenty of railroad tracks going in every direction and on them were dozens of railroad wagons of all kinds.

While we navigated ourselves towards the oil refinery a bullet zipped over our heads. Used to getting shot at we continued our way without even looking up. After a minute a second bullet hit a nearby railway wagon. The more we approached the refinery the more shots were fired at us. They seemed to come from all directions, even from the village that we had left behind. Every time a bullet hit a railway car it was ricocheting from the metal surface with a nasty “pling” sound. From somewhere somebody with a megaphone started yelling : Allah u Akhbar! “

We ran the last meters to the refinery. The bullets were now raining at us. We hunkered down in a trench near a giant oil storage tank which luckily seemed to be empty. Every time a bullet hit this storage tank it made a resonating sound like a drum. Soon it was like a thousand drums were playing all at once.

Now the first enemy grenades were hitting nearby. Mortar and RPG grenades, which could be fired only from a close distance. Although by now we had complete daylight, we still couldn’t figure out from where the enemy was shooting at us. We encountered another small group from our unit nearby. They had made out an enemy position at the far end of the refinery and decided to attack it. I saw one of the guys fixing his bayonet to his AK rifle. Then they disappeared. We also decided to move, but in another direction, towards a big warehouse building next to the refinery.

The building was half empty and we used its cover to take a break from the bullets and grenades, smoke a cigarette and wait for orders coming over the radio. This was a warehouse from a tea factory: There were thousands of teabags everywhere around us: Chamomile tea. The smell of it became soon intolerable.

By listening to the radio communication we got a clearer image about what was going on : Obviously there were still enemy troops in the village we had marched through earlier on. They either hadn’t seen us when we sneaked through or they had decided to let us pass. Either way, the enemy was now between us and our base. They were in well camouflaged positions and we were an easy target for them. Furthermore, the group of soldiers we had encountered earlier on near the refinery was now in serious trouble and had suffered its first casualties.

We were ordered to retreat. Now we just had to find a way back. We decided to try our luck by following the railway line in one direction to get around the enemy village and then to cut through open ground and reach our own lines. This was easier said than done: We left the warehouse on the opposite side from where we’ve entered it and met two more groups of our unit. It seemed that by retreating from the enemy’s fire most of our unit had ended up right in this spot. We all took cover in a long trench which ran along the side of the building.

Now snipers were starting to aim at us while mortar and RPG grenades were hitting the trench. It was clear that if we would stay there any longer we would all be doomed.

The only way out was a small road, but there was absolutely no cover for at least 400 meters. We started to leave the trench in small groups of 2 or 3 while the remaining soldiers shot cover fire.

I was in the last group to leave. When I jumped out of the trench I ran over the first dead body just a couple of feet away. I ran maybe 10 meters before I fell to the ground and started crawling. There were bullets everywhere. A friend of mine crawled just in front of me and I saw how some tracer bullets were hitting the tarmac just inches away from him. Another soldier behind me got hit in the leg and started screaming.

We managed to crawl down the road until we were stopped by a big wire fence. It was too high to climb over it: All the soldiers who escaped the trench were piled up in front of this fence and were attracting enemy fire.

Finally we managed to cut through the wire of the fence by connecting an AK bayonet with its scabbard. This makes a perfect wire cutter. On the other side of the fence we continued crawling.

About 100 meters further down the road I reached the first of our own defense positions. I entered a small bunker, its floor was covered in blood. A wounded Croatian soldier was getting first aid there.

Meanwhile a Croatian T-55 tank was approaching to cover our retreat. Under its protection we started to evacuate some of the wounded soldiers along the road.

In the evening we took count: From 18 soldiers of our platoon six were killed during that day. Another two were missing. The next day we learned that they also got killed. The guy that I saw planting his bayonet on his AK was also dead. Another comrade was heavily injured by a head shot and died later in a hospital. Three days later two more soldiers of our platoon were killed when their car was hit by a mortar grenade.

The following week we buried our dead comrades. During one of the funerals we came under heavy artillery fire, but luckily nobody died.

And I don’t drink Chamomile tea anymore.

New Zealand Will Not Join the US Coalition Against China

Wellington’s deeply ingrained tradition of foreign policy independence and robust economic ties to China serve as a considerable constraint on major policy change.
...That said, a combination of countervailing imperatives, including New Zealand’s deeply ingrained tradition of foreign policy independence and robust economic ties to China serve as a considerable constraint on major policy change. New Zealand will not take lightly a decision to join a coalition against China.

Foreign policy independence is the practical expression of contemporary nationalism in New Zealand. It has two interlinked sources: geography and anti-nuclear sentiment. New Zealand’s geography epitomizes a low threat environment, which makes relative independence both an appealing and achievable goal. The country is located deep in the southern hemisphere. Its neighbors are either a close ally with near identical values and interests (Australia) or relatively small island states.

And then there is New Zealand’s anti-nuclear sentiment, which manifested itself in public aversion to the docking of nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed U.S. naval vessels in the 1970s. This was buttressed by then-Prime Minister David Lange’s widely endorsed statement in a March 1985 debate at Oxford University that “nuclear weapons are morally indefensible.” The back story is important to understand the clash of interests that broke the New Zealand-U.S. leg of the ANZUS alliance.

In February 1985, a crisis broke out in the alliance when the Reagan administration stuck to longstanding U.S. policy of not revealing whether its naval vessels were armed with nuclear weapons while transiting New Zealand’s territorial waters. Faced with this uncertainty, Wellington refused to allow a U.S. naval vessel access to New Zealand ports. When the Lange administration refused to change course, the United States suspended its ANZUS security obligations to New Zealand in August 1986.

Wellington then passed the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act in 1987, banning both nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed vessels from its ports. Congress responded immediately with the Broomfield Act, downgrading New Zealand’s status as a formal ally. To be sure, both sides have since sought to improve ties, as shown by the signing of the 2010 Wellington Declaration and the 2012 Washington Declaration. In February 2013, then-Prime Minister John Key even stated in an interview that “the relationship between New Zealand and the United States has never been better.” Nevertheless, Secretary of State George Shultz’s 1986 statement at the time of the ANZUS break, that “we remain friends, but we are no longer allies,” holds true.

Hard economic interests, exemplified in the contemporary China-New Zealand relationship, reinforce the imperative not to align with Washington against Beijing. Since signing a free trade agreement in 2008, China has become New Zealand’s top trade partner, with total trade exceeding US$33 billion in 2020. In the first quarter of 2022, New Zealand government figures reveal that China is the destination for more than 25 percent of New Zealand’s exports and the source for just under 20 percent of imports. Economic interdependence has a political effect. Like many states in the Indo-Pacific, there is a deep reluctance in New Zealand to get on the wrong side of China.

There is a clear record here. As far as possible, the New Zealand government’s formal statements of disagreement on China-related issues are expressed in as non-provocative a manner as possible. When China’s treatment of its Uyghur population in Xinjiang was heavily criticized in a non-binding resolution in parliament in 2021, the Ardern administration rejected any formal designation that genocide was occurring.

Truth be told, New Zealand’s engagement with China has been challenged as Beijing’s internal political sensitivities and problems are increasingly being projected abroad. Events in Auckland in June and July 2019 exemplify the point...

Full article HERE

The Bombardier Beetle

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Meet the Bombardier Beetle, named so because it expels from its rear a highly combustible spray. It only smokes visually at this scale,, but make no mistake this is deadly!

This weapon, which is primarily used for defense, as with everything in the insect world, can fry everything within range. Ants, worms, other beetles, a spider, it all gets burns. The spray reaches temperatures of up to 100 degrees Celsius, most of it vaporizes from the heat. This bug likes its food charbroiled, apparently.

A letter…

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If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? Turns Out It’s Just Chance.

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.

The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report in 2017 concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people.

This seems to occur in all societies at all scales. It is a well-studied pattern called a power law that crops up in a wide range of social phenomena. But the distribution of wealth is among the most controversial because of the issues it raises about fairness and merit. Why should so few people have so much wealth?

The conventional answer is that we live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on. Over time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role.

But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.

The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.

And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people. What’s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures.

What factors, then, determine how individuals become wealthy? Could it be that chance plays a bigger role than anybody expected? And how can these factors, whatever they are, be exploited to make the world a better and fairer place?

We finally get an answer thanks to the work of Alessandro Pluchino at the University of Catania in Italy and a couple of colleagues. These guys have created a computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life. The model allows the team to study the role of chance in this process.

The results are something of an eye-opener. Their simulations accurately reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world. But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent). They are the luckiest. And this has significant implications for the way societies can optimize the returns they get for investments in everything from business to science.

Pluchino and co’s model is straightforward. It consists of N people, each with a certain level of talent (skill, intelligence, ability, and so on). This talent is distributed normally around some average level, with some standard deviation. So some people are more talented than average and some are less so, but nobody is orders of magnitude more talented than anybody else.

This is the same kind of distribution seen for various human skills, or even characteristics like height or weight. Some people are taller or smaller than average, but nobody is the size of an ant or a skyscraper. Indeed, we are all quite similar.

The computer model charts each individual through a working life of 40 years. During this time, the individuals experience lucky events that they can exploit to increase their wealth if they are talented enough.

However, they also experience unlucky events that reduce their wealth. These events occur at random.

At the end of the 40 years, Pluchino and co rank the individuals by wealth and study the characteristics of the most successful. They also calculate the wealth distribution. They then repeat the simulation many times to check the robustness of the outcome.

When the team rank individuals by wealth, the distribution is exactly like that seen in real-world societies. “The ‘80-20’ rule is respected, since 80 percent of the population owns only 20 percent of the total capital, while the remaining 20 percent owns 80 percent of the same capital,” report Pluchino and co.

That may not be surprising or unfair if the wealthiest 20 percent turn out to be the most talented. But that isn’t what happens. The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it. “The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,” say the researchers.

So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? “Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,” say Pluchino and co.

The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. “It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones,” they say. “And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones.”

That has significant implications for society. What is the most effective strategy for exploiting the role luck plays in success?

Pluchino and co study this from the point of view of science research funding, an issue clearly close to their hearts. Funding agencies the world over are interested in maximizing their return on investment in the scientific world. Indeed, the European Research Council invested $1.7 million in a program to study serendipity—the role of luck in scientific discovery—and how it can be exploited to improve funding outcomes.

It turns out that Pluchino and co are well set to answer this question. They use their model to explore different kinds of funding models to see which produce the best returns when luck is taken into account.

The team studied three models, in which research funding is distributed equally to all scientists; distributed randomly to a subset of scientists; or given preferentially to those who have been most successful in the past. Which of these is the best strategy?

The strategy that delivers the best returns, it turns out, is to divide the funding equally among all researchers. And the second- and third-best strategies involve distributing it at random to 10 or 20 percent of scientists.

In these cases, the researchers are best able to take advantage of the serendipitous discoveries they make from time to time. In hindsight, it is obvious that the fact a scientist has made an important chance discovery in the past does not mean he or she is more likely to make one in the future.

A similar approach could also be applied to investment in other kinds of enterprises, such as small or large businesses, tech startups, education that increases talent, or even the creation of random lucky events.

Clearly, more work is needed here. What are we waiting for?

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 : Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure

Noteworthy “news”

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What happened after the death of Caeser

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In all, the group of conspirators that plotted against Caesar was large- with 60 men at least. However many of these men merely dipped their hands in Caesar’s blood and tried to take credit.

The actual killers are as follows

  1. Tillius Cimber: He initiated the assassination
  2. Publius Servilius Casca: The first to attack Caesar, cutting his shoulder
  3. Gaius Cassius Longinus: This was the first man to stab Caesar
  4. Titiedius Servilius Casca: This was the second man to stab Caesar
  5. Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus: The third to stab Caesar, he stabbed him in the thigh
  6. Marcus Junius Brutus: Brutus delivered the final blow, killing Caesar by stabbing him in the groin

These 6 men were the main guys that actually killed Caesar. There were lots of other conspirators that helped but these are the actual assassins.

So what happened to them? Nothing good.

After the assassination, Mark Antony met with these men and Cicero to strike a deal. You see the assassins had made an error.

The murder of Caesar could be justified legally by being tyrannicide. In Rome, the murder of a tyrant was legal. However, if Caesar was declared a Tyrant all of his decisions were voided. It turns out that all of these assassins were appointed to their positions by Caesar.

So the deal was that Caesar’s laws and appointments would stand and that they would conduct a public funeral as a sign of unity.

During this funeral, Mark Antony rose to speak. He first talked about how much Caesar loved the people and how he had donated his wealth to them. He read Caesar’s will which stipulated that every citizen be given the equivariant of 3 months’ wages. Then, he brought out a wax statue of Caesar that depicted the stab wounds graphically.

The crowd went nuts and began to attack the conspirators. They flew into a frenzy and all of Caesar’s assassins were forced to flee.

These men would head East and raise a large army to march on Rome. Meanwhile, Caesar’s heir and Antony got their own Army together. There was a battle and Caesar’s assassins lost.

  • Brutus, Casca, Titiedius, and Cassius killed themselves after being defeated
  • Decimus was killed by Antony early on in a small Civil War
  • Cimber died in combat during the battle with Octavian and Antony

As for the other plotters that helped- they were all killed by Octavian and Antony. When Octavian began Consul he purged Rome of everyone who was anti-Caesar including even Cicero.

The Most Amazing Lasagna

This is a great video. Inspirational!

Emperor Honorius was an idiot

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Honorius was one of the last “major” emperors of the Western Roman Empire. He ruled for a long time from 393 – 423, which is much longer than the average 7 years emperors reigned for.

He oversaw the collapse of his Empire. He witnessed it slowly decline into a failed shell of its former self. Worse yet – he did nothing to stop it.

Flavius Stilicho was the last great Roman leader (or one of the last). He was a brilliant general who saved Italy 2 times at least. He personally saved Honorius twice and negotiated a decades-long peace with the Sassanid Persians.

Stilicho really tried to save the empire. He wasn’t out for wealth or fame – he just really wanted to save Rome. He had limited resources, limited time, and was one of the only capable men in all of the Empire. Yet again and again he desperately tried to save the empire.

Whenever things seemed doomed, when armies were at the gates of the capital, Stilicho would raise an army, taking garrisons where he could and hiring barbarians to serve him and rush down to save Italy.

Alaric – the man who sacked Rome and one of the most brilliant generals of the age – was defeated by Stilicho twice.

As stated, Honorius was an idiot and a child. He allowed everyone to manipulate him and cared nothing for Rome so long as he got to live in luxury. Luckily for Rome, Stilicho dominated him and was the de facto ruler of the empire.

Eventually, Stilicho found himself in a hard space. He relied on barbarians to fill the ranks of his army. The Senate and Nobles hated this, but he couldn’t do anything else as they refused to allow Stilicho to recruit from their estates.

Stilicho wanted to eventually reunite East and West, but for now, he wanted Illyria back, hoping to use it as recruitment grounds. Illyria meanwhile was in the hands of the Eastern Roman Empire and Emperor Arcadius (Honorius’s just-as-stupid brother) refused to give it back.

When Arcadius died, Stilicho had a choice. He could go down to Constantinople and influence the process of crowning a new emperor. Maybe he could get Illyria back and help unite East and West. But by doing so he would be leaving Italy and Honorius would be alone – surrounded by Stilicho’s enemies. What if they turned Honorius against him?

Stilicho chose to head to Constantinople and press Honorius’s claims. It was just too good of an opportunity to pass up.

Before he even left the Western Empire, Honorius fell under the sway of Olympius – an anti-barbarian racist who hated Stilicho. Olympius turned Honorius against Stilicho with ease and that was it.

Stilicho’s army revolted against him. His loyal officers were executed along with their families, and the Roman elements turned against their general. Stilicho heard and turned back. He was hoping to get a chance to speak with Honorius and fix this. He knew the risk but made for Ravenna anyway. Soon he was found and captured at a church by Honorius’s men.

He was taken away to be executed. When his bodyguards protested, Stilicho waved them off and allowed himself to be executed. In the end, he knew that a civil war would cost the empire too dearly and so he allowed himself to be killed.

A true man of Rome until the end. He was 10 times the man that ruled over the Western Roman Empire and had Stilicho been serving a capable emperor maybe the empire could have been saved.

With Stilicho gone, Rome lost maybe its last real hope of survival. Even with Stilicho alive the odds of Rome surviving were practically 0. However with Stilicho gone, everything came crashing down around the empty uncaring head of Honorius.

I guess nobody realized exactly how much of the Empire Stilicho was alone holding together. They soon would.


Bear with me a moment – this all comes full circle.

You see Rome at this time faced 3 really serious issues:

  1. Millions of barbarians pouring into the Empire. They had all been displaced by the Huns
  2. No money to raise a large army to resist this migration
  3. No recruits to fill the ranks even if they had enough money

This is what Stilicho was dealing with as well.

In response, Rome had a decent idea. They gave the barbarians pieces of the Empire under the condition they fight for Rome. This could have worked too. Rome’s great strength was their ability to assimilate new peoples into the Empire. After all, they had been doing it for 1000 years well enough.

In fact, the Roman Republic had a similar set up in Italy. They left everyone their independence if they just sent men to fight.

With this move, Rome hoped to bolster its ranks for cheap while also keeping the barbarian on their side. It’s actually not a bad idea at all and may have worked.

So where does Stilicho fit in?

Well, Stilicho was not a Roman or at least not ethnically. He was half Vandal, which made him almost a barbarian in the eyes of the Romans.

But for Stilicho, this was an advantage. He was able to easily work with the Goths and Vandals and Franks, because in a way he was one of them. He wasn’t some uppity Italian Noble looking down his nose at everyone – he was one of the boys.

In a way, this made Stilicho the symbol of this new Roman world. He was a Roman by choice – a full-blooded die-hard Roman that really believed in the Empire and the eternal city. But he was also a barbarian. He should have been a symbol of the future – but it was never so.

Stilicho thus carefully cultivated a large army of barbarian auxiliaries to reinforce his dwindling numbers.

Over the decades, this army became rather formidable. It was an army that tasted victory after victory and never knew defeat. It was an army of veterans led by a brilliant tactician – it was exactly what Rome needed.

When anti-barbarian racist Olympius took over as Honorius’s new master, he basically sent these barbarians packing. Just like that, the veteran backbone of the Roman army was gone. Worse yet – this hardened army of veterans was now hungry, far from home, and a bit angry.

Naturally, Alaric was there to take them in. Suddenly Alaric went from recently defeated and on the ropes – to flush with hardened warriors. Just as suddenly Rome had no army and no good generals.

I’m sure this won’t lead to a legendary sack of a famous city or anything.


Speaking of sacking and cities, let’s talk about another stupid thing Honorius did.

So Alaric is looking good. The only man who could ever stop him, Stilicho, is dead. Even better, Stilicho’s army is now his army. So Alaric decides he is going to make a move for power.

Alaric invades Italy and Rome has literally no army to do anything about it. Alaric doesn’t want to conquer Italy though. He just wants to blockade Rome, have the Senate pay him off, and leave.

The Senate pays him and he honors his deal and leaves Rome. He then heads up to Ravenna to meet with Honorius and negotiate a long term peace deal.

Alaric makes the following demands

  1. A spot as a Roman general
  2. A yearly stipend of gold for his people
  3. Grain shipments to keep his people fed
  4. Land in Illyria and independence

The Senate comes up from Rome to meet with Honorius. They tell him to take the deal – Alaric is strong and there is nothing they can do.

Honorius agrees to everything except making Alaric a general.

Alaric then changes his tune. He suddenly drops all his demands. He simply demands land along the Danube and regular food shipments and in exchange, he would defend the Roman border.

We need to stop here and talk about this. Alaric has an army – the ONLY army in the area. Rome can literally do nothing to stop him. All he wants is some food and useless land along the Danube river and in return, he is willing to defend the Roman border from the coming barbarian hordes. This is an amazing deal. This is like someone holding a gun to your head and demanding you take their cash.

A lot of historians question why Alaric offered this deal. Most, including myself, think that he was planning ahead. He knew Rome was 1 good emperor away from being on top of the world and that he was positioning himself as a friend of Rome when that day came.

Either way, it doesn’t matter, because Honorius is an idiot.

HE TURNED DOWN THE DEAL AND BROKE OFF NEGOTIATIONS.

(Yeah. No shit!)

Alaric then sacked Rome……

Rome, the eternal city, a city that had not been taken for 800 years was sacked. 800 years…. think about that. The USA is 250 years old. So go way back to George Washington, then do that 3 times. That’s how long Rome remained safe.

This was really the true ending of Rome.

From here, the barbarians would continue to sack Rome. They made a few efforts to stay alive, but they lacked the funds, manpower, and resources to do anything at all.

Imagine how much a skilled general like Alaric with 40,000 veteran soldiers could have helped turn things around. And again – they were doing it for free.

So no matter how dumb you are, you will NEVER be as dumb as Honorius.

To be clear he

  1. Killed the best general Rome had seen in perhaps a century
  2. Then allowed his only decent army to go over to his enemies’ side
  3. When his enemy offered to fight for him he REFUSED
  4. He allowed Rome to be sacked

I mean if you tried to suck at life you still couldn’t be this bad.

EDIT: I am deleting comments about Trump. This question and answer couldn’t have less to do with Trump. No – Honorius is not Donald Trump. Honorius was a child that watched his empire burn while feeding chickens.

Artist Imagines How Pop Culture Characters Would Look If They Were Saints

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Digital artist Gedo, better known as @gedogfx to his followers on his Instagram account, recently created an amazing project where he transformed famous characters from pop culture into holy figures.

All of these figures have halos and majestic religious clothes to portray them as saints and unique symbols that represent their characters best. If you look closely, you will see that the Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen, from the famous American fantasy drama series Game of Thrones, is portrayed with a little dragon resting on her shoulder. Or Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction, the American crime film by Quentin Tarantino, is shown with a needle in her heart as a reference to the scene where she almost dies after overdosing on heroin, but is saved by Vincent, who stabs her in the heart with a syringe full of adrenaline.

So if you’re wondering how famous pop culture characters would look as saints with a little bit of dark humor, you’ll surely love these illustrations.

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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Death trap for the USA, Greek fire under the ocean, some delicious sweet potato pie and the Funniest Raccoon Memes

I like to think that there are some really great things here. I hope you enjoy this post.

Smile for the day…

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Norway and Russia settle cargo dispute

Norway and Russia have found a way to deliver goods to Russian settlements on Norway’s Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

The statement comes after a week of tension between Moscow and Oslo, after Norway halted two cargo containers destined for Russian miners living on the archipelago on June 15, citing sanctions imposed on Moscow over its conflict with Ukraine.

Russia insisted that Norway’s “unacceptable” ban on supply deliveries was depriving Russian miners of “critical” goods, including food, medical equipment, building materials, and spare parts. Moscow threatened “appropriate retaliatory measures” if the issue was not resolved.

The Norwegian Foreign Ministry now claims that the containers were blocked because they were being transported on Russian vehicles, which were banned from bringing cargo over the Russian-Norwegian border. However, it noted that there would be no issue if these containers were brought to the miners using Norwegian vehicles instead.

Dad Recycles Old Crayons Into New Ones for Schools, Hospitals and Art Programs

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No young artist can resist the crisp, new box of crayons that back-to-school season so often brings, but not every little artist has access to them.

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He now extends their useful life through his nonprofit startup, The Crayon Initiative, boiling them down and repurposing them into new boxes of crayons for kids in need.

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It’s changing the shape of the crayons themselves, too, making them easier for special-needs children to hold. It all started about four years ago, when the Danville, California dad was out to eat with his family one evening, and the waitress brought crayons for the kids.

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“He was fiddling with a crayon and said, ‘I wonder what happens to these when we leave,’” his wife, Marissa Ware, told Contra Costa Times.

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More than 100,000 boxes, donated from all over the U.S., have already been transformed into 800,000 thicker, triangular-bodied crayons, while towering bags of old crayons, sorted by color still await their turn in the melting pot.

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Bryan Ware estimates he has invested nearly $30,000 of his own money into the startup. He partnered with a physical therapist to create the new crayons’ easy-grip design, then arranged for the manufacture of the metal molds needed to transform old crayons into the new shape.

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With the old crayons piling up in his garage, what he needs now is the corporate funding to scale up and move the operation out of his family’s home and into a proper production facility, complete with warehouse.

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But for now, with or without other family members’ help, he’ll go on spending 30 to 40 hours a week at the kitchen stove, stirring two big stainless-steel pots full of melting crayons.

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To learn more or to donate to the Crayon Initiative, go to thecrayoninitiative.org. Old crayons can be sent to 540 Glasgow Circle, Danville, CA, 94526.

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NASA to build a nuclear base in the moon before Russia and China


According to recent reports, NASA and the U.S Department of Energy (DOE), announced on June 21, that they are jointly advancing space nuclear technology. They have planned three design concept proposals for The Fission Surface Power Project. Russia and China already have similar concepts.

The project plans to build a 40 kilowatt-class nuclear fission power system on the moon. According to NASA, this power system can power 30 homes for 10 years, the equivalent of a small nuclear power plant. The design proposals came from US aerospace companies Lockheed Martin Space Systems, and Electrical Companies Westinghouse and IX. The latter is a joint venture between autonomous driving systems company Intuitive Machines and nuclear reactor designer X-Energy. These companies will each receive a 12-month contract worth $5 million.

NASA and DOE want to explore nuclear technology in space. After all, electricity is not available on the moon or beyond, and other methods aren’t viable. When astronauts get to the moon and then to Mars, they will need a reliable and portable power system. The power system should also be able to operate in different places and in different environmental and weather conditions. Nuclear Fission Power generation systems meet these criteria.

Until the end of the century, NASA and DOE hopes to test a 40 kW class nuclear fission system on the moon. This power system will pave the way for long-term human missions to the moon and Mars.

“The nuclear fission surface energy project is a practical first step toward building a nuclear power plant on the moon for the United States,” John Wagner, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, said in a statement.”

To recall, NASA had already tested another space nuclear power project. The KiloPower Project was launched in 2015, as the new generation of space nuclear reactors. In May 2018, the project completed all major surface tastes. Last year, DOE and NASA collaborated on a request for comments asking the U.S. companies to provide design concepts for nuclear fission surface energy systems.

The goal is clearly to build solid energy stations between the Moon and other planets. For now, everything sounds like a big brainstorm, but we can’t say that this is impossible. Worth noting that China, Russia, and other aerospace powers have also begun to explore the application of nuclear energy in space. We are curious to see if this will be the start of another technological race. Aerospace exploration, once again, will be a center of discussion in the next few years. The cold way between Russia and the United States accelerated space exploration several years ago. Now, we’re living in an era of tensions between these three countries. Will this lead to a second cold war? Time will tell.

Katharina Detzel

Katharina was admitted to an asylum after sabotaging the rails of a train so that it crashed, for stealing, and many other crimes.

The curious thing about this woman is that when she arrived at the asylum, Katharina made a life-size doll with the straw from her bed. She hit him when she was angry, and when she was happy she danced with him. This doll, she gave her the surrogate love that she needed so badly while inside the mental institution.

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As you can see, the doll has three key features, a beard, glasses and a penis.

During her stay, she tried to escape from the institution numerous times, and after almost 20 years trying, she succeeded, after which she was taken to another mental institution where she was never known what became of her.

From HERE

In her desire for freedom she made a whole series of runners and keys out of wood. She made figurines from bread dough (e.g. Shakespeare). Detzel also worked on a human figure with wings and made the photographed life-size male, which she hanged in her single cell. With the help of this figure (which exuded a certain authority with glasses, penis and beard, it reminds us of the ideal type of a scientist or physician of that time) Detzel tried to be relocated from the cell to the dormitory, from where she could escape. She explained to the doctors that she would soon be like this doll: should she continue to be isolated, then she too would soon be lifeless in the cell. Detzel was unsuccessful: The doctors did not respond to her threat, but removed almost all items from the cell: mattress, canvas, clothes (even her shirt) was taken from the patient, she has only chaff in the cell.

Detzel continued to vigorously opposing the suppression of patients by staff and sanctions (e.g. prolonged baths). In her struggle against social injustice, she wanted to establish a home for infants, compiled a pamphlet against prostitution and wrote a play entitled “The Extramarital Child or the Child Bed of Righteousness”.

After 19 years, she finally managed to escape from the institution. She moved out with her daughter. In 1939 Detzel was arrested again. This time because of theft and forgery. She was soon institutionalized, this time in Andernach. In 1941 she moved to another institution, Johannestal in Süchteln. It is uncertain if she survived the war and the Nazi Euthanasia Program.

The photograph above is part of the Prinzhorn Collection. The collection (on display in the University of Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic) is made up of approximately 6,000 works, all created by inmates of psychiatric institutions between 1840 and 1940. It ranges from water-colors, drawings, paintings and sculptures to textile works and texts. The major part of it was collected by art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933) while he worked as assistant physician at the Psychiatric Hospital of Heidelberg University.

US asked Russia to reconsider mercenaries’ status – Moscow — RT World News

Washington has requested that captured American mercenaries be treated as combatants, according to Deputy FM.

The United States has requested the recognition by Russia of American fighters captured during the Ukraine conflict as combatants, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Friday.

“There was a certain signal from the American side, mainly focused on the fact that these individuals should be considered combatants under the definition of the Geneva convention and should be subject to the relevant protections,” he told reporters.

The deputy FM added, however, that the topic of American mercenaries had not been explicitly discussed between Russia and the US.

According to Ryabkov, the presence of foreign mercenaries аnd their actions “on the side of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and nationalist battalions” is now one of the most “serious and problematic moments” in Russia’s relations with the US and other Western countries.

He said that the actions of captured foreign mercenaries are being investigated to determine the circumstances of “their appearance in the combat zone and the role they played there.”

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“We have repeatedly warned the citizens of countries that are unfriendly to Russia to refrain from adventurous plans to ‘prove themselves’ on the battlefield in Ukraine,” Ryabkov pointed out. “But those who do not take these warnings into account are reaping the fruits of their own misanthropy and unwillingness to accept the reality of the situation that has unfolded in the region.”

On Tuesday, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced that some 170 foreign mercenaries had been killed in Ukraine “over the past 10 days” and that 99 had “refused to participate in combat and left the territory of Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, two American fighters – Alexander John-Robert Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh – are currently awaiting trial in the Donetsk People’s Republic where three foreign fighters from the UK and Morocco were handed out death sentences last month over their “illegal activities.” The death sentences, however, have yet to be carried out as all three foreigners have appealed the Donetsk court’s verdict.

Article HERE

The tomb of Liu He

When archaeologists opened the tomb of Liu He, Lord of Haihun of the Han Dynasty, they found a pile of money. This includes 5,330,000 ancient copper coins, weighing about 10 tons, and 358 gold cakes.

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As a distant relative of the royal family, Liu He was the emperor of the Han Dynasty for 27 days.

However, he couldn’t do the job. He liked music and chess, but didn’t really know how to become an emperor.

Unsurprisingly, he was quickly overthrown, and transferred south with his treasures.

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He died in his 30s from eating too much cantaloupe.

New South Korea president may be a nail in the coffin for North Korea engagement

Soon after elected (with strong US support), His popularity dropped drastically.

He immediately followed 100% American establishment policy: he openly saluted the US flag, he completely destroyed relations with North Korea and (of course) Korea's largest revenue partner, China.

He openly endorsed Asian NATO, Japan, and is against Russia. 

Since he came to office he has done nothing that helped to revive the Korean economy. In fact, through his actions, he is in the process of destroying the foundation of the Korean economy. And already Korea is starting to economically collapse just like the rest of the collective West are.

He may be the next Abe and Zelensky

Full article HERE

Withdrawing from China failed. Apple turned to Chinese manufacturers for help.

Back ground info:
My personal knowledge and understanding is:

1) Apple is exploiting its suppliers via its volume and keep pressing their margin year on year;

2) to support apple volume, these apple supply chains have to expand their plant, production lines, and stock up materials to meet apple demand ;

3) however, Apple with the crusader DNAs showing no mercy to its supply chain partners, once apple failed in pressing down the prices the following years, Apply will look for alternative suppliers and suddenly cut off the existing one, resulting in the other party running a lost or without profit after years of hardwork supplying Apple.

4) my understanding is Apple seeking profit increment of 11% year on year by selling higher prices to retailers and squesting supply chains;

5) as such apple without any factory enjoying 70% profit while the rest of apple partners sharing the other 30%

6) so, there are many Chinese supply chains decided not to deal with apple anymore.

7) so, Apple openly announced to move supply chain elsewhere, particularly Vietnam. But Vietnam doesn't has the support industry like China, and the workers productivity is not as efficient as China. In addition, Vietnam infrastructure is not up to the Chinese standard to support mass industry expansion.

So, now Apple finally forced to return to China for help.
Thank you Putin the Great and Xi the great, the de-imperialism process has speeded up.
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US Boeing already in deep trouble.
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The US chip industry is another disaster in the making.
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Apple 5G investment is already a failure (meaning for the first time, Apple is behind its competitors) , now Apple has a big supply chain problem…
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Don’t be surprised with how fast the world most ruthless crusader will crumble within the next few years.
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I am preparing more volka to celebrate…

SpaceX Poised To Downgrade “Starbase” R&D Facility

“As far as anything being launched directly to space to the moon or Mars, that’s more than likely not going to happen here.”

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The real reason for this is the fact that SpaceX requires Chinese and Russian components and these are no longer available. -MM

As the current testing grounds and launch site of SpaceX’s massive Starship — a fully reusable rocket that very well may be the most powerful in the world — “Starbase” near Brownsville in South Texas, attracts plenty of space enthusiasts that want to catch a glimpse of the titanic rocket in action.

But to their dismay, that privilege could soon end, National Geographic reports, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hinting that the space company could eventually move operations to the Florida Space Coast.

“Everybody down here, Brownsville and the whole valley, was expecting to see that this was going to be the Gateway to Mars,” Louis Baldera, a local resident known to his tens of thousands of online followers as LabPadre, and who has closely been following SpaceX’s operations, told the publication.

“As far as anything being launched directly to space to the moon or Mars, that’s more than likely not going to happen here,” he added. “I think that’s going to bum some people out.”

Employees at the facility, who chose to remain anonymous, also told Dallas Express News this week that they no longer believe that Starbase will be the “Gateway.”

That’s in large part because SpaceX and the Federal Aviation Administration have been embroiled in an ugly battle over granting approval for orbital test flights for Starship, with the FAA citing environmental concerns and delaying their decision on multiple occasions.

“I guess our worst-case scenario is that we would be delayed for six to eight months to build up the Cape launch tower and launch from there,” Musk said at a February press conference, when asked what would happen if the FAA required a more extensive environmental review.

Permission was eventually granted last month to carry out the inaugural orbital test flight — as long as SpaceX complies with over 75 environmental provisions.

If operations were to move to Florida, that’s not a prospect that’s likely to sit well with Brownsville residents, especially given the potential consequences on the local economy such a decision could have.

After all, SpaceX is the biggest employer in the city.

“I didn’t know any of those plans beforehand,” Jessica Tetreau, the Brownsville city commissioner, told National Geographic. “What startled us was when we heard the timeline and how they would have to start moving things to Florida.”

SpaceX already started building a Starship launch tower in Florida last December and more recently added its second segment in June.

With the FAA breathing down their neck and dismay from local environmental groups growing, Starbase could be losing its desirability as a launch location.

Of course, that wouldn’t mean a complete pull-out. The facility would most likely be used for less glamorous research and development purposes, as Musk stated at the February conference.

While it’s still mostly speculation at this point — it’s still not a given that SpaceX will move operations — hopefully it won’t have too much of an economic impact on the region.

From HERE

Sweet Potato Pie

The perfect Sweet Potato Pie recipe! Made with a tender and flaky, buttery pie crust and a lightly spiced, perfectly sweetened, browned butter sweet potato pie filling.

Then you have your choice to top with sweetened whipped cream or a toasted homemade marshmallow topping!

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Sweet Potato Pie

If you like pumpkin pie you’ll love sweet potato pie. They’re very similar in taste but this recipe is made with fresh, baked sweet potatoes (instead of canned pumpkin) and it includes browned butter so you know it’s going to be good!

There are a few steps to the process of making it but it’s worth every step once you get to taste this luscious pie.

So What Makes the Best Sweet Potato Pie Recipe?

So I learned a few things in testing and creating this recipe:

  • Blind baking the crust will keep you from ending up with a soft and gooey pie crust.
  • Using baked sweet potatoes instead of boiled sweet potatoes concentrates their flavor rather then ending up with water logged boiled sweet potatoes.
  • Browning the salted butter adds adds some depth of flavor to the pie filling. Salted browned butter and sweet potato were made to go together (have you tried my browned butter mashed sweet potatoes yet?)
  • Keeping it light on the spices lets the sweet potato flavor shine.
  • I personally preferred the classic texture of using mashed by hand sweet potatoes vs. those pureed in a food processor.
  • The lightly caramelized flavor of evaporated milk was preferred to the flavor of milk or cream.
  • Tent pie crust edges with foil to prevent over-browning.
  • And being careful not to over-bake the pie prevented deep cracks from happening (but if they do no big deal, just cover with the topping).

This is easily my favorite sweet potato pie recipe! And I prefer the marshmallow topping for that nostalgic flavor combination, plus I feel that’s what will really set it apart from pumpkin pie but feel free to use either whipped cream or marshmallow topping.

If you use the marshmallow topping you’ll want to prepare and toast it when it’s time to serve (which is the only drawback), so it’s nice and fluffy.

Sweet Potato Pie Ingredients:

  • Unbleached all-purpose flour – this is used to make the base of the pie crust. Standard bleached flour will work too if that’s what you have, unbleached just has better flavor.
  • Granulated sugar and brown sugar – the white sugar is used in the pie crust to add a faint sweetness and the brown sugar is used for the filling. The added molasses of the brown sugar pairs perfectly with the sweet potato flavor.
  • Salt – this brings out the flavors of the pie crust and filling so it doesn’t taste flat.
  • Unsalted and salted butter – unsalted butter is used in the pie crust (unsalted butter stays cold better), and salted butter for the filling. Salted browned butter tastes so much better than unsalted.
  • Ice water – be sure to add lots of ice to the water, stir and rest before you use it. This helps the butter stay cold so you end up with a flaky crust.
  • Sweet potatoes – I like to use red garnet variety. Other orange varieties work as well but don’t use white or purple sweet potatoes.
  • Evaporated milk – I like to use the small 5 oz. can so I don’t have leftover but if you only have a larger can that will work but be sure to measure amount listed.
  • Eggs – this helps bind the pie filling together and make a custard type filling. They are crucial to the recipe.
  • Cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger – with the ratios here I recommend sticking with each separate spice rather than using a spice blend.
  • Vanilla extract – this adds another faint background flavor in the pie. Use real vanilla for best flavor.

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How to Make Sweet Potato Pie Filling:

  • Prepare pie crust dough. Chill, roll, shape and chill. Blind bake.
  • Bake sweet potatoes until soft.
  • Brown butter.
  • Prepare filling and pour into crust.

How Long to Bake Sweet Potato Pie?

  • Bake until pie edges are set and center just wiggles slightly, this will take about 40 – 50 minutes at 350 degrees.
  • Let cool at room temperature 2 hours. Serve or chill (I prefer it served cold).

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Can I Make It in Advance?

This pie can be made 1 day before serving. Store in the refrigerator. Wait until the day of serving to prepare topping.

Can I Use Canned Sweet Potatoes or Yams?

For best flavor and pie consistency I recommend using fresh sweet potatoes. It’s almost just as easy, just baking and scooping out the flesh – no peeling and chopping.

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TSMC Wins Legal Battle Against Employee Who Violated Contract & Moved To China

This is NORMAL in the industry. You routinely sign Non-Compete agreements locking you out of a job with a competitor once you leave the firm. These contracts are rarely enforced, however, but for a high visibility industry, it could be problematic. I dare say that the Taiwanese laws do not apply to Chinese residents. And this might sound frightening, but really, it's just a bunch of "hot air". 

This happened in 2016. Since them, entire busloads of engineers left for China.-MM

A former procurement manager for the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has been fined NT$2.5 million as part of a violation of his non-compete agreement with the chipmaker. The former employee, Xue Zongzhi, had left his role at TSMC to take up a similar position at a Chinese wafer supplier, which violated his agreement with TSMC the company had argued. In response, Mr. Zongzhi retorted that his experience in procurement was not subject to a non-compete agreement and by taking up a role at his new employer, he had leveraged his skills acquired through time spent in the industry.

The report comes courtesy of the Taiwanese publication United Daily News (UDN) and it states that Mr. Zongzhi’s appeals against the Taiwanese court’s decision have been rejected. The controversy surrounding his departure started in 2016 when he left TSMC to join a Chinese wafer company within months of his departure.

Mr. Zongzhi had been managing TSMC’s purchasing department since 2011 and chose to leave the role in July 2016. As per the UDN, his contract with the company prohibited him from taking up similar roles at competing firms which were defined as companies that are engaged in “semiconductor wafer manufacturing and services.” However, in December of the same year, the executive took up a role as the vice president of procurement at the Yangtze River Storage Company which is a part of the Continental Ziguang Group and owned in it entirety by the Wuhan Xinxin Integrated Circuit Company.

The Wuhan Xinxin Integrated Circuit Company (XMC) is a direct competitor of TSMC, argued the company, since it also manufactures and sells semiconductors. As a result, the Taiwanese fab sent a legal notice to Mr. Zongzhi, asking him to resign from his new position, but failed to receive a response.

Subsequently, TSMC sent him a notice to pay damages equal to NT$15.5 million in a lawsuit. The suit also claimed that the former manager had leaked TSMC’s trade secrets such as its order contracts, bids and product prices as part of his new position.

However, Mr. Zonghzi insisted that prices and bids were not proprietary information and TSMC does not use them to compete with other companies. He also outlined that his experience over the years is not TSMC’s intellectual property and that XMC is a small fish compared to TSMC, which is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of semiconductors and chips.

As the UDN reports, the court sided with TSMC in the affair, and it ruled that contracts, bids and prices are sensitive information which is indeed used by the chipmaker to compete with rivals. It also held that Mr. Zhongzhi’s contract with TSMC did prevent him from working for other chip manufacturers, but that he was free to work with non-chip manufacturers. Finally, the court also rejected the manager’s claim that XMC is not TSMC’s rival, as it stated that the reality is to the contrary as both engage in manufacturing semiconductors.

However, it reduced the damages owed to TSMC since the company was unable to prove how Zongzhi’s departure led to losses. TSMC’s share price has grown consistently since the former manager left the company, and its profits have also grown significantly. Subsequently, Zhongxi was sentenced to pay NT$2.5 million in damages to his former employer.

The revolution industry and how the Hong Kong police were targeted

From HERE
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Professional destabilisers worked with activists for years to distort reality in Hong Kong, writes Phill Hynes. And there’s a specific reason why the destruction of the reputation of the city’s police became a key target.

When the protests in Hong Kong broke out in 2019, they became the focus for sustained and intense international media attention.

The saturation-level coverage of Hong Kong blanked out other major events elsewhere in the world—even though the other stories were often far more newsworthy, involving larger events with far more fatalities. Populism and right-wing politics were moving center stage in Europe, the Middle East was on fire, as was South America.

In other riots around the world, the military were called out and many protesters’ lives were lost. In contrast, Hong Kong police killed not one protester in six months of violent protest.

Yet the city received the sustained glare of the global media circus—and unrelenting coverage which was reprehensibly biased, particularly against the police.

In particular, not one mainstream media outlet reported the quickly obvious fact that the protests were organised, well-funded, and clearly using a long list of specialised techniques associated with a shadowy sector known as “the revolution industry”. It’s worth setting that right.

Doing the army’s job

In particular, one key fact was rarely acknowledged: Under-prepared, under-experienced Hong Kong police officers found themselves forced to do an incredibly difficult job that was done everywhere else by fully equipped armies with military vehicles and an bottomless supply of lethal weaponry.

Who was standing in the shadows, stirring up the protests? No one, apparently. Just try and find a single mainstream media article that mentioned the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) and/ or the Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategy, (CANVAS). Who are they?

This topic will be considered in three parts. First, we’ll look at some of the players in the revolution industry. Second, we’ll look at the strategy and tactics used in Hong Kong. Third, we’ll look at their focus on delegitimising authority, and particularly the city’s police force.

Part 1: The revolution industry

There have been many civil disobedience movements, uprisings, colour revolutions and protest movements in the past 20 years—and several organisations that have had direct involvement in the majority of these movements. The AEI, founded by Gene Sharp in 1983 in the US, has been at the forefront of inspiring hybrid wars. CANVAS was created in 2004 in Serbia by Srđa Popović and the CEO of Orion Telecom, Slobodan Đinović, former founding members of Otpor, the precursor to CANVAS, the group that toppled Serbian president Milosevic. There are a number of other groups in this area, such as the Oslo Freedom Foundation (which, despite the name, is headquartered in New York). The Azov Battalion from Ukraine sent a team from its Gonor Group to Hong Kong in 2019.

The revolution industry developed techniques now associated with various terms, including “psyops”, “colour revolution”, “hybrid war”, and so on. In simple terms, the western powers trigger a battle in which conventional physical fighting is supplemented with an underhand media saturation campaign to humanise one side and demonise the other. This causes the general public to take the pro-US side and enables politicians to easily syphon public funds to the coffers of arms-makers.

No conspiracy theory

It is no conspiracy theory to talk about their involvement in the Hong Kong protests. In a 2014 BBC report from an Oslo Freedom Foundation meeting, street protest specialists admitted they had been working to prepare Hong Kong activists for almost two years, and had distributed materials to a thousand activist leaders in the city.

Furthermore, Hong Kong protesters have been widely observed using revolution industry techniques (such as marginal violence) and even admitted to it.

The Albert Einstein Institute (which has no direct connection with the scientist of that name) was founded by Gene Sharp, a US academic specialising in street protest strategies and regime change. In 1993, he published the book From Dictatorship to Democracy. Updated versions of the book are accompanied by a tactical training manual with 198 meticulously thought-out steps within structured sections.

Make it seem home-grown

AEI and CANVAS both encourage localisation by activists: indigenous elements are seen as a key component of success. The protests need to look home-grown and spontaneous, but this can be superficial. As we have seen, journalists will not dig a centimetre below the surface to check.

The CANVAS organisation has its own publications designed for social movements and revolutionaries, including:

  • Canvas Core Curriculum: A Guide to Effective Non-violent Struggle
  • Making Oppression Backfire
  • Non-violent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points

CANVAS has merged its tactical guidelines with those of the AEI to create a “manual of chaos” for protest movements that is shared freely among interested parties. Moreover, a plethora of US sponsored NGOs offer training to organisations, leaders and movements on the techniques featured in the manuals, and on how to set up, fund, recruit, manage, and run protest movements and revolutions. This is now happening on an industrial scale. CANVAS grew out of the Serbian protests.

CANVAS played a different role to AEI in Hong Kong. If AEI was the inspiration, providing a philosophical and strategic basis for the orientation of a movement, then CANVAS was the tactical source or engine to drive the movement’s objectives. (The initial creation and formation of such movements rests with other NGOs – a topic for another time.)

Part 2: Strategy and tactics

In Hong Kong, which has a very complex political landscape, the protest movement benefited significantly from CANVAS tactical know-how, but CANVAS and their sponsors also benefited from the protesters. Sharp wrote: “Movements adapt the core principles and localise them to their particular circumstances on the ground.” In Hong Kong, protesters were very adaptive, refining techniques, and adding new ones.

As a result, the Hong Kong protest movement, working with a supportive western media, was hugely successful in distorting reality. Out of all the protests around the world at that time, the authorities in Hong Kong were least violent, and most likely to continue to hand out protest permits – yet the impression given was the opposite, with the Hong Kong police painted as brutal and the authorities being characterised as unwilling to allow public demonstrations.

This level of success in news manipulation meant that Hong Kong became a benchmark for tactical developments for other revolutionary movements globally, and an incubator for enhanced tactical learning, with new and modified tactics being visibly exported to other countries. The revolution specialists could add to their list of techniques.

Six stage escalation

In the now combined AEI and CANVAS chaos manual, there are six distinct stages to achieve the movement’s objectives. They start from the final objective and work back in a system known as “Inverse Planning”. (This is critically important to understand the Hong Kong protest movement, as they had a clearly established timeframe for attainment of their objectives.)

The six key stages are:

  1. Non-violent Protest and Persuasion
  2. Social Non-cooperation
  3. Economic Non-cooperation – Boycott
  4. Economic Non-cooperation – Strike
  5. Political Non-cooperation
  6. Non-violent Intervention

Why were the Umbrella Movement techniques cast aside for an alternative system? Evolution, baby! Not to mention a revised agenda. These changes were not in any way spontaneous, or reactionary. The new techniques were planned and designed to take control of the messaging and control the communications, assisting in building a movement.

Long term planning 

Indeed, the evidence points to the 2014 Umbrella Movement being a stepping stone in a much larger game plan. The architects knew in 2012 when they were planning for Occupy Central that it had a limited possibility of success in achieving the ultimate objectives. The time was not right for a bigger assault. Using their own inverse model, the target now looks to have always been for a bigger event between 2019 and 2022. As Dr. Simon Shen put it in November 2019 in the publication Think China: “Hong Kongers need to be in it for the long game.”

Alignment of conditions

What 2019 presented was the alignment of conditions, circumstances and events that lead to the escalation and implementation of the next phase of the program.

According to the CANVAS model of non-violent protest communications, control of communications, harmonising messaging, security and delivery are critical to success. Tactically, it does not matter how strong you are. If your control of communications is flawed, you will lose. The Hong Kong government was surely in the right to clamp down on the huge amount of violence and destruction of public facilities – but with no communications skill of its own, and the media arraigned against them, the constructed narrative portrayed them as the bad guys, and continues to do so.

Part 3: Removing a pillar

Gene Sharp’s theory of power identified the pillars on which governments retain their authority. These became strategic targets for attack, so that governments can be undermined, toppled, removed and ultimately replaced. See the image below for reference.

The process of undermining the government in Hong Kong had been started long ago using precisely this strategy. Civil society, education, media, and religion, had long since been penetrated and compromised. However, the city presented a unique opportunity to undermine one of the most important pillars of support – number one in the diagram is the military.

Hong Kong does not have a military. Thus it was a weak point.

In theory, the People’s Liberation Army provides military defence. But leaders in both Hong Kong and mainland China chose not to use them, showing an unexpected level of patience.

For that reason, attacking and destroying the Hong Kong police force’s legitimacy became an imperative. Once such an important pillar starts to crumble, the others will be weakened, and the whole structure will fall. Hong Kong will descend into chaos—or so the powers behind the scenes hoped.

Demonising the police

Thus, there was a clear strategy to demonise and dehumanise the Hong Kong Police Force. When the protests started, activists had but one demand, the abandonment of the extradition bill. However, that was quickly achieved, so the protest continued with its infamous “five demands, not one less” chant.

Even supporters of the protests admitted that the five demands made little sense (and were hard to remember), but the second of the five became the focus. It was the anti-police clause. Initially, it called for an independent body to be set up to review police behaviour. In fact, such a body had already existed for years, and was well trusted by the Hong Kong public.

Nevertheless, this demand was repeated ad nauseam and evolved to call for the jailing of officers and then the complete defunding of the police force itself.

Unexpected onslaught

From the first moment of the first outburst of violence on the evening of 9 June 2019, the police were the direct target of aggression. The police had been expecting large numbers of protesters—but were not expecting the level of violence that came with them, nor the media onslaught that turned attacks on police into attacks by police.

Shocked, the police reacted largely in self-defence and continued to act in this way for the next few weeks, or until it started to become apparent that the protests were not spontaneous and were coordinated and well-planned. The protest architects had a hidden objective: the Hong Kong police force had one of the best reputations of any regional police force in Asia. This had to be attacked, undermined and discredited as a matter of urgency.

‘Get the police to hit you’

One method was the use of Marginal Violence Theory. Protesters use aggression to provoke the police into any type of response, which the media could then present as police attacks on peaceful protesters. This created escalating hostility to the authorities. One protester, Fred Chan Ho-fai, even described the strategy in a 2019 New York Times article called “A Hong Kong Protester’s Tactic: Get the Police to Hit You.”

Chan wrote: “Such actions are a way to make noise and gain attention. And if they prompt the police to respond with unnecessary force, as happened on June 12, then the public will feel disapproval and disgust for the authorities. The protesters should thoughtfully escalate nonviolence, maybe even resort to mild force, to push the government to the edge.”

Creating hate (“disapproval and disgust”) for ordinary men and women trying to do their job became the deliberate intention of large bands of masked protesters carrying petrol bombs for many months, with the media eager to play their part in the process. Protesters were directed to provoke confrontation with the police at every available opportunity. To further blacken the name of the force, they brought in school pupils, young people, mothers with children, and the elderly, for photo-opportunities.

Police not blameless

But let’s be fair. It is inevitable in such a long and sustained conflict that individuals in the police force did likely respond on occasion more aggressively than perhaps they should have. Tear gas was used at times when it was not necessary, and sometimes they seemed to have forgotten that it was not an offensive weapon, but a tool for crowd control. Rubber or plastic bullets were used incorrectly on too many occasions, firing directly at targets as opposed to ricocheting off the ground. Some individual officers behaved deplorably in the conduct of their duty.

However, it is all too easy for the layman to judge them harshly from the comfort of a secure, remote perspective.

The present writer has served front and centre in such situations, while bricks, bottles, Molotov cocktails and all manner of improvised objects rain downed upon us. But of course, as an officer of the authorities, you have to stay within the limits of professionalism and discipline. The throwers of petrol bombs have no such constraints.

By comparison, restrained

Hong Kong soon descended into months of sustained protests, rioting, arson attacks, destruction of property and businesses owned or associated with mainland Chinese. Protesters threw thousands of Molotov cocktails, committed vicious assaults against civilians, and there were undeniable attempts to harm or kill members of the police force. Compared to how other countries’ police forces would have behaved, the Hong Kong contingent were, by and large, remarkably restrained.

The media played an irresponsible role in the nurturing and cultivation of this narrative. “Citizen Journalists” (some as young as 12 years old) would at times insert themselves between the police and rioters, thereby making themselves willing victims of police actions. This would be duly reported as police brutality. Video footage was carefully edited to show the police as the aggressors. Rarely did the truth of a particular situation make it into the mainstream media. The wanton violence of the rioters would be omitted, leaving only the apparent brutality of the police. Even photographs of an innocuous interaction between public and police would be misrepresented as evidence of barbarity.

Police become focus

Since it was plainly ludicrous for that level of destruction to be justified as a call for the abandonment of a bill that had long been abandoned, the chorus of calls for the disbandment of the Hong Kong police became the main theme of the protests. However, when protest leaders were questioned on how to proceed with this, there were no answers.

None of this made any sense. But it didn’t have to. The protesters had taken the strategic objective of removing a key pillar of support from the government. The Hong Kong police force was not merely collateral damage: destroying their legitimacy was one of the objectives of the protests.

Ultimately, it failed

Ultimately, the campaign to cause Hong Kong to descend into chaos, goading the PLA into take control, and killing the “one country two systems” policy, failed. The Chinese government was too patient.

No matter. The Western media still blamed China for everything that went wrong, and refused to acknowledge any involvement by outsiders. But in Hong Kong itself, people on all sides of the debate did become more fully aware that there were underhand forces at play, and realised that their home was being used as a political football. For them, the national security law makes much more sense than the international media will acknowledge. You have to have tools to deal with wrongdoing when the games are being played below the surface of dark waters.

And the people of Hong Kong have a continuing concern, too. The game, they worry, may not be over. For the international media, the revolution industry doesn’t exist at all. For many traumatised citizens of Hong Kong, it is very real indeed. And the forces behind it are still very much at work.

Phill Hynes is a geopolitical analyst based in Hong Kong and specialising in Asian affairs.

Reposted from https://www.fridayeveryday.com/

Japan’s “chip giant” Sakamoto Yukio: was collapsed by the United States and South Korea, and went to China for revenge at the age of 72

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In Chinese, From HERE

The Sistine Chapel of the ancients.

This latest stunning archaeological discovery from deep in the Amazon Rainforest has been referred to as The Sistine Chapel of the ancients.

Nestled between towering limestone table-top mountains that ring the horizon and dotted with immense limestone outcrops is a sheltered natural basin in the Amazon Rainforest, this isolated paradise is crisscrossed by rivers and amongst the most biodiverse places on Earth.

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For centuries this strange sheltered basin was a contested landscape, since 1960 FARC guerrillas have controlled the region and much of the surrounding Columbian countryside.

Then in 2020, a team of Archaeologists from the University of Essex in the UK, and the National University of Colombia, carried out an expedition to the depths of this mysterious basin and what they discovered was so unbelievable that it was kept secret and only announced in 2021.

Impatient readers start grumbling - ‘What the heck Henrey, tell us what they found, damnit.’

Patience my young padawans, anyway, roughly 13-thousand-years-ago, a mind-bogglingly long time ago, some ancient humans reached this sheltered paradise that is guarded by immense walls of limestone mountains and rich with life.

These ancient humans settled down claiming this region for themselves and built yet to be discovered settlements that today lay buried beneath the dense Amazon Rainforest.

However, these Ancients did leave us something utterly incredible, and it was finally found in 2020, after 12,500 years of waiting, humans have once again found The Sistine Chapel of the ancients.

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What these Ancients created would have taken generations of continuous work, I suppose what I’m saying is this wasn’t just some random caveman painting his willy on a wall or sketching a few doodles of animals or stick people.

What the Archaeologists found was an eight-mile-long wall of tens of thousands of prehistoric paintings, that include everything from extinct Ice Age animals, humans hunting and dancing, detailed depictions of edible plants, intricate shapes and flowing complex patterns.

“One of the most fascinating things was seeing ice age megafauna because that’s a marker of time. I don’t think people realise that the Amazon has shifted in the way it looks. It hasn’t always been this rainforest. When you look at a horse or mastodon in these paintings, of course, they weren’t going to live in a forest. They’re too big. Not only are they giving clues about when they were painted by some of the earliest people – that in itself is just mind-boggling – but they are also giving clues about what this very spot might have looked like: more savannah-like.” - Al-Shamahi.

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Ice-Age megafauna displayed in the pictographs of the Serranía La Lindosa including: (a) giant sloth, (b) mastodon, (c) camelid, (d, e) horse, (f) long-neck, three-toed ungulate with a trunk.

Honestly, just thinking that there is this 8-mile long cliff face in the depths of the Amazon rainforest that was painted by ancient humans more than 12,500 years ago, and it is all still there, is simply bonkers.

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Bonkers, no other words, just bonkers, the age of exploration and new discoveries is still alive.

The below image is one of my favourites, I had to zoom in and crop the original, so I know it doesn’t show all the paintings on this section of the wall, but just take a moment, it’s fascinating.

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This single image shows the Ice Age megafauna these ancient humans would have hunted, two van-sized Mastodon dominate the top left of the image, while near the middle left is what looks like a large wooden tower, which was likely built to enable these ancient people to paint 20 foot off the ground and undertake this monumental generational endeavour, mile after mile.

There is another wooden tower clearly depicted to the middle right, honestly, so far we only have a handful of images and the entire 8-mile-long wall is covered with complex paintings, it will literally take the next decade to fully document and photograph the paintings along the entire wall.

Personally, I believe it is very likely there could be ancient stories depicted on this wall or lessons, because these ancient people spent generations over hundreds of years painting an 8-mile long wall in detail, creating giant wooden towers to paint every itty little bit of their canvas, I highly doubt it was all just meaningless doodles.

Q&A: Indonesia’s defence minister on security in the Asia-Pacific

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Indonesia’s Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto tells Al Jazeera he is confident the leaders of the US and China will be ‘wise’.

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Singapore – As defence chiefs from around the Asia-Pacific gather in Singapore for the Shangri-La Dialogue, much of the focus has been on growing tensions between the United States and China.

The three-day security summit organised by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies is considered the most important defence-related conference in the region. This year, more than a dozen defence chiefs from around the world, including the US, China, and more, are attending.

After a two-year hiatus, the event has returned and attracted high-profile guests, including the Indonesian defence chief and former presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto.

The former lieutenant general met with Al Jazeera’s Jessica Washington during the Shangri-La Dialogue, sharing his thoughts on the war in Ukraine, and modernising Indonesia’s military arsenal.

Al Jazeera: In your speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue, you spoke about the “Asian way”. Where does Indonesia fit into that idea?

Subianto: That is our culture that we always try to resolve problems with negotiations, with interactions, with engagement, and we keep on engaging, we keep on discussing until we come to an amicable, mutually beneficial solution. That is the Asian way.

And it is the Indonesian way. We call it musyawarah mufakat (discussion to reach a solution) and we call it gotong royong (working together). We look for common interests; if we always talk about the differences, we might not even meet.

Al Jazeera: A big focus during this summit has been on US-China tensions. What do you see as Indonesia’s role in dealing with those tensions?

Subianto: We are in the real and actual position that we respect and we are friendly, and we are good friends. We have good cooperation with both powers — I have said that many times. The United States has helped us many times, in our critical moments. But China has also helped us. China has also defended us and China is now a very close partner with Indonesia. And actually, China has always been the leading civilization in Asia. Many of our sultans, kings, our princes in those days, they would marry princesses from China. We have hundreds of years of relationship.

So it’s natural. So, you asked me, what is our position, as good friends we try to be, maybe a good common bridge. If not, then we maintain the good relationships.

And we are convinced that both powers will have wise leadership. I’m optimistic on that front, many people, of course, understandably are concerned, and yes there are dangers. But I believe the leader of China will be wise, and the leader of the US also. They are great powers. The world will expect them to give us good leadership.

Al Jazeera: What about some of the aspects of Indonesia-China relationships, where there are differences of opinions… for example the South China Sea. How do you navigate those challenges?

Subianto: As I said with good relations, good communication with direct contacts, we can come to an amicable understanding that’s mutually beneficial.

Al Jazeera: The US Secretary of Defense, earlier in the speech mentioned Indonesia, specifically the naval exercise called Garuda Shield…

Subianto: Garuda Shield has been going on for 14-15 years, but we have also exercises with other countries. We also plan to have exercises with China.

Al Jazeera: The US Secretary talked about the situation in Ukraine, and you mentioned in your speech, you said it is a very sad situation. Do you have anything else to say on that?

Subianto: Historically, geopolitically, there are always two versions to a story. Indonesia, as you know we voted with the many western countries in opposing the invasion of Ukraine — that’s our position on the invasion.

But once again, I would like to say that Russia has been a very good friend to Indonesia all these years. We have good relations with Russia, they helped us also when we were having difficulties and as I mentioned, a friend in need is a friend indeed. Never forget friends who helped you. That’s our position.

We say all the great powers must be respected, and their concerns must be respected.

Al Jazeera: You have made it your priority to modernise Indonesia’s defence capabilities, how is that going?

Subianto: It is going well, of course, everything needs what I call an incubation period, we can’t go to the supermarket and buy defence equipment. I would say it’s going well, of course, I’m pretty impatient, I wish it could go faster, maybe if I have a magic wand.

Al Jazeera: Following your speech, you were asked about the region and you said each country can make their own decisions. Anything further to say on that?

Subianto: Basically that’s the right of every country to assess their own security needs. So I cannot tell the Australians or the British what they should do. I also don’t want them to tell us what to do. We respect each other.

Al Jazeera: Can I ask for your views on the situation in Myanmar?

Subianto: I think Indonesia’s position is very clearly do not recognize the regime in Myanmar

Al Jazeera: Let’s look at a domestic issue in Indonesia. There is discussion about the plan to create new provinces in Papua and some international human rights groups have raised concerns about security implications and the impact on human rights.

Subianto: There’s always this, I would say double standards or triple standard, anything countries like Indonesia do. They always try to emphasise the possibility of human rights abuses. I think our needs, we have vast areas and that has been in discussion and planning for many years.

Al Jazeera: Indonesia’s foreign policy has long been guided by the phrase ‘free and active’. Do you see Indonesia as having a leadership role among countries that take a neutral stance?

Subianto: Leadership is not something that we can award to ourselves. I think the best form of statecraft in my opinion is to get your own house in order. If we take care of our own house in good order, people will look to us.

Al Jazeera: Speaking of leadership, your plans for 2024 — Are you planning to run for the presidency?

If I am needed, if there is strong support for me, then I have to put myself at the service of my people and my country.

U.S. Wants China’s SMIC to Stop Making 14nm Chips

When the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) restricted access of China’s largest contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) to fab equipment used to make10nm-class chips, it was considered a tough but not too severe move. Now the U.S. government is mulling restricting China from producing logic chips using a 14nm-class fabrication process.

The DOC is examining the possibility of prohibiting the exportation of chipmaking tools to companies in China that can make logic chips using 14nm-class manufacturing nodes and thinner, according to a Reuters report that cites five people familiar with the matter. The only company in China currently producing chips using its 14nm fabrication process is SMIC, which has been doing so since late 2019.

What is not completely clear from the report is whether the DOC wants to ban SMIC from getting tools used to make semiconductors on its 14nm node and thinner, or if it wants to ban SMIC from getting any tools at all because it is capable of making chips using its 14nm technology.

Currently, American companies can sell equipment good enough to build 14nm chips to SMIC without any export licenses from the DOC and other agencies. If the U.S. government decides to restrict SMIC’s access to advanced chipmaking tools, companies like Applied Materials and Lam Research will have to apply for an export license every time they deal with SMIC. The application will be reviewed with a presumption of denial.

An official for the U.S. DOC did not confirm that the department was discussing 14nm-related export restrictions for SMIC but confirmed that it was continuously reviewing the ongoing situation.

“With respect to semiconductor-related export license applications in particular, (Commerce) and the other reviewing agencies … consider a variety of factors in making licensing decisions, including the technology node for the proposed export,” the spokesperson for the Department of Commerce is reported to have said.

Because SMIC could not access extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tools due to the Wassenaar Arrangement, the firm began the development of its 12nm, N+1, and N+2 process technologies that relied purely on deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography and were aimed primarily at inexpensive chips that did not require a high transistor density. Now, both N+1 and N+2 nodes are considered sub-10nm fabrication processes, so SMIC had to cancel their development.

When SMIC was barred from manufacturing tools advanced enough to make chips using its 10nm-class (and sub-10nm-class) nodes in late 2020, the company said it would focus on developing advanced packaging technologies to make sophisticated multi-chiplet designs out of tiles produced on 14nm and thicker nodes. That would enable Chinese chip designers to build sophisticated and capable processors with tens of billions of transistors even without using an advanced process technology. In addition, the company announced multi-billion dollar expansion plans that would triple the output of chips made on advanced nodes.

To a large degree, advanced packaging technologies could be SMIC’s way to work around the U.S. export restrictions. As a result, China would gain access to advanced computing capabilities that could be used for military purposes.

The U.S. administration certainly understands SMIC’s options and risks that it brings to America and its allies, so it wants to further crackdown China’s access to sophisticated chipmaking tools.

Article from HERE

PM Anthony Albanese issues warning to China at Quad meeting

The new PM has told China it must remove its sanctions on Australian products if the two countries are ever to improve relations.

Ellen Ransley

So the New Prime Minister of Australia attended the United States QUAD meeting. The QUAD was set up by Mike Pompeo as a Pacific NATO as a military block to "counter" China militarily. During the meeting, the new Prime Minister got up on the podium and listed demands and warnings to China. Here, in this article, the local Australian media reports on his "warnings" and the Chinese retort. -MM

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The QUAD showing the United States military bases.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has warned China the only way to improve its relationship with Australia is by removing trade bans.

After years of strained diplomatic relations between the two countries, the incoming Prime Minister told the Quad meeting his government, on behalf of Australia, would seek good relations with all countries – but would not be soft on China.

In his address, Mr Albanese urged Beijing to lift trade tariffs it imposed on Australian goods such as barley, wine, coal and seafood.

“Australia seeks good relations with all countries,” Mr Albanese said in Tokyo.

“But it’s not Australia that’s changed, China has. It is China that has placed sanctions on Australia.

There is no justification for doing that. And that’s why they should be removed.”

Oh really? Eh? China just up and decided to do that without justification.  Hum...-MM

Mr Albanese’s first comments as Prime Minister about China comes as he confirmed he had received a letter of congratulations from Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.

The Quad leaders, which include US President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, reaffirmed their commitment to a secure and peaceful Indo-Pacific at the meeting on Tuesday.

In a joint statement, the four leaders directly referenced China’s military expansion in the South China Sea and its claims over Taiwan.

“We strongly oppose any coercive, provocative, or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo and increase tensions in the area, such as the militarisation of disputed features,” the statement read.

Earlier this week, Mr Biden confirmed the US was prepared to “get involved militarily” to defend Taiwan if China did make good on its threats to invade.

Mr Albanese said there was no change in Australia’s position that there should be “no unilateral change to the status quo” but would not explicitly detail the issue of a military response.

The incoming Prime Minister’s demands of China, and the Quad meeting as a whole – comes as Chinese officials travel to the Solomon Islands to make further security plans.

The security arrangement was also a topic of conversation at the Quad.

From HERE

China lists four criteria to get the Australian-Chinese relationship on track…

China’s Foreign Ministry also said there were four requirements for Australia to improve the relationship.
They included the following demands:
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  • Australia must treat China as a “partner rather than a rival”,
  • the two countries must seek “common ground while shelving differences,
  • Australia must reject “manipulation by a third party”, a clear reference to the United States and finally
  • both countries must build “public support featuring positiveness and pragmatism”.
Chinese media has reported that Foreign Minister Penny Wong and her Chinese counterpart agreed to remove obstacles to get the China-Australia relationship back on track.
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These four criteria ENRAGED the new Prime Minister…

Anthony Albanese hits back on China’s four demands to rebuild relationship

Anthony Albanese has warned China he won’t be taking orders after Beijing issued four demands to “get the relationship on track”.

Anthony Albanese has warned China he won’t be taking orders over Beijing’s four demands to “get the relationship on track” including not treating it as an adversary.

Over the weekend, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi issued Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong with a four-point list of demands to repair the relationship and

Foreign Minister Wang Yi blamed the Morrison government’s “irresponsible” words and deeds for the difficulties in the relationship.

“The root cause of the difficulties in bilateral relations over the past few years was the former Australian government’s insisting on regarding China as a rival or even a threat, allowing its words and deeds being irresponsible against China,” he said.

“It is hoped that the Australian side will seize the current opportunity and take concrete actions to reshape its correct understanding of China, reduce negative assets and accumulate positive energy for the improvement of China-Australia relations.”

It followed a meeting in Bali on Friday between the pair that ended a diplomatic freeze that has dragged on for three years.”

Speaking in Canberra, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Australia will continue to co-operate with China where it can but won’t shy away from standing up for the national interest.

“Look, Australia doesn’t respond to demands. We respond to our own national interest,’’ Mr Albanese said.

“I’ll say this. We will co-operate with China where we can. I want to build good relations with all countries. But we will stand up for Australia’s interests when we must.”

China’s Foreign Ministry also said there were four requirements for Australia to improve the relationship.

They included the following demands: Australia must treat China as a “partner rather than a rival”, the two countries must seek “common ground while shelving difference, Australia must reject “manipulation by a third party”, a clear reference to the United States and finally both countries must build “public support featuring positiveness and pragmatism”.

Chinese media has reported that Foreign Minister Penny Wong and her Chinese counterpart agreed to remove obstacles to get the China-Australia relationship back on track.

Asked what obstacles the Foreign Minister agreed to move, Mr Albanese said: “I’m not in a position to listen to what the Chinese media says. I’ll listen to what Penny Wong says about the meeting.”

“It was a constructive meeting. It was just a step forward,’’ the Prime Minister said.

“Australia has not changed our position on any issues. We’ll continue to be constructive.”

“We are engaging in the lead-up to the Pacific island forum, and indeed, ministers (Penny) Wong and (Pat) Conroy are leaving for the Pacific island forum today. This is an important meeting. We know that Australia hadn’t, in my view – we said it very publicly. It’s obvious that we had dropped the ball.

“The deal that occurred with Solomon Islands represents Australia not so much as having a step up in the Pacific, as a stuff-up in the Pacific.”

The Morrison government’s call for a full investigation into the origins of Covid-19 was one flashpoint in recent years as the ban on China’s Huawei from participating in Australia’s 5G rollout and foreign interference laws.

On Sunday, the Coalition’s foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham said China should have taken a stronger position over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

”China’s muted response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and war on Ukraine has been a shameful thing to see,” Senator Birmingham told Sky News Australia.

”We would wish to see China take a stronger response in that regard.

”What the world would no doubt love to see in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is for China to show leadership. It would be an enormous opportunity for China to do so and one I’m sure many would encourage them to do.”

From HERE

Funniest Raccoon Memes by Nocturnal Trash Posts

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Who doesn’t like a good raccoon meme? Who doesn’t like a good raccoon? Wait, who doesn’t like a good raccoon anything? Trash pandas are awesome and no, there can’t be any other way. And speaking of raccoon memes, there is a dedicated Instagram page that celebrates raccoonhood with existential, funny, and straight up nonsensical memes.

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US’s global WMD bioweapons are not “Russian-Chinese lies”. Demand war crime trials now.

Bombshell documentary! By Dilyana Gaytandzhieva..

Full video and transcript HERE.

Biscuits and Gravy

This CLASSIC Biscuits and Gravy recipe is one everyone knows and loves! Delicious buttery biscuits smothered in a homemade sausage gravy! It only takes a few simple ingredients and is perfect for breakfast (dinner) or a holiday morning!

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Homemade Biscuits and Gravy

When you think of good home cooking, do you have certain recipes that come to mind? I’m talking the ultimate comfort food that mom or grandma used to make. Biscuits and Gravy is one of those recipes that comes to mind for me!

Homemade Biscuits and Gravy is a classic breakfast recipe that has become a staple in our home (we even have a Biscuits & Gravy Casserole we love). What’s crazy is that I didn’t realize how simple it is to put together until I finally got brave enough to try it for myself!

You can make homemade biscuits to go with your sausage gravy, but for simplicity sake, I oftentimes use the refrigerated biscuits that come in a can. Especially if we’re doing a big family breakfast during the holidays, or even just throwing together ‘breakfast for dinner‘ on a busy weeknight, it’s easier to whip out the pre-made stuff.

Now, I’m not above using generic brands on most things. However, I must warn you… I have tried other sausages and nothing has compared to Jimmy Dean. My family loves the Hot Sausage Roll, but if you’re not a fan of spice, stick with the regular. Or if you’re making it for big crowd, do one of each and it’s the perfect combination.

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How to Make Sausage Gravy

As delicious as buttermilk biscuits are, let’s be honest – the gravy is the real star of the show. The best part? The sausage gravy recipe only takes THREE ingredients to make! And chances are, you already have 2 of them on hand.

COOK SAUSAGE. To make the sausage gravy, cook the sausage on medium high heat, breaking it up with a spatula as you go.

MAKE GRAVY. Once sausage is cooked through, carefully stir in flour, ½ cup at a time, until sausage has a nice coating. Slowly add your milk, until you’ve reached your desired consistency. (For a soupier gravy, add more milk. If you like the sauce to be thicker, add less milk. If you find you have added too much milk, add flour to thicken it up.)

SEASON. Season this with salt and pepper and enjoy your super simple and delicious biscuits and gray,

You’ll be blown away by how much flavor can be created with such few ingredients in so little time. And then when you pour it over some freshly baked buttermilk biscuits? Match made in heaven!

SAUSAGE GRAVY TIP: Remember, do not drain the excess fat from the sausage after cooking it. The sausage drippings will help bring the flour and milk together. Completely stir the flour and allow it to cook with the sausage and drippings for 1-2 minutes, then slowly add the milk.

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biscuits And gravy Variations & FAQ:

Here are some ideas for changing up your classic B & G!

  • Replace the biscuits with rice, corn bread, toast, or mashed potatoes.
  • Try using ground turkey (plus 2 tbsp of butter) or ground beef in place of the sausage.
  • Replace regular milk with buttermilk.
  • Add some spice with chili flakes or tabasco sauce.
  • Try adding Mushrooms or bell peppers, or cooked bacon bits to change up the flavor.
  • Make a casserole version to easily feed a crowd

Can biscuits and gravy be frozen? Unfortunately cream/milk based gravies do not freeze well. The cream/milk will separate during the thawing process. You can precook your sausage and freeze it (along with all of the drippings) in an airtight container for up to 3 months.

When you’re ready to make the gravy thaw the sausage and follow the recipe as written. Cooked biscuits can also be stored in their own airtight freezer container for up to 3 months until ready to use.

Reheat. Leftover biscuits and gravy can be stored in the fridge for 3-4 days. Reheat the gravy in the microwave or in a saucepan in the stove top until it reaches your desired temperature.

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Nothing beats some homemade biscuits and gravy! Whether it’s for breakfast or dinner or a holiday party, we hope you enjoy this simple recipe.

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Being Poor in Africa

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That most Africans are poor, not because they really are poor, but because someone decides to describe them as such.

My grandfather is ‘poor’. He certainly lives on “less than a dollar a day”. He is now 95 years old. In his nine and a half decades on earth, he has never lacked, and he has never begged. He only attended one year at a mission school in the 1930s and learnt how to read and write. This is how he pulls it off:

When he wants food, he goes to the banana plantation, looks at tens of bunches of matooke (banana) and decides which to harvest for the day’s dinner. Adjacent to the plantation is a sweet potato garden, cassava garden, yams and finger millet. To the south of the banana plantation are beans, cow peas or peanuts gardens. Down the valley is grazing land with tens of Frisian and cross-breed cattle. They provide him with milk daily, 365 days a year.

He also has about 20 goats. In Uganda, goat milk was generally not considered palatable, possibly due to the abundance of cow milk, so we never milked goats. He would sell a couple of them to supplement income from other produce to send his children to school. He also reared a couple of chickens, more as a hobby.

The farm produces more than he can consume. He sells the surplus to afford such essential services as kerosene (recently upgraded to solar), soap, sugar (at his age he no longer takes sugar, he uses honey — doctor’s orders).

Scattered across the farm are sugarcane (for eating, not for making sugar) and fruit trees (guava, mango, pawpaw, avocado, orange, passion fruit, pineapple). He drinks fresh juice from mangoes and passion fruit. As is evident, everything here is on a subsistence basis, but very organic. He has done this for the past 75 years.

He had eleven children, my mother being his first born. He sent all of them to school, saw eight of them through college. He sold at least two cows, some goats and some produce each school term to send his children to school.

I went to live at grandfather’s place when I was 5 years old. I left when I was 14 (my family lived in an urban area). I learnt how to farm, milk cows, tether goats, harvest fruits (by climbing the fruit tree) and harvesting honey (at night using smoke).

Why the long story?

My grandfather, just like millions of other Africans that live like him, is considered poor. He rarely holds money, and he rarely needs it. He produces most of what he needs. But using the standard World Bank/IMF description of ‘poor’, my grandfather is poor. I live in the city and earn about USD 12,000 a year after tax, which in Uganda is a decent salary. But I can hardly match my grandfather in terms of providing for my family with fresh milk, fresh food and fresh fruits.

This is one thing most people that watch International media do not know about Africa: not all Africans are poor, many simply live differently than you.

Russian Navy Takes Delivery of First “Nuclear Tsunami” Submarine

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Yesterday, July 8, 2022, the Russian Navy took delivery of the first submarine capable of firing the “Poseidon” nuclear tsunami drone torpedo.  No other submarine on earth has such capability and there is no defense at all against its “Poseidon” drone nuclear torpedo.

The Russian Navy submarine armed with a strategic nuclear torpedo the size of a school bus was delivered to the Kremlin this week, according to an announcement from the shipyard.

Project 09852 Belgorod is based on a Russian Oscar-class guided-cruise missile submarine that has been altered to accommodate six Poseidon nuclear torpedoes that could each be armed with a warhead of up to 100 megatons.

The submarine was delivered to the Russian Navy in a ceremony in at the Northern Fleet’s headquarters in Severodvinsk on Friday.

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“The Belgorod submarine opens up new opportunities for Russia in conducting various research, allows conducting diverse scientific expeditions and rescue operations in the most remote areas of the world ocean,” according to a statement from Russian Navy chief Adm. Nikolai Anatolyevich Yevmenov.
“The ship is designed to solve diverse scientific problems, conduct search and rescue operations, and can also be used as a carrier of rescue deep-sea and autonomous unmanned underwater vehicles.”

The cut-away shown below provides readers with an understanding of the vast capabilities of this new vessel:

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Mini or Midget submarines for deep sea operations – including cutting communications cables on the sea floor – are carried aboard or beneath this new sub.

Yet the most fearsome aspect of this vessel is its new “Poseidon” autonomous, nuclear drone torpedo. Take a look:

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Length: 24 meters (79 ft) (estimate)
Diameter: 2m (6.5 ft) (estimate)
Speed: 70 knots (Reports that Poseidon can travel at very high speeds and/or uses super-caitation have been debunked).
Range:
Operating depth: >1,000 meters (3,280 ft) (reported)
Propulsion: nuclear

In 2019, the Russian Navy put out a video on Youtube, showing the torpedo being LAUNCH tested (not exploding).  Here’s the video:

 

 

The torpedo is carried to maybe 100 miles offshore of a target city.  It could be launched much farther out to sea as well.

It is launched and commences autonomous operation.  The sub which launches it does not have to remain anywhere near it.

The torpedo travels to it’s programmed location at a deep depth of maybe 1 kilometer, then waits as long as it is programmed to wait . . .  could be days or even weeks, allowing the sub that launched it to be safely far away, then detonates at a depth of about 1 kilometer.

At that depth, there is so much water, that even the heat of the nuclear blast will not turn ALL of the water to steam which vents harmlessly upwards.   A massive amount of the water will be “pushed” by the expanding blast force and that “push” will create a Tsunami wave, traveling toward the target coastline.

As the depth of water gets shallow approaching the coastline, the water piles-up on itself, reaching a projected height of up to FIVE HUNDRED METERS (1500 feet) above the typical ocean surface- and slams ashore at about 600 MPH, smashing absolutely everything in its path.

Entire cities would be knocked down and totally flooded by such a wave.

Worse, because the wave was caused by a thermonuclear explosion, all the water is radioactive.  Once that water comes ashore, the radiation levels from the flooding will be so high, that nothing will be able to survive and nothing will be able to enter into the flooded area for hundreds of years.

So ferocious is this new weapons system, that, if detonated off the Atlantic coast of the United Kingdom, it could submerge the entire British Isles, wiping out every living thing, and making the entire UK uninhabitable for hundreds of years.

With the ongoing troubles between Russia and Ukraine, and with the US and UK using NATO to supply weapons to Ukraine to kill Russians, the Russians are getting aggravated to the point where, on Russian Television, they told their citizens that just one Poseidon drone torpedo could sink the UK into the sea, killing every living thing.  Here is that video from Russian TV:

 

 

Now, imagine they detonated one of these off Washington, DC, or New York City, or Boston . . . or all of them?

Imagine if they detonated one of these off Los Angeles, or San Francisco . . .  or both?

There is no defense against this type of weapon.  And there would be no surviving its effects.

Now that Russia actually has an operational submarine capable of launching this now-tested and operations nuclear drone torpedo, maybe picking a fight with Russia over Ukraine is not such a good idea for the Untied States.

The US has clearly fallen in the arms race.  Yes, we have about 6200 nuclear warheads, but Russia has hypersonic missiles and we do not.  Russia has this nuclear drone torpedo and we do not.

Looks to many people that if war breaks out, Russia survives . . .  and we . . . . do not.

Ancient Romans were a lot like contemporaneous Americans

You see the Romans are a lot like modern Americans

  1. They considered themselves the peak of civilizations
  2. They were litigious and placed extreme importance on legalism
  3. They loved to drink and overeat
  4. They loved a good party
  5. They loved sport- from gladiators to races
  6. They were materialistic
  7. They were quick to evolve and adopt aspects of other cultures
  8. They were extremely diverse culturally and racially

If you envision Romans as Americans without all this technology you’ll often be spot on.

The one big difference was Christianity. The Romans lacked the moral issues with sex that Christianity would foster. Thus Rome was far more sexually liberated than the modern United States is.

Now in Roman marriage monogamy was expected and cheating was definitely taboo. But the Romans had very few hang-ups. Divorcing your pregnant wife so she can marry your political ally was not such a big deal- and this happened multiple times.

The Romans loved origins and they loved prostitutes. Sex was super common and it was a BIG part of Roman life.

Now Rome was patriarchal. A wife cheating was a HUGE deal while a husband cheating was a much smaller deal. But it was always bad.

I’ve recently seen this meme (below) so I would like to explain further as to why this was the case.

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The Chinese do NOT FUCKING play.

In one short sentence: because ancient Chinese always practiced total war.

By definition, a total war was a war where all assets of state would be managed to prioritize war effort, including civilian citizens. This differs from the kinds of “rules based” wars conducted by the Western Europeans and Americans.

There were a lot of practices in ancient wars that would be considered completely inhumane by modern standards. Let me list out a few:

  • Pillaging a captured city for loot, kept by either the soldiers themselves or their superiors. Of course some modern armies still do this, but the list gets worse.
  • Forced conscription. Many civilians were literally dragged out of their homes and force to fight. I heard a lot of old Taiwanese veterans recount this; they were usually the most pro-unify people in Taiwan with some requesting in their will to be buried back in their mainland hometown.
  • Mass execution of surrendered POW. Most notably, Bai Qi did so at the Battle of Changping. Cao Cao and Tuoba Gui had also done this (that’s just off the top of my head). This was due to logistics problems of keeping them fed, or to prevent them from rejoining the enemy army.
  • Destruction of entire cities or natural terrain to better defend or prevent resources entering enemy control. Sometimes people were forcefully migrated, other times they were left to die.
  • Intentionally killing civilians but reporting it as enemy combatants; this was for promotion or false victories. Some deathtolls of war combatants were not necessarily real combantants.
  • Rise of rebel warlords and bandits when government control was lost. If the government’s army did not commit atrocities, they would. Imagine a Walking Dead apocalypse, and how a lot of people suddenly awakened their inner psychopath.

One particular film I recommend is The Warlords starring Jet Li, Andy Lau, and Takeshi Kaneshiro (3 legendary actors!). It was a fictional account of the Taiping Rebellion, but outlined the cruelty and deeper motivations behind atrocities committed in the war.

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The cruelty of war was in fact a huge shock for some of the Westerners who set foot in China. In the Taiping Rebellion, there was an incident where several Taiping generals surrendered to Charles George Gordon, commander of the Ever Victorious Army, who promised to spare their lives.

When they were delivered to Li Hongzhang, he instead had them all summary executed.

Westerner Charles George Gordon was very angry because Li Hongzhang made him lose face with a dishonored promise and threatened to leave with his army, ultimately getting an apology from Li.

Meanwhile, Zeng Guofan (infamous for his cruelty towards the rebels) gave him a pat on the back saying he did the right thing.

The Chinese population have always feared the cruelty of war, to have such idioms:

宁做太平犬 不做乱世人 
I'd rather be a dog in peacetime than a man in wartime.

一将功成万骨枯 
One general’s success lied on tens of thousands of rotten bones.

Some final notes…

  • Wars of such magnitude usually only happened once every 200–300 years and the collapse of the central government would usually follow. Atrocities did not always happen in every single war, but usually many of these atrocities did.
  • While Sun Zi did advocate that a war of attrition with significant deaths was non-beneficial, there was never a formal code similar to the International Laws of War. Most of these wars happened obviously before such a concept even existed.
  • As I commented, it was not just government army committing atrocities, some rebels and warlords did it worse. And when one side committed war crimes, the other side followed in revenge. Take my listed example: although Charles Gordon promised to spare the Taiping rebels out of goodwill, he was a British with no previous ties to them. Most of the Chinese militia recruited had lost family members to the rebels, so they’d kill any Taiping soldiers they’d see because it was their motivation to fight (and Zeng Guofan was clever to utilize this).

Death trap for the USA

Jeff Brown

[COMMENT: New York Times citing US officials on 24/7/2022 reported that US & European allies will not be able to maintain current level of support for Kiev for a prolonged period of time.

Despite the fact that President Biden has vowed to stand with Ukraine for “as long as it takes”, no one expects more billions of support for Ukraine when the currently authorised aid package of $54 billion in military & other assistance runs out by second quarter of 2023.] 

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Russian commentary [24/7/2022:

Death trap for the USA

The tactics of unhurried military operations in Ukraine are still bewildering the best Pentagon analysts, and only a few have begun to guess that the main goal of the operation is not at all the surrender of Kyiv.

The fall of the Kyiv regime is undoubtedly spelled out in the plans for a special military operation, but not at all as the culmination of Russia’s actions, but only as an intermediate stage. The war is actually being waged at a much higher level.

American politicians and generals firmly believe that the United States is using Ukraine as a weapon to deplete Russia. In fact, everything is exactly the opposite — the Anglo-Saxons were lured to this battlefield in order to put an end to the dubious and extremely dirty hegemony.

Some in Washington began to suspect something, but it was already too late, as the deadly trap for the United States was slammed, and the Americans themselves did the most to achieve this.

The main trick of the special operation of the Russian Federation was revealed by the Ukrainian politician and journalist Dmitry Vasilets, noting that with their unhurried advancement, the (Russian) allied forces most effectively implement the process of demilitarisation not only of Ukraine, but of the entire collective West. He said:

“The Russian army took some tactical pause to regroup before the attack on Slavyansk. Even in the West, many have already concluded that this is far from a traditional war. In fact, the Russian army could long ago destroy all the bridges across the Dnieper and stop the transfer of equipment and personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to the Donbass.

“We see a slow advance in the Donbass and near Kharkov, which is due to the fact that the army saves its forces as much as possible, giving the enemy even time and the opportunity to bring up reserves and thus destroying the entire military potential of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

“It is already clear that Russia is planning a long-term war with the West in Ukraine. Most of the territory of Ukraine is becoming a financial yoke for Europe and the United States. As they say, politics is a concentrated economy, and war is an even more concentrated economy. The West has fallen into a deadly trap.

“For many years, Kyiv’s “partners” exported all its resources out of the country, but  now they are only forced to inject huge amounts of money without receiving anything in return. This is a death trap for the US and its satellites.”

“Most likely, this is why Russia operates in Ukraine with a limited contingent and does not rush things at all, ”Vasilets explained.

The journalist noted that one should not believe in fairy tales about the unlimited resources of the United States, which, they say, can cover any costs by running the printing press at full capacity.

The sanctions war is hurting the American economy. At the same time, the United States needs to fully support Ukraine, even paying the salaries of the entire state apparatus, and soon it will also need to support the declining economy of the European Union in order to keep the already shaky anti-Russian coalition under control.

The Americans simply will not pull out a long war in such conditions, but, in theory, they also cannot retreat, at least without serious geopolitical losses. The trap has really slammed shut and in Ukraine they (Russians) are now grinding not only the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but the entire collective West.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Is China blah blah blah?

Yeah. The anti-China media is off the charts. But why focus on China while the West, led by the United States is burning?

  • Is China collapsing?
  • Is China undergoing famine?
  • Is China facing chaos?
  • Is China’s yuan failing?

Yeah. Same narrative, spewed forth over and over and over again.

Here’s some real news, some cats, a tad bit of interesting stuff, some food, and some fun.

Car Production by Country 2022

2022 report: China car production is more than US, Japan, and Germany combined
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Article HERE

Real news about Russia and China trade

Real news:
China-Russia trade up 28.9% in Jan-May; further growth expected - Global Times

Article HERE
China's alumina exports to Russia surge after Ukraine invasion — Quartz

Article HERE

China’s trade with Russia up by 12% in March from a year earlier | China | The Guardian

Article HERE

POLL: 25% of All Americans Open to “Taking-up arms against government”

More than one quarter of US residents feel so estranged from their government that they feel it might “soon be necessary to take up arms” against it, a poll released on Thursday claimed.

This survey of 1,000 registered US voters, published by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP), also revealed that most Americans agree the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me”.

The data suggests that extreme polarization in US politics – and its impact on Americans’ relationships with each other – remain strong.

The survey indicates that distrust in government varies among party lines. While 56% of participants said they “generally trust elections to be conducted fairly and counted accurately”, Republicans, Democrats and independents were dramatically split on this point. Nearly 80% of Democrats voiced overall trust in elections, but that number dipped to 51% among independents and a mere 33% of Republicans.

Per the poll, 49% of Americans concurred that they “more and more feel like a stranger in my own country”. Again, this number reflected sharp political divisions: the sentiment was held by 69% of self-described “strong Republicans”, 65% of self-described “very conservative” persons, and 38% of “strong Democrats”.

Of the 28% of voters who felt it might soon be necessary “to take up arms against the government,” 37% had guns in their homes, according to the data.

One-third of Republicans – including 45% of “strong Republicans – hold this belief about taking up arms. 35% of independent voters, and 20% of Democrats, also agreed, the poll said.

Meanwhile, those polled voiced negative sentiments about persons from opposing political parties. Seventy-three per cent of self-described Republican voters agreed that “Democrats are generally bullies who want to impose their political beliefs on those who disagree,” and “an almost identical percentage of Democrats (74%) express that view of Republicans”.

“While we’ve documented for years the partisan polarization in the country, these poll results are perhaps the starkest evidence of the deep divisions in partisan attitudes rippling through the country,” said the Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, who conducted the survey in May with and Democratic pollster Joel Benenson.

The survey also stated that almost half of respondents expressed averting political talk with other people “because I don’t know where they stand”. One-quarter described losing friends, and a similar proportion claimed to have avoided relatives and friends, due to politics, per the survey.

Biden’s Sanctions Are a Windfall For Russia!

Joe Biden: “The reason why gas prices are up is because of Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia.”

By Ron Paul

It’s easy to see why, according to a new Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans said they do not want Joe Biden to run for re-election. As Americans face record gas prices and the highest inflation in 40 years, President Biden admits he could not care less. His Administration is committed to fight a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine and Americans just need to suck it up.

Last week a New York Times reporter asked Biden how long he expects Americans to pay record gasoline prices over his Administration’s Ukraine policy. “As long as it takes,” replied the president without hesitation.

“Russia cannot defeat Ukraine,” added Biden as justification for his Administration’s pro-pain policy toward Americans. The president has repeatedly tried to deflect blame for the growing economic crisis by claiming Russia is solely behind recent inflation. “The reason why gas prices are up is because of Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia,” he said in the same press conference.

But Biden has a big problem: Americans do not believe him. According to a Rasmussen poll earlier this month, only eleven percent of Americans believe Biden’s claim that Russian president Vladimir Putin is to blame for high prices.

When it comes to disdain for the average American hurt by higher prices, there is more than enough in the Biden Administration to go around.

Brian Deese, Director of President Biden’s National Economic Council, was asked in a recent CNN interview, “What do you say to those families that say, listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years?”

His answer? “This is about the future of the Liberal World Order and we have to stand firm.”

Has there ever been an Administration more out of touch with the American people? If you asked working Americans whether they’d be happy to suffer poverty for the “liberal world order,” how many would say “that sounds like a great idea”?

President Biden’s attempts to bring down gasoline prices are bound to fail because he does not understand the problem. He can beg the Saudis to pump more oil, he can even threaten the US oil companies as he did in a Tweet yesterday. He can buy and sell from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in attempt to give the impression that prices are lowing. None of it will work.

The strangest part of this idea that Americans must suffer to hurt the Russians is that these policies aren’t even hurting Russia! On the contrary: Russia has been seen record profits from its oil and gas exports since the beginning of the Ukraine war.

According to a recent New York Times article, increasing global oil and gas prices have enabled Russia to finance its war on Ukraine. US sanctions did not bring the Russian economy to its knees, as Biden promised. They actually brought the American economy to its knees while Russian profits soared.

As Newsweek noted last week, Russian television pundits are joking that with the financial windfall Russia has seen since sanctions were imposed, “Biden is of course our agent.”

Washington’s bi-partisan foreign policy of wasting trillions on endless wars overseas has finally come home. Biden is clearly out of touch, but there is plenty of blame to go around. The only question is whether we will see an extended recession…or worse.

NASA chief warns: China was able to enter the space race by stealing American technology

Yeah. Sure…

Bill Nelson, the director of NASA, warned that China joined the space race by stealing other people's technology and is now going to occupy the moon. 

The remarks provoked resentment in Beijing. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused Nelson of smearing.

China has accelerated its space program over the past decade, with one of its priorities being exploring the moon. 

In an interview published in the German newspaper Bild on Saturday (July 2), NASA Administrator Nielsen said: 

"We have to pay very much attention to china's landing on the moon and say, 'Now (the moon) is ours, don't come.'" ’。 

Nelson also said that China's space program is a military program. 

He further denounced China for relying on technology theft to enter the space race.

From HERE

Zero.

That is Bank of America’s latest forecast for the growth of the U.S. economy in the second quarter.

The second largest American bank by assets on Friday revised down its estimate for GDP growth in the April through June period from 1.5 percent to 0.0 percent, citing weaker than expected consumer spending reported by the Department of Commerce on Thursday.

“This was the first fall in consumer spending this year amid high inflation and hawkish hikes by the Fed, indicating a slightly weaker economy than previously assumed,” the bank’s economists said in a note to clients.

The Atlanta Fed’s GDP tracker, GDP NOW on Friday plunged to minus 2.1 percent growth for the second quarter, down from the one percent reading on Thursday.

The Commerce Department’s Personal Consumption Expenditure data released for the first quarter and the month of May indicated that consumer spending has been more or less flat since January. Inflation-adjusted household earnings have fallen, with wage gains swamped by rising prices. PCE inflation, the Fed’s favored measure of price changes, remained at 6.3 percent in May, defying predictions that it would come down as the Fed imposed the biggest rate hike in this century.

The Institute of Supply Management said on Friday that its barometer of manufacturing activity fell to the lowest level since May 2020, when the economy was staggering from the onset of the pandemic and lockdowns.

Bank of America expects the economy to grow 2.3 for the full year this year. It expects just 1.4 percent next year and 0.8 percent in the year after that as the “lagged impact of tighter financial conditions cools the economy.” The bank estimates a 40 percent chance of a recession next year.

Boeing takes issue with massive Chinese Airbus order

Boeing has expressed dismay with China’s ‘Big Three’ carriers placing an order for 292 A320neo family jets on 1 July.
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The US company points to its long history in China’s aerospace market, and feels the joint order by the three state-owned carriers – Air China, China Eastern Airlines, and China Southern Airlines – was affected by geopolitical tensions.

Article HERE

Interview with American Fighters Who Surrendered in Donbass

Claiming disorganization and incompetence in Ukrainian military, the two US veterans have told fellow foreigners to stay at home

Two American nationals have told RT that they surrendered to Russian forces after being abandoned by their Ukrainian commanders. The pair told veterans like them to “think twice” before making the trip to Ukraine.

Alexander Drueke and Andy Huynh spoke to RT from a detention center in the Donbass People’s Republic, a day after The Daily Telegraph reported that they had been taken prisoner. The British newspaper described them as being the first American citizens captured while fighting for Ukraine, and Washington has vowed to secure their return.

The two veterans – Drueke served two tours with the US Army in Iraq while Huynh worked in logistics for the Marine Corps in Okinawa, Japan – were captured just hours after being sent to the front lines near Kharkov last week. Under the command of Ukraine’s secret police, the SBU, Huynh said that the pair were sent to cover a Ukrainian retreat.

“We were told to post up on a little overlook,” Huynh recalled, describing how he was armed with a Czech CZ rifle and a Rocket-Propelled Grenade (RPG) launcher. Columns of Ukrainans retreated past their point, followed by armored vehicles and a tank belonging to either Russia or the DPR.

“When [the tank] shot the first time, I was readying my RPG,” Huynh said. He claimed that the tank shot at a different position moments later, and thinking it was firing upon him, Huynh shouldered his weapon and fired a rocket at the vehicle, but missed. With the Ukrainian troops gone, Huynh and Drueke “ran away and hid in a fighting hole,” as Russian vehicles and foot patrols passed by.

“We were initially supposed to do [reconnaissance] with drones,” Drueke told RT, “but when we got to our location there was already a battle of sorts in progress. Our plans changed…and one teammate and I were left in the woods.”

When the coast was clear, the Americans set off walking through a forest for several hours before Drueke said that they “took a wrong turn or a misstep and made it into a village. We were approached by a Russian patrol and immediately surrendered to them.”

Currently in captivity, the stakes for Drueke and Huynh are high. Last week, the Russia-allied Donetsk People’s Republic sentenced to death three foreign fighters captured during the battle for Mariupol, including two Britons. The republic’s top court ruled that they were mercenaries and thus not granted privileges that regular prisoners of war would enjoy under international law.

Both men described fair treatment at the hands of their Russian captors, describing how Russian troops gave them food, warm blankets and cigarettes. However, Drueke said that he has heard rumors that the pair could potentially be sentenced to death.

Drueke, who left the US military in 2014, initially set out for Ukraine without a clear plan. Flying to Poland with the intention of doing humanitarian work, he nevertheless brought military gear and said that he was prepared to fight, even if military service “was not the be-all and end-all.” He said that while he was distrustful of American news coverage, he believed that Ukraine’s struggle was being portrayed in a way that “would appeal to veterans like myself.”

Now, with Ukrainian shells falling on civilian targets in the majority-Russian speaking city of Donetsk, he told RT that he realized “there are two sides to this story and I was not getting one of them.”

Huynh said that he’d traveled to Ukraine in April and contacted a Polish priest overseeing humanitarian relief, but soon made contacts in Ukraine’s ‘International Legion.’ After joining the legion, he left shortly afterwards, citing corruption and disorganization within the ranks.

“Commanders were very corrupt and troops were very ill-prepared and supplied,” he said. Drueke also began his duty in Ukraine with the legion, where he said he was “dissatisfied with the caliber of person they had there.”

Both men traveled the country looking for a more competent unit to join, before ending up in the so-called ‘Task Force Baguette’ in eastern Ukraine, a foreign mercenary unit consisting mainly of American and French veterans. The unit confirmed on Wednesday that Drueke and Huynh – referred to by their nicknames ‘Bama’ and ‘Hate’ – had been captured.

“Watching the propaganda from the West, it says how glorious all Ukraine is, and when I came here I saw how not true that was,” Huynh told RT. “The Ukrainians say they’re the best, but from what I’ve seen, I’ve seen a lot of corruption.”

Drueke ended his interview with a warning. “Fellow veterans like me who are thinking of coming: don’t.”

“Think really long and hard about why you’re doing it and what can happen, and if this is really your fight,” he said. “If I make it out of this situation, I have a lot of things to think about.”

At time of writing, the US has not officially acknowledged the capture of Drueke and Huynh. According to Russian figures, 6,956 foreign citizens from 64 countries have arrived in Ukraine since February to fight for Kiev. Some 1,956 of those have been killed, while 1,779 have left the country, the Russian Defense Ministry stated on Friday.

French Household bills soar by €64 a month in a year, new French study shows

Household bills soar by €64 a month in a year, new French study shows. This is based on DATA COMPILED BEFORE the ware in Ukraine.
15 Dec 2021 — The average cost of household fuel bills in France has risen by €64 per month from December 2020 to October 2021, a new official

Article HERE

Bulgaria Ejects 70 Russian Diplomatic Staff; Russia may cut ties

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Bulgaria has turned down Russia’s request to alter its decision about the expulsion of 70 Russian diplomats (espionage concerns) from the country.

The Russian ambassador declared she intends to discuss the issue of closing the embassy in Bulgaria with the Russian leadership.  This would cut Diplomatic ties between Russia and Bulgaria.

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

Bulgaria says they’ve done this over “espionage concerns.”  This is such utter nonsense.

What, in God’s name, does Bulgaria have, make, invent, or do, that anyone would even bother to spy on them?

I mean, in my 60 years of life on this planet, I cannot recall __any__ mention of __any__ invention, technology, product or service that even originated in Bulgaria, never mind be worth spying on!

What we have here is a little “nothing” of a country, posturing on the world stage to gain attention, by manufacturing a Russian bogeyman over nothing.

This is nothing more than deliberate antagonizing of Russia, o the world stage, to demean and insult the Russians, just for the sake of doing so.

Apparently, the people running Bulgaria are another set of spoiled brat children with nothing better to do than stir up trouble . . . for themselves.

All Natural Gas Flow on Yamal-Europe Pipeline Halted

Stuff going on…

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Russia has completely shut off all flows of natural gas in the Yamal-Europe pipeline.

After President Putin’s Decree on July 4,  which ordered no vital commodity shipments – at any price or in any currency – can be made to “unfriendly countries,” the gas flow to much of Europe has now been completely shut off.

Europe was striving over the past month or so to build up its tanks-storage-reserves and at last look, some countries had fifty-seven percent (57%) of their winter tank storage already filled.

It is not known how much more than 57% they may have accumulated in the past month, and it is not yet known how long such tanked reserves might last if they are drawn upon to supply countries now.

 

More info if I get it.

 

UPDATE 8:17 PM EDT–

As of May 5, 2022, Poland’s natural gas storage tanks were at 81% capacity, and RUMOR has it that as of today, those storage tanks are at 98% capacity.   I have not yet verified that they are at 98%.

I __have__ been able to verify that Gas Storage Poland, is responsible for operating gas storage tanks. The company’s seven LNG storage tanks have a total capacity of 3.18 bln cubic meters.   In May, we can confirm those tanks were at 81% or 2.58 bln cubic meters. Poland’s consumption of natural gas amounted to just above 21 bln cubic meters in 2021, most of which is consumed in the colder months of autumn and winter.

So presuming those tanks are full . . . Poland has seventeen percent of its ANNUAL ACTUAL USAGE, stored up.  That’s about two months worth.

Yet, bear in mind that although they can store 3.18 billion cubic meters for winter excess needs, those winter excess needs have always been IN ADDITION TO the regular amount of gas coming into Poland via pipeline.  Now, those regular flows have halted.   So . . .  less than two months natural gas for the whole country???

I am also told that wood-burning stoves have SOLD OUT in Germany.   Allegedly NONE to be had, at any price, anywhere in the country.

 

UPDATE 8:28 PM EDT —

Germany has by far the largest storage volume for natural gas in central and western Europe (24 billion m3), which CAN supply Germany for two- to-three average temperature winter months.  But as of March, 2022, the German storage tanks were at less than 60% full.   Still trying to get more current data, but again the storage for two to three months of average winter temperatures exists while regular pipeline service continues 24/7.   Now that Yamal-Europe is offline, Germany must rely on Nordstream One, which last month, dropped from 130 million cubic meters per day down to 100 million cubic meters per day, and dropped again TODAY from 100 million to only 58 million cubic meters per day.  So Germany may, realistically, only have two months gas supply for their whole country!

World War 3 is already underway as EUROPE does the unthinkable

He’s right.

What me worry?

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VIDEO: Missile/Projectile Hits Belgorod Russia

Stuff going ON.

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Some type of projectile or missile has struck in Belgorod, Russia, presumably launched from Ukraine.

The ten second EXCERPT video below, taken from a longer video by a person on an apartment terrace who was outside videoing the city at night, shows the hit and detonation:

 

 

If this turns out to be a U.S.-supplied HIMAARS, then real trouble has just exploded.

UPDATE 3:19 PM EDT —

Now able to report 3 people were killed and 4 injured after the explosion in Belgorod in Russia. All together, 11 apartments and 39 houses were destroyed.

Ukraine Armed Forces are DENYING an attack.  They claim a Russian Defensive Missile malfunctioned and hit the neighborhood.

But if Russia fired a “defensive missile” then doesn’t it stand to reason they were firing at incoming Ukrainian fire?

Additional source inside Russia now reports “Ukrainian Ground Forces fired a pair of 9M79-1 short-range ballistic missiles by Tochka-U systems at city of Belgorod in Russia. One hit a military site while the second failed and hit a building.”

 

UPDATE 9:52 PM EDT —

The tail section of a Ukrainian Tochka-U missile has been found in Belogorod, Russia.

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This is proof that the attack video seen above was, in fact, a Ukrainian missile attack and also proves the Ukrainian Armed Forces LIED when they told the world it was a Russian defensive missile that failed. Once again, the Ukrainians are shown to be flat-out, deliberate, liars.

Louis XI Enjoyed an Abominable Orchestra of Squealing Pigs – the Piganino

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Believe it or not, but it appears that the ruthless 15th century King Louis XI of France, nicknamed the Spider King or l’universelle araignée , took pleasure in the torture of animals. One particular story tells of a pig organ, a.k.a. a hog harmonium, piganino, pigano, or even the porko forte, which created music using the squeals of a selection of carefully chosen pigs.

Looking at the date, however, this should come as no surprise. According to Lisa Kiser, in A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age , it was common practice in Europe to use animals for entertainment between 1000 and 1400. From royal menageries to animal performances, including anything from juggling apes, talking bears or even a rooster dancing on stilts, animal cruelty and sadism was an everyday affair during the so-called Dark Ages. Bear-baiting, where a chained bear was made to fight against dogs, was a popular blood sport in Britain until the 19th century, while France was home to a lovely game known as getter au cochon , where four blindfolded players would enter an enclosure and beat a pig to death. The more well-known cockfights and cat burning were also par for the course.

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Cover illustration for the piece of sheet music entitled La Piganino, illustrating the porko forte. ( Public domain )

The story of Louis XI and his piganino comes from Nathaniel Wanley’s 1678 The Wonders of the Little World . It appears that he made a comment to the Abbot of Baigné, known to be an amateur inventor, about the musical nature of pigs. Taking this as a challenge, the Abbott proceeded to invent one of the more sadistic musical instruments on record, whereby a keyboard was connected to a series of cages containing pigs categorized by the sound of their voices. On pressing a key, the poor creatures would be poked with metal spikes, creating “ music” made up of their fear and pain-driven grunts and squeals. All this to the delight of the king.

This is not the only time that an unbelievably bizarre musical instrument is said to have been created using live animals. Musurgia Universalis , the 1650 music-related compendium by Athanasius Kircher, mentioned the katzenklavier, or cat organ, created to “raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position.” The concept was pretty much identical to that of the piganino, with eight cats in cages, tails pulled taught and, on pressing a key, slammed with a nail to produce “a melody of meows.” While some believe the cat organ to be mere myth, it was also reported by historian Juan Calvete de Estrella, in a description of the procession of King Phillip II in Brussels. This time the cat organ was being played by a bear.

Top image: A man playing a fantastic pig organ, or piganino, composed of screaming pigs. Source: British Museum / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Patrice Rushen – Forget Me Nots (12″ Version)

Ah. Please enjoy this batch of funk.

Father’s Game Guides Are Amazing

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When you play games, you most likely make notes – in your mind. It is unlikely that you write down everything in diaries. Or maybe you write down who knows you.

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Twitter user Ishikoro18 published images of guides for the passage of various games that were written by her father. Among them are titles such as Final Fantasy X-2, Siren, Ico, Silent Hill 3, Kingdom Hearts and others.

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On the pages you can find sketches, maps, solved puzzles and passwords. Maybe you also need to start a diary to pass on to the next generation?

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America in a World of Limits

In truth, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not change the fact that America’s global power position is constrained.

by Dan Caldwell in The National Interest. A Neocon publication.
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RUSSIA’S VILE war of aggression against the people of Ukraine has accelerated discussion about the future of U.S. foreign policy. However, the terms of the debate have done more to confound than clarify. While foreign policy elites declare that the Russian invasion “changes everything,” their resounding chorus offers a familiar refrain, namely, the vindication and perpetuation of U.S. global primacy. In truth, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not change the fact that America’s global power position is constrained. The heady days of unipolarity are over. Policymakers who fail to acknowledge those realities when dealing with the fallout from the war in Ukraine will only make America less safe and threaten the conditions of our prosperity.

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To be sure, the United States retains a powerful economy and military. But unlike in the early 1990s, the United States faces real global competitors—in particular China—along with domestic challenges that will require better prioritization and trade-offs.

While far from guaranteed, there is a reasonable chance that China’s total economic power will overtake the United States within the next few years. China’s economy now comprises 18 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (in terms of purchasing power parity) compared to 16 percent for the United States. Additionally, future American economic growth is threatened by record levels of inflation and a $30 trillion national debt.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military has spent the last two decades bogged down in a handful of endless wars across the Middle East and Africa. The price of these conflicts has been steep. Thousands of American lives were lost and more than $8 trillion squandered. These conflicts also wore down important strategic assets like our B-1 bomber fleet, incentivized investments in platforms like the Littoral Combat Ship that are not suited for combat against near-peer adversaries, and forced cuts to the U.S. Air Force and Navy to build an Army designed to fight counterinsurgency conflicts in strategic backwaters.

Moreover, these wars were unpopular—both at home and abroad—and their pernicious effects have eroded the power of American leadership. The challenges facing America have not gone unnoticed. Many countries have refused to join the American and European-led sanctions regime imposed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. These nations are clearly hedging their bets in a world where American dominance is less certain. This even includes countries that have benefitted from the American security umbrella. Take the United Arab Emirates for example, which has enabled Russian oligarchs to escape targeted sanctions on their assets. The Emirati crown prince doubled down on this bad behavior when he refused a call from President Joe Biden to discuss energy market distress.

The United States should not tolerate a delusional foreign policymaking elite that ignores real constraints on American power. Instead, our leaders should adopt a sober and realistic approach to the current state of the world that recognizes our limits so that America can remain safe and prosperous.

In Eastern Europe, the United States must make it clear to our wealthy European partners that they are primarily responsible for the security of their own continent. Russia’s failures in Ukraine have revealed that its conventional armed forces are not a threat to well-funded and well-trained European armies—even without significant American support. A Russian Army that cannot take Kharkiv certainly cannot take Warsaw, Berlin, or Paris.

Accordingly, the United States should encourage the strengthening and development of non-NATO security architectures in Europe, like the European Union’s Common Defence and Security Policy. To effectively facilitate this, the United States must avoid taking actions that encourage free-riding under the American security umbrella. This would include short-sighted policies like more permanent deployments of U.S. troops to Europe, or NATO expansion to countries such as Finland and Sweden.

In the Middle East, the United States should resist efforts by authoritarian petrostates such as Saudi Arabia to exploit the current energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine to extract more security commitments from the United States. Instead, the United States should draw down from this increasingly less important region—especially from the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Syria—in order to free up resources for other priorities.

Real U.S. interests are at stake in East Asia, and this region will require careful navigation of perilous waters. China is a rising competitor that poses challenges that U.S. policymakers must take seriously. To deal with this, the United States should continue to develop defensive systems and technologies that enable partners in the region to deter Chinese aggression. Future defense budgets should prioritize funding for the Air Force and Navy over other branches since these two services would be at the forefront of any potential conflict in the Pacific. Additionally, the U.S. intelligence community should confront China’s malign economic and military espionage activities more aggressively.

But U.S. leaders should avoid overinflating the threat posed by China. Indeed, China has its own domestic and international constraints that may hinder its rise. Accordingly, policymakers should deal with the challenges posed by China without resurrecting the Cold War or raising the likelihood of direct conflict.

The acknowledgment that the United States faces real limits on its power does not mean accepting American decline or forlorn resignation that our best days are behind us. To the contrary, prudent foreign policy tradeoffs will better husband our power and provide the means to attend to our domestic economic and fiscal challenges thus ensuring future American safety and prosperity.

However, those who continue to deny reality and advocate the same failed policies that led us to where we are today will only guarantee American decline—not greatness. In the interest of American security and the American people, we must demand better.

Dan Caldwell is the vice president of foreign policy for Stand Together. He is a former congressional staffer and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War.

Ok… so let’s see what The Duran has to say about this…

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NATO calls China “systemic challenge,” then asks China to enforce oil price cap

Listen. This is the reality.

So how ready is Europe and the USA ready to take on Asia?

NATO BASE EQUIPPED WITH U.S. NUKES RAIDED BY POLICE – METH LAB BUSTED

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Belgium Police officials conducted a raid of Kleine-Brogel Air base, a NATO Joint base where U.S. nuclear bombs are stored, and busted a drug lab making Crystal Methamphetamine.  It gets worse: At least two individual arrested had to be let go because of “Diplomatic Immunity.”

Kleine Brogel Air Base (ICAO: EBBL) is a Belgian Air Component military airfield located 0.8 nautical miles (1.5 km; 0.92 mi) east of Kleine-Brogel, in the municipality Peer, Belgium. It is home to the Belgian 10th Tactical Wing, operating F-16 Fighting Falcons, which are capable, among other capabilities, of delivering B61 nuclear bombs.

The base has been subject to much political controversy, because of American nuclear weapons allegedly being stored in the facility by the United States Air Force (USAF), but never recognized officially by the Belgian government.

Under the NATO nuclear sharing arrangement, these nuclear bombs would require an actual dual key system, which would imply the simultaneous authorizations of Belgium and the United States, before any action is taken. Should that be the case, Kleine Brogel Air Base would be the only location in Belgium with nuclear weapons.

According to the press, Eastern European Member States of NATO resisted the withdrawal of the shared nuclear bombs in Europe, fearing that it would show a weakening of the American commitment to defend the European Union against Russian aggression.

None of the five NATO member states, whose air forces allegedly might share its premises, have ever provided an official confirmation of the bombs existence. However, former Italian President Francesco Cossiga declared that the Aeronautica Militare hosted or shared American nuclear bombs, just as other NATO member states do. In an interview he talked about French weapons. In the same way, on 10 June 2013, former Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers confirmed the existence of 22 shared nuclear bombs at Volkel Air Base.

Kleine Brogel Air Base is also the home of the United States Air Force’s 701st Munitions Support Squadron which allegedly is the unit in charge of looking after the shared nuclear bombs.

Belgium police raided the base just hours ago.  Several persons were taken under arrest, but there’s a massive twist; at least two persons arrested had to be let go because they have “Diplomatic immunity.”

The Source who provided this information to the Hal Turner Radio Show was quite explicit with this detail.  The source pointed out that had U.S. military been arrested, they would have remained under arrest and, if nothing else, would have been transferred to the custody of the US military and treated in accordance with the Status of Forces agreements that exist between countries.  But that is NOT “Diplomatic Immunity” which only applies to credentialed Diplomats and their staffers.

The source repeated this several times — those let go had “Diplomatic Immunity.”

It is not known yet if they were American diplomats / staff  or were from some other country . . . and right now a lid is being clamped down on information.

I expect more information soon.

The big takeaway for the time being is: What was a drug lab doing on a military base where US nuclear weapons are stored, and; who were the Diplomats invoilved?

HOMEMADE RUSSIAN STYLE SAUERKRAUT FROM START TO FINISH

Like my mother used to make.

Bill introduced in Russia To Give Emergency Powers to Putin; Puts Defense Industry in “State of War”

A Bill has been introduced in the Russia legislature which will give President Vladimir Putin emergency powers, will put the Russian Defense industry on 24/7 “state of war’ and lays the groundwork for a GENERAL MOBILIZATION conscription of the Russian people, for war.

The Bill makes reference to “military operations abroad” while also mentioning Ukraine, Luhansk and Donetsk.

Clearly, the intent of the Bill is to give President Putin legal authority to expand Russian military operations to outside of Ukraine, likely in response to hostile acts by Lithuania’s blockading the Russian exclave state of Kaliningrad, and now Norway’s blockage of food and supplies to Russian miners on the Svalbard Archipelago.

Lithuania announced yesterday they will be implementing a total blockade of Kaliningrad from July 10.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said the country would continue to implement the terms of the EU’s fourth package of sanctions against Russia and stop the transit of other goods through the Kaliningrad region from July 10, when the restrictions are due to take effect.

Knowing this would cause war-type trouble a Lithuanian Member of Parliament was brazen enough to warn Moscow – twice – not to abrogate the Treaty recognizing the independence of Lithuania in 1991!  The member of the Seimas (Parliament) of Lithuania, Matas Maldeikis, asked Moscow to return to Vilnius “the ancestral lands of Smolensk”.

In fact, he asked for it twice in June!

He said “If Russia revokes its recognition of Lithuania’s independence in 1991, Lithuania will revoke the Polyanovka Treaty of 1634 and demand that Russia return all occupied territories to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Smolensk is Lithuania!’

The situation with external countries now making land claims against Russia while at the same time blockading the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, has caused Russia lawmakers and the Russian leadership to see this as an organized Nato project, both in the Baltic and in the case of Norway, and is prepared to respond militarily if Lithuania doesn’t remove the exclusions against Kaliningrad and Norway doesn’t remove the blockade of food against Svalbard.

According to information, the Russian government has submitted a draft law in order for the executive branch, that is, the president of Russia and the Russian government, to receive special powers.

The bill was submitted to the State Duma.

Amendments to the Defense Law are proposed. The Russian government supplements the law with the article on “Ensuring the conduct of anti-terrorist and other operations by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, other troops, military formations and bodies outside the territory of the Russian Federation “.

The explanatory note states that this includes, among other things, a “special military operation in the territories of Lugansk, Donetsk and Ukraine”.

“Georgia Guide Stones” Blown-up

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The famous “Georgia Guidestones” which promoted a human population under 500 million worldwide (The world’s population is 7 billion; or 14 times more than that) so as to sustain the earth, were blown up around 4:00 this morning.

Nearby residents say they heard a loud explosion but didn’t know what it was.  At sunrise, the guide stones were found reduced to a pile of rubble.

“Known as America’s Stonehenge, this 19-foot-high monument displays a 10-part message espousing the conservation of mankind and future generations in 12 languages,” according to a description on the state of Georgia’s tourism website.

Erected in 1980 in Elbert County, Georgia, in the United States. A set of ten guidelines is inscribed on the structure in eight modern languages and a shorter message is inscribed at the top of the structure in four ancient language scripts.

The monument stands at an approximate elevation of 750 feet (230 m) above sea level, about 90 miles (140 km) east of Atlanta, 45 miles (72 km) from Athens, Georgia and 9 miles (14 km) north of the center of the city of Elberton.

One slab stands in the center, with four arranged around it. A capstone lies on top of the five slabs, which are astronomically aligned. An additional stone tablet, which is set in the ground a short distance to the west of the structure, provides some notes on the history and purpose of the guidestones. The structure is sometimes referred to as an “American Stonehenge”.

The monument is 19 feet 3 inches (5.87 m) tall, made from six granite slabs weighing 237,746 pounds (107,840 kg) in all.The anonymity of the guidestones’ authors and their apparent advocacy of population control, eugenics, and internationalism have made them an object of controversy and . . . conspiracy theories.

 

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

Well, it appears that someone decided to make a statement about the current ongoing nonsense plaguing our country and our world.  When it comes to population control, global Communism (You will own nothing and be happy) and Internationalism, perhaps the message sent today was a bold “No thanks.”

The so-called “elite” seem to think THEY know what’s best for the rest of us, and they attacked the general public with the bio-weapon “COVID-19” to start killing us off in pursuit of their grand plans.

Then they came at us with their phony mRNA “vaccines” which are killing-off millions more of us around the world.  They thought they got away with it.

Then they came at us with “supply-chain disruption” which they initially blamed on COVID.  Now that COVID is over, and the supply chain issues are getting worse, it is becoming clear to even the village idiots that this is all being done deliberately.  Surreptitiously.

Trouble is, no one asked The People whether any of __us__ wanted these grand plans. No one asked us if we wanted to “own nothing and be happy.” The “Elite” just went and started DOING what THEY wanted with the rest of us.  THEY started adversely affecting OUR lives. They didn’t ask. They didn’t care what we thought or what we want; they just implemented THEIR plans and the rest of us be damned.

Sorry Mr. & Mrs. “Elite” but, that dog don ‘t hunt.

Last night, someone apparently decided to send them a message that their plans are over.   Someone blew up the Georgia Guidestones.

Do you think the “Elite” will take the hint, or will their arrogance over-ride reason, and cause them to push even harder?

My bet: Their ego and arrogance will come unglued and they’ll go balls-to-the-wall now.

You see, with the destruction of the Georgia Guidestones, THEY know, that WE know.  All the nonsense going on with COVID, the vax, the supply chain troubles . . . are all deliberate.  They are all part of the plan to destroy our way of life so THEY can . . . what phrase are they all using . . . . Oh, yes . . . . “Build Back Better.”

Sorry Mr. & Mrs. “Elite” we do not consent.

With today’s explosion, they NOW know that “The People” are not only ABLE to fight them off, but The People have now become WILLING to fight them off; kinetically.  By force.

I have a feeling things are going to get very ugly.  I have a feeling these “Elites” are not gonna stop until they ARE stopped.

In my opinion, if they’re smart, they will now realize that people are WILLING to blow-up their symbols, their plans, and maybe even them!  I certainly don’t advocate that and I absolutely have no plans whatsoever to engage in any such behavior personally.  Neither should anyone else.

But since the Elite have already taken to actually killing us with COVID and their phony “vax” they drew first blood.

If the explosions continue, or get personal for the “Elite,” it seems to me they will have brought it upon themselves.

BRICS

A World War III Win is a Bridge Too Far for 21st Century Globalist America

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Is USA able to fight and Win a World War 3?  VT has Questions!

You have to wonder why the U.S. and NATO keep pouring billions upon billions of dollars into a Ukrainian/Russo war that could very well be won by the Russian military regardless. This is despite what you hear from the mainstream media about the Ukraine military successfully advancing on the Russians.

They’re not.

With funding and support also coming from pro-Globalist billionaires like George Soros and an America that recently witnessed a humiliating military defeat in Afghanistan despite superior U.S. union-made products and state-of-the-art weaponry (much of which was left in the hands of the enemy), the U.S. in conjunction with NATO seem all too willing to prolong a war which, if financed and weaponized for too long, just might bring us to the brink of the nuclear annihilation.

That’s a war no one wins.

According to a new article by author John Carter, he sees no scenario in which a Globalist American Empire can possibly win World War III. Here are some of his reasons.

Point [1] The USA is a Global Hyperpower

Most conventionally minded Americans believe that the U.S. could win a new world war is because of the U.S.’s “global hyperpower.”

Its military budget actually dwarfs the rest of the world’s militaries combined. The U.S. currently has in play a dozen carrier groups, nuclear-powered submarines that can make around-the-world dives twice over without surfacing, subs called “Boomers” equipped with nukes that in theory can wipe out coastlines in mere moments.

The U.S. also maintains bases just about everywhere along with the ability to defend them. Satellites in space can surveil something as small as your hand, while predator drone fleets can rain down destruction anywhere in the world from a desktop in downtown Atlanta, Georgia.

This is, of course, a very impressive show of military might. Says Carter, “no one out there wants to pick a fight with that.” He goes on to say that no one in their right mind doubts that a “direct confrontation between great powers” would inevitably result in horrible and terrific devastation.

Point [2] Radioactive Bubble

With that in mind, Carter contends that whichever powers are able to emerge victoriously from a “radioactive bubble,” it will likely not be the U.S. or more specifically, Washington, DC.

Not going to be the United States.

One of the main problems begins with the GAE (Government, Administration, and Elections) war machine. The situation today is similar to that of World War II.

At the beginning of the war in 1939, Germany’s military was bigger, better trained, and more technologically sophisticated than its competitors. They had adapted “war-fighting doctrines” which would account for every advance in military high tech that had occurred after World War I.

But Germany’s problem came in the form of natural resources of which they had little. On the other hand, the U.S. which enjoyed many resources were able to put their vast made-in-the-U.S. industrial complex to work and was able to manufacture Sherman tanks inside retrofitted Model-T factories, by the dozens.

Says Carter, the U.S. was able to bury the Reich with a “sheer mass of stuff.”

Point [3] Today’s American Industry

Over the course of the past several decades, America’s industrial base has become a rusted-out relic of what it once was.

Today, the U.S. relies almost completely on imported goods, from microchips to antibiotics. This remains true when it comes to critical wartime necessities for both the maintenance and replenishment of munitions for a supply chain that would be crushed by global hostilities.

A shortage of essential components would be a crippling blow to the U.S. and our adversaries know that.

The reliance on an over-extended supply chain might not seem all that important in the short run, but when you consider that the U.S. is supplied with much of its electronics from China while semiconductors come from Taiwan, you begin to see the bleak picture. And in a time of global conflict, China would likely snatch Taiwan up rather quickly.

Point [4] U.S. Poisoning

Rather than rely on natural remedies for the problems that ail them like good food and exercise, Carter claims that Americans have been “extensively poisoned with toxic foodstuffs.”

Approximately one-tenth of the U.S. population is reliant on psychiatric meds, while at the same time, “potent recreational drugs” such as methamphetamine, fentanyl (which comes largely from China), and legalized pot, now run rampant.

Plus, the average American is overweight.

As well as a substantive percentage are clinically depressed.

Point [5] The U.S. Global Strategic Situation

Presently, the U.S.’s “global strategic situation” is standing in the abyss of a “great power war.”

Like Eisenhower warned decades ago, the GAE will eventually have no friends that will want to come to its aid in a global conflict. After all, they are in it for the money.

The U.S. population, according to Cater, is somewhat “sick” in body and mind and has been “deliberately sickened” to make the population more controllable.

What’s more, there is almost no social capital or cohesion to tap into, while the economy continues to falter in every way.

Point [6] American “Leadership”

While the political divide hasn’t been this wide since the Civil War, the political leadership is largely corrupt and publicly despised.

The “for-profit” mainstream media is not trusted.

Military training standards have suffered greatly due to the injection of an “ideological madness” that seems to have destroyed everything in its path as Western society as a whole continues to decay.

Summary

Despite owning a large military-industrial complex, the Globalist friendly U.S. is in no position to fight World War III, much less be in it to win it.

Qatar to Demand EU Sign Long-Term LNG Deals If It Wants More Gas

I guess that it doesn’t trust the Euro-weenie. -MM

I just came across in the Chinese media: “Qatar demands [1] a 20 years contract and [2]  “must pay first” as the conditions for them to invest in an increased production to supply EU gas.
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Ah. By taking Russian reserve money in EU banks and confiscating Russian private property at will, they have effectively damaged world trust towards Western nations.
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So I do a search in English and found this, unfortunately pay wall:
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  • Bloomberg pay wall. From HERE. 
  • Flying carpet link. Flies you over the paywall. HERE

Largest Maine Coon

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Guinness World Records undated handout photo of Ludo the Maine Coon from Wakefield in South Yorkshire with owner Kelsey as they appear in this year’s Guinness World Records. Issue date: Thursday September 8, 2016. (Photo by Paul Michael Hughes/Guinness World Records/PA Wire)

Lukashenko Says Ukraine Fired Missiles At Belarus

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Saturday said his army had shot down missiles fired into their territory from Ukraine and vowed to respond “instantly” to any enemy strike.

“We are being provoked,” Lukashenko was quoted as saying by state news agency Belta. “I must tell you that around three days ago, maybe more, they also tried to strike military targets in Belarus from Ukraine.

“Thank God, our Pantsir anti-air systems intercepted all the missiles fired by the Ukrainian forces.”

Ukraine last week said missiles fired from Belarus had struck a border region inside its territory.

Lukashenko on Saturday denied his country was seeking to intervene in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but issued a warning aimed at Kiev and its Western allies.

“As I said more than a year ago, we do not intend to fight in Ukraine,” he said

“We will only fight in one case. If you… enter our land, if you kill our people, then we will respond,” he added, warning that Belarus would reply “instantly” to an enemy strike on its soil.

Long-term Kremlin ally Belarus has supported Russia’s military operation in Ukraine since February 24 by acting as a rear base for Moscow’s forces.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced last week that Moscow would deliver Iskander-M missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons to Belarus “in the coming months”.

“Less than a month ago, I ordered our armed forces to put in our sights the decision centers in Western capitals,” Lukashenko said on Saturday, citing the missiles promised by Putin and the Belarusian rocket-launcher Polonez.

Interesting Quote

I wonder if the fellows at Fort Detrick who designed and disseminated the SARS-CoV-2 bioweapon, thinking that China was an easy target, knew that it would ultimately herald the fall of the collective West? The brilliance of American arrogance shines so bright it is blinding. Well, no need to fret about that, for historical reflection is for losers; the United States' newly concocted recipe, an indomitable mixture of seething anger, rising unemployment, mass gun availability, and prevalent mental illness, all served on itself, will definitely turn out well.

Posted by: Bill | Jul 3 2022 15:36 utc | 9

100 Year Old Veteran U.S. Marine Breaks Down Crying “this isn’t the country we fought for”

Video below says it all . . .

Maja Säfström’s Illustrations Are Witty And Relatable

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Illustrator and author Maja Säfström is known for her playful style of illustration based on her witty observations of the world around her. Based in Stockholm, she works full-time as an illustrator and runs her own shop in central Stockholm.

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Having earned a tremendous international following on social media, as well as widespread critical acclaim and multiple awards, it’s surprising to learn that Säfström’s background actually lies in architecture. “I have been drawing for as long as I can remember,” she shared in an interview with Lake. “I drew a lot when I was a kid. I had a few years in high school where I thought I was really bad. Then I started studying architecture at university and found myself drawing the scenes around the buildings with MUCH more enthusiasm than the actual houses. Well, one thing led to another!”

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Indeed one thing led to another. “I used to work as an architect and illustrating was something I did in my time off work,” she says. “Now that it is my full-time job, I realize, it is much less meditative. Because now the drawings are often commissioned, which is a bit different from just drawing whatever you feel like. It is the best job in the world though. Being an illustrator! My new hobby is taking care of my plants at home.”

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Each of her illustrated pieces is made by first drawing a thin outline with a pencil, after which the final drawing is made with a fineliner. Her comic-like illustrations often include speech bubbles. “I think the speech bubbles are a very important part of my work,” says Säfström. “I love combining text with drawings. I often experience something in life and make a drawing of that.”

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Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster

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If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these U.S. foreign policy debacles, writes Jeffrey D. Sachs.
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The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.  The Biden administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the U.S. wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the U.S. and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these U.S. foreign policy debacles.

The neocon movement emerged in the 1970s around a group of public intellectuals, several of whom were influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classicist Donald Kagan. Neocon leaders included Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), Frederick Kagan (son of Donald), Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert), Elliott Cohen, Elliott Abrams and Kimberley Allen Kagan (wife of Frederick).

The main message of the neocons is that the U.S. must predominate in military power in every region of the world and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge U.S. global or regional dominance, most important Russia and China.  For this purpose, U.S. military force should be pre-positioned in hundreds of military bases around the world and the U.S. should be prepared to lead wars of choice as necessary. The United Nations is to be used by the U.S. only when useful for U.S. purposes.

Wolfowitz Spelled It Out 

This approach was spelled out first by Paul Wolfowitz in his draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) written for the Department of Defense in 2002. The draft called for extending the U.S.-led security network to Central and Eastern Europe despite the explicit promise by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1990 that German unification would not be followed by NATO’s eastward enlargement.

[Related: The New York Times’ Shift on Victory in Ukraine]

Wolfowitz also made the case for American wars of choice, defending America’s right to act independently, even alone, in response to crises of concern to the U.S.  According to General Wesley Clark, Wolfowitz already made clear to Clark in May 1991 that the U.S. would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria and other former Soviet allies.

The neocons championed NATO enlargement to Ukraine even before that became official U.S. policy under President George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008. They viewed Ukraine’s NATO membership as key to U.S. regional and global dominance. Robert Kagan spelled out the neocon case for NATO enlargement in April 2006:

“[T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the ‘color revolutions’ of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world.  Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union — in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?”

Kagan acknowledged the dire implication of NATO enlargement. He quotes one expert as saying, “the Kremlin is getting ready for the ‘battle for Ukraine’ in all seriousness.”

The neocons sought this battle. After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the U.S. and Russia should have sought a neutral Ukraine, as a prudent buffer and safety valve.  Instead, the neocons wanted U.S. “hegemony” while the Russians took up the battle partly in defense and partly out of their own imperial pretensions as well.  Shades of the Crimean War (1853-6), when Britain and France sought to weaken Russia in the Black Sea following Russian pressures on the Ottoman empire.

Kagan penned the article as a private citizen while his wife Victoria Nuland was the U.S. ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush, Jr.

Nuland has been the neocon operative par excellence.  In addition to serving as Bush’s ambassador to NATO, Nuland was President Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs during 2013-17, when she participated in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and now serves as Biden’s undersecretary of state guiding U.S. policy vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine.

The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the U.S. military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world.  It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence.

Since the 1950s, the U.S. has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated. Yet in the “battle for Ukraine,” the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by U.S. financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a neocon think-tank led by Kimberley Allen Kagan (and backed by a who’s who of defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Raytheon), continues to promise a Ukrainian victory.

Regarding Russia’s advances, the ISW offered a typical comment:

“[R]egardless of which side holds the city [of Sievierodonetsk], the Russian offensive at the operational and strategic levels will probably have culminated, giving Ukraine the chance to restart its operational-level counteroffensives to push Russian forces back.” 

The facts on the ground, however, suggest otherwise. The West’s economic sanctions have had little adverse impact on Russia, while their “boomerang” effect on the rest of the world has been large.

Moreover, the U.S. capacity to resupply Ukraine with ammunition and weaponry is seriously hamstrung by America’s limited production capacity and broken supply chains. Russia’s industrial capacity of course dwarfs that of Ukraine’s.  Russia’s GDP was roughly 10X that of Ukraine before the war and Ukraine has now lost much of its industrial capacity in the war.

The most likely outcome of the current fighting is that Russia will conquer a large swath of Ukraine, perhaps leaving Ukraine landlocked or nearly so. Frustration will rise in Europe and the U.S. with the military losses and the stagflationary consequences of war and sanctions.

The knock-on effects could be devastating, if a right-wing demagogue in the U.S. rises to power (or in the case of Trump, returns to power) promising to restore America’s faded military glory through dangerous escalation.

Instead of risking this disaster, the real solution is to end the neocon fantasies of the past 30 years and for Ukraine and Russia to return to the negotiating table, with NATO committing to end its commitment to the eastward enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia in return for a viable peace that respects and protects Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development. He has been adviser to three United Nations secretaries-general and currently serves as an SDG advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017) and The Age of Sustainable Development, (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

This article is from  Common Dreams.

Lama High Jump record

Why?

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Caspa – Highest Jump By A Llama Guinness World Records 2016. Location: Porthmadog, Wales. Photo by Paul Michael Hughes/Guinness World Records)

Why English will lost its influence? Re: Imperial English language

When I was sent to set up a business in Eastern Europe based in Hungary in 1991, I notice that, there are more people who can speak Russian and German than English in that part of Europe. The Hungarian trade office in Singapore at the time also told me Russian and German language are more widely spoken in most part of the Eastern Europe than English.

The power and influence of a language very much dependence on the commercial and political power of a nation.

The anglo-Saxon crusaders have done too many evil things across the world, once they are down, the memory of what they did will re-emerged across the world, and many world leaders pressured and bullied by them will begin to speak and act openly against them. hated across the world will begin to reduce the influence of their language. Schools across the world will slowly replace English with another more important commercial language.

About a decade ago, an Australian friend on the Gold Coast went to Shanghai, thinking to travel the city on his own, he expressed his disappointment to me that most people he met on the streets in Shanghai cannot speak English. I than told him he should not expect the world to know his language, and begin to tell him a story:

In 1992, I took a train from Istanbul back to Hungary with a few Chinese friends, when the train briefly stop at Bulgaria capital, a Bulgarian speaking staff came to our session using his language asking us to move to the other train, we cannot understand what he said, so, after anxiously using his language trying to explain again and again, he later simply move on, there are 2 young American ladies in our session, spoke to each other and laughed: “he is so stupid, he cannot even speak English “.

I went out my train session asking other passengers leaving the train what’s going on, one told me I have to get off this train now to another train heading to Budapest. So, I use Chinese language to tell my friends to get off the train immediately. I would have told the Americans if they were not such arrogant fools.

The minute we got off the train, the train moved on to somewhere else. I decided to let the Americans learn a real life lesson that they should learn people language when they are in other countries.

Language is something that one need to regularly used to be able to speak fluently, once the Anglo Saxon empires gone, their countries disintegrated, the language will lost its commercial values. The number of people using the language will reduce.

If you went to Japan, you will notice that most Japanese despite learning English as second language in school, cannot speak English. That is because, English is not widely used among the average Japanese. Unless your job requires you to get in touch with foreigners, whatever other language you learn in school as second language, you will forget soon after you left school.

Ask those western countries students who learn Japanese in school, they will end up only able to say Ali Gato and nothing else.

I self learning Russian for a year before going to Moscow in 2002 to source for new suppliers for my Russian arts and crafts wholesales business in Australia. At that time, I at least know how to make bargain in Russian language. However, after my import business destroyed by the quarantine department, I moved on to restart another business, and now, I have forgotten even how to read the Russian alphabet despite still having a Russian English dictionary, and a Russian English electronic translator at home.

I used to growth up speaking fluently 2 Chinese dialects in Singapore (teo chew 潮州话and Hokkien 福建话), but after working in Hungary for 3 years, and living on the Gold Coast for 27 years, I can no longer speak the 2 languages beside using some swearing words to scold people. However, I learned Cantonese in Western Australia in my finally year after moving in an accommodation living with 8 Hong Kong students and later married one of them. I later work in Hong Kong briefly.

I think China has remove English as a Compulsory subject in school recently. It has become a selective subject just like any other language for higher education. The policy rationale is that, most students won’t need to use the language in real life, and most will end up wasting their life learning a language they will not be using in real life. China gov want them to use their limited time to learn something more useful such as a new skill, more in-depth learning of Chinese culture, etc.

I am sure, English will decline once the Anglo Saxon crusader empire lost its economic power. The France never like the English, and there is a widely known speculation that if you talk to a France in English in French, you will get no where. So, you rather talk to them in any other language, and they will than try to speak to you in English.

Cheers

Chua

LUHANSK LIBERATED! Russia Routes last of Ukraine Army

LEADER DECLARES THE FULL LIBERATION OF LUHANSK PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC – JULY 3, 2022.

“Dear compatriots! Citizens of the Luhansk People’s Republic! Today, July 3, is a great day, which will forever enter the red date in the calendar of our Fatherland. Today is the day we have accomplished what we have been striving to for eight long years. Today our troops, with the support of the Russian armed forces, liberated the town of Lysychansk, thus completing the liberation of the Republic within its historic borders.

The Ukrainian neo-Nazis, who came to our land to kill and plunder, have been defeated. They used sneaky tactics, using civilians as human shields. Therefore, our military had to carefully recapture literally every house, every street, every settlement. And now, finally, such big cities of Luhansk region as Rubizhne and Severodonetsk were also taken, and today Lisichansk was completely liberated!

I sincerely congratulate us all on this new Great Victory Day! This holiday, just like in the distant 1945, also with tears in my eyes – the battles were hard and bloody. And Victory is ours again, it will always be so!

How To Prepare A Big Batch Of Breakfast Sandwiches (English Muffins, Sausages, Eggs & Cheese Slices)

A good video that is easy to use. Check it out.

Bearded woman

Harnaam Kaur – Youngest Female With A Full Beard Guinness World Records 2016. Location: The Ottoman Crew, London. (Photo by Paul Michael Hughes/Guinness World Records)

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After the Cavalry Didn’t Charge.

What are we going to do when Ukraine is over?

As I pointed out last week, the war in Ukraine is exactly the kind of crisis that NATO was originally created to deal with, yet militarily, the alliance did effectively nothing. But let’s suppose the rhetoric about increasing defence budgets and expanding the militaries of western states was seriously pursued as a policy. How easy would it be? Not very. In fact, there’s a good argument that it’s scarcely feasible at all. Here’s why.

For the forty years of the Cold War, NATO members retained large, powerful conventional forces with an elaborate command and control system, in case there was a major war with the Soviet Union and its allies. Although a war like that was never regarded as likely, it was still thought possible, not least because the longer the Cold War lasted, the more deeply ingrained became the mutual suspicion  of the two blocs. Exercise scenarios in those days often began with a political crisis over a third country: Yugoslavia was a favourite.

Well, that scenario has now more or less come to pass. A political crisis in Eastern Europe has turned nasty, and the Russians have invaded a country supported by the West. And the reaction? NATO wants you to know that it is really, really cross, and it’s sending some equipment and imposing some sanctions as an indication of just how cross it is. Which is odd behaviour for a military alliance specifically founded to counter Russia, but quite explicable in term of the changes in the underlying balance of forces that I discussed last week.

But let’s go beyond that. Let’s assume a serious effort by western states to re-build their military capability to something like the level of the Cold War. What would that entail? Would it be even possible?

The first question is just one of the concept. In the Cold War, the two sides both believed  that any war between them would be the Big One, an existential struggle for survival which would be fought out to the end. NATO hoped, but didn’t necessarily expect, that the conflict could be contained to the conventional level: it’s less clear that the Warsaw Pact did. This was why the use of nuclear weapons was expected, and planned for by both sides. The assumption of the Big One dictated strategies and force structures, and produced militaries on a high state of readiness for a short, brutal war of unprecedented violence, at the end of which the combatants would be largely disarmed and their economies in ruins. By contrast, it’s not obvious what any serious conflict between Russia and the West today would actually be about, in the absence of  the kind of apocalyptic stakes that existed during the Cold War. What are the differences between Russia and the West that might justify blowing up the world? NATO’s exclusively non-militarily reaction to Ukraine is not just a sign of relative weakness, it’s more importantly a recognition that vital interests aren’t involved. So what would vital interests be, then? I don’t think anyone knows.

For that reason, it’s probably best to leave nuclear weapons out of the argument. Their main utility is political, after all, and a threat to use them would only ever be taken seriously if the very survival of a nuclear power were at stake. It’s honestly hard to imagine how we could arrive there, no matter how stupid you may think your least-favourite politicians of the moment are. So, let’s start from the hypothesis of a conventional war between Russia and some or all western nations. Where would that be, exactly?

If you look at a map it’s not obvious. Taking the most likely outcome of the current war—the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine as independent republics with close ties to Russia—then Russian forces would only be on the borders of the Baltic states and Norway, as now. If the Finns and Swedes were to join NATO formally (and the Swedes have been informal members for generations) then there would be an expanded northern zone of contact between the Russians and some NATO states. But assuming that neither Russia nor NATO set out to provoke another crisis, then there is no obvious reason why there should be conflict in that area. If there were a general crisis between Russia and the West leading to war, then there would be little point in attacking only in those areas. The Russians would want to ensure their unrestricted use of the Murmansk naval base, especially to get their nuclear missile submarines to sea, but that would be a subsidiary part of any general offensive.

So if you were a political leader, and your military came to ask what threat they should actually plan, train and exercise against, then the only one that makes any sense would be a main advance through Belarus towards Poland, with a southward thrust towards Ukraine and Romania/Bulgaria. Now the first question is whether the Russians would actually be capable of doing that. Let’s stipulate that for some reason they just have to be able to take Warsaw as a minimum objective, while neutralising Ukraine and Romania, and let’s start with distance.

Well, assuming you concentrate your forces around Minsk, the distance to Warsaw is then about 600 km, comparable to the sort of distances covered by the Allied armies from the Normandy beach-heads in June 1944 to the surrender of Germany a year later. It’s about as far as the Red Army advanced in one of its final offensives in January-February 1945, where the Russians could field two million men against an exhausted and massively inferior German Army. And that only gets you as far as Warsaw. By then, you’ve already got lines of communication and supply extending hundreds of kilometres through hostile territory, and a presumably unhappy Ukraine to worry about, as well as the threat of NATO forces in Slovakia and Hungary to the South, and the Baltic States to the North.

Oh yes, manpower. The total strength of the Russian military is about one million, including all the branches, with about two million reservists. That sounds a lot, but of course only a fraction of those are combat troops who can be used in a modern high-technology ground war. The Russians seem to be employing about a 100,000 troops in current operations in the Ukraine, and that’s probably close to the maximum effort they can make in any one operation outside the country, particularly as about two-thirds of their total strength is conscripts. By contrast, the old group of Soviet forces in the GDR alone had a strength of some 350,000 men. Overrunning Europe would be problematic, therefore.

And where would the battles take place, and how? In the Cold War, the two forces were actually facing each other in essentially in the positions they occupied in 1945. The British, French and American forces, like the Soviets, were repurposed versions of the occupying armies at the end of WW2. Over several decades, a huge infrastructure of barracks, training areas and airfields was added to what remained of the historical infrastructure in Germany. The only comparable area today is Poland. So are we going to deploy our shiny new armies along the Polish-Belarusian border? Has anybody asked the Poles what they think about turning their country into an armed camp, as Germany used to be? Who’s going to pay for all that?

But let’s say that some, at least, of the wilder promises of military expansion and rearmament are maintained, rather than being quietly forgotten. Lots more money is voted, and some kind of future NATO concept is finally agreed. That’s the easy bit, though. The first problem is time, and history may help a bit here. You don’t build up and equip armed forces overnight. So the British, and French governments all started rearming after 1934. Even at 1930s levels of technology,  though, neither was fully ready by 1939. Radar, like the Spitfires and Hurricanes, only just arrived in time for the Battle of Britain. At least the British had some government-owned arms factories: in France, successive governments found that the private sector simply wasn’t that interested in producing complex military systems where there was no guarantee of long term orders. These days, of course, it’s a lot worse. The western armaments industry is small, heavily concentrated and internationalised. It makes small numbers —often just a handful each month—of highly sophisticated and complex platforms. So the first thing you would need to do is set up a lot more factories, as the British did in the 1930s. For that, you need many more skilled engineers and a highly qualified workforce, and the time and materials to build the factories. You need raw materials and components to make the weapons and equipment, many of which come from far away, quite a few from China. And you’ll be competing with everyone else for the same raw materials and components.

You’ll need more personnel, of course. For a start, there’s an obvious limit to the number of people in any country who can be high-tech military specialists: not just fast jet pilots, but also officers or at least senior NCOs in a modern high-technology Army or Air Force. For most of those  who can, it won’t be an attractive career.  Few military personnel just carry a rifle around these days, and the militaries of most countries struggle to retain the technical specialists they do have, in the face of better salaries and conditions of work elsewhere. Modern militaries today are very small by the standards of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Take the Bundeswehr, for example. At the height of the Cold War, it had half a million active personnel, and millions of reservists. It now has less than a third of the active strength it had then , and only handfuls of reservists. Its once mighty Army has shrunk to 60,000 personnel, and it is also badly weakened by many years of underfunding. But it still has trouble attracting enough technical specialists, even at its present size.

This problem is insoluble without the return of military service. It doesn’t need to be universal: it can be highly selective, as in Russia, while maintaining an expanded permanent professional cadre. But is that even remotely politically feasible in most countries? By the end of the Cold War, military service had often dropped to token levels (typically six months)  but it was still generally accepted politically: after all, Soviet forces were not that far away. But a selective military service scheme, where often the better educated and more technically skilled receive the call, isn’t going to be popular, especially if it means Belgian conscripts spending six months in a barracks on the Polish/Belorussian frontier. And if you double or triple the size of the military, you need to double or triple the number of officers and senior NCOs, since someone has to lead, train and administer them. You can’t just magically find people with perhaps two years’ initial training and 10-15 years of experience. And of course you need a large auxiliary workforce of administrators, educators, cooks, domestic staff, security guards, medical personnel, and half a hundred other specialities.

Where are you going to train them? For a hundred years until the end of the Cold War, western nations set up a huge infrastructure to house, feed and train large numbers of conscripts every year. Almost all of that has been sold off: there are often luxury flats today where the flagpoles once stood. You couldn’t even think of returning to the sort of militaries the West had a generation ago without massive programmes of land purchase (or seizure) and new building construction.  And that’s only individual basic training. You then need to set up new establishments, with new instructors and support staff, for the technical and specialist training. After which comes collective training, for which you need ranges and exercise areas. And of course there will be a lot more flying training, which is notoriously noisy and disruptive. There are some things you can’t do by Zoom.

But let’s assume you’ve done this. Over ten difficult years,  you have doubled or tripled the size of your forces at huge expense and with enormous disruption, reintroduced selective national service, and fielded your shiny new military. What do you do with it? Where do you put it? In the Cold War, there were permanent British, Dutch, German, Belgian and US forces stationed in Germany itself, with French forces ready to move in. So are we going to do the same thing in Poland? Will Italian and Croatian forces be stationed in Romania? If not, are the Dutch going to set up and maintain a transport and logistic infrastructure enabling them to deploy a distance of perhaps 1500km to the Polish border?

I could go on. But the answer to all these question is self-evidently “no.” There will be token measures, ritual chest-beating, some rebuilding of capability and quite a lot of extra money, often wasted. But for severely practical reasons, anything resembling the size and type of the NATO deployments in the Cold War simply isn’t going to happen. What, then?

Well, we wind up with a very curious situation. The Russians will secure their frontiers and develop a protective glacis against western incursions. But the nearest Russian soldier will still be perhaps 6-700 kilometres away from the nearest NATO frontier. And the Russians will have neither the capability not the intention to go much further west, without being provoked by some catastrophic political crisis which for the moment we can’t even imagine.

So at first sight, things should settle down, and in the end not change very much. The West glowering at Russia, Russia glowering at the West, with perhaps a few Russian troops in Belarus and a few NATO troops in Poland. Can we go back to where we were before? Not so fast. As I explained in the previous essay, the underlying economic and military situation has been changing for a while. It just hasn’t been consciously registered by western leaders.  Europe will continue to be dependent on Russia for natural gas and a whole range of other raw materials, while Russia doesn’t really depend on the West for much except luxuries. Ambitious plans to replace Russian natural gas may succeed over a long enough time and with enough investment, but no amount of investment can mine scare metals that were not in the ground in the first place. (The West can’t supply its own needs for titanium, for example: Russia can.) There will be repercussions, though for the moment it’s not clear how things will turn out.

But on the military side, the position will be starker. Russia will be able to use force to keep any foreign military presence away from its borders. It can stop any western attempt to expand into Belarus, and it can keep Ukraine disarmed, by force if necessary. And there will be nothing the West can do about it. (As I’ve explained, nuclear weapons are simply not relevant here.) As a result, Europe will have to get used to living with a Russia which, whilst not a super-power,  is militarily superior to any reasonable combination of European states, assuming they could operate together, and which can defeat any plausible US force despatched to Europe.

One reason for this is precisely the lack of a common frontier. The only way that Europe and Russia can directly threaten or strike each other is by air, and there, Russia has a massive advantage. Now, this is not in manned aircraft. Individually, NATO air-superiority aircraft and pilots are almost certainly superior to their Russian equivalents. But that’s soccer, and the Russians are playing rugby. Their air defence system is effectively impenetrable by Western aircraft without horrific casualties, which would risk ultimately disarming the nations sending the aircraft. If, say, NATO sent a hundred strike aircraft against Russia in one mission, and the Russians used a thousand missiles to destroy them, their infrastructure and support, on the ground or in the air, Russia could replace those missiles in months, whereas NATO would take perhaps five years to regenerate the same capability with trained pilots and support personnel. And with conventional bomb-loads, how much damage could the aircraft and missiles actually reaching the target manage to do? The Russians have spent decades building on the impressive old Soviet Air Defence system, to produce a capability to stop the vast majority of attacks on their territory by aircraft and missiles, and with NATO’s current inventory, the alliance is simply not able to threaten enough damage. The Russians, on the other hand, have invested a great deal of money in high-precision, long-range conventional missiles, which are difficult or even impossible to stop, in spite of laborious efforts by NATO over the last twenty years to develop anti-missile defence. These are not super-weapons, and there may not be many of them, but they change the strategic landscape entirely. The West can’t hurt Russia very much, but Russia can hurt the West a lot more.

As I’ve suggested before, the political and media classes are often slow to appreciate the consequences of changes in the underlying economic and strategic realities, and tend to coast along like bicycles going downhill. This new situation will take some getting used to, but may, in the end, turn out to be stabilising. Neither Russia nor the West has any real reason to attack the other. Neither can launch a major ground attack against the others’ vital interests, and neither has any reason to resort to nuclear weapons. All we have to hope for is a minimum amount of common sense and rationality: you know, the kind of thing that hasn’t been much in evidence recently.

Finland “Seizes” Almost 1000 Russian Rail Cars

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Finland has seized nearly a thousand Russian freight cars as a result of EU sanctions.  On its face, this appears to be outright THEFT.

After the EU sanctioned Russian coal in April, Finland’s state-owned rail operator VR moved to reduce railway traffic from Russia. According to a June 6 letter from Russian Railways to the Ministry of Transport, 865 Russian freight cars have been seized by Finnish bailiffs.

VR officials confirmed that about 800 sanctioned Russian freight cars were in Finland at the moment and that the company wishes to return any that have not been seized. VR’s head of logistics said there were around 5,000 Russian cars when it decided to reduce traffic, and that bailiff authorities ordered some to be seized.

The seized railway cars belong to Russian companies either targeted by EU sanctions or dealing with indirect consequences of sanctions. Russian companies impacted by the freight car seizure have denounced the move as “unlawful.”

Finnish bailiff authorities say that Finland had frozen the assets of dozens of Russian and Belarusian individuals and legal entities, including transportation firms. In total, the frozen assets are worth about $84 million.

This week at a conference in Switzerland, Ukrainian officials said they wanted seized Russian assets and Russia’s frozen foreign currency reserves to be used to pay for Ukraine’s future reconstruction. But Western officials have yet to agree to the plan, as such a move would be outright theft.

Dollar Vs Yuan: Central Banks Increasingly Want to Hold China’s Currency

Central banks are increasingly keen to hold China’s yuan as a reserve currency, according to a new survey.
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Some 85% of central bank reserve managers said they already hold or are interested in owning the yuan.
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More than 80% said a shift to a more “multipolar” world, where the US no longer reigns supreme, would benefit the currency.

Article HERE

Oil From US Reserves Went to Asia, Europe As Refineries Near Full Tilt

This is good news. A nation without oil, is a nation that is unable to conduct war. -MM

More than 5 million barrels of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve were exported to Asia and Europe last month, Reuters first reported.

Among the shipments were two cargo ships carrying 560,000 barrels each from Atlantic Trading & Marketing, part of France’s TotalEnergies, according to Reuters. And Phillips 66, the fourth-largest oil supplier in the US, sent about 470,000 barrels from a storage facility in Texas to Trieste, Italy, where a pipeline feeds refineries in central Europe.

The exports follow similar shipments of Strategic Petroleum Reserve crude in April, when three ships went to Europe to replace Russian oil.

Overall, US oil exports have been surging since Russia invaded Ukraine in February as Western countries and companies turn away from Russian supplies.

While gas prices typically follow oil prices, which are set by global markets, US refineries have been a key bottleneck. Because of earlier shutdowns and limited investment in recent years, capacity has shrunk and refineries have been running nearly at full tilt.

With little extra scope for refining more volumes of fuel, additional supplies of crude, including from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, have been going overseas. In fact, oil exports from the US Gulf Coast hit a record rate in the second quarter, according to Rystad Energy.

The Biden administration has been releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to lower fuel prices. Releases are at a record pace of roughly 1 million barrels a day, bringing the stockpile to the lowest level since 1986 in June.

Full article HERE

Russian army converts Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant into a military base

Genius. -MM

Russian forces are transforming Europe’s largest nuclear power plant into a military base on the front lines of surveillance, exacerbating months-long security crises at the giant nuclear power plant and its thousands of workers.

More than 500 Russian soldiers occupied the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine in March, Wall Street Journal signature Drew Hinshaw/Joe Parkinson reported today. According to workers, residents, Ukrainian officials and diplomats, the Russian soldiers have deployed heavy artillery batteries and laid lethal mines in recent weeks along the coast of the reservoir used to cool the plant’s six reactors. Ukrainian troops control several towns scattered across the river, about 3 miles (about 5 kilometers), but they don’t think it’s easy to attack the plant because of the dangers of artillery battles around the reactors in use.

The newly deployed armaments allowed the plant to be virtually immune to a counterattack by the Ukrainian military, creating an unprecedented situation for the heavily regulated atomic energy industry: the slow transformation of a nuclear power plant into a military fortress. A lesser-publicized aspect of Russia’s war strategy, the country’s military deploys weapons every day around the world’s largest nuclear power plant to tighten its grip on the front line as the Russian approach to southern Ukraine comes to a standstill.

The rest of the article HERE

Done in the name of “democracy”The Airbus sales to Chinese airlines is causing upset in the Empire no doubt:

Boeing Disappointed

In the article, it cited potential loss of Boeing sales in the Chinese market of $38Billion to $51Billion per year and said this equates to loss of job for 167K to 225K workers. So, in the aircraft industry worker salaries average $225K/annum per worker??? Wow, this is higher than I thought. Salary figures usually only include wage+ benefit costs. On top of that one needs to add other loading of costs such as travel/per diem/office/factory, etc. etc. This is one well-paying labor field.

Russia Adds Wheat to “Rubles Only” Payment

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The Russian government has added grain, sunflower oil, and extracted meal to the list of exports that must be paid for in rubles. A resolution giving effect to the decision was adopted on Friday and published on the official portal of legal information.

It also provides for a one-year extension of duties to be paid in the national currency in respect of exported sunflower oil and sunflower meal until August 31, 2023.

As part of the new payment mechanism, the base price for calculating the export duty on wheat will be 15,000 rubles (over $267) per ton.

Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter and a major supplier of sunflower seeds. Russian Minister for Agriculture Dmitry Patrushev said this month that the country would export agricultural products to “friendly countries” only.

According to the minister, Russia’s grain harvest could reach 130 million tons this year, which would be enough to cover both domestic needs and ensure export potential.

RUSSIA, CHINA, IRAN, VENEZUELA WAR GAMES MID AUGUST – Target: USA

Normally, this story would be COVERT INTEL for subscribers only, but this is too important: In Mid-August, Russia, China, Iran, and ten other nations will join Venezuela in “War Games” off the US from Latin America . . .  and the Caribbean.

This is just a little too coincidental given the depletion of our Ammunition and Weapons supplies sent to Ukraine, and the draining of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve which now has only 27 days of oil left in it.

Its the perfect setup for an Invader to attack us, here, in the USA.

It’s almost as though the U.S. is being intentionally weakened by our own government, to make us ripe to be invaded and taken over.

The information about this enormous “war game” fits just a little too neatly into a pattern of events that seem all designed to lead the USA to a fall.

I do not yet have the exact date for this war game BUT . . .

The nations involved will “pre-position forward-deployed military assets in Latin America and in the Caribbean.”   So they are already moving troops into place.

Maybe I’m paranoid, but maybe I can see the writing on the wall as plain as day.

How To Make DIY Cat Toys! (Super Easy)

Why not do some DIY? It’s easy and fun!

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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I’m so tired of the geopolitical stress, let’s go through the news with a laugh, a smile and a cat

Who’s running the West right now?

It’s the Fu Er Dai. Or the adult version the Guan Er Dai. Which is a Chinese name for “spoiled rich kid from a super-billionaire”. These children are so used to being pampered and treated like royalty that they become arrogant bastards or the female equivalent.

Daddy will always “bail them out” of trouble. So they have NEVER seen the consequences of their actions. They believe that they are untouchable, and that this factor comes direct from God.

The term "Fuerdai" literally translates to 'rich second generation'. It describes Chinese people born into families of high socioeconomic status, who inherited their wealth but did not create it.

The term is often used in a derogatory manner, with emphasis on their overindulgent lifestyles and materialistic attitudes.

The term has also seen limited use as a general label for anyone with rich parents and who enjoyed a privileged upbringing as a result. Non-Chinese figures, such as Fidel Castro and Donald Trump, have been described by Chinese media as Fuerdais.

-Wikipedia

Who are these people running the USA, and what is going on?

When a civilization achieves its primary goal (namely being self-sufficient) it stops striving. This is because once having attained its goal, it no longer NEEDS to strive.

Older civilizations realize that once the primary initial goals are achieved, a series of subsequent long-term goals must be implemented. Otherwise a long-duration malaise would seep into the society.

But young nations, well, they don’t realize this. And you know, the United States is a very young nation.

Such is the nature of life.

When you do a task well, you move it aside and, behold! there is another one right behind it.

Fix the stove so you can find the problem in the gas line; replace a clogged pipe in the garden and watch the new stronger water pressure blow up a few corroded sprinkler heads.

As a society ages, it moves from a calling to a job. The calling consists of survival, and you get perhaps not immediate feedback, but at least it’s “concrete”  feedback. You are either cold, wet, and hungry surrounded by predators or you are not; you are warm, dry, and fed.

When a calling becomes a job, it moves from ends-over-means to means-over-ends.

In a calling, you set up an objective and do it however you have to, based on the situation and what works. In a job, you stick to methods prescribed by those above you for the “optics” of working hard, obeying, and helping others.

With any job, we see the problem of success. If one person uses a certain method and succeeds, it becomes de facto obligatory for the rest of the group to emulate that. Therefore, you get an impassable groupthink, and that spurs on a contrarian, ironist, and novelty-based movement.

This group turns on the idea of success itself.

They do not want to emulate what others have done, and they instead seek to declare reality unreal so that they can pursue what makes others around them feel good, which gives these anti-success people more social popularity and therefore power.

People of this nature aim to always be seen as the good guy in a social situation because they know it keeps others from attacking while building their own control over others. This makes them feel safe from attack, although since it is never certain this power is weak and like a dictator, they must constantly reinforce it.

The interesting thing here is that they no longer care about whether their ideas work in reality.

The idea — the symbol, the feelings, the theory — replaces reality.

This is because the symbol is being used to manipulate others by creating joyful feelings in them.

This mirrors how control-based civilizations work, namely that they exclude all methods which scare the group or debunk the dominant paradigm.

By choosing from among what is left, people unconsciously reinforce the system and therefore, feelings of safety, pacifism, and relevance.

In other words, people choose political opinions for the social benefit of having those opinions.

And they have become entirely disconnected from the effects of those opinions.

This is a type of mandated narcissism which quickly influences all levels of the society and individual behavior.

Manipulation also forces you to scorn those you manipulate and see them as lesser even when saying to their faces how equal and good they are. The point is to benefit yourself by manipulating these marks and rubes, not to help them. They help you.

In this way, the late stage society becomes a pathological place where everyone lies to each other in the hopes of swaying enough others to have power. How do people enslave themselves? They adopt a system of manipulation, at which point no sanity will be tolerated.

Such a society breaks down into two mirror-image groups, the “do the stuff that always works” party and the “do anything but the stuff that always works” party. The latter has better symbols but no goal except not the other goal, so they have no consistency; forever rationalization, they seek reasons to justify what they want, and have no actual reasons for what they do.

Sure, some decent ones get caught up in it too, the true believers. They believe the message of pacifism, which is that if we remove the differences in situation, people can get along and actually like each other. It is a pleasant dream.

Saner people simply opt for fairness, but realize that it has nothing to do with redistribution wealth, status, and power. Instead it means accepting people as they are and rewarding the ones who do good so that the others know what they must do.

Roots conservatives such as your scribe here see things even more simply: reward only the good, and remove the bad each generation, so that the next season you have people who are inherently and inwardly better, instead of trying to force bad people to behave as if they are good.

Better than tolerance, this is acceptance. You recognize the good as what they are, and also recognize the bad as what they are, and you send the bad away because they are incompatible with what you want. You take them as what they are and do not pretend, which is more honorable than manipulation.

This process of decay has no masters; it occurs naturally in human groups because, unless guided by kings who push the group to new heights, every group falls back on dividing up the spoils and pursuing the individualistic as a moral good.

For this reason it proves hard to fight. You are not fighting against people, but their illusions. You defeat them only by revealing the emptiness of those illusions. Otherwise, you are just killing your own people for another pointless war over symbols.

Well, with that on to the way… where is the collective West in Late Stage Democracy today?

In America, it seems the Supreme Court has pushed back on abortion, the States are gaining power, and the federal government has doubled down on its Carter-style pursuit of ideologically-symbolic actions on environmentalism, diversity, poverty, and sexual liberation.

But America is not the world.

The bigger factor will probably be the global currency market. US dollars are in high demand when we drop interest rates because the dollar becomes like BitCoin, an easy way to acquire relatively untraceable cash in many countries for quick business deals.

As time goes on however it has become quite clear that the dollar is losing actual value because we have too many in circulation that are not backed by anything tangible. They are simply paper of a value that is no longer tangible.

The rest of the world realizes this.

The markets realize that FAANG stocks are not worth nearly what the label says; there is distrust of the American economy because of our heavy debt public and private, our instability arising from diversity, and our complete political inconsistency.

In the meantime, all of the problems that the West has blown off for generations are coming home to roost. Climate change is nonsense, but the Ecocide is real. Water and food supplies are declining. Pollution is in everything. Affirmative action, unions, globalist treaties, a surplus of laws and regulations, and high taxes have killed quality of life.

This means that change is on the wind.

The American Left is fighting a rearguard action now, trying to make their retreat as devastating as possible while keeping their networks in place. However, they have lost the middle of the voting population, and as the Great Replacement becomes clear, they are going to lose many of the others.

When change comes it is first met with [1] panic, then [2] denial, then [3] tantrums, and finally [4] acceptance, after which point people start to see the potential bright side.

America is somewhere in the first two steps. And right now, the West is starting it’s plummet towards the third step. It’s an exciting step as global democracy, worldwide Leftism, fiat currency, multicultural diversity, and international finance begin their graceful arc of descent…

… accelerating as they go…

…until they reach ballistic conditions …

…where steering is no longer possible…

…and impact …

…an absolute certainty.

Man denied giving blood after refusing to answer if he was pregnant

Sinclair, of Stirling in central Scotland, was told to complete a form asking whether he was with child or had been pregnant in the last six months, prompting him to reply that the question did not apply to a man in his late 60s.

Sinclair told a staffer at the Albert Halls clinic in Stirling it was “impossible” for him to be pregnant, but soon learned that he needed to answer the query in order to give blood. He now has no plans on returning to the donation center.

The secret to the West is careerism.

Someone got promoted for writing that “stunning and brave” question into the script. This gave the bosses bragging rights at the club about how progressive they were and satisfied the insurers, politicians, and lawyers, who wanted to make sure that no one would be sued for discrimination.

Only when those same people get their careers wrecked and end up working at Tesco will the insanity stop.

In the meantime, institutions like this run on the goodwill of decent, normal people and more of them will stay away, so the voters (who have slept through all of this) will wake up when they find out that the only blood available at hospitals is being bought from teenage drug addicts who need the money.

Texas Could Vote to Secede From U.S. in 2023 as GOP Pushes for Referendum

Under a section titled “State Sovereignty,” the platform states: “Pursuant to Article 1, Section 1, of the Texas Constitution, the federal government has impaired our right of local self-government. Therefore, federally mandated legislation that infringes upon the 10th Amendment rights of Texas should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified.

“Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.”

Texas has a solid argument for secession: the fraudulent 2020 election.

If Texas is being manipulated by fraudulent votes, it can consider its agreement with the United States to provide fair and balanced elections to be in breach, and therefore make a solid legal argument — going back to English common law — for secession.

If Texas were to break away and roll back its policies to 1980s America levels, it would quickly become a home for most of the business in North America if not the world.

If it scrapped the majority of rules and entitlements, it would dominate the world economy. And, unlike Ukraine, it would most likely retain its nuclear weapons.

What is Japan doing buying Chinese used cigarette butts?

2022-06-29 17:19 HKT From HERE

Japan has always had cooperative companies in Qingdao, Chengdu and other places to acquire the business of cigarette butts, which will be exported to Japan after the acquisition. So what exactly does Japan need these cigarette butts for?

First of all, the main component of cigarette butts is acetate fiber. In addition to being used in cigarette butts filtering, it is widely used in medical and clothing industries because of its various characteristics. Japan is an island country with scarce resources and strong demand. Under the promotion, Japan also changed from military plunder during World War II to commercial recycling.

In China, acetate fiber currently needs to be imported, and the import price of one ton can reach about 20,000 yuan. Some people say why China does not collect and process it, and we have so many smokers. Part of the reason is that the cost of collecting cigarette butts is too high. China has only started sorting waste in recent years. As far as cigarette butts are concerned, it is also difficult to recycle. Overall, it is not as cost-effective as imported from abroad.

Therefore, China still has a long way to go in the field of recycling. Japan has started the use of recycling in the recent Tokyo Olympics. Although most people complain, it is also an attempt. I hope China can also gradually In this regard, there are some inclinations in resource research and development. After all, China has such a large population and various wastes brought about by consumption. If useful materials can be classified in it, then China’s energy will also have an independent path. In the future, the earth’s resources In the continuous consumption, solar energy, wind energy, hydrogen, and recyclable materials have become the top priorities of future energy use.

Holy Mackerel, the Confederacy Just Won

Thoughts by an American on the latest rulings by the Supreme Court. -MM

Back in the 1860s, America fought a civil war over states rights. While the touchstone issue for the North was slavery, for the South it was tariffs and other laws favoring the northeastern factories that mostly employed Irish people.

Naturally Abraham Lincoln, a student of the modern State in the European sense, found it easy to unite these new Irish voters against the mostly-Anglo South, and to use that to centralize government control with a Civil Rights Act which passed shortly after his 2500 fps lobotomy and death.

The sense in America — already divided by Irish diversity — was that if we did not force everyone into a false unity and conformity of action, the same methods at the same time, we would disintegrate and not be able to compete with modern nations.

Consequently law after the Civil War and during the world wars followed the same goal: strengthen federal authority, enforce it on the states, standardize everything, and therefore, create a sensation and sentiment of unity among the people of the nation.

Fighting dictators like Stalin and Hitler gave us a false view of what we were attempting to avoid. We assumed that the founding fathers tried to warn us off of dictatorship, but they were really trying to warn us away from infectious groupthink.

Infectious groupthink occurs when an idea becomes popular because it is lowest common denominator, after which point no one will refrain from emulating it because they want to be competitive with others who are using that idea. If something succeeds, everyone does it, even if not really relevant.

You can see infectious groupthink in America today. Even companies that make sump pumps and oil filters are advertising how they support LGBT gay pride month, BLM racial shakedowns, and other goodthinker topics.

Consequently, the Supreme Court is pushing back with a few momentous decisions, all of which favor resisting the herd and granting more power to local communities and states:

  • Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: this ruling removes a federal right to abortion, justified by the 14A, and instead throws the issue back to the states. This does not automatically make abortion legal or illegal; most states, having had time to prepare, have laws in place to either grant abortion rights or criminalize abortion. This ruling in effect gives the states the power of a nation-state, namely that they are for themselves deciding what defines murder, the onset of human life, and the degree to which they want legal sexual liberation.
  • New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n Inc. v. Bruen: argued on the basis of the 14A in defense of the Second Amendment, the Court holds that New York violated the rights of its citizens by imposing costs and regulations on the ability to carrry a firearm. This would have been stronger had it been a straight 2A case, but it sets up the Left to take aim at the 14A, which would great help us to get it reinterpreted or removed. This case essentially blocks not just local but federal action to impose gun control.
  • Vega v. Tekoh: on the surface, the Court holds that a citizen may not sue the state for having failed to give him a full Miranda warning, but in the process, the Court redefined the Miranda warning as “protections of rights” and not rights themselves. In other words, the expansion of human rights hit an upward limit, and Miranda failures may in the future not be grounds for overturning convictions. This also throws the question back to the states.

These cases came about for the most part in reaction to the seizure of the federal government by the Left and the rapid pace with which it has used presidential executive orders, unelected bureaucrat written regulations, and hastily assembled bills rocketed through a compliant House.

The Court exists to protect the Constitution. Therefore, when it sees federal overreach, it tends to pare it back by removing the crutches it uses to justify such power. Almost universally these have been 14A and § 1980 cases which enforce individual rights over state or local decisions via federal law.

However, as justices have hinted in the past, many of these laws were designed to fix perceived wrongs, not become eternal justifications for whatever power and money government wants to seize. By kicking these back to the states, the Court makes the voters choose on these hot-button issues.

This allows the Court to fulfill one of the purposes of the Constitution: it is designed to allow people to escape from being forced to comply with the latest trend of infectious groupthink. It allows states and individuals to break away from the herd.

Lincoln destroyed that, as did his party in subsequent years, with the Civil Rights act, much as the 1913 income tax obliterated what was left, since now people were required to fund all sorts of infectious groupthink programs that they would otherwise want to escape.

The Court has now affirmed that the Confederacy was indeed right about states rights. In order to avoid groupthink and socialist-style entitlements programs turned coercive, such as diversity, EMTALA, and the need to fund the diversity abyss, states need to make these decisions, not the fedgov.

If we are lucky, the Court will take aim at the expansion of civil rights as a blank cheque for abolishing all standards. If the next big case involves affirmative action, we could see a different America emerge quite shortly as people flee diversity and socialism.

Suspicious about military content, Nepal rejects US disaster mitigation programme

2022/06/23
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Gen. Charles A.Flynn with Nepalese PM Sher Bahadur Deuba
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Nepal does not want to jeopardize relations with China
By P.K. Balachandran
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Colombo, June 21: Fearing that the US State Partnership Programme (SPP) is a trap to involve it in an anti-China military alliance, the Sher Bahadur Deuba government in Nepal has rejected the programme.
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The Deuba government (like predecessor governments in 2015, 2017 and 2019) was initially impressed with the SPP for its disaster mitigation content, but it had to reject it eventually, because the mood in Nepal is unambiguously against foreign programs which smack of a military alliance.
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Nepalese governments have generally not wanted any trans-national agreements which could jeopardize their delicately balanced relationship between India and the US on the on hand and China on the other.
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Article HERE

NATO claims Vladimir Putin and Xi Jingping collude to subvert the global order

June 30, 2022 – 8.21am
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Madrid | NATO has accused Beijing of conspiring with Moscow to subvert the international rules-based order...

... as part of a new 10-year blueprint that identifies China for the first time as a global threat...

... and brands Russia the most significant and direct threat to security, peace and stability in Europe.

Beijing reacted angrily to the new NATO Strategic Concept, agreed to at its summit in Madrid, accusing the 32-member alliance of trying to launch a new cold war.

Full article HERE

Homemade Potato Chips

Forget buying a bag of potato chips at the grocery store when you can make these at home. This quick and easy recipe will delight everyone in the family. —Taste of Home Test Kitchen

Ingredients

  • 7 unpeeled medium potatoes (about 2 pounds)
  • 2 quarts ice water
  • 5 teaspoons salt
  • 2 teaspoons garlic powder
  • 1-1/2 teaspoons celery salt
  • 1-1/2 teaspoons pepper
  • Oil for deep-fat frying

Directions

  1. Using a vegetable peeler or metal cheese slicer, cut potatoes into very thin slices. Place in a large bowl; add ice water and salt. Soak for 30 minutes.
  2. Drain potatoes; place on paper towels and pat dry. In a small bowl, combine the garlic powder, celery salt and pepper; set aside.
  3. In a cast-iron or other heavy skillet, heat 1-1/2 in. oil to 375°. Fry potatoes in batches until golden brown, 3-4 minutes, stirring frequently.
  4. Remove with a slotted spoon; drain on paper towels. Immediately sprinkle with seasoning mixture.

Manfred Mann – Blinded by the Light

I hope you all appreciate this little tune.

Beijing Slams NATO For ‘Maliciously Smearing’ China As A Security Threat

Friday, Jul 01, 2022 – 09:50 AM

Authored by Kenny Stancil via Common Dreams, 

Beijing criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Thursday after the U.S.-led military alliance asserted that China poses “serious challenges” to global stability.

NATO listed China as one of its priorities in the so-called 2022 Strategic Concept that leaders approved Wednesday at a summit in Madrid. This marked a first, as the alliance’s previous blueprint, published in 2010, made no mention of the East Asian country. According to NATO, Beijing’s “coercive policies” threaten the Western bloc’s “interests, security, and values.”

Addressing the “systemic challenges posed by the People’s Republic of China to Euro-Atlantic security” and the “deepening strategic partnership” between China and Russia is now a NATO priority, the bloc declared.

Beijing responded with indignation. “Who’s challenging global security and undermining world peace?” China’s mission to the European Union asked Thursday in a statement. “Are there any wars or conflicts over the years where NATO is not involved?”

“NATO’s so-called Strategic Concept, filled with Cold War thinking and ideological bias, is maliciously attacking and smearing China. We firmly oppose it,” the statement said. “When it comes to acts that undermine China’s interests, we will make firm and strong responses.”

As The Guardian reported:

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China has been pointing its finger at the U.S. and NATO on multiple occasions. But NATO's attention to the China-Russia partnership began even before Moscow's military operations in its neighbor. It has also been openly talking about China for some time.

In its annual summit in Brussels last June, the traditionally Russia-focused military alliance asserted, for the first time, that it needed to respond to Beijing's growing power. The language the bloc used at the time also echoed the E.U.'s phrase of "systemic rival," and the U.K.'s "systemic competitor" when describing China.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters Wednesday that “China is substantially building up its military forces, including nuclear weapons, bullying its neighbors, threatening Taiwan… monitoring and controlling its own citizens through advanced technology, and spreading Russian lies and disinformation.”

“China is not our adversary,” said Stoltenberg, “but we must be clear-eyed about the serious challenges it represents.” In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Thursday that NATO’s latest policy document “disregards facts, confuses black and white… [and] smears China’s foreign policy.”

China, Zhao added, does not pose “the systemic challenge imagined.” Instead, he argued, it is NATO that is a “systemic challenge to world peace and stability” and its “hands are stained with the blood of the world’s people.”

While Stoltenberg claimed that NATO is still “open to constructive engagement” with Beijing, the trans-Atlantic military alliance is moving to expand its reach across the Pacific. This is due in part to fears that Russia’s military assault on Ukraine could embolden China to invade Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing considers its province, and concerns about possible military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing on Russia’s Pacific coast.

As Al Jazeera reported:

Highlighting NATO's new focus on China, the gathering of world leaders in Madrid, both inside the bloc's summit and on its sidelines, included many from Asian nations.

It was the first time that the leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand were invited to a NATO summit. They participated in a NATO session on new global challenges after holding a side meeting outside of the summit.

On Wednesday, Zhao encouraged NATO to abandon its “zero-sum game and the practice of creating enemies, and not try to mess up Asia and the whole world after disrupting Europe.” Referring to NATO’s response to the war in Ukraine, Zhao said that “sanctions are not a way out of conflicts, and the continued delivery of weapons will not help realize peace.”

During this week’s summit, Stoltenberg announced that “thousands of new troops would be deployed in eight countries on NATO’s eastern flank,” the New York Times reported Thursday. Biden, for his part, said that “Washington would deploy an Army garrison headquarters and a field support battalion in Poland, the first U.S. forces permanently located on NATO’s eastern flank.”

Just before issuing its strategic blueprint, NATO also extended formal membership invitations to Finland and Sweden. Peace advocates have warned that the incorporation of the two previously neutral Nordic countries, one of which shares an 830-mile border with Russia, into NATO increases the likelihood of a direct confrontation that could spiral into a nuclear war.

The Time of Our Time

We have not been so ripe for regime change since 1776. A ruling Party of Chaos is doing absolutely everything to disorder our lives and there really is no generous interpretation for its motives.

Let’s face it: most people will not read Justice Alito’s carefully crafted arguments about what the constitution says or doesn’t say about abortion, or the meaning of “ordered liberty” through our history.

We do not live in history. We live in the time of our time.

And, until just recently, this has been a time that discarded former modes of conduct between men, women, and children as inconvenient to the presumably greater project of self-actualization.

To be-all-that-you-can-be is a stirring notion, and it seemed to work nicely within the colossal techno-industrial armature of the past century, with all its inducements to thrive personally, at least for the comfortable elites who pulled the levers of that system — though not so much for those below caught in the gears, who produced children despite all the novel means for avoiding it.

For the fortunate, motherhood became just another “no” box to check off, while fatherhood merged into the odious mists of obsolete patriarchy.

History is made up of things that seem like good ideas at the time. The hard part now is moving out of a familiar time into the undiscovered country of a new time.

The support system for all that is going, going, gone and in the ensuing flux all that rousing self-actualization starts to look more like Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all, a savage and pre-human state of nature. As this occurs, all human beings have to fall back on are modes of conduct that include a moral and ethical dimension, which is to say, what is right and what is wrong, not just what is allowed at a given moment.

Which is also to say: maybe the time of smashing boundaries is over. As that scaffold of techno-industrial comfort and safety disintegrates, and all the dazzling promises of becoming transhuman dissolve — sorry, Klaus Schwab — we will likely have to settle for being human again, and in the best way, not the worst way. That includes a certain reverence for our nature and for each other. That suggests not killing children.

These days, this place on the planet that used to be a nation groans under a tribulation of bad ideas, bad choices, bad conduct, bad management, and bad faith. We have not been so ripe for regime change since 1776.

A ruling Party of Chaos is doing absolutely everything to disorder our lives and there really is no generous interpretation for its motives.

Everything it touches breaks, wilts, withers, splinters, rots, poisons, and infects the body politic, driving it deeper into derangement. It doesn’t even pretend to make sense because that would require making distinctions between what is true and what’s not true. We follow-the-science into pure evil.

What awaits is the abandoned scaffold of the family and the community as opposed to the brute hierarchies of mere lonely, forsaken persons under the leviathan state and the behemoth corporation, which have produced mainly new kinds of cruelties, such as: the deadly “vaccine” mandates, the no-knock FBI visitations, the surveillance cameras, the robotic phone trees with their interminable holds, the obtuse insults of the HR departments, the drag queens twerking in your children’s faces, and much more.

You might not know it from the news — what is the news now, anyway, except mercenary shuck-and-jive — but these giant governments and corporations are thrashing in their death throes.

Get out of their way if you possibly can.

Form the bonds you can with people and cherish them. For many, they will be all you’ll have for a while.

You can’t overstate the havoc that we’ll have to live with in the months ahead, short of blowing up the whole joint, one can hope.

And it will happen just as a gigantic set of pretenses to a New Order of things rolls out to thumping failure. Forget about central bank digital currencies. Don’t believe that the very people who have severed the relationship between actual capital and money can just magically conjure a new order of money that they propose to control and you don’t.

Meanwhile, the old-school money they created too much of is headed for the biggest gaping black hole imaginable because that’s what happens when money based on debt is not paid back. So, for a while, there will be too much money and then there will be not enough, and then nobody will have money.

All that happens as the supply of every kind of stuff in the world stops moving from Point A to Point B, including replacement parts for every sort of machine, distribution of petroleum and its products, and food.

And at the same time, it finally becomes too obvious to ignore the fact that many millions are dying or becoming disabled from the effects of the mRNA vaccines foisted on the public, especially in the USA and Europe.

Out of all that suffering will eventually come a new respect for human life and reconstructed relations between men and women, with all the abstruse ambiguities, pretensions, and nebulosities about sex put aside for some future age of decadence.

It won’t require further agonizing reappraisals by any high courts to figure it out. Children are the consequence of sex. Children are required to carry on the human project.


American Chip Makers Stall On Building New Semiconductor Plants As Subsidies Bill Languishes

Friday, Jul 01, 2022 – 12:10 AM

The Biden administration is laser-focused on sending Ukraine billions of dollars in weapons, including the latest round of anti-ship systems, artillery rockets, and rounds of 105 mm ammo for howitzer cannons that it has entirely lost focus on reshoring efforts to boost semiconductor production Stateside.

Multiple manufacturers of semiconductor wafers have announced plans for new multi-billion dollar factories across the U.S. but are contingent on Congress allocating funds to aid in building facilities under the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act. 

Congress passed the CHIPS Act in January 2021 as part of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which proposed $52 billion in funding for increasing the domestic capacity of chip production, though the House and Senate have come to a standstill over disagreements on certain parts of the bill that have sparked so much uncertainty among companies set to build new factories.

In a letter on June 15, dozens of technology executives from IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Analog Devices, Micron, Amazon, and Alphabet called on Congress to move quickly on the CHIPS Act. They wrote, “the rest of the world is not waiting for the U.S. to act,” and funding for new chip factories must be achieved immediately.

The uncertainty around Congress not formally allocating any budget to finance the CHIPS Act is causing concern among top chipmakers planning to build massive factories that might have to delay expansion plans.

Unfortunately, CHIPS Act funding has moved more slowly than we expected, and we still don’t know when it will get done. It is time for Congress to act so we can move forward at the speed and scale we have long envisioned for Ohio and our other projects to help restore U.S. semiconductor manufacturing leadership and build a more resilient semiconductor supply chain,” an Intel spokesperson recently said in a statement. 

Taiwan’s GlobalWafers announced a new $5 billion factory in the U.S. on Monday, but contingent on subsidies from the federal government.

"This investment that they're making is contingent upon Congress passing the CHIPS Act. The [GlobalWafers] CEO told me that herself, and they reiterated that today," U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told CNBC, the same day GlobalWafers announced its development plan.

In 2020, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. announced a new $12 billion plant in Phoenix, Arizona, and said some of the building costs would have to be picked up by the U.S. and Taiwan.

The Biden administration has hailed the president’s efforts to increase chip manufacturing capacity, but Congress appears to be holding things up, which may result in delays for planned expansion projects this fall.

Currently, the U.S. only accounts for 12% of the world’s chip supplies, a 40% reduction since the 1990s. The CHIPS Act is supposed to restore America’s dominance in chipmaking — but expansion plans appear to be on hold as funding Ukraine seems to be the top priority in Washington.

Asian herbal‐tobacco cigarettes: “not medicine but less harmful”?

From HERE

Introduction

Smoking in Asia has become a public health crisis, with East Asian countries having 38% of the world’s smokers.1 The high smoking prevalence is complicated by the fact that many countries have state‐run tobacco monopolies, including China, with 360 million smokers.2 Japan Tobacco International is the world’s 3rd largest transnational tobacco company and is 2/3 owned by the Ministry of Finance.3 Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand all have had tobacco monopolies as well.4,5,6 The entry of transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) into the Asian markets in the 1980s has led to higher rates of cigarette consumption than would have been otherwise expected with the native tobacco monopolies alone;7 the TTCs are now particularly interested in entering the large Chinese market.8,9

Asian herbs have been used for medicinal purposes for centuries10 and, beginning in 2000, several Asian countries started producing cigarettes that combine these herbs with tobacco. (The herbs used in Western herbal cigarettes, in contrast, use ingredients such as hazel and rose petals that are not considered medicinal nor are mixed with tobacco.11,12) Asian herbal‐tobacco cigarettes may appeal to Asian smokers who believe they are deriving a health benefit from smoking these products. Correspondingly, the TTCs and a 2001 Institute of Medicine report have encouraged the creation of potentially reduced exposure products (PREPs), which may deliver fewer toxins to smokers who are unwilling or unable to quit.13 The strategy of product modification as a form of tobacco control has been criticised by some public health groups and researchers, however, because there is no evidence of a public health benefit at the population level14,15 and this strategy may discourage current smokers from quitting.16

Little is known about Asian herbal‐tobacco cigarettes, so we sought to describe their development and product characteristics by examining international news accounts and internet sites for product descriptions and health claims. We also used the TTCs documents to determine the level of awareness and interest in the development of these products. Asian herbal‐tobacco cigarettes that claim to reduce the harms of smoking have been developed in China since the 1970s and the TTCs have been tracking these products since the 1980s. In 2000, other Asian countries tried to develop similar products, which coincides with efforts by the TTCs17 to work with Asian tobacco companies in promoting their “harm reduction” strategy in Asia.

Methods

Analysis of international news sources, company websites, and the transnational tobacco companies’ (TTC) documents. PubMed searches of herbs and brands.

Results

Twenty‐three brands were identified, mainly from China. Many products claimed to relieve respiratory symptoms and reduce toxins, with four herb‐only products advertised for smoking cessation. No literature was found to verify the health claims, except one Korean trial of an herb‐only product. Asian herbal‐tobacco cigarettes were initially produced by China by the 1970s and introduced to Japan in the 1980s. Despite initial news about research demonstrating a safer cigarette, the TTC analyses of these cigarettes suggest that these early products were not palatable and had potentially toxic cardiovascular effects. By the late 1990s, China began producing more herbal‐tobacco cigarettes in a renewed effort to reduce harmful constituents in cigarettes. After 2000, tobacco companies from Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand began producing similar products. Tobacco control groups in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand voiced concern over the health claims of herbal‐tobacco products. In 2005, China designated two herbal‐tobacco brands as key for development.

Conclusion

Asian herbal‐tobacco cigarettes claim to reduce harm, but no published literature is available to verify these claims or investigate unidentified toxicities.

The increase in Asian herbal‐tobacco cigarette production by 2000 coincides with the Asian tobacco companies’ regular scientific meetings with TTCs and their interest in harm reduction. Asia faces additional challenges in tobacco control with these culturally concordant products that may discourage smokers from quitting.

Rationing Has Already Started In Europe As The Entire Globe The West Plunges Into A Horrific Economic Nightmare

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If countries in Europe are already beginning to ration certain things due to “supply problems”, how long will it be before it starts happening in the United States?

Up until the past couple of years, many of us in the western world always considered shortages to be something that only “unsophisticated” poor countries on the other side of the planet had to deal with.

But the last couple of years have shown us that painful shortages can happen to wealthy countries in the western world too.

At first we were told that they were “just temporary”, but the months went by and we just kept having more shortages.

In fact, in 2022 “supply problems” have become so serious that many supermarkets in Europe have been forced to strictly ration essential items at various times.  For example, it was being reported that due to the war in Ukraine flour, sunflower oil and sugar were all being rationed by stores in Greece

After limiting the sale of some flours and sunflower oil online, Greek supermarkets are turning to rationing the sale of sugar as well, now including in their stores, over supply problems.

The AB Vassilopoulos is setting a maximum limit on the purchase of all brands of corn and sunflower oil and of flour per customer while Mymarket put a ceiling on sunflower oil purchases and Sklavenitis has added sugar to the rationed sales of corn oil through its online store, with a maximum of four packs, the products in high demand from restaurants, some of which said they have to stop selling french fries and other fried foods.

Over the past few months we have seen similar measures implemented in other major European nations as well.  For example, the war in Ukraine prompted some pretty severe rationing in Spain

Sporadic shortages of products like eggs, milk, and other dairy products also hit Spain since the war in Ukraine began. And major supermarkets including Mercadona and Makro began rationing sunflower oil earlier this month.

Now, stores will temporarily be allowed to limit “the number of goods that can be bought by a client,” according to information in the Official State Gazette published on Wednesday.

Looking forward, natural gas rationing is the next big thing that many people in Europe are talking about.  The flow of Russian natural gas into Europe has been cut back, and it appears that this may soon cause widespread rationing in Italy

Italy may start rationing natural-gas consumption to certain industrial giants, after Russia’s Gazprom halved supplies on Friday.

On the weekend, the newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that the Italian government and energy industry would meet Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss the crisis, with the likely outcome being the introduction of a state of alert under the country’s gas emergency protocol.

And CNN is reporting that Germany is “one step closer to rationing supplies” now that Russia has decided to reduce the flow of natural gas going to that country…

Europe’s biggest economy is now officially running short of natural gas and is escalating a crisis plan to preserve supplies as Russia turns off the taps.

Germany on Thursday activated the second phase of its three-stage gas emergency program, taking it one step closer to rationing supplies to industry — a step that would deliver a huge blow to the manufacturing heart of its economy.

Of course there are other parts of the globe that are dealing with problems that are far, far more serious than what Europe is facing right now.

As I discussed in an article that I posted earlier this week, significant numbers of people are starting to literally drop dead from starvation in portions of eastern Africa.  Global food supplies just keep getting tighter, and the head of the UN is openly telling us that the world is heading into an “unprecedented global hunger crisis”.

So if you have plenty of food to eat tonight, you should be thankful.

Here in the United States, economic conditions are deteriorating fairly rapidly, and most Americans are completely and totally unprepared for any sort of a major economic downturn.

Earlier today, I came across yet another survey that shows that about 60 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck

“We find that consumers in all income brackets — including those who make more than $100,000 annually — are living paycheck to paycheck. PYMNTS’ research finds that 61% of U.S. consumers were living paycheck to paycheck in April 2022, marking a 9 percentage point increase from 52% in April 2021, meaning that approximately three in five U.S. consumers devote nearly all of their salaries to expenses with little to nothing left over at the end of the month.”

So what is going to happen when those people start losing their jobs in large numbers?

Already, we have seen the number of tech layoffs greatly accelerate over the last couple of months.

Sadly, the layoffs will get much worse in the months ahead.

And as inflation continues to systematically eat away at our standard of living, Americans are turning to credit cards at a record pace

As Americans grapple with the highest inflation in 40 years, the number of new credit cards have surged as more Americans rely on them to keep up with high prices. According to a recent report from the Federal Reserve, revolving credit (credit cards and lines of credit) increased by 19.6% from the previous year to $1.103 trillion.

Going into credit card debt is not a solution.

At best, it can buy you a little bit of time.

And it is especially a bad idea to go into credit card debt as we plunge into a recession.

At this point, almost everyone realizes that things are going to get bad.  According to one recent poll, a whopping 85 percent of all Americans believe that the U.S. is “headed in the wrong direction”

The national dissatisfaction is bipartisan. Most Americans, 85%, say the country is headed in the wrong direction. A majority of Republicans have been unhappy with the direction of the country since Biden’s election. Democrats had been positive about how things were going, but now 78% say the country is headed in the wrong direction.

I was astounded to see that 78 percent of Democrats believe that the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction with a Democrat in the White House.

I have never seen a number like that ever before.

But this is just another indication that the hour is late and that things are about to start getting really crazy out there.

For the moment, life is still at least somewhat normal in the western world.

Sadly, it won’t stay that way for long, and so I would recommend using your time wisely.

European road connectivity has been completely cut from Russian GPS maps

NATO sanctioned the world into self isolation. It is time for the civilized world to work and trade exclusively with each other without the crusader nations. 

By taking away Russian foreign reserve money and private assets at will, the crusaders alerted the civilized world that their currencies are untrustworthy. 

So, it is time for the civilized world to follow Putin the Great policy to stop accepting $, £, € as trading currencies as these currencies can become worthless anytime the looting civilization decided to take away from you. 

In Chinese language, the term currency is called 货币,货 is goods, 币 is money. The meaning is, only when a money able to established it trust worthiness and values in a market in exchange for goods and services, can be called currency. 

Apparently, putin the Great policy has effectively reduced the image of the crusaders currencies into its true form: untrustworthy, can become worthless anytime. The outcome is:

When The crusaders make a few hundred billions fast money from robbing the Russian reserved currency and private assets inside their countries, they alerted the world that their so-called currency are untrustworthy. So, in a foreseeable future, the crusaders will become more and more isolated from the rest of the world. Their economy will drastically reduced in size, and that they can no longer relying on printing money to maintain their economy. 

As a result , the money they print will turn into currency depreciation and domestic inflation as the civilized world no longer trust their currency. 

The speed of the crusader nations internal chaos and disintegration will be so fast that beyond most people expectations. 

The risk of the crusaders starting another world war is at all time high. However, my assessment is that, they have already lost the capability to win, so the chances of them starting another world war is reduced. Their economy will collapse sooner than they could start another war. 

Z: the number of days the crusaders live on looting the world is coming to an end:

Record numbers leaving Germany’s churches

Hundreds of thousands of people have resigned their memberships in Germany’s Protestant and Catholic churches. Fifteen years ago, 61% of Germans belonged to churches, a number that has now dropped below 50%.
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An important development toward the makeup of a new, new world order.
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Full article HERE

Chinese And Russian Navies Circle Japan In “Show Of Force”

This article is curious in that it displays the absolute ignorance of the writer. -MM

In yet another example of the increasingly close alliance between Russia and China, the Chinese Navy and Russia’s Pacific Fleet have been engaging in war game operations, seemingly in tandem around Japan, according to the Japanese Defense Ministry.

Reports of coordinated military exercises have not been officially acknowledged by Russia or China, though Japan continues to post regular updates on ship movements.  The naval exercises were apparently focused around the islands of Miyako and Okinawa, which hold 50,000 US forces, as well as a 70-mile wide corridor between the island of Yonaguni and Taiwan.

While not unheard of, military cooperation in the Pacific between Russia and China has grown in frequency, with naval exercises increasing over the past month.  While Japan calls these movements a “show of force,” they may very well be practice for a conflict planned in the near future.

After the recent BRICS summit in Beijing and the reaffirmation of China’s economic support of Russia during its war with Ukraine and NATO sanctions, it only makes sense that the economic relationship would evolve into at least a loose military agreement.  The latest decision on the induction of Sweden and Finland into NATO as well as naval escalation in the South Pacific are only going to drive Eastern interests closer together over time.

China is nursing a compulsive obsession when it comes to absorbing Taiwan into the CCP, and with the West overly focused on Russia and Ukraine, they may act soon.  If an invasion of Taiwan is planned it would have to take place sometime in September/October when weather conditions in the region are favorable to naval operations.  Leaked reports from Russian intel in March seem to indicate that a fall invasion of Taiwan was indeed in the works.  Some believe that the Russian war with Ukraine will force China to scuttle such plans, but there is also a chance that Ukraine will provide excellent cover for an action against Taiwan; forcing western governments to split their efforts and focus on two fronts instead of one.

The bigger question is:  Will Russia and China form an official military alliance?  There is no debate now over their trade alliance, but the notion of military cooperation between the two countries will lead many people to scoff.  Keep in mind, however, that there were numerous skeptics that argued only a week ago that the Turkish government under Erdogen would “never” agree to Finland and Sweden joining NATO, and yet that is exactly what they did.

The geopolitical landscape is changing fast and the old rules no longer seem to apply.

The Most Optimistic Woman On Wall Street Now Says That The U.S. Economy Has Entered A Recession

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Even the most wild optimists are starting to sound like “doom and gloomers”.  In fact, even the most optimistic woman on Wall Street is now telling us that the U.S. economy is in a recession right now.

At one time, Cathie Wood seemed like she could do no wrong.  Many of her wildly optimistic stock predictions kept coming true, and she gained hordes of Internet followers that hung on her every word.

In 2020, her ARK Innovation fund outperformed the S&P 500 by a very wide margin, and pundits such as Jim Cramer were calling her a “genius”

In 2020, Wood’s predictions appeared to be on their way to coming true. She was riding high atop the Fed-driven bull market: Her ARK Innovation fund, often known by its ticker as ARKK, returned some 157 percent during that first year of the pandemic, compared to just 18 percent for the S&P 500 as a whole. It was a legendary performance that drew accolades from various market watchers, including CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who in February of last year tweeted, “Cathie Wood is a genius.”

But these days Cathie Wood sounds like she could be writing for The Economic Collapse Blog.  The value of her ARK Innovation fund is down 67 percent over the past year, and she just did an interview with CNBC in which she stated that she believes that the U.S. economy has already plunged into a recession…

Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood said Tuesday that the U.S. is already in an economic downturn, and she admitted that she underestimated the severity and lasting power of inflation.

“We think we are in a recession,” Wood said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Tuesday. “We think a big problem out there is inventories… the increase of which I’ve never seen this large in my career. I’ve been around for 45 years.”

Of course she is far from alone.

Economist Stephen Moore also believes that the U.S. economy has entered a recessionary period…

Economist Stephen Moore warned on Monday that the United States is already in a “soft recession,” noting that the “real question” is now whether the Federal Reserve can achieve a soft landing.

Moore, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, provided the insight on “Varney & Co.” Monday, reacting to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers contradicting President Biden on Sunday by saying that a recession was “almost inevitable” in the next two years.

Peter Schiff is even more pessimistic.

In fact, he is using the word “crash” to describe what is ahead for our economy…

Stockbroker Peter Schiff, the chief economist and global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, went a step further a couple of weeks ago by tweeting that most citizens have given up on the thought of a soft landing for the economy after the Fed’s interest rate hikes and now expect a harder fall.

“The only landing possible is a crash, where everyone on board dies,” Schiff tweeted. “That’s why the Fed won’t even attempt to land and give up its pretend inflation fight.”

Sadly, all three of them are correct.

At the moment, what we are currently experiencing could definitely be described as a “soft recession”, and it will inevitably get a whole lot worse.

And U.S. consumers certainly are not hopeful about the future at this point.  On Friday, we learned that U.S. consumer confidence has now dropped to the lowest level ever recorded

A closely followed University of Michigan survey released Friday found that US consumer sentiment hit a new record low in June -— the lowest recorded level since the university started collecting the data 70 years ago.

The June index saw a 14.4% drop since May as consumers became increasingly alarmed about inflation. About 79% of those consumers said they expected bad times for business conditions in the upcoming year, the highest level for that metric since 2009.

Just think about that for a moment.

In 70 years, U.S. consumers have never been more pessimistic than they are right now.

That is incredible.

Unfortunately, most consumers are also highly vulnerable.

One recent survey found that 58 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.  So when harder times come and many start losing their jobs, a lot of them are going to be in financial trouble very rapidly.

The pace at which things are now changing really is breathtaking.

Exactly one year ago, it seemed like the U.S. economy was riding high and stock prices would keep going up forever.

But now it appears that the first half of 2022 will end up being the worst first half of a year for the stock market since 1970

Stocks are about to turn in the worst first half in fifty years when the second quarter wraps on Thursday as inflation sits at a 40-year high.

The S&P 500, the broadest measure of stocks, is down nearly 18% this year the worst since 1970, as tracked by Dow Jones Market Data Group. That makes 2022 the fifth-worst half performance on record.

Trillions upon trillions of dollars of paper wealth has already been wiped out, and we continue to get more bad economic news with each passing day.

And now that the Federal Reserve has decided to foolishly raise rates just as an economic downturn is picking up speed, there is no hope that things will turn around any time soon.

The reckless optimists on Wall Street didn’t see this coming in advance.  If Cathie Wood had understood which direction things were about to go, her fund would not be down 67 percent over the past year.

But of course there are countless others on Wall Street that have been hit extremely hard as well.

The end of a party can often come very abruptly.  In this case, many investors that didn’t get out in time are now feeling an extraordinary amount of pain.

Unfortunately, a lot more pain is coming for Wall Street and for the economy as a whole.

Irrelevance

People from the first world get weirded out when they go to the third world (and its enclaves in the first world) and see people kill each other over even the mildest slight. If you disrespect someone, meaning do not acknowledge their relevance, you have basically ranked them as worthless.

It is easy to make fun of these incidents until you understand why two pieces of chicken are worth killing for:

The 57-year-old victim said he took two pieces of chicken from another resident and ate them. Akron police said the other man became upset, grabbing the victim by the throat and throwing him to the floor.

Keeping with the chicken theme:

In a Monday, June 27, Facebook statement an MPD spokesperson added: “Officers were advised by the staff that a customer was upset about $2 worth of change and chicken sandwiches.”

“The suspect made threats to do bodily harm to the female employees, and knocked the cash registers off their stands onto the floor, causing $10,000 worth of damage.”

Chicken is serious business. If you get in a dispute over it, you may end up getting shot:

Around 8:30 p.m., two men pulled into the drive-thru lane of the KFC at 6301 15th Street E. in Sarasota and got into an argument with the restaurant’s employees at the window about the food they ordered, the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.

Minutes later, two employees left the restaurant and met the customers in the parking lot, where the argument escalated. During the dispute, one of the employees was shot, the sheriff’s office said.

These barbecue-related slayings seem to form a trope:

“He said the food was too cold and he just started getting a real bad attitude about it so we were like OK, OK, if you don’t want it, we will give your money back to you. So that’s what we did,” said Bautista.

“We started walking away and something told me to turn around. When I turned around he had gone inside the house and then comes back out and he had a gun,” said Bautista.

You want more chicken-related violence?

Bountiful Police say Suliafu’s father returned home with food for Suliafu. When he discovered the wings were not the variety he liked, Suliafu became upset and began arguing with his father. During the argument, police say Suliafu went into another room, retrieved a firearm from his father’s bag, and pointed the gun at his father.

The chicken-related carnage continues:

A female passenger in a car was reportedly involved in an altercation with employees over a spicy chicken sandwich.

After the altercation, the pair left then returned in the car, firing multiple shots from the road into the parking lot, the affidavit said.

And the stunner of chicken redrum:

That’s when police say Munn’s mother got into a heated argument over “guests getting too many pieces of chicken” with another family member, according to court documents.

The family continued the argument outside in the front yard, where police say Rogers pulled out two guns and shot Dandridge seven times.

If you are following the mainstream narrative, you should pretend to be shocked here. These are seemingly pointless crimes over things of low value, so a modern citizen sees them as laughably absurd risk of jail for almost no gain.

That is because modern societies do not understand our primitive origins as a human species.

In those egalitarian or communal hunter-gatherer societies that Leftist praise in the science magazines, in theory when there is a hunt or harvest the people who found the food bring it back and share it equally with everyone in the tribe.

But in reality, no food goes to those who are disrespected and irrelevant. At the very least, they stand in the back of the line because their social status is low. When food is scarce, they may simply die in the bush if they cannot snag some bush meat, pick fruit, or dig up edible roots.

Under ideal conditions, this process works to gradually exclude those who are incompetent. They are after all “useless eaters” who want part of the profits of the hunt or harvest, but are unable to provide anything of value on their own.

Some duck out of the process by being submissive. Homosexuals, for example, seem to exist in every society as a type of domestic help and source of labor for occupations shunned by aggressive males, like interior decorating and hair cutting.

Other males accept their low status and form a gang around someone more powerful. Their loyalty and henchman status buys them some of the food, although they are usually angling for more whenever their boss starts looking weak, old, or confused.

In this way the egalitarian tribe preserves hierarchy without formally doing so, which would offend its pretense of egalitarianism, which is how it keeps the tribe together. It is a soup line with a few added conditions, essentially, namely loyalty in time of attack.

But because this society handles redistribution, your public image matters more than reality. The reality is that you do not really care about chicken that much, but if someone disrespect you, your status will get lowered if you do not fight back right away.

Even if you lose and end up in the hospital, you retain your status as someone not to be messed with. If you walk away from a fight, everyone assumes that you were going to lose, and so they see you as a loser. Only those who enforce their status through pointless violence keep rising in the public eye.

In primitive hunter-gatherer societies and many tropical societies today, you become irrelevant unless you are willing to step up over even a mildly symbolic slight. Like superstition, symbolism manipulates human minds with the belief that the symbol can be a universal, absolute cause like magic or divinity.

In other words, you are the symbol. When your symbol ceases to mean a willingness to fight over trivial displays of status, you lose ground and are on your way toward irrelevance, starvation, and death. It was never about the fried chicken; it is about your standing in the community.

The third world manages image by violence generally because this is understandable by even lower-IQ populations like we see in the third world and underclasses of the first world. The top quarter of the Bell Curve in the first world uses a different quantum of measurement.

Where in the third world, individuals preserve status through violence, in the first world they manage their rank in the hierarchy by maintaining a group mental state of cooperation. When you make others feel hopeful about our ballistic trajectory, paranoid and superstitious egalitarianism, and inflated defensive sense of self-worth, then you gain status in the middle class West.

To do that is to be seen as relevant, where those who oppose the current System are seen as irrelevant because nothing that they say or do helps anyone get ahead in the current regime. If you instill good feelings in everyone, they quiet down and do the obvious necessary things, which makes you a hero of the Party or local equivalent.

When you exist in an egalitarian society, whether first world or third world, you have nothing permanent. Your role is subject to your obedience. Non-egalitarian societies do not have this problem because you exist in a niche and level of a hierarchy, so you always have a role and place.

Relevance in nature comes from structural overlap. Different species in an ecosystem are relevant to each other; ideas which form continuous thoughts addressing some aspect of reality show relevance. Ideas unrelated to reality connect to nothing enduring and are irrelevant.

When social pressures take over from thinking, a market for importance is created, as measured in popularity, media attention, wealth, and power, all of which combine to form a factor known as status. Unless you constantly generate status, you become irrelevant.

Egalitarian societies therefore tend to be narcissistic and shape people to be narcissists. Since everyone must manipulate others in order to have status, manipulation becomes the psychology of that society and everyone follows that lead because it succeeds in the System.

Eventually they become solipsists, or those who are entirely atomized and isolated from everything else. This makes them irrelevant, except in the eyes of others, so they become pathological manipulators who care nothing for those they manipulate or the results that are achieved.

In this way, society in its end stages divides into two groups. The solipsists want to avoid inner change, and they will demand any amount of power for others to give them meaning through external influences like politics, pop culture, ideology, and symbolic religions.

The other group, realists, want to escape all of the noise and get back to what is true and real in not just the world but their inner selves. Realism, since it forces thinking about consequences and end states, leads to an exploration of intuition to find what is good.

Most people simply want jobs. There they are told what to do, and if something goes wrong, no real consequences come their way, like starving on a farm because of a failure to produce food. They succeed by being narcissistic and manipulating others but this is easy and does not require inner change.

When enough people who simply want jobs appear in a society, which happens when it reaches success and also simultaneously loses sight of any objective because it has succeeded in its first objectives, it goes down the path to egalitarianism and narcissism.

At that point, relevance contradicts reality, and so you get this silly End of Rome type stuff where people stunt and try to be as outlandish as possible in order to draw attention to themselves. It is the same impulse as killing a man over fried chicken, just buried in layers of abstraction and neurosis.

Apple in-house 5G chip for iPhones fails – to continue with Qualcomm

Earlier today, well-known Apple analyst, Ming-Chi Kuo said that Apple’s 5G chip development may have failed. This means that the 2023 iPhones will still use Qualcomm chips. In fact, the American chip maker will still get 100% of Apple’s orders. According to previous reports from Kuo, Apple’s 2023 iPhones would use Apple-designed modem chips instead of Qualcomm chips. Furthermore, Otakara, citing sources from the industry chain claims that Apple has actually been developing its own baseband. However, this is a very long project. The source did not entirely describe it as a failure because it needs more time. The original plan is to use this chip in 2023 but this did not survive. Otakara claims that this is a delay in the production process.

According to Apple’s plan, it will use self-developed baseband chips next year, while TSMC is still their exclusive foundry. The chip will use the 5nm process with an annual production capacity of 120,000 pieces. In fact, Qualcomm hints that Apple’s in-house baseband will soon be put into use. The company also hints that its share of iPhone baseband orders will drop to about 20% in 2023.

Why is iPhone 5G baseband delaying

Regarding the reason for the delay, people in the industry chain claim that the baseband is different from other chips. Since the design and production are not direct, there is a need for testing in a full range of different operators. This process is long, and the pandemic did not help matters. All these are slowing down Apple’s progress.

In addition, the testing of Apple’s baseband by many operators around the world is also slower than Cook expected, so it will be postponed. At the close of U.S. stocks on March 29, Qualcomm (QCOM) shares rose 3.48% to $131.6 per share, with a total market value of $147.39 billion. One-day market capitalization increased by $4.95 billion. Apple (AAPL) fell 2.98% to $137.44 per share, with a total market value of $2.2 trillion, and a single-day market value of $68.3 billion evaporated.

Article HERE

Happy Cats, Coffee Shops And Carefree Times In TAO’s Cheerful, Detailed And Nostalgic Illustrations

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As she explains on her Tumblr profile, Sapporo-based illustrator TAO is particularly fond of cats, Showa Era things, and sneakers. With their cheerful tone and kawaii characters enjoying relaxing moments, coffee mug in hand, her artwork will surely put a smile on your face or dispel any clouds hanging over your head.

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Her most recent illustration perfectly encapsulates the feel-good, relaxing mood and Showa Era nostalgia that characterizes much of her work.

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The happy, relaxed mood and the cute cats are an obvious plus, but the nostalgia factor can largely be attributed to the cocktail table mahjong video game. Previously a fixture in most Japanese coffee shops, they’re all but extinct.

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Behind the Tin Curtain: BRICS+ vs NATO/G7

Slow-Cooker Baked Ziti

I don’t know one family that doesn’t have some crazy, hectic weeknights. This slow-cooker baked ziti recipe was a delicious, easy fix for a busy weeknight dinner for our family. —Christina Addison, Blanchester, Ohio

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Ingredients

  • 1 container (15 ounces) whole-milk ricotta cheese
  • 1 large egg, beaten
  • 1 teaspoon dried basil
  • 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, optional
  • 1 jar (24 ounces) meatless pasta sauce
  • 2 cups uncooked ziti
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
  • 1/4 cup minced fresh basil
  • Grated Parmesan cheese, optional

Directions

  1. In a small bowl, stir together ricotta cheese, egg, basil, and if desired, red pepper flakes; set aside. Pour pasta sauce into a 5-qt. slow cooker. Evenly top sauce with pasta; pour water over top. Drop heaping tablespoons of ricotta cheese mixture over pasta. Sprinkle with mozzarella cheese.
  2. Cover; cook on high until heated through and pasta is tender, 2 to 2-1/2 hours. Top with fresh basil and if desired, Parmesan cheese and additional red pepper flakes; serve immediately.

Chinese PLA Navy transport aircraft hold simulated landing on carrier, ‘indicate 3rd carrier to be equipped with cargo planes’

First in aircraft carrier history: Only deep thinker could come up with strategic deployment ideas beyond simply attack, bombing, and killing!

The crusaders simply cannot comprehend ideas beyond killing, bullying and looting…

China and Russia will change the currently unequal and brutal world controls by the crusaders within the next decade

Full article HERE

Poverty Rate in the United States

U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (CPS), Annual Social and Economic Supplements (CPS ASEC), Report P60-273: Income and Poverty in the United States: 2020-Current Population Reports (September 14, 2021):

Highlights, Poverty:

  • The official poverty rate in 2020 was 11.4 percent, up 1.0 percentage point from 10.5 percent in 2019. This is the first increase in poverty after five consecutive annual declines.
  • In 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019 .
  • Between 2019 and 2020, the poverty rate increased for non-Hispanic Whites and Hispanics. Among non-Hispanic Whites, 8.2 percent were in poverty in 2020, while Hispanics had a poverty rate of 17.0 percent. Among the major racial groups examined in this report, Blacks had the highest poverty rate (19.5 percent), but did not experience a significant change from 2019. The poverty rate for Asians (8.1 percent) in 2020 was not statistically different from 2019.
  • Poverty rates for people under the age of 18 increased from 14.4 percent in 2019 to 16.1 percent in 2020. Poverty rates also increased for people aged 18 to 64 from 9.4 percent in 2019 to 10.4 percent in 2020. The poverty rate for people aged 65 and older was 9.0 percent in 2020, not statistically different from 2019.
  • Between 2019 and 2020, poverty rates increased for married-couple families and families with a female householder.
  • The poverty rate for married-couple families increased from 4.0 percent in 2019 to 4.7 percent in 2020.
  • families with a female householder, the poverty rate increased from 22.2 percent to 23.4 percent. The poverty rate for families with a male householder was 11.4 percent in 2020, not statistically different from 2019.

NYT equates China’s health workers with Adolf Eichmann

A twisted narrative by a paper unhinged by China’s success with Covid-19

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In a article on the front page of The New York Times on January 13, reporter Li Yuan equated the public health and medical personnel behind China’s successful battle against Covid-19 in the city of Xian to Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the Holocaust. The article’s opening sentence views these personnel as typical of “the millions of people who work diligently toward” containing Covid-19 in China.

The anti-Covid campaign in Xian, a city of 13 million, has terminated the spread of Covid-19 without a single death and limited its spread to about 2,000 cases. The Nazi Holocaust designed and managed by Eichmann resulted in the extermination of millions of Jews.

The piece takes aim at the millions of Chinese who have worked tirelessly to do the rapid mass testing, tracing, quarantining and vaccinations and to staffing the lockdowns including ensuring that those under lockdown were supplied with necessities of life.

As a result of their work China has reported about 100,000 cases Covid-19 and fewer than 5,000 deaths. The mortality count has been verified by a count of excess deaths in a peer-reviewed article by a team from Oxford University and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the prestigious British Medical Journal; it is summarized here for the layman.

Peter Hessler, who was living and teaching in Chengdu, Sichuan, during the first of the lockdowns, described these workers as follows in a New Yorker piece in March 2020:

“When I asked if there had been much resistance to the new policies, he [the Communist Party official in charge of the lockdown in Hessler’s neighborhood in Chengdu] shook his head. ‘Ninety percent of the population agrees,’ he said. ‘We have some people who think it’s not convenient, and they want to go out and play mah-jongg or something. But most people follow the rules.’

“From what I had seen, he wasn’t exaggerating. The overwhelming compliance was one of the most impressive features of the lockdown, along with the dedication of grassroots officials. In Wuhan, the government had sent 1,800 teams of epidemiologists, each consisting of at least five people, to trace the contacts of infected citizens. The WHO report noted that the containment effort had been possible because of ‘the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action.’” (Emphasis added.)

Contrast that with this from Wikipedia’s entry on Eichmann:

“Eichmann and his staff became responsible for Jewish deportations to extermination camps, where the victims were gassedGermany invaded Hungary in March 1944, and Eichmann oversaw the deportation of much of the Jewish population. Most of the victims were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, where about 75% were murdered upon arrival.

“By the time the transports were stopped in July 1944, 437,000 of Hungary’s 725,000 Jews had been killed. Dieter Wisliceny testified at Nuremberg that Eichmann told him he would ‘leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had 5 million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.'”

How can the NYT’s Li Yuan equate the two? The polemic used to justify the equation deserves examination, because it demonstrates how the paper’s construction of the narrative of the day often works.

The tone and target are set by the online headline, which reads ominously, “The Army of Millions Who Enforce China’s Zero-Covid Policy, at All Costs.” (Emphasis added.) Later the case for the Eichmann equation begins as follows:

“The government has the help of a vast army of community workers who carry out the policy [of dynamic zero Covid] with zeal…. The tragedies in Xian have prompted some Chinese people to question how those enforcing the quarantine rules can behave like this.”

What are these tragedies? The author comes up with three presented near the very beginning of the piece.

First was a man with chest pains whose hospital admission was delayed by six hours and later died of a heart attack; the bureaucratic delay related to his living in a medium-risk district.

Second, a pregnant woman whose admission was also delayed because her Covid test appeared invalid; after admission she miscarried.

Third, a young man who was violating a curfew and got into an altercation with security guards.

Certainly, each of the first two these events is a tragic and unacceptable error. The third is hard to judge – if it is true. But in a city of many millions threatened with a deadly outbreak of the Delta variant of Covid, there were bound to be some mistakes. And if these are the worst of them, then it would seem that praise should be heaped on Xian’s hospital and public health workers.

Nevertheless, the first two of these incidents caused an outcry far and wide over the Internet, leading officials to take action. (Note that the disclosure and widespread discussion online belie the idea that there is no opening for criticism in China.)

The mass complaints led to the temporary closure of the hospitals to examine their procedures and ultimately to the punishing of those in charge. A national declaration made it clear that no patient was to be turned away from a hospital under any circumstances.

Building on these three anecdotes and neglecting any context up to this point, reporter Li continues:

“‘The banality of evil’ is a concept Chinese intellectuals often invoke in moments like Xian. It was coined by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote that Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, was an ordinary man who was motivated by ‘an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.’

“Chinese intellectuals are struck by how many officials and civilians – often driven by professional ambition or obedience – are willing to be the enablers of authoritarian policies.” 

Who are these unnamed “intellectuals”? That is not clear. Certainly, there are a good many Chinese intellectuals in the country and abroad who are proud of China’s handling of the pandemic.

In summary, the anatomy of the article is a headline, then a cherry-picked set of anecdotes to set the tone. It is important that this mood be set as arrestingly and strikingly as possible. The most outrageous exceptions to the rule must be presented as though they are the norm. Finally based on these anecdotes, far-fetched conclusions are drawn based on the assumption that the anecdotes are representative.

Later on, buried deep in the article some context may be slipped in as a way to cover the writer’s derriere. Noam Chomsky many years ago suggested reading the NYT’s articles beginning with the end, since that is where the real information may lie. Often, any such qualifications are left out, resulting in a giant lie of omission.

That is how it is done.

There is a bright spot, however. Many if not most of the comments posted online, at least at the time of my reading, found Li’s polemic to be baseless, even downright absurd. Americans are not so easily deceived as the NYT editors may think. This is heartening, because the daily demonization of China in the US mass media, relentlessly and prominently so in the NYT, is a prelude to conflict and war.

As author Caitlin Johnstone tells us, “Before they drop the bombs, they drop the narrative.”

The NYT is carpet-bombing us Americans with an anti-China narrative these days.

One must ask in the end, what is the animus that drives this anti-China diatribe? Is it fear of the loss of the US role as global hegemon? Is it the self-righteousness and arrogance of the Exceptionalists? Or is it simply careerism in the service of an evil agenda, the very thing Hannah Arendt deplored?

Istanbul connectivity the new Russia-EU transit hub

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis
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European road connectivity has been completely cut from Russian GPS maps in an illustration of how serious Moscow views the EU’s perspective of the Ukraine conflict, and further evidence that Russia views the EU import and export markets as ‘dead.’
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This of course has significant and long-term implications for all EU businesses conducting trade with Russia and vice-versa, and has made Istanbul (shown as a red dot) the new central point for EU-Russian trade. It is also the nearest and fastest access point between Russia and Europe. It is a 3.5 hour flight between Moscow and Istanbul, coupled with the required connecting flights between Istanbul and all European destinations.
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2021 EU-Russia bilateral trade had reached €257.5 billion, with nearly all of that now looking to be sourced from new routes. Dezan Shira & Associates Chairman, Chris Devonshire-Ellis, is currently in Turkiye looking at facilitation opportunities.
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Article HERE

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RADIOACTIVITY – KRAFTWERK – HD Live

Enjoy the stage show. LOL!

Iran, Argentina apply to join BRICS bloc after recent summit

China and Russia friendship circle continues to grow bigger and bigger.  Whereas the US and Europe friendship circle shrinks and thus, as we have observed, in the process of internal disintegration.

Article HERE

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Australia’s leading wine authority to close office in China as exports plunge

Australia’s leading wine authority to close office in China as exports plunge.
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Good riddance.

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Here’s proof of how fast the state of Florida is growing these days. Just wow.

Here is what is going on inside of Florida.

Vladimir Putin ally warns London ‘will be bombed first’ if World War 3 breaks out

Vladimir Putin ally warns London ‘will be bombed first’ if World War 3 breaks out. ‘It’s crystal clear that the threat to the world comes from the Anglo-Saxons,’ Andrey Gurulyov said.
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Emily Atkinson
5 days ago
London will be the first strategic Nato target to be hit by Russian missiles should a third world war erupt, a close ally of president Vladimir Putin has claimed.

Speaking on Russian state TV, Andrey Gurulyov, an MP who sits on Moscow’s defence committee, described how a possible full-scale invasion of Nato’s Baltic state members would work.

Paywall Article HERE

China’s colonial past is reflected in Semantics

For example, publicist Sima Nan, referring to the publications of a
famous mathematical scientist who appears on social networks under the
pseudonym Shanzhen Azhi, suggests that China’s colonial and
semi-colonial past is reflected in the way some Western countries are
referred to in modern Chinese. In a recent video posted on Chinese
social networks, Sima Nan, discussing China’s history, points out that
“once the Chinese sagged under Western pressure and consciously or
unconsciously began to praise overseas oppressors” and chose
semantically positive characters to name conquering countries. Without
going into the hieroglyphics and phonetic features of the Chinese
language, let us explain that, for example, the two hieroglyphs used to
write down the United States are translated as “Wonderful State”,
England as “Outstanding State”, France as “State of Law”, Germany,
respectively, as “State of Virtue”. The pious names of some European
powers and the United States, which once subjugated the decrepit
imperial China, were reflected in the minds of the Chinese.

According to Shanzhen Achzhi, England, which imposed the opium trade on
China, was called Outstanding, whereas it should have been called Opium,
leaving the sound, only changing the character. Virtuous Germany should
be renamed the Land of Knives, based on the crimes committed by the
“mustachioed artist” in the mid-20th century. We must discard the
incorrectly attributed “legitimacy” of French statehood, which until
very recently took part in the bombing of Libya, Iraq and Yugoslavia,
and assign it the homonymic character “fu” – which has an emotionally
colored negative meaning.

“American statehood, built on land taken from the native population,
would also do well to start writing it differently,” argues Sima Nan,
who questions the “beauty” of American history and the virtues of all
Western civilization. Of course, the above said is difficult to
understand for a foreigner not experienced in the wisdom of Chinese
hieroglyphics, but for the Chinese it all has deep meanings, i.e.,
speaking in a more understandable way – “as you call a boat, so it will
float” – the change of names of some European countries and the USA may
be followed by a revaluation of the whole Western civilization by the
Chinese.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, with the defeat in the Opium
Wars, China became politically, economically and, consequently,
culturally dependent on the West. Global changes in the political map of
the world at the end of the twentieth century expanded China’s economic
ties with the West, but again forced it to maneuver politically. All
this, coupled with the increased mobility of the population and the
advent of the Internet, had by the beginning of this century only
increased the foreign influence on Chinese culture, which seems to have
recently begun to cause open concern among thinking and patriotic
people. Examples of China’s reassessment of values and purging its
national culture of foreign influences abound.

At the end of May, the Chinese segment of the Internet posted about
teaching materials released by the People’s Education publishing house
in 2013 and reprinted many times in the following years. The mother
tongue textbooks used by Chinese schoolchildren for nearly 10 years
appeared to contain a lot of “ideological subversion,” in short: Asian
children in the textbook pictures have clear signs of Down syndrome,
while the blond children are cheerful, red-cheeked, and dressed nicely
and neatly. In the textbooks, the positive heroes have foreign names,
while the bad kids are called by Chinese names. Heroic deeds are done in
stories that took place in the West, and everything bad is given
explicit references to China, etc. As many believe, the “harmful
textbook” scandal is a manifestation of a fierce struggle between
feuding forces in China itself and foreign forces interested in a change
of power in the country.

15 Exquisite Illustrations Which Sum Up Perfectly How Much We Love Our Pets

Pets always fill our home with a carefree, cheerful, and joyful atmosphere, and they don’t expect anything in return. They’re quite simply devoted to us, every day, all day. If you’ve ever been luck enough to own one, then you understand what unconditional love means. You know this feeling from all those times when you waited the whole day to come back home and stroke your cat or pet your dog.

So, we collected the 15 sweetest illustrations we could find which we think really show the incredible depth of love we have for our feline and canine friends. Go and hug your cat or dog right now! They deserve it.

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F-35 Stealth Fighters ‘Suppressed’ By Russian Electronic Warfare; Missiles Fail To Hit Target

Unverified reports and videos by local Russian media claim that Israeli F-35 stealth fighters missed hitting their target due to electronic interference.

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The reports claim that Israeli jets missed their target because of robust electronic suppression, which disrupted the weapon systems of the Lockheed Martin F-35 jets. According to reports, neither aircraft could strike the target during the military drills, which Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett attended.

At the same time, the report notes that this demonstrates the severe vulnerability of the fifth-generation F-35 fighters to electronic countermeasures.

Parth Satam, a defense analyst at the EurAsian Times, says: the video shows an air-to-ground munition, reportedly fired from an F-35, missing its target, which the website claims are owing to Electronic Warfare (EW) interference from Russian systems.

While it certainly is true that Russian EW systems like the Krasukha-4 have been highly effective in jamming even US drones, Russia’s interference in Israeli military exercises within its territory seems highly unlikely.

The only situation where Russia would interfere in Israeli air operations is in Syria, where they have a deconfliction mechanism to allow IAF to strike Iranian targets. They also helped shoot down Israeli AGMs with the Buk-M2/3 supplied to the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) a few months ago.

But Russia would softly retaliate by electronically interfering in Israeli air operations only around its interests in Ukraine or Syria. The AviaPro report might be valid to the extent that GPS signal disruption has been observed in the Eastern Mediterranean since Russia specifically installed anti-drone and EW systems at its Khmeimem air base in Syria to protect from air and space surveillance.

Russian electronic jammers can disrupt signals from GLONASS, American GPS, European Galileo, and Chinese BieDou satellite navigation systems. Thus aircraft, drones, or missiles will see their GPS receivers go awry.

Even in March 2021, interference was reported on the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite, which some OSINT experts and telecommunications specialists concluded was radar interference. It was over the Black Sea region.

But assuming Russia did directly interfere in the Israeli domestic military drills, it could be because it calculated that the current tensions with Iran where Israel is trying to ramp up a regional coalition against it, conducting cyber attacks within the country and assassinating its military officers and nuclear scientists have gone out of hand.

Article HERE

Hiroshima ● 1985 ● Another Place (FULL ALBUM)

Enjoy this great background music…

NATO adopts tough line on China at Biden’s debut summit with alliance | Reuters

BRUSSELS, June 14 (Reuters) – NATO leaders warned on Monday that China presents “systemic challenges,” taking a forceful stance towards Beijing in a communique at Joe Biden’s first summit with an alliance that Donald Trump openly disparaged.

The new U.S. president has urged his fellow NATO leaders to stand up to China’s authoritarianism and growing military might, a change of focus for an alliance created to defend Europe from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The language in the summit’s final communique, which will set the path for alliance policy, came a day after the Group of Seven (G7) rich nations issued a statement on human rights in China and Taiwan that Beijing said slandered its reputation.

“China’s stated ambitions and assertive behaviour present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to alliance security,” NATO leaders said in the communique.

Biden also told European allies that the alliance’s mutual defence pact was a “sacred obligation” for the United States – a marked shift in tone from his predecessor, Trump, who had threatened to withdraw from the alliance and accused Europeans of contributing too little to their own defence.

“I want all Europe to know that the United States is there,” said Biden. “NATO is critically important to us.”

Full Article HERE

G7 Leaders’ Communiqué on June 28. The word “China” appears 14 times

From HERE

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian’s Regular Press Conference on June 29, 2022

2022-06-29 23:52

CCTV: The 48th G7 Summit released a Leaders’ Communiqué on June 28. The word “China” appears 14 times in the text, which is largely critical of China on matters concerning Hong Kong, Xinjiang, human rights, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, etc. What’s China’s comment?

Zhao Lijian: Despite China’s solemn position and firm opposition, the G7 used the Leaders’ Communiqué to peddle the “democracy versus authoritarianism” narrative, interfere in China’s internal affairs, attack and smear China, and incite confrontational sentiments. This shows that the G7 has no intention of having dialogue and cooperation on the basis of equality and mutual respect, that the G7 remains entrenched in its Cold War mentality and ideological bias, and that the G7 prefers bloc politics that serves the group’s own interests.

Hong Kong affairs are purely China’s internal affairs. Today, 25 years after Hong Kong’s return to the motherland, the democratic rights and freedoms of Hong Kong residents guaranteed by law are fully protected. The Chinese government governs Hong Kong in accordance with the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China and the Basic Law of the Hong Kong SAR. On human rights, the G7 countries, with their own record being far from perfect, have no authority to lecture others or use human rights issues as a political tool to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. By attacking and smearing China on topics such as Xinjiang and Tibet, they are simply showing the world their hegemonic nature and hypocrisy. There is but one China in the world and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory. The Taiwan authorities are pushing the “Taiwan independence” separatist agenda, and the US and a few other Western countries are using Taiwan to contain China. This is the greatest threat to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. China has the right to take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard our sovereignty and security. China has been firmly committed to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and a staunch defender of world peace and development and regional security and stability. This stands in sharp contrast with the US, a warmonger and wielder of illegal unilateral sanctions.

The G7 members have benefited the most from globalization. As such, they have a special responsibility to promote globalization, boost world economic growth and tackle global economic and financial challenges. However, at a critical juncture in the global pandemic response and economic recovery, the G7, rather than committing to solidarity and cooperation, is preoccupied with stoking division and confrontation and has shown absolutely no sense of responsibility or moral authority. I must also point out that for a group which accounts for about one tenth only of the world’s population, the G7 has no authority to speak for the whole world, still less to present its own values and standards as universal values and standards.

We urge the G7 to earnestly step up to its responsibility and due international obligations, uphold true multilateralism, and stop applying double or even multiple standards, stop causing confrontation and division, stop discrediting and slandering China, and stop all forms of meddling in China’s domestic affairs.

China Daily: French writer Maxime Vivas recently published his new book Les Divagations des Antichinois en France, or The Ramblings of Anti-China Forces in France. In this book, he has unmasked anti-China organizations like the World Uyghur Congress, the National Endowment for Democracy, and Human Rights Watch and wrote about how they made and spread lies against China with funding from the CIA. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: I have seen relevant reports and noticed that Mr. Vivas said in an interview that he has faced repeated attacks, threats and slanders for his work on debunking the lies of Western anti-China forces.

Over the years, the US and some Western countries have sought to manipulate international public opinion through propaganda machines and made up numerous lies on Xinjiang-related issues. These countries have not only been oblivious to the authoritative facts made available to the public by China, but also jointly attacked people like Mr. Vivas who speak the truth, and launched political witch-hunts against them. Is this what they call “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press”? No, this is 21st-century McCarthyism.

No matter what the anti-China forces do, nothing can hide the truth and reality from the world. Recently, Australian scholar Jaqueline James released reports on Xinjiang-related anti-China propaganda materials published by ASPI, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. She debunked and questioned the numerous lies and fallacies in those articles with detailed analysis. She asked these organizations to answer honestly whether their donors are paying for human rights advocacy or a “China bad” story?

More people have now joined the effort to expose the fact that individuals and organizations like ASPI are funded by the US and Australian governments to falsely accuse and smear China. We believe that more and more thoughtful people will see through the dishonorable action of the US and some Western countries, who use Xinjiang to contain China and spread rumor and lies about China. We believe people will choose to stand on the side of justice and truth.

MASTV: US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that NATO’s Strategic Concept will speak very directly and in a clear-eyed way to the multifaceted challenge posed by China. The number-one priority with respect to China, when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, is that China not become militarily supportive of Russia through the provision of equipment. Number two is that they not engage in undermining or evasion of US sanctions. He added that China has the responsibility to urge Russia to cease fire. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: We have made our position clear on the developments concerning China with regard to NATO’s Strategic Concept. NATO has publicly stated on many occasions that it will remain a regional alliance, it does not seek a geopolitical breakthrough and it does not seek to expand to other regions. However, in recent years, NATO has repeatedly made forays into the Asia-Pacific region. Some NATO member states keep sending aircraft and warships to carry out military exercises in China’s nearby waters, creating tensions and fanning up disputes. NATO has sought to make advances into new areas and domains and clamored for bloc confrontation. The world needs to keep its vigilance and firmly reject it. NATO should stop drawing ideological lines, stoking political confrontation, or seeking to start a new Cold War. It should discard the Cold War mentality and zero-sum game mindset and stop making enemies. NATO has already disrupted Europe. It should not seek to destabilize Asia and the world.

I want to stress that China consistently opposes unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdictions that have no basis in international law or mandate from the Security Council. Reality has shown that toughening sanctions is not an effective way to resolve conflict, nor can a continuous supply of weapons bring peace. The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict has taken a heavy toll on Europe politically, economically and socially, while the US benefits from it, with arms-dealers popping champagne and American grain and energy industries making exorbitant profits.

As the one who started the Ukraine crisis and the biggest factor fueling it, the US needs to reflect on its disreputable role it has played in the Ukraine crisis and stop smearing China.

CRI: We noticed that a report from the US Department of the Interior last month said a large number of Native American children died at Indian boarding schools. After that, more and more survivors and their descendants have spoken out and accused the US government of genocide against American Indians. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: We are deeply sympathetic to the tragic experience of the Native American children. Those so-called boarding schools that carried the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man” were in essence crime scenes of the US cultural genocide against Native Americans. What happened at these schools is also important evidence of the racial genocide committed by the US against Native Americans. More and more facts have come to light and shown that the US committed systemic genocide against Native Americans in three dimensions, which has lasted hundreds of years and continues to this day.

First, the US has committed physical genocide against the Native American population. Statistics show that since its independence in 1776, the US government has launched over 1,500 attacks on Indian tribes to slaughter the Indians. Before the arrival of white settlers in 1492, there were five million Indians, yet the number plummeted to 600,000 by 1800 and only 237,000 in 1900. Among them, more than a dozen tribes, such as the Pequot, Mohegan, and Massachusetts, were completely extinct. The US government also applied forced sterilization to Indians. Between 1930 and 1976, the US Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly sterilized approximately 70,000 Indian women through the “Indian Health Service program”. In early 1970s, more than 42% of Indian women of childbearing age were sterilized.

Second, the US has committed spiritual and cultural genocide against Native Americans. They have long suffered hostility, discrimination and oblivion. The inter-generational inheritance of indigenous spirits and culture of Native Americans have long been hindered. In the 1870s and ’80s, the US government adopted a policy of “forced assimilation” to obliterate the social fabric and culture of Indian tribes and destroy the ethnic and tribal identity of the Indians. To attain the dual goal of cultural assimilation and taking Indian lands for itself, the US government began with forcing Native American children into the Indian boarding schools, banning them from speaking their native language, wearing their traditional clothes, or carrying out traditional activities. The children also suffered serious abuse and torment. US-based scholar Preston McBride estimates that the total number of deaths could be as high as 40,000, adding that “basically every school had a graveyard.” Even today, the US is still trying to deliberately obliterate the historical memory and information of the indigenous people in education and media reports. According to a report by National Indian Education Association, 87% of state-level US history textbooks do not mention the post-1900 history of indigenous people.

Third, the US has committed deprivation of the rights of Native Americans. The US has systematically deprived Native Americans and other ethnic minorities of a wide range of their rights, leaving them mired in a crisis of survival and scarcity of rights. A report by the Indian Health Service shows that Native Americans born today have a life expectancy that is 5.5 years less than the national average, and they have the highest infant mortality rate. The suicide rate of Native American adolescents is 1.9 times that of the national average. By June 2022, the COVID-19 mortality rate among Native Americans is about 2.1 times that of the White population. From 1969 to 2009, the US government conducted 928 nuclear tests in the Shoshone tribal region, resulting in nuclear fallout of around 620 kilotons. Cancer incidence rate in Native Americans’ reservations is far higher than other areas. High levels of radioactive substance has been detected in the systems of about a quarter of Navajo women and infants. According to 2018 US Census Data, the poverty rate among Native Americans was 25.4%, far higher than 8.1% among the White population.

Genocide against Native Americans is an original sin of the US that can never be erased. The untold tragedies of Native Americans should never be forgotten. The US government has every reason to admit its crimes of genocide against Native Americans, and offer sincere apologies and repentance to the victims and their descendants. The US government should also credibly make up for the trauma Native Americans are suffering, and seriously face up to grave human rights issues and crimes of racism that exist within the US.

Reuters: On the topic of NATO, leaders of South Korea and Japan will attend NATO Summit as observers for the first time. North Korean media said that this is a dangerous prelude to the creation of an Asian version of NATO. Does China share this view?

Zhao Lijian: I have just restated China’s position on NATO. For years, NATO has sought to make advances into new areas and domains and clamored for bloc confrontation. The world needs to keep its vigilance and firmly reject it.

Peace, development and cooperation represents the trend of the times and the shared aspiration of people around the world. Anyone who clings to the Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice, encourages bloc confrontation and form small circles or blocs will receive no support and will not succeed.

CCTV: According to reports, at least 50 illegal migrants were found dead in San Antonio, Texas on June 27 local time. UN Secretary-General’s press office expressed sadness on this. Do you have any comment? 

Zhao Lijian: I have noted the reports. The tragedy is heartrending. What is even more regrettable is that such tragic deaths of migrants did not happen by accident in the US.

According to statistics, US law enforcement authorities arrested about 1.7 million migrants at the US southern border with Mexico for fiscal year 2021, a record high for 20 years. That included roughly 145,000 minors. The US locks up migrants in detention centers with dreadful living conditions, where migrants are often subject to abuse, violence and other types of inhumane treatment. The US’s brutal law enforcement led to 557 migrant deaths during fiscal year 2021, more than doubling the figure for fiscal year 2020. Amid COVID-19, the US speeded up the repatriation of tens of thousands of COVID-infected illegal migrants despite international opposition. This directly worsened the pandemic situation in many Latin American countries.

The US needs to seriously reflect on and address its poor track record on migrant issues, take concrete actions to protect human rights and other basic rights of migrants, and prevent such tragedies from happening again.

CNR: Newsweek recently cited a study published by the Denmark-based Alliance of Democracies Foundation and Germany-based Latana data tracking firm, which shows that in the US, only 49% of those asked said their country was a democracy and some 63% said their government mainly serves the interests of a minority. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: The results show that in the eyes of the majority of the American people, the US-style democracy equals democracy for the minority and money-based democracy. What ties the minority to the government is nothing else but money.

Mark Hanna, a US Senator, hit the nail on the head over a century ago when he said, “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.” Today, the US is spending increasingly larger sums on money-based democracy. The amount of money spent on presidential and congressional campaigns in the 2020 election reached $14 billion, more than doubling that of 2016. American writer Roxane Gay once said that in the US, “policy is sold to the highest bidder”. Obviously, in the game of money-based democracy, it is the politicians and those holding the purse strings who are the true beneficiaries of elections while the general public is merely the background.

The big money the US spends on election campaigns stands in sharp contrast to the country’s yawning wealth chasm. According to statistics from the Federal Reserve, last year, the wealth of America’s top 1% hit $45.9 trillion, more than that of the bottom 90% combined. Between 1990 and 2021, the combined wealth of US billionaires increased 19-fold, while US median wealth only increased by 5.37%. More than 40 million people live in poverty in the US. Nearly 20% of all US households say they lost all their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak and more than 60,000 people had to live on the streets after losing their homes.

When people are only allowed to get involved during elections and get brushed aside after casting their ballots, when people are showered with tantalizing promises on the campaign trail and completely lose their voice after the vote, when people are courted before elections and ignored afterwards, it’s not true democracy. US elections may appear to follow the “one person, one vote” rule, but in reality it’s more like “one dollar, one vote”, “one post, one vote”, and “one advertisement, one vote”. No wonder it has been said that the US-style democracy is fake democracy. The US government is now of, by and for only 1% of the US population. Such a government would eventually lose the trust of its people.

Xinhua News Agency: We have learned that the Taiwan authorities failed to sneak into the UN Ocean Conference by trying to become part of the Tuvalu delegation. What is your comment?

Zhao Lijian: We have stated our position on the issue yesterday. I would like to reiterate that there is only one China in the world and Taiwan is part of China. The one-China principle is a basic norm in international relations and the shared understanding of the international community. It is also a fundamental principle affirmed in UNGA Resolution 2758. Certain country ignored the one-China principle and the overriding trend in the world. It facilitated the personnel of the Taiwan authorities to wedge into the conference, and deliberately hyped up this matter. China is firmly opposed to this. China practices true multilateralism and supports parties in attending the UN Ocean Conference in accordance with relevant laws and rules. We welcome the steps taken by the party concerned to correct the mistake and return to the conference. It is important that the conference focuses on the sustainable development of the ocean.

I also want to say that the Taiwan authorities will only bring disgrace to itself when it stoops to joining a foreign entourage in order to tag along and wedge into international conferences.

Dragon TV: According to reports, when talking about China’s COVID response in a recent interview with German media, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that unlike authoritarian state, it takes a while for democracy to respond to major issues, but by the end, they will get resolved. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: China follows the dynamic zero-COVID approach. We have curbed the spread of the virus at top speed and with minimum cost. We have provided maximum protection to people’s lives and health and minimized COVID’s impact on socioeconomic development. This is the responsible thing to do for the Chinese people and for the world. For over two years since COVID first hit, the infection rate and mortality rate in China have remained the lowest in the world. At the same time, China’s economy has maintained steady growth on the whole. That’s why we say China’s epidemic prevention and control policy is science-based, correct and effective, and it has been a responsible choice for the Chinese people.

The UK is among the first countries in the world to opt for “herd immunity”. But the cost for that is 22.61 million infections and 180,000 deaths. I noticed that according to media reports, a report published following an inquiry by two parliamentary committees last year found that the UK’s apparent decision to allow COVID to spread throughout the population in a bid to achieve “herd immunity” is a big mistake, which also delayed a comprehensive lockdown and could be called one of the country’s worst ever public health failures.

Countries may differ in their national realities, but that should not stop governments from taking a responsible approach to fighting COVID-19. China has no intention to compare or compete with any country in terms of the way we deal with the virus, but we hope the UK side will put China’s approach to COVID-19 into proper perspective. To propagate the narrative of “democracy vs. authoritarianism” in the context of COVID-19 would only lead to more mistakes and could take an even heavier toll on the people.

Bloomberg: Reuters has reported that China wants to host the video meeting with the ten nations of the Pacific Islands Forum during their gathering next month. Do you have any details to provide on this and have the specific islands nations agreed to this request?

Zhao Lijian: I answered this question yesterday. China-Pacific Island Countries relations enjoy sound development. We have maintained close exchanges and cooperation between government departments, legislatures, political parties, civil groups and local governments. As for the specific event you mentioned, I would refer you to the competent authorities.

MASTV: Following the inauguration ceremony of the Padma Multipurpose Bridge on June 25 in Bangladesh, Chinese Ambassador to Bangladesh Li Jiming said in an interview that the project is a milestone of China-Bangladesh cooperation. It will connect with other projects under the Belt and Road Initiative and serve as an important link between China and the Trans-Asian Railway. Could you share more details with us?

Zhao Lijian: We congratulate Bangladesh on the opening of the Padma Multipurpose Bridge. In recent years, under the leadership of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh has focused on economic and social development and improving people’s livelihood, and continues to strengthen infrastructure construction. It is on track to graduate from the UN’s Least Developed Countries list soon with remarkable achievements. The Padma Bridge is funded by the Bangladeshi government and constructed by a Chinese company. Having been inaugurated, the bridge will now further connect Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, with the southern and southwestern parts of the country and inject new impetus into Bangladesh’s economic development.

Reuters: The United States added five Chinese companies to a trade blacklist for allegedly supporting Russia’s military. Has China made checks into these five companies to verify whether they had sold goods to Russia’s military? 

Zhao Lijian: The US sanctioned and blacklisted Chinese companies for alleged support to Russia’s military and defense industrial base. This has no basis in international law, nor is there a mandate of the UN Security Council allowing such moves. This is another example of US unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction. China firmly opposes that and has lodged a strong demarche to the US side.

China and Russia conduct normal economic and trade cooperation on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit. This should not become the target of any intervention or restriction by a third party. In handling its relations with Russia, the US must in no way undermine China’s legitimate rights and interests.

We urge the US to rectify these measures at once, revoke the sanctions and stop imposing long-arm jurisdiction and unilateral sanctions on Chinese businesses. China will take all necessary measures to resolutely protect lawful rights and interests of Chinese companies.

Follow-up: Is China willing to let independent auditors check these companies to ascertain whether they had sold goods to Russia? Is it China’s position that even if the companies had sold goods to Russia’s military, they should not be sanctioned?

Zhao Lijian: I have stated China’s full position on this just now. What the US needs to do is to revoke the sanctions and stop imposing long-arm jurisdiction and unilateral sanctions on Chinese businesses. There is no basis for the US to slap sanctions on Chinese companies by citing domestic laws. China firmly opposes this.

Phoenix TV: The White House on June 28 released the fact sheet titled The United States Continues to Strengthen Cooperation with G7 on 21st Century Challenges, including those Posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It reads that the G7 will include a commitment that represents their values as G7 partners compete with China and calls on G7 to remove all forms of forced labor from global supply chains, such as in Xinjiang. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: The international community is now at a crucial juncture of combating COVID-19 and striving for economic recovery. The G7 needs to be open and inclusive, strengthen solidarity and cooperation with other parties, and take due responsibility to respond to global challenges, uphold true multilateralism and promote world economic recovery. The world needs the G7 to make positive contribution to world peace and development, instead of clinging to the Cold War mentality and ideological bias, or drawing ideological lines and forming small circles and blocs to promote bloc politics, antagonism and confrontation.

I also want to stress that the so-called “forced labor” in Xinjiang is a huge lie made by anti-China forces to smear China. Their allegations do not stand up to scrutiny given the reality that the labor rights and interests of people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang are duly protected. For some time, to use Xinjiang to contain China, the US has been rehashing the false narrative of “forced labor” and seeking to engender forced unemployment in Xinjiang and make the world decouple with China. It is clear enough that the US is a hegemonic power that tramples human rights and rules in the name of protecting them. The US chooses to ignore facts and seeks to curb the development of Xinjiang and China as a whole. It has deliberately damaged international economic and trade rules, and disrupted international industrial and supply chains. China firmly opposes this. We will resolutely defend the lawful rights and interests of Chinese companies and citizens. None of these US attempts will succeed.

Phoenix TV: Nepali President Bidya Devi Bhandari has appointed Bishnu Pukar Shrestha as the new ambassador to China. What is China’s comment?

Zhao Lijian: China welcomes the new Nepali ambassador to China, and looks forward to his assumption of the post at an early date. China and Nepal are connected by mountains and rivers, and enjoy an ever-lasting friendship. China is ready to work with Nepal to follow through on the important consensus of the leaders of the two countries, deepen political mutual trust, promote mutually beneficial cooperation, and elevate the strategic partnership of cooperation featuring ever-lasting friendship for development and prosperity to new heights.

China News Service: An official of the US National Security Council said on June 29 that the US isn’t asking countries in Latin America to pick between working with the US or China. The US is putting forward support that China and Russia can’t offer. It is committed to supporting democracy and reforming multilateral development banks, which contrasts with a lack of transparency in Chinese investments, as well as Chinese vaccines that were sold rather than donated. He also drew a distinction between the US practice and China’s focus on buying commodities from the region. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: China has always pursued cooperation in a wide range of areas with Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries in line with the principles of mutual respect, equality, mutual benefit, openness and inclusiveness and on the basis of respecting each other’s needs and interests. We do not attach any political strings to such cooperation, nor do we make empty promises to these countries. We have honored our words and brought tangible benefits to the people of both sides.

Since the US official tried to make a comparison between the practices of China and the US, perhaps I should reciprocate. In the case of COVID response cooperation, for instance, there is indeed a distinction between China and the US. While busy dealing with the COVID situation at home, the US did the opposite of helping Latin America by prohibiting some companies from exporting N95 masks to countries in Latin America and seizing or intercepting ventilators and other medical supplies purchased by Latin American countries during their transit in the US. By stark contrast, China overcame its own difficulties and took the lead in providing vaccines to Latin America and other developing countries. For many countries in the region, Chinese vaccines are the first vaccines they received, and the only vaccines they could obtain for many months that followed.

China believes that different countries can carry out cooperation with LAC countries in a mutually non-exclusive, complementary and reinforcing way. If the US truly cares about the opinion of the region, it should abandon the Monroe Doctrine and hegemonic practice as soon as possible, and act upon what it has said about not asking LAC countries to pick between China and the US, instead of saying one thing and doing another, still less publicly or privately attacking and smearing China or sowing discord between China and LAC countries and hampering China-LAC cooperation.

NATO invites Finland, Sweden to join and eyes ‘direct threat’ from Putin amid Ukraine war

NATO has now officially invited Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, a sign of just how dramatically the Kremlin's war has upended the previous military landscape in Europe.

Earlier in the day, at the start of a summit in Madrid, President Joe Biden announced an increased U.S. military presence in Europe headlined by the first permanent American forces on NATO’s eastern flank and more rotating troops in the Baltic states.

The Western alliance also called Russia its "most significant and direct threat" in a joint statement, a notable shift from its description of Moscow as a "strategic partner" a decade ago.

Article HERE

Putin condemns NATO’s ‘imperial ambitions’, warns Finland, Sweden

Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned NATO’s “imperial ambitions”, accusing the military alliance of seeking to assert its “supremacy” through the Ukraine conflict.

The Russian leader also said on Wednesday that he would respond in kind if NATO deployed troops and infrastructure in Finland and Sweden after the two Nordic countries join the military alliance.

Putin made his comment a day after NATO member Turkey lifted its veto over the bid by Finland and Sweden to join the alliance when the three nations agreed to protect each other’s security.

Helsinki and Stockholm joining NATO marks one of the biggest shifts in European security in decades.

“With Sweden and Finland, we don’t have the problems that we have with Ukraine. They want to join NATO, go ahead,” Putin told Russian state television after talks with regional leaders in the central Asian ex-Soviet state of Turkmenistan.

“But they must understand there was no threat before, while now, if military contingents and infrastructure are deployed there, we will have to respond in kind and create the same threats for the territories from which threats towards us are created,” he said.

Moscow’s relations with Helsinki and Stockholm would inevitably sour over their NATO membership, he added.

“Everything was fine between us, but now there might be some tensions, there certainly will,” Putin said.

“It’s inevitable if there is a threat to us.”

Article HERE

India Cement Maker Pays For $26m Russian Coal Cargo in Yuan

Dollar as world reserve currency is built on trust, however, the moment the crusaders looted Russian foreign currency reserve in their banks, the trust is gone. When trust is gone , the world will begin to turn away from the dollar and the Euro. The RMB will replace the dollar as the world number one reserve currency sooner than people can imagine.
India’s biggest cement producer is to pay for a $26 million cargo of Russian coal with Chinese yuan.

In what could be a groundbreaking move, UltraTech Cement’s purchase could help insulate Moscow from the effects of western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine if others follow its lead.

It could also bolster Beijing’s push to further internationalise its currency and chip away at the dominance of the US dollar in global trade.
US economy is in big trouble.

Full article HERE

Stealth Killer! Russia’s Rezonans-NE Radar That Can Track F-35 Jets Deep Inside Finland & Norway Begins Construction — Reports

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Russia has reportedly begun constructing a Rezonans-NE VHF radar on the hilltop of Korzunova air base, presumably to counter the F-35 fighter jets of the United States and its allies.  

The location for installing the Rozonans-NE radar was first announced in 2020. According to the most recent claims, the construction work has been going on since July 2021, as seen in the latest satellite images.

The facility is located near the Zapolyarny, a mining town about 10 kilometers from Russia’s border with Norway. The facility comprises four radar modules covering 90 degrees and can scan an entire circular area.

According to reports, the complex is without rotating antennas and has a transmit antenna-feeder and elevation antenna-feeder devices, as well as radar data receiving and processing systems. 

Once finished, the radar will have a sufficient field of operation to keep an eye on the skies above Rovaniemi in Finland and Evenes airport in Norway. These two places are current and future bases for the F-35.

NATO already has a pair of F-35 fighter jets at Evenes. These jets are assigned for Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) missions to intercept Russian aircraft flying out of the Kola Peninsula. The first of Finland’s F-35s, scheduled to enter service in 2025, will be based in Rovaniemi.

In 2020, a Rozonans-NE radar system sold to Iran, according to the Russian state-affiliated news agency TASS, had effectively located and tracked American F-35 fighter jets just outside the country’s borders.

The new radar is one of at least six similar systems that have already been installed or will soon be installed along Russia’s Arctic coastline, from the Kola Peninsula in the west to the Bering Strait in the east. 

Rozonans-NE Radar

The radar system can identify and follow even the most complicated air targets. The Rezonans-NE is a high frequency [VHF] early warning phased-array radar.

It is intended to detect various present and potential air targets, including low-observable cruise and ballistic missiles, hypersonic aircraft, and stealth aircraft, in environments with strong electronic countermeasures (ECM) and clutter.

The radar can run in a predetermined sector or circular scan mode. In addition to tasks for peacetime, it can provide information support for air and air defense warfare operations as well as an early warning of an air attack. 

The Rezonans-NE has four radar modules, each of which can operate independently and offers control in an azimuth sector of 90 degrees. The radar module includes transmit, azimuth, elevation antenna feeders, and the power amplifier. 

The radar’s data reception and processing system collects and processes data in the four modules. The radar data receiving and processing apparatus, as well as the probe signal generator, are digital devices controlled by specialized processors. The four-module radar, which covers a 100 x 100-meter area, scans a 360-degree sector.

Yuri Knutov, a Russian military expert, previously stated that Rezonans-NE is a highly effective radar system that incorporates artificial intelligence components. This technology enables the station to simulate an electronic image of a target and precisely identify its type with flight parameters.

The Resonance-N radar’s technical capabilities enable it to identify and designate targets at distances up to 600 km for aerodynamic air targets and up to 1,200 kilometers for ballistic targets. The system finds targets at up to 100 kilometers in altitude simultaneously.

The “Resonance-N” radar is being developed in modules. It significantly lowers the cost of its production because all of the station’s nodes are assembled into special containers afterward. The station has a friend-or-foe target recognition system and can function reliably in winds up to 50 m/s at the lowest and highest air temperatures.

During combat operations, the radar is said to be able to track more than 500 targets simultaneously, giving early warning of an air attack and informing aviation and anti-aircraft defense systems about the air situation. The system does not have rotating antennas, typically used to provide all-around visibility. 

Rezonans-NE is typically set up on the ground as a square of four modules. However, the radar can be built in one-module, two-module, or three variants with viewing segments of 90°, 180°, and 270°, respectively, upon the customer’s request.

This system is also exported to a few countries. Presently, the system has already been acquired by Egypt and Iran. Algeria is also said to be a user of this system. It is assumed that the Egyptian Resonance-NE radar monitors all objects in the airspace over Israel, Syria, and other countries besides Egypt.

In Huawei Battle, China Threatens Germany ‘Where It Hurts’: with German Automakers

It’s no longer possible to hurt China without being hurt BADLY in retaliation.

VW, Daimler and BMW sell more cars in China than anywhere else and many already cooperate with Huawei — a dependency Beijing is not shy to exploit.

NYT Paywall. Article HERE

China Orders Government, State Firms to Replace Foreign Computers – Bloomberg

China has ordered central government agencies and state-backed corporations to replace foreign-branded personal computers with domestic alternatives within two years, marking one of Beijing’s most aggressive efforts so far to eradicate key overseas technology from within its most sensitive organs.

Staff were asked after the week-long May break to turn in foreign PCs for local alternatives that run on operating software developed domestically, people familiar with the plan said. The exercise, which was mandated by central government authorities, is likely to eventually replace at least 50 million PCs on a central-government level alone, they said, asking to remain anonymous discussing a sensitive matter.

Article HERE

RCMP admits they hack Canadians’ devices to spy on them

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In a breathtaking admission, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) say they’ve secretly used spyware on Canadians’ devices to get audio and visual recordings of Canadians without their knowledge.

According to sources, the RCMP claim they only use such spyware in the most “serious cases,” such as when there are national security concerns. However, this is the first time the RCMP has openly admitted that they infiltrate mobile devices to collect data, despite having access to the technology for years.

Their admission came after a Conservative MP questioned what government programs are used to gather data on Canadians last week.

“This is a kind of capability that they have done everything possible to keep incredibly quiet,” said UofT senior research associate Christopher Parsons.

“This is a remarkable finding and, for the first time, publicly reveals that the RCMP is using spyware to infiltrate mobile devices, as well as the broad capabilities of their spyware.” Parsons continues, saying that many security experts have been aware of these capabilities but that this is the first time the RCMP has admitted it. He added that this “is the cleanest, most straightforward explanation of what they’re capable of doing that I’m aware of.”

The RCMP claims it only used this technology in 10 investigations between 2018 and 2020.

According to the submitted RCMP document, the decision to use spyware to infiltrate Canadians’ personal devices is in response to new encryption services that make it difficult for officers to conduct court-authorized electronic surveillance.

“In less than a generation, a high number of Canadians migrated their daily communications from a small number of large telecommunication service providers, all of which provided limited and centrally controlled services to customers, to countless organizations in Canada and elsewhere that provide a myriad of digital services to customers,” the document reads.

“That decentralization, combined with the widespread use of end-to-end encrypted voice and text-based messaging services, make it exponentially more difficult for the RCMP to conduct court-authorized electronic surveillance.”

As for the scope of the spyware used, the technology can gather pictures, videos, calendar entries, financial records, audio recordings, text messages, private communications, and “photographic images of persons, places and activities viewable by the camera(s) built into the targeted device.”

What is not being said is that [1] the technology to spy was obtained from the United States, and [2] none of the Huawei systems and towers could be "backdoored". -MM

The Economist rephrases controversial article comparing the amount of food consumption by Chinese with pigs

By GT staff reporters
Published: Jun 30, 2022 04:02 PM
The Economist rephrases controversial article, clarifies it never intended to cause offense amid accusations of racism - Global Times

Full article HERE

The Economist magazine has rephrased the controversial comparison featured in one of their articles that compares pigs to Chinese people and clarified that it was not intended to cause offense, which, however, failed to convince Chinese netizens outraged by such racist and dehumanizing language.

On Thursday, in an email reply to the Global Times, the magazine writes: "As our intention was never to cause offence, we have rephrased the article to make our meaning absolutely clear."

"In a Graphic setting out how most of the world's grain is fed to animals or used to make biofuel, we observed that 431m tonnes of grain is eaten by pigs and that, if it were a stand-alone country, this would rank at the very top of the league tables for grain consumption. By way of comparison, we pointed out that this is 45% more than the real-life country that consumes the most rice and wheat, which is China," The Economist explained in the email. 

The Economist said it had rephrased the article and attached a note at the bottom after being "contacted by Chinese readers, who object to the comparison."

 

The now-deleted content was part of an article titled "Most of the world's grain is not eaten by humans" published on June 23. 

"In 2019 pigs ate 432m tonnes of grain, 45% more than the people of China did," it read.

On Thursday, the Global Times found that the comparison has been rephrased to "According to our calculations, if the world's pig population were a stand-alone country, it would rank at the very top of grain-consumption league tables, chomping through as much grain as 2bn people."

In a clarification note attached at the bottom of the article on Wednesday, The Economist said "An earlier version of this article compared the grain-consumption rate of pigs with that of the people of China. We selected China solely because it is the world's leading consumer of both wheat and rice."

However, the rephrase and clarification seemingly still failed to convince the outraged Chinese netizens, as The Economist did not make any apology for the mistake.

"Spitting in our face and then 'rephrasing things,' what's the point??" said a user of China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo.

The previous comparison triggered backlash among Chinese readers as well as overseas netizens after The Economist used it in a Tweet to promote the article on Tuesday.

Although the article mainly focuses on analyzing data of food consumption per country, area, and year, the inappropriate comparison between pigs and the Chinese people was widely criticized for being "awful," "racist" and "dehumanizing."

The Tweet has also been deleted as of Wednesday.
On Thursday, the Global Times found that the comparison has been rephrased to “According to our calculations, if the world’s pig population were a stand-alone country, it would rank at the very top of grain-consumption league tables, chomping through as much grain as 2bn people.”.
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California Just Leaked The Name, Address Of Every Concealed Carry Licensee In The State

Friday, Jul 01, 2022 – 06:10 AM

The California government has leaked an enormous volume of personal data on the state’s gun owners—including the name and address of every concealed carry permit holder in the stateThe data was posted to the internet on Monday—when the California Department of Justice launched its “2022 Firearms Dashboard Portal.”

The readily-downloadable information included

"names, birthdays, addresses, ages, the purchase date and type of firearm permit they possessed, and their Criminal Identification Index numbers, which are used to track state and federal criminal records,"

according to GizmodoABC30 reports that gender and driver’s license numbers were also exposed.

The state’s assault weapon registry and Dealer Record of Sale (DROS) data were also affected, but the DOJ has not yet determined to what extent associated personal data was compromised.

The personal data was available for downloading with the click of a button on the site’s mapping feature, according to The Reload. The portal was accessible from Monday afternoon until sometime Tuesday morning.

The breach potentially opened a Pandora’s box of harms for law-abiding Californians who acquired firearms and permits for self-protection. Those perils extend far beyond merely being ostracized by liberal coworkers and neighbors. For example:

  • A list of gun owners and their addresses is a treasure map for thieves seeking to steal firearms
  • Knowledge of an individual’s gun ownership can be used against them via the filing of spurious “red flag” complaints pursuant to the state’s Gun Violence Restraining Order system
  • Someone who obtained a firearm for protection from an abusive partner or ex-partner could be endangered if knowledge of that weapon acquisition sends the partner into a rage

The leaked data identified who among the concealed carry permit holders is a police officer or a judge. The Reload studied the posted data for Los Angeles County and found 244 judge permits complete with addresses and other personal data. Another 2,891 ordinary concealed carry permit-holders in the county were also exposed.

California issued 40,000 concealed carry permits in 2021, well off the 2016 peak of 100,000.

In light of the state’s dangerous mass violation of gun owners’ privacy, Monday’s press release promoting the portal’s debut now reads like dark comedy. In it, state attorney general Rob Bonta said,

“Transparency is key to increasing public trust between law enforcement and the communities we serve...Today’s announcement puts power and information into the hands of our communities."

After the leak was discovered, Bonta said,

“This unauthorized release of personal information is unacceptable and falls far short of my expectations for this department.”

As this article is written, those attempting to access the portal are presented with a notice:

"Website temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a few minutes."

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California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) president Chuck Michel told The Reload that …

"vindictive sore loser bureaucrats have endangered people’s lives and invited conflict by illegally releasing confidential private information. CRPA is working with several legislators and sheriffs to determine the extent of the damage caused by DOJ’s doxing of law abiding gun owners. Litigation is likely.” 

The portal is meant to provide data on dealer record of sales, Gun Violence Restraining Orders, concealed carry permits, firearms safety certificates, “assault weapons,” and a roster of “certified handguns.”

The mass data dump was discovered by two California sheriffs who were using the new dashboard.

This Japanese Artist Imagined What Cats Would Look Like As Anime Girls

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Japanese artist known as DHK recreated funny cat pictures in an anime style, turning the kittens into girls. The recreations are cute and professional. The artist manages to keep the resemblance to the original picture while creating stylish and beautiful characters that will probably make you wonder how your pets would look as humans.

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The Crisis Of Competence

One of the subtexts to the current war in the Ukraine is the fact that the West has been wrong about every aspect of the conflict. None of the predictions about the actual fighting have been correct. Even the propaganda has been hilariously wrong, often making the West look foolish. The economic response, which was supposed to be a fatal blow to Russia, has gone horribly wrong. Europe now faces an unprecedented energy shortage this fall and winter.

The bulk of the blame lies at the feet of the neoconservatives running foreign policy for the Global American Empire. The same cast of characters who were horrifically wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush years have managed to turn a regional issue into a global disaster. London and Brussels, along with the provincials occupying legacy positions in national government share blame as well. They enthusiastically went along with a war plan that had no chance to succeed.

The degree of wrongness is a thing of beauty, when you can look at it from a purely objective point of view. Rolling dice, flipping coins or pulling policy ideas out of a hat would have had a better result. One could be forgiven for thinking that maybe this series of errors is somehow deliberate. Maybe that ridiculous bald guy from the World Economic Forum really is a super villain. The masters of the universe are setting the West ablaze so they can build back better.

The question that should be pondered is why has everything gone so terribly long for the collective West? One reason is competence. The Global American Empire is led by a man who barely knows where he is most of the time. In his prime, Joe Biden was known as an affable moron. In his dotage, he is a confused and incompetent old man unable to perform his duties. His handlers give him stage instructions for basic things like where and when to sit.

Biden is the bit of the iceberg we see. There is a whole apparatus around him that was instrumental in getting him into office. The Washington political community thought a dementia patient was better than Trump. That says nothing about Trump and everything about the people who engineered Biden’s ascension. People forget that the Democratic Party had to rig its own primary to get Biden the nomination. They never stopped to think what this would mean after the election.

Of course, this degree of incompetence is made possible by a political culture that is defensive, isolated and insulated. They picked Biden because he was the safest option to get rid of Trump. Biden’s primary appeal to the political class was that he was a vegetable they could move around however they pleased. Biden and his family were simply happy to fill the role and play their part. He also provided the best chance of liberating the city from the scourge of Trump people.

That decision gets to the insularity of the political class, not just in Washington, but across the collective West. These are people without any understanding of the societies over which they rule. When you look at the resumes of these people, the common feature is no experience in the dreaded private sector. Politics has been their life since they were adults. In fact, we have reached a point where private sector experience raises suspicion in the political class.

These are people who simply have no idea how things work. They just take for granted that things work. Like the heirs of a family business, the political class has spent their life in a system without ever having to think about how it came into being. The system of power they command is a permanent feature of life. The only variable is who will have control of the institutions of power. That is politics, the game of verbal chess which picks the winners and losers in the system.

Therein lies the other cause of this unfolding disaster. The West is a collection of people who deal in words exclusively. They have never done anything, other than talk about making other people do things. Nancy Pelosi has been in Washington for eighty years and there is no single physical thing she can point to, other than her ten-thousand-dollar freezer, as a product of her political career. When she is dead, the next wave will wash away her footprints in the sand and she will be forgotten.

On the other side of this fight is a different system, one that is the result of people doing things and rising in the ranks as a consequence. Putin is a man who had to navigate a world where failure meant prison or death. When that world collapsed, he had to navigate a world of chaos. When he gained power, he then had to impose order, often taking on powerful oligarchs backed by Western interests. Putin and his ruling circle are a collection of men who do things, not just talk about things.

Six months ago, the West was prepared to give the Russians a good tongue lashing, cancel her from the internet and de-platform her from the financial system. On the other side, the Russians prepared to fight a war against a well-armed and prepared enemy in Ukraine and a well-armed and prepared West on the world stage. One side was ready for a battle of words while the other side was ready for a battle of actions. It turns out that words count for a lot less than actions.

All civilizations have periods of incompetence. The Russians suffered through the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods. The difference for the West is that the system has been selecting for bourgeois obsequiousness for a long time. The reason Washington is run by fossils is the next in line is much worse than the geezers. Mitch McConnell knows something about running the party. Kevin McCarthy was selected because no one in power worried that he would be a challenge.

The crisis of the West is that it is now run by a managerial class that was selected for being the teacher’s pet, ticking the right box on a form and making sure to never utter a discouraging word around the boss. It is why presidents have been increasingly ridiculous since the Cold War. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden are all mileposts in the decline of competence. Next up is Kamala Harris, an absurd manifestation of a system that selects against competence.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Some witty single panel comics, the genius of Mortensen, coffee cakes, and global geopolitics

So much change.

The United States is disintegrating before our eyes.  Society has collapsed, the government is frail, ineffective, bloated, and acting insanely.

Internal domestic conflict is in process as it is trying to “right the sinking ship” somewhat.

Roe's demise marks new phase in state-by-state battle over abortion...
The Court giveth and the Court taketh away!
Ruling Highlights Diverging Paths of Roberts, Alito...
Critics fear Thomas 'extreme' position on contraception...
LGBTQ community braces for rollback of rights...
Next big fight looms over pills...
Biden confronts bombshell that could define presidency...
Condemns But Has Few Powers...
Trump Publicly Credits God -- Privately Says 'Bad'...
Kavanaugh Gave Assurances. Collins Says He 'Misled' Her...
World leaders call decision horrific...
Corporations scramble to determine what will cover...
Prosecutors vow not to go after women seeking procedures...

However, it is ultimately going to fail. Simply because the United States is in such dept that if you sell everything, in the United States… EVERYTHING, the people would be still in trillions of dollars in debt.

Historically, the only solution is to enslave the civilian survivors and have them work off their debts as serf / slaves to a conquering power.

That’s clear as day.

American “allies” and proxy militarized forces are all weak, yet still believing in their unwavering power (from God).

Meanwhile, there is a massive ray of hope; BRICS has organized, planned, and implemented a structure that is being built upon the collapsing embers and rubble of the collapsing West.

It is a superior structure.

It is a long lasting one, and it is and will continue to be, a fair one.

It’s an exciting time for those who are aware.

Yet, this period is fraught with peril.

"The US has at least two Soviet era nuclear weapons recovered by the CIA from submarine K-129 in "Operation Azorian" in 1974."

The implication is a nuclear false flag. Big yikes.

Let’s go through today’s article posting…

Chicken Fricassee – quick French Chicken Stew

Quick, simple and delicious. What’s not to love?

CSIS

The CSIS, funded by the American Military-Industrial Complex, advises the United States government on what to do. Obviously, that’s one (major) reason why nothing goes right.

Here’s and example from the “brilliant advice” from CSIS:

From Seth Jones, June 2022. Senior Vice President; Harold Brown Chair; and Director, International Security Program. Subject:  Russia’s Ill-Fated Invasion of Ukraine

Lessons in Modern Warfare

Russia has failed to achieve most of its objectives in Ukraine because of poor military planning, significant logistical problems, low combat readiness, and other deficiencies, which undermined Russian military effectiveness. 

These and other challenges—including Ukrainian military efforts and Western aid—severely impacted Russian air, ground, cyber, and maritime operations. 

Russia’s failures will force the Russian military to fundamentally rethink its training practices, organizational structure, culture, logistics, recruitment and retention policies, and planning efforts. 

Nevertheless, Russia is still attempting a de facto annexation of parts of eastern and southern Ukraine that it controls. here

Senior diplomat says relations with Japan at important juncture

By MO JINGXI | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-06-08 07:10 

China-Japan relations involve a number of old and new problems, a senior Chinese diplomat said on Tuesday, adding that the difficulties and challenges faced by bilateral ties should not be ignored.

Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, made the remark in a phone conversation with Takeo Akiba, secretary-general of Japan’s National Security Secretariat.

Noting that China-Japan relations have reached an important point in history, with this year marking the 50th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic ties between the two countries, Yang said China and Japan must stay on the right track, adhere to win-win cooperation, take a long-term perspective and enhance mutual trust on security.

Stable ties

He called on Tokyo to work with Beijing to ensure stable, healthy and resilient China-Japan relations over the next 50 years and jointly safeguard regional peace and prosperity.

According to a statement on the Foreign Ministry’s website, Akiba told Wang that Japan stands ready to deepen cooperation with China, and appropriately handle differences and strengthen communications on sensitive bilateral issues and international hot spot issues in order to jointly build a constructive and stable Japan-China relationship.

Yang also elaborated on China’s principled positions on the Taiwan question and issues related to Hong Kong and the Diaoyu Islands, among others, during the meeting.

Experts said that the meeting came at a time when Japan has been closely following the United States’ “Indo-Pacific” strategy and is actively engaged in containing China and stirring up confrontation in the Asia-Pacific region.

By doing so, Tokyo is also attempting to regain its status in Asia. However, such a practice is not conducive to regional peace, stability and the healthy development of China-Japan relations, and Japan will inevitably have to pay the price for this, they added.

Last month, as US President Joe Biden made his first trip to Asia, Tokyo hosted the leaders’ meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, an anti-China grouping consisting of the US, Japan, India and Australia. Japan also endorsed the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework launched by Biden in Tokyo.

Irresponsible remarks

During Biden’s visit, Japan and the US made irresponsible remarks and groundless accusations on a series of issues related to China’s domestic affairs, including on the Taiwan question.

Wang Junsheng, a researcher of East Asian studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that Japan is joining with the US to counter China as Tokyo is Washington’s close ally, and also because it misjudges China’s development.

“Japan is unwilling to see a rising China because it mistakenly assumes that China’s development will harm its own interests,” Wang said. “However, the fact is that as close neighbors, both China and Japan will benefit from their good relationship in various areas including trade and the economy, regional cooperation and tackling climate change.”

Xiang Haoyu, a distinguished research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, said in an article in Global Times that hyping up or creating so-called external threats for specific political purposes will not make Japan great again or bring it absolute security.

Instead, it will only get Japan into greater security dilemmas, Xiang said.

Artist Creates Witty Single-Panel Comics Depicting Odd And Absurd Situations In A Slightly Different Everyday Life

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Let us introduce you to Jim Shoenbill, an illustrator who is on a mission to brighten people’s days with positive humor. He creates witty single-panel comics depicting weird and absurd situations in a slightly different everyday life.

In this universe made by Jim, a deer can be a stand-up comedian, Jesus is no longer a miracle worker, but an optician, beverages can talk and more. As the artist described himself, he just channels his distractions and odd thoughts into funny cartoons “to make the world a better place”.

Jim’s illustrations and writing have appeared in magazines such as The Oldie, Alta, Women’s World, American Legion Magazine and more. So, without further ado, scroll down to immerse yourself in the sea of humor and puns.

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PCR’s latest. He says we are headed to war now:

Source article HERE

“War With the Russian Federation
June 24, 2022

Dear Readers, this website, the Institute for Political Economy is a 501c3 tax-exempt public foundation. For it to continue to exist, public support must comprise one-third of its operating costs. Currently, this is the case. However, public support has been falling. The backbone of the website are the monthly donors. But the response to the quarterly requests are weakening. The response in September is always weak, but this June the response is weak as well.

Is this the situation — when truth is most needed, support for it is running out? Once the ruling elites control the narratives, liberty, freedom, life as Americans knew it is dead.

It is increasingly difficult to tell the truth as Americans are punished for doing so. If you do not support those few of us who are addicted to truth, truth will die.

War With the Russian Federation

Paul Craig Roberts

I remember when others tooted my horn. The French government of President Francois Mitterrand bestowed upon me the French Legion of Honor for the restoration of economic science. President Reagan sent his Budget Director, Jim Miller, to the award ceremony with a letter from Reagan giving me credit for Reagan’s successful economic policy that cured stagflation.

The US Department of the Treasury gave me its Silver Medal for “outstanding contributions to US economic policy.” Who’s Who in America gave me the Lifetime Achievements Award. The Press Club of Mexico gave me its International Journalism Award. When my children were born congratulatory letters arrived from such luminaries as the Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And so on.

Today, my horn is not tooted unless I do it myself, which I have not done but now will. I have ruined myself by telling the truth, and I don’t even get credit for that.

Yesterday (June 23, 2022) The Saker (Andrei Raevsky) wrote that it has become undeniable that what began as a Russian limited military operation in Ukraine has turned into an open and full-scale war between Russia and the West.

I was the first person to put into print that the “limited” aspect of Russia’s intervention in Donbass was a delusion.

Washington, I said, would never allow it to be limited.

For this obviously correct insight, Andrei denounced me as anti-Russian. Dmitry Orlov dismissed me as a crank who wanted nuclear war. In other words, my pointing out a Kremlin miscalculation that would result in a wider war was unwelcome despite its obvious truthfulness.

Well, as Andrei now acknowledges, the wider war I predicted is upon us.

The Kremlin’s receptivity to provocations have brought them to the situation where an insignificant country, certainly militarily, but in all respects, has blocked Russia’s provision of part of Russia — Kaliningrad. If the Kremlin, ever tolerant of provocations, accepts this, Russia is finished. If the Kremlin doesn’t accept it, Lithuania is finished.

As Lithuania is a NATO member–stupid decision–NATO will have to go to war or back down. The Jewish neoconservatives who control US foreign policy will not let them back down. Washington pays a lot for obedience and will expect NATO to comply.

In other words, Europe’s “leaders” are likely soon to be faced with a decision: Do we destroy Europe or do we give up our American payments?

They will take the money and run, but to where?

As a former Cold Warrior, as a former member of a presidential investigatory committee to assess the CIA’s views of Soviet economic and military capability, I can say, with confidence, that there is nowhere to run.

Unless the hegemony over US, and thereby the West’s, foreign policy that is held by the Jewish neoconservatives is broken, the West and Russia are headed into nuclear war.

The war will be nuclear, because the West is too weak conventionally to confront Russia.

The West is NOT aware of this, because the Russian Donbass intervention involves few Russian troops who are moving slowly using encirclement.

Normally, an invasion force relies on a 3 to 1 superiority in manpower, but in the Donbass conflict the Ukrainians probably outnumbered the Russians, with the mass of the Russian Army waiting on the sidelines for any NATO troop intervention.

There is no doubt whatsoever that Russia will clear Donbass of Ukrainian military forces. That job is almost over. But not the wider conflict.

EU and NATO forming coalition ‘for war against Russia’ – Lavrov

The Russian Foreign Minister said today: “Hitler rallied a significant part, if not most, of the European nations under his banner for a war against the Soviet Union,” adding that “now, the EU together with NATO are forming another – modern – coalition for a standoff and, ultimately, war with the Russian Federation.”

Streusel Coffee Cake

Everyone needs a classic coffee cake recipe. Simple to make and a treat to eat, this is it! Our cinnamon Streusel Coffee Cake recipe is the perfect one to wake up and create for a holiday brunch. It only takes 10 minutes of prep time and is made easy with Bisquick™ Original Pancake & Baking Mix.

Streusel Coffee Cake
Streusel Coffee Cake

What you need.

How to make it.

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Tips and tricks.

Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say

US miliatary fighting Russian military. And not a thought to the implications of what this means. -MM

A secretive operation involving U.S. Special Operations forces hints at the scale of the effort to assist Ukraine’s still outgunned military.

WASHINGTON — As Russian troops press ahead with a grinding campaign to seize eastern Ukraine, the nation’s ability to resist the onslaught depends more than ever on help from the United States and its allies — including a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training, according to U.S. and European officials.

Much of this work happens outside Ukraine, at bases in Germany, France and Britain, for example. But even as the Biden administration has declared it will not deploy American troops to Ukraine, some C.I.A. personnel have continued to operate in the country secretly, mostly in the capital, Kyiv, directing much of the vast amounts of intelligence the United States is sharing with Ukrainian forces, according to current and former officials.

At the same time, a few dozen commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine. The United States withdrew its own 150 military instructors before the war began in February, but commandos from these allies either remained or have gone in and out of the country since then, training and advising Ukrainian troops and providing an on-the-ground conduit for weapons and other aid, three U.S. officials said. . .here

This Stray Cat Ask To Be Let Inside To Keep Her Kittens Safe | The Dodo

A heartwarming kitty cat video.

Ukraine SINKS Russian Rescue Ship on Black Sea

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The Russian Black Sea Fleet Rescue Tug “Vasily Bekh” has been hit by Ukrainian-launched missiles and SUNK.

Russian Black Sea Fleet Rescue Tug "Vasily Bekh"
Russian Black Sea Fleet Rescue Tug “Vasily Bekh”

The vessel was struck by two Harpoon anti ship missiles, a U.S. produced weapons system, manufactured by McDonnell Douglas.

The 187 foot long ship sank within 18 seconds of being hit.

At least ten (10) Russian sailors are dead, 23 others are wounded.

Video, below, was taken by a Bayraktar Drone operated by the Ukraine military, shows the two missiles striking from the left, and the ship going under almost immediately after the explosions.

The assault on the Vasily Bekh Rescue tugboat was first announced on the official Twitter account of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, and a few minutes later a video showing the assault was posted on social media.

Nicaragua approves Russian troop access to country, defies US objection

Hum. Interesting. The article seems to be blocked.

Screenshot.

Article HERE

China ready to supply components for aircraft to Russia

There are no restrictions from the Chinese side, Zhang Hanhui noted…
MOSCOW, June 17. /TASS/. China is ready to supply components for aircraft to Russian airlines, Chinese Ambassador to Moscow Zhang Hanhui told TASS.

"We are ready to supply components to Russia, we are organizing such cooperation," he said. "[Airlines] are currently addressing [it], they have certain channels, there are no restrictions from the Chinese side," the diplomat added.

On February 26, the European Union prohibited sale and supply, including leasing, of aircraft and components to it for Russian air carriers, as well as provision of any insurance and reinsurance services to its aircraft, as well as repairs, over the situation in Ukraine. The Russian authorities responded by taking a number actions, particularly allowing local carriers to continue exploiting aircraft leased or rented from foreign companies.

Full article from Tass HERE

Decoupling from China is not a serious option – Google Search

Of course.

If the Empire could do it, they would already have done it. 

I have a hunch that the powers that be in China are way ahead of the game before us mere mortals are aware of it. Perhaps the election of Xi to lead China is not an accident. Perhaps Xi's actions reining in the party and the PLA are not coincidences. Maybe his cleaning up of rampant corruption, strengthening of national defense, putting a lid on corporate malfeasance, and making term extensions possible are all for conducting a long and unspoken war. I await that moment when China finally is in firm possession of much needed technologies and resources, and then it can do what Russia has done, which is to demand payment in RMB for trade, stop measuring wealth or economics in USD, and sell 90% of USD reserves. 

China to this day is still one of the strongest supporters of the USD, which provides the hege-money that makes the empire possible. Take that away and the house of cards will fall. Maybe a better system and more responsible government will emerge. That will of course be up to the American people. Much better for the world is that America will not be able to afford its military adventurism, flooding the world with weapons, and creating havoc all over the world. Hence we will have peace. Only by attacking the empire's foundation, the dollar hege-money, that the house of cards will buckle and collapse.

PM

Stunning Autochrome Portraits of Women Taken by Alfonse Van Besten From the Early 20th Century

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Alfonse Van Besten (1865–1926) was a painter and took full advantage of the possibilities of the new color process. One can see that many of his autochromes were taken with a “painterly eye” e.g. Musing (Mrs.Van Besten) and Symphony in white. It was evident that he had a very good sense of composition.

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During the First World War he was a refugee in Holland. Together with his friend A. Van Son, another Belgian autochromist and refugee, they gave countless lectures at Dutch photography societies. They were praised for their excellent autochrome work, e.g. on the 16th of April 1915 the photographic society “Meer Licht” from Nymegen paid an homage to Van Besten for his outstanding autochrome plates.

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I could easily paint from these images. They are perfect to use as figurative guides.

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Chinese tunnel boring machine shipped to Portugal

Remark: Previously to this, Germany sold similar machinery to China at a very exorbitant expensive price. They included a super expensive repair cost structure, warranties and insurance that provided a very nice yearly income to the German manufacturers. Meanwhile, the Germans would also block any Chinese on-site efforts while they would repair the machinery.
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Today China produces much more sophisticated and advanced TBM tunneling machinery. And, thus, it is winning business in Europe.
Just wait and see. 

The west always claimed that China steals their technology. But I know from very beginning that the West is using self deception. 

I was a manager for four years in a village collectively owned factory of 175 years before I went to college. 

The factory started in 1966, with less than thirty yuan investment with five workers. 

By 1973 when I joined the factory as a fresh high school graduate, the factory had over 100 workers, with three lathes, two planers, three 60 ton presses, five big drills, more than thirty electric welders and two gas welders. 

I started as a lathe operator, and then became the manager at the beginning of next year. 

By the time I went to college in the spring of 1978, the factory had 175 people with a gross revenue of more than one million a year. 

Most of the workers had very little technical background but everybody worked together to solve technical problems. 

One time, we took an order which required technical standards that we did not have the equipment to do. 

No factory in the Qingdao Areas had the equipment to do it. 

But one of our old workers came up with a brilliant idea and told me that we could do the work without the necessary equipment.

We eventually did the job, making two huge ventilation machines for a big textile factory in Qingdao, and made a lot of money out of it. 

When the engineers came to see how we made it, they were shocked by the primitive ideas and technology we used to produce the parts and assembled the machines in the end. 

The workers in my factory were all paid the same amount of work points. 

Management and workers worked together to solve the problems. 

If we needed to work ten hours, twelve hours, even sixteen hours a day, we would do it. The shared objective was to get things done as quickly, efficiently and economically as possible. Exactly because the manager did not get more pay than the workers, it was much easier to be a leader at that time.

I left China to study in Singapore, then the U.S. and eventually stayed in the U.S. 

After I came to the U.S. and learned how the system worked here, I was convinced that the West would never be able to compete with China if China stayed its track. 

I have been teaching under five (college) presidents in the current university. 

From my experience, except the first one who was a good leader. All the last four presidents were disasters. 

They got paid five or six times more than the faculty, but did nothing good for the college and they were either left themselves or asked to leave after they did enough damages. 

But most faculty and staff tolerated them until the last minutes. Our college has been going down hill because of their poor leadership. 

I think my college's situation is very reflective of the whole country in the U.S. 

The lack of good leadership with a big gap in the pay of the workers and management. 

It would be fine for them when there was no competition. 

But now China is a serious competition, and the U.S. and the west are still doing their business as usual. It will not be long when China leads the world in every aspect.

Dongping
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Journey – Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’ (Official Video – 1979)

Time machine time…

Member of Russian Parliament Says “London will be Bombed first”

A Russian Member of Parliament, Andrey Gurulyov, has said that “London will be the first city to be bombed by Russia if the blockade of Kaliningrad leads to a war with NATO.”

MP Andrey Gurulyov, 54, a member of Russian parliament’s defense committee, advocated the Russian invasion of the NATO Baltic countries.

On state TV’s Channel 1 he said there was no other way to prevent the West blockading Russian exclave Kaliningrad.

Such a move would trigger the NATO Treaty “Article five” which says “an attack upon one member of NATO is an attack upon all members” and spark World War Three.

“We’ll destroy the entire group of enemy’s space satellites during the first air operation,” said Lt-Gen Gurulyov, a senior commander in the Russian Army who now represents United Russia, the main political party.

“No-one will care if they are American or British, we would see them all as NATO.

“Second, we’ll mitigate the entire system of anti-missile defense, everywhere and 100 per cent.

“Third, we certainly won’t start from Warsaw, Paris or Berlin.

“The first to be hit will be London.

“It’s crystal clear that the threat to the world comes from the Anglo-Saxons.”

Like other Moscow hardliners, he believes the West – especially on continental Europe – has no stomach for a real war.

“As part of the operation to destroy critically important sites, Western Europe will be cut off from power supplies and immobilized.

“All power supply sites will be destroyed.

“And in the third stage, I shall see what the USA will tell Western Europe on continuing their fight in the cold, without food and electricity.

“I wonder how they (the US) will manage to stay aside.

“This is the rough plan, and I deliberately leave out certain moments because they are not to be discussed on TV.”

Gurulyov is a former deputy commander of Russia’s southern military district.

He served with Russian forces in Syria.

He has been sanctioned by the US for his close links to Putin.

Pineapple-Banana Coffee Cake

Aloha! Your taste buds will welcome this tropical delight of banana coffee cake loaded with pineapple and topped with a pineapple glaze.

Pineapple-Banana Coffee Cake
Pineapple-Banana Coffee Cake

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Pineapple-Banana Coffee Cake

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Pineapple-Banana Coffee Cake

RUSSIANS CONQUER SEVERODONETSK; NEXT STOP: LYSYCHANSK

Russia’s army has “fully occupied” the key Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk after weeks of fighting, its mayor said Saturday.

The capture of the industrial hub of Severodonetsk is an important strategic win for Moscow as it seeks to gain full control over the east of the country.
It has been the scene of weeks of running battles, but the Ukrainian army said Friday that its outgunned forces would withdraw to better defend the neighboring city of Lysychansk.

“The city has been fully occupied by the Russians,” mayor Oleksandr Striuk said on Saturday.

A few hours earlier, pro-Moscow separatists said Russian troops and their allies had entered Lysychansk, which faces Severodonetsk across the river.

“Street fighting is currently taking place,” a representative of the separatists, Andrei Marochko, said on Telegram, in a claim that could not be independently verified at that time.   Now, however, the city is confirmed to have been conquered by the Russian Army.

Grotesque, Occult, and Bizarre Images by William Mortensen, the Forgotten Hollywood Photographer

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Photographer Ansel Adams, whose beautiful black and white landscapes full of mountains still grace both museum and office walls, called fellow photographer William Mortensen “the Anti-Christ” for what he did to the art of photography.

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In a roll call of the pioneers of modern photography, one name is never invoked. From the late 1920s to the 1950s, William Mortensen was one of the most famous and celebrated photographers in America. However, his subject matter – which veered towards the savage, indecorous, gothic and grotesque – as well as his use of montage and illustration, made him a pariah among the puritanical new guard in photography, led by Ansel Adams, who tried to write him out of history.

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Mortensen was the last of the great pictorialist photographers, the movement that dominated early 20th-century photography. Working in Hollywood, he shot many of the leading stars of his day: Rudolph Valentino, Lon Chaney, Fay Wray, Jean Harlow, Clara Bow and Peter Lorre all submitted themselves to the gaze of his lens.

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Cat Trapped In A Sewer For 70 Days Is Almost Drowned From Heavy Rain

Save the kitty! Hurry!

Reality Check: Falsehoods in US perceptions of China

fmprc.gov.cn | Updated: 2022-06-19 19:40 
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has recently delivered a speech at Asia Society outlining the US administration’s approach to China.

With a carefully calibrated language, he sought [1] to promote the “China threat” narrative, [2] continue American interference in China’s internal affairs, and  [3] smear China’s domestic and foreign policy, all in a continuing effort aimed at [4] full-blown containment and suppression of China.

The following is the CHINESE RESPONSE.

It is printed in FULL.

You will NOT see this anywhere in American, or Western media.

In what is to follow, we will use facts and figures to show to the world how deceptive, hypocritical and dangerous the US’s China policy is.

Falsehood 1: China poses the most serious long-term challenge to the international order and is undermining it. The US will defend the international law, agreements, principles, and institutions that maintain peace and security, and protect the rights of individuals and sovereign nations.

Reality Check: What the US has constantly vowed to preserve is a so-called international order designed to serve the US’s own interests and perpetuate its hegemony. The US itself is the largest source of disruption to the actual world order.

◆ China has been and always will be a defender of the international order. China is a founding member of the United Nations (UN) and the first country to put its signature on the UN Charter. China is committed to upholding the UN-centered international system, the international order underpinned by international law, and the basic norms governing international relations built on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence jointly championed by China, India and Myanmar have been widely recognized by the international community and have become the basic norms guiding state-to-state relations.

China upholds true multilateralism and global strategic stability. China is the largest contributor of peacekeepers among the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the second largest contributor among all countries to the UN peacekeeping budget. China has taken an active part in international arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation processes. It has signed or acceded to more than 20 multilateral arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation treaties, including the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). China is against arms race.

In the wake of the international financial crisis of 2008, China adopted a responsible macro policy, remained a “stabilizer” for the world economy and made important contribution to global recovery. China actively provides international public goods to various countries, and has signed BRI cooperation agreements with 149 countries and 32 international organizations.

◆ In recent years, President Xi Jinping’s vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind has been warmly received by the international community. It has been written into multiple important documents issued by the UN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other multilateral institutions. UN Secretary-General António Guterres hailed China as an important pillar for multilateralism, noting that the purpose for practicing multilateralism is to build a community with a shared future for mankind. Peter Thomson, president of the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly, said the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind advocated by China is the only future for humanity on this planet.

In response to various new global challenges, President Xi Jinping put forward the Global Development Initiative (GDI) and the Global Security Initiative (GSI). They represent China’s proposals for making the global governance system fairer and more equitable, and have received positive response and wide support from the international community.

◆ The US has blatantly violated the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and the norms governing international relations. With its military might, the US has launched wars in numerous parts of the world, stoking divisions and conflicts and bringing huge turmoil and disaster to the world. Throughout the 240-plus-year history of the US, there were only 16 years in which the US was not at war. The US might as well be called the most belligerent country in the history of the world. US magazine The National Interest quoted Dakota Wood, senior research fellow for defense programs at the Heritage Foundation, who wrote that the US consistently needed to deploy military force every 15 years or so.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has either launched or participated in many wars overseas, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghan War and the Iraq War. Those wars caused extremely severe civilian casualties and property losses, and lead to colossal humanitarian disasters. Since 2001, US wars and military operations in the name of counterterrorism have killed more than 900,000 people, about 335,000 of whom were civilians, injured millions and displaced tens of millions.

◆ The US habitually puts its domestic law above the international law, and selectively applies international rules as it sees fit. Since the 1980s, the US had once withdrawn from 17 international organizations and treaties, including the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Paris Agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Treaty on Open Skies.

Although the current US administration declared that “America is back” and the US has rejoined some international organizations and agreements, the administration has in essence not abandoned the “America First” policy, and is advancing “selective multilateralism”. The current administration has stayed out of institutions and agreements considered harmful to US interests such as the Treaty on Open Skies. European media have described it as “America First 2.0”.

◆ The US has abused its financial hegemony and technological clout and engaged in economic coercion in the name of protecting national security. The US has enacted some domestic laws, such as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, and issued a series of executive orders to target and sanction specific countries, entities or individuals. The ambiguous rules contained in these acts and executive orders, such as the “minimum contacts principle” and “doctrine of effects”, are a willful expansion of the jurisdiction of US domestic laws. The US also abuses its domestic channels of prosecution to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over entities and individuals in other countries.

For more than 60 years, in total disregard of the many resolutions of the UN General Assembly, the US has continued its comprehensive blockade against Cuba based on its embargo policies and domestic laws such as the Torricelli Act and the Helms-Burton Act. The Cuba blockade is the longest and cruelest systemic trade embargo, economic blockade and financial sanctions in modern history. The blockade has been gravely detrimental to Cuba’s economic and social development, causing over 100 billion US dollars of direct losses to Cuba’s economy.

The US has carried out blockade and sanctions against Iran since late 1970s. In May 2018, the US government announced its unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA, and soon after resumed and expanded sanctions against Iran. Many countries and relevant entities have been forced to give up their cooperation with Iran. A large number of foreign oil enterprises left the country. Iran’s manufacturing industry can hardly sustain normal operation. The country has suffered economic slowdown, coupled with heightened inflation and massive currency depreciation.

The US has imposed unilateral sanctions on Belarus, Syria and Zimbabwe, among others, over the years, and ratcheted up ”maximum pressure” against the DPRK, Venezuela, etc.

◆ Statistics show that the previous US administration had imposed over 3,900 sanction measures, which means it wielded its “big stick” three times a day on average. As of fiscal year 2021, the entities and individuals on US sanction lists topped 9,421, which was 933 percent higher compared to the fiscal year 2000.

The US’s illegal unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction have gravely undermined the sovereignty and security of other countries and severely impacted their economic development and people’s wellbeing. The sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction also constitute a gross violation of international law and basic norms of international relations.

In an article published in the September/October 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs, Daniel Drezner, Professor at Tufts University and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, criticizes successive US administrations for using “sanctions as the go-to solution for nearly every foreign policy problem.” He notes that sanctions not only are ineffective, but also “exert a humanitarian toll”, and that the United States of America has become the “United States of Sanctions”.

◆ The “rules-based international order” championed by the US is in fact another version of power politics. This is an attempt to impose one’s own will and standards on others, and to replace the commonly accepted international laws and norms with the house rules of a few countries.

In the world, there is only one international system, i.e. the international system with the UN at its core. There is only one international order, i.e. the international order underpinned by international law. And there is only one set of rules, i.e. the basic norms governing international relations underpinned by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.

Before wanting to discuss rules and order, the US should first pay up its arrears of one billion US dollars for the UN’s regular budget and 1.4 billion US dollars peacekeeping assessments, ratify in a timely manner the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, stop single-handedly blocking the negotiations on a verification protocol under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), lift illegal unilateral sanctions, earnestly fulfill its international obligations and set a good example for others in respecting laws and norms.

Falsehood 2: The US is not looking for conflict or a new Cold War. It doesn’t seek to block China from its role as a major power, nor to stop China from growing its economy or advancing the interests of its people.

Reality Check: Despite its claims that it doesn’t seek to block China from its role as a major power, nor to stop it from growing its economy, the US is actually deploying its domestic and external resources to unscrupulously contain and suppress China.

◆ Without producing any credible evidence, the US government uses national security as a catch-all pretext and all its apparatus to wantonly suppress and sanction Huawei, restricting its products’ entry into the US market, cutting off its access to chips and operating system, and coercing countries around the world into banning Huawei from their 5G rollout. The US also orchestrated and pressured Canada to hold Huawei’s CFO for nearly three years without cause.

◆ In violation of the principle of fair competition and market economy and international trading rules, the US seeks to hamstring competitive Chinese hi-tech companies under all kinds of trumped-up charges. To date, it has placed over 1,000 Chinese companies on various sanctions lists, subjected biotechnology and artificial intelligence technologies to enhanced export controls and stringent investment review, and sought to ban Chinese social media platforms including TikTok and WeChat.

◆ Under the pretext of protecting human rights, the US has fabricated misinformation and disinformation concerning Xinjiang such as the existence of ”forced labor” and, on the basis of those unfounded stories, has adopted the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act which maliciously targets Xinjiang’s competitive cotton, tomatoes and solar photovoltaic sectors to contain China’s growth. This has disrupted the international trade order and destabilized global industrial and supply chains.

◆ The previous US administration, in grave violation of WTO rules, waged a massive trade war on China. Based on its own Section 301 investigation, it imposed three rounds of steep tariffs on about 360 billion US dollars’ worth of Chinese imports. In September 2021, the current US administration initiated a Section 232 investigation to determine the effects on US national security from imports of neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets at a time when global commodity prices were hovering at elevated levels.

◆ The US has a record of grossly interfering in China’s domestic affairs on issues concerning China’s core interests, including Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. It seeks to undermine China’s security and stability by, both overtly and covertly, condoning and supporting separatist activities.

◆ The bipartisan innovation bills being debated in the US Congress, while professing to enhance US competitiveness, see China as a perceived rival. “China” appears more than 800 times in the text, which is packed with provisions detrimental to China’s interests.

◆ In a bid to maintain its power and predominance in international institutions, the US has attempted to smear and block the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind and the initiative of advancing Belt and Road cooperation, among others, in multilateral fora and also to remove references to them in UN and other international documents.

◆ Clinging to a Cold War mentality and the hegemon’s logic, the US pursues bloc politics, concocts the “democracy versus authoritarianism” narrative, cajoles other countries into forming exclusive cliques, strengthens the Five Eyes, peddles the Quad mechanism, puts together AUKUS with the UK and Australia and ramps up bilateral military alliances, in a clear attempt at countering China.

◆ The US pushes NATO to insert itself in Asia-Pacific affairs, fan the “China threat” narrative in the bloc’s new strategic concept, and include in its Madrid Summit such US allies in the Asia-Pacific as Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK) and Australia, in a bid to build an “Asia-Pacific version of NATO”, which would disrupt security and stability in the Asia-Pacific region.

◆ The development of state-to-state relations should be based on equality, mutual respect and win-win results. China-US relations have reached an important crossroads. The US should stop viewing this relationship through a Cold War, zero-sum mindset, follow the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, and reflect in its action the five assurances it has made to China (i.e. the US does not seek a new Cold War with China, the US does not seek to change China’s system, the revitalization of US alliances is not against China, the US does not support “Taiwan independence”, and the US is not looking for conflict with China) .

Falsehood 3: Our diplomacy is based on partnership and respect for each other’s interests, while China practices coercive diplomacy against other countries and retaliates recklessly. Our task is to prove once again that all countries will be free to chart their own paths without coercion.

Reality Check: It is the US that invented “coercive diplomacy” and excels at coercing countries. Over the years, by imposing economic blockade, unilateral sanctions and other means, the US has practiced coercive diplomacy around the world with textbook examples.

◆ In 1971, American scholar Alexander George first put forward the concept of “coercive diplomacy” to summarize the US policy toward Laos, Cuba and Vietnam at that time. The US government forced the military government of Haiti to step down in 1994, and referred to that as “a textbook example of coercive diplomacy”. In 2003, it explicitly characterized 30.3 billion US dollars additional military expenses for “coercive diplomacy” as incurred expenses.

The US government froze seven billion US dollars assets of the Afghan central bank on the grounds of punishing the Afghan Taliban and even claimed the “life-saving money” of the Afghan people as its own, which resulted in the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan. Mohammad Naeem, spokesman of the Taliban Political Office in Doha, said the seizure is “indicative of the lowest level of human and moral decay of a country and a nation”.

In order to force the Nepalese parliament to approve the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) agreement, the US openly issued an “ultimatum”, saying that the US will review its ties with Nepal if it fails to ratify the compact.

After the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict, the US Justice Department established the “Task Force KleptoCapture” to find, freeze and seize the yachts, apartments, private jets and huge deposits of Russian citizens in the US and Europe. This fully shows that the US-touted “inviolable and sacred right to property” is just a lie. The US has forced other countries to pick sides and pressured them to join sanctions against Russia. And those who refuse to do so will pay a “price”.

After China and the Solomon Islands had signed a framework agreement on bilateral security cooperation, the US sent senior officials of the National Security Council to the country, doing whatever it can to obstruct the legitimate cooperation between China and Solomon Islands. A Solomn Star article pointed out, “Washington DC, which has literally forgotten Solomon Islands since World War II, has finally woken up and is applying the heat on the Solomon Islands to abandon the security pact.”

In May 2022, on the eve of the High-Level Virtual Meeting of the Group of Friends of the GDI, the US exerted pressure on multiple UN development agencies to obstruct their attendance and threatened to “cut funding”.

◆ The “Clean Network” program launched by the previous administration is another textbook example of US coercive diplomacy. Under the pretext of upholding US national security and citizens’ privacy, the program explicitly requires that Chinese companies such as Huawei, Baidu and Alibaba to be purged from five areas: telecom operators, mobile app stores, mobile apps, cloud services and submarine optical cables. The then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other US politicians lobbied all around the world, coercing countries and regions to join its so-called “Network”. A US senior official even threatened Cyprus and other countries not to work with Chinese 5G suppliers, or they would bear the consequence. Former UK Business and Industry Minister Vince Cable said the government’s decision to ban Huawei’s 5G equipment and services “had nothing to do with national security”, and was because “the Americans told us we should do it”.

◆ The US shows no mercy in coercing its allies. Out of its geopolitical and energy interests considerations, the US has imposed sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project since December 2019. Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the US has imposed new sanctions on related companies and personnel even though Germany had announced the suspension of the certification process for the project.

◆ A US scholar pointed out that American foreign policy since World War II has been based on a simple idea: “Either you are with us or against us. America should lead, allies should follow, and woe be to countries that oppose its primacy”. His words lay bare the nature of US coercive diplomacy.

◆ China never engages in coercive diplomacy and firmly opposes coercive diplomacy by other countries. China never threatens other countries with force, never creates military alliance, never exports ideology, never meddles in others’ domestic affairs, never seeks a trade war, and never imposes unjustified oppression on foreign enterprises. That said, however, China has the right to make necessary and legitimate responses to actions that undermine China’s sovereignty, security and development rights and interests.

Falsehood 4: The US democracy is one of the most powerful assets in this contest. Our task is to prove once again that democracy can meet urgent challenges and that the future belongs to those who believe in freedom.

Reality Check: The US sets standards for democracy after its own system, does not allow other systems, paths and models to exist, and gangs up with others to wantonly interfere in other countries’ internal affairs in the name of democracy. This not just contravenes the spirit of democracy, but also spells disaster for democracy.

◆ The American-style democracy is a rich men’s game based on capital. Money politics penetrates the entire process of election, legislation and administration in the US. People in fact only have a restricted right to political participation. The inequality in economic status has turned into inequality in political status. According to statistics, winners of 91 percent of US congressional elections are the candidates with greater financial support. Big companies, a small group of rich people, and interest groups are more generous to offer financial support and have become the main source of electoral funding. The so-called representatives of people’s will, once elected, often serve the interests of their financial backers, and speak for vested interests rather than the ordinary people. A US Senator had a sharp observation, “Congress does not regulate Wall Street. Wall Street regulates Congress.”

US Republican congressman from Alabama Mo Brooks publicly denounced ”corruption” of the US Congress in a video on social media. “If you want to be chairman of a major committee, you have to purchase it.” The purchase price depends on how important the committee is, with the minimum bid for a major committee being one million US dollars. Those who cannot afford it have to accept the contributions of special interest groups and then give ”quid pro quos” to the lobbyists. “Special interest groups run Washington. I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean that literally.”

◆ According to a scholar in Singapore, the United States is clearly not functioning as a democracy. It is functioning as a plutocracy. A democracy is a government of the people, by the people, for the people. A plutocracy is a government of the one percent, by the one percent, for the one percent.

◆ The US presidential election follows the Electoral College system, where the president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College. The flaws of such an electoral system are self-evident. First, as the president-elect may not be the winner of the national popular vote, there is a lack of broad representation. Second, as each state gets to decide its own electoral rules, confusion and disorder often occur. Third, the winner-takes-all system exacerbates inequality among states and between political parties. It leads to a huge waste of votes and discourages voter turnout. Voters in deep blue and deep red states are often neglected, while swing states become disproportionately more important where both parties seek to woo more supporters. There have been five presidential elections in US history in which the winner of nationwide popular vote was not elected the president.

The gerrymandering is widely recognized by the US public as a flaw of the electoral system. It refers to an unfair division of electoral districts in favor of a particular party to win as many seats as possible and cement its advantage. The US conducts a census every ten years. Following the completion of the census, redistricting or the redrawing of electoral district boundaries will take place under the principle of maintaining roughly equal population in every voting district while considering demographic shifts. Under the US Constitution, each state legislature has the power to redistrict. This leaves room for gerrymandering by the majority party in a state legislature. According to a YouGov poll in 2021, only 16 percent of US adult citizens say they think their states’ congressional maps would be drawn fairly, while 44 percent say they think the maps would be drawn unfairly and another 40 percent of adults say they are unsure if the maps will be fair.

◆ The American-style democracy is ”one person one vote” in name, yet “rule of a dominant minority” in reality. Political pluralism is only a facade. A small number of elites dominate the political, economic and military affairs. They control the state apparatus and policy-making process, manipulate public opinion, dominate the business community and enjoy all kinds of privileges.

According to the Associated Press, 18.8 million people were missed in the 2020 US census. The black population had a net undercount of 3.3 percent, while it was almost five percent for Hispanics and 5.6 percent for American Indians and Native Alaskans living on reservations. The undercount robs them of their equal share of federal resources including in education, health care and housing and puts them in an unfavorable condition as to congressional apportionment. It reveals the hypocrisy in the US democracy and its “perpetuating systemic racism”.

Noam Chomsky, a political commentator and social activist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that the US is a “really existing capitalist democracy”, where there is a positive correlation between people’s wealth and their influence on policy-making. For the lower 70 percent on the wealth/income scale, they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They are effectively disenfranchised.

Wertheimer, President of the non-profit US organization Democracy 21, says that corruption in the US is systemic corruption of the process itself. “When you are dealing with billions and billions of dollars, much of that focused on buying influence, it overwhelms the system, and it is much harder to defend against and maintain representation for ordinary Americans.”

Danny Haiphong, an independent journalist in the US, believes that Western-style democracy views the election itself as the highest achievement. The question of whether this system serves the needs of the broad masses of people is generally ignored in order to obscure the fact that powerful corporate interests set the policy agenda well before votes are cast.

◆ The checks and balances in the American-style democracy have resulted in a “vetocracy”. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out in his book Political Order and Political Decay that there is an entrenched political paralysis in the US. The US political system has far too many checks and balances, raising the cost of collective action and in some cases making it impossible altogether. The US democratic process is fragmented and lengthy, with a lot of veto points where individual veto players can block action by the whole body. The function of “checks and balances”, which was purportedly designed to prevent abuse of power, has been distorted in American political practice. Politicians in Washington, D.C. are preoccupied with securing their own partisan interests and no longer care about national development. The two parties are addicted to vetoing and caught in a vicious circle. The government efficacy is inevitably weakened, law and justice trampled upon, development and progress stalled, and social division widened.

According to a Pew Research Center report in October 2021 based on a survey of 17 advanced economies including the US, Germany and the ROK, the US is more politically divided than the other economies surveyed. Nine in ten US respondents believe there are strong conflicts between people who support different political parties, and nearly 60 percent of Americans surveyed think their fellow citizens no longer disagree simply over policies, but also over basic facts.

As political and partisan polarization continues to grow, more “opposition for opposition’s sake” is seen among Democrats and Republicans. Under its influence, voters of the two parties are increasingly antagonized over gun policy. Among Republican voters, 76 percent support the right to possess guns, while 81 percent of Democratic voters see gun control as more important. Hijacked by interest, partisan conflict and the public opinion, the legislation and law enforcement process of gun control is fraught with difficulties. For the past ten years, Democratic congressmen put forward dozens of bills on gun violence and gun control every year, but due to the continued obstruction from the Republican Party, only a handful of them successfully entered the plenary deliberation and debate stage at the Senate or the House of Representatives.

The US National Rifle Association (NRA) has five million members and spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and lobbying every year. Its tentacles penetrate deep into the fabric of the American society. The NRA is an important funder of the Republican Party. Since its establishment in 1871, the NRA has successfully attracted nine US presidents to join it. According to CNN statistics in 2018, 307 of the 535 US congressmen have received either direct campaign contributions from the NRA and its affiliates or benefited from independent NRA spending like advertising supporting their campaigns. In the face of huge profits, all kinds of gun control efforts have ended up in vain.

◆ The US is not a straight A student when it comes to democracy. Its practice of democracy has been messy and chaotic. On 6 January 2021, thousands of Americans gathered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and stormed the Capitol building in a bid to stop the joint session of the Congress from certifying the newly-elected president. The incident interrupted the transfer of US presidential power, leaving five dead and over 140 injured. It is the worst act of violence in Washington, D.C. since 1814 when the British troops set fire to the White House, and it sent shock waves throughout the international community. The US Senate Republican leader described it as a “failed insurrection”.

A scholar from the US Council on Foreign Relations says that the US is not nearly as unique as many Americans believe, and that the Capitol riot should put an end to the notion of American exceptionalism, of an eternal shining city on a hill.

An American expert on international issues wrote in The New York Times that while the US leader has reunited the West, he may not be able to reunite America. Trump and his supporters would be willing to depart from established constitutional rules and norms with his Big Lie. This may undermine the ability of the US government to transfer power peacefully and legitimately. Consequently none of the institutions will work for long, and the people will be thrust into political and financial chaos.

◆ The dysfunctional American-style democracy has triggered a trust crisis. Public commitments to the people come with behind-the-scene deals. Political infighting, money politics, and vetocracy make it virtually impossible for quality governance to be delivered as aspired by the general public. Americans are increasingly disillusioned with the US politics and pessimistic about the American-style democracy.

A Gallup survey in October 2020 shows that only 19 percent of the Americans surveyed are “very confident” about the presidential election, a record low since the survey was first conducted in 2004. According to a poll conducted by The Wall Street Journal in June 2022, six out of 10 Americans feel pessimistic about achieving the American dream.

A Pew Research in 2021 shows that 65 percent of Americans see a need for major reform to the American democracy. People’s confidence in the American democracy dropped in 16 developed countries, and 57 percent of respondents think that the American democracy is no longer a good example to follow.

The Democracy Perception Index released in 2021 by a German polling agency reveals that 44 percent of respondents in the 53 countries surveyed are concerned that the US threatens democracy in their country.

◆ Over the years, despite the structural flaws and problematic practice of its democratic system, the US has been touting the “alliance of democracies” and hyping up the narrative of “democracy versus autocracy”. It is in essence attacking those who hold different views under the banner of democracy, using ideology and values as a tool to suppress others and advance its own geopolitical strategies. This is hegemony in the guise of democracy. A former CIA official openly stated: “We will intervene whenever we decide it’s in our national security interest to intervene. If you don’t like it, lump it.”

The US has pushed for the neo-Monroe Doctrine in Latin America under the pretext of promoting democracy, incited color revolutions in Eurasia, and remotely controlled the Arab Spring in West Asia and North Africa. These moves have brought chaos and disasters to many countries, gravely undermining world peace, stability and development. As suggested by the French website Le Grand Soir, democracy has long become a weapon of massive destruction for the US to attack countries with different views.

◆ Whether a country is democratic or not depends on whether its people are truly the masters of the country. It depends on whether the people have the right to vote, and more importantly, the right to participate; what promises they are given during elections, and more importantly, how many of these promises are delivered after elections; what kind of political procedures and rules are set through state systems and laws, and more importantly, whether these systems and laws are truly enforced; and whether the rules and procedures for the exercise of power are democratic, and more importantly, whether the exercise of power is genuinely subject to public oversight and checks.

◆ The Communist Party of China (CPC) leads the Chinese people in carrying out the whole-process people’s democracy in China. It has not only a complete set of institutions and procedures, but also full-fledged civil participation. A comprehensive, extensive, and well-coordinated system of institutions has been formed to ensure that the people run the country, and diverse, open, and orderly channels for democracy are put into place. This allows the entire people to engage in law-based democratic elections, consultations, decision-making, management, and oversight and to manage state as well as economic, cultural, and social affairs in various ways and forms and in accordance with the law. The whole-process people’s democracy integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy, and people’s democracy with the will of the state. It is a model of socialist democracy that covers all aspects of the democratic process and all sectors of society. It is a true democracy that works. China’s whole-process people’s democracy is gaining wider recognition and acclaim from the international community.

A British scholar says that electoral democracy does not breed a close relationship with the people and government, because the people are only called upon to be involved whenever to make elections take place. The Chinese approach is different in that there is a very important consultative component in the way China operates.

◆ Democracy is a concrete phenomenon that is constantly evolving. Rooted in history, culture and tradition, it takes diverse forms and develops along the paths chosen by different peoples based on their exploration and innovation. China stays committed to respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, uphold non-interference in internal affairs, and respect the independent choices of development paths and social systems made by people in different countries. China has no intention to engage in systemic rivalry or ideological confrontation with the US. China never exports ideology, never interferes in other countries’ internal affairs, and never seeks to change the system of the US.

Falsehood 5: The US has profound differences with the CPC and the Chinese Government. But those differences are between governments and systems – not between our people.

Reality check: The CPC’s leadership is the choice of history and of the people. The CPC and the Chinese government enjoy the wholehearted support and endorsement of the Chinese people. The US’s attempt to drive wedges between the CPC and the Chinese people only serves to reveal its animosity against China’s system and path.

◆ The CPC has deep roots among and close ties with the Chinese people. This is what has kept the CPC full of vigor and vitality. By the end of 2021, the CPC had over 95 million members. The CPC is the largest party in the world that has exercised long-term governance in the world’s most populous country. Under the leadership of the CPC, China has created the two miracles of rapid economic development and long-term social stability. Over 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty and 1.4 billion people are moving toward modernization. Over the course of just several decades, China has accomplished what took western developed countries hundreds of years.

A Harvard University survey among the Chinese people spanning 13 years found that more than 90 percent of respondents are satisfied with the Party and their government, the highest rate among countries for years running. A trust and credibility survey released in 2022 by Edelman, a renowned US public relations consultancy firm, shows that as many as 91 percent Chinese citizens trust their government in 2021, the highest among all surveyed countries.

◆ The previous US administration, in a McCarthyism-style campaign, went all out to attack and discredit the CPC. It has attacked Chinese leaders and China’s domestic and foreign policies, sown discord between the CPC and the Chinese people, flagrantly challenged the leadership and governing position of the CPC, incited anti-China and anti-CPC sentiment, and imposed visa restrictions on CPC members and their families.

The current administration, since its inauguration, has made no substantive changes to those policies. In June 2021, the US Senate passed the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, which is more than 2,000 pages long. It regarded China as a strategic competitor and the main challenge to the US, slandered China’s development path and domestic and foreign policies, and malignantly urged actions to counter the “influence and malign activities” of the CPC. It asked for more than 200 billion US dollars of public funding to ensure US advantages in key technology sectors over China, and advocated mobilizing US resources in strategic, diplomatic, economic, and technological realms to engage in comprehensive strategic competition with China. The US Senate also proposed an appropriation of 300 million US dollars for each of the fiscal years 2022 through 2026 to “counter the malign influence” of the CPC and designated the US Department of State and Agency for International Development to train journalists on investigative techniques necessary to ensure public accountability related to the Belt and Road Initiative, including “supporting civil society and independent media”.

The US continues to use the CPC background as a pretext for cracking down on normal people-to-people exchanges and cooperation. For some time, Chinese students and visiting scholars going to the US have been harassed and suppressed by the US. Most of them were asked whether they or their parents are CPC members. Some were repatriated on inconceivable grounds, such as being suspected of military connections simply because they had photos in their mobile phones of military training at college. These stop-and-search activities go far beyond what the US claims as “normal law enforcement”.

◆ The CPC, the Chinese government and the Chinese people share an inseparable bond. The US says it respects the Chinese people, then it should respect the development path and political system chosen by the Chinese people and respect the CPC that represents the fundamental interests of the Chinese people. By targeting the CPC and the Chinese government, the US is in effect targeting the Chinese people. Anything done to separate the CPC, the Chinese government and the Chinese people and pit the Chinese people against the CPC and the Chinese government will surely be met with the unanimous opposition and resolute response of the over 1.4 billion Chinese people.

Falsehood 6: The United States raises human rights issues and calls for change – not to stand against China, but to stand up for peace, security, and human dignity.

Reality Check: The human rights of the Chinese people are guaranteed like never before, with a notable increase in their sense of fulfillment, happiness and security. In contrast, the US has been engaged in grave human rights violations both at home and abroad, and its shocking track record makes it the biggest human rights abuser in the world.

◆ China always puts people’s right to subsistence on top of its agenda, prioritizes the work to enhance their right to development, regards the protection of citizens’ lawful rights and interests as its basic task, has made the safeguarding of the rights of ethnic groups an important part of its work, and considers the protection of people’s safety its long-term goal.

Guided by a people-centered philosophy, since the day when it was founded, the CPC has made seeking happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation its mission. For the past 100 years, the Party has been working tirelessly for the interest of the people, and has dedicated itself to realizing people’s aspirations for a better life. China has been advancing whole-process people’s democracy, promoting legal safeguard for human rights, and upholding social equity and justice. The Chinese people now enjoy fuller and more extensive and comprehensive democratic rights.

◆ China has created the miracle of eliminating absolute poverty. By the end of 2020, China has lifted all 98.99 million rural residents living below the current poverty line out of poverty. In 2021, China completed the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and historically resolved the problem of absolute poverty. Since the launch of reform and opening-up, 770 million impoverished rural residents have shaken off poverty as currently defined. Based on the international poverty line of the World Bank, China accounts for 70 percent of global poverty reduction over the same period. China met the poverty reduction goal of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ten years ahead of schedule, making major contributions to global poverty reduction and human rights progress. China has also put in place the world’s largest education system, the largest social security system and the largest health care system.

◆ Since COVID-19 started, China has been acting on the principle of putting the people and their lives first. Based on China’s national conditions, it has formulated and implemented a dynamic zero-COVID guideline, and has been constantly fine-tuning its response measures in light of the evolving situation, to best protect people’s life and health and at the same time, ensure sustained, sound and steady socioeconomic development with the pandemic under effective control. Both the infection rate and mortality rate of China are the lowest in the world.

◆ As an active participant in global human rights governance, China has made its contribution to and offered its initiatives on world human rights development. In recent years, the concept of “building a community of shared future” has been written into the resolutions of the UN Human Rights Council, and China-sponsored resolutions on “the contribution of development to the enjoyment of all human rights” and on “Promoting Mutually Beneficial Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights” were adopted multiple times at the Human Rights Council. China also made joint statements on behalf of developing countries on the implementation of the right to development, the promotion of human rights by poverty alleviation, equitable distribution of vaccines, among other subjects, contributing its share to safeguarding the basic human rights of developing countries, which has won it wide recognition and support from the international community.

◆ China has been an advocate and a doer in advancing the international human rights cause. A World Bank study estimates, if implemented fully, the Belt and Road Initiative could lift 32 million people out of moderate poverty — those who live on less than $3.2 a day. It shows how participating in Belt and Road cooperation can advance human rights in more countries. In the face of the pandemic, China launched its largest global humanitarian operation since the founding of the People’s Republic, and championed the building of a global community of health for all. To address the global development deficit, China proposed the Global Development Initiative (GDI) which sees improving people’s welfare and achieving well-rounded human development as the fundamental purpose and goal. The GDI has been echoed and supported by more than 100 countries and many international organizations including the UN. The Initiative galvanizes extensive international consensus for accelerated implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and builds up international synergy for coordinated development, thus providing a strong underpinning for the advancement of the international human rights cause.

◆ The right to life is of utmost importance, as survival is the basis of all human rights. Endowed with the world’s most advanced medical equipment and technologies, the US has registered the world’s largest number of COVID-19 infections and deaths. Pandemic response has been extremely politicized, and become a tool and lever to attack, undercut and oppose each other between the Republicans and the Democrats. Politicians only focus on political gains, with no regard to the life and health of the ordinary people. Its pandemic control, which has been unscientific, unequal and irresponsible, has gravely undermined American people’s right to life and health.

So far, the COVID-19 death toll in the US has surpassed one million. The deaths are, according to The Atlantic, “unexpected, untimely, particularly painful, and, in many cases, preventable”. Some politician even suggested that old people may sacrifice themselves for the country and that saving the country’s economy is more important than old people’s lives. Data of the US Center for Disease Prevention and Control shows that most COVID victims are aged 65 years and above. USC and Princeton researchers project that due to the pandemic deaths last year, life expectancy at birth for Americans will shorten by 1.13 years, the sharpest decline since World War II. ”For Blacks, the life expectancy would shorten by 2.10 years, and for Latinos, by 3.05 years. Whites are also impacted, but their projected decline is much smaller – 0.68 years.”

The Washington Post points to a far greater number behind the one million death toll: That number is 9 million – the number of Americans who have lost spouses, parents, grandparents, siblings and children to COVID. A study by the Imperial College London estimates that more than 250,000 US children had lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19 by 23 May 2020. Figures released by the US Government Accountability Office in March 2022 show that up to 23 million people in the US may have developed “long COVID”, and an estimated one million people suffering from the symptoms may be pushed out of work.

The US is the country most rampant with gun violence. Its population, totaling 333 million or 4 percent of the world’s total, own more than 400 million guns or 46 percent of all the private guns in the world. It tops the world in terms of gun ownership, and shooting incidents every now and then in the US takes away more than 110 lives on a daily average. Many people say it is easier to buy a gun than baby formula in the US.

Data of the US website Gun Violence Archive show about 45,000 Americans are killed in gun violence incidents in 2021. On 24 May 2022, the Robb elementary school shooting in Texas claimed 21 lives, including 19 children. By US media counts, it is the 39th campus shooting this year. According to The Washington Post tally, 202 mass shootings took place in the US in the first five and half months this year. For decades, no substantive measures have been taken by the US government to address such problems. In the past 25 years, the US federal government fails to introduce any gun control act. The New York Times observed, “The United States has become ungovernable not because of political differences or protest or a lack of civility, but because this is a country unwilling to protect and care for its citizens – its women, its racial minorities and especially its children.”

Despite the claim by US founding fathers that “All men are created equal”, slavery was preserved in its Constitution of 1789. Although the US has abolished segregation on the surface, white supremacy continues to wreak havoc, and systemic discrimination against racial minorities still exists even to this day. The entrenched racism, compounded by the coronavirus, has fueled a new spike of hate crimes against Asian-Americans. At the same time, racial persecution of the indigenous people persists, discrimination against the Muslim community worsens, racial economic divide yawns, and racial inequality aggravates day by day. Nearly 60 years on since Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, people still see a brutal reality as reflected in George Floyd’s “I can’t breathe” plea.

◆ Through slaughter, expulsion, sterilization and forced assimilation, the US committed a genocide against Native Americans, resulting in a sharp drop in their population from five million in 1492 to 250,000 in the early 20th century. The Native American community has long been neglected and discriminated against. The indigenous culture was fundamentally crushed, and the inter-generational inheritance of indigenous lives and spirits was under severe threats. Many US government statistical programs either leave them out completely or simply classify them as “others”.

Shannon Keller O’Loughlin, Chief Executive and Attorney of the Association on American Indian Affairs, said that Native Americans have diverse cultures and languages, but are often seen not as an ethnic group, but as a political stratum with limited autonomy based on treaties with the federal government. The Atlantic commented that from the expulsion, slaughter and forced assimilation back in history to the current widespread poverty and neglect, the American Indians, once the owner of this continent, now have a very weak voice in American society.

The US government enforced the system of boarding schools in Native American areas to impose English and Christian education on Native American children. It also enacted laws prohibiting Native Americans from performing religious rituals which have been passed down through generations. An article titled “The United States Must Reckon With Its Own Genocides” carried by Foreign Policy website on 11 October 2021 noted that over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, there were more than 350 government funded indigenous boarding schools across the US. Hundreds of thousands of indigenous children passed through, or died in, these schools. The purpose of Indian boarding schools was to culturally assimilate indigenous children by forcibly relocating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were to be forcibly suppressed. The US was not just morally, but also legally responsible for the crime of genocide against its own people.

Native American writer Rebecca Nagle believes that information about Native Americans has been systematically removed from mainstream media and popular culture. According to a report by National Indian Education Association, 87 percent of state-level US history textbooks do not mention the post-1900 history of indigenous people. According to the Smithsonian Institution, things taught about Native Americans in American schools are full of inaccurate information and fail to present the real picture of the sufferings of indigenous people. Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, said publicly at the Young America’s Foundation that “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here … but candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

◆ Islamphobia and the discrimination against and suppression of Muslims and Islam in US mainstream society has become more pronounced. A Bloomberg report on 9 September 2021 observed that discrimination against Muslims in the US increased in the two decades after 9/11. On the same day, the Associated Press cited a survey which found that 53 percent of Americans have negative views toward Islam. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in its 2021 report that it receives an increasing number of complaints each year about bullying and hate speech against Muslims.

According to the survey findings released by the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley on 29 October 2021, 67.5 percent of Muslim respondents said they had experienced Islamophobia, and an even larger percent of those surveyed, 93.7 percent, said that anti-Muslim hatred had affected their mental or emotional well-being to some degree.

◆ The US has serious problems of human trafficking and forced labor. It still has not ratified the Forced Labour Convention (1930), the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Every year, nearly 100,000 people are smuggled into the US for forced labor. Today, there are at least half a million people enslaved in the US; roughly 240,000 to 325,000 women and children are victims of sexual slavery.

◆ Immigrants and refugees have become a tool of partisan feuding and political rivalry in the US. The government changes its rules and regulations capriciously, enforces laws violently, and immigrants have been subjected to inhuman treatment such as prolonged detention, torture and forced labor. Data released by US Border Patrol shows that in fiscal year 2021, as many as 557 migrants died on the southern border of the US, more than double the previous fiscal year, hitting the highest number since records began in 1998. That same year, the US detained more than 1.7 million immigrants at the southern border, including 45,000 children. In September 2021, more than 15,000 asylum seekers from Haiti crowded under a bridge in the Texas border town of Del Rio, sleeping in squalid tents or dirt in the sweltering heat, and surrounded by trash under dire living conditions. US border patrol authorities brutalized the asylum seekers, with patrols on horseback, brandishing horsewhips and charging toward the crowds to expel them into the river. CNN commented that this scene is reminiscent of the dark era in American history when slave patrols were used to control black slaves.

◆ Turning a blind eye to the systematic violation of the human rights of its own people, the US government has wilfully attacked other countries and interfered in their internal affairs in the name of human rights, challenging right with might and trampling on justice out of selfish interest.

Since 2001, the US has waged war or conducted military operations in about 80 countries in the name of “war on terror”, resulting in the deaths of more than 900,000 people, including 300,000 civilians. The 20-year-long war waged by the US has left Afghanistan devastated and impoverished. A total of 47,245 Afghan civilians and 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers unrelated to 9/11 have been killed and more than 10 million displaced as a result of US operations. The War in Afghanistan has destroyed the foundation of economic development and impoverished the Afghan people. When the US withdrew from Afghanistan, it immediately froze billions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves at the Afghan central bank, pushing the Afghan economy to the brink of collapse and making things worse for the Afghan people.

At the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, many countries denounced the US as “the biggest destroyer of human rights in the world” and urged it to address its own gross human rights problems.

◆ The US has been an expert in arbitrary detention and torture. Under the pretext of “war on terror”, the CIA has set up black sites in at least 54 countries and regions over the years, where more than 100,000 people are detained. A group of independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said in a statement released on 10 January 2022 that the US has arbitrarily detained people without trial and subjected them to torture or ill-treatment in Guantanamo Bay for 20 years in violation of international human rights law, calling this “a stain on the US Government’s commitment to the rule of law”. The US should face up to and resolve its own systemic and chronic human rights problems, reflect on the humanitarian disasters and crimes it has caused around the world, and give a responsible account of itself to the international community.

Falsehood 7: The US remains committed to its ”one China” policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three Joint Communiques, the Six Assurances. Its policy on Taiwan has not changed.

Reality Check: The one-China principle is an established norm of international relations and a universal consensus of the international community. The US has acted faithlessly, kept regressing from its own commitments and the consensus it reached with China, and attempted to weaken and undermine the one-China principle and use Taiwan to contain China. This is a major threat to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

◆ In October 1971, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted, with an overwhelming majority, Resolution 2758, which decided to restore the lawful seat of the People’s Republic of China in the UN, and has solved once and for all the issue of China’s representation in the UN in political, legal and procedural terms. The official legal opinions of the Office of Legal Affairs of the UN Secretariat pointed out explicitly that “the United Nations considers ‘Taiwan’ as a province of China with no separate status”, the “‘authorities’ in ‘Taipei’ are not considered to … enjoy any form of governmental status”, and “Reference to ‘Taiwan’ … should read ‘Taiwan, Province of China'”.

On the basis of the one-China principle, China has established diplomatic relations with 181 countries, including the US.

◆ The US made the following commitments to China regarding the one-China principle in the three China-US joint communiqués.

In the Shanghai Communiqué released in 1972, the US explicitly stated that “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position”.

In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations released in 1978, the US clearly stated that “The United States of America recognizes the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China”; ”The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China”.

In the August 17 Communiqué released in 1982, the US unequivocally stated that “In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations on January 1, 1979, issued by the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of the United States of America, the United States of America recognized the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China, and it acknowledged the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China”, and that “it has no intention of infringing on Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity, or interfering in China’s internal affairs, or pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan'”.

According to this Communiqué, “the United States Government states that it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan, that its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and that it intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan, leading, over a period of time, to a final resolution. In so stating, the United States acknowledges China’s consistent position regarding the thorough settlement of this issue”.

◆ Rather than faithfully abiding by its commitments on Taiwan, the US has kept backpedaling on history.

On the political front, the US has added the so-called “Taiwan Relations Act” and the “Six Assurances” to the expression of its one-China policy, with a growing list of such prefixes. Both prefixes are unilaterally made by the US side in breach of its commitments in the three China-US joint communiqués as well as the one-China principle affirmed in the UNGA Resolution 2758 and widely observed by the international community. They are illegal, null and void from the very beginning, and China has never acknowledged and has firmly rejected them from the outset. The US has also violated its commitment of maintaining unofficial relations only with Taiwan and kept upgrading the level of engagement. In recent years, senior US officials including the Secretary of Health and Human Services and Under Secretary of State as well as members of Congress have visited Taiwan. US ambassadors overseas have also met with Taiwan’s so-called “representatives” in their host countries.

In the military field, the US has reneged on its commitment “that it intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan, leading, over a period of time, to a final resolution”. Instead of ceasing the arms sales, it has sold weapons at a larger scale and with enhanced capability including assault weaponries such as anti-radiation missiles, heavy weight torpedoes, and F-16V fighter jets. To date, the total volume of US arms sales to Taiwan has exceeded 70 billion US dollars. According to reports by Reuters and other new agencies, US special operations forces have been rotating into Taiwan on a temporary basis to train with Taiwanese forces.

Since 2021, the US leader has stated publicly on three occasions that the US would help defend Taiwan in case of a war in the Taiwan Strait.

On the international stage, the US has been assisting Taiwan in expanding its so-called “international space”. Recently, the US has been spreading globally the fallacy that UNGA Resolution 2758 did not determine the status of Taiwan, and that each country should be able to determine the contours of its own “one China” policy. It has vigorously advocated support for Taiwan’s participation as an observer in the 75th session of the World Health Assembly, and even blatantly helped to consolidate Taiwan’s “diplomatic relations”.

◆ These US acts have breached its commitment that “it has no intention of … pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan'”. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2022, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, “my understanding of the agreement (China and the US reached upon the establishment of diplomatic relations) has been that the United States would uphold the principle of one China … it is essential that these principles be maintained, and the United States should not by subterfuge or a gradual process, develop something of a two-China solution”.

◆ The DPP authorities have been stubbornly advancing its “Taiwan independence” separatist agenda, and the US has been encouraging and supporting “Taiwan independence” forces overtly and covertly. This is the root cause of current tensions across the Taiwan Strait. To defend peace across the Taiwan Strait and beyond, we must forestall the growing tendency of “Taiwan independence” and the collusion between the US and Taiwan. The one-China principle must not be challenged. China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must not be infringed upon. And the red line that no one should pursue a policy of “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan” must not be crossed. China is fully confident, capable and prepared to resolutely curb “Taiwan independence” separatist activities, resolutely foil all external interferences, and firmly safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity. The US should abide by the provisions in the three China-US joint communiqués, follow a true one-China policy, and act on its commitments including on not supporting “Taiwan independence”. The US needs to genuinely reflect on and redress its regressive and erroneous behavior, and stop playing with fire on the Taiwan question. Otherwise, it would gravely jeopardize peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, undermine China-US relations and incur an unbearable cost on itself.

Falsehood 8: The United States stands with countries and people around the world against the genocide and crimes against humanity happening in the Xinjiang region, where more than a million people have been placed in detention camps because of their ethnic and religious identity.

Reality Check: The human rights of the people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang are fully protected. There is no “genocide” or “crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang. The US has been spreading disinformation about Xinjiang simply to create an excuse for discrediting and attacking China.

◆ Xinjiang-related issues are not about human rights, but about fighting violence, terrorism and separatism. According to figures available, between 1990 and the end of 2016, there were several thousand incidents of violent and terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers, and causing immeasurable property damage.

In response to such real threats, Xinjiang has acted resolutely to fight terrorism and extremism in accordance with law. At the same time, a series of supporting measures have been taken, like improving people’s livelihoods, raising public awareness about law, and offering help through vocational education and training centers. The trend of frequent terrorist activities has thus been effectively curbed. There has been no violent act of terrorism in Xinjiang for five consecutive years and more. The region has enjoyed security, social stability and good development. The safety and security of people of all ethnic groups have been effectively protected.

◆ ”Genocide” in Xinjiang is a complete “lie of the century”. Over the past 60 years and more, the Uyghur population has increased from 2.2 million to about 12 million, and their average life expectancy has grown from 30 to 75 years.

With stability prevailing in Xinjiang, local people live and work in peace and happiness. The region has made unprecedented progress in delivering economic and social development and in bettering people’s lives. Between 2014 and 2019, GDP in Xinjiang rose from 919.59 billion yuan to 1.36 trillion yuan, with an average annual growth rate of 7.2 percent, while per capita disposable income grew by an average annual rate of 9.1 percent. Remarkable achievements have been made in eliminating extreme poverty. All 3.09 million impoverished people by current standards have been lifted out of poverty, making absolute poverty a thing of the past in Xinjiang.

The lawful rights and interests of the people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang have been protected effectively. All ethnic groups, regardless of their populations, have equal legal status and enjoy freedom of religious belief and various rights in accordance with law, including participating in the management of state affairs, receiving education, using their own languages, and preserving their traditional culture.

◆ In July 2019, permanent representatives of more than 50 countries in Geneva sent a joint letter to the President of the UN Human Rights Council and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, praising China’s achievements in fighting terrorism, deradicalization and human rights protection. In October 2019, more than 60 countries spoke at the Third Committee of the 74th session of the UN General Assembly, commending the tremendous human rights advancement in Xinjiang. In June 2021, more than 90 countries made joint or separate statements at the Human Rights Council in support of China. In the meantime, Canada took the lead in attacking China on issues related to Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet. Just a little over 40 countries echoed Canada’s criticism, and none of them are from the Muslim world.

◆ In recent years, over 2,000 people from more than 100 countries, including experts, scholars, journalists, diplomats and religious figures, have visited Xinjiang, witnessing the unity, harmony and happiness of people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang.

◆ The so-called “genocide” in Xinjiang is a lie cooked up by anti-China forces represented by the anti-China German scholar Adrian Zenz. He is a member of the far-right group “Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation” sponsored by the US government, and a key figure in an anti-China organization set up by US intelligence agencies. He is also a racist. His “research” is full of inconsistencies, fabrications and data manipulation. It does not have any academic credibility and cannot be cleared for academic publication. For example, a chart in Zenz’s “paper” claims that new IUD placements in Xinjiang average between 800 and 1,400 per person each year, which means each woman in the region would have to undergo four to eight such insertion surgeries every day. This is totally against common sense.

◆ On 29 June 2020, the Jamestown Foundation of the US published a “research report” by Adrian Zenz, in which he falsely accused the Chinese government of committing “genocide” against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

Upon the release of the report, US politicians including then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, Senator Marco Rubio and House Representative Jim McGovern immediately pitched in to whip up the “genocide” accusation. Rubio, McGovern, Senator John Cornyn and Senator Robert Menendez went on to urge the administration to make a genocide determination of China’s policy on Xinjiang. Contradicting the conclusion reached by lawyers at the State Department Office of the Legal Adviser, Pompeo announced that ”I have determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups” on 19 January 2021, the last day of the previous administration. The current administration has followed the same position and continued to allege “genocide” in Xinjiang. This further exposes the US’s real intention of political manipulation in the name of human rights.

◆ The World Uyghur Congress, an anti-China separatist organization, hired people like Sayragul Sauytbay and Tursunay Ziawudun to make false statements and spread all kinds of lies about ”persecution”. In the 70-plus press conferences held so far by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, falsehoods spread by anti-China forces have been debunked with solid facts. For instance, some “performers” who claimed to be the victims of forced sterilization in vocational education and training centers have never been to one. The family members or friends reported by some “performers” as missing are actually living a normal life in Xinjiang.

◆ The false claim about ”millions of Uyghurs detained” in education and training centers was initiated and spread by “Chinese Human Rights Defenders”, an NGO supported by the US government. Based on interviews with eight Uyghurs and rough estimation, the organization came to the preposterous conclusion that at least 10 percent of the 20 million people in Xinjiang are detained in “reeducation camps”.

The education and training centers in Xinjiang are no different in nature from deradicalization centers or community correction and desistance and disengagement programs in many other countries. It has been proven to be a successful exploration in preventative counter-terrorism and deradicalization, consistent with the principle and spirit of counter-terrorism resolutions including the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy and the UN Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism. At the centers, trainees acquire greater proficiency in standard spoken and written Chinese language and employability, and gain a stronger sense of national identity, citizenship and rule of law. By October 2019, all trainees had graduated from the centers. Most of them have steady employment after finding jobs by themselves or with the help of the government, or starting up their own businesses.

◆ The US and some other Western countries have been making an issue of human rights in Xinjiang in total disregard of the basic reality of human rights protection and development there. It has become a means for them to achieve their strategic objective of using Xinjiang as a pretext to contain China. Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired US Army Colonel and chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said publicly in August 2018 that one of the three-fold purpose of the US military’s presence in Afghanistan is the containment of China — “If the CIA would want to destabilize China, that would be the best way to do it – to form an unrest, and join with those Uyghurs in pushing … Beijing from internal places rather than external”.

Falsehood 9: The CPC has imposed harsh anti-democratic measures in Hong Kong under the guise of national security. Beijing’s quashing of freedom in Hong Kong violates its handover commitments, enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration.

Reality Check: By attacking and smearing the Law on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), what the US is really up to is to meddle in Hong Kong affairs and make Hong Kong a “bridgehead” for infiltration and interference against the mainland. Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong. Hong Kong affairs are purely China’s internal affairs that brook no interference from the US.

◆ For a long time, the US has colluded with the anti-China, destabilizing forces in Hong Kong, interfered in Hong Kong’s political agenda, stoked up social tensions, and even directly intervened in Hong Kong affairs. The US Consul-General in Hong Kong publicly criticized the Hong Kong SAR government for the proposed legislative amendments in 2019 and the One Country, Two Systems. Officials from the US Consulate-General in Hong Kong also met with the so-called leaders of the rioters. The rioters openly admitted that they had discussed with the US the legislative process of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 and urged the US to stop exporting tear gas and rubber bullets to the Hong Kong police.

◆ Funded and incited by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other US government’s “white gloves”, anti-China rioters in Hong Kong committed vandalizing, looting and arson in the name of the so-called fight for “democracy” and “freedom”, and violently stormed the building of the Legislative Council (LegCo) of Hong Kong. NED even appeared publicly on the street to direct relevant activities, attempting to stage a “color revolution” in Hong Kong. NED contacted opposition parties, groups and organizations in Hong Kong through its affiliating National Democratic Institute for International Affairs or the National Democratic Institute (NDI). NDI funded the “1 July marches” orchestrated by the opposition to obstruct legislation on Article 23, funded the participation of opposition parties and groups at workshops and seminars, and provided personal counseling on campaigning skills for their leaders, ran a so-called “young political leaders program” to support emerging political groups in confronting the government, plotted, together with opposition members of LegCo, a “five-district referendum”, and directed and funded the opposition and young radicals in orchestrating the illegal “Occupy Central” movement.

According to the NED website, two million US dollars were spent on 11 Hong Kong-related projects in 2020, with a particular focus on disrupting LegCo elections. Key projects include: “Strengthening Citizen Election Observation”, which offered technical and financial assistance to newly formed destabilizing groups in Hong Kong, and encouraged them to obstruct LegCo elections by means of election monitoring, get-out-the-vote methods, etc.; “Amplifying Citizens’ Perspectives on Political Participation”, which collected and disseminated survey findings on democratic development, and induced young Hong Kongers to share their political participation experiences on the Internet; “Supporting Unity Among Student Activists”, which called for better coordination among Hong Kong student groups prior to LegCo elections, and instructed and trained them to build capacity for “democratic change” and international communication and to play a role in disrupting electoral order; and “Building Regional Solidarity and Empowering the Hong Kong Movement”, which sought to strengthen Hong Kong’s “democratic movement” through network building, cultivate next-generation “leading activists” in Hong Kong, and set up a network of “democratic movement” in Asia.

◆ US officials used “violence” and “shame” to describe the storming of the Capitol building by protesters, but labeled the violent, criminal activities in Hong Kong that assaulted residents and damaged public facilities as “a beautiful sight to behold”. The US police used armored vehicles to disperse demonstrators, abused their force to beat and drive away sit-in demonstrators, and arrested demonstrators after deliberately inducing them to walk on vehicle lanes which constitutes violation of the law, while discrediting the Hong Kong SAR government’s law-based actions to protect people’s rights and the public order as “violation” of human rights. This is another display of US-style hypocritical double standards and exposes its intention to undermine prosperity and stability of Hong Kong and contain China under the pretext of human rights and democracy.

◆ During the 150-plus years of British colonial rule, there was no democracy in Hong Kong whatsoever. None of the governors was democratically elected by Hong Kong residents. For most of the time, Legco members were directly appointed by the governor. In stark contrast, after the return of Hong Kong, pursuant to the Basic Law, Hong Kong has come to enjoy the executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication. Its residents are masters of the SAR as provided by law who manage their own affairs within the scope of the high degree of autonomy. They enjoy a wide range of democratic rights and freedoms like never before. This is a fact that every fair-minded person would recognize.

◆ The purpose of enacting the National Security Law in Hong Kong is to close the legal loopholes in safeguarding national security in the SAR. It is a legitimate and necessary move to respond to violent terrorist activities and illegal external interference in Hong Kong. Constitutions of more than 100 countries have stipulations that the exercise of fundamental rights and freedoms shall not endanger national security. According to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the rights to freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and public trial may be subject to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety and order. The European Convention on Human Rights has similar provisions.

The national security law specifically targets four categories of crimes: secession, subversion, terrorist activities, and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security. It seeks to punish a tiny number of criminals who seriously endanger national security and protect the vast majority of law-abiding Hong Kong citizens. It provides better protection for the rights and freedoms enjoyed by Hong Kong residents and the high degree of autonomy of Hong Kong enshrined in law. It creates the conditions needed for addressing the deep-seated problems in the economy and concerning people’s livelihood. It also helps maintain the rule of law and business environment in Hong Kong, ease the concerns of the business community about social disorder, and offer better conditions for people from around the world who want to work, invest and live in Hong Kong.

Over the past two years or so since the National Security Law was enacted, the rule of law in Hong Kong has been strengthened and better guaranteed. Hong Kong’s rule of law index continues to stay among the top in the world. Foreign investors have stronger confidence in the city. Hong Kong is seeing a bright prospect transitioning from chaos to order and to prosperity. According to the 2022 AmCham Hong Kong Business Sentiment Survey released early this year, the number of businesses in Hong Kong optimistic about Hong Kong’s business outlook increased by 18 percent from the previous year, while the number of businesses that are pessimistic was down by 17 percent.

◆ The legal basis for the Chinese government to govern Hong Kong is the Chinese Constitution and the Basic Law of the HKSAR. The Sino-British Joint Declaration is not relevant in this regard. As China resumed the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997, all provisions concerning the UK under the Joint Declaration had been fulfilled. The basic policies regarding Hong Kong stated by China in the Joint Declaration are China’s declaration of its policies, which have since been fully embodied in the Basic Law enacted by the National People’s Congress. These policies have not changed; they will continue to be upheld by China. The Joint Declaration does not assign the UK any responsibility over Hong Kong nor give it any right to intervene in Hong Kong affairs after the return of Hong Kong. The UK has no sovereignty, jurisdiction or “right of supervision” over Hong Kong after its return. The Joint Declaration is a bilateral instrument between China and the UK; it does not involve any other country or has anything to do with a third country. Sovereign equality and non-interference are enshrined in international law and are basic norms of international relations. Other countries and organizations have no right to meddle in Hong Kong affairs on the grounds of the Joint Declaration.

The Central Government of China has unswervingly implemented the policy of One Country, Two Systems. Since Hong Kong’s return, the policy of One Country, Two Systems under which the people of Hong Kong administer Hong Kong with a high degree of autonomy has been earnestly implemented with widely recognized achievements. Practice has fully proven that One Country, Two Systems is the best institutional arrangement for Hong Kong’s long-term prosperity and stability. The Central Government will continue to ensure that the policy of One Country, Two Systems remains unchanged, is unwaveringly upheld, and in practice is not bent or distorted.

◆ Turning a blind eye to the fact that Hong Kong’s democracy has improved in ways unseen before its return, the US has acted against Hong Kong’s mainstream public opinion for unity and progress and made irresponsible remarks on Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy, human rights and freedom as the “preacher” of democracy. This only exposes its hypocritical double standards and the agenda to destabilize Hong Kong and contain China.

Falsehood 10: China purports to champion sovereignty and territorial integrity while standing with and defending the Russian government that brazenly violate them.

Reality Check: On the Ukraine issue, China has always adhered to an objective and just position, a position shared by most countries. The Cold War mentality and power politics is the root cause of the Ukraine crisis. The US should earnestly shoulder its due responsibilities and take concrete actions to ease the situation and solve the problems.

◆ The US has betrayed its own promises and kept pushing for the eastward expansion of NATO,creating the Ukraine crisis.

When meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, the then US Secretary of State James Baker gave clear assurances that “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east”. However, the US has led five rounds of NATO eastward expansion since 1999, increasing its membership from 16 to 30, and advancing NATO more than 1,000 kilometers eastward to the Russian border, forming a C-shaped encirclement of the Black Sea.

In 1997, former US diplomat and observer on the Soviet Union George Kennan wrote in his New York Times Op-Ed that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

In 2014, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post that if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it should not join NATO, and that it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.

At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022 in Davos, Kissinger said that Ukraine should have been a bridge between Europe and Russia, but that opportunity does not now exist in the same manner. Russia has been for 400 years an essential part of Europe, and on a number of occasions as the guarantor by which the European balance could be re-established. Current policy should keep in mind the restoration of this role is important to develop.

An American expert on international affairs points out in an article that the US government should bear considerable responsibility for the deterioration of relations with Russia caused by its major mistake of greenlighting the NATO expansion. Noting that “America and NATO aren’t innocent bystanders”, he also believed that it is “the height of folly” for some US officials to brag in public about leaks or even intelligence sharing between the US and Ukraine. He warned that such instigation on the US side could dangerously widen the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

According to Clare Daly, Member of the European Parliament, the US has been adding fuel to the fire on Ukraine because they want to weaken Russia and benefit from the crisis, for which Europe will pay a heavy price. These is still no hope of peace in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, mainly because the US does not want Russia and Ukraine to reach a peace agreement.

Former US Senator Bill Bradley said that “the fundamental blunder that the United States made in the late 80s, early 90s was the expansion of NATO”.

Former US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said in an interview if Joe Biden simply promised not to include Ukraine into NATO, the war would have been prevented.

Over the years, the US has pursued interventionism and grossly violated the sovereignty of Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, Syria and other countries. Alfred de Zayas, a senior UN expert, said in an exclusive interview that from the perspective of international law, Russia’s military actions in Ukraine violated the UN Charter, but the United States and NATO have broken international law so often over the years that “precedents of permissibility” have therefore been set for Russia’s current actions in terms of customary international law.

◆ The US has been fanning the flames on the Ukraine issue. Instead of promoting peace talks, the US continued to provide weapons to Ukraine, escalating tensions and expanding the conflict, making it more prolonged and complicated. This has sufficiently exposed the selfish nature of the US.

On 25 April 2022, US Defense Secretary Austin said after a visit to Ukraine that the US wants to use the war to “see Russia weakened”.

In late May 2022, on top of the original 13.6 billion dollars aid, the US Congress voted to approve another over 40 billion dollars in military and economic aid to Ukraine. The total assistance has exceeded 70 percent of the combined military expenditure of Russia and Ukraine in 2021.

The ongoing crisis has cost Europe heavily in political, economic and social aspects, but the US is reaping dividends, with its arms dealers, food and energy companies gaining huge profits. For example, the market value of US military industrial giants has surged by hundreds of billions, and the price of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exported to Europe is more than 10 times higher than a year ago.

As the result of the conflict, more than 6.5 million Ukrainians have fled into neighboring European countries, posing an unprecedented refugee crisis. But the US admitted only 12 refugees from Ukraine in March 2022. Thousands of Ukrainian refugees remain stranded on the US-Mexico border, and many were in US custody. Even when the UN and the international community are calling for an early end to the conflict, some in the US are still claiming that they would “fight to the last Ukrainian”.

◆ The relationship between China and Russia features non-alliance, non-confrontation and non-targeting at any third party. It is essentially different from the practice of the US and a small number of other Western countries, where they still stick to the Cold War mentality and a friend-or-foe dichotomy to draw ideological lines, form so-called “alliances” and “cliques”, pursue bloc politics and create confrontation and division.

In the joint statement issued on 4 February 2022, China and Russia call on all to champion humanity’s common values of peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom, respect the rights of all peoples to independently determine the development paths of their countries, and the sovereignty, security and development interests of all countries, protect the UN-centered international system, and the international order based on international law, seek true multilateralism with the UN and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role, promote more democratic international relations, and ensure peace, stability and sustainable development across the world.

◆ As a responsible major country, China’s decisions and judgments on the Ukraine issue are made independently based on the merits of the matter. China has made great efforts to safeguard international peace and security, and has been committed to promoting talks for peace and deescalating tensions. China maintains that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected, that the purposes and principles of the UN Charter should be upheld, that legitimate security concerns of all countries should be taken seriously, and that all efforts conducive to a peaceful resolution of the crisis should be supported. China’s position is objective, fair and consistent with the aspirations of most countries.

◆ Of the 233 sovereign countries and regions in the world, 185 are not involved in sanctions on Russia. Among the more than 190 members of the UN, more than 140 countries, including NATO member state Turkey, have refused to impose sanctions on Russia. The combined population of countries and regions participating in sanctions against Russia and those not is 6.5 billion versus 1.1 billion. Among them, those openly oppose sanctions have a combined population of 4.8 billion.

About two-thirds of the world’s population does not support Western positions on Ukraine, according to a report by the British Economist magazine.

Falsehood 11: The US is setting up new coalitions in the Indo-Pacific for regional peace and stability, and has launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), as it “shares the vision that the regional countries and people across the region hold: one of a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Reality Check: The so-called US vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” is essentially a strategy to divide others, incite confrontation and undermine peace. It runs counter to the trend of the times in the Asia-Pacific, i.e., the trend of peaceful development and win-win cooperation.

◆ The US administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy is self-contradictory: the US claims to promote the region’s “freedom and openness” as its goal, while in reality co-opting with allies to forge a “five-four-three-two-one” formation made up of the Five Eyes, the Quad, AUKUS, bilateral alliances and IPEF, forming exclusive “small circles” and forcing countries in the region to take sides.

AUKUS helps Australia build nuclear-powered submarines and develops hypersonic weapons, pushing up the risk for a regional arms race. Under the pretext of fighting illegal fishing and keeping supply chains resilient, the Quad has vigorously pursued military cooperation and intelligence sharing. The US has also encouraged NATO’s involvement in the Asia-Pacific. These are all attempts to materialize an “Asia-Pacific version of NATO” and promote “integrated deterrence” against China.

◆ The Indo-Pacific strategy has raised increasing alarm and concern of many countries, especially those in the Asia-Pacific. As BBC reported, in April 2021, New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta expressed New Zealand’s discomfort with expanding the Five Eyes’ remit by putting pressure on China in this way, and New Zealand still prefers to pursue bilateral relations with China. At the US-ASEAN Special Summit, ASEAN countries stressed their aspiration for peace and cooperation, not for taking sides, division or confrontation.

◆ The US has made clear that IPEF is to enable it to win the contest in the 21st century. This means that the IPEF is designed to serve the US economy. The US has shelved the development of the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) for a long time, left the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and refused to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). This exposes the self-serving nature of the US and its selective approach to international institutions. It is all about the US’ self-interests, nothing mutually beneficial.

IPEF is a political instrument of the US in propping up its hegemony in the regional economy. The essence is to dominate the supply chains, value chains and new economic sectors, and marginalize specific countries. The US has chosen to weaponize economic issues as political and ideological ones, using economy to coerce regional countries into taking sides between China and the US.

US Trade Representative Katherine Tai publicly stated that IPEF is a standalone arrangement independent from China. US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said IPEF marks the US’s restoration of economic leadership in the region and presents Indo-Pacific countries an alternative to China’s approach. Previously, she also expressed that IPEF may harmonize export controls and other “poison pills”, such as limiting sensitive products export to China.

IPEF seeks to establish US-led trade rules, restructure the industrial chain system and economically and scientifically “decouple” regional countries from China. Many countries in the region get concerned, and believe that the cost of such “decoupling” will be huge. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad noted that any trade alliance that excludes the world’s second largest economy is not conducive to closer, multilateral trade cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. The US’s exclusion of China is not an economic issue but a political one.

◆ Hailed as “menu approach” cooperation, IPEF actually pays little regard to the development level and real needs of the regional countries. It barely gives concessions to developing countries on tariff reduction and market access, but forces participating countries to accept the so-called high standards of the US and its unilateral agenda. IPEF focuses solely on the US’s self-interests and cares little about the needs of other parties. There is no such thing as mutual benefit in IPEF.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) pointed out in its report “Regional Perspectives on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework” that IPEF has little more to offer than enlarging the US economic presence in the region. It fails to address the issues of the greater interests of regional countries. There is widespread concern that IPEF will only benefit the US, while saddling participating regional countries with a heavy burden.

Falsehood 12: China has announced its ambition to create a sphere of influence in the Pacific region. It is advancing unlawful maritime claims in the South China Sea, undermining peace and security, freedom of navigation and commerce. The US will continue to oppose Beijing’s aggressive and unlawful activities in the South and East China Seas. It will support the region’s coastal states in upholding their maritime rights, work with allies and partners to uphold freedom of navigation and overflight, and will continue to fly and sail wherever international law allows.

Reality Check: China is committed to the path of peaceful development, the five principles of peaceful coexistence and opposes the practice of the big and strong bullying the small and weak. The US, by painting China as a threat and using “freedom of navigation” as a pretext to undermine China’s sovereignty, security and maritime rights and interests, is actually the real threat to regional peace and security.

◆ China stands for equality among all countries irrespective of their size, respects every country’s choice of development path suited to its national condition, and does not seek any sphere of influence. China pursues a defense policy that is defensive in nature and a military strategy of active defense. In developing its defense capabilities, China aims to safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests, and does not target any other country. The growth of China’s defense capabilities amplifies the force for peace in the world.

◆ China is the first to have discovered, named, and explored and exploited Nanhai Zhudao and relevant waters, and the first to have exercised sovereignty and jurisdiction over them continuously, peacefully and effectively. China’s sovereignty over Nanhai Zhudao and its relevant rights and interests in the South China Sea have been established in the long course of history. They are solidly grounded in history and law, and have been upheld by successive Chinese governments and recognized by the international community. Pursuant to the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation, China recovered territories illegally occupied by Japan including Xisha Qundao and Nansha Qundao after WWII, and has since affirmed sovereignty and strengthened jurisdiction by establishing official names, publishing maps, creating administrative units and stationing troops. China’s resuming its exercise of sovereignty over Nanhai Zhudao is a legitimate and lawful act to inherit China’s rights established over the course of history. It is also part of the post-WWII international order, and has been recognized by countries around the world including the US.

◆ With the joint efforts of China and ASEAN countries, the overall situation in the South China Sea remains stable. With the full and effective implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), the parties have increased dialogue, properly handled differences, deepened cooperation and enhanced mutual trust, and have made active progress in advancing consultations on the Code of Conduct (COC) in the South China Sea, in an effort to jointly safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea and inject positive dynamics into regional and global security, stability and prosperity. Despite COVID-19, the parties have held offline Senior Officials’ Meetings on the implementation of the DOC and 10 joint working group meetings via video link to advance consultations on the COC text. Last month, the first face-to-face COC consultations since COVID-19 was held in Cambodia. Such positive progress speaks volumes about the resolve and commitment of regional countries to steadfastly advance consultations toward a COC.

◆ China respects and supports all countries’ freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea in accordance with international law, and actively safeguards the security of and unimpeded passage through international shipping lanes. In fact, the South China Sea is one of the world’s safest and freest sea lanes. Fifty percent of merchant vessels in the world and one-third of international maritime trade pass through it, and more than 100,000 merchant ships sail through it annually. Freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea has never been an issue.

◆ Diaoyu Dao and its affiliated islands are China’s inherent territory. China’s patrol and law enforcement missions in waters off the Diaoyu Dao are legitimate measures taken by China to exercise its sovereignty in accordance with law and are necessary responses to Japanese provocations in violation of China’s sovereignty. No country or force should misjudge the strong resolve of the Chinese government to safeguard sovereignty and territorial integrity. At the same time, China stays committed to properly handling and resolving issues through dialogue and consultation, and has made great efforts to maintain maritime stability. In 2014, a four-point principled consensus was reached between China and Japan to handle and improve China-Japan relations, which includes a clear understanding on managing the situation surrounding Diaoyu Dao and the East China Sea.

◆ Acting under the logic of the Monroe Doctrine, the US often uses power politics and hegemonic and bullying acts to flagrantly undermine the international maritime order, with a view to sustaining its maritime predominance. In the 240-plus-year history of the US, there were only 16 years when the country was not at war with others. The US operates over 800 military bases in 80 countries and regions. Its military expenditure, which has topped the world for many years in a row, accounts for one-fourth of the global total and is equivalent to the combined military spending of the next nine countries. Recently, the US has proposed a national defense budget request of about 813 billion US dollars for fiscal year 2023. Such massive military spending makes the US the real “pacing challenge” to the world.

◆ The US disregards the history and facts surrounding the South China Sea issue, deliberately stokes disputes on territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, and sows discord among regional countries. It has become the biggest force undermining stability and fueling militarization in the South China Sea. Data from relevant organizations show that the number of US close-in reconnaissance activities targeting China has more than doubled over the past decade and more. Right now, an average of five US naval vessels cruise near China’s shore every day. This year, US naval vessels have been sailing through the Taiwan Strait about once a month, and large US reconnaissance planes have flown over 800 times close to China and repeatedly violated China’s airspace. Eager to stir up trouble in the South China Sea, the US has also encouraged its allies and partners to sail their naval vessels into the South China Sea.

On 2 October 2021, USS Connecticut, a nuclear submarine, had an underwater collision in the South China Sea. It was not until a week later that the US issued a vague statement, claiming that the submarine hit an unknown object. One month after, it said that the submarine “grounded on an uncharted seamount”. A final report on the accident was eventually released by the US Navy on 23 May 2022, yet no clear explanation has been offered in response to the grave concerns and questions raised by many, including the intent of the submarine, the specific location of the accident, whether the submarine had entered exclusive economic zones (EEZ) and even territorial sea of other countries, and whether the accident had caused a nuclear leak or damaged marine environment.

◆ The US began its Freedom of Navigation (FON) Program in 1979 ahead of the signing of the UNCLOS. Challenging the new maritime order, the move sought to maximize the freedom of the US military to rampage through the oceans. The FON Program is not consistent with the universally recognized international law, disregards the sovereignty, security and maritime rights and interests of the many littoral countries, and seriously jeopardizes regional peace and stability. Its goal is to advance American maritime supremacy under the pretext of “freedom of navigation”. The FON Program has been firmly opposed by many members of the international community, especially the developing countries.

Falsehood 13: Chinese government officials spread disinformation.

Reality Check: China is the top victim of disinformation, while the US is the biggest source of spreading disinformation.

◆ With sharp confrontation between the Republicans and Democrats, habitual lying, finger-pointing and blame-shifting among politicians have become part of the US political ecology. A poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Pearson Institute at the University of Chicago reveals that nearly half of the respondents blame the US government for the spread of misinformation.

◆ The US has used disinformation to launch multiple wars across the globe in pursuit of its hegemonic agenda. Colin Powell, the then US Secretary of State accused Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction with a test tube of “laundry powder”. The US blamed the Syrian government for using bio-chemical weapons against its own people with fake videos by the White Helmets.

In 2019, the then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly claimed that “we lied, we cheated, we stole … we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

On 4 May 2022, Republican Senator Rand Paul spoke bluntly at a Senate hearing, “Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The US government.”

◆ Manipulation by US politicians has seriously undercut the media’s credibility. A Gallup poll in 2020 shows that 60 percent of Americans remain largely distrustful of the media, among whom 33 percent have no trust at all, which is 5 percentage points higher than that of 2019.

◆ The US has on multiple occasions fabricated numerous lies and rumors on issues concerning origins-tracing, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, democracy and human rights, including the so-called “lab-leak theory”, “genocide” and “forced labor”, which have all been defeated by facts.

Since the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out, the US has kept spreading disinformation on China and made unfounded accusations against it, in order to shirk its responsibilities for triggering the conflict with NATO’s eastward expansion. The New York Times quoted from anonymous US senior officials who claimed that China had prior knowledge of Russian military operation in Ukraine. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US Representative to the UN, said at a Security Council meeting that China had been spreading disinformation in support of Russia. This is sheer fabrication and slandering. Meanwhile, as part of the fierce hunt of voices different from its own, the US has added special labels to Tweets sharing links of Chinese media reports, while turning a blind eye to the Western media that are actually telling the lies.

◆ The US has used disinformation as a political tool to attack and suppress China, and formed a supply chain of anti-China rhetoric combining dirty funding, fact-twisting stories and massive smear campaigns. On the surface, these anti-China rhetoric come from certain media outlets and politicians, but what lies underneath is a massive capital-driven supply chain — some institutions and organizations from the US and other Western countries provide dirty funding for political purposes to anti-China groups and individuals; some think-tanks and academic institutions make up fact-twisting stories to fuel anti-China rhetoric around the world through Western hegemony on public opinion; and politicians and media act as mouthpieces propagating lies and falsehoods about China in massive smear campaigns.

Adrian Zenz and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), both fabricated numerous Xinjiang-related lies, are typical examples of such “lies manufacturers”.

Adrian Zenz is a member of a far-right group founded by the US government and a key member of an anti-China research institute set up and manipulated by the US intelligence agency. His so-called reports on Xinjiang reflect no credibility, intellectual merit or academic integrity at all.

As disclosed by the media, the US State Department and arms manufacturers are the primary foreign sponsors for the ASPI. Funding from the US State Department alone reached nearly 1.4 million Australian dollars a year, all directed to research projects attacking China. The ASPI disseminated a series of lies and disinformation on issues concerning origins-tracing, Xinjiang and data security.

◆ In addition to constantly spreading disinformation on China, the US has also rolled out measures to suppress and contain China based on such disinformation, including China-related bills and sanctions. In December 2021, under the pretext of its so-called concerns on “forced labor”, the US signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law, imposing a full ban on imports from Xinjiang. This is a malicious move to denigrate human rights situation in Xinjiang, and a serious violation of international law and basic norms of international relations.

◆ China has used facts and figures to tell the truth and refute the lies and rumors created and propagated by the US. It is aimed at making truth heard, not spreading disinformation. Instead of observing basic facts, the US has acted in its own interests and labeled all views different from its own as “disinformation”. This is, in essence, hegemony and bullying in the field of public opinion.

Falsehood 14: China is circumventing or breaking trade rules and its economic manipulations have cost American workers millions of jobs, harming workers and companies in the United States but also around the world. The United States will push back on market-distorting policies and practices, like subsidies and market access barriers, which China’s government has used for years to gain competitive advantage.

Reality Check: China has faithfully delivered on its commitments made upon accession to the WTO. China upholds, builds and contributes to the multilateral trading system. China-US economic and trade relations are mutually beneficial in nature. However, US’ wanton suppression of China in trade and investment areas has been the root cause of trade frictions between the two countries, which hurts others without benefiting oneself.

◆ Over the past 20-plus years since joining the WTO, China has earnestly fulfilled its commitments upon accession. It has rolled out nationwide the management system of pre-establishment national treatment plus a negative list, kept expanding market access, brought down overall tariff level from 15.3% to 7.4%, and opened up nearly 120 sectors in the service industry.

In October 2021, the WTO conducted the eighth review of trade policies and practices of China. The report of the review fully recognized China’s efforts in upholding the multilateral trading system and its active role in the WTO. It spoke highly of China’s achievements in such areas as trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, greater opening-up and progress under the Belt and Road Initiative.

A leading official of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development pointed out that, over the past two decades, China has steadfastly supported the rules-based multilateral trading system, practiced true multilateralism, participated fully in WTO negotiations, steered negotiations in areas such as investment facilitation and e-commerce, and worked for WTO rules keeping pace with the times.

◆ Embracing the trend of regional and global economic integration, China has deepened economic and trade ties with countries around the world, signing free trade agreements and stepping up the building of free trade zones. As of now, China has signed 19 free trade agreements with 26 countries and regions.

◆ China has actively deepened supply-side structural reform. It has met the target of phasing out 150 million tons of overcapacity in the steel industry set out in the 13th Five-Year Plan two years ahead of schedule, 1.14 times of the global total in slashing overcapacity of steels. The process involved the reemployment of 280,000 Chinese steel workers, more than the total number of steel workers in the US, Europe and Japan.

◆ China and the US have highly complementary economies, deeply integrated interests, and mutually beneficial economic and trade ties. In 2021, bilateral trade topped record-breaking 750 billion US dollars. The US Export Report 2022 issued by the US-China Business Council showed that, in 2021, goods exports to China grew by 21 percent to 149 billion US dollars, supporting 858,000 jobs in the US. The 2020 Annual Business Survey Report on Chinese Enterprises in the United States released by the China General Chamber of Commerce-USA indicated that, as of 2019, CGCC’s Chinese member companies cumulatively invested over 123 billion US dollars, employed more than 220,000 people, and supported over one million jobs throughout the United States. Research of the US-China Business Council showed that Chinese exports have helped bring down US consumer price by 1 to 1.5 percent, saving each US household 850 US dollars per year.

◆ By blaming China for its own economic problems, the US started a trade war and tariff war against China, which only backfired for itself. US tariffs against China have cost American companies more than 1.7 trillion US dollars in market capitalization and increased average household expenditure by 1,300 US dollars per year. A 2021 report by the US-China Business Council pointed out that the trade war with China has resulted in a loss of 245,000 jobs in the US. A report from Moody’s Investor Service was cited as saying that American consumers bear 92.4 percent of the cost of imposing tariffs on Chinese goods. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize laureate in economics, incisively pointed out that US trade policy toward China has failed and tariffs harm the US more than their intended targets.

On 18 May 2022, the National Retail Federation (NRF) wrote to President Biden, calling for eliminating tariffs, which, as pointed out in the letter, could reduce consumer prices by as much as 1.3 percent. Janet Yellen, the US Treasury Secretary, said that some tariffs on China hurt American consumers and businesses, and that cutting tariffs was worth considering in order to lower US inflation.

The obstacles to China-US economic and trade cooperation are mainly from the US side. Over 1,000 Chinese companies have been put on its lists for unfair suppression or sanction. The US Congress has put forth more than 300 negative China-related bills. The proposed Bipartisan Innovation Act, which is still being developed, essentially aims to hold back China’s economic growth.

◆ The US arbitrarily accuses China of its industrial subsidy policies, but the country itself was among the first to develop such policies, including subsidies and so on. Successive US administrations have rolled out plans to support emerging industries. Through tax relief, government procurement and other means, the US administrations have interfered in the market to push forward cooperation between government and enterprises and advance technology transfers. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US undertook special programs to promote the development of its aerospace and military industries. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration supported the growth of hi-tech industries with the Information Superhighway plan. Such industrial policies are still being practiced in the US today. A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that the US and its allies and partners in Europe and Asia have increased subsidies to industries such as semiconductors, electric-car batteries and pharmaceuticals to shore up support for domestic companies.

◆ The US poses the biggest challenge to the global trading system. Following “America First” policy, the US has refused to shoulder its due obligations under multilateral trading agreements, and withdrawn from international treaties and organizations, taking a heavy toll on the development and functioning of the global trading system. A WTO dispute settlement report has identified the US as the biggest rule-breaker, responsible for two-thirds of violations of WTO rules. The US also blocked the appointment of new judges in the WTO Appellate Body, leading to an impasse in the Appellate Body since December 2019.

Falsehood 15: The US will give countries an alternative choice, so that they can be free from opaque investments that leave them in debt.

Reality Check: In providing foreign assistance, China always respects the sovereignty of recipient countries, attaches no strings whatsoever and pursues win-win outcomes. Chinese assistance has delivered real benefits to the relevant developing countries and received their acclaim and appreciation.

◆ The so-called Chinese “debt trap” is a narrative trap that the US and some other Western countries use to defame and smear China and disrupt China’s cooperation with other developing countries. As a 2021 article in The Atlantic points out, the debt-trap narrative is just a lie fabricated by some Western politicians, and a powerful one.

Western capital constitutes the largest creditor of developing countries. According to the 2022 statistics of the World Bank on international debt, 28.8 percent of Africa’s outstanding external debt is owed to multilateral financial institutions and 41.8 percent to commercial creditors mainly composed of Western financial institutions. These two types of institutions together hold nearly three-quarters of the debt, making them the primary creditors of Africa’s debt.

According to the director of the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at Johns Hopkins University of the US, after scrutinizing thousands of Chinese loan documents, mostly for projects in Africa, CARI has not found any evidence that China deliberately pushes poor countries into debt as a way of seizing their assets or gaining a greater say in their internal affairs. CARI’s figures show that China holds 17 percent of Africa’s overall external debt, far less than that of the West.

Not a single African country has been forced to use its strategic resources such as ports or mines as collateral for financing cooperation with China. DW points out that the default of African countries does not give China the right to use the relevant infrastructure.

◆ The debt issue is, in essence, a development issue. The key to resolving this issue lies in ensuring that the loans deliver real benefits.

Take Africa as an example. Western countries’ financing for Africa is mainly concentrated in non-production fields, and most loans come with political strings attached, such as human rights and judicial reform. They have failed to truly promote economic development, boost government tax revenue and improve balance of payments. Rather, they have served as instruments for controlling and causing harm in Africa.

China always respects the will of the African people and bears in mind the actual needs of African countries. Chinese investment in and financing for Africa are mainly in infrastructure building and production-related fields. Entering the 21st century, China has worked actively to support Africa’s economic development and provided an alternative to the traditional financing channels of the Paris Club. This  has helped Africa to strengthen its capacity of self-generated and self-reliant development and to usher in a golden age of high-speed economic growth for 20 years straight.

Professor Deborah Brautigam of Johns Hopkins University noted the diversification of Chinese investment. In 2014 alone, Chinese companies signed over 70 billion US dollars in construction contracts in Africa that will yield vital infrastructure, including hospitals, oil and gas pipelines, and airports.

According to preliminary statistics, between 2000 and 2020, China helped African countries build more than 13,000 kilometers of roads and railway and more than 80 large-scale power facilities, funded more than 130 medical facilities, 45 sports venues and more than 170 schools, and trained more than 160,000 professionals across various fields for Africa.

The Nairobi Expressway project built by Chinese companies in Kenya through public-private partnership has created more than 6,000 local jobs and benefited more than 200 subcontractors and several hundred local suppliers. The Kenyan government speaks highly of the project, commending it as an important manifestation of the mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation between Kenya and China.

Nigeria’s Lekki Deep Sea Port project, built with Chinese participation, has provided more than 1,200 local jobs and is expected to create, directly and indirectly, 170,000 more upon completion.

A study conducted by Hong Kong scholars finds that more than 80 percent of the employees of Chinese companies in Africa surveyed are local Africans.

A team at the London School of Economics and Political Science finds that Chinese investment in Africa has produced “significant and persistently positive long-term effects”.

A study by RAND Corporation indicates that in the BRI region, having a rail connection between trading partners has improved total exports by 2.8 percent.

◆ China attaches high importance to the debt sustainability of projects. Back in 2017, it signed the Guiding Principles on Financing the Development of the Belt and Road with 26 countries participating in the BRI. In 2019, China released the Debt Sustainability Framework for Participating Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative. Based on the debt situation and repayment ability of debtor countries, and following the principles of equal-footed consultation, compliance with laws and regulations, openness and transparency, the framework aims to strengthen monitoring and assessment of the economic, social and livelihood benefits of the projects, and channels sovereign loans into areas with high yields, with a view to ensuring the long-term returns of the projects. China has also made proactive efforts to lessen the burden of debtor countries.

According to the World Bank, between 2008 and 2021, China provided 71 debt restructurings for low-income countries. In 2020, China actively responded to the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) by suspending the payment of more than 1.3 billion US dollars of debt that year alone, or nearly 30 percent of the G20’s total, making it the largest contributor among G20 members. China has signed debt suspension agreements or reached mutual understanding on debt suspension with 19 African countries, and actively participated in the case-based debt settlement for Chad and Ethiopia under the G20’s Common Framework.

◆ The US and some other Western countries, rather than taking actions themselves, point fingers at China for providing assistance. This has caused much displeasure among countries in the wider developing world.

Professor Samita Hattige, adviser to the National Education Commission of Sri Lanka, said in an interview with Global Times that Chinese loans are based on the needs of the Sri Lankan government and for the purpose of improving Sri Lankan infrastructure. The loans have brought major changes to Sri Lanka’s economy and people’s livelihood, and there is no such thing as a “debt trap”. China’s share in Sri Lanka’s external debt is around a mere 10 percent. Apparently, some media have chosen to ignore this fact. While the “Chinese debt trap” hyped up by Western media seems apprehensible at a glance, it has deliberately evaded the huge economic values that infrastructure improvement has created, such as economic development and more jobs and investment.

The article “Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal Need China for Development” published by Sri Lanka’s Daily News on 17 January 2022 says, “South Asia needs China in its development process because China is synonymous with the term ‘Development’. China’s … Belt and Road Initiative provides benefits for almost all South Asian countries.” “In the case of Sri Lanka,” the article writes, ”Sri Lanka is a beneficiary of Chinese projects. Many say only about the Chinese debt trap in this regard but no one mentions Chinese developmental activities in Sri Lanka.” “They have invested heavily in seaports, airports, … national highways, and power distribution centers. ”

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni stated in an interview with Nikkei in 2022 that “Africa has been having (debt) problems for the last 600 years due to the slave trade, colonialism, neocolonialism — and none of it was from China.” “China supported Africans’ fight against colonialism before starting economic activity on the continent.”

Rwandan President Paul Kagame pointed out that China’s presence in Africa is different from that of other countries — “I don’t think China has forced any country in Africa to take their money to accumulate the kind of debt you may find with some countries.”

Nigerian Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama stated that Nigeria had chosen Chinese companies for infrastructure projects because they were experienced and provide competitive rates. “So the issue of Chinese influence really doesn’t come in.

Falsehood 16: For too long, Chinese companies have enjoyed far greater access to our markets than our companies have in China. American companies operating in China have been subject to systematic forced technology transfer, while Chinese companies in America have been protected by our rule of law.

Reality Check: China is committed to fostering an enabling business environment that is based on market principles, governed by law and up to international standard. While China’s business environment keeps improving, the business environment for Chinese companies operating in the US continues to deteriorate.

◆ China has seen the most substantial improvement in business environment among all economies. In recent years, China has made continuous efforts to shorten the negative list on foreign investment, improved the institutions for investment promotion and protection and for information reporting, and stepped up intellectual property protection, becoming one of the most-improved economies for ease of doing business. With the continuous improvement in business environment and its super-sized domestic market, China is a strong magnet for cross-border investment from around the world. The number of newly established foreign-invested enterprises is on a steady rise in China. From 2012 to 2021, the number of foreign-invested enterprises in China increased from 441,000 to 664,000, up by over 50 percent. According to the Doing Business 2020 report released by the World Bank Group, China ranked 31st on ease of doing business, moving up by 47 spots in two years. The European Business in China Business Confidence Survey 2021 released by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China (EUCCC) shows that a majority of the European companies surveyed found intellectual property rights enforcement to be “adequate” or “excellent” in China, marking a record high in satisfaction levels.

◆ It is the foreign companies, including the US companies operating in China, that can best tell whether China’s business environment is good or not. The 2022 China Business Climate Survey Report of the American Chamber of Commerce in China (AmCham China) shows that 58 percent of the US companies in China saw their operating revenue growing in 2021; 66 percent of the companies plan to increase their investment in China this year; and China remains a top-three priority of the global investment planning for 60 percent of the companies. The recently released USCBC 2021 Member Survey shows that 95 percent of the respondents remained profitable in their China operations; and 74 percent of the companies took China as a top priority or a top-five priority market in their business strategy. In the first four months of 2022, the actual US investment in China rose by 53.2 percent year on year. These figures speak volume about the optimism of foreign companies in China’s economic prospects, as well as their recognition of China’s sound business environment and confidence in building a long-term business in the Chinese market.

◆ To preserve its hegemony and economic interests, the US has abused its national power in violation of the principles of market economy and international trade rules, and resorted to every possible means to suppress and contain Chinese enterprises. The US government has fabricated all sorts of lies including “forced labor” in an attempt to bring down Xinjiang’s cotton, tomato and solar photovoltaic industries. According to preliminary statistics, in 2021, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued seven Withhold Release Orders (WROs) on the exports of goods made with “forced labor” to the US, including apparel, textiles, tomato seeds, canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, and other goods made with cotton or tomatoes, silica-based products and electronic products produced in Xinjiang, and detained or confiscated 485 million US dollars worth of goods, which are notably larger in both quantity and value compared to 2020. The current US administration has already outperformed its predecessor in terms of the scale and magnitude of sanctions imposed on China for Xinjiang-related issues.

◆ The US has imposed sweeping restrictions on the financing and operation of Chinese enterprises in the US through non-transparent and unfair administrative means. According to official US statistics, the US has up to now put 1,055 Chinese entities and individuals (overseas affiliated entities excluded) on various types of sanctions lists, including 467 on the Entity List, 306 on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN), 201 on the Unverified List (UVL), 68 on the Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies (NS-CMIC) List, and a few other entities. Last February, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) put WeChat and AliExpress on its latest Notorious Markets List, while Pinduoduo and other Chinese companies as well as nine physical markets located within China remained on the list.

Falsehood 17: China takes advantage of the openness of the US economies to spy, to hack, to steal technology and know-how to advance China’s military innovation, entrench its surveillance state and increase other countries’ technological dependence. The US should make sure that technologies are rooted in democratic values.

Reality check: China’s technological innovation and development is based on its own investment and efforts. The US is drawing ideological lines in scientific and technological exchanges and cooperation, and this embodies its Cold War mentality.

◆ China is a big innovator in the world with leading input and growth rate in innovation. According to statistics, China’s social R&D investment in 2021 reached 2.7864 trillion yuan, an increase of 14.2 percent over the previous year. A total of 696,000 invention patents were authorized in 2021, up by 31.3 percent year-on-year. The Global Innovation Index (GII) 2021 published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) shows that China’s world innovation performance ranking has moved up from the 35th place to the 12th. China is now home to 19 of the top 100 science and technology clusters worldwide, ranking the second globally. Chinese applicants submitted 69,500 international patent applications, making China the first in the world for three consecutive years. The European Patent Office (EPO) recorded 16,665 applications from China in 2021, registering a year-on-year increase of 24 percent and the biggest surge among leading patent filing countries.

◆ In recent years, China has been actively integrating into the global science and technology innovation network, and has enjoyed fruitful results in technological and people-to-people exchanges under the BRI. In addition, China has also actively worked to join the Hague Agreement and the Marrakesh Treaty, contributing its share to the global governance of intellectual property rights. The Business Confidence Survey 2021 published by the EUCCC shows that over half of interviewed companies view intellectual property rights enforcement in China as ”adequate” or “excellent”.

◆ Throughout history, the US has repeatedly stolen intellectual properties and reaped dividends from technological developments through various means, including prying out information, offering immigration status and monopolizing patents.

After World War II, the US launched Operation Paperclip to plunder Germany of its technology patents, including those on advanced aircraft and guided missile control. Nearly all German government agencies, research and development institutes and large companies were looted, and German scientists were forced to immigrate to the US.

In the 1990s, US intelligence agencies installed eavesdropping devices in the cars of Japanese negotiators during automobile trade talks to intercept internal information and gain the upper hand in the negotiations.

In 2001, the European company Airbus sued the American company Boeing for tracking Airbus employees’ telephone, fax, and e-mails for business espionage using the electronic surveillance system named Echelon developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

In 2013, the US DOJ detained four Alstom executives to force the French company into a fire sale of its core business, power and grid, to the US company General Electric.

In 2021, Danish media exposed that the US NSA wiretapped senior officials and business leaders in European countries using internet facilities located in Denmark.

In addition, using “chip shortages” as an excuse, the US has also set deadlines to force leading chip makers from different countries to submit key information, including orders, clients and inventory, in an effort to turn the table in the chip sector.

◆ While claiming to uphold “peace” and “openness”, the US has been wantonly setting up technological barriers, piecing together the so-called “democratic technology alliance”, politicizing science and technology and turning them into ideological issues, and forming exclusive small circles. Identifying nearly 20 categories as controlled critical technologies, including biotechnology and artificial intelligence, the US has tightened up export control and investment scrutiny. It has also overstretched the concept of national security to contain and even stranglehold the development of high-tech industries in other countries, which severely violates the rights of developing countries in pursuing science and technology advancement.

Falsehood 18: Climate is not about ideology. It’s about math. If China sticks with its current plan and does not peak its emissions until 2030, then the rest of the world must go to zero by 2035. And that’s simply not possible.

Reality Check: The US holds undeniable responsibilities for climate change and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction. It shouldn’t shift responsibilities onto others, nor should it practice “double standards”.

◆ Developed countries, due to their unconstrained emissions over more than two centuries of industrialization, bear undeniable historical responsibilities for climate change. From 1850 to 2011, developed countries contributed to 79 percent of global carbon emissions. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement all require developed countries to repay their historical debts.

◆ From a historical perspective, developing countries are not the primary emitters of GHG, but the victims of climate change. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities is the cornerstone of global climate governance. As developed and developing countries do not bear the same historical responsibilities for climate change, and have different development needs and capabilities, it would be both inappropriate and unfair to apply the same restrictions on them. Wera Mori, Minister for Environment Conservation and Climate Change of Papua New Guinea (PNG) said on the sidelines of COP26 that countries like PNG have become victims of climate change caused by the industrialization of developed countries and are now bearing the consequences of their actions, which is absolutely unfair.

◆ In tackling climate change, China is not just a responsible participant, but also a serious doer. President Xi Jinping committed explicitly that China will strive to peak CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. That means China will move from carbon peak to neutrality in only 30 years, while the time the EU, the US and Japan give themselves is respectively 2.4, 1.4 and 1.2 times of China’s.

China has made notable contribution to the global efforts in energy conservation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, transport and building, which are all in the range of 30 to 50 percent. By the end of 2020, China’s CO2 emissions per unit of GDP had dropped by 48.4 percent relative to the 2005 level. The proportion of coal in total energy consumption fell from 67 percent in 2005 to 56.8 percent in 2020. The cumulative installed capacity of renewable power generation exceeded 1 billion kilowatts, accounting for 43.5 percent of the national total. Chinese companies have taken 15 spots in the world’s top 20 PV companies list, including all the top five spots, and seven spots in the top 10 wind power companies list. In the past ten years, China phased out 120 million kilowatts of coal-fired power generation capacity, which is larger than the total installed power capacity of the UK. By the end of 2021, China’s new energy vehicle ownership had exceeded 7.84 million units, and 2.95 million units were newly registered in 2021, accounting for 11.25 percent of all newly registered vehicles that year.

The share of renewable energy in China’s energy mix has already exceeded that of the US. By the end of 2019, the total installed capacity of China’s hydro, wind and solar power generation had reached 756 million kilowatts, 2.8 times that of the US. Renewable energy accounts for 12.7 percent of China’s primary energy consumption, approximately 1.4 times that of the US.

◆ The US is the world’s largest GHG emitter in cumulative terms, and its per capita carbon emissions are 3.3 times that of the global average. In the 270 years from 1750 to 2019, the US emitted a cumulative 412.5 billion tons of GHG, accounting for about 1/4 of the global total. The US has produced the world’s largest cumulative emissions, which are almost twice that of China’s. Here are some statistics: the historical peak of US per capita GHG emissions was 23.44 tons; in 2018, US per capita emissions were 16.85 tons, while China’s were 7.56 tons. Despite its status as a major manufacturing nation, China’s current per capita carbon emissions are not even half that of the US, and its per capita cumulative emissions are only around 1/8 that of the US. Even by the time of 2030, when China’s carbon emissions will have peaked, the country’s per capita carbon emissions will still just be around 7-8 tons. In comparison, when the US had its carbon peak in 2005, its per capita carbon emissions had already reached 14 tons.

◆ In June 2017, the US announced its decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, and in November 2020, it officially pulled out of the accord. Such a move seriously undermined the equity, efficiency and efficacy of global climate governance. The US had stayed outside the Paris Agreement until February 2021. Despite the improvement in political posture, the GHG emissions generated simply cannot be rolled back. Instead of cutting emissions, the US produced more emissions in 2021 than 2020, drifting further away from the course set by the Paris Agreement. With its flip-flopping on such an existential issue, the US has fully exposed its utilitarian approach to major issues of principles and lost its credibility in the family of nations.

◆ It is the unshirkable moral responsibility of developed countries to provide funding for developing countries to help them better cope with climate change. At Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancún in 2010, developed countries committed to a goal of mobilizing jointly 100 billion US dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. More than ten years have passed, developed countries have never truly delivered on their commitment. Report by a well-known international think tank shows that not only did developed countries fall short of their collective climate financing target every year, they also juggled the figures, providing far less funds than officially released figures. Most notably, the US only fulfilled less than 20 percent of its due contribution.

◆ For years, the US has been saying publicly that it wants to work with China on climate change, but its actions say otherwise. While demanding China to consume less coal, it asks China to continue buying coal from it; while appealing for the development of renewable energies, it imposes sanctions on Chinese PV businesses. Take PV products as an example, starting from 2012, the US has imposed anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Chinese PV products, with rates as high as 34 to 47 percent. In December 2014, the US conducted anti-dumping and countervailing investigations on Chinese PV manufacturers. In January 2018, the previous US administration decided to slap global safeguard tariffs on 8.5 billion US dollars’ worth of solar panel imports. In late 2021, the so-called “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” was signed into law by the US, which is yet another attempt to hobble the PV industry in Xinjiang under the disguise of human rights. Relevant US measures have not only impeded normal trade in PV products and disrupted normal supply chains, but also undermined global efforts in countering climate change. The US should correct its wrong practices in order to create an enabling environment for climate cooperation with China.

◆ Climate change has caused serious challenges to human survival and development, and must be tackled through global cooperation. Developed countries, the US included, should honor the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and follow the requirements of the Paris Agreement. They need to face up to their historical responsibilities, and level up their ambitions and actions. They need to take the lead in making substantial reductions of emissions and strive to achieve carbon neutrality before 2050. In the meantime, they need to give developing countries due space for development and emission, and deliver on their commitments of providing developing countries with adequate finance, technology and capacity-building support. On the basis of meeting financing pledges and leveraging public funds, efforts can be made to promote the development of green finance and bring private investment into low-carbon sectors. It is also important to build national, regional and global carbon markets and carbon pricing mechanisms, bring down the costs and raise the level of emissions reductions, promote technological innovation and sustainable development, and provide developing countries with stable sources of funding for mitigation and capacity-building through the benefit sharing mechanism of carbon markets.

Falsehood 19: To counter illegal and illicit narcotics, especially synthetic opioids like fentanyl, we want to work with China to stop international drug trafficking organizations from getting precursor chemicals, many of which originate in China.

Reality Check: The US has itself to blame for the root cause of fentanyl abuse in the country.

◆ Narcotics abuse, a chronic malaise plaguing the US, has deep historical and social roots.

With five percent of the world’s population, the US consumes 80 percent of opioids in the world, making the country the world’s biggest market for narcotics. There is a prevalent tradition of prescription painkiller abuse in the US, undergirded by a complete chain of pharmaceutical companies, medical representatives and doctors. All-out marketing by pharmaceutical companies, over-prescription by doctors, ineffective government crackdowns and the negative implications of marijuana legalization are among the combination of factors behind an ever-growing market for narcotics. Opioid abuse in the US and its rising toll started with OxyContin, an opioid painkiller made by Purdue Pharma and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1995. When it comes to discouraging demand and curbing production, the US should have done a lot more.

While the US has the most acute fentanyl challenge in the world, it is also the biggest producer and consumer of fentanyl and has yet to officially schedule fentanyl-related substances as a class. Nevertheless, it kept demanding other countries to take actions. This is a typical example of “forcing others to take medicine for one’s own illness”.

◆The Chinese government takes a zero-tolerance approach to narcotics and strictly regulates anesthetics, psychotropic substances and their precursors. By the end of 2021, China has added 37 drug precursors and ephedrine-related substances to its control list, which became even longer than the UN list. China strictly regulates import and export of chemicals pursuant to international rules and its domestic laws, and its efforts and achievements in this regard are visible to all.

On 1 May 2019, the Chinese government became the first country in the world to class schedule fentanyl-related substances, although there was no large-scale fentanyl abuse or immediate hazard in China. This is an important follow-up to the common understandings reached between the presidents of China and the US, and a concrete example of how China, keeping in mind the health, safety and well-being of humanity, actively responds to the US concern and helps it tackle its domestic opioid crisis.

On 1 July 2021, China class scheduled all synthetic cannabinoids and another 18 psychoactive substances including fluoroketamine. On 20 September of the same year, another six chemicals, including methyl alpha-phenylacetoacetate (MAPA), were added as drug precursors. China is making continuous efforts to regulate precursors in accordance with law.

China has taken a host of measures to crack down on the trafficking of fentanyl and other scheduled chemicals, like introducing real-name registration of senders and receivers, parcel examination and X-ray screening in the express delivery sector, and stepping up examination of cross-border parcels to certain destinations including the US. These measures have paid off.

After class scheduling fentanyl-related substances, China’s National Narcotics Control Commission and Ministry of Public Security have maintained close, candid and in-depth coordination with their US counterparts including the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the State Department Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Since September 2019, the US has not seized any fentanyl-related substances coming from China. The US has expressed appreciation to China on many occasions and noted drug control as a highlight in bilateral law enforcement cooperation.

As is known to all, the responsibility to prevent the entry of non-scheduled chemicals and their use in illicit drug-making falls on the import country. The US, however, would neither officially schedule fentanyl nor address the issue of domestic consumption. Instead, it chose to shift the blame by falsely claiming that “fentanyl precursors used by drug trafficking organizations originate in China” and making an issue out of non-scheduled chemicals. This reflects an ulterior motive and an extreme lack of responsibility for the life and health of its own people.

◆ In May 2020, without producing any evidence, the US added the Institute of Forensic Science of China’s Ministry of Public Security and the National Narcotics Laboratory to its “Entity List”. Such a practice of seeking China’s cooperation on the one hand while imposing sanctions on China’s narcotics control authorities has seriously hindered the operation of China’s fentanyl monitoring system and undermined the counter-narcotics cooperation between China and the US.

While China and the rest of the world are tightening control over fentanyl-related substances, fentanyl-related problems are deteriorating in the US, causing a mounting death toll. It lays bare the US’s failure to get to the crux of the fentanyl abuse problem. China has acted out of goodwill and repeatedly advised the US to follow effective practices widely recognized by the international community, like stepping up regulation on fentanyl prescription and promoting public awareness

Falsehood 20: As a global food crisis threatens people worldwide, we look to China — a country that’s achieved great things in agriculture — to help with a global response.

Reality Check: The US has long been restricting grain exports and monopolizing grain trade. After the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the US expanded its arms assistance and abused unilateral sanctions, further aggravating the global food shortage. It bears unshirkable responsibility for the global food crisis.

◆ The US-driven deglobalization, its grain-for-energy production policies and food oligopolies are the root causes of global food crisis.

Using its status as a major grain-producer, the US has been restricting its grain exports to other countries, causing disruptions to normal global grain trade. The 12 major grain producers such as the US, Canada and the European Union accounts for 70percent of the world’s total grain production and exportation. In global trade relations, the US and other Western countries weigh heavily on whether developing countries can buy grain and at what price.

The US consumes grain to produce biofuels, straining global food supply, especially the supply of subsistence crops. Nearly one-third of the corn produced in the US is used for biofuels. Using grain as substitute for energy leads to fewer grain for global food supply, creating a vicious circle of food and energy prices pushing up each other.

The four major grain suppliers —ADM, Bunge and Cargill and Louis Dreyfus — monopolize more than 80percent of the world’s grain trade, and control global agricultural raw materials as well as grain production, processing and supply. These four grain suppliers, three from the US, manipulate the international prices of grain and earn extra profits from global food price volatility. Since 2021, their net income has increased by 53 percent, 80 percent, 64 percent and 47.7 percent respectively, and the stock prices of ADM and Bunge have nearly tripled. These international food oligopolies are profit-seeking, and they won’t miss any opportunity to stir up food security issues and inflate food supply shortage to make bigger profits.

◆ The US has been stoking the flames in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and abusing economic sanctions. These have exacerbated global food shortage.

The protracted conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a direct consequence of the constant instigation by the US and other Western countries. US military and arms assistance to Ukraine has increased to 53.6 billion US dollars, more than 70 percent of the combined military spending of Russia and Ukraine in 2021. The longer and bigger the conflict is, the greater its impact on global food production and supply will be, and the food crisis will further intensify.

In the face of a global food crisis, major grain-producing countries such as the US have instead kept their “grain bags” tight. According to the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report released by the US Department of Agriculture this May, US wheat exports in 2021/22 will be 18.9 percent lower than the previous year. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the total amount of food exports affected by the restrictions has increased significantly, which now represents about 17 percent of total calories traded in the world

The US food security initiative is more of empty words than concrete actions, only to fragment global food security governance. Russia is a major exporter of subsistence crops and the world’s largest exporter of fertilizers. Since the US and other Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia, the price index of various fertilizers has risen by more than 30 percent, which has seriously affected agricultural production. From 2021 to 2022, wheat and barley exports from Russia account for 16 percent and 12.9 percent of the world’s total respectively. Statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) show that since the US imposed sanctions on Russia, the Food Price Index in May this year has risen by 14 percent compared with February.

◆ Serious food waste in the US has worsened the global food shortage.

First, the amount of food waste is astounding. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in the US, 30 to 40 percent of the food supply and 38 percent of grain products are never eaten each year. In 2018, the US had 103 million tons of its food wasted, worth 161 billion US dollars. In 2020, the country’s food waste per capita was 59 kilograms.

Second, distribution is uneven. About 38 million people are food insecure in the US in 2020, and the majority of them are African Americans, Latin Americans and Native Americans. According to National Geographic, more than one-third of the low-income households do not have access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program introduced by the US government, and its benefits fall short of helping many families in high-cost areas enjoy a healthy and adequate diet.

Third, secondary problems are prominent. Every year, the overproduction of food in the US puts a staggering burden on the environment and wastes numerous resources, including over 9.3 million hectares of arable land, 22 trillion liters of water, 350 million kilograms of pesticides, and 6.35 million tons of chemical fertilizers.

◆ China has made significant contributions to global food security. It has supported one-fifth of the world’s population with a quarter of the world’s total food, on less than 9 percent of the world’s arable land. The Global Development Initiative put forward by China has identified food security as one of the eight priority areas of cooperation. China will mobilize efforts from all parties across the globe to draw on each other’s strength, and form the greatest synergy to meet all sustainable development goals including food security. This initiative has received positive response from more than 100 countries around the world and international organizations such as the UN.

◆ The Chinese people cherish food and keep to the traditional virtue of thrift. President Xi Jinping attaches great importance to food security. He has called for thriftiness and opposes squandering, stressing on multiple occasions the need to stop food waste. Since the launch of the nationwide “Clear Your Plate” campaign in 2013, consumer food waste in China has been significantly reduced. According to the Nature magazine, the amount of food discarded by Chinese restaurants and eateries has decreased by 40 percent. In 2021, the International Conference on Food Loss and Waste hosted by China was well received by the international community, including members of the G20.

◆ China is an important strategic partner of FAO in South-South cooperation. In recent years, China has donated 130 million US dollars to the FAO South-South Cooperation Trust Fund. China has sent more than 1,100 agricultural experts and technical personnel to and trained nearly 100,000 farmers in more than 40 countries and regions. Under the framework of the FAO’s South-South Cooperation Programme, China has donated the largest amount of fund, sent the most experts, and undertaken the most projects among all developing countries.

◆ China has provided its own solutions to global food shortage. Chinese hybrid rice is being grown in dozens of countries and regions in Asia, Africa and the Americas, with an annual growth area of eight million hectares. This increased the world’s total grain output by 150 million tons, enough to feed 400 to 500 million more people. Yuan Longping, known as the “Father of Chinese Hybrid Rice”, and other Chinese researchers have offered advice and counsel in India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bangladesh and many other countries. Through international training courses, China has trained over 14,000 hybrid rice technicians for more than 80 developing countries.

Falsehood 21: Beijing has perfected mass surveillance and exported that technology to more than 80 countries.

Reality Check: The US is the biggest empire of hacking.

◆ The use of video surveillance and big data technology is an important step taken by the Chinese government to improve social governance, and also a common practice across the world. It is necessary, legal and justified. Tianwang (Skynet), which is composed of video surveillance systems, effectively eliminates potential risks to public security and ensures the high percentage of solved criminal cases in China. With the increasingly digitized crime prevention and control system, 98.6 percent of the people in China felt safe in 2021, and China is widely recognized as one of the safest countries in the world. China ranked the third in the law and order index published by Gallup, a US consulting company, while the US 36th.

◆ Statistics show that there were some 70 million cameras installed in the US in 2018, one for every 4.6 people. For the US to accuse China of mass surveillance, it’s just double standard at work.

◆ For a long time, the US has carried out large-scale, organized and indiscriminate cyber espionage, surveillance and attacks on foreign governments, enterprises and individuals in violation of international law and the basic norms governing international relations. In June 2013, the Guardian and the Washington Post reported that NSA has been running PRISM, a clandestine electronic surveillance program, since 2007, whose targets include even its own allies. Der Spiegel reported that the US intelligence may have been monitoring the German Chancellor’s mobile phone communications for nearly a decade.

◆ In 2020, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) demanded Facebook to stop sending data of EU users to the US. The report comes just a few months after the European Court of Justice ruled the data transfer standard between the EU and the US doesn’t adequately protect European citizen’s privacy and concluded that EU citizens had no effective way to challenge US government surveillance. It is reported that US agencies such as NSA can theoretically ask internet companies like Facebook and Google to hand over data on an EU citizen and that EU citizen would be none-the-wiser.

◆ In December 2020, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) of France stated that google.fr and amazon.fr websites violated relevant French regulations by placing tracking cookies on their users’ computers without obtaining prior consent and without providing adequate information.

◆ In 2021, Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) reported that between 2012 and 2014, NSA used information cables of Denmark to wiretap (spy on) senior officials of Sweden, Norway, France and Germany, including many political dignitaries such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The US apparently broke its promise that it would stop wiretapping Merkel.

◆ The US abuses its leading position in internet and communication technology and is truly an empire of hacking, tapping and theft of secrets. From PRISM, the Irritant Horn project, and Stellar Wind, to Operation Telescreen, the Hive platform and the QUANTUM attack system, the US has violated the freedom of communication and speech of its citizens through digital surveillance, and has engaged in cyber attacks, surveillance and thefts of secrets across the world. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden of the Stateroom program show that the US has covertly installed eavesdropping devices in nearly 100 of its embassies and consulates to steal secrets from their host countries.

◆ A report on APT-C-39 released by Chinese cybersecurity company 360 in 2020 reveals that APT-C-39, a hacking group under the CIA, has conducted cyber infiltration attacks on China for 11 years targeting critical sectors including aviation and aerospace, research institutions, oil industry, large internet companies, and government agencies. Such attacks have seriously undermined China’s national security and the security of its economy, critical infrastructure as well as personal information of the general public.

According to a report on the indiscriminate worldwide cyber attacks by NSA’s APT-C-40 over the past decade released by 360 in 2022, NSA has attacked, using cyber weapons, 403 targets in 47 countries and regions worldwide, including China, the UK, Germany, France, Poland, Japan, India, the ROK, the UAE, South Africa and Brazil.

On 19 April 2022, China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) issued an alert on cyber attacks by the US government against other countries and released a related report. It brings to light “Hive”, a lightweight cyber weapon used exclusively by the US government, and the fact that the US has deployed cyber attack platforms worldwide and has jumper servers and VPN channels in countries like France, Germany, Canada, Turkey and Malaysia.

Putin: Russia Will Provide Modern Missiles to Belarus, Capable of Carrying Nuclear Warheads

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin announced this evening in Moscow, that Russia will be providing modern missiles to Belarus.  Such missiles will be capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

President Putin also claimed that, according to Russian Covert Intelligence, America has prepared 257 planes in Europe for possible use of nuclear weapons.  Clearly those planes are meant to hit Russia.

He went on to say that this is one, non-Diplomatic step in response to the European Embargo against the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

Specifically, Putin stated:

– Russia will upgrade Belarus aircraft to carry nuclear weapons.
– Russia will provide Belarus with Iskander-M missile systems (they can carry either conventional, or nuclear warhead).
– Russia will train Belarus to use nuclear weapons.

For his part, the President of Belarus added today “The policy pursued by our neighbors from Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia is causing us concern.”

To that, Putin responded “the new missiles will be installed within months.”

(HT REMARK:  Spreading-out the potential targets for NATO?)

UPDATE 4:23 PM EDT —

The Ukrainian Army is reporting missiles have been fired from BELARUS into Ukraine’s Chernigiv border region

We Haven’t Seen Carnage Like This Since 2008

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Trillions of dollars in market wealth has already been wiped out, and investors are bracing for a chaotic second half of 2022.  We truly haven’t seen anything like this since the financial crisis of 2008.  The early months of 2020 were volatile due to the eruption of the COVID pandemic, but the Federal Reserve quickly rushed to the rescue.  The Fed poured trillions of dollars into the system, and that spurred a rally that was absolutely breathtaking.  But this time around the Fed isn’t going to be riding to the rescue any time soon.  The Fed is committed to raising interest rates in a desperate attempt to get inflation under control, and the size of the Fed balance sheet is now being reduced.  So there will be no artificial life support for the financial markets for the foreseeable future, and that is really bad news for those that are seeing their portfolios get absolutely monkey-hammered.

Things have been particularly brutal for crypto investors.

Last November, the total global market cap for all cryptocurrencies peaked out at about 3.1 trillion dollars.

Over the weekend, the total global market cap for all cryptocurrencies actually dipped below 850 billion dollars

The crypto market suffered one of its most dramatic selloffs in years this week as the prices of top cryptocurrencies declined as much as 35% week-over-week as fears of a broad economic recession intensified.

On Saturday, the total global market cap of cryptocurrencies sank below $850 billion as top tokens tumbled.

Poof.

More than two-thirds of all “crypto wealth” is already gone.

CNBC is using the word “carnage” to describe what we have been witnessing in the crypto industry, and I think that fits the nightmare that is currently unfolding quite well…

Carnage in the crypto market won’t let up, as token prices plummet, companies lay off employees in waves, and some of the most popular names in the industry go belly up. The chaos has spooked investors, erasing more than $2 trillion in value in a matter of months — and wiping out the life savings of retail traders who bet big on crypto projects billed as safe investments.

It has been estimated that 16 percent of all U.S. adults either own or have owned a cryptocurrency.

So a whole lot of people out there are really hurting right now.

Bitcoin

Last November, the price of Bitcoin peaked at $68,789.63.

As I write this article, it is sitting at $20,170.10.

Ethereum

Last November, the price of Ethereum peaked at $4,891.70.

As I write this article, it is sitting at $1,093.40.

I feel really sorry for those that decided to pour their money into cryptos near the peak.

Stock investors are also getting pummeled these days.

In fact, U.S. retirement accounts have already declined in value by almost three trillion dollars thanks to rapidly falling stock prices…

The U.S. stock market rout that has put U.S. equities in a bear market isn’t just reducing the net worth of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It’s also taking a toll on Americans’ retirement savings, wiping out trillions of dollars in value.

The selloff has erased nearly $3 trillion from U.S. retirement accounts, according to Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. By her calculations, 401(k) plan participants have lost about $1.4 trillion from their accounts since the end of 2021. People with IRAs — most of which are 401(k) rollovers — have lost $2 trillion this year.

Stocks have just kept falling and falling and falling.

In fact, the S&P 500 has fallen for 10 of the last 11 weeks

The S&P 500 posted its 10th down week in the last 11, and is now well into a bear market. On Thursday, all 11 of its sectors closed more than 10% below their recent highs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 30,000 for the first time since January 2021 this past week.

Cryptos have already collapsed, but stocks theoretically still have a ton of room to keep falling.

There are some that are speculating about what will happen if the Dow drops all the way to 20,000, and that would definitely be a crash of historic proportions.

Of course the housing market is much larger than the stock market, and that is starting to implode too.

If you can believe it, the total value of the U.S. housing market was valued at 43.4 trillion dollars earlier this year.

Unfortunately, mortgage rates are absolutely skyrocketing and that is going to change everything.

According to Redfin, home sellers are already dropping their prices at a rate that we have never seen before…

The highest share of sellers on record dropped their list price during the four weeks ending June 12 as mortgage rates shot up to levels not seen since 2008, dwindling the pool of home shoppers.

It is being reported that in some areas of the country home prices have already been reduced by as much as 20 percent.

And this implosion is likely to accelerate as the Federal Reserve just pushes interest rates higher and higher and higher.

How long will it be before millions upon millions of U.S. homeowners are underwater on their mortgages just like we saw in 2008?

As I warned last week, those that do not learn from history are likely to end up repeating it.

The U.S. economy was almost certainly heading into a recession anyway, but now a crypto crash, a stock market crash and a housing crash all at the same time will accelerate matters greatly.

According to one recent survey, 60 percent of corporate executives expect a recession to begin “in the next 12 to 18 months”

More than 60% of executives expect a recession in the next 12 to 18 months, according to a survey of CEOs and other C-suite executives conducted by the Conference Board, a business research firm. That’s a stunning increase from the end of 2021, when just 22% of executives forecast a recession.

Sadly, we aren’t going to have to wait that long.

As I detailed last week, there are lots of numbers that indicate that a major economic downturn is already here.

It is time to batten down the hatches, because a “perfect storm” has arrived.

Global events are accelerating at a frightening pace, and the months ahead are not going to be pleasant.

US warned over ‘illusions’ about Taiwan

By CAO DESHENG | China Daily | Updated: 2022-06-15 07:24

Senior diplomat stresses China’s stand on safeguarding national sovereignty

Beijing has warned Washington not to make any “misjudgments” or have “illusions” in playing the “Taiwan card” to contain China, saying that the nation is determined and capable of defending its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

In a meeting with United States National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Luxembourg on Monday, senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi reiterated that the Taiwan question concerns the political foundation of China-US relations which, unless handled properly, will have a subversive impact.

“The risk does not only exist, but will escalate as the United States attempts to contain China with the Taiwan question, and as the Taiwan authorities rely on the United States to seek its ‘independence’,” said Yang, who is a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee.

Yang stressed that China takes an unambiguous and steadfast stand in safeguarding its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

China’s internal affairs brook no interference by other countries, and any attempts to thwart or undermine China’s national unity are doomed to fail, he said.

Yang also stated China’s solemn position on issues concerning the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Tibet autonomous region, and the South China Sea, as well as human rights and religion.

The meeting between Yang and Sullivan came three days after State Councilor and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe met with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of the 19th Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.

During that meeting, Wei also slammed the US for its wrongdoing on the Taiwan question, which is the most sensitive matter in China-US relations, saying that “the People’s Liberation Army will relentlessly safeguard China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and if anyone dares to separate Taiwan from the motherland, the Chinese military will definitely smash such attempts at any cost, even by going to war”.

A statement issued by the White House said that the meeting between Sullivan and Yang included candid, substantive and productive discussion of a number of regional and global security issues, as well as key issues in US-China relations.

Both sides agreed at the Luxembourg meeting that maintaining unimpeded channels for communication between the two sides is necessary and beneficial, Xinhua News Agency reported.

During his meeting with Sullivan, Yang urged the US to correct its strategic perception about China, make the right choices, and translate US President Joe Biden’s commitments to President Xi Jinping during their virtual meeting in November into concrete actions.

In November, Biden had promised Xi that the US does not seek a new Cold War with China, does not aim to change China’s system, does not target China with its alliances, does not support “Taiwan independence” and has no intention of seeking a conflict with China.

However, the US administration has been insisting on further containing and suppressing China in an all-around way. It has kept using the Taiwan question to provoke China by selling arms to Taiwan or elevating “official” relations with the island while urging its allies and partners to contain China.

Noting that China firmly opposes using competition to define bilateral ties, Yang said “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation” are the correct approaches for China and the US to get along with each other.

Analysts said that in the light of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, the interactions between the world’s two largest economies are necessary and beneficial for them to avoid misunderstanding and miscalculation and properly handle their differences, and their communication about the regional and international issues is also conducive to promoting global stability.

However, they said that the US should keep in mind that the Taiwan question is a red line for China, and Washington needs to refrain from meddling in China’s domestic affairs and rationally view China’s development in order to ensure that the growing competition between them would not escalate into a much bigger conflict.

Zhou Wenxing, an assistant professor at the School of International Studies at Nanjing University, said that while trying to establish new guardrails in terms of its relations with Beijing, Washington is simultaneously dismantling existing and other more important guardrails.

“If Washington seeks to de-escalate rising tensions, and get its sour relations with China back to normal, it should preserve rather than destroy the guardrails they both share. The one-China principle is and will be a very significant guardrail guiding China-US ties,” Zhou said.

Rabi Sankar Bosu, an Indian contributor to Chinese media outlets, said that the US, with the aim of preserving its own hegemony across the world, openly described China as a rival.

There is no doubt that the US and China bear heavy responsibilities not only to their own people but to the world at large, so the China-US relationship should still be led by mutually beneficial cooperation, and feature healthy competition and avoid confrontation, Bosu wrote in an opinion article published on the website of China Global Television Network.

Things They Don’t Tell You: Honest Guide To Life Brought To You By Cartoonist Winston Rowntree

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Cartoonist Winston Rowntree created an honest guide to life about all those things that they don’t tell you (but should), all brought to you by adorable animals who try to deal with the harsh reality.

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UPDATED 9:04 PM EDT — VIDEO: Russian President URGENTLY Brought to Kremlin 11:00 PM Moscow Time

A motorcade carrying Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin was seen moving swiftly into the Kremlin late Saturday night.

The specific reason for the sudden, late-night move to the Kremlin is described over Intel Channels as “A serious matter requiring Presidential decision.”

Video of the Presidential motorcade arriving at the Kremlin, appears below.

Video LINK

 

UPDATE 8:19 PM EDT —

Intel circuits saying “Something really serious has happened.”

UPDATE 8:50 PM EDT —

Russian Air Force strategic bomber voice net active 5648 Kilohertz USB and 6552 Kilohertz USB

NOT CERTAIN IF THIS SUDDEN ACTIVITY ON RUSSIAN STRATEGIC BOMBER FREQUENCIES IS RELATED AT ALL TO PUTIN’S RETURN TO KREMLIN.  JUST REPORTING IT AS IT IS __IS__ UNUSUAL AT THIS HOUR ON A SATURDAY.

8:53 PM EDT —

CAN NOW CONFIRM RUSSIAN LONG-RANGE STRATEGIC BOMBERS ARE UP IN THE SKIES.

UPDATE 9:04 PM EDT —

Second video emerged of Putin Motorcade “hauling ass” to the Kremlin late Saturday night in Moscow.   Moving quite fast, as if an Emergency.

Video HERE

Abandoned Cat Was Antisocial Until A Tiny Kitten Forced Him To Play With Her

A nice cute video

China Just KILLED Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse

Big, big, HUGE changes to the world are coming. Here’s just a little tiny taste of what China is doing RIGHT NOW! Jeeze!

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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BRICS is organizing, and it’s putting its collective power behind changing the world’s currency

Some time ago, Lavrov stated the anglo west had launched (hybrid) war on Russia. He said we accept the challenge. 

To me, the main result from the recent BRICS meeting was the announcement of a new international currency being formed based on a basket of commodities. 

A large chunk of world GDP in BRICS. 

Countries have already began trade with national currencies. 
Many US dollars will be going home to roost. 

US will be lucky if it does not break into several sections with the economic destruction and resulting political destruction that is heading its way.

-Peter AU1

Big stuff going on right now. BRICS is organizing, and it’s putting its collective power behind changing the world’s currency, and thus the economic balance of power in the world. The preamble to the meeting is further down in this article. It’s a must read. This is what is REALLY going on.

But today, aside from this geopolitical stuff, I want to squeeze in some humanity. And nothing quite points to our shared humanity is how we treat other species. As such, I have placed a number of (hopefully) positive videos about cats, and dogs that I hope will help explore our sense of humanity, and why it is so very important to be a STO sentience.

As well as a mix of other things…

From Bad to Worse

Jack Whittaker didn’t need to win the lottery; the West Virginian was a wealthy and successful businessman in the construction industry. But, in 2002, he won the then-largest jackpot in the Powerball multi-state lottery. His prize was worth around $315 million, but he opted to take the one-off cash payment option that left him with over $113 million after taxes.

Whittaker was kind-hearted and well-meaning as he pledged 10% of his winnings to Christian charities and set up the Jack Whittaker Foundation to distribute food and clothing to the needy in rural West Virginia. He also rewarded the man who worked in the store where Whittaker had bought the winning ticket and threw handfuls of cash from his new sports car around the neighborhood.

Then things started to go bad. In 2003, someone stole over $500,000 that Whittaker had left in his car in the parking lot of a strip club. Not a good look Whittaker, but things kept going from bad to worse.

Next, his teenage granddaughter, Brandi, was lavished with cash and gifts, but in 2004, the body of Brandi’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend was found in Whittaker’s home. The boy had taken a cocktail of drugs leading to his death. Later that year, Brandi went missing, and her body turned up dumped on a friend’s property. She had been taking drugs, but the cause of death wasn’t clear, and authorities filed no charges.

Unfortunately, Jack had problems with gambling, and his uninsured house burned to the ground. He died in 2020.

Little Kittens Found Underneath The Floor But A Foul Odor Fills The Room..?

We begin with this little story about a foul odor beneath the floorboards in a kindergarten.

Did Obama really say that “the Earth can’t substain 1.4 billion Chinese having the same living standard as American and Australian, so we can’t allow China to be rich”, as many Chinese claimed?

Yes, it’s possible.

I didn’t find it on google, so had to search in Baidu. Here is what I tracked and finally found:

“If over a billion Chinese citizens have the same living patterns as Australians and Americans do right now, then all of us are in for a very miserable time. The planet just can’t sustain it…”

It is said this happened on an interview in an Australian TV program “The 7.30 Report”, April 14th, 2010.

Keep in mind that really no one wants to have a life that like Americans have, except the ignorant, the destitute, and of course, Americans.

Wine and other funny comix…

There’s some real truths here.

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Inaccurate, but funny as hell.

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Yup. Accurate

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Exile on Main Street: the Sound of the Unipolar World Fading Away

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The future world order, already in progress, will be formed by strong sovereign states. The ship has sailed. There’s no turning back.

Let’s cut to the chase and roll in the Putin Top Ten of the New Era, announced by the Russian President live at the St. Petersburg forum for both the Global North and South.

The era of the unipolar world is over.

The rupture with the West is irreversible and definitive. No pressure from the West will change it.

Russia has renewed its sovereignty. Reinforcement of political and economic sovereignty is an absolute priority.

The EU has completely lost its political sovereignty. The current crisis shows the EU is not ready to play the role of an independent, sovereign actor. It’s just en ensemble of American vassals deprived of any politico-military sovereignty.

Sovereignty cannot be partial. Either you’re a sovereign or a colony.

Hunger in the poorest nations will be on the conscience of the West and euro-democracy.

Russia will supply grains to the poorer nations in Africa and the Middle East.

Russia will invest in internal economic development and reorientation of trade towards nations independent of the U.S.

The future world order, already in progress, will be formed by strong sovereign states.

The ship has sailed. There’s no turning back.

How does it feel, for the collective West, to be caught in such a crossfire hurricane? Well, it gets more devastating when we add to the new roadmap the latest on the energy front.

Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, in St. Petersburg, stressed that the global economic crisis is gaining momentum not because of sanctions, but exacerbated by them; Europe “commits energy suicide” by sanctioning Russia; sanctions against Russia have done away with the much lauded “green transition”, as that is no longer needed to manipulate markets; and Russia, with its vast energy potential, “is the Noah’s Ark of the world economy.”

For his part Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller could not be more scathing on the sharp decline in the gas flow to the EU due to Siemens’ refusal and/or incapacity to repair the Nord Stream 1 pumping engine: “Well, of course, Gazprom was forced to reduce the volume of gas supplies to Europe by 20%+. But you know, prices have increased not by 20%+, but by several times! Therefore, I’m sorry if I say that we don’t feel offended by anyone, we are not particularly concerned by this situation.”

If this pain dial overdrive was not enough to hurl the collective West – or NATOstan – into Terminal Hysteria, then Putin’s sharp comment on possibly allowing Mr. Sarmat to present his business card to “decision-making centers in Kiev”, those that are ordering the current shelling and killing of civilians in Donetsk, definitely did the trick:

“As for the red lines, let me keep them to myself, because this will mean quite tough actions on the decision-making centers. But this is an area that shouldn’t be disclosed to people outside the military-political leadership of the country. Those who deserve appropriate actions on our part should draw a conclusion for themselves – what they may face if they cross the line.”

Baby please, stop breaking down

Alastair Crooke has masterfully outlined how the collective West’s zugzwang leaves it lumbering around, dazed and confused. Now let’s examine the state of play on the opposite side of the chessboard, focusing on the BRICS summit this Thursday in Beijing.

As much as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and ASEAN, now it’s time for a reinvigorated BRICS to step up its game. In conjunction, these are the key organizations/instruments that will be carving the pathways towards the post-unipolar era.

Both China and India (which between them were the largest economies in the world for centuries before the brief Western colonial interregnum) are already close and getting closer to “the Noah’s Ark of the world economy”.

The G20 – hostages of the Michael Hudson-defined FIRE scam that is the core of the financialized neoliberal casino – is slowly fading away, while a potential new G8 ramps up: and that is directly connected to BRICS expansion, one of the key themes of this week’s summit. An expanded BRICS with a parallel G8 configuration is bound to easily overtake the Western-centric one in importance as well as GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP).

BRICS in 2021 already added Bangladesh, Egypt, the UAE and Uruguay to its New Development Bank (NDB). In May, at Foreign Ministry-level debates, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Thailand were added to the 5 BRICS members. Leaders of some of these nations will be connected to the Beijing summit.

BRICS plays a completely different game from the G20. They aim for the grassroots, and it’s all about slowly “building trust” – a very Chinese concept. They are creating an independent Credit Rating Agency – away from the Anglo-American racket – and deepening a Currency Reserves Arrangement. The NDB – including its regional offices in India and South Africa – has been involved in hundreds of projects. Time will tell: one day the NDB will make the World Bank superfluous.

Comparisons between BRICS and the Quad, a U.S. concoction, are silly. Quad is just another crude mechanism to contain China. Yet there’s no question India treads on tightrope walker territory, as it’s a member of both BRICS and Quad, and made a vastly misguided decision to walk out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the largest free trade deal on the planet – opting instead to adhere to the American pie-in-the-sky Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF).

Yet India, long term, skillfully guided by Russia, is being steered to find essential common ground with China in several key issues.

BRICS, especially in its expanded BRICS+ version, is bound to increase cooperation on building truly stable supply chains, and a settlement mechanism for resources and raw material trade, which inevitably has to be based in local currencies. Then the path will be open for the Holy Grail: a BRICS payment system as a credible alternative to the weaponized U.S. dollar and SWIFT.

Meanwhile, a torrent of bilateral investments from both China and India in the manufacturing and services sector around their neighbors is bound to lift up smaller players in both Southeast Asia and South Asia: think Cambodia and Bangladesh as important cogs in a vast supply wheel.

Yaroslav Lissovolik had already proposed a BEAMS concept as the core of this BRICS integration drive, uniting “the key regional integration initiatives of BRICS economies such as BIMSTEC, EAEU, the ASEAN-China free trade agreement, Mercosur and SADC/SACU.”

It’s only (BRICS) rock’n roll

Now Beijing seems eager to promote “an inclusive format for dialogue spanning all the main regions of the Global South via aggregating the regional integration platforms in Eurasia, Africa and Latin America. Going forward this format may be further expanded to include other regional integration blocks from Eurasia, such as the GCC, EAEU and others.”

Lissovolik notes how the ideal path from now on should be “the greater inclusivity of BRICS via the BRICS+ framework that allows smaller economies that are the regional partners of BRICS to have a say in the new global governance framework.”

Before he addressed the St. Petersburg forum on video, President Xi called Putin personally to say, among other things, that he’s got China’s back on all “sovereignty and security” themes. They also, inevitably, discussed the relevance of BRICS as a key platform towards the multipolar world.

Meanwhile, the collective West plunges deeper into the maelstrom. A massive national demonstration of trade unions this past Monday paralyzed Brussels – the capital of the EU and NATO – as 80,000 people expressed their anger at the rising and rising cost of living; called for elites to “spend money on salaries, not on weapons”; and yelled in unison “Stop NATO.”

It’s zugzwang all over again. The EU’s “direct losses”, as Putin stressed, provoked by the sanctions hysteria, “could exceed $400 billion a year”. Russia’s energy earnings have hit record levels. The ruble is at a 7-year high against the euro.

It’s a blast that arguably the most powerful cultural artifact of the entire Cold War – and Western supremacy – era, the perennial Rolling Stones, is currently on tour across a “caught in a crossfire hurricane” EU. On every show they play, for the first time live, one of their early classics: ‘Out of Time’.

Sounds much like a requiem. So let’s all sing, “Baby baby baby / you’re out of time”, as one Vladimir “it’s a gas, gas, gas” Putin and his sidekick Dmitry “Under My Thumb” Medvedev seem to be the guys really getting their rocks off. It’s only (BRICS) rock’n roll, but we like it.

Chili Mac and Cheese

This almost-instant main dish combines the flavors of two favorite comfort foods. Taco-flavored cheese and mild chilis add an extra kick without too much spice.

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Sky High to Rock Bottom

We can’t know what would have happened if Edwards had won just enough money to turn his life around, but he won a lot.

David Lee Edwards was a connected armed robber who had spent one-third of his 46 years in prison. Broke and unemployed, he borrowed some cash from a friend to pay a utility bill. Unfortunately, Edwards had some change left over that he spent on a pizza and a couple of lottery tickets. He won $27 million.

At a press conference, Edwards swore that he would turn his life around and look after his daughter. Yet, he immediately began spending money left and right. His mansion in Florida was full of expensive gadgets, and his body was full of expensive drugs.

Edwards supported his and his wife’s increasing dependence on drugs. He also paid for his friend’s drugs and funerals if they overdosed. Edwards did spoil his daughter, but by 2006, he and his wife were living in a storage unit surrounded by drug paraphernalia and their own body waste.

Mrs. Edwards left him; he died penniless in a hospice in Kentucky. He was 58.

Cute Cat Enjoys 60°C Sauna Everyday

A nice cute little video to put a smile on your face.

So accurate

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Maureen O’Connor

Maureen O’Connor, a native of San Diego, California, rose through the local political ranks to become the city’s first female mayor from 1986 to 1992. At the time, she was married to Robert O. Peterson—the founder of the Jack in the Box fast-food chain.

When her husband died in 1994, O’Connor’s personal fortune stood somewhere between $40 and $50 million. In the cutthroat world of politics, all successful politicians are big risk-takers. O’Connor was a political winner, but she was a loser when she began to gamble in casinos.

O’Connor lost around $13 million in casinos.

She misappropriated over $2 million from her husband’s charitable foundation, which she immediately spent playing video poker.

To raise more cash to fund her gambling, she liquidated all her savings and took out second and third mortgages on her home. She attempted to pay off her debts but found herself charged with wire fraud.

She attributed her gambling addiction to a brain tumor. In 2015, a judge formally dropped all charges against her.

Consider how the American media treats China

All in process…

1. Classification: People divided into “us & them”
2. Symbolization: People FORCED to identify themselves
3. Discrimination: People begin to face systemic discrimination
4. Dehumanization: People are equated with animals, vermin or diseases
5. Organization: Gov’t creates specific groups (police/military) to enforce policies
6. Polarization: Gov’t creates propaganda to turn public against target group
7. Preparation: Official action to remove/relocate people
8. Persecution: Beginning of murders, theft of property, trial massacres
9. Extermination: Wholesale elimination of target group. It’s not considered “extermination” or murder because target group are NOT considered human
10. Denial: Gov’t denies it has committed any crime

Norway

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Supreme Court Overturns NY’s Concealed Carry Law, Expanding Gun Rights

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a New York law that regulated who is allowed to carry a concealed weapon in public, expanding gun rights nationwide.

In a 6-3 decision by the court’s conservative majority, the justices ruled that requiring people to demonstrate a particular need for carrying a gun in order to get a license to carry one in public violated the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that the Constitution protects “an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”

In a dissent joined by his liberal colleagues, Justice Stephen Breyer focused on the toll taken by gun violence. “Since the start of this year alone (2022), there have already been 277 reported mass shootings—an average of more than one per day,“ Breyer wrote.

The decision expected to ultimately allow more people to legally carry guns on the streets of the nation’s largest cities — including New York, Los Angeles and Boston — and elsewhere. About a quarter of the U.S. population lives in states expected to be affected by the ruling, the high court’s first major gun decision in more than a decade.

Bat Cat

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Abandoned Cat Became A Monk And Promised Buddha She Won’t Eat Meat

Another cute kitty video.

WTF?

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Moderna and Pfizer Vaccines more dangerous than Covid

The numbers are coming in.

Stanford, UCLA, Louisiana study says that serious adverse effects from Moderna and Pfizer Vaccines exceed the risk reduction of serious adverse effects from Covid.

The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively).

Full paper HERE

SUPREME COURT OVERTURNS “ROE V. WADE” – No federal constitutional Right to Abortion

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, holding that there is no federal constitutional right to an abortion.   Widespread protests, maybe even riots and social upheaval, are expected beginning today, as the supporters of the right to kill babies, go on a rampage.

The opinion is the most consequential Supreme Court decision in decades and will transform the landscape of women’s reproductive health in America.

Going forward, abortion rights will be determined by states, unless Congress acts.

Already, nearly half of the states have or will pass laws that ban abortion while others have enacted strict measures regulating the procedure.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”

A Fall from Grace

Eike Batista is not a rags-to-riches story since Batista’s father had been the Minister of Mines and Energy in two previous Brazilian governments. It was natural that Eike Batista made his living in mining, gas, and oil with his family background. It was then a logical step to finance large-scale infrastructure projects that would support his other concerns.

At the beginning of 2012, Batista had a net worth of around $35 billion—this meant that he was the seventh wealthiest person in the world. Unfortunately, he didn’t last long in the world’s top ten. By the summer of 2013, his wealth stood at $200 million and, a year later, had fallen to minus $1 billion.

There were various reasons for this dramatic drop, but not all of them were Batista’s fault. A general downturn in the precious metals industry, underperforming assets, and poor decisions played a part. But the biggest fall from grace may be that Batista is facing 30 years in jail for bribing the governor of Rio de Janeiro.

So why should Batista never have become rich? The answer is simple. A capitalist economy relies on the operation of free markets that depend on trust. Someone who builds a business empire built on sand warps the economy, destroys confidence, and wipes out the investments that pay people’s pensions.

Supreme Court Overturns NY’s Concealed Carry Law, Expanding Gun Rights

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a New York law that regulated who is allowed to carry a concealed weapon in public, expanding gun rights nationwide.

In a 6-3 decision by the court’s conservative majority, the justices ruled that requiring people to demonstrate a particular need for carrying a gun in order to get a license to carry one in public violated the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that the Constitution protects “an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”

In a dissent joined by his liberal colleagues, Justice Stephen Breyer focused on the toll taken by gun violence. “Since the start of this year alone (2022), there have already been 277 reported mass shootings—an average of more than one per day,“ Breyer wrote.

The decision expected to ultimately allow more people to legally carry guns on the streets of the nation’s largest cities — including New York, Los Angeles and Boston — and elsewhere. About a quarter of the U.S. population lives in states expected to be affected by the ruling, the high court’s first major gun decision in more than a decade.

Harvey Norman declares bankruptcy after going whole month without government handout

Australia biggest electronic retailer giants. They pretty much have been sourcing from China, and can no longer compete with the Australian tariffs and restrictions.
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Wonder how long the new government will still want to act tough against (Australians biggest trading country) China like the Morrison’s government has?

A Warning About The Coming Shortages Of Diesel Fuel, Diesel Exhaust Fluid And Diesel Engine Oil

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What I am about to share with you is a developing situation, and I hope to share more once the facts become clearer.  It appears that a very serious diesel crisis is coming in the months ahead, and that will have a dramatic impact on our economy.  As you will see below, we are being warned that there will be shortages of diesel fuel, diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil.  Most diesel vehicles require all three in order to run, and so a serious shortage of any of them would be a major disaster.  Needless to say, simultaneous shortages of all three could potentially be catastrophic.  Most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about diesel, but without it our supply chains collapse and we don’t have a functioning economy.  In a recent Time Magazine article discussing the coming diesel fuel shortage, we are told that “the U.S. economy runs on diesel”…

Though most consumers shake their heads at the cost of gasoline and complain about the cost of filling up their car tanks, what they really should be worried about is the price of diesel. The U.S. economy runs on diesel. It’s what powers the container ships that bring goods from Asia and the trucks that collect goods from the ports and bring them to warehouses and then to your home. The farmers who grow the food you eat put diesel in their tractors to plow the fields, and the workers that bring construction equipment to build your home put diesel in their trucks.

Since January, supplies of diesel fuel have been steadily getting tighter.

As supplies have gotten tighter, prices have skyrocketed.  The average price of a gallon of diesel fuel hit $5.50 a gallon in early May, and it has remained above that level ever since.

One of the biggest reasons for the supply crunch is a serious lack of refining capacity.  Back in 1980, the U.S. had twice as many refineries

There are also fewer refineries, which process crude oil into diesel and other products, in the U.S. than were just a few years ago. There are just 124 now operating, down from twice as many in 1980, and down from 139 in 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Association. The northeast region is particularly spare, with just seven refineries today, down from 27 in 1982.

There have already been some temporary outages of diesel fuel at a few locations around the country, and we are being warned that disruptions are likely to intensify during the summer months.

But the good news is that we aren’t going to run out of diesel fuel.  It may become a lot more expensive, and there may be painful temporary shortages, but we won’t run out of it.

Unfortunately, the crisis that we are facing with diesel exhaust fluid is potentially much more serious.

If you have just been skimming this article, this is the part where you need to start really paying attention.

Newsweek is telling us that the United States “could soon experience a severe shortage of diesel exhaust fluid”…

The U.S. could soon experience a severe shortage of diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), impacting U.S. drivers already hit with soaring fuel prices.

DEF is a solution made up of urea and de-ionized water that is needed for almost everything that runs on diesel. It reduces harmful gases being released into the atmosphere and works by converting nitrogen oxide produced by diesel engines into nitrogen and steam.

If you have a diesel vehicle that was sold in the United States after 2010, your vehicle could technically run without DEF, but in most cases your vehicle will simply not let you start it if the DEF tank is dry

Can we call it a DEF jam? Everything is in short supply as supply chains continue to unlink. The latest commodity reportedly hit is DEF, or the blue diesel exhaust fluid that every diesel sold in the U.S. after 2010 needs to cut emissions. This means that every diesel truck, diesel RV, SUV, and car owner will likely have to look harder, and pay more for, DEF. A diesel engine can technically run without DEF, but your diesel vehicle likely won’t let you start it if the DEF tank is empty.

A lack of urea is the biggest reason for the growing shortage of DEF.

The United States is one of the largest importers of urea in the world, and Russia and China are two of the largest exporters.  In previous years that wasn’t a problem, but now the war in Ukraine has dramatically changed things

A major portion of our urea comes from Europe, and because of the war in Ukraine we’re seeing a shortage of it, according to Newsweek. Russia is one of the world’s major exporters of it. China, too, is a major exporter of it, and it has suspended exports. Weather, too, has caused supply chain disruptions. Since it’s also a major component in fertilizers, there’s intense competition for urea.

Without enough DEF, our economy is going to be in for a world of hurt.

Meanwhile, Mike Adams is reporting on the growing shortages of diesel engine oil that are starting to happen all over the nation…

Retailers, customers and distributors are all reporting shortages in diesel engine oil. This is not an imaginary problem, it is a real problem that is so far entirely ignored by the corporate media.

Apparently there are some diesel engine oil additives that are in extremely short supply, and one industry insider is telling us that this problem isn’t going to be resolved any time soon.

So what this means is that people are going to start running out of diesel engine oil.

In fact, it is already being reported that the trains in Sri Lanka will soon have to completely shut down because of a lack of diesel engine oil…

Sri Lanka Railways said that it will NOT be possible to operate trains in the future due to the lack of engine oil. A senior official at Sri Lanka Railways said that the current level of engine oil would only last for another two months.

That’s in line with the warning we’re hearing in the states: About 8 weeks of diesel engine oil remaining in the pipeline.

Just solving one of the shortages that I have described in this article will not be enough.

As I noted in the opening paragraph, a diesel vehicle requires diesel fuel, diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil in order to operate.

You need all three.

This is a story that I will be following very closely.  Needless to say, there are enormous implications for our supply chains and for our economy as a whole if solutions cannot be found.

XIV BRICS Summit Beijing Declaration

This is a VERY IMPORTANT document. This is the preamble. It defines the new, new world order; a unipolar world. - MM

Preamble

1. We,the Leaders of the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Russian  Federation, the Republic of India, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of South Africa held the XIV BRICS Summit under the theme “Foster High-quality BRICS Partnership, Usher in a New Era for Global Development” on 23-24 June 2022.

2. We recall that in the past 16 years, upholding the BRICS spirit featuring  mutual respect and understanding, equality, solidarity, openness, inclusiveness, and consensus, BRICS countries have strengthened mutual trust,deepened intra-BRICS mutually beneficial cooperation,and closer  people-to-people exchanges, which has led to a series of significant  outcomes. We reiterate the importance of further enhancing BRICS  solidarity and cooperation based on our common interests and key priorities, to further strengthen our strategic partnership.

3. We are glad to note that despite the COVID-19 pandemic and other challenges, BRICS countries in 2022 have jointly continued enhancing solidarity and  deepening cooperation on, inter alia, economy, peace and security, people-to-people exchanges, public health, and sustainable development  by holding a series of meetings and activities, and contributed to tangible outcomes of BRICS cooperation.

4. We welcome the High-level Dialogue on Global Development at this Summit as  a testimony to the open and inclusive nature of BRICS Partnership including BRICS Outreach/BRICS Plus cooperation. We look forward to the Dialogue injecting new impetus to strengthen international cooperation and solidarity on implementing the 2030 Agenda  for Sustainable Development.

Strengthening and Reforming Global Governance

5. We reiterate our commitment to multilateralism through upholding  international law, including the purposes and principles enshrined in  the Charter of the United Nations as its indispensable cornerstone, and  to the central role of the United Nations in an international system in  which sovereign states cooperate to maintain peace and security, advance  sustainable development, ensure the promotion and protection of  democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, and promoting  cooperation based on the spirit of mutual respect, justice and equality.

6. Recalling the BRICS Joint Statement on Strengthening and Reforming the Multilateral System adopted by our Foreign Ministers in 2021 and the  principles outlined therein, we agree that the task of strengthening and  reforming multilateral system encompasses the following:

    • Making instruments of global governance more inclusive, representative and  participatory to facilitate greater and more meaningful participation of  developing and least developed countries, especially in Africa, in global decision-making processes and structures and make it better attuned to contemporary realities;
    • Being based on inclusive consultation and collaboration for the benefit of all, while respecting sovereign independence, equality, mutual  legitimate interests and concerns to make the multilateral organizations more responsive,effective,transparent and credible;
    • Making multilateral organizations more responsive, effective, transparent,  democratic, objective, action-oriented, solution-oriented and credible,  so as to  promote cooperation in building international relations based  on the  norms and principles of international law, and the spirit of  mutual  respect, justice, equality, mutual beneficial cooperation and  realities  of  the  contemporary  world;
    • Using  innovative  and inclusive solutions, including digital and technological  tools to  promote sustainable development and facilitate affordable and  equitable  access to global public goods for all;
    • Strengthening  capacities  of individual States and international organizations to  better respond  to new and emerging, traditional and non-traditional  challenges,  including those emanating from terrorism, money  laundering,  cyber-realm, infodemics and fake news;
    • Promoting  international  and regional peace and security, social and economic  development, and  preserve nature’s balance with people-centered  international cooperation at its core.

7. We recall the UNGA Resolution 75/1 and reiterate the call for reforms of the principal  organs of the United Nations. We recommit to instill new life in the  discussions on reform of the UN Security Council and continue the work  to revitalize the General Assembly and strengthen the Economic and  Social Council. We recall the 2005 World Summit Outcome document and  reaffirm the need for a comprehensive reform of the UN, including its  Security Council, with a view to making it more representative,  effective and efficient, and to increase the representation of the  developing countries so that it can adequately respond to global  challenges. China and Russia reiterated the importance they attach to  the status and role of Brazil, India and South Africa in international  affairs and supported their aspiration to play a greater role in the UN. 

8. We appreciate the role of India and Brazil as members of the UN Security Council for 2021-2022 and  2022-2023 respectively. The presence of four BRICS countries in the UN  Security Council provides an opportunity to further enhance the weight  of our dialogue on issue of international peace and security and for  continued cooperation in areas of mutual interest, including through regular exchanges amongst our permanent Mission to the United Nations and in other international fora.

9. We  reiterate the need for all countries to cooperate in promoting and  protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms under the principles of  equality and mutual respect. We agree to continue to treat all human  rights including the right to development in a fair and equal manner, on  the same footing and with the same emphasis. We agree to strengthen  cooperation on issues of common interests both within BRICS and in  multilateral fora including the United Nations General Assembly and  Human Rights Council, taking into account the necessity to promote,  protect and fulfil human rights in a non-selective, non-politicised and  constructive manner and without double standards. We call for the  respect of democracy and human rights. In this regard, we underline that  they should be implemented on the level of global governance as well as  at national level. We reaffirm our commitment to ensuring the promotion  and protection of democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms for  all with the aim to build a brighter shared future for the international  community based on mutually beneficial cooperation.

10. We  stress that global economic governance is of critical importance for  countries to ensure sustainable development and recall further our  support for broadening and strengthening the participation of emerging  markets and developing countries (EMDCs) in the international economic  decision-making and norm-setting processes. We reiterate our support for  G20’s leading role in global economic governance and underline that G20  shall remain intact and respond to current global challenges. We call  upon the international community to foster partnerships while  underlining that it is imperative to strengthen macro-policy  coordination in driving the world economy out of the crisis and shaping a  strong, sustainable, balanced and inclusive post-pandemic economic  recovery. We urge major developed countries to adopt responsible  economic policies, while managing policy spillovers, to avoid severe  impacts on developing countries.

11. We reaffirm our support for an open, transparent, inclusive,  non-discriminatory and rules-based multilateral trading system,as embodied in the World Trade Organization(WTO). We will engage  constructively to pursue the necessary WTO reform to build an open world  economy that supports trade and development, preserve the pre-eminent  role of the WTO for setting global trade rules and governance,  supporting inclusive development and promoting the rights and interests  of its members, including developing members and LDCs. We recognize that  special and differential treatment as established in WTO rules is a  tool to facilitate the achievement of WTO objectives with respect to  economic growth and development. We call upon all WTO members to avoid  unilateral and protectionist measures that run counter to the spirit and  rules of the WTO. We emphasize the top priority and urgency of  launching the selection process of the Appellate Body members to restore  the binding two-tier multilateral dispute settlement mechanism. We  agree that the Appellate Body crisis should be resolved without further  delay and should not be linked with other issues. We endorse BRICS  Statement on Strengthening the Multilateral Trading System and Reforming  the WTO. We commend the successful conclusion of MC12 that underscores  the value of multilateralism. We encourage WTO members to sustain  momentum and achieve further meaningful outcomes by MC13.

12. We  reaffirm our commitment to maintaining a strong and effective Global  Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced IMF at  its center. We call for the timely and successful completion of the 16th  General Review of Quotas by 15 December 2023, to reduce the IMF’s  reliance on temporary resources, to address under-representation of  emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs) for their meaningful  engagement in the governance of IMF and protect the voice and quota  shares of the poorest and smallest members. We welcome progress on  voluntary channeling of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) from countries  with strong external positions to support countries most in need, as  well as the IMF’s decision to establish the Resilience and  Sustainability Trust (RST). We look forward to early operationalization of the RST.

13. We note that the  COVID-19 pandemic has caused serious shock and hardship to humanity,  unbalanced recovery is aggravating inequality across the world, the  global growth momentum has weakened, and the economic prospects have  declined. We are concerned that global development is suffering from  severe disruption, including the widening North-South development gap,  divergent recovery trajectories, pre-existing developmental fault-lines  and a technological divide. This is posing huge challenges to the  implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as  economic and health scarring, particularly for EMDCs, is projected to  persist beyond the current pandemic. We urge major developed countries  to adopt responsible economic policies, while managing policy  spillovers, to avoid severe impacts on developing countries. We  encourage multilateral financial institutions and international  organizations to play a constructive role in building global consensus  on economic policies and preventing systemic risks of economic  disruption and financial fragmentation. We welcome the actions to  accelerate the progress towards achieving the 2030 Agenda for  Sustainable Development.

Working in Solidarity to Combat COVID-19

14. We  reiterate that it was imperative to ensure the availability of safe,  efficacious, accessible and affordable diagnostics, medicines, vaccines  and essential medical products to people from different countries  especially developing countries, and equitable distribution of vaccines  and expeditious vaccination, to fill the immunization gap globally. We  support the leading role of the WHO in combating the pandemic, as well  as acknowledge initiatives such as the COVAX and the ACT-A. We recognize  the importance of the discussions in the WTO on relevant IP waiver  proposals, as well as capacity building and strengthening local  production of vaccines and other health tools, especially in developing  countries. We stress the need to continue to strengthen the cooperation  on testing methods, therapeutic, research, production and recognition of  vaccines, the research on their efficacy and safety in light of new  variants of COVID-19 virus and recognition of national document of  vaccination against COVID-19 and respective testing, especially for  purpose of international travel. 

15. We  reaffirm our commitment to multilateralism and continue to support  World Health Organization (WHO) to play the leading role in the global  health governance, while supporting other UN relevant agencies’  activities. The BRICS countries will strengthen technical multilateral  cooperation aimed at enhancing capacities in the fields of responding to  major public health emergencies, Universal Health Coverage (UHC),  vaccine research and development, prevention & therapeutic health  care and digital health systems. We agree to deepen existing cooperation  through establishing closer cooperation ties among BRICS health  institutions and exploring opportunities for joint collaborative  projects in the health sector. 

16. We welcome the convening of the BRICS High-Level Forum on Traditional Medicine.

17. We  stress that BRICS countries should be better prepared for COVID-19 and  future public health emergencies, and enhance exchanges and cooperation  on public health emergency alert, pandemic prevention preparedness and  response, and best practices in medical treatment. We welcome the  virtual launch of the BRICS Vaccine Research and Development Center and  commend the “Initiative on Strengthening Vaccine Cooperation and Jointly  Building a Defensive Line against Pandemic”. We welcome  the participation of other countries, especially EMDCs, in the Center to  upgrade capacity for controlling and preventing infectious diseases. We  support and emphasize the urgent need for the establishment of the  BRICS Integrated Early Warning System for preventing mass infectious  diseases risks in accordance with the International Health  Regulations (2005) and the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response  Network, and emphasize that BRICS countries should jointly take  proactive and effective measures to prevent and reduce the risk of  cross-border transmission of infectious diseases and contribute to  improving global health.

18. We support  continuing to hold the BRICS TB Research Network Meetings, which will  contribute to achieving the WHO goal of ending TB by 2030. We support  the early signing of the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in  the Field of Regulation of Medical Products for Human Use among our drug  regulatory authorities and welcome the holding of a BRICS Seminar of  Officials and Experts in Population Development in the second half of  2022. 

19. We call on international  agencies and philanthropists to procure vaccines and boosters from  manufacturers in developing countries, including in Africa, to ensure  that the manufacturing capabilities being developed are retained. This  is critical to build health system resilience and preparedness for  emerging variants and any future health emergencies including  pandemics. In this context access to diagnostics and therapeutics is  essential to adopt quality and affordable medical countermeasures  and develop overall surveillance capabilities. 

Safeguarding Peace and Security

20. We  welcome the BRICS Joint Statement on “Strengthen BRICS Solidarity and  Cooperation, Respond to New Features and Challenges in International  Situation” adopted by our Foreign Ministers on 19 May 2022, and the 12th  Meeting of BRICS National Security Advisers and High Representatives on  National Security, held on 15 June 2022, and commend their fruitful  discussions on various strategic issues. 

21. We commit to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all  States, stress our commitment to the peaceful resolution of differences  and disputes between countries through dialogue and consultation,  support all efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of crises.

22. We  have discussed the situation in Ukraine and recall our national  positions as expressed at the appropriate fora, namely the UNSC and  UNGA. We support talks between Russia and Ukraine. We have also  discussed our concerns over the humanitarian situation in and around  Ukraine and expressed our support to efforts of the UN  Secretary-General, UN Agencies and ICRC to provide humanitarian  assistance in accordance with the basic principles of humanity, neutrality and impartiality established in UN General Assembly  resolution 46/182.

23. We strongly  support a peaceful, secure and stable Afghanistan while emphasizing the  respect for its sovereignty, independence, territorial  integrity, national unity and non-interference in its internal affairs.  We emphasize the need for all sides to encourage the  Afghanistan authorities to achieve national reconciliation through  dialogue and negotiation, and to establish a broad-based and inclusive  and representative political structure. We reaffirm the significance of  relevant UNSC resolutions. We emphasize that the Afghan territory not to  be used to threaten or attack any country or to shelter or train  terrorists, or to plan to finance terrorist acts, and reiterate the  importance of combating terrorism in Afghanistan. We call on the  Afghanistan authorities to work towards combating drug-related crime to  free Afghanistan from the scourge of drugs. We stress the need to  provide urgent humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people and to  safeguard the fundamental rights of all Afghans, including women, children, and different ethnic groups. 

24. We  reiterate the need to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue through  peaceful and diplomatic means in accordance with the international law,  and stress the importance of preserving the JCPOA and the UNSCR 2231 to  international non-proliferation as well as wider peace and stability and  hope for success of diplomatic efforts towards the resumption of  the JCPOA.

25. We express our support  for negotiations in bilateral and multilateral formats to resolve all  issues pertaining to the Korean Peninsula, including its complete  denuclearization, and maintaining peace and stability in Northeast Asia. We reaffirm the commitment to a comprehensive peaceful, diplomatic and  political solution to the situation.

26. We  reaffirm our commitment to a peaceful and prosperous Middle East and  North Africa. We stress the importance of addressing development and  security challenges in the region. We call on the international  community to support efforts aimed at the stability and peace in the region.

27. We commend efforts of  African countries, the African Union and sub-regional organizations to  address regional challenges, including maintaining peace and security,  post conflict reconstruction as well as development efforts, and call  for continued support by the international community to them. We  emphasize the collaboration of AU and UN in accordance with the UN Charter.

28. We call for continued efforts to strengthen the system of arms control, disarmament and  non-proliferation treaties and agreements and to preserve its integrity  for maintaining global stability and international peace and security,  and stressed further the need to maintain the effectiveness and  efficiency as well as the consensus-based nature of the relevant  multilateral instruments in the field of disarmament, non-proliferation  and arms control.

29. We call for  strengthening the system of arms control, disarmament and  non-proliferation, including the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological)  and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BTWC) and the Convention on  the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of  Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction (CWC), and for preserving  their integrity and effectiveness to maintain global stability and  international peace and security. We underline the need to comply with  and strengthen the BTWC, including by adopting a legally binding  Protocol to the Convention that provides for, inter alia, an efficient  verification mechanism. We reassert our support for ensuring the  long-term sustainability of outer space activities and prevention of an  arms race in outer space (PAROS) and of its weaponization, including  through negotiations to adopt a relevant legally binding multilateral  instrument. We recognize the value of the updated Draft Treaty on the  Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use  of Force against Outer Space Objects (PPWT) submitted to the Conference  on Disarmament in 2014. We stress that practical Transparency and  Confidence-Building Measures (TCBMs), may also contribute to PAROS.

30. We  reaffirm our commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons and stress  our strong commitment to nuclear disarmament and our support to the work  on this subject during the session of 2022 of the Conference on  Disarmament. We note the Joint Statement of the Leaders of the People’s  Republic of China, the French Republic, the Russian Federation, the  United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United  States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races on 3 January  2022, in particular the affirmation that a nuclear war cannot be won and  must never be fought.

31. We reaffirm  our commitment to the promotion of an open, secure, stable, accessible  and peaceful ICT-environment, underscored the importance of enhancing  common understandings and intensifying cooperation in the use of ICTs  and Internet. We support the leading role of the United Nations in  promoting constructive dialogue on ensuring ICT-security, including  within the UN Open-Ended Working Group on security of and in the use of  ICTs 2021-2025, and developing a universal legal framework in this  realm. We call for a comprehensive, balanced, objective approach to the  development and security of ICT products and systems. We underscore the  importance of establishing legal frameworks of cooperation among BRICS  countries on ensuring security in the use of ICTs. We also acknowledge  the need to advance practical intra-BRICS cooperation through  implementation of the BRICS Roadmap of Practical Cooperation on ensuring  security in the use of ICTs and the activities of the BRICS Working  Group on security in the use of ICTs.

32. We,  while emphasizing the formidable potential of the ICTs for growth and  development, recognize new associated possibilities they bring for  criminal activities and threats, and expressed concern over the rising  level and complexity of criminal misuse of ICTs. We welcome the ongoing  work in the UN Open-Ended Ad Hoc Committee of Experts to elaborate a  comprehensive international convention on countering the use of ICTs for  criminal purposes and reaffirm our commitment to cooperating in the  implementation of the mandate adopted by the UN General Assembly resolution 75/282.

33. We express strong  condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations whenever,  wherever and by whomsoever committed. We recognize the threat emanating  from terrorism, extremism conducive to terrorism and radicalization. We  are committed to combating terrorism in all its forms and  manifestations, including the cross-border movement of terrorists, and  terrorism financing networks and safe havens. We reiterate that  terrorism should not be associated with any religion, nationality,  civilization or ethnic group. We reaffirm our unwavering commitment to  contribute further to the global efforts of preventing and countering  the threat of terrorism on the basis of respect for international law,  in particular the Charter of the United Nations, and human rights,  emphasizing that States have the primary responsibility in combating  terrorism with the United Nations continuing to play central and  coordinating role in this area. We also stress the need for a  comprehensive and balanced approach of the whole international community  to effectively curb the terrorist activities, which pose a serious  threat, including in the present-day pandemic environment. We reject  double standards in countering terrorism and extremism conducive to  terrorism. We call for an expeditious finalization and adoption of the  Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism within the UN  framework and for launching multilateral negotiations on an  international convention for the suppression of acts of chemical and  biological terrorism, at the Conference of Disarmament. We welcome the  outcomes of the Seventh BRICS Counter-Terrorism Working Group Plenary  Meeting and its five Subgroup Meetings. We commend the Chair for hosting  the Seminar on Targeted Financial Sanctions Related to Terrorism and  Terrorist Financing, and look forward to organization of the Seminar on  Strengthening Counter-Terrorism Capacity Building in Developing  Countries, and the BRICS Police Training Program. We also look forward  to further deepening counter-terrorism cooperation.

34. We  look forward to further deepening counter-terrorism cooperation and  reaffirm the sole authority of the UN Security Council for imposing  sanctions and call for further consolidation and strengthening of the  working methods of UN Security Council Sanctions Committees to ensure  their effectiveness, responsiveness and transparency, while avoiding  politicization of any of their proceedings including listing proposals  objectively on evidence-based criteria.

35. We  reaffirm our commitment to strengthening international cooperation  against corruption. While respecting the legal systems of our respective  countries, we are committed to strengthening experience sharing and  practical cooperation on issues related to anti-corruption law  enforcement, including on pursuit of economic and corruption offenders,  on mutual legal assistance in civil and administrative matters, and on  asset recovery. We welcome the BRICS Initiative on Denial of Safe Haven  to Corruption. We will further strengthen anti-corruption capacity  building through education and training programs and enhance  anti-corruption exchanges and cooperation within multilateral  frameworks. We welcome the first BRICS Anti-corruption Ministerial  Meeting. 

36. We are concerned about the  serious drug situation in the world and reiterate our commitment to the  existing international drug control mechanism underpinned by the three  United Nations Drug Control Conventions and the various political  commitments. We appreciate BRICS Anti-Drug Working Group’s active role  in combating transnational drug trafficking and promoting global drug  governance and will further strengthen drug control cooperation.

Promoting Economic Recovery

37. We  recognize the important role of BRICS countries working together to  deal with risks and challenges to the world economy in achieving global  recovery and sustainable development. We reaffirm our commitment to  continuing to enhance macro-economic policy coordination, deepen  economic practical cooperation, and work to realize strong, sustainable,  balanced and inclusive post-COVID economic recovery. We emphasize the  importance of continued implementation of the Strategy for BRICS  Economic Partnership 2025 in all relevant ministerial tracks and working  groups.

38. We recognize the dynamism  of the digital economy in mitigating the impact of COVID-19 and enabling  global economic recovery. We also recognize the positive role that  trade and investment can play in promoting sustainable development,  national and regional industrialization, the transition towards  sustainable consumption and production patterns. We take note of China’s  hosting the “Buy BRICS” online promotion event and endorse the BRICS  Digital Economy Partnership Framework, BRICS Initiative on Trade and  Investment for Sustainable Development and BRICS Initiative on Enhancing  Cooperation on Supply Chains. We recognize the challenges facing trade  and investment development in the digital era and acknowledge that BRICS  members are at different levels of digital development, and thus  recognize the need to address respective challenges including the  digital divide. We welcome the establishment of the Digital Economy  Working Group by upgrading the E-commerce Working Group. We also agree  to promote consumer protection in e-commerce by advancing the  implementation of BRICS Framework for Consumer Protection in  E-commerce. We reaffirm that openness, efficiency, stability,  transparency, reliability and resilience of the global, regional and  national production and supply chains are crucial in combating the  COVID-19 pandemic, tackling economic recovery challenges and boosting  international trade and investment. We encourage cooperation among BRICS  countries to enhance the interconnectivity of supply chains and promote  trade and investment flows. We agree to strengthen exchanges and  cooperation in trade in services and engagement of BRICS national focal  points, as established in the BRICS Framework for Cooperation on Trade  in Services, with the BRICS Business Council with the aim to promote  implementation of BRICS Trade in Services Cooperation Roadmap and  relevant documents including the BRICS Framework for cooperation in  Trade in Professional Services. We take note of the proposal of the  Chair to establish the BRICS Trade in Services Network (BTSN) and will  continue discussions. 

39. We  congratulate New Development Bank (NDB) on its relocation to its  permanent headquarters building in Shanghai as well as the opening of  NDB’s regional office in India. We welcome the decisions on admission of  four new members to the NDB and look forward to further membership  expansion in a gradual and balanced manner in terms of geographic  representation and comprising of both developed and developing  countries, to enhance the NDB’s international influence as well as the  representation and voice of EMDCs in global governance. We support the  NDB’s goals of attaining the highest possible credit rating and  institutional development. We appreciate the vital role of the NDB in  addressing the impact of the pandemic and assisting in the economic  recovery in member countries. We note the second General Strategy  approved by the Board of Governors at its annual meeting and look  forward to its smooth implementation. We encourage the Bank to follow  the member-led and demand-driven principle, mobilize financing from  diversified sources, enhance innovation and knowledge exchange, assist  member countries in achieving sustainable development goals and further  improve efficiency and effectiveness to fulfill its mandate, aiming to  be a premier multilateral development institution.

40. We  welcome the decision to establish the BRICS Think Tank Network for  Finance. We expect it to work independently and provide intellectual  support, as and when tasked, for knowledge sharing, exchange of  experiences and practices and cooperation on finance issues amongst  BRICS countries, aiming at addressing global challenges and serving the  interests of the EMDCs.

41. We recognize  the key role that infrastructure investment can play in facilitating  sustainable development. We reaffirm our understanding that PPPs are an  effective approach to leveraging the private sector to address  infrastructure gaps, and scaling up infrastructure assets. We endorse  the Technical Report on Public Private Partnerships for Sustainable  Development. We welcome the exchange and sharing of good practices and  experiences, and encourage further cooperation on infrastructure  investment and PPPs. We look forward to resuming technical  engagements with the NDB and the BRICS Task Force on PPP and  Infrastructure on the Integrated Digital Platform on infrastructure  investment projects and call for intensification of work in this area.

42. We  acknowledge the importance of strengthening the Contingent Reserve  Arrangement (CRA) mechanism, which contributes to strengthening the  global financial safety net and complements existing international  monetary and financial arrangements. We support the amendments to the  CRA Treaty, and welcome the progress in amending other relevant CRA  documents. We look forward to the finalization of the amendments which  would enhance the flexibility and responsiveness of the CRA mechanism.  We look forward to the successful completion of the fifth CRA test run  later in 2022. We support the work to improve the framework for  coordination between the CRA and the IMF. We welcome the progress in  developing the BRICS Economic Bulletin 2022 as part of our streamlined  CRA research program.

43. We underscore  the importance of continued work under the existing work streams,  including information security in the financial sector, and the BRICS  Payments Task Force (BPTF) as a platform for exchanging experience and  knowledge, and welcome the central banks’ further cooperation on the  payments track. 

44. We commit to  strengthening intra-BRICS cooperation to intensify the BRICS Partnership  on New Industrial Revolution (PartNIR) and collectively create new  opportunities for development. We encourage intra-BRICS cooperation in  human resource development through BRICS Centre for Industrial  Competences, BRICS PartNIR Innovation Centre (BPIC), BRICS Start-up  Events and collaboration with other relevant BRICS mechanisms, to carry  out training programmes to address challenges of NIR for inclusive and  sustainable industrialization. We support the BRICS PartNIR projects to  explore cooperation mechanisms with New Development Bank (NDB) and other  financial institutions based on market-driven principles. We recognize  the importance of BRICS Startup Events including BRICS Innovation  Launchpad and BRICS Startup Forum Meeting, aimed to promote networking,  interaction, mentorship among Startups in BRICS countries. We welcome  the events hosted by the BPIC including the 4th BRICS Forum on PartNIR,  the BRICS Industrial Innovation Contest 2022, and the BPIC training  programme, which are aimed at translating the vision of PartNIR into  real actions and benefits for all BRICS members. We welcome the BRICS  Forum on Development of Industrial Internet and Digital Manufacturing,  during which representatives from BRICS governments, industry and  academia participated and discussed the development of digital  manufacturing. We also welcome the release of the BRICS Initiative for  Cooperation on Digitalization of Manufacturing.

45. We  acknowledge the progress of BRICS cooperation on STI, including  outcomes of BRICS STI Steering Committee, inter alia, on advancement of  flagship projects initiative aiming to find effective STI solutions to  global challenges. We encourage further work on proposals regarding the  polycentric BRICS Technology Transfer Center Network, iBRICS Network,  joint research projects including flagship projects, BRICS Young  Scientist Forum and Young Innovation Prize.

46. We  commend the progress of cooperation in the field of ICTs, including the  adoption of the terms of reference of the Digital BRICS Task Force  (DBTF) and the decision to hold the Digital BRICS Forum in 2022. We  encourage the BRICS Institute of Future Networks and the DBTF to make  suitable working plans at an early date, and carry out cooperation on  R&D and application of new and emerging technologies. We look  forward to a fruitful and productive meeting of BRICS Communication  Ministers in July 2022. We support the coordination and interaction  among the Digital Economy Working Group and the Working Group on ICT  Cooperation, as well as the workstreams established within this track,  namely the DBTF and the BIFN as practicable to avoid any duplication for  advancing the BRICS digital economy in accordance with respective  advantages, and within respective domestic legal frameworks.

47. We  commend our Customs authorities for the Agreement Between the  Governments of BRICS Countries on Cooperation and Mutual Administrative  Assistance in Customs Matters, and the progress made in areas of mutual  administrative assistance, capacity building and law enforcement  cooperation. We recognize the importance of BRICS customs enforcement  cooperation and will work together to further strengthen it. We support  our Customs authorities in holding the BRICS Workshop on Customs  Strategy and Capacity Building and the BRICS Workshop on Customs  Enforcement Cooperation, for smart cooperation and smart practice  sharing, as also for promoting partnership in customs under the theme of  “Smart Cooperation for a High-quality Partnership among BRICS Customs”.

48. We  emphasize the fundamental role of energy security in achieving  sustainable development goals. While recognizing that the energy  transition of each country is unique according to national  circumstances, we underscore the prime importance of securing universal  access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy in line  with Sustainable Development Goal 7. We welcome the BRICS Energy Report  2022, support joint research and technical cooperation within the BRICS  Energy Research Cooperation Platform, and commend the holding of the  BRICS Youth Energy Summit and other related activities.

49. We  encourage the BRICS Interbank Cooperation Mechanism to continue playing  an important role in supporting BRICS economic and trade cooperation,  and appreciate the renewal of the Memorandum of Understanding between  the Member Development Banks of BRICS Interbank Cooperation Mechanism  and the New Development Bank. We welcome the seventh edition of the  BRICS Economic Research Award to encourage and stimulate advanced  doctoral research by nationals of the BRICS countries on topics of  relevance to the BRICS nations.

50. We reiterate the commitments to promote employment for sustainable  development, including to develop skills to ensure resilient recovery,  gender-responsive employment and social protection policies including  workers’ rights. We welcome research by the BRICS Network of Labour  Research Institutes on employment and income support in the context of  COVID-19 crisis outlining impact of the pandemic, response measures and  post-COVID-19 changes.

51. We recognize  the crucial role that MSMEs play in the BRICS economies and reaffirm the  importance of their participation in production networks and value  chains. We agree to continue to deepen cooperation on competition  amongst BRICS countries and create a fair competition market environment  for international economic and trade cooperation. We agree to enhance  exchanges and cooperation in the field of standardization and make full  use of standards to advance sustainable development. We commit to  strengthen cooperation and coordination in areas of tax information  exchange, capacity building and innovation in tax administration, and  create a signature knowledge product called ‘the Best Tax Practices from  BRICS’ to serve as reference for other developing countries. We support  deepening IPR cooperation and promoting exchanges and mutual learning  on IPR protection system, and look forward to more practical outcomes in  such fields as patent, trademark, and industrial design. We support  enhancing BRICS statistical cooperation and continuing to release the  BRICS Joint Statistical Publication 2022.

Expediting Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

52. We  note with concern that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted efforts to  achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and reversed years  of progress on poverty, hunger, health care, education, climate change,  access to clean water, and environmental protection. We reaffirm our  commitment to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in all its three  dimensions – economic, social and environmental – in a balanced and  integrated manner. We stress that the international community should  attach more importance to development, revitalize global development  partnerships and push for realization of all sustainable development  goals by pooling the necessary resources to instill fresh momentum into  implementing the 2030 Agenda. We urge donor countries to honour their  Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitments and to facilitate  capacity building and the transfer of technology along with additional  development resources to developing countries, in line with the national  policy objectives of recipients. We stress the importance of dialogue  between the relevant development agencies from the BRICS countries.

53. We  commemorate the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Framework  Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and call on all parties to adhere  to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and  respective capabilities, in the light of different national  circumstances and in accordance with the institutional arrangement of  nationally determined contributions, and to implement the UNFCCC and its  Paris Agreement in an accurate, balanced and comprehensive way, based  on existing consensus. We recall relevant provisions of the Paris  Agreement, emphasizing that the Paris Agreement aims to strengthen  global response to the threat of climate change in the context of  sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, and that  peaking of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions will take longer for  developing countries. We underline that the developed countries have  historical responsibilities for global climate change, and should take  the lead in scaling up mitigation actions and scale up indispensable  support to developing countries on finance, technology and  capacity-building. We express our support to the incoming Egyptian  Presidency of COP27, working towards the success of COP27, and promote  COP27 to prioritize implementation and highlight the reinforcement of  adaptation and delivery and enhancement of developed countries’  commitments to provide financial support and technology transfer to  developing countries.

54. We oppose  green trade barriers and reiterate our commitment to enhancing  coordination on these issues. We underline that all measures taken to  tackle climate change and bio-diversity loss must be designed, adopted  and implemented in full conformity with the WTO agreements and must not  constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a  disguised restriction on international trade and must not create  unnecessary obstacles to international trade. We express our concern at  any discriminatory measure that will distort international trade, risk  new trade frictions and shift burden of addressing climate change to  other trading partners, developing countries and BRICS members. 

55. We  acknowledge the positive outcomes of the first phase of the 15th  Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological  Diversity (COP15) and its Kunming Declaration. We welcome and support  China’s hosting of the second phase of COP15 and call on all parties to  jointly adopt an ambitious, balanced and practical Post-2020 Global  Biodiversity Framework.

56. As BRICS  countries produce around 1/3 of the world’s food, we stress our  commitment to furthering agricultural cooperation and driving  sustainable agricultural and rural development of BRICS countries aimed  at safeguarding food security of BRICS countries and the world. We  emphasize the strategic importance of agriculture inputs, including,  inter alia, fertilizers, on ensuring global food security. We reiterate  the importance of implementing the Action Plan 2021-2024 for  Agricultural Cooperation of BRICS Countries, and welcome the Strategy on  Food Security Cooperation of the BRICS Countries.

57. We  take note that the breakthroughs in the applications of digital  technologies, such as Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) may play  an important role towards sustainable development. We take note of the  BRICS Forum on Big Data for Sustainable Development. We support  information exchanges and technical cooperation on AI technology. We  recall the declaration of the 7th BRICS Communications Ministers meeting  recognizing the rapid developments and huge potential of Artificial  Intelligence technologies and its value to economic growth. We  acknowledge the need to cooperate with each other to build trust,  confidence and security, as well as transparency and accountability in  promoting trustworthy AI to maximize its potential for the benefit of  society and humanity as whole with specific emphasis on marginalized and  vulnerable groups of population. We express our concerns on the risk,  and ethical dilemma related to Artificial Intelligence, such as privacy,  manipulation, bias, human-robot interaction, employment, effects and  singularity among others. We encourage BRICS members to work together to  deal with such concerns, sharing best practices, conduct comparative  study on the subject toward developing a common governance approach  which would guide BRICS members on Ethical and responsible use of  Artificial Intelligence while facilitating the development of AI. 

58. We  welcome the establishment of the BRICS Joint Committee on Space  Cooperation in line with the Agreement on Cooperation on BRICS Remote  Sensing Satellite Constellation and the convening of the first joint  committee meeting. We are satisfied with the formulation of working  procedures for data exchange and joint observation of the BRICS Remote  Sensing Satellite Constellation and appreciate the commissioning of data  sharing and exchange of the constellation. We encourage BRICS space  authorities to continue to effectively utilize the capacity of the  Constellation, and to widely promote application with data of the  Constellation, aimed at facilitating the sustainable development of  BRICS countries.

59. We commend the  proposal to organize the BRICS High-level Forum on Sustainable  Development. Taking it as an opportunity, we look forward to deepening  cooperation on, inter alia, the fight against COVID-19, digital  transformation, resilience and stability of industrial and supply  chains and low-carbon development.

60. We  reiterate the importance of exchanges and dialogues among BRICS  disaster management authorities. We encourage cooperation in key areas  including comprehensive disaster reduction capacity, disaster resilient  infrastructure and emergency rescue and response, with a view to  improving the global and regional disaster management response.

61. We  express our support to the African Union Agenda 2063 and to Africa´s  efforts towards integration through the development of the African  Continental Free Trade Area and other means. We stress the importance of  issues including industrialization, infrastructure development, food  security, health-care, and tackling climate change for the sustainable  development of Africa. We support Africa in attaining economic recovery  and sustainable development in the post pandemic era.

Deepening People-to-People Exchanges

62. We  reaffirm the importance of BRICS people-to-people exchanges in  enhancing mutual understanding, friendship and cooperation amongst our  nations and people. We appreciate the progress made under China’s  Chairship in 2022, including in the fields of governance, culture,  education, sports, arts, films, media, youth and academic exchanges, and  look forward to further exchanges and cooperation in these areas. 

63. We  appreciate the signing of the Action Plan for the Implementation of the  Agreement between the Governments of the BRICS States on cooperation in  the Field of Culture (2022-2026), encourage the BRICS countries to  promote the development of digitalization in the field of culture,  continue to deepen cooperation in the fields of, inter alia, arts and  culture, cultural heritage, cultural industry and cultural alliances  under the framework of the action plan, and establish a cultural  partnership featuring inclusiveness and mutual learning. 

64. We  acknowledge the urgent need for tourism industry recovery and the  importance of increasing mutual tourist flows and will work towards  further strengthening the BRICS Alliance for Green Tourism to promote  measures, which can shape a more resilient, sustainable and inclusive tourism sector. 

65. We appreciate the  progress on education and Technical and Vocational Education and  Training (TVET) cooperation, especially the establishment of the BRICS  TVET Cooperation Alliance which focuses on strengthening communication  and dialogue in TVET, promoting substantial cooperation in TVET,  integrating TVET with industry, enhancing research collaboration and  supporting recognition of TVET standards. Also, the launch of the BRICS  Skills Competition will strengthen exchanges and cooperation among the  nations. We support the digital transformation in education and  TVET space, and commit to ensure education accessibility and equity, and  promote the development of quality education. We reiterate the  importance of digitalization in education and development of a  sustainable education by strengthening the cooperation within BRICS  Network University and BRICS University League.

66. We  commend the successful holding of the BRICS Business Forum and  welcome the Beijing Initiative of BRICS Business community. We encourage  the BRICS Business Council to strengthen cooperation, including in the  fields of agri-business, aviation, deregulation, digital economy, energy  and green economy, financial services, infrastructure, manufacturing,  and skills development. We appreciate contributions and activities of  the BRICS Women’s Business Alliance (WBA) to deepening BRICS economic  and trade cooperation. We welcome the holding of the second BRICS  Women’s Innovation Contest by the BRICS Women’s Business Alliance  towards empowering women’s innovation and entrepreneurship. 

67. We commend the progress in sports exchanges and the role it plays in the  development of our athletes in a fair, inclusive and non-discriminatory  fashion. We look forward to the successful holding of BRICS Sports  Ministers Meeting in 2022.

68. We  appreciate the holding of the fora pertaining to political parties,  think tanks, and civil society organizations. We also acknowledge the  proposal for institutionalization of the BRICS Civil Society  Organizations Forum.

69. We support the  convening of the fifth BRICS Media Forum and the continuation of the  BRICS International Journalism Training Program within the framework of the Forum.

70. We look forward to the  BRICS Youth Summit, support youth development as a priority and  encourage strengthened exchanges among BRICS youth. We welcome the BRICS  Film Festival in Shanghai and look forward to enhancing exchanges and  cooperation in the field of film. We commend the progress made by BRICS  countries in promoting urban development, and appreciate the  contribution of mechanisms including BRICS Urbanization Forum, BRICS  Friendship Cities and Local Governments Cooperation Forum and BRICS  International Municipal Forum to facilitating the building of more  friendship city relations among BRICS countries and promoting the  implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Institutional Development

71. We  note with satisfaction the progress made in BRICS institutional  development and stress that BRICS cooperation needs to embrace changes  and keep abreast with the times. We shall continue to set clear  priorities in our wide-ranging cooperation, on the basis of consensus,  and make our strategic partnership more efficient, practical  and results-oriented. 

72. We emphasize  the BRICS efforts of extending its cooperation to other EMDCs and  support further promoting the BRICS Outreach and BRICS Plus  Cooperation in line with the updated Terms of Reference adopted by the  BRICS Sherpas in 2021 through inclusive and equal-footed and flexible  practices and initiatives. We commend China’s Chairship for hosting the  Dialogue session under the theme ‘Increased Role of Emerging Markets and  Developing Countries in Global Governance’ during the Meeting of BRICS  Ministers of Foreign Affairs/International Relations on 19 May 2022. 

73. We support promoting discussions among BRICS members on BRICS expansion  process. We stress the need to clarify the guiding principles,  standards, criteria and procedures for this expansion process through  Sherpas’ channel on the basis of full consultation and consensus.

74. South Africa, Brazil, Russia and India commend China’s BRICS Chairship in  2022 and express their gratitude to the government and people of China  for holding the XIV BRICS Summit.

75. Brazil, Russia, India and China extend full support to South Africa for its  BRICS Chairship in 2023 and the holding of the XV BRICS Summit.

(Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China)

Chinese ambassador hits out at Morrison’s ‘nonsense’ COVID inquiry

China listed 14 graviences. All committed by Australia. And now we have the  Wuhan “smear campaign” by Morrison. Yeah. Sure, it’s only 1 of the 14 greviances, but the media continued to use their selective wording to continue to smear China.

Article HERE

Creamy Chicken Soup (THE BEST Chicken Soup Recipe)

WOW! I’m going to try this tomorrow! Wow, oh wow oh wow!

South Korea exposed the US military laboratory secretly made “biochemical weapons”? What do you intend to be so close to China?

The zombie movie “Travel to Busan” was shown in the world a few years ago. In the film, the virus leaked by the Busan Biopharmaceutical Company in South Korea triggered a terrible zombie crisis. Now, with the exposure of the biochemical laboratory hidden by the United States in South Korea, Koreans have begun to chant that “Travel to Busan” is not a fiction, but a preview of reality.

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Travel to Busan

Recently, the United States has repeatedly sent biological warfare reagents to the Korean peninsula through the US military stationed in South Korea. After the incident was exposed, South Korean people and media investigations discovered that the US military had secretly established four biochemical laboratories in South Korea, one of which was in Busan. The sinister behavior of the United States has triggered many demonstrations by South Koreans.

So, what secret weapon is the U.S. Biochemical Warfare Laboratory making? Is it related to the coronavirus pandemic that WHO is tracing? What does the US military intend to build the laboratory on the doorstep of China?

Today, Xiaota will talk to everyone about the conspiracy of the United States in overseas biochemical laboratories.

As early as last year, South Korea’s “Tong Shimbun” published an article that broke the news: “The U.S. Army in South Korea has set up Bacillus anthracis biological laboratories at four bases in Yongsan, Busan, Gunsan and Pyeongtaek.” Bacillus anthracis is a species that can pass through the skin and mucous membranes. The bacteria spread by the respiratory tract and the digestive tract, German and Japanese fascists, have tried to make it into biochemical weapons, but now, the U.S. military, which has inherited the Japanese biochemical warfare technology and experience, has vigorously developed this extermination weapon, even It has been made “more terrible than coronavirus”. This virus can not only kill people and animals, but can even survive and reproduce in the soil. As long as it is contaminated with Bacillus anthracis, the soil must be completely removed, otherwise it will always be a forbidden zone for life.

The U.S. military has built extremely dangerous laboratories overseas, obviously not willing to allow its own country to bear unexpected risks. The United States’ wishful thinking is brilliant. Judging from the information that has been released so far, from 2009 to 2014, the US military conducted at least 15 anthrax experiments in South Korea, and there have indeed been at least one virus leak.

It happened in May 2015. The bacillus anthracis was accidentally leaked at the U.S. Air Force Base in Osan, South Korea. 5 U.S. Air Force personnel, 10 U.S. Army personnel, 3 U.S. military members, and 4 Koreans who may be exposed to the virus He was treated in isolation, and his later situation is unknown.

It was this leak that exposed the news of the US military at the Korean Biochemical Laboratory, which caused a violent shock in Korean society. Countless South Korean citizens took to the streets to launch protest marches, demanding a reply from the US, and disclosure of laboratory information, and the laboratory was immediately cancelled. Many South Korean civil organizations gathered to call for a comprehensive revision of the “Status of Forces Agreement in South Korea” to limit the privileges of US troops in South Korea. There are also calls for the South Korean government to conduct independent investigations to find out the truth of the incident.

What the Americans say is better than what they sing. The United States says that “the American system is very safe”, but I’m sorry, the system cannot be built in the United States. The United States engages in biochemical experiments, but does not aim at biochemical experiments. The U.S. states that it will alert in time when it finds danger, but what is the use of such alert? It may be for the United States to block South Korea in time and prevent the virus from spreading to the United States. The United States says that the purpose of developing chemical weapons is to defend against biological and chemical threats, but the biggest threat in the world is the United States. The United States should still find a way to defend itself.

Even more frightening is that in the surrounding area of ​​the US military laboratory, there have been outbreaks of uncommon local diseases many times. According to a 2019 report by the U.S. Audit Office, in the past 10 years, there have been 400 accidents in U.S. biosafety tertiary laboratories. Although the victims of these accidents are mainly confined to the staff in contact, the number of accidents Leakage, the harm will be to all mankind.

Article HERE

Dog’s Reaction After Seeing The Owner Who’s Abandoned Her Years Later

So many people are without compassion and humanity. The owner couldn’t even pet her when she was jumping in happiness seeing him. How humans could be so calloused and cruel like this?  It’s so painful seeing animals waiting for their owners who abandoned them yet still wagging their tails upon seeing them. These people don’t deserve these kind of pure love from these animals. It’s so sad.

My heart broke when I saw her jumping around her owner’s legs and he completely ignored her. It broke my heart and she walked back to that abandoned old house and looked over her shoulder to see if he was following her and I cried when I saw her hiding in the dry grass looking so frightened and lonely. How could anyone do that to such a sweet loving animal as her. Extremely heartbreaking….but so glad she was adopted.

Hope she has a wonderful life now.

A name?

When Jason Sadler’s mom told him his stepfather was filing for divorce, Sadler responded to the news with a joke. Sadler told his mom he’d just have to sell off his last name to avoid being stuck with the family name of a third divorced dad.

That joke became reality half a year later when Jason Sadler created a website called buymylastname.com. Sadler offered to change his last name to an advertising billboard for any company willing to pay for the privilege. What would happen if Nike wanted to change Jason’s name to Jason JustDoIt? Jason would just do it indeed, as long as the dubbing was for the highest price offered.

Within 24 hours of the auction opening, his name’s selling price skyrocketed to thirty thousand dollars. Forty days later, Jason was paid forty-five thousand dollars to legally become Jason Headsetsdotcom.

While “Mr. Headsetsdotcom” may be a memorable title, Jason decided he would not settle on that last name either. Headsetsdotcom did not go back to calling himself Jason Sadler. Instead, he auctioned off his last name again, and for fifty-thousand dollars Jason was now Jason Sufrapp.

What is in a name? Almost one hundred thousand dollars, apparently.

The United States- the Pacific bully

Jun 24, 2022

The US dominates the Pacific Islands to an extent China can never hope to achieve. With Australia’s support, the US is now engaged in an arms build-up in its Pacific territories and de-facto colonies in a little known boost to its containment of China.

The US has three self-governing territories in the Pacific: Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. Guam hosts some of the US’s most important bases the world. After a large scale military expansion on one of the main islands in the Northern Marianas, Tinian is expected to rival Guam in importance in coming years.

The US also has Compacts of Free Association with three countries covering thousands of islands in the Pacific – the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands. The compacts are a de-facto form of colonialism which gives the US exclusive military access to these countries’ land and maritime surrounds in return for defence guarantees and financial assistance.

The Federated States of Micronesia has a population of around 100,000. It has a land area of 702  square km on 607 islands amid 2,600,000 square km of ocean. The US will build a new base there. The residents are concerned about the impact of the base as their islands are often tiny and the landscape important to their identity. The US is also establishing a new military base on Palau, which has 340 islands and a total population of just over 18,000. The Marshall Islands landmass is 181 square km amid 466,000 square km of ocean. Although the Kwajalein atoll is only 15 square km, it is exclusively a military base with an extraordinary array of US activities; including a key role in US testing interceptors aimed ballistic missiles.

The Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi recently visited seven South Pacific countries and signed various agreements in some, including the provision of infrastructure and police training , but he failed to get support for a 10-country trade agreement. He did not seek permission to build a navy base in the Solomon Island or anywhere else. Nevertheless, some saw the visit as an act of Chinese aggression. It is an odd view of aggression compared to the damage done by US, British and French testing of thermonuclear (also called hydrogen) bombs on Pacific islands, or when Australia helped invade Iraq.

The US conducted 105 nuclear tests in the Pacific, mainly in the Marshall islands, between 1946 and 1962, as part oftits program to develop thermonuclear bombs. Operational weapons were sometimes tested, including a submarine-launched war head. One test in 1952 completely vaporised the island of Eluglab. In 1954, a thermonuclear bomb tested on Bikini atoll exploded with force of 15 megatons – over 1,000 times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The radioactive cloud engulfed a Japanese fishing boat about 80 miles away in a white powder that poisoned the crew. One died from the exposure seven months later and 15 more in following years.

The radioactivity affected the drinking water and food. Children played in the ash-like powder. Some ate it. Marshall Islanders over a wide area were subject to abnormal radiological doses. In 2005, the US National Cancer Institute reported that the risk of contracting cancer for those exposed to the fallout was over one in three.

Nevertheless, in 1946, a US Navy Commodore had asked 167 people living on Bikini atoll to re-locate so their home could be used use “for the good of mankind”. They were resettled in 1969, but had to be evacuated again after high radiation levels were detected.

There has been some increase in the pathetically low initial compensation. But it is hard to compensate for the environmental damage and loss of cultural heritage, traditional customs and skills. In 2014, the Marshall Islands attempted to sue the US and eight other nuclear armed nations, for failing to move towards nuclear disarmament as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. A US Court dismissed the suit in 2017.

Britain tested 40 thermonuclear bombs on an islands in the Kiribati group between 1957 and 1962. Troops from Britain , Fiji (then a British colony), and New Zealand worked on the tests. Many were harmed by radiation and other causes. As usual, the locals were treated badly and their water and lands polluted.

France conducted 41 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1966 and 1974 in French Polynesia. It then conducted 140 underground, primarily of thermonuclear bombs, until 1996. One of the islands used was subject to cracking. In an act of state terrorism, French secret service frogman killed a photographer when they bombed a Green Peace protest ship in Auckland harbour on its way to the French nuclear testing area.

Labor’s defence minister, Richard Marles now refers to France as a Pacific county, despite the fact that it is a European country with a tenuous justification for holding onto its colonial possessions in the Pacific – New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Labor used to oppose colonialism. Now it seems it’s good if the colonial power opposes China.

The South Pacific Forum comprises 18 members: Australia, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, French Polynesia, Kiribati, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Republic of Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. Not all are normally considered to be in the South Pacific. The inclusion of three countries with Compacts of Free Association with the US and two French possessions basically guarantees they will vote for what the US or France wants.

However, the legacy of the contemptuous disregard for the indigenous residents during massive hydrogen bomb tests ensures that  nuclear issues, including the passage of nuclear submarines, remain sensitive.

At the time of the negotiation of the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty in 1985 Paul Malone wrote that it was for a “partial nuclear free zone”, as it did not prohibit the “passage of nuclear-armed ships or aircraft through the region”. Malone reported that some Pacific Island countries wanted to be Treaty to prohibit access to nuclear-armed warships. The then Prime Minister Bob Hawke insisted on that omission which reflected the wishes of the US. However, nuclear issues have been revived by the creation of the 2021AUKUS pact in which Australia is committed to buying nuclear powered submarines.

A journalist and researcher based in the Pacific, Nic Maclellan says, “Any hope that Australia’s island neighbours will welcome further nuclearisation of the region is folly. Within days of the UKUS announcement, statements from Pacific leaders, community elders and media organisations highlighted the persistence of the deep antinuclear sentiment.

The general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, Reverend James Bhagwa tweeted

“Shame Australia, Shame.” The Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare told the UN General Assembly his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free . . . We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

The Kiribati President Taneti Maamau told the ABC, “Our people are victims of nuclear testing. We still have trauma. With anything to do with nuclear, we thought it would be a courtesy to discuss it with your neighbours”. He said he was especially concerned about Australia developing nuclear powered submarines which he said “puts the region at risk”

Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama tweeted that his father was among the Fijian soldiers the British sent to help with their nuclear bomb tests. He said, “To honour the sacrifice of all those who have suffered due to these weapons, Fiji will never stop working towards a global nuclear ban.”

The New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern repeated that nuclear submarines “can’t come into our internal waters”. New Zealand and nine South Pacific Forum countries have ratified the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Australia hasn’t. The Samoa Observer wrote, “It is a relief seeing Prime Minister Ardern continuing to maintain the tradition of her predecessors by promoting a nuclear-free Pacific; probably she is the only true friend of the Pacific Islands.”

Contemporary Art Paintings By Stanislav Plutenko

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The artist Stanislav Plutenko plays on colour contrasts, his painting is very vigorous, illustrative and imbued through by sarcasm on the reality.

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In spite of the fact that the characters of his pictures are fattened and absolutely earthly ones, they are always astir – running, fluttering and flying somewhere. Having awkward bodies and unprepossessing faces they feel themselves angels and we are sympathetic towards them with their naivete.

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With an identical acuteness he presents images of the people and visual psychological surroundings. In each genre stage with elements of grotesque style we can find the small history of life with symbolical underlying theme. His pictures stimulate in the spectators the scale of feelings, down to the protest, but not the indifference.

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“Save My Baby Who Fell Into A 10m-long Pipe” Mom Cat Cries Out For Help

Be the Rufus! Help and save the poor trapped kitten!

Summer Preview: Rolling Blackouts, Higher Gas Prices, Natural Gas Rationing In Europe And A Historic Diesel Crisis

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Almost everyone has heard about the rapidly growing global energy crisis by now, but most people assume that this crisis will eventually go away because they think that authorities have everything under control.  Unfortunately, that is not true at all.  This crisis has taken our leaders by surprise, and now many of them have shifted into panic mode because they realize that there will be no easy fixes.  Decades of neglect and foolish decisions have brought us to the precipice of a nightmare, and many of us are going to be absolutely astonished by some of the things that happen in the months ahead.

Here in the United States, we have neglected to properly invest in our power grids for a very long time, and now they are at a breaking point.

We are being warned that there could be widespread “rolling blackouts” this summer, and the situation is particularly dire in Midwest states such as Michigan

The Lansing Board of Water and Light, or BWL, warned in a press release on Tuesday that the company is preparing for potential ‘rolling black-outs’ this summer.

The Mid-Continent Independent System Operator, or MISO, is Michigan’s power grid regulator. MISO will have to ‘load-shed’ if they see expected energy shortages during peak usage times due to hot weather. Load-shedding is purposefully shutting down electric power in some areas of a power-distribution system to prevent the entire system from failing when it is strained by high demand.

Meanwhile, the price of gasoline is likely to continue to go up.

For quite some time, the amount of oil that is being produced around the world each day has been lower than the amount of oil that is being used around the world each day, and as a result supplies have been getting tighter and tighter

Fast forward to today, and where are we? Intrinsic demand is thought to be around 103 million barrels a day now, owing to 1% per year global population growth, plus increased wealth–and demand should keep growing at roughly that pace. But supplies aren’t nearly keeping up. We’re currently producing around 100.6 million barrels (reflecting the loss of about a million barrels from Russia), and the resulting spike in prices is already constraining demand to around 101 million barrels, according to Majcher.

When demand is greater than supply, either prices go up or eventually you have shortages.

And sometimes both things happen.

Bank of America is telling us that oil inventories have reached a “dangerously low point”, and until that changes prices are likely to continue to rise…

The result is a market that for the second straight year is under-supplied, and drawing down inventories as a result–on top of the drawdown in strategic reserves approved by political leaders to try and lower prices. Bank of America is already warning that global oil inventories have fallen to a “dangerously low point,” with certain gasoline and diesel supplies in particular at “precarious levels” as we head into peak U.S. driving season. U.S. oil inventories are already 14% below their five-year average, BofA notes, while distillates (like diesel) are 22% below.

I wish that I could tell you that there is hope that things will turn around eventually.

But at this point the CEO of Exxon is actually warning us to expect “up to five years of turbulent oil markets”

Consumers must be prepared to endure up to five years of turbulent oil markets, the head of ExxonMobil said Tuesday, citing under-investment and the coronavirus pandemic.

Energy markets have been roiled by the Ukraine war as Russia has reduced some exports and faced sanctions while Europe has announced plans to wean itself off dependency on Russian fossil fuels in coming years.

If you think that things are bad now, just wait until you see what happens after a major war erupts in the Middle East.

Then things will really start getting crazy.

Speaking of war, over in Europe a looming natural gas shortage due to the war in Ukraine is likely to cause immense economic problems in the months ahead.

Now that Russia has significantly reduced the flow of natural gas to Germany, it looks like the Germans will soon be forced to ration it, and the Wall Street Journal is telling us that authorities expect “a gas shortage by December”…

The German government moved closer to rationing natural gas on Thursday after Russia cut deliveries to the country last week in an escalation of the economic war triggered by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Berlin triggered the second of its three-step plan to deal with gas shortages after the Kremlin-controlled energy giant Gazprom, the country’s biggest gas exporter, throttled delivery via the Nordstream pipeline by around 60% last week. Germany’s gas reserves are at 58% capacity, and the government now expects a gas shortage by December if supplies don’t pick up, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said.

It would be difficult for me to overstate the seriousness of this problem.  Energy prices have already gone completely nuts in Europe, and one German official is actually comparing this crisis to the collapse of Lehman Brothers

With energy suppliers piling up losses by being forced to cover volumes at high prices, there’s a danger of a spillover effect for local utilities and their customers, including consumers and businesses, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said Thursday after raising the country’s gas risk level to the second-highest “alarm” phase.

“If this minus gets so big that they can’t carry it anymore, the whole market is in danger of collapsing at some point,” Habeck said at a news conference in Berlin, “so a Lehman effect in the energy system.”

Needless to say, it isn’t just Germany that is being affected

The crisis has spilled far beyond Germany, with 12 European Union member states affected and 10 issuing an early warning under gas security regulation, Frans Timmermans, the European Union’s climate chief, said in a speech to the European Parliament.

“The risk of a full gas disruption is now more real than ever before,” he said. “All this is part of Russia’s strategy to undermine our unity.”

If the war in Ukraine could be brought to a peaceful resolution, that would greatly help matters.

But we all know that isn’t going to happen any time soon.

On top of everything else, global supplies of diesel fuel get squeezed a little bit more with each passing day.  The price of diesel fuel is 75 percent higher than it was a year ago, and here in the United States we have been warned that the Northeast “is quietly running out of diesel”

The upward pressure on diesel and jet fuel prices in particular is getting attention in the White House, Amrita Sen of Energy Aspects told Squawk Box yesterday. Diesel prices are up a whopping 75% from a year ago, and the spread between diesel and gasoline prices has also widened considerably. The high cost is creating huge strains on truckers and the supply chain; the Northeast “is quietly running out of diesel,” FreightWaves warned two weeks ago.

Even though there could be a historic supply crunch, we won’t completely run out of diesel fuel.

However, as I detailed in an article that has gone extremely viral, we are potentially facing really severe shortages of both diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil if solutions cannot be found.

Urea is required to produce diesel exhaust fluid, and the U.S. doesn’t produce enough.  We are normally one of the largest importers of urea in the entire world, and Russia and China are two of the largest exporters.  Our leaders have decided that we don’t want urea from Russia, and China has restricted exports.

So that puts us in a really tough position.  If you have a diesel vehicle, I would highly recommend stocking up on diesel exhaust fluid while you still can.

As for diesel engine oil, there are several key additives that are in short supply right now due to major problems at several manufacturers.  An article that Mike Adams just posted goes into the details.  This is a very serious situation that is not going to be resolved any time in the near future.

The bottom line is that supplies of diesel fuel are going to get very tight, and there may be times when diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil are not available at all.

All three are required in order for diesel vehicles to operate, and as I explained yesterday, the U.S. economy runs on diesel.

If we were suddenly unable to use our diesel vehicles, all of our supply chains would collapse and we would no longer have a functioning economy.

So hopefully our leaders are working really hard to find some solutions.

Because it looks like this summer could be quite difficult, and the outlook for the months beyond is even less promising.

Millions to Manslaughter

Ibi Roncaioli was Hungarian by birth but moved to Canada, where she married a successful gynecologist. She was not short of money but bought a ticket for a lotto game with a friend. In 1991, the two won $10 million and split the money.

Roncaioli started spending her winnings without telling her husband, but she didn’t spend much of it on herself. Mainly, the money went to her three sons. One of these was the son that she had had with her husband, one from before she married, and the third was a child that even her husband of thirty years knew nothing about.

Most people who knew the Roncaiolis described them as a happy, devoted older couple. However, in 2003, Ibi died. The authorities assumed that she had died from natural causes. Still, after careful examination, they found a toxic level of painkillers and alcohol in her body, and there were needle marks on her legs and feet.

The court found her husband guilty of manslaughter. The couple’s net worth was just $300,000 despite Ibi’s winnings and her husband’s considerable earnings. Her 72-year-old husband was sentenced to seven years.

Stranded Cat Cries In Despair As Her Last Canned Food Drops Down

How to rescue this stranded little kitty?

Too Much of a Good Thing

Gerald Muswagon was not a well-educated man but was friendly and well-liked by his family and friends. Yet, he had had brushes with the law in his native Canada since 1981.

In 1998, he bought a two-dollar lottery ticket that won him $10 million. He spent a lot of it on luxuries and gifts but did try to invest in his own lumber business. Unfortunately, his business lost money because of low sales. Muswagon was surrounded by hangers-on who were only interested in his money and never got the guidance that he needed about how to handle such a large sum.

He continued to have problems with the police, and things got worse when his wife died suddenly in 2002. Muswagon hanged himself in his parent’s garage.

“FORCE MAJEURE” DECLARED – Oil For Diesel Engines Gone in 8 Weeks

A potentially catastrophic situation is emerging that threatens to wipe out the entire supply of diesel engine oil across the United States, leaving the country with no diesel engine oil until 2023.

Chemical manufacturers of diesel engine oil additives have declared “force majeure” ( a force they cannot control)  and have ceased supply operations to the diesel engine oil manufacturers. Those manufacturers combine base oils with “additive packages” to create diesel engine oil.

(This story is referring to the OIL that goes inside a diesel engine, and NOT Diesel “fuel.”)
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Antioxidants, anti-corrosion agents, dispersing additives, antirust mechanisms, friction modifiers, EP additives, antifoaming agents, antioxidants, are all chemicals that must be added to the oil for diesel engines so they can operate.  Without these additives, diesel engine oil manufacturers cannot produce the final oil products that lubricate diesel engines.

Because key manufacturers of these additives have ceased operations, diesel engine oil can apparently no longer be produced in the USA, at least not until these necessary chemicals are restored to full supply, which may not be until the year 2023.

If trucks have to shut down because their engine oil is exhausted, ALL COMMERCE will cease, because everything in the country, except electricity and natural gas, MUST – at some point – be transported by truck.    No trucks means no products.   No products means no commerce.

Full, complete, collapse.

The TRUTH is coming out

Great discussion. Tying together BRICS, inflation, and the American leadership.

To the Bitter End

John Werner Kluge (1914–2010) was a successful businessman who became a television mogul. At one time, he was the richest person in the United States. A hard-working philanthropist, he also found time to indulge in his hobby of getting married. He married four times, and Patricia was the third of his wives.

When the couple divorced in 1990, Patricia kept the Albemarle estate near Charlottesville, Virginia. The couple had built a 45-room mansion on the property that hosted parties for the rich and famous. With her new husband, Patricia Kluge opened the Kluge Estate Winery in 1999. This was an excellent place for growing vines, and their ambition was to create a world-renowned winery that would produce some of the finest vintages in the world. To an extent, they succeeded.

However, they had enough money to launch the project and were rich by most people’s standards, but their plans called for much more money than they had available. Patricia took out $65 million in loans but found that she was over-extended. When the economy crashed in 2008, she put the estate up for sale. Donald Trump eventually bought it for a fraction of the asking price. It is now known as the Trump Winery.

It is possible to be rich but not quite rich enough. This is the trap that Patricia fell into.

Kitten Trapped Inside A Pillar Wishes To Hold Mom’s Hand Before She Dies

Save the little kitten!

Do you want more?

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Americans remain misinformed. They think China will collapse when the United States Empire stops buying their products

Americans remain misinformed. They think China will collapse when the United States Empire stops buying their products. 

In truth, only 3% of China's GDP is derived from exports to the USA. 

Exports worldwide only make up 18.5% of China's GDP.

In this light, it seems to me that Xi JP has the patience of a saint. If I were in his shoes, would just label all my products as having origins in Xinjiang. Then sit back and watch the riots happen when Americans can't afford not just their gasoline in their cars, but also that toaster in Walmart when they finally manage to walk there.

It would be a Russian and Chinese one-two punch for the obnoxious teenage bully.

-littlereddot

Let’s plow on though this most crazy period of time. I do hope that you enjoy my collection of “news” insanity, and various contextual snippets. Have fun.

The NGO “Hong Kong Watch” has FINALLY admitted to being funded by UK government

It took them bloody long enough.

For decades they were critical of the Hong Kong government, and were active in “uncovering crimes and human rights abuses” in China. Well, after a few of their members were decloaked as CIA assets, participants and organizers of the “pro-democracy” movements, rounded up and sent into prison, the “dust has settled”. And now the UK government admits that they were behind the organization that was instrumental in the “color revolution(s)” in Hong Kong.

Video HERE

Ukraine, Taiwan – Battle for US Hegemony Continues

A pretty good video.

Alexander Selkirk

Alexander Selkirk is one of history’s most famous missing persons, but there’s a good chance you don’t recognize his name. That’s because his story became famous only after it was fictionalized and he was rebranded “Robinson Crusoe.”

According to Smithsonian, Selkirk was really only sort-of missing. There were plenty of people who knew where he was, notably the 21-year-old ship captain who deliberately stranded him on an island 418 miles off the coast of Chile. At first, Selkirk was all, “Cool, just leave me here. I don’t like you and I don’t want to be on your leaky ship.” (Note: not an actual historical quote). When Selkirk realized no one else was going to join him on his 3-hour tour, though, he begged the captain to reconsider. And because 21-year-olds who have too much responsibility aren’t exactly known for their empathy, the captain rather predictably refused to take him back.

The ship sailed away and Selkirk was left to fend for himself for four years and four months. Fortunately, the island was populated by feral animals, so he survived on a well-balanced diet of seafood, goats, watercress, and turnips. When he was finally picked up by a passing ship, his rescuers noted that he was so wild in appearance and mannerisms that he seemed to have “forgot his language for want of use, we could scarce understand him, for he seem’d to speak his words by halves.”

Today’s propaganda of the day…

It’s from UK “Intelligence experts”. Found on Drudge.

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Yuppur. More examples of Russia “losing big” in Ukraine.

Favorite Potato Salad

Every home cook should have one go-to classic potato salad recipe on hand. It’s the perfect dish to bring to summer picnics, serve at grill-outs and take along to potluck suppers. But don’t just limit this simple potato salad to warm-weather months—this dish can be served year-round. The next time someone samples your delicious side dish and asks you how to make potato salad, just hand them this easy potato salad recipe.

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Five possible strikes on Lithuania as a response to the blockade of Kaliningrad

Is Russia being dragged into a war with NATO?

From HERE

Lithuania has decided to stop the transit of certain types of goods from the EU sanctions list by rail from June 18. Transit stopped. Now politicians and political scientists are busy thinking about how Moscow can respond to the transport blockade of one of the subjects of the Russian Federation – the Kaliningrad region. And if earlier the talk about the war with NATO was of an abstract nature within the framework of the discussion of an unlikely prospect, then Lithuania, by its actions, brought this probability closer.

If cargo transit is not restored, Russia reserves the right to take action to protect its national interests, Maria Zakharova said.

Russian Chargé d’Affaires in Lithuania Sergey Ryabokon said on the Russia-24 TV channel :

“When the sanctions actions of the European Union began, they found the most fertile ground here in Lithuania. And Lithuania began to offer itself what could be done to inflict maximum damage on us .

Ryabokon noted that this measure was developed by the European Union a month and a half ago, but it was not specified, and now Lithuania has moved forward. Lithuanian politicians have been saying for thirty years that they have a lever of pressure on Russia – transit to Kaliningrad. And on the night of June 17-18, this lever was activated. Among other things, the import of fertilizers, the need for which is very high, is prohibited.

Commenting on the situation, the State Duma noted that the transport blockade could give serious grounds for the start of hostilities, but the Russian Federation would not use them. Another way of solving the problem is proposed – to speed up the procedure for canceling the decision of Lithuania to secede from the USSR and cease its existence as a subject of international law. It is assumed that in this case, the NATO protection regime will cease to operate on the territory of Lithuania.

Blocking transit to the Russian region, Vilnius did not calculate the consequences. How Russia might respond, Alexander Nosovich, a political scientist based in Kaliningrad , explained :

withdrawal of recognition of Lithuanian independence. The idea to recognize as illegitimate the secession of the Baltic republics from the USSR has been in the air since September 5, 1991, when this illegal secession took place;

withdrawal from the agreements with the European Union on Lithuania. Russia recognized the borders of Lithuania in exchange for guarantees for the transit of Russian citizens and goods from Kaliningrad and to Kaliningrad. Thanks to this recognition, Lithuania was able to join the EU and NATO.

“I would like to remind you that an integral part of the package of joint EU-RF-Lithuania decisions of 2002-2003 on guaranteed transit of Russian goods and, of course, citizens of the Russian Federation to/from the Kaliningrad region was a counter obligation of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation to ratify the State Border Treaty with the Republic of Lithuania. I remember this very well, because then I headed the State Duma Committee on International Affairs and was the special representative of the President of Russia at these negotiations , ”

writes the head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin. –

If Brussels and Vilnius initiatively and treacherously destroy the package of agreements they signed on the Kaliningrad transit, which entered into force on July 1, 2003, then the EU must understand the consequences of their suicidal decision for the legitimacy of their own eastern border .

The measures are as follows:

Russia’s demand to return Klaipeda. The current borders of Lithuania were established by the Soviet Union, and they have nothing to do with the Republic of Lithuania, which declares itself the legal successor of pre-Soviet Lithuania and rejects the Lithuanian SSR as a “Soviet occupation”. In fact, the only official successor of the USSR is the Russian Federation. This means that Moscow has the right to reconsider the ownership of the territories annexed to Lithuania during the Soviet period, in particular the ownership of the Klaipeda region;

disconnection of Lithuania from the BRELL energy system (an energy ring that unites Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). This would be Moscow’s most painful economic response to Vilnius’ hostile move. So far, Lithuania is strenuously pretending that it does not need to be connected to BRELL, but it is not known how it will feel after a real shutdown and a rise in the price of everything from goods to fuel;

creation of the Suwalki corridor. This is a land passage between Lithuania and Poland, which could connect the territory of Belarus with the Kaliningrad region of Russia.

“As for gas, we have the Marshal Vasilevsky LNG terminal, which has already been tested in case Lithuania cuts off gas pipeline gas ,” says Nosovich. - Regarding transit, I talked with high officials of our region and representatives of the center, and they assure that the Russian civilian fleet in the Baltic Sea is quite enough to supply all the volumes of goods that Lithuania can block us by rail. The question is how quickly we can do it all. But I am sure that we will not have interruptions in supplies, empty shelves in stores . ”

According to the governor of the region Anton Alikhanov, the ferries of the Kaliningrad region will cope with the new cargo. The transportation of oil products to the Kaliningrad region through Lithuania continues until August 10:

“According to our preliminary estimates - we have not yet completed the analysis  - this is from 40% to 50% of the cargo that was transported between the Kaliningrad region and other regions of the Russian Federation. These are cargoes, including building materials, cement, metals. A range of other materials important for construction and manufacturing. Finished products that were exported from our territory. This will require us to urgently put new ships on the Ust-Luga-Baltiysk line , ”

explained the head of the region.

State Duma deputy Konstantin Zatulin suggested that with all these difficulties – violation of agreements, disregard for diplomatic norms, bombing of peaceful quarters of Donetsk and oil platforms – Russia is being tested and, possibly, provoked to open a second front in the Baltics, that is, they are being drawn into a war with NATO.

Cynthia Ann Parker

By the early to mid-1800s, European occupation was taking a toll on native villages. As their populations fell, some indigenous people turned to kidnapping as a way to increase their numbers. Sometimes, kidnapped white children were adopted by indigenous families who had lost their own children to diseases like cholera or smallpox (via HistoryNet). One of these children was Cynthia Ann Parker, who was abducted from her family farm in Texas when she was just nine years old (via Humanities Texas).

Parker was missing for 24 years, though there were occasional sightings of her living among the Comanche. She eventually married and had three children, and probably would have stayed with the Comanche until her death, except some Texas Rangers decided to “rescue” her and her infant daughter. Her reunion with her white family was not a happy one, and Parker never adjusted to life in the white settlements. Despite being a grown woman capable of making her own choices, she was also not permitted to return to the Comanche and her two sons, one of whom — Quanah Parker — became one of the most influential Comanche leaders in history.

There are some conflicting accounts about her eventual death sometime between 1864 and 1871. According to Texas Monthly, she is said to have starved herself to death.

A little common sense about proxy war

The question is: why does one person initiate confrontation with another person in an aggressive way?

Isn’t it obvious? They think that they are going to win.

Or they think that they will gain some advantage by it, and still survive. (I am not talking about defending yourself from real or imagined threats.)

But you say; there are millions of examples where apparently weaker entities challenge an obviously stronger adversary. Are they just foolhardy to take on this risk? No, they still think that they are going to win, or gain some advantage. How so? Because they have “an uncle” at their back. I’ll just get Uncle to come in and save me. Or maybe Uncle wants to hobble that other entity, and they hired me to do it for them, (with certain guarantees for me of course).

In the modern day of international relations, this is called the “Proxy War”. It is the most insidious activity on the planet, to hire different factions of poor people to kill each other. It is a kind of Cock-Fighting, and the sideline bets are enormous. For as long as I can remember, America is the unavowed champion at this game. They have these magic words “Plausible Deniability”, which they think is a garment that covers their naked aggression. They even brag about how good they are at it. I find it a dead give-away, and not plausible at all.

Well, America has at least 800 military bases around the world, so there are at least 800 of these chickens (at various levels of readiness for cock fighting), those that are hosting these bases. Of course, they are paid to do this, but who is getting paid? Dictators are enriched, or Vassal type leaders, Criminal regimes and Gangster billionaires. Does any advantage filter down to the populations? Is threatening a bigger power in their interest in any way?

Let’s look at the Ukraine, where average people live on $10/day, the below average people, (you can calculate that). That’s right, the GDP/capita is $3,500/year. Surely now it will be half of that, if not less.

Ukraine does have an Uncle, actually many of them. They gave guarantees too, but what was Ukraine’s obligation with those guarantees? They had to win some battles; then everything could progress as planned. But it seems it is not happening that way, and the guarantees are getting thinner and thinner.

I don’t have to make any claims about it, since it is moving so fast that we’ll all know very soon.

So, what is the situation with their transaction at this time? Ukraine has managed the destruction of its infrastructure, Russia has started softly on some things. Can it be rebuilt, even in a generation? For one Trillion dollars? And for how many generations will the debts have to be paid off? They are also combining the death of one generation of men, it may soon arrive to that level of carnage if they don’t put on the brakes soon. To obtain such a result took 30 years of building the whole country on a foundation of HATE.

It is based on the philosophy of Dmytro Dontsov, 1883 – 1973, author of the dogma behind Stepan Bandera. His two INITIAL postulates, without which “Ukrainian integral nationalism” is impossible, are namely the cultural opposition to “Moscow” and the social opposition to “socialism”. He built a philosophy where everything nationalistic is against Russia and against Jews. He has 24 books and they can be downloaded free from web sources. But they are all in Ukrainian, so I didn’t pursue it. Maybe Yandex could translate them.

The reading of his works is mandatory for all nationalist Ukrainian soldiers, particularly for those of the Azov regiment. He is the guiding intellectual behind the Ukrainian regime and he’s been one of the best-selling authors in Ukraine these recent years.

What the Ukraine must be hoping for is that their leaders would all become billionaires. Then after the ethnic cleansing of the Russian population, they would have all the mines, energy, minerals, farmland and industry of the Donbas, to divide among themselves. If they could get the Crimea, they would get an enormous rent from NATO for the Sevastopol Naval Base.

Would they operate all these assets, or have land reform to include the common people? Highly unlikely, they would sell these assets on the cheap to westerners and to Monsanto, to further make the Ukrainian billionaires into multi-billionaires.

The main product that they WOULD produce is terrorism and insurgency, which they would deliver across the Russian border. It’s exactly the same job Stepan Bandera was hired for 70 years ago by MI6 and the CIA. (Not a conspiracy theory, but it is proudly stated in the reports of MI5 and MI6, the British handlers of Bandera.)

And NATO bases would be right next to them to supply and train the chickens.

1965 Buick Riviera Gran Sport

1965 Buick Riviera Gran Sport
1965 Buick Riviera Gran Sport

China says it’s ready to co-operate with Australia in the Pacific

Wang told Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mataafa that China was not seeking “exclusive rights” to help develop the area.

“China is willing to enhance communication with all countries that care about Pacific Island Countries, especially Australia and New Zealand, and give full play to respective strengths to carry out more trilateral co-operation on the basis of respecting Pacific Island Countries’ wishes,” he said.

Article HERE
China says it is willing to co-operate with Australia in the Pacific, signalling a rhetorical and diplomatic shift following the election of the Labor government.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday failed to get consensus from 10 Pacific nations to sign up for Beijing’s “Common Development Vision,” a regional security deal in exchange for trade and economic co-operation that sparked fears of China’s economic and military ambitions in Washington and Canberra. But at least half-a-dozen countries including Samoa, Kiribati and Niue have signed up for enhanced co-operation in Beijing’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road infrastructure investment program.

Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, who hosted Wang for the Pacific foreign ministers meeting in Suva, said the region had to work together to face existential threats before signing up for any major multilateral deals.

“We put consensus first,” said Bainimarama. “Geopolitical point scoring means less than little to anyone whose community is slipping beneath the rising seas, whose job has been lost to a pandemic.”

The leak of China’s proposal to Reuters and a warning by David Panuelo, the President of the Federated States of Micronesia that it would shift the region “into Beijing’s orbit” put hopes of a deal being signed on Monday in peril. The region, which has found itself in the middle of a geopolitical contest between the United States, Australia and China, puts a high value on unity in its negotiations through the Pacific Islands Forum. Instead, Wang said that China would now pursue a policy position paper in the region as it looks to build multinational support for its vision of “common development, sovereignty and territorial integrity

“Some have been questioning ‘why China has been so active in supporting Pacific countries’?” said Wang, who did not take any questions from reporters at the press conference.

“China is a major developing country, and we do this with a great sense of responsibility.”

Wang presented a message from President Xi Jinping stating China was willing to work with Pacific Island nations to build a “community with a shared future” – highlighting Beijing’s growing diplomatic investment in the region after signing a landmark security and trade deal with Solomon Islands in April.

In his first direct mention of Australia during his 10-day, eight-country tour, Wang told Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mataafa that China was not seeking “exclusive rights” to help develop the area.

“China is willing to enhance communication with all countries that care about Pacific Island Countries, especially Australia and New Zealand, and give full play to respective strengths to carry out more trilateral co-operation on the basis of respecting Pacific Island Countries’ wishes,” he said.

Wang’s comments followed a diplomatic blitz by Foreign Minister Penny Wong last week. Wong said it was up to individual nations to make sovereign decisions about their future but warned them that a region-wide deal with Beijing could sacrifice their independence, lead to unsustainable debt levels and endanger the Pacific’s security. The countries visited by Wang sit on a key strategic route between the United States, Australia and Asia and less than 2000 kilometres off the coast of Queensland that could block supply lines in the event of a conflict.

Wang failed to get consensus on the Pacific-mega deal but halfway through his 10-day tour has signed dozens of bilateral agreements including police training in Samoa, COVID-19 economic recovery plans with Fiji, radio and television co-operation with Niue and climate change and marine protection programs with Kiribati

Beijing’s top diplomat has positioned China in meetings with his Pacific counterparts as the leader of a growing group of developing countries that feel left out of the US-led international order that he argues is fuelled by Western geopolitical aims.

“Developing countries need to strengthen solidarity,” Wang said on Sunday.

“As the largest developing country, we have always stood by developing countries and stood firm for fairness and justice for small and medium-sized countries.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has yet to publicly respond to a message from Chinese Premier Li Keqiang congratulating him on his election. Beijing’s tone since the Labor victory on May 20 has been trending softer but $20 billion in trade sanctions on Australian exports remain in place and Albanese has maintained that Australia would not begin negotiations until trade restrictions were lifted.

Ukrainian soldiers take documents and things from the bodies of the dead, by which they can be identified

MOSCOW, June 22 - RIA Novosti. Ukrainian troops opposing the allied forces in the LPR have been instructed to depersonalize the bodies of servicemen - all documents are taken from them, making it more difficult to identify foreign mercenaries, Lieutenant Colonel of the People's Militia of the LPR Andrey Marochko said on Wednesday. 

"Instructions were given to Ukrainian servicemen to depersonalize the corpses of servicemen. They simply take away all identity documents so that they cannot be identified," Marochko said on the air of Rossiya 24, commenting on the issue of the origin of foreign mercenaries previously liquidated in the Gorsky area and Golden. 

He added that the identification of the destroyed mercenaries is now underway.
Article HERE

World War III

Most friends at this group may already know that I hold abnormal opinions. Here is my not very traditional view on World War III.

1. Volunteers will not cause a World War. If they do, then Russia is already fighting one.

2. People who are truly afraid of World War III are actually people who already own the world by virtue of their hege-money. If you have 100 billion dollars by which you can get whatever you want and do whatever you want with impunity, would you rather get into something that will turn your "wealth" and power into nothing and kill you and your family at the same time? If the powerless and enslaved people like us are afraid of World War III, then let us target the miscreants, not sing kumbaya and let the warmongers continue to murder, pillage, and rape with impunity. This is what the criminals want us to believe and how they want us to act. Never do what your enemy wants you to do. Why 99% are slaves of the 1%? Because 99% are craven and stupid, that's why.

3. Don't be afraid of bullies. They will threaten fire and brimstone, including suicidal world destruction. Don't believe in their lies and don't be cowed. Bullies are usually cowards. They love living because their lives are good. Know your target, learn his weakness, have an objective, make a plan, strengthen yourself, bide your time, and the bully will be defeated. 

4. I have many personal experiences with bullies. In grade five, I was the runt of the schoolyard wearing glasses. The school bully who had already beaten everyone up decided that he wanted to beat me up after school because I ignored him and he was running out of targets. Not only did he never lay a finger on me, but I was the only victim to have laid the bully flat on his back in front of all the other kids. It took me one and half years of planning and biding my time to get there. He never bullied anyone at school again. I have also stories of facing down the Chinese mafia, but maybe another time.

5. How do we stop war then? It's not by being peaceful and throwing flowers at the warmongers. If the target is the 1%, why should anyone threaten to kill the 99% who have nothing? The whole kabuki show of suicidal world destruction by nuclear war by the 1% who controls the nuclear weapons is a farce meant to keep the stupified 99% in a stupor. Know your target. The 1% is not hard to find, their wealth and properties are no secret, and their loved ones are usually going around town in expensive cars with chauffeurs and bodyguards. But the 99% are too busy working at soul-crushing jobs, rallying for minimum wage to pay for the wars, and voting for more lying miscreants to defend their freedom.

"Niemand ist hoffnungsloser versklavt als jene, die fälschlicherweise glauben, frei  zu sein." -- Goethe (None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free) Thanks to Frans for the more elegant German original.

PM

Another propaganda of the day…

It’s just too delicious. LOL!

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It’s going to be installed in kitchen appliances that are shipped to the United States!

‘Nothing Will Be As Before’

By Batiushka for the Saker Blog

Western Europe and North America are now in dire economic straits. Four EU leaders, from Germany, France, Italy and Romania, have just been to Kiev to plead with Zelensky to start negotiating again and make territorial concessions. The Western media did not much report on the fourth Romanian/German leader, Klaus Iohannis, and showed few photograph of him; possibly because the racists who work in the Western media despise Romania (https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=Romanian+Leader+In+Kiev&qpvt=romanian+leader+in+kiev&FORM=EWRE). What they all forgot to mention is that Russia has no need to negotiate and, given the way that it has been treated since 2014 (indeed, since 1991), it is not going to make concessions.

The EU leaders once more made the illusory promise that the Ukraine might soon become a candidate for EU membership (despite the Dutch veto), if it restarts negotiations. This old carrot dangled before the Ukrainian donkey is irrelevant. The EU has more than four countries and four leaders, whatever promise that the Ukraine may become an EU member in 20 years time. Long before that, there will be no Ukraine and probably no EU. The day after their visit, the Johnson clown went to Kiev too, though we do not know what he spoke of. Presumably, he just wanted to show that the UK is a ‘Great Power’ – like the EU?

It is all too late. Negotiations on the Donbass failed for eight years because the West forbade them. They failed again last March in Belarus and Istanbul, for the same reason. The West in its arrogance believed that it could crush Russia using its Ukrainian cannonfodder. This has been displayed for nearly four months now by the reports of State propaganda mouthpieces like CNN, the BBC etc. with their nonsense that President Putin is dying and that Russia is running out of fuel and ammunition! Wishful thinking all the time. Originally Russia just wanted to liberate the Donbass. However, pig-headedness in Kiev means that they will now be forced to take control of the whole country – and perhaps more, if aggression from outside the Ukraine continues. It was all so unnecessary…

The West cannot go on with its suicidal and illegal sanctions against Russia – or rather against itself. The lack of oil, gas, fertilisers and essential raw materials is biting. Inflation is taking off all over the West. In the UK a wave of strikes is threatened. The incredibly unpopular Johnson’s days are numbered. The only problem for Russia is that the rouble keeps rising. Despite interest rate cuts from 15% to 8.5%, the rouble is again at 56 to the dollar. Clearly, further Russian interest rate cuts are, forgive the pun, in the pipeline. Meanwhile, African and Asian leaders have told Zelensky to stop fighting. They want grain (https://news.mail.ru/politics/ 51814770/ ?frommail=1).

Of course, it is true that many of the West’s woes began well before this year, not least with the absurd and totalitarian ‘covid’ restrictions from 2020 on, which bankrupted many companies and led to it printing ever more money and to ever higher and unpayable debts. The West is desperate for the conflict in the Ukraine to end before the autumn cold sets in. Otherwise there are going to be popular revolts in Western countries, with scenes of looting on the streets.

Western arms, usually third-rate from stocks anyway, are making hardly any difference in the Ukraine. Most, together with munitions, get destroyed before they can be used. Much that has been promised cannot be used because it will take months to instruct Ukrainians on how to use them. The rate of attrition of the Kiev Army, up to 1,000 a day according to Kuleba, the Kiev Interior Minister, is simply unsustainable. Once the fortifications in the Donbass, built by Kiev and NATO over the last eight years, have been overwhelmed, there will be a clear run to Odessa, Transdnestria, Kharkov and Kiev or indeed anywhere that Russia wants. This could happen soon.

Yesterday, the Russian Ministry of Defence released figures on mercenaries (https://news.mail.ru/incident/51803470/?frommail=1). The picture is dismal for the Ukraine. Of some 6,000 mercenaries in the Ukraine from 64 different countries, some 2,000 have been killed and some 2,000 have fled. Perhaps they thought that they were going to fight in a Third World country, where the enemy just had Kalashnikovs and not world-beating hypersonic missiles? How long the remaining 2,000 or so will remain alive remains to be seen.

Poland supplied the greatest number of mercenaries, with 1,831. Presumably as with other countries like Canada (601 mercenaries), USA (530), Romania (504), Germany and France, the majority of these were actually Ukrainians who have lived outside the Ukraine for some years, rather than native people. In third place for mercenaries from Europe comes the UK with 422, of whom 102 have been killed and 98 have fled. According to General Konashenkov who released the figures, the number of mercenaries coming has stopped and indeed been reversed. It is too dangerous to stay and get killed in the Ukraine.

This leaves the two foolish British mercenaries, not killed in action with the 102 others, but taken prisoner. And also it leaves two captured US mercenaries. There is speculation that the British might plea for their release in exchange for Julian Assange. That would upset the Americans. On the other hand, the British mercenaries, Eslin and Pinner, have already been sentenced to death. If that sentenced is carried out, it is going to make Johnson even more unpopular than he already is. Perhaps that is why Johnson went to Kiev to plead.

Thus, the first or military stage is coming to an end and should be over later this summer. However, this is only the start. The New Ukraine has to be formed. Then there is the demilitarisation and denazification of the rest of Eastern Europe. And there is the economic war, declared by the West, to be finished. On 17June at the International Economic Forum in his native Saint Petersburg, President Putin said:

‘After the Cold War the USA declared itself to be the emissaries of God on Earth, without any responsibility, only with interests….Today’s changes in economics and in international politics are tectonic and revolutionary. The Western elites are in a state of delusion, clinging on to the shadow of the past and denying changing reality…Nothing will be as before…The EU has definitively lost its political sovereignty. The current situation in Europe will lead to an outburst of radicalism and in the probable future a change of elites’.

Here is the future.

’72 Mach 1 Mustang

’72 Mach 1 Mustang
’72 Mach 1 Mustang

Russia Overtakes Saudi Arabia As China’s Top Oil Supplier

Wednesday, Jun 22, 2022 – 09:00 AM

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

  • Chinese imports of Russian crude surged by 55 percent in May as the world’s biggest importer of oil took advantage of major discounts.
  • Russia has now overtaken Saudi Arabia as China’s top oil supplier.
  • While Russia is sending lots more crude to Asia, it is unlikely that the Asian market can absorb all 4 million barrels that were going to Europe.

China imported a record volume of Russian crude in May, with arrivals surging by 55 percent to nearly 2 million barrels per day (bpd). This has made Russia the top oil supplier to the world’s leading crude importer—putting it ahead of Saudi Arabia for the first time in a year and a half.

A record volume of cheap Russian oil, which sells at steep discounts to crude from other countries, made its way to Chinese refiners last month, according to figures from China’s General Administration of Customs cited by Reuters.

China imported 1.98 million bpd of Russian crude oil in May, up by 55 percent from May last year and up from 1.59 million bpd of Russian oil imported in April 2022, the data showed.

The high purchases of Russian oil outstripped supply from Saudi Arabia, Russia’s partner in the OPEC+ deal. Chinese imports of Saudi crude averaged 1.84 million bpd in May, up by 9 percent compared to May 2021, but down from 2.17 million bpd imported in April, according to the data cited by Reuters.

Thanks to the increased shipments of cheap crude to China, Russia became the top supplier to the world’s biggest oil importer for the first time in 19 months, per Reuters estimates.

Russia has been increasingly selling its crude to China and India after Western buyers shun Russian oil and the EU—Russia’s top oil customer before the war in Ukraine—prepares to launch a phased-out embargo on seaborne imports from Russia by the end of the year.

Russia is also estimated to have overtaken Saudi Arabia to become India’s second-largest supplier of crude oil in May. The average daily rate of Russian oil exports to India stood at 819,000 barrels last month, compared with 277,000 bpd in April.

Half of Russia’s crude is headed east to Asia. This compares to 75 percent of Russia’s oil exports which were being shipped to Europe earlier this year, Alexander Dyukov, chief executive of Gazprom Neft, said last week.

Still, analysts doubt that the Asian market can absorb all 4 million bpd of oil that Russia was sending to Europe before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

1967 Chevrolet Camaro RS LS3 6.2L V8

1967 Chevrolet Camaro RS LS3 6.2L V8
1967 Chevrolet Camaro RS LS3 6.2L V8

Russia’s ‘Satan 2’ missile changes little for U.S., scholars say

Summary;

Russia has successfully tests the RS-28 Sarmat. This is a very large, heavy-duty ICBM, that carries [1] large nuclear weapon payloads, [2] shoots them using hyper-velocity missiles, and [3] the collective West has no defense for.

The United States government says that this is of no concern. The US has nuclear weapons also.

“This truly unique weapon will strengthen the combat potential of our armed forces, reliably ensure Russia’s security in the face of external threats, and will provide food for thought to those who in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric try to threaten our country,” Putin said in televised remarks.

The RS-28 Sarmat, which NATO has dubbed “Satan 2,” is considered Russia’s most powerful ICBM: a super-heavy, thermonuclear-armed intercontinental-range ballistic missile.

The missile that was introduced during a 2018 Russian state-of-the-nation address was the “next generation” of weaponry that could breach “any missile defense” system, Putin claimed at the time.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Wednesday that the United States did not consider the weapon a threat to Washington or its allies.

The Sarmat was intended to replace the Soviet-designed Voevoda, which was designed in 1962 with the capability to carry three warheads. The Sarmat weighs 200 metric tons (220 tons) and has a longer range, allowing it to fly over the North or South poles and strike targets anywhere in the world, Putin said in 2018. He added that the Sarmat carries a larger number of more powerful nuclear warheads. The Pentagon minimized the features of the weapon and said that “the American people should rest assured that we are fully prepared.”

Russia initially planned to finish Sarmat trials in 2021 and begin deploying it to the army soon after, but several test launches, considered late-stage trials in arms development, were postponed until 2022, the state-run Tass news agency reported last year.

“Sarmat is the most powerful missile with the longest range of destruction of targets in the world, which will significantly increase the combat power of our country’s strategic nuclear forces,” the Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday, announcing a successful test launch from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region.

Putin praised the Sarmat engineers in his speech Wednesday for creating a purely “domestic” product. Rounds of economic sanctions imposed on Russia over the years, most recently for its invasion of Ukraine, have essentially barred Russia from importing any dual-purpose goods that could help advance its military complex and have left many key industries that rely heavily on imports, such as aviation, vulnerable to production and maintenance disruptions.

1966 Chevrolet Corvette 327ci

1966 Chevrolet Corvette 327ci
1966 Chevrolet Corvette 327ci

China defiant on Australian trade sanctions

China has defended its trade sanctions on $20 billion worth of Australian exports as “beyond reproach” in a rebuff to Anthony Albanese’s call for it to drop the tariffs as a precursor to repairing bilateral relations.
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Unfortunately, this “Australian leader” is not very good in math. He is simply unable to workout who has the upper hand :

Abstract Seinfeld Oil Paintings Are Perfect For Any Man Cave

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If you’re looking to add something special to your man cave then you might want to think about getting one of these abstract Seinfeld paintings. Artist Morgan Blair is obsessed with the show and she’s found a way to turn her passion into art.

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70 Shelby GT-500

70 Shelby GT-500
70 Shelby GT-500

Cat Who Lost Her Kittens Cries When Embracing An Abandoned Kitten

Show understanding. Show humanity.

’71 Barracuda

 

’71 Barracuda
’71 Barracuda

Brazil: trade with China more than double that of the USA

China’s Peaceful rise through a win-win trade relationship with the world.  Successful without firing a shot. Unprecedented in human history.
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Look at what other civilizations do to become great power: Portuguese, Spain, Holland, France, UK, Germany, Japan, USSR, USA!
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Should the CCP be awarded a noble prize for this effort?
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China used to focus her relation with the “me-only” crusader nations such as US, EU, Australia etc as being the most important relationships to keep peace
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However, these warmongering, unethical , greedy, lack of appreciative morale, looting civilizations have proven themselves,  time after time, to be unable to accept any kind of win-win trade relation.
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Thus, since Xi came into power, he focused on developing strong relations with all other nations.
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Trump’s effort to initiate an all-out trade and technological war against China has helped free up China’s market capacity. And this is benefiting the rest of the world.
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The People’s Republic of China has traditionally regarded Latin America as a zone for US interests and influence and has tended to tread carefully with countries in the region. But with the issuance in 2008 of the first ever State Council White Paper in Beijing on relations with Latin American countries, this attitude started to change. As a sign of acceleration, in 2016, a second paper came out, updating and enhancing what had gone before. This has been complemented by the number of visits to the region by Chinese President and Communist Party leader Xi Jinping since his appointment in 2012–13.

Of all the places in Latin America, for China, Brazil is among the most important. As this paper makes clear with plentiful data, in terms of exports and trade, Chinese–Brazilian relations are very strong. This is particularly the case with raw materials such as iron

ore and agricultural products. Even during the pandemic, from 2020, flows of meat, soybeans and oils have been maintained, meaning that Brazil ranks as China’s largest supplier in these areas.

The paper also argues how, with China’s economic transition to a more service- sector-dominated structure, Brazil’s export pattern will need to evolve and change. China’s intensive manufacturing and high use of imported raw materials is still important, but there are new developments. The ‘dual circulation’ idea of 2020 issued from Beijing stressed the need for the government to develop Chinese consumption. It also showed how much China wished to become more autonomous in terms of research, development and technology.

Full detailed report HERE

’72 Datsun Fairlady 240z

’72 Datsun Fairlady 240z
’72 Datsun Fairlady 240z

How Russia responded to the Ukrainian strike on drilling rigs in the Black Sea

The Ministry of Defense told in detail what the plan of Zelensky’s Nazis was when they hit civilian targets and what they got in return.

Retaliation on our part was [1] the destroyed hangar with Bayraktar drones at the Shkolny airfield near Odessa. And, [2]  two more platoons of NATO howitzers M-777 on Kubansky Island, as well as [3] two launchers of the S-300 system in the Ochakovo and Tuzla regions of the Odessa region.

This was stated by the official representative of the Ministry of Defense Igor Konashenkov.

By the way, according to Konashenkov, the Chornomorneftegaz platforms were not the targets of the Ukrainian raid.

They were hit rather out of desperation – they needed a bright picture for a TV show. The main task was Serpent’s Island, which the Ukrainians lost at the very beginning of the special operation and cannot get it back.

Here’s how it was:

According to the plan of the Ukrainian command, their forces were to first deliver massive air strikes and artillery on Serpent Island and then land troops there.

Serious forces were thrown – 15 attack and reconnaissance drones, the gunner of which was two Bayraktars, the US Air Force Global Hawk RQ-4 strategic reconnaissance aircraft circling nearby, and all this under the cover of the S-300.

Attacks on Serpentine were carried out by Tochka-U ballistic missiles, Uragan multiple launch rocket systems and M-777 howitzers.

Russian troops were defended by anti-aircraft complexes “Pantsir” and “Tor”.

Everything that flew in the direction of Zmeinoye – 4 Tochka-U and 21 Hurricane shells – was shot down, as were 13 drones.

When the Ukrainians realized that they had achieved nothing, they abandoned the landing on the island and hit civilian drilling rigs. 7 of those who were on them are still considered missing.

Read article HERE.

Explain It to Me, Please

If you want a war with Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela tell me why and how it would benefit Americans

Lost Cat Found With Brain Damage Dying Alone In The Cement Room

Tear jerker, but the cat recovered. The story is very interesting and tells us quite a bit about ourselves, and our humanity.

How problem solving became the problem in the west

by Denis A. Conroy for the Saker Blog

Awoke this morning and thought it was time to review my political convictions as it had become apparent that the war in Ukraine was beholden to the usual ‘us-and-them’ arrangements that stood in for enlightened insight… Another day wherein the propaganda-controlled media confronted me with the power of its’ nuclear-ballistic narrative (based on fire power), to assure me that our ace-in-the hole superior mediation could slam dunk those who refused to acknowledge Western exceptionality-a clear sign that the Pentagon was in bed with The Chicago School of economics.

My ruminations continued as I set about preparing breakfast…I found time for coffee despite the chaos beyond my boundaries. What was wrong with our market-oriented economy? Was our model up shit creek?

We in the West have a problem it seems? People of the lesser than white pigmentation are no longer accepting the fact that we, the descendants of the first European industrial revolution, can be trusted. We, who colonized great swathes of the non-industrialized world are no longer being viewed as magnanimous partners in any sharing sense.

The neo-conservative West tried exporting its’ Globalization (WTO) rules-based business-school mentality that underpins the theories of the Chicago School of Economics to the entire planet. The white man’s burden should be applied and set… and reset… according to the rules of the inchoate modernist unilateralist and utility-minded who eschew democracy over money.

The dream; to regroup in order to grow the capitalist vision of capturing Eurasia in a muscular web of 800 military bases put there to inhibit the development of peer modelling, meant full spectrum dominance.

On hearing the news that Washington was giving Ukraine a 64 billion super-duper military handout, the inner consultant took over from the inner muse and my mind went into equative overdrive.

Do the righteous amongst us choose formulaic thinking over science-based deductive observation? Well, the answer to that seems to be a big yes!

Shall we start with the Jewish controlled media? The Jewish ability to trade themselves to the center of power is impressive, but does it contain the seed of a truly universal outlook, or is it anchored in ethnic moorings that have succeeded in pulling off a coup par excellence that has taken the West by storm! The question is, does it require an arcane narrative in order to occupy the high moral ground? And, having acquired the moral high ground vis a vis alliance with power brokers, does this give them the right to LORD it over those who are told that they are checkmated vis a vis 800 military bases in Eurasia or the iron rim of the Gaza strip. All of this is precisely what Mainstreet Media is conniving at. Accept our ‘truth’ or we will execute great vengeance upon our enemies with furious rebukes (and Palestine and America are not the only counties that have an Anglo-Zionist problem). Think of what America and Israel have in common; exemption from the injurious consequences of their actions (what’s that line again about actions speaking louder than words and why are their cinematic art forms so bereft of human dignity?).

PART 2

For instance, PULP FICTION, released in 1994 as an American black comedy neo-noir crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is from a story by Tarantino and Roger Avery. It was, and continues to be a cultural watershed…a great piece of cinematic art capturing the myopia within American culture. Samuel Jacksons treatment of Ezekiel’ passage 25:17 “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them” is quintessentially, American hubris.

Pulp Fiction grafts contemporary narrative on arcane roots in antiquity to create a novel way of resolving the delusions of myopic grandeur that beset Jules Winnfield, a thug in need of redemption. The society Tarantino presents to the public is one where hype and entertainment paralyse the human spirit as the market economy goes about its business shredding the wellbeing of its’ citizens…the sense that an intractable appetite for personal gratification has become America’s raison d’etre is all pervasive.

Marsellus Wallace is a gang boss and husband to Mia Wallace. He is the boss of Vincent Vega, Jules Winnfield, Butch Coolidge and many other unknown gangsters. He famously states that the business he’s in “is filled with unrealistic motherfuckers” when addressing Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis), a pugilist being forced to “throw” a fight. The term motherfucker here implies the existence of somebody of indeterminate status and inevitably applies to all who get in the way of any dominant actor seeking power…hegemony…over others in a rat-race to the top. The three stories capture the ineluctable spread of corruption that seeps through to every nook and cranny of society…leaving Hollywood to capitalize on one unholy mess.

So before leaving part two, a thought: Does Volodymyr Zelensky realize what the tide of neo-conservatism lapping at the shores of Ukraine would bring to that hapless country?

PART 3

When propaganda took control of macro-America, the media went along with the process of shoving Americas’ Foreign Policy ‘down the throat of all and sundry. It happened when America found itself the sole superpower on the planet. What followed was the marshaling of Anglo/Zionist forces to downplay the role of government in economics. With the help of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, governments throughout the West became separated from governance. The Chicago School was libertarian and laissez-faire at its core, rejecting Keynesian notions of governments managing aggregate economic demand to promote growth. It was a 1930s form of economic unilateralism that succeeded in keeping finance out of the hands of the so-called ‘turbulent’ masses. It also became the political incarnation of colonial interference, aided and abetted by military overkill forever available to induct or vamoose main-street–ness.

“MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” became the clarion call of muscular America in the service of promoting the United States of Americas’ dream of empire. But was anybody listening? When Biden said “America is back”, was anybody listening? When Putin said enough is enough, quit the provocation, was he or anybody in Bidens’ administration listening? When the nonaligned nations of the world rejected Americas sanctioning of Russia, was anybody in the West listening? Isn’t it time Americans consulted their inner jerks and gave a thought to the suffering their imperial obsession has wrought on Afghanistan and Palestine, to mention but two examples of the arcane mindset.

Hollywood, the dream machine always gets it right. Life in America is about coupling in one way or another…couples struggling with their destinies are at the hub of the three stories that did it for Pulp Fiction in an extremely fractious way. Hollywood became Hollywood because it succeeded in identifying the American existential narrative as a drama belonging to couples or individuals compelled, by external social conditions, to trade their way through a dog-eat-dog system designed to produce winners and losers from within its protean boundaries.

PART 4

America and Palestine are not the only countries…nations…with an Anglo-Zionist problem!!

As Europe squishes under the yoke of the pulpy Atlantic Alliance, there is little reason to believe that hope might spring eternally from the minds of its’ generally mediocre neo-conservative leadership.

An Independent Inquiry Into the American Origins of Covid?

As most are surely aware, for more than two years I have been pointing to the strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the Covid outbreak that devastated our own country and the world was very likely the result of an exceptionally reckless American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

Under my analysis, the million American deaths and massive social disruption we have suffered would constitute the most disastrous blowback of any military operation in the history of the world, and if it became widely accepted, the domestic political consequences would be monumental.

My suggestion of a central American role in the creation of this global epidemic has been excluded not only from the mainstream media but from virtually all of the alternative media as well, presumably because the possibility is simply too horrific to contemplate. However, this situation may now be starting to change.

Last month, the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences carried an opinion article authored by prominent Columbia University economist Jeffrey D. Sachs and a medical colleague suggesting an American role in the creation of the virus and arguing for an independent inquiry into that possibility.

Their paper also presented some of the very considerable evidence that the virus had been artificially engineered in a laboratory, providing a comparison chart noting the striking difference in structure between Covid and all of its closest natural relatives. Indeed, the former seems to have the sort of human-insert sequence that American researchers had been exploring in their scientific papers.

Sachs and his co-author also emphasized that the Eco-Health Alliance, heavily funded by our own Department of Defense, had been very active in organizing the collection of SARS-like bat-viruses from China, exactly the sort of viruses that probably would have constituted the precursor stock to a genetically-engineered Covid virus.

These sorts of implications are hardly surprising to those who have been following my own writings of the last couple of years, but they obviously have vastly greater impact when made by top mainstream scholars writing in one of America’s most influential academic journals. Although the two authors are careful to avoid touching upon the central thesis of my own articles, their analysis is entirely consistent with that framework.

So far, this potentially important paper seems to have received relatively little media coverage, but it may have already contributed to some renewed interest in my own work.

In February I had presented my ideas at length in several video interviews, including Kevin Barrett’s Truth Jihad, Geopolitics & Empire, and Red Ice TV, totaling nearly four hours of discussion. During the last ten days or so, these videos have attracted a great deal of new interest, adding another 60,000 total views, and are now rapidly approaching the half-million mark. Shortly after my interview with Kevin Barrett, he told me he hoped that the viewership might eventually break 100,000, a possibility I considered wildly optimistic at the time, but that video is now actually at the verge of reaching 200,000 views. If these trends continue, at some point media outlets may finally be forced to recognize the likely reality of what befell America and the rest of the world a couple of years ago.

Video Link

Video Link

Video Link

 

Meanwhile, I have recently been preoccupied with different matters. In June 2018 I resumed my writing, and during the last four years I have published more than a half-million words of articles and columns, the bulk of them in my American Pravda series. That lengthy collection of essays, focusing on the lapses and lacunae in our mainstream coverage of important past events has gradually grown into a comprehensive historical counter-narrative of the last one hundred years of Western history.

Back in early 2016 I had collected my previous articles, mostly on racial and ethnic issues, and published them as a 700 page hardcover book entitled The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays. Although that volume had been partially intended as an adjunct to our unsuccessful Free Harvard/Fair Harvard political campaign for the university’s Board of Overseers, I was very pleased to have my book available in hard copy on Amazon. However, the publication project had involved a great deal of time and effort while sales soon dwindled away to scarcely even a trickle.

Then last year I began collecting all my writings into a series of freely downloadable eBooks, available in both the ePub and Mobi/Kindle formats, and this seemed a much more cost-effective means of distribution.

Since their release, these eBooks have been downloaded roughly 70,000 times, a total roughly 70,000 larger than my total print sales during that same time period. As a consequence, I had never considered investing the time and effort to produce any new hard copy editions of my work.

However, while writing my recent retrospective survey on the Harvard campaign, I was reminded of the particular advantages of having a print book available for distribution, and I began reconsidering the idea, especially since various people over the years had expressed interest in obtaining my recent writings in print form.

Obviously, a collection running 400,000 or 500,000 words would be completely unmanageable as a single text, but I discovered that Amazon’s KDP system provides a relatively easy means of creating professional-quality books using Print On Demand technology. So I decided to produce an series of shorter, more narrowly focused collections, with each generally running 50,000 to 100,000 words.

Over the last few years my reading, research, and writing efforts have absorbed an enormous amount of my time, so applying another 1% or less to make this same material available in print editions seems a very cost-effective decision. A book that you can hold in your hand may often have considerably greater weight and impact than something merely read online or in some other electronic format.

Two books in this new series are now available, each running less than 200 pages and reasonably priced at under $10 in paperback. They constitute short collections of essays that can easily be read in just a day or two, and over the next few weeks, I’m planning to release several additional ones.

The first volume is entitled Encountering American Pravda, and represents something of a short introduction to my American Pravda series, with most of the essays coming from 2016 or earlier and the book priced at just $8.99. I think this particular collection would be an ideally effective means of introducing others to the material, while doing so in a relatively non-threatening manner.

I have also now published Our Covid-19 Catastrophe, priced at $9.99. This contains my major Covid articles, presenting the American biowarfare hypothesis that has been the main focus of my writing and research efforts over the last two years.

Busy individuals are continually bombarded with emails and links and hence tend to disregard nearly all of them. However, I think that someone who receives an attractively printed book in the mail is much more likely to examine it rather than just throw it into the trash. So purchasing these hard copy editions for friends and acquaintances may be effective and relatively inexpensive means of getting this important information into much wider circulation.

I’m obviously eager to promote this material in reviews or podcasts. Therefore, I would be glad to provide complementary copies of my books to any bloggers or podcasters who think they would be interested in writing reviews or interviewing me. Just drop me an email with a link to your website or podcast and your mailing address, and I’ll have the copies sent right out.

As an example of this, I was interviewed a few days ago by Edward Dutton on his Jolly Heretics podcast. Prof. Dutton had initially been quite skeptical of my Covid biowarfare hypothesis, but the information provided in my eBook greatly surprised him, and he decided to interview me as a consequence. The 90m session is available on the Odysee platform, and I’ve also reposted it on Rumble:

Video Link

In addition, I had another hour-long radio interview with Kevin Barrett, with a copy of the transcript now available in transcript form.

Edward Curtin: Why is Everything Broken?

Unfortunately, all these people, westerners, most of them Americans, are writing about all the disaster and trouble in the USA and elsewhere. And indeed, they’re right, there’s a bad moon rising in America. But none of them is aware of the fact that there’s another much bigger nation at the other side of the world; that the population of the USA is just a small fraction of the global population. That the economy and power of the USA is over, that they should prepare for third world situations in the USA.

Are they, in spite of their vitriol on the American system, suffering from American exceptionalism ?

What I dearly miss, is the broader viewpoint, the viewpoint from the rest of the globe. None of these writers realize that there is hope for humanity at the other side of the globe. -Frans

Edward Curtin

June 9, 2022

“Begin then with a fracture, a cesura, a rent; 
opening a crack in this fallen world, a shaft of light.”

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

Being sick for the past few weeks has had its advantages. It has forced me to take a break from writing since I could not concentrate enough to do so. It has gifted me with a deeper sympathy for the vast numbers of the seriously ill around the world, those suffering souls without succor except for desperate prayers for relief.

And it has allowed thoughts to think me as I relinquished all efforts at control for a few miserable weeks of “doing nothing” except napping, reading short paragraphs in books, watching some sports and a documentary, and being receptive to the light coming through the cracks in my consciousness.

I suppose you could say that my temporary illness forced me, as José Ortega Y Gasset described it, virtually and provisionally to withdraw myself from the world and take a stand inside myself – “or, to use a magnificent word which exists only in Spanish, that man can ensimismarse (‘be inside himself’).”

But as I learned, being “inside myself” doesn’t mean the outside world doesn’t come visiting, both in its present and past manifestations. When you are sick, you feel most vulnerable; this sense of frailty breaks you open to strange and familiar thoughts, feelings, dreams and memories that you must catch on the fly, pin with words if you are quick enough. I’ve pinned some over these weeks as they came to me through the cracks.

“Broken flesh, broken mind, broken speech,” wrote Norman Brown when he argued for aphoristic truth as opposed to methods or systematic form. These days the feeling that everything is broken is the norm, that madness reigns, that truth is being strangled and all we have are lies and more lies.

Carefully constructed arguments fall on deaf ears as dissociation of the personality, post-modern attention-disorder, gender confusion, and corporate/intelligence mass media propaganda techniques are used daily to sow confusion. In simple colloquial language, people are badly fucked up.

Much of the world is suffering from megrims.  Bob Dylan puts it simply:

Who can disagree?  Everyone’s mind seems to be at the end of its tether.

Why? There are obvious answers, and while so many are true, they are insufficient, for they usually scratch the surface of a worldwide crisis that has been developing for at least a century and a half.

That crisis is spiritual. Many can feel it rumbling beneath the surface of world events. It’s a rumbling in the bowels. It’s unspoken. It’s something very dark, sinister, and satanic. It seems to be a form of systemic evil almost with a will of its own that is sweeping the world.

For many decades I have studied, written, and taught in an effort to grasp the essence of what has been happening in our world. My tools have been philosophy, theology, literature, art, and sociology – all the disciplines really, including a careful study of popular culture. It was always a personal quest, for my “career” has been my vocation.

Being trained in the classics from high school through college, and then the scientific method and textual analysis, I adhered for the most part to logical analyses in the classical style. Such an approach, while possessed of a certain elegance and balance, has serious limitations since it suggests the world follows a neat Aristotelian logic and that there is a method to the world’s madness that is easy to capture in logical argumentation.

Romanticism and existentialism, to name two reactions to such thinking, arose in opposition. Each offered a needed corrective to the reductive, materialist nature of a scientific method that became deified while dismissing God, freedom, and the spiritual as leftover superstitions from olden times.

But I have no sustained argument to offer here, just some scraps I gathered while enduring weeks in the doldrums. I sense these bits of seemingly digressive little flashes in the dark were telling me something about what I have been trying to understand for many years: the grasp the demonic has on our world today.

It is easy to dismiss the use of such a word, for it sounds hyperbolic, and it easily plays into the ridiculous themes of popular Hollywood and tabloid entertainment, which have also become staples of the formerly “serious” media as well.

It’s all entertainment now, life the movie, the unreality of endless propaganda, sick, sordid, and what can only be termed “The Weirdness,” a term my friend the writer and playwright Joe Green has suggested to me.

I think it would be a serious mistake to dismiss the demonic nature of the forces at work in our world today:

  • Like Rip Van Winkle, I awoke one recent day, a few weeks after I wrote my last article before I got sick, to see that the corporate media/intelligence narrative on the war in Ukraine had taken an abrupt turn. I had written on May 13, 2022, that certain leftists were parroting the official U.S. propaganda that Russia was losing its battle with the Ukrainian forces.  Noam Chomsky had claimed the U.S. media were doing a good job reporting Russian war crimes in Ukraine and Chris Hedges had said that Russia had suffered “nine weeks of humiliating military failures.”  Now The New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. – mirabile dictu – have suddenly changed their tune and the Russians are winning after all.
    Who was asleep?  Or was it sleep that prompted such obviously false reporting?  For the Russians were clearly winning from the start. Yet we can be assured the authoritative voices will continue to flip the switch and play mind games, for shock and confusion are keys to effective propaganda, and American exceptionalism with its divine mission, its manifest destiny, is to demonically try to destroy Russia.
  • The slogan that I learned when I was a Marine before becoming a conscientious objector came to me when I was feverish. “My rifle is my life.”  I never thought so, but I did recall how when I was ten years old my cousin killed his brother with a rifle, and how I heard the news on the radio while talking with my father.  The New York Times reported: “A 9-year-old boy was fatally wounded last night by his brother, 7, while the two were playing with a rifle in a neighbour’s apartment in the northeast Bronx….[the rifle] “was secreted in a bedroom” [under the bed] and was loaded.
  • Report: Don McLean cancels his singing performance at the National Riffle Association’s convention following the Uvalde school shooting. What an act of moral courage! Ah, Don, “Now I understand/What you tried to say to me/And how you suffered for your sanity/And how you tried to set them free/They would not listen, they did not know how/Perhaps they’ll listen now.”
    Let’s hope not to you.
  • Watched the new documentary about George Carlin – “George Carlin’s American Dream.” I have always had a soft spot for George, a fellow New Yorker with a Catholic upbringing, and a good-hearted guy who generously offered to help me years ago when I was fired from a teaching position for ostensibly playing a recording of his seven words that you can never say on television.  The real reasons for my firing were that I was organizing a teacher’s union and had brought well-known anti-war activists to speak at the school.  But what struck me in this interesting documentary was George’s facile dismissal of God – “the God bullshit,” as he put it.  Funny, of course, and correct in certain ways, it was also jejune in significant ways and threw God out with the bathwater.
    It was something I had not previously noticed about his routine, but this time around it hit me as unworthy of his scathing critiques of American life.  It got laughs at the expense of deeper and important truths and probably has had deleterious effects on generations who have been beguiled and besotted by how George’s God critique consonantly fits with the shallow arguments of the new atheists.  George was overreacting to the ignorance of his superficial religious training and not distinguishing God from institutional religion.
  • Half-awake on the couch one day, I somehow remembered that when I was teaching at another school and involved in anti-war activities, a fellow teacher stopped me on a staircase on a late Friday afternoon when no one was around and tried to get me to join Army Intelligence. “You are exactly the type we could use,” he said, “since you are so outspoken in your anti-war positions.”  I will spare you my reply, which involved words you once could never say on TV.  But the encounter taught me an early lesson about distinguishing friend from foe; how treachery is real, and evil often wears a smiley face. The man who approached me was the head of social studies curricula for the Roman Catholic Brooklyn Diocese of New York.
  • Al Capone, while speaking to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. in 1931: “People respect nothing nowadays….It is undermining the country. Virtue, honour, truth, and the law have all vanished from our life.”
  • I also read this from Literature and the Gods by Roberto Calasso: “… all the mythologies now pass a largely indolent life in a no-man’s-land haunted by gods and vagrant simulacra, by ghosts and Gypsy caravans in constant movement. They learn only to tell their stories again …. Yet it is precisely this ability that is so obviously lacking in the world around us. Behind the trembling curtains of what passes for ‘reality,’ the voices throng. If no one listens, they steal the costume of the first person they can grab and burst onto the stage in ways that can be devastating.  Violence is the expedient of what has been refused an audience.”
  • Lying in bed after a feverish night early on in my sickness, I looked up at the ceiling where a fly was buzzing. I remembered how years ago, when my father was in the hospital after a terrible car accident in which he smashed his head, he told me he was seeing monkeys all over the ceiling of the hospital room.  Later, when I was out of bed, I heard the news reports about monkeypox and thought I was also hallucinating.  I started laughing, a sardonic laughter brought to a feverish pitch after more than two years of Covid propaganda.  These are the same people who hope to create a transhuman future – mechanical monkeys.
  • On a table lay the third volume of a trilogy of books – Sinister Forces – by Peter Levenda. I opened it to a bookmarked page.  Anyone who has read these books with a half-way open mind will be shocked by the amount of documented history they contain, history so bizarre and disturbing that reading them is not advisable before bedtime.  Sinister forces that run through American history, indeed, but Levenda presents his material in a most reasonable and fair-minded way.  I read these paragraphs:
“The historical model I am proposing in these volumes should be obvious by now. By tracing the darker elements of the American experience from the earliest days of the Adena and Hopewell cultures through the discovery by Columbus, the English settlers in Massachusetts and the Salem witchcraft episode, the rise of Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Mormons via ceremonial magic and Freemasonry, up to the twentieth century and the support of Nazism by American financiers and politicians before, during, and after World War II, and the UFO phenomenon coming on the heels of that war, we can see the outline of a political ectoplasm taking shape in this historical séance: politics as a continuation of religion by other means. 

The ancillary events of the Charles Manson murders, the serial killer phenomenon, Jonestown, and the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Marilyn Monroe are all the result of the demonic possession of the American psyche, like the obscenities spat out by little Regan [The Exorcist], tied to her bed and shrieking at the exorcists. It is said that demonic possession is a way of testing us, and making us aware of the real conflict taking place within us every day….

The more I looked, however, the more I found men with bizarre beliefs and involved in questionable, occult practices at the highest levels of the American government, and buried deep within government agencies. I also discovered that occultism was embraced by the American military and intelligence establishments as a weapon to be used in the Cold War; and as they did so, they unleashed forces upon the American populace that cannot be called back….

One inevitably was forced back to the CIA and the mind-control experiments that began in the late 1940s and extended nearly to the present day [no, to the present day]. Coincidence piled upon coincidence, indicating the existence of a powerful, subliminal force working at the level of chaos – at the quantum level – and struggling to manifest itself in our reality, our consciousness, our political agenda.”


If that all sounds too bizarre for words, unbelievable really, I suggest that one read these books, for if only a minority of Levenda’s claims are true, we are in the grip of evil forces so depraved that fiction writers couldn’t imagine such reality.

As I finish these notes, I am sitting outside on a small porch, watching the rain subside. The sun has just emerged. It is 5:30 P.M. and across the driveway and a lawn of grass, eight foxes have come through the bushes. The parents watch as the six kits jump and scamper around the ground-level porch of a cottage that is unoccupied.

Interesting too?  Chris Hedges: America’s Death March

The foxes have a den under the porch, and every day for a few months we have been privileged to watch them perform their antics in the mornings and evenings. Cute would be an appropriate word for the kits, especially when they were smaller. But they are growing fast and suddenly one sees and seizes a squirrel and worries it to death by shaking it in its mouth.

Soon they are ripping it to pieces. Cute has turned deadly.  But as the aforementioned Ortega Y Gasset says, while people can be inside themselves, “The animal is pure alteraciόn. It cannot be within itself.”  This is because it has no self, “no chez soi, where it can withdraw and rest.”

Foxes always live in pure exteriority, unlike me, who is sitting here with a small glass of wine and thinking about them and the various thoughts that have come to me over these past few weeks.

Before I came outside, I read this from a powerful new article by Naomi Wolf – “Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide” – “It is a time of demons sauntering around in human spaces, though they look human enough themselves, smug in their Italian suits on panels at the World Economic Forum.”

In this piece, she writes about what is in the 55,000 internal Pfizer documents which the FDA had asked a court to keep under wraps for 75 years, but which a court has released as a result of outside pressure.

These documents reveal evil so depraved that words would fail her if not for her moral conscience and her growing awareness – that I share – that we are dealing with a phenomenon that demands an analysis that is theological, not sociological. She writes:

“Knowing as I now do, that Pfizer and the FDA knew that babies were dying and mothers’ milk discoloring by just looking at their own internal records; knowing as I do that they did not alert anyone let alone stop what they were doing, and that to this day Pfizer, the FDA and other demonic “public health” entities are pushing to MRNA-vaccinate more and more pregnant women; now that they are about to force this on women in Africa and other lower income nations who are not seeking the MRNA vaccines, per Pfizer CEO Bourla this past week at the WEF, and knowing that Pfizer is pushing and may even receive a US EUA for babies to five year olds — I must conclude that we are looking into an abyss of evil not seen since 1945.

So I don’t know about you, but I must switch gears with this kind of unspeakable knowledge to another kind of discourse.”

That discourse is religious, for Naomi has realized that our world is in satanic hands, and that only a recognition of that fact offers a way out. That those who wield weapons both medical and military can only be defeated by those who realize that a key part of the killers’ propaganda has been a long campaign to convince people, not only that God does not exist, but that Satan doesn’t either.

Interesting too?  Forskellen mellem beskyldninger om dis- og misinformation er afgørende
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This, while they assume the mantle of the evil one.

She says:

“This time could really be the last time; these monsters in the labs, on the transnational panels, are so very skilful; and so powerful; and their dark work is so extensive.

If God is there — again — after all the times that we have tried his patience — and who indeed knows? – will we reach out a hand to him in return, will we take hold in the last moment out of this abyss, and simply find a way somehow to walk alongside him?”

We will, but only if we also recognize the deeper forces informing our hidden history and haunting our present days. Sometimes an illness can crack you open to being receptive to shafts of light that can lead the way.

Yet to do so we must go deep into very dark places.

And since everyone and everything seems broken now – let’s say everyone is just sick in some way – maybe courage is what we need, the simple courage to open ourselves to the voices of the hungry ghosts that haunt this country.

Norman O. Brown referred to them and our stage set this way:

“Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.”

The U.S.A. and its allies are waging war on many fronts. It is a form of total war – cold, hot, medical, military, mind-control, spiritual, etc. – that demands a total response from us.

None of us is completely innocent; we are all part of the deep evil that is happening all around us. But if we listen carefully, we might hear God asking for our help. For we need each other.

I watch in horror as the cute foxes kill their prey. I must remind myself that that is their nature. As for my fellow humans, I know that it isn’t nature that drives them to kill, maim, hurt, lie, etc.

Everything is truly broken, and I’m not joking.

But someone is laughing.

It’s not God.

Two kinds of people

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Jaycee Dugard

When adolescent girls are abducted by strangers, there’s almost never a happy ending. Most of the time they turn up dead, if they turn up at all. When 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard disappeared while walking to the bus stop, police feared the worst, and they didn’t get any more hopeful when days turned into weeks, then into years.

But Dugard was alive and living in a shed in Phillip and Nancy Garrido’s backyard in Antioch, California (via Biography). For 18 years, she was kept prisoner by the Garridos, who told her that her family didn’t love her and wasn’t looking for her.

While in captivity she gave birth to two of Phillip Garrido’s children and eventually gave up hope of escaping.

Then, Garrido got cocky.

He brought Dugard’s two daughters with him to see the special events coordinator at the UC Berkeley campus, where he was hoping to stage a religious event of some kind. The special events manager thought something was off about Garrido and the girls and called his parole officer, and after that everything started to unravel for the Garridos.

Dugard revealed her identity during a parole meeting and her long ordeal was over.

Dugard was reunited with her family in 2009. Her family got a $20 million award from the State of California as an acknowledgment that Garrido’s parole supervision had maybe not been as thorough as it should have been.

BRICS summit: Xi Jinping criticizes Western sanctions, analysis says China helped Putin return to the world

In Chinese. Needs to be translated. Article HERE.

US sanctions helping China supercharge its chip-making industry

China has 19 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing chip industry firms over the past four quarters
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Article HERE

Jun 21, 2022 – 4.45pm
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Hong Kong | China’s chip industry is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, after US sanctions on local champions from Huawei Technologies to Hikvision spurred appetite for home-grown components.
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Nineteen of the world’s 20 fastest-growing chip industry firms over the past four quarters, on average, hail from the world’s second-biggest economy, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That compared with just eight at the same point last year.
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Those China-based suppliers of design software, processors and gear vital to chip making are expanding revenue at several times the likes of global leaders Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing or ASML Holding.
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That supercharged growth underscores how tensions between Washington and Beijing are transforming the global $US550 billion ($789 billion) semiconductor industry – a sector that plays an outsized role in everything from defence to the advent of future technologies like AI and autonomous cars.
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In 2020, the US began restricting sales of American technology to companies like Semiconductor Manufacturing International and Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, successfully containing their growth – but also fuelling a boom in Chinese chip-making and supply.
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Nineteen of the world’s 20 fastest-growing chip industry firms over the past four quarters, on average, hail from the world’s second-biggest economy, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That compared with just eight at the same point last year.
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Those China-based suppliers of design software, processors and gear vital to chip making are expanding revenue at several times the likes of global leaders Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing or ASML Holding.
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That supercharged growth underscores how tensions between Washington and Beijing are transforming the global $US550 billion ($789 billion) semiconductor industry – a sector that plays an outsized role in everything from defence to the advent of future technologies like AI and autonomous cars.
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In 2020, the US began restricting sales of American technology to companies like Semiconductor Manufacturing International and Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, successfully containing their growth – but also fuelling a boom in Chinese chip-making and supply.
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Beijing is expected to orchestrate billions of dollars of investment in the sector under ambitious programs such as its “Little Giants” blueprint to endorse and bankroll national tech champions, and encourage “buy China” tactics to sidestep US sanctions. The rise of indigenous names has caught the attention of some of the pickiest clients: Apple was said to consider Yangtze Memory Technologies as its latest supplier of iPhone flash memory.
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“The biggest underlying trend is China’s quest for self-sufficiency in the supply chain, catalysed by COVID-related lockdowns,” Morningstar analyst Phelix Lee wrote in an email responding to inquiries from Bloomberg.
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“Amid lockdowns, Chinese customers who mostly use imported semiconductors need to source homegrown alternatives to ensure smooth operations.”
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At the heart of Beijing’s ambitions is the impetus to wean itself off a geopolitical rival and more than $US430 billion worth of imported chipsets in 2021. Orders for chip-manufacturing equipment from overseas suppliers rose 58 per cent last year as local plants expanded capacity, data provided by industry body Semi show.
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That in turn is driving local business. Total sales from Chinese-based chipmakers and designers jumped 18 per cent in 2021 to a record of more than 1 trillion yuan ($215 billion), according to the China Semiconductor Industry Association.
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A persistent chip shortage that’s curtailing output at the world’s largest makers of cars and consumer electronics is also working in local chipmakers’ favour, helping Chinese suppliers more easily access the international market – sometimes with premiums tacked onto the best-selling products, such as auto and PC chips.
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SMIC and Hua Hong Semiconductor, the biggest contract chip-makers, have kept their Shanghai-based plants operating at almost full capacity even as the worst COVID-19 outbreak since 2020 paralyses factories and logistics across China.
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Shanghai Fullhan Microelectronics’ revenue grew 37 per cent on average because of high demand for surveillance products. The video chip designer has pledged to expand into electric vehicles and AI after winning its “Little Giant” designation.
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And design tool developer Primarius Technologies doubled sales on average over the past four quarters, saying it’s developed software that can be used in making 3-nanometer chips.
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Putting aside long-term profitability concerns, Morningstar’s Mr Lee said the aggressive capacity build-up from Chinese players will elevate their presence globally.
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“There’s little doubt Chinese chipmakers can achieve revenue growth over the next few years from cars, consumer electronics and other devices,” he said.

The Empire Is Slipping. Get Ready for the Big Win-Win.

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The American media is throwing a hissy-fit after two “Americans” (one of them is a Korean for some reason) have been captured while working as mercenaries in the Ukraine.

Previously, two British mercenaries were sentenced to death by the Russians, and that will almost certainly happen to the Americans. This is totally in line with international law.

Legally, there is no difference between a random American murdering or attempting to murder Russian civilians.

NBC News interviewed Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov about this, and he implied they would likely be sentenced to death, as they are not lawful combatants and they are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.

CNBC:

 It’s a tense week for Ukraine as it awaits to see whether it will be granted the status of a candidate country for the European Union.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that he expects Russia to intensify its attacks on his country while it awaits the EU’s decision. Russia’s ground and tactical air operations continued to focus on the Donbas in eastern Ukraine over the weekend and more villages around the twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk were pummeled by Russian artillery on Monday.

Elsewhere, there are growing concerns over the fate of two U.S. military veterans captured in Ukraine after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said Moscow wouldn’t guarantee that they won’t face the death penalty.

“It depends on the investigation,” Dmitry Peskov told NBC News senior international correspondent Keir Simmons when he was asked whether Alexander Drueke and Andy Huynh would “face the same fate” as two British citizens and a Moroccan who were sentenced to death in a pro-Russian separatist “court” (widely seen as a kangaroo court) in eastern Ukraine this month. 

“Widely seen” by whom?

They are following the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war. No one is claiming that these people are not mercenaries. Actually, the nervous and ridiculous Jew Antony Blinken claimed earlier this month that the Brits who were sentenced to death were somehow “lawful combatants.”

 

But what does that mean? They are literally mercenaries, and no one anywhere claims that mercenaries are “lawful combatants.” So these are just ridiculous nonsense statements that the Jew Blinken can feel safe his kinsmen in the media are not going to analyze.

Peskov is really good. His English is good and he acts like an adult in the way no American does. Imagine that his official role is the same as that of… Karine Frenchman.

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Everyone around President Putin is very competent, and really makes America look ridiculous.

I’m getting pretty tired of schizo theories about how there is some secret competent elite running America, and this is all part of the plan. It’s not part of the plan. They had a plan, and it is failing everywhere you look. This should be good news for everyone.

Somehow, the schizo stuff is increasing across the internet.

I think this is probably part of a conspiracy. Schizos view the Western elite as literal gods in any version of their stupid theories, and they are basically shilling for the American regime by claiming that all of its enormous, obvious mistakes are part of a secret plan.

If you call them out, they just pretend to be retarded (I’m not sure if they’re actually pretending) and start talking about the World Economic Forum, and claiming that I’m denying that there is a plan at all.

I am not denying that there is a plan.

I am denying that this plan is working.

It is obvious to everyone with a brain at this point, and not even a secret at all, that there is a plan to establish a one world government ruled by a tiny elite minority where a mass of peasants are treated like slaves and their population drastically reduced.

Acknowledging that this plan exists does not somehow equal believing that it is infallible.

Part of it is obviously just stupidity.

When people find out about the World Economic Forum, or the Bilderberg Group, or the Club of Rome, or the Trilateral Commission, or the Council on Foreign Relations, or any of these globalist institutions that created a plan for a global government, they apparently assume that the fact they didn’t know about that plan before means it is ultra-competent.

I’ve known about that plan for twenty years.

I was myself accused of being schizophrenic by friends and family, because I started reading all of these books from all of these high-level technocrats and finding that it was all real.

I didn’t “wake up” during Covid.

I had to work my way through the sludge of fifty million tons of garbage theories to get to my current level of understanding, and I’m explaining it in the simplest terms I am able.

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If people think that there is a secret agreement between Washington and Beijing, or that Jews secretly run the Bank of China, or that China is soon going to collapse, or any of these other theories that somehow explain why the West would be failing on purpose, they need to present some kind of counter-argument to what I’ve put forward that takes into account everything that I’ve argued.

I’m not claiming to be God, I’m not claiming infallibility, but every single schizo just ignores every reply I give and comes back at me with “what if the Jews already infiltrated China though???” or “maybe the Chinese economy is going to collapse and the CIA will stage a revolution and install people from Taipei????”

It all ultimately hinges on China.

At this point, Russia is a de facto proxy state of China. China is the peer competitor for the United States. And all of these schizo theories about Jews infiltrating China, or a secret agreement with China, or an imminent collapse of China – none of them are backed with any facts at all.

The simplest and most logical explanation, which takes into account all data, is that the Americans thought the Chinese were stupid and that if they gave them all of this free wealth in the form of exporting industry to China, China would become another “human rights anal democracy” vassal state.

Instead, China became an ultranationalist superpower.

The globalist agenda had no contingency plan for this eventuality, because they made these decisions about China without any real understanding of the Orient.

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Stop idolizing Jewish power.

By claiming it is infallible, you’re just saying the same thing the Jews are saying – that they are gods on earth, destined to rule you.

They’ve screwed everything up, because God is real and God is not going to allow them to take over the world.

We are in a pretty good spot.

When the US is no longer the seat of global power, these people in Washington are no longer going to have the resources to force their will on us.

If you go to any third world country, you will find that [1] people have a lot more personal freedom, that [2] families are much healthier, that [3] people are just generally doing better.

The biggest reason for that is that a third world country simply doesn’t have any resources to micromanage people’s individual lives.

When Washington falls, a strongman will rise from the ashes, and through blood and fire, we will begin to see the changes we want to see.

There will be no security.

Many will die. Many will die horribly. Your comfort zone will no longer exist, and you will never be able to return to it. But these things must come to pass and they will come to pass.

We’re right on course here.

Everything is fine, everything is exactly how it is supposed to be.

No one man can understand the Golden Path until it shows itself, and yet, the Golden Path is always there, always moving the enemies of God into places where their actions will lead to their own demise.

Chin up.

(Republished from The Daily Stormer by permission of author or representative)

Petra Pazsitka

In 1984, a 24-year-old college student from Braunschweig, Germany, went to the dentist and never returned. Just in case that’s just giving you new reasons to be irrationally afraid of dental work, Petra Pazsitka didn’t die in a root canal gone wrong, she just never came home.

As is often the case when a young woman disappears, police suspected murder. A massive search ensued, and Pazsitka was even featured on the German true-crime show “Aktenzeichen XY.” For a while there was a suspect — in 1987, a man identified only as Gunter K. said he’d killed Pazsitka (via The Telegraph), and since he’d also confessed to killing a 14-year-old girl in the same part of Germany, police had no reason to disbelieve him. He later withdrew his confession (via Independent), which didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t the killer.

Pazsitka was declared dead in 1989, and that was that — until 2015, when a woman in Dusseldorf named “Mrs. Scheider” called police to say her apartment had been burgled (via News.com.au). When unable to produce ID, she confessed to being the missing woman. Evidently, she’d managed to evade discovery by never opening a bank account or attempting to get a driver’s license or social security card. She also couldn’t be charged with a crime, because she’d never tried to use false documents. The reasons for Pazsitka’s disappearance are still not clear. She told police she was neither interested in discussing the matter publicly nor reuniting with her family.

Disaster In The Heartland: Wheat Crops In Kansas Are Failing On A Massive Scale

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Did you know that Kansas is known as “the Wheat State”?  In 2021, it produced nearly one-fourth of all wheat that was harvested in the United States.  Needless to say, we really need Kansas to come up big again this year because the war in Ukraine and a number of other factors have combined to bring us to the precipice of an absolutely horrifying global food crisis.  Unfortunately, things are not going well in Kansas this year.  In fact, wheat crops in much of the state are failing on a massive scale

This time of year, the wheat growing in this part of western Kansas should be thigh-high and lush green.

But as a months-long drought continues to parch the region, many fields tell a different story.

“There’s nothing out there. It’s dead,” farmer Vance Ehmke said, surveying a wheat field near his land in Lane County. “It’s just ankle-high straw.”

At this point, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is telling us that 41 percent of all wheat in Kansas is in “poor” or “very poor” condition.

The situation is particularly dire in the western portion of the state.  It is being reported that many fields of wheat in western Kansas now resemble “barren wastelands”

Across western Kansas, many fields planted with wheat months ago now look like barren wastelands. The gaping spaces between rows of brown, shriveled plants reveal hardened dirt that’s scarred with deep cracks from baking in the sun.

Of all the years for drought to hit western Kansas wheat farmers, it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Even though the price of wheat has soared to crazy levels, it is being estimated that somewhere around 10 percent of all wheat fields in Kansas will not even grow enough crops to bother harvesting them.

That is really bad news, but the truth is that things are even worse in Colorado and Texas

To the west in Colorado, projections say nearly one-third of wheat fields won’t produce enough to bother harvesting. In Texas, around three-quarters of the crop will likely be abandoned.

Please read that again.

This is enormous news, and it is going to deeply affect all of us in the months ahead.

At the worst possible time, wheat crops are failing on a massive scale all over the western half of the nation.

We have been stuck in a pattern of drought that resembles the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s for many years now, and things are starting to happen which would have once been unthinkable.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell have both dropped to all-time record lows, and the drinking water for tens of millions of Americans is now in jeopardy.

 

I wish that more people would understand the gravity of what we are potentially facing.

Down in Mexico, residents of Monterrey are already being limited to six hours of water a day because shortages have already become so severe…

In the sprawling metropolitan area of Monterrey, home to some 5.3 million people, the drought and years of below-average rainfall have led to citywide water shortages.

“We’re in an extreme climate crisis,” Nuevo Leon Governor Samuel Garcia said at a news conference last week. “Today, we’re all living it and suffering.”

The city in June began limiting water access to six hours a day, forcing schools to adjust class schedules and sparking panic buying of bottled water that emptied supermarket shelves.

The western half of North America is in the midst of the worst multi-year drought that it has experienced in 1,200 years, and experts are telling us that it isn’t going to end any time soon.

Meanwhile, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed is warning us that the planet is potentially facing “a food crisis of global proportions” in 2023…

First, time is short to prevent a food crisis of global proportions next year. We must stabilize global markets, reduce volatility and tackle the uncertainty of commodity prices. There can be no effective solution to the global food crisis without reintegrating Ukraine’s food production, as well as the food and fertilizer produced by the Russian Federation into world markets — despite the war. To avert a food availability crisis in 2023, we must restore fertilizer availability, especially for smallholder farmers now.

Global food production is going to be way below expectations all over the world this year, and we really are heading into a nightmarish worldwide food crisis.

I hope that you are preparing accordingly.

Before I end this article, there is one more thing that I wanted to mention.

Authorities are telling us that an absolutely massive sunspot known as AR3038 “is now facing Earth”

An enormous sunspot that has doubled in size in only 24 hours is now facing Earth—meaning it could send a solar flare our way.

This particular sunspot has actually doubled in size for each of the past three days, and at this point it is approximately 2.5 times the size of our entire planet.

And we are being warned that it could “potentially send an M-class solar flare” directly at us…

“Yesterday, sunspot AR3038 was big. Today, it’s enormous,” reads the SpaceWeather.com website. “The fast-growing sunspot has doubled in size in only 24 hours.”

The magnetic field associated with the sunspot means it could potentially send an M-class solar flare at Earth—the second-strongest type. However, it is not known whether this will be the case.

Scientists are assuring us that we probably don’t have anything to be concerned about, and hopefully they are correct.

But let’s keep a close eye on this sunspot anyway.

As I have always warned, it is just a matter of time before another Carrington Event comes along.

We live during such unusual times, and things seem to be getting crazier with each passing week.

The “perfect storm” that so many have been warning about is now here, and the months ahead will be filled with chaos and uncertainty.

Russia and China back together again

Some vintage posters.

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This is what Putin REALLY wants, pay attention

Talking about BRICS. This is super important news. It’s about the demise of the USD.

’69 Road Runner

’69 Road Runner
’69 Road Runner

Cat Cries For Help To Save Her Kittens Stuck Inside The Cement Ground

You must save the kittens!

Make-Ahead Chicken and Dumplings

We’ve devised a clever and no-fail way to make classic chicken and dumplings into a freezer-friendly meal. Make the chicken stew ahead of time, and when you’re ready to cook, simply add easy Bisquick™ dumplings, and dinner’s ready!

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Toyota 2000GT

Toyota 2000GT
Toyota 2000GT

World War 3 for dummies

A brilliant piece. -MM

By Gaius Baltar for the Saker Blog

Some knowledgeable people, apparently including the Pope, are beginning to suspect that there may be more going on in the world than just the war in the Ukraine. They say that World War 3 has already started and things will get worse from now on. This can be difficult to determine while we are participating in the unfolding events and do not have the benefit of the historical perspective. It is doubtful that people back in 1939 realized that they were looking at the start of a major worldwide conflict, although some may have suspected it.

The current global situation is in many ways like a giant jigsaw puzzle where the general public only sees a tiny part of the complete picture. Most don’t even realize that there may be more pieces and don’t even ask these simple questions: Why is all this happening and why is it happening now?

Things are more complicated than most people realize. What they see is the evil wizard Vladimir Saruman Putin invading innocent Ukraine with his orc army – for absolutely no reason. This is a simplistic view, to say the least because nothing happens without a reason. Let’s put things in perspective and see what is really going on – and why the world is going crazy before our eyes. Let’s see what World War 3 is all about.

The pressure cooker

The West (which we can define here as the US and the EU and a few more) has been maintaining pressure on the entire world for decades. This does not only apply to countries outside the West, but also to Western countries which strayed from the diktats of the West’s rulers. This pressure has been discussed widely and attributed to all kinds of motives, including neocolonialism, forced financial hegemony, and so forth. What is interesting, particularly during the last 20 years, is which countries have been pressured and what they do not have in common.

Among the pressured countries we find Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, Serbia, Thailand, and Iran to mention a few. There have also been recent additions, including India and Hungary. In order to understand why they have been pressured, we need to find out what they have in common. That’s not easy since they are extremely different in most ways. There are democracies and non-democracies, conservative and communist governments, Christian, Muslim and Buddhist countries, and so on. Still, many of them are very clearly allied. One must ask why conservative and religious countries such as Russia or Iran would ally themselves with Godless communists in Cuba and Venezuela.

What all these countries have in common is their desire to run their own affairs; to be independent countries. This is unforgivable in the eyes of the West and must be tackled by any means necessary, including economic sanctions, color revolutions, and outright military aggression.

The West and its NATO military arm had surrounded Russia with hostile countries and military bases, armed and manipulated Ukraine to be used as a hammer against it, and employed sanctions and threats. The same thing was and is happening in Asia where China is being surrounded by all means available. The same applies to all the Independents mentioned above to some extent. In the past 10 years or so the pressure has increased massively on the Independents and it reached almost a fever pitch in the year before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

During the year before the Ukraine war, the US sent its diplomats around the world to tune up the pressure. They were like a traveling circus or a rock band on a tour, but instead of entertainment, they delivered threats: buy this from us and do what we tell you or there will be consequences. The urgency was absolute and palpable, but then came the Ukraine war and the pressure went up to 11. During the first month of the war, the entire West’s diplomatic corps was fully engaged in threats against the ‘rest of the world’ to engineer the isolation of Russia. This didn’t work, which resulted in panic in political and diplomatic circles in the US and Europe.

All this pressure through the years, and all the fear and panic when it didn’t work, are clearly related to the events in the Ukraine. They are a part of the same ‘syndrome’ and have the same cause.

The debt dimension

There have been many explanations for what is going on and the most common is the fight between two possible futures; a multipolar world where there are several power centers in the world, and a unipolar world where the West governs the world. This is correct as far as it goes, but there is another reason which explains why this is happening now and all the urgency and panic in the West.

Recently the New Zealand tech guru Kim Dotcom tweeted a thread about the debt situation in the US. According to him all debt and unfunded liabilities of the US exceed the total value of the entire country, including the land. This situation is not unique to the US. Most countries in the West have debt that can only be paid back by selling the entire country and everything it contains. On top of that, most non-western countries are buried in dollar-denominated debt and are practically owned by the same financiers who own the West.

During the last few decades, the economy of the US and Europe has been falsified on a level that is difficult to believe. We in the West have been living far beyond our means and our currencies have been massively overvalued. We have been able to do this through two mechanisms:

  1. The first one is the reserve status of the dollar and the semi-reserve status of the euro which have enabled the West to export digital money and receive goods in return. This has created enormous financial power for the West and enabled it to function as a parasite on the world economy. We have been getting a lot of goods for free, to put it mildly.
  2. The second falsification mechanism is the increase in debt to a level where we have essentially pawned everything we own, including our houses and lands, to keep up our living standards. We own nothing now when the debt has been subtracted. The debt has long since become unserviceable – far beyond our ability to pay interests on – which explains why the interest rates in the West are in the neighborhood of zero. Any increase would make the debt unserviceable and we would all go formally bankrupt in a day.

On top of all this, the falsification has created artificially strong currencies in the West which has boosted their purchasing power for goods priced in non-western currencies. These mechanisms have also enabled the West to run bloated and dysfunctional service economies where inefficiencies are beyond belief. We have giant groups of people in our economies that not only create no value but destroy value systematically. What maintains the West’s standard of living now is a small minority of productive people, constant debt increase, and parasitism of the rest of the world.

The people who own all this debt actually own everything we think we own. We in the West own nothing at this point – we only think we do. But who are our real owners? We know more or less who they are because they meet every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos along with the western political elites who they also happen to own.

It is clear that our owners have been getting increasingly worried, and their worries have been increasing in sync with the increased pressure applied by the West on the rest of the world, particularly the Independents. During the last Davos meeting, the mood was bleak and panicked at the same time, much like the panic among the western political elites when the isolation of Russia failed.

What is about to happen

The panic of our owners and their politicians is understandable because we have come to the end of the line. We can no longer keep up our living standards by debt increase and parasitism. The debt is reaching beyond what we own as collateral and our currencies are about to become worthless. We will no longer be able to get free stuff from the rest of the world, or pay back our debt – let alone pay interest on it. The entire West is about to go bankrupt and our standard of living is about to go down by a massive percentage. This is what has our owners panicked and they see only two scenarios:

  1. In the first scenario most countries in the West, and everything and everyone within them, declare bankruptcy and erase the debt by diktat – which sovereign states are able to do. This will also erase the wealth and political power of our owners.
  2. In the second scenario, our owners take over the collateral during the bankruptcy. The collateral is us and everything we own.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which scenario was chosen. The plan for the second scenario is ready and being implemented as we speak. It is called ‘The Great Reset’ and was constructed by the people behind the World Economic Forum. This plan is not a secret and can be examined to a certain degree on the WEF website.

The Great Reset is a mechanism for the seizing of all debt collateral which includes your assets, the assets of your city or municipality, the assets of your state, and most corporate assets not already held by our owners.

This asset seizure mechanism has several components, but the most important are the following four:

  1. Abolishment of sovereignty: A sovereign (independent) country is a dangerous country because it can choose to default on its debt. The decrease in sovereignty has been a priority for our owners and various schemes have been attempted such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The most successful scheme is undoubtedly the European Union itself.
  2. The down-tuning of the economy: The western economy (and indeed the global economy) must be tuned down by a very significant percentage. This down-tuning is necessary because the western economy is massively falsified now and must be taken down to its real level – which may be as low as half of what it is now – or more. The slow takedown has also the purpose of avoiding a sudden crash that would cause massive social unrest which would be a threat to our owners. A controlled takedown is therefore preferable to an uncontrolled crash. This controlled takedown is already happening and has been going on for quite some time. Many examples can be mentioned of this takedown, including the EU and US energy policy which is designed to sabotage the western economy, and the obvious attempts at demand destruction during and after the epidemic, including the fairly bizarre logistical problems which suddenly came out of nowhere.
  3. Asset harvesting (you will own nothing and be ‘happy’): All assets that can be considered to be collateral to our private and collective/public debt will be taken over. This is a clearly stated aim of the Great Reset but it is less clear how this would be carried out. Total control of western governments (and indeed all governments) would seem to be necessary for this. That precondition is closer than one might think because most western governments seem to be beholden to Davos at this point. The process will be sold as necessary social restructuring because of an economic crisis and global warming and will result in a massive decrease in living standards for regular people, although not the elites.
  4. Oppression: A great many people will not like this and an uprising is a likely response, even if the takedown is done gradually. To prevent this from happening, a social control mechanism is being implemented which will erase personal freedom, the freedom of speech, and privacy. It will also create absolute dependence of the individual on the state. This must be done before the economic takedown can be completed or there will be a revolution. This mechanism is already being implemented enthusiastically in the West as anybody with eyes and ears can see.

Russia, China, and other Independents

How do Russia and China, and the war in Ukraine, factor into all of this? Why all the pressure from the West throughout the years and why all this panic now? Part of the reason for the pressure on the Independents, particularly Russia and China, is simply that they have resisted western hegemony. That is enough for getting on the West’s naughty list. But why the increased pressure in recent years?

The reason is that Russia and China cannot be subjugated through bankruptcy and their assets harvested. They do not have much debt in western currencies which means that the people who own the West through debt do not currently own Russia and China (like they own the West and the indebted ‘third world’) and cannot acquire them through debt. The only way to acquire them is through regime change. Their governments must be weakened by any means, including economic sanctions and military means if necessary -thus the use of Ukraine as a battering ram for Russia and Taiwan for China.

Subjugating Russia and China is an existential issue for our Davos owners because when they take the western economy down, everything else must go down too. If the western economy is taken down and a large economic block doesn’t participate in the downfall, it will be a disaster for the West. The new block will gain massive economic power, and possibly unipolar hegemony of sorts, while the West descends into a feudal Dark Age and irrelevance. Therefore the entire world must go down for the Great Reset to work. Russia and China must be subjugated by any means, as well as India and other stubborn nations.

This is what has fueled the situation we now find ourselves in and will fuel the continuation of World War 3. The western owner-elites are going to war to keep their wealth and power. Everyone who resists must be subjugated so they can follow the West into the planned Great Reset Dark Age.

The reason for the current panic among western elites is that the Ukraine project isn’t going as planned. Instead of Russia being bled on the battlefield, it is Ukraine and the West that bleed. Instead of the Russian economy crashing resulting in Putin’s replacement by a Davos-compatible leader, it is the West’s economy that is crashing. Instead of Russia being isolated, it is the West that is being increasingly isolated. Noting is working, and to top it all off, Europe has given the Russians the means and motive to destroy the European economy by partly shutting down its industry. Without Russian resources, there is no European industry, and without industry, there are no taxes for paying for unemployment benefits, pensions, all the refugees, and pretty much everything else which holds European societies together. The Russians now have the ability to engineer an uncontrolled crash in Europe which is not what Davos planned. An uncontrolled crash might see Davos’s heads roll, literally, and that is causing fear and panic in elite circles. The only solution for them is to move on with World War 3 and hope for the best.

What to do

The Great Reset of the world economy is the direct cause of World War 3 – assuming that is what is going on. What can be done about this? From inside the West, little can be done. The only way is to somehow remove Davos from the equation, but that is most likely not going to happen for two reasons: The first one is that the Davos great resetters are too entwined in the western economy and politics. Davos is like an octopus with its arms and suckers inside every country’s elite circles, media, and government. They are too entrenched to be easily removed. The second reason is that the western population is too brainwashed and ignorant. The level of their brainwashing is such that a large part of them actually want to become poor – although they use the word ‘green’ for ‘poor’ because it sounds better. There are, however, some indications that there may be divisions within western elites. Some of them, particularly within the US, may be resisting the primarily Europe-designed Great Reset – but whether this opposition is real or effective remains to be seen.

However, outside the West, there are certain measures that can be taken and must be taken. Some of those measures are drastic and some of them are being done as we speak. Among the measures are the following:

  1. The Independents, led by Russia, China, and India, must create a block to isolate themselves from the radioactive West. This isolation must not only be economic, but also political and social. Their economic systems must be divorced from the West and made autonomous. Their cultures and history must be defended against western influences and revisionism. This process appears to be underway.
  2. The Independents must immediately ban all western sponsored institutions and NGOs in their countries, regardless of whether they are sponsored by western states or individuals. Furthermore, they must ban all media receiving western sponsorship and strip every school and university of western sponsorship and influence.
  3. They must leave all international institutions up to and possibly including the United Nations because all international bodies are controlled by the West. They must then replace them with new institutions within their block.
  4. They must, at some point, declare the dollar and the euro currencies non grata. That means that they should declare default on all debts denominated in these currencies, but not other debts. This will most likely come at a later stage but is inevitable.

This will create a situation where the West will descend into darkness without pulling others down with it – if we manage to escape the nuclear fire.

Tired Of Being Asked To Work For Free, This Artist Started Drawing These Client Requests

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@forexposure_txt is a Twitter account dedicated to compiling quotes from artists who were expected to work for free. It was created by artist and writer Ryan Estrada. An artist has decided to take some of those quotes and use them to inspire various portraits of what she imagines those people look like. They’re part of a series titled “For Exposure,” and they were created for Format Magazine by Emmie Tsumura, a Toronto-based illustrator and graphic designer. Check out some of our favorites below. If you’re an artist then chances are that more than a few of them will resonate with you!

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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Russian Anthrax, Texas Secession from the USA, Undersea submarine war near Taiwan, NATO and UK arming up for nuclear war with Russia

Jesus! Shit the world seems to be a crumbling fast. Many changes. Many new ideas, and a collapse of the old. Things going on, but most are not being reported on. But we will touch on the items here.

Let’s begin with a plea for help investing 27 million dollars. All she needs is a tiny retainer.

Don’t you know…

I am sending my greetings to you from the Sultanate of Oman, In the capital city of Muscat.

May i use this medium to open a mutual communication with you, and seeking your acceptance towards investing in your country under your management as my partner, My name is Aisha Gaddafi and presently living in Oman, i am a Widow and single Mother with three Children, the only biological Daughter of late Libyan President (Late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi) and presently i am under political asylum protection by the Omani Government.

I have funds worth "Twenty Seven Million Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars" -$27.500.000.00 US Dollars which i want to entrust on you for investment project in your country.If you are willing to handle this project on my behalf, kindly reply urgent to enable me provide you more details to start the transfer process.

Thanks
Yours Truly Aisha

China is involved in a massive undersea operation off the South Coast of Taiwan

The flight paths are identical to the flight paths that were involved in…

  • The American Submarine “collision with a undersea mountain”.
  • The American “recovery effort” of a F-35 fighter jet in the ocean.

The flight path of the military aircraft is shown below:

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The type of aircraft that are involved included:  (All images are file photos, and NOT from today’s flights)

1x Y-9 EW

Starting from the 1980s, based on a Chinese cargo plane Y-8 (a localized version of the Soviet An-12 production Shaanxi Aircraft Industry Corporation) and its radically improved version of Y-9 was created 19 different versions of special aircraft, including 11 types of aircraft series “Gaoxin” (GX, 高新) for the Air Force and Air Force PLA Navy.

“Gaoxin” – a designation for the aircraft carriers of special electronic equipment, in this family include aircraft EW, AWACS, electronic intelligence, psychological warfare and basic patrol.

Older types of patrol and other special aircraft, which were created in the 1980s – 1990s, as well as the test platform used in the aviation industry, this designation does not carry.

Also, refer to “Gaoxin” have no special plane on the basis of other platforms, such as AWACS aircraft KJ-2000 and electronic reconnaissance aircraft based on the Tu-154 (Tu-154D).

From the bottom up: Airplane EW GX-1 (Y-8CB), electronic intelligence aircraft GX-2 (Y-8JB), jammer GX-3 (Y-8G)
From the bottom up: Airplane EW GX-1 (Y-8CB), electronic intelligence aircraft GX-2 (Y-8JB), jammer GX-3 (Y-8G)

From the bottom up: Airplane communication and control GX-4 (Y-8T). AWACS aircraft GX-5 (Y-8W, KJ-200), base patrol aircraft GX-6 (Y-8Q)
From the bottom up: Airplane communication and control GX-4 (Y-8T). AWACS aircraft GX-5 (Y-8W, KJ-200), base patrol aircraft GX-6 (Y-8Q)

From the bottom up: GX-7 (Y-8XZ) psychological warfare aircraft, functionally close to the US EC-130J Commando Solo, capable of performing radio and television broadcasting in the territory controlled by the enemy; GX-8 (Y-9JB) - air complex electronic warfare for the Navy; GX-9 (Y-9W, KJ-500) - AWACS aircraft of the new generation.
From the bottom up: GX-7 (Y-8XZ) psychological warfare aircraft, functionally close to the US EC-130J Commando Solo, capable of performing radio and television broadcasting in the territory controlled by the enemy; GX-8 (Y-9JB) – air complex electronic warfare for the Navy; GX-9 (Y-9W, KJ-500) – AWACS aircraft of the new generation.

From the bottom up: GX-10 (Y-9XZ) - psychological warfare aircraft of the second generation; GX-11 (Y-9G) - electronic reconnaissance aircraft the Air Force of the second generation.
From the bottom up: GX-10 (Y-9XZ) – psychological warfare aircraft of the second generation; GX-11 (Y-9G) – electronic reconnaissance aircraft the Air Force of the second generation.

All of the variants.

All of the variants.
All of the variants.

1x Y-8 ELINT

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 6x H-6

This is a bomber equipped with missiles that are designed to sink submarines.

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1x Y-20 (tanker variant)

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 2x KJ-500 AEW&C

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 1x Y-8 ASW

Anti-submarine hunter-killer aircraft.

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All aircraft were supported by a strong presence of military aircraft in support. They included…

 8x J-16

It’s sort of like a Chinese F-14 clone. Think the movie “Topgun” starring Tom Cruse.

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 4x Su-30

This is sort of like the Chinese version of the American F-18. Think of the second Tom Cruse movie “Topgun: Maverick”.

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 5x J-11

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Australia’s leading wine authority to close office in China as exports plunge

Australia’s leading wine industry body Wine Australia will be closing its only physical office in China after sales to the greater China succumb to Beijing’s prohibitive duties.

“Wine Australia has made the difficult decision to close our physical office in Shanghai. This decision follows extensive consultation with the Australian grape and wine sector and is based on the current environment and market opportunity,” a Wine Australia spokeswoman said.

“Wine Australia will continue to maintain our brand presence in China via our wine trade and consumer facing social media channels, and will continue to work closely with in-market trade representatives on brand building and marketing campaigns.”

The once 1.2 billion Australian dollar-a-year trade ($830 million) has whittled down to just over AU$200 million at the end of March, an alleged casualty of the tension between the two countries.

Wine Australia said it will continue to operate in China as it does in other markets, through “relationships with key in-market agency and marketing partners, trade show organizers and education networks,” a format that tends to be used for smaller trading markets.

The rest of the article HERE

UKRAINE ATTACKS RUSSIAN DRILLING PLATFORM IN BLACK SEA OFF CRIMEA

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The Ukrainian armed forces have attacked an Oil & Gas Drilling platform in the Black Sea off the coast of Crimea.

A reported missile strike by Ukraine, blew up the Chernomorneftegaz drilling platforms.

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The platforms of Chernomorneftegaz were hit this early morning, the head of the Crimea, Sergei Aksenov, says.

“This morning, the drilling platforms of Chornomorneftegaz were attacked. I am in touch with colleagues from the Ministry of Defense and the FSB, we are working on saving people. Five people were rescued with three of them reported injured. The search for the rest of them continues. The Ministry of Defense ensures the conduct of a rescue operation with the involvement of patrol ships and aviation. We will provide updates on the events,” 

The head of the Crimea said in his post.

Chernomorneftegaz is an enterprise that independently carries out exploration and development of oil and gas fields in the Crimean sector of the Black and Azov Seas."

Word on Intel Circuits is that Russia will launch retaliatory strikes on “Ukrainian decision making centers.”

‘Stop NATO,’ protesters chant at massive rally in heart of EU

70,000 to 80,000 demonstrators packed the streets of Brussels on Monday, bringing the city to a standstill. In addition to expressing anger at the rising cost of living in Belgium, many condemned the US-led NATO alliance and its involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.

Article HERE

*****BULLETIN ***** COVERT INTEL – “The Decision has been taken . . .”

This content is for Subscribers only —

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Artist Imitators Thrive in China’s Famous Oil Painting Village

When I lived in Shenzhen, I used to visit this village perhaps twice a year. It’s just awesome.

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An artist working on his painting outside a gallery at the artist village on June 12, 2014 in Shenzhen, China. The Dafen Artist Village in Guangdong province, China, is home to thousands of artists who reproduce some of the world’s most iconic paintings as well as create their own works. The village, on the outskirts of Shenzhen, is becoming a major center for original Chinese art. (Photo by Palani Mohan/Getty images)

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***** BULLETIN ***** Covert Intel – “Attack against broad swaths of NATO”

This content is for subscribers only —

Morocco To Receive New Vaccine Production Equipment From China

Morocco aims to position itself as a regional manufacturing hub for COVID-19 vaccines, supporting the continental vaccination campaign.

Poroshenko: Minsk Agreement Was Only To Buy Time for Ukraine

Former Ukraine President Poroshenko admitted on television that the Minsk Agreement was a complete deception; was only signed to buy time for Ukraine to build its army and economy.   He looked directly in the faces of Hollande of France, Merkel of Germany, and Putin of Russia,  and lied to them as he shook their hands.

The Minsk Agreement of 2015 was a heartfelt and earnest effort by French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and representatives from Luhansk and Donetsk, to make a peace deal to stop the battles between Ukraine and the Donbass (Luhansk and Donetsk) which had already killed thousands of civilians.

It is now revealed that the Ukraine delegation, headed by Poroshenko, was there with the express intent to deceive.  They had no intention whatsoever of negotiating a true and lasting peace, they were only there to buy time to build Ukraine’s military.

In the video below, Poroshenko, interviewed this past weekend, June 18-19, 2022, admits on TV the entire negotiation was to “buy time to build Ukraine’s army and buy time to build Ukraine’s economy.”   The entire presence of Ukraine at the peace negotiations was a complete, planned, deliberate, fraud.

Ukraine did not implement even ONE aspect of the Minsk Agreement for eight years after it was signed.   Now, they wonder why there is war on their soil?

VIDEO:

Slow-Cooker Barbecue Bacon Cheeseburger Meatballs

Who needs a bun? These barbecue bacon cheeseburger meatballs simmer away in the slow cooker while you get the rest of your party prepped, then team up with pickles for a pretty presentation.

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Ukraine SitRep – Lysichansk Cauldron – Sinking Morale – More Provocations

From MoA

The former CIA and intelligence bigwig Graham Fuller predicts a gloomy outcome of the U.S-Russia proxy war in Ukraine. Gloomy for Ukraine, the U.S. and Europe:

Contrary to Washington’s triumphalist pronouncements, Russia is winning the war, Ukraine has lost the war. Any longer-term damage to Russia is open to debate.

American sanctions against Russia have turned out to be far more devastating to Europe than to Russia. The global economy has slowed and many developing nations face serious food shortages and risk of broad starvation.

There are already deep cracks in the European façade of so-called “NATO unity.” Western Europe will increasingly rue the day that it blindly followed the American Pied Piper to war against Russia. Indeed, this is not a Ukrainian-Russian war but an American-Russian war fought by proxy to the last Ukrainian.

Contrary to optimistic declarations, NATO may in fact ultimately emerge weakened. Western Europeans will think long and hard about the wisdom and deep costs of provoking deeper long term confrontations with Russia or other “competitors”of the US.

Europe will sooner or later return to the purchase of inexpensive Russian energy. Russia lies on the doorstep and a natural economic relationship with Russia will possess overwhelming logic in the end.

Europe already perceives the US as a declining power with an erratic and hypocritical foreign policy “vision” premised upon the desperate need to preserve “American leadership” in the world. America’s willingness to go to war to this end is increasingly dangerous to others.

All the above had already been said on this website in late February and March. But it is good to see that seasoned intelligence people are now coming to similar conclusions.

Two weeks ago I wrote that the Ukrainians will soon reach a breaking point. Today’s ‘clobber list’ by the Russia Ministry of Defense has an additional part about Ukrainian troop loses that supports that take:

Since May 19, during the month, only the 14th Mechanised Brigade of the AFU has lost 2,100 persons who resulted dead and wounded. Due to low moral and psychological conditions, 800 persons destined for replenishing the losses of this unit, refused to go to the operational area and accused officers of incompetence, bribery and cronyism in paying money allowance.

About 100 servicemen of a reconnaissance unit of the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade have been relieved of combat duty and transported to Kremenchug for investigation.

A considerable part of the commanders of the 30th Mechanised Brigade of the AFU have abstracted themselves from managing their units and refuse to fulfil combat tasks. All kinds of pretexts are used for simulating illness. The majority of units have already been left without any officers.

A mechanized brigade has about 3,500 soldiers. In one month the Ukrainian 14th lost two third of its people. The replacements are not trained on mechanized equipment (tanks, APCs) that likely no longer exists and can only be used as unprotected infantry. It is no wonder that they reject to be send into a hopeless situation.

Finland: NATO = “No Deal”

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Finland could not reach an agreement with Turkey, over what the Turks want in order to approve Finland’s membership in NATO.  For now, it looks as though Finland will NOT be able to join NATO.

Details are sketchy at this time.

The information above comes from an Intel source in the Office of the President of Finland.

More info as I get it.

Texas is building up to leave the United States

Oh, yes it is.

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Throughout this document are strongly worded sentences and directions on how to leave the United States.

A very interesting discussion on “Redacted”. It’s TEXAS SECESSION. The discussion starts at point 1:31:40 and well worth a listen to.

Surface View: A Wallcovering with a Difference

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Surface View is quite simple. It’s where images and your imagination come together to create stunning interiors. Surface View’s workshops are based in Reading, England, where they make every print to order. From sourcing, reproduction and design, to individually made prints and installation, here’s how it works. Surface View is all about combining cutting-edge technology with the curator’s eye, and skilled experts are the embodiment of that process.

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MoA continues…

The Russian side reported yesterday that it had killed 50 generals and higher officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with a missile strike. The group was meeting to plan the further fight in the southern region of Odessa and Kherson. This now seems to have been confirmed:

Management Impact Solutions Consulting, LP - @MiExecSearch - 15:10 UTC · Jun 20, 2022

Russian Armed Forces beat out AFU generals, who were holed up in the rear. The military-civilian administration of Zaporozhye region confirmed results of a missile strike on AFU command post near the village of Shirokaya Dacha, 57 top-level officers were killed.

Last night, probably in response to the strike on the officers, the Ukrainians fired a missile against a gas and oil production platform in the waters near Crimea. The installation was damaged. Russia considers that to be a direct attack on valuable infrastructure within Russian territory and will likely give a strong response.

Yesterday Lithuania announced that it would immediately prohibit Russian goods under EU sanctions to cross from Belarus to the Kaliningrad enclave at the Baltic seas which is Russian territory. That is in breach of several international agreements which guarantee unhindered Russian access to the city. Russia has yet to announce a response to this new provocation.

Social Class Identity

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This project is concerned with our social class system operating within society and in particular the ‘1’ percent of our global population. A response to NextByDesign‘s call for posters relating to the Occupy movements worldwide, in which we are entering a year polarised by the ’99’ and ‘1’ percent inequalities.

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An interesting discussion

There must be some sane people at the Pentagon ...

-Eighthman 


Any sane people there who haven't already fled have no doubt been driven mad by all the lunatics in charge of their own military now protecting and defending what has become the world's first official Pathocracy.

-Scorpion

Anthrax Case in Russia

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In the Stavropol region of southwest Russia, a local resident is confirmed to be infected with anthrax.

Initial information out of the area says there’s no need for public alarm, but no one is saying how this person became infected or if anyone else is infected.

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Illustrator Shows The Cultural Difference Between The East And The West

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Berlin-based designer Yang Liu creates illustrations that show the cultural difference between the East and the West. Yang Liu was born in 1976 in Beijing. After studying at the University of Arts Berlin, she worked as a designer in Singapore, London, Berlin, and New York.

Drawing on her own experiences of China and Europe, Yang Liu explores a rich range of differences between Eastern and Western experience, from sleeping patterns to the role of senior citizens, from leisure activities to attitudes towards beauty, property, and public space. With their clarity, insight, and fundamental fondness towards both cultures, Yang Liu’s work has become not only a social media and magazine darling, but also a favorite with professional training programs around the world.

Blue = West, Red = East

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Lithuania Warned – in Writing!

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Russia has explicitly WARNED Lithuania that unless unrestricted rail passage is restored to the Russian state of Kaliningrad, immediately, “Russia will take action” against Lithuania.

These words were written and handed to the charge d’ affaires of Lithuania, who was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry to receive the written warning today.

The last time Russia warned a country they had “X” time to do something, was Ukraine.   Seven hours after being given that five hour deadline, the Russian Army entered Ukraine by force.

Russia means business. No more "fun and games". This is exactly the kind of things that Got Germany, and Poland into war in 1939. -MM

‘HELP!’ Stray Cat Pleads For Helping His Friend Be Treated

It’s important for us to be guardians for others. Whether animals or humans. Be the Rufus!

Panic Buying in Kaliningrad as Lithuania “Sanctions” Russian Railroad

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Video below shows panic-buying by Russians living in Kaliningrad, a portion of Russia detached from the mainland, nestled between Lithuania and Poland. The buying began because Lithuania cut-off Russian railroad shipments to the oblast (state).

For more than thirty years, there has been an understanding between Russia and Lithuania that the oblast (state) of Kaliningrad would be supplied via the Russian railroad through a narrow strip of land called the Suwalki Gap, that runs from Russia, along the southeastern border of Lithuania.  The agreement held that the trains would be left alone, and act as a supply tunnel of sorts to the Russians living in Kaliningrad.

All that ended 48 hours ago, when Lithuania took it upon itself, to say Sanctions against Russia (over its Ukraine special military operation) would be applied to trains to/from Kaliningrad.

This means that virtually no transit can take place between Russia and its western-most state.

People in Kaliningrad fear they may starve to death having been cut-off from Supplies.  That fear caused panic, and panic-buying took place yesterday and last night.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

It appears that Lithuania is trying to CAUSE Russia to attack them militarily over this new embargo.  They want this to take place because Lithuania is a member of NATO and once an attack takes place, Lithuania will invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty, collective self defense.

That would instantly place ALL the countries of NATO, at war with Russia, which is exactly what NATO wants, so as to be able to engage Russia directly to stop its operation in Ukraine.

The trouble with this thinking is that the President of Russia made clear “it will be a war that nobody will win.”   That’s a euphemism for nuclear war.

President Putin, commenting publicly at the start of Russia’s “special military operation” into Ukraine, made clear that Russia’s conventional forces are no match for NATO Conventional forces.   But, he said, “Russia is also a nuclear power.  And our technology is superior to everyone else’s.  So if NATO invokes Article 5, it will be a war no one will win.”

Knowing this, Lithuania STILL enacted a sanctions embargo against Kaliningrad.

They want nuclear war.

UPDATE 8:58 AM EDT —

“The UN needs to rectify the situation with the blockade of Kaliningrad, or Russia will be free to resolve the issue of transit in any way– the head of the Russian Federation Commission for the Protection of Sovereignty Klimov.

(HT REMARK: This is almost identical to the wording used by Russia about resolving Security Guarantees, before it entered Ukraine.  Clearly, this remark is meant to warn Lithuania (and the world) that Russia will resort to armed force to open the Kaliningrad embargo.)

UPDATE 10:27 AM EDT —

Senator Klimov: the blockade of Kaliningrad by Lithuania can be regarded as direct aggression

If the European Union does not correct the “impudent trick” of Lithuania, which banned the transit of almost half of the cargo to the Kaliningrad region, then Brussels itself will disavow the legitimacy of the documents on Lithuanian membership in the EU for Russia and thus “untie its hands” to solve the problem of Kaliningrad transit “by any means.” 

Brief Recap with historical notes:

Kaliningrad’s governor Alikhanov has already called on Russian federal authorities to prepare tit-for-tat measures against Lithuania in wake of the transit ban.

Alikhanov cited a key condition in the 2004 agreement that was part of Lithuania’s accession to the EU:

"that the Baltic state will apply in practice the principle of freedom of transit of goods, including energy, between the  Kaliningrad Region and the rest of Russian territory."

"In particular, we confirm that there shall be freedom of such transit, and that the goods in such transit shall not be subject to unnecessary delays or restrictions and shall be exempt from customs duties and transit duties or other charges related to transit,"

Then, in April…
When the EU first proposed the blockage of goods as part of the last major sanctions package in early April, Kremlin officials warned of war given Moscow would have to “break the blockade” for the sake if its citizens.

"I think that for now, this is a game, testing the waters <…>.

In case of a blockade, as they are saying, the Soviet Union knows how to break the blockades, we (Russia as the successor of the Soviet Union – TASS) have vast experience,” the senator said.

"If they want to go to the length of making us break this blockade to save the lives of our people, who live there, we can do this,"

Ahead of the new Lithuanian transit ban taking effect, the state railways service was reportedly ‘awaiting final word’ from the European Commission.

Then Brussels ruled that:

"sanctioned goods and cargo should still be prohibited even if they travel from one part of Russia to another but through EU territory,"

In Moscow’s eyes, this is tantamount to laying economic siege to part of Russia’s sovereign territory and one million of its citizens.

What Is Your Plan To Make It Through The Worst Global Food Crisis In Any Of Our Lifetimes?

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We are being warned well ahead of time that it is coming.  Joe Biden has publicly admitted that the coming food shortages are “going to be real”, and the head of the UN World Food Program is now telling us that we could soon see “hell on Earth” because the lack of food will be so severe.

Food prices are already escalating dramatically all over the globe, and food riots have already erupted in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.  But most people in the western world are treating this crisis as if it is no big deal.  Many seem to assume that our leaders have everything under control and that things will work out just fine somehow.

Unfortunately, the truth is that everything is not going to be okay.

So far this year, the number of hungry people around the globe has risen to more than 800 million

Currently around 811 million people are experiencing hunger. Levels of food insecurity have doubled from 2019, increasing from 135 million to 276 million. Of this total around 48.9 million people are facing acute or emergency levels of food insecurity that require humanitarian intervention.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Much worse is ahead, and David Beasley is openly warning that “hell on Earth” is coming…

The UN has warned that there could be “hell on earth” due to the global economic impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Guardian reports that David Beasley, director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), has said that the war has been “devastating” in conjunction with various other factors.

He said, “Even before the Ukraine crisis, we were facing an unprecedented global food crisis because of Covid and fuel price increases. Then, we thought it couldn’t get any worse, but this war has been devastating.”

According to Beasley, we will soon see “frightening” shortages of food, and those shortages could potentially spark civil unrest in literally dozens of different nations…

Dozens of countries risk protests, riots and political violence this year as food prices surge around the world, the head of the food-aid branch of the United Nations has warned.

Speaking in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, on Thursday, David Beasley, director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), said the world faced “frightening” shortages that could destabilise countries that depend on wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia.

But most Americans are not paying much attention to this rapidly growing crisis because they don’t think that it will really impact them personally.

For the vast majority of us, a lack of food is something that we have never had to be concerned about before.

During “normal” times, we could always go to the grocery store and fill up our carts with mountains of super cheap food whenever we wanted.

Unfortunately, things have changed.  Food production in the U.S. is going to be way below expectations this year, and the head of the National Black Farmers Association claims that we will soon see “a lot of empty shelves and a lot more high food prices”

Three weeks ago John Boyd Jr., the President of the National Black Farmers Association, said “We are in a crisis right now as far as the food chain goes with the farmer in this country,” adding “We’re going to see a lot of empty shelves and a lot more high food prices.” 

In his forty-year career as a farmer, Boyd said he never imagined he would be “paying $5.63 for a gallon of diesel fuel, $900 a ton for fertilizer, and all-time high prices for soybean seeds.” All of the prices he mentioned are at record highs, pressuring farmers’ margins.

Of course we are already seeing widespread shortages of certain products around the country.

For example, Fox Business is reporting on the serious shortage of tampons that has recently started making headlines…

A spokesperson for Tampax, which is owned by P&G, told FOX Business in a statement that this is “a temporary situation, and the Tampax team is producing tampons 24/7 to meet the increased demand for our products.”

Meanwhile, the ongoing shortage of baby formula just keeps getting even worse...

Parents aren’t getting much of a break as the out-of-stock rate for baby formula rose to 73% nationwide for the week ending May 29, according to the most recent data by retail data firm Datasembly. It’s a significant increase from earlier in the month, when the national out-of-stock rate for baby formula stood at 45%.

On top of everything else, we are now facing a shortage of hot sauce

In April, Huy Fong Foods, Inc., the nation’s leading sriracha sauce manufacturer, sent a letter to customers about an impending shortage, which would directly impact retailers and restaurants.

“Unfortunately, we can confirm that there is an unprecedented shortage of our products,” Huy Fong Foods told Fox News Digital in an email.

These shortages are just a very small preview of what is approaching.

As I have been warning on my website throughout 2022, conditions are going to deteriorate quite a bit more in the months ahead.

So what is your plan to make it through the worst global food crisis in any of our lifetimes?

Have you been stocking up?

Earlier this year, I published a list of 50 basic items that I would recommend having on hand.  The following list is certainly not exhaustive, but it will help you cover many of the essentials…

  • #1 A Generator
  • #2 A Berkey Water Filter
  • #3 A Rainwater Collection System If You Do Not Have A Natural Supply Of Water Near Your Home
  • #4 An Emergency Medical Kit (Equipped with major medicines.)
  • #5 Rice
  • #6 Pasta
  • #7 Canned Soup
  • #8 Canned Vegetables
  • #9 Canned Fruit
  • #10 Canned Chicken
  • #11 Jars Of Peanut Butter
  • #12 Salt
  • #13 Sugar
  • #14 Powdered Milk
  • #15 Bags Of Flour
  • #16 Yeast
  • #17 Lots Of Extra Coffee (If You Drink It)
  • #18 Buckets Of Long-Term Storable Food
  • #19 Extra Vitamins
  • #20 Lighters Or Matches
  • #21 Candles
  • #22 Flashlights Or Lanterns
  • #23 Plenty Of Wood To Burn
  • #24 Extra Blankets
  • #25 Extra Sleeping Bags
  • #26 A Sun Oven
  • #27 An Extra Fan If You Live In A Hot Climate
  • #28 Hand Sanitizer
  • #29 Toilet Paper
  • #30 Extra Soap And Shampoo
  • #31 Extra Toothpaste
  • #32 Extra Razors
  • #33 Bottles Of Bleach
  • #34 A Battery-Powered Radio
  • #35 Extra Batteries
  • #36 Solar Chargers
  • #37 Trash Bags
  • #38 Tarps
  • #39 A Pocket Knife
  • #40 A Hammer
  • #41 An Axe
  • #42 A Shovel
  • #43 Work Gloves
  • #44 N95 Masks
  • #45 Seeds For A Garden
  • #46 Canning Jars
  • #47 Extra Supplies For Your Pets
  • #48 An Emergency Supply Of Cash
  • #49 Bibles For Every Member Of Your Family
  • #50 A “Bug Out Bag” For Every Member Of Your Family

Many of the items on this list are now much more expensive than they were earlier this year.

And if you wait, many of them will continue to become much more expensive.

If you don’t like my list, come up with your own.

The important thing is to have a plan.

Global events are really starting to spiral out of control, and I expect the second half of this year to be even more chaotic than the first half of this year has been.

Kyle Hilton’s Paper Dolls

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A series of paper dolls, based on tv shows/characters, created by illustrator Kyle Hilton.

This New Import Law Will Hurt U.S. Consumers

Today the the U.S., suffering from high inflation caused by a lack of supplies, is launching the dumbest sanction regime ever:

A new law, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, goes into effect in the United States on Tuesday and will bar products that were made in Xinjiang or have ties to the work programs there from entering the country. It requires importers with any ties to Xinjiang to produce documentation showing that their products, and every raw material they are made with, are free of forced labor — a tricky undertaking given the complexity and opacity of Chinese supply chains.
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In theory, the new U.S. law should block all goods made with any raw materials that are associated with Xinjiang until they are proven to be free of slavery or coercive labor practices. But it remains to be seen if the U.S. government is willing or able to turn away such an array of foreign goods.

The 12 million Uighurs live predominantly in the south of China’s Xinjiang province. The area is arid and there is not enough water for the growing population. Over the years this had led to poverty, social unrest and, with the help of some Saudi educated Wahhabi preachers, to terrorism against non-Wahhabis.

The Chinese government had launched a large scale program to solve the problem once and for all.

It subsidized companies to move production facilities to Xinjiang. For geographic reasons these are now mostly in the northern part of Xinjiang. The government also organized large camps for vocational and language training. After people went through those they were offered jobs in the new factories where they work in exchange for normal wages.

The U.S. anti-China propaganda campaign claims that these Uighur people were forced to take up their new jobs and calls that ‘forced labor’. It is not.

Working in some industry far from home is normal in China. It is the reason why each year during the Spring Festival season 300 million  people in China travel to reunite with their families.

Real forced labor is what one sees in the U.S. prison industry where prisoner have no choice but to work for a few pennies which the prison will in the end regain due to absurd prices for small necessities prisoners have to pay for.

It is doubtful that the Biden administration will not apply the new law to many more products.

Domestic producers competing with Chinese products can complain to the commerce department which would then have to detain imports at the border, launch an investigation and could eventually seize the products.

Auxin, a small U.S. producer of solar panels, did exactly that in a tariff case causing chaos in the industry:

The investigation will cut expected solar installations by 46 percent for 2022 and 2023 and could cost more than 100,000 solar jobs should the department impose the tariffs, according to an analysis released yesterday by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), which organized the congressional meetings.

The probe is “already having a pretty devastating impact,” SEIA President and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper told The Climate 202.

The new law will replace a Withhold Release Order (WRO) which the U.S. Custom and Border Protection (CBP) issued under the Trump administration in January 2021. The WRO applied to cotton products sourced from Xinjiang and has led to some chaos in the apparels industry.

The new UFLPA law is much wider and will hit many more products. Many commodities like lithium and nickel are produced in Xinjiang and flow into many downstream products:

Xinjiang Nonferrous and its subsidiaries have partnered with the Chinese authorities to take in hundreds of such [Uyghur] workers in recent years, according to articles displayed proudly in Chinese on the company’s social media account. These workers were eventually sent to work in the conglomerate’s mines, a smelter and factories that produce some of the most highly sought minerals on earth, including lithium, nickel, manganese, beryllium, copper and gold.

It is difficult to trace precisely where the metals produced by Xinjiang Nonferrous go. But some have been exported to the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and India, according to company statements and customs records. And some have gone to large Chinese battery makers, who in turn, directly or indirectly, supply major American entities, including automakers, energy companies and the U.S. military, according to Chinese news reports.

The bureaucratic effort importers in the solar and other industry will have to make to avoid getting punished under the new law is extensive:

CBP released UFLPA guidelines last week that includes a section on polysilicon imports. In order to comply with the UFLPA, CBP said solar companies must:

[1]   Provide complete supply chain documentation that lists all entities involved in the exported good.

[2]   Provide a flow chart mapping each step in production and identify the region where each material originated.

[3]   Provide a list of all entities associated with each step of production, even if the exporting company did not directly work with them.

The CBP guidelines also state that solar companies that source polysilicon both from within Xinjiang and outside the region risk being subject to detention, as it may be more difficult to verify the products did not co-mingle with Xinjiang polysilicon at any point in the manufacturing process.

For small importers it will be impossible to do the above. Only big companies can afford to research and provide all that data and to take the risk of importing products that may get confiscated at the border. They will of course ask their customers to pay for all that.

For the U.S. consumer this does not only mean higher prices but likely less access to products they need or want. The U.S. industry is not in state where it can provide on the scale that China can.

To avoid the scrutiny Chinese producers may eventually move their factories. But they will move to countries in South Asia and not to the United States.

Why the ‘green agenda’ Biden administration thought that this is a smart move is beyond me.

Posted by b on June 21, 2022 at 17:09 UTC | Permalink

Classic Album Covers Reimagined With Kittens

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These copycats are feline in the mood for rock… Legendary albums from a world dominated by kittens! All kitteny album parodies by Alfra Martini of aymvisuals.

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Kitten Reaches Out His Hand For People, Hoping They’d Save Him

A fine kitten rescue story. All because a big adult cat led people to the trapped kitten. A Rufus cat!

How to Make French Toast

What’s not to love about battered and fried bread? Especially when there are so many ways to make it! Here’s everything you need to know to whip up fabulous French toast for just about any meal.

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Types of French Toast

As far back as the 15th century, Europeans were following recipes for French toast—a.k.a. pain perdu (French for “lost bread”)—a simple dish consisting of stale bread that’s soaked in an egg-and-milk mixture and cooked to a golden brown. That recipe isn’t too far from the French toast we know and love today.

Nowadays, there are myriad ways to prepare this simple dish—and it doesn’t have to be relegated to the breakfast table either. Savory French toast variations, like stuffing it with ham and cheese, are perfect for cozy breakfasts, brunches, lunches, desserts or those special nights when breakfast for dinner is on the menu (hello, brinner!).

What You Need to Make French Toast

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Making French toast is simple; in fact, you probably already have everything you need!

  • Bread: Fantastic French toast starts with the right bread. Select bread that is thick enough to stand up to the egg mixture, such as Texas-toast style. The thicker cut allows the bread to soak up the egg without falling apart or becoming too mushy.
    • Many people prefer day-old bread, as stale bread will soak up more of the egg mixture without falling apart.
    • Try mixing things up with French or Italian bread, brioche, sourdough, cinnamon-raisin or banana bread, or whole-grain versions.
    • If you are gluten free or Celiac, there’s no reason you can’t get in on the French toast fun! Experiment with your favorite gluten-free bread varieties.
  • Eggs: Choose medium-size eggs that are nice and fresh. If you are vegan or don’t eat eggs, try some of these vegan egg substitutes. There is also a new product on the market called VeganEgg that is mixed with water to form an egg substitute.
  • Milk or cream: The liquid thins out the egg, allowing it to coat the bread and making it less “eggy.” If you’re allergic to milk or prefer milk alternatives, try soymilk, coconut milk or nut milks such as almond or cashew.
  • Batter extras: Many recipes, especially for classic French toast, call for additions such as nutmeg, cinnamon, sugar or vanilla (see below for more ideas). • Toppings: This is the really fun part! See below for creative topping ideas.
  • Something to grease the griddle: Use butter (watch it closely so it doesn’t burn!), cooking spray or a high heat-friendly oil like vegetable or canola. If you are using a nonstick surface, this step is optional.
  • Equipment: A mixing bowl for batter, cutting board and knife for bread if it’s not already sliced and either an electric skillet or large skillet.
  • Utensils: Whisk or fork to mix batter, heat-safe spatula for flipping the bread.

How to Make French Toast Batter

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Making the egg mixture doesn’t stop at beating a few eggs. This is where you add flavor that will infuse the French toast. Make your batter in a mixing bowl that is large enough for you to dip slices of bread in. Make sure the bread is coated on all sides before cooking it so it soaks up the batter and develops a nice crust as it cooks.

For basic French toast, use one egg, ¼ to 1/3 cup milk (depending on desired thickness) and ½ teaspoon vanilla extract for every 2 slices of bread. So, if you were making French toast for four, you would whisk together 4 eggs, 1 to 1/3 cups milk, and 2 teaspoons vanilla extract.

How to Cook French Toast in a Skillet or Griddle

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Cooking French toast in a skillet or griddle can get messy, but it’s worth it! Preheat a nonstick griddle to 375° on your stovetop (or heat skillet over medium heat), lightly oiling or buttering if desired. Once the pan is good and hot, dip the bread in the egg mixture on both sides, make sure it’s coated, and place onto the skillet. Cook until golden brown (2-4 minutes, depending on the size and thickness of the bread) on both sides. Remove from the griddle and repeat the process until all of the bread has been cooked.

To make the process less messy, place your batter bowl near the pan, and quickly move the bread from bowl to skillet. You’ll want to flip the toast carefully—batter can splash up and burn you if you do it too fast. Keep slices warm in the oven until you’re ready to serve them up.

Other Ways to Make French Toast

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Overnight French Toast: Soaking bread overnight infuses even more flavor and makes French toast extra soft and heavenly. To do this, dip the bread like normal, then place slices in an ungreased pan. Pour any remaining batter over the bread, cover loosely and refrigerate at least 8 hours but no longer than 24 hours before cooking the bread. Remember: There are raw eggs in the batter, so ensure that it’s covered and refrigerated properly!

Coated French Toast: Dredge your bread in something crunchy after dipping it in the batter—like crushed French Toast Crunch cereal (um, yum!)—for extra flavor and texture.

Baked French Toast: To avoid slaving over a hot stove or griddle while your guests await their brunch, try making French toast for a crowd in the oven as a bake or casserole!

Slow-Cooker French Toast: Put your slow cooker to use on holidays, or whenever you want an easy French toast recipe for a crowd. Cooking it low and slow lets the bread soak up even more flavor.

Stuffed French Toast: Chocolate, fruit, cream cheese or savory ingredients can all be stuffed inside French toast for extra flavor.

China’s comprehensive, systematic and elaborate response to Secretary Antony Blinken’s China policy speech

This is a comprehensive take down of Blinkens blunders about China and the US in general.  Full text on the Chinese Embassy of the USA website

It is long, very long, as any list of US problems, and dishonesty must be.

Please keep as a reference. The Chinese sound peeved, very very peeved.

Reality Check: Falsehoods in US Perceptions of China

2022/06/19 10:52

Introduction

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has recently delivered a speech at Asia Society outlining the US administration’s approach to China. With carefully calibrated language, he sought to promote the “China threat” narrative, interfere in China’s internal affairs, and smear China’s domestic and foreign policy, all in an attempt at full-blown containment and suppression of China.

In what is to follow, we will use facts and figures to show to the world how deceptive, hypocritical and dangerous the US’s China policy is.

Falsehood 1: China poses the most serious long-term challenge to the international order and is undermining it. The US will defend the international law, agreements, principles, and institutions that maintain peace and security, and protect the rights of individuals and sovereign nations.

Reality Check: What the US has constantly vowed to preserve is a so-called international order designed to serve the US’s own interests and perpetuate its hegemony. The US itself is the largest source of disruption to the actual world order.

◆ China has been and always will be a defender of the international order. China is a founding member of the United Nations (UN) and the first country to put its signature on the UN Charter. China is committed to upholding the UN-centered international system, the international order underpinned by international law, and the basic norms governing international relations built on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence jointly championed by China, India and Myanmar have been widely recognized by the international community and have become the basic norms guiding state-to-state relations.

China upholds true multilateralism and global strategic stability. China is the largest contributor of peacekeepers among the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the second largest contributor among all countries to the UN peacekeeping budget. China has taken an active part in international arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation processes. It has signed or acceded to more than 20 multilateral arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation treaties, including the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). China is against arms race.

In the wake of the international financial crisis of 2008, China adopted a responsible macro policy, remained a “stabilizer” for the world economy and made important contribution to global recovery. China actively provides international public goods to various countries, and has signed BRI cooperation agreements with 149 countries and 32 international organizations.

◆ In recent years, President Xi Jinping’s vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind has been warmly received by the international community. It has been written into multiple important documents issued by the UN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other multilateral institutions. UN Secretary-General António Guterres hailed China as an important pillar for multilateralism, noting that the purpose for practicing multilateralism is to build a community with a shared future for mankind. Peter Thomson, president of the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly, said the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind advocated by China is the only future for humanity on this planet.

In response to various new global challenges, President Xi Jinping put forward the Global Development Initiative (GDI) and the Global Security Initiative (GSI). They represent China’s proposals for making the global governance system fairer and more equitable, and have received positive response and wide support from the international community.

◆ The US has blatantly violated the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and the norms governing international relations. With its military might, the US has launched wars in numerous parts of the world, stoking divisions and conflicts and bringing huge turmoil and disaster to the world. Throughout the 240-plus-year history of the US, there were only 16 years in which the US was not at war. The US might as well be called the most belligerent country in the history of the world. US magazine The National Interest quoted Dakota Wood, senior research fellow for defense programs at the Heritage Foundation, who wrote that the US consistently needed to deploy military force every 15 years or so.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has either launched or participated in many wars overseas, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghan War and the Iraq War. Those wars caused extremely severe civilian casualties and property losses, and lead to colossal humanitarian disasters. Since 2001, US wars and military operations in the name of counterterrorism have killed more than 900,000 people, about 335,000 of whom were civilians, injured millions and displaced tens of millions.

◆ The US habitually puts its domestic law above the international law, and selectively applies international rules as it sees fit. Since the 1980s, the US had once withdrawn from 17 international organizations and treaties, including the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Paris Agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Treaty on Open Skies.

Although the current US administration declared that “America is back” and the US has rejoined some international organizations and agreements, the administration has in essence not abandoned the “America First” policy, and is advancing “selective multilateralism”. The current administration has stayed out of institutions and agreements considered harmful to US interests such as the Treaty on Open Skies. European media have described it as “America First 2.0”.

◆ The US has abused its financial hegemony and technological clout and engaged in economic coercion in the name of protecting national security. The US has enacted some domestic laws, such as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, and issued a series of executive orders to target and sanction specific countries, entities or individuals. The ambiguous rules contained in these acts and executive orders, such as the “minimum contacts principle” and “doctrine of effects”, are a willful expansion of the jurisdiction of US domestic laws. The US also abuses its domestic channels of prosecution to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over entities and individuals in other countries.

For more than 60 years, in total disregard of the many resolutions of the UN General Assembly, the US has continued its comprehensive blockade against Cuba based on its embargo policies and domestic laws such as the Torricelli Act and the Helms-Burton Act. The Cuba blockade is the longest and cruelest systemic trade embargo, economic blockade and financial sanctions in modern history. The blockade has been gravely detrimental to Cuba’s economic and social development, causing over 100 billion US dollars of direct losses to Cuba’s economy.

The US has carried out blockade and sanctions against Iran since late 1970s. In May 2018, the US government announced its unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA, and soon after resumed and expanded sanctions against Iran. Many countries and relevant entities have been forced to give up their cooperation with Iran. A large number of foreign oil enterprises left the country. Iran’s manufacturing industry can hardly sustain normal operation. The country has suffered economic slowdown, coupled with heightened inflation and massive currency depreciation.

The US has imposed unilateral sanctions on Belarus, Syria and Zimbabwe, among others, over the years, and ratcheted up “maximum pressure” against the DPRK, Venezuela, etc.

◆ Statistics show that the previous US administration had imposed over 3,900 sanction measures, which means it wielded its “big stick” three times a day on average. As of fiscal year 2021, the entities and individuals on US sanction lists topped 9,421, which was 933 percent higher compared to the fiscal year 2000.

The US’s illegal unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction have gravely undermined the sovereignty and security of other countries and severely impacted their economic development and people’s wellbeing. The sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction also constitute a gross violation of international law and basic norms of international relations.

In an article published in the September/October 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs, Daniel Drezner, Professor at Tufts University and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, criticizes successive US administrations for using “sanctions as the go-to solution for nearly every foreign policy problem.” He notes that sanctions not only are ineffective, but also “exert a humanitarian toll”, and that the United States of America has become the “United States of Sanctions”.

◆ The “rules-based international order” championed by the US is in fact another version of power politics. This is an attempt to impose one’s own will and standards on others, and to replace the commonly accepted international laws and norms with the house rules of a few countries.

In the world, there is only one international system, i.e. the international system with the UN at its core. There is only one international order, i.e. the international order underpinned by international law. And there is only one set of rules, i.e. the basic norms governing international relations underpinned by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.

Before wanting to discuss rules and order, the US should first pay up its arrears of one billion US dollars for the UN’s regular budget and 1.4 billion US dollars peacekeeping assessments, ratify in a timely manner the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, stop single-handedly blocking the negotiations on a verification protocol under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), lift illegal unilateral sanctions, earnestly fulfill its international obligations and set a good example for others in respecting laws and norms.

Falsehood 2: The US is not looking for conflict or a new Cold War. It doesn’t seek to block China from its role as a major power, nor to stop China from growing its economy or advancing the interests of its people.

Reality Check: Despite its claims that it doesn’t seek to block China from its role as a major power, nor to stop it from growing its economy, the US is actually deploying its domestic and external resources to unscrupulously contain and suppress China .

◆ Without producing any credible evidence, the US government uses national security as a catch-all pretext and all its apparatus to wantonly suppress and sanction Huawei, restricting its products’ entry into the US market, cutting off its access to chips and operating system, and coercing countries around the world into banning Huawei from their 5G rollout. The US also orchestrated and pressured Canada to hold Huawei’s CFO for nearly three years without cause.

◆ In violation of the principle of fair competition and market economy and international trading rules, the US seeks to hamstring competitive Chinese hi-tech companies under all kinds of trumped-up charges. To date, it has placed over 1,000 Chinese companies on various sanctions lists, subjected biotechnology and artificial intelligence technologies to enhanced export controls and stringent investment review, and sought to ban Chinese social media platforms including TikTok and WeChat.

◆ Under the pretext of protecting human rights, the US has fabricated misinformation and disinformation concerning Xinjiang such as the existence of “forced labor” and, on the basis of those unfounded stories, has adopted the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act which maliciously targets Xinjiang’s competitive cotton, tomatoes and solar photovoltaic sectors to contain China’s growth. This has disrupted the international trade order and destabilized global industrial and supply chains.

◆ The previous US administration, in grave violation of WTO rules, waged a massive trade war on China. Based on its own Section 301 investigation, it imposed three rounds of steep tariffs on about 360 billion US dollars’ worth of Chinese imports. In September 2021, the current US administration initiated a Section 232 investigation to determine the effects on US national security from imports of neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets at a time when global commodity prices were hovering at elevated levels.

◆ The US has a record of grossly interfering in China’s domestic affairs on issues concerning China’s core interests, including Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. It seeks to undermine China’s security and stability by, both overtly and covertly, condoning and supporting separatist activities.

◆ The bipartisan innovation bills being debated in the US Congress, while professing to enhance US competitiveness, see China as a perceived rival. “China” appears more than 800 times in the text, which is packed with provisions detrimental to China’s interests.

◆ In a bid to maintain its power and predominance in international institutions, the US has attempted to smear and block the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind and the initiative of advancing Belt and Road cooperation, among others, in multilateral fora and also to remove references to them in UN and other international documents.

◆ Clinging to a Cold War mentality and the hegemon’s logic, the US pursues bloc politics, concocts the “democracy versus authoritarianism” narrative, cajoles other countries into forming exclusive cliques, strengthens the Five Eyes, peddles the Quad mechanism, puts together AUKUS with the UK and Australia and ramps up bilateral military alliances, in a clear attempt at countering China.

◆ The US pushes NATO to insert itself in Asia-Pacific affairs, fan the “China threat” narrative in the bloc’s new strategic concept, and include in its Madrid Summit such US allies in the Asia-Pacific as Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK) and Australia, in a bid to build an “Asia-Pacific version of NATO”, which would disrupt security and stability in the Asia-Pacific region.

◆ The development of state-to-state relations should be based on equality, mutual respect and win-win results. China-US relations have reached an important crossroads. The US should stop viewing this relationship through a Cold War, zero-sum mindset, follow the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, and reflect in its action the five assurances it has made to China (i.e. the US does not seek a new Cold War with China, the US does not seek to change China’s system, the revitalization of US alliances is not against China, the US does not support “Taiwan independence”, and the US is not looking for conflict with China) .

Falsehood 3: Our diplomacy is based on partnership and respect for each other’s interests, while China practices coercive diplomacy against other countries and retaliates recklessly. Our task is to prove once again that all countries will be free to chart their own paths without coercion.

Reality Check: It is the US that invented “coercive diplomacy” and excels at coercing countries. Over the years, by imposing economic blockade, unilateral sanctions and other means, the US has practiced coercive diplomacy around the world with textbook examples.

◆ In 1971, American scholar Alexander George first put forward the concept of “coercive diplomacy” to summarize the US policy toward Laos, Cuba and Vietnam at that time. The US government forced the military government of Haiti to step down in 1994, and referred to that as “a textbook example of coercive diplomacy”. In 2003, it explicitly characterized 30.3 billion US dollars additional military expenses for “coercive diplomacy” as incurred expenses.

The US government froze seven billion US dollars assets of the Afghan central bank on the grounds of punishing the Afghan Taliban and even claimed the “life-saving money” of the Afghan people as its own, which resulted in the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan. Mohammad Naeem, spokesman of the Taliban Political Office in Doha, said the seizure is “indicative of the lowest level of human and moral decay of a country and a nation”.

In order to force the Nepalese parliament to approve the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) agreement, the US openly issued an “ultimatum”, saying that the US will review its ties with Nepal if it fails to ratify the compact.

After the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict, the US Justice Department established the “Task Force KleptoCapture” to find, freeze and seize the yachts, apartments, private jets and huge deposits of Russian citizens in the US and Europe. This fully shows that the US-touted “inviolable and sacred right to property” is just a lie. The US has forced other countries to pick sides and pressured them to join sanctions against Russia. And those who refuse to do so will pay a “price”.

After China and the Solomon Islands had signed a framework agreement on bilateral security cooperation, the US sent senior officials of the National Security Council to the country, doing whatever it can to obstruct the legitimate cooperation between China and Solomon Islands. A Solomn Star article pointed out, “Washington DC, which has literally forgotten Solomon Islands since World War II, has finally woken up and is applying the heat on the Solomon Islands to abandon the security pact.”

In May 2022, on the eve of the High-Level Virtual Meeting of the Group of Friends of the GDI, the US exerted pressure on multiple UN development agencies to obstruct their attendance and threatened to “cut funding”.

◆ The “Clean Network” program launched by the previous administration is another textbook example of US coercive diplomacy. Under the pretext of upholding US national security and citizens’ privacy, the program explicitly requires that Chinese companies such as Huawei, Baidu and Alibaba to be purged from five areas: telecom operators, mobile app stores, mobile apps, cloud services and submarine optical cables. The then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other US politicians lobbied all around the world, coercing countries and regions to join its so-called “Network”. A US senior official even threatened Cyprus and other countries not to work with Chinese 5G suppliers, or they would bear the consequence. Former UK Business and Industry Minister Vince Cable said the government’s decision to ban Huawei’s 5G equipment and services “had nothing to do with national security”, and was because “the Americans told us we should do it”.

◆ The US shows no mercy in coercing its allies. Out of its geopolitical and energy interests considerations, the US has imposed sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project since December 2019. Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the US has imposed new sanctions on related companies and personnel even though Germany had announced the suspension of the certification process for the project.

◆ A US scholar pointed out that American foreign policy since World War II has been based on a simple idea: “Either you are with us or against us. America should lead, allies should follow, and woe be to countries that oppose its primacy”. His words lay bare the nature of US coercive diplomacy.

◆ China never engages in coercive diplomacy and firmly opposes coercive diplomacy by other countries. China never threatens other countries with force, never creates military alliance, never exports ideology, never meddles in others’ domestic affairs, never seeks a trade war, and never imposes unjustified oppression on foreign enterprises. That said, however, China has the right to make necessary and legitimate responses to actions that undermine China’s sovereignty, security and development rights and interests.

Falsehood 4: The US democracy is one of the most powerful assets in this contest. Our task is to prove once again that democracy can meet urgent challenges and that the future belongs to those who believe in freedom.

Reality Check: The US sets standards for democracy after its own system, does not allow other systems, paths and models to exist, and gangs up with others to wantonly interfere in other countries’ internal affairs in the name of democracy. This not just contravenes the spirit of democracy, but also spells disaster for democracy.

◆ The American-style democracy is a rich men’s game based on capital. Money politics penetrates the entire process of election, legislation and administration in the US. People in fact only have a restricted right to political participation. The inequality in economic status has turned into inequality in political status. According to statistics, winners of 91 percent of US congressional elections are the candidates with greater financial support. Big companies, a small group of rich people, and interest groups are more generous to offer financial support and have become the main source of electoral funding. The so-called representatives of people’s will, once elected, often serve the interests of their financial backers, and speak for vested interests rather than the ordinary people. A US Senator had a sharp observation, “Congress does not regulate Wall Street. Wall Street regulates Congress.”

US Republican congressman from Alabama Mo Brooks publicly denounced “corruption” of the US Congress in a video on social media. “If you want to be chairman of a major committee, you have to purchase it.” The purchase price depends on how important the committee is, with the minimum bid for a major committee being one million US dollars. Those who cannot afford it have to accept the contributions of special interest groups and then give “quid pro quos” to the lobbyists. “Special interest groups run Washington. I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean that literally.”

◆ According to a scholar in Singapore, the United States is clearly not functioning as a democracy. It is functioning as a plutocracy. A democracy is a government of the people, by the people, for the people. A plutocracy is a government of the one percent, by the one percent, for the one percent.

◆ The US presidential election follows the Electoral College system, where the president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College. The flaws of such an electoral system are self-evident. First, as the president-elect may not be the winner of the national popular vote, there is a lack of broad representation. Second, as each state gets to decide its own electoral rules, confusion and disorder often occur. Third, the winner-takes-all system exacerbates inequality among states and between political parties. It leads to a huge waste of votes and discourages voter turnout. Voters in deep blue and deep red states are often neglected, while swing states become disproportionately more important where both parties seek to woo more supporters. There have been five presidential elections in US history in which the winner of nationwide popular vote was not elected the president.

The gerrymandering is widely recognized by the US public as a flaw of the electoral system. It refers to an unfair division of electoral districts in favor of a particular party to win as many seats as possible and cement its advantage. The US conducts a census every ten years. Following the completion of the census, redistricting or the redrawing of electoral district boundaries will take place under the principle of maintaining roughly equal population in every voting district while considering demographic shifts. Under the US Constitution, each state legislature has the power to redistrict. This leaves room for gerrymandering by the majority party in a state legislature. According to a YouGov poll in 2021, only 16 percent of US adult citizens say they think their states’ congressional maps would be drawn fairly, while 44 percent say they think the maps would be drawn unfairly and another 40 percent of adults say they are unsure if the maps will be fair.

◆ The American-style democracy is “one person one vote” in name, yet “rule of a dominant minority” in reality. Political pluralism is only a facade. A small number of elites dominate the political, economic and military affairs. They control the state apparatus and policy-making process, manipulate public opinion, dominate the business community and enjoy all kinds of privileges.

According to the Associated Press, 18.8 million people were missed in the 2020 US census. The black population had a net undercount of 3.3 percent, while it was almost five percent for Hispanics and 5.6 percent for American Indians and Native Alaskans living on reservations. The undercount robs them of their equal share of federal resources including in education, health care and housing and puts them in an unfavorable condition as to congressional apportionment. It reveals the hypocrisy in the US democracy and its “perpetuating systemic racism”.

Noam Chomsky, a political commentator and social activist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that the US is a “really existing capitalist democracy”, where there is a positive correlation between people’s wealth and their influence on policy-making. For the lower 70 percent on the wealth/income scale, they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They are effectively disenfranchised.

Wertheimer, President of the non-profit US organization Democracy 21, says that corruption in the US is systemic corruption of the process itself. “When you are dealing with billions and billions of dollars, much of that focused on buying influence, it overwhelms the system, and it is much harder to defend against and maintain representation for ordinary Americans.”

Danny Haiphong, an independent journalist in the US, believes that Western-style democracy views the election itself as the highest achievement. The question of whether this system serves the needs of the broad masses of people is generally ignored in order to obscure the fact that powerful corporate interests set the policy agenda well before votes are cast.

◆ The checks and balances in the American-style democracy have resulted in a “vetocracy”. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out in his book Political Order and Political Decay that there is an entrenched political paralysis in the US. The US political system has far too many checks and balances, raising the cost of collective action and in some cases making it impossible altogether. The US democratic process is fragmented and lengthy, with a lot of veto points where individual veto players can block action by the whole body. The function of “checks and balances”, which was purportedly designed to prevent abuse of power, has been distorted in American political practice. Politicians in Washington, D.C. are preoccupied with securing their own partisan interests and no longer care about national development. The two parties are addicted to vetoing and caught in a vicious circle. The government efficacy is inevitably weakened, law and justice trampled upon, development and progress stalled, and social division widened.

According to a Pew Research Center report in October 2021 based on a survey of 17 advanced economies including the US, Germany and the ROK, the US is more politically divided than the other economies surveyed. Nine in ten US respondents believe there are strong conflicts between people who support different political parties, and nearly 60 percent of Americans surveyed think their fellow citizens no longer disagree simply over policies, but also over basic facts.

As political and partisan polarization continues to grow, more “opposition for opposition’s sake” is seen among Democrats and Republicans. Under its influence, voters of the two parties are increasingly antagonized over gun policy. Among Republican voters, 76 percent support the right to possess guns, while 81 percent of Democratic voters see gun control as more important. Hijacked by interest, partisan conflict and the public opinion, the legislation and law enforcement process of gun control is fraught with difficulties. For the past ten years, Democratic congressmen put forward dozens of bills on gun violence and gun control every year, but due to the continued obstruction from the Republican Party, only a handful of them successfully entered the plenary deliberation and debate stage at the Senate or the House of Representatives.

The US National Rifle Association (NRA) has five million members and spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and lobbying every year. Its tentacles penetrate deep into the fabric of the American society. The NRA is an important funder of the Republican Party. Since its establishment in 1871, the NRA has successfully attracted nine US presidents to join it. According to CNN statistics in 2018, 307 of the 535 US congressmen have received either direct campaign contributions from the NRA and its affiliates or benefited from independent NRA spending like advertising supporting their campaigns. In the face of huge profits, all kinds of gun control efforts have ended up in vain.

◆ The US is not a straight A student when it comes to democracy. Its practice of democracy has been messy and chaotic. On 6 January 2021, thousands of Americans gathered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and stormed the Capitol building in a bid to stop the joint session of the Congress from certifying the newly-elected president. The incident interrupted the transfer of US presidential power, leaving five dead and over 140 injured. It is the worst act of violence in Washington, D.C. since 1814 when the British troops set fire to the White House, and it sent shock waves throughout the international community. The US Senate Republican leader described it as a “failed insurrection”.

A scholar from the US Council on Foreign Relations says that the US is not nearly as unique as many Americans believe, and that the Capitol riot should put an end to the notion of American exceptionalism, of an eternal shining city on a hill.

An American expert on international issues wrote in The New York Times that while the US leader has reunited the West, he may not be able to reunite America. Trump and his supporters would be willing to depart from established constitutional rules and norms with his Big Lie. This may undermine the ability of the US government to transfer power peacefully and legitimately. Consequently none of the institutions will work for long, and the people will be thrust into political and financial chaos.

◆ The dysfunctional American-style democracy has triggered a trust crisis. Public commitments to the people come with behind-the-scene deals. Political infighting, money politics, and vetocracy make it virtually impossible for quality governance to be delivered as aspired by the general public. Americans are increasingly disillusioned with the US politics and pessimistic about the American-style democracy.

A Gallup survey in October 2020 shows that only 19 percent of the Americans surveyed are “very confident” about the presidential election, a record low since the survey was first conducted in 2004. According to a poll conducted by The Wall Street Journal in June 2022, six out of 10 Americans feel pessimistic about achieving the American dream.

A Pew Research in 2021 shows that 65 percent of Americans see a need for major reform to the American democracy. People’s confidence in the American democracy dropped in 16 developed countries, and 57 percent of respondents think that the American democracy is no longer a good example to follow.

The Democracy Perception Index released in 2021 by a German polling agency reveals that 44 percent of respondents in the 53 countries surveyed are concerned that the US threatens democracy in their country.

◆ Over the years, despite the structural flaws and problematic practice of its democratic system, the US has been touting the “alliance of democracies” and hyping up the narrative of “democracy versus autocracy”. It is in essence attacking those who hold different views under the banner of democracy, using ideology and values as a tool to suppress others and advance its own geopolitical strategies. This is hegemony in the guise of democracy. A former CIA official openly stated: “We will intervene whenever we decide it’s in our national security interest to intervene. If you don’t like it, lump it.”

The US has pushed for the neo-Monroe Doctrine in Latin America under the pretext of promoting democracy, incited color revolutions in Eurasia, and remotely controlled the Arab Spring in West Asia and North Africa. These moves have brought chaos and disasters to many countries, gravely undermining world peace, stability and development. As suggested by the French website Le Grand Soir, democracy has long become a weapon of massive destruction for the US to attack countries with different views.

◆ Whether a country is democratic or not depends on whether its people are truly the masters of the country. It depends on whether the people have the right to vote, and more importantly, the right to participate; what promises they are given during elections, and more importantly, how many of these promises are delivered after elections; what kind of political procedures and rules are set through state systems and laws, and more importantly, whether these systems and laws are truly enforced; and whether the rules and procedures for the exercise of power are democratic, and more importantly, whether the exercise of power is genuinely subject to public oversight and checks.

◆ The Communist Party of China (CPC) leads the Chinese people in carrying out the whole-process people’s democracy in China. It has not only a complete set of institutions and procedures, but also full-fledged civil participation. A comprehensive, extensive, and well-coordinated system of institutions has been formed to ensure that the people run the country, and diverse, open, and orderly channels for democracy are put into place. This allows the entire people to engage in law-based democratic elections, consultations, decision-making, management, and oversight and to manage state as well as economic, cultural, and social affairs in various ways and forms and in accordance with the law. The whole-process people’s democracy integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy, and people’s democracy with the will of the state. It is a model of socialist democracy that covers all aspects of the democratic process and all sectors of society. It is a true democracy that works. China’s whole-process people’s democracy is gaining wider recognition and acclaim from the international community.

A British scholar says that electoral democracy does not breed a close relationship with the people and government, because the people are only called upon to be involved whenever to make elections take place. The Chinese approach is different in that there is a very important consultative component in the way China operates.

◆ Democracy is a concrete phenomenon that is constantly evolving. Rooted in history, culture and tradition, it takes diverse forms and develops along the paths chosen by different peoples based on their exploration and innovation. China stays committed to respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, uphold non-interference in internal affairs, and respect the independent choices of development paths and social systems made by people in different countries. China has no intention to engage in systemic rivalry or ideological confrontation with the US. China never exports ideology, never interferes in other countries’ internal affairs, and never seeks to change the system of the US.

Falsehood 5: The US has profound differences with the CPC and the Chinese Government. But those differences are between governments and systems – not between our people.

Reality check: The CPC’s leadership is the choice of history and of the people. The CPC and the Chinese government enjoy the wholehearted support and endorsement of the Chinese people. The US’s attempt to drive wedges between the CPC and the Chinese people only serves to reveal its animosity against China’s system and path.

◆ The CPC has deep roots among and close ties with the Chinese people. This is what has kept the CPC full of vigor and vitality. By the end of 2021, the CPC had over 95 million members. The CPC is the largest party in the world that has exercised long-term governance in the world’s most populous country. Under the leadership of the CPC, China has created the two miracles of rapid economic development and long-term social stability. Over 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty and 1.4 billion people are moving toward modernization. Over the course of just several decades, China has accomplished what took western developed countries hundreds of years.

A Harvard University survey among the Chinese people spanning 13 years found that more than 90 percent of respondents are satisfied with the Party and their government, the highest rate among countries for years running. A trust and credibility survey released in 2022 by Edelman, a renowned US public relations consultancy firm, shows that as many as 91 percent Chinese citizens trust their government in 2021, the highest among all surveyed countries.

◆ The previous US administration, in a McCarthyism-style campaign, went all out to attack and discredit the CPC. It has attacked Chinese leaders and China’s domestic and foreign policies, sown discord between the CPC and the Chinese people, flagrantly challenged the leadership and governing position of the CPC, incited anti-China and anti-CPC sentiment, and imposed visa restrictions on CPC members and their families.

The current administration, since its inauguration, has made no substantive changes to those policies. In June 2021, the US Senate passed the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, which is more than 2,000 pages long. It regarded China as a strategic competitor and the main challenge to the US, slandered China’s development path and domestic and foreign policies, and malignantly urged actions to counter the “influence and malign activities” of the CPC. It asked for more than 200 billion US dollars of public funding to ensure US advantages in key technology sectors over China, and advocated mobilizing US resources in strategic, diplomatic, economic, and technological realms to engage in comprehensive strategic competition with China. The US Senate also proposed an appropriation of 300 million US dollars for each of the fiscal years 2022 through 2026 to “counter the malign influence” of the CPC and designated the US Department of State and Agency for International Development to train journalists on investigative techniques necessary to ensure public accountability related to the Belt and Road Initiative, including “supporting civil society and independent media”.

The US continues to use the CPC background as a pretext for cracking down on normal people-to-people exchanges and cooperation. For some time, Chinese students and visiting scholars going to the US have been harassed and suppressed by the US. Most of them were asked whether they or their parents are CPC members. Some were repatriated on inconceivable grounds, such as being suspected of military connections simply because they had photos in their mobile phones of military training at college. These stop-and-search activities go far beyond what the US claims as “normal law enforcement”.

◆ The CPC, the Chinese government and the Chinese people share an inseparable bond. The US says it respects the Chinese people, then it should respect the development path and political system chosen by the Chinese people and respect the CPC that represents the fundamental interests of the Chinese people. By targeting the CPC and the Chinese government, the US is in effect targeting the Chinese people. Anything done to separate the CPC, the Chinese government and the Chinese people and pit the Chinese people against the CPC and the Chinese government will surely be met with the unanimous opposition and resolute response of the over 1.4 billion Chinese people.

Falsehood 6: The United States raises human rights issues and calls for change – not to stand against China, but to stand up for peace, security, and human dignity.

Reality Check: The human rights of the Chinese people are guaranteed like never before, with a notable increase in their sense of fulfillment, happiness and security. In contrast, the US has been engaged in grave human rights violations both at home and abroad, and its shocking track record makes it the biggest human rights abuser in the world.

◆ China always puts people’s right to subsistence on top of its agenda, prioritizes the work to enhance their right to development, regards the protection of citizens’ lawful rights and interests as its basic task, has made the safeguarding of the rights of ethnic groups an important part of its work, and considers the protection of people’s safety its long-term goal.

Guided by a people-centered philosophy, since the day when it was founded, the CPC has made seeking happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation its mission. For the past 100 years, the Party has been working tirelessly for the interest of the people, and has dedicated itself to realizing people’s aspirations for a better life. China has been advancing whole-process people’s democracy, promoting legal safeguard for human rights, and upholding social equity and justice. The Chinese people now enjoy fuller and more extensive and comprehensive democratic rights.

◆ China has created the miracle of eliminating absolute poverty. By the end of 2020, China has lifted all 98.99 million rural residents living below the current poverty line out of poverty. In 2021, China completed the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and historically resolved the problem of absolute poverty. Since the launch of reform and opening-up, 770 million impoverished rural residents have shaken off poverty as currently defined. Based on the international poverty line of the World Bank, China accounts for 70 percent of global poverty reduction over the same period. China met the poverty reduction goal of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ten years ahead of schedule, making major contributions to global poverty reduction and human rights progress. China has also put in place the world’s largest education system, the largest social security system and the largest health care system.

◆ Since COVID-19 started, China has been acting on the principle of putting the people and their lives first. Based on China’s national conditions, it has formulated and implemented a dynamic zero-COVID guideline, and has been constantly fine-tuning its response measures in light of the evolving situation, to best protect people’s life and health and at the same time, ensure sustained, sound and steady socioeconomic development with the pandemic under effective control. Both the infection rate and mortality rate of China are the lowest in the world.

◆ As an active participant in global human rights governance, China has made its contribution to and offered its initiatives on world human rights development. In recent years, the concept of “building a community of shared future” has been written into the resolutions of the UN Human Rights Council, and China-sponsored resolutions on “the contribution of development to the enjoyment of all human rights” and on “Promoting Mutually Beneficial Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights” were adopted multiple times at the Human Rights Council. China also made joint statements on behalf of developing countries on the implementation of the right to development, the promotion of human rights by poverty alleviation, equitable distribution of vaccines, among other subjects, contributing its share to safeguarding the basic human rights of developing countries, which has won it wide recognition and support from the international community.

◆ China has been an advocate and a doer in advancing the international human rights cause. A World Bank study estimates, if implemented fully, the Belt and Road Initiative could lift 32 million people out of moderate poverty — those who live on less than $3.2 a day. It shows how participating in Belt and Road cooperation can advance human rights in more countries. In the face of the pandemic, China launched its largest global humanitarian operation since the founding of the People’s Republic, and championed the building of a global community of health for all. To address the global development deficit, China proposed the Global Development Initiative (GDI) which sees improving people’s welfare and achieving well-rounded human development as the fundamental purpose and goal. The GDI has been echoed and supported by more than 100 countries and many international organizations including the UN. The Initiative galvanizes extensive international consensus for accelerated implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and builds up international synergy for coordinated development, thus providing a strong underpinning for the advancement of the international human rights cause.

◆ The right to life is of utmost importance, as survival is the basis of all human rights. Endowed with the world’s most advanced medical equipment and technologies, the US has registered the world’s largest number of COVID-19 infections and deaths. Pandemic response has been extremely politicized, and become a tool and lever to attack, undercut and oppose each other between the Republicans and the Democrats. Politicians only focus on political gains, with no regard to the life and health of the ordinary people. Its pandemic control, which has been unscientific, unequal and irresponsible, has gravely undermined American people’s right to life and health.

So far, the COVID-19 death toll in the US has surpassed one million. The deaths are, according to The Atlantic, “unexpected, untimely, particularly painful, and, in many cases, preventable”. Some politician even suggested that old people may sacrifice themselves for the country and that saving the country’s economy is more important than old people’s lives. Data of the US Center for Disease Prevention and Control shows that most COVID victims are aged 65 years and above. USC and Princeton researchers project that due to the pandemic deaths last year, life expectancy at birth for Americans will shorten by 1.13 years, the sharpest decline since World War II. “For Blacks, the life expectancy would shorten by 2.10 years, and for Latinos, by 3.05 years. Whites are also impacted, but their projected decline is much smaller – 0.68 years.”

The Washington Post points to a far greater number behind the one million death toll: That number is 9 million – the number of Americans who have lost spouses, parents, grandparents, siblings and children to COVID. A study by the Imperial College London estimates that more than 250,000 US children had lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19 by 23 May 2020. Figures released by the US Government Accountability Office in March 2022 show that up to 23 million people in the US may have developed “long COVID”, and an estimated one million people suffering from the symptoms may be pushed out of work.

The US is the country most rampant with gun violence. Its population, totaling 333 million or 4 percent of the world’s total, own more than 400 million guns or 46 percent of all the private guns in the world. It tops the world in terms of gun ownership, and shooting incidents every now and then in the US takes away more than 110 lives on a daily average. Many people say it is easier to buy a gun than baby formula in the US.

Data of the US website Gun Violence Archive show about 45,000 Americans are killed in gun violence incidents in 2021. On 24 May 2022, the Robb elementary school shooting in Texas claimed 21 lives, including 19 children. By US media counts, it is the 39th campus shooting this year. According to The Washington Post tally, 202 mass shootings took place in the US in the first five and half months this year. For decades, no substantive measures have been taken by the US government to address such problems. In the past 25 years, the US federal government fails to introduce any gun control act. The New York Times observed, “The United States has become ungovernable not because of political differences or protest or a lack of civility, but because this is a country unwilling to protect and care for its citizens – its women, its racial minorities and especially its children.”

Despite the claim by US founding fathers that “All men are created equal”, slavery was preserved in its Constitution of 1789. Although the US has abolished segregation on the surface, white supremacy continues to wreak havoc, and systemic discrimination against racial minorities still exists even to this day. The entrenched racism, compounded by the coronavirus, has fueled a new spike of hate crimes against Asian-Americans. At the same time, racial persecution of the indigenous people persists, discrimination against the Muslim community worsens, racial economic divide yawns, and racial inequality aggravates day by day. Nearly 60 years on since Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, people still see a brutal reality as reflected in George Floyd’s “I can’t breathe” plea.

◆ Through slaughter, expulsion, sterilization and forced assimilation, the US committed a genocide against Native Americans, resulting in a sharp drop in their population from five million in 1492 to 250,000 in the early 20th century. The Native American community has long been neglected and discriminated against. The indigenous culture was fundamentally crushed, and the inter-generational inheritance of indigenous lives and spirits was under severe threats. Many US government statistical programs either leave them out completely or simply classify them as “others”.

Shannon Keller O’Loughlin, Chief Executive and Attorney of the Association on American Indian Affairs, said that Native Americans have diverse cultures and languages, but are often seen not as an ethnic group, but as a political stratum with limited autonomy based on treaties with the federal government. The Atlantic commented that from the expulsion, slaughter and forced assimilation back in history to the current widespread poverty and neglect, the American Indians, once the owner of this continent, now have a very weak voice in American society.

The US government enforced the system of boarding schools in Native American areas to impose English and Christian education on Native American children. It also enacted laws prohibiting Native Americans from performing religious rituals which have been passed down through generations. An article titled “The United States Must Reckon With Its Own Genocides” carried by Foreign Policy website on 11 October 2021 noted that over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, there were more than 350 government funded indigenous boarding schools across the US. Hundreds of thousands of indigenous children passed through, or died in, these schools. The purpose of Indian boarding schools was to culturally assimilate indigenous children by forcibly relocating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were to be forcibly suppressed. The US was not just morally, but also legally responsible for the crime of genocide against its own people.

Native American writer Rebecca Nagle believes that information about Native Americans has been systematically removed from mainstream media and popular culture. According to a report by National Indian Education Association, 87 percent of state-level US history textbooks do not mention the post-1900 history of indigenous people. According to the Smithsonian Institution, things taught about Native Americans in American schools are full of inaccurate information and fail to present the real picture of the sufferings of indigenous people. Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, said publicly at the Young America’s Foundation that “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here … but candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

◆ Islamphobia and the discrimination against and suppression of Muslims and Islam in US mainstream society has become more pronounced. A Bloomberg report on 9 September 2021 observed that discrimination against Muslims in the US increased in the two decades after 9/11. On the same day, the Associated Press cited a survey which found that 53 percent of Americans have negative views toward Islam. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in its 2021 report that it receives an increasing number of complaints each year about bullying and hate speech against Muslims.

According to the survey findings released by the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley on 29 October 2021, 67.5 percent of Muslim respondents said they had experienced Islamophobia, and an even larger percent of those surveyed, 93.7 percent, said that anti-Muslim hatred had affected their mental or emotional well-being to some degree.

◆ The US has serious problems of human trafficking and forced labor. It still has not ratified the Forced Labour Convention (1930), the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Every year, nearly 100,000 people are smuggled into the US for forced labor. Today, there are at least half a million people enslaved in the US; roughly 240,000 to 325,000 women and children are victims of sexual slavery.

◆ Immigrants and refugees have become a tool of partisan feuding and political rivalry in the US. The government changes its rules and regulations capriciously, enforces laws violently, and immigrants have been subjected to inhuman treatment such as prolonged detention, torture and forced labor. Data released by US Border Patrol shows that in fiscal year 2021, as many as 557 migrants died on the southern border of the US, more than double the previous fiscal year, hitting the highest number since records began in 1998. That same year, the US detained more than 1.7 million immigrants at the southern border, including 45,000 children. In September 2021, more than 15,000 asylum seekers from Haiti crowded under a bridge in the Texas border town of Del Rio, sleeping in squalid tents or dirt in the sweltering heat, and surrounded by trash under dire living conditions. US border patrol authorities brutalized the asylum seekers, with patrols on horseback, brandishing horsewhips and charging toward the crowds to expel them into the river. CNN commented that this scene is reminiscent of the dark era in American history when slave patrols were used to control black slaves.

◆ Turning a blind eye to the systematic violation of the human rights of its own people, the US government has wilfully attacked other countries and interfered in their internal affairs in the name of human rights, challenging right with might and trampling on justice out of selfish interest.

Since 2001, the US has waged war or conducted military operations in about 80 countries in the name of “war on terror”, resulting in the deaths of more than 900,000 people, including 300,000 civilians. The 20-year-long war waged by the US has left Afghanistan devastated and impoverished. A total of 47,245 Afghan civilians and 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers unrelated to 9/11 have been killed and more than 10 million displaced as a result of US operations. The War in Afghanistan has destroyed the foundation of economic development and impoverished the Afghan people. When the US withdrew from Afghanistan, it immediately froze billions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves at the Afghan central bank, pushing the Afghan economy to the brink of collapse and making things worse for the Afghan people.

At the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, many countries denounced the US as “the biggest destroyer of human rights in the world” and urged it to address its own gross human rights problems.

◆ The US has been an expert in arbitrary detention and torture. Under the pretext of “war on terror”, the CIA has set up black sites in at least 54 countries and regions over the years, where more than 100,000 people are detained. A group of independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said in a statement released on 10 January 2022 that the US has arbitrarily detained people without trial and subjected them to torture or ill-treatment in Guantanamo Bay for 20 years in violation of international human rights law, calling this “a stain on the US Government’s commitment to the rule of law”. The US should face up to and resolve its own systemic and chronic human rights problems, reflect on the humanitarian disasters and crimes it has caused around the world, and give a responsible account of itself to the international community.

Falsehood 7: The US remains committed to its “one China” policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three Joint Communiques, the Six Assurances. Its policy on Taiwan has not changed. 

Reality Check: The one-China principle is an established norm of international relations and a universal consensus of the international community. The US has acted faithlessly, kept regressing from its own commitments and the consensus it reached with China, and attempted to weaken and undermine the one-China principle and use Taiwan to contain China. This is a major threat to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

◆ In October 1971, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted, with an overwhelming majority, Resolution 2758, which decided to restore the lawful seat of the People’s Republic of China in the UN, and has solved once and for all the issue of China’s representation in the UN in political, legal and procedural terms. The official legal opinions of the Office of Legal Affairs of the UN Secretariat pointed out explicitly that “the United Nations considers ‘Taiwan’ as a province of China with no separate status”, the “‘authorities’ in ‘Taipei’ are not considered to … enjoy any form of governmental status”, and “Reference to ‘Taiwan’ … should read ‘Taiwan, Province of China’”.

On the basis of the one-China principle, China has established diplomatic relations with 181 countries, including the US.

◆ The US made the following commitments to China regarding the one-China principle in the three China-US joint communiqués.

In the Shanghai Communiqué released in 1972, the US explicitly stated that “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position”.

In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations released in 1978, the US clearly stated that “The United States of America recognizes the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China”; “The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China”.

In the August 17 Communiqué released in 1982, the US unequivocally stated that “In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations on January 1, 1979, issued by the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of the United States of America, the United States of America recognized the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China, and it acknowledged the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China”, and that “it has no intention of infringing on Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity, or interfering in China’s internal affairs, or pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan’”.

According to this Communiqué, “the United States Government states that it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan, that its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and that it intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan, leading, over a period of time, to a final resolution. In so stating, the United States acknowledges China’s consistent position regarding the thorough settlement of this issue”.

◆ Rather than faithfully abiding by its commitments on Taiwan, the US has kept backpedaling on history.

On the political front, the US has added the so-called “Taiwan Relations Act” and the “Six Assurances” to the expression of its one-China policy, with a growing list of such prefixes. Both prefixes are unilaterally made by the US side in breach of its commitments in the three China-US joint communiqués as well as the one-China principle affirmed in the UNGA Resolution 2758 and widely observed by the international community. They are illegal, null and void from the very beginning, and China has never acknowledged and has firmly rejected them from the outset. The US has also violated its commitment of maintaining unofficial relations only with Taiwan and kept upgrading the level of engagement. In recent years, senior US officials including the Secretary of Health and Human Services and Under Secretary of State as well as members of Congress have visited Taiwan. US ambassadors overseas have also met with Taiwan’s so-called “representatives” in their host countries.

In the military field, the US has reneged on its commitment “that it intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan, leading, over a period of time, to a final resolution”. Instead of ceasing the arms sales, it has sold weapons at a larger scale and with enhanced capability including assault weaponries such as anti-radiation missiles, heavy weight torpedoes, and F-16V fighter jets. To date, the total volume of US arms sales to Taiwan has exceeded 70 billion US dollars. According to reports by Reuters and other new agencies, US special operations forces have been rotating into Taiwan on a temporary basis to train with Taiwanese forces.

Since 2021, the US leader has stated publicly on three occasions that the US would help defend Taiwan in case of a war in the Taiwan Strait.

On the international stage, the US has been assisting Taiwan in expanding its so-called “international space”. Recently, the US has been spreading globally the fallacy that UNGA Resolution 2758 did not determine the status of Taiwan, and that each country should be able to determine the contours of its own “one China” policy. It has vigorously advocated support for Taiwan’s participation as an observer in the 75th session of the World Health Assembly, and even blatantly helped to consolidate Taiwan’s “diplomatic relations”.

◆ These US acts have breached its commitment that “it has no intention of … pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan’”. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2022, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, “my understanding of the agreement (China and the US reached upon the establishment of diplomatic relations) has been that the United States would uphold the principle of one China … it is essential that these principles be maintained, and the United States should not by subterfuge or a gradual process, develop something of a two-China solution”.

◆ The DPP authorities have been stubbornly advancing its “Taiwan independence” separatist agenda, and the US has been encouraging and supporting “Taiwan independence” forces overtly and covertly. This is the root cause of current tensions across the Taiwan Strait. To defend peace across the Taiwan Strait and beyond, we must forestall the growing tendency of “Taiwan independence” and the collusion between the US and Taiwan. The one-China principle must not be challenged. China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must not be infringed upon. And the red line that no one should pursue a policy of “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan” must not be crossed. China is fully confident, capable and prepared to resolutely curb “Taiwan independence” separatist activities, resolutely foil all external interferences, and firmly safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity. The US should abide by the provisions in the three China-US joint communiqués, follow a true one-China policy, and act on its commitments including on not supporting “Taiwan independence”. The US needs to genuinely reflect on and redress its regressive and erroneous behavior, and stop playing with fire on the Taiwan question. Otherwise, it would gravely jeopardize peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, undermine China-US relations and incur an unbearable cost on itself.

Falsehood 8: The United States stands with countries and people around the world against the genocide and crimes against humanity happening in the Xinjiang region, where more than a million people have been placed in detention camps because of their ethnic and religious identity.

Reality Check: The human rights of the people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang are fully protected. There is no “genocide” or “crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang. The US has been spreading disinformation about Xinjiang simply to create an excuse for discrediting and attacking China.

◆ Xinjiang-related issues are not about human rights, but about fighting violence, terrorism and separatism. According to figures available, between 1990 and the end of 2016, there were several thousand incidents of violent and terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers, and causing immeasurable property damage.

In response to such real threats, Xinjiang has acted resolutely to fight terrorism and extremism in accordance with law. At the same time, a series of supporting measures have been taken, like improving people’s livelihoods, raising public awareness about law, and offering help through vocational education and training centers. The trend of frequent terrorist activities has thus been effectively curbed. There has been no violent act of terrorism in Xinjiang for five consecutive years and more. The region has enjoyed security, social stability and good development. The safety and security of people of all ethnic groups have been effectively protected.

◆ “Genocide” in Xinjiang is a complete “lie of the century”. Over the past 60 years and more, the Uyghur population has increased from 2.2 million to about 12 million, and their average life expectancy has grown from 30 to 75 years.

With stability prevailing in Xinjiang, local people live and work in peace and happiness. The region has made unprecedented progress in delivering economic and social development and in bettering people’s lives. Between 2014 and 2019, GDP in Xinjiang rose from 919.59 billion yuan to 1.36 trillion yuan, with an average annual growth rate of 7.2 percent, while per capita disposable income grew by an average annual rate of 9.1 percent. Remarkable achievements have been made in eliminating extreme poverty. All 3.09 million impoverished people by current standards have been lifted out of poverty, making absolute poverty a thing of the past in Xinjiang.

The lawful rights and interests of the people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang have been protected effectively. All ethnic groups, regardless of their populations, have equal legal status and enjoy freedom of religious belief and various rights in accordance with law, including participating in the management of state affairs, receiving education, using their own languages, and preserving their traditional culture.

◆ In July 2019, permanent representatives of more than 50 countries in Geneva sent a joint letter to the President of the UN Human Rights Council and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, praising China’s achievements in fighting terrorism, deradicalization and human rights protection. In October 2019, more than 60 countries spoke at the Third Committee of the 74th session of the UN General Assembly, commending the tremendous human rights advancement in Xinjiang. In June 2021, more than 90 countries made joint or separate statements at the Human Rights Council in support of China. In the meantime, Canada took the lead in attacking China on issues related to Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet. Just a little over 40 countries echoed Canada’s criticism, and none of them are from the Muslim world.

◆ In recent years, over 2,000 people from more than 100 countries, including experts, scholars, journalists, diplomats and religious figures, have visited Xinjiang, witnessing the unity, harmony and happiness of people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang.

◆ The so-called “genocide” in Xinjiang is a lie cooked up by anti-China forces represented by the anti-China German scholar Adrian Zenz. He is a member of the far-right group “Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation” sponsored by the US government, and a key figure in an anti-China organization set up by US intelligence agencies. He is also a racist. His “research” is full of inconsistencies, fabrications and data manipulation. It does not have any academic credibility and cannot be cleared for academic publication. For example, a chart in Zenz’s “paper” claims that new IUD placements in Xinjiang average between 800 and 1,400 per person each year, which means each woman in the region would have to undergo four to eight such insertion surgeries every day. This is totally against common sense.

◆ On 29 June 2020, the Jamestown Foundation of the US published a “research report” by Adrian Zenz, in which he falsely accused the Chinese government of committing “genocide” against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

Upon the release of the report, US politicians including then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, Senator Marco Rubio and House Representative Jim McGovern immediately pitched in to whip up the “genocide” accusation. Rubio, McGovern, Senator John Cornyn and Senator Robert Menendez went on to urge the administration to make a genocide determination of China’s policy on Xinjiang. Contradicting the conclusion reached by lawyers at the State Department Office of the Legal Adviser, Pompeo announced that “I have determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups” on 19 January 2021, the last day of the previous administration. The current administration has followed the same position and continued to allege “genocide” in Xinjiang. This further exposes the US’s real intention of political manipulation in the name of human rights.

◆ The World Uyghur Congress, an anti-China separatist organization, hired people like Sayragul Sauytbay and Tursunay Ziawudun to make false statements and spread all kinds of lies about “persecution”. In the 70-plus press conferences held so far by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, falsehoods spread by anti-China forces have been debunked with solid facts. For instance, some “performers” who claimed to be the victims of forced sterilization in vocational education and training centers have never been to one. The family members or friends reported by some “performers” as missing are actually living a normal life in Xinjiang.

◆ The false claim about “millions of Uyghurs detained” in education and training centers was initiated and spread by “Chinese Human Rights Defenders”, an NGO supported by the US government. Based on interviews with eight Uyghurs and rough estimation, the organization came to the preposterous conclusion that at least 10 percent of the 20 million people in Xinjiang are detained in “reeducation camps”.

The education and training centers in Xinjiang are no different in nature from deradicalization centers or community correction and desistance and disengagement programs in many other countries. It has been proven to be a successful exploration in preventative counter-terrorism and deradicalization, consistent with the principle and spirit of counter-terrorism resolutions including the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy and the UN Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism. At the centers, trainees acquire greater proficiency in standard spoken and written Chinese language and employability, and gain a stronger sense of national identity, citizenship and rule of law. By October 2019, all trainees had graduated from the centers. Most of them have steady employment after finding jobs by themselves or with the help of the government, or starting up their own businesses.

◆ The US and some other Western countries have been making an issue of human rights in Xinjiang in total disregard of the basic reality of human rights protection and development there. It has become a means for them to achieve their strategic objective of using Xinjiang as a pretext to contain China. Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired US Army Colonel and chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said publicly in August 2018 that one of the three-fold purpose of the US military’s presence in Afghanistan is the containment of China — “If the CIA would want to destabilize China, that would be the best way to do it – to form an unrest, and join with those Uyghurs in pushing … Beijing from internal places rather than external”.

Falsehood 9: The CPC has imposed harsh anti-democratic measures in Hong Kong under the guise of national security. Beijing’s quashing of freedom in Hong Kong violates its handover commitments, enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration. 

Reality Check: By attacking and smearing the Law on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), what the US is really up to is to meddle in Hong Kong affairs and make Hong Kong a “bridgehead” for infiltration and interference against the mainland. Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong. Hong Kong affairs are purely China’s internal affairs that brook no interference from the US.

◆ For a long time, the US has colluded with the anti-China, destabilizing forces in Hong Kong, interfered in Hong Kong’s political agenda, stoked up social tensions, and even directly intervened in Hong Kong affairs. The US Consul-General in Hong Kong publicly criticized the Hong Kong SAR government for the proposed legislative amendments in 2019 and the One Country, Two Systems. Officials from the US Consulate-General in Hong Kong also met with the so-called leaders of the rioters. The rioters openly admitted that they had discussed with the US the legislative process of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 and urged the US to stop exporting tear gas and rubber bullets to the Hong Kong police.

◆ Funded and incited by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other US government’s “white gloves”, anti-China rioters in Hong Kong committed vandalizing, looting and arson in the name of the so-called fight for “democracy” and “freedom”, and violently stormed the building of the Legislative Council (LegCo) of Hong Kong. NED even appeared publicly on the street to direct relevant activities, attempting to stage a “color revolution” in Hong Kong. NED contacted opposition parties, groups and organizations in Hong Kong through its affiliating National Democratic Institute for International Affairs or the National Democratic Institute (NDI). NDI funded the “1 July marches” orchestrated by the opposition to obstruct legislation on Article 23, funded the participation of opposition parties and groups at workshops and seminars, and provided personal counseling on campaigning skills for their leaders, ran a so-called “young political leaders program” to support emerging political groups in confronting the government, plotted, together with opposition members of LegCo, a “five-district referendum”, and directed and funded the opposition and young radicals in orchestrating the illegal “Occupy Central” movement.

According to the NED website, two million US dollars were spent on 11 Hong Kong-related projects in 2020, with a particular focus on disrupting LegCo elections. Key projects include: “Strengthening Citizen Election Observation”, which offered technical and financial assistance to newly formed destabilizing groups in Hong Kong, and encouraged them to obstruct LegCo elections by means of election monitoring, get-out-the-vote methods, etc.; “Amplifying Citizens’ Perspectives on Political Participation”, which collected and disseminated survey findings on democratic development, and induced young Hong Kongers to share their political participation experiences on the Internet; “Supporting Unity Among Student Activists”, which called for better coordination among Hong Kong student groups prior to LegCo elections, and instructed and trained them to build capacity for “democratic change” and international communication and to play a role in disrupting electoral order; and “Building Regional Solidarity and Empowering the Hong Kong Movement”, which sought to strengthen Hong Kong’s “democratic movement” through network building, cultivate next-generation “leading activists” in Hong Kong, and set up a network of “democratic movement” in Asia.

◆ US officials used “violence” and “shame” to describe the storming of the Capitol building by protesters, but labeled the violent, criminal activities in Hong Kong that assaulted residents and damaged public facilities as “a beautiful sight to behold”. The US police used armored vehicles to disperse demonstrators, abused their force to beat and drive away sit-in demonstrators, and arrested demonstrators after deliberately inducing them to walk on vehicle lanes which constitutes violation of the law, while discrediting the Hong Kong SAR government’s law-based actions to protect people’s rights and the public order as “violation” of human rights. This is another display of US-style hypocritical double standards and exposes its intention to undermine prosperity and stability of Hong Kong and contain China under the pretext of human rights and democracy.

◆ During the 150-plus years of British colonial rule, there was no democracy in Hong Kong whatsoever. None of the governors was democratically elected by Hong Kong residents. For most of the time, Legco members were directly appointed by the governor. In stark contrast, after the return of Hong Kong, pursuant to the Basic Law, Hong Kong has come to enjoy the executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication. Its residents are masters of the SAR as provided by law who manage their own affairs within the scope of the high degree of autonomy. They enjoy a wide range of democratic rights and freedoms like never before. This is a fact that every fair-minded person would recognize.

◆ The purpose of enacting the National Security Law in Hong Kong is to close the legal loopholes in safeguarding national security in the SAR. It is a legitimate and necessary move to respond to violent terrorist activities and illegal external interference in Hong Kong. Constitutions of more than 100 countries have stipulations that the exercise of fundamental rights and freedoms shall not endanger national security. According to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the rights to freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and public trial may be subject to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety and order. The European Convention on Human Rights has similar provisions.

The national security law specifically targets four categories of crimes: secession, subversion, terrorist activities, and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security. It seeks to punish a tiny number of criminals who seriously endanger national security and protect the vast majority of law-abiding Hong Kong citizens. It provides better protection for the rights and freedoms enjoyed by Hong Kong residents and the high degree of autonomy of Hong Kong enshrined in law. It creates the conditions needed for addressing the deep-seated problems in the economy and concerning people’s livelihood. It also helps maintain the rule of law and business environment in Hong Kong, ease the concerns of the business community about social disorder, and offer better conditions for people from around the world who want to work, invest and live in Hong Kong.

Over the past two years or so since the National Security Law was enacted, the rule of law in Hong Kong has been strengthened and better guaranteed. Hong Kong’s rule of law index continues to stay among the top in the world. Foreign investors have stronger confidence in the city. Hong Kong is seeing a bright prospect transitioning from chaos to order and to prosperity. According to the 2022 AmCham Hong Kong Business Sentiment Survey released early this year, the number of businesses in Hong Kong optimistic about Hong Kong’s business outlook increased by 18 percent from the previous year, while the number of businesses that are pessimistic was down by 17 percent.

◆ The legal basis for the Chinese government to govern Hong Kong is the Chinese Constitution and the Basic Law of the HKSAR. The Sino-British Joint Declaration is not relevant in this regard. As China resumed the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997, all provisions concerning the UK under the Joint Declaration had been fulfilled. The basic policies regarding Hong Kong stated by China in the Joint Declaration are China’s declaration of its policies, which have since been fully embodied in the Basic Law enacted by the National People’s Congress. These policies have not changed; they will continue to be upheld by China. The Joint Declaration does not assign the UK any responsibility over Hong Kong nor give it any right to intervene in Hong Kong affairs after the return of Hong Kong. The UK has no sovereignty, jurisdiction or “right of supervision” over Hong Kong after its return. The Joint Declaration is a bilateral instrument between China and the UK; it does not involve any other country or has anything to do with a third country. Sovereign equality and non-interference are enshrined in international law and are basic norms of international relations. Other countries and organizations have no right to meddle in Hong Kong affairs on the grounds of the Joint Declaration.

The Central Government of China has unswervingly implemented the policy of One Country, Two Systems. Since Hong Kong’s return, the policy of One Country, Two Systems under which the people of Hong Kong administer Hong Kong with a high degree of autonomy has been earnestly implemented with widely recognized achievements. Practice has fully proven that One Country, Two Systems is the best institutional arrangement for Hong Kong’s long-term prosperity and stability. The Central Government will continue to ensure that the policy of One Country, Two Systems remains unchanged, is unwaveringly upheld, and in practice is not bent or distorted.

◆ Turning a blind eye to the fact that Hong Kong’s democracy has improved in ways unseen before its return, the US has acted against Hong Kong’s mainstream public opinion for unity and progress and made irresponsible remarks on Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy, human rights and freedom as the “preacher” of democracy. This only exposes its hypocritical double standards and the agenda to destabilize Hong Kong and contain China.

Falsehood 10: China purports to champion sovereignty and territorial integrity while standing with and defending the Russian government that brazenly violate them.

Reality Check: On the Ukraine issue, China has always adhered to an objective and just position, a position shared by most countries. The Cold War mentality and power politics is the root cause of the Ukraine crisis. The US should earnestly shoulder its due responsibilities and take concrete actions to ease the situation and solve the problems.

◆ The US has betrayed its own promises and kept pushing for the eastward expansion of NATO,creating the Ukraine crisis.

When meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, the then US Secretary of State James Baker gave clear assurances that “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east”. However, the US has led five rounds of NATO eastward expansion since 1999, increasing its membership from 16 to 30, and advancing NATO more than 1,000 kilometers eastward to the Russian border, forming a C-shaped encirclement of the Black Sea.

In 1997, former US diplomat and observer on the Soviet Union George Kennan wrote in his New York Times Op-Ed that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

In 2014, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post that if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it should not join NATO, and that it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.

At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022 in Davos, Kissinger said that Ukraine should have been a bridge between Europe and Russia, but that opportunity does not now exist in the same manner. Russia has been for 400 years an essential part of Europe, and on a number of occasions as the guarantor by which the European balance could be re-established. Current policy should keep in mind the restoration of this role is important to develop.

An American expert on international affairs points out in an article that the US government should bear considerable responsibility for the deterioration of relations with Russia caused by its major mistake of greenlighting the NATO expansion. Noting that “America and NATO aren’t innocent bystanders”, he also believed that it is “the height of folly” for some US officials to brag in public about leaks or even intelligence sharing between the US and Ukraine. He warned that such instigation on the US side could dangerously widen the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

According to Clare Daly, Member of the European Parliament, the US has been adding fuel to the fire on Ukraine because they want to weaken Russia and benefit from the crisis, for which Europe will pay a heavy price. These is still no hope of peace in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, mainly because the US does not want Russia and Ukraine to reach a peace agreement.

Former US Senator Bill Bradley said that “the fundamental blunder that the United States made in the late 80s, early 90s was the expansion of NATO”.

Former US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said in an interview if Joe Biden simply promised not to include Ukraine into NATO, the war would have been prevented.

Over the years, the US has pursued interventionism and grossly violated the sovereignty of Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, Syria and other countries. Alfred de Zayas, a senior UN expert, said in an exclusive interview that from the perspective of international law, Russia’s military actions in Ukraine violated the UN Charter, but the United States and NATO have broken international law so often over the years that “precedents of permissibility” have therefore been set for Russia’s current actions in terms of customary international law.

◆ The US has been fanning the flames on the Ukraine issue. Instead of promoting peace talks, the US continued to provide weapons to Ukraine, escalating tensions and expanding the conflict, making it more prolonged and complicated. This has sufficiently exposed the selfish nature of the US.

On 25 April 2022, US Defense Secretary Austin said after a visit to Ukraine that the US wants to use the war to “see Russia weakened”.

In late May 2022, on top of the original 13.6 billion dollars aid, the US Congress voted to approve another over 40 billion dollars in military and economic aid to Ukraine. The total assistance has exceeded 70 percent of the combined military expenditure of Russia and Ukraine in 2021.

The ongoing crisis has cost Europe heavily in political, economic and social aspects, but the US is reaping dividends, with its arms dealers, food and energy companies gaining huge profits. For example, the market value of US military industrial giants has surged by hundreds of billions, and the price of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exported to Europe is more than 10 times higher than a year ago.

As the result of the conflict, more than 6.5 million Ukrainians have fled into neighboring European countries, posing an unprecedented refugee crisis. But the US admitted only 12 refugees from Ukraine in March 2022. Thousands of Ukrainian refugees remain stranded on the US-Mexico border, and many were in US custody. Even when the UN and the international community are calling for an early end to the conflict, some in the US are still claiming that they would “fight to the last Ukrainian”.

◆ The relationship between China and Russia features non-alliance, non-confrontation and non-targeting at any third party. It is essentially different from the practice of the US and a small number of other Western countries, where they still stick to the Cold War mentality and a friend-or-foe dichotomy to draw ideological lines, form so-called “alliances” and “cliques”, pursue bloc politics and create confrontation and division.

In the joint statement issued on 4 February 2022, China and Russia call on all to champion humanity’s common values of peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom, respect the rights of all peoples to independently determine the development paths of their countries, and the sovereignty, security and development interests of all countries, protect the UN-centered international system, and the international order based on international law, seek true multilateralism with the UN and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role, promote more democratic international relations, and ensure peace, stability and sustainable development across the world.

◆ As a responsible major country, China’s decisions and judgments on the Ukraine issue are made independently based on the merits of the matter. China has made great efforts to safeguard international peace and security, and has been committed to promoting talks for peace and deescalating tensions. China maintains that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected, that the purposes and principles of the UN Charter should be upheld, that legitimate security concerns of all countries should be taken seriously, and that all efforts conducive to a peaceful resolution of the crisis should be supported. China’s position is objective, fair and consistent with the aspirations of most countries.

◆ Of the 233 sovereign countries and regions in the world, 185 are not involved in sanctions on Russia. Among the more than 190 members of the UN, more than 140 countries, including NATO member state Turkey, have refused to impose sanctions on Russia. The combined population of countries and regions participating in sanctions against Russia and those not is 6.5 billion versus 1.1 billion. Among them, those openly oppose sanctions have a combined population of 4.8 billion.

About two-thirds of the world’s population does not support Western positions on Ukraine, according to a report by the British Economist magazine.

Falsehood 11: The US is setting up new coalitions in the Indo-Pacific for regional peace and stability, and has launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), as it “shares the vision that the regional countries and people across the region hold: one of a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Reality Check: The so-called US vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” is essentially a strategy to divide others, incite confrontation and undermine peace. It runs counter to the trend of the times in the Asia-Pacific, i.e., the trend of peaceful development and win-win cooperation.

◆ The US administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy is self-contradictory: the US claims to promote the region’s “freedom and openness” as its goal, while in reality co-opting with allies to forge a “five-four-three-two-one” formation made up of the Five Eyes, the Quad, AUKUS, bilateral alliances and IPEF, forming exclusive “small circles” and forcing countries in the region to take sides.

AUKUS helps Australia build nuclear-powered submarines and develops hypersonic weapons, pushing up the risk for a regional arms race. Under the pretext of fighting illegal fishing and keeping supply chains resilient, the Quad has vigorously pursued military cooperation and intelligence sharing. The US has also encouraged NATO’s involvement in the Asia-Pacific. These are all attempts to materialize an “Asia-Pacific version of NATO” and promote “integrated deterrence” against China.

◆ The Indo-Pacific strategy has raised increasing alarm and concern of many countries, especially those in the Asia-Pacific. As BBC reported, in April 2021, New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta expressed New Zealand’s discomfort with expanding the Five Eyes’ remit by putting pressure on China in this way, and New Zealand still prefers to pursue bilateral relations with China. At the US-ASEAN Special Summit, ASEAN countries stressed their aspiration for peace and cooperation, not for taking sides, division or confrontation.

◆ The US has made clear that IPEF is to enable it to win the contest in the 21st century. This means that the IPEF is designed to serve the US economy. The US has shelved the development of the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) for a long time, left the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and refused to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). This exposes the self-serving nature of the US and its selective approach to international institutions. It is all about the US’ self-interests, nothing mutually beneficial.

IPEF is a political instrument of the US in propping up its hegemony in the regional economy. The essence is to dominate the supply chains, value chains and new economic sectors, and marginalize specific countries. The US has chosen to weaponize economic issues as political and ideological ones, using economy to coerce regional countries into taking sides between China and the US.

US Trade Representative Katherine Tai publicly stated that IPEF is a standalone arrangement independent from China. US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said IPEF marks the US’s restoration of economic leadership in the region and presents Indo-Pacific countries an alternative to China’s approach. Previously, she also expressed that IPEF may harmonize export controls and other “poison pills”, such as limiting sensitive products export to China.

IPEF seeks to establish US-led trade rules, restructure the industrial chain system and economically and scientifically “decouple” regional countries from China. Many countries in the region get concerned, and believe that the cost of such “decoupling” will be huge. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad noted that any trade alliance that excludes the world’s second largest economy is not conducive to closer, multilateral trade cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. The US’s exclusion of China is not an economic issue but a political one.

◆ Hailed as “menu approach” cooperation, IPEF actually pays little regard to the development level and real needs of the regional countries. It barely gives concessions to developing countries on tariff reduction and market access, but forces participating countries to accept the so-called high standards of the US and its unilateral agenda. IPEF focuses solely on the US’s self-interests and cares little about the needs of other parties. There is no such thing as mutual benefit in IPEF.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) pointed out in its report “Regional Perspectives on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework” that IPEF has little more to offer than enlarging the US economic presence in the region. It fails to address the issues of the greater interests of regional countries. There is widespread concern that IPEF will only benefit the US, while saddling participating regional countries with a heavy burden.

Falsehood 12: China has announced its ambition to create a sphere of influence in the Pacific region. It is advancing unlawful maritime claims in the South China Sea, undermining peace and security, freedom of navigation and commerce. The US will continue to oppose Beijing’s aggressive and unlawful activities in the South and East China Seas. It will support the region’s coastal states in upholding their maritime rights, work with allies and partners to uphold freedom of navigation and overflight, and will continue to fly and sail wherever international law allows.

Reality Check: China is committed to the path of peaceful development, the five principles of peaceful coexistence and opposes the practice of the big and strong bullying the small and weak. The US, by painting China as a threat and using “freedom of navigation” as a pretext to undermine China’s sovereignty, security and maritime rights and interests, is actually the real threat to regional peace and security.

◆ China stands for equality among all countries irrespective of their size, respects every country’s choice of development path suited to its national condition, and does not seek any sphere of influence. China pursues a defense policy that is defensive in nature and a military strategy of active defense. In developing its defense capabilities, China aims to safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests, and does not target any other country. The growth of China’s defense capabilities amplifies the force for peace in the world.

◆ China is the first to have discovered, named, and explored and exploited Nanhai Zhudao and relevant waters, and the first to have exercised sovereignty and jurisdiction over them continuously, peacefully and effectively. China’s sovereignty over Nanhai Zhudao and its relevant rights and interests in the South China Sea have been established in the long course of history. They are solidly grounded in history and law, and have been upheld by successive Chinese governments and recognized by the international community. Pursuant to the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation, China recovered territories illegally occupied by Japan including Xisha Qundao and Nansha Qundao after WWII, and has since affirmed sovereignty and strengthened jurisdiction by establishing official names, publishing maps, creating administrative units and stationing troops. China’s resuming its exercise of sovereignty over Nanhai Zhudao is a legitimate and lawful act to inherit China’s rights established over the course of history. It is also part of the post-WWII international order, and has been recognized by countries around the world including the US.

◆ With the joint efforts of China and ASEAN countries, the overall situation in the South China Sea remains stable. With the full and effective implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), the parties have increased dialogue, properly handled differences, deepened cooperation and enhanced mutual trust, and have made active progress in advancing consultations on the Code of Conduct (COC) in the South China Sea, in an effort to jointly safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea and inject positive dynamics into regional and global security, stability and prosperity. Despite COVID-19, the parties have held offline Senior Officials’ Meetings on the implementation of the DOC and 10 joint working group meetings via video link to advance consultations on the COC text. Last month, the first face-to-face COC consultations since COVID-19 was held in Cambodia. Such positive progress speaks volumes about the resolve and commitment of regional countries to steadfastly advance consultations toward a COC.

◆ China respects and supports all countries’ freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea in accordance with international law, and actively safeguards the security of and unimpeded passage through international shipping lanes. In fact, the South China Sea is one of the world’s safest and freest sea lanes. Fifty percent of merchant vessels in the world and one-third of international maritime trade pass through it, and more than 100,000 merchant ships sail through it annually. Freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea has never been an issue.

◆ Diaoyu Dao and its affiliated islands are China’s inherent territory. China’s patrol and law enforcement missions in waters off the Diaoyu Dao are legitimate measures taken by China to exercise its sovereignty in accordance with law and are necessary responses to Japanese provocations in violation of China’s sovereignty. No country or force should misjudge the strong resolve of the Chinese government to safeguard sovereignty and territorial integrity. At the same time, China stays committed to properly handling and resolving issues through dialogue and consultation, and has made great efforts to maintain maritime stability. In 2014, a four-point principled consensus was reached between China and Japan to handle and improve China-Japan relations, which includes a clear understanding on managing the situation surrounding Diaoyu Dao and the East China Sea.

◆ Acting under the logic of the Monroe Doctrine, the US often uses power politics and hegemonic and bullying acts to flagrantly undermine the international maritime order, with a view to sustaining its maritime predominance. In the 240-plus-year history of the US, there were only 16 years when the country was not at war with others. The US operates over 800 military bases in 80 countries and regions. Its military expenditure, which has topped the world for many years in a row, accounts for one-fourth of the global total and is equivalent to the combined military spending of the next nine countries. Recently, the US has proposed a national defense budget request of about 813 billion US dollars for fiscal year 2023. Such massive military spending makes the US the real “pacing challenge” to the world.

◆ The US disregards the history and facts surrounding the South China Sea issue, deliberately stokes disputes on territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, and sows discord among regional countries. It has become the biggest force undermining stability and fueling militarization in the South China Sea. Data from relevant organizations show that the number of US close-in reconnaissance activities targeting China has more than doubled over the past decade and more. Right now, an average of five US naval vessels cruise near China’s shore every day. This year, US naval vessels have been sailing through the Taiwan Strait about once a month, and large US reconnaissance planes have flown over 800 times close to China and repeatedly violated China’s airspace. Eager to stir up trouble in the South China Sea, the US has also encouraged its allies and partners to sail their naval vessels into the South China Sea.

On 2 October 2021, USS Connecticut, a nuclear submarine, had an underwater collision in the South China Sea. It was not until a week later that the US issued a vague statement, claiming that the submarine hit an unknown object. One month after, it said that the submarine “grounded on an uncharted seamount”. A final report on the accident was eventually released by the US Navy on 23 May 2022, yet no clear explanation has been offered in response to the grave concerns and questions raised by many, including the intent of the submarine, the specific location of the accident, whether the submarine had entered exclusive economic zones (EEZ) and even territorial sea of other countries, and whether the accident had caused a nuclear leak or damaged marine environment.

◆ The US began its Freedom of Navigation (FON) Program in 1979 ahead of the signing of the UNCLOS. Challenging the new maritime order, the move sought to maximize the freedom of the US military to rampage through the oceans. The FON Program is not consistent with the universally recognized international law, disregards the sovereignty, security and maritime rights and interests of the many littoral countries, and seriously jeopardizes regional peace and stability. Its goal is to advance American maritime supremacy under the pretext of “freedom of navigation”. The FON Program has been firmly opposed by many members of the international community, especially the developing countries.

Falsehood 13: Chinese government officials spread disinformation.

Reality Check: China is the top victim of disinformation, while the US is the biggest source of spreading disinformation.

◆ With sharp confrontation between the Republicans and Democrats, habitual lying, finger-pointing and blame-shifting among politicians have become part of the US political ecology. A poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Pearson Institute at the University of Chicago reveals that nearly half of the respondents blame the US government for the spread of misinformation.

◆ The US has used disinformation to launch multiple wars across the globe in pursuit of its hegemonic agenda. Colin Powell, the then US Secretary of State accused Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction with a test tube of “laundry powder”. The US blamed the Syrian government for using bio-chemical weapons against its own people with fake videos by the White Helmets.

In 2019, the then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly claimed that “we lied, we cheated, we stole … we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

On 4 May 2022, Republican Senator Rand Paul spoke bluntly at a Senate hearing, “Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The US government.”

◆ Manipulation by US politicians has seriously undercut the media’s credibility. A Gallup poll in 2020 shows that 60 percent of Americans remain largely distrustful of the media, among whom 33 percent have no trust at all, which is 5 percentage points higher than that of 2019.

◆ The US has on multiple occasions fabricated numerous lies and rumors on issues concerning origins-tracing, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, democracy and human rights, including the so-called “lab-leak theory”, “genocide” and “forced labor”, which have all been defeated by facts.

Since the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out, the US has kept spreading disinformation on China and made unfounded accusations against it, in order to shirk its responsibilities for triggering the conflict with NATO’s eastward expansion. The New York Times quoted from anonymous US senior officials who claimed that China had prior knowledge of Russian military operation in Ukraine. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US Representative to the UN, said at a Security Council meeting that China had been spreading disinformation in support of Russia. This is sheer fabrication and slandering. Meanwhile, as part of the fierce hunt of voices different from its own, the US has added special labels to Tweets sharing links of Chinese media reports, while turning a blind eye to the Western media that are actually telling the lies.

◆ The US has used disinformation as a political tool to attack and suppress China, and formed a supply chain of anti-China rhetoric combining dirty funding, fact-twisting stories and massive smear campaigns. On the surface, these anti-China rhetoric come from certain media outlets and politicians, but what lies underneath is a massive capital-driven supply chain — some institutions and organizations from the US and other Western countries provide dirty funding for political purposes to anti-China groups and individuals; some think-tanks and academic institutions make up fact-twisting stories to fuel anti-China rhetoric around the world through Western hegemony on public opinion; and politicians and media act as mouthpieces propagating lies and falsehoods about China in massive smear campaigns.

Adrian Zenz and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), both fabricated numerous Xinjiang-related lies, are typical examples of such “lies manufacturers”.

Adrian Zenz is a member of a far-right group founded by the US government and a key member of an anti-China research institute set up and manipulated by the US intelligence agency. His so-called reports on Xinjiang reflect no credibility, intellectual merit or academic integrity at all.

As disclosed by the media, the US State Department and arms manufacturers are the primary foreign sponsors for the ASPI. Funding from the US State Department alone reached nearly 1.4 million Australian dollars a year, all directed to research projects attacking China. The ASPI disseminated a series of lies and disinformation on issues concerning origins-tracing, Xinjiang and data security.

◆ In addition to constantly spreading disinformation on China, the US has also rolled out measures to suppress and contain China based on such disinformation, including China-related bills and sanctions. In December 2021, under the pretext of its so-called concerns on “forced labor”, the US signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law, imposing a full ban on imports from Xinjiang. This is a malicious move to denigrate human rights situation in Xinjiang, and a serious violation of international law and basic norms of international relations.

◆ China has used facts and figures to tell the truth and refute the lies and rumors created and propagated by the US. It is aimed at making truth heard, not spreading disinformation. Instead of observing basic facts, the US has acted in its own interests and labeled all views different from its own as “disinformation”. This is, in essence, hegemony and bullying in the field of public opinion.

Falsehood 14: China is circumventing or breaking trade rules and its economic manipulations have cost American workers millions of jobs, harming workers and companies in the United States but also around the world. The United States will push back on market-distorting policies and practices, like subsidies and market access barriers, which China’s government has used for years to gain competitive advantage.

Reality Check: China has faithfully delivered on its commitments made upon accession to the WTO. China upholds, builds and contributes to the multilateral trading system. China-US economic and trade relations are mutually beneficial in nature. However, US’ wanton suppression of China in trade and investment areas has been the root cause of trade frictions between the two countries, which hurts others without benefiting oneself.

◆ Over the past 20-plus years since joining the WTO, China has earnestly fulfilled its commitments upon accession. It has rolled out nationwide the management system of pre-establishment national treatment plus a negative list, kept expanding market access, brought down overall tariff level from 15.3% to 7.4%, and opened up nearly 120 sectors in the service industry.

In October 2021, the WTO conducted the eighth review of trade policies and practices of China. The report of the review fully recognized China’s efforts in upholding the multilateral trading system and its active role in the WTO. It spoke highly of China’s achievements in such areas as trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, greater opening-up and progress under the Belt and Road Initiative.

A leading official of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development pointed out that, over the past two decades, China has steadfastly supported the rules-based multilateral trading system, practiced true multilateralism, participated fully in WTO negotiations, steered negotiations in areas such as investment facilitation and e-commerce, and worked for WTO rules keeping pace with the times.

◆ Embracing the trend of regional and global economic integration, China has deepened economic and trade ties with countries around the world, signing free trade agreements and stepping up the building of free trade zones. As of now, China has signed 19 free trade agreements with 26 countries and regions.

◆ China has actively deepened supply-side structural reform. It has met the target of phasing out 150 million tons of overcapacity in the steel industry set out in the 13th Five-Year Plan two years ahead of schedule, 1.14 times of the global total in slashing overcapacity of steels. The process involved the reemployment of 280,000 Chinese steel workers, more than the total number of steel workers in the US, Europe and Japan.

◆ China and the US have highly complementary economies, deeply integrated interests, and mutually beneficial economic and trade ties. In 2021, bilateral trade topped record-breaking 750 billion US dollars. The US Export Report 2022 issued by the US-China Business Council showed that, in 2021, goods exports to China grew by 21 percent to 149 billion US dollars, supporting 858,000 jobs in the US. The 2020 Annual Business Survey Report on Chinese Enterprises in the United States released by the China General Chamber of Commerce-USA indicated that, as of 2019, CGCC’s Chinese member companies cumulatively invested over 123 billion US dollars, employed more than 220,000 people, and supported over one million jobs throughout the United States. Research of the US-China Business Council showed that Chinese exports have helped bring down US consumer price by 1 to 1.5 percent, saving each US household 850 US dollars per year.

◆ By blaming China for its own economic problems, the US started a trade war and tariff war against China, which only backfired for itself. US tariffs against China have cost American companies more than 1.7 trillion US dollars in market capitalization and increased average household expenditure by 1,300 US dollars per year. A 2021 report by the US-China Business Council pointed out that the trade war with China has resulted in a loss of 245,000 jobs in the US. A report from Moody’s Investor Service was cited as saying that American consumers bear 92.4 percent of the cost of imposing tariffs on Chinese goods. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize laureate in economics, incisively pointed out that US trade policy toward China has failed and tariffs harm the US more than their intended targets.

On 18 May 2022, the National Retail Federation (NRF) wrote to President Biden, calling for eliminating tariffs, which, as pointed out in the letter, could reduce consumer prices by as much as 1.3 percent. Janet Yellen, the US Treasury Secretary, said that some tariffs on China hurt American consumers and businesses, and that cutting tariffs was worth considering in order to lower US inflation.

The obstacles to China-US economic and trade cooperation are mainly from the US side. Over 1,000 Chinese companies have been put on its lists for unfair suppression or sanction. The US Congress has put forth more than 300 negative China-related bills. The proposed Bipartisan Innovation Act, which is still being developed, essentially aims to hold back China’s economic growth.

◆ The US arbitrarily accuses China of its industrial subsidy policies, but the country itself was among the first to develop such policies, including subsidies and so on. Successive US administrations have rolled out plans to support emerging industries. Through tax relief, government procurement and other means, the US administrations have interfered in the market to push forward cooperation between government and enterprises and advance technology transfers. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US undertook special programs to promote the development of its aerospace and military industries. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration supported the growth of hi-tech industries with the Information Superhighway plan. Such industrial policies are still being practiced in the US today. A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that the US and its allies and partners in Europe and Asia have increased subsidies to industries such as semiconductors, electric-car batteries and pharmaceuticals to shore up support for domestic companies.

◆ The US poses the biggest challenge to the global trading system. Following “America First” policy, the US has refused to shoulder its due obligations under multilateral trading agreements, and withdrawn from international treaties and organizations, taking a heavy toll on the development and functioning of the global trading system. A WTO dispute settlement report has identified the US as the biggest rule-breaker, responsible for two-thirds of violations of WTO rules. The US also blocked the appointment of new judges in the WTO Appellate Body, leading to an impasse in the Appellate Body since December 2019.

Falsehood 15: The US will give countries an alternative choice, so that they can be free from opaque investments that leave them in debt.

Reality Check: In providing foreign assistance, China always respects the sovereignty of recipient countries, attaches no strings whatsoever and pursues win-win outcomes. Chinese assistance has delivered real benefits to the relevant developing countries and received their acclaim and appreciation.

◆ The so-called Chinese “debt trap” is a narrative trap that the US and some other Western countries use to defame and smear China and disrupt China’s cooperation with other developing countries. As a 2021 article in The Atlantic points out, the debt-trap narrative is just a lie fabricated by some Western politicians, and a powerful one.

Western capital constitutes the largest creditor of developing countries. According to the 2022 statistics of the World Bank on international debt, 28.8 percent of Africa’s outstanding external debt is owed to multilateral financial institutions and 41.8 percent to commercial creditors mainly composed of Western financial institutions. These two types of institutions together hold nearly three-quarters of the debt, making them the primary creditors of Africa’s debt.

According to the director of the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at Johns Hopkins University of the US, after scrutinizing thousands of Chinese loan documents, mostly for projects in Africa, CARI has not found any evidence that China deliberately pushes poor countries into debt as a way of seizing their assets or gaining a greater say in their internal affairs. CARI’s figures show that China holds 17 percent of Africa’s overall external debt, far less than that of the West.

Not a single African country has been forced to use its strategic resources such as ports or mines as collateral for financing cooperation with China. DW points out that the default of African countries does not give China the right to use the relevant infrastructure.

◆ The debt issue is, in essence, a development issue. The key to resolving this issue lies in ensuring that the loans deliver real benefits.

Take Africa as an example. Western countries’ financing for Africa is mainly concentrated in non-production fields, and most loans come with political strings attached, such as human rights and judicial reform. They have failed to truly promote economic development, boost government tax revenue and improve balance of payments. Rather, they have served as instruments for controlling and causing harm in Africa.

China always respects the will of the African people and bears in mind the actual needs of African countries. Chinese investment in and financing for Africa are mainly in infrastructure building and production-related fields. Entering the 21st century, China has worked actively to support Africa’s economic development and provided an alternative to the traditional financing channels of the Paris Club. This  has helped Africa to strengthen its capacity of self-generated and self-reliant development and to usher in a golden age of high-speed economic growth for 20 years straight.

Professor Deborah Brautigam of Johns Hopkins University noted the diversification of Chinese investment. In 2014 alone, Chinese companies signed over 70 billion US dollars in construction contracts in Africa that will yield vital infrastructure, including hospitals, oil and gas pipelines, and airports.

According to preliminary statistics, between 2000 and 2020, China helped African countries build more than 13,000 kilometers of roads and railway and more than 80 large-scale power facilities, funded more than 130 medical facilities, 45 sports venues and more than 170 schools, and trained more than 160,000 professionals across various fields for Africa.

The Nairobi Expressway project built by Chinese companies in Kenya through public-private partnership has created more than 6,000 local jobs and benefited more than 200 subcontractors and several hundred local suppliers. The Kenyan government speaks highly of the project, commending it as an important manifestation of the mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation between Kenya and China.

Nigeria’s Lekki Deep Sea Port project, built with Chinese participation, has provided more than 1,200 local jobs and is expected to create, directly and indirectly, 170,000 more upon completion.

A study conducted by Hong Kong scholars finds that more than 80 percent of the employees of Chinese companies in Africa surveyed are local Africans.

A team at the London School of Economics and Political Science finds that Chinese investment in Africa has produced “significant and persistently positive long-term effects”.

A study by RAND Corporation indicates that in the BRI region, having a rail connection between trading partners has improved total exports by 2.8 percent.

◆ China attaches high importance to the debt sustainability of projects. Back in 2017, it signed the Guiding Principles on Financing the Development of the Belt and Road with 26 countries participating in the BRI. In 2019, China released the Debt Sustainability Framework for Participating Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative. Based on the debt situation and repayment ability of debtor countries, and following the principles of equal-footed consultation, compliance with laws and regulations, openness and transparency, the framework aims to strengthen monitoring and assessment of the economic, social and livelihood benefits of the projects, and channels sovereign loans into areas with high yields, with a view to ensuring the long-term returns of the projects. China has also made proactive efforts to lessen the burden of debtor countries.

According to the World Bank, between 2008 and 2021, China provided 71 debt restructurings for low-income countries. In 2020, China actively responded to the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) by suspending the payment of more than 1.3 billion US dollars of debt that year alone, or nearly 30 percent of the G20’s total, making it the largest contributor among G20 members. China has signed debt suspension agreements or reached mutual understanding on debt suspension with 19 African countries, and actively participated in the case-based debt settlement for Chad and Ethiopia under the G20’s Common Framework.

◆ The US and some other Western countries, rather than taking actions themselves, point fingers at China for providing assistance. This has caused much displeasure among countries in the wider developing world.

Professor Samita Hattige, adviser to the National Education Commission of Sri Lanka, said in an interview with Global Times that Chinese loans are based on the needs of the Sri Lankan government and for the purpose of improving Sri Lankan infrastructure. The loans have brought major changes to Sri Lanka’s economy and people’s livelihood, and there is no such thing as a “debt trap”. China’s share in Sri Lanka’s external debt is around a mere 10 percent. Apparently, some media have chosen to ignore this fact. While the “Chinese debt trap” hyped up by Western media seems apprehensible at a glance, it has deliberately evaded the huge economic values that infrastructure improvement has created, such as economic development and more jobs and investment.

The article “Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal Need China for Development” published by Sri Lanka’s Daily News on 17 January 2022 says, “South Asia needs China in its development process because China is synonymous with the term ‘Development’. China’s … Belt and Road Initiative provides benefits for almost all South Asian countries.” “In the case of Sri Lanka,” the article writes, “Sri Lanka is a beneficiary of Chinese projects. Many say only about the Chinese debt trap in this regard but no one mentions Chinese developmental activities in Sri Lanka.” “They have invested heavily in seaports, airports, … national highways, and power distribution centers. ”

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni stated in an interview with Nikkei in 2022 that “Africa has been having (debt) problems for the last 600 years due to the slave trade, colonialism, neocolonialism — and none of it was from China.” “China supported Africans’ fight against colonialism before starting economic activity on the continent.”

Rwandan President Paul Kagame pointed out that China’s presence in Africa is different from that of other countries — “I don’t think China has forced any country in Africa to take their money to accumulate the kind of debt you may find with some countries.”

Nigerian Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama stated that Nigeria had chosen Chinese companies for infrastructure projects because they were experienced and provide competitive rates. “So the issue of Chinese influence really doesn’t come in.

Falsehood 16: For too long, Chinese companies have enjoyed far greater access to our markets than our companies have in China. American companies operating in China have been subject to systematic forced technology transfer, while Chinese companies in America have been protected by our rule of law.

Reality Check: China is committed to fostering an enabling business environment that is based on market principles, governed by law and up to international standard. While China’s business environment keeps improving, the business environment for Chinese companies operating in the US continues to deteriorate.

◆ China has seen the most substantial improvement in business environment among all economies. In recent years, China has made continuous efforts to shorten the negative list on foreign investment, improved the institutions for investment promotion and protection and for information reporting, and stepped up intellectual property protection, becoming one of the most-improved economies for ease of doing business. With the continuous improvement in business environment and its super-sized domestic market, China is a strong magnet for cross-border investment from around the world. The number of newly established foreign-invested enterprises is on a steady rise in China. From 2012 to 2021, the number of foreign-invested enterprises in China increased from 441,000 to 664,000, up by over 50 percent. According to the Doing Business 2020 report released by the World Bank Group, China ranked 31st on ease of doing business, moving up by 47 spots in two years. The European Business in China Business Confidence Survey 2021 released by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China (EUCCC) shows that a majority of the European companies surveyed found intellectual property rights enforcement to be “adequate” or “excellent” in China, marking a record high in satisfaction levels.

◆ It is the foreign companies, including the US companies operating in China, that can best tell whether China’s business environment is good or not. The 2022 China Business Climate Survey Report of the American Chamber of Commerce in China (AmCham China) shows that 58 percent of the US companies in China saw their operating revenue growing in 2021; 66 percent of the companies plan to increase their investment in China this year; and China remains a top-three priority of the global investment planning for 60 percent of the companies. The recently released USCBC 2021 Member Survey shows that 95 percent of the respondents remained profitable in their China operations; and 74 percent of the companies took China as a top priority or a top-five priority market in their business strategy. In the first four months of 2022, the actual US investment in China rose by 53.2 percent year on year. These figures speak volume about the optimism of foreign companies in China’s economic prospects, as well as their recognition of China’s sound business environment and confidence in building a long-term business in the Chinese market.

◆ To preserve its hegemony and economic interests, the US has abused its national power in violation of the principles of market economy and international trade rules, and resorted to every possible means to suppress and contain Chinese enterprises. The US government has fabricated all sorts of lies including “forced labor” in an attempt to bring down Xinjiang’s cotton, tomato and solar photovoltaic industries. According to preliminary statistics, in 2021, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued seven Withhold Release Orders (WROs) on the exports of goods made with “forced labor” to the US, including apparel, textiles, tomato seeds, canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, and other goods made with cotton or tomatoes, silica-based products and electronic products produced in Xinjiang, and detained or confiscated 485 million US dollars worth of goods, which are notably larger in both quantity and value compared to 2020. The current US administration has already outperformed its predecessor in terms of the scale and magnitude of sanctions imposed on China for Xinjiang-related issues.

◆ The US has imposed sweeping restrictions on the financing and operation of Chinese enterprises in the US through non-transparent and unfair administrative means. According to official US statistics, the US has up to now put 1,055 Chinese entities and individuals (overseas affiliated entities excluded) on various types of sanctions lists, including 467 on the Entity List, 306 on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN), 201 on the Unverified List (UVL), 68 on the Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies (NS-CMIC) List, and a few other entities. Last February, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) put WeChat and AliExpress on its latest Notorious Markets List, while Pinduoduo and other Chinese companies as well as nine physical markets located within China remained on the list.

Falsehood 17: China takes advantage of the openness of the US economies to spy, to hack, to steal technology and know-how to advance China’s military innovation, entrench its surveillance state and increase other countries’ technological dependence. The US should make sure that technologies are rooted in democratic values.

Reality check: China’s technological innovation and development is based on its own investment and efforts. The US is drawing ideological lines in scientific and technological exchanges and cooperation, and this embodies its Cold War mentality.

◆ China is a big innovator in the world with leading input and growth rate in innovation. According to statistics, China’s social R&D investment in 2021 reached 2.7864 trillion yuan, an increase of 14.2 percent over the previous year. A total of 696,000 invention patents were authorized in 2021, up by 31.3 percent year-on-year. The Global Innovation Index (GII) 2021 published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) shows that China’s world innovation performance ranking has moved up from the 35th place to the 12th. China is now home to 19 of the top 100 science and technology clusters worldwide, ranking the second globally. Chinese applicants submitted 69,500 international patent applications, making China the first in the world for three consecutive years. The European Patent Office (EPO) recorded 16,665 applications from China in 2021, registering a year-on-year increase of 24 percent and the biggest surge among leading patent filing countries.

◆ In recent years, China has been actively integrating into the global science and technology innovation network, and has enjoyed fruitful results in technological and people-to-people exchanges under the BRI. In addition, China has also actively worked to join the Hague Agreement and the Marrakesh Treaty, contributing its share to the global governance of intellectual property rights. The Business Confidence Survey 2021 published by the EUCCC shows that over half of interviewed companies view intellectual property rights enforcement in China as “adequate” or “excellent”.

◆ Throughout history, the US has repeatedly stolen intellectual properties and reaped dividends from technological developments through various means, including prying out information, offering immigration status and monopolizing patents.

After World War II, the US launched Operation Paperclip to plunder Germany of its technology patents, including those on advanced aircraft and guided missile control. Nearly all German government agencies, research and development institutes and large companies were looted, and German scientists were forced to immigrate to the US.

In the 1990s, US intelligence agencies installed eavesdropping devices in the cars of Japanese negotiators during automobile trade talks to intercept internal information and gain the upper hand in the negotiations.

In 2001, the European company Airbus sued the American company Boeing for tracking Airbus employees’ telephone, fax, and e-mails for business espionage using the electronic surveillance system named Echelon developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

In 2013, the US DOJ detained four Alstom executives to force the French company into a fire sale of its core business, power and grid, to the US company General Electric.

In 2021, Danish media exposed that the US NSA wiretapped senior officials and business leaders in European countries using internet facilities located in Denmark.

In addition, using “chip shortages” as an excuse, the US has also set deadlines to force leading chip makers from different countries to submit key information, including orders, clients and inventory, in an effort to turn the table in the chip sector.

◆ While claiming to uphold “peace” and “openness”, the US has been wantonly setting up technological barriers, piecing together the so-called “democratic technology alliance”, politicizing science and technology and turning them into ideological issues, and forming exclusive small circles. Identifying nearly 20 categories as controlled critical technologies, including biotechnology and artificial intelligence, the US has tightened up export control and investment scrutiny. It has also overstretched the concept of national security to contain and even stranglehold the development of high-tech industries in other countries, which severely violates the rights of developing countries in pursuing science and technology advancement.

Falsehood 18: Climate is not about ideology. It’s about math. If China sticks with its current plan and does not peak its emissions until 2030, then the rest of the world must go to zero by 2035. And that’s simply not possible.

Reality Check: The US holds undeniable responsibilities for climate change and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction. It shouldn’t shift responsibilities onto others, nor should it practice “double standards”.

◆ Developed countries, due to their unconstrained emissions over more than two centuries of industrialization, bear undeniable historical responsibilities for climate change. From 1850 to 2011, developed countries contributed to 79 percent of global carbon emissions. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement all require developed countries to repay their historical debts.

◆ From a historical perspective, developing countries are not the primary emitters of GHG, but the victims of climate change. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities is the cornerstone of global climate governance. As developed and developing countries do not bear the same historical responsibilities for climate change, and have different development needs and capabilities, it would be both inappropriate and unfair to apply the same restrictions on them. Wera Mori, Minister for Environment Conservation and Climate Change of Papua New Guinea (PNG) said on the sidelines of COP26 that countries like PNG have become victims of climate change caused by the industrialization of developed countries and are now bearing the consequences of their actions, which is absolutely unfair.

◆ In tackling climate change, China is not just a responsible participant, but also a serious doer. President Xi Jinping committed explicitly that China will strive to peak CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. That means China will move from carbon peak to neutrality in only 30 years, while the time the EU, the US and Japan give themselves is respectively 2.4, 1.4 and 1.2 times of China’s.

China has made notable contribution to the global efforts in energy conservation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, transport and building, which are all in the range of 30 to 50 percent. By the end of 2020, China’s CO2 emissions per unit of GDP had dropped by 48.4 percent relative to the 2005 level. The proportion of coal in total energy consumption fell from 67 percent in 2005 to 56.8 percent in 2020. The cumulative installed capacity of renewable power generation exceeded 1 billion kilowatts, accounting for 43.5 percent of the national total. Chinese companies have taken 15 spots in the world’s top 20 PV companies list, including all the top five spots, and seven spots in the top 10 wind power companies list. In the past ten years, China phased out 120 million kilowatts of coal-fired power generation capacity, which is larger than the total installed power capacity of the UK. By the end of 2021, China’s new energy vehicle ownership had exceeded 7.84 million units, and 2.95 million units were newly registered in 2021, accounting for 11.25 percent of all newly registered vehicles that year.

The share of renewable energy in China’s energy mix has already exceeded that of the US. By the end of 2019, the total installed capacity of China’s hydro, wind and solar power generation had reached 756 million kilowatts, 2.8 times that of the US. Renewable energy accounts for 12.7 percent of China’s primary energy consumption, approximately 1.4 times that of the US.

◆ The US is the world’s largest GHG emitter in cumulative terms, and its per capita carbon emissions are 3.3 times that of the global average. In the 270 years from 1750 to 2019, the US emitted a cumulative 412.5 billion tons of GHG, accounting for about 1/4 of the global total. The US has produced the world’s largest cumulative emissions, which are almost twice that of China’s. Here are some statistics: the historical peak of US per capita GHG emissions was 23.44 tons; in 2018, US per capita emissions were 16.85 tons, while China’s were 7.56 tons. Despite its status as a major manufacturing nation, China’s current per capita carbon emissions are not even half that of the US, and its per capita cumulative emissions are only around 1/8 that of the US. Even by the time of 2030, when China’s carbon emissions will have peaked, the country’s per capita carbon emissions will still just be around 7-8 tons. In comparison, when the US had its carbon peak in 2005, its per capita carbon emissions had already reached 14 tons.

◆ In June 2017, the US announced its decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, and in November 2020, it officially pulled out of the accord. Such a move seriously undermined the equity, efficiency and efficacy of global climate governance. The US had stayed outside the Paris Agreement until February 2021. Despite the improvement in political posture, the GHG emissions generated simply cannot be rolled back. Instead of cutting emissions, the US produced more emissions in 2021 than 2020, drifting further away from the course set by the Paris Agreement. With its flip-flopping on such an existential issue, the US has fully exposed its utilitarian approach to major issues of principles and lost its credibility in the family of nations.

◆ It is the unshirkable moral responsibility of developed countries to provide funding for developing countries to help them better cope with climate change. At Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancún in 2010, developed countries committed to a goal of mobilizing jointly 100 billion US dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. More than ten years have passed, developed countries have never truly delivered on their commitment. Report by a well-known international think tank shows that not only did developed countries fall short of their collective climate financing target every year, they also juggled the figures, providing far less funds than officially released figures. Most notably, the US only fulfilled less than 20 percent of its due contribution.

◆ For years, the US has been saying publicly that it wants to work with China on climate change, but its actions say otherwise. While demanding China to consume less coal, it asks China to continue buying coal from it; while appealing for the development of renewable energies, it imposes sanctions on Chinese PV businesses. Take PV products as an example, starting from 2012, the US has imposed anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Chinese PV products, with rates as high as 34 to 47 percent. In December 2014, the US conducted anti-dumping and countervailing investigations on Chinese PV manufacturers. In January 2018, the previous US administration decided to slap global safeguard tariffs on 8.5 billion US dollars’ worth of solar panel imports. In late 2021, the so-called “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” was signed into law by the US, which is yet another attempt to hobble the PV industry in Xinjiang under the disguise of human rights. Relevant US measures have not only impeded normal trade in PV products and disrupted normal supply chains, but also undermined global efforts in countering climate change. The US should correct its wrong practices in order to create an enabling environment for climate cooperation with China.

◆ Climate change has caused serious challenges to human survival and development, and must be tackled through global cooperation. Developed countries, the US included, should honor the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and follow the requirements of the Paris Agreement. They need to face up to their historical responsibilities, and level up their ambitions and actions. They need to take the lead in making substantial reductions of emissions and strive to achieve carbon neutrality before 2050. In the meantime, they need to give developing countries due space for development and emission, and deliver on their commitments of providing developing countries with adequate finance, technology and capacity-building support. On the basis of meeting financing pledges and leveraging public funds, efforts can be made to promote the development of green finance and bring private investment into low-carbon sectors. It is also important to build national, regional and global carbon markets and carbon pricing mechanisms, bring down the costs and raise the level of emissions reductions, promote technological innovation and sustainable development, and provide developing countries with stable sources of funding for mitigation and capacity-building through the benefit sharing mechanism of carbon markets.

Falsehood 19: To counter illegal and illicit narcotics, especially synthetic opioids like fentanyl, we want to work with China to stop international drug trafficking organizations from getting precursor chemicals, many of which originate in China.

Reality Check: The US has itself to blame for the root cause of fentanyl abuse in the country.

◆ Narcotics abuse, a chronic malaise plaguing the US, has deep historical and social roots.

With five percent of the world’s population, the US consumes 80 percent of opioids in the world, making the country the world’s biggest market for narcotics. There is a prevalent tradition of prescription painkiller abuse in the US, undergirded by a complete chain of pharmaceutical companies, medical representatives and doctors. All-out marketing by pharmaceutical companies, over-prescription by doctors, ineffective government crackdowns and the negative implications of marijuana legalization are among the combination of factors behind an ever-growing market for narcotics. Opioid abuse in the US and its rising toll started with OxyContin, an opioid painkiller made by Purdue Pharma and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1995. When it comes to discouraging demand and curbing production, the US should have done a lot more.

While the US has the most acute fentanyl challenge in the world, it is also the biggest producer and consumer of fentanyl and has yet to officially schedule fentanyl-related substances as a class. Nevertheless, it kept demanding other countries to take actions. This is a typical example of “forcing others to take medicine for one’s own illness”.

◆The Chinese government takes a zero-tolerance approach to narcotics and strictly regulates anesthetics, psychotropic substances and their precursors. By the end of 2021, China has added 37 drug precursors and ephedrine-related substances to its control list, which became even longer than the UN list. China strictly regulates import and export of chemicals pursuant to international rules and its domestic laws, and its efforts and achievements in this regard are visible to all.

On 1 May 2019, the Chinese government became the first country in the world to class schedule fentanyl-related substances, although there was no large-scale fentanyl abuse or immediate hazard in China. This is an important follow-up to the common understandings reached between the presidents of China and the US, and a concrete example of how China, keeping in mind the health, safety and well-being of humanity, actively responds to the US concern and helps it tackle its domestic opioid crisis.

On 1 July 2021, China class scheduled all synthetic cannabinoids and another 18 psychoactive substances including fluoroketamine. On 20 September of the same year, another six chemicals, including methyl alpha-phenylacetoacetate (MAPA), were added as drug precursors. China is making continuous efforts to regulate precursors in accordance with law.

China has taken a host of measures to crack down on the trafficking of fentanyl and other scheduled chemicals, like introducing real-name registration of senders and receivers, parcel examination and X-ray screening in the express delivery sector, and stepping up examination of cross-border parcels to certain destinations including the US. These measures have paid off.

After class scheduling fentanyl-related substances, China’s National Narcotics Control Commission and Ministry of Public Security have maintained close, candid and in-depth coordination with their US counterparts including the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the State Department Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Since September 2019, the US has not seized any fentanyl-related substances coming from China. The US has expressed appreciation to China on many occasions and noted drug control as a highlight in bilateral law enforcement cooperation.

As is known to all, the responsibility to prevent the entry of non-scheduled chemicals and their use in illicit drug-making falls on the import country. The US, however, would neither officially schedule fentanyl nor address the issue of domestic consumption. Instead, it chose to shift the blame by falsely claiming that “fentanyl precursors used by drug trafficking organizations originate in China” and making an issue out of non-scheduled chemicals. This reflects an ulterior motive and an extreme lack of responsibility for the life and health of its own people.

◆ In May 2020, without producing any evidence, the US added the Institute of Forensic Science of China’s Ministry of Public Security and the National Narcotics Laboratory to its “Entity List”. Such a practice of seeking China’s cooperation on the one hand while imposing sanctions on China’s narcotics control authorities has seriously hindered the operation of China’s fentanyl monitoring system and undermined the counter-narcotics cooperation between China and the US.

While China and the rest of the world are tightening control over fentanyl-related substances, fentanyl-related problems are deteriorating in the US, causing a mounting death toll. It lays bare the US’s failure to get to the crux of the fentanyl abuse problem. China has acted out of goodwill and repeatedly advised the US to follow effective practices widely recognized by the international community, like stepping up regulation on fentanyl prescription and promoting public awareness

Falsehood 20: As a global food crisis threatens people worldwide, we look to China — a country that’s achieved great things in agriculture — to help with a global response. 

Reality Check: The US has long been restricting grain exports and monopolizing grain trade. After the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the US expanded its arms assistance and abused unilateral sanctions, further aggravating the global food shortage. It bears unshirkable responsibility for the global food crisis.

◆ The US-driven deglobalization, its grain-for-energy production policies and food oligopolies are the root causes of global food crisis.

Using its status as a major grain-producer, the US has been restricting its grain exports to other countries, causing disruptions to normal global grain trade. The 12 major grain producers such as the US, Canada and the European Union accounts for 70percent of the world’s total grain production and exportation. In global trade relations, the US and other Western countries weigh heavily on whether developing countries can buy grain and at what price.

The US consumes grain to produce biofuels, straining global food supply, especially the supply of subsistence crops. Nearly one-third of the corn produced in the US is used for biofuels. Using grain as substitute for energy leads to fewer grain for global food supply, creating a vicious circle of food and energy prices pushing up each other.

The four major grain suppliers —ADM, Bunge and Cargill and Louis Dreyfus — monopolize more than 80percent of the world’s grain trade, and control global agricultural raw materials as well as grain production, processing and supply. These four grain suppliers, three from the US, manipulate the international prices of grain and earn extra profits from global food price volatility. Since 2021, their net income has increased by 53 percent, 80 percent, 64 percent and 47.7 percent respectively, and the stock prices of ADM and Bunge have nearly tripled. These international food oligopolies are profit-seeking, and they won’t miss any opportunity to stir up food security issues and inflate food supply shortage to make bigger profits.

◆ The US has been stoking the flames in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and abusing economic sanctions. These have exacerbated global food shortage.

The protracted conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a direct consequence of the constant instigation by the US and other Western countries. US military and arms assistance to Ukraine has increased to 53.6 billion US dollars, more than 70 percent of the combined military spending of Russia and Ukraine in 2021. The longer and bigger the conflict is, the greater its impact on global food production and supply will be, and the food crisis will further intensify.

In the face of a global food crisis, major grain-producing countries such as the US have instead kept their “grain bags” tight. According to the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report released by the US Department of Agriculture this May, US wheat exports in 2021/22 will be 18.9 percent lower than the previous year. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the total amount of food exports affected by the restrictions has increased significantly, which now represents about 17 percent of total calories traded in the world

The US food security initiative is more of empty words than concrete actions, only to fragment global food security governance. Russia is a major exporter of subsistence crops and the world’s largest exporter of fertilizers. Since the US and other Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia, the price index of various fertilizers has risen by more than 30 percent, which has seriously affected agricultural production. From 2021 to 2022, wheat and barley exports from Russia account for 16 percent and 12.9 percent of the world’s total respectively. Statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) show that since the US imposed sanctions on Russia, the Food Price Index in May this year has risen by 14 percent compared with February.

◆ Serious food waste in the US has worsened the global food shortage.

First, the amount of food waste is astounding. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in the US, 30 to 40 percent of the food supply and 38 percent of grain products are never eaten each year. In 2018, the US had 103 million tons of its food wasted, worth 161 billion US dollars. In 2020, the country’s food waste per capita was 59 kilograms.

Second, distribution is uneven. About 38 million people are food insecure in the US in 2020, and the majority of them are African Americans, Latin Americans and Native Americans. According to National Geographic, more than one-third of the low-income households do not have access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program introduced by the US government, and its benefits fall short of helping many families in high-cost areas enjoy a healthy and adequate diet.

Third, secondary problems are prominent. Every year, the overproduction of food in the US puts a staggering burden on the environment and wastes numerous resources, including over 9.3 million hectares of arable land, 22 trillion liters of water, 350 million kilograms of pesticides, and 6.35 million tons of chemical fertilizers.

◆ China has made significant contributions to global food security. It has supported one-fifth of the world’s population with a quarter of the world’s total food, on less than 9 percent of the world’s arable land. The Global Development Initiative put forward by China has identified food security as one of the eight priority areas of cooperation. China will mobilize efforts from all parties across the globe to draw on each other’s strength, and form the greatest synergy to meet all sustainable development goals including food security. This initiative has received positive response from more than 100 countries around the world and international organizations such as the UN.

◆ The Chinese people cherish food and keep to the traditional virtue of thrift. President Xi Jinping attaches great importance to food security. He has called for thriftiness and opposes squandering, stressing on multiple occasions the need to stop food waste. Since the launch of the nationwide “Clear Your Plate” campaign in 2013, consumer food waste in China has been significantly reduced. According to the Nature magazine, the amount of food discarded by Chinese restaurants and eateries has decreased by 40 percent. In 2021, the International Conference on Food Loss and Waste hosted by China was well received by the international community, including members of the G20.

◆ China is an important strategic partner of FAO in South-South cooperation. In recent years, China has donated 130 million US dollars to the FAO South-South Cooperation Trust Fund. China has sent more than 1,100 agricultural experts and technical personnel to and trained nearly 100,000 farmers in more than 40 countries and regions. Under the framework of the FAO’s South-South Cooperation Programme, China has donated the largest amount of fund, sent the most experts, and undertaken the most projects among all developing countries.

◆ China has provided its own solutions to global food shortage. Chinese hybrid rice is being grown in dozens of countries and regions in Asia, Africa and the Americas, with an annual growth area of eight million hectares. This increased the world’s total grain output by 150 million tons, enough to feed 400 to 500 million more people. Yuan Longping, known as the “Father of Chinese Hybrid Rice”, and other Chinese researchers have offered advice and counsel in India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bangladesh and many other countries. Through international training courses, China has trained over 14,000 hybrid rice technicians for more than 80 developing countries.

Falsehood 21: Beijing has perfected mass surveillance and exported that technology to more than 80 countries.

Reality Check: The US is the biggest empire of hacking.

◆ The use of video surveillance and big data technology is an important step taken by the Chinese government to improve social governance, and also a common practice across the world. It is necessary, legal and justified. Tianwang (Skynet), which is composed of video surveillance systems, effectively eliminates potential risks to public security and ensures the high percentage of solved criminal cases in China. With the increasingly digitized crime prevention and control system, 98.6 percent of the people in China felt safe in 2021, and China is widely recognized as one of the safest countries in the world. China ranked the third in the law and order index published by Gallup, a US consulting company, while the US 36th.

◆ Statistics show that there were some 70 million cameras installed in the US in 2018, one for every 4.6 people. For the US to accuse China of mass surveillance, it’s just double standard at work.

◆ For a long time, the US has carried out large-scale, organized and indiscriminate cyber espionage, surveillance and attacks on foreign governments, enterprises and individuals in violation of international law and the basic norms governing international relations. In June 2013, the Guardian and the Washington Post reported that NSA has been running PRISM, a clandestine electronic surveillance program, since 2007, whose targets include even its own allies. Der Spiegel reported that the US intelligence may have been monitoring the German Chancellor’s mobile phone communications for nearly a decade.

◆ In 2020, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) demanded Facebook to stop sending data of EU users to the US. The report comes just a few months after the European Court of Justice ruled the data transfer standard between the EU and the US doesn’t adequately protect European citizen’s privacy and concluded that EU citizens had no effective way to challenge US government surveillance. It is reported that US agencies such as NSA can theoretically ask internet companies like Facebook and Google to hand over data on an EU citizen and that EU citizen would be none-the-wiser.

◆ In December 2020, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) of France stated that google.fr and amazon.fr websites violated relevant French regulations by placing tracking cookies on their users’ computers without obtaining prior consent and without providing adequate information.

◆ In 2021, Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) reported that between 2012 and 2014, NSA used information cables of Denmark to wiretap (spy on) senior officials of Sweden, Norway, France and Germany, including many political dignitaries such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The US apparently broke its promise that it would stop wiretapping Merkel.

◆ The US abuses its leading position in internet and communication technology and is truly an empire of hacking, tapping and theft of secrets. From PRISM, the Irritant Horn project, and Stellar Wind, to Operation Telescreen, the Hive platform and the QUANTUM attack system, the US has violated the freedom of communication and speech of its citizens through digital surveillance, and has engaged in cyber attacks, surveillance and thefts of secrets across the world. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden of the Stateroom program show that the US has covertly installed eavesdropping devices in nearly 100 of its embassies and consulates to steal secrets from their host countries.

◆ A report on APT-C-39 released by Chinese cybersecurity company 360 in 2020 reveals that APT-C-39, a hacking group under the CIA, has conducted cyber infiltration attacks on China for 11 years targeting critical sectors including aviation and aerospace, research institutions, oil industry, large internet companies, and government agencies. Such attacks have seriously undermined China’s national security and the security of its economy, critical infrastructure as well as personal information of the general public.

According to a report on the indiscriminate worldwide cyber attacks by NSA’s APT-C-40 over the past decade released by 360 in 2022, NSA has attacked, using cyber weapons, 403 targets in 47 countries and regions worldwide, including China, the UK, Germany, France, Poland, Japan, India, the ROK, the UAE, South Africa and Brazil.

On 19 April 2022, China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) issued an alert on cyber attacks by the US government against other countries and released a related report. It brings to light “Hive”, a lightweight cyber weapon used exclusively by the US government, and the fact that the US has deployed cyber attack platforms worldwide and has jumper servers and VPN channels in countries like France, Germany, Canada, Turkey and Malaysia.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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We are entering a peak transition period geopolitically

What I like about China is that it points not to the superiority of its ideology but to RESULTS!  

The US wants to make an argument based not on results, since it has little to offer in that regard, but on ideology which is infinitely flexible and demands only a control over the playing field, that is, the media.

The Chinese approach is also better at winning over the people of the world.  

-John V. Walsh

We are entering a peak transition period geopolitically. This is coinciding with the makings of an American civil war – now that the United States society has collapsed. The drivers for all of these changes are (of course) the actions decided upon by the Oligarchy that controls the United States “leadership”. This is understood and expected by the Asian powers. The changes are going to (ultimately) be stunning, but during this period of change will appear to be “out of control”. Don’t worry, it’s not. It’s just that the entire “shebang” is simply not being reported on.

Hang on tight. Don’t get too upset.

In the eyes of others, the US is not the benign power it thinks it is

  • America’s foreign policy goals are often self-serving, while its designs for a rules-based international order primarily reflect the interests of its business and policy elites
  • What’s good for the US may not be good for the world. The sooner Washington recognises that, the better

When I started teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School in the mid-1980s, competition with Japan was the dominant preoccupation of US economic policy. The book Japan as Number One by Harvard’s premier Japan expert at the time, Ezra Vogel, set the tone of the debate.

I remember being struck back then by the degree to which the discussion, even among academics, was tinged by a certain sense of American entitlement to international pre-eminence. The United States could not let Japan dominate key industries and had to respond with its own industrial and trade policies – not just because these might help the US economy, but also because the US simply could not be No 2.

Until then, I had thought that aggressive nationalism was a feature of the Old World – insecure societies ill at ease with their international standing and reeling from real or perceived historical injustices. American elites, rich and secure, may have valued patriotism, but their global outlook tended towards cosmopolitanism.

But zero-sum nationalism was not far from the surface, which became clear once America’s place atop the global economic totem pole was threatened.

After three decades of US triumphalism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a similar process is now playing out on a vastly greater scale. It is driven both by China’s rise – which represents a more significant economic challenge to America than Japan did in the 1980s and is also a geopolitical risk – and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The US has responded to these developments by seeking to reassert its global primacy – a goal American policymakers readily conflate with that of establishing a more secure and prosperous world. They regard US leadership as central to the promotion of democracy, open markets and a rules-based international order.

What could be more conducive to peace and prosperity than that? The view that US foreign policy goals are fundamentally benign underpins the myth of American exceptionalism: what is good for the US is good for the world.

While this is undoubtedly true at times, the myth too often blinds American policymakers to the reality of how they exercise power. The US undermines other democracies when it suits its interests and has a long record of meddling in sovereign countries’ domestic politics. Its 2003 invasion of Iraq was as clear a violation of the United Nations Charter as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.

US designs for “open markets” and a “rules-based international order” often primarily reflect the interests of US business and policy elites rather than smaller countries’ aspirations. And when international rules diverge from those interests, the US simply stays away (as with the International Criminal Court, or most of the core International Labour Organization conventions).

Many of these tensions were evident in a recent speech by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on America’s approach to China. Blinken described China as “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order”, arguing that “Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress”.

Blinken is correct that many of the elements of the post-World-War-II order, such as the UN Charter, are not purely American or Western. But it is far from certain that China poses a greater threat to those truly universal constructs than the US does. For example, much of the trouble that US policymakers have with Chinese economic practices relates to domains – especially trade, investment and technology – where universal rules hardly prevail.

According to Blinken, the US “will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system”. Again, who could possibly oppose such a vision?

But China and many others worry that US intentions are much less benign. To them, Blinken’s statement sounds like a threat to contain China and limit its options, while bullying other countries into siding with America.

None of this is to claim an equivalence between current US actions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s gross human rights violations in Xinjiang and land grabs in the Himalayas and South China Sea.

For all its faults, the US is a democracy where critics can openly criticise and oppose the government’s foreign policy. But that makes little difference to countries treated as pawns in America’s geopolitical competition with China, which often struggle to distinguish between the global actions of major powers.

Blinken drew a clear link between China’s authoritarian practices and the country’s presumed threat to global order. This is a mirror-image projection of America’s belief in its own benign exceptionalism. But just as democracy at home does not imply goodwill abroad, domestic repression need not inevitably lead to external aggression. China also claims to be interested in a stable, prosperous global order – just not one arranged exclusively on US terms.

The irony is that the more the US treats China as a threat and attempts to isolate it, the more China’s responses will seem to validate America’s fears.

With the US seeking to convene a club of democracies openly opposing China, it is not surprising that President Xi Jinping cosied up to Putin just as Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine. As the journalist Robert Wright notes, countries excluded from such groupings will band together.

To those who wonder why we should care about the decline of America’s relative power, US foreign policy elites respond with a rhetorical question: would you rather live in a world dominated by the US or by China?

In truth, other countries would rather live in a world without domination, where smaller states retain a fair degree of autonomy, have good relations with all others, are not forced to choose sides, and do not become collateral damage when major powers fight it out.

The sooner US leaders recognise that others do not view America’s global ambitions through the same rose-tinted glasses, the better it will be for everyone.

Dani Rodrik is professor of international political economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Copyright: Project Syndicate

“Sic Transit Gloria Mundi”: Thus Passes The Glory Of The World

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Standing nearly 20-feet-high, 43 U.S. Presidential busts rest on April 9, 2019 in Croaker, Virginia (previously). From George Washington to George W. Bush., these remnants of bankrupted Presidents Park are stored on the property of Howard Hankins.

He has recently partnered with historian and photographer John Plashal to provide legal tour of the busts. According to multiple media reports, Hankins has said he is seeking to restore and transport the massive sculptures, but needs to fund more than $1.5 million in order to do so.

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Alice In Chains – Down in a Hole (MTV Unplugged – HD Video)

FINLAND Having Second Thoughts about Joining NATO

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The President of Finland, Sauli Niinisto, said today “Finland will not join NATO without Sweden.” Looks like Finland is having second thoughts.

Sweden is having serious trouble when it comes to joining NATO. It seems the Swedes took-in a whole slew of Middle East Refugees years back and among them are people that the nation of Turkey feels are a terrorist threat: PKK. a.k.a. “Kurds.”

Turkey is invading parts of Syria for the past two years, trying to clear all Kurds out of northern Syria along the Turkish border because Turkey perceives the Kurds and their political movement called “PKK” within Turkey, as a terrorist threat.

So Turkey will not vote to approve Sweden (or Finland) until those alleged “terrorists” are somehow purged from Sweden (and perhaps Finland).

In order for a country to join NATO, the vote by existing NATO members must be unanimous. If Turkey holds to its position, that it will not vote to admit Sweden (or Finland) then neither of those two countries will be able to join NATO.

Since Sweden seems to be in the most jeopardy from a Turkish “No” vote, the President of Finland took this opportunity to say “Finland will not join NATO without Sweden.”

But his comment is likely not related AT ALL to Sweden. You see, it appears to many keen observers, that Finland now realizes it has made a series of very bad decisions about its large neighbor to the east, Russia.

Those bad decisions included applying economic sanctions against Russia over the ongoing Ukraine Special Military Operation, and Finland refused to pay for Russian natural gas and oil in Rubles, which resulted in Russia cutting off energy supplies to Finland. Finland thought they could make it without Russian natural gas, and now it appears they cannot.

Without Russian natural gas and oil, the Finland economy is starting to keel-over. As in other western countries that Sanctioned Russia, fuel prices in Finland are now skyrocketing. That is causing prices for things like food, to skyrocket because all the food has to be transported by truck, and fuel costs for trucks have skyrocketed.

Moreover, Russia has begun moving considerable military hardware toward the border of Finland. The Russians say they have to make certain that their border is protected from NATO and if Finland is going to join NATO, then Russia has to increase its security along the Finland border.

While the movement of Russian troops is not really a concern; there are no hostile issues between Russia and Finland, the move takes place as the Russian Army is literally chewing-up and spitting-out the much larger army of Ukraine.

Neither NATO nor non-NATO countries like Finland and Sweden, ever thought that Russia was as powerful as they clearly are. Moreover, NATO trained the Ukraine Army for eight full years before hostilities broke out between Ukraine and Russia. And with all that high-tech, modern, NATO training . . . . Ukraine is getting its butt kicked.

So whatever representations NATO made to Finland and Sweden about how NATO could protect them from Russia, are all starting to ring hollow at this point.

Perhaps the President of Finland sees this as a very convenient chance to walk-back his nation’s effort to join NATO. After all, things between Russia and Finland are not bad at all. But life in Finland without Russian gas and oil, is not good at all. Maybe the Finnish President sees the obvious writing on the wall, and realizes it would be far better for Finland to walk away from NATO, and stay away . . . far away.

Iran’s Khamenei on tanker seizures: ‘You stole our oil, we took it back from you’ | TradeWinds

Supreme Leader makes plain the nation’s retaliatory motives in detaining two Greek suez-maxes.
No longer looting without consequences. Long live 21st century :

Full article HERE

Awesome!

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tYKHjAq

Oil and Gas prices

Found in a comment section on MoA. American Gasoline prices actually hit $5 yesterday.

For gasoline

  • Current Avg. $5.010
  • Yesterday Avg. $5.004
  • Week Ago Avg. $4.848
  • Month Ago Avg. $4.418
  • Year Ago Avg. $3.077

For diesel

  • Current Avg. $5.771
  • Yesterday Avg. $5.765
  • Week Ago Avg. $5.636
  • Month Ago Avg. $5.557
  • Year Ago Avg. $3.211

Again, the US uses about 100 billion gallons of gasoline and 40 billion gallons of diesel – so the delta in prices from today vs. last year can be multiplied by the above numbers to arrive at just how much more money people are paying for transportation.

China to use Civilian Cargo Ships to Stealth Invade Taiwan

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    LOL. The actual situation is something else. -MM
  • ChinaCargoShips StealthInvasion large
    ChinaCargoShips StealthInvasion large
  • Preparations for what China is now calling “the de-americanization of Taiwan” are in full swing.

    Diversion and reconnaissance teams of one of the marine brigades of the 72nd Army Group of the Eastern Zone of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)  Combat Command (the operational area of responsibility includes Taiwan) conducted exercises on covert penetration and seizure of a beachhead on the coast of a conventional enemy using civilian dry cargo ships.

    Video Below:

Awesome!

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xkglgn1sd3191

Awesome!

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SFk05Dr

カネコアヤノ – ロマンス宣言 / Kaneko Ayano – Romance sengen

Recommended by an influencer. Well worth the video. Check it out. She sure is cute.

Awesome!

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ompdaotpomx81

Awesome!

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A list of American Amendments that were never approved

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f6fdx996pmu71

Awesome!

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Is China MORE Democratic than America Now? Poll Results will SHOCK You

Another very outstanding and great video.

Awesome!

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The best video about America today…

“How To Tell Your Husband You Accidentally Shrank His Favorite Wool Sweater”

husbands sharing their wife fails 640 high 04
husbands sharing their wife fails 640 high 04

NASA is complaining that the Chinese Space organization is not sharing it’s technology

Complaining that China Aerospace is not cooperating, the director forgot the Wolff clause? NASA is actually crying wolfe!
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NASA administrator Nielsen borrowed the saying “it takes two people to dance the tango”, saying that China Aerospace does not offer cooperation and lacks transparency.
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What? Have they forgot the 2011 Wolfe Clause?
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From HERE

None of the funds made available by this Act may be used for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) or the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement, or execute a bilateral policy, program, order, or contract of any kind to participate, collaborate, or coordinate bilaterally in any way with China[1]

——Public Law 112-55, SEC. 539

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This Chinese mall has a “husband depository” with massage chairs and phone chargers

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l745hjk6eaa81

Mountain Dew

Racing fuel, Mountain Dew cocktail blamed in teens’ deaths
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While the Mountain Dew we know today comes in 35 different flavors and is synonymous with “gamer fuel,” it was created for a much different purpose. Brothers Barney and Alley Hartman began bottling their lemon-lime creation in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1932. Its name was originally a slang term for mountain-made moonshine, and it was created to be a whiskey chaser.

In order to make moonshine, a fermentation process is needed, which creates alcohol in two forms: ethanol and methanol. Ethanol is the drinkable version, but methanol is toxic. The human body converts methanol into formaldehyde. The formaldehyde is then converted into formic acid, which essentially poisons the body’s cells. Racing fuel contains almost 100% methanol, creating the same inebriated feeling that ethanol gives through alcohol consumption. While methanol is extremely poisonous, it is cheap and easy to access in the form of racing fuel, which makes it luring to underage drinkers.

Four teenage boys at a party in January of 2016 created a deadly concoction called “Dewshine,” a mix of Mountain Dew and racing fuel. The teens created the mixture on purpose and drank it. Authorities were called to the home of sixteen-year-old Logan Stephenson on January 21, 2016, after he was found dead in his bed. Just a few minutes later, they were called to the home of his best friend, J.D. Byram, because he had begun having seizures. Byram died the following Monday.

Concepts for polymer US dollars

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Denmark Inflation

Inflation, its not just the US

Food and Energy prices in Denmark hit 40 year high

Prices for consumers have increased in Denmark by 6.7 percent across the last 12 months.

So now the Danish can get high food and energy prices to go along with their highest electricity price in Europe distinction:

Electricity prices, household in Denmark

Denmark, the country with the most expensive electricity in Europe

The average price of electricity in Denmark, in December of 2021, has been 0.3448€ per kilowatt hour. Electricity price has increased € 0.0548 kWh, 18.9% since the previous semester. Meanwhile, the average price of electricity without taxes in Denmark in that period was € 0.1485 per kilowatt hour, compared to € 0.104 kWh in the previous semester. The price of electricity excluding taxes increased by 42.79%.

In the last twelve months the price of electricity in Denmark has increased by 63.55%.

In Denmark, the price of electricity reached its maximum price, € 0.3448kWh, in December of 2021. Its minimum price was €0.2401 kWh, corresponding to December of 2007.

Denmark is the country in Europe with the most expensive electricity.

When looking at the difference between the price of electricity with and without taxes, we see that households in Denmark paid € 0.1963 in taxes for each kilowatt hour, which means that 56.92% of what consumers pay for electricity is in concept taxes.

“My 39-Week Pregnant Wife Went To The Store To “Get Stuff For Dinner”. This Is What She Came Home With”

husbands sharing their wife fails 640 03
husbands sharing their wife fails 640 03

A pretty interesting article

How Amish use technology – wired.com

Pretty interesting article, but the conclusion I drew was far removed from what the author was clearly trying to promote.

Throughout the industrial age and now in the information age, the Amish have adhered to the long-standing tradition of making as a primary form of work.

The fact that the Amish have also begun making digital technologies, such as the black-box phone that worked as an intended replacement for cell phones, should come as no surprise. The black-box phone, however, is just one of many examples of an increasing number of communication technologies developed for Amish people by Amish people. These devices are crafted to most precisely complete professional goals, while limiting the negative impacts that come with digital communication today. The Amish recognize that this most certainly has political implications. Making in general, and making of digital technologies in particular, further enables the Amish to exercise their creativity, resist surveillance, and control and sustain their way of life in the digital age.

The manner in which the Amish put technologies to use reveals a great deal about the relationship that they want to have to the larger society. In addition to the black-box phone, I have observed an array of Amish workarounds that reflect local values and are determined by social context. The particular assemblage that comprises a workaround can also signal one’s Amishness or shared group identity.

In particular, the capability to withstand technology is only possible with extremely tightly bound communities – and even then, it is quite clear that the “fence straddlers” that are the focus of this story are far more like those selling organic produce to rich non-believers than some progressive Amish variant.

Awesome!

3Ckanoe
3Ckanoe

US policies led to ‘new G8’ – China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Turkey

Imagine that!

China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Turkey – in terms of GDP at PPP is 24.4% ahead of the old group,”

US policies led to ‘new G8’ – Moscow — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union The United States “with its own hands” pushed the countries that are not participating in “sanctions wars” to form a “new Big Eight” group with Russia, the Russian State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said on Saturday.

Following the launch of Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine in late February, the US, EU, UK and many other countries imposed hard-hitting restrictions on Moscow, making Russia the most sanctioned country in the world.

In a Telegram post, Volodin included a table with IMF data on GDP based on purchasing power parity of countries he calls the “new G8” and of countries forming the current G7 (after Russia’s participation in the bloc was suspended over Crimea’s vote to join the country in 2014, the G8 effectively turned into the G7).

The group of eight countries not participating in the sanctions wars – China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Turkey – in terms of GDP at PPP is 24.4% ahead of the old group,” Volodin wrote.

In his opinion, the economies of the G7 members – the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada – continue “to crack under the weight of sanctions imposed against Russia.”

Full article HERE

Daddy Jack’s Sicilian Pasta

"Daddy Jack has been a favorite of mine for 2-3 years. I was aware of my affection for his personality and respect for his cooking, but I was NOT prepared for how hard his passing hit me. I'm still surprised at the well of emotion when I watch certain videos, and this one might be the one that gets me the most, other than the last ones made at home with Lakisha, Titus, and Axle. I also love the ones where he speaks so lovingly about his mom, and those where he shares with the people in his life. What other chef on Youtube gave us this much? Think about it. Most just don't let us in. But Daddy Jack was happy to do it. Not making the trek to New London to meet this man and taste his food will always be a regret of mine. RIP Daddy Jack. You gave SO much more than you had to. THANK YOU."

Kremlin Responds After Polish EU Official Says West Should Give Ukraine Nukes

Monday, Jun 13, 2022 – 06:00 AM

Starting in April, dangerous rhetoric related to regional nuclear aspirations began coming out of Poland – apparently directed as a ‘threat’ to Russia amid the invasion of Ukraine. Early that month, for example, ruling Polish party leader, Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski suggested that a “tougher” anti-Russian defense posture would include Poland being “open” to having nuclear weapons stationed in the country.

But this weekend has seen the rhetoric heighten even further, eliciting a fierce response from Moscow, when Poland’s European Parliament Deputy and former Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski suggested that the West give nukes to Kiev. “The West has the right to give Ukraine nuclear warheads so that it can protect its independence,” Sikorski said according to regional sources.

As also detailed in a Yahoo News/Ukrayinska Pravda report, “He argued that Russia broke the terms of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances by refusing to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and integrity, so nuclear weapons should be returned to Kyiv, even though Ukrainians voluntarily disposed of them.”

In response, a top Russian Duma official warned that such a scenario would mean central Europe would in effect “cease to exist” as it would surely trigger nuclear war:

The Head of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, Viacheslav Volodin, threatens that if the suggestion by the former Foreign Minister of Poland Radoslaw Sikorski to provide Ukraine with nuclear weapons is fulfilled, then the possible nuclear conflict will destroy the European continent.

Volodin said specifically in response to the Polish EU official: “Sikorski is provoking a nuclear conflict in the center of Europe. He doesn’t think neither about the future of Ukraine nor about the future of Poland. In case his suggestions are fulfilled, these countries will cease to exist, as will Europe as well.”

Since 1994, Ukraine has voluntarily been a ‘nuclear-arms-free’ country based on being a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, which marked its accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

In the days ahead of Russia’s Feb.24 invasion, President Vladimir Putin accused the Ukrainian government of seeking to revive nuclear capabilities based on Soviet technology still in its possession.

“There have already been statements that Ukraine is going to create its own nuclear weapons… Ukraine does indeed still have Soviet nuclear technologies and [the] means of delivering such weapons,” Putin had said in televised address just days before the war against Ukraine started, listing it as a justification for Moscow’s actions to come.

“Therefore, it would be much easier for Ukraine to obtain nuclear weapons than to some other states – I won’t name them now – who effectively carry out such research. Especially in case of technological support from abroad, and we must not rule this out as well,” Putin added in his speech at the time.

Grape Soda Homicide

This is one of the reasons why children MUST stay with their biological parents. There is a reason why "evil stepmother" meme's exist. My stepmother was a real fucking witch. Read what the fuck this step mother did... -MM

Something about the term “forbidden” or “off-limits” seems to promote an insatiable desire to explore, especially as children. Whether it’s a particular room in the house, an area in the neighborhood, or simply an adult’s favorite treat, we’ve all been guilty at one point or another of letting our curiosity get the better of us. However, for five-year-old Alexa Linboom, stealing her stepmother’s grape soda would cost her her life.

On January 1, 2012, Alexa stole “one or two grape drinks” from her stepmother Mary Vaughn and was forced to drink more than two liters of grape soda and water within a two-hour time frame as her punishment. The excessive amounts of fluid she ingested caused her sodium levels to drop and her brain to swell. Alexa began screaming in pain, and she later fell unconscious, but her father and stepmother waited several more hours before taking her to the hospital.

She was declared brain dead and removed from life support just two short days later. Her death was declared a homicide due to acute fluid/water intoxication. Both her father, Randall Vaughn, and her stepmother were sentenced to life in prison without parole.

“We’re Moving. This Is How My Wife Packed The Kid’s Dolls”

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husbands sharing their wife fails 640 07

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UPDATED: China Tells U.S. “Will not Hesitate to Start a War”

FLASH– 7:31 PM EDT  Friday, June 10, 2022 — The Defense Ministry of the People’s Republic of China told their U.S. counterparts this evening “Beijing will not hesitate to start a war over Taiwan.”

They used those exact words.

UPDATE 6:32 AM EDT SATURDAY –

Now they’re saying it in gentler words, but PUBLICLY:

China will ‘smash to smithereens any Taiwan independence plot and resolutely uphold the unification of the motherland’ Chinese Defense Minister Fenghe told U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue conference in Singapore on Friday.

‘If anyone dares to split Taiwan from China, the Chinese army will definitely not hesitate to start a war no matter the cost’, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Wu Qian quoted the Fenghe as saying during the meeting, in what is a escalating of tension, not least of which in the type of language being used.

Austin met with his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe who bemoaned new American arms sales to Taiwan announced this week, saying it ‘seriously undermined China’s sovereignty and security interests.’

 

Awesome!

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    8y5n2geit0091

Google Will Declare Bankruptcy In Russia, Says Russian Authorities Seized Bank Account

The Russian subsidiary of Alphabet’s Google plans to file for bankruptcy after authorities seized its bank account, the company said Wednesday, in an apparent escalation of the Kremlin’s drive to cut Russians off from information about the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

Key Facts

Google Russia filed an intention to declare bankruptcy after the seizure of its bank account made it “untenable” to meet its financial obligations, a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Forbes and other outlets.

Google’s intention to file for bankruptcy is already on Russia’s Fedresurs financial registry website, according to Reuters and Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti.

A company spokesperson said Google will continue to operate free services including its search engine, YouTube and Gmail.

Key Background

Google has been arguably Russia’s greatest foe in challenging the war narrative advanced by Kremlin-controlled media within the country since Russia invaded Ukraine February 24.

Google suspended all advertising in Russia in March, banned state-run Russian media YouTube channels worldwide and most critically has refused to remove information on the war deemed illegal from Youtube.

The Russian communications regulator has repeatedly threatened to punish Google for not deleting certain content, and Russia banned Google News in the country last month for publishing “inauthentic” information on the war.

Crucial Quote

“People in Russia rely on our services to access quality information,” the Google spokesperson said in a statement explaining the company’s intention to keep YouTube and other services running.

Tangent

In addition to YouTube, the Russian government has another U.S.-based information foe: Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia has refused to delete information on the war, including information from the Ukrainian government on civilian and troop death tolls, causing the Russian government to threaten fines against Wikipedia. Russian President Vladimir Putin chimed in on the Kremlin’s war against Wikipedia earlier this month, telling Russians not to trust the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia in an interview with state media.

MM Comments

Forbes is a CIA mouthpiece, funded indirectly from the CIA via the NED organization. This is all well-known.

Google, also, is indirectly funded by the NED, and thus the CIA out of the Pentagon. This is all well-known.

Google was operating inside of Russia during a time of war, and promoting the Western “narrative” which is a mixture of lies, distortions and manipulations.

Russia seized all of it’s funding.

Google will be forced to stop operations inside of Russia.

This runs counter to the desires of the United States Pentagon.

The Verve Pipe – The Freshmen [Original Acoustic Version] [I’ve Suffered A Head Injury] [Track #10]

[I’ve Suffered A Head Injury] [Track #10]”]

“I’ve Accidentally Shrunk My Husband’s Jacket. Husband For Scale”

husbands sharing their wife fails 640 high 10

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Zelensky: Ukraine is fine with China’s position on war with Russia

Article HERE

President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that China has chosen the policy of staying away from the Russian-Ukrainian war and Ukraine is currently satisfied with this policy.
“China has chosen the policy of staying away. At the moment, Ukraine is satisfied with this policy. It is better than helping the Russian Federation in any case. And I want to believe that China will not pursue another policy. We are satisfied with this status quo, to be honest,” President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said at a video link during the Davos Ukrainian Breakfast, Ukrinform reports.
Before the war with Russia, China was Ukraine’s largest trading partner, he added. And now, according to Zelensky, no China’s steps against Ukraine are observed. At the same time, the President admits that China has not taken any steps to support Ukraine.
“Although there is a rather good and long history between the countries. Therefore, I would like to have an advantage in these relations compared to Russia,” he said
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“My Wife Likes To Keep Dog Food Beside Coffee Beans. Guess What I Did At 5:30 Am This Morning”

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husbands sharing their wife fails 640 high 17

ASML’s growth in China a rebuttal to US interference in global chip sector

Wang Yi23:12 Jun 07 2022

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Dutch chip lithography leader ASML said Monday that all of its projects in China are progressing as scheduled, and it plans to recruit more than 200 employees this year to expand business in the market, according to Chinese news outlet The Paper.

Against the backdrop of the US is trying every means to recklessly stop ASML from shipping any of its most cutting edge lithography systems to China, the company’s increasing investment in the market fully demonstrates that no matter how reluctant the US to see, global giants in the semiconductor sector like ASML are seeing business expansion in China, the world’s largest consumer of semiconductors.

Business is business. From a return on investment point of view, it’s a perfectly reasonable choice for ASML to expand business in China. ASML’s sales in Chinese mainland took up 34 percent of its total lithography system sales in the first quarter of this year, according to media reports.

China and the US are indeed in a fierce technological competition, and the semiconductor industry is bearing the brunt of that pressure. The US government has never bothered to hide its plans to stifle the development of China’s chip sector. Yet, the US chip hegemony has become the culprit in disrupting the global industrial chain. The arbitrary political interference of the US government in the industry has clearly become the biggest concern for many companies. The US chip hegemony has caused and escalated the global chip supply chain crunch.

While former US President Donald Trump’s arbitrary sanctions on major Chinese tech giants like Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) have dealt heavy blows to the global chip industry chain, the Biden administration’s political interference in companies’ operation have also stirred strong backlashes.

Last November, the Biden’s administration obstructed SK Hynix’s plan to import the advanced equipment to its chip factory in East China’s Jiangsu Province. The US’ move that put SK Hynix’s chip factory’s renovation plans in jeopardy has caused strong backlash from South Korean media outlets. If the US continues to intervene in this way, South Korean companies will suffer more losses. The purpose of an economic alliance is to promote mutual economic interests, but the US coerces its allies to suffer economic losses for its own political interests, some South Korean media outlets questioned.

The US government’s political coercion and interference in attempting to split the global semiconductor sector will not stop China’s semiconductor sector from development, but only serve to further escalate the current chip shortage and stresses throughout the global industrial chain. What the US does may block US companies and other international companies from the Chinese market, and these companies are unwilling to bear the losses and pay for this kind of political scheming orchestrated by the US.

Those politicians in Washington who are calling for tougher semiconductor export controls, secondary sanctions, and research blockades against China have clearly underestimated the costs of US-China semiconductor decoupling. According to estimates from the US Department of Commerce, if American business with China on semiconductors is cut off completely, it will probably cost anywhere between $80 to $100 billion in sales and 125,000 jobs in the US.

China’s chip market occupies a large share of global industry value and has huge potential. It is increasingly regarded as an important market by related companies in the global chip industry chain and has strong manufacturing advantages. The Chinese market will continue to expand opening up, and concrete measures are being taken to improve the market’s business environment. Foreign companies like ASML are welcome to achieve mutual beneficial development in China.

FADING FAST: UKRAINE RUNNING OUT OF AMMUNITION

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The Russian Army, using its overwhelming firepower, is smashing the Ukraine army, sending Ukraine troops fleeing for their lives.  Now, things have gotten much worse because Ukraine is simply running out of ammunition.

Newly promised Western weapons systems are arriving, but too slowly and in insufficient quantities to prevent incremental but inexorable Russian gains in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, which is now the focus of the fight.

Around 200 Ukrainian soldiers are now being killed every day, up from 100 late last month, an aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky told the BBC on Friday — meaning that as many as 1,000 Ukrainians are being taken out of the fight every day, including those who are injured.

To the shock and dismay of Ukraine supporters, the overall trajectory of the war has unmistakably shifted away from one of unexpectedly dismal Russian failures and tilted in favor of Russia as the demonstrably stronger force.

The odds against the Ukrainians are starting to look overwhelming, said Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, an adviser to the Ukrainian government on defense and intelligence issues.

“The Russians are using long-range artillery against us, often without any response, because we don’t have the means,” he said. “They can attack from dozens of kilometers away and we can’t fire back. We know all the coordinates for all their important targets, but we don’t have the means to attack.”

“The strategies and tactics of the Russians are completely different right now. They are being much more successful,” he said. “They have more resources than us and they are not in a rush.”

“There’s much less space for optimism right now,” he added.

Ukraine has now almost completely run out of ammunition for the Soviet-era weapons systems that were the mainstay of its arsenal, and the Eastern European countries that maintained the same systems have run out of surplus supplies to donate, Danylyuk said. Ukraine urgently needs to shift to longer-range and more sophisticated Western systems, but those have only recently been committed, and in insufficient quantities to match Russia’s immense firepower, he said.

Russia is firing as many as 50,000 artillery rounds a day into Ukrainian positions, and the Ukrainians can only hit back with around 5,000 to 6,000 rounds a day, he said. The United States has committed to deliver 220,000 rounds of ammunition — enough to match Russian firepower for around four days.

The Russians have meanwhile adapted their tactics in ways that have let them take full advantage of their firepower by remaining at a distance from Ukrainian positions, pounding them relentlessly, then taking territory once the Ukrainians have been forced to retreat.

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

When this conflict erupted in February, I told listeners to my radio show, and readers of this web site, “Ukraine doesn’t stand a chance.”

Of course at the time, I had no idea the west (NATO) would pour so much weaponry into Ukraine, which, at first thought, would dramatically change the equation in Ukraine’s favor.

Then the ugly reality of American and NATO “smart weapons” struck:  Our advanced weaponry, is very, VERY, fragile.   Yes, it is sophisticated, and when it works, it is devastatingly effective, but quite often, our high tech gizmos DON’T work.   The electronics that make the weapons so smart, are not suited for the rough and tumble realities of the battlefield.

That became evident when, after killing or capturing a number of Ukrainian regiments, the Russian Army found Ukrainian troop cell phones.  One the screens of those phones: Google Searches with the search terms “Why isn’t javelin working” “javelin won’t shoot” “javelin making noises”   

Here, look at one of the phones from the Battle field:

UkrainianArmyPhone GoogleSearches
UkrainianArmyPhone GoogleSearches

The equipment failures aside, there is another far more important reason Ukraine is losing, and losing badly: history.

I am a sort of student of history and I know full well that it was the Russian Army that stormed Berlin in WW2. Not the Americans, not the British, not the French. It was the Russians that totally crushed Hitler, and at a staggering cost to the Russian nation and its people. But they DID IT.

They paid the price, and won.

The youngsters handling military strategy and intelligence analysis in the US and our NATO vasal states these days, seem to have ZERO knowledge of history. They game-out scenarios on their computers, and to them, they think they know how things will turn out. But it is blazingly clear they did not (and do not) factor-in historical realities. In this instance, the one historical reality they failed to consider is that the Russian Army is one of the two most fearsome fighting forces on planet earth.

The other is China.

As such, Ukraine never stood a chance. This was over the moment the Russian Army crossed the border into Ukraine.

Ukraine’s best hope right now is to unconditionally surrender. To do anything else, will merely delay the inevitable, and cause the deaths of hundreds-of-thousands more Ukrainians, fighting against a force they have zero chance of defeating.

Sadly, Ukraine cannot even NEGOTIATE a peace deal, because they’ve shown their word (in negotiations) is worthless. Ukraine negotiated the Minsk Agreement, then reneged and didn’t implement even ONE of the terms it agreed to. They did this for over five years!

Moreover, when the fighting initially began, Ukraine announced they would not abide by the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, they signed back in the 1940’s. So now, nobody can believe anything Ukraine says because they’ve proven their word is useless. Surrender is their only option.

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Shelly West – Flight 309 To Tennessee

“”It’s Always So Cold In Our House. Our Furnace Sucks” – Wife, Jan 2020, -32C”

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husbands sharing their wife fails 640 high 20

China’s PLAN Leaked — A Fleet Of VTOL Drones Spotted On Chinese PLA Navy’s Shandong Aircraft Carrier

 

In a first, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been spotted on the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) aircraft carrier, Shandong. According to reports in Chinese state media, Shangdong is currently at the Dalian Shipyard for maintenance and repairs.

On June 1, Andreas Rupprecht, an expert on Chinese military aviation, shared an image of UAVs on Shandong’s deck suggesting that it could be the first time, drones have been spotted on board the aircraft carrier.

In late April, the Chinese state-owned Global Times reported that Shandong was undergoing “its first scheduled maintenance and refurbishment” at the Dalian Shipyard after two years of service “to enhance the flattop’s usability”.

Before that, in March, the aircraft carrier was reported to have sailed through the Taiwan Straits, near Taiwan’s Kinmen island opposite the Chinese mainland city of Xiamen. Reports at the time also noted that there were no aircraft on Shangdong’s flight deck.

 

One of the UAVs spotted onboard Shangdong, has an inverted V-shaped tail and it bears resemblance to a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) UAV that was reportedly seen onboard the PLAN’s Type 075 LHD amphibious assault ship in December, last year.

According to Chinese media reports, it was the CW-40 dual-purpose UAV, designed and developed by the Chinese company JOUAV, which made its first appearance during the 2021 edition of the China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition, also known as Zhuhai Airshow.

The UAV was also showcased in March this year at the DSA 2022 defense exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2022 06 03 17 40
2022 06 03 17 40

“My Lovely Wife Bought A New Screen And A Cat Door To Go In It. Took A Few Hours And She Was So So Proud Of Herself”

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husbands sharing their wife fails 640 high 44

Chris Isaak – Wicked Game (MTV Unplugged) [HD]

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The CW-40 UAV 

The CW-40 is designed to conduct reconnaissance, search and surveillance, participate in rescue operations, ensure security, monitor the environment, prevent forest fires and protect important facilities.

The drone has a fuselage length of 2.3m and a wingspan of 4.6m. It can fly at an altitude of 4000m, has a take-off weight of 45kg, and carries a maximum payload of 10kg.

According to the Chairman of JOUAV, Ren Bin, the CW-40 adopts a domestically made four-stroke EFI engine.

The UAV is equipped with three light photo-electric pods for large areas, and long-distance video surveillance. The full CW-40 system can be assembled and disassembled in 15 minutes, according to claims by JOUAV.

2022 06 03 17 41
2022 06 03 17 41

The PLA has been actively advancing its employment of UAVs into its force structure for various purposes, such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions, attack purposes, or even as target drones to simulate anti-aircraft combat scenarios.

If the UAV spotted onboard the Shandong is CW-40, then it could fulfill a role similar to the ASN-209 medium-altitude, medium-endurance (MAME) UAV, known as the ‘Silver Eagle’ which has a range of 200km and a maximum endurance of 10 hours, just like the CW-40.

2022 06 03 17 42
2022 06 03 17 42

The Sky Eagle is capable of Target Designation, Electronic Intelligence (ELINT), and Electronic Warfare (EW), and can even be used for guiding missiles to the target.

Experts also suggest that PLAN might use this UAV, as a communications relay for accompanying surface or aerial forces in case the satellite communications are compromised.

Life Is Worth Losing – Dumb Americans – George Carlin

Don Bacon Logic

General Austin in Singapore: “Do rules matter? Does sovereignty matter? Does the system that we have built together matter? I am here because I believe that it does. And I am here because the rules-based international order matters just as much in the Indo-Pacific as it does in Europe.”

“We’re determined to uphold the status quo that has served this region so well for so long,” he said. “So let me be clear: We remain firmly committed to our longstanding one-China policy — guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances. We categorically oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side. We do not support Taiwan independence.

UN Charter Article 2(1)
The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.

So Taiwan is a domestic affair! China’s sovereignty matters!

-Don Bacon

Chinese PLA Navy Goes Unmanned?

In addition to UAVs, the PLAN is known to have incorporated a wide array of unmanned systems such as unmanned surface and underwater vehicles.

Moreover, the advancements in artificial intelligence in recent years have led China to envision a greater role for unmanned platforms in maritime security and competition for control of sea lanes and marine resources.

Last month, China launched an unmanned ship, named Zhu Hai Yun that can be controlled remotely and navigate autonomously in open water and carry dozens of drones, submersibles, and other vessels for conducting ocean research.

Also, China is currently working on a next-generation assault carrier, known as Type 076 LHD which is being developed as a successor to the Type 075 LHD. It is said to be capable of carrying Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs).

Reports suggest that China’s stealthy GJ-11 Sharp Sword UCAV may be one of the drones being planned to board the Type 076 LHD, based on a CG simulation released last year by the China Aviation Industry Group at the Zhuhai Airshow.

The GJ-11 UAV is 12.2m long, with a wingspan of 14.4m and a height of 2.7m, and has a maximum takeoff weight of over 10 tons with an estimated payload estimated of around 1.9 tons, and a combat radius of over 1,500km with an endurance of six hours.

  • U.S. gas prices hit $5 per gallon

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    2022 06 12 11 50

    This is the 31st “record high” in 33 days!   Way to go, Brandon!

    Stolen elections have consequences.

    But to those of you are were foolish enough to vote Democrat, if you keep voting how you’ve voted, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.

    Wise-up.   Fast.  Before they make you choose between eating and driving to work or heating your house.

    7-up poisoning

    The Dominican Republic is a country on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean and has become a popular tourist destination due to its beautiful beaches, endless recreational options, and rich culture. Surrounded by the Caribbean Sea on the south and the Atlantic Ocean on the north, it seems like the perfect place for a family vacation, romantic getaway, or beachfront wedding.

    Awilda Montes had planned a romantic getaway to the Dominican Republic with her boyfriend in October of 2018. However, their stay at the Luxury Bahia Principe Bouganville Resort quickly became anything but romantic. Montes had only been at the resort for a few hours when she decided to grab a bottle of 7-Up from the mini bar. Upon opening the bottle, she noticed there was no “fizz” but carefully proceeded to take a sip. She immediately tasted bleach which caused her entire mouth and tongue to burn, and she began spitting up blood.

    While the resort claimed the incident was an “accidental mix-up” and tried to make things right with apology dinners, free nights, and couples massages, those “apologies” came with a price. The resort staff asked Montes to sign a disclaimer, which she refused. More disturbing is the fact that the three other Americans have also died at the same resort. A 41-year-old woman, Miranda Schaup-Werner, also died after drinking a beverage from the mini bar, and an engaged couple from Maryland were found dead in their room.

    Rodney Dangerfield Almost Makes Carson Fall Out of His Chair Laughing

    The Past can show us so much!

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    Adelaide Springett, Who Was So Ashamed At The State Of Her Boots She Took Them Off, Stand For A Photograph In London, 1901. Photo By Horace Warner

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    Isaac And Rosa, Emancipated Slave Children From New Orleans, 1863

     

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China Won’t “Hesitate To Start A War” Over Taiwan As Series Of Private Warnings Conveyed To US

Monday, Jun 13, 2022 – 11:00 AM

A new report by Bloomberg on Sunday has detailed a series of instances that Chinese officials have privately conveyed to their American counterparts that the Taiwan Strait does not constitute international waters, upping tensions given the Biden administration has been sailing navy warships through the contested waters on a monthly basis.

“The statement disputing the US view of international law has been delivered to the American government by Chinese officials on multiple occasions and at multiple levels, the person said,” Bloomberg writes. “The US and key allies say much of the strait constitutes international waters, and they routinely send naval vessels through the waterway as part of freedom of navigation exercises.”

The Biden administration is said to be “alarmed” by the private warnings, given that “It’s not clear whether the recent assertions indicate that China will take more steps to confront naval vessels that enter transit the Taiwan Strait,” according to the report. This also suggests China could take a more assertive stance in the South China Sea, where US warships have also been conducting freedom of navigation exercises.

On Friday during the first ever face-to-face meeting between US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and China’s defense minister Wei Fenghe, the latter warned his American counterpart that Beijing will “not hesitate to start a war” if Taiwan declares independence.

Wei had warned Austin that “if anyone dares to split Taiwan from China, the Chinese army will definitely not hesitate to start a war no matter the cost“, defence ministry spokesman Wu Qian quoted the minister as saying during the meeting.

Further Wei vowed that China woujld “smash to smithereens any ‘Taiwan independence’ plot and resolutely uphold the unification of the motherland,” as emphasized in a defense ministry statement issued following the conclusion of the meeting. He “stressed that Taiwan is China’s Taiwan… Using Taiwan to contain China will never prevail,” further according to the statement.

For the US side, Defense Secretary Austin warned the Chinese defense minister in the Friday meeting to “refrain from further destabilizing actions” on Taiwan.

“The Secretary reaffirmed the importance of peace and stability across the Strait, opposition to unilateral changes to the status quo, and called on the PRC to refrain from further destabilizing actions toward Taiwan,” according to the readout.

The key takeways here:

[1] China is treating the Taiwan strait as Chinese territory, not international waters.

[2] China will "smash to smithereens" any attempts to get involved with a Chinese domestic dispute. This sounds like normal American political rhetoric, but it is NOT. In Chinese, these are very, very serious and nasty words, phrases and terms. This is serious, serious talk.

Soldier From Germany (NATO) — Bearing Arms — Caught on TV in Severodonetsk, Ukraine

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FlagOfGermany large
FlagOfGermany large

It has long been rumored that NATO already has active duty military troops from NATO countries, inside Ukraine ACTUALLY ENGAGED IN COMBAT against Russia.  NATO says they are only “training” Ukrainian forces.  So why is this German soldier bearing arms in Severodonetsk?

Below is a still image taken from a FOX NEWS CHANNEL broadcast on Saturday, June 11, 2022 at 8:29 PM eastern U.S. time. (h/t to HTRS Reader/Listener “Rick” for providing this image) 

The image clearly shows a soldier, wearing the uniform flag patch of Germany on his arm, in battle gear, carrying a launch tube for some type of weapon, in Severodonetsk, Ukraine, where utterly intense military battles have been taking place for the past week, between Ukraine and Russia.

GermanSoldierOnSeverodonetskBattlefield armed
GermanSoldierOnSeverodonetskBattlefield armed

What is this German soldier doing there, carrying arms?

He certainly isn’t training anyone given the gear he is seen wearing.

This seems to be the first conclusive proof that NATO is covertly engaged in actual combat against Russia.

Undeclared war?  By NATO?  Against Russia?

World War 3 now appears closer than any of us knew.

"My Wife Worked For An Hour On This Peach Crisp And Burst Into Tears Right Before My Parents Showed Up To Our House"

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husbands sharing their wife fails 640 high 42

Facebook fiasco
Below is a quote from a posting at The Register
Facebook and Instagram's parent biz, Meta, was hit with not one, not two, but eight different lawsuits accusing its social media algorithm of causing real harm to young users across the US.




The complaints filed over the last week claim Meta's social media platforms have been designed to be dangerously addictive, driving children and teenagers to view content that increases the risk of eating disorders, suicide, depression, and sleep disorders.

"Social media use among young people should be viewed as a major contributor to the mental health crisis we face in the country," said Andy Birchfield, an attorney representing the Beasley Allen Law Firm, leading the cases, in a statement.

"These applications could have been designed to minimize any potential harm, but instead, a decision was made to aggressively addict adolescents in the name of corporate profits. It's time for this company to acknowledge the growing concerns around the impact of social media on the mental health and well-being of this most vulnerable portion of our society and alter the algorithms and business objectives that have caused so much damage."

The lawsuits have been filed in federal courts in Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Missouri, according to Bloomberg.

So, how long before social media is reigned in within the West?

Will these lawsuits get anywhere? Is there any limit on what might be done for profit?

Filipinos urged ‘to take heart all the learnings from the past’

The Philippines emphasis has prioritized friendship with China while celebrating the coming independence day from Spain and US.

Article HERE

Outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte has urged Filipinos to “take heart all the learnings from the past” in a speech ahead of the celebration of the 124th Philippine Independence Day.

He delivered his speech during the virtual celebration of Independence Day and the 21st Filipino-Chinese Friendship Day organized by the Federation of Filipino Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Inc. (FFCCCII).

In his speech, Duterte reminded Filipinos about the importance of celebrating Independence Day on June 12 as a testament to how the country’s forefathers fought for the freedoms that Filipinos enjoy today.

“May it inspire us to take after the courage of our heroes as well as encourage us to use our ability, skills and knowledge for the benefit of our community,” Duterte said.

He also urged the public to “take heart all the learnings from the past”, especially the countless hardships that Filipinos had to endure as a nation.

“Let our rich histories move to translate our love for this country into real acts of goodwill for all our fellow men. Let us also work together so that we could realize our vision of a more harmonious and progressive Philippines. May we have a meaningful commemoration,” he added.

The country’s first president, Emilio Aguinaldo, proclaimed the Philippines’ independence from the Spanish colonial rule in Kawit, Cavite on June 12, 1898.

From July 4, 1946, the Philippines celebrated Independence Day every July 4. However, the celebration was moved to June 12 by virtue of Proclamation 4166, issued by President Diosdado Macapagal.
PH-China friendship
Incoming President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., for his part, expressed hope that the centuries-old relationship and friendship between the Philippines and China will continue to be of great mutual benefit to their respective people.

“From trade, arts, culture, athletics to regional peace and stability to the employment of opportunities for our people, and all the significantly generous efforts extended to us during the pandemic, the cooperative partnership of our nations continues to reach new heights,” he said.

He said he looked forward to more years of not just diplomatic relations but of continuous, fruitful engagements between China and the Philippines.

The Philippines and China established their diplomatic relations on June 9, 1975.

June 9 of every year is also declared as Filipino-Chinese Friendship Day, by virtue of Proclamation 148 issued by former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2002.

Aside from Duterte and Marcos, also in attendance were Vice-President-elect Sara Duterte, Macapagal-Arroyo, lawmakers, and other guests.

The FFCCCII is the umbrella organization of Filipino Chinese entrepreneurs, which brings together over 170 business and trade associations from all over the Philippines. (PNA)

Russia and China connected: first road bridge (2020 04) and first cross river railway bridge (2021 08)

China’s endless infrastructure projects vs US endless wars, sanctions, military exercises, and verbal threats….
Historic $307 million road link across the Amur River - known in China as the Heilongjiang River - will open in April 2020.

Article HERE

First cross-river railway bridge between China and Russia completed - UCLG-ASPAC BRLC . A new bridge that will link Russia and China’s railway systems was completed on August 17, 2021, seven years after its much-heralded groundbreaking.

Mongolia wants to fuel Russia and China by rail – Business News

The Belt and Road keeps connecting more and more parts of the world everyday without any participation from the “West”.
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After a turbulent and conflicting politics around the potential security implications of expanding its freight logistics in China, Mongolia hopes to complete three important rail lines by the end of this year. These developments will have a massive impact on commodity markets, allowing China and Russia to look inland for trade, particularly in bulk commodities like coal and metals – making both countries more energy secure and less subject to sanctions pressure.
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Article HERE

Ukrainian Official Threatens THE WEST; Ukraine Could “Switch Sides”

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ARESTOVICH THREATENS WEST; READY TO SWITCH SIDES!

Oleksiy Mykolaiovych Arestovych is a Ukrainian presidential adviser and military columnist.  He is deep within the inner circle of Ukrainian President VOlodimir Zelensky.

During a televised interview Arestovych said this:

Machine translation: “If Putin wins, 500 thousand Ukrainians will fight for Russia and no one will be able to stop this force.”

Zelensky’s representative explained why the West should supply more weapons and prevent Putin from winning.

“…If Putin wins. And the 1.5 million Russian army will be joined by another 500,000 Ukrainian army. Everyone has seen how we can fight. And then where will the amusing American/NATO troops be able to stop this united force, plus Belarus?”

The BEST Vietnamese PHO Recipe

Outstanding! Look at how it cooks it! WOW!!!!!

"I've never made pho before and I just made this recipe. The broth is incredible. The charring of the onions and ginger provides a subtle smokey flavor and the fish sauce and dried shrimp packs an umami punch that I looove. I was worried it would just taste fishy with these 2 ingredients but it didn't! Thank you for sharing with us, and shout out to the person in the comments who transcribed the recipe from the video! <3"

The Benefits Of Economic Collapse

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

I first began to predict a major economic collapse back in 1999. Although I understood that it was at least fifteen years off and possibly more, I believed that it would be wise to begin to prepare for it then, as the actual date of collapse could not be predicted. (Better to be a few years early than even one day too late.)

Not surprisingly, back then, this prediction appeared to most people to not only be unlikely, but laughable.

Today, we’re a good bit closer to the onset of an economic crisis and it now not only seems possible, but quite likely to an increasing number of those people who are paying attention.

And not surprisingly, as so many people are now realising the inevitability of such a crisis, they’re also realising that they should have been preparing for it. Preparation for a major event such as this requires a fair bit of time and many people are belatedly coming to realise that they may be caught with their pants down when the initial crashes begin.

Whenever the inevitability of such a debacle is first recognized, the first reaction for most people is to dive into denial, saying, “It simply can’t happen. Nobody would let it happen, because nobody benefits.”

But that’s just it. Not only does someone benefit, they’ll benefit on a grand scale.

The controllers of an economy always benefit from a collapse

In 1814, Napoleon’s army went into battle at Waterloo, Belgium. The investment moguls at Capel Court in the City of London were biting their nails with worry, as the outcome of the battle would determine stock prices. If the French won, stock prices would drop dramatically. If Britain won, prices would rise dramatically.

In those days, communication was slow. it would take considerable time for the official envoy to travel from the battlefield in Belgium to London with the news of the outcome of the battle.

England’s foremost banker, Nathan Rothschild, had sent his own messenger to Waterloo with instructions to return by the fastest possible means with the news. Consequently, Mister Rothschild received the news many hours ahead of the return by official messenger.

He then was seen at the stock exchange selling as much as he could as quickly as he could. The word went out: “Rothschild knows.” This elicited a panic and others sold as quickly as they could.

Prices plummeted quickly; then, as the official envoy from Waterloo came up the Thames, Rothschild suddenly bought heavily at a rock-bottom price. Within the hour, the envoy provided the news that Britain had won the battle and prices shot through the roof, making enormous profits for Rothschild, all within one trading day.

He later called it, “The best business I ever did.”

The above tale is one that should be committed to memory, as it informs us that those who know of an economic event will most certainly capitalise on it.

Those who pull the strings make tremendous profits by manipulating an economy over the length of prosperous times, but they make just as much in crisis periods. They simply wait until an economic collapse has been completed and the dust has settled, then they buy up the remaining companies at rock-bottom prices at a time when the average investor has been wiped out. Then, when the economy begins its recovery, they ride the next wave of prosperity.

For this reason, anyone who’s in the economic driver’s seat understands that he’s best-served by creating false prosperity, then triggering its collapse, then cashing in on the collapse.

When this realisation occurs to the average investor, he more often than not declares, “Well, if that’s true, I’m toast either way.”

But this is only true if he takes a passive role in his economic future.

You can benefit from a collapse

The Mandarin word for “crisis” also means “opportunity.”

Those who are able to understand this Chinese concept have a tremendous opportunity in terms of investment. They can recognise that the coming crisis is also an opportunity.

Yes, there will be a collapse in the stock and bond markets. These will unquestionably be deflationary events, causing asset prices to crater.

But this need not spell disaster. The game is not over, but the crisis is unquestionably a game-changer.

It’s important to bear in mind that real wealth never disappears; it merely changes hands.

To prepare for the new game, the objective would be to liquidate all or most stocks, bonds and hard assets such as real estate, in advance of a crash.

Next you would wish to expatriate the proceeds to a jurisdiction that’s less likely to be a casualty of the crisis and, hopefully, would be a net-gainer at such a time.

Like those who actually pull the strings, you’d not only avoid becoming a casualty of the economic collapse, you’d stand to gain from it.

Rescue a drowning kitten waiting to die by the lake. miracle of god

Gosh! He looks dead to me! But he’s alive!

Mark Levin: We are staring tyranny in the face

Meanwhile in America, it appears that a civil war is going to happen soon. This is HISTORIC TIMES.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Super delicious Greek food, Zombie Gnomes, American freak-outs, Chinese moon bases, HST and other adventures

We continue on our quest to find some sanity in the rapidly collapsing world. The easiest way to do so is to turn off news from USA, UK, Australia and Korea. Then everything becomes so peaceful. Don’t you know…

Let’s continue down our stroll through the “news” at this point in time.

BMW Group strengthens partnership in China: Extension of Joint Venture Contract until 2040 enters into force

Another smart German company in defiance of the USA gov order to disconnect with China.

From HERE

Volkswagen going all-in on China’s EV future — 200EV manufacturer in china

Not only BMW.

“everyone agrees there are too many electric vehicle brands in China.” Officials in Beijing claim there are as many as 200

VW act-locally-to-succeed-globally approach. That, it’s hoped, will win the trust and loyalty of Chinese motorists leaning toward supporting local job creation, much the way Japanese carmakers operate in the US.

In the past, our approach was to develop in Germany and localize in China,” Brandstaetter told Nikkei Asia. “But this approach will be changed significantly by setting up more local resources for R&D, especially for software, to be faster, to be more independent in China.”

Brandstaetter adds that “we’re also using these technology trends for the rest of the globe and our other entities.” That means a strong focus on the internet-connected vehicles preferred on the mainland and EV offerings with self-driving functions.

The joint venture that’s majority-owned by Volkswagen will operate from a new plant in Anhui Province. By 2023, the facility hopes to churn out 300,000 vehicles annually

Add in joint ventures with FAW Group and SAIC Motor and that puts Volkswagen at the 1 million cars-per-year mark. That will raise China to a 20% share of Volkswagen’s global production....

Article HERE

We face a global economic crisis. And no one knows what to do about it | Economics | The Guardian

Ah. If the USA, and the UK, and Australia are experiencing it, it MUST be global. Eh? LOL. Hey! The World is not the UK / America, just like China is not Shanghai.  -MM

Back in February, plenty of investors were betting that the buildup of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border was no more than an elaborate bluff.

The Russian and Ukrainian currencies appreciated in value as hedge funds and private equity firms, signalling their faith in some form of peace deal emerging, confidently bought roubles and the Ukrainian hryvnia.

Today there is a war going on that has effectively locked up the raw materials and food usually exported by both nations, and no one knows when the conflict will end.

It is clear from the collapse in global stock markets and sliding cryptocurrency values that investors are panicked by the uncertainty. Shares in the US, where the S&P 500 index is down by almost a quarter since January, have suffered their worst start to a year for 60 years.

We have seen panics before, notably after the 2008 crash. Investment firms, despite their reputations as the clever custodians of pension fund money, always press the sell button at the first sign of trouble. Collectively, it leads to a rout.

Seasoned policymakers know how to react in such uncertain times, and that is to do whatever it takes to reassure investors that their money is safe. Western governments have dipped into their reserves, and when that well of cash has run dry, borrowed heavily to maintain a stable outlook for their economies. Vital support has arrived in the form of cheap borrowing from central banks. With low interest rates acting like the cavalry in a John Wayne film, everyone has been able to rest assured the panic will be shortlived.

Not any more. This time there is a real war, not just a financial one, and no one quite knows what to do. The major powers cannot agree about how to fight it and policymakers cannot agree about how to handle the fallout, especially the shortages of raw materials and food from Ukraine and Russia that are pushing inflation to 10% and beyond.

In particular, central banks have lost their nerve. Instead of being a reassuring presence, they are adding to the sense of panic by increasing the cost of borrowing. As one analyst said about the US central bank’s decision to raise interest rates by 0.75 percentage points last week: “The Federal Reserve is going to hike interest rates until policymakers break inflation, but the risk is that they also break the economy.”

On Thursday, the Bank of England pushed its base rate to 1.25% after a period of more than a decade during which it had never climbed higher than 0.75%. Some analysts believe the base rate will increase to 3% by the end of next year after Threadneedle Street put tackling inflation above sustaining growth.

Inflation is an affliction caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and to a lesser but important extent by China’s difficulties with Covid

WTF?

Inflation is Russia's fault.
Inflation is also China's fault.

And there you have the narrative! -MM

We know that an increase in the cost of borrowing in the UK, the eurozone and the US, which is what we are now witnessing, will do nothing to bring down prices.

Inflation is an affliction caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and to a lesser but important extent by China’s difficulties with Covid after its vaccine development failures, which have caused repeated lockdowns and holdups at ports. In the UK, Brexit adds a further big twist because it has damaged trade and cut the number of available workers.

The justification for higher interest rates, then, must lie elsewhere, and central banks, to justify their spasm of action, argue they must go ahead to avert a wages spiral – one where pay exceeds inflation.

In Britain, this argument presumes that the average worker, to prevent a fall in personal living standards, will be able to negotiate a pay deal that beats the Bank of England’s latest forecast for peak inflation later this year of 11%.

When the government is expected to limit public sector pay rises to between 0% and 3% this year, that means private sector increases would have to be even higher – about 12% or 13% on average. These levels of pay rise are a fiction. Worker power, apart from in some discrete pockets of the labour market, is a mirage.

Yet the Bank looks likely to press ahead anyway, which leaves anyone looking for reasons to remain confident turning to Rishi Sunak.

The chancellor has made it clear he values fiscal rectitude above the “whatever it takes” open-ended commitments needed to foster confidence. He has warm words for investors about low business taxes, special visas for foreign entrepreneurs and a reheated Thatcherite plan to increase the number of workers by compelling more of those on benefits to look for work.

That is a feeble collection of micro-policies that will do little to improve the mood of companies looking to invest in the UK. No wonder the pound has tumbled. Few investors want to buy British at the moment, and who can blame them?

… as you’re joining us today from Japan, we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.

Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence. Reporting like this is vital for democracy, for fairness and to demand better from the powerful.

And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the global events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it.

From HERE

Ukrainian leaders integrated Ukrainians into Europe “piece by piece”. Transplantation center discovered in Mariupol.

This issue was resolved in the office of the “International Red Cross” (Sweden), which was equipped as a bunker and stored everything mined behind heavy armored doors on the basement and basement floors.. Recently, Ukraine has been considered in Europe as its own transplantation base. In Mariupol, in the abandoned office of this organization, medical records of children were found, in which not their illnesses were indicated, but their healthy organs not affected by any diseases, as well as the addresses and contacts of their parents. The bunker was not left in a big hurry, but, one might say, “planned”, since a lot of equipment and documents were burned and deliberately destroyed. Bearing in mind the seriousness of the structures, one can rightfully assume that the organs extracted from these children were also stored there. On what grounds was the “International Red Cross” engaged in this activity in Mariupol?

The fact is that the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine in December 2019 adopted the draft law No. 2457 “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine, which simplifies the transplantation of anatomical materials to humans.” Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Dmytro Kuleba welcomed him, calling him “an important step for our country towards European practice.” In March of the same year, this law “On the transplantation of human anatomical materials” came into force.

As noted by Ukrainian specialists interviewed by Life at that time, who studied the law “On the transplantation of human anatomical materials” that had entered into Ukraine, there is an interesting clause in it – “If there are no recipients for anatomical materials in Ukraine, they can be offered to other states with which relevant international treaties. “There is no need for risk and smuggling: you just need to declare that there is no suitable recipient for a particular organ in Ukraine, and then send organs to other countries for a separate fee,” experts say. – And most importantly – everything is according to the law.

At that time, the main volunteer of Ukraine, Miroslav Gai, even at that time suggested sending prisoners “for organs”: “I know why the Rada legalized the trade in human organs. We have many Russian prisoners, and the Russians slow down exchanges all the time. Their prisoners, like Lusvargi, accumulate and give burden on the budget. Otherwise, it will be of any use. From a black sheep, even kidneys … sorry, tufts of wool. ”

According to the Ukrainian businessmen interviewed by Life, who earn on intermediary services, they bring together a potential donor – kidney, liver, etc. – with those foreign cliques in Europe and America, whose clients are ready to pay for “new” organs, for example, by selling a kidney, for example, you can earn up to 50 thousand dollars, part of the liver – 35-40 thousand dollars, a lung – up to 100 thousand dollars, and here the bone marrow is not very valued – from 5 to 10 thousand dollars

According to Life’s interlocutors, who are familiar with the shadow business of selling human organs, most potential donors in Ukraine place ads on the Internet on specialized sites.

This bill can be considered a continuation of law No. 2386a-1, which allows organ transplantation, which the Verkhovna Rada adopted on May 17, 2018, and  Petro Poroshenko  signed on June 19 of the same year. However, it did not work due to certain legal conflicts, the solution of which required the adoption of a new bill by the Servants of the People.

“These idiots in the Verkhovna Rada adopted a law on transplantation. In a country at war, in a country of chaos and lawlessness, where they do not trust either the courts or the law enforcement system, they allowed organ transplantation, ”  Vadim Rabinovich , co-chairman of the Opposition Platform – For Life faction, said about the law .

Although in Ukrainian society the attitude towards this law was mostly negative, but in the Ministry of Health, under the leadership of Ulyana Suprun, they decided to “adjust” society to the opinion of Europe. “The opinion of Europe, the opinion of the leading countries on transplantation is diametrically different from the opinion of our society. Therefore, society must come to the conclusion that this is good, ”  Konstantin Rudenko , an expert from the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, commented on the law .

As Ukrainian observers noted at the time, “many people do need organ transplants, but in poor and corrupt countries there are huge risks associated with organ trafficking or the deliberate killing of a person in order to seize expensive “spare parts.” In the poorest countries, organ sales often become way to pay off debts or earn money at the cost of a threat to one’s own life or health. In this context, it should be noted that the simplification of the procedure for organ transplantation takes place against the backdrop of massive impoverishment of Ukrainians, many of whom have nothing to pay their utility bills.”

Vadim Rabinovich also focused attention on this, commenting on the new bill: “Dear Ukrainians, I want to congratulate you on the fact that today for the first time the issues that need to be resolved by the new government have been submitted to the Verkhovna Rada session hall, the main of which will be the simplification of the procedure for organ transplantation. In a country where people have no money, where the tariffs are exorbitant, where land is sold, it is very important that you can sell your organs in order to pay for the “communal”. It was this law that was put first on the agenda of the work of deputies. Why not bring our tariff reduction bill to the floor? This simple law, which has already been voted on in the committee, can reduce tariffs for people tomorrow,” Rabinovich said. Why not bring our tariff reduction bill to the floor? This simple law, which has already been voted on in the committee, can reduce tariffs for people tomorrow,” Rabinovich said. Why not bring our tariff reduction bill to the floor? This simple law, which has already been voted on in the committee, can reduce tariffs for people tomorrow,” Rabinovich said.

Ukrainian journalist  Irina Zaslavets  said on ObozTV that black transplants are very active in Ukraine precisely because of the poverty of many Ukrainians who are looking for buyers for their organs themselves.

“Just yesterday, I saw a letter that came to the Shalimov Institute [National Institute of Surgery and Transplantology – Auth.] – “I am such and such a woman, buy a kidney from me, I really need money …” Such letters constantly come to the Shalimov Institute, and Ukrainians are looking for an opportunity to sell the organ. Periodically, such criminal cases are heard in the courts, ”said Zaslavets.

In fact, as the Ukrainians themselves admitted, “such a legal conflict was created intentionally for the adoption of a new law that will work primarily for wealthy Western patients.”

In contrast to the 1999 law “On the Transplantation of Organs and Other Anatomical Materials”, according to which only state institutions could perform organ harvesting, private clinics also received such a right. The same law specifically spells out the possibility of transferring these organs abroad. According to political scientist  Kirill Molchanov  , under Poroshenko, the law on transplantation was deliberately pushed through by groups of deputies who were vitally interested in the export of organs.

“Fights went on for a long time in the Rada, who will control this rather profitable market for the sale of organs. The organs will be sold not only in Ukraine, but also for export. Certain groups of people’s deputies, after the adoption of this law, will simply divide all the cash flows among themselves, ”Molchanov argued.

The same observers stated that, in fact, this law is the legalization of “black transplantation”.

In general, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 10,000 organs are sold annually on the black market. Globally, about 10% of kidney transplants are due to international smuggling, and the leaders of the black market in organs are Kosovo, Mozambique, Israel, India, Pakistan, Egypt, China, Ukraine and Moldova. Globally, the illicit organ transplant business is estimated at between $1.5 billion and $8 billion a year. Human organs flow massively from poor countries to rich ones, and from poor people to rich ones.

According to the international organization Organs Watch, which is trying to stop the illegal business, a typical kidney donor looks like this: a 28-29-year-old male from countries such as Brazil, South Africa, Ukraine, Romania, Afghanistan, the Philippines or India with an annual income of about $480.

“The buying or selling of organs is illegal in most countries, including the United States, but a chronic shortage of organs for transplants has led to a thriving international black market. Typically, poor donors (usually from third world countries) are paid several thousand dollars for organs, which are then resold for more than $100,000 to wealthy recipients, usually from first world countries.

Often, the financial interest of doctors in transplantation leads to cases when the life of a patient who is “suitable” according to the database for the role of a donor is simply not fought for, especially in cases of head injury only (a frequent result of an accident). The patient can be declared dead with a still beating heart, since surgical removal of still living organs is required, in which the survival rate is many times higher than that of organs removed from a corpse. Judicial proceedings and evidence in such cases are very problematic.

Oleg Panasenko , chairman of the Free Trade Union of Medical Workers of Ukraine   , said that the inefficiency of law enforcement agencies in Ukraine and the poverty of ordinary citizens create a huge field for manipulation and criminal schemes in organ transplantation.

“In order for there to be no “black” transplantation and people were not allowed to have organs, the law enforcement system should work at a high level in the country and there should be a good economic situation. What is not present in Ukraine today. Accordingly, there remains a field for manipulation, ”Panasenko said. According to the leader of the medical trade union, the purpose of the bill was initially to legalize “black transplantation”.

Previously, they tried to fight against these facts in Ukraine.

So, on October 18, 2019, the Kyiv police announced the exposure of a private clinic that was engaged in organ transplantation. In 2017, the press service of the prosecutor’s office of the Kyiv region also reported the arrest of four people who were taking Ukrainian citizens abroad, where they were seized for kidney transplantation.

“Two citizens of Turkey and two citizens of Ukraine from September 2015 to April 2017, through the Internet, searched for victims with a difficult financial situation and persuaded the latter to sell their organ for a monetary reward,” the official statement said.

According to the press service, people were not warned about the negative consequences of kidney deprivation, and organ donors were promised to pay from $10 to $15 thousand for a kidney, but after the removal of the organ they were given much less money. The price of a donor kidney on the world transplantation market ranges from $40,000 to $60,000. As a result, many Ukrainians integrated into Europe posthumously and by no means entirely. – said in an official statement. According to the press service, people were not warned about the negative consequences of kidney deprivation, and organ donors were promised to pay from $10 to $15 thousand for a kidney, but after the removal of the organ they were given much less money.

The price of a donor kidney on the world transplantation market ranges from $40,000 to $60,000. As a result, many Ukrainians integrated into Europe posthumously and by no means entirely. – said in an official statement. According to the press service, people were not warned about the negative consequences of kidney deprivation, and organ donors were promised to pay from $10 to $15 thousand for a kidney, but after the removal of the organ they were given much less money. The price of a donor kidney on the world transplantation market ranges from $40,000 to $60,000. As a result, many Ukrainians integrated into Europe posthumously and by no means entirely.

Full article HERE.

Abandoned at 17 – new beginning for an elderly cat

What a story…

Zombie Gnomes Are A Perfect Way To Keep Everyone From Your Lawn

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Getting sick and tired of trespassers destroying your beautiful lawn? Well, maybe it’s time you taught them a lesson. And what better way to do it than by scaring the bejeezus out of them!

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For that, the Canadian group of artists RevenantFX, have created a perfect solution – zombie gnomes. These creepy undead garden decorations will make sure your Halloween-ready yard will be protected from unwanted visitors and may even turn some heads in your neighborhood.

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Scott Ritter & Ray on Ukraine, Russia, China

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Scott and I focused initially on President Biden’s just-completed Excellent Adventure in the Far East and the U.S. effort to woo countries away from China or, at least, pre-empt closer bilateral ties.

I again posed the question (see my brief talk Thursday, embedded in Article HERE ), Why must China’s “win-win” approach be dismissed out of hand — especially when it was so mutually beneficial 50 years ago in reducing tension and keeping the peace?

Recent developments, including talks with Chinese officials, have fortified Scott’s view that China remains extremely reluctant to go to war over Taiwan. Nevertheless, China will do so “in a heartbeat” if Taiwan declares independence and develops a more substantial military relationship with the U.S.

Bottom line: Scott predicts that the U.S. will be at war with China within six months to a year — and will lose. This could be avoided if the U.S. takes the military aspect out of the equation in confronting China and does the sensible thing in limiting the competition to the economic sphere.

Ray discussed the lemming-like bloc heads now leading the NATO bloc and compared them to statesmen and stateswomen of the past — the German Social Democratic Party’s Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr, for example; and Angela Merkel (no Socialist she), who told President Obama to his face that Germany would not join any effort to send offensive arms to Ukraine. Sadly, serious leaders of the past, experienced in foreign affairs as well as politics, have been replaced by political hacks with little or no experience (or even interest) in Ostpolitik, which yielded a peaceful, mutually beneficial detente in the 1970-80s.

The economic sanctions are already making themselves felt, however, in Germany and elsewhere. And there are preliminary signs that even some bloc-head lemmings may be having serious second thoughts. Fissures are cracking open and expanding among the NATO countries — particularly among those most affected by the sanctions.

Scott reiterated his longstanding view that Russian forces will prevail on the ground in Ukraine, adding that recently they have been performing in a very impressive, professional way. This, despite what the NY Times and Washington Post has been saying, (and even their narrative of Russian “blundering” has begun to change under the force of circumstances). One major question: If Establishment media find themselves forced to acknowledge strong Russian advances in the coming weeks, will they turn on the Biden administration as the mid-term November elections draw near? Snippets of truth have begun to appear in the likes of the NY Times and Washington Post.

The way things have evolved on the ground, serious embarrassment may be unavoidable. Will Biden cut his loses? I suggest the answer to that is No. Rather, with no adults in the room, Biden may instead be persuaded to up the ante (see below). I do hope someone tells the president that the Russians will not back down in the face of escalatory steps they are capable of neutralizing, and that this includes what they call “offensive strike missiles” capable of reaching Russia.

UPDATE

In this context, the trial-balloon-type media reports yesterday afternoon, after our interview, that the U.S. is preparing to send long-range rocket systems to Ukraine, takes on added importance. A final decision by the White House is expected as early as next week. (See: Article HERE )

One key weapons system under discussion is the U.S.-made Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) capable of firing a torrent of rockets 180 miles or more. This is much farther than the systems currently in Ukraine’s inventory, and could put Russia itself within range. This system has been sitting atop the long list of requests from Ukrainian officials, who say it is needed to curb advancing Russian forces in the Donbas. U.S. officials reportedly “have concerns” that Ukrainian forces might end up firing into Russian territory, causing major escalation.

Meanwhile, CNN reports (See: Article HERE ) that Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, who was part of a congressional delegation trip to Kyiv earlier this month, told CNN he believes the systems could help Ukraine gain significant momentum against Russia.

Crowing About the MLRS

“I think it could be a game-changer”, Crow** said, not only for offensive attacks but also for defense. He explained that Russian conventional artillery, which has a range of about 50km, “would not get close” to Ukrainian urban centers if MLRS systems were positioned there. “So it would take away their siege tactics,” he said of the Russians.

The Kremlin has warned that any country providing advanced weaponry to Ukraine will face harsh repercussions. Yesterday Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the West has “declared total war” against Russia. The Russians would see any attempt to provide MLRS to Ukraine as additional proof of the West’s intent.

I would expect any MLRS that make it into Ukraine to be neutralized as soon as they are detected.  And then Lockheed Martin (poor thing) would have to manufacture and sell still more! The money is there; the only problem is how fast it can be spent down.  And so it goes.

** Jason Crow styles himself as something of a specialist on Russia. He has asserted that: “Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy.”

UN Rights Chief Is Urged to Resign After China Visit

Well, under the urging of the United States, the UN sent inspectors to visit China, and investigate the claims of “human rights violations”. They analyzed the situation, made  up a full report, and stated that they couldn’t find anything.

The United States went into hysterics and a tizzy!

Following her long-anticipated trip to China, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet's statement concerning the treatment of minority groups in Xinjiang prompted strong criticism from commenters on social media and in Western governments.
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These Zoom Backgrounds Turn Your House Into the Cover of An IKEA Catalog

The Swedish retailer has released a series of video-conference backgrounds pulled from the covers of Ikea catalogs of yesteryear. The backgrounds will make it look like you live in a house worthy of a catalog, even if it’s decidedly not.

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HandG ikea cat 1987 2

The 10 backgrounds capture a time before millennial pink: the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s. A time of rolled-arm couches with cream-colored slipcovers, glass and metal armoires, and aquamarine and tangerine accents. One background from a 2000 cover shows a mom and her son smiling over a Game Boy while sitting on one such cream-colored couch. Another from 2003 suggests you “Go Cubic!” much like the boxy TV featured in the lightly colored living room with a cherry-red and fuchsia abstract rug and green-apple accents.

HandG ikea cat 1997 2
HandG ikea cat 1997 2

HandG ikea cat 1992 2
HandG ikea cat 1992 2

HandG ikea cat 1988 2
HandG ikea cat 1988 2

Greek chicken souvlaki | Akis Petretzikis

Lunar Research Station: Russia, China Almost Ready To Ink Pact On ‘Moon Base’ That Will Rival Artemis Accords – Rogozin

Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin recently said that Moscow and Beijing were very close to signing the agreement on creating the joint Lunar Station.

“We are now almost ready to sign an intergovernmental agreement on creating a lunar research base with China,” Rogozin said in an interview with the state-owned Rossiya 24 TV channel.

The Artemis Accords

As EurAsian Times has reported earlier, China and Russia are leading the opposition to the US-led space block, called the Artemis Accords.

It consists of 19 countries, all of which include the United States and it’s proxy surrogates.

The overall aim is to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2025.

As well as establishing a governing framework for exploring and mining for natural resources, on Moon, Mars, and beyond.

The mission intends (some day) to build a research station on the Moon’s south pole.

The rough plans are also to have a supporting research station orbiting the Moon, called the Lunar Gateway.

As part of that program, an uncrewed mission to Moon, Artemis 1, is planned to be launched as early as July 2022.

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China and Russia are promoting their own International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) as an alternative to the US-led Artemis program.

This joint Sino-Russian mission aims to build a Moon base and install a space station in the lunar orbit. The station is planned to be a state-of-art experimental research facility created on the surface or in the orbit of the Moon.

Roadmap For the IIRS; International Lunar Research Station

Last June, Roscosmos and China National Space Administration (CNSA) presented a roadmap for the ILRS during the Global Space Exploration Conference (GLEX 2021).

According to the roadmap, divided into three phases, five facilities and nine modules are planned for the station to support long and short missions to the Moon’s surface and orbit. The construction of the station is expected to be completed by 2035.

These facilities include a CisLunar Transport Facility to support round-trip transfer between Earth and the Moon, lunar orbiting, soft landing, a take-off on the lunar surface, and re-entry to Earth.

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On the surface, a long-term support facility will feature a command center, energy and supply modules, and thermal management. The lunar transport and operation facility will help modules move the surface and support excavation or sampling.

The other two are the lunar scientific facility for in-orbit and surface experiments and the ground support and application facility.

As for the modules, the designs reportedly include a “hopping robot” and smart mini-rovers that would move around the Moon’s surface.

First Phase Of ILRS Construction

The station is planned to be built in three phases, with the first phase involving six missions, including China’s Chang’e-4, 6, and 7 missions and Russia’s Luna 25, 26, and 27. The first phase involves gathering data and verifying high-precision soft-landings which is supposed to last till 2025.

The Chang’e-4 (CE-4) mission delivered a landing platform and a rover named Yutu-2 to the Moon’s far side in January 2019, marking the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon by any country.

Yutu-2 landed in Von Kármán crater, in the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin, in January 2019. The CE-4’s purpose is to explore the area’s geology. The CE-6 and CE-7 are expected to be launched around 2025.

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The CE-6 is supposed to bring back to Earth lunar samples with a mass of up to 2 kilograms, and CE-7 will be tasked with landing on the lunar South Pole and detecting local natural resources.

CE-7 is comprised of five separate spacecraft, namely an orbiter, lander, rover, hopping probe, and a polar relay satellite.

Meanwhile, Russia also plans to launch its Luna-25 mission in August 2022, thereby reactivating the Soviet-era series of robotic lunar missions that ended decades ago. The last in the series was Luna 24, which sent about 6 ounces (170 grams) of moon material back to Earth in 1976.

The Luna-25 moon probe will launch atop a Soyuz-2.1b rocket with a Fregat upper stage from the Vostochny spaceport in the far eastern region of Amur. The probe’s primary destination for landing is the Moon’s South Polar region, specifically, a spot north of the Boguslavsky Crater.

According to Russia’s rocket design bureau, NPO Lavochkin has constructed the Luna 25’s lander. There are three main tasks for this mission: to develop soft-landing technology; study the internal structure and exploration of natural resources, including water, in the circumpolar region of the Moon; and investigate the effects of cosmic rays and electromagnetic radiation on the Moon’s surface.

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2022 06 03 20 11

In addition, Luna 25 is also supposed to use a suite of sensors onboard to study the lunar topside and dust particles in the Moon’s exosphere.

Luna 25 also had a camera called Pilot-D, a demonstrator terrain relative navigation system, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA). However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ESA announced its decision in April to discontinue cooperation on Russia’s Luna series of robotic moon missions. Now Pilot-D will not be a part of the Luna 25 mission.

While the Luna 26 and Luna 27, which were earlier scheduled to launch in 2024 and 2025, respectively, will also be postponed, announced chief of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, shortly after ESA discontinued its cooperation.

Second And Third Phases Of ILRS

Following the completion of the first phase in 2025, which may get delayed considering the possible postponement of Luna 26 and Luna 27, phase two called the ‘construction’ phase, will begin in 2026, and this is supposed to go on till 2035.

The construction phase will be divided into two sub-stages, the initial one from 2026 to 2030, which will involve technology verification, sample return, massive cargo delivery, and the start of joint operations. Two missions are planned during this period, the Chinese CE-8 and the Russian Luna-28.

Stage two of the second phase will take place from 2030 to 2035 and involve completing the in-orbit and lunar surface infrastructure for energy, communication, actual resource utilization, and other technologies.

Five joint missions are planned for this sub-stage, named ILRS-1 through 5 and Russian super heavy-lift launch vehicles are listed to launch the mission.

Phase three will see the start of crewed landings after 2036, when the ILRS has been mostly completed and humans can conduct research and exploration.

Meanwhile, China and Russia are looking to add more nations to ILRS and there have been reports of negotiations with the ESA, Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. However, as the ESA has backed out of Russia’s Luna series of moon missions over the Ukraine war.

Artemis Accords: why many countries are refusing to sign Moon exploration agreement

So why so few nations want to join with the USA in their "moon exploration" effort? Well, this UK-centrist article tries to attempt explaining why all the other space-faring nations won't participate in it, and intends to go their own way. -MM

Eight countries have signed the Artemis Accords, a set of guidelines surrounding the Artemis Program for crewed exploration of the Moon. The United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates and the US are now all participants in the project, which aims to return humans to the moon by 2024 and establish a crewed lunar base by 2030.

This may sound like progress. Nations have for a number of years struggled with the issue of how to govern a human settlement on the Moon and deal with the management of any resources. But a number of key countries have serious concerns about the accords and have so far refused to sign them.

Previous attempts to govern space have been through painstakingly negotiated international treaties. The Outer Space Treaty 1967 laid down the foundational principles for human space exploration – it should be peaceful and benefit all mankind, not just one country. But the treaty has little in the way of detail. The Moon Agreement of 1979 attempted to prevent commercial exploitation of outer-space resources, but only a small number of states have ratified it – the US, China and Russia haven’t.

Now that the US is pursuing the Artemis Program, the question of how states will behave in exploring the Moon and using its resources has come to a head. The signing of the accords represents a significant political attempt to codify key principles of space law and apply them to the programme. You can hear more about some of the governance issues facing nations who want to explore the Moon in the podcast To the moon and beyond, see link below.

The accords are bilateral agreements and not binding instruments of international law. But by establishing practice in the area, they could have a significant influence on any subsequent governance framework for human settlements on Mars and beyond.

Natural allies

All seven partners who have agreed to the accords with the US are natural collaborators on the Artemis Program and will easily adhere to the stated principles.

Japan is keen to engage in lunar exploration.

Luxembourg has dedicated legislation allowing for space mining and has also signed an additional collaborative agreement with the US.

The UAE and Australia are both actively trying to establish collaborative links with the broader space industry, so this represents a perfect opportunity for them to build up capacity.

Italy, the UK and Canada all have ambitions to develop their space manufacturing industries and will see this as a chance to grow their economies.

The contents of the accords are relatively uncontentious.

  • Be subject to American laws, rules and regulations.
  • Pay a large fee for participation.
  • Host American Space Military forces.

Throughout, there is reference to the existing Outer Space Treaty framework, so they are tied closely to existing norms of American space law.

There is an explicit statement that the mining of space resources is in accordance with international law. This follows on from the controversial passing of the Space Act 2015, which put the right to use and trade space resources into American domestic law.

But section 10(4) of the accords also commits to ongoing discussions at the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space as to how the legal framework should develop.

The rest of the accords focus on safety in space operations, transparency and interoperability (which refers to the ability of space systems to work in conjunction with each other) under American law.

Controversial issues

If the substance is reassuring, the US promotion of the accords outside of the “normal” channels of international space law – such as the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space – will be a cause of consternation for some states.

Duh!

By requiring potential collaborators to sign bilateral agreements on behaviour instead, some nations will see the US as trying to impose their own quasi-legal rules.

This is clearly seen as the US leveraging partnership agreements and lucrative financial contracts to reinforce its own dominant leadership position.

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2022 06 04 13 48

Non Participants

Russia has already stated that the Artemis Program is too “US-centric” to sign it in its present form.

China’s absence is explained by the US congressional prohibition on collaboration with the country.

Concerns that this is a power grab by the US and its allies are fuelled by the lack of any African or South American countries amongst the founding partner states.

Intriguingly Germany, France and India are also absent.

These are countries with well developed space programmes that would surely have benefited from being involved in Project Artemis. Their opposition may be down to a preference for the Moon Agreement and a desire to see a properly negotiated treaty governing lunar exploration.

The European Space Agency (ESA) as an organisation has not signed on to the accords either, but a number of ESA member states have. This is unsurprising. The ambitious US deadline for the project will clash with the lengthy consultation of the 17 member states required for the ESA to sign on as a whole.

Summary

Ultimately, the Artemis Accords are revolutionary in the field of space exploration. Using bilateral agreements that dictate norms of behaviour as a condition of involvement in a programme is a significant change in space governance. With Russia and China opposing them, the accords are sure to meet diplomatic resistance and their very existence may provoke antagonism in traditional UN forums.

Questions also remain about the impact that the looming US election and the COVID-19 pandemic will have on the programme. We already know that President Trump is keen to see astronauts on the Moon by 2024. The approach of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, is a lot less clear. He may well be less wedded to the 2024 deadline and instead aim for broader diplomatic consensus on behaviour through engagement at the UN.

While broader international acceptance may be desirable, the US believes that the lure of the opportunities afforded by the Artemis Program will bring other partners on board soon enough.

  • Obey USA laws.
  • Be subject to USA regulations.
  • Be offered protection by the USA Space Force.

Space-active states now face a stark choice: miss out on being the first to use the resources of the Moon, or accept the price of doing business and sign up to the Artemis Accords.

Well, of course the writer ASSUMES that NASA will actually achieve it's goals of being the first to create a base on the moon. I have my doubts, as a long time observer of this issue. Which is why most of the rest of the world has decided to side up with China and Russia. -MM

 

By Larry Romanoff

Introduction

China has the world’s longest high-speed rail (HSR) network with some 38,000 kilometers in operation,[1] which comprises nearly 70% of all the world’s high-speed lines[2] and more than three times that of the entire European Union.[3] China has more than 2,500 high-speed trains in operation, more than all the rest of the world combined,[4] and it also has the fastest trains in operation anywhere,[5] with several generations now operating at speeds between 350 Km/h and 400 Km/h. Shanghai’s Maglev is still the fastest operating train in the world,[6]
with sustained speeds of 430 Km/h. China’s rail system carries about 3.5 billion passengers per year, nearly 70% of these on high-speed trains. During the 40 days of China’s Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), passenger volume reached a peak of more than 400 million.

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2022 06 08 14 59

The Chinese government planned the HSR program in part to compress passenger travel on these dedicated tracks and free much of the slower existing rail system for freight, to remove trucks from the nation’s highways, thus lowering costs and in turn making highways safer for automobiles. The Shanghai-Nanjing route for example has 38 trains each way each day – carrying perhaps 150,000 passengers, which frees a huge amount of track time for freight. China’s high-speed trains have dramatically reduced the travel time between most major centers. Shanghai-Beijing is down from 12 hours to 4; Shanghai-Nanjing from 4 hours to 1; Wuhan to Guangzhou from 14 hours to only 3 hours.

There are always potential difficulties establishing routes due to the number of communities to serve and the consequent number of stops – which negate the advantage of high-speed trains. China seems to have arrived at an excellent solution. As an example, the 275 Km. route from Shanghai to Nanjing serves 6 communities between the two terminal stations, with some trains on this route travelling on an express basis and making no stops (1 hour), with others stopping at one or several cities on route, with different trains making different combinations of stops (1.5 hours). This has proven to be a convenient method to serve all cities on the route while still maintaining low average travel times.

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2022 06 08 15 00

Many of the statistics and other information available online on China’s (and other) train travel are inaccurate at best, one website claiming China in 2019 had 1.4 trillion train passengers. Even Statista is quite inaccurate, confusing test runs of experimental trains with regular operating speeds of scheduled rail.[7]

 France’s TGV is listed at its maximum one-time test speed of 575 Km/h, when it operates at only 300 Km/h. Statista has operating speeds wrong too, listing China’s Fuxing at 418 Km and Hexie at 486 Km/h, which normally operate at only 300 and 350 Km/h although they have proven capable of operating at these higher sustained speeds.

Train and Passenger Classes

China has three generations of high-speed trains in operation: G, D, and C. The G-trains are the fastest commercial-use high-speed trains in the world with speeds of 350 Km/h to 400 Km/h. The D-trains operate at 250 Km/h and the first-generation C at 200 Km/h. Below this, there are still the ‘normal’ trains with designations of Z, T, K, N and more. The Z, T and K trains run at 160 Km/h, 140 and 120. Slower trains are used for short rural trips where time is not so important.

These train alphabets are not nothing. I once took a G-train from Shanghai to Haining (the world-famous leather market), a trip of maybe 30 minutes if I recall correctly. I didn’t have a return ticket since I wasn’t certain of my return time, so I simply asked the wicket lady to put me on “the next train to Shanghai”. That was a big mistake. N-train. Ten kilometers per hour on the flat, much less uphill. That train stopped at every town, village, pig farm and strawberry patch on its way to Shanghai, and many times we had to pull off the track to permit a faster train to go by. Two and half hours to return home. I wondered why the ticket was so cheap. The kind of mistake you make only once.

I would note too that punctuality is a hallmark of Chinese transportation generally, this certainly applying to the HSR network. If the schedule states the departure time as 11:02, then at 11:02 the doors silently close and the train is moving. I’ve experienced a few departure delays, typically due to an arrival that is late, but usually by only 5 or 10 minutes. I don’t have available the percentage of on-time departures and arrivals but it must be in the high 90s.

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2022 06 08 15 02

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These high-speed trains typically have cars that are First-Class, Second-Class and Business Class, and trains not dedicated to short runs have sleeper cars which are very clean and perfectly comfortable even in older trains, the later generations offering lovely duvets, a separate TV for each bunk, electrical outlets, lights, Wi-Fi. Regular sleepers have four bunks to a room while the highest grade has only two berths to a compartment, suitable for couples, and equipped with a sofa, a wardrobe, and private bathroom. Sleepers typically carry a 25% or 30% cost premium over regular seats.

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2022 06 08 15 03

Business Class

These offer a pleasant alternative to air travel for the typically rushed and pressurised one-day business trips, for example from Shanghai to Guangzhou or Hong Kong. We board our train in the evening after dinner, do a bit of work or watch TV, and awake at 7:00 AM downtown at our destination, with enough time for breakfast before our first meeting. On the return trip, we have a leisurely dinner with friends, board the train across the street, and awake at 7:00 AM back in Shanghai. With two full nights’ sleep, there is no jet lag and no residual fatigue.

Here are some typical ticket prices:

G-train

  • Beijing-Shanghai, 1,350 Kms; 350 Km/h (4 hours)
  • 2nd Class, 550 RMB ($80)
  • 1st Class, 900 RMB ($135)
  • Business Class, 1,700 ($250)

D-Train

  • Kunming-Lijiang, 500 Kms; 250 Km/h (2 hours)
  • 2nd Class, 220 RMB ($30)
  • 1st Class, 350 RMB ($50)

C-Train

  • Beijing-Tianjin, 125 Kms; 200 Km/h (1 hour+)
  • 2nd Class, 55 RMB ($8)
  • 1st Class, 90 RMB ($13)

It’s almost impossible to compare train fares with the US because in China the fares vary only by distance and train type. Amtrak has a fare schedule that on first approach appears occult, apparently following the convoluted airline model of changing fares by time of departure and other secret paranormal factors, so a particular price could be almost anywhere. On some routes, twice the distance costs half the price. Still, they appear to be much higher than in China by a factor of perhaps 5 or more.

China’s Maglev Trains

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2022 06 08 15 0r3

The first Maglev train in China was a Siemens design installed in Shanghai, with service beginning in 2004. It was until recently the world’s only regularly-scheduled operating Maglev (at 430 Km/h), but now they are becoming common in China. Maglev technology is simple in principle at low speeds, but smoothness and stability at high speed are exceptionally complicated. Maglevs have a higher level of safety in that they cannot be derailed since they ‘wrap around’ the track, and maintenance costs are low compared to rail trains because there is no wear on the track bed and few moving parts to degrade or require maintenance and replacement.

Chinese engineers initially produced quite successful low-speed Maglevs (200 Km/h) entirely on their own IP, for use throughout China as city trains, done to gain experience and develop their own proprietary designs and technology. These trains are now operating in Beijing, Changsha, and other cities, running on short local routes. There are few other Maglev trains in existence. Korea built a Maglev track to shuttle visitors at the Daejeon Expo, which still runs the few kilometers between the Expo Park and the National Science Museum, but it is very slow, and another in 2016 that runs only a few kilometers between the airport and a subway station, also very slow. Japan built its first “commercial maglev line” in 2005, with a route less than 10 kilometers and a maximum speed of only 100 Km/h – about the same as Shanghai’s new subway lines.

China’s 600 Km/h Maglev

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2022 06 08 15 04

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In addition to billions poured into R&D for regular HSR trains, Chinese engineers continued their Maglev research at a brisk pace, and have pushed Maglev technology to the point where China is now beginning commercial production of a fabulous 600 Km/h (nearly 400 Mph) Maglev which will replace traditional high-speed rail on many routes.[8]

[9]

Engineers spent much time on wind tunnel testing of the design of the locomotives and cars to reduce air resistance to a minimum, greatly assisting both high speed and stability. Chinese engineers have managed, again on their own IP, to bring down the cost for this very fast train to only two-thirds that of regular high-speed trains. This new Maglev will help to fill the gap between regular HSR and airplanes that fly at 900 Km/h or more, and it is likely that this gap will be closed further.

The Changes

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It is now legendary that when the Chinese government set its mind to an objective, it doesn’t waste time. Everything you have read above has happened in only the past 16 years. “At the beginning of the 21st century China had no high-speed railways. Slow and often uncomfortable trains plodded across this vast country, with low average speeds making journeys such as Shanghai-Beijing a test of travel endurance. Today, it’s a completely different picture. [China] has . . . the world’s largest network of high-speed railways, and all have been completed since 2008.”[10]

An aside: A Brief Note on Subways

Subways are not exactly high-speed rail, although China’s new trains are pushing the envelope in this area as well, at least up to 100 Km/h (almost as fast as American high-speed trains). However, another example of the Chinese not wasting time when they decide to do something. Shanghai and other major cities have set an objective that every place within the inner cities is within about 5 city blocks of a subway station. Here is a list of a few major cities with the current length of subway track and the time required to reach that level:[11]

  • London 131 years, 400 Kms.
  • Paris 122 years, 225 Kms.
  • Berlin 119 years, 148 Kms.
  • New York 113 years, 399 Kms.
  • Shanghai 28 years, 900 Kms.

The Pleasures of Train Travel

One of the great advantages of HSR (High-Speed Rail) train travel compared to flying is the saving in wasted time. A flight in most any country normally involves a one-hour trip to the airport with a requirement to arrive at least 1.5 hours prior to departure which is frequently subject to delays. At the arrival end, there is always the seemingly long wait to deplane, the long walk to the baggage carousels and the exits, then the one hour or more trip downtown.

When we take into account the commute and the necessary pre-departure allowance for check-in and security clearance and the 2-Km walk to the departure gate, then the post-arrival delays and the commute downtown at our destination, trains are equal to flying in trips up to 1,500 Kms, and much faster than flying for shorter trips while also being less expensive. The frequency of departures, at least between major centers in China is astonishing, the Shanghai-Beijing route having some 75 or 80 HSR trains each way each day, often leaving less than 10 minutes apart with as many as 2,000 passengers (two trains linked into 16 cars). Many other routes are similar. The same is true with airlines in China, with flights seemingly departing from everywhere to everywhere every 30 minutes or so.

In China (and in most cities everywhere), the railway stations are downtown so the commute is minimal, one arriving at the station with luggage in hand only 20 or 30 minutes before departure. There is no ‘check-in’ process as with the airlines, only the usual security check and luggage scanners when entering the station where you can spend time in comfortable waiting rooms or simply find the correct platform and board your train. Even though many stations are huge, walking distances are normally much shorter than in most airports. At the destination, since that station is also downtown, taxis and subways are conveniently at hand. Also, in many cities airports and train stations are next door to each other, conveniently facilitating travel continuation.

Another advantage of train travel is the considerable convenience and comfort, trains being much superior in both categories with an absence of pressure and time apprehension. Trains eliminate most unpleasant elements of air travel, with the attraction of being able to see the countryside. On a plane, we are forced to adhere to a rigid schedule: the time for coffee or a meal, the time to close the window curtains and darken the cabin so the staff can rest. If the food cart is out, you cannot get up to walk around or go to the bathroom. Everything seems regulated and under pressure. Leaving your seat is often a major inconvenience. By contrast, on a train you are free to do as you please. Your luggage is accessible at any time, the food carts come by regularly, the dining car is always there, seats have twice the leg room, the aisles are wide enough to accommodate passengers; everything much more relaxed, pleasant, and enjoyable. And you have the advantage of constant Wi-Fi and GPS signals, with AC power and USB outlets usually available at your seat.

China’s high-speed trains are very quiet, without wind noise, and mercifully free of the incessant hum of aircraft engines and, with the flawlessly-welded rails, even the soft clacking of the rails is gone (I rather miss that). The seats are as wide or wider than airline business class, they recline partially (recline fully in business class) and, with the comfort and silence, it is very easy to sleep on a train. I would add that you are more alert (and healthier) on a train because aircraft are pressurised to 8,000 feet; you don’t normally go above 10,000 feet without supplementary oxygen.

They are also very steady. China has the highest standards for stabilising high-speed trains in their longitudinal, lateral and vertical dimensions, a rail expert stating “It is no exaggeration to say the Beijing-Shanghai rail lines were built with the highest standards in the modern world. China leads the world in rail stability.” Here is a Xinhua video of one of China’s high-speed trains where a coin rests on its edge on a windowsill for more than 8 minutes before it finally falls over – this at 350 Kms per hour. (12)

A Bit of Background

“High-speed rail” emerged first in Japan in the early 1960s with the construction of the Shinkansen ‘bullet train’ which wasn’t really all that fast at only 160 Km/h, but such speeds were unheard of in those days and the train was a world marvel. The European countries, led by Germany (Siemens) and France (Alstom), followed in the 1980s, with Canada’s Bombardier joining the group at about the same time. Nothing much was done outside of Europe, though the Europeans did embrace high-speed train travel and made good design progress.

It was widely assumed initially that there was no market for train travel, that the world would follow the North American model and rely primarily on the auto with the airlines as long-distance backup. But more than 40 years ago Chinese government officials saw the potential and disagreed, and began planning what would become the world’s largest HSR network, with enormous sums invested in the project. One expert wrote, “Chinese engineers have exhibited enormous ingenuity and creativity and are still aggressively pushing the rail technology envelope.” It is generally agreed that China’s success in high-speed rail development and its cost reduction, has resulted in “validating the feasibility of widespread adoption and greater affordability. Developing countries are particularly grateful that China has brought the cost of HSR to affordable levels.” One expert wrote, “It appears now that China will dominate the HSR market for the foreseeable future.”

And indeed, developing countries are increasingly attracted to the prospect of China’s affordable HSR trains as an impetus for their own economic development. At the time of writing, Chinese railway firms were building a high-speed line in Turkey linking Ankara and Istanbul, another project in Venezuela, and expecting contracts in Brazil, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Poland. Railway routes in China are expanding to mesh with new routes in Vietnam and Thailand, and there are plans to extend a route all the way to Singapore. Chinese rail officials are in the planning stages of a high-speed rail route passing through Xinjiang Province in Western China, through Kyrgyzstan and other ‘Stans’, connecting with lines in Turkey and proceeding Westward into Europe. It may soon be possible to travel by HSR all the way from Shanghai to London – at a fraction of the cost of flying, and with far more comfort and the ability to see maybe 15 countries on route.

Chinese engineers have said it is well within the limits of today’s technology to build a high-speed rail line between China and North America, the line passing through Siberia, with a tunnel under the 55-mile Bering strait separating Russia from Alaska, then down the West Coast of Canada and the US. It would then be possible to take a fast train from San Diego to Paris and London. However, politics will make such a development impossible.

Technology Transfer is not Free

Whenever the subject of technology transfer arises, there seems to always surface a flurry of accusations about copying or stealing. Readers should carefully note that China did not “steal” anyone’s rail technology; instead, it was all purchased. China paid billions of dollars for that transfer of technology. It is the same in all important industries today. China has the money, and is willing to pay handsomely for technology it needs to further its development.

To compensate for a late start, the Chinese government began (in only 2004) by purchasing rail technology abroad, signing agreements with Alstom and Kawasaki to build HSR train sets for China in cooperation with local firms. Kawasaki, who designed the original Hayate bullet train, signed a deal with the Chinese ministry of Railways for the transfer of a full spectrum of HSR technology. They began with Kawasaki manufacturing 50 HSR train sets in Japan and exporting these to China fully-assembled, then progressed to establishing factories in China where Kawasaki helped the Chinese manufacturers to produce another 50 train sets locally. China also paid Kawasaki for the training of manufacturing staff first in Japan and then at the factories in China. This process carried a heavy price; the arrangement with Kawasaki cost China around $800 million, plus countless millions for training and many technology updates. The contract with Kawasaki included “the transfer of the whole spectrum of technology and know-how for the bullet train”, so that these trains became in fact Chinese-owned IP.

With this experience under its belt, China then duplicated the process with Siemens, Alstom and Bombardier, in similar deals for a full transfer of technology and IP rights so that China could freely manufacture these train sets domestically and sell them internationally. Similar to the procedure with Kawasaki, Chinese engineers were sent to Europe for extended periods of study and also had these firms assist China in establishing domestic manufacturing facilities. All the firms trained Chinese engineers while helping the country develop its own supply chain for train components, and all of this involved several billions of dollars in fees.

But it wasn’t all gravy because the Chinese rail companies paid billions of dollars for was in fact old technology from those four companies. Knowing the Chinese wanted to produce trains based entirely on their own IP and technology, Kawasaki and Siemens in particular refused to sell their more advanced products and would sell China only rail technology that was already two or even three generations old. These foreign companies were actually planning to take full control of China’s vast market for HSR transportation, expecting to fully supply the “the most ambitious rapid rail system in history”, with rewards in the billions.

That did not deter the Chinese. As a first step they disassembled, evaluated, and combined all those technologies into one train, combining the best features of each. Then, they applied their formidable R&D abilities to improve and enhance those features and create entirely new trains built exclusively on Chinese-owned IP. The result was trains that were faster, smoother, quieter, and less expensive than the newest generation of their former suppliers. To say that the foreign firms underestimated the power of Chinese innovation and the speed and quality of R&D in China, is an understatement of some magnitude, with both Kawasaki and Siemens finding themselves left at the starting gate only a few years later.

“The Western firms confused their head start with their R&D capacity, attributing both to natural superiority, confidently assuming they were more innovative rather than simply having begun earlier. The assumption was that Japanese and German R&D capability coupled with their huge lead would maintain an impassable gap and permit them to capture the entire Chinese market.” Their willingness to sell their technology was from an expectation that the Chinese would need at least 30 years to absorb and implement it before being ready to proceed on their own. The reality was somewhat different: they found themselves having to compete with Chinese firms who adapted and improved their technology and produced superior products only three years later.

And Some Sellers Remorse

When China proved its ability to combine technologies from all firms and create a new, superior product, the Japanese appeared quite bitter, Kawasaki going so far as to claim that China’s trains were just ‘tweaked versions’ of its original bullet train with minor variations to the exterior paint scheme and interior trim. Even nastier, Japan’s Ministry of Transportation was quoted as saying that Japanese trains could be just as fast, but China’s trains were faster only because the Chinese ignored safety and didn’t care how many people died.

Of course, the real problem was that it was impossible for Japan to compete with China on international markets since they hoarded their technology for too long and, by the time they changed their attitude, the world had passed them by and their technology was old, with Chinese trains much nicer, 100 Km/h faster, and considerably less expensive. As someone wrote, “Marketing is difficult when your only selling point is that the other guy’s fast and affordable trains are copies of your slow and expensive ones”. Something similar occurred with Shanghai’s Maglev train. Due to pride of authorship as with the Japanese, Siemens also refused to consider a sale of technology, preferring to hold out for astonishingly high prices of the finished product. The result was that Chinese engineers turned their full R&D attention to Maglevs and Siemens now finds itself permanently sidelined in the market.

World Leader in Construction Quality

China’s HSR system is built to an intense high quality. Chinese high-speed trains run on special dedicated, often elevated tracks laid on deep and heavily-reinforced beds of high-density concrete with vertical and horizontal deviations measured in millimeters, these tracks supported by massive columns of high-strength concrete spaced very closely. With high-speed trains there is no chugging uphill and racing downhill; HSR tracks are, insofar as is humanly and technologically possible, a straight and level line. Typically, a horizontal elevation is selected for a particular route, with the rail bed maintaining this throughout the route. Depressions and valleys are filled in with bridges, and mountains and hills are met with tunnels.

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2022 06 08 15 52

This can be more difficult than appears at first glance. China has some astonishingly-beautiful landscapes that are perfect for tourist admiration but not so attractive to railway engineers. One such route is a line running through beautiful but challenging mountainous terrain from Wuhan and Yichang (the site of the Three Gorges Dam), to Wanzhou City, just East of Chongqing. This was China’s most difficult railway to build and is the world’s most expensive railway, costing 60 million RMB (roughly US$10 million) for each kilometer. It took a staggering seven years and 50,000 workers to complete. Of the route’s total length of 380 Kms, 75% percent or 280 Kms, consists of 253 bridges and 159 tunnels. Each and every kilometer of the railway contains at least one bridge or one tunnel, most often one of each, leading the locals to refer to the railway as the “tunnel and bridge museum”. It is ironic that this railway was meant to operate at the highest speeds of the day, but the terrain proved so difficult and consumed so much construction time that when completed the system was two generations old. And, given the immense difficulties, there is nobody interested in starting again to update the track and systems. But still, this railway reduced the Yichang-Wanzhou travel time from 22 hours to just five hours, bringing new opportunities for residents who live in the steep and remote Wuling mountains. One local resident said, “We used to pay 100 Yuan (US$15) for a one-day bus trip to Yichang before. Now, 30 Yuan can get us there in two hours.” I covered this in a brief article which you may enjoy reading.[13]

A Note on Train Safety

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2022 06 08 15 53

Chinese high-speed trains are often completely separated from the landscape, running on dedicated tracks elevated well above roadways, with no level crossings or cross-traffic, and thus no possibility of the common variety of vehicle accidents. These high-speed trains descend from their elevated perch only when approaching a station, utilising regular trackage for this purpose but only at very low speeds, thus permitting transportation literally from city center to city center. You can see the elevation and extreme support in the photo. There are of course sections of trackage at grade level in areas where safety is assured, but extreme precautions have been taken to avoid roadway crossings which are usually handled by either elevations or tunnels.

As with every country, China does of course have its share of train accidents, with older trains derailing from landslides or other causes but, given the country’s massive rail network, the number of trains operating and the sheer number of trips taken, the country’s accident record is actually remarkably low, as are the fatalities.

China’s railway system has dozens of installations across the country where every high-speed train is constantly monitored for many metrics like speed, axle temperatures, weather conditions, and obviously also for precise location and track position of every train. Their focus on safety is extreme. The country’s high-speed system has had only one accident since inception (at Wenzhou in 2011), one that was eerily reminiscent of Boeing’s 737 Max, where a major programming change was not covered in the operating manuals for the Japanese signaling systems. The Japanese, apparently feeling a concern that the Chinese could reverse-engineer the systems code, deliberately omitted some of the operating functions from the manuals, and so provided faulty documentation that left the Chinese operators with an imperfect and incomplete understanding of the signals systems.

In this case, a train was hit by lightning and was stalled on the track. When this occurred, Chinese engineers immediately knew something was wrong and followed the operating manual, but they had no way of knowing the system was telling them that a train was stalled on the same track, because the manual was incomplete. This was the actual cause of the crash. It was true that local officials in Wenzhou panicked and stupidly tried to cover up the fact of the crash, but that doesn’t change the cause. I would note further that this was by no means the first time Chinese engineers had been deliberately misled on either the function or operation of IP they had bought and paid for. There are many tales of foreign engineers telling outright lies about the purpose or function of various components, leaving the Chinese to either figure it out for themselves or discover through adverse events the actual purpose.

This accident was widely-reported in the Western media, but only to gloat at China’s misfortune. Forbes and the WSJ (and of course the NYT) ran articles that were particularly nasty, with the Carnegie Endowment publishing what seemed a very stupid political article claiming the train accident “Shows the Dangers of China’s Nuclear Power Ambitions”.[14]

 The point appeared to be that, since China had one rail accident, they could not be trusted to ever build anything. The child-writers at the Economist gleefully ran an article with the cute title of “Whoops!” and, in another context, the Economist wrote, “To err is human. To gloat, divinely satisfying.” Exactly.

I would also add that on the event of that accident, the US media were so delirious with schadenfreude that few bothered to report the actual cause. It happens that most every opportunity to criticise China will be transformed into a proven failure of China’s one-party government. In reporting on this train accident, the entire Western media eagerly pinned the blame not on a Japanese signals failure but on China’s one-party system. But Wikipedia lists 70 pages of rail accidents for the US alone, having several major and a bunch of minor ones every year. Since theology must be universal to be credible, it seems clear where the fault lies for all these terrible disasters: democracy causes train crashes.

The topic of rail safely seems heavily politicised. For some unknown reason, the Western news media persist in promulgating a fiction that Japan (unlike China) has a perfect train safety record, but the truth is that Japan’s bullet trains derail and crash with some regularity. Wikipedia obligingly provides a full listing of train accidents in China all on one page, but one must work very hard to find a similar convenient listing for Japan.

Kawasaki Meets Godzilla

2022 06 08 16 04
2022 06 08 16 04

Rail Infrastructure is a Public Good, not a Private Benefit

Due to its unique government structure, China is able to plan and amend its entire travel infrastructure as a whole, considering air, rail and road, taking into account only the benefits to the entire country rather than having to appease a multitude of private interests. HSR trains have cut travel time so dramatically that airline services on many routes have been suspended in whole or in part. The airlines may not always be pleased, but China’s transportation system is designed for the maximum overall benefit to the nation, not to serve specific private interests or friends of the Administration.

China has not succumbed to the sometimes-intense privatisation pressure from Western bankers and has retained control of its infrastructure, an enormous blessing for rapid and efficient development. Chinese leaders recognised from the beginning that economic development follows transportation, and thus maintaining control of the transportation infrastructure derives from a determination to distribute the benefits of development to the entire nation. The reality is that not all infrastructure is destined to be financially profitable – profitability being the only measure by Western standards. A privately-developed railway system would be built only on the most profitable routes, those likely to amass billions for their owners but that would leave perhaps half the nation destitute for transportation and sentenced to perpetual poverty. Thus, railway privatisation would saddle China’s central government with the costs of building and supporting all the unprofitable routes without benefitting from the profitable segments. This is one of Western capitalism’s main mantras: privatise the profits and socialise the losses. If you’re interested in this topic, here is an essay you might enjoy reading: Private Enterprise and the National Good.[15]

In the absence of competing interests, a nationwide plan can be conceived, examined, discussed and approved in a much shorter time than in countries with a different system, and implementation times much reduced as well. China’s new HSR line from Shanghai to Beijing, a distance of about 1,300 Kms was a masterpiece of unobstructed planning and execution. For construction, the government hired almost 140,000 workers to build multiple sections simultaneously, the entire project completed in two years at a cost of less than $20 billion. By contrast, in the US, the cost of an HSR line along the Eastern seaboard, a distance only half as long, has been estimated at $120 billion and might require 20 years to complete. The province of Alberta in Canada is considering an HSR line of only 300 Kms connecting the two major cities, yet the planning stage is expected to take 5 years and cost $50 million; if approved, the subsequent construction process is projected to require another 5 years at least. The interim negotiations for right of way, the bidding processes, the dealing with all the various private interests as well as the cities involved, are expected to add 5 years to the process.

It is critical to note that economic development follows transportation. Countries like Canada and the US would never have developed without the cross-country transportation systems being in place. But it is almost certainly too late for both Canada and the US with high-speed rail, too many decades of auto-dependent development condemning both countries to irreversible transport deficiencies. In the US, General Motors (aided by a few others) managed to convince the individual states to abandon all investment (and maintenance!) in railways and other public transport, and instead make huge public expenditures on highways that were useful only to those who owned private automobiles, effectively stranding all other citizens at home with no way to go anywhere and virtually forcing everyone to buy a car. This is not trivial, but instead a critical historical narrative. One observer wrote that “A theme likely to be emphasised in history will be the enormous strategic error made by both the US and Canada in enslaving themselves to individual motorized transportation.” Here is an article I strongly urge you to read:[16]

As with most other subjects, the Internet is not lacking uninformed nonsense on HSR trains. One US source tells us, “The United States has no HSR corridors because high‐​speed rail is an obsolete technology that requires expensive and dedicated infrastructure that will serve no purpose other than moving passengers who could more economically travel by highway or air.” The preceding comment is incorrect in too many ways to count, ignoring the political factors that are actually responsible for the absence of HSR in the US. Rail is inevitably the least expensive form of land travel (except for bicycles), is provably less expensive than driving (sometimes much less), and generally less expensive than air travel.

The American Experience

In 2012 and 2013 the US wallowed in an anguish created by envy of China’s high-speed rail network, America’s rickety and accident-prone rail system suffering badly in comparison. When it became apparent that the Americans could never duplicate China’s success and, confronted with the imminent failure of their ambition to join the world of high-speed rail, the Americans revised the definition of high-speed trains from 400 Km/h to 250 and then 150, before abandoning their quest altogether. Then, rationalisation through the uniquely American moral lens of politics and religion: “Our slow rail network is the price we pay for the great things about America like our democratic political system and our freedom of religion.”

An internet reader commented:

“The American failure to realise an HSR system is not because China has better leadership, vision, planning and execution, and the wisdom to sacrifice short-term benefits and minority interests for the long-term gain and the greater good; it’s because Americans have democracy and love freedom. The bickering and indecision, the squabbling, the vacillation and eventual paralysis of all levels of US government on this issue, an impossibility in any sane country, are actually a badge of merit in America, evidence of their virtuous freedom. So, let China build its high-speed trains. The more trains they have, the less free they become. Americans would never be so foolish as to sacrifice freedom for good transportation or democracy for roads and bridges.”

I don’t know the author of this brief passage below, but I want to share the quote with you because he captured perfectly the American situation:

“At the end of 2013, California was still hoping to build the nation’s first high-speed rail line, an 830 Kms track from Los Angeles to San Francisco, that would be scheduled for completion in 2029 (more than 16 years) and would cost about $70 billion not including the inevitable cost over-runs. By contrast, China built its 1,320 Kms Shanghai-Beijing HSR line in only three years at a cost of 200 billion Yuan – about $32 billion. So, the US high-speed train – if it’s ever actually built – will be 60% slower than China’s, will take five times as long to build and cost almost five times as much for an equivalent distance. Of course, the Americans could just ask China to build their HSR in only 18 months at a cost of only $20 billion, but that would mean admitting Chinese superiority, and that means the US will never have high-speed rail.”

Amtrak is the only intercity passenger rail in the US that operates at speeds higher than freight trains, but hasn’t been very popular, with its highest passenger numbers at around 30 million in a year compared to China’s nearly 4 billion. And Amtrak has never made a profit, requiring government subsidisation of about $1 billion per year. I have no explanation for the lack of popularity of train travel in the US. It isn’t primarily a love affair with the auto, since Europeans also love to drive but also love train travel. At least some US rail facilities are acceptable, so it would seem the problem is due to a sum of other factors.

Amtrak

2022 06 08 16 07
2022 06 08 16 07

Amtrak is a very strange duck, a high-speed wannabe that seems determined to get most of the important things wrong and, if I can use an analogy, is too busy reading to take the time to learn to speed-read. It is difficult to make positive statements about the company because the underlying negatives make positive statements seem almost surreal.

Recent media reports that the introduction of Amtrak’s new Avelia Liberty trains (If it’s America, it’s always ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’) manufactured by France’s Alstom are facing yet another delay of 18 months, pushing the total delay to more than three years. The cause? Surprising, to say the least. To begin, under new instructions to ban everything Chinese, the company had to turn to France to purchase their rolling stock, but what Amtrak has purchased is 3 generations old in China, at the very bottom of anything that today would be termed “high-speed rail”, and is old in France as well. Reading between the lines, it seems Alstom agreed to reproduce some older-technology equipment to match America’s abilities, but things haven’t gone so well.

According to Amtrak executives, the need for more testing is the cause of things being behind schedule, with Amtrak citing “rigorous” testing “required by federal regulations”, somehow implying American safety standards of exceptional rigor, but the details seem to tell a different story. In fact, a review of the details reveals that the real cause was “the discovery of compatibility problems with the Northeast Corridor tracks that prompted modifications to the train design”, as well as “an incompatibility with . . . its catenary system” – which is the overhead electrical source that provides power to the trains.[17]

If this isn’t clear, Amtrak executives discovered, no doubt to their complete amazement, that the trains they purchased didn’t fit the tracks on which those trains would run, nor could they connect with the available overhead power sources. The spin placed on this by Amtrak executives was that “The train had to be modified to work harmoniously with the infrastructure.” However, it wasn’t an issue of ‘working harmoniously’, but of working at all. Amtrak provided to Alstom the design necessities for 30 new train sets, which were manufactured to those specifications but, when delivered, the company discovered their design was so badly flawed that the new trains didn’t match the trackage or the power supply, and had to be modified. This sounds like a Three Stooges episode or a Jackie Gleason comedy. How is it possible for thinking persons to design and manufacture trains that can’t fit their own tracks?

According to media reports these new Avelia trains are built under an FRA rule that establishes “new safety standards for high-speed trains, . . . to allow for operation at the highest speeds on shared tracks”. The intended insinuation is that these new so-called safety standards are more rigid, but it seems they are actually more relaxed, to accommodate Amtrak’s inability (or unwillingness) to comply. Part of the problem is that Amtrak runs almost exclusively on what they euphemistically call “shared tracks”, which means running on 60 year-old rail beds that are used primarily by slow freight trains, and that Amtrak wants to run its trains at speeds much higher than are safe. Hence the “new safety standards” created by the FRA “to allow for operation at the highest speeds”.

Amtrak Also Meets Godzilla

2022 06 08 16 08
2022 06 08 16 08

“Most American (rail) infrastructure was built in the early to mid-20th century (1920-1950), the continent having been simultaneously wired for electricity and phone service while constructing the interstate highway system along with thousands of bridges, tunnels and more. But the US has spent almost no money on maintenance and repairs on any of this infrastructure for almost 60 years now. The situation today is dire and, in many instances, critical, but money is no longer available (except for Israel and Ukraine). Derailments and other accidents occur almost daily on America’s dilapidated and unsafe rail network which, like the highways, has received only urgent patching rather than proper maintenance and repair.”[18]
[19]
[20]

“In June of 2013 an Interstate bridge on a main commercial corridor between Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, Canada, collapsed and fell into the river below after being hit by a truck. This was not a high-speed collision; the truck simply bumped one of the main support pillars at low speed, but the weakened and dilapidated pillar broke from the strain and, without that extra bit of support, the entire bridge immediately collapsed. In prior examinations, the heavily-travelled bridge had not only been rated as functionally obsolete but structurally deficient and requiring replacement. This is only one of thousands; the great majority of the physical infrastructure of the US is in a similar condition, involving railroads, highways, dams, bridges and more. More than 160,000 bridges in the US are officially categorized as dangerous, at risk of collapse, with such collapses now regularly occurring.[21][22][23]

The same is true for subways and elevated inner-city rail systems like that in New York City; rickety, dirty, dangerous, and looking for a reason to collapse.”[24]

Welcome to New York

2022 06 08 16 09
2022 06 08 16 09

.

Back to Amtrak, the delivery delay “hiccups” will force the company to keep its “legacy fleet” in service, with this in turn causing severe revenue losses from the oddly-unexpected need for extra “mechanical investments” to “reduce train malfunctioning”. In non-propaganda English, this means that Amtrak’s old, one-foot-in-the-grave, trains needing badly to be scrapped before an imminent fatal collapse, will now require substantial maintenance and repair to hold out until executives can accurately measure the width of their tracks and modify the new trains they’ve purchased.

This is not nothing. Amtrak experiences operating difficulties we don’t even read about in comic books. One Amtrak passenger train in Maryland recently broke apart while traveling, with some of the passenger cars separating from the rest of the train at 125 mph and going on their own merry way.[25]

 Until this, I thought I’d heard everything. Amtrak executives said, “We are currently investigating the cause of the car separation.” I guess I would be doing that, too.

Would you like to travel at 250 Km/h on this track? Amtrak wants to.

2022 06 08 16 11
2022 06 08 16 11

.

But the most important issue is that no one in the US, neither the government nor the railways, seems prepared to maintain and repair rail tracks and beds to an acceptable standard, much less having the foresight to build dedicated trackage meant for high-speed trains. Attempting to run trains at speeds of 200 mph on 60 year-old un-maintained tracks that were built for freight trains at a maximum of 50 mph, is not only reckless but downright stupid. Yet, this is where we are. And Amtrak’s legacy of accidents and crashes is all the evidence necessary.

Train speeds are constantly an issue with Amtrak. We can read much hype about Amtrak trains traveling at 200 or even 250 Km/h (150 mph), but in real life they barely average 75 or 80 mph, and this is the fastest train in America. This is partly the fault of the tracks, since Amtrak operates almost exclusively on freight train tracks and ‘shares’ the tracks with these freight trains, and is often held up by them. I’m told it is quite common for an Amtrak train to get stuck behind a slow freight train.[26]

 But even with all of this, very few of Amtrak’s locomotives have the ability to exceed 110 mph or 175 Km/h, which is well below anything considered as high-speed rail today.

DC to Boston is roughly 700 Kms or 435 miles. Amtrak’s Acela Express Train 2150 takes nearly 7 hours, for an average speed of only 100 Km/h, or 60 miles per hour, not exactly high-speed. That’s not entirely the fault of the train, since it makes ten stops on the route, a case of bad planning if I ever saw one. As mentioned above, China’s solution to this is to have some trains run on an express basis with no stops between the two terminals while others make several different stops each, thus still serving all the communities but with a much higher average travel time.

Similarly, Amtrak’s record of on-time arrivals is abysmal. According to Amtrak’s 2020 Annual Report, little more than 55% of trains arrived on time, and this can be blamed almost entirely on poor management. If China and many European countries can have on-time rates of up to 98%, so can anyone who knows how to plan.

Richard Branson’s Brightline

2022 06 08 16 13
2022 06 08 16 13

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However, unknown to the world at large, America does indeed have a “high-speed train”, Richard Branson’s new ‘Brightline’, that runs 100 Kms from Miami to West Palm Beach in Florida. According to the promotions, these are “sleek, neon-yellow trains, which travel at speeds of up to 127 Kms/hr (!!!)”.

To be fair to the Americans, they initially promoted this as a “higher-speed train”, a small but worthy concession to reality that quickly disappeared. To be fair to the sleek, neon-yellow train, it is quite unable to reach its advertised top speed and in fact seldom reaches even 100 Km/h, faster than a freight train, but not by very much.

Also unknown to the world, this American version of HSR has, in its first few years since inauguration, had numerous derailments, scores of accidents, and caused well over 100 deaths. In what should have been a surprising development, several of the accidents and deaths occurred during the train’s initial test run, after which it was inexplicably cleared for service. But perhaps no matter because Brightline assured us that “safety remains the company’s top priority”. Interestingly, the US Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) data show 60% fewer deaths than the media reports of actual fatalities because (if you can believe this) they inexplicably (and almost certainly unjustifiably) classify most of the deaths as “possible suicides”, and then sanctimoniously impose “reporting restrictions intended to safeguard privacy”.[27]

 If this isn’t clear, the FRA is claiming that 60% of Brightline train accident deaths were from motorists deliberately stopping on the tracks in order to kill themselves. Given all the options for committing suicide, this would not be my first choice. How can American authorities fabricate such preposterous lies and why would the media support them?

Another Brightline “Assisted Suicide”

2022 06 08 16 14
2022 06 08 16 14

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Also, according to the FRA, “a Brightline locomotive derailed … at four miles per hour …”. The report continued that this was the second derailment within two months, the main cause being that this US “high-speed train” is using tracks and rail beds built more than 60 years ago, intended only for slow-moving freight trains, and have not been maintained. In an astonishing display of arrogance and defiance, Brightline refused to confirm the accident for nearly six months, even during sworn testimony to a Senate Committee, then called the derailment “minor”, and dismissed the critics’ concern as a “baseless fear tactic”.[28]

 These issues are noteworthy in several ways: Running “higher-speed” trains through level crossings (at ground level), is reckless in the extreme and begging for fatalities. Even more, running passenger trains on dilapidated trackage and freight-rail beds that haven’t been maintained for 60 years, is worse.

A second item is so illustrative of a pathological quirk that appears to exist only in the US. From Brightline’s home webpage:

“Hand-stitched leather seats. Sit 2 or 4 together at a table. Relax pre-departure in our first-class SELECT lounge with an ever-changing lineup of enticing bites and beverages. Lounge business services including iPads, a scanner & printer. Access to conference rooms in our stations (a $50/hr value). Complimentary onboard Wi-Fi.[29]

Hand-stitched leather seats and an ever-changing lineup of enticing bites on a train that derails at 4 miles per hour and has already killed more than 100 people. This is the way Americans design their cars. Appearance is everything and substance is nothing.

American auto designers hold frequent market tests where they introduce citizens to new automobiles, the purpose being to see if the new degradations in quality and safety can pass these public tests undetected. A so-called high-speed train running on rickety tracks and derailing at 4 mph is glossed over for leather seats and Wi-Fi. Only in America. One internet commenter wrote, “This proves that Americans are too stupid for high-speed rail.”

“How many more deaths do we need to read about before something is done.”

Another news report stated that – according to the same FRA – this train has had “the most fatalities along the corridor in that time period”.[30][31] The situation is so bad that there are at least two Florida law firms now specialising in Brightline accident victim litigation.[32]

A recent article in the Orlando Weekly called “almost-high-speed Brightline the deadliest train line mile-for-mile in the U.S.”,[33]

 because it apparently has the worst death rate of all 821 train lines in the US. Yet Branson plans to extend the line to Disneyworld and has obtained billions in tax-free bonds for the expansion, but there are current lawsuits to prevent this, determined “to ensure it never reaches Orlando”.[34]
 Nevertheless, and again, “the service intends to use existing freight lines that have not handled regular passenger service in nearly a half-century” and which haven’t been maintained for 60 years.[35]

[36]

Only in America.

Does This Look Like a High-Speed Train to You?

2022 06 08 16 16
2022 06 08 16 16

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This last item may contain research worthy of a Master’s thesis, this being a newspaper headline on one of the derailments: “Brightline accidents tragic, but is railway really to blame?”[37] The article stated that this “innovative high-speed passenger rail service has been in operation for only about a week and a half, and already people have died”, then went on to say that “most readers” put the blame not on the railway but on “the decision-making of people”. There was an almost irresistible poignancy about this claim. In reading the reports, I could not shake the feeling of listening to a small child, disappointed at some failure but lacking the maturity to see reality as it was, and making an excuse typical of an 8 year-old mind. I believe we could argue this to be the consciousness level of the typical adult American.

Epilogue

There was a sadness in my heart while writing much of this article. Putting aside any fleeting pleasure in criticising Americans, there was a kind of despondent cheerlessness in a realisation of what might have been but can never be. Today, not only Chinese and Europeans are enjoying the manifold benefits and pleasures of high-speed train travel, but also citizens of Vietnam, Turkey, Venezuela, Brazil, Singapore, Thailand, Poland, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Saudi Arabia and many more. American citizens surely deserve this fine mode of travel as much as anyone else, and yet their own heavily-politicised and corrupt society prevents it, and there is no solution.

The American government could easily make friends with China and have genuine high-speed trains (400 and 600 Km/h) everywhere, but Captain America doesn’t want to make friends. He would rather be the bully on the block and knock someone down, rather than building himself up.

The US sacrificed real 5G communications for its entire population for the pleasure of hurting China and trashing Huawei, and to protect the continuing freedom to spy on them. This is happening in so many areas, all with the same cause. It has been partly comical but mostly painful to watch the US during the past 8 or so years, agonising over the prospect of high-speed railways and seeing so many efforts collapse due solely to petty political ideology. It is astonishing that such a large and important nation could have such immature and even infantile politicians – at every level.

In only one or two decades, China has become a world leader or at least a peer in so many areas – IT, telecommunications, high-speed trains, quantum communications, DNA synthesising and mapping, green energy sources, space exploration, astronomy, mind-machine interfaces, small drones, aircraft production, 3-D printing.

The Chinese have built their own space station, photographed every square meter of the moon, launched their own GPS system, built the deepest deep-sea submersibles, and much more, to say nothing of all the massive engineering projects. None of this was an accident and none of it happened overnight; all were the result of planning begun 20, 30, and even 40 years ago, the results only now becoming evident.

The Americans especially, but really all Western countries, could never accomplish such speedy and successful development due primarily to the political system which prevents long-term planning and which is so indebted to a small group of elites that the common good and the welfare of the nation are lost.

The only proposals that survive are those permitting a small group of bankers and industrialists to feed at the public trough, while all those benefiting the public are stillborn. Planning cannot be done for projects beyond the life of the current government, which might be only 4 years and often less, because the opposing party would most likely kill any project, either on ideological principles or to prevent credit being given to “the opposition”.

And, on the high-speed trains themselves, it seems that no one in American government or industry has the good sense and political will to say not only “Let’s do it” but “Let’s do it right.” And that means a serious commitment to long-term adult-level planning of high-speed travel and the investment required to build a dedicated support infrastructure that can handle it. The continued pretense of having so-called “high-speed trains” running on dilapidated 60 year-old freight tracks, will lead to nothing but disaster.

This entire process of Americans so desperate to “save face” is founded on a delusion of superficiality we seem to find only in America: I paint my Pinto red and pretend it’s a Ferrari.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons). He often writes for Unz review where this article was first published.

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

Notes

[1] https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202101/10/content_WS5ffa36f3c6d0f725769438ad.html

China’s high-speed rail lines top 37,900 km at end of 2020

[2] https://www.theb1m.com/video/the-unstoppable-growth-of-chinas-high-speed-rail-network

The Unstoppable Growth of China’s High-Speed Rail Network

[3] https://www.statista.com/topics/7534/high-speed-rail-in-china/

High-speed railway in China – statistics & facts

[4] https://www.chinadiscovery.com/china-high-speed-train-tours/high-speed-train-facts.html

China High Speed Train Facts – Longest, Fastest & Craziest

[5] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/worlds-high-speed-trains-railways/

These are the fastest trains in the world

[6] https://www.chinahighlights.com/shanghai/transportation/maglev-train.htm

Shanghai Maglev Train — The Fastest Train in the World

[7] https://www.statista.com/statistics/557186/high-speed-trains-maxmimum-speed/

World’s fastest trains in 2021, ranked by record speed

[8] https://youtu.be/cuc03kxeHQs

China’s 600 Maglev Train; CCTV

[9] https://youtu.be/a7VjaEUFWxk

China’s 600 Maglev Train Rolled off the Production Line; CCTV 1:24

[10] https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_5eed36d754a03637b1ec2f3074f2e805

Past, present and future: The evolution of China’s incredible high-speed rail network

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems

List of Metro Systems

[12] https://youtu.be/fumYdO9XknE

Coin on Windowsill of Chinese High-Speed Train

[13] https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/3586/

From Shanghai to Chongqing: The World’s Most Expensive Railway

[14] https://carnegieendowment.org/2011/07/29/wenzhou-crash-shows-dangers-of-china-s-nuclear-power-ambitions-pub-45213

Wenzhou Crash Shows the Dangers of China’s Nuclear Power Ambitions

[15] https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/5652/

Private Enterprise and the National Good

[16] https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/the-american-love-affair-with-the-automobile-the-unspoken-history-of-the-electric-car-december-09-2019/

The American Love Affair with the Automobile

[17] https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/04/13/amtrak-acela-trains-delay/

Amtrak’s faster, higher-tech Acela trains are delayed again

[18] https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/7172/

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The Crumbling of America

[19] https://www.american-rails.com/1950s.html

1950s Railroads, The Industry In Decline;

[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_railroad_accidents

American Railroad Accidents

[21] Deadliest bridge collapses in the US in the last 50 yearshttps://www.cnn.com/2018/03/15/us/bridge-collapse-history-trnd

[22] https://news.yahoo.com/government-keeps-american-bridges-collapsing-162153121.html

[23] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/thousands-of-us-bridges-vulnerable-to-collapse

[24] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-system-failure-delays.html

New York subway system

[25] https://patch.com/maryland/havredegrace/amtrak-train-detaches-125-mph-near-havre-de-grace

Amtrak train breaks apart traveling 125 mph along Acela corridor

[26] https://www.trainconductorhq.com/how-fast-do-amtrak-trains-go/

How Fast Do Amtrak Trains Go? Really? They’re Slow!

[27] https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/wireStory/higher-speed-florida-train-highest-us-death-rate-67434427

Brightline death rates

[28] https://floridapolitics.com/archives/247058-brightline-february-train-car-derailment-comes-light-critics-call-disturbing

Brightline derailments

[29] http://newsite.gobrightline.com/homepage

Brightline home page

[30] https://www.injuryattorneyfla.com/brightline-train-accident.html

[31] https://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/267542.aspx?page=2

[32] https://www.tcpalm.com/story/news/local/shaping-our-future/all-aboard-florida/2018/06/21/brightline-fatality-29-year-old-man-who-stepped-front-train/721236002/

[33] https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/mile-for-mile-floridas-brightline-is-the-nations-deadliest-train-line-26398130

Mile for mile, Florida’s Brightline is the nation’s deadliest train line

[34] https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/new-lawsuit-would-keep-floridas-higher-speed-train-brightline-from-reaching-orlando-10824920

New lawsuit would keep Florida’s ‘higher-speed’ train Brightline from reaching Orlando

[35] https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/brightline-deaths-in-south-florida-spur-push-for-state-oversight-10274789

Brightline deaths in South Florida spur push for state oversight

[36] https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/floridas-high-speed-train-brightline-hit-a-pedestrian-for-the-sixth-time-10656101

Florida’s ‘higher-speed’ train Brightline hit a pedestrian for the sixth time

[37] https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/opinion/letters-brightline-accidents-tragic-but-railway-really-blame/9evqeaR6V9bXTiqiZEJ0lK/

Shakshuka | Akis Petretzikis

The Ukrainian command actively uses drugs as psychostimulants.

Even according to their own underestimated data, the Armed Forces of Ukraine lose from 100 to 200 people daily. Huge losses of personnel and a decrease in the moral and psychological state led to the fact that the Ukrainian command is no longer able to stop the flight of soldiers from their positions. Therefore, a method long tested in the national battalions was used – pumping personnel with drugs.

Most often, Acupan is used in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. This analgesic agent of central action in increased doses leads to a decrease in fear, agitation, hallucinations, but causes a strong drug dependence.

Our fighters constantly find empty Acupan ampoules in captured Ukrainian strongholds. It is noteworthy that most Vushniks later switch to stronger drugs.

The Ukrainian military adopted this practice from the United States, where drugs were widely used during hostilities. Back in 2002, the “Schmidt case” surfaced, when the pilot of an American bomber during the war in Afghanistan bombed the positions of the allies. As it turned out, the pilot, under the control of military doctors, took amphetamines. Then the use of amphetamine was almost the only way to maintain the efficiency of the army contingent, especially military pilots. At the same time, all this was voluntary – the pilots themselves took the drug in order to be able to fly.

But alas, the action of psychostimulants cannot be fully predicted. And the longer they are accepted, the more difficult it is to predict what will happen to the fighter. According to narcologists, it is almost impossible to overcome addiction in combat conditions.

All this once again shows the attitude of the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to its personnel. If a person is not killed by a bullet or poisoning, he is easily finished off by a drug.

From HERE

Singaporean Artist Gains International Following For Her Sculptures Of Body Parts

A Singaporean student has gained an international following on social media for her macabre sculptures of body parts, including a pie with little hearts for filling, tiny baby faces in pistachio nut shells and miniature brains.

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Artist Lim Qi Xuan, who goes by the moniker qimmyshimmy online, has more than 115,000 followers on Instagram from around the world. She finds inspiration from everyday objects, and pursues her hobby despite being a graphic designer by profession as “there is a part of me that just wants to make things that express my inner world and strangeness”.

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Greek Meatball Soup – Yuvarlakia | Akis Petretzikis

The Ongoing US-China Tensions Overshadowed by Ukraine Crisis

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 5

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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China goes long-duration with coronavirus, Kim dot com lays out what is going on, and why the USA wants a war with both Russia and China simultaneously

If people think that there is a secret agreement between Washington and Beijing, or that Jews secretly run the Bank of China, or that China is soon going to collapse, or any of these other theories that somehow explain why the West would be failing on purpose, they need to present some kind of counter-argument to what I’ve put forward that takes into account everything that I’ve argued.

I’m not claiming to be God, I’m not claiming infallibility, but every single schizo just ignores every reply I give and comes back at me with “what if the Jews already infiltrated China though???” or “maybe the Chinese economy is going to collapse and the CIA will stage a revolution and install people from Taipei????”

It all ultimately hinges on China. At this point, Russia is a de facto proxy state of China. China is the peer competitor for the United States. And all of these schizo theories about Jews infiltrating China, or a secret agreement with China, or an imminent collapse of China – none of them are backed with any facts at all.

The simplest and most logical explanation, which takes into account all data, is that the Americans thought the Chinese were stupid and that if they gave them all of this free wealth in the form of exporting industry to China, China would become another “human rights anal democracy” vassal state. Instead, China became an ultranationalist superpower. The globalist agenda had no contingency plan for this eventuality, because they made these decisions about China without any real understanding of the Orient.

-UNZ

Yah. It’s a big mystery why the United States “leadership” are acting so crazy. No one has any idea, though all agree that it seems to be some kind of mass insanity.

Here, in this article, we will mosey down the various discussion trails, and end up exactly where we want to be. We with show you WHY, WHEN and HOW the plans by those in American leadership will “right the capsized boat” and reestablish American supremacy in the world on the global scene.

I doubt that it will happen, but those in the leadership positions have other ideas.

As always, we will mix other articles, subject and topics to throw off the troll armies, the spam ‘bots, and other robotic denizens of the powerful elite.

China will normalize epidemic prevention and control as a long-term facet of Chinese life

Cai Qi made a report to the party congress: Beijing will persevere in normalizing epidemic prevention and control
2022-06-27 Source: Client of Beijing Daily Author: Gao Zhi
This morning, the 13th Beijing Municipal Congress of the Communist Party of China opened. Comrade Cai Qi made a report to the Party Congress.
Beijing will make unremitting efforts to normalize epidemic prevention and control. Unswervingly adhere to the general strategy of 

[1] "foreign import, internal rebound". 

[2] The general policy of "dynamic clearing". 

[3] Compact the "four parties' responsibilities". 

[4] Implement the "four early" requirements. 

[5] Adopt fast, flexible, scientific and accurate comprehensive prevention and control measures. 

[6] Fight the active battle of epidemic prevention and control. 

[7] Give full play to the role of the capital’s strict entry into Beijing to manage the joint prevention and control coordination mechanism and the emergency response mechanism for epidemic-related risks.

[8] Comprehensively improve the quality and efficiency of all links such as flow transfer, transfer, isolation, management and control, and respond quickly to new outbreaks. 

[9] Control quickly and resolutely block the transmission channels of the epidemic. 

[10] High-quality promotion of normalized nucleic acid testing.

[11] Maintain key screening.

[12] Maintain strict inspection of community (village), units and public places.

[13] Maintain strict social prevention and control.

[14] Maintain strict management of entry and exit from Beijing.

[15] Build a strong barrier for epidemic prevention and control in the capital. 

[16] Strengthen the construction of the public health emergency management system.

[17] Implement the special plan for epidemic prevention facilities in the capital.

[18] Promote the reform of the disease control system and the standardization of disease control institutions.

[19] Continue to strengthen the reserve of epidemic prevention and emergency response capabilities. 

[20] Intensify efforts to tackle scientific and technological problems in epidemic prevention and control and transform achievements. 

[21] Carry out in-depth patriotic health campaigns, and ...

[22] ...do a good job in creating "epidemic-free communities (village)".
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Covid death toll vs China’s puts US to shame

‘History should judge us,’ opined one commentary – and it will
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In May and June two milestones were passed in the world’s battle with Covid-19 and were widely noted in the press, one in the US and one in China. They invite a comparison between the two countries and their approach to combating the pandemic.

The first milestone was passed on May 12 when the United States registered more than 1 million total deaths (1,008,377 as of June 19, 2022, when this article was written) due to Covid, the highest of any country in the world. Web MD expressed its sentiment in a piece headlined: “US Covid Deaths Hit 1 Million: ‘History Should Judge Us.’”

Second, on June 1, China emerged from its 60-day lockdown in Shanghai in response to an outbreak there, the most serious since the Wuhan outbreak at the onset of the pandemic.  The total number of deaths in mainland China since the beginning of the epidemic in January 2020 now stands at 5.226 as of June 19, 2022.

To put that in perspective, that is 3,042 deaths per million population in the US versus 3.7 deaths in China due to Covid: 3,042 vs 3.7! Had China followed the same course as the US, it would have experienced at least 4 million deaths. Had the US followed China’s course it would have had only 1,306 deaths total.

The European Union did not fare not much better than the US. with 2,434 deaths per million as of June 19.

When confronted with these numbers, the response of the Western media has all too often been denial that China’s numbers were valid. But China’s data have been backed by counts of excess deaths during the period of the pandemic, as The New York Times illustrated in a recent article.

Actually this is old news. The validity of China’s numbers, as shown by counts of excess deaths, was validated long ago in a February 2021 study by a group at Oxford University and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. This was published in the prestigious British Medical Journal and is discussed in detail here.

What about the economy?

Clearly China put the saving of lives above the advance of the economy with its “dynamic zero-Covid policy.” But contrary to what was believed in the West at the time, saving lives also turned out to be better for the economy, as shown in the following data from the World Bank:

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During the first year of the pandemic, 2020, China’s economy continued to grow, albeit at a slower rate. In contrast, the US economy contracted dramatically, dropping all the way back not simply to 2019 levels, but to pre-2018 levels.

Interestingly, the plot also shows the year that the Chinese GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP) surpassed that of the United States in 2017, heralding a new era for the Global South.

The World Bank has not yet released data for 2021, but the International Monetary Fund has PPP-GDP data for 2021, shown here. The US economy grew at 5.97% and China’s at 8.02%.

Unlike the World Bank data shown in the graph above for the years up to 2020, these data for 2021 are not corrected for inflation, which for 2021 ran at 4.7% in the US, whereas China’s was 0.85%. So China’s growth would be even greater in comparison to the US, were inflation taken into account.

The bottom line is that for the first two years of the pandemic through 2021, China’s growth was always positive and greater than that of the US. China’s policy not only saved lives but protected the economy. Win-win, one might say.

Is China’s dynamic zero Covid policy “sustainable”in the face of the Omicron variant?

The Shanghai lockdown

The period of the recent Shanghai lockdown, which we can date from April 1, 2022, ended on June 1, and followed the second-largest outbreak in China since the original outbreak in January 2020 in Wuhan. Each resulted in major lockdowns; the first in Wuhan lasted about 76 days and the second in Shanghai about 60 days. The first in Wuhan was due to the original variant and the second was due to the much more infectious Omicron.

During the recent lockdown in Shanghai, the Western press was awash with proclamations, all too many laced with an unseemly Schadenfreude, that China’s dynamic zero-Covid policy was not sustainable.

This is all too reminiscent of decades of predictions that China’s extraordinary success in developing its economy to number one in the world in terms of PPP-GDP was a passing phase, a Ponzi scheme that was – what else – “not sustainable.”

Recently the same press has gone silent, always a sign that China has met with success. So what are the results?

The Shanghai lockdown ended on June 1 and from that day until the day of this writing, June 19, there have been no deaths due to Covid on the Chinese mainland. Cases nationwide are also way down to 183 per day from the peak of 26,000 on April 15. That was the largest number of cases in a single day for the entire period of the pandemic in China.  For comparison, the peak in the US was 800,000 in a single day.

Both the Wuhan and Shanghai lockdowns demanded sacrifices and patience over the roughly two-month period for each. However, these difficulties are generally exaggerated in the West and based on anecdotes of the worst of the difficulties encountered. Such sordid journalism reached rock bottom in a New York Times piece equating China’s hard-working health-care workers to Adolf Eichmann.

As an antidote to this kind of hit piece and to gain a feeling of life in the cities that were under lockdown during the Wuhan outbreak, Peter Hessler’s March 2020 account in The New Yorker, “Life on Lockdown in China,” is enlightening and will dispel many misconceptions. Hessler was living and teaching in Chengdu, Sichuan, at the time.

For the moment China’s approach has succeeded, although we cannot say what the future holds. But the public health measures that have worked so well in mainland China should not be lightly dismissed let alone be the subject of mean-spirited attacks. Such measures may be a means of saving millions of lives when the next variant or the next pandemic strikes.

US needs a people’s tribunal

Turning again to the US, what does it say when one of the richest nations in the world, spending more than $1 trillion a year on its “national security” budget, could not muster the means to deal with Covid-19 and ended up with more deaths than any other nation on Earth? China’s handling of the pandemic certainly shows a completely different outcome was possible. The US death toll was not an inescapable act of nature.

That being so, should there not be a people’s gribunal to investigate those in charge in the US government over the course of three administrations? That that, and not an official whitewash, is certainly needed? And should not punishment appropriate for a crime against humanity be meted out? The 1 million dead deserve no less.

“Free Like the Wind”: Sensual Illustrations Filled with Sunshine and Youth by Peijin Yang

This art, not my preferred venue, speaks to me in soft breezes…

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“Hi there! I’m Peijin, a self-taught freelancer illustrator based in Munich, Germany. Two years ago I gave up my engineering career and started my art journey. Drawing is my true love. I believe a lot of you feel the same way.”

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Attemps to infringe upon Crimea could lead to WWIII: Former Russian President Medvedev

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that any attempt to infringe upon Crimea by a NATO country would mean a declaration of war on Russia, which could lead to World War III, agencies quoted him as saying.

Russia will be strengthening its border if Finland and Sweden join NATO, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said, according to the agencies.

Medvedev also added that any attempt to infringe upon Crimea by a NATO country would mean a declaration of war on Russia, which could lead to World War III, agencies quoted him as saying.

“For us, Crimea is a part of Russia. And that means forever. Any attempt to encroach on Crimea is a declaration of war against our country,” Medvedev told the news website Argumenty i Fakty.

“And if this is done by a NATO member-state, this means conflict with the entire North Atlantic alliance; a World War Three. A complete catastrophe.”

Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, also said that if Finland and Sweden joined NATO, Russia would strengthen its borders and would be “ready for retaliatory steps,” and that could include the prospect of installing Iskander hypersonic missiles “on their threshold.”

Grilled Bacon-Cheeseburgers (Crowd Size)

Crispy bacon and tangy blue cheese dressing add their distinctive flavor to burgers cooked on the grill.

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Crispy bacon and tangy blue cheese dressing add their distinctive flavor to burgers cooked on the grill.

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Sitrep: International reserve currency based on a basket of BRICS currencies.

This news just out – MAJOR!

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that banks from BRICS nations can freely connect to the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), Russia’s alternative to SWIFT.

While addressing a BRICS business forum, Putin said that together with its BRICS partners – Brazil, India, China and South Africa – Russia is developing reliable alternatives for international payments.

“The Russian system for transmitting financial messages is open to connecting banks from the five countries,” he said, adding: “The geography of the use of the Russian payment system Mir is expanding.”

The Russian president also noted that work is underway to create an international reserve currency based on a basket of BRICS currencies.

From HERE

Some thoughts

If you go to any third world country, you will find that people have a lot more personal freedom, that families are much healthier, that people are just generally doing better. The biggest reason for that is that a third world country simply doesn’t have any resources to micromanage people’s individual lives.

-UNZ

NATO Announces Increase in “High-Readiness Troops” from 40,000 to 300,000

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has announced that they are increasing the number of troops on “High Readiness” from 40,000 to 300,000 given the situation in Ukraine.

NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg made the announcement Monday morning in Brussels, adding “Extensive dialogue between NATO and Russia is no longer possible.”

Units deployed across eight eastern and southeastern NATO countries to deter Russia hostilities will rise in size from 1,000-strong battlegroups to brigades, which comprise around 3,000-5,000 troops with more war-fighting equipment in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

“We will transform the NATO Response Force and increase the number of our high readiness forces to well over 300,000,” the NATO chief said.

The NATO Response Force – which are kept at varying degrees of readiness to mobilize, from two days’ notice to six months – is currently around 40,000 soldiers, sailors and air personnel.

In addition to the increase in High-Readiness troops, the U.S. Air Force has deployed F-35 Stealth Fighter jets to the region, with the flight path of at least one such jet allowed to be visible on FlightRadar24:

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Day by day the situation between NATO and Russia grows worse, almost as though NATO is TRYING to find a reason to get into direct war with Russia, over the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine.

Trouble is, there is no NATO or U.S. national security interest in Ukraine. So it seems to many observers that NATO is sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, and literally TRYING to start World War 3.

At the end of this article

I describe why the United States proxy nations are so fucking Hell-bent on getting in a war with Russia at the very end of this article. Just continue reading on…

Here is a guy that does a great job on what is going on in the front lines in Ukraine

Blackberry Cobbler

Celebrate summer with a homemade cobbler filled with delicious blackberries! If you’re lucky enough to have access to fresh fruit, be sure to use it in this Blackberry Cobbler recipe. Otherwise, frozen berries will work just as well. Top off this delicious, easy Blackberry Cobbler dessert with homemade vanilla ice cream or even whipped cream for a special touch.

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Ingredients

  • 2 1/2 cups fresh or frozen (thawed and drained) blackberries (do not use blueberries)
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 cup Gold Medal™ All-Purpose Flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup milk
  • 1/2 cup butter, melted
  • Cream, whipped cream or ice cream, if desired

Steps

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    In medium bowl, stir together blackberries and sugar. Let stand about 20 minutes or until fruit syrup forms. Heat oven to 375°F.
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    In large bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, salt and milk. Stir in melted butter until blended. Spread in ungreased 8-inch square pan. Spoon blackberry mixture over batter.
  • 3
    Bake 45 to 55 minutes or until dough rises and is golden. Serve warm with cream.

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Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study

Article HERE

But, there is something missing from the study.

With all due respect, I think you miss a major point here.

Before the vaccines were rolled out, there were only public health measures throughout almost all of 2020. (It was only in December,2020, that vaccination began in China and the West.

During that year, there were about half a million deaths in the US and about 5000 in China. 

Most all those deaths occurred during the period of 76 days when the virus struck Wuhan and China after some confusion (always happens when an epidemic breaks out) responded with public health measures.

There were essentially no deaths after April in China! And in the next year up until the Shanghai outbreak there were no deaths. (5 deaths in all from the end of the Wuhan lockdown in 2020 until the onset of the Shanghai outbreak in March 2022!). 

The vaccines no doubt helped but the public health measures were so good that they made little difference until Shanghai when I suspect that they saved many lives. 

And in the next pandemic again it will take time to get a vaccine rolled out. Until then there will be only public health measures. And the West has little interest in them. 

They require a people's war on the virus and the West does not have the will, the values or the social organization provided by the CPC neighborhood committees and government funding to make it possible.

Yes. This is correct.

Exactly.
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It are the neighborhood communities who saved millions of lives in China, not the vaccines.
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It was these local communities who organized the massive testing, and put in place the tight mandatory lock-downs.
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Chinese Propaganda Posters From The Cultural Revolution Ages, 1960s-1970s

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In 1966 Mao Zedong, the Communist leader of China, started a political campaign that became known as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Mao called on China’s youth to help him purge capitalist influences and bourgeois thinking in government, teaching, the media and arts, and to reinvigorate the revolutionary spirit.

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Calling themselves The Red Guards, radical students set out to destroy the “four olds”: old ideas, customs, habits and culture. They spearheaded the interrogation, humiliation and beatings of teachers and intellectuals, and traveled the country destroying cultural heritage. During the Cultural Revolution traditional artists were condemned as counter-revolutionaries and their work destroyed. A new style of art was required that supported the Maoist line and served the worker, peasant and soldier.

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The decade was marked by purges and power struggles at the upper echelons of government, and the mobilization of masses of young people to enforce Maoist thought. One of the primary vessels for disseminating instructions and models of behavior was propaganda art. Vivid posters were created to inspire citizens to put forth their labor towards agriculture, industry and national defense, as well as concerns such as hygiene and family planning.

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Slogans are often used alongside imagery in posters, usually written in bold, Chinese script. They include pro-revolution messages about “working hard”, “uniting for victory” and “working towards the general communist goal. “Bright” colors are used in many of the posters and red appears a lot as it is the color of communism and revolution. Much of the work that came out of the Cultural Revolution is attributed to committees or groups, rather than individuals. Thousands of copies of the posters were printed and sold cheaply as the establishment at the time wanted the posters to be something that everyone should have on their walls at home. Many of the posters were painted by hand and then printed as lithographs, a process involving using stone, oil and chemicals to create prints.

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Ukrainian military destroy foreign instructors, fearing the disclosure of secret data

From HERE
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Ukrainian military destroy foreign instructors, fearing the disclosure of classified REUTERS data.
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Groups of the Armed Forces of Ukraine remaining in Lysychansk and Severodonetsk have begun to liquidate foreign mercenaries.

"Ukrainian militants received a command to eliminate foreign instructors in Lisichansk and Severodonetsk, since they have certain information about the activities of foreign special services in the Donbass so that they would not be captured and would not tell this information,"

He said.  TASS source close to the People’s Militia of the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR).

According to him, the LPR military has already discovered the burned bodies of several dead mercenaries.

On the Eve of NATO Summit, Russian Space Agency Published Coordinates of “Decision-Making centers”

On the eve of the NATO meeting in Madrid, at which Russia is expected to be declared the most dangerous threat in the world, the Russian Space Agency made an interesting post to their web site: The GPS Coordinates of certain “decision-making centers” around the world.

While at the upcoming summit of the alliance, representatives of 30 participating countries and their sympathizers will declare Russia the number one evil, Roskosmos published entertaining satellite images – those same “decision centers” — or rather, their coordinates — just in case . . .

⠀⠀🇺🇸 38.897542, -77.036505
⠀⠀🇺🇸 38.870960, -77.055935
⠀⠀🇬🇧 51.503049, -0.127727
⠀⠀🇫🇷 48.870433, 2.316842
⠀⠀🇩🇪 52.519903, 13.368921
⠀⠀🇧🇪 50.879986, 4.425771

The coordinates are for:

  • The White House in Washington, DC
  • The Pentagon
  • #10 Downing Street in London, England
  • Le Palais d’ Le Elysee in Paris, France
  • The German Chancellery (Bundeskanzleramt) in Berlin, Germany
  • NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium

Now, most reasonable people would view this as a terse reminder that Russia can reach out and touch anyone they want; especially folks who are being intentionally “unfriendly” or even hostile.

Of course, the political weaklings of the West will likely start whining that this is some sort of threat, while in actual fact, it is merely a statement of reality.

Before the west goes and declares Russia to be the most evil one, perhaps they should look in the mirror at their own actions: Financing, inciting and fomenting the overthrow of the Ukraine government in 2014.   Installing a puppet regime in Ukraine.   Moving to bring Ukraine into NATO for the purpose of placing US missiles (aimed at Russia) on to Ukraine soil with a flight time of only about 5 minutes to Moscow.  Telling Ukraine to “ignore” Russia’s pre-special military operation ultimatum, and now, supplying deadly weapons to Ukraine, to be used to kill Russians.

It is the West that has done all these things.

It is the West who is the aggressor.

Russia is reminding the West that Russia isn’t some backwards, third-world country like Iraq they’re playing around with.

Russia isn’t playing.

Oh Now They‘re Banning China Spreading Chinese In The UK!

There is a concerted effort by the Western powers to contain the spread of Chinese and to prevent China from teaching Mandarin in the West

By Thorsten J. Pattberg for the Saker Blog

Much of the global media attention is on the sabotaging of everything ‘Russian’ in the West. However, at the same time there is a concerted Western attack on everything ‘Chinese’.

The UK now is basically saying: ‘Chinese’ is the property of the West, and China has no business in teaching Chinese in the West. Something like that. It is definitely spooky.

A British Member of Parliament (MP), Alicia Kearns, recently delivered a strong message to China at the Palace of Westminster, which was attended by maybe 20 of her social mores:

“Our students, our kids, our under-18-years olds are taught Mandarin by the Confucius Institutes which are the arm of the Chinese state.”

She goes on and bashes a 1.4 billion Chinese state just like that, for click-bait and going viral. So we believe MP Kearns is what the UK deserves, and want to promote her. She calls China “a genocidal regime” and demands the 30 UK Confucius Institutes to be punished or “banned.” Wow.

 

Not knowing Mandarin, many British elites fear Chinese. Fear is a German concept: Angst. And Angst leads to Ohnmacht. Ohnmacht means “without power.”

Did I just use a foreign language and it sounded like a political statement?

The MP knows the effect a foreign language has on fearful natives. To her, language is of course always politics. Therefore, China must not spread Chinese, because it‘s all politics.

She continued: “We recently discovered that Edinburgh University‘s Confucius Institute has representatives of the Chinese Communist Party‘s embassy on its board.“

Oh there are Chinese on the board of the Confucius Institute for Scotland—is that it?!

But the director is a German woman, trained and funded all her life by the powers in Berlin, and Berlin wants Scotland to break off from the UK and join the EU. Think about that, MP Kearns.

 

British China Studies is heavy stuff, compared to German China Studies, I mean.

This has to do with the British having bombarded Chinese ports in Guangzhou in 1839, the capture of Hong Kong in 1842, the burning down of the Summer Palace in 1860, and the drugging of 30 million Chinese with heavy narcotics.

During the last 150 years of “exchange,” the British meddled in Tibet, Taiwan, Peking, Shanghai and Canton, but never learned Chinese. Call it an “import ban.”

So the past is the past, and now ‘Global Britain’—the official UK slogan under MP Kearns—has this huge pent-up demand for Chinese culture, concepts and terms, right?

Those Confucius Institutes our British MP wants to ban are providing the most authentic, accredited and prestigious Chinese language training there is.

China has the best China Studies universities in the world, and the Confucius Institutes are the best places for learning Chinese outside of China. Period.

I know that many British imperialists still believe No we British are China. But sorry, you are not—China is!

Mastering Chinese requires thousands of hours of hard recitation, rote learning and love for China. Before the arrival of the Confucius Institutes in Europe in 2004, Western professors could not read or write Mandarin. Now they have to.

And the MP continued, that China is “undermining the integrity of the Mandarin education in our country.”

Mandarin education in your country can keep up with China precisely because it cooperates with China, for instance the London School of Economics or the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Read the latter school’s slogan—’SOAS, the world’s leading institution for the study of Asia, Africa and the Middle East’.

Well, SOAS wasn’t the world’s leading institution in any of these things, and certainly not China. China has the world’s leading institutions for the study of China. But now SOAS has a real Confucius Institute and things look much better.

Back to our MP’s politics fear. She went on about how China’s Ministry of Education is a threat to freedom because it only selects qualified teachers.

Think, what she is indirectly saying about UK teachers. She is saying that the UK does not vet its teachers! Just like that German director at Edinburgh University, got it? And just like MP Kearns, who doesn‘t know Chinese but wants to ban it.

 

The British MP must know that the Confucius Institutes are partly funded by China and partly funded by the host university, and that they generate tuition fees and partner up with British culture makers. All this is transparent, so MP Kearns demands more transparency. She could also have demanded more weather.

There are 100 million Mandarin learners in the world, and most will achieve proficiency when they visit China eventually. About 40% of them study Chinese not in China, and the best place for them to do that is with an accredited Confucius Institute. Britain has no expertness in teaching Chinese, China is best at that. Britain can teach… I don’t know, Irish best?

British educators also fear its name—Confucius. Confucius lived some 2500 years ago, and this could indeed cause misunderstanding. We don’t name European institutes the “Jesus Christ Institutes.” Just saying.

Last, a fair criticism is spies. Britain indeed has a James Bond agent 007 obsession with spies, which is a fiction. Here is how it really works. Before 2003, there were at most 300 China Studies masters graduates in the UK, and MI6, MI5 and DI intelligence services recruited from those because they could read Mandarin, also in Edinburgh.

On the other hand, there were years with 100,000 Chinese students in the UK who could all read English, so everyone is paranoid now.

Well done, if the British MP succeeds in keeping China out of China Studies, this could cancel ‘Global Britain’ once and for all. And Scotland is probably on its way out too.

End.


Shakedown Successful? Turkey To Green Light Sweden & Finland Entry into NATO

Reports are coming in that a deal has been struck whereby the country of Turkey will agree to vote in favor or both Sweden and Finland joining NATO.  The Turks previously said they would never agree; seemingly dooming the entry of both countries.

Turkey, Sweden and Finland signed a tripartite memorandum on the NATO membership processes of Finland and Sweden.

A photo released from the meeting wherein the deal was allegedly struck, shows lots of outright frowns on the faces of attendees.

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None of the attendees look happy . . . at all.

One wonders who got how much, and from whom, to make THIS deal happen?

Latest Twitter Alert when you click on “like” on sources link to China websites!!!

From my in-box. -MM

Latest Fascinating discovery on Twitter:

I just posted this on twitter: https://twitter.com/OcastJournalist/status/1541228260595404800 (See the warning on the tweet)

If you cannot access above link, simply go to: https://twitter.com/OcastJournalist (see 1st tweet)

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When I clicked on like, there is this warning dialogue box pop up (see below or attached screenshot). Note the statement:

“This Tweet links to a China state-affiliated media website. Help keep Twitter a place for reliable info. Find out more before liking this Tweet.”

Welcome to the free world so afraid of real news!!!

2 x news: Vladimir Putin says Russia’s trade with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa has jumped 38% amid sanctions and war in Ukraine

Vladimir Putin says Russia’s trade with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa has jumped 38% amid sanctions and war in Ukraine.
China and India now account for about 50% of Russia’s seaborne oil exports, as Asian demand props up Moscow’s energy revenues

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A nice discussion on the USA going to war against Russia and China

A good video.

The Musket and the Noodle Stall: A Strategic Comparison

By Fred Reed for the Saker Blog

In big-chunk terms, in the world today we see a contest between the Chinese economy and the American military.

It is between Chinese dynamism and American coercion.

Sure, China has a military and the US has an economy. Yet the emphasis, and spirit are as described.

    • The United States gives priority to the military over civilian economy, with military spending increasing at the expense of internal infrastructure and social needs.
    • By contrast, China focuses on infrastructure within and trade without.

I wonder whether Americans are aware of the extent of this. And its likely consequences.

To read the Asian-based press—Asia Times, Nikkei Asia, the South China Morning Post, the Global Times, and various tech sites—is to see a constant stream of infrastructure projects in China and advancing trade outside.

As perhaps many know China promotes the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive program to connect all of Eurasia, as well as Africa and Latin America in a huge trade zone connected by rail, highways, fiber optics, maritime links, and commercial treaties.

If completed it will DWARF the United States.

China, a rising technological center, leads the world in civil engineering, manufacturing, Five G, trade, and clearly intends to maintain the lead.

All power ultimately rests on economic power.

Below a few news stories more or less randomly chosen from around the web. Can you think of American equivalents?

China Mandalay Rail Line

“New international railway route from Southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality to Mandalay, southern Myanmar, has officially started operation, with the first freight train departing from Chongqing on Monday, which will arrive in Mandalay about 20 days earlier than what it takes on traditional routes.”

The port will also further connectivity under the Belt and Road Initiative and increase Chinese influence in Myanmar.

Key word: Trade

America leads in phenomenally expensive aircraft carriers with serious developmental problems and no particular purpose. Google “Ford class carriers.”

China’s High Speed Rail

China’s high-speed rail network hit the 40,000-kilometer mark by the end of 2021, reaching out to 93 percent of domestic cities with a population of over 500,000, An Lusheng, deputy head of National Railway Administration, said on Friday. This comes as the country ramps up a push to build itself into a transportation power.”

Fast, pervasive transportation greatly facilitates almost everything. Beijing has said it will have 30,000 miles in a few years.

Key words: manufacturing, trade, connectivity.

Russia – China Connections

The first China-Russia highway bridge, which stretches from Heihe, a border city in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, to the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk spanning the Heilongjiang River, opened to traffic on Friday, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported. It will open a new international highway that will boost the connectivity between cities in China and Russia.“

A few days ago. Here we have more of China’s program to tie all of Eurasia into one interconnected web. Note that it says the “first” bridge.

Key words: Trade, connectivity.

China plans new high-volume space-launch facility

“The new Ningbo spaceport, the nation’s fifth such facility, will give a crucial lift to Beijing’s new space programs as its rivalry with the United States reaches space. The spaceport is said to be tailor-made for Chinese commercial aerospace manufacturers and service providers to one day wrest business and foreign orders from US rivals.”

Typical China. Planning five years in advance. If this follows the country’s pattern, construction will begin and continue without interruption until completed.

Keyword: Commercial.

America leads the world in overpriced fighter aircraft with a history of unending engineering problems. Google “F-35.”

Cargo carried via New Land-Sea Corridor in western China grows 38% in Jan-May”

“With the RCEP coming into effect, the corridor has played a bigger role in boosting trade between China and ASEAN. On April 8, four trains left Southwest China’s Sichuan Province, carrying aluminum products, agricultural equipment, industrial equipment, chemicals and food to Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia

The RCEP, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, is a vast commercial agreement among whose members are all of ASEAN, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and China.”

Key word: Trade.

Seabed Trencher

Multi-functional modular seabed trencher developed by a Chinese firm has recently completed 100 kilometers of pipelines construction in “Bangladesh’s first marine pipeline project, setting two world records in directional drilling and deep trenching.”

My knowledge of pipeline trenching would be zero even after three cups of coffee and a hearty breakfast. I note, though that it is in Bangladesh: More connection of China and everywhere else. It also sounds like good engineering.

Key words: Trade, connectivity.

CKU Rail

The CKU Railways will create significant trade opportunities for Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan while linking China directly to the Middle East via Rail, with spin off benefits throughout the region.”

China, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan will be tied more into the Central Asian ecosystem. Construction begins next year.

Key words: Trade, connectivity.

America is unchallenged in funny-looking Batplane intercontinental nuclear bomber costing, says Aviation Week, $640 million a copy as America prepares to fill intense world demand for nuclear war. Google “B-21.”

The China-Laos Railway: Yunnan to Vientiane by Bullet Train

On December 3rd 2021, the 1,035-km (643-mile) China-Laos Railway was fully opened making possible a bullet train journey of only 10 hours from Kunming to Vientiane, capital of Laos.

Key word: Trade.

China-Europe freight train trips top 50,000, yearly growth of 55% from 2016 to 2021

“The value of goods transported by the cargo service skyrocketed to $74.9 billion in 2021, up from $8 billion dollars in 2016, and its share in total trade between China and Europe has increased from 1.5 to 8 percent, according to the release China State Railway Group sent to the Global Times.” 

America will probably try to block this traffic because it goes through Russia. Again, coercion over competition.

Key word: Trade, connectivity.

Proposed US military budget: $857 billion.

Keywords: Profits, stupidity.

China Hosts over Sixty Percent of World’s Five G Base Stations

“China had set up a total of nearly 1.43 million 5G base stations as of the end of 2021….”

And many more this year. As can be found by browsing tech sites, China leads in Five G patents, installed base, technology, and manufacturing capacity.

Keywords: Trade, manufacturing.

Many millions of Americans can’t read, a hundred thousand a year die of opioid overdoses, the economy is a trainwreck, and despair grows, but the Pentagon has Space Command to give America “Total Spectrum Dominance,” which presumably will pay our mortgages.

China’s digital yuan extends usage into finance scenarios

“SHANGHAI, June 17 (Reuters) – China’s digital yuan can now be used to buy wealth management products, pay for insurance policies, and extend bank loans, as the central bank further expands e-CNY’s application beyond retail shopping, though still only in pilot schemes.”

China is the world’s leading major country in digital currency. Beijing is low-key about it but implications for global finance worry the US.

Keywords: Money, connectivity.

US leads world in pricey, unnecessary but glamorous and profitable nuclear-missile submarines. Google “Columbia class submarines.”

China moves toward STEM leadership

Worth reading.

“American” prowess in technology increasingly rests on East Asian and Indian scientists and engineers as the US destroys its schools to further inclusiveness.

Keywords: Abject, stupidity.

Value of China-Vietnam Cross-border Freight Trains More Than Triples in Q1”

US holds world lead in ratio of money given to the Ukraine to number of citizens living on sidewalks.

China leader in supercomputers:

“As of June 2021, 188 of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers were located in China, a figure which is a third more than that of its nearest competitor, the United States, which accounted for an additional 122 supercomputers. Together, the two nations account for around 60 percent of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.”

This needs to be read with caution.

How the two stack up in aggregate computing power, whatever that means, I don’t know. The US just announced the first exascale computer at Oak Ridge. The Sunway Oceanlight from China is on many websites said to be exascale, but isn’t quite.

The important point is that it is entirely of Chinese design from architecture to chips, using silicon of Chinese design and manufacture. It is remarkable that China can manage this in the face of American attempts to strangle the country technologically.

China Launches World’s Largest container Ship

A gorgeous monster. Check photo. China also has seven of the world’s largest cargo ports.

Keyword: Trade

Trade deficit with China.

Boring but worth a glance.

“During 2021, the United States exported $151,065,200,000 in products to China, but then imported $506,366,900,000 in products from China, resulting in $657,432,100,000 in total trade between the two countries–and a $355,301,700,000 deficit for the United States.” 

Keyword: Can you guess?

Kim Dotcom Breaks Down the True Scale of US Government Debt

New Zealand tech CEO, Kim Dotcom did the math on the United States’ sovereign debt and he tweeted a thread about it, saying it may the most important thread that he may ever make.

Kim explains that US spending and debt have spiraled out of control and the Government can only raise the money it needs by printing more of it, which means that hyperinflation is guaranteed.

He says this has been going on for decades and there’s no way to fix it and that the US got away with this for so long, because US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. When the US Government prints trillions, it is thereby robbing Americans and the entire world in what he calls the biggest theft in history.

He says the total US debt is at $90 trillion, which together with $169 trillion in US unfunded liabilities totals $259 trillion, which is $778,000 per US citizen or $2,067,000 per US Taxpayer.

Now, the value of all US assets combined: every piece of land, real estate, all savings, all companies, everything that all citizens, businesses, entities and the state own is worth $193 trillion.

Our total debt, $259 trillion minus our total net worth, $193 trillion equals negative $66 trillion of debt and liabilities after every asset in the US has been sold off.

So even if the US could sell all assets at the current value, which is impossible, it would still be broke.

This is where the ‘Great Reset’ comes in and he asks, “Is it a controlled demolition of the global markets, economies and the world as we know it? A shift into a new dystopian future where the elites are the masters of the slaves without the cosmetics of democracy?”

He notes how the world has changed so much in recent years and how nothing seems to make sense anymore. He sees the blatant corruption and the obvious gaslighting propaganda media and the erosion of our rights but he doesn’t know where it’s all going and he finishes the thread asking, “What’s the end game?”

As Harrison Smith from the American Journal says, “It’s a pyramid scheme. The people perpetrating the pyramid scheme are in charge of everything…they’re going to sacrifice humanity in order to maintain their system…

“The world economy is being collapsed, the food supply system is being destroyed, the energy that we rely on to maintain civilization is being curtailed and eliminated and we’ll be forced into the Great Reset where we will own nothing.”

Former BlackRock stockpicker, Ed Dowd believes that the entire COVID sham was created as a cover for the financial collapse and that new lockdowns are coming, to try mitigate the inevitable violence and chaos that we can expect to be witnessing in the streets.

We also saw how Dr Mike Yeadon, former Pfizer VP also believes that COVID and the death shot are an elaborate hoax to engineer a collapse of sovereign currencies to bring in the Great Reset and the introduction of programmable central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), for a wholly-controlled population, in which people will not be able to buy food, etc. unless the algorithms permit and the undesirables can basically be starved to death via artificial intelligence.

Kim Dotcom June 5, 2022 Thread

This may be the most important thread I ever make. Big picture stuff about the major global collapse that is coming.

I will try to help you understand why the future is not what we’re hoping for. It’s worse than most can imagine.

Our leaders know.
But what are they planning?

The United States did not have a surplus or a balanced budget since 2001. In the last 50 years the US only had 4 years of profit. In fact all the profit the US had would not be enough to pay for 6 months of the current yearly deficit. So how did the US pay for things?

US spending and debt have spiraled out of control and the Govt can only raise the money it needs by printing it. That causes inflation. It’s like taxing you extra because you pay more for the things you need and all your assets decline in value.

See the US money printing frenzy:

The reason why the US got away with it for so long is because USD is the worlds reserve currency. Nations everywhere hold USD as a secure asset. So when the US Govt prints trillions it’s robbing Americans and the entire world. The biggest theft in history.

The problem is that this has been going for decades and there’s now no way to fix it. The reality is that the US has been bankrupt for some time and what’s coming is a nightmare: Mass poverty and a new system of control. Let me explain why this isn’t just doom and gloom talk.

Total US debt is at $90 trillion. US unfunded liabilities are at $169 trillion. Combined that’s $778,000 per US citizen or $2,067,000 per US tax payer 

Remember, the only way the US Government can operate now is by printing more money. Which means hyperinflation is inevitable.

The total value of ALL companies listed on the US stock market is $53 trillion. The real value is much lower because the US has been printing trillions to provide interest free loans to investment banks to pump up the stock market. It’s a scam.

Most of the $53 trillion is air.

The value of all US assets combined, every piece of land, real estate, all savings, all companies, everything that all citizens, businesses, entities and the state own is worth $193 trillion.

That number is also full of air just like the US stock market.

US total debt
$90 trillion

US unfunded liabilities
$169 trillion

Total
$259 trillion

Minus all US assets
$193 trillion

Balance
$66 trillion

That’s $66 trillion of debt and liabilities after every asset in the US has been sold off.

Do you understand?

So even if the US could sell all assets at the current value, which is impossible, it would still be broke.

The US is beyond bankrupt.
This patient is already dead.
This patient is now a zombie.

You probably wonder why are things still going? Why didn’t everything collapse yet.

It’s all perception, denial and dependency.

The perception is that the US has the largest economy and the strongest military in the world. But in reality the US is broke and can’t afford its army.

The denial is that all nations depend on a strong USD or global markets collapse.

The reason why the US zombie keeps going is because the end of the US is the end of western prosperity and an admission that the current system failed as a model for the world. It doesn’t change the reality. The collapse is inevitable and coming.

What are our leaders planning?

You may have heard about the ‘great reset’ or the ‘new world order’. Is it a controlled demolition of the global markets, economies and the world as we know it?

A shift into a new dystopian future where the elites are the masters of the slaves without the cosmetics of democracy?

Without a controlled demolition the world will collapse for all, including the elites. The world has changed so much and nothing seems to make sense anymore, the blatant corruption is out in the open, the obvious propaganda media, the erosion of our rights.

What’s the end game?

MM explains the “End Game”

The United States, were it to sell EVERYTHING in the United States, it would still owe $66 Trillion dollars.

However…

The complete net value of everything in Russia is $ 3.4 Trillion dollars. HERE.

It’s not enough to “make a dent” in America’s debt. But China is a big “juicy” target that can “do the job”. America needs to have a war with China, take it over, and sell it off so that it can become a stable nation again.

The complete net value of everything in China is $ 510 Trillion dollars HERE.

But the first step is to disarm Russia. By taking over Russia, it can break it up and disarm it so that it cannot assist China in defense.

The wealth obtained from Russia (in the meantime) can be used to make payments on American debt while forces and pieces are moved into place for a “death blow” that will destroy China and make it easy to absorb and disassemble.

  • Destroy Russia, break it up. Use the wealth to continue to make interest payments on USA debt.

Then, use the time to build up an enormous military force to…

  • Destroy China. Break it up. Loot it. Pay off the Debt and rebuild America!

Now that you know the “end game”, doesn’t everything look clearer right now?

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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The truth about the Tiananmen square massacre and how the USA and planning to create more narratives in support of a hot war in the Pacific

Black operations have been very busy as of late prepping the ground work for a long duration “hot war” centered on American proxy nations to engage China, while Russia is too preoccupied with NATO.

I have covered this in great detail over the last few years.

Here, in this article we will review the rewriting of history and how black operatives (out of the United States and the UK) are busy getting the world ready for a full onslaught engagement with China on proxy nation land. We will also include the anti-troll articles, the anti-shadow banning articles, and other techniques used to successfully throw-off the ‘bots that haunt the internet and search for targets.

This includes, food, cats, social issues, stories, and other issues.

We begin here…

Tiananmen lies and such

How psy-ops warriors fooled me about Tiananmen Square: a warning • Wenyahonline Journal.

An outstanding article.

1) NED In 1988, an office was set up in China by a relatively new organization with an innocent name – the National Endowment for Democracy.

At that time, we reporters HAD NO IDEA it was a CIA spin-off, designed to build relationships with anti-government activists overseas for the purpose of spreading disinformation and destabilising communities in the interests of the US.

2) CIA In the following months, CIA agents helped Chinese student activists form an anti-government movement, and even provided typewriters, fax machines and other equipment to help them spread their message—this information came from a US official.

And it continues…

3) The Pentagon. A key player was Colonel Robert Helvey, a 30-year Pentagon veteran of destabilization operations in Asia. He “trained, in Hong Kong, the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques, which they were to subsequently use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989,” according to a highly detailed academic paper by B. Raman, the former director of India’s foreign intelligence agency.

4) A cry for more socialism. When protests broke out in China in April 1989, demonstrators were not calling for democracy, but purer socialism, free of corruption and inequality, which were endemic at the time. Students carried pictures of Chairman Mao and sang the Chinese national anthem repeatedly.

Western hybrid warfare includes two key principles:

     a) Locate and amplify GENUINE local grievances, and
     b) Rebrand them as calls for western liberal democracy and freedom.

5) Contact people rotated. The US State Department withdrew US ambassador Winston Lord, and replaced him with James Lilley, a veteran CIA agent who had run operations smuggling people in and out of China.

6) Rebranding. The Chinese protesters were advised by persons unknown to add the word “democracy” in English to their banners, and say they were calling for “freedom”, rather than their actual goal, a purer form of communism.

Such a great article. With loads of photos and quotes in the main article.

7) Image creation. The protesters were advised to create a statue and began work on May 27. But, as good communists, students chose to make it as unlike the Statue of Liberty as possible, basing their statue (replica on the right) on the work of Russian revolutionary communist sculptor Vera Mukhina (above). The students were not at all a homogenous group, but they were socialists.

8) American specialists called in. On May 28th, 1989, Gene Sharp, America’s top undercover street protest strategist, flew into Beijing with his assistant Bruce Jenkins to offer help. “The students in the square were operating with great commitment and bravery but they didn’t know what the hell they were doing,” Sharp later wrote.

9) Injection of hate. As May turned into June, the energy level dropped and there was need to bring things to a head. Student leader Chai Ling gave her infamous talk, where she warned of a massacre “which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square”. She added that she expected to die shortly – but confusingly also said that she no longer intended to stay in China, but wanted to move to the United States. What did that mean? It was baffling at the time, but it would all make sense later.

We now know that student leaders were promised [1] US passports, [2] CIA-run safe passage out of China, and [3] enrollment in top US universities.

10) China is patient. But there was a problem. Things were not coming to a head. The Chinese government was remaining remarkably restrained, as was the army. Because the main body of the protesters were asking for purer communism, people were politically on the same page – students and soldiers had good relationships, and even shared food and sang together.

Violence finally started when a mysterious group of thugs, some from ethnic minorities, triggered a fight in Muxidi, five kilometers away, attacking army buses with petrol bombs and setting them alight, burning the occupants to death. This was unexpected, because gasoline was rationed and hard for ordinary people to obtain. Soldiers who managed to escape the burning buses were beaten to death. The word “massacre” could be used for this atrocity—although that doesn’t fit the western narrative, since it was soldiers who died. Other military men arrived in Muxidi and, infuriated at the sight of their slaughtered colleagues, shot at protesters (mostly unionists rather than students): there were many more tragic deaths, this time of civilians.

11) Things ended peacefully. Back in Tiananmen Square, in the early hours of June 4, soldiers arrived and called on students to leave. Student leader Feng Congde worked to gauge protesters opinions, and concluded that the majority wanted to leave. “So I announced the decision to leave,” he said. Students left peacefully.

12) A killing. At a different location on the periphery of the square, a fight broke out in which a soldier was killed, leading to some violence, according to a declassified report from the US Embassy.

13) More killings. One student protester, a friend of the present writer, watched one man lose his life. In the following skirmishes, several lives were lost. But in the square itself, the only gunfire came from bullets used to silence the sound system.

14) The lies begin. In contrast to this, a BBC reporter said he watched, from the Beijing Hotel, soldiers shooting at students in the center of the square. All eyewitness sources say this did not happen. It was also against the laws of physics – that location is not visible from the hotel.

15) The lies turn outrageous. Now this is where it gets strange. Over the following hours and days, a very different story was circulated, saying that the peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in China had come to a violent and bloody end. A cable from the British Embassy said the students in the square had been massacred with machine guns, their bodies pushed into piles with bulldozers, and then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers.

16) More outrageous lies. A report was also sent out by the Australian Embassy delivering almost exactly the same information. “When all those who had not managed to get away were either dead or wounded, foot soldiers went through the square bayoneting or shooting anybody who was still alive,” said the report, read out loud by then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. “They had orders that nobody in the square be spared, and children and young girls were slaughtered, anti-personnel carriers and tanks then ran backwards and forwards over the bodies of the slain until they were reduced to pulp, after which, bulldozers moved in to push the remains into piles which were then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers.”

17) The lies grow exponentially. An unknown (at the time) source was distributing related news “a minimum of 10,000 people had been massacred.” One document about this horrific (but fictional) massacre was sent to the Hong Kong office of the Wen Wei Po newspaper, from an anonymous source. In Beijing, a student, Wu’er Kaixi, said he could confirm that the story was true – he had watched it happen, he claimed.

18) Lies become super-funded. Then came an astonishing split. The main newsrooms of the international media chose to canonize the fictional “Tiananmen Square massacre” story as fact. We ran it at great length (and came to ritually repeat it every year since). But individual reporters at the scene, often working for the same media companies, took a very different line over the days, weeks, months and years that followed.

19) Truth is suppressed. The massacre story was quite wrong, said Jay Mathews, former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post.  “A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.”

20) The famous parrot the lies. New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, a bitter critic of China, wrote: “There is no massacre in Tiananmen Square, for example, although there is plenty of killing elsewhere.”

21) The truth comes out 30 years later. Some told the truth years later. In 2009, James Miles, a senior BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted that he had “conveyed the wrong impression” and that “there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.”

22) More truths in small drips and dabs. Graham Earnshaw of Reuters, who was in the square, wrote a detailed report in his memoir explaining how the military came, negotiated with the students and made everyone, including himself, leave peacefully.

23) Debunking the narrative is well known. Even the student protesters debunked the story. Wu’er Kaixi, who claimed to have seen the massacre with his own eyes, wasn’t even there, they said. He had left the Square hours earlier. It was later revealed that Wu’er was a Xinjiang Uyghur named Örkesh Dölet. He was spirited out of China through the Hong Kong-based “Operation Yellowbird” and taken to the US, where he was given a place at Harvard University.

More recently, Wu’er Kaixi/ Örkesh Dölet drew parallels between the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Hong Kong 2019 riots—perhaps more accurately than he realized, both being heavily misreported using the exact same techniques, by the exact same unholy alliance of behind the scenes manipulators and anti-Chinese journalists.

24) The true has been suppressed. Madrid’s ambassador to Eugenio Bregolat was filled with righteous anger. He noted that western journalists were reporting the massacre as fact from their hotel guestrooms, while Spain’s TVE channel had a television crew physically in the square that evening and knew it was false.

25) Diplomats knew. In fact, most diplomats knew the Tiananmen Square massacre story was fake. “Within a few days, certainly within a week, it was clear that the information about what happened in the square itself was incorrect,” Professor Richard Rigby, a staff member at the Australian Embassy in 1989, told reporters on an ABC news show.

26) The US completely knew. US Embassy officials interviewed a Chilean diplomat who had been present in the Square at the time of the alleged massacre. He confirmed that no such thing happened. The officials kept the information secret – until it was exposed by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks operation in 2011.

27) Black Operations. Many diplomats strongly suspected that the Tiananmen Square fiction was “a black op”. Australia’s Professor Rigby later said: “I cannot entirely rule out the possibility that we were being fed some sort of a ‘line’.”

28) USA and UK involvement. That, of course, was exactly what had happened. “The mystery report was very likely the work of the US and UK black information authorities ever keen to plant anti-Beijing stories in unsuspecting or cooperative media,” said Gregory Clark, a British-born Australian diplomat.

29) History has been changed. A pair of human rights campaigners, again, harsh critics of the Chinese government, were also uncompromising. In a book, George Black and Robin Munro wrote: “The phrase ‘Tiananmen Square massacre’ is now fixed firmly in the political vocabulary of the late twentieth century. Yet it is inaccurate. There was no massacre in Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3.”

30) Mainstream media. Still, almost all the mainstream media clung tightly to their fiction. On air, Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press recalled the machine gun deaths of “ten thousand students”.

31) Nothing to report. A group called the June Fourth victims’ network decided to gather the names of the ten thousand dead for publication by a New York group called Human Rights in China. After ten years of research, the list of victims was just 155 names long, one source said. The story seems to have disappeared.

32) All debunked. In 2017, diplomatic papers quietly declassified by the British government showed that it was British Ambassador Sir Alan Donald in Beijing who had spread the debunked news that that a minimum of 10,000 citizens died. The BBC and other media continues to present this as if was a credible fact from a credible source, rather than a piece of discredited fiction almost certainly from a “black op”.

The BBC newsroom gives credence to the story of 10,000 deaths in the square, even though it has been has been widely debunked, including by its own staff

33) The lies live on. Western publishers of many types continue to present the massacre story as fact. The Lonely Planet series, one of the world’s best-selling travel books, includes this line in its volume on China: “Eyewitness accounts have indicated that hundreds died in the square alone, and it’s likely fighting in the streets around the square led to another several thousand casualties.”

34) The lies get worse and worse with time. The “Encyclopedia of the World” (Houghton Mifflin Co, 2001) tells the children of the world, in shocked capital letters, a version of the tale even more extreme that the black op version: “June 3-4: PLA TROOPS ENTERED TIANANMEN SQUARE DURING THE NIGHT AND FIRED DIRECTLY INTO THE SLEEPING CROWD.”

35) What to do? It appears there’s nothing that can be done. Western media simply swallows disinformation about mainland China or Hong Kong and spits it out as fact, and continues to do so on a daily basis. Gregory Clark notes the incalculable harm to humanity done by “CIA/MI6 black information massacre myths and Western media gullibility”. They have prevented, and continue to prevent, any sort of accurate understanding of the recent history of the most populous community on earth.

“A major lesson from all this is the need to control our Western black information operations. Few seem to realize the depth of their penetration in Western media,” he wrote.


GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

Now there are going to be some people who will not accept that the story we so long believed, that peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in China came to a violent and bloody end, was a “psy-ops” operation by US disinformation specialists.

To those people, I would point to a recruitment video by US military disinformation specialists released this year. It aims to introduce viewers to the world of international disinformation techniques. Called Ghosts in the Machine, it begins with black and white cartoonish images and words, and then we hear a newscaster speaking the following sentence:

“As the world watches and listens in horror, the peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in China come to a violent and bloody end.”

Article HERE

A kitty rescue

Let’s begin on a positive note with this video about rescuing this beautiful feral kitten.

New Reuters Survey Finds That Trust In Mainstream News Is Rapidly Declining

Saturday, Jun 18, 2022 – 09:55 PM

It probably does not come as much of a surprise to most people today, but it is now confirmed by the mainstream media’s own surveys – They are rapidly losing their audience and their influence.

The Reuters Institute For The Study Of Journalism runs a yearly project designed to gauge public perceptions of media, specifically corporate media, and how much trust the MSM has garnered.  Spoiler Alert:  They haven’t garnered any.  In fact, over the course of the past two years establishment journalists have alienated a large portion of the general public.

The latest survey finds that globally, 38% of people are avoiding most news altogether, indicating that coverage of specific subjects such as covid had become ‘repetitive’ and depressing.  This is an increase of almost 10% from 2017.  The more vital statistic, though, is the number of people that do not trust the media at all.

Globally, only 42% of people said they trust the media most of the time.  In the US, only 26% said they trust the media, a three point dip from 2021.  This is reinforced by the exponential decline in mainstream news ratings in the past few years.

CNN lost approximately 70% of its audience in key demographics this year, and the network recently suffered one of the smallest weekly audience ratings since 2015.  The collapse of the CNN+ paid membership program before it ever got off the ground also indicates a complete lack of public interest in the extreme leftist ideology pumped out by the network.

MSNBC’s audience numbers were also down 32% this month as their prime time shows struggle to maintain a viewership of 1 million people.  Even the Jan 6th hearings, touted as a historic event for the US that would supposedly present “proof” of a planned “insurrection” of the federal government, only pulled in 20 million viewers across 12 networks; that’s around 6% of the American population that bothered to watch.  Fox New is the only corporate network that appears to be holding a steady audience.

Is it any wonder that the establishment media has been working so closely with social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube to artificially push their content into top search results?  With the population thoroughly disgusted with the media’s constantly biased coverage of the pandemic event, the BLM riots, the Hunter Biden Laptop issue, the Ukraine war as well as the ongoing economic crisis, the only way the MSM can get people to watch them is when they work with Big Tech to force people to watch them.

It’s simple, when you constantly lie to the public eventually they will ignore you.

SWIFT dollar decline

Lots of hyperlinks in this articles, good sources for citation

Full article HERE

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR: U.S.-led sanctions are inadvertently undermining the dollar’s post-Second World War dominance. The growing number of countries threatened by U.S. and allied actions is forcing victims and potential targets to respond pro-actively.

SWIFT strengthened dollar

The instant messaging system of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) informs users, both payers and payees, of payments made. Thus, it enables the smooth and rapid transfer of funds across borders.

Created in 1973, and launched in 1977, SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium. It links 11,000 banks and financial institutions (BFIs) in more than 200 countries. The system sends over 40 million messages daily, as trillions of U.S. dollars (USD) change hands worldwide.

Co-owned by more than 2,000 BFIs, it is run by the National Bank of Belgium, together with the G-10 central banks of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the U.S.. Joint ownership was supposed to avoid involvement in geopolitical disputes.

Many parties use USD accounts to settle dollar-denominated transactions. Otherwise, banks of importing and exporting countries would need accounts in each other’s currencies in their respective countries in order to settle payments.

SWIFT abuse

U.S. and allied–including European Union (EU)–sanctions against Russia and Belarus followed their illegal invasion of Ukraine. Created during the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, SWIFT remains firmly under Western control. It is now used to block payments for Russian energy and agriculture exports

But besides stopping income flows, it inadvertently erodes USD dominance. As sanctions are increasingly imposed, such actions intimidate others as well. While intimidation may work, it also prompts other actions.

This includes preparing for contingencies, e.g., by joining other payments arrangements. Such alternatives may ensure not only smoother, but also more secure cross-border financial transfers.

As part of U.S.-led sanctions against the Islamic Republic, the EU stopped SWIFT services to Iranian banks from 2012. This blocked foreign funds transfers to Iran until a compromise was struck in 2016.

U.S. financial hegemony

Based in Brussels, with a data centre in the U.S., SWIFT is a ‘financial panopticon’ for surveillance of cross-border financial flows. About 95% of world USD payments are settled through the private New York-based Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS), involving 43 financial institutions.

About 40% of worldwide cross-border payments are in USD. CHIPS settles U.S.$1.8 trillion in claims daily. As all CHIPS members maintain U.S. offices, they are subject to U.S. law regardless of headquarters location or ownership.

Hence, over nearly two decades, CHIPS members like BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered and others have paid nearly U.S.$13 billion in fines for Iran-related sanctions violations under U.S. law!

Exorbitant privilege

The USD remains the currency of choice for international trade and foreign reserve holdings. Hence, the U.S. has enjoyed an “exorbitant privilege” since World War Two after the 1944 Bretton Woods conference created the gold-based ‘dollar standard’–set at U.S.$35 for an ounce of gold.

With the USD remaining the international currency of choice, the U.S. Treasury could pay low interest rates for bonds that other countries hold as reserves. It thus borrows cheaply to finance deficits and debt. Hence, it is able to spend more, e.g., on its military, while collecting less taxes.

Due to USD popularity, the U.S. also profits from seigniorage, namely, the difference between the cost of printing dollar notes and their face value, i.e., the price one pays to obtain them.

In August 1971, President Nixon unilaterally ‘ended’ U.S. obligations under the Bretton Woods international monetary system, e.g., to redeem gold for USD, as agreed. Soon, the fixed USD exchange rates of the old order–determining other currencies’ relative values–became flexible in the new ‘non-system’.

In the ensuing uncertainty, the U.S. ‘persuaded’ Saudi King Feisal to ensure all oil and gas transactions are settled in USD. Thus, OPEC’s 1974 ‘petrodollar’ deal strengthened the USD following the uncertainties after the Nixon shock.

Nevertheless, countries began diversifying their reserve portfolios, especially after the euro’s launch in 1999. Thus, the USD share of foreign currency reserves worldwide declined from 71% in 1999 to 59% in 2021.

With U.S. rhetoric more belligerent, dollar apprehension has been spreading. On 20 April 2022, Israel–a staunch U.S. ally–decided to diversify its reserves, replacing part of its USD share with other major trading partners’ currencies, including China’s renminbi.

Sanction reaction

The EU decision to bar Iranian banks from SWIFT prompted China to develop its Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CIPS). Operational since 2015, CIPS is administered by China’s central bank. By 2021, CIPS had 80 financial institutions as members, including 23 Russian banks.

At the end of 2021, Russia held nearly a third of world renminbi reserves. Some view the recent Russian sanctions as a turning point, as those not entrenched in the U.S. camp now have more reason to consider using other currencies instead.

After all, before seizing about U.S.$300 billion in Russian assets, the U.S. had confiscated about U.S.$9.5 billion in Afghan reserves and U.S.$342 million of Venezuelan assets.

Threatened with exclusion from SWIFT following the 2014 Crimea crisis, Russia developed its own SPFS (Financial Message Transfer System) messaging system. Launched in 2017, SPFS uses technology similar to SWIFT’s and CIPS’s.

Both CIPS and SPFS are still developing, largely serving domestic BFIs. By April 2022, most Russian banks and 52 foreign institutions from 12 countries had access to SPFS. Ongoing developments may accelerate their progress or merger.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has its own domestic payments systems, RuPay. It clears millions of daily transactions among domestic BFIs, and can be used for cross-border transactions.

Sanctions cut both ways

Unsurprisingly, those not allied to the U.S. want to change the system. Following the 2008-9 global financial crisis, China’s central bank head called for “an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations”.

Meanwhile, China’s USD assets have declined from 79% in 2005 to 58% in 2014, presumably falling further since then. More recently, China’s central bank has been progressively expanding use of its digital yuan or renminbi, e-CNY.

With over 260 million users, its app is now ‘technically ready’ for cross-border use as no Western bank is needed to move funds across borders. Such payments for imports from China using e-CNY will bypass SWIFT, and CHIPS will not need to clear them.

Russia has long complained of U.S. abuse of dollar hegemony. Moscow has tried to ‘de-dollarize’ by avoiding USD use in trade with other BRICS–i.e., Brazil, India, China and South Africa–and in its National Wealth Fund holdings.

Last year, Vladimir Putin warned the U.S. is biting the hand feeding it, by undermining confidence in the U.S.-centric system. He warned, “the U.S. makes a huge mistake in using dollar as the sanction instrument”.

The scope of U.S. financial payments surveillance and USD payments will decline, although not immediately. Thus, Western sanctions have unwittingly accelerated erosion of U.S. financial hegemony.

Besides worsening stagflationary trends, such actions have prompted its targets–current and prospective–to take pre-emptive, defensive measures, with yet unknown consequences.

Here’s The Best Combined Explanation For Surging Inflation: Cascading Idiocy

Sunday, Jun 19, 2022 – 04:30 AM

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Cascading Policy Errors

1: Covid hit. Lockdowns that were arguably excusable in the beginning, lingered far too long, affecting far too many businesses. Policy error one.

2: The Fed reacted with QE far to excessive and far too long, continuing all the way until March 2022. Policy error two.

3. Free Money from Congress. Again excusable in the beginning, but the second round by Trump was excessive and the third by Biden was preposterous. Policy errors three and four with Biden getting far more of the blame.

4. Demand shift to goods away from services as a result of the above three items.

5. The demand shift to goods happened when there were fewer workers due to continuing lockdowns.

6. The US meddled in Ukraine in 2014 setting the stage for war. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy kept insisting to the bitter end it wanted to be in the EU and NATO, both red flags to Putin. Accurately label Zelenskyy’s statements a policy error. And blame Putin for the war, so that makes policy errors five, six, and seven counting US meddling in 2014.

7: Let’s not leave Angela Merkel out of this. Kowtowing to the Greens, Merkel mothballed Germany’s nuclear plants creating greater dependence on energy from Russia. This is policy error number eight.

8. And what about Biden and the US Greens telling Big Oil it wanted to put them out of business. Guess what? Energy investment plunged. Policy error number 9.

9. Inane sanctions in response to the war busted supply chains in energy. Policy errors ten and eleven by the US and EU.

10. Finally, please consider Biden’s stupid energy policy to rising oil price. Instead of taking actions to increase oil supply, Biden blamed oil companies, threated tax hikes, threated FTC involvement, blamed gouging, then with refinery capacity already crippled demanded more ethanol from corn. The ethanol demand will increase need for fertilizer, increase summer smog, and drive more small refiners out of business.

I am not sure how many policy errors there are in point ten. Pick a number.

Passing the Buck 

Putin Tax

Search for Enemies 

Paul Krugman, No Policy Errors?!

No, it’s not all Biden’s fault. It’s Biden, the Fed, Congress, Merkel, Putin, Trump, the EU, and Zelenskyy.

Please apportion the blame, but here’s a simple way to start:

    • It’s mostly Progressive free money policies by Biden and Congress coupled with inane responses to to the war with the Fed providing excess stimulus all the way to March of 2022.
    • Key policy errors by Merkel and the US in 2014 set the stage for compounding everything that followed.

Putin: “Previous World Order, Won’t Return”

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Those who believe that things will go back to the way they were before the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine are wrong, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.

“It is a mistake to suggest that the times of turbulent changes can be waited out and that things will return to normal; that everything will be as it was. It won’t,” Putin insisted during his speech at the the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on Friday.

The changes that the world is going through at the moment are fundamental, radical, and irreversible, he added.

However, the ruling elites of some Western countries refuse to notice this obvious shift and choose to “cling to the shadows of the past,” he added.

For example, they believe that the dominance of the West in global politics and economy is a constant, eternal value,” Putin said. But “nothing is eternal,” he reminded everyone.

Since claiming victory in the Cold War in the early 1990s, the US has “declared itself the messenger of God on Earth, who has no obligations, but only interests, and those interests are pronounced to be sacred,” the president said.

However, the idea of a unipolar world is flawed at its core, according to the Russian leader, as the norms of international relations can’t always be interpreted in favor of a single nation, “even if it’s a strong one.”

It seems as if Washington refuses to see the new centers of power that have emerged in recent decades and which have every right to “protect their interests and ensure their national sovereignty,” he said.

Putin’s June 2022 Speech

I’m slowly moving through Putin’s speech pulling out gems to further illuminate and discuss them. Here’s yet another where he provides an interesting description of Neoliberalism:

"Of course, perhaps we would be pleased to hear that we are so powerful and omnipotent: inflation is blown to the skies in the West, in the United States, in Europe, and we are doing something else that makes everyone nervous. 

Maybe it would be nice for us to feel such power, but this is not true. 

The situation has matured for years, spurred on by the short-sighted actions of those who are accustomed to solving their problems at someone else's expense, who relied and still rely on the mechanism of financial emission to buy, pull on trade flows and thereby exacerbate deficits and provoke humanitarian disasters in certain regions of the world. 

I would like to add that this is essentially the same predatory and colonial policy, but, of course, in a new form, in a new edition, it is much more subtle and sophisticated. 

You won't know what's going on right away."

Yes, it’s been well hidden for decades; and in reality, for well over a century–since the 1880s. IMO, there’s only one method of slaying it: Proper education that leads to political then policy change. There’s hope that as usual economic pain will help remove the political blinders that keep the masses enslaved.

Peach Crisp

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What you need.
What you need.

What you need.
What you need.

Tips
Tips

MoA has something interesting to say…

Today, without any announcement, the British prime minister Boris Johnson, undoubtedly on order of Biden, appeared in Kiev to lobby for more war just like he did at the end of March when he told Ukraine’s president Zelensky to ditch the negotiations with Russia.

That is why I fear that Michael Brenner is right and that Biden will escalate the war by attacking somewhere else:

Necessity is the mother of invention — or so it is said. However, grasping what is “necessary” can be a very slippery business. An actual recasting of how one views a problematic situation normally is a last resort. Experience and history tell us that, as do behavioral experiments. 
...
So, you are stuck with the albatross of a truncated, bankrupt Ukraine hung around your neck. There is nothing that you can do to cancel these givens — except a direct, perhaps suicidal test of force with Russia. Or, perhaps, a retaliatory challenge elsewhere. The latter is not readily available — for geographic reasons and because the West already has expended its arsenal of economic and political weaponry.

Over the past year, the U.S. attempted to foment Maiden style regime changes in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Both were foiled. The latter was with the connivance of Turkey, which deployed a contingent of bashi bazouks from the stock of Syrian jihadis it keeps on call in Idlib (to be deployed as President Recep Erdogan did more successfully in Libya and Azerbaijan).

There remains one conceivable sensitive target: Syria. There, the Israelis have become increasingly audacious in goading the Russians by airstrikes against Syrian infrastructure as well as military facilities.

Now, we see signs that Moscow’s tolerance is wearing thin, suggesting that further provocations could spark retaliation which Washington then could exploit to ratchet up tensions. To what avail? Not obvious — unless the ultras in the Biden administration are looking for the kind of direct confrontation that they’ve avoided in Ukraine, until now.

The implication is that the denial option and the incremental adjustment option are foreclosed. Serious rethinking is in order — logically speaking.

The most worrisome scenario sees the frustration and anger and anxiety building in Washington to the point where it encourages a reckless impulse to demonstrate American prowess. That could take the form of an attack on Iran in the company of Israel and Saudi Arabia — the region’s new odd couple.

Another, even grimmer prospect would be a contrived test of wills with China. Already we see growing evidence of that in the bellicose rhetoric of American leaders from U.S. President Joe Biden on down.

The Pentagon is not ready for a war on China. Iran is too strong and would respond to an attack by launching its huge missile arsenal on Israel and U.S. allies in the Gulf. This leaves Syria. It is unlikely by chance that the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the U.S. is coordinating Israeli airstrikes in that country:

WASHINGTON—Israel secretly coordinates with the U.S. on many of the airstrikes it carries out in Syria as the allies face a battlefield crowded with militant groups, Iranian-backed militias and foreign militaries, according to current and former U.S. officials.

I expect those airstrikes, like last week’s attack on the airport of Damascus, to intensify with the hope to divert Russian attention from Ukraine.

Russia is of course 100% prepared for that but U.S. miscalculations that led to this are many and I do not expect that tendency to change anytime soon.

In his latest talk about The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war (vid) John Mearsheimer also speaks of why he thinks that an escalation is likely, and what the potential results might be. Without the Q&A it is only one hour long and well worth your time.

Posted by b on June 17, 2022 at 16:35 UTC | Permalink

FRANCE CUT-OFF COMPLETELY FROM RUSSIAN NATURAL GAS

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All flows of natural gas from Russia to France have suddenly HALTED via the Nord Stream Pipeline.

France gets around 17 percent of its gas from Russia through network connections with Germany, which relies heavily on Russian supplies and has criticized Gazprom’s move as “political.”

Gazprom said the supply reductions via the Nord Stream pipeline are the result of repair work, but EU officials believe Moscow is punishing allies of Ukraine, where Russian forces launched an invasion in February.

Our American Economy In A Nutshell

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The economy has reached an inflection point where everything that is unsustainable finally starts unraveling.

Our economy is in a crisis that’s been brewing for decades. The Chinese characters for the English word crisis are famously–and incorrectly–translated as danger and opportunity. The more accurate translation is precarious plus critical juncture or inflection point.

Beneath its surface stability, our economy is precarious because the foundation of the global economy– cheap energy–has reached an inflection point: from now on, energy will become more expensive.

The cost will be too low for energy producers to make enough money to invest in future energy production, and too high for consumers to have enough money left after paying for the essentials of energy, food, shelter, etc., to spend freely.

For the hundred years that resources were cheap and abundant, we could waste everything and call it growth: when an appliance went to the landfill because it was designed to fail (planned obsolescence) so a new one would have to be purchased, that waste was called growth because the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) went up when the replacement was purchased.

A million vehicles idling in a traffic jam was also called growth because more gasoline was consumed, even though the gasoline was wasted.

This is why the global economy is a “waste is growth” Landfill Economy. The faster something ends up in the landfill, the higher the growth.

Now that we’ve consumed all the easy-to-get resources, all that’s left is hard to get and expensive. For example, minerals buried in mountains hundreds of miles from paved roads and harbors require enormous investments in infrastructure just to reach the deposits, extract, process and ship them to distant mills and refineries. Oil deposits that are deep beneath the ocean floor are not cheap to get.

Does it really make sense to expect that the human population can triple and our consumption of energy increase ten-fold and there will always be enough resources to keep supplies abundant and prices low? No, it doesn’t.

Many people believe that nuclear power (fusion, thorium reactors, mini-reactors, etc.) will provide cheap, safe electricity that will replace hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas). But nuclear power is inherently costly, and there are presently no full-scale fusion or thorium reactors providing cheap electricity to thousands of households.

Reactors take many years to construct and are costly to build and maintain. Cost over-runs are common. A new reactor in Finland, for example, is nine years behind schedule and costs have tripled.

The U.S. has built only two new reactors in the past 25 years.

The world’s 440 reactors supply about 10% of global electricity. There are currently 55 new reactors under construction in 19 countries, but it will take many years before they produce electricity. We would have to build a new reactor a week for many years to replace hydrocarbon-generated electricity. This scale of construction simply isn’t practical.

Supplying all energy consumption globally–for all transportation, heating of buildings, etc.) would require over 10,000 reactors by some estimates–over 20 times the current number of reactors in service.

Many believe so-called renewable energy such as solar and wind will replace hydrocarbons. But as analysts Nate Hagens has explained, these sources are not truly renewable, they are replaceable; all solar panels and wind turbines must be replaced at great expense every 20 to 25 years. These sources are less than 5% of all energy we consume, and it will take many decades of expansion to replace even half of the hydrocarbon fuels we currently consume.

To double the energy generated by wind/solar in 25 years, we’ll need to build three for each one in service today: one to replace the existing one and two more to double the energy being produced.

All these replacements for hydrocarbons require vast amounts of resources: diesel fuel for transport, materials for fabricating turbines, panels, concrete foundations, and so on.

Humans are wired to want to believe that whatever we have now will still be ours in the future. We don’t like being told we’ll have less of anything in the future.

The current solution is to create more money out of thin air in the belief that if we create more money, then more oil, copper, iron, etc. will be found and extracted.

But this isn’t really a solution. What happens if we add a zero to all our currency? If we add a zero to a $10 bill so it becomes $100, do we suddenly get ten times more food, gasoline, etc. with the new bill? No.

Prices quickly rise ten-fold so the new $100 bill buys the same amount as the old $10.

Adding zeroes to our money (hyper-financialization) doesn’t make everything that’s scarce, expensive and hard to get suddenly cheap. It’s still scarce, expensive and hard to get no matter how many zeroes we add to our money.

Many people feel good about recycling a small part of what we consume. But recycling is not cost-free, and the majority of what we consume is not recycled.

The percentage of lithium batteries that are recycled, for example, is very low, less than 5%. We have to mine vast quantities of lithium because we dump 95% of lithium-ion batteries in the landfill. There are many reasons for this, one being that the batteries aren’t designed to be recycled because this would cost more money.

The majority of all manufactured goods–goods that required immense amounts of hydrocarbons to make–are tossed in the landfill.

Goods and services are commoditized and sourced from all over the world in long dependency chains (hyper-globalization): if one link breaks, the entire supply chain breaks.

Our economy is precarious because it’s in a lose-lose dilemma: resource prices can’t stay high enough for producers to make a profit without impoverishing consumers. Prices can’t stay low enough to allow consumers to spend freely without producers losing money and shutting down, depriving the economy of essential resources.

Playing hyper-financialized games–creating money out of thin air, borrowing from tomorrow to spend more today and inflating speculative bubbles in stocks, housing, etc.–won’t actually create more of what’s scarce. All these games make wealth inequality worse (hyper-inequality), undermining social stability.

The economy has reached an inflection point where everything that is unsustainable finally starts unraveling. Each of these systems is dependent on all the other systems (what we call a tightly bound system), so when one critical system unravels, the crisis quickly spreads to the entire economic system: one domino falling knocks down all the dominoes snaking through the global economy.

Those who understand how tightly interconnected, unsustainable systems are basically designed to unravel can prepare themselves by becoming antifragile: flexible, adaptable and open to the opportunities that arise when things are disorderly and unpredictable.

20,000 Women and 100,000 Castrated Men to Serve the Emperor: The Imperial Harem of China

In Imperial China, one of the important tasks that the emperor needed to do was to ensure the continuation of the dynasty, which was achieved by the production of a male heir. For this purpose, the emperors of Imperial China kept an enormous harem of women. There was a hierarchy in the emperor’s harem, and whilst the exact classes changed over the millennia, it may be said that in general there were three ranks – the empress, consorts, and concubines. In addition, the eunuchs who served these imperial women may be considered to be a part of this harem as well.

Hierarchy in the Harem

At the top of the hierarchy of the Imperial Chinese harem was the empress, who was the Emperor’s one ‘official wife’. The empress was the most venerated and revered figurehead for women in China, as she was considered to be the ‘mother of the world’. In the harem, only the emperor and the mother of the emperor were above the empress, all other individuals had to obey her orders. In addition to empresses, there was also the rank of empress dowager. Empresses who outlived their husbands were promoted to this rank. Some famous empress dowagers include Wu Zetian of the Tang Dynasty (who later became China’s first female emperor) and Cixi of the Qing Dynasty.

Consorts in the Imperial Chinese Harem

Underneath the empress were the consorts. The number and ranks of these consorts differed according to the ruling dynasty. During the Qing Dynasty, for example, an imperial harem would have had one Imperial Noble Consort, two Noble Consorts, and four Consorts. Below these consorts were the concubines, and this number varied according to each emperor. According to the Rites of Zhou , an emperor could have up to 9 high ranking concubines, 27 mid ranking ones and 81 low ranking ones. However, during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), there were no limits set for the number of consorts an Emperor could have, and during the reigns of Emperor Huan and Emperor Ling, there were more than 20,000 women living in the Forbidden City.

Selection of Concubines

During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD), there was an official system for selecting concubines to join the emperor’s harem. The selection process would take place inside the Forbidden City every three years. Candidates ranged from 14 to 16 years of age and were chosen based on their background, virtues, behavior, character, appearance and body condition.

Eunuchs – The Only Males Allowed in the Harem

To ensure that any child born in the harem was fathered by the emperor, males were not allowed to serve the women of the emperor’s harem.

The only exceptions to this rule were the eunuchs, men who had been castrated, thus rendering them impotent. Throughout the history of Imperial China, eunuchs have served the imperial family, including as servants in the harem. Far from being mere servants, however, these eunuchs could aspire to positions of power and wealth by involving themselves in the politics of the harem. During the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), there was an eye-opening 100,000 eunuchs serving the emperor and his harem.

Rivalries in the Harem

With so many women in the harem, it was inevitable that rivalries amongst the emperor’s women would arise, as they competed for the emperor’s attention. The most coveted position was, of course, that of the empress, and to bear a son for the emperor would certainly be a big bonus to a woman in the harem. At times, ambitious women in the harem who plotted against their rivals would form alliances with eunuchs. If an intrigue was successful, a woman in the harem could rise through the ranks. She, in turn, would reward the eunuchs who supported her by placing them in positions of authority.

Such harem intrigues have happened often in Chinese history. For example, during the Tang Dynasty, one of the Emperor Gaozong’s consorts was Wu Zetian. According to popular belief, Wu Zetian had her new born child murdered, and placed the blame on the Empress Wang. As a result of this, the empress was demoted, and Wu Zetian became the new empress. Nevertheless, not all imperial harems were hotbeds of conspiracy. The semi-mythical Huangdi, for example, had four concubines, who were not chosen based on their looks, but on their competence. One of his secondary concubines, for instance, is regarded as the inventor of cooking and of the chopsticks, whilst another is believed to have invented the comb. Together, these concubines assisted Huangdi in ruling the country.

Many concubines met a sad fate when their emperor died. They were sacrificed, often buried alive, to join their master in the afterlife.

Dan Bongino: The Biden administration is slowly dying

A decent enough FOX video.

“Red Flag” laws as a way to abolish Habius Corpus

Yeah. I know. “Democrats are gonna get  and ban guns”. Well, right now, it’s the uni-party; both Republicans and Democrats that want to do this.

What this means, of course is that the USA is RIPE for a civil war. Look at the ingredients…

  • Ballistic inflation.
  • Banning gun ownership.
  • Disastrous international policies
  • Out of touch leadership
"Let them drive electric cars!"
  • No domestic spending.
  • Insane levels of foreign spending.
  • Threat of nuclear war with Russia and China simultaneously.

Third American captured in Ukraine fighting with the Nazis.

A third former U.S. serviceman who has gone missing in Ukraine has been identified, but his whereabouts remain unknown.

Family and friends of Grady Kurpasi, who served in the Marine Corps for 20 years, last heard from the veteran on April 24, according to a report. Kurpasi arrived in Ukraine to volunteer alongside Ukrainian forces on March 7. His last known location was in the Kherson region, in southeastern Ukraine, where he manned an observation post in late April. Kherson is occupied by Russian forces.

“For him personally, he has a skill set that he feels he can give back,” George Heath, a family friend of Kurpasi’s, told CNN on Thursday. “He wanted to go and help the Ukrainian people. He wasn’t really planning on fighting.”

State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Thursday that the department is aware of the third missing American in Ukraine and is “in touch with the family.”

On Wednesday, reports emerged that two other former U.S. servicemen had been captured by Russian forces in Ukraine.

A photo purportedly of the two volunteers, Alexander Drueke and Andy Huynh, was posted on the social media platform Telegram on Thursday by a Russian blogger. The image purported to show the two in the back of a Russian military truck with their hands apparently tied behind their backs.

“We are aware of unconfirmed reports of two U.S. citizens captured in Ukraine,” a State Department official told reporters on Wednesday. “We are closely monitoring the situation and are in contact with Ukrainian authorities.”

Article HERE

Slow-Cooker Apple Butter

All you need are Gala apples, brown sugar, salt and a cinnamon stick to make our yummy slow-cooker apple butter. Great for gifting!

Apple butter.
Apple butter.

Apple butter.
Apple butter.

Apple butter.
Apple butter.

US to send heavy guided missiles to Ukraine

Why not?

.

The USA is sending them anyways.
The USA is sending them anyways.

The US is sending Ukraine heavy guided missiles with a range of 70km for use with the HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl revealed on Tuesday. The White House previously said that HIMARS launchers would be provided with “battlefield munitions,” widely understood to be unguided rockets with a shorter range.

The high-mobility artillery rocket system will come with GMLRS guided rockets, Kahl said on Tuesday, speaking at a conference hosted by the Center for New American Security (CNAS), a Democrat-linked think tank for which he used to work.

“Sometimes when you see images of MLRS firing off, it’s like salvos of multiple rockets going off at the same time. That’s really not how this system is meant to operate,” Kahl said.

“The GMLRS is a precision guided munition, and a big one – a 500 pound munition,” he added. “Think of GMLRS more like the effect of an airstrike rather than launching off whole salvos. So, in other words, you can do a lot with a little, or you don’t need a lot to have a significant effect.”

When the White House first announced it was sending HIMARS launchers to Ukraine on June 1, it said they would be armed with “battlefield munitions,” which was widely taken to mean barrage rockets with a range of between 32km and 60km, considering that HIMARS is also capable of launching ballistic projectiles with a range of up to 300km.

“The range does not depend on the system itself, but on the missiles that are used,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a TV interview earlier this month, adding that if the US sends long-range rockets Russia will “draw the appropriate conclusions and use our weapons, which we have enough of, in order to strike at those objects that we have not yet struck.”

Even though the US initially promised four launchers and said they had been “pre-positioned” in Europe, they have yet to reach Ukraine, according to the Pentagon. The first group of Ukrainian artillerists are currently finishing their training on the launchers, Kahl said.

The HIMARS launcher is equipped with one pod that can carry six GMLRS rockets, according to their maker, Lockheed Martin. The M270 launcher, which the UK has promised to Ukraine, carries two pods for double the payload. Kahl did not say how many rockets the US was sending.

According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, since the start of the conflict Ukraine has lost over 500 multiple rocket launch systems and more than 1,900 pieces of artillery. Kiev has beseeched its allies in the West to provide more weapons and ammunition.

“We’re going to provide the Ukrainians what they need to prosecute the targets inside Ukrainian territory that they’re looking to go after,” Kahl said at the end of his remarks about the HIMARS.

On Monday, the authorities in the Donetsk People’s Republic reported the heaviest Ukrainian shelling since 2015, with “indiscriminate” strikes on the city of Donetsk resulting in five fatalities and almost 40 civilian injuries. Among the incoming shells were 155mm munitions used by howitzers provided to Ukraine by the US and other NATO allies, authorities in the Donbass republic said, requesting additional military assistance from Russia.

Moscow has condemned the shelling of Donbass civilians as “absolutely barbaric.” A spokesman for the UN secretary-general called the shelling of a maternity hospital in Donetsk “an obvious breach of international humanitarian law.”

The USA is "doubling down" and "going for broke" totally and completely ignorant of the resultant consequences. -MM

House Democrats Propose 1,000% Tax On AR-15s

If you cannot ban something, you can place a large tax on it making it prohibitive to own. -MM

If Congress won’t ban AR-15s, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer (VA) wants to slap a 1,000% tax on them – which would of course mean only people with lots of money, such as drug dealers and rich people, could afford them, while punishing lower-income Americans.

AR-15
AR-15

Introduced last week, Beyer’s Assault Weapons Excise Act has 36 Democratic co-sponsors, according to the Washington Post. The group hopes the idea might bypass the Senate filibuster, which would require the support of at least 10 Republicans.

According to Beyer, the idea is to increase the price to such a degree that it significantly limits who’s able to buy them. The tax would also apply to high-capacity magazines.

Wants to ban.
Wants to make ownership prohibitive.
 

“It’s trying to hit the sweet spot, where it’s not an all-out ban, but people’s independent purchasing decisions would be much more ‘no’ than ‘yes,’” Beyer told the Post, adding. “You want to shift the demand curve pretty significantly.”

Beyer said part of the thinking behind the 1,000 percent figure was to have a high-enough fiscal impact that the Senate parliamentarian would find it qualifies for inclusion in a reconciliation package, meaning it could pass the Senate with a simple majority. -WaPo

“In a nation crying out for progress on gun safety, we would present a plausible way forward in this Senate,” he said.

The tax would only apply to newly purchased guns, and would not apply to government buyers. The proceeds would go into the general fund.

As the Epoch Times notes, in an attempt to define what would be taxed, the bill says it would apply to “semiautomatic assault weapon[s],” which are semiautomatic rifles that have the capacity to use a magazine that isn’t a fixed magazine, a pistol grip, a forward grip, and a folding, telescoping, or detachable stock. Other items that fall under that definition include a semiautomatic rifle with a barrel shroud, a threaded barrel, and a “functional grenade launcher.”

The excise tax would also apply to “a semiautomatic rifle that has a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds, except for an attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with, .22 caliber rimfire ammunition,” as well as certain semiautomatic pistols, all belt-fed semiautomatic rifles, shotguns with revolving cylinders, and more.

“Congress must take action to stem the flood of weapons of war into American communities, which have taken a terrible toll in Uvalde, Buffalo, Tulsa, and too many other places,” Beyer said in reference to widely reported mass shootings in recent weeks.

About half of all rifles manufactured in the United States or imported in 2018 were AR-15-style weapons, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation trade group. The group said there are about 20 million of those firearms in circulation as of 2020.

United States rent costs are exploding!

Median rents in the US crossed the $2000 mark this past month for the first time ever, while rental markets surged 15% – 20% in a single year depending on the region.

This is yet another trend which supports the position that official CPI is inaccurate and overall inflation is actually much higher than the central bank and the Biden White House reports.

The latest CPI print indicates an “official” inflation rate of 8.6%, while REAL inflation is closer 17% according to pre-1990s calculations.  The continued denial of real inflation rates is causing confusion among Americans who are facing vastly larger price increases than are often reported by the government.

Inflation apologists can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that the Fed and government use creative accounting to soften data and misrepresent the economic threat.

  • Rent prices jumped over 20% in Orange County, CA.
  • They are up 19.3% in the greater Cleveland area.
  • They are up 15.5% in the Cincinnati area.
  • Nashville and Seattle saw prices rise over 30%.
  • And, Austin, TX is witnessing epic rental inflation of over 50%.
  • New York’s median rent cost climbed to $4000 per month despite the fact that vast numbers of people have left the city in the course of the past two years.

Officials including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have only just recently admitted that inflation is not transitory as they had insisted a year ago.  However, the public seems to be learning that establishment economic predictions cannot be trusted and they are already preparing for more pain in the near future.  A George Mason University poll indicates that the majority of Americans are cutting back on spending to adapt to higher prices.  Over 66% of participants polled expect inflation to climb even more this year.

Inflation worries have continued to soar over the past several months while the populace has dealt with constant gaslighting from the media telling them that the economic instability they are facing is “not something they should be concerned about.”

The relentless expansion of prices suggests that the Federal Reserve will enact sweeping interest rate hikes in the coming months, though there are many economists that continue to disbelieve the possibility.  Even with moderate hikes and slower spending, it is likely that inflation will climb unabated well beyond 2022.  Central bank stimulus printing has triggered an avalanche of too many dollars chasing too few goods and now prices are evolving to meet the supply crunch.

The rent inflation issue is partially influenced by a number of factors including the mass migration of millions of Americans from blue states where covid restrictions and high taxes were strangling residents.  But, with that migration now over, prices remain high due to dollar devaluation pressures.

The greatest danger is that this will translate to increased poverty and homelessness by 2023.

It is unlikely that Fed actions on interest rates will affect any change in the current trend, at least not until rates are adjusted much higher than mainstream economists expect.

FCC Says Most Requests for Funds to Replace Chinese Telecom Equipment Are Deficient

Nothing better to do? Too much money no where to spend? 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) told Congress on Wednesday it had found deficiencies in two-thirds of applications to reimburse U.S. carriers for removing equipment from Chinese companies deemed national security threats.

FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said of 181 applications filed by mostly rural carriers under a $1.9 billion program, 122 were found to be "initially materially deficient."

The FCC told applicants they have 15 days to fix their applications, and it "expects to complete this process by July 15."

The FCC currently estimates the cost estimate to remove the equipment from companies like Huawei and ZTE Corp from the "rip and replace" program is $5.3 billion, much higher than what Congress set aside.

In July 2021, the FCC voted to finalize the program that had been funded by Congress in December 2020.

The FCC designated Huawei and ZTE as national security threats to communications networks in July 2020 - a declaration that barred U.S. firms from tapping an $8.3 billion government fund to purchase equipment from the companies.

The FCC in December 2020 adopted rules requiring carriers with ZTE or Huawei equipment to "rip and replace" that equipment.

The issue is a big one for rural carriers that face high costs and difficulty finding workers to remove and replace equipment.

Huawei said last year the "FCC initiative only creates extraordinary challenges for carriers in the most rural/remote areas of the U.S. to maintain the same high level and quality of service they provide to their customers without disruption."

Rosenworcel's letter noted the FCC "will allocate funding first to approved applications that have 2 million or fewer customers."

She said to date "all but one of the eligible applicants falls within the first prioritization group, and the collective demand of these applicants exceeds available funds for the program."

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Leslie Adler and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Full article found HERE

How China is Winning Its Battle Against Air Pollution

Not at all reported in the Western media. -MM

National air pollution action plans devised by China have seen significant reductions in pollution levels and associated health risks.

China has lifted millions out of poverty like no other country on the planet. The price of that economic progress is demonstrated in the air pollution that has caused a public health crisis, killing more than 1.1 million people every year. It has also proved costly for the nation as the economy suffers an annual loss of $37 billion due to pollution-induced crop failure.

China Air Pollution Solutions

After Beijing’s ‘airpocalypse’ sparked a mass outpouring of anger and frustration among citizens, China set out to clean up the air quality of its cities. The government prohibited new coal-fired power plants and shut down a number of old plants in the most polluted regions including city clusters of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and the Pearl and Yangtze Deltas. Large cities like Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou restricted the number of cars on the road and started introducing all-electric bus fleets. The country reduced its iron-and steel-making capacity and shut down coal mines. …

Full article HERE

Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe

Ya think? -MM

Read paywall article HERE

New Hong Kong school textbooks say city was not a British colony

A fine neocon, anti-China publication. -MM

New textbooks sent to Hong Kong secondary schools teach that the city was not a British colony, but rather an occupied territory.  Described (in the article) as a “recasting of history that is part of Beijing’s ideological clampdown in the city“.

Full article found HERE

Omm Sety – A British Woman Whose Life Was Lined by Reincarnation and Connected to a Pharaoh

When Dorothy Eady arrived to Egypt for the first time, it was obvious to her that she had been there before. But her last visit near the Nile may have taken place thousands of years earlier.

Dorothy was born on January 16, 1904 in the London suburb of Blackhearth. Doctors believed that she would not survive a terrible fall when she was three years old. However, it seems that the accident she faced was the beginning of her unbelievable life – a moment of opening the gate to the memories of a past life. Over the years, many skeptics tried to disprove Eady’s mystifying tale, but nobody could ever fully negate that she was one of pharaoh Seti I’s (c. 1290 – 1279 BC) lovers.

An Ancient King’s Lover?

Dorothy grew up in a Christian family and she attended church regularly when she was young. One day, her parents took her to the British Museum. While looking at the photograph of the temple of Seti I, a pharaoh of the 19th dynasty of the New Kingdom Period (and the father of Rameses II), she said that it was her home. She couldn’t understand why there were no gardens and trees around the temple, but she recognized the monuments and other artifacts in the rooms of the Egyptian collection. She kissed the feet of the statues, and very soon after, decided to study ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

One of her teachers was the famous E.A. Wallis Budge, who encouraged her to study the history of ancient Egypt. Dorothy was 15 years old when she described the first dream “meeting” she had with the mummy of Pharaoh Seti I. She claimed that he made her remember her past life. With time, she turned more and more to the ancient religion and stopped feeling attached to Christianity.

Dorothy married the Egyptian Eman Abdel Meguid in 1931. This marriage was like a ticket to her beloved Egypt, where she became an English teacher. When her feet touched Egypt’s land for the first time she kissed the ground and felt like she was welcomed by her old home. She had a son who she called Sety. In this period, she reported having visions related to Hor-Ra. She also discovered her ancient Egyptian name – Bentreshyt meaning ‘Harp of Joy.’ In her visions she also saw her ancient family.

Dorothy said that she was a daughter of one of Seti I’s soldiers and a woman who sold vegetables. Her mother died when she was three years old, and she was given to the temple in Abydos, where she grew up and became a priestess. At 12 years old, she claimed she became a consecrated virgin, but a few years later she met ‘a living god’ – pharaoh Seti I. They became lovers, and Bentreshyt got pregnant. Unfortunately, the lovers’ fate was not a happy one. The High Priest of the temple told her that the situation was a huge offense against Isis and would cause many problems for pharaoh, so she decided to commit suicide.

The Eternal City of Abydos

After 19 years of living in Cairo, Dorothy Eady decided to move to Abydos. She was 52 years old, and she set up a home near the mountain Pega-the-Gap. According to ancient beliefs, it was a mountain which was the road to the afterlife. At this stage of life, she started to be called Omm Sety , meaning ”mother of Sety”.

Omm Sety believed she was finally back home. During one of her visits to the temple, the chief inspector from the Antiquities Department decided to check her knowledge. He was curious how realistic her explanations were. Dorothy was asked to stand next to the wall paintings in the darkness. She was then asked to identify them with what she remembered from her past life.

When Eady accomplished the task without any mistakes, many people stopped doubting her story. Her life in Abydos was full of collaborations with Egyptologists who asked her for support. She published several books on her own, but also joined the works of other researchers. The most important subject of her works was, of course, the Temple of Seti I at Abydos. She helped to discover the garden, where she believed she met Seti I for the first time. The excavations uncovered the space, which would have looked exactly as she described during ancient times.

Eady also told other researchers what the prayers and traditional rituals looked like. She knew the plot of many religious papyri even before she read them. Her descriptions of the monuments, reliefs, and other things she saw during her previous life were repeatedly confirmed by excavations.

Researchers Couldn’t Believe it

Moreover, many Egyptologists couldn’t negate her words. Eady had knowledge which was not available to specialists who had worked in Egypt for many years.

One of them is famous British Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen. Although he did not want to openly admit it, written resources suggest that he believed her.

Nicholas Reeves also took her visions into account while searching for Nefertiti. According to Eady, the tomb is in the Valley of the Kings. She said:

''I did once ask His Majesty where it was, and he told me. He said, `Why do you want to know’? I said I would like to have it excavated, and he said, `No, you must not. We don’t want anything more of this family known`. But he did tell me where it was, and I can tell you this much. 

It’s in the Valley of the Kings, and it’s quite near to the Tutankhamun tomb. But it’s in a place where nobody would ever think of looking for it," she laughed. "And apparently it is still intact" ... '' 

For decades, Eady was an inspiration to many researchers. Her stories about life and death in the times of Seti I touched many hearts as well. Many discoveries were made based on her words. Following her information, researchers led by Otto Schaden discovered tomb KV63 in the Valley of the Kings, which is located near the tomb of Tutankhamun and contained burials of women from the times of the 18th dynasty.

A Reunion of Two Souls

Dorothy Eady died at age 81 and was buried in the Coptic cemetery in Abydos. She believed that death would allow her to reconnect with her beloved. Even now, researchers are still trying to prove that she was she a liar, who had somehow gotten access to the newest literature and had great acting skills. But others say that she was one of the most fascinating people they have ever met.

Russia Cuts Natural Gas by 40% to Germany and Italy – Pump failures

.

Russia’s state-owned natural gas company, GAZPROM has been forced to reduce pumping of natural gas through the Nord Stream pipeline into German and Italy by 40% because Canada will NOT return a remanufactured gas compressor pump from Montreal, on account of economic sanctions.

The remaining pumps on the Nord Stream pipeline cannot continue to handle the full load of 167 million cubic meters of gas per day, and must be scaled back to have continued service life.

Siemans Energy said a gas turbine which powers a compressor station on the Nord Stream pipeline, had been in service for more than ten years.  It had been taken to Montreal for a scheduled overhaul.

Because of economic sanctions imposed by Canada, the company has been unable to return the overhauled turbine to the customer, GAZPROM.

Thus, Europe as a whole will only be able to get 100 million cubic meters of natural gas per day, instead of its needed 167 million per day.

The price for European natural gas is surging this morning because of the forty percent cut by Russia.

Russian gas supply to Europe fell further on Thursday, sparking concerns about refilling storage for winter….
diplomatic tussle as Gazprom blames Western sanctions for hampering maintenance work…
►Supply via Nord Stream 1 to Germany cut to 40% capacity
►Europe’s benchmark gas price jumps 25% in morning trade

Gazprom cutting supply to Germany is a warning signal that could cause problems for Europe’s biggest economy this winter.
“It would significantly worsen our situation,” Klaus Mueller told the Rheinische Post daily. “We could perhaps get through the summer as the heating season is over. But it is imperative that we fill the storage facilities to get through the winter.”

The cuts come as Nord Stream 1 is set to undergo annual maintenance on July 11-21 when supply will be cut off completely.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

Once again, western economic sanctions imposed against Russia, backfire and harm only the west.

It should be noted that recently, German Chancellor Scholz publicly stated Germany was going to rebuild its army into the largest army in Europe; something that hasn’t happened since the time of Hitler.

One wonders how Germany plans to build that army when it doesn’t have enough natural gas supply to even run the country?

The people imposing these economic sanctions against Russia really do seem to me,  to be a special kind of stupid.

U.S. Army Engineers Are Racing to Build Hypersonic Weapons

A fine neocon, anti-China publication. -MM

Hypersonic weapons are now being fired from U.S. Air Force planes and U.S. Army ground launchers while also being fast-tracked to fire from U.S. Navy destroyers by 2025 and submarines by 2028. These technological breakthroughs are already reshaping warfare tactics and concepts of operation.

Projectiles that skip along the upper boundary of the earth’s atmosphere and descend upon targets at more than five times the speed of sound are no longer a “concept” for the future. The U.S. military is already in the process of arming major platforms with them. The U.S. Air Force, for example, has already fired its Air-Launched Rapid Response hypersonic weapon from a B-52 Stratofortress.

What about hypersonic weapons ten or twenty years from now? What will they consist of? How fast will they fire? Will they maneuver in flight, perhaps traveling at now unimagined speeds?

These questions are now being explored through cutting-edge basic research efforts at the Army Research Laboratory, where teams of engineers and scientists are experimenting with mixtures of ceramic, metal, polymer, and composite materials at the microscopic level to uncover better performing materials to engineer the weapons of the future. While the work could yield near-term applications in the event of breakthrough testing, much of the exploration is aimed at uncovering “disruptive” or paradigm-changing scientific breakthroughs.

Specific materials built into weapons systems bring distinct properties such as being lighter in weight, more resistant to penetration or better equipped to maneuver and manage accurate flight at previously unimaginable temperatures.

Nicholas Ku, a materials engineer working for the Ceramic and Transparent Materials Branch at DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory spends his time mixing, testing, heating, and experimenting with different combinations of materials in search of breakthrough discoverings.

“Ceramics are of interest for hypersonics applications, through the way additive manufacturing has an ability to create complex shapes, decrease manufacturing costs as well as increase the design space in making new components,” Ku said.

Ku was clear that much of the work involves simply creating different combinations and layers of materials. The process is called “additive manufacturing,” and Ku and other ARL scientists use it to uncover new materials for armored vehicles, body armor, and projectiles such as hypersonics. Ku explained that traditional methods of manufacturing greatly limit the complexity of the design when compared with options made available through additive manufacturing, a circumstance that introduces new dimensions of possibility.

“By enabling additive manufacturing of these materials, we can increase the design space,” Ku said.

The shape and composition of a hypersonic projectile determine key aerodynamic and performance variables of great consequence. Will yet-to-be-discovered materials will enable new hypersonic structures to travel as much as two or three times as fast as existing hypersonic projectiles? Perhaps new materials can enable a hypersonic weapon to achieve previously unprecedented precision flight path and targeting.

The rest of the Article HERE in this Neocon publication

Slow-Cooker Pork Chops with Apple Chutney

Pork and apples have long been perfect partners. Dried cranberries add color and tartness.

Pork and apples.
Pork and apples.

Pork and apples.
Pork and apples.

The ‘New G8’ Meets China’s ‘Three Rings’

The G7 is falling into dust, while a new group; the G8 rises. -MM

The coming of the new G8 points to the inevitable advent of BRICS +, one of the key themes to be discussed in the upcoming BRICS summit in China.

By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted

The speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, may have created the defining acronym for the emerging multipolar world: “the new G8”.

As Volodin noted, “the United States has created conditions with its own hands so that countries wishing to build an equal dialogue and mutually beneficial relations will actually form a ‘new G8’ together with Russia.”

This non Russia-sanctioning G8, he added, is 24.4% ahead of the old one, which is in fact the G7, in terms of GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP), as G7 economies are on the verge of collapsing and the U.S. registers record inflation.

The power of the acronym was confirmed by one of the researchers on Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sergei Fedorov: three BRICS members (Brazil, China and India) alongside Russia, plus Indonesia, Iran, Turkey and Mexico, all non adherents to the all-out Western economic war against Russia, will soon dominate global markets.

Fedorov stressed the power of the new G8 in population as well as economically: “If the West, which restricted all international organizations, follows its own policies, and pressures everyone, then why are these organizations necessary? Russia does not follow these rules.”

The new G8, instead, “does not impose anything on anyone, but tries to find common solutions.”

The coming of the new G8 points to the inevitable advent of BRICS +, one of the key themes to be discussed in the upcoming BRICS summit in China. Argentina is very much interested in becoming part of the extended BRICS and those (informal) members of the new G8 – Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, Mexico – are all likely candidates.

The intersection of the new G8 and BRICS + will lead Beijing to turbo-charge what has already been conceptualized as the Three Rings strategy by Cheng Yawen, from the Institute of International Relations and Public Affairs at the Shanghai International Studies University.

Cheng argues that since the beginning of the 2018 U.S.-China trade war the Empire of Lies and its vassals have aimed to “decouple”; thus the Middle Kingdom should strategically downgrade its relations with the West and promote a new international system based on South-South cooperation.

Looks like if it walks and talks like the new G8, that’s because it’s the real deal.

The revolution reaches the “global countryside”

Cheng stresses how “the center-periphery hierarchy of the West has been perpetuated as an implicit rule” in international relations; and how China and Russia, “because of their strict capital controls, are the last two obstacles to further U.S. control of the global periphery”.

So how would the Three Rings – in fact a new global system – be deployed?

The first ring “is China’s neighboring countries in East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East; the second ring is the vast number of developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and the third ring extends to the traditional industrialized countries, mainly Europe and the United States.”

The basis for building the Three Rings is deeper Global South integration. Cheng notes how “between 1980-2021, the economic volume of developing countries rose from 21 to 42.2 percent of the world’s total output.”

And yet “current trade flows and mutual investments of developing countries are still heavily dependent on the financial and monetary institutions/networks controlled by the West. In order to break their dependence on the West and further enhance economic and political autonomy, a broader financial and monetary cooperation, and new sets of instruments among developing countries should be constructed”.

This is a veiled reference to the current discussions inside the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), with Chinese participation, designing an alternative financial-monetary system not only for Eurasia but for the Global South – bypassing possible American attempts to enforce a sort of Bretton Woods 3.0.

Cheng uses a Maoist metaphor to illustrate his point – referring to ‘the revolutionary path of ‘encircling the cities from the countryside’”. What is needed now, he argues, is for China and the Global South to “overcome the West’s preventive measures and cooperate with the ‘global countryside’ – the peripheral countries – in the same way.”

So what seems to be in the horizon, as conceptualized by Chinese academia, is a “new G8/BRICS+” interaction as the revolutionary vanguard of the emerging multipolar world, designed to expand to the whole Global South.

That of course will mean a deepened internationalization of Chinese geopolitical and geoeconomic power, including its currency. Cheng qualifies the creation of a “three ring “ international system as essential to “break through the [American] siege”.

It’s more than evident that the Empire won’t take that lying down.

The siege will continue. Enter the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), spun as yet another proverbial “effort” to – what else – contain China, but this time all the way from Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia, with Oceania thrown in as a bonus.

The American spin on IPEF is heavy on “economic engagement”: fog of (hybrid) war disguising the real intent to divert as much trade as possible from China – which produces virtually everything – to the U.S. – which produces very little.

The Americans give away the game by heavily focusing their strategy on 7 of the 10 ASEAN nations – as part of yet another desperate dash to control the American-denominated “Indo-Pacific”. Their logic: ASEAN after all needs a “stable partner”; the American economy is “comparatively stable”; thus ASEAN must subject itself to American geopolitical aims.

IPEF, under the cover of trade and economics, plays the same old tune, with the U.S. going after China from three different angles.

  • – The South China Sea, instrumentalizing ASEAN.
  • – The Yellow and East China Seas, instrumentalizing Japan and South Korea to prevent direct Chinese access to the Pacific.
  • – The larger “Indo-Pacific” (that’s were India as a member of the Quad comes in).

It’s all labeled as a sweet apple pie of “stronger and more resilient Indo-Pacific with diversified trade.”

BRI corridors are back

Beijing is hardly losing any sleep thinking about IPEF: after all most of its multiple trade connections across ASEAN are rock solid. Taiwan though is a completely different story.

At the annual Shangri-La dialogue this past weekend in Singapore, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe went straight to the point, actually defining Beijing’s vision for an East Asia order (not “rules-based”, of course).

Taiwan independence is a “dead end”, said General Wei, as he asserted Beijing’s peaceful aims while vigorously slamming assorted U.S. “threats against China”. At any attempt at interference, “we will fight at all costs, and we will fight to the very end”. Wei also handily dismissed the U.S. drive to “hijack” Indo-Pacific nations, without even mentioning IPEF.

China at it stands is firmly concentrated on stabilizing its western borders – which will allow it to devote more time to the South China Sea and the “Indo-Pacific” further on down the road.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi went on a crucial trip to Kazakhstan – a full member of both BRI and the EAEU – where he met President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and all his counterparts from the Central Asian “stans” in a summit in Nur-Sultan. The group – billed as C+C5 – discussed everything from security, energy and transportation to Afghanistan and vaccines.

In sum, this was all about developing much-needed corridors of BRI/ New Silk Roads – in sharp contrast to the proverbial Western lamentations about BRI reaching a dead end.

Two BRI-to-the-bone projects will go on overdrive: the China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline Line D, and the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway. Both have been years in the making, but now have become absolutely essential, and will be the flagship BRI projects in the Central Asian corridor.

The China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline Line D will link Turkmenistan’s gas fields to Xinjiang via Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. That was the main theme of the discussions when Turkmen President Berdimuhamedow visited Beijing for the Winter Olympics.

The 523 km China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway for its part will crucially link the two Central Asian “stans” to the China-Europe freight rail network, via the existing rail networks in Turkmenistan.

Considering the current incandescent geopolitical scenario in Ukraine, this is a bombshell in itself, because it will enable freight from China to travel via Iran or via Caspian ports, bypassing sanctioned Russia. No hard feelings, in terms of the Russia-China strategic partnership: just business.

The Kyrgyz, predictably, were ecstatic. Construction begins next year. According to Kyrgyz President Zhaparov, “there will be jobs. Our economy will boom.”

Talk about China acting decisively in its “first ring”, in Central Asia. Don’t expect anything of such geoeconomic breadth and scope being “offered” by IPEF anywhere in ASEAN.

European Central Bank Calls Emergency Meeting; EURO Headed to valuation less than $1

These are "leaders"?
These are “leaders”?

The European Central Bank has called an Emergency meeting because the value of the EURO is sliding downward (fast) and looks to be worth less than one US Dollar very soon.

Countries around the world have begun unloading their supplies of EUROS because decisions made by Europe against Russia, show that Europe will not have much of a manufacturing base, or be able to sustain value of their currency much longer.

Europe’s reliance upon Russian gas and oil, and subsequent embargo of its own energy supplies in an effort to “sanction” Russia, is backfiring on Europe in an extraordinary way.

Put simply, Europe is cutting its own throat economically by embargoing Russian gas and oil.   Without cheap and plentiful energy, Europe cannot have industry.  Without industry, Europe cannot pay its bills and will collapse.

Rather than wait, countries around the world are lessening their supplies of EUROS, causing the value of that currency to drop against the US dollar.

Wells Fargo Bank in the U.S. made clear yesterday, they believe the EURO will fall to a value less than one US Dollar within a month:

Strawberry Streusel Bars

This sweet streusel-topped strawberry cookie bar is the perfect treat for summertime.

If The Streets Of America Are This Chaotic Now, What Will They Be Like When Things Really Start Hitting The Fan?

Sunday, Jun 19, 2022 – 03:30 AM

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

If you are not alarmed by what is happening to our largest cities, you should check to see if you still have a pulse.  Once upon a time, the beautiful new cities that our forefathers constructed were the envy of the entire planet, but now many of them have degenerated into crime-infested hellholes that are absolutely teeming with violent predators.  Shoplifting has essentially become a national pastime, open air drug markets operate freely right under the noses of indifferent authorities, and addicts pull down their pants and take a dump whenever and wherever they feel like doing so.  Thanks to record levels of illegal immigration, gang membership is absolutely exploding, and human trafficking has reached truly frightening levels.  Of course our steadily thinning police forces are overwhelmed at this point.  In fact, police in Seattle are stretched so thin that they often are not able “to take reports from rape victims”.  And if you are the victim of a non-violent crime in Seattle, good luck ever getting a police officer to pay attention to your case.  From coast to coast, communities are descending into a state of utter lawlessness.  So if things are this bad already, what will conditions be like when things really start hitting the fan?

Continuing a trend that we have seen for the last couple of years, crime rates all over the nation just keep going higher and higher.

For example, auto theft, grand larceny and transit crime are all up by more than 50 percent in New York City so far this year…

Data released by the New York City Police Department showed Grand Larceny Auto increased by 51.1% with 5,420 incidents as of June 5 compared to just 3,587 incidents by the same time in 2021.

That category had one of the largest upticks during the most recent crime statistic report covering May 30 to June 5. Grand larceny incidents spiked by 50.1% from 20,659 incidents reported to NYPD as of June 5, compared to the 13,713 reported during the same period last year.

Meanwhile, overall transit crime surged by 53.6% so far this year.

I thought that the new mayor was elected to end the crime wave.

Instead, it appears that it has been supersized.

One way to hide the rapid rise in crime is to decriminalize things that used to be major offenses.

In Portland, voters decided to decriminalize hard drugs, but that just turned the city into an “open air drug market”

The streets of Portland resemble an ‘open air drug market’ after state officials’ scheme to decriminalize hard drugs led to a surge in overdose deaths, critics claim.

Law enforcement agents say that the streets of Portland are full of homeless addicts openly buying and selling drugs and that signs of drug addiction are actually increasing statewide, Fox News reported.

Photos show the desperate situation in the liberal Pacific Northwest city, where people can be seen shooting up drugs or passed out in broad daylight.

At one time, Portland was one of the most magnificent cities in the entire world.

Now it is a horror show.

On top of all the ordinary crime that is going on, now we are witnessing a very alarming rise in politically-motivated violence.

The Supreme Court decision that will overturn Roe v. Wade is expected to be released this month, and a group known as “Jane’s Revenge” has announced that it is “open season” on those with pro-life views…

The pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge is declaring it “open season” on pro-life groups and crisis pregnancy centers.

The group has a history of damaging property during their protests, and they took credit for the vandalization of a pregnancy resource center in Des Moines, Iowa earlier this month. In a message posted to social media, the group said they broke windows and left graffiti political messages all over the clinic. “It was easy and fun,” the message read.

Sadly, even though the official Supreme Court decision has not even been released yet, there has already been quite a bit of violence.

In fact, it is being reported that there have been more than three dozen attacks on pro-life groups, churches and crisis pregnancy centers in recent weeks…

An armed would-be assassin’s alleged attempt on the life of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week is part of a wave of violence, arson, vandalism, and intimidation targeting pro-life groups and government officials since the leak last month of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

There have been more than three dozen such incidents directed at crisis pregnancy centers and churches in at least 20 states and Washington, D.C., according to a tally maintained by LifeNews.com, an anti-abortion site.

The thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted on a daily basis is rapidly dissipating, and our streets are becoming more uncivilized with each passing day.

If this is happening while economic conditions are still relatively stable, what will happen once things start getting really crazy out there?

In some parts of the world, the food crisis has already reached critical levels.  For example, the government of Sri Lanka has actually shortened the work week so that workers will have more time to grow their own food

Sri Lanka’s federal government on Monday approved a proposal that would shorten the work week of most public sector staff to four days so that workers will have time to farm their own crops, Reuters reported Tuesday, noting the measure aims to combat Sri Lanka’s worsening food shortages caused by a recent economic crisis.

“Sri Lanka’s Cabinet late on Monday approved a proposal for public sector workers to be given leave every Friday for the next three months, partly because the fuel shortage made commuting difficult and also to encourage them to farm,” Reuters reported on June 14.

Over in Africa, the United Nations has stopped feeding approximately 1.7 million citizens of South Sudan because they simply do not have enough funding to feed the rapidly growing throngs of desperately hungry people…

The World Food Programme has been forced to stop providing food aid to around 1.7 million people in South Sudan, because of a lack of funding. The UN-run organization will still reach 4.5 million people, but many will miss out on vital resources.

According to BBC News, over half the population of South Sudan is currently facing hunger due to floods, localized drought, continuing conflict, and rising food prices. Marwa Awad is from the World Food Programme and is in the northern town of Bentiu in South Sudan, where she has been talking to people about the effects the cuts to aid are having.

All of the experts are telling us that the global food crisis is going to get a lot worse as the months roll along.

If the UN has already reached the limit of what they are able to do, who is going to help the millions upon millions of hungry people that will soon need help in order to survive?

Here in the U.S., food production has been affected by a bizarre series of disasters, and we are being warned that much less will be produced this year than originally anticipated.  I think that one expert summed up the current situation very well when he warned that “we are teetering on the edge right now”

Pennsylvania farmers are being “crushed” by the record cost of diesel – so much so, that questions about a food crisis are starting to loom, the Morning Call reported.

One farmer in Lehigh County is quoted as saying: “I’ve got a tractor hooked up to my corn planter out here, no diesel fuel, and I can’t afford to get any.”

That farmer was airing his gripes to Kyle Kotzmoyer, a legislative affairs specialist for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau. Kotzmoyer then turned around and testified to state lawmakers: “We have reached that point to where it is very close to being a sinking ship. We are teetering on the edge right now.”

If we eventually get to a point where food prices spiral completely out of control and there are widespread shortages, do you think that those living in our core urban areas will respond with grace and patience?

Of course not.

Instead, people will go absolutely nuts.

We got a small preview of what is to come during the Arab Spring of 2011.  There were serious food shortages around the world that year, and that resulted in tremendous civil unrest.

Here in the United States, most people do not have large amounts of food stored up, and that is especially true in our largest cities.

So we better hope that the rapidly growing global food crisis does not affect us too severely, because the truth is that we are definitely not equipped to handle such a scenario.

An American “Green Revolution”

This is out of Australia.They are discussing the outrageous costs that are going ballistic inside the United States.

USA
Outrageous costs.

Everyone can see…

The Engineered Stagflationary Collapse Has Arrived – Here’s What Happens Next

Saturday, Jun 18, 2022 – 11:40 AM

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

In my 16 years as an alternative economist and political writer I have spent around half that time warning that the ultimate outcome of the Federal Reserve’s stimulus model would be a stagflationary collapse. Not a deflationary collapse, or an inflationary collapse, but a stagflationary collapse. The reasons for this were very specific – Mass debt creation was being countered with MORE debt creation while many central banks have been simultaneously devaluing their currencies through QE measures. On top of that, the US is in the unique position of relying on the world reserve status of the dollar and that status is diminishing.

It was only a matter of time before the to forces of deflation and inflation met in the middle to create stagflation. In my article ‘Infrastructure Bills Do Not Lead To Recovery, Only Increased Federal Control’, published in April of 2021, I stated that:

Production of fiat money is not the same as real production within the economy… Trillions of dollars in public works programs might create more jobs, but it will also inflate prices as the dollar goes into decline. So, unless wages are adjusted constantly according to price increases, people will have jobs, but still won’t be able to afford a comfortable standard of living. This leads to stagflation, in which prices continue to rise while wages and consumption stagnate.

Another Catch-22 to consider is that if inflation becomes rampant, the Federal Reserve may be compelled (or claim they are compelled) to raise interest rates significantly in a short span of time. This means an immediate slowdown in the flow of overnight loans to major banks, an immediate slowdown in loans to large and small businesses, an immediate crash in credit options for consumers, and an overall crash in consumer spending. You might recognize this as the recipe that created the 1981-1982 recession, the third-worst in the 20th century.

In other words, the choice is stagflation, or deflationary depression.”

It’s clear today what the Fed has chosen. It’s important to remember that throughout 2020 and 2021 the mainstream media, the central bank and most government officials were telling the public that inflation was “transitory.” Suddenly in the past few months this has changed and now even Janet Yellen has admitted that she was “wrong” on inflation. This is a misdirection, however, because the Fed knows exactly what it is doing and always has. Yellen denied reality, but she knew she was denying reality. In other words, she was not mistaken about the economic crisis, she lied about it.

As I outlined last December in my article ‘The Fed’s Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error’:

‘First and foremost, no, the Fed is not motivated by profits, at least not primarily. The Fed is able to print wealth at will, they don’t care about profits – They care about power and centralization. Would they sacrifice “the golden goose” of US markets in order to gain more power and full bore globalism? Absolutely. Would central bankers sacrifice the dollar and blow up the Fed as an institution in order to force a global currency system on the masses? There is no doubt; they’ve put the US economy at risk in the past in order to get more centralization.’

The Fed has known for years that the current path would lead to inflation and then market destruction, and here’s the proof – Fed Chairman Jerome Powell actually warned about this exact outcome in October of 2012:

“I have concerns about more purchases. As others have pointed out, the dealer community is now assuming close to a $4 trillion balance sheet and purchases through the first quarter of 2014. I admit that is a much stronger reaction than I anticipated, and I am uncomfortable with it for a couple of reasons.First, the question, why stop at $4 trillion? The market in most cases will cheer us for doing more. It will never be enough for the market. Our models will always tell us that we are helping the economy, and I will probably always feel that those benefits are overestimated. And we will be able to tell ourselves that market function is not impaired and that inflation expectations are under control. What is to stop us, other than much faster economic growth, which it is probably not in our power to produce?

When it is time for us to sell, or even to stop buying, the response could be quite strong; there is every reason to expect a strong response. So there are a couple of ways to look at it. It is about $1.2 trillion in sales; you take 60 months, you get about $20 billion a month. That is a very doable thing, it sounds like, in a market where the norm by the middle of next year is $80 billion a month. Another way to look at it, though, is that it’s not so much the sale, the duration; it’s also unloading our short volatility position.”

As we all now know, the Fed waited until their balance sheet was far larger and until the economy was MUCH weaker than it was in 2012 to unleash tightening measures. They KNEW the whole time exactly what was going to happen.

It is no coincidence that the culmination of the Fed’s stimulus bonanza has arrived right after the incredible damage done to the economy and the global supply chain by the covid lockdowns. It is no coincidence that these two events work together to create the perfect stagflationary scenario. And, it’s no coincidence that the only people who benefit from these conditions are proponents of the “Great Reset” ideology at the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions. This is an engineered collapse that has been in the works for many years.

The goal is to “reset” the world, to erase what’s left of free market systems, and to establish what they call the “Shared Economy” system. This system is one in which the people who survive the crash will be made utterly dependent on government through Universal Basic Income and one that will restrict all resource usage in the name of “carbon reduction.” According to the WEF, you will own nothing and you will like it.

The collapse is engineered to create crisis conditions so frightening that they expect the majority of the public to submit to a collectivist hive mind lifestyle with greatly reduced standards. This would be accomplished through UBI, digital currency models, carbon taxation, population reduction, rationing of all commodities and a social credit system. The goal, in other words, is complete control through technocratic authoritarianism.

All of this is dependent on the exploitation of crisis events to create fear in the population. Now that economic destabilization has arrived, what happens next? Here are my predictions…

The Fed Will Hike Interest Rates More Than Expected, But Not Enough To Stop Inflation

Today, we are witnessing the poisonous fruits of a decade-plus of massive fiat money creation and we are now at the stage where the Fed will reveal its true plan. Hiking interest rates fast, or hiking them slow. Fast hikes will mean an almost immediate crash in markets (beyond what we have already seen), slow hikes will mean a drawn out process of price inflation and general uncertainty.

I believe the Fed will hike more than expected, but not enough to actually slow inflation in necessities. There will be an overall decline in luxury items, recreation commerce and non-essentials, but most other goods will continue to climb in cost. It is to the advantage of globalists to keep the inflation train running for another year or longer.

In the end, though, the central bank WILL declare that the pace of interest rates is not enough to stop inflation and they will revert to a Volcker-like strategy, pushing rates up so high that the economy simply stops functioning altogether.

Markets Will Crash And Unemployment Will Abruptly Spike

Stock markets are utterly dependent on Fed stimulus and easy money through low interest rate loans – This is a fact. Without low rates and QE, corporations cannot engage in stock buybacks. Meaning, the tools for artificially inflating equities are disappearing. We are already seeing the effects of this now with markets dropping 20% or more.

The Fed will not capitulate. They will continue to hike regardless of the market reaction.

As far as jobs are concerned, Biden and many mainstream economists constantly applaud the low unemployment rate as proof that the American economy is “strong,” but this is an illusion. Covid stimulus measures temporarily created a dynamic in which businesses needed increased staff to deal with excess retail spending. Now, the covid checks have stopped and Americans have maxed out their credit cards. There is nothing left to keep the system afloat.

Businesses will start making large job cuts throughout the last half of 2022.

Price Controls

I have no doubt that Joe Biden and Democrats will seek to enforce price controls on many goods as inflation continues, and there will be a handful of Republicans that will support the tactic. Price controls actually lead to a reduction in supply because they remove all profits and thus all incentive for manufacturers to keep producing goods. What usually happens at that point is government steps in to nationalize manufacturing, but this will be substandard production and at a much lower yield.

In the end, supplies are reduced even further and prices go even higher on the black market because no one can get their hands on most goods anyway.

Rationing

Yes, rationing at the manufacturing and distribution level is going to happen, so be sure to buy what you need now before it does. Rationing occurs in the wake of price controls or supply chain disruptions, and usually this coincides with a government propaganda campaign against “hoarders.”

They will hold up a few exaggerated examples of people who buy truckloads of merchandise to scalp prices on the black market. Then, not long after, they will accuse preppers and anyone who bought goods BEFORE the crisis of “hoarding” simply because they planned ahead.

Rationing is not only about controlling the supply of necessities and thus controlling the population by proxy; it is also about creating an atmosphere of blame and suspicion within the public and getting them to snitch on or attack anyone that is prepared. Prepared people represent a threat to the establishment, so expect to be demonized in the media and organize with other prepared people to protect yourself.

Be Ready, It Only Gets Worse From Here On

It might sound like I am predicting success of the Great Reset program, but I actually believe the globalists will fail in the end. That’s not going to stop them from making the attempt. Also, the above scenarios are only predictions for the near term (within the next couple of years). There will be many other problems that stem from these situations.

Naturally, food riots and other mob actions will become more commonplace, perhaps not this year, but by the end of 2023 they will definitely be a problem. This will coincide with the return of political unrest in the US as leftist factions, encouraged by globalist foundations, demand more government intervention in poverty. At the same time, conservatives will demand less government interference and less tyranny.

At bottom, the people who are prepared might be called a lot of mean names, but as long as we organize and work together, we will survive. Many unprepared people will NOT survive. Understand that the economic conditions ahead of us are historically destructive; there is no way that serious consequences can be avoided for a large part of the population, if only because they refuse to listen and to take proper steps to protect themselves.

The denial is over. The crash is here. Time to take action if you have not done so already.

Japan to attend NATO summit for first time

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has said he will attend this month’s NATO summit in Madrid, becoming the country’s first leader to join a top meeting of the transatlantic group.

The announcement on Wednesday comes ahead of a June 28-30 gathering of the military alliance that is seen as a crunch moment for its 30 members, four months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Sweden and Finland, which have applied to join NATO, are sending delegations to the summit, and South Korea’s new President Yoon Suk-yeol will also be the first leader from his country to attend.

Japan, a key United States ally and not a NATO member, has delivered defensive supplies to Ukraine and imposed tough sanctions on Russia in tandem with the other Group of Seven (G7) countries.

“As the only Asian country in the G7, Japan’s diplomatic capabilities are being tested,” Kishida told reporters.

His attendance at the NATO summit will be “the first time for a Japanese prime minister”, he said, adding that he intends to highlight the link between security concerns in Europe and Asia.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

Is it me, or is there something very wrong with this picture?

The last time I checked, “NATO” stood for “North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”    Emphasis on “Atlantic.”

In that same vein, the last time I checked, Japan was in the PACIFIC.

How is there a “fit” for Japan and NATO, unless of course, Russia is 100% correct that NATO is simply an aggressive military alliance designed to encircle Russia?

As if what NATO is doing with Ukraine isn’t aggressive enough, now they’ve moving to bring Japan into the fold?

Clearly these people are not going to stop until they ARE stopped.

When the move comes to put a stop to NATO, I hope Americans and Europeans understand, we brought this upon ourselves by allowing our public servants (in NATO and at home) to run wild and create an existential threat to Russia.

We are in the wrong and we are setting the stage for a comeuppance for OURSELVES the likes of which humanity itself will be lucky to survive.

A warning to Americans

This following video is being passed forward through all the alternative websites. Gonzalo Lira has a warning, and while he is just repeating stuff that you all realize, this new “wrinkle” is actually frightening.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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Cool animal miniatures, Ukraine geopolitics, crazy America, and Ghana Dancing Pallbearers Figurines

If you don't know what you're doing, neither does your enemy.
- Joe Tzu

The one thing that seems to me to be obvious is that Russia means it when they say the US is incapable of negotiation, and the Russians are not in any hurry because they are draining the west. They know that no promise is any more important than it is meaningless.

So, I keep learning more by watching only what Russia does. Everyone else (except Turkey) are running around like recently decapitated chickens.

They also appear to know (like China) that the only way to break the US/NATO is to be patient and watch them do it by themselves. Russia knows there is limited support for the governments of many of the “enemies of Russia” type nations. These same that have openly displayed their own form of Nazi behavior, some for many decades.

The EU volunteered to be destroyed. The US also negatively affected everyone in Europe and Asia, Africa as well as the two America’s. These nations don’t make friends.

A slow going, fewest casualties, most protecting the environment and housing, assisting in delivery of wheat to the world, clearing out a nest of Nazi’s out of control, rebuilding cities, controlling the nuclear plants to deliver electricity…

This sounds more like the complaint about the Romans from “The Life of Brian” (what have the Romans ever done for us)

The western nations that are being unfriendly are losing their shit watching Russia become what the US has ceased to be.

HIMARS

010 HIMARS in Jordan DVIDS 1170x610 1
010 HIMARS in Jordan DVIDS 1170×610 1

Do you all remember those HIMARS that the US has sent to Ukraine? The US wasn’t going to send the long range ammo so they couldn’t be used for terror bombing of Russian cities. Some of us have been cynical enough to suggest that the long range ammo would get there anyhow (in a plausibly deniable way of course) now look….

Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak has announced that the country will acquire 500 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to support its military modernization efforts.

In a social media post, the minister revealed that he has signed a letter of request (LOR) to acquire US-made M142 HIMARS launchers.

Poland-based factories will reportedly produce some significant components of the system to ensure a “high level of Polonization.”

The country also seeks to ensure that the weapon system can easily be integrated with its battlefield management system.

“We are increasing the capabilities of our rocket and artillery forces,” Błaszczak said. “I have signed an LOR related to the acquisition of about 500 M142 HIMARS launchers for more than 80 batteries of the Homar system.”

Polish armaments agency spokesperson Lt. Col. Krzysztof Płatek said that the technology transfer for the production of HIMARS’ local components would go into a Polish domestic effort called HOMAR...

From HERE

Melt In Your Mouth Pork Belly That Makes U Go Mmm! Dong Po Rou 东坡肉 Chinese Braised Pork Belly Recipe

Go ahead and eat like MM! Yum!

Biden’s Foreign Policy Is One Big Mess

"If you have two friends, better to make them both your enemies. 

Then, in the future, you will be able to control your own people better by saying, "There are mean people over there. That is why we need your guns." 

-Joe Tzu

Over the last months I have written little about other U.S. foreign policy issues than the war in Ukraine.

A short review shows that there is little that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken or his president could count as a success.

Last month Biden traveled to Asia where he had meetings with the QUAD (Australia, Japan, India and the U.S.) as well as with South Asian leaders.

The QUAD meeting was a failure as India showed no sign of joining the other three in their condemnation of Russia. Instead of sanctioning  Russia it is buying more oil from Russia which offers decent rebates. Such disunity does not look good for a U.S. designed anti-China coalition.

Most noted though was that Biden came to Asia with empty hands:

Months after U.S. President Joe Biden first indicated that his administration would launch a new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) that would signal strengthened U.S. engagement with Asian economies, the president, together with the leaders of a dozen countries from across Asia, announced the launch of the IPEF in Tokyo on May 23. 
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The slow process of determining what will be in the four “pillars” of the IPEF, how negotiations will be handled due to a division of labor between the U.S. trade representative and the commerce secretary, and uncertainty about which governments would sign up have deepened the ambivalence.

As a result of this ambivalence, the joint statement launching the framework referred to “collective discussions toward future negotiations,” indicating that there is more work to do to flesh out the initiative.

Asian governments are not wrong to have mixed feelings about the IPEF. U.S. trade officials plan to seek higher labor and environmental performances from negotiating partners, but they have also indicated that they are not prepared to offer access to the U.S. market—let alone pursue a TPP-style free trade agreement.

Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad said that the new US-led trade group IPEF is intended to ‘isolate China’. It will be unsuccessful doing that as it the whole idea is likely to fail.

As a writer for the Lowy Institute in Sydney opined in the New York Times:

Mr. Biden huddled last week with leaders of the four-nation “Quad” group formed to counter Beijing, vowed to defend Taiwan against China and introduced a new economic pact involving a dozen nations to shore up U.S. economic influence in the region.

Yet China is already winning throughout much of Asia on both the economic and diplomatic fronts, and nothing the United States is doing seems likely to change that. 
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The Biden administration’s answer, unveiled last week in Tokyo, is its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. It falls far short.

The plan calls for cooperation on trade, supply chains, infrastructure and fighting corruption. But it does not include better access to the huge U.S. import market, a crucial carrot that normally underpins trade agreements. 
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Meanwhile, China has forged ahead. State-owned companies have locked up big projects around the region, often under the umbrella of China’s sprawling Belt and Road Initiative.

China also practices persistent diplomacy. Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s travels in Southeast Asia and the Pacific have far outstripped the pace of his U.S. counterpart, Antony Blinken. Despite the fanfare of Mr. Biden’s recent trip to Asia, it was his first to the region since taking office 16 months ago and included visits only to close allies South Korea and Japan. 
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Competing with China in Asia will not be easy. But it starts with recognizing that right now the United States is losing.

Those words, coming from a staunch U.S. ally, are pretty harsh.

Another area where current U.S. foreign policy is failing is in the Americas. Biden is currently hosting the ‘summit’ of the Organization of American States. The head of states of at least 7 of the 34 OAS member states were not invited or declined to come:

Mr. Biden’s insistence that the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela not attend the summit was seen in many capitals as a sign of U.S. imperialism and an unwillingness to address in an honest way the complex issues in the region.

The three Central American nations known as the Northern Triangle — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — which along with Mexico are the source of about 66 percent of the illegal migration at the U.S. border, decided to send their foreign ministers to the summit as a signal of their displeasure.

Biden’s (or Blinken’s) ideological argument that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are ‘dictatorships’ does not make much sense when one learns that the unelected acting president of Haiti, Ariel Henry, was invited even though he is under suspicion of having ordered the murder of his predecessor Jovenel Moïse.

Biden again came with empty hands:

Administration officials said that Mr. Biden would propose reforms to the Inter-American Development Bank to encourage more private investment in the region and investments of $300 million by the United States to combat food insecurity. On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced pledges of $1.9 billion in investments by private companies over the next several years.

But it is not clear that the investments will be robust enough to prevent those countries from turning to China for help, a key goal for Mr. Biden.

The foreign policy establishment is not happy with this:

Richard N. Haass @RichardHaass - 11:44 UTC · Jun 7, 2022

The Summit of the Americas looks to be a debacle, a diplomatic own goal. The US has no trade proposal, no immigration policy, & no infrastructure package. Instead, the focus is on who will & will not be there. Unclear is why we pressed for it to happen.

U.S. policy in the Middle East is stuck. The nuclear agreement with Iran is unlikely to be revived under Biden as he has rejected to lift Trump’s terror designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. His planned visit to Saudi Arabia, to beg for more and cheaper oil, has been moved to some uncertain future date. The leader of Saudi Arabia is still miffed about Biden previously snubbing him. He also wants to continue his OPEC+ agreement with Russia and others oil producer to prevent lower oil prices.

It does not help that the Democratic leaning retired General John R. Allen is under investigation for having lobbied for Qatar, the arch rival of Saudi Arabia. Allen is leading the equally Democratic leaning Brookings Institute which has received major donations from Qatar.

On its anti-China policy the Biden administration had two other setbacks. It had banned solar modules from China over alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang where the raw materials for making these modules is coming from. This, and a minor trade dispute, led to supply crisis for solar panels and stopped some major ‘green energy’ projects. Biden reacted to that by signing an emergency authorization to lift tariffs on solar modules from southeast Asian ‘producers’ which are in fact reselling Chinese produced ones.

The State Department also seems confused about its own anti-China policy:

The U.S. State Department has updated its fact sheet on Taiwan again, to reinstate a line about not supporting formal independence for the Chinese-claimed, democratically-governed island.

One might argue that Biden’s plan to lure Russia into a war in Ukraine has worked well. NATO is at least temporarily united and the EU under strict U.S. control. But the monetary assault on Russia via sanctions has turned out to be a total failure with the ruble gaining new heights. The effects of the sanctions have instead created another supply shock with prices for oil, fertilizer and wheat going through the roof.

The World Bank has downgraded its global growth predictions and is warning of stagflation. The average gasoline price in the U.S. has hit $5 per gallon and is likely to increase further. General inflation has markedly increased thought the causes get misidentified. This while the stock and house markets are more or less in free fall.

It does not look good at all for the Democrats in the upcoming mid-term election or a reelection of Biden in 2024.

Morale in the White House is down:

President Joe Biden and his aides have grown increasingly frustrated by their inability to turn the tide against a cascade of challenges threatening to overwhelm the administration.

Soaring global inflation. Rising fuel prices. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A Supreme Court poised to take away a constitutional right. A potentially resurgent pandemic. A Congress too deadlocked to tackle sweeping gun safety legislation even amid an onslaught of mass shootings.

In crisis after crisis, the White House has found itself either limited or helpless in its efforts to combat the forces pummeling them. Morale inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is plummeting amid growing fears that the parallels to Jimmy Carter, another first-term Democrat plagued by soaring prices and a foreign policy morass, will stick.

Biden could still save his bacon by replacing his ideological minded secretary of state and national security advisor with capable realists. The above list includes enough reasons to do so.

He also needs to shut down the war in Ukraine. He could tell Zelensky to end the senseless fighting and to submit to Russia’s demands. Sanctions against Russia could then be lifted and a further oil price increase prevented. (As the war has already moved off the front pages this is likely doable.)

Biden though has never shown the necessary flexibility to do either.

Posted by b on June 8, 2022 at 16:24 UTC | Permalink

A comment

Yesterday, I posted a comment aimed at proving the Outlaw US Empire misgoverns because it lives within a fantasy land of its own creation that ignores reality. 

Today's article by b serves to prove and reinforce that contention. What's happening isn't just a result of Biden's misgovernance as it's been ongoing for decades. 

The first manifestation of Fantasy Land was the creeping falsification of everything that began with WW2 censorship followed by the creation of an agency--CIA--whose activities had to be lied about as well as the actual thrust of US foreign--Imperial--policy. 

And the federal government and the two major political parties were able to get away with their lies. Indeed, the 1948 lie of a War Scare was needed to keep Wallace from ousting Truman as president with Wallace splitting the D-Party vote. That's how long the crap's been ongoing. The lies were then escalated massively with the falsification of economic figures that really took-off at the behest of CIA-VEEP GHW Bush in 1981--Something had to be done to show "Voodoo Economics" was viable. Then Greenspan was brought in to further accelerate Neoliberal economic policies and the regulatory agencies were turned over to Wall Street for it to run and thus further ruin the USA's real economy.

Real economic growth within the Outlaw US Empire ceased in the late 1990s with the bursting of the Dot.com bubble. Prior to that it was recognized that the Rentier Empire needed to increase the value of the collateral backing the dollar while a certain clique wanted to use that need as cover for executing the Zionist dream of expansion within Southwest Asia, but to do that a powerful justification needed to be supplied. Enter 911 and by 2003 the theft of Iraq's resource base. And the fantasy domestic economy seemed to boom, until 2007-8 when it went bust. There was a joke during Clinton's reign about the surge in the number of jobs, the quip being: Yeah, I have three of them. A long-term indicator of all that at the real economy level is displayed in this employment chart, the blue line being the real line that measures real unemployment prior to its falsification. From 2000 onward, that chart shows you why elections needed to be manipulated and the Duopoly solidified. The aberration, or perhaps better would be the hubristic overconfidence of Neoliberal Ds, was Trump's upset victory which in many respected threw off the Neoliberal timetable it planned to pursue. Trump's overt pointing out of the huge damage incurred by the real economy was excellent politics that attracted many voters, particularly many voters who usually don't vote, and that reality had to be quashed. Thus Russiagate, which provided proof of the great depth of corruption within the US Federal government.

With H. Clinton damaged beyond repair, the Ds were left with Biden as their only malleable figurehead. It could be argued the pandemic was unleashed to discredit Trump and to provide the needed cover for the required 2020 election manipulations since Trump's mishandling of the pandemic couldn't be counted on to overcome his still very strong real economy popularity, although his policies there were just as bad as Biden's have proven. Currently, the politicos misgoverning are all ancient and beyond retirement. But who is out there that can replace them that isn't already a Deep State tool? The answer to that question requires new commentary.

Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 8 2022 18:08 utc | 32

I think I love You (2021 Version) by The Partridge Family

A time machine to the late 1960s.

China says all IAEA member states must agree before Aukus nuclear sub project begins

  • Chinese foreign ministry says IAEA decided to establish formal agenda to discuss issues that could affect Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
  • Australia could become the first non-nuclear weapon state to field a nuclear-powered submarine, absolutely creating a loophole in the IAEA inspection system
The nuclear submarine project between Australia, the United States and Britain should not begin until ALL International Atomic Energy Agency members agree, China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that at China’s request, the IAEA had for the third time decided to establish a special formal agenda to discuss issues around the Aukus group’s nuclear submarine cooperation regarding the transfer, safeguarding and supervision of nuclear materials, which could affect the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

“China has repeatedly stressed that the cooperation between the United States, Britain and Australia on nuclear submarines poses a serious nuclear proliferation risk, affects the international nuclear non-proliferation system, intensifies the arms race and undermines regional peace and stability,” Zhao said in Beijing.
More HERE

Giant Skull Armchair Designed By Gregory Besson

"Never interrupt my nap while my State Department is in the middle of making a mistake." -Joe Tzu

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Parisian designer Gregory Besson imagined an armchair that takes the shape of a skull, a theme that has been treated many times in the design area. Conceived with fiberglass and provided with a high quality leather seat, each creation is unique and will be made on demand.

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Mazzy Star – Flowers in December (Live on 2 Meter Sessions)

"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them."

- Julius Nyerere

Haunting and sweet. She has such a unique sound.

A fine Joe Tzu quote

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US imports from China rose to an all-time record after seasonal adjustment in April, despite the Shanghai lockdown and other Covid-related blockages

The unrelenting and repeated efforts to talk down the Chinese economy has once again dismissed by the monthly, quarterly, or yearly raw data.

China exports to US jump, contrary to press reports

By David P. Goldman
US imports from China rose to an all-time record after seasonal adjustment in April, despite the Shanghai lockdown and other Covid-related blockages in the Chinese economy. That isn’t what you read in Bloomberg News, whose 30 economists and 100 full-time economics reporters apparently haven’t learned the difference between seasonally adjusted and unadjusted data.

From HERE

Artist’s Stunning and Spooky Abandoned Movie Theater Diorama Is Too Real Not to Believe In

When climbing stairs, better to fall repeatedly and make yourself look weak. That way, people will never be able to tell how weak you actually are."

~ Joe Tzu

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Japanese model artist Takatsu breathtaking diorama is one that is taking us down memory lane with a bit of nostalgia–and also one that is so breathtakingly realistic we can’t believe they’re not photographs!

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A Comment

We say 'NATO' because it sounds a lot more impressive than "America and a pack of poodles."

-Eugene Debs

“Fix a knife”: US diplomats admit to deliberately hyping human rights in Xinjiang and the US counterattacks

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China’s Qiantu K20 Two-Seater EV Costs Just $13,000 Yet Is Really Quick

Andrei Nedelea – Tuesday

Its top version has a dual-motor setup with 214 horsepower and it can sprint to 100 km/h (62 mph) in 4.7 seconds.

Quiantu made quite a splash back in 2015 when it unveiled its fully-electric K50 sports car that went into production in 2018 and was later also made available as a drop-top. However, costing well over $100,000 to buy in its native China, it only found a few hundred buyers before being discontinued in 2020.。。。read more

You Can Now Buy Ghana Dancing Pallbearers Figurines

"We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we kmow they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying."

 -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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JMG 1/64 Miniatures, a Hong Kong based figurine workshop has released the “Funeral Coffin Dance” figurines. Dancing with the coffin is an ancient tradition common in Ghana. The inhabitants of this country hire special dancers for the funeral to cheerfully send the dead to the next world.

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There are two sets. Set A has 7 people with a coffin. Set B has 5 people, with 4 of them crawling on the floor with the coffin on their back.

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Set A costs US$49 while set B costs US$40. They are available for preorder til April 24. The shop supports international shipping.

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It Appears the Decision Has Been Made: There won’t be a “Ukraine” Anymore

A small announcement made today inside Ukraine carries utterly enormous implications,  It now appears a decision may have been made that there won’t be a “Ukraine” anymore . . .

The announcement of a small change was made by the head of the military-civilian administration of the region, Volodymyr Saldo.  He said quite simply “Residents of all Ukraine, regardless of the place of registration, will now be able to apply for a Russian passport in the Kherson region.”

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

Yet the implications of this seemingly trivial announcement, are staggering:  If residents of “all Ukraine, regardless of the place of registration” can now apply for Russian Passports, then they would all be “Russian” and not “Ukrainian” anymore.

If there is still to be in existence a “Ukraine” how will that be if their citizens are now all Russians?

Looks as though there ISN’T going to be a “Ukraine” anymore.

Life-Size 1964 Ford Mustang Recreated In Lego

Damn! That’s a shit-load of legos!

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Business Cards of German and Canadian Government Officials Found in Abandoned Azov Battalion Headquarters in Mariupol

By Sonja Van den Ende on Jun 08, 2022 07:56 pm. LINK

Points to wider western involvement in Ukraine war and association with Neo-Nazi Battalion

[This article presents a Russian view of the war, based on first hand reporting by a journalist whose investigation was made possible by DPR and Russian military protection.—Editors]

Left amidst the ruins of the Azov battalion’s headquarters in Mariupol were the business cards from the German embassy. One was of an attaché named Michael Faul, a Canadian colonel named Colonel Brian Irwin and the French Embassy staff member in Kyiv, First Secretary Christophe Boursin.

According to the following information, Faul now works in the UK: "Michael Faul works at German Embassy London and Consulate General Edinburgh, which is a Federal company with an estimated 766 employees." So he has been relocated or has always been working there, probably for MI6, the UK Secret Service. Last Update: 3/10/2022 5:43 PM (move March 3 to UK), EMAIL: m***@london.diplo.de.

Colonel Robert Brian Irwin, whose bio is interesting: From Ontario, Canada; Decorations for Meritorious Service - Military Division; Meritorious Service Cross; Issued: October 16, 2019; Invested on: May 27, 2021; Rank: Colonel...

As Canada's Defense Attaché to Ukraine from August 2016 to July 2019, Colonel Irwin proved instrumental in achieving Canada's foreign policy goals. He quickly became an influential and important member of the [Canadian] mission [in Ukraine], where he advised successive commanders of the joint task force, promoted security sector reform and actively contributed to military cooperation between the two nations. Known for his professionalism and diplomacy, he has had an undeniable influence on the operations of the Canadian Forces in Ukraine.

The likely authenticity of the documents is enhanced by the fact that in 2018, Irwin had been photographed shaking hands with a member of the Azov Battalion, indicating Canadian government support for the neo-Nazi outfit. […]

The post Business Cards of German and Canadian Government Officials Found in Abandoned Azov Battalion Headquarters in Mariupolappeared first on CovertAction Magazine.

Read in browser »

An interesting observation…

"Chinese ambassador to Moscow has said US hegemony must be ended. US now buying near double the oil from Russia compared to what it was buying prior to banning Russian oil... I suspect it would take very little to send US economy into a very fast death spiral."

Artist Kerri Pajutee Creates Incredibly Realistic Miniature Animal Sculptures

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Artist Kerri Pajutee creates incredibly beautiful, real-looking animal sculptures that are to 1:12 to actual size. Pajutee’s remarkable attention to detail imbues each of her miniatures with distinct personality and feeling, particularly when the animal appears to be in motion, with another animal or if something else is happening, such as a haircut. While Pajutee is self-taught, she has found great success in doing something she loves.

“As a self-taught artist, I revel in the creative process. Sculpting has afforded me a means of expression and provided me with over four decades of never-ending trial and fascination. Inspired by the animals I have come to know, my art is motivated by my desire to capture and express that ‘spark’ of personality, while reflecting a personal encounter or endearing memory that will delight the heart and bring a smile to the face of the observer.”

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pajutee miniatures 69426728 1099037976955418 6073546175668234887 n
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Meanwhile…

With so much happening, this announcement during Zakharova’s weekly briefing, here’s some stuff important enough to pass along:

"On June 9-10, 2022, the XX International Likhachev Scientific Readings will be held in St. Petersburg. They are held in accordance with the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin "On Perpetuating the Memory of D.S. Likhachev" No. 587 of May 23, 2001. The readings are held with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia.

"From year to year, this authoritative forum gathers in the city on the Neva River representatives of the scientific and creative intelligentsia, prominent public figures, politicians and experts from different countries for a constructive exchange of views on a wide range of issues. For two decades, the International Likhachev Readings have established themselves as an authoritative discussion platform. In the current situation, such a format is more than in demand, a non-politicized discussion of trends in modern international relations and the development of world processes in various fields are more relevant than ever.

"This year's Readings will be devoted to the important theme for the entire world community "Global conflict and the contours of the new world order"."

Also there’s this important announcement:

"As we reported at the last briefing, the XXV St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) will be held on June 15-18.

"Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is scheduled to take part in the Forum's events. The relevant formats and bilateral talks between the Russian Foreign Minister are currently being worked out.

"On June 16, as part of the business program, a panel discussion on the topic "The dictatorship of neoliberalism through the eyes of Russian compatriots abroad" will be organized by the Russian Foreign Ministry together with the Rossiya Segodnya International News Agency.

"It is planned to discuss the devaluation of the values of the Western model of liberal democracy on specific examples, in order to talk not only about theory, but also based on practice. We will talk about gross violations of human rights, Russian citizens and our compatriots, but also in principle in the breakdown of all that the West takes credit for itself and what is the basis of the democratic development of the state. There will be interesting participants, experts. I invite everyone."

COVERT INTEL; American Tactical Nukes SHIPPED!

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PAYWALL. Article HERE.
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Homeless cat sits by the road and waits for help

A great story.

A fine Joe Tzu quote

JoeTzu2
JoeTzu2

Such a tiny man, but what a great voice!

Ronnie James Dio singing Heaven & Hell Heaven and Hell -FHD.

Kung Pao Chicken, how to make authentic Kung Pao sauce 宫保鸡丁

Eat like MM! Yummy!

American “Javelin” Anti-Tank Missiles Sent to Ukraine, Are Now FOR SALE on the Dark Web

Javelin with checkout equipment large
Javelin with checkout equipment large

People from Ukraine have posted several American made FGM-148 “Javelins” (photo above) for sale on the Dark Web Marketplace, and on Thief Marketplace.

One posting was made less than three hours ago and the seller advertised “shipping available from Ukraine, specifically Kyiv.”

The seller is charging $30,000 USD for what seems to be just the tube. Unseen is the command Launch Unit, and it is unclear if there is a missile in the tube.

The Sale photos posted with the offering are shown below:

JavelinSalePhoto
JavelinSalePhoto

JavelinSalePhoto 2
JavelinSalePhoto 2

 

A full ensemble of the “Javelin” usually goes for $206,000 USD, with the Command Launch Unit valued at around  $120,000 USD and each missile at about 80K USD, so this posting is “a steal.”  I am not publishing the web address of this sale because I do NOT want these weapons out in public.

Listeners to the Hal Turner Radio Show were told WEEKS AGO, that weapons shipped from the USA to Ukraine as “aid” for Ukraine’s war with Russia, were ending up on the Black Market inside Serbia.  The weapons are being STOLEN by Ukrainians when they arrive in the country, and those Ukrainians are offering the weapons for sale on the Dark Web, then pocketing the money.

Listeners to the show were also told that a full TWO-THIRDS of the weapons being sent to Ukraine, were being stolen and sold on the black market.

Hey America, where do you think your $40 BILLION in “aid” is actually going???   Yes, an awful lot of it is being outright stolen.

In case any of you feel like calling your members of Congress to let them know what you think of what’s going on!

UPDATE 5:24 PM EDT —

The seller also has several other American weapon systems ranging from Stinger MANPADS, Phoenix Ghost Drones, and smalls arms and ammunition.

The United States has reportedly sent 5,500 Javelin tubes to Ukraine, and an unspecified number of command launch units which are needed for firing. The United States has reportedly sent 1/3 of its Javelin inventory to Ukraine in order to combat Russian tanks and other ground vehicles since the February 24th invasion.

COVERT INTEL – Central American Nation Gets Russian Troops & Planes

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PAYWALL. Article HERE.
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The Wallflowers – One Headlight (Official Music Video)

I still enjoy this song over all these years.

A fine Joe Tzu quote

JoeTzu3
JoeTzu3

Not Good Enough! US Could Sell Its ‘Lousy Warships’ To Allies That Were Designed To Fight China In SCS

Earlier this month, US Naval Chief Admiral Michael Gilday advised the House Armed Services Committee that nine Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), some of which were recently commissioned, should be decommissioned owing to unsatisfactory performance.

Despite attempting to outmatch China’s naval fleet, Admiral Gilday had justified plans to get rid of these vessels in the fiscal year 2023.

“I refuse to put an additional dollar against a system that would not be able to track a high-end submarine in today’s environment,” he had told the Committee.

Now, Admiral Gilday has suggested that the Navy can sell some of the vessels to friendly countries and allies, including countries in South America. He made these comments while testifying before the Defense Sub-Committee of the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations while responding to an alternative.

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2022 06 03 20 00
The Navy’s budget request for the Fiscal Year 2023 discloses that nine Freedom-class LCSs will be decommissioned by the end of 2024. Furthermore, two Independence-class LCS will also be decommissioned roughly around the same time, as per the long-term force plan.

The Navy’s estimated FY23 budget has noted that decommissioning the ships will save the service $391 million. This, however, would only fund a fraction of the $3.2 billion costs of the nine littoral combat ships.

This is probably where the idea of selling these ships to friendly countries comes into the picture. Though Admiral Gilday suggested that the ships could be sold, he offered little insight into how that process would take place.

Admiral Gilday stated during the hearing that the decision to decommission the nine Freedom-class LCS — which are fairly young ships and cost billions to develop — was made to “stratify” the Navy’s range of capabilities. He contended, however, that the ships may prove to be beneficial to the navies of US allies and partners.

 

“There are countries in South America which would be able to use these ships that have small crews. Instead of just considering scrapping them as a single option, I think there are others we can look at.”

With high stakes for the US in any conflict that could erupt in the Indo Pacific region (against China), US Navy understandably wants to focus more on the quality of operations that its vessels are designed to undertake. Admiral Gilday admits that the LCS has failed in anti-submarine ops.

Since the LCS was built to operate in shallow areas like the South China Sea, they were welcomed and lauded as part of the US deterrence against China. However, the decommissioning of so many in such a short time is an admission that the costly surface combatants have fallen far short of expectations, reported CNN.

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Littoral Combat Ship USS Gabrielle Giffords operated in the southern South China Sea near the drillship WestCapella in 2020- US Pacific Fleet

The US Navy plans to decommission the vessels to free up funds for a more capable and combat-ready fleet in the face of the growing Chinese threats, especially in the wake of US President Joe Biden’s promise to counter China’s military if it were to attack Taiwan.

A US congressional report has already admitted that the single biggest threat to its security at sea, China, has the largest Navy in the world by size. The millions of dollars spent on building these less than useful Littoral Combat Ships could thus be recovered by selling them to allies with limited offensive objectives than those of the US Navy.

Why Decommission The Freedom-Class LCS?

Admiral Gilday’s suggestion about selling the ships to friendly countries came as a response to Senator Jerry Moran requesting clarity on why the Navy wanted to decommission the Freedom-class LCS.

The Senator questioned whether “other uses” for the ships could be figured out given their previous role in combating drug smuggling.

Moran backed his argument by citing collaborative activities in 2021 between the Dominican Republic’s Navy and the USS Sioux City (LCS-11) in the busting narcotics trade.

“One of the nine Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships was involved in joint exercises with the Dominican Republic Navy, those exercises, as I understand, were successful and they interdicted drug smugglers.”

 

Those navies that would be interested in acquiring Freedom-class LCS would want to make sure that they are combat-ready. However, Admiral Gilday made no pitch to potential buyers based on the vessel’s capabilities.

He explained that the Navy’s decision to decommission the Freedom-class LCSs was based on a review of their “warfighting value,” or lack thereof, in the context of the fleet as a whole.

Admiral Gilday went on to elaborate on the shortcomings of the vessel and its non-utility for the US Navy — a precedent that has been widely known and acknowledged by the service and politicians alike over the last few years.

The Freedom-class LCSs’ “warfighting value” was eventually determined by concerns with its long-in-development anti-submarine warfare (ASW) suite, according to Admiral Gilday. He said that the ASW equipment designed to ‘plug into’ Freedom-class ships is “just ineffective.”

Furthermore, the LCS program has been a non-starter in several ways apart from its inability to counter hostile submarines. There have been several recorded instances of the ship breaking down, one of the most famous ones occurring in 2020 when the USS Detroit broke down in South American waters due to a propulsion system failure.

 

The Freedom-class has suffered several well-publicized mechanical breakdowns, including problems with the propulsion system and the highly complicated “combining gear,” according to The War Zone. In the case of the propulsion system, the US Navy stated last year that it would take years to remedy the problem across the Freedom-class ships, with accompanying costs in the tens of millions of dollars per ship.

 

 

Furthermore, the over-the-horizon anti-ship missile that served as its “main battery” for surface combat was retired a decade ago.

Who Will Buy The ‘Disappointing’ LCS From The US?

Taiwan has been considering the acquisition of the soon-to-be-retired littoral combat ships (LCS) from the US Navy, Deputy Defense Minister Alex Poe had said in April this year. Besides, it had also expressed interest in buying the decommissioned US Warship USS Independence, an LCS with just 11 years of service record.

Taiwan requires hulls to compete with China’s significant fleet size advantage, which continues to expand. The Littoral Combat Ships could be a good fit for the littoral warfighting environment that it is likely to experience. Taiwan has already made it known that it intends to employ asymmetric warfare against China.

Taiwan is already testing anti-ship missiles on several of its high-speed Coast Guard ships. Compared to the ships used by Taiwan for the purpose, the Freedom-class would be a significant improvement. It’s feasible that they could become useful assets for Taiwan if the price was appropriate, especially since they’d be deployed on shorter missions close to home.

2022 06 03 20 0ju2
2022 06 03 20 0ju2

However, all of this is contingent on the reliability of the ship, which has been abysmal. Furthermore, potential buyers of Freedom-class LCS in South America or elsewhere would be required to cover the exorbitant costs of simply operating these ships, which are, by any measure, exceedingly costly to operate.

Furthermore, with no capacity to deploy anti-submarine capabilities, other mission packages in limbo, and a lack of capabilities in other core mission areas, the Freedom-class LCS delivers low operational value relative to the high operating expenses.

So, while the Navy Chief’s suggestion to the Committee could be worth pondering over, there needs to be a detailed plan chalked out by the Navy Chief to make the vessel’s purchase seem like a profitable venture even to already interested buyers.

Chicago Saturday In The Park / 25 Or 6 To 4 Live at Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Ah. What great memories.

Now You Can Touch A Niceballs To Relieve The Stress At Work

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Neil Young – Harvest Moon (unplugged)

I am a long-time Neil Young fan from way, way back.

Europol and CIA operate data mining in the SWIFT system

European data from the SWIFT financial transaction system has been supplied in bulk by Europol to the US Treasury Department for data mining for years. This data ended up with the CIA.

By Erich Moechel

The plans of the EU Commission and the Council of Ministers for Europol to use data mining to monitor mass chats, online forums and e-mail boxes have caused an enormous stir. The fact that became known at the same time that Europol is constantly supplying massive data sets from the European SWIFT financial transaction system to the CIA for data mining has so far gone unnoticed by the public.

Two official reports to the US Congress, available to ORF.at, reveal the amount of data that flows into the USA and the rules governing this transatlantic data mining partnership.

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2022 06 09 09 28

The first document on the subject from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) dates from November 2020. The PCLOB is an independent body in the US Congress that examines new laws and the implementation of projects already passed for possible violations of fundamental and civil rights. At the time of writing this report, the PCLOB was also unaware of the existence of a parallel CIA data mining program for European financial data.

The SWIFT scandal and its aftermath

The data transfers from Europol to the USA are based on the so-called “Terrorist Finance Tracking” agreement between the EU and the USA from 2009. Before that, the CIA had been systematically dealing with huge amounts of data from the SWIFT data center in Culpeper since 2001 , Virginia Self Serviced. Until then, all European transactions had also been mirrored at the SWIFT location in Culpeper. After this scandal broke out in 2006, the European SWIFT data was only processed and stored in the data center in Zoeterwoude (Netherlands) and since 2013 also at the new location in Diessenhofen (Switzerland).

Since the signing of the TFTP agreement in 2009, data from the European SWIFT system has been supplied to the US by Europol, officially to the US Treasury, the US Treasury Department. The algorithms of the same AI applications that the US authorities use to sift through their own foreign payment transactions at SWIFT’s US headquarters in Culpeper were then unleashed on these data volumes from Europe. The results were then also sent to the customer, Europol, and in some cases also to national authorities in the EU area. That was the state of affairs until November 2020, and even the PCLOB, as the responsible supervisory authority, was not yet aware that copies of these massive amounts of data from Europe had been sent to the Central Intelligence Agency since 2016 at the latest.

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2022 06 09 09 29

“More than 40 percent of all searches under the TFTP program are based on inquiries from Europol or EU member states, according to the PCLOB report from the end of 2020. Since the start of the program, 2,750 reports have been sent to Europe, in addition to the report It also includes all datasets that are in any way related to the report.”As far as European data is concerned, the Treasury Department is acting as a de facto outsourced provider to the EU and its governments,” the PCLOB said.

The ominous data sets from third countries

Because Europol itself did not have the license for data mining, European financial transactions in third countries were delivered in bulk to the US Treasury Department for data mining. That should be different now, because at the end of January the European data protection officer ordered that Europol had to delete petabytes of stored data sets. Some of this “bulk data” comes from the national police data collections, since Europol is a service provider for European police authorities in the field of databases and information systems. However, this is a long way from reaching volumes in the petabyte range.

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2022 06 09 09 2c9

So most of it must come from third parties that constantly produce huge amounts of data, and the SWIFT system is of course the first candidate. The ominous “data records from third countries”, which are expressly mentioned several times in the documents accompanying the new Europol regulation and make up a large part of the data, should therefore largely be the transfers from foreign banks to accounts in the EU area. The entire SWIFT system processes 40 million such transactions every day, but these are not individual transfers but bulk interbank accounts that include all such individual transfers of funds or securities.

More HERE

Zero Fucks Coins Allow You To Literally Give Zero Fucks

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2022 06 09 10 35

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What Russia Has To Do After Russia Wins

One of the best from Gonzalo Lira.
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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 5

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Global Mercy, Lagash, the Lost City of Mesopotamia, Ukraine, Western madness, and lots and lots of cats

I am pretty well convinced that the alternative media, and their viewers are completely convinced that the Western “leadership” are bat-shit crazy. And the sad things about this, is that the “leadership” doesn’t have a single clue as to how insane they are. Well, today we will skim through the “news” and take a view of other marginal subjects to put a smile on our collective faces, and cause us to muse about our shared pasts.

Have fun, you all.

Earliest Social Drinking Evidence in the Middle East Found in Israel

Israeli
Israeli

Israeli archaeologists working at the Tel Tsaf site in the Jordan valley have discovered the earliest evidence of social drinking in the Middle East, dating to 5000 BC. Source:  Nejron Photo  / Adobe Stock

Social drinking history in the Middle East has been rewritten with finds at Tel Tsaf, Israel. According to the  Times of Israel  , Israeli archaeologists have found the first evidence of social drinking in the Middle East from a 7,000-year-old settlement site in Jordan Valley. Archaeologists from the University of Haifa came to this conclusion after finding the remains of cereal grains used to produce alcohol in ancient pottery at the ancient site located in the central Jordan Valley.

According to Rosenberg, the Tel Tsaf find is very exciting because it is one of the few known  Chalcolithic sites  in the region, a period of transition from small, undifferentiated agricultural communities to larger, more complex ones that became urban settlements.

“We can imagine Tsaf’s developing community holding largescale events in which large quantities of food and beer are consumed in a social context — and not just in a ceremonial context, ” said Rosenberg.

Read more HERE

Baby Lion Playing With Autumn Leaves

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An adorable 11-week old lion cub named Karis had a very exciting day playing in a pile of autumn leaves that her keeper swept into her enclosure at the Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park in Scotland. This proved to be a very wise decision on her keeper’s part, as she seems to have had the time of her life frolicking around in the pile of leaves.

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​​​​​​​Axon Halts Stun-Gun Drone Project After Exodus Of Ethics Board

Tuesday, Jun 07, 2022 – 10:40 AM

Taser-maker Axon Enterprise Inc. says it will “pause” stun-gun-equipped drone development for schools after some members of its ethics advisory board resigned.

Last Thursday, Axon announced stun-gun-equipped drones and artificial intelligence-powered surveillance systems for schools following the tragic May 24 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Hours after the release, the company’s AI Ethics Advisory Board released a statement specifying it instructed the company to limit a pilot program for the taser drone, only to be used by police. The board said a majority voted against moving forward with the project.

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2022 06 07 15 19

“However, in light of feedback, we are pausing work on this project and refocusing to further engage with key constituencies to fully explore the best path forward,” Chief Executive Rick Smith said in a press release on Sunday.

"It is unfortunate that some members of Axon's ethics advisory panel have chosen to withdraw from directly engaging on these issues before we heard or had a chance to address their technical questions. We respect their choice and will continue to seek diverse perspectives to challenge our thinking and help guide other technology options that we should be considering," Smith continued.

One of the ethics board members, Wael Abd-Almageed, told Reuters he and eight members resigned from the 12-member panel. He said many on the board had significant concerns the drone could be used beyond schools and “exacerbate racial injustice, undermine privacy through surveillance and become more lethal if other weapons were added.”

"What we have right now is just dangerous and irresponsible, and it's not very well thought of and it will have negative societal consequences," he said.

Axon, formerly known as Taser, sells body-worn cameras and policing software to most police departments across the country.

As for now, Axon appears to have shelved the taser drone but shows the dystopic technology coming down the pipe that could be misused by law enforcement and or government agencies against the American people.

Birch Bark Letters Found in Russia are an Ancient Time Capsule

Birch 0
Birch 0

Birch bark letter no. 497, (c. 1340 – 1390 AD) also discovered in Veliky Novgorod . (  Public domain  )

Researchers excavating an estate dating back to the 12th and 15th century, have discovered a complete birch bark letter in the historic city center of Veliky Novgorod in north-western Russia. The letter was well-preserved thanks to the waterlogged clay soil in which it lay since the 12th century and adds to previous knowledge garnered from other birch bark letters found in the area.

More than 1,000 birch bark texts written on bark between 11 th and 15 th centuries have been found to date. They have been immensely significant in changing traditional ideas about literacy rates in ancient Russia, opening a new page in the study of the Russian language, and shedding light on early northern  Russian culture.

Most of the  letters deal with everyday usage, business and personal correspondence, such as instructions, complaints, contracts, news, reminders, and study exercises. They touch on family life and household management, trade and finance, crimes and legal proceedings, travel, military expeditions, and various other types of material, all of which reveal an enormous amount of details of medieval northern Russian life.

Read more HERE

Siberian Farm Cats Are Waiting For Spring To Come In Marvelous Photos By Alla Lebedeva

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Alla loves nothing more than taking pictures of her beloved pets – and it seems the world can’t get enough of them either.

Siberian farmer Alla Lebedeva loves seeing pictures of her pet cats, but it seems the world does too. Unbeknown to her, photographs she has taken of her litter have been reproduced on social media websites with some turned into humorous jokes.

“A couple of years ago I noticed that my pictures had gone viral,” said Alla. “At first I spotted my photos on some website about Norwegian cats – they used my pics twice, without any credit – and now they are going around the world as ‘Norwegian cats’.”

Alla lives with her husband Sergey on a farm in the settlement of Prigorodny, on the outskirts of Barnaul in western Siberia.

They have raised cats for more than a decade, with their first pet, Babushka, becoming the ancestress for the rest of the ever-growing litter. She gave birth to five ginger kittens in 2004 and now the couple’s home is overrun with their furry friends.

Even Alla herself jokes that they live in a Koshlandia (land of cats).

She said: “How many do we have now? To such a question I usually answer ‘a million, maybe more’. They live in the henhouse, and sleep on the polati, and they have three ‘little bedrooms’ there where can they sleep according to how they feel. Our cats protect the chickens and rabbits from rats and mice.”

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Ukrainian military: “Our enemy is not Russia, but Zelensky!”

Ukrainian military: “Our enemy is not Russia, but Zelensky!”

Soldiers and officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who were captured sent a video message to their "commander in chief"

Igor Yakunin

...

Immediately, dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war recorded a video message to Vladimir Zelensky (see our website KP.RU ). A one-minute video in which each of the recaptured Ukrainian soldiers says only one phrase. But the words add up to an accusation against the President of Ukraine.

This, of course, must be seen - young and old, well-fed and exhausted, with bruises and with the faces of rested models. Various. But to the camera they say in unison:

- Volodymyr Zelensky. People are turning to you. Soldiers and officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Who you left to die Like cannon fodder. You tricked us into fighting. Fight against your own people. You filled our homeland with corpses. You bombed schools and churches. You took a peaceful life from the Ukrainians. You left us without food. Without clothing. No connection.

Zelensky appears in the frame for a moment and asks:

- Who am I?

The prisoners answer him:

You are a murderer and a rapist. Marauder. Murderer. And a fascist.

The only girl among the male choir says:

- You have no forgiveness. You have ruined our country.

Others echo her:

- You will answer for it. Russia is not our enemy. Our enemy is you!

The good actor Volodymyr Zelensky, who, by the will of fate and the oligarchs, became the leader of Ukraine, had a great chance in life to play the film role he had already played - the president. It was enough for him to give Ukraine a neutral status and implement the Minsk agreements. And guaranteed to avoid war. Yes, by doing so he would have doomed himself to the curse of the nationalists. And he could have lost his chair if he couldn't handle them.

But he would have saved the country, including even the autonomous Donbass in its composition. And most importantly - thousands of lives.

But Zelensky was more expensive chair.

As a result, he reached the pinnacle of his acting career - he is a superstar, opens festivals in Cannes and makes speeches in a khaki T-shirt in front of the European Parliament.

But Ukraine is on fire, millions of refugees, thousands of soldiers are dying and being taken prisoner. At the same time, the neutral status of the country (if it remains) will still have to be accepted - this is already recognized even by Kyiv's allies. And Donbass will never be part of Ukraine. Like, very similar, and a few more regions.

Is it worth all the chairs and applause of Cannes?

No, this is worth the curses of their own soldiers, their own people.

Watch video

Ukrainian military: “Our enemy is not Russia, but Zelensky!”
Read on WWW.KP.RU: HERE
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Your Show of Shows

At least half the public is already onto the extravagant damage inflicted on our national life by the beneficiaries of the 2020 election….

Clusterfuck Nation
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The unravelling of the USA gets its summer steroid booster shot this Thursday when the political twerk-fest known as the January 6th Select Committee commences prime-time televising of its inquiry into the so-called “insurrection” the day that Congress met to tally the 2020 electoral college vote when hundreds of protesters entered the US Capitol illegally, egged on and enabled by a squad of FBI plants larded through the crowd, and by shadowy figures inside the building who unlocked the doors for them.

The objectives of this extravaganza are A) to soften up the remaining “purple” voters before the midterm election, B) to paint former president Donald Trump as an instigator of the uproar and an enemy-of-the-people so he won’t be able to run for office again, and C) to punish former White House employees and Trump partisans with onerous legal fees so as to knock them off the political game board.

The Party of Chaos certainly doesn’t need to reinforce the mass formation psychosis of its base who maintain that the 2020 election was the fairest-and-squarest in US history. The committee members will chant the talismanic phrase “The Big Lie” ad nauseam to ward off reasonable suspicions that they are the ones doing the lying. Since a kind of maniacal stupidity attends all the party’s doings these days, it could easily backfire on them. Even two years later probes are still pending in several swing states, and only a few weeks ago, the documentary 2000 Mules released time-stamped videocam footage of blatant wholesale drop-box ballot-stuffing around the country.

Lawsuits filed lately also claim the committee itself is illegally constituted, since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disallowed (against the rules) the minority Republicans from appointing their own chosen members. Instead, she did it for them, planting the vehemently hostile rogues Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger on it, meaning no witnesses will be called who might refute pertinent details of the “insurrection” narrative already constructed. Much of the testimony presented will be videotaped interviews with Trump White House officials and there will be no accounting for what may be edited out. In other words, you have an obvious setup for a star chamber, a device for disregarding individual rights and fair procedure.

The context, of course, as I aver above, is a country that is imploding six ways to Sunday — to paraphrase Chuck Schumer, the Party of Chaos’s Senate leader. At least half the public is already onto the extravagant damage inflicted upon our national life by the beneficiaries of the 2020 election. Thanks to “Joe Biden,” the dollar is hemorrhaging value, we instigated a war in Ukraine that will lead to global famine and mass refugee events, oil and natgas are unaffordable thanks to our destabilizing of global distribution networks, spare parts are unavailable for every imaginable machine in the land, the business model for farming is broken, real estate is groaning under rising mortgage interest rates, the CDC is still pushing Covid vaccines despite proof that they are ineffective and harmful, cities are overwhelmed with criminal violence and psychotic homeless drug fiends, and, as a final indignity — actually, an advertisement to the world of our depraved weakness — the US military is hosting drag queen shows at our European air bases.

Are these the circumstances that American voters are expected to endorse in the November election when all these conditions are liable to get a lot worse? Apparently, the Party of Chaos thinks so, since they’re delivering exactly what they stand for. And yet, they’re clearly nervous about it, as if they suffer fugitive doubts that we-the-people are avid for cultural and economic collapse.

My advice, then, is to take the televised January 6th hearings for the grand entertainment it’s intended to be. Enjoy the sob stories of the Capitol Police officers pretending to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Behold the terrible “threat to our Democracy” of the bare-chested interloper in a horned helmet chatting-up security guards in the Senate chamber. Note the “insurrectionists” taking seditious selfies in statuary hall and trying to fob off with souvenir furnishings. See Rep. Liz Cheney fulminate with scorn and disgust against her orange nemesis. Sympathize with committee Chair Bennie G. Thompson as he bangs his gavel and cries for order when any live witness utters the name Ashli Babbitt. Watch Rep. Adam Kinzinger turn on the waterworks. Take it all in and ask yourself: who exactly seeks to subvert this republic of ours?

4,000 Years Ago, Chinese Advances Were Fueled By Mass Beer Production!

mass beer production
mass beer production

What were the important forces and factors that led to notable evolutionary leaps in Chinese culture more than 4,000 years ago? New research identifies one major cultural development that helped initiate high-level civilizational change, and it is an eye-opener. These researchers claim that a significant innovation in brewing technology, which created the possibility for mass beer production, had a profound impact on ancient Chinese peoples, who truly enjoyed the chance to consume this fermented beverage at large-scale public events.

Red rice beer would have been considered desirable for its flavor, its mind-altering effects, and its “sacred” red tint. A team of scientists from China and the United States published their study in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences and it revealed that mass beer production technology led to vigorous trading activity and knowledge exchanges between Neolithic peoples in ancient China, the scientists write in their journal article, and it was this shared excitement about a fermented alcohol product that ultimately helped trigger the birth of dynastic Chinese civilization.

New social linkages produced by certain cultural practices are the seeds from which larger, more advanced, and more ambitious civilizations can emerge. And mass beer production in China thousands of years ago provided a key ingredient for big gatherings and thus bigger social networks. The ancient Chinese civilization began to grow more cohesive and united starting around the fourth millennium BC, as previous divisions were countered by various centralizing forces and factors.

These circumstances set the stage for the ascension of China’s first ruling dynasty, the Xia Dynasty founded by Yu the Great around 2070 BC. Xia Dynasty leaders were able to rule effectively in a country that was now sharing a stronger sense of unified purpose and identity. And mass beer production was instrumental in this evolutionary leap forward in China about 4,000 years ago.

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Dakougang vessels examined in the study, which led to the conclusion that mass beer production capabilities had a profound effect on Chinese development starting about 4,000 years ago. ( Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences )

From Mass Beer Production to Unifying New Feast Networks

Alcohol fermentation as a science was discovered in China at least 9,000 years ago. A Dartmouth College study published in 2021 showed that ceremonial drinking vessels excavated from an ancient burial site at Qiaotou in China’s Zhejiang province contained the preserved traces of red rice beer, confirming that this drink in particular had been consumed for a very long time.

It took a few thousand years for the knowledge of how to make alcohol to spread more widely. The influence of mass beer production and consumption in ancient China created the conditions for meaningful “mass” cultural exchange and knowledge transfer to evolve rapidly.

The Chinese Dawenkou culture , which was built by settlers in the area of modern-day Shandong province in eastern China between 4,600 and 6,700 years ago, created the fermentation recipe and methodology that facilitated mass beer production. They made their distinctive red rice beer in large clay basins known as dakougangs, which represented a major leap forward in alcohol-making technology. It was this technology that was the focus of the new study, which attempted to learn exactly how the dakougangs had been used and for how long.

“Dakougangs were not made in every settlement but were mainly found in large elite burials ,” study co-author Li Liu, a professor in Chinese archaeology at Stanford University, told the South China Morning Post . “It is not clear exactly where dakougangs were made, how they were distributed or if they were traded as commercial items.”

At that time, elites competed for recognition in part by throwing gigantic community feasts. Red rice beer, a specialized product believed to have sacred qualities, would have been highly coveted at such feasts, And consequently dakougang-style fermentation technology would have been in high demand as knowledge of it spread rapidly westward along growing trade networks.

“Individuals who could provide large quantities of such beverages would have been more competitive for status and prestige in the community,” the authors wrote in their Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences article. “Particularly if the drinks were of an exotic type.”

The dakougangs would have been placed out in the open during feasts and other public events. They would have been filled with enough red rice beer to keep the good spirits flowing all day long.

“Feasts could have fostered an element of solidarity among participants, signaled various kinds of information to participants and the broader community, and enhanced prestige of the hosts,” Professor Liu wrote in a separate article on the subject in 2021.

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2022 06 07 16 31

These vessels found at the Yuchisi site, Anhui province, China were analyzed in the mass beer production technology study . ( Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences )

New Study Proves Chinese Dakougangs Held Fermented Elixir

Chinese civilization six thousand years ago was altered by the development of what scholars refer to as an “interaction sphere.” The term was coined by archaeology professor Kwang—chih Chang in the 1980s, and it described a unique period where formerly separate societies were becoming more complex, layered, and interactive as they began to gradually form a more collective mindset.

In their Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences study, the scientists identify the interaction sphere as a period starting in the fourth millennium BC when Neolithic cultures in China “experienced increased transregional interactions, characterized by artifacts with striking similarities being distributed over an unprecedentedly large area, including certain forms of ceramic vessels .” These vessels were the dakougangs, which had been unearthed during excavations of elite burials in all parts of the country.

Previous to this new study, the actual purpose of the 16-28-inch (40-70-centimeter) tall dakougangs had eluded scholars. To determine how they were actually used, the scientists analyzed microfossil remains of fungi, starch, and phytoliths found in recovered dakougangs and from jars and cups removed during excavations at the late Dawenkou culture site of Yuchisi in Anhui province .

These tests revealed the large basins and the drinking vessels had in fact contained a fermented beverage. This beverage was eventually identified as red rice beer, which would have been manufactured from an eclectic mixture of rice, millet, Job’s tears, Triticeae and snake’s gourd root. A fermentation starter named qu would have been created from a mold known as monascus, and this substance is still used to make this type of drink today.

It was the monascus that gave the potent alcoholic beverage its red tint. This tint was seen as metaphysically important because of its resemblance to the color of blood.

“The symbolic implication of red color associated with the seemingly magical transformation from cereal to alcohol, as well as the psychoactive effect of the beverage, may have contributed to the importance of red rice beer, which probably was regarded as a sacred substance,” the paper co-authors wrote.

This would have been yet another reason why status-conscious elites across the country would have been interested in learning the secrets of mass beer production.

China’s Elite-Centered Culture Was Strengthened by Beer!

Ultimately, a shared interest in this beverage helped forge culturally unifying links between different peoples. But within the context of these broader alliances social stratification remained a very real thing, as the privilege of making this sacred drink was reserved by the elites.

The community could enjoy mass produced alcohol during feasts. But common citizens wouldn’t have been granted the right to brew it on their own. People would have enjoyed attending the celebratory feasts of local elites, but they would not have been in a position to sponsor such feasts themselves.

Mass beer production would have been useful as a way to increase power among the already powerful, and as a result monopolies over its mass production would have been zealously sought by the wealthy and the status-conscious in every region of the country.

Americans ‘Deeply Pessimistic’ About US Economy, Inflation

Tuesday, Jun 07, 2022 – 09:20 AM

Last week President Biden insisted that “more Americans feel financially comfortable” since he took office.

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2022 06 07 15 21

Yet, according to a new poll, 83% of Americans are pessimistic about the US economy – describing it as “poor or not so good,” while 35% say they aren’t satisfied with their financial situation – the highest level of dissatisfaction in the 50 years since the Wall Street Journal-NORC (University of Chicago) poll began.

The survey found Americans in a sour mood and registering some of the highest levels of economic dissatisfaction in years. The pessimism extended beyond the current economy to include doubts about the nation’s political system, its role as a global leader and its ability to help most people achieve the American dream. -WSJ

The Journal frames sentiment as “deeply pessimistic,” and says Americans view the nation as sharply divided over its most important values.

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2022 06 07 15 22

Only 27% of the 1,071 adults polled say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living – a 20% drop from last year, while 46% said they don’t.

Meanwhile, 38% said their financial situation had gotten worse in the past few years – marking the second time since the 2007-2009 recession that more than 30% of respondents said their finances were worse off, according to 50 years of data.

Some 60% said they were pessimistic about the ability for most people to achieve the American dream.

“The promise was this was a place where what you were born into did not determine who you could be. But I think we’ve failed deeply at that,” said Julie Olsen Edwards, an 83-year-old Soquel, Calif., retired community college teacher. “I find myself choking up saying it.”

What’s driving the results? Inflation, of course.

The survey results show that high inflation in particular is driving the dim economic outlook, said Jennifer Benz, vice president of public affairs and media research at NORC. Inflation is running at close to its fastest pace in four decades, at an 8.3% annual rate in April, one of several factors weighing on consumers. Households are digging into savings to support their spending, the Commerce Department has said, and the S&P 500 nearly closed in bear territory recently. -WSJ

The poll does have a bright spot – namely the labor market, with the unemployment rate close to a multi-decade low at 3.6%. Around 2/3 of those polled said it would be ‘somewhat or very easy’ to find a new job with around the same income and benefits – the highest % since 1977.

That said, the overall results of the poll suggest that Democrats ‘face a dispirited electorate heading into November’s elections,’ as respondents’ despondent view of things suggests that ‘a connective tissue of pessimism underlies Americans’ economic and social attitudes.”

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2022 06 07 15 23

According to the poll, 86% said that Americans are ‘greatly divided’ when it comes to key values, while over half said they expect the divisions to worsen over the next five years.

“I’m angry,” said Robert Benda, a 69-year-old retired telecommunications worker who lives in Berthoud, Colo., who says freedom is the most important American value, which Democrats controlling Washington are trying to take away.

Our government is doing what’s right for their special-interest groups, and everybody else be damned.”

A Great White Shark Preserved In Formaldehyde In An Abandoned Wildlife Park

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Rosie the Shark is a Great White Shark that was preserved in a tank filled with formaldehyde originally on display at the wildlife park called Wildlife Wonderland in Bass, Victoria which ceased business in 2012 due to animal welfare concerns and operating without appropriate licences.

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Crystal World & Prehistoric Journeys director Tom Kapitany moved the shark to Crystal World in 2019 in response to trespassers of the derelict wildlife park vandalising the sharks vitrine, raising concerns of a potential biohazard.

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The great white shark was humanely killed after becoming caught in the Lukin family’s tuna fishing nets on the coasts of South Australia in 1998. Seal Rocks Sea Life Centre initially showed interest in purchasing the shark from the Lukin family, but later decided against the purchase with Wildlife Wonderland purchasing the great white.

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As the shark was being transported to Wildlife Wonderland in Victoria, frozen in a refrigerated truck, it was impounded by the Government of South Australia because a woman had been reported missing, requiring an autopsy of the shark at the South Australian Museum. Following the autopsy, the great white shark was stuffed with dacron and preserved in a formaldehyde solution in a custom built tank.

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Founder of Wildlife Wonderland John Matthews recalled the operation of ownership as “It was a huge logistical operation, working with Melbourne Museum, and all up cost us about $500,000,” and further stating “We had to build a purpose-built room and the roof had to be removed and the shark craned in and put into a new, sealed tank.”

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In 2012, Wildlife Wonderland were reported to have been operating their business without appropriate licenses, forcing the wildlife park to cease business and surrender all animals to RSPCA Australia and the Department of Sustainability and Environment Victoria.

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In November 2018, a video released on Youtube by urban explorer Luke McPherson showed inside the decaying wildlife park and later stumbling upon the shark tank. Months after, the Youtube video gained millions of views, prompting a rise in trespassing into the property to view the shark, with vandals also damaging and graffitiing the tank and its surroundings.

1,000-Year-Old Chamber Burial on Polish Island Reveals Rare Treasures

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Rare 0

Rare amber ring found in a 1,000-year-old grave in Poland. Source:  Jerzy Sikora

A 1,000-year-old grave on a remote island in northern Poland has been found to be richly furnished with grave goods, some of them extremely rare. Two amber rings, a bronze bowl, an iron knife in a leather holder and bronze buckles were found in the grave of a man near the village of Ostrowite, who lived between the 11th and 12th centuries, reports  The First News  .

This is not the first time that ancient burials have been unearthed at the site at Ostrowite, which lies in Poland’s Pomeranian Voivodeship. Two burials with bronze bowls were found earlier, one in 2007 by a farmer working in his field and another by archaeologists in 2010. As fragments of bronze bowls continued to be found throughout the site, archaeologists decided to work with volunteer teams with metal detectors to pinpoint where to dig for other graves in 2020 and 2021.

Dr. Jerzy Sikora from the University of Łódź, who has been leading the excavations at Ostrowite for years, said: “The deceased was most likely a representative of one of the  local Pomeranian elites.”

Read more HERE

Ukrainians, retreating, burn wheat

Ukrainians, retreating, burn wheat
Yan Gagin, an adviser to the head of the government of the DPR, said that Ukrainian troops burned tons of grain during the fighting, which was in the storage facilities of the Mariupol seaport. 

As Gagin stated, “the enemy, retreating from the port, set fire to the granaries so that this grain would not go to the forces of the DPR.” 

Moreover, "they extinguished it for several days, but to no avail." 

And now wheat and corn are scattered in large quantities over the territory near the granaries, the smell of rot and burning is in the air. 

When fully loaded, the storage could hold 57,000 tons. Bread show off, senseless and merciless. 
Read on WWW.KP.RU: HERE

NATO Countries Surrounding Serbia Blocked Russian FM’s Plane In “Hostile Action”

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Tuesday, Jun 07, 2022 – 01:24 AM

The Kremlin has denounced fresh airspace closures by three eastern European countries which blocked a top level Russian diplomatic flight as a “hostile action” in Monday statements.

Russian Foreign Ministry Sergey Lavrov was set to fly Sunday for an official trip to Serbia, but his plane was blocked by the countries surrounding Serbia, which includes Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Montenegro. All three countries, including the tiny Serb breakaway nation of Montenegro, are NATO members.

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2022 06 07 15 36

IL-96 plane of the Russian presidential administration’s airline. Via Reuters

Lavrov in follow-up called the move “unprecedented” and “unthinkable” – with a separate statement from Putin’s office saying such actions thwart essential diplomatic communications and contacts.

“There were a lot of questions from the media last night and this morning regarding our reaction to the unprecedented decisions taken by some NATO member states and the decisions that prevented the Russian Foreign Minister from visiting the Republic of Serbia. The unthinkable has happened, of course; I understand the interest you are showing in our assessment of these outrageous actions,” Lavrov stated.

“What has happened is basically a deprivation of a sovereign state’s right to conduct foreign policy. Serbia’s international activity is blocked, at least for the moment in the direction of Russia,” the top Russian diplomat emphasized.

He added: “We are not going to beat around the bush here. This is another very clear and instructive demonstration of the extent to which NATO and the EU can go to use the most lowbrow ways to influence those who are guided by national interests and not ready to sacrifice their principles, their dignity in favor of the very rules that the West imposes instead of international law,” according to TASS.

And separately a statement from Dmitry Peskov said “such actions could cause problems with the timing of high-level diplomatic meetings. But they would not prevent Moscow from maintaining contacts with friendly countries.”

Additionally, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed the move as “another closed channel of communication” – in reference to ongoing tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats between Russia and the EU particularly.

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2022 06 07 15 37

But perhaps the most interesting comments came from Serbia. It should be recalled that during NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign of Yugoslavia under then US President Bill Clinton, Russia was Belgrade’s foremost ally in condemning the US-Western action. In response to Lavrov’s plane being blocked,  Serbia’s interior minister, Aleksandar Vulin, called it an “obstruction” of “a great and proven friend of Serbia.”

“A world in which diplomats cannot seek peace is a world in which there is no peace. Those who prevented the arrival of Sergei Lavrov do not want peace, they dream of defeating Russia,” Vulin said. He added: “Serbia is proud that it is not part of the anti-Russian hysteria, and the countries that are, will have time to be ashamed.”

The Kremlin later confirmed the trip has been canceled after the overnight airspace blockage. Within the first week of the Feb.24 Russian invasion of Ukraine, a number of European countries moved to preemptively close airspace to all Russian flights, including commercial traffic.

Kitty Cat video of the day

A nice rescue story.

Slow-Cooker Italian Shredded Beef Hoagies

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905c4cda 715d 45fb 8c36 e77454e8b9d6

Ingredients

  • 2-lb beef boneless arm roast, trimmed of fat
  • 2 medium onions, sliced
  • 1 can (14.5 oz) Italian-seasoned diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 1/4 cup tomato paste
  • 8 hoagie buns, toasted if desired
  • 2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese (8 oz)

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2022 06 04 14 50

Japanese Art Student’s Graduation Project Is A Lineup Of Cats Adorably Asking You For High Fives

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Japanese sculptor Sakura Hanafusa expertly crafted one that all cat lovers would love in their home. A lineup of seven cats extending their paws to high five you after you come home.

Hanafusa made the sculptures as her graduation project from art university in 2016, and writes on Twitter that she “wanted to make a piece that people not only looked at and enjoyed, but could have fun interacting with.” She certainly did that with the project, titled “High-Seven” (seven cats, seven high fives, of course). Each cat is carved individually from camphor wood and oil painted, and in an interview with Yahoo News, Hanafusa says she modeled the individual expressions of 6 of the cats after a her family cats, and 1 after a friend’s.

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The United States Moves To Seize 2 Luxury Jets From Roman Abramovich Valued North Of $400 Million

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Tuesday, Jun 07, 2022 – 08:00 AM

On Monday the US moved to seize two luxury private jets from Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. It marks one of the greatest single attempted seizures of a Russian oligarch’s personal assets in the wake of the Putin-ordered military invasion of Ukraine, at a total value north of $400 million.

“U.S. authorities moved Monday to seize two luxury jets — a $60 million Gulfstream and a $350 million aircraft believed to be one of the world’s most expensive private airplanes — after linking both to Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich,” The Associated Press reports. One of the planes reportedly has an elaborate paper trail which attempted to shield and obscure Abramovich’s ownership, the DOJ investigators uncovered.

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2022 06 07 15 27

Illustrative: example of an interior room on a custom Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Before it underwent lavish upgrades and customizations, the initial value of his giant Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, currently believed to be parked in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, was less than $100 million. While it perhaps could be easier for the much smaller Gulfstream to evade the long arm of US law, the Boeing Dreamliner is without doubt too big to hide, unless it makes its way to Russia.

The warrant, signed by a federal magistrate judge Monday, indicates the aircraft are in violation of US sanctions given they were moved within a designated time period after sanctions took effect but without a US exemption license.

“In explaining the move to seize the planes, an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit that the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft and the Gulfstream G650ER plane are subject to seizure because they have been moved between March 4 and March 15 without licenses being obtained in violation of sanctions placed against Russia,” AP explains.

“According to the affidavit, Abramovich controlled the Gulfstream through a series of shell companies. The plane, it said, is believed to have been in Moscow since March 15,” the report added.

And according to a profile last year of Abramovich’s huge Dreamliner in Forbes Russia, “For personal needs, such huge aircraft are used very rarely” and often the aviation industries of entire countries don’t have one.

The Dec.2021 profile detailed:

The Dreamliner, which Abramovich bought, was built in June 2015 for private Swiss airline Privateair but was never handed over to him. In 2019, its equipment began in accordance with the requests of the Russian billionaire. The plane reportedly can to carry up to 50 passengers: 10 seats are provided for security, 10 for staff and 30 for guests, says a Forbes source in the aviation market. 

The flight range of the "dreamliner" is 18,418 km (with 25 passengers on board), the cabin area is 224.4 sq.m. The operator of the new vessel is the same as the previous one, owned by Abramovich - Global Jet Concept. At the same time, unlike its previous Boeing 767 aircraft, which received the code name "Bandit" due to the black "mask" on the cockpit windows, the new vessel is painted with extreme restraint. “It’s fashionable now – it helps to attract less attention,” the source explains.

Given his high visibility in the West, it’s perhaps not a surprise that Abramovich’s assets (which, until very recently, included Chelsea Football Club, the popular English Premier League team which he recently placed in the hands of a trust ahead of a sale) have been the focus of particular attention.

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2022 06 07 15 28

According to a recent FT report, he has at least five mega-yachts worth a combined total of about $1 billion. Two of the most expensive ones ended up in Turkey after fleeing European sanctions. At least one is believed to be in Montenegro.

World’s Largest Floating Hospital, Built In China & Designed By European Contractors, Makes African Debut

Even as geopolitical fault lines become stark due to tensions between China and the Western world, their noble collaboration in building the world’s largest civilian hospital ship aimed at helping the poor is nothing short of a silver lining.

The ship ‘Global Mercy,’ the largest civilian hospital ship in the world, made its African debut on May 27 in Dakar, where it will train health personnel for four weeks, Chinese media CGTN reported.

It is the latest entrant to the Mercy Ship Charity program that operates the largest non-governmental hospital ship in the world.

The massive ship, constructed at the Tianjin Xingang shipyard of China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) in northern China, had many sub-contractors involved in the project, including from Europe, America, and the wider Asian region.

The ship is 174 meters long and 28.6 meters broad and has about 12 decks. It will remain in Senegal’s capital until June end before returning in 2023 to serve disadvantaged and poor people with surgical care.

Global Mercy is Mercy Ships’ second vessel of its kind, set to join Africa Mercy serving in Africa since 2007.

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2022 06 03 18 55
Senegalese President Macky Sall welcomed the Global Mercy on May 30 at a ceremony attended by Guinea-Bissau President Umaro Sissoco Embalo and Comoros President Azali Assoumani.

The arrival of the giant ship coincides with the latest tragedy that has rocked the country and exposed the flaws in the tits health care system, crushed under the weight of pandemic-induced distress.

On May 25, eleven newborns were charred to death in a fire at a public hospital in Tivaouane noted Africa News.

The crew onboard the ship plans to train 260 Senegalese health professionals during their stay in Senegal, alongside the crew of the Africa Mercy, which has been at the port of Dakar since February and plans to stay at least till November, performing surgeries on board.

The Global Mercy will then return to the Canary Islands at the end of June for a “complete and final dressing of the ship.”

Mercy Ships will make a come-back in early 2023 to provide training and surgery in areas such as maxillofacial and reconstructive surgery, tumor removal, cleft lip and palate repair, obstetric fistula repair, and more.

Global Mercy — A Feather In CSSC’s Cap

The complex vessel’s design, contracting, and construction oversight have all been handled by Stena RoRo, a company based out of Sweden.

“We have applied one of our concepts on a ship from the RoPax-class, which are passenger and freighter vessels for international voyages, and modified her into a pure passenger ship with hospital capabilities,” said Per Westling, CEO of Stena RoRo AB.

“Instead of a card deck, we’ve built operating rooms and hospital wards. The ship will have space for about 950 persons with everything needed for both patients and those who work onboard, including grade schools and nursery schools for the children of staff.”

The role of the Chinese Ship Building Industry also comes into the focus, which was the ‘chosen one’ for building the world’s largest civilian hospital ship, despite the involvement of other subcontractors.

China’s commercial shipbuilding industry — the largest in the world — has been engaged in the construction of ships along its shoreline for years. It has also acquired the capital and technological know-how to construct increasingly sophisticated models of all types of naval ships through foreign contracts over the years that it has been engaged in expanding its industry.

“For a few years now, our team has consisted of up to 16 members, stationed at the Tianjin Xingang shipyard,” said Stena project leader and site manager Rikard Olsson, who has been working on the project in China since 2016.

“For this shipyard, this is the first time this kind of ship, which can be compared to a cruise ship, has been built. We have worked hard to meet the required standard and everything has gone very well”, Maritime Executive reported.

After several years of construction in Xinjiang, the mammoth ship completed its sea trials in May last year. In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 93 percent of the population lacks access to quality surgical treatment, and the coronavirus pandemic has put local resources under strain. A civilian hospital ship with advanced features could thus fill the vacuum tremendously.

Global Mercy

The Global Mercy hospital covers about 7,000 square meters and includes “six operating theatres, 102 acute care beds, seven intensive care beds, and 90 convalescent beds,” according to a statement from Mercy Ships, which works relentlessly to improve access to health care in developing countries in Africa.

The project began in 2013 with Stena RoRo, a Swedish shipping company, in charge of the project’s design, contracting, and execution.

The broker was French Barry Rogliano Salles, BRS, the detailed design was done by Finnish Deltamarin, and the ship was built in China at the Tianjin Xingang shipyard. The Global Mercy will sail under the Maltese flag and operate along the African coast.

Six operating theaters, 200 hospital beds, a laboratory, a patient clinic, and an eye and dental clinic are all available at the Global Mercy. The ship will have a total capacity of 950 persons, including 640 crew members.

The ventilation system has been specifically tailored, with an emphasis on reducing vibration and noise. Since the ship would be in port for long periods, enormous cranes have been installed to allow it to take on containers containing provisions, vehicles, and other equipment. Four Wärtsilä 32 engines will power the vessel.

Amid news of global animosity flooding the internet every day, an international collaboration for providing health care to the needy is a rather welcome development.

Lagash, the Lost City of Mesopotamia

Eagle 1
Eagle 1

‘Eagle of Lagash’ symbol found on votive bas relief of Dudu in the Louvre Museum. Source: Louvre Museum /   CC BY-SA 2.0

The historic region of Mesopotamia has been long regarded as one of the original cradles of civilization. Defined by the bountiful Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Mesopotamia gave birth to some truly prosperous and groundbreaking early civilizations. The foremost of these was the civilization of Sumer, well remembered for its revolutionary inventions, such as the early writing system. Sumerians were truly unique, and were defined by their powerful city-states that often competed for power and wealth. One of the most prominent of these city states was centered on the town of  Lagash, a major and influential player in the politics and economy of Sumer.

Lagash had a long and diverse history, but eventually was lost to the passing of time. What little of it remains today is a true Pandora’s box for archaeologists. Excavations have yielded numerous significant finds and an important insight into the rich history of both Lagash, and the Sumerian civilization on the whole.

Read more HERE

MEDVEDEV TELLS UKRAINE TO CUT BACK ON COCAINE AND TO NEGOTIATE BEFORE IT LOSES SOVEREIGNTY

Dmitry Medvedev has become one of the most hardcore Russian politicians.  The former President of Russia and now Deputy Chairman of the National Security Council told Ukraine leaders to stop using Cocaine and start negotiating.

In the brief video below, Medvedev says: Ukraine risks losing its sovereignty if it continues refusing to negotiate on Moscow’s terms. He also advised authorities in Kiev to cut back on cocaine use and approach key decisions with a sober mind.

Super-Easy Chicken Manicotti

Super easy! No precooked noodles, just five ingredients and only three easy steps.

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b010db92 5e8e 488c 9ca5 321a672f968a

Ingredients

  • 1 jar (25.5 oz) Muir Glen™ organic pasta sauce (any variety)
  • 3/4 cup water
  • 1 teaspoon garlic salt
  • 1 1/2 lb uncooked chicken breast tenders (not breaded)
  • 14 uncooked manicotti shells (8 oz)
  • 2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese (8 oz)
  • Chopped fresh basil leaves, if desired

2022 06 07 15 40
2022 06 07 15 40

4 Really Big Names That Are Warning That Major Economic Disaster Is Ahead

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I hope that you are enjoying these beautiful summer weekends while you still can, because it appears that very troubled times are dead ahead.  Simultaneously, inflation continues to spiral out of control even as economic activity in the U.S. dramatically slows down.  Many have compared what we are currently experiencing to the “stagflation” of the 1970s, but the truth is that what we are facing will eventually be so much worse than anything that we went through back then.  A meltdown of historic proportions is here, and as you will see below, some of the biggest names in the entire country are talking about it.

On Monday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States set another all-time record high

The gas price spike keeps getting worse.

The national average jumped to $4.87 a gallon on Monday, according to AAA. That’s up 25 cents in the past week and 59 cents in the past month.

There are now 10 states where the average price of gasoline is $5 a gallon or higher, with the latest being Michigan and Indiana. Washington, DC, is also above $5, according to CNN.

A 25 cent increase in one week is just insane.

If we continue on this trajectory, the price of gasoline would go up about a dollar a month.

I can’t imagine that will be the case, but stranger things have happened.

Overall, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has now more than doubled since Joe Biden entered the White House.

How high will it be a year from now?

For a long time I warned my readers that the price of gasoline would eventually hit ten dollars a gallon, but now we have learned that it is already almost there at one gas station in California.

Meanwhile, U.S. economic activity is really slowing down and we are being warned to brace ourselves for the worst.

In fact, at this point some of the most prominent people in the entire country are starting to sound like they could be writing for The Economic Collapse Blog.  The following are four really big names that are warning that major economic disaster is ahead…

#1 If you have a “bad feeling” about the U.S. economy, you are not alone.  Elon Musk says that he has a “super bad feeling” about where the U.S. economy is heading, and so he intends to reduce the Tesla workforce by approximately 10 percent…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a “super bad feeling” about the economy and wants to cut about 10% of jobs at the electric carmaker, he said in an email to executives on Thursday seen by Reuters.

The message came two days after the world’s richest man told employees to return to the workplace or leave the company.

#2 I never imagined that I would write about something that rapper Cardi B said on this website, but that is precisely what I am about to do.  At one time she was a huge Biden supporter, but on Sunday she publicly suggested that the U.S. economy is about to enter a recession

Rapper and Joe Biden supporter Cardi B took to Twitter on Sunday to ask when “they going to announce” that the United States is “going into a recession.”

“When y’all think they going to announce that we going into a recession?” Cardi B wrote Sunday in a tweet, which has since garnered more than 120,000 likes, and over 16,000 retweets.

Actually, the U.S. economy contracted during the first quarter of 2022, and if it contracts again in the second quarter then we are actually already in a recession right now.

#3 I really admire author Robert Kiyosaki, and his advice has helped millions of people all over the globe.  In the past he was known for his relentless optimism, but now he is almost as pessimistic about our economic future as I am.  For example, he tweeted out the following back on March 8th

DO YOU HAVE a PLAN “B”? We are in BIGGEST BUBBLE in world history. Bubbles in stocks, real estate, commodities & oil. FUTURE? Possible DEPRESSION with HYPER-INFLATION. My PLAN B: be an entrepreneur, stay out of stock market, create own assets, use debt as $, save G,S, BC, guns.

Then he followed that up with this gem on March 13th

BRANDON & FED want INFLATION to pay off trillions in debt. BEST INVESTMENT may be stocking products you will always use such as toilette paper, trash bags, canned goods, frozen foods, gold, silver, Bitcoin. I do not trust Brandon or Fed. They are Marxists. End the Fed & Brandon.

And then on April 15th he boldly declared that a “hyper-inflation depression” has arrived…

Wiley COYOTE moment coming. Biggest Bubble Bust coming. Baby Boomer’s retirements to be stolen. $10 trillion in fake money spending ending. Government, Wall Street & Fed are thieves. Hyper-inflation Depression here. Buy gold, silver, Bitcoin before the coyote wakes up. Take care

Of course he is dead on accurate about where the economy is heading.  I don’t share his optimism about Bitcoin, but otherwise I think that the things that he has shared are very wise.

#4 The crisis that we are now dealing with did not arrive overnight.  For years, many of us have been relentlessly warning about debt levels, the destruction of our currency, and the foolish decisions that our leaders were making.  Now we are facing the largest debt bubble in all of human history, and there is no easy way out.  On Monday, some thoughts that Kim Dotcom shared on Twitter went viral all over the Internet

Let’s do the math:

US total debt
$90 trillion

US unfunded liabilities
$169 trillion

Total
$259 trillion

Minus all US assets
$193 trillion

Balance
– $66 trillion

That’s $66 trillion of debt and liabilities after every asset in the US has been sold off.

I might quibble with the precise numbers that he used a little bit, but overall Kim Dotcom is right on target.

And I really like how he summarized the nightmare that is in front of us

So even if the US could sell all assets at the current value, which is impossible, it would still be broke.

The US is beyond bankrupt.
This patient is already dead.
This patient is now a zombie.

You probably wonder why are things still going? Why didn’t everything collapse yet.

It’s all perception, denial and dependency.

Our leaders have tried to keep the party going for as long as they possibly could, and for a while that actually worked.

But now a day of reckoning has arrived, and a horrifying economic meltdown has begun.

We are NOT talking about a “recession” that will be here for a while followed by a return to the way that things used to be.

No, NOT AT ALL. Instead, what we are heading for is the sort of immense economic nightmare that I have been warning about for years.

Many Americans will be greatly surprised by how rapidly things totally fall apart, but the real surprise has been that it has taken us so long to get to this point.

You can’t defy the laws of economics forever, and we are about to see the greatest debt pyramid that the planet has ever seen come crashing down all around us.

A word to the wise…

…leave the United States as fast as you can.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 5

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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China so outclasses the United States its just crazy insane

China so outclasses the US which is accustomed to putting so little thought into its policies since it has not had to do so since WWII by virtue of its overwhelming power in 1945, a power no longer based on its accomplishments but based on the destruction of its competitors and potential competitors in that conflict.

-John Walsh

The American Public has been held behind a nearly airtight Iron Curtain of media falsehoods for some time now. Fortunately, Americans have stopped watching the endless stream of lies emanating from “newrooms”. Sadly, for the average person this means there is no place to turn to for an accurate picture of the world.

Simply put, the American People are being held hostage by the swarms of sociopaths that breed in DC’s fetid swamps

Let’s avoid swimming in these boggy pools of shit and turn elsewhere…

Daryl Hall & John Oates – Rich Girl • TopPop

Top of the charts in 1976. Yeah. I had this album.

CIA man’s ‘tell-all’ book reveals more about internal agency incompetence than Russian malfeasance

In ‘The Fourth Man’, former CIA officer Robert Baer crafts a narrative full of speculation and short on facts
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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. 

In 1984, the CIA and the FBI were riding high. Each of these powerful organizations were managing portfolios of Soviet agents who were ostensibly doing their bidding, spying against the USSR, and providing the United States with troves of secret information about the inner workings of the former superpower.

Then, between 1985 and 1986, the walls came tumbling down. Thanks to three American traitors, the entire portfolio of spies being run by the CIA and FBI were rounded up by Soviet authorities. Responsibility for this intelligence disaster would ultimately be assigned to two CIA officers (Edward Lee Howard, who gave away Adolf Tolkachev, the “billion dollar spy,” so named because the information he provided on Moscow’s military capabilities saved the US a billion dollars in research and development costs, and Aldrich Ames, who betrayed 25 Soviet moles, 10 of whom were allegedly arrested and subsequently executed for their crimes) and one FBI man (Robert Hansen, who betrayed scores of Soviet agents, along with the names of so-called double agents – Americans recruited by the Soviets to spy, but who were really working for either the CIA or FBI).

The CIA never fully recovered from the impact of the betrayals inflicted by the trio of traitors – Howard, Ames, and Hansen – all of whom spied for the Soviets and together were responsible for the literal annihilation of the CIA’s human intelligence networks operating in the USSR during the mid-1980s.

Instead of accepting responsibility for its failures, however, the CIA sought to blame a ghost who became known as the so-called “fourth man”, a spy that existed only in the imagination of those who spent years scouring the shadows for evidence of his existence and turning up nothing. It is the hunt for this mythical “fourth man” that is the subject of Robert Baer’s eponymously named book.

Baer, himself a former CIA operations officer, has tapped into his former life, prying open the memories of his former colleagues at the CIA to breathe life into a tale of betrayal and deception-driven paranoia that does not cast a positive light on his former employer.

The Fourth Man, supposedly an “explosive, never-before-told story of the thrilling hunt for a KGB spy in the top ranks of the CIA,” has been likened to a real-life version of John LeCarre’s classic tale of espionage and betrayal, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier…Spy. After reading it, I instead felt like I had experienced a Jerry Seinfeld-inspired tale from The Twighlight Zone – a tiresome story that promised much but, in the end, was about nothing.

One disturbing aspect of Baer’s book is that he puts a name to the “fourth man” – Paul Redmond, a retired CIA counterintelligence officer whose job was to ostensibly hunt down the very spy Baer has tried to bring to life in his narrative. After reading Baer’s book, I walked away very uncomfortable about his assertion that Redmond – the man former CIA Director James Woolsey called “a voice crying out in the wilderness” regarding the existence of a Soviet “mole” inside the CIA who turned out to be Aldrich Ames – was himself not just a spy, but the spy.

The one Baer claims was responsible not only for the inability of the CIA to reconstitute its human intelligence networks in Russia, but also the CIA’s inability to predict the rise of Vladimir Putin, and get a source close enough to Putin to better inform US policy makers about the Russian leader’s intentions. In short, according to Baer, Redmond is singularly responsible for the absolute failure of the CIA when it comes to producing quality intelligence about post-Soviet Russia.

While Baer is open about the many failures of the CIA and the FBI when it came to allowing Howard, Ames, and Hanson to inflict such harm on US intelligence operations, the story he weaves about why the CIA was never able to regain its lost position in Russia – namely that the “fourth man,” a person whom Baer calls “the perfect spy,” was able to tip the Russians off about everything the CIA was doing and thinking of doing regarding Russia – comes off as too contrived, too speculative, and too incomplete to ever capture the imagination of the reader.

For a layperson, Baer’s foray into the world of LeCarre-like quasi-intellectualism might be believable. But Baer – himself an experienced CIA case officer with experience in the former Soviet Union – provides too many clues as to the real reason behind the CIA’s failures, namely the incompetence of the people it tasked with penetrating targets in Moscow. Baer, perhaps unwittingly, regales his audience with two incidents that he was personally involved in – the unauthorized testing of a secret CIA satellite communications system in the Russian capital, and when he and other CIA agents in transit passed through a metal detector in Moscow on their way to destinations south, only to be casually waived through by the Russian customs officer – that together shed a light on the true reasons for the CIA’s many failures.

Given what I know, and what Baer begrudgingly acknowledges, about the professionalism of the Russian security services, it is highly unlikely that either incident escaped the attention of Baer’s Russian hosts, guaranteeing that Baer and his fellow travelers were completely compromised. Simply put, if Baer’s actions were indicative of the lax tradecraft used by the CIA in post-Soviet Russia, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a crack CIA counterintelligence squad to understand that the “fourth man” was the agency itself – a fabrication derived from the collective imaginations of the amalgam of egotists, drunks, and schizophrenics that populated the CIA and who had been so unnerved by the consequences of the Howard, Ames, and Hansen betrayals that they allowed themselves to become paralyzed by fear, afraid to undertake any meaningful action against Russia target lest they fall victim to their own collective incompetence.

The “fourth man,” Baer claims, was “more senior and better placed than [Aldrich Ames],” someone who spied for “the game” and not money, and who was never caught, let alone charged, with spying – the “Holy Grail” of American counterintelligence “who knew how to play the game to win.”

I remain unconvinced. I look at the CIA’s abysmal track record in post-Soviet Russia, and I see an agency trapped by mediocrity and a lack of imagination, a Russia Department staffed by second-tier players (the first team was off fighting terrorists) and guided by erstwhile post-Soviet Russian “experts” who comprehended the rise of Vladimir Putin even less than they understood post-Soviet Russia as a whole, and who were more than willing to allow the fiction of the “fourth man” to be promulgated in order to absolve them of their utter incompetence.

2022 06 14 18 00
2022 06 14 18 00

Stray Kitten Waits Outside Home of Family He Befriended, Asking for Help

Russian report

⚡️ From the very beginning of the special operation in Ukraine, military experts undertook to analyze the tactics and further strategy of the RF Armed Forces. The guesses turned out to be wrong due to the dynamic development of events and the fact that our army tried different models of warfare. Today it is already possible to conduct an intermediate analysis of the situation that is developing within the framework of the NWO. In my estimation, everything is going as it should.

The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have completely switched to the tactics of mobile assault groups and complex fire engagement, shifting the focus from high speed of advance to minimizing losses while maintaining damage to the enemy.

Now an approximate algorithm of actions looks like this: Ukrainian positions are opened by UAVs and reconnaissance groups, then artillery and aircraft hit at the identified objects, after critical damage to the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, assault groups consisting of several tanks, other armored vehicles and infantry platoons are advanced in the direction of key objects. Point support is provided by artillery forces and mortars. If Ukraine tries to counterattack, or the offensive of our troops is slowed down, and the enemy’s points are again “polished” by artillery and fighters. Such tactics are systematically squeezing the Armed Forces of Ukraine out of cities, villages and fortified areas.

❗️In general, the Russian troops adopted a strategy to deplete the enemy’s resources. After the final retirement of the combat-ready backbone of the personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as well as the deprivation of the Ukrainian troops of the minimum number of heavy weapons, repair and fuel and lubricant resources, things will go faster.

At the moment, the actions of Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups have been almost completely neutralized. First of all, due to the counter-ambush actions of our special forces. In addition, extensive work is being carried out in the rear of the RF Armed Forces to identify and capture / destroy Ukrainian DRGs. Additionally, there is a checkpoint system.

As for the losses of Ukraine as a whole. With a change in tactics, the effectiveness of the liquidation of the personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine increased. On average, it is 300-500 people per day. The total amount of Ukrainian combat losses today is, in my opinion, up to 100,000 people. Of these, approximately 25-30 thousand were killed and up to 70 thousand were wounded and surrendered. To these 100 thousand one can add several tens of thousands more deserters.

Russian long-range aviation and the Navy continue to regularly strike with long-range cruise missiles at enemy military targets, including deep in the rear. The calculation of Kyiv and the Western side that the Russian Armed Forces would run out of missiles did not materialize – our military industry provides a sufficient rate of production of these products.

Speaking of aviation, our Air Force has now achieved operational air supremacy. It eliminates the possibility for any effective actions of Ukrainian aviation over the territories controlled by the Russian Federation, and also allows Russian pilots to operate effectively. At the same time, pockets of Ukrainian air defense remain, creating a high danger for our aircraft. The air defense system of the Ukraine was created according to Soviet principles, with deep separation, extensive use of maneuver and camouflage, and the use of anti-aircraft ambush tactics. In the history of wars, such a powerful and diverse air defense system operates for the first time.

With regards to the supply of Western weapons. They turned out to be a tangible help for the Ukrainian troops, but not enough. There are few foreign weapons, ensuring their operation suffers due to the extremely short training period for Ukrainian combat crews. There is an ammunition shortage. In addition, a number of European countries are sabotaging supplies initiated by the United States, which leads to a low density of heavy equipment per kilometer of front and does not have a significant impact on hostilities.

The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation use the theater of operations within the framework of the NMD to develop the latest weapons. At a minimum, the use of BMPTs, the Tornado-G and Tornado-S MLRS systems, and a flight of Su-57 fighters was noticed. For the first time, the Buk-M3 air defense system is used in combat conditions.

– Colonel Khodarenok
(machine translation)

COLOMBIAN ARROZ CON POLLO (Rice with chicken)

Today’s main meal entree hails from Columbia. It’s a very flavorful rice and chicken meal. Very delicious!

“Top Gun: Maverick” is Military Propaganda. Official Documents Prove It

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF – “Top Gun: Maverick” is a box-office smash, a massive hit with both critics and the public alike. Navy and Air Force units across the country have set up recruitment stalls inside movie halls, hoping to sign up individuals buzzed after watching the high-paced aviation action. But documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the movie was made only after an agreement was signed between Hollywood and the Pentagon, with the Navy insisting on “weav[ing] in” their “key talking points” in exchange for granting the production company extensive access to military hardware.

Investigative journalist Tom Secker, author of “National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood,” was one of those who obtained the documents. Secker explained that “Top Gun: Maverick” was made with an explicit agenda behind it, telling MintPress:

It’s about rehabilitation of the military’s image in the wake of numerous failed wars. The film also helps foreground human pilots flying an actual combat mission – something very rare in these days of high-altitude airstrikes and drone warfare. It helps distract from all the drone pilots who’ve spoken out about the misery and horror inherent in that job.”

The sequel to the hit 1980s movie “Top Gun,” the new film follows the story of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell over 30 years later, as the renegade pilot who does not play by the rules is brought in to train the Navy’s best young pilots for a secret mission to blow up a uranium enrichment facility [a site implied to be in Iran]. Maverick instead shows that he is still the best pilot and is selected for the mission himself.

The production agreement between the Department of Defense (DoD) and Paramount Pictures is an explicit quid pro quo. In exchange for all manner of technical support and access to military equipment and personnel, the Pentagon was allowed to “[a]ssign a senior staff, post-command Officer to review with public affairs the script’s thematics and weave in key talking points relevant to the aviation community.”

Full Article HERE

These 15 Maps Hilariously Explain the United States of America.

Funny, but really good.

Foreign English teachers requested to swear allegiance to Basic Law, ‘part of HK revamp plan’

Published: Jun 13, 2022 09:11 PM
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2022 06 14 14 46
2022 06 14 14 46

The Education Bureau (EDB) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) told the Global Times on Monday that the requirement for native-speaking English teachers (NETs) working in Hong Kong government schools to swear allegiance to the city accords with the law and would ensure effective governance, rebutting some foreign media hype of the city’s “increasing restrictions” and doubts over Hong Kong’s ability to retain educators.

EDB on Saturday said NETs and advisors working in government-run schools whose contracts begin in the coming school year were recently informed of the declaration requirement and that they were required to return the signed declaration on or before June 21, Hong Kong media reported.

EDB confirmed the latest requirement to the Global Times through an email on Monday, saying all government staff, including civil servants and staff appointed on non-civil service terms (non-civil service government staff) are required to declare that they will uphold the Basic Law, bear allegiance to the HKSAR, be dedicated to their duty, and be responsible to the HKSAR government.

NETs currently employed by the EDB on non-civil service terms should sign the declaration, EDB explained, noting the requirement accords with Article 6 of the national security law for Hong Kong.

The requirement is an open acknowledgement of the acceptance and a genuine manifestation of the responsibilities of and expectations on them, which will further safeguard and promote the core values that should be upheld by all government employees, and ensure the effective governance of the HKSAR Government.

The authority also noted that “neglect, refusal or failure to sign and return the declaration by the deadline without a reasonable excuse” would lead to a contract termination.

Since the waning of the social uproar and the enactment of the national security law for the HKSAR in 2020, oath-taking has been applied to the public sector like district councilors, civil servants and government staff.

Hong Kong society wasn’t that satisfied with the ethics of some teachers, who exposed the students to hazardous ideas and remarks during the past social unrest, Tang Fei, vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Federation of Education Workers, told the Global Times on Monday. Liberal teaching materials in Hong Kong have also been criticized for containing obsolete and biased content that tarnishes the Chinese mainland.

The requirement for NETs to swear allegiance is part of the Hong Kong government’s education revamp plan, as it hopes to prompt teachers to reflect on professional ethics, Tang said. “And it is natural for NETs in Hong Kong to abide by local laws and regulations.”

Hong Kong started to recruit English teachers from abroad under the NETs scheme in 1997 to better improve children’s English language skills. The monthly salary of a foreign educator under NETs program exceeds HK$30,000 ($3,800).

As for foreign media hype that “13% of NETs in secondary schools left in the 2020-21 school year,” analysts said this is not a big problem and that the HKSAR can further open up its education links with the Chinese mainland.

Schools in Hong Kong can give priority to hiring foreign teachers from international schools and public schools in the mainland, as they are more familiar with all aspects of China and the oath-taking is unlikely to pose obstacles for them.

NETs’ monthly salary is similar to that of local teachers, but the Hong Kong government needs to provide foreigners with additional housing allowance, which is of a high cost, Tang said.

The distribution of NETs in Hong Kong is also uneven and not necessary for some schools, such as those focusing on Chinese language education, Tang said.

Is this the Collapse of the Great American Empire?

Another very good video. Please check it out. I’m a lovin’ this channel.

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Was up all night working on the house

Great personal story by Hal Turner. -MM

So for the past week, I have been working on cleaning up (permanently) the cat damage to my mom’s house in Pennsylvania, that I am inheriting now that she’s gone.  Last night everything came to a head . . .

When my mom died in November, I was to inherit the house in rural Pennsylvania.   I’ve been up here doing my radio show from here for a couple weeks now.

I needed to do that because there’s lots of work that needed doing inside the house.  Chief among that work was ridding the house of cat pee smell.  Of course the gutters all had to be cleaned, they were all clogged.  The roof had moss/lichen growing on it, the vinyl siding had all manner of dead . . . bug . . . thingys. . .  Bore bees have eaten into the framing along the roof, the landscaping was a total disaster . . . lots to do.

For some reason, known only to God, my mom (much to my chagrin) became an old cat lady.   She had at least four cats in the house, then started feeding strays outside, which brought another five or six hanging around the property.

Before mom’s funeral, I let it be known that once I went back to New Jersey, there would be no one at the house to take care of the four cats, and they needed a new home right now.

By the day mom was laid to rest,  we had arranged new homes for all four.

Three of the four went into cat-carriers with little trouble.  The fourth proved to be the psycho-cat-from-hell.   Hissing, biting, clawing.  Drew blood from my neighbors hand even though he was wearing heavy leather gloves.  Long story short, the cat jumped onto a window sill and went out through the screen into the wild.  It was November 28 or 29 and it was cold up here.  The cat had only a house cat fur, so I doubt it survived the weather.

Moreover, it was the nastiest cat imaginable.  Loved my mom; hated everyone and everything else.   So I figured with a disposition like that, even if it survived the cold, it wasn’t likely to survive an encounter with the actual wild animals out in the woods here.   A fox, or Bobcat, or even a Raccoon or two, would make short work of this little psycho-cat.

After the cats were gone, I did the typical clearing out of old stuff.  Clothing, shoes, files.  OMG, how is it that people keep paper files for dozens of years, in drawers all over the house????  Then there are the knick-knacks.  Trivial little things that mean nothing, are worth nothing, but were apparently from some trip or event that gave mom some joy in her life.  And ALL those little knick-knacks, accumulated dust.  Lots of dust.   Oh, and nicotine.  Mom smoked and everything is covered with nicotine, too.

All of it has to be either thrown out or washed.   The dishwasher has gotten an amazing and sustained workout!  It did a great job too.  All those little knick-knacks, all came out shiny clean.

Then the kitchen cabinets.   OHHHHHHHHHH.   What a job those pots and pans.   It turned out that mice got into the kitchen cabinets at some point – don’t know when, but there was mouse pee and crap throughout the cabinets.  ARRRRGHHH, had to clean all that out, too.

Anyway, this latest trip up here to Pennsylvania had to deal with the remaining ugliness of the cats:  specifically, the cat pee smell permeating the house.

Just after mom died, I hired Stanley Steamer to come clean EVERYTING.  Floors, carpets, furniture.   It looked great and smelled great.  Until a few weeks later when that cat pee smell came roaring back.

Tracking it down became an important task.

Remember that psycho cat from hell?   It peed on mom’s queen size mattress, and lived under the box spring in her bedroom, where it peed in there too.  It had torn the underside of the box spring and was living up inside it!

That mattress and box spring had to be burned.  Literally.   Took it out to the burn pit on the property and set it ablaze.

Pillows from various parts of the house also had to go.

But the smell persisted.

So early last week, a neighbor of mine up here came and helped remove ALL the carpeting and padding beneath it.  We cut it out in strips so as to reduce the need to move the heavy furniture.  The only place we couldn’t cut it out was under loaded book cases in the living room.

Once the carpeting and padding was gone, we could see massive stains in the wood subfloor, where the urine (and other waste) had penetrated both the carpeting and the padding.

I have tried every known remedy for cat pee smell.   Cold water and dish soap.  Didn’t work.    Hydrogen peroxide. Fizzed like mad, over and over again, but didn’t work once it dried.  OxyClean, did an amazing job, but in the end, the smell remained.   White vinegar. Stunk the house up with a wretched smell, and when that cleared, the cat pee was back.   OMG there were moments that I thought I should hire a contractor and just bulldoze the house out of existence!

I finally got told by two other people who went through similar things is that the ONLY thing that will work is a product called KILZ Original oil-based primer-sealer.  I kept that in mind as life went on.

Now, there are several levels to what’s been going on and they all came to an apex last night.

I ordered new carpeting a couple months ago from a local carpeting/flooring store.  I wanted to keep the colors and patterns close to – but not precisely as – what my mom had.   It’s a pretty little house in the country.  It’s for relaxing and not for putting on airs or social status.  Mom’s choice of colors and such was nice.  Comfortable.  Rural.  Country-esque, not gawdy or loud.

While the carpeting for the bedrooms and hallway was common and easy to get, the carpet in the living room was special order.  Had to wait 6 weeks for it to be made.

That was fine because an Appraisal had to be done on the house and I didn’t want all new everything in it – that I paid for – affecting the price.

So the Appraisal gets done on May 13 and I then call the carpet vendor to schedule install.  He says, (today) June 13.,

Well, there’s no sense in putting brand new carpeting over cat-pee-stained/smelling sub flooring.  So I had to deal with the stains and such THIS WEEKEND before the carpet guys came.

But I also had to cut the grass and do this web site, and the radio show, and I get tired a lot faster than I used to, so I put it off and put it off and put it off until I couldn’t anymore.

I got the KILZ Original oil-based primer sealer, and then had to move the furniture to actually do the work.

Remember I mentioned book cases in the corner of the living room? They were absolutely LOADED with books.  So I had to give those away in order to move the book cases.  Thankfully, a local couple, long-time friends of my mom, stopped by each night and took a couple bags full.   By Saturday, the book cases were empty.

I moved the book cases, pulled out the last remaining strip of carpeting and padding and found . . . . . . completely rotten plywood sub-flooring, damaged by years of water coming into the house from the rear deck.   The deck is at the same level where the wood frame of the house meets the cinder block foundation, and the water seeped into the house there.

Oh, and when I tell you the wood was rotted, I mean it.  It was literally breaking apart.  I wondered why the book cases were leaning backwards . . . the floor was giving way.

Well, THAT had to be fixed right now.  Couldn’t wait.  So all day Saturday was tear-out the rotted sub-floor, install a new 2″ x 10″ structural beam beneath it to augment the partially rotted one that was in there, seal the holes that developed in the exterior wall, re-install the insulation, and new plywood sub-flooring.

That surprise repair set me back a full day.  The carpet guys were still coming this morning.

Now, I liked the furniture that mom had in the house, but recently I took a nap on the couch.  Comfy cozy.  In my sleep, I rolled from facing the TV in the living room, to facing the rear of the couch.  WHAM.  Cat pee smell in the back cushions.  So I move to the love seat.  WHAM, cat pee smell.   OMG, this is horrifying.  So I move to the over-stuffed chair and ottoman, WHAM, cat pee smell.

These “effin” cats, ruined all the furniture too!   While Stanley Steamer got the stains out of the fabric, it did nothing about what got into the inner cushioning.

So I went to Raymour & Flannigan to order new furniture.  It won’t be in stock until mid-July, but I had to get rid of the existing furniture.

The neighbor that helped me with the carpet said he’d take it.   I made it VERY CLEAR to him about the cat pee smell, and he said, no problem, he thought he could take care of that.   He has grand kids who have basically worn out HIS furniture, so this furniture, he said, would be an improvement.

We loaded the couch, loveseat, overstuffed chair and ottoman into his pick-up truck late Saturday and off he went.

He called me Sunday.   He parked the truck in an outdoor carport at his house, that has doors to keep out the weather.  When he went back into the carport later, it stunk of cat pee! 

I reminded him that I had warned him about this.   I didn’t SELL the furniture, I GAVE it . . . and I don’t want it back.  So if he can’t get rid of the smell, I told him to throw the furniture in a dump.

Sunday, with the rotted sub-floor fixed, I could begin moving the remaining furniture (end tables, coffee table, the thing the TV/Stereo/DVR/DVD player etc. sits on) to do the KILZ Primer Sealer.   This furniture is all Bassett.  Good stuff.  HEAVY stuff!

What a job moving it.  I’m up here for weeks all alone.  I am not the spry young guy I used to be.  This physical work takes a toll on me very fast.  I did it nonetheless.

Well, I started sealing the living room flooring.  The vapors given off by this oil-based primer sealer are God awful.  So I open all the windows to get fresh sir . . . . it starts raining.  Raining IN.  So I had to close the windows.

Finished around 3:48 AM this morning.   Whacked from the vapors, and bone tired, I hit the bed,.   But I had to be up for the carpet guys. I  grabbed three hours sleep and was up around 6.

The carpet guys arrived about 9:30.   They start installing new tack-strip around the perimeter of the living room and we’re having casual conversation, when I mention that the Forest green carpeting goes in the living room first, and the beige goes in the hallway, foyer, and three bedrooms second.  This way we can move the furniture from the two remaining bedrooms into the living room to allow install of the carpet into those bedrooms

The guy says to me, “No one gave us any forest green carpeting, we only have the beige.”

What?

Yep.  Turns out the guy at the warehouse only gave them the rolls needed for the bedrooms, hallway and foyer; NOT the living room.  They LEAVE!   Will be back tomorrow to do the whole house in one shot.

Which is actually a good thing for me because now, I can use the KILZ primer-sealer in the foyer and the two upstairs bedrooms.   I’ll have to do those tonight after my radio show.

So if I’m a little off my game while on the air tonight, you know why!

The Ghost Town of THURMOND, WV – A Good Town Gone Bad

A very good video. It’s about typical America and what has happened to it.

New York spent big on drag shows for kids – media

Parents say they weren’t given the chance to excuse their kids from the performances

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2022 06 14 16 37

New York City Council has spent more than $200,000 in taxpayers money on drag queen shows at city schools since 2018, the New York Post reported on Saturday. The shows featured cross-dressing performers interacting with kids as young as three, and some parents are furious they weren’t given a chance to request an opt-out for their children.

Since January, Drag Story Hour NYC has organized 49 events in 34 public elementary, middle and high schools in the city, the Post reported, noting that the group earned $46,000 last month alone. Since 2018, the group has received $207,000 from New York State and from the city’s departments of education, cultural affairs, youth, and even transportation.

Most of this cash came from the discretionary budgets of city council members, and a further $80,000 has been set aside to bring cross-dressing men into classrooms and libraries this year.

Drag Story Hour NYC shows are described by New York Public Libraries as “inclusive, gender-affirming programs,” in which colorfully-dressed men in women’s clothes give children a sample of “LGBTQ reads … with lots of songs and glitter along the way.” The group has put on shows at public libraries in the city since 2017.

While some parents told the Post that they welcomed such shows in schools, others were furious. “I didn’t get any notice,” one parent told the paper. “My daughter actually came home and told me that a drag queen came to the school … I feel like it would have been better for that conversation to happen at home.”

“Exposing children to drag queens in school is none other than an abuse of authority for the purpose of sexualizing children,” activist Dr. Elana Fishbein told the Post, calling the program “a flagrant disregard for the real needs of the students.” The Department of Education did not comment when asked by the outlet if performers had to pass background checks before interacting with children.

Footage from a “child-friendly” drag show at a Texas gay bar last weekend went viral after children were seen waving dollar bills at performers and joining the queens on stage beneath a sign reading “it’s not gonna lick itself.” The footage prompted Republican lawmakers to introduce legislation banning such events, and follow-up shows at the same bar have been picketed by conservative protesters accusing the organizers of “grooming” children.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, footage showing children and toddlers marching in a ‘Pride’ parade behind a topless man with breasts caused outrage online over the weekend.

Last year, the CEO of an LGBT advocacy group responsible for funding drag queen story hour events in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was arrested and charged with seven counts of child pornography. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.

How To Make Aborrajados, A Colombian Street Food Snack

A really DIFFERENT taste treat. You cannot use regular bananas on this you have to use their related fruit the plantain.

Arctic Expedition Discover Mysterious Hole Cut Into The Ice

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Looks uncannily like a scene from the movie “The Thing” but in fact this gigantic hole was recently been discovered by an Arctic expedition in Siberia.

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This recently discovered Bermuda triangle type phenomenon is currently being inspected by a team of scientists who believe the huge gas explosions in the frozen Artic oceans although they admit that it is still too early to come to any conclusive facts about this and other similar holes found in the same area.

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This huge hole in the ice with sheer sides looking like it was cute with a mechanical device was found in the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia.

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The large team of scientists do not all agree on what has caused this strange event to happen or even how old it is and how common these holes are, currently they are studying satellite images going back to the 19080’s to just how many other holes they can find and how old the holes are.

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The Cuban Sandwich – How to Make a Cubano Sandwich

Yes. This is a very special sandwich. And yes, it is truly unique. OMG! Watch this video. Don’t you feel inspired to go ahead and make one RIGHT now?

Monetary Madness

A half century ago, President Richard Nixon closed the gold window. American citizens had been prohibited from owning gold since the early 1930s, but foreign governments could exchange their extra dollars for gold. France tried to make a run on the US gold supply so the American government was forced to break the final link between the dollar and gold, thus ending the gold standard. This set off a chain of events that eventually led to what has been known as the petro-dollar.

Nixon was forced to break the gold peg because it was a fiction. In theory, the amount of dollars in circulation reflected the amount of gold held by the United States, but in reality, the American government had been printing as much money as they thought they needed. The reason the French were racing to redeem their dollars for gold was that they knew the peg was a lie. Once that lie was fully understood, a run on the dollar and global monetary collapse was possible.

It is a good lesson about the reality of the gold standard.

It was an example of the old adage that if you need a gold standard to control a corrupt government, that government is corrupt enough to find a way around it. Much of the good living of the post-war years was due to expansionary monetary policy. The cost of that was paid in the 1970’s with spasm of inflation and finally a recession in the early 1980’s that supposedly put monetary policy back in order.

The thing is the money printing after the war was not a problem because those extra dollars could find a home in the expanding American economy and most especially in the rebuilding of Europe. The dollar was the world reserve currency so everyone in the world was willing to take dollars for payment. Europe was in rubble and needed rebuilding, so the demand for dollars seemed endless. As a result, the United States supplied as many dollars as was needed.

The monetary crisis on the 1970’s was due in large part to the fact that Europe had recovered and no longer needed a flood of dollars. The trouble was the American economy was dependent on the expansion of the money supply. The subsequent negotiations that ended with the petro-dollar and the Louvre Accords was supposed to solve this problem. Instead, it merely shifted the target for extra dollars to low labor cost areas like Asia and South America.

That has been the story of the last thirty years. American manufacturing, technology and services have been shifted to low cost areas. The extra dollars followed them in the form of investment, thus keeping inflation in the United States low. The dollars not soaked up in these countries came back in the form of investments in treasuries, equities and real estate. The system let the government expand and asset values to mushroom, without creating retail inflation.

Like the 1970’s, the place for the extra dollars is drying up. That means they are flowing back in the form of inflation. China is no longer the cheap labor economy desperate for investments, so they are not soaking up extra dollars. In fact, China is a maturing economy determined to shift from exports to domestic consumption. It is also not willing to accept inflation from the United States and Europe. The result is too much money in the West creating an inflation spiral.

It is not the only reason for inflation. Stimulus policies aimed at sustaining the standard of living against economic reality are a big driver. The supply chain crisis that is the result of decades of outsourcing is another driver. Then you have the berserk response to the crisis in Ukraine, which is creating havoc in fuel and energy markets. In a complex system like the global economy, there are always many contributing factors to the things we see in the marketplace.

One way to look at the current economic crisis is as a consequence of the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War. The half century long state of war in the United States and the West resulted in an economic system designed to wage global war without operating a war economy. When the war ended, there was no great demobilization and normalization. The cost was seen as too high, so American leaders found what looked like a cheap way to avoid it.

Unlike the 1970’s, the short term solution for the present inflation is not a contraction of the money supply. The Federal Reserve is carrying trillions of assets on its balance sheet which it has to unload. It will now be selling those into a rapidly declining market, as asset prices have been artificially sustained with the combination of free credit and the flows of extra dollars into assets. The Fed could easily set off a collapse in asset values and a global credit crisis if it is not cautious.

The biggest problem facing the country is the lack of competence in the decision making areas of the ruling class.

  • The economic side is dominated by monetarists, who think an economy is just the sum of it money.
  • The political class is full of carny weirdos selected for their entertainment value.
  • Of course, the senior generation has been conditioned to seek good times, rather than make sacrifices.
  • America lacks the human capital to tackle the problems we face.

The situation facing America is not unlike that which faced the Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The cost of terrible governance over seventy years came home all at once and they lacked the political leaders to manage it. The Russians not only faced an economic catastrophe, but a political one as well. They went through a decade of chaos followed by a decade of slow recovery.

That is what most likely awaits the United States and its European dependents.

Pilot – It’s Magic • TopPop

"Magic" is a 1974 song by Scottish pop rock band Pilot, and was the first hit single for the group. 

It was written by band members David Paton and Billy Lyall for their debut album, From the Album of the Same Name. 

Pilot were a Scottish rock group, formed in 1973 in Edinburgh by David Paton and Billy Lyall. 

They are best known for their songs "January", "Magic", "Just A Smile" and "Call Me Round". 

Both Paton and Lyall had briefly been substitute members of the Bay City Rollers before that band's breakthrough. 

Joined by drummer Stuart Tosh, the band recorded several demos during 1972 and 1974. 

They were signed to a management contract with Nick Heath and Tim Heath, sons of British bandleader Ted Heath, and John Cavanagh. In due course they signed to a worldwide recording deal with EMI Records. 

After the recording of their debut album, From the Album of the Same Name, guitarist Ian Bairnson (who had played on the album as a session musician) joined the band permanently. 

The 1974 single "Magic" from their first album, produced by Alan Parsons and written by Lyall and Paton, was a No. 11 UK and No. 5 US success. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc by the R.I.A.A. in August 1975.

Xi signs outlines that direct China’s military operations other than (for) war

Liu XuanzunPublished: Jun 13, 2022 10:40 PM Updated: Jun 13, 2022 10:32 PM
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Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, recently signed an order to promulgate a set of trial outlines on military operations other than war, which will take effect on Wednesday.

The outlines will standardize, and provide the legal basis for Chinese troops to carry out, missions like disaster relief, humanitarian aid, escort, and peacekeeping, and safeguard China’s national sovereignty, security and development interests, experts said.

The outlines aim to prevent and neutralize risks and challenges, handle emergencies, protect people and property, and safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests, and world peace and regional stability, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Monday.

The outlines have important meanings for the Chinese armed forces to carry out their duties and missions in the new era, as they will make innovations in ways military forces are used and standardize the organization and implementation of the armed forces’ military operations other than war, Xinhua said.

Military operations other than war refer to operations that do not involve war, like disaster relief and humanitarian aid, as well as operations that limit the scale of the use of force like maritime escorts and peacekeeping, a Chinese military expert who requested anonymity told the Global Times on Monday.

The Chinese armed forces have been engaged in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020. They also played a vital role in saving the people from natural disasters like earthquakes and floods, which often took place in China over the past years, the expert said, noting that the recipients of disaster relief and humanitarian aid from the Chinese armed forces have also expanded to other countries, including many that received medical equipment and vaccines against COVID-19, and Tonga that was heavily hit by a volcanic eruption and tsunami earlier this year.

The Chinese armed forces are also responsible for counter-terrorism, anti-pirate and peacekeeping missions, including regular escort missions in the Gulf of Aden and waters off Somalia as well as UN peacekeeping missions, providing public security goods to the international community, the expert said.

By carrying out these operations overseas, in some cases, the Chinese troops can prevent spillover effects of regional instabilities from affecting China, secure vital transport routes for strategic materials like oil, or safeguard China’s overseas investments, projects and personnel, analysts said, noting that this is likely why Xinhua described the outlines as being capable of safeguarding China’s national sovereignty, security and development interests.

With six chapters and 59 chapters, the outlines summarize experiences accumulated from past missions and practices, draw results from both military and civilian research, and standardize the basic principles, organization and command, types of activities, activity support and political work, providing the legal basis for the troops to carry out military operations other than war, according to Xinhua.

Kittens Tied Up In Trash Bag Cry For Dear Life, Hoping People’d Save Them

Jeeze!

Soviet Mystery Amphibious Vehicle Has Been Discovered In Chelyabinsk

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One local man, Ivan Ivanov, discovered the odd vehicle and shared it over VK, the Russian social network.

He claim it weights around 600kg with a length of 4530mm, a width of 1900mm and a height of 1490mm. Aluminium chassis, slick james-bond design, amphibious, this is like real super hero vehicle. A mysterious amphibious vehicle created back in 1950’s by the Design Bureau of the Chelyabinsk tractor hydraulics plant.

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China trains with its new security partner in Pacific

Chinese police officers have begun training their Solomon Islands colleagues, the island nation has announced

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Chinese police have started training their Solomon Islands counterparts, the island nation announced on Sunday. The first round of exercises took place at the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) headquarters in Rove, a western suburb of the capital city of Honiara, between June 7 and 11.

“The security challenges are evolving and still out there threatening this nation and therefore RSIPF must be well prepared to tackle these threats. That is why these trainings are critical and must be delivered to reach all RSIPF officers in Honiara and the provinces,” Deputy Commissioner Ian Vaevaso said during the opening ceremony ahead of the exercise.

The training involved practicing “basic equipment handling skills, basic survive skills, self-defense and counterattack, posture and movement,” the Solomon Islands government said in a statement. The exercise was conducted by instructors with the China Police Liaison Team, it added.

The drills come following a security pact inked by Beijing and Honiara in late April. The agreement further soured the already strained ties between Australia and China, alarming Canberra’s Western allies as well. The West accused Beijing of seeking to create a military base in the Solomon Islands, while then-Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described such prospects as a “red line” for Canberra. US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink warned that Washington would have “significant concerns, and we would very naturally respond to those concerns” should such an outpost emerge.

China, however, rejected the criticism, stating that it distorted “facts and slanders China’s regular cooperation with the countries of Oceania,” while denying harboring any plans to set up a military base in the Solomon Islands. In late May, Western media leaked a draft document suggesting that Beijing was planning to offer economic and security cooperation deals to 10 additional small island nations in the Pacific. The potential deals appeared to be very similar in nature to the pact inked with the Solomon Islands.

Beijing maintains it will continue building ties with the Pacific nations despite the overseas pressure. The agreement with the Solomon Islands has become an example of “open” and “transparent” cooperation, China’s Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Feng said on Saturday.

“The Pacific should be a stage of international cooperation, not an arena for geopolitical games,” Xie told China Media Group in an interview.

Descend Into A Tomb Of Imprisoned Vehicles Frozen In Time

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Nobody likes a visit to the car pound. It probably as one of my least favourite places to be on earth, but you wouldn’t have a hard time convincing me to pay a visit to this particular car pound, hidden 150ft below a piazza in the city of Naples, sealed off after WWII and forgotten about for more than 60 years.

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The place is filled with vintage cars, motorcycles and scooters dating back to the 40s and 50s, but the walls and tunnels they’re entombed in look ancient. And they almost are. Built in 1853 by Ferdinand II of Bourbon, the multilevel subterranean network was conceived as a sort of emergency escape route for the unpopular monarch who feared revolution. The vast underground tunnels would serve as a passageway large enough for his troops and horses to escape the palace and make it to the military barracks. The revolution never came, at least not before Ferdinand’s death in 1859, and the network was never completed.

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Chinese and Pakistani officials have agreed to increase their cooperation in countering terrorism and other security concerns, deepening their cooperation amid efforts by “outside forces” to divide the two countries.

“Pakistan and China reaffirmed their strategic partnership in challenging times and agreed to continue regular exchange of perspectives on issues of mutual interest,” Islamabad’s military said in a statement on Sunday. The countries also vowed to enhance their ties on training, technology, and counterterrorism.

The agreement followed talks during a four-day visit to Beijing by a Pakistani military delegation, headed by Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa. Their Chinese hosts were led by General Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission.

The delegations discussed their perspectives on international and regional security. Beijing reportedly called on Bajwa to stop attacks in the Balochistan region against Chinese nationals who are working on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a collection of infrastructure projects valued at more than $60 billion.

US officials have repeatedly criticized the CPEC, arguing that it will burden Pakistan with high-cost Chinese loans. Pakistani National Assembly Speaker Raja Pervaiz Ashraf last week said the CPEC was the target of a “malicious disinformation campaign” and that the initiative was Pakistan’s best opportunity to address its infrastructure woes and become a regional geo-economic hub.

China’s top diplomat in Pakistan, Pang Chunxue, said earlier this month that the CPEC was threatened by a “Cold War mentality.”

“Hostile forces are trying to undermine the development of CPEC as well as the unity and mutual trust between the two countries,” she told reporters in Islamabad.

Baloch insurgents have reportedly targeted CPEC projects, including natural gas pipelines and electricity transmission towers, because they consider China an imperialist power that seeks to plunder the province’s natural resources.

China seeks stronger security ties with Pakistan

Beijing has reaffirmed its strategic partnership with Islamabad and agreed to enhance defense cooperation.

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Senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi warns US not to have miscalculation or illusion on Taiwan question

Published: Jun 14, 2022 10:18 AM Updated: Jun 14, 2022 10:03 AM

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In talks with National Security Advisor of the US Jake Sullivan in Luxembourg, senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi said the US shouldn’t have miscalculation or illusion on the Taiwan question and warned that the Taiwan question, if inappropriately handled, will have a disruptive impact.

The two held “frank, deep and constructive” dialogue and communication on questions that concern both, agreeing to strengthen communication and dialogue, reduce misunderstanding and miscalculation, and properly manage differences. Both of them said it is necessary and beneficial to keep communication channels open.

Yang noted that US President Joe Biden had repeatedly stated that the US has no intention to seek a new Cold War or change China’s system, that the revitalization of US alliances is not anti-China, that the US does not support “Taiwan independence,” and that it is not looking for conflict or confrontation with China.

However, the reality is that the US has been determined to step up all-round containment and repression against China for some time now. It doesn’t solve US’ domestic problems, but plunged China-US relations into a very difficult situation, greatly damaging bilateral exchanges and cooperation.

Such a situation is not in the interests of China, the US and the rest of the world, Yang noted.

Yang is a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee.

China-US relations are at a critical crossroads, Yang said, noting that China is willing to approach China-US relations based on mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.

China firmly opposes defining China-US relations as competition.

The senior Chinese diplomat said the US should correct its strategic perception of China to make the right choice, and adopt concrete actions to meet China half-way.

In their talks,Yang stressed the Taiwan question concerns political foundation of China-US relations. It will have disruptive impacts if it is inappropriately handled.

The US shouldn’t have miscalculation or illusion on this. It must abide by the One-China principle and the provisions of the three China-US joint communiques, and handle Taiwan related questions carefully and properly.

China’s position on safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity is unequivocal and firm. China’s internal affairs brook no interference from other countries. Any attempt to obstruct or undermine China’s national unity will be doomed to fail, Yang said.

The US should have positive interactions with China and make joint efforts for the prosperity, stability and development of the Asia-Pacific region.

In their talks, Yang also expressed China’s solemn position on Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Xizang, the South China Sea, human rights, religion and other issues. They exchanged views on Ukraine and the nuclear issues on Korean Peninsula.

Global Times

Chris Hedges: No Way Out but War

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.

There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

None of these opposition forces, which did not reverse the permanent war economy but curbed its excesses, now exist. The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry. Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts. NBC’s “Meet the Press” aired a segment May 13 where officials from Center for a New American Security (CNAS) simulated what a war with China over Taiwan might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle Flournoy, who appeared in the “Meet the Press” war games segment and was considered by Biden to run the Pentagon, wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”

The handful of anti-militarists and critics of empire from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, and the right, such as Ron Paul, have been declared persona non grata by a compliant media. The liberal class has retreated into boutique activism where issues of class, capitalism and militarism are jettisoned for “cancel culture,” multiculturalism and identity politics. Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw them join significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler. There is little hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the disasters being orchestrated on a national and global level.  The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists chant in unison for war. Biden has appointed these war mongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department.

Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. This military adventurism accelerates the decline, as the defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate. War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War, or the threat of war, will curb the growing economic and military clout of China.

These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality. No longer able to salvage their own society and economy, they seek to destroy those of their global competitors, especially Russia and China. Once the militarists cripple Russia, the plan goes, they will focus military aggression on the Indo-Pacific, dominating what Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, referring to the Pacific, called “the American Sea.”

You cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The U.S., whose growth rate has fallen to below 2 percent, while China’s growth rate is 8.1 percent, has turned to military aggression to bolster its sagging economy. If the U.S. can sever Russian gas supplies to Europe, it will force Europeans to buy from the United States. U.S. firms, at the same time, would be happy to replace the Chinese Communist Party, even if they must do it through the threat of war, to open unfettered access to Chinese markets. War, if it did break out with China, would devastate the Chinese, American, and global economies, destroying free trade between countries as in World War I. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Washington is desperately trying to build military and economic alliances to ward off a rising China, whose economy is expected by 2028 to overtake that of the United States, according to the UK’s Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The White House has said Biden’s current visit to Asia is about sending a “powerful message” to Beijing and others about what the world could look like if democracies “stand together to shape the rules of the road.” The Biden administration has invited South Korea and Japan to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.

But fewer and fewer nations, even among European allies, are willing to be dominated by the United States. Washington’s veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its economic decline, with China’s manufacturing 70 percent higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible. War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Thucydides noted in the History of the Peloponnesian War.

A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class, and military families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service. It protects the military from internal revolts, carried out by troops during the Vietnam War, which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed forces.

The All-Volunteer Force, by limiting the pool of available troops, also makes the global ambitions of the militarists impossible. Desperate to maintain or increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military instituted the stop-loss policy that arbitrarily extended active-duty contracts. Its slang term was the backdoor draft. The effort to bolster the number of troops by hiring private military contractors, as well, had a negligible effect. Increased troop levels would not have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the tiny percentage of those willing to serve in the military (only 7 percent of the U.S. population are veterans) is an unacknowledged Achilles heel for the militarists.

“As a consequence, the problem of too much war and too few soldiers eludes serious scrutiny,” writes historian and retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich in After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. “Expectations of technology bridging that gap provide an excuse to avoid asking the most fundamental questions: Does the United States possess the military wherewithal to oblige adversaries to endorse its claim of being history’s indispensable nation? And if the answer is no, as the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, wouldn’t it make sense for Washington to temper its ambitions accordingly?”

This question, as Bacevich points out, is “anathema.” The military strategists work from the supposition that the coming wars won’t look anything like past wars. They invest in imaginary theories of future wars that ignore the lessons of the past, ensuring more fiascos.

The political class is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses to accept the emergence of a multi-polar world and the palpable decline of American power. It speaks in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it has the right to impose its will as the leader of the “free world.” In his 1992 Defense Planning Guidance memorandum, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival superpower again arises. The U.S. should project its military strength to dominate a unipolar world in perpetuity. On February 19, 1998, on NBC’s “Today Show”, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version of this doctrine of unipolarity. “If we have to use force it is because we are Americans; we are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”

This demented vision of unrivaled U.S. global supremacy, not to mention unrivaled goodness and virtue, blinds the establishment Republicans and Democrats. The military strikes they casually used to assert the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and prolonged warfare. None of them saw it coming until the hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center twin towers. That they cling to this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope over experience.

There is a deep loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy League architects of American imperialism. Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to project power abroad and produce rising living standards at home. It was tolerated when it restrained itself to covert interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam. The military defeats that followed accompanied a steady decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series of economic policies and trade deals, orchestrated by the same ruling class, which deindustrialized and impoverished the country.

The establishment oligarchs, now united in the Democratic Party, distrust Donald Trump. He commits the heresy of questioning the sanctity of the American empire. Trump derided the invasion of Iraq as a “big, fat mistake.” He promised “to keep us out of endless war.” Trump was repeatedly questioned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin was “a killer,” one interviewer told him. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump retorted. “You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump dared to speak a truth that was to be forever unspoken, the militarists had sold out the American people.

Noam Chomsky took some heat for pointing out, correctly, that Trump is the “one statesman” who has laid out a “sensible” proposition to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution included “facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe…in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation.”

Trump is too unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the economic war against Venezuela and reinstituted crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which the Obama administration had ended. He increased the military budget. He apparently flirted with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” But he acknowledges a distaste for imperial mismanagement that resonates with the public, one that has every right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us into one war after another. Trump lies like he breathes. But so do they.

The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”

“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”

Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.

MoA steals the show with REAL news…

Now on towards real news: U.S. president Joe Biden has told NATO to end the proxy war in Ukraine as soon as possible.

Dr. David Lütke @DrLuetke - 20:33 UTC · Jun 12, 2022

Today #NATO's #Stoltenberg stated that #negotiations are needed for #peace in #Ukraine.

Quote:
"Peace is possible. The question is how much territory, how much independence...are [Ukraine] willing to sacrifice for peace."

Rhetoric is changing:
What happened to Ukraine winning?
video

This is the same Stoltenberg who in early April said that NATO must prepare for a ‘long haul’ in Ukraine. Who then said that the war could drag on for years. Jens Stoltenberg, who told us in May that we must put values over profits, is now talking about peace for territorial and sovereignty concessions.

It seems that someone has told Biden that there is zero chance for the Democrats to win in the midterm elections if gas prices stay beyond 5 dollar per gallon. Or maybe this Saturday NYT piece really got under his skin:

Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of ‘No’ Start to Rise.

In interviews, dozens of frustrated Democratic officials, members of Congress and voters expressed doubts about the president’s ability to rescue his reeling party and take the fight to Republicans.

Whatever.

Russia is winning the war. The Ukraine has lost the war and will also lose a large chunk of its territory. Its western fueled ‘resistance’ against the inevitable has seen to that. The U.S. and NATO now acknowledge that much.

Unfortunately some of Zelenski’s advisors are still unable to recognize that:

Михайло Подоляк @Podolyak_M - 7:12 UTC · Jun 13, 2022

Being straightforward – to end the war we need heavy weapons parity:
1000 howitzers caliber 155 mm;
300 MLRS;
500 tanks;
2000 armored vehicles;
1000 drones.

Contact Group of Defense Ministers meeting is held in #Brussels on June 15. We are waiting for a decision.

“To end the war” … Ukraine needs as many weapons as it had when the war started? What happened to those weapons? Will it also need 50 pink unicorns?

It is over. How much territory Ukraine will have to give will be decided by Russia.

The Windover Bog Bodies, Among the Greatest Archeological Discoveries Ever Unearthed in the United States

burial 0
burial 0

It was only after the bones were declared very old and not the product of a mass murder that the 167 bodies found in a pond in Windover, Florida began to stir up excitement in the archeological world. Researchers from Florida State University came to the site, thinking some more Native American bones had been unearthed in the swamplands. They were guessing the bones were 500-600 years old. But then the bones were radiocarbon dated. It turns out the corpses ranged from 6,990 to 8,120 years old. It was then that the academic community became incredibly excited. The Windover Bog has proven to be one of the most important archeological finds in the United States.

In 1982, Steve Vanderjagt, the man who made the find, was using a backhoe to demuck the pond for the development of a new subdivision located about halfway between Disney World and Cape Canaveral. Vanderjagt was confused by the large number of rocks in the pond as that area of Florida was not known to be particularly rocky. Getting out of his backhoe, Vanderjagt went to investigate and almost immediately realized that he had unearthed a huge pile of bones. He called the authorities right away. It was only thanks to his natural curiosity that the site was preserved. After the medical examiners declared them ancient, the specialists from Florida State University were summoned (another brilliant move by Vanderjagt- too often sites are ruined because experts are not called). Deeply intrigued, EKS Corporation, the developers of the site, financed the radiocarbon dating. Once the striking dates were revealed, the State of Florida providing a grant for the excavation.

2022 06 14 18 29
2022 06 14 18 29

Unlike the human remains found in European bogs, the Florida bodies are only skeletons – no flesh remains on the bones. But this does not negate their significance. Nearly half of the skulls contained brain matter. The majority of the skeletons were found lying on their left sides with their heads pointing westward, perhaps toward the setting sun, and their faces pointing to the north. Most had their legs tucked up, as in the fetal position, however three were lying straight. Interestingly, each corpse had a stake thrust through the loose fabric that enshrouded them, presumably to prevent them from floating to the surface of the water as decomposition filled them with air. This practical step was what ultimately protected the bodies from scavengers (animals and grave robbers) and kept them in their intended positions.

people digging
people digging

The find provides unparalleled insight into a hunter-gather community that existed 3,500 years before the Pyramids were built in Egypt. The skeletons and the artifacts found with them have been studied almost continuously in the decades since their discovery. The research paints a picture of a hard but good life in pre-Columbian Florida. Though living mainly off what they could hunt and gather, the community was sedentary, indicating that whatever hardships they may have faced were small compared with the benefits of the area they chose to settle in.

Theirs was an incredibly caring society. Children’s bodies were almost all found to have small toys in their arms. One older woman, perhaps 50, showed signs of having several broken bones. The fractures occurred several years before her death, meaning that despite her handicap the other villagers cared for her and helped her even when she could no longer contribute significantly to the workload. Another body, that of a 15-year-old boy, showed that he was a victim of spina bifida, a crippling birth defect where the vertebrae do not grow together properly around the spinal cord. Despite his many deformed bones, evidence suggests he was loved and cared for throughout his life. These discoveries are mind boggling when one considers how many ancient (and even a few modern) societies abandon the weak and deformed.

2022 06 14 18 30
2022 06 14 18 30

Contents found within the corpses’ as well as other organic remains found in the bog reveal an ecosystem rich in diversity. 30 species of edible and/or medicinal plants were identified by paleobotanists; berries and small fruits were particularly important to the community’s diet. One woman, perhaps 35 years old, was found with a concoction of elderberry, nightshade, and holly in the area where her stomach would have been, suggesting that she was eating medicinal herbs to try and combat an illness. Unfortunately, the combination did not work and whatever afflicted the woman ultimately took her life. Interestingly, the elderberry woman was one of the few bodies stretched out, as opposed to curled up, with her face pointing downward. In other Native American traditions, elderberries were used to fight viral infections.

Another striking difference between the Windover bog people and their European counterparts is that none of the Floridians suffered violent deaths. The bodies include men, women, and children. Roughly half of the bodies were younger than 20 years old when they died but some were well over 70 years old. This was fairly good mortality rate for the place and time. The presence of brain matter in 91 of the bodies suggests that they were buried quickly, within 48 hours of death. Scientists know this because, given the hot humid climate of Florida, brains would have liquefied in bodies not buried quickly.

Somewhat amazingly, DNA analysis of the remains show that these bodies share no biological affiliation with the more modern Native American groups known to have lived in the area. Recognizing the limitations of modern technology, about half of the Windover site was left intact, as a protected National Historic Landmark, so that in 50 or 100 years’ researchers could return to the bog and excavate untouched remains.

A War on Homelessness

Filmed in 2013 but seriously accurate today. A much watch!

Cat Purrs Non-stop When She Finds a Quiet Home for Her Kittens and a Better Life for Them All

French Amazing Food Dish! OMG!

We finish up with this amazing dish which is local to France…

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2022 06 14 17 37

I never heard of this, but if I lived in France, I would hike over and get this dish at some local restaurant or make it myself. It looks so very super delicious.

Kitten Takes Care Of Her Mom’s Corpse

Another cat story…

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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American media is reporting on (what looks like) a collapse of the Chinese banking system, but I’m not seeing any of it

I’ve been dealing with a major website crash. I’ve thus been spending a heck of a lot of time trying to get it up and running. This has thus taken away from my video time, my patreon time, and my article generation time. Not to mention my time in regards to my life, my work, my career and my family… as well as my retirement time. Sheech!

So if you noticed some holes in the daily output, now you know why they are there. I’m way to busy trying to “patch things up”

It will take me quite some time to regain full daily functionality. There are many issues and holes that were electronically “punched” into my operations. In the meantime, I will continue on and adapt.

I’m going to be wrapping up all this geopolitical stuff and going back to the standard MM fare. Right now, most are on Patreon videos, but I will have a transition period so that all may benefit.

Moving on…

Hal Turner has an article out that paints a very gloomy picture inside of China. He has no love for China, and his is part of the Intel community, no matter how he might appear otherwise. But that does not mean that he doesn’t have something good to say. It only means that he tends to color his “reporting” with a strong bias.

Today he had an article that seems like an American Depression “bank run” inside of China. And he named a number of my banks that I hold accounts with. So after I read his article I went down the street, to my Bank of China (BOC) and talked to the manager there. They didn’t know what I was talking about. There just isn’t any runs in the banks at all here in the Guangzhou corridor.

BANK RUNS IN PROGRESS WITHIN CHINA

2022 06 15 18 43
2022 06 15 18 43

All banks in Shanghai have just restricted depositors from withdrawing money, causing people to line-up in panic at bank branches.  Banks in rural China have been delaying customer withdrawals for 60 Days, and media have been warned not to publish stories about this or risk prosecution for contributing to additional Bank runs!

Multiple sources  have confirmed deposits at the following six banks have been frozen:

  • Yuzhou Xinminsheng Village Bank (located in Xuchang City, Henan Province)
  • Zhecheng Huanghuai Bank (City of Shangqui, Henan Province)
  • Shangcai Huimin Rural Bank (Zhumadian City, Henan Province)
  • New Oriental Village Bank (City of Kaifeng, Henan Province)
  • Huaihe River Village Bank (Bengbu City, Anhui Province)
  • Yixian County Village Bank (Huangshan City, Anhui Province)

It’s understood the banks with branches across the Henan and Anhui Provinces successively issued announcements in April, stating they would suspend online banking and mobile banking services due to a system upgrade.

At the same time, clients reported their electronic deposits in online accounts, mobile apps and third-party platforms could not be withdrawn.

This led to depositors rushing to local bank branches, only to be told they were unable to withdraw funds.

By late May, images emerged on Chinese social media of demonstrations at the front of numerous bank branches.

According to one user on the Chinese social media platform WeChat, the protests are ongoing but are rarely mentioned in Chinese press.

“It has caused widespread concern on the internet but the media attention is not high, the highest degree of concern is the four banks in Henan.”

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has responded to the rural bank run. It issued a statement on April 25.

“The People’s Bank of China is highly concerned… At present relevant departments have launched an investigation, the People’s Bank of China will cooperate with the relevant departments, to protect the rights of financial consumers.”

Fraud scheme blamed

Following the public protests and the PBOC statement, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission revealed it is investigating fraudulent activity carried out by the Henan New Fortune Group – the largest shareholder of the four banks listed above in the Henan Province. It’s understood the commission is working with police to investigate allegations that the Group colluded with bank insiders to misappropriate bank funds.

Anti-CCP group, bannedbook.org, reported the following:

“According to a call recording between depositors and police officers, a company named Henan New Fortune Group Investment Holdings Co., Ltd. is suspected of illegally absorbing public deposits, and the amount is huge.”

Bank run contagion to “sweep across China”

Regardless of the cause, the developments raise serious questions about the health of China’s banks and its regulatory oversight. The more immediate concern, however, is the prospect of contagion, which is now seeing bank runs spread to bigger cities.

There’s evidence this is already happening.

In one of the only mainstream international media articles to report on the unfolding situation, local residents highlighted the seriousness of the situation and the likelihood of contagion.

From the Financial Times on June 9:

Some depositors such as Xu have already lost trust in the system. The 39-year-old said he had withdrawn all of his deposits from 10 other small banks that had promised him an annualised yield of more than 4 per cent.

“Another depositor, a 30-year-old father, said he had placed more than Rmb900,000 in his village’s banks since 2020 at a return of 4.1 per cent. “I felt like being slaughtered,” he said, declining to give his name. He drove overnight to negotiate with the banking regulator in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan, in mid-May. “This is the money my wife and I have saved together since we got married. I had to lie to her that I was away for work.”

On Twitter, a video of a large line at an ICBC Bank in China (one of China’s largest state-owned banks) posted on Tuesday, June 9, suggest contagion is in progress.

Translated to English, the tweet reads “The bank card system is locked, and these people are here to unlock it. Massive runs are coming.”

 

 

Blogger, Jennifer Zeng, has reported major issues with withdrawing cash from banks in Shanghai in recent days. The uncertainty no doubt exacerbated by the prospect of more lockdowns as COVID cases again spike.

All banks in Shanghai have restricted depositors from withdrawing money… A bank run is about to sweep China,” she said.

The lack of reporting about the clear signs of a bank run in China is somewhat surprising.

As HSBC China’s Xuefang Liu puts it, “The rise of China as a global economic power has caused concern that a crisis in Chinese banking could lead to a worldwide downturn similar to the Global Financial Crisis.”

While many analysts believed China’s banking system was widely immune to the Evergrande Crisis, cracks are beginning to emerge and should this bank run intensify, already volatile global markets could be faced with a black swan event even more significant than Evergrande.

 

 

 

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

In the anatomy of an economic crisis, a bank run is the point of no return.  China has just reached that point . . .

Bank runs occur when people scramble to withdraw cash from banks in fear of collapse. In the worst cases, banks’ liquid cash reserves are exhausted, not everyone gets their money and the bank defaults.

It’s a grim scenario which, fortunately, has occurred rarely in history.

The most significant bank runs in the United States took place during the 1930’s Great Depression. More recently, there were runs on numerous U.S. banks during the Financial Crisis in 2008.

In Asia, bank runs have also been rare. A run on Japanese banks in 1927 led to the collapse of dozens of institutions across the country. There was a banking crisis in Myanmar in 2003 which the country has never really fully recovered from.

But perhaps since the Great Depression, none has been as significant compared to what is seemingly unfolding in China right now.

The fact that some con artists scammed some small village banks into going broke would not ordinarily be a big deal, except in this case, the fear such revelations caused triggered mass withdrawal efforts at other small banks . . . which then had to DENY WITHDRAWALS to stay afloat.

Word of these denials spread and people started panicking, going to still more banks to get THEIR money out.   Then, more denied withdrawals.

Instead of containing this in the rural areas, China Regulatory Agencies “opened investigations” but did nothing to restore depositor money . . . which lead to more withdrawals from a wider geographic area.

Now, Banks in Shanghai are denying withdrawals.  That’s it.  That’s the “big one.”

I am told the Shanghai situation is deteriorating very rapidly today.    I was awoken at 3:03 this morning with Covert Intel sources saying there is panic in the streets in Shanghai over this.

Shanghai means banks on other nations ***may*** be affected.   It would likely go first to Banks in eastern Europe, already flummoxed by the Russia-Ukraine hostilities, then move west to London, then to New York.

It could all spread THIS WEEK.

Having proper cash on hand for yourself and your family to get by for a month or two, is now highly advisable . . . just in case.   Remember, cash is NOT for paying bills; it is for SURVIVAL.   Buying food and fuel to get to/from work.  That’s it.

A ding on your credit report is nothing compared to going hungry.   Don’t go hungry.  Have cash.

MM Opinion

This might be happening regionally. But it is not happening where I live, nor where my extended family lives. One of whom lives in Shanghai.

If it IS HAPPENING…

Don't be so sure that it is a random event that is the result of malfeasance. Instead consider the potential that it might be part of a grand "chess move" actuated by the Chinese government intentionally.

If it is NOT happening…

Then consider that this is just more of the same out of the American-controlled "news" media operation. It's an effort to generate fear, and to create the illusion that China is collapsing.

Now a great opinion from Jeff Brown…

A run on Chinese banks? Don’t believe the West’s Big Lie Propaganda Machine. It can’t happen, since the citizens own them all. China Rising Radio Sinoland 220622

A must read HERE

People with eyes with x-ray abilities

Natasha Demkina has something unique, namely eyes with x-ray abilities. Her abilities began to manifest at the age of 10. “I was at home with my mother, and suddenly I had a vision. I could see inside my mother’s body, and I started telling her about the organs I could see. Now, I have to switch from ordinary vision to ‘medical vision.’ I see a colorful picture inside the person for a split second, and then I analyze it,” said Demkina.

After describing her mother’s internal organs to her, Demkina’s story spread by word of mouth among the locals. People began to gather outside her door seeking medical consultation. This discovery attracted the interest of groups from London, New York, and Tokyo, all of whom invited Demkina to demonstrate her abilities.

Demkina’s ability is super powerful. That said, many people and experts doubt her ability. Instead, they believed that Natasha was utilizing “cold reading,” a deceptively simple yet effective method commonly used by astrologers, psychics, and fortune-tellers.

Regardless, Demkina claims she could see that one of her subjects had a prosthetic knee. She was also able to determine that another person has asymmetrical internal organ positions. She can also see the early stages of pregnancy and even the fetus in pregnant women. Remarkable, isn’t it?

Another Cataclysmic Error Threatens To Plunge The U.S. Economy Into A Bottomless Abyss Of Pain And Suffering

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I can’t believe that they actually did it.  Even though it is painfully obvious that the U.S. economy is slowing down dramatically and that we are heading into an excruciating repeat of the housing crash of 2008, the Federal Reserve decided to go ahead with the largest interest rate hike in 28 years anyway.

History has shown us that raising rates just as an economy is entering a recession is an exceedingly foolish move, and many of us have been pleading with the Fed not to do it.  But of course if the Fed actually listened to people like us, we would not be facing such a dire crisis in the first place.

Essentially, the Fed just killed any hopes of avoiding a recession.  The rate hike that was announced on Wednesday was the largest that we have seen since 1994

The Fed raised its key short-term interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point Wednesday – its largest hike since 1994 – to a range of 1.5% to 1.75. It also downgraded its economic forecast.

And it signaled that more big moves may be coming. Fed officials forecast the federal funds rate will end 2022 at a range of 3.25% to 3.5% and next year at close to 4%, according to their median estimate.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell insists that substantially raising rates will tame inflation.

That worked in the early 1980s, but I am skeptical that the same playbook will work again for a couple of reasons.

First of all, in the early 1980s the U.S. was one trillion dollars in debt.  Today, we are 30 trillion dollars in debt.  Our politicians have been on the greatest borrowing and spending binge in the history of the world during the last couple of years, and hiking interest rates cannot erase the trillions upon trillions of new dollars that have entered the economy.

In addition, the Federal Reserve has pumped trillions of dollars that they created out of thin air into the system in recent years.  Hiking interest rates is not a “magic bullet” that can erase that colossal mistake either.

But the Fed feels like it has been forced to do something to address the current crisis, because prices continue to spiral out of control.

For example, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States hit a new record high for the 18th day in a row on Wednesday…

Gas prices on Wednesday reached a record high for the eighteenth consecutive day.

The national average price of gas reached $5.039, according to GasBuddy. On Tuesday, gas prices were around $5.02 per gallon.

And survey after survey has shown that the American people are rapidly losing faith in the Federal Reserve…

Even more concerning are new signs that families have lost faith in the Fed’s policies. Consumer sentiment in June sank to a low not seen since the 1980 recession, according to a University of Michigan survey. Similarly, a poll by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government found that most Americans expect inflation to worsen and are adjusting their spending habits, a mind-set that can make the surge in prices even worse.

So I can understand why Powell and his minions felt a need to raise rates.

But you simply can’t raise rates as the economy enters a recession.  That is suicidal.

At this point, even the Fed’s own numbers show that the economy is really slowing down…

After a week of rampant jawboning to adjust the market’s expectation for The Fed’s actions later today (after last Friday’s unexpected resurgence in CPI), the continued erosion in economic data (most notably retail sales this morning) has prompted The Atlanta Fed to slash its forecast for Q2 GDP growth from +0.9% to 0.0%, meaning the US is now right on the verge of a technical recession (after Q1’s contraction).

If U.S. GDP goes negative again in the second quarter, then we are already officially in a recession right now.

And what the Fed just did is going to make it much worse, because it is about to become a lot more expensive to borrow money…

Every time the Fed raises rates, it becomes more expensive to borrow. That means higher interest costs for mortgages, home equity lines of credit, credit cards, student debt and car loans. Business loans will also get pricier, for businesses large and small.

The most tangible way this is playing out is with mortgages, where rate hikes have already driven up rates and slowed down sales activity.

In particular, higher rates are going to absolutely eviscerate the housing market.  In fact, yesterday I discussed the fact that another housing crash has already begun.  Right now there is a tremendous amount of panic out there as those that work in the industry come to grips with what is now taking place.

 

A year ago, the housing market in the U.S. was red hot, but now the environment has completely changed.

Compared to the same period a year ago, total mortgage application volume was down a whopping 52.7 percent last week…

Total mortgage application volume was 52.7% lower last week than the same week one year ago, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index. Sharply rising interest rates are decimating refinance volume, and those rates, along with sky-high home prices and a shortage of houses for sale, are hitting demand from potential buyers.

In 2008, the Federal Reserve played a major role in bursting the most epic housing bubble in the history of our country.

Now it is happening again, only this time the housing bubble is even larger than the one that imploded over a decade ago.

Most Americans may not realize it, but this is truly a very sad day for the United States.

An immensely painful economic crisis has essentially been guaranteed, and beyond that we are going to see things happen that once would have been unthinkable.

But things didn’t have to turn out this way.

If we would have made better decisions, we could have had much different results.

Unfortunately, the Fed has come up with an endless series of colossal errors in recent years, and this latest error is one of the biggest of them all.

MidJourney Neural Algorythm Sharpens Style of AI Art

MidJourney is a new art-making tool in closed beta. Though both mysterious and obvious—the output suggests AI-powered generative networks trained to perform style transfer—the resulting art is breathtaking.

As test participants write, invitations come much more often compared to DALL-E 2, because the neural network is more focused on creating amateur art.

Art 1
Art 1

Art 2
Art 2

Art 3
Art 3

Stunning and disturbing "hands" 1
Stunning and disturbing “hands” 1

Stunning and disturbing "hands" 2
Stunning and disturbing “hands” 2

Stunning and disturbing "hands" 3
Stunning and disturbing “hands” 3

Art 4
Art 4

Art 5
Art 5

Art 6
Art 6

Art 7
Art 7

Art 8
Art 8

Art 9
Art 9

Witch
Witch

China’s top trade official fails to meet Australia minister at WTO conference | The Straits Times

The heading should actually be “China refused meeting with the self indulgence arrogant Aussie minister”.

GENEVA (BLOOMBERG) - China's Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao was not available to meet Australia's new Trade Minister Don Farrell during a visit to Geneva, potentially delaying a reset in relations between the two countries.

Canberra and Beijing ended a diplomatic deep freeze lasting more than two years on Sunday (June 12), when Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and Defence Minister Wei Fenghe met in Singapore during an international summit.

Full article HERE

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Superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS)

Pam Gilbert began to hear things that others couldn’t. The noises then seized control of her life. Pam Gilbert’s hearing appeared to be a superpower ability at first. When she was on the second story of her house, she could hear the faucet in the basement trickling or her kids turning over in the next room. But it rapidly became a nightmare when she realized she could hear the noises of her own body—her heart pounding in her ears and even her eyeballs shifting from side to side.

Superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS) is a devastating and rare inner ear condition that impairs Gilbert’s hearing and balance. Gilbert describes the sounds she’s hearing as “unshakable noises.”

“They never went away, and there was no way to turn them down. The bones in my neck were breaking like sandpaper, and I could hear it. I could hear my eyeballs moving at one point,” Pam Gilbert detailed the situation. Gilbert confesses that her sanity is eroding as a result of her condition.

Gilbert, fortunately, had surgery on March 4th, 2011. The operation went well. Gilbert felt a sensation of serenity and that her hearing had returned to normal.

How US ‘debt-trap’ diplomacy backfired in Cambodia | South China Morning Post

Both sides could have settled on long-standing loans made to the corrupt regime of Lon Nol in the early 1970s. Instead, US intransigence pushed Phnom Penh further into the embrace of Beijing at a time of intensifying rivalry between the two superpowers

Article HERE

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Confessions Of A Woman In A Polygamous Marriage

How did you end up in a polygamous marriage?

I was born and was raised in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh. A few months before my seventeenth birthday, my father, due to the Guardian System, told me that he had arranged a marriage for me to a foreign businessman in Dubai, and that I would be married within a few weeks.

At the beginning of 2017, I was married to my new husband in Dubai, and became his second wife. I didn’t ever realize that I wouldn’t be his first wife until a few days before the wedding, and I can only remember crying for an entire afternoon the day I found out I would be his second wife. It would not be until the end of last year that our husband took his 3rd and most recent wife.

How old is your husband?

Early 50s

How soon before the wedding did you meet him? What would have happened if you didn’t like him/he didn’t like you?

I met him about a week before the wedding for the first time. If he hadn’t like me, it’s not likely anything would happen since he had already talked to my father, but if i hadn’t liked him there was not much I could have done about it. At that point I was such a mess of nervous teenage anxiety and emotion that there wasn’t much I could have even thought or said.

Why did he marry you?

I’m not sure why exactly, it could have been for my looks or age, since his first wife is quite a bit older than i am, but I’m sure it was also due to the social connections between him and my father that would be forged because of the marriage.

Has your husband mentioned how many wives he plans on having?

He legally can’t marry more than 4 according to Sharia Law, but I can’t imagine he would marry someone else, especially at this point in his life. But who knows, he certainly could. I hope not, but it is a possibility.

Do you have a good relationship with him?

We have a fairly good relationship. Although he doesn’t spend as much time with me as his new wife, he’s very polite and nice to me, and doesn’t mistreat me at all.

Do you love him? Does he love you?

In a way I think I love him; even though I don’t think he married me for love, and I didn’t have much of a choice, I’ve learned to love him for what he is. I know he cares for me in his own way, and I know he wants me to be happy and provided for, which I am very thankful for.

Do you guys have children?

Yes, we have one child, a beautiful two-year old baby girl!

How does your husband treat you? Does he treat all his wives equally or is he biased?

It depends; he treats his first wife and I pretty much the same, or at least spends the same amount of time with us, but ever since his third marriage he’s spent most nights with his new wife. I try not to feel jealous, but it is hard not to resent him and her for it.

How old are his first and third wife?

His first wife is 36, and his most recent wife is only 16. Even though 18 is legally the marriable age in the UAE, a judge can approve a younger marriage, and our husband is wealthy enough to ensure that it happens.

What do you think of a man in his early 50s marrying a girl of 16?

I personally don’t think it’s right for such a marriage to take place. Even though legally it was allowed, the odds are she’ll be widowed before she even turns 40, which is really tragic for her.

Why are you more concerned for her after he dies than what might happen during the marriage?

I don’t think it’s right for him to marry someone so young, but at least this way she is provided for. Once he dies, I’m not sure what’s going to happen to any of us once he dies.

What typically happens to the wives once their husband dies? Say you are 50. Do you get an inheritance?

I would most likely be sent to live with a male relative, and perhaps receive an inheritance or something similar. I would have to follow ‘Iddah’ under Shariah Law and wait before remarrying though. If I an widowed while still young, I could probably remarry, but if I was older I might just live as a widow with my relatives.

He must be very rich to afford 3 wives, 3 households. Are you allowed to spend any money?

He is, as far as I know, fairly wealthy, even though he never talks about business or finances with us. Each of us gets a monthly allowance for groceries, clothes, shopping, and anything else we might need, but it’s never enough to make any really extravagant purchases; for anything like that, like jewelry or really nice clothes; anything really expensive, we have to ask him for permission.

What do you enjoy spending your allowance on?

Well, its usually not enough to buy anything more than the essentials, but I love cooking and buying new ingredients, and i always put a little aside to buy paints and art supplies with.

Are you allowed to work?

No, we aren’t allowed to work, or at least not for money. I love painting and art, so I do work on that a lot, but my husband would never let me sell them or earn a living myself. For the most part I have to rely on my husband to provide for me and our daughter.

How are mealtimes? Do you cook? Do you all eat together?

I usually cook meals for myself and daughter, and maybe a few friends, but we usually I don’t eat with our sister wives, except for on Friday, when we usually eat a meal together with our husband.

When it comes to sex, is it only ever you and him? Or is part of it that the four of you have sexual relations?

It is always only him and one of us, he has never asked any of us to have relations with him at the same time. It’s a very private affair.

Do you spend time with the other wives? Are they your friends? Or do you keep separate lives?

For the most part we are like separate families, we each have our own apartment, cook our own meals, and have our own beds, but fortunately his first wife and I do get along very well; since I left Saudi Arabia she’s been almost like a sister to me. His third wife though, she is very rude to us, since she is the youngest, and we definitely don’t get along.

How is she rude to you?

It feels like since our husband spends more time with her than the rest of us, she has a more privileged relationship with him than we do. She can get him to do things to us that he wouldn’t do otherwise, like punish us for doing innocent things, like going out without his permission, he is usually fine with, but if his youngest wife convinced him to, he will get angry and even hit us, even very softly. It’s more of symbolic than anything, but it still makes me feel awful. She also doesn’t miss an opportunity to bring me down or insult me.

What’s the best thing about your marriage?

Probably having such a good relationship with his first wife. It’s almost like having another sister, and it definitely helps make up for some of the worse parts of my marriage. Either that or being provided for so well. I’m not mistreated or neglected, and it gives me a chance to raise our daughter.

If he were to die soon, would you still be friends with the first wife?

I think we would. Even if we didn’t share a husband, I think we would have been friends anyway, and I think we would stay friends even if we weren’t married to the same man.

What is the worst part about living in such a relationship?

The worst part of my relationship is probably just the stress it brings. For instance, he spends most nights with his new wife, and she knows she is his favorite right now and uses that to treat his first wife and I very badly. I try not to hold it against her or our husband, but it’s hard not to.

Do you feel any resentment towards your father for putting you in a situation you may not have necessarily chosen for yourself?

I do sometimes. He never really gave me a choice in the matter, so I do sometimes feel resentful towards him for putting me into this situation, but it’s the culture he knew growing up, and i know he had my best interests at heart. He wanted to be sure I would be provided for, and I know that despite everything he loves me and wants what’s best for me. But it’s not easy to forgive him.

If you were given a chance to, would you get out of the marriage?

Although under Sharia Law divorce is allowed, the only way it could realistically happen for me is if my husband wanted a divorce as well, which he does not. And if I did divorce him, I don’t know what I would do or where I would go, especially since I would have trouble finding anyone willing to marry a divorced single mother. But honestly, I really don’t want to leave, although I wish it hadn’t happened at all, now that I’m married, I’m fairly well off and happy, and although it’s hard, it’s something I have to live with, and I am alright with that.

Would you prefer a different future for your daughter?

Absolutely. I would never want anyone, least of all my daughter, to be in the same relationship as me.

I would like to see the attitudes towards marriage become more western, and allow women more of a say in who they marry. I also pray that plural marriage continues to become more and more rare as time goes on.

Did you have a childhood sweetheart/relationship before your marriage?

I did have a sweetheart before I got married, he was a family friend, and I thought I was going to marry him for the longest time. I was actually looking forward to it, and I stroll sometimes regret not being able to spend my life with him. But I never had a choice in the matter, so I’ve learned to live with it.

How do you feel about the fact that a lot of the world (at least a lot of the Western world) looks down upon plural marriages. Do you ever question your own lifestyle?

I definitely question my lifestyle, and if I had the choice, I don’t think I would want to be in a plural marriage. Since I do live in Dubai, I do get exposed to more western culture than I did before, and I generally think that the west is right about the negative aspects of polygamy. Despite this, I’ve lived my whole life this way, and I’m not unhappy like many people in the west think. It’s not ideal, and certainly causes more stress and emotional strain on everyone, but it’s not all bad.

How has your life changed because of the marriage?

Before I was married, I lived with my family, and, because of the laws in Saudi Arabia, I had very little freedom of movement, and had to ask permission to do or go anywhere. Even while I was at home my parents, and especially my father, had absolute control over what I did.

Now that I’m married, I don’t have to ask permission to go out, as long as I am accompanied by another woman or male guardian, and I have more control over how I spend the small allowance I get. I also have more freedom at home, to raise our child and to talk and spend time with female friends. Despite this, if he wanted to, or if I made him unhappy with me, my husband could control me just like my father, did and monitor my every move, but fortunately he allows his wives to be fairly independent as long as we obey.

Russia may withdraw recognition of the independence of the Baltic republics and Ukraine

Article HERE

Russian State Duma deputy Yevgeny Fedorov, in an interview with the Sputnik Latvia news agency, said that Russia could withdraw recognition of the independence of Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine in the future. Earlier, Fedorov submitted to the State Duma a draft law on the abolition of the resolution of the USSR State Council of September 6, 1991 - "On the recognition of the independence of the Republic of Lithuania." The explanatory note to the document states that the decision is illegal, since it was adopted by an unconstitutional body in violation of the requirements of several articles of the Constitution of the Soviet Union.

The MP also noted that after Lithuania, such a scenario is possible for Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine. “ We just started with Lithuania. And it is clear why - Lithuania is more dangerous for the Russian Federation in terms of the situation related to the Kaliningrad region, and in the confrontation with NATO and the United States. Therefore, Lithuania is now more important, but this does not mean that we will stop there ,” Fedorov said.

In an interview with the International Affairs magazine, Fedorov spoke about the consequences of the withdrawal of recognition of the independence of Lithuania by the Russian Federation:

"First, Lithuania, in accordance with international law, will automatically cease to be a nation like Kosovo. Someone recognizes Kosovo, someone does not, but Kosovo is not in the UN. It's not a nation, it's a disputed territory. The status of a disputed territory means that this territory cannot be part of NATO, because there is paragraph five there, which states that disputed states and territories cannot be part of NATO. In this case, we proceed from the fact that NATO did not know about this, we did not raise the issue of the dispute, but either after this law or a court decision, by the way, there is such a procedure for canceling the decision of the State Council to recognize the independence of Lithuania, NATO will be obliged to return to this issue due to newly discovered circumstances. In the process of our negotiations with NATO, there will be a legitimate basis for excluding Lithuania from the Alliance in accordance with the fifth paragraph of the NATO Charter.

We are in a constant cycle of conflicts. The operation on the territory of Ukraine is already the hundredth military conflict in thirty years, and the basis for this is the violation of the law in 1990-1991. It was then that territorial international law was violated following the results of the Second World War,” Yevgeny Fedoro said .

From the material of the information portal of the Izvestia newspaper - IZ.RU:

“ Similar measures should also be applied to other countries of the post-Soviet space, in respect of which there are questions about the legal grounds for their withdrawal from the Soviet Union and which show hostility towards Russia. At the same time, Fedorov emphasized, this is not about the return of territories, but about “eliminating threats” for the Russian Federation.

Director General of the Center for the Study of Integration Prospects Sergey Rekeda commented on Fedorov's initiative, calling it a signal to Lithuania and other Baltic countries about their political inferiority. He also added that the decisions to divide the territory of the USSR were not flawless from a legal point of view. In them, according to Rekeda, the factual rather than the formal side prevailed, later consolidated by the consensus between the elites in Moscow and the former Soviet republics, which was violated.

On June 14, the head of the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, in an interview with Foreign Policy, expressed Vilnius' concerns about the bill introduced by Fedorov. According to him, despite the fact that the initiative to revoke the recognition of Lithuanian independence does not come from top Russian officials, the Lithuanian authorities perceive it as a direct threat to the country .”

A Nightmare On Wall Street

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This is bad.

This is really, really bad.

Investors loved the ride up, but now the Federal Reserve is helping to destroy the bubble that it once so eagerly created, and trillions of dollars in paper wealth is being wiped out in the process.  Unfortunately, our system is not really designed to handle this sort of carnage.

So many in the financial world live right on the edge, and when things go really, really bad the dominoes can start falling at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking.  We witnessed this back in 2008, and it could soon happen again.

On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 880 points, and many were deeply concerned about what Monday would bring.

Well, the pessimists turned out to be correct, because the Dow plunged another 876 points on Monday.

Overall, the Dow is now down approximately 17 percent from its record high, and so it has almost reached bear market territory.

Of course the S&P 500 is already there

The S&P 500 fell 3.88% to 3,749.63, marking its lowest level since March 2021 and bringing its losses from its January record to more than 21%. The benchmark closed in bear market territory (down more than 20% from its high) after trading there briefly on an intraday basis about three weeks ago. Some on Wall Street say it’s not an official bear market until the index closes there and that’s what happened on Monday. The last time stocks were in a bear market was in March 2020 at the onset of the pandemic.

Needless to say, the Nasdaq has them both beat.  Tech stocks were on the cutting edge on the way up, and now they are on the bleeding edge on the way down.  The Nasdaq dropped another 4.68% on Monday, and at this point it has already dropped over 33 percent from the all-time high.

Just think about that.

A third of the value of the Nasdaq has already been obliterated.

Wow.

As I write this article, investors are extremely concerned that the Fed could raise rates by 75 basis points on Wednesday…

Major averages hit their lows of the session in the final 30 minutes after a Wall Street Journal report suggested the Fed would consider raising rates by 0.75% on Wednesday, more than the half-point increase currently expected.

And Fox Business is reporting that some traders believe that we could actually see a 100 basis point increase in July….

While market consensus is for a half-point interest rate hike at the Fed’s policy-setting meeting this week, the odds for a larger increase next month are surging, with a potential 75-basis point or 100-basis point jump on the table in July. About 16% of traders are penciling in a 100-basis point jump next month, compared to 53% forecasting a 75-basis point increase, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool, which tracks trading.

Of course the Fed should not be raising rates at all.

The U.S. economy is clearly heading into a very painful recession, and you don’t raise rates as a recession is starting.

Unfortunately, Fed officials feel like their hands are tied because inflation is completely out of control.  Last week we learned that the consumer price index has risen to 8.6 percent, and we were told that was the highest that it has been since December 1981.

But if the inflation rate was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would actually be well over 15 percent at this point.

So the Fed is going to bring down the hammer, and that is going to continue to roil financial markets.

And right now cryptocurrencies are being hit harder than anything else.

In fact, the price of Bitcoin plunged 15 percent in just 24 hours…

Bitcoin, the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency, has lost 15% in the last 24 hours — putting it about 66% below its all-time high in November last year, when it traded around $69,000, according to data from Coinbase. Bitcoin fell below $24,000 Monday, sending the crypto to its lowest level since December 2020.

Ether, the second-most-valuable digital coin, plunged 17%, and has now lost about 75% of its value since November.

At the peak, just about every Bitcoin investor was in the green.

But as I have warned my readers over and over again, you only make money in the financial markets if you get out in time.

There was quite a bit of panic among crypto investors after the Celsius Network announced that it was being forced to temporarily pause “withdrawals, swaps and transfers”

Celsius Network Ltd., one of the biggest lenders in crypto and a key player in the world of decentralized finance, said late Sunday that it was pausing withdrawals, swaps and transfers following weeks of speculation over its ability to make good on the outsize returns it offered on certain of its products, including yields as high as 17%. The move effectively halted a platform with registered entities across the globe and billions of dollars worth of digital coins under management, accelerating a selloff in the broader market that was already in progress on concern over prospects for tightening monetary policy ahead of a Federal Reserve meeting this week.

We should watch some of these big players in the cryptocurrency industry very carefully.

In the end, I have a feeling that some people that thought that they were “crypto millionaires” will actually walk away with nothing or next to nothing.

Of course it isn’t just crypto investors that are going to get eviscerated.

In recent years our financial markets have been transformed into the biggest casino in the history of the world.

And a lot of investors had become convinced that the Federal Reserve had decided to permanently rig the game in their favor.

Now the rug is being pulled out from under them, and the losses are piling up fast.

Hopefully the markets will stabilize after the Fed decision comes out.

But the outlook for the months ahead is terrible, and my regular readers already know what I believe is coming beyond that.

It took years to get to the top of the rollercoaster, but the ride down will go much, much faster.

Russian Spares for Airbus and Boeing aircraft – Airline Ratings

Russia plans to manufacture unauthorized and unapproved spare parts for Airbus and Boeing aircraft, as their supply lines have been cut by economic sanctions.

This could further deteriorate the value of leased western aircraft operating in Russia, as the use of unauthorized Russian spares would render the aircraft not airworthy in western countries.

The Russian aviation authority, Rostaviatsia, has issued developer certificates to five companies that authorize them to perform modification, certification of minor changes, and issuance of technical documentation, including approval of repair documentation and changes. The five companies include the State Civil Aviation Research Institute, S7 Technics, the Ural Civil Aviation plant, Aviation Engineering Solutions, and the Navigator Institute of Aeronautical Instrumentation. This certification will enable them to manufacture Russian spares. However, those spares would not be recognized as airworthy outside Russia.

Article HERE

Propaganda award of the day…

Yeah. Just add the word “possibly” and include a statement by an “unnamed expert”. LOL!

By the way, the Chinese don’t brew coffee at home. No one owns coffee makers. They drink tea. And if they want a cup of coffee they go to McDonald’s, KFC, or Starbucks for one.

This is just silly…

Can you believve this?
Lies. Lies. Lies.

UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet says will not seek second term | United Nations News | Al Jazeera

The cost of telling the truth!

Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations human rights chief, has said she will not seek a second four-year term after her current one expires at the end of August, ending weeks of speculation.

The 70-year-old made a trip to China last month for which she was criticised by rights groups as well as some Western governments for not doing enough to act against alleged abuses against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in the western region of Xinjiang.

Full article HERE

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China’s hostile environment for Western tech pushed out Amazon and Airbnb, but competition remains the biggest challenge | South China Morning Post

On platforms like Airbnb, Amazon and Uber were out competed by local Chinese rivals.
China’s hostile environment for Western tech pushed out Amazon and Airbnb, but competition remains the biggest challenge

An increasing number of Western internet firms are calling it quits in the world’s second largest economy, citing Covid-19 and a tougher regulatory environment

More recent challenges just tell part of the story, according to analysts, who say platforms like Airbnb, Amazon and Uber were outcompeted by local rivals

Full article HERE

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Setback For Airbus-Led Consortium: After 20 Years Of Frustration, Norway Goes The Australia Way & Dumps Its Rotorcraft

Not a lot of countries able to develop their own high tech industry, eg. AUSTRALIA; a TOTAL FAILURE AGAIN AND AGAIN TO BUILD IT OWN SUBMARINE :
Norway has terminated its two-decade-old contract with an Airbus-led consortium of European aircraft and defense manufacturers, NATO Helicopter Industries (NHI), to acquire 14 NH90 medium-lift helicopters, citing 20 years of frustration with the delays, errors, and time-consuming maintenance.

“Regrettably we have reached the conclusion that no matter how many hours our technicians work, and how many parts we order, it will never make the NH90 capable of meeting the requirements of the Norwegian Armed Forces,” said Norwegian Minister of Defence, Bjørn Arild Gram, in a statement released on June 10.

“Based on a joint recommendation by the Armed Forces and associated departments and agencies, the Norwegian Government has therefore decided to end the introduction of the NH90 and has authorized the Norwegian Defence Material Agency to terminate the contract.”

Article HERE

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Ukraine latest updates: Moscow ‘destroys’ Western weapons depot | Russia-Ukraine war News | Al Jazeera

Of course.

Ukraine latest updates: Moscow ‘destroys’ Western weapons depot full of high-technology, expensive, weapons systems.

Full Article HERE

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U.S. paid 2 bln in rubles for astronaut’s trip via Russian spacecraft – CGTN

Russian Space Agency official said U.S. has already paid in ruble for its astronaut's flight on Russian spacecraft in an interview on Saturday, according to China Media Group.

Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos, said the U.S. has paid the full amount of the cost of the flight to the International Space Station for the crewmate Mark Vande Hei on the Russia "Soyuz" spacecraft in an interview with the Russia 24 news channel.

NASA has chosen the Axiom Space Corporation as a middle man to purchase a seat for the American astronaut under pressure from Congress.

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth with two Russian cosmonauts aboard Russia's Soyuz MS-19 Spacecraft in the end of March.

The payment was a month later than planned, according to Rogozin. He said Axiom Space is the direct payer who made the payment of 2 billion rubles, not NASA.

In March, Rogozin said Roscosmos will switch to ruble-denominated contracts with other countries, according to TASS state news agency.

The move came after Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia will seek payment in rubles for gas sales from "unfriendly" countries as part of countermeasures against Western countries freezing Russia's overseas assets.

Article HERE

Two Culinary Students Made Gigantic, Chocolate Covered Rock Candy Geodes

At the Culinary Institute of America, two students—Alex Yeatts and Abby Lee Wilcox—have spent the last six months creating a collection of chocolate-covered, rock candy geodes and they look absolutely amazing.

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Taiwan

Recently, China starts to make it clear that Taiwan straight is NOT the so-called international water. Chinese MFA spokeperson said as follows on 2022/06/13 (source).

Bloomberg: We reported that Chinese military officials have repeatedly asserted that the Taiwan Strait is not international waters in recent months during meetings with US counterparts. Does the foreign ministry have any comment on this?
Wang Wenbin: Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory. The Taiwan Strait ranges in width from about 70 nautical miles at its narrowest and 220 nautical miles at its widest. According to UNCLOS and Chinese laws, the waters of the Taiwan Strait, extending from both shores toward the middle of the Strait, are divided into several zones including internal waters, territorial sea, contiguous zone, and the Exclusive Economic Zone. China has sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the Taiwan Strait. At the same time, it respects the lawful rights of other countries in relevant waters.
There is no legal basis of “international waters” in the international law of the sea. It is a false claim when certain countries call the Taiwan Strait “international waters” in order to find a pretext for manipulating issues related to Taiwan and threatening China’s sovereignty and security. China is firmly against this.

This QnA was 2 days ago but I didn’t see this in any western media, especially in anglo sphere. It seems to me that China has put Taiwan reunification on schedule.

China’s President Signs Decree: “Special Military Operations”

World Hal Turner

President Xi Jinping of China signed an order on the right to conduct a “special military operation” without declaring war.  It seems clear, he has Taiwan in mind.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, recently signed an order to promulgate a set of trial outlines on military operations other than war, which will take effect on Wednesday.

The outlines will standardize, and provide the legal basis for Chinese troops to carry out, missions like disaster relief, humanitarian aid, escort, peacekeeping, and safeguarding China’s national sovereignty, security and development interests, experts said.

The outlines aim to prevent and neutralize risks and challenges, handle emergencies, protect people and property.  They also deal with safeguarding national sovereignty, security and development interests, world peace and regional stability.

The outlines have important meanings for the Chinese armed forces to carry out their duties and missions in the new era, as they will make innovations in ways military forces are used and standardize the organization and implementation of the armed forces’ military operations other than war, sources say.

Military operations other than war refer to operations that do not involve war, like disaster relief and humanitarian aid, as well as operations that limit the scale of the use of force like maritime escorts and peacekeeping, a Chinese military expert who requested anonymity said today.

The Chinese armed forces have been engaged in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020. They also played a vital role in saving the people from natural disasters like earthquakes and floods, which often took place in China over the past years, the expert said.

The Chinese armed forces are also responsible for counter-terrorism, anti-pirate and peacekeeping missions, including regular escort missions in the Gulf of Aden and waters off Somalia as well as UN peacekeeping missions, providing public security goods to the international community, the expert said.

By carrying out these operations overseas, in some cases, the Chinese troops can prevent spillover effects of regional instabilities from affecting China, secure vital transport routes for strategic materials like oil, or safeguard China’s overseas investments, projects and personnel, analysts said.

With six chapters and 59 pages, the outlines summarize experiences accumulated from past missions and practices, draw results from both military and civilian research, and standardize the basic principles, organization and command, types of activities, activity support and political work, providing the legal basis for the troops to carry out military operations other than war.

Atop all those matters, the issue of Taiwan seems to be the real focus of the President’s new Decree.

In the same way that Russia is now engaged in a Special Military Operation in Ukraine, China now has the legal basis for it to do the same with Taiwan.

A Conflict inside of China

The main actions of the world conflict will take place around China—expert (EurAsia Daily, Alan Pukhaev, June 13, 2022 — in Russian)

It is practically no secret to anyone anymore that the big game started by the West in the context of the ongoing geopolitical confrontation is pursuing global goals. The fate of the world order is at stake. At the same time, the West, which is defending its hegemony, in its usual manner, is trying to act by proxy, creating problems along the perimeter of its geopolitical enemies—Russia and China.

East and South Asia

Outwardly, this looks rather confusing, but not for those who developed the ingenious schemes used today.

Today, the main direction of the front of the geopolitical struggle is the Ukraine, where Russia is conducting a special military operation, and where the collective West is investing huge financial resources. In this situation, it may seem that Russia is acting alone and China has taken a wait-and-see attitude.

However, according to the renowned sinologist Nikolay Vavilov, this is by no means the case. China is acting. Moreover, it is actively, conscientiously fulfilling the part of the tasks assigned to it.

The aggravation of the situation in the Taiwan Strait can serve as evidence of this. Despite U.S. dissatisfaction, Chinese Air Force planes are flying into the island zone more and more frequently, getting on the nerves of the Taiwanese administration and irritating the United States. This does not allow Washington to fully focus on the Ukraine, which is an obvious help for Russia.

At the same time, it can be noted that today, along the entire perimeter of the Chinese border, the hot phase of the Cold War unleashed by the U.S. against China has unfolded.

“Imran Khan flew to the opening of the Olympics in Beijing. After that, he flew to Moscow. In response, the United States initiated the overthrow of Imran Khan, bringing the pro-American opposition to power. And now a civil war is flaring up in Pakistan,” Nikolay Vavilov wrote in his Telegram channel. “Pakistan is China’s most important ally. The route from western China through Pakistan and on to the Persian Gulf is a strategic hydrocarbon supply route. Basically, a territory bordering China was struck.”

The sinologist draws attention to the fact that quite recently the pro-Chinese regime in the state of Sri Lanka was swept away with the support of the U.S. A government crisis is brewing in Nepal, which directly borders China.

“There was an active struggle for the President in the Philippines as well,” the expert continued. “The winner is a politician associated with Chinese monopolies. But the Philippine military department is pursuing its own pro-U.S. policy. Recently, the head of the Pentagon, Lloyd Austin, visited there. During his visit, a framework agreement on maritime security was signed between the Philippines and the U.S. In addition, the United States is trying to draw Vietnam into the anti-Chinese coalition, taking advantage of the fact that it has territorial disputes with China.”

He recalls that Biden has visited South Korea and Japan in May. These are the closest allies of the U.S. And many analysts believe that during his visit a proposal was made to expand Washington’s military cooperation with Seoul and Tokyo with the possibility of transforming Japan into a nuclear power and deploying tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of South Korea.

“We see that Biden is flying not to the Ukraine, but to East Asia,” continues Vavilov. “Meeting with leaders of Southeast Asian countries, focusing efforts in that region.”

The sinologist points out that nearly at the same time there was a coup attempt in the Solomon Islands, where China basically helped the government to stay in power by signing a bilateral security agreement. In addition, according to U.S. media reports, China intends to sign similar agreements with Kiribati and Vanuatu. This is how, according to the expert, Beijing is responding to Washington’s actions—by creating a security belt in the Pacific Ocean.

In addition, it is worth paying attention to NATO’s intentions to grant membership the countries of East Asia. Obviously, this is solely an anti-Chinese measure.

Central Asia

As a confirmation of the expert’s opinion, we can also recall the situation in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan, which also directly borders China. Recall that on May 17–18 this year, the Tajik security forces carried out an anti-terrorist operation there against organized armed gangs.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic has officially stated that the actions of the militants were coordinated from abroad via extremists wanted by the state, the main figure among whom is the leader of the National Alliance and the Islamic Renaissance Party (banned in Tajikistan) Muhiddin Kabiri.

Also bordering China, Kyrgyzstan was visited last month by British representative Richard Chalk (Richard Edward Oliver Chalk. Since 2011, he was heading UK special unit RICU—Research, Information and Communication—a secret service that is part of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism under the UK Home Office. He is now running UK NGO REOC Communications — EurAsia Daily). According to Kyrgyz sources, the main purpose of his visit was to convince the Kyrgyz authorities to start accepting Afghan refugees.

Of course, one cannot ignore the January events in Kazakhstan, which brought the country to the brink of civil war.

Thus, as Nikolay Vavilov noted, destabilization is taking place along the entire perimeter of the Chinese border, with the exception of Mongolia. At the same time, the weakest links, in his opinion, are Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Myanmar. Therefore, it can’t be said that China is sitting on the sidelines. It is fighting a cold war against the U.S.

“Another thing is that this war is still being waged via proxies, via allied political forces, but it is no less fierce,” Nikolay Vavilov continues. “Entire regimes are being demolished, governments are being replaced, and preparations are underway for a large-scale conflict.”

In view of the foregoing, there are reasons to believe that the main actions of the current world conflict will unfold in the Asia-Pacific region. And the Ukraine is a maneuver to distracts Russia.

In Germany

Sanctions going really well: 1 in 6 Germans skipping meals due to inflation price increases on food

Nearly one in six Germans (16 percent) have been forced to go without regular meals to make ends meet, and another 13 percent may face a similar situation if food prices continue to rise, a new survey by the Institute for New Social Answers (INSA) for Germany’s Bild newspaper has found.

Electricity in Australia

Sydney suburbs plunged into darkness as more power outages

Entire suburbs in Sydney were sent into darkness on Monday night, with concerns more power outages could hit areas of both New South Wales and Queensland over the next 24 hours.

It appears at least part of the problem is price controls imposed on electricity suppliers such that some are turning off generation rather than lose money on every kWh generated.

Remember 2008? Another Terrifying Housing Crash Is Now In Progress

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It is often said that those that refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  More than a decade ago, the Federal Reserve created the most epic housing bubble in American history and everyone was happy until 2008 came along.

The economy slowed down, home prices crashed and the ensuing chaos on Wall Street spawned an endless series of movies, television specials and documentaries.

But instead of learning our lessons, we did it again.

The Federal Reserve created an even larger housing bubble, and I have been relentlessly warning that it would inevitably burst.  Now home sales have fallen for six months in a row and prices are crashing again.  In fact, in some parts of the country we have already seen prices plunge by as much as 20 percent

Property prices have fallen by up to 20 percent across parts of the US as buyers shun the market amid ‘Bidenflation’ and spiking interest rates.

Asking prices have plummeted by up to $400,000 in wealthy areas while poorer neighborhoods have seen house values nosedive by as much as $115,000.

Do you remember last time around when millions of homeowners ended up “underwater” on their mortgages?

If we continue on this current trajectory, it is going to happen again.

Last year at this time, the housing market was extremely hot, but now a new report from Redfin is telling us that things have dramatically changed

A May study by Redfin found that about 19 percent of sellers dropped the prices on their homes in a four week period between April and May. The outlet said that the report indicated an end to the country’s pandemic-era housing boom.

Their report found that Google searches for ‘homes for sale’ were down 13 percent from the same time last year.

It also found that requests for home tours were down 12 percent, and that mortgage applications dropped 16 percent from a year prior.

And the higher mortgage rates go, the worse things are going to get.

Unfortunately, mortgage rates are spiking at a rate that is absolutely breathtaking this month

Mortgage rates jumped sharply this week, as fears of a potentially more aggressive rate hike from the Federal Reserve upset financial markets.

The average rate on the popular 30-year fixed mortgage rose 10 basis points to 6.28% Tuesday, according to Mortgage News Daily. That followed a 33 basis point jump Monday. The rate was 5.55% one week ago.

The last time we saw mortgage rates this high was during the last housing crash.

Unfortunately, they are only going to go higher because the Federal Reserve wants interest rates throughout our economy to rise in order to fight inflation.

But as I have warned repeatedly in recent months, a high rate environment is going to absolutely eviscerate the housing market.  Already, higher rates have had a colossal impact on home affordability…

Higher home prices and rates have crushed home affordability.

For instance, on a $400,000 home, with a 20% down payment, the monthly mortgage payment went from $1,399 at the start of January to $1,976 today, a difference of $577. That does not include homeowners insurance nor property taxes.

It also does not include the fact that the home is about 20% more expensive than it was a year ago.

Vast multitudes of potential home buyers will be forced out of the market until home prices comes down dramatically.

If you are one of those people, you could try to rent a place while you wait, but apartment rents are 15 percent higher than they were a year ago…

A new report from Redfin shows that nationally listed rents for available apartments rose 15% from a year ago. And the median listed rent for an available apartment rose above $2,000 a month for the first time.

Rents are up more than 30% in Austin, Seattle, and Cincinnati. In Los Angeles the median asking rent is $3,400. Even in formerly affordable cities such as Nashville it’s now $2,140, up 32% from last year.

I am so thankful that Redfin gives us these numbers, but it turns out that Redfin is in deep trouble too.

In fact, Redfin just announced that they will be laying off 8 percent of their workers…

Real estate firms Redfin and Compass are laying off workers, as mortgage rates rise sharply and home sales drop.

In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Compass announced a 10% cut to its workforce, and Redfin announced an 8% cut.

Shares of both companies fell Tuesday. Redfin’s stock touched a new 52-week low.

So many of the exact same things that we witnessed back in 2008 are happening again.

The economy is slowing down.

Big corporations are starting to lay off workers.

Home prices are starting to collapse.

And there is a tremendous amount of pessimism about what is ahead.  In fact, one new survey has found that small business owners are “feeling their gloomiest in nearly five decades”

Small business owners in America are feeling their gloomiest in nearly five decades, a survey released Tuesday morning showed.

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) said its gauge of businesses expecting better business conditions over the next six months fell to the worst reading in the 48-year history of the survey.

When things got really bad in 2008 and 2009, the Federal Reserve responded by pushing interest rates all the way to the floor, and that certainly helped.

But now the Federal Reserve doesn’t have that option.

In fact, the Federal Reserve seems quite determined to dramatically raise rates in a desperate attempt to fight the inflation monster that they had a major role in helping to create.

And the higher that rates go, the worse things will get for the housing market and for the economy as a whole.

If we would have learned some lessons from the last crisis, all of this could have been avoided.  But instead we are now moving into a future which is going to be extraordinarily painful.

At this point, the Federal Reserve is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

If they don’t raise rates, inflation will continue to spiral out of control.

But if they do raise rates, they will crush the housing market and make the coming recession far worse.

For years, they assured all of us that they had everything under control and that they knew exactly what they were doing.

Now everyone can see the truth, but unfortunately it is too late to reverse course.

Tetrachromacy

The majority of us can only perceive a limited number of hues or colors from our surroundings, which may number in the millions. If you think that is already a lot, consider someone who can see 99 million more colors than you. Concetta Antico, the world’s only tetrachromatic artist, is an example.

Tetrachromacy is a hereditary condition in which a small percentage of the global population has more receptors in their eyes than a normal person, allowing them to detect more colors.

Concetta Antico perceives more than green in a tree leaf, stating, “around the rim, I see orange, crimson, or purple; in the shadow, you may see dark green, but I see violet, turquoise, or blue.”

Antoci’s tetrachromacy translates to her vibrant and colorful paintings, and you can see them on her website, concettaantico.com. The crazy part is that her parents first mistook her for color blind or daltonic since she detailed hundreds of hues that only she could see!

Q&A: Indonesia’s defence minister on China in the Asia-Pacific

China has always been the leading civilization in Asia. Many of our sultans, kings, our princes in those days, they would marry princesses from China. We have hundreds of years of relationship.

Al Jazeera: In your speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue, you spoke about the “Asian way”. Where does Indonesia fit into that idea?

Subianto: That is our culture that we always try to resolve problems with negotiations, with interactions, with engagement, and we keep on engaging, we keep on discussing until we come to an amicable, mutually beneficial solution. That is the Asian way.

And it is the Indonesian way. We call it musyawarah mufakat (discussion to reach a solution) and we call it gotong royong (working together). We look for common interests; if we always talk about the differences, we might not even meet.

Al Jazeera: A big focus during this summit has been on US-China tensions. What do you see as Indonesia’s role in dealing with those tensions?

Subianto: We are in the real and actual position that we respect and we are friendly, and we are good friends. We have good cooperation with both powers — I have said that many times. The United States has helped us many times, in our critical moments. But China has also helped us. China has also defended us and China is now a very close partner with Indonesia. And actually, China has always been the leading civilization in Asia. Many of our sultans, kings, our princes in those days, they would marry princesses from China. We have hundreds of years of relationship.

So it’s natural. So, you asked me, what is our position, as good friends we try to be, maybe a good common bridge. If not, then we maintain the good relationships

And we are convinced that both powers will have wise leadership. I’m optimistic on that front, many people, of course, understandably are concerned, and yes there are dangers. But I believe the leader of China will be wise, and the leader of the US also. They are great powers. The world will expect them to give us good leadership.

Al Jazeera: What about some of the aspects of Indonesia-China relationships, where there are differences of opinions… for example the South China Sea. How do you navigate those challenges?

Subianto: As I said with good relations, good communication with direct contacts, we can come to an amicable understanding that’s mutually beneficial.

Q&A: Indonesia’s defence minister on security in the Asia-Pacific

Article HERE

Strawberry Shortcake Poke Bundt Cake

This fun poke bundt cake puts a whole new spin on strawberry shortcake!

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Ingredients

Cake

Strawberry Poke Mixture

  • 1 1/2 cups sliced fresh strawberries
  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 teaspoons lemon juice

Cream Cheese Glaze

  • 3/4 cups powdered sugar
  • 2 tablespoons butter, softened
  • 1 oz cream cheese, softened
  • 1 to 2 tablespoons milk
  • 1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Garnish

  • 1 cup sliced fresh strawberries

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Russia, Ukraine, China, Taiwan, NATO w/Gonzalo Lira (Live)

"A conflict with China is a catastrophe."

An outstanding, but very long (4 hours) talk about geopolitics including Russia and China. The China section starts around 1:40:00. A must listen to. Listen to the the entire broadcast if you are able to.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 5

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Jus primae noctis, household treasures, Elvis Presley and his love mobile, China lays the line, 1970s tunes, and delicious food

The accusation of Xinjiang genocide is so ludicrous as to insult the intelligence of the audiences being preached to, yet highly placed scholars/politicians/scientists/journalists of the west would still echo every silly comment coming from State Department, or MI6, or that propaganda outfit in Mid-town Manhattan. 

-Oriental Voice

It is CLEAR that the United States want to “pull an Iraq WMD” excuse to invade / do battle with China. They are pushing, pushing and pushing about the “Xinjiang genocide”. And they are not going to stop, as they seem to have invested much in this avenue to attack China.

What am I talking about? HERE, and here…

Fury at UN human rights chief over ‘whitewash’ of Uyghur repression

Dozens of scholars have accused the UN human rights chief of having ignored or contradicted academic findings on abuses in Xinjiang with her statements on the region.

In an open letter published this week, 39 academics from across Europe, the US and Australia called on Michelle Bachelet to release a long-awaited UN report on human rights abuses in China.

The letter, published online, included some academics with whom Bachelet had consulted prior to her visit to Xinjiang. The letter’s signatories expressed gratitude for this, but said they were “deeply disturbed” by her official statement, delivered at a press conference in Guangzhou at the end of her six-day tour.

Set the tone for this article.

The Band! Need I say more?

Dilbert

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China puts it’s foot down.

China will fight to prevent any effort to split Taiwan from China. Splitting is yet precisely defined. It would be at China's discretion. It could even mean the sale of offensive weapons to China's traitors.

Xi Jinping has recently elevated the irritable antics of Japan to very high profile.

It has defined the air surveillance zones including the Diaoyutai, and unfriendly entities will be fended off; China is holding high profile memoriam for Nanjing Massacre; China is explicitly pointing finger at Japan's emperor during WW2 as the number 1 war criminal, and ask for accountability.

China will perpetuate these, and perhaps even increase the frequency.

Afterall, there was 731 biolab issue and the 3-burn/kill/plunder war crimes yet to be addressed as yet. Take Russia's strategy: demilitarization; denazification, indemnification, on Japan!!!

First Japan. Then Uncle Sam next.

- Oriental Voice

Fresh Berry Cobbler

Don’t forget the ice cream.

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Pssst, for an impressive dessert that guests will love and is simple to make, try our easy berry cobbler. It’s ready in a snap and tastes like summer. In our berry cobbler recipe, we love using Bisquick™ to achieve the perfect tender top layer. Top your warm Bisquick™ berry cobbler with whipped topping, homemade whipped cream—it’s super easy to make—or ice cream.

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Steps

  • 1
    Heat the oven to 425°F.
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    In 2-quart saucepan, mix 1/2 cup sugar and cornstarch. Stir in raspberries, water and lemon juice. Heat to boiling over medium heat, stirring constantly. Continue boiling 1 minute, stirring constantly. Pour berry mixture into 8- or 9-inch (2 quart) glass baking dish.
  • 3
    In medium bowl, stir Bisquick™ mix, milk, 1 tablespoon sugar and melted butter just until blended and a dough forms. Drop dough by 6 spoonfuls onto hot berry mixture.
  • 4
    Bake about 15 minutes or until berry mixture is bubbly and topping is light brown.
  • 5
    Place baking dish on a wire cooling rack. Cool slightly. Serve warm.

China draws security red line to US at defense ministers’ longer-than-expected first meeting

Published: Jun 10, 2022 10:46 PM Updated: Jun 10, 2022 11:17 PM
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The Chinese military won’t hesitate to fight anyone who dares to separate the island of Taiwan from China, China’s State Councilor and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe told US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during their first meeting in Singapore at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ (IISS) 19th Shangri-La Dialogue on Friday.

With the purpose to use Taiwan island and topics on the South China Sea to hype “China threat,” the US seeks to build an iron curtain between China and other Asian countries and to implement its “Indo-Pacific Strategy” by rallying allies, analysts said, noting that China is drawing a bottom line by reiterating its firm stance on the Taiwan question.

After being canceled for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the IISS 19th Shangri-La Dialogue is taking place in Singapore from Friday to Sunday. The talks between Wei and Austin on Friday were the first meeting between Chinese and US defense ministers since Austin took office in January 2021.

Topics on the island of Taiwan, South China Sea, and the Ukraine crisis had been discussed at the defense ministers’ meeting.

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Two Su-35 fighter jets and a H-6K bomber fly in formation on May 11, 2018. Photo:China Military

There is only one China, and Taiwan is a sacred, inalienable part of China’s territory, Wei told Austin, noting that if anyone dares to separate Taiwan from China, the Chinese military will not hesitate to fight, and will resolutely crush any “Taiwan independence” attempts at all cost to firmly safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, senior Colonel Wu Qian, a spokesperson at China’s Ministry of National Defense, said at a press conference after the meeting.

Austin reiterated to Wei that the US remains committed to its longstanding one-China policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three US-China Joint Communiqués, and the Six Assurances. However, he also “reaffirmed” opposition to “unilateral changes to the status quo,” according to a press release from the US Department of Defense.

The Chinese defense minister’s remarks stressed China’s bottom line for the US as Washington has ramped up efforts to link the Russia-Ukraine conflict with the Taiwan question and create tensions in the region, analysts said. They lashed out at the US for taking “a sausage cutting” strategy to hollow out its one-China policy gradually and intensify the situation at the Taiwan Straits.

Analysts said the US is attempting to shift its EU allies’ focus to the Asia-Pacific region and also consolidate its alliance in Asia.

Japan is the one that closely follows the US in using the current Russia-Ukraine crisis to hype the Chinese mainland’s “threat” to the island of Taiwan. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida used the Russia-Ukraine conflict as an example to oppose “unilateral changes” to the status quo by force and unveil a plan to raise Japan’s defense budget

The US and its allies have stepped up efforts to promote the implementation of the “Indo-Pacific Strategy” this year, as it is trying to build an iron curtain between China and others in the Asia-Pacific region, Yang Xiyu, a senior research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times on Friday.

Yang said that the biggest difference in this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue is that the Asia-Pacific region is now facing an unprecedented strategic instability. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has spilled over to the world. NATO is going global, and Western countries have deliberately added fuel to the fire by linking Ukraine with Taiwan, which are irrelevant.

The US had built QUAD, AUKUS, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, but China decided to confidently face them or integrate into them, Yang said, pointing out that China’s choice to send its top defense official this year at this sensitive time shows China’s confidence and strategic focus, as well as China’s strategic sincerity of pushing the Asia-Pacific to integration and cooperation standing at the crossroads.

Frank exchangesWei and Austin’s meeting on Friday is of significance to implementing the important consensus between the two countries’ top leaders and pushing forward the development of the two countries’ military ties, said Senior Colonel Wu, noting the conversation was a frank, positive and constructive strategic communication.

Both sides agreed that the two militaries should carefully implement the key consensus reached by the two countries’ top leaders, keep frequent communication and manage risks and crises, Wu noted.

The meeting between Chinese and US defense ministers is an exchange of views at this historic moment, as China pushes the region toward integration and cooperation and away from separation and Cold War, Yang said.

The significance of the meeting is that it proved the two countries’ high-level conversation is sustainable. Even if the two sides crossed swords with words, being able to exchange views in a frank manner means both sides are willing to implement the consensus reached by the two countries’ top leaders, Yang said.

The conversation between the Chinese and US defense ministers has a positive meaning to the deepening of strategic communication, the exploration in the construction of a “guardrail” for China-US relations, as well as the management of risk, Cao Yanzhong, a research fellow at the Academy of Military Sciences of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), told the Global Times on Friday.

When it comes to the “guardrail” for  China-US relations the US wants to build, China has already drawn three bottom lines the US should not cross during the two countries’ meetings in Anchorage and Tianjin. The US should keep its promises, stop making provocations on the Taiwan question, stop expanding and enhancing military alliances and partnerships in its attempt to “shape security environment of China,” and stop trade sanctions and technology blockades, and take real actions to stabilize China-US relations and promote peace, Cao said.

However, as the US insists on defining the bilateral relations with major power competition, there are two options for such competition to evolve: it can escalate to conflict, or it can pave the way for cooperation, Zhang Yingli, former professor at the International College of Defense Studies at the PLA’s National Defense University, told the Global Times on Friday.

The US military frequently carries out close-in reconnaissance and make provocations on China, and China’s frontline troops have garnered rich experience and skills as they deal with them. This means Chinese troops can carry out their duties in safeguarding national sovereignty very professionally and avoid possible accidents that could lead to crises from happening as much as possible, Zhang said.

Analysts noted the US should also immediately stop arms sales to and military cooperation with the island of Taiwan, stop the highly frequent close-in reconnaissance on China as well as stop stirring up regional confrontation and security tensions in the Indo-Pacific region.

How this is reported in the West...

FLASH: China Tells U.S. “Will not Hesitate to Start a War”

FLASH– 7:31 PM EDT  Friday, June 10, 2022 — The Defense Ministry of the People’s Republic of China told their U.S. counterparts this evening “Beijing will not hesitate to start a war over Taiwan.”

They used those exact words.

Developing  . . .

Neocons warn American leadership that you cannot take what China says at “face value”

“The US doesn’t have to believe anything China says, but it doesn’t have to pick a fight with China either.”

From HERE

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NEWS ALERT! China Will Not Hesitate To Start A War If US Does Not Follow One-China Policy — Beijing

Ah. For those of you who have not been paying attention. -MM

China will not hesitate to start a war if Taiwan is pulled away from China, Chinese Defense Ministry Spokesperson Wu Qian said on Friday.

“If anyone dares to rip Taiwan away from our country, the People’s Liberation Army of China will not hesitate to start a war,” Wu Qian was quoted by the CCTV as saying after a meeting between Defense Minister Wei Fenghe and his US counterpart Lloyd Austin in Singapore.

“We will firmly defend our country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Meanwhile, Austin and Wei discussed the need to responsibly manage competition and maintain open lines of communication, the Pentagon said.

“Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III met today with the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Minister of National Defense General Wei Fenghe on the margins of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. Secretary Austin and General Wei discussed US-PRC defense relations and regional security issues,” the statement said.

According to the Pentagon, Austin focused on “the need to responsibly manage competition and maintain open lines of communication.”

“The Secretary underscored the importance of the People’s Liberation Army engaging in substantive dialogue on improving crisis communications and reducing strategic risk,” it added.

The two also discussed North Korea and the Russia-Ukraine crisis. During the talks, the Pentagon chief reaffirmed US commitment to “our longstanding One-China policy,” according to the statement.

The meeting was the first in-person meeting between Austin and Wei, who last spoke with each other over the phone on April 20, which was itself the first such call since the Biden administration took office.

China, last month, in response to a US congressional delegation visit to Taiwan, sent 30 warplanes near the island and urged the US to avoid sending signals of Taiwanese independence.

The Shangri-La Dialogue is an annual event designed to allow heads of state and top defense officials to meet in person to discuss security challenges. The event did not take place in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Urban Exploration Photographer Reveals Abandoned Ferrari & MG Sports Car. Bonus: Lamborghini Diablo Goat Edition

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A comment

Marie-Antoinette, 1770: "Let them eat cake!"
Von der Leyen, 2022: "Let them drive electric!"

-Passerby

CIA spycraft

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Developed by CIA’s Office of Research and Development in the 1970s, this micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was the first flight of an insect-sized aerial vehicle (Insectothopter). It was an initiative to explore the concept of intelligence collection by miniaturized platforms. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

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US Navy aircraft carriers may be useless in a war with China

“The days of the carrier on the modern battlefield may be numbered.”

Aircraft carriers such as the $13 billion USS Gerald R. Ford are floating symbols of the United States’ military power. They are built to dissuade adversaries from attacking American interests, reassure allies in times of crisis, and provide lifesaving close air support to U.S. troops in combat.

Yet these capital ships are also large and tempting targets for anti-ship missiles. Now China, which has missiles that can strike ships up to 2,500 miles away, has reportedly found a way to track U.S. aircraft carriers in real-time.

Last June, a Chinese satellite equipped with artificial intelligence detected the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman during naval exercises off the coast of Long Island, New York, allowing China’s military to follow the ship’s movements, The South China Morning Post first revealed.

Task & Purpose has not independently verified the claim made by Chinese space scientists that they had spotted the Harry S. Truman. The Navy referred questions about the possible implications of this claim to the Pentagon, which did not provide a comment for this story.

If this reporting is accurate, it could indicate the Navy would be unable to dispatch aircraft carriers to Taiwan in response to a Chinese invasion, said Timothy Heath, a senior international defense researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization.

“Given China’s long-range anti-ship ballistic missiles, the only hope that a U.S. carrier has for surviving a battle near Taiwan is to hide from Chinese sensors,” Heath told Task & Purpose. “If this report is true, then the carriers’ last defense against anti-ship ballistic missiles is now gone. The carrier can be found, identified, and tracked, and that data undoubtedly can be passed to Chinese targeteers who could then target the warship.”

In the past, Chinese analysts have had to pore over a massive number of satellite images to locate U.S. aircraft carriers, Heath said. By using artificial intelligence, the Chinese military could greatly accelerate that process.

Even if this particular story about how China tracked the Harry S. Truman turns out not to be true, military analysts have long expected that artificial intelligence would make it much easier for China and other adversaries to sift through satellite images and identify targets, he said.

“I think there is an understanding that the future battlefield is going to be highly transparent in the sense that the proliferation of satellites and AI [artificial intelligence] will make it increasingly difficult for major combatant ships like a carrier to hide. In fact, it’s almost a given that the days of the carrier on the modern battlefield may be numbered.”

China already has a variety of ground-based radars, airborne sensors, and satellites that have made U.S. military planners apprehensive about sending aircraft carriers anywhere near Taiwan, Heath said.

“The military officers I’ve talked to said they have been planning for years to deploy carriers so far away from Taiwan that they’re out of range of the [Chinese] missiles, but frankly, also irrelevant to the combat,” Heath said. “The bottom line is if the U.S. is relying on carriers to save Taiwan, that’s a lost cause. It’s just not viable.”

Retired Navy. Capt. Jerry Hendrix said he has been worried about how U.S. aircraft carriers can be detected from space. Hendrix is a Navy expert who spent 26 years on active duty, during which he served on aircraft carriers and as a strategist on the Chief of Naval Operations staff.

Hendrix recounted to Task & Purpose how he read a news story years ago about an astronaut who spotted his former carrier while he was serving on a space station. From far above the Earth, the astronaut was still able to see the ship’s hull number through one of the station’s telescopes.

“It occurred to me that if a human astronaut in the space station was able to do this, that it probably is not that hard to look for aircraft carriers,” Hendrix said.

Indeed, there are not that many ships in the world that are as large, as fast, or that displace as much water as U.S. aircraft carriers, so Chinese satellites have plenty of clues to look for, Hendrix said. Even though super tankers are larger than aircraft carriers, they do not turn into the wind to launch aircraft.

“If you’re programming in through AI-specific attributes of an aircraft carrier that an aircraft carrier would do but a merchant ship of a similar size would not, then you’re able to make that detection from overhead imagery more quickly,” Hendrix said.

Artificial intelligence would also allow Chinese satellites to quickly distinguish an aircraft carrier’s electronic signature from background noise on the electromagnetic spectrum, he said.

To keep aircraft carriers relevant in future wars, the Navy needs to invest in carrier-based aircraft that can fly much further without refueling than F-35C Joint Strike Fighters, Hendrix said.

Hendrix said he estimates the F-35C can fly up to 650 nautical miles before it needs to be refueled. While the Navy is developing the MQ-25 drone to refuel carrier-based aircraft, not enough of those drones will be on individual aircraft carriers to refuel a lot of F-35Cs for a large strike, he said.

The Navy really needs an unmanned combat aircraft, Hendrix said. The service had been developing such a drone, the X-47B, but decided to move forward with the MQ-25 program first.

There’s no doubt that threats against aircraft carriers are growing, but it’s also worth noting that experts have been writing the aircraft carrier’s obituary for a century. Indeed, the U.S. Naval Institute has compiled a list of articles from its “Proceedings” magazine going back to 1922 that debate the carrier’s worth.

One naysayer argued in 1925 that the Navy should use large dirigibles instead of ships to carry aircraft because airships can fly over both sea and land. A 1959 commentary questioned whether the Navy would get better use out of its money if it built more submarines instead of carrier strike groups. And one author wrote in 1999 that the cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda in Sudan and Afghanistan the previous year marked the beginning of the end for aircraft carriers.

“As we enter the new millennium it will become more and more obvious, however, that technology that earlier favored the aircraft carrier will dictate its demise,” wrote the author, whose name was not included in the USNI list.

Retired Navy Capt. Brent Sadler said he does not believe the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers are so vulnerable to detection that they could not take part in a military response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

“These Chinese kill chains are long and carrier strike groups are hard targets,” said Sadler, the senior fellow for naval warfare and advanced technology at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C. “They can and will operate within threat ranges.”

In other words: Just because Chinese satellites detect U.S. aircraft carriers does not mean that the Chinese military can get the ships’ location in time to successfully hit them with missiles.

In 1981, the U.S. Navy exercise Ocean Venture demonstrated that American aircraft carriers could avoid being detected by Soviet satellites, thus disproving that the carriers had to stay far away from Soviet territory to survive, said Sadler,  the senior fellow for naval warfare and advanced technology at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C.

“Same is true today, but we just have not really demonstrated this in a way like Ocean Venture did,” Sadler told Task & Purpose.

With that said, the U.S. military has a lot of work in preparation for a possible war with China triggered by an invasion of Taiwan, Salder said That includes practicing how it would fight such a war, expanding the defense industrial base, and investing in more ships to be able to wage a long war.

“Bottom line – carrier strike groups, long-range aircraft and submarines will all be active if such a war occurs,” Sadler said.

Stunning Photos Of The Installation Process For Chinese 5G Network Equipment On  Mount Everest

Not reported in “The West”.

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China Mobile Hong Kong and Huawei have jointly taken 5G connectivity to the highest-altitude base station to the north of Mount Everest. Built at an altitude of 6,500 meters, the highest 5G antenna installation in the world will enable China Mobile to run its dual Gigabit network.

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The base station, along with previously built stations at altitudes of 5300 meters and 5800 meters, is designed to provide full coverage of 5G signals on the North Ridge as well as the Summit of Mount Everest. The network is being maintained by network specialists stationed 24/7 at the altitudes of 5,300 meters and above.

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Apart from this, Zhou Min, general manager of Tibet branch of China Mobile, told the media that the trio of basecamps would ensure telecommunication for the activities of mountain climbing, scientific research, environmental monitoring, and high-definition live streaming by providing download speeds that top 1.66 Gbps and upload speeds higher than 215 Mbps.

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China Mobile Hong Kong revealed the project last month and recently announced its completion via a Facebook post. The team consisted of 150 engineers, network analysts, construction workers, and a couple of Yaks who lugged the 8-ton equipment to the highest base camp. They also plan to use the network in order to properly measure the true height of Mount Everest.

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Approximately 25 km of fiber optic cables were laid as part of the project on top of the 177 km transmission trunk line and the route along with Everest.

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Chinese 5G is everywhere, except inside the USA and their western proxy nations.

A-10 pilot explains how the Air Force can outfit the beloved ‘Warthog’ to take on China

The most delusional article of the day.-MM

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"In order to survive, the A-10 Warthog must adapt and overcome."

Throughout my 10-year flying career in the United States Air Force, the A-10C Thunderbolt II, affectionately dubbed the Warthog, has been the subject of divestment. There is a joke amongst the A-10 community that discussions of getting rid of the A-10 started 2.5 minutes after the last one rolled off the Fairchild-Republic assembly line in 1984. Despite such quips, there is one resounding fact that defines our community; the mission comes before the plane. Now don’t get me wrong, with more than 2,000 hours and two deployments in the A-10, I love the jet with all my heart. But the mission will always come first. So herein lies the paradox: how does a jet under constant threat of divestment adapt and evolve to support the ever-changing mission?

In August of 2020 Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown published a white paper titled “Accelerate Change or Lose,” wherein he asserts that for the Air Force to retain the ability to project power and establish air supremacy anywhere in the world, we must embrace rapid growth and adaptability. Gen. Brown followed his white paper up with action orders, published in December 2020 and revised in February 2022. The action orders were a charge to Air Force leaders to embrace the ideas laid out in the paper, stating “these action orders provide the what. It’s the way we address these action orders that will provide the how. It is all of us … our talented airmen … that are key to cutting unnecessary bureaucracy, recognizing and understanding our competition, and thinking of creative ways we can reshape the design of our Air Force.” With Brown’s charge in mind, the A-10 community set out to analyze and identify how to support the Air Force’s strategic, operational, and tactical goals.

The notion of integrating stand-off weapons (SOWs) on the A-10 was first hatched 10 years ago, but never gained traction due to the threat of divestment. Now, a decade later, and congressionally mandated to remain in service despite divestment efforts in each of the last 10 budget requests, the idea of integrating SOWs on the A-10 was revisited. In July 2021, a group of A-10 tactical experts gathered ‘round the infamous Hog Trough — an informal gathering area where A-10 pilots and crew have mission-related discussions — and postulated on how the A-10C could better help our 4th, 5th, and soon to be 6th-gen brothers and sisters win in the air. The first proposal was the ADM-160 Miniature Air-Launched Decoy, also known as MALD. Carried by the F-16 and B-52, the MALD is a low-cost combat capability that offers mission and combatant commanders the opportunity to saturate an air defense picture and increase the survivability of our 5th-gen assets. When planned and utilized properly, a few dozen decoys can wreak havoc on the defenses of a sophisticated potential enemy like Russia or China.

The A-10C has up to 10 weapons stations available. In today’s Air Force, where new fighters have fewer weapons stations in order to prioritize internal carriage and stealth, the A-10’s sheer volume of available weapons stations is a force multiplier. The MALD weighs about 300 pounds and has a range of approximately 500 miles. It is programmable and aims to duplicate the signatures and flight profiles of combat aircraft, inducing confusion and noise into the enemy air defense picture and complicating their tactical decision-making. A single MALD can be loaded directly onto a station, or two MALD can be loaded on a triple-ejector rack. This enables a single A-10 to carry up to 16 MALD, which is as many as a B-52 can hold and 12 more than an F-16 can. To further break it down, a four-ship formation of A-10s could bring up to 64 MALD to a fight. The A-10’s robust, agile combat employment capabilities (low maintenance footprint and ability to operate from unimproved or makeshift runway surfaces) combined with the ability to carry 16 MALD per aircraft, provides combatant commanders the ability to create multi-axis problems, target saturation, and horizontal escalation options for adversaries. No software integration with the jet’s central computer is required. Carriage and separation testing is the only cost to consider.

After about seven months of research, building a roadmap, rallying A-10 community support and being told ‘no’ at least 50 times, the 127th Wing from Selfridge Air National Guard Base, Michigan, borrowed some load-training versions of the MALD and ground fit checked the ADM-160 on the A-10C at Volk Field Air National Guard Base, Wisconsin. This happened the same day the A-10 chief engineer signed off on the project. The motivation, creativity, and perseverance of our airmen, paired with a mission-oriented community proved that we can accelerate change. Hopefully, the effort will gain the support of Air Combat Command (ACC) and Headquarters Air Force (HAF). With their support, the MALD can go through separation testing and complete its integration on the A-10 in the next few months. Integration of the MALD on the A-10C provides a unique method to use the austere capabilities of the airframe to increase the survivability of every aircraft in the fight.

The second proposal, the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile or JASSM, is the next step in the A-10’s evolution of mission support. The JASSM is a low-observable, air-launched cruise missile, which has become so strategically important to combatant commanders, that it has been integrated onto the F-15E, F-16, F/A-18, F-35, B-1, B-52, and even the B-2. Initial assessments and theorizing suggests that the A-10 could potentially carry four to five of the missiles. For comparison, the F-15E is the only fighter that can carry more than two JASSM (the Strike Eagle can carry up to five JASSM), while the bomber fleet can carry between 12 and 24 of the munitions, depending on the platform. Although this may not have the same sticker shock associated with the MALD, the A-10 can offer combatant commanders an additional four to five JASSM per sortie, and leverage integrated combat turns (ICTs) to increase sortie production. Risk mitigation demands more SOWs employment, and the carriage capacity combined with the quick-turn capability of the A-10C should be considered as a means to increase the Mass the USAF can provide to a combatant commander. This is not about taking the JASSM away from bombers and other fighters. This is about bringing more weapons to bear in a shorter span of time, which is a critical component of massing fires.

The A-10 is not a nuclear-capable asset, so deployment should not carry the same level of strategic threat as assets that are nuclear-capable. This provides an opportunity for combatant commanders to forward stage long range fires without potentially triggering a change in strategic posture. Unlike the MALD, the JASSM will require software integration in addition to ground fitting and separation testing, however, given the fact that the A-10 and the JASSM are currently available, with support, the timeline could encourage rapid capability offerings to combatant commanders to integrate into plans right away.

Imagine a rapidly-deployable force of non-nuclear fighters that can operate from the most austere locations with a minimal footprint while providing long range fires, decoys, electronic attack, and mission support. That vision is achievable at minimal cost by using assets and capabilities that the Air Force already has, but simply needs to integrate. That is what stand-off weapon integration on the A-10 can provide to combatant commanders.

In the end, should we be called to militarily defend democracy and the freedoms we hold dear, we are going to fight with the force we have, not the force we want. Without a suitable replacement aircraft, the A-10 is likely to remain a congressionally-mandated part of the Air Force, as noted in Gen. Brown’s “4+1” fighter force structure. The integration of the MALD and the JASSM are merely two ways the A-10 community is evolving to best support the Air Force in future fights. Gen. Brown charged airmen with embracing the idea of thinking outside the box and working to counter our adversaries with new and unique methods. The innovative spirit and “get it done” attitude of the A-10 community is an example of accelerating change to not lose. Good luck to our adversaries trying to sort and pick through the 64 MALD delivered by a four-ship flight of A-10s.

CIA operations inside of China

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Dru Blair, Mixed Media on Illustration Board, 2010, Donated Courtesy of Alan Seigrist.

November 1950 marked the entry of Chinese Communist military forces into the Korean War.

The Truman Administration tasked CIA to conduct covert-action programs on the Chinese mainland.

One particularly sensitive and dangerous one involved CIA’s Civil Air Transport (CAT) flying agent-exfiltration missions in which low-altitude, slow-moving planes hoisted agents from the ground.

The painting depicts an ill-fated flight on November 29, 1952 when Norman A. Schwartz and C flew such a mission into Manchuria, unaware that Chinese Communist units had been tipped off about the flight and were waiting in ambush.

Their plane was shot down, and they were killed.

Their two crewmen, John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, however, were not seriously hurt.They were captured by the PLA.

They were convicted of espionage and imprisoned.

Fecteau was eventually released nearly a year shy of his 20-year sentence, and Downey was released after serving just over 20 years of his life sentence.

(Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

Steve Winwood Dear Mr. Fantasy Live-Crossroads 2007 (High Quality)

I’m jamming to 1970s tunes…

‘Assume you can be jammed’ — What US troops are learning about electronic warfare in Ukraine

“We are really not prepared for that level of electronic warfare.”

Russia’s use of electronic warfare in eastern Ukraine provides a preview to U.S. troops about what it will be like to fight an adversary that can intercept and jam their communications, sever all links to their drones flying overhead, and blind their radars and other sensors.

“Electronic warfare is almost by definition one of the hardest things to discern on the battlefield,” Russian military analyst Michael Kofman told Task & Purpose. “It seems early on Russia was not well prepared to employ these capabilities, but now there are numerous stories of localized jamming and disabling of drones.”

Open source analysts such as Oryx Blog suggest the Ukrainians have destroyed several Russian jammers and deception systems, including the Krasukha mobile electronic warfare system, which is meant to jam drones and other weapons systems guided by radar, said Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at CNA, a federally funded research and development center.

However, the Russians have still been able to jam Ukraine’s military communications as well as the Global Positioning Receivers on the drones that the Ukrainians use as artillery spotters, the Associated Press recently reported.

“They are jamming everything their systems can reach,” an unnamed official with a civilian organization that provides the Ukrainian military with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance told the Associated Press. “We can’t say they dominate, but they hinder us greatly.”

The ongoing battle in Eastern Ukraine shows that electronic warfare does not distinguish between inside and outside of the wire. Russia’s tactics in Ukraine may indicate that the days when U.S. troops could comfortably sit in a tactical operations center with perfect communications are coming to an end.

Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran would likely try to jam and intercept U.S. troops’ communications and block or deceive navigation systems in a war, said Lt. Col. Tyson Wetzel, senior Air Force fellow with the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, D.C.

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Under an electronic attack, American service members may need to resort to seemingly anachronistic forms of communications. For example, the Ukrainians use analog landline field phones because they cannot be jammed by the Russians, Coffee or Die reporter Nolan Peterson revealed.

A contested electronic environment could also make it more difficult for U.S. military aircraft to strike their targets. In 2018, Army Gen. Tony Thomas, who led U.S. Special Operations Command, said during a speech that an AC-130 gunship over Syria had been temporarily disabled by an electronic warfare attack.

Thomas told Task & Purpose on Monday that the AC-130 was still able to carry out its mission despite the electronic jamming. It is unclear whether the electronic attack was launched by Syria, Russia, or the Islamic State group.

“But we had to work around in a ‘dirty’ battlefield as opposed to some of the areas in which we had been operating in previous years,” Thomas said, referring to the contested electromagnetic environment.  “It also reminded us that our peer adversaries have that capability in large quantities.”

The threat of electronic warfare remains “an ever-present reality” for U.S. troops in Syria, said Air Force Lt. Col. Gina McKeen, a spokeswoman for Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve.

“U.S. troops and coalition partners are working together to minimize the electronic warfare threat to operations in the Levant in order to ensure the enduring defeat of Daesh [ISIS],” McKeen told Task & Purpose.

In October 2020, the Defense Department released its “Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy,” which calls for investing in “revolutionary, leap-ahead technologies” to combat electronic warfare.

“Recognizing U.S. reliance on the EMS [electromagnetic spectrum], our adversaries have spent 30 years studying, investing, and implementing policies, capabilities, and procedures with the single focus of gaining military advantage over U.S. forces,” the strategy says. “These adversaries are developing and fielding advanced technology that targets U.S. capabilities across the EMS.”

For junior enlisted U.S. service members and noncommissioned officers, Russia’s use of electronic warfare in Ukraine is a reminder that they have an electronic signature – just as they have heat and visual signatures – that can be detected, targeted, and hit, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army Europe.

“We should expect that the Russians will jam/intercept our communications,” Hodges told Task & Purpose. “They already do this occasionally. That’s why it’s important we train on this at our training centers and home station so that soldiers are disciplined to minimize Russian EW [electronic warfare] effects.”

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U.S. troops must also continue to practice proper procedures to make sure that they are always clear and concise whenever they communicate in a contested electronic warfare environment, he said.

“Assume that you can be jammed and/or intercepted and thus targeted, no matter what system you are using,” Hodges said.

The Russians have learned that lesson the hard way by using cell phones when their communications systems failed. That has made it easy for the Ukainians to find, target, and strike Russian troops, including general officers.

Right now, the Russians have effectively put their jammers on blast so that regions of Eastern Ukraine are electromagnetic dead zones, where neither the Ukrainians nor Russians have access to communications, radars, and other sensors, said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Glenn “Powder” Carlson, president of the Association of Old Crows, a professional organization for electronic and cyber warfare professionals.

Carlson compared the situation to a scene in the movie “The Hunt for Red October,” in which a Navy officer describes how the Soviet fleet was moving too quickly to detect anything on active sonar: “They could run over my daughter’s stereo and not hear it.”

If U.S. troops had to fight in such an environment, they would likely need to use High, Very High, and Ultra High Frequency radios to communicate with each other, Carlson told Task & Purpose.

“EW [electronic warfare] is very much a chess match,” Carlson said. “There’s always moves and counter moves. When I came into it, it was called ‘electronic countermeasures.’ And then you had electronic counter-countermeasures. From those terms, we’ve changed to ‘electronic support,’ ‘electronic attack,’ ‘electronic protect,’ because otherwise we end up with too many ‘counters’ in there.”

The Russians have long been known for their prowess in electronic warfare. Philip Karber, a Marine veteran and national security analyst, has made 39 trips to Ukraine since March 2014, spending a total of 189 days with Ukrainian combat troops. He remembers one incident years ago when the Ukrainians he was with not only came under Russian artillery fire, but the Russians also called the Ukrainian commander on his cell phone to taunt him.

However, even though Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine began in late February, it has only been recently that Russian electronic warfare efforts have become increasingly effective, said Karber, president of the Potomac Foundation, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

That is partially because the Russian forces that took part in the initial assault on Kyiv may not have been properly trained how to use electronic warfare systems, Karber told Task & Purpose. Those forces may have also been too dispersed and moving too quickly to launch effective electronic warfare attacks. And it is possible that the Russians found they were inadvertently jamming their own systems.

One lesson of the war in Ukraine is that American troops are vulnerable to electronic warfare attacks, said Karber, who argued the U.S. military is too narrowly focused on countering cyber threats.

“We have not addressed the vulnerability – particularly of our command posts – that are dependent on communication, which has grown exponentially,” Karber said. “We have not gotten used to operating without electronic communication, either using land wires or runners, which both the Russians and Ukrainians have learned to adapt to as well. We are really not prepared for that level of electronic warfare, in my opinion.”

Well then…

I posted this in another article and a software update somehow erased the content. So here it is again. I hope that you enjoy it.

Airmen with Comic Sans name tapes are testing the limits of Air Force regulations

This is the modern United States military. It's what is going on throughout the military, and is clear and complete evidence for a wholesale rot and decay of all pillars of American structure. -MM

“First sergeants everywhere just sensed a disturbance in the Force.”

The Air Force has a long tradition of defying the odds and pushing the envelope. Take Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager, a hero of World War II who became the first human to fly at supersonic speeds; or Col. John Boyd, who defied his own service to create the F-16 fighter jet. And now, in an era where Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. is encouraging his branch to “accelerate change or lose,” airmen are taking up the challenge by printing out their uniform name tape in Comic Sans, Wingdings and Old English instead of the standard block sans serif lettering used by everyone else in the service.

Why stand out from the herd like this? Well, airmen argue that Air Force Instruction 36-2903, which regulates uniforms and appearance, does not technically prohibit them from doing so.

“Most airmen are familiar with AFI 36-2903 (Dress and appearance), but I had a good amount of time to read over it while in training,” said an anonymous cyber warfare officer who posted to Reddit last month an image of his name tape in Comic Sans. “I noticed that the [operational camouflage pattern] name tapes lacked the descriptions that the other tapes had.”

Indeed, while AFI 36-2903 states that name tapes for the outdated airman battle uniform must be “dark blue block lettering,” for the current operational camouflage pattern, it states only that the name tape must be “stitched in Spice Brown block lettering, centered on an OCP background tape and affixed over the right chest pocket with velcro fastener,” for the airman’s last name, and that a separate name tape saying “U.S. Air Force” must be affixed over the left chest pocket. It does not specifically mention which font or typeface that lettering must be in. It specifies only that it must be “block,” where each letter is uniform and distinct and disconnected from others.

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The Air Force disagrees with that interpretation, however. Tech Sgt. Deana Heitzman, an Air Force spokesperson, pointed out that Figure 5.2 in AFI 36-2903 clearly shows an example of the operational camouflage pattern uniform top with standard block lettering for the name tapes. And “the omission of a specific item or appearance standard does not automatically permit its wear,” Heitzman said, referring to section 1.5.1.2, which also says “any item not mentioned in this Air Force Instruction (AFI) is not authorized for wear.”

When asked about those points, the cyber officer said that there is often some type of catch-all like that in the regulations.

“These situations usually boil down to commander’s intent, which I predict precludes Comic Sans in this scenario,” he said. “Ultimately, it is of course up to [Air Force Headquarters] whether or not something will fly, and we all respect that decision.”

Still, last month it was worth giving Comic Sans a shot. The officer said the catalyst came when he waited two weeks for new name tapes to arrive from the Army & Air Force Exchange Service only for them to spell his name wrong. That made him want to take the Comic Sans typeface, which has long been mocked for looking juvenile, for a spin. The airman asked a buddy with an embroidery machine to make a set of Comic Sans typeface name tapes for him. He then posted a shot of it to the unofficial Air Force reddit, and it received far more attention than he had expected.

“I thought it might get a few dozen comments, but then I woke up to thousands of upvotes and comments,” the airman told Task & Purpose. “It actually sparked some good discussion on regulations and professional image.”

Like he said, some commenters took the opportunity to discuss the subjectivity of what counts as professional military image. One pointed out that the five elements of the Air Force’s dress and appearance standards are “neatness, cleanliness, safety, uniformity and military image.” While the first four are “absolutely, objective criteria,” the fifth “is subjective, but necessary,” the regulation says.

While “military image” is subjective, one commenter argued that Comic Sans is actually more legible than the usual typeface. There is also a claim among Comic Sans fans that the typeface is easier for people with dyslexia to read, though there does not appear to be any solid scientific evidence supporting that claim.

Of course, there were plenty of joke comments too, and solicitations from others who wanted special name tapes too.

“First sergeants everywhere just sensed a disturbance in the Force,” wrote one reader.

“Papyrus for me!” wrote another.

For his part, the officer said he did not encounter much resistance to his new name tape on base during the one day he wore it.

“Nobody noticed unless I brought it up,” he said, adding that he was not chewed out for the style choice because “Thankfully I have really good leadership.”

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The cyber warfare officer actually kicked off a small trend, as other airmen inspired by his post made custom name tapes of their own.

“I see your Comic Sans and raise you Old English,” said one anonymous senior airman who posted a shot of his ye olde-style name tape to Reddit last week. Turns out, many of his fellow airmen did not have a problem with it.

“My immediate peers and leadership liked them and didn’t have anything negative to say only ‘of course you would’ (I’ve read 36-2903 for various uniform things and new updates, more than I would like to admit),” he wrote to Task & Purpose.

The only negative response the Old English airman received was from his senior leadership, who asked if he was making some kind of a joke. The senior airman pointed out that the AFI did not specify the typeface, but he was told that he could not wear the name tape because he did not buy it from an Army & Air Force Exchange Service or an authorized military clothing store.

“So the reign of the Old English tapes ended after 3/4 of the day,” after which he switched back to the normal ones, the airman said. However, he later checked with the Army & Air Force Exchange Service and found that they could in fact make the name tape in Old English. The airman said he plans to bring it back once he makes sure he can barracks lawyer his way out of similar encounters in the future.

“I didn’t intend to come off as making a joke or being one,” he said. “My intentions were to do something that was unique and within the given guidance. And if I made some people smile and laugh on the way even better.”

Old English may have been short-lived, but Wingdings, the 1990s predecessor to emojis, received a warm welcome in name tape form.

“Most people when they saw them said ‘ha! I saw some of those on Reddit. Wait. Was that your post?!’” said Tech Sgt. Tom Burright, a cyber warfare operator who posted a picture to Reddit last week of his name tape with U.S. Air Force written in Wingdings.

“Most people didn’t even notice,” Burright said. “We were at a group lunch at a restaurant and it took about 20 mins for the guy across from me to say “oh my god I didn’t even notice your name tapes!”

Even the higher ranks above Burright laughed and said they loved it, and it was only one fellow tech sergeant who “didn’t really like it but also accepted that it wasn’t breaking any rules and shrugged it off,” he said. One of the highlights of Burright’s time wearing it was a personnel worker looking at his name tape to get his last name and saying “oh my god,” he recalled.

Some of the warm reception might be due to cyber warfare’s unique culture in the Air Force. Like the Old English airman, Burright was inspired by the original Comic Sans Reddit poster, whose uniform and Reddit username sports a cyber warfare badge.

“[Of course] it’s cyber too [laughing my ass off],” one commenter wrote about the original post.

“Typical cyber airman,” wrote another..

“Definitely some wiggle room in there, so I got a martial arts ‘karate’ type black belt, purchased some black reflective fabric on Amazon, and took it to uniform alterations on the base to have them wrap the entire black belt in the black fabric,” he said. “The result was a belt that was completely reflective and worn comfortably around my waist.”

Burright wore the karate belt every day, and while some higher-ranked individuals tried to argue with him about it, a quick citation of the AFIs convinced them to “just accept it and move on with their life,” he said.

Most folks Burright encountered got a good laugh from it, including Iraqi civilians who were initially confused, but then would call the airman Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee and show off their best karate moves. Burright said his Wingdings name tape is in the same spirit of harmless fun.

“I’m still smart about it and don’t want to make the Air Force look bad or reflect badly on my unit,” said the airman, who wears the usual name tapes at public or off-base events.

There could soon be more airmen following in Burright’s and the other Reddit users’ footsteps. The airman said he had received several messages from other airmen asking how they could make special typeface name tapes too. He has thought about making name tapes in elvish, the language of elves in “The Lord of the Rings,” or hieroglyphics. Hopefully the Reddit posts about those will be just as fun as Wingdings.

A common saying in the military is that regulations are written in blood, meaning that every regulation in the book came from a prior service member’s suffering or, in some cases, their intentional trolling. While the regulation on name tapes does not seem to be written in blood or in Wingdings, many commenters on Reddit anticipated it may be in the near future.

“We are seeing the birth of those rules and it’s beautiful,” said one commenter. “Some airman is going to read the AFI one day and it’s going to say ‘US Air Force name tapes must be in English and in (font name). Examples of unacceptable fonts are wingdings, comic sans, papyrus, etc.’ Then they’re going to wonder what someone did to make that get added to the reg.”

Yet those rules may take longer to emerge than service members might expect. Tech Sgt. Deana Heitzman, the Air Force spokesperson, said the Air Force directorate for manpower, personnel and services had not heard of airmen wearing name tapes with unusual typefaces before, but it does not plan on developing any new language about the issue, considering the existing language she pointed out earlier.

“No, we are not currently developing any language to specify a typeface,” she said. “Nametapes are developed primarily by Military Clothing Sales Stores using manufacturer drawings developed by the Institute of Heraldry and the drawings utilize blocked lettering as required.”

Airmen who hope to sport Papyrus, Baskerville, Press Start 2P and other silly typefaces may get the book thrown at them in the future, but for now, viva la Comic Sans.

“It was a nice little laugh,” Burright said. “Work continued as usual.”

Steely Dan – Aja {Remastered} [Full Album]

This takes me back to the late 1970’s. My GTO. Cleaning out the stems , twigs and seeds, from the “nickel bag” on the open album.  I had these HUGE “Technique®” speakers that stood maybe a meter (a yard) tall, and were two feet thick. I also had a “Panasonic®” stereo equalizer. And we would gather… smoke, drink whiskey sours, play chess and jam out…

”]

CIA in French Indo-China

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Jeffrey W. Bass, Oil on Canvas, 2006, Donated by the Fairchild Corporation. This painting commemorates air operations of Civil Air Transport (CAT, an Agency proprietary) and its CIA contract pilots in support of French forces at Dien Bien Phu during the final days of the conflict between the French and Viet Minh in 1954.

In Fairchild C-119s with US Air Force markings hurriedly painted over with French Air Force roundels, 37 CAT pilots volunteered to fly supplies from the French airbase at Haiphong to the battlefield near Vietnam’s border with Laos. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

How will history remember you?

By your photos or by your deeds?

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low budget glamour shots22

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low budget glamour shots4

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low budget glamour shots1

America can beat those terrible Chinese commies…

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How the Army once got its own soldiers stoned out of their minds

Talk about a bad trip.

During the Cold War, an Army sergeant with a Combat Infantry Badge on his uniform stumbled through the woods and was apparently unable to comprehend a tree branch in front of him while being led around an obstacle course.

“No, I’m not cold at all,” said another soldier who was, to put it mildly, tweaking out of his mind while speaking to a couple of Army doctors, despite not seeming to know where he was. “I could run 100 miles right now.”

These were some of the test subjects from medical experiments conducted for two decades at the Edgewood Arsenal, a section of Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. And by “medical experiments” we mean that the Army spent years getting its soldiers high.

The study is the subject of the new documentary “Doctor Delirium and the Edgewood Experiments,” debuting this week on Discovery+.

The question at the heart of these experiments was, bluntly, can you fight a war if you are on a drug trip? Or, if you want to put it in language that’ll pass muster at a closed session in Congress: can psychochemical warfare be used to incapacitate enemy troops?

And in trying to figure that out, thousands of soldiers were used as test subjects while knowingly and unknowingly given a variety of substances, from tear gas to Phencyclidine (PCP) to psychoactive drugs including lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate, known as “BZ.”

“This was the Cold War, and I was assigned to the Cold War at its height,” says Dr. James Ketchum, an Army psychiatrist who oversaw many of the experiments, in archival footage.

Beginning in the early 1960s, BZ became a central focus of testing.

“It’s more like psychosis or delirium,” says one researcher of the effects of the drug.

In one test, four soldiers were given varying doses of the drug and spent the next several days trying — and generally failing — to perform basic tasks like donning a gas mask. One man stayed awake and suffered hallucinations the entire time, completely unable to function.

BZ was eventually weaponized, although it was never employed in combat and the military destroyed all stockpiles at the end of the Cold War. The testing continued until 1975 when the program was shut down amid congressional investigations.

The soldiers were generally recruited by being told that they would mostly be testing equipment for the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. Coupled with the promise of no guard shifts or weekend duty, it might seem like a nice way to spend a couple of months in the Army. While assigned to the temporary duty, as one soldier described it, certain names would be called for that day’s experiments. Because of the classified nature of the program, however, they were rarely told exactly what they were being exposed to.

This also meant that years later, these soldiers found it difficult or impossible to file medical claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs for the after-effects of the experiments.

At the time, the Feres Doctrine also prohibited service members from suing the government for negligence or wrongdoing.

In 2009, though, several of the Edgewood veterans filed a lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency, citing the government’s failure to follow the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical guidelines for medical testing developed following the discovery of Nazi experiments conducted during World War II.

The court ultimately ruled in favor of the veterans, saying that they were eligible for full medical benefits and that the government had a duty to continue warning them of any potential side effects of the tests.

However, many of the test subjects interviewed in the documentary, say that it has still been difficult to get a clear picture of what was done to them. Many have likely never been contacted by the government, while others in the film showed consent forms with dates that don’t even match their service records.

In the archival interviews, Ketchum, who passed away in 2019, is more sanguine about the tests.

“I’ve got regrets about a number of things I’ve done,” says Ketchum. “But that would not apply to the work I did at Edgewood.”

Inside A 1947 Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, The Largest And Fastest Aircraft In Commercial Service

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After World War II, Boeing reentered the commercial market with a new long-range airliner, the Stratocruiser (Model 377). It was the first Boeing commercial transport since the Stratoliner, and like its military counterpart, the C-97, was based on the B-29 Bomber. It possessed all the speed and technical improvements available to bombers at the end of the war.

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The Stratocruiser’s first flight was on July 8, 1947. Its design was advanced for its day; its innovative features included two passenger decks and a pressurized cabin, a relatively new feature on transport aircraft. It could carry up to 100 passengers on the main deck plus 14 in the lower deck lounge; typical seating was for 63 or 84 passengers or 28 berthed and five seated passengers.

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Separate men’s and women’s dressing rooms provided a place for passengers to prepare for sleep or the dawning day.

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During the early 1960s, Aero Space Lines ballooned the Stratocruiser’s fuselage into a whale-like shape to carry spacecraft sections. Nine of the variants were assembled. The first was called the “Pregnant Guppy,” followed by five larger “Superguppies” and three smaller “Miniguppies.”

A unique feature of the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser was its lower-level lounge and bar, reached via a spiral staircase.

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Aboard the double decker Boeing 377, passengers could descend the spiral staircase from the main deck to a fabulous lounge. This was the most deluxe feature of the luxurious Stratocruiser. Here passengers could socialize and enjoy an after-dinner drink and perhaps a game of cards. Although other aircraft of the era had these, none were as large and opulent as the lounge aboard the Pan American World Airways Stratocruiser.

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A Pan Am Boeing 377 Stratocruiser at Honolulu International Airport.

 

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This drawing shows the Boeing 377’s sleeping berths, dressing rooms, galley, lower-deck lounge, and private luxury compartment.

Get Your Monkeypox On

It’s a dangerous game trying to beat down the population this way, and to what end, exactly?
.

The made-for-TV January 6th Capitol Riot hearings kicked off last night with tribute video of a whole lot of pissed-off ordinary Americans marching on the stately building where, that fateful day, the final certification ceremony of a blatantly dishonest election was underway after, mind you, four years of seditious machinations by a weaponized bureaucracy aimed at disabling and destroying the sitting chief executive — in case it’s unclear why the huge crowd flocked to the capital city in the first place.

The Party of Chaos is playing its hand: a select committee of seven deuces and two jokers. Do they look like they’re going to get through this extravaganza without humiliating themselves? You never know what might come out of some witness’s mouth, despite the orchestrations of former ABC’s Good Morning America producer James Goldston, brought in to cement the narrative in the collective public brain, pre-softened with years of manifold media mind-fuckeries.

It’s the centerpiece of their midterm campaign. And I submit that it may be just a little premature as it becomes increasingly clear that the Party of Chaos, led by the “winner” of the 2020 election, “Joe Biden” and unseen handlers, have nearly completed their mission of destroying the USA as an ongoing enterprise. Broken economy, broken health, broken military, broken law enforcement, broken culture, broken morale. They sure got’er done. Do they think nobody noticed?

If the January 6th Committee show is short-and-sweet, say a few weeks, it will be quickly forgotten in the welling summertime heat as the great masses of America groan under $5… $7… maybe $10-a-gallon gasoline prices (or maybe no gas at all) while diesel prices at $6.50 today are already destroying the trucking industry — and thus the entire system for delivering all goods around the country. The zeitgeist is quivering with intimations of food shortages and the philosopher reminds us that any given body politic is just nine missed meals away from bloody rebellion. Have another look at that motley January 6th committee group photo and consider the lampposts along Pennsylvania Avenue.

It’s a dangerous game trying to beat down the population this way, and to what end, exactly? I doubt that even the Blue Team could articulate it… or would dare to… because at this point their sole aim, really, is to hide their many acts of criminality over a span of the past six years and escape prosecution, a compelling motive. And it’s getting harder and harder to conceal all that, especially their campaign to physically harm over 200-million people with mRNA “vaccines.” The body-count is rising — way higher even than deaths from the hypothetical “pandemic” that the “vaccines” were supposedly concocted to vanquish, and spectacularly failed to.

And was this Covid-19 “pandemic” itself cooked up tacitly to disorder the 2020 election with mail-in ballots so easily replicated, harvested, and stuffed by the bale into drop-boxes under cover of night? Kind of looks like it, more and more. And now, the Party of Chaos is so keenly desperate to stay out of prison that they apparently seek to repeat the trick in the fall midterm, which is otherwise quite certain to sweep them ignominiously off the game board like so many misplayed quoits.

Thus: monkeypox, the visitation of weeping pustules far more visually horrifying than was Covid-19 in all its spikey iterations, if actually hardly lethal. The hopelessly corrupt CDC has already gotten into the act with its guidance to mask-up on airplanes against this new plague. Perhaps travelers would do better wearing condoms on their noses. Apparently, monkeypox spreads by means of intensely intimate flesh-to-flesh contact. The current outbreak popped up following a giant sex rave in the Canary Islands, men having rough sex with other men. Suspicions abound that this monkeypox bears the earmarks of something engineered in a lab. Jeez, d’ya think?

If there is a God, when judgment is at hand, a jury in the court of the angels will bum-rush this Party of Chaos into a special hell of an eternal drag queen story hour, featuring Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) reading Uncle Remus to an assembled multitude of howling Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Maoist Red Guards. Refreshments will not be served. Ever.

Jus primae noctis: Did Medieval Lords Really Sleep With Serf Brides First?

The jus primae noctis , droit du seigneur , or “right of the first night,” is an alleged medieval custom which permitted lords to engage in sexual intercourse with the brides of their male subjects on the first night after marriage.

Spanning centuries, this seedy exercise of male domination has been referenced across the eons, yet the reality of its existence remains unclear.

It is a topic that has been hotly discussed by anthropologists and historians, who have debated whether the jus primae noctis is a custom, a law, or a simply a sordid myth.

Ancient and Medieval References to jus primae noctis

Jus primae noctis is a phenomenon that has been documented throughout history, stretching back nearly 2,000 years. The earliest textual reference can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh , written in 1900 BC, where Gilgamesh, who was king of Uruk, enjoyed many privileges over his male subordinates and their newlyweds:

“He cohabits with the betrothed bride–He first, The husband afterwards.” (Epic of Gilgamesh as cited in Wettlaufer, p. 112.) 

In 450 BC, the same practice was reported by the Greek historian Herodotus in his Historiae, who wrote of a similar power dynamic in the society of the Adrymachidae, a Lybian tribe. Before virgins were married, he chronicled how the king had the right to deflower them before their husbands could “have” them.

The Greek scholar Herakleides Pontikos, writing in 400 BC, outlined the same benefits for the ruler of the Greek island of Kepahlonia. Next, during a slave revolt at Volsinii, an ancient Italian city, Valerius Maximus in 20 AD would note how free men were unable to marry a women who had not been deflowered by a slave first.

Several centuries later, in 300 AD, this sexual entitlement privilege was attributed to Emperor Maximin. In the Middle East, the Romans and Greeks, both occupiers at various times, were said to engage in the practice, according to the Talmud, an ancient Jewish text.

The tradition would purportedly continue into the early medieval age. The Annals of Clonmacnosie in Ireland from the 8th century AD, for instance, recorded how the Vikings believed they were entitled to jus primae noctis with Christian brides:

“The cheefe Gouvernour of them should have the bestowinge of any woman in the k’dom the first night after her marriage, so before her own husband should have carnal knowledge of her, to whom he pleased or keep her to himself by night, to satisfy his lust.” (Annals of Clonmacnosie as cited in Wettlauger, p. 112.) 

The idea of jus primae noctis would be maintained into the 14th century, when a French tale, called Baudouin de Sebourc mentioned it as a lord’s right if the bride couldn’t provide a sufficient dowry to his male serf. By the 16th century, evidence suggested a widespread belief in the existence of jus primae noctis , with many European lords using the notion to legitimize customs of sexual harassment. In 1543, a charter in a Swiss village outside of Zurich read:

“…and when the wedding starts, the bridegroom shall allow the sergeant to lie with his bride for the first night, or he shall buy her off with 5 pounds and 4 pennies.” (Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich as cited in Wettlaufer, p. 115.) 

Sometimes, however, the lord would go too far, and peasants would be forced to act. At the end the 15th century, in the only successful peasant revolt of the Middle Ages, the serfs of Catalonia in Spain rose up against their abusive liege lords. The lords had introduced various coercive acts on the wedding nights of their serfs, including climbing into the bed of the bride for their own sexual gratification. In a similarly perverted manner, landed aristocrats in France permitted themselves to place their bare leg on the bride’s bed.

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In this 1874 AD painting by Vasily Polenov, Le droit du Seigneur, a synonym for Jus primae noctis, shows an old man is bringing his young daughters to his feudal lord. (Vasily Polenov / Public domain )

Ritual Defloration and the Anthropologists’ View

In prehistoric times, the ritual defloration of virgins by elites, such as priests or kings, was a common occurrence. In Indian and South American tribes , taking the virginity of young women and girls before marriage was a recurrent practice, and was viewed not as a privilege but as a duty, as primeval peoples remained very superstitious about hymenal blood. In the primordial tribes of Hawaii, it was usually the chief who had to perform what was seen as a sacred duty:

“With many of the families, who were admitted to the royal court because of blood relationship, the virginity of the daughters was strictly guarded and when a girl became of a marriageable age and was spoken for as a wife, she was taken to the chief who would remove her virginity.” (The Polynesian Family System in Ka'u Hawai'i, Tokio, Rutland as cited in Wettlaufer, p. 117.) 

Any baby that was produced as a result of this action was often celebrated by the husband, who found great honor in knowing that his wife bore the child of his chief.

The holy priests of India, the Brahmins, were said to offer the same service. Hamilton, an early modern traveler, outlined the details and motivations of such a ceremony in the tribes of the Zamorin:

“When the Zamorin marries, he must not cohabit with his bride till the Nambudri, or chief priest, has enjoyed her, and he, if he pleases, may have three nights of her company, because the first fruits of her nuptials must be a holy oblation to the god she worships.” (A New Account of the East Indies as cited in Wettlaufer, p. 117.) 

In 1903, German anthropologist German Wilutsky stressed that:

“Every link in the chain of evidence must be followed in order to understand the most recent form of a custom.” (Vorgeschichte des Rechts as cited in Howarth, p. 294.) 

Consequently, anthropologists believe that jus primae noctis and its reported episodes in the ancient and medieval eras originated from these early ritual defloration ceremonies.

Comparing them to jus primae noctis , they point to the fact that both feature the sexual exploitation of subservient virgins under the dominion of a powerful master.

As a result, anthropologists tend to believe in the existence of jus primae noctis because it supports their view that humans gradually shifted from polygamous to monogamous societies. To them, jus primae noctis in ancient and medieval society appears as one of the last vestiges of this ancient tradition.

The Historian’s View

In contrast to anthropologists, historians, who have scoured the archival records of the human race, postulate that the jus primae noctis is simply a myth and a gratuitous misinterpretation of two documented medieval systems of obligation in Europe.

The first, known by various names including culagium, jambage, cuissage, and drench de pernada , stipulated that if a slave wanted to marry a free woman, he was required to pay a fee, called a dowry, which he would often acquire through a loan from his lord.

Legal codas state that the lord, after the lending of money, would simply gain the right to have the amount repaid.

This customary payment was erroneously connected with a right given to the lord which permitted him to have intercourse first with the new bride in exchange for his help in securing the dowry payment for his serf.

In practice, however, this unusual right was simply symbolic, and in reality, copulation never occurred and was not part of the written legal directives.

The second involved the Church and its procedures relating to marriage. At the Council of Carthage in 298, an ecclesiastical ban was issued ordering couples to refrain from consummating the marriage for the first three days. The prohibition stemmed from passage in the Book of Tobit, in which Tobias married his wife Sarah. The holy scripture relates how Sarah had been married 7 times previously, and that all her husbands had been killed by the Devil before their marriage could be consummated. To fend off the advances of the Devil, it was instructed that the newlyweds should engage in prayer and other such holy activities for up to three days after the marriage before confirming the union.

However, many husbands, impatient at waiting for three days, would often bribe ecclesiastical authorities for the privilege of copulating with their wife on the first night, which was subsequently misconstrued as the fabled jus primae noctis of the lord. It is unclear how widespread this practice was in medieval times, although in the 14th century it is reported that this became such a problem for the King Phillip IV and Charles VI in France that they demanded the Bishop of Amiens revoke such illicit payments.

In fact, in their search for the existence of the jus primae noctis , historians have found no strong evidence to suggest the practice was legally codified. The only example that even touches on the subject, and which is obviously fabricated, come from the Chronicle of Boece , a fictional history of the early kings of Scotland published in 1526 by Hector Boece. It reports how a King Ewen III of Scotland, in 875, legally sanctioned the right of the first night:

“And othir law he maid, that wiffs of the commonis sal be fre to nobilis; and the lord of the ground sal have the maidinheid of all v dwelling on the same.” (Chronicle of Boece as cited in Bullough, p. 164.) 

The author goes on to state that the practice remained in existence until 1061, when it was repealed by King Malcom Canmore. Despite being an obvious invention, the Chronicle of Boece remains the most traceable source for later references to the custom in early modern works, where it is repeated multiple times. In 1666, Sir John Skene would reiterate this piece of fake history in his Exposition:

“King Evenus did wicked lie ordaine, that the Lord or maister of the ground, or land, suld have the first nicht of ilk maried woman within the samin. The quhilk ordinance was after abrogate be King Malcolme the Thrid; quha ordained, that the Bride-groome sulde have the use of his awin wife.” (Exposition of the termes and difficill mordes, conteined in the foure Buikes of Regiam Majestatem as cited in Howarth p. 298.) 

In a later story from 1773 tome The Journey to the Western Islands , Johnson and Boswell would conveniently re-discover traces of this ancient tradition on their travels around Scotland, this time referenced as the “ mercheta mulierum ”:

“M’Quarrie insisted that the Mercheta Mulierum, mentioned in our old charters, did really mean the privilege which the lord of a manor, or a baron, had, to have the first night of all his vassals’ wives.” (Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides as cited in Howarth p. 299.)

The Myth of jus primae noctis

The propagation of the jus primae noctis myth was aided by its mention in many famous literary works, where it became a staple by authors searching for a sensationalist plot-line or a literary device as a convenient obstruction to marriage. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, Jack Cade uses the right to try and discourage rebellion:

“The proudest peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his shoulders, unless he pay me tribute; there shall not maid be married, but she shall pay to me her maidenhead ere they shall have it.” (Henry IV, Part II as cited in Howarth p. 300.) 

Although being a regular literary device, the historical basis for the jus primae noctis , a term that only started appearing in the 18th century, remains very weak, and implies that it was likely a myth stemming from a depraved misinterpretation of the obligations of peasants to their lords and the fake history of Scotland written by Hector Boece in 1526.

In reality, the unsavory implication of the “right of the first night” was probably a medieval joke that went too far and was grounded in the traditional superiority that lords exercised over their subjects, especially if they were female.

The very few references to customs or laws that involved the sexual exploitation of women vassals were not legally enforceable mandates, but simply sleazy exercises in male power displays over the less powerful classes.

Thus, anthropologists are correct to identify jus primae noctis as more of a custom, rather than a law, which has sadly occurred repeatedly in human history.

CIA Blood Chit in flights in and around China

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This silk blood chit was issued for use by the Office of Strategic Services in the China-Burma-India Theater.

Written in several native languages, it reads, “This foreign person (American) has come to China to help the war effort. Soldiers and civilians, one and all, should save and protect him”. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

CIA “alterations” to building codes

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What looked like a concrete ball was actually a “gap-jumping antenna” removed from one of the preformed concrete columns in the embassy office building. US investigators called it “gap-jumping” because it coupled magnetically with a matching antenna in the adjacent column. This allowed data to be transmitted without a physical electrical connection. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

Automatic Man 1977

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OMG! I had this album when in High School and I must have played it until the grooves were worn out on the platter.

"Remnants of both Steely Dan and Earth Wind & Fire! So much more vocal based than their debut album..."

CIA extraction plans

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To rescue six American diplomats who evaded capture during the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran, on 4 November 1979, CIA technical specialists created a fake movie-production company in Hollywood and delivered disguises and documents that made possible the diplomats’ escape from Iran in 1980.

The team set up “Studio Six Productions” and titled its new production “Argo”. This document includes an Introduction, Story Treatment & Locations, and Visuals. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

Stunning Photos of Elvis Presley’s 1960 Luxury Gold Cadillac

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And finally, here is “The King” with some of his (rotating) travel companions. I’m sure that every trip was an enjoyable one in this massive vehicle.

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Grilled Three-Cheese Bacon Sandwiches

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Grilled cheese goes gourmet with this elevated take on the classic sandwich. Made with Gruyère, cheddar and American cheeses, this three-cheese grilled cheese sandwich with bacon takes a childhood favorite to new, delicious levels.

Ingredients

  • 8 teaspoons mayonnaise
  • 4 slices sourdough sandwich bread
  • 2 slices deli sliced American cheese (2 oz)
  • 4 slices cooked bacon
  • 1/2 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese (2 oz)
  • 1/2 cup shredded Gruyère cheese (2 oz)

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Dilbert

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Uh Oh! Bank of England Says Top Banks “No Longer Too Big To Fail”

The Bank of England (BoE) said on Friday it was satisfied that Britain’s top banks could be shut down without putting at risk the stability of the financial system or disrupting customers . . . as it found “shortcomings” at three major lenders.

In its first public assessment of how failing lenders could be dismantled in a crisis without taxpayer handouts, the BoE said it had also identified “areas or further enhancement” for six firms.

The three banks found to have shortcomings were Lloyds, Standard Chartered,  and HSBC. All three banks said in separate statements on Friday they were improving their so-called resolution plans.

The BoE is aiming to stop banks from being “too big to fail,” potentially requiring taxpayers to bail them out as happened in the 2007-09 global financial crisis.

The other lenders included in the review were Barclays, NatWest, Nationwide, Santander UK and Virgin Money UK.

The Bank of England said it would repeat its assessment in 2024 and review progress made by the lenders every two years after that.

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

Sooooooo . . . BoE says their top banks are no longer “too Big to Fail.”     OK.  Who asked them?

I mean, who asked the BoE about this, that they issue a statement of this nature late on a Friday afternoon?

The mere existence of this public statement raised the hair on the the back of my neck.

It says to me . . . and it’s just my hunch . . .  they know something gigantic is coming, and they’re already “setting the narrative” for when it hits.

The real problem is that the whole world is financially inter-connected.  What happens in Beijing Affects London.  What happens in London, affects New York.  What happens in New York affects . . . . . everyone!

Whatever their motivation for issuing this statement today, we little guys need to pay close attention.  In the end, it is us that gets the shaft.

Dilbert

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Kitten Can’t Let Go Of His Dead Father, Kneading Him Until He Wakes Up (Part 1) | Animal in Crisis

A very heartwarming story.

Defeating the oligarchs

Consortium News has an article by Chris Hedges about Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant.

How to Defeat the Billionaire Class

Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative (SA) party have, for nearly a decade, waged one of the most effective battles against the city’s moneyed elites. She and the SA have adopted a series of unorthodox methods to fight the ruling oligarchs and, in that confrontation, exposed the Democratic Party leadership as craven tools of the billionaire class. Her success is one that should be closely studied and replicated in city after city if we are to dismantle corporate tyranny.

 

Sawant, who lives on $40,000 of her $140,000 salary and places the rest into a political fund that she uses for social justice campaigns, helped lead the fight in 2014 that made Seattle the first major American city to mandate a $15 an hour minimum wage.

Following a three-year struggle against Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, she and her allies pushed through a tax on big business that increased city revenues by an estimated $231 million a year.

“The way to run a strong electoral campaign is to, as I said, completely reject personality politics, completely reject careerism, and build political organizations like Socialist Alternative. Except we need far bigger organizations where we can hold our elected representatives and other leaders in the organization accountable in the program of demands that we are fighting around. This becomes the central focus, not those individuals who could then use those positions to build their own careers by making themselves useful to the ruling class. That’s what we need to reject.”

Excellent reporting, and the piece emphasizes her stance that the Democratic Party is not an ally of the people. It also touches on other successful grassroots movements including the successful unionization of a Staten Island Amazon workplace, which won a $30 minimum wage and the right to work fulltime, which is a win against the common strategy to leave workers without healthcare and other benefits by classifying them as part time workers.

CIA reading your personal letters

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In this “flaps and seals” kit for advanced users, tools handmade of ivory in a travel roll were used for the surreptitious opening of letters and packages during the 1960s. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

Dilbert

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The Death of the QUAD

This article informs us AUKUS was called out for its violations of the NPT. So, we have the Outlaw US Empire violating the Biological Weapons Treaty and the Non Proliferation Treaty along with its continual violations of the UN Charter.

“The three countries cannot repeatedly stick heads in the sand and must earnestly fulfill their legal obligations on non-proliferation. As a nonnuclear weapon state under the NPT, Australia must promptly and comprehensively declare its nuclear weapons materials and related facilities at all stages, Wang said, noting paper cannot wrap up fire.”

IMO, this isn’t a case of sticking heads in sand; rather, it’s a case of thumbing their noses to the entire world–Fuck You!! We’ll do whatever we want!! is the message as usual.

CIA in China

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An essential part of the survival kit for American forces in the Philippines, China and Burma, this knife was ideal for cutting through jungle brush.

It also had potential as a combat knife – its manufacturer provided instructions on how to use the Woodsman’s Pal to defeat a Japanese soldier armed with a samurai sword. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

Central Asia

Putin met today with the President of Turkmenistan, which some may not know is a declared Neutral Nation. For years, the Outlaw US Empire has tried to pry it away from its very longstanding close affiliation with Russia. Fortunately, its attempts have failed while relations between Russia and Turkmenistan continue to deepen. At the top of the transcript of their talks are links to the two sets of documents, the most important being the Declaration on Deepening the Strategic Partnership between the Russian Federation and Turkmenistan. Of greater interest is Putin’s statement to the press after their meeting. Putin’s opening remarks:

“This year is significant for Russian-Turkmen relations. April marked the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties, as well as the 20th anniversary of the signing of the fundamental Treaty between the Russian Federation and Turkmenistan on Friendship and Cooperation, which serves as a solid foundation for the entire complex of multifaceted interaction between our countries.

“The Declaration on Deepening Strategic Partnership, which we have just signed, sets out the priorities for joint work for the future in the political, trade, investment, cultural and humanitarian fields, and in the field of security, including biological and informational.”

IMO, Russia’s Central Asian “soft underside” is more secure than at anytime since 1991. Russia’s economic development is being shared with all Central Asian nations and also stimulated by China’s BRI.

CIA communications equipment

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US Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan used the AN/PEQ-1A SOFLAM to direct exact delivery of ordnance. The SOFLAM was an important tool in the battle for Tora Bora where a CIA US Special Forces team directed 72 hours of unrelenting air strikes – sometimes dangerously close to their own position – killing hundreds of al Qa’ida terrorists. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

World’s 1st Anti-Hypersonic System? China Says It Is Ready With An AI-Powered Defense Against Mach 5+ Missiles

While Beijing has repeatedly demonstrated its hypersonic offensive capabilities, it is now time for a ‘Chinese defense system’ against hypersonic missiles.

Chinese military researchers claim to have developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that can predict the trajectory of a hypersonic glide missile as it approaches a target at speeds exceeding five times that of sound, South China Morning Post reported.

A rocket is used to launch a hypersonic glide vehicle to hit a target. The glide vehicle subsequently separates from the rocket and moves toward its target at a speed of at least Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound.

It is extremely difficult to track a hypersonic glide missile due to its unpredictable trajectory and the ability to enter space and re-enter the atmosphere in a very short period. Countries like the US are also relentlessly working on developing air missile defense against hypersonic missiles.

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Artist rendering of a hypersonic missile.

The Chinese researchers, however, seem to be several steps ahead of their American counterparts. According to them, a Chinese AI-powered air defense system can predict the potential kill trajectory of an incoming weapon and launch a swift counterattack with a three-minute advance time.

The typical missile stays within an 8-kilometer (5-mile) target zone, which is quite small for a weapon that can travel that distance in under two seconds.

“The world’s military powers are currently engaging in a fierce arms race around the development of hypersonic glide vehicles, bringing new and severe challenges to air and space safety,” said Zhang Junbiao, a computer scientist from the early warning intelligence department of the Air Force Early Warning Academy in Wuhan.

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The trajectory of Ballistic vs. Hypersonic missile- US Government Accountability Office (GAO)

“Trajectory prediction is of great significance to combat intent assessment and aerospace defense interception,” wrote Zhang and his team in the Journal of Astronautics, a peer-reviewed publication run by the Chinese Society of Astronautics.

These Chinese claims come at the heel of a dedicated effort in the United States to build and test a hypersonic weapon system to match the capabilities of its adversaries, China and Russia.

Meanwhile, the US recently carried out a successful test of an Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) hypersonic missile, a few days after it had successfully tested its Hypersonic Air-Breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC).

Though efforts in the US are ongoing, there could be some time before a weapon is fielded. However, that has not deterred China’s quest to develop a defense against it in advance.

China, S.Korea defense chiefs agree to enhance exchanges, as a peaceful peninsula is in their interests

Should manage risks, overcome external noise and cooperate on regional security

Published: Jun 10, 2022 04:54 PM Updated: Jun 10, 2022 11:15 PM
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Chinese and South Korea defense ministers exchanged views on Friday at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, which observers saw as an important and timely occasion for the two to have a comprehensive communication to better understand each other and jointly work toward regional peace and security which is facing great challenges amid external interference. 

Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe and South Korean Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup's meeting, the first since November 2019, came as tensions rise on the Korean Peninsula. Wei reiterated China's stance to maintain peace on the Korean Peninsula and hopes China and South Korea will cooperate on realizing the denuclearization of the peninsula.

2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of China-South Korea diplomatic relations, and Wei and Lee noted both sides should enhance practical cooperation based on mutual respect and shared interests, Yonhap reported.

Wei hopes exchanges will be deepened between the defense authorities and militaries of the two countries. They also agreed to push forward mutual visits of defense ministers, strategic dialogue and other exchange activities. 

On June 2, the two countries set two new military hotlines, bringing the total number to five. 

The same day, China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi had a phone conversation with South Korea's Head of the Office of National Security Kim Sung-han, noting bilateral relations are off to a good start since the new South Korean government took office. 

Wei and Lee's meeting, with the Korean Peninsula issue on top of the agenda, also provided an opportunity for China and the Yoon government to have comprehensive communication to better understand each other's policies and avoid unilateral moves that could bring obstacles to hard-fought bilateral friendliness or further shaken regional security, Lü Chao, an expert on the Korean Peninsula issue at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday. 

The latest peninsula tension was sparked by combined military exercises of South Korea and the US last week involving an American aircraft carrier, the first in more than four years, after which North Korea launched missiles on Sunday in response. 

As the Korean Peninsula issue enters a dangerous downward spiral, Chinese observers stressed that any party should be restrained to prevent further tensions. 

Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, believes there is an important message China wants to deliver — a peaceful peninsula is consistent with both China and South Korea's interests and the issue should be handled in a peaceful way rather than "setting the wolf to keep the sheep" and allow the US to exert maximum pressure on North Korea. 

As a non-regional power, the US won't care about playing out of the tensions and the costs to China, South and North Korea when conflicts over the Peninsula issue get out of control, experts said, citing the Russia-Ukraine crisis. 

China, upholding the principle of pushing for dialogue and political solution to the peninsula issue, vetoed a US-backed resolution to impose more sanctions against North Korea at the UN Security Council. 

Blindly adding sanctions will not help solve the problem and it's inhumane. Dialogue is the only feasible way, Xing Haiming, Chinese Ambassador to South Korea, explained China's decision during a TV interview with South Korean media on Thursday.

China respects South Korea's traditional alliance with the US, and is happy to see regional countries develop bilateral and multilateral relations based on friendly cooperation, but only if such relations do not target China, Xing said, stressing that "the Asia-Pacific should be a high ground for peaceful development, not a geopolitical arena."

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol had pledged to deploy an additional THAAD battery in South Korea during the election campaign. According to Korea Times on Friday, Seoul is thinking of enabling the full-fledged operation of a THAAD anti-missile unit, which has been in "temporary installation" pending an environmental impact assessment.

South Korea has been claiming the THAAD is defensive. However, Song said the system is equipped with radar that can effectively detect China's objectives of strategic depth. It is not only an interception system, but also a monitoring and early warning system, posing a serious threat to China's national security, the expert said.

Such a system will break the power balance in Northeast and East Asia, seed unrest and threaten China's security environment, and add fuel to the current tensions, even risking a military conflict on the Korean Peninsula, Song warned.

Xing said in the televised interview that on the THAAD issue, the most sensitive topic in China-South Korea relations, China understands South Korea's security demand but South Korea should also understand China's concerns.

Xing said the lessons from the past must be learned and the two sides should properly manage the issue and avoid making it a prominent point or impact the hard-fought friendliness in bilateral relations.

According to Yonhap, Wei raised concerns over South Korea's engagement with the US' Indo-Pacific Strategy to contain China, and the deployment of THAAD.

The meeting lasted 75 minutes, longer than the scheduled 40 minutes and Lee told reporters the talks "were very useful, and it was such a good opportunity for the two sides to understand each other."

How Does AI Defend Against Hypersonic Missile?

A hypersonic glide weapon, unlike a normal ballistic missile, may move through the atmosphere like a stone skipping across water and bank to the left or right, making it more difficult to detect and intercept, according to SCMP.

At Mach 5 or higher speed, there is little time for an air defense system to respond to the threat, and it is widely assumed that current technology will be unable to intercept a hypersonic glide missile.

Zhang, on the other hand, believes Artificial Intelligence is capable of handling such unpredictable tasks and develops a defense against an unpredictable trajectory and incredibly high speed.

The defending side normally has no idea about the mass, size, shape, aerodynamic control system, or purpose of hostile weapons, but by analyzing observed flight data, the AI may make a fairly accurate assumption. According to the researchers, every move a missile makes will give off some modest but useful signals about its design, capabilities, and mission, regardless of how advanced or fast it is.

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As a result, a machine learning system may learn from data collected during the early phases of a hypersonic flight and utilize that information to forecast the most likely trajectory during the flight’s later stages.

Zhang and his colleagues acknowledged that translating this idea into a working model was difficult. They claim that the raw data collected by an early warning system contains a lot of noise that might confuse AI and that too much data can also overload the computer.

To combat the problem of unwanted and overwhelming noise that could mislead the AI, the Chinese researchers devised a novel deep learning method that could automatically eliminate noise from observed signals. The algorithm similarly simulates the human brain’s activity by focusing just on the most recent, most important data to save calculation resources.

The new system can run on a laptop computer and produce a result in 15 seconds, according to the study, despite being more advanced than any previous AI for hypersonic trajectory prediction. Simulated experiments indicated that the system is still effective against a wide spectrum of weapons traveling at up to Mach 12 speeds.

Earlier in March, China’s Aerospace Defense industry had claimed that Beijing had made significant progress in building an AI (artificial intelligence) system that could even design new hypersonic weapons autonomously.

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Type 055 ‘Lhasa’ Destroyer

CIA doing “fishy things”

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CIA’s Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs developed the Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) fish to study aquatic robot technology. The UUV fish contains a pressure hull, ballast system, and communications system in the body and a propulsion system in the tail. It is controlled by a wireless line-of-sight radio handset. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

Double Whammy For The US?

As tensions continue to rise between the US and China in the Indo-Pacific region with an aggressive Beijing practicing dangerous military maneuvers, policymakers and military are alive to the challenges posed by the Chinese hypersonic missiles.

The US is currently reworking the defenses of its strategic assets in the Indo-Pacific against a Chinese offense. The EurAsian Times recently reported how the US was putting in place a dedicated layered missile defense system in Guam to protect its territory and valuable military assets against Chinese missile strikes in the event of hostility.

 

Chinese Researchers had earlier claimed that its hypersonic missile with advanced infrared homing capability would allow it to hunt down a stealth fighter like the F-22 and even a moving car on the street with precision.

Therefore, these advanced would be able to destroy a target in an adversarial country over super long distances with absolute precision.

If the Chinese claims are anything to go by, it’s double trouble for the US, which lags far behind China in the hypersonic weapons race. As of now, the US neither has an operational hypersonic missile nor a workable defense against hypersonic missiles.

China, on the other hand, claims that it has both!

Stunning and Rare Images of The 1935 Adler Diplomat 8 Wheels

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The Adler Diplomat is a substantial six-cylinder “limousine” built by the Frankfurt auto-maker, Adler. It was introduced in March 1934 as a direct replacement for the manufacturer’s Standard 6. Less directly the six-cylinder Diplomat also replaced the Adler Standard 8 since Adler’s large eight-cylinder car was discontinued in 1934 without a direct replacement of its own.

The Diplomat initially, in 1934, took over the body from the previous year’s Adler Standard 6. However, the Standard Six had received an all new body for its final year of production, and for keen eyed observers the final year’s Standard Six was differentiated from the first year’s Diplomat by redesigned fender aprons. The chassis which had been a defining feature of the 1933 Standard 6 had been of an underslung design whereby the axles emerged directly above the principal chassis members: this allowed for a lower centre of gravity and a lower-bodied car than the overslung chassis, with axles mounted directly below the chassis, which had left the earlier Standard Six looking unfashionably high-bodied in the early 1930s.

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‘The State is no longer working to serve us and to protect our shared heritage’: Neil Oliver

A very great video. It’s most certainly worth a view.

More pictures from the past…

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The 1970’s it’s how we rolled!

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American CIA in Taiwan

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CAT travelers received flight bags as complementary gifts. Once a Chinese Nationalists Airline, was owned by the CIA for covert operations. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

Americans Will Never Forget The Historic Economic Collapse During Joe Biden’s Presidency

We have faced a lot of significant challenges in modern American history, but nobody will ever forget the economic horror that is breaking loose during Joe Biden’s time in the White House.  For years, we were warned that the policies that our leaders were pursuing would destroy the value of our currency and unleash rampant inflation.  Now it has happened.  For years, we were warned of a looming global energy crisis that would inevitably hit us.  Now it is here.  But what we have been through already is just the beginning.  The shortages that we are experiencing now will get worse.  Many of the ridiculously high prices that we are seeing now will seem like bargains by the end of the year.  And right now the U.S. economy appears to be rapidly slowing down at the exact same moment that economies all over the globe are moving in the wrong direction.  The CEO of Goldman Sachs just told us that “there’s going to be tougher economic times ahead”, and he is not exaggerating one bit.

On Thursday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States reached yet another brand new all-time record high

US gas prices have hit a new high of $4.71, just a day after hitting the record as seven states top off at $5 a gallon as inflation soars.

The national average jumped four cents overnight, leaving drivers in even more despair as gas prices continue to skyrocket emptying their wallets.

If Americans don’t like paying about five bucks a gallon, how are they going to feel when it takes about 10 bucks to buy a gallon of gas?

Fortunately, we did just get a bit of good news that should provide some temporary relief

OPEC and its oil-producing allies agreed on Thursday to hike output in July and August by a larger-than-expected amount as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wreaks havoc on global energy markets.

OPEC+ will increase production by 648,000 barrels per day in both July and August, bringing forward the end of the historic output cuts OPEC+ implemented during the throes of the Covid pandemic.

Unfortunately, this isn’t really going to change the trajectory of where we are heading.

In fact, one energy expert says that this is essentially just a symbolic gesture

Robert McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group and a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush, said prices rallied Thursday because the OPEC move was “more symbolic than fundamentally significant.”

“I wouldn’t call it a drop in the bucket. It’s basically a gesture… an important one symbolically,” he told CNN Business.

What we really need are long-term solutions, and there aren’t any on the horizon.

And the truth is that we aren’t just facing an oil crisis.  At this stage, the balance between supply and demand has reached a crisis point for all traditional forms of energy simultaneously

“Now we have an oil crisis, a gas crisis and an electricity crisis at the same time,” Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency watchdog group, told Der Spiegel in an interview published this week. “This energy crisis is much bigger than the oil crises of the 1970s and 1980s. And it will probably last longer.”

The global economy has largely been able to withstand surging energy prices so far. But prices could continue to rise to unsustainable levels as Europe attempts to wean itself off Russian oil and, potentially, gas. Supply shortages could lead to some difficult choices in Europe, including rationing.

What do you think the European economy will look like when there is widespread rationing of natural gas six months from now?

Can anyone out there answer that question?

We have never faced anything like this before, and one industry insider is referring to this as a “perfect storm”

Joe McMonigle, secretary general of the International Energy Forum, said he agrees with this depressing forecast from the IEA.

“We have a serious problem around the world that I think policymakers are just waking up to. It’s kind of a perfect storm,” McMonigle, whose group serves as a go-between for energy producing and consuming nations, told CNN in a phone interview.

Isn’t it funny how that term keeps popping up?

For years, I warned that a “perfect storm” was coming over and over again, and now that term has constantly been in the news throughout this year.

Another element of the “perfect storm” that we are facing is the rapidly growing global food crisis.

Here in the United States, the bird flu pandemic that has erupted in 2022 has resulted in 38 million chickens and turkeys being wiped out.

As a consequence, the price of eggs has been soaring to unprecedented levels

The price of eggs increased 10.3% in April. The UDSA predicts an increase between 19.5% and 20.5% year over year in 2022. That could mean $1.00 an egg. Poultry prices will rise as much as 9.5%.

Did you ever imagine that you would be paying a dollar for a single egg?

I still remember when you could get an entire carton of eggs for one dollar.

Chicken meat and turkey meat will be getting more expensive too, and now we are being warned that shortages are coming.

In fact, the CEO of Hormel Foods is openly telling us that “large supply gaps in the Jennie-O Turkey Store will begin in the third quarter”

A top US food processing company warned of an upcoming shortage of its turkey products at supermarkets following one of the worst bird flu outbreaks.

“Our Jennie-O Turkey Store team is facing an uncertain period ahead,” Hormel Foods Corporation CEO Jim Snee told investors in an earnings call. “Similar to what we experienced in 2015, (avian influenza) is expected to have a meaningful impact on poultry supplies over the coming months.”

Snee said the “large supply gaps in the Jennie-O Turkey Store will begin in the third quarter.” He said highly pathogenic avian influenza was confirmed in “our supply chain” in March.

In case you didn’t get the point of what he was saying, “large supply gaps” is a politically correct way of saying “widespread shortages”.

Speaking of shortages, the baby formula shortage in the United States is now worse than ever

But, as Bloomberg reports, out-of-stock rates climbed to 74% nationally for the week ending May 28, according to data on 130,000 stores followed by Datasembly. The increase comes after rates spiked to 70% for the week ending May 21 from 45% the week prior.

Even more stunningly, ten states now have shortage rates at 90% or greater, with Georgia hardest hit at 94%.

The Biden administration made a really big deal out of the fact that they were flying in baby formula from Europe, but once again that turned out to mostly be a symbolic gesture.

As economic conditions continue to deteriorate, an increasing number of Americans will fall into poverty and hunger.  In fact, according to NPR “demand at food banks is way up again”, and many of those food banks are already at a crisis point

Fitzgerald, of Feeding America, says providers around the country are dipping into emergency reserves, switching to cheaper products, limiting how often people can visit or how much food they can get, and “stretching their inventory to be able to meet more people’s needs.”

If our food banks are in such distress now, what will things be like six months or a year from today?

Because the truth is that food supplies are only going to get tighter.

The winter wheat harvest in the U.S. is going to come in way, way below original expectations.  In fact, we are being told that the winter wheat harvest in Kansas could be down “by more than 25%”

The U.S. winter wheat harvest potential in Kansas has dipped by more than 25% because of severe drought, and farmers in the state may leave thousands of acres of wheat in fields this year instead of paying to harvest the grain hit by the dry winter.

Looking ahead, a lot less wheat is being planted for the coming growing season because of extremely bizarre weather patterns in some areas.

For example, the amount of wheat that is currently being planted in North Dakota is expected to be the smallest ever recorded

Some farmers in North Dakota are unable to plant as much wheat as they normally would because of heavy rain across the state.

Government data shows the state is expected to plant wheat over the smallest recorded share of its farmland.

For much more on why U.S. food production is going to continue to shrink in the months ahead, please see this article.

The bottom line is that we are facing really severe problems that are not going to go away any time soon.

And if you are waiting for Joe Biden to come to the rescue, you are going to be waiting for a very long time

The president of the United States says he understands that inflation is impacting family budgets. But on Wednesday, he said he’s not “aware” of any “immediate action” that would reduce food and fuel prices.

“[W]e can’t take immediate action, that I’m aware of yet, to figure out how we bring down the price of gasoline back to three dollars a gallon. And we can’t do that immediately with regard to food prices, either,” Biden said.

A historic economic nightmare is here, and the guy in the White House is all out of answers.

So buckle up and try to enjoy the ride.

The months ahead are going to be quite chaotic, and you probably don’t even want to think about what is coming after that.

The illegal transfer of nuclear weapons materials involved in AUKUS cannot be denied: Chinese envoy

Published: Jun 10, 2022 10:04 AM
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The Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) trilateral nuclear submarine cooperation violated…

[1] the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT),

[2] the comprehensive safeguards agreement of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

[3] and additional protocol signed between Australia and the IAEA,

China’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Vienna Wang Qun said on Thursday, noting the US, the UK and Australia must give an account to the international community.

No matter what name the three countries give to the AUKUS and how they handle relevant nuclear weapon materials, the essence of the illegal transfer of nuclear weapon materials involved in AUKUS cannot be denied, Wang said.

Wang made the remarks when addressing a meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors, which deliberated the issue of the transfer of nuclear materials in the context of AUKUS and its safeguards in all aspects under the NPT.

The Chinese envoy said the AUKUS has a far-reaching negative impact on global strategic stability, security order and regional peace and stability, which should be politically responded to by relevant international and regional security mechanisms.

The three countries cannot repeatedly stick heads in the sand and must earnestly fulfill their legal obligations on non-proliferation. As a nonnuclear weapon state under the NPT, Australia must promptly and comprehensively declare its nuclear weapons materials and related facilities at all stages, Wang said, noting paper cannot wrap up fire.

The US and the UK have applied double standards on nuclear proliferation issues, as they imposed unilateral sanctions on civilian nuclear programs of some nonnuclear weapon states, while at the same time blatantly transferred nuclear weapon material to Australia, Wang said.

Such double standards have a disastrous impact on the international non-proliferation regime and the resolution of hotspot issues, including the Iran nuclear issue and the Korean Peninsula’s nuclear issue, the Chinese envoy said.

Some countries insist on “centralism” and “exceptionalism,” Cold War mentality and hegemony and pursue bloc politics, which goes against the trend of history and will only trigger conflicts and split the international community, Wang said.

In September 2021, the US, the UK and Australia announced the establishment of AUKUS, under which the US and the UK will assist Australia in its acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines.

CIA in Laos

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Keith Woodcock, 2008, Oil on Canvas, Donated Courtesy of the Air America Association Board.

When President Kennedy decided in 1961 to forcefully resist rising Communist aggression against the remote but strategically located Kingdom of Laos, the CIA – and its proprietary airline Air America – were ready.

Flying in a mountainous land-locked country with few roads, continually shifting weather conditions, and virtually no navigational aids, Air America crews routinely conducted hazardous resupply missions to hundreds of government outposts.

This aerial lifeline provided essential assistance to Royal Lao and US-directed forces battling North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao Communist troops. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

Showing ‘not hesitant to fight’ attitude helps peace across Taiwan Straits: Global Times editorial

Published: Jun 11, 2022 12:44 AM

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This year’s Shangri-La Dialogue kicked off on Friday and will run through Sunday. Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe will deliver an address on Sunday. On Friday, Wei held talks with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Senior Colonel Wu Qian, a spokesperson of China’s Ministry of National Defense, said at a press conference after the meeting that the meeting was not long but yielded positive effect. Overall, it was a frank, positive and constructive strategic communication.

During the meeting, Wei reiterated China’s firm stance on the Taiwan question, stressing if anyone dares to split Taiwan from China, the Chinese military will not hesitate to fight, and will resolutely crush any “Taiwan independence” attempts to firmly safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity at any cost.

Austin reiterated that the US “remains committed to our longstanding one-China policy.”

The two sides believe that the two militaries should maintain high-level strategic communication, enhance their strategic mutual trust, manage and control conflicts and differences, and not turn conflicts and differences into confrontations.

Objectively speaking, against the background in which China-US tensions continue and the two countries have conflicts in many fields, effective face-to-face exchanges between the defense ministers of China and the US are of great significance for managing differences and stabilizing ties between the two militaries.

What needs to be underlined in particular is that Wei has drawn a red line on the Taiwan question and once again showed China’s attitude and will, which will help avoid dangerous misjudgments by the US and other relevant parties. This is the genuine safeguard of peace across the Taiwan Straits.

Taiwan is part of China.

This is a universally recognized international consensus, which is generally accepted and clearly bolstered by the majority of countries and people across the world, except for some forces pretending to be deaf and blind and deliberately distorting its meaning.

Any deceptive rhetoric under the banner of peace that puts aside or distorts this international consensus is a breach of regional peace and a misjudgment of China’s determination. China has repeatedly emphasized that “relying on the US to seek independence” and “exploiting Taiwan island to control China” is playing with fire. If the Taiwan question is not properly handled, it will have a “subversive impact” on China-US relations. All these serious remarks are purposely oriented.

We noticed that the US announced a $120 million arms sale to Taiwan before Austin’s trip, while US public opinion is keen to hype the People’s Liberation Army’s legitimate response to the provocation of the Australian military aircraft, confusing right and wrong and claiming that China’s “provocative behavior” in the Asia-Pacific region has exacerbated the tension. At the same time, US Defense Department officials told media that one of the main goals for Washington this time is to set “guardrails” on the relationship between the two militaries to manage crises and ensure the competition between the two countries doesn’t escalate into conflict. But the fact is that it is the US’ moves that have constantly increased the risk of military conflict in the Asia-Pacific region.

Washington now puts a lot of emphasis on the so-called guardrails and crisis management between the two militaries, but not to realize long-term peace and stability. It wants to implement its salami slicing strategy so it won’t choke while enjoying the slices.

The US has no intention to stop manipulating the Taiwan question or creating divisions in the Asia-Pacific region.

Instead, it is becoming increasingly imperious.

While taking a confrontational stance that it must subjugate China, the US doesn’t want to pay the high cost to defeat its opponent. This could be the genuine intent behind Washington’s rhetoric about “guardrails” and “preventing competition from escalating.”

It is important to note that the risks in the Asia-Pacific region have reached a point where they must be managed. But this can never be achieved by forcing China to give up its core interests.

Washington has always proclaimed itself an Asia-Pacific country and considers itself responsible for the region’s security. If that is the case, it should be its responsibility to eliminate the origin of the crises and abandon its Cold War mentality and sense of a zero-sum game.

The US should truly fulfill its commitment: The US does not seek to have a new Cold War with China, to change China’s system, or to revitalize alliances against China, and that the US does not support “Taiwan independence” or intend to seek a conflict with China. It should also become a constructive force in the Asia-Pacific region. In this case, is there any need for a “guardrail?”

The Shangri-La Dialogue focuses on military security agenda, the most sensitive area in relations between countries. This US-Western-dominated forum has left a deep impression on people that it has been targeting China. China sent its defense minister to this dialogue, demonstrating Beijing’s sincerity in managing differences and its role as a responsible power for regional security.

It is hoped that Wei’s solemn statement of “smashing it even at any price, including war” can make some forces restrain their impulse and enable some countries to stay sober.

CIA in Vietnam / Cambodia

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CIA technicians invented and used this unusual device in the 1960s to keep track of the enemy in Southeast Asia.

The mission was to count people and supplies moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam to South Vietnam along the borders of Laos and Cambodia.

Many of the Laotian trail watchers whom CIA recruited could not read or write, let alone understand English. And so the device featured “pictograms,” such as symbols representing troops, trucks, motorcycles, carts, bicycles, tanks, cannons, small artillery, missiles, donkeys, and yes, occasionally elephants, a common beast of burden in Laos.

Alongside each pictogram was a knob that could be set to a number, and then the data could be transmitted to an airplane by activating a toggle switch. (Photo by Central Intelligence Agency)

GT Voice: Why do Chinese prices remain stable amid global inflation?

Yeah. My food and gas prices inside of China hasn't bulged at all. The stories about inflation in the West seen so odd =, strange and far away. -MM
Published: Jun 09, 2022 10:09 PM
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China’s major commodities imports were generally characterized by declined volume and a sharp price increases in the first five months of this year, according to the latest data released by the General Administration of Customs on Thursday.

Specifically, Chinese imports of crude oil, coal, natural gas, and soybeans in the January-May period were down by 1.7 percent, 13.6 percent, 9.3 percent, and 0.4 percent year-on-year in terms of import volume, with their average import prices rising 55.6 percent, 105.3 percent, 70.3 percent, and 23.3 percent, respectively.

To a certain extent, the considerable rise in commodities prices shows that China has been facing much imported inflationary pressure from overseas markets in recent months. Nevertheless, despite the global high inflation, Chinese goods prices have remained within a reasonable range.

The country’s consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, rose 2.1 percent year-on-year in April, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which is due to release the May CPI data on Friday.

Why can China keep domestic prices basically stable amid soaring global inflation?

For starters, the disruption of global supply chains caused by COVID-19 is a reason for high inflation. However, since the early days of the pandemic, China has effectively brought the epidemic under control, ensuring the normal operation of domestic industrial chains and leading to relatively small shocks to China’s supply chains compared with other countries.

Moreover, developed economies, led by the US, adopted expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, and the huge liquidity they injected into the market is another important cause of global inflation. By comparison, China has been pursuing relatively modest monetary and fiscal policies.

Even though the current COVID-19 epidemic resurgence has caused some difficulties for the Chinese economy, the government still appears relatively cautious in choosing the right stimulus tools, indicating its reluctance to see some long-term economic problem exacerbated due to improper short-term policies.

The difference between China and the US in terms of inflation and monetary policy underscores the different cycle and trend of economic development in the world’s two largest economies. For instance, taming inflation has become the top priority of the US at the moment, while rate hikes have led to concerns over the growing risk of a recession in the US economy. In China, with relatively low inflation, the most important economic priority now is to stabilize growth.

Of course, there is no denying that China will continue to face great inflationary pressure from overseas, which will be challenge to China’s economic policy choice in the future. The country needs to take precautions when it comes to the continuing issue of global inflation.

It needs to be pointed out that some Western media outlets have accused of China of adding to global inflation fears, citing its soaring factory prices. China’s producer price index (PPI), which measures costs for goods at the factory gate, went up 8 percent year-on-year in April. But the PPI increase was due in large part to the surge in global raw materials prices.

In fact, China has actually played an active role in stabilizing global prices in recent months. This is because China has, to a certain extent, absorbed some of the imported inflationary pressure thanks to the massive industrial scale and complete industrial systems of its manufacturing sector.

This is also the unique advantage of Chinese exports, which has not only ensured the country’s export growth, but also strengthened the status of Chinese manufacturing throughout the global industrial chain.

This is why the US cannot really decouple from China, and why the US must rely on Chinese manufacturing when it comes to reining in its elevated inflation.

Man Develops 120-Year-Old Photos Of Cats Discovered Inside A Time Capsule

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Mathieu later colored the photo using Photoshop.

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He repeated the process for the second negative.

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And produced another cat photo!

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This time it revealed one more kitten along with an adorable puppy.

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The SOS Band Live Studio A5621

Wow! They got so much better as they aged. They all look great, and their sound takes me back to the early 1980’s. Just an awesome experience!

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Kitty control and a global situation that has the Western elite all in disarray, an American presidential idiot, and some delicious food

Today’s mix of news and pleasures reflect this strange point in time. I hope that you all enjoy it. Things are shaping up nicely, and we are beginning to see some form take shape, and that defines clarity to what will happen next. I hope that you enjoy this article.

Indian FM Jaishankar Calls Out West Again

Highlights (7 minutes): HERE

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BUT sadly, it also shows at the very end that India will deal with the devil himself, US imperialism, in its differences with China.  I hope that this was just a point of diplomacy – it was not spoken with the same indignation that the FM reserved for the rather ugly comments of the interviewer.  So maybe it is a passing phase.  Let’s hope so.

India should be concerned about the US.  The Wolfowitz Doctrine dictates that any country that grows too powerful will be targeted and brought down by the US.  Right now India has the number three PPP- GDP in the world.  If China is brought down, India will be the next target for the US.  Bank on it.

The longer version is revealing in that it shows the blindness of the West to the Global South in the snarky neocolonial attitude of the interviewer and of the questioner from the Baltics.

US-China trade war: ‘all options’ on table in tariff review, Washington seeking ‘structure that makes sense’

Deputy US Trade Representative Sarah Bianchi says Washington is seeking to address long-term challenges from China and ‘getting a tariff structure that really makes sense’ US President Joe Biden has said he is considering removing some of the tariffs imposed on Chinese goods by predecessor Donald

Article HERE

UKRAINE FIRING MLRS AT DOWNTOWN DONETSK – TOTAL CIVILIAN AREA!

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6:45 PM EDT — BOUT FOUR HOURS AGO, The Ukraine Armed Forces launched a horrifying attack with Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) against ALL CIVILIAN TARGETS in downtown Donetsk, the city center!   Large explosions in rapid succession seen on video below.

There are no Russian forces operating inside the city and there have been no outbound firing of weapons from that city.   Today’s attack was deliberate targeting of a completely civilian area.   Here, look:

 

This is precisely what Ukraine was doing from the year 2014 until 2016, paused when President Trump was sworn in, but resumed when Biden stole the US presidency.

They are attacking civilians because those civilians speak Russian, and want to be independent of Ukraine.

This is a war crime – again – by Ukraine . . . . again.

Funny

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How Russia, And Putin, Are Weaponizing, Losing And Running Out Of … Everything

The Western "news" is so silly. -MM

Moon of Alabama earlier explored how Russia was weaponizing everything. This after Donald Trump had done so many good things for Russia. Then Putin lost everything he ever might have had.

It has been getting worse since.

Now Russia, and Putin himself, are ‘running out’ of whatever may have been left.

Posted by b on June 3, 2022 at 7:46 UTC | Permalink

RUMORS: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Face “No Confidence” Vote

United Kingdom (UK) Prime Minister Boris Jonson is RUMORED to be on his way out of power, as 65 letters of “No Confidence” have allegedly been filed in Parliament.   Under UK rules, 54 such letters are required to force a vote.

If the tally of letters has reached 65, then Johnson could be ejected as Prime Minster.

Sir Graham Stuart Brady is RUMORED to be ready to announce the tally of letters on Monday.

Brady is a British politician who has served as the Member of Parliament for Altrincham and Sale West since 1997.

A member of the Conservative Party, he has been Chairman of the 1922 Committee since 2020, previously holding the position from 2010 to 2019.

It is that Committee that has the power to call a “No Confidence” vote within the Party.

Roman Abramovich’s UK Telecoms Firm to Be Sold for $1: Report

New form of looting. Singapore tiger Air was sold for A$1 after Australia abuse airsafety regulation to damage the airline reputation in Australia to kill an Asian competition. Now UK did the same to Russian investment:
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  • Roman Abramovich’s Truphone is being sold for about $1 to two European entrepreneurs, a report says.
  • The company had been worth $512 million in 2020, according to The Times.
  • Abramovich is among the individuals sanctioned by the west following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
A British telecoms company owned by Roman Abramovich is being sold to two European tech entrepreneurs for about $1, The Times reported.
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Truphone, valued at $512 million ($410 million) in 2020, has received almost $375 million of investment from Abramovich and two business partners, Alexander Abramov and Alexander Frolov. According to the newspaper, Abramovich owns 23% of the company.
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Truphone hired the advisory firm FRP in April to review its “strategic options” following the sanctions imposed on the former owner of Chelsea FC.
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Hakan Koc is one of the two entrepreneurs who has emerged as one of the preferred bidders for Truphone, according to The Times…. More
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Full article HERE

Very Interesting Video

Rare video of the Russian TOS-1 MRLS system in use at shorter range. The launch and impact sites are both visible and about 1 km apart. You can see why Ukrainian fighters are terrified of the 220mm fuel-air explosive rockets. A trench is not sufficient to shield soldiers from the long thermobaric blast wave produced – lethal (in this video) at least to the extent of the shockwave ‘fog’ front. The visible shockwave is a function of the relatively low temperature and high humidity – it’s not normally visible in most situations.

View the Video here

Javelin ATGM missiles have an effective range of 2.5 km, so the TOS-1 launcher in the above video is easily close enough to be counter-attacked. You have to be able to see the Javelin target to fire on it, so the launcher is probably positioned behind trees or terrain. The TOS-1 rockets are ballistic and able to arc over such cover even at very low trajectories.

Cake Mix Gooey Butter Lemon Cookies

Lemony, soft cookies topped with a sweet citrus glaze using a genius shortcut — cake mix!

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Ingredients

Cookies

  • 1 package (8 oz) cream cheese, softened
  • 1/2 cup butter, softened
  • 2 tablespoons finely grated lemon peel
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tablespoons lemon juice
  • 1 box Betty Crocker™ Super Moist™ lemon cake mix

Glaze

  • 1 3/4 cups powdered sugar
  • 3 to 4 tablespoons lemon juice

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North Korea Fires Missiles into Sea of Japan

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At about 1:00 AM eastern US time Sunday, North Korea fired at least one, and perhaps multiple, ballistic missiles.  The missile(s) were fired from the east coast of North Korea toward the Sea of Japan.

UPDATE 8:00 AM EDT —

North Korea fired eight (8) short range ballistic missile from Sunan, near Pyongyang.   The missiles flew at various altitudes and distances, presumably to test targeting and range.  Missiles flew 110-670 km at top altitude of 25-90 km.

It now appears that North Korea did this IN RESPONSE TO South Korea and the United States staging their first combined military exercises involving an American aircraft carrier in more than four years.

Grief days with changes in Narrative… or why Trolls are Doomed

By F(unny) MAN for the Saker Blog

In the last days we have been observing some important developments:

The MSM defecators (1) are changing the Narrative from:

  • Weeeeeeeeee, we are the best of the best.
  • 404 Super-army of Call-of-duty soldiers are defeating the Russian Zombie hordes.
  • Russian Army is losing millions of men, thousands of tanks, hundredths of aircrafts.
  • Russia has no more men, ammo, missiles, whatever, and they will have to stop the offensive
  • United we will win (Ha! this, a very good one)

To admit that, something is happening (or could happen) that is closer to the reality that is developing in the Real World and on the ground (You know what I mean…) such as:

  • The “Diplomatic Solutions to the conflict that, 404 can and should find (from a position of Force) with Russia”
  • The “Shocking Victory that Putin the magician is about to pull off his hat”
  • The (at minimum) “600 daily casualties of the 404 army in the Donbass”
  • The “We will never pay in Rubles! But please, can we open an account in Gazprombank“
  • Et cetera…

As my grandpa always said; when you enter into conflict with reality, no matter how your wishes, your paranoia, or your narcissistic self-appreciation and wokeism are… you are in for a hard punch in the face.

We are slowly but surely seeing some kind of collective grief at play, because you can observe all phases developing (2) in front of you. You only have to look carefully at their, now serious, faces (not happy and cheering anymore) and declarations. Be they politicians in the zone A, MSM hosts, opinion makers, general analysts, vassals and puppets, or any other fauna of this political and informational ecosystem (3).

Every time I hear or read the reports about 404, I do have the feeling that what they are just bitterly saying can be resumed in this sentence: United we fight against Russia, from Victory to Victory till the final Defeat.

I suppose their days should be terrible because looks like the Russian have a never-ending supply of Tanks, Men, Talent, Aircraft, and Missiles. But what should you expect? The incredible hat of Putin the magician has no bottom end.

But let me tell you that, this grief, is also found in the troll scene. What many people might have been noticing lately is that the level of trolling has been reduced significantly in the last weeks. I have been observing a decline in the quantity and quality of troll commenting on those websites and Alternative Media (4) that some people use to look for real (I mean REAL) information, opinion, and analyses. I have the feeling that many of the trolls should also be in (or close to) the Depression phase of the grief.

I have contacted some of my troll-friends that, unfortunately, have to work as troll-commentators(5) fundamentally in well-known 3-letter-agencies such as CENSORED, CENSORED or CENSORED, and made a little bit of research and interviews… their words were stunning.

They speak about unhealthy conditions, miserable and delayed payment, alienation, abusive and violent working atmosphere, overworking hours, lack of respect at work, anxiety, psychological trauma, and ptsd (the answer to their trolling comments is terrible to their self-esteem) high incidence of suicide, high incidence of divorce, obesity, stress, sleep deprivation, fatigue, anxiety (again) and other problems. They openly state that they cannot work much longer under such pressure conditions. One of them even claimed to need more than 36 hours of psychological treatment after realizing he started to believe that the answers to their trolling comments seemed to be quite reasonable and articulated, and more likely truth worthy that the official narrative they have to push (as that it is obviously impossible).

One of my (closest) troll-friends is also considering leaving his Job in CENSORED after more than 25 years of trolling. With his experience and qualifications, he can always find a high-skilled job somewhere as a Self-Storage Manager or as Restroom Attendant.

I have to inform you that no trolls were harmed or exposed to light in the investigative research that was conducted to the writing of this article.

In the time you invested in reading this article, 26 trolls have died, 96 have quit, 238 have to get a two-week sick leave due to due to the problems, hardness, and complications related to their job.

1.) It is quite a gross definition, but… they defecate through one of the orifices in their body, just not the traditional one (6)

2.) The five stages of grief:

  • Denial
  • Anger
  • Bargaining
  • Depression
  • Paying in Rubles

3.) To get more information about these Fauna and Ecosystem, you just have to switch on your Television, there is a 24/7 documentary going on, all the time, nonstop… geeeez! do it at your own risk.

4.) Websites like this one CENSORED you are reading, or those of Mr. Martyanov CENSORED or Mr. Bernhard CENSORED just to mention some.

5.) They say you have to have friends even in Hell, and Hey! Trolls do have to eat too. They have Families, Troll-Wives and Troll-Kids. So long they do not work in the light of the day (with you-know-what-consequences) they have to make something productive of their lives and provide for those they are responsible for. Also, garden dwarves are not that abundant anymore.

6.) I know, self-referencing is not a good idea, but… I just Wonder… if they defecate through the mouth… they should get the Feed through the…

Show Your Feline The Respect It Deserves With A “Game of Thrones” Cat Bed

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Your cat rules your life and only lets you live because you feed it, empty its litter tray, and sometimes you can be quite amusing. So isn’t it time you just admit who’s boss in your household?

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The First Financial Domino Just Fell; China’s EVERGRANDE is now OFFICIALLY in “Default”

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At Midnight U.S. east coast time Friday night-into-Saturday, China’s second largest Real Estate developer, EVERGRANDE, officially entered “DEFAULT” status on its massive global debt.  This is the first Domino in the coming financial collapse, and it has just fallen, hard.

The China Evergrande Group is the second largest property developer in China by sales.

It is ranked 122nd on the Fortune Global 500.

It is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory, and headquartered in the Houhai Financial Center in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China.

According to Citibank as of Saturday June 4th, EVERGRANDE is more than 30 days past due on interest payments.

This means that hundreds of billions of Dollars will get removed from market makers and banks on Monday  6th June.

Most G20 nation banks, Money Market  funds, some State pension funds will have direct or secondary counterparty exposure to this.

China Will only bail out China…by CCP takeover of Evergrande companies.

Foreigners are left holding the bag.

More or less the same thing happened in Ireland not too long ago and MANY Irish banks went bust overnight because of it.

A full 2/3rds of China’s domestic wealth and economy is tied up in residential and commercial real estate.  It is the largest single asset class of any nation in the world.

As China Evergrande reportedly begins negotiating creative ways to repay billions owed to offshore bondholders, a paying agent of one of the embattled property giant’s USD-denominated bonds has sent a letter to investors officially confirming default.

Dr Marco Meltzer, a respected German financial analysts and outspoken critic of the handling of Evergrande’s debt crisis, says he received a letter from Citi earlier this week all but confirming the company is broke.

Citigroup serves as a paying agent for a number of Evergrande’s offshore bonds. Paying agents are intermediaries which accept payments from bond issuers and distribute the funds among the bond holders.

“Just this week, I received an official letter from the agent Citibank that Evergrande has defaulted on our bond and I will never see my money again,” said Dr Meltzer.

“I had bought bonds last year in November to see if the media coverage of the real estate giant was accurate, as they repeatedly reported that Evergrande was doing well.

“Unfortunately, it appears this media coverage is taking its course.”

Meltzer shared a copy of the letter (published in the feature image of this article) which states Evergrande and its Subsidiaries “have not made payment of interest that was due and payable on April 11, 2022”.

Last year, an Asia Markets’ investigation highlighted a litany of examples in which missed Evergrande offshore bond payments were sugar-coated in the financial press through anonymous sources claiming that default had been avoided, thus leading to many investors overlooking the risk the crisis poses to global financial markets.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

All the stories in the media about Evergrande negotiating its way out of default and paying bond holders were lies . . .  from or through, the media.

You see, its cheaper to pay the media to run a bs story than it is to pay $300 Billion worth of debt.

So here we see that media PROPAGANDA lured people into investing money, which they have now lost.

Think about that the next time you watch any so-called “main stream” media outlet.  It is no longer the exception to the rule to have media outright lie.  Many of you found that out with COVID.   Now investors are finding out the hard way.

The Takeaway: DON’T TRUST THE MAIN STREAM MEDIA.

Now, we all get to see what kind of rhetorical “blood-bath” takes place in Asian markets when they re-open later tonight (Sunday).   If it is as bad as I think it will be, the contagion will spread rapidly to Europe and to the US.   This could be quite a week.

WARNING SIGNS on JUNE 2

There was a major, red flag warning sign, that something wicked was coming when Fitch Rating Service announced on June 2 they would cease rating Evergrande and its subsidiaries.

They announced “Fitch Ratings has decided to withdraw the credit rating for Communist China’s real estate Evergrande and its two subsidiaries on June 2nd, as there is not enough information to maintain the rating.

Foreign media reported that the rating agencies downgraded China Evergrande Group and its subsidiaries, Hengda Real Estate Group Co Ltd, and Tianji Holding Ltd to “restricted default” last December, saying the companies’ offshore bonds, including loans and private placement, had defaulted. However, as there is not enough information to maintain these ratings anymore, Fitch said. “No further ratings or analysis will be provided to Evergrande and its subsidiaries.” they added.

 BANK CRASH?

When Ireland saw similar major crash, MANY banks in Ireland found themselves book-broke overnight.

Ireland is tiny.  China is gigantic.

The amount of Evergrande debt is at least $300 Billion.   How many banks globally may now be tipped-over into being book-broke?   We start to see tomorrow.

Worst case, global bank runs.

The Numerology people will be going nuts over the date:  06-06-2022 . . . but when they add the 2’s  in the year, it becomes 6-6-6.   Just sayin . . .

What Australia Looks Like In The Winter

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Australia turns white in the winter time but not from the snow. Some places still turn white due to creatures that spin massive webs around that time of year and they look like this.

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VIDEO: University of Minnesota Being “Culturally-Enriched” by “Diversity”

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Students and others on University Avenue near the University of Minnesota got “culturally enriched” last night as “Diversity” opened-fire.  Video below:

 

Ain’t “Diversity” grand?!?!?!?

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Bilderberg does China

When Davos and Bilderberg messenger boys look at The Grand Chessboard, they realize that their era of perpetual free lunch is over.

By Pepe Escobar posted with his permission and widely cross-posted. 

Discreetly, as under the radar as a looming virus, the 68th Bilderberg meeting  is currently underway in Washington, D.C. Nothing to see here. No conspiracy theories about a “secret cabal”, please. This is just a docile, “diverse group of political leaders and experts” having a chat, a laugh, and a bubbly.

Still, one cannot but notice that the choice of venue speaks more volumes than the entire – burned to the ground – Library of Alexandria. In the year heralding the explosion of a much-awaited NATO vs. Russia proxy war, discussing its myriad ramifications does suit the capital of the Empire of Lies, much more than Davos a few weeks ago, where one Henry Kissinger sent them into a frenzy by advancing the necessity of a toxic compromise named “diplomacy”.

The list of Bilderberg 2022 participants is a joy to peruse. Here are just some of the stalwarts:

James Baker, Consigliere extraordinaire, now a mere Director of the Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon.

José Manuel Barroso, former head of the European Commission, later the recipient of a golden parachute in the form of Chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Albert Bourla, the Pfizer Big Guy.

William Burns, CIA director.

Kurt Campbell, the guy who invented the Obama/Hillary “pivot to Asia”, now White House Coordinator for Indo-Pacific.

Mark Carney, former Bank of England, one of the designers of the Great Reset, now Vice Chair of Brookfield Asset Management.

Henry Kissinger, The Establishment’s Voice (or a war criminal: take your pick).

Charles Michel, President of the European Council.

Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, which will duly relay all major Bilderberg directives in the magazine’s upcoming cover stories.

David Petraeus, certified loser of endless surges and Chairman of KKR Global Institute.

Mark Rutte, hawkish Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

Jens Stoltenberg, NATO top parrot, sorry, secretary-general.

Jake Sullivan, Director of the National Security Council.

The ideological and geopolitical affiliations of these members of the “diverse group” need no further elaboration. It gets positively sexier when we see what they will be discussing.

Among other issues we find “NATO challenges”;

  • “Indo-Pacific realignment”;
  • “continuity of government and economy” (Conspirationists: continuity in case of nuclear war?);
  • “disruption of global financial system” (already on);
  • “post-pandemic health” (Conspirationists: how to engineer the next pandemic?);
  • “trade and deglobalization”; and of course, the choice wagyu beef steaks:
  • Russia and China.

As Bilderberg follows Chatham House Rules, mere mortals won’t have a clue of what they actually “proposed” or approved, and none of the participants will be allowed to talk about it with anyone else.

One of my top New York sources, with direct access to most of the Masters of the Universe, loves to quip that Davos and Bilderberg are just for the messenger boys: the guys who really run the show don’t even bother to show up, ensconced in their uber-private meetings in uber-private clubs, where the real decisions are made.

Still, anyone following in some detail the rotten state of the “rules-based international order” will have a pretty good idea about the 2022 Bilderberg chatter.

The statements and position postures…

Secretary of State Little Blinken – Sullivan’s sidekick in the ongoing Crash Test Dummy administration’s Dumb and Dumber remake – has recently claimed that China “supports” Russia on Ukraine instead of remaining neutral.

What really matters here is that Little Blinken is implying that Beijing wants to destabilize Asia-Pacific – which is a notorious absurdity. Yet that’s the master narrative that must pave the way for the US to muscle up its “Indo-Pacific” concoction. And that’s the briefing Sullivan and Kurt Campbell will be delivering to the “diverse group”.

Davos – with its new self-billed mantra, “The Great Narrative” – completely excluded Russia.

Bilderberg is mostly about containment of China – which after all is the number one existential threat to the Empire of Lies and its satrapies.

Rather than wait for Bilderberg morsels dispensed by The Economist, it’s much more productive to check out what a cross-section of fact-based Chinese intelligentsia thinks about the new “collective West” racket.

What the Chinese say

Let’s start with Justin Lin Yifu, former Chief Economist of the World Bank and now Dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University, and Sheng Songcheng, former head of the Financial Survey and Statistic Dept. a the Bank of China.

They advance that if China achieves “dynamic zero infection” on Covid-19 by the end of May (that actually happened: see the end of the Shanghai lockdown), China’s economy may grow by 5.5% in 2022.

They dismiss the imperial attempt to establish an “Asian version of NATO”: “As long as China continues to grow at a higher rate and to open up, European and ASEAN countries would not participate in the US’s decoupling trap so as to ensure their economic growth and job creation.”

Three academics from the Shanghai Institute of International Studies and Fudan University touch on the same point: the American-announced “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework”, supposed to be the economic pillar of the Indo-Pacific strategy, is nothing but a cumbersome attempt to “weaken the internal cohesion and regional autonomy of ASEAN.”

Liu Zongyi stresses that China’s position at the heart of the vastly inter-connected Asian supply chains “has been consolidated”, especially now with the onset of the largest trade deal on the planet, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

Chen Wengling, Chief Economist of a think tank under the key National Development and Reform Commission, notes  the “comprehensive ideological and technological war against China” launched by the Americans.

But he’s keen to stress how they are “not ready for a hot war as the US and Chinese economies are so closely linked.” The crucial vector is that “the US has not yet made substantial progress in strengthening its supply chain focusing on four key fields including semiconductors.”

Chen worries about “China’s energy security”; “China’s silence” on US sanctions on Russia, which “may result in US retaliation”; and crucially, how “China’s plan of building the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with Ukraine and EU countries will be affected.” What will happen in practice is BRI will be privileging economic corridors across Iran and West Asia, as well as the Maritime Silk Road, instead of the Trans-Siberian corridor across Russia.

It’s up to Yu Yongding, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank, to go for the jugular, noting how” the global financial system and the US dollar have been weaponized into geopolitical tools. The nefarious behavior of the US in freezing foreign exchange reserves has not only seriously damaged the international credibility of the US but has also shaken the credit foundation of the dominant international financial system in the West.”

He expresses the consensus among Chinese intel, that “if there is a geopolitical conflict between the US and China, then China’s overseas assets will be seriously threatened, especially its huge reserves. Therefore, the composition of China’s external financial assets and liabilities urgently needs to be adjusted and the portion of US dollar denominated assets in its reserves portfolio should be reduced.”

This chessboard sucks

A serious debate is raging across virtually all sectors of Chinese society on the American weaponization of the world financial casino. The conclusions are inevitable: get rid of US Treasuries, fast, by any means necessary; more imports of commodities and strategic materials (thus the importance of the Russia-China strategic partnership); and firmly secure overseas assets, especially those foreign currency reserves.

Meanwhile Bilderberg’s “diverse group”, on the other side of the pond, is discussing, among other things, what will really happen in case they force the IMF racket to blow up (a key plan to implement The Great Reset, or “Great Narrative”).

They are starting to literally freak out with the slowly but surely emergence of an alternative, resource-based monetary/financial system: exactly what the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) is currently discussing and designing, with Chinese input.

Imagine a counter-Bilderberg system where a basket of Global South actors, resource-rich but economically poor, are able to issue their own currencies backed by commodities, and finally get rid of their status of IMF hostages. They are all paying close attention to the Russia gas-for-rubles experiment.

And in China’s particular case, what will always matter is loads of productive capital underpinning a massive, extremely deep industrial and civil infrastructure.

No wonder Davos and Bilderberg messenger boys, when they look at The Grand Chessboard, are filled with dread: their era of perpetual free lunch is over. What would delight cynics, skeptics, neoplatonists and Taoists galore is that it was Davos-Bilderberg Men (and Women) who actually boxed themselves into zugzwang.

All dressed up – with nowhere to go. Even JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon – who didn’t even bother to go to Bilderberg – is scared, saying an economic “hurricane” is coming. And overturning the chessboard is no remedy: at best that may invite a ceremonious tuxedo visit by Mr. Sarmat and Mr. Zircon carrying some hypersonic bubbly.

‘Demonic’ AI generating its own secret written language that nobody can understand

An image AI called DALL-E has sparked debate among AI experts who claim it is creating a secret language to categorise images – the words look like gibberish but have a hidden meaning.

From HERE

A popular AI tool that turns text into images appears to be creating its ‘own language’ of indecipherable gibberish and using it to categorise different pictures.

The DALL-E tool, which uses AI to generate images from text, is seemingly generating nonsense text when instructed to create images featuring printed words.

Computer science PhD student Giannis Daras took to Twitter to share examples of the ‘language’, including phrases the AI had created to identify birds and insects.

“Apoploe vesrreaitais” means ‘birds’, while “Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons” means insects.

Daras claimed in the viral thread that if you enter the gibberish words created by the AI back into the system, it will generate images linked to those phrases.

In a research paper which is yet to be peer-reviewed, Daras and his colleague Alexandros G. Dimakis said: ““[T]ext prompts such as: ‘An image of the word airplane’ often lead to generated images that depict gibberish text.

“We discover that this produced text is not random, but rather reveals a hidden vocabulary that the model seems to have developed internally.

“For example, when fed with this gibberish text, the model frequently produces airplanes.”

The academics believe that the AI generates its own words to make sense of the images it creates, and can then understand these words when they are read back to it.

The claims sparked debate on Twitter. One user, Dmitriy Mandel, said: “Hmm, time to brush up on signs of demonic possession.”

Another person said :”Is this an actual LANGUAGE? With grammar and stuff?”

However, other AI experts remain highly sceptical of the claims.

Thomas Woodside said: “I do not believe this is accurate. At the very least, it is a lot more complicated than this thread / paper makes it out to be,” before sharing a thread where he explained issues with the claims.

Another user went further, saying: “This is not science, this nonsense is **tarot card reading**… trying to find meaning in random noise.”

DALL-E is a machine learning system that allows you to generate images just by typing short descriptions into a text box. You can find out more about it here.

No Chinese Engines Please! Thailand ‘Rejects’ To Buy Yuan-Class Submarines From Beijing Sans German Tech

Amid concerns about the missing German engines in Chinese submarines, Thailand’s Prime Minister, Prayut Chan-o-cha had warned in April that the planned procurement deal with China could be shelved if Beijing was unable to fit the engines specified in the original purchase agreement.

The EurAsian Times had reported that the German engine manufacturing company Motoren- und Turbinen-Union (MTU) had refused to supply MTU396 diesel engines to China to be fitted into the S26T Yuan-class submarine being built for the Royal Thai Navy (RTN).

To resolve the issue, the Royal Thai Navy and China Shipbuilding & Offshore International Co (CSOC) have scheduled a meeting on June 9 to settle the dispute, Thai media outlet Pattaya Mail reported.

The vice president of CSOC is due to meet with Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Tharoengsak Sirisawat to discuss the situation.

The Chinese firm has asked the Royal Thai Navy to change the contract to allow it to employ a Chinese-made alternative, such as the MWM 620, which it claims is of comparable quality.

The Royal Thai Navy, on the other hand, is sticking to the contract’s original provisions, which it feels are non-negotiable.

 

Negotiations on the issue were initially set to take place in May but were repeatedly postponed due to the Covid-19 situation in China. According to observers, CSOC may give the Navy revised terms to complete the contract.

However, if no headway is made, the agreement could even be terminated.

“What do we do with a submarine with no engines? Why should we purchase it?” Prayut had told journalists in April. The submarine that China wants to outfit with its home-grown engines is expected to be delivered in 2024.

Under the terms of the agreement, China Shipbuilding & Offshore International Co (CSOC), a state-owned shipbuilding conglomerate, is supposed to build and sell three advanced export variants of Type 039B Yuan-class submarine – to be called the S26T – for a total cost of 36 billion baht (1.16 billion) to be paid in 11 annual installments.

Will The Deal Fall Through?

The Thai government approved the purchase of three Yuan-class submarines from China for $1.05 billion in April 2017. However, due to budget constraints, the purchase of only one submarine was allowed — valued at $403 million, while the other two were shelved.

While Germany bypassed the terms of the European Union embargo by taking advantage of some loopholes, it had to terminate the dealing after an investigation exposed how Germany was violating a comprehensive EU arms embargo and benefiting China, a common European adversary that has been challenging its power.

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After the abrupt suspension of German engine delivery, China reportedly offered reverse-engineered Chinese-made engines certified by German MTU to the Thai Navy.

However, the Thailand officials rejected the offer, insisting that the Chinese side adheres to the original terms of the agreement. They also turned down the Chinese offer to transfer two of its decommissioned submarines, according to Thai PBS World.

The Chinese have demonstrated well-known capabilities in reverse engineering technology obtained by foreign countries to develop their system. However, the dearth of examples of home-grown propulsion technology could be understood as the object of Thailand’s doubt regarding Chinese engines.

Even though Thailand has indicated that terminating the purchase will not affect bilateral relations, China’s inability to equip the submarine with the original engine could risk future submarine sales. The explanation for this is simple: German engines are not coming and new Chinese engines are not trustworthy yet.

Will Thailand Accept China’s Offer? 

While China has made significant advances in engine manufacture for fighter jets such as the J-20 and wind tunnels for hypersonic technologies, it lags far behind in submarine propulsion.

Since the majority of engines used in Chinese submarines are foreign-made, propulsion engineering is one of the military industry’s most serious weaknesses.

The Song and Yuan-class attack submarines, for instance, which account for the majority of China’s conventional submarine fleet, are powered by MTU 396 SE84 series diesel engines manufactured in Germany.

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Professor Andrew Erickson of the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) said at a 2015 conference on the Chinese Navy’s capabilities that propulsion engineering in the PLAN’s [People’s Liberation Army Navy’s] underwater force is still a work in progress.

Due to diesel engines that are specifically designed to minimize vibration and noise to avoid sonar detection, diesel-electric submarines are far stealthier than nuclear submarines. MTU Friedrichshafen GmbH of Friedrichshafen, Germany’s 396 SE84 series of state-of-the-art diesel engines, for example, power both the Song– and Yuan–class attack submarines.

According to The Diplomat, each Song and Yuan–class battleship has three of these engines, which have been built under license by Chinese defense contractors since 1986.

The Yuan-class submarines are also thought to be equipped with Stirling air-independent propulsion and quieting technologies from Russian-designed submarines.

It has made some advancements in reverse engineering in the past few years; however, the Chinese engine has been rejected by the Thailand authorities despite the certification received by MTU. As of now, the deal hangs in the balance, and so does China’s standing as a regional exporter of arms.

More Pictures from the Past

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“Sits Down Spotted”- Crow Nation, Fort Keogh, Montana, 1881. Photo By L.A. Huffman

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WTF?

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Another Lira: What Happens To Europe When Russia Wins

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I invite you to compare this with Batiuska’s article newly posted.  Other video HERE

Same thing .. very differently expressed.  Is it the end of the imbeciles?

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 5

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Murder hornets, US and Britain in a tussle over weapon technology, Penis Pendants, Tiananmen Square, and the Grave of Scotia

Life is crazy and the idiots running the West are the craziest of them all. I hope that you all are being prudent and collecting firewood, having a wood stove, riding a bicycle, and learning how to can and tend to your gardens. The madness from above will trickle down and saturate your life in a flood. Do not be caught “flat footed”.

Here’s some articles, art, fun, and amusements for today. have fun. -MM

Wearing Futuristic Protective Suits, Washington State Crews Destroy First US Murder Hornet Nest

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Heavily protected crews worked in Washington state on Saturday to destroy the first nest of so-called murder hornets discovered in the United States.

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Race Against Time to Save the 33,000-Year-Old Underwater Cosquer Cave

During glacial Pleistocene, the entry to the famous Cosquer Cave was 100 meters (330 ft) above sea level, but the Holocene sea level rise, propelled lately by climate change, has meant that the entrance to the cave is now 37 meters (121 ft) below sea level. Renowned for being the only place in the world where prehistoric underwater marine art can be found, scientists are now racing against time to save the art from climate change and pollution, reports  Agence France-Presse (AFP) .

Over 30,000 years old and created over 15 millennia, the spectacular cave art at Cosquer Cave is in grave danger, with a 12 cm (almost 5 in) rise in sea level in 2011 alone. With sea levels rising a few millimeters every year, and the combination of water and plastic pollution is doing more and more damage to the art, archaeologist and diver Luc Vanrell and his colleagues have taken matters into their own hands.

Cosquer Cave: A Fortuitous Discovery and an Artistic Language

Discovered by Henri Cosquer in 1985, Cosquer Cave was only revealed to the public in 1991. In that interim six-year period dozens of interested explorers, divers and amateur enthusiasts tried to visit the cave, with three divers losing their lives in the process. It was after this tragic incident that the entrance to the cave was made public. Luc Vanrell explored the cave in 1994, and by 1995 had taken on all the scientific and technical work related to the preservation of this Upper Palaeolithic marvel.

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While in use, Cosquer Cave was 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) away from the coast. “At the time we were in the middle of an ice age and the sea was 135 meters [443 ft] lower” than it is today, highlighted archaeologist Michel Olive in  AFP. “The entrance to the cave was on a little promontory facing south over grassland protected by cliffs. It was an extremely good place for prehistoric man.” Olive has been put in charge of the academic research and study of the cave.

Though four-fifths of the cave has inadvertently been lost or submerged due to the passage of time, 229  rock art  figures depicting 13 species remain on the wall. An added bonus is 69 red or black  hand prints , including three that have been left by mistake, some of these made by  children. In total, 600 signs, images and rock carvings, which include aquatic life never seen before in  cave paintings  have been found. The cave was occupied between 33,000 and 18,500 years ago, but no traces or evidence of people having lived there have been found, reports  The Daily Mail .

To access the cave, visitors first need to dive to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of southern France, at the gorgeous Calanques inlets east of  Marseille. After that, they have to navigate a 137 meter (450 ft) tunnel, before arriving at a submerged cavern. The cavern leads to the 2,500 square meter (27,000 sq. ft.) Cosquer Cave.

On 4 June 2022 a life-sized replica cave, known as  Cosquer Méditerranée , is being opened up a few kilometers away in Marseille. The replica will confirm the bountiful coastal wildlife that must have once graced the Mediterranean – horses, deer,  bison, ibex, prehistoric auroch cows, saiga antelopes, seals, fish, penguins, and even a cat and a  bear. There are also hundreds of geometric signs, and eight depictions of male and female body parts.

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Digital Mapping and Preservation at Cosquer Cave

As of now, Vanrell and his team are rushing to beat the clock to prepare a 3D reconstruction of the cave through digital mapping. “We fantasized about bringing the cave to the surface. When it is finished, our virtual Cosquer cavern—which is accurate to within millimeters—will be indispensable for researchers and archaeologists who will not be able to physically get inside,” said diver Bertrand Chazaly, who is in charge of the operation to digitalize what has come to be known as the “underwater Lascaux” cave. The  replica cave , slightly smaller than the original, has cost a whopping $24 million.

In fact, in terms of importance and size Cosquer Cave is right up there with  Lascaux, Altamira, and  Chauvet, three of the largest cave sites in the world. “And because the cave walls that are today  underwater were probably also once decorated, nothing else in Europe compares to its size,” says Vanrell.

Having said that, the alarming rise in sea levels, exacerbated by the pace of anthropocenic activity in the past few decades, has caused the walls to rinse and be leeched out. It has also finally gained the attention of the French government, who have launched a major push to record all available data before it’s too late.

In the meantime, Vanrell and his team are hoping to discover what the purpose of the cave was, in order to understand the ways of our ancestors and their artistic pursuits. After all, examples of Palaeolithic  cave art  have been located across all continents, including cave art created as far back as  45,000 years ago in Indonesia . Clearly, cave art, which predates human language, is the first form of symbolic visual communication that developed into more complex forms of language much later on.

“The peace dividend has ended, and it is time for China to prepare for a complete decoupling”

No more illusions exist in China.  The "barbarians" will NOT accept coexistence and win-win situations with the rest of the world.

Full article is found HERE

"The peace dividend is over, it's time for China to have to prepare for a full decoupling"

School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Shanghai International Studies University

[Introduction] Since the change between China and the United States in 2018, the world situation has been in turmoil, and various "decoupling theories" at home and abroad have become popular. Especially since the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the international situation has shown a clear camp-like pattern, and the United States has targeted China from all aspects of its domestic and foreign affairs. Although many people believe that globalization is irreversible and do not believe that there will be a day of complete decoupling, if there is a complete decoupling in the future, how should we deal with it?

This article argues that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a symbolic event in the end of the globalization tide led by the United States, which means that China no longer has the peaceful external development environment of the past 40 years. The author points out that the current seemingly "rule-based order" is actually a center-periphery hierarchical international order dominated by Western countries. Because of their strong ability to manage and control capital, China and Russia have become the last two obstacles for the United States to further control the global periphery, and it is inevitable that they will be fully suppressed by the West. Therefore, China must re-examine the past tradition of multilateralism, adjust the spatial priority of foreign exchanges, and reshape a new international environment that is conducive to China's national security and long-term development.

The author believes that in the future, China will promote the construction of a new global system, that is, a "three-ring" international system to ensure China's national security and development : the first ring is East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East around China. Form a system of close industrial division of labor, and obtain stable energy supply and reliable security barriers through them; the second ring is the developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with which China exchanges raw materials and industrial products, and assists their development; the third ring is Expand to traditional industrialized countries dominated by Europe and the United States. Among them, the "first ring" is the key to China's construction of the "new third ring" international system. In recent decades, developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America have formed a new global system. The solid foundations of developing countries in terms of economic volume, trade exchanges, and economic cooperation are not what they used to be. To further enhance economic and political autonomy, we must get rid of financial and monetary dependence on Western countries. Therefore, to build the "new three-ring" international system, a higher level and wider range of financial and monetary cooperation should be developed among developing countries

This article was originally published in the 3rd issue of "Cultural Landscape" in 2022 (June issue), with the original title "Constructing the "New Three Rings": Facing the Possible China's Choice for Comprehensive Decoupling" , which only represents the author's point of view for everyone to think about.

Building the "New Three Rings": China's Choice in the Face of a Possible Comprehensive Decoupling

Russia's "special military operation" against Ukraine, and the ensuing full-scale confrontation between Western countries and Russia, is a landmark event in the end of the globalization tide since the 1980s. The United States has hijacked its allies to impose deadly sanctions on Russia, and coerced other countries in the world to choose sides between Western countries and Russia. The world is reappearing the scene of life-and-death battles a hundred years ago, and it also brings huge challenges to China. The "end of globalization" makes China no longer have the external development environment of the past 40 years to use. The United States promotes the process of rebuilding the international system dominated by it and "decoupling" from China and Russia, which is very likely to be further strengthened in the future. The characteristics of the times in today's world have undergone a paradigm change. Faced with the possibility of passive and comprehensive decoupling, China needs to actively adjust its foreign strategic arrangements and make a new choice on the priority of state exchanges, so as to shape a new type of international system that is conducive to hedging the negative impact of Western countries' decoupling from China.

▍The unspoken rule of the international order is the center-periphery power structure

In the 30 years since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia has moved from actively moving toward the United States and Western countries at first, to gradually alienating them, and even now fighting fiercely, highlighting the political limits of globalization. Contrary to people's romantic imagination of globalization, the latest round of globalization was originally an investment of American hegemony, partially serving the purpose of dismantling the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, which made it impossible to expand indefinitely. From the perspective of the relationship between the leading countries and following countries of globalization, or the developed countries and developing countries, there is a limit of equality in international politics: when globalization backfires on the initiators and threatens their power advantages, the global The transformation will inevitably be "reversed", and the operating path will be redesigned. The process of globalization in recent decades and America's pursuit of power advantage are two sides of the same coin. The two are mutually conditional and mutually advanced. Russia's "special military operation" against Ukraine is the result of this round of globalization that has completely exposed its power and brought an end to the globalization led by the United States

The eastward expansion of NATO is the main reason for Russia to take the initiative. This appears to be a security issue, but in fact it is also an economic issue in the process of globalization. Peripheralizing the Soviet Union in the global system is the goal of the globalization process initiated by the United States. Russia’s desire to use globalization to achieve national rejuvenation and become a central country is obviously contrary to the logic of its occurrence and evolution. Global capital, especially financial capital's interest in Russia, is more concentrated in energy, food and minerals, which are areas where financial capital can make huge profits. However, since Putin came to power, Russia has strengthened its control over key industries related to national security and basic people's livelihood, and is committed to building the Eurasian Economic Union and creating an economic development space suitable for itself, which is not welcome by external capital. The eastward expansion of NATO is the embodiment of capital’s influence on politics to achieve market expansion. It constantly squeezes Russia’s development space and aggravates Russia’s externalization. If no effective response is made, Russia will be further fixed in the position of primary product provider and lose its position as a primary product provider. The ability to participate in great power politics, and even a domestic crisis. This is what the Russian elite does not want to see.

The eastward expansion of NATO and the current frenzied sanctions against Russia by Western countries have revealed the power structure of the contemporary world. After the end of World War II, the European colonial system gradually disintegrated. Since the second half of the 20th century, the clear rules of the international order have been centered on the United Nations and international law, and embody the principle of sovereign equality of states. However, the center-periphery hierarchical international order under the European colonial system has not really disappeared, but has continued to this day as an unspoken rule and an implicit order, but the absolute hierarchical power relations characterized by direct drive in the past no longer exist. It is based on the "common but differentiated" international order, that is, all countries have equal sovereignty on the surface, but there are still power differences in actual operation. "Rule-based order" is the main expression of this order, all countries need to abide by the same rules, but the real connotation of this rule is not centered on the United Nations and international law, but centered on Western countries.

U.S. hegemony since the postwar period and the G7 established after the 1970s are the main manifestations of the contemporary version of the global center-periphery order. The annual meeting of the G7 discusses more than just seven countries. The matter is also the matter of the whole world, and they are negotiated and then pushed to be transformed into global rules. The "rule-based order" is actually "the rule-based order established by Western countries", and who is the rule maker is the key. In the global division of labor system, rule-making, money supply and industrial product production are the affairs of a few countries in the center. If other countries want to join in, they may disintegrate the dominant position of a few countries. This is the mastery of the rules. Countries that have the right to formulate and dominate the currency and maintain a technological advantage with intellectual property do not want to see it. China's unexpected economic growth in recent decades has broken the center-periphery international order since the postwar period, threatening the unspoken rules centered on Western countries. In recent years, the United States has defined China as a major "strategic competitor" "The main reason is that China's development has touched the cheese of the United States and other Western countries. The latter never imagined that China can also "enter the center of the world stage", even now It's actually just "getting closer".

Whether it is the eastward expansion of NATO or the US's selection of China as a key target of suppression, it all reflects that the US and Western countries want to maintain and strengthen their own power advantages. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the Ukrainian sanctions against Russia are further highlighted by the fact that most countries in the world are in the "rural areas" in the periphery, a few countries are in the "cities" in the center, and the United States is the "Downtown", "city" in the global "urban center" does not want to see "rural" become "urban" like them. The hindrance of China and Russia to the global "city center" lies not only in their strong ability to control capital, making them the last two largest undisciplined places of capitalist globalization; much greater national power, and become an obstacle for the "urban center" to gain further control over the "rural" fringes of the world. In the process of this round of globalization, China, with its strong economic growth and comprehensive national strength, has shown a trend of moving from "rural" to "urban". In recent years, it has become the leader of "de-globalization", which has exposed the "common" limits of the post-war international order. China has also become a member of the "city" that the heartland countries cannot tolerate.

▍The basic plate of China's multilateral cooperation lies in non-Western countries

In "An Analysis of All Classes in Chinese Society", the first chapter of "Selected Works of Mao Zedong", the opening question asks: "Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This question is the primary question of the revolution." In the past few years, the reform and opening up, and the proposal to build a community with a shared future for mankind in recent years, no longer deliberately emphasize the distinction between enemies and friends in international exchanges, but hope to promote "the beauty of the United States and the beauty of the world" in the "beauty of each, and the beauty of the beautiful". ". But whether the world can achieve "Great Harmony" is not determined by the wishes of the Chinese family. With the US-led Western countries showing an all-round confrontation with Russia and China, the characteristics of the contemporary world can no longer be regarded as "peace and development" mechanically, but "competition" and even "war" need to be seriously considered ——Even if the war can be ruled out, it is impossible to achieve better development in the globalization system dominated by Western countries as always. China has to rethink the "primary question" in its foreign exchanges: who are the possible partners of China at present and in the future, and who are the partners that China cannot hold?

Birds of a feather flock together. The same is true of countries. Countries with similar experiences, situations and demands are more likely to form long-term cooperative relationships. In the contemporary discourse system of international relations, Western countries vs non-Western countries, developed countries vs developing countries, northern countries vs southern countries are common distinctions between countries. Developed countries and northern countries are mostly Western countries, while southern countries and developing countries are mostly Western countries. The countries are all non-Western countries. Unlike the distinction between developed countries and developing countries, and northern countries and southern countries, which is biased toward the economic level, the distinction between Western countries and non-Western countries also points to the political and cultural level, which implies global power relations. Since the 19th century, under the influence of three key elements, industrialization, rational state building and "progressive ideology", the world has undergone a "Global Transformation" : a "centerless and pluralistic world" that used to be in a discrete state. , turned to a highly interconnected and hierarchical "center-periphery" global international system, with the West at the center of this order. In the revolutionary era from the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th century, the frequently discussed "imperialism" was the description and characterization of this order relationship. Imperialism and globalization in the middle and late 19th century to the early 20th century are two sides of the same body. Imperialism comes with globalization, while globalization strengthens imperialism. Barrel array", trying to escape from it is not easy. Western countries used to be the center of the global system and the birthplace of imperialism. The colonial order in the modern world and the hegemony of the United States since the mid-to-late 20th century have all come from this; at the same time, many revolutions in modern times, including the 20 What the anti-colonial movement in the mid-to-late century was trying to break was this center-periphery power structure of inequality and injustice.

In the center-periphery global power structure, it is impossible for the countries in the heartland to truly help the revolution of the countries in the peripheral regions, nor would they welcome the countries in the peripheral regions to join the countries in the central region in an equal manner. The fate of being deprived can only rely on the grouping of countries in the peripheral areas to keep warm, and in occasional situations, the gaps between the countries in the central area must be used to strive for cooperation with the latter in the struggle. During the Chinese revolution in the first half of the 20th century and the consolidation of the regime in the second half of the 20th century, the main external forces that China relied on came from the periphery of the global system. The Communist International network, which the Communist Party of China once participated in, was an alliance between the non-regime forces of the colonized and oppressed nations at that time; during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, China took the opportunity of participating in the World Anti-Fascist War to continue the "anti-imperialist" demands of the previous Chinese revolution. , to further promote the abolition of the various unequal rights imposed on China by imperialist countries; after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, China attached great importance to cooperation with "Third World" countries, and supported anti-colonial movements and anti-colonial movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The country building after independence, especially the active participation in the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the proposal of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, has been well echoed by the Asian, African and Latin American countries, and has also become an important node in the virtuous circle of relations between China and the Asian, African and Latin American countries. With the support of the latter, China returned to the United Nations in 1971 and became a permanent member of the Security Council.

The mutual solidarity and assistance between China and the Asian, African and Latin American countries in resisting colonial rule and in national construction has laid a key feature of China's multilateralism since modern times, that is, attaching great importance to cooperation with non-Western developing countries and building a common resistance against central countries. Defend national independence and development and progress in the unequal and unjust international order. In its all-round diplomacy based on non-Western developing countries, China does not exclude exchanges and even the development of friendly and cooperative relations with Western developed countries and other major powers. However, it should also be noted that in the past, China's exchanges and cooperation with countries in the heartland have always had two preconditions: First, from the perspective of China, China insists on developing its foreign relations on the basis of independence, equality and mutual benefit, and opposes the development of foreign relations in international relations. Power hierarchy; second, from the perspective of countries in the center, they always have a ceiling in cooperation with China, that is, they cannot shake the global power structure centered on Western countries. When either of these two premises changes, it will be difficult for China, as a developing country, to continue to develop in-depth cooperative relations, especially political cooperative relations, with Western countries.

▍Adjusting the spatial priority of China's foreign exchanges

In the past 40 years, China has abandoned ideological differences and avoided differences in national systems, and has been committed to cooperation with all countries, gradually forming a foreign exchange in which "big powers are the key, neighboring countries are the primary, developing countries are the foundation, and multilateralism is an important stage". pattern. But this pattern has encountered many obstacles at the time of the "end of globalization". The "decoupling" initiated by the United States coercing other Western countries with China in terms of economy, technology, knowledge, and personnel exchanges is unlikely to be withdrawn due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. On the contrary, it may intensify.

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, it has experienced many changes in the direction of its diplomacy, from the "one-sidedness" at the time of the founding of the People's Republic of China, to the division of "one line, one large area" and "three worlds" in the 1970s, to the division of "three worlds" after 1978. Turning to reform and opening up, focusing on development and cooperation with Western countries, all responded to the situation at that time. At the time of the current "big changes unseen in a century", Western countries have shown a stronger and stronger intention to suppress potential challengers. Especially after the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, groups of Western countries have assembled to suppress non-Western countries in all aspects. The situation is fully exposed and will become the structural presence of international relations for a long time to come. China cannot but be highly vigilant that Western countries' all-encompassing sanctions and suppression measures against Russia will be imitated on China in the future. Therefore, it is urgent to re-examine China's past tradition of multilateralism, adjust the spatial pattern of foreign exchanges, and strengthen cooperation with non-Western developing countries, so as to create a new international environment conducive to safeguarding China's national security and long-term development.

In 1974, Mao Zedong proposed the division of "three worlds", and made a distinction and analysis of the three types of countries in the world at that time and the ways China could interact with them. It is also a member of the "Third World" countries. The Chinese government and people firmly support the just struggle of all oppressed people and nations. The "Three Worlds" theory inherits the previous experience of China's foreign exchanges and ranks the spatial priority of China's foreign exchanges at that time. It is also an important ideological guide for China's participation in South-South cooperation in the past. The spatial priority still has strong instructive significance. Compared with the fact that China has attached more importance to cooperation with Western countries since the reform and opening up, China will put the promotion of South-South cooperation in a prominent position in the future. Whether it is seeking diplomatic breakthrough, long-term development or national rejuvenation, for a long time to come, China's foreign strategic arrangements will focus on promoting the construction of a new global system based on Asia and its surrounding regions. The final result is to form a "three-ring" international system to ensure China's national security and development: the first ring is East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East around China. East Asia connects the world's financial resources, and China and countries in this region have formed close industries. The division of labor system, Central Asia and the Middle East connect the world's resources, China must rely on the countries in this region to obtain stable energy supply and reliable security barriers; the second link is the vast developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with which China supplies raw materials and industrial products. China's foreign aid should also be mainly aimed at these countries; the third ring extends to traditional industrialized countries dominated by Europe and the United States, with which China exchanges industrial products, technologies and knowledge. Based on this "three-ring" structure, we should arrange the priorities and front and back of external exchanges, and re-plan the direction and content of external exchanges.
The first and the 。。。。。Read more…
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Home Natural Gas Price DOUBLED in last 6 months

As regular readers to this web site know, I inherited my mother’s house in northeastern, rural, Pennsylvania when she died last November.   I’ve been spending time up here doing clean-up and maintenance work because this house can be a fall-back (Bug-Out) location if needed due to economic collapse, social upheaval, or war.

There is no Municipal water supply, or sewer, or natural gas supply up here; everyone has to take care of such things on their own.

As such, the house has Well water, a Septic system and tanks to hold natural gas/propane for heating and cooking.

The local gas supply company knows how large the tanks are at each customer home.  Their computers monitor “Degree Days” which are days where the temperature outside is such that a typical family would be using a furnace, and they automatically send a delivery truck, similar to the generic one shown above, to come refill the tanks as the Degree Days warrant.  Of course, you can call for a delivery if you feel you need one, but they track all this stuff pretty good, and we have yet to ever run out of gas.

Based on actual, annual, gas use, the company projects the use for each coming year, projects the future cost of gas,  and sets up a budget plan for each customer so they pay the same amount each month, and at the end of the year, it all pretty much averages out to a zero balance.  Sometime you owe a little, other times they owe you.

The budget for this house for the past few years, based upon ACTUAL usage was $180 a month.

I got a letter from the gas company yesterday.  Based on this house’s actual use, and more importantly, the projected future price of gas, this year’s budget jumped to $345. a month! ! !

Folks, that’s almost DOUBLE . . .  and get this: “Due to the volatile nature of the natural gas markets, this price may DOUBLE AGAIN OR MORE ! ! ! ! “

Joe Biden and Democrats did this.   Just a reminder.

Germany to change constitution to enable $110 billion defense fund

Only 70+ years after committed war crimes, Germany is back… Should the world worry?
BERLIN, May 29 (Reuters) - Germany has agreed to change its constitution to allow for a credit-based special defense fund of 100 billion euros ($107.35 billion) proposed after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the German finance ministry announced on Sunday.  read more 
Germany's centre-right opposition and ruling coalition with centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) said they reached the required two-thirds majority to exempt the defense fund from a constitutional debt brake.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the negotiations were led by FDP leader Christian Lindner, SPD's Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht, Greens leader Annalena Baerbock and the opposition's vice whip Mathias Middelberg.

The money is to be used over several years to increase Germany's regular defense budget of around 50 billion euros and enable the country to meet the NATO target of spending 2% of its economic output on defense each year.

Article HERE

Japan has yet to change constitution but their military already on the way back…
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HISTORIC: NYC Cancer Treatment Results in “Complete Remission” of Colon Cancer

A small NYC-led cancer trial has achieved a result reportedly never before seen – the total remission of cancer in all of its patients.

To be sure, the trial — led by doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering and backed by drug maker GlaxoSmithKline — has only completed treatment of 12 patients, with a specific cancer in its early stages and with a rare mutation as well.

But the results, reported Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine and the New York Times, were still striking enough to prompt multiple physicians to tell the paper they were believed to be unprecedented.

One cancer specialist told the Times it was an “unheard-of” result.

According to the NEJM paper and the Times report, all 12 patients had rectal cancer that had not spread beyond the local area, and their tumors all exhibited a mutation affecting the ability of cells to repair damage to DNA.

After being treated with the drug, dostarlimab, all 12 are now in complete remission, with no surgery or chemotherapy, no severe side effects — and no trace of cancer whatsoever anywhere in their body.

Doctors quoted by the Times said that while the results were promising, they would need to be replicated and expanded – nor was it clear if the medication in question would be useful beyond this specific application.

Japanese Artist’s Maddeningly Realistic Food Illustrations Have Our Mouths Watering

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This Japanese artist says that he gets a lot of joy from hearing that his work looks tasty, and it’s a compliment he receives often. Yoshinobu Saito worked previously as a character designer, but recently it was his artistic forays into the world of gastronomy which have gained him attention online.

And it’s easy to see why. His work is almost maddeningly realistic. In particular, he seems to specialise in the tantalising glisten that many delicious foods have, the one that relentlessly and unforgivingly triggers our hunger pangs.

11 4w7
11 4w7

1 w85
1 w85

2 w82
2 w82

3 8w2
3 8w2

4 78w
4 78w

6 w67
6 w67

Tiananmen Square: The Failure of an American-instigated 1989 Color Revolution

Article HERE

By Larry Romanoff

There are few places in China that seem more burned into the consciousness of typical Westerners than Tiananmen Square, and few events more commonly mentioned than the student protests of 1989. But the stories are wrong on several levels. It was never reported in the Western media that there were two separate events that occurred in Beijing on June 4, 1989. One was a student protest that culminated in a sit-in in Tiananmen Square by several thousand university students, which had lasted for several weeks and finally terminated on June 4. The other was a one-day worker strike that occurred (perhaps not by chance) also on June 4, when a group of workers unhappy with their lot in life, organised their own protest independently of the students, and in a different place. For reasons that will become apparent, the workers’ protest is the necessary focus for understanding the events of that date, so I will begin there.

The Workers’ Revolt

A group of workers gathered, and barricaded several streets in Muxidi, an area in Beijing five or six kilometers from Tiananmen Square, the barricades attended by several hundred mostly adult workers, with an undetermined few young people. However, there was a third quite large group present that to my knowledge has never been clearly identified, though it is obvious from the photos they were not workers and certainly not young students. (1) Thugs or anarchists might be an appropriate adjective, but the facts seem to support the conclusion (and my own personal judgment) that they were mercenaries. (2)

The government sent in busloads of soldiers, accompanied by a few APCs to clear the barricades and re-open the streets to traffic. (3) The violence began when the third group attacked the young men attempting to clear the barricades. They were well-prepared, armed with at least hundreds and perhaps thousands of gasoline bombs, and immediately torched dozens of buses and the few APCs – with the soldiers still inside. Many soldiers in both types of vehicles escaped, but many others did not, and many burned to death. There are countless photos of dead soldiers burned to a crisp, some hung by the thugs from lampposts, others lying in the street or on stairs or sidewalks where they died, others hanging out of bus windows or the APCs, having only partially escaped before being overcome by the flames. There are documented reports and photos showing that the group of thugs managed to get control of one APC, and drove it through the streets while firing the machine guns on the turret. (4) It was only then that the government sent in armed soldiers and military equipment.

Government reports and independent media personnel generally claim a total of 250 to 300 civilian deaths before the violence subsided, but a similar number of soldiers had already been killed. When police or military are attacked in this way, they will surely use force to defend themselves and cannot be faulted for that. If you or I were the military commander on the scene, watching our men being attacked and burned to death, we would have done the same. From everything I know, I can find no fault here.

Here is an eyewitness report from someone who was there, an excerpt from the book ‘Tiananmen Moon’: (5)

“There was a new element I hadn’t noticed much of before, young punks decidedly less than student-like in appearance. In the place of headbands and signed shirts with university pins they wore cheap, ill-fitting polyester clothes and loose windbreakers. Under our lights, their eyes gleaming with mischief, they brazenly revealed hidden Molotov cocktails. Who were these punks in shorts and sandals, carrying petrol bombs? Gasoline is tightly rationed, so they could not have come up with these things spontaneously. Who taught them to make bottle bombs and for whom were the incendiary devices intended?

Someone shouted that another APC was heading our way. My pace quickened as I approached the stalled vehicle, infected by the toxic glee of the mob, but then I caught myself. Why was I rushing towards trouble? Because everyone else was? I slowed down to a trot in the wake of a thundering herd of one mass mind. Breaking with the pack, I stopped running. Someone tossed a Molotov cocktail, setting the APC on fire. Flames spread quickly over the top of the vehicle and spilled onto the pavement. I thought, there’s somebody still inside of that, it’s not just a machine! There must be people inside.

Someone protectively pulled me away to join a handful of head-banded students who sought to exert some control. Expending what little moral capital his hunger strike signature saturated shirt still exerted, he spoke up for the soldier. “Let the man out,” he cried. “Help the soldier, help him get out!” The agitated congregation was in no mood for mercy. Angry, blood-curdling voices ricocheted around us. “Kill the mother fucker!” one said. Then another voice, even more chilling than the first screamed, “He is not human, he is a thing.” “Kill it, kill it!” shouted bystanders, bloody enthusiasm now whipped up to a high pitch. “Stop! Don’t hurt him!” Meng pleaded, leaving me behind as he tried to reason with the vigilantes. “Stop, he is just a soldier!” “He is not human, kill him, kill him!” said a voice. “Get back, get back!” someone screamed at the top of his lungs. “Leave him alone, the soldiers are not our enemy!” After the limp bodies of the soldiers were put into an ambulance, the thugs attacked the ambulance, almost ripping off the rear doors in an attempt to remove the burned soldier and finish him off. After that, charred bodies of soldiers were hung from a lamp post, and a large amount of ammunition was taken from the APC.” (6)

From a Government Report on the Worker’s Riot:

“Rioters blocked military and other vehicles before they smashed and burned them. They also seized guns, ammunition and transceivers. Several rioters seized an armored car and fired its guns as they drove it along the street. Rioters also assaulted civilian installations and public buildings. Several rioters even drove a public bus loaded with gasoline drums towards the Tiananmen gatetower in an attempt to set fire to it. When a military vehicle suddenly broke down on Chang’An Avenue, rioters surrounded it and crushed the driver with bricks. The rioters savagely beat and killed many soldiers and officers. At Chongwenmen, a soldier was thrown down from the flyover and burned alive. At Fuchengmen, a soldier’s body was hung upside down on the overpass balustrade after he had been killed. Near a cinema, an officer was beaten to death, and his body strung up on a burning bus.

Over 1,280 vehicles were burned or damaged in the rebellion, including over 1,000 military trucks, more than 60 armored cars, over 30 police cars, over 120 public buses and trolley buses and over 70 motor vehicles of other kinds. The martial law troops, having suffered heavy casualties before being forced to fire into the air to clear the way forward. During the counter-attack, some rioters were killed, some onlookers were hit by stray bullets and some wounded or killed by armed ruffians. According to reliable statistics, more than 3,000 civilians were wounded and over 200, including 36 college students, were killed. As well, more than 6,000 law officers and soldiers were injured and scores of them killed.” (Cables from the US Embassy in Beijing confirmed the basics of this report as well as the casualty estimates). (4)

Though conclusive direct evidence is still thin, it appears a certainty the revolt had considerable outside help. In addition to the curious timing, there is too much evidence of advance preparation for violence and supply of the weaponry used. Gasoline was tightly rationed at the time, and unavailable in the volume required for this event. Black hands arranged the supply lines and provided instructions for the manufacture and use of the gasoline bombs which were almost unheard of in China before that time.

There are also too many signs of external incitement in the still-unidentified third group, whose violent actions in no way represented the sentiment of the attending public. The enormity of violence unleashed at Muxidi requires considerable prior emotional programming and could not possibly have originated spontaneously from a simple workers’ strike, almost a guarantee of external interference. Disaffected citizens in any country may parade and protest from real or imagined grievances, but burning young soldiers to death and stringing their charred bodies from lampposts, are not the acts of naive students wanting “democracy” or of workers protesting an inadequate social contract. (7) They are almost always the result of substantial programmed incitement from behind the scenes, usually directed to regime change.

The Student Protest

Briefly, the students congregated in the Square and waited for an opportunity to present various petitions dealing with social policy, perceived corruption, idealism, in fact the same things that we as students all had on our list of changes we wanted to make in the world. Since the government did not immediately respond, the students camped in the square and waited. Government officials held talks with the students for several weeks, and finally set a June 4 deadline for evacuation of the Square. Soldiers were sent to the Square on the day prior, but they were unarmed and carried only billy sticks. By all reports, there was no animosity between the students and the soldiers. Neither had a philosophical dispute with the other, nor did they see each other as enemies. In fact, photos and reports show the students protecting the soldiers from angry bystanders.

Discussions were held between the students and the soldiers at repeated times during the evening and throughout the night. Almost all of the students were persuaded to leave the Square during the evening, and the small remainder left the following morning. Tanks and bulldozers did enter the Square the following morning, flattening all the tents and rubbish that had piled up during the previous three weeks, pushing the garbage into huge piles and setting them afire. This was the apparent origin of claims that “thousands of students” were crushed by tanks streaming through the Square, but this was just the clean-up crew and the students were long gone when the bulldozers and heavy machinery arrived. There is overwhelming documented evidence from a multitude of reputable sources (8-15) that no violence occurred in the Square, that no students were killed, and that there never was any “Tiananmen Square Massacre”. Gunfire was apparently heard in the distance, but the few reports of gunfire from within the Square itself were later quickly discredited and, as mentioned above, the soldiers in the Square were not armed. (16)

VIDEO

Clearance of the Tiananmen Square on June 4 1989 – EN from Roberto Petitpas on Vimeo.

Subtitled in CH, DE, EN, FI, FR, HZ, NL, PT, RO, SI, SP, RU

The Ever-Present Black Hand

It seems plausible that the student movement in China during the late 1980s may, at its origin, have generated spontaneously, but there is no shortage of evidence that the entire movement was quickly hijacked by agencies of the US government long before the students gathered at Tiananmen Square. It has taken some time to open locked doors and ferret out details, but it is no longer in dispute that the leaders of China’s student movement were trained in Hong Kong and Guangdong by Col. Robert Helvey, an officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon, who spent 30 years instigating revolutions throughout Asia on behalf of the military and the CIA. (17)

There is little reason to question the assertion that a major part of US foreign policy then, as today, lay in attempts to destabilise China and perhaps instigate a massive revolution that would open the door to US influence and control. It is increasingly clear today that the student movement in 1989 was a major part of that strategy, orchestrated by the US State Department with the full approval of then President George Bush. (18)

I live in China and was for many years the editor of a widely-read newsletter that gave me trusted access to about 2,500 middle and high-level corporate executives who were university students in China during the period in question, many of whom were involved in the student movement, and more than a few of whom were at Tiananmen Square. I’ve spoken to many of them at length about the student movement and the events of the time. In addition to confirming my observations and conclusions, their comments and testimony strongly suggest that the very idea of a mass confrontation with the government, and the selection of Tiananmen Square as the venue, did not originate with them but were orchestrated ”from somewhere outside”.

It is necessary to understand that the student movement in China in 1989 was categorically not a “pro-democracy movement”. At its origin the student protest was primarily pragmatic civics, and secondly Chinese cultural. The students visioned themselves intellectual protesters, not political activists, with no thought of their government replicating the political structure of the West. From my discussions with many former students, the references to ‘democracy’ were imposed upon them by their CIA handlers as the best method of realising their practical and cultural ends. And these cultural ends were not necessarily very deep. Wu’er Kaixi, one of the student leaders, responded to questions about his participation by saying (in different words) “Because we want to wear Western brands and take our girlfriends to bars like the Americans do.”

Many of the students with whom I spoke, particularly those who were actually present at the Square, have told me of the supplies provided for them by various US government sources. They especially mentioned the countless hundreds of Coleman camp stoves – which at the time were far too expensive for students in China to acquire, and many commented on the well-established supply lines of these and other items. Adding to the student supplies were manuals, instructions, training, strategy and tactics, and the patiently inflammatory rhetoric of the VOA broadcasts from Hong Kong. It is not possible to sensibly challenge the assertion that the puppet-masters were American.

According to a government report, many Americans were active in stage-managing the student leaders, in violation of the martial law decrees operative in parts of Beijing at the time. John Pomfret, now of the Washington Post, was an AP correspondent in Beijing, and an important information conduit for the ringleaders, and Alan Pessin, a VOA correspondent in Beijing at the time, violated the restrictions by his illegal VOA news coverage, and repeatedly dispatched distorted reports, spreading false rumors and encouraging both rebellion and violence among the students. (19)

What Really Happened in Tiananmen Square 25 Years Ago

Most university students of that day will tell you of the influence of the VOA and the picture it painted of “freedom and democracy”. They tell of listening to the VOA in their dorms late into the night, building in their imaginations a happy world of freedom and light. The Voice of America:

“The world’s most trusted source for news and information from the United States and around the world.”

They also confirm that the VOA was broadcasting to the students 24 hours a day from their Hong Kong station during the weeks of the sit-in at Tiananmen Square, offering provocative encouragement and giving advice on strategy and tactics.

One of the original participants in the student sit-in wrote this:

“We settled down and continued with our study. We dated, found our loved ones, and many sought to go abroad. By the time we graduated there was almost no discussion about the student movement and we no longer listened to the VOA. One thing I have been kept thinking was the role of the VOA. Many students were the fans of the radio station before, during and shortly after the student movement. Even when we were on the square many students were listening to their programs as if only they could tell us what was going on. I remember at one stage . . . I realized how stupid I was . . .”

Another student made these comments:

“But it was true that the 1989 student movement was being manipulated by someone, wasn’t it? The students had nothing but emotions and superficial knowledge of politics. We started only demanding the cleaning up of corruption by officials, yet the slogans were somehow led through a transformation into ones “demanding democracy”.

There is a huge difference in political implication between these two classes of demands. So what was democracy? What kind of democracy was practiced in the west? What kind of democracy would befit China? Frankly, I (we) didn’t have clue. In other words, I didn’t know what I really wanted. I simply had this … resulting impulse to go onto the street and shout slogans. It was as if I participated just to participate and I was moved by the simple fact of experiencing a students movement. And then things got out of control. But because the student leaders refused to change stance, the students wouldn’t back off. So the whole thing dragged on. Yet a miracle happened, those “leaders” somehow managed to escape unharmed. For many years since 1989, I had been reluctant to accept that I and the other students were actually so stupid and naive to be truly manipulated by others behind the scene.”

The perception in the West, and also in China, has always been that the student congregation in Tiananmen Square was spontaneous, idealistic and, above all, peaceful. It may at its origin have been idealistic, but it was in no way spontaneous and, by May and June, the underlying peacefulness was rapidly coming to an end. In 1995, two American filmmakers at the Longbow Group, Dr. Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon, released a now-famous documentary on Tiananmen Square titled “The Gate of Heavenly Peace”. (20) Chai Ling, the Tiananmen students’ self-proclaimed “Supreme Commander”, for years pursued lawsuits against the film company (21), primarily because the documentary included incriminating video dated May 28, 1989, of her in an interview with American journalist Philip Cunningham:

“The students kept asking, ‘What should we do next? What can we accomplish?’ I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people (i.e. the students: Ed.). Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain this to my fellow students? I can’t say all this to my fellow students. I can’t tell them straight out that we must use our blood and our lives to call on the people to rise up. Of course, the students will be willing. But they are still such young children! And what is truly sad is that some students, and famous well-connected people, are working hard to help the government, to prevent it from taking such measures. For the sake of their selfish interests and their private dealings they are trying to cause our movement to collapse and get us out of the Square before the government becomes so desperate that it takes action.”

If this isn’t clear, Chai Ling is openly stating her intention to provoke the government to a violent military solution, filling Tiananmen Square with the blood of the students – for the express purpose of “uniting the people” to incite a widespread political revolution. She then laments that (1) she cannot reveal to the students that their lives are meant to be sacrificed for this cause, and (2) “what is truly sad” is that some people, “for the sake of their selfish interests” are seeking to avoid bloodshed by preventing the government from resorting to violent measures, and seeking to disband the student protests before they themselves turn violent.

Cunningham then asked, “Are you going to stay in the Square yourself?” “No, I won’t.” “Why?” Chai replied, “Because my situation is different. I want to live. . . . I believe that others have to continue the work I have started. A democracy movement can’t succeed with only one person!” And finally, “I might as well say it – you, the Chinese, you are not worth my struggle! You are not worth my sacrifice!”

In the video there is a damning reference to American cold-bloodedness in directing the student protests, a literal confession by Chai Ling that, after the students had already voted to end their protest and leave the Square, her Hong Kong handlers still pushed her and the students to remain in the square and continue to agitate until they provoked their own bloodshed, encouraging them to sacrifice their lives as the only way to attract the world attention and sympathy which had somehow now become crucial to their cause. Transcripts and video of her entire interview along with reader comments are available online. (22)

The American plan was to incite the students to not only irritate but eventually enrage the Chinese government sufficiently to provoke a violent crackdown against the students, with the expectation this would in turn provoke the general population into a ‘color revolution’ resulting in the overthrow of the government and the collapse of China. In accord with this plan, the students were pushed to begin demanding “democracy”, quickly followed by insistent and intractable demands that the government step down. As part of the process, the students were given details on the construction of a huge papier-mâché “goddess of democracy” statue in the Square. In an intelligence summary prepared for then US Secretary of State James A. Baker dated June 2, 1989, the hope was noted that the statue would “anger top leaders and prompt a response”, stating that the students (or, factually more likely, the US government) hoped the erection of the statue would provoke “an overreaction by authorities (and) breathe new life into their flagging movement.” (23) In all cases in all countries, students and young people are co-opted into a US attempt at regime change. Westerners may not easily appreciate that Beijing in 1989 was not different in any material aspect.

After the Government declared martial law, Chai Ling’s American puppet-masters rapidly escalated their offensive by having her distribute leaflets inciting armed rebellion against the Government, calling upon the students and the general public to “organize armed forces and oppose the Communist Party and its government”, going so far as to actually make a list of names of government officials they planned to kill, encouraging the students to obtain firearms for the purpose. She claimed they would never yield and “would fight to the finish” with the government, scheming until past the end to provoke a bloody incident in Tiananmen Square.

China was spared a national catastrophe primarily by the patient and non-threatening stance of the government which served to dampen the inflammatory rhetoric emerging from the VOA and their handlers in Beijing and the urging toward bloodshed by their stage managers in Hong Kong. The result was that when the deadline approached for the evacuation of the Square, the students abandoned their “Supreme Commander” and agreed to leave peacefully, meaning that the Americans simply ran out of time. My feeling is that China was protected by Providence, because the specter of violence and bloodshed may have been very near indeed. (24)

Intricate plans had been made in advance to spirit the student leaders out of China when the hoped-for bloodshed began. Operation Yellowbird (25)was a Hong Kong-based CIA scheme to help the leaders of the student protests and of the violence at Muxidi to escape arrest under the diplomatic protection of the American Embassy, by offering political sanctuary, by the advance issue of US passports, and by arranging their escape from China. The CIA was central in this, but the UK MI6 and the French intelligence agencies were also involved. When the protests failed and the students dispersed, the primary leaders fled first to Hong Kong, then to the US. (26) Some of the leaders of the violence in Muxidi were helped to flee, while others where sheltered in the American Embassy in Beijing, the Americans refusing to surrender them to the Chinese authorities. (27)

As well, for their efforts to destroy their own country, these student leaders were handsomely rewarded by the Americans with prestigious university degrees, good jobs, and CIA salaries for continuing to incite political instability in China. Chai Ling was given an honorary degree in political science from Princeton university and a job with the management consultancy of Bain & Co., as well as being the salaried head of an NGO especially created for her and tasked with condemning China’s then one-child policy. Wu’er Kaixi, who was actually a troublesome and unstable Uigur named Uerkesh Daolet, was rewarded with a free pass to Harvard university. Liu Xiaobo remained in China on a CIA stipend of $30,000 per year, tasked with irritating the Chinese government under direction from the US State Department.

The Path Forward

The Americans succeeded, perhaps beyond their wildest expectations, with the inflamed violence in Muxidi, but failed miserably in their main effort which was the provocation of bloodshed in Tiananmen Square, which offered the possible prize of a revolution and the overthrow of the government.

The most immediate problem faced by the US State Department was that their success in Muxidi was not a particularly useful victory from a political standpoint since it had no long-term propaganda value. Nobody in the West, especially when seeing photos of the carnage produced, would have much sympathy for a workers’ revolt in a far-away country, and it would have ceased being news within a day or two. What the Americans wanted, and badly needed, the prize they were hoping for, was photos of dead student bodies and student blood in thestreets since these infallibly draw universal condemnation. But, with the peaceful resolution in Tiananmen Square, these didn’t exist, so they gathered the photos of the carnage and dead bodies from Muxidi and presented those to the world as evidence of a student massacre in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese government, a totally fabricated story.

By the time the students voted to evacuate the Square and even before the violence in Muxidi had subsided, plans were already well in place for more than the evacuation of the leaders. Without exception, the Western media in all countries immediately published identical claims and photos, consistently omitting all the contradictory evidence. Every photographer who took photos at Muxidi knew where he took them, and he and the media editors knew full well those photos were not taken in Tiananmen Square. It is not possible that more than 200 newspaper editors and more than 100 TV station news managers in more than 30 countries mis-captioned the same photos in the same way by carelessness or accident. This is why the Western media suppressed entirely the facts of the violence in Muxidi, and unanimously refused to publish photos of the soldiers burned to a crisp and hanging from lamp posts. They needed the facts and photos for their already-planned “Tiananmen Square Student Massacre” story.

It has been 30 years since the June 4, 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square. In spite of all the categorical documentation proving there was never any student massacre in China, the US Government and its handlers refuse to let go of their prize because of its powerful political propaganda value, having enabled the West for decades to define China as being “ruled by the jackboot, the rifle, and the thought police”. This has been unquestionably one of the greatest propaganda victories in history, turning a US State Department-sponsored color revolution, albeit a failed one, into a whip that could lash China non-stop for 30 years. It was so successful that the Western media, led by the NYT but followed by nearly everyone, publish in June of every year a kind of “anniversary story” to continue to milk it for its residual propaganda value. This false story has been hammered into the consciousness of Westerners for 30 years, to the point where it is nearly impossible to discuss Tiananmen Square due to the enormous emotional baggage it carries.

Some missing pieces of this story began to fall into place when, in 2011, Wikileaks released all the cables sent to Washington from the US Embassy in Beijing on June 4, 1989, confirming that the student movement ended peacefully and that there had been no violence, no student massacre in Tiananmen Square and, importantly, confirming some important basics of the violence at Muxidi. As well, some highly-respected international journalists, as well as foreign camera crews, and some foreign diplomats, who were present in Tiananmen Square at the time of the student dispersal, have written books and articles testifying that the student sit-in ended peacefully and that the stories of a student massacre at Tiananmen Square are pure fiction.

Faced with this release of evidence, Western media editors and prominent columnists are attempting to prolong this myth by fabricating an entirely new one, this being that it was the students who rigged and manned the barricades at Muxidi to prevent the military from proceeding to Tiananmen Square to kill the students there,so the Chinese government instead massacred the students at Muxidi. (28) There is no evidence whatever to support those claims, and it should be obvious from the above narrative that they are false on all counts. (29) (30)

If there were a massacre in Beijing on June. 4, 1989, it was at Muxidi, not at Tiananmen Square, and the massacre was of soldiers, not students, with all evidence indicating it was engineered by the US Department of State and the CIA. While the American government deserves to take the blame for orchestrating these events, the blame must be shared since the Americans were themselves puppets. The conspiracy against China was wider and deeper than I’ve indicated here.

Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. His writing has been translated into more than 20 languages and is available on more than 100 foreign-language websites around the world.  He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.

Notes:

(1) From the photos, some appear to be Xinjiang Uigurs, of which there are five distinct groups, four being eminently sociable, the last seeming genetically predisposed to almost any kind of crime.

(2) To produce a unit of this kind would normally involve prior training and cash payment. One reason the US Consulates in China insist on cash-only payments for US visa applications from Chinese citizens (1,000 RMB each) is that this money bypasses the banking system and is freely available for black operations, today producing more than 800 million RMB per year that leaves no paper trail.

(3) Military use for civilian purposes is a normal operation in China for typhoon and flood evacuations, landslide and earthquake rescues, and other similar emergencies. These are not armed soldiers in military vehicles, but simply able-bodied men available on command in the large numbers often required for such occasions. In Muxidi, these were all young men, most appearing from the photos to be perhaps in their early 20s. They were not armed, and arrived at the scene in ordinary city buses. 

(4) The Morning Intelligence Summary for June 4, 1989, for US Secretary of State Baker, described the violence in Muxidi, and referred to how civilians “swarmed around military vehicles. APCs were set on fire, and demonstrators besieged troops with rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails.”

(5) I haven’t a link for the availability of this book. I believe it is out of print but may be obtainable as a download from secondary or tertiary websites. 

(6) If we read carefully, it is evident from even this minuscule report that the third group, the ‘mercenaries’, were not acting in concert with either the workers or the students but were unknown outsiders acting against and above the public wishes and pursuing their own agenda of violence for which they had come prepared, and functioning as a team in the carnage they unleashed.

(7) The strikingly similar pattern of uncontrolled violence by China’s Xinjiang Uigurs several years ago, where they bombed police stations, randomly burned hundreds of cars and buses, and killed indiscriminately hundreds of people (mostly police), were not, as the Western media claimed, spontaneous rebellions against intolerance by Beijing, but the result of a deliberate process of emotional programming. After the rebellion was put down, the government found in the hands of these people thousands of foreign-supplied “Otpor” manuals, inflammatory DVDs, instructions on bomb-making, and more, all clearly part of a planned program. The rioting in Hong Kong today exhibits the same fundamentals.

(8) A mere glance at any of the published photos displaying violence or mayhem, will permit anyone with even a passing familiarity with Beijing to see instantly that none of those photos were taken in Tiananmen Square. It was only the world’s lack of knowledge of China that permitted the US government and the international media to perpetrate this enormous fraud. 

(9) One cable sent on June 22, 1989 from the US Embassy in Beijing to the US Department of State in Washington, was a document that, in the words of its authors, “attempts to set the record straight” about the events of the night of June 3-4. It claims that, contrary to the reports in the Western media, any deaths did not occur in Tiananmen Square, but elsewhere. It also confirmed the casualty estimates. The contents of this cable were suppressed for more than 20 years until Wikileaks released it.

(10) In addition to the reports and chronicles from the Chinese government, the cables from the US Embassy in Beijing, and the written testimony of a number of respected journalists and diplomats who were present at the Square, a Spanish News camera crew took live video, which I believe is still available, of the peaceful clearing of the square. The video has never been shown.

(11) The Spanish Ambassador to China, Eugenio Bregolat, was present at the Square with the camera crew and wrote a book on the event, in which he vents his anger at the Western media for fabricating the massacre story. Publishers in English-speaking countries unanimously refuse to print a translation, and Amazon refuses to carry the original.

(12) The Columbia Journalism Review conducted a detailed study in 1998, and published an article written by Jay Matthews, titled “The Myth of Tiananmen And the Price of a Passive Press”; the Columbia Journalism Review; June 4, 2010; https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php?page=all

(13) In 2009, James Miles, who was the BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted he had “conveyed the wrong impression” and that “there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square”, claiming “we got the main story right, but some of the details wrong”.

(14) New York Times, June 05, 1989. Article by Nicholas Kristoff confirming a peaceful end to the student sit-in.

(15) Birth of a Massacre Myth; How the West Manufactured an Event that Never Occurred; Japan Times; Monday, July 21, 2008, By Gregory Clark; https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2008/07/21/commentary/birth-of-a-massacre-myth/

(16) “Live Reports” were published from some Western reporters detailing the view from their windows of the Beijing hotel of hundreds of students being mowed down by machine guns. Their reports were ridiculed and condemned by others who revealed that the Square cannot be seen from the Beijing Hotel. Similar claims were made by Wu’er Kaixi, the Uigur student leader, also discredited when foreign reporters stated that he was seen in a far side of Beijing at the time he claimed to have seen those events.

(17) Helvey organised student revolutions in Vietnam and Myanmar, along with Otpor! in Serbia, Kmara! in Georgia, Pora! in Ukraine, Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet revolution” in 1989, then spreading his talents to Africa and South America. Helvey was associated with Gene Sharp in the George Soros-funded Einstein Institute, formed in 1983 as an offshoot of Harvard University to specialise in organising student political protests as a form of US colonial warfare. It was Sharp and Helvey who created the Otpor manuals that began the process of the destruction of Jugoslavia. 

(18) Near the end of May, 1989, Wan Li, the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, was in Washington for a meeting with then President George Bush, in which Wan raised the issue of the student protest in Beijing. The record of the meeting is too heavily redacted to create much understanding or draw conclusions but, after the meeting, Wan abruptly cut short his US visit, returned home, and publicly supported the dire necessity for the government’s prior declaration of martial law. 

(19) The VOA is operated by the NED – the National Endowment for Democracy – a front company funded by the CIA that does much of that agency’s dirty work not involving actual killing – although sometimes it does that, too. The VOA is funded for its public activities by the US State Department, and by the CIA for its participation in black ops.

(20)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen _(documentary) 

(21) Longbow lawsuit: The New Yorker; May 7, 2009 The American Dream: The Lawsuit

(22) TAM Transcript Index; Chai Ling; http://www.tsquare.tv/film/transcript_complete.php

(23) Tiananmen Square, 1989: The Declassified History; Edited By Jeffrey T. Richelson and Michael L. Evans; National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 16; Published – June 1, 1999; http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/index.html 

(24) For the potential showdown in Tiananmen Square, the workers’ protest, and the mercenary violence in Muxidi, it is difficult to believe the simultaneity was accidental. The theory that appears to fit all the known facts is that the workers’ revolt, with the mercenary violence separately coordinated and injected into the picture, was timed to coincide with the hoped-for Tiananmen bloodshed with the intent of reducing much of Beijing to violence and anarchy, resulting in a range of unpleasant possibilities. It nearly happened just this way.

(25) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellowbird

(26) In those days, travel to Hong Kong was not quick and easy as today, so some clever logistics were necessary, Chai Ling claiming to have been shipped to Hong Kong in a suitcase.

(27) Many diplomatic problems resulted from the US government’s interference in China’s internal affairs at the time. In addition to stoking revolutionary fires in the students and fueling the violence at Muxidi, the US government was condemned for providing sanctuary in the US Embassy for several of the Chinese riot leaders, and on June 11 a US Embassy cable reported that Chinese radio and TV stations read official letters on the air, accusing the US government of not only actively supporting political rebels but providing refuge for the “criminals who created the violence” at Muxidi. (18) The Western media entirely censored all such news.

(28) US Embassy confirms China’s version of Tiananmen Square events; Cables obtained by Wikileaks confirm China’s account. UK Telegraph, By Malcolm Moore, Shanghai; 04 Jun 2011;

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html 

(29) Students were not involved in arranging the protest at Muxidi though a few may have been in attendance. The square already had a contingent of soldiers and was in no need of reinforcement, the military may have entered Muxidi with guns firing, but students were not the target, and in any case the students had already voted to clear the square before the violence erupted at Muxidi.

(30) It should be noted that the truncated version of the famous “tank man” photo, which was taken a day or two later, of a single young man apparently defying several military tanks, was used to embellish the hoax. The wide-angle view of that photo shows a long string of military vehicles on a totally unrelated passage down Chang’An Avenue and through the Square and, in any case, they were clearly leaving, not arriving.

Interview with Juan Restrepo – RTVE correspondent for more than three decades and a direct witness to the events in Tiananmen Square.

ROLL the page until you find the interview

The original source of this article is Global Research

Larry Romanoff is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new COVID-19 anthology ”When China Sneezes”.

This article is republished with permission from the author- Copyright © Larry RomanoffMoon of Shanghai, 2020

Latvia Selling “Insect Protein” Bars

Many people know the so-called “Elite” want us to “own nothing and be happy.”  Apparently, they also want us to eat bugs instead of, you know, meat.

In Latvia, stores have begun selling the “Better Bar”

OIP.Il4 yCnX8IdPFtaxjzu5fQHaD4
OIP.Il4 yCnX8IdPFtaxjzu5fQHaD4

On the label, prominently displayed, is one ingredient:  INSECT PROTEIN.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

Still think the so-called “Elite” aren’t crazy?

These people have to be stopped.  Scorned.  Rejected.  If need be, coerced.

Their agenda is mentally sick.  I will not partake.

US slaps new sanctions on Bosnia and Herzegovina officials

The United States has imposed sanctions on the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Bosniak-Croat federation and an official of the Bosnian-Serb entity, accusing them of threatening the country’s democratic institutions. In a statement on Monday, the US Department of the Treasury said it was blacklisting Marinko Cavara, a member of a nationalist Bosnian-Croat party, and Alen Seranic, the Serb Republic’s minister of health and social welfare.

Article HERE

US suspends tariffs on some solar panel imports for two years, but leaves China out

Waivers are issued for Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam but not China. Which is odd, as China has indeed, the largest manufacturer of solar panels and related systems.

Article HERE

Finland Wants to Join NATO — But LOOK at Finland’s Military Swastika Flags!

Much ado has been made of late that Finland and Sweden seek to join NATO after Russia began its Special Military Operation to de-militarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.

Now, as we look harder into Finland, we see SWASTIKA Flags of their military units . . .  just like in Ukraine!

The images below tell the story far better than can be written.  This is the Finland Military of today:

fINLAND nAZI uNIT mARCHING
fINLAND nAZI uNIT mARCHING

So what’s with the Swastika and why would NATO even consider accepting Finland given its current, official, endorsement of literal Nazi ideology?

fINLAND nAZImILITARYgRADUATION
fINLAND nAZImILITARYgRADUATION

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

I thought Nazis were the bad guys.   I thought tens of millions of people DIED fighting the Nazis in World War 2.

Yet here we are, in the year 2022, and what do we see in Ukraine  and now, in Finland?  Nazis!

From at least 2014 through 2022, we watched the AZOV Regiment of the Ukraine Armed Forces, wearing Waffen SS lightning logos on their government issued uniforms, wearing helmets with Swastikas emblazoned on them, and doing so much harm and damage, that Russia realized the need to enter Ukraine to protect Russian-Speaking people in Luhansk and Donetsk, from these Nazi units in Ukraine.

Once Russia entered Ukraine, what did the west do?  We sided with Ukraine.   An odd thing to do given that government embraces Nazi ideology and symbolism in its army, in its police and in its government officials.

Then, Finland and Sweden got spooked by Russia entering Ukraine, and both Finland and Sweden want to join NATO.

Now, we see that in Finland too, their official military units openly march with Swastika flags!

Again, I thought Nazis were the bad guys.  What am I missing here?

Was World War 2 not dispositive of Nazis?   Was that war, which killed 90-100 Million people, merely a battle in some kind of never-ending war?

Because as I sit here on June 7, 2022, what I see is the rise of Nazi ideology, embraced by sitting governments, and marching under Nazi symbols in public.  First in Ukraine, now in Finland.

If Nazis are the bad guys, why are we associating with them?  Why would we even consider bringing Finland or Ukraine into NATO?

Quest for the Grave of Scotia, the Pharaoh’s Daughter Who Founded Scotland and Ireland

A short distance from the bustling Irish town of Tralee in County Kerry there is an otherworldly looking glen which is known as Scotia’s Grave. According to Irish folklore, the glen was the location of a battle known as Sliabh Mish which took place between the Celtic Milesians and a supernatural race called the Tuatha Dé Danann (tribe of the gods).

Although it was the Milesians who were victorious in battle it was a triumph at the expense of their queen, Scotia, who is reputed to have been buried in the glen.

Who Was Queen Scotia?

Queen Scotia appears in a chronical called the Book of Leinster , a medieval Irish manuscript which was compiled in around 1160 AD. The book was compiled by an abbot named Áed Ua Crimthainn who deeply respected the traditions and history of Ireland, even when they were at odds with his views as a Christian or his reasonable beliefs as a well-educated man.

She is described as the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh, the wife of a Greek king, and a contemporary of the Biblical Moses who allegedly cured her husband after he was bitten by a venomous snake.

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2022 06 07 20 50

Queen Scotia was the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh. (Rama / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Both Scotia and her husband King Gaythelos were exiled from Egypt for unspecified reasons during a time of great upheaval, and it is after this that they traveled to Europe where they founded both the Scots in modern day Scotland and the Gaels in Ireland. Scotia gave her name to the Scots and to Scotland and Gaythelos gave his name to the Gaels.

Scotia’s death in battle was supposedly the result of the pregnant woman attempting to jump a bank on horseback.

A Traditional Interpretation of the Myth of Scotia

The myth of Queen Scotia has traditionally been regarded by historians as entirely fictitious. It was recorded by an abbot at a time where people in Christian countries wanted to assert their ancient roots, and links to important Biblical figures. It is particularly noteworthy that Scotia’s husband was said to have been healed by Moses.

The site of Scotia’s Grave itself could be a way for a place so remote from the original locations in the Bible to steak a believable claim to having Biblical links. ‘Burial place of the wife of a man who once met Moses’ is vague enough to be believable and unremarkable enough that it does not warrant extensive investigation to verify it, while still referencing one of the more important figures in the Old Testament .

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2022 06 07 20 51

The glen where Queen Scotia’s grave is said to be. (John M / CC BY-SA 2.0 )

Although the myth of Queen Scotia (also Scota) is fantastical it is not out of the realms of possibility and controversial historian Ralph Ellis believes he has found evidence that Scotia really did exist.

The History of Egypt

Ellis claims the myth of Scotia does not originate in the Book of Leinster but far earlier, in a text called The History of Egypt ( Aegyptiaca) written in 300 BC by a Greco-Egyptian author called Manetho. Evidence in Aegyptiaca may point to Scotia being an identity of Ankhesenamun, a daughter of Akhenaton and Nefertiti, and both half-sister and widow of Tutankhamen

According to Ellis, Ankhesenamun went on to marry a Pharaoh named Ay, whom he claims is actually Gaythelos. After Ay’s reign was cut short, the couple were sent in to exile where they made their way to Europe and settled in Iberia. Rather than Scotia herself making the journey to Ireland, Ellis believes it was her descendants who migrated, four generations after she settled in Iberia. Of course, this interpretation does not explain the existence of Scotia’s Grave or the references to Queen Scotia in Medieval Irish literature .

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2022 06 07 20 52

“Queen Scotia unfurls the sacred banner”, illustration from an 1867 book of Irish history. (Nicknack009 / Public Domain )

Archaeological Evidence?

Although Ellis’ bold claims are extremely controversial, he is not the only one to find evidence the myth may be at least partially true. Lorraine Evans, who studied Egyptology at one of the world’s top universities, also believes the myth of Queen Scotia cannot be entirely debunked.

She points to the remains of an ancient boat found in Yorkshire, which is of a type found in the Mediterranean at around the time the myth is set, as just one piece of archaeological evidence proving a link between Egypt and ancient Britain and Ireland.

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2022 06 07 20 53

Signpost of Scotia’s grave by-road, south of Tralee. (Fenitharbour / Public Domain )

It is often the case that myths and legends have a kernel of truth at their core and there is no reason the story of Scotia should be any different. The legend may have grown up around the desire to find links to Biblical figures but if you strip back the layers it becomes more plausible. Maybe Scotia didn’t ever meet Moses and maybe she was not an exiled Egyptian queen. Perhaps, if she was real, she was just an extraordinary woman who made an exceptional journey across continents almost 4000 years ago.

Slow-Cooker Tangy Italian Beef Sandwiches

Take just 10 minutes to prep this recipe. You’ll not only get great sandwiches but if you’re lucky, you’ll have leftovers, too.

e9adacd4 a705 4192 b7ec ad57be6b97c2
e9adacd4 a705 4192 b7ec ad57be6b97c2

Ingredients

  • 1 boneless beef sirloin tip roast (3 to 4 lb), trimmed of fat
  • 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1 bottle (16 oz) Italian dressing
  • 2 teaspoons Italian seasoning
  • 12 burger buns, split

2022 06 04 14 30
2022 06 04 14 30

Kitty Cat video of the day

A couple abandons a cat as they move away. And a neighbor rescues the cat. A great video.

Disturbing Red Painted Curse Discovered In Jerusalem Catacomb

painted curse Jerusalem
painted curse Jerusalem

An ancient painted curse has been discovered in a tomb in Beit She’arim. Representing the first such discovery in 65 years, the timeworn Greek text warns thieves that Yaakov (Jacob) “the Proselyte” will curse them.

Yaakov lived about 1,800 years ago. His title, “the Proselyte,” means he converted to Judaism. After having died at around 60 years of age Jacob was interred in a cave at Beit She’arim, the ancient Jewish town and necropolis in Lower Galilee during the Roman period. The park-like area around the necropolis is about 100 kilometers or 62 miles northwest of Tel Aviv and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2015.

After Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 AD the Sanhedrin Jewish council moved to Beit She’arim, and it became the new Jewish center of education and learning. Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority ( IAA) and University of Haifa revealed on Wednesday that the curse was found painted in a catacomb in the Beit She’arim necropolis that was only discovered last year.

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2022 06 08 10 37

The Red Painted Curse or Hex Was Written in Greek

According to a report in Haaretz, it was Jonathan Price, professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University, who discovered the two Greek inscriptions inside the innermost chamber of an unexplored tomb. The painted curse, or hex, was written in Greek, in red paint, on a wall near the burial lodge. It was specifically designed to deter grave robbers , and as such it says: “Jacob the Proselyte vows to curse anybody who would open this grave, so nobody will open it. He was 60.”

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2022 06 08 10 38

The curse, written in red paint on stone at an ancient grave in Beit She’arim. It reads “Jacob the Proselyte vows to curse anybody who would open this grave, so nobody will open it. He was 60.” As translated by Jonathan Price, professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University. (יבגני אוסטרובסקי/ IAA)

The researchers suspect his age, 60, was written by someone after Jacob had died. Prof. Adi Erlich of the Zinman Institute of Archeology at the University of Haifa, who leads the excavations at Beit She’arim, said the inscription dates to the Late Roman or Early Byzantine period (i.e. circa 390-400 AD). Prof. Erlich also explains that Jacob, or Yaakov the Proselyte, was probably a Christian, or had belonged to one of the popular cults of Isis or Mithra.

The “Life-changing” Conversion of Jacob To Judaism

What exactly did Jacob have to do to convert to Judaism? Firstly, according to an article in the BBC, converting to Judaism “is not easy” and involves many serious lifestyle changes. After about a year of studying Jewish law converts not only have to wholeheartedly accept the Jewish faith, but they become a member of the Jewish People, and they must embrace the totality of Jewish history , and the culture that grows from it.

Even when a prospective candidate’s heart is in the right place, the process of conversion to Judaism is governed by Jewish religious law in a religious court. And while many changes must be made in diet and lifestyle, perhaps the hardest is that male converts must undergo circumcision. And even if a man is already circumcised, this is all about ritual, and blood must again be drawn, as the whole ordeal is symbolic of the covenant between God and Abraham described in the Old Testament.

From Ancient to Contemporary Grave Robbers in Israel

Jacob’s curse was aimed directly at tomb robbers over 1,500 years ago, but looting is still a problem in Israel today. In 2012, the Times of Israel reported on a small squad from the Israel Antiquities Authority “who rappelled to the bottom of an ancient well, crawled through a narrow entrance into a 2,000-year-old horizontal tunnel and surprised two Palestinian men scouring the passageway for artifacts.”

A stolen and recovered Greek vase painted in the red-figure style, looted from Israel, with Head of the Anti-Theft Unit at the IAA Amir Ganor. (Yuli Schwartz / IAA)

A stolen and recovered Greek vase painted in the red-figure style, looted from Israel, with Head of the Anti-Theft Unit at the IAA Amir Ganor. (Yuli Schwartz / IAA)

Only last year Amir Ganor, Head of the Anti-Theft Unit at the IAA, told the Jerusalem Post about “one of the most significant operations undertaken in the history of the country to fight the unlawful trade in artifacts .” A criminal ring had stolen ceramic pottery, coins, jewels and protomas (representation of the head and neck of an animal) of Roman deities “valued at roughly tens of millions of shekels.” Ganor said many of the objects were “left in tombs as offerings to the dead and were meant to serve the departed in the life beyond.”

It seems that as the age of science progresses, curse effectiveness diminishes and grave robbing increases.

US Threatens Britain (UK) With Curtailed Military Cooperation As ‘War Of Word’ Erupts Over Submarine Tech

In a dispute between staunch allies – the US & UK over the supplier of classified technology to nuclear submarines, US authorities have warned to curtail defense cooperation with Britain, reported the UK-based Telegraph.

Intelligence sources told the media outlet that if the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, blocks the £2.6 billion ($3.28) deal of Ultra Electronics to Boston-based private equity firm Advent International, it would undermine the future collaboration between the two countries, the report said.

Last year, Kwarteng directed regulators to probe the acquisition of British defense contractor Ultra Electronics by a US private equity firm on national security concerns. The takeover bid is lodged by another UK-based firm, Cobham, owned by the American private equity group Advent.

The US-based sources accused Kwarteng of intentionally discriminating against US corporations after ordering a national security probe into a buyout of Ultra.

The acquisition has caused quite a stir in the United Kingdom because the firm manufactures key military communications technology, including the highly classified Trident nuclear submarine kit.

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A senior US Congressional intelligence source said: “At a time when allies like the US and the UK are looking to deepen defense cooperation, we need to remove obstacles, not create them.”

“Congress has already taken action to ease some of the restrictions on British defense companies operating in the US,” the source added, referring to recently lifted limitations on British companies such as BAE Systems and Rolls Royce. This allows them to conduct more freely across the Atlantic.

“But instead of adopting a similar approach, it seems the British government is determined to impose unnecessary obstacles that make it harder for American defense firms to operate in the UK.”

Meanwhile, Kwarteng obtained an initial report on the deal last month and decided to continue negotiations with Advent in order to find a compromise that would allow it to proceed.

If these negotiations fail, the Business Secretary is expected to urge the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to conduct a rare in-depth phase two examination, which would make it difficult to meet Advent’s August 4 target for completion of the deal and might ultimately prevent the takeover from taking place.

Is The UK Being Fussy? 

The British government already had the right to engage in mergers and acquisitions on national security grounds. However, the new National Security and Investment Act, adopted on January 4, gave the business secretary wide-ranging powers to interfere in such deals.

According to previous reports, the UK government has already indicated that they may ban China’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation from developing a nuclear reactor in the UK, citing national security concerns.

Boris Johnson’s administration has begun to adopt a tougher stance on foreign ownership of critical defense and nuclear assets.

Officials from the United States claim that the British government is exploiting powers enacted in January to restrict hostile states’ ability to acquire companies with connections to British security services.

They argue that these powers should not be extended to close allies such as the United States because the UK and the US already have intelligence-sharing agreements as part of the Five Eyes alliance.

Furthermore, the two countries work closely together to preserve the British nuclear deterrent. Last year, the United States signed the AUKUS, a trilateral security pact with the United Kingdom and Australia, to collaborate on the development of a new generation of nuclear submarines.

Other military research initiatives, such as the development of hypersonic weapons, are also being discussed as part of the agreement’s expansion.

A senior US official said: “We do not distinguish between a British investor in a US company for reasons of national security. “It’s not fair that the British government treats American firms this way.”

US officials are concerned that any prolonged delay may exacerbate the Ultra takeover. According to officials from the Department of Trade, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, the deal may still be authorized if Advent is willing to make commitments to resolve national security concerns.

Ultra’s representative said the company was preparing an “appropriate undertaking to protect British national security interests” in cooperation with British officials.

Nevertheless, it appears to be challenging at times to find a middle ground between the UK’s aim to oversee a “global Britain” that is open to global investment while also attempting to protect British industries.

Goats Take Over Empty Streets Of Seaside Town In Wales During The Coronavirus Outbrake

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A herd of goats has taken over a deserted town centre, eating hedges and flowers from gardens. Usually, the wild herd of about 122 Kashmiri goats venture from the Great Orme into Llandudno, Wales, England during bad weather. But town councillor Carol Marubbi believes the lack of people around because of coronavirus has drawn them down.

“They are curious, goats are, and I think they are wondering what’s going on like everybody else,” she said.

The goats – some of which have recently had kids – have been spotted nibbling flowers. She said everyone in Llandudno was “very proud” of the animals and they had been providing “free entertainment” to people from their windows.

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Roman Penis Pendant Found in Britain Declared a “National Treasure”

“Only in England”.

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A Roman “penis pendant,” or more accurately a phallic amulet, found in England 18 months ago, has been declared a national treasure. Described as a first-of-its-kind find, it was discovered by metal detectorist Wendy Thompson on December 31st, 2020 while searching a farm in Higham, near Gravesend and Strood, in Kent, reports The Sun UK . It is believed to date back to between 43 AD and 410 AD, when Britain was occupied by the Romans.

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Wendy Thompson found the penis pendant while metal-detecting. (Wendy Thompson)

First-of-It’s-Kind Penis Pendant Find for Britain

“The rarity of it is that it’s a silver example of a penis pendant,” explained Thompson. “I’ve got other bronze ones that I have found in the past but they’re nowhere near as significant.” The 73-year-old added that she was going about her job, scouring the field end to end rather meticulously with her metal detector , when she found it wedged 8 inches (20.32 cm) into the earth.

“The last person to hold it was back in that era,” said Thompson excitedly. “It’s a long, long time it’s been lying in the ground waiting for me to come along and find it.” She instantly dated it to 2,000 years old, which was verified later by the coroner’s report from the British Museum, though the exact date is difficult to ascertain.

The penis pendant measures 1.2 inches (3 cm) and weighs 0.3 ounces (9.7 g), and is complete with a detailed “foreskin, shaft, and pubes,” according to Coroner Roger Hatch, though it conspicuously lacks testicles. In the same report, he classified it as a “ national treasure .” For an item to be classified as a “treasure” in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, as per the British Museum, it can be a metallic object, other than a coin, whose weight is at least 10 percent precious metal, and is at least 300 years old when found.

Hatch also added that the Roman Empire is renowned for its “large corpus of phallic imagery”. In fact, there are 451 phallic objects recorded in Roman Britain alone. As per a report published in The Daily Mail , experts at the British Museum described the artifact as having a reverse triangular top section with “ribbed decoration, presumably pubic hair, narrowing to a tapering shaft and terminating in a raised band foreskin.”

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Greco-Roman Obsession with the Phallus

In Greco-Roman culture the phallus or the penis had virile regenerative powers, enabling fertility and domination. To an empire that was preoccupied with territorial expansion, sex was conceptually seen as an unequal exchange led by a man who would dominate an “inferior” or “weaker” being – women, girls, boys, male slaves, to name a few. The phallic symbol was so common that it was associated with the worship of male gods like Dionysus and Hephaestus. It was also a good luck charm used to ward off evil, seen on mosaics and tiles all across the empire.

In ancient Roman religion and magic, the fascinus or fascinum was the embodiment of the divine phallus. The fascinum was worn by children around their necks to ward off illnesses. They were sometimes used to indicate the social standing of the wearer as well. “Infants are under the especial guardianship of the god Fascinus, the protector, not of infants only, but of generals as well,” wrote legendary Roman philosopher and historian, Pliny the Elder .

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The fascinum, or penis pendants, were worn by children to ward off illness. (David Perez / CC BY 4.0 )

When Roman generals entered battle, the penis was the symbol used to announce a grand and powerful entry. “It is the image of this divinity that is attached beneath the triumphant car of the victorious general, protecting him, like some attendant physician, against the effects of envy,” added Pliny on the mythical phalluses that represented domination.

“It is likely that this pendant is depicting a flaccid macrophallus, rather than an erect one, with the possibility that, rather than representing the ability to target and defeat the evil eye , a lack of control and an almost barbaric sexuality is suggested,” stated a report by the British Museum which confirms this phallocentric Roman obsession. “The archaeological contexts of stratified examples, along with phallic wall carvings, such as at Hadrian’s wall , suggest a close association with military sites.”

Human Builds A Dragon-Shaped Cardboard House For His Cat In Order To Please His Master

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One creative guy named Sam just took cardboard cat houses to the next level. Inspired by his beloved kitty Denni, the entire thing is made out of cardboard and held by hot glue. “I love making things, especially out of cardboard. My cat also loves cardboard and I love my cat,” Sam writes on his website.

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The structure is actually more advanced than one may think.

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“I designed this new cardboard cat tower with moving parts, giving Dinni alternative movement around the tower: some stepping planks that can be pulled out, ramps, sliding windows and some storage draws for his toys”.

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Sam’s other passions include DIY cat toys and homemade feline food, so if you’re a cat’s person, Sam is definitely someone to follow.

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Now they’re starting a war with China right before our eyes

Very accurate. A must watch video.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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The United States continues with dangerous provocations.

China seems not to be mincing words as of late, calling out US dastardly deeds as they see them. 

I suspect that when the bluffs begin getting called in the Pacific theater, Uncle Sam & Friends are going to take a beating.

It comes back to the notion that the bully manipulator sociopath will never listen to reason or be "agreement capable".

They will back away only when hurt.

Mother Nature has seen to this for millions of years and domesticated primates merely amplify this principle with their technological toys.

Much like the Russian resolve in Ukraine, I'll bet China will clearly state their aims, warn a few times and when the US stumbles over the red line, simply sink a carrier or vaporize Diego Garcia.


-Chevrus

The United States continues with it’s never ending, dangerous, and serious,  provocations against China. These latest events are obviously probing events. Perhaps a look at a map might clarify what is going on, eh?

Map
Where the American made P3, led by American generals inside of Korea, was probing Chinese airspace.

Bernard has a very good write up on this…

Canadian Spy Plane Air Patrols Near China Are Not On ‘UN Mission’

Canada falsely claims that it is implementing international law when its airplanes are in fact spying on China.

On June 2 the Canadian Globe & Mail reported of a Chinese interdiction of a Canadian reconnaissance aircraft:

Canadian military accuses Chinese warplanes of harassing its patrol aircraft on North Korea sanctions mission

Canada’s military has accused Chinese warplanes of harassing its patrol aircraft as they monitor North Korea sanction evasions, sometimes forcing Canadian planes to divert from their flight paths.

On several occasions from April 26 to May 26, aircraft of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) approached a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) CP-140 Aurora long-range patrol aircraft, the Canadian Armed Forces said in a statement on Wednesday.
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Such interactions are of concern and of increasing frequency, the Canadian military said, noting that the missions occur during United Nations-approved operations to implement sanctions on North Korea.

The Canadian aircraft were part of Ottawa’s “Operation NEON”, which sees military ships, aircraft and personnel deployed to identify suspected sanctions evasions at sea, including ship-to-ship transfers of fuel and other supplies banned by United Nations Security Council resolutions.

Did the United Nations really give Canada a mission or even a right to identify sanction evasions at high sea or near North Korea? I would find that astonishing.

Four days later the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the incidents. His answers came after China had explained its position:

China’s foreign ministry is warning Canada that provoking Beijing could bring “grave consequences” after the Canadian military last week accused Chinese warplanes of harassing its aircraft, which are monitoring North Korea’s compliance with United Nations sanctions.

Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Zhao Lijian suggested during a media briefing in Beijing on Monday that these patrols by Canadian and allied aircraft are illegal.

“The UN Security Council has never authorized any country to carry out military surveillance in the seas and airspace of other countries in the name of enforcing sanctions,” he told reporters.

Trudeau’s response to that is somewhat muddled:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in response, defended the patrols, which he said are part of a multinational effort to enforce UN sanctions. He warned Beijing that pilots on both sides are in danger of behind hurt or killed by China’s behaviour.

“China’s actions are irresponsible and provocative in this case, and we will continue to register strongly that they are putting people at risk while at the same time not respecting decisions by the UN to enforce UN sanctions on North Korea,” he told reporters during a press conference in Ottawa with Chile’s President on Monday.

Chinese fighter pilots have recently stepped up aggressive behaviour against Canadian military aircraft flying in international airspace near North Korea.

A “a multinational effort to enforce UN sanctions” is something different than a “United Nations-approved operations to implement sanctions on North Korea” which the Canadian military claimed.

Since 2019, Canada has from time to time dispatched a naval frigate or long-range patrol aircraft to help monitor ocean approaches to North Korea as part of a multinational approach, with the United States and other allies, to enforce sanctions against Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons program. The area under patrol includes the contested East China Sea, above which China established an aircraft defence identification zone in 2013.

The ‘multinational’ behind the effort are the U.S. and its usual proxies. But if that were a UN or UN approved mission China and Russia must have agreed to it at the UN Security Council. They never did.

Still Trudeau insists on the UN smoke screen:

“Canada is participating in a UN mission designed to interdict and intercept and ensure the respect of sanctions on North Korea’s murderous regime,” the Prime Minister said. “Canada continues to stand up for the rule of law. We continue to stand up for multilateralism. We continue to stand up for the principles of the UN Charter.”

I find no news of formal paper that says the UN has ever designed or asked for any such mission.

There are a total of nine UN Security Council resolutions against North Korea. The relevant here is UNSCR 1718 from 2006. In paragraph 8 it asks member countries to implement certain sanctions:

Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, and taking measures under its Article 41 ... 
...
8. Decides that:

(a) All Member States shall prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer to the DPRK, through their territories or by their nationals, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, and whether or not originating in their territories, of:

[... a list of certain weapon systems and materials.]

That paragraph restricts any measure countries can take with UNSC agreement to territory, nationals or vessels under their control. It does not authorize to do anything to other territories, nationals or to foreign flagged vessels or to act against such vessels at high sea.

Paragraph 8d, which is about financial sanctions, has similar restrictions:

d) All Member States shall, in accordance with their respective legal processes, freeze immediately the funds, other financial assets and economic resources which are on their territories at the date of the adoption of this resolution or at any time thereafter, ...

UNSC resolution 2094 from 2013 added additional sanctions but included the same territorial restrictions:

11. Decides that Member States shall, in addition to implementing their obligations pursuant to paragraphs 8 (d) and (e) of resolution 1718 (2006), prevent the provision of financial services or the transfer to, through, or from their territory, or to or by their nationals or entities organized under their laws (including branches abroad), or persons or financial institutions in their territory, ...

In fact all UNSC resolutions I am aware of, except those few which directly allow for a war, have similar restrictions. Orders or request to UN member countries for implementing sanctions or to take other measure are always restricted to those things or persons the country legally controls. The reasons for that are obvious. It would breach the rights of other countries if the UN would allow Canada or anyone else to interfere outside of their own legal realm.

The Canadian military’s claim that its planes are on a “United Nations-approved operations” is false. There is no UN approval for such operations.

The Canadian Prime Minister’s claim of participating in a “UN mission” is false. There is no such mission with regard to the DPRK.

The Canadian spy planes flying near the Chinese border are not implementing international law. That is simply a subterfuge of their real mission which is in fact spying on China.

Trudeau should be reminded of the 2001 incident near Hainan Island where a Chinese jet collided with a U.S. spy plane which then had to make an emergency landing in China:

The 24 crew members (21 men and 3 women) were detained for 10 days in total, and were released shortly after the U.S. issued the "letter of the two sorries" to the Chinese. 

The crew was only partially successful in their destruction of classified material, and some of the material they failed to destroy included cryptographic keys, signals intelligence manuals, and the names of National Security Agency employees.

Some of the captured computers contained detailed information for processing PROFORMA communications from North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, China and other countries.

The plane also carried information on the emitter parameters for U.S.-allied radar systems worldwide. The fact that the United States could track PLAN submarines via signal transmission was also revealed to China.

The U.S. now largely avoids such missions. It instead ordered Canada (and Australia) to do these, passing the risk to them. Pissing off China by making false claims of flying these in support of international law will only up the risk for another serious incident.

Posted by b on June 16, 2022 at 12:28 UTC | Permalink

In Australia

I don't know if you are aware, that's what an Australian Surveillance plane did in the South China Sea and the Chinese did a flight interdiction and Australia went mental about it here in Australia. For all concerned not in Australia the "New" Labor Government is no different from the former Conservative ratbags because the US has them by the short and curly's! The difference is the Australian Labor Government portrays themselves as "More Caring"? 

- William Edward Kiera

This is just a long string of probing incidents that are attempting to locate Chinese air defenses…

Australian Spy Plane Engines Ingested Chinese Chaff During Intercept in South China Sea, Canberra Claims

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The allegation comes on the heels of grievances by the Canadian Armed Forces earlier this week that People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) jets were “buzzing” a Canadian maritime patrol aircraft enforcing sanctions against North Korea and approaching close enough to give the plane’s crew the finger.
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A Chinese fighter jet drew up near an Australian Royal Air Force Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft operating in the South China Sea and released aluminum-based countermeasures which got sucked into the plane’s engines, the Defence Ministry reported Sunday.
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“Defence advises that on 26 May 2022, a RAAF P-8 maritime surveillance aircraft was intercepted by a Chinese J-16 fighter aircraft during a routine maritime surveillance activity in international airspace in the South China Sea region. The intercept resulted in a dangerous manoeuvre which posed a safety threat to the P-8 aircraft and its crew,” the ministry said in a statement.
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Later in the day, Defence Minister Richard Marles provided additional details on the suspected incident, saying that after approaching the Australian aircraft and firing flares, “the J-16 then accelerated and cut across the nose of the P-8, settling in front of the P-8 at very close distance” and releasing a “bundle of chaff, which contains small pieces of aluminum.” Some of these pieces “were ingested into the engine of the P-8 aircraft,” he said.
Marles vowed that the incident “will not deter” Canberra from continuing its maritime surveillance activities in the South China Sea, saying that “freedom of navigation” in the maritime region was “fundamentally in our nation’s interest.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed that he had been briefed on the incident, and that Canberra had “raised” its concerns with Beijing.
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Chinese officials have not commented on Australia’s allegations. The People’s Republic is also yet to respond to Canadian accusations made earlier this week that PLAAF fighter pilots were regularly giving a Canadian spy plane operating near North Korea the finger while performing what Ottawa called “unsafe and unprofessional” intercepts.
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China lays claim to wide swathes of the South China Sea, with Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and the Philippines making their own claims to parts of the strategic shipping artery, which also happens to be rich in hydrocarbons and fishing resources. The United States and its allies, including Australia and Britain, have challenged Beijing’s claims, and have spent more than a decade conducting “freedom of navigation” missions in the body of water and forging bilateral security agreements with other claimants.
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China has repeatedly slammed the US and its allies over these activities, urging them to mind their own business and moving to negotiate with South China Sea-adjacent nations on the creation of a regional maritime “code of conduct.”
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Occasionally, Chinese warships and aircraft are directed to challenge US and allied planes’ and navy vessels’ ‘freedom of navigation’ jaunts. In October 2018, a Chinese warship nearly collided with a US Navy ship while chasing it through the body of water. Chinese military pilots have also been accused of trolling their US counterparts by “meowing” at US spy planes patrolling in disputed areas.

Science

Science
Science

US Department of Defense Finally Comes Clean – Admits in Public Document that There Are 46 US Military-Funded Biolabs in Ukraine

“There are 25+ US-funded biolabs in Ukraine which if breached would release and spread deadly pathogens to US/world.” Gabbard said on Sunday.

“We must take action now to prevent disaster. US/Russia/Ukraine/NATO/UN/EU must implement a ceasefire now around these labs until they’re secured and pathogens destroyed,” she added.

 

VIDEO:

 

Tulsi Gabbard made her statement based on testimony from the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in Eurasia, Victoria Nuland.

Victoria Nuland admitted during testimony before a US Senate committee the existence of biological research labs in Ukraine.

Less than 24 hours later, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that reports of biolabs in Ukraine were fake news propagated by Russia.

The Democrat-fake news-media complex then attacked anyone who brought up the biolabs in Ukraine.

Mitt Romney lashed out at Tulsi Gabbard, saying, “Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.”

Then this happened– Russia released alleged captured documents from Ukraine exposing evidence of US Military Biolabs in Ukraine.

Russia made the accusations in front of the United Nations General Assembly.

Now this–

The Pentagon on Thursday finally admitted in a public statement that there are 46 US-funded biolabs in Ukraine.

This is after months of lies and denials by Democrats, the Biden regime and their fake news mainstream media!

The Pentagon FINALLY came clean.

The United States has also worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health, providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades. The collaborative programs have focused on improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.

Here is a screengrab from the US Department of Defense website.

 

Not good.
Not good.

 

Monkeypox will be renamed, says World Health Organization

Is the WHO trying to help erase the idea that a US lab monkey escaped in Pennsylvania? (Article HERE ) and the spread of monkeypox?
 
The World Health Organization (WHO) says it is working with experts to officially rename monkeypox, amid concerns over stigma and racism around the "discriminatory" name of the virus.

Key points:

WHO says it will rename "monkeypox virus, its clades and the disease it causes"

More than 30 scientists last week alerted health officials to the need for a name that was neither discriminatory nor stigmatising

Director-General of the WHO made the announcement during an emergency committee that was held after "unusual" recent behaviour of the virus

Article HERE

Galaxy Quest images

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Xi Pledges China Will Keep Backing Russian “Sovereignty, Security” In Putin Call

China has once again issued a pledge of verbal support to Moscow amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. A Wednesday phone call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin included Xi saying China backs Russia on “sovereignty and security”.

China is “willing to continue to offer mutual support (to Russia) on issues concerning core interests and major concerns such as sovereignty and security,” Chinese state broadcaster CCTV quoted Xi as saying.

Significantly, it was the second such ‘positive’ call between the two leaders since the Ukraine invasion began on Feb.24. Over the past years the two have become obviously closer amid increasing US economic measures intent on isolating both countries.

The Moscow Times reports the following on the contents of the call:

According to CCTV, Xi praised the "good momentum of development" in bilateral relations since the start of the year "in the face of global turmoil and changes."

Beijing was willing to "intensify strategic coordination between the two countries," Xi reportedly said.

China was ready to "strengthen communication and coordination" with Russia in international organizations and "push the international order and global governance towards more just and reasonable development," he added.

And noticeably absent in the state media readout was apparently any explicit mention Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the resultant global crises unleashed such as the impact on global wheat and food supply, as well as fuel prices. However, the wording of Xi’s support for Russian “sovereignty and security” has clear enough implications, and certainly sends a message to the West.

The huge economies of China and India not only have refused to jump on board the West’s retaliatory measures targeting Moscow, but have sought to siphon more cheap Russian oil, which has helped Russia blunt Western sanctions.

Additionally, Beijing has at every turn refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while also denying earlier Biden administration charges that it’s helping thwart anti-Russia sanctions, or the more inflammatory accusation of supplying replenishing weapons and munitions related to Ukraine operations.

Witchcraft? Tributes to Murder Victims? The Uncertain Origins of 17 Miniature Coffins in Scotland

17 miniature coffins were discovered in a small cave on the mystical Arthur’s Seat outside of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1836. Today, only eight remain and are now on display at the National Museum of Scotland. Despite the passage of 181 years, researchers are no closer to ascertaining the creator or the purpose of the coffins, each of which contains a tiny, carefully dressed human figure.

Some say that it is witchcraft. Others claim it is a symbolic burial of men lost at sea. One of the most intriguing theories is that the coffins were made in a kindly attempt to quiet the wandering souls of 17 people who were murdered for the dissection table by the notorious serial killers Burke and Hare.

According to The Scotsman , the first paper to write about the story, “a number [of the coffins] were destroyed by the boys pelting them at each other as unmeaning and contemptible trifles” (Dash, 2013). As described by The Scotsman , each of the coffins “contained a miniature figure of the human form cut out in wood, the faces in particular being pretty well executed. They were dressed from head to foot in cotton clothes, and decently laid out with a mimic representation of all the funeral trappings which usually form the last habiliments of the dead.

The coffins are about three or four inches in length, regularly shaped, and cut out from a single piece of wood, with the exception of the lids, which are nailed down with wire sprigs or common brass pins. The lid and sides of each are profusely studded with ornaments, formed with small pieces of tin, and inserted in the wood with great care and regularity” (Dash, 2013).

 

 

New Insights on the Creators

Since that description was written in the 19th century, further research has determined that the figures were most likely made by the same craftsman and the coffins were made by two different people. In addition, “the materials and tools used – wood, iron embellishments, nails, a sharp, hooked knife – indicate the coffins could have been fashioned by a shoemaker” (Scottish History and Archeology, 2017). Moreover, “the figures seem to form a set, and their upright bearing, flat feet, and swinging arms suggest they may have been toy soldiers. Their eyes are open, making it unlikely they were originally designed as corpses” (Scottish History and Archeology, 2017).

Finally, a closer examination of the cotton used in the figures’ dressing dates their creation to the early 1830s. This means that they could not have been buried for long before being discovered by the school children. Yet such close scrutiny has not brought people any closer to understanding the effigies’ purpose. According to the Museum of Scotland, to understand why these coffins were made, one must examine what was happening at the time.

An Unexpected Discovery – 17 Miniature Coffins

In June of 1836, a group of local school children was roaming the hills of Arthur’s Seat in search of rabbits. In a secluded area on the northeast side, they found a small cave (or possibly a large hole) hidden behind three slabs of slate. Inside were 17 little coffins, each nailed shut, arranged neatly in two rows of eight, with the 17th resting on top as if to start a third row.

Body Snatchers and Murderers

In the 1820s and 30s, Edinburgh was a cultural center renowned for its medical prowess. The city’s medical schools turned out some of the best doctors and each year more and more students enrolled. This influx created a problem. In the 19th century, the key to the healing arts was to understand human anatomy.

And the only way this was possible was through dissection. Yet, as Edinburgh progressed, there were fewer criminals being sent to death at the gallows (the typical source of cadavers). Thus, the infamous practices of body snatching and grave robbing came into vogue.

While highly profitable, the crime scandalized the Scottish public. It was conventional wisdom at the time that in order for one to rise again to life on the day of the Last Judgment, a person must have his or her body intact. This prevailing sentiment led to a number of innovations to prevent robbers from making off with corpses, such as iron clad coffins and all night vigils. This is important to bear in mind because it may also have contributed to why somebody would make the tiny surrogate bodies.

Among the most devious body snatchers in history were William Burke and William Hare , both Irish immigrants, as well as the famous Edinburgh anatomist and scholar Dr. Robert Knox. As a once-popular children’s rhyme retells, “Up the close and doun the stair/ But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare. Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief/ Knox the boy that buys the beef” (Scottish History and Archeology, 2017).

Burke and Hare’s first transaction with Dr. Knox occurred when an elderly tenant at Hare’s boarding house died before paying off a debt to Hare. In order to recoup his losses, Burke and Hare sold the man’s body to the doctor’s anatomy school in Surgeon’s Square. It was such easy money.

“But with no-one else in the boarding house prepared to drop dead of their own accord, the pair thought they’d hurry the process along a bit. And so began a vicious killing spree that lasted 10 months, during which Burke and Hare dispatched at least 16 victims [12 of whom were female] and earned around £150 (roughly £12,000 now – no mean sum)” (Scottish History and Archeology, 2017).

On the offset, they only killed vagrants who they believed would not be missed. But then they grew careless and began to kill local residents who were not only missed but also recognized at the school.

 

 

In November 1928, the men were arrested. Hare agreed to testify against Burke and was therefore granted immunity. On January 28, 1828, Burke was hanged before a crowd of thousands. His body was then sent to be dissected at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, who (on the orders of the court) preserved Burke’s skeleton as a testament to his atrocious crimes.

Dr. Knox was cleared of any wrongdoing; however, the incident ruined his illustrious career. Hare was never heard from again. Most likely he went back to Ireland but there is a folk legend that says he made off to London where he fell into a lime pit and was permanently blinded.

17 Coffins for the Victims?

A popular theory holds that the 17 coffins were buried for the 17 victims. “It just seems like a particularly Edinburgh kind of thing, to try and lay these ghosts to rest by creating a symbolic image of the victims to place and give a proper burial to. Even if nobody every learned about it, it just seemed like something somebody who had known somebody who had disappeared in Edinburgh might have done to give their friend a bit of peace” (Henderson quoted in Scottish History and Archeology, 2017).

Today, the remaining eight little coffins still have a grip on the popular imagination and have been on display to the public consistently since their donation to the Museum in 1901.

An Alternative Explanation

According to The Scotsman , author and amateur historian Jeff Nisbet believes the miniature coffins were created to keep the “flames of rebellion lit” following the Radical war of 1820.

He suggests the coffins were meant to serve as a memorial honoring the Radicals who were killed.

The Scotsman explains the background for the situation:

“many poorly paid workers and weavers from the area were arrested following a series of protests and strikes aimed at improving their working conditions and securing better pay. Many of those arrested were exiled to Australia, while several of the ring leaders were executed. Following the event, many of those who agreed with the movement were put to work building a path that would become known as the ‘Radical Road’ around Arthur’s seat.” 

The mystery of the meaning behind the miniature coffins continues to draw in curious researchers.

Italian Baked Pasta

Italian Baked Pasta
Italian Baked Pasta

A very nice old cottage

UKRAINE ARMY DEATHS: 70,000 Plus 210,000 Wounded!

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Collecting the dead.
Collecting the dead.

The magnitude of Ukraine’s losses in its fight against Russia have now been exposed as staggering. Based on actual cemetery grave count: Seventy-Thousand Ukraine troops are dead, According to numerous other reporting, another 210,000 Ukraine troops have been wounded.

Currently Russia is holding 8,500 Ukrainian POWs. Most are in POW camps in Donbass. Ukraine is holding 325 Russian POWs at this time

US shoe company Skechers forced to prove ‘no forced labor’ ahead of US discriminative act on Xinjiang – Global Times

"The crusaders run their country based on political agenda, politicking, and fake news against others without any basic sense of ethics and honesty. They engage in single way thinking without doing the math and often suffer from boomerang effects:"
US shoe company Skechers has had a batch of its products manufactured in China seized by US customs, which cited the so-called Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the Global Times learned from sources.
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In order to appeal to the US customs, Skechers organized an independent investigation conducted by a third party, which found no evidence to support so-called forced labor allegations.
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In December, 2021, US President Joe Biden signed a legislation titled the “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act,” which bans products made in China’s Xinjiang, citing “oppression” of the Uygur and other minority populations.
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The new law creates a “rebuttable presumption” that all goods partially or wholly produced in the Xinjiang region are “tainted by forced labor.” It also requires corporations to prove with “clear and convincing evidence” that imports from the region are not made by forced labor.
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Article found HERE

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Harry Nilsson – Me and My Arrow

1971. Extracted from the cartoon called “The Point”. It became a hit ten years or so later.

Serious Development in Ukraine: DPR Leader Says Will March to Lviv

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A very serious development has taken place regarding ongoing hostilities in Ukraine.  The Leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Denis Pushilin, says the decision has been made to fight all the way to Lviv; there may not BE a “Ukraine” anymore.

Pushilin is the elected leader of the now-independent Donetsk People’s Republic, which was formerly a state (Oblast) of Ukraine.   The people there voted in the year 2014, to leave Ukraine and join Russia.  They did this after the European Union (EU) and the United States fomented, incited, and financed the forcible overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-elected President, Viktor Yanukovich, and installed a puppet regime in Kiev, favorable to the West.

Rather than allow Donetsk (and its northern neighbor, Luhansk) to peacefully leave Ukraine, Kiev sent troops to force those two states to remain in Ukraine.  War began.

From 2014 to 2022, more than fourteen thousand (14,000) civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk, were killed by Ukraine army troops.   Russia intervened on February 24, 2022, to stop that killing, and to protect the Russian-speaking population of those two states, which had, in the interim, declared their Independence from Ukraine.

Pushilin says the DPR will continue pushing on; they will not stop at DPR’s borders!   The Denazification of Ukraine will continue to Dnipro, Kiev, and Lviv!

Pushilin hopes to complete the special operation in Ukraine by the end of the year.

The head of the DPR gave an interview to @rian_ru on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). The main point:
Ukraine as a state may simply not be, in the foreseeable future.

The supply of new weapons by the West to Ukraine Pshilin says, has forced the decision that DPR troops not stop at the border of the republic.

The decision on the referendum on the accession of the DPR to Russia will be made after the completion of the special operation.

Pushilin also said it is planned to ship about one million tons of cargo through the Mariupol port by the end of the year, now that Mariupol is cleared of Nazis and Ukraine military.

The DPR Embassy in Russia will be opened in late June – early July.

A very nice house

Oh. Yes it is.

Dozens more Australians banned from entering Russia over Ukrainian invasion sanctions

The list of 121 names, which includes billionaires, newspaper bosses, chief executives, professors and military officers, builds on the 228 Australians including then leader Scott Morrison and current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese banned from Russia in April.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed the banned people formed part of Australia's "Russophobic" agenda and warned more would be added to the country's "stop list".

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The B-52’s – Rock Lobster

THE song that was played at every college party at university.

Explosion Rocks Russia’s Largest Natural Gas Field. Sabotage?

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A massive explosion tore through a 1400mm natural gas pipeline at Russia’s largest natural gas field in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in Siberia today.   The fire is presently burning out of control.

A source reports the fire is burning in the area of GP 8, skip 8832 which is in the Gazprom Dobycha Urengoy section, between gas fields 7-8.

The cause of the explosion is being investigated, but a source says it appears this was a DELIBERATE ACT of Sabotage.  Investigators are already saying someone is trying to send a message to Russia, that infrastructure even deep inside their country “can be gotten to.”  The trouble with sending a message to Russia, is that the Russian then need to send a message back.

The Urengoy field is one of the largest fields in the world,  with the only two larger gas fields being the North/South Pars (Qatar/Iran) in terms of reserves. The recoverable reserves of this Russian gas field amount to 10 trillion cubic meters of gas.

Last August, a large-scale fire at Gazprom’s gas chemical complex in Novy Urengoi reduced gas deliveries via the Yamal-Europe pipeline. This caused prices on the European market to jump by 6%.

With Europe now trying to embargo Russian natural gas, the Yamal Pipeline is already shut down to several countries in Europe, but today’s explosion and fire could still result in market driven price increases.

Youdao does a good job of translating Wei’s speech

From HERE

Full text of speech by Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe in Shangri-La Forum in Singapore

Wei expounded his position on the Taiwan issue in his speech, saying that the Taiwan issue bears on China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. No country in the world will tolerate national division. When I visited the United States last year, My American friends told me that Lincoln is the greatest president in The history of the United States because he led and won the Civil War and prevented the division of the United States. The United States is indivisible, and China is indivisible. China must and will be reunified. Why not?

'If anyone dares to separate Taiwan from China, the Chinese military has no choice but to fight at all costs and resolutely safeguard the reunification of the motherland,' Wei said. "I want to warn the DPP authorities and external interfering forces: First, any attempt to split China will never succeed. Second, any attempt to interfere in the Taiwan question is doomed to failure. Third, any underestimation of the Chinese military's resolve is extremely dangerous. We are willing to strive for the prospect of peaceful reunification with utmost sincerity and utmost efforts, but we will never promise to renounce the use of force. It is the sacred duty of the armed forces to safeguard national unity. If the PLA cannot safeguard the reunification of the motherland, what is the PLA for? !"

With regard to the recent economic and trade frictions launched by the United States against China, Wei fenghe said in his speech that the Chinese people are now talking about nine words: talk, yes; Fight, accompany; Deceit, delusion!

He said China has always maintained that all countries, big or small, strong or weak, rich or poor, are equal members of the international community and should respect and accommodate each other's legitimate security concerns. China always understands and respects the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries, and supports the social system and development path independently chosen by all countries. China cannot develop in isolation from the world, and the world cannot develop in isolation from China. China does not covet other countries' interests or envy their development, but we will never give up our legitimate rights and interests. No country should expect us to swallow the bitter fruit of undermining China's sovereignty, security and development interests. Just as the US recently launched economic and trade frictions against China, the door is open for negotiations. If you fight, you fight to the end. The nine words that have become popular among the Chinese people are: talk, yes; Fight, accompany; Deceit, delusion!

Full text of speech by Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe

It gives me great pleasure to attend the 18th Shangri-La Dialogue. I would like to thank Dr. David Chipman, Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, for the invitation and the Singapore Government and the Ministry of Defence for their warm hospitality. I also wish to congratulate Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on his wonderful speech. This is my first time to attend the incense gathering as Defense Minister. I have come here for exchanges and mutual trust, cooperation and peace. Next, I would like to speak on China’s cooperation with international security.

First, human society is at a crossroads. Building a community with a shared future for mankind is the right path and the trend of The Times

The world today is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century, with increasing uncertainties, destabilizing factors and challenges. President Xi Jinping’s vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind is simple. It is the right choice for the people of the world to live together in harmony and effectively solve global issues. It is the right way to achieve world peace and stability and prosperity and development of mankind. We have noted that the US side talked about its vision on regional affairs in its speech to the CONFERENCE yesterday. We believe that any proposal should fully take into account the common security and interests of countries in the region, and should not be in the nature of a military alliance or undermine the interests of other countries. We have different views on some of the views of the US side. We firmly oppose the wrong words and deeds of the US side on the Taiwan and South China Sea issues. Now, LET me talk about a few questions to think about with you.

What choice should we make between peaceful development and conflict and confrontation? Peace and development are the theme of our times and the trend of history. At present, hotspot issues in the world and in the region keep flaring up, and there is always the risk of conflict or even war. How are wars and conflicts in regional countries, rampant terrorism, chaos in the Middle East and the Refugee crisis in Europe caused? Who caused it? Where are the roots? It is worth reflecting on. Whose interests are these acts of dividing camps, deliberately creating confrontation, meddling in and stirring up troubles, wanton interference in other countries’ internal affairs and even wanton resort to force? At the expense of whose interests?

What choice should we make between openness, inclusiveness and exclusion? We should approach the world with an open and inclusive mind and be full of friends and partners. Seeing the world through a narrow and exclusive lens, filled with enemies and adversaries, is called “self-fulfilling prophecy.” At present, anti-globalization and protectionism are on the rise. Some countries are resorting to unilateralism, putting themselves first and ignoring the interests of others. They have either broken contracts or withdrawn from groups.

What choice should we make between win-win cooperation and a zero-sum game? Win-win cooperation will make the pie bigger and bring more benefits to all. A zero-sum game can only hurt both sides. More than 150 countries and international organizations have taken an active part in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Not long ago, more than 6,000 delegates from 150 countries and 92 international organizations came to China to attend the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. The axioms are self-evident.

What choice should we make between mutual learning among civilizations and arrogance and prejudice? A few days ago, China successfully hosted the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations. Civilizations are colorful, equal, inclusive and learn from each other. No one civilization should be singled out or disparaged. The slavery of the Black people, the expulsion of the Indians, the colonization of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the mutilation of the Jews in history are all irremediable wounds and tragedies in the history of human civilization. At present, some people are reviving the “clash of civilizations” argument, viewing other civilizations in a narrow view and reeking of decadent racism. This is quite wrong. How can history allow such a retreat?

Ii. In the face of complex and volatile international security situation, the Chinese government and military are firmly committed to safeguarding regional and global prosperity and stability

Anyone familiar with China’s modern history knows that the poor and weak Old China suffered a lot of sufferings. The Chinese people know better than anyone the essence of peace and the cruelty and disaster of war. Over the years, some people have deliberately hyped up and exaggerated the “China threat theory”. This may be out of ignorance of China’s history, culture and current policies, but most of it is out of misunderstanding and prejudice, or even out of their ulterior motives.

China is committed to the path of peaceful development.

China’s nature as a socialist country, its independent foreign policy of peace and the Chinese cultural tradition that “peace is most precious” have determined that China will always follow the path of peaceful development. This is a solemn commitment made to the Chinese people and the people of the world. It has been explicitly written into the Constitution of the COMMUNIST Party of China and the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. This is the will of our Party and country. If someone can’t believe that, what can they believe? Over the past 70 years, China has never initiated a single war or conflict, invaded any country, or occupied an inch of other people’s land. No matter how developed it may become, China will never threaten anyone, seek hegemony or hegemony, or seek to establish spheres of influence. History has proved and will continue to prove that China will not follow the beaten path of “a strong country will seek hegemony”. Seeking hegemony is not in line with China’s values and national interests.

China has always pursued a military strategy of active defense.

China’s military strategy has always adhered to the principle of defense, self-defense and post-strike strike, emphasizing that “we will not attack unless attacked, but we will certainly attack if attacked.” The development of the Chinese armed forces is purely for self-defense, to protect national security and the peaceful work of the Chinese people, so that the Chinese people can avoid the scourge of war and live a better life. China has never bullied, pillaged or invaded anyone. Of course, We will not allow anyone to bully, pillage or invade us. The development of China’s military is in response to security threats, just as we were forced to develop nuclear forces when we were threatened by nuclear weapons. China’s defense spending is reasonable and moderate. China’s national defense construction and development has always been based on the legitimate need to safeguard its own security and contribute to the growth of the force for world peace.

The Chinese armed forces resolutely safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests.

The PLA is a people’s army under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. In the face of aggression, might and difficulties, the Chinese military has always been courageous and moved from victory to victory. The Chinese people grow stronger and stronger under pressure. They grow stronger and stronger under setbacks. In times of adversity, they become more united and break out into amazing strength. In the face of complex and severe security threats, the Chinese armed forces always bear in mind that not a single inch of the sacred territory of the motherland should be lost, and not even a penny of others’ possessions should be taken away. The Chinese military does not make troubles, but it is not afraid of them either. If anyone dares to take risks and cross our bottom line, the Chinese military will definitely strike decisively and defeat all intruders.

The Chinese military is firmly committed to safeguarding regional and global security and stability.

China has actively supported UN peacekeeping operations. It is the largest troop contributor among the permanent members of the UN Security Council and a major contributor of funds. For a long time, China actively participates in bilateral and multilateral security cooperation and high level of comprehensive strategic partnership between China and Russia, China and the United States military relations remained stable after twists and turns and difficult but overall, we were positively correlated with asean countries, and India, and south Asian countries, such as traditional friendship deepened, and the surrounding countries remain peaceful coexistence and good-neighborly friendship for a long time, It has maintained good relations with the armed forces of African and Latin American countries. This October, China will host the 9th Beijing Xiangshan Forum. Military leaders and scholars from all countries are welcome to attend the forum.

In the historical process of achieving common prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region, the core interests and security concerns of all countries must be respected and safeguarded

China always maintains that all countries, big or small, strong or weak, rich or poor, are equal members of the international community and should respect and accommodate each other’s legitimate security concerns. China always understands and respects the sovereignty, independence and integrity of all countries, and supports the social system and development path independently chosen by all countries. China cannot develop in isolation from the world, and the world cannot develop in isolation from China. China does not covet other countries’ interests or envy their development. But we will never give up our legitimate rights and interests. No country should expect us to swallow the bitter fruit of undermining China’s sovereignty, security and development interests. Just as the US recently launched economic and trade frictions against China, the door is open for negotiations. If you fight, you fight to the end. What the Chinese people are now saying is: Talk, yes; Fight, accompany; Deceit, delusion. Now, I would like to clarify China’s position on several issues of common concern.

On the Taiwan Question.

The Taiwan question concerns China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. No country in the world will tolerate national division. When I visited the United States last year, My American friends told me that Lincoln is the greatest president in The history of the United States because he led and won the Civil War and prevented the division of the United States.

The United States is indivisible, and China is indivisible.

China must and will be reunified.

Why not? If anyone dares to separate Taiwan from China, the Chinese military will have no choice but to fight war and resolutely safeguard national reunification at all costs.

Here, I want to warn the DPP authorities and external interference forces;

First, any attempt to split China will never succeed.

Second, any attempt to interfere in the Taiwan question is doomed to failure.

I have noted the remarks made by the US side. Does the Taiwan Relations Law belong to Taiwan? American law? Is it Chinese law? Or the law of the world? Or the LAW of the United Nations?

The US is using its domestic law to interfere in China’s internal affairs.

Third, any underestimation of the Chinese military’s resolve is extremely dangerous. We are willing to strive for the prospect of peaceful reunification with utmost sincerity and utmost efforts, but we will never promise to renounce the use of force. It is the sacred duty of the armed forces to safeguard national unity. If the PLA cannot safeguard the reunification of the motherland, what is the PLA for? !

On the South China Sea issue. The situation in the South China Sea is on the whole stable and improving. This is thanks to the efforts of all of us, especially countries in the region. But there are always those who want to make waves in the South China Sea for their own profit. Here I’d like to discuss a few issues with you.

First, who is threatening security and stability in the South China Sea?

More than 100,000 ships pass through the South China Sea every year, and no one has ever faced any threat. On the contrary, in recent years, some countries outside the region have flexing their muscles in the South China Sea under the pretext of safeguarding “freedom of navigation”.

This rampage of massive military forces in the South China Sea is the biggest destabilizing and uncertain factor in the South China Sea.

Second, who will be hurt and who will benefit from the turmoil in the South China Sea?

Once chaos breaks out in the South China Sea, of course, it is the countries in the South China Sea that will suffer. What is the purpose of some countries sending warships and fighter jets to the South China Sea from afar?

Are there too few cases in which a major country interferes in regional affairs, creates chaos and eventually leaves a mess behind?

Third, does stability in the South China Sea depend on countries within or outside the region?

We hope relevant parties will not underestimate the wisdom and capability of the neighboring countries in the South China Sea to properly handle differences and maintain peace. We also welcome constructive suggestions from all countries.

Fourth, is China’s construction on islands and reefs in the South China Sea militarized?

China’s construction on its own territory is the legitimate right of a sovereign state. China has built some defensive facilities on the islands and reefs for self-defense. Where there is a threat, there is self-defense. In the face of super armed military aircraft and ships, how can we not build some defense facilities?

On the Korean Nuclear issue.

China is committed to achieving denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, maintaining peace and stability on the Peninsula, and resolving issues through dialogue and consultation. China is committed to promoting peace talks and has played an irreplaceable constructive role. We hope that the US and the DPRK can be rational and patient, accommodate each other’s legitimate concerns, meet each other halfway and restart dialogue as soon as possible. The US and the DPRK should follow the dual-track approach and combine denuclearization with the establishment of a peace regime. We hope that the international community will actively respond to the DPRK’s legitimate concerns, activate the reversible provisions of the UN Security Council sanctions resolution at an appropriate time, promote the issuance of a declaration on the end of the war and actively build mutual trust among all parties.

On China-Us relations.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States. Over the past 40 years, our relations have gone through ups and downs, but overall progress has been made.

The biggest lesson we have learned is that cooperation benefits both sides while confrontation hurts both.

Look ahead.

The two sides should jointly advance china-us relations based on coordination, cooperation and stability in accordance with the consensus reached by the two heads of state. At present, the two militaries maintain continuous communication and reach consensus on many major issues.

First, on implementing the consensus reached by the two heads of state. It is to make the military-to-military relationship a stabilizer of bilateral relations.

Second, to maintain regular strategic communication. The day before yesterday, I had a candid and pragmatic exchange with Acting Secretary Shanahan. Both sides agreed to maintain communication and develop constructive military-to-military relations.

Third, managing risks and crises and preventing conflicts and frictions. We are all aware that a conflict or even a war between China and the US would be disastrous for both countries and the whole world. Cooperation requires the joint efforts of both sides, and the struggle begins as long as one side initiates it. China hopes that the United States will work with us towards the same direction, with no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation, so as to push forward China-Us relations along the right track.

China’s great achievements in the past 70 years since the founding of the People’s Republic did not come from heaven, nor did they depend on the handout of others, nor did they depend on military expansion or colonial plunder.

They are the result of the hard work, wisdom and courage of the Chinese people.

They are also the result of China’s reform and opening-up and win-win cooperation with the rest of the world.

At present, under the strong leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, China enjoys political stability, social stability and steady economic development. It is fair to say that the country enjoys peace, people enjoy harmony, and all industries are thriving. The Chinese people are working hard to realize the Chinese dream of great national renewal.

What Life Is Like Before And After You Get A Dog

If you decide to get a dog or any other animal as a pet, experienced owners have something to tell you. The owner of a golden retriever, John, shows how his life has changed after getting his pup Maimai — whom he describes as ’’a cute little furry devil’’.

As pup’s owner explains, everyone who has a dog soon starts feeling guilty that they don’t share their food or buy new toys for it. And you can forget about having a tidy apartment — ever again. But it’s all worth it. Because there’s no one else who’s happier than the person who sees their dog greeting them every evening in the hallway.

Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.
Life with a dog.

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin’s Regular Press Conference on June 15, 2022

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin

The 12th Meeting of BRICS National Security Advisers and High Representatives on National Security will be held virtually on June 15. Yang Jiechi, Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, will chair the meeting in Beijing. National security advisers and high representatives on national security of South Africa, Brazil, Russia and India will attend the event.

Al Jazeera: It is reported that the US Air Force’s RC-135V reconnaissance aircraft today conducted what was suspected to be reconnaissance on China over the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea. Do you have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: For quite some time, the US side has frequently sent aircraft and vessels to conduct close-in reconnaissance on China. Such acts cause serious danger to China’s defense security. China urges the US to immediately stop such dangerous acts of provocation. We will continue to take necessary measures to firmly safeguard our sovereignty and security interests.

People’s Daily: Could you share with us China’s expectations for the 12th Meeting of BRICS National Security Advisers and High Representatives on National Security? 

Wang Wenbin: The Meeting of BRICS National Security Advisers and High Representatives on National Security is an important platform for BRICS countries to enhance political and security cooperation. At the upcoming meeting, national security advisers and high representatives on national security of the five BRICS countries will have an in-depth exchange of views, coordinate positions and build consensus on a range of issues including multilateralism and global governance, new threats and challenges to national security, and governance in new domains.

With profound changes in the international landscape interwoven with a pandemic unseen in a century, our world has entered a new phase of turbulence and transformation. As the current BRICS chair, China looks forward to working with fellow BRICS members to achieve positive results through this meeting, further consolidate political mutual trust, deepen political and security cooperation, uphold the five countries’ security and development interests, and contribute to world peace and stability.

Associated Press of Pakistan: The seventh China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) Media Forum was recently held offline and online. Leaders and officials from China and Pakistan attended the forum. Do you have any comment on that?

Wang Wenbin: The seventh CPEC Media Forum was recently hosted by the Chinese Embassy in Pakistan and sponsored by China Economic Net and Pakistan-China Institute in an online plus offline format. Around 200 people from various sectors in China and Pakistan including senior officials, diplomats, media practitioners and think tank representatives attended the forum virtually. The theme of this forum is “Enhance New Media Cooperation to Depict the Multidimensional and Comprehensive CPEC”. In-depth exchange and discussion was held on such topics as “Pakistan, Global Development Initiative, and the Role of Media”, the latest update on the Belt and Road Initiative and CPEC development, and “Give Scope to Media to Objectively and Fairly Report CPEC”. A ceremony was held to present the book “China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Stories Behind” and the “CPEC Communication Award”. The Chinese Embassy in Pakistan has put out a press release on the event.

We hope Chinese and Pakistani media will continue to be a bridge connecting the two countries, do a good job in telling the story of China-Pakistan cooperation, jointly reject disinformation, and contribute more to CPEC development, socioeconomic progress in both countries and closer people-to-people exchange.

Formal Questions.
Formal Questions.

 

Reuters: Officials in Taiwan have complained to organizers of the 2022 Qatar World Cup about the fact that football fans for the World Cup currently have to select an option saying that they are part of Taiwan as a province of China. And there’s no option for Taiwan being a separate option when they buy their tickets. And they have asked the Qatar World Cup organizers to rectify this. Does the Chinese foreign ministry have a comment?

Wang Wenbin: I am not aware of what you mentioned. I would like to reiterate that Taiwan is part of China and adhering to the one-China principle is a basic norm governing international relations and shared consensus of the international community. 

CCTV: According to US media reports, during the US troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan last August, at least two Afghans fell to their deaths from a US C-17 cargo airplane which hastily took off from Kabul airport. Nearly 10 months later, the US military announced the conclusion of investigations of the incident which said that the aircrew was in compliance with applicable rules. Do you have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: Impunity of US military personnel over wrongdoings is nothing new. There have been too many cases where the US shields and exonerates the military from its crimes. 

On August 29, 2021, the US military stationed in Afghanistan launched a drone attack on a civilian residence in Kabul on counter-terrorism grounds which killed 10 civilians, the youngest of whom were only two years old. However, the US announced that US military personnel involved in this drone attack in Kabul would not face any form of punishment. 

In September 2020, in retaliation to the International Criminal Court’s investigation into the US military’s war crimes in Afghanistan, the US announced sanctions against two ICC high-ranking officials. 

In November 2019, the US granted clemency to three US service members who had committed war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

These cold, ruthless cases are evidence that the US couldn’t care less about lives in other countries and their people’s human rights. The reality seems to suggest that the US military can enjoy impunity over wrong killings simply because the US is a mighty power, while people in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq are wrongly killed and yet cannot receive justice just because their countries are weaker. This is what the US’s rules are really about — a 21st-century law of the jungle. 

However, hegemony will not last and justice will prevail. People across the world have now seen through the hypocrisy of the US on “protecting human rights”. The US must and will be held accountable and duly punished for the harm it has done to the human rights of people in other countries. 

Bloomberg: Do you have any comment on the recent Sheffield Hallam University report that polyvinyl chloride factories in Xinjiang are employing forced labor?

Wang Wenbin: The so-called “forced labor” in Xinjiang is a big lie made by anti-China forces. It is a lie against logic, against facts and against legal principles.

No one have been forced to become “transferred laborers” in Xinjiang. Workers of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang choose their professions according to their own will. Labor contracts are signed between workers and companies on an equal and voluntary basis in accordance with laws and regulations, including the Labour Law of the People’s Republic of China, and the workers are paid accordingly. They are free to choose where they want to work. Their right to obtain remunerations for labor, take rests, have holidays and leaves, receive labor safety and sanitation protection and enjoy social insurance and welfare treatment are protected in accordance with law.

For many months, anti-China forces have falsely alleged that the cotton industry in Xinjiang uses “forced labor”. The fact, however, is that large-scale mechanized and industrialized production has become the norm in Xinjiang. In cotton production for example, more than 98 percent of seed-sowing is done through comprehensive mechanized methods in most areas. In some places, BeiDou Navigation and auto pilot technologies have been applied to sowing machines. Cotton farming has evolved from using primitive methods such as irrigation ditches and manual harvesting in the early days to today’s modern methods of efficient drip irrigation and mechanical harvesters. It is absurd to create the false impression that today’s Xinjiang is like the US in the 19th century where plantation owners forced black slaves to pick cotton. Are those responsible for the allegations indicating that mechanical labor is also a type of forced labor?

As we have seen, some people have lately come up with new lies about “forced labor” in the building material industry in Xinjiang. Although the script keeps changing, their approach and narratives are similarly clumsy. 

I must point out that the term “forced labor” has a clear legal definition. It is stipulated in the International Labour Organization’s Forced Labour Convention (1930). According to the convention, “the term forced or compulsory labour shall mean all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily”. The Chinese government has ratified 28 ILO conventions including the Forced Labour Convention (1930) and is in faithful compliance with the obligations of international conventions. China applies international labor and human rights standards in its legislation, policymaking and policy implementation, to effectively safeguard workers’ rights. China opposes forced labor. Article 29 in the Regulations of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on the Protection of Labor Rights and Interests explicitly prohibits employers and management personnel from forcing employees to work with violence, threats and by other illegal means. It is a far cry from facts to say that there is “forced labor” in Xinjiang. 

I noticed that the report you cited also mentioned the US’s Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The so-called act is not based on facts at all. Under the legislation, importers are required to provide evidence that demonstrates that relevant goods do not involve forced labor. Such acts of presumption of guilt runs counter to the basic legal principle of presumption of innocence. This only serves to prove that the allegation of “forced labor” is nothing but a pretext used by the US side in an effort to seek political manipulation for the sheer purpose of destabilizing Xinjiang and containing China’s development. 

The fact is, forced labor exists not in Xinjiang, but in the US. The US still has not ratified the Forced Labour Convention (1930). In the US’s immigration detention system, over 70 percent of detainees are held in private detention centers, where they are required to participate in labor through the so-called “voluntary work programs”. Voluntary in name, the program is in fact about forced labor, as inmates who do not take part will be deprived of the access to necessities and put in solitary confinement as criminals. And those who comply are only paid one dollar for every eight hours of intensive labor. The US is also the only country in the world that has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. And still about 500,000 child farmworkers are toiling in the fields. The Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations of ILO has criticized child labor and forced labor in the US for many years running. And the Committee on the Application of Standards of ILO examined the US among individual country cases related to the observance of the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention at the 103rd Session of the International Labour Conference.

We urge the international community to look into the crimes of forced labor in the US so that justice can be upheld.

Wang Wenbin
Wang Wenbin

 

Shenzhen TV: We have noticed that the International Forum for Trilateral Cooperation 2022 was held in the Republic of Korea (ROK) on June 14. Foreign ministers of China, Japan and the ROK sent congratulatory messages to the Forum. Can you share more information on that? What’s China’s expectations for the trilateral cooperation?

Wang Wenbin: The International Forum for Trilateral Cooperation 2022 was held in the ROK on June 14 in an online and offline format. China’s State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the ROK’s Foreign Minister Park Jin and Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi sent congratulatory messages to the Forum. The three foreign ministers agreed that as permanent close neighbors and important cooperation partners, China, Japan and the ROK need to enhance mutual trust, work in solidarity and coordination, jointly inject more positive energy into regional peace and economic recovery and friendship between the peoples, and continuously move forward the trilateral cooperation. Renowned representatives in the political, business and academic sectors attended the Forum and former Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress Zhang Ping attended the opening ceremony via video link and delivered a keynote speech. Participants of the three countries had in-depth discussions under the theme “Future-Oriented Trilateral Cooperation: Lasting Peace, Common Prosperity, Shared Culture” and put forward suggestions for improving the cooperation mechanism, promoting inclusive growth and stepping up cultural exchanges. 

China, Japan and the ROK are close neighbors and important development partners. Since its inception more than 20 years ago, the trilateral cooperation has played a positive role in maintaining peace and stability in Northeast Asia, guiding regional economic cooperation and promoting world development and prosperity. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and the ROK and the 50th anniversary of the normalization of China-Japan relations. As important countries in the region and major economies in the world, the three countries need to enhance mutual trust, actively conduct positive interactions and release useful messages of long-term peace, friendship and cooperation among the three countries. We need to expand common interests and make the pie of cooperation bigger in digital economy, green development and public health. We need to promote closer people-to-people ties, guide people of the three countries, especially young people, to enhance mutual understanding and friendship, and create a positive, steady and healthy social atmosphere. 

China is ready to work with the ROK and Japan to advance the trilateral cooperation with an eye on the fundamental and long-term interests of the people in the three countries and the region and in the spirit of partnership, and help build a more secure, stable, open and prosperous Northeast Asia.

Reuters: Comments have emerged from the White House suggesting that the US is considering changing some of what it calls “irresponsible tariffs on Chinese goods”. What’s Chinese foreign ministry’s comment?

Wang Wenbin: I would like to refer you to competent authorities for these specific questions. 

To reiterate our principled position, China-US economic and trade cooperation is mutually beneficial and win-win in nature. No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war or tariff war. With inflation rates running high across the globe, the US needs to lift all the additional tariffs imposed on China, as this will serve the interests of businesses and consumers and benefit both countries and the world at large. 

Beijing Youth Daily: It is reported that in its latest report, Anzer, a cybersecurity information platform, revealed that the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), a unit under the US National Security Agency (NSA), has indiscriminately “grabbed” data from internet users around the world and that the US uses submarines to tap undersea fiber-optic cables and cables. TAO has handed cyber weapons over to the US and other “Five Eyes” countries, and the British government has engaged in cyber theft against the EU headquarters through infiltration into its telecommunications provider. Besides, the US government has also asked American Internet companies to work with them in the research and development of cyber weapons, including those targeting Chinese telecommunications equipment. Do you have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: We’ve noted the report. It shows once again that the US has become the primary threat to cybersecurity for not only China, but also the world at large. 

The information revealed by the report demonstrates that the cyber agencies of the UK and other “Five Eyes” countries as well as some European countries have assisted and participated in the US’s cyber theft operations around the globe. This indicates that the US has been building an “axis of cyber theft” with the US at its center.

It is worth noticing that the report pointed out that some US-based software and hardware companies have been involved in almost each and every stage of the US’s cyber weapons research and development. A report released by China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center not long ago points out that for the existing international internet backbone network and critical information infrastructure that contain software or hardware provided by US companies, it is highly likely that various types of backdoor could be installed, making them targets of US government cyberattacks wherever they are. It’s obvious that the US’s attack and smear against China citing national security grounds is aimed for nothing but facilitating its irresponsible cyber theft.

China urges the US to immediately stop malicious cyber activities around the world and be responsible in cyberspace.

Questions.
Questions being asked.

 

China News Service: At the 50th session of the UN Human Rights Council on June 14, Cuba delivered a joint statement on behalf of nearly 70 countries to voice support for China’s position on issues related to Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet and to express opposition to interference in China’s internal affairs under the pretext of human rights. Do you have any comment on this? 

Wang Wenbin: On June 14, Cuba delivered a joint statement on behalf of nearly 70 countries at the 50th session of the UN Human Rights Council. The joint statement stressed that Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibetan affairs are China’s internal affairs; we oppose politicization of human rights and double standards, or interference in China’s internal affairs under the pretext of human rights; we maintain that all parties should abide by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and respect the right of the people of each state to choose independently the path for development in accordance with their national conditions; the international community should uphold multilateralism, strengthen solidarity and coordination, respond jointly to global challenges, advance world peace and development, and promote and protect human rights. Dozens more countries either have voiced or are ready to voice their support to China’s justified position in their separate statements or by sending joint letters.

As an old Chinese saying goes, “A virtuous mind is not alone. It can always find company.” Once again, nearly a hundred countries at the Human Rights Council spoke up for justice. And once again, the attempt of a handful of Western countries to attack and smear China on Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet has been thwarted. This fully shows that political manipulation through human rights issues and interference in other countries’ internal affairs will find no support and will never succeed. For those very few Western countries, desperately repeating the lies and rumors only further exposes their hidden political agenda and malicious intention. Whatever stunt they pull, they would never stop the Chinese people’s solid steps toward development and progress. China will not waver in its resolve to uphold its sovereignty, security and development interests. 

There is a Chinese proverb, “A thief crying ‘stop the thief’.” Facts show that it is those few Western countries that ignore and trample upon human rights. Oblivious to the serious human rights problems at home, they often criticize and lecture other countries condescendingly on human rights. They have waged numerous wars to invade other countries that killed nearly a million people and displaced tens of thousands. They are the No.1 origin of human rights tragedies in the world. A word of advice for these Western countries: Please keep your hypocrisy, arrogance and prejudice to yourselves and stop using human rights as a pretext to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs and hold back their development. The days are over for you to ride roughshod over the developing countries. 

Phoenix TV: According to a Bloomberg report, a study by the University of Chicago found that “China has reduced air pollution nearly as much in seven years as the US did in three decades, helping to bring down average global smog levels in the process”. This “would add about two years to average life expectancy if sustained”in China. It is “a strong indication of the opportunities that could lie ahead for other nations if they were to impose strong pollution policies”. Do you have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: The report provides evidence of the good progress China has achieved in reducing its air pollution and its significant contribution to global environmental governance. For those of you who are posted here foreign journalists, I’m sure you have also seen and felt the improvement in China’s air quality. We are seeing fewer hazy days, more clear blue skies, cleaner waters and greener hills. People are benefiting tangibly from the conservation efforts. I would like to share with you some figures. In 2021, across 339 cities at or above the prefecture level, the air quality was either good or excellent on 87.5 percent of the days, 0.5 percentage point higher than 2020; Up to 64.3 percent of Chinese cities met the national air quality standard; The average PM2.5 concentration was 30 micrograms per cubic meter, down 9.1 percent year-on-year. 

I would like to take this opportunity to say that this week is the 32nd National Energy Conservation Week in China. Today, June 15, is this year’s national low-carbon day with the theme of “actions toward carbon peak and carbon neutrality to jointly build a beautiful homeland”. Improving the awareness and capacity of the whole society in energy conservation, promoting a green way of living and production, and encouraging the whole society to take part in low-carbon actions is a vital part of the efforts to build an ecological civilization and build a beautiful China. China upholds the vision to build a community of life for man and Nature, and follows a development path that prioritizes ecological conservation and pursues green and low-carbon growth. A clean, beautiful and green planet is an ideal shared by people of all countries. We will join this common effort, start by making personal contribution and start with small things in our daily life to raise the awareness of energy conservation and emission reduction and lead a green and low-carbon lifestyle. Let’s each play our part in protecting the planet we all call home and promoting sustainable development.

Reuters: The British government has decided to buy 20 percent stake in the Sizewell nuclear power plant, which would mean that it no longer requires the funding from the China General Nuclear Power. What’s the Chinese foreign ministry’s comment?

Wang Wenbin: I am not aware of what you mentioned. We hope the UK will provide a fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies. 

Italian Sausage Lasagna

Italian Sausage Lasagna
Italian Sausage Lasagna

Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide: Dr. Naomi Wolf on the Pfizer “Confidential Report”

It’s Really True: They Know they are Killing the Babies

First published by Global Research on May 31, 2022

I’ve been silent for some weeks. Forgive me.

The truth is: I’ve been rendered almost speechless — or the literary equivalent of that — because recently I’ve had the unenviable task of trying to announce to the world that indeed, a genocide — or what I’ve called, clumsily but urgently, a “baby die-off” — is underway.

The WarRoom/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Research Volunteers, a group of 3000 highly credentialled doctors, RNs, biostatisticians, medical fraud investigators, lab clinicians and research scientists, have been turning out report after report, as you may know, to tell the world what is in the 55,000 internal Pfizer documents which the FDA had asked a court to keep under wraps for 75 years.

By court order, these documents were forcibly disclosed. And our experts are serving humanity by reading through these documents and explaining them in lay terms. You can find all of the Volunteers’ reports on DailyClout.io.

The lies revealed are stunning.

The WarRoom/DailyClout Volunteers have confirmed:

that Pfizer (and thus the FDA) knew by December 2020 that the MRNA vaccines did not work — that they “waned in efficacy” and presented “vaccine failure.” One side effect of getting vaccinated, as they knew by one month after the mass 2020 rollout, was “COVID.”

Pfizer knew in May of 2021 that 35 minors’ hearts had been damaged a week after MRNA injection — but the FDA rolled out the EUA for teens a month later anyway, and parents did not get a press release from the US government about heart harms til August of 2021, after thousands of teens were vaccinated. [See this]

Pfizer (and thus the FDA; many of the documents say “FDA: CONFIDENTIAL” at the lower boundary) knew that, contrary to what the highly paid spokesmodels and bought-off physicians were assuring people, the MRNA, spike protein and lipid nanoparticles did not stay in the injection site in the deltoid, but rather went, within 48 hours, into the bloodstream, from there to lodge in the liver, spleen, adrenals, lymph nodes, and, if you are a woman, in the ovaries. [See this]

Pfizer (and thus the FDA) knew that the Moderna vaccine had 100 mcg of MRNA, lipid nanoparticles and spike protein, which was more than three times the 30 mcg of the adult Pfizer dose; the company’s internal documents show a higher rate of adverse events with the 100 mcg dose, so they stopped experimenting with that amount internally due to its “reactogenicity” — Pfizer’s words — but no one told all of the millions of Americans who all got the first and second 100 mcg Moderna dose, and the boosters.

Pfizer skewed the trial subjects so that almost three quarters were female — a gender that is less prone to cardiac damage. Pfizer lost the records of what became of hundreds of their trial subjects.

In the internal trials, there were over 42,000 adverse events and more than 1200 people died. Four of the people who died, died on the day they were injected.

Adverse events tallied up in the internal Pfizer documents are completely different from those reported on the CDC website or announced by corrupted physicians and medical organizations and hospitals. These include vast columns of joint pain, muscle pain (myalgia), masses of neurological effects include MS, Guillain Barre and Bell’s Palsy, encephaly, every iteration possible of blood clotting, thrombocytopenia at scale, strokes, hemorrhages, and many kinds of ruptures of membranes throughout the human body.

The side effects about which Pfizer and the FDA knew but you did not, include blistering problems, rashes, shingles, and herpetic conditions (indeed, a range of blistering conditions oddly foreshadowing the symptoms of monkeypox).

The internal documents show that Pfizer (and thus the FDA) knew that angry red welts or hives were a common reaction to the PEG, a petroleum-derived allergen in the vaccine ingredients — one that you are certainly not supposed to ingest. Indeed, PEG is an allergen so severe that many people can go into anaphylactic shock if they are exposed to it. But people with a PEG allergy were not warned away from the vaccines or even carefully watched by their doctors, EpiPen in hand. They were left to their shock.

Pfizer knew that “exposure” to the vaccine was defined — in their own words – as sexual contact (especially at time of conception), skin contact, inhalation or lactation. [See this]. ‘Fact-checkers’ can deny this all they want. The documents speak for themselves.

Of course, people who have tried to raise any of these issues have been deplatformed, scolded by the President, called insane, and roundly punished.

Athletes and college students and teenagers are collapsing on football and soccer fields. Doctors wring their hands and express mystification. But BioNTech’s SEC filing shows a fact about which the CDC and the AMA breathe not a word: fainting so violently that you may hurt yourself is one of the side effects important enough for BioNTech to highlight to the SEC.

But not to highlight to you and me.

I was able to process all of this and keep simply reporting. But in the last few weeks the horror overcame me. Because now, the Volunteers, under the excellent leadership of Program Manager Amy Kelly, have confirmed that there is a genocide underway, intentionally driven or not. And Israeli journalist Etana Hecht has added her own superb analysis. Here is Ms Hecht’s summary of the Volunteers’ findings:

It seems that there can indeed be a happenstance genocide. Reproduction itself is targeted, intentionally or not, by the mRNA vaccines. And if you know that reproduction is harmed, and babies and fetuses are harmed, and you know that this is at scale, which everyone at Pfizer and at the FDA who read these documents, knew —and if you do not stop — then does that not ultimately become a genocide?

The WarRoom/DailyClout volunteers have confirmed that lipid nanoparticles, the tiny hard fatty casings that contain the MRNA, traverse the amniotic membrane. That means that they enter the fetal environment, of course. (They also traverse the blood-brain barrier, which may help explain the post-MRNA vaccination strokes and cognitive issues we are seeing). The Volunteers have drilled deep into the Pfizer documents’ reports about pregnancy and found that the assurance that the vaccine is “safe and effective” for pregnant women, was based on a study of 44 French rats, followed for 42 days (the scientists who ran the study are shareholders or employees of BioNTech). [See this]

The Volunteers found that while pregnant women were excluded from the internal studies, and thus from the EUA on which basis all pregnant women were assured the vaccine was “safe and effective”, nonetheless about 270 women got pregnant during the study. More than 230 of them were lost somehow to history. But of the 36 pregnant women whose outcomes were followed – 28 lost their babies.

The Volunteers found that a baby died after nursing from a vaccinated lactating mother, and was found to have had an inflamed liver. Many babies nursing from vaccinated mothers showed agitation, gastrointestinal distress, and failure to thrive (to grow), and were inconsolable.

I am hearing anecdotal reports of these symptoms in babies nursing from vaccinated mothers, now, from across the country.

The Pfizer documents also show that some vaccinated mothers had suppressed lactation, or could produce no milk at all.

Doctors, of course, are stumped by all this. Stumped.

The NIH database has a preprint study making the case that there are negligible amounts of PEG in the breast milk of vaccinated women. [See this]

But what is a negligible amount of a petroleum product in mother’s milk, when you are a tiny newborn with no immunities, just arriving in the world? The NIH preprint itself reported higher levels of GI distress and sleeplessness in the infants studied, and one mother had elevated PEG levels in breast milk, and the fine print concludes that more study is needed:

“Larger studies are needed to increase our understanding of transfer of PEG into human milk, and potential effects after ingestion by the infant. Although expert consensus states there is minimal or no potential risk for the infant from maternal COVID-19 vaccination(20,21), the minor symptoms that were reported (sleep changes and gastrointestinal symptoms) could be further investigated in future studies to determine if they are related to vaccination.”

Since no babies died in the brief time frame of the tiny study, the study concluded that nursing babies suffered no real ill effects from vaccinated mothers. But the study did not follow these poor babies, with their acknowledged sleeplessness and their confirmed GI distress, to see if they actually “thrived” — gained weight and developed normally.

On such faulty science were women assured that the vaccines were “safe and effective” for them and their nursing babies.

But — four of the lactating vaccinated women in the Pfizer documents reported “blue-green” breast milk. I am not making this up. And the nursing baby who died, with an inflamed liver — the case has been buried; has not made headlines.

Coincidentally — or not — the SAME FDA that turned a blind eye to vast harms to humans, and to the subcategory of moms and babies, in the Pfizer documents, declared that Abbot, a major producer of baby formula in the US, had to close its factory. [See this]

Coincidentally, with little formula available and with some or many (we don’t know) vaccinated moms having compromised breast milk, it turns out that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Mark Zuckerberg have all invested in a startup called “BioMilq” — which produces lab grown breast milk from mammary cells. [See this]. Reports of this startup include this Frankenstein-like language as if this is normal:

“The BIOMILQ team creates its product from cells taken from human breast tissue and milk, donated by women in the local community, who get a Target giftcard in return.” [See this]

As if all of this is not horrific enough, Ms Hecht drew studies from three countries — Canada, Scotland and now Israel – -to show that babies are dying disproportionately, during and after 2021, in highly vaccinated countries, and that newborns are dying disproportionately if they have vaccinated mothers versus unvaccinated mothers.

In highly vaccinated Scotland, almost twice the number of babies died in 2021 as died in baseline numbers. 

In Ontario, Canada, 86 babies died in 2021, versus a baseline of four or five; this was a baby die-off so severe that a brave Parliamentarian brought the issue to Parliament. [See this].

In Israel, at RamBam Hospital in Haifa, there were 34% more spontaneous abortions and stillbirths to vaccinated women as to unvaccinated women.

Ms Hecht also notes that menstrual dysregulation in vaccinated women is fully confirmed now by many studies, with an average of one extra day of bleeding a month (a side effect about which I warned about in March of 2021, which in turn got me called names by a CNN commentator and permanently deplatformed from Twitter).

You don’t have to know more than eighth grade biology to know that a dysregulated menstrual cycle, not to mention spike protein accumulating in the ovaries, not to mention the traversing of the bodies’ membranes, including the amniotic sac, by tiny hard fatty lipid nanoparticles, not to mention PEG in breast milk, is all going to affect fertility, fetal health, childbirth, and babies’ GI wellbeing or distress, and thus their ability or failure to thrive (let alone to bond).

And now, the babies are dying. Now scale the data from Canada, Scotland and Israel to all the vaccinated nations in the world.

What do we do with all of this?

Knowing as I now do, that Pfizer and the FDA knew that babies were dying and mothers’ milk discoloring by just looking at their own internal records; knowing as I do that they did not alert anyone let alone stop what they were doing, and that to this day Pfizer, the FDA and other demonic “public health” entities are pushing to MRNA-vaccinate more and more pregnant women; now that they are about to force this on women in Africa and other lower income nations who are not seeking the MRNA vaccines, per Pfizer CEO Bourla this past week at the WEF, and knowing that Pfizer is pushing and may even receive a US EUA for babies to five year olds — I must conclude that we are looking into an abyss of evil not seen since 1945.

So I don’t know about you, but I must switch gears with this kind of unspeakable knowledge to another kind of discourse.

I am not saying that this is exactly like finding evidence of Dr Mengele’s experiments; but I am saying, with these findings, that now the comparison may not be that excessive.

These anti-humans at Pfizer, speaking at the WEF; these anti-humans at the FDA; knowing what they know; are targeting the miraculous female body, with its ability to conceive, gestate, birth and nurture life. They are targeting the female body’s ability to sustain a newborn human being with nothing but itself. They are targeting the amniotic membrane, the ovaries that release the ovum, they are targeting the lymph and blood that help support the building up of mother’s milk, they are targeting the fetus in utero, helpless.

They are targeting the human fetus’ very environment, one of the most sacred spaces on this earth, if not the most sacred.

And they know it.

I don’t know about you, and I am not proselytizing, but as you may know if you read me here, these apocalyptic days, I turn to prayer. I have started to say in public, once I had to face the fact of the die-off of the babies, that this is a Biblical time; and I mean Old Testament Biblical.

It is a time like that of the construction of the Tower of Babel — of massive arrogance against divine plans. Men such Bill Gates tamper with and seek to outdo God’s best works in lab after lab, and Tech Bros “disrupt” the human competition for their unsought-after goods and services, by targeting human processes and by ruining the bodies made in the image of God.

It is a time like that when the ten plagues assailed the Egyptians in Exodus 11:4-6:

“4 So Moses said, “This is what the Lord says: ‘About midnight I will go throughout Egypt.Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the female slave, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt—worse than there has ever been or ever will be again. 7”

This was the worst plague of all, the slaying of the firstborn.

It is a time of ha-Satan — Satan — “going to and fro in the earth, and […] walking up and down in it”, as Job 2 describes him.

It is a time of demons sauntering around in human spaces, though they look human enough themselves, smug in their Italian suits on panels at the World Economic Forum.

Ha-Satan – and his armies: ruining the conception, the milk, the menses, the touch, the cradling of the infant by its mother, ruining the feeding of the infant; ruining the babies themselves.

I read the Prophets a lot these days — because how could I not? I am looking for what writer Annie Lamott called “Operating Instructions.” What do you do when humanity itself is threatened? When there are professional battalions and bureaucratic departments of people who act with anathema toward the human race?

Surely there must be a clue.

So I reread the story of Noah, and the Book of Esther, a lot these days; I reread Jeremiah.

We’ve been here before. Embarrassingly often, when it comes to that.

The story is always the same, at least in the Hebrew Bible (in the New Testament, of course, God skips to the end and upends the plot).

At least in the Hebrew Bible, God is always trying to get our attention, always, it seems, simply asking us just to walk alongside him; simply asking us to keep his not–too-challenging commandments; not, indeed, asking a lot.

Jeremiah 1:13:

The word of the Lord came to me again: “What do you see?”

“I see a pot that is boiling,” I answered. “It is tilting toward us from the north.”

14 The Lord said to me, “From the north disaster will be poured out on all who live in the land. 15 I am about to summon all the peoples of the northern kingdoms,” declares the Lord.

“Their kings will come and set up their thrones
in the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem;
they will come against all her surrounding walls
and against all the towns of Judah.
16 I will pronounce my judgments on my people
because of their wickedness in forsaking me,
in burning incense to other gods
and in worshiping what their hands have made.”

In the Hebrew Bible, anyway, the math is simple. We turn, we listen, and we are saved; or we carry on heedlessly, worshipping what our own hands have made, sluts to other gods — to “the science,” to media lies; to the narcissism of convention, these days, one might say — and thus we are lost.

We have been nearly lost, time after time after time.

This time could really be the last time; these monsters in the labs, on the transnational panels, are so very skillful; and so powerful; and their dark work is so extensive.

If God is there — again — after all the times that we have tried his patience — and who indeed knows? – will we reach out a hand to him in return, will we take hold in the last moment out of this abyss, and simply find a way somehow to walk alongside him?

Or will we this time, in losing the babies, and heedlessly carrying on nonetheless — be truly lost ourselves?

Enigma MCMXC a.d (Full Album)

I’ve been a fan from 1990. One of a kind of music! And it never gets old! It’s just timeless! Still listening and will ’till the end of days…

How to Make Blueberry Pie Filling

A fine inspiration for some delicious blueberry pie to charm your family and surprise your friends with. Oh, and don’t forget to have some quality ice cream in the freezer. -MM

Quick and easy blueberry pie filling recipe that’s made with only 5 ingredients: blueberries, sugar, vanilla, lemon, cornstarch. It can be used as topping or filling in many desserts.

For the longest time, I used to be intimidated by making HOMEMADE blueberry pie filling or any fillings, whatsoever. However, after a bit of practice and my mom guiding me along, I really enjoy making pie fillings from scratch now.

They taste so much BETTER than canned fillings and you can ADJUST the flavors and extracts, based on your preference.

They also always have a wonderful FRESH flavor and aroma that’s intoxicating in desserts.

How do you make blueberry pie filling with frozen blueberries?

Add blueberries in a nonstick saucepan and cook until they release their juices. Separately, whisk together sugar and cornstarch and add this into the saucepan. Continue mixing until mixture thickens. Remove from heat and add vanilla extract and lemon juice.

How do you make blueberry sauce?

It’s made the same way as blueberry pie filling but it is sweeter and more sugar should be added to this recipe. Many people also believe that both are the same and there is no difference.

How do you make a blueberry pie?

  1. Bake a pie crust (store-bought or homemade).
  2. Fill it with this blueberry pie filling.
  3. Top it off with whipped cream.
  4. Decorate with chocolate shavings.

What thickens pie filling?

There are many options:

  1. Use CORNSTARCH as a thickener. It’s best to dissolve it in some water first so there are no lumps.
  2. Make blueberry pie filling with TAPIOCA FLOUR.
  3. Use regular ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR. I have noticed that this leaves a subtle after-taste and makes the filling a bit cloudy.
  4. Use CLERAR JEL/CLEAR GEL, which thickens very well and also prevents the cloudy appearance.

If you are planning on making blueberry pie filling without cornstarch because of allergies or intolerances, tapioca flour, all-purpose flour and Clear Jel would all be good choices.

Tips for homemade blueberry pie filling:

  • If you are knowledgable on canning, you can easily follow those techniques to make canned blueberry pie filling and enjoy it for months.
  • I used cornstarch to thicken this pie filling but you can also use tapioca flour, all-purpose flour or Clear Jel.
  • This FROZEN blueberry pie filling can also be made with FRESH blueberries.
  • ADJUST the amount of sugar, based on your preference. More sugar makes a sweet pie filling. less sugar makes a slightly tart pie filling.
  • Add a little lemon zest, lime zest or even orange zest to give this filling a slight citrus kick.
  • Add a little cinnamon powder to add a little spice to this filling.
  • You must use a NON-STICK saucepan to prevent the filling from burning or sticking.
  • This filling will THICKEN a bit more as it cools down.
  • This filling is enough for a 9 inch pie.

Blueberry pie filling uses:

There are MANY recipes using blueberry pie filling and below are some blueberry pie filling desserts that I have tried and enjoyed.

  • Blueberry pie filling crisp: Use your family’s no fail crisp recipe and replace the canned filling with this homemade blueberry version.
  • Blueberry pie filling bread: Use it as a topping on the bread or slice the bread in half and use it as a filling.
  • Blueberry pie filling bars: Use your favorite bars recipe and replace whatever fruit filling you are using with this one.
  • Blueberry pie filling muffins: After your muffins have baked, make a hole in teh center and fill it with a spoonful of this filling. It would be a nice fruity surprise to bite into.
  • Blueberry pie filling coffee cake: Use your favorite fruit coffee cake and replace the fruit filling with this blueberry one.
  • Blueberry pie filling cobbler: Use your family’s no fail crisp recipe and replace the canned filling with this homemade blueberry version.
  • Blueberry pie filling dump cake: This is a very easy cake that’s usually made it the slow cooker with a cake mix and canned filling. Just replace the canned filling with my recipe.
  • Crepe, waffle or pancake filling or topping
  • Cake filling
  • Cupcake filling
  • Scone topping
  • Ice cream topping
  • Trifles
  • Yogurt topping
  • Cheesecake topping

 

How to make it happen.

VIDEO: Miami Shootout Looks Like War Zone (Jesus H. Christ!)

One minute surveillance video (below) from a private home doorbell camera portrays some of the nearly 200 shots fired in NW Miami-Dade, Florida.

The shooters killed one and wounded several others near 99th St and 21st Ct.

Police have made arrests. Those arrested are linked to other high-profile crimes in Miami-Dade.

 

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

If this is how things are now, here in parts of the U.S., just TRY to imagine how ferocious they will be when everything falls apart economically, and with the food supply.

To say we’re in for a “shit storm” is a massive understatement.

Look at how fast this started and stopped.

A quiet residential neighborhood.  Presumably a reasonably safe area.

In come the hoodlums.  They get out of their car and within seconds. war zone.

This is how fast it can happen where YOU live.

And I fear that, for very many of us, this is exactly how fast, and how ferocious, it will be.

I’m not certain how you can “prepare” for this level of violence happening so quickly.

I guess it’s a state of mind, more than anything.  You know, having it down pat that if you hear gunshots you will get to whatever firearm you have, where ever you have it, and try to defend.

But seeing how fast this began and ended, and knowing the sheer terror that a human being feels when he’s being shot at, with bullets teraing holes in walls, debris flying all over, the noise, the smell of gunpowder . . . its instant chaos on an emotional level.

I am of the personal opinion that in many areas of the U.S., this is what will come when the food runs out, or the economy finally falls-over, dead.

These people want what they want and are willing to take it by force.

Will YOU be the one they do this too?  Will I be the one?

None of us know.

But at least with the video above, you get a real glimpse of how fast, and how ferocious, it can be.

Depeche Mode – Personal Jesus (Official Video)

Enjoy.

FIRST TWO AMERICANS CAPTURED IN UKRAINE

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Americans Robert Drueke, 39, and Andy Huynh, 27.
Americans Robert Drueke, 39, and Andy Huynh, 27.

Americans Robert Drueke, 39, and Andy Huynh, 27, have been captured by the Russian Army, fightng inside Ukraine.   Word is out they were captured last week.

The pair were part of a ten-men squad which encountered Russian forces in Kharkiv.

They disabled a Russian tank but then were lost in the fog of return fire and disappeared, comrades say.

Drueke served in Iraq in the US Army but Huynh, a former Marine, has never been in active combat before.

He gave an interview before he ventured to the region in which he said he was prepared to die.

Developing . . .

Two American Fighters Are Believed Captured By Russia In Ukraine

wo American citizens and military veterans who were fighting alongside Ukraine forces against the Russian invasion are feared captured, CNN and other major media are reporting Thursday.

Alexander John-Robert Drueke, 39, from Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27, from Hartselle, Alabama are currently “missing” from the battlefield, however, their precise fate is as yet unconfirmed, according to a State Department official. 

If their capture by the Russian army is confirmed, it would mark the first known instance that American volunteers have been taken into custody by Russia, raising the stakes and tensions significantly between Washington and Moscow.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby didn’t confirm the reports, but strongly hinted that it’s the administration’s belief they were likely captured, given he stated to reporters the US government “will do everything we can” to get Huynh and Drueke back.

The men’s families have sounded the alarm over their likely capture, describing that they lost all contact with the pair a week ago. Further CNN in a fresh report has revealed the following details of their last known whereabouts as follows

A man who is acting as the team’s sergeant, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, provided CNN with photos of both men’s passports and their entry stamps into Ukraine. The man said that their unit was fighting under the command of Ukraine’s 92nd mechanized brigade on June 9, near the town of Izbytske.

Drueke and Huynh, he said, went missing during the battle and subsequent search missions failed to find any remains. A post on a Russian propaganda channel on Telegram the following day claimed that two Americans had been captured near Kharkiv. “It was absolute chaos,” he told CNN. “There was about a hundred plus infantry advancing on our positions. We had a T72 firing on people from 30, 40 meters away.”

Drueke’s modter said to CNN that “they are presumed to be prisoners of war, but that has not been confirmed.”

Throughout Thursday morning the reports received such international attention that the Kremlin formally addressed the allegations of American foreign fighters in its custody:

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on June 16 in a televised program that Washington had not contacted Moscow regarding the two U.S. citizens.

Huynh is a Marine veteran, while Drueke is an Army veteran – though little has as yet been revealed by the respective branches about their service record at this point.

The US State Dept. now says the US is “closely monitoring the situation” and are “in contact with Ukrainian authorities” – but issued no further details based on “privacy considerations”. Likely if US officials had anything to make them believe that the Russian Telegram reports and claims are false, they would deny it.

Last week there was shock and outrage in the West after a pair of British fighters that were in the Ukrainian army were handed death sentences after their capture during battles in the Donbas region by a pro-Russian Donetsk court. 28-year old Aiden Aslin and 48-year old Shaun Pinner were charged with “terrorism” and “being a mercenary”. A third foreigner, a Moroccan, was also tried alongside them and given the same sentence.

Proud of Yourselves?

Five-year-old children generally have no idea what adult sexuality is about….

America has an eating disorder — have you noticed? — and a touch of the old sexual dysphoria — am I a boy or a girl? — and has been caught in its room playing with razor blades. Ergo: America is a thirteen-year-old girl in need of some therapeutic assistance. Who will answer the call for help?

Here we are in the fat middle of Pride Month. Why is it, then, that the authorities have sent squadrons of drag queens out across the land like so many flying monkeys, flapping and shrieking from the candy-colored forests of Oz, to conduct “story hours” for children? Is America not sufficiently confused these days? Are drag queens really the best interlocutors for the doctrine of Diversity and Inclusion? Have we nothing better on offer to occupy childrens’ minds, say, learning to bake bread or build a bird-house? Practical skills they will need when the economy of Western Civ completes its disorienting descent out of Modern Times into the New Medieval?

Does anyone actually know what children think about a drag queen reading, say, My Princess Boy by Cheryl Kilodavis to a roomful of five-year-old boys and girls? I mean, apart from what the parents who take them there tell us their children think. (“They were enchanted!”) We know that the parents are pretending that this is a wholesome developmental exercise. And yet, let’s face it: is it not the whole point of being a drag queen to present a horrifying parody of an adult female human? Something like women-as-monsters?

A new progressive America.

Do any of the mommies who bring their children to the drag queen story hour present themselves in public as women the way the drag queens do? As, above all, sexually super-available? Would, say, the Palo Alto mommy of a five-year-old pause to twerk in the frozen food section of the supermarket on any given afternoon? In that context, what might be the reaction of other mommies shopping for hot pockets and Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby?

Five-year-old children generally have no idea what adult sexuality is about. Should perhaps their first exposure to a realm so fraught and complex that many adults do not understand it be the presentation of women as monsters? And why are the mommies so avid for their children to be introduced to sexuality this way? Are some of the children perceptive and astute enough to suspect that drag queens on display are not really women? That, for instance, they might be… men? (A beard can be a give-away.) And might they take that thought a step or two further and ask themselves: why does this man want to pretend to be a monster-woman? Why doesn’t he want to be a daddy? Are mommies monsters? Can they turn into something like this when I’m not around? Are daddies who try to act like mommies monsters?

How exactly is a child supposed to process all of this? All on its own, without any inversions, distortions, and misconstructions, sex is difficult for some young humans to process. By the time they reach the threshold of puberty — say, age thirteen for girls — the onset of sexual development is so alarming that they attempt to starve their way out of it and cut themselves up.

Of course, we have not begun to probe what might animate a man to present himself to the world as a monstrous parody of a woman. Suffice it to say that such behavior suggests some complicated psychodynamics. And why, exactly, are they suddenly on-display so extravagantly now across the country, supposedly for the edification of children? I’ll tell you why: It’s not actually for the sake of the children. The children are just pawns in what is actually a national political psychodrama. Or rather, they are hostages.

What you’re seeing is the Party of Chaos sending a message to the rest of us — those who are not members of the Party of Chaos. The message is: we will take your children and destroy their minds, and pretend that it’s just another module of their education… and you will know, and we will know, and you will know that we know that this is just a malicious shuck-and-jive to humiliate you while we wreck the machinery of civilization, which we hate because it requires boundaries and norms to function.

And think of it: just days ago the FDA announced that it accepted Pfizer’s application for a Covid-19 vaccine for children between six months and five years old. That’s the same “safe and effective” vaccine they have been giving to the rest of you for over a year, which has produced adverse reactions and illnesses in rather striking numbers. Do you know why they did that? I’ll tell you why: to extend the emergency use authorization that shields Pfizer from legal liability for their mRNA vaccines. They are not content with wrecking civilization. They want to kill you and your children too.

“The Economy Is Going To Collapse” – Here Are 18 Signs That The Economic Meltdown We Have Been Waiting For Has Already Begun

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In all my years of writing, I have never seen more economic pessimism than I am seeing right now.  Over the past couple of months there has been a monumental shift in public sentiment, and now just about everyone realizes that we are heading into very troubled economic times. 

Of course there were still a few economic optimists that were searching for a ray of hope, but the Federal Reserve left no room for optimism when it announced the largest interest rate hike in 28 years on Wednesday.  When the Fed aggressively raised rates in the early 1980s, it resulted in one of the most painful recessions in American history.  Unfortunately, many believe that what is ahead of us is going to be even worse.

For example, legendary Wall Street investor Michael Novogratz is openly warning that “the economy is going to collapse”

“The economy is going to collapse,” he told MarketWatch. “We are going to go into a really fast recession, and you can see that in lots of ways,” he added.

“Housing is starting to roll over,” he said. “Inventories have exploded. There are layoffs in multiple industries, and the Fed is stuck [with a position of having to] hike [interest rates] until inflation rolls over.”

Novogratz is correct, but I think that it would be more accurate to say that “the economy is already starting to collapse”.  The following are 18 signs that the economic meltdown we have been waiting for has already begun…

#1 Stock prices have been plummeting in recent weeks, and that has resulted in almost 3 trillion dollars being erased from retirement accounts in the United States…

The U.S. stock market rout that has put U.S. equities in a bear market isn’t just reducing the net worth of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It’s also taking a toll on Americans’ retirement savings, wiping out trillions of dollars in value.

The selloff has erased nearly $3 trillion from U.S. retirement accounts, according to Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. By her calculations, 401(k) plan participants have lost about $1.4 trillion from their accounts since the end of 2021. People with IRAs — most of which are 401(k) rollovers — have lost $2 trillion this year.

#2 The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell beneath the psychologically important 30,000 barrier for the first time in more than a year on Thursday.  If it cannot return to that level within the next few trading sessions, a lot of investors are really going to start to panic.

#3 The Dow is now down 19 percent from the all-time high.

#4 The S&P 500 is now down 24 percent from the all-time high.

#5 The Nasdaq is now down 34 percent from the all-time high.  Just think about that for a moment.  A third of the value of the Nasdaq has already been wiped out.

#6 Two-thirds of the value of all cryptocurrencies has already been wiped out since the peak of the market.  Last November, the total value of all cryptocurrencies had soared past the three trillion dollar mark.  As I write this article, that number has fallen to less than a trillion.

#7 This week we witnessed the fastest rise in mortgage rates since 1987.  Needless to say, this is going to absolutely devastate the housing market…

Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday that the average rate on the 30-year loan this week rose to 5.78% from 5.23%, the latest in a series of rapid increases and the biggest one-week jump since 1987. The rate is well above the 2.93% recorded just one year ago and marks the steepest level since November 2008.

#8 The largest percentage of sellers ever recorded reduced the list price on their homes during the four week period ending June 12th.

#9 In some parts of the nation, home prices have already fallen by as much as 20 percent.

#10 Compared to the same period a year ago, the total number of mortgage applications was down 52.7 percent last week.

#11 We just learned that housing starts in the U.S. fell 14.4 percent in May.

#12 The number of permits for the construction of new homes was down 7 percent in May.

#13 Wholesale prices continue to accelerate at a very alarming pace

Wholesale prices rose at a brisk pace in May as inflation pressures mounted on the U.S. economy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday.

The producer price index, a measure of the prices paid to producers of goods and services, rose 0.8% for the month and 10.8% over the past year. The monthly rise was in line with Dow Jones estimates and a doubling of the 0.4% pace in April.

#14 The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker is now projecting that economic growth during the second quarter will be 0 percent.

#15 The Philadelphia Fed Business Index came in at a negative 3.3 reading for the month of June.  This represents the first contraction since the early days of the COVID pandemic.

#16 One recent survey discovered that small business owners are “feeling their gloomiest in nearly five decades”.

#17 At this point, 59 percent of manufacturers in the United States believe that a recession is coming.

#18 Bloomberg is projecting that the probability of a recession during the next 24 months is 98.5 percent.

But this was not supposed to happen.

Last year, the talking heads on television assured us that a golden new age of prosperity was just around the corner and that the stock market could just keep going up indefinitely.

In fact, many of those talking heads were telling us things that now look completely and utterly ridiculous in retrospect.

Our leaders thought that they could defy the laws of economics, and for a while their “economic voodoo” seemed to be working.

But the truth is that every time they kicked the can down the road they just made our long-term problems even worse.

Now we have reached a point where the immediate future looks extremely bleak, and the outlook for our long-term future is absolutely nightmarish.

If we would have made much different decisions along the way, we would not be facing such a horrifying crisis today.

Unfortunately, what is done is done, and now we get to reap the consequences for the very foolish decisions that our leaders have been making.

Deep Forest 1992 (Sound Enhanced) High Quality

This fantastic Album is the first musical sensation from French duo Eric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez. The album mixes New Age electronics with UNESCO field recordings of music from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Solomon Islands, Burundi, Tibesti, and the Sahel.

Some profits from this album go to the Pygmy Fund, a California-based organisation committed to helping the natives of central Africa cope with environmental threats to their homeland.

Wherein I Use Greek Mythology To Show How Screwed We Are

“Would Homer cut away from Odysseus’s journey just as he was being enticed by the siren’s song?” – BoJack Horseman

We’ve reached the Scylla and Charybdis stage of our economy.

Scylla was, in Greek mythology, a six-headed monster that was probably less scary than the average half-dozen Congresscritters, and certainly less dangerous.

Charybdis was a whirlpool that sucked inside everything that got close to it three times a day, so it was pretty much exactly like Kamala Harris.

The idea is that if you’re between Scylla and Charybdis, life is on the edge because there are dangers on either side. When Odysseus tried to sneak between the two, he lost six crewmembers, one to each head of Scylla. Thankfully they didn’t go too close to Charybdis, since Kamala has a mean-looking canker sore, and some gifts last forever.

Trying to thread the fine line between Scylla and Charybdis: that’s where our economy is now.

Could it be that the Odyssey is just a made-up excuse by a husband as to why he’s ten years late?

As inflation rages through the system, every minute that we have an interest rate well below the rate of inflation, inflation is being fed.  To quote Joe Biden from January 24, 2022, “It’s a great asset – more inflation.  What a stupid son of a bitch.”  You can tell he’s excited to Build Back Better!

Oddly, it’s not inflation in everything.  Some items are starting to deflate now.  Houses, for instance.  The price of a house is tied to the interest rate – the more interest wrapped into a monthly payment, the fewer the number of buyers that can afford or qualify for a loan.  And in Biden’s America® people have to qualify for more important things, like a Quarter Pounder™ or a tank of gas.

But back to home loans:  fewer people qualify?  Less demand.  Less demand?  Lower home prices.

When we moved to Modern Mayberry in the middle of the Great Recession, some houses had been on the market for longer than 350 days.  These were decent houses, but there just wasn’t any demand.  Recently, as people began to take my advice and flee the cities, houses disappeared off the market in days here in Modern Mayberry.  With all the city folk moving in, at least I know what a hipster weighs:  an Instagram®.

One hipster I knew poured water from an ice tray into his beverage.  He liked ice before it was cool.

Now?  Interest rates for mortgages are going up, so demand for houses will be going down.  Eventually, the market for houses will go back to where it was when I got here.  That’s okay, I never expected to walk away from Stately Wilder Mansion with a single dime of profit.  For me, a house is where I live, not an investment.

So, interest rates up, housing prices down.  Simple.

Also, interest rates up, stock prices down.  For the last decade, stocks have been just about the only game for people who were trying to keep up with inflation.  This was a continual pressure upwards on stocks.  Now as interest rates go up, there are other options.

Traditionally, there was (this was something I read in an article a long time ago) a formula showing the value of a stock in relation to the interest rate:  Maximum P/E=20-Prime Rate.  That meant, with an interest rate of 0%, a stock was at fair value with a Price to Earnings ratio of 20.  Likewise, if the interest rate was 10%, the fair market P/E would be about 10.

Obviously, it’s such a one-dimensional analysis that it was made back when “digital computing” meant counting on your fingers.  There’s no way I’d suggest anyone use it to pick stocks (nor would I suggest taking the advice of an Internet humorist on any investment advice no matter how witty, charming, and handsome he might be), but it does show how the relationship between interest rates and stock prices and earnings was thought about once upon a time.  But it summarizes the same idea – interest rates up, stocks down.

Heck, it even led me to a never-fail way to manipulate individual stocks: if I buy a stock, it goes down.

There are other impacts, too. For instance, it makes debt harder to pay back for people around the planet. If Egypt owes money to ChaseAmericanFargo™ Bank and the interest rate is variable, that means that Egypt will have to start selling items to pay back New York, or London, or Beijing. Heck, the British would already have the Pyramids, but they wouldn’t fit in the British Museum

More money to the banking centers? Less money for chow for the Egyptians. We saw this exact scenario play out in the Arab Spring in 2012. Expensive stuff caused people to go hungry and then hungry people with no hope do what they always do when they can’t watch Netflix™ and buy Twinkies©.

They swap out the government. The new boss looks a lot like the old boss in Egypt, and it’s exactly the same boss as it was in Syria. Some things don’t change. If it’s bad enough, it also craters the economies in South America and, even Canada might have its assets frozen. Or, more frozen.

But when the interest rates go up, it’s not just the government in Egypt that gets squeezed.  The current debt in the United States is $30.5 trillion.  The total US debt, including personal debt, student loans, credit cards, and I.O.U.s to me from that one guy that owes me $20 is about $91 trillion.  (All numbers from usdebtclock.org)

When the interest rates go up, the payments on interest go up.  That means less money available for everything else.  When last I looked, the mandatory payments the Federal government were as much as or more than the amount of money that they took in.  That means that printing more money is now the only way the system can work.  It’s like having a tobacco cessation class with a two-cigar minimum.

That leads to the difficult bit – the hall of mirrors.  If we don’t raise interest rates, and raise them quickly and raise them high enough, inflation will devastate the economy.  If we do raise them, interest payments will freeze the economy and dry up all the PEZ®, pantyhose, and elephant rides the government buys daily.  We are in a classic trap, but it is a trap entirely devised by the Fed® and the politicians working long-term problems on short-term incentives.

By attempting to push back the moment of financial reckoning by any means possible, we’ve created a failure that is much, much larger.  If we would have let financial companies fail in 2000 and 2008, and fixed the structural problems with Medicare, perhaps, just perhaps we wouldn’t be here today.

But we are.

How bad are things?

Again, people have been trying to gauge when things in the stock market are out of whack – Gregory Mannarino came up with a market risk index that he called the Mannarino Market Risk Index, which was modified by Nobody Special Finance into the Modified Mannarino Market Risk Index.  You can watch the video on what makes it up here (LINK).  It’s only twelve minutes, and it’s pretty simple.  The MMMRI is simple, but it’s still quite a bit more sophisticated than the 20=P/E-Interest rate formula from back in the Stone Age.  The summary is of selected past MMMRIs is:

  • Black Monday (1987),              MMMRI    234
  • Dotcom Bubble Pop (2000),    MMMRI    208
  • Great Recession (2008),           MMMRI    169

Right now?

Yup. MMMRI is screaming loudly that the stock market is really, really messed up. But you knew that. Things are broken, and they’re breaking faster as things go downhill.

So, whatever you do, don’t buy canned goods and storage food and precious metals and PEZ® and ammo.

Nope.

I’m sure that the team of Biden and Harris along with Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, (who had no idea that inflation was even a problem) or Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secretary, (who said that high gas prices are “a very compelling case” to buy an electric car) will be here to help us charter a safe course between Scylla and Charybdis.

Oh, wait, Biden and Harris are Scylla and Charybdis.

Golden Earring – “When The Bullet Hits The Bone” (Twilight Zone) Live at Rockpalast, 1982

Appropriate. Welcome to mid-year 2022.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

 

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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A Gorgeous Colossal Millennium Falcon, Graphic Motifs, pulled beef Arepas, and daddy fanny packs for beer transport

I hope and trust that you all are also visiting my Metallicman You-Tube, and considering my Metallicman Patreon site . As well as this (here) MM site.

The You-tube Metallicman is (of course) all free. Videos discuss various subjects ranging from Geopolitical issues, to China, to cats, and social issues of the day.

And the Metallicman Patreon focuses on the world-line travel, souls, extraterrestrials, mysteries, the Domain, Prayer Affirmations, and OOPARTS aspects of Metallicman. While many of the videos and content provided there are for subscribers, not all are.

All in all, I hope that you will gain some benefit in visiting this trio of web-sites.

We continue on our daily briefing of the crazy discord that is flooding and saturating the world right now.

Daegon Magus

First up; DM was interviewed on You-Tube. He’s still “alive and kicking”, and doing well. He is embroiled in a ton load of changes (and of course, I associate that they are tied to his affirmation campaigns of the last year or so). But he’s doing well. So go ahead and watch his interview…

Pabellon Criollo – Venezuela’s National Dish

"...My take on the national dish with lots of variations. Tender, stewed cumin flavored beef with bacon-y black beans, caramelised plantain and rice. to mop up the juices. Cook this up next Independence Day!"

Expectations

I fully expect an almost exact repeat of the Ukraine debacle in Taiwan. Before the next U.S. Presidential election, the Neocon idiots in the Biden administration will deliberately or accidentally trigger a proxy war with China, which the U.S. will lose. 

Until the toxic Neocon ideology of the Washington Blob is exorcised, the U.S. will face an unending series of foreign policy disasters.

-HH

Jeff and his Hemi-Sync / Self-Hypnosis explorations

I like Jeff and he writes on a great number of Go-Political issues. I have linked to him on numerous occasions. He has taken advice on the self-hypnosis, and mind centering techniques that I promote and he has told me that he doesn’t really know whats going on, but that he feels far better using the techniques.

Today, I got this from him…

Really fascinating. My Huawei watch analyzes sleep. Check out the right side of the attached graph, starting at 6:02, when I started my self-hypnosis.

It is impossible for me to sleep on my back, yet my hypnosis mimics deep/light sleep and I even have REM! Don’t know where the semi-consciousness periods happen, but I am clearly not in an awakened state.

Thought you might find this interesting.

2022 06 10 07 55
2022 06 10 07 55

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LEGO’s Gorgeous Colossal Millennium Falcon Set Is A Mind-Numbing 7,541 Pieces

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Lego has released a new Millennium Falcon set that’s bound to impress any Star Wars fan. This was released a few years back, but gosh! What a kit!

Coming in at 7,541 pieces, Lego said that it’s the biggest Millennium Falcon set it’s ever released—the second-largest set, which was released in 2007, had 5,195 pieces—and when built will measure 8 inches high, 33 inches long, and 22 inches wide. Even before you build it, it’s big enough that Lego has suggested rolling it out on wheels. (In comparison, the Lego Millennium Falcon set released ahead of The Force Awakens had a respectable 1,329 pieces.)

The Millennium Falcon has touches of its roots in the original Star Wars trilogy as well as the newer one. It comes with both the circular and rectangular dishes that go on top of the ship, 11 buildable characters including two different Han Solo’s, Leia Organa, Chewbacca, Rey, Finn, BB-8, and two porgs, and plenty of the touches that are essential to the Falcon’s interior decorations. There’s even a few new additions made to the Falcon that may end up in The Last Jedi.

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4 Really Big Names That Are Warning That Major Economic Disaster Is Ahead

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I hope that you are enjoying these beautiful summer weekends while you still can, because it appears that very troubled times are dead ahead.  Simultaneously, inflation continues to spiral out of control even as economic activity in the U.S. dramatically slows down.  Many have compared what we are currently experiencing to the “stagflation” of the 1970s, but the truth is that what we are facing will eventually be so much worse than anything that we went through back then.  A meltdown of historic proportions is here, and as you will see below, some of the biggest names in the entire country are talking about it.

On Monday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States set another all-time record high

The gas price spike keeps getting worse.

The national average jumped to $4.87 a gallon on Monday, according to AAA. That’s up 25 cents in the past week and 59 cents in the past month.

There are now 10 states where the average price of gasoline is $5 a gallon or higher, with the latest being Michigan and Indiana. Washington, DC, is also above $5, according to CNN.

A 25 cent increase in one week is just insane.

If we continue on this trajectory, the price of gasoline would go up about a dollar a month.

I can’t imagine that will be the case, but stranger things have happened.

Overall, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has now more than doubled since Joe Biden entered the White House.

How high will it be a year from now?

For a long time I warned my readers that the price of gasoline would eventually hit ten dollars a gallon, but now we have learned that it is already almost there at one gas station in California.

Meanwhile, U.S. economic activity is really slowing down and we are being warned to brace ourselves for the worst.

In fact, at this point some of the most prominent people in the entire country are starting to sound like they could be writing for The Economic Collapse Blog.  The following are four really big names that are warning that major economic disaster is ahead…

#1 If you have a “bad feeling” about the U.S. economy, you are not alone.  Elon Musk says that he has a “super bad feeling” about where the U.S. economy is heading, and so he intends to reduce the Tesla workforce by approximately 10 percent…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a “super bad feeling” about the economy and wants to cut about 10% of jobs at the electric carmaker, he said in an email to executives on Thursday seen by Reuters.

The message came two days after the world’s richest man told employees to return to the workplace or leave the company.

#2 I never imagined that I would write about something that rapper Cardi B said on this website, but that is precisely what I am about to do.  At one time she was a huge Biden supporter, but on Sunday she publicly suggested that the U.S. economy is about to enter a recession

Rapper and Joe Biden supporter Cardi B took to Twitter on Sunday to ask when “they going to announce” that the United States is “going into a recession.”

“When y’all think they going to announce that we going into a recession?” Cardi B wrote Sunday in a tweet, which has since garnered more than 120,000 likes, and over 16,000 retweets.

Actually, the U.S. economy contracted during the first quarter of 2022, and if it contracts again in the second quarter then we are actually already in a recession right now.

#3 I really admire author Robert Kiyosaki, and his advice has helped millions of people all over the globe.  In the past he was known for his relentless optimism, but now he is almost as pessimistic about our economic future as I am.  For example, he tweeted out the following back on March 8th

DO YOU HAVE a PLAN “B”? We are in BIGGEST BUBBLE in world history. Bubbles in stocks, real estate, commodities & oil. FUTURE? Possible DEPRESSION with HYPER-INFLATION. My PLAN B: be an entrepreneur, stay out of stock market, create own assets, use debt as $, save G,S, BC, guns.

Then he followed that up with this gem on March 13th

BRANDON & FED want INFLATION to pay off trillions in debt. BEST INVESTMENT may be stocking products you will always use such as toilette paper, trash bags, canned goods, frozen foods, gold, silver, Bitcoin. I do not trust Brandon or Fed. They are Marxists. End the Fed & Brandon.

And then on April 15th he boldly declared that a “hyper-inflation depression” has arrived…

Wiley COYOTE moment coming. Biggest Bubble Bust coming. Baby Boomer’s retirements to be stolen. $10 trillion in fake money spending ending. Government, Wall Street & Fed are thieves. Hyper-inflation Depression here. Buy gold, silver, Bitcoin before the coyote wakes up. Take care

Of course he is dead on accurate about where the economy is heading.  I don’t share his optimism about Bitcoin, but otherwise I think that the things that he has shared are very wise.

#4 The crisis that we are now dealing with did not arrive overnight.  For years, many of us have been relentlessly warning about debt levels, the destruction of our currency, and the foolish decisions that our leaders were making.  Now we are facing the largest debt bubble in all of human history, and there is no easy way out.  On Monday, some thoughts that Kim Dotcom shared on Twitter went viral all over the Internet

Let’s do the math:

US total debt
$90 trillion

US unfunded liabilities
$169 trillion

Total
$259 trillion

Minus all US assets
$193 trillion

Balance
– $66 trillion

That’s $66 trillion of debt and liabilities after every asset in the US has been sold off.

I might quibble with the precise numbers that he used a little bit, but overall Kim Dotcom is right on target.

And I really like how he summarized the nightmare that is in front of us

So even if the US could sell all assets at the current value, which is impossible, it would still be broke.

The US is beyond bankrupt.
This patient is already dead.
This patient is now a zombie.

You probably wonder why are things still going? Why didn’t everything collapse yet.

It’s all perception, denial and dependency.

Our leaders have tried to keep the party going for as long as they possibly could, and for a while that actually worked.

But now a day of reckoning has arrived, and a horrifying economic meltdown has begun.

We aren’t talking about a “recession” that will be here for a while followed by a return to the way that things used to be.

No, what we are heading for is the sort of immense economic nightmare that I have been warning about for years.

Many Americans will be greatly surprised by how rapidly things totally fall apart, but the real surprise has been that it has taken us so long to get to this point.

You can’t defy the laws of economics forever, and we are about to see the greatest debt pyramid that the planet has ever seen come crashing down all around us.

Barflies bantering about Ukraine…

Biden's best bet now is to topple Zelensky, say there's been a coup then head off to try his luck with China. :) 

Who knows, Perhaps the Biden admin and the Euro twits will be foolish enough to sanction China as well.

-Peter AU1

US imports from China rose to an all-time record after seasonal adjustment in April, despite the Shanghai lockdown

China exports to US jump, contrary to press reports

By David P. Goldman 

US imports from China rose to an all-time record after seasonal adjustment in April, despite the Shanghai lockdown and other Covid-related blockages in the Chinese economy. That isn’t what you read in Bloomberg News, whose 30 economists and 100 full-time economics reporters apparently haven’t learned the difference between seasonally adjusted and unadjusted data.

Found HERE

This Modern Japanese Fishing Boat Designed With Graphic Motifs

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Have you ever seen a fishing boat with so much style? Nendo design studio has transformed the Japanese fishing boat Shofukumaru into a true work of art.

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The crew of such a ship usually stays at sea for about ten months, a heavy ordeal both physically and mentally. Most of the young crew members do not come back on a second mission. It was therefore asked to create a ship that would attract young members and reduce their stress.

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The ship was covered by a linear pattern that emphasizes the curve of the hull. The rest was decorated with Japanese patterns from the hull to the interior of the ship.

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The design has a lot of straight lines, a shape that could remind of life ashore (straight lines of buildings, windows, screens…) which could then comfort the crew. A beautiful story proving that art is an element that can improve the comfort at work.

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Military aircraft crashes in California

A military aircraft, originally reported to be carrying nuclear material, but subsequently reported to NOT be carrying nuclear material, has crashed in California, leaving officials to believe all five passengers are dead.

The plane crashed in Imperial County near Highway 78, preliminary reports indicate.

Officials believe at least five people were aboard at the time of the crash.

Investigators have presumed all passengers are dead.

It is unknown what caused the crash.

Original reports claimed the plane was carrying  nuclear material.  The military now says that is false.  They now say the plane DID NOT have any nuclear material onboard.

Military officials are currently at the scene of the crash and an investigation is underway.

The crash happened near Highway 78 and Coachella Canal Road.

I don't know what to think. But disinformation; contel is normal with the United States today. -MM

Long term consequences…

Europe and Russia are natural trading partners, so the U.S. has accomplished, at great expense, a gross distortion of trade relationships that is inflicting major damage on the EU economy. This is likely to result in political turmoil in EU states as economic conditions worsen. When Europeans awaken to the fact that they have been played by the U.S., the blowback may result in the disbanding of NATO.

The U.S. oligarchs who backed the Neocon project of global liberal hegemony will eventually realize that they have created an ideological monster that will seriously damage the U.S. economy. The toxic Neocon foreign policy that benefits only the defense sector (5% of the U.S. economy) will increasingly disrupt the global commerce on which much of the rest of the U.S. economy depends. The only question is how much damage the U.S. sustains before the Neocons are finally driven out of power.

- HH

ASML looks to expand China operations in Beijing and Shanghai

What’s all this United States nonsense about keeping high end chip fabricators out of the hands of the Chinese?

BEIJING — ASM Lithography of the Netherlands is expanding its presence in China by setting up its first direct sales office in Tianjin, and the Dutch company is also working on plans for locations in Beijing and Shanghai, according to ASML officials.

In the port city of Tianjin, ASML has a significant installed base of exposure tools at Motorola Inc.'s new MOS17 fab. This month, Motorola is expected to begin processing its first 8-inch (200-mm wafers in MOS17, which is being prepared for chip processing with 0.35- and eventually 0.25-micron technology.

ASML is also in the hunt for new business in Shanghai and Beijing. “The China market looks good for us,” said Rodney Chisholm, technical sales support manager for Asia at ASML, in an interview at last week's Semicon China 2001 trade show in Beijing.
Found HERE

Ukraine President’s Inner Circle Buying Multi-Million $ Mansions in Switzerland!

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If Ukraine is winning the war with Russia, then why are key people in President Zelensky’s inner circle buying houses in Switzerland? Oh, and how are they affording $9 million for those houses? Is U.S. “foreign aid” being stolen so they can buy multi-million dollar mansions?

Like most countries, Switzerland has land registry records showing who owns a particular property, how much it sold for, and what taxes are paid on it. Extracts from those land registries can be accessed by the general public.

Among the owners of luxury real estate in the country of banks and alpine meadows, are high-ranking officials from Zelensky’s entourage.

We begin with Dmitry Razumkov, a Ukrainian politician and former Chairman of the Verkhovna (Legislature).

According to land registry extract Mr. Razumkov seems to have bought himself a luxurious home for 8,954,621.00 Swiss Francs, which are about equal to the value of a U.S. Dollar. His name is at the bottom of the property sale record:

SwitzerlandTaxData Razumkov
SwitzerlandTaxData Razumkov

Next is Oleksandr Danyliuk (Daniljuk) former Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) of Ukraine. His name appears as the buyer of the 9,126,538.00 CHF home shown on the record below:

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SwitzerlandTaxData 2

Next is the record for Lyudmila Denisova, the same ombudsman who was fired because of false reports about the atrocities of the Russian army against children.

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SwitzerlandTaxData 1

The cost of each home is about 9 million Swiss francs. The franc is currently almost equivalent to the dollar.

They love Ukraine so much that they decided not to live in it.

Not only that, where did these “public servants” come up with about $9 million to get themselves mansions in Switzerland?

Most of these homes were purchased just BEFORE Russia began its Special Military Operation into Ukraine.

Were these homes some sort of Bribe or Payoff to these public officials to get them to sell-out Ukraine by stoking the fires until war broke out? Were these public officials paid-off by someone to get them to help start a war?

Or worse, did foreign aid to Ukraine get stolen so these people could buy luxurious mansions for themselves, far away from the war they helped start?

Inquiring minds want to know.

The Dadbag, A Fanny Pack That Looks Like An Exposed Daddy’s Belly

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This is the Dadbag, the brainchild of designer Albert Pukies, which I did just a little bit in my mouth right now. Each bag looks like the exposed stomach of a man, and come in a variety of skin tones, hairiness, and plumpness.

At the time of this writing, the Dadbag isn’t commercially available yet (Pukies is still looking for production partners), which is a shame for everybody who saw this and thought, “I must have one of those,” and a real blessing to everyone who didn’t.

Keep going for several more shots including the different options.

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David Cross: Why America Sucks at Everything

The video resonates with me. Sorry.

Healthy young people are dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a mysterious syndrome – as doctors seek answers through a new national register

  • People aged under the age of 40 being urged to go and get their hearts checked
  • May potentially be at risk of having Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS)
  • SADS is an ‘umbrella term to describe unexpected deaths in young people’
  • A 31-year-old woman who died in her sleep last year may have had SADs

People aged under 40 are being urged to have their hearts checked because they may potentially be at risk of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.

The syndrome, known as SADS, has been fatal for all kinds of people regardless of whether they maintain a fit and healthy lifestyle.

SADS is an ‘umbrella term to describe unexpected deaths in young people’, said The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, most commonly occurring in people under 40 years of age.

Article HERE

Russia Deploys S-400 Air Defense on “Snake Island”

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SnakeIslandMap large

Snake Island, also known as Serpent Island or Zmiinyi Island, is an island located in the Black Sea off the coast of (what used to be) Ukraine, near the Danube Delta, with an important role in delimiting what (used to be) Ukrainian territorial waters. It is now Russian and Russia means to keep it.

The island has been known since classical antiquity, and during that era hosted a Greek temple to Achilles.

In the Special Military Operation that Russia began in February to de-militarize and de-Nazify Ukraine, the island became the focus of storied battles; with Ukraine claiming their soldiers bravely faced-off against Russian naval vessels, which allegedly killed all the Ukrainian defenders.

Of course, that story proved false, when Russia released unharmed, all the soldiers from Ukraine they had taken prisoner when Russia conquered the island.

During the ongoing hostilities between Ukraine and Russia, several high profile attempts were made by Ukraine to retake the island. All failed.

This week, Russia deployed its famous S-400 air defense system on the island. The S-400 is widely known as the most accurate and deadliest air defense system in the world.

Looks as though Russia means to keep what it has, and the S-400 seems perfectly able to make sure it does.

India-US to hold high-altitude military exercise amid China’s ‘alarming’ build-up along LAC

This REEKS of CIA disinformation. -MM

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2022 06 10 10 43

New Delhi: Noting that the Chinese military’s infrastructure build-up under its Western Theatre Command — that looks after India — was “eye-opening and alarming”, a top visiting US Army officer Wednesday said the Indian and American Army will train together this year at 9,000-10,000 feet to increase interoperability for high-altitude warfare.

Pitching for a strong operational bond between the two armies in the Indo-Pacific region instead of only focusing on the naval interoperability, US Army Pacific Commanding General Charles Flynn termed China’s build-up near Ladakh and strengthening of its military infrastructure as part of Beijing’s “corrosive and destabilising behaviour”.

Pointing out that he has been part of the Pacific Command since 2014 under various ranks, Gen Flynn said, “When I sort of look back on what the CPC (Communist Party of China) and the PRC (People’s Republic of China) were doing, compared to what they are doing today, they have taken an incremental and insidious path and destabilizing and corrosive behaviours that they project into the region are simply not helpful”.

Interacting with a select group of journalists, the senior US Army officer who will be visiting the crucial Eastern Command tomorrow also spoke on the Ladakh situation.

When asked about the Chinese buildup along the Line of Control (LAC) and construction of villages in Bhutan, the officer said he believed “that activity level is eye-opening”.

“Some of the infrastructures that is being created in Western Theatre Command (WTC) is alarming. And so much like across all of their military arsenal, one has to ask the question why. I don’t have a crystal ball to say how it is going to end or where it will be but I will say, it is worthy of asking that question and trying to get a response as to what their intentions are,” he said.

Talking about the ongoing military and diplomatic talks between India and China to resolve the Ladakh crisis that has entered its third year, he said it is helpful but Chinese actions and words don’t match.

“I think the talks that are going on are helpful but behaviour matters here as well. I think my understanding is that what they are saying is one thing but the way they are acting and behaving in a way of build-up is concerning and it is concerning to everyone. Obviously, there has been tension and we have to pay attention to that,” he said.

Article HERE

The Worst Economic Gloom In 50 Years

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We haven’t seen anything like this in decades.  Energy prices are soaring to unprecedented heights.  Food shortages in some parts of the world are starting to become quite severe.  Rampant inflation is out of control all over the globe.  Meanwhile, economic activity is slowing down everywhere that you look.  Some are comparing this current crisis to the “stagflation” of the 1970s, but I believe that is a far too optimistic assessment.  Just about everyone can see that economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating, and there is a tremendous amount of alarm about what the months ahead will bring.

According to a brand new Wall Street Journal-NORC survey that was just released, the percentage of Americans that believe that the state of the U.S. economy is “poor or not so good” is 83 times larger than the percentage of Americans that believe that the state of the U.S. economy is “excellent”…

A severe pessimism grips the U.S. economy and Americans report the highest level of dissatisfaction with their financial situation in at least half a century, poll results released Monday show.

Eighty-three percent of Americans describe the state of the economy as poor or not so good, according to a Wall Street Journal-NORC Poll. Only one percent describe the economy as “excellent.”

I would like to talk to someone from the one percent of Americans that still believe that the U.S. economy is in “excellent shape”.

To me, it is always fascinating to find someone that can completely deny reality even when all of the evidence points in the other direction.

The same survey found that the percentage of Americans that are “not at all satisfied with their financial condition” is the highest in at least 50 years

Thirty-five percent said they are not at all satisfied with their financial condition, the highest level of dissatisfaction since NORC began asking the question every few years starting in 1972.

Sixty-three percent of Americans say they are extremely or very concerned about the price of gas. Fifty-four percent say they are extremely or very concerned about the impact of high grocery prices on their household’s financial situation. Just 13 percent say they not very or not at all concerned about gas prices and 19 percent about grocery prices.

In other words, this is the gloomiest that Americans have been about their own personal finances in at least five decades.

Wow.

One of the big reasons why people feel this way is because the price of just about everything is going up.

In particular, the price of gasoline has been making national headlines just about every day.  On Tuesday, it set another brand new record

The national average price of gas is now $4.955, reflecting an over three-cent jump overnight, 28-cent rise in the last week, and nearly 64-cent rise in the last month. Diesel also hit another record on Tuesday, reaching $5.719.

Currently, 16 states are experiencing an average price of gas of $5.00 or more. That includes Maine ($5.023), Massachusetts ($5.21), New Jersey ($5.032), Pennsylvania ($5.031), Michigan ($5.214), Ohio ($5.061), Indiana ($5.234), Illinois ($5.532), Idaho ($5.025), Alaska ($5.469), Hawaii ($5.493), Washington ($5.489), Oregon ($5.485), Nevada ($5.564), Arizona ($5.181), and California ($6.390). California’s Mono County appears to be reporting the highest gas price average in the Golden State — $7.213.

Unfortunately, there is a growing consensus among the experts that this is just the beginning.  Here is one example

With the summer travel season just getting underway, demand for gasoline, coupled with the cut-off of Russian oil shipments due to the war in Ukraine, is sending oil prices higher on global markets.

The national average for gasoline could be close to $6 by later this summer according to Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis for the OPIS, which tracks gas prices for AAA.

And here is another example

GasBuddy head of petroleum analysis Patrick De Haan provided insight into record-high gas prices, warning on Wednesday that “we’re going to be swimming in these high prices for a while.”

Speaking on “Varney & Co.” on Wednesday, De Haan also revealed his forecasts for how high prices at the pump will climb, arguing that they could reach a national average of $6 a gallon in the coming months, but “what seems like more of a guarantee is that $5 mark.”

Others are even more pessimistic.  In fact, the head of commodity trading giant Trafigura just warned that the price of oil could actually make a “parabolic ” move in the months ahead.

Needless to say, energy prices have a domino effect throughout the entire economy.  When commentator Anthony B. Sanders contacted moving companies about his coming move out of state, he could hardly believe the quotes that he was given

As I line up my move from Fairfax VA to Columbus OH, I am getting a variety of quotes from moving companies. And wow! The cost of moving using a national moving company for a 4 bedroom house is $15,000 to $20,500. That includes International, North American and Bekins.

One of the reasons for the high cost of moving is the massive increase in diesel fuel used for trucking. Diesel fuel under Biden has risen 117%. And since it was revealed that natural gas often is used for electric charging stations, and NATGAS is up 281% under Biden (but there aren’t many electric moving trucks yet).

Could you imagine paying $20,000 to move from Virginia to Ohio?

In the old days, you could purchase your own new vehicle for that much money.

In this crazy environment, some companies are attempting to hide inflation by shrinking their package sizes

“Joining the parade of downsized products is cereal stalwart Honey Bunches of Oats, which has seen the weight of its standard box, previously 14.5 ounces, lessen to 12 ounces — a reduction of roughly 17 percent,” the U.K. paper said.

Angel Soft toilet paper has also reduced its size from 425 sheets per roll to 320, while Bounty paper towels have cut their rolls from 165 sheets per roll to 147 late last year. Gatorade also cut its bottle size from 32 ounces to 28 ounces.

Do they actually believe that we will not notice that the packages have changed?

And this isn’t just happening here in the United States.  At this point, this is taking place all over the globe

In the U.S., a small box of Kleenex now has 60 tissues; a few months ago, it had 65. Chobani Flips yogurts have shrunk from 5.3 ounces to 4.5 ounces. In the U.K., Nestle slimmed down its Nescafe Azera Americano coffee tins from 100 grams to 90 grams. In India, a bar of Vim dish soap has shrunk from 155 grams to 135 grams.

Our standard of living is falling with each passing day, and that process is only going to accelerate during the second half of this year.

In a desperate attempt to keep living the way that they always have, many Americans are turning to their credit cards at an alarming rate.

Needless to say, that is only a short-term solution.

And at the same time, overall economic activity continues to slow down

A closely followed measurement from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank suggests the economy could be headed for a second-quarter decline in gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced in a country. The GDPNow tracker shows the economy grew at an annualized pace of just 0.9% in the spring, a steep decline from its previous estimate of 1.3% on June 1.

If U.S. GDP is actually negative for the second quarter, that will be two quarters in a row, and that will mean that we are officially in a recession right now.

But what we are heading into in 2023 and beyond is not going to be just a “recession”.

Ultimately, we are heading into the sort of “nightmare scenario” that I have warned about for years.

It took decades of very foolish decisions for us to reach this point, and our leaders in Washington continue to make very foolish decisions.

So the truth is that there are no long-term solutions in sight.

Only pain.

So if the American people are this upset about the economy now, how will they be feeling six months down the road?

China deployment of missiles system in Cambodia

Tiktok video HERE.

Venezuelan Arepas | The Frugal Chef

This is easy to make and a great unique taste!

BRITISH MERCENARIES IN UKRAINE SENTENCED TO DEATH

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BritsSentencedToDeath large

Two British mercenaries, Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner, who went to assist Ukraine in the attacks against Luhansk and Donetsk, have been found guilty of “trying to seize power” and have been sentenced to DEATH by the Supreme Court of Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

“We have said continually that prisoners of war shouldn’t be exploited for political purposes,” a spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.

“Under the Geneva Convention prisoners of war are entitled to combatant immunity and they should not be prosecuted for participation in hostilities.

“So we will continue to work with the Ukrainian authorities to try to secure the release of any British nationals who were serving in the Ukrainian armed forces and who are being held as prisoners of war.”

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the court verdict was a “sham judgment with absolutely no legitimacy”.

Aslin, 28, and Pinner, 48, and Moroccan national Saaudun Brahim, have been found guilty of being mercenaries and taking action towards violent seizure of power.

They were sentenced in a court in the Russian-backed self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic that is not internationally recognized.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

I bet when they’re executed, they will be just as dead as if the Donetsk People’s Republic WAS “internationally recognized.”

This is what happens when people stick their nose into the affairs of others.   Aslin and Pinner are not Ukrainian; they’re British.   Both men went to Ukraine with the express intent to side with Ukraine in a war zone, yet neither man joined the Ukraine military.  As such, they are not covered by the Geneva Convention because they were not members of a sovereign military engaged in war.

Put simply, these two guys thought it would be cool to live action role play (LARP) and now they’re going to be executed for what they did.

Clearly, had they minded their own business, none of this would be happening.   This is what can happen to people who don’t mind their own business.

Venezuelan Pulled Beef Recipe – Easy Arepa Recipe

To go with the delicious Arepas presented earlier.

Why?

Well people… This is why.

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2022 06 10 13 31

Execution for war crimes: Ukrainian foreign mercenaries sentenced to death

From HERE
They have a month to appeal the verdict, and then the lawyers can still apply for a pardon.
The trial of British and Moroccan mercenaries in Donetsk turned out to be very quick.

The trial of British and Moroccan mercenaries in Donetsk turned out to be very quick. It took the Supreme Court of the DPR just a few days to sentence two subjects of the British crown - 48-year-old Sean Pinner and 27-year-old Aiden Eslin - and a citizen of the Kingdom of Morocco to capital punishment - the death penalty. 

Recall that it exists in the DPR (and in the LPR) in wartime. Apparently, the reason for such efficiency lies in the good work of the investigation at the preliminary stage. Moreover, the investigators had a very rich evidence base.

All three mercenaries surrendered in Mariupol as part of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, leaving the cellars of Azovstal. And with them, thousands of witnesses of their service surrendered. It was their testimony that made it possible to establish that Sean Pinner, who spoke about his work as an instructor, was on the staff list as a sniper.

No one was touched by the lyrical story of Aiden Eslin, who ended up in Ukraine after he fell in love with a girl from Ukrainian Nikolaev and decided to join his life with her. For which he could not think of anything better than to serve as a mercenary and kill the tribesmen of his beloved.

The Moroccan Saadoun Brahim, as his father said, came to study as an astronaut, but, due to the absence of an astronaut in Ukraine as such, and training in this profession, he also became a mercenary. The Moroccan had no luck with space, but it seems that the earth called him to her. By the way, all of them admitted partially their guilt in committing the charges brought against them.

According to the legislation of the DPR, all those sentenced must be shot. At the same time, it is clear that this will not happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. The convicts have a month to appeal the verdict, then it will take some time to consider the complaint, then they will be given the right to file a request for pardon. And only after all these procedures are completed, the sentence will be carried out.

NATO JUST GOT THE BAD NEWS: EUROPEAN TANK PRODUCTION HALTED, LACK OF TITANIUM – FROM RUSSIA

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The NATO Military alliance just got the rug pulled out from beneath its entire operation.  It seems that Europe no longer has any Titanium, which is essential for the armor of tanks.  In years past, Europe bought its Titanium from . . .  Russia.   They can’t buy it anymore. As such, tank production – in Germany – has stopped.

Yes, you read that correctly, Tank building in Germany, has stopped.

Hints that there was some type of undisclosed problem with European militaries started being visible when Ukraine asked for tanks, Armored Personnel Carriers and more from Europe and the United States, to fight Russia.

Germany refused to donate tanks to Ukraine, or to augment Poland, which did donate tanks to Ukraine.

Germany’s refusal to supply its heavy tanks to Poland was not at all caused by Berlin’s attempt to deceive Warsaw, but by the fact that Germany simply does not have titanium to build new tanks.

Some of my former colleagues in the Intelligence Community from my years working with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) tell me “due to the lack of titanium supplies from Russia, it is extremely problematic to establish the production of tanks in any required quantity today.”

Tanks require a fairly large amount of titanium, which is a component of the armor. However, due to the lack of supplies from Russia, this caused an almost complete halt in German tank building.

Moreover, a similar situation will soon occur in the UK, France, and other European countries.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

Bottom line: If Russia were to engage NATO in actual war, then NATO would be completely unable to build _any_ replacement tanks, once existing tanks were destroyed in battle.

The short and sweet of it: NATO cannot afford to fight Russia because NATO countries don’t have Titanium to use for armor in tanks and without tanks, NATO would flatly lose the war.

Period.  Full stop.

This is kinda funny. Almost all of NATO is out there screeching like an old wash woman that “Russia baaaad.”

Then they all realized “Uh oh they supplied the materials we need to go kill them.”

Bahaha.  The governments of the west: Fucking morons.

An outstanding discussion

You all must watch this lecture.

National Guard Placed on Ready-Go Alert for Supreme Court Abortion Ruling

The National Guard in all fifty (50) U.S. states has been told to adopt a “Ready-Go” posture for deployment in preparation for the soon-to-be-released US Supreme Court ruling on Abortion.

The Court is expected to overturn the precedent of Roe v. Wade” which made Abortion legal.

If and when such a ruling comes out, it is widely speculated that the pro-abortion, kill-the-babies-on-demand crowd of spoiled brats. will take to the streets and riot, nationwide.

While overturning Roe v. Wade will NOT make Abortion automatically ILLEGAL, it will put the issue back under state control, instead of the federal government, so individual state legislators can craft laws their citizens deem appropriate.

Developing . . . .

Russia’s nuclear threat has worked | The Strategist

The war in Ukraine has reasserted the relevance of nuclear weapons as a major deterrent in global conflicts. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, a great power has publicly threatened to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. And the threat worked: the West has been carefully calibrating its arms supply to Ukraine in order to avoid giving Russia reason to resort to nuclear escalation. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine wouldn’t have happened had Ukraine not surrendered its nuclear arsenal under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, which included American and Russian guarantees to respect and defend its territorial integrity.

Revolutionary powers such as North Korea and Iran have watched these developments closely. For Iran, a rising Shia power, its nuclear program represents an insurance policy against the surrounding Sunni powers, all allies of Israel and the United States. North Korea’s nuclear logic isn’t much different.

There are few realistic options for stemming the trend towards nuclear proliferation. One development that would make a difference would be for the five big nuclear powers to lead by example and start reducing their arsenals drastically. The obstacle here arises from the disparity between American conventional military might and that of China and Russia. For France and Britain, meanwhile, maintaining nuclear weapons is an issue of status.

If leaders of the calibre of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev—capable of overruling their respective security establishments—re-emerged, they could potentially lead such a non-proliferation movement. But such leadership doesn’t seem to be imminent.

Another possibility would be to establish a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. But that could happen only if agreements were reached on the major conflicts in the region, and Israel surrendered its supposed nuclear capabilities.

I’m not optimistic about any of these scenarios. Ultimately, however, whether a regime has nuclear weapons isn’t the main issue. It’s the nature of the regime that counts.

Ukraine made a mistake in entering negotiations with Russia at a very early stage of the war, when the impression was still that Russia’s military was unstoppable. A mutually harmful deadlock offers a better opportunity to reach a peace agreement. Unless Russia introduces nuclear weapons into the equation, we may be nearing such a deadlock, owing partly to the fact that the US and its allies have wisely calibrated their arms supply to prevent a Ukrainian defeat while not provoking Russia to escalate.

The Ukrainians should not enter negotiations if the price of admission is accepting Russia’s demand that they not join NATO. This should be a concession in a negotiating process, not a precondition to it.

That said, as I’ve argued recently, peace is about equilibrium and stability, not justice. The just outcome—Russia’s full withdrawal from Ukraine and reversal of its annexation of Crimea—would be political suicide for Putin and a tremendous setback for Russia’s international standing. Far from being a cooperative participant in a European security system, a defeated Russia, as a humiliated nuclear-armed superpower, would pose an enduring threat to it.

Western powers should be part of the peace process, not only because they are part of the conflict, but also because they are the ones with the power to compensate Russia for any concessions it makes. That compensation should come in the form of a European security system that addresses key Russian concerns and upholds the neutrality and territorial integrity of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. Finally, to deal with Ukraine’s dual identity, the ethnic Russian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk would have to enjoy significant autonomy within a federal state, as was stipulated by the 2015 Minsk II settlement.

For far too long, Europe has remained comfortably embedded in a ‘post-historical’ world, while outsourcing its security to American taxpayers. The war in Ukraine marks the end of the myth that history ‘ended’ with the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It also vindicates the Latin adage, Si vis pacem, para bellum (‘If you want peace, prepare for war’). A strong and united NATO would help secure peace.

But any European security architecture that emerges from the Ukraine war must include buffer areas between Russia and NATO. Ukraine, which will probably have to abandon its aspirations for NATO membership as part of any peace settlement, should be one such zone. Sweden and Finland, with its 1,340-kilometre border with Russia, should be two more. The alternative is a long border in a permanent state of friction, war or the imminent threat of war.

For the foreseeable future, peace must be based on disengagement. The end of Europe’s dependence on Russian energy would contribute to peace, as it would force Russia to diversify its economic model, increase Russia’s stake in global stability, and drive the country to become a more active participant in the global economy.

Article HERE

US Threatens China With ‘Military Action’ If It Breaches The Red Line; Can US Navy Fight PLA On Its Home Turf?

Here's an "armchair warrior" analysis out of an anti-China publication out of India. Pretty pro-USA. Worth a read, and then a vomit. 

After all, since WHEN is Chinese territory a "Red Line"?  

As to the question being raised; "can the USN fight the PL"? Well, this was answered in 1950. Then the USA fought China in Korea. And the USA lost. And lost terribly. -MM

US President Joe Biden has said twice over the last year that Washington will militarily defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion attempt. His latest explicit security guarantee to Taiwan was made in Tokyo last week.

But does America have the military superiority over China in this part of the world to deliver what President Biden pledged?

This is a question that many security analysts in the US are asking, given the fact that the US Navy, which has to play the most important role in case China attacks Taiwan, is undergoing structural changes because of budgetary constraints that many consider will weaken both its capacity and capability in the near term.

Critics are pointing out that given the current threat, the fleet is not growing fast enough to meet the potential challenge of fighting competitors like China and Russia.

The US Navy recently released its long-awaited 30-year shipbuilding blueprint, providing three options for future fleet force structure.

The first option would yield an inventory of 316 ships by FY 2052, the second would yield 327 ships by FY 2052 and the third would yield 367 ships by FY 2052. However, the document of the blueprint notes that “the ability of the industrial base to support” the third option with the largest fleet size “has not been independently assessed,” this has worried the analysts.

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Big Changes On The Anvil

The new shipbuilding plans show the Navy decommissioning two Independence-class LCS – USS Jackson (LCS-6) and USS Montgomery (LCS-8) – in FY 2024. Jackson entered the fleet in 2015, while Montgomery was commissioned in 2016. Both ships were built by Austal USA.

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2022 06 03 19 55

The Navy also wants to continue decommissioning its aging Ticonderoga-class cruiser fleet, starting with USS Antietam (CG-54), USS Leyte Gulf (CG-55), and USS Shiloh (CG-67) in FY 2024. Under the proposal, the Navy would decommission the entire cruiser fleet by the end of FY 2027, including the ones that are currently in the cruiser modernization program.

The blueprint shows the Navy decommissioning USS Nimitz (CVN-68) in FY 2025 and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) in FY 2027, which aligns with the 50-year service lives for the Nimitz-class carriers.

According to the blueprint, the first two options would be for “a budget with no real growth,” while the third option “represents an additional $75 billion real growth beyond the [Future Years Defense Program] in FY2022 constant dollars.”

The document says that “The increased procurement level, informed by industrial base capacity and on-time and on-budget performance, achieves 326 manned battle force ships in the mid-2030s, and ultimately achieves 363 manned battle force ships in FY2045.”

Overall, the long-range plan shows the Navy decommissioning 13 ships in FY 2024, another 13 in FY 2025, 14 ships in FY 2026, and 13 in FY 2027. FY 2027 would also see the service decommission of USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51), the lead ship of the class.

Fresh Procurement Schemes

The three procurement schemes show what ships the Navy could purchase between FY 2028 and FY 2032, a time frame the service is calling a “transition” period after the FY 2023 five-year spending plan, and between FY 2033 and FY 2052, which the Navy is calling the “future force design” time frame.

While the first two options only show the Navy buying one Ford-class aircraft carrier between FY 2028 and FY 2032, the third option shows the service purchasing one in FY 2028 and another in FY 2032.

“A decision on CVN 82/83 two-ship buy is required no later than FY25 and will be evaluated during upcoming force structure and industrial base studies,” the document reads. “The Department is reviewing Large and Small Surface Combatant and Attack Submarine procurement quantities in FY 2028-2032.”

The blueprint makes it clear that the US Navy is “prioritizing readiness before capacity”. It says, “Assuming no real budget growth, the two low ranges of the plan do not procure all platforms at the desired rate (e.g., DDGs, SSNs, and FFGs at two ships per year), which industry needs to demonstrate the ability to achieve, but do maximize capability within projected resources, industrial factors, and technology constraints to build the most capable force. Overall, this approach accepts risk in capacity to field a more capable and ready force.”

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The 30-year blueprint talks of the US Navy having 327 ships by FY 2052. The Navy has always planned a goal of having more than 300 ships. But then the fact remains that the fleet has never achieved that goal since 2003.

China’s Massive Strength

In the year 2018, it had been said that with the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) adding more than 120 battle-force ships, the US should have at least 355 ships of which it was short of 57.

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Over the last four years, the PLAN has further increased its strength. The Chinese have built a large fleet including aircraft carriers, cruise missile-armed surface ships, and several submarines. The PLAN is supported by land-based missiles and aircraft.

And that prompted the Trump administration in its final days to encourage the Navy to have a fresh force structure assessment. The Navy said accordingly that given the rising profile of the PLAN, it should have a figure between 382 and 446 manned ships and an additional 143 to 242 unmanned ships.

But within two years, the Navy seems to have changed its assessment. The US is driving down fleet numbers and ship production, the critics point out. They say that the average gap between ordered and achieved battle fleet size over the last five years was roughly 10 ships.

“Integrating the precipitous drop from 2022 to 2023 and loosely projecting that magnitude of 50 ships over five years shows a battle force of 275 ships or smaller”. It may be noted that at the moment the US Navy has 298 ships.

Major Gaps

Further, buried within the FY23 capacity gap is a lethality gap. As Congresswoman Elaine Luria (Democrat), who represents Coastal Virginia, home to the world’s largest naval base and who before running for Congress had served two decades in the US Navy, points out, “the U.S. Navy is suffering a clear disadvantage in anti-ship weapons concerning China, which is fielding supersonic anti-ship weapons across its surface forces, bombers, land-based forces, and undersea forces in high numbers.

By comparison, almost all the anti-ship capability of the US armed forces reside in a limited number of surface and air-launched Harpoon missiles, whose fundamental design is 45 years old.

The surface fleet’s launch cells are mostly filled with defensive anti-air weapons, but newer weapons such as Naval Strike Missile, Long-Range Anti-Surface Missiles, Maritime Strike Tomahawks (MST), and SM-6 missiles”. Only procuring them in higher numbers in the near term could close the gap that currently exists between the PLAN and US Navy, she argues.

Of course, the fate of the latest blueprint for the next 30 years, that is, which ships to purchase and which ships to retire, rests ultimately with the members of US  Congress like  Elaine  Luria. Many in Congress, incidentally, have repeatedly criticized the service for decommissioning ships at a faster rate than it can build new ones. 

It seems that for adversaries like China, the Biden administration prefers the theory of “deterrence by punishment” to the theory of “deterrence by denial” that the Trump regime pursued. In a denial strategy, the adversary is deterred from aggression by introducing significant doubt in its mind about whether its ultimate military objective can be achieved.

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Need For A Fresh Strategy

This doubt is based on the threat of overwhelming military force being brought to bear at a time early in the conflict that will make the goals of the aggressor unachievable. A denial strategy requires the will of the defending nation to back up its rhetoric with action when necessary.

This strategy is believed to be more expensive because it requires more ready deployed forces, and it may also require the will to potentially use these forces in pre-aggression phases of conflict.

On the other hand, a punishment strategy seeks to deter an aggressor by the threat of pain if they take aggressive action. This strategy does not reveal one’s strength fully and keeps the adversary guessing.

This strategy implies that a nation will not or cannot decisively foreclose objectives to the adversary, and instead hopes that an adversary’s pain threshold can be overwhelmed into submission.

In a sense, it is an ambiguous proposition. But this is said to be cheaper because it requires fewer forward-deployed forces, thus less force structure. It is also politically more palatable because popular support will be more forthcoming after adversaries initiate aggression.

Most importantly, this strategy facilitates what Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Mike Gilday says “divest to invest” so that the US navy is more capable and more lethal. But the issue is that its eventual success rests on many “assumptions”, which the US Congress wants to be clarified.

Nanking Cargo: Riches From the Orient

Article HERE

It’s the kingdom of power and awe where the winds wail, the gulls cry and the sea surges. Only the bold will brave it. Gales may blast it, rains may flood it and tides may churn it, but it is and always will be…the South China Sea.

Ask Michael Hatcher and he’ll tell you about raging storms, dark waters and pirates that he faced in an unforgiving environment unwilling to give up its treasure even to the bravest of souls. Hatcher never considered himself brave. Lucky perhaps, but not the daring swashbuckler portrayed in Hollywood productions. His demeanor, quiet, cordial and determined, was a perfect match for his line of work: Professional Treasure Hunter.

The South China Sea wasn’t unfamiliar to the Yorkshire, UK, orphan who grew up on a farm in the Australian outback. He picked up various jobs on land until age 27 when he bought his first boat. It took a lot of time and hard work, but by 1977 he had formed his own company and was salvaging scrap metal from sunken WWII vessels. Avoiding monsoons and standing up to modern-day pirates was standard operating procedure for the adventurer called “Hatch” by friends and crew.

Hatch greeted Lady Luck with a smile in 1983 when he stumbled upon a 17th century Chinese junk that went down on Admiral Stellingwerf Reef in the South China Sea. He and his crew salvaged more than 20,000 pieces of late Ming and Traditional Period Chinese porcelain that netted $2 million at Christie’s Auction House in Amsterdam. Hatch was ecstatic. Money to operate the boat, pay the crew and purchase high tech equipment was always a concern, but now he had the resources. Now he could make a mighty push in trying to locate the big “G.”

The Geldermalsen, a Dutch East India company merchant vessel, sank in a storm in 1752. The 1,150 ton vessel was on a return voyage from Canton to Amsterdam laden with Chinese porcelain, tea, raw silk and gold. Accounts from the survivors verified the shipment along with records in Holland whose trade with Asia for two centuries was dubbed the Golden Age. Along with his partner, Max de Rham—an engineer skilled in high technology and marine surveys—Hatch researched the merchantman. Both agreed to begin the search in the area where the Chinese junk was found. Using satellite navigation, proton magnetometers and side-scan sonar, they swept a five mile perimeter, but came up empty handed. After two months of fruitless effort, Hatcher wanted to quit, but de Rham begged for one more day. Bingo! The very next day, May 11, 1985, the prize appeared on sonar—an image of a shipwreck showing mastheads, cannons and deck contours.

Hatch and de Rham were the first down and right off the bat found shards with the luster of cobalt blue beneath a ceramic glaze. Their expectations soared as pairs of dive teams uncovered crate upon crate of blue and white teacups, bowls, butter tubs, dinner plates, teapots and more. Serendipity kicked in when the divers realized the crates of porcelain had been cushioned upon impact by the bags of tea. More good fortune emerged when they recovered 127 gold bars in the captain’s cabin.

Diving conditions were hazardous. Silt swirled around as cargo was removed, forcing divers to work by feel. Large bags of tea leaves broke free from their containers prompting Hatch to declare, “It was like swimming around in a giant black teapot.” The 132-foot depth and dark waters were ominous. Using surface air supply, hoses had to be monitored and bottom time computed. Getting the bends was always possible, but the salvors were experienced divers who stressed safety first. Divers entered a decompression chamber after each turn on the wreck. Storms delayed progress and lookouts packing guns stood guard against interlopers. After 10 weeks of long hours and intense labor, a container ship arrived to haul off 1,400 cartons of the Hatch’s cache. Upon arrival in Holland, it took six people, working steadily for one month, to unpack, clean and stack more than 170,000 pieces of china.

The payoff came in April, 1986, when Christie’s of Amsterdam opened a five day auction of the “Nanking Cargo.” An official from Christie’s coined the name, Nanking, the main distribution center for Chinese porcelain shipped to Europe throughout the years. It had an appealing ring to it and helped prices soar beyond auction forecasts. More than 20,000 people attended the auction, many harboring a desperate desire to own a memento from this romantic treasure trove. An anonymous bidder paid $332,786 for a 144-place dinner setting, while a Swiss banker bought a pair of butter tubs for $15,275. A small stoneware jug went for $5,251. In all, the sale brought in $15.3 million, double the pre-auction estimates. Gold soared as well, netting a Midas touch that bordered on $2 million.

As for Hatch, the 45-year-old salvage entrepreneur, this was a happy moment, but one he never looked back upon. Like all steadfast adventurers, he went off searching for another wreck in the untamed South China Sea. When asked by a reporter to give up one of his secrets to success, he responded with one word: “experience.” His mantra throughout all of his exploits has been, “Experience is the best teacher.” That being the case, Hatch, the student, continues to earn straight A’s.

China and Singapore to resume military exercises, cooperate on defence education

Article HERE

  • Analysts say the developments are a ‘natural progression’ of warming defence ties between China and the city state, which also has strong strategic ties with the US
  • A question that will be raised is ‘the level of exposure both sides would have to each other’s doctrine and equipment’, one observer says

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China and Singapore’s defence ministers on Thursday said joint military exercises suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic were set to resume, and pledged to deepen defence ties in their first face-to-face meeting since 2019.

Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe and his Singaporean counterpart Ng Eng Hen held talks at the inaugural Singapore-China Defence Ministers’ Dialogue, where they discussed global security issues, a statement from the city’s defence ministry said.

The two defence ministers also shared their respective views on bolstering defence exchanges between China and Asean, the statement said.

A Survey Of Corporate Financial Officers Found That 100 Percent Of Them Expect A Recession To Start In The Months Ahead

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Have you ever heard of a survey where 100 percent of the respondents agree?  I can’t ever recall seeing one like that, but as you will see below, 100 percent of the corporate CFOs that were just surveyed by CNBC believe that a recession is coming by the end of next year.  At this point, our economic troubles are growing so rapidly that you would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what is happening.  A meltdown of historic proportions has already begun, and there is economic gloom just about everywhere that you look.

But even though the U.S. economy is clearly moving in one direction, I still didn’t expect to see this sort of a consensus among corporate financial executives…

According to the majority (68%) of CFOs responding to the survey, a recession will occur during the first half of 2023. No CFO forecast a recession any later than the second half of next year, and no CFO thinks the economy will avoid a recession.

The CNBC CFO Council Q2 survey is a sample of the current outlook among top financial officers. It was conducted among 22 chief financial officers at major organizations between May 12-June 6.

Of course they are right on target.

The months ahead are going to be very difficult.

And with each passing day we continue to get more evidence that the economic slowdown is accelerating.  For example, it appears that a “transportation recession” has already begun

A downturn, if not a full-on recession, is clear in the transportation world. While the rest of the economy debates whether things are that bad, it’s been clear for months to logistics providers that the situation has worsened — and the velocity of that change is still stunning.

The cost to move a container from Asia to a major port in North America or Europe has sunk by 23% since the beginning of this year, according to maritime research firm Drewry. Spot rates have plummeted even faster; marketplace Freightos said rates from China to the West Coast are down 38% month-over-month. FreightWaves forecast this week that ocean shipping volumes will “drop off a cliff” by this summer, based on slumping bookings out of China.

Meanwhile, the most absurd housing bubble in the history of our country is clearly starting to burst.  Compared to a year ago, mortgage applications were down a whopping 21 percent last week…

This just keeps getting worse: Applications for mortgages to purchase a home dropped 7% for the week, and were down 21% from a year ago, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported today. An indicator of future home sales: Potential homebuyers try to get pre-approved for a mortgage, lock in a mortgage rate, and then start house-hunting.

Mortgage rates have soared this year, and home prices have soared for years to ridiculous levels, causing layers and layers of potential buyers to abandon the market, amid “worsening affordability challenges,” as the MBA called it.

On top of everything else, jobless claims just shot up to their highest level in almost six months

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits unexpectedly jumped last week, spiking to the highest level since mid-January in a sign the hot labor market could be starting to cool.

Figures released Thursday by the Labor Department show that applications for the week ended June 4 rose to 229,000 from an upwardly revised 202,000 a week earlier, missing the 210,000 forecast by Refinitiv analysts. It marked the biggest one-week increase since last July. The four-week average of new claims, which smooths volatility in the weekly figures, also increased slightly to 215,000 last week.

But even though all of these numbers clearly indicate that a “recession” is coming, a potential “recession” is not the number one economic concern for most Americans.

That is because the worst inflation crisis in modern American history is hitting all of us extremely hard.

According to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll that was just released, 52 percent of Americans believe that inflation is “the most important issue facing the country” right now…

At this point, the answer to what Americans are most worried about is pretty straightforward: inflation. In the first FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, 52 percent of Americans said the most important issue facing the country was inflation. We asked Americans this question in a variety of ways, but regardless of how we asked it, the top answer was always the same: inflation.

Other surveys have come up with similar results.  For example, just check out these numbers from the Pew Research Center…

Seven-in-ten Americans view inflation as a very big problem for the country, followed by the affordability of health care (55%) and violent crime (54%).

About half say gun violence and the federal budget deficit are very big problems (51% each), according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted April 25-May 1 among 5,074 U.S. adults.

Inflation is something that the American people can see on a daily basis.

On Thursday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States hit five dollars a gallon for the first time ever.

And as I pointed out the other day, experts are warning that it will soon cross the six dollar threshold.

The grocery store is another place where all of us can clearly see the rampant inflation that is happening.  A single shopping cart of food can easily cost $300 these days, and that is absolutely insane.

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning, and most Americans realize this.  In fact, one survey just discovered that approximately two-thirds of us expect inflation to get even worse over the next year

The Federal Reserve, the Biden administration, and Wall Street’s economists are confident that inflation will be brought down over the coming year. The American public disagrees.

Two-thirds of Americans say they expect inflation to get worse over the next year, according to a poll conducted by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

Some of us have been warning for years that the decisions that our leaders were making would destroy the stability of our currency.

Now nightmarish inflation is officially here.

And some of us have been warning for years that our rapidly growing long-term economic problems would eventually result in a meltdown of epic proportions.

Now that meltdown has begun.

Our fate could have been very different if we would have chosen a much different path while we still had the chance.

But now it is too late, and the pain that is ahead is going to be greater than many Americans will be able to handle.

1957 America. Some Say This Time Was Paradise.

A great look at what once was…
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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 5

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Cats, nuclear bombs, robot mice, and incredible hulk hamsters

It’s an awful strange time that we are living though. Indeed, the entire world seems to be upside down. The United States is arming Nazis with nuclear delivery systems for freedom, and is willing to risk global world war 3 over transgender queer rights while at the same time President Biden plans on allowing the second amendment to be enforced but not allowing anyone to buy or sell anything related to a firearm.  I calls it the Canadian influence. Perhaps it’s time to play with the kitties and turn off the “news” for a change. Eh? What do you think?

The tanker fallout from impending Russian insurance ban

The likely insurance ban that both the UK and the European Union are looking to put on any tankers carrying Russian oil anywhere in the world is expected to create a huge further shake-up in tanker fortunes. The insurance ban follows swiftly on from news the EU is to stop taking seaborne imports of Russian oil this year.
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Crunching the numbers on what the outcome could be is Poten & Partners, the New York-based tanker brokers, which has predicted that all the sanctions, especially with the extra pressure of the insurance ban, could see Russia cut its exports from the Black Sea and the Baltic by 50% to 1m barrels per day each.
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Aframaxes and suezmaxes are the preferred tankers to export crude from the Baltic and the Black Sea. If an insurance ban takes most of the international tanker fleet out the equation, Russia, China and India will have to use domestically owned or controlled tonnage to move the crude, Poten pointed out in its latest weekly report.
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For the Baltic exports, Poten reckons。。。
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Article HERE

US-China relations: East Timor isn’t ‘taking sides’ but it wants Beijing’s help, says president

Note: anyone aware that Australia bullied and looted East Timor 18 years of oil in their joint venture in the East Timor part of the seas, until East Timor successfully make the case to UN in recent years. During that period, East Timor entered failed state listing.
Independence hero Jose Ramos-Horta has his sights set on expanding cooperation with China via the ‘extraordinary vision’ of the Belt and Road Initiative.  The 72-year-old hero maintains his country won’t get involved in any US-China rivalry, but analysts say it’s going to be a tough balancing act to pull off.
...that the aim was to maintain an equal distance from all major powers, while still keeping the door open to trade and investment.

“What we want is the best for our own national interests. In my case, I will make decisions that are in the best interests of the people of Timor Leste,” Ramos-Horta said, using the country’s official name. “We welcome strong ties with all, the US, China, Australia, Indonesia and … [other] Asean countries, we are not going to say we are taking anyone’s side.”

Article HERE

This Fuffy Cat Has A Better Life Than Most Of Us

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Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur. Very hot photo series by the Vietnamese photographer Lữ Phúc Anh Dũng. Purr-lease…

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Ukraine war: FOUR UK squaddies go AWOL to fight Putin’s forces including 19-year-old Queen’s Guard

AWOL? Apparently, UK dare not official admit it directly involved in war against the Russians in Ukraine.
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FOUR UK squaddies go AWOL to fight in Ukraine: MoD launches desperate hunt to find 19-year-old Queen’s Guard last heard of on the Polish border and three colleagues amid fears Putin could claim Britain has entered the war if they are captured

Article HERE

VW defends Xinjiang operations amid alleged rights abuses

Ignored all the agenda based language, the reality of this report is, western companies voted for China:

The German car giant has claimed its presence in Xinjiang has a positive impact despite reports of ongoing human rights abuses. VW is also facing accusations of using slave labor in Brazil under the former dictatorship.

The CEO of German car manufacturer Volkswagenhas defended the presence of a Volkwagen factory in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, where Beijing has been accused of carrying out human rights abuses, during an interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt.

While several major corporations ended their operations in Xinjiang following US claims that China is committing "genocide" against the Muslim Uyghur minority, VW boss Herbert Diess said that the joint-venture partner SAIC Volkswagen would not close its factory there.

In comments published Monday, he said the company had been active in Xinjiang for years, but that the "small factory" there was economically "insignificant."

Asked whether VW would end operations in protest, Diess told Handelsblatt: "We could do that. But we won't, because we believe that our presence has a positive impact."

Article HERE

The United States continues to poke and taunt Russia

People! This is NOT how you diffuse a dangerous situation.

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2022 06 05 11 47

Hong-Kong Based Company Makes Cat ‘LEGOS’ For People Who Love All Things Cat

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If Lego and cats are among your favorite things in this world, now you can order a playful statue made of ‘Legos’ to liven up even the dullest office space or a living room. Hong-Kong-based company Jekca offers mini Lego sculptures for ‘kidults’ that come around 1.6 ft each – and their variety will surprise even the pickiest of customers.

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Available in a variety of colours and patterns the 1.6 ft high cats aren’t available in different breeds however they do come in various positions, whether that’s perched on a table top or playfully stretching on the sofa. The good news is that the LEGO sculptures won’t fall part either –

“These cats are like real sculptures and will not collapse or break apart,” the company writes over on its Facebook page. So there you have it – purrfect if you love all things ‘cat’.”

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Creamy Ground Beef Noodle Casserole

“Comfort” is the key word for this creamy ground beef and noodle casserole that makes a memorable meal out of simple ingredients.

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fe6e9467 247e 4b3d 9694 973a818eeab1

Ingredients

  • 8 oz uncooked farfalle pasta (about 2 1/2 cups)
  • 1 lb ground beef
  • 1 can (15 oz) Muir Glen™ organic tomato sauce
  • 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 cup sour cream
  • 1 cup cottage cheese
  • 1/2 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
  • 3/4 cup sliced green onions
  • 1 1/2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese (12 oz)

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2022 06 03 20 35

‘Shooting themselves in the foot’: Western sanctions on Russia

Moscow has diversified its commodities exports as the EU faces the difficult task of replacing Russia as its energy supplier, analysts say.

Article HERE

New UK Gov. report confirms COVID Vaccination significantly increases the risk of Death and kills hundreds of thousands after five months

I don’t normally post about the mRNA stuff, but jeeze!

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2022 06 05 20 06

This is not a conspiracy theory. Even the UK government admits that mRNA injections are deadly.

On the 17th May, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its latest dataset on deaths by vaccination status in England, and it has revealed a whole host of shocking findings.

For example we now know that according to the ONS, 70,000 people have died within 28 days of Covid-19 vaccination in England, and 179,000 people have died within 60 days.

We also now know that Covid-19 vaccination increases children’s risk of death between 8,100% and 30,200%.

But it turns out that once you dig a little deeper into data, you find that Covid-19 vaccination actually increases the mortality rate of everyone within approximately 5 months.

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2022 06 05 20 07

Article HERE

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Capable Of Striking Any Part Of US, Russia Conducts ‘Massive Drills’ With Nuclear-Capable Yars 24 Missile

Russia’s forces are conducting nuclear drills in the Ivanovo province, northeast of Moscow, involving some 1,000 servicemen and over 100 vehicles, including Yars intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, the Russian defense ministry has said.

“In the Ivanovo region, autonomous launchers of the Yars mobile ground-based missile system of the Strategic Missile Forces (Teikovsky formation) are performing intensive maneuvering actions on combat patrol routes as part of the exercises,” the Russian Defense Ministry was cited as saying by the Interfax news agency.

The Strategic Missile Forces are the main component of Russia’s nuclear forces, whose purpose is nuclear deterrence.

The equipment used by Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN) included the ‘RS-24 Yars’ an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with a range of up to 11,000 km (6,500 miles), equipped with multiple warheads having individual guidance units.

Such a range can enable Russia to strike any target in the US.

In addition, the drill also involves the use of new Typhoon-M Combat anti-sabotage vehicles to detect, block and destroy threats to Yars.

It is said to be equipped with the latest reconnaissance technology as well as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and is supposed to destroy subversion and reconnaissance groups of the enemy.

During the maneuvers, the MDR Listva remote demining vehicle was used to escort the Yars mobile ground-based missile system on combat patrol routes. The MDR neutralized the remotely controlled explosive devices planted along the route of the column by conditional saboteurs.

Reports suggest that one of the top priorities of this exercise was to simulate a wide array of scenarios relating to searching and destroying conditional sabotage and reconnaissance formations of the enemy in the daytime and at night.

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2022 06 03 20 15

“The exercise makes it possible to improve the level of training of personnel, the coherence of formations and military units of the Strategic Missile Forces,” the Russian Ministry of Defense said.

Japanese Company Releases Line Of ‘Crotch Charms’ For Women To Dangle From Their Swimsuits Between Their Legs

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A Japanese company is selling what might be one of the most uncomfortable and impracticable pieces of jewelry ever dreamed up.

BoDivas, based in Tokyo, is offering the strange item, which they call the ‘Beachtail’ and describe as ‘sexy charms for bikini crotch’. The metallic charms are meant to be worn through the crotch of bikini bottoms, so the decorations dangle between a woman’s legs.

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Russia’s Nuclear Threat To NATO Countries

Russian nuclear forces have been on a high alert since the onset of the Ukraine war and some of the top Kremlin officials and state-owned media have repeatedly threatened nuclear strikes on NATO countries.

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2022 06 03 20 16

In late May, the head of Russia’s space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, warned that Russia would have about 50 Sarmat missiles by autumn 2022, capable of reducing all enemies to a “nuclear crater.”

Earlier, a Russian state-backed television channel had simulated a terrifying nuclear attack on Europe and issued a warning that there would be “no survivors”.

“One Sarmat missile and the British Isles will be no more,” nationalist politician Aleksey Zhuravlyov told Channel One’s ’60 Minutes, a show hosted by Evgeny Popov and Olga Skabeyeva, also known as the ‘Iron Doll of Putin TV’.

The show presented a diagram of how the missiles could be launched from Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave sandwiched between Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic Sea. It stated that a nuclear strike could destroy Berlin in 106 seconds, Paris in 200 seconds, and London in 202 seconds.

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Mystery Orbs and Wobbulating Beams

The following is an excerpt from Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO Disinformation in the Age of Aquarius

On one occasion, Bill Moore and Paul Bennewitz were on the deck of Bennewitz’s condo when he instructed Moore to set the shutter speed of his camera to 1000 and snap some random photos of the general landscape which encompassed Kirtland AFB and Manzano Mountain. When Moore later developed these photos, several shots revealed a curious tube of light that was only visible at this 1000th of a second setting. By using this shutter setting, Bennewitz had presumably employed a method of photographing images otherwise unseen by the naked eye.

Another oddity Bennewitz observed were orange orbs that frequently materialized in his home. Bill Moore later confirmed seeing one of these softball-sized orbs, which he described as three dimensional and self-illuminating, hovering near the ceiling. According to film maker Mark Pilkington:

“Others had noticed the orbs too. On one of his many trips out to the Bennewitz home to check up on things when the family was out (i.e., break-ins) Doty and two NSA operatives had disconnected the alarm system and were just about to start snooping around when they noticed one of the balls floating underneath a central stairway in the large entry room. “It was orange and had sparkles in it,” said Doty. “I asked the other guys: ‘Is it one of yours?’” But the NSA men were mystified as well, and the trio tried to see if the phenomenon was projected from outside of the house somewhere. No dice. ‘We never did figure out what that was,’ said Doty. Perhaps the NSA was in fact responsible, but if so, they never admitted this to anyone outside their circle.” 1 

Orbs weren’t the only weird things buzzing about Bennewitz. National Security Agency (NSA) operatives had moved into a vacant building across the street from Bennewitz’s home in an attempt to monitor his activities. Although Bennewitz didn’t know if the strangers across the street were actually government agents, or aliens in disguise, he somehow determined that they were scanning him with high tech equipment. Bennewitz said he could “sense their sweep” and that it caused a stinging sensation on his body. Over time, Bennewitz grew to suspect that this “sweep” had been performed by an ET beam. On one occasion, Bill Moore was visiting Bennewitz and also experienced this sensation, describing it as a beam that scanned his body.

To combat this perceived ET beam, Bennewitz constructed his very own spacegun. “The speed of my weapon exceeds that of their weapons and in its most sophisticated form can be readily computer controlled to allow extremely rapid tracking and lock-on regardless of speed along with electronic wobbulation of the beam.” 2 Bennewitz further claimed that: “Two small prototypes have been funded and constructed by my Company. Tests conducted to date indicate they do work and work rather well considering their small size…” 3

The beam or “scan” that Bennewitz and Moore experienced could have conceivably been a form of directed-energy weapon that was first reported in development during the late 1990s by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Kirtland Air Force Base. According to researcher Christian Lambright:

“In 2001, the AFRL publicly revealed the existence of Active Denial Technology (ADT), which was referred to, behind closed doors, as the ‘pain beam,’ a science fiction sounding “microwave beam that heats the water in the surface layer of the skin where the pain-sensing nerves are, and can do so from a considerable distance…By all accounts, the sudden and intense pain is enough to cause virtual panic as people desperately try to get away from the beam. Research into such ‘non-lethal’ weapons has reportedly been going on since the mid-1980s, though it is an outgrowth of research into radar and electromagnetic pulse technology.” 4

During the ADT’s 2001 public roll-out, a contraption called the Active Denial System (ADS) was demonstrated, which consisted of a large antenna mounted atop a military transport. In 2003, Eric Adams—an associate editor with Popular Science Magazine—volunteered himself, guinea pig style, to test the effects of this technology. According to Lambright:

“[Adams] had the system fired at him from a half mile away with the directed-energy beam controlled to hit him only in the middle of his back. In less than two seconds, he experienced a warm sensation that quickly grew to feel like an ‘electric burner.’ Though in this demonstration the purpose was to show that the ADS could generate only enough pain to motivate someone to leave the area, in a 2007 accident at Moody AFB, Georgia, an exposure of four seconds at 100% power injured one person seriously enough to require being flown to a local burn center. However, at lower power levels the beam can produce only a mild feeling of warmth and, as the above demonstration showed, it can be focused on a relatively small area even over a substantial distance…” 5

Lambright notes the existence of “man-portable” ADS-like systems in development as far back as the early 1970s. A 1972 Time Magazine article entitled “The Death Ray” described “a portable chemically-powered laser” that could “silently burn a fatal, quarter-inch-wide hole in the body of an enemy soldier up to five miles away…Much of the Pentagon’s laser weaponry research is being conducted in great secrecy at Kirtland Air Force Base, outside Albuquerque.” Lambright goes on to say:

“The above Time Magazine article was written forty years ago, and we are left to wonder how the research may have developed since then. Perhaps it melded into the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate and a little-known research group located at Kirtland Air Force Base…Even more interesting, is word of the Portable Efficient Laser Testbed (PELT), which was described in the above New Scientist article…as the ‘first man-portable heat compliance weapon of its kind.’ Cursory information on this weapon appeared in a Department of Defense (DoD) document titled Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Exercise Reference Book published in 2003, which listed the PELT laser rifle as a classified program. Included in the document is an illustration of this decidedly futuristic looking weapon and, if you look closely, it sports the unique logo of the ScorpWorks…

“What about the choice of the unusual name ‘ScorpWorks’? It was one of the questions I addressed to the AFRL Public Relations Office and, as expected, they acknowledged that the name is a play on the infamous Skunkworks, the secretive advanced aircraft division of Lockheed. The reference to a scorpion is supposed to reflect the Southwest flavor of their New Mexico location. But a scorpion being selected to symbolize the types of weapons the ScorpWorks develops, directed energy beam weapons with painful effects, also brought to mind what Paul Bennewitz complained about. It is what scorpions do. When a scorpion strikes… it stings… “ 6 

ADS was subsequently deployed to Afghanistan during the 2010 Iraq War, but never used due to “ethical and safety concerns” and was “deemed too unpredictable to use in war zones.” 7 However, as recently as the Summer of 2020, the Trump administration was toying with the idea of using ADS on its own citizenry. According to a National Public Radio (NPR) article dated September 16, 2020:

“… Joint Forces Headquarters Command in Washington, D.C., confirmed to NPR that hours before federal police officers cleared a crowded park near the White House with smoke and tear gas on June 1, a military police staff officer asked if the D.C. National Guard had a kind of ‘heat ray’ weapon that might be deployed against demonstrators in the nation’s capital.” The command “inquired informally about capabilities across the full-spectrum of non-lethal systems, to include the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) and Active Denial System (ADS)…” 8 

Soon after, The Washington Post matched NPR’s reporting citing the congressional testimony of Major Adam D. DeMarco, the senior-most D.C. National Guard officer on the ground when the hammer went down in Lafayette Square. Not only did DeMarco contradict White House denials that they hadn’t used tear gas on protestors, but DeMarco also provided an email from June 1, 2020 that stated:

“…the Defense Department’s top military police officer in the Washington region… asked whether the unit had a Long Range Acoustic Device, also known as an LRAD, or a microwave-like weapon called the Active Denial System, which was designed by the military to make people feel as if their skin is burning when in range of its invisible rays…”

The email went on to describe ADS in glowing terms:

“ …the ability to reach out and engage potential adversaries at distances well beyond small arms range, and in a safe, effective, and nonlethal manner…The ADS can immediately compel an individual to cease threatening behavior or depart through application of a directed energy beam that provides a sensation of intense heat on the surface of the skin. The effect is overwhelming, causing an immediate repel response by the targeted individual.”

Ultimately, federal officials were unable to get their hands on an ADS device and instead opted for tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd from Lafayette Square so that President Trump could stage a photo op of himself holding a bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

The former guy, preparing to burst into flames, after placing his tiny fingers on a Bible.
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Apparently, this wasn’t the first such instance in which the Trump admin contemplated using ADS on civilians. According to reporter Michael D. Shear in the August 26, 2020 edition of The New York Times:

“Fifteen days before the 2018 midterm elections, as President Trump sought to motivate Republicans with dark warnings about caravans heading to the U.S. border, he gathered his homeland security secretary and White House staff to deliver a message: “extreme action” was needed to stop the migrants….That afternoon, at a separate meeting with top leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection officials suggested deploying a microwave weapon — a “heat ray” designed by the military to make people’s skin feel as if it is burning when they get within range of its invisible beams… Two former officials who attended the afternoon meeting at the Department of Homeland Security on Oct. 22, 2018, said the suggestion that the device be installed at the border shocked attendees, even if it would have satisfied the president…”

The Most Expensive Cat Toy That Your Cat Might Actually Play With

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Mousr is the only toy designed from the wheels up to play the way your cat wants. Mousr’s variety of tail attachments means he’s customizable to match just about any cat’s play style. With a switch of his tail, it’ll be like your cat is meeting Mousr for the very first time!

Bring the excitement of a cartoon cat and mouse chase right into your living room! Mousr’s suite of sensors and built-in artificial intelligence make him the most sophisticated cat toy on the market. Can your cat outsmart Mousr?

Started from $149.99 USD.

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New Milestone For China – World’s ‘Largest’ Amphibious Aircraft AG600 Conducts Its First Flight With New Configuration

On May 31, a new-configuration variant of China’s AG600 large amphibious aircraft flew for the first time over Zhuhai, South China’s Guangdong Province, reported state-run media, CGTN. 

The AG600, codenamed “Kunlong,” took off from Zhuhai Jinwan Airport at 10:55 am and conducted a series of test flight missions. It flew for 20 minutes before landing safely, with its entire control system functioning normally.

According to the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), the successful flight heralds a new milestone for the AG600 project and a substantial breakthrough in improving the large amphibious aircraft’s firefighting functional model.

With a maximum take-off weight of 60 tones and a maximum water-storage capacity of up to 12 tones, this new configuration AG600 aircraft is specifically designed for firefighting missions. It meets China’s need for a large firefighting plane.

The aircraft is equipped with a pressure cabin, fly-by-wire flight control system, integrated avionics system, and systems for its future firefighting missions.

Key Part Of China’s Emergency-Rescue System

The AG600, along with the Y-20 heavy transporter and the C919 single-aisle passenger plane, is part of China’s major initiative to build a “large aircraft family” independently.

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2022 06 03 17 55

The aircraft is a critical piece of aviation equipment in China’s emergency-rescue system. According to the AVIC, it is also the first Chinese-made large specialized aircraft built under civil-aircraft airworthiness requirements.

This new-configuration AG600 amphibious aircraft conducted a successful maiden flight on Tuesday, according to the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). Due to the sophisticated nature of the aircraft’s future operations, it will require a variety of testing and must meet stringent standards.

It can operate in complex weather and environmental circumstances and rescue up to 50 people in a single mission.

The plane is expected to perform firefighting duties and enter service in 2023. The firefighting and rescue variants of the AG600 will be certified by the Civil Aviation Administration of China and delivered in 2024 and 2025, respectively.

AVIC said that it would aid in the development of the Chinese domestic air-emergency-rescue-product system, with the AG600 project serving as the driving force.

Capable of supporting China’s Ambitions  

China’s most recent five-year plan, spanning the years 2021 to 2025, recognized the AG600 as a vital program due to the country’s pressing need for an emergency rescue aircraft, as well as the strategic necessity for equipment that can support its bases in the South China Sea.

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2022 06 03 17 56
The AG600 is a hybrid aircraft that can take off and land on both land and water. It is intended for use in suppressing forest fires, maritime patrols, and search and rescue missions. It might also be used to observe the oceanic environment, explore resources, and transport people between islands.

The aircraft, if stationed in the southern island province of Hainan, will be likely to reach anywhere in the South China Sea in four hours. It might potentially operate as a cargo or passenger carrier between the region’s Chinese-controlled islands.

The propeller-driven plane, once finished, will be the world’s largest amphibious aircraft, surpassing Japan’s US-2 and Russia’s BE-200.

Another movie personality runs for office..

In a backwards run nation under mob-rule, only the television personalities stand a chance at “joining the club” of wealthy power elite. Like the head of Ukraine, and Donald Trump, these actors play roles that they script out and pretend to occupy. It’s the future of the West manifesting here and now.

Pennsylvania Republicans have rallied behind a celebrity former TV host and political neophyte, choosing a charismatic convert to conservatism over a rival who espoused a purer form of the party’s modern doctrine.

The above sentence could have been written in 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Senator Ted Cruz in Pennsylvania’s presidential primary on his way to receiving the GOP nomination. But tonight it’s a description of Mehmet Oz, America’s favorite living-room M.D., who has finally won the Keystone State’s Republican nomination for Senate with help from the former president. Oz narrowly topped the financier David McCormick after McCormick unexpectedly conceded in the middle of a statewide recount.

From HERE

Four B-1B Bone Bombers Have Arrived At Andersen AFB In Guam

Tyler Rogoway
Article HERE

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2022 06 05 11 45

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A quartet of B-1B Bone bombers just arrived at Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam today. It isn’t clear if the bombers will be staying as part of the now sporadic bomber presence deployments to the Indo-Pacific region or if they are there to take part in a major exercise, or both. Valiant Shield, a series of large multi-domain wargames is getting underway in the region. There have also been some rumors that a B-1 deployment was imminent as a deterrent and hedge against North Korean actions, including a potential nuclear test.

In 2020, it was announced that after 16 years of fulfilling the Continous Bomber Presence mission to Guam, the Pentagon would opt for a far less predictable deployment plan to the region for its bombers.

What came after was a flurry of extremely long-range bomber patrols, many from the continental United States, to Russia’s eastern borders and the tumultuous South China Sea, as well as shorter deployments to Guam or Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean by the USAF’s B-1, B-52, and B-2 bomber force.

More pictures from the past…

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A “dream kitchen”…

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You know…

The “news” has become silly.

Scientists accidentally create super-vicious HAMSTERS in a lab after gene editing experiment goes wrong and makes aggressive rodents chase, bite and pin each other down

  • Gene editing lab test inadvertently makes horde of rage-fuelled hamsters
  • Scientists removed key hormone in the hope it would boost animals’ cooperation
  • But it turned them wild, prompting chasing, biting and pinning among hamsters
  • ‘We [thought] it would reduce aggression. But the opposite happened’: test chief
  • ‘We don’t understand this system as well as we thought we did’, Professor added 

Scientists inadvertently bred a horde of unusually aggressive hamsters after a gene editing experiment to ‘reduce aggression’ went wrong.

Researchers at Georgia State University produced new rodents without hormone vasopressin in an effort to raise ‘social communication’ between the rodents.

Yet the chemical change turned the Syrian hamsters wild, prompting fights inside cages.

The ultra-vicious hamsters were pictured pinning, biting and chasing each other.

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2022 06 05 11 38

Lead researcher Professor Elliott Albers said: ‘We anticipated […] we would reduce both aggression and social communication — but the opposite happened.’

They key hormone Avpr1a was thought to regulate friendship and bonding, with its removal expected to increase harmony between the animals.

Instead, the lab experiment recorded ‘high levels of aggression towards other same-sex individuals’.

Professor Albers said: ‘We were really surprised at the results.’

It was thought that vasopressin affects the social behaviours of hamsters including aggression and communication.

To investigate further, scientists deactivated Avpr1a, removing a receptor that interacts with vasopressin in key regions of the brain.

Now immune to the hormone, it was thought the rodents would become friendlier.

The results were anything but, with a heightened frequency of fighting, biting, chasing and pinning down among the hamsters in their cages.

The study’s striking conclusions challenge scientists’ understanding of the relationship between biology and behaviour.

The professor added: We don’t understand this system as well as we thought we did.

‘The counterintuitive findings tell us we need to start thinking about the actions of these receptors across entire circuits of the brain, not just in specific brain regions.

‘Developing gene-edited hamsters was not easy. But it is important to understand that the neurocircuitry involved in human social behaviour and our model has […] relevance for human health.’

Professor Albers said the gene editing tests are intended to help find solutions to neuropsychiatric disorders including autism and depression.

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2022 06 05 11 40

The West’s Big Lie Propaganda Machine never rests.

Unfortunately, brainwashed citizens in Eurangloland accept it as fact…

Russia Will Strike Decision-Making Centers – Not in Kiev — if U.S. Arms to Ukraine hit Russia

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The Deputy Chairman of Russia’s National Security Council (Their equivalent of a Senate) has warned that the Kremlin could target western cities if Ukraine uses rockets supplied by the US to carry out strikes on Russia.

President Joe Biden announced this week that his administration was sending long-range missiles to Ukraine, backtracking on an earlier statement that the US would not be giving the war-torn country advanced weaponry.

Dmitry Medvedev, a former President of Russia and current chairman of the national security council, warned there would be consequences if these were used against Russian soil.

He told Al Jazeera: ‘If, God forbid, these weapons are used against Russian territory then our armed forces will have no other choice but to strike decision-making centers. ‘Of course, it needs to be understood that the final decision-making centers in this case, unfortunately, are not located on the territory of Kyiv.’

The rocket systems being sent over to Ukraine will be able to strike enemy targets about 50 miles away.

Biden said it would help Ukraine on the battlefield as fighting intensifies in the east of the country.

The White House said it had agreed to provide Ukraine with the new missiles after receiving assurances from President Zelensky that they would not be used to hit targets inside Russia.

However, the Kremlin said it did not believe Zelensky.

‘The United States is directly and intentionally adding fuel to the fire,’ Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said.

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Silly, as the USA makes all the decisions for Ukraine. It's a puppet. 

When the USA sends missile systems that are nuclear capable, and range capable, and it's puppet promises not to use them... how fucking stupid do you think we are? -MM
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Meanwhile in the United States…

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Are You Upset About Inflation? If So, You Aren’t Alone.

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All of a sudden, just about everyone is upset about inflation.  It would have been nice if everyone would have been this upset back when our leaders were making the exceedingly foolish decisions that resulted in this crisis.  In May 2012, the federal government was 15 trillion dollars in debt.  Now we are 30 trillion dollars in debt, but our politicians continue to spend money as if tomorrow will never come.  Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has pumped trillions of dollars that they created out of thin air into the financial system in recent years.  For a very long time, I passionately denounced what our leaders were doing, because I knew what would happen.  Now a day of reckoning has arrived, and millions upon millions of Americans are absolutely desperate for things to return to normal.  Unfortunately, that simply is not going to happen.

In May 2020, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States was less than two dollars.

Today, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States reached a brand new record high of $4.62, and we are being warned that it could soon go to “$5 a gallon or more”

The national average for unleaded gas hit another new high of $4.62 per gallon Tuesday, according to AAA data. Prices are up more than 50% compared with last year.

Analysts say gasoline prices usually peak by mid-May, but this year prices at the pump could continue to rise into July and reach about $5 a gallon or more.

Most of the time, the vast majority of the population doesn’t pay much attention to economics.

But this is where the rubber meets the road, and two recent polls show very clearly that Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated…

An NBC News poll released earlier this month found that 33 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the economy, while 23 percent approve of his handling of the cost of living.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll in early May found that more than 9 in 10 Americans are concerned, at a minimum, about the rate of inflation, which has been at a 40-year high for months. That included 44 percent who say they are “upset” about the problem.

In addition, Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index has now fallen to the lowest reading that we have seen since the end of the Great Recession

Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index measured -45 in May, down from -39 in each of the previous two months. It is the lowest reading in Gallup’s trend during the coronavirus pandemic, and likely the lowest confidence has been since the tail end of the Great Recession in early 2009.

When things go bad, who are people going to blame?

More than anyone else, people are going to blame the guy in the White House.

And right now the Biden administration is absolutely desperate “to contain the political damage caused by inflation”

The White House launched a new push Tuesday to contain the political damage caused by inflation after President Biden complained for weeks to aides that his administration was not doing enough to publicly explain the fastest price increases in roughly four decades.

Aiming to demonstrate to the public that it is responding to its concerns, Biden met with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell in the Oval Office, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about inflation and sent top aides across major networks to push the administration’s economic message.

What is Biden’s “economic message” exactly?

I have been sitting here pondering that question, and I honestly cannot answer it.

Every day, the story seems to change.  A while back, Biden promised to do all that he could to lower gasoline prices, and he foolishly released a million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

That didn’t work.

So what now?

One insider told Politico that high gasoline prices are “a really difficult issue to message around”, because “you can’t deny the reality”

The White House’s focus on gas prices is bred from two sobering political conclusions top officials have made. The first is that they have little control over the problem. The second is that as prices rise at the pump, so do Democrats’ odds of a midterm wipeout — especially as the average U.S. gallon of gas hits fresh record highs.

“There really isn’t one silver bullet,” said one person familiar with the discussions. “It’s a really difficult issue to message around when you can’t deny the reality.”

If Joe Biden asked me what he should do in order to reduce gasoline prices, the first thing I would say would be to stop doing things that are counterproductive.  The following comes from a recent editorial by Marc A. Thiessen

If the Biden administration cared about high gas prices, they would be doing everything in their power to increase domestic production. After a federal judge invalidated an offshore oil and gas lease sale in January, the administration chose not to appeal and has since canceled three transactions in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska — taking millions of acres off the auction block. The Post called the move “a victory for climate activists intent on curbing U.S. fossil fuel leasing,” which “effectively ends the possibility of the federal government holding a lease sale in coastal waters this year.” Worse, the administration is about to let the nationwide offshore drilling program expire next month without a new plan in place.

Moving forward, we need to remove mountains of regulations that have made it extremely difficult to build and operate new refineries in the United States.

And we need far more exploration and far more drilling as soon as possible.

Of course the truth is that this isn’t just a U.S. problem.

Energy prices are out of control all over the world, and they are actually much higher in Europe than they are here.

In fact, soaring energy prices are a big reason why inflation in the European Union just hit a brand new record high

Following Germany’s post-Weimar record high inflation print, the European Union’s consumer price inflation data this morning surged to a record high at +8.1% YoY (notably hotter than the +7.8% YoY expected).

Most Americans don’t realize this, but Europe is actually much closer to a full-blown economic meltdown than we are.

I expect the euro to fall below parity with the dollar in the not too distant future.

And I expect a nightmarish energy crunch in Europe as supplies from Russia are restricted or cut off completely.  Unless something changes, next winter is going to be a really challenging time for many European nations.

We have entered the worst energy crisis in modern history, but what we have experienced so far is just the beginning.

Much worse is ahead, and the American people will become increasingly frustrated as prices just keep going higher and higher.

BBC offers a classic case of “smooth propaganda”. Can you spot the lies and layers of deception?

Elegant and devious, punctuated with half-truths, their brand of insidious “journalism” is a textbook of effective disinformation.

The BBC (like the New York Times) excels at disinformation with an authoritative touch. 

These media engines do not shout. 

Who wants to use a vulgar ax when innuendo, used as a stiletto, can accomplish so much more? 

Not surprising, then, that their "facts" and "arguments" —calibrated for a refined audience, and slyly embedded in many layers of deception not liable to be spotted by the untrained eye—are couched in what appears to be established truths and impeccable reasoning. 

Yet, as this piece so efficiently illustrates, almost every paragraph is tainted with a lie. 

Can you identify the lies? 

We'll give you a hint: the article uses one major stratagem to inject its poison—reality inversion. 

Almost everything in it is upside down. 

The people attacked are actually the truthtellers; the lonely few pushing against the vileness of tyrannical plutocratic elites masquerading as zealous champions of peace, freedom, and democracy. 

The people defended—like the notorious White Helmets, long exposed as a creation of British intelligence to facilitate regime change ops—are vectors for the lies upholding the Western imperialist order. 

For good measure, the pain of the "victims" is also exaggerated. 

And it doesn't help any that, by design, the discourse is also conducted in a contextual miasma in which some witnesses—like Dr Schlosberg—is seen loftily casting a curse on both warring houses. 

(Progressives of this type, who always end up carrying water for the Empire, are a regular fixture in Western political debates). 

It's also ironic but to be expected for these avatars of priggish "journalistic integrity", that while they are quick to mention in ominous tones that Dr Schlosberg (in connection with the largely debunked Bucha story) has been using some "Russian state media", they conveniently forget that the BBC itself is a huge media and propaganda instrument of the British state, an aggressive participant in many of the topics and events discussed in this story.

So give it a try. We'd like to hear what you have to say.

From HERE

Three-Cheese Beef Pasta Shells

These Three-Cheese Beef Pasta Shells can be ready to impress in no time at all. Perfect for company and cozy nights at home, this hearty dish only looks like you spent all day in the kitchen. In fact, you can pull stuffed pasta shells with ground beef together with just 25 minutes of prep time, then get the rest of the meal ready while it bakes. These stuffed shells with cream cheese, ground beef, melty cheese and pasta sauce bring a whole new meaning to the term “comfort food.” No matter the occasion, nothing satisfies quite like a warm dish of Three-Cheese Beef Pasta Shells.

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3526ddd5 fc58 4b9d 871e ca902621a15f

Ingredients

  • 24 uncooked jumbo pasta shells
  • 1 lb ground beef (at least 80% lean)
  • 1 jar (25.5 oz) Muir Glen™ organic chunky tomato & herb pasta sauce
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1 container (8 oz) chive and onion cream cheese spread
  • 1 1/2 cups shredded Italian cheese blend (6 oz)
  • 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
  • 1 egg
  • 1 to 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley, if desired

2022 06 03 20 32
2022 06 03 20 32

Killdozer

Out of the dust-bin, one of my long forgotten articles has gotten legs; The Tale of the Killdozer. My guess is that this is because it is approaching the anniversary of the event. In any event, I have got more than a random flood of visitors to the article.

Perhaps you all might want to mozy on over and check out this post; indeed, it is one of my better posts. It’s probably associated with the domestic insanity of the Biden Administration. Maybe that’s why so many people are visiting that article.

The Tale of the Killdozer.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 5

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are galloping ahead

Yah. The West is in collapse. It is obvious to everyone (except the deluded). And everyone is now “hunkering down”. Everyone has their “heads down”, and watching their actions, internet footprint, and activity. It’s the calm before the storm. It’s gathering. It’s gonna be nasty.

Watch out!

Uh Oh! Medvedev: “The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are galloping ahead”

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In a TV interview with Al Jazeera Television, Dimitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, said “This is not a forecast, but what’s already in play.  The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are galloping ahead, and we can only look towards God.”

Here is the video:

 

 

Medvedev was elected president of Russia in the 2008 election. He was regarded as more liberal than his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, who was also appointed prime minister during Medvedev’s presidency.

Medvedev’s top agenda as president was a wide-ranging modernization program, aiming at modernizing Russia’s economy and society, and lessening the country’s reliance on oil and gas.

During Medvedev’s tenure, the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty was signed by Russia and the United States, Russia emerged victorious in the Russo-Georgian War, and recovered from the Great Recession. Medvedev also launched an anti-corruption campaign, despite later being accused of corruption himself.

He served a single term in office and was succeeded by Putin following the 2012 presidential election. Medvedev was then appointed by Putin as prime minister. He resigned along with the rest of the government on 15 January 2020 to allow Putin to make sweeping constitutional changes; he was succeeded by Mikhail Mishustin on 16 January 2020. On the same day, Putin appointed Medvedev to the new office of deputy chairman of the Security Council.

The fact that Medvedev made direct reference to the “Horsemen of the Apocalypse” is utterly stunning to may observers because it signals how the leadership of Russia sees actual developments in the world.  Medvedev made clear “This is not a forecast, but what’s already in play.”

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse

(From Wikipedia) 

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (often referred to as the Four Horsemen) are figures in the Christian religion, first appearing in the Old Testament's prophetic Book of Zechariah and in the Book of Ezekiel, where they are named as punishments from God. They later appear in the New Testament's final book, Revelation, an apocalypse written by John of Patmos.

Revelation 6 tells of a book or scroll in God's right hand that is sealed with seven seals. The Lamb of God/Lion of Judah opens the first four of the seven seals, which summons four beings that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses. Zechariah describes them as "the ones whom the Lord has sent to patrol the earth," causing it to rest quietly. Ezekiel lists them as "sword, famine, wild beasts, and plague".

In John's revelation, the first horseman rides on a white horse, carries a bow, and is given a crown – he rides forward as a figure of Conquest,[1][2] perhaps invoking PestilenceChrist, or the Antichrist. The second horseman carries a sword and rides a red horse and is the creator of (civil) War.[3] The third horseman, a food-merchant riding upon a black horse, symbolizes Famine. He carries The Scales.[4] The fourth and final horse is pale, and upon it rides Death.[5] "They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine, and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth."[6]
Apocalyptic Christianity sometimes interprets the Four Horsemen as a vision of harbingers of the Last Judgment, setting a divine end-time upon the world.[7][8]

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

Given the “wars and rumors of war from the east” as well as the ongoing pestilence of COVID and now, Monkeypox, as well as “signs in the Heavens and upon the earth” in the form of earthquakes, entire bodies of water turning blood red without explanation, and similar strange events,  it is not hard to see why Medvedev said what he said.

While the U.S. and its NATO vasal partners view things as mere “strategy” and “political positioning,” the leaders of Russia are viewing things from the perspective of the literal end of the world.  This  variance in the approach of national leadership may explain why the sides aren’t stopping the craziness going on over the special military operation to de-Nazify and de-militarize Ukraine.  Instead of de-escalating, pausing, or even taking a step back to reconsider, mankind is moving ahead toward the frightening reality of Armageddon.

Circumstances seem to keep pushing the United States and Russia closer and closer to a horrifying showdown.

If I was in the White House, I would be doing all that I could to try to find a way out of this mess.

Unfortunately, the guy currently leading our nation is a hothead in an advanced state of mental decline, and he is surrounded by the worst foreign policy team in U.S. history.  That is a recipe for disaster, but most Americans seem to be entirely convinced that a full-blown war with Russia is extremely unlikely.  Most of us seem to think that we can keep escalating the conflict in Ukraine without ever suffering any serious consequences.

Unfortunately, the Russians see things very differently.

On Russian television, there is constant discussion about how the conflict in Ukraine is really a proxy war between the United States and Russia.

On the state TV show 60 Minutes, host Olga Skabeeva announced: “I have some unpleasant news… Even though we are methodically destroying the weapons that are being delivered [to Ukraine], but the quantities in which the United States are sending them force us to come up with some global conclusions. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that maybe Russia’s special operation in Ukraine has come to an end, in a sense that a real war had started: WWIII. We’re forced to conduct the demilitarization not only of Ukraine, but of the entire NATO alliance.”

Sadly, she is quite correct that World War III has now begun.

Let us hope that a way to stop it can be found before it goes nuclear.

Nuclear war is NOT a topic that is brought up much on American news channels, but in Russia it is regularly proposed as a potential option…

Vladimir Avatkov, from the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said: “You mentioned WWIII and the way Americans and Poles are acting on the territory of Ukraine—indeed, we need to remember the words of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who said that anyone who tries to interfere in the special military operation will pay a heavy price.” Skabeeva interrupted: “We never forget about these words of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, but a great number of people are already standing in line, trying to interfere in Russia’s special operation on the territory of Ukraine. Turns out, we have to act—but we’re yet to figure out how we can act without conducting a nuclear strike.”

Reading something like that should chill you to the core.

When Russian journalists and politicians say stuff like this, why won’t we take them seriously?

Just the other day, one prominent Russian politician openly talked about destroying both coasts of the United States with Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles…

The politician, Alexie Zhuravlev, was joined on the talk show by fellow MP and Russian-state mouthpiece Yevgeny Popov, the host of the Rossiya 1 channel show.

The lawmaker claimed that two of Russia’s Sarmat  missiles would destroy the entirety of America’s east coast – before adding it would take just “two missiles for the west coast” as well.

“Four missiles and there’ll be nothing left.”

Russia’s Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles are far superior to anything that we have, and we have no defense against them.

If push comes to shove, I believe that the Russians will not hesitate to use their nuclear weapons.

Our leaders should be trying to find a peaceful way out of this crisis, but instead both sides just continue to escalate matters.

In fact, for the very first time Joe Biden has just promised to give long-range rocket systems that are capable of hitting targets inside Russia to Ukraine…

U.S. President Joe Biden has agreed to provide Ukraine with advanced rocket systems that can strike with precision at long-range Russian targets as part of a $700 million weapons package expected to be unveiled on Wednesday.

The United States is providing Ukraine with high mobility artillery rocket systems that can accurately hit targets as far away as 80 km (50 miles) after Ukraine gave “assurances” they will not use the missiles to strike inside Russia, senior administration officials said.

What an incredibly foolish move.

Has Biden gone completely insane?

In response, the Russians are holding missile drills…

The nuclear forces of Russia are holding drills in a region just northeast of Moscow.

The decision to begin these drills comes just one day after President Joe Biden announced his decision to send advanced missile system to Ukraine, the New York Post reported.

According to an independent news agency in Russia, around 1,000 Russian soldiers are taking part in intense maneuvers using more than 100 military vehicles, including Yars intercontinental missile launchers.

Yikes!

At this point, the U.S. is providing most of the new military equipment for the war in Ukraine, most of the intelligence for the war in Ukraine, and U.S. Secretary of State Lloyd Austin has publicly admitted that we are actually bringing Ukrainians into the United States to train them to go back and fight in the war.

And now we have learned that the U.S. has actually been conducting “offensive hacking operations” against Russia…

General Nakasone confirmed for the first time that the US was conducting offensive hacking operations in support of Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion.
He told Sky News: “We’ve conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum; offensive, defensive, [and] information operations.”

What are we thinking?

Have our leaders really become this reckless?

Once a full-blown war with Russia starts, there will be no going back.

But right now many Americans are so self-obsessed that they don’t even realize that our leaders in Washington have brought us to the brink of the unthinkable.

We have become a country full of self-destructive degenerates that are so out of it that we don’t even realize what we are doing to ourselves.

There is a small minority of the population that is awake, but most Americans are in a deep state of sleep.  I am doing my best to try to wake them up, but most of the population simply does not want to listen.

The corporate media is telling them to hate Russia, and so most of them are going to keep cheering for more escalation until it is far too late to reverse course.

If we keep escalating the conflict in Ukraine, the Russians could eventually be put into a position where they feel like they are forced to make a very difficult decision.

And when that day finally arrives, you better hope that they don’t decide to pull the trigger.

Economic fiasco, nuclear fiasco, societal fiasco, the truth is clear…

The American (and western) societies have collapsed. Their governments are on “zombie autopilot”, and those in (functional) control are hard-line religious technocrat zealots. You all should be in your “life boat” right now. The fight for life-preservers will be on-going over the next few months. -MM

We start with what will happen on a day to day basis…

Pay for play for the rest of us

You know how “pay-to-play” works: contribute a couple of million dollars to key political players, and then get your tax break, subsidy, no-bid contract, etc., slipped into some nook or cranny of the legislative process that few (if any) will notice because the legislation is hundreds of pages long or a “gut and replace” magic wand was wielded at the last minute.

As the essential systems of everyday life break down and become increasingly dysfunctional, I predict the rise of what I’m calling “pay-to-play” for the rest of us: if you pay for expedited service, concierge service, etc., you will get the kind of service everyone used to get, i.e. functional, prompt and efficient.

As I detailed in Who’s Going to Fix What’s Broken?, systems such as vehicle registration and tax collection are becoming kafkaesque quagmires where the expected (or promised) services are not provided or are botched.

Waiting for services at the DMV, IRS, et al. and the county welfare office are identical experiences. Poor people have no choice but to put up with long waits and bureaucratic quagmires, but the top 10% who earn almost half of all income and are responsible for roughly half the consumer spending are not amused by services that are equivalent to what the bottom 10% must tolerate out of necessity.

Since nobody in power is truly interested in fixing these large-scale, complex systems, then it’s easy to predict the rise of “pay-to-play” for the rest of us: pay an extra fee, get much better service.

There are already examples of this trend. For example, if you want expedited processing of your U.S. passport renewal, that will cost you $60. Given my previous experience with passport renewals, I was happy to pay the extra $60 just to have some additional assurance I was actually going to receive the new passport in a timely manner.

Would I have paid an extra $100 for “expedited processing” of my DMV registration to avoid a 7-month descent into bureaucratic Heck? Yes, with no hesitation whatsoever. Would I have paid $200 for “expedited processing” of my federal tax return to bypass that 7-month kafkaesque quagmire? Gladly, without hesitation.

How about a $500 “expedited processing” of your building permit? Given that those long months of slogging through the quagmire cost real money, a $500 “concierge service” fee to get your permit in 8 weeks rather than 8 months would be a bargain.

“Pay-to-play” is inherently unfair: the wealthy get their interests served, the rest of us tax donkeys and debt-serfs slog through kafkaesque quagmires. “Pay-to-play” for the rest of us will also be inherently unfair, but at least it will democratize “pay-to-play” to the degree that a couple hundred bucks will actually buy better service, and that’s within reach of many more households than the million dollars required to access political “pay-to-play.”

If systems can’t or won’t be fixed, then having access to the 10% which still functions is worth a great deal. The more kafkaesque quagmires you’ve slogged through, the more you hope “pay-to-play” for the rest of us becomes ubiquitous.

How much would you pay for expedited emergency services?

Ponder that thought as you check out some funny cartoons…

What Would Animals Say If They Could Speak?

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All of us have already wondered what animals think and what they would say to us if they could talk. Jimmy Craig tried to answer this question with these amusing comics which are part of a series called “They Can Talk.”

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Amusing, huh?Consider that Hunter Biden is a multi-millionaire. that he makes a living for “being in the club” and arranging the mass deaths of “enemies of the Untied States” by WMD. Now consider how others “in the club” get by.Nope. You can never aspire to be part of this club…

Top-Paid LA Lifeguards Earned Up To $510,283 In 2022

Wednesday, Jun 01, 2022 – 05:00 AM

By Adam Andrzejewski of Open The Books substack

Who knew that LA lifeguards – who work in the sun, ocean surf, and golden sands of California – could reap such unbelievable financial rewards?

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2022 06 04 10 24

It’s time we put Baywatch on pay watch. In 2019, we found top-paid lifeguards made up to $392,000.

Unfortunately, today, the pay and benefits are even more lucrative.

Daniel Douglas was the most highly paid and earned $510,283, an increase from $442,712 in 2020. As the “lifeguard captain,” he out-earned 1,000 of his peers: salary ($150,054), perks ($28,661), benefits ($85,508), and a whopping $246,060 in overtime pay.

The second highest paid, lifeguard chief Fernando Boiteux, pulled down $463,517 – up from $393,137 last year.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found 98 LA lifeguards earned at least $200,000 including benefits last year, and 20 made between $300,000 and $510,283. Thirty-seven lifeguards made between $50,000 and $247,000 in overtime alone.

And it’s not only about the cash compensation. After 30 years of service, LA lifeguards can retire as young as 55 on 79-percent of their pay.

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2022 06 04 10 25

Furthermore, we found that most of the top-paid lifeguards were men. In fact, only two of the top 20 high-earners were women: Virginia Rupe ($307,664; 16th highest paid), a lifeguard captain, and Lauren Dale ($303,518; 19th highest paid), an ocean lifeguard specialist.

Overtime pay drove earnings into the corporate executive range.

Last year alone, 37 lifeguards made overtime in amounts between $50,000 and $247,000. For example, Daniel Douglas (overtime: $246,060); James Orr (overtime: 146,506); Patrick O’Neil (overtime: $133,235); and five others each made six-figures plus.

However, in a six-year period, between 2016 and 2021, the LA lifeguard corps made a fortune in overtime. The top three high earners made between $505,579 and $980,007 in overtime alone: Daniel Douglas ($980,007); Jaro Spopek ($513,365); and James Orr ($505,579).

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2022 06 04 10 27

Some high-earning lifeguards also win awards for heroism. However, we found many lifeguards winning Valor Awards failed to crack the top of the payroll.

In 2020, the Medal of Valor winner, Edward “Nick” Macko (salary: $134,144), an ocean lifeguard, jumped into the rough waters in a remote Palos Verdes gorge and pulled a man to safety through potentially skull-crushing swells and over razor-sharp rocks.

In 2021, the Exemplary Service Award for EMS went to lifeguards Todd Ribera (comp: $184,676); Stephen Leon Jr. (comp: $36,597); Max Malamed (comp: $130,952); and Blake Hubbell (comp: $170,956).

Also winning Exemplary Service Awards were high-earners: ocean lifeguard specialist Lauren Dale ($303,518), the 19th highest paid lifeguard, and lifeguard captain Roque Roque ($319,566), the sixth highest paid in 2020.

Beach lifeguard pay dwarfs that of their colleagues at the pools. The highest paid “pool lifeguard” made $45,030, including pay and benefits.

During the pandemic, lifeguards continued to work and took additional precautions doing water rescues. Many traded their trunks and sunscreen for masks and scrubs at Covid testing sites. In some cases, lifeguards acted as police, enforcing stay-at-home orders, keeping people off the beaches and out of the water.

Why beach lifeguards earn so much money is an open question the L.A. taxpayer might start asking.

A lifeguard’s job can be dangerous, but it’s unclear why they are now paid up to a half million dollars a year.

Really?

Consider the payment rates of “diversity officers”.

How much does a Director, Diversity & Inclusion make in the United States? 

The average Director, Diversity & Inclusion salary in the United States is $106,958 as of , but the salary range typically falls between $91,540 and $123,411. 

Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession. 

With more online, real-time compensation data than any other website, Salary.com helps you determine your exact pay target.

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2022 06 04 11 46

Ugh. Makes me sick.

Here, enjoy a nice unique burger flavor…

Grilled Italian Sausage Burgers

Inject come spice into your next barbecue with quick and easy Italian sausage burgers, fresh off the grill. Thick slices of mozzarella and sun-dried tomato mayo make simple, savory finishing touches.

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db5bc70d 726d 4741 b728 86d8495b4a5d

Ingredients

  • 1 pound lean ground beef
  • 1/2 pound bulk mild or hot Italian sausage
  • 2 tablespoons Progresso™ Italian-style bread crumbs
  • 6 slices (3/4 ounce each) mozzarella cheese
  • 12 slices Italian bread, 1/2 inch thick
  • 1/2 cup sun-dried tomato mayonnaise
  • 1 cup shredded lettuce
  • 1 medium tomato, thinly sliced

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2022 06 03 20 49

Why America Decays: The Tyranny Of Self-Interest

Wednesday, Jun 01, 2022 – 04:30 AM

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Only those societies which still have a functional public interest / common good will survive; those ruled by the tyranny of self-interest will fall.

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2022 06 04 10 30

I’ve discussed the moral rot consuming the American Project in blog posts and my books. This moral rot–perhaps better described as civic decay–is so pervasive and ubiquitous that we are forgiven for assuming “this is the way it’s always been.”

This inability to discern the rot is the result of the gradualness of the decay. There are many analogies: the slowly boiled frog, the way in which weight gain creeps up on us, and so on. This is the result of humanity’s finely tuned knack to habituate to any new environment and normalize what would have been intolerable in the recent past.

We adapt to changing expectations, incentives, values and realities over time and forget the way our world functioned in previous eras.

There are many examples of this. Many of the changes in our society, politics and economy can be traced back to the early 1980s, when financialization (and its offspring, regulatory capture and pay-to-play) began its rise to supremacy.

Forty years ago, student loans were unknown and healthcare costs did not bankrupt households. Forty years ago, relatively few Americans were obese. Go back a decade further, prior to the explosion of fast-food outlets, and a small percentage of the money Americans spent on food went to eating out / away from home, i.e. fast-food and restaurants. Eating out was a treat reserved for special occasions, not a daily ritual / birthright.

In the post-Vietnam era, Americans were wary of foreign entanglements. The Presidency wasn’t quite as Imperial as it is today. Congress still held some modest power over foreign entanglements. This is no longer the case.

The most insightful way to grasp the pervasive moral rot is to examine the tyranny of self-interest: in the past, the public interest / common good still had a foothold in the nation’s values, incentives and expectations. Now the public interest / common good are nothing but paper-thin PR cover for maximizing private gains by any means available, i.e. the supremacy of self-interest.

Our ability to discern the difference between serving the public interest / common good and making a modest profit doing so and harming the common good to maximize private gains has been lost. There are many such examples. The financialized self-interest behind student loans, healthcare, national defense, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Everything–i.e. cartels and monopolies–is visible in every nook and cranny of the U.S. economy, political structure and economy.

Synthetic opioids offer a good example. Under the preposterously false guise of “serving the common good” with painkillers, Big Pharma caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands more via the devastation of addiction– addiction which Big Pharma was pleased to promote as non-addictive because this served to maximize profits.

As is now the norm, no one is held personally responsible for this completely needless public health catastrophe. A few wrist-slap fines are administered and life in America goes back to the relentless urgency to maximize private gains by any means available: fraud, deception, overbilling, embezzlement, regulatory capture, pay-to-play, and so on.

The phony PR cover for the the tyranny of self-interest is that the pursuit of maximizing profits by any means available magically benefits the public. The apologists trot out various example of planned obsolescence as “proof” that the supremacy of self-interest is the golden road to a glorious society, but all this careful cherry-picking doesn’t make the moral rot and civic decay go away.

America is doomed to decay as long as we can’t tell the difference between the public interest / common good and self-interest. The two are not the same, but we’ve lost the ability to discern the difference. Only those societies which still have a functional public interest / common good will survive; those ruled by the tyranny of self-interest will fall.

China’s J-20, Russia’s Su-57 Stealth Fighters Ready For Joint ‘Combat Patrols’ To Challenge US Hegemony – State Media

At a time when Russia is facing isolation from the West, its Iron Brother’ China, has been cementing closer ties with Moscow. In the latest revelation, the Chinese PLA Air Force (PLAAF) has said that its J-20 and Russia’s Su-57, both stealth fighter jets, could participate in a joint combat patrol.

Helpless Against Hypersonic Missile! US To Boost Its Military Base That China Is ‘Practicing To Obliterate’ With Deadly Missiles

Last week, China’s Ministry of National Defense announced that the Air Forces of China and Russia conducted a joint strategic patrol above the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea, and the West Pacific Ocean as part of their annual military cooperation plan.

While the Chinese PLA Air Force sent its advanced H-6K strategic bombers, the Russian Aerospace Forces dispatched its Tu-95MS strategic missile carriers for the joint strategic patrol.

However, in a startling development, Chinese military experts have indicated that the stealth fighters of the two Air Forces, the J-20 and the Su-57, could soon be leading these joint patrols.

The development gains significance in the light of unhindered Chinese-Russian cooperation, which has been perceived as a security threat by the US.

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File Image: J-20 Stealth Aircraft

Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times recently that to deal with the constantly changing battlefield environment and to improve combat capability, China needs enough fighter jets to ensure that strategic aerial patrols can be carried out reliably, effectively, and safely.

He indicated that more advanced equipment, such as China’s J-20 stealth fighter jet and Russia’s Su-57 stealth fighter jet, could participate in the next joint patrol. According to Song, this would result in a significant increase in the fleet’s overall combat capability.

Though heavy bombers are formidable assets, fighter jets are often required to escort these bombers as they are not designed for air to air combat. However, on the other hand, a stealth fighter jet could effectively engage in air combat with far great success due to its ability to evade radars.

 

The threat of J-20 patrolling with Su-57 becomes even more perilous as the PLAAF J-20 stealth fighter was already deployed for training patrols in the East China Sea and the South China Sea in April.

The move was aimed at countering the presence of American stealth fighters making an appearance in the contested region, as previously reported by the EurAsian Times.

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Geopolitical commentary by the Indian-based journalist...

The presence of stealth fighters in the same region where the Chinese and Russian bombers flew last week could lead to an escalation in tensions especially as both Beijing and Moscow remain locked in a tussle with Japan.

China’s consistent belligerence against Taiwan and a spate of military drills that took place in April also paint a rather dangerous picture.

President Joe Biden had recently stated that the US would intervene militarily in case China was to launch an invasion of Taiwan. The stealth fighters of the adversarial Air Force patrolling the region inhabited by staunch US allies could escalate tensions manifold at a time when the region has become a major flashpoint.

Additionally, the Global Times report also revealed that the Chinese bombers on their recent joint patrol were not alone in their voyage. The PLAAF J-16 fighter jet, which is the most frequent visitor to Taiwan’s ADIZ, escorted the H-6K bombers.

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China should give up ‘illusion’ of avoiding US rivalry, Beijing think tank says

The US behavior against China, after the Chinese helped get the US out of the 2008 GFC, has reminded the Chinese people what the USA is; and what it represents.

It has no appreciative culture, and can NEVER be trusted. 

So, since Xi took over China leadership, he has been active preparing the PLA for war, as well as, seeking bilateral cooperation to avoid war. 

Ukraine war fallout has heightened risks of all out US-China military confrontation, Renmin University think tank warns.  China should prepare for the worst, but seek bilateral cooperation to avoid it, institute urges in recent report.

J-16 Cover For Bombers 

China’s J-16 fighter jets were observed participating in a China-Russia joint patrol for the first time on Sunday, according to China Central Television (CCTV), which showed a photo of two J-16s flying alongside a Chinese H-6K bomber and a Russian Tu-95MS bomber.

According to Chinese military experts, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it dispatched Su-30SM fighter jets as an escort, implying that China’s J-16 deployment was deployed as a reciprocal arrangement.

 

Since the strategic bombers are not designed to participate in air-to-air combat, observers stated that having fighter jets as escorts is also battle-oriented, noting that both China’s J-16 and Russia’s Su-30 are heavy fighter jets that may contribute to the joint patrol’s overall combat readiness.

As seen in the photo, each J-16 was equipped with two PL-10 close-range combat missiles; however, the J-16 can also carry long-range air-to-air missiles, as the unnamed expert pointed out.

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2022 06 03 11 3b9

The J-16’s high range, dual engines, twin seats, enormous fuel capacity, and in-flight refueling capability make it ideal for long-range escort operations, according to the expert.

The Japan Air Self-Defense Force had been monitoring the China-Russia joint patrol, according to the Ministry of Defense Joint Staff, although the presence of the J-16s and Su-30s was not mentioned in the press statement.

Analysts speculated that the Chinese and Russian fighter jets may have only partially escorted the bombers and did not reach close enough to Japan’s identification zone or that Japan simply missed them.

More pictures from the past…

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Russia imposed retaliatory sanctions. It’ll be a knockout right from the first pack

From HERE

Many of our fellow citizens, in a thirst for universal justice, asked Putin to impose retaliatory sanctions against the West. Are you Vladimir Putin or Leo Tolstoy? How long can one or the other cheek be turned under the sixth package of sanctions already in a row? When will we finally bang something – so much so that the whole West is in dust? And finally, our answer followed.

No, Russia did not launch Sarmats in the US, as some recommended – apparently those who have a personal bunker in their dacha. And she did not turn off the gas valve to Europe, as others loudly demanded, probably very rich people who are not dependent on social obligations from the state and have a lot of currency to buy everything for themselves.

You don’t know Putin well if you thought that he would become like Western leaders, shooting himself in the foot and attacking the interests of Russian citizens, just to harm the West, and still achieve nothing.

This is how Western sanctions can be characterized. They have already introduced six packages, but they did not achieve the desired effect, they only disgraced themselves, dispersed record inflation and ruined the lives of their own fellow citizens.

And Russia continues to go its own way, the sanctions did not stop us. Which means one thing – European politicians have publicly got into a puddle with their sanctions packages. Of course, it is foolish to deny that these sanctions hit us. Nobody denies. The irony here is that these sanctions hit them no less. And the big question is who suffered more.

I don’t know what kind of style of martial art it is when the enemy hits his head so hard that your ears start to ring, but our president is engaged in more traditional and effective martial arts.

Our authorities quietly and calmly, without unnecessary pathos and PR, decided to knock out the Western economy with just one sanctions package – they banned the export of inert gases from Russia. What are these gases and why is it deadly for the West – now I will try to explain everything.

Inert gases include neon, xenon, krypton, argon and others. Neon is used for the production of microcircuits, xenon in headlights, and krypton is used to fill double-glazed windows. And this is only a part of the scope of these gases. But even this small part is enough to understand that without these gases it is impossible to produce modern technological goods.

Whether it’s at least a whole car or just an ordinary electric kettle. Because almost every modern household appliance has microcircuits. And in fact, almost the entire Western economy is based on the production of electronics. And a shortage of one component is enough to stop huge production there.

For us, the price of the issue of these sanctions is a penny. The revenue of our companies from the sale of these gases amounted to literally tens of millions of dollars. This is not even close to the billions from the sale of oil and gas. That is why I said at the beginning that Putin did not shoot the Russian economy in the foot, but dealt a more measured blow.

Let’s say the West will be able to produce a conditional car – the body itself and the seats. But he can’t sell it if it doesn’t have the necessary chips or headlights to make it work. And they will not be, because in their production inert gases are used, the export of which has been banned by Russia.

Yes, Russia does not have a complete monopoly on these gases. For example, in neon we have a market share of approximately 50%. However, the Chinese have about 30% more, and they will not share with the West, they themselves will not have enough. By the way, that is why there is such a comment in the text of the decree:

Russia decided to remind unfriendly countries of their import dependence. Now the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade will determine who will have access to neon, krypton, xenon – key and critical gases for the production of semiconductors.

We’re talking about the Chinese here. We will sell to them, and to the West – shish. And this is not out of love for the Chinese, but simply so that when production crashes in the West, we ourselves will not be left without goods. China will supply them to us, receiving from us the supplies of these gases necessary for production.

And the Western economy, meanwhile, will really crash. About 75% of our neon went to Taiwan – to TSMC and South Korean Samsung, i.e. in companies producing products for Western brands. And without neon and other important components from Russia, they will soon be unable to produce it. And it is important here that all gases go “in one package”.

If we were talking about one more gas, then it would be possible to replace it, and even then not immediately. For example, in the USA, the terms for replacing neon are estimated to be anywhere from a year to two. And then, if someone invests in it. But for this you need to be sure that Russia will not return to the world market, otherwise the new capacities will simply be superfluous.

And our authorities acted quite cunningly, saying that the ban is valid until “the end of 2022”, and then it is not known, maybe we will resume it, maybe not. This creates a sense of insecurity among potential investors and a reluctance to risk money by investing it in a potentially losing business.

How this uncertainty works in practice, we saw in 2020, when Russia and Saudi Arabia discouraged investors from investing in shale oil production in the United States, because at prices in the region of $20 per barrel, many shale companies then went bankrupt.

And now the risk that we will repeat this number is scaring off investors. But the problem isn’t just finding replacement investors.

Given that we banned all types of inert gases at once, the situation for the West is even more difficult – to replace such a large number of industries at once, it will take not one or two years, but about ten years. But the Western economy simply does not have this time. On the account of months at most.

There are certainly some stocks of components necessary for the production in warehouses. They will last for several months. But what’s next? During this time, it is impossible to build your own production of such gases. And no one will buy “semi-finished” products – do you need a non-working iPhone or a car that will stand in the garage waiting for the chip?

And people at the enterprises need to pay salaries. You also have to pay for the energy consumed by this enterprise. And how to pay if the products are not fully assembled, which means they cannot be sold? And where to store such “semi-finished products”? All warehouses will quickly fill up.

Let me put the question even a little broader: what money can we use to buy gas and oil from Russia if the West has nothing to sell in return? Putin warned in advance that there would be no free gas, and all kinds of joke bank tickets – euros and dollars – we will no longer accept this.

So it turns out such an interesting situation, when a conditional European, to whom the enterprise will stop paying wages, will not even have anything to pay for gas in an apartment, not to mention refueling a car and other excesses. No one has rubles hidden under a mattress.

Therefore, the further development of the situation is something like this – the West spends the last components in warehouses over the coming months and sells off the remnants of finished products. And then, if he wants to eat, warm up and fill up the car, he will have to pay in kind – various kinds of machine tools and other valuable equipment.

It’s time for us to raise the national economy. And the Western machine tools of Russia will come in handy in this matter. We will gladly exchange them for rubles. And in Gazprombank, Chancellor Scholz will be able to hand these rubles to the cashier with his trembling hand from the cold so that Gazprom will supply gas to the Germans.

Massive Fire Breaks Out At Poultry Farm That Supplies Eggs To Major Supermarkets

Wednesday, Jun 01, 2022 – 02:00 AM

A poultry farm in Howard Lake, Minnesota, that supplies the nation’s largest supermarkets with three million eggs per day experienced a devastating fire over the weekend.

Forsman Farms spokesperson Jon Austin told local media outlet KARE that estimates aren’t firm yet, but anywhere between “tens of thousands of chickens were killed, up to a couple hundreds of thousands.” The spokesperson continued and said chickens in adjacent barns were affected by smoke inhalation.

Video posted on YouTube by Eddie Olson shows massive flames lighting up the night sky on Saturday.

“It’s a lot of chickens. It’s a hit to the egg market, it’s people’s jobs, it’s a local community. So any time anything big like that happens, it’s not good,” Olson said.

It’s unclear exactly how the fire started though impacts could be felt at supermarkets. This year alone, retail egg prices have soared 41% because of the deadly bird flu wreaking havoc on the country’s egg-laying hen flock.

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Since January, the outbreak has spread to 32 states, killing more than 37 million chickens and turkeys. Of that, 29 million egg-laying hens have died, or about 10% of the U.S.’ total flock of 300 million. Bloomberg recently reported the bird flu is “shaping up to be the worst outbreak of its kind.”

The blaze at the commercial egg farm in Minnesota comes as dozens of food processing facilities across Canada and the U.S. have experienced mystery fires and explosions over the past year, helping to strain the North American food supply chain.

A Black Cat Interrupted A Football Match And Unsurprisingly Refused To Leave

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Over the weekend, the Premier League match between Everton and Wolverhampton Wanderers had a short delay as a black cat had wandered onto the pitch – and refused to leave.

The game, which took place at Goodison Park in Liverpool, saw the four-legged spectator wandering around the goal and sidelines. The crowd looked on in delight as none of the players or officials even tried to chase away the feline. Perhaps they all forgot their laser pointers and balls of yarn?

Thankfully, the cat eventually got bored and scampered to the sideline. Everton, however, eventually lost the match, going down 3-1, to the visiting team.

Sorry lads, better luck next time.

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Putin’s war on the West is only just beginning

By unleashing brutal force against Kyiv, the Russian president essentially announced a de facto divorce from Western civilization. And as many divorces tend to go it is likely to be a messy, costly and drawn-out affair...

Two assumptions keep driving the debate since the start of the invasion back in late February 2022.

First, Vladimir Putin's army is technologically backward, comprising poorly trained and lowly-motivated deserters who are only capable of pillaging and drinking.

As a result, Russia's detractors say it is about to run out of capacity to fight and has no chance of winning the war.

Second, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is gravely ill, has no sense of reality or the capacity to lead, and will transit into a different world in due course.

Both of these assumptions continue to dominate the Western information media space. (note: like US funded NGOs and individuals unrelenting smeared campaign against China, and decades of Golden Chiang prediction of the collapsed of China economy, the Russia's money driven western funded traitors also did a good job in helping to hide the real strength of Russia till the day, when the west realised, it is too late for the crusaders to do anything.)

They also resonate well across the West and beyond as the majority of the free world look at Russia now as a shameless aggressor and an immediate threat to Western liberal values and freedoms.

As a result, we tend to treat the Russia-Ukraine war as our war, in which we naturally want the aggressor to lose.

However, our expectations of the outcome of this war should not be based on just hopes and wishes but on the detailed analysis of the cold-hearted battlefield reality, which should not give the Western allies sufficient grounds for unconditional optimism.

Being a different kind of Dr, I cannot comment on Putin’s state of health. But the battlefield analysis comes to a similar conclusion.

After a vital strategic win over the battle for Mariupol, which resulted in the unconditional surrender of the elite Ukrainian units, the Russian forces have systematically stepped up their offensive across the Donbass region.

What seemed initially to be a slow advance was in reality the reflection of two key factors.

Firstly, the continuous ferocious resistance of the Ukrainian defenders. Their will to push the Russian invaders back despite taking very heavy losses deserves full recognition.

There was also a vast and sophisticated fortifications network - which has been gradually extended by the Ukrainian military along the lines of confrontation in eastern Ukraine since 2015.

Breaking through these layered defensive barriers was a massive challenge for the Russians, even with their overwhelming firepower and tactical air dominance.

Still, the Russian military is slowly gaining pace.

Since the launch of their proper offensive in Donbass on 19 April, they have seized control of some of the most important military nerve centres that make up that massive defensive barrier... Read more...

From HERE

Now Even The Elite Are Openly Admitting That America Is Facing An Absolutely Enormous Economic Crisis

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Not too long ago, the elite were trying to put a happy face on our growing economic problems.  It was obvious that things were trending in a very alarming direction, but they kept assuring us that any bumps in the road were just temporary and that a new golden age of prosperity was just around the corner.  Needless to say, there were dead wrong, and now some of them are publicly admitting the truth.  For example, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon just publicly stated that an economic “hurricane” is rapidly approaching…

Jamie Dimon is no meteorologist, but the JPMorgan Chase CEO is predicting an economic “hurricane” caused by the war in Ukraine, rising inflation pressures and interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve.

“Right now it’s kind of sunny, things are doing fine. Everyone thinks the Fed can handle this,” Dimon said at a Bernstein conference. “That hurricane is right out there down the road coming our way.”

JPMorgan Chase is one of the most important financial institutions in the entire world.

So it is a really big thing for Dimon to make a statement like this.

Of course he is right on target.  An economic hurricane is coming, and it is going to be far more horrible than most Americans could possibly imagine right now.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also just said something that is making a lot of headlines.

Last year she insisted that high inflation would just be “transitory”, but now she is openly admitting that she “was wrong”

“I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take. As I mentioned, there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy […] that I, at the time, didn’t fully understand.”

 

It isn’t exactly a surprise that she turned out to be completely wrong about high inflation being transitory.

We knew that she was wrong when she said it.

But I will give her credit for publicly admitting a mistake.  Many in Washington will never do such a thing under any circumstances.

At this point, it should be obvious to everyone that we are in the midst of an absolutely horrifying inflation crisis.

On Wednesday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States jumped another nickel to $4.67.  But the real story is the crazy prices that we are starting to see out on the west coast.  For instance, one gas station in Los Angeles is now charging more than 8 dollars a gallon for regular gasoline…

A Chevron station in downtown Los Angeles on the corner of Alameda Street and Cesar E. Chavez Avenue is charging customers over $8 for regular gasoline causing some locals to complain about price gouging, KTTV Los Angeles reported on Tuesday.

In a statement to KTTV, Chevron pointed out that the majority of its California branded stations are independently owned and that “unique” factors are contributing to gas prices in the Golden State.

How soon will we see someone break the 10 dollar a gallon threshold?

Will it be by the end of the summer?

In some cities, the price of a gallon of gasoline is already higher than the hourly minimum wage.

That is nuts!

Of course diesel prices have been rising even faster, and this is putting a tremendous amount of financial strain on America’s farmers.  If you doubt this, just check out what Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller just told Maria Bartiromo

When Bartiromo noted “filling a tractor daily now costs farmers $1,000 – twice what it was a year ago,” Miller responded, “it’s through the roof, but it’s not just diesel.”

“It’s fertilizer prices. It’s parts. We can’t get new tractors, new combines. We can’t get new tillage equipment,” he stressed. “So we have to keep running our older equipment, which we can’t get parts for. And so it’s just a whole comedy of errors, and it just multiplies on top of itself.”

When costs go up for farmers, they inevitably get passed on to consumers.

And we have already been seeing food prices spike dramatically.  Just check out these numbers from April

Food grains—including corn and wheat—were up 2.8 percent for the month and 45 percent compared with a year ago. Feed grain prices increased 7.8 percent from the prior month and 33 percent from a year ago.

The poultry and egg index jumped 22 percent from March and 94 percent from a year earlier. The April market egg price, at $2.21 per dozen, is 81.0 cents higher than March and $1.64 higher than April 2021. The price of chickens raised for meat, at $1.05 per pound, is 15.3 cents higher than March and 49.7 cents higher than a year ago. At 95.3 cents per pound, the April turkey price is 2.5 cents higher than the previous month and 18.5 cents higher than April 2021.

Milk prices climbed 4.12 percent in April and are up 47 percent compared with a year earlier.

In the entire history of our nation, we have never seen anything like this.

But as I keep warning my readers, this is just the beginning.

In fact, one prominent Texas farmer is warning that food prices “are going to double”

“People don’t realize what’s fixing to hit them,” said Texas farmer Lynn “Bugsy” Allen.

“They think it’s tough right now, you give it until October. Food prices are going to double.”

Can you imagine that?

Can you imagine what it will do to our country if food prices double from their already extremely inflated levels?

People will go absolutely bananas.

But this is exactly the type of scenario that I have been warning about for years.

Eventually, food will become such a prime target for thieves that we will actually see armed guards escorting grocery store delivery trucks.

And civil unrest will erupt all over the planet as millions upon millions of poor people get hungrier and hungrier.

Unfortunately, even though so many are now sounding the alarm, the vast majority of the population still has no idea what is coming our way.

Lemon-Garlic Shrimp Orzo Skillet

You know that phrase, “a little goes a long way?” Well, that absolutely applies to this dish, which tastes rich and buttery but actually only includes 2 tablespoons of butter!

The trick is waiting until the end to add the butter when it can enrich the orzo, which has already been flavored by cooking in broth, and the zucchini, which has a naturally buttery taste when sautéed.

The shrimp, also added at the end, gets infused with all the flavors already in the pan, so the whole dish is redolent of garlic and butter and only needs a squeeze of lemon and sprinkle of fresh herbs for contrast. Garnishing with a bit of nutty Parmesan takes it all over the top.

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Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 large zucchini, cut in half lengthwise and into 1/4-inch slices (about 2 cups)
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped (about 4 teaspoons)
  • 3/4 cup uncooked orzo pasta (about 5 oz)
  • 1 1/2 cups Progresso™ reduced sodium chicken broth (from 32-oz carton)
  • 1 lb uncooked large shrimp (21 to 30 ct), peeled, deveined, tail shells removed
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
  • 1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
  • 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley

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The Algonquin Hotel In NYC Has A Kitty Concierge Named Matilda

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The Algonquin Hotel in New York City offers a unique amenity in the form of Matilda, a cat concierge whose main outpost is laying above the luxury hotel’s welcome desk. The experience is aimed at replicating the comforts of home and the Algonquin Hotel is one of many incorporating such mascots or concierges.

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For those looking to spend a bit more time with Matilda than a hangout in the lobby, guests have the option of booking the ‘Friends of Matilda’ package. The ‘Friends of Matilda’ package includes a plush toy replica of Matilda, a personalized welcome letter from the feline herself and a book containing health and beauty secrets for the pampered kitty.

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Why separations between humans and guardian angels are necessary

This following video is one of the early Patrion videos. Subscription has been  necessary to watch it. However, it is presented here for all MM “followers” to watch for free.I hope that you gain some insight, as well as to see the benefits on contributing to MM via the Patrion page.

Please check it out…

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Lemon-Dijon Chicken, Russian Oil, 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Lungo Touring Berlinetta, and lots of old pictures.

I have to tell youse guys that I am having a drop-off in participation once I switched my format. I have been spending much of my time on the geopolitical stuff and mixed it all up with food, pictures and odd and ends. I have since supplemented the written content with videos. The videos cover china, world-line travel, souls, the nature of the universe and all sorts of other things. I hope that you all don’t give up on MM during this period. Please have some faith.

Let’s start off with something delicious. Seriously easy to make, and certainly one of the many, many reasons why “home cooked” meals for your family and loved-ones are important.

Lemon-Dijon Chicken Skillet

This tender chicken in a luscious lemon-Dijon sauce might look like it came from a nice restaurant, but it’s a dish you can cook up in your own kitchen, while staying within budget (and under 400 calories!).

The trick is using the cooking juices as the base of the rich-tasting sauce and upping its flavor further with a couple of impactful ingredients, like Dijon, rosemary and lemon.

While we often like cooking with boneless chicken thighs for the sake of convenience, bone-in chicken ensures extra flavor in this recipe.

Remember to remove the chicken from the pan, so it doesn’t overcook while you finish the sauce. Keep the chicken warm, and then plate it all up beautifully.

When you serve up this meal, your dinner companions will be impressed, and you can congratulate yourself on pulling off such a nice meal without any extra fuss.

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6532e17c 982d 4036 a125 d5bd63e6339d

Ingredients

  • 3 teaspoons Dijon mustard
  • 1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh rosemary plus 2 sprigs rosemary
  • 2 teaspoons finely chopped garlic
  • 2 teaspoons lemon juice
  • 6 bone-in chicken thighs, skin removed (about 1 1/2 lb)
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
  • 1/2 cup dry white wine (such as Sauvignon Blanc)
  • 1 1/2 cups Progresso™ reduced sodium chicken broth (from 32-oz carton)
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 tablespoon Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon chopped Italian (flat-leaf) parsley

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Europe Bans Insuring any Oil Tankers Carrying Russian Oil; Russia Responds with Inert Gas cut-off (Argon, Neon, etc.)

Europe has enacted another round of Sanctions against Russia; these forbid insuring tanker ships carrying Russian Oil.   Ship owners will be unwilling to risk an uninsured vessel simply because of its cargo, so this will likely have a massive effect upon Russia.

In response, Russia announced Thursday they are restricting supplies of neon, argon, helium and other inert gases to foreign markets. 

A Decree by the Government restricts the export of inert gases from Russia until the end of this year.

These gases are used for the production of semiconductors, from which microchips are made. Microchips are needed for electronics in many types of products: for the manufacture of gadgets, cars, navigation systems, etc.

Thirty percent (30%) of the world’s neon is provided by Russia. Now, its export will be available only by the decision of the Government.

According to experts, this may be very sensitive for the countries that imposed sanctions against  Russia.

Put simply, with their new Sanctions against insuring vessels carrying Russian Oil, Europe just fucked their entire industrial base, which now will not be able to get semiconductors to run their machinery and businesses.   In this one small step, Europe has wiped out its own manufacturing sector.

Brutal 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Lungo Touring Berlinetta

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First shown at the 1935 London Motor Show, the 8C 2900A was a sports racer targeted to the gentleman driver, powered by a supercharged 2.9-liter inline eight-cylinder engine rated at 220 horsepower.

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In the hands of Scuderia Ferrari, Alfa Romeo 8C 2900A models swept the podium at the 1936 Mille Miglia, backing up this performance by finishing 1-2 in the 1937 race. Not every buyer needed (or wanted) a car with this level of performance, so in response Alfa Romeo created the the slightly more relaxed 8C 2900B in 1937.

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The 8C 2900B was detuned for greater reliability, producing 180 horsepower thanks in part to a drop in compression from 6.5:1 to 5.75:1. Though the eight-cylinder engine retained its 2.9-liter displacement and Roots-type supercharger, aluminum was substituted for magnesium on certain engine castings and the wheelbase was lengthened slightly from 2.75 meters (roughly 108 inches) to 2.8 meters (roughly 110 inches) on corto (short) chassis examples. The 8C 2900B also debuted a new lungo chassis variant, which utilized a wheelbase of 3.0 meters (roughly 118 inches).

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Just 10 lungo chassis 8C 2900B models were ever built, including the five aforementioned examples wearing enclosed Berlinetta bodywork from Carrozzeria Touring. Chassis 412020 was the first completed, and displayed at motor shows across Europe in late 1937 and early 1938.

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Israel simulates massive strike against Iran with hundreds of aircraft

Hundreds of Israel Air Force (IAF) aircraft, including fighter jets and refueling planes, took off overnight Wednesday from various bases to simulate striking targets far from Israel’s borders, including in Iran.

The exercise, part of the IDF’s monthlong Chariots of Fire drill, saw fighter jets, transport planes and refueling aircraft take off from several bases in Israel for Cyprus.

Israel has significantly increased its readiness level and has taken steps throughout the past year to prepare a credible military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The IDF, which is planning several military options against Iran should the nuclear talks between the West and the Islamic Republic fail, is carrying out its largest drill ever with thousands of soldiers and reservists.

One of the possible military options has been simulated during the exercise.

IAF platforms, Israeli naval units and troops from the elite Shayetet 13, Yahalom special combat engineering unit, Oketz canine unit, Intelligence Corps and the C4I and Cyber Defense Directorate are also taking part in the drill, which will end on Friday.

USAF’s New Stealth Bomber “Strides Toward Flight Readiness” After Successful Load Test

Saturday, May 28, 2022 – 10:40 AM

Northrop Grumman tweeted Wednesday that its new stealth bomber “made strides toward flight readiness with a successful loads calibration test.”

A press release from Northrop Grumman described how the B-21 Raider “completed the first — and most critical — loads calibration test.” The first of three ground test before the aircraft takes to the skies in 2023.

The next two tests will be engine testing and low-speed and high-speed taxi tests. Air Force Magazine noted the B-21 was initially supposed to take flight in the second half of this year, though Northrop Grumman has pushed that back to 2023 (cause of delays weren’t cited).

"The B-21 test aircraft is the most production-representative aircraft, both structurally and in its mission systems, at this point in a program, that I've observed in my career," Randy Walden, director of the Department of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office and program executive officer of the B-21 Raider program, recently said. 

Northrop Grumman said the stealth bomber would be unveiled later this year.

KALIBR CRUISE MISSILES HAVE DESTROYED BESKYDY RAIL TUNNEL – MAJOR NATO WEAPONS ROUTE!!

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BeskydyRailTunnel large

Kalibr cruise missiles fired from a Russian naval vessel in the Black Sea, entered into – and flew deeply inside – the Beskydy Railway Tunnel near Lviv, Ukraine, and detonated, destroying the tunnel.   It was a key rail route for NATO weapons being shipped into Ukraine.

The 1.8km long tunnel, travels beneath the Carpathian Mountains.  It is the second longest (after Lutuginsky ). It is part of the Lviv railway .

A historic single-track tunnel was built in 1886 during the Austro-Hungarian period . In 2007, due to the emergency condition of the old tunnel, it was decided to build a new, double-track tunnel, which was laid 22 meters south of the old one and parallel to it.

The official opening of the new tunnel took place on May 24, 2018 with the participation of the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko; train traffic on it began on May 25.

For Ukraine, the new Beskydy Tunnel is of strategic importance, since this route transports goods towards the western border of the country, as well as more than 60% of transit cargo towards Western and Central Europe .

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Its construction was a magnificent feat of engineering.

One month ago, on May 2, Ukraine strengthened the security of the Beskydy Tunnel, which provides railroad deliveries of weapons, equipment, fuels, and lubricants, from Central Europe to Ukraine. In Kyiv, they feared that Russia would strike at the facility to cut-off NATO weapon shipments.

“The goal is to try to disrupt the railway and stop the supply of fuel and weapons from our allies,” said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukraine’s Interior Minister

Now, the tunnel has, in fact, been destroyed.

Sweet City Woman

It was a different time, don’t you know.

Thanks to Climate-Change Fanatics and Green-Energy Whackos, 2/3rds of US Faces blackouts this Summer

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2022 06 03 10 28

Tough news keeps coming for Americans struggling with high energy prices. Not only have gas prices broken records for the past several weeks, now a good portion of the country is being told they should expect rolling blackouts, as we enter the hot summer months.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) officially released its summer report last week and almost two-thirds of the country should prepare for a possible blackout.

The report from NERC includes a harrowing map that shows most of the nation should stand ready for possible blackouts this summer.

The reason for these coming blackouts is clear: a mandated transition to clean energy. The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes:

“Welcome to the “green energy transition.” We’ve been warning for years that climate policies would make the grid more vulnerable to vacillations in supply and demand. And here we are. Some of the mainstream press are belatedly catching on that blackouts are coming, but they still don’t grasp the real problem: The forced transition to green energy is distorting energy markets and destabilizing the grid.”

One of the chief proponents of forcing a transition to clean energy has been Richard Glick, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). In February, he and the other Democrat commissioners at FERC tried to force through a policy that would have made building new natural gas pipelines and infrastructure almost impossible. Thankfully, the leadership of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee blasted the move. Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso made clear they wouldn’t stand for it. FERC pulled back the rule, for now.

Glick has been renominated as the chair of FERC. The Journal editorial board continues: “His re-nomination is a clear and present danger to the U.S. electricity supply.

The war in Ukraine and surging energy prices haven’t deterred Democrats from their anti-fossil fuels campaign. Will widespread power outages finally make them realize they’re harming all of us?”

The Biden administration’s policies are resulting in a hot, dark summer for millions of Americans. With the summer heat just getting started, there is no relief in sight.

People Are Sharing Pics Of Life 50-100 Years Ago And They Might Put Things In A New Perspective

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“My Grandfather And His Horse, Ruby. 1940’s”

How would you describe normal, everyday life? Well, for a modern person, it’s anything from brushing their teeth to… commuting to work. Oh wait, not anymore. Coronavirus has shaken up quite a few things, and made us work from home, stay in more, keep distances and whatnot. The change is dramatic and it’s only been like two years (almost three!, o-m-g) since it first started in late 2019.

So yep, time is flying like a hadron collider, changing things beyond recognition on the way. But today would look nothing like a day 20, 50, or even 100 years ago. And we mean it. Thanks to the miscellaneous corner of Reddit “The Way We Were,” which is home to a stunning collection of old photos, scanned documents, articles, and personal anecdotes, we can all secure our seat belts and travel to the past.

The community was created back in 2012, and will celebrate its ten-year anniversary in less than a month.

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“My Grandma And Uncle In Iran, April 1971”

Nancy Darling is a professor and chair at the Department of Psychology at Oberlin College and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Adolescence and she happily shared some very interesting insights.

It turns out that people tend to judge the passage of time as a function of how many things happen. In that sense, our perception of time is purely subjective. “I find it interesting that when my days are packed, I feel time passes both very fast and very slow.” For example: “During a busy week, events a week ago seem in the far, distant past because so many things have intervened since.” Simultaneously, we feel like time is flying by because so many things are happening every hour.

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“Cairo Mary,” Bouncer At Shanghai Reds (5th And Beacon In San Pedro, Ca) Escorts A Customer To The Door. 1953

Interestingly, as we get older, the way we perceive time may change as well. It has to do with the usual things, “like cooking a meal or grocery shopping, that start taking longer for you to do.”Most importantly, “the passage of time just marks age and accomplishment,” according to Nancy. “I just got an email this morning reminding me I’d promised to do something in July. That seems both forever ago (I’ve done a thousand things since) and very close (every day, I keep saying I’ll do it ’tomorrow.’)”

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Interestingly, we can do that with life as well. Just think of your kids being tiny and dependent, urges the professor. “How can my son be living in Manhattan and getting ready to teach in the public schools? Time flies,” she said. At the same time, Nancy said that she feels like “there are many things I’d always planned to do, but haven’t gotten to (yet).” And she added: “I am too old now?”

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“This Is My Great Aunt In Front Of Their House In Boston, 1964. The House Was Bought On A Milkman’s Salary”

The key challenge is to keep time on our side, and don’t let yourself fall into the trap of one day turning into the whole year. According to Nancy, there are things that can be done about it. “If you regularly review what your priorities are and focus on those, you feel like a lot has gotten done and you don’t regret the fact that you’ve wasted your days,” she suggested.

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The sense of accomplishment, whether big or small, creates invisible gaps in time that makes it feel like time stretches. “Days when I accomplish a lot are full and satisfying, but also feel long. A productive week feels like it’s lasted forever. It also feels good,” Nancy concluded.

TSMC And Intel Are In A Mad Dash To Hire Semiconductor Technicians For Their New Plants In Arizona

Saturday, May 28, 2022 – 09:20 AM

To solve the semiconductor shortage, companies now have to deal with a labor shortage…

We have extensively covered how major semiconductor companies have been responding to the global chip shortage over the last couple of years. One of the most notable companies to take action has been TSMC, who is in the process of building a $12 billion chip fab in Arizona, not far from where Intel is expanding their campus.

TSMC’s project is racing to come online by 2024, but there remains a major obstacle for both companies: securing labor. “Simply finding enough workers to build the facilities has already proved a challenge,” according to a new report from Nikkei.

Over 6,000 workers are currently on site trying to get the facility up and running by its targeted 2024 timeline, the report says. While it was tough to find construction workers, finding the skilled technicians necessary to work at a chip plant is proving even tougher.

Kweilin Waller, deputy human services director at the Phoenix Business and Workforce Development Board, commented: “You say ‘semiconductor manufacturing’ [to potential recruits], people look at you like you have two heads. It’s just unfamiliar.”

“I think those students that we are trying to recruit to ultimately become employees don’t know what they don’t know. So even before we give consideration to the seven semiconductor manufacturers that they could work with, they need to understand, ‘What is a semiconductor technician?'” added Daniel Barajas, a careers director at the Maricopa County Community Colleges District.

Intel is trying to tackle the problem by creating a close relationship with The Schools of Engineering at ASU, which have about 27,000 students enrolled.

TSMC doesn’t have the history that Intel does with the university to attract such talent as easily.

Kyle Squires, the school’s dean, said: “Indeed, it’s more of a challenge [for TSMC to attract students]. The informal networking [among students] starts to really grab on.”

One associate professor at ASU said: “TSMC recruiters have been very heavily present on campus. TSMC is presently negotiating with the university for some extended collaborations, both in research and in workforce development, and broader training programs.”

TSMC only had plans of hiring in the U.S. before sending employees to train in Taiwan, but now the company is considering hiring directly from Taiwan, the Nikkei report says. “TSMC is focused on hiring employees, including technicians, locally in the U.S. for our Arizona fab,” a spokesperson said.

Jennifer Mellor, chief innovation officer at the Greater Phoenix Chamber, concluded: “I think TSMC is really trying to get their name known in the market, and they’re actually doing a really good job of trying to connect with different education partners.”

LOL. They should look at China. That's where they all went, you fucking stupid jackasses. -MM

Rare And Amazing Color Photographs Of Behind The Scenes From The Set Of ‘Alien’, 1979

An iconic film which shaped generations of sci-fi / horror films to come. Alien is a masterpiece and a film that can still invoke fear and wonder even after repeated viewings.

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Alien received both critical acclaim and box office success, receiving an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, along with numerous other award nominations. It has remained highly praised in subsequent decades, being considered one of the greatest films of all time.

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The success of Alien spawned a media franchise of novels, comic books, video games, and toys. It also launched Sigourney Weaver’s acting career by providing her with her first lead role, and the story of her character Ellen Ripley’s encounters with the Alien creatures became the thematic thread that ran through the sequels Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992) and Alien: Resurrection (1997).

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US Seizes Russia-Flagged Tanker Full Of Iranian Oil Near Greece

Friday, May 27, 2022 – 06:30 PM

Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

Fresh off of the US targeting a series of companies involved in an Iran-linked oil smuggling network, the US has now seized an oil tanker near Greece, taking the Iranian oil within to be sent to the US.

The oil was on a Russian-operated ship, which had been singled out for US targeting in February. It was then called the Pegas. The company renamed the ship the Lana and was Russian flagged. Greece had impounded the Pegas and its Russian crew last month over the invasion of Ukraine, but ultimately released it.

The Russian-flagged oil tanker Pegas previously shown off Turkey, via Reuters

Neither the US nor Russia is commenting. Greece says the US informed them the oil was Iranian, and that the US hired a different ship to take the oil to America. Iran has summoned the Greek charges d’affaires and called the incident a “clear example of piracy.”

The US accused the tanker of loading 700,000 Bbls of oil from Iran in August 2021. The tanker mostly sent oil to China.

Earlier in the week The Maritime Executive detailed that “The story of a shadowy Russian oil tanker took a new turn… as the U.S. Department of Justice seized the oil aboard the vessel and according to reports is in the process of transferring the oil to the United States on a chartered tanker.”

“The vessel was detained nearly seven weeks ago in Greece when authorities thought it was covered by the European Union sanctions on Russian assets, but later held for mechanical deficiencies while watchdog groups announced that it was actually smuggling sanctioned Iranian oil.”

The report continued: “The Aframax tanker arrived off Greece early in April with reports of a possible mechanical failure and indications that they were looking for assistance to make repairs to continue their voyage. When she anchored south of the Greek island of Evia the 115,520 dwt tanker was being identified as the Russian-flagged Pegas.” And the initial “assumption at the time was that it was laden with a Russian crude oil cargo,” according to the report.

The seizure of the tanker, and oil, comes amid tensions on the ongoing nuclear talks. Iran believes, and not unfairly, that the oil was just stolen from them, and the US position, while yet to be public, is that the oil is now theirs.

It’s not a great precedent, but generally Iran can’t do much about it, and the US is keen to have the oil.

Iran Seizes 2 Greek Tankers In Gulf As Retaliation For US Taking Oil

Saturday, May 28, 2022 – 12:36 AM
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Iranian military operatives have seized two Greek oil tankers in the Persian Gulf on Friday. The Associated Press initially reported that the US Navy is “looking into” the reports. The tankers were boarded in international waters in the gulf, with the AP in follow-up saying that IRGC operatives now have control of the ships.

The IRGC has announced it is in possession of the seized vessels, with Bloomberg reporting, “The Guard’s announcement comes as tensions remain high between Iran and the West over stalled negotiations regarding its rapidly advancing nuclear program.” And more according to the AP:

The Guard issued a statement on its website, accusing the unnamed tankers of unspecified violations.

Greece’s Foreign Ministry said Iranian authorities “violently took over” the two ships in an “act of piracy.”
Delta Poseidon, via Lloyd’s List

Industry monitor Lloyd’s List maritime intelligence describes that its “sources confirmed that in two seemingly similar operations the suezmaxes Delta Poseidon (IMO: 9468671) and Prudent Warrior (IMO: 9753545), both under Greek flag, were approached by Iranian helicopters on Friday afternoon.”

“They were both boarded by military personnel and later escorted by naval vessels from international traffic lanes to Iranian waters a few miles off the coast,” the report continues.

Earlier in the day Tehran threated “punitive measures” after the United States seized a Russian flagged tanker transporting Iranian oil off Greece.

Iranian sources stated following the tanker seizure in the Mediterranean, “The Islamic Republic has decided to take punitive measures against Greece after it seized an Iranian tanker and let the US government confiscate its crude oil, Nour News, affiliated to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, reports.

Russian senator urges missile strikes on U.S. bases in Europe

A Russian senator has suggested that his country should attack U.S. military bases in Europe in response to the Biden administration’s decision to send rocket systems to Ukraine.

Senator Frants Klintsevich told Russian state TV that Russia should “wreck” American bases using the country’s “high-precision long-range weapons” after the U.S. announced it will send Ukraine the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).

A clip of Klintsevich’s remarks was shared by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring on Thursday, who monitors Russian state TV. The senator’s comments come ahead of the 100th day of the invasion of Ukraine on Friday.

 

 

Klintsevich was part of a panel discussing the Biden administration’s decision to send HIMARS to Ukraine and said it was “complete nonsense” for Ukraine to claim the rocket system would only be used in defense.

He argued that it was “impossible to talk to the Americans and Ukrainians in these conditions.”

The senator said that Russia was speaking to the West “from a position of tolerance” and “giving signals when we say that line cannot be crossed.”

“But unfortunately, they view our tolerance and integrity as weakness,” Klintsevich said. “And now, the places where the arms shipments are arriving, in particular in Europe, taking into consideration Russia’s high precision long-range weaponry, it’s about time we took steps to warn them.”

Klintsevich said that Russia had shot down U.S. aircraft during the Korean War in the early 1950s. It’s likely he was referring to Soviet pilots who flew in planes bearing Chinese and North Korean markings during the conflict. The U.S. and the former Soviet Union were not officially at war at the time.

The senator said that when the Soviets shot down American planes “the world didn’t end.”

“It’s time to wreck American bases, for now, the ones in Europe,” Klintsevich went on.

“Unfortunately, that’s just my personal opinion,” he said,

More pictures from the past…

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Russia’s Necessary and Legal Military Response to US/ NATO Aggression in Ukraine

Easily the best summation of the Russian operation’s moral logic.

Evidence shows that Russia’s special military operation (SMO) in Ukraine is a legally justified, critically necessary, and predictable response to the US’ recent escalation of its decades-long aggression against Russia in Ukraine–militarily, in the international corporate media, in cyberspace, and in the political-economic arena.  The US’ hostile actions against Russia were summarized in a 2019 US-Army funded RAND Corporation blueprint for “Over Extending and Unbalancing Russia.”  Underlying US actions is its aim is to dismember and asset-strip Russia–to appropriate its coveted oil, gas, and mineral resources and vast agricultural lands–and to enable US investors’ access to Russia’s economy. This is a step towards the US’ overarching goals of controlling Central Asia and achieving full spectrum dominance or global hegemony. Although the US war against Russia in Ukraine started years ago, US aggression escalated under the Biden administration and created conditions that posed an immediate existential threat to Russia and necessitated its military response.

In 2014, the US initiated a proxy war against Russia by engineering the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-elected president. This ignited a bloody civil war on Russia’s border in which the US-installed and US-armed Kiev regime attacked the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk whose largely ethnically Russian residents opposed the US coup. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) documented the Kiev regime’s attacks that killed thousands of civilians and terrorized the populace. In 2015, the US-installed then-president, Petro Poroshenko, publicly articulated Kiev’s anti-Russia stance and its policy for the Donbass:

“We will have jobs—they will not. We will have pensions—they will not. [….] Our children will go to schools and kindergartens—theirs will hide in the basements.”  Popular Ukraine pundits openly called for Donbas residents’ extermination. In 2015, Congress lifted its ban on funding Ukraine’s neo Nazi militias and placed US military trainers on the ground inside Ukraine. NATO and the CIA also began training Ukraine regime forces–effectively establishing Ukraine as a de facto US/NATO mercenary state. During the past eight years, Russia exhibited enormous restraint as the US and Ukraine violated the Minsk Protocols and rejected requests for diplomacy. In 2021, US aggression against Russia increased dramatically once Biden took office–in Ukraine and in the Black Sea. US actions and Ukraine President Zelensky’s public statements generated immediate threats to the survival of the Russian nation-state.

Russia’s Military Response Was Over-Determined By Four Existential Threats 

The US government and the corporate media falsely characterize Russia’s special operation as entirely ‘unprovoked’ and an ‘illegal invasion’. These allegations ignore four conditions which each independently compelled President Putin and the Duma to initiate Russia’s denazification and demilitarization operation and which establish this intervention as consistent with international legal norms.

Chief among the factors necessitating Russia’s immediate military response were indications of an imminent new massacre as 125,000 Ukraine forces amassed along the border of Donbass in December of 2021. This was never reported in the US corporate press.  Instead, the US government and corporate media repeatedly stated that Russian troops were gathering on Ukraine’s border (inside Russia) and predicted an impending Russian invasion. In hindsight, US intelligence could make this accurate claim because it was aware of the menacing buildup of Ukraine forces. Anticipating an imminent massacre, Russia was obligated to intervene militarily because it had a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) the citizens of Donbass.  R2P is a political commitment to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity; it was endorsed by the United Nations at its 2005 world summit.

Second, on February 19, 2022, Ukraine President Zelensky announced that Ukraine would seek to acquire nuclear weapons, saying, “I want to believe that the North Atlantic Treaty and Article 5 will be more effective than the Budapest Memorandum.” Zelensky’s expressed desire to acquire nuclear weapons represented a dangerous threat to Moscow and signaled that the window of opportunity for conventional military intervention was closing.  It is unlikely that Zelensky operates completely autonomously; Biden publicly bragged about his control over Ukraine government policies and has remunerated Zelensky following Zelensky’s implementation of anti-Russia policies and actions.

Third, Zelensky’s repudiation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was a reminder of Ukraine’s intent to join NATO. For years, US President Biden advocated NATO membership for Ukraine, assuring Zelensky as recently as December 11, 2021 that this was in Ukraine’s own hands. NATO membership would entail NATO nuclear missiles inside Ukraine, aimed at Moscow. Ukraine’s geographic proximity to Russia eliminates the crucial minutes in which Moscow could verify and respond to an attack and would effectively place Russia and the US at DEFCON Level Two. The US dismissed Russia’s December 17, 2021 verbal and written requests for a diplomatic response to its security concerns. Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken deliberately rejected Russia’s entreaties and ignored the predictable consequences of Ukraine’s potential NATO membership. Renowned international relations scholars, diplomats and politicians, including John Mearsheimer, Jack Matlock, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, and William Perry warned that NATO membership for Ukraine was a dangerous provocation which would trigger Russia’s military response.

A fourth threat requiring Russia’s intervention was the presence of US Department of Defense-operated biolabs inside Ukraine. Russia’s concerns were validated on March 11, 2022 when Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland admitted during Congressional questioning that the Ukraine biolabs contained ‘biological materials’ which the US ‘did not want to fall into Russian hands’. While the pathogenic biological agents in these biolabs do not technically constitute bioweapons, they can become bioweapons once there is a ‘mechanism for spreading the agent.’ A delivery mechanism need not be sophisticated to be effective.  Bioweapons researcher, Jeffrey Kaye, described the extreme level of US secrecy surrounding the biolabs. Kaye noted that the Director of the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Robert Pope, did not reassure when he stated that, “the Ukraine biolabs currently did not have the ability to manufacture bioweapons.”

Russia’s Intervention Is Consistent with International Law

These four US-generated conditions represented urgent existential threats to the Donbas and to the Russian nation-state and contradict US claims that Russia ‘illegally invaded Ukraine’ and that Russia’s intervention was unprovoked. Russia was compelled to intervene militarily to neutralize these threats and its response is consistent with the United Nations Charter of 1945 concerning international rules governing a state’s use of military force. The United Nations allows two exceptions to its prohibition of the use of force in international law: “self-defence under Article 51, and military measures authorised by the Security Council in response to “any threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression.” In particular, the UN Charter notes, “there is no problem – and never has been – with that state, without first seeking Security Council approval, using military force ‘preemptively’.’ Both exceptions apply to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine: Russia perceived an imminent threat to the Donbas and an imminent threat to the Russian nation-state.  The immediacy of these threats obviated any requirement that Russia seek prior UN Security Council approval. Seeking UN approval would be futile, in any case, because the United States, a permanent UN Security Council member, is the principal combatant generating the hostilities.


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2022 06 03 10 43


Under the Biden administration, what began in 2014 as a US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine transformed into the US’ direct war against Russia. The US’ covert and overt military actions establish it as a legal “co-belligerent.” Now, the US continues to flood Ukraine with billions of dollars of heavy weapons and provides intelligence to guide Ukraine’s attacks on Russian forces. The US blatantly states that it wants to “weaken” Russia and that Russia must be defeated.  This is the US whose regime change wars in the Middle East killed 5 million; whose 1955-1975 war against Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia cost 3.4 million military and civilian lives. This is the US CIA whose coups and illegal interventions around the globe since its 1947 inception left a trail of bloodshed and chaos. Russia is legally and crucially defending the Donbas and the Russian nation-state against the US quest for global domination. The US generated four existential threats to the Donbas and to the Russian nation-state that necessitated Russia’s immediate intervention. The US—not Russia—is the illegal aggressor in Ukraine.

Never Been Any Reason

This song was playing about the time when I was entering the US Navy.

Tears For Fears – Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Official Music Video)

This song was used in an awesome 1980’s movie. Do you remember it?

New York street interviews are frightening…

These New Yorkers don’t know how many states there are in the US, who fought in the Civil War, who the Vice President is, and much much worse!

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2022 05 23 21 36

Horrific. You MUST check out this video…

Hold Your Head Up

This song carries me back to seventh grade. LOL.

Roasted Sweet Potato Pie

When it comes to bringing smooth and silky flavor to the table, our Roasted Sweet Potato Pie should be at the top of your list. This incredibly effortless dessert is brought together with the help of a pre-made pie crust and loaded with bourbon or vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, roasted sweet potatoes, butter, brown sugar and whipping cream. No matter the occasion, you can’t go wrong with a cozy dessert bursting with flavor.

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Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 lb dark-orange sweet potatoes (about 2 medium-large)
  • 1 crust from 1 box (14.1 oz) refrigerated Pillsbury™ Pie Crusts (2 Count), softened as directed on box
  • 1/2 cup butter, softened
  • 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup whipping cream
  • 2 tablespoons bourbon or 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 2 eggs

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2022 05 23 21 32

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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No efforts are being made by the USA to calm things down. They act like they WANT a global nuclear war!

Where are diplomats when you need them? The USA have given up on any pretense of controlling the world and avoiding war. It’s all obvious to everyone. Check out all the flashing warning signs. Sheech!

Historic times.

Official Warning: “Direct US-Russia Conflict”

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Russia today officially warned the United States it is now risking “direct conflict with Russia” after the US announced it is sending still heavier, longer-range weapons to Ukraine.

Washington’s arming of Ukraine with heavier weapons increases the risk of direct US-Russia confrontation regardless of American statements about mitigating such a possibility, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Wednesday.

The diplomat was commenting on the news that the US has decided to supply HIMARS multiple rocket launchers to Ukraine. Washington has insisted that the weapons system will not allow Ukrainian forces to attack Russia and argues it prevents a scenario in which Moscow would consider the US a party to the conflict.

“We’re not providing any weapons that will allow the Ukrainians to attack Russia from inside of Ukraine, and President [Joe] Biden has been very clear on that,” US representative to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said of the deliveries. “We’re not going to become [a] party to the war.”

Ryabkov disagreed with the rationale, saying the US was making the conflict more dangerous.

“Any arms supplies, which continue and escalate, increase the risk of such a development,” Ryabkov told journalists, referring to the possibility of a direct confrontation between Russia and the US.

The diplomat added that the US for years has done nothing to prevent an escalation of tensions with Russia over Ukraine. It stonewalled Moscow’s last-ditch attempts to negotiate a legally binding deal that would have addressed Russian concerns over NATO expansion in Europe, he pointed out. After open hostilities broke out in February, “the remnants of a healthy attitude to the situation were shattered,” he said.

Washington “maintains its course of what we characterized many times as an intention to wage war to the last Ukrainian, which reflects the goal of inflicting – as they say themselves – the strategic defeat of Russia. This is unprecedented. This is dangerous,” Ryabkov said.

The latest ramping up of arms supplies to Ukraine does not fundamentally alter the situation, only raises the risks, he stated.

2022 06 02 12 28
2022 06 02 12 28

Cat Found in a Carrier with Her Kittens on Sidewalk, Is So Happy to Be Helped by Kind Neighbors

Europe beefs up trade armoury for long-term fight with China

Suicidal Europe: It will be ruined by politicians who know no consequences. :

Europe beefs up trade armoury for a long-term fight with China.

The "Trade weapons"  in the works will tackle everything from market access to forced labour, but getting them through will be ‘the litmus test’...

It’s being driven by [1] a geopolitical shift amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, [2] frustration with the WTO and [3] hardening attitudes towards Beijing driving by American industrial-military / neocon interests.

Article (paywall)  HERE

Freezer Breakfast Sandwiches

Weekday breakfasts will be no problem with these make-ahead freezer-friendly breakfast sandwiches.

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b058e479 e314 415c be75 5e44f596a0d1

Ingredients

  • 6 eggs
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • 6 English muffins, split
  • Butter, softened
  • 6 slices Cheddar cheese
  • 12 slices Canadian bacon

2022 06 02 14 20
2022 06 02 14 20

Russian Foreign Minister Says 3rd Country “Could Become Involved” in Ukraine Conflict

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov publicly stated late this evening (Moscow time) that “A third country could become involved in the Ukraine conflict, now that the U.S. is sending long-range missiles to Ukraine.”

Lavrov did NOT expand on his meaning.

The possibilities being SPECULATED over this remark are:

1) Another country, like Belarus, might join the fight against Ukraine to assist Russia against the onslaught of NATO weaponry being sent into Ukraine, OR;

2) The country SUPPLYING the new long-range missiles to Ukraine, could become involved by being ATTACKED for sending the weapons.  If this is the possibility, then the U.S. might be the one “becoming involved” or a European nation trans-shipping US missiles to Ukraine could be the third country Lavrov speaks about.

Lavrov’s remarks are not clear about what he means, and this type of ambiguity is very unusual for Lavrov and for Russia.

Perhaps that’s the point; within the ambiguity are severe escalation possibilities. Perhaps Russia is allowing that ambiguity to sink-in before letting on what they actually mean.

Either way, Lavrov’s remarks clearly mean one solid thing: escalation.

Again.

Yakuza

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A real life photo story by the photographer Anton Kusters.

YAKUZA is a personal visual account of the life inside an inaccessible subculture: a traditional Japanese crime family that controls the streets of Kabukicho, in the heart of Tokyo, Japan. Through 10 months of negotiations with the Shinseikai, my brother Malik and I became one of the only westerners ever to be granted this kind of access to the closed world of Japanese organized crime.

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Russia threatens to wipe out the entire US with just four Satan II missiles in chilling warning over Ukraine

From HERE

A chilling moment on Russian state TV on Monday saw hosts issue the latest in a long line of threats, this time warning Putin could “destroy the entire east cost of the US” with just two missiles.

In footage from Russia’s flagship propaganda show, a member of Russia’s parliament boasts about the nation’s military might, before also labelling 2 million Ukrainians as “incurable.”

The politician, Alexie Zhuravlev, was joined on the talk show by fellow MP and Russian-state mouthpiece Yevgeny Popov, the host of the Rossiya 1 channel show.

The lawmaker claimed that two of Russia’s Sarmat ‘Satan 2’ missiles would destroy the entirety of America’s east coast – before adding it would take just “two missiles for the west coast” as well.

“Four missiles and there’ll be nothing left.

“They think the mushroom cloud will be taller than a high rise. That mushroom cloud will be visible from Mexico” said Zhuravlev.

Standing at the colossal height of a 14-storey tower block, the 208 ton RS-28 Sarmat missile, also known as the ‘Satan 2’, is capable of striking targets at almost 16,000mph.

The world-ending nuke can also carry 15 warheads and has the potential to obliterate an area the size of the UK in a single blast.

Putin-cronies have claimed the Russian military could have as many as 50 Sarmat missiles in their arsenal, and have even bizarrely threatened to use them to drown the UK in a radioactive tsunami.

Each of the Sarmat missile’s 15 nuclear warheads are over 100 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War 2.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has also said that his Satan 2 missiles “can break through all modern anti-missile defences.”

However, while these kinds of threats have become increasingly common on Russian propaganda shows since the invasion of Ukraine, the risk of mutually assured destruction undercuts much of the danger.

As well as threatening to wipe out the United States with their nuclear capabilities, the unsettling conversation also covered the crisis in Ukraine, as the hosts repeated the ‘nazification’ theme of Russia’s invasion.

Describing them as “incurable,” Zhuralev stated that two million Ukrainians should “be de-nazified, which means to be destroyed.”

The talk show discussed a study that found 40% of Ukrainians do not support tearing down Soviet era statues in the nation, which is being carried out in some areas.

Zhuralev claimed that the 36% with “no opinion” on the matter were too afraid to share their opinion, making the case that: “three quarters of Ukrainians are against tearing down monuments, only 19 per cent support it.”

“If we re-install their brains correctly, 12-15 per cent will also believe it shouldn’t be done. So the maximum of 5 per cent are incurable,” said the Russian lawmaker, arguing that they must be “destroyed.”

Bizarre Hospital Images From A Very Strange Cache Of Japanese Stock Photos

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There’s a website called “Sukima Nurse” that offers pictures of a Japanese nurse holding unusual objects in a hospital and similar locales. The pictures fall generally into the stock photo category, although with a very, very narrow focus.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone having any reason to use a picture of a Japanese nurse blowing through a conch shell, but that is the very thing that makes the pictures so hilarious.

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cut47 baseball 1200×801 1

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Russian Members of Parliament Say On TV “Four Sarmat Missiles Could Wipe Out Entire USA”

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Politician, Alexie Zhuravlev, was joined on a talk show by fellow Member of Parliament Yevgeny Popov, the host of a popular Rossiya 1 TV channel show, and made clear Russia can “wipe out” the US with just four (4) of their new, nuclear, missiles.

The lawmaker claimed that two of Russia’s Sarmat ‘Satan 2’ missiles would destroy the entirety of America’s east coast – before adding it would take just “two missiles for the west coast” as well.

“Four missiles and there’ll be nothing left.

The discussion centered on U.S. interference in the Russia-Ukraine special military operation to de-Nazify and de-militarize Ukraine, and what Russia may have to do to stop that interference.

The U.S. has interfered severely by supplying money and weapons to Ukraine, even though the U.S. has no national interest in that country whatsoever.

The US weapons are enabling the KILLING of Russian soldiers, and the Russian government is getting more and more aggravated by the interference from the U.S. and its NATO vasal state partners.

Standing at the colossal height of a 14-storey tower block, the 208 ton RS-28 Sarmat missile, also known as the ‘Satan 2’, is capable of striking targets at almost 16,000mph.

The world-ending missiles can carry 15 warheads and have the potential to obliterate an area the size of the United Kingdom in a single strike.

Each of the Sarmat missile’s 15 nuclear warheads are over 100 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War 2.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has also said that his missiles “can break through all modern anti-missile defenses.”

They achieve this not only through the speed at which they travel, but also by being able to maneuver in-flight specifically to avoid incoming missile defenses, which cannot change course and cannot fly as fast as the Sarmat. Quite simply, there is presently no protection and no defense against such missiles. The US and NATO could literally be wiped-out by them.

Experienced observers say while these kinds of threats have become increasingly common on Russian TV news shows since the invasion of Ukraine, the risk of mutually assured destruction undercuts much of the danger. Those experienced observers, however, turned out to be wrong.

Russia has a national system of nuclear bomb shelters for its population. The US does not.

Russia’s blast shelters are stocked with food, water, medicine, tools, and have emergency generators for electric, with fuel to run those generators. The US does not.

Russia performs regular nuclear attack drills with its civilian population, and has successfully seen forty million (40,000,000) of their citizens arrive at shelters within minutes, to survive a US or NATO nuclear attack. Neither the US not any of its NATO partners ever conduct such drills.

These facts kind of take the “mutual” out of of “mutual assured destruction.” Put simply, the US and NATO would be wiped out, while Russia and its citizens will survive in great numbers, with food, electric, and tools, to rebuild afterwards. The US and NATO would not survive or be able to rebuild.

The Russian politicians know this and they are going to great lengths to make clear what the world faces.

Why the US and NATO continue to interfere, when there is no national security interest at all with Ukraine, seems to many, to be suicidal.

Yet the mass-media in the US and its NATO vasal partner states in Europe, conceal this information from the general public; leaving citizens blissfully unaware that western governments are sleepwalking them into nuclear Armageddon.

Lovely Vintage Photos of Rock Stars Posing With Their Kitty Cats

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Johnny Ramone

Who doesn’t like rock stars and cute kitty cats?

Though their contributions rarely receive credit, pets have played their part across pop history. An animal’s presence can offer comfort, laughter, inspiration, or annoyance, and earning a pet’s affection can be one of the most rewarding experiences in life. Naturally, those emotions can’t help but bleed into an artist’s work.

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Patti Smith

But owning a pet is also a great responsibility, and for musicians who spend much of their time on the road, bringing a furry friend into the family can lead to difficulties. What do you do with the little critter while on tour? Can it come along? If so, how? Will it be forced to stay in the car or bus?…

Behind many great musicians exists a great pet… Here’s a collection of a few  adorable vintage photos of rock stars posing with their beloved cats:

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Debbie Harry

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John Lennon

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Janis Joplin

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Tom Waits

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Brian Eno

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Keith Moon

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Joey Ramone

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Johnny Cash

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Frank Zappa

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Joan Baez

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Freddie Mercury

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Bob Dylan

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Phil Collins

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David Bowie

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Kurt Cobain

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George Harrison

YELLEN: “large shocks to the economy […] that I, at the time, didn’t fully understand.”

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The Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, said today that the so-called “transitory” inflation, may not be so transitory . . . signaling things will get very much worse.

Appearing on TV, Yellen finally admitted in an interview on Tuesday that she was “wrong” about “the path that inflation would take,” as the lagging COVID-19 pandemic and economic sanctions imposed against Russia for its special military operation in Ukraine, have kept prices persistently high.

During an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the network played a clip of previous comments she made in 2021, in which she said inflation would be a “small risk” and added that she didn’t “anticipate that inflation is going to be a problem.”

“Well, look, I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take,”

the Treasury secretary said when asked about her previous comments.

“As I mentioned, there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy that have boosted energy and food prices and supply bottlenecks that have affected our economy badly that I didn’t — at the time didn’t fully understand. But we recognize that now.”
“The Federal Reserve is taking the steps that it needs to take. It’s up to them to decide what to do. And, for our part, President Biden is focused on supplementing what the Fed does with actions we can take to lower the cost that Americans face for important expenditures they have in their budgets,”

she added.

We’ll see.

 

 

David Gilmour – Raise My Rent

My university days. I hope this transporter takes you to happy places…

Russia’s Necessary and Legal Military Response to US/ NATO Aggression in Ukraine

Easily the best summation of the Russian operation's moral logic.
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Evidence shows that Russia’s special military operation (SMO) in Ukraine is a legally justified, critically necessary, and predictable response to the US’ recent escalation of its decades-long aggression against Russia in Ukraine–militarily, in the international corporate media, in cyberspace, and in the political-economic arena.  The US’ hostile actions against Russia were summarized in a 2019 US-Army funded RAND Corporation blueprint for “Over Extending and Unbalancing Russia.”  Underlying US actions is its aim is to dismember and asset-strip Russia–to appropriate its coveted oil, gas, and mineral resources and vast agricultural lands–and to enable US investors’ access to Russia’s economy. This is a step towards the US’ overarching goals of controlling Central Asia and achieving full spectrum dominance or global hegemony. Although the US war against Russia in Ukraine started years ago, US aggression escalated under the Biden administration and created conditions that posed an immediate existential threat to Russia and necessitated its military response.

In 2014, the US initiated a proxy war against Russia by engineering the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-elected president. This ignited a bloody civil war on Russia’s border in which the US-installed and US-armed Kiev regime attacked the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk whose largely ethnically Russian residents opposed the US coup. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) documented the Kiev regime’s attacks that killed thousands of civilians and terrorized the populace. In 2015, the US-installed then-president, Petro Poroshenko, publicly articulated Kiev’s anti-Russia stance and its policy for the Donbass:

“We will have jobs—they will not. We will have pensions—they will not. [….] Our children will go to schools and kindergartens—theirs will hide in the basements.”  Popular Ukraine pundits openly called for Donbas residents’ extermination. In 2015, Congress lifted its ban on funding Ukraine’s neo Nazi militias and placed US military trainers on the ground inside Ukraine. NATO and the CIA also began training Ukraine regime forces–effectively establishing Ukraine as a de facto US/NATO mercenary state. During the past eight years, Russia exhibited enormous restraint as the US and Ukraine violated the Minsk Protocols and rejected requests for diplomacy. In 2021, US aggression against Russia increased dramatically once Biden took office–in Ukraine and in the Black Sea. US actions and Ukraine President Zelensky’s public statements generated immediate threats to the survival of the Russian nation-state.

Russia’s Military Response Was Over-Determined By Four Existential Threats 

The US government and the corporate media falsely characterize Russia’s special operation as entirely ‘unprovoked’ and an ‘illegal invasion’. These allegations ignore four conditions which each independently compelled President Putin and the Duma to initiate Russia’s denazification and demilitarization operation and which establish this intervention as consistent with international legal norms.

Chief among the factors necessitating Russia’s immediate military response were indications of an imminent new massacre as 125,000 Ukraine forces amassed along the border of Donbass in December of 2021. This was never reported in the US corporate press.  Instead, the US government and corporate media repeatedly stated that Russian troops were gathering on Ukraine’s border (inside Russia) and predicted an impending Russian invasion. In hindsight, US intelligence could make this accurate claim because it was aware of the menacing buildup of Ukraine forces. Anticipating an imminent massacre, Russia was obligated to intervene militarily because it had a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) the citizens of Donbass.  R2P is a political commitment to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity; it was endorsed by the United Nations at its 2005 world summit.

Second, on February 19, 2022, Ukraine President Zelensky announced that Ukraine would seek to acquire nuclear weapons, saying, “I want to believe that the North Atlantic Treaty and Article 5 will be more effective than the Budapest Memorandum.” Zelensky’s expressed desire to acquire nuclear weapons represented a dangerous threat to Moscow and signaled that the window of opportunity for conventional military intervention was closing.  It is unlikely that Zelensky operates completely autonomously; Biden publicly bragged about his control over Ukraine government policies and has remunerated Zelensky following Zelensky’s implementation of anti-Russia policies and actions.

Third, Zelensky’s repudiation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was a reminder of Ukraine’s intent to join NATO. For years, US President Biden advocated NATO membership for Ukraine, assuring Zelensky as recently as December 11, 2021 that this was in Ukraine’s own hands. NATO membership would entail NATO nuclear missiles inside Ukraine, aimed at Moscow. Ukraine’s geographic proximity to Russia eliminates the crucial minutes in which Moscow could verify and respond to an attack and would effectively place Russia and the US at DEFCON Level Two. The US dismissed Russia’s December 17, 2021 verbal and written requests for a diplomatic response to its security concerns. Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken deliberately rejected Russia’s entreaties and ignored the predictable consequences of Ukraine’s potential NATO membership. Renowned international relations scholars, diplomats and politicians, including John Mearsheimer, Jack Matlock, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, and William Perry warned that NATO membership for Ukraine was a dangerous provocation which would trigger Russia’s military response.

A fourth threat requiring Russia’s intervention was the presence of US Department of Defense-operated biolabs inside Ukraine. Russia’s concerns were validated on March 11, 2022 when Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland admitted during Congressional questioning that the Ukraine biolabs contained ‘biological materials’ which the US ‘did not want to fall into Russian hands’. While the pathogenic biological agents in these biolabs do not technically constitute bioweapons, they can become bioweapons once there is a ‘mechanism for spreading the agent.’ A delivery mechanism need not be sophisticated to be effective.  Bioweapons researcher, Jeffrey Kaye, described the extreme level of US secrecy surrounding the biolabs. Kaye noted that the Director of the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Robert Pope, did not reassure when he stated that, “the Ukraine biolabs currently did not have the ability to manufacture bioweapons.”

Russia’s Intervention Is Consistent with International Law

These four US-generated conditions represented urgent existential threats to the Donbas and to the Russian nation-state and contradict US claims that Russia ‘illegally invaded Ukraine’ and that Russia’s intervention was unprovoked. Russia was compelled to intervene militarily to neutralize these threats and its response is consistent with the United Nations Charter of 1945 concerning international rules governing a state’s use of military force. The United Nations allows two exceptions to its prohibition of the use of force in international law: “self-defence under Article 51, and military measures authorised by the Security Council in response to “any threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression.” In particular, the UN Charter notes, “there is no problem – and never has been – with that state, without first seeking Security Council approval, using military force ‘preemptively’.’ Both exceptions apply to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine: Russia perceived an imminent threat to the Donbas and an imminent threat to the Russian nation-state.  The immediacy of these threats obviated any requirement that Russia seek prior UN Security Council approval. Seeking UN approval would be futile, in any case, because the United States, a permanent UN Security Council member, is the principal combatant generating the hostilities.

Under the Biden administration, what began in 2014 as a US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine transformed into the US’ direct war against Russia. The US’ covert and overt military actions establish it as a legal “co-belligerent.” Now, the US continues to flood Ukraine with billions of dollars of heavy weapons and provides intelligence to guide Ukraine’s attacks on Russian forces. The US blatantly states that it wants to “weaken” Russia and that Russia must be defeated.  This is the US whose regime change wars in the Middle East killed 5 million; whose 1955-1975 war against Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia cost 3.4 million military and civilian lives. This is the US CIA whose coups and illegal interventions around the globe since its 1947 inception left a trail of bloodshed and chaos. Russia is legally and crucially defending the Donbas and the Russian nation-state against the US quest for global domination. The US generated four existential threats to the Donbas and to the Russian nation-state that necessitated Russia’s immediate intervention. The US—not Russia—is the illegal aggressor in Ukraine.

Bacon, Chile and Cream Cheese-Stuffed Chicken Breasts

Jalapeño poppers are the inspiration for these addictive, crispy baked chicken breasts.

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0a55c520 6ba0 4f85 8945 43641ca4ae8c

Ingredients

  • 2 slices bacon, chopped
  • 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
  • 1 poblano chile, cored, seeded and diced
  • 4 oz cream cheese, softened
  • 1/2 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese (2 oz)
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (6 to 8 oz each)
  • 1/4 cup butter, melted
  • 1 cup Progresso™ plain panko crispy bread crumbs

2022 05 30 15 39
2022 05 30 15 39

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2022 05 30 15 40 1

A document of the war

The story of a Ukrainian interpreter who was drafted into military service against the Russian attack
By Yuri Movchan*

*Name is known to the editors

I want to tell you my personal story about this war. I call them “The Adventures of Cannon Fodder” or “How I Ended Up at the Front in Jeans and a Set of Band-Aids.”

Late in the evening of March 1, I drove with my wife and child to Uzhhorod, on the border with Slovakia. In my naivety I also went along because I thought I wasn’t fit for military service. The provisional certificate issued to me as a replacement for my military ID card read “peacetime unfit, restricted military service.” When I inquired, I immediately received a summons to the draft office. I was told to call a cab and drive to the recruitment office in the middle of the night. Although I hadn’t done anything illegal—I hadn’t offered a bribe, nor attempted to sneak across the border, I was just asking—I knew from the way they spoke to me that I would never get out of there.

I kissed my son who was sleeping in the Red Cross tent, hugged my wife goodbye and went back to my homeland. “How am I going to fight with my eyesight?” I asked the man in uniform, purely rhetorically and to keep the conversation going while I waited for a cab. “There are many different jobs and roles in the army, not necessarily just shooting,” he explained.

Nobody seemed to be listening to me in the recruiting office. They told me to report to the counter, get some forms and queue for a medical exam. The kind-hearted ophthalmologist, noting that my short-sightedness had increased since the last examination, scribbled a number of medical phrases on a form, based on which the head of the commission declared me fit for duty and sent me on my way.

From interpreter to shooter

In Uzhgorod, long queues formed in front of the registration and draft office. Volunteers offered water and sandwiches, many people sat there for days and then set off in groups. I waited in line until closing time and received a new subpoena for tomorrow. On March 4th, my documents were written, I was put on a yellow shuttle along with the others who were “caught.” A priest came in to pray for us and bless us – then we drove off.

It turned out that in my group there were many people who, like me, had health problems, people who, like me, were no longer young and who, like me, had no experience of military service. “You will be something like territorial defense,” we were assured when we got to the unit, “you will stay in the Zakarpattia region and, for example, stand at roadblocks and guard some facilities.” “But,” added the soothing voice casually added, “if there is an order to that effect, you may be assigned other targets…” (Looking back after a month and a half of absurdity and criminal negligence, it can be seen that the order was already on an employee’s desk, only undated and undated ).

That’s how I ended up as a rifleman in the newly founded Fifth Rifle Battalion. I was listed as a clerk on my ID card. I had worked as an English translator for 20 years, including as an interpreter for the British military instructors of our troops in Operation Orbital. But the people organizing home defense got the impression that I would be more useful in digging trenches and shooting from AK-74s. My staff included three programmers from Kyiv. They were occasionally used to type endless lists of personal information into Excel spreadsheets. But the rest of the time they were like everyone else—lawyers, teachers, farmers, builders—learning to disassemble machine guns, dig fortifications, and throw grenades.

But it must be said that there was not much training. In the first two weeks we did various tasks: moving boxes around, getting uniforms and shoes. However, because not all sizes were available, a dozen other men and I were never outfitted with uniforms—neither “pixel” (jacket and pants) nor boots. After a month we were told to buy them for our money – “You get your wages,” remarked the company commander. Somehow I was reluctant to make these purchases (especially since the items were rarely and reluctantly given out), so I went to the front in jeans and black winter boots. But it was my own fault, as the saying goes. However, the overalls were distributed to everyone – used ones provided by the Slovak army.

The squad leader warned that there weren’t enough body armor for everyone and suggested that those who were wealthier should buy them at their own expense. But in the last few days before the hasty departure, protective vests were brought for everyone. And even old rubber gas masks and chemical protective coats OZK with holes in the seams were handed out. We had to carry this extra cargo everywhere. Shortly before marching off to the position, however, the company commander said that we could not take OZK protective coats with us (although they could also help against rain). We were also given sleeping mats and sleeping bags but they were mixed as they had all been donated by volunteers.

So for the first two weeks we arranged our way of life, mud and tobacco smoke were omnipresent as the obligatory background. The training began around the third week. The first two days were meaningful: showing how to disassemble the Kalashnikov assault rifles, then also how to use the PKM (a modernized Kalashnikov machine gun) – affectionately called “Pokemon” – and two types of grenade launchers. It wasn’t entirely clear why there were grenade launchers at the checkpoints, and why everyone in the squad was enlisted as a gunner, grenade launcher, machine gunner, communicator and medic – but extra knowledge never hurts, right?

Then it was shown how to stop heavy bleeding with a large rubber band (of the kind often attached to bicycle loads). And they explained how to move in groups with machine guns. We then spent a few more weeks “solidifying” what we had learned: walking in single file around an abandoned training ground with submachine guns, or sometimes with batons mimicking them. Or we’d just “dance” around and sunbathe when one of the so-called instructors would honestly say, “Guys, go and imitate something so your superiors don’t screw you up.” Others, more “conscientious,” insisted that we “consolidate” the “knowledge” we had acquired. They repeated meaningfully, “Guys, be careful, your life may depend on it.”

There were not enough instructors for us poor people. And those assigned to teach didn’t quite know what to do. No wonder, because almost all platoon leaders (and the company commander himself) had never served; at best they had a military department at a college. Half, if not more, of all members of our company (I’m sure it was the entire battalion) had never served.

The paramedic was a phlegmatic and indifferent guy named Anton, a former vet I think. His first lesson was, “This shit, boys, goes in this damn thing… If it’s a throat wound, there’s nothing you can do about it. Even experienced doctors can’t always help… A fractured pelvis can be recognized by a clear crunch when pressing. A special splint is used for such cases, but you won’t have one… Your job is to get the injured person to a safer ‘yellow’ area where people like me will provide assistance.’ Which was small consolation. But we weren’t too concerned about this “competence” of our medics – no one seriously believed they would be going to the battlefield any time soon. So these courses gave us the opportunity to to have fun and not get bored so much. One of the officers found combat training materials in the textbooks written in inarticulate Chancery language. I, as a man of higher education, read the general information about patrols and convoys of armored vehicles to the soldiers sleeping on the lawn.

The corporal took a more lively approach: He watched lots of videos on Youtube before the class and taught everything in simple language, with a healthy dose of swear words. But even that seemed either far removed from our duties or inaccessible without much practice. So it all turned into a friendly chat about who had heard what about mines, snipers and ambushes. When even the dense cigarette smoke couldn’t hide the tired facial expression, the foreman repeated the leitmotif: “Your life may depend on it.”

After half a month we started going to the shooting range once a week. I’ve heard that a military handbook states how many times a soldier must pull the trigger before being considered ready for action. So I’d been to the range three times and fired about 70 rounds in total (and thrown a practice grenade once – not counting the practice where we threw rocks through the windows of a landfill that used to be a tank training ground) and was done ready for active combat in April.

The three of us took turns shooting standing, kneeling and lying down. We had to remember when to release the safety, when to engage the breech, and check to see if there was a cartridge left in the gun. We got a little confused, the bosses got a little angry and yelled at the “morons”. So we tried it even faster, not caring about accuracy or aiming, just the formal smoothness of the exercise. The superior, who for some reason called himself a psychologist, was pleased and said indulgently: “There is war in the country, no time for study. So let’s go to battle!’ And right on the rainy ground we were provided with stew, apples and even chocolate from humanitarian aid supplies. That was admittedly more interesting than the sticky noodles,

Healthy is who does not fall over

In mid-March, air raid alarms apparently began to sound regularly in the distant Transcarpathian Mountains. During the alert, we had to spread out (so that one rocket didn’t kill everyone at once) and lie close to the ground (so the shrapnel would fly through without hitting us). For some reason, our unit didn’t have an air raid shelter, and we had to walk around the parade ground and sports field several times every night, crouching on the ground. Eventually we got smart and started taking pack blankets and sleeping bags, dressing warmer, and stocking up on candy and cigarettes during the alarms.

Soon almost everyone was coughing, choking on snot and running a fever. The paramedics considered any case with a fever of less than 40 degrees as a trifle. In fact, even one man who had the coronavirus was deemed immediately fit to work and sent to our overcrowded barracks. So we stoically choked back our coughs, swallowed the phlegm and prepared for the constellation ritual. We waited for the officers to confer on the sidelines and split into their platoons to convey our task ahead: ‘Anyway folks. Now we will reinforce yesterday’s lesson. Until noon. And then we’ll clean our guns.”

The stoic contempt for the mortal body in the service of a higher purpose led annoyingly to acute and chronic pain. But that didn’t stop us either. In early April, when I was already tired of swallowing every second of snot and disturbing my comrades with monstrous snoring at night, I went to see real doctors. They determined that I had chronic maxillary sinusitis and acute tracheobronchitis and prescribed antibiotics, among other things. But a march and shooting at the firing range was planned in two days, so I, along with all the other relatively healthy soldiers (since I was not on IV fluids and not getting burned in the heat), walked five kilometers to the firing range and the same distance at heavy rain back. there was no place

The first military unit, as I said, was overcrowded. The bunk beds were quickly set up, but even faster they were filled with the fresh catch from the Uzhgorod conscription office, which was sometimes brought in in the middle of the night. Once I got up in the night to go to the bathroom and had trouble making my way through the darkness between the recruits sleeping on the floor. Soon the beds filled all the rooms and closets and lined the corridors in tight rows. The glorious Fifth Rifle Battalion took full form. The soldiers had two washbasins and two showers for over 400 men of the battalion, but once a week they were given socks and trousers marked “ZSU” (Ukrainian Ground Forces, jW ).

After the rocket attacks in the Lviv region, it was decided to take the soldiers out of the easily identifiable unit and disperse them. At first they were housed in separate rooms, which were terribly cold but spacious. But after a few days we decided that it’s easier to manage the herd when it’s in the same barn, so we set up “boxes” in large rooms (apparently meeting rooms) on the ground floor. The same bunk beds were brought in, but here we had to huddle even closer—three people on two mattresses (which made our team even closer). Unfortunately, in this fraternal community there have also been unfortunate incidents: arguments over a place for a bag under the bed, or confusion about whose coat or shoes went where. But in the army you learn an important principle early on: “You don’t steal, you break it.” And it teaches personal responsibility and the careful handling of things.

Our morale was boosted not only by cheering on the formation every day, but also by the power of the art. Once Viktor Pavlik (well-known Ukrainian musician, JV) brought to the department, sang with his guitar in the lobby and took pictures with the people. The most suspicious of us thought that such exorbitant luxuries were a sign of impending departure, but that too was wrong. In general, there was a lot of rumors and speculation. ‘Well, they can’t really send us to the front, we’re zeros!’ ‘We don’t have armored vehicles, we’re deployed at checkpoints and guards.’ ‘Our people are deployed separately in other units, and only those who agree to go there.” “None of our people are trained to work with ‘javelins’ and without that they definitely won’t be sent to a combat zone,” and so on. There have been many hypotheses and conjectures, but reality has trumped them.

Three days of field exercises were on the program before Easter: digging out fortifications, building shelters, sleeping in the fresh forest air, simulated patrols and combat, and finally a day at the firing range. Everything indicated that we would spend some more time at home (or rather, out of unit) at Easter and then be sent elsewhere. There was even another cultural event that disturbed our souls: on the Sunday a week before Easter, when we had barely eaten two spoons, the conductor burst into the canteen and ordered us to form up.

We were immediately taken in pairs to the Institute for Culture and Art and took a seat in the auditorium. At first the students of this school danced in their national costumes, then other students sang patriotic songs mixing the traditional tropes “Cossacks” and “Wolf and Nightingale” with new TV jargon like “Bayraktars” and some ridiculous insults to the enemy. Then the lead singer of Shablya performed. The band, as we have learned, since the beginning of the ATO (“anti-terrorist operation” in Donbass, jW) found their niche and roams military units across the country with martial and sometimes melancholic songs to keep up the fighting spirit of the Cossacks. After the concert we were treated to cookies, pastries and coffee and then returned to our cold soup at leisure.

On the eve of the “conclusion” of the training, the administrative and economic hectic intensified: we were rushed to receive ancient OZKs, first-aid kits (only with bandages, gauze and plasters in them) and a good imported tourniquet (instead of the promised three , but thanks) that they didn’t want to give out before (“You’ll twist them and break them before you even get out!”). The military ID cards were collected again to create new lists. There are some mystical problems with these lists – no matter how many times they make them, they still issue certificates with misspelled names, mix up the dates in the accounts, forget to put stamps or signatures… I wish there were accountants and businessmen in the Army,

To the front

And so it was Tuesday, a day of lengthy training on the field. We were routinely woken up at 5am so we could patiently wait until 8am for the first group to gather and leave. On site we had already dug enviable holes, almost completed the communal shelter, built a fire and waited for the meat to cook for the Bograch when the order came to drop everything and head back. The Bograch was dumped on the ground, we made our way back to the unit. There we were lined up and told with beaming smiles: »Guys, it’s finally time that we too defend our homeland!« It was a warm evening on April 19th. “Pack up, we’re leaving tonight when the kamazes (trucks,jW ) arrive. Only take the essentials with you: OZK, gas mask, BK (ammunition set), weapons, gloves, sleeping bag, underwear and a pair of socks … Don’t take anything extra with you!«

But we couldn’t go that fast. We got bulletproof vests. Then everyone got four full magazines (120 rounds of ammunition, with no additional forms or signatures), our automatic rifles, dry rations for three days. We didn’t leave until two o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday. In two big buses. There were also two Kamaz trucks in the convoy: one with personal belongings and one with additional BKs, machine guns, shovels, saws, other infantry tools and kitchen utensils… The bosses with pistols on their belts also rode in a pickup truck.

No one told us where we were going or what the task was. “Guys, I’m not going to tell you. Because I do not know. Honestly, I don’t know,” swore the captain, a company commander who had never served.

We drove very slowly: someone fell behind the column and we had to wait for him, then one of the trucks boiled over and the other had to be repaired. Given these delays, the commander was understandably annoyed by the soldiers’ requests to use a restroom, smoke, or eat. More than once he rigorously suppressed these whims. By the end of the first day, we had barely left the Zakarpattia region. On the second day we left Ivano-Frankivsk. Everyone guessed that the route went to the Dnipro.

We were told to only take one dry meal per bus (and where else would gas masks and other items go). The food, dubbed »Palianitsa«, was made by Britain for the heroes of Ukraine: tasteless sausages, a simple stew (no side dish or at least bread), assorted nuts, dark chocolate and a good dessert of oatmeal flavored with caramel and toffee. There was also a bag of instant fruit drinks and water purification tablets.

In the following days we had to ask for help in the shops where the locals gave us many things for free and generously brought us bottled water, coffee, groceries, Easter buns, apples etc. Some people tried to give us money. “I have a son there myself,” said one of them. It was a little embarrassing to accept this undeserved participation and help.

The landscape changed. At rest stops we wiped our bare feet with wet wipes. We finally reached Dnipro on the Saturday before Easter, but passed the city and took the Donetsk highway. Every fork in the road jolted our weary brains anew. At the exit of the city we stopped and stood for a long time. After the meetings, the commanders informed us about a plan for further action. We were almost there, but the final leg of the journey would be very close to the front line in places. “We’re going to help a unit that’s waiting for us in the morning. We’ll go out in the dark, in body armor and helmets, with loaded machine guns in hand. The bus will drive slowly and with the doors open. Some of the soldiers look out the window and when they spot flashing lights, the bus stops and everyone quickly gets off and lies down in the street behind them. Don’t go to the curb. There could be mines there!”

I was so exhausted from this endless drive that I took it all with indifference and almost fell asleep. (The assignment was clear and concise, but it still raises questions like: “What if we were lying behind the bus on the tarmac? Attack the attackers from the darkness, behind the mined roadside? Go through the night and one leave the shot-up bus behind? Where? Are you waiting for backup? From who?’) I pushed these idle thoughts aside and surrendered to the warm current of sleepy apathy.
However, for some reason my comrades grew restless. The group leader, who always seemed smart and experienced, approached me. “We will speak to the commanders that we do not agree with this order.”

“And what are your arguments?” I asked. I chose my words carefully so as not to betray my amazement: I am not the only one who recognizes the absurdity of what is happening! There are sane people around me… (no cogs obeying the system). “The order seems silly to many,” explained my group leader, Sanya. ‘Is there a connection to those we ask for support? Do they know we are coming and won’t they open fire on us themselves? And one more thing: our battery (120 cartridges) is enough for only ten minutes of combat. And then what? Some are asking how can we conduct a combat mission when many of them still don’t have ID cards to assign them to their unit?”

“What do you think, should we go or not?” he finished. “I agree that we don’t have to go there,” I said and he left.

At four in the morning I went with three other guys to guard the area around our campsite. Around five o’clock the soldiers began to gather between the buses and trucks. Officials from the authorities spoke to them. We on duty were completely forgotten. I only caught snippets of sentences being said: “I know Colonel A. personally and he would never give a crazy order… He’s worried about each and every one of you… I understand you’re scared… but out there wait guys like you…” At six-thirty I realized there was no point in standing guard. “What have you decided?” Sanya asked when he saw me. “About what? I didn’t really hear what was said.” Then came the order: “If you don’t want to go, stand here on the left,

I murmured, “I don’t think it’s worth going there with my level of education,” and wandered to the left while Sanya walked to the right. I looked at both groups with amazement. There were more leftists, but not much more, by no means an overwhelming majority. The bosses told everyone to form groups of three or four and for some reason counted the gray men in the wet morning light.

Then something was said. We got on our buses and went somewhere. “Don’t worry,” Sanya leaned towards me, “you did the right thing.”

I stared in silence, struggling with an odd mix of emotions. As time went on, the mixture of anger and laughter, an unfriendly laugh, grew sharper and sharper. “What’s changed?” I asked, in my most neutral and sleepy voice, “You were against it, and now you’re for it.”

‘There was a lot of confusion, but it’s more or less settled now. The paperwork will be sorted, and no one will be sent anywhere without their military record stamped. Our task will be to cover the artillery. Nobody’s going to put us in the front row,’ Sanya explained, adding simply and without much emotion, ‘unless they screw it up’.

The bus kept going on and on. We drove to the Donetsk region and looked sullenly out of the windows. We reached the city of Pokrovsk. Here we stopped at the end of a road bridge and everyone was ordered to get out and line up under the bridge with tanks and machine guns. In front of us were the political instructors, the commanders, the lawyer and the VSP (Ukrainian Military Law Enforcement Service, jW ). The “soft” political official answered a few questions. Then someone else spoke up, “I understand it’s scary. In the beginning everyone is afraid. But you will get used to it. Before you there were groups where some people didn’t serve at all, and now nothing…”

“We’ve got half the men who didn’t serve,” rumbled someone in the crowd. “That’s okay,” the officer said calmly, “you’ll see, after the first shot, it’s all over. You will get used to it.”
Then the VSP (or just its mouthpiece) took the floor. He began by listing crimes that multiply in times of war. He began pointing out “problems” and “eyesores.” A goofy smile spread across my face and I could barely contain my laughter. “So I want to ask you once again to think about what you vote for, I want the left to make the right decision after all,” the loving political officer called out again. “If you don’t want to go, go to this side.” Nobody moved. “So everyone is ready?” he asked in a more solemn tone. “That’s right!” answered the line, drowning out my “Sure, dammit!”

Then we got back to our buses and drove on. We arrived in the Lugansk region. We drove on. Then we reached our new “apartments,” but we still seemed to be on the move. I slept comfortably on a pallet under a lathe in an abandoned factory building. We unloaded our backpacks from the kamaz, and there was a whole feast of various canned goods. I quietly pooped in the concrete ditch and looked at the factory landscape. I found that there was still water in the boiler room and used it to wash my feet and socks. I hung them in the sun. Every little thing made me happy. I even found a generator and charged my phone to the brim. I squinted at the sun-drenched concrete and the almost perfectly clear sky. only on the horizon

Postscript
The platoon commander has just informed me that we will be resting all day today and will leave for our positions in the evening. We may also get our own generator, but when we leave we turn off our phones and turn them in. They are kept in a kind of box. “Phones won’t do much good there anyway,” he remarked sensibly, sipping on his e-cigarette.

I’m leaving the text as is, although much could be added and corrections made (I typed it on my phone at night). Just now, at 10:00 am on April 26th, there was a line-up and it was officially announced that we are going to fortify our positions tonight.

So I’m sending him as he is. I want my voice to be heard in the depths of this absurdity and hell. It’s not death itself that’s scary, it’s senseless and stupid death. If I don’t come back, maybe this text will help someone solve this crime (and probably many others).

I want my voice to be heard.

Mysterious Mummified Predator Baffles Experts

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2022 06 02 16 13

Some people may not be aware, but animals have been mummified throughout history in various places, including Turkey in the Middle Ages. Niğde, Turkey is a site were researchers have recently found mummified remains of an apparent carnivore – that has defied classification so far.

“We are examining pictures of the skeleton and it seems to be a carnivore,” Aydin Topcu, Natural History professor at Niğde University, told the Daily Mail . “But we need more time to conduct further tests. After the examinations we will be able to tell what species it belongs to and of which period of time it is.”

The Daily Mail wrote in its article that it had sent photos of the find to the Zoological Society of London, the Horniman Museum, the Natural History Museum and the British Museum, the last of which refused to comment on the photos. The news agent says the creature could be a hoax, but it resembles a cat. Some experts told them it could be a prehistoric animal.

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2022 06 02 16 1v4

There is a history of cats and children being mummified in Anatolia from the 10th to the 13th centuries AD, the Daily Mail said. This particular specimen, 1 meter long (3 feet) from nose to tail tip, was found by a locksmith in an old cellar of his shop in Niğde. He has put the creature on display.

Cats were revered and mummified in ancient Egypt, and some experts think Anatolia was influenced by the practice. One reason cats were so loved in Egypt was because they could eat the rodents that threatened the grain supplies. A cat could also take on a cobra, the Daily Mail says.

Some ancient Egyptians adorned their cats with gold jewelry and allowed them to eat off their plates.

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2022 06 02 16 1b4

Millions upon millions of animal mummies have been found in the dark, carved stone tunnels beneath the location of Egypt’s earliest pyramid at Saqqara. The necropolis of Saqqara is the burial site of kings, commoners and sacred animals.

The astounding piles of preserved animal remains not only signify a cultural and religious phenomenon, but also speak to the mammoth industry that operated to maintain a source of constant tributes to the gods.

The Catacombs of Anubis at North Saqqara ,” a study published in 2015 in the archaeological journal Antiquity, examines the underground world associated with the temples dedicated to animal deities of ancient Egypt.

The Saqqara catacombs served as the burial places of animal tributes to the jackal-headed deity Anubis. Between this study, and other studies by Egyptologists from University of Manchester , it can be seen that the millions of dogs sacrificed and mummified to the canine deity were only one part of a wider practice of sacred animal cults.

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2022 06 02 16 1n4

But the Egyptians mummified many cats too, though they are not the only people in the world to have buried felines with elaborate ceremony and in recognition of status or symbolism.

In 2015, archaeologists found the remains of a bobcat in an important mound burial from 2,000 years ago. The mound was usually reserved for humans, but the feline was important enough to the Hopewell people of western Illinois to be included. The bobcat had been decorated with sea shells and bear-teeth pendants, and found with its paws placed together. It was included in the human burial mound, while dogs were buried around the village. Researchers speculate the bobcat was a beloved pet, not sacrificed or violently killed, and that it held spiritual significance to the Native Americans.

Captured according to instructions. Their commanders have already begun to agree on the surrender of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

From HERE

When there were battles for Mariupol, hundreds of soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were taken prisoner, and then thousands. After the “evacuation” (this is how Kyiv came up with the idea of ​​calling the surrender) from Azovstal, it might seem that the trickle of Ukrainian soldiers ready to lay down their arms had dried up. But it’s not. Kyiv throws new units to the front line almost daily, where the vast majority of fighters are yesterday’s civilians. The mobilized are not ready to die for no reason, and the flow of prisoners from the areas of Krasny Liman, Popasna, Severodonetsk is again stable.

Warm and satisfying

“We made a decision for ourselves not to leave, because it’s scary, but just to give up. The best option for us,” says prisoner of war Andrei Kaminsky from Lutsk. He, in a group of 16 people, was sitting in the basement of the church during the shelling, they surrendered at the first opportunity. The man tells for a long time how good it is in captivity and how well they are fed, which, according to him, was not only on the front line, but even in Lutsk at checkpoints.

There are already a lot of videos in which prisoners of war talk about the inhuman attitude of their fathers-commanders, how they are not fed and armed properly, and even about detachments that shoot those who run back and surrender. Each one is about the same thing: they were forced to fight, they are thrown to the front naked and barefoot and without heavy weapons, they call themselves cannon fodder, they call on other fighters not to sacrifice their lives and to surrender. However, the stories of military personnel are about the same.

or example, UAF Lieutenant Oleksandr Lukhanin says Ukrainian soldiers have nothing to fear from Russians unless they have committed war crimes. “Nothing will happen to them if they have not committed any actions against the civilian population,” he says. “They will figure it out for you, and you will go to your families, to your relatives – children, mom, dad.”

Sergeant of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Serhiy Sidorchuk surrendered voluntarily and says that his colleagues have long wanted to do the same. “Morale has dropped. Everyone just wants to go home to the point that they are ready to lay down their arms. They were afraid of persecution, but now it doesn’t matter to them either,” he admits. Sidorchuk is sure that “it is better to go to jail than to die.” And he shares his first impressions of captivity: “How did I get here, the guys said: “That’s it, we fought back. Lucky you will live. Our conditions are normal.” The sergeant was surprised that the prisoners were not only fed, but also given warm clothes and blankets, because the room was a little cool.

Increasingly, the Ukrainian military come out to surrender in groups. As a graduate of the Kharkov Phystech Valery Grishko . He himself enlisted in the defense to avoid mobilization. He says he thought that he would “sit at the headquarters at the computer”, but he was thrown to the front line. IT specialists were instructed to scan radio frequencies and listen to the conversations of the military. The newly-minted radio intelligence understood the whole delusional nature of the task – household walkie-talkies cannot detect closed channels, and they did not show official zeal. But they quickly found the positions of the NVO troops and five of them surrendered.

We must surrender together

Among the Ukrainian soldiers, and not only on the front line, instructions on how to surrender correctly walk from hand to hand. Three rules. Advise to go en masse, entire military formations. So there is less chance that the command will write down the entire unit as deserters. But before doing this, it is better to “isolate political officers from the national battalions and the SBU.” And also unanimously record a video message led by an officer. Well, the route of capturing should be chosen carefully so as not to run into a detachment of nationalists.

In practice, especially when artillery is constantly working, it does not always work according to the instructions. But the scheme is working. How it happens in life, according to Russian servicemen fighting in the Donetsk region, military commander Alexander Kots told. At night, a Ukrainian fighter came to the checkpoint and asked to speak with the commander. “We are now being drafted only because otherwise we will go to jail, and here we can’t retreat, behind the cadre or nationalists, we will get a bullet from them,” he said. He described two weeks in the training manual, when the charters are crammed and they give 30 rounds of ammunition for everything about everything, and then immediately to the front. He said that the mood in the unit is sad – “everyone is afraid, both those who are in front and those who are behind.” And he asked to tell how to surrender: “We do not want to fight for the oligarchs sitting abroad, and our corrupt government! Why is it possible for the “Azovites”*, but not for us?” A day after the start of the next assault, the platoon of this Ukrainian commander surrendered in full force.

Forgotten and no one needs

In early May, information appeared that naive Ukrainian fighters did not follow instructions from the enemy, but sent relatives to “intermediaries” who, for money, “agreed” with the RF Armed Forces on a safe exit into captivity. Military commander Alexander Sladkov admitted that such a scheme could be quite working: “Surely there is such a “matchmaker for prisoners”. And not alone. For money.” But in reality, especially now, when Kyiv is trying to cling to a piece of land in the Donbass at any cost, you have to negotiate at your own peril and risk, without intermediaries.

However, Ukrainian prisoners of war have to take care of their own future. Without waiting for help from the Ukrainian authorities, the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who were captured a month or two ago, recorded an appeal to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky demanding to stop ignoring their duties and return them home to their families. “We have been here for more than a month and no one is taking care of us. Everyone is puzzled only by the Azov regiment. For some reason, no one asks all the presidents of Europe, the Pope , Elon Musk to assist in our exchange. We also have families, there are children who need us very much, they say. — When there was a need for us, we honestly performed our duty, stood as a “human shield”. Why are we just forgotten and no one needs us now?

Judging by the way events are developing, this appeal is unlikely to have the desired effect on prisoners of war. So, both on the front line and in captivity, in order to save their lives and return home to their families, both the regular soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and those mobilized will have to solve problems themselves. And before that, think hard about what they are fighting for.

More Pictures from the Past

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Caprese Chicken and Orzo Skillet

One-and-done dinners are where it’s at in the summertime, and this one is particularly well suited to the season. Featuring all the flavors of a caprese salad—including tomatoes, mozzarella and fresh basil—but on a hearty bed of orzo and chicken breasts, this meal will fill up the whole family. And perhaps best of all, it’s an easy way to make a weeknight dinner extra special in under an hour!

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9774520f ad0b 42a1 b25a 81ac721c24da

Ingredients

  • 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (1 1/4 lb)
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 cup Progresso™ chicken broth (from 32-oz carton)
  • 1 can (14.5 oz) Muir Glen™ organic fire roasted diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 cup uncooked orzo or rosamarina pasta
  • 1 package (8 oz) fresh mozzarella pearls, drained
  • 1/4 cup shredded fresh basil leaves

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2022 05 30 15 43

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2022 05 30 15 44

Some fantastic posters from China…

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A depiction of Dong Cunrui, who sacrificed his own life in 1949 during the Chinese Civil War while detonating explosives in an enemy bunker. c. 1960.

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“Follow the Constitution to Achieve Greater Industrial Victory.” c. 1970.

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“Have the Whole Country in Mind and Have the Whole World in View.” c. 1970.

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“Win Honor For Our Socialist Country, Win Honor For Our Great Leader Chairman Mao.” c. 1970.

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“American Imperialism Must Be Driven Out of Southern Vietnam!” c. 1970.

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“Strive to Collect Scrap Metal and Other Waste Materials!” c. 1970.

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“Vigilance, Defend the Motherland!” 1968.

Are You Upset About Inflation? If So, You Aren’t Alone.

All of a sudden, just about everyone is upset about inflation.  It would have been nice if everyone would have been this upset back when our leaders were making the exceedingly foolish decisions that resulted in this crisis.  In May 2012, the federal government was 15 trillion dollars in debt.  Now we are 30 trillion dollars in debt, but our politicians continue to spend money as if tomorrow will never come.  Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has pumped trillions of dollars that they created out of thin air into the financial system in recent years.  For a very long time, I passionately denounced what our leaders were doing, because I knew what would happen.  Now a day of reckoning has arrived, and millions upon millions of Americans are absolutely desperate for things to return to normal.  Unfortunately, that simply is not going to happen.

In May 2020, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States was less than two dollars.

Today, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States reached a brand new record high of $4.62, and we are being warned that it could soon go to “$5 a gallon or more”

The national average for unleaded gas hit another new high of $4.62 per gallon Tuesday, according to AAA data. Prices are up more than 50% compared with last year.

Analysts say gasoline prices usually peak by mid-May, but this year prices at the pump could continue to rise into July and reach about $5 a gallon or more.

Most of the time, the vast majority of the population doesn’t pay much attention to economics.

But this is where the rubber meets the road, and two recent polls show very clearly that Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated…

An NBC News poll released earlier this month found that 33 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the economy, while 23 percent approve of his handling of the cost of living.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll in early May found that more than 9 in 10 Americans are concerned, at a minimum, about the rate of inflation, which has been at a 40-year high for months. That included 44 percent who say they are “upset” about the problem.

In addition, Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index has now fallen to the lowest reading that we have seen since the end of the Great Recession

Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index measured -45 in May, down from -39 in each of the previous two months. It is the lowest reading in Gallup’s trend during the coronavirus pandemic, and likely the lowest confidence has been since the tail end of the Great Recession in early 2009.

When things go bad, who are people going to blame?

More than anyone else, people are going to blame the guy in the White House.

And right now the Biden administration is absolutely desperate “to contain the political damage caused by inflation”

The White House launched a new push Tuesday to contain the political damage caused by inflation after President Biden complained for weeks to aides that his administration was not doing enough to publicly explain the fastest price increases in roughly four decades.

Aiming to demonstrate to the public that it is responding to its concerns, Biden met with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell in the Oval Office, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about inflation and sent top aides across major networks to push the administration’s economic message.

What is Biden’s “economic message” exactly?

I have been sitting here pondering that question, and I honestly cannot answer it.

Every day, the story seems to change.  A while back, Biden promised to do all that he could to lower gasoline prices, and he foolishly released a million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

That didn’t work.

So what now?

One insider told Politico that high gasoline prices are “a really difficult issue to message around”, because “you can’t deny the reality”

The White House’s focus on gas prices is bred from two sobering political conclusions top officials have made. The first is that they have little control over the problem. The second is that as prices rise at the pump, so do Democrats’ odds of a midterm wipeout — especially as the average U.S. gallon of gas hits fresh record highs.

“There really isn’t one silver bullet,” said one person familiar with the discussions. “It’s a really difficult issue to message around when you can’t deny the reality.”

If Joe Biden asked me what he should do in order to reduce gasoline prices, the first thing I would say would be to stop doing things that are counterproductive.  The following comes from a recent editorial by Marc A. Thiessen

If the Biden administration cared about high gas prices, they would be doing everything in their power to increase domestic production. After a federal judge invalidated an offshore oil and gas lease sale in January, the administration chose not to appeal and has since canceled three transactions in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska — taking millions of acres off the auction block. The Post called the move “a victory for climate activists intent on curbing U.S. fossil fuel leasing,” which “effectively ends the possibility of the federal government holding a lease sale in coastal waters this year.” Worse, the administration is about to let the nationwide offshore drilling program expire next month without a new plan in place.

Moving forward, we need to remove mountains of regulations that have made it extremely difficult to build and operate new refineries in the United States.

And we need far more exploration and far more drilling as soon as possible.

Of course the truth is that this isn’t just a U.S. problem.

Energy prices are out of control all over the world, and they are actually much higher in Europe than they are here.

In fact, soaring energy prices are a big reason why inflation in the European Union just hit a brand new record high

Following Germany’s post-Weimar record high inflation print, the European Union’s consumer price inflation data this morning surged to a record high at +8.1% YoY (notably hotter than the +7.8% YoY expected).

Most Americans don’t realize this, but Europe is actually much closer to a full-blown economic meltdown than we are.

I expect the euro to fall below parity with the dollar in the not too distant future.

And I expect a nightmarish energy crunch in Europe as supplies from Russia are restricted or cut off completely.  Unless something changes, next winter is going to be a really challenging time for many European nations.

We have entered the worst energy crisis in modern history, but what we have experienced so far is just the beginning.

Much worse is ahead, and the American people will become increasingly frustrated as prices just keep going higher and higher.

Blinken Lays out Washington’s Anti-China Agenda

It’s very well done, how he breaks down the hidden messages, and lies out of Washington DC…

Paper Models Of The Most Controversial Buildings Erected Behind The Iron Curtain

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Zupagrafika, creators of make-your-own-paper-model sets of “brut-iful” architecture in London, Paris, Warsaw, and Katowice, have released their newest set, ‘Brutal East’. The creators’ selection captures the “certainly brutal” charm of the “functionalist panelák estates and otherworldly concrete grand designs” of the Eastern Bloc. With ‘Brutal East’ you can build your own East European city.

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Russian propaganda declares ‘WW3 has started’ in terrifying Kremlin TV threat

Propaganda from a Russian TV show has claimed that the war in Ukraine is over, and that the new goal of Russian forces is to ‘demilitarise’ NATO, with a news anchor saying a ‘real war’ has started.

From HERE

A Kremlin TV propaganda piece has claimed World War Three has started, and that Russia’s horrifying task is now to “demilitarise” NATO.

Russian television anchor Olga Skabeyeva of Putin mouthpiece Rossiya-1 claimed on camera that the war in Ukraine, known in Russia as a special military operation, "is now over".

Skabeyeva argued that the West's provisions of arms to Ukraine meant that the special operation had spilled over into a global conflict as Ukraine showcased new British Wolfhound heavy tactical support vehicles.

The anchor’s tirade was broadcast on Rossiya-1, where she claimed Russia were being “forced to demilitarise” both Ukraine and NATO.

Skabayeva said: "It's time to admit, perhaps, that Russia's special operation in Ukraine is now over. In the sense that a real war has started, World War III. We are being forced to demilitarise, not just Ukraine but NATO as a whole.

"It was not only Smerch MLRS with cluster munitions that struck Donetsk. The strikes were carried out with... American M777 howitzers."

Separate claims made by Lugansk People’s Republic head Leonid Pasechnik, who alleged that Ukrainian propaganda was to blame for hatred of Russian activities.

He said: “Most people, of course, meet us as liberators, with tears in their eyes, seeking to thank the military in person. Many come outside, hug republican, Russian servicemen, saying that they were anticipating liberation.

“Hatred towards everything Russian was promoted in Ukraine: language, culture, people and Russia in general. To our great regret, Kyiv and the US were able to raise an entire generation, a nation even, a nation of nationalists, in such a short time.

“Despite that, there are tens of thousands of people in Ukraine who support the Russian world, friendship with the brotherly people of Russia.”

The Prisoner 15;  “The Girl Who Was Death”.

This is episode 15. I hope that you enjoy it.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Oh man, are we in the deep right now. Lets stroll and ponder our fates.

We continue with the historic glimpse in the great global upheavals that we are all part of. I know you all want more on the core topics of MM, but we are living though historic times. Please bear with me. In the mean time, please enjoy this article.

Here’s some truth…

Instant Pot® Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

Chopped onions, mushrooms, carrots and celery are the fresh and flavorful base of this creamy and savory soup that stars a hearty helping of wild rice and chicken. This Instant Pot® spin on classic chicken and wild rice soup will be your go-to update on a universally loved recipe.

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60c3ebda 50a7 415e 8c66 14f6c9b93034

Ingredients

  • 1 package (20 oz) boneless skinless chicken thighs, patted dry
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 cups chopped onions
  • 1 package (8 oz) white mushrooms, chopped
  • 1 carton (32 oz) Progresso™ chicken broth
  • 2 cups peeled, sliced carrots
  • 1/2 cup sliced celery
  • 1/2 cup uncooked wild rice
  • 1 cup heavy whipping cream
  • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • Chopped fresh thyme leaves, if desired

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2022 05 30 16 39

Elite San Francisco School Sees Record D’s And F’s After Ditching ‘Racist’ Merit-Based Admissions

Tuesday, May 31, 2022 – 07:45 AM

A record number of freshman students at San Francisco’s elite Lowell High School earned D and F grades this past fall – the first semester after the school board eliminated merit-based admissions that were deemed “racist” by former SF Board of Education Commissioner, Alison Collins – who was ousted along with two other school board members in a February recall over the admissions debate and other issues – including a series of 2016 tweets by Collins targeting Asian Americans.

Of the 620 freshman students at Lowell, 24.4% received at least one D or F during the fall semester, which compared with just 7.9% of first-year students in fall 2020 and 7.7% in fall 2019, according to internal SF Unified School District figures obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle. Overall, the number of 9th graders at Lowell with a D or F tripled from 51 in 2020 to 152 in 2021 – bringing the figures closer to those at other high schools in the city.

Lowell students in grades 10 through 12 – who were admitted under the old merit-based system, saw a “slight” drop in grades over the same time period, while other city high schools did not see similar rises in D’s and F’s. In fact, freshman receiving low grades at other schools declined citywide between fall 2019 and 2021.

The lower grades, while expected by many, are likely to become part of a fervid debate over Lowell that touches on race, equity and achievement. The grades raise questions about how students — and the school’s teachers and administrators — are adapting to the changes.

However, it’s unclear exactly how much the change in admissions policy factored into the rise in D’s and F’s among Lowell’s ninth-graders, compared with other possible factors such as the pandemic. -SF Chronicle

In 2020, Collins notably said merit-based achievement and standardized testing are “racist systems” and the “antithesis of fair” – prompting the school to change their admissions policy to a lottery system similar to all other SF city high schools, vs. test scores and grades.

After the school dropped merit-based admissions, Lowell High accepted fewer asian (-4.4%) and white students (-6.5%), and more hispanic (+10%) and black students (+2.9%).

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2022 05 31 19 29

According to outgoing Lowell High principal Joe Ryan Dominguez, there are “way too many variables that contributed” to the rise.

“Over a year of distance learning, half of our student body new to in-person instruction at the high school level and absences among students/staff for COVID all explain this dip in performance,” he said – without addressing the fact that students admitted under the merit-based system were doing better than those admitted under the lottery. “It is important not to insinuate a cause on such a sensitive topic at the risk of shaming our students and teachers who have worked very hard in a difficult year.”

Pressured by the pandemic, the school board approved a fast-tracked switch from merit- to lottery-based admissions at Lowell starting this school year, citing COVID disruptions to the tests and grades that underpin applications to the school. Lowell’s freshman class this year was the most diverse in decades, with more Black and Latino students.

Both before and since the board’s decision, Lowell’s students, parents, educators and alumni have been locked in a debate over how the school should admit its students in the future.

Lowell has long been one of the top performing public schools in the country, whose alumni include prominent figures in politics, entertainment, literature and science. It’s viewed as a high-pressure launchpad to elite colleges and has offered more advanced placement courses than other San Francisco high schools. -SF Chronicle

Those opposed to the new lottery-based system say it disproportionately hurts Asian American students, who were ‘overrepresented’ at Lowell vs. other SFUSD schools, and that it ignores the benefits of a competitive school afforded to high-achievers.

During a Tuesday school board meeting, departing district Superintendent Vincent Matthews proposed extending the lottery-based admissions system at Lowell through the 2023-2024 school year while the district launches a public process to determine a long-term solution.

Mysterious Inscription Baffles French Village, Prize Offered to Crack the Code

From HERE

A recently discovered engraving is baffling local people in the small village in north-west France. The locals have made various attempts to decipher the inscription and have enlisted the help of many local experts to no avail. Now they are offering a prize to anyone who can decipher the mysterious inscription.

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2022 06 01 11 38

The inscription is near the small village of  Plougastel-Daoulas, Brittany, on the north-west of France near the Atlantic coast . The engraving is on a rock that is as ‘high as a man’ and is only seen when the tide is low. According to Newsweek, ‘the rock is accessible via a path from the hamlet of Illien ar Gwenn just to the north of Corbeau point’.  Its remoteness and the fact that it is completely submerged at high tide mean that it only came to light four years ago. The Mayor of Plougastel-Daoulas  Dominique Cap, has stated that no one has been able to understand the meaning of the engraving, despite their best efforts.

A Baffling Set of Words

The enigmatic inscription consists of a number of letters and some symbols, one depicts a boat with sails. Not all of the inscription is legible, but the letters are definitely from the Latin alphabet, used in modern French.

Newsweek reports that it has been suggesting that it is ‘written in Basque or in an archaic version of Breton, a Celtic language still spoken in Brittany’. Some of the engraving reads “ROC AR B… DRE AR GRIO SE EVELOH AR VIRIONES BAOAVE,”  according to CNN.

The locals have become increasingly frustrated at being unable to decipher the inscription. CNN quotes Michel Paugam, a local councilor as saying, “there are a lot of words….., but we can’t read them, we can’t make them out.”

The village has enlisted the help of local linguists, academics, and epigraphers, but even these experts who are familiar with Breton history and culture have been baffled by the words and the symbols. This is despite the fact that the date of the writing is only just over two centuries old.

There are two dates in the inscription, and these are 1786 and 1787, a time just before the French Revolution. At that time the Royal government in Paris had ordered the construction of batteries and fortifications to protect the harbor at Brest. This was France’s most important Atlantic port at the time.

There is the possibility that it was a memorial left by one of the builders who worked on the project at Brest. Romantics believe that it may have been some sort of love message. Some villagers have even begun to call the inscription their ‘ Rosetta Stone ,’ reports Channel News Asia.

The Competition to Decipher the Mysterious Inscription

The local community has now decided to ask for the help of experts from beyond Brittany to help them to break the code. They have decided to launch a competition that is open to linguists, students, epigraphers, and anyone who thinks that they can solve the mystery. Both professional and amateur code breakers can enter the competition.

Those who do manage to decipher the mysterious words will receive a prize of 2000 euro (2240 USD). A local official, Veronique Martin, is managing the competition and she has assembled a team to help her.

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2022 06 01 1d1 38

The village will examine all of the entries and the proposed solution to the mystery. NDTV reports that a ‘ jury will then meet to choose the most plausible suggestion and award the prize’. How they will actually determine which is the most plausible solution has not been stated.

There is the possibility that given the nature of the inscription it may not be deciphered and the prize not awarded. It is also possible that the engraving may never be deciphered. It can be said though that the village of Plougastel-Daoulas has been put on the map thanks to the enigmatic words engraved on the rocks .

 

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2022 06 01 11 3ff8

Escobar: The Eurasian Economic Union Steps Up

Monday, May 30, 2022 – 04:00 PM

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The Eurasian Economic Forum has shown once again that this high-speed – economic integration – train has already left the station…

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2022 05 31 19 39

The first Eurasian Economic Forum, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, took place this week at a very sensitive geopolitical juncture, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov keeps stressing that, “the West has declared total war against us, against the entire Russian world. Nobody even hides this now.”

It’s always important to remember that before Maidan in 2014, Ukraine had the option to become a full member of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and even balance it with a loose association with the EU.

The EAEU comprises five full members – Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia – yet 14 nations sent delegations to the forum, including China, Vietnam and Latin American nations.

There was much rumbling that the proceedings would be jeopardized by the serial sanctions packages imposed on Russia by the collective West.

There’s no question that some EAEU members – such as Kazakhstan – seem to be more worried about the effects of the sanctions than about fine-tuning business with Russia.

Yet that’s not the point.

The crucial point is that by 2025 they have to harmonize their legislation concerning financial markets. And that’s directly connected to what the executive body of the EAEU, led by Sergey Glazyev, is working on, extensively: designing the lineaments of an alternative financial/economic system  to what the West would rather coin as Bretton Woods 3.

The Eurasian Economic Forum was established by the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council explicitly to further deepen economic cooperation between EAEU members.

No wonder the official theme of the forum was Eurasian Economic Integration in the Era of Global Shifts: New Investment Opportunities, focusing on strategic development in the industrial, energy, transport, financial, and digital areas.

So Many Converging Strategies

President Putin’s speech to the plenary session was quite revealing. To really appreciate the scope of what’s implied, it’s important to remember that the Greater Eurasian Partnership concept was presented by Putin in 2016 at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, focused on a “more extensive Eurasian partnership involving the Eurasian Economic Union” and including China, Pakistan, Iran and India.

Putin stressed how the drive for developing ties “within the framework of the Greater Eurasian Partnership” (…) “was not the political situation but global economic trends, because the centre of economic development is gradually – we are aware of this, and our businesspeople are aware of this – is gradually moving, continues to move into the Asia-Pacific Region.”

He added, “in the current international conditions when, unfortunately, traditional trade and economic links and supply chains are being disrupted”, the Greater Eurasian Partnership “is gaining a special meaning.”

Putin established a direct connection not only between the Greater Eurasian Partnership and EAEU members but also “BRICS members such as China and India”, “the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, ASEAN and other organizations.”

And that’s the core of the whole, ongoing, multi-layered process of Eurasia integration, with the China-led New Silk Roads intersecting with the Eurasia Economic Union, the SCO, BRICS+, and other converging strategies.

Lavrov this week said that Argentina and Saudi Arabia want to join BRICS, whose next summer in China is being meticulously prepared.

Not only that: Lavrov mentioned how quite a few Arab nations want to join the SCO. He was careful to describe this process of converging alliances as “not antagonistic”.

Putin for his part was careful to define the Greater Eurasian Partnership as “a big civilizational project. The main idea is to create a common space for equitable cooperation for regional organizations”, changing “the political and economic architecture on the entire continent.”

Thus, the necessity to “draft a comprehensive strategy for developing large-scale Eurasian partnership”, including “a roadmap for industrialization”. That translates in practice as developing “engineering centers and research centers. This is inevitable for any country that wants to increase its economic, financial, and ultimately political sovereignty. It is inevitable.”

Yaroslav Lissovolik  at the Valdai Club is one of the top analysts tracking how this convergence may profit the whole Global South. He stresses that among the “variability and diversity in the platforms that may be launched by Global South economies, the most sizeable and comprehensive of which could include the aggregation of CELAC (Latin America), African Union (Africa)”, and the SCO in Eurasia.

And an even more diverse set of “regional blocs that targets deeper integration could feature a BRICS+ platform that comprises the South African Development Community (SADC), MERCOSUR, BIMSTEC”, the China-ASEAN free trade agreement, and the EAEU.

The Eurasian Economic Forum has shown once again that this high-speed – economic integration – train has already left the station. It’s quite enlightening to notice the sharp contrast with the endless doom and gloom afflicting a collective West prone to inflation, energy shortages, food shortages, fictional “narratives” and the defense of neo-Nazis under the banner of liberal “democracy”.

Stunning Photographs Of The Old Cincinnati Library Before Being Demolished, 1874-1955

Built in 1874 on the site reserved for an opera house, the Old Cincinnati Library was a thing of wonder. With five levels of cast iron shelving, a fabulous foyer, checker board marble floors and an atrium lit by a skylight ceiling, the place was breathtaking. Unfortunately that magnificent maze of books is now lost forever.

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One of the large cast-iron book alcoves that lined the Main Hall.

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The Old Main in an early picture.

Patrons entered on Vine Street beneath busts of William Shakespeare, John Milton and Benjamin Franklin. A vestibule led to the cathedral-like main hall, four stories tall, topped with a massive skylight roof. The floor was checkerboard marble tile. Five levels of bookshelves jammed the walls. Shafts of sunlight cut through the windows to provide ample illumination. “The main hall is a splendid work”, The Enquirer reported at the opening. “The hollow square within the columns is lighted by an arched clear roof of prismatic glass set in iron, the light of which is broken and softened by a paneled ceiling of richly-colored glass. One is impressed not only with the magnitude and beauty of the interior, but with its adaptation to the purpose it is to serve”.

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A glimpse of the Main Hall can be seen through vestibule.

The cost of the lot and building was $383,594.53, about $7.7 million today. The Public Library contained 60,000 volumes, with an estimated capacity of 300,000. So why this building demolished? Talks for a new library building had already begun 30 years earlier when the book collection had started to outgrow the building. Books were stacked beyond reach. Ventilation was poor, the air stuffy. The paint was peeling.

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The Newspaper Room (photo circa 1899).

In January of 1955, a new contemporary library opened at 800 Vine Street. The old building was sold to Leyman Corp for about $100,000 today, and by June that year, the magnificent library was razed. The site is now a parking garage. The three heads that once guarded the main entrance of the library were the only original features of the building that were saved and placed in the new library’s garden.

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People reading books.

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Another view of the hall.

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Children inside the Old Main.

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Looking down at the reading area in the Main Hall.

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Over the years the library wasn’t able to accommodate all the readers.

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The library’s main entrance.

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The welcoming booth.

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This photo of the Main Hall was taken about a year before the building was closed.

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Readers.

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Completed in 1874, originally intended to be an opera house before the project went bankrupt, the modestly-sized building did not do justice to to the magnitude and beauty of the interior designed by architect J.W. McLaughlin.

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The Main Hall featured five tiers of cast-iron alcoves that housed over 200,000 books.

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The beautiful main hall.

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Young readers.

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Young readers.

 

The Rocks Of War

The Z-man


Wars often turn over rocks exposing truths about the age that have either been ignored or hidden from the world. Old tactics, in the case of the Great War, were exposed as obsolete by modern weapons. Sometimes it is in war that the hollowness of a great power is exposed. This was the case of the Soviets in Afghanistan. That war exposed the internal weakness of the regime. The war in Ukraine is similarly exposing problems in the collective West.

The first lesson of this war so far is that Western intelligence has been exposed as useless in understanding modern Russia. At every turn, the information provided to political leaders about what Russia is doing and planning to do has turned out to be more fantasy than reality. The West has been operating on assumptions that may have been true twenty-five years ago but are no longer true today. The result has been a total political failure in response to the invasion.

The big example of this was the claim that the Russians could only support their army in Ukraine for a couple of months. Western strategy was built on the assumption that the Ukrainians just had to hold out for a month or two. They would dig into fortified positions and wait out the Russian assault. Instead, a highly mobile and patient Russian assault is slowly decimating the Ukrainian army. Three months into the conflict and the Russians are on the cusp of victory.

This is another rock turned over in this war. The West has been preparing for a war with a Russian army than has not existed since the Cold War. The Soviet way of war was something called deep battle doctrine. This is based on a highly mobile, combined arms approach to fighting. The Russians would find a weak spot in the enemy front, concentrate forces there, break through the lines and then flood the zone with armor and infantry, creating chaos in the enemy rear.

The Soviet approach required large numbers of men. It imagined millions of men mobilized to fight in the West. This is not the new Russian way of war. The Russians, like everyone else in the West, have been living in the age of low fertility and rising standards of living. Mobilizing millions of men and throwing them into battle like Stalin did against the Nazis is no longer acceptable. Instead, the Russians have organized around reducing casualties to the minimum.

As a practical matter, what those hunkered down Ukrainians have been facing is something like what the Mongols brought to the fight. Instead of one massive army centrally controlled from the rear, it is a collection of small units, self contained and self-directed toward narrow goals. These units combine infantry, armor, mobile artillery and air support, along with the use of drones. This is combined arms warfare reduced to small units working independently.

Because these units are smaller, they are more intolerant of personnel losses, so they are more cautious. A unit that loses its tanks is no longer effective as a unit, so the premium is on reducing losses. The goal is to use speed and mobility to find weak spots in the enemy and quickly exploit them, with minimum losses. Overall, this is a much slower approach to fighting, but once a weakness is exposed, it can be exploited much faster due to the improved mobility and flexibility.

This is on display in the Donbas. The Russians used artillery and airpower to break down the Ukrainian defenses at Popasnaya, which is a strategic town in the middle of the contact line. The Russians were then able to rush units into this breech and employ the modern version of deep battle doctrine. These small units combined to turn the contact line into a series of pockets surrounded by Russian units. Now the Russians are pounding these cauldrons with artillery and air power.

The result is the West, primarily Washington, prepared the Ukrainians to fight the wrong war against the wrong army. Instead of a short defense against a Soviet siege, they are getting a war of attrition against a highly mobile and flexible army using the right weapons for such a fight. That is another aspect of this war that should be a wake up call to Western planners. The Russian weapons are better and more useful than the Western weapons supplied to the Ukrainians.

In line with the new way of fighting, the Russians have developed weapons that can be incredibly useful with small, combined arms units. They do not require a complex information grid so that commanders in the rear can direct the action. Modern technology is used to make it easy for these small units to fight effectively on their own or quickly combine with other units on the fly. The Russians have also done their homework and have evolved effective counter measures.

This is why the many “game changers” the West has sent to the Ukrainians have failed to do much damage to the Russian forces. The javelin has been a bust. The Man-portable air defense systems (ManPads) are worthless. The Russians have made these weapons obsolete. The big shock is their drone defense. The kamikaze drones and the Turkish TB2 have not been the game changer that was promised because the Russians have evolved effective jamming tools.

Probably the biggest rocks turned over in this war are economic. The assumption of the West when they instigated this war was that the Russian economy had not changed since the end of the Cold War. For a long time, the West has looked at Russia as a gas station masquerading as a country. It was a version of Venezuela, wholly dependent on selling natural resources to the West. If the sale of those resources slowed just a bit, then the Russian economy would collapse.

This has turned out to be wildly wrong. Now, part of this failure is due to the raging bigotry of the neocons behind the war. Their seething hatred for the Russian people has blinded them to many things. The economic revolution that has taken place in Russia is the biggest one. It turns out that the Russian economy is much more resilient and flexible than anyone in the West realized. As a result, the sanctions regime has turned out to be a disastrous failure.

That has turned over another economic rock. The European economy has been revealed to be a house of cards. The sanctions regime is creating havoc for the Europeans, because their economy was based on the assumption that the Russians would always supply them with cheap necessities. The EU is a mommy economy where Mother Russia makes sure her babies are warm and fed. Shortages and spirally prices are bringing this reality home to Europeans.

In total, what the war in Ukraine is revealing is that the collective West has been living in a fantasy world for the last few decades. Without a real challenge, they have been allowed to indulge in whatever fantasies they liked. Like trust fund babies raised in insular opulence, Western leaders are unprepared for a world where they have to perform their role as elites. The war is exposing them as a toxic blend of self-indulgence, stupidity and ignorance.

The truth about war is that the rocks that it turns over cannot be turned back over to hide the truth underneath. The West will now have to face this new reality, especially on the economic front. The grand schemes for creating a new world order in the image of Western elites will now have to give way to this new realty. What has been revealed is that the new world order is one in which the West must compete in a multipolar world of civilizational equals. That means a new elite for this new age.

Some posters from China …

Some great posters and fantastic art.

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“Go to the Big Ocean To Exercise.” c. 1970.

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“Let Mao’s Philosophy Be Our Strongest Weapon.” c. 1970.

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“The Cadre Should Mix With the Workers.” c. 1970.

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“Be Prepared Now.” c. 1970.

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“Be on Guard, 100 Times Alert.” c. 1970.

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“Celebrate the 9th Congress of the Industrial Union.” c. 1960.

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“Learning Dai Qi by Making More Contributions!” c. 1970.

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“Annihilate the Invading Enemy.” c. 1970.

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“Grasp Revolution, Promote Production.” 1976.

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“Enhance the Coastal Defense of the Motherland.” 1962.

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“Shipyard Industry Workers Learn From Da Qing.” 1976.

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“Pay Attention to Hygiene.” c. 1970.

Three Dog Night – One (1969)

History lesson. MM was in seventh grade. This is called a “Time Machine”. Enjoy…

Washington Floods Taiwan With Weapons

The United States treads on Beijing’s red line and continues its military supply policy in Taiwan. This is the third supply in three years. Exactly fifty years have passed since US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China. That meeting between Nixon and Mao Dse Dong paved the way for stable diplomatic relations. Since then, one of the crucial issues has been the status of Taiwan.

The administration led by Joe Biden, however, pretends to forget the past and aims to create tension between the two sides of China. It is yet another demonstration that Washington uses diplomatic agreements only when it is clearly convenient.

Thus, the Beijing government is on alert. In recent weeks, a delegation of former US officials led by Admiral Michael Glenn Mullen has arrived in Taipei. A clear sign of support for Taiwan that Beijing has described as “useless”. Now, China is contesting the US State Department’s decision to authorize the supply of military equipment to Taiwan for $ 95 million.

For Beijing, arms sales to Taipei “seriously undermine the nation’s sovereignty, interests and development”. Beijing’s position was illustrated by Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, according to which US assistance in Taiwan will end up damaging the bilateral China-US relationship and jeopardizing stability in the Strait. The spokesman thus urged Washington to cease trade with the island and to honor the commitments set out in the three joint China-US communiques.

What joint press releases is Zhao talking about? The reference is to the diplomatic correspondence that dates back to the time of Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. In those joint communiques, which cover the period from 1972 to the early 1980s, the issue of the island’s sovereignty was first of all addressed of Taiwan.

In the Shanghai communiqué, issued at the end of Nixon’s visit, Beijing called the Taiwan question “crucial” to normalize relations with the United States. For China, Taiwan is “a province” and its “liberation” is an internal issue of China on which no interference is allowed.

In the same document, the United States recognized, however, that “all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait believe that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China and reaffirms its interest in a” peaceful resolution. ”

“The ultimate goal,” reads the February 1972 communiqué, is the withdrawal of all US forces and military installations from the island. The second joint statement dates back to 15 December 1978, the US “recognizes the government of the People’s Republic of China as the only legal government of China”. In this context, however, “the people of the United States will maintain commercial, cultural and other unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan”.

The issue of arms sales to Taiwan is the main theme of thethird joint communiqué between China and the United States, that of August 17,1982, which starts from the failure to resolve the issue of arms sales to Taiwan, due to “different positions “of Beijing and Washington.

This is the diplomatic context from which one should start.

Meanwhile, the United States continues its campaign to strengthen Taiwan’s military. With the decision of the US State Department to sell weapons to Taiwan, the line of the Taiwan relations act, with which Washington ensures that military items and services are made available to Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capacity, are continued.

The new military aid package would include training, planning, deployment and maintenance services for the Island’s Patriot air defense systems, the Pentagon has notified Congress.

“This proposed sale serves the national, economic and security interests of the United States by supporting the beneficiary’s efforts to modernize its military and maintain credible defensive capability,” the Pentagon statement said referring to Taiwan.

The United States, under the Taiwan relations act, feels bound by law to provide defense assistance to Taiwan, despite the absence of formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Taipei. This is the third military aid package announced by President Joe Biden’s administration to benefit the Island.

Putting The Shanghai Lockdown Into Context: China Sees This As A Bioweapon

Written by Matthew Ehret

Over the course of the past 10 days, I have noticed that many smart folks are freaking out over the events in Shanghai.

I’m not sure why people have forgotten that the Chinese government has been in Defcon-2 since the start of the pandemic over two years ago treating this like a US bio terror attack targetting Han chinese who have been struck disproportionately by this thing from the get go for which there is ample evidence which will be treated in the following report and interview with Jesse Zurawell on TNT Radio:

The Launch of the Pandemic

Ever since the earliest days of the Coronavirus pandemic, evidence emerged that the pathogen being used to justify a complete shut down of the world economy in preparation for a supposed Great Reset was not a naturally occurring evolutionary phenomenon as asserted by the WHO, Nature Magazine, and editors at the Lancet, but had other origins.

Among the earliest of those who found themselves supporting this theory was the Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lijian Zhao who made international waves by sharing two articles by Professor Larry Romanov on the possibility of “gene targeting” of the virus which was having a disproportionately bad effect on Iranians, Italians and various Asian genotypes.

Larry Romanoff’s work on this particular topic are of extremely high value, the most recent of which develops a conclusive study of the genetic targetting operations underlying the global Pentagon-run bioweapons complex that have had a disproportionately devastating effect on Han Chinese.

His most recent piece on this topic is found on the Canadian Patriot Review:

COVID-19 – A Biological Weapon Targeting Ethnicity and Body Systems

Zhao was soon joined by bioweapons experts like Francis Boyle, prominent virologists Luc Montagnier and Judy Mikovits, followed by a growing array of scholars, scientists and academics from around the world who all assessed that the virus’ apparent gene sequencing implied human handiwork. While all agreed that COVID appeared to have originated from a lab, it was still unclear whether that lab was Chinese or controlled by the USA.

Another obvious question arose with this lab theory: Was it an accidental leak or was it consciously deployed?

Since pandemic war game operations had become a normalized part of western geopolitical life from the early days of Dark Winter in 2000 to the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2011 Lock Step to the World Economic Forum’s Event 201 (and dozens more in between), the likelihood of conscious deployment was a very serious possibility.

Who had the motive, means and modus operandi to carry out such a global operation?

The Wuhan Theory Begins

By February 2020, the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis began to make headlines fed by evidence that Dr. Anthony Fauci had exported certain gain of function coronavirus experiments from US bioweapons laboratories to Wuhan’s Institute of Virology- one of two BSL-4 labs in China equipped to conduct this sort of research.

When Sir Richard Dearlove (former head of MI6) became a loud proponent of the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis in June 2020, something seemed amiss.

Dearlove certainly knew a thing or two about bioweapons. He knew very well of the Pentagon’s vast array of internationally extended bioweapons labs peppered across the world, and he certainly understood the art of misdirection being himself a byzantine shadow creature who operated at the highest echelons of British intelligence.

Dearlove was after all in charge of the “yellowcake” dodgy dossier that launched an Iraq war, he knew of the fallacious reports of nerve gases used by the governments of Libya and Syria sponsored by MI6, had even overseen major components of Russiagate that drove a color revolutionary process in the USA. Dearlove also knew a thing or two about the Porton Down labs that manufactured Novichok used in the Skripal Affair.

While Dearlove’s cheerleading of the Wuhan lab theory raised alarm bells, as time passed, no smoking gun evidence of an alternative lab-leak hypothesis surfaced that one could fully “take to court”. In this respect, Dearlove’s operation had the upper hand since receipts from Fauci’s NIH to the Wuhan Lab did conveniently make headlines, and acted as a “smoking gun” in the minds of many.

Before going into the next phase of the story, it is important to recall that the absence of empirical evidence is not by itself a proof of one party’s innocence, just as the existence of a piece of empirical evidence is not a proof of another party’s guilt.

Wuhan Lab Origins Go Viral Again

In recent weeks, the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis has once again become all the rage.

Rand Paul’s May 10 showdown with Fauci over this the latter’s funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology added fuel to the fire. Sky News’ May 7 reporting of public Chinese policy papers discussing covid-based bioweapons have gone viral.

On March 26, former Center of Disease Control head Robert Redfield asserted his support for the Wuhan lab leak theory. While the scanned receipts of the funds transfer from Fauci’s NIH to research in China via Eco Health Alliance ($600 thousand went to Wuhan) for coronavirus research, had been available since last February, one must wonder why it is now over a year later that this fact is being spread across the perception landscape on all levels.

Both mainstream and alternative media across the western world representing both the left and right have jumped on board the bandwagon blaming China for leaking the virus whether by accident or intent (though obviously, intent is the conclusion which anyone is expected to draw once the Wuhan lab leak theory is accepted).

But again, I must ask: In a world of misdirection, psychological warfare and perception management, do the clues that we are being given force us to conclude that the Chinese government is behind the global pandemic or is another culprit likely to be found?

Chinese Leaders Blame the CIA

Zeng Guang, a chief epidemiologist at China’s Center of Disease Control recently joined the conspiracy club on February 9, 2021 in an interview with Chinese media. While denying that the Chinese Wuhan lab is the source of the virus as so many in the west have claimed, Guang asserted that SarsCov2’s origins in a laboratory should not be discounted. Pointing to the vast globally extended US bioweapons labs littering the earth (and citing the USA’s proven track record of deploying bioweapons as part of its asymmetrical war arsenal since WWII), Guang asked:

“Why are there so many laboratories in the United States when biology labs are all over the world? What is the purpose? 

On many things, the United States requires others to be open and transparent, only to find that it is the United States itself that is often the most opaque. 

Whether or not the United States has any special fame on the issue of the new corona virus this time, it should have the courage to be open and transparent. 

The United States should take responsibility for proving itself to the world, rather than being caught up in hegemonic thinking, hiding itself from the virus and dumping others.”

Guang was himself joined by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying who had also pointed to the Pentagon’s globally extended array of bioweapons laboratories saying:

“I’d like to stress that if the United States truly respects facts, it should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues like its 200-plus overseas bio-labs, invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States, and respond to the concerns from the international community with real actions.”

Those who tend to avoid looking at the history and scope of Pentagon controlled bioweapon warfare tend to ignore the content of such remarks cited by those Chinese officials above for a multitude of reasons. For one: it is easy to believe that Fauci and Gates are corrupt, and this theory not only implicates both men but also ties them to a Chinese government which most westerners have been brainwashed to fear as a bastion of global debt-trappery, genocide, and communist imperialism out to destroy western values.

After conducting a short review of some of the fundamental facts of recent world history alongside certain geopolitical realities of our present world order referenced by the head of the Chinese CDC, I believe that China’s Wuhan Lab is being set up. Here are five facts to support my case…

Fact #1) Depopulation Then and Now

While many people may wish to avoid looking at this fact, depopulation is a driving factor behind international unipolar policy today as it had been during the days of WW2 when Rockefeller Foundation, Macy Foundation, City of London and Wall Street interests gave their backing to both the rise of fascism as an economic miracle solution for the economic woes of the great depression and eugenics (the science of population control) as the governing religion of a new scientific priesthood.

Today, this agenda masquerades behind a new transhumanist movement, shaped by words like “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, “decarbonized economies”, and “Great Resets”. The primary targets of this agenda remain: 1) the Institution of the sovereign nation states, and 2) the “overpopulated zones” of the world with a focus on China, India, South America and Africa.

For anyone who would find themselves instinctively inclined to brush aside such claims as “conspiracy theorizing”, I would encourage a brief review of Sir Henry Kissinger’s infamous NSSM-200 report: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests published in 1974. This declassified report went far to transform US foreign policy from a pro-development philosophy to a new paradigm of population control. In his report, Kissinger warned that…

“if future numbers are to be kept within reasonable bounds, it is urgent that measures to reduce fertility be started and made effective in the 1970s and 1980s….

(Financial) assistance will be given to other countries, considering such factors as population growth… 

Food and agricultural assistance is vital for any population sensitive development strategy… 

Allocation of scarce resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control… 

There is an alternative view that mandatory programs may be needed….”

In Kissinger’s twisted logic, US Foreign Policy doctrine had too often foolishly sought to end hunger by providing the means of industrial and scientific development to poor nations.

A true Malthusian through and through, Kissinger believed that aiding the poor to stand on their own feet would result in global disequilibrium as the new middle classes would consume more, and use the strategic resources found under their own soil, which would set the world system accelerated entropy.

This was deemed unacceptable to the mind of Kissinger and any misanthropic follower of Malthus who shared his views of humanity and government.

Kissinger’s Master-Slave Global Society

At the time of Kissinger’s ascent to power as Secretary of State under Nixon, a new grand strategy was unleashed designed to create a new “master-slave” dependency between the developed and undeveloped sectors of the world… with a special emphasis on the 13 nations targeted by NSSM 200 plus China.

China itself was only permitted to acquire western tech needed to start climbing out of abject poverty on the condition that they obeyed the Rockefeller-World Bank demands that one child policy programs were imposed to curb population growth.

Kissinger began organizing for this new set of relations in society around “Have”, post-industrial consumers and a massive “Have-Not” class of poor laborers with access to industry, but remaining stagnant, cheap and without the means of purchasing the goods they produced. The other darker skinned parts of the world would be even more worse off, having neither the means of production, nor consumption while remaining in constant states of famine, war and backwardness. These dark age zones would be largely made up of Sub Saharan Africa and would find their resource-rich lands exploited by the corporate middle men and financiers trying to run the world order above the “obsolete order” of nation states.

Kissinger’s model of a world order was absolutely static with no room for population growth or technological progress. Mao and the Gang of Four which ran the cultural revolution appeared to be highly compatible with Kissinger’s agenda. But when Mao died and the Gang of Four were rightfully imprisoned, a new long-term strategy known as the Four Modernizations shaped by Zhou Enlai and carried out by Deng Xiaoping was launched. This program was far more foresighted than Kissinger realized.

Fact #2) China is currently a leading force of pro-population growth.

While the west has been accelerating into a decaying path on every measurable level, China is quickly moving in an opposing trajectory via extending long term investments and advanced tech development into its own society as well as to its neighbors through such comprehensive projects as the Belt and Road Initiative.

While its own population has not healed from the disastrous 1979 one child policy and is far from achieving the 2.1 children per couple needed for replacement fertility, it did lift the one child limit to two in 2015 and three in 2021. Today leading Bank of China economists have called for a total elimination of all limits in the near term future. Meanwhile, the top-down national orientation of China towards increasing the free energy needed to support and grow the economy is unlike anything we have seen in the closed-system western world for many decades.

A vital fact often forgotten is that together China and India were instrumental in sabotaging the December 2009 COP-14 program in Copenhagen which had promised to establish legally binding emission target cuts to guide the de-carbonization (and de-industrialization) of much of society.

The London Guardian had reported in 2009 that

“Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. 

The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.”

Apparently China and India, along with African governments like Sudan (which had not yet been carved up on the careful watch of Rhodes Scholar Susan Rice) did not wish to sacrifice their industry and national sovereignty on the altar of climate change models and technocrats that had only weeks earlier been publicly exposed as frauds by East Anglia University researchers during the embarrassing Climategate scandal.

While China and India should be celebrated for having sabotaged this effort 11 years ago, very few people have been able to hold this drama in their memory, and fewer still realize how this fight over sovereignty was in any way connected to China’s 2013 creation of the Belt and Road Initiative as the vital force behind the emerging Multipolar Alliance.

Fact #3) Soros at Davos 2020: The two greatest threats to Open Society: 1) Donald Trump’s USA and 2) Xi Jinping’s China.

During his January 2020 Davos speech, Soros took aim at both Trump and Xi Jinping as the two greatest threats to his Open Society who had to be stopped at all costs. In September 2019 (just as Event 201 was happening) Soros wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

“As founder of the Open Society Foundations, my interest in defeating Xi Jinping’s China goes beyond U.S. national interests. 

As I explained in a speech in Davos earlier this year, I believe that the social-credit system Beijing is building, if allowed to expand, could sound the death knell of open societies not only in China but also around the globe.”

Before becoming mired into the “China virus” narrative, Donald Trump had worked exceptionally hard to emphasize good relations with China and even managed one of the most important trade deals that had successfully moved into phase one the week Soros spoke at Davos.

This first phase involved China creating a market to purchase US finished goods as part of the program to rebuild America’s lost manufacturing sector that had been hollowed out over 5 decades of “post industrialism”.

Where Kissinger called NAFTA “the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War” Trump went far to renegotiate the anti-nation state treaty giving nation states a role to play in shaping economic policy for the first time in over 25 years.

It is important to also recall that Trump resisted the war hawks pushing a total military encirclement of China begun under Obama’s Asia Pivot which is today threating nuclear war.

He took the fuel out of the THAAD missile encirclement of China which has justified its expansion based on the “North Korean threat” for over a decade- always denying the truth that the real targets were both Russia and China.

Trump’s push to build friendly relations with Kim Jong Un had much greater ramifications in changing US Pacific military policy than many realized, although that fact was certainly not missed by the Chinese intelligentsia.

While the Soros/CIA-driven color revolutionary operations have so far failed to divide up China in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang, they have been successful in the USA.

Fact #4) The Pentagon’s Global Bioweapons Complex Is a Fact

While China is the proud owner of a total of TWO BSL-4 labs (both within its own borders), a vast array of dozens of Pentagon-run bioweapons labs litter the international landscape. Exactly how many is hard to estimate as Alexei Mukhin (Director General of Russia’s Center for Political Information) stated in a May 2020 interview:

“According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, in the post-Soviet space, 65 American secret bio-laboratories operate: 

15 – in Ukraine, 
12 – in Armenia, 
15 – in Georgia, 
4 – in Kazakhstan. 

In the United States, such activity is prohibited . 

Accordingly, the Pentagon, in its own laws, is engaged in illegal activities (in spirit, not in letter). The goal is the creation of biological weapons directed against the peoples who inhabited the territory of the USSR.”

In 2018, investigative journalist Dilya Gaytandzhieva documented the Pentagon’s multibillion dollar budget that sustains bioweapons labs in 25 nations (and 11 within the USA itself) which grew exponentially since the December 2001 bioweaponized anthrax attack killed five Americans and justified a hyperbolic increase of bioweapon warfare to rise from $5 billion when Cheney’s Bioshield Act was passed in 2004 to over $50 billion today.

Additionally, an October 2000 policy document co-authored by William Kristol, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Donald Rumsfeld titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses (RAD) explicitly stated that in the new American Century, “combat will likely take place in new dimensions: In space, cyber-space and perhaps the world of microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”.

Fact #5) International Pandemic War Game Scenarios Laid the groundwork for the international response to Covid. Not China

The driving force behind such bioweapon war game exercises such as the June 2000 Operation Dark Winter, the May 2010 Rockefeller Foundation report Operation Lock step, and the World Economic Forum/Gates Foundation/CIA Event 201 pandemic exercises indicate that China is not the causal nexus.

All in all, these facts have persuaded me that China is being set up and is in fact a primary target for destruction.

How China would find itself the beneficiary of such an irresponsible unleashing of a novel virus that hammered its own economy, accelerated the blow out of the world financial bubble economy and annihilated the foundations of international stability is absurd to the extreme… especially considering the fact that everything China has done for the past decades has indicated a consistent desire to create stability, long term development and win-win cooperation with the international community.

Nothing similar has been seen among members of the Five Eyes or their Trans Atlantic network of over bloated imperialists.

The oligarchy running the Trans Atlantic System certainly loves the centralized control found in the Chinese system, and they adore the behaviorist social credit stuff, but that is where their admiration ends. The Kissinger, Gates, Carney or Schwab-types hate and fear everything China has actually done for development, ending poverty, population growth, national banking, long term credit generation, building full spectrum industrial economies and defending sovereignty along with Russia whom they are tightly bonded with in the Eurasian Multipolar alliance.

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk, and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and in 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation .

More pictures from the past…

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The Best Thai Coconut Soup

Authentic, bold, and delicious Thai flavors make this soup irresistible! This is the best Thai coconut soup I’ve had. You won’t be disappointed with this one! Serve over steamed rice.

OIP.WzP8BUF BeZ1XBohiIIarQHaJQ
OIP.WzP8BUF BeZ1XBohiIIarQHaJQ

Ingredients

Original recipe yields 8 servings
Ingredient Checklist

Directions

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat. Cook and stir the ginger, lemongrass, and curry paste in the heated oil for 1 minute. Slowly pour the chicken broth over the mixture, stirring continually. Stir in the fish sauce and brown sugar; simmer for 15 minutes. Stir in the coconut milk and mushrooms; cook and stir until the mushrooms are soft, about 5 minutes. Add the shrimp; cook until no longer translucent about 5 minutes. Stir in the lime juice; season with salt; garnish with cilantro.

Locations Of US Carrier Strike Groups – May 31, 2022

This is the newest update of the ‘U.S. Carrier Strike Groups Locations Map’ exclusive series showing the approximate locations of U.S. Carrier Strike Groups. SouthFront: Analysis & Intelligence tracks locations of U.S. aircraft carriers using the available open-source information. No classified information was used in production of the map.

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2022 06 01 20 06

2022 06 01 20 0v7
2022 06 01 20 0v7

The Prisoner S01E13 Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling

We continue with the series. I hope that you enjoy it.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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The United States has made one mistake too many, and the end is approaching close.

There’s a big bunch of disturbing things going on geopolitically. All of which revolves around the United States. They have openly announced complete formal war with China and Russia simultaneously to be conducted via proxy. This simply cannot end well.

I am under the impression that the “leadership” are all delusional fools who somehow believe that they will not be personally affected by the wrath and rage that they will unleash.

Chechen leader, staunch Putin ally, threatens Poland over support for Ukraine

These Chechen fighters in Ukraine (fighting as part of the Russian forces) are pissed off that Poland has decided to fight alongside the Ukraine Nazi's. Here is their warning. If you read the "news article" you wouldn't be aware of this backstory. -MM

LONDON — Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a staunch ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, threatened to attack Poland over its support for Ukraine.

Speaking in a video that was posted to social media on Wednesday, the warlord warned that Poland had “better take back” the weapons it supplied to its neighbor.

“The issue of Ukraine is closed,” said Kadyrov, via a translation from a BBC reporter. “I’m interested in Poland. Poland, what is it trying to achieve?”

He added: “After Ukraine, if we’re given the command, in six seconds we’ll show you what we’re capable of. You should better take back your weapons and your mercenaries and beg official forgiveness for what you did to our ambassador.”

Article HERE

Philippines president-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr says Manila and Beijing to expand relationship

From HERE

Philippines president-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr says his country’s ties with China will expand and “shift to a higher gear” when he takes power, signalling an intent to advance outgoing leader Rodrigo Duterte’s pro-Beijing agenda.

Key points:

  • Mr Marcos said China and the Philippines should expand their relationship in the realms of diplomacy, trade, culture, education, knowledge and health
  • He said the two countries’ current conflicts should not be allowed to “become historically important”
  • The Chinese embassy in Manila said the phone conversation focused on bilateral ties and regional development

Mr Marcos, who won last week’s election by a landslide, said he held “very substantial” talks by phone on Wednesday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who assured him of support for his “independent foreign policy”, and agreed to hold more comprehensive discussions.

The 64-year-old son and namesake of the notorious former Philippines dictator said Mr Xi also acknowledged his late father’s role in opening diplomatic relations between the two countries.

“The way forward is to expand our relationship not only diplomatic, not only trade, but also in culture, even in education, even in knowledge, even in health to address whatever minor disagreements that we have right now,” Mr Marcos said in a statement.

“I told him, we must not allow what conflicts or difficulties we have now between our two countries to become historically important.”

Mr Marcos has been in Melbourne this week, reportedly to help his youngest son settle into the University of Melbourne, where he is enrolled to study.

Several members of the Australian Filipino community on Tuesday protested outside the accommodation where Mr Marcos was believed to be staying.

A spokesman said the president-elect would fly back to Manila on Thursday.

What Filipino Australians say about the Marcos revival

This is what the Filipino community in Australia are saying about their future.

The Philippines and China have had a rocky relationship in recent years over Beijing’s vast territorial claims and actions of its coast guard and fishing fleets in the South China Sea, through which at least $4.84 trillion of annual trade passes.

Their phone conversation focused on bilateral ties and regional development, the Chinese embassy in Manila said in a separate statement.

“President Xi said the two countries should also grasp the general trend, write a grand story on the China-Philippines friendship in the new era and follow through the blueprint for bilateral friendly cooperation, so as to usher in an even brighter future for the bilateral ties,” the embassy said.

Mr Marcos won the presidency with nearly 59 per cent of the votes last week. He will take office late in June.

Many analysts expect Marcos to seek stronger ties with Beijing, but say maintaining close relations with defence ally Washington will be essential in keeping the military and the public onside in a country with historically strong links to the United States.

China was among the first to congratulate Marcos, who was the first to win a presidential election by an outright majority since a 1986 revolution that toppled his late father’s two-decade dictatorship.

Kurt Campbell, the White House coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, last week said the US would seek early engagement with the Marcos administration but said there were “historical considerations” that could pose challenges.

Mr Marcos said Mr Xi had expressed a desire to talk privately.

“We are both looking forward to having further dialogue,” Mr Marcos said.

“He said both of us should talk, without the others.”

REPORTS: Russia to Cut-Off Denmark from Natural Gas on Tuesday

Intel circuits are blazing as of 10:24 PM EDT Monday night, with reports that Russia has told Denmark all natural gas to that country will be CUT-OFF tomorrow (Tuesday, 31 May 2022) because Copenhagen refuses to pay for Russian gas in Rubles.

Denmark holds 0.57 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of proven gas reserves as of 2017, ranking 66th in the world and accounting for about 0.008% of the world’s total natural gas reserves of 6,923 Tcf.

Denmark has proven reserves equivalent to 5.1 times its annual consumption, but they can’t get it out of the ground fast enough because most of it comes from rigs in the North Sea.  So Denmark must import about 12% of their annual natural gas usage.

Of course, Denmark is saying the Russia cut-off won’t matter much.  Finland said the same thing just before they were cut-off.  Here’s what’s actually taking place now in Finland as a direct result:

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2022 05 31 11 27

Gee, suddenly it doesn’t look like Finland is doing so well. No bread? No gas in commercial bakeries anywhere in the country to bake bread?????

HMMMMM. Seems like the politicians in Finland LIED.

Gee whiz. Ain’t that just too bad . . . .

Pay in Rubles and you can eat bread again!

Gai Pad Prik Gaeng Recipe (วิธีทำ ไก่ผัดพริกแกง)

gai pad prik gaeng recipe
gai pad prik gaeng recipe

If you love the flavor of the curry, but the stir fry cooking method, you’ll love this Thai recipe.

Along with chicken stir fried with holy basil, chicken stir fried in red curry paste, known as gai pad prik gaeng (ไก่ผัดพริกแกง) in Thai, is one of my favorite quick and easy Thai street food dishes.

The best thing about this dish is that it’s available at nearly every single Thai stir fry street food restaurant, and while it’s excellent on the streets, it’s even better when you make it at home using freshly made red curry paste.

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2022 05 30 20 43

This gai pad prik gaeng recipe (ไก่ผัดพริกแกง) is really easy to make, as long as you already have some Thai red curry paste (เครื่องแกงเผ็ด) available.

The Thai red curry paste forms the base of flavor for this gai pad prik gaeng (chicken fried with red curry paste ไก่ผัดพริกแกง).

Ingredients you’ll need:

Note: If you want to get straight to the directions of this recipe, you can scroll below to the recipe box, otherwise keep reading for a more thorough explanation of how to cook this Thai chicken stir fried curry recipe.

Note #2: Making your own red curry paste is the best option, but if you’re not able to, you can try using red curry paste in a jar, my recommendation is for Mae Ploy red curry paste, but you’ll have to alter the salt and other seasonings in the recipe depending on the flavor of the packaged curry paste.

Once you have your Thai red curry paste ready to go, either freshly made, or from a can or bottle (but fresh is of course going to taste better), you’ve just got to fry it up with some chicken and a few other ingredients, and you’re ready to go.

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2022 05 30 20 44

I used about 300 grams of chicken breast, which was 1.5 chicken breasts altogether.

First slice the chicken into small bite sizes pieces – I like to slice it pretty small because more flavor gets coated on each piece of chicken, plus it’s faster to fry.

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2022 05 30 20 45

Along with Thai red curry paste and chicken (ไก่), for this recipe I used Chinese long beans (ถั่วฝักยาว, but I think green beans will also work fine), and kaffir lime leaves.

I used about 3 strands of long beans, cut into 1 inch pieces, and it equaled out to about 1/3 of a cup of them. So if you use green beans, chop up enough for about 1/3 of a cup.

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2022 05 30 2d0 45

Since most of the amazing flavors are already taken care of the in red curry paste, you barely need any other seasoning.

Other than the paste, you’ll just need about 1 teaspoon of fish sauce (น้ำปลา taste it though, it depends on how salty your red curry paste is from the start), and normal Thais would add about 1 teaspoon of sugar, but when I make this recipe for myself I add just a pinch, if any, and that’s all.

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Stir fry

Stir frying food is one of my favorite things to do in the world, it’s such a fast way to cook, and all the flavors remain in the pan and with the ingredients you fry.

For this gai pad prik gaeng recipe (ไก่ผัดพริกแกง), once all your ingredients are ready to go, turn on your stove to low heat.

Add about 1 tablespoon of oil (น้ำมัน) to your wok or pan, keeping it on low heat, and you can add in about 3 tablespoons of Thai red curry paste before the oil heats up too much.

If your pan is too hot the curry paste will burn, so keep it on low heat and just stir fry for about 30 seconds.

After your red curry paste is hot sizzling and fragrant, toss in your chicken, and season with a bit of fish sauce (red curry pastes can taste different and be of different saltiness, so make sure you taste test and see how it is before adding fish sauce), and a pinch of sugar, and fry until the chicken is all the way cooked.

Finally, at the end, toss in your long beans and kaffir lime leaves, stir fry for about 30 more seconds and your marvelous gai pad prik gaeng (ไก่ผัดพริกแกง) is ready.

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2022 05 30 20 47

You can either serve gai pad prik gaeng (ไก่ผัดพริกแกง) directly over a plate of rice, or you can put it all onto a communal plate accompanied by a separate plate of rice.

Either way tastes just as good.

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2022 05 30 20 48

In Thailand when you order a dish like gai pad prik gaeng (ไก่ผัดพริกแกง), or any other stir fry dish, you have the choice to get a fried egg on the side.

This is not a requirement, but a fried egg on top of your rice along with the red curry paste chicken sure tastes incredible.

Before we get started making this recipe, be sure to watch the video below for all the cooking instructions and details.

Gai pad prik gaeng recipe (วิธีทำ ไก่ผัดพริกแกง)

(Thai recipe for chicken stir fried with red curry paste)

Time: about 15 – 20 minutes (if you have the red curry paste already prepared)
Recipe size: 1 plate of stir fried chicken, 1 – 2 people
Cooking utensils: wok, stir fry
Flavors: salty and spicy
Eat it with: fresh steamed rice and a fried egg on the side if you’d like

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2022 05 30 20 53

 

To make your dish extra authentic, you can make a small bowl of prik nam pla, or fish sauce and chilies. Just dice up a few Thai chilies, and a clove of garlic, and add a couple tablespoons of fish sauce, and if you like, a squeeze of lime juice.

With each bite, you can scoop on a few pieces of chili and a drizzle of fish sauce – tastes especially wonderful on the egg.

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2022 05 30 20 54

Gai pad prik gaeng (ไก่ผัดพริกแกง) has such a wonderful fresh and pungent flavor. You’ll taste the dry chilies, garlic, shallots, and the lime zest from the kaffir limes leaves, and the kaffir lime peel in the paste.

It’s an extremely flavorful Thai dish.

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2022 05 30 20 55

Conclusion

Gai pad prik gaeng (ไก่ผัดพริกแกง) is a Thai dish that includes chicken stir fried in curry paste with long beans and kaffir lime leaves.

It’s one of my personal go-to Thai dishes in Bangkok, and so I’m excited to share with you this quick and simple recipe that tastes so incredibly delicious.

Eating gai pad prik gaeng (ไก่ผัดพริกแกง) is like having all the curry flavor coated onto pieces of chicken, and it’s absolutely delicious!

Chinese space centre finds jamming device weeks before launch of latest space station mission in first reported incident of its kind

Staff at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in Inner Mongolia found the item in a car ahead of the launch of the Shenzhou 14 mission. It was not clear if there had been a deliberate attempt at sabotage or not.

Article HERE

GDP USA vs. China

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2022 05 31 11 06

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Childhood’s End

America has become a malfunctioning pageant without feasible roles that children can realistically project themselves into….

The phoniest trope in American life goes like this: We must find the cause of X so that it never happens again.

Of course, it will happen again.

We only pretend that the cause is a mystery. Let’s count the ways that school massacres happen.

American schools are fantastically depressing places. They are designed to look like medium security prisons and insecticide factories. They send the message: Enter here and be psychologically brutalized. They are too big, overwhelmingly alienating, ugly, devoid of visible symbolism signaling the value of being human. The interiors of the schools are designed for the convenience of janitors, hard surfaces of tile and linoleum that can be hosed down easily like the quarters of zoo animals. Children act accordingly.

The “facilities,” as we call them, are deployed in the illegible landscape of a demolition derby, separated from all the other activities of daily life, which themselves have reached a culminating state of meaninglessness: big box shopping, national chain franchise food installations, strip malls of empty storefronts, parking lot wastelands, nothing that will excite a child’s imagination with emotions other than bewilderment, anxiety, and aversion.

The “teaching” that supposedly goes on in schools is a broken remnant of preparation for an economy that no longer exists. We’re no longer a society of people who do things, but rather a society of people to whom things are done, many of them harmful, humiliating, and arbitrary. America’s demoralized teaching corps is so unhinged by their own anomie that they resort to imposing sadistic fantasies on the children in their charge.

Thus, all the inappropriate curricula around adult preoccupations with sex, such as the Drag Queen Story Hour, for which mentally ill men are invited to act-out impersonations of women-as-monsters for young people who can’t possibly be expected to make sense of the spectacle. (I suspect that even six-year-olds, hard-wired to function as successful animals in this world, understand it as some kind of affront to reality.) Otherwise, American teachers are out of ideas, and are themselves damaged by the same forces in culture that they are now asked to direct.

America has become a malfunctioning pageant without feasible roles that children can realistically project themselves into. What ten-year-old longs to become the Burger King fry-o-later boss in a brown apron and an asinine cardboard crown? Rather, they are prompted to aspire to become sports star millionaires, of which there are perhaps fewer than 5,000 positions in a land of 340-million. By age twelve, they probably comprehend the unlikelihood of that outcome, or of becoming the next Kardashian… or Spiderman. (Superheroes are supplied by the entertainment cartels to occupy the imaginative realm of children because American culture is bereft of reality-based roles worth aspiring to.)

In this tumult of cultural impoverishment, psychotic grandiosity creeps in. Be big if you can’t be anything else. Hence, one achievable role for young persons in American life is mass murderer. It is a way of becoming important, of having an effect on other people and society in general. Your name may be forgotten, but the act itself will endure in the collective memory of a people. It will be some kind of a mark in history, even better remembered, perhaps, than whoever played third-base for the Atlanta Braves in 1994… or the woman who once capered down the red carpet at the Oscars in a dress fashioned on a slaughtered swan.

The mayhem unleashed in a school shooting is just the rectified essence of the manifold derangements in our national life. Everything is out-of-whack, including our perception of what’s going on and what it means.

There is almost nothing left of childhood in this land, in the way of young, unformed creatures assisted by adults who love them into a future worth being part of.

We have forgotten how to be grateful for coming into this world at all, leaving us unworthy of being here.

The quality of virtue, meaning that some things and some doings are recognizably better than others, was deceitfully replaced by the equity of nothing being allowed to be better than anything else.

Truth and beauty have gone outlaw. Bad faith and wickedness rule, led by a Party of Chaos.

So, really, what do you expect?

And what do you deserve?

Verizon statement on Huawei litigation settlement

After 1.5 year, finally: Verizon statement on Huawei litigation settlement | About Verizon
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Article One HERE
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2019 Huawei asks Verizon to pay more than $1 billion for over 230 patents: Source
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Article Two HERE

The Best Live Perform Ever!!! Jeff Beck – A Day In The Life | HD

I had this album, and traded it for another back while in university. What was I thinking?

Australian Leader Dutton issues grim China warning in first appearance as Liberal leader

Peter Dutton urges Labor Party to stand strong against Beijing as he labels China the ‘biggest issue’ facing Australia. Newly elected Liberal leader Peter Dutton has doubled down on his strong statements towards Beijing and said China’s rise was the “biggest issue” Australia will face in the future.
“The issue of China under President Xi is the biggest issue our country will face in our lifetimes. That's the reality,” he said.

“I will support policies which help to defend our country, decisions made by the new government in relation to rolling out AUKUS … and other policies which will help keep us safe.

“I don't want interference in our electoral outcomes, I don't want there to be threats on university campuses.

“I want us to have a productive relationship with China. I want it to be restored but that is an issue for China.”

During his time as defence minister Mr Dutton came under fire for his strong stance on China and his rhetoric around war in the Pacific.

Last year, Mr Dutton said it would be “inconceivable” that Australia would not send troops in the event of US involvement in a war between China and Taiwan.

He has also said Australians should “prepare for war” during an address on Anzac Day this year, which was lashed by Labor and also Western Australia Premier Mark McGowan.

Meet Elena Deligioz, Probably The Most Beautiful Female Cosplay Soldier In The World

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Meet Elena Deligoiz from Russia. She is not really a soldier but her good looks and uncanny addiction to military equipment will make most men fall in love with her. Her followers believe that she could have been the most beautiful woman in the military had she joined the army. Elena Deligioz was dubbed the ‘world’s most famous soldier’ and she is currently breaking the internet.

Her photographs have gone viral in various social media websites around the world, making her extremely famous. Who knows maybe after this article she gets an offer from the military!

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Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian’s Regular Press Conference on May 30, 2022

From HERE

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Beijing Youth Daily: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement on May 28, saying that the US is concerned about the conditions China imposed on the visit to China by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet and China’s efforts to restrict and manipulate the visit. What is China’s comment?

Zhao Lijian: At the invitation of the Chinese government, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet visited China from May 23 to 28. China believes that this visit has enhanced understanding and cooperation, and clarified misinformation. After meetings and talks, conversations and field trips in Guangzhou and Xinjiang, the High Commissioner had a deeper understanding and recognition of China’s path for human rights development, and had first-hand experience of Xinjiang’s reality with social security and stability, sound and sustained development and people’s well-being.

All lies and rumors related to Xinjiang have fallen apart in front of facts and truth. But as the saying goes, “You cannot wake up someone who is only pretending to be asleep.” Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the facts and truth about Xinjiang, the US rehashed the false claims that had already been debunked countless times in an attempt to smear and attack China. Ridiculously, this time they made up new lies that China has restricted and manipulated the visit. In fact, all the activities and arrangements of High Commissioner Bachelet during her stay in China were decided in accordance with her will and based on full consultation. The High Commissioner also said at the press conference that she had unsupervised and extensive meetings during the visit. Where is restriction and manipulation to speak of? Look no further than the US to find the one trying to manipulate this visit. It is the one and the same US that was most vocal about the High Commissioner’s visit to China at first, imposed various kinds of conditions for the agreed visit, and ultimately attacked and slandered the visit after it was made. This once again proves that the US does not care about human rights conditions whatsoever. What it really wants is to use human rights as a pretext to constantly denigrate China and hold it down. Such hypocrisy and political scheme of the US has long been seen through by the whole world.

By contrast, the human rights conditions in the US are like “the emperor’s new clothes”. The recent mass shooting at a school in Texas is particularly heart-wrenching. The right to life of ordinary people, including children and teenagers, cannot be guaranteed. I’d like to share some figures with you. Since 2001, the US waged wars or conducted military operations in about 80 countries in the name of counterterrorism, which killed more than 800,000 people including about 300,000 civilians. The US set up black sites like the Guantanamo Bay prison across the world, where people are arbitrarily detained without trial for long periods of time and subject to torture and ill treatment. Racism in the US is deeply entrenched and racial minorities like African Americans and Asian Americans have to live with systemic racism. Shutting eyes to grave human rights violations at home, what rights does the US have to act like a patronizing judge and interfere in other countries’ affairs? We ask the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to conduct investigations into and submit reports on US’ human rights problems.

Bloomberg: In relation to the press conference on Saturday evening, what’s the takeaway for China on this? There were some recommendations from the High Commissioner. For example, she talked about how anti-terrorism and deradicalization should not be in conflict with human rights. What’s your comment?

Zhao Lijian: I briefed you on High Commissioner Bachelet’s visit to China just now. She also held a press conference on that. During High Commissioner Bachelet’s visit here, especially in Xinjiang, the authorities of the Autonomous Region has made comprehensive presentation on the measures and results of counter-terrorism and deradicalization. High Commissioner Bachelet toured an exhibition on counter-terrorism and de-radicalization, learning in detail the legal and policy frameworks, practices, and results of counter-terrorism and deradicalization in Xinjiang. Violence and terrorism have inflicted the greatest harm on the human rights of people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, and counter-terrorism and de-radicalization is the greatest protection for the human rights of people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang. I can tell you that there has been no violent terrorist attack in Xinjiang for five consecutive years and the region has enjoyed security, stability, development, and prosperity. This is the best illustration of the effectiveness of Xinjiang’s counter-terrorism and deradicalization efforts. I believe that foreign people from all walks of life who have visited Xinjiang, like the High Commissioner herself, will be able to draw objective and fair conclusions.

I also want to say that China attaches great importance to the UN human rights affairs and stands ready to contribute to advancing the international human rights cause. During the visit, the Chinese side and the OHCHR had thorough exchange on deepening cooperation and reached broad consensus. The two sides have agreed to establish an Annual Senior Strategic Meeting, to discuss national, regional and international human rights issues of common interest. And the two sides have agreed to establish a working group to facilitate human rights cooperation in such areas as development, business, poverty reduction, counter-terrorism, minority groups, digital space, and judicial safeguard. China is willing to provide greater support to the human rights work of the United Nations. Such concrete measures not only are conducive to the cooperation between China and the OHCHR, but also represent China’s new contribution to the international human rights cause.

Shenzhen TV: In his recent speech on the US administration’s approach to China, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that China poses “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order” and that the US “must defend and reform the rules-based international order”.  Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: This speech misrepresents facts with a long list of lies. The attacks on China mirror exactly what the US has been doing. It is no other than the US that poses “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order”. The “rules-based international order” it touts is actually the “US rules-based international order”, a hegemonic order to dominate the world with the house rules of its clique. Last week my colleague already responded to the speech. Today I would like to take this opportunity to further reveal the hypocrisy of the US by debunking some of its lies and fallacies with facts and figures.

To start, the US has zero reverence for the international order underpinned by the UN Charter and international law. Throughout its over two-century-long history, the country has only witnessed 16 years free from war. It is the largest source of disruption threatening the international peace and stability and the greatest destabilizing element in the international order. The US claims that it will defend “concepts like self-determination, sovereignty, the peaceful settlement of disputes” enshrined in the UN Charter. However, it always says one thing and does another. As William Blum pointed out in his book America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, since the end of World War II, the US has attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments and grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries. According to a report by the Brown University, since 2001, the US-waged wars and military operations in the name of counter-terrorism have claimed over 800,000 lives and turned more than 20 million people into refugees in countries including Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria alone.

Second, the US is the top saboteur of the international order, who sticks to US centrism and exceptionalism and wantonly withdraws from treaties and organizations. It refuses to sign or ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, voted against the Global Compact for Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees, and remains the sole party obstructing negotiations for a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention. Since the 1980s, the US has withdrawn from 17 international organizations or treaties, including the UN Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Paris Agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, the Arms Trade Treaty, the INF Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, among others with flip-flops regarding some of them. Such a country now shamelessly disguises itself as a referee of international rules, shining a spotlight on where others come short while turning a blind eye to its outright violations. When American politicians eloquently cite the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to criticize other countries, are they aware of the fact that the US is not even a state party to the Convention?

Third, the US is in no position whatsoever to talk about rules. In the eyes of the US, international rules must be subordinate to and serve its interests. When international rules happen to be consistent with US interests, they are cited as authority. Otherwise they are simply ignored. Here are some questions for the US to answer: when the US flagrantly waged wars on sovereign nations and instigated color revolutions, was it following rules? When the US grossly slapped illegal unilateral sanctions, plunging people in the affected countries into disaster, was it following rules? When the US refuses to pay its long overdue $1 billion assessed contributions to the UN regular budget and $1.4 billion peacekeeping assessments, is it following rules? When the US strengthens AUKUS and Quad, and attempts to build an Indo-Pacific version of NATO to mess up the Asia-Pacific and undermine the international nuclear non-proliferation system, is it following rules? When the US hosted the so-called Summit for Democracy, which divided the world into two camps by inviting half and excluding the other half, was it following rules? When the US refused to implement the WTO ruling that its tariff war against China violates global trade rules, and blocked the appointment of new judges to the WTO’s Appellate Body, was it following rules?

The US places its domestic law above international law and international rules and willfully resorts to illegal unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, Venezuela, Syria and Iran have been grappling with severe difficulties with a struggling economy and strained medical resources due to prolonged US sanctions. Under such circumstances, the US, rather than halting those sanctions, redoubled them, making things even worse for these countries. The international community sees with increasing clarity that the US only complies with the market competition principle and international trade rules it claims to champion when it suits US interests. While talking about a level playing field and free trade, US politicians actually believe in “America first” and wield a big stick of sanctions.

I also want to stress that over the 70-plus years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, we have not initiated any war or taken an inch of land from other countries. We call for resolving disputes through dialogue and negotiation, and has completely resolved all land boundary issues with 12 out of the 14 neighbors. As the second largest economy in the world, China has been contributing to over 30% to the world economic growth, ranking the top for 15 years running. China is now the second largest contributor to UN regular budget and peacekeeping assessments, actively participated in the building and reform of the global governance system, and taken real actions to honor the spirit of the UN Charter and the authority of the UN. It is fair to say that China remains a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development and a guardian of international order. We will always stand in solidarity with all peace-loving and justice-pursing countries under the UN flag, uphold real multilateralism, and continuously contribute confidence, wisdom and strength to universal prosperity of the world and common progress of the humanity.

Al Jazeera: Yesterday, Israeli extremists, protected by police, attacked Palestinians in East Jerusalem and prevented them from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Israeli Prime Minister Bennett said that the whole of Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. China has always supported the two-state solution and East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. May I ask if you condemn the Israeli Prime Minister’s remarks? Now that the Palestinian-Israeli situation is gradually deteriorating. If Israeli atrocities are not stopped in time, a serious humanitarian disaster is inevitable. Is China considering taking substantive action to protect the Palestinians and protect regional peace and stability?

Zhao Lijian: Lately there has been ongoing tension between Palestine and Israel, particularly in Jerusalem. China is deeply concerned over this. Parties concerned should act in accordance with relevant UN resolutions, respect and maintain the historical status quo of the holy sites in Jerusalem, and avoid taking any unilateral and provocative actions that change the historical status quo of the holy sites in Jerusalem. China has stressed many times that the underlying reason for the recurring conflicts between Israel and Palestine is the absence of the implementation of the “two-state solution” and long denial of the Palestinian people’s legitimate appeal of establishing an independent state. The international community should have a greater sense of urgency and work for the early resumption of peace talks between Palestine and Israel on the basis of the two-state solution, so as to achieve the comprehensive, just and lasting resolution of the Palestine question at an early date.

Hubei Media Group: May 29, 2022 was the 20th International Day of UN Peacekeepers. Could you talk about China’s participation in UN peacekeeping missions?

Zhao Lijian: UN peacekeeping missions are important means to advance international peace and security. Over the past seven decades or so, the UN has conducted over 70 missions, rallying more than one million peacekeepers under the UN flag and making outstanding contributions to safeguarding and restoring regional peace and assisting in the resolution of regional conflicts. The Blue Helmets have become a symbol of peace and hope, winning wide acclaim from the international community.

In 1990, China sent military observers to the UN, which marked the beginning of its participation in UN peacekeeping operations (UNPKOs). In 1992, China dispatched its first formed military unit of Blue Helmets to participate in UNPKOs. Over the past three decades, China has sent nearly 50,000 peacekeepers to participate in UNPKOs in more than 20 countries and regions. A total of 16 Chinese peacekeepers have made the ultimate sacrifice serving under the UN flag. China is the second largest contributor to UN peacekeeping assessments and the largest troop contributor to peacekeeping operations among the five permanent members of the Security Council. As we speak, more than 2,200 Chinese officers are working in eight peacekeeping mission areas. Chinese Blue Helmets have become a key force in the UN’s peacekeeping efforts. Chinese peacekeepers adhere to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, act in strict accordance with their mandate, and faithfully fulfill peacekeeping missions, making important contributions to safeguarding world peace and promoting common development.

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic overlapping with a host of threats including regional hotspot issues, ethnic strife and terrorism, the role and significance of UNPKOs have become more prominent. China will continue to work in close cooperation with the international community to increase the efficacy and efficiency of UNPKOs so that they can play a bigger role in safeguarding international peace and security. At the same time, UNPKOs rely on the support of all member states. We hope a certain country will pay its overdue $1.4 billion peacekeeping assessments in full without further delay and avoid hindering the normal operation of UNPKOs for selfish interests.

Associated Press of Pakistan: On May 27, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif visited Karot Hydropower project, being completed under China Pakistan Economic Corridor. Talking to engineers and workers there, he said this project will generate cheap electricity and also promote green development in Pakistan. Do you have any comment on that?

Zhao Lijian: The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a key pilot project under the Belt and Road Initiative and an important platform for all-round practical cooperation between the two countries. It is guided by the concept of green, open and clean development and committed to realizing sustainable, livelihood-oriented and high-standard growth. Since its launch, CPEC has delivered fruitful outcomes in energy cooperation, which helps Pakistan to effectively tackle energy shortage and provides reliable energy supply for its economic and industrial development.

The Karot hydropower plant is a major energy cooperation project under CPEC between China and Pakistan. Once installed and put into operation, it will not only generate steady and affordable energy supply, meet the electricity needs of approximately five million local residents, and further improve Pakistan’s energy structure, but also boost the country’s sustainable development as well as global efforts towards carbon neutrality by reducing an estimated amount of 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, thus contributing to the global response to climate change. We are looking forward to the completion of the hydropower plant and hope that it can be put into use at an early date.

Bloomberg: A question about a joint document between China and the Pacific nations, which according to news reports was not adopted. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: You’ve been closely following the situation. In fact, I just got some relevant information and would like to share with you some information briefly.

The second China-Pacific Island Countries Foreign Ministers’ Meeting was successfully held. The parties had an in-depth discussion about how to deepen cooperation between the two sides in a united and friendly manner, and reached wide new consensus. After the meeting, China will release a position paper on cooperation between China and the Pacific Island countries in response to the expectations of the latter. Please stay tuned to the relevant press release from China.

As for the joint document you mentioned, it involves an ongoing process of discussion. Not every meeting has to issue a joint document. At the foreign Ministers’ meeting this time, all parties reached new consensus on this, making an important step towards reaching the final agreement.  The parties agreed to continue to engage in active and practical discussions in order to build more consensus.

CCTV: The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People’s Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP), held its 21st Summit in Havana, Cuba on May 27, 2022. The Final Declaration adopted by the alliance’s member states denounces the exclusionary and discriminatory treatment by the United States as the host country of the so-called Summit of the Americas against some countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, rejects the imposition of coercive unilateral measures against Venezuela and Nicaragua, and the economic, commercial, and financial blockade against Cuba and calls on the genuine regional integration led by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People’s Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP) represents a useful exploration by countries in Latin America and the Caribbean for promoting regional integration. Since its founding, the organization has been committed to seeking development through solidarity among regional countries and encouraging its member states to follow a path of independent development.

Since its founding, CELAC has been committed to multilateralism and played an important role in upholding multilateralism, safeguarding regional peace and stability, promoting economic and social development and protecting the rights and interests of developing countries. China appreciates this and supports countries in the region in actively seeking a development model suited to the region and their efforts to promote integration.

Under the pretext of so-called democracy and human rights, the US has been ganging up to suppress countries that have different opinions, wantonly abused unilateral sanctions and interfered in and manipulated the internal affairs of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. This is typical hegemony that gravely violates the purposes of the UN Charter and the basic norms governing international relations, and seriously contravenes the sovereignty and dignity of countries in the region. China firmly rejects this. I would like to stress that Latin America is by no means a front court or backyard of a certain country, and the Summit of the Americas is not a “Summit of the United States of America”. The US scheme to interfere in regional affairs by taking advantage of its capacity as the host of the Summit of the Americas is doomed to fail.

China Daily: According to media reports, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, commenting on some negative remarks by the US side on Taiwan, stressed that Taiwan is a Chinese province and an inalienable part of China’s territory and that pushing Taiwan to declare independence is a dangerous adventure. He called on all sides to respect China’s sovereignty and avoid adding fuel to the flame. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: China highly appreciates Prime Minister Hun Sen’s remarks on Taiwan. There is but one China in the world, Taiwan is part of China, and the government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. This is a consensus of the international community. The Taiwan question is purely China’s domestic affair and brooks no foreign interference. The Chinese side’s just cause of safeguarding sovereignty and territorial integrity, opposing secession, and realizing national reunification has received and will surely continue to receive understanding and support from Cambodia and the rest of the international community.

Reuters: The World Health Organization recently organized the World Health Assembly meeting and they reached agreement on reforming global health emergency rules. Did China take part and did China also agree to this reform?

Zhao Lijian: I’m not aware of what you mentioned.

The Paper: Last week, the fourth regional security dialogue on Afghanistan was hosted by Tajikistan and the Dushanbe Statement was released. We learned that a Chinese representative attended the meeting. Can you share more information?

Zhao Lijian: The fourth regional security dialogue on Afghanistan was held in Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan, on May 27. Senior representatives from China, Russia, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan attended the meeting. Cheng Guoping, External Security Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, represented China at the meeting.

Commissioner Cheng said, Afghanistan is the “Heart of Asia”. The development of the situation in Afghanistan, especially its security situation, has a major impact on regional security and stability. The Global Security Initiative, put forward by President Xi Jinping not long ago, stressed the importance of upholding the new vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, and jointly upholding world peace and security. China is ready to honor this spirit, work in concert with regional countries and support the whole system of Afghanistan in well responding to challenges.

The Dushanbe Statement released at the meeting welcomes the Tunxi Initiative of the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan on Supporting Economic Reconstruction in and Practical Cooperation with Afghanistan adopted at the Third Foreign Ministers’ Meeting Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan in late March, calls on all parties to provide more support for Afghanistan in economy, humanitarian assistance, connectivity, trade and internal capacity building. It reiterates non-interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs and the “Afghan-led, Afghan-owned” principle, urges countries bearing responsibilities for Afghanistan to seriously fulfill the commitment of economic reconstruction and future development of Afghanistan, and opposes politicization of humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan. The statement particularly pointed out that international terrorist organizations should never be allowed to use the Afghan territory to hide, train, plot and sponsor any terrorist activities targeting any country in the region to make sure that Afghanistan will not become a hotbed, harbor or source of terrorist forces.

Afghanistan is now at a critical stage from chaos to stability. Security is the prerequisite for development. China is ready to continue to work with regional countries to strengthen communication and coordination, build consensus and form synergy, and make relentless efforts to help Afghanistan achieve lasting peace and stability.

Bloomberg: Do you have any more details on the agreements that were signed between China and Kiribati and Samoa? Is there anything you could offer on those agreements?

Zhao Lijian: Our delegation is there on their trip. Relevant information has been released, and you can check it out.

Dragon TV: Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said at the 27th “International Conference on the Future of Asia” that the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) is not an economic but a political grouping that is intended to isolate and exclude China. China has contributed to other countries’ economic growth but has been left out in the IPEF. Economic development requires stability and no conflict. The United States seems enthusiastic about shutting out China and is sending ships to the South China Sea. This may one day cause an accident, resulting in violence or war, which is not good for the economic development of ASEAN countries. It’s necessary to avoid intensifying conflict between the United States and China and maintain regional stability. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: That’s very well put. Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad spoke the thoughts of the vast majority of countries in the region and clearly indicated what they care most about and want most. That is peace, stability and economic development in the region. It represents the overriding trend and people’s aspiration. However, the US has deviated from this direction and politicized economic issues for its own selfish ends, even at the cost of the interests of other countries and the region at large. It wins support and is doomed to fail. The key to success in the Asia-Pacific is win-win cooperation, not zero-sum confrontation. China is ready to work with other countries in the region to practice true multilateralism, build an open regional economy and make the Asia-Pacific our better home.

Reuters: According to reports in Swiss media, efforts by the Swiss government to update its free trade agreement with China have stalled as Switzerland is taking a more critical view of China’s human rights record. What’s China’s comment?

Zhao Lijian: Since its implementation in 2014, the China-Switzerland free trade agreement has brought enormous tangible benefits to both countries and peoples. To upgrade the agreement will help both sides to further tap into the potential for economic and trade cooperation and revitalize and grow the economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

I would like to stress that the free trade agreement is a mutually-beneficial arrangement, not a favor bestowed by either side. The two sides have maintained close communication and active negotiation in the spirit of mutual respect and equality regarding the upgrading of the agreement. China will be delighted to have the agreement upgraded and hopes that the Swiss side could stay clear of disruptive elements and meet China halfway.

Bloomberg: Just to go back to my earlier question, I want to make sure that I was clear. Basically I was asking about agreements with Kiribati, but also with Samoa. So I was asking on the two countries. Could you give us more details on China’s agreements with the two countries?

Zhao Lijian: As I said just now, the Chinese side has issue the press release on the visit. Just before the press conference, we released information about the talks between Fijian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Frank Bainimarama and State Councilor Wang Yi. The press release can be found on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. China will soon release relevant information on the China-Pacific Island Countries Foreign Ministers’ Meeting. Please stay tuned.

Reuters: Recently, the WHO held its first in-person since the COVID-19 outbreak. Did China attend the meeting? Does China support any reform measures mentioned at this conference?

Zhao Lijian: As I just said, I am not aware of relevant situation. I may come back to you after I learn more about it. According to my initial information, China participated in relevant discussions, but I am not aware of the details.

And yet more pictures from the past

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Miniature UFO Wreckage Discovered in Science Museum Archive?

From HERE

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Wreckage from a “miniature” UFO crash in North Yorkshire sixty years ago has been rediscovered in the archives of the Science Museum in London.

Or has it?

Known as Britain’s “answer to America’s Roswell incident,” the Silpho Saucer story broke on December 9, 1957 in  The Yorkshire Post when ‘a mystery’ disc was found on Yorkshire moor. Scarborough businessman Frank Dickenson and two friends were driving up Reasty Hill, near the village of Silpho, and their car stalled as ‘a glowing object in the sky’ landed in Borax Forest.

Mr. Dickenson found the metallic saucer in a patch of bracken, but when he returned with his friend the object was gone, so he placed a classified advert in the Scarborough newspaper and eventually bought it for £10. When the artifact was cut open a tiny book was found made of “17 thin copper sheets” covered in 2000 hieroglyphs.”  Scarborough café owner, Philip Longbottom studied the disc and claimed it been sent to Earth by an alien called “Ullo” and the message warned: ‘You will improve or disappear’. Hieroglyphics were also found on the wreckage of the UFO that allegedly crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in June 1947.

Measuring 45 cm (17.72 inches) in diameter and weighing 15 kg (33.07 lbs.), for half a century, UFO enthusiasts have speculated as to the destiny of this missing artifact. Now, parts of the “wreckage” have been rediscovered inside a tin cigarette box at the  Science Museum Group ’s archive.

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The remains of the ‘Silpho Moor Object’ were sent to London for examination in 1963 and included a “fused section of the metal and plastic from the outer casing, a length of hollow copper tubing and pieces from the copper booklet discovered inside.” Gordon Claringbull of the Natural History Museum, who specialized in meteorites and explosives said in a memo to the Science Museum that he was ‘prepared to wager anything’ that the pieces of metal were made on Earth, reported the Yorkshire Post.

A BBC report  this week revealed how tests carried out at the time in Manchester University found the object’s shell “contained lead and the copper parts […] of unusual high purity.” This raised expectations in the UFO community, but a metallurgist soon concluded that because the disc had not been exposed to high temperatures it “could not have come from space.”

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According to the Yorkshire Post , UFO expert Jenny Randles believes this metallic disc ‘is the most costly and well organized hoax that has ever taken place in Britain.”

Although the scientific community was skeptical, Air Chief Marshall Lord Dowding, who led the RAF during the Battle of Britain during WW2, examined the Silpho Saucer in 1958 and believed it was “genuine.” Describing it as a ‘a miniature pilot flying saucer’ – Lord Dowding was openly convinced it was “a genuine artefact from space,” according to the report in the Yorkshire Post.

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Since the discovery, skeptics have claimed the ‘saucer’ was made from a “domestic hot water cylinder in a back-street garage and planted on the moor as an elaborate hoax.” And this wouldn’t be the first time that a shiny part from a water cylinder has grabbed the world’s headlines – in 1974 another UFO part ‘allegedly’ crashed in Florida. Antoine and Jerri Betz, accompanied by their 21-year-old son Terry, discovered ‘’a bright metal globe, about the size of a bowling ball, just sitting there in the grass.”

When Terry played his guitar the ball “strangely resonated the music” and began to “move around, all on its own.” The media stir eventually caused scientists from NASA to inspect the Betz Sphere, and even some of them were convinced it had “otherworldly” origins. However, similarly to the Silpho Saucer story, the skeptics’ evidence was much stronger and came in the form of the “sphere’s owner.”

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2022 06 01 15 3g3

A skeptiod.com article tells that after the story broke, artist James Durling-Jones in Taos, New Mexico came forward claiming that he had used similar spheres in several sculptures. He had made a trip in his Volkswagen bus collecting scrap “industrial ball valves” in two sizes: 10-inch (25.4 cm) balls weighing about 70 pounds (31.75 kg) and 8-inch (20.32 cm) balls weighing about 22 pounds (9.98 kg), exactly the same weight and dimensions as the Betz Sphere. Durling-Jones had strapped the metal balls on his luggage rack and drove through Jacksonville around Easter of 1971 when “a few of the balls rolled off the luggage rack and were lost,” until three years later when the Betzes came along.

It can be concluded that the Silpho Saucer and the Beta Sphere are unquestionably two of most famous INFOs (identified non-flying objects) in the world.

U.S. bill would bar Google, Apple from hosting apps that accept China’s digital yuan

Such insane self-defeating behavior!

Republican senators want to bar U.S. app stores including Apple and Google from hosting apps that allow payments to be made with China's digital currency, amid fears the payment system could allow Beijing to spy on Americans.

The bill, unveiled Thursday and first reported by Reuters, states that companies that own or control app stores "shall not carry or support any app in [their] app store(s) within the United States that supports or enables transactions in e-CNY." It is sponsored by Senators Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio and Mike Braun.

According to Cotton's office, digital yuan could provide the Chinese government with "real-time visibility into all transactions on the network, posing privacy and security concerns for American persons who join this network."

The Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, said in a January 2021 report that China's digital currency and electronic payments system was "likely to be a boon for CCP surveillance in the economy and for government interference in the lives of Chinese citizens," noting that "transactions will contain precise data about users and their financial activity."

Article HERE

A Winter Tour of the Hidden Corners of a Little Town in Upstate NY

“I moved here in November and have been exploring it through this weird, snowless winter of 2012.”

A look at what rural America is. This is the real deal. I can name countless towns throughout the United States that resembles this... -MM

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This is what MOST of rural and small-town America looks like. I can confirm that this is exactly how parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Mississippi looked ten years ago.

Couple that with what the cities look like today. The United States is a nation in Crisis. So, given that, can you actually believe that the leadership are so delusional that they want to take on Russia and China simultaneously?

The Prisoner 16 Once Upon a Time

I do hope that you all enjoy this episode.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Japan, Korea, Australia and Ukraine. The world is changing. We discuss this with some pretty Gibson girls.

An American vet, long living down under, told me, "I have heard everything about America since I lived here from: 'I hate America to I love America', now it is: 'I feel sorry for America'..."

The world is changing. Here’s a collection of videos, articles, and stuff for you all to check out and chill-out with. I hope that you enjoy this particular article.

A thought about Japan and the QUAD

Japan is an American attack dog. It's not wise to lay all the blame on the dog. When someone sets his dog on you, what will you do? You can kick the shit out of the dog, but you will suffer bites. Or you can feed the dog with its favorite food and beat the shit out of its owner. After a while, the stupid dogs will get killed and the smart dogs will stay out of the fray. 

PM

Interesting quote

Sociopaths are very concerned with maintaining control over their "inferiors" in the present moment. They don't have the cognitive ability to make long term plans. They just "go with the flow".

They will keep going with this attitude until a bigger gangster comes along and tells them to lay off, or else.

This general atmosphere of sociopathy propagates through western society, as the fish rots from the head down.

School dance in the 1950s

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As Things Fall Apart Biden May Want To Escalate

Is reality setting in? Is that why a Washington Post reporter, who has been on the frontline in Ukraine, was allowed to write this?

Ukrainian volunteer fighters in the east feel abandoned

[A]fter three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions.

The volunteers were civilians before Russia invaded on Feb. 24, and they never expected to be dispatched to one of the most dangerous front lines in eastern Ukraine. They quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of war, feeling abandoned by their military superiors and struggling to survive.

In mid February these people were still civilians in some town in west Ukraine. They then ‘volunteered’, to avoid a draft into the army, for the territorial defense forces with the hope to serve near their homes:

Lapko, built like a wrestler, was made a company commander in the 5th Separate Rifle Battalion, in charge of 120 men. The similarly burly Khrus became a platoon commander under Lapko. All of their comrades were from western Ukraine. They were handed AK-47 rifles and given training that lasted less than a half-hour.

“We shot 30 bullets and then they said, ‘You can’t get more; too expensive,’ ” Lapko said.

They were given orders to head to the western city of Lviv. When they got there, they were ordered to go south and then east into Luhansk province in Donbas, portions of which were already under the control of Moscow-backed separatists and are now occupied by Russian forces.

The men were put into a frontline ditch and have since been shelled again and again without any ability to respond. They then disregarded the orders from above and left. They have now be arrested.

The military value of such units was zero to begin with. Untrained men under command of an inexperienced civilian and with no real weapons have no chance to hold out against a professional military force like the Russian army.

That 60 or so of them got killed or wounded for no good reason is the responsibility of the servant of the corrupt (recommended), President Vlodomir Zelenski, and those ‘western’ politicians, like Boris Johnson, who egg him on.

But the biggest part of the responsibility for the life of those men falls to the Biden administration. It tried to push Zelensky to invade Donbas in early 2021.

Back then Russia started large scale maneuvers and made clear that they would intervene. Zelensky got cold feet and pulled back. As the Carnegie Endowment’s Dmitri Tretin reported at that time:

In February [2021], Zelensky ordered troops (as part of the rotation process) and heavy weapons (as a show of force) to go near to the conflict zone in Donbas. 

He did not venture out as far as Poroshenko, who dispatched small Ukrainian naval vessels through the Russian-controlled waters near the Kerch Strait in late 2018, but it was enough to get him noticed in Moscow. 

The fact of the matter is that even if Ukraine cannot seriously hope to win the war in Donbas, it can successfully provoke Russia into action. 

This, in turn, would produce a knee-jerk reaction from Ukraine’s Western supporters and further aggravate Moscow’s relations, particularly with Europe. 

One way or another, the fate of Nord Stream II will directly affect Ukraine’s interests. Being seen as a victim of Russian aggression and presenting itself as a frontline state checking Russia’s further advance toward Europe is a major asset of Kyiv’s foreign policy.

When the 2021 attempt had failed the Biden administration did not change its general plan as it is part of a larger strategy to push the ‘west’ into a new cold war with Russia and China.

After the 2021 attempt on Donbas had failed the U.S. immediately prepared for a new attempt to provoke Russia in Ukraine in spring 2022.

The first instruction that Secretary of State Antony Blinken got from President Biden was to “reset” America’s alliances and partnerships abroad so that the United States could deal with the challenges ahead. That strategy would prove decisive in combating Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

Blinken and other officials gave me new details this week, describing a series of behind-the-scenes meetings over the past year that helped forge the U.S.-led coalition to support Ukraine.
 
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The Biden administration’s secret planning began in April 2021 when Russia massed about 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border. The buildup turned out to be a feint, but Blinken and other officials discussed U.S. intelligence about Russia’s actions with leaders of Britain, France and Germany at a NATO meeting in Brussels that month. Their message was, “We need to get ourselves prepared,” a senior State Department official said. 

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The Ukraine threat got red-hot in October, when the United States gathered intelligence about a renewed Russian buildup on the border, along with “some detail about what Russian plans for those forces actually were,” Blinken said. This operational detail “was really the eye opener.” The Group of 20 nations were meeting at the end of October in Rome, and Biden pulled aside the leaders of Britain, France and Germany and gave them a detailed readout on the top-secret evidence.

“It was galvanizing enough that there was an agreement … to fleshing out the consequences for Russia if it went ahead with the aggression,” Blinken said. 

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Threatening sanctions can be an empty diplomatic ritual. But in December, Blinken and his colleagues began seriously discussing with allies what steps they would take. The initial venue was a Group of Seven foreign ministers meeting in Liverpool, England, on Dec. 11. The attendees publicly committed that there would be “massive consequences and severe costs,” Blinken remembered. As a result, he said, “when the aggression actually happened, we were able to move immediately.”

NATO military planning accelerated along with the diplomacy. Air Force Gen. Tod Wolters, the NATO commander, told me that his colleagues began preparing in December and January the “ground lines of communication” that would allow rapid shipment of arms into Ukraine. They studied entry points for supplies and other practical details. This weapons pipeline delivered Stinger and Javelin missiles before the invasion began Feb. 24 and has transferred huge numbers of heavier weapons since then.

That narrative is of course deeply misleading. The U.S. did not know of a ‘Russian invasion’. What it knew was that Zelensky, pushed by the U.S., would make another attempt to invade the Donbas republics with overwhelming force and that Russia’s leadership would have to react to such an assault on its compatriots.

The Ukrainian assault began on February 16 when over several days Ukrainian artillery increased its bombardment of Donbas by a factor of 40. Russia reacted to that and on February 24 preempted the planned ground assault.

The above part of Biden’s plan to provoke Russia into a war as a means to strengthen the U.S. position in Europe has worked well.

But how long will the coalition of the ‘west’ hold when inflation, energy scarcity and hunger set in? European unity is already falling apart with each country scrambling to fulfill its own energy needs.

Everyone can now see that the Ukraine, and with it the U.S., is losing the war. Meanwhile Russia is doing much better than anyone had expected.

What is Biden’s plan now as things fall apart? Escalating towards a wider war is an option but the risk of it is much higher than potential gains.

Still, for Biden it may be the only way he is willing to go.

Posted by b on May 27, 2022 at 15:36 UTC | Permalink

Huevos Rancheros Hash Brown Skillet

Crispy hash browns take center stage in this skillet breakfast topped with eggs, salsa and plenty of cheese. Who wouldn’t love this tasty take on a favorite Mexican breakfast?

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Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 medium onion, chopped (1 cup)
  • 1 tablespoon chili powder
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 6 cups frozen shredded hash brown potatoes (from 30-oz bag)
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 cup salsa
  • 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese (4 oz)

Make it FRESH toppings, as desired

  • Sour cream
  • Sliced avocado
  • Chopped red onion
  • Cilantro leaves
  • Salsa

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It Is Worse Than We Thought

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The U.S. economy is slowing down more quickly than almost all of the experts had anticipated.  As I detailed yesterday, U.S. consumers have been getting hit extremely hard by this economic slowdown, and at this point most Americans believe that a recession is coming.

But could it be possible that a recession has already begun?

As you will see below, the numbers seem to indicate that such a scenario is quite likely.  But whether we are already officially in a recession or not, the truth is that whatever we are experiencing now is nothing compared to the pain that is eventually coming down the road.

Do you remember how painful it was for our society when the first housing bubble spectacularly imploded back in 2008?

Well, it is starting to happen again.  On Thursday we learned that pending home sales in the United States have now fallen for six months in a row

Pending home sales slipped in April, as contract activity decreased for the sixth consecutive month, the National Association of Realtors® reported. Only the Midwest region saw signings increase month-over-month, while the other three major regions reported declines. Each of the four regions registered a drop in year-over-year contract activity.

The Pending Home Sales Index (PHSI),* www.nar.realtor/pending-home-sales, a forward-looking indicator of home sales based on contract signings, slid 3.9% to 99.3 in April. Year-over-year, transactions fell 9.1%. An index of 100 is equal to the level of contract activity in 2001.

Earlier in the week, I discussed the fact that new home sales were 26.9 percent lower this April than they were last April.

We are clearly past the peak of the housing bubble, and now the rollercoaster is very rapidly headed in a downward direction.

Of course the economy as a whole is starting to head in a downward direction.  On Thursday we also learned that U.S. GDP for the first quarter of 2022 had been revised even lower

First-quarter gross domestic product declined at a 1.5% annual pace, according to the second estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That was worse than the 1.3% Dow Jones estimate and a write-down from the initially reported 1.4%.

Downward revisions for both private inventory and residential investment offset an upward change in consumer spending. A swelling trade deficit also subtracted from the GDP total.

Many experts are assuring us that GDP growth will bounce back into the green for the second quarter.

But it if doesn’t, that would mean that GDP has contracted for two quarters in a row, and that would officially confirm that we are in a recession right now.

Of course even if GDP does bounce back this quarter, the outlook for the months ahead is not promising at all.

In fact, a survey of 500 prominent CEOs just found that 75 percent of them expect a recession to begin by the end of next year…

At this time last year, the Fortune 500 CEOs we surveyed were breathing a collective sigh of relief as profits and revenues came roaring back from the ravages of the pandemic. This spring, that roar sounds uncomfortably loud, as companies cope with soaring inflation and the growing likelihood that sky-high prices and labor shortages will help tip the economy into recession. In all, 75% said they expected the next recession to begin by the end of 2023, though only 32% believed it would start in this calendar year.

Just about everyone can feel that economic troubles are in our future, and that will especially be true if the Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates.

Unfortunately, the Fed feels forced to raise rates because inflation has gotten wildly out of control.

If you can believe it, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has risen by 47 cents in just the past month alone…

Gas prices have increased by over 47 cents in the last month alone as the U.S. continues to smash gas price records day by day under President Joe Biden’s leadership.

On Wednesday, May 25, the U.S. recorded yet another all-time high, as the average price of gas stands at $4.599 for regular gas. This reflects an over 47 cent rise in the last month alone. One month ago, the gas price average stood at $4.123.

That is insane!

And U.S. natural gas prices have risen almost 150 percent so far in 2022…

U.S. natural gas prices have skyrocketed nearly 150% this year while inventory levels have shrunk, signaling more consumer pain ahead of the summer season.

The Henry Hub natural gas spot price, an indicator of nationwide prices, stormed past $9.30 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) Thursday, up from its early January price of $3.74 per MMBtu and the highest level since 2008, according to government data.

Food prices continue to soar into unthinkable territory as well.

This week, a single trip to the grocery store cost me 309 dollars, and I was trying to be very frugal.

309 dollars!

I remember a time when you could buy a used vehicle for that kind of money.

For years, I have been warning that our leaders were destroying our currency and setting the stage for nightmarish inflation, and now that time has arrived.

And all of the borrowing and spending that our politicians have been doing has made our national long-term financial problems exponentially worse

Over the past two years, $4.6 trillion has been provided by Congress in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The impact on inflation, particularly the timing of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021, is subject to some debate, but what cannot be denied is the impact this spending has had on the interest paid on the national debt. 

Between 2011-2018, interest on debt held by the public averaged $272 billion annually. Between 2019-2021, annual interest on the debt averaged $389 billion, an increase of $117 billion, or 43 percent. 

The president’s fiscal 2022 budget, which is the first to project deficits of more than $1 trillion for 10 consecutive years, estimates that FY 2022 interest on debt of $26.3 trillion will be $305 billion and reach $941 billion in FY 2031, or more than triple the amount for the current fiscal year. 

By that time, interest payments will account for 59 percent of the projected $1.6 trillion deficit.

We could have avoided all of this if we had taken a different path.

But we didn’t.

Instead, we kept sending the big spenders back to Washington time after time.

We thought that we could keep kicking the can down the road and get away with it, but instead we have literally destroyed America’s financial future.

Getting a facial from an ice machine, the 1950s

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Richard Says…

The US is a kleptocracy run by the kleptomaniacal. The sum total of their activity is called GDP. 

The government has to keep things churning while simultaneously inflating the currency on a compound basis in order to finance the dollar printing presses. This is known as economics. 

Ordinary people are in a daily cat fight for survival with government always posed to seize their homes for non-payment of taxes. Economic crime is epidemic. 

What a country. The Ukraine war, with stammering Brandon at the helm, is the latest kleptocratic scam. 

Can anyone tell me I am exaggerating?

- Richard

Grace JonesI’m Not Perfect But I’m Perfect For You

Please enjoy this bit of crazy 1990’s America…

Another valuable quote…

"The various talking heads--Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, Yellen, etc.--should be ignored...

... as the actual policy aim ...

... is to reduce Russia so severely...

... so that China can then also be reduced.

This is what remains the United States genuine policy goal."


-vetinLA

Nonresident alien border ID, 1943

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Countering China’s ‘Greatest & Longest’ Hypersonic Missile – US Says Its ‘Missile Killer’ Program Just Not Ready

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The head of the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) recently said that its Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI) program, designed to eliminate Hypersonic missiles, may not be ready even in the next decade.

“We’re just getting started,” said Vice Adm. Jon Hill at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The MDA is working on a wide array of missile tracking sensors and defeat capabilities to build a “layered” defense against incoming ballistic and hypersonic missiles.

The GPI is one of them which is supposed to target hypersonic missiles during the glide phase of flight (once a missile has re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and is heading toward its target), which is challenging to forecast, as the missiles travel at five times the speed of sound while making rapid evasive maneuvers.

The interceptors will be integrated into the current Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense destroyers in the US Navy which would involve the interceptor being launched from its regular Vertical Launch System (VLS), connected with the Baseline 9 Aegis Weapon System that detects, tracks, controls, and engages hypersonic threats.

Last year in November, the MDA-selected Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon to design Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI). Raytheon Missiles and Defense was granted $20.97 million, Lockheed Martin $20.94 million, and Northrop Grumman $18.95 million respectively. Each vendor is supposed to provide concept designs for prototypes by September 2022.

“We’ve got three great proposals, and we may decide to stay on three, may drop to two, may drop to one. So it just really kind of depends,” said Hill.

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Chinese, Russian Hypersonic Missile

In recent times, the US is increasingly becoming worried about the threat posed by hypersonic weapons from China and Russia.

In July of last year, China tested its hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), sparking widespread concern and panic among the US military’s brass. The glide vehicle traveled around 24,800 miles (39,911 km) in space before re-entering the atmosphere and striking the ground target, according to a report by US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

The DIA report reads that the flight test lasted more than 100 minutes, making it “the greatest distance flew and longest flight time of any Chinese land-attack weapons system to date.”

China is known to have a medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM), known as Dong Feng-17 (DF-17) which is capable of carrying the DF-ZF HGV. The missile itself can travel at a speed of Mach 5-10 and carry conventional or nuclear weapons. It has a range of 1,800-2,500km and a launch weight of 15,000kgs.

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The DF-ZF HGV can travel at speeds between Mach 5-10 and is said to be capable of performing evasive maneuvers to tackle the enemy defenses. The DF-17 is a ground-launched missile; an air-launched version may be developed that can be deployed on the Xian H-6N bomber – the latest variant of the H-6 series bombers based on the Soviet Tupolev Tu-16 twin-engine jet bombers.

The H-6N has a range of 8,000 km and if armed with DF-17, its range can extend up to 10,000 – 11,000 km bringing the key enemy installations across the entire Indo-Pacific within its range.

A video surfaced in 2020 showing the H-6N bomber landing at an unknown airfield carrying a missile with a warhead and booster section on the bottom of its fuselage, which appeared to be similar to the DF-17 hypersonic missile.

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Meanwhile, Russia has also developed the Avangard HGV with a range of over 6,000 km, capable of carrying both nuclear and conventional payloads. According to a TASS report, the HGV’s nuclear warhead is “more than two megatons in TNT equivalent.”

Currently, the Avangard is carried by the SS-19 “Stiletto” (UR-100NUTTH) ballistic missile but it is slated to be replaced by the R-28 Sarmat that has just been successfully tested and planned to be deployed later this year.

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Also, MDA and the Space Development Agency are currently working on the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) that would assist the current missile warning/tracking satellites that could lose hypersonic missiles after their boost phase.

The HBTSS is supposed to be able to detect a missile launch, as well as the first, second, and third-stage separation. Once the GPI is fired by the Aegis BMD system on a Navy destroyer, it would be connected to HBTSS for updated tracking data and the interceptor would kill the threat before it got too close to its intended target.

The HBTSS is planned to be launched into orbit next year for a demonstration.

The ‘Mysterious’ Tully Monster Fossil Just Got More Mysterious

By Chris Rogers / The Conversation

2022 06 01 10 57
2022 06 01 10 57

Every now and again, scientists discover fossils that are so bizarre they defy classification, their body make-up is unlike any other living animals or plants. Tullimonstrum (also known as the Tully Monster), a 300 year-old fossil discovered in the Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois, US, is one such creature.

At first glance, Tully looks superficially slug-like. But where you would expect its mouth to be, the creature has a long thin appendage ending in what looks like a pair of grasping claws. Then there are its eyes, which protrude outward from its body on stalks.

Tully is so strange that scientists have never been unable to agree on whether it is a vertebrate (with a backbone, like mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish) or an invertebrate (without a backbone, like insects, crustaceans, octopuses, and all other animals). In 2016, a group of scientists claimed to have solved the mystery of Tully, providing the strongest evidence yet that it was a vertebrate. But my colleagues and I have conducted a new study that calls this conclusion into question, meaning this monster is as mysterious as ever.

When Was the Tully Monster Discovered?

The Tully Monster was originally discovered in the 1950s by a fossil collector named Francis Tully. Ever since its discovery scientists have puzzled over which group of modern animals Tully belongs to. The enigma of Tully’s true evolutionary relationships has added to its popularity, ultimately leading it to become the state fossil of Illinois.

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2022 06 01 10 5f7

There have been many attempts to classify the Tully Monster . The majority of these studies have focused on the appearance of some of its more prominent features. These include a linear feature in the fossil interpreted as evidence of a gut, the light and dark banding of the fossil, and the peculiar grasping claws of its mouth. The body plan of the Tully Monster is so unusual in its entirety that it will greatly expand the diversity of whatever group it ultimately belongs to, changing the way we think about that group of animals.

The 2016 research argued the animal should be grouped with vertebrates because its eyes contain pigment granules called melanosomes, which are arranged by shape and size in the same way as those in vertebrate eyes . But our research shows that the eyes of some invertebrates such as octopus and squid also contain melanosomes partitioned by shape and size in a similar way to Tully’s eyes, and that these can also be preserved in fossils.

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2022 06 01 10 rr58

Particle Accelerator Research on the Tully Monster Fossil

To do this, we used a type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron radiation lightsource located at Stanford University in California. This allowed us to explore the chemical makeup of samples from fossils and from animals living today.

The synchrotron bombards specimens with intense bursts of radiation to ‘excite’ the elements within them. When excited, each element releases X-rays with a specific signature. By detecting the emitted X-ray signatures, we can tell what elements were excited and ultimately what the specimen we are studying is made of.

First we found that melanosomes from the eyes of modern vertebrates have a higher ratio of zinc to copper than the modern invertebrates we studied. To our surprise, we then found the same pattern could be seen in fossilized vertebrates and invertebrates found at Mazon Creek.

We then analyzed the chemistry of Tully’s eyes and the ratio of zinc to copper was more similar to that of invertebrates than vertebrates. This suggests the animal may not have been a vertebrate, contradicting previous efforts to classify it.

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2022 06 01 10 58

We also found that Tully’s eyes contain different type of copper to that found in vertebrate eyes. But the copper also wasn’t identical to that in the invertebrates we studied. So, while our work adds weight to the idea that Tully is not a vertebrate, it doesn’t clearly identify it as an invertebrate either.

The Tully Monster Remains Unclassified

Where do we go from here? A broader analysis of the chemistry of melanosomes and other pigments in the eyes of a wider range of invertebrates would be a good next step. This may help to further narrow down the group of animals to which Tully belongs.

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2022 06 01 10 5gh8

 

Futuristic car design by Bob Riley

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The truth about American weapons in Ukraine you won’t believe | Redacted with Clayton Morris

Interesting. Check it out.

Breakfast in Bed: Extraordinary Color Photographs Revealed the First Class of Air France in the 1950s

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Air France, in full Compagnie Nationale Air France, French international airline originally formed in 1933 and today serving all parts of the globe. With British Airways, it was the first to fly the supersonic Concorde. Headquarters are in Paris.

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By 1948 Air France operated 130 aircraft, one of the largest fleets in the world. Between 1947 and 1965 the airline operated Lockheed Constellations on passenger and cargo services worldwide.

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During the mid-1950s it also operated the Vickers Viscount turboprop, with twelve entering services between May 1953 and August 1954 on the European routes. On September 26, 1953, the government instructed Air France to share long-distance routes with new private airlines. This was followed by the Ministry of Public Works and Transport’s imposition of an accord on Air France, Aigle Azur, TAI and UAT, under which some routes to Africa, Asia and the Pacific region were transferred to private carriers.

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In 1957, Eugene Louis Kammerman (1920–1961) took a series of photographs for an advertising campaign for Air France. Photographer for the United States Army, he married a French woman and decided to stay in France. A reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, he collaborated to the young newspaper L’Express, then too “poor” to pay him. He started to work on advertising campaigns and did reportages on the major fashion houses, his images were published in magazines such as Elle, Paris Match and Life…

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Made In America: Goods Exports By State

Saturday, May 28, 2022 – 08:40 AM

After China, the U.S. is the next largest exporter of goods in the world, shipping out $1.8 trillion worth of goods in 2021 – an increase of 23% over the previous year.

Of course, as Visual Capitalist’s Raul Amoros and Jennifer West detail below, that massive number doesn’t tell the whole story. The U.S. economy is multifaceted, with varying levels of trade activity taking place all across the nation.

Using the latest data on international trade from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, we’ve visualized the value of America’s goods exports by state.

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2022 05 29 12 23

Top 10 Exporter States

Here are the top 10 American states that exported the highest dollar value worth of goods during 2021. Combined, these export-leading states represent 59.4% of the nation’s total exports.

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2022 05 29 12 26

Texas has been the top exporting state in the U.S. for an incredible 20 years in a row.

Last year, Texas exported $375 billion worth of goods, which is more than California ($175 billion), New York ($85 billion), and Louisiana ($77 billion) combined. The state’s largest manufacturing export category is petroleum and coal products, but it’s also important to mention that Texas led the nation in tech exports for the ninth straight year.

California was the second highest exporter of goods in 2021 with a total value of $175 billion, an increase of 12% from the previous year. The state’s main export by value was computer and electronic product manufacturing, representing 17.8% of the total U.S. exports of that industry. California was also second among all states in exports of machinery manufacturing, accounting for 13.9% of the U.S. total.

What Type of Goods are Exported?

Here is a breakdown of the biggest U.S. export categories by value in 2021.

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2022 05 29 12 27

These top 10 export categories alone represent almost 70% of America’s total exports.

The biggest grower among this list is mineral fuels, up by 59% from last year. Pharmaceuticals saw the second biggest one-year increase (45%).

Top 10 U.S. Exports by Country of Destination

So who is buying “Made in America” products?

Unsurprisingly, neighboring countries Canada (17.5%) and Mexico (15.8%) are the two biggest buyers of American goods. Together, they purchase one-third of American exports.

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2022 05 29 12 2f8

Three Asian countries round out the top five list: China (8.6%), Japan (4.3%), and South Korea (3.7%). Together, the top five countries account for around half of all goods exports.

Atlas space station in 1958

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Gravitas: China retaliates after Biden’s Taiwan comment

Very serious.

NASA scientists pose with their board of calculations

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Is Yoon prepared for the consequences of cold-shouldering China?

South Korea elected a new President. Apparently, hearsay has it that many of the younger people were stunned that such a Pro-America "dinosaur" would be elected. 

Promptly after taking the reigns of power, he started "pulling a Ukraine" and embracing a pro-USA, and hate-China stance. Here is an editorial on this subject. -MM

From HERE

As South Korea formalizes its economic security alliance with the US and participates in the US-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), its trade policy stance is coming to a major turning point.

The presidential office explains this as a ramping up of the change from the existing framework of the US being Korea’s main security ally and China being its strongest economic partner to a framework of relying on the US for security and working with the world on economic matters. However, this is misleading. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Yoon administration perceives the US as Korea’s most important partner in both the fields of security and the economy.

It goes without saying that the Korean economy is highly dependent on China and market diversification is necessary. However, sudden changes without the necessary preparation will inevitably come with costs.

China accounts for about one-quarter of Korea’s total imports and exports. In particular, an interdependent division of labor structure is currently held tightly in place with intermediate goods. Intermediate goods account for 64% of Korea’s imports from China and 80% of exports.

In addition, of the items Korea considers vulnerable to supply chain disruptions — which account for more than 70% of imports from specific countries among all imported items in Korea — 2,434 are sourced from China, 601 from the US, and 565 from Japan. China’s share is overwhelmingly larger than that of other countries.

As was seen with the urea crisis late last year, Korean industries can end up paralyzed without China. The same goes for high-tech industries. Lest we forget 60% of Korea’s semiconductor exports go to China.

The IPEF is a grand plan by the US to artificially reorganize the division of labor in high-tech industries mainly in Northeast Asian countries such as Korea, China, Japan, and Taiwan. The goal is to have Southeast Asian countries and India take over the role of China. If the US’ plan becomes a reality, it’s only a matter of time before Korean industry and trade are dealt a big shock.

Companies that seize opportunities in the transition process can reap the benefits, but those that do not adapt properly will suffer damage.

Regarding Korea’s involvement in the IPEF, President Yoon Suk-yeol told CNN in an interview on Monday, “Even if we strengthen our alliances with the United States in security and technology, it does not mean that we think our economic cooperation with China is unimportant.”

Yoon also said that, since both South Korea and China depend on their mutual cooperation, he does “not believe it is reasonable for China to be overly sensitive about this matter,” revealing the very easy-going way of thinking of the president.

The IPEF is based on the US intention to exclude China from the global supply chain.

A plan is needed that puts the characteristics of the Korean industry and the ecosystem into perspective. For Korea, which heavily depends on trade to keep its economy strong, fully excluding either the US or China is far too risky.

First selfie, 1900

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Rand Paul: “Elitists Want A One World Government; It’s Not A Conspiracy Theory”

Saturday, May 28, 2022 – 05:40 AM

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Senator Rand Paul appeared on Fox News Thursday and discussed the ongoing World Economic Forum gathering in Davos Switzerland, remarking that it is not a conspiracy theory to suggest the organisation is seeking a one world government, rather it is “in their mission statement.”

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2022 05 29 12 16

Paul urged that “The real danger here that’s even more dangerous than all their phony caring about carbon footprint, the real danger is this; look how bad your government is in a country where you get to vote for these people.”

“This would be a government, a world government where you don’t get to vote on anybody. This is everybody’s worst nightmare,” Paul asserted, referring to the ‘penetration’ of the WEF, to quote its head Klaus Schwab, into national governments.

“The bureaucracy that we have trouble in our United States because we don’t get to vote on them, we vote indirectly,” Paul said, adding “Can you imagine the one-world bureaucracy of all these elitists and their private jets that would rule our country and we wouldn’t get to vote?”

The Senator continued, “So I’m dead set against this and they used to call people that talked about one-world government used to say it’s a conspiracy. We would always say no, it’s in their mission statement.”

“They say it at every meeting. That’s what they’re for,” Paul proclaimed, adding “lack of sovereignty means lack of freedom, it means lack of responsiveness and it’s completely antithetical to everything our country stands for.”

Watch:

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The Best Photos Of The Spectacular One-Off 1965 Dodge Deora Pickup Truck

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The Deora is a 1965 Dodge A100 pickup truck that was heavily customized by Mike and Larry Alexander in Detroit for the 1967 Detroit Autorama, also known as “America’s Greatest Hot Rod Show.” Believe it or not, after winning many awards, including the Ridler in 1967, it became the prototype for a Hot Wheels car, and plastic model kit.

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Based on a 1965 Dodge A100 compact pickup truck, the Deora was heavily modified by a Detroit-based custom house run by two brothers. The A100’s roofline was chopped, while the body was sectioned and channeled. One of the neat features of the Deora was the front windshield that would lift up and the lower gate would swivel, allowing the driver/passenger access into the car through the front of the cab. The result was a futuristic-looking pickup that looked like it came out of a scene from the Jetsons.

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Despite its 21st century looks, which would’ve been considered light years away in 1967, it was powered with a basically stock slant-six engine and a three-speed manual transmission, which were moved rearward 15 inches to allow for the severely customized cab. The bed was covered with a hard tonneau cover and the truck was emblazoned in gold paint complemented by chrome wheels while the interior featured some pretty trick modifications for the era.

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Because of its outrageous design, a major plastic model car company and a diecast toy manufacturer offered scaled-down versions for sale to the growing youth market. To help promote the launch of the model version, the model car company ran a naming contest, and it was a 13-year-old who came up with the name “Deora.” Loosely translated, it’s Spanish for “golden.” Other toy manufacturers quickly offered miniature versions of the Deora in plastic and metal, and soon it was one of the hottest-selling toy cars of the late 1960s.

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The Deora made its public debut at the 1967 Detroit Autorama and won the prestigious Ridler award that recognizes the skill and creativity of custom cars and their builders within the industry. It also caught the attention of the Chrysler marketing folks who really loved the look of the Deora. They leased it for two years and put it on tour going around the United States with other factory concept cars to complement the Dodge displays at the new car shows during the late 1960s.

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After its tour of duty on the show circuit, the Deora was sold and put in storage for more than 30 years. Finally, after a light restoration, the Deora reappeared and made its “second debut” at the 50th anniversary Detroit Autorama in 2002.

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In 2009 the Deora was put up for auction in California and was sold for $324,500. It was described as featuring a 101 bhp (75 kW; 102 PS) 6-cylinder 170 cu in (2,800 cc) engine.

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Watch: Mysterious South China Sea Missile Launch Came Dangerously Close To Commercial Airliner

Saturday, May 28, 2022 – 12:30 AM

An unknown foreign military in southeast Asia has reportedly test launched an SLBM, or submarine-launched ballistic missile, which appears to have endangered a nearby commercial aircraft full of people. Stunning video taken from a Cathay Pacific Boeing 777 as it flew over the South China Sea just as the unidentified submarine launched the missile shows the airliner remarkably closeThe Drive reports that it was likely a test of either the Chinese or South Korean military, but not even the precise date of the event has been confirmed at this point:

Twitter user @jchovernut, a pilot for U.S.-based airline Allegiant Air and a veteran of the U.S. Navy's submarine community, posted the video, seen below, online on Tuesday. "They were over the South China Sea & were issued a last-minute hectic call from ATC: 'turn left 90 degrees immediately!!,'" according to one Tweet accompanying the video.

That a commercial aircraft was so close to an SLBM launch that a passenger could get rare, crystal clear video of the projectile as it shot out of the submarine is unprecedented.

The pilot who posted the original clip further described, “To their bewilderment, they spotted a SLBM emerging from the sea below their previously intended flight path!! PLAN Missile Submarine launch with very little regard to Commercial Air Traffic in the area!! That would’ve been me on the ‘delivery end’ of that Missile 30 years ago!”

China in particular has been known over the years to conduct unannounced missile launches which creates last-minute flight delays.

However, The Drive admits that the location and timing of the video cannot be verified at this point, with a statement from Cathay Pacific also saying it can’t confirm any details of the event or the passenger that filmed it.

“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) did announce that it would be conducting drills in the South China Sea between May 19 and May 23, which coincided with U.S. President Joe Biden’s visits to South Korea and Japan, but did not mention any planned live-fire missile launches,” the report notes, speculating on possibilities.

A number of observers have asserted that China’s PLA Navy launched the missile…

Further, on the possibility that Pyongyang might be behind it, given the recent spate of ballistic missile launches which have caught the West’s attention: “On May 7, North Korea did test a submarine-launched ballistic missile, but in the East Sea, hundreds of miles away from the South China Sea,” The Drive writes.

“In 2017, the crew of Cathay Pacific flight flying north of Japan observed a portion of a North Korean missile test. However, it is unlikely that this video shows that previous incident, as the airline said at the time that what the aircrew saw was parts of the missile falling back to Earth, not being launched.”

Thus the above video clip could mark a significant first of an airline observing a full launch and flight path from the ocean’s surface into the atmosphere, and was able to catch it all on film at a close proximity.

Permanent Wave Machine, 1935

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SpongeWax Ecstatic (To Sell Angelina)

A great rock video, and some fish oil promise for a wonderful life, eh?

A comment…

“…today I encountered a discouraging comment from a foreign visitor (to the United States) which is really an accurate view of of a terribly faulty government …

My 50 days road trip in America is almost over (today is my last day)
It was pure fun and it was great seeing all these places, going to events and having such experience, meeting people.

It was 98% enjoyment.

I want to share some other thoughts though. Thoughts that bugged my mind for some time now. I don’t want it sound like a rant, because it isn’t.

But I think your country and people should address that ASAP.

Most of my trip went through the country, visiting nature and wild life.

But driving 7000 miles and walking 400 made me see also another picture.

What have you done to your cities people?

LA, San Francisco downtown looked like where Mad Max went to buy his water in the movies. Junkies, homeless, crazy people living on the streets. Endless tents, trash, misery, smell of urine and shit. It’s I don’t know … unbelievable. 

My friends in Europe had totally different image about LA, SF, Portland…any major west coast city I visit was like that. 

I don’t want to go to the politic side of things, because I am not local...but let me tell you. Misery on such level in the center of the cities it’s just not normal. 

It ruins business, tourism, everything.

Talking about business …every place I went, bar, eatery, restaurants, hotels …are short staffed and have “we are hiring” sign. Like almost every freaking place.

So reason for this people to be on the streets is not unemployment…

...there is work literally on every corner. 

So what is it? What’s wrong? 

These people should be like moved out of the Center of the city, crisis shelter should be build in the perimeter where this people can get like a cheap hot meal, maybe some help, shower, haircut and send to find a job…and judging by the above it should NOT be hard. 

Even if you are not qualified, those places look just for people with will you work, they will provide training.

I don’t know what’s your opinion on this…but as a foreigner visiting your country I can tell you are already on a slippery slope. If you don’t fix that somehow …it maybe not able to be reverted.

Just my 2 cents.

And because I don’t want to be off topic and to finish on a positive note, posting my top selection pictures from my travel in USA. Some of them I already posted but yeah. Enjoy. And thank you for the adventure your country unveiled for me.

Why Asia Pacific Chose China (You Won’t Believe What America Did)

A very good video…

Law-Abiding West Virginian Woman With Concealed Firearm Stops A Mass Shooting

Saturday, May 28, 2022 – 08:45 PM

Instead of waiting for the police to arrive, a woman with a concealed carry license in West Virginia acted fast to stop a crazed man with an AR-15-style rifle who was about to kill dozens of people at a graduation party.

"Instead of running from the threat, she engaged with the threat and saved several lives last night," Charleston Police Department Chief of Detectives Tony Hazelett told local news WCHSTV

The incident occurred Wednesday when Dennis Butler,37, was angered by a group of people hosting a graduation party who told him to slow down through an apartment complex in Charleston. He returned 30 minutes later, parked his vehicle, jumped in the backseat, and discharged his weapon toward the group of 30-40 people.

Unbeknownst to the shooter, a law-abiding citizen with a CCW was within the group and quickly drew her weapon and engaged Bulter with direct fire, fatally wounding him.

"There was a graduation party, a party with kids," Hazelett said at a press conference. "So obviously somebody just graduated high school and another birthday party. We could have had a casualty shooting there." He estimated between 30 to 40 people attended the parties.

There were no injuries reported besides the gunman. Police have yet to release the woman’s name, though they said she’s not part of law enforcement and is just an average law-abiding citizen.

Charleston police discuss the incident.

So a good woman with a gun prevents a bad person with evil intentions and an extensive criminal record from committing a mass shooting. Should society consider her a hero for saving the lives of dozens of people?

Gibson Girls: The Sexiest Women Of All Time

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The Gibson Girl began appearing in the 1890s and was the personification of the feminine ideal of physical attractiveness portrayed by the satirical pen-and-ink illustrations of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson during a 20-year period that spanned the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States and Canada. The artist saw his creation as representing the composite of “thousands of American girls.” The Gibson girl’s neck was thin and her hair piled high upon her head in the contemporary bouffant, pompadour, and chignon fashions.

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China is not in good mood…

China will take no crap from NATO’s Stoltenberg:

"Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg has been making groundless accusations and smearing attacks against China, making reckless comments on China's political system and domestic and foreign policies, and promoting a 'China-threat' theory, which China firmly opposes and strongly condemns, declared the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Thursday.

"Wang Wenbin, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, made the remarks during a routine press conference on Thursday, responding to inquiries on the NATO chief's recent remarks calling China an 'authoritarian regime' and a threat to the alliance security during an interview on Tuesday....

"Wang also questioned that China does not use force to threaten other countries like some NATO countries do, it does not engage in military alliances, does not export ideologies, and is never the one to take the initiative in initiating trade wars, has never meddled with other country's internal affairs and has never unreasonably suppressed other countries' enterprises. So how can China threaten NATO security in any way?"

China then showed it can also diplomatically tell NATO’s chief propagandist to shut the fuck up:

"Wang urged Stoltenberg to immediately stop spreading unfounded rumors against China, and abandon the practice of drawing imaginary ideological lines. 'NATO has already messed up Europe, and it must not be allowed to do the same to Asia and the rest of the world.'"

That’s the most direct truth told to NATO that will certainly be heeded by the Global South.

Sophie B. HawkinsDamn I Wish I Was Your Lover

Do you all remember this tune?

Make-Ahead Breakfast Burritos

This best breakfast burrito is ready to go when you are! Prepare the night before, bake them in the morning, and start your family’s day the right way—with hearty, filling ingredients that come to life with a touch of salsa.

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d4176b9f e90e 496b b4bd 6441b53604a3

Ingredients

  • 1 lb bulk pork sausage
  • 2 green onions, chopped
  • 8 eggs
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 package (11 oz) Old El Paso™ flour tortillas for burritos (8 tortillas; 8 inch)
  • 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese (4 oz)
  • Old El Paso™ Thick ‘n Chunky salsa
  • Sour cream

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2022 05 27 11 17

Here Are 11 Statistics That Show How U.S. Consumers Are Faring In This Rapidly Deteriorating Economy

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Prices are soaring, there are widespread shortages of certain items such as baby formula all over the nation, and at the same time U.S. economic activity appears to be really slowing down.

Considering all of that, it makes perfect sense why the American people are feeling so negative about the economy right now.

In fact, a whopping 85 percent of all Americans believe that there will be a recession within the next year.  These days, it is virtually impossible to get Americans to overwhelmingly agree about anything, and so the fact that 85 percent of us are anticipating a recession is a really big deal.

Just about everyone realizes that economic conditions are going to get worse, but for those of you that still doubt where we are headed here are 11 statistics that show how U.S. consumers are faring in this rapidly deteriorating economy…

#1 According to a Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll that was recently conducted, 56 percent of Americans say that their financial situations are getting worse, and only 20 percent of Americans say that their financial situations are improving.

#2 Another new survey has just discovered that 66 percent of Americans “have avoided social events because they’ve felt embarrassed or uncomfortable” about their financial situations.

#3 The housing bubble appears to be bursting.  At this point, sales of new single family homes are falling at a very frightening pace

Sales of new single-family houses in April plunged by 16.6% from March and by 26.9% from a year ago, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 591,000 houses, the lowest since lockdown April 2020, according to the Census Bureau today. Sales of new houses are registered when contracts are signed, not when deals close, and can serve as an early indicator of the overall housing market.

#4 After breaking the all-time national record in March, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has gone 42 cents above the old record and is now sitting at $4.59.

#5 The average age of a car on U.S. roads has reached an all-time record high of 12.2 years.  Many Americans continue to delay replacing their current vehicles because new vehicles have become so unaffordable.

#6 Millions of American families are struggling with rapidly rising food prices

The index for food away from home increased 7.2% over the last year, the Labor Department reported earlier this month. Food prices were up 9.4% in April from the same time last year — the biggest jump since April 1981, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported. And grocery store prices increased 10.8% for the year ended in April.

#7 U.S. natural gas futures just crossed the nine dollar threshold – the highest level that we have seen since the financial crisis of 2008.  That means that much higher energy costs are on the way for U.S. consumers.

#8 Multiple Fed surveys are showing that manufacturing activity in the U.S. is really slowing down

The slowdown in manufacturing activity on display in reports from the Federal Reserve banks of New York and Philadelphia was confirmed by a survey from the Richmond Fed indicating that factory activity contracted in the mid-Atlantic region in May.

The Fifth District Survey of Manufacturing Activity index dropped 23 points from a positive reading of 14 in April to a minus nine, the lowest reading since May 2020, when much of the economy was still reeling from the onset of the pandemic and lockdowns.

#9 Zero Hedge is reporting extremely depressing news about U.S. macro data: “Other than April 2020 – when the entire economy was closed – May’s serial disappointment in US Macro data is the worst since Lehman”

#10 Thanks to plunging stock prices, approximately 20 trillion dollars in household net worth has been “wiped out” so far this year.

#11 A new CBS News/YouGov survey has found that 74 percent of Americans believe that things are going badly in this country and that 51 percent of Americans actually believe that Joe Biden is “incompetent”.

Right now, conditions are so similar to what we witnessed just before the financial crisis of 2008.

If we had addressed our long-term problems back then, perhaps we would be in a much different place at the moment.

But instead, we appear to be poised to repeat history in a lot of ways.

In fact, many experts believe that the crisis that is staring us in the face will be even worse than what we went through more than a decade ago.  For example, just check out what Peter Schiff is saying

This one is going to be even bigger because the economy has a lot more debt now than it did in 2008. And Americans are less able to pay it when interest rates rise because the balances are much greater. So, we’re in much worse shape as a result of all the bailouts and all the stimulus that papered over the last crisis. So, now the one we’re dealing with is going to be much worse because we kicked the can down the road instead of solving the problem when we had a chance.”

He makes some really great points.

Every time there has been some sort of a crisis in our society, our leaders responded by showering the system with even more money.

In 2008, the U.S. national debt crossed the 10 trillion dollar threshold.

In 2022, the U.S. national debt has crossed the 30 trillion dollar threshold.

Our politicians have been systematically destroying our future, and most Americans didn’t seem to care.

Now a day of reckoning has arrived, and it is going to be immensely painful.

There is no silver bullet that is going to cure inflation.

The Federal Reserve is going to try to tame inflation by hiking interest rates, but that will just destroy the housing bubble and dramatically slow down the economy.

And there is no silver bullet that is going to end the shortages that we are currently facing.

We are now experiencing some of the consequences of decades of mismanagement, and a lot more pain is on the way.

SpongeGiants (Lyrics On Screen)

This song played over and over in my mind when I was serving time in the ADC Brickeys.

Putin says ‘Thank God’ some foreign companies have left Russia

From HERE

LONDON (Reuters) -President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he was glad some foreign companies had left Russia because home-grown businesses could take their place, and he warned the West that Moscow would still find ways to acquire advanced technology and luxury goods.

Putin has cast the invasion of Ukraine as a turning point in Russian history: a revolt by Moscow against the United States, which he says has humiliated Russia since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine says it is fighting for its survival.

Besides the death and horror of war, the conflict and the West’s attempt to isolate Russia as punishment have crimped global economic growth and triggered a wave of inflation as the prices of grain, cooking oil, fertiliser and energy soar.

Since the war, a host of major foreign investors – ranging from BP to McDonald’s Corp – have exited just as the Russian economy faces its worst contraction since the years following the turmoil of the Soviet collapse.

Sometimes when you look at those who leave – thank God, perhaps? We will occupy their niches: our business, our production – it has already grown, and it will safely sit on the ground prepared by our partners,” Putin said.

Speaking by video link to leaders of ex-Soviet states, Putin quipped that luxuries such as the Mercedes favoured by bandits in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia would still be available, though he admitted they might be a little more expensive.

“It will be a little more expensive for them but these are people who already drove Mercedes 600s and they will still do so. I can assure you they will bring them in from wherever, from whichever country.”

Putin said Russia still needed access to the advanced technologies of developed economies.

“We are not going to cut ourselves off from this – they want to squeeze us out a bit, but in the modern world this is simply unrealistic, impossible.”

He did not elaborate on how Russia would find ways to maintain access to western components and software.

Putin promised that Western attempts to isolate Russia would fail, saying developed economies were grappling with an inflationary spiral, broken supply chains and a food crisis just as the centre of global economic power had moved to Asia.

Western sanctions have stoked Russian inflation while snarling supply chains, though Putin said the country is coping well and that Russia is turning away from the West in favour of China, India and other powers.

“Representatives of our businesses face problems, of course, especially in the field of supply chains and transport. But nevertheless, everything can be adjusted, everything can be built in a new way,” Putin said.

Not without losses at a certain stage, but it helps us in a way to become stronger. In any case, we are definitely acquiring new competencies, we are starting to concentrate our economic, financial and administrative resources on breakthrough areas

Russia’s central bank slashed its key interest rate to 11% on Thursday and said it saw room for more cuts this year, as inflation slows from more than 20-year highs and the economy heads towards a contraction.

Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine has killed thousands of people, displaced millions more and raised fears of the most serious confrontation between Russia and the United States since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Putin says the United States was using Ukraine to threaten Russia through NATO enlargement and Moscow had to defend against the persecution of Russian-speaking people.

Ukraine and its Western allies reject these as baseless pretexts to invade a sovereign country.

The Prisoner S1E11 It’s Your Funeral

The latest installment of the 1960s television show The Prisoner.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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The united West are drunk on power and have decided to “go for broke”. Lord help us!

Well, today I had another you-tube video censored. The video was about the town where I grew up in, and where I am now. I hoped that it was inspirational. But apparently the You-tube censors felt otherwise. They believed that comparing my town in the United States to my town in China would generate people to kill themselves. No. I am not being “funny”. I am speaking the truth…

2022 05 31 13 26
2022 05 31 13 26

It’s actually kind of funny when you think about it. Well, I will generate a second replacement video. And I will pay attention so that I don’t inspire anyone to kill themselves. Sheech!

Let’s get on with the news…

MAJOR DEVELOPMENT: NATO Says “Previous Commitments to Russia no longer valid”

BREAKING NEWS 7:48 AM EDT — Deputy Secretary-General of NATO: The alliance is free from its previous commitments with Russia not to deploy its forces in Eastern Europe.

UPDATE 8:11 AM EDT —

VILNIUS, lITHUANIA — NATO is no longer bound by past commitments to hold back from deploying its forces in eastern Europe, the US-led alliance’s deputy secretary general said Sunday.

Moscow itself has “voided of any content” the NATO-Russia Founding Act, by attacking Ukraine and halting dialogue with the alliance, Mircea Geoana told AFP.

Under the 1997 Founding Act, intended to reset the relationship between Russia and the Alliance, both sides agreed to work to “prevent any potentially threatening build-up of conventional forces in agreed regions of Europe, to include Central and Eastern Europe.”

“They took decisions, they made obligations there not to aggress neighbors, which they are doing, and to have regular consultations with NATO, which they don’t,” said Geoana, speaking in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.

“So I think that in fact this founding act is basically not functioning because of Russia,” he added.

Russia, he said, had effectively moved away from the terms of the 1997 agreement.

“Now we have no restrictions to have robust posture in the eastern flank and to ensure that every square inch of NATO’s territory is protected by Article 5 and our allies.”

NATO’s article 5 is the one referring to collective defense, which says that an attack on one member is an attack on all of them.

Geoana did not give details of any such planned deployment, but said he anticipated “a robust, flexible and sustainable presence.”

In 2017, NATO had already deployed multinational tactical groups to the Baltic states and Poland as a dissuasive measure. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the end of February, it sent reinforcements there.

The Baltic states have called for a greater presence of its allies there, including for the development of brigades to replace the smaller tactical groups.

NATO defense ministers will meet in mid-June to discuss this and other questions, and the leaders of the NATO members states will meet to approve any changes at a NATO summit in Madrid at the end of June.

Texas, 1977

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5 4

Authentic Thai Basil Chicken Recipe (ผัดกระเพราไก่)

R.de80c7863ef78732fa699bd514bedf43
R.de80c7863ef78732fa699bd514bedf43

In this Thai basil chicken recipe, you’ll learn to cook an authentic Thai street version of the dish.

Thai basil chicken, better known in Thai as pad kra pao gai (ผัดกระเพราไก่ pad ka prao gai), is a contender for the most popular, and the most beloved Thai street food dish of all time.

You know sometimes when you go to a restaurant and you have no idea what to order, or even what you want to eat?

When that happens in Thailand, pad kra pao gai (ผัดกระเพราไก่, with chicken), or any type of meat stir fried with Thai holy basil, is a dish that comes to the rescue!

thai chicken basil recipe 4 X3
thai chicken basil recipe 4 X3

Ingredients you’ll need

For the fried egg (optional, but I think it’s mandatory)

  • 1 egg
  • 2 tablespoons of oil for frying

For the basil chicken

  • 1 chicken breast (or any other cut of boneless chicken, about 200 grams)
  • 5 cloves of garlic
  • 4 – 10 Thai chilies – when you fry the chilies, they aren’t as spicy
  • 1 tablespoon oil for frying
  • 1 teaspoon of oyster sauce
  • 1/2 teaspoon light soy sauce
  • 1 splash of dark sweet soy sauce (you can use Indonesian kecap manis)
  • 1/2 teaspoon sugar
  • 1 handful of Thai holy basil leaves (really try to get holy basil)

You can make your pad see ew with chicken, pork, squid, shrimp, or even tofu, but this time I’ll be making this Thai basil recipes with chicken. However, feel free to substitute chicken with whatever meat you want.

Note: To see the exact steps for making this Thai basil chicken recipe, scroll down below to the recipe box, or keep reading for more of an explanation of this amazing Thai dish and an in-depth look into some of the ingredients.

2022 05 30 20 00
2022 05 30 20 00

Let’s quickly talk about Thai basil…

There are three main types of basil used in Thai cooking: Thai sweet basil (ใบโหระพา bai horapa – this one is often just referred to as Thai basil), lemon basil (ใบแมงลัก bai maenglak), and holy basil (ใบกะเพรา bai kra prao).

This Thai basil chicken recipes uses holy basil (ใบกะเพรา).

But, can I use Thai sweet basil for this recipe?

Unfortunately it can be challenging to find holy basil outside of Thailand, and I’ve found that Thai restaurants in the United States often substitute Thai sweet basil for Thai holy basil and call it basil chicken.

However, sweet basil doesn’t have the vibrant peppery flavor that holy basil has, and so to get this dish to taste the way it tastes in Thailand, you really can’t substitute another type of basil for holy basil.

But if you simply cannot find holy basil (you could grow some yourself) and can only find Thai sweet basil, you can still make this recipe, and though it won’t have that peppery flavor, it will still probably taste good.

For a little reassurance, on my latest visit to the United States, one day at the Asian supermarket I came across a big box of holy basil, I think grown in California – so it can be found in the US.

2022 05 30 20 01
2022 05 30 20 01

Another way you can really elevate the flavor of this Thai basil chicken recipe is by using a mortar and pestle to hand grind your garlic and chilies. A garlic press would also do the job well.

Unlike mincing, grinding really releases all the juices and oils of the chilies and garlic and it brings out an extra depth of flavor, which in return makes the entire dish of chicken basil more vibrant, garlicky and spicy.

You don’t need to crush the garlic and chilies down to a curry paste, but you’re just looking for just a coarse crush, like in the photo above.

But no worries if you don’t have a mortar and pestle, mincing is still adequate.

2022 05 30 20 02
2022 05 30 20 02

Before getting started on this Thai basil chicken recipe, often my very first step is to begin by cooking a pot of rice. That way it’s finished and freshly cooked as soon as the chicken and egg are ready.

The first step is to fry the egg. Thai fried eggs are more like deep fried eggs, cooked in lots of oil. The extra oil gives them a lovely crispiness on the outside edges, and they taste so incredibly good mixed with the rice and chicken.

After the egg is finished cooking, lay it aside and get started cooking the chicken.

Finally, just like all of my Thai recipes, the ingredients listed (and the quantities) are a guide – it’s what I used – but use it loosely as a guide. Thai food is made to taste the way you want it to.

Thai basil chicken recipe

Time: About 30 minutes or less
Recipe size: 1 plate meal, and to be honest, it tastes best when cooked in a single portion. You could multiply this recipe a few times to make enough for a few people at once, or you could make individual portions.
Utensils: wok, frying pan
Flavors: Salty stir fry, complete meal deal, fragrant from the chilies, garlic, and holy basil
Eat it with: Pad kra pao gai (ผัดกระเพราไก่) is normally eaten on top of a pile of plain steamed jasmine rice with a fried egg on the side.

2022 05 30 20 04
2022 05 30 20 04

Dish out a plate of freshly steamed jasmine rice, scoop the hot Thai basil chicken (pad kra pao gai ผัดกระเพราไก่) onto one side of your rice, and nestle your fried egg on the other side of the plate.

And there you have one of the most widely loved Thai street food dishes in Thailand.

Try this recipe out, let me know if you have any questions or comments below, and if you enjoyed this recipes, I would really appreciate it if you would share this with a friend you know who loves Thai food as well – thank you!

2022 05 30 20 05
2022 05 30 20 05

Toronto, Canada, 1972

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Reality Sets-in: Europe Cracking; CANNOT agree on Russia Oil Embargo

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EDITORIAL OPINION —

Superficial European “unity” over Russia’s entry into Ukraine to De-Nazify and De-militarize” that regime, which resulted in Europe sanctioning Russia, is falling apart.

The European Union CANNOT get unanimous agreement to embargo Russian Oil or gas into Europe.   The reality, that Europe actually needs inexpensive, reliable energy, is finally taking hold.

The knee-jerk reaction by European Union countries to “sanction” Russia, was poorly thought out from its beginning.  By sanctioning Russia, Europe was actually siding WITH the Nazi-infested regime of Ukraine.

That was downright foolish on every level.

But ever-willing to contort reality, politicians in Europe chose to call their actions “defending democracy” and “defending Ukraine sovereignty.”  That flew until Ukraine outlawed opposition political parties, which is not “democracy” and was exposed as using heavy artillery against civilians in Luhansk and Donetsk, WHO THEY BURIED IN MASS GRAVES, which is not something any “sovereign” can legally do.

More directly though, Europe came to realize that their countries actually DEPEND on Russian natural gas and Russian oil.

Their economies require inexpensive, reliable energy, which Russia provides.

As the initial “sanctions” took effect, prices for petrol in Europe skyrocketed to over $10 a gallon.  Home heating oil — and natural gas — are also skyrocketing in price.

Europeans simply cannot afford it.

When winter comes this year, people in Europe will face the mind-numbing choice of heating their home to stay alive, or eating.   That’s a choice no one NEEDS to be forced into; except that “sanctions” on Russia are forcing that precise choice upon citizens.

The whole situation is untenable.

The politicians in Europe, shielded from the ugly reality of the decisions they make, actually want to make things worse by adopting a Europe-wide embargo of Russian oil.  Discussion to achieve that have been ongoing, but finally fell apart this past weekend.

Many (but not all) European nations simply cannot survive with viable, normal, societies, and thriving businesses, if Russia is embargoed.  The efforts to embargo have, finally, fallen apart.

Just today, Britain announced they expect rolling electric blackouts this coming winter.

As many as six million British households could be subjected to power cuts this winter if Russian gas supplies to Europe stop, The Times reported Sunday, citing a Whitehall document.

It said that imports of natural gas from Norway could halve next winter amid surging EU demand. Britain buys around half of its total supplies from the Nordic country.

Shipments of liquified natural gas from major producers such as the United States and Qatar could also halve this winter, the UK government warned, pointing to fierce global competition for supplies of the fuel.

Meanwhile, interconnectors from the Netherlands and Belgium could also be cut off in winter, as the two countries struggle meeting their own demand.

The UK, which has vowed to end the importation of Russian oil by the end of the year, is now seeking to bolster electricity supply by extending the life of its coal and aging nuclear power stations

This is a good thing.

The whole issue of “sanctions” upon Russia, was poorly thought out from it inception.  Russia is not in the wrong on Ukraine.   It is Ukraine that is in the wrong.

To their credit, Russia made Herculean diplomatic efforts – for years — to try to avoid what is now taking place.   Even as recently as December 2021 into January of this year, Russia put forth Diplomatic proposals for “iron-clad-legally enforceable, security guarantees” which would have avoided all the bloodshed and destruction now taking place.

Both Europe and America WILLFULLY chose to ignore/reject those Russian Diplomatic efforts.

Then the fighting began on February 24.

Politicians in Europe and America, unaccustomed to anyone daring to disagree with them, or acting with force in opposition to them, got their skirts in a twist, and tried to manhandle Russia with economic sanctions.  Worse, both the US and EU then outright STOLE Russia’s investments here in the West.  They literally seized billions in Russia’s bank reserves and sovereign wealth funds.   It was outright theft. The US Congress, Senate and US Treasury Office of Foreign Asset Control are nothing more than brazen thieves.  They seem to think that stealing someone else’s money, without due process of law, is somehow “OK” when a government does it.   It’s not OK.  It’s theft.

All of it backfired.

The only nations being harmed by the Sanctions are European countries, and the USA.   Fuel costs for gasoline and diesel have skyrocketed to outright unaffordable levels.

Commerce is rapidly stopping because companies cannot afford shipping costs or even energy costs for manufacturing.

These are not “Putin Price Hikes” as the politicians love to claim; they are artificially-induced price increases because economic sanctions were imposed.  We in America and in Europe, did this to ourselves!

That reality is finally sinking in.  This past weekend, Europe could not come to unanimous agreement to embargo Russian oil.

Oh, did I mention, it gets worse for the Europeans too.

Over the weekend, Italy Army General Leonardo Tricarico publicly urged not to provoke Russia. Tricarico believes that the EU should leave the “crazy idea to win in Ukraine.”

He then went on to say publicly “If we want to reach an agreement with Putin on Ukraine, then we must avoid provocations and useless things, such as NATO expansion.”

Then, the coup de gras, when he said “We must force Ukraine to capitulate and not provoke Russia.”

FINALLY!  Someone actually stated the obvious!!!

Kudos to General Tricarico!!!!!

What has gone on here with Russia-Ukraine-Europe-US-NATO has been a travesty of mis-management and deliberate provocation of Russia by the West.

It needs to stop.

Fast.

Before the ongoing hostilities explode into a much larger, and far deadlier World War.

14 Immortal Black And White Film Scenes Tastefully Colored By Austrian Artist

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Buster Keaton in the film ‘The General’ (1926)

The exquisite and elegant beauty of monochrome film and photography is unparalleled. At the same time, it would be extremely curious and fun to see what some of the most iconic movie scenes in film history would look like in color, wouldn’t it?

If you agree with that sentiment, the works of Austrian photographer and photo editor Mario Unger (previously here, here and here) is just what the doctor prescribed to satiate that curiosity. The photo magician that he is, Mario meticulously colorized 14 of the most iconic film scenes and portraits of famous film personas, artists and musicians, and gave them new life.

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A scene from ‘Abbott And Costello Go To Mars’ (1953)

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A scene from ‘You Only Live Once’ (1937) Featuring Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda

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The Beautiful Grace Kelly in the film ‘Rear Window’ (1954)

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Signed Autograph of Mary Pickford (c.1914)

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A scene from ‘The Seahawk’ (1940) Featuring Errol Flynn

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The Famous Mexican Painter Frida Kahlo at the age of 11 (1919)

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A scene from the Movie ‘Their First Mistake’ (1932) with Laurel and Hardy

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Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald in 1946 by William P. Gottlieb

10 7 1
A Scene from the Film ‘Stake Uncle Sam To Play Your Hand’ (1918) Featuring Mae Marsh in the Role of a Belgian Girl and A.C.Gibbons in the Role of a German Soldier

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A scene from the film ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946) with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall

12 7
Portrait of the Virtuous Fred Astaire

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Portrait of Kay Aldridge

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A scene from ‘Angel And The Badman’ (1947) with John Wayne and Gail Russel

China urges UN rights chief to look into school shootings in US

From HERE

The Global Times made the suggestion in an editorial Tuesday (May 31), a day after Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a regular briefing in Beijing that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights should produce a report on problems the US faces.

"The US system is equally incapable, or lacks interest, motivation, and courage, to address these problems thoroughly," said the Communist Party newspaper, which added that US domestic issues have "intensified its external aggression."

China has ramped up criticism of the US's human rights record around a trip to the Asian nation by UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, and the fault-finding escalated after the recent killings at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and at a school in Uvalde, Texas.

The party's flagship People's Daily ran a commentary under the headline "Racism a poison running through American body politic," that referenced the killing of Blacks in Buffalo, and the official Xinhua News Agency and English-language China Daily published similar articles.

Of course, the usual reporting trick used by “news” is to redirect the criticism away from the United States and blame the accuser…

The commentaries appear to be an effort to hit back at the US, which along with lawmakers in other nations, has accused China of carrying out genocide in Xinjiang. Beijing calls the accusations "the lie of the century."

The US has also criticised China for how it handled Ms Bachelet's recent trip.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken's press office said in a statement that authorities "did not enable a complete and independent assessment of the human rights environment" in the world's No. 2 economy and that it had reports Xinjiang residents were warned not to complain.

Human rights groups were also critical of Ms Bachelet and her six-day trip, which she repeatedly said wasn't an "investigation" of Chinese practices in Xinjiang or elsewhere.

What the U.S. just said about China is TERRIFYING | Redacted with Clayton Morris

A very, VERY good video. A must watch.

But you know... China has been at war with the USA since 2014, and China has never forgotten the bio-weapon "carpet bombing" of it's livestock. China does "tit-for-tat" actions prior to a formal war-declaration. I can only wonder what China is doing about all this... -MM

Tens Of Thousands Of Chickens Killed In 3 Million Eggs Per day Egg Farm Fire

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The united States of America is obviously under planned attack of its food supply and food distribution network.  The people doing this must be found and “stopped” by any means necessary.

Massive flames burned down a barn with tens of thousands of chickens in Wright County, Minnesota over the weekend.

The fire started late Saturday night at Forsman Farms in Howard Lake, causing major damage.

The Trebesch family thought they would spend Saturday night around their bonfire, but just after 10 p.m. they noticed massive flames across the field at Forsman Farms.

“It was unbelievable how quick it grew, it was insane,” Andy Trebesch said. “It was the whole sky, it was quite large.”

They called 911. Firefighters from multiple agencies across Wright County showed up, many volunteer firefighters. A barn housing tens of thousands of chickens was leveled, in what a farm spokesperson called a “tragic accident.”

According to Forsman Farms website, the farm started in 1918, and now the fourth-generation family farm sells more than three million eggs a day to some of the nation’s largest retailers.

“Overnight, a fire destroyed one of our barns at our Howard Lake farm. No one was injured and we are grateful that first responders were quickly on scene to put out the fire. Unfortunately, chickens were lost because of the fire. We are evaluating the extent of the damage – which appears to be confined to a single structure – as well as investigating the cause of the fire,” a Forsman Farms spokesperson said.

NUMEROUS OTHER FOOD – SUPPLY ALSO TORCHED THIS YEAR

In April, the tragic destruction by fire of the headquarters of Azure Standard in Oregon shocked millions of people, and since that news broke quite a few readers have been reaching out to me about the long string of unusual blazes that we have been witnessing from coast to coast in recent months.

I decided to look into this phenomenon for myself, and I am sharing what I have discovered so far in this article.  Dr. Benjamin Braddock and others had already been digging into this, and their research proved quite valuable as I began my investigation.

Some of the incidents that people have reported I was not able to independently verify, and others I felt were too minor to be put on this list.  With all that being said, the following is a list of 16 major fires that have occurred at key food industry facilities in the U.S. since the start of 2022…

#1 Salinas, California

As the smoke settles near Taylor Farms, questions remain on the future of the business and the roughly 1,000 people employed at the Abbott Street facility.

There is little to nothing left of the processing facility due to fire and smoke damages caused by Wednesday night’s blaze, according to Deputy Fire Chief Sam Klemek.

“About 85% to 95% of the building is a total loss,” he said.

#2 Hermiston, Oregon

Multiple workers are hospitalized following an explosion at a food processing facility that has nearby residents on alert for possible evacuation.

The explosion occurred Tuesday evening at Shearer’s Foods in Hermiston, a city in agriculturally rich eastern Oregon. No deaths have been reported from the blast, but the extent of the damage to the plant and its future were not clear. City officials are concerned what the fire could mean for the community and local economy.

#3 Conway, New Hampshire

Neighbors banded together to support crews as they battled a fire in Conway for about 16 hours Monday night.

More than 12 departments and agencies worked together to put out the fire at East Conway Beef and Pork.

#4 San Juan, Texas

On March 31, 2022, a structure fire significantly damaged a large portion of the largest fresh onion packing facilities in South Texas.

#5 Jonesboro, Arkansas

“The situation at our Jonesboro factory is under control and we are looking into the cause of the fire,” a Nestle spokesperson said. “Thankfully, no employees were injured and all are safe. We appreciate the quick response of the Jonesboro Fire Department and emergency response teams. The factory will remain closed as we assess the damage and return the factory to full operation. We plan to continue to support our employees financially during this time.”

Nestle opened the plant in 2002 and in December 2020 the company unveiled plans to invest more than $100 million to expand the frozen foods plant, including the addition of 90,000 square feet and a new production line for Hot Pockets frozen sandwiches. In addition to Hot Pockets, Nestle makes products under the Stouffer’s, Lean Cuisine, DiGiorno, Tombstone and Sweet Earth brands at the plant.

#6 Mauston, Wisconsin

A portion of Mauston’s Wisconsin River Meats burnt down during an overnight fire Feb. 2-3, with the cause of the fire still under investigation.

“The old portion of the plant is a total loss,” Wisconsin River Meats said in a Facebook post about the fire. “We humbly ask that you be patient and please give us some time to sort out the cause of the fire and for us to transition some of our business and invoicing to our warehouse.”

#7 Fayetteville, Illinois

Operating from what company officials referred to as the command center at Deli Star Corp.’s St. Louis Innovation Center, the Siegel family-led operations and executive team have spent the week scrambling to fulfill customers’ orders and work with local officials investigating a Jan. 11 fire that destroyed its 75,000-square-foot processing plant in Fayetteville, about 40 miles southeast of them.

#8 Belfast, Maine

Fire crews from several towns have been battling a fire at the Penobscot McCrum potato processing plant in Belfast. Crews were called to the scene at 28 Pierce Street around 3:30 a.m., according to Maine Department of Public Safety spokesperson Shannon Moss.

#9 Leoti, Kansas

A fire at a fertilizer company in western Kansas prompted evacuations Tuesday afternoon because hazardous materials were involved, officials said.

The Ford County Regional Hazardous Materials Team deployed to Leoti for the fire and was fighting the blaze and removing hazardous material, Wichita County Clerk Lynda Goodrich said.

#10 Claypool, Indiana

Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) said on Wednesday a fire had broken out in a bag house at its Claypool, Indiana, soybean processing and biodiesel plant on Tuesday and the affected systems had been suspended.

No employees were injured and the fire was put out by 9:15 p.m. central time on Tuesday, LDC said in a statement. LDC’s website said soybean deliveries were suspended at the plant on Wednesday. LDC says Claypool is the largest fully integrated soybean processing and biodiesel plant in the United States.

#11 Winston-Salem, Carolina

An uncontrolled fire at a fertilizer plant in North Carolina forced thousands of people to evacuate as firefighters stood back Tuesday because of the danger of a large explosion.

Authorities drove through neighborhoods and knocked on doors asking residents to leave within a one-mile radius (1.6 km) of the Winston Weaver Company fertilizer plant on the north side of Winston-Salem, where the fire started Monday night. Overnight, bright orange flames and thick plumes of smoke could be seen shooting into the sky. No injuries were reported.

#12 Sunnyside, Washington

A smoldering pile of sulfur quickly became a raging chemical fire just after 1 p.m. Monday at Nutrien Ag Solutions, 1101 Midvale Road, Sunnyside Fire Chief Ken Anderson said.

The fire destroyed one storage building on the southeast corner of the fertilizer storage facility in the Port of Sunnyside and damaged others, but adjacent Nutrien buildings and storage tanks containing hazardous chemicals were spared, Anderson said Monday evening.

#13 Lecompte, Louisiana

A fire started at the Cargill-Nutrena feed mill in Lecompte, LA in the early hours of Thursday morning and burned for 12 hours, coverage by local television news station KALB said. An explosion reportedly occurred as firefighters were working the scene.

#14 Maricopa, Arizona

It’s a long road to recovery for Maricopa Food Pantry after a fire destroyed around 50,000 lb of food. The fire happened just 15 minutes after their food bank closed on Monday morning. Smoke was still coming from the rubble 24 hours later. “It had to be 40-50 feet in the air, just pure black smoke. It engulfed the entire neighborhood,” said Maricopa Food Pantry President Mike Connelly. “The heat we could feel down at the corner.”

#15 Dufur, Oregon

The headquarters of Azure Standard, the nation’s premier independent distributor of organic and healthy food, was destroyed by fire overnight. There were no injuries. The cause of the fire is unknown and under investigation. The loss of the facility and the impact on companywide operations is being assessed and expected to be limited and temporary. No other Azure Standard facilities were affected.

#16 Planfield, Indiana

Investigators from the ATF’s National Response Team began its on-scene investigation on Friday into the massive fire at a Walmart facility in Plainfield.

The team, led by Supervisor Christopher Forkner, is working with the Plainfield Fire Territory, Indiana State Fire Marshal’s Office and the Plainfield Police Department, according to a press release. ATF special agents from the Indianapolis Offices of the Columbus Field Division will also be assisting.

Of course it is not unusual for there to be fires at food industry facilities, and fire departments are accustomed to responding to such fires and putting them out.

But in many of these cases, we are talking about absolutely uncontrollable fires that seemed to erupt very suddenly.

And in many of these cases the firefighters that responded were not able to save the structures because the fires were so enormous.

Needless to say, the collective loss of all of these facilities will make the coming food shortages quite a bit worse.

It seems to many people this string of fires is not accidental.   It seems the American people are under attack.

Whoever is perpetrating this, needs to be “ended.”

Utah state vet warns of cattle disease outbreak

From HERE

Utah is warning of a disease outbreak in cattle. The state veterinarian says that several bulls tested positive for trichomoniasis after grazing in a southern Idaho pasture last summer.

Ten herds grazed in that field and the state vet calls the discovery a concern.

Trich is a parasite that is spread through breeding. Bulls remain infected for life.

There is no treatment, and it can be economically devastating to a herd.

Biden’s New Boondoggle

A potential trade deal with 12 Indo-Pacific countries threatens to further hurt the American middle class.

From HERE

Earlier this week, President Joe Biden unveiled the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), a potential new trade deal with 12 Indo-Pacific countries.

While the details of the deal remain murky, some have raised serious concerns based on the little information that has become public. The IPEF does not seem to focus on lifting tariff barriers like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which other countries have suggested the U.S. rejoin instead of going forward with the IPEF.

Instead, Biden’s new trade deal appears to be a handout to Big Tech, big online retailers like Amazon, and express shippers.

The U.S. and the 12 partner nations—Australia, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—released a joint statement Monday announcing the framework.

“We share a commitment to a free, open, fair, inclusive, interconnected, resilient, secure, and prosperous Indo-Pacific region that has the potential to achieve sustainable and inclusive economic growth,” the statement read. “We acknowledge our economic policy interests in the region are intertwined, and deepening economic engagement among partners is crucial for continued growth, peace, and prosperity.”

The pandemic, the nations added, has “emphasized the importance of strengthening economic competitiveness and cooperation and securing critical supply chains,” and underscores the importance of “stimulating job growth and improving economic opportunities, including for our workers, women, medium- and small-enterprises, and our societies’ most vulnerable groups.”

Some conservatives, such as American Compass executive director Oren Cass, are uneasy about the deal.

“We should support the idea of assembling a regional economic bloc that includes U.S. allies and excludes China,” Cass told The American Conservative via email. “But it could also turn into a boondoggle that mostly just benefits multinational corporations.”

“The question,” he added, “is what everyone is intending to agree to, and what leverage the U.S. has to shape an agreement that benefits us. I worry that we are still caught in the neoliberal framework that takes access to the U.S. market as the unquestioned starting point.”

The vague language used in the nations’ joint statement suggests Cass’s fears are well-founded. For example, the signatory nations argued that, in the long run, “economic competitiveness will be largely defined by our ability to harness technology, promote innovation, participate in the digital economy, justly transition energy systems and achieve energy security, and tackle the climate crisis in a manner that produces equitable, inclusive growth and improves socio-economic welfare.”

What those platitudes will mean in practice is yet to be seen, but the deal appears to be centered around four pillars: trade, supply chains, clean energy, and anti-corruption. The White House’s fact sheet for the IPEF gives those components of the plan slightly different names, detailing the sorts of provisions that could be included under each pillar.

To foster a “connected economy,” the IPEF members “will pursue high-standard rules of the road in the digital economy, including standards on cross-border data flows and data localization.” The deal will also focus on “the region’s rapidly growing e-commerce sector, while addressing issues is [sic] such as online privacy,” and “seek strong labor and environment standards and corporate accountability provisions.”

While that language may seem benign, Charles Benoit, trade counsel at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, spots some red flags.

“Big Tech, when TPP started, wasn’t a big part of the trade scene,” Benoit said. “They very much are now, and they’ve got big trade-policy goals.” While “Big Tech sees that there’s not much appetite for tariffs to be cut, they think, ‘Why should that stop us from achieving our policy goals?’”

The biggest policy goal for Big Tech companies in the trade space, according to Benoit, “is stopping data-localization requirements, which mean you have to have a server within the country’s borders.”

The IPEF’s stated commitment to pursue multilateral standards on data flows and localization, Benoit fears, could strip away requirements to keep data security and maintenance operations on U.S. soil, and incentivize those operations to move to Asia. Removing data-localization requirements would not only be a bad deal for the American workers currently tasked with manning these facilities. It would pose a national-security risk, given China’s ambitions for regional hegemony and rapidly increasing cyber capabilities.

Benoit also expressed concerns about the fact sheet’s explanation of the second pillar, the creation of a “resilient economy,” focused on stabilizing supply chains. The IPEF’s purported focus on supply chains, paired with its enthusiasm for a growing e-commerce sector, has the makings of another push to increase the de minimis threshold, a rule that currently allows shipments with a declared value of less than $800 to enter the U.S. without undergoing tariff evaluations.

When Congress established the de minimis threshold in the 20th century, it created three separate categories of goods that could enter tariff-free under a certain value: souvenirs, bonafide gifts, and certain mail orders. De minimis standards were created, Benoit told TAC, “because we didn’t want to use regular customs officers’ judgment or discretion on what to waive through. So, Congress said, ‘We’re going to tell you what’s worth your time and what’s not.’”

“The first two categories were $10 for most of that time period,” Benoit said. “The mail-order category was originally just $1. Everything over a dollar would have to get a tariff assessment.”

But NAFTA blew the lid off of de minimis thresholds in 1995. The de minimis threshold for the mail-order category, which has become known as the e-commerce category today, increased from about $5 to $200. It was a “huge win for express shippers like FedEx and UPS,” Benoit explained.

“When I see e-commerce, I see them pushing all the other IPEF nations to have higher de minimis thresholds.” Benoit told TAC. “The express shippers love this because they’re displacing a whole business segment, what used to be traditional import wholesalers,” and “can continue displacing” other small and medium businesses.

“The Jake Sullivan types don’t care at all about competition and don’t have real antitrust concerns at all,” Benoit claimed. “A lot of what we see in this policy area is securing pathways for entrenched big business and monopolies in the name of securing access, while actually making it harder for other businesses to compete in a given field.”

The IPEF has a significant environmental component. The signatories tout future “first-of-their-kind commitments on clean energy, decarbonization, and infrastructure that promote good-paying jobs” to “accelerate efforts to tackle the climate crisis.”

If the past is prologue with respect to clean energy provisions, then the IPEF’s clean-energy chapter entail be a massive tariff cut in favor of big businesses that off-shore or outsource manufacturing.

“For a long time there was a proposed WTO environmental-goods agreement,” Benoit explained. “It’s basically an effort to cut tariffs on thousands of machine components under the rubric of making clean energy cheaper. But it’s not like these provisions are limited to wind turbines and solar panels. They cover pretty standard machine components.

“So, a lot of other goods could get their tariffs cut under an environmental-goods agreement in the IPEF,” he said, if the IPEF is styled after previous attempts to make clean energy more cost-effective via trade agreements. “We could end up cutting tariffs on thousands of goods that are only tangentially related to clean energy.”

Nevertheless, the White House says the IPEF will create a “fair economy,” by tackling bribery, money laundering, and other forms of corruption. That’s all well and good, but when Americans cry out for fair trade, their foremost concern is not money laundering; it is the propensity of multinational corporations and other countries take advantage of deals like the IPEF to undercut America’s middle and working classes. The problem isn’t limited to individual actors failing to play by the rules of the game. The larger problem is that the rules of the game themselves are rotten.

While things could change, the IPEF is looking like another rotten deal for the American worker.

Be prepared for an animal disease outbreak

Hopefully, infectious diseases don’t appear in Canada but the industry needs to have a plan in place
If there ever is a foreign animal disease outbreak in Canada, we all know it could be devastating to the industry.

Contagious pathogens such as foot and mouth in bovines, sheep and swine, or African Swine Fever (ASF) in pigs, can cost individual producers in lost production and animal deaths, as well as closing the borders to all exports.

The older farming generation might remember the British 2001 foot and mouth disease outbreak that required the destruction of more than six million animals to control the disease.

In Canada, AHEM (Animal Health Emergency Management Project) is an organization created to meet with the different production-animal groups and provide advice on how the Canadian industry can be better prepared in the event of a foreign animal disease outbreak. To read more about the four-year initiative that runs until 2023, visit https://animalhealth.ca.

If you run across AHEM information please take it seriously. This work could potentially benefit us all immensely. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us appreciate how quickly a contagious disease can spread through a population.

African Swine Fever would do the same with a tremendous mortality rate in the hog industry.

The AHEM group has already developed a producer handbook as well as a fact sheet on what to do if, for example, your herd was quarantined. It’s very good information to use if ever needed — get the producer handbook and give it a read.

Incredible Futuristic-Looking 1939 Duesenberg Coupe Simone Midnight Ghost

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1 a74

Duesenberg ceased production in 1937 after Cord’s financial empire collapsed. However, between 1937 and 1940, one automobile put the final touch to this historical marque. It it took three years to complete both the tailor-made interior and futuristic body.

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2 7s3

By command of the owner, it was to be painted in a two-tone grey paint scheme so it would look like a ghost in the night. Finished in 1939, this legendary masterpiece was christened as “Duesenberg Coupé Simone Midnight Ghost.” It was both the longest Duesenberg and the last one delivered; and finally the last one ever made.

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3 d71

Inspired by the modernist lines of the Art Deco movement, it captures all the romance of a bygone era. The graceful sweep of the fenders, the luxuriously appointed interior complete with a crystal-clear steering wheel.

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4 66

The car was made by the American car body designer Emmet-Armand on the basis of the Duesenberg Type J. They only made one of them which was ordered by the French cosmetics king Gui De LaRouche.

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5 64

Gui De LaRouche had always believed that a man must succumb to his passions. So he commissioned Emmett and Armand to create an exotic-bodied Coupé on a Duesenberg chassis. The new automobile would be a gift to his lover, a beauty called Simone.

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6 60 1

As the drums of war were beating and Hitler was moving into France, many automobiles were stored in hide-a-ways to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis. The “Duezy” was lost somewhere on the French countryside at the beginning of World War II. The stranger part of the story is that Emmet disappeared with it. There still is a chance that some day “Simone Midnight Ghost” will be found in a shabby old barn however it’s also possible that it was destroyed during the war.

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7 52 1

Nevertheless it’s probably one of the most stunning designs of the 20th century and it will be kept in our memories.

Syphilis-ridden Spanish Skeletons Found at Lima’s First Hospital

From HERE

The remains of 42 syphilis-ridden, colonial Spaniards have been unearthed at a 500-year-old hospital in Lima. But it’s suspected that beneath these poor afflicted souls, might lie the lost mummified bodies of the three last rulers of the Inca Empire.

Lima, the capital city of Peru, is located on the country’s arid Pacific coast and represents one of the largest population centers in South America. The city was founded with the building of a church on January 18, 1535, after Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro had successfully subdued the Inca population.

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2022 06 01 10 07

The city’s foundation date, January 18, 1535, marked the 16th-century Catholic ‘Epiphany’ holiday, celebrating the Three Kings visiting baby Jesus. Therefore, Lima became known as Ciudad de los Reyes, the “City of the Kings” and the capital of 16th-century Spanish Peru. It was at a site downtown that archaeologists discovered what is probably Lima’s first hospital, and the unfortunate Spanish syphilis patients.

First Spanish Hospital Built 20 Years After Pizarro Founded Lima

The Hospital Real (royal) of San Andres was founded only 20 years after Pizarro established the city of Lima. The story began when Francisco de Molina selflessly cared for poor patients through the 1530s and 40s at his home in the modern Barrios Altos area of Lima. The Peruvian hospital was formally founded in 1552 AD by Spanish viceroy , Andres Hurtado de Wildoso, after whom it was named. Today, this historic building is one of the oldest hospitals in Peru, and one of the oldest in the Americas.

Having slowly risen to the surface over five centuries, most of the 42 bodies were discovered only 30 centimeters (12 inches) beneath ground level, in a courtyard cemetery next to the 16th-century Spanish hospital. Within the sepulchral structure the researchers also discovered and mapped “a pharmacy, a psychiatric ward , a walled garden and the burial ground.” They also discovered fragments of ceramic bowls, containers, and bottles wrapped in cotton wool.

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2022 06 01 10 0v7

Syphilis from the America’s Killed European Colonialists

Héctor Walde, chief archaeologist for the Lima municipality, and his team of archaeologists discovered a copper cross on a chain around the neck of one of the male skeletons. This was a form of spiritual protection against the devilish disease that was discovered in most of the bodies: syphilis. This sexually transmitted disease is caused by the Treponema Pallidum bacterium. And while we are all taught at school that Spaniards brought syphilis to the new world, The Columbian hypothesis states that navigators in Columbus’ fleet “brought the previously unknown affliction back to Europe on their return from the New World in 1493 AD.”

Whatever the origins of syphilis, Christians in the new world rightfully associated it with sexual promiscuity, and therefore, with the devil . And with the new Spanish city of Lima awash with syphilis it is no wonder Professor Walde said “the ritual and religiosity in Lima was very strong.”

In fact, so strong were beliefs in the protective powers of the crucifixion tool of Christ that the Hospital Real de San Andrés was designed in the shape of a cross, with its altar located at the very center, a location symbolic of the heart of Christ. Therefore, this church is a wonderful example of 16th-century architectural sacred geometry in a sacred healing context.

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2022 06 01 10 0b8

Are The Three Lost Royal Inca Mummies Beneath The Spaniards?

While the story of the 42 syphilis ridden bodies is grabbing media headlines, the researchers also identified an “underground crypt containing pre-Hispanic Inca ceramics.” And while all of the bodies recovered so far belong to mostly male immigrant Spaniards, according to a Daily Mail report Walde believes the site might contain the “mummies of the last three Inca kings, Pachacutec, Huayna Capac and Tupac Yupanqui.”

Let’s get something clear here. No matter what you read out there, there were no kingdoms or “kings” in Pre-Columbian Peru. The word “king” was a European thing. The sovereign ruler of the Inca Empire was called the Sapa, which in the Quechua language of ancient Peru meant “son of the Sun.”

Héctor Walde told the Associated Press that 16th-century Spanish chroniclers noted that three mummies were sent from Cusco, the capital of the Inca Empire, to Viceroy Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza in Lima.

However, Walde indicated caution, saying several archaeological research projects over the last 200 years have failed to locate these three royal mummies. It is pure speculation that the three mummies are at the Lima hospital site. However, there weren’t that many administrative buildings in the area at the time, and the thinking is that these lost three Inca Sapas are hidden somewhere beneath Lima.

 

“Accidental Fires” Continue To Happen At Food Processing Facilities All Over The United States

We are supposed to believe that what we are witnessing is just one “tragic accident” after another.  We aren’t supposed to see any sort of a pattern, and we aren’t supposed to ask any questions.  Last month, I wrote an article about 16 mysterious fires that have happened at important food industry facilities in the United States since the start of 2022.  Unfortunately, this trend has continued since that time.  In fact, there have been more “accidental fires” in recent days, and I believe that the American people deserve some answers.

On Saturday night, a “massive” fire erupted at a commercial egg farm in Minnesota.

We are being told that the structure that burned down contained “tens of thousands of chickens”

Massive flames burned down a barn with tens of thousands of chickens in Wright County.

The fire started late Saturday night at Forsman Farms in Howard Lake, causing major damage.

Like so many of the other mysterious fires that I have reported on, this fire grew to an absolutely enormous size very, very rapidly

The Trebesch family thought they would spend Saturday night around their bonfire, but just after 10 p.m. they noticed massive flames across the field at Forsman Farms.

“It was unbelievable how quick it grew, it was insane,” Andy Trebesch said. “It was the whole sky, it was quite large.”

We are being told that there was no foul play.

Just another senseless accident.

Nothing to see here.

Of course the same explanation is being given for a “dramatic fireball” that burned a grain silo to the ground in Washington state just a few days ago…

A spectacular fire demolished M & E Seed and Grain Co. in Prosser and left one person with burns.

A smoldering pile of twisted metal and charred lumber was all that remained Thursday morning after firefighters battled the blaze in downtown Prosser all night.

A few firefighters remained at the scene to monitor the fire.

They are assuring us that this sort of thing happens all the time.

So don’t try to apply common sense to any of this, because that will just confuse you.

A few days before that tragedy in Washington state, 43 rail cars that were carrying much needed potash derailed in Alberta

About 43 westbound Canadian Pacific (CP) Rail cars carrying potash derailed northeast of Fort Macleod, Alta., Sunday morning, RCMP say.

At 8:15 a.m., Mounties responded to a train derailment between Range Roads 251 and 252, near Highway 3. Fire crews and CP Rail also came to the scene, according to police.

So what are Canadian authorities telling us about this incident?

You guessed it!

Apparently it was just another “accident”.

 

People sure are getting careless these days, because “accidents” just keep happening time after time after time.

And all of this is taking place at a moment in history when we are being told that we are about to enter an absolutely horrifying global food crisis.

During recent testimony in front of the UN Security Council, the CEO of Gro Intelligence warned that “the lowest grain inventory levels the world has ever seen” are getting even lower…

Menker said estimates from official government agencies from across the world show that wheat inventories at 33% of annual consumption, but added that models created by Gro Intelligence show that the figure may actually be closer to 20%, a level not seen since 2007 and 2008.

“It is important to note that the lowest grain inventory levels the world has ever seen are now occurring while access to fertilizers is highly constrained,” she said. “And drought in wheat growing regions around the world is the most extreme it’s been in over 20 years. Similar inventory concerns also apply to corn and other grains.”

In other words, there isn’t going to be enough food for everyone.

As I noted yesterday, we are being told that one-fifth of the entire population of the globe could soon descend into poverty and hunger

For months, the specter of a global hunger crisis has been looming. The war in Ukraine is a compounding factor, blocking key value chains for food and fertilizer just as the world reckons with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on global hunger.

Add the pervasive effects of climate change to the mix, and the result is what the United Nations is calling a “perfect storm” that risks one-fifth of the global population – as many as 1.7 billion people – falling into poverty and hunger.

I am not the one saying that one-fifth of the global population is heading into poverty and hunger.

It is the United Nations that is saying this.

Of course it is quite true that I have been warning that a “global famine” was coming for a very long time, and now it is here.

David Beasley, the head of the UN World Food Program, says that his organization is already taking food away from the hungry to feed the starving.

So what is he going to do when countless millions are starving all over the planet?

Global trends have been pushing us in this direction for years, but now the events of 2022 have greatly accelerated the development of the “perfect storm” that we are now facing.

We are being told that things will be far worse by the end of 2022 than they are now, and you probably don’t even want to hear about what the outlook for 2023 looks like.

You can try to ignore this growing crisis if you want, but it is not going away.

A nightmare of epic proportions has begun.  Unfortunately, this is a nightmare that is not going to end any time soon.

New Orleans, 1976

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11 3

Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers – Jeff Beck

Classic Jeff Beck. I hope you all enjoy this. Screaming guitar solos. Great stuff this.

An interesting quote

I don’t have Telegram, but someone posted this on his social media. It sounds about right to me.

"There has long been a group of NATO advisers within the staff [Ukrainian] who is planning military operations. 

Recently, a strong confrontation has started due to the attitude of American generals who consider our (Ukrainian) troops as cannon fodder sent to be slaughtered on the eastern front. 

Mr. Zaluzhny disagrees on this issue with the political leaders of the country, who support the opinion of the [NATO] advisers”, writes the Ukrainian Telegram channel “Resident”.

" As stated earlier the chain Telegram Legitimniy, a group of officers of the US armed forces were deployed in Ukraine. 

These officers have the power to issue direct orders to units and Ukrainian formations, and to cancel the orders of command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the National Guard. 

In case of disobedience to American orders, kyiv may be left without financial and military support from Washington." '

California – Early 1980’s

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10 3 1

Why denazification?

From HERE

Talking to Ukrainian friends… Each of us today is faced with this terrible and painful necessity. Because our troops are bombarding Kyiv, and this is such a monstrous darkness that none of us could even think of yesterday. And let these be strikes on military targets, but civilians are dying, ours are dying - our common ones! - Soldiers and cadets. And the chaos on the streets of Ukrainian cities, albeit aggravated by the uncontrolled distribution of weapons, would not have begun if Russia had not opened hostilities.

How to talk with Ukrainian friends, when exactly we, Russians, having crushed an abscess in Donbass, flooded vast areas of Ukrainian land from Kharkov to Odessa with pus and blood?

We are not Nazis! our friends and relatives shout to us in despair and horror. We just want to live in our own land! Why did you come to us with your denazification??

Just today, a Ukrainian friend wrote to me that there are no more than 10% of Nazis in Ukraine (yesterday it was 2%, but this is not the essence of it), and this was not a problem of society. Like, the problems started now, when you aggressively attacked Ukraine, plunging it into bloody chaos and terror. Almost everyone says that the last sympathy for the Russians is buried under this ashes, we will never be forgiven, and the Russian troops have achieved unity of Ukraine against a common enemy much more effectively than any Maidan, any Nazis and Western partners.

And all this is true. Most of the inhabitants of today’s Ukraine do not profess Nazi ideology. They are not Nazis, they often hate Nazism. So does denazification mean a lie, a fabricated pretext for invading and seizing territories?

NO.

The problem is that modern Ukraine is a passive element of the Nazi project, conceived and implemented by the new all-powerful Reich - the Western political and financial elite. And Ukrainians are modern Jews, that is, a political, economic, ideological resource and a lever.

Just as the majority of the Jewish population of the Third Reich did not profess the Nazi ideology, but passively participated in its implementation, so today’s Ukraine is a necessary cog in the cynical world order, in which the colonial system acquired precisely Nazi features and methods, albeit in a somewhat softened way.

And when Ukrainian friends tell us: “We are not Nazis! Bandera and other henchmen of Hitler are not our heroes!” – One cannot but agree with this. Yes, they are not your heroes. But they were appointed to you, and you accepted this appointment with criminal carelessness, not understanding what they were molding out of you.

And they are molding – or rather, they have already blinded – from Ukraine, of course, not a new Reich, but a completely structured, working and quite effective concentration camp for its functions, similar to the “open ghetto”, which serves as an important support for maintaining the power of the new Reich. Through long-term manipulations and a series of crises, including the last Maidan, Ukraine has turned into an absolutely manageable and controlled system that only imitates the functions of society and the state.

To clarify my idea, I will turn to the history of Jewish ghettos in the occupied territories during the Great Patriotic War.

Why did the Germans create ghettos and concentration camps? First of all, to control the rather large masses of the population, which suddenly came under German rule during the Drang nach Osten.

The process of creating a ghetto in the overwhelming majority of cases took place in two stages. At the first stage, the Nazis created a place of compact residence of a mono-ethnic minority (Jews) or a multinational people declared mono-ethnic (Ukrainians) in a specially allocated territory. In your case, national segregation was used much more sophisticatedly. Jews were declared pariahs and victims, Ukrainians were declared God’s Chosen .

Being God's Chosen is flattering, no one will refuse this mission, and the entire Ukrainian cultural elite rushed to look for and invent justifications for this new Nazi theory, the purpose of which was only to forever cut the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. I will not enumerate the heaps of lies and nonsense that fell on your heads to strengthen this primitive scam. From “Ukraine is not Russia” to “Kievan Rus is Ukraine”.

What was it for, you ask? It was for delineating the boundaries of an open concentration camp, inside which new rules for controlling the population were established. Brilliant and simple – everyone who felt falsehood and forgery felt the pressure of the rest of society, reveling in their chosenness, and were forced to either leave the country or submit to the general mood. Those who actively tried to resist were eliminated in one way or another, and a rather serious consolidation of society gradually arose around the idea of ​​a “speciality” of the Ukrainian nation, which appropriated all the heroic achievements of the Russian Empire and the USSR, while at the same time portraying itself as a victim of their machinations.

Not noticing the paradoxical nature of such a position, the Ukrainians rushed to match the hypostasis invented for them, pulling out archaic or simply sham attributes into the light of day. Vyshyvankas (shirts with national embroidery), wreaths, “mova” (the Ukrainian language), a virus separate from the despised “Rusnya” (derogatory “Russians”) and other labels of belonging to a chosen race. At the same time, no one really asked the question for what purposes she was chosen – especially since all these ‘dances in little boots’ infinitely touched Western partners, who all these years applauded Ukraine-not-Russia as passionately as they recently applauded the fake president Zelensky in European Parliament.

Why was Ukraine chosen? Of course, for entry into the European family of higher peoples. This entry began immediately after the collapse of the USSR and continues to this day, miraculously making no progress in the process. No, individual parties of Ukrainians managed to almost catch up, if not with the Anglo-Saxons, then with the Poles and Czechs, gain a foothold in the orbit of the European Union and discard the take-off stage of Ukrainianism as an unnecessary vestige. But the rest were inspired by the very promise of equal rights and opportunities with the civilized peoples of Europe and the USA.

The fact that this promise was only a means of manipulation and control occurred to only a few – and these few also had to either leave or die.

The control over the Jews in the concentration camps was carried out much more primitively, but the scheme was worked out even then. Fake self-government bodies were created – the Judenrats, absolutely controlled by the Reich, consisting of loyal Jews, imitating the protection of the rights and freedoms of the ghetto population. To maintain order, the Jewish police were created and armed, supplemented by separate brigades of declassed bastards who did not disdain any methods of intimidation, including torture, rape of children and mass murders for their own pleasure.

This rot, which unfortunately exists in any nation, self-destructs in healthy societies or is re-educated in strict regime colonies. But in the ghetto, as well as in the Reichskommisariat, Ukraine performs the necessary function of keeping the population in complete obedience and fear. Because if you know that at any moment you can come to you with weapons of the down-and-out scum, that they can mock you and your family, they can torture and kill with impunity on the basis that you did not follow certain rules and rituals imposed from the outside – you will not once again raise your voice in defense of a neighbor.

You will think “ugh, it has passed”, and then you will justify someone else’s torment with objective reasons. After all, the neighbor really refused to dance at the vyshyvanka festival or uttered the word “palyanytsia” in the Moscow language. That he should not provoke the new masters of the situation - and the masters of the situation in such a community inevitably turned out to be scum with weapons in their hands.

Who armed them? Those who appointed you, Ukrainians, new heroes and gods, new founding fathers, a new faith and new ideals.

And when the work on redrawing your image was completed – with the loyalty of the absolute majority, although not fully accepted, but not rejecting this absolutely archaic image of a Ukrainian with a forelock, in trousers and with a yellow-blue flag, the same signal and identification as yellow star, it was already possible to do anything with you.

And the new Reich, by and large, wants only one thing: to pump out other people's resources. Absolutely all resources representing at least some value.

After 2014, when the Ukrainian society and its nominal government were completely taken under the control of the United States and NATO and actually cut off from Russia, the pumping went on without any restrictions. As at all stages of the existence of the ghetto – and the Nazis did not hide that this was a temporary formation – the Jews were seized by robbery and indemnities, first cash, then hidden gold, then things and clothes, gold crowns, the last household items. In the same way, while you forced the Russians to learn the preposition “in” (in Russian, the preposition “on” is used with the word Ukraine. The word “Ukraine” means “edge of the country”, therefore “on” the edge of the country, and not “in”) and applaud the “revolution of hydness” invented personally for you (but in fact, bad swagger), national incomes and natural wealth, labor resources and brains were pumped dry from / to Ukraine , technologies and works of art, including priceless antique gold, which is rich in yours – and in fact our common Russian land.

Yes, I share the point of view that the state of Ukraine is a simulacrum assembled from different parts of our common space of Ancient Russia, the direct successor of Constantinople. But the point is not only and not so much in the heterogeneity of parts of Ukraine or in ethnic differences. The rights to certain historical territories can be claimed by any neighbors anywhere in the world, and the peaceful existence of various ethnic groups and nationalities in one country is far from uncommon. Let me remind you that 190 nationalities coexist in Russia, the American in general is all tied together with the world – and Wyoming does not bomb Texas.

This was not the cause of the Ukrainian catastrophe. Namely, that social form of existence, which was not born naturally, but was prudently and ruthlessly organized by the new Reich.

In today’s circumstances, I have no right to talk about the reasons for what happened and blame someone for this – of course, except for the inhuman machine for the destruction of countries and peoples called the United States and NATO, which adopted Nazi methods. But with a pain in my heart, I urge you to wake up! It’s too late, it was late yesterday, but there is still a chance for salvation.

I understand that this is a huge national humiliation - to understand that you were sucked out and thrown away like an empty shell, pumped up with weapons for the last use - a fratricidal war with Russia. Do not try to bleed this pain! Because those who brought your country to this state are now putting a machine gun in your hands and cynically whipping them up with slogans that all of us, originally from the USSR, have sewn into the matrix of consciousness.

This matrix is ​​assembled on the platform of the war of liberation, and it is this leverage that Western manipulators use to make us kill each other. It was as if a mirror was placed between the Russian and the Ukrainian and the same slogans were broadcast – “not an inch of their native land”, “death to the invaders”, “they fought for their homeland”. And I perfectly understand your shock, your pain and resentment from the fact that today Russia has become an enemy and occupier for you.

Our propagandists are making a terrible mistake when they press on the fact that Ukraine deserved its suffering. An even more monstrous mistake is to say that we invaded Ukraine in order to prevent a NATO strike and save ourselves .

NO! UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING!

I think I know why Putin committed this radical act, which many attribute to his madness. And why is he talking about denazification.

Ukraine is a victim of an inhuman experiment of Western intelligence agencies and financial centers. And only the dismantling of the system of its internal structure can save this country and its population. Russia went to war not with the people of Ukraine, not with a gang of local Nazis, and not with an army pumped up and infected with nationalist ideas . This is a war with the world order that made a concentration camp out of Ukraine – with a lured ruling elite and an uncomplaining population.

In some mystical way, this is understood and felt by all people in Russia - with the exception of the cultural and financial elite bred in the West, who were bred just for the same purpose.

Dear, beloved Ukrainian friends, everything that happened to you yesterday should have happened to us tomorrow, because we are just as easy to be trapped in political manipulation, and only a miracle and our huge size did not allow it to happen to Russia as quickly. and successfully, as they did to you.

The dismantling of the Nazi concentration camp, in which you were imperceptibly placed – this is the goal of denazification, and not punishment, or – God forbid – lustration, which the frenzied “patriots” are calling for here. I hope – or rather not, I see that this is the task that the Russian Army has to solve today.

When in 1943-1945 the army of the USSR liberated the cities captured by the Nazis, it also unwittingly brought with it grief, death and destruction. And people who got used to the Germans also suffered from the fact that the liberators were destroying their usual life. Sometimes, when a concentration camp is liberated, not only policemen, but also prisoners die – this is our common tragedy.

But the way your government behaves under these conditions only indicates that these bloody clowns are just a props for the mighty world forces that created the Reich Commissar of Ukraine, so that under sweet speeches about freedom and democracy it would be easier to rob you, rape you, and then destroy, erasing the traces of their crimes.

What to do with it further - I do not know. But if you continue to live in the illusion that you were almost taken to Europe, and bloody Putin prevented your free choice, as the scoundrels who gutted the country suggest to you, we will not be able to help. No army can make people realize their mistakes and change their lives. I can only say one thing - there is oriental wisdom, which personally helped me many times in my life.

No matter how far you go down the wrong path, come back. The road will be long and difficult, but sooner or later you will reach your goal. If you don’t come back, you’re going nowhere.

And the last.

While the Nazis of the Third Reich were herding Jews into ghettos and appointing fake “institutions of democracy” for them, a few residents of the occupied territories (including Jews) went into the forests and began to partisan. They blew up trains and killed Nazi chiefs. Many hated them – because after each such attack, the Nazis burned villages as punishment, hanged civilians. In the same way and for the same reason, you began to hate the LNR and the DNR, which did not submit to the concentration camp. It seemed to you – and it still seems to many now – that all your problems are because of the partisans, and if they had sat quietly, then everything would have worked out. And you can live under the Nazis. Or maybe, if it were not for the partisans, you would have been taken to Europe – as the Jews from Bremen, Hamburg and Cologne were promised that they could return and live in Germany, if only they would serve the masters of the Aryan race well. They were promised this in the Minsk ghetto in 1941. In December 1943, the Minsk ghetto with its entire population was already destroyed – the Germans so brilliantly simply solved the “Jewish question”.

What to do with the “Ukrainian issue” is up to you and me to decide. Therefore, the Western hosts have already seen you off with applause. To their pleasant surprise, you dug your own hole almost resignedly and are already standing on its edge. Fireworks for these funerals are still being delivered. And “Putin’s invasion”, which they so condemn in words, in fact suits them perfectly. Because they do NOTHING to save you except talking and pumping weapons. You are not even allowed to sign a surrender – they want to push you into the pit so that you drag us along with you.

Yes, they applaud your death. But pay attention – with what horror they exchange glances at the same time. Because the smartest ones understand that if they cannot devour Russia, tomorrow they will have to eat each other.

Personally, I really, really look forward to seeing it.

Author Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina

New Orleans, 1981

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Chicken Cordon Bleu Roll-Ups

A clever technique and a few lightened-up touches let you indulge in all the flavor of Chicken Cordon Bleu, without all the fuss or the fat. It all starts with skipping the stuffed chicken breasts. Instead, pound your chicken breasts flat and layer with Swiss cheese, ham and spinach (for an extra boost of veggies). Then, roll them up, so the flavors can melt together. Coating the outside of your chicken roll-ups with a toasty, herby panko crust and baking them, instead of frying, keeps calories down without sacrificing crispy texture. So, you end up with crunchy-on-the-outside and melty-on-the-inside chicken roll-ups packed with classic flavor and fewer than 400 calories per serving!

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c626139b b5be 40aa 9369 4670b924d387

Ingredients

Topping

  • 1/3 cup Progresso™ plain panko crispy bread crumbs
  • 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
  • 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1/8 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons vegetable oil

Chicken Rolls

  • 2 large boneless skinless chicken breasts (8 oz each)
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup baby spinach
  • 4 slices (0.75 oz each) Swiss cheese
  • 4 slices (0.5 oz each) deli ham
  • 1 egg white, beaten with 1 tablespoon water

2022 05 30 16 32
2022 05 30 16 32

The Worst Energy Crisis In U.S. History Is Going To Get Even Worse In The Months Ahead

Are you ready for what is coming next?  Are you ready to pay six dollars for a gallon of gasoline?  Are you ready to pay much higher prices for everything at our major stores as the price of diesel goes haywire?  Are you ready for widespread blackouts all over the U.S. this summer?  Unfortunately, we are being warned that all of these things are coming.  The worst energy crisis in U.S. history is poised to get even worse in the months ahead, and there is no “silver bullet” on the horizon which is going to magically solve our problems.  The refineries that we need are not being built and the drilling that needs to be done is not really happening.  Of course energy supplies are getting tighter and tighter all over the globe, and things will go to an entirely new level once the next major war starts.

Needless to say, things are bad enough already.  On Sunday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States set a brand new all-time record high of $4.61 a gallon

Gas prices in the US soared to record heights again Sunday, reaching an all-time high of $4.61 per gallon.

The number is more than 50 percent higher than the cost of a gallon a year ago. It comes as gas prices have continued to climb during Joe Biden’s presidency, and as millions of Americans are poised to travel by road for Memorial Day weekend.

A 50 percent increase in just one year.

Just think about that.

To my knowledge, we have never seen anything like this before.

If you can believe it, the average price of a gallon of gasoline has jumped 25 cents over the past six weeks.

That is crazy, but we are being warned to expect significantly higher prices “by the end of the summer”

Experts say that number will likely surpass the $6 mark by the end of the summer – as pump costs in West Coast cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco already meeting that mark earlier this month.

I still remember when I could get 20 gallons of gas for 20 dollars.

Soon, 20 gallons of gas will cost all of us 120 dollars.

Who can afford that?

The price of diesel has been increasing at an even faster pace.

In fact, it has risen a staggering 75 percent since last Memorial Day…

Diesel prices are up as well – by a whopping 75 percent from Memorial Day last year – at around $5.50 a gallon, also an all-time record.

The rising cost of the fuel – commonly used by truckers for their rigs – has further hampered America’s embattled economy, driving up prices of good being transported cross-country by truckers, who are now electing for shorter routes due to the ‘unprecedented’ increase.

‘I can pretty much count on setting on fire $5-$700 a day…minimum,’ 22-wheel driver Eric Jammer told NPR Saturday of the rise in diesel costs seen over the past 12 months.

The trucks and trains that bring our goods to the stores run on diesel.

Diesel is only going to get more expensive from here, and America’s companies are going to pass those costs along to the consumers.

Yes, that will be quite painful.

Thanks to the soaring cost of fuel, airline fares are also shooting up dramatically

Domestic airline fares for summer are averaging more than $400 for a round trip, 24 percent percent higher than this time in 2019, before the pandemic, and a full 45 percent higher than a year ago, according to travel-data firm Hopper.

One survey that was conducted just a few days ago found that approximately a third of all Americans say that their travel plans for Memorial Day were affected by high energy prices.

Joe Biden promised to do all that he could to drive down gasoline prices, and in order to try to keep that promise he foolishly took enormous amounts of fuel out of our strategic reserve.

Obviously that didn’t work, and now we are being told that Biden is running out of options

President Joe Biden has vowed to do everything in his power to fight record-setting gasoline and diesel prices, but he’s up against a stark reality: There are few options for taming the surge.

While Biden has unleashed an unprecedented amount of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, other tools at the administration’s disposal would come at the expense of environmental protection and have little effect on fuel costs stoked by strained crude supplies and a global shortage of refining capacity. And the one sure-fire fix — for Americans to stop driving so much — is largely outside his control.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, Joe Biden is not going to save us from this crisis.

In the short-term, nobody is going to save us from this crisis.

We need more refineries, we need more drilling, and ultimately we are going to need some major technological breakthroughs because the way that we are currently doing things is not even close to sustainable.

On top of everything else, our rapidly aging power grids were never designed to handle so much demand.  According to CBS News, we could potentially be facing widespread outages during the summer of 2022…

In its annual summer assessment released this week, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation noted that the Upper Midwest is facing a capacity shortfall leading to a “high risk of energy emergencies.” The entire Western U.S. also could face a power outage emergency in the event of spikes in energy use.

“We’ve been doing this for close to 30 years. This is probably one of the grimmest pictures we’ve painted in a while,” John Moura, NERC’s director of reliability assessment and performance analysis, told CBS MoneyWatch.

What will you do if the power in your area goes out for an extended period of time?

We all know that California has been experiencing problems for years, but in 2022 we are being told that the middle of the nation is actually at greatest risk

In a large swath of the grid stretching from Illinois to Minnesota, the summer’s power demands are projected to exceed the grid’s capacity. That’s because this area of the grid — known as the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO — has lost about 2% of its generation capacity since last year as plants have retired; a key transmission line is also down for maintenance.

Perhaps you think that my headline is a little too dramatic.

Perhaps you do not yet believe that we are facing the worst energy crisis in U.S. history.

If that is the case, give it a few months.

By the end of the summer, I think that everyone will understand that we truly have entered a nightmare with no end in sight.

More pictures from the past…

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2022.05.30 The Crazy Policies Are Going To Get (A Lot) Worse

Good video from Gonzalo Lira.

Portland, Oregon, 1973

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Harpoon Missiles Arrive in Ukraine

The Odessa, Ukraine Regional Military Authority said Sunday “So many Harpoon missiles have been handed over to us, we can sink the entire Russian Black Sea Fleet.”

The Harpoon is an all-weather, over-the-horizon, anti-ship missile developed and manufactured by McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing Defense, Space & Security). The AGM-84E Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM) and later AGM-84H/K SLAM-ER (Standoff Land Attack Missile – Expanded Response) are cruise missile variants.

The regular Harpoon uses active radar homing and flies just above the water to evade defenses. The missile can be launched from:

  • Fixed-wing aircraft (the AGM-84, without the solid-fuel rocket booster)
  • Surface ships (the RGM-84, fitted with a solid-fuel rocket booster that detaches when expended, to allow the missile’s main turbojet to maintain flight)
  • Submarines (the UGM-84, fitted with a solid-fuel rocket booster and encapsulated in a container to enable submerged launch through a torpedo tube);
  • Coastal defense batteries, from which it would be fired with a solid-fuel rocket booster.

It has not (yet) been revealed which type of Harpoon missiles have been sent to Ukraine and there is GIGANTIC RISK for NATO countries depending upon the type of Harpoon sent.  You see, at least one of the Harpoon variants has the ability to use net-enabled networking for in-flight target updating.

That updating would have to come from a NATO ship or aircraft as the missiles flew, once launched by Ukraine.

If a NATO ship or aircraft provided in-flight target updating, that would constitute active participation in the war, and would be an “act of war” against Russia.

Here are the various types of Harpoon Missile:

Harpoon Block 1D

This version featured a larger fuel tank and re-attack capability, but was not produced in large numbers because its intended mission (warfare with the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe) was considered to be unlikely following the Dissolution of the Soviet Union. Range is 278 kilometers (173 mi). Block 1D missiles were designated RGM/AGM-84F.

SLAM ATA (Block 1G)

This version, under development, gives the SLAM a re-attack capability, as well as an image comparison capability similar to the Tomahawk cruise missile; that is, the weapon can compare the target scene in front of it with an image stored in its onboard computer during terminal phase target acquisition and lock on (this is known as DSMAC). Block 1G missiles AGM/RGM/UGM-84G; the original SLAM-ER missiles were designated AGM-84H (2000-2002) and later ones the AGM-84K (2002 onwards).

Harpoon Block 1J

Block 1J was a proposal for a further upgrade, AGM/RGM/UGM-84J Harpoon (or Harpoon 2000), for use against both ship and land targets.

Harpoon Block II

In production at Boeing facilities in Saint Charles, Missouri, is the Harpoon Block II, intended to offer an expanded engagement envelope, enhanced resistance to electronic countermeasures and improved targeting. Specifically, the Harpoon was initially designed as an open-ocean weapon. The Block II missiles continue progress begun with Block IE, and the Block II missile provides the Harpoon with a littoral-water anti-ship capability.

The key improvements of the Harpoon Block II are obtained by incorporating the inertial measurement unit from the Joint Direct Attack Munition program, and the software, computer, Global Positioning System (GPS)/inertial navigation system and GPS antenna/receiver from the SLAM Expanded Response (SLAM-ER), an upgrade to the SLAM.

The US Navy awarded a $120 million contract to Boeing in July 2011 for the production of about 60 Block II Harpoon missiles, including missiles for 6 foreign militaries.

India acquired 24 Harpoon Block II missiles to arm its maritime strike Jaguar fighters in a deal worth $170 million through the Foreign Military Sales system. In December 2010, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) notified U.S. Congress of a possible sale of 21 additional AGM-84L Harpoon Block II Missiles and associated equipment, parts and logistical support for a complete package worth approximately $200 million; the Indian government intends to use these missiles on its Indian Navy P-8I Neptune maritime patrol aircraft. The Indian Navy is also planning to upgrade the fleet of four submarines – Shishumar class – with tube-launched Harpoon missiles.

Harpoon Block II missiles are designated AGM/RGM/UGM-84L.

In early 2018, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of Harpoon Block II to the Mexican Navy for use on their future Sigma-class design frigates, the first of which is being built by Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding.

Harpoon Block II+

On 18 November 2015, the U.S. Navy tested the AGM-84N Harpoon Block II+ missile against a moving ship target. The Block II+ incorporates an improved GPS guidance kit and a net-enabled data-link that allows the missile to receive in-flight targeting updates. The Block II+ is planned to enter service in 2017.

The USN intends to deploy the Harpoon Block II+ in late FY2018[24] by upgrading its existing inventory of Harpoon IC missiles.

Harpoon Block III

Harpoon Block III was intended to be an upgrade package to the existing USN Block 1C missiles and Command Launch Systems (CLS) for guided missile cruisers, guided missile destroyers, and the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter aircraft. After experiencing an increase in the scope of required government ship integration, test and evaluation, and a delay in development of a data-link, the Harpoon Block III program was canceled by the U.S. Navy in April 2009.[citation needed]

Harpoon Block II+ ER

In April 2015, Boeing unveiled a modified version of the RGM-84 it called the Harpoon Next Generation. It increases the ship-launched Harpoon missile's range from the Block II's 70 nmi (81 mi; 130 km) to 167.5 nmi (192.8 mi; 310.2 km), along with a new lighter 300 lb (140 kg) warhead and a more fuel-efficient engine with electronic fuel controls. Boeing offered the missile as the U.S. Navy's Littoral Combat Ship frigate upgrade over-the-horizon anti-ship missile as a cost-effective missile upgrade option; complete Next Gen Harpoons would cost approximately as much as a Block II at $1.2 million each, with upgrades for an existing missile costing half that. The version is also called the Harpoon Block II+ ER. Boeing claims the Block II+ ER is superior to the Naval Strike Missile through its improved turbojet giving it greater range and active radar-homing seeker for all-weather operation, as well as a lighter but "more lethal" warhead. Test shots in 2017 had been confirmed. In May 2017, Boeing revealed it was no longer offering the upgraded Harpoon for the frigate OTH missile requirement, but would continue development of it.

Radio frequencies used for the net-enabled, in-flight target updating for the Harpoon missile, ARE KNOWN to the Russians.  They can monitor those frequencies for in-flight target updates, and they WILL know if a NATO plane or ship participated in a missile strike upon a Russian Naval vessel.

Chicken Parmesan Skillet Casserole

This hearty skillet dinner is an easy, deconstructed version of chicken Parmesan that makes the classic achievable, even on the most rushed weeknight. Still cheesy, still crunchy, still saucy—just easier to assemble and made right on the stovetop!

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b3e09018 03e1 49bc 8d8d 98e958527bf5

Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoons butter
  • 1/2 cup Progresso™ Panko Italian style crispy bread crumbs
  • 1/2 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
  • 1 package (16 oz) boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut in 1-inch pieces, patted dry
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
  • 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
  • 1 1/2 cups Muir Glen™ organic tomato basil pasta sauce (from 24.5-oz jar)
  • 1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese (6 oz)
  • 2 tablespoons thinly shredded fresh basil leaves

2022 05 30 16 36
2022 05 30 16 36

The Prisoner 2.0 – ep14: FALL OUT [Series Finale, Part 2] (SirQ Audiovisual Restoration)

This is supposed to be the final episode of “The Prisoner”. Numerically, it should be episode 17, but this refers to an episode 14. So I am a tad confused.

This is the end of the series. I hope that you like it.

(SirQ Audiovisual Restoration)”]

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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NZBZ and American insanity, cute kitty cats, Thunder Island, and some great Quick Lasagna

I am seriously considering changing everything that represents MM here. Keeping the website up but only making bi-monthly or single articles (say) one article per week, and cutting down on the you-tube videos. Instead, focusing on my Paetron site, and posting articles on MM core subjects. Such as world-line travel, affirmation campaigns, and fate forecasting. Maybe some extraterrestrial stuff too.

I have noticed that many regular MM readers are unaware of all the MM you-tube videos. So I will post the videos as embed in separate MM articles as time moves forward. Like what I did for the missing children video that I posted yesterday.

I will accept donations to both MM and Patreon.

In general, I post one thick, juicy enormous “New Beginning” article a day, with periodic extra MM articles. I post form one to three You-Tube videos per day on You-Tube Metallicman, and one very, very juicy MM article on souls and Domain on patreon every day.

So have fun today…

Thunder Island

I had this album when I attended university and would play it on my record player while I studied. I’m surprised that I found it on you-tube.

US Military Journal Suggests Taiwan Should Destroy Its Semiconductor Industry To Deter Chinese Invasion Plan

Jeeze! Idiotic American neocons. -MM
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A new deterrence strategy proposed by American scholars has turned the argument of Chinese plans to invade Taiwan on its head.

A paper, titled ‘Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan’ written by Jared McKinney and co-authored by Peter Harris in US Army War College’s quarterly academic journal Parameters, has urged Taipei to follow a “scorched earth policy” and destroy its semiconductor industry if China decided to invade Taiwan.

It was the most downloaded academic paper of 2021 from Parameters, reported The Register. The authors urged that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the biggest chipmaker in the world and the largest chip supplier for Beijing, should be destroyed.

McKinney is the chair of the Department of Strategy and Security Studies at the eSchool of Graduate Professional Military Education, Air University, and co-author Peter Harris is an associate professor of political science at Colorado State University.

Article HERE

Quick Lasagna

Very terrible picture. But very delicious meal.

Looking for an Italian-inspired dinner? Then check out this ground beef lasagna packed with three types of cheese – a scrumptious meal!

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a657a870 5204 42ee 8dee 6be6de82f440

Ingredients

  • 1 clove garlic
  • 1/2 pound ground beef
  • 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
  • 1 cup spaghetti sauce
  • 6 purchased precooked or oven-ready lasagna noodles (each about 7×3 inches)
  • 1 container (12 ounces) reduced-fat cottage cheese (1 1/2 cups)
  • 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese (4 ounces)
  • 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese

2022 05 27 14 57
2022 05 27 14 57

Ukraine Military Situation

Meanwhile the war is progressing in Russia’s favor. I do not have time to show detailed maps of what is happening but there are two reasonable Youtube channels which provide good daily reports based on multiple sources. These are Military Summary and Defense Politics Aaaaasia.

In the north Lyman has fallen with reports of Ukrainian troops withdrawing after a short fight. In the east the Ukrainian held city Severodonetsk is mostly isolated and now under fierce attack. Several more towns around the Popasna bulge have been taken by the Russian side. South of it the city Svetlodarsk has fallen after the Ukrainian tried but failed to destroy a nearby dam. The Ukrainian troops retreated without a fight.

Instead of holding the lines by all means Ukrainian units now seem more interested in running away. That is more healthy for them and also solves their serious supply issues. Like other supply lines the Bakhmut-Lisichansk road is now under Russian fire control. This video shows what that means.

What we are seeing now are the effects of nearly three months of Russian artillery war. The Ukrainian troops at the frontline have been ground down and those who are left are moving out before being destroyed too. The front begins to move at several points. When those points merge we may next see the tactical deep battle phase of a classic Russian deep operation:

Deep battle envisaged the breaking of the enemy's forward defenses, or tactical zones, through combined arms assaults, which would be followed up by fresh uncommitted mobile operational reserves sent to exploit the strategic depth of an enemy front. The goal of a deep operation was to inflict a decisive strategic defeat on the enemy's logistical abilities and render the defence of their front more difficult, impossible, or indeed irrelevant. Unlike most other doctrines, deep battle stressed combined arms cooperation at all levels: strategic, operational, and tactical.

18may2022 Ukraine map
18may2022 Ukraine map

Blinken Lays out Washington’s Anti-China Agenda

This is a really, REALLY great video. It’s a MUST watch.

URME: Your Personal Surveillance Identity Prosthetic

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The URME Personal Surveillance Identity Prosthetic demonstrates the latest in 3D printing technology. Made from a pigmented hard resin, this mask is both a 3D scan of artist Leo Selvaggio’s face, as well as photo realistic rendering of his features, such as skin tone, texture and hair.

URME belongs to artist Leo Selvaggio and founder of URME Surveillance. As an artist Leo has been interested in identity and how it can be thought of as data: highly manipulable, editable, and corruptible. In 2013 he applied this idea to surveillance, using his own identity as a guinne pig and realized its applications for the larger public. It was then that URME was born.

People have been hiding from surveillance since the begining of networked cameras. Unfortunately wearing a ski mask in public makes you a pretty easy target. its fairly easy to track on camera, and even if the camera doesn’t see you, EVERYONE else will. “Why is that dude wearing a ski mask?” Etc, etc. In response, URME Surveillance has developed a state of the art identity replacement tech in the Personal Surveillance Identity Prosthetic. The basic gist is that rather than hide from cameras, simply give them a face other than your own to track without drawing attention to yourself in a crowd. In other words, when your out in the world doing whatever you are doing, all your actions, which are being recorded are documented as the actions of someone other than yourself, freeing you from any threat of surveillance.

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UKRAINE BIOLABS: “Illicit Ebola and Smallpox researches run by US”. Alert by Russian Lawmaker. Shadows of Gates, NATO & CIA

International Intrigue behind Pentagon’s bacteriological experiments on SARS too.

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by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio for VT Europe

VERSIONE IN ITALIANO

The US researched Ebola and smallpox viruses in Ukraine, says Irina Yarovaya, Co-Chair of the Parliamentary Commission on Investigation of US Biological Laboratories in Ukraine, according TASS Russian News Agency.

The alert is particularly disturbing for various reasons that the keenest readers of Gospa News’ WuhanGates inquiries will easily remember.

First of all, it should be noted that this report on smallpox trials comes just in the week in which numerous cases of monkeypox have been recorded which, although mild, have already led British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to relaunch the use of vaccines against smallpox produced by multinationals that often collaborate with the Pentagon, or the US Department of Defense.

But even more disturbing are other episodes. Among them is the mysterious and untimely death, just discovered the pandemic virus, of the Canadian scientist Frank Plummer who was working on experimenting with recombinant chimeric viruses, with Dual Use vaccine and military bioweapon purposes, on SARS, MERS, ancestors of SARS -Cov-2, on HIV, of which traces have been found in the Covid-19 virus, and finally on Ebola.

«In July 2019, a rare event occurred in Canada. Suspected of espionage for China, a group of Chinese virologists was forcibly evicted from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg (directed by the late Plummer – ed), where they had been running parts of the Special Pathogen Program of Canada’s public health agency. One of the procedures conducted by the team was the infection of monkeys with the most lethal viruses found on Earth. Four months prior to the Chinese team’s eviction, a shipment containing two exceptionally virulent viruses—Ebola and Nipah—was sent from the NML to China. When the shipment was traced, it was held to be improper and a “possible policy breach.” ».

The Lieutenant Colonel (res.) Dr. Dany Shoham, a microbiologist and chemical and biological warfare expert in the Middle East and formerly an Israeli Army (IDF) military intelligence analyst, wrote it on January 29, 2020. He was among the first to argue that all counterintelligence agencies in the world know of the origin of laboratory SARS-Cov-2.

INTRIGUE BETWEEN EBOLA VACCINES, GAVI ALLIANCE OF GATES AND NATO

Finally, it should not be forgotten that one of the world’s leading experts in virology and vaccines, Geert Vanden Bossche worked in the Global Health Discovery team of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle (USA) as Senior Program Officer; before moving to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization GAVI, founded by Bill Gates, as Senior Ebola Program Manager in Geneva

In 2015, he questioned the safety of the Ebola vaccine used in the ring vaccination studies conducted by the WHO in Guinea and broke off his collaboration with Gates becoming one of the staunchest supporters of the danger of anti-Covid gene serums.

It should be remembered that a former director of Gates’ Ngo GAVI, which today manages the Covax vaccination plan against Covid in poor countries, was Jens Stoltenberg, who later became NATO secretary.

This organization, in addition to fomenting the current war in Ukraine, in 2014 collaborated in the coup in Ukraine orchestrated by George Soros, an investor in Big Pharma Gilead who manages the Richard Lugar Center in Tbilisi, Georgia, on contract from the Pentagon and under supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency, the American counterintelligence.

In about twenty lines we explained why the alarm raised by the Russian parliamentarian Irina Yarovaya, co-chairman of the Parliamentary Investigation Commission on US biological laboratories in Ukraine, however biased it may appear as her nation is at war with Ukraine, must be taken absolutely with extreme attention …

Also in the light of the evidential clues on the construction of SARS-Cov-2 in the laboratory in an EU-US-China deal,through the Shanghai Gang defeated by the current leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, which would then pass through the Moderna Big Pharma funded by Gates and the Pentagon.

THE ALERT OF THE RUSSIAN LAWMAKER

“Today, we presented an analysis of which pathogens the US was particularly interested in in Ukraine,” she told reporters Friday, according TASS Russian News Agency..

“Aside from the pathogens that are territorially bound to Ukraine, [the laboratories] researched viruses and pathogens that are endemically very far from Ukraine, such as Ebola and smallpox.”

WHOLE ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE

Kitten with Big Bear Paws and Fearless Nature is So Excited to Run Around for the First Time

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2022 05 27 20 56

A kitten with big bear paws and fearless nature is so happy to run around freely for the first time.

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2022 05 27 20 58

Late last month, a polydactyl kitten with curled ears and a bobtail was brought into Friends for Life Rescue Network, an animal rescue in Los Angeles. She was four weeks old and came with an extremely bent ankle.

“She was born with the bent front leg. Polydactyl cats’ paws are too big in utero and can result in the arm being bent at an abnormal angle when there isn’t enough room,” Jacqueline DeAmor, founder of Friends for Life Rescue Network, told Love Meow.

“In her case, she came from a bigger litter so there wasn’t enough room to accommodate her paw size. This caused the tendons to be stuck over constricted.”

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2022 05 27 21 00

The kitten whom they named Indira (Indy), was walking on her forearm with limited mobility. Fortunately, she was very young and her condition could be significantly improved through physical therapy.

“Usually this can be corrected with massaging and stretching as a newborn for the first few weeks of life if noticed early. Four weeks was prime age to splint and correct the leg before her bones calcified and before the tendons became too short to be stretched,” Jacqueline shared with Love Meow.

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2022 05 27 21 02

After just one week of leg wraps, Indy was able to land on her four paws and began to walk a lot more steadily. As she built enough strength, she turned into a ball of energy with a lot of sass.

Indy adores people and loves being catered to. Adam and Margaux, foster liaisons of the rescue, syringe-fed the kitten during the day and were completely enamored with the little tabby.

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2022 05 27 21 03

“Every time I sat down to feed her, Indy would jump right into my lap and wait for food. It melted my heart,” the couple shared with Love Meow.

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2022 05 27 21 06

“I was also very impressed at how much she adapted to having her leg wrapped — it didn’t slow her down at all! And her leg straightened out so quickly that she only needed wraps for a week.”

Watch Indy and her journey in this cute video:

Kitten with big bear pawswww.youtube.com

“Now, she gets 10 minutes of leg massaging and stretching after each meal,” Adam and Margaux told Love Meow.

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2022 05 27 21 08

At almost seven weeks old, Indy can stand up completely on her paws and run around just like any other kitten.

“Now that she’s gotten so steady on her feet, you can really see her playful side coming out. She loves to jump around, chase things, and wrestle with toys. Once she’s good and tired, she comes right up for cuddles.”

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2022 05 27 21 09

Indy enjoys scampering around at full speed while trying to pounce on all the resident cats, who are much larger in size. When she is ready to take a break and recharge, she likes to put herself to bed.

“She goes here every time she feels tired,” Jacqueline shared with Love Meow.

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2022 05 27 21 10

If she finds a soft blanket, she will go to town and make (knead) the sweetest biscuits while purring up a storm.

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2022 05 27 21 11

Indy is so thrilled to be able to run around without a care in the world. She is brave, playful and adventurous, and enjoys every little thing in life.

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2022 05 27 21 12

Government meeting on stabilizing economy lifts market sentiment, with experts feeling upbeat about GDP rebound after COVID wanes

By GT staff reportersPublished: May 26, 2022 10:12 PM

China holds unprecedented meeting on stabilizing economy with focus on policy implementation

HERE 

also:

And HERE

Soon after China convened what has been seen as an unprecedented national video teleconference on stabilizing the economy, entities ranging from central departments to local governments spared no time to map out their economy-lifting missions, while the stock market also edged up after investors received a message of determination from the government to guide the economy back to normal  after a marked slowdown.

The instant reaction also mirrors the market’s eagerness for a clear policy  from the top to stimulate economic growth, as many businesspeople still feel a sense of uncertainty for future prospects after they encountered headwinds like coronavirus lockdowns and the Ukraine crisis, experts said.

At the teleconference held by China’s State Council on Wednesday and reportedly included around 100,000 participants, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stressed that the country must “grasp a time window” and strive to get the economy back to normal.

The premier stressed that stabilizing growth needs to be given a higher priority as the country focuses on ensuring market entities, employment and people’s livelihood.

Experts interpreted the meeting as marking a top-down resolution in safeguarding the momentum of the world’s second-largest economy, while presenting a unified spirit will help the country overcome the headwinds.

“It’s better early than late to map out economic work, in case the recent kind of black swan events hap-pen again in China,” said Ye Qing, former deputy head of the Hubei Provincial Statistics Bureau, adding that one major objective of the recent arrangement is to achieve positive GDP growth in the second quarter.

Market response

Along with the meeting, different entities ranging from central departments to local governments have moved to align economic-lifting work in accordance with what has been instructed in the aforementioned meeting. 

The People’s Bank of China, China’s central bank, issued a notice saying that it will push for the establishment of a long-term mechanism that makes financial institutions capable of and willing to lend loans to micro enterprises, the bank said on Thursday.

The State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission issued 27 measures to help alleviate small companies’ difficulties, including reducing web fees for small enterprises.

China also launched 13 measures to support the trade sector including safeguarding production stability and increasing fiscal support to trade firms, according to a document published by the general office of the State Council, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Local governments also took instant action. The Nanjing city government convened a meeting on Wednesday to study the allocation of work for stimulating the city’s economy. The city’s officials were requested to make clear work responsibilities and make efforts to achieve targets for the first half of this year.

China’s stock markets edged up on Thursday, with the Shanghai Composite Index rising  0.5 percent, while the Shenzhen market rose  0.57 percent.

Several companies interviewed by the Global Times applauded the government’s action to help domestic companies cope with difficulties, saying they still have confidence in a business rebound soon in spite of a business contraction recently.

A manager of a logistics company based in Shanghai surnamed Zhao told the Global Times on Thursday that the company’s business has dropped by at least 50 percent in April due to the lockdown, but he expects the company’s revenue to pick up by about 10 percent in May compared with the previous month as the city gradually lifts closed-loop management. His company engages in foreign trade.

According to Zhao, the growing complexity of the external environment including the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy, high inflation abroad and the rising interest rate of the dollar, is casting a shadow of uncer-tainty on foreign trade companies. But he still holds confidence and believes that the epidemic will be brought under control soon.

“It would take another 2-3 months or more for the industry to recover to pre-epidemic level,” Zhao said.

Liu Hongyuan, CEO of a compression socks maker and exporter Hangzhou Zhongzhi Industry Co., told the Global Times that he feels a mix of uncertainty and confidence in the future.

“I have confidence in the long-term development prospects of the sports industry (which boosts de-mands for our products), but our business pressure is heavy currently,” he said.

This feeling of uncertainty has arisen from diminishing purchasing power or willingness from overseas clients, he said, which caused the company’s exports to drop compared to last year.

He said that the company has benefited from the government’s VAT credit refund policy, and he hopes more such support from the authorities, like favorable policies on loans to medium and small companies.

Future outlook 

Although China is going through tremendous economic pressure, many economists are still upbeat about a rebound soon, as they pointed out that the fundamentals of China’s economy have not been damaged by the recent difficulties.

Cong Yi, a professor at the Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times on Thursday that the current downward pressure is due to the sudden outbreak of the Omicron virus, rather than any fundamental problems.

“Our confidence and efforts to maintain growth comes from  stable fundamentals-backed by China’s huge market, strong production capability and domestic demand. Those will not disappear because of the temporary coronavirus resurgence,” Cong said.

Cao Heping, an economist at Peking University, also told the Global Times on Thursday that if Shanghai can gradually recover by the end of May and seize the June window, China’s economic growth can remain positive in the second quarter.

He said that in order to stabilize growth and market entities, stimulus ranging from tax cuts to other support measures have to be “extremely efficient,” “quite precise” and go to those who need them most.

A report of the Economic Daily published on Thursday noted that China should not only face up to the current pressure, but should also recognize the internal economic rules in the long term, pointing out that China’s economy is full of potential and resilience.

Experts also stressed that the government is looking to prepare for an “accurate” stimulus policy in the second quarter by mapping out and studying China’s economic indicators.

Premier Li noted that major economic indicators for the second quarter across different parts of the country would be published by national statistics departments in a  truthful manner.

“The government is attaching great importance to second quarter GDP data, being stricter about its calculations and hoping the numbers reflect China’s genuine economic situation,” Ye said.

Huo Jianguo, vice chairman of the China Society for World Trade Organization Studies in Beijing, told the Global Times on Thursday that there’s no need to adjust the full-year growth target of 5.5 percent, although it means challenges for the third and fourth quarter’s economic performance.

How to Design a Nuclear Reactor – an Illustrated Rough Guide, 1956-1998

I just LOVE the line art.

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The University of New Mexico’s Centennial Science and Engineering Library hosts these images of Nuclear Engineering Wall Charts. The graphics appeared in Nuclear Engineering International magazine from it inception in 1956 to 1998. Nuclear power has had its successes and disasters – but it’s rarely looked better.

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Western Civilization at a Crossroads: Mythical Hegemony or Win-Win Paradigm?

“I was honored to discover that my recent piece co-authored by Dr Edward Lozansky was just published on The American Committee for US-Russia Accord tackling the big question of WHICH western civilization is shaping the current Neoliberal Rules Based disorder? “
As the world is moving slowly but surely to the edge of the abyss, there is a parallel crisis going within the nations that claim to exemplify the best of “western values” while undermining and violating them at every point.

Of course, the West blames all the problems of the world on the East, particularly Russia and China but there are some “dissident” voices that need to be heard at least for the sake of those who are interested in searching for ideas that might avoid Armageddon. 

Rudyard Kipling once wrote: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.”

In his poem, Kipling was expressing his belief that cultures of the East and West were so intrinsically different that any hope for harmony or mutual interest was little more than a delusion.

How could such a worldview possibly mesh with the cultures of Orthodox Russia, Confucian China, or the Islamic world? To the degree that those cultures maintained their ancient traditions and values, it obviously could not, as only total submission to a hegemon could resolve the conflict.

Impossibly Easy Bacon Cheeseburger Pie

Come on!

What’s stopping you from giving this dish a try-out? Eh?

Ground beef combines with bacon to add a delicious flavor to this easy cheeseburger pie – perfect when you want dinner to be ready in 50 minutes.

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a5acb451 564e 4b8a 9bbd 0bc045af4dae

Ingredients

  • 6 slices bacon
  • 1 lb lean (at least 80%) ground beef
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 large onion, chopped (1 cup)
  • 1/4 cup ketchup
  • 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese (4 oz)
  • 1/2 cup Original Bisquick™ mix
  • 1 cup milk
  • 2 eggs

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2022 05 23 21 29

HD】南征北戰NZBZ – 《生來倔强》巡迴演唱會_我的天空 (Live) [Official Music Video] 官方LIVE版

Enjoy a taste of contemporaneous Chinese culture…

官方LIVE版”]

The Intelligence Service Owl From Russia

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A Russian technopolis ERA presents a remotely piloted vehicle that looks like an owl. The intelligence service drone can stay in the air for forty minutes and overcome a distance up to twenty kilometers. Besides, it can recognize ground targets from a distance up to ten meters.

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The vehicle determines the cordinates of ground reconnaissance objects with use of a laser target marker ranger and the Global navigation satellite system “Glonass”. The weight of the owl is 5 kg, it can be launched by one person. The producer of the vehicle notes that it’s also possible to make similar remote-piloted vehicles that would look like falcons or other birds of prey.

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The Prisoner S1E2 Part 1

This is the second episode of The Prisoner. It is in two parts because it is so long. This is the first part. I hope you enjoy it. It took me forever to find.

The Prisoner S1E2 Part 2

This is the second episode of The Prisoner. This is the second part. I hope you enjoy it. It took me forever to find.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Fooling around, mysteries, new geopolitical alignments in the Pacific Rim, and Beef and Green Chile Enchiladas

My wife just got a cute little yellow envelope in the mail from an organization called "Project Hope". They were soliciting donations for Ukraine. Yeah right. There's a scam for everything in the USA. 

So I looked up their executive compensation. Get dafuq outta here!

1. Thomas Kenyon, M.D. $415,652
2. Alan Weil $406,419
3. Rabih Torbay $347,437

-Tom_Q_Collins

I hope youse guys are all doing well. Things are warming up here in Zhuhai. Still funky weather. That’s for certain, here in this installment of MM mixed up subjects we are going to though out numerous songs and some history with food and other fun subjects. I hope you all enjoy this edition.

But first, I want to give a “shout out” to Ohio Guy. He’s one of the handful of special contributors that have been supporting MM all these years. I feel bad that I lumped him in with the many, many who just hop in and go along “for the ride” without a kind note, a friendly wave, or a dollar in the tip jar.

I want all of you to know that I try to make this MM site free for everyone, but those that contribute in some funds, and donations, that place some comments, and that send me some private emails are THE ENGINE that keeps MM humming along.

And it’s really important.

We all have good days, and bad days, just like you do. And MM is no exception, but you know what? It’s that super kind comment that turns my day around. It’s that heart-felt email that I get that put a shine on my cheeks, and it’s that little donation that make me stand a little taller, and makes the day a little brighter.

So, with this in mind, I dedicate this entire post to “Ohio Guy”! Take a bow. My hat’s off to you!

You are the guy who dragged me back to the chair, and kept me working. You are the guy; the man, who inspired me to keep on, going on.

I salute you.

Beef and Green Chile Enchiladas

Try these easy, cheesy ground-beef enchiladas, complete with sassy sauce and mild chiles.

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2b23cf23 2d3b 48a3 93b1 912004fbe8d0

Ingredients

  • 1 lb. lean (at least 80%) ground beef
  • 1/2 cup chopped onion (1 medium)
  • 1 cup frozen corn
  • 1/2 cup sour cream
  • 1 (4.5-oz.) can Old El Paso™ Chopped Green Chiles
  • 8 oz. (2 cups) shredded colby-Monterey Jack cheese
  • 1 (10-oz.) can Old El Paso™ Enchilada Sauce
  • 6 (8-inch) flour tortillas
  • Shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes and additional sour cream, if desired

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2022 05 25 19 48

Philippines’ Marcos wants China ties to ‘shift to higher gear’ under his presidency

  • Xi, Marcos to hold more comprehensive talks
  • China will respect an “independent” foreign policy -Marcos
  • Philippines an issue in U.S.-China strategic rivalry
  • Marcos widely expected to lean towards China

MANILA, May 18 (Reuters) – Philippines president-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr on Wednesday said his country’s ties with China will expand and “shift to a higher gear” when he takes power, signalling intent to advance outgoing leader Rodrigo Duterte’s pro-Beijing agenda.

Reporting by Karen Lema and Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Martin Petty

The article is HERE

Elvin Bishop | Fooled Around and Fell in Love

Yousa! I love this…. It must have been awesome in concert. It was just so and so when I was growing up. But watching the live video is something else.

Vladimir Putin signs legislation allowing him to hold office until 2036 – ABC News

Long live Putin
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Key points:

  • New legislation allows Mr Putin to hold office for two additional six-year terms
  • The amendments emphasise Russian law over international norms, outlaw same-sex marriages and mention “a belief in God” as a core value
  • The opposition has criticised the legislation, arguing that it lacks transparency and hinders independent monitoring
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed legislation allowing him to hold office for two additional six-year terms — a move that means he may stay in power until 2036.

If Mr Putin remains in power until 2036, his tenure will surpass even that of Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union for 29 years, making him the country's longest-serving leader since the Russian empire.

Mr Putin has served twice as president, from 2000-08 and 2012-present, as well as serving as de facto leader while prime minister from 2008-12.

Last year, Mr Putin signed additional legislation granting former presidents a lifetime seat in the federation council or senate, a position that assured immunity from prosecution upon leaving the presidency.

The 68-year-old Russian President, who has held power for more than two decades, said he would decide later whether to run in 2024 when his current six-year term ended.

Article HERE.

Someone Found An Old Photo Album Full Of Pics Of This strange Woman And Hollywood Celebrities In A Thrift Shop

It’s a mystery.

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Bruce Willis

A thrift shop in Belgium has caused quite a stir on the Internet. People at Opnieuw & Co, a local establishment in Mortsel, discovered an old photo album where a woman posed next to the biggest stars in Hollywood.

After they shared some of the pictures, the online community immediately started their investigation.

Who was this woman hugging Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Bruce Willis, and other A-list celebrities?

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Patrick Stewart

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Lawrence Fishburn

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Harrison Ford

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Nicolas Cage

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Sam Neill and Robert Downey Jr

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Kevin Costner

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Tom Seleck

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Tom Cruise

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Richard Dreyfuss

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Kristin Davis

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Jon Bon Jovi

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Cuba Gooding Jr, Lawrence Fishburn

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Drew Barrymore

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Ed Harris

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Keanu Reeves

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Tim Roth

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Heather Locklear

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Antonio Banderas

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Johnny Depp

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Kevin Costner, find yourself someone looking at you like Kevin Costner looks at her.

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Hugh Grant

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Kevin Bacon and Tom Hanks

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Rutger Hauer

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The Cast of “The Bold & The Beautiful”.

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William Shatner

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Young Elijah Wood

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Will Smith

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Meg Ryan and Andy Garcia

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Kirk Douglas

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Luke Perry

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Andy Garcia

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Emilio Estevez

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Clarence Williams III, Kyle Maclachlan and Samuel L Jackson

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Helen Hunt

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Kate Winslett

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Liam Neeson

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Jack Nicholson

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Faye Dunaway

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Robert Duvall

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The Cast of “Melrose Place”

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Christopher Walken

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Steven Spielberg

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Walter Matthau

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Jack Lemmon and Sophia Loren

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Tommy Lee Jones

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Gerard Depardieu and Claude Berri

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Sir Anthony Hopkins and Richard Attenborough

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Julia Roberts

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Johnny Depp and Juliette Lewis

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Michael Douglas

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Andrew Shue

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Denzel Washington

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Cary Elwes

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Matt Dillon

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Danny Glover

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Nicole Kidman and Michael Keaton

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Cast of Saved By The Bell

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Cast of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Women

After a while, someone noticed a tag she had in one of the photos. Turns out, the ‘mysterious’ woman is actually Maria Snoeys-Lagler, a former member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA). It’s a non-profit organization of journalists and photographers who report on the entertainment industry. The HFPA consists of about 90 members from around 55 countries, and they’re the ones conducting the annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony in Los Angeles every January.

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Looking at these pictures, it’s clear that Maria Snoeys-Lagler has met virtually everyone dominating the biggest screens and stages. Or is it the other way around? Maybe, just maybe, there’s a secret club in Hollywood of all the celebrities who have had their picture taken with Maria Snoeys-Lagler?

S O S Band Take Your Time Do It Right 1980

Gosh this girl is so darn HOT!

China is pursuing a Pacific-wide pact with 10 island nations on security, policing and data – report

Federated States of Micronesia wants deal rejected because it could spark new cold war between China and west while Australia admits ‘we’ve got a lot of work to do’

Wed 25 May 2022 18.44 AEST

China will pursue a Pacific-wide deal with almost a dozen island nations covering policing, security and data communications cooperation when the foreign minister, Wang Yi, hosts a meeting in Fiji next week, documents show.

A draft communique and five-year action plan sent by Beijing to 10 Pacific islands ahead of a foreign ministers meeting on 30 May has prompted pushback from at least one of the invited nations, which said it showed China’s intent to control the region and “threatens regional stability”.

In a letter to 21 Pacific leaders seen by Reuters, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) president, David Panuelo, said his nation would argue the “pre-determined joint communique” should be rejected because he feared it could spark a new “cold war” between China and the west.

Wang will visit eight Pacific island nations that China holds diplomatic ties with between 26 May and 4 June.

He arrives on Thursday in Solomon Islands, which recently signed a security pact with China despite objections from Australia, the US, Japan and New Zealand, which fear it could upset regional security arrangements and give China a military foothold in the Pacific.

Beijing rejects this, saying the pact is focused on domestic policing and criticism by western countries was interfering in Solomon Island’s sovereign decision-making.

China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the document.

The FSM government, which has a defence agreement with the US as well as an economic cooperation agreement with China, declined to comment on the letter.

Australia’s new foreign minister, Penny Wong, on Wednesday said: “China has made its intentions clear [but] so too are the intentions of the new Australian government.”

Wong declared the incoming Labor government had a lot of work to do to recover Australia’s status as the partner of choice in the Pacific after a “lost decade” of Coalition rule.

New vision

A region-wide agreement covering security and trade between China and Pacific islands would represent a shift in Beijing’s focus from bilateral relationships to dealing with the Pacific on a multilateral basis – and would likely increase concerns by Washington and its allies.

The China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision draft document, as well as a five-year action plan, has been circulated by Beijing ahead of the meeting in Fiji.

It states China and the Pacific islands will “strengthen exchanges and cooperation in the fields of traditional and non-traditional security”.

“China will hold intermediate and high-level police training for Pacific Island countries through bilateral and multilateral means,” the document seen by Reuters states.

The action plan outlines a ministerial dialogue on law enforcement capacity and police cooperation to be held in 2022, and China providing forensic police laboratories.

The draft communique also pledges cooperation on data networks, cybersecurity, smart customs systems, and for Pacific islands to “take a balanced approach to technological progress, economic development and protection of national security”.

Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei, which is barred from 5G networks run by several US allies, has been repeatedly thwarted in attempts to build submarine cables or run mobile networks in the Pacific islands by Australia and the US offering rival bids for the sensitive infrastructure, citing national security concerns.

China’s provision of customs systems would lead to “biodata collection and mass surveillance of those residing in, entering and leaving our islands”, he added.

The letter was also critical of Australia’s lack of action on climate change, which Panuelo said was the greatest security threat to the region.

The new Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, pledged this week to increase climate financing to Pacific islands, saying climate change was the main economic and security challenge for low-lying island countries.

Tommy James + The Shondells – Crystal Blue Persuasion

Dust off this lost great…

Ukraine Propaganda – BBC Tries To Sell Telegram Rumors That Make No Sense

From MoA

Do they really think that the people are dumb enough to believe such shit?

Russian media: retired Russian major general killed in skies over Ukraine

 

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2022 05 26 15 30

Which ‘Russian media’ one might asks:

A [Russian] fighter has been shot down in the skies over Ukraine, and Kanamat Botashev, a retired Major General of the Russian Air Force, was killed.Source: Russian edition of BBC with reference to Botashov’s three former subordinates

Details: Subordinates who had kept in touch with Botashev after leaving the service agreed to comment on condition of anonymity for reasons of personal safety.

Oh, the ‘Russian media’ is in fact the Russian language site of the BBC World Service which is financed and directed by the British government’s Foreign Office. The same BBC World Service which since March has suspended its operation and which had its its website blocked in Russia.

That BBC World Service will surly have reliable sources for making such nonsense claims:

One of Botashev’s former colleagues confirmed that a retired general was carrying out missions in a Su-25 aircraft in Ukraine.In one of the Russian Telegram channels, this participant reported on Botashev’s death …

 

‘Russian Telegram channels’ are anonymous and also widely used by Ukrainians. They are often unreliable.

The picture above is somewhat curious too. Its resolution is too low to read the name patch of the pictured officer who does totally not look like 63 year old retired man.

The plane the Ukrainians allegedly shot down was a Su-25 ground attack aircraft. Why then is the ‘retired Major-General Botashev’, should he actually exist, pictured in front of an Su-34, a supersonic fighter-bomber. According to Tineye the photo was first published on May 23 by a news site in Tbilisi, Georgia. There is no metadata in the picture and I am unable to find any caption for it.

The whole story makes absolutely no sense:

It is unclear how the 63-year-old retired general found himself at the controls of the Su-25 in Ukraine.


Botashev commanded a regiment of the Guards Air Base in Voronezh. His military career came to an end in June 2012, when he was accused of crashing a Su-27 fighter near Petrozavodsk. The general asked his friend-colonel to let him fly a Su-27, a flight permit he did not have.

 

So the dude was kicked out of the military? He hasn’t flown military planes for 10 years? Somehow he steals an Su-25, which he probably did not know how to fly, and gets shot down over Ukraine? Yeah, that makes totally sense …

What will the BBC World Service editors try to sell us next? Bridges?

Posted by b on May 25, 2022 at 16:03 UTC | Permalink

Underwater Graveyard Full Of WWII Planes Is Otherworldly

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For 70 years, World War II planes have been resting in peace at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Although divers have enjoyed exploring the underwater graveyard since the 1960s, Brandi Mueller‘s photos allow us to admire these treasures without a wetsuit.

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“I find diving [to see] the airplanes really exciting,” Mueller, a scuba diving instructor and boat captain, told Mashable. “It’s a strange thing to see airplanes underwater. Shipwrecks you expect, but not airplanes.”

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The planes didn’t actually crash at this particular location near the Marshall Islands, though. They were discarded there after WWII because it was too expensive to transport them back to the United States from the Kwajalein Atoll, according to Mueller.

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The site includes Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers, F4U Corsairs, TBF/TBM Avengers, Helldivers, B-25 Mitchells, Curtiss C-46 Commandos and F4F Wildcats, which sit in the sand about 130 feet below the surface.

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Here Are 11 Statistics That Show How U.S. Consumers Are Faring In This Rapidly Deteriorating Economy

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Prices are soaring, there are widespread shortages of certain items such as baby formula all over the nation, and at the same time U.S. economic activity appears to be really slowing down.  Considering all of that, it makes perfect sense why the American people are feeling so negative about the economy right now.  In fact, a whopping 85 percent of all Americans believe that there will be a recession within the next year.

These days, it is virtually impossible to get Americans to overwhelmingly agree about anything, and so the fact that 85 percent of us are anticipating a recession is a really big deal.

Just about everyone realizes that economic conditions are going to get worse, but for those of you that still doubt where we are headed here are 11 statistics that show how U.S. consumers are faring in this rapidly deteriorating economy…

#1 According to a Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll that was recently conducted, 56 percent of Americans say that their financial situations are getting worse, and only 20 percent of Americans say that their financial situations are improving.

#2 Another new survey has just discovered that 66 percent of Americans “have avoided social events because they’ve felt embarrassed or uncomfortable” about their financial situations.

#3 The housing bubble appears to be bursting.  At this point, sales of new single family homes are falling at a very frightening pace

Sales of new single-family houses in April plunged by 16.6% from March and by 26.9% from a year ago, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 591,000 houses, the lowest since lockdown April 2020, according to the Census Bureau today. Sales of new houses are registered when contracts are signed, not when deals close, and can serve as an early indicator of the overall housing market.

#4 After breaking the all-time national record in March, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has gone 42 cents above the old record and is now sitting at $4.59.

#5 The average age of a car on U.S. roads has reached an all-time record high of 12.2 years.  Many Americans continue to delay replacing their current vehicles because new vehicles have become so unaffordable.

#6 Millions of American families are struggling with rapidly rising food prices

The index for food away from home increased 7.2% over the last year, the Labor Department reported earlier this month. Food prices were up 9.4% in April from the same time last year — the biggest jump since April 1981, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported. And grocery store prices increased 10.8% for the year ended in April.

#7 U.S. natural gas futures just crossed the nine dollar threshold – the highest level that we have seen since the financial crisis of 2008.  That means that much higher energy costs are on the way for U.S. consumers.

#8 Multiple Fed surveys are showing that manufacturing activity in the U.S. is really slowing down

The slowdown in manufacturing activity on display in reports from the Federal Reserve banks of New York and Philadelphia was confirmed by a survey from the Richmond Fed indicating that factory activity contracted in the mid-Atlantic region in May.

The Fifth District Survey of Manufacturing Activity index dropped 23 points from a positive reading of 14 in April to a minus nine, the lowest reading since May 2020, when much of the economy was still reeling from the onset of the pandemic and lockdowns.

#9 Zero Hedge is reporting extremely depressing news about U.S. macro data: “Other than April 2020 – when the entire economy was closed – May’s serial disappointment in US Macro data is the worst since Lehman”

#10 Thanks to plunging stock prices, approximately 20 trillion dollars in household net worth has been “wiped out” so far this year.

#11 A new CBS News/YouGov survey has found that 74 percent of Americans believe that things are going badly in this country and that 51 percent of Americans actually believe that Joe Biden is “incompetent”.

Right now, conditions are so similar to what we witnessed just before the financial crisis of 2008.

If we had addressed our long-term problems back then, perhaps we would be in a much different place at the moment.

But instead, we appear to be poised to repeat history in a lot of ways.

In fact, many experts believe that the crisis that is staring us in the face will be even worse than what we went through more than a decade ago.  For example, just check out what Peter Schiff is saying

This one is going to be even bigger because the economy has a lot more debt now than it did in 2008. And Americans are less able to pay it when interest rates rise because the balances are much greater. So, we’re in much worse shape as a result of all the bailouts and all the stimulus that papered over the last crisis. So, now the one we’re dealing with is going to be much worse because we kicked the can down the road instead of solving the problem when we had a chance.”

He makes some really great points.

Every time there has been some sort of a crisis in our society, our leaders responded by showering the system with even more money.

In 2008, the U.S. national debt crossed the 10 trillion dollar threshold.

In 2022, the U.S. national debt has crossed the 30 trillion dollar threshold.

Our politicians have been systematically destroying our future, and most Americans didn’t seem to care.

Now a day of reckoning has arrived, and it is going to be immensely painful.

There is no silver bullet that is going to cure inflation.

The Federal Reserve is going to try to tame inflation by hiking interest rates, but that will just destroy the housing bubble and dramatically slow down the economy.

And there is no silver bullet that is going to end the shortages that we are currently facing.

We are now experiencing some of the consequences of decades of mismanagement, and a lot more pain is on the way.

Rita Hayworth & Fred Astaire dance to Led Zeppelin

Genius. Worth a watch.

Journey in the Search for the American Dream

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Photographer Pavel Prokopchik plans to travel across the USA trying to capture the essence of the American life today. He’d like to find out what “The American Dream” means to people in the USA today. The project he has in mind is one that will shape itself as it proceeds, and is essentially elastic, where unexpected meeting can easily deviate him from my original route.

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Chaka Khan and Rufus – Tell me something Good (RE-MASTERED) Official Video HD

Rufus! Chaka Khan is awesome!

The Level Of Evil In Our Society Is Off The Charts

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What in the world has happened to our society?  Every day I scour dozens of news websites as I do research for my articles and upcoming books, and every day I am horrified by all of the evil that I encounter.

We are a deeply, deeply sick society, and more symptoms emerge with each passing day.  For example, what would cause an 18-year-old to walk into an elementary school and start gunning down young children?

When I was growing up, I never once imagined something like that could possibly ever happen in any of the public schools that I attended.  But now this sort of thing is becoming a regular occurrence in America, and the great tragedy that we witnessed on Tuesday quickly made headlines all over the nation

A gunman opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde on Tuesday, killing 14 students and one teacher, Gov. Greg Abbott said. The gunman, identified by law enforcement as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, was also killed, Abbott said. Ramos was reportedly a student at Uvalde High School or was a former student, Abbott said. Uvalde Police Chief Pete Arredondo said it appears that Ramos acted alone.

It was not immediately clear how many people, in addition to the dead, were wounded, but Arredondo said there were “several injuries.”

It is also being reported that Ramos actually shot his own grandmother before going over to the school…

The suspect also allegedly shot his grandmother before entering the school and again opening fire, Abbott said. He did not say anything further about her condition.

Decades ago, this sort of incident would have been talked about for years.

But most Americans will forget all about this shooting a few days from now, and that is because school shootings have become incredibly common in our day and time.

In fact, this was the 27th school shooting in the United States so far this year.

How many of them can you name?

Our schools are not safe anymore, and this is one of the big reasons why so many parents are turning to homeschooling.

Of course it isn’t just our schools that have become danger zones.  At this point, major urban areas all over the country are rapidly being transformed into war zones.  According to the CDC, the number of firearm homicides jumped almost 35 percent just from 2019 to 2020…

The United States suffered 19,350 firearm homicides in 2020, up nearly 35 percent compared to 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in its latest data.

Sadly, getting shot and killed is not the only thing our kids have to be concerned about these days.

There is also the possibility that they could be abducted and forced into sex slavery.  This actually happened to one extremely unfortunate 15-year-old girl that attended a Dallas Mavericks game a few weeks ago

A 15-year-old Texas girl was rescued by police 10 days after she was kidnapped at a basketball game while using the bathroom, then trafficked by pedophiles.

The unidentified teenager’s father raised the alarm shortly after she left to use the restroom and didn’t return to her seat at a Dallas Maverick game in the American Airline Center on April 8.

She was one of the lucky ones.

There are countless others that are never rescued.

But at least our kids should be safe in church, right?

Wrong.

There are sexual predators there too, and sometimes they are even in the pulpit.

On Sunday, a woman named Bobi Gephart that had her virginity taken by a pastor when she was just 16 years old confronted him in front of the entire congregation

Turning to Lowe, she continued: ‘I was just 16 when you took my virginity on your office floor. Do you remember that? I know you do.

‘You did things to to my teenage body that should have never been done. If you can’t admit the truth, you have to answer to God. You are not the victim here.’

I can’t even begin to describe how evil this is.

And her husband stated that this abuse lasted for a total of nine years

Bobi’s husband Nate then added: ‘This is a lie. This is not just adultery.

‘It’s another level. It happened for nine years. When she was 15, 16, the grooming started.’

I wish that this was an isolated incident, but it isn’t.

In fact, a new report has revealed widespread sexual misconduct in one of the largest Christian denominations in the entire nation…

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention publicly apologized to victims of sexual abuse within the denomination and vowed to make public a private database of offenders in response to an explosive report detailing allegations of sexual misconduct and cover-up.

On Tuesday, SBC leaders gathered to discuss a historic investigation report from Guidepost Solutions that found that the denomination’s leadership mishandled widespread sexual abuse allegations, ignored and silenced victims and engaged in an abusive pattern of intimidation largely to avoid liability.

This shouldn’t be happening.

People go to church to find God, but in way too many instances they are encountering predators instead.

We have become a deeply, deeply wicked country, and it is getting worse with each passing year.

It is in this sort of environment that exceedingly wicked leaders can emerge.  In fact, the guy currently in the White House has been telling mammoth lie after mammoth lie for decades

 

If we lived in a just society filled with decent people, such a man could never have a career in politics.

Of course the entire world is headed in the same direction, and that has enabled someone like Klaus Schwab to become one of the most important leaders on the entire planet…

 

This week, Schwab boldly told the elite gathered at Davos that “the future is being built by us”

 

Sadly, to a very large degree he is correct.

They are trying to construct their version of “utopia”, but their plans are starting to crumble as a “perfect storm” of war, economic troubles, food shortages, energy problems and major pestilences hammers their efforts from all sides.

As I have tried to explain for many years, ultimately they will fail.

They have destroyed everything that our forefathers worked so hard to build, and in the end their efforts will be destroyed as well.

But right now just about every form of evil that you can possibly imagine is flourishing in our American society, and that should deeply sicken all of us Americans.

Strawberry Alarm Clock – Incense & Peppermints (1967)

So very groovy!

Double Cheese and Bean Nachos

It’s hard to resist a platter of crunchy, gooey nachos, especially this jalapeño-studded version loaded with cheese.

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Ingredients

  • 4 cups small round corn tortilla chips
  • 1 cup Old El Paso™ refried beans (from 16-oz can)
  • 1/2 cup Old El Paso™ Thick ‘n Chunky salsa
  • 2 tablespoons from 1 jar (12 oz) Old El Paso™ Hot Jalapeño Slices
  • 1/2 cup chopped green onions (8 medium)
  • 2 cups shredded Mexican cheese blend (8 oz)

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S1 Episode 8 Schizoid Man – Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner

We continue with this episode…

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Bio-weapons, small American towns in ruin, delicious muffins, and old photos of kitty cats.

This article is much longer than what I intended, but I hope that you enjoy it. It’s got a whole bunch of good stuff, and some really hidden treats that (I hope) will have you all running back for more. When you make the muffins, please make sure that you use real butter and make sure that they are hot right out of the oven! It’s a word to the wise, eh?

The Answer is the Coming Small-Town Revival

The post-COVID recovery will be change, not restoration. We’ll be forced to rebuild where we are.

From HERE

Years ago, I moved from a somewhat larger small town (pop. 30,000) in upstate New York to a smaller small town (pop. 2,500) 15 miles east in order to establish a little homestead with gardens, fruit trees, and chickens. I found this three-acre property literally on the edge of town, a five-minute walk to the center of Main Street.

If you’ve been following this column on urban design the past year, you know I’ve said we’re entering an era of stark economic contraction that will change the terms of daily life in America, and one feature of it is that the action will shift from the big cities and sprawling suburbs back to America’s small towns.

The COVID-19 virus has accelerated this trend, actually drawing a sharp dividing line between “then” and “now” that historians will recognize—but that many contemporary observers are missing.

My little town was badly beaten down when I got here in 2011 and actually sank a bit lower over the years since.

The last Main Street shops that sold anything not previously owned shut down. The two last suppertime restaurants folded. The tiny local newspaper ceased publication, and the DOT put a concrete barrier across the tracks of the little railroad spur line, which hadn’t run trains, anyway, since the 1980s.

The several factories on the river that runs through town—a tributary of the mighty Hudson—had all shuttered in the 1970s, and only one even still stands in the form of ruins, the rest demolished, wiped off the map and out of memory.

In the century and a half previous, they’d gone through iterations of making textiles—first linen, which was grown here, then cotton, which was not—and then paper products (finally, and not without irony, toilet tissue).

What’s left in the town is a phantom armature of everyday life tuned to a bygone era with all its economic and social functionality removed, like a fine old piano with all its string cut.

The bones are still there in the form of buildings, but the activities, relationships, and institutions are gone.

The commerce is gone, the jobs are gone, the social and economic roles have no players, the places for fraternizing and public entertainment gone, the churches nearly empty.

There’s a post-1980 shopping strip on the highway leaving the west end of town.

That’s where the supermarket is (it replaced a 1960s IGA closer to the center, which replaced the various greengrocers, butchers, and dry goods establishments of yore on Main Street).

There’s a chain pharmacy, a Tractor Supply, a pizza shop and a Chinese take-out place out there, too.

The Kmart closed in 2017 and two years later a Big Lots (overstocked merch) took its place.

The local school system may be the town’s largest employer these days; it’s also the town’s leading levier of taxes.

Some people drive long distances to work in other towns, even as far as the state capital, Albany, where jobs with good pay, real medical benefits, and fat pensions still exist—though you can’t claim they produce anything of value.

Quite a few people scrambled for years with marginal small home-based businesses (making art, massage, home bakeries, etc.), but the virus creamed a lot of them.

It’s hard these days to find a plumber or a carpenter.

A few dozen farmers hang on.

There is a lively drug underground here, which some can make a living at—if they can stay off their own product—but it’s not what you’d call a plus for the common good.

Federal cash supports of one sort or other account for many of the rest who live here: social security, disability, SNAP cards, plain old family welfare payments, and COVID-19 checks (for now), adding up to a quasi-zombie economy.

In short, what appears to be a town now bears no resemblance to the rich set of social and economic relationships and modes of production that existed here a hundred years ago, a local network of complex interdependencies based on local capital and local resources—with robust connections (the railroad! The Hudson River and Champlain Canal!) to other towns that operated similarly, and even linkage to some distant big city markets.

The question I’m building up to is:

How do we get back to anything that resembles that kind of high-functioning society?

The answer is trauma, a set of circumstances that will disrupt all the easy and dishonest work-arounds which have determined the low state of our current arrangements.

You can be sure this is coming; it’s already in motion:

  • collapsing oil production due to the insupportable costs of the shale “miracle,”
  • the end of industrial growth as we’ve known it,
  • the limits of borrowing from the future to pay today’s bills (i.e., debt that will never be paid back),
  • widespread household bankruptcy and unemployment,
  • and the consequent social disorder all that will entail.

That reality will compel us to reorganize American life, starting with how we inhabit the landscape, and you can bet that three things will drive it:

  • the necessity to produce food locally,
  • the need to organize the activities that support food production locally,
  • and the need—as when starting anything—to begin at a small and manageable scale.

It will happen emergently, which is to say without any committee of experts, savants, or commissars directing it, because the need will be self-evident.

For now, the broad public remains bamboozled, distracted by the terrors of COVID-19, the uproars of race-and-gender tension, the dazzle of Federal Reserve hocus-pocus, the anxiety over climate change, and, of course, the worsening struggle of so many ordinary citizens to just keep paying the bills.

When you’re in a ditch, you don’t call the President of the United States. You need a handful of friends and neighbors with a come-along.

That’s how it’s going to work to bring our small towns back to life.

When the chain stores choke on their broken supply chains, some attentive persons will see an advantage in figuring out how to get and sell necessities by rebuilding local networks of supply and retail.

Farming will be rescued from its artificially induced senility when the trucks stop delivering pallets of frozen pizza and Captain Crunch as dependably as they used to.

And then the need for many other businesses that support farming and value-added production will find willing, earnest go-getters.

The river still runs through town and it runs year-round, powerfully enough to make some things, if there was a reason to, and a will, and a way.

And after a while, you’ll have a fully functioning town again, built on social and economic roles that give people a reason to think that life is worth living.

Wait for it.

I completely endorse this thought and prediction. -MM

What do you think? DO you think that the United States can adapt and revitalize the nation after the fiasco that the current government structure created, or do you think that massive destruction and fiasco must occur to force change?

America declares war on China

From HERE.

US secretary of state declares China the “most serious long-term challenge”

Despite the eruption of military conflict between the United States and Russia over Ukraine, the central aim of US foreign policy is to [1] cripple, [2] isolate and [3] contain China, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a major policy speech Thursday.

Blinken’s remarks, which have been delayed for months following the eruption of the war in Ukraine, represent a public presentation of the Biden administration’s internal strategy document on China, which declares that Beijing is the central target of the US military.

“Even as President Putin’s war continues, we will remain focused on the most serious long-term challenge to the international order—and that’s posed by the People’s Republic of China,” Blinken said.

He continued, “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”

“We will defend our interests against any threat,” Blinken said.

Although he did not use the term, Blinken’s statement embraces the framework of economic “decoupling” developed under Trump. Blinken explicitly repudiated the efforts by the Nixon administration to engage with Beijing. The “China of today is very different from the China of 50 years ago, when President Nixon broke decades of strained relations to become the first US president to visit the country,” he declared.

Blinken continued, “Now, China is a global power with extraordinary reach, influence, and ambition. It’s the second largest economy… it seeks to dominate the technologies and industries of the future. It’s rapidly modernized its military and intends to become a top tier fighting force with global reach. And it has announced its ambition to create a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power.”

Blinken’s statement constitutes yet another embrace of the central foreign policy aim of the Trump administration: preparations for conflict with China. Notably, Blinken invoked the racist conspiracy theory developed by the Trump administration, that COVID-19 was a man-made virus, condemning China’s alleged efforts to block an “independent inquiry into COVID’s origin.”

Modeling his tone and delivery on the rhetoric of former President Obama, Blinken repeatedly made completely contradictory assertions with a straight face. Blinken delivered blood-curdling threats, followed immediately by a declaration that the United States is not threatening anyone.

The war declaration is treated as a “nothing burger” in the United States

From HERE.

Blinken China policy speech: Nothing new to see here

The Secretary’s remarks were a rehash of old statements and the usual mixed messages about US competition with Beijing.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a frankly underwhelming address outlining the Biden administration’s policy towards China on Thursday.

The speech at George Washington University had been scheduled for earlier in the month, but it was postponed because Blinken tested positive for COVID the day before he was set to give it. Coming on the heels of Biden’s visit to Asia and his controversial remarks committing the U.S. to intervene to defend Taiwan, Blinken’s speech offered little more than a rehashing of previous administration statements. 

Administration officials had of course emphasized to reporters in the weeks leading up to the speech that it would not contain any new announcements, and it did not. The speech served mainly as an occasion to give an overview of Biden’s China policy without providing much useful detail of how they intend to execute it. 

Biden’s China policy is modeled closely on that of the Trump administration, and it is arguably the one policy where there is the greatest continuity between Biden and his predecessor. There is good reason why Biden’s policy so far has been perceived as little more than “Trump lite”: not only are there very few substantive changes from the previous administration’s approach, but the Biden administration also fails to emphasize the differences that do exist.

It was some twenty years after the end of the Vietnam war that a security conference was held between leading military figures from both America and Vietnam. Following the conference a U.S. Air Force General approached a Vietnamese General.

The American had been a fighter pilot captain during the conflict, the Vietnamese general had been a Colonel in the N.V.A. The American asked (paraphrasing): “You have to tell me, we knew your Army was continually crossing the Mekong, we flew sorties up and down the river and could never find your bridges.” “I know,” said the Vietnamese, “we built them three feet under water.”

In that instant the American understood why America lost the war. His “Road to Damascus” moment was informed by how the different combatants approached problems. Had that been an American problem, how an Army crosses a wide, deep and fast flowing river, they would have solved the problem differently. They would have built a suspension bridge, they would have had bases on either side to protect it. They would have had Bowling alleys and Burger Kings and would have been flying in Bob Hope to entertain the troops. Why? Because they could, when you have resources they become the answer to every problem. The Vietnamese didn’t have resources, so they were resourceful.

And that, as the American realized, was why the Vietnamese won, and America lost.

The general may have learned a lesson, but if he told anyone, no one listened. Many of the same mistakes were repeated in Afghanistan, with the same results. Resources are not the answer to every problem. As with Americas war on drugs, war on crime, war on poverty, all resources do is obscure the underlying problem and present false, ineffective solutions.

War, and the threat of war is America’s solution to everything. To the man with the hammer, every problem is a nail. America does indeed have a formidable war machine. However, as with all machines it requires fuel to run it, that fuel is the U.S. dollar. Since the Bretton Woods accord at the end of WWII, America has had the privilege of possessing the world’s reserve currency. This enabled America to dictate to all countries outside the Soviet bloc how the global financial system would work. The so-called “free world” was anything but free, it was handcuffed by a system that effectively exercised control over their domestic economies.

In 1973 Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, much to the chagrin of the rest of the world. Despite protests no country was in a position to do much about it. Under its proxies, the IMF and World Bank, it enslaved much of the developing world and prevented it from post-colonial development. The resentment towards America and the weaponisation of its dollar resource should not be underestimated.

Iraq had resources, mainly oil, but what should have been a blessing for the country turned into a curse. Saddam Hussein decided to break from the petrodollar system and sell his oil in other currencies, we all know how that turned out. Similarly, when Ghadafi decided to sell his oil in the newly launched gold-backed dinar, it turned out badly for him and the Libyan people too. Both countries were deliberately destroyed, Tripoli, the once vibrant capital city of Africa’s most prosperous country, now has open slave markets. None should doubt how seriously America takes the subject of the dollar. These were lessons learned by national leaders everywhere. For those curious as to why America needs 1000 foreign military bases in more than 100 countries, that’s why, so no country attempts to stray from the dollar plantation.

The trillions of foreign debt owed by America was never intended to be repaid, just rolled over indefinitely. Fair to say, most countries understand that the monies they were compelled to invest in U.S. treasuries is a sunk cost, and they are not getting it back. With every turn of the printing press the dollar further loses credibility and the asset value of their holdings diminishes further. Every country is looking for alternative ways of doing business that don’t involve the dollar. China and Russia, China and Iran and China with many of its Asian neighbours have been using reciprocal currencies for several years. This amounts to trillions in trade that the Dollar is no longer a party too. Once this is understood it can help provide a context for current events.

Russia has complete control over its central bank and minimal foreign debt. It also possesses immense gold reserves. President Putin has wisely made Russia virtually “sanction proof”. Sure, the West can sanction a few overseas oligarchs, but who cares? Not the Russian people. Removing Russia from the SWIFT payment system will result in come short-term inconvenience, but alternatives are available. Both Russia and China have developed their own interbank payment systems and are now making them available to other countries who wish to by-pass the dollar altogether.

The use of the dollar as a weapon of war has worked well for America, until now. But when a country becomes overly reliant on its resources, it becomes a “one trick pony”, see Saudi Arabia. Stripped of oil, what kind of economy would the Saudis have? They wouldn’t have one at all. America stripped of its unique resource will be in the same position.

The dollar could crash any day, the government has long known this. A government-issued digital currency is planned to replace it. That may work in America, but few countries will want to entangle themselves in another American-dominated financial system. The resource is running dry, and American leadership shows no sign of any resourcefulness.

Interesting times…

The United States is freaking out that resources, and trade are controlled by “enemies”…

From HERE

While proponents of renewables — including President Biden, top White House officials and Democratic lawmakers — have suggested that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown the foolishness of relying on fossil fuels, the crisis has also roiled green tech. Renewable technology such as wind turbines, solar panels, industrial-scale battery storage and electric vehicles require a wide range of critical minerals sourced from around the world.

Russia, China and other hostile nations control most of the global critical mineral supply chain, according to a 2021 White House report on supply chains. 

Following the invasion of Ukraine, the price of nickel surged more than 100%, reaching $100,000 per metric ton because of the threat of sanctions on Russian commodity markets.

“The media hasn’t covered the cost of nickel, cobalt, aluminum, manganese or lithium,” Kish told the DCNF. “Lithium batteries, for example — if you want to call gasoline the fuel of internal combustion engines, lithium is the fuel of electric vehicles.”

Recent volatility in commodity markets triggered by the Ukraine crisis, though, could “engender potentially long-lasting change,” according to Wood Mackenzie.

4 Minute Video of Actual TRENCH FIGHT Between Russian and Ukraine Soldiers – Brutal Bravery

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The ongoing Special Military Operation by Russia into Ukraine, is accurately described as “war.”  We’ve all seen the images and the videos, but few have ever caught the actual moments of bravery by BOTH sides.  The 4m20s video below shows it for all to see.  Russian soldiers entering a Ukrainian army TRENCH.  The bravery by both sides is stunning.  The killing is up-close and real.  This is the reality of actual war.

The video begins with an aerial drone view of a trench, which – for the purposes of this description – I will refer to as a north-south trench line.  Russian soldiers enter from the south.  Ukrainians are along the way toward the north.

As the Russian move slowly northward, Ukrainians begin to move southward.  Think about the actual bravery it takes for men on BOTH sides to do what you will see being done.  The bravery of knowing there are armed men facing you in that very trench, and either you kill them, or they will kill you . . . . and yet soldiers from BOTH sides proceed along anyway.  THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is effin bravery.

As the Russians move northward and the Ukrainians move southward, they cannot see each other for a bit.  Once they get within eye sight, oh dear God how brutal it gets.

The first two soldiers catch a glimpse of each other and shots get fired.  The Ukrainian retreats northward, to no avail.  Fractions of a second later, he goes down.  Shot.  Dead.

Other Ukrainians, in side trenches off the main trench, then one-by-one, engage the advancing Russians.  Machine gun fire hits the sides of the trench.  Grenades get hurled, but most miss.

The battle goes on.

At one point, a grenade lands within arms reach of a Ukrainian; he grabs it and throw it OUT of the trench just in time to save his own life.  Then another.

Then . . .  the grenades hit their mark.  The Ukrainians are killed.

It only last four minutes and twenty seconds.  But the sheer bravery of men on BOTH sides is amazing. While I support RUSSIA, I have an amazing respect for men on BOTH sides.  True bravery exists on BOTH sides. They know death is coming for them, yet they proceed nonetheless.  And some of them die nonetheless.

This is actual war.  Horrifying in its violence, while showing the bravery that mere mortal men, actually have inside.

WOW.

Beehive Banana Muffins

Muffin mix and Cheerios® cereal partner in an easy crunchy-topped treat.

21f7fc1f 2dab 46ce b928 51cbd04633e7
21f7fc1f 2dab 46ce b928 51cbd04633e7

Ingredients

Streusel

  • 1/4 cup Honey Nut Cheerios™ cereal
  • 2 teaspoons Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoons packed light brown sugar
  • 2 teaspoons butter or margarine, softened

Muffins

  • 1 1/2 cups Honey Nut Cheerios™ cereal
  • 1 pouch (6.4 oz) Betty Crocker™ Banana Nut Muffin Mix
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 egg

2022 05 30 21 21
2022 05 30 21 21

Lovely Snaps Capture People With Their Cats Over 100 Years Ago

Along with dogs, cats have been also close friends with humans since a long time. These vintage lovely pics will prove this.

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Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad says new US-led trade group IPEF intended to ‘isolate China’

From HERE

  • He was referring to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework set up by President Joe Biden for the US and Asian countries to work closely together
  • ‘China is a big trading partner for Malaysia, we don’t want to see any tension, any conflict,’ the former prime minister said
Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad criticised a new US-led economic grouping on Friday, saying it is intended to isolate China, and will not benefit regional economic growth without Beijing.

US President Joe Biden launched the 13-nation Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) during a visit to Japan earlier this week. He said it would help the United States work more closely with Asian countries in areas including supply chains, digital trade, clean energy and anti-corruption

“The US will always want to use groupings like this in order to isolate China,” Mahathir said at an international conference in Tokyo. “Many countries recognise that this is not an economic grouping but it is truly a political grouping.”

Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd – The Wall – 4K Remastered

One of the best movie scenes / rock music combos of all time.

Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong warns against nuclear ‘arms race’ on Asian soil, isolating China during Tokyo conference

From HERE

  • Singapore’s PM Lee warned that any talk about deploying or developing nuclear weapons in Asia could lead to an unstable outcome in the region
  • Lee also urged that China remain integrated in the region, days after US President Joe Biden visited Asia to launch an Indo-Pacific plan that excludes Beijing
Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has sounded the alarm over ongoing public debate on whether US treaty allies South Korea and Japan should deploy or develop their own nuclear weapons.

Speaking at Nikkei’s Future of Asia conference on Thursday, Lee questioned if public discussions would contribute to an “arms race” in the region, amid a refocus on territorial defence capabilities following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“In Japan and South Korea, sensitive issues are being raised publicly, including whether to allow nuclear weapons to be deployed on their soil, or even go a step further and build capabilities to develop such weapons,” Lee said.

The USA is in control of the South Korean military

China withdrew its military from North Korea after the Korean war. Today it has no control of North Korea in either the political or the military establishment. However, it is a completely different story for the USA :
Why US control of the South Korean military is here to stay | The Interpreter
In late October, the US and South Korea agreed to delay the issue of who would control the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) in the event of a war on the Korean Peninsula. In the argot of Korean security, this is known as the reversion of operational control or 'OPCON'. The debate on this issue has raged for a decade. It now appears over; indefinite extensions mean it is probably no longer a meaningful option.

Since the war in the 1950s, the US had maintained control over the entire South Korean military. US Forces Korea (USFK) were integrated with ROK forces into a Combined Forces Command, which was in turned integrated into the United Nations Command. All three commands are headed by the same person – a four-star US general. The current commander is Curtis Scaparotti.

This command structure is unique. Nowhere else does a US commander operate under multiple jurisdictions like this – not in Japan or NATO. (A nice review here.)

Unfortunately, this structure also implicated the US military in Korea's earlier dictatorships. When leftist critics of the US position in Korea argue that the US 'runs' Korean foreign policy or that Washington is responsible for past Korean dictatorial repressions (most notably in Kwangju), this is usually what they mean. US defenders have argued that if dictators like Park Chung-Hee or Chun Doo-Hwan had exercised full control of the South Korean military, the repressions would have been much worse.

The Full Article HERE

China’s Share of Global Chip Sales Now Surpasses Taiwan’s, Closing in on Europe’s and Japan’s

Global chip sales from Chinese companies are on the rise, largely due to increasing U.S.-China tensions and a whole-of-nation effort to advance China’s chip sector, including government subsidies, procurement preferences, and other preferential policies.

Just five years ago, China’s semiconductor device sales were $13 billion, accounting for only 3.8% of global chip sales. In 2020, however, the Chinese semiconductor industry registered an unprecedented annual growth rate of 30.6% to reach $39.8 billion in total annual sales, according to an SIA analysis [1]. The jump in growth helped China capture 9% of the global semiconductor market in 2020, surpassing Taiwan for two consecutive years (2018, and 2019) and closely following Japan and the EU, which each took 10% of market share.

Sales data for 2021 are not yet available.

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2022 05 30 21 05

If China’s semiconductor development continues its strong momentum – maintaining 30% CAGR over the next three years – and assuming growth rates of industries in other countries stay the same, the Chinese semiconductor industry could generate $116 billion in annual revenue by 2024, capturing upwards of 17.4% of global market share [2]. This would place China behind only the United States and South Korea in global market share.

2022 05 30 21 11
2022 05 30 21 11

Chinese Semiconductor Firms Post Impressive Growth

Across all four subsegments of the Chinese semiconductor supply chain – fabless, IDM, foundry, and OSAT – Chinese firms recorded rapid increases in revenue last year, representing annual growth rates of 36%, 23%, 32%, 23%, respectively, based on an SIA analysis. Leading Chinese semiconductor firms are on track to expand domestically, and even globally, in several submarkets.

2022 05 30 21 12
2022 05 30 21 12

SIA analysis further shows that in 2020, China held an impressive 16% market share in the global fabless semiconductor segment, ranking third after the U.S. and Taiwan, and up from 10% in 2015 [7]. Benefiting from China’s massive consumer and 5G market, Huawei’s HiSilicon, China’s largest chip designer, generated nearly $10 billion in revenue in 2020, despite tightened export control restrictions (largely due to significant stockpiling suggested by official Chinese trade data). Other Chinese fabless firms, such as communications chip supplier UNISOC, MCU and NOR flash designer GigaDevice, fingerprint chip firm Goodix, and image sensor designers Galaxycore and OmniVision (a U.S.-headquartered corporation acquired by China), have all reported a 20-40% annual growth rate to become China’s top fabless firms. Moreover, in addition to supplying Chinese OMEs, GigaDevice, OmniVision, and Goodix have entered top 3 global smartphone vendors’ supply chains [8].

2022 05 30 21 13
2022 05 30 21 13

Meanwhile, Chinese consumer electronics and home appliance OEMs and leading internet firms have also been ramping up efforts to expand into the semiconductor sector by designing chips in-house and making investments in established semiconductor firms, with notable progress made in designing advanced chips and building domestic supply chains over the past two years [9].

China’s Chip Manufacturing Expansion Continues

China also maintains robust growth in building out its semiconductor manufacturing supply chain, with 28 additional fab construction projects totaling $26 billion in new planned funding announced in 2021 [10]. SMIC and other Chinese semiconductor leaders have further expanded their partnerships with local governments to construct additional joint venture fabs, with a focus on mature technology nodes [11]. Wafer manufacturing startups are continuing to spring up in the trailing-edge fabrication field, backed by government incentives [12].

2022 05 30 21 15
2022 05 30 21 15

On the chip manufacturing front, due to the inclusion of Huawei and SMIC on the U.S. government’s Entity List (China’s most advanced chip designer and foundry, respectively), the Chinese semiconductor industry has largely suspended advanced logic node manufacturing development and redirected most capital to mature fabrication technology. As a result of this change, from September 2020 to November 2021, Chinese wafer manufacturers have added nearly 500K wafer per month (WPM) capacities in trailing nodes (>=14nm), and only an additional 10K in capacity for advanced nodes. China’s wafer capacity increase alone accounted for 26% of the worldwide total [13]. In 2021, China also started commercial shipments of indigenously manufactured mobile 19nm DDR4 DRAM devices, and 64-layer 3D NAND Flash chips and started 128-layer products [14]. While the Chinese memory industry is still at an early stage of development, Chinese memory firms are expected to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 40-50% in output and become highly competitive over the next five years [15]. Regarding backend production, China is a global leader in outsourced assembly, packaging, and testing (OSAT), with its top three OSAT players collectively holding more than 35% of the global market share [16].

All indications are that China’s rapid growth in semiconductor chip sales is likely to continue due in large part to the unwavering commitment from the central government and robust policy support in the face of deteriorating U.S-China relations. While there remains a long way to go for China to catch up with existing industry leaders – especially in advanced node foundry production, equipment, and materials – the gap is expected to narrow over the next decade as Beijing sharpens its focus on semiconductor self-reliance during the current 14th Five-Year Plan [17].

From HERE

Chinese scientists call for plan to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites

Chinese military researchers have called for the development of a “hard kill” weapon to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system if it threatens China’s national security.

The researchers drew attention to Starlink’s “huge potential for military applications” and the need for China to develop countermeasures to surveill, disable or even destroy the growing satellite megaconstellation. Their paper was published last month in the journal China’s Modern Defence Technology. A translated copy of the paper is available here.

There are ONLY 70 days left until catastrophe | Redacted with Clayton Morris

If you live in the West, you need to pay attention to this.

More Pictures from the Past

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2022 05 29 17 28
2022 05 29 17 28

A monkeypox virus particle captured via a coloured transmission electron micrograph UK HEALTH SECURITY AGENCY / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

 

The Russian military has spent over two months now detailing the extent and reach of the US military-biological research effort in Ukraine, revealing that the Pentagon has used the country as a testing ground for the study of deadly bioagents, and uncovering the tangled web of military, corporate, and political interests behind these activities.

Russian Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defence Troops chief Igor Kirillov issued a fresh briefing on Friday, providing new information on US military biological activities in Ukraine, as well as details on what his troops know about monkeypox, a smallpox cousin which has caused a global health scare in recent weeks.

 The Pentagon, he said, introduced a mandatory smallpox vaccination back in 2003, with US diplomats and medical personnel also required to be jabbed against the infectious disease.

 “This indicates that the United States considers the smallpox pathogen a priority pathogenic agent for combat use, and ongoing vaccination measures are aimed at protecting their own military contingents”, Kirillov said.

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2022 05 29 17 29

Excerpt from 2003 memorandum on Pentagon’s mandatory smallpox vaccination programme.
© Photo : Russian Ministry of Defence

 

The complete 2003 US “Army Smallpox Preparedness and Vaccination Program Implementation Plan” document can be found here.

“The Pentagon’s interest in this infection is far from accidental. The return of the causative agent of smallpox would be a global catastrophe for all of humanity”, Kirillov suggested, emphasising that smallpox is 10 times more lethal than COVID-19.

Citing seized documentation, Kirillov revealed that American instructors trained employees of biolabs in Ukraine on how to respond to an emergency smallpox outbreak. Ukrainian-language documents on this training can be found here.

Smallpox was eradicated in the late 1970s thanks to global efforts, with vaccinations against the disease subsequently halted by most countries. However, health authorities in countries around the world have recently begun expressing concerns about monkeypox, after cases began to spread earlier this month.

Banana-Chocolate Chip Muffins

All natural fat free yogurt helps make these muffins moist and delicious!

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0bd24196 5f9b 414c 9fb4 cdfc6d22027f

Ingredients

  • 3/4 cup mashed ripe bananas (about 2 small)
  • 1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil
  • 3/4 cup Yoplait® All Natural Fat Free plain yogurt (from 2-lb container)
  • 1 egg
  • 1 3/4 cups Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2/3 cup chocolate chips

2022 05 30 21 23
2022 05 30 21 23

A Secret Roswell Journal Becomes The Focus Of A New UFO Documentary

From HERE

I saw this article, and consider it interesting. I thought that I would share the article with everyone. -MM

A secret journal offers new clues about the nature of the alleged 1947 AD UFO crash at Roswell in the New Mexico desert, or does it? Before we kick off, this isn’t one of these Reddit stories that emerged from some basement decorated with posters of the Starship Enterprise and Chewbacca. Quite the opposite.

Live Science is one off the internet’s more respected academic media outlets and today they tell the story of a hitherto unknown personal diary belonging to Major Jesse Marcel, a head intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Air Field. The secret Roswell journal could change the narrative of this famous UFO event. In particular, the secret Roswell journal may contain secret coded observations that will help to “clarify” what really happened in Roswell in 1947 AD.

Marcel investigated the famous Roswell site in New Mexico where in 1947 a UFO is believed by many to have crashed. Furthermore, he claimed to have recovered some of the debris from whatever ditched in the desert that July night near the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). Newspaper photos at the time showed Marcel with pieces of metallic material and on the afternoon of July 8, 1947 AD he disclosed to the media “the crash and recovery of a flying disc.” However, the following day, an army official made a statement saying that a weather balloon had fallen to earth, “not a flying saucer.”

Will The Secret Roswell Journal Change Everything?

The Roswell story now takes a new turn since Major Marcel’s family revealed they had kept his personal secret Roswell journal which contains “hitherto unknown clues about the crash.”

The secret diary and its equally secret contents will soon be presented on History Channel´s History’s Greatest Mysteries series in an episode called Roswell: The First Witness .

The episode was released on December 12th, Saturday, 2020 AD.

The show host, Ben Smith, is a former CIA operative and the show’s lead investigator. He thinks it is very unusual that the day after the government claimed they had recovered a UFO they switched stories and maintained it was merely “a weather balloon,” Smith told Live Science .

This story is another in a long line of recent reports pertaining to UFOs. According to The Guardian in 2017 AD a former Pentagon official confirmed the existence of a federal agency that had been “secretly investigating UFOs since 2007.”

Then, in 2018, U.S. Navy pilots reported “three encounters with fast-moving UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena” better known to us civies as UFOs.

And building up this emerging alien narrative, officially declassified videos of these occurrences were published in April of this year, as previously reported on Live Science .

Secret Roswell Journal: A Problem Of Might, May And Could

Let´s now return to Major Jesse Marcel, the author of the secret Roswell journal.

He investigated the site at Roswell and recovered what he believed to be debris from a flying saucer . In 1997 AD, Time published an article saying Marcel told an interviewer at the time that “he believed” the object that crashed in the New Mexico desert had extraterrestrial origins.

Now, a forensic analysis of Marcel´s secret Roswell journal “could reveal” coded messages that he wrote about the crash at the time that it happened, Ben Smith said.

This application of the word “could” will no doubt have skeptics raging, because they all know what’s most probably coming here. If the diary really contained any actual evidence that the Roswell incident was nothing more than a collapsed weather balloon we would certainly have heard about it by now. Unless of course thousands of unpaid interns and staff at the network have all kept quiet, doubters can argue. Perhaps the skeptics greatest argument is presented in plain sight in the newspaper photograph of Marcel on the evening of the crash. To all but the most committed believers in extraterrestrials it is perfectly clear that Marcel is holding a piece of a crumpled (crashed) weather balloon.

When the History Channel episode airs and unavoidably “no evidence” of extraterrestrials is offered, perhaps then maybe some “believers” will consider the content of the Ancient Origins news article I wrote about this only last month.

A team of Oxford University researchers recently applied statistics to the question “are we alone” and concluded that “life on earth is probably a unique universal phenomena, and that it´s ‘extremely unlikely’ that any other intelligent life exists anywhere else in the universe.” This is a profound claim that sceptics love and believers loathe.

And the same extreme opinions are likely to flood across social media channels when the details of Major Marcel’s secret Roswell journal are revealed.

US Biolabs in Nigeria

Kirillov took note of the World Health Organisation’s recent determination that the causative agent of the monkeypox virus being met today originated in Nigeria, and pointed out that this is “another state upon whose territory the United States has deployed its biological infrastructure”.

“According to available information, there are at least four US-controlled biolabs” in the African nation”, Kirillov said.

2022 05 29 17 30
2022 05 29 17 30

Cropped excerpt from Russian Defence Ministry briefing slide showing locations of suspected US-controlled biolabs in Nigeria,
including two in Abuja, one in Zaria, and one in Lagos. © Photo : Russian Ministry of Defence

 

Kirillov also pointed to media reports on the 2021 Munich Security Conference-Nuclear Threat Initiative simulation modelling the outbreak of a bioengineered, highly deadly strain of monkeypox by terrorists, calling the exercise “an odd coincidence which needs additional verification by specialists”.

2022 05 29 17 33
2022 05 29 17 33

The officer emphasised that against the backdrop of repeated US violations of biosafety requirements and evidence of the careless storage of pathogenic biomaterials, including smallpox, the WHO should investigate the activities of US-funded labs in the cities of Abuja, Zaria, and Lagos, Nigeria, and inform the international community on their findings.

The RCB Defence Troops chief also expressed concerns about the safety of smallpox virus samples inside the United States itself.

“The lack of proper control and the violation of biosecurity requirements in the United States could lead to the use of this pathogen for terrorist purposes. Between 2014 and 2021, unaccounted for vials containing the virus were repeatedly found in the laboratories of the US Food and Drug Administration, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland, and the Centre for Vaccine Research in Pennsylvania”, Kirillov said.

Kirillov stressed that the work of these labs violated a 1996 resolution by the WHO, which prohibited smallpox’s causative agent from being stored in all but one US-based laboratory – the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

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2022 05 29 17 34

1996 resolution by the Forty-Ninth World Health Assembly requiring the United States and Russia to hold
smallpox virus samples at only one facility per country. © Photo : Russian Ministry of Defence

New Details on Pentagon-Funded Labs in Ukraine

During Friday’s presentation, Kirillov also provided new documentation on the operation of nearly a dozen military-biological projects organised by the Pentagon in Ukraine, including deadly agents and “economically significant” infections, funded to the tune of over $8.01 million between 2008 and 2019.

The officer drew attention to a 2007 memorandum prepared by the Office of the US Secretary of Defence regarding UP-2, a project mapping dangerous pathogens in Ukraine, whose “main purpose”, in Kirillov’s words, was “to collect information on the molecular composition of pathogens characteristic to Ukraine, and to transfer strain samples”.

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2022 05 29 17 36

DTRA document on the approval of project concept UP-2 (Multi-pathogen Mapping), to be carried out in accordance with the
2005 “Policy Guidance for the Cooperative Threat Reduction Biological Weapons Proliferation Prevention Program in Ukraine.”
© Photo : Russian Ministry of Defence

 

The complete six-page “Partner Project Agreement” on UP-2 can be found here.

A similar memorandum was prepared for project UP-1, studying rickettsia and other diseases spread by arthropods, Kirillov said, pointing out that the document required for all of the dangerous pathogens collected to be transferred to the Central Reference Laboratory in Kiev, allowing them to be transferred to the US.

The “Partner Project Agreement” on project UP-1 can be found here.

2022 05 29 17 3r6
2022 05 29 17 3r6

DoD Memorandum approving project UP-1 dated 19 February, 2008.
© Photo : Russian Ministry of Defence
The RCB Defence Troops also published documentation on UP-4, a programme investigating the possibility of spreading dangerous infections through migratory birds, which the MoD has already previously reported on at length. The “UP-4 Project Option Year 2 Quarterly Report” for the period from October 2019-January 2020 shows that a total of 991 specimens from wild birds were collected by researchers.

2022 05 29 17 37
2022 05 29 17 37

Excerpt from Defense Threat Reduction Agency report on project UP-4.

© Photo : Russian Ministry of Defence

 

Nine pages of the 50+ page DTRA report, prepared by Pentagon contractor Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp in collaboration with Metabiota, can be found here.

The documents released Friday by the RCB Defence Troops also included a detailed 2019 Black & Veatch report for the DTRA detailing its activities in Ukraine, including work on some 19 separate research projects, and collaboration with a host of Ukrainian and international organisations, including the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, the USDA, the CDC, several American universities, and Western pharmaceutical giants. Dozens of pages from the 63-page document, containing a goldmine of important details, can be found and downloaded here.

2022 05 29 17 39
2022 05 29 17 39

Page from 2019 report by Pentagon contractor Black & Veatch on some of the company’s many projects in Ukraine.
© Photo : Russian Ministry of Defence
.

Chinese Propaganda Posters From The Cultural Revolution Ages, 1960s-1970s

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“Speed Up Agriculture Using Modern Machinery.” 1971.

In 1966 Mao Zedong, the Communist leader of China, started a political campaign that became known as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Mao called on China’s youth to help him purge capitalist influences and bourgeois thinking in government, teaching, the media and arts, and to reinvigorate the revolutionary spirit.

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“Fully criticize the Chinese Khrushchev from a political, ideological, and theoretical perspective.” 1967.

Calling themselves The Red Guards, radical students set out to destroy the “four olds”: old ideas, customs, habits and culture. They spearheaded the interrogation, humiliation and beatings of teachers and intellectuals, and traveled the country destroying cultural heritage. During the Cultural Revolution traditional artists were condemned as counter-revolutionaries and their work destroyed. A new style of art was required that supported the Maoist line and served the worker, peasant and soldier.

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“Greet the 1970s with the new victories of revolution and production.” 1970.

The decade was marked by purges and power struggles at the upper echelons of government, and the mobilization of masses of young people to enforce Maoist thought. One of the primary vessels for disseminating instructions and models of behavior was propaganda art. Vivid posters were created to inspire citizens to put forth their labor towards agriculture, industry and national defense, as well as concerns such as hygiene and family planning.

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“Produce More Coal and Support the Socialist Construction.” c. 1970.

Slogans are often used alongside imagery in posters, usually written in bold, Chinese script. They include pro-revolution messages about “working hard”, “uniting for victory” and “working towards the general communist goal. “Bright” colors are used in many of the posters and red appears a lot as it is the color of communism and revolution. Much of the work that came out of the Cultural Revolution is attributed to committees or groups, rather than individuals. Thousands of copies of the posters were printed and sold cheaply as the establishment at the time wanted the posters to be something that everyone should have on their walls at home. Many of the posters were painted by hand and then printed as lithographs, a process involving using stone, oil and chemicals to create prints.

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“Never Tire of Training to Destroy The Enemy.” c. 1970.

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“Grow Strongly Under the Broad Sky and Earth.” c. 1970.

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“Protect the Forest.” c. 1970.

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“Prepare for Struggle, Prepare for Famine, Work for the People.” c. 1970.

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“If You Want to Prosper, You Must Control The Population.” c. 1970.

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“Prevent Hepatitis by Washing.” c. 1970.

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“Learn Science, Build The Country.” c. 1970.

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“Set a Good Example, Fight Corruption.” c. 1970.

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“Teach the Younger Generation.” c. 1970.

Intel: Ukraine Losing 1500 Soldiers per day to death, wounding, capture, surrender, or desertion

“Intercepted communications from the Ukrainian command reveal their aim to build a layered defense from Poltava through Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhia, Krivoy Rog, and Nikolaev – which happens to be a shield for the already fortified Odessa. None of that guarantees success against the incoming Russian onslaught.

It’s always important to remember that Operation Z started on February 24 with around 150,000 or so fighters – and definitely not Russia’s elite forces. And yet they liberated Mariupol and destroyed the elite neo-Nazi Azov battalion in a matter of only fifty days, cleaning up a city of 400,000 people with minimal casualties.

While fighting a real war on the ground – not those indiscriminate US bombings from the air – in a huge country against a large army, facing multiple technical, financial and logistical challenges, the Russians also managed to liberate Kherson, Zaporizhia and virtually the whole area of the ‘baby twins,’ the popular republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Russia’s ground forces commander, General Aleksandr Dvornikov, has turbo-charged missile, artillery and air strikes to a pace five times faster than during the first phase of Operation Z, while the Ukrainians, overall, are low or very low on fuel, ammo for artillery, trained specialists, drones, and radars.

What American armchair and TV generals simply cannot comprehend is that in Russia’s view of this war – which military expert Andrei Martyanov defines as a “combined arms and police operation” – the two top targets are the destruction of all military assets of the enemy while preserving the life of its own soldiers.

So while losing tanks is not a big deal for Moscow, losing lives is. And that accounts for those massive Russian bombings; each military target must be conclusively destroyed. Precision strikes are crucial.

There is a raging debate among Russian military experts on why the Ministry of Defense does not go for a fast strategic victory. They could have reduced Ukraine to rubble – American style – in no time. That’s not going to happen. The Russians prefer to advance slowly and surely, in a sort of steamroller pattern. They only advance after sappers have fully surveilled the terrain; after all there are mines everywhere.

The overall pattern is unmistakable, whatever the NATO spin barrage. Ukrainian losses are becoming exponential – as many as 1,500 killed or wounded each day, everyday. If there are 50,000 Ukrainians in the several Donbass cauldrons, they will be gone by the end of June.

Ukraine must have lost as many as 20,000 soldiers in and around Mariupol alone. That’s a massive military defeat, largely surpassing Debaltsevo in 2015 and previously Ilovaisk in 2014. The losses near Izyum may be even higher than in Mariupol. And now come the losses in the Severodonetsk corner.

We’re talking here about the best Ukrainian forces. It doesn’t even matter that only 70 percent of Western weapons sent by NATO ever make it to the battlefield: the major problem is that the best soldiers are going…going…gone, and won’t be replaced. Azov neo-Nazis, the 24th Brigade, the 36th Brigade, various Air Assault brigades – they all suffered losses of 60+ percent or have been completely demolished.

So the key question, as several Russian military experts have stressed, is not when Kiev will ‘lose’ as a point of no return; it is how many soldiers Moscow is prepared to lose to get to this point.

The entire Ukrainian defense is based on artillery. So the key battles ahead involve long-range artillery. There will be problems, because the US is about to deliver M270 MLRS systems with precision-guided ammunition, capable of hitting targets at a distance of up to 70 kilometers or more.

Russia, though, has a counterpunch: the Hermes Small Operational-Tactical Complex, using high precision munitions, possibility of laser guidance, and a range of more than 100 kilometers. And they can work in conjunction with the already mass-produced Pantsir air defense systems….

…the imminent loss of Severodonetsk and Lysichansk will ring serious alarm bells in Washington and Brussels, because that will represent the beginning of the end of the current regime in Kiev. And that, for all practical purposes – and beyond all the lofty rhetoric of ‘the west stands with you’ – means heavy players won’t be exactly encouraged to bet on a sinking ship…

…Zelensky will be fine. He’s protected by British and American special forces. The family is reportedly living in an $8 million mansion in Israel. He owns a $34 million villa in Miami Beach, and another in Tuscany. Average Ukrainians were lied to, robbed, and in many cases, murdered, by the Kiev gang he presides over – oligarchs, security service (SBU) fanatics, neo-Nazis. And those Ukrainians that remain (10 million have already fled) will continue to be treated as expendable.”

Put simply, Ukraine is losing the war.  They are losing fast. They are losing big.

Short of direct NATO intervention, there is no hope at all for Ukraine to prevail militarily.

Ukraine’s Own Security Service Warned About Dangers of Cooperation With US

Friday’s document dump also included a letter by a Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) officer expressing concern about epidemiological threats posed by US involvement in biological activities in Ukraine.

The letter, written by Col. A.A. Lemeshov, deputy head of the SBU Directorate in the Kherson Region and addressed to Col G.I. Kuznetsov, deputy chief of the Anti-Terrorist Centre and Analytical Department head Col. S.I. Shanaida, was sent on 28 February 2017, and focused on the safety of Ukrainian laboratories and the threat of biological terrorism.

Lemeshov bluntly warned that;

"recently, the potential threat to the epidemiological and epizootic situation in our country has taken on increasing importance, due to attempts by the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency through the Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp to establish control over the operations of microbiological laboratories in Ukraine for the study of pathogens of especially dangerous infectious diseases which can be used to create new biological weapons or improve old ones".

The officer stressed that “in order to maintain the stability of biosecurity in Ukraine, and to prevent attempts to accumulate pathogen samples in its territories under the pretext of ‘studying the specifics of local strains and determining the degree of virulence of the obtained samples among the population’, it is advisable to track the activity of Black & Veatch Special Project Corp’s ‘programmes of involvement in joint biological activities'”.

The original, Ukrainian-language document can be found here. A Russian-language translation can be found here.

2022 05 29 17 41
2022 05 29 17 41

Russian Defence Ministry photograph of document by Ukrainian Security Service officer explicitly warning of the dangers
created by US military-biological activities in Ukraine to the nation’s security. © Photo : Russian Ministry of Defence

 

Kirillov’s RCB Defence Troops have spent months briefing media on the extent of US military biological activities in Ukraine, citing seized documents and other materials to reveal how the Pentagon, US government agencies and corporations have cooperated with their Ukrainian counterparts to engage in dangerous research on Ukrainian territory.

Earlier this month, Russian Senator Konstantin Kosachev indicated that Moscow intends to initiate a formal probe at the United Nations into possible US violations of the Biological Weapons Convention in Ukraine.

2022 05 29 17 4d1
2022 05 29 17 4d1

 [Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya]

 

In a document-filled briefing earlier this month, Kirillov revealed that in addition to its use by the US military to study deadly pathogens, Ukraine has acted as a guinea pig for Western drug companies, including Pfizer, Battelle, Gilead, Dynaport Vaccine, AbbVie, Eli Lilly & Co, Merck, Moderna, and others, to test medicines which could not be tested in their home countries for safety reasons.

The Danger of Underestimating Russia

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When I was a wee young thing on Wall Street, I would hear a warning regularly from colleagues at Lazard, about “believing your own PR”. Interesting, this phrase was not a part of the general Wall Street lexicon. It was important at Lazard because it was a top M&A boutique (this was in the days of Felix Rohatyn) and therefore made its living off managing the abnormal psychology of CEOs. Specifically, the firm’s deal flow depended on maintaining these personal relationships. Therefore Lazard partners did what they could to prevent CEO self-destruction.

Unfortunately, it’s become painfully obvious that in just the same way the West has become hoist on its Russia sanctions petard, so too has it blinded itself with its anti-Russia propaganda. The jingoism and fabrications have become so extreme and relentless that any erstwhile realist has to go to non-mainstream, or at least non-US/non-European MSM sources. And even then, if you don’t buy what Ukraine is spinning, and is being amplified uncritically in the Western media, you must be some sort of turncoat.

Admittedly, we’re seeing some signs of cracks, such as a New York Times editorial telling Team Biden that Ukraine needs to negotiate. Similarly, at the World Economic Forum, Henry Kissinger also said negotiations needed to start in the next two months, and Italy has devised a proposal and even sent it to Russia.

But there’s massive denial about facts on the ground. The militias and Russia have cleared Mariupol, control the Donetsk oblast and are very close to taking Lugansk…and with it, thousands to as many as 20,000 of Ukraine’s best fighting forces. Russia has started shelling military targets in Zaporizhzhia, a major industrial city in the Zaporizhzhia oblast, just to the west of the Donetsk oblast on the Black Sea coast.

Kissinger proposed returning to status quo ante, when Russia’s red lines as of the end of March, at the time of the last serious negotiating session in Istanbul, were much higher than that. Russia had also made clear that the longer the war went on, the more its demands would increase. Yet Italy, which is getting unhappy about the costs of the conflict, is also now seeking a settlement and apparently put forward a proposal. I have yet to see it but it’s already been rejected by former President and deputy chairman Dmitry Medvedev….of all things on Telegram. Admittedly Medvedev is speaking out of school; Lavrov said the government was studying it. Nevertheless (see starting at 6:50, courtesy Alex Christoforu):

But no, it’s just pure stream of consciousness by European graphomaniacs….One has the feeling it was prepared not by diplomats but by local political analysts who have read too many provincial newspapers and use only Ukrainian fakes.

Medvedev then goes through three of the four major points and dismisses each. For instance:

3. The full autonomy of Crimea within Ukraine

This is direct boorishness toward Russia, a threat to its territorial integrity and a pretext for starting a full-fledged war. There is not and never will be a political force in Russia that would agree even to discuss the fate of Crimea. That would be a national betrayal.

There is no point in analyzing it further. This is just an attempt to save Ukraine some face….However, Ukraine does not want to negotiate at all. They chose to forget about the Russian draft peace treaty long ago. It is as if there is no such thing at all. They are counting only on the flow of money and weapons from Western countries. War until the victorious end.

In vain.

The cognitive dissonance is impressive. German chancellor Olaf Scholz and US Defense Secretary LLoyd Austin both called Russia seeking a ceasefire. You don’t do that if you are winning. But the Western media has so inflated the position of Ukraine and its supposedly invincible military that keeps kicking Russian ass that it would take a massive change in media messaging just to get the public to accept that Ukraine would have to cede territory, let alone make other concessions like neutrality.

The US and Ukraine have both proven so “agreement incapable” that Russia has likely concluded it needs to take matters into its own hands and execute rather than negotiate demilitarization and denazification. In this blogger’s humble opinion, that means at a minimum taking Odessa, since that’s another big nest of Azovities and other nasty types. And as much as Russia’s seemingly leisurely prosecution of the war has enabled the Western press to denigrate it, it’s probably the only sound way to deal with Ukraine’s bunkers in Donbass. Plus the sanctions blowback gets ever more painful as the military campaign grinds on.

Most of this will be familiar ground to regular readers. I wanted to widen the frame a bit. The Western ‘tude towards Russia, that it should be willing to go full Emily Litella “Never mind” and simply walk away from its successes so far and its underlying security concerns, seems to be rooted in US/Anglo chauvinism and persistent underestimation of Russia. If you managed to miss it yesterday, be sure to see Dimitri Orlov’s The Secret American Plan to Make Russia Great Again.

Below are two different examples of US misappraisal. The first, embedded at the end of this post, is the latest Defense Intelligence Agency Threat Estimate. We wrote about it shortly after it was presented, in early May. What seemed noteworthy then was its pointed failure to say much about Ukraine, particularly its capabilities and prospects. This seemed like damning with faint praise. We also took note of quite a few reality-challenged claims, such as Russia wanting to challenge the US and undermine American democracy.

Reader scarnoc voiced broader concerns:

It is quite frightening to me that this is a threat assessment that is used to explain things to congress-lizards and their staffers. The assessment underplays Russian conventional and strategic military capabilities. Current capabilities (particularly strategic nuclear ones) are downplayed or explained as possible future developments instead of current realities.There is a false pretense that sanctions are slowing or harming Russian military-industrial output. There is no detailed description of Russia’s very public and oft-repeated war aims, or of their medium and long term diplomatic aims, none of which have been withdrawn or changed by Moscow. The Russians still intend to push NATO back to its 90s borders, for example. If anything, those medium/long term goals have expanded.

The special relationship between Beijing and Moscow is described as a series of formal agreements instead of an informal but very close ‘friendship’ that both sides have repeatedly called ‘better than an alliance’. A relatively uninformed reader would conclude that there is space between Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin that USA can exploit. Lizards and their staffers, being creatures who live primarily on TV news, are by definition uninformed, and they will draw all the wrong lessons from these parts of the report.

The section on Iran does not mention the depth of friendship and cooperation between Iran and Russia, nor the depth of Iran’s growing relationship with PRC.

There is little in this assessment that explains to the reader just how immense the Russian threat to American unipolarity is right now, today. Given how American congressional and executive leadership talks about Russia like it needs to be completely erased and destroyed, I don’t see any mechanism in front of us that will de-escalate this conflict. Russia will continue to act in accordance with it’s own power and sense of national destiny, stupid American elites will continue to discount and misunderstand that Russian power and overestimate their own power, until at some point we arrive at nuclear exchange. I really, dearly hope I am wrong. I’m putting curtains up in the bunker at this point.

Another example is Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. This is an important speech and I urge you to watch it in full.

This event was in the time frame where Putin still harbored hopes of Russia being able to operate like a normal advanced economy and having cooperative relations with other countries. But those in the US/NATO defense community who hadn’t already taken a dislike to him already used this talk as an excuse. Putin had the temerity to speak directly as opposed to deferentially, pointed out the world was moving to multipolarity by virtue of the growing economic heft of countries like China and India, and worst of all, that the US was threatening the notion of international law by launching wars without getting UN approval. That in turn jeopardized stability since no country could feel safe. I am sure quite a few leaders year later took note of how Gadaffi was our friend until suddenly he wasn’t.

Putin also used the bully pulpit to call out NATO installing new bases closer to Russia even as Russia was honoring commitments as a provocation that reduced, not enhanced security. And he also called out how WTO/Western development programs for poor countries asked them to open their markets, particularly to subsidized agricultural goods, yet held back higher-tech goods:

On the one hand, financial resources are allocated for programs to help the world’s poorest countries – and at times substantial financial resources. But – and many here know this – linked with the development of the same donor country’s companies….one hand distributes charitable help and the other hand not only preserves economic backwardness but also reaps the profits thereof.

Ouch.

John McCain reportedly looked daggers at Putin the entire time. Apparently pointing out what should have been an obvious trajectory of events, as well as risks of the current course of US action, was seen as presumptuous. Countries like Russia are supposed to know their place. The reason Putin’s remarks stung was that they were on target. The US of 2007 wasn’t even secure enough to laugh off Putin’s observations as that of an arriviste who didn’t know enough of secret dealings to render judgement.

And the US and the West continue to act to our own detriment out of a distorted sense of amour propre.

The Prisoner 14

Here it is again, in case you missed it.

“Living in Harmony”.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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Jay Chou and one toke over the line with Pork Ragu, nonsense about Ukraine, and a giant strawberry

It’s pouring rain out today. I mean that it is a deluge. The weather, as of late, has been very unusual. But we are all fine. I hear that this May it snowed a few feet in Colorado. Indeed that is odd, but between the Monkey-pox, and Joe Biden deciding to start world war 3 with China and Russia simultaneously, and the lack of baby formula, I mean… what are you going to do?

Perhaps a giant strawberry is what you need right now.

Howdy. Buckle up and enjoy yourself here today.

FLASH: BELARUS PRESIDENTIAL ORDER — UKRAINE

Lukashenko large
Lukashenko large

Something very unusual, big, and serious, is happening . . .

President Viktor Lukashenko of Belarus has ordered the armed forces of Belarus to immediately create an operational command to handle “the Ukrainian direction.”

Appearing on national television in his full military uniform, Lukashenko told the nation trouble is coming.

The fact that he put on his uniform for this says it all.

UPDATE 3:11 PM EDT —

Lukashenko also saying that Belarus expects “pressure” from Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, in particular, with the help of NATO troops stationed there.

Hal Turner Remarks

As readers of this site will recall, it was just Tuesday into Wednesday of this week that the country of Hungary, enacted  a “WARTIME EMERGENCY” declaration despite no hostilities in or near Hungary.  (Story Here)

Now, we have Belarus ordering its military to stand-up a new Ukrainian Command . . . .

Something wicked this way comes . . . .

Slow-Cooker Pork Ragu

This slow-cooked pasta sauce goes well beyond the average spaghetti topper with all-day slow-cooked flavor. Pork shoulder, bacon and aromatic vegetables cook in a crushed tomato sauce and thicken to a hearty, rich consistency that pairs well with rigatoni pasta in particular. Make it a day ahead when you have some extra time, and let the flavors mellow and meld—or just be sure to save some leftovers! This take on a classic Italian sauce is sure to impress your dinner table regulars and special guests alike.

 

3750c57e 0977 4ef3 8052 46768c6e20d5 1
3750c57e 0977 4ef3 8052 46768c6e20d5 1

Ingredients

  • 8 slices applewood smoked bacon, chopped (half of a 12-oz package)
  • 1 1/2 lb boneless pork shoulder, trimmed and cut into 2-inch pieces
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 1/2 cups chopped onions
  • 2 cups chopped carrots
  • 5 cloves garlic, chopped
  • 2 teaspoons dried oregano leaves
  • 1/2 cup Progresso™ chicken broth (from 32-oz carton)
  • 1 can (28 oz) Muir Glen™ organic fire roasted crushed tomatoes, undrained
  • 6 cups cooked rigatoni pasta (about 4 1/2 cups uncooked)
  • Shredded Parmesan cheese, if desired
  • Chopped fresh oregano leaves, basil or Italian (flat-leaf) parsley, if desired

2022 05 25 19 23
2022 05 25 19 23

One Toke Over the Line

Welcome to the 1970s.

The United States has long demonstrated to the global community its disregard for international regulations, along with its readiness to unleash a war with the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) anywhere in the world. This is what the Americans did in Japan, when they dropped nuclear bombs on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

There have subsequently been many other incidents documented and reported to the UN which involved the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons by the United States against its opponents not only in Korea, but also in other regions of the world. Thus, in the period from 1949 to 1988 the Soviet Union submitted to the UN evidence about 13 facts of large- and small-scale use of WMDs with the US involvement. Here are just some of them.

  • – In 1951-1953, the USSR forwarded to the UN the documented evidence about the US’s use of bioweapons against North Korea and China during the Korean War. Those crimes garnered broad media coverage even in the US itself, and were proved by declassified documentary information;
  • – in 1948-1960, the UN received some documented evidence of the application of “scorched earth” tactics by the British army, backed by the United States, with the use of chemical and bioweapons against civilians in Malaya;
  • – in 1961-1971, the UN received evidence of the use of the same policy by the US Armed Forces in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand;
  • – In 1982, Moscow forwarded to the UN documentary evidence of CIA’s financial support to breeding and proliferation of genetically modified malaria-carrying mosquitoes in Afghanistan. The biolabs in Pakistan were used for these R&D activities;
  • – in 1985, the USSR submitted to the UN evidence of the activities of US secret biolabs in South Africa and Israel, studying the impact of certain biological agents on certain racial (Negroid) and ethnic (Arab) groups;
  • – at the same period, the Soviet Union submitted to the UN incriminating evidence, supported by 25 countries, about the possible involvement of the US military laboratory at Fort Detrick (Maryland, USA) in the development of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), as well as in deliberate distribution of this virus in Africa;
  • – in the 1990s and 2000s, the UN agencies had already been investigating the “leak” of dangerous pathogens from the US military bases in Spain and Kenya, following which it was proved that the above “leaks” were clearly purposeful and planned.

All materials on these war crimes have been registered with the UN and are at the disposal of this organization!

Most recently, The Exposé, a British publication, published the results of its investigation into the direct involvement of the United States and Ukraine in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic…

Recently, new documentary evidence of the US criminal activities aimed at unleashing a global biological war has been obtained by the Russian Ministry of Defense during the special military operation in Ukraine.

In particular, Igor Kirillov, the Head of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces of the Russian Armed Forces (RCBPF), has disclosed new information revealing the details of the Pentagon’s inhumane experiments on Ukrainian citizens in a psychiatric hospital in Kharkov region (Strelechye village). The test subjects included a group of male patients aged 40-60 with a high stage of physical exhaustion. “The received information proved the fact that the United States was launching an offensive military biological program in Ukraine, the purpose of which was to study the possibility of initiating controlled outbreaks of diseases on particular territories,” Kirillov said.

Documented evidence was received about an attempt to infect the residents of the Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR) with tuberculosis by means of fake banknotes contaminated with the tuberculosis causative agent. The infected notes were distributed among the minors in the village of Stepovoye in 2020. “The criminal masterminds exploited the behavior of children who are prone to tasting everything and eating without washing their hands,” Kirillov said. Aside from this, some additional information about the incidents associated with the use of bioweapons in Ukraine was obtained during the special military operation: documentary evidence was studied about the deliberate use of a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis pathogen in 2020 to infect the population of Slavyanoserbsky district in the LPR.

According to Igor Kirillov, the results of bacteriological tests proved the resistance of extracted bacteria to Tier 1 and Tier 2 anti-tuberculosis drugs. The disease caused by them would be much more difficult to treat, and the cost of such treatment would be much higher. The Lugansk Republican Sanitary and Epidemiological Service made a conclusion about the artificial nature of infection found on the banknotes, as extremely dangerous strains were found and their “concentration capable of guaranteeing infection and development of the tuberculosis process.”

Along with this, the Russian Armed Forces have discovered more than a dozen unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with tanks and nozzles for spraying bioweapon agents. In particular, on March 9, in the territory of Kherson region, three UAVs were detected with 30-liter tanks and equipment for spraying malicious agents. In late April, ten more similar UAVs were detected near the settlement of Kakhovka. At the same time, Igor Kirillov, the Head of RCBPF, added that, as a result of the special military operation in Ukraine, facts came to light evidencing the work carried out with pathogens that are potential agents of bioweapons.

At the same time, not only the United States, but also a number of its NATO allies, such as Germany, Poland and 10 other Western allies of Washington, are running their military biological projects in Ukraine. Thus, the Polish Institute of Veterinary Medicine took part in the studies of rabies virus in Ukraine together with the Battelle Institute, one of the Pentagon contractors, said the Head of the RCBPF.

According to Kirillov, the ideologists of American military biological operations in Ukraine are the leaders of the US Democratic Party who “formed the legislative framework for funding military biological research directly from the federal budget.” “Non-governmental organizations controlled by the leadership of the US Democratic Party, submitted their funds including the investment funds owned by the Clintons, Rockefellers, Soros, Biden, under the state guarantees,” the representative of the Ministry of Defense said. Major pharma companies, such as Pfizer, Moderna, Merck, as well as Gilead, a Pentagon-affiliated company, were also involved in this scheme. “US specialists are testing new medicines bypassing the international safety standards,” Kirillov added.

It should be noted that Washington has been involved in those activities for many decades, with the obvious connivance of the UN and other international organizations who were submitted incriminating evidence of the criminal use of bioweapons by the US. Instead of ensuring compliance with the international regulations and international conventions signed by the United States to combat the development and use of chemical and bacteriological weapons, Washington regularly arranges fake news campaigns accusing other countries of alleged use of prohibited WMDs. And these campaigns, unfortunately, are actively promoted and supported by the US-funded media and representatives of a number of Western political parties and governments around the world, thereby shielding official revelations of the US criminal activities.

Today, US military biolabs are located not only in Ukraine, but also in many other countries of the world that are facing a similar danger of Washington using bioweapons. And the US does not seem to be ashamed telling the global community about its “right” to make plans for changing political regimes “in authoritarian countries if they pose a threat to US security.” In particular, Henry Kissinger, one of the most respected veterans of the US politics, the former US Secretary of State and national Security Adviser to the US President, recently made this statement in his interview to the Financial Times.

Given all of the above, every country in the world should be asking one question today: Why is the United States getting away with unleashing a global biological war?

周杰倫 Jay Chou千里之外 Far Away (feat.費玉清 Fei Yu-ching)】-Official Music Video

A classic Jay Chou movie out of China. All these videos date from his first album around 2002 or so. And they are videos that tell a story. You don’t need to understand the lyrics to figure out what is happening…

Dollar is dying there is no question about it

A great talk.

Texas School Shooter May Have Been ARRESTED in 2018 for “Terror Attack Plot in 2022” at SCHOOL, Years before Shooting that Left 21 Dead!

An active shooter situation in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, left 19 children and two adults dead.   Now, however, we find the shooter may have been one of two juveniles arrested in 2018 for plotting such an attack . . . . to be carried out in the year 2022!

A hospital report from the area states that in addition to 19 kids and two adults who were killed, 14 other children and at least one other adult are being treated by hospitals in Uvalde and San Antonio.

The shooter was killed by responding police, according to Texas Governor Abbott.

The Hal Turner Radio Show has now found that in 2018 two teens were arrested for planning a mass shouting at their school in Uvalde Texas.

Their plan was to carry out the shooting in their senior year which would be 2022.

The teens were 13 and 14 years old when they were arrested. The youth were evaluated by mental health professionals and the older of the children was released to his mother. Here is the statement made by the Uvalde school system back in 2018:

Our school district is committed to the safety and education of all our students and we want to clearly communicate about safety issues when they arise. One of our Morales Junior High students was experiencing a crisis. Upon rendering aid and support, the student revealed a future plan to conduct a school shooting in the year of 2022. With the type of detailed information that was revealed by the student to law enforcement and confirmed in their investigation, the student has been arrested and will not be returning to our school. 

Our school district has a strong partnership with our local law enforcement agencies and emergency responders. They share our commitment to student safety, and we are working closely with them to ensure all information is thoroughly evaluated and our school is as safe as possible.

We ask our parents to assist us in reminding their child/children of the importance of telling a staff member if they ever become aware of a plan to harm individuals or of a weapon at school. The STOPit app may be utilized by parents or students to inform administration of any inappropriate behavior. In this way, we are all working together to keep our schools safe.

 

A press release obtained by TV Station KENS-5 thoroughly chronicles events leading up to an investigation performed by the Uvalde Police Department and the Texas Rangers.

<p”>In the press release, Uvalde Chief of Police Daniel Rodriguez said that a Morales Junior High School student,14, and a former Morales student, 13, had specifically targeted numerous students in what they described as a plan to perform a “mass casualty event against the school.”

Authorities said the students were motivated in large part by the Columbine shootings:

The investigation revealed that the students were infatuated with the Columbine High School shootings and identified themselves to the shooters. The investigation uncovered that the students even referred to themselves using the Columbine shooter’s names.”

Investigators also believe the students were planning to hold the attacks years from now during their senior year, on the anniversary of the Columbine shooting. However, one of the students began to convince the other that they should move the attacks up to this year.

“One of the students had numerous writings and drawings which depicted weapons capable of causing mass destruction. He wrote about being “God-like” and killing police and other persons. He had an academic analysis of one of the Columbine shooter’s journals,” the release stated.

According to the release, the teens were also planning on detonating IED’s before killing students from a list ‘ranked by priority.’

After that, the release states the pair were going to kill at random before eventually turning the guns on themselves.

“Any kids that had talked bad about them or said anything they did not like, basically, they said they were going to go and kill them,” one student said. You just felt unsafe. And teachers have been bringing it to our attention that you can’t be saying those things anymore. We can’t do that. It is wrong.”

“It was scary. We hear it everywhere else, but you don’t expect for it to happen in your town,” one parent said. “I am glad they were able to control the situation before anything does happen. And that they actually did something about it. Sometimes you think they’re just going to hear it, and say it won’t happen and dust it under the rug, and they actually did something.”

Both students were reportedly evaluated by mental health services on April 19, when the investigation led officials to the pair. The older of the two was released on April 23 into his mother’s care.

On April 25, the pair were taken into custody again, and this time arrested for Conspiracy to Commit Murder.

Because Juvenile Arrest records are SEALED, it is not yet known if Tuesday’s shooter in that same town, was one of the Juveniles arrested for such a plot back in 2018.

 

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

This is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions.

The children shot and killed on Tuesday, were in the Second, Third, and Fourth grade.  That would make most of them between the ages 7 and 9 years old.

What kind of a monster deliberately chooses to kill such helpless, innocent, children?  Who created this monster, and who didn’t report him before he killed so many?

If Tuesday’s gunman WAS, in fact, one of the two arrested in 2018, what was he doing out of custody and what kind of mental health “professionals” turned this beast loose?

If, however, Tuesday’s shooter was NOT one of the kids arrested back in 2018, then what the hell is going on in the schools of that town, that so many kids are having fantasies of – and now actually becoming – mass shooters?

There are an awful lot of questions to be answered here.

One such question is this:  If the threat back in 2018 was for an attack to be done in April or May of 2022, where was the extra security at schools to guard against such an attack?

Seems to me the local Board of Education has a lot of explaining to do about that.

My bet, and this is just personal opinion and conjecture: I think this shooter WAS one of the kids arrested in 2018.  After all, what are the odds it would be someone else?

I’d Love to Change the WorldAlvin Lee & Ten Years After

1970s. We all wish to return to those days; to be freed from the craziness of the 2020s.

America’s Crumbling Infrastructure | 60 Minutes Archive

This is reality.

China Builds World’s First AI-Powered Drone Carrier For Maritime Operations

The latest observation of how China aims to use artificial intelligence to conquer the Pacific is the launching of the world’s first autonomous drone carrier.

According to the South China Morning Post, the intelligent, unmanned 88-meter drone carrier named Zhu Hai Yun will bring revolutionary changes to ocean surveillance, deploying a swarm of aerial, sea, and or submersible drones.

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2022 05 26 22 17

The Zhu Hai Yun is powered by an artificial intelligence system called the Intelligent Mobile Ocean Stereo Observing System (IMOSOS). The vessel can navigate autonomously in open water and or be controlled remotely while releasing various types of drones.

"The intelligent, unmanned ship is a beautiful, new 'marine species' that will bring revolutionary changes for ocean observation," Chen Dake, director of the laboratory responsible for the ship, was quoted as saying by the Science and Technology Daily in 2021 when the shipbuilding began. 

The ship was built by Guangzhou of the Huangpu Wenchong Shipyard, a subsidiary of China’s top shipbuilding company, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Sea trials will happen in the second half of the year.

Aside from these civilian uses, the drone carrier could be used for military operations.

Suppose the autonomous drone carrier is transferred to the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). In that case, it could be used as a surveillance craft to patrol the country’s militarized islands in the South China Sea.

China’s primary strategy is to defeat the US by expanding its artificial intelligence military capabilities. So this could be the beginning of the world’s second-largest superpower building out a fleet of intelligent drone carriers to patrol highly contested waters.

Meanwhile, the US Navy has piloted drone ships in the Pacific, though only equipped for anti-submarine warfare.

Photos of America today

A picture tells a complete story.

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Creedence Clearwater RevivalWho’ll Stop The Rain

MelanieLay Down (Candles in the Rain (1970)

Remember this big hit from the past?

‘Go f**k yourselves’, Zelensky aide tells Western officials

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Ukrainian presidential adviser Alexey Arestovich had the nerve to cuss-out the Benefactors who have given his country over $50 BILLION; because some are now saying Ukraine must cede territory to restore peace to that region.

“Go f**k yourselves with such proposals, you dumb f**ks, to trade Ukrainian territory a little bit! Are you f**king crazy? Our children are dying, soldiers are stopping shells with their own bodies, and they are telling us how to sacrifice our territories. This will never happen,” he insisted in an interview on Wednesday.

Arestovich criticized the logic of “bleating” voices encouraging Ukraine “to curb its appetite” and to give Russia the territories it supposedly wants, as this would allow Kiev to “establish a comprehensive peace and to return to business as usual.”

Another adviser of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mikhail Podoliak, took to Telegram on Wednesday to address the “pro-Russian lobbyists in Europe.”

“We do not sell our citizens, territories or sovereignty. This is a clear red line. Ukrainian society has paid a terrible price and will not allow anyone to even take a step in this direction – no government and no country,” Podoliak said.

While no one wants a long military action or a food crisis, “the shortest way to end the war is with weapons, sanctions and financial assistance to Ukraine,” he argued.

“The Ukrainians defended Kiev, liberated three regions and are completing the liberation of the fourth. Today, the same people offer us to give Russia the east and the south. Thanks for the advice, but we'll probably take up arms,” the adviser said.

Neither man seems willing to accept the fact that Ukraine is LOSING the conflict with Russia and unless Ukraine wises-up - fast - they may not have a country left at all.

The statements from Arestovich and Podoliak come after former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Monday. Kissinger urged Ukraine to make peace quickly, warning that if the conflict is not resolved within two months, Russia may become a “permanent ally” of China in its stand-off with the US.

President Volodymyr Zelensky also criticized Kissinger, calling him out by name, while speaking in more polite terms than Arestovich, saying the American statesman “emerged” from the long gone past and spoke “as if it is 1938 and not 2022. And he thought he was talking to an audience in Munich of that time and not Davos.”

He was apparently referring to the Munich Agreement, a deal that the UK and France made with Axis powers Germany and Italy in 1938, in which the Nazis were given a free hand to invade Czechoslovakia. Comparing modern Russia with Nazi Germany is a favorite rhetorical device of many Ukrainian officials.

Ukraine has insisted that it will not agree to any peace proposals that do not respect its pre-2014 borders.

Moscow has made it clear that the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as the status of Crimea as a Russian region, are not up for discussion. 

Russia attacked the neighboring state in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols were designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.
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Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork

Bring out your inner BBQ master with this Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork recipe. Just 10 easy minutes of prep, and then let the slow cooker do most of the work for you. Once the pork roast is cooked and tender, shred it up and choose your level of spice by adding in your family’s favorite BBQ sauce for delicious smoky or spicy pulled pork that makes you the kitchen hero.

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China Responds to Joe Biden’s Declaration of War

周杰倫 Jay Chou青花瓷 Blue and White Porcelain】-Official Music Video

Another classic Jay Chou music video story. This shows and illustrates the Chinese belief in cycles, and reincarnation, as well as the yin / yang.

A Giant Abandoned Stawberry Is Becoming More And More Popular Among Urban Explorers In Poland

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Have you ever seen “James and the Giant Peach”? Ok, so now it’s the time for a Polish version – Alex and the Giant Strawberry. Traveling from Modlin to Warsaw you can find this amazing object. The strawberry lies next road and it’s easy to find. Actually, it’s hard not to see the strawberry, because it’s giant.

Probably you have a lot of questions now…

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Well, you know, the fruit was the symbol of a huge farm called Sadpol.

The Sadpol’s owner had a 700-hectares field and he grew there strawberries, of course. That was big business.

He sold thousands of kilograms of strawberries each year. His clients came not only from Poland but also from other European countries. It may have been the most powerful strawberry business. Unfortunately, the farm’s owner lost his employees.

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They quit their jobs and they didn’t want to return.

What happened? We don’t know.

We cannot judge him as an employer. Maybe people choose social security benefits instead of honest work. No one really knows.

The farm had to be closed and only the giant strawberry remains.

It is a relic of the glory days of Sadpol.

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Nowadays, the strawberry is abandoned so it’s a nice goal for urban explorers. It’s not a building but it’s special in its own way.

Traveling there you can have interesting urbex photos.

In the summertime, you can take colorful photos. If you prefer to have gloomy photos of the abandoned strawberry, you can visit this place in winter.

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S1E7 A B and C – Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner

We continue with the the adventure known as “The Prisoner”. This is episode 7 from series 1.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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United States is scrambling, and starting to go completely and totally mad.

I hope that you all enjoy this article of frolic, fun and “news”. Let’s try to keep things light. Truly insane people are running the West right now, and it’s best that we try to keep positive and concentrate on ourselves instead.

Some “news”…

Pfizer & Moderna Investors Run for the Exits

Wall Street investors are dumping their Moderna and Pfizer stock faster than the world can drop the mandates. Moderna is down 70 percent from its high, while Pfizer is off 19 percent. Former Blackrock Executive and investment adviser Edward Dowd calls for Moderna to go to zero and Pfizer to end under ten dollars per share.

Article

How to Cook Beef Tapa Recipe | Tapsilog Recipe

Want to try something new and tasty?

Thailand’s NGO Law vs US Meddling

A very good video. It discusses how the USA has been trying to take over Thailand.

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2022 05 29 16 11

Video here, a must watch…

Russia Conquers Severodonetsk – Then Grabs 85km west to Slovyansk!

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The Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk has been won by the Russian Army. More stunning, they moved with astonishing speed toward Slovyansk, 85km farther west.

Fighting is now raging on the outskirts of Slovyansk in a smaller city called Raihorodok, shown on the map below:

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2022 05 29 14 01

Ukraine is losing the war, very badly.

I don’t know what type of munitions Russia is using, but OMG look at just this single blast crater:

 

 

 

Roxy Music Both Ends Burning live at The Apollo London 2001

Oh, how I love those go-go cheerleader dancers. Enjoy this live performance out of the dusty files… To quote another viewer “This is so good, I cried”. It really, REALLY is great.

They are having so, so much fun on stage! It’s so darn obvious.

And those go-go girls are all wearing “go-go boots”, and doing 1960’s dances like “the monkey”, and the “mashed potato”. Seriously, it’s worth the time to watch the go-go girls alone.

Banana-Blueberry Muffins

This one is for the Banana-Blueberry Muffin lovers. Ready in 30 minutes–these perfect-for-anytime muffins will not disappoint. When whipping up a batch of blueberry and banana muffins, don’t overstir or overthink these simple muffins. Overstirring can cause little “mountain peaks” to form on your delightfully delicious Banana-Blueberry Muffins. Add these to your next at-home brunch menu for a surefire hit. Nothing beats muffins from scratch.

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Ingredients

  • 2/3 cup milk
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil
  • 1/2 cup mashed very ripe banana (1 medium)
  • 1 egg
  • 2 cups Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 2/3 cup sugar
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1 cup fresh or frozen (thawed and well drained) blueberries

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2022 05 29 13 55

Terrifying Video Shows ‘Bubble-like Clouds’ After Russia Fired Its Thermobaric Bomb On Ukraine – Watch

Phil Manzanera – Out of the Blue (en vivo en CCK)

I hope that you enjoy this video.

Horrific Footage Of ‘Chinese Sub-Launched Missile’ Flying Near A Passenger Aircraft Gets Caught On Video

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In a dramatic video circulating on social media, an airliner narrowly avoided being hit by a missile, reportedly launched from a Chinese submarine in the disputed South China Sea.

The plane was flying over the South China Sea when Air Traffic Control (ATC) issued a frantic call, “Turn left 90 degrees immediately!!.”

The gravity of the situation can be grasped by listening to unknown persons in the video discussing whether or not the missile is heading their way.

The projectile can be seen emerging from the sea’s surface and soaring to a high altitude at the front of the aircraft. The footage was shared online by Twitter user @jchovernut, a pilot for Allegiant Air and a veteran of the US Navy’s submarine community.

 

The clip was purportedly recorded from a Cathay Pacific Boeing 777, according to a subsequent post of the video on Facebook. Cathay Pacific, however, stated that no such incident had taken place.

Meanwhile, the actual date and location of the video’s shooting remain unknown. There are no noticeable Notices to Airmen (NOTAM) or other pictures linked to missile or rocket launches in the region.

The regional tensions are already high because of the intense maneuvering of the Chinese military and North Korean military. Between May 19 and May 23, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) announced that it would undertake drills in the South China Sea.

These overlapped with US President Joe Biden’s visit to South Korea and Japan. However, no live-fire missile tests were mentioned in Beijing’s announcement.

Pyongyang did conduct a submarine-launched ballistic missile test on May 7, but the site was kilometers away from the South China Sea.

In 2017, a North Korean missile launch was seen by the crew of a Cathay Pacific plane heading north of Japan. However, it’s unclear if this video depicts the past event. Yet, if it is an unannounced missile launch, such an incident might spark a major confrontation in the region and jeopardize the passenger plane’s safety.

A few odd paintings that might make your home “pop out”…

Michael Sowa (b.1945) is a German artist known for his whimsical, surreal and stunning paintings often featuring animals. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin for seven years, spent a brief time as an art teacher and then became a painter.

His art might make great conversation pieces to hang in your living rooms…

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Hindi ITO Beefsteak

Ok. I cannot understand a word he is saying, but the directions are clear, and it looks like a LOT of fun to make. A must try, you all!

Oligarchy vs. Colony for Dummies:

From ReadingJunkie…

I keep hearing that Russia is [just another] oligarchy. The main argument is that there are [VERY] rich people in Russia. True, though compared to Elon Musk or Bill Gates they are beggars. But are they oligarchs in the proper sense of the word? I don’t think so. Maybe they were proxy rulers with limited authority. I’ll try to explain.

Article HERE

This is a follow-up of my earlier post I Finally Understand Why We Hate Russia. Now I argue that under the European model of post-modern European supremacy, I mean liberalism, the enemy within is worse than the enemy outside. I am referring not to geography or borders, but to ethnicity.

Article HERE

Appreciate What You Have And Stop Comparing Yourself To Others

We live in a society in which, in one way or another, everyone compares themselves to others. This in turn gives rise to a devastating feeling — jealousy. The following comic strip really helps you think about how this feeling is actually meaningless, and how important it is to appreciate what we have.

We love the simplicity of the ideas expressed here by the author, Igor Kalashnikov, and we just had to share them with you. Take a look.

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The Truth About Michael Pompeo and China

It’s a very good video.

“Cops & Corgis”: New Russian Social Media Bot Puts Riot Police Where You Least Expect Them

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FreeOmon is a bot account based in the social network Telegram. Its sole function is to add Russian riot police to preexisting images. Any user who sends the bot an image file immediately receives a new-and-improved, highly secured version in return.

Thanks to Twitter users, the police proceeded to round up the Avengers, a group of kindhearted corgis, an extremely sad Moscow cat who has recently taken Russian social media networks by storm, and many, many other threats to public safety.

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US Biolabs created MonkeyPox

Russia: US labs in Nigeria responsible for monkey outbreak, Saturday, 28 May 2022 10:03 AM [Last Update: Saturday, 28 May 2022 10:23AM)

Article HERE, 28 May 2022 10:03 AM [ Last Update: Saturday, 28 May 2022 10:23 AM ]

The world’s monkeypox outbreak apparently originated from US military bioweapons labs in Nigeria. This is not tinfoil-hat stuff. This is from the Russian MoD, summarized by Saker:

According to a WHO report, the West African strain of monkeypox originated in Nigeria, another state in which the US has deployed its biological infrastructure...

Against the backdrop of multiple US biosafety violations and the negligent storage of pathogenic biomaterials, we call on the World Health Organisation leadership to investigate the US-funded Nigerian laboratories in Abuja, Zaria, Lagos and inform the global community of the results.

The Saker article HERE

The most disturbing aspect of this report concerns a planned smallpox outbreak:

"The Pentagon’s interest in this infection is far from accidental: the return of the smallpox pathogen would be a global catastrophe for all mankind."

Beautiful Photo Session In Traditional Costume From The Region Of Łowicz In Central Poland

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When we come upon some interesting photo-shoots we are usually eager to share them with you. This was one such “nostalgia” driven photo spectacle by Polish blogger Wiktoria Nowak. She was a folk dancer for 11 years in her younger age, because of that dance has been a large part of her personality and life. You know there is a thing about these folk gatherings, or what we mean they will leave you filled with good memories such as events, dances, trips, camps and culture preserving.

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New York bearing signs of ‘societal decay’

This is what the United States is today. Painful to watch.

NYC – STAY AWAY FROM HERE; THE CITY IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN EVER

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For over a year I have been warning readers of this website and listeners to my radio show to STAY AWAY FROM NEW YORK CITY because the crime is so widespread, brazen, and violent.  Below, two videos of about one minute each, showing you the latest.

We begin with this: Just another day in New York City’s safest subway system, where innocent people are being harassed and assaulted.

But the mayor wants you to ride the subway instead of driving, to save the environment.

Then, at night, this is a neighborhood uptown.  Look at what they do when cars are caught mid-block by a traffic light, and vehicles stopped ahead of them:

THIS is what takes place each and every day in New York City.  And worse.   Armed robberies at gunpoint are taking place in the open, on crowded Manhattan streets.  Unprovoked beatings of people who are merely walking down streets.  Brazen shoot-outs between rival gangs.

New York City does not seem safe to me — at all.   I say that as someone who has lived in this region almost all my life.

AVOID NEW YORK CITY AT ALL COSTS.  It is dangerous here.

This is kind of big news.

First look at AZOV Battalion in Russian lockdown center. They are all facing 15 to life and in some cases the death penalty

Video can be found HERE

85-Year-Old Farmer Given Makeover By Grandson And Is Transformed Into Fashion Icon

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The young creative, who goes by the name XiaoYeJieXi (@小野杰西) on Weibo, dressed the octogenarian in fashionable pieces like colorful three-piece suits, felted hats, and tailored denim. XiaoYeJieXi then photographed his grandfather among a vibrant cityscape, resulting in series that looks like it’s on the pages of a glossy magazine.

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Despite the polished look of these images, XiaoYeJieXi’s intention wasn’t for commercial fame. He simply wanted to give his grandfather a makeover and take him for a tour around the city. It’s in contrast to the elderly man’s regular life in the rural Fujian Province, where he gardens and farms vegetables.

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Kaoma – Lambada (Official Video) 1989 HD

Oh my. Enjoy this great trip to Brazil…

Custard Pie

Bring back memories of Grandma’s kitchen with this traditional custard pie in a homemade pastry crust.

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9a8a63c9 959d 4565 a0f1 27bc958167d5

Ingredients

Pastry

  • 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour*
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/3 cup cold shortening
  • 3 to 5 tablespoons ice-cold water

Filling

  • 3 eggs
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 2 1/2 cups hot whole milk or half-and-half

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TWICE “LIKEY” M/V

I’ve mentioned this video before. This is the Korean K-pop group known as “Twice”. My daughter loves to dance to their songs. There are two great aspects of this video. First, that it is filmed in Boston… I LOVE Boston… secondly, the fantastic smiles on the pretty girls. Smiles make things happen…

…oh yeah. And the girls are all Han Chinese.

Why Taiwan is NOT the Next Ukraine

Chris made a nice video. It’s pretty good, but not the entire story. Watch it. He omits the Guangzhou corridor. And what it means to the equation.

Anti-Surveillance Fashion Designed To Trigger And Inject Junk Data In To Automated License Plate Readers

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The fabric on this garment is designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, adding unhelpful data to the systems used to surveil our communities. Look fabulous in an all-over printed, body-hugging crop top.

For the pattern to have a maximum effect, it’s ideal for the fabric to hang straight so that the text is not excessively warped. For this reason, you may want to consider sizing up if you intend for it to read in to ALPRs effectively.

How It Works

The patterns on this shirt were generated by testing a series of modified license plate images with commercial ALPR APIs, working to generate aesthetic fabric patterns that read in to devices and services as if they were real plates.

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The patterns are designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their locations.

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M777

This article gives a reasonable account of twists in the M777 debacle in Ukraine: Article.

Summary:

– ammunition (U.S. and Canadian) destroyed in Ukraine ammo dumps before making it to front
– only 20km range, 40km [ed: should be ’30km’] with rocket-assisted projectiles which Ukraine does not have
– 7-man crew that normally requires nine weeks of training for basic gun skills
– months of additional training for M777 units to gain proficiency
– 80% of guns arrived in Ukraine without targeting electronics (DFCS system)
– Canadian electronics used as hasty replacement
– Canadian units fail in field due to wall of Russian electronic warfare
– Operating M777s usually located in under 30 minutes by Russian drones or counter-battery due to unique acoustic signature
– Ukriane M777s might get off four or five rounds on a good day before being destroyed or crew killed

Amazing Vintage Photos Of 1937 Cadillac V16 Series 90 Hartmann Cabriolet

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This custom Cadillac is probably the most extreme cabriolet ever built. The car was originally commissioned by wealthy playboy Philippe Barraud. He wanted a custom car constructed on a grand scale and in late 1936 ordered a 452 cu in Cadillac V16 chassis through the Edelweiss Garage in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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Cadillac shipped a bare chassis, one of only two that year, around the world to Switzerland and there it was bodied in Lausanne by Willy Hartmann. Barraud wanted to body the chassis in his own home town so he could personally supervise the work.

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After two year’s war broke out and the Cadillac was stored for ten years. It was then brought back to life and Phillipe had it repainted white over pale blue to use it over the next ten years. It was again repainted light over dark brown after a crash which destroyed the front end and its lights. New bullet lights were fitted to replace the small driving lights that did little for the grace of the design. Additionally a full width bumper was constructed.

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Abandoned by its owner in the mid-sixties, the car was “discovered” 31 years later, in derelict condition, in a field near Geneva, Switzerland. That was in the summer of 1968. It was acquired in April the following year by the 2nd owner, Mr. Jean-Jacques Belet of Lausanne, for just CHF4000 (the equivalent at that time of approximately $925).

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The car has changed hands 10 times since then. Restored four times (the last time in 2017–18) and probably owing in a large part to a “tampered” dash-mounted coachbuilder’s nameplate (added around 1985), the value of the Hartmann roadster has soared out of all normal proportions. The actual price paid by the current owner has not been disclosed but may be estimated to be around “a few million” dollars.

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The Prisoner Series 1 Episode 4

Enjoy this latest installment.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

.

Classic Blueberry Pie, CIA, Chinese and American mobile phone systems and the ugliest car in the world

Do you know the difference between poisonous and venomous? See the picture above. America has become poisonous, where China and Russia are both Venomous.

Two widely circulated reports from the UK are now demanding escalation of the confrontation with both Russia and China: The Henry Jackson Society is demanding total “decoupling” and economic warfare against China; while the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) is calling for directing the NATO-armed Ukraine to retake Crimea, forcing a nuclear showdown with Russia, arguing that “a nuclear crisis of this sort could make it easier for leaders to make difficult compromises.”

Such madness must be stopped.

But you know, the insanity has to occur and increase in measured madness until it hits a brick wall and dies.

I, and many others, are all convinced that this is the fate for the United States.

Chinese and American Mobile Phone Systems

At the risk of appearing to be a shill, I think it is safe to say that China arguably has the best mobile phone service in the world, certainly second to none, while the US and Canada have arguably the worst, surely the most fragmented and dysfunctional, and certainly the most expensive. Let’s look at some details.

I’m uncertain about the US but, so far as I am aware, in Canada and many European countries, mobile phones can be purchased only from a telecom company, one of the more clever but clearly anti-social provisions in Western communications legislation. This gives the phone companies a truly ‘captive market’ in that, if you want a particular phone, you have no choice but to submit to all that company’s policies and to pay their demanded prices. A major difference in the communications landscape is that Chinese phone companies do not have a monopoly on the sale of mobile phones and are in fact minority sellers.

To buy a mobile phone in China, you go to any one of thousands of shops in your city, each selling hundreds of different brands and models of mobile phones, and negotiate the best price you can get for the phone you want. And you CAN negotiate: “There are three shops across the street selling this same phone. Either give me a better price (or a free expensive umbrella, or a nice stuffed animal), or I’ll go there instead.” Some Americans will recognise this as “competition”.

After you buy the phone, you buy a SIM card (about $3.00), which contains your phone number, network connection authorisation, and some free air time. You insert the SIM card, turn on the phone, and begin making calls while still in the shop. That’s the whole process. Except for the SIM card, it’s the same as buying a toaster.

You can choose from various phone companies to provide service, but everything is pretty much the same and, while there are many various “usage plans”, you needn’t subscribe to them and can simply use your phone on a pay-as-you-go basis. Noteworthy is that in China you can change phone companies without changing your phone or your number. If you buy a new phone, you simply insert your old SIM card and everything is as it was. You can purchase a second (or third) SIM card and have different local numbers to use in different cities, if you want to do that.

For sure one of the best features is that the entire country is wired, even in remote locations. Some time back I was on holiday in Inner Mongolia and could happily send photos on WeChat while riding my camel in the desert. Given the extensiveness of wireless coverage, in more than 17 years in China I could count the number of dropped calls on the fingers of one hand. And it isn’t only China itself, but the entire Asian region that is seamlessly connected. I recently called a friend in Shanghai to invite him for lunch, and he said, “I can’t. I’m in Vietnam”.

If anyone from anywhere in the world calls me, the system knows where I am and my phone rings. I never have to think about service provider compatibility, roaming, and all the other restrictions that exist in Canada or the US. If I travel to Beijing, I receive a text message welcoming me and telling me my calls are now local calls. And in a sense, all mobile phone calls in China are ‘local’. The landline system still uses area codes, but the mobile phone system abandoned them decades ago and simply uses an 11-digit phone number, so calling anywhere in the country is the same. The system is so functionally useful that I cannot recall ever meeting anyone in China who had a personal or home land line.

The system also monitors abuses, presenting warning notices upon receiving a call from a number reported to belong to telemarketers or telephone scam operators. As well, the SMS system is used very effectively for some kinds of public notices like a simultaneous warning to 100 million citizens of an approaching typhoon.

Phone calls in China cost maybe $0.01 per minute, and SMS messages are the same for sending; receiving is free. The typical monthly cost for a smart phone in China, including typical internet usage, is maybe $15.00, compared to around $100.00 in the US or Canada, and sometimes as much as $200.00. Many young kids in China stream movies on their phones and can run up higher bills, but the $15.00 cost is probably typical and maybe even high. I should add that in China the ‘basic phone bill’ includes all the ancillaries which are usually sold at extra cost in the West: caller ID, call-holding, and many others.

International calls have a special provision: I first dial a 5-digit number before the phone number I’m calling and that automatically places me on some kind of heavy discount basis. Perhaps other countries have this feature now, but I can speak to a friend halfway around the world for less than $1.00 per hour.

Once on an extended trip to Canada I thought I’d buy a Canadian SIM card for my phone for the sake of convenience. That was a mistake. The phone company charged me $30 for the SIM card and another $30 as a “connection fee”. That last one rankled. In the days of land lines, the phone company had to send a man out to your house to physically connect your phone, so you paid a connection charge. But today there is no such thing as a ‘connection’. When you turn on your phone, the SIM card pings the tower and you’re connected. On my return to China, I discovered I’d lost my China SIM card; not a big deal but I didn’t want to lose my phone number. Happily, for 5 RMB (about $0.75), the nice girl at China Mobile reprogrammed a new SIM card with my old number and life was normal again.

There is one other item I would raise that seems to be primarily an American phenomenon: dirty tricks. One such was Marriott Hotels a few years back using illegal frequency jammers to block guests’ Wi-Fi hotspots and other such devices, shutting them out from the Internet entirely, then charging them between $250.00 and $1,000.00 per device to connect to the hotel’s own wireless network. A Marriott spokesperson with the unlikely name of Gaylord Opryland, claimed it was only “a security precaution” to protect hotel guests from “rogue Wi-Fi hotspots”, and that the hotel used only “FCC-authorized equipment provided by well-known, reputable manufacturers”, i.e., the CIA. The claim apparently didn’t fly with the FCC who fined the hotel chain $600,000 for the scam.[1]

[2]

I suppose it’s possible this kind of thing happens in China too, but I have never heard of it.

I once had that experience on a cruise ship traveling from Shanghai to Tokyo. As soon as we boarded the ship, even while still in port, all signals disappeared and we had no choice but to pay the cruise line’s exorbitant fees to be able to use our own phones. I refused just on principle, but I discovered there was one small portion of one lower deck where the jamming wasn’t effective, and I could still communicate with Shanghai until we were more than 300 miles out of port. No idea how the signal could carry that far, but it did.

Also, there is something unreal about the mobile phone market in North America. I don’t know if I can define it well enough to make it sensible, but it has overtones (or undertones) of what appears to be some combination of religion and ‘national security’. It suggests there exists something intrinsically mystical or inherently menacing about mobile phones and thus the rapacious practices of the phone companies are disguised as necessities to save the country from unspecified evils. Yet a mobile phone is nothing but a toaster with a SIM card (minus the toaster part). The propaganda of greed.

Of course, capitalists in China are just as greedy as capitalists everywhere, so the phone companies are usually on the lookout for a way to raise the price of something, and occasionally make attempts, furtive or otherwise, to raise rates or sneak in more charges. But if the people begin complaining, the government is not at all bashful about kicking the telecoms in the shins and telling them to roll back the price increases. And they do.

For a long time, it wasn’t possible to buy a Wi-Fi hotspot in the US, Canada, or Europe; these devices had to be rented at a cost of around $50.00 per month, and with about an equivalent monthly cost for usage. It seems they are now available for purchase, at prices ranging from around $100.00 to many hundreds, plus usage charges. In Canada, they seem to cost between about $300.00 and $650.00. Perhaps readers can update this.

In Shanghai, I have two phones and I tether them, using one as the Wi-Fi hotspot for the other and also for my laptop, so I always have my own Wi-Fi wherever I am. It’s possible to buy a dedicated Wi-Fi hotspot for $25 or $30, and pay around another $10 for usage, but my way is more convenient since my other devices connect automatically and I don’t have yet one more device to carry or one more battery to die when I need it. Plus, I have no bandwidth limitations, and never any service disruptions.

This is partially an aside, and you will no doubt hate me for telling you this, but the high-speed internet connection (DSL) for my home in Shanghai costs 500 RMB (about US$75.00) for two years, and that comes with at least 300 TV channels; I haven’t made an accurate count. On the other hand, Canada has the world’s highest internet costs at around $100 per month and showing no signs of decreasing.

The price disparities are not primarily from lower costs or wages, but that the mobile phone systems in Western (capitalist) countries were not designed for the people but for the mobile phone companies, resulting in the exclusive assigned regions, the resulting network and frequency fragmentation, à la carte menus, high costs and poor service. The few companies (with their assigned and protected markets) collaborate to keep prices high and prevent customers from escaping the trap. And US government protection of the telecom monopolies has been vicious: at least until recently, Americans would pay $500,000 and spend ten years in prison for unlocking a phone, the act represented as some kind of abhorrent immoral felony when it was merely a justifiable act of self-defense against a grossly-predatorial system.

China recognised that rapid communications and transportation were vital to increasing economic development, some estimates claiming China’s GDP is 15% higher than would otherwise have been without its current mobile phone system, and another 30% attributed to its nearly universal rapid transportation, especially the high-speed trains.

The World of 5G

China seems to have taken the lead in rolling out the new generation of mobile networks with about 2 million 5G base stations operating now, and covering 60 or 70 major urban centers, essentially all those with a population of one million or more. The country installed more than 650,000 of them in 2021 alone, and the pace is increasing if anything. The number of 5G subscribers is over 500 million and climbing quickly. Also, in 2021 5G smartphones accounted for more than 80% of all handset shipments with nearly 300 new models released.[3][4][5] Not only that, but China is already heavily into research for 6G, the next much-faster generation of mobile communications.

According to a recent article in the WSJ,[6]

“At this point, football fans have seen so many ads from AT&T and Verizon claiming to have the fastest and most reliable 5G service on the planet that those without a 5G smartphone might think they are really missing something. Don’t be misled. Unless you are traveling internationally, you won’t enjoy faster speeds with a new 5G-enabled smartphone than you’d get on a 4G phone streaming games from New York, Los Angeles or many other U.S. cities.

AT&T’s and Verizon’s new 5G networks are often significantly slower than the 4G networks they replace. America is far behind in almost every dimension of 5G while other nations – including China – race ahead. America’s average 5G mobile internet speed is roughly 75 megabits per second, which is abysmal. In China’s urban centers 5G phones get average speeds of 300 megabits per second. . . fast enough to download a high-definition movie in two minutes.”

Many MSM media articles attempt to explain why the US has fallen so far behind in this area, but this is mostly propaganda with everyone avoiding the elephant in the room. Americans have a right to be disappointed in the performance of their telecom companies whose marketing hype much exceeded their ability to deliver, but this wasn’t really their fault and the blame lies elsewhere – in the world of politics and espionage, unfortunately.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, wrote in a recent WSJ article[7]

that “The U.S. government’s “dithering” has left the country “well behind” China in the race to build out 5G technology,” but that’s a dishonest presentation. The US is indeed far behind China, but “dithering” was not the cause. I will try to explain.

The Trouble With Huawei

There are two major issues here, both political. The first involves Huawei, the Chinese IT giant. Huawei was far ahead of the rest of the world in 5G, holds a large portion of the most useful and critical patents in this area, and had the current capacity to ship almost unlimited numbers of base stations and the rest of the 5G infrastructure to the world.

The first and most obvious problem was that (in the eyes of the US Administration) China was “eating America’s lunch” in IT innovation and invention and the White House wanted to derail this by destroying Huawei and clearly made every possible effort in this regard, including bullying and threatening half the known world against using Huawei’s products. Unfortunately, the US telecom companies conducted their marketing campaigns on the expectation of installing Huawei’s equipment, which hopes were dashed by the sudden violent attacks on Huawei and the eventual banning of their equipment. This left the US telecoms with literally nothing to offer and no place to go. Ericsson and others did have equipment available, but most of it was quite inferior and with little production capacity, leaving the US telecoms with no option but to goose their 4G infrastructure and present it as “5G”, which it wasn’t. They did their best, but the results were mediocre.

Huawei was suddenly promoted as unreliable and a grave threat to US national security, and the US telecoms thus became one of the innocent victims of the trade war with China. But what was behind this? Huawei had already been in all the Western countries during 1G, 2G, 3G and 4G, and there had never been a whisper of technical issues nor any concern with data security or espionage, so what suddenly changed with 5G? As it happened, Huawei’s ‘lunch menu’ was the smallest part of the problem.[8]

The Five Eyes

The real issue was espionage, and not by China. It is so widely-known and accepted that there is no practical value in disputing the assertion that Cisco and other American hardware and software firms install back doors to all their equipment for the convenience of CIA and NSA access. There is a video on YouTube where a Microsoft executive is challenged during a speech to explain why Windows had a built-in back door specifically identified in the program code as “NSA Back Door”. The Microsoft executive did not deny the existence of this feature, nor could he have done because he knew that the man asking the question was the person who discovered it. In the event, he refused to respond and changed the subject. And it’s widely-known that as far back as 30 and 40 years ago all Xerox machines and fax machines delivered to foreign embassies and consulates in the US were “espionage-ready”.

All of Cisco’s equipment, and that of most other American manufacturers, were designed to accommodate wide-spread NSA information-gathering on Americans, as evidenced by Edward Snowden, but even this was the smaller part of the problem. The real issue was the US’ creation of the “Five Eyes” espionage network that included Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Briefly, this was set up to break every law in the book while pretending no laws were being broken. It is generally against the law for a government to spy on its own citizens, but that law doesn’t apply to a foreign government. So, Canada spies on Australian citizens and sends the information to the Australian spooks who can claim they did nothing wrong. Rinse and repeat.

According to Snowden, the Five Eyes was a “supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries”, his documents clearly revealing that these five countries were “spying on one another’s citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens”.

But suddenly Huawei is replacing Cisco and those other American firms with its better and less expensive products and filling the American mobile phone landscape with Huawei equipment. This part might be troublesome but manageable, but the CIA and NSA can hardly approach Huawei and ask the company to build back doors into their equipment so the US can spy on everybody including China. There is no solution to this problem. With the installation of Huawei equipment into these five countries, Five Eyes is dead in the water, and the US government was forced to make a decision between providing world-class 5G communications for the benefit of the country or to protect the functioning espionage network. They chose the latter. And it wasn’t sufficient to ban Huawei only from the US because this company’s equipment would castrate the NSA’s effort in the other four nations. Thus, US bullying to ensure each of its five eyes is Huawei-free.

There was no way to explain this to the public. We could not have an NYT article telling the American people that they cannot have a 5G phone system because that would prevent NSA and CIA spying, so the only option was to trash Huawei’s reputation as a grave security threat, and hype that ridiculous accusation to the point where the public would accept an inferior service. And that’s the entire story, like it or not.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons). Archive

His full archive can be seen at: HERE and Over HERE

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

Notes

[1] Article
Marriott Illegally Blocked People’s Internet Access And Charged Them Up To $1,000 Instead

[2] Article
Marriott Whacked for $600,000 for War on Rogue Wi-Fi Hotspots

[3] Article

[4] Article

[5] Article

[6] Article

China’s 5G Soars Over America’s; In some U.S. cities, it’s slower than the old 4G system.

[7] Article- behind-china-in-5g-race-ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-says.html

‘Pathetic’ performance has left U.S. ‘well behind’ China in 5G race, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says

[8] Article

Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat

Wartime Emergency

The country of Hungary will declare a “WARTIME EMERGENCY” at midnight tonight.

Hal Turner advises…

Prime Minister Orban says "the government will declare a state of war from midnight today" to "protect Hungary and Hungarian families by all possible means" in a video posted on Facebook.

So clearly he knows something gigantic is about to take place.   The "something" must clearly be actual "war" because they're actually saying it!

This seems to be "it" folks.   

Be prepared by tonight to BE ABLE TO bug-out at a moment's notice to any backup shelter you may have, and make sure you have food, water, medicine, and COMMS for that bugout shelter location. If this thing goes wild weasel between Russia-Ukraine/NATO, it will happen so fast people won't even have time to think.

Slow-Cooker Beef Roast with Onions and Potatoes

Onion and potatoes add Old-World flavor to a family favorite beef roast.

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59f10fa4 69bd 44ff 827e 953fbbc1d94at.

Ingredients

  • 1 large sweet onion, cut in half, then cut into thin slices
  • 3-lb boneless beef bottom round roast
  • 3 baking potatoes, cut into 1 1/2- to 2-inch cubes
  • 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1 3/4 cups Progresso™ beef flavored broth (from 32-oz carton)
  • 1 package (1 oz) onion soup mix (from 2-oz box)
  • 1/4 cup Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour

2022 05 24 15 40
2022 05 24 15 40

Lavrov Outlines Russia’s Future Geopolitical Strategy

Right now the West is “reacting furiously” to Russia defending its “absolutely legitimate, fundamental interests,” Lavrov said. Western leaders “chant spells” and declare they must “defeat Russia,” or make Russia “lose on the battlefield,”
without understanding the history or nature of Russia, “They must have done poorly in school,” said Lavrov.

“I am convinced this will eventually end. The West will eventually recognize reality on the ground. It will be forced to admit that it can’t constantly attack the vital interests of Russia – or Russians, wherever they live – with impunity,” he added.

If and when the West comes to its senses and wants to offer something in terms of resuming relations, Russia will “seriously consider whether we will need it or not,” the foreign minister told high-schoolers.

Moscow isn’t just implementing a strategy of import substitution in response to anti-Russian sanctions, but “must stop in any way being dependent on the supply of anything from the West” and rely on its own capabilities, and those of countries that have “proven their reliability” and act independently, Lavrov explained.

(HT REMARK: So clearly, the Russians are settling-in for the very long term.  This does not bode well for __any__ other countries that have wronged Russia.  It also shows the Russians are not going to back down - at all - with the Ukraine thing and as such, the only people being harmed by western Sanction . . .  are those of us in the West.

We need to immediately stop sticking our nose into what's going on between Ukraine and Russia.  Those two countries are literally like brothers.  Sometimes, brothers fight.  It's best to stay OUT of family squabbles.)

The RoAcH CoAcH: How the Designer Imagined the Cars of The Future from The 1970s

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1 20 1

The RoAcH CoAcH, originally built by RoAcH, Inc in the 70′s is alive and well and living in Dayton, OH. The brainchild of RoAcH, Inc., the custom show car was designed by Ed Newton and built by Dan Woods, Don Boeke, and a band of merry men. The car was a ISC show-car for years.

After hundreds of hours over six years, the RoAcH CoAcHwas born. The debut was a monster party during the 1978 NHRA Spring Nationals. The party celebrated the opening of RoAcH, Inc.’s new 100,000 sq ft. facility.

2 18 1
2 18 1

Designer: Ed Newton
Body: Dan Woods & Ed Newton custom fiberglass sculpture
Chassis: Granatelli Indy Car
Paint: Egyptian Body Shop
Interior: Egyptian Body Shop
Assembly: Egyptian Body Shop

7 17
7 17

6 17
6 17

5 17 1
5 17 1

Ugliest car I have ever seen. -MM

Two Front World War: Biden Says He’ll Attack China in Defense of Taiwan!

Classic Blueberry Pie

This Classic Blueberry Pie is amazingly delicious without the fuss of peeling and pitting needed for other fruit pie recipes. Plus, our blueberry pie recipe from scratch is easier than you think and a great way to celebrate summer. When selecting your blueberries, look for ones that are uniform in size with a smooth exterior. No stress if you don’t have fresh blueberries, frozen blueberries work just as well in this homemade blueberry pie. Eliminate some elbow grease and cut down on time, pick up Betty Crocker™ pie crust mix. Enjoy a slice, or two!

2022 05 23 21 20
2022 05 23 21 20

Ingredients

Pastry

  • 2 cups Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2/3 cup shortening
  • 4 to 6 tablespoons cold water

Filling

  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, if desired
  • 6 cups fresh blueberries
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • 1 tablespoon butter, if desired

2022 05 23 21 17
2022 05 23 21 17

2022 05 23 21 18
2022 05 23 21 18

Russian and Chinese War Planes Enter South Korea Air Defense ID Zone Without Notice

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Korea is approximately 13 hours ahead of the US East Coast Time Zone. At approximately 7:00 PM Korea Time, war planes from both Russia and China entered South Korea’s Air Defense Identification Zone without notice.

HT REMARK: This stunned the South Koreans and reminded the world that NATO is no longer the only game in town.

Details are sketchy right now, and this story will be updated as details become available.

EU Weapons Smuggling Truck Grabbed in Luhansk by Russian Allied Troops

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LPRTroops EU Truck Weapons large
LPRTroops EU Truck Weapons large

After heavy fighting around Izyum, Ukraine, soldiers of the Luhansk People’s Republic, fighting alongside Russian Army troops for the Independence and freedom of Luhansk and Donetosk, found a burned pickup truck with ammunition boxes in the bed.

The Nissan pick-up has an EU License button and  German license plate with the abbreviation MOL for Märkisch-Oderland district from the state of Brandenburg, Germany!

“The most interesting thing is that the German car number appears. Brandenburg. No idea who that was and why there are Nissans with EU numbers here”  said one of the soldiers who came upon the truck.

The vehicle tail lights, and license plate lights, were taped-over with blue painters masking tape, so the vehicle could travel unseen at night.

Clearly, this is the manner in which NATO countries have been smuggling weapons and supplies into Ukraine, to kill Russian Army troops.

One wonders how much longer Russia will sit back and allow this to go on before smashing the countries that are doing it?

The Prisoner S1E6 The General – Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner

I really hope that you enjoy this episode. Seriously, pay attention to how the media controls the prisoner. And note how everyone is controlled by the media. Written and presented in the early 1960s.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Number Six, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Asov HQ, 1959 Cadillac DeVille, and Ukraine War

Another daily dose of fun, frolic and an engagement in the geopolitical thoughts of the day. I hope that this article finds you well and that you enjoy it’s content.

Let’s start here…

Russia Rewrites the Art of Hybrid War

May 22, 2022 Pepe Escobar Original Article Here

Hybrid War is being fought predominantly in the economic/financial battleground – and the pain dial for the collective West will only go up.

The ironclad fictional “narrative” imposed all across NATOstan is that Ukraine is “winning”.

So why would weapons peddler retrofitted as Pentagon head Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin literally beg since late February to have his phone calls answered by Russian Defense Minister Shoigu, only to have his wish finally granted?

It’s now confirmed by one of my top intel sources. The call was a direct consequence of panic. The United States Government (USG) by all means wants to scotch the detailed Russian investigation – and accumulation of evidence – on the US bioweapon labs in Ukraine, as I outlined in a previous column.

This phone call happened exactly after an official Russian statement to the UN Security Council on May 13: we will use articles 5 and 6 of the Convention on the Prohibition of Bioweapons to investigate the Pentagon’s biological “experiments” in Ukraine.

That was reiterated by Under Secretary-General of the UN in charge of disarmament, Thomas Markram, even as all ambassadors of NATO member countries predictably denied the collected evidence as “Russian disinformation”.

Shoigu cold see the call coming eons away. Reuters, merely quoting the proverbial “Pentagon official”, spun that the allegedly one-hour-long call led to nothing. Nonsense. Austin, according to the Americans, demanded a “ceasefire” – which must have originated a Siberian cat smirk on Shoigu’s face.

Shoigu knows exactly which way the wind is blowing on the ground – for Ukrainian Armed Forces and UkroNazis alike. It’s not only the Azovstal debacle – and Kiev’s all-around army breakdown.

After the fall of Popasnaya – the crucial, most fortified Ukrainian stronghold in Donbass – the Russians and Donetsk/Luhansk forces have breached defenses along four different vectors to north, northwest, west and south. What’s left of the Ukrainian front is crumbling – fast, with a massive cauldron subdivided in a maze of mini-cauldrons: a military disaster the USG cannot possibly spin.

Now, in parallel, we can also expect full exposure – on overdrive – of the Pentagon bioweapons racket. The only “offer you can’t refuse” left to the USG would be to present something tangible to the Russians to avoid a full investigation.

That’s not gonna happen. Moscow is fully aware that going public with illegal work on banned biological weapons is an existential threat to the US Deep State. Especially when documents seized by the Russians show that Big Pharma – via Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and Gilead – was involved in several “experiments”. Fully exposing the whole maze, from the start, was one of Putin’s stated objectives.

More “military-technical measures”?

Three days after the UN presentation, the board of the Russian Foreign Ministry held a special session to discuss “the radically changed geopolitical realities that have developed as a result of the hybrid war against our country unleashed by the West – under the pretext of the situation in Ukraine – unprecedented in scale and ferocity, including the revival in Europe of a racist worldview in the form of cave Russophobia, an open course for the ‘abolition’ of Russia and everything Russian.”

So it’s no wonder “the aggressive revisionist course of the West requires a radical revision of Russia’s relations with unfriendly states.”

We should expect “a new edition of the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation” coming out soon.

This new Foreign Policy Concept will elaborate on what Foreign Minister Lavrov once again stressed at a meeting honoring the 30th Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy: the US has declared an all-round Hybrid War on Russia. The only thing lacking, as it stands, is a formal declaration of war.

Beyond the disinformation fog veiling the application of Finland and Sweden – call them the Dumb and Dumber Nordics – to join NATO, what really matters is another instance of declaration of war: the prospect of missiles with nuclear warheads stationed really close to Russian borders. Moscow already warned the Finns and Swedes, politely, that this would be dealt with it via “military-technical measures”. That’s exactly what Washington – and NATO minions – were told would happen before the start of Operation Z.

And of course this goes much deeper, involving Romania and Poland as well. Bucharest already has Aegis Ashore missile launchers capable of sending Tomahawks with nuclear warheads at Russia, while Warsaw is receiving the same systems. To cut to the chase, if there’s no de-escalation, they will all eventually end up receiving Mr. Khinzal’s hypersonic business card.

NATO member Turkey, meanwhile, plays a deft game, issuing its own list of demands before even considering the Nordics’ gamble. Ankara wants no more sanctions on its purchase of S-400s and on top if be re-included in the F-35 program. It will be fascinating to watch what His Master’s Voice will come up with to seduce the Sultan. The Nordics engaged in a self-correcting “clear unequivocal stance” against the PKK and the PYD is clearly not enough for the Sultan, who relished muddying the waters even more as he stressed that buying Russian energy is a “strategic” issue for Turkey.

Counteracting financial Shock’n Awe

By now it’s evidently clear that open-ended Operation Z targets unipolar Hegemon power, the infinite expansion of vassalized NATO, and the world’s financial architecture – an intertwined combo that largely transcends the Ukraine battleground.

Serial Western sanctions package hysteria ended up triggering Russia’s so far quite successful counter-financial moves. Hybrid War is being fought predominantly in the economic/financial battleground – and the pain dial for the collective West will only go up: inflation, higher commodity prices, breakdown of supply chains, exploding cost of living, impoverishment of the middle classes, and unfortunately for great swathes of the Global South, outright poverty and starvation.

In the near future, as insider evidence surfaces, a convincing case will be made that the Russian leadership even gamed the Western financial gamble/ blatant robbery of over $300 billion in Russian reserves.

This implies that already years ago – let’s say, at least from 2016, based on analyses by Sergey Glazyev – the Kremlin knew this would inevitably happen. As trust remains a rigid foundation of a monetary system, the Russian leadership may have calculated that the Americans and their vassals, driven by blind Russophobia, would play all their cards at once when push came to shove – utterly demolishing global trust on “their” system.

Because of Russia’s infinite natural resources, the Kremlin may have factored that the nation would eventually survive the financial Shock’n Awe – and even profit from it (ruble appreciation included). The reward is just too sweet: opening the way to The Doomed Dollar – without having to ask Mr. Sarmat to present his nuclear business card.

Russia could even entertain the hypothesis of getting a mighty return on those stolen funds. A great deal of Western assets – totaling as much as $500 billion – may be nationalized if the Kremlin so chooses.

So Russia is winning not only militarily but also to a large extent geopolitically – 88% of the planet does not align with NATOstan hysteria – and of course in the economic/financial sphere.

This in fact is the key Hybrid War battleground where the collective West is being checkmated. One of the next key steps will be an expanded BRICS coordinating their dollar-bypassing strategy.

None of the above should overshadow the still to be measured interconnected repercussions of the mass surrender of Azov neo-Nazis at UkroNazistan Central in Azovstal.

The mythical Western “narrative” about freedom-fighting heroes imposed since February by NATOstan media collapsed with a single blow. Cue to the thunderous silence all over the Western infowar front, where no mutts even attempted to sing that crappy, “winning” Eurovision song.

What happened, in essence, is that the creme de la creme of NATO-trained neo-Nazis, “advised” by top Western experts, weaponized to death, entrenched in deep concrete anti-nuclear bunkers in the bowels of Azovstal, was either pulverized or forced to surrender like cornered rats.

Novorossiya as a game-changer

The Russian General Staff will be adjusting their tactics for the major follow-up in Donbass – as the best Russian analysts and war correspondents incessantly debate. They will have to face an inescapable problem: as much as the Russian methodically grind down the – disaggregated – Ukrainian Army in Donbass, a new NATO army is being trained and weaponized in western Ukraine.

So there is a real danger that depending on the ultimate long-term aims of Operation Z – which are only shared by the Russian military leadership – Moscow runs the risk of encountering, in a few months, a mobile and better weaponized incarnation of the demoralized army it is now destroying. And this is exactly what the Americans mean by “weakening” Russia.

As it stands, there are several reasons why a new Novorossiya reality may turn out to be a positive game-changer for Russia. Among them:

  1. The economic/logistics complex from Kharkov to Odessa – along Donetsk, Luhansk, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye, Kherson, Nikolaev – is intimately linked with Russian industry.
  2. By controlling the Sea of Azov – already a de facto “Russian lake” – and subsequently the Black Sea, Russia will have total control of export routes for the region’s world-class grain production. Extra bonus: total exclusion of NATO.
  3. All of the above suggests a concerted drive for the development of an integrated agro-heavy industry complex – with the extra bonus of serious tourism potential.

Under this scenario, a remaining Kiev-Lviv rump Ukraine, not incorporated to Russia, and of course not rebuilt, would be at best subjected to a no-fly zone plus selected artillery/missile/drone strikes in case NATO continues to entertain funny ideas.

This would be a logical conclusion for a Special Military Operation focused on precision strikes and a deliberate emphasis on sparing civilian lives and infrastructure while methodically disabling the Ukrainian military/logistics spectrum. All of that takes time. Yet Russia may have all the time in the world, as we all keep listening to the sound of the collective West spiraling down.

Pepe ESCOBAR is an independent geopolitical analyst, writer and journalist.

Journalists get their first look inside the abandoned Azov headquarters.

They had Member I.D cards and worked directly with the Ukraine Government, making Zelensky an accomplice to their hate crimes.

There are already videos of the interior of the Azovstal bunkers where the crem of the crem of the Ukrainian Marines and nazi battallions remained without knowing what a fight is..

The rooms had air conditioning, and for what it shows the collection of objects exposed, they passed the time reading books like Mein Kmapf, and the like…

Their documents show they were all linked to the Zelensky administration as official soldiers, included some Polish ones.

Then, it is calls from the people in Lvov willing to give the Russians the coordinates on the customs where trucks full of luxury cars that are entering Ukraine…

Article One HERE

Biden´s new Minsiter of Truth photographed working along into the Zelensky´s campaign HQ…

Article Two HERE

The Wallflowers – One Headlight (Official Music Video)

Subject: What Australia did to China

Professor James Laurenceson, Director,
Australia-China Relations Institute, UT Sydney.
 
Dear Dr. Laurencson,
 
In your recent ACRI newsletter you asserted, “After all, in 2020 it was Beijing’s decision and Beijing’s decision alone to respond to political disagreements by cutting off senior level dialogue and hitting Australia’s exports”.
 
A dispassionate review of our behavior, including our unprovoked invasions of four of China’s neighbors, suggests that Beijing’s response is fully justified. Let us count the ways.
 
In late 2017, the Solomon Islands featured in aggressive Australian efforts to influence the award of the contract to lay internet cable between Honiara and Sydney.  Said the Lowy Institute’s Jonathan Pryke: “This was seen as a red line that Australia would not cross and so we jumped in with a better deal providing the cable as a grant that would be implemented with a procurement partner of Australia’s choosing – that wouldn’t be Chinese.”

Our stigmatizing normal cooperation and imposing restrictions, like the revocation of Chinese scholars’ visas, caused a scandal in China, as did our intimidatory predawn searches and reckless seizures of Chinese journalists’ homes and properties without charge or explanation.

Then the CSIRO told staff it will not renew its climate research partnership with the Qingdao National Marine Laboratory, following an unsupported ASIO assertion that ocean temperature modelling could assist submarine operations against Australia–a pronouncement met with robust criticism by Australian scientists.

We targeted China with one-third of our ongoing WTO actions and two-thirds of current measures, despite our Productivity Commission finding ‘no convincing justifications for the measures,’ and imposed hefty duties on their steel (144%), aluminium, and chemicals. China consistently lowered tariffs on our products to the point that ninety-five percent of our exports enjoyed zero duties, yet we initiated one-hundred six anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigations of Chinese products, complaining bitterly when Beijing finally resorted to the WTO, for the first time, with barley and wine tariffs.
When Rep. Shaoquett Moselmane repeated the WHO’s praise for China’s coronavirus response, Mark Latham MP called his approval ‘disgusting’ and, at dawn on June 26, 2020, forty police arrived at Moselmane’s home and stayed until 1:30 am the next morning. They brought sniffer dogs, took hair and dust samples from his car, searched the car engine and door rubbers, had a helicopter hovering and raided his parliamentary office, and froze the Moselmane family’s bank accounts. Despite Peter Dutton’s obvious, public allegiance to the United States, he told Ray Hadley, “You can’t have an allegiance to another country and pretend to have an allegiance to this country at the same time”.
 
Our international attack on Huawei, however, was particularly cruel, since it is China’s first international tech leader. Malcolm Turnbull loudly campaigned against its domestic adoption, contravening our trade agreements on unjustified, unstated ‘national security’ grounds, then lobbied the British Government on the specious grounds that Beijing can compel companies to provide information. This ignores identical Australian, American, European laws and the technical impossibility of so doing. We further revealed our hypocrisy by ignoring Huawei’s offer to base its network security division in Australia.
 

When China listed its concerns, Canberra concealed China’s fourteen concerns from public scrutiny, and DFAT lied: “The fourteen items identified by the Chinese embassy document are seen by the Department of Foreign Affairs as key to Australia’s national interest and non-negotiable.. the government makes sound decisions in our national interest and in accordance with our values and open democratic processes”. No democratic process was involved, of course. The points, still unanswered, are

  1. In contravention of ChAFTA, we rejected a dozen Chinese investment projects, and restricted areas like infrastructure, agriculture and animal husbandry on ambiguous, unfounded (and ludicrously insulting) “national security concerns”.
  2. We launched 107 anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigations of Chinese products, more than any of China’s other trading partners. 
  3. We politicized and stigmatized normal exchanges and cooperation, created barriers, and imposed restrictions like revoking visas for Chinese scholars, in parallel with America’s identical, failed witch hunt.
  4. Though Covid-19 was endemic in Europe and the US before it reached China, PM Morrison loudly demanded a weapons-style inspection into its Chinese origins–then fell silent when the US refused to sign the UN resolution to investigate its source.
  5. We spearheaded a crusade against China in multilateral forums.
  6. We legislated against Victoria’s participation in BRI.
  7. We paid anti-China think tanks to spread false reports, and peddle unsubstantiated allegations about Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
  8. Canberra funded investigations into so-called ‘China infiltration’ designed to manipulate public opinion against the country.
  9. Our police made pre-dawn searches and conducted reckless seizures in Chinese journalists’ homes without charge, explanation, or apology.
  10. Our politicians made repeated, false allegations about Chinese cyber attacks. 
  11. We condoned and repeated government-funded NGOs’ outrageous condemnations of the governing party of China. 
  12. We shrugged off hundreds of racist attacks against Chinese and Asian people.
  13. We permitted our media to repeat unfounded reports about China and made no effort to correct them.
  14. We were the first non littoral country to condemn China’s behavior in the South China Sea at the United Nations.

The Chinese see a pattern of bad-faith dealings, discrimination, and unprovoked hostility, best illustrated by our consistent opposition to their United Nations initiatives:

I am curious as to why you have not discussed any of these matters in your newsletter. Could it be that doing so would jeopardize your job?

Sincerely,

Godfree Roberts

No response was ever returned.

Gluten-Free Fruit Swirl Coffee Cake

Glazed fruit swirl coffee cake – a delicious dessert that’s ready in 45 minutes. Serve it warm or cold – it’s a delight either ways.

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c172fd05 0600 47f7 90de 045e5c1b977e

Ingredients

Coffee Cake

  • 4 eggs
  • 3/4 cup milk
  • 1/2 cup butter, melted
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla
  • 1 box Bisquick™ Gluten Free mix (3 cups)
  • 2/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 can (21 oz) fruit pie filling (any flavor)

Glaze

  • 1 cup powdered sugar
  • 2 tablespoons milk

2022 05 23 20 57
2022 05 23 20 57

The ASEAN-US summit: rhetoric versus reality

May 23, 2022

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ASEAN wants the U.S. to make its actions consistent with its rhetoric of supporting ASEAN centrality in regional security affairs. Image: Pixabay

When the US-ASEAN Summit was first announced, there were great expectations on both sides. However fond hopes foundered on the rocks of reality.

When the US-ASEAN Summit was first announced, there were great expectations on both sides. But after a postponement due to disagreements on dates, Kurt Campbell, czar and architect of US Asia Policy, quipped “We just hope they show up.” The leaders of Myanmar and the Philippines did not but the rest did come. However fond hopes foundered on the rocks of reality.

The U.S. wanted to win over ASEAN and its members to its side in its struggle with China for regional domination. ASEAN wanted to extract robust US commitments to its regional centrality in political and economic affairs as well as to actions that demonstrate that the US interest in it will not fade in favor of Europe.

Some had hoped that the U.S. would court ASEAN for its own merits rather than as a pawn in its strategic struggle with China for regional dominance. But the summit did little to dispel their concern.

The highlight of the meeting was an agreement to establish a US-ASEAN Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. The U.S. needed this to place its relations with ASEAN on the same level as that of ASEAN’s with China. Ironically this symbolized their intensifying competition for ASEAN’s hearts and minds. But it is unclear what this new formality will mean in practice.

The U.S. has previously made its intentions crystal clear. The goal of its Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS) is to prevent China’s regional hegemony by building greater coordination with allies and partners “across war-fighting domains” to ensure allies can dissuade or defeat aggression in any form_.” This means that its success depends on a US-centric network of security allies and partners and their willingness to go along with it in confronting China. The summit was part of this US effort to build a united front against China.

But ASEAN and the U.S. have fundamentally different visions for the region. The U.S. vision of an implicitly anti-China, security-oriented Free and Open Indo-Pacific contrasts with ASEAN’s inclusive [including China], more economic, less militaristic Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. ASEAN hopes the US and China can coexist and refrain from raising tensions that hurt them.

ASEAN wants the U.S. to make its actions consistent with its rhetoric of supporting ASEAN centrality in regional security affairs. ‘Centrality’ here “refers to the role of ASEAN as a regional leader or driver, convenor or facilitator, hub or key node_ _”. US President Joe Biden declared that “strengthening the US relationship with ASEAN is “at the very heart of [US] foreign policy strategy”. Perhaps that is so. But the goal of that strategy is to constrain and contain China and that is not necessarily in the interests of ASEAN or its members.

ASEAN and its members were already wary of US-driven realpolitik strategic moves like AUKUS and the Quad that have been initiated to counter what the U.S. sees as the “China threat’ to its hegemony in Asia. The U.S. and its allies went around and over ASEAN to form these pacts. In doing so ASEAN has been split and weakened.

The Joint Vision Statement issued by the meeting reflects these contradictions. It is remarkable more for what is missing or left ambiguous rather than included and clear. The parties agreed to “appropriately [emphasis added] cooperate in international and regional fora”. But what is ‘inappropriate’ cooperation? Clearly, either or both had reservations regarding certain types of cooperation . But which types and why?

They declared that they “look forward to further strengthening cooperation including through relevant initiatives or frameworks of the United States or ASEAN.” This ambiguity appears to reflect real differences or uncertainties as to which side should take the initiative on what issues. For example, the U.S. seems to want to fit ASEAN in to the ‘Quad”—the ad hoc security dialogue between India, Japan Australia and the U.S.. But ASEAN centrality means its security architecture and forums should take precedence and the Quad should take direction from them. Despite its rhetoric to the contrary, this meeting was still all about China and the U.S. effort to form a united front against it.

ASEAN wants the U.S. to place more emphasis on US-ASEAN economic relations. Indeed, the most important single thing the U.S. could do to appeal to ASEAN members would be to lead and coordinate a multinational effort of economic assistance in a strategic manner focusing on needs defined by the recipients.

Yet it missed the opportunity to announce its long awaited Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). It was not even mentioned in the Joint Vision Statement. This only reinforced the notion that “ASEAN is not a fulcrum for US economic co-operation in the Indo-Pacific”. Moreover there is concern that the IPEF will be focused on issues more important to the U.S. and its strategy to contain China rather than ASEAN members’ urgent needs. Because of the ephemeral nature of previous US commitments to Asia like the ‘pivot’, there is suspicion that the IPEF will not outlast the Biden administration. This concern was reinforced by the US announcement of a paltry US 150 million aid pledge, including 60 million for US Coast Guard assistance in training, presence and equipment to ASEAN countries. This will increase maritime domain awareness that is to the U.S. advantage in its long term struggle against China. The total is ridiculously small compared to China’s 1.5 billion aid pledge and the many US billions in aid to Ukraine.

As another example of US centrism, the US managed to insert in the Joint Vision Statement its concern with “ensuring “freedom of navigation and over flight and other lawful uses of the seas”. The latter is code for asserting what it considers to be its right to undertake provocative intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance probes against China.

Perhaps the most egregious US hypocrisy in the Joint Vision Statement is “we support ASEAN’s efforts to preserve the Southeast Asian region as a nuclear weapon free zone_ _as enshrined in the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty. In addition to frequently transporting nuclear weapons through the region, the U.S. has declined to become a party. Meanwhile China has declared that it is ready to sign—apparently in response to the AUKUS agreement which will likely bring more nuclear powered and nuclear weapon capable submarines into the region.

On the interpersonal level, Mr. Biden declined bilateral meetings with the leaders. His administration claimed this was to emphasize that he was meeting with ASEAN as an institution. Given that they had traveled half way around the world to meet him, I suspect some were miffed.

A major flaw in this approach is that ASEAN is not united on political issues. This is clearly demonstrated by its members’ diverse responses to the crisis in Myanmar and Ukraine and even to China’s behavior in the South China Sea.

They are only united in that they do not want to be forced to choose between China and the U.S..

Indeed, they do not want to become puppets or designated proxies for either one as happened during the US-Soviet Union Cold War with disastrous results for some of them—like Vietnam. But it is not clear from this summit that the U.S. will help them avoid that fate.

This piece first appeared in the Asia Times.

Italian Dressing

Why buy salad dressing, when you can make your own, and it’s cheaper and far better tasting.

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7eb7741a 6996 4abf afea 46bf9e20f2fe

Ingredients

  • 1 cup olive or vegetable oil
  • 1/4 cup white or cider vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons finely chopped onion
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh or 1 teaspoon dried basil leaves
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 1 teaspoon ground mustard
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano leaves
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

Steps

  • 1 Shake all ingredients in tightly covered container. Shake before serving.

They tried to escape

Ukrainian Nazi’s tried to get past the RF at the Azovstal complex dressed as civilians when the civilians were eventually released they were picked out after questioning and detained.

"Chechen special forces showed suspects of participating in hostilities against the allied forces of the Russian Federation and the DPR - according to the Russian side, the detainees tried to escape from Mariupol, dressed in civilian clothes.

Video showing the commander of the special police regiment named after Akhmata Kadyrova Zamid Chalaev conducts initial interrogation of detainees, the head of Chechnya published Ramzan Kadyrov in his Telegram channel. "Ukrainian Nazis, disguised as civilians, wanted to slip past the Russian military. My dear brother Zamid Chalaev asks simple questions, but the prisoner is so confused that he does not understand the first time," Kadyrov signed this publication. The head of the republic suggests that he is probably afraid of retribution for crimes and this point has yet to be clarified."

Article HERE

Cool Pics Of The 1959 Cadillac DeVille Series

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The 1959 Cadillac is remembered for its huge sharp tailfins with dual bullet tail lights, two distinctive rooflines and roof pillar configurations, new jewel-like grille patterns and matching deck lid beauty panels.

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D2 18

In 1959, the Series 62 were moved from the Series 62 to their own series, the Series 6200. DeVilles and 2-door Eldorados became the Series 6300 and Series 6400 respectively, though they all, including the 4-door Eldorado Brougham (which was moved from the Series 70 to Series 6900), shared the same 130 in (3,302 mm) wheelbase.

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D3 18

Engine output was an even 325 hp (242 kW) from the 390 cu in (6.4 L) engine. Standard equipment included power brakes, power steering, automatic transmission, back-up lamps, windshield wipers, two-speed wipers, wheel discs, outside rearview mirror, vanity mirror, oil filter, power windows and two-way power seats.

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D6 16

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FF16 7

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FF13 9

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FF9 11

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FF7 13

“Girded with barbed wire”: the wild atrocities of the Finns in World War II are revealed

Killed every third Red Army soldier who was captured by them

From HERE
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During World War II, Finland became one of the allies of Nazi Germany, which attacked the Soviet Union. This pastoral country managed to distinguish itself then in a very specific way. The Finns were able to surpass even the Germans in terms of creating hellish conditions for Soviet prisoners of war and civilians who found themselves in the occupied territories.

Juvenile prisoners of the camps. Photo: wikipedia@sa-kava@archives

The principles of cultural conduct of hostilities on the Eastern Front against the Red Army were “turned off” in advance not only by the leadership of the German Wehrmacht, but also by other allies of the Third Reich, who sent their troops to fight the Soviets. However, the degree of cruelty shown to the enemy by soldiers from the country of Suomi gave odds to almost all other members of the Nazi bloc.

boiled alive

Historians are unanimous: Russophobia was a policy in those years, officially approved by the leaders of the Land of a Thousand Lakes. Among the population, a hostile attitude towards the Russ was actively promoted (such a contemptuous designation was popular). Many joined the ranks of the civil guards – shutskor, which was originally created to fight those Russians who lived on the territory of Finland that separated from the Russian Empire.

The confessions given during interrogation by Lieutenant Pelkonen, the captured deputy head of the Olonets camp No. 17 for prisoners of war, are indicative: “I completely shared the fascist propaganda carried out by the Finns. In the person of the Russian nationality, I saw the primordial enemies of my country. With this opinion, I went to fight against the Russians. My boss, lieutenant Soininen, said that the Russians, even in captivity, continue to be enemies for the Finns.

However, even taking into account all the mentioned atrocities of the White Finns in relation to the captured Soviet soldiers, they are taken aback. Even their colleagues from among the German monsters with SS stripes give in to the Finnish shoulder craftsmen.

Here are just some of the evidence recorded in documents, in publications of that time.

“The Red Army soldier Sergey Pavlovich Terentyev, who escaped from the White Finnish captivity, spoke about the unbearable suffering of Soviet prisoners of war languishing in a camp near the city of Pitkyaranta. “In this camp,” said Terentiev, “wounded Red Army soldiers are kept. They are not provided with any medical care. … We were given a mug of flour stew a day. Finnish executioners came up with a terrible torture for us. They girded the prisoner with barbed wire and dragged him along the ground. Every day, the corpses of tortured Soviet soldiers are taken out of the camp.” (From the message of the Soviet Information Bureau on October 7, 1942)

“The Red Army soldier Lazarenko, who fell into the clutches of the Mannerheims, was subjected to monstrous torture. Finnish executioners drove cartridges into his nostrils, and burned a five-pointed star on his chest with a red-hot ramrod. But even this seemed not enough to vile sadists. They smashed their victim’s skull and stuffed crackers inside.” (Pravda, July 25, 1944)

“Dear comrade editor! Take a look at this photo. It shows Lieutenant of the Finnish army Olkinuorya. In his hands is the skull of a Red Army soldier tortured and killed by him. As the prisoners testified, this beast in uniform decided to keep the skull of his victim “as a keepsake” and ordered the soldiers to boil it in a cauldron and clean it. And in the suitcase of the captured Finn Saari, we found photographs like this. Saari tortured the prisoners, cut off their arms and legs, and ripped open their stomachs. He even established a system: first he cut off the feet, hands, then the shins, forearms, and only then cut off the head. (From a letter from senior lieutenant V. Andreev, published in Komsomolskaya Pravda on August 11, 1944)

“… Many of the found corpses of tortured Soviet officers and soldiers have stab wounds, many have their ears and noses cut off, their eyes gouged out, their limbs turned out of their joints, skin strips and five-pointed stars were cut out on the body. Finnish monsters practiced burning people alive at the stake…

… The act and resolution of the military investigator on the corpse of an unknown Red Army soldier found on the shore of Lake Ladoga on June 25, 1944, boiled alive on a fire in a large iron barrel, testifies to what vile, sophisticated torture Finnish sadists reach …

… A regime was established in the concentration camps, designed for the extinction of prisoners of war by a slow, painful death. They were starved. The barracks in which the prisoners were placed, as a rule, were not heated all year round. The appalling unsanitary living conditions of prisoners of war and rotten, inedible food were the cause of massive stomach and other illnesses. The most common disease, most often fatal, was general exhaustion …

… There are not isolated cases when the guards of the camps arranged vile, bloody fun, setting dogs on defenseless people.

Prisoners are used as experimental material in medical experiments. The Swedish newspaper Volksviljan wrote at the beginning of this year: “It is known among doctors in Stockholm that in Finland Russian prisoners of war are used as subjects for medical experiments. Finnish doctors use Russian prisoners of war to determine how much air can be injected into a person’s blood. This inflicts terrible torment on the victims during the “research”, after which death occurs. In experiments on Russian prisoners, they are also trying to find out how much drugs the human body can withstand. (From the Report on the atrocities of the White Finns in the temporarily occupied territory of the USSR, sent to the head of the GlavPU of the Red Army A.S. Shcherbakov by his deputy I.V. Shikin on July 28, 1944)

50,000 “extra” Russians

In the spring of 2020, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal case of genocide on the death of thousands of civilians in Finnish concentration camps in the occupied part of Karelia during the Great Patriotic War

The beginning of this horror, which lasted almost four years, was laid by the Supreme Commander of the Army of Finland, Marshal Mannerheim. In his secret order No. 132, signed on July 8, 1941, he ordered the Finnish soldiers and officers: “The Russian population should be detained and sent to concentration camps.”

We talked about what happened next with the director of the Institute of History, Political and Social Sciences of Petrozavodsk State University, Professor, Doctor of Historical Sciences Sergey Verigin.

– Even before the start of hostilities against the USSR, the Finnish authorities approved the concept of creating Greater Finland. It was supposed to include part of the Soviet lands – Karelia, the Kola Peninsula. Moreover, in such an expanded Finnish state, in addition to representatives of the titular nation, only their “younger brothers” — Karelians, Ingrians, Vepsians — were supposed to live. The Russians, according to the doctrine then prevailing in the country of Suomi, are for all these territories an alien people who have no place there. Therefore, the Finnish leadership decided to act on an ethnic basis. Drive the aliens to concentration camps, and after the final victory over the USSR, send them away – to the Slavic regions captured by Germany.

Entering the war, the Finns were able to occupy two-thirds of Soviet Karelia. 86,000 civilians remained in the territory they occupied. Of this number, about 36,000 turned out to be representatives of kindred peoples – Karelians, Vepsians … And the remaining 50,000 are the very “extra” Russian-speaking population.

As a result of the efforts of the Finnish military to carry out Mannerheim’s order, almost half of these people were sent to concentration camps. Thousands of them died.

Can this really qualify as genocide?

– In my opinion, that’s right. Of course, at the level of everyday consciousness, genocide is associated with mass executions, with gas chambers, executions … But in this case, we are dealing with genocide carried out virtually without the use of weapons or any special technical means.

Civilians – and mostly they were women, old people, children – were herded into concentration camps. Living conditions there were harsh. The prisoners were used for hard work, and food was provided very poorly. Weakened people were mowed down by diseases, epidemics …

The result was a terrible record. In 1942, the mortality rate in Finnish concentration camps was even higher than in German concentration camps: 13.75% versus 10%. Later, however, the conditions for campers were slightly improved. This began in 1943, when a clear turning point occurred in the course of the war. The Finnish leadership then realized that the prospects for it were sad, they were frightened. To further disguise their “sins”, they even decided to rename the concentration camps to camps for displaced persons, and a certain number of people who were there were released. But in general, such cosmetic measures did not change the situation in any way.

On the occupied territory of Karelia, the White Finns created a hundred places of detention: 14 concentration camps, 34 labor camps, 42 prisoner of war camps, 9 prisons and one colony. I even find it difficult to name any other occupied territory where such a high density of camps for its inhabitants was created during the Second World War.

What was the labor camp like?

– Those who were there, it seems, were not formally considered prisoners. But the life of these unfortunates was akin to a concentration camp. People lived in villages, although not behind barbed wire, but under constant guard and without the possibility of free movement. Fearing that the “trudoviks” might join the partisans, the Finnish soldiers forbade them even to go to the neighboring forest. In addition, adult residents of such a camp were required to travel to work daily. Moreover, the invaders prepared for them the most difficult types of it: these people paved the roads, felled the forest … Of course, many could not withstand such difficult conditions.

Facts from the past:

“Shortly after the occupation of the Karelian-Finnish SSR by the White Finnish invaders ... they drove most of the civilian population, mainly Russians, into concentration camps. The camps housed Soviet citizens of all ages, from infants to the elderly. The regime, in essence, was no different from the regime in concentration camps for Soviet prisoners of war: starvation rations, illness, dirt, beatings, abuse, executions. The regime in the Olonets camp No. 8 and in the Kutizhma camp was especially cruel. Exhausted by constant hunger, people were forced to work 12-14 hours a day. Those who were unable to move were dragged to the place of work, and at the end of the working day they were again dragged to the camp. Beatings were commonplace. The camps had a whole set of tools for torture: whips, rubber clubs, gas mask tubes filled with sand. Torture was carried out alone and in groups. For failure to comply with unbearable work norms, women and girls were cut bald. For the slightest deviation from the established order, for going beyond the fence without an escort, execution was threatened. In Camp No. 8, on average, 2–3 people died daily.

Mocking Soviet citizens, the head of Camp No. 8 ordered every week, under the pretext of fighting lice, to drive men, women and children together, stripped naked, into a very hot heated bathhouse and keep them there for 45 minutes. with tightly closed windows and doors. People were going crazy...

The doctor of the Kutizhma camp, Beino Kolykhmainen, turned the hospital into a dungeon, which the prisoners were more afraid of than the punishment cell. The sick preferred to hide their illness so as not to fall into the clutches of this beast. He used to line up the sick in a line and beat them with a stick, saying "work, work." He often poisoned patients who developed edema from exhaustion by mixing poison into the medicine.

... On March 10, 1942, a new batch of 600 prisoners was sent to Kutizhma. By July 13, 1942, only 160 people from this party remained alive.

Wild arbitrariness reigned not only in the camps, but also outside their fences. For "unauthorized absence" from the village, for walking around the city after 10 o'clock - execution. (From the Report on the atrocities of the White Finns in the temporarily occupied territory of the USSR, sent to the head of the GlavPU of the Red Army A.S. Shcherbakov by his deputy I.V. Shikin on July 28, 1944)

“In the first days of June 1944, I was in Petrozavodsk. The camp accommodated children from 5 to 15 years old. The kids were creepy to watch. They were small living skeletons, dressed in unimaginable rags. The children were so exhausted that they forgot how to cry and looked at everything with indifferent eyes. (From the testimony of a captured Finnish soldier of the 20th Infantry Brigade Toivo Arvid Laine.)

“In the village of Palalahta, Vedlozersky district, the White Finns arrested the Karelian Anna Gumbarova, “suspected of sympathy for the partisans.” The girl was thrown into prison, starved, tortured. The Soviet patriot steadfastly endured all the torment and bullying. She was locked up for 20 days in a dead room, where the corpses lay. When this did not help, Anna Gumbarova was taken to the cemetery, forced to dig her own grave and shot in front of the entire population of the village.

... The Mannerheimians created several concentration camps in the occupied areas, in which Soviet people languish. One of these camps is located in Petrozavodsk. It's in spooky mode. The police systematically arrange drunken orgies, during which the prisoners are subjected to wild abuse. Recently, a new monstrous torture has been invented here: after beating a prisoner until he loses consciousness, the police undress him, wrap the wounded body in a sheet soaked in salt, and leave him in this position for several hours, and sometimes even days. ("Red Star", November 28, 1943)

“Unusual Invaders”

– How many Soviet people – prisoners of war and civilians – passed through these Finnish “millstones”? I ask Sergei Verigin.

– According to the State Emergency Commission, which worked in 1944-1945, about 8,000 civilians, including 2,000 children, died in the Finnish concentration camps created on the territory of Soviet Karelia during the war years. To this should be added also at least 7,000 dead and killed prisoners of war held in Karelian concentration camps.

However, these are only very approximate figures. It should also be taken into account that some of the captured Red Army soldiers were sent to camps located on the territory of Finland itself. Historian Antti Kujala, associate professor at the University of Helsinki, based on the latest updated data, came to the conclusion that a total of 22,000 people died from among the prisoners of war.

Although this needs to be corrected. Indeed, as far as I know, there were frequent cases when the Finns did not send a captured Red Army soldier to their rear – to a concentration camp. They were simply afraid to organize such a convoy under shelling, bombing, and therefore resorted to a much more convenient solution to the problem: they simply shot these people right there, on the front line.

5-6 years ago, Finnish researchers provided us with a database in which information was collected about 19.5 thousand Soviet prisoners of war. However, they themselves admit that this is far from a complete list, they say: we do not know exactly how many of your prisoners and civilians died in those years. Indeed, during the war, the accounting of Russian camp inmates was carried out very carelessly. Looking through these documents, you see that some surnames are crossed out, others are entered additionally … Sometimes there are omissions in the accounts, covering whole months. Such a negligent attitude of the Finnish “owners” to the accounting of the “living souls” who ended up in their camps is quite understandable. After all, for them, Russian people – aliens – were worthless consumables.

Now the same Kuyala gives the total number of Soviet soldiers and officers who went through Finnish captivity during the war years, 67,000 people. I emphasize once again: of this number, 22,000 died. That is, every third prisoner of the concentration camp did not live to see liberation.

– What caused such a large percentage of victims?

“First of all, people died of starvation. After all, as eyewitnesses testify, the food in the concentration camps was very bad. Secondly, people could not stand the harsh working conditions. Particularly terrible memories were preserved of the forest camps in the Medvezhyegorsk region. There, sometimes the composition of prisoners was completely renewed after six months: the entire first batch of prisoners of war was mowed down, and they were replaced by others. In addition, the camp guards also did not stand on ceremony. People were beaten, even shot. There were no such mass executions as the Germans had, but they practiced demonstrative executions of those who tried to escape. The fugitives caught – five, nine people – were placed in front of the formation of campers and shot as a warning to the rest, so that they would not even try to break free.

— Why is the case about the Karelian genocide during the war years initiated right now?

– In the spring of 2020, about 4,000 documents related to those events were declassified, which were preserved in the regional department of the FSB. This event received a great response in the republic. The researchers were able to find out many hitherto unknown facts about what the Mannerheimians were doing. On the basis of the now available documentary information, we managed to find out the names of several dozen “heroes” who are guilty of mocking prisoners and in their death – these are the heads of concentration camps, commandants, guards …

In addition, at the same time, the surviving juvenile prisoners of the Finnish concentration camps turned to the Investigative Committee. The result of all these events was the decision to initiate proceedings on the grounds of genocide.

In Finland itself, the epic with the documents now declassified in our country also made a lot of noise. Many local experts published articles and gave interviews. They tried in every possible way to whitewash the military regime of the first half of the 1940s. Like, the Finns were occupiers, but “unusual occupiers”, not like the Germans: they opened schools in the villages and cities of Karelia, created medical aid points, fed and clothed children … But at the same time, the gentlemen forget to make one small clarification. All this was indeed done in the territories occupied by the Finns, but only for representatives of the Finno-Ugric nationalities “related” to them. But the “wrong” Russians instead of household goods from the invaders got only camp bunks, beatings, exhausting labor, hunger, bullying.

Not very happy with the Asov’s leadership

The head of the Nazi’s in the Azovstal taken out in armoured car as the civilians in Mariupol wanted to murder him.

“The operation to liberate the Azovstal plant in Mariupol from the militants of the nationalist formation Azov has been completed. The leader of the group Denis Prokopenko (“Radish”) was taken out in a special armored car, said May 20, the official representative of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Major General Igor Konashenkov.

Mariupol has been completely liberated from Ukrainian militants.
“The so-called “commander” of the Nazis “Azov” because of the hatred of Mariupol residents and the desire to massacre him citizens for numerous atrocities was taken out of the territory of the plant in a special armored car,” Konashenkov said.

Konashenkov reported on the complete liberation of Azovstal Iron and Steel Works earlier in the day. On May 20, the last group of 531 militants surrendered. In total, since May 16, 2439 Azov Nazis and servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), blocked on the territory of Azovstal, have laid down their arms and surrendered.”

From HERE

Laser Grinding of SpaceX: Why the US Is Alarmed by the Abrupt Failure of Military Satellites Over Ukraine

May 20, 2022

Commercial systems remain the only channel for obtaining data for the Pentagon and the UAF, but they may soon “go out”.

Combat lasers

On May 18, Deputy Prime Minister of the government and curator of the Russian defence industry, Yury Borisov, said that the “Peresvet” combat laser system has already been serially supplied to the Russian troops. According to the Deputy Prime Minister, the laser can disable satellites in orbits up to 1,500 kilometres high. Such technologies were previously considered impossible. A significant number of experiments in this area were conducted by two superpowers of the world.

Several similar programs have been active in the US for some time. One of the most promising was considered to be the development work on the topic of the YAL-1 “flying laser” based on the Boeing 747 aircraft. As a result, $12 billion was spent on a high-energy weapons program to intercept ballistic missile warheads, but the work was completed to no avail.

In the USSR, they went the other way. Few people know, but it was the mock-up of the “Skif-DM” combat laser complex, or “Index 17F19DM”, better known as “Polyus”, that was the first “passenger” of the superheavy “Energiya” rocket back in 1987. As with modern anti-satellite weapons, its principle was based on the defeat of the optical elements of enemy satellites – visors and lenses. The second, cheaper and simpler project in this direction is the A-60 chemical laser based on the Il-76 transport aircraft.

“Peresvet” laser and secret “Zadira”

Work on the “Peresvet” combat laser complex was first announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The exact composition of the equipment inside the complex is not disclosed, however, it is known that “Peresvet” is a high-energy laser in a mobile version: a generator and a combat readiness maintenance system, a radiator and a surveillance system are located in several sections. According to some reports, the complex is effective against all surveillance means, including RQ-4 Global Hawk high-altitude unmanned vehicles, as well as most spacecraft of the American IMINT species reconnaissance system. According to some reports, commercial structures are also periodically connected to it. The most famous example is MAXAR, which provides high-resolution intelligence to the US military. The other two participants in this program are slightly less well known, but Planet Labs and SkyBox have the most high-tech devices.

Back in 2014, with the help of a complex optical circuit, ultra-sensitive matrices and software processing, Skybox was able to achieve outstanding performance. From a height of 600 km, their devices can film the surface of the planet with a detail of about 1 meter, while it’s not only about photos, but also about video. The project turned out to be so impressive that the entire company was bought out by the IT giant Google, and the satellites formed the basis of the Terra Bella surveillance system. Another company, Planet Labs, received the first “spy grant” back in 2016, and since then it has been commercial structures that have been spying on the most important objects of a likely enemy, including in Russia.

The capabilities of the “Peresvet” laser are designed just for such means of reconnaissance. The principle of operation of the weapon is not disclosed, however, it is known that the previous complexes, designed in the USSR and Russia, could operate in several modes. The two most important ones are the “local impact” mode on a specific vehicle flying over a restricted zone, as well as the “continuous defeat” mode, when over a certain zone (a square of several hundred kilometres) a so-called laser curtain is being put up.

There is no detailed data on the combat deployment of the “Peresvet” complexes during the special military operation in Ukraine, however, in early March, Wired reported that American satellites were “experiencing difficulties” in working when flying over the border areas of Russia and Ukraine. According to Wired, the intelligence department of the US Department of Defence could not get any pictures of the desired area at all before the start of hostilities, and the advanced units of Russian troops on the territory of Ukraine were noticed from space only a few hours after the start of “Operation Z”. Neither civilian analysts nor representatives of the Pentagon specify why this happened.

And on February 28, 4 days after the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, Google satellites “fell off”. The company even had to issue a statement informing users about the “temporary shutdown” of updates for images in areas of concentration and movement of Russian troops. In total, according to Professor Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas, at least 50 different synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) satellites were deployed over Ukraine after the start of its military operation by the Russian Army.

It is curious that the combat protection of such objects as the “Peresvet” laser is carried out not only by electronic warfare troops and air defence units, but also by fully-fledged “Zadira” combat lasers. This complex was developed at the Russian Federal Nuclear Center (Russian Federal Nuclear Center — All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics) in Sarov. The power of the weapon is not disclosed, however, according to some reports, a few seconds of radiation is enough to “cut” a small reconnaissance drone into two parts.

Starlink to Ukraine

According to some reports, the American and Ukrainian military had several simultaneous serious problems.

Firstly, a significant part of the equipment of the US surveillance satellites “failed” in the first few days of the special operation in Ukraine. The reasons why this happened are not disclosed in the United States, just as in Russia they do not make statements on the combat use of “Peresvet” lasers capable of burning out the powerful optics of satellites in orbits up to 1,500 kilometres high.

Secondly, the transmission of data from Maxar Technologies’ WorldView-2 satellites to Ukrainian spacecraft was difficult, since the latter, as it turned out, were not designed for such a volume of information. Data overload has led to the fact that a significant part of telecommunications satellites simply failed. It is not possible to restore their functionality at the moment, so the spacecraft are just hanging out in orbit like garbage.

It is for this reason that Elon Musk was urgently brought into the arena. Starlink communications satellites, previously tested at military exercises of the US Army and the Strategic Command, turned out to be the most convenient channel for data transmission. If it were not for the data transmission network that SpaceX deployed in orbit, the UAF would have lost all intelligence — both its own and those transmitted to them by American intelligence.

Russia steps up its banning list of American’s now not allowed into Russia.

"US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA chief William Burns have been banned from entry to Russia as relations between the two world powers continue a constant downward spiral over the crisis in Ukraine.

The Russian Foreign Ministry on Saturday published a blacklist containing 963 US nationals, including Biden, Blinken and Burns, banned from entering the country due to anti-Russian activities.

“In response to the continuously imposed anti-Russian sanctions from the US and incoming requests about the exact composition of our national ‘stop list’, the Russian Foreign Ministry has published a list of American citizens who are permanently banned from entering Russia,” the ministry announced in a statement.

Joe Biden's son, Hunter, Vice President Kamala Harris, actor Morgan Freeman and many US congressmen and journalists were named on the blacklist."

1970s Zingers! Full-Sized Toy Vehicles

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These are the Zingers!, the “hairiest, scariest fistfuls of muscle yet,” according to the ads for the line of MPC plastic models introduced in 1971.

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In the days when wild show cars reigned, legendary promoter Bob Larivee Sr. drew crowds by commissioning full-scale versions of top-selling toys. Perhaps the most well-known is the Red Baron, built in 1:1 scale in 1969 by Chuck Miller of Styline Customs based on the Tom Daniel-designed Monogram model.

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When Larivee wanted fullsize Zingers!, he called on Styline to build the VW, the van, and the Vettes shown here in these Mike Brenner photo outtakes from a story in the July ’71 HOT ROD. The dune buggy was built by show-car builder and drag-racer Steve Tansy.

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The life-size Zingers used real engines with half-scale bodies, and others on the show circuit (and in the model-car line) included a ’57 Chevy and a Super Drag dragster.

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The Asov Facility Tour

John Mark Dougan touring an Azov-facility in the vicinity of Mariupol.

And this video also…

It Is Foolish for Finland and Sweden to Join NATO and Ignore Both the Real Causes and Consequences

From HERE

By Jan OBERG

Here’s what the West is intellectually unable – in the midst of its boundlessly self-righteous, militarist mood to see:

NATO’s expansion policy created – and is responsible for – the conflict. Russia created – and is responsible for – the war. There exists no violence which is not rooted in underlying conflicts. Conflict and peace literate people, therefore, talk about both.

And if they want peace, they do not increase the symptoms – the war – they address the real cause, the conflict and ask the conflicting parties to tell what they fear and what they want and then move, step-by-step towards a sustainable solution.

But neither the mainstream media nor politicians have the civil courage to address the conflict. It’s only about the war and only about Russia/Putin who must be punished, no matter the price to be paid by future generations. If we survive.

It’s a banality to point out that it takes at least two to conflict. But that’s the intellectual and moral level decision-makers, media and much of academia operate in these dark times.

This approach has no future and can never bring peace. Period.

Decisions taken with this irrational approach and emotionalism will only make things worse. Such as Sweden and Finland joining NATO based on the hysteric panic of the moment: There simply exists no credible, realistic scenario that would lead to an isolated, out-of-the-blue Russian attack on either of them if they remained non-aligned as they’ve been for decades.

That some less knowledgeable people – or people who speak for NATO membership – have been talking about even an isolated, out-of-the-blue attack on the Swedish island of Gotland is Monty Python politics.

Why will Sweden and Finland join?

So why will Finland and Sweden now make a disastrous, tension-increasing decision to join NATO? Here are some of the possible reasons:

• Both have been under heavy pressure by NATO and the US in particular. Sweden’s prime minister, Olof Palme, was murdered – a man who stood for the UN goal of international disarmament, nuclear abolition and the intelligent concept of common security. US ambassadors have held secret meetings with Swedish MP, there are many channels, demands and rewards.

• Sweden’s single worst security challenge was the Russian submarine, U 137 Whisky on the Rocks. It was Russian, yes, but the operation was an American PSYOP – Psychological Operation – conducted by the “Navigation Expert” on board who was the only one never interviewed in Sweden and who soon after disappeared.

It was a PSYOP intended to make Sweden recognise that the Soviet Union was a threat, that its defence against the East was deficient and that it should seek protection from the West itself. This is extremely well-documented by professor emeritus, Ola Tunander’s, eminent multi-decade research, latest published in the book, “Navigations-Experten. Hur Sverige lät sig bedras av U 137” (The Navigation Expert. On how Sweden accepted to be deceived by U 137).
Step by step, Sweden was guided in the right direction. Certain Swedish politicians knew what was going on, but the media and the people didn’t.

• Both countries have moved to be wooed by the US and NATO. They have, over the last 20 years, become engaged with NATO in all kinds of ways – so, as the saying goes, why not marry now? In other words, Finland and Sweden now join because they have – incrementally – made one wrong decision after the other, painted themselves into a “no-choice-but-NATO” corner and abdicated every ounce of their historical, independent-minded creative foreign policy thinking. And stopped criticism of warfare and militarism.

That has also been possible because critical, or alternative, independent intellectual input into ministries of foreign affairs has been cut out and substituted by various types of pro-American marketing of policies. For decades, the NATO Echo Chamber has defined the national pro-NATO Groupthink. Nobody was allowed in to ask: Where on earth are we heading in, say, 25 years from now?

• Further, Sweden and Finland are now joining because elites related to the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, in both countries – rather than the people – decide security and foreign policy matters. Of course, there was extremely little open public discussion; it wasn’t wanted. Decision-makers knew that NATO’s nuclear weapons foundation and its members’ contact wars, particular in the Middle East were seen as basically evil among the citizenry.

• Liberal media suggest that there cannot be a referendum because there is such a time pressure – presumably before that Russian invasion of Sweden and Finland – and, so, just make the most important foreign and security political decision since 1945 in a hurry now there is popular outrage at Russia – the beloved, necessary enemy.

The Swedish decision-makers of course know that there will never be a 75% or so majority for NATO – which is what there should be to make such a fundamental, fateful decision. So much, you may say, for democracy – but no new NATO member has held a referendum where NATO and other alternatives were freely discussed and a 75% majority came out in favour. (According to the Swedish Svenska Dagbladet daily of May 6, 2022, 48% think that Sweden shall join, but in just one week those who are not sure what to think have increased from 22 to 27%).
Finland’s pro-NATO opinion seems to have grown from 53% in February to 76% in May 2022. It was 19% in 2017 according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Ukraine has played its role.

• A further reason to join is the intellectual disarmament that decision-makers have unified around one alternative, forgotten to leave other doors open and deliberately quelled alternatives. The discourse of peace – in media, politics and research – has been disappeared. Peace has come to mean weapons, deterrence, more and more of it coupled to blind loyalty with every US/NATO war. For instance, then Social Democratic prime minister Göran Persson’s government quickly decided to disable Sweden’s weapons export prohibition legislation in 2001 in order to be able to continue exporting weapons to the US during its invasion of Iraq.

This multi-year intellectual disarmament is manifest – and always tends to favour military over civilian means as well as diplomacy. And not only in these countries, of course.

An institute such as SIPRI – Stockholm International Peace Research Institute – has decayed intellectually into something that should rather be named Stockholm International Military Security Research, SIMSI – as I have suggested years ago.

In other words, the political creativity that was needed to run an independent policy of neutrality, non-alignment and global disarmament coupled with a strong belief in international law vanished years ago.

It’s easier to follow the flock – particularly when, as it seems, the Social Democratic party today exists only by name.

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• Without exhausting all those – tragic – reasons, one final reason to mention is the role of the media. Like everywhere else, media from left to right have unified around a pro-Western, non-neutral policy. The present pro-NATO propaganda, not the least in the liberal Dagens Nyheter, is pervasive. Critical voices are marginalised and public information “explainers” are reduced to some high school-like basic facts coupled with FOSI, Fake + Omission + Source Ignorance. Sweden is able to have televised panel discussions where, de facto, all the participants are more or less pro-NATO thus leaving out a large part of public opinion. *)

What will be the consequences of Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership?

There are potentially so many – some more likely than others – that they cannot all be listed in a short pointed analysis like this. But let me mention:

• The Swedes and the Finns will become less secure. Why? Because there will be harder confrontation and polarisation instead of soft borders and mediating attitudes. In a serious crisis, they will, for all practical purposes, be occupied and told what to do by the US/NATO.

• To the degree that, at some point in the future, the two countries will be asked to host US bases – like Norway and Denmark now – they won’t be able to say ‘No’! Such bases will be Russia’s first-order targets in a war situation.

• From a Russian point of view, of course, their NATO membership is extremely tension-increasing and confrontational. Russia has 8% (US$ 66 billion) of the military expenditures of the 30 NATO members. Now there will be a huge re-armament throughout NATO; Germany alone plans to increase to almost twice as much as Russia’s expenditures. Ukraine will receive about US$ 50 billion. Add a re-armed Sweden and Finland and we shall see Russia rush down to 4% of NATO’s expenditures – and still be called a formidable threat.

• There will be virtually no confidence-building and conflict-resolution mechanisms left in Europe. No discussion will be possible about a new all-European peace and security system. And whether it is understood and respected or not, Russia will feel even more intimidated, isolated and – in a certain situation – become even more desperate. As does, normally, the weaker party in an a-symmetric conflict. We are living in very dangerous times and these two countries in NATO will only increase the danger, there is no way it could reduce it.

• If Finland and Sweden so strongly want to be “protected” by the United States and/or NATO, it is completely unnecessary for these two countries to join because, if there is a serious crisis, the US/NATO will under all circumstances come to “protect” or rather use their territories to be closer to the Baltic republics. That’s what the Host Nation Support agreements are about.
The only reason to join would be paragraph 5 – but the disadvantage is that paragraph 5 requires that Finland and Sweden will be expected to participate in wars that are not about their defence and perhaps even in future international law-violating wars à la those in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya. So, will Finnish and Swedish young people be killed in future NATO-country wars? Are they ready for that?

• It will cost a fortune to convert their military infrastructure to full NATO membership – and when they have joined, they cannot not pay whatever the price will turn out to be. In addition, there will be much less de facto sovereign decision-making possible – here de jure is almost irrelevant. And it was already very self-limited before they joined.

• As NATO members, Finland and Sweden cannot but share the responsibility for nuclear weapons – the deterrence and possible use of them by NATO. It’s also obvious that NATO vessels may bring nuclear weapons into their ports – but they will of course not even ask – they know the arrogant US response is that “we neither confirm nor deny that sort of thing.”
This goes against every fibre of the Swedish people – and Sweden’s decision to not develop nuclear weapons dating some 70 years back.

• The days when Sweden and Finland can – in principle, at least – work for alternatives are numbered. That is, for the UN Treaty on nuclear abolition and the UN goals of general and complete disarmament, any alternative policy concepts like common security, human security, a strong UN etc. They won’t be able to serve as mediators – like, say, Austria and Switzerland. No NATO member can pay anything but lip service to such noble goals. NATO is not an organisation that encourages alternatives. Instead, it seeks monopoly as well as regional and global dominance.

• Finland and Sweden say yes to militarist thinking, to a ‘peace’ paradigm that is imbued with weapons, armament, offensiveness (long-range + large destructive capacity), deterrence and constant threatening: NATO is human history’s most militaristic organisation. Its leader, the United States of America, has been at war 225 out of 243 years since 1776. Every idea about nonviolence, the UN Charter provision of making peace by predominantly peaceful means (Article 1 in the Charter) will be out of the window.

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• The political attention, as well as funds, will tend to switch to military matters, away from contributing to solving humanity’s most urgent problems. But – we know it now – the excuse will be Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Is there any huge change that cannot be justified with reference to that?

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• While everybody knows that the Arctic is going to be a region of central security and peace concerns in the near future, this issue has hardly been discussed in relation to the two countries’ NATO membership. However, it doesn’t require much expertise to see that US/NATO access to Sweden and Finland is a clear advantage in the future confrontation with Russia and China there.

 

• As NATO members, Sweden and Finland not only accept but reinforce decades of hate of the Russian people, everything Russia including Russian-European culture. It will say yes to the West’s reckless, knee-jerk collective (illegal) punishment of everything Russia, the cancellation of Russia on all dimensions.

Once upon a time, in contrast, Finland’s President Kekkonen stood for policies of active neutrality, a go-between role and initiating the OSCE. Finland was proud that its people felt that neither the East nor the West was an enemy, various kinds of equidistance prevailing. And that was during the height of the First Cold war when the Warsaw Pact was about 10 times stronger vis-a-vis NATO than Russia is today. How and why? One reason was that policies had an intellectual foundation and leaders a consciousness about what war meant. Not so today.

• The prospect that no NATO advocates talk about is this: In all likelihood, we have only seen the hard beginning of an extremely Cold War with an ever-increasing risk of a Hot War too. It is the stated purpose of the US – and that means NATO – to weaken Russia militarily in Ukraine so it can’t rise ever again and to undermine its economy back home through history’s hardest, time-unlimited and unconditional sanctions – that is, sanctions that will not be lifted in a lifetime or more.

• And, finally, by joining NATO, the two countries will be forced to side with the larger West in the future world order change in which China, the Middle East, Africa and South America as well as huge non-Western regional associations will gain strength.

The US priority Number One is China. As NATO members, Sweden and Finland will be unable to walk on two legs in the future, a Western and a Non-Western, and will decline and fall with the West – the US Empire and NATO in particular.

If you think that’s a too daring and pessimistic scenario, you’re not following developments and trends outside the West itself. Also, please consider that a split and problem-torn US, EU and NATO have just come together for one reason: the negative policy of hating Russia and cover-up for its crystal clear co-responsibility for the conflict that brought us where we now are.
The West has no positive vision anymore – its actions are about re-armament, threats, sanctions, demonisation, the self-righteous “we-never-did-anything-wrong” and the concomitant projection of its own dark sides upon others, China in particular.

For small countries to put all their eggs in one basket when they do have alternatives and acting without a clue about the next five-to-ten years has always been a recipe for disaster, for war.

Both NATO and the EU act these days as the passengers did in the restaurant of the elegant, luxurious RMS Titanic.

There were huge problems which should have been solved for humanity to survive: climate, environment, poverty, inequality, militarism, nukes, etc. They are now forgotten. Economic crisis and disruptions followed, and then came the Corona and took a heavy toll on all kinds of resources and energies. And, finally, now this war in Europe with its underlying NATO-created conflict.

This is not the time to make decisions in a moment of historical hysteria and panic. This is indeed a moment to keep cool.

One can only regret that Sweden and Finland lack the intellectual power to see the larger picture in time and space. NATO has had the time since 1949 to prove that it can make peace. We know now that it can’t. Joining it, therefore, is one big gift to militarism and future warfare.

(*) Rest assured that an analysis like this will cause no reaction in any NATO country’s media or among decision-makers although sent to thousands of them.

How To Make Easy Stuffed Bell Peppers | Chef Jean-Pierre

Running On Empty

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Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change.  Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, I could count on fielding at least one comment from a reader who expected the entire modern world to crash and burn in the next few months.  I’d have to patiently remind them that Rome wasn’t sacked in a day—that it takes years of breathtakingly moronic decisions motivated by mindless greed, vicious partisan hatred, blind ideological dogmatism, and a total unwillingness to think about the long-term consequences of short-term decisions, to bring a civilization down.

Now of course all through the years while I was telling people this, decisions of the kind I’ve just described, guided by motives of the sort I’ve just characterized, were standard operating procedure throughout the industrial world.  Those proceeded to have their usual effect. I still don’t expect modern civilization to crash to ruin in the next few months, but it’s reached the point that I no longer have to tell people that the Long Descent won’t show up as soon as they think. No, at this point it’s my ironic duty to suggest that they make whatever preparations they have in mind sooner rather than later, because the world shows no signs of waiting for them.

As I write this, the most obvious set of problems has to do with the economies of the United States and its client states. Those of my readers who follow financial media already know that signs of economic trouble are elbowing one another out of the way to get to the front pages. The cryptocurrency market has racked up gargantuan losses; the stocks listed on NASDAQ have shed something like $7 trillion in value so far this year; the massively overinflated US real estate market has sprung a leak and is showing signs of deflation, and layoffs are spreading through the economy as corporations shed jobs at a rapid pace. It’s shaping up to be a real mess.

Part of this is the ordinary rhythm of idiotic excess followed by equally idiotic panic—up with the rocket and down with the stick—that sets the beat of economic life in a neoliberal economy. That said, I think there may be more going on here than that. I don’t know how many of my readers are aware that the simmering hostility between the US government and the oil-producing nations of OPEC is coming to a brisk boil just now. The steady rise in oil prices over the last year or so has caused stark panic in the White House, since increased gas prices correlate rather nicely with the fading of Joe Biden’s last dim hopes of reelection. Repeated attempts to pressure the OPEC nations to increase oil production and drive prices down have gotten no response, not least because the Biden administration isn’t offering anything in return, and has been noticeably hostile to the interests of several leading OPEC nations.

Cue the gibbering inmates of the US Congress to draft a bill that would make it possible for plaintiffs to sue OPEC nations for price fixing in American courts. Normally there’s a thing called sovereign immunity—in plain English, the governments of other nations can’t be held accountable to US laws—but this bill, the cutely named NOPEC Act, would strip OPEC nations of sovereign immunity in US courts for any decision that some US lawyer could label price-fixing. The target of this project, of course, is the gargantuan amount of money that OPEC nations have invested in assets in the United States and its client states, which could be seized to pay off judgments under the new law. Since governments in the US and Europe have engaged in exactly that sort of piracy toward Russian assets this year, this isn’t an empty threat.

So, dear reader, if you were a high-ranking official in a petroleum-producing country, and you picked up the newspaper and read about the NOPEC Act, what would you do?

That’s right. You would start quietly cashing out of your investments in the United States and its client states, so those investments wouldn’t be available for US courts to seize. Those asset sales would of course result in a general softening of market conditions, and might well trigger a crash in asset prices, but at least you’d get some of your money back, you know.

Meanwhile there are countries outside the US sphere of influence that would be happy to provide a home for your investment money—Russia, China, and India come to mind, just for starters—and if the US and its client states get obstreperous, why, you can always do what your grandfather did in 1973, refuse to sell petroleum to the American market, and watch the price of oil soar in response.

I don’t know for a fact that this is what’s happening to asset markets in the US and Europe. Nor do I know for a fact that this is part of what’s behind the remarkable robustness of the Russian economy in the face of US sanctions:  that would make perfect sense if there was a covert flow of OPEC wealth into Russian banks and securities, but doubtless there are other factors involved.  If the OPEC nations have the brains the gods gave geese, they’re using plenty of financial shenanigans to camouflage their reallocation of assets as long as possible, and so it’ll be very difficult to tell what’s happening until a lot of money is gone.  It could just be that the markets are insanely overinflated and what went up is now on its way back down.  It could be that China is doing the same sort of asset shuffle to free up funds to deal with its imploding real estate sector and the long term costs of its Covid policies. It could be that something completely different is going on.

Still, it’s pretty clear that it has never occurred to anybody in the US Congress that OPEC nations might, you know, have their own interests in mind, and might respond to a hamfisted attempt at bullying by doing something other than groveling at Uncle Sam’s feet.

I’ve noted before that the elite classes in the US and Europe today seem incapable of understanding that the rest of the human race doesn’t consist of little automatons that will always and only do as they’re told. That failure of basic reasoning is fairly common in senile aristocracies, and it very often plays a large and colorful role in the collapse of empires. It may well play such a role in the collapse of ours.

One way or another, of course, sky-high energy prices are an important element in the fix we’re in, and that brings me circling back around to one of the themes I sketched out last week—the complex twilight of fossil fuel resources summed up in the phrase “peak oil.”

Let’s start with the basics. Petroleum is a nonrenewable resource. Yes, I’m aware that there’s a cornucopian fringe out there insisting, under the label “abiotic oil,” that the Earth is full of oil and any oil field drained of oil will promptly be replenished from further underground. Do you recall the 2008 oil spike, when old oil fields in Pennsylvania, California, and a hundred other places that had been capped decades ago were opened up again, since crude oil was worth upwards of $100 a barrel?  Not one of those fields had refilled, as the abiotic oil theory predicted.  There’s a good simple word for a theory that makes predictions that don’t pan out. That word is “wrong.”

Petroleum is a nonrenewable resource.  It provides around 40% of all energy used by human beings on this planet, including nearly all the energy for transportation. (Electric cars and trains have a negligible share worldwide.) It’s fairly rare in the Earth’s crust, all things considered, and it’s been extracted at a breakneck pace for more than a century. The rate of new discoveries has been far behind the rate of annual extraction for decades.  Do you see the problem there?

The obvious solution, if you happen to want to sustain an industrial society of the current sort, is to find some other energy source to replace petroleum. The other fossil fuels won’t cut it—they’re also being used at breakneck rates, and facing the same depletion problems as oil. More coal is being mined and burnt today, for example, than at the peak of the coal age a century and a quarter ago, and most of the coal that’s being burnt now is low-quality brown coal because all the good stuff got shoveled up and burnt decades ago.

That means that some new energy resource has to be discovered and deployed in a hurry. That’s why scientists have been hard at work on that project for well over fifty years now, and the one minor difficulty is that they haven’t found one yet.  More to the point, they’ve found any number of supposed replacements for petroleum, which have soaked up a great many investment dollars and then failed to perform as advertised. There are two primary reasons why all attempts at a substitute for petroleum have failed: scale and net energy.

Let’s start with issues of scale. To cite one example that took up a great deal of attention and investment money back in the day, you can grow corn, ferment it into ethanol—that’s spelled “corn likker” in the flyover states, and it’s great stuff if you don’t mind the hangover—and burn that in an engine along with, or instead of, gasoline.

Back when I was first blogging, there were ethanol trolls all over the peak oil end of the internet, loudly proclaiming that all us peak oil bloggers were as wrong as wrong could be, because corn-based ethanol would make up the shortfall. The one small problem with this analysis is a matter of scale. If you planted every acre of farmland in the United States with corn, leaving no room for food or anything else, and turn it into fuel ethanol, you’d replace only a small fraction of the gasoline we use every single year. (And that doesn’t even begin to deal with the need for diesel fuel, jet fuel, or any of the other fuels made from petroleum.)

Similar difficulties show up with many other proposed replacements for any of the fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are far more concentrated than any other energy resource on this planet. You get petroleum when huge accumulations of dead sea life in anoxic conditions get squeezed and roasted deep inside the earth for millions of years, a process that soaks up vast amounts of energy that no human being has to pay for. That’s why to match the energy in a single gallon of gasoline, for example, you need around one ton of fully charged auto batteries. That’s one of the problems with renewables, by the way: they depend on the diffuse and intermittent flows of energy we get from the sun right now, instead of the highly concentrated resources the earth has stashed away in her sediments over the last half billion years or so.

Issues of scale, though, are only one set of challenges that have to be faced to replace petroleum. The second is net energy. It takes energy to extract, process, and transport energy, and to build the devices that use energy. Take the total energy in a resource and subtract the energy that has to be used for all these purposes, and what’s left is net energy. It’s exactly the same, conceptually, as net income: take your gross income and subtract your expenses, and you’ve got your net, which is the amount of money you can actually do something with.

You can have a huge gross income and still go broke.  All that’s necessary is that your expenses have to be just a little bit larger than your income. (Watch the tech industry over the next few years if you want to see that assertion proved in a very colorful manner.)  In exactly the same way, your gross energy doesn’t matter two farts in a Cat-5 hurricane if the energy inputs you need are too high. The poster child here is algal biodiesel, another supposed substitute for petroleum that boomed and went bust a decade ago. On paper, it looks great: you farm vast amounts of oil-rich pond scum, process it into diesel, and away you go. In practice, the net energy ranges well into negative numbers—in other words, it makes exactly as much sense as trying to get a profit by buying dollar bills for $1.50 each.

Net energy is very difficult to calculate. Fortunately there’s a convenient proxy, which is price. The more expensive an energy resource turns out to be in practice, the worse the net energy turns out to be. Nuclear power is a great example here. Yes, I know there’s always some exciting new nuclear technology that’s sure to change that, and provide abundant, cheap electrity into the far future.  There’s always one of those on the drawing boards, or more than one, and it’s funny how reliably it turns out that every nuclear technology is affordable until it gets built. Then it turns out to be another gargantuan white elephant that can only keep going with huge and ongoing government subsidies.

The secret is that the net energy of nuclear power is very, very low. You have to process vast amounts of raw material to produce the fuel rods, and that takes energy; you have to build and maintain a huge and complex power plant, and that takes energy; you have to deal with the wastes, and that takes energy, and so on through a very long list of energy sinks. That’s another problem with renewables, by the way. Most renewable technologies yield very modest net energy, because so much energy has to go into gathering and concentrating the diffuse energy flows that power renewables. That’s why they require the same sort of constant subsidies as nuclear plants.

Keep track of the economic dimension, in fact, and you can filter out most of the nonsolutions to the accelerating depletion of conventional petroleum. Keeping track of the economic dimension, in turn, is something that cheerleaders for purported replacements for petroleum inevitably will not do. They love to talk about technical feasibility, and of course it’s quite true that you can come up with any number of technically feasible gimmicks to replace petroleum. The problem is that none of them can pay for themselves.

It’s usually about this point in a discussion of peak oil that somebody gets angry and starts yelling, “Look, there has to be some replacement for petroleum!” That’s an understandable belief. Unfortunately, it also happens to be dead wrong. No law of nature requires another cheap, abundant, highly concentrated energy source to pop up in time to save us from the consequences of wasting the one we had. Most people figure out fairly early in life that if you spend your entire paycheck on booze, no good fairy is going to come up with the rent money in time to keep your rump from landing on the street. The same rule applies to energy, but for complex reasons rooted in our collective psychology, this isn’t something that most people want to hear.

That brings us around to our current situation. Despite the crumbling economy, petroleum is running well above $100 a barrel these days, because—ahem—we’re running out:  not all at once, but slowly, one dry oil well at a time. The fracking frenzy that briefly boosted US oil production over the last decade is sputtering, because oil is a nonrenewable resource, and even if you don’t have to worry about the bottom line because the Fed is printing money hand over fist and funneling it to you, eventually you run out of shale deposits that can be fracked.

Again, this doesn’t mean that we’re going to run out suddenly. It means that oil production firms have to run faster and faster, invest more and more money and resources, and struggle harder and harder against geological reality to keep the market supplied with oil—and this means that an ever-growing share of economic output has to be funneled into the energy industry, leaving an ever-shrinking share for everything else.

That’s the future we’ve backed ourselves into. We’re running on empty, and the last gas station is somewhere back there in the blue distance.

I mentioned two weeks ago when I announced this sequence of posts that I was going to talk about what individuals, families, and community groups could do about all this. Fortunately, what to do about an energy crisis was explored in great detail half a century ago, during the oil crises of the 1970s, and before then in the severe shortages during the two world wars. The difficulty we face is very simple.  Energy—all forms of it—will become much more expensive than you expect, and everything made with energy—in other words, most goods and services, across the board—will also become much more expensive than you expect. Meanwhile jobs will become scarcer and economies will contract as energy costs bite deeper into every form of economic activity. That’s called stagflation: stagnation plus inflation. It’s what happens when the price of energy spikes, and it’s happening now.

So you have two straightforward tasks ahead of you, dear reader. The first is to use much less energy than you do right now. The second is to cut your expenditures on everything you can, to free up the money you’ll need to deal with soaring energy costs and price inflation generally.

Using less energy is easy if you’re American. It’s easy because we waste energy so profligately. Go here and you can download a set of basic energy conservation papers that were drawn up during the oil crisis of the 1970s. (They’re the lessons I studied when I was getting my Master Conservers certificate in the very early 1980s. Yes, they had Master Conserver programs back then.) If you rent, you can use weatherstripping and cheap window insulation; if you own your own home, there’s much more that you can do. You can change your habits to cut energy costs, and you can also pick up the grand old 1970s habit of doing more for yourself instead of buying things, since here again energy goes into most goods and services, and prices will rise accordingly.

If you have the chance to pick up some do-it-yourself books from back in the day,  you’ll be better off still. The self-sufficiency books listed for sale in old issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and other resources of the same era?  Worth their weight in gold.  It also helps to know people who can teach you how to do things for yourself, and to put plenty of time and effort as soon as possible into applying that fine old country saying, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”  People thought they could afford to neglect that during the heyday of the fossil fuel era. Now we get to learn better.

Oh, and make sure to have backups for anything that depends on energy you don’t produce yourself. With its usual monumental stupidity, the US Congress is already talking about price controls, and those are among the best ways known to our species to turn price hikes into actual shortages. (The US isn’t self-sufficient in energy resources, not by a long shot, and nobody will be in a hurry to sell oil to us at artificially low prices, you know.) If price controls go through, expect gas stations to run out of fuel, diesel shortages to play merry hob with product delivery to stores, and rolling blackouts if the price controls get applied to natural gas. Fun times!

One more detail. This isn’t going to last forever; energy crises never do.  My working guess at this point is that the US and Europe are facing a decade or so of economic crisis and soaring energy costs before demand destruction, sharp increases in energy efficiency, and a modest helping of new technologies bring renewed stability in energy markets. Mind you, by then we’ll have other things to worry about. I’ll discuss those in the posts ahead.

Toad the Wet Sprocket – Crazy Life – Live in San Francisco

One of my all time favorite songs, and groups. Dating way back to my years in Boston.

Aerial Photographer Created A Miniature Utopian Village And It Took Him 2 Years To Finish

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Ognyan Stefanov is an accomplished aviation photojournalist and graduate of the prestigious National Academy for Theater and Film Art in his native town of Sofia, Bulgaria. His award-winning aerial photographs have been featured at exhibitions and appeared in numerous global publications.

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Stefanov has an impressive resume of roles including an official photographer for the Bulgarian Air Force and exclusive photographer to the President of the Republic of Bulgaria. He achieved as much success with his work in miniature by winning scale modeling awards in featured competitions around the world.

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The city features lush gardens and jewel-toned landscapes with a community filled with homes, shops, a barn, and an apartment building.

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Stefanov says: “I wanted to create a self-contained utopia where people have everything they need to live, surrounded by greenery and gardens and even a local inn offering traditional hospitality.”

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A number of unique structures are interconnected by a series of multi-level paths, pulleys, stairways, and bridges that join the various areas together.

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Kate Bush /David Gilmour – ” Running Up That Hill “

A fantastic concert / stage performance. Awesome.

Former Ukrainian deputy Kiva accused Zelensky of exporting state grain reserves to Poland

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The ex-deputy of the Verkhovna Rada said that Western countries began the robbery of Ukraine, writing it off and sentencing it as a state
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President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has begun exporting grain from the state reserves of Ukraine to the West. This was stated by the former Ukrainian MP Ilya Kiva, citing his own sources.
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“Zelensky urgently gathered relevant state structures and security officials to immediately organize the export of the state grain reserve to Poland,” Kiva wrote on his Telegram channel on Thursday, May 12.
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According to Kiva, the first ten thousand tons of Ukrainian grain have already been transported across the Polish border.
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The former deputy is alarmed by the fact that, according to him, Western countries have begun to plunder Ukraine.
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“Ukraine was sentenced and written off as a state – now there is a robbery of what else can be taken away, leaving with you! Leaving scorched earth, destroyed infrastructure and hungry, distraught people,” Kiva said, adding that, according to the information he received, deforestation in Ukraine and its supply to Europe has tripled over the past month.
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Earlier it was reported that the United States is looking for an opportunity to export 20 million tons of grain from Ukraine. Details.
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In response, the Chairman of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, said that the United States wanted to arrange a famine in Ukraine. “Instead of real help, they take away the most necessary, in fact, setting up a surplus appraisal,” Volodin said.
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Earlier, Biden said that the withdrawal of Russia and Ukraine from the world grain market could provoke a total food shortage in the world. Details. At the same time, back in April, Biden promised to provide Ukraine with another $800 million in military aid. On May 9, Biden signed a law on the supply of weapons to Ukraine under Lend-Lease. The law provides for accelerated procedures for lending or leasing weapons to Ukraine.

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EU Shift Away from Russian Oil And Gas To Cost $220 Billion

By Irina Slav – May 18, 2022, 8:30 AM CDT

The European Union’s plan to reduce imports of Russian oil, gas, and coal to zero by 2027 will cost it some $220 billion (210 billion euros), according to a draft plan cited by Reuters.

The three pillars of the plan include switching to other oil and gas suppliers, expanding wind and solar generation capacity, and reducing energy consumption, the document showed

From HERE

War with China despite their immense military capabilities?

May 6, 2021

Five years ago, I would’ve said that the possibility of a “kinetic war” in the Indo-Pacific was very unlikely, now it is more likely than it was then. This is something that you and I may well have to confront in the next 5 to 10 years, Christopher Pyne.

Does Mr Pyne know that, seventy years ago, a Chinese volunteer force, lacking air cover and communicating with bugles, humiliated the US Army? That China enjoys the same advantages–shorter supply lines, higher morale, greater maneuverability, stronger popular support–now as then? That China’s neighbour and ally, Russia, can simultaneously threaten any combination of forces in Europe and Japan?

Has he forgotten that, while fleets win battles, economies win wars? That China’s economy is thirty per cent bigger than America’s, grows three times faster, has twice the manufacturing capacity, and launches a new warship every month? That, adjusted for purchasing power, China’s discretionary defence budget equals America’s?

Is Mr Pyne aware that China’s President is the son of a famous general and was himself Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for three years?

Who can blame the Chinese for being eager for a rematch with America? In 1944 the US Air Force firebombed Wuhan, killed 44,000 civilians and left the city burning for a week. In 1992, the US Navy held the Yinhe, a Chinese freighter, at gunpoint in international waters for three weeks, falsely claiming she was carrying contraband. Two years later the US sent the most powerful fleet ever assembled through the Taiwan Strait and, in 1998, the USAF dropped five precision bombs on China’s Belgrade embassy, killing three diplomats and seriously wounding twenty. CIA director George Tenet told Congress, “It was the only target we nominated”.

In 2018 the US Navy practised blocking the Malacca Strait to cut off China’s oil but, says analyst Michael Thim, the gesture was meaningless, “Even in 1996, China’s Navy had sufficient capabilities such that sending Carrier Strike Groups into the Taiwan Strait would be suicidal. The situation has only become more challenging for the Navy in recent years, not because the PLAN has acquired aircraft carriers of its own, but because China has greatly enhanced and modernized its existing anti-access/area-denial capabilities”.

China’s Maritime Militia, its first line of defence, counts 180,000 ocean-going fishing boats and 4,000 merchant freighters–some towing sonar detectors–crewed by a million experienced sailors transmitting detailed information around the clock on every warship afloat. Shore bases fuse their reports with automated Beidou transmissions and forward the data to ‘vessel management platforms’ that collate, format, and send actionable information up the PLAN command chain. Ashore, eight million coastal reservists train constantly in seamanship, emergency ship repairs, anti-air missile defence, light weapons, and naval sabotage.

The PLAN’s fleet composition is fascinating.

Commander Yang Yi, the youngest (and first female) Chief Designer in naval history, designed its eighty Type 022 missile patrol boats on Australian-designed hulls. 400 feet long, with a range of 300 miles, they carry eight C-802 anti-ship missiles tipped with 500lb. warheads that travel fifteen feet above the surface at 650 mph to targets a hundred miles away (an early version disabled an Israeli warship off Lebanon’s coast in 2006). Four of her little boats, she says, can cover the entire Taiwan Strait while sheltering behind China’s coastal islands.

Supporting them are thirty Type 056 frigates with a range of 2,500 miles, each armed with YJ-83 anti-ship missiles and six torpedo tubes, and protected by eight SAM launchers. One frigate can sink Taiwan’s entire navy without coming within range of its American-supplied weapons. Behind the frigates are 20 Type 052D Arleigh Burkeclass destroyers. Their 64 missile tubes fire–among others–unique Yu-8 anti-submarine missiles that fly 20 miles then release torpedoes into the water near unsuspecting targets.

Type 055 cruisers, the most powerful surface combatants afloat, carry 128 missile tubes armed with surface-to-air, anti-ship, land-attack and anti-submarine missiles.

Below them, 70 nuclear and conventional submarines carry YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missiles and wake-homing torpedoes that deliver 500-pound warheads at 60 mph from fifteen miles away. Their CM-401 high-supersonic ballistic missiles make precision strikes against medium-size ships, naval task forces, and offshore facilities within two hundred miles. Their CJ-10 subsonic missiles carry a half-ton payload – with a forty-foot radius of accuracy – 2,000 miles. Without leaving Chinese waters, the PLAN’s nuclear subs carry JL-3 missiles that can strike targets in the United States.

But the greatest threat to hostile fleets was born when the US Navy invited a Chinese admiral to visit the carrier Nimitz. Upon his return, he told colleagues, “I’ve just seen the world’s biggest target. If we can’t hit an aircraft carrier we can’t hit anything”.

Thrifty engineers designed novel guidance systems for existing, million-dollar rockets and created the first anti-ship, ballistic ‘carrier killer,’ the DF-21D. It lofts a half-ton warhead one thousand miles into the stratosphere, then it falls, vertically, at 7,500 mph, onto $12 billion aircraft carriers. US Navy analysts say it can destroy a carrier in one strike and that there is currently no defence against it. Its new sibling, the DF-26D, carries twice the payload twice as far.

The last US carrier to pass through the Taiwan Strait was the USS Kitty Hawk in 2007. “We are at a disadvantage with regard to China today in the sense that China’s ground-based ballistic missiles threaten our basing and our ships in the Western Pacific,” Admiral Harry Harris told the US Senate in 2018. The following year Robert Haddick warned, “China’s anti-ship missile capability exceeds America’s in terms of range, speed, and sensor performance,” and Captain James Fanell added, “We know that China has the most advanced ballistic missile force in the world. They have the capacity to overwhelm the defensive systems we are pursuing”.

US Navy officers say they risk defeat in a serious conflict off China’s coast and avoid provoking the PLAN in the ‘Three Seas,’; South China, East China, and Yellow Seas.

The Rand Corporation says that, for conflicts close to the mainland or Taiwan, the PLAAF can deploy more fifth-generation J-20 fighters than the US. The J-20 costs half as much, flies twice as far and carries twice the payload of America’s F-35C or F-22 Raptor. Its YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missiles travel 200 miles and deliver thousand-pound warheads at supersonic speed in a corkscrew trajectory. The US Navy says one strike will render any vessel inoperable and warned that, even against alerted warships, one-third of missiles score hits.

The J-20 also carries the specialized PLA-15 air-to-air missile. Propelled by novel dual pulse rocket motors on a semi-ballistic trajectory, it homes on AWACS and airborne tankers loitering behind battle lines. General Herbert Carlisle, warning Congress that his two hundred F-22 Raptors carry six missiles each while the PLAAF’s J-20s carry twelve, added, “Look at the PLA-15, at the range of that weapon. How do we counter that?” The PLA-15’s smaller sibling, the PLA-10, is no less deadly, says airpower specialist Douglas Barrie, “For the notional Western combat aircraft pilot, there is no obvious respite to be found in keeping beyond visual range of the PLA-10. The PLAAF can mount increasingly credible challenges at engagement ranges against some targets that would previously have been considered safe. As one former USAF tanker pilot drily noted, ‘That’s aimed right at me.’”

As if to prove the point, the US Air Force cancelled its E-8C AWACS recapitalization program because it would be easy prey for the PLA-15, and the Pentagon withdrew its entire strategic bomber fleet from Guam in 2020.

Chinese hyperspectral detection satellites oversee the Western Pacific battlespace and airborne lasers detect wave and temperature variations generated by moving targets. The West Pacific Surveillance and Targeting satellite, along with fifteen Yaogan-30 satellites in low-earth orbit–operating as triplets positioned in close proximity–geo-locate military platforms by measuring the angular or time difference of arrival of their intercepted electromagnetic signals. Below them, the Caihong-T4, a massive, solar-powered drone, loiters for months at a cloudless altitude of 65,000 feet, while below, the fifteen-ton, 150-foot wingspan Divine Eagle High Altitude Stealth-Hunting Drone reads electronic signals from aircraft long before they approach their targets. Below the drones AWACS, whose solid-state detectors have twice the range of the US AWACS rotating domes, relay targeting information to Russian-built S-400 anti-aircraft/anti-missile batteries. Jin Canrong, the PRC’s senior defence policy advisor, says China’s shore-based weapons can see all stealth bombers and submarines, destroy every military base in its region within minutes, and take out every aircraft carrier within two thousand miles.

China’s three-stage, solid-fuel DF-41 ICBM, with a 12,000-mile range and a top speed of 20,000 mph, far outranges its American counterpart. Road-mobile, it launches on four minutes’ warning, is faster than any American weapon, and delivers ten independently targetable nuclear warheads.

The DF-ZF Hypersonic Glide Vehicle–whose significance Russian Defence Minister Rogozin compared to the first atom bomb–is operational. Launched six miles above the earth from a missile travelling at 16,000 mph, the DF-ZF rides its own shockwave to the target.

Says RAND,

“With the ability to fly at unpredictable trajectories, these missiles will hold extremely large areas at risk throughout much of their flight”.

A Congressional report concludes,

“The very high speeds of these weapons combined with their maneuverability and ability to travel at lower, radar-evading altitudes would make them far less vulnerable to current defences than existing missiles”.

What is Mr Pyne thinking?

Scott Ritter: Live-Action Role Play in Ukraine

From HERE

Malcolm Nance, Dennis Diaz and Willy Joseph Cancel: Their experiences — one fatal — offer a sobering view of Americans in the International Legion of the Territorial Defense of Ukraine.

By Scott RITTER

It was — literally — a made-for-television moment. A former U.S. Navy chief petty officer turned cable news pundit, dressed in a fresh out-of-the-box camouflage uniform replete with body armor and magazine pouches, wearing matching camouflage helmet and gloves, and cradling an automatic rifle, stared into the camera and announced “I am here to help this country [Ukraine] fight what is essentially a war of extermination.”

With a Ukrainian flag on his left shoulder, and a U.S. flag emblazoned on his body armor, the man, Malcolm Nance, declared that “This is an existential war, and Russia has brought it to these people and is mass murdering civilians.”

A day before, Nance had tweeted a black-and-white photograph of himself, similarly clad, announcing “I’m DONE talking.”

I’m DONE talking. #JoinTheLegion #StopRussia #SlavaUkraini pic.twitter.com/ob3gL1cZ7P

— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) April 19, 2022

Nance spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy as a cryptologic technician, interpretive (CTI), specializing in the Arabic language, and has turned his career into a thing of legend, so much so that when he speaks of his journey from news desk to Ukraine, it almost sounds convincing.

“Ukraine announced that there was an international force on Feb. 27,” Nance told one reporter,

“and I started looking into it on Feb. 28 … I called the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, and I said: ‘Hey, I want an appointment.’ They were a little slow, so I just went down there and put in my application. The guy asked if I had combat experience and I said ‘Yep.’ Then he looked at my application and said, ‘You’re on the team.’”

Just like that.

But the hype doesn’t match the reality. Although he sports a combat action ribbon on the lapel of his coat jacket (when not attired in full combat regalia), Nance has never actually participated in ground combat operations, according to a serviceman who served with him. His “combat” experience was limited to providing linguistic support onboard a U.S. Navy ship off the coast of Beirut in 1983. Important work, but not combat.

Despite this resume enhancement, Nance was — according to Nance — a natural for recruitment by Ukraine. In the days before the Russian invasion, Nance was in Ukraine, reporting for MSNBC.

But being Malcolm Nance, he claimed to be doing so much more. “I spent a month in Ukraine,” Nance recalled, “driving around, mapping out the Russian order of battle, driving up and down the highways and analyzing where the invasion routes would come and go. So I knew the country backward and forwards by the time of the invasion.”

(It might be time to remind the reader that Nance’s Navy specialism in Arabic gave him neither the training nor the experience to conduct the kind of battlefield intelligence preparation that he described.)

The Ukrainians know this. So why would they take on a 61-year old Arabic linguist whose physical presence on any battlefield would be seen as a detriment?

‘Not an Infantry Guy’

2022 05 17 15 30
2022 05 17 15 30

“I’m not an infantry guy,” Nance is quick to admit. However,

“combat isn’t about being a murdering, Seal Team Six assassin; it’s mainly about precision, accurate fire, selective fire, keeping people calm, getting on the line and moving forward.”

None of which are skill sets in Nance’s real-life resume.

Despite his larger-than-life televised send-off, and his proclivity for dressing and acting like an aging LARP (live action role play) warrior on a weekend airsoft reenactment, Nance’s real-world duties mimic those he was performing with MSNBC.

2022 05 17 15 31
2022 05 17 15 31

“Right now, part of my duty is to the press,” Nance admitted during a recent interview.

“They [the Ukrainians] were well aware that I was a high-level asset. So, instead of putting me out on the line, I’m in a safe house talking to people like you.”

Today, Nance is little more than a poorly paid newsroom producer (the Ukrainians pay him and other Legionnaires $600 per month). “I get up at 4 and what I do is I read, I read the news. I try to feel the battlefront based on Ukrainian news and reporting. And then I look at expert analysis from the previous night in the West.”

But he is always hopeful for some action.

“No matter where I am, no matter what I’m doing, I constantly check my gear. If I’m in a safe house on a press junket, like I am now, I go over all of my gear. I reorganize my pack. I assume that I will have to take everything, get up and run with it or move to a forward location.”

This would all be pathetic if it were not irresponsibly dangerous.

Nance fronts for the International Legion of the Territorial Defense of Ukraine, which he describes as “a branch of the Ukrainian army.”

According to Nance, the International Legion is “an organized combat element with contracts signed by the Ukrainian army. We are paid by the Ukrainian army and get a Geneva convention ID card.”

And the mission of the International Brigade? Simply put, per Nance, if a Ukrainian unit is “on the line and they need more reinforcement, they will get a legion unit to give them more manpower.”

Dennis Diaz

Dennis Diaz enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 2000. He was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, before being honorably discharged in 2004.

In early March, Diaz, an entrepreneur and former 2020 candidate for U.S. president from Waterbury, Connecticut, now 39 and the father of four, volunteered to serve in the International Legion.

“I’m ready to roll,” he told local media before leaving the U.S. “Whatever I have to bring, I’m going to pack it up and we’re going to take care of business.”

https://t.co/Cc66tuUIfm
— Dennis A. Diaz (@RealDennisDiaz) April 4, 2022

His age and obvious lack of physical conditioning did not seem to be an obstacle for the one-time combat Marine. “War,” he told the press, “is 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical.”

Diaz says he has a lot to offer Ukraine. “I have a lot of military experience,” he said, “I did go to Iraq and Afghanistan … I have some flight experience. Also, I was field artillery in the Marine Corps. Also, I’ve got some experience driving tanks. Enough to be a valuable asset to Ukraine.”

According to his Tik Tok page, Diaz spent some $2,700 of his own money purchasing uniforms and field equipment, including a flak vest and helmet, to take with him to Ukraine.

But by late March, Diaz was still in the U.S., waiting further instructions from the Ukrainian embassy. He never made the trip.

The Ukrainians, it seemed, had cooled to the idea of Americans fighting for the International Legion. Where once they were welcoming (“Foreigners willing to defend Ukraine and world order as part of the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, I invite you to contact foreign diplomatic missions of Ukraine in your respective countries,” the Ukrainian foreign minister tweeted in early March), by the end of March the Ukrainian embassy stopped publicly commenting on U.S. applications.

The primary reason for this newfound publicity shyness appears to be the poor performance of the International Legion during its first combat experiences, fighting Russian troops in the Kiev suburb of Irpin in mid-March.

Haphazard Approach

The haphazard approach to recruitment was the norm, it seemed, for the entire intake and training processes associated with the legion.

Potential recruits made their own way to Poland, from where they were told to head to the western Ukrainian city of Lvov. The candidate legionnaires were then taken to Livorov, a military camp outside Lvov, where they were subjected to a rudimentary selection process that sought to separate those with and without combat experience.

Those with combat experience were issued weapons and ammunition and sent straight to the front, where they were integrated with Ukrainian Territorial Defense Units. Those without were given a rudimentary four-week basic training course.

2022 Spring Fund Drive

The first group of “combat tested” legionnaires were sent to Irpin, where they were tasked with conducting a “hasty defense” against a Russian attack.

While the Ukrainians held, the performance of the legion was “uneven,” resulting in many of the newly minted legionnaires being unceremoniously released from service and sent home. The lackluster performance of the legion had become a domestic political issue, prompting the Ukrainian government to halt recruitment due in large part to the lack of weapons and the lack of military experience.

Some legionnaires, however, were asked to stay, including a four-man team led by a veteran U.S. Army combat engineer with two deployments to Afghanistan named Cameron Van Camp.

Willy Joseph Cancel

One of the Americans under Van Camp’s charge was a 22-year-old former U.S. Marine named Willy Joseph Cancel.

Cancel had enlisted in the Maines in 2017, where he underwent basic training before being trained as an infantryman. Cancel never saw combat and was given a bad conduct discharge. In 2020 he was given a bad conduct discharge from the Marines after serving five months in jail for disobeying a direct order. Upon being discharged, Cancel got married, had a son, and gained employment as a corrections officer in Tennessee.

For whatever reason, Cancel, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, left his job and his family and, on March 12, at his own expense, flew to Warsaw, Poland, where he met up with Van Camp.

Together the two Americans travelled to Ukraine, where they were sent directly to the front lines in Kiev due to their status as “combat veterans.” though Cancel n ever served in a combat zone.)

Embellishment appeared to be the name of the game with the Americans and the legion; according to Van Camp, he and Cancel were sent to Irpin to assist the Ukrainian military in counter-battery and “sniper” operations, even though neither of them had ever been trained in these highly specialized military occupations, something that would have been painfully obvious to anyone involved.

In any event, Van Camp was able to keep his four-man team in the legion following the post-Irpin “purge” and subsequently his unit saw combat in southern Ukraine, fighting in Kherson and Nikolaev. It was here, sometime in late April, that Cancel lost his life; his remains were not recovered from the battlefield.

BREAKING: U.S. citizen Willy Joseph Cancel was killed in Ukraine while fighting alongside Ukrainian troops against invading Russian forces, his family confirms to @ABC News. https://t.co/fLWXAt2tQ0 pic.twitter.com/HaQJ8L6ksH

— ABC News (@ABC) April 29, 2022

Van Camp and the other Americans who had fought with Cancel left Ukraine in early May to bring the deceased former Marines’ belongings home and to speak with Cancel’s widow and family.

Cancel’s presence on the battlefield raises numerous questions about the screening process used by the International Legion.

One of the easiest ways to check the relevant military experience of a U.S. veteran is through an examination of his or her DD 214, or record of service, a copy of which is provided to every veteran upon discharge.

Cancel’s DD-214 would not only have shown that he lacked any combat experience, but that he had not been trained in any relevant combat arms skill set other than basic infantryman — especially sniper or counter-battery operations. Moreover, his bad conduct discharge would have been a red flag for any professional military organization.

Cancel’s death on the front line as part of the International Legion directly contradicted the legion’s own stated standards.

“What we want is for people to come that have already been in the line of fire,” a corporal in the International Legion who was responsible for training declared.

Americans, however, could apparently pass themselves as having what the corporal called “concrete combat experience,” making them “very attractive candidates” for the legion.

This inability to effectively screen genuine combat veterans from LARPers points to a lack of professionalism on the part of the International Legion.

A Canadian who had travelled to Ukraine to help train the Territorial Defense Force in urban combat said he wasn’t impressed by what he had seen; with recruits lacking experience, equipment and proper motivation. In true LARP fashion, they seemed only interested in gaining what the Canadian described as “quick combat exposure.”

“I think that the international legion was something that was conceived to be a propaganda tool to push forward the message that this is the world against [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and that they’re fighting for more than just Ukraine,” the Canadian said. “They don’t have the infrastructure, or the time, to really properly do any sort of international unit.”

This message should be heard by anyone who might be caught up in the “romance” of fighting side-by-side with the Ukrainian army against the Russian invader. It should be used to counter the propaganda being generated by over-the-hill want-to-be heroes like Nance. It would have been useful for aging veterans such as Diaz before they spent nearly $3,000 outfitting themselves for a war in which they were never going to participate.

But, most importantly, it should have been heard by Cancel and his family, so that he could have been dissuaded from embarking on his one-way journey of personal redemption.

Easy Artisan Ciabatta Bread Recipe/Rustic Italian Bread/No Knead Rustic Bread

US is having trouble finding Asian countries willing to shoot missiles at China

May 12, 2022 Bradley Blankenship

Original Article Here

What was supposed to be a satirical headline is actually just an instance of saying the quiet part out loud.

A satirical impression of a headline in the ‘Foreign Policy’ magazine, authored by one Raymond L. Bloodthirst Jr., began circulating around the internet recently. It read as follows: ‘We’re Having Trouble Finding Asian Countries Willing to Shoot Missiles at China.’ The subheading then lambasted China’s neighbors for not being “democratic enough” to potentially sacrifice thousands of lives in this endeavor.

It’s very clearly fake, although some people who shared it didn’t examine it too closely and believed it was real – and one journalist on the “disinformation” beat, who apparently works for Voice of America, made a Twitter thread about the post. Well, it may be hard to really blame users who circulated the satirical headline since it is, at least in part, based in reality.

As it turns out, a recent article by the decidedly non-satirical RAND Corporation, a highly influential American nonprofit global policy think tank, had the exact same take as the satirical headline. RAND wrote on Twitter about its report: “A U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific that relies on an ally agreeing to permanently host ground-based intermediate-range missiles risks failing because of an inability to find a willing partner.”

The section of the report outlining the key findings goes on to list US allies in the region, such as Thailand, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, Japan and Australia, and discuss how each of them would be reluctant to accept US GBIRMs – either because of “historical” reluctance or opposition from China. It does, however, suggest that “the most likely strategy to succeed would be helping Japan develop an arsenal of ground-based, anti-ship missile capabilities.” This would be the first step in getting Japan to accept GBIRMs, it says.

It appears that the satire was not too far off the mark. Indeed, what it succeeded in doing was critique RAND’s position by bringing the unsaid to the fore, which is the mark of good satire. It invites us to ridicule this position because of how patently absurd it is. Yes, the idea of the US placing intermediate-range missiles in China’s neighborhood is ridiculous, and when you mention the logical conclusion of this policy then it does appear just stupid.

I am reminded of one dramatic principle, Chekhov’s gun. The idea goes that a writer must make every detail of a story or play contribute to the overall narrative. Writers should not make false promises in narrative works: details that may create misleading expectations should be omitted, whereas those that are included should ultimately be involved in the narrative’s resolution. To sum it up, you should never introduce a gun in a story that you aren’t prepared to use.

Reality doesn’t always conform to art (though we can see that actual news headlines and satire are sometimes not far apart), but one has to wonder whether these GBIRMs aren’t one of Chekhov’s guns. Why else would the US want to place such weapons near China if it isn’t prepared to actually use them?

This is why it is such a provocative move – because placing these missiles in China’s neighborhood necessarily implies that they could be used against China. If anything, just the threat of that force is inherently coercive and undermines China’s sovereignty and independence. It also necessarily implies that whichever country might choose to house such weapons would be complicit in this threat, i.e., they’d have to be “Willing to Shoot Missiles at China.”

Such a policy is extraordinarily destructive and undermines global peace. China is a nuclear-armed state that, although having a very restrained nuclear policy compared to other nuclear powers, would still use them if they are introduced into a conflict. Meanwhile, the United States would probably go to any lengths to win an outright conflict against China. The US remains, after all, the only country to have ever actually used nuclear weapons in a war, having dropped two atomic bombs on Japan at the conclusion of World War II.

We can see that provoking a conflict between these two countries could lead to a terminal nuclear war, which is an outcome that benefits no one and only endangers our existence as an organized form of life on this planet. That’s why people are excoriating this policy – because it is absolutely deranged. If no countries in China’s neighborhood end up wanting to house US intermediate-range missiles, that would be a positive development for humanity.

Canadian Patriot’s Cynthia Chung and Matt Ehret host Jeff J. Brown-The Ugly Truth of US WMD Biowarfare in Ukraine and Beyond.

Great discussion.

From HERE

NBC Fantasizes About Nuclear War With China

May 20, 2022

Jimmy Dore and The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté (Video)

It’s no secret that the various tentacles of the United States’ military industrial complex are all doing whatever they can to whip up interest in a war with China. The latest effort comes from NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, who all but openly drooled during a segment imagining what a 2027 conflict between the two powers over a Chinese invasion of Taiwan might look like.

Jimmy and The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté (https://mate.substack.com) discuss the growing fervor for war with China as some of the excitement over the Ukraine conflict begins to abate.

The prisoner Season 1 Episode 5

I do hope that you all enjoy this episode…

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Mysterious Viking caves, Some cool vintage moms, Baked Steak Burritos. Automotive discoveries, and the war in Ukraine

Continuing on the unwinding of the world’s global situation. It’s a crazy time, but no need to freak out, eh? We will cover some selected articles, some delicious food, some vintage photos and some cool discoveries. I hope that you all enjoy this.

Mysterious Viking Era Cave Network Found in Iceland is Enormous

From HERE

Last summer, a series of man-made Viking era caves were discovered southwest of Oddi in southern Iceland dated to the 10th century AD. Excavations have now revealed a massive system of interconnected caves that are both larger and older than previously thought. Much mystery still surrounds the caves and the true purpose for their construction.

Iceland’s Latest Viking Era Caves: Vast and Challenging!

“You really have no words to describe this,” says archaeologist Kristborg Þórsdóttir about her experience of standing amongst one of the holiest and best-preserved man-made caves from the Viking era. “The size of these structures is just so vast, there hasn’t been a study of such large structures, and definitely not from this time period in Iceland,” she added. Kristborg has been leading the study and working on this site since 2020.

It was in 2018 when the man-made cave system was found in the Oddi area in southern Iceland, during a joint 3-year mission led by Kristborg and the Archaeological Institute, after the making a test ditch, reports Iceland Review . The mission had been initiated in 2017, as per a report published last year published by MBL.is. The man-made cave had an adjoining, even larger cave connected to it, which became the focus of Kristborg and her team’s research.

Securing the cave and ensuring it doesn’t collapse on people working in it has been a huge challenge for her team. The texture of the rock is prone to crumbling and the cave is deep, which can lead to dangerous outcomes.

Time is of the essence for the team, who feel any delay would result in the loss of precious artifacts and data. The entire system of man-made caves was not used for very long because they are inherently unstable.

Oddi: Ruled by the Powerful Oddverjar Viking Clan

Oddi itself is a historically and culturally relevant location that was once home to one of Iceland’s most important political seats, ruled by the powerful Oddverjar clan. The current archaeological study near Oddi has been ongoing for two years now.

So far, a historic church, farm, and vicarage have been unearthed. In fact, when Christianity came to Iceland around 1000 AD, Oddi was one of the first places to build a church.

“There was not any place that could support the making of literary works in the Middle Ages , as Oddi is believed to have done,” said Kristborg. “Although we are not looking for direct evidence of scriptwriting or writing, the study is about looking at the environment and the foundations of the center of power that was there.”

Culturally, Oddi peaked between the 11th and 12th centuries AD, with a vibrant writing culture that coincided with the rise of the Oddverjar clan. The catch is that the current man-made cave under investigation seems to have been buried before this cultural development peak, as evidenced from the study of the cave’s volcanic layers .

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2022 06 01 10 00

The most famous Oddverjar clan member was Sæmundur fróði, or Sæmundur the Learned (1056-1133 AD). Having studied in France, he was one of the earliest chroniclers of history of the Norwegian kings.

Sæmundur the Learned’s grandson, Jon Loftsson, a powerful chieftain himself, gave patronage to Snorri Sturluson, the legendary historian and poet, who is widely recognized as the man behind the chronicling of modern Norse mythology . This partly authored work is called the Prose Edda . He is also responsible for the Heimskringla, a saga of the Norwegian kings, which is likely based on the lost chronicled manuscript written by Sæmundur.

Mythological Bull’s Cave or Just A Livestock Pen?

The cave was likely used for livestock according to Kristborg. It also has a mythological mention in Bishop Þorlákur’s “Legends of Saints,” which dates to the first half of the 13th century. In this fable, it was called Nautahellir, Bull Cave, which collapsed with 12 bulls in it. One of the bulls was rescued from the rubble. Interestingly, even the fable deals with the fragility of the cave!

However, there is still a lot we don’t know about this man-made cave. It was likely used for something else before becoming a livestock pen.

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2022 06 01 09 59

Since the man-made cave network near Oddi is so big, the focus of the study has to be narrow. Kristborg has admitted to it being an almost overwhelming uphill task to deconstruct the historical usage of each cave. With further research, and a bigger crew, should the structures of the cave permit, more will be ascertained about the history of this man-made Viking era cave system. Nonetheless, a lot of information about the technology and traditions of Viking era Icelanders have been understood from this fantastic discovery.

“But then this is a longer and more complex story here in the use of these caves and we are only just beginning to see it, but it is so extensive that we can only look at a small part now. Then we would have to start a much, much larger study here with a much larger crew if we are to get to the bottom of this and trace this story completely, this use history of the caves here,” concluded Kristborg.

No More NATO Expansion

One day, the US will be called on to honor commitments that were carelessly made, and we will all come to regret that no one bothered to consider the costs.

“Mom, wearing orange chenille in July ’67”

Not my mom, but pretty exciting.

19 5
19 5

French Volunteer Outraged by Lies of Western Media, revealed truth about War Crimes in Ukraine

Boquet confirmed that the Bucha massacre was staged. He added that a lot of reporters from the US are working in Ukraine, filming the staged scenes

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Dear US/NATO officials, This is from a French TV interview with a former NATO French officer, that Southfront did a story on as part of their daily Ukraine war coverage. The source is really the officer himself, and next the TV interview itself, which made it to YouTube, but seemed to be blocked in the US when I tried to embed it here.

So I clicked off the ‘Russian source’ box in WordPress because I used some of SF’s text.

We need a US/NATO/EU official website with all the ins and outs on reporting on the war that have been cleared by free press experts so we do not have to deal with overzealous claims of aiding and abetting a participant in this nasty war simply by reporting the various views on it.

It is all just a,b,c reporting on published source material with some commentary, which I see all the time on MSM, but of course with their picking and choosing what they want to report and how, with no fears of ‘aiding or abetting’ claims.

BTW, this French veteran seemed to me to be cut from Vietnam Vets Against the War cloth, and as I remember, their critical comments about that war did not expose them to official sanction. Proof of that is their GI bill benefits rolled on just fine until the Agent Orange scandal broke and the government then became their adversary. Gordon was at Michigan State with thousands of them.. Thank you…JD.

Introduction

This is Day whatever of the Ukraine war and Western media will still not mention a word about how the Maidan Coup birthed this current crisis. The Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 failures seemed to have been swallowed by a Black Memory Hole with France and Germany acting like they know nothing about it when they were guarantors.

And the NeoNazis, some trained by the US and I suspect some other NATO countries, went to the Donbass perimeter and shelled it for eight years killing 14,000 people there, and virtuall all of Western MSM seems to think that had nothing to do with the current conflict which is claimed to be Russian aggression.

So dear readers, if you see any mention of these huge oversights published in MSM please send me to them as may folder for them is still empty. Go to the board and staff link on the font page and my email will be in my bio. Thanks.   

[ Editor’s Note: This is quite a catch, a somewhat disabled French officer who went to help out in Ukraine and was not happy with what he saw going on. Think about all the others that have gone over, and certainly seen much of the same horrors, and don’t utter a peep about it when they return.

That is a very poor reflection on Western society that I would describe as a rot. I found this on Mr. Boquet.

Adrien Boquet is a retired military officer, writer and journalist from France, and author of the book “Get Up and Walk Thanks to Science”. Several years ago he suffered a severe spinal injury.

He spent three weeks in Ukraine on a humanitarian mission, and after returning home, he gave an interview to French Sud Radio and spoke, without any cuts, about the numerous war crimes of the AFU, the neo-Nazis from AZOV and the supply of Western arms to Ukraine. He separately mentioned the events in Bucha.

The Ukrainian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Darya Herasymchuk, exposed the fakes of Ukrainian propaganda. She said that the information spread about the alleged abuse of small children by “occupants” is a fake.

The interview is in French, but subtitled so you can get the gist. It’s thirteen minutes to watch, and with Southfront’s overview text below… Jim W. Dean ]

2022 05 19 16 59
2022 05 19 16 59

First published May 12, 2022

A French volunteer Adrien Boquet told in an interview with French media about the war crimes committed by the Nazi militants of the Azov regimen in Ukraine. He described the real situation in the war-torn country which is hidden by the Western media.

Adrien Boquet is a former French serviceman, author of the book “Get Up and Walk Through Science”. He described his experience of his three-week humanitarian mission in Ukraine in an interview on Sud Radio France.

“I am fully responsible for what I say. There on the spot I witnessed war crimes. I’ve seen a lot of war crimes. I am talking only about those that I saw myself on the spot, and only those that were committed by the Ukrainian military. But not the Russian military… I do not claim that the Russians did nothing… But I confirm the war crimes committed by the Ukrainian military.” he said.

“Azov fighters are everywhere. With neo-Nazi stripes. It shocks me that Europe supplies weapons to neo-Nazis. The symbols of the SS are embroidered everywhere on their uniforms. They not hide their views. They advertise them. I worked with these people and treated them. They openly say that they are ready to destroy blacks and Jews,” he added.

The French military confirmed the war crimes of Ukrainian militants including against prisoners of war. He confirmed that the AFU militants are using civilians as a “human shield”, hiding ammunition in residential buildings at night, without even informing residents.

“I witnessed how the Ukrainian military shot through the knees of captured Russian soldiers and shot at the head of employees with a rank higher than officer.”

During the interview Boquet confirmed that the Bucha massacre was staged. He added that a lot of reporters from the US are working in Ukraine, filming the staged scenes.

“Butcha was staged. The bodies of the victims were moved from other places and deliberately placed in such a way as to produce a shocking shooting,” he stated.

Adrien Boquet emphasised that he was shocked by the fact that French TV channels invite as experts people who have not been to Ukraine and do not know anything about what is happening there. In conclusion, he assured that he would use his photos and videos taken during the humanitarian mission as evidence of Ukraine’s crimes.

Three young ladies prepare to have their pictures taken in Manhattan photo booths in April 1954.

Love that dress.

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1 91

“Mom, 1965”

Not my mom, but very nice.

17 5
17 5

MonkeyPox Outbreak Traced to GAY PRIDE FESTIVAL on Canary Islands

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The sudden and fast-spreading outbreak of MonekyPox seems to have been traced to a GAY PRIDE FESTIVAL held from May 5 to May 15, in the city of Maspalomas, on Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands.  Upwards of 80,000 attended the “festival” and now that many have returned to their home countries, those countries are seeing a very sudden and significant outbreak of Monkeypox.  Exactly as the Bible warned:

Romans 1:27, CSB: The men in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error.

MONKEYPOX cases in Spain and Italy have been traced to an island festival attended by 80,000 revelers.

Authorities are trying to halt an outbreak that has exploded across Europe and beyond, with 92 cases now confirmed and dozens more suspected.

Cases of monkeypox in the UK have doubled in just a week after a total of 20 cases were reported.

And doctors warned that number will rise significantly as the virus spreads through Europe and as far as the US, Canada and Australia.

Spain now has the highest number of infections, outside places in Africa where the virus is endemic, with more than 50 known cases.

Now authorities are investigating a festival in Gran Canaria after it was linked with a number of cases in Madrid, Tenerife, and Italy.

The Canaria Pride festival, held in the town of Maspalomas between May 5 and 15, has become a hotspot for the monkeypox outbreak, reports El País.

The massive party was attended by over 80,000 people, including three Italian men who later tested positive for the virus.

A health source told the newspaper: “Among the 30 or so diagnosed in Madrid, there are several who attended the event, although it is not yet possible to know if one of them is patient zero of this outbreak or if they all got infected there.”

Public health services are currently investigating whether there have been more infections during the celebrations including a suspected case detected in Tenerife.

UPDATE 7:18 PM EDT —

Here are the documented number of cases Internationally at this time:

2022 05 23 15 12
2022 05 23 15 12

Baked Steak Burritos

A spicy beef and bean filling is all bundled up in a south-of-the-border burrito.

OIP.OlYPlSIEs0eeaqsYhRl3mgHaEK
OIP.OlYPlSIEs0eeaqsYhRl3mgHaEK

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 package (1 oz) Old El Paso™ taco seasoning mix
  • 1 1/2 lb beef boneless sirloin tip steak, cut into thin bite-size strips
  • 1 can (16 oz) Old El Paso™ refried beans
  • 12 Old El Paso™ flour tortillas for soft tacos & fajitas (6 inch; from two 8.2-oz packages)
  • 2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese (8 oz)
  • 3 medium green onions, thinly sliced (3 tablespoons)
  • 1 can (10 oz) Old El Paso™ enchilada sauce
  • 1 cup shredded Mexican cheese blend (4 oz)

Steps

  • 1
    Heat oven to 400°F. In 10-inch skillet, melt butter over medium heat. Stir in taco seasoning mix. Add beef strips; cook 5 to 6 minutes, stirring occasionally, until desired doneness; drain.
  • 2
    Meanwhile, place refried beans in microwavable dish. Microwave uncovered on High 2 minutes, stirring once or twice.
  • 3
    Spread each tortilla with refried beans to within 1/4 inch of edge. Top each with beef, Cheddar cheese and onions. Roll up, folding in sides. In ungreased 13×9-inch (3-quart) glass baking dish, place burritos with seam sides down. Pour enchilada sauce over burritos. Sprinkle with Mexican cheese blend.
  • 4
    Bake uncovered 7 to 12 minutes or until burritos are thoroughly heated and cheese is melted.

2022 05 17 16 57
2022 05 17 16 57

“Mom with a cat, 1968”

Not my mom, but what a nice picture.

15 10g
15 10g

BULLETIN: POLISH TROOPS HAVE ENTERED UKRAINE WAR

PolandEntersWar large
PolandEntersWar large

Staggering reports are coming in claiming two (2) battalions of Polish Army troops have entered Ukraine covertly.   Overnight, 2 battalions of Polish infantry moved out from Kyiv the day before and have already reached Pavlograd.

Two or more companies make up a battalion, which has 400 to 1,200 troops and is commanded by a lieutenant colonel. The battalion is the smallest unit to have a staff of officers (in charge of personnel, operations, intelligence, and logistics) to assist the commander.

Each battalion inside Ukraine is said to have 4 Rapira anti-tank guns, armored personnel carriers, and American armored personnel carriers.

Currently, the Polish infantry is being prepared for the transfer to the Avdeevsky front.

Whether we are talking about regular troops or mercenaries, it is difficult to say now.   Some reports are claiming the Poles are Mercenaries, who were waiting for the US $40 Billion in Ukrainian “aid” to be approved before moving into action.  That was approved formally late this past week.

MORE:

Additional reports are openly saying The British SAS has been inside Ukraine carrying out special commando ops against the Russians  as well.

WORSE, the reports now admit the US is on the ground inside eastern Ukraine doing targeting mapping and other things.

UPDATE 10:27 AM EDT —

U.S. SENATOR TELLS NATO “PREPARE FOR RUSSIAN NUCLEAR ACTION”

The US and its NATO allies should prepare a “devastating” response to potential Russian nuclear action, Sen. Mitt Romney said on Saturday.

The call to action comes on the heels of threats from the Kremlin and warnings from Russian diplomats that the country’s Ukraine invasion could lead to a nuclear strike, the Utah Republican wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times.

“Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon would unarguably be a redefining, reorienting geopolitical event,” Romney, 75, wrote.

“We should imagine the unimaginable, specifically how we would respond militarily and economically to such a seismic shift in the global geopolitical terrain.”

The former presidential candidate presented several options available to western allies in addition to a nuclear response if a “cornered and delusional” Russian President Vladimir Putin deployed a nuclear weapon.

(HT REMARK: Romney is in "The Club" if he is making this warning there is definitely something behind it.  His now-public remarks are a signal - at least to me - they already KNOW what's coming.  I think guys like Romney are going to get a slew of us KILLED.   The voters of Utah would do well to get their Senator back under control before he causes a whole bunch of us to get nuked.)

The Ultimate 1980s Barn Find: This Guy Found A Lamborghini Countach Hiding In Grandma’s Garage For 20 Years

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The lucky guy is Reddit user named eriegin, who posted these photos along with the caption “Despite the rust and dust, grandma’s 1981 Lamborghini Countach is the coolest.”

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This isn’t an ordinary Countach. The images posted on Reddit suggest that we are looking at a Countach 500S, one of just 321 examples built.

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According to Carscoops, the car is powered by a naturally-aspirated 4.8-liter V12, and while the Redditor claims that it is in poor condition, it could easily be worth $300,000 – or, if restored, more than $500,000.

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The Reddit user says that the Countach was purchased by his late grandfather in 1989, “but after insurance costs became too high for him to operate the company, he kept the car (and many others including the Ferrari 308 in front of the Lambo) outside/in leaky garages for 20+ years instead of selling them,” he wrote. “Don’t ask me why, I have no clue.”

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While it’s sad to see a car as iconic as the Countach being locked up for so long, it’s refreshing to see it coming out to the real world again.

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The Daily Stormer shut down!

I guess that their acceptance of Nazi-leaning contributors was too much for the Pro-Ukraine (Asov Nazi) Progressive American liberals to accept.

“Daily Stormer” is a website that the world-shaking Buffalo shooting’s perpetrator Payton Gendron claimed had a strong influence on him. The website surprisingly had a .cn country code domain, which led some in the media and the public to accuse China of being involved in the incident and even “supporting the American far right and neo-Nazism.”

From HERE.

Meet The Globalists: Here Is The Full Roster Of Davos 2022 Attendees

The infamous World Economic Forum (WEF) will host its annual meeting in Davos this week, and Jordan Schachtel,via ‘The Dossier’ Substack, is going to make sure you know who is attending the invite-only gathering.

For those of you who are new to this nefarious organization:

The World Economic Forum (WEF), through its annual Davos conference, acts as the go-to policy and ideas shop for the ruling class. The NGO is led by a comic book villain-like character in Klaus Schwab, its megalomaniac president who articulates a truly insane, extremist political agenda for our future.

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Klaus Schwab

How about the “Great Reset?”

All of those bumper sticker political narratives were popularized by the World Economic Forum.

Have you read about the ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) movement?

That’s also a WEF favorite.

Davos 2022 includes the usual components of WEF’s “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” totalitarian eco statist agenda. Topics discussed and panels at the 2022 meeting will include:

  • Experience the future of cooperation: The Global Collaboration Village
  • Staying on Course for Nature Action
  • Future-proofing Health Systems
  • Accelerating the Reskilling Revolution (for the “green transition”)
  • The ‘Net’ in Net Zero
  • The Future of Globalization
  • Unlocking Carbon Markets
  • And of course, a Special Address by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine

The American contingent will include 25 politicians and Biden Administration officials. US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo will join Climate Czar John Kerry as the White House representatives there. They will be joined by 12 democrat and 10 republican politicians, including 7 senators and two state governors

Without further delay, I’ve provided the entire list of attendees who are showing up to Davos next week. I’ll list the Americans below and the rest are linked below that in an attached document.

  • Gina Raimondo Secretary of Commerce of USA USA
  • John F. Kerry Special Presidential Envoy for Climate of the United States of America
  • Bill Keating Congressman from Massachusetts (D)
  • Daniel Meuser Congressman from Pennsylvania (R)
  • Madeleine Dean Congresswoman from Pennsylvania (D
  • Ted Lieu Congressman from California (D)
  • Ann Wagner Congresswoman from Missouri (R)
  • Christopher A. Coons Senator from Delaware (D)
  • Darrell Issa Congressman from California (R)
  • Dean Phillips Congressman from Minnesota (D)
  • Debra Fischer Senator from Nebraska (R)
  • Eric Holcomb Governor of Indiana (R)
  • Gregory W. Meeks Congressman from New York (D)
  • John W. Hickenlooper Senator from Colorado (D)
  • Larry Hogan Governor of Maryland (R)
  • Michael McCaul Congressman from Texas (R)
  • Pat Toomey Senator from Pennsylvania (R)
  • Patrick J. Leahy Senator from Vermont (D)
  • Robert Menendez Senator from New Jersey (D)
  • Roger F. Wicker Senator from Mississippi (R)
  • Seth Moulton Congressman from Massachusetts (D)
  • Sheldon Whitehouse Senator from Rhode Island (D)
  • Ted Deutch Congressman from Florida (D)
  • Francis Suarez Mayor of Miami (R)
  • Al Gore Vice-President of the United States (1993-2001) (D)

Full list of confirmed attendees of 2022 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

Here’s the PDF File in case the link goes down.

There is one member of the ‘elites’ that is not going to be there (and never has).

As Mohamed El-Erian writes in an op-ed at Bloomberg, Davos meetings are full of potential but rarely full of solutions.

I have never taken up the opportunity to attend the Davos meeting and I will pass again this year.

That, however, does not mean that I do not follow its evolution and outcomes. I am certainly interested in what could emerge from a meeting that brings together so many leaders of governments, civil society and business.

In an ideal world, this year’s meeting would prove catalytic in two important ways. 

  • First, it would trigger greater awareness of ongoing watershed developments in the global economy and draw attention to how differently these are viewed around the world.
  • And second, it would point to ways in which an increasingly “zero-sum” view of international coordination can be reshaped to contribute to collective resilience and inclusive prosperity.

The list of ongoing watershed developments in the global economy is long, extending well beyond the horrific war in Ukraine and the associated human tragedies. Here is an example of what is on such a list:

  • Due to the convergence of food, energy, debt and growth crises, a growing number of poorer countries face a rising threat of famine — and this is but one part of the “little fires everywhere” phenomenon undermining lives and livelihoods around the world.
  • Inflation at 40-year highs in wealthier countries is undermining standards of living and growth engines, hitting the poor particularly hard, fueling political anger, eroding institutional credibility, and undermining the effectiveness of economic and financial policy.
  • The inability to deal with critical secular challenges, including climate change, is seeing short-term distractions compound what already are meaningful long-term challenges.
  • Private- and public-sector efforts to strike a better balance between highly interconnected supply chains and national/corporate resilience are complicated by a global economy that lacks sufficient momentum for this to be done in an orderly fashion.
  • The western weaponization of international finance, while effective in bringing the eleventh largest economy in the world to its knees, has been pursued without a global framework of standards, guidelines and safeguards.

I suspect that, while the vast majority of Davos participants will agree on this list (and, indeed, add a few more items), there will be quite a bit of disagreement on the causes and longer-term consequences. Such disagreement is problematic in two ways.

  • First, it undermines the shared responsibility needed to address challenges with important international dimensions;
  • and second, it erodes even more trust in the existing international order. Unless the disagreements can be resolved, the damaging effects will deepen and spread.

On paper, the upcoming Davos meeting would be perfectly suited for resolving these conflicts. History, however, does not provide much encouragement or optimism.

Time and time again, Davos has fallen victim to a lack of focus and actionable unifying vision. Individual and collective interests have remained unreconciled. Distractions abound. As a result, the output has been, at best, backward-leaning.

Given the multiple crossroads facing the global economy, this would be a particularly good time for Davos to fulfill its considerable potential — to look ahead, not back. To identify solutions instead of just problems. Otherwise, the forum will evolve even more into a network and social club that is, and is widely perceived to be, even more decoupled from the realities of many and the challenges of most.

“Mom sun bathing in backyard, 1961”

Not my mom, but still…

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It’s the War Mobilization, Stupid!

From HERE

 

Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign defeated incumbent president George HW Bush with the help of Ross Perot and an unrelenting focus on the be-all end-all of presidential campaigns: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Clinton’s slogan pithily summarized the accumulated wisdom of more than two centuries of presidential politics: Voters identify the incumbent president and incumbent party with their perception of the current state of the economy. If times are good, the president and/or his party will likely be re-relected. If not, it’s time to “throw the bums out.”

I learned this in 1979 in a course on American Economic History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. According to the professor, it was an open secret that every president tries to strong-arm the Fed into juicing up the economy prior to his re-election campaign, usually with some success.

The 2020 election provided a classic example of the power of current economic trends over national election results. As of late 2019, the US economy was booming and Donald Trump was cruising toward an easy victory. Then COVID-19 hit, the economy imploded, and suddenly Trump no longer looked like a “very stable genius” to the crucial tranches of undecided, uninformed, and/or independent voters. Also, thanks to COVID and the economic implosion, Democrats could be whipped into a much more hysterical anti-Trump frenzy than would have been otherwise possible, leading to frenetic and heavily-funded get-out-the-vote efforts. So whether or not Trump is correct about alleged vote padding in swing states, he is certainly right that absent the COVID pandemic he would have won an easy re-election.

Now that we have established the crucial connection between economic trends and incumbent parties’ prospects in national elections, it’s time to ask the million dollar question: What the @&# are the Democrats thinking?! The Biden Administration, facing very tough midterm contests this year and at least equally monumental challenges in the 2024 presidential race, has made the apparently idiotic decision to blow up the US and global economies by provoking war with Russia.

As I write this, stocks, crypto, and even the bond market aren’t just swirling around the porcelain bowl, they’re plunging through the pipes and well on their way to the sewage treatment facility. The worst inflation in 40 years, driven in part by higher food and energy costs from Biden’s war on Russia, has forced the Fed to start ratcheting interest rates upward, pushing America towards 1970s-style stagflation at best, or a 2008 or even 1929 scenario at worst. Biden’s ever-escalating giveaway of US tax dollars to Ukraine is contributing to the economic as well as military mayhem.

Is Biden senile? Is Harris an idiot? Are the Democrats suicidal? Though the answer to the first two questions is undoubtedly “yes,” I’m not sure that the Democratic Party leadership and the oligarchs who own it are entirely bent on political self-destruction. There must be some sort of method in their apparent madness. And I think I know what it is:

“It’s the war mobilization, stupid!”

The oligarchs who own the Democratic Party (who may overlap somewhat with the ones that own the Republicans) aren’t going to seek success in 2022 and 2024 by riding a strong economy. Instead, they are hoping to win by dragging us into war and pounding their chests and telling us to support our fearless wartime leaders—and if you don’t you’re a treasonous unpatriotic Russia-loving Putin-loving Trump-loving transphobic white nationalist conspiracy theorist scumbag.

If the war gets bad enough, and the propaganda gets loud enough, people will put up with just about any amount of economic devastation. Consider World War II. Even though the US didn’t enter the war until more than two years after it started, and never experienced the level of combat and losses other nations suffered, the American people were quickly convinced to endure draconian rationing, forced conscription, virtual slave labor in war factories, and various and sundry economic unpleasantness, all in the name of defeating the evil racially-inferior slanty-eyed Japs and the evil white supremacist Adolf Hitler. FDR, who had cruised to re-election in 1940 by promising to keep America out of the war, had no problem winning in 1944 despite his broken promise (and his Pearl Harbor treason). When the nation is on a total war footing, people snap to attention and salute and do what they’re told and don’t ask questions, and the incumbent party and president enjoy almost godlike status.

My parents were children during World War II, and they (and my grandparents) experienced food rationing, gasoline rationing, and the near-total unavailability of all sorts of consumer goods, from appliances to automobiles. Sounds familiar? It’s like what we’re heading into now—only in 2022 we’re merely facing de facto rationing as many people can no longer buy their customary allotments of food, gas, and goods. Fortunately the authorities probably won’t start issuing ration coupons until the war really heats up.

And heat up it will. Biden’s seemingly crazy policies, foreign as well as domestic, make sense only on the assumption that we’re heading into all-out World War III. Why would the US refuse Russia’s repeated entreaties to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality and cap NATO expansion, thereby provoking a ruinous war? Why would US leaders refuse Russia’s (and Zelensky’s) overtures for a negotiated solution? Why would they create what will soon become a 100-billion-dollar arms pipeline to Ukraine, while pushing Finland and Sweden to join NATO—a move that Russia will inevitably greet with military strikes?

The real rulers of the US empire, the neoconservatives who overthrew the Republic on 9/11/2001, are bent on world conquest. A decision has apparently been made behind the scenes to fight World War III sooner rather than later, in service to the Wolfowitz Doctrine that the US will tolerate no challenges to its global hegemony.

The neocons have made their position clear: They will either rule the planet unilaterally or destroy it. That is why the Empire and its vassals are inflicting economic devastation on their own people, and the people of the world, as they frantically mobilize for the biggest and most destructive war in human history.

If we are going to stop it, the time is now. Once NATO is officially at war with Russia, dissent will be ruthlessly quashed. And once the nukes start flying, we will spend whatever is left of our lives wishing we had done more to stop the neocon Strangeloves from pursuing their mad dream of world conquest.

2 x news: Europe olive branch to Putin

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Now, Italy begins backtracking on its promises and extending an olive branch toward Russia – TFIGlobal
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Opinion | On Ukraine, good-cop France is offering Putin a way out – The Washington Post
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Enter the good cop. In a speech shortly after Putin’s Victory Day fizzle, French President Emmanuel Macron offered an olive branch to Moscow …
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From HERE

“Mom in reflection, December 1960”

Cool mom. Not mine, though…

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Hawaiian Ham and Bacon Pasta Salad

Sweet, salty, smoky and a little bit spicy, there’s a whole lot of flavor going on here, and with surprisingly few ingredients. That’s the genius of this recipe: It combines a few complementary ingredients to scrumptious effect. Pineapple bits, ham chunks, bacon crumbles and diced jalapeño folded into the creamy pasta base make for a mouthwatering meal that you can probably pull together without running to the store.

It’s a great use of leftover ham, but also beautiful enough to feature on your Easter brunch table. Whether you’re making it for tonight’s dinner or a major holiday, prep it ahead of time and stash it in the fridge, so it’s quick to assemble when it’s time to come to the table.

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Ingredients

  • 1 box Betty Crocker™ Suddenly Salad™ classic pasta salad mix
  • 1/2 cup mayonnaise
  • 1/2 cup pineapple tidbits (from 8-oz can, drained and juice reserved)
  • 1 cup diced ham
  • 1/2 cup crumbled cooked bacon (5 slices)
  • 1 cup packed baby spinach
  • 1/4 cup sliced green onions (about 4)
  • 2 tablespoons seeded, chopped jalapeño chile (1/2 large)
  • 1/2 cup cubed block mozzarella cheese (2 oz)

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2022 05 23 16 59

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The Proliferation Of Nostalgia-Inducing LEGO Sets Indicates That They’re Far More Than Just A Child’s Toy

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LEGO FORMA is a premium LEGO experience designed for adults looking for a fun, engaging way to reconnect with their creative side. LEGO FORMA mechanical models are cleverly designed but simple to assemble. Sturdy rods and parts combine with customizable skins to create a joyful creative challenge. Taking design cues from nature, LEGO FORMA incorporates life-like movement, colors, and patterns. The result is an elegant conversation piece that’s a tasteful addition to any room.

The beauty of nature. The simple pleasure of building. A thoughtful creative challenge. These are at the core of LEGO FORMA, a premium LEGO experience for adults looking for a simple, fun way to disconnect from their screens and reconnect with their creative side. LEGO FORMA models feature beautiful, customizable skins that allow for personal expression. Choose from the Koi Skin, Shark Skin, Splash Koi Skin, or decorate your own with the Ink Koi Skin.

Two hundred and ninety four elements come together to form a dynamic model. A clever gear system generates life-like movement that’s as satisfying to put together as it is to see. The sum is a thoughtful creative challenge that’s relaxing yet creatively stimulating.

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Supply chains are never returning to ‘normal’

BeyondWords

The conventional wisdom at this time is that most of the world has moved on from the pandemic (except for China); therefore, supply chains will return to “normal.” Unfortunately, this is not the case. The world has permanently changed and supply chains are going to face continuing challenges for decades to come. Among those challenges are:

  • Supply chains will remain under constant threat of disruption for the next decade
  • Supply chains operate best when the world is peaceful and stable
  • A smoothly running supply chain requires “buffer stock,” which is challenging with declining population demographics
  • There is a conflict between environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals and supply chains optimized for cost and speed. If we prioritize ESG, we will need to contend with supply chain risks
  • Supply chain technology will become the big venture capital category winner as companies continue to make investments in technologies that can help them mitigate their supply chain challenges

In a world faced with the prospect of tightening supplies, higher energy costs, heightened geopolitical risk, and strained transportation networks, advanced supply chain technologies will become mission-critical for many more companies.

Supply chains benefit from times of peace

Anyone that has been a part of the supply chain industry can attest to the fact that supply chains have always been subject to disruptions. Natural disasters, terrorism, economic cycles, and capacity shortages have created challenges since the beginning of trade.

Since the end of the Cold War, global supply chains have benefited from peaceful trade between developed and developing countries. Many poorer and less developed countries that were previously ruled by Communist or autocratic regimes took advantage of new markets in the developed world and used global trade to move beyond subsistence economies to prosperous ones. Some of these countries developed into capitalistic and democratic countries, while other governments exploited the free market system to solely benefit those already in power, and became wealthy and powerful enough to threaten the very system that enabled their ascension.

The Eastern European countries that were formerly part of the Soviet bloc are examples of the countries that embraced capitalism and shifted toward democracy, while China did the opposite.

Labor is key in supply chains

The arbitrage between the developed and developing countries has been massive. The cost of producing goods in countries with cheap labor, lax environmental and labor regulations, and little regard for sustainable natural resources has enabled the world to enjoy unprecedented prosperity and peace.

Because the goods produced in these parts of the world were so cheap, it made sense that they would be produced in excess. This buffer stock kept inflation in check and provided supply chains with ample supplies that could fend off short-term fluctuations and disruptions. Think about how the cost of televisions and computing hardware has fallen over the past few decades, and how auto prices haven’t risen as significantly as the many improvements in product features and quality were made.

This all happened at a time when the United States was the only superpower and the only expectation that the U.S. had of other nations is that trade should be unobstructed.

Cheap labor is becoming scarcer, particularly in Asia. This is largely due to aging populations – the average age continues to increase and there are fewer people to work in these manufacturing jobs.

ESG requirements hamper the stability of supply chains

Companies have instituted ESG requirements that require disclosures and monitoring of how and where products have been sourced. This pressure means that goods that are produced in factories that don’t match Western standards for environmental controls and human rights may not be available to Western consumers. The factories that do produce goods that match Western standards will often be more expensive and therefore there will be less buffer stock in the system.

The same ESG standards also create challenges for commodity producers, as the cost of adhering to environmental and social disclosures makes it more expensive and less productive. It also discourages investment in the production of environmentally sensitive commodities – most obviously in energy.

Environmental concerns and regulations that have prevented exploration and production and killed pipeline projects are largely the reason that the world currently lacks sufficient energy resources to buffer against the consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war.

In the previous three decades, supply chains have operated relatively smoothly because companies could source from around the world and not have to worry about global military conflict or autocratic regimes shutting down manufacturing. While international trade regulations were complicated to navigate, the world overall was trending toward larger, more open trading blocs – not just in North America, but in Europe and Asia as well.

As the United States has become more insular and has pulled back from being the world’s policeman, and China has started to flex its muscles and create a global competitor to the United States, the world has become far more unstable and less peaceful. This global friction is unlikely to go away. China desires to take Taiwan as its own, risking sending the world into a geopolitical crisis that is more dangerous than at any point since World War II.

Buffer stocks of products are far less likely in the future, as the cost of producing those items continues to rise. Cheap labor, offered by large populations of young people, is largely a thing of the past. This will make it more expensive for companies to produce buffer stock and far less likely that supply chains will enjoy the ability to absorb short-term shocks that are inherent to complex global networks.

Supply chain technology will be the big winner

Companies will look closer to home for product sourcing. They will prioritize production in countries that are far more stable and friendly to the United States. The Freedom Trade movement will drive supply chain professionals to prioritize production and sourcing in the Americas.

Latin America will become a big winner, as it benefits greatly from having direct land transportation networks with North America and seas that are well protected by the U.S. Navy.

The American South and Midwest will also see an acceleration in manufacturing and production, as they can offer predictable and resilient sourcing, without the geopolitical risks of foreign suppliers or the labor unions of the Rust Belt.

Automation, including robotics, will become more important. Nearshoring manufacturers will try to offset higher production costs with robotics and other automated production systems.

Supply chain market intelligence systems, a data category that monitors developments around supply and demand, will be critical for supply chain professionals who are trying to navigate increasingly complex and opaque markets. Materials and product supplies are no longer guaranteed, so the need for constantly refreshed data models that track the balance of supply and demand will be critical to the success of companies.

FreightWaves SONAR provides near real-time market intelligence information, which has seen explosive growth in recent months as shippers have realized that supply chains are not returning to normal and the need for high-frequency data is increasingly critical for success. Historical models no longer work – as the world becomes far less predictable, peaceful, and safe – and supply chains are far more exposed to supply and demand shocks.

“Mom in 1969. Pregnant with me”

Not my mom, but very nice.

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Inflation in the United States

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2022 05 17 15 48

McDonalds Leaves Russia—Russians Gain Four Years of Life Expectancy

This is funny. Please do not take seriously. -MM

Dissociated Press

The Russian Ministry of Health announced Tuesday that McDonalds’ decision to leave Russia is expected to add more than four years to the average Russian’s life expectancy.

Studies undertaken by the University of Moscow School of Health Issues and Troubles (UMSHIT) show that when the drunken buffoon Boris Yeltsin took over Russia after the CIA coup of 1991, Russian men lost almost a decade of life expectancy. Originally it was thought that the looting of Russia by CIA-affiliated Zionist billionaire oligarchs had destroyed life-support systems for food, utilities, and other infrastructure, and that Russians were so depressed about being ruled by an evil American-owned clown like Yeltsin that they started drinking themselves to death.

But more recent research has revealed that McDonalds also played a role. “We discovered that the high-calorie, high-carb, addictive-chemical-drenched drek served by McDonalds was responsible for almost half of the massive loss of life expectancy suffered by Russia after its defeat in the Cold War,” said UMSHIT researcher Morgansky Spurlockovich. “That means that during the past three decades, McDonalds has killed nearly as many Russians as Hitler did. Expelling McDonalds from Russia will save millions of Russian lives and go a long way toward addressing our demographic deficit.”

Sources close to Vladimir Putin say that Russia will not only send McDonalds back to the US, but also covertly fund its operations there.  By spending a fraction of the vast wealth Russia is earning due to higher energy prices to open even more McDonalds franchises in America, sources say, Putin will further feminize American men, render them obese and unable to fight, and ultimate kill millions of Americans at a fraction of the cost of a single 9M730 Burevestnik radioactive-tidal-wave-causing cruise missile.

Meanwhile, rumors that the Russian Air Force has begun dropping Big Macs with fries and soda on decision-making centers in Kiev have not yet been confirmed by official sources.

“Mom & 1961 Chevy Impala, September 1961”

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General Motors’ Miraculously Surviving Electric Car Found in A Parking Lot — May Be the Last EV1 in The World

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2022 05 17 15 54

In one of Atlanta’s usual multi-level parking lots, an EV1, developed by General Motors in the late 1990s, was found in 2019. The entire run was later recalled and put under the press, but one car miraculously survived.

The General Motors EV1 was an electric car produced and leased by General Motors from 1996 to 1999. It was the first mass-produced and purpose-designed electric vehicle of the modern era from a major automaker and the first GM car designed to be an electric vehicle from the outset. The EV1 was made available through limited lease-only agreements, initially to residents of the cities of Los Angeles, California, and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.

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2022 05 17 15 55

While customer reaction to the EV1 was positive, GM believed that electric cars occupied an unprofitable niche of the automobile market, and ended up crushing most of the cars, regardless of protesting customers.

Furthermore, an alliance of the major automakers litigated the CARB regulation in court, resulting in a slackening of the ZEV stipulation, permitting the companies to produce super-low-emissions vehicles, natural gas vehicles, and hybrid cars in place of pure electrics. The EV1 program was subsequently discontinued in 2002, and all cars on the road were taken back by the company, under the terms of the lease. Lessees were not given the option to purchase their cars from GM, which cited parts, service, and liability regulations.

The majority of the EV1s taken back were crushed, with about 40 delivered to museums and educational institutes with their electric powertrains deactivated, under the agreement that the cars were not to be reactivated and driven on the road. The only intact EV1 was donated to the Smithsonian Institution. General Motors also allegedly gave models to research institutions with EV1s being found in the wild near universities often in states of disrepair.

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The EV1’s discontinuation remains controversial, with electric car enthusiasts, environmental interest groups and former EV1 lessees accusing GM of self-sabotaging its electric car program to avoid potential losses in spare parts sales (sales forced by government regulations), while also blaming the oil industry for conspiring to keep electric cars off the road. During the discontinuation movie director Francis Ford Coppola hid his EV1 from General Motors and was ultimately able to keep his EV1. As a result of GM taking the cars back as the leases ended and the subsequent destruction of the majority of EV1s, an intact and working EV1 is one of the rarest cars from the 1990s.

Azovstal Ukrainian fighters continue to surrender

There were over 2500 hundred AFU servicemen in the industrial zone, 404 of them were wounded, 200 corpses of dead fighters were frozen in refrigerators

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ScreenHunter 7020

On May 17, the Russian Ministry of Defence confirmed that the surrender of the militants of the nationalist Azov regiment and Ukrainian servicemen, who were blocked at the Azovstal plant in Mariupol began.

Over the past day, 265 militants have laid down their arms and surrendered, including 51 seriously wounded. All those in need of medical care were sent for treatment to the hospital in Novoazovsk, Donetsk People’s Republic. The other were transferred to the village of Elenovka in the Donetsk People’s republic.

The surrender of the “garrison of Mariupol” continues. The Ukrainian fighters are disarmed, then they are sent to Novoazovsk or Elenovka.

On May 17, a Russian military reporter in Mariupol claimed that as of May 16, there were over 2.5 thousand AFU servicemen in the industrial zone, 404 of them were wounded. 55 servicemen were seriously injured. 200 corpses of dead fighters were frozen in refrigerators.

There were also three Russian prisoners, including an officer and two soldiers.

In total, 804 members of the Azov nationalist regiment were hiding in Azovstal. The others were servicemen of the 53rd, 54th, 56th separate brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the 36th separate brigade of Marines, 501st and 503 separate battalions of marines and 12 brigade The National Guard, which included “Azov”.

The military reporter added that the decision was made not to comment on the situation in Azovstal. The officials claims will be made by the Russian Ministry of Defence.

In an attempt to justify the fall of the Ukrainian fortress, the Minister of Defense of Ukraine called the surrender of the AFU remnants from Azovstal a “delicate situation.”

The Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine stated that the GUR, the AFU, the border service, the National Guard, the SBU, the National Police and Azov are carrying out a special operation to rescue defenders of Mariupol blocked on the territory of the Azovstal plant. If the operation was aimed at the transfer of the nazi fighters to the Russian military, it likely succeeded.

The Kiev regime continuesly claims that all the Ukrainian militants should be exchanged for the Russian prisoners of war. The Russian military officials have not confirmed any exchange so far.

Moreover, on May 17, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin ordered to work on the proposal of the members of the State Duma to prohibit the exchange of all Ukrainian Nazis to Ukraine. He added that this issue should be worked out jointly with the Defense and Security Committee.

“You are making the right offer. Nazi criminals should not be exchanged. These are war criminals. We must do everything to ensure that they face trial” Volodin summed up.

“Mama and us at Yosemite, California, 1963”

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4 16

Leaked Vietnam video

Leaked Vietnam video: Showing Vietnam PM cursing America saying Ukraine war created by US.
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Short Video HERE

Taiwan TVS media reported a leaked video footage showing Vietnam PM privately cursed America , saying he is not afraid of America, and that Ukraine war has been created by the Americans. This was filmed during the recent US organized ASEAN meeting.
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The Ultimate Brownie

This is Betty’s all-time favorite homemade brownie!

Ultimate Brownies 1
Ultimate Brownies 1

Ingredients

  • 2/3 cup butter or margarine
  • 5 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, cut into pieces
  • 1 3/4 cups sugar
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 cup Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup chopped walnuts

Steps

  • 1
    Heat oven to 350°F. Grease bottom and sides of 9-inch square pan. In 1-quart saucepan, melt butter and chocolate over low heat, stirring constantly. Cool slightly.
  • 2
    In medium bowl, beat sugar, vanilla and eggs with electric mixer on high speed 5 minutes. Beat in chocolate mixture on low speed. Beat in flour just until blended. Stir in walnuts. Spread in pan.
  • 3
    Bake 40 to 45 minutes or just until brownies begin to pull away from sides of pan. Cool completely in pan on cooling rack. For brownies, cut into 4 rows by 4 rows.

2022 05 17 17 04
2022 05 17 17 04

After the NATO War is Over

By Batiushka for the Saker Blog

Make no mistake about it: The tragic war that is currently taking place on Ukrainian battlefields is not between the Russian Federation and the Ukraine, but between the Russian Federation and the US-controlled NATO. The latter, also called ‘the collective West’, promotes an aggressive ideology of organised violence, a politically- economically- and militarily-enforced doctrine euphemistically known as ‘Globalism’. This means hegemony by the Western world, which arrogantly calls itself ‘the international community’, over the whole planet. NATO is losing that war, which uses NATO-trained Ukrainians as its proxy cannon fodder, in three spheres, political, economic and military.

Firstly, politically, the West has finally understood that it cannot execute regime change in Moscow. Its pipedream of replacing the highly popular President Putin with is CIA stooge Navalny is not going to happen. As for the West’s puppet-president in Kiev, he is only a creature of Washington and its oligarchs. A professional actor, he is unable to speak for himself, but is a spokesman for the NATO which he loves.

Secondly, economically, the West faces serious resistance to the 6,000 sanctions it has imposed on Russia and Russians. Those sanctions have backfired. In the West, we can testify to this every time we buy fuel or food. The combination of high inflation (10% +) and even higher energy prices, caused almost solely by these illegal anti-Russian sanctions, are threatening the collapse of Western economies, much more than threatening Russia or China. As a result of this reverse effect of sanctions against Russia, the rouble is at a three-year high, standing at about 64 to the US dollar and rising, though immediately after the sanctions it had briefly gone down to 150 to the dollar.

After strenuously denying that they would do it, already most countries in Europe (at least 17 for now), including Germany and Italy, have agreed to open accounts with Gazprombank, as Russia advised them to do and to pay for oil and gas in roubles. And this number is growing by the week. The problems will be even greater with food shortages, as the world food chain is highly integrated and the agricultural production of Russia and the Ukraine (now controlled by Russia) is at least 40% of the world’s grain production.  Just days ago it was announced that Russia expects record grain production this year (130 million tonnes). Russia may yet demand payment in roubles for all this as well.

The sanctions against Russia have divided Europe and are threatening to divide NATO.  President Erdogan of Turkey, a NATO member, has announced that he would veto the entry to NATO of Finland and Sweden into NATO. At the same time, Russia has announced that it will cut off Finland’s natural gas supply. Swedish leaders are re-thinking their entry to NATO.

Thirdly, militarily, it is clear that the Ukraine, with huge numbers of desertions and surrenders, has no chance of winning the war against Russia. Most of its military equipment has already been wiped out and newly-delivered and often antiquated Western equipment will make little difference, even if it is not destroyed by Russian missiles as soon as it reaches the Ukraine. The conflict could now be over within weeks, rather than months. The US ‘Defense Secretary’ (= Minister for Offense), Lloyd Austin, has desperately called the Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu to beg for a ceasefire. Would you agree to a ceasefire when in less than three months and with only 10% of your military forces you have already occupied an area greater than England inside the Ukraine, an area that produces 75% of Ukrainian GDP?

The panic of financial disaster in the West has begun to set in. As a result, the French President Macron has told President Zelensky (that is, told Washington) to give up part of Ukraine’s sovereignty and at last start serious negotiations with Russia. Macron is also trying to free French mercenaries from Azovstal in Mariupol, but the problem is much bigger than this, as the whole of Europe is facing economic meltdown. And the Italian Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, has asked President Biden to contact President Putin and ‘give peace a chance’. Note that Mario Draghi is a former president of the European Central Bank and a Goldman Sachs puppet – just as Macron is a Rothschild puppet.

There have always been empires and invasions throughout history. However, they have always been local and not been justified as the only possible global ideology, a ‘New World Order’, to be imposed by violence all over the planet. After the NATO war is over, lost by ‘the collective West’, NATO Centralism, the ideology of a ‘Unipolar World’, controlled from Washington, must end. However, Centralism must also come to an end everywhere else, like that under Soviet-period Moscow (1).

However, Nationalism must also come to an end. Here we should remember that the very word ‘Nazism’ comes from the German words for ‘National Socialism’. (Nationalism entails hatred for others, whereas Patriotism means the ability not only to love your own country, but also love the countries of others, not hate their countries). And the Ukraine has a history of Nazism, stretching back over eighty years. Moreover, today’s leading Kiev soldiery are Nazi nationalists and represent the tribalism so typical of Western Europe, responsible in the twentieth century for two huge wars which it spread worldwide. The Nazi Ukrainian cries of ‘Glory to the Ukraine’ and their slogan of ‘Ukraine above Everything’ are slogans of Nazism.

Let us move to a world that is multipolar and multicentric, which has unity in diversity and diversity in unity. If we do not move towards this, we will probably be lost. For a multipolar, multicivilisational and multicultural world, the world of seven billion human beings already, is the only civilized world, the only true international community.

Note:

1. Here anti-Semites will tell you that the Centralism of Soviet-period Moscow was founded by the Bolsheviks, of whom over 80% were Jews. Firstly, it should be pointed out that they were atheist Jews, internationalists like Bronstein/Trotsky, who supported the ‘Third International’. In other words, they were political Zionists (not religious Zionists, indeed, they were anti-religious). And let us recall that a huge number of Jews were and are anti-Zionists and a huge number of Zionists were and are not at all Jews. This is why the Saker rightly uses the term ‘Anglo-Zionism’ for these unipolar centralisers.

Streusel Coffee Cake

Everyone needs a classic coffee cake recipe. Simple to make and a treat to eat, this is it! Our cinnamon Streusel Coffee Cake recipe is the perfect one to wake up and create for a holiday brunch. It only takes 10 minutes of prep time and is made easy with Bisquick™ Original Pancake & Baking Mix.

0dfa7d9b d6d8 4fe1 a13f fa5f938a1b3b
0dfa7d9b d6d8 4fe1 a13f fa5f938a1b3b

Ingredients

Cinnamon Streusel

  • 1/3 cup Bisquick™ Original pancake & baking mix
  • 1/3 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 2 tablespoons firm butter or margarine

Coffee Cake

  • 2 cups Bisquick™ Original pancake & baking mix
  • 2/3 cup milk or water
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 1 egg

2022 05 23 17 09
2022 05 23 17 09

“Mom when in Madrid, 1961”

3 20
3 20

Cambodia Demands British Museums Return Stolen Khmer Artifacts

Khmer artifacts
Khmer artifacts

It's just a beginning. -MM

Stolen Khmer artifacts from ancient Cambodian temples should be returned now. This is what Cambodian heritage authorities have told London’s Victoria & Albert and British Museum who currently profit from scores of once looted Khmer artifacts.

Until the 7th century AD, Cambodian (Khmer) arts were greatly influenced by Indian Hindu themes. By the 10th century, however, Khmer artisans had formulated their own distinct style of sculpting which scholars say is closer to the wholeness of Egyptian sculpture than it is to Indian styles. Standing sentinel among thousands of jungle temples is the massive Angkor Wat representing the largest religious complex ever built, and Banteay Srei, a comparatively tiny hospital temple.

All Khmer temples are completely covered with sculpted deities, spirits and demons. Garuda is part man and part bird, Apsaras are celestial dancing girls, Dvarapalas are demonic temple guardians with clubs and Gajasimha is a mythical animal with the body of a lion and the head of an elephant. These figures and many more were among the hundreds of sculptures smashed from their plinths, looted, and sold to British and US museums. Now Cambodia wants them back!

2022 05 19 16 41
2022 05 19 16 41

When Stolen Khmer Artifacts Become War Crimes

Cambodia’s culture minister appealed to the Victoria & Albert (V&A) and British Museums (BM) to return scores of Khmer artifacts it claims were “ stolen from its temples.” Believed to enshrine the souls of their kings and ancestors, many of these temple statues were illegally removed from Cambodia by the late Douglas Latchford.

According to the Washington Post , beginning in the 1970s, Latchford, an English explorer, arts connoisseur and author, helicoptered into remote Cambodia and amassed “one of the world’s largest private collections of Khmer treasures.” The Cambodian Ministry of Culture’s chief legal counsel and the head of its investigative team, Brad Gordon, told the BBC that trading in these items should be “considered a war crime”.

Plundering Ancient Treasures In The Fog Of Modern War

Members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 and murdered more than two million citizens. They controlled swathes of Cambodia up to the early 90s, and most of the temples were looted during these three chaotic decades. In 2012, Lachford was identified by US prosecutors in a case targeting a New York artifacts dealers , and in 2019 he was charged for smuggling stolen antiquities, but he died in 2020 before going to trial.

Phoeurng Sackona, the Cambodian Ministry of Culture, recently wrote to Nadine Dorries, her British equivalent, informing her that around 100 important cultural treasures that were stolen from sacred temples are now in two London museums. The letter reminded Dorries of the Hague Convention document signed on 14 May 1954 which protects cultural property seized during armed conflicts.

Museologists at the Victoria and Albert Museum said they “welcomed constructive dialogue” and staff at the BM said they would “consider the requests carefully and respectfully.”

2022 05 19 16 42
2022 05 19 16 42

A High Class, Low Minded, British Criminal

Brad Gordon said Lachford tried to offload his collection “right up until he went into the hospital and died.” Julia Latchford, Douglas’s daughter, says she has already transferred her entire collection to the Cambodian authorities with five major objects already repatriated. However, about 50 pieces are currently on display at the two London museums generating cash income from tourists.

Sopheap Meas, an archaeologist on the investigative team, said Cambodians believe the statues contain the “soul of a king, a god or maybe an ancestor.” Brad Gordon told the BBC that everyone in the world knew what was happening in Cambodia and that the BM and the V&A “shouldn’t have accepted these pieces.” There is little room for excuses here as Gordon added most of the hundred plus artifacts have “no export licence or permit,” therefore, the two museums are holding “stolen property that needs to come back to Cambodia,” says Gordon.

By Ashley Cowie

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Jack London, Dreamy Landscape Photographs, Muslim Lolita Fashion and New York Style Pizza

More articles, and comments as we dance and observe the world in transition. The united West (United States, the UK, and all the proxy nations) are in “free fall”, while the “global South”, the “East” are doing just fine. We will continue to report on this great period of historical change. Hopefully it should calm down and achieve stability within the next few years.

Check it out…

Chinese efforts to replenish reserves with Russian oil would not violate U.S. sanctions -White House

Imagine that.

White house: China is allowed to import oil from Russia, but not from the rest of the world.
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Apparently, there are positive outcomes from Trump all out trade assault on China. US no longer dares to start another round of an all-out trade assault against China
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From HERE

The Drive: Russia “caught by surprise” US intelligence during an unprecedented operation

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By Sergey Ignatiev

The United States organized an unprecedented reconnaissance operation with RC-135S aircraft off the Russian coast. This is reported by The Drive, an exclusive retelling of the publication of which is presented by PolitRussia.

Columnist Thomas Newdick notes that the US Air Force decided on a “highly unusual move” by arranging an “unprecedented espionage operation” off the eastern coast of Russia. We are talking about the flight in the Pacific Ocean of two strategic reconnaissance aircraft Boeing RC-135S Cobra Ball, specialized in tracking ballistic missiles.

The reason for such a mission was the test of the new RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, which, according to Newdick, is one of the six superweapons announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin as part of the message to the Federal Assembly in March 2018.

The launch of the complex was carried out at the Plesetsk cosmodrome (Arkhangelsk region) to confirm the calculated characteristics and hit the target at the Kura test site (Kamchatka Peninsula). Actually, it was the final destination that interested American intelligence.

2022 05 22 17 51
2022 05 22 17 51

Two RC-135S aircraft took off from the US Air Force Base in Alaska (Eielson) in the direction of the Far East coast of Russia.

“Flight tracking services have spotted [aircraft] near St. Matthew Island, a remote, uninhabited outpost of Alaska in the Bering Sea,” writes The Drive.

2022 05 22 17 52
2022 05 22 17 52

The aircraft, which have been known for their reconnaissance activities since the Cold War, are designed to collect information about missile systems. They are equipped with spectrometers, a camera system, antennas for intercepting telemetry data and other equipment. Newdick suggests that the planes were supposed to collect information about the flight of the Sarmat training warheads, however, apparently, something went wrong.

“Usually, Cobra Ball takes a position much closer to the Russian coast, with a focus on Klyuchi (the village in the vicinity of which the Kura test site is located – ed.). Therefore, most likely, two RC-135S aircraft were “caught by surprise”, since the arrival [of blocks in a given area] occurred before the aircraft reached their planned position, ”the publication notes.

It is noteworthy that the distance from the Keys to the island of St. Matthew is almost 1,500 kilometers. And the capabilities of the RC-135S to detect and track complexes are limited to 500-600 kilometers. It is entirely possible that the unprecedented air mission was wasted, even though the Pentagon says it was given advance notice of the Sarmat test.

2022 05 22 17 53
2022 05 22 17 53

Nevertheless, as noted by aviation historian Robert Hopkins III, who served in the Air Force for 17 years, the United States took the unprecedented step of organizing the flight of two strategic reconnaissance aircraft at once.

“The immediate takeaway from the flight seems to be that US intelligence was so desperate to collect data on this first-of-its-kind ICBM test that they sent two RC-135S aircraft to monitor it,” The Drive summarizes.

Earlier, PolitRussia told what signal the Russian Federation sent to NATO from Kaliningrad.

Red beans and rice | Southern U.S. style

The World Through Jack London’s Eyes

When most people hear the name Jack London, they think of one of the most widely read American writers who produced 50 books including Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf; some may also know him as an adventurer or social activist.

But most don’t realize that Jack London was a prolific photographer producing nearly 12,000 photographs during his lifetime, ranging from the poignant images of the ragged homeless living in London’s East End; images of the Russo-Japanese War while he was on assignment for the Hearst Syndicate; sensitive images of the South Seas islanders during his voyage aboard the Snark to the 1906 San Francisco earth quake devastation.

In his photography, London showed his powers of perception and revealed his compassion, respect and love for humanity. Most of his photographs remained unpublished until 2010 when authors Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Sara S. Hodson and Philip Adam published Jack London Photographer with 200 images.

London lived during the first true mass-media era, when the use of photographic images ushered in a new way of covering the news. With his discerning eye, London recorded historical moments through the faces and bodies of the people who lived them, creating memorable portraits of individuals whose cultural differences pale beside their common humanity.

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White Chapel on a bank Holiday, London, 1902.

2 1
Men spending the night outdoors on the Thames embankment, London, 1902.

3 1
Homeless women sleeping in Spitalfields Garden, London, 1902.

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Salvation Army barracks in London during Sunday morning rush – men who had been given tickets during the night queuing for free breakfast, 1902.

5 1
London, 1902.

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The devastation caused by the San Francisco earthquake on Kearny Street, 1906.

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The ruins after the San Francisco earthquake, 1906.

PeeWee Herman gets High with Phill Hartman

Seven Mary Three – My My

Some thoughts on SARS and SARS-COV-2 in regards to them being bioweapons

To begin with, SARS-CoV-2 did not first appear in China. It appeared in the US and France prior to China; China was just the first to report it to the WHO. The Wuhan market appears to have been a source of transmission, cold chain transmissions being documented numerous times by Chinese scientists. Different clades appeared rapidly on different continents (Chart B), something uncharacteristic of a natural virus but obvious for one spread from those continents.





To state unequivocally COVID "was not genetically engineered" seems quite naive, given geopolitics over the past decade and the exponential rise in BSL labs worldwide this century - along with the exponential rise in diseases and "pandemics" (Chart, p 44). Logic and probability simply must be applied:  How many times during the past 100 years has China attacked another country?  Used a biological or chemical weapons against any people?  How many times during the past 100 year has the US attacked (intentional destabilization is included as an attack) another country? How many times has the US used biological or chemical weapons against any people?  How about the AngloZionist Empire (US/UK/Israel)?

Qui bono?

Sellin presents no special credentials or research to uphold opinions on COVID. Working at Ft. Detrick alone is insufficient. In the past, his opinions have gotten him kicked out of military positions due at least in part to his presenting them as fact in mainstream media rather than as his opinions in a blog.  One of his published opinions states that the third of the US' three mistakes in Afghanistan was "Misstep No. 3: Our inability to manage, let alone solve, Afghanistan’s illicit narcotics trade.”  "Solve"?  For any student of geopolitics, this would appear as direct obfuscation, since it's widely assumed that Afghanistan's poppy trade was encouraged by the US, not the Taliban (who again banned immediately upon assuming leadership this year), and that the funds were used by the CIA for global psyops, including the addicting of US and UK publics.  While Sellin's words do not convince, neither, for me, do his bio or prior publications.  His opinions regarding SARS-CoV-2 require a great deal of substantiation prior to consideration.

Caren

US Regime Change in Pakistan

The West’s war against any and all competitors to its domination seems to be in full steam now

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Part 1

Brig. General Asif Haroon Raja

This is a longer editor’s note than usual, a result of the intensely changing times we find ourselves in now where we have to see and understand clearly what is going on to avoid becoming roadkill…JD

[ Editor’s Note: General Raja from Pakistan has been a long time geopolitical writer, one of a number of Pakistani military, Intel and civilian leaders that Gordon came to know during his trips to Pakistan. He spent an evening once with Imran Khan at his campaign headquarters when he was losing one of his political races for president.

There are no social promotions in the Pakistani military, government, and diplomatic orgs. Education levels are very high, based originally on the British model. Language ability begins at three, not 3 years of age, but being able to converse fluently in three languages.

Although VT has published several articles already on the US inspired and backed coup to remove Khan as Prime Minister, Raja has compiled the saga into one read, long yes, but easier to read and get a better handle on what is going on, versus reading a half dozen of the earlier articles.

The West’s war against any and all competitors to its domination seems to be in full steam now, despite China being the only peer competitor to US hegemony. John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, has long lectured that the US should focus attention on China, with Russia being a diversion.

But it seems that the US and NATO have chosen to cull Russia from the Asian alliance, with Ukraine being the doorway to upsetting Russia’s more vulnerable economy due to the substantial trade it has with the EU in goods and services.

Before the decision to put the squeeze on Russia, due to the US wanting the EU gas market all to itself, the $100 billion in oil and gas sales to the EU balanced Russia’s imports from the EU, a flourishing level of trade that kept both sides happy.

The geopolitical gangsters have now stepped in, and those regions’ trade is now thrown to the wind just when we are all trying to come out of the Covid drain of resources, putting the future economic standing of all of us at risk; and mind you, no one asked our permission to do this.

Although it gets less publicity in the US, Biden is moving on China. Recent moves to stir up Taiwan issues are progressing to give the Navy something to do, while Hong Kong tries to emerge from a drawn out Covid debacle.

China has kept a low profile on the Ukraine-NATO-Russia war, despite highly public threats from Biden against China with his silly threats to not assist Moscow in avoiding sanctions, the modern form of Western pirate activities.

So here we are with the usual suspect ‘asset strippers’ having decided that it is time to go shopping, all paid for by more debt on the American people who were not really consulted on the new offensive plan, one being launched in the middle of an intense US political war.

I am not sure that America understands that we are being asset stripped ourselves. I hope I am wrong, but one clue that I am right is the total absence of any anti-war and anti-asset stripping factions emerging to challenge what is being rammed down our throats… Jim W. Dean ]

2022 05 22 17 58
2022 05 22 17 58

First published April 21, 2022

The US high-handed tactics

The US in its bid to keep the world under its hegemony, uses its military might, diplomatic clout and other coercive tools to terrify the third world countries and till now has been quite successful. It has managed to install puppet regimes in the developing countries and whichever ruler defied its dictates was either removed from power or assassinated.

Regimes have been changed by the US either through invasions, or fomenting insurgency or a political movement, or with the help of the military or the politicians in opposition.

Ups & downs in Pak-US relations

Pakistan has remained in the camp of the US since 1954 and had become its most allied ally. Pakistan first leaned towards China after seeing the discriminatory behavior of the US in the aftermath of Sino-India border clash in 1962, and then in the 1965 war. Pak-China friendship steadily grew stronger because the US preferred India over Pakistan.

The US tilt toward India became more pronounced after 1990 and both became strategic partners. Pakistan became the most sanctioned country due to which its robust economy dwindled and never stabilized. The US highly discriminatory policy compelled Pakistan to forge strategic relationship with China and to normalize relations with Russia.

It is in this backdrop that Pakistan under former PM Imran Khan (IK) started shedding off the magic spell of Washington by making its foreign policy independent. The change came from ‘do more to no more to absolutely not’ and refusal to give a military base to the imperious USA.

IK declined the invitation of Biden to attend the democracy summit, attended Olympics ceremony in Beijing and visited Moscow last February against the wishes of the US. Pakistan adopted a neutral policy over the issue of Ukraine and abstained from voting in the UN.

Pakistan is extending support to Afghanistan which is undergoing humanitarian crisis. All these acts coupled with IK’s inclination to make Pakistan an Islamic welfare state displeased Joe Biden and in anger he never phoned him.

In keeping with its old tradition, the US launched a regime change operation in order to replace the IK regime with a compliant regime. The regime change is a prelude to the bigger game plan, the objectives of which were framed after 9/11. Before going for Pakistan’s nuclear program, the next objective would be to separate Baluchistan.

Pakistan’s inanities and dependence upon the USA

Ever since Pakistan got wedded with the USA, it has gone through painful experiences. It has paid a heavy price for its mistake to put all its eggs in the basket of double-dealing USA. The US has used it for achieving its short term objectives and then discarded it like a used tissue paper. It has been constantly meddling into the internal affairs of Pakistan to keep it in line.

It was easy for the US to treat Pakistan as its satellite state since all the military and political leaders of Pakistan pursued a policy of appeasement to keep the imperialist USA in good humor.

The politicians and the media in Pakistan sell their souls and make compromises on national interests cheaply. Our political leaders have been seeking American help whenever in distress, or blamed the military establishment for their misfortunes. Some even sought India’s help.

PTI-PDM tussle

The 9-party Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), which later on morphed into a 13-party alliance built a narrative against the ruling PTI regime that it was a party selected by the military establishment and due to its incompetence, inflation and prices spiraled to record breaking levels in its 3 ½ years tenure, the economy slumped, and the lives of the people became wretched. The establishment was jeered over its poor selection.

Once the ruling regime failed to fulfil its tall promises and couldn’t provide any relief to the masses, the narrative of the PDM began to appeal to the senses of the disillusioned people. Their growing resentment galvanized the spirits of the PDM.

As long as the military was on one-page with the ruling party, the PDM remained weak and divided, but no sooner the military became neutral, the squabbling opposition rived in infighting parties got united.

Suspected financial support of the US to the PDM could be another reason of their boosted spirits. The two major parties PML-N and PPP used the dirty money generously on horse trading to win over the loyalties of PTI’s dissident MNAs and to entice the allies of the PTI — MQM-P, PML-Q and BAP as well as Jahangir Tareen-Aleem groups to their side.

The conspiratorial letter

Pakistan’s outgoing Ambassador in Washington Asad Majeed sent a telegraphic cable to the Foreign Office on March 7, giving details of his meeting with the US undersecretary of South Asian Affairs Donald Lu.

The latter expressed his discomfiture over IK’s visit to Moscow and Pakistan abstaining from voting in the UN to condemn Russian invasion of Ukraine. He stated that if he didn’t mend his ways, a No-Confidence Motion (NCM) would be brought against him.

He summed up by saying that any regime other than IK would be acceptable and forgivable. The threat was conveyed openly since never before any Pakistani civil or military leader had defied the dictates of Washington.

Battle for regime change

The battle for regime change started after the PDM moved a NCM on March 8. The PTI didn’t attach much importance to the ‘letter-gate’, since such threats had been a routine affair. Above all, it didn’t want to lose the support of some of its MNAs suspected of being part of the conspiracy.

Alarm bells sounded when ten dissidents of PTI took refuge in Sindh House (SH) Islamabad on March 18. The renegades were shifted to Marriott Hotel after the SH was stormed by the activists of PTI. The opposition claimed that as many as 25 PTI members had been taken on board.

The PTI after failing to win back the loyalties of the deserters, moved a case in the apex court to disqualify the floor crossers but couldn’t evoke a positive response since the accusation was based on conjectures. The other reason given was that the court didn’t want to meddle into the parliamentary affairs.

Foreign conspiracy card

Learning that loyalties of some of the PTI allies had become doubtful, it became obvious that the dice had upturned in favor of the opposition. IK and his core team decided to play the foreign conspiracy narrative as a rearguard action, which was not a concoction. This narrative was played since the military establishment and the ISI had decided to remain neutral and to stay out of politics.

IK assembled a huge crowd of his fans at Islamabad on March 27 and waved a letter stating that the US had hatched a conspiracy to remove him from power. Evidence of all the meetings of PDM leaders with the US officials in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi was collected. A campaign was launched against the floor crossers propagating that crores of Rupees had been doled out to them and the fence sitters.

Purpose was to establish a connection of the masterminds with the PDM leaders and the dissidents, to put the USA on the defensive, shame the conspirators, to put fear into the hearts of the dissidents, and build a narrative to win the sympathies of the public that he was being punished on account of pursuing an independent foreign policy.

IK didn’t explain as to why this important letter was not discussed in the right quarters from March 8 to March 29. One reason could be that he was hopeful of winning back the loyalties of his party dissidents.

The contents of the letter were eventually discussed in the National Security Council (NSC) on March 30. The participants agreed that the language of the letter was undiplomatic. Based on their inputs, the case was brought before the Parliamentary Security Committee on March 31. A demarche was given to the US charge d’ affairs in Islamabad, and also in Washington, which happened for the first time.

Foreign Minister Qureshi during his visit to Beijing brought the matter into the notice of his counterpart. China made an announcement that it will not accept another round of cold war in this region.

Last ditch effort to save the crown

Seeing the writing on the wall that the PDM had won the number game, instead of getting depressed or exercising one of the options of resigning, or dissolving the National Assembly (NA), or facing the NCM, IK remained in a fighting mood and asserted that he will fight till the last ball. He also talked of a big surprise.

No one could guess as to what surprise he could spring. Most thought that having lost the political battle, he was bluffing.

Vote of no-confidence – April 3

The session of the NA was held in the morning of April 3, but to the utter surprise of the opposition leaders who were 100% sure of victory in the voting, the deputy Speaker Qasim Suri after listening to the charge sheet of conspiracy and treason under Article 5 of the constitution by the newly appointed law minister Fawad Choudhry, read out the prepared script and rejected the NCM in a huff.

It left the 190 members of the opposition gaping in disbelief. The Speaker reconfirmed the ruling of his deputy.  Soon after, the PM dissolved the NA. The waiting President completed the last formality by issuing the dissolution notification. All this was preplanned and executed within minutes.

The opposition leaders had remained so engrossed in buying the loyalties of MNAs and in completing the numbers, and were so excited to have collected much more votes than was required that they never took into consideration this sort of a bombshell which would paralyze them.

What was intriguing was that instead of rejoicing the exit of the PTI which had become a nightmare for them, the whole lot of opposition members along with the turncoats got demoralized as if victory had been stolen from them. What was most disquieting for them was that the tag of ‘Ghadars’ (traitors) was added to the tag of ‘Thieves & Looters’. Master stroke played by IK left his opponents and their patrons aghast.

What worried the opposition was that things had gone against the script. IK had come out of the ‘do or die battle’ as a victor since he had built a strong narrative to win the empathies of his voters.

His theme of ‘victim of foreign conspiracy’, and his boldness to expose the conspirators would help him to sweep the next elections. His popularity graph had fallen considerably, shot up as was seen from the recent local body’s poll results.

Court battle

There was complete political breakdown compounded by a constitutional crisis. Finding themselves in a quandary, the legal wizards of the two mainstream opposition parties rushed to the Supreme Court (SC) and submitted petitions to declare the ruling of Qasim Suri illegal and to reincarnate the dead government.

The SC Bar Council insisted upon the SC to take suo-moto notice and take up the issue on Sunday. The 190 PDM legislators and defectors raved mad for being dubbed as traitors. They argued that if the matter was so sensitive, why such a belated action, and why only a demarche, and why not an apology was sought from the US?

The battle shifted from the parliament to the SC. It was quite strange that the SC which had rejected the petition of the PTI seeking decision over the defection clause saying that it was the internal matter of the parliament, this time agreed within an hour to assemble a bench on Sunday to discuss the verdict given by the deputy speaker duly authenticated by the speaker.

The chief justice Bandiyal called a meeting of senior judges at his house on holiday and held discussions with them. The five-member bench held sessions daily and gave the unanimous ruling on April 7.

It declared the ruling of the deputy speaker unconstitutional and against the law. It restored the NA and directed the Speaker to complete the process of voting on April 9, starting 10.30 am. It was now the turn of the opposition leaders to celebrate and for the PTI to feel dejected.

The ‘letter-gate’ bomb was not considered a serious matter by the SC. Washington denied the allegation. IK after losing the legal battle complained that the US-inspired conspiracy had been legitimized and the traitors let off the hook.

Day of high drama

April 9 was a day of high drama. The proceedings of NA started on time but the Speaker Qaiser instead of holding voting allowed the PTI legislators to resort to delaying tactics by playing up the conspiracy theory and further ratcheting the jangled nerves of the opposition and provoking them to create a ruckus.

The hide and seek play went on until near midnight. The purpose could be either to avoid the voting, which was not possible since the SC had given the date and cutout time of voting. The Speaker knew that if he didn’t comply with the court orders before 2400 hours, he would be proceeded against under the charge of contempt of court.

The only possible motive behind the inordinate delay could be to cause nervous breakdown to the dissidents, forcing them in sheer panic to revert to the treasury benches.

The jittery NCM movers contemplated approaching the apex court to arrest the obstinate Speaker. After 2300 hours, the doors of the SC and of the IHC opened up; additional security forces and prisoner buses arrived. At about 2330 hours, the COAS and the DG ISI landed in the PM House in a helicopter and held a meeting with the PM. These fast paced developments gave rise to many tantalizing rumors.

At that belated stage the Speaker after meeting the PM stated that the PM had handed him the US letter which can be read by any member in his chamber. He ended the proceedings melodramatically minutes before 2400 hours by resigning from his seat and inviting former Speaker of PML-N Ayaz Sadiq to complete the proceedings. The latter conducted the voting in which the opposition bagged 174 votes.

For the first time in Pakistan’s history an elected PM was voted out of power through NCM. IK’s premature ouster upheld the track record that no PM could complete five years tenure.

 

Regime change in Pakistan

Part 2

Asif Haroon Raja

Change of guards

On April 11, the opposition leader Shahbaz Sharif (SS) was elected as the new PM; he secured 174 votes. The PTI boycotted the voting. SS straightaway announced a relief package in the form of 10% increase in pensions and fixed Rs 25000 as minimum wage for the laborer effective from April, but soon the date was shifted from April to May.

When President Alvi regretted conducting the oath taking ceremony of the PM on April 12, the Chairman Senate Sanjrani performed this duty. Stock exchange became bullish and the Rupee value appreciated.

Oath taking ceremony of the new cabinet members numbering 34 from different coalition partners was again performed by the Senate Chairman.

People’s backlash

Responding to the call given by Imran Khan (IK), the people came out on the streets on the night of 10/11 April. Huge rallies were taken out all over the country and in western countries to record their protest against the decision of the Supreme Court (SC).

They glowed their mobile torches, carried placards and chanted slogans in favor of IK and against the army, the US and the incoming rulers. Social media launched a vicious propaganda campaign to smear the image of Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa. The BBC issued a frivolous report giving manufactured details of the happenings in the PM House on the night of April 9.

An impression has been built as if the army’s top leadership was part of the plot of regime change. Concocted stories and fake audio tapes of senior generals circulated on social media to discredit the army. Letter-gate scandal is being drummed up fiercely.

Establishment’s response

The top brass of the army took a serious note of the anti-army vilification campaign and the circulating myths and notions by some quarters to malign the institution, aimed at driving a wedge between army and the society.

They expressed their concern in the annual formation commanders conference presided by Gen Bajwa on April 12 and pledged to uphold the constitution and rule of law at all costs and to defend the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Pakistan against all external and external threats with full force.

DG ISPR’s Press Briefing

After the conference in GHQ, the DG ISPR Maj Gen Iftikhar Babar held a press briefing on April 14 and made an effort to put the record straight and to dispel the misperceptions. An impression has been built by the ousted PTI that Gen Bajwa was part of the conspiracy to make the vote of no confidence successful. The factor of ‘establishment’s neutrality’ has become a sour point.

He clarified that the US had never asked for a military base; there will be no martial law; Gen Bajwa didn’t seek extension in service; there is no division within the army; army stays out of politics.

Options were not given to the former PM by the army chief, but those were put forward by the government and the establishment was asked to resolve the political crisis; the PM visit to Moscow was in consultation with the GHQ; the word ‘conspiracy’ was not written in the cable sent by Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington.

A demarche was sent to Washington on account of the undiplomatic language used by the US undersecretary, which was noted as interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs. Lastly, the nuclear program is in safe hands.

Veterans tilt towards Imran Khan

The briefing did help in deflecting the anti-army tirade but didn’t cool down the tempers of the PTI activists and fans inside and outside the country. A new debate over the subtle difference between the words ‘conspiracy’ and ‘interference’ has been generated. For many, it amounts to the same.

What is worrying for the army top brass is that never before the veterans openly expressed their affections for IK and their resentment against the establishment’s interference or neutrality. These feelings were discernible within a segment of serving officers as well.

Gen Bajwa’s speech at Islamabad Security Dialogue on April 17 favoring the US and condemning Russian invasion of Ukraine at a time when the alleged US conspiracy theory was the hottest topic was not well received.

Gen Bajwa’s address in Lahore

To cool down their emotions, Gen Bajwa had to address officers in Rawalpindi and Lahore garrisons. At Lahore the interaction went on for over four hours during which he had to answer hundreds of loaded questions.

The crux of his briefing was that IK had been helped in forming governments in Islamabad and in Punjab, he was guided at every step to improve his policies, and he stood committed to the one-page doctrine, ignoring the banter and accusations leveled by the opposition.

He shared his difficulties saying that IK never listened to the advice rendered, didn’t change the chief ministers of KP and Punjab, and wasted all his energies in chasing his political opponents instead of focusing on economics and governance. He candidly admitted that the tiff developed over the posting out of DG ISI Lt Gen Faiz in last August.

His concluding remarks that he will welcome IK if he gets elected in next elections which are not far and will extend full cooperation raised eyebrows. By the time the elections are held, either he would be attending farewell dinners in Oct/Nov or would have joined the retired club. The onus of cooperation or non-cooperation will be on the new chief and not him.

The PTI ex minister Fawad spilled the beans and laid to rest the conspiracy theory on April 20 by stating that his party’s ouster was the result of strained ties with the establishment which couldn’t be repaired despite concerted efforts.

Imran Khan’s backlash

Imran Khan in the meanwhile gave a call to his party activists, followers and fans to stage a protest over the ouster of his party on the night of 10/11 April. The response was overwhelming.

His narrative is that he had been punished for refusing to toe the US dictates, to meet the CIA Director and to give a base to the CIA, to condemn Russia and to make Pakistan’s foreign policy independent. He is lashing out at his political opponents and his party dissidents who had floored his party with the help of the USA. He has held public meetings in Peshawar, Karachi and Lahore in which the attendance was mammoth.

IK fiery speeches in the public meetings were emotive and provocative and amounted to incitement to violence. IK’s charisma that had peaked in Oct 2011 has once again catapulted with a big bang.

He will keep increasing the temperature and will restart politics of non-cooperation and agitation to fail the government. He is demanding early elections, or else he would block the whole country. True to his words, he is proving more dangerous to his opponents after being ousted from power.

While he abstained from ridiculing the army, he stated that neither the army nor any external power could safeguard the country and democracy but the people were the real defenders and saviors.

New Government’s challenges

For the new government, the plate is full to the brim with a plethora of compound problems. Each member has to remove the tag of ‘traitor’ for which a probe committee has been formed. Immediate challenges will be depleting foreign exchange reserves, soaring public debt, foreign debt, trade imbalance, fiscal deficit, current account deficit, and the new budget in May.

Managing the cabal of 12 political parties that were part of the PDM, each hungering for lucrative cabinet seats will be taxing for the new PM SS who took oath on April 12. He had to labor hard for a week to convince the coalition partners to accept the allotted ministries and take oaths of their offices. The PPP got the lion’s share and is still aspiring for the seats of President, Chairman Senate and at least two seats of governors.

Mohsin Dawar and Ali Wazir, the two leaders of PTM showed their intent by brazenly expressing their resentment over the air strikes carried out against the hideouts of the TTP in Khost and Kunar. Akhtar Mengal felt so bitter over the security forces operation against the terrorists in Chaghi that he didn’t attend the oath taking ceremony.

The BNP-M, and ANP didn’t accept any portfolios in the cabinet due to their reservations. Cooperation of BNP-M and PTM will be conditional to Pak Army’s disassociation from counter terrorism, and support of the MQM-P will be subject to meeting their 7-point demands, most important of which is reopening their offices in Karachi.

In other words, Akhtar Mengal would insist upon withdrawal of Frontier Corps and ISI/MI from interior Balochistan. The PTM would seek withdrawal of the army from former FATA, and the MQM would like the wings of Sindh Rangers to be clipped and influence of Altaf’s unit/sector commanders to return.

Both the PPP and the PML-N would be interested in defanging the NAB, and in civilianizing the ISI. The ANP is still tied to the agenda of Pashtunistan. The PTM and the ANP are likely to get close to the Taliban regime in Kabul, ignite Pakhtun nationalism, and foment misgivings between Pakistan and Afghanistan. They would thus facilitate the CIA’s job to do the rest.

While restoring the health of the sick economy is the biggest challenge, SS main worry would be how to keep the greedy allies appeased and united, and above all how to deal with the confrontational politics of PTI. The government is pinning hopes on the foreign funding case against the PTI pending in the ECP court since 2016 which is being concluded within a month. It is hoping that if the decision goes against the party, it could pave the way for its disbandment.

As a tit-for-tat, a series of corruption cases would be initiated against the PTI leaders. Unlike the last tenure of PML-N in which it was very soft towards the vandalism of the PTI, this time it would handle them more firmly. They will be dealt with the way the TLP activists were brutalized by the former regime.

The political situation in Punjab is still in choppy waters. After the physical brawl in the provincial assembly in which the Deputy Speaker and the Speaker Pervez Elahi were injured on the day of voting, the Governor Punjab Cheema belonging to PTI refused to give oath to the newly elected Chief Minister Hamza Shahbaz son of SS.

He cancelled the resignation of former chief minister Buzdar on technical grounds. The PTI’s President Alvi has so far ignored the request of the PM to de-notify Cheema. It’s a complete muddle.

Points to ponder over

Would it not have been better if the PTI was allowed to complete its tenure? There would have been no conspiracy card, horse trading, upwelling of anti-army emotions and character assassination of the army chief, IK’s popularity wouldn’t have got a shot in the arm, and Pakistan would have been saved from a national regime comprising ill-reputed parliamentarians. Barring the newcomers, almost all other cabinet ministers are on bail and court cases are pending against them.

Interestingly, the IMF wants the entire federal cabinet to declare their assets, bank accounts, tax returns and business details. This is the biggest bombshell dropped upon the plunderers.

The big question is whether fresh elections would resolve the chronic problems? Whenever elections are held, the losers will not accept the results and the tug of war will recommence. With tainted institutions, and soiled politicians and bureaucrats, no progress is possible, whether the next regime will be of PML-N or the PTI.

It will suffer a similar fate with zero results. Pakistan will continue to lurch from one crisis to another and the foreign conspirators will continue to play the game of snake and ladders with our mini mind leaders.

The only way out is to carry out electoral, judicial, bureaucratic, police, economic and education reforms. These cannot be done by a single political party or a weak coalition. The incumbent regime comprising politicians from different parties, backgrounds and ideologies, with some branded as anti-Pakistan, looters, money launderers and criminals, not much can be expected. The case is akin to the adage, “too many cooks will spoil the broth”.

SS’s speed and efficiency would be hugely hindered by the selfish coalition partners, confrontational politics of the PTI, and the tainted reputation of the judiciary and the police.

Would the conciliatory comments of Gen Qamar Bajwa and change in regime ease tensions with the US and alter the interventionist and bossy policy of Washington? The answer is a big NO. The only possible change could be that the US, IMF and the EU become helpful and a bit more generous, the FATF removes Pakistan from the grey list.

Generosity of the US will of course not be cost free. Would Pakistan cede to the US demand for a military base or airspace, and if so, what impact will it have on Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan and China?

What effects Gen Bajwa’s harsh comments will have upon Pakistan’s relations with Russia, which promised oil and grains at a cheap price, and resolving gas shortages? Vladimir Putin instead of reacting, showed grace by congratulating the new PM.

Would falling back into the magic spell of the US change the objectives of the Indo-US-Israel nexus against Pakistan? Do we still consider the trio harmless and friends of Pakistan?

So far the vibes from China are positive. Rejuvenation of CPEC at a faster pace is the only way to recover our economy and to make Pakistan self-reliant.

If the incumbent regime tries to delay elections, the PTI is likely to again repeat its old tactics of long march after Ramadhan, and this time stage sit-in at Islamabad, Peshawar, Lahore, Karachi and Quetta in an attempt to paralyze the state machinery. If so, will it be possible for the law enforcement agencies to block the sea of people from different directions?

Taking into consideration the exceptionally high emotions of the people, is the stage not getting set for chaos and anarchy? Will the establishment remain neutral in the face of building volcanoes?

The writer is retired Brig Gen, war veteran, defence, security & political analyst, international columnist, author of five books, Chairman Thinkers Forum Pakistan, Director Measac Research Centre, takes part in TV talk shows, and delivers talks. asifharoonraja@gmail.com  

How to Survive the First 90 Days After the Collapse

A tad gloomy, and fear-mongering. However, the content is valuable.

Have some fun, check this oldie out…

Dragnet 1967 – The Big Explosion

Hot Damn! It’s The Soggy Bottom Boys! | O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Reminds me how Morrison lost his election…

When Photos Looked Like Paintings: Dreamy Landscape Photographs Taken By Leonard Misonne

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Belgian photographer Leonard Misonne (1870-1943) trained as an engineer before discovering photography. Raised in Gilly, Belgium, the photographer traveled throughout his homeland and beyond to capture the landscape and people of Europe in the Pictorialist style.

Photographs, characterized by soft, painterly scenes, were created through alternative printing processes that utilize materials such as oil and gum bichromate. The Pictorialist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries sought to elevate photography to the level of other fine arts such as painting and sculpture.

Misonne said, “The sky is the key to the landscape.”

This philosophy is clear in many of Misonne’s images, often filled with billowing clouds, early morning fog, or rays of sunlight. The artist excelled at capturing his subjects in dramatic, directional light, illuminating figures from behind, which resulted in a halo effect. Favoring stormy weather conditions, Misonne often found his subjects navigating the streets under umbrellas or braced against the gusts of a winter blizzard.

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Survival Bugout – Survival Scenarios

EMP attack.

Why is China suddenly buying up so much Australian wheat?

Yesterday, I wrote a mention of a news article regarding “China increased wheat import from Australia by over 500%”.
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And now we know the reason…
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When searching “China aid to Afghanistan”, and you will notice that China has been delivering all types of food to Afghanistan provinces. This has been the case in every Afghanistan province ever since the Western “crusaders” (the United States and it’s proxies) left Afghanistan.
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Below is a search using China give Afghanistan rice:
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China distributes rice to Afghanistan, every person (family) 100kg, 50kg per bag.
http://greads.net/post/3085499.html
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YouTube footage:
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The US looted the entire Afghanistan bank account, but China is now helping  Afghanistan rebuild by delivering food to save lives.
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A lot of goodwill that china did and is still doing (across the world) is never reported by the Western  propaganda machine, they will only tell you that China building roads, rail, school … across the world are debt traps. You know the drill “What aobut the cost?”
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Welcome to world world order and propaganda control by the Western governments.

US Drawing Up Plans To Sink the Russian Black Sea Fleet: Ukrainian Official

Moscow has offered a diplomatic solution to the Black Sea standoff.

JEA: The US is really trying to start World War III with Russia by planning to sink Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. If they think that Russia isn’t going to respond, then they’ve got another thing coming.

By Kyle Anzalone

Shortly after Reuters published an exclusive story that the White House was looking to move advanced anti-ship missiles to Ukraine, an official in Kiev said that the US is making a plan to sink Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs adviser Anton Gerashchenko tweeted, “The US is preparing a plan to destroy the [Russian] Black Sea Fleet. The effective work of the Ukrainians on [Russian] warships convinced [the US] to prepare a plan to unblock the [Ukrainian] ports. Deliveries of powerful anti-ship weapons are being discussed.”

Gerashchenko cited the Reuters report on Washington’s effort to ship Harpoon and Naval Strike Missiles to Ukraine. The missiles have a range of up to 300 km and cost $1.5 million each.

Three US officials and two Congressional sources told the outlet the White House was still working out the details for sending the advanced weapons to Ukraine. Logistical issues and the possibility the US would have to remove a launcher from one of its ships to send to Ukraine are current obstacles to completing the transfer.

Responding to a question from Newsweek, the State Department did not deny it was working on a plan to take out the Russian fleet. “As the conflict is changing, so too is our military assistance to deliver the critical capabilities Ukraine needs for today’s fight as Russia’s forces engage in a renewed offensive in eastern Ukraine,” a spokesperson said.

However, the Department of Defense issued a sharp denial of the claims made by the Ukrainians official. “I can tell you definitively that that’s not true,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday afternoon. The Pentagon denial applied only to the Ukrainian official’s assertion the US was helping sink the Black Sea fleet, and did not refer to the proposed anti-ship weapons transfer.

Gerashchenko said the attack would help to open up Ukraine’s ports. Russia currently controls the Black Sea and maintains a blockade. The UN has called for an easing of restrictions in the sea to allow food exports from Ukraine to help alleviate global food shortages.

Moscow has offered a diplomatic solution to the Black Sea standoff. On Thursday, the Kremlin proposed lifting the blockage in exchange for sanctions relief. The Russian Foreign Ministry said the problem goes beyond the blockade and includes Western sanctions restricting fertilizer exports. “You have to not only appeal to the Russian Federation but also look deeply at the whole complex of reasons that caused the current food crisis. [Sanctions] interfere with normal free trade, encompassing food products including wheat, fertilizers and others,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said.

New York-style pizza at home, v2.0

A MUST watch video.

Muslim Lolita Fashion Is A New Trend Inspired By Japan

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In an awesome fashion mash-up that nobody could’ve foreseen, Muslim fans of the Japanese lolita fashion trend have begun pairing these sweet-as-candy outfits with their hijabs, creating a unique new style that Japanese lolita fans are falling in love with.

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The lolita trend, at its most basic, involves wearing modernized Victorian- or Rococo-style dresses and outfits that are heavily accessorized and painstakingly coordinated into elaborate costumes. The trend’s fans (called ‘lolitas’) then meet up at various events to spend time together and appreciate each others’ outfits (or, as they call them, ‘coords’).

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Two Muslim lolitas, Noor and Alyssa, have pioneered the combination of lolita costumes with their Muslim hijabs. While fittingly stylish and flamboyant, their costumes still fully adhere to their religious principles.

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EMP (a short film)

One Guy Changed My Pizza Game Forever

Seven Mary Three – Cumbersome (Official Video)

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Big changes in Australia, LEGO Colosseum, Northlandz, Good Charlotte, Dragnet, and Creamy Tomato and Tortellini Soup

We continue with the global geo-political changes. The world is changing, and we can see this. The entire Pacific energy balance has been or is in the process of reshaping with the loss of Morrison, but don’t hold your breath. The USA owns Australia. Never the less, depending on the new leadership, you will see a changing power alignment transform the Pracific rim.

First up…

Bye Bye Morrison

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison conceded defeat in a national election Saturday, saying, while vote counting was incomplete, the opposition Labor party looked likely to form a government.

“Tonight I have spoken to the Leader of the Opposition and the incoming Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and I’ve congratulated him on his election victory this evening,” Morrison said at a televised speech in Sydney.

Morrison added he would stand down as leader of the Liberal party.

The capitulation ends eight years and nine months in power for Morrison’s conservative coalition. Morrison became prime minister in 2018 after several leadership changes.

Lithuania To Be Cut Off From Russian Oil, Gas, and electricity, Sunday!

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The country of Lithuania will be cut-off from all Russian oil, natural gas flows, and electricity, starting Sunday morning.

Developing . . . check back.

No global grain shortage, says India, defends curbs on export

India is right. I believe that it was the 4 world major nasty western capitalist food companies running scare campaign to increase profits.

Article HERE

China’s April imports of Australian wheat surge 525.72% despite hostility from Canberra – Global Times

National food security interests and peoples well-being come before politics. Perhaps, preparing for the next United States / proxy brainless extreme move…

From HERE

Dragnet 1967 Season 3 Episode 12

Oh, what memories! You all are going to love this!

UTTER CARNAGE: The Stock Market Is Coming Apart Like A 20 Dollar Suit As Fear Sweeps Through Wall Street

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This is starting to get really bad.  By now, you have probably heard that the stock market crashed again on Wednesday.  The carnage was immense, and the big names on Wall Street are deeply concerned about what will happen next.  But this wasn’t supposed to happen.  After falling for six weeks in a row, this was supposed to be the week when stock prices finally bounced back.  Needless to say, that isn’t what we are witnessing.  In fact, we just witnessed the worst day for the Dow since the early days of the COVID pandemic

The Dow shed 1,164.52 points, or 3.57%, to 31,490.07, or the average’s biggest decline since June 2020. The S&P 500 traded 4.04% lower to 3,923.68, also the worst drop since 2020. The Nasdaq Composite slipped 4.73% to 11,418.15, which is the largest fall in the tech-heavy index since May 5. The selling was broad and intense on Wall Street with just eight members of the S&P 500 in the green.

If the Dow breaks below the all-important 30,000 psychological barrier, this steady slide in stock prices could quickly evolve into a full-blown avalanche.

There is already a tremendous amount of fear on Wall Street, and at this point it won’t take much of a push to set off a colossal wave of panic.

On Wednesday, disappointing results from two of our largest retailers were being blamed for the renewed wave of selling.  Target “reported a stunning 52% drop in profit for the first quarter”, and Walmart stock “had its worst day in 35 years” after reporting numbers that were well below expectations.

It turns out that U.S. consumers have a lot less discretionary income to spend at retailers these days because they are having to spend so much more on basics such as food and gasoline.  And we are being warned that all retailers are likely to suffer as long as this highly inflationary environment persists…

“Any company that relies on households and discretionary purchases will likely suffer this quarter because a lot of discretionary income has been funneled to food and energy prices,” said Jack Ablin, founding partner of Cresset Capital.

There is only so much money to go around, and as I explained a few days ago, this inflationary spiral is systematically destroying our standard of living.

If prices stay at their current levels, the average U.S. household will spend approximately $5,000 a year just on gasoline…

U.S. households are now spending the equivalent of $5,000 a year on gasoline, up from $2,800 a year ago, according to Yardeni Research.

Of course gasoline prices are not going to stay at their current levels.

They just keep going higher and higher and higher.

In fact, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has now hit a brand new record high for nine days in a row

Wednesday was the 9th straight day that gas prices hit an all-time record high!

9 DAYS IN A ROW–

The price at the pump is now $4.56 per a gallon of regular gas.

Diesel also hit a new record. The price of diesel is now at $5.57 per gallon.

But if you think that $4.56 is bad, just wait until we get to the end of the summer.

JPMorgan is warning that the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States could hit 6 bucks just a few months from now…

The average price for gasoline in California hit $6 a gallon Tuesday for the first time — and analysts at JPMorgan are warning that price could be the national average before the end of the summer.

The startling forecast comes as US gas prices have surged to record highs in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, casting a shadow over the economy.

“There is a real risk the price could reach $6+ a gallon by August,” Natasha Kaneva, head of global oil and commodities research at JPMorgan, told CNN in an email on Tuesday.

In a desperate attempt to get the inflationary spiral that they created under control, the Federal Reserve has started to recklessly raise interest rates.

Of course this is going to cause the housing market to crash, and we just got even more evidence that this is already starting to happen…

Homebuyer demand for mortgages tumbled last week as the average interest rate on the most popular U.S. home loan hovered near a 13-year high, a sign the red-hot housing market may be starting to cool off, according to new data from the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Mortgage applications to purchase a home dropped 12% on a weekly basis and are down 15% compared with the same week one year ago.

The housing bubble will not survive without low interest rates.

Neither will the stock market bubble.

But Fed Chair Jerome Powell doesn’t seem to care.

He is so spooked by inflation that he can’t seem to see any of our other rapidly growing problems.  In fact, he is now telling us that his institution may need “to consider moving more aggressively” in the months ahead…

Fed Chair Jerome Powell told a Wall Street Journal conference that the U.S. central bank will “have to consider moving more aggressively” if inflation that is running at a four-decade high fails to ease after earlier rate hikes.

In other words, Powell is openly admitting that the Fed may raise rates at an even faster pace by the end of this calendar year.

Oh boy.

The only reason why stock prices ever got so ridiculously high is because the Fed kept interest rates way too low for way too long, and because the Fed kept pumping trillions of fresh dollars into the system.

Now the Fed is taking away the punch bowl and is aggressively raising interest rates.

This is inevitably going to cause the bubble that they created to completely and utterly implode.

So if you want to know who to blame for the coming financial crisis, just look at the Federal Reserve.

Those that follow my work on a regular basis know that I have been a severe critic of the Fed for a very long time.

They got us into this mess, and now everyone is hoping that they can get us out of it.

You can put your faith in them if you want, but meanwhile I would highly advise that you brace yourself for the giant crash that has now started to happen.

In This Place (2007 Remaster)

This song takes me back to when I was 16 years old.

Slow-Cooker Creamy Tomato and Tortellini Soup

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As they say, opposites attract. That’s certainly the case with sweet, acidic tomatoes and creamy dairy—in all its many forms. After all, it’s this better-together combination that makes lasagna so luxurious, pizza so mouthwatering and grilled cheese and tomato soup so irresistible. So when we set out to make an extra-easy slow-cooker soup, we knew we wanted it to feature this combo. But hold on—dairy in the slow cooker? That’s usually a less-than-ideal combination (dairy can easily curdle in the slow cooker). That’s why the trick to this recipe is waiting until the end to add the cream and cheesy tortellini. That’s right, we decided a double-dose of dairy would be the perfect complement to the tomatoes in this soup, and the result is rich, velvety and very comforting! And that’s not all, the dollop of fresh pesto adds bright, anise-tinged notes and the sprinkle of shredded Parmesan adds nutty richness that take this simple soup to the next level!

Ingredients

  • 2 cans (28 oz each) Muir Glen™ organic fire roasted crushed tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 1/2 cups Progresso™ chicken broth (from 32-oz carton)
  • 1/2 cup finely chopped green onions, white parts only
  • 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
  • 1 cup heavy whipping cream
  • 1 package (9 oz) refrigerated cheese tortellini
  • 1/4 cup refrigerated basil pesto
  • 1/2 cup shredded Parmesan cheese (2 oz)

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2022 05 21 21 14

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2022 05 21 21 1b5

U.S. CREDIT CARD SYSTEMS — DOWN

This is in accordance and in coordination with the Russian hacking group that warned that they would shut down Western financial systems. -MM
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A massive problem has arisen in the past hour, nationwide, in the USA; Credit Card processor terminals are “down” all over the country.   From a supermarket in northeastern New Jersey, to gas stations in Ohio, to LOWES in Florida, and even stores in California, consumers are standing in line not knowing what to do because they cannot pay for their purchases.

The Hal Turner Radio Show is getting reports from listeners and website readers all over the country that this is taking place. Reports started coming in about 3:30 eastern US time and are continuing to come in.

This is a fast-developing story but the bottom line is simple: Cash is king.  People with cash money can get what they choose to buy, people with plastic cards cannot.

VISA and MASTERCARD are showing as having a sudden surge of problems as reported to DownDetector.com

UPDATE 6:16 PM EDT —

VISA continues to suffer severe outages

Dollar is dying there is no question about it

We are not idiots

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2022 05 21 21 00

Green Tambourine – The Lemon Pipers

Oh yeah. You just had to experience the 60’s to believe and understand what it was like.

Why were there patents on SARS and SARS-COV-2 before they were “discovered”?

Why were there patents on SARS and SARS-COV-2 before they were “discovered”?

From HERE

Ralph Baric got $46 million from Fauci & Co. to weaponize SARS-COV-2 and Wuhan got $3.7 million. It’s like saying the peanut gallery hit the grand slam. See the attached timeline.

China was happy to get its hands on the genome, to prepare for the expected US bio-attack, which they have suffered repeatedly since 1935, covered here… (Complete found HERE).

But, it cost them getting tarred with the Wuhan Virus/Kung Flu tag around the world, which Baric and Fauci started propagandizing in 2016. See the attached paper and its title. Baric is the paper’s principle author and he and Fauci thank Wuhan in the acknowledgements.

By getting their hands on SARS-COV-2 early on, the Chinese could get a jump on rapid vaccine development and were well-prepared for the 2019 Military World Games.

It possibly saved millions of Chinese lives.

12 Nightmarish Economic Trends That We Should Expect To See During The 2nd Half Of 2022

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If you thought that the economic news was crazy during the first half of 2022, just wait until we get to the second half.  So many of the problems that we are experiencing now are going to continue to intensify, and Americans are becoming more pessimistic about economic conditions with each passing day.  In fact, as you will see below, a whopping 85 percent of us believe that it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that the economy will go through a recession at some point during the next year.  Of course the truth is that if all we have to suffer through is a “recession”, we would be extremely fortunate.  Our leaders have lost control of the economy, and many of us are extremely concerned about what is coming next.  The following are 12 nightmarish economic trends that we should expect to see during the second half of 2022…

#1 Gas prices will continue to surge higher, and many Americans will be shocked by how high they eventually go.  If you can believe it, in Washington State at least one gas station has now reprogrammed their gas pumps “to make room for double-digit pricing”

At the 76 Gas Station in Auburn, Washington located at 1725 Auburn Way North, gas pumps have been reprogrammed to make room for double-digit pricing. In March, they still had single-digit programming.

A spokesperson at 76 confirmed to The Post Millennial that the gas pumps were reprogrammed to allocate for double-digit pricing. Although not confirming that they are expecting prices to increase up to $10.00 or more, the current trend suggests the possibility.

Supplies of fuel will continue to get even tighter in the months ahead.  Earlier today, I heard from a reader on the east coast and a reader in the middle of the country that both said that diesel is now being rationed where they live.  So far, I have not been able to confirm that this is happening on a widespread basis.

#2 We are being warned that there could be extended blackouts in some parts of the nation during the summer months.  It is being reported that the middle of the country is particularly at risk

About 100 million Americans face power blackouts this summer as roasting weather, overstretched powerplants and unreliable green energy sources combine to create a perfect storm of problems.

States stretching from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean which are home to tens of millions of Americans could have a hard time producing enough power for their residents this summer.

The ‘MISO’ part of America’s power grid – whose full name is the Midcontinent Independent System Operator is at greatest risk of a large-scale outage.

#3 Everyone pretty much agrees that food prices will continue to rise.  Of course they have already reached levels that are absolutely insane

Take the case of Jeff Good, who co-founded three restaurants in Jackson, Mississippi. Around 18 months ago, a 40-pound box of chicken wings cost him about $85. Now, it can go as high as roughly $150. Expenses for cooking oil and flour have nearly doubled in the past five months, he said. But it’s not just ingredient prices going up. He’s paying more for labor and services, too. Even the company that maintains his air conditioners has tacked on a $40 fuel charge per visit. To cope, he’s raised menu prices.

A 15-piece order of chicken wings, a signature dish at his Sal and Mookie’s pizzeria, went for $13.95 before Covid hit. Now, wing costs can vary so much they’re labeled at “market price,” like some restaurants do with lobster. At peaks, the menu price can be be about $27.95 — but that represents a barely-there margin — and Good estimates the “real cost” is closer to about $34. He’s trying to decide whether to keep raising prices or take wings off the menu.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever see myself paying 34 dollars for an order of chicken wings.

#4 As our supply chains endure even more stress, shortages will continue to intensify.  The extreme baby formula shortage that we are witnessing right now is just a preview of coming attractions

Two children in Memphis have been hospitalized after needing IV fluids and nutritional support due to the baby formula shortage.

The preschooler and toddler, both from different families, were rushed to Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital after their parents failed to secure formula as shelves across America go bare.

#5 The UN is telling us that we are heading into the worst global food crisis since World War II.  In some parts of Africa, the number of people suffering from “extreme hunger” has already more than doubled

More than 23 million people are experiencing extreme hunger in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, according to a new report by Oxfam and Save the Children. That’s up from over 10 million last year.

The region’s worst drought in 40 years is being exacerbated by conflict and the pandemic. And the war in Ukraine has sent food prices soaring to record levels.

#6 Widespread hunger will almost certainly lead to more civil unrest.  Recent events in Sri Lanka give us an indication of what may be coming…

Protesters in Sri Lanka have burned down homes belonging to 38 politicians as the crisis-hit country plunged further into chaos, with the government ordering troops to “shoot on sight.”

Police in the island nation said Tuesday that in addition to the destroyed homes, 75 others have been damaged as angry Sri Lankans continue to defy a nationwide curfew to protest against what they say is the government’s mishandling of the country’s worst economic crisis since 1948.

#7 The Federal Reserve is likely to continue to aggressively raise interest rates.  In fact, Fed Chair Jerome Powell is openly admitting that his institution’s battle against inflation could cause “some pain” in the months ahead…

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned Tuesday the U.S. could feel “some pain” as the central bank raises interest rates to fight inflation, insisting the Fed would do whatever it takes to curb price growth.

During a live interview for The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” summit, Powell said the Fed will continue to raise interest rates until inflation starts to fall and the forces driving prices higher fade, even at the risk of a deeper economic slowdown.

#8 Higher interest rates will be devastating for the housing market in the United States.  And that is very troubling news, because home sales have already fallen for three months in a row

Home sales fell for the third consecutive month in April as rising mortgage rates and affordability challenges pushed many would-be home buyers out of the market.

#9 Defaults are likely to continue to rise higher.  Just like we saw right before the last financial crisis, defaults on subprime loans are really starting to surge

Consumers with low credit scores are falling behind on payments for car loans, personal loans and credit cards, a sign that the healthiest consumer lending environment on record in the U.S. is coming to an end.

The share of subprime credit cards and personal loans that are at least 60 days late is rising faster than normal, according to credit-reporting firm Equifax. In March, those delinquencies rose month over month for the eighth time in a row, nearing their prepandemic levels. Delinquencies on subprime car loans and leases hit an all-time high in February, based on Equifax’s tracking that goes back to 2007.

#10 As the economy slows down, we should expect layoffs to increase and jobless claims will eventually start to spike.  In fact, we just learned that they have now hit a four month high.

#11 Needless to say, all of this bad economic news is going to be really bad for stock prices.  The S&P 500 has already nearly fallen into bear market territory, and many believe that what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.

#12 Many are warning that a recession is either already here or will arrive soon.  And Americans are increasingly becoming more pessimistic about the economy.  One survey that was recently conducted found that 85 percent of Americans believe that it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that there will be a recession at some point in the next year…

An overwhelming majority of Americans are expecting there to be a recession within the next year, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.

The poll found that 85 percent of Americans think it is likely for the country to go through an economic recession in the next year. Of those who responded, 45 percent said it is “very likely,” and 40 percent said “somewhat likely” for a recession.

The sort of historic economic meltdown that I have been warning about for years is rapidly approaching, and the mood of the nation will dramatically shift as conditions greatly deteriorate.

Already, we are starting to see a tremendous amount of anger out there.  Earlier today, I came across the following post on a very popular Internet discussion forum

Just want to vent. I am from middle Missouri, I am a single mom of 2 teens. My day job pays well and pays the bills well, a year ago my income would support us, bills, food, gas etc. i now have to work a second job just to feed us and put gas in my car. Eggs here went from .99 a carton to 1.99, ground beef went from 2.89 a pound to 4.99, and it goes on and on. Gas went from 1.90 to 4.29 a gallon. 

I am out of my mind scared it will only get worse. I have democrat friends that say “that’s how the economy works”. No it’s because Biden was giving out “covid” bucks to non working people taking advantage of the system, giving our money to Ukraine, shutting down gas lines in the US etc.

I can understand her anger.

Most Americans are working as hard as they can, but our standard of living is being systematically destroyed by the very foolish policies of our leaders.

Unfortunately, we are still only in the very early chapters of this crisis.

It looks like the second half of this year will be even more challenging than the first half, and that is going to have enormous implications for all of us.

Northlandz: The World’s Biggest Model Railroad

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The world’s biggest model railroad Northlandz in Flemington, New Jersey, was created by Bruce Williams Zaccagnino. (Butterworth/SplashNews)

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It boasts more than eight miles of track and features more than 100 trains, as well as almost 400 bridges. (Butterworth/SplashNews)

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The attraction, called Northlandz, in Flemington, New Jersey, contains more than 3,000 miniature buildings in cities and villages, 50,000 trees and 40-foot bridges spanning huge canyons, meaning it’s anything but small-scale. (Butterworth/SplashNew)

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The owner and creator Bruce Williams Zaccagnino, not only built the 52,000 sq ft building it is housed in but also painstakingly designed and handcrafted almost all of the scenery. (Butterworth/SplashNews)

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It has even attracted several celebrity visitors, including famed model railroad fan, rocker Rod Stewart, and rocker Neil Young, who went to the attraction in disguise. (Butterworth/SplashNews)

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The path through the exhibit, spread across 16 acres, is almost one mile long. Visitors are told it will take at least two hours to make their way through the whole thing. (Butterworth/SplashNews)

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These handcrafted soldiers highlight creator Bruce Williams Zaccagnino’s attention to detail. (Butterworth/SplashNews)

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Aeroplanes line up for take off. (Butterworth/SplashNews)

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Owner and creator Bruce Williams Zaccagnino’s vast control room. (Butterworth/SplashNews)

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An intricate city scape. (Butterworth/SplashNews)

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Good Charlotte – I Don’t Wanna Be In Love (Dance Floor Anthem) (Video)

I hope that you all appreciate this video…

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (3/10) Movie CLIP – The Hotel on Acid (1998) HD

A real classic.

Skillet Spinach Alfredo Chicken Pot Pie

With just a few ingredients and 50 minutes, you can serve up this creamy Italian riff on chicken pot pie for a skillet dinner that’s big on flavor and low on fuss.

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d85f9c82 ac94 4a5e 8dec a660a0a53f11

Ingredients

  • 1 jar (15 oz) Alfredo pasta sauce
  • 2 teaspoons Italian seasoning
  • 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
  • 3 cups chopped cooked chicken
  • 3 cups lightly packed fresh baby spinach leaves
  • 1 crust from 1 box (14.1 oz) refrigerated Pillsbury™ Pie Crusts (2 Count), softened as directed on box
  • 1 tablespoon butter, melted

2022 05 21 21 19
2022 05 21 21 19

Shanghai Lockdown

An interesting point: In fact, the Shanghai Lockdown occurred in sync with Russian SMO; Feb. 24, Feb. 28! What a coinicidence!
[Go HERE]

Thus the Chinese in effect are sabotaging NATOstan’s efforts to ramp-up their production…

Smart move 😉 Comment on the Saker’s latest publication of Pepe Escobar today:

Found HERE.

More NATO brass caught in Azovstal

Is anyone really surprised?

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2022 05 22 11 50

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2022 05 22 12 112

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2022 05 22 12 12

From HERE.

6 x news from 2022 01 to 05: Monkey on loose in Pennsylvania after crash on way to laboratory

Origin of monkeypox?
 

2022 05 21: Australia reports ‘probable’ case of monkeypox in returned traveller from Europe | 7NEWS

2022 05 20: Monkeypox cases investigated in Europe, US, Canada and Australia – BBC News

HERE

 

2022 05 20; Monkeypox confirmed in Melbourne and Sydney – ABC News

2022 05 19 US buys millions of Monkeypox vaccines after Massachusetts case
 

2022 01 26: Woman who helped after truck carrying monkeys crashed has fallen ill after monkey hissed at her | The Independent

Wednesday 26 January 2022 12:25

2022 01 22: Monkey on loose in Pennsylvania after crash on way to laboratory | Pennsylvania | The Guardian
Police advise people not to approach cynomolgus monkey believed to be on the loose near Danville after Friday crash

Staff and agencies

Sat 22 Jan 2022 11.41 EST

Residents of a Pennsylvania county were warned on Saturday not to approach a monkey still missing after a crash involving a pickup towing a trailer taking about 100 of the animals to a research laboratory.

State troopers urged people not to look for or capture the cynomolgus monkey following the Friday afternoon crash on a state highway near an Interstate 80 exit in Montour county.

“Anyone who sees or locates the monkey is asked not to approach, attempt to catch, or come in contact with the monkey. Please call 911 immediately,” a tweet said.

HERE

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In belgium, they could trace all monkeypox cases back to the Darkland festival, an international festival for homosexuals.
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LEGO Colosseum by Ryan McNaught

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There’s nothing we love more than a finely crafted LEGO project, and that’s exactly what we have here from Ryan McNaught, one of the best certified LEGO builders in the game.

McNaught has built the world’s first Colosseum built entirely from LEGOs. The project took nearly 200,000 LEGO bricks to put together, and is currently on display at the Nicholson Museum in Melbourne, Australia until January 2013. The project is displayed in a half and half form, showcasing the Colosseum in its present day form on one side along with Rome’s original Colosseum circa 80 AD on the other half.

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Sweet – Fox On The Run – 45 (OFFICIAL)

If you are old enough, you will appreciate this.

Creamy Feta, Bacon and Spinach Dip

Bacon and feta take spinach dip to a whole new level. Fair warning: Once your friends and family taste this addictive dip, you’ll be asked to make it for every get-together.

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0f2cd972 a17f 458c b400 ab37b53b12cf

Ingredients

  • 1 can (11 oz) refrigerated Pillsbury™ Original French Bread
  • 6 slices bacon, chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1 bag (5 oz) baby spinach
  • 1 package (8 oz) cream cheese, softened
  • 6 oz crumbled feta cheese
  • 1/2 cup mayonnaise
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
  • 1/2 cup Progresso™ plain panko crispy bread crumbs

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2022 05 21 21 23

The leaders of the Azov Battalion* who surrendered in Mariupol are facing the death penalty

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Readovka
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May 18 at 12:50
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The leaders of the Azov Battalion* who surrendered in Mariupol are facing the death penalty. At least if they are tried according to the laws of the DPR
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The laws of the DPR do not ratify the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which provides for a moratorium on the use of the death penalty. This means that if the trial takes place on the territory of the DPR and LPR, and the crimes of the Azov militants are confirmed, they will be shot.
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This is also confirmed by the statements of a number of Russian figures, including Senator Andrei Klishas, ​​who noted that all neo-Nazis from Azov should be tried for crimes committed in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. The militants committed crimes on the territory of the DPR, which is why they must be tried in accordance with the laws of the Republic, said State Duma deputy Artyom Turov. The State Duma also announced the need to judge the Azovites – today a draft resolution prohibiting the exchange of “Nazi criminals” will be considered.
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* – banned in the Russian Federation

Will The First Public UFO Hearing In Congress In 50 Years Help Set The Stage For A Great Delusion Of Epic Proportions?

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Why have they suddenly decided to reveal so much?  For decades, a very thick cloak of secrecy has surrounded what the government really knows about UFOs, but now our politicians are talking openly about such things.  In fact, Congress just held their very first public hearing about UFOs in 50 years.  So what has changed?  If anything happens in Washington, it is usually because someone has an underlying agenda.  Could it be possible that we are being prepared for some sort of a huge revelation?

To me, it is clear that something is up.

And I think that it says a lot that the power structures in our society are now treating this topic very seriously.  At this point, even CNN is admitting that UFOs are no longer being “relegated to the fringes of public policy”…

Key lawmakers warned at a House hearing on Tuesday that unidentified aerial phenomena — popularly known as UFOs — must be investigated and taken seriously as a potential threat to national security.

The event marked the first congressional public hearing on UFOs in decades, a high-profile moment for a controversial topic that has long been relegated to the fringes of public policy.

During the hearing on Tuesday, U.S. officials confessed that there have been at least 400 “unexplained sightings” by members of our military…

US SPY chiefs were grilled by lawmakers in a historic hearing on UFOs as dramatic videos of two sightings were shown.

Security officials were forced to admit there have been 400 unexplained sightings reported by the US military .

That number is very different from the number that we were given in 2021.

Late last year, the Pentagon told us that there were just 144 unexplained sightings.

But now we are being told that the real number is nearly triple the original number.

And on Tuesday we were also told that there have been “11 near misses” with U.S. military aircraft…

They also confessed there have been 11 near misses with unidentified objects and US military aircraft, and they are probing incidents where craft may have attempted “jam” US planes.

So let me get this straight.

11 different times our aircraft were almost hit by other aircraft that we simply cannot identify?

Why weren’t we told about this a long time ago?

Of course there is so much more that the Pentagon is choosing not to tell us.  According to Politico, one Defense Department official is freely admitting that there is a great deal that is not being publicly revealed…

“Without forcing peoples’ hand, it is going to be very difficult to uncover legacy ventures and programs that we know about based on oral interviews we dug up,” said a Defense Department official who is involved in the new effort but was not authorized to speak publicly. “There has to be a forcing mechanism.”

“There has to be something to hold people accountable but also give them a chance to come out clean for a period of time,” the official added, noting that in his experience the Pentagon oversight group has been “stonewalled.”

That same official went on to explain that the people that are refusing to come forward are protecting some “very interesting information”.

I would definitely like to know what that “very interesting information” is.

Wouldn’t you?

I think that most of the population would be completely floored if everything that the government knows was finally put on the table.

According to one member of Congress, our military has actually recovered physical wreckage from a UFO that crashed…

A CONGRESSMAN has claimed the US has wreckage recovered from a UFO as the phenomena takes centre stage today in Washington.

Rep. Tim Burchett – a long term advocate for disclosure – told The Sun Online he has been informed by reliable sources that “material” has been recovered from the objects or craft that have been reported in skies over the US.

So why can’t the American people know about this?

What are they trying to hide from us?

Burchett says that he can’t say more because this information was given to him in a “classified setting”

The Tennessee Republican declined to elaborate further as he said the information had been passed to him in a “classified setting”.

“I’ve been told by multiple sources we have recovered something from these [crafts or objects],” Mr Burchett told The Sun Online.

It is so frustrating to hear about this and know that we will probably never be given the specific details.

The American people deserve the truth, but so much is being purposely hidden.

Lue Elizondo, a former senior staffer at the Pentagon, says that there has been much speculation in military circles about the true source of these unidentified craft

‘People jump to speculation that it’s from the Pleiades or something like that, when in fact one of the hypothesis when I was in AATIP was this could be as natural to Earth as we are, but we are just at a point where technologically we aren’t advanced enough we can collect information on it and begin to try to figure out what it is,’ he said.

‘There’s been another hypothesis that these things are possibly from underwater and as outlandish as it may seem, there is some anecdotal evidence that supports all of these observations, so what we want to do is try to get as much data on the table as we can before we start eliminating,’ said Elizondo.

He said way too much right there, because he got way too close to details that we aren’t supposed to know about.

If he keeps talking like that, he could end up being killed.

Because even though our officials are now talking more openly about UFOs, there are still many things that they would very much prefer to keep secret.

These unidentified aircraft are very real, and every year they are spotted thousands upon thousands of times all over the globe.

Now this subject is being brought out into the spotlight, and that should make all of us very nervous.

The prisoner Episode 14

“Living in harmony.”

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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The collapse of Ukraine is not far away

The collapse of Ukraine is not far away. Soon the full-on “pivot to Asia” will begin in force. That is not going to be so nice and polite as Putin did with Ukraine. It will be harsh and in-your-face. Already the USA is lining up it’s war “chess pieces”, and last week Anthony Blinkedin made a speech that was a declaration of War in every way except formally speaking the words out loud.

Welcome to the next phase of world war three. I hope you are all ready for it…

US stock plunge has Asia bracing for a fall – Asia Times

Asian governments and investors remember all too well the carnage wrought in 2008 by US market failure and excess
TOKYO – A bloodbath in US stocks wasn’t high on Asia’s risk list for 2022. But as Wall Street’s stumble pivots from correction to death-dive territory, Asia’s markets are increasingly in harm’s way.
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The losses reverberating around the globe indicate that the biggest economy is about to go through a rough patch of unknown proportions. It’s already been through plenty, to name but a few: inflation at 40-year highs; Covid-19 traumatized consumers; a geopolitical minefield sending intensifying headwinds its way; legislative paralysis in Washington; war in Europe; a Federal Reserve behind the inflation curve.
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This last riddle — a woeful monetary response — stands out as the US flashes signals that seem ripped from the headlines of 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed, setting off the concatenation of events that led to the global financial crisis.
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Full article HERE

Brigitte Bardot on set during filming of Lady and the Puppet.

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ABC’s ‘brave and independent’ journalists seem to have vanished

It seems that those journalists who once championed the idea of brave public interest journalism have descended into a pack of fawning cheerleaders, gushing over the rule of their new leaders.

This entire sordid tale being explained away as “independent and brave reporting” would be much easier to swallow if it didn’t appear one side of politics was being targeted by such aggressive reporting.

Now that the Coalition has been turfed can we expect the same brave independence to flow through to their reporting on the actions of Anthony Albanese and his team?

If the first few days of his government are anything to go by, no.

Those journalists who enjoyed defending their activism as independent journalism are now in the process of transitioning to the role of government stenographers.

ABC’s 7.30 chief political correspondent Laura Tingle now spends her time retweeting, uncritically, messages from Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong who this week declared “we will listen because we care what the Pacific has to say”.

Favorite Potato Salad

Every home cook should have one go-to classic potato salad recipe on hand. It’s the perfect dish to bring to summer picnics, serve at grill-outs and take along to potluck suppers. But don’t just limit this simple potato salad to warm-weather months—this dish can be served year-round. The next time someone samples your delicious side dish and asks you how to make potato salad, just hand them this easy potato salad recipe.

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b4856949 30a8 42d9 bec7 e061ace4d00e

Ingredients

  • 6 medium boiling potatoes (2 pounds)
  • 1 1/2 cups mayonnaise or salad dressing
  • 1 tablespoon white or cider vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon yellow mustard
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 2 medium celery stalks, chopped (1 cup)
  • 1 medium onion, chopped (1/2 cup)
  • 4 hard cooked eggs, chopped

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2022 05 27 15 11

A President Salutes Another Country’s Flag… What A Protocol Mistake Means – Kurdo

It not only appears that this new Korean "President" is a CIA plant, but also his loyalty is to the United States. Not to Korea. -MM
South Korea : an American puppet regime.
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From HERE

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A picture of President Yoon Seok-yeol appearing to be saluting the American flag at the Korea-US summit dinner on the 21st was posted on the US President’s Instagram.

The diplomatic protocol is established in the international community, and it is difficult for even the head of state to change and apply it at will. Because it is disrespectful to the other country. In order to make changes to the ceremony, it is necessary to consult with the other country in advance. However, as in this case, it is unlikely that the summit will be regarded as disrespectful for the leader to salute the flag of the other country.

But it can be disappointing to the people of the country. Most people want their president to act proudly without bowing his head no matter where he goes in the world. This applies to anyone who voted for president in an election or who didn’t. Because the president represents the country.

It is highly likely that President Yoon Seok-yeol, who cannot be unaware of this fact, saluted the American flag was a simple mistake caused by lack of experience rather than intentional.

However, this simple mistake symbolizes this summit between Korea and the United States. If the preparations were meticulous, there is a high possibility that the president’s diplomatic mistake would not have occurred. Here, it is clearly revealed that it has only been 12 days (at the time of the 21st) since President Yoon took office. It gives the impression to the other country that the new government is not yet ready. This is the reason why diplomatic protocols that seem insignificant are so important and require a lot of preparation.

Looking at the contents of the summit, from the point of view of US President Biden, there is much to be gained from this summit. He drew active participation in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) and sanctions against Russia, and stipulated that cooperation with Japan as well as South Korea-US cooperation is important for North Korea. It also explicitly obtained South Korea’s commitment to investment in the US. President Yun achieved the success of making it easier for the US strategic forces to mobilize to the Korean Peninsula. However, US semiconductor technology companies’ investment in Korea and membership in the four unofficial security council quads of the US, India, Japan and Australia did not take place.

If the new government’s diplomatic and security strategy is ‘as the United States wants’, it can be said that the summit has achieved great results. If not, it is questionable whether the summit was held with a meticulous negotiating strategy in a state where a foreign and security strategy was established.

The new government emphasized that, contrary to the usual order of the US president’s East Asian tour, he visited Korea before Japan. The joint statement between the leaders of the Republic of Korea and the United States also added meaning, saying, “This summit was recorded as the earliest meeting held with the President of the United States during the term of the President of the Republic of Korea.” There was also an evaluation saying, “One president has changed, but the dignity of the Republic of Korea is rising” (Lee Jun-seok, representative of the People’s......

One Of About 50 Fiat 599 Ferves Rangers Still Around!

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Manufactured between 1967 and 1971. Approximately ten of 50 survivors are in the United States. Made by Turin-based coachbuilder Ferves (acronym of Ferrari Veicoli Speciali), where mechanical components borrowed from various models – Fiat 500F, 600D, 850, Autobianchi Primula – were assembled. This charming 4-seater flaunted four-wheel drive and “Cargo” work versions; some have described it as a small-size SUV or mini jeep… and yet today it is one of some collectors’ biggest dreams.

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China urges Indonesia to cut out ‘interference’ as host of G20 summit after calls to discuss Ukraine war

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi tells Indonesia’s Retno Marsudi the summit in November should discuss the economy, not politics.  Wang hails the arrival of the ‘Asian moment’ for global governance, suggesting Asian nations should form a tighter bond.

Roll with the Changes (REO Speedwagon) | Classic Rock Cover – Kelly and the Ding Dongs

What I really love about this is that everyone is in lock down, and through use of the internet they play the song together and sync it together. Actually really good. I cannot help but get a smile on my face.

And here they are jamming to Traffic’s Dear Mr. Fantasy…

Photographer Finds Charming Japanese Countryside Scenes that Look Right Out of an Anime

Really? Photographs? I find it difficult to believe…

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It can sometimes sound silly to pass through a place in Japan and remark that “it looks like an anime”, because after all, many anime feature intricately researched and illustrated recreations of real locations in Japan.

Talented photographer Akine Coco proves that at just the right moment, the saying has a lot of truth in it. In what appear to be particularly countryside settings in Japan, Akine writes in their Twitter profile that they “show the anime-esque world through photographs”, and their latest beautiful photography certainly does that!

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While many of Akine’s subjects are of everyday scenery and found around Japan, they seem to be able to capture them in a light and from angle that really do make them seem as if they were lifted from an anime directed by Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli, or perhaps a Makoto Shinkai work.

That’s why Akine posts them usually with the caption “Just like a scene from an anime,” here are a few of Akine’s standout shots!

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Japan to enable fighter jet and missile exports to 12 nations – Nikkei Asia

The source is Nikkei (the mouthpiece of the CIA in the Pacific).

The Japanese government plans to allow exports of fighter jets, missiles and other arms to 12 countries, including India, Australia as well as some European and Southeast Asian nations, Nikkei has learned. Regulatory changes to allow for the exports could come by next March.

Actress Rita Hayworth looks stunning – wearing her trademark charming, nonchalant look – in a nightgown in 1941.

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China-Australia relations: ex-Australian PM Kevin Rudd tells West to offer alternatives to Pacific islands, not ‘lectures’.

Duh!

Some Western nations have criticized the Solomon Islands-China pact, claiming the move will lead to Beijing bolstering its military presence in the region. Kevin Rudd said the West must offer better and more development-friendly proposals to Pacific Island nations, rather than a ‘stern moral lecture’
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Full article HERE.

RATS FLEEING THE SINKING SHIP: FORMER UKRAINE PRESIDENT CAUGHT AT BORDER TRYING TO FLEE UKRAINE

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2022 05 28 12 20

Former President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, is at the Rava-Russkaya checkpoint of the Lvov customs and is trying to leave Ukraine for Poland in a Range Rover vehicle.

"Poroshenko is trying to escape from Ukraine!"

 - Customs Service.

MORE:

The Prosecutor General’s Office in Kiev has announced the issuance of an Arrest Warrant for the former Chairman of Ukraine’s Constitutional Court, Oleksandr Tupytskiy, on charges of . . .  Fleeing Ukraine.

The former head of Ukraine’s highest court is said to have fled the country into Poland.

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2022 05 28 12 20

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Gee, if Ukraine is actually winning the war, then why are all these top people FLEEING?

Oh, maybe this is why:

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2022 05 28 12 21

Cat Waited Her Whole Life to Be Indoors, is Now Living the Dream Life with Her Kitten

Albanese: China must remove its sanctions on Australian products to have any chance of improving relations between the two countries…

China must remove its sanctions on Australian products to have any chance of improving relations between the two countries, (the new Australian) Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declared after joining the QUAD summit in Tokyo with regional leaders to endorse a firm line against the Chinese.
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Australia’s new government has urged China to lift trade sanctions if it wants to reset a bilateral relationship that plumbed new depths under the previous administration.
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As reported in America. HERE

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Penny Wong urges Pacific nations to weigh up ‘consequences’ of China security offers | Australian foreign policy | The Guardian
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Ukraine Foreign Minister Admits He Has NOW Been Told to “Negotiate” with Russia

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UKRAINIAN FOREIGN MINISTER KULEBA SAYS THEY WANT HIM TO NEGOTIATE. . .

After this morning’s news that the Ukraine Army is COLLAPSING (Story Here), we now have official confirmation from Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba himself, that he is being told to begin negotiating with Russia to end the war.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

Well, well, well . . . all the Ukraine hype about how they were winning, and beating the Russians at every turn, seems to have suddenly fallen apart.

All the TV news reports about Ukraine victories, all the videos put out by public relations firms touting Ukraine’s strength . . . all turned out to be propaganda . . . and boatloads of people in countries around the world, fell-for-it, hook, line, and sinker.

That didn’t take long!

Here is Kuleba in Ukraine language admitting he has now been told to negotiate:

Reading between the lines, though, is what’s far more interesting: all those hawks in EU are starting to capitulate after they saw what Russians did to a NATO-trained army.

Even they realize that NATO . . . is a paper tiger at this point.

NATO trained and equipped Ukraine for EIGHT FULL YEARS . . . and Ukraine was the largest standing army in all of Europe.  Yet the Ukraine Army is collapsing after only 90 (or so) days of actual war.

What does this tell Europe about NATO?    NATO Training?    NATO Tactics?   NATO equipment?

It’s not what they were told NATO was ! ! ! ! 

Now, Europe realizes they have to act fast to save face; they need to avoid a complete collapse of Ukraine in coming weeks.

Kuleba complains about the EU, which now requires Kiev to negotiate with Moscow.

“If everything is so difficult, then we need to sit down and negotiate, whatever the price of these agreements,” the head of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry informs Europe.

According to him, he has already heard this “very painful position” repeatedly.

Twice Baked Potatoes

You don’t have to wait for dinner at a fancy steakhouse to enjoy cheesy, gooey twice baked potatoes. They’re surprisingly easy to make at home. Once assembled, the finished potatoes are super-easy to make ahead and store in the fridge or freezer.

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Ingredients

  • 4 large unpeeled Idaho or russet baking potatoes (8 to 10 oz each)
  • 1/4 to 1/2 cup milk
  • 1/4 cup butter, softened
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • Dash pepper
  • 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese (4 oz)
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives

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2022 05 27 15 13

Singapore wholesaler allegedly exported Pokka drinks to N Korea

Singapore MUST obey America or else…!

A wholesale supplier was charged on Wednesday (25 May) with exporting Pokka drinks to North Korea, in breach of United Nations sanctions.
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123 Duty Free was handed five charges under Singapore’s Regulation of Imports and Exports Regulations for importing assorted Pokka drinks worth around S$341,318 to the hermit state on five occasions between 10 April and 8 August 2018. The flavours under the brand include Melon Milk, Strawberry Milk, and Milk Coffee.
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Full article HERE

Beautiful Photos Of The 1971 DeTomaso Pantera

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The De Tomaso Pantera is a mid-engine sports car produced by Italian automobile manufacturer De Tomaso from 1971 to 1993. Italian for “Panther”, the Pantera was the automaker’s most popular model, with over 7,000 manufactured over its twenty-year production run.

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The first 1971 Pantera models were powered by a 5.8 L (351 cu in) Ford Cleveland V8 engine having a power output of 335 PS (246 kW; 330 hp). The high torque provided by the Ford engine reduced the need for excessive gear changing at low speeds: this made the car much less demanding to drive in urban conditions than many of the locally built offerings.

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The 1971 Pantera could accelerate to 97 km/h (60 mph) in 5.5 seconds according to Car and Driver.

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‘International robbery’: Greece agrees to send Iranian oil from seized aframax to the US | TradeWinds

You see, Greece acts as a proxy, and then robs ships at will… sending the products to the United States.

From HERE.

Ukraine Army COLLAPSING; Zelensky (Now) Saying “Must Face Reality . . .”

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2022 05 28 12 25

The Armed Forces of Ukraine are collapsing on the battlefield and the defeats are happening so fast, over such a wide area, that today, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky told the country “Ukraine is not eager to talk to Russia’s Vladimir Putin but that it has to face the reality that this will likely be necessary to end the war.”

Quite a turnaround from just a week ago when Zelensky said Ukraine will never give up any territory, and would “win” against the Russian Army.

Over the past two weeks, the situation for Ukraine has gotten almost dire.   Its armed forces are being decimated on almost every battlefield.  Russian long range artillery is smashing thousands of Ukraine troops, and causing those still alive to surrender.

In fact, the number of Ukraine troops surrendering has gotten so enormous, the Ukraine legislature voted on a Bill allowing military officers to SHOOT SURRENDERING TROOPS to stop the mass-surrenders!

In the brief video below, Ukraine troops who SURRENDERED, report to the world that their commanding officers DID, in fact, SHOOT THEIR OWN TROOPS IN THE BACK to prevent the surrender!

The reality on the battlefield is so dire for Ukraine troops, many seasoned observers believe the Ukrainian Army cannot survive even another two weeks.

Moreover, the opinion of the general public is taking a very significant turn; in favor of Russia.

Citizens of almost all western nations, now becoming aware that Nazis are in the Ukraine government, police, and military, are no longer so quick to support Ukraine.

And when those same Western citizens see the video of Ukraine President Zelensky admitting on TV he uses cocaine because it gives him energy all day – they realize that Ukraine is being run by a drug-addled guy who may actually be so disconnected from reality (by drugs) that he’s perhaps a madman!

Even an Archbishop speaking from the Altar in the Church of England told Parishioners  “Putin is the only one standing-up against the New World Order” and that “Russia was provoked into this war! ”

Here, listen for yourselves:

 

Judging by the speed with which the Armed Forces of Ukraine are fleeing from the cities of the Donbass, specifically from the Donetsk area, a moral breakdown has occurred.

This is certainly not the final Russian victory, but it is clearly a very serious success.

In recent history, we have not yet seen such wars in dense urban areas, with the use of all types of weapons, excluding nuclear weapons, and in which so many personnel and equipment are involved.

Ukraine is now losing the war, losing fast, and losing badly.

Below, video shows dozens of dead Ukraine troops, some with giant pieces of shrapnel protruding from their cracked open skulls — VERY GRAPHIC:

Just this morning (Friday) Zelensky Advisor Alexey Arestovich reported on TV  “THE CITY OF LYMAN HAS BEEN LOST”
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He went on to say “According to reports, the city of Liman has been lost. The way the Russian army captured it shows that there have very talented commanders, and this shows the increased level of operational management and skills of the Russian army.”
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Residents of Krasny Liman report the retreat of the Ukrainian Armed Forces from the southern outskirts of the city and the railway station, in the area of which fierce battles had been going on since yesterday..

Another Ukrainian battalion had to Mutiny to save their own lives.  The brief video below shows them explaining why they fled:

 

BELOW, A UKRAINIAN POW SAYS HIS COMMANDER LEFT THEM “FOR A MEETING” AND NEVER CAME BACK!

Again and again, stories are repeated about how commanders leave their subordinates on the battlefield and leave “for a meeting.” And not a single bad word about being kept in a POW camp.

Overnight, a Ukraine military cargo plane was shot down near Odessa.   All of its western-supplied military weaponry was destroyed.   Here’s the crash site:

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2022 05 28 12 28

Meanwhile, it is quickly becoming clear that western military aid into Ukraine, is being stolen and re-routed to be sold in Serbia on the Black Market!!   Upwards of TWO-THIRDS of the ManPad surface-to-air, man-portable anti-aircraft weapons, are now in Serbia for sale.

This includes American STINGER missiles!

Worse, all manner of other weapons of war are also being offered on the Black market, including mortars, rocket propelled grenades, land mines, and armor-piercing ammunition in such vast quantities, the smugglers can’t even find place to store their ill-gotten goods.   It’s like a terrorist bazaar; where anyone can go buy any weapons they want!

The Ukrainians are literally STEALING the west-supplied weapons so they can sell them on the black market and put the cash in their own pockets.

So much for the forty billion in U.S. aid approved by Congress.  It is highly likely much of that aid is already stolen.

Perhaps the facts reported above are why President Zelensky today, told his countrymen “Ukraine is not eager to talk to Russia’s Vladimir Putin but that it has to face the reality that this will likely be necessary to end the war.”

Many people are starting to realize the only words Zelensky is going to soon be able to say to Putin are “Ukraine surrenders.”

UPDATE 3:55 PM EDT —

Ukraine Foreign Minister reveals he has NOW been told to negotiate with Russia to end the war .

KC and the Sunshine Band (Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty DOLLY PARTON 1976 HQ

Now watching with though my older eyes of experience, I can see it’s true face. It’s a great stage show, though at the time, I wasn’t really fond of the song. Now, I see that as being such a cultural icon.

The prisoner episode 12

Another great episode from the series.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Monkey Pox, Eli’s Coming, Doner Kebabs, Finland, Mafia boss Joe Masseria, $10 a gallon gasoline, boxing and The Doobie Brothers

Some real treats here. Please enjoy this nice stroll though the past, and a look at the present, as well as some great food to try and sample. i hope that all of you get something of benefit from this latest article. Have fun!

I’ll tell you what!

First Electricity, Now Natural Gas; Russia To Halt Gas Flow to Finland 21MAY22

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NordStream large

Russia is cutting off its supply of natural gas to Finland as of Saturday as Helsinki moves forward with its effort to join NATO in response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Finnish energy company Gasum on Friday said it had been notified by the Russian energy giant Gazprom that it would shut off its supply of gas the next day.

The announcement comes as Russia demands that Finland pay for the natural gas in rubles, which Finland has refused to do.

It also adds a new layer to an escalating energy fight between Russia and much of Europe fueled by the war in Ukraine.

The European Union earlier this month proposed an oil ban on imports from Russia. This week, the EU unveiled additional details on its plan to reduce its dependence on Russian natural gas.

Russia has already cut off gas to Poland and Bulgaria.

President Biden has hailed the efforts of Finland and Sweden to join NATO after decades outside the bloc. Both countries took steps to join the military alliance after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in February. The leaders of Sweden and Finland met with Biden at the White House on Thursday.

Mafia boss Joe Masseria lays dead on a Brooklyn restaurant floor holding the ace of spades, 1931.

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Mafia boss Joe Masseria lays dead on a Brooklyn restaurant floor holding the ace of spades, 1931.

Insane Tyranny: EU ‘Needs’ Lockdown-like Restrictions to Curb Russian Oil Use

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Measures akin to a COVID lockdown are needed according to an apparently insane European official, in order to curb the EU’s reliance on Russian oil.

Lockdown-like measures should be implemented across the European Union to curb the bloc’s reliance on Russian oil, Luxembourg’s energy minister has said.

The demand comes as the transnational bloc prepares to publish a plan aimed at weaning the EU off of fossil fuels supplied from Russia, with some nation-states such as Germany being badly addicted to the likes of natural gas provided by the state.

According to a report by Der Spiegel, Luxembourg believes that such a plan should include the introduction of an EU-wide mandatory speed limit, a bloc-wide work-from-home mandate for at least two days of the week, and for every major EU city to ban the use of cars on the weekends.

This, the minister argues, would curb the use of oil in Europe and, in turn, lower reliance on Russian fuel imports.

“What we need at EU level is an EU-wide coordinated speed limit and two days of home office per week,” said the Luxembourgish Energy Minister Claude Turmes.

“I urge the Commission not to miss the opportunity to set Europe on this path,” he continued.

How to Make a Doner Kebab

have you ever wanted to make some “Greek food”? Here’s your chance.

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Washington state gas stations run out of fuel, prep for $10 a gallon

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Gas stations in Washington state are resetting their price boards to accommodate double digits in preparation for fuel prices potentially reaching $10 a gallon.

The move comes as several gas stations in the Evergreen State ran out of fuel.

At the 76 gas station in Auburn, about 30 miles south of Seattle, gas pumps were reprogrammed so the display could indicate a price of at least $10 a gallon.

The displays were limited to single digits as recently as March, but the surging price of gas has led to the change.

A 76 spokesperson told the Post Millennial that the change did not necessarily mean the company was predicting gas prices would reach $10 a gallon.

The station in Auburn also sells race fuel, which is more expensive than the fuel that is used by ordinary citizens.

Race fuel costs more due to the high-octane, premium fuel that is required to enable the engine to have a higher compression ratio, giving it a more energetic explosion and improving the performance of turbocharger and supercharger engines.

Washingtonians are also having to contend with gas stations that are running out of fuel.

Motorists who drive up to gas pumps in Kennewick, Pasco and West Richland are met with notes indicating that the station does not have any fuel to sell — except diesel.

On Facebook, local residents are reporting more than 10 gas stations that are out of fuel.

The average price of a gallon of gas in Washington state is $5.18 — well above the national average of $4.59 as of Thursday, according to AAA.

Jennie MacGregor, arrested by Minneapolis police on April 10, 1924 for dispensing alcoholic beverages from life-preserver flasks .

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Jennie MacGregor, arrested by Minneapolis police on April 10, 1924 for dispensing alcoholic beverages from life-preserver flasks .

The United States is no longer an accurate reflection of who and what we are

The Republican planets are beginning their alignment to leverage their political gravity to strangle our democracy

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Lawrence: Minority Rule Is Killing The ‘United’ in The United States

[ Editor’s note: Mr. O’Donnell cuts right to the chase. We need a name change, as the one we have no long fits, because the ‘minority rule’ gang has abandoned future attempts, due to its policies, to win the right to rule over the country by winning the most votes.

I knew the game was up when the Repubs broadcast their mantra, “we will win the presidency in 2024 one way or the other”. It was no subtle message, but a declaration of war. It was basically a pledge to attach limpet mines on the hull of our ship of state.

The Republican plans may strangle our democracy, because they have told us they are going to rig the President electoral count by having states legislate their ability to make the final determination on the electoral count.

The Insurrectionists, in hindsight, see this as their mistake in 2020, by not having already set up the state rigging process earlier, but they have the time now.

This includes the Congressmen that could be charged for aiding and abetting the Jan 6 sedition. This could be a ‘get out of jail card’ for them and all the Jan6’ers who might be indicted.

I cannot imagine a more dedicated campaign mob. The top Republicans constructing this new political coup strategy seem confident that they have the best Supreme Court in history to make sure they don’t have any deal killer legal issues.

The military and Intel branches stood firm on the last coup attempt, but will they on the next one? Are we on the road to becoming the biggest banana republic in history? I certainly hope not, but we will have to fight like hell, to borrow a Trump phrase, or I doubt we will have a country anymore… Jim W. Dean ]

Vaccine study of 23 million shows risk of ‘heart problems’ from Moderna or Pfizer jab

Vaccine study of 23 million shows risk of ‘heart problems’ from Moderna or Pfizer jab – Google Search
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From HERE

The Mississippi Slugburger – How to Make America’s Strangest Hamburger – Food Wishes

What do you think about this? Check out the video.

Hungarian Jews being selected by Nazis to be sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz concentration camp, Auschwitz Album May-June 1944.

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Hall & Oates – Sara Smile

In March, 2021, the “Nuclear Threat Initiative” Held a “Drill” for MonkeyPox Terror Attack — May 15, 2022 . . . now we have one

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In March 2021, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) partnered with the Munich Security Conference to conduct a “tabletop exercise” simulating a global pandemic involving an unusual strain of monkeypox caused by a terrorist attack using a pathogen engineered in a laboratory.  In the “exercise” the terror Monkey pox attack took place in May, 2022.   Well, it is now May, 2022, and we now have . . .  an outbreak of actual Monkeypox.   These “exercises” aren’t exercises, they’re plans!

The exercise was allegedly designed to examine gaps in national and international biosecurity and pandemic preparedness architectures—exploring opportunities to improve prevention and response capabilities for high-consequence biological events. Participants included 19 senior leaders and experts from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe with decades of combined experience in public health, biotechnology industry, international security, and philanthropy.

This report, Strengthening Global Systems to Prevent and Respond to High-Consequence Biological Threats: Results from the 2021 Tabletop Exercise Conducted in Partnership with the Munich Security Conference, written by Jaime M. Yassif, Ph.D., Kevin P. O’Prey, Ph.D., and Christopher R. Isaac, M.Sc., summarizes key findings from the exercise and offers actionable recommendations for the international community.

Developed in consultation with technical and policy experts, the fictional exercise scenario portrayed a deadly, global pandemic involving an unusual strain of monkeypox virus that first emerged in the fictional nation of Brinia and spread globally over 18 months. Ultimately, the exercise scenario revealed that the initial outbreak was caused by a terrorist attack using a pathogen engineered in a laboratory with inadequate biosafety and biosecurity provisions and weak oversight. By the end of the exercise, the fictional pandemic resulted in more than three billion cases and 270 million fatalities worldwide.

Discussions throughout the tabletop exercise generated a range of valuable insights and key findings. Most significantly, exercise participants agreed that, notwithstanding improvements following the global response to COVID-19, the international system of pandemic prevention, detection, analysis, warning, and response is woefully inadequate to address current and anticipated future challenges. Gaps in the international biosecurity and pandemic preparedness architecture are extensive and fundamental, undermining the ability of the international community to prevent and mount effective responses to future biological events—including those that could match the impacts of COVID-19 or cause damage that is significantly more severe.

Report Findings and Recommendations

Discussion among exercise participants led to the following key findings:

(The full findings are available on page 14 of the report.)

  • Weak global detection, assessment, and warning of pandemic risks. The international community needs a more robust, transparent detection, evaluation, and early warning system that can rapidly communicate actionable information about pandemic risks.
  • Gaps in national-level preparedness. National governments should improve preparedness by developing national-level pandemic response plans built upon a coherent system of “triggers” that prompt anticipatory action, despite uncertainty and near-term costs—in other words, on a “no-regrets” basis.
  • Gaps in biological research governance. The international system for governing dual-use biological research is neither prepared to meet today’s security requirements, nor is it ready for significantly expanded challenges in the future. There are risk reduction needs throughout the bioscience research and development life cycle.
  • Insufficient financing of international preparedness for pandemics. Many countries around the world lack financing to make the essential national investments in pandemic preparedness.

To address these findings, the report authors developed the following recommendations:

(The full recommendations are available on page 22 of the report.)

  1. Bolster international systems for pandemic risk assessment, warning, and investigating outbreak origins
    • The WHO should establish a graded, transparent, international public health alert system.
    • The United Nations (UN) system should establish a new mechanism for investigating high-consequence biological events of unknown origin, which we refer to as a “Joint Assessment Mechanism.”
  2. Develop and institute national-level triggers for early, proactive pandemic response
    • National governments must adopt a “no-regrets” approach to pandemic response, taking anticipatory action—as opposed to reacting to mounting case counts and fatalities, which are lagging indicators.
    • To facilitate anticipatory action on a no-regrets basis, national governments should develop national-level plans that define and incorporate “triggers” for responding to high-consequence biological events.
  3. Establish an international entity dedicated to reducing emerging biological risks associated with rapid technology advances
    • The international community should establish an entity dedicated to reducing the risk of catastrophic events due to accidental misuse or deliberate abuse of bioscience and biotechnology.
    • To meaningfully reduce risk, the entity should support interventions throughout the bioscience and biotechnology research and development life cycle—from funding, through execution, and on to publication or commercialization.
  4. Develop a catalytic global health security fund to accelerate pandemic preparedness capacity building in countries around the world
    • National leaders, development banks, philanthropic donors, and the private sector should establish and resource a new financing mechanism to bolster global health security and pandemic preparedness.
    • The design and operations of the fund should be catalytic—incentivizing national governments to invest in their own preparedness over the long term.
  5. Establish a robust international process to tackle the challenge of supply chain resilience
    • The UN Secretary General should convene a high-level panel to develop recommendations for critical measures to bolster global supply chain resilience for medical and public health supplies.

Click here to learn more about the November 23, 2021 launch event for this report on the margins of the Biological Weapons Convention Meeting of States Parties.

To learn more about NTI’s previous tabletop exercises at the Munich Security Conference, see the 2019 report, “A Spreading Plague,” and our 2020 report,  “Preventing Global Catastrophic Biological Risks.”

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

It seems to me personally that these “exercises” are not “exercises” at all.  I think they are actual PLANS.

Here.  Look at this page from their own  Monkeypox “Exercise” simulation:

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MonkeypoxAttackExercise Plan

So here we are, in May, 2022, and what are the headlines?

First Case of Monkeypox CONFIRMED in USA  (May 18 Story)

and:

ALERT: MONKEY POX IN MANHATTAN, NYC (May 19 Story)

Just like the “exercise” said would happen . . . right down to the precise month and even the precise WEEK!

This is not the first time some “exercise” turned out real.

The attacks of 9/11 took place during an “exercise” which simulated the hijacking of aircraft . . .  and became the real thing.

Now,   these other “exercises” are turning out to be the same real things.

Of course, the people doing these things would have us believe its all “coincidence.”

Coincidence my ass.  I say these people are intentionally attacking us, and now, they’ve escalated from airplanes-into-buildings, to bio-weapons attacks.

COVID-19 Was An ATTACK, TOO!

I believe there is actual proof that COVID-19 was planned.  I think it was a bio-attack.  Here’s why:

Richard A. Rothschild applied for a Patent on a Test for COVID-19 on 10-13-2015 when COVID-19 didn’t exist yet.

How do you apply, in 2015, for a Patent on a testing system for a disease, almost four years before the disease had even been named?  (Full Story HERE)

But wait . . . there’s more . . .

Boxes of COVID-19 Vaccine from AstraZeneca show a Manufacture Date of July 15, 2018 . . . But “COVID-19” wasn’t discovered until 2019 and wasn’t NAMED until February 11, 2020.

How Did Astra-Zeneca Manufacture “COVID-19 Vaccine” in July of 2018 Before the Disease Was Even Discovered or Named?  (Full Story HERE)

There’s even MORE. . . .

‘The world first started to hear about a novel coronavirus in early January 2020, with reports of an alleged new pneumonia-like illness spreading across Wuhan, China. However, the world did not actually know of Covid-19 until February 2020, because it was not until the 11th of that month that the World Health Organization officially named the novel coronavirus disease “Covid-19.”

So with this being the official truth, why does United States Government data show that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) awarded a contract on the 12th November 2019 to Labyrinth Global Health INC. for ‘COVID-19 Research’, at least one month before the alleged emergence of the novel coronavirus, and three months before it was officially dubbed Covid-19?  (Full Story HERE)

Moving farther along in this brief foray into inconvenient truth, I offer you this little gem:

Confidential documents surfaced in a Confidentiality Agreement between the U.S. National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Moderna showing they transferred “potential coronavirus vaccine candidates” to the University of North Carolina, on December 12, 2019

. . . which was nineteen (19) days BEFORE the outbreak of novel coronavirus in China!

How could they know they would need a Coronavirus Vaccine BEFORE the outbreak, unless they had knowledge the outbreak was going to happen?   (Full Story HERE)

Last but not least,

France Gov’t Printed “VACCINE PASSPORT” Signs 4 days BEFORE France Ever Had a Case of COVID-19. How did the French Government know there would need to be a “Vaccine Passport” for COVID four days before the disease ever hit France?

It seems to me personally that the only logical conclusion is that they knew, because they planned the whole thing.   (Full Story HERE)

So now, we have this “tabletop exercise” involving a terrorist attack using Monkeypox, and the exercise says the “attack” takes place on May 15, 2022. Lo and behold, by May 18, 2022, we have an ACTUAL outbreak of Monkeypox.

In my view, these “exercises” are, in fact, plans.

Bio-weapon attack plans.

And we . . .  you and me . . .  are the targets.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had quite enough of this shit.   I’ve had enough of the overt planning.  I’ve had enough of them actually carrying-out these attacks.  And I’ve had more than enough of law enforcement at every level, local, county, state and federal, doing absolutely nothing about any of it.

When will we collectively step-up and put and end to this shit?

Or do we sit idly-by and wait to get murdered by these psychopaths?

There’s an old axiom: “Turnabout is fair play”

And there’s another: “What’s good for the Goose, is good for the Gander.”

They attacked first.

Magical Slavic Photography From Russia Is So Impressive That It Looks Unreal

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Russia culture is just one off spring branch of greater Slavic culture that is shared by 360 million Slavs worldwide. Vibrant images filled with electric series of Slavic folklore is a colorful photography mix that comes from Moscow artistic direction study of Yakovlev & Aleeva. These pieces show a interesting mixture of traditionalism, high fashion and certain degree of modernity. These stunning Russian women models are all dressed in what is know as traditional clothing plus they are adorned in bright colored jewelry and lipstick, which fits Russian culture as we know it today.

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It’s beyond just fashion, it’s a blend of orthodoxy along with a classical love of opulence that together reveal an actual historically influenced images made for the contemporary world of ours. The eggs are also lavishly decked and share the spotlight with the gorgeous backdrops.

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Boxing match aboard the U.S.S. New York, July 3, 1899.

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Tsar Nicholas II allows his daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, to smoke.

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The Doobie Brothers – China Groove

Cool Photos of Teenage Girls in the 1970s

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Teenage girls’ fashion in the 1970s continued the “do-your-own-thing” look of the late 1960s for the early years of the decade.

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Girls’ clothing styles were dominated by the disco look during the latter half of the 1970s. Girls’ clothes transitioned from costume-like hippie garb to styles influenced by disco party dresses, evening wear and the preppie look.

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Towards the end of the decade, the decadent punk look began to catch on. Take a look at these cool photos to see what fashion styles of teenage girls looked like in the 1970s.

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Tubes – White Punks On Dope (1977 R0X M1X)

What a great show!

Gosh! I can smell the spilled bong water all the way through the years!

Bob Dylan with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at Jaggers 29th birthday party, July 1972.

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An American evacuee punches a South Vietnamese man for a place on the last chopper out of the US embassy during the evacuation of Saigon in 1975.

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Breakfast advertisement

My favorite television show in the early 1970’s.

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The Statue of Liberty under construction in Paris in 1884.

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How to Make Parmesan Cheese (Italian Hard Cheese) at Home

Crew of the Japanese carrier Zuikaku give one final banzai cheer before the ship sinks, 1944.

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All Ukraine NAZIS at Azovstal Have Now Surrendered and are in Custody

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LastAzovstalNazisSurrender large

The entire territory of the Azovstal steel mill and factory complex in Mariupol has been liberated, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Friday.

More than 2,400 people hiding inside for almost a month, including Ukrainian servicemen and members of the neo-Nazi Azov unit, have laid down their arms and surrendered.

“The last group of 531 militants surrendered today,” the Russian military spokesman, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, said in a statement.

He added that a total of “2,439 Azov Nazis” and Ukrainian servicemen had laid down their arms since May 16, and that the entire Azovstal complex is now under control of Russian armed forces.

Richard Nixon’s last meal at the White House, in 1974.

On the day that he announced his resignation, Nixon ordered cottage cheese, pineapple slices and a glass of milk.

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R-100 Airship: Inside a British “Flying Hotel”, 1929-1930

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The R100 airship was built as part of a British government programme to develop airships to provide passenger and mail transport between Britain and the countries of the British Empire, including India, Australia and Canada. Originally, it was proposed that two airships be constructed: one, R101, to be designed and constructed under the direction of the Air Ministry, and the other, R100, to be built by a private company under a fixed price contract.

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The R-100 nears completion in its hangar in Yorkshire. 1929.

The R100, designed by Barnes Wallis, was the first to be finished in Howden, Yorkshire in 1929. The airframe was made of duralumin, an early aluminum alloy, and covered with a giant 5-acre fabric coating stitched together in pieces and stretched into place. Inside the cavernous 146,000 cubic metre shell, 17 gas bags made from oxen intestines provided the all-important buoyancy.

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Passengers lounge in the grand salon of the R-100. 1930.

After the 7 successful trial flights and flights checking the outer cover ripple effect, the decision was made for a transatlantic flight or long distance proving flight by one of the two new airships. As the R101 had been put back in Shed Number 1 for further changes to the design to increase the disposable lift, the R100 was tasked with a trip to Canada, successfully crossing the Atlantic to Montreal to the newly erected mast. The ship slipped the moorings from the Cardington mast at 02.48am on the morning of 29th July 1930. The ship flew over the Atlantic and headed down the Newfoundland coast.

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Passengers admire the view from the veranda deck of the R-100. 1929.

After R101 crashed and burned in France, en route to India on 5 October 1930, the Air Ministry ordered R100 grounded. It was deflated and hung up in its shed at Cardington for a year whilst three options were considered: a complete refit of R100 and continuation of tests for the eventual construction of R102; static testing of R100 and retention of about 300 staff to keep the programme “ticking over”; or retention of staff and the scrapping of the airship. In November 1931, it was decided to sell R100 for scrap. The entire framework of the ship was flattened by steamrollers and sold for less than £600.

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Passengers pass the time in the R-100’s lounge. 1929.

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A maid prepares a dish in the airship’s galley. 1929.

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Passengers enjoying the views from above. 1929.

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A maid sets up a table for lunch in the lounge. 1929.

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A passenger looking outside the R-100 panoramic windows.

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Passengers hang around the salon and upper gallery. 1930.

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Maids set up tables in the lounge for a meal. 1929.

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The lounge is rearranged as a dining room for meals. 1929.

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R-100 airship (interior).

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Reading and playing cards in R-100’s deck.

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The R-100 leaves her mooring on her maiden voyage.

A group of men posing in front of Lynch’s Slave Market, St. Louis, Missouri, 1852.

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[ SCHOOL UNIFORM ] China, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam.

Great video. Learn something. It’s fun.

China, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam.”]

Scottish piper in a Kilt on the battlefield during World War One.

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Three Dog Night – Eli’s Coming (1969)

It makes me want to put on my old leather vest with the long fringes…

The Prisoner S01E13 Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling

A great episode of the prisoner.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Nazi life, hamster homes, Nord Stream gas-lines, motorcycle riding, Oklahoma Onion Burgers, and no Holy Communion for you

Today we present some fun subjects and some delicious food. Oh, yes, and we also include some geopolitical stuff too. For you all who don’t want to read that “news”, you can go ahead and gloss or jump over it. There is no shame in skim reading if that is your want. I say, go for it! If it makes your boat float!

Have some fun here. Enjoy yourself.

Europe will need Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline one day, Kremlin says

Common sense is a luxury among NATO, EU, and Anglo-Saxon countries leadership.

From HERE

A pair of kids from Ohio rest on their motorcycles after arriving at Daytona Beach in 1975.

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Oklahoma Onion Burgers are SHOCKINGLY Good

Looks delicious! Doesn’t it?

Shrimpton: Russo-Ukrainian War (6)

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The war goes on, although it hasn’t quite yet reached the intensity of the libel battle between Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney in the High Court in London. I still think that ‘Russo-Ukrainian War’ is the best title. At any rate the MSM haven’t come up with anything better. It’s turned into a war of attrition with moderate to heavy casualties on both sides. Assessing just how heavy the casualties have been is very far from straightforward, although it still seems safe to divide the Ukrainian figure for Russian casualties by ten. I think that the Ukrainians will do less well in the war than in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Russia is right to complain that they are effectively fighting the whole of NATO. Aside from the British and American ground troops (special forces) deployed, crazily, inside Ukraine, NATO countries are supplying Ukraine with enormous quantities of weapons. Indeed US stocks of precision guided munitions are reported to be running low.

I expect a formal Russian declaration of war on the Ukraine in the next few months, possibly weeks, followed by general mobilisation. As Ukrainian stocks of precision anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles run low Russia is likely to regain control of the battlefield and Ukrainian airspace.

The Azov battalion continues to hold out in the Azovstal steelworks, desperate to protect its dirty secrets. Conditions are now reported to be worse than on the Beltway at rush hour, with bodies piled up everywhere. They can’t hold out for much longer. I hold no more brief for the Azov battalion than I do for the Waffen-SS but they are brave men and should be treated as such when they finally surrender. There’s been nothing like it since World War II.

NATO strategy is to get as many Ukrainians killed as possible by prolonging the war for as long as possible. So far as I can tell NATO is not trying to start World War III, but they might want to think twice about accepting Finland and Sweden into membership. If the Russian Government goes public on the intelligence yield then support for Ukraine in the West will fall away.

At the moment we are close to what NASA might term ‘Max Q’. The venom and lies being directed at Russia have understandably angered her elected president and government. Western precision weapons have dramatically increased Russian casualties. Anglo-Russian relations haven’t been this bad since the Crimean War.

Russian troops are now being accused of carrying out mass rapes, in what is undoubtedly intended to be an echo of 1945. There is no doubt that Russian soldiers raped a great many German women, sadly, at the end of the last world war, but the rapes were sanctioned by the notorious German agent Josef Stalin, who was not of course Russian.

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Stalin’s intent seems to have been to damage the reputation of the Red Army. I doubt that he was anxious to let the boys get their leg over, as it were, or desirous of getting back at the Germans for the mass rape of Russian women. Rape is wrong of course and never justified, either in peace or war.

However I sense increased scepticism about Ukrainian claims of Russian war crimes, which are starting to assume the proportions of a blood libel. Thankfully the Russophobes Boris Johnson and Simon Case aren’t likely to remain in power in London for much longer. Their resignations should pave the way for a UK climbdown on false claims about GRU officers poisoning the Skripals in 2018 in Salisbury and Lt-Colonel Litvinenko in 2006, and of Russian involvement in the murderous shoot-down of MH17 in 2014.

Revelation of the German GO2’s role in poisoning and probably murdering the Skripals would considerably ease tensions between London and Moscow. (Litvinenko poisoned himself of course, being killed by the antidote which he swallowed at the same time as the polonium.) It’s unlikely that the fanatically anti-Russian Liz Truss will continue to serve as Foreign Secretary, thankfully.

Will the Ukraine survive?

It’s now clear that when President Zelensky rejected President Putin’s fair peace terms back in March he bet the farm. There is now reporting that Poland is planning to participate in the dismemberment of the Ukraine, which would reflect the historical position, Western Ukraine being incorporated in the Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Poles of course participated in the break-up of Czechoslovakia after Munich.

I imagine that Russia will want to incorporate the whole of the Ukraine east of the Dneiper into Russia, along with a land bridge to Transnistria. Ethnic Ukrainian hatred for Russia and Russians is such that a negotiated solution is unlikely to work. Moscow will want a deep buffer zone around the Donbas.

Incorporating Western Ukraine into Poland is likely to prove more stable in the long run than having a rump Ukrainian republic endlessly plotting revenge against Russia. I fail to see how Russia could ever trust the Ukraine again.

American People In The 1950s

Here is a wonderful photograph collection of people in America taken by photographer Stevel in the 1950s.

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Atomic clocks put China’s BeiDou satnav system ahead of the rest, study finds

Of course. They learn from the United States on what NOT to do.

From HERE.

The New Disguise of the Russian Armed Forces used in Ukraine

RF Armed Forces use new radio-thermal camouflage as part of a special operation in Ukraine

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MOSCOW, April 26 – RIA NovostiThe Russian Armed Forces, as part of a special military operation in Ukraine, are using a new type of camouflage that reduces the visibility of combat vehicles in the infrared and radar ranges, an informed source told RIA Novosti.

Camouflage is a synthetic material that is worn on top of equipment in the form of covers or coatings. The material reduces the level of thermal radiation, for example, from a tank by several times, so that it practically merges with the background surface. In the radar range, it is significantly reduced detection range of equipment,” the source said.

He explained that, first of all, this disguise is intended to reduce the visibility of equipment by enemy UAVs and reconnaissance aircraft.

According to the source, the coating can also be painted in camouflage colors, reducing the visibility of military equipment in the visible optical range.

“As part of the special operation, various types of such camouflage are used on the Iskander operational-tactical missile systems, as well as on the latest T-90M Proryv tanks,” the source said.

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A pair of young women sunbathe at Coney Island in 1977.

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How to Make Italian Sausage, Peppers, and Onions | Allrecipes.com

Must listen: a very powerful speech by a former Singapore UN diplomat

Why Europe and US must change their me-only security mentality…
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From HERE

Crowds of beachgoers enjoy the sun at Deerfield Beach, Florida, 1976.

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ALERT: MONKEY POX IN MANHATTAN, NYC

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The New York City health department is investigating a possible case of monkeypox in the Big Apple.

The unnamed patient is currently being treated at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, city health officials confirmed on Thursday.

Medical officials have implemented appropriate isolation protocols and are conducted preliminary tests in an effort to confirm the diagnosis.

If positive, the tests will be sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for confirmatory testing.

The health department’s epidemiologists will also follow-up with all those who may have been in contact with the patient during their infectious period.

Monkeypox, which mostly occurs in west and central Africa, is a rare viral infection similar to smallpox, though milder. Cases of the disease have now been confirmed in seven countries outside of Africa, including the U.S., Canada, UK, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Sweden.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health on Wednesday confirmed a single case of monkeypox virus infection in a man who had recently traveled to Canada.

He has been hospitalized, but is in good condition, officials report.

The Massachusetts agency said it was working with the CDC and relevant local boards of health to carry out contact tracing, adding that ‘the case poses no risk to the public.’

America joins five European countries: Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the UK in confirmed cases. At least 13 suspected cases are also being investigated in Quebec, Canada.

U.S. officials are also probing six people who were on a place ride with a Briton that later tested positive for the virus. No deaths have been tied to the virus during this outbreak.

Monkeypox was first recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1970s. The number of cases in West Africa has increased in the last decade.

Symptoms include fever, headaches and skin rashes starting on the face and spreading to the rest of the body.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, told DailyMail.com Thursday that the virus is spreading via physical touch – and that it only spreads through respiratory droplets in the air in people that are already exhibiting symptoms.

This changes the formula for how the virus spreads compared to what Americans are typically used to after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It also gives an explanation as to why many of the cases detected in Europe are among gay and bisexual men.

A group of friends take a break from roller-skating at Venice Beach, 1979.

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PELOSI FORMALLY AND PUBLICALLY EXCOMMUNICATED BY SAN FRANCISCO ARCHBISHOP

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San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone announced on Friday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is forbidden to receive Holy Communion because of her increasingly “extreme” pro-abortion views.

Cordileone wrote:

After numerous attempts to speak with her to help her understand the grave evil she is perpetrating, the scandal she is causing, and the danger to her own soul she is risking, I have determined that the point has come in which I must make a public declaration that she is not to be admitted to Holy Communion unless and until she publicly repudiate her support for abortion “rights” and confess and receive absolution for her cooperation in this evil in the sacrament of Penance. I have accordingly sent her a Notification to this effect, which I have now made public.

In his letter, Cordileone said he wrote to Pelosi on April 7, telling her that she must publicly disavow her pro-abortion stance “or else refrain from referring to your Catholic faith in public and receiving Holy Communion, I would have no choice but to make a declaration, in keeping with canon 915, that you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” Cordileone said since sending that letter that Pelosi has not abided by his request. He wrote:

Therefore, in light of my responsibility as the Archbishop of San Francisco to be ‘concerned for all the Christian faithful entrusted to [my] care” (Code of Canon Law, can. 383, §1), by means of this communication I am hereby notifying you that you are not to present yourself for Holy Communion and, should you do so, you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion, until such time as you publicly repudiate your advocacy for the legitimacy of abortion and confess and receive absolution of this grave sin in the sacrament of Penance.

He also said a Catholic legislator who supports abortion after knowing the teaching of the Church, “commits a manifestly grave sin which is a cause of most serious scandal to others.  Therefore, universal Church law provides that such persons ‘are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly bans both obtaining an abortion and assisting with one, saying “since the first century, the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion….”

“This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law,” the catechism says.

Cordileone wrote in his announcement that he has received many letters over the years “expressing distress over the scandal” of Catholics in public life — like Pelosi and President Joe Biden — promoting “such grievously evil practices as abortion.” He said in part:

I have responded that conversion is always better than exclusion, and before any such action can be taken it must be preceded by sincere and diligent efforts at dialogue and persuasion.  With regard to Speaker Pelosi, I have striven to follow this wise route, as delineated by then-Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) in a letter to U.S. bishops regarding Holy Communion and Catholic politicians who cooperate in the grave evils of abortion and euthanasia.

The announcement continues:

Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi’s position on abortion has become only more extreme over the years, especially in the last few months.  Just earlier this month she once again, as she has many times before, explicitly cited her Catholic faith while justifying abortion as a “choice,” this time setting herself in direct opposition to Pope Francis: “The very idea that they would be telling women the size, timing or whatever of their family, the personal nature of this is so appalling, and I say that as a devout Catholic”; “They say to me, ‘Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows more about having babies than the Pope.’  Yes I do.  Are you stupid?

Cordileone said he took “no pleasure whatsoever” in fulfilling his pastoral duty and said his action is “not political.”

It’s the War Mobilization, Stupid!

Watch the new False Flag Weekly News on Rumble or watch alongside the links to stories we’re discussing

By Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor

Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign defeated incumbent president George HW Bush with the help of Ross Perot and an unrelenting focus on the be-all-end-all of presidential campaigns: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Clinton’s slogan pithily summarized the accumulated wisdom of more than two centuries of presidential politics: Voters identify the incumbent president and incumbent party with their perception of the current state of the economy. If times are good, the president and/or his party will likely be re-elected. If not, it’s time to “throw the bums out.”

I learned this in 1979 in a course on American Economic History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. According to the professor, it was an open secret that every president tries to strong-arm the Fed into juicing up the economy prior to his re-election campaign, usually with some success.

The 2020 election provided a classic example of the power of current economic trends over national election results. As of late 2019, the US economy was booming and Donald Trump was cruising toward an easy victory. Then COVID-19 hit, the economy imploded, and suddenly Trump no longer looked like a “very stable genius” to the crucial tranches of undecided, uninformed, and/or independent voters. Also, thanks to COVID and the economic implosion, Democrats could be whipped into a much more hysterical anti-Trump frenzy than would have been otherwise possible, leading to frenetic and heavily-funded get-out-the-vote efforts. So whether or not Trump is correct about alleged vote padding in swing states, he is certainly right that absent the COVID pandemic he would have won easy re-election.

Now that we have established the crucial connection between economic trends and incumbent parties’ prospects in national elections, it’s time to ask the million-dollar question: What the @&# are the Democrats thinking?! The Biden Administration, facing very tough midterm contests this year and at least equally monumental challenges in the 2024 presidential race, has made the apparently idiotic decision to blow up the US and global economies by provoking war with Russia.

As I write this, stocks, crypto, and even the bond market aren’t just swirling around the porcelain bowl, they’re plunging through the pipes and well on their way to the sewage treatment facility. The worst inflation in 40 years, driven in part by higher food and energy costs from Biden’s war on Russia, has forced the Fed to start ratcheting interest rates upward, pushing America towards 1970s-style stagflation at best, or a 2008 or even 1929 scenario at worst. Biden’s ever-escalating giveaway of US tax dollars to Ukraine is contributing to the economic as well as military mayhem.

Is Biden senile? Is Harris an idiot? Are the Democrats suicidal? Though the answer to the first two questions is undoubted “yes,” I’m not sure that the Democratic Party leadership and the oligarchs who own it are entirely bent on political self-destruction. There must be some sort of method in their apparent madness. And I think I know what it is:

“It’s the war mobilization, stupid!”

The oligarchs who own the Democratic Party (who may overlap somewhat with the ones that own the Republicans) aren’t going to seek success in 2022 and 2024 by riding a strong economy. Instead, they are hoping to win by dragging us into war and pounding their chests and telling us to support our fearless wartime leaders—and if you don’t you’re a treasonous unpatriotic Russia-loving Putin-loving Trump-loving transphobic white nationalist conspiracy theorist scumbag.

If the war gets bad enough, and the propaganda gets loud enough, people will put up with just about any amount of economic devastation. Consider World War II. Even though the US didn’t enter the war until more than two years after it started, and never experienced the level of combat and losses other nations suffered, the American people were quickly convinced to endure draconian rationing, forced conscription, virtual slave labor in war factories, and various and sundry economic unpleasantness, all in the name of defeating the evil racially-inferior slanty-eyed Japs and the evil white supremacist Adolf Hitler. FDR, who had cruised to re-election in 1940 by promising to keep America out of the war, had no problem winning in 1944 despite his broken promise (and his Pearl Harbor treason). When the nation is on a total war footing, people snap to attention and salute and do what they’re told and don’t ask questions, and the incumbent party and president enjoy almost godlike status.

My parents were children during World War II, and they (and my grandparents) experienced food rationing, gasoline rationing, and the near-total unavailability of all sorts of consumer goods, from appliances to automobiles. Sounds familiar? It’s like what we’re heading into now—only in 2022, we’re merely facing de facto rationing as many people can no longer buy their customary allotments of food, gas, and goods. Fortunately, the authorities probably won’t start issuing ration coupons until the war really heats up.

And heat up it will. Biden’s seemingly crazy policies, foreign as well as domestic, make sense only on the assumption that we’re heading into all-out World War III. Why would the US refuse Russia’s repeated entreaties to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality and cap NATO expansion, thereby provoking a ruinous war? Why would US leaders refuse Russia’s (and Zelensky’s) overtures for a negotiated solution? Why would they create what will soon become a 100-billion-dollar arms pipeline to Ukraine, while pushing Finland and Sweden to join NATO—a move that Russia will inevitably greet with military strikes?

The real rulers of the US empire, the neoconservatives who overthrew the Republic on 9/11/2001, are bent on world conquest. A decision has apparently been made behind the scenes to fight World War III sooner rather than later, in service to the Wolfowitz Doctrine that the US will tolerate no challenges to its global hegemony.

The neocons have made their position clear: They will either rule the planet unilaterally or destroy it. That is why the Empire and its vassals are inflicting economic devastation on their own people, and the people of the world, as they frantically mobilize for the biggest and most destructive war in human history.

If we are going to stop it, the time is now. Once NATO is officially at war with Russia, dissent will be ruthlessly quashed. And once the nukes start flying, we will spend whatever is left of our lives wishing we had done more to stop the neocon Strangeloves from pursuing their mad dream of world conquest.

Barry White – Just The Way You Are (Official Music Video)

Luxury Villas For Your Hamster

A design studio based in South Korea, studio ZIT, just launched a new incredible product: a miniature series of luxury villas for your hamsters! A fascinating and minutious concept that will allows you to choose a more comfy house than a simple cage for your lovely pets.

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Homemade Soft Pretzels!! How to Make Pretzels Recipe

Old Fashioned Love Song (1975) – Three Dog Night

First time I have heard this song in fifty years! LOL. Great presentation.

A woman (left) roller-skates, and a group of girls (right) get ready for a skate, at Venice Beach, California, 1979.

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Israeli media confirming CIA trained Ukrainian Nazi Paramilitary

Like a muddied spring, a ruined fountain, Is a righteous man fallen before a wicked one. Proverbs 25:26 (The Israel BibleTM)

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New evidence reveals CIA trained, armed Ukrainian Nazi paramilitary now leading the fight against Russia

…fom Israel 365 News

[ Editor’s Note: I surely couldn’t pass this up, coming from an Israeli source. No one in the US government or media would dare trash it, so here it is.

It’s a little late, but better than never. We have a long history of reporting on the neo-Nazis and Azov, going back to 2014. When this current fighting is over, there will be time to write a fuller history of it all.

The Cold War foreign intelligence agencies have always been wanting to keep a finger in the destabilization pies of countries by building ‘friendly forces’ with a combat capacity for when the big coup day comes.

When people don’t have money, but have low self esteem, it’s a big draw for them to become a player on the world stage. One just needs a suitable enemy to rage against. It took some time for NATO to grow this current Ukraine war, and here it is.

The only people who seen to be benefiting from it so far are the usual grifter types that always crawl out from under their rocks in times like these… Jim W. Dean ]

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2022 05 20 20 45

First published May 13, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s accusation that Ukraine advocated Nazism, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion seemed proof of his claim. But further research seems to implicate the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in establishing and funding the white supremacist paramilitary.

Sputnik News, a Russian state-owned news agency that is now inaccessible in the US, reported last week that Putin’s claims of ties between the US government and the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion were true.

Formed in 2014, the Azov Special Operations Detachment is a right-wing extremist, neo-Nazi, formerly paramilitary, unit of the National Guard of Ukraine, based in Mariupol, in the Azov Sea coastal region.

2016 report issued by the Office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights details accusations against the Azov movement’s use of torture and other war crimes in the ensuing conflict after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

The battalion’s sources of funding have always been unclear but the report cited the battalion’s online claims of receiving training from foreign military forces including those of Canada, Germany, the US, and the U.K.

10 Hammer into Anvil – Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner

Episode 10 of The Prisoner.

“Music begins where the words leave off…”

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Four potential outcomes for the fourth turning and the change to a New World Order Mark Two

We continue on our stroll though the “news” as the West slowly enters it’s nose dive towards the enormous dark and damp black hole that it has created. In this installment, we enjoy the curious and the interesting as well as suggest some tasty food adventures that might well result in some fine and delicious food experiences. Experiences, mind you, that would be glorious to share with friends. Hint. Hint.

I hope you all have fun here today.

“My mother, Pat Clark, photographed by my father, Honolulu, 1965”

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“The Real President Is Whoever Controls The Teleprompter”: Musk Delivers Scathing Criticism Of Biden

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Tech billionaire Elon Musk this week warned that the United States must take steps to address inflation or it will end up like socialist Venezuela.

Musk, who is currently in the process of acquiring Twitter, told a virtual conference that he believes the government has printed too much money in recent years.

“I mean, the obvious reason for inflation is that the government printed a zillion amount of more money than it had, obviously,” Musk said, likely referring to COVID-19 relief stimulus packages worth trillions of dollars that were passed in recent years.

U.S. inflation rose by 8.3 percent in April, compared with the previous year. That’s slightly lower than the 8.5 percent spike in March, but it’s still near the 40-year high.

“So it’s like the government can’t … issue checks far in excess of revenue without there being inflation, you know, velocity of money held constant,” the Tesla CEO said. 

“If the federal government writes checks, they never bounce. So that is effectively creation of more dollars. And if there are more dollars created, then the increase in the goods and services across the economy, then you have inflation, again, velocity of money held constant.”

If governments could merely “issue massive amounts of money and deficits didn’t matter, then, well, why don’t we just make the deficit 100 times bigger,” Musk asked. “The answer is, you can’t because it will basically turn the dollar into something that is worthless.”

“Various countries have tried this experiment multiple times,” Musk said.

“Have you seen Venezuela? Like the poor, poor people of Venezuela are, you know, have been just run roughshod by their government.”

In 2018, Venezuela, a country with significant reserves of oil and gas, saw its inflation rise more than 65,000 percent amid an economic crash that included plummeting oil prices and government price controls. The regime of Nicolas Maduro then started printing money, thereby devaluing its currency, which caused prices to rapidly increase.

During the conference, Musk also said the Biden administration “doesn’t seem to get a lot done” and questioned who is actually in charge.

“The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter,” he said.

“The path to power is the path to the teleprompter.”

“The Trump administration, leaving Trump aside, there were a lot of people in the administration who were effective at getting things done,” he remarked.

And it appears that Musk has seen enough of Democratic Party politicking to know who he will vote for from now on…

Musk’s comment about the White House comes as Jeff Bezos, also one of the richest people in the world, has increasingly started to target the administration’s economic policies. Bezos, in a series of Twitter posts, said the rapid increase in federal spending is the reason why inflation is as high as it is.

“Remember the Administration tried their best to add another $3.5 TRILLION to federal spending,” Bezos wrote on Monday, drawing rebuke from several White House officials.

“They failed, but if they had succeeded, inflation would be even higher than it is today, and inflation today is at a 40-year high.”

An Artist Has Made This Badass Raven Costume Entirely By Hand

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According to Rah-Bop, an illustrator and video game artist living in Seattle: “Since I get the impression it’s acceptable to dress up as an animal person at AC I took the opportunity to make a costume out of Rue, my D&D character, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while. If you see me, please feel free to say hi.”

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Investigation Launched After ‘Mystery’ Surge In Deaths Of Newborn Babies

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Health authorities in Scotland have launched an investigation after a mystery surge in deaths of newborn babies, the second time the phenomenon has been recorded in the space of six months.

A report by the Herald newspaper highlights the “very unusual” spike in deaths of babies, with the alarm being raised after 18 infants died within four weeks of birth in March.

That same control limit was also breached in September last year, when 21 neonatal deaths were reported, the first time this had occurred since records began.

“The neonatal mortality rate was 5.1 per 1,000 live births in September and 4.6 per 1,000 in March, against an average of 1.49 per 1000 in 2019,” reports the newspaper.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) said the deaths could not have been down to chance, while the cause behind the previous spike in September also “remained a mystery.”

The report notes that vaccination uptake has increased in expectant mothers and that COVID infections during pregnancy are associated with a higher chance of premature birth, but found no “direct link” between COVID surges and the deaths.

PHS Scotland says COVID infections “did not appear to have played a role” in the September spate of deaths.

Edinburgh University’s Dr. Sarah Stock said, “The numbers are really troubling,” but admitted she didn’t know the cause of the deaths.

Impossibly Easy Banana Bread Coffee Cake (With Make-Ahead Directions)

This banana bread coffee cake is a tasty new take on breakfast! It goes wonderfully with coffee. Sliced and mashed bananas make this cake extra moist and delicious.

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Ingredients

Coffee Cake

  • 2 to 3 large ripe bananas, mashed (about 1 1/3 cups), plus 1 large banana, sliced
  • 2/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/4 cup milk
  • 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 3 eggs
  • 2 2/3 cups Original Bisquick™ mix
  • 3/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Streusel

  • 1 cup Original Bisquick™ mix
  • 1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
  • 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
  • 6 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces

Serve-With, If Desired

  • Maple syrup

Steps

  • 1
    Heat oven to 350°F. Grease bottom and sides of 13×9-inch pan with shortening or cooking spray.
  • 2
    In large bowl, stir mashed bananas, granulated sugar, milk, oil, cinnamon and eggs. Stir in 2 2/3 cups Bisquick mix and 3/4 cup walnuts; fold in banana slices. Pour mixture into pan.
  • 3
    In medium bowl, mix Streusel ingredients, cutting in butter with pastry blender or fork until crumbly. Sprinkle over mixture in pan.
  • 4
    Bake 30 to 36 minutes or until knife inserted in center comes out clean. Cut into 4 rows by 3 rows. Drizzle with maple syrup just before serving.
  • 5
    Make-Ahead Directions: Make as directed through step 3. Cover and refrigerate up to 12 hours. Uncover, and bake as directed in step 4.

“My mother, Ritva, 1960s”

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McConnell Says Congress Hopes To Approve Sweden’s NATO Bid By August

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised that approval of Sweden’s application to join NATO will be fast-tracked by Congress and could be done within months.

McConnell made the comments to reporters in Stockholm on Monday after Sweden officially announced it will apply to NATO to provide better security for the country in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Sweden shares a maritime border with Russia.

“We anticipate moving this rapid—in a more rapid fashion than past applications for NATO,” McConnell told reporters in Stockholm, where the Kentucky Republican was visiting with a delegation of GOP senators in a show of support amid the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict.

“We hope to approve it before August,” he said. “We are confident it will be approved.”

McConnell also shared a statement on Monday following his visit to both Sweden and Finland where he reiterated his support for both nations joining NATO, stating that both would “bring tremendous value as new NATO members and would strengthen the alliance significantly.”

“Sweden and Finland already have long track records as two of the United States and NATO’s most capable friends and partners, even from outside the alliance,” the Senate Republican leader said.

“Both countries have massive geographic importance, professional and well-equipped armed forces, strong military industrial bases, and significant interoperability with U.S. and NATO forces. Both nations’ robust commitments to defense funding mean that their accession would directly address longstanding concerns about burden-sharing and the financial contributions of our allies,” McConnell said.

He added that he would do “everything in my power to ensure that our part of their accession process moves smoothly and expeditiously.”

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson told reporters in Stockholm on Monday that the decision to join NATO was driven in part by Finland’s recent move to join the alliance.

Finnish leaders, with backing from lawmakers in the country, announced plans to officially seek NATO membership over the weekend.

“Should Sweden be the only country in the Baltic Sea region that was not a member of NATO, we would be in a very vulnerable position. We can’t rule out that Russia would then increase pressure on Sweden,” Andersson said.

The vote to approve new membership into NATO must be unanimous among all members.

However, Turkey has threatened to block the bid by Sweden and Finland, citing their alleged willingness to support terrorist organizations, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and followers of Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara accuses of being behind the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey.

“Neither of these countries has a clear, open attitude toward terrorist organizations,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a joint news conference with his Algerian counterpart Abdelmadjid Tebboune on Monday. “How can we trust them?”

Erdogan also described Sweden as an “incubation center for terrorist organizations,” and claimed that some members of Sweden’s Parliament supported the PKK.

He also pointed to the fact that both Sweden and Finland imposed arms export embargoes on Turkey in 2019 after its incursion into Syria.

“First of all, we cannot say ‘yes’ to those who impose sanctions on Turkey, on joining NATO which is a security organization,” Erdogan also noted.

The Turkish president added that NATO would become “a place where representatives of terrorist organizations are concentrated” if both Sweden and Finland were to join.

Numerous other NATO members have signaled support for the two nations to join.

America the Feckless

How low can we go?

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Shireen funeral 600×400 1

There have been several particularly disturbing stories in the media over the past week even if one chooses to tune out the US Congress’s pending astonishing overwhelming approval of a grant of $39.8 billion to Ukraine to continue the war to “weaken” Russia. Even so-called progressives in the Democratic Party voted for the war. So now the United States will be at war with Russia through proxy, like it or not, and the consequences could be devastating, particularly if NATO member Poland intervenes directly, as it has been threatening, but few in Washington seem to be awake to that reality. And only Senator Rand Paul, who is asking for an inspector general to supervise the cash flow, is seriously wondering how much of the “aid” will be stolen by President Volodymyr Zelensky and his cronies. Ukraine has long been distinguished as the most corrupt country in Europe.

Another revolting story concerns the murder of a Palestinian Christian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who also happens to be an American citizen. She was shot dead by an Israeli sniper who hit her in the neck in the small gap between a protective helmet and vest. She was covering Israeli Army violence directed against protesting Palestinians in the West Bank town of Jenin for al-Jazeera and the vest was labelled “Press” in large letters. Israel initially sought to blame her death on Palestinian “gunmen” who allegedly were in the area, but that story would not wash when confronted with the eyewitness testimony of others who were on the scene and it was eventually conceded that an Israeli soldier “might have” fired the fatal shot. Last Friday, preceding Shireen’s funeral at the Cathedral of the Annunciation of the Virgin in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli police providing “security” were seen kicking and using batons to beat mourners seeking to carry the coffin from the hospital to the church. The police also hurled stun and smoke grenades into the crowd after several plastic water bottles were allegedly thrown in their direction. Abu Akleh’s home was also searched by police and it will no doubt be claimed that she was a “terrorist,” standard Israeli practice for many of those whom they murder.

Whenever an American citizen is killed under questionable circumstances overseas it is the responsibility of the local US Embassy to demand an investigation and explanation of what occurred. To be sure, the ardently Zionist US Ambassador Thomas Nides in Jerusalem has called for an inquiry, but let’s see what happens in this case as the mainstream media conspires to make the story disappear even though a number of Democratic congressmen (and no Republicans) have called for a response. Former Israeli army spokesman Avi Benayahu has already opined that “Let’s assume Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by IDF. No need to apologize for that.” Nevertheless, some form of inquiry acceptable to Israel will no doubt take place, but the Israeli government and the country’s courts have a history of exonerating soldiers and armed settlers when they kill Palestinians. Recently, a Palestinian was sentenced to nine months in prison for slapping an armed settler who was threatening his family while Israeli soldiers and settlers who have killed non-threatening Palestinians, including children, rarely receive any punishment at all.

And being an American citizen makes no difference. History tells us that Israel can kill Americans with impunity judging from the massacre of 34 American sailors on board the USS Liberty in 1967 and the Rachel Corrie murder-by-bulldozer in 2003. A Turkish-American boy Furkan Dogan who was on an aid ship to Gaza in 2010 was also murdered by Israeli soldiers who boarded the vessel, also killing eight others. No Israeli has been punished for any of the deaths.

This has to stop but the problem is in Washington, not in Jerusalem. Israel kills and kills because it knows it can get away with it due to American enabling of the process. It is an embarrassment that a series of US Ambassadors to Israel have been little more than apologists for the Jewish state. And we have House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declaring “I have said to people when they ask me if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.” Meanwhile President Joe Biden has self-declared as a “Zionist” while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer calls himself in Hebrew the “shomer yisroel” or defender of Israel in the Senate. And then there is House Intelligence Committee head Adam Schiff’s son sporting a Mossad t-shirt. And what about the regular mass “pilgrimages” by groups of Congressmen to Israel during recesses, an exercise in obtaining the approval of whichever unindicted felon is in charge of that rogue country that pretends to pass for a “democracy”?

As much as one would like to see all the traitors in Congress and the White House who give Israel a free pass on its monstrous behavior held accountable, such an outcome is unimaginable because enough of them have been bought or intimidated to such an extent that they remain silent or chant like a chorus in a Greek tragedy that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” And there is also the Jewish dominated mainstream media: the NY Times report on this latest murder had a headline reading that Shireen Abu Akleh had somehow “Died,” not that she was murdered by the Israelis, to whom the American taxpayer gives $10 million every single day! It is shameful and disgusting!

A related tale also concerns Israel and the United States. David Brog is running for Congress from Nevada. Brog is the former executive director of Pastor John Hagee’s Texas-based Christians United For Israel even though he is Jewish. Indeed, he has made Israel the focal point of his campaign based on his contention that “he brings a lifetime of dedication and a depth of knowledge to lead on pro-Israel causes.” He has said “I don’t just want to be a friend of Israel. I want to be a leader on Israel and a champion of Israel… We have to be very quick to reach out and broaden our coalition to all people of goodwill who love Israel and hate antisemitism.”

Brog, who is not from Nevada, has not surprisingly raised considerably more money than other GOP candidates vying for the position and he has also received the backing of former Trump administration Jewish officials, including David Friedman, the ex-US Ambassador to Israel, and Elan Carr, the special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. Friedman and Carr co-hosted a virtual fundraiser for Brog two weeks ago.

Brog is a one trick pony and his trick is to keep saying Israel over and over again to bring in the Shekels from the likes of Israel born Miriam Adelson, who inherited her husband’s casino fortune and lives in Las Vegas. It is disconcerting to see a politician running for national office in the United States so he can advance the interests of a foreign country, yet that is what Brog is doing openly. One would hope a lot of Nevada voters will see the issue in the same fashion, but Brog will have big bucks and the pro-Israel media supporting him. In any event, I have to wish the “malocchio” or evil eye on Brog and I hope he loses in his run and loses big. The United States does not need yet another ardent Israel booster in Congress or anywhere else in the public space!

Another tale that is developing surrounds the publication of the latest tell-all book by a survivor of the Donald Trump administration. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who was fired by Trump after the 2020 election, has described a series of catastrophic proposals by the president relating to national security and defense, including using missiles fired from the US to take on Mexican drug cartels. Another idea floated by Trump, if Esper is not lying, was to use soldiers to shoot protesters in Washington in the wake of the George Floyd death in Minneapolis in May 2020. Other former senior Trump officials have also been claiming that Trump often asked whether China had developed a top-secret hurricane gun that could be firing storms at the United States. And John Bolton, in his book, asserts that Trump asked if Finland were part of Russia.

But to my mind the most interesting revelation made by Esper is the back story, also set in the Middle East, relating to the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, which illustrates much that is wrong with the national security state that the United States has evolved into. According to Esper, Trump lied after the assassination was criticized by saying that Soleimani was actively preparing attacks on four American Embassies in the Mideast region. Esper confirms that there was no intelligence to back up that claim, but interestingly goes beyond that to make clear that there was no specific intelligence at all suggesting that such an attack was imminent or even being planned. There were only generic regional security threats that many embassies in the world respond to and make preparations to defend against.

One recalls the back story at the time, with the Iraqi government claiming that Soleimani, widely regarded as the second most powerful official in Iran after the Ayatollah, was in Baghdad to discuss peace arrangements and that the US Embassy had been informed of his planned trip and had raised no objection to it. Instead, the US used the opportunity to launch an armed drone to kill him and nine Iraqi militia members that were accompanying him from the airport. In other words, there was no imminent threat, nor even a plausible threat, and the US went ahead any way and killed a senior Iranian government official. That is unambiguously a war crime. Will anyone be held accountable? Of course not!

But finally there is also a bit of good news. The White House press secretary who is replacing Jen Psaki is Karine Jean-Pierre. She is a woman, black and lesbian, so clearly she passes the Democratic Party template for such a position but she lacks the mandatory Israel connection. It turns out that she once criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and even called for it to be boycotted. She is already being attacked by the usual groups and individuals, so let’s see how long she lasts!

Wooden Sculptures That Are So Realistic They’ll Leave Everyone With Goosebumps

“I saw the image in a piece of material, and then I just set it free.” This is how many famous sculptors describe their work. Sometimes their creations are so uncannily realistic that you might feel a little scared looking at them, yet you’re unable to drag your gaze away.

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Fwd: Interview with US Col. Richard Black (ret.)

Richard Black
Richard Black

“I found this interview of a Col. Richard Black (ret.) extremely interesting.  This guy is a US military man  who served 31 years in the Marines and in the Army, then served in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1998 to 2006, and in the Virginia Senate from 2012 to 2020.
It lasts over an hour, covers the US intervention in Syria, post-Yeltsin Russia, US political military strategy, Ukraine and US victory at all costs, and more.”
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-Irene

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Mike Billington with Executive Intelligence Review interviews Col. Richard Black (ret.).

BILLINGTON: Hi, this is this is Mike Billington with Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute. I am here today with Col. Richard Black, Sen. Richard Black, who, after serving 31 years in the Marines and in the Army, then served in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1998 to 2006, and in the Virginia Senate from 2012 to 2020. I’ll also allow Colonel Black to describe his military service himself.

So, Colonel Black, welcome. With the with the U.S. and U.K. and NATO surrogate war with Russia, which is taking place in Ukraine, and the economic warfare being carried out directly against Russia, this has been accompanied by an information war which is intended to demonize Russia and especially President Vladimir Putin. One repeated theme is that the Russian military is carrying out ruthless campaigns of murder against civilians and destruction of residential areas, often referring to the Russian military operations in Syria, claiming that they had done the same thing in Syria, especially against Aleppo. These are supposedly examples of their war crimes and crimes against humanity.

You have been a leading spokesman internationally for many years, exposing the lies about what took place in Syria and the war on Syria. So first, let me ask: How and why did Russia get involved in Syria militarily? And how does that contrast with the U.S. and NATO supposed justification for their military intervention in Syria?

BLACK: Well, let me begin, if I could, by telling our listeners that I’m very patriotic: I volunteered to join the Marines and I volunteered to go to Vietnam. I fought in the bloodiest Marine campaign of the entire war. And I was a helicopter pilot who flew 269 combat missions. My aircraft was hit by ground fire on four missions. I, then, fought on the ground with the First Marine Division, and during one of the 70 combat patrols that I made, my radioman were both killed, and I was wounded while we were attacking and trying to rescue a surrounded Marine outpost.

So I’m very pro-American. I actually was a part of NATO and was prepared to die in Germany, to defend against an attack by the Soviet Union.

But Russia is not the Soviet Union at all. People don’t understand that because the media have not made it clear. But Russia is not a communist state; the Soviet Union was a communist state.

Now, one of the things that I’ve seen claimed, that has been particularly irritating to me because of my experience with Syria: I have I have been in Aleppo city. Aleppo city is the biggest city in Syria, or it was at least before the war began. And there was a tremendous battle. Some some call it the “Stalingrad of the Syrian war,” which is not a bad comparison. It was a terribly bitter battle that went on from 2012 until 2016. In the course of urban combat, any forces that are fighting are forced to destroy buildings. Buildings are blown down on a massive scale. And this happens any time that you have urban combat. So I have walked the streets of Aleppo, while combat was still in progress. I have looked across, through a slit in the sandbags at enemy controlled territory; I’ve stood on tanks that were blown out and this type of thing.

What I do know, and I can tell you about Aleppo is that Russia was extremely reluctant to get involved in combat in Syria. The war began in 2011, when the United States landed Central Intelligence operatives to begin coordinating with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. And we had been unwavering supporters of Al Qaeda, since before the war formally began. We are supporters of Al Qaeda today, where they’re bottled up in Idlib province. The CIA supplied them under secret Operation Timber Sycamore. We gave them all of their anti-tank weapons, all of their anti air- missiles. And Al Qaeda has always been our proxy force on the ground. They, together with ISIS, have carried out the mission of the United States, together with a great number of affiliates that really are kind of interchangeable. You have the Free Syrian Army soldiers move from ISIS to Al Qaeda to Free Syrian Army, rather fluidly. And so we started that war.

But the United States has a strategic policy of using proxies to engage in war. And our objective was to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria, and in order to do that, we employed proxy soldiers who were the most vile of all terrorists. Something very similar is happening right now in in Ukraine.

But going back to Aleppo, the Syrian army, together with Hezbollah, which was very effective; there were some troops that were organized by Iran also, but it was pretty much a Syrian show, certainly directed by Syrian generals. And they had fought this bitter urban combat, very brutal, very deadly. And they had fought it for four years, before Russia ever joined the battle. So after four years, the city of Aleppo had enormous destruction. And at that point, the Russians, at the invitation of the legitimate government of Syria, entered the war. But unlike many of the media reports, they did not enter the war as a ground force.  Now, they had some small ground forces. They had military police, they had a few artillery units, a few special operations people, and quite a number of advisers and that sort of thing. But they were not a significant ground force.

On the other hand, they were a significant and very effective air force, that supplemented the Syrian Air Force. But it really was just the last year of the war, the battle for Aleppo, just the last year, that they entered and their air power was very effective. And by this time, the Syrians had pretty well worn down the terrorist forces. And the Russian assistance was able to tip the balance, and Aleppo was the grand victory of the entire Syrian war.

But to blame the Russians for the massive destruction that took place within Aleppo, it’s bizarre: Because they were not there, they were not even present when this happened. So this is simply another part of the propaganda narrative, which is which hasbeen very effective for the West, demonizing Russia, and making claims that have no substance. But people don’t remember the history of these things—they’re rather complex. So, no: Russia was not in any respect responsible for the massive destruction of the city of Aleppo.

BILLINGTON: How would you contrast the methods of warfare followed by Russia, as opposed to the U.S. and allied forces in Syria?

BLACK: Well, first of all, the American involvement, the United States war against Syria is a war of aggression. We put a highly secretive CIA special activities center—these are kind of the James Bond guys of the Central Intelligence Agency, total Machiavellian; they will do anything, there’s no it’s no holds barred with these guys. We sent them in and we started the war in Syria. The war didn’t exist until we sent the CIA to coordinate with Al Qaeda elements. So we began the war and we were not invited into Syria.

In fact, the United States has seized, two significant parts of Syria. One is a very major part, the Euphrates River, carves off about a third of the northern part of Syria: The United States invaded that portion. We actually put troops on the ground, illegal—against any standard international law of war—it was it was a just a seizure. And this was this was something that was referred to by John Kerry, who was then the Secretary of State, and he was frustrated at the tremendous victory by the Syrian Armed Forces against Al Qaeda and ISIS. And he said, well, we probably need to move to Plan B. He didn’t announce what Plan B was, but it had it unfolded over time: Plan B was the American seizure of that northern portion of Syria. The importance of taking that part of Syria is, that it is the bread basket for all of the Syrian people. That is where the wheat—Syria actually had a significant wheat surplus and the people were very well fed in Syria, before the war. We wanted to take the wheat away, to cause famine among the Syrian people.

The other thing we were able to do, is to seize the major part of the oil and natural gas fields. Those also were produced in that northern portion beyond the Euphrates River. And the idea was that, by stealing the oil and then the gas, we would be able to shut down the transportation system, and at the same time, during the Syrian winters, we could freeze to death the Syrian civilian population, which in many cases were living in rubble, where these terrorist armies, with mechanized divisions had attacked and just totally destroyed these cities, and left people just living in little pockets of rubble.

We wanted to starve and we wanted to freeze to death the people of Syria, and that was Plan B.

Now, we became frustrated at a certain point that somehow these Syrians, these darned Syrians—it’s a tiny little country, and why are these people resilient? They’re fighting against two-thirds of the entire military and industrial force of the world. How can a nation of 23 million people possibly withstand this for over a decade? And so we decided we had to take action or we were going totally lose Syria. And so the U.S. Congress imposed the Caesar sanctions. The Caesar sanctions were the most brutal sanctions ever imposed on any nation. During the Second World War, sanctions were not nearly as strict as they were on Syria.

We weren’t at war with Syria! And yet we had a naval blockade around the country. We devalued their currency through the SWIFT system for international payments, making it impossible for them to purchase medications. So you had Syrian women who would contract breast cancer, just like we have here in this country. But instead, where in this country where breast cancer has become relatively treatable, we cut off the medical supplies so that the women in Syria would die of breast cancer because they could not get the medications, because we slam their dollars through the SWIFT system.

One of the last things that we did and the evidence is vague on it, but there was a mysterious explosion in the harbor in Lebanon, and it was a massive explosion of a shipload of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. It killed hundreds of Lebanese people. It wounded thousands and thousands, destroyed the economy of Lebanon. And, most importantly, it destroyed the banking system of Lebanon, which was one of the few lifelines remaining to Syria. I don’t think that explosion was accidental. I think it was orchestrated, and I suspect that the Central Intelligence Agency was aware of the nation that carried out that action to destroy Beirut Harbor.

But throughout you see this this Machiavellian approach, where we use unlimited force and violence. And at the same time, we control the global media, to where we erase all discussions of what’s truly happening. So, to the man or the woman in the street, they think things are fine. Everything is being done for altruistic reasons, but it’s not.

BILLINGTON: Part of your military service was as a JAG officer, and for a period of time, you were the Army’s head of the criminal law division at the Pentagon. And in that light, what do you see as of how these Caesar sanctions—how would you look at those from the perspective of international law and military law?

BLACK: Well, now, I was not the international law expert. I was the criminal law expert. But I would say that making war on a civilian population is a crime of grave significance in the law of war.

One of the things that we did as we as we allied ourselves with Al Qaeda, and on and off with ISIS; I mean, we fought ISIS in a very serious way, but at the same time, we often employed them to use against the Syrian government. So it’s kind of a love-hate. But we have always worked with the terrorists. They were the core.

One of the policies that was followed was that under this extreme version of Islam, this Wahhabism, there was this notion that you possess a woman that you seize with your strong right arm in battle. And this goes back to the seventh century. And so we facilitated the movement of Islamic terrorists from 100 countries, and they came and they joined ISIS, they joined Al Qaeda, they joined the Free Syrian Army, all of these different ones. And one of the things that they knew when they arrived is that they were lawfully entitled to murder the husbands—I’m not talking about military people, I’m talking about civilians—they could murder the husbands, they could kill them, and then they could possess and own their wives and their children.

And they did it in vast numbers.

And so there was there was a campaign of rape, it was an organized campaign of rape across the nation of Syria. And there actually were slave markets that that arose in certain of these rebel areas where they actually had price lists of the different women.

And interestingly, the highest prices went to the youngest children, because there were a great number of pedophiles. And the pedophiles wanted to possess small children, because under the laws that were applied, they were permitted to rape these children repeatedly. They were able to rape the widows of the slain soldiers or the slain civilians, and possess them and buy them and sell them among themselves. This went on.

I’m not saying that the CIA created this policy, but they understood that it was a widespread policy, and they condoned it. They never criticized it in any way.

This was so bad, that I spoke with President Assad, who shared with me that they were in the process—when I visited in 2016; I was in a number of battle zones, and in the capital. And I met with the President, and he said that at that time, they were working on legislation in the parliament, to change the law of citizenship. They had always followed the Islamic law, which was that that a child citizenship derived from the father. But there were so many tens, hundreds of thousands of Syrian women impregnated by these terrorists who were imported into Syria, that it was necessary to change the law, so that they would have Syrian citizenship and they wouldn’t have to be returned to their ISIS father in Saudi Arabia, or in Tunisia. They could be retained in Syria. And I checked later and that law was passed and was implemented.

But it just shows the utter cruelty. When we fight these wars, we have no limits on the cruelty and the inhumanity that we’re prepared to impose on the people, making them suffer, so that somehow that will translate into overthrowing the government, and perhaps taking their oil, taking their resources.

BILLINGTON: Clearly, the policy against Russia today, by the current administration.

BLACK: Yes. Yes. You know, Russia is, perhaps more blessed with natural resources than any other nation on Earth. They are a major producer of grain, of oil, of aluminum, of fertilizers, of an immense number of things that tie into the whole global economy. And no doubt there are people who look at this and say, “if we could somehow break up Russia itself, there will be fortunes made, to where trillionaires will be made by the dozens.” And there’s some attraction to that. Certainly you’ve seen some of this taking place already, with foreign interests taking over Ukraine, and taking their vast resources.

But, we began a drive towards Russia, almost immediately after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The Soviet Union dissolved, the Warsaw Pact dissolved. And unfortunately, one of the great tragedies of history is that we failed to dissolve NATO. The sole purpose of NATO was to defend against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union no longer existed. NATO went toe toe with the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact was gone; it no longer existed. There was no purpose in NATO’s continuing to exist. However, we retained it, and it could not exist unless it had an enemy. Russia was desperate to become part of the West.

I met with the head of Gazprom, the largest corporation in Russia, And this was shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union, and he described for me how they were struggling to have their media be as free as it was in the West. And they perceived us as being much more free and open than we were. And he said, you know, we’ve got this problem because we have this uprising in Chechnya, which is part of Russia. And he said the Chechnyan rebels send videos to Russian television and we play them on Russian television, because that’s the way freedom of speech works.

And I said, “Are you kidding me?” I said, “You’re publishing the enemy propaganda films?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “Isn’t that the way you do it in the United States?” I said, “No.  In the Second World War, we took the head of the Associated Press and we put him in charge of wartime censorship, and it was very strict.”

So but this is just an example of how they were struggling. They went from being an officially atheist country, to where they became the most Christianized major nation in Europe, by far. Not only were the people, the most Christianized people in any major country in Europe, but the government itself was very supportive of the church, of the Christian faith.

They altered their Constitution to say that marriage was the union of one man and one woman.

They became very restrictive on the practice of abortion. They ended the practice of overseas adoptions, where some people were going to Russia and adopting little boys for immoral purposes. So they became a totally different culture and.

In any event, the United States has this long-standing strategy, this political-military strategy, of expanding the empire. We did it in the Middle East, where we attempted to create a massive neocolonial empire. It’s it became rather frayed. The people did not want it. And it seems to be doomed to extinction sometime—but it may go on for another 100 years. But in any event, we are trying to do something similar, as we roll to the East, right up virtually to the Russian border.

BILLINGTON:  So, the U.S. and U.K. position on the war in Ukraine, just over these last few weeks has now become not only supporting the war, but victory at all costs. This has been declared by Defense Secretary Austin and others. And they are pumping in huge quantities of not only defensive but offensive military weaponry to the Kyiv regime. What do you see as the consequence of this policy?

BLACK: I think one thing that it will do is it will ensure that a tremendous number of innocent Ukrainian soldiers will die needlessly. A lot of Russian soldiers will die needlessly. These are kids. You know, kids go off to war. I went off to war as a kid. You think your country, right or wrong, everything they’re doing is fine. It just it breaks my heart, when I look at the faces of young Russian boys, who have been who have been gunned down—in some cases very criminally by Ukrainian forces. And likewise, I see Ukrainian young men, who are being slaughtered on the battlefield.

We don’t care!

The United States and NATO, we do not care how many Ukrainians die.

Not civilians, not women, not children, not soldiers. We do not care. It’s become a great football game. You know, we’ve got our team. They’ve got their team, rah rah. We want to get the biggest score and run it up. And, you know, we don’t care how many how many of our players get crippled on the playing field, as long as we win.

Now, we are shipping fantastic quantities of weapons, and it’s caused the stock of Raytheon, which creates missiles, and Northrop Grumman, which creates aircraft and missiles, all of these defense industries have become tremendously bloated with tax dollars. I don’t think it’s ultimately going to change the outcome.

I think that Russia will prevail.

The Ukrainians are in a very awkward strategic position in the East.

But if you look at the way that this unfolded, President Putin made a desperate effort to stop the march towards war back in December of 2021. He went so far as to put specific written proposals on the table with NATO, peace proposals to defuse what was coming about.

Because at this point, Ukraine was massing troops to attack the Donbas. And so, he was trying to head this off.

He didn’t want war.

And NATO just blew it off, just dismissed it; never took it seriously, never went into serious negotiations.

At that point, Putin seeing that armed Ukrainians, with weapons to kill Russian troops were literally on their borders, decided he had to strike first.

Now, you could see, that this was not this was not some preplanned attack. This was not like Hitler’s attack into Poland, where the standard rule of thumb, is that you always have a 3-to-1 advantage when you are the attacker. You have to mass three times as many tanks and artillery and planes and men, as the other side has. In fact, when Russia went in, they went in with what they had, what they could cobble together on short notice.

And they were outnumbered by the Ukrainian forces.

The Ukrainian forces had about 250,000.

The Russians had perhaps 160,000. So instead of having three times as many, they actually had fewer troops than the Ukrainians. But they were forced to attack, to try to preempt the battle that was looming, where the Ukrainians had massed these forces against the Donbas.

Now, the Donbas is adjacent to Russia.

It is a portion of Ukraine that did not join with the revolutionary government that conducted the coup in 2014 and overthrew the government of Ukraine. They refused to become a part of the new revolutionary government of Ukraine. And so they declared their independence.

And Ukraine had massed this enormous army to attack against the Donbas.

And so Russia was forced to go in to preempt that planned attack by Ukraine.

And you could see that Russia very much hoped that they could conduct this special operation without unduly causing casualties for the Ukrainians, because they think of the Ukrainians, or at least they did think of the Ukrainians as brother Slavs; that they wanted to have good relations.

But there is a famous picture with a Russian tank, that had been stopped by a gathering of maybe 40 civilians who just walked out in the road and blocked the road and the tank stopped.

I can tell you, in Vietnam, if we had had a bunch of people who stood in the way of an American tank, going through, that tank would not have slowed down, in the slightest!

It wouldn’t honk the horn, it wouldn’t have done anything; wouldn’t have fired a warning shot. It would have just gone on. And I think that’s more typical—I’m not I’m not criticizing the Americans. I was there and I was fighting, and I probably would have would have driven the tank straight through myself.

But what I’m saying is that the rules of engagement for the Russians were very, very cautious.

They didn’t want to create a great deal of hatred and animosity.

The Russians did not go in—they did not bomb the electrical system, the media systems, the water systems, the bridges and so forth. They tried to retain the infrastructure of Ukraine in good shape because they wanted it to get back. They just wanted this to be over with and get back to normal. It didn’t work. The Ukrainians, the resistance was unexpectedly hard. The Ukrainian soldiers fought with great, great valor, great heroism. And. And so now the game has been upped and it’s become much more serious.

But it is amazing to look and to see that Russia dominates the air. They haven’t knocked out the train systems. They haven’t knocked out power plants. They haven’t knocked out so many things. They’ve never bombed the buildings in the center of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine; they haven’t bombed the buildings where the parliament meets. They’ve been incredibly reserved about these things, hoping against hope that peace could be achieved.

But I don’t think I don’t think Ukraine has anything to do with the decision about peace or war.

I think the decision about peace or war is made in Washington, D.C. As long as we want the war to continue, we will fight that war, using Ukrainians as proxies, and we will fight it to the last Ukrainian death.

BILLINGTON: How do you project the potential of a war breaking out directly between the United States and Russia? And what would that be like?

BLACK: You know, if you go back to the First World War in 1914, you had the assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary. He and his wife were killed. As a result of those two people being killed, you had a domino effect of all of these alliances, and anger, and media hysteria. And before it was over, I think it was 14 million people had been killed. It’s always hard to get true numbers, but anyway, it was an enormous number of millions of people who died as a result of that.

We need to recognize the risk of playing these games of chicken. Where, for example, the Turkish media just published an article saying that at Mariupol, where there was a great siege, that the Russians ultimately won.

The one area they haven’t taken over is this tremendous steel plant.

There are a lot of Ukrainian soldiers who are holed up there. And now it has come to light that apparently there are 50 French senior officers, who are trapped in that steel plant along with the Ukrainians.

The French soldiers have been on the ground fighting, directing the battle. And this was kept under wraps, ultra-secret, because of the French elections that just occurred. Had the French people known that there were a large number of French officers trapped and probably going to die in that steel plant, the elections would have gone the other way: Marine Le Pen would have won. And so it was very important that for the entire deep state, that it not come to light that these French officers were there.

We know that there are NATO officers who are present on the ground in Ukraine as advisors and so forth. We run the risk. Now, my guess is—and this is this is a guess, I could be wrong—but the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva, was sunk as a result of being struck by anti-ship missiles.

My guess is that those missiles, I think there’s a good chance they were fired by the French. Now, I could be wrong, but those missiles are so ultra-sensitive and so dangerous to our ships, that I don’t think that NATO would trust the missiles to Ukrainians, or to anybody else. I think I think they have to be maintained under NATO control and operation.

So I think that it was probably NATO forces that actually sunk the Moskva.

And you can see we’re taking these very reckless actions, and each time we sort of up the ante—I happen to be a Republican—but we have two Republican U.S. senators who have said that, “well, we might just need to use nuclear weapons against Russia.”

That is insane.

I think it’s important that people begin to discuss what a thermonuclear war would mean.

Now, we need to understand, we think, “oh, we’re big, and we’re bad, and we have all this stuff.”

Russia is roughly comparable to the United States in nuclear power.

They have hypersonic missiles, that we do not have. They can absolutely evade any timely detection, and they can fire missiles from Russia and reach San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York City.

And if you think about just Virginia, where I happen to live, if there were a nuclear war—and keep in mind, they also have a very large and effective fleet of nuclear submarines that lie off the coast of the United States.

They have a great number of nuclear-tipped missiles, and they can evade any defenses we have.

So just in Virginia, if you look at it, all of Northern Virginia would be essentially annihilated.

There would hardly be any human life remaining in Loudoun County, Prince William County, Fairfax County, Arlington, Alexandria. The Pentagon lies in in Arlington County:

The Pentagon would simply be a glowing mass of molten sand.

There would be no human life there.

And there would be no human life for many miles around it. Just across the Potomac, the nation’s capital, there would be no life remaining in the nation’s capital. The Capitol building would disappear forever.

All of the monuments, all of these glorious things—nothing would remain.

If you go to the coast of Virginia, you have the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, you have the Port of Norfolk. You have you have the greatest accumulation of naval power on the face of the Earth. This is where we park all of our aircraft carriers, our nuclear submarines, all of those things. There would be nothing remaining.

There would be nothing remaining of any of those shipping industries there.

And you can carry this on.

You talk about New York City, probably New York City itself, not only would everybody be killed, but it would probably be impossible for people to inhabit New York City for hundreds of years afterwards. But not only would it cease to be a place of vibrant human life, but probably going out for maybe half a millennium, it would not recover any sort of civilization.

We need to understand the gravity of what we’re doing.

Perhaps if it were a matter of life and death for the United States, what happens in Ukraine, that would be one thing. Certainly when the Soviet Union put missiles in Cuba, that targeted the United States, that was worth taking the risk, because it was right on our border and it threatened us. And it was it was a battle worth fighting for and a risk worth taking.

The Russians are in this in exactly the mirror image of that situation, because for them, the life of Russia depends on stopping NATO from advancing further right into Ukraine, right to their borders.

They cannot afford not to fight this war.

They cannot afford not to win this war.

So I think, toying with this constant escalation in a war that, really, in a place that has no significance to Americans—Ukraine is meaningless to Americans; it has no impact on our day-to-day lives. And yet we’re playing this reckless game that risks the lives of all people in the United States and Western Europe for nothing! Just absolutely for nothing!

BILLINGTON: Many flag grade officers certainly understand the consequences that you just described in a rather hair-raising way. Why is it that, while there are some generals speaking out in Italy, in France, in Germany, warning that we are pursuing a course that could lead to nuclear war, why are there not such voices from flag grade officers—retired, perhaps—saying what you’re saying here today?

BLACK: You know, there’s been a tremendous deterioration in the quality of flag officers, going back to, well, certainly the 1990s.

We had very, very fine flag officers, during the time I was on active duty—I left in ‘94—just superior quality people.

But what happened is, subsequently, we had President Clinton take over, later, we had Obama. We’ve got Biden now. And they apply a very strict political screen to their military officers.

And so, we now have “yes men.”

These are not people whose principal devotion is to the United States and its people. Their principal devotion is to their careers and their ability to network with other military officers upon retirement. There’s a very strong network that can place military generals into think tanks, where they promote war, into organizations like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, and all of these defense operations, where they can get on boards and things like that.

So there’s quite a personal price that you pay for saying, “Hey, stop. War is not in the interests of the American people.” If we had a better quality of individual, we would have people with the courage who would say, “I don’t care what it costs me personally.”

But it is very difficult to get into the senior ranks, if you are an individual guided by principle, and patriotism, and devotion to the people of this nation. That’s just not how it works. And at some point, we need a President who will go in and shake the tree, and bring a lot of these people falling down from it, because they’re dangerous.

They’re very dangerous to America.

BILLINGTON: Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute have a petition — and we held a conference on April 9th on the same theme — that the only way to really stop this descent into hell and into potential nuclear holocaust is for a new Peace of Westphalia. In this case, an international conference to secure a new security architecture and a new development architecture, the right to development for all countries. And like the Peace of Westphalia, one in which all sides sit down together, recognize their interests, their sovereign interests, as including the sovereign interests of the others, and forgiving all past crimes. Anything short of that is going to keep this division of the world into warring blocs. Just like I asked what’s keeping the generals from speaking out, why, and what will it take, to get Americans to recognize that we can and must sit down with Russians, and with Chinese, and with all other nations and establish a true, just world based on the dignity of man and the right to development and security?

BLACK: I think, unfortunately, there’s going to have to be enormous pain to drive that, just as there was with the Peace of Westphalia. A nuclear war would do it; an economic cataclysm of unprecedented proportions, resulting from the unbridled printing of money that we’ve engaged in over the last 20 years, there are things that could bring it about.

But at this point, the media have been so totally censored and so biased that the American people really don’t have a perception of the need for anything of that sort. It’s going to be difficult.

You know, here’s something that’s interesting that has happened. Here in this country, you would think the entire world is against Russia.

It’s not.

In fact, there are major countries of the world that lean towards Russia in this war, starting with China, but then Brazil, you’ve got South Africa, Saudi Arabia—a wide array of countries. India. India is tremendously supportive of Russia.

The idea that somehow we have this enormously just cause, it doesn’t strike a great deal of the world that it is just, and much of the world does not accept the latest propaganda about war crimes: this thing about Bucha. That’s probably the most prominent of all the war crimes discussions.

And what was Bucha?

There was a film taken of a vehicle driving down the road in Bucha, which had been recaptured from the Russians. And every hundred feet or so there was some person with his hands, zip tied behind his back, and he’d been killed. It was not announced until four days after the Ukrainians had retaken Bucha.

Now, we knew almost nothing about it. We actually didn’t even have proof that people had been killed. But assuming they had, we didn’t know where they had been killed. We did not know who they were. We did not know who killed them. We did not know why they were killed. No one could provide an adequate motive for the Russians to have killed them. The Russians held Bucha for a month. If they were going to kill them, why didn’t they kill them during that month? And if you’re going to slaughter a bunch of people, wouldn’t they all be in one place and wouldn’t you gun them all down there? Why would they be distributed along a roadside, a mile along the way? It makes no sense!

What we do know is that four days after the mayor of Bucha joyously announced that the city was liberated, four days after the Ukrainian army had moved in, and their special propaganda arm of the Ukrainian military were there, all of a sudden there were these dead people on the road. How come they weren’t there when the Russians were there? How come they only appeared after the Russians were gone?

If I were looking at it as simply a standard criminal case, and I was talking to Criminal Investigation Division or the FBI, or military police or something, I’d say, “OK, the first thing, let’s take a look at the Ukrainians.” My guess would be, and you start with a hunch when you’re investigating a crime—my hunch is that the Ukrainians killed off these people after they moved in, and after they looked around, and said, “OK, who was friendly towards the Russian troops while the Russians were here? We’re going to execute them.” That would be my guess. Because I don’t see any motive for the Russians to have just killed a few people on their way out of town.

And nobody questions this, because the corporate media are so monolithic. We know for a fact, from the mouth of the head of a Ukrainian hospital, the guy who ran the hospital, he boasted that he had given strict orders to all of his doctors, that when wounded Russian POWs, when casualties were brought in, they were to be castrated. Now, this is a horrific war crime, admitted from the mouth of the hospital administrator, and the Ukrainian government said, “we’ll kind of look into that,” Like it’s no big thing.

I can’t think of a more horrific, horrific war crime, ever.

Where did you hear about it, on ABC and MSNBC and CNN and FOX News? Not a whisper. And yet the proof is undeniable. We had another clip where there was a POW gathering point, where the Ukrainians would bring POWs to a central point for processing—and this is about a seven-minute video—and the Ukrainian soldiers simply gunned them all down. And they had probably 30 of these wounded Russian soldiers lying on the ground, some of them clearly dying from their wounds. Some of them, they put plastic bags over their heads.

Now, these are these are guys who are laying there, sometimes fatally wounded with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, and they’ve got plastic bags over their heads, making it difficult to breathe. And because they can’t raise their hands, they can’t take the bags off, so that they can breathe. At the end of the video, the Ukrainians bring in a van, and there are three unwounded Russian POWs.

Without the slightest thought or hesitation, as the three come off, and their hands are bound behind their backs, they gunned down two of them, right on camera and they fall over. And the third one gets on his knees, and begs that they won’t hurt him. And then they gun him down!

These are crimes.

And these were not refuted by the Ukrainian government. But you’d never even know that they occurred! So far, I will tell you that the only proven—I’m not saying that there aren’t war crimes happening on both sides. I’m just telling you, that the only ones where I have seen, fairly irrefutable proof of war crimes, have been on the Ukrainian side.

Now, often you hear it said, well, the Russians have destroyed this or destroyed that. Well, I’ve got to tell you, you go back to the wars that we fought when we invaded Iraq, the “Shock and Awe,” we destroyed virtually everything in Iraq, everything of significance. We bombed military and civilian targets without much discrimination.

The coalition flew 100,000 sorties in 42 days. You compare that to the Russians, who have only flown 8,000 sorties in about the same period of time. 100,000 American sorties versus 8,000, in about the same time.  I think the Russians have tended to be more selective.

Whereas we went out — the philosophy of Shock and Awe is that you destroy everything that is needed to sustain human life and for a city to function. You knock out the water supply, the electrical supply, the heat, the oil, the gasoline; so that you knock out all of the major bridges. And then you just continue to destroy everything.

So it’s really ironic. And keep in mind, Iraq is a relatively small country. Ukraine is a huge country. 100,000 sorties in 42 days, 8,000 sorties in about the same time. A tremendous difference in violence between what we did in Iraq, and what they have done in Ukraine. So there’s simply no credibility when you actually get down to the facts and you look at the way that the war has been conducted.

BILLINGTON: Well. Senator Black, Colonel Black.  I think the way you have described the horror that’s already taking place, and considering that we can’t wait for a nuclear war to provoke a new a Peace of Westphalia, I would suggest that what you have described is already horrific enough. And when combined with the hyperinflationary breakdown now sweeping the Western world, with everybody being affected, we believe that we have to take that as the adequate horror, and a recognition of a descent into a dark age, to motivate citizens in Europe, in the United States.

We are finding that there is a waking up of people who have not wanted to look at their responsibility to the human race as a whole in the past, but who now are forced to consider that, which is the basis on which we’ve called for this, in this petition, for an international conference of all nations, with the U.S., Russia, China, India and so forth, sitting down to end this horror; but to also bring about a true peace for mankind and an era of peace through development.

And we thank you for giving this breath of ugly truth to a population which needs to hear it. If you have any final thoughts, I ask you to give your final greetings.

BLACK:  I’ll just add one thing, and I thank the Schiller Institute for the tremendous effort that you’ve made towards achieving world peace. It is one of the most important efforts ever made, and I certainly applaud that.

If you look at Russia, the Russian troops that went into battle in Ukraine, for the most part had never experienced combat. This is a peacetime army. Russia doesn’t fight overseas wars. Syria is the only significant overseas engagement that they have had. You compare that with the United States, where literally speaking, if a soldier retires today after a 30-year career in the military, he will not have served a single day when the United States was at peace. Kind of an amazing thing. And you contrast that with the Russian military, where, with few exceptions, the country has been at peace.

So we really need to start thinking about peace and about the limits of warfare, this idea that somehow we need a zero sum game where we take from you and that enhances us. We’re in a world where everyone can gain and prosper by peace. But I’m concerned that the hyperinflation may be the wake-up call that jolts the world into a recognition that we must have a new paradigm for the future, and I think the Peace of Westphalia at that point might become a possibility.

So thank you again for the opportunity to be here. There’s always hope and I think there’ll be good things in the future, with the blessings of God.

BILLINGTON: And thank you very much from Schiller Institute, The LaRouche Organization, and EIR.  We’ll get this posted as quickly as we possibly can, because it’s going to have a tremendous impact. Thank you.

BLACK: Thank you very much.

1981 SAAB 906 Turbo, Sweden’s 6-Wheeled Colossal With Full Variety of Gadgets

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There aren’t a lot of six-wheeled cars out there and often they’re one-of-a-kind mods like this Saab 906 Turbo. It was built by designer Leif Mellberg and it’s the biggest Saab that was ever built.

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The car started its life as a 1981 900 GLS, which he then extended by nearly two feet, giving the car a total length of 209 inches. Mellberg wasn’t content to only make his creation longer. He also made it wider, so this 906 Turbo was a beast.

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A car this impressive in size needed to have an equally impressive interior, so it’s loaded up with all sorts of features that were very high-end when the car was built back in 1984. It had a video screen, a 16-speaker stereo system, fridge/freezer/heater cabinets, a police radio, and radar detector. Probably, at the time, most well-equipped car in Sweden.

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The car did not serve as a transport vehicle such as Leif originally planned, and became a rolling advertisement for his company Mellbergs custom. Unfortunately, the car was 20 years ago ended up at the junkyard in Varberg.

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Bacon-Wrapped Barbecue Pork Tenderloin

This sure-to-please roast is quick and simple to prepare, but guaranteed to impress. Pork tenderloin is wrapped in bacon and glazed with a smoky, slightly spicy, slightly sweet barbecue sauce.

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Ingredients

  • 8 slices bacon
  • 2 pork tenderloins (about 1 lb each)
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/3 cup Annie’s™ Naturals organic sweet & spicy BBQ sauce
  • 1 tablespoon finely chopped chipotle chile in adobo sauce
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin

Steps

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    Heat oven to 425°F. Line 15x10x1-inch pan with heavy-duty foil; spray foil with cooking spray.
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    Microwave bacon between layers of microwavable paper towels on microwavable plate 3 to 4 minutes or just until edges begin to brown but are still soft and pliable. Cut each piece in half crosswise.
  • 3
    Season tenderloins with salt and pepper; place in pan. Arrange bacon pieces diagonally over top of pork, pressing bacon over sides.
  • 4
    In small bowl, mix barbecue sauce, chipotle chile and cumin. Brush tops of each tenderloin with glaze. Bake tenderloins 30 to 35 minutes or until meat thermometer inserted in center of pork reads 145°F. Let stand 10 minutes before slicing.

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Will The First Public UFO Hearing In Congress In 50 Years Help Set The Stage For A Great Delusion Of Epic Proportions?

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MM, comment: do not hold your breath. -MM

Why have they suddenly decided to reveal so much?  For decades, a very thick cloak of secrecy has surrounded what the government really knows about UFOs, but now our politicians are talking openly about such things.  In fact, Congress just held their very first public hearing about UFOs in 50 years.  So what has changed?  If anything happens in Washington, it is usually because someone has an underlying agenda.  Could it be possible that we are being prepared for some sort of a huge revelation?

To me, it is clear that something is up.

And I think that it says a lot that the power structures in our society are now treating this topic very seriously.  At this point, even CNN is admitting that UFOs are no longer being “relegated to the fringes of public policy”…

Key lawmakers warned at a House hearing on Tuesday that unidentified aerial phenomena — popularly known as UFOs — must be investigated and taken seriously as a potential threat to national security.

The event marked the first congressional public hearing on UFOs in decades, a high-profile moment for a controversial topic that has long been relegated to the fringes of public policy.

During the hearing on Tuesday, U.S. officials confessed that there have been at least 400 “unexplained sightings” by members of our military…

US SPY chiefs were grilled by lawmakers in a historic hearing on UFOs as dramatic videos of two sightings were shown.

Security officials were forced to admit there have been 400 unexplained sightings reported by the US military .

That number is very different from the number that we were given in 2021.

Late last year, the Pentagon told us that there were just 144 unexplained sightings.

But now we are being told that the real number is nearly triple the original number.

And on Tuesday we were also told that there have been “11 near misses” with U.S. military aircraft…

They also confessed there have been 11 near misses with unidentified objects and US military aircraft, and they are probing incidents where craft may have attempted “jam” US planes.

So let me get this straight.

11 different times our aircraft were almost hit by other aircraft that we simply cannot identify?

Why weren’t we told about this a long time ago?

Of course there is so much more that the Pentagon is choosing not to tell us.  According to Politico, one Defense Department official is freely admitting that there is a great deal that is not being publicly revealed…

“Without forcing peoples’ hand, it is going to be very difficult to uncover legacy ventures and programs that we know about based on oral interviews we dug up,” said a Defense Department official who is involved in the new effort but was not authorized to speak publicly. “There has to be a forcing mechanism.”

“There has to be something to hold people accountable but also give them a chance to come out clean for a period of time,” the official added, noting that in his experience the Pentagon oversight group has been “stonewalled.”

That same official went on to explain that the people that are refusing to come forward are protecting some “very interesting information”.

I would definitely like to know what that “very interesting information” is.

Wouldn’t you?

I think that most of the population would be completely floored if everything that the government knows was finally put on the table.

According to one member of Congress, our military has actually recovered physical wreckage from a UFO that crashed…

A CONGRESSMAN has claimed the US has wreckage recovered from a UFO as the phenomena takes centre stage today in Washington.

Rep. Tim Burchett – a long term advocate for disclosure – told The Sun Online he has been informed by reliable sources that “material” has been recovered from the objects or craft that have been reported in skies over the US.

So why can’t the American people know about this?

What are they trying to hide from us?

Burchett says that he can’t say more because this information was given to him in a “classified setting”

The Tennessee Republican declined to elaborate further as he said the information had been passed to him in a “classified setting”.

“I’ve been told by multiple sources we have recovered something from these [crafts or objects],” Mr Burchett told The Sun Online.

It is so frustrating to hear about this and know that we will probably never be given the specific details.

The American people deserve the truth, but so much is being purposely hidden.

Lue Elizondo, a former senior staffer at the Pentagon, says that there has been much speculation in military circles about the true source of these unidentified craft

‘People jump to speculation that it’s from the Pleiades or something like that, when in fact one of the hypothesis when I was in AATIP was this could be as natural to Earth as we are, but we are just at a point where technologically we aren’t advanced enough we can collect information on it and begin to try to figure out what it is,’ he said.

‘There’s been another hypothesis that these things are possibly from underwater and as outlandish as it may seem, there is some anecdotal evidence that supports all of these observations, so what we want to do is try to get as much data on the table as we can before we start eliminating,’ said Elizondo.

He said way too much right there, because he got way too close to details that we aren’t supposed to know about.

If he keeps talking like that, he could end up being killed.

Because even though our officials are now talking more openly about UFOs, there are still many things that they would very much prefer to keep secret.

In my latest book, I talk extensively about the great deception that I believe is coming.

These unidentified aircraft are very real, and every year they are spotted thousands upon thousands of times all over the globe.

Now this subject is being brought out into the spotlight, and that should make all of us very nervous.

Mother Creates An Amazing Cardboard Kitchen For Her Daughter

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Rodessa Villanueva-Reyes went above and beyond to create a play kitchen for her young daughter. It may look like a store-bought kitchen, but it was crafted almost entirely from cardboard boxes! It’s a beautiful DIY project that every kid would love to have, and Rodessa was kind enough to share the instructions with anyone interested in making something like this for their own child.

The first step was determining a shape and organizing the boxes accordingly.

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Then draw the outlines each box where you want to place the doors.

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A combination of vinyl stickers and paper cover the cardboard.

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Just add your children’s kitchen toys.

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Add your child’s name and they’ll have their own little restaurant!

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To install a sink, cut a circle in the cardboard and fill it with a pot. The “faucet” is just an old soap dispenser.

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Jar caps can be used for the dials on the stove.

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How cool is this?

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“Smiling mom sitting on the grass, 1960s”

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British Government Admits: COVID-19 Vaccines PERMANENTLY DAMAGE Natural Immune System

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The UK government admits that the COVID-19 Experimental mRNA “vaccine” has damaged the natural immune system of those who have been double-dosed.

The government has confessed that double-vaxxed (or more) people, will never  — ever  — be able to acquire full natural immunity to COVID variants – or possibly any other virus.

Keen observers of this COVID debacle are now saying “The real pandemic will now begin”  because all the people whose immune systems are permanently damaged, may not be able to fight-off __any__ future viral infection!

In its Week 42 “COVID-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report,” (Direct Link HERE) the UK Department of Health admits on page 23 that:

N antibody levels appear to be lower in people who become infected after two doses of [the vax].”

It goes on to say that this drop in antibodies is essentially – get this – permanent.

What does this mean? Well, we know that the wacky vax does not prevent infection or transmission of the China virus (indeed, the report elsewhere shows that vaxxed adults are now much more likely to be infected than unvaxxed ones).

The British now find that the vax interferes with the body’s ability to make antibodies after infection not only against the spike protein but also against other parts of the virus.

In particular, vaxxed persons do not appear to form antibodies against the nucleocapsid protein – the envelope of the virus (which is a crucial part of the response in unvaccinated people).

In the long term, the vaxxed are far more susceptible to any mutations in the COVID spike protein, even if they have already been infected and cured once or more.

The unvaccinated, on the other hand, gain lasting – if not permanent – immunity to all strains of the alleged virus after being naturally infected with it even once.

A win-win for those who kept their heads, and didn’t buy-into all the COVID hype.

A no-win for those who went with the crowd, or were willfully obtuse, intellectually lazy, or arrogant.

Scott Ritter’s Switcheroo: “Why I Radically Changed My Overall Assessment”

From HERE

On Sunday, the foreign policy blogs were abuzz with the news that Scott Ritter had done “an about-face in his assessment of the war”. It appears that the ex-Marine had examined recent developments in Ukraine and concluded that it’s going to be much harder for Russia to win than he had originally thought..

Naturally, the news of Ritter’s reversal sent shockwaves across the internet, especially among the people who follow events in Ukraine closely and who greatly admire his even-handed analysis. Some of these people clearly felt betrayed by Ritter’s comments and blasted him as a “concern troll” which refers to a person who feigns sympathy while actually feeling the opposite. This is a terrible way to treat a guy who’s devoted so much of his time to informing people about an issue of which they might know very little without his research. Besides, Ritter is no hypocrite. Quite the contrary.

It’s fair to say, however, that Ritter has probably been the most outspoken proponent of the “Russia is winning” theory, a hypothesis that runs counter to everything we read in the legacy media or see on the cable news channels. Unfortunately, Ritter’s views on the matter have changed dramatically, and that’s due almost entirely to developments on the ground. As Ritter candidly admits, “The military aid the west is providing to Ukraine is changing the dynamic and if Russia doesn’t find a way to address this meaningfully… the conflict will never end.”

That’s quite a turnaround from a statement he made just weeks earlier that, “Russia is winning the war, and winning it decisively.”

So, what changed? What are the so-called developments that led to Ritter’s volte-face?

Here are a few excerpts from the interview that triggered the fracas. Ritter was joined by Ray McGovern and host Garland Nixon on Saturday Morning Live. (The quotes are copied from video. I accept blame for any mistakes.)

 Scott Ritter (start at 47:50 minute mark) — “The thing that frustrates me… is that, it was my assessment that it would be very hard for Ukraine to absorb this new equipment and material (Material– the additional lethal weapons that have recently been shipped to Ukraine) but the howitzers are already operating against Russia. (And) They are having an effect in the Kharkov region. Not all 90 of them, but they have several batteries in place that are being used.

How did this happen?

And this is why I have radically changed my overall assessment, because I had been operating on the assumption that Russia would be able to interdict the vast majority of this equipment, but Russia has shown itself unable or unwilling to do this and– as a result– the Ukrainians are having meaningful impact on the battlefield. Not in the areas of main contention, like the Donbass, but on the periphery. This is why Russia has carried out tactical withdrawals north of Kharkov, because in order to match Ukraine’s best capabilities, Russia would have to divert resources from its main effort which Russia has decided not to do. So, they are re-configuring the battlefield. (trading land in different areas)…(“Saturday Morning Live with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern, You Tube) 

So, while Ritter’s sympathies have not changed in the slightest, it’s clear that his analysis has. At first, he didn’t think that the deluge of lethal weaponry would affect the outcome of the war. Now he’s not so sure. It’s a honest mistake but, still, he needed to ‘come clean’ and explain the factors that contributed to his U-turn. Here’s more from the same interview:

 Scott Ritter– This is a transformative moment in the war, because what it means is that demilitarization is not taking place. For all the forces Russia is destroying in the east, Ukraine is rebuilding significant capability (in the west) I liken this to Moscow in December 1941, when the Germans were moving towards Moscow and the Russians just started throwing things at them., sacrificing everything to slow the German offensive. until General Winter and the combination of Siberian divisions gave them the ability to counterattack. The Germans were bled white and they were stopped and turned back. If Russia doesn’t change the calculation, then that is the trajectory we are heading on., because 200,000 troops–however capable they may be, are only capable of doing so much. And the fighting that’s taking place right now –even though it is slaughtering Ukrainians– it isn’t cost free to the Russians. They’re losing equipment, they’re losing men, they’re losing material, and unless Putin mobilizes or transfers forces in, those aren’t being replaced. So, instead of having 200,000 online, Russia might have 180,000 men. And if you don’t think removing 20,000 men doesn’t change the options available to the Russian leadership, then you don’t know anything about war.”

So, I believe Russia is going to win in the east, they are grinding them down as we speak, they are slaughtering them; the amount of death and destruction that is being dealt to the Ukrainians is unimaginable, but I believe the Ukrainians are willing to take these losses in order to buy time to reconstitute a military that will challenge Russia Because unless Russia is willing to jump across the Dnieper River and head into western Ukraine where it can eliminate the strategic depth that the Ukrainians are being gifted by the Russians, then demilitarization of Ukraine is not going to take place. It can’t take place when tens of billions of dollars of equipment is pouring in and Russia is not able to interdict it. The fact that these advanced howitzers are operating on the front lines right now, shows there’s something wrong with the Russian methodology. And–unless they alter that methodology– I think we’re in for a very long summer.” (“Saturday Morning Live with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern, You Tube) 

It’s hard to grasp what Ritter is saying here. Is he actually suggesting that Putin expand the current “special operation” into a full-blown World War? At one point, he casually opines that Russia will have to mobilize 1 and a half million men (Note: Russia currently only has 200,000 in Ukraine) if they want to prevail in Ukraine and then move on to Finland. It’s impossible to tell by Ritter’s tone whether he is simply making an objective observation of ‘what is needed’ to succeed or if he is making an explicit recommendation that he thinks Russia’s High Command should consider. I can’t answer that. Here’s more from the interview:

 Scott Ritter(5:20 mark)– “The idea that the Ukrainian military has been eliminated as an effective fighting force is a flawed concept, and unless Russia broadens its special military operation– probably to the point of changing it form a special military operation to a war which includes the totality of Ukrainian battle-space–(then) this is a conflict that is dangerously close to becoming unwinnable by Russia which means that while they can complete their objectives in the east with 200,000 troops, they aren’t able to prevent Ukraine from rearming and reequipping when Ukraine is being provided with tens of billions of dollars of equipment by NATO —Whenever you provide your enemy with “safe space” to rebuild military capability, you’re never going to win. …

Yes, Russia is winning in the east which is what they said their objective was all along. And they are accomplishing that. That is the special Military Operation. But now we’re talking about “war”, and I don’t think Russia has made that transition yet. This is a defacto proxy war between the west and Russia using Ukrainian forces as NATO’s sword. The object of this is to “bleed Russia dry”. And if Russia doesn’t change the dynamic, Russia will be bled dry.” Zelensky has indicated that he’s willing to mobilize a million people, at a time when the west is ready to provide the funding and equipment to turn those million men into a real military threat. 

So, I see what has been happening in the last few weeks as being decisive. 

The military aid the west is providing is changing the dynamic and if Russia doesn’t find a way to address this meaningfully, and to eliminate it as a military capability… then the conflict will never end.” (“Saturday Morning Live with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern, You Tube)  

There it is from the horse’s mouth. Readers will have to draw their own conclusions.

IMHO, Scott Ritter is gradually adjusting to the idea that the conflict in Ukraine is not a just regional skirmish between two quarrelsome neighbors, nor is it a proxy-war between NATO and Russia.

No.

Ukraine is the first phase of a broader plan for crushing Russia, collapsing its economy, removing its leaders, seizing its natural resources, splintering its territory, and projecting US power across Central Asia to the Pacific Rim.

Ukraine is about hegemony, empire, and pure, unalloyed power.

Most important, Ukraine is the first battle in a Third World War, a war that was concocted and launched by Washington to ensure another unchallenged century of American primacy.

Miyu Kojima Creates Miniature Replicas Of Lonely Deaths

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Twenty six-year old Miyu Kojima works for a company that cleans up after kodokushi (孤独死) or lonely deaths: a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time.

The instances first began to be reported around 2000, and are thought to be a product of increased social isolation coupled with a greying population.

Part art therapy and part public service campaign, Kojima spends a large portion of her free time recreating detailed miniature replicas of the rooms she has cleaned. A word of caution: although recreated without the corpses, some of the replicas can be quite disturbing.

“I mainly clean up these flats, apartments, houses where lonely death had happened and also organise their mementos,” says Miyu. On average, those whose homes she cleans, she says, may have been lying undiscovered for a month or two; the longest, eight months.

Sometimes, they clean the homes of people who died in hospital, were murdered or committed suicide.

At first, Miyu found the work tough. The scenes could be grotesque. Even after the body has been removed, hair and seepage from the corpse sometimes remain. The work can be physically demanding. But “what I find most difficult,” she explains, “is to talk to the family. I don’t know how much I can really ask or talk.”

To preserve and document the scene, the company always takes photographs of the rooms in case relatives want to see them. However, Kojima noticed that the photographs really don’t capture the sadness of the incident. And while she had no formal art training, she decided to go to her local craft store and buy supplies, which she used to create her replicas.

She sometimes uses color-copies of the photographs, which she then sculpts into miniature objects.

Kojima says that she spends about 1 month on each replica.

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“This is my mother before the prom. I think she looks like Jackie O in this picture, 1960s”

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Bank of England Governor Warns of “APOCALYPTIC” Food Price Increases

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The governor of the Bank of England has warned of “apocalyptic” food prices, saying he is “helpless” to thwart soaring inflation.

Andrew Bailey hit back at criticism that the Bank acted too slowly to tackle inflation, blaming a “bad situation” on a series of external shocks including the war in Ukraine and the lockdown in China.

“We can’t predict things like wars – that’s not in anybody’s power,” he said.

He said he does not think the Bank could have done anything differently to prevent soaring prices.

He said the conflict in Ukraine has pushed up energy prices, which are the biggest driver of inflation – while the lockdown in Shanghai has exacerbated increases in the cost of goods due to its effect on supply chains.

Mr. Bailey said the Bank also underestimated the number of people who would leave the labor market after the threat of the pandemic receded, which is leading to labor shortages that affect inflation.

The consumer price index (CPI) measure of inflation hit 7% in England during March and is expected to pass 10% later this year.

Americans can expect exactly the same situation.

Four Potential Outcomes

Strauss and Howe laid out four potential outcomes, which I have presented many times before in previous articles.

Three of the four are not positive. The only positive outcome is #4; the last outcome listed. In it, the United States of America is transformed into something better and greater.

The previous three are all bad, and only vary by degree…

  • The entire world is destroyed (Senario #1)
  • Humanity survives, but enters a very dark time, and regresses. (Senario #2)
  • The United States is destroyed, but the rest of the world continues on (Senario #3)

If you asked me a few years ago, I would have selected outcome three as the most likely, as the American Empire died with a whimper, much like the British Empire after World War II.

Others, fixiated on the belief that the world revolves around the United States and it’s proxy nations cannot imagine a world without the United States. But I tell you what, the entire rest of the world can.

I believe outcome three is inevitable. The United States will die in a firery end, and the rest of the world, while damaged and “dinged” will continue on. As the dominant nation (America) has chosen to take a course which will engulf the planet in a war with an unknowable outcome.

However, given [1] the enormous advantage in leadership, economies, resources, social stability and military comparatively of a unified China / Russia to that of the United States, as well as [2] the historical trends that illustrate complete destruction of the nation hosting the global reserve currency, there is no question that the United States must and will die for a new global world order to be birthed.

We can only hope that in America cooler heads will prevail, but observing what is considered Western “leadership” in this day and age, I’m not optimistic. The only real leaders are found in Russia, China, and the rest of Asia. America, and Europe are acting like drug addicted, mentally ill, evil, psychopaths, with bullying behaviors and an over-inflated ego based on reinforced ignorance.

From Strauss and Howe…

  1. This Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. For this Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection, and bad luck.
  2. The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rhythm – which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance – could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. Such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.
  3. The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of the United States as a nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.
  4. Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.

I’ve always preached preparedness and combining forces with like-minded people, but can you really prepare for a world where outcome one or two is the climax of this Fourth Turning? I know many bloggers make money off of doom, but I simply cannot conceive of a more American-positive outcome based on the current dynamics driving the world towards war.

I’d love to give a Knute Rockne speech to inspire the team to rally around someone who can lead us to victory. But, as far as the United States and it’s proxy nations are concerned, all I see are monkeys with matches in a room full of dynamite.

It’s only a matter of time until it explodes.

The decline of the American Military Empire is awful to watch and even worse to live through. To you Americans trapped inside the seething cauldron, watching your world crumble around you, I offer my sympathies, and wish you Godspeed in what the future may have in store for you.

So, thank you for reading my ramblings. I hope I’m wrong.

S1E9- Its Your Funeral – Patrick MxGoohan’s The Prisoner

Provided to all you “prisoners” out there, desperately trying to figure out a way off this “prison planet”…

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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A new revised direction on Geopolitics out of the United States. It’s very clear now.

Enjoy this article and be careful with the USA/Ukie propaganda. It is everywhere.

Well, today is 24MAY22 and the Chinese understands, and we all know, what the direction and the revised thinking of the United States is (Geopolitically speaking). That is crystal clear after the Biden meetings with South Korea, Japan, and Australia. We now fully understand the pans for global dominance out of the USA.

This is the manifestation and implementation of the “unipolar” (rules-based order) world.

The original plan is out. It is obsolete. It is not possible.

The original plan; to first [1] destroy Russia, and then [2] destroy China is “off the table”. That plan is not feasible.

So the plan has become to one of isolation; to isolate Russia from the rest of the world, and to isolate China from the rest of the world. Both of them together. The way to accomplish this is simple.

First by cutting off and interrupting the systems of communication, trade, and interaction… and if that fails, to place harsh embargoes on Asia and punish all those that dare disobey the Untied States.

Russia

The American plan to [1] suppress Russia, [2] invade (parts of it) and [3] topple Russian leadership though domestic discord and [4] to isolate Russia have all failed.

Ukraine

Discussions and manipulations on how to carve up Ukraine into something other than a nation is in the works. We can see this with Poland’s involvement at this time.

Iron Curtain

The USA intends to put up another “Iron Curtain” to isolate Asia (Russia and China together). One half of this curtain is already up and complete. That is the part around Russia. And, you know,  nations such as Sweden and Finland don’t want to be on the Asian side of that curtain.

All of Asia

This curtain will surround all of Asia, and that was the purpose of the Biden meeting; to set up work-around systems so that no one trades or interacts with China, Russia or any of their friends.

China

But China is trying to be peaceful. How to justify putting it behind a curtain? Certainly, of course there will need to be a “reason” to enact “Sanctions from Hell”.

Which of course, are just the first stages of a full-on military embargo. And that will involve the crossing of one or more “red lines” regarding Taiwan.

The USA will scream, and holler.  The MSM propaganda machine will be working overtime (again), but you know, the USA will start sailing up and down the Chinese coast, but will refrain from getting involved in a “Hot war”. The “Sanctions from Hell” will appear, and that will lead up to the Pacific Rim nations choosing sides.

The “Wet Dream” of the United States

If the USA gets their way, Russia and China will become isolated and alone, and will eventually collapse domestically, as the USA will continue to wage bio-warfare carpet bombing, engage in “color revolutions”, and do everything in their ability to crush Russia and China simultaneously. Eventually, within a year, a “NEW Iron Curtain” will be up and policed by the nations of the world.

Judging from past historical precedents, I do not believe that this will turn out as planned.

What probably will happen…

We do not know what will happen.

Certainly the concerns of a full-scale thermonuclear war is still possible, but I personally believe that something different, something easier, but scarier, will emerge. I don’t know what it is.

But I do know, that war or no war, isolation of no isolation, the following points will factor into the way the future will unfold…

  • The vast remaining manufacturing in the USA is in the defense industry. This requires a war, a constant and steady war to do battle with.
  • The value of the USD is going towards absolute zero.
  • The American population are corrupt, ignorant, manipulated, and armed. As the government raises the intensity level on them in regards to lies and propaganda, there will be consequences.
  • Japan’s and Korea’s manufacturing has all been off-shored to China. If isolation does occur, a great deal of discomfort will manifest in these nations.
  • Russia and China are led by merit, and they have certainly planned for this sequence of events. Do not be under the impression that they are not ready to deal with them, and retaliate.
  • Retaliation to the USA and it’s allies, whether through military or other means, will be painful for the West. I argue and suspect that the pain “dial” will be pinging red.
  • Domestic American politics will play a large role in the Geopolitical situation.

And that’s where we are today. Let’s see what unfolds.

In the meantime, let’s continue our daily mix…

Gasoline hits $7.29/Gal. in Los Angeles

Gasoline7 29Gallon LosAngeles 05 23 2022 large
Gasoline7 29Gallon LosAngeles 05 23 2022 large

Gasoline has hit a record high of $7.29 per gallon in Los Angeles, CA as of May 23, 2022.

This is what Democrats did when they stole the US Presidency in November 2020, through rampant and brazen election fraud, aided and abetted by weak-minded Republicans in states like Georgia and Arizona, who were more concerned with President Trump’s “mean tweets” than public policy.

Once the Democrats and Republicans-In-Name-Only (RINOS) ousted Trump through a stolen election, the Democrats imposed their Green Agenda to wage war against fossil fuels under the fraudulent guise of “Climate Change.”

They know that earth’s climate is changing because earth’s magnetic field is moving west, and is now farther west than it has been in about ten thousand years.

Instead, they blame Fossil fuel emissions, which is total fraud.

The war against fossil fuels resulted in canceled oil pipelines, closed oil drilling leases, and enormous regulation of existing oil-production.  Those changes reduced gasoline supplies and as such, the prices are skyrocketing.

(Hal Turner Remark: This is what politicians who are supposed to SERVE us, have done TO us. If you keep voting the way you've voted, you'll keep getting what you're now getting.  Wise-up.)

Zelensky “nationalizes” the Polish army to send it to fight under the flag of Ukraine

Zelensky “nationalizes” the Polish army to send it to fight under the flag of Ukraine
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In Ukraine , a law comes into force, according to which anyone who supports the Russian special operation, or at least agrees with it, will be deprived of all property.
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And the wording “in one way or another” in the text of the law finally unties the hands of the punitive machine. At the same time, the Ukrainian authorities do not hide their goals. For them, the main thing is to replenish the treasury at the expense of those who have an excellent opinion: the law “will allow you to quickly and effectively replenish the Ukrainian budget at the expense of enemies,” according to the website of the President of Ukraine.
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So why in Ukraine it is possible to deprive everything acquired by overwork?
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The entire list of actions is about 30 points. Among them:
  • – causing significant damage to the national security of Ukraine and its sovereignty,
  • – financing the “aggressor”, including by collecting donations,
  • – investing in securities,
  • – “glorification of persons” involved in the SVO (that is, praise – ed.),
  • – maintaining the policy of “non-recognition of the right of the Ukrainian people to self-identification and self-determination”,
  • – comparison of Ukrainian patriotism with Nazism “or other misanthropic ideologies”,
  • – “incitement of hatred towards the Ukrainian people, their culture, state language, national identity.”
This law is not about those who take a pro-Russian position, but about everyone who does not agree with Zelensky and his henchmen, said Vladimir Shapovalov, deputy director of the Institute of History and Politics of Moscow State Pedagogical University , in an interview with Radio KP .
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This is an extremely serious danger for the entire Russian, Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. Not only representatives of the business elite, not only opposition politicians like Medvedchuk, but also ordinary citizens, and representatives of various public organizations, representatives of the church, representatives of various local communities will fall under this norm. A significant part of the population of Ukraine will be declared enemies of the people.
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Another law, which will be adopted in the near future, is urgently written in the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. Zelensky offered a special status to the Poles . And essentially equalize their rights with the citizens of their country.
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Under this law, Polish citizens will be able to:
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  • – to hold elected office in Ukraine;
  • – be appointed to state authorities and to the leadership of defense enterprises in Ukraine;
  • – get access to secret data of Ukraine;
  • – to be judges inside of Ukraine;
In other words, they are given every right except to vote in elections. And most importantly, the Polish police are literally equal in rights and powers with the Ukrainian police on the territory of Ukraine!
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Zelensky has one goal – to legalize Polish troops on the territory of his country and thus surrender the country to a neighbor, says Marat Bashirov, a political scientist and author of the Politjoystick telegram channel:
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Mr. Zelensky can form a new military unit from Polish citizens and appoint Poles as commanders there. It turns out that, on the one hand, this is a Ukrainian military unit, but it will be completely Polish. Of course, they will import NATO weapons, which they know how to use, unlike Ukrainian soldiers. On the territory where they will be placed, it will be such a hidden occupation.
It is worth emphasizing that the military units consisting of Polish citizens will be Ukrainian. That is, Article 5 of the NATO Charter (when an attack on one of the members of the Alliance is considered as an attack on all its members) will not work, although without a doubt the Polish command will try to draw the Alliance into hostilities in Ukraine:
The Poles, if it is hard, of course, will try to start talking with NATO member countries, - says Bashirov. - But large countries such as Germany and France, of course, will rest against the horn. If they agreed, now in Ukraine such a garden would not be fenced. And this design bypasses just the resistance of Germany and France.
The bill on the resignation of rights to Polish citizens on the territory of Ukraine is the seizure of the country, Igor Dimitriev, a political strategist, is sure.
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“At the present time, it is possible to seize countries without a military invasion. Economic and political instruments, entering the management of numerous grant structures and specialist training programs, Dimitriev writes in his Telegram channel. – Let me remind you that Turkey is doing the same when planning its Turan. This is how some states capture others in the 21st century, this is exactly what an offensive weapon is. And the army, tanks, planes and other scrap metal are defensive weapons. Which is included in order to protect their grant-eaters, political consultants and other agents-007. In those cases when they are not allowed to work by all sorts of dictators.
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Biden escalates tensions with China. One step closer to conflict in South Pacific

This is a MUST WATCH.

"All of this is extremely dangerous, and the Chinese are reacting very dangerously to this. They see this as a challenge, and one that they MUST face."

...

"What a freaking disaster if this happens. What a freaking disaster..."

This is the situation right NOW.

CEO of an insurance group , indicted for trafficking in minor human beings, rape of minors, and participation in a criminal activity

Who’s this guy ?

From HERE

INFO RTL – The CEO of an insurance group imprisoned for exploitation and rape of minors.

One of the largest fortunes in France has been placed in pre-trial detention since Saturday, indicted for trafficking in minor human beings, rape of minors, and participation in a criminal association with a view to committing kidnapping or kidnapping. organized.

He is 75 years old and is one of the 500 largest French fortunes.

This entrepreneur in the insurance field has been placed in pre-trial detention since Saturday May 21, indicted – among other things – for trafficking in minor human beings, rape of minors, and participation in a criminal association with a view to commit kidnapping or organized forcible confinement.

After a meticulous investigation which mobilized a good part of the staff of the Brigade for the Protection of Minors (BPM) of the Parisian PJ, a whole system was discovered by the police.

According to information from RTL, a 22-year-old woman presented herself to the Parisian police last March.

She explained to them that for 5 years, she had been “captive” of a very wealthy man, who lodged her in one of his apartments and raped her on several occasions.

Worse still, while according to her, she was becoming “too old for him”, the young woman would have been forced to find a “substitute” to take over.

This is how a 14-year-old girl was then housed in this apartment.

The complainant managed to film the CEO and the 14-year-old girl together in bed. This video was turned over to investigators.

Relatives also incarcerated.

The story does not end there.

While the CEO is aware of the existence of this video, he will try to silence the complainant.

Justice suspects him of having wanted to set up a team to kidnap the young woman, seize the video, and force her to leave France.

For this, the septuagenarian would have asked his wife, two employees of his company, a young woman close to the complainant, as well as a former gendarme member of the GIGN.

All five were arrested last week, and indicted on Saturday for “failure to report sexual assault on a minor, and participation in a criminal association to commit kidnapping or kidnapping in an organized gang”.

They were also placed in pre-trial detention, confirmed the Paris prosecutor’s office to RTL.

Their respective roles and objectives have yet to be determined at this stage.

A system that had been repeated for many years.

According to our information, the investigators also traced the past of this man.

They discovered the existence of at least 7 young women, minors or young adults, who succeeded each other in this apartment.

The investigation determined that they were young girls with similar profiles: unemployed or runaways, at odds with their family or society.

Always the same mechanism in place, once they reached their twenties, the CEO said he was not interested in them and asked them to find a younger girl to take their place in the apartment.

RTL has tried to reach the lawyer for the main respondent who has not yet responded to our requests.

“My mom was Homecoming Queen, 1965”

21d 5
21d 5

White House Rejects President’s Foreign Policy

From MoA

U.S. President Joe Biden apparently pursues different foreign policies than the White House.

October 23 2021:

‘Strategic Ambiguity’ on Taiwan Apparent as White House Walks Back Biden Comments

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday appeared to walk back President Joe Biden's statement on Thursday that the United States was committed to defending Taiwan should it come under Chinese attack.

"The president was not announcing any change in our policy, nor has he made a decision to change our policy," Psaki said during a White House news briefing. "Our defense relationship with Taiwan is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act."

The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act states that the U.S. will provide arms for Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability. It does not say the U.S. would intervene militarily to protect Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.

Psaki's statement stands in contradiction to Biden's comment at a CNN town hall Thursday night. When asked if the U.S. would come to the defense of Taiwan, Biden said, "Yes, we have a commitment to do that."

November 17 2021:

Biden Struggles to Stick to the Script on Taiwan

Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is habit—or so the saying goes.

Amid escalating tensions with China, U.S. President Joe Biden has misspoken about U.S. policy toward the self-governed island of Taiwan at least four times since August, fueling speculation as to whether the president is subtly trying to signal an evolving U.S. policy toward Taiwan or just fumbling the details.

March 27 2022:

Biden’s Putin remark, White House walk-back faces scrutiny

President Biden’s remark that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” reverberated throughout Washington on Sunday, with some current and former officials and lawmakers scrutinizing the reported ad-lib while others slammed the White House for its subsequent walk-back.

Biden turned heads on Saturday when, at the end of a speech in Warsaw, Poland, he said, “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The White House quickly tried to walk back the comment, claiming that Biden was referring to Putin exercising power outside of Russia, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken affirmed that the U.S. has no plans for regime change in Moscow.

May 23 2022:

US would defend Taiwan if attacked by China, says Joe Biden

Joe Biden has said the US would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan if it came under attack from China – a statement that is likely to enrage Beijing as concern grows over Chinese military activity in the region.

Speaking in Tokyo on the second day of his visit to Japan, Biden said the US’s responsibility to protect the self-ruled island – which China considers a renegade province – was “even stronger” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in one of the most forceful statements in support of Taiwan in decades.

Amichai Stein @AmichaiStein1 - 6:32 UTC · May 23, 2022
White House official: Biden’s statement that the US would get involved militarily to defend Taiwan is NOT a departure from long-standing US policy of strategic ambiguity

Quoted Tweet 
Amichai Stein @AmichaiStein1 - 6:01 UTC · May 23, 2022
#BREAKING: President Biden says would be willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan from China aggression

They urgently need to shut up that warmongering idiot.

A candid moment of school girls in 1953.

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The United States and Taiwan

The reason Biden is coming out the way he has is because the US Dept. of State apparently carte blanche issued this declaration, which is essentially a declaration of war against China:

US state department updates fact sheet on Taiwan ties
A bilateral relations fact sheet on Taiwan-US relations published on the US Department of State Web site ...

...was recently updated...

...to remove statements saying that it [1] acknowledged Beijing’s “one China” position, and that [2] the US does not support Taiwanese independence.

The fact sheet is produced by the department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
My guess is that this is a pre-emptive salvo issued by the John Bolton (always the dumbest) part of the Dept of State staff.

-Pacifica Advocate

“My mother, 1967”

Not my mom, but a great picture anyways…

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Banana Bread French Toast

Turn banana bread into your favorite breakfast with this dish. The tangy Buttermilk Syrup is a perfect make-ahead touch. It goes wonderfully with a fine morning cup of coffee.

banana bread french toast 10
banana bread french toast 10

Ingredients

Buttermilk Syrup

  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 3/4 cups buttermilk
  • 1/3 cup butter
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla

French Toast

  • 1 loaf banana bread
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/4 cup milk

Garnish, if desired

  • 1 cup fresh berries

Steps

  • 1
    To make buttermilk syrup, in 2-quart saucepan, stir syrup ingredients until well blended. Heat to boiling. Cook 7 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat; beat in vanilla with whisk. Keep warm.
  • 2
    Heat nonstick skillet or griddle over medium heat. Cut banana bread into 1-inch-thick slices. In shallow dish or pan, beat eggs and milk until well mixed. Coat bread slices on both sides with egg mixture; place in hot skillet. Cook until golden brown on each side. Serve with buttermilk syrup and garnish with berries. Enjoy!

“My mother in Florida while early in her Nursing career, 1967”

Not my mom. But I can well imagine the moment.

2ddd4 4
2ddd4 4

What “Iskander” Missiles Are & How They Differ From “Kalibr” & “Kinzhal”

May 19, 2022

Some NATO experts call these missiles Russia’s most terrifying weapon, apart from nuclear weapons. Although, “Iskander” can be equipped with a nuclear warhead, and then it really becomes a “sentence” for Europe.

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2022 05 24 11 36

Let’s start with the fact that “Iskander” is not a missile in itself (like “Kinzhal” or “Kalibr“) – it is a whole missile system. That is, in addition to the launcher, it also includes a bunch of other equipment: a loading vehicle, a command post, a repair vehicle, a life support vehicle (barracks on wheels), a reconnaissance vehicle, etc.

At the same time, this missile system is operational and tactical. What does it mean?

Traditionally, missile weapons are divided into three types.

  • First: strategic missiles. They fly directly into enemy territory thousands of kilometres from the front line. This includes, for example, the famous “Sarmat” or “Bulava”.
  • Second: tactical missiles. They are used directly at the frontline. That is, their range is small. This includes, for example, MLRS “Grad” or the same “Katyusha”, during the Great Patriotic War.
  • Third: operational-tactical missiles (OTM). They occupy an intermediate position between strategic and tactical ones. Their task is to hit behind the front line (up to about 500 km) at the rear of the enemy group’s support: railway junctions, air defence systems, warehouses, headquarters, airfields, etc.
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    2022 05 24 11 33

One of the first OTMs was, for example, the Soviet “Luna” and “Temp-S”.

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2022 05 24 11 34

“Temp-S”, adopted in 1965

They were replaced by the “Tochka” missile system, followed by a more advanced one “Tochka-U“. We often hear about this “U” now, but it is already outdated and is not in service with the Russian Federation.

It was just replaced by “Iskander” – as a new generation of operational-tactical missile systems.

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2022 05 24 11 35

Iskander is the next stage of development after Tochka-U

“Restricted Access Zone”

This term was coined by NATO and it refers to the territory on which, in the event of a war with Russia, NATO troops will not be able to stay without receiving unacceptable damage.

Well, that is, in the event of a war with the Bedouin in the desert, the United States can afford to fly and drive anywhere. With Russia, this trick will not work, because our country is able to create not just threats, but to cause catastrophic damage if the enemy is in the “Access Ban Zone”.

This zone is ensured, for example, by the most advanced S-400 air defence system in the world (as well as the latest S-500 and the promising S-550) – it covers us from the air.

From the sea, the “Bastion” coastal complex provides cover. But the “Iskander” is designed to work on enemy ground targets. In total, this trio creates extremely uncomfortable conditions for the enemy on our territory.

READ:  Poroshenko Inadvertently Helped the Modernisation of the Russian Navy

At the same time, “Iskander”, in fact, has two varieties that are absolutely opposite to each other. These are “Iskander-M” and “Iskander-K”.

Iskander-M

It fires a rocket that flies at a high altitude (up to 100 km, that is, touches space) and manoeuvres very strongly.

The maneuverability of the rocket is such that overloads of up to 30 G are created during flight! Let me remind you that:

  • when riding a roller coaster, a person experiences an overload of up to 4 G;
  • Formula 1 drivers experience up to 6 G when braking sharply;
  • cosmonauts experience up to 8 G at rocket launch;
  • in fighter planes, up to 12 G is generated during the sharpest manoeuvres.

30 G is deadly not only for humans, but also for almost any equipment. Thus, at 30 G a fighter jet can simply fall apart.

The “Iskander-M” missile can withstand such overloads. This is despite the fact that at 30 G body weight increases by 30 times. That is, for example, if you weigh 60 kg, but at 30 G your body will start to weigh 1800 kg. Naturally, even the bones can’t withstand such an overload.

The super-maneuverability of the “Iskander-M” missile is necessary so that it is not shot down. In addition, the missile has stealth technologies, throws out false targets in flight, and also conducts radio-electronic warfare with enemy air defence systems.

That is why it is considered that it is almost impossible to shoot down this missile.

Iskander-K

But this type of missile, on the contrary, flies very low – at an altitude of 6-10 meters from the earth’s surface. Naturally, skirting the terrain.

2022 05 24 11 3sd6
2022 05 24 11 3sd6

An important advantage of “Iskander” is that both types of missiles can be launched from the same launcher. That is, “Iskander” can fire two types of missiles at a target at once: one will fly high and unpredictably, and the second will fly low and extremely imperceptibly.

All this together makes the probability of hitting the target close to 100%.

The stated range of both missiles is up to 500 km. However, many experts (including those in NATO) believe that this figure is greatly underestimated. The Russian military simply declares it, so as not to fall under the terms of the treaty on the elimination of intermediate-range and short-range missiles.

The actual flight range of “Iskander” can be up to 5000 km. However, it will be possible to check this only in the conditions of a real war.

What is the difference between “Kalibr” and “Kinzhal”?

You may have noticed that the “Iskander-M” behaves roughly like “Kinzhal”, and the “Iskander-K” behaves roughly like “Kalibr”.

READ:  What Has Moscow Achieved…and Did It Fail After Imposing Two Ceasefires?

And there is not just some truth in this, but a very large amount. The fact is that the hypersonic “Kinzhal”, in fact, is an improved “Iskander-M”.

Just “Iskander-M” starts from the ground and spends a huge part of its energy on acceleration and climb. But “Kinzhal” is raised to a height in advance and accelerated by a fighter jet, so it spends most of its energy on gaining hypersonic speed.

As for the similarity of the second version of “Iskander” (“K”) with “Kalibr”, this is exactly the similarity. There is no direct relationship between the missiles, although both of them are cruise missiles.

What is “Iskander” capable of?

Flying 500 km beyond the horizon, “Iskander” is able to hit the target with an accuracy of up to 5 meters.

At the same time, the mass of the missile’s warhead is 500 kg. That is, it’s possible to cram either half a ton of explosives or a fairly decent nuclear bomb into it, and then a deviation from the target of even 50 meters will not matter much.

The speed of the high-altitude missile is 2100 m/s (over Mach 6). That is, it is hypersonic (like “Kinzhal”, whose speed is 2 times higher, up to 4000 m/s).

In the non-nuclear version, “Iskander” is capable of carrying one of three types of warheads:

  • High-explosive shrapnel. This is the most popular type for hitting most targets, from warehouses to airfields. It can be described simply as a “large grenade” (under 500 kg), which creates a powerful shock wave and scatters fragments
  • Concrete cutting. This is for breaking through underground bunkers
  • Cluster. This is for hitting large areas with shrapnel. One Iskander cluster missile covers approximately 15,000 m2 of ground with a cloud of shrapnel, which means two football fields.

In the nuclear version, “Iskander” is capable of carrying a warhead of up to 50 kilotons. This is 3 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Given that the range of “Iskander” can really reach 2-3 thousand kilometres, this weapon is not just a nightmare for Europe. This is its verdict if it comes to a large-scale conflict.

They understand this and therefore they are now acting with someone else’s hands, pushing forward naive guys who have hung their ears in front of a “bright European future”. A future in which they will not be taken in any case.

Let me remind you that “Iskander” is not called the most formidable by me, but by NATO experts. Now I want to mix military affairs with geography a little, that is, show on the map where these very Iskanders are located at all.

And so. Just as soldiers are organised into platoons, companies, battalions, and regiments, “Iskanders” have a certain organisational structure.

Much more can be found HERE.

A Photo Set of The 1960 Dodge Dart Phoenix D-500, a Reflection of The Jet-Age Styling of The Late 1950s

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The 1960s opened with great promise. The Dodge Dart was a new model that year, based on a mid-sized 118-inch wheelbase unibody design adopted from Plymouth, and the Phoenix was the premium trim package for it. This special Phoenix was further equipped with the performance-oriented D500 package; indeed, this amazing motorcar features not only its original drivetrain and sheet-metal, but nearly every available option that could be added to this vehicle platform in 1960.

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Dodge created 586 Phoenix D500-optioned Darts in 1960, but few were as spectacular as this one. The car is equipped with the 383/330 HP V-8 engine with Chrysler’s special long-tube D500 ram induction, which featured dual 4-barrel carburetors mounted on sonically tuned cast manifolds that looped across each opposing valve cover. It is backed by the pushbutton-activated TorqueFlite automatic transmission.

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The car, featuring its Ghia-inspired finned-and-piped panels as executed by designer Virgil Exner, is painted red and augmented by front bumper guards, backup lights, door-edge moldings and dual side mirrors; lower-body stone shields and deluxe wheel covers complete the picture of Dodge luxury.

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Inside are red interior components, complete with rare power-swivel front seats, power windows, factory electric clock, foam-cushioned rear seat and an Astrophonic AM Radio with rear-seat speaker. Driving ease was accomplished with power steering and power brakes.

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Here is a photo set of the 1960 Dodge Dart Phoenix D-500, a reflection of the jet-age styling of the late 1950s and the cataclysms that brought about the legendary Chrysler products of the 1960s.

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Chris Hedges: No Way Out but War

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.

There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

None of these opposition forces, which did not reverse the permanent war economy but curbed its excesses, now exist. The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry. Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts. NBC’s “Meet the Press” aired a segment May 13 where officials from Center for a New American Security (CNAS) simulated what a war with China over Taiwan might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle Flournoy, who appeared in the “Meet the Press” war games segment and was considered by Biden to run the Pentagon, wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”

The handful of anti-militarists and critics of empire from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, and the right, such as Ron Paul, have been declared persona non grata by a compliant media. The liberal class has retreated into boutique activism where issues of class, capitalism and militarism are jettisoned for “cancel culture,” multiculturalism and identity politics. Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw them join significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler. There is little hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the disasters being orchestrated on a national and global level.  The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists chant in unison for war. Biden has appointed these war mongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department.

Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. This military adventurism accelerates the decline, as the defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate. War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War, or the threat of war, will curb the growing economic and military clout of China.

These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality. No longer able to salvage their own society and economy, they seek to destroy those of their global competitors, especially Russia and China. Once the militarists cripple Russia, the plan goes, they will focus military aggression on the Indo-Pacific, dominating what Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, referring to the Pacific, called “the American Sea.”

You cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The U.S., whose growth rate has fallen to below 2 percent, while China’s growth rate is 8.1 percent, has turned to military aggression to bolster its sagging economy. If the U.S. can sever Russian gas supplies to Europe, it will force Europeans to buy from the United States. U.S. firms, at the same time, would be happy to replace the Chinese Communist Party, even if they must do it through the threat of war, to open unfettered access to Chinese markets. War, if it did break out with China, would devastate the Chinese, American, and global economies, destroying free trade between countries as in World War I. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Washington is desperately trying to build military and economic alliances to ward off a rising China, whose economy is expected by 2028 to overtake that of the United States, according to the UK’s Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The White House has said Biden’s current visit to Asia is about sending a “powerful message” to Beijing and others about what the world could look like if democracies “stand together to shape the rules of the road.” The Biden administration has invited South Korea and Japan to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.

But fewer and fewer nations, even among European allies, are willing to be dominated by the United States. Washington’s veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its economic decline, with China’s manufacturing 70 percent higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible. War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Thucydides noted in the History of the Peloponnesian War.

A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class, and military families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service. It protects the military from internal revolts, carried out by troops during the Vietnam War, which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed forces.

The All-Volunteer Force, by limiting the pool of available troops, also makes the global ambitions of the militarists impossible. Desperate to maintain or increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military instituted the stop-loss policy that arbitrarily extended active-duty contracts. Its slang term was the backdoor draft. The effort to bolster the number of troops by hiring private military contractors, as well, had a negligible effect. Increased troop levels would not have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the tiny percentage of those willing to serve in the military (only 7 percent of the U.S. population are veterans) is an unacknowledged Achilles heel for the militarists.

“As a consequence, the problem of too much war and too few soldiers eludes serious scrutiny,” writes historian and retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich in After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. “Expectations of technology bridging that gap provide an excuse to avoid asking the most fundamental questions: Does the United States possess the military wherewithal to oblige adversaries to endorse its claim of being history’s indispensable nation? And if the answer is no, as the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, wouldn’t it make sense for Washington to temper its ambitions accordingly?”

This question, as Bacevich points out, is “anathema.” The military strategists work from the supposition that the coming wars won’t look anything like past wars. They invest in imaginary theories of future wars that ignore the lessons of the past, ensuring more fiascos.

The political class is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses to accept the emergence of a multi-polar world and the palpable decline of American power. It speaks in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it has the right to impose its will as the leader of the “free world.” In his 1992 Defense Planning Guidance memorandum, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival superpower again arises. The U.S. should project its military strength to dominate a unipolar world in perpetuity. On February 19, 1998, on NBC’s “Today Show”, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version of this doctrine of unipolarity. “If we have to use force it is because we are Americans; we are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”

This demented vision of unrivaled U.S. global supremacy, not to mention unrivaled goodness and virtue, blinds the establishment Republicans and Democrats. The military strikes they casually used to assert the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and prolonged warfare. None of them saw it coming until the hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center twin towers. That they cling to this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope over experience.

There is a deep loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy League architects of American imperialism. Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to project power abroad and produce rising living standards at home. It was tolerated when it restrained itself to covert interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam. The military defeats that followed accompanied a steady decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series of economic policies and trade deals, orchestrated by the same ruling class, which deindustrialized and impoverished the country.

The establishment oligarchs, now united in the Democratic Party, distrust Donald Trump. He commits the heresy of questioning the sanctity of the American empire. Trump derided the invasion of Iraq as a “big, fat mistake.” He promised “to keep us out of endless war.” Trump was repeatedly questioned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin was “a killer,” one interviewer told him. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump retorted. “You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump dared to speak a truth that was to be forever unspoken, the militarists had sold out the American people.

Noam Chomsky took some heat for pointing out, correctly, that Trump is the “one statesman” who has laid out a “sensible” proposition to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution included “facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe…in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation.”

Trump is too unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the economic war against Venezuela and reinstituted crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which the Obama administration had ended. He increased the military budget. He apparently flirted with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” But he acknowledges a distaste for imperial mismanagement that resonates with the public, one that has every right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us into one war after another. Trump lies like he breathes. But so do they.

The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”

“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”

Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.

Wuhan Lab Did Gain of Function Research on . . . Monkeypox

WuhanMonkeypox Header large
WuhanMonkeypox Header large

The very same Biolab that performed gain of function research into Coronaviruses, and is widely believed to have spawned the outbreak of COVID-19, is now shown to have ALSO done that research on Monkeypox; which the world is seeing outbreaks of right now.

Virologica Sinica is an international journal which aims at presenting the cutting-edge research on viruses all over the world. The journal publishes peer-reviewed original research articles, reviews, and letters to the editor, to encompass the latest developments in all branches of virology.

In February 2022, Virologica Sinica published a recent gain of function research project on Monkeypox,  performed by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in August 2021 while the COVID-19 pandemic was still raging around the world.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology assembled a monkeypox virus genome, allowing the virus to be identified through PCR tests, using a method researchers flagged for potentially creating a “contagious pathogen”

The study was published in February 2022.  (Link to Study)

So now the world is seeing the SECOND outbreak of a strange and dangerous new virus, and it is also seeing this from the exact same laboratory that did Gain of Function research into both those now-in-the-wild Viruses.

Is this carelessness, or deliberate bio-warfare against the world by China?

China’s No.2 surprises Anthony Albanese with congratulations before PM’s first big test

Apparently, this is China’s New foreign policy: stop communication with any  hostile nation until they lost office, then initiate good-will with the new leadership. If the new establishment still behaves in a hostile and barbaric manner, then they will continue to stop communicating until the leadership is then replaced.
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This, in the long run, will shape the national geopolitical alignments.

Mr Albanese has been sworn in. Now he must meet his first big challenge.

James Robertson
Political Editor
7:52pm, May 23
China has ended a block on communicating officially with Australia after Premier Li Keqiang – second to President Xi Jinping – congratulated Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hours after he took office, state media reported.

The olive branch came as Mr Albanese was flying to his first major foreign policy engagement, a regional security summit formed to be a counterweight to China’s influence in the region.

State news agency Xinhua quoted Premier Li as saying he hoped that this year’s 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties would be an occasion to review relations between the two countries.

From HERE

Amazing Colorized Photos Show What Kitchens Looked Like In The First Half Of The 20th Century

An amazing set of colorized photographs from Color Me Six Ways to Sunday that show what kitchens looked like from the first half of the 20th century.

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China Insists Party Elites Shed Overseas Assets, Eyeing Western Sanctions on Russia – WSJ

An internal Communist Party directive bars senior officials from owning property abroad or stakes in overseas entities, whether directly or through spouses and children

From HERE

OSCE Satellite Phone Found in NAZI Lair Beneath Azovstal

OSCE Sat Phone ID large
OSCE Sat Phone ID large

For over a month, the Russian Army surrounded NAZIS from Ukraine at the Azovstal Steel Mill in Mariupol. The NAZIS finally surrendered last week. Now, the Russians have found a Satellite Phone from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in EUROPE (OSCE) inside the NAZI Lair. Why was OSCE facilitating the NAZIS in Ukraine?

Here’s a full image of the Satellite Phone found by the Russian Army in the catacombs of the Azovstal Steel Mill:

OSCE Sat Phone Found Beneath Azovstal Mill NAZIS used it
OSCE Sat Phone Found Beneath Azovstal Mill NAZIS used it

This phone made it possible for an actual Army Unit from Ukraine, composed of actual NAZIS who perpetrated barbaric war crimes upon innocent civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk, to maintain contact with their bosses in Kiev for further instructions and supplies.

Why would the OSCE have provided such a communications device to actual NAZIS?

OSCE cannot claim it was “lost” or “stolen” — the phone still works. The account is still active.

So again, why was OSCE facilitating actual NAZIS?

No comment has been received back to our inquiring email from OSCE.

Asian countries have good ties with US, China and other major powers, don’t need Nato-equivalent, Singapore’s PM Lee says

  • •US President Biden said on Saturday that stronger ties among like-minded nations is needed amid ‘competition between democracies and autocracies’
  • •But Singapore’s PM Lee Hsien Loong said in an interview that a ‘better configuration’ is one that does not involve countries joining opposing blocs
Updated: 10:20am, 24 May, 2022
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Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said it is in Asia’s interest to avoid forming a security bloc like Europe’s Nato, noting the region’s history and circumstances make such a military alliance unnecessary.
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Lee’s remarks in an interview with Nikkei Asia published on Monday come amid calls from US President Joe Biden for Washington’s partners in the region to shore up cooperation amid escalating rivalry against the world’s “autocracies”.
That rhetoric has largely been described by observers as aimed at getting countries aligned with the US and the West to cooperate and gird themselves against China and Russia.
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Biden, currently on his maiden Asia tour as US president, said on Saturday that stronger ties among like-minded nations were necessary amid an inevitable “competition between democracies and autocracies”.
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Asked by Nikkei’s editor Tetsuya Iguchi if Asia needed a “collective security equivalent” to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), Lee pointed out that Asia’s circumstances were not the same as Europe’s.
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The region did not have Europe’s history, where Western countries were split from Soviet Union-backing “Warsaw Pact” nations during the Cold War.
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“In Asia, the history is different. There was never a grouping in Asia which was the equivalent of Nato,” Lee said. “And countries in Asia, many of them enjoy good ties with China, as well as with the US and the US’ treaty allies,” he said, naming US treaty allies Japan, South Korea and Australia.
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“Many more are not, but are friends of the US, like Singapore – we are a major security cooperation partner. But even many of the allies maintain important relations with China,” said the Singapore prime minister.
He added: “So I think that that is a better configuration than one where countries are divided along a line and one bloc confronts another. That is the history in Europe, but it has not been the history in Asia. And I think it is better that it remains not.”
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In the interview, Iguchi said “many countries rely too much on trade with China” and that “if China stops importing from Asian countries, the effect would be devastating”.
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In response, Lee said “you cannot afford not to do business with China”.
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“The opportunities are there, the markets are there, and you want to trade with them, and soon, many countries will be welcoming their investments as well,” he said.
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While countries will want to grow their trade links with the rest of the world, “China is now a bigger part of the world economy and therefore proportionately you would expect more of your trade to go with China,” Lee added.
Russia, China seeking to ‘rewrite international rule book’: Nato chief
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“If you say China is a big part, but I do not want to trade with them, it will not only be very costly, but you are setting up for more friction and less chances of maintaining the peace.”
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In the wide-ranging interview, Lee also touched on the question of China and self-ruled Taiwan’s recent application to join the 11-nation Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade pact.
Singapore is this year’s chair of the group’s decision-making body. In September Taiwan, which China views as a renegade province, applied to join the CPTPP a week after Beijing did so.
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“We are the Chair, but we do not decide. We are the traffic police,” Lee said.
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“It is an open grouping where economies can join if they meet the standard, which are quite high, and the decision is made by consensus,” Lee said.
“That means the Chair will consult the member economies, and they will have their views, and if there is a consensus to start the accession process, it will begin,” he said.
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The consultations will “take a while” as individual economies may have different views and would have separate discussions with the nations applying to join.
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Lee said Singapore, for its part, would welcome China to the CPTPP. He said the world’s second-largest economy would need to meet the standards of the pact. “But in the end, the decision is made by the consensus of the members so the other members may well have different views,” he said.
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Possible Nato membership for Finland and Sweden sparks concern in Russia

On the US-initiated Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) launched by President Biden on Monday in Tokyo, Lee said Singapore – a participant in the initiative – was “positive” about its formation.
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So far 12 countries – Australia, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam and the US – have signed up and account for 40 per cent of the world’s GDP, according to the White House.
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The countries said in a joint statement the framework would help them collectively “prepare our economies for the future” following disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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The IPEF, which involves supply chains, the digital economy and green economy cooperation, was an alternative to a multilateral trade pact involving the US, and reflects Washington’s “intent to cooperate on economic issues which are relevant to the region,” Lee said.

“My mom, looking gorgeous as usual, Fremont, CA, mid-1960s”

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Sitrep 180 Hot Potato : Ritter, Lira, Johnson and Martyanov

By Amarynth for the Saker Blog

Let me first give the links to the debate in question (and this is a sitrep, so it is more freewheeling than a serious article for the Saker blog).

We’ve been talking about Ritter’s 180 swing in his coverage on both the SMO-404 and the Russian capabilities.

This article, titled “Ukraine War Has No End in Sight” gives the Ritter view post his 180: HERE and there were three prior videos where this view developed.  But this written form is good enough.

Andrei Martynov weighed in and Larry Johnson weighed in on various occasions and on a professional basis.  Gonzalo Lira weighed in his casual style.  On the Saker Blog, I weighed in during discussions and even analyzed a few paragraphs of Ritter’s article.

Even Pepe Escobar had to retract a quasi ‘Ritter sentence’ that he used.  This was his short and creative retraction.  “Martyanov is right on Western Ukraine. I should have emphasized the conditionalities – as it stands a 404 “New Model Army” is American wishful thinking.”

All of these people (including myself) were 180 opposite to Ritter’s view and I for one asked for evidence of this New Scary NATO army because clearly, Wunderwaffe came to mind.

Yet, there is no discussion and Ritter did it again.  This time in an interview with Sputnik here:

Article HERE

Both Andrei Martyanov as well as Larry Johnson weighed in again.

Before I quote from their work, let’s try to answer the question of Why?  Why are we responding to Ritter in this manner?  I will give you only my personal perception.  I view Ritter’s 180 as pushing NATO talking points and even spreading Ukrainian manure.   He assumes a static position from Russia.  After his 180, his tone changed and he presents NATO as the All Powerful and backed by the US Money Machine and Weapons Machine, as Invincible.  He creates new armies out of thin air, and professes knowledge of the Russian thinking and possible future actions which he cannot possibly know.  We can then discuss whether this is pure deception of his mainly western audience, or purely disingenuous, or a project based on a think-tank or something.  I hope it is none of those, and that he will enter into discussion and debate with his peers.  (Note Johnson’s article quoted later in this report).  If not, we have to question his whole basis for pumping American Wishful Thinking, as well as the substance of his presentation.

I’ll go back to an older quote from Martyanov:  “That is why when I hear that some piece of metal and a pile of increasingly diminishing US Dollars are going to make any real tactical, operational, let alone strategic difference in 404, other than being blown up or taken as trophies, I smile. Even LDNR people today complain (in Russian) that most of the US equipment when even not-expired and up to date, often doesn’t work and breaks down.

I know, for true American patriot such as Scott it is difficult to accept this fact but in the last 20 years it goes without saying that institutional rot completely engulfed America’s strategic and operational thought and, and I wrote three books on that, US increasingly produced weapons which like Javelins or Littoral Combat Ships, or F-35 or Patriot PAC 3s are not really suited for a serious war against competent enemy who, in addition, like Russia, has all means to see the enemy and destroy it.”  Article HERE

Let’s go to Larry Johnson’s latest titled:  Debating Scott Ritter.

He deals with the new funding, western weapons supply, training and intelligence sharing.  And he posts a video of Gonzalo Lira, who in his casual format understands these matters.  Here are some points but read the whole article:

  • Money may make the world go around but it does not magically produce trained, enthusiastic troops willing and capable of using such weapons.
  • Ukraine’s problem right now is not a lack of equipment. They had combat aircraft, helicopters, tanks, artillery and drones. Russia destroyed a significant amount of that materiel and killed the soldiers and pilots who were trained to operate those systems.
  • Scott Ritter sees the training of Ukrainian troops in Poland and Germany as a critical variable that could really hurt the Russians. Training reinforcements on new technology might be a potential game-changer if the situation on the ground in Ukraine was static. It is not.
  • Scott also asserts that intelligence sharing gives the Ukrainians an edge. When you provide intelligence on Russian troop movements, locations or plans, there is an assumption that the recipients of that intelligence will be able to do something to hurt the Russians. How did that work out in Mariupol? How about fending off the Russian missile attack in Desna. In my view, sharing intelligence with Ukraine is an effort in futility. Am empty gesture that will not change anything on the ground.

How to actually understand this Hot Potato?, and it is an important one.  The Ukraine SMO is only but a small representation of what Russia means by stopping the growth of NATO, indivisibility of security, the security balance in Europe, and most important, military-technical measures.   And then, one has to bring into the calculus that China is solid behind Russia in the thinking, and further, that the US pre-amble to actual kinetic action in the Ukraine, is now being duplicated around China.  The dead give-away is that SHOULD in Biden’s sentence.  Remember the many ‘ifs’ and ‘shoulds’ that we saw in the runup to Russia entering the Ukraine.  “President Joe Biden said Washington could be directly involved in conflict should China try to take the island by force.”  They are again trying to project and create a condition that is not necessarily there.

And this is the tone change in Ritter’s work.  He is projecting a condition that is not necessarily existent and presents it as fact. 

We have to understand that NATO is now being presented as the ultimate force projection by the small collective west.  Those familiar with Martyanov’s work understand that this is but a paper tiger and the boogyman (although with destructive ability) under the bed.  This is a projection and the small collective west only has a boogyman left to threaten the world.

Here is another such projection, this time with a clown:  Klaus Schwab has just introduced President Zelensky of Ukraine to the World Economic Forum in Davos with a glowing tribute saying that all of Europe and the international order stands with him.

Lira’s view is important here, albeit not professional.  He asks the question, Why is it Absurd that the Ukraine is standing up a million man new army?  (Short, 7 minutes or so).

For comments, I remind you, that this is not a personality contest.  As Johnson says – it is a substantive matter.  So commentators, please be reasonable and kind, and don’t tell us who you like most.  At least present knowledge of the substance of this matter.  From the commentariat, let’s keep this one closely focused on the topic.

There is a bigger picture here.  From here and there in Europe, we see that everyone is now desperately scrambling for a peace plan.  A contributor sent me this one from Italy titled Now, Italy begins backtracking on its promises and extending an olive branch toward Russia.  HERE

I smiled, on two accounts.  This peace plan is Minsk redux!

And secondly, why this reach for a peace plan now?  Besides worrying about economics and gas and oil, it is another containment of Russia.  They all know Russia will win in the Ukraine, the way Russia perceives it, handsomely.   So, everyone desperately wants to devise new conditions, because the fear is that Russia will not stop.  So, they want to devise peace now, and send Russia back to Russia.  The news is that we are in a world-changing epoch, and Russia will not stop but take her full part in this world-changing epoch, preferably peacefully, but if not, military-technical.

What’s Behind Biden’s Resolve to Defend Taiwan Against Beijing?

Jeff J. Brown on Sputnik News. China Rising Radio Sinoland 220524  . It’s an audio track. Interesting stuff. Jeff’s stuff always is.

From HERE

This 19th-Century Tool Box Is Meticulously Designed To Hold 300 Tools

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The look of tool chests can tell us much about workers and workplaces. While their purpose is to organize, carry, and protect tools, this chest also suggests what a worker thinks of himself and how society measures the value of his work.

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If the workmanship in a tool chest is any indication of the maker’s talent, then the craftsmanship of Master carpenter and Freemason H. O. Studley must have been awe-inspiring. Brother Henry O. Studley (1838-1925) built this magnificent wall-hung chest while employed by the Poole Piano Company of Quincy, Massachusetts.

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In an oak clamshell box adorned with rosewood, ebony, pearl and ivory, Studley kept both tools he made and a collection of the finest hand tools made prior to 1900, including a complete set of woodworking tools as well as machinist and stonemasonry tools. To pack the 300-plus tools into a case only 19 1/2 inches wide, 39 inches long and 9 1/2 inches deep, Studley devised a jigsaw puzzle arrangement of flip-up trays, fold-out layers and hidden compartments. Maine native Pete Hardwick originally owned the chest, which had been in his family since it was bequeathed to his grandfather by Studley.

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Hardwick acquired the chest from his brother by trading a 1934 Ford sedan for it. A good trade? It would seem so: just one tool – the Stanley No. 1 plane housed in the ebony archway in the upper-left part of the chest – was appraised at $700.00 in 1993.

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This tool chest was carefully restored to its original splendor and glory, loaned to the Smithsonian Institution, then displayed in the National Museum of American History as the centerpiece of woodworking and other tradesman tool chests. Studley’s chest then changed hands again (for an undisclosed $$$ amount) to another private collector.

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The Prisoner Episode 3

Enjoy this episode. I will continue to add these episodes in the future articles.

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I warned you. It’s NOW in process. China is now on full war mobilization and red alert status.

The US Air Force has the F35, a fighter plane that is invisible to radar. The F35 is so invisible no-one in Ukraine has seen it.

-Passerby

We interrupt the normal flow of opinion, articles and news on MM for this breaking and concerning alert. But first, some background. Watch the video that I made on Saturday morning…

MM Warning on Saturday 21MAY22

This is the video that I made on Saturday morning. Watch it.

China DEFCON moves from Orange to Red Status

Update: This is FAKE NEWS. Sorry for presenting it. Sources inside of the Chiense govnerment has confirmed that the high state of readiness has not decreased since 2019. I am ashamed for being so taken in by the bullshit. Apologies all around. -MM

Hal Turner Comments…

From HERE.

The China Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee has issued a “National Mobilization Order” to switch China from peacetime to Wartime economy. This is now formal preparation to seize Taiwan and fight-off U.S. protection of that island.

Audio from a Provincial government meeting in the Province of Guangdong was recorded, making explicitly clear they have been ordered to immediately switch to a wartime operating status.

Support of frontline troops, through coordination of industrial production, is now being implemented.

We now return back to our regular programming…

Elegant Photos That Defined Edwardian Fashion Styles Of Young Women

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One of the primary changes of the Edwardian Era included the change in clothes of the women.

A typical Edwardian Woman was very fashion conscious and this era hence brought about remarkable new trends in women’s attire. Curvy hips and fuller low chests were the unique characteristics of this era because they emphasised slim and trim fits.

In short, Edwardian women’s fashion is actually a simplification from Victorian era, but pretty more creativity and innovation. These elegant photos below that defined Edwardian fashion styles of young women.

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Pepe Escobar, in “Russia Rewrites The Art of Hybrid War” at SCF:

So why would weapons peddler retrofitted as Pentagon head Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin literally beg since late February to have his phone calls answered by Russian Defense Minister Shoigu, only to have his wish finally granted?

It’s now confirmed by one of my top intel sources. The call was a direct consequence of panic. The United States Government (USG) by all means wants to scotch the detailed Russian investigation – and accumulation of evidence – on the US bioweapon labs in Ukraine, as I outlined in a previous column.

This phone call happened exactly after an official Russian statement to the UN Security Council on May 13: we will use articles 5 and 6 of the Convention on the Prohibition of Bioweapons to investigate the Pentagon’s biological “experiments” in Ukraine.

...

Shoigu cold see the call coming eons away. Reuters, merely quoting the proverbial “ Pentagon official”, spun that the allegedly one-hour-long call led to nothing. Nonsense. Austin, according to the Americans, demanded a “ ceasefire” – which must have originated a Siberian cat smirk on Shoigu’s face.

So, according to Escobar, it’s not primarily the disastrous surrender of 2,000 Azov prisoners at Avostal or the possible NATO remainders there that so terrifies the deep state, but the fact that Russia has irrefutable documentation of US war crimes against Humanity in its bioweapons labs — the 30 or so in Ukraine plus ~300 worldwide. The origin of Covid-19 as possible biowarfare against China and Iran also risks exposure.

Scandinavian Airlines Pulled Out Vintage Images Of Old Menu Cards And In-Flight Meals

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Scandinavian Airlines, usually known as SAS, is the flag carrier of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, which together form Scandinavia. SAS is an abbreviation of the company’s full name, Scandinavian Airlines System. Founded on August 1, 1946. A few years ago for their seventieth anniversary they pulled out some old menu cards and and pictures of in-flight meals. Times have changed…

It all looks glorious. Of course it does. These pictures were taken to advertise the marvel of flying with SAS. What we do see are the chefs, who with flourishes of impressive blades carve slices of meat from the grinning hostesses’ well-stocked trolley. The sommelier stands by, ready to suggest the best vintage to accompany the smogasbord of mile-high delights.

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Expert says Putin’s demand for rubles is the “most serious blow” to American interests in Ukraine

From HERE

An expert has said that the demand by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s for rubles if “unfriendly countries” want gas is the “most serious blow” to American interests in Ukraine.

European countries were stunned by Russia’s demand that gas be paid in rubles as they seemingly expected the Eurasian country to be sanctioned and locked out of Western financial mechanisms without retaliation. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on March 31 that he had signed a decree forcing buyers from “unfriendly countries” to pay for Russian gas in rubles from April 1, warning that contracts would be halted if these payments were not made.

Although the companies and governments of “unfriendly countries” have rejected the move as a breach of existing contracts, which are set in euros or dollars, French economy minister Bruno Le Maire said his country and Germany were preparing for a possible scenario that Russian gas flows are halted – something that would plunge Europe into a full-blown energy and economic crisis.

Although the halt of gas supplies to Europe could see Gazprom lose about half of its profits and reduce investment, it will have an even greater negative consequence on the European energy sector. Europe will not be able to quickly replace Russian gas with LNG supplies from the United States and Qatar, and as a result, European gas prices could rise to $5,000 per 1,000 cubic meters or even higher, which will force a consumption reduction and hit the economy.

Charles Michel, head of the Council of Europe, presented the EU Programme on ensuring energy security. He stressed that eliminating dependence on Russian energy sources is at the heart of the program as, according to him, it is necessary to quickly get rid of Russian carbon hydrogen and then fossil fuels in general.

However, it is clear that even without the current global energy crisis caused by the lack of gas supplies, it would still be impossible to find a short to medium term solution to replace Russian sources. In this way, EU states, the UK, the US and other listed unfriendly countries will have no choice but to engage in rubles trade if they want to continue receiving Russian energy and not let their economic situations worsen.

Speaking about changes in the global economic system following sanctions and Russia’s responses to the financial hostilities, Serbian geopolitical analyst Borislav Korkodelovic said: “IMF and World Bank data also show that it is becoming increasingly easy for the rest of the world to reject the demands of the West because it is no longer as economically omnipotent as it once was.”

“Even when it comes to nominal GDP, the difference between the BRICS countries on the one hand, and the EU and the US on the other, is narrower (24% to 30% before the pandemic and now it is even smaller). When the GDP is calculated relative to the parity of purchasing power, the stakes have already been replaced: 45% to 44.1% in favor of BRICS.”

For his part, Serbian lawyer Branko Pavlović said that Russia, China and India had a key part in building a new global economic system that is more equitable, as it should have been after the Second World War.

“This is a fight for a whole new international relationship and a return to multilateralism with respect to the sovereignty and equality of states, as envisioned after World War II, but now with incredible economic momentum to the general benefit. Everyone around the world understands that America and the West have been exploitative so far. We are now witnessing a new internationalism of liberation,” said Pavlović.

This sentiment was shared by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov who said that BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will be at the center of a new world order and stressed that the demand for rubles “is not a change in the terms of [energy] contracts,” but rather “a protection of Russian interests.”

It is this very drive to protect Russian interests that has forced Putin’s hand to demand rubles for energy. In fact, sanctions against Russia have only forced an accelerated change to the global economic system as de-Dollarization is being explored by nearly every major non-Western country.

Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, a Mexican political scientist, said that London, Washington and Beijing agree that there is a weakening of globalization. He stressed that “Moscow’s demand that your gas is paid in rubles” is an example of “the dismantling of the globalized model in the energy framework.”

Jalife-Rahme also explained that “the financial globalization with the predominance of the dollar generated annual profits of 1 trillion dollars for the United States, about 10% of the global GDP. The change of this paradigm may be one of the most serious blows of the Ukrainian situation to American interests.”

The West thought that it could economically collapse Russia, ignoring that sanctions failed to topple Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s Ayatollah’s, Kim Jong-Un and Nicolás Maduro. Rather, sanctions have only forced an acceleration of the de-Dollarization of the global economy. In effect, the demand for rubles for gas is pushing forward a multipolar and more equitable global economic system.

THE WARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

I would now like to offer you some thoughts that do not commit you to this or that conflict, and even less to this or that side. I will just lift a veil and invite you to look at what it hides. What I am about to say may shock you, but we can only find peace by accepting reality.

Wars are changing. I am not talking about weapons and military strategies, but about the reasons for conflicts, about their human dimension. Just as the transition from industrial capitalism to financial globalization is transforming our societies and pulverizing the principles that organized them, so this evolution is changing wars. The problem is that we are already incapable of adapting our societies to this structural change and therefore even less capable of thinking about the evolution of war.

War always seeks to solve the problems that politics has failed to solve. It does not happen when we are ready for it, but when we have eliminated all other solutions.

This is exactly what is happening today. The US Straussians have inexorably cornered Russia in Ukraine, leaving it no option but to go to war. If the Allies insist on pushing her back, they will provoke a World War.

Thierry is always good:

From HERE

Ukraine update & Wheat for Rubles has collective west in panic mode

A Big Lie

The NY Times publishes a Big Lie,

"In the end, it is the Ukrainians who must make the hard decisions."

No, the opposite is true–all decisions are made in DC and have since 2014.

The phone calls are pathetic since they’re being made by those who lack the power to initiate negotiation. Blinken, Sullivan and Nuland are the ones killing Ukrainians since they refuse to allow any attempts at peace. And those three believe their own swill.

karlof1

Placebo – English Summer Rain [Soulmates Never Die HD]

Takes me back…

”]

May Ukraine SitRep – Russians Break Through U.S. Bolsterism

From MoA.

On May 14 I noted that the U.S. had asked Russia for a ceasefire in Ukraine:

The U.S. readout of the call says:

On May 13, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III spoke with Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoygu for the first time since February 18. Secretary Austin urged an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication.

Austin initiated the call and the U.S. is seeking a ceasefire in Ukraine!!!

Yesterday the top officers of the U.S. and Russia had a call which, again, the U.S. side had initiated:

Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, held a conversation that the Pentagon declined to further detail beyond acknowledging it had happened.

Thinks must be bad in Ukraine for this to have happened. Indeed if one trusts the daily ‘clobber list’ the Russian Ministry of Defense puts out all positions of the Ukrainian army are under heavy artillery fire and it is losing about 500 men per day. There are additional Russian effective strikes on training camps, weapon storage sites and transport hubs all over the country.

On top of that the tactical situation at the eastern frontline has changed after Russian forces broke through the heavily fortified frontline.

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Source: liveuamap.combigger A few days ago the Russian army went forward along the H-32 road, broke through the line in the direction of Propasna and took the town. It has since extended the bulge by taking several villages to the north, west and south.

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biggerThis breakthrough gives the chance to roll up the Ukrainian fortifications along the frontline through flank attacks or from behind. By cutting the supply lines of the Ukrainian troops to the north and south envelopes can be created which will eventual lead to cauldrons with no way out for the Ukrainian troops.

This is especially dangerous for the several thousand soldiers north of the bulge which currently defend the cities of Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk in the north eastern part of the upper bubble.

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biggerThe Russian plan was to have another breakthrough from the north pushing to Siversk to then close the upper envelope. But after several failed attempts to cross the forest area and the Seversky Donets river that breakthrough has still to happen.

Russia is now likely to push fresh troops into the Propasna bulge to extend its reach into all directions. Reports of current actions show that the heavy fighting and bombing on the frontline continues and that bombing also continues to target traffic nodes.

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biggerOther fronts in Ukraine are currently relatively quiet with little direct fire. Still daily Russian artillery attacks hits all Ukrainian front lines and will cost daily casualties.

Some 2,000 Azov militia and Ukrainian army troops have left the catacombs of Azovstal in Mariupol. Another thousand may still be down there. The Russian army is filtering these prisoners. Members of Azov and other militia will be put to court. Ukrainian army soldiers will become prisoners of war.

The gasoline and diesel scarcity in Ukraine is currently having severe impacts. Even the Ukrainian military is now rationing its fuel. Since about six weeks ago Russia has systematically attacked refineries and fuel storage sites in Ukraine. It also disabled railroad bridges along the lines that brought fuel from Moldova and Romania.

At the same time the Ukrainian government had held up price regulations for fuel. The consumer sale prices for diesel and gasoline were fixed. The cost of fuel brought in by private trucks from Poland exceeded the price gas station owners could ask for. In consequence gas stations ran dry as their owners refrained from purchasing new fuel.

Three days ago the Zelensky regime in Kiev finally ended the fuel price control:

According to [economy minister] Svyrydenko, the government expects that the maximum prices for diesel will not exceed UAH 58 ($1.97), for gasoline — UAH 52 ($1.76) per liter, once controls are lifted.

“As soon as we feel that market operators are abusing their position, we will impose sanctions on them,” she added.

“We will monitor the situation on a daily basis”.

The expected prices are lower than what is currently asked for in Germany and that is without trucking the fuel the 600 kilometer from Poland to Kiev. The threat of sanctions also means that local wholesalers will have little incentives to actually deal in fuel. With the average wages in Ukraine being about $480 per months the real fuel prices will soon become another economic shock.

The Ukrainian government also continues its attacks on unions and labor laws:

In March, the Ukrainian parliament passed wartime legislation that severely curtailed the ability of trade unions to represent their members, introduced ‘suspension of employment’ (meaning employees are not fired, but their work and wages are suspended) and gave employers the right to unilaterally suspend collective agreements.
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But beyond this temporary measure, a group of Ukrainian MPs and officials are now aiming to further ‘liberalise’ and ‘de-Sovietise’ the country’s labour laws. Under a draft law, people who work in small and medium-sized firms – those which have up to 250 employees – would, in effect, be removed from the country’s existing labour laws and covered by individual contracts negotiated with their employer. More than 70% of the Ukrainian workforce would be affected by this change.

Against a background of concerns that Ukrainian officials are using Russia’s invasion to push through a long-awaited radical deregulation of labour laws, one expert has warned that the introduction of civil law into labour relations risks opening a “Pandora’s box” for workers.

In total the social-economic situation for Ukraine is catastrophic. The military situation is even worse. Mariupol has fallen and Russian troops working there will soon be able to go elsewhere. The Propasna bulge is threatening to envelope the whole northern frontline together with the core of the Ukrainian army.

There is no more talk of the Ukrainian army ‘winning’ like in Kiev or Karkov where the Russian troops retreated in good order after finishing their task of holding Ukrainian forces in place.

The Ukrainian command has sent several territorial brigades to the front lines. These units were supposed to defend their home towns. They consist of middle age men drafted into service. They have little fighting experience and lack heavy weapons. Several of these units have published videos saying they were giving up. They are lamenting that their commanders left them when their situation became critical.

That the Ukrainian army is now using such units as cannon fodder shows that it has only few reserves left.

Weapons that come in from the ‘west’ have difficulties reaching the front lines and had so far very little effect. They amount to drops of water on a hot plate.

All the above are the reasons why Austin and Milley have phoned up their Russian equivalents. They are also the reasons why the New York Times editors call on the Biden administration to end its bluster and to take a more realistic position:

Recent bellicose statements from Washington — President Biden’s assertion that Mr. Putin “cannot remain in power,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s comment that Russia must be “weakened” and the pledge by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that the United States would support Ukraine “until victory is won” — may be rousing proclamations of support, but they do not bring negotiations any closer.
In the end, it is the Ukrainians who must make the hard decisions: They are the ones fighting, dying and losing their homes to Russian aggression, and it is they who must decide what an end to the war might look like. If the conflict does lead to real negotiations, it will be Ukrainian leaders who will have to make the painful territorial decisions that any compromise will demand.
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[A]s the war continues, Mr. Biden should also make clear to President Volodymyr Zelensky and his people that there is a limit to how far the United States and NATO will go to confront Russia, and limits to the arms, money and political support they can muster. It is imperative that the Ukrainian government’s decisions be based on a realistic assessment of its means and how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain.

Confronting this reality may be painful, but it is not appeasement. This is what governments are duty bound to do, not chase after an illusory “win.” Russia will be feeling the pain of isolation and debilitating economic sanctions for years to come, and Mr. Putin will go down in history as a butcher. The challenge now is to shake off the euphoria, stop the taunting and focus on defining and completing the mission. America’s support for Ukraine is a test of its place in the world in the 21st century, and Mr. Biden has an opportunity and an obligation to help define what that will be.

Posted by b on May 20, 2022 at 16:49 UTC | Permalink

The Gregg Allman Band 1982 – Queen of Hearts – Saenger Theatre New Orleans

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Killer bunny rabbits, Economic Suicide, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Mariupol, and delicious home-made bagels

I’ve been spending more time than I would like on the Metallicman you-tube channel. However, it’s a venue that seems to fit me personally. I just need to work on my learning curve and improve on my presentation skills, my video editing skills, and my Marketing skills. That will come. It’s all a matter of time.

This installment concentrates on the crazy “news” that is flowing through the airwaves today, and mixed with my anti-troll, and anti-‘bot articles that really zeroes out the effectiveness of the government, and corporate entities that wish to confuse and control the narratives that MM produces. I hope you enjoy this article.

The bold and brazen truth is exposed

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov:

“Ukraine… No one wants Ukraine. They are an expendable country in this hybrid war against Russian Federation. No one has doubts anymore”.

The language from Russian sources has changed and they now say clearly that Ukraine is a tool and the fight is against Russia by the West.

How Europe Was Pushed Towards Economic Suicide

A decent piece from MoA

With the active help from Europe’s ‘leadership’ the U.S. is succeeding in ruining Europe.

As Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, wrote in early February, before Russia’s intervention in Ukraine:

America no longer has the monetary power and seemingly chronic trade and balance-of-payments surplus that enabled it to draw up the world’s trade and investment rules in 1944-45. The threat to U.S. dominance is that China, Russia and Mackinder’s Eurasian World Island heartland are offering better trade and investment opportunities than are available from the United States with its increasingly desperate demand for sacrifices from its NATO and other allies.

The most glaring example is the U.S. drive to block Germany from authorizing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to obtain Russian gas for the coming cold weather. Angela Merkel agreed with Donald Trump to spend $1 billion building a new LNG port to become more dependent on highly priced U.S. LNG. (The plan was cancelled after the U.S. and German elections changed both leaders.) But Germany has no other way of heating many of its houses and office buildings (or supplying its fertilizer companies) than with Russian gas.

The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27: “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The problem is to create a suitably offensive incident and depict Russia as the aggressor.

In mid February OSCE observer noted that the artillery bombardment of Donbas by the Ukrainians increased from a handful to over 2,000 explosions per day. Russia reacted to these attack preparations by recognizing the Donbas republics, signing defense agreements with them and by finally coming to their help.

Shortly after the launch of the Russian military operation Professor Hudson further developed his earlier thoughts:

The recent prodding of Russia by expanding Ukrainian anti-Russian ethnic violence by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi post-2014 Maiden regime aims at forcing a showdown. It comes in response to the fear by U.S. interests that they are losing their economic and political hold on their NATO allies and other Dollar Area satellites as these countries have seen their major opportunities for gain to lie in increasing trade and investment with China and Russia. 
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As President Biden explained, the current military escalation (“Prodding the Bear”) is not really about Ukraine. Biden promised at the outset that no U.S. troops would be involved. But he has been demanding for over a year that Germany prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from supplying its industry and housing with low-priced gas and turn to the much higher-priced U.S. suppliers. 
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[T]he most pressing U.S. strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices. In addition to creating profits and stock-market gains for U.S. companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy.

In early April Professor Hudson took another look at the situation:

It is now clear that the New Cold War was planned over a year ago, with serious strategy associated with America’s perceived to block Nord Stream 2 as part of its aim of barring Western Europe (“NATO”) from seeking prosperity by mutual trade and investment with China and Russia. 
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So the Russian-speaking Donetsk and Luhansk regions were shelled with increasing intensity, and when Russia still refrained from responding, plans reportedly were drawn up for a great showdown last February – a heavy Western Ukrainian attack organized by U.S. advisors and armed by NATO.
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European trade and investment prior to the War to Create Sanctions had promised a rising mutual prosperity among Germany, France and other NATO countries vis-à-vis Russia and China. Russia was providing abundant energy at a competitive price, and this energy supply was to make a quantum leap with Nord Stream 2. Europe was to earn the foreign exchange to pay for this rising import trade by a combination of exporting more industrial manufactures to Russia and capital investment in rebuilding the Russian economy, e.g. by German auto companies, aircraft and financial investment. This bilateral trade and investment is now stopped – for many, many years, given NATO’s confiscation of Russia’s foreign reserves kept in euros and British sterling.

The European response to the U.S. proxy war against Russia was based on media driven hysteric moralizing or maybe moralizing hysteria. It was and is neither rational nor realistic.

The European ‘leadership’ decided that nothing but the economic suicide of Europe was sufficient to show Russia that Brussels was seriously miffed. Dimwit national governments, including the German one, followed that program. Should they stay on their course the result will be a complete de-industrialization of western Europe.

In the words of one serious observer:

Today, we see that for purely political reasons, driven by their own ambitions, and under pressure from their US overlord, the European countries are imposing more sanctions on the oil and gas markets which will lead to more inflation. Instead of admitting their mistakes, they are looking for a guilty party elsewhere. 
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One gets the impression that Western politicians and economists simply forget basic economic laws or just choose to ignore them. 
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[S]aying no to Russian energy means that Europe will systemically and for the long term become the world’s most costly region for energy resources. Yes, prices will rise, and resources will go to counter these price hikes, but this will not change the situation significantly. Some analysts are saying that it will seriously or even irrevocably undermine the competitiveness of a significant portion of European industry, which is already losing ground to companies from other parts of the world. Now, these processes will certainly pick up pace. Clearly, the opportunities for economic activity, with its improvements, will leave Europe for other regions, as will Russia’s energy resources.

This economic auto-da-fe… suicide is, of course, the internal affair of the European countries. 
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Now our partners’ erratic actions – this is what they are – have resulted in a de facto growth in revenue in the Russian oil-and-gas sector in addition to the damage to the European economy. 
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Understanding what steps the West will take in the near future, we must reach conclusions in advance and be proactive, turning the thoughtless chaotic steps of some of our partners to our advantage for the benefit of our country. Naturally, we should not hope for their endless mistakes. We should simply, practically proceed from current realities, as I said.

Vladimir Putin, Meeting on oil industry development, May 17 2020, Kremlin, Moscow

Posted by b on May 18, 2022 at 14:01 UTC | Permalink

Weapons arrive in Ukraine

Incoming weapons.  On the Polish-Ukrainian border, seven South African-made Mamba Mk2 EE armored vehicles transferred to Ukraine by Estonia as military assistance were seen. These vehicles were specifically produced for the Estonian army.

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We have to conclude if we can see these armored vehicles via telegram channel on the Polish border, then the Russian forces can see them too.  And ditto for all other incoming weapons.

China Eastern black box indicates 737 crash was intentional

***   The Offical Chinese government says that this article is FAKE NEWS and to ignore it.   ***

May 18, 2022.

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The crash occured within two days of Mr. Blinkedin, and President Biden WARNED China that "serious consequences" would occur unless China sanctioned Russia.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that someone intentionally put flight China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 into a nose dive killing all 132 aboard.

“Data from a black box recovered in the crash suggests inputs to the controls pushed the plane into the fatal dive,”

…the WSJ said.

The paper is quoting people familiar with US officials’ preliminary assessment of what led to the accident.

Chinese authorities, who are leading the investigation, also have not flagged any mechanical or flight control problems with the plane involved in the March 21 crash.

What is not clear is whether it was one of the pilots or a passenger.

China Eastern Flight MU 5735 crashed on March 21, 2022.

Flight MU 5735 a Boeing 737-800, of China Eastern Airlines, took off from Kunming Changshui Airport at 13:16 Beijing time and climbed to an altitude of 8900m.

At 14:20:55 Guangzhou area control radar showed a “deviation” warning, as the aircraft left the cruise altitude.

ATC called the crew but received no reply.

Haiti

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A Haitian walks by a murdered man on the sidewalk near the Catholic Cathedral, Sunday, September 18, 1994 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. An American invasion of Haiti was averted Sunday night in the most dramatic fashion as President Clinton’s negotiators reached an 11th-hour compromise with Army commander Raoul Cedras. Clinton said Haiti’s military rulers would leave power by October 15. (Photo by Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo)

Don’t ignore what’s happening in Sri Lanka, it’s coming for all of us | Redacted

Take notice of Sri Lanka.

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OIP.rptLVrzrxWSw3vbxQvt 8wHaJP

Coming to the collective West.

No Knead Crusty Rolls – Easier Than You Think!

Mariupol Liberated… Western Media Silence Amid Their Big Lie Exposure

From HERE

For anyone who has been seriously following the conflict in Ukraine it is obvious that Western governments and media have been a total travesty in what they are claiming about that country.

The Western news media were made to look like laughing stocks this week with the evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, the Black Sea port city in southern Ukraine.

Not just laughing stocks, but actually proponents of deceitful war propaganda. This should be a matter of excruciatingly deep shame for the Western media and indeed the basis for future prosecution over war crimes complicity.

Up to 100 civilians were released from the sprawling industrial factory and taken into care by Russian forces in conjunction with United Nations rescue officials and the International Red Cross. Their testimonies flatly contradict the claims that were being blared by Western news media for several weeks.

Amplifying the narrative of the NATO-backed Kiev regime, the Western media had been making out that the civilians were voluntarily in the Azovstal plant to help defend it along with Ukrainian soldiers. The Russian military surrounding the factory was said to be besieging the site and threatening the safety of civilians.

However, it turns out, based on their own testimonies, that the civilians were being held hostage as human shields by the Ukrainian combatants. While the Western media had been extolling the “heroic” defenders of the Azovstal factory, it has now become apparent that these “heroes” were grossly violating laws of war by systematically using non-combatants as human sandbags to deter a Russian assault.

We should not be surprised by the criminal and degenerate conduct. For the “brave defenders” at the Azovstal plant that the Western media have been eulogizing are none other than the Nazi-affiliated Azov battalion. These militants are the frontline troops of the Ukrainian armed forces. They have been trained and armed by NATO powers, including the United States, Britain, Canada, and Poland. There is speculation that there may even be NATO special forces still holed up in the steel plant along with their Azov battalion charges.

It remains to be seen what the residual 1,000 militants in the factory will do now that their siege is finally doomed. One of the fighters even put out a bizarre appeal this week to SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk to help mediate their escape. How appropriate for the weird times we live in!

Contrary to Western media claims, the Ukrainian forces have been routinely using schools, hospitals, residential apartments, and other civilian centers as cover for fighting against Russian troops.

The sudden fall-off in Western media coverage this week is in stark contrast to the near-hysterical saturation reporting in previous weeks when it was being claimed that the Ukrainian port city was cruelly besieged by Russian forces. Consumers of Western media were led to believe that Russia’s military was about to perpetrate a heinous crime of mass murder. The hysteria being generated is part of the manufacturing of consent from the public for Western governments to funnel taxpayer money and military aid to prop up the Kiev regime. This week, the Biden administration is set to send a $40 billion military aid package to the Kiev regime; this largesse is while one million Americans have died from the Covid-19 pandemic.

For anyone who has been seriously following the conflict in Ukraine it is obvious that Western governments and media have been a total travesty in what they are claiming about that country. The regime in Kiev that seized power in 2014 through a CIA-backed coup against an elected president has actually been an international disgrace only given cover by the Western media and fawning Western governments. The regime may currently have a Jewish president as a figurehead, but for eight years it has been infested with Nazis, fascists and other anti-Russian radicals. This regime and its foot soldiers in the Azov battalion and other such formations openly glorify the memory of Second World War collaborators with the Third Reich in the prosecution of its Final Solution genocide.

The Western media had previously acknowledged the “Nazi problem” in Ukraine. But since the US-led NATO bloc ramped up its war agenda against Russia over the past six months, all such pejorative mention of the Kiev regime has been expunged. The Western public is inculcated to believe that Washington and its European allies are defending democracy in Ukraine. The conflict has been completely shorn of any factual context, from the origins of the Kiev coup to the past eight years of relentless deadly aggression against the Russian-speaking people in the breakaway Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

A major reason why Moscow ordered the military intervention into Ukraine on February 24 was to defend the Russian people of the southeast Donbass region from the ravages of the NATO-backed Kiev regime forces and their Nazi hatred.

Nearly three months on, the Donbass provinces have been largely liberated by the Russian military. The Azov Nazis have been pushed back. The southern port city of Mariupol is a key strategic gain to link up the Donbass territory under the control of Russian forces in alliance with the armies of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

The Western media tell their consumers that Russia’s military operation in Ukraine has been a failure; that it has involved massive war crimes; that the “brave defenders” are holding out.

The facts are that the Kiev regime has callously and cynically used its own population as cannon fodder to cling on to power and as emotive pawns to facilitate the NATO weaponizing of the country as a catspaw against Russia. That is exactly what the NATO powers want. The United States and its NATO accomplices – the ultimate architects of this conflict – are funneling tens of billions of dollars into the Ukraine, supplying covert forces and military intelligence that is recklessly risking a direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia.

One can be bamboozled by the cornucopia of narratives and propaganda. The Bucha (false-flag) massacre that allegedly happened in March was a classic example of media gaslighting psyops, as was the bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol – all covertly perpetrated by NATO-backed Nazis but blamed on Russia by the Western media.

But perhaps the clearest test case of lies from facts surely is the liberation of Mariupol by Russia. The city is returning to normal after weeks of heavy fighting. Humanitarian aid is being provided by Russian forces in coordination with the UN and Red Cross. As with other parts of liberated Donbass, civilians are expressing relief and gratitude for having gotten rid of militants who had been holding them under siege with their hateful Nazi ideology.

There is a vivid parallel with Syria’s northern city of Aleppo when it was liberated by Russian forces in late 2016 from jihadist militants. Recall how for weeks before Aleppo was retaken, the Western media were declaring that a bloodbath was imminent against innocent civilians and “brave rebels”.

Just like Mariupol and the rest of the Donbass, the civilian population has been liberated from a siege of terror that Western-backed proxies had imposed. In the case of Aleppo, Western media conspicuously did not follow up on their tall stories and wild claims. When did they ever visit Aleppo to find out what became of the civilians under siege?

It is therefore fitting – albeit damning – that Western media have suddenly dropped their coverage of Ukraine this week. It is truly astounding how such Western media have reacted. There is a mass denial of reality because otherwise, they are exposing themselves as the liars and purveyors of propaganda that they shamelessly are. Why aren’t the BBC and CNN and so on in Mariupol, Donetsk and Lugansk to enquire about people’s conditions and views? That’s because the Western media would be exposing themselves as witting conduits of war propaganda. It is more prudent for them to simply just shut up and pretend nothing has happened.

The dogs bark and the Western media caravan trundles on… to some other dutiful destination.

Is it any wonder that Western governments are massively censoring all critical, independent media? Searching the internet now just brings up approved Western media sources. Hardly any Russian media views are permitted and neither are critical, independent Western perspectives. This draconian suppression of free speech and information by the West is part of their war propaganda campaign aimed at giving the warmongering media free rein to spout their preposterous and pernicious lies unchecked. The implications are shocking. Western states are devolving into totalitarian regimes that at the same time have the audacity to pontificate about democracy and freedom. They largely get away with this absurd audacity because the profiteering corporate media are bought and paid for to be dutifully dumb and obsequious. There is an increasingly vicious circle of toxic Western militarism aided and abetted by so-called media that more accurately should be referred to as the “ministry of truth”.

There are many nails going into the coffin of Western corporate-controlled media as far as their public credibility and respect are concerned. Another nail just slammed in this week from the exposure of their Big Lie about Mariupol.

Vietnam

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A medic gives blood transfusion to unidentified 101st airborne brigade soldier in futile effort to save his life at An Ninh, South Viet Nam on September 18, 1965. Victim was wounded when helicopters bringing in his unit for battle against Viet Cong were hit by heavy fire. The Americans were pinned down for 24 hours, preventing evacuation of casualties. This soldier died three hours after he was wounded. (Photo by AP Photo)

The American Biolabs

Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy gives key takeaways from the last UN Security Council meeting on US biolabs in Ukraine:

  1. The US refuses to explain its engagement in military bio activities in Ukraine. Keeps shrugging off several hundred pages of evidence. “These are all lies and Russia’s propaganda, and we are good guys because it can’t be otherwise”. Not a word on the point of discussion.
  2. Western delegations are praising the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and calling on us to make use of its mechanisms. They fail to mention however that it is the US who is blocking the elaboration of BWC verification mechanism. Such a hypocricy!
  3. The US refuses to explain why it doesn’t want an effective international verification mechanism for bio weapons. Why act like this unless you are trying to conceal something? Why does Washington position itself above the international law? American exceptionalism at its best.
Main conclusion: we have definitely hit their soft spot. It’s clear for any unbiased observer that they are obscuring the issue and trying to divert attention from this uncomfortable topic trying to discourage us to raise it by repeating mantras on “Russian aggression” etc.

So stay tuned, there’s more evidence on US military biological programs to follow!

Top level headline in China’s Global Times today:  “‘Neo-Nazism’ poisons Ukraine, Europe under US, West’s connivance”.

Amazing Photographs Of Trees Growing Through Classic Cars

For unknown reasons trees seem to like the apocalypse-style of growing through abandoned vehicles. Why? Good protection for seedlings?

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Toward a Theory of Impossibility: Column Upends Science

By Fred Reed for the Saker Blog

In today’s column, we will revolutionize science, and establish that much of what we believe, at least regarding living things, is at best improbable and likely impossible. Science won’t notice, so no harm will be done.

As we explicate the Theory of Impossibility, we must begin with particle physics. This will give the column a touch of class. Specifically, the Fundamental Theorem of Quantum Mechanics states, “If a thing makes no sense at all, wait until you get used to it, and then it will.” For example, the idea that a particle can simultaneously be a wave is absurd, but is now everywhere accepted, like potatoes. The EPR effect, holding that if one of a pair of entangled photons, in Scarsdale, changes polarity, its entangled partner, in Alpha Centauri, will simultaneously change polarity, is ridiculous. How would it know? Neither of these things can happen. But they do, so we regard them as reasonable. Here we enunciate and underlying principle: A thing is not necessarily possible merely because it happens.

Unless something is going on that we do not know about.

Scientists see the universe as if it were a gigantic crossword puzzle. Crosswords are inherently solvable. While the great puzzle of life and existence has not been entirely elucidated, we assume that it can be, given time and effort. We may not know a five-letter word ending in Q that means “seventh-century Persian coin,” but we assume that it exists and can one day be found. But…is this so?

This reminds me that when I was in college, before the invention of fire, sophomores quoted Gödel’s Theorem as saying that in a logical system of sufficient complexity, there were questions that could not be answered within the system. Whether the theorem actually says this, I forget, but we said it said it, and felt very wise.

Here we come to one of my favorite clichés, by the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane, “The world is not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think.” Just so. Perhaps there are questions that can’t be answered, and therefore won’t be. This cannot be a comforting thought to a new-minted chemist as he rushes forth from CalTech, which may be why anything suggesting inherent unanswerability is rejected. But it may be that we just aren’t smart enough to understand everything, or maybe even much of it. Here we come to another cliché by my favorite philosopher (me): The smartest of a large number of hamsters is still a hamster.

Now, impossibility. Suppose I showed you a pair of tiny gears and said, “See? When I turn this one, it meshes with the other and makes it turn too.” You would respond with a lack of surprise. Suppose I then showed you fifty such little gears in an old-fashioned Swiss watch in which they all turned to make the hands move. You might say, “Isn’t that ingenious.” Suppose that I then told you that someone had assembled, literally, a cubic mile of such tiny gears and that they meshed perfectly for fifty years to do many complex things. You would ask me what I was smoking.

Even though each step in a cubic-mile process could be shown to be possible—gear A turns gear B, which turns gears C and D—you would sense that the entire complex wouldn’t work, however plausible each sub-process might be. You would be unconsciously applying the law that the improbability of the whole is greater than the sum of the improbabilities of the parts. The improbability is not a linear function of the number of parts but increases without limit as the number of parts goes above, say, one thousand.

Does that sound dreadfully portentous, or what? One day it will be the foundation of ponderous overpriced textbooks to extract money from sophomores. At least I hope so. I could use the money.

To a neophyte of biochemistry, the textbook description of a cell seems the mapping of a robotic Japanese factory onto a swamp. For example, in what sounds like a computer-controlled assembly line, enzymes uncoil the DNA, others unzip it, complementary nucleotides snap into place, a zipper-upper enzyme glues them together, click, click, click, whereupon the mRNA rushes purposefully off to a ribosome where, click, click, click. This is probably AP biology in decent high schools, if any, and has been verified thousands of times by biochemists. But…it sounds like mechanical engineering, not mindless undirected glop in solution.

You say, “But Fred, you don’t know anything about biochemistry.” True, but so what? You don’t have to know anything about it to know that it is impossible. Too many little wheels. You’ve got mRNA and microRNA and rRNA all rushing about, or sometimes holding still, and doing complex and purposeful things, and tRNA codons and anticodons coupling like drunken teenagers, and busybody enzymes editing this or that on the fly in the manner of bioschoolmarms or splicing this and some other thing and ribosomes and lysosomes and spliceosomes and palindromes and maybe aerodromes and really twisty long molecules with names like 2,4-diethyl-polywannacrackerene—and all of this is said to run with the efficiency of a Mexican drug cartel. All of this in a tiny space where everything ought to bang into everything else and just lie there in smoking rubble.

To us barbarians on the outside, the cell looks like a microscopic globule of goop with sticky stuff diffusing mindlessly about. I do not doubt that biochemists, whom I respect, have shown all of this to happen by careful experiments. I just don’t believe it. It’s the cubic mile of gears again. You have hundreds of reactive species in close proximity doing extraordinarily complicated things for sometimes a hundred years with what sounds like precisely coordinated purposefulness–instead of congealing immediately into a droplet of disagreeable mush. I do not doubt that lab folk have proved that it happens. I just don’t think it is possible. Unless something is going on that we don’t understand.

The foregoing is not orthodox biochemistry and may encounter initial resistance in the trade.

A problem of biology for years has been the inability of evolutionists to explain how life or many of its manifestations can have evolved, irreducible complexity and all that, the usual response being ok, we aren’t sure, but any day now we will have the answer. The check is in the mail. But in fact the inexplicability grows ever greater year on year as more and more complexity is discovered, such as epigenetics, and the more complexity, the less likelihood of coming about by chance. But we advocates of Impossibility Theory assert that not only can living things not have evolved, but also that they can’t function. Too many little gear wheels. Therefore life doesn’t exist.

Consider the retina, a very thin membrane consisting of ten distinct sublayers engaging in appallingly complex biochemistry, somehow maintaining position and function for, occasionally, a hundred years. These layers consist of millions of cells doing the impossibly tricky chemical dance mentioned above, more or less perfectly. In the rest of the eye you have the three layers of the eyeball, sclera, choroid, retina, and the five layers of the cornea, epithelium, Bowman’s membrane, stroma, Descemet’s membrane, and posterior lamina. And a lens consisting of a proteinaceous goop contained in a capsule, attached to the muscular ciliary body by suspensory ligaments, and an iris of radial and circumferential fibers innervated competitively by the sympathetic and parasympathetic subsystems of the autonomic nervous system. No way exists of explaining how this purportedly evolved—or how it works for many years without the layers of intricacy, biochemical through mechanical, collapsing. (I know this stuff because I have eye problems connected with Washington’s foreign policy.)

The intricacy of life is layered. We start with a zygote which, being a cell, is bogglingly complex. This little time bomb develops into a baby, which is impossible. If you don’t think so, try reading a textbook of embryology. The migration of cells, this control gradient, that control gradient, DGRNs, perfect inerrant specialization to form implausibly precise and complex things like incus, malleus, stapes, tympanum in the ear and (very) numerous other examples, all impossible individually and more so in aggregate.

Impossible, at least, unless we can come up with an auxiliary explanation. Magic seems a good candidate.

All of the organs of the baby are in varying degrees impossibly complicated and, even more impossible, almost always all of them are perfect at once. Everyone knows Murphy’s Law: If something can go wrong, it will. A baby should bring joy to Murphy because the opportunities of disaster are nearly infinite—yet things almost never go wrong. It is like a federal program that actually works.

The functioning of said baby is as mysterious as its formation. Babies grow. Children grow. How does this happen? For example, the baby has various small, hollow bones which grow year after year into large hollow bones. For this to work, cells (osteoclasts) eat away the bone from the inside, making the hollow larger, while other cells (osteoblasts) lay down new bone on the outside. Complex and wildly implausible communication between blast and clast purportedly makes this work. Medical researchers, honest people, no fools, assure me that this happens, and I believe them. Sort of. The idea that this evolved by random mutation is, if I may use a technical term, nuts. So, according to Impossibility Theory, is its precise, inerrant functioning. We come back to magic.

The whole baby does this sort of thing. The skull grows. Kidneys grow. The heart grows. All, with few exceptions, perfectly. Meanwhile, kidneys excrete, endocrine glands secrete, neurons weirdly but correctly link up, skin grows in perfect layers, nervous system deploys—perfectly. Do you believe this? It isn’t possible.

Unless there is something we haven’t figured out, and perhaps can’t.

I don’t know much about anything (readers delight in assuring me of this). However, I don’t know less about computers than I don’t know about biology. I want an engineering information-flow analysis of cells and a baby. Probably there are courses and books about this, and I just haven’t heard of them.

Consider a drill, perhaps in a factory, controlled by a computer. The total information involved in this transaction presumably consists of information flowing from sensors on the drill to the computer, and from the computer to the drill. Digital bits are easy to understand if you have at least two fingers. Cells are dauntingly analog.

A whole lot of things have to happen in a cell at the right time and produce the right amounts of all sorts of stuff. But to my naïve gaze, not only do processes have to produce things in correct amounts, but the systems that tell them how much to produce have to know how much that is, and these interrelationships all have to interrelate with each other. How much is that in gigabytes? Again, I am a barbarian of such things, but I wish a software engineer would reduce the whole shebang to data-flow diagrams, including how it knows when things are wearing out and the information paths needed to repair them. And why everything doesn’t just stick to everything else.

Thee you have the elements of a theory of impossibility. Doubtless it will rank with general relativity and Watson and Crick. You saw it here first.

The Astonishing Cinematic Autochrome Photography From The 1890s By Heinrich Kühn

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The rise of photography in the mid-late 19th-century began the move away from an oral and literary tradition towards one based on image. A photograph can describe a moment in time more viscerally than the written word.

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Technology dictates form. When cameras were big box brutes – heavy, unwieldy things that took an age to process an image -photography was best served by landscape, as little moved other than the trees under the breath of the wind.

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As cameras slowly changed during the 1890s, becoming lighter, more manoeuvrable, there grew a desire among photographs to create more artistic images. pictures that rivalled painting for their impressionistic beauty. One pioneer of this trend was Heinrich Kühn, a German-born amateur photographer. Back then, most photographers were amateurs. It was an expensive hobby. Only those who could afford to pay for the technology, the processing, the darkroom, and the time necessary indulge their hobby.

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Kühn was the son of successful merchants. He was born in Dresden and studied medicine and science. He gave up his studies to focus on photography. He was able to do this because of an allowance he inherited from his father. He moved to Vienna and became part of the Vienna Camera Club, where he was influenced by the city’s Secession artists who believed in creating Getsumkunstwerk or a total work of art.

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From 1890 onwards, Kühn started working on creating his “total art” photographs. His pictures were described as “painterly” and “impressionistic” but to our modern eye look more like movie stills from some great, unreleased film.

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Dressed in his linen suit, Panama hat, gold-rimmed spectacles and luxuriant moustache, Kühn directed his wife and children to perform for his camera.

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You Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or to Cry. The EU Now Has a Masterplan to Hit Putin Where It Hurts

From HERE

Hit Putin where it hurts? He’s more likely to hurt himself from laughing. Try harder, Ursula.

The EU is about to unveil its own sanctions plan to wean its own member states off Russian oil. But getting backing from all EU governments might be harder to push it through. Try not to laugh.

On the foreign policy circuit the EU doesn’t have an impressive track record. For anything. More, if anything, for leaving a trail of havoc in its wake when it dabbles in international politics. The problem is simply that the EU, while quite capable at agreeing on new directives for the size of your windscreen wipers, or the size or shape of a given piece of fruit, struggles with the big stuff. There simply isn’t the support from member states yet to hand over to Brussels how those same governments unilaterally deal with conflict around the world. The result is actually quite comical as who can forget Federica Mogherini’s offer to both President Assad of Syria and opposition fighters of cash from the EU to stop the war? Or for the same office to suggest using British frigates off the coast of Libya to literally blow out of the water smuggler boats laden with African migrants trying to get to Europe. Or that unforgettable foray into conflict resolution on the Chad border in 2001 where French officers under a so-called peacekeeping mission from the EU fled for their lives when rebels actually started firing live rounds at them? Imagine. Live rounds.

And then there was the EU police force in Afghanistan which was so terrified of the streets of Kabul that they simply decided it would be safer for them, even though they were armed, to stay in their barracks. And then the fiasco of Covid where the EU couldn’t even get an agreement from its own governments on how to proceed with a rescue plan and so did nothing, while thousands of its own citizens died. Even Brexit was a catastrophe for the EU, given that after all that drama over the negotiations and the empty threats by Brussels, Britain turns out to be not merely a survivor but a champion with economic growth the envy of the 26-member bloc.

The list just goes on and on. Someone really should write a book about the EU’s comical attempt to be a superpower and how it fails every single time.

And it will be the same with the latest escapade from the European Commission’s own President who seems to have set a new record for being especially ineffective – even for European Commission presidents. Ursula von der Leyen, an unremarkable German politician, bereft of any real dynamism and a particularly obscure foreign minister when she held the post, is grasping the nettle and facing Russia head on. Oh yes she is. Dear Ursula has a new draft directive which will ensure that all EU member states will abandon their deals with Russia oil, or at least phase them out over a period of time. We don’t know what the timeline is but the ambitious plan will have to have the support of all member states and this where it might run into some obstacles. Given that some EU member states have made it pretty clear that they don’t have the means or resources to look for alternative sources of gas, for example, it’s hard to see how an EU directive is going to make any differences. Some might argue that an EU directive is a by-product of a lack of unity in the first place and so the failed superstate needs to look to the bureaucrats to find a fix. But contrary to popular belief, the EU Commission isn’t as powerful as it likes to believe and cannot impose draft legislation on member states or the European parliament for that matter.

Realistically, the Russia move is an act of desperation following the EU’s grotesque support for U.S. and British objectives in Ukraine, i.e the toppling of Putin. The announcement shouldn’t therefore be taken seriously and given the recent Covid ordeal which lost von der Leyen considerable credibility it’s hard to see how she can galvanise opinion across 26 member states. What’s more likely is that this latest ruse will be a rod for her own back as more independently-minded EU member states who have made the headlines of late for not getting in line, will use it as a political tool to hit back at Brussels. And time is also a factor. If, say, it takes a year to be adopted – which is fast tracked – has the Commission president considered the present financial hardship that many EU citizens themselves are facing due to the Ukraine war and the political blowback that this directive would have, if adopted? While Joe Biden says remarkably stupid things like the U.S. is looking to Qatar for a solution to Europe’s energy dependency (they haven’t got any spare capacity to ship to Europe), it seems the EU is duty bound to follow the trend of talking nonsense and producing fake news. Hit Putin where it hurts? He’s more likely to hurt himself from laughing. Try harder, Ursula.

Make ANY Bagel With THIS Recipe ( Plain/Everything/Egg/Onion/Poppy/Sesame ) New York Bagels Recipe

The Luxury Apartment On Wheels: Camping In Style In A 1930s Jungle Yacht

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The Jungle Yacht was created for and used by Italian explorer Commander Attilio Gatti and his wife, who both traveled extensively to the African Congo as a deluxe apartment “for his 1937-1940 (his 10th) and 1947 (his 11th) expeditions” and “equipped them quite lavishly.”

The expedition used two streamlined trailers designed by Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky and using 1937 International Harvester D-35 chassis, and were 44 feet long and weighed 9 tons. The vehicles were built by the International Harvester company, who was evidently one of the sponsors of the expedition.

The trailers were pretty luxurious accommodations for camping out in the boonies of British East Africa. They were joined together in camp as a deluxe 5-room apartment on wheels, and served as headquarters while the expedition’s personnel sought out the secrets of the dim heart of Africa.

The camps were equipped with electricity and air conditioning and had a workshop, a photographic lab, and a ham radio station (Gatti was an enthusiastic ham radio operator). Electricity was supplied by a 110 volt generator mounted behind the cabs of the trucks. Each night a single wire 4500 volt electric fence was put up to dissuade the large specimens of the local wildlife from approaching the camp.

One of the vehicles in transit from the International Harvester factory to New York.

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Cocktails in the deepest heart of Africa.

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The living room.

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The Commander’s desk in the living room.

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The bedroom.

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An International Trucks brochure heralds the first journey of the five-room convoy.

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Major Fail, other than war. 

Washington failed to get the summit with the ASEAN countries to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

ASEAN nations are Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.

Failure in freezing Russian Money

Another failure of freezing funds:  Switzerland released $6.33 billion of Russia’s frozen funds.

US, Japan Prepare Statement Pledging To Jointly ‘Deter’ China Militarily

From the “news” outlet Zero Hedge quoting propaganda outlets Bloomberg and Nikki. Thursday, May 19, 2022 – 09:05 AM
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Tensions between Beijing and Tokyo are about to ratchet further amid widespread reports that the United States and Japan have prepared a statement calling for both to “deter and respond to” China’s aggressive military activities in the Indo-Pacific region.

The statement is expected to be released as President Joe Biden visits Tokyo to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida early next week. Biden will travel to South Korea and Japan from May 20 to May 24, the White House previously announced.

Crucially, according to Nikkei, “The statement to be released after their Monday meeting in Tokyo will also clarify America’s resolve to defend Japan if it is attacked, including with nuclear weapons.”

The meeting will mark Biden’s first face-to-face meeting with the Japanese PM Kishida, coming at a crucial moment that the anti-China stance of both countries have steadily growing over recent years.

When Biden last year met with then-Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, the two issue a joint statement calling for stability in the “Taiwan Strait” – which was viewed as a provocative term by China given it was the first joint US-Japan statement to invoke Taiwan in many decades.

Next week’s Asia trip will include Biden rolling out his administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework – which is a plan to counter China economically.

Anticipating the Tokyo meeting, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Wednesday warned Japan, stressing that US-Japan cooperation must not “hurt China’s sovereignty, security and development interests” – as quoted in Bloomberg. “China hopes that Japan acts cautiously and learns a lesson from history,” the Chinese foreign ministry was cited further as saying.

Killer Rabbits Terrorized the Pages of Medieval Manuscripts

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2022 05 19 15 41

From HERE

In early medieval art and literature fluffy white rabbits, bunnies, and hares were typically motifs of innocence, venerability, and purity. However, more in sync with these animals’ rate of reproduction they later came to represent fertility. But as well as these classic archetypes of world mythology the rabbit was sometimes portrayed as a horrifically murderous killer.

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Entering the Medieval Magical Inverse World

Fans of Monty Python and the Holy Grail will recall the vicious killer bunny that attacked King Arthur and his valiant knights, however, only a few will know that this farcical scene has its origins in real-world medieval manuscripts. Hand-written animal skin books were first created by monks in 11th century monasteries and those with illustrations in gold and silver decorations are known as ‘Illuminated.’ A research article in a 2016 ‘ Daily Art Magazine’ explains that the ‘marginalia’ or margins of some illuminated texts feature a range of mythological creatures known as ‘the drolleries,’ the painting of which peaked between 1250 AD to the 15th century.

While rabbits began their symbolic journey in this world as markers of purity and helplessness the mythological dimension of drolleries was inverted, therefore, in illuminated texts rabbits were often depicted as armor-wearing sadistic, cruel, and unpredictably violent creatures which murdered animals and people in the most awful ways.

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2022 05 19 15 41

According to art historian Margaret Rickert’s 1954 book ‘ Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages ,’ medieval scribes painted ‘cocks with human heads, dogs carrying human masks, archers winding out of a fish’s mouth and bird-like dragons with an elephant’s head on the back.’ Dr. Jorn Gunther says the idea of an inverse world in which everything is upside down ‘reaches back to antiquity’ when people ritually fought the perceived evils of winter.

A more recent 2022 article in ‘ Art Magazine Daily’ suggests that in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ‘the culture of laughter was trying to make the regular world full of mysticism, dogmatism, and seriousness more bearable.’ Furthermore, carnival celebrations and jokes ‘dramatized the comic and relative side of absolute truths and supreme authorities highlighted the ambivalence of reality, coming to represent the power of both absolute liberty and farce.’ This would suggest killer rabbits were simply medieval jokes and mirrors of culture at that time, but they are much, much more.

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2022 05 19 15 43

Rabbit Courts and Beheaded Human Hunters

An entry on ‘ Mediaeval Manuscripts Blog ‘ says that during the Harley Cataloguing Project , while re-cataloguing the ‘ Arnstein Passional ’ that was made at Arnstein Abbey in Germany around the 1170s, researchers spotted a particularly early killer bunny. Regarded as the earliest killer rabbit ever discovered, a decorated letter ‘T’ doubles as a gallows on which two rabbits have hung a human hunter. The killers in this instance are standing on their hindlegs pointing and jeering with their front paws at the murdered man.

To interpret this apparently awful scene we must think in reverse, so as to better suit the topsy-turvy environment of the magical inverse world. Rabbits in this world are fluffy and innocent prey animals so it makes perfect sense that they would become violent administrators of justice, punishing human hunters who killed rabbits, in the upside-down world.

This is certainly the case in the ‘ Smithfield Decretals’ that were illuminated in London in the 1340s AD and are currently kept at the British Library in London.

The marginal scenes in these illuminated texts depict a group of giant overweight rabbits waging hyper-violence on a human hunter and his hound. The first rabbit is an archer and it shoots the hunter in his spine before the other rabbits tie him up and haul him before a rabbit judge. After an inevitable guilty verdict, the gang of rabbits haul the hunter away and joyously behead him.

But this was only the beginning of the rabbit’s bloodlust, which after murdering the hunter set about catching his dog which was the number one enemy of rabbits in this world and a perfect motif for the violence of rabbits in the upside down world. The dog met a similar fate to its master and was beheaded after being found guilty in a rigged rabbit court.

All That is Impossible Here, Happens There

It can be concluded that the killer rabbit motif has many possible interpretations, but they all unite in that they reflect a reversal of morals in the medieval upside down world. But what exactly did ‘upside down’ and ‘inverted’ mean in the sixteenth century?

According to Vincent Robert-Nicoud ’s 2018 book ‘ Introduction The Sixteenth-Century World Upside Down’ the words ‘upside down’ and ‘inverse’ were used in the same way we might use the words ‘weird’ or ‘freaky,’ most often to describe abnormal or unnatural objects or occurrences. ‘The topos of the world upside down,’ wrote Robert-Nicoud, ‘brings to mind a world returned to its initial state of primaeval chaos, in which everything is inside-out, topsy-turvy and out of bounds.’

Now that you are aware of it, keep an eye out for this medieval ‘world upside down’ rhetorical device for it appears in hundreds of texts, poems, paintings, and adages which collectively describe a place where natural impossibilities in this world, or dimension, are everyday occurrences.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 4

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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Cat videos and art with Cats Reimagined As Marvel And DC Superheroes

Are youse guys all getting tired of  the geopolitical stuff? Yeah. I thought so. Yes, it’s a major time and period of historical change. And we are front-row seat spectators at it. But, you know, we need a break from it all. And there’s always a good reason to look at cats, art, and food. Here, we are going to go full-out cat in this article.

It’s a short article, but I hope that it does put a smile on your face, eh?

Part 1 – Heroic Kitty Art

What if they had your life in their heroic paws?

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fajareka setiawan 28070619 10211147987755207 4102162554792210643 o

To all the geeky cat-lovers out there – we bring the purrfect artwork you will not be able to resist. A talented Indonesian illustrator and concept artist Fajareka Setiawan is creating fun mashups of cute kittens and Marvel and DC characters that we didn’t know we needed in our lives.

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fajarekas 31463383 630139993994494 730395949309886464 n 768×768 1

In his personal ‘Catvengers’ series, Fajareka transforms kittens into our favorite superheroes (or the other way around) with amazing precision, and it’s not only about the detailed costume.

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fajarekas 36159984 193753054809418 1505839714643476480 n 768×768 1

If you look closely, you will recognize the character traits in each illustration. From Catpool to AquaCat, these are the fierce supurrheroes we would truly love to see on a big screen.

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fajarekas 42852290 2207098019574879 4798881493193426677 n 990×990 1

Oh my goodness!

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Fish kitty!

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fajarekas 47693005 132300877782795 6566685056202958283 n 990×990 1

Spidey cat!

Pretty amazing stuff, eh.

Now for some fun videos.

Part 2 – Kitty cat videos

We start out with a fairly sad video. But note that the Rufus rescued the kitten, and it is now in a good home and doing very well.

Video – The dead cat mother and the kitten trying to feed it

This is a bitter-sweet video. The mother cat is dead. But it’s kitten stays nearby, not knowing what to do. So it goes forth and hunts grasshoppers and mice to bring back to it’s sick mom. Eventually, though, the mother cat passed on. Luckily, a Rufus saw what is going on and tries to help. He catches the kitten and takes both to a vet for love and care. video 32MB

Video – Watch how its done.

Cats are natural hunters. video 13MB

Video – Cat childcare

video 2MB

Video – So cute

Momma cat teaches its kittens. video 20MB

Video – kitten mouser

video 10MB

Video – standoff

video 3MB

Video – cat and baby

video 21MB

Video – Rescue of a kitten in a ring

video 31MB

Video – dog and cat

video 11MB

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Cat Index, found in my Happiness index  here…

Life & Happiness

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MM Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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A time of uncertainty and of strangeness.

The german humiliation represented by the American veto of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline is paradigmatic. 

On February 7, in the middle of the White House, and even before the Russian intervention in Ukraine, Joe Biden publicly disavows the newly appointed german chancellor Olaf Scholz, stating categorically that the Nord Stream II pipeline would be stopped. 

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Besides representing, in symbolic terms, the humiliation of Germany as a sovereign country, it consolidates the definitive “Coup d’Etat” in the European integration project.

-Saker

It’s an in-between time; a crazy time. A time of uncertainty and of strangeness. It’s an odd time, and a surreal time. Here, we go through some selected news and reports that serve best to flush out the realities that we all face.

In Biden’s Annual Economic Report, The Word “Gender” Is Used 40 More Times Than The Word “Inflation”

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I think that the phrase “out of touch with reality” doesn’t even come close to describing what we are witnessing here.
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We all knew that the Biden administration was completely out of touch with what is going on in Real America, but it appears that things are even worse than we thought.  Right now, inflation is the number one political issue in the entire country, and the persistent shortages that we have been experiencing are right up there as well.  But the Biden administration apparently has other priorities.

The Biden administration has just released the “Economic Report Of The President” for 2022, and you can find it on the official White House website right here.  But unless you are a glutton for punishment, I would strongly advise against reading the entire thing, because it is dreadfully boring.

Thankfully, there are others that have already gone through the entire document for us, and one eagle-eyed researcher discovered that the word “gender” is used 40 more times than the word “inflation” is used in the report, and the word “inequality” is actually used more than either one of them

President Joe Biden released his annual Economic Report on Thursday where he mentioned the word “gender” significantly more than “inflation” as the country faces the highest prices in over 40 years.

Biden used the word “gender” 127 in his economic plan, while he mentioned “inflation” just 87 times. Meanwhile, the report mentioned “inequality” 147 times and “emissions” nearly 100 times.

Obviously, Biden administration officials are far more concerned about “social justice issues” than they are about our growing economic problems.

As for Biden himself, he is so incoherent at this point that a guy in a giant bunny suit scares the living daylights out of him.

If you are expecting Biden and his minions to save the day, you are going to be waiting for a really long time.

Meanwhile, prices just continue to rise.  On Monday, the price of corn reached the highest level in almost a decade

The surging price of corn hit another milestone on Monday morning as the cost of global commodities continues to push higher.

The contracts for July corn futures were trading above $8 per bushel on Monday, the highest level since September 2012. The contracts were trading near $6 per bushel at the start of the year.

And the price of natural gas has surged to a level that we haven’t seen since just before the financial crisis of 2008

U.S. natural gas prices hit the highest level since 2008, with the U.S. benchmark Henry Hub edging close to $8 per million British Thermal Units on Monday afternoon.

The last major Henry Hub price spikes in 2008 and 2006 were partly due to hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico, the Epoch Times reports. Prices in 2008 peaked at $13.32 per million on July 3rd.

As I pointed out the other day, the inflation crisis that we are experiencing now is already worse than anything that we went through during the 1970s and early 1980s.

Even more frightening is the fact that this is just the beginning.

In particular, food prices will eventually go much higher than they are now.  I visited a local supermarket earlier today, and I was astounded by all of the price changes.  What we are witnessing is already unprecedented, but I believe that there are several factors that will actually accelerate the increase in food prices in the months ahead.

One of those factors is the horrific bird flu pandemic that has erupted inside the United States.  According to an expert that was interviewed by the Washington Post, this pandemic is spreading at a much faster pace than the outbreak that caused so much chaos back in 2015…

WaPo spoke to Gro Intelligence (ag data experts) senior research analyst Grady Ferguson who tracked the last outbreak in 2015, saying this one could be more disruptive to the poultry and egg markets.

Ferguson said that 66 days into the outbreak, 1.3% of all US chickens had been affected, and 6% of the US turkey flock. In 2015, he said, only .02% of total chickens were affected at this same time. The number rose to 2.5% of chickens infected at the outbreak’s peak, and more than 50 million were culled.

So what will happen if we get six months down the road and the total death toll for chickens and turkeys reaches 100 million?

What do you think that will mean for our food supply?

As I have been documenting for months, we were already heading for a major global food crisis even without the bird flu and even without the war in Ukraine.

Now both of those factors are making things a whole lot worse.

And instead of trying to find a way to end the war, our leaders continue to talk like they want to escalate matters.  In fact, U.S. Senator Chris Coons is openly calling for U.S. troops to be sent into Ukraine

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) signaled that he wants the US to send troops into Ukraine to fight Russia in an interview on Sunday. When pressed about the issue, Coons said Russian President Vladimir Putin “will only stop when we stop him.”

Coons was asked on CBS News’s Face the Nation about comments he made last week in an address to the University of Michigan. In the speech, Coons said the Biden administration and Congress should “come to a common position about when we are willing to go the next step and to send not just arms but troops to the aid in defense of Ukraine … If the answer is never, then we are inviting another level of escalation in brutality by Putin.”

That is complete and utter insanity.

But Coons and Biden are apparently really good friends, and many other top Democrats are also pushing for Biden to do more to help defend Ukraine.

I still remember the “old days” when many on the left were actually “anti-war”.

I don’t know what happened, but these days the biggest warmongers of all seem to be on the left.

Of course there are many warmongers on the right as well.  It is almost as if something is in the water in Washington.  I have never seen so many of our leaders act as if they have completely lost their minds.

Needless to say, similar things could be said for society as a whole.  I really like how Mike Adams made this point in one of his recent articles

Humanity is intoxicated to the point of suicidal collapse.

Note the word root “toxic” found in the word “intoxicated.” It doesn’t just refer to consuming alcohol, but to a long list of behaviors, substances and desires that turn off rational thought and thrust people into bad decision making.

If it appears to you that the whole world is going crazy, that is because it really is going crazy.

Global events are starting to spiral out of control, and a whole lot of people out there are having a really hard time coping with it all.

Unfortunately, global events will continue to become more intense in the months ahead, and so will the emotional breakdowns.

Chinese first grade military training exam

I never tire of watching these elementary school kids in China. You know everyone in China gets military training starting at first grade (Kindergarden in some areas). It’s damn impressive. video 9MB

Pretty Chinese girl

Here’s a fine Chinese girl. video 2MB

(2007) Military Lowers Standards to Fill Ranks

The military has loosened recruiting standards to enlist older, less educated soldiers — some with criminal pasts — in an effort bolster the nation’s dwindling volunteer ranks.

Critics warn the new policies would leave the U.S. with military defenses that are too old, too unskilled, and too poorly behaved to protect America’s future.

Article

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(2015) Soldiers say Army has become soft by lowering physical fitness standards

After twenty years of lowering physical, intelligence and skill assement standards,  the military is under critism becuase the “soldiers” are unable to perform the most basic demands of the service.

Article

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(2019) Army changes minimum requirements for several fitness standards

The already low standards isn’t enough to recruit the manpower that the American military needs. Further reductions are necessary.

Article

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Chinese first graders at roll call

Meanwhile, in China, everyone is fit. Everyone is organized. Everyone is motivated. Everyone is trained.

I love their disipline and enthusiasm. video 10MB

Nice Chinese girl

Another fine Chinese girl. Doesn’t seem like a good thing to start blowing these people up with bombs does it? video 3MB

Day 50 of the SMO – are things becoming clear(er)? (UPDATED 2x)

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First, I want to point you to an excellent analysis by Bernhard at Moon of Alabama entitled “U.S. Military Intelligence Official Refutes ‘Russian Atrocities’ Claims“.

So we can now “officially consider” the Bucha false flag as an “official flop” 🙂

Next, I want to point you to Andrei Martyanov‘s commentary on what happened to the missile cruiser Moskva he simply titled “About RKR Moskva“.

So now we are 50 days into this Special Military Operation (SMO) and right in between the end of the first phase and the beginning of the second one.  So I want to begin by list a few things which were unclear/ambiguous/misunderstood and which now are becoming clear(er):

  • Evolution of war. There is this saying “no plan survives the first contact with the enemy” which I would even expand to “no plan survives the first contact with reality”.  Why?  The first one is obvious, the enemy will try to foil your plans, but the second one is less known: in war there is always a large element of chaos simply because your entire country and your military are in one mode up until the initiation of combat operations and because they have to very quickly switch over a completely new reality.  The point is therefore not to stick to plan A at any cost, but neither is it to ditch it all and reinvent the wheel.  What is needed is a quick response time to identify the problems and fix them.  I would say that with this in mind, the Russian military did a very good job by quickly transforming an integrated Ukrainian military capable of strategic operations into a broken-up entity with its various parts isolated and unable to support each other.  What is my evidence for that?  There has not been a single Ukrainian counter-attack higher than on a subunit (battalion, company) level.  Considering that the Ukrainians have the double advantage of being on the defense and having a larger force, this is truly a remarkable achievement.  Add to this the money, weapons and intelligence support from the US/NATO and it is nothing short of a triumph.
  • Russia reporting failed. At the same time, Russia as a whole, and especially the military, did an absolutely awful job talking to the public, both in Russia and in the West.  See a typical example of the image on the right.  The only mistake the US PYSOPs made was that they really “overdid it”, which profoundly angered and alienated the Russian public which went from “what is going on?” to “we are in a fight for our very survival” very quickly and most Russians are now in what I would refer to a “WWII” mode: total warfare until total victory.  In the West, however, the US PSYOPs truly triumphed and totally defeated the Russian counter-propaganda efforts which, the truth be told, were primitive, clumsy, slow and even self-defeating at times.  Does that matter?  Yes, very.  Why?
  • Russia seems to be losing. Because most people in Zone A sincerely and truly believe that “Russia is losing the war”.  Now these are the same folks who until February of 2022 were all virologists/epidemiologists/microbiologists/etc. and who in a remarkable feat, became overnight military experts and now are sincerely advising the Russians on how to wage a war.  The fact that no “real” war has even begun does not elicit any second thoughts or doubts in these “experts in everything” folks who simply don’t believe that some matters require years of training to achieve the expertise needed to understand even the basics.  And no, as Andrei Martyanov always points out, a BA in communications or a law degree do not make you into a military expert overnight (by the way, I notice a very large “overlap” between the COVID death cult members and the armchair generals).
  • Russia is a stranger to the West. Objectively, there is also a double language and culture barrier at work here.  Very few folks in Zone A are fluent, or even conversant, in Russian and even fewer understand the Russian mindset.  So if all the English speaking media (including putatively pro-Russian ones – more about those later) says something it makes no sense to expect most English speakers to find the correct Russian language Telegram channels to get the other side of the information.  As for RT and Sputnik, in their naive and clumsy efforts to appear “objective” they just reinforce the western propaganda narratives.
  • Pretend bloggers. Then there is an interesting phenomenon that became very apparent over the past 50 days: there are quite a few websites and blogs that PRETEND to be pro-Russian but, in reality, that support is conditional on Russia supporting their agenda and if Russians do things differently those putatively pro-Russian outlets quickly take up the exact same talking points as the US PSYOPs.  There are also a number of PRETEND “liberal” or “Leftist” or “Anti-Imperialist” websites which were ALWAYS CIA-operated but which, over the years, acquired some (totally undeserved) credibility and which have now suddenly “flipped”.  Pro-Nazi “liberals”, got to love that…

The result of all this?  FUD: fear, uncertainty and doubts of course.

Even worse are the implications of this FUD on many levels:

  • A sense of Impunity. It gives the folks in the West a sense of impunity and it almost totally conceals the magnitude of the dangers the Empire of Hate and Lies is facing today: from real food shortages to an economic collapse, and even to a continental war in Europe.  After all, if the Russians are losing, then “we” must be winning, so all is well.  Not very bright, but oh so human…
  • Russian Frustration. It angers and frustrates the Russian soldiers actually doing the fighting who are living in fear not about a heroic Ukrainian counter-offensive, but what the Russian government (at all levels and in all branches) will screw up next.  Want an example?  Sure!  How about this: until senior LDNR official began to openly complain about the Russian customs the latter did not allow non-governmental humanitarian convoys to cross into the Ukraine.  This was solved, now the next one is this: how to organize pensions for the families of Russian volunteers who fight in the Ukraine?
  • Fight to the death. It greatly encourages the Ukrainians to fight this war down to the last Ukrainian and to total destruction of the Ukrainian civil infrastructure.  Yes, the united West wants to genocide Russians by means of genociding Ukrainians.  It cannot get any more openly satanic than that!

Having said all of the above, we now need to step back and only make some very basic predictions:

  • Evolution of war. What began as the “special military operation” is now turning into a total war of the united West against Russia and that means that the goal for the West is not peace, its victory, and a Russian defeat.  My personal conclusion is that the West will only stop doubling down if the US homeland itself is threatened by Russian conventional and nuclear strategic deterrence capabilities.
  • The USA will not stop. The Russians are slowly but surely coming to the realization that in spite of all the concessions and retreats made by Russia since 2013 the Empire of Hate and Lies will not stop by itself, it will have to be stopped, by Russia.  Again.  As the VDV motto says “nobody but us”.
  • Cannon fodder. The Ukrainians have no agency, and neither do the Eurolemmings.  In fact, the USA is using both the Ukronazis and their EU serfs as cannon fodder because their calculation is that if Russia wins, then the Eurolemmings will become not only terrified and even more subservient, but also that the EU will burn itself down removing a competitor.  I remind you that the USA’s wealth is based on how much the USA profited from both WWI and WWII.  So why not with WWIII as long as it remains within the confines of the European theater of operations?  And that will be doubly true if Russia loses.

My first conclusion here is that a direct military conflict involving NATO and Russia is now likely.

That, by itself, is simply horrible, but here is a simple truth: if the Anglos, yet again, want to burn down the European continent there might not be anything Russia could do to prevent that.  And forget about the suicidal Eurolemmings.  Russia can win that war, and she will, but yet again at a huge cost.

And that is exactly what the Anglos want.

So is there a silver lining here or is it all doom and gloom?

In fact, there is: the reactions of the Russian public to the rather ambiguous and sometimes outright weird stuff members of the Russian government, at different levels, have been doing and saying.  Like that terrible Medinski presser which totally freaked out most Russians.  Or the rumor that Abramovich (!) is negotiating between Moscow and Kiev.  Oh I know, that is just another rumor, but considering the DISMAL job of Russian information operations that rumor, and hundreds more, are making the public weary and angry.

And the general public itself, rather than any government officials, started to react to this kind of dangerous FUD by something we could think of as a grassroots counter-propaganda campaign.  For example, while the letters Z and V have been banned in the Ukraine (and in Latvia, Moldova, Greece and even in some German states) they are literally all over the Runet and you could say that Z and V have now become part of the Russian alphabet and that they are now often used to replace the traditional Cyrillic Z (З) and V (В).

And now Slovakia is declaring that the Nazis in Kiev are “fighting for the future of Europe“.

Basically, the EU politicians have now de facto rehabilitated the Third Reich.  At least now it is official.

Heck, since that war began, even Uber-Atlantic-Integrationist Medvedev has turned into a patriotic hardliner!

So maybe it will be the “Russian street” that will teach the so-called “specialists” how informational warfare is done?  I sure hope so!

The other major power from Zone B, China, immediately understood what this was all about: “West’s ban of ‘Z’ symbol a manifestation of its Russophobia“.

Yup, the letter Z is now serving a somewhat similar function to the Star of David in Nazi Germany.

Then there are the many iterations of the following slogans “our cause is just“, “the enemy will be defeated” and “we will go to the end!” which are also all over the Runet.  Note that all of these slogans are strongly associated with WWII in the Russian mind.

And then there is this: the, shall we call them “poor communication skills”, of the Kremlin have resulted in a real shitstorm of angry protests and freakouts so the Kremlin had to tone it down by a lot.  Yes, Putin PERSONALLY is very popular and trusted (over 80%), but not the government or, even less so, mid-level or local government officials.  It would not take much (another major SNAFU for example) to trigger angry protests.

But if anybody is to be truly credited with reassuring the Russian public that no “negotiators” will backstab the Russian military, that honor should go to the “Biden” Administration which “convinced” Zelenski to stop any and all negotiations and to restate the Ukronazis most extreme demands (including the LDNR and Crimea).  Now that truly made negotiations not only pointless but pretty much impossible.

Thank you “Biden”!

I also want to use this opportunity publicly express my deepest gratitude to Josip Borrell, the Eurolemming’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, for declaring “this war must be won on the battlefield“!  When EU *diplomats* use that kind of language, it has a quasi-miraculous effect on the wannabe “peace camp” in Russia.  Even RT (!) seems to have smelled the coffee and now we can find an article entitled “It appears that the West doesn’t want peace in Ukraine“.  No kidding, geniuses!

As I have mentioned it in the past, I am personally very much in favor of negotiations and even talking to the enemy during a war, but that should be done very discreetly, very carefully and with the clear “message”  to the general public if these negotiations, or leaks about them, are made public.  If you cannot negotiate without freaking out your own people, then don’t try, you will do more for peace by shutting up and staying at home.  If instead of using the insect-like Medinski (he reminds me of Blinken, same “I am a loser” look) Putin had sent Ramzan Kadyrov the perception about “negotiations” in Russia would probably be very different today.

So what is up next?

  • A major battle around the Donbass cauldron
  • NATO convoys moving into the Ukraine
  • The collapse of the “the Russians are losing” narrative replaced by
  • A Russian “atrocity” of some type
  • The western media will begin to “discover sins” amongst those they lionized until now (see image)
  • The full dimension of the economic crisis resulting from the collapse of the international economic system will become much more apparent, especially in the EU.

What about the Black Sea Fleet – can it operate without its flagship?

As I mentioned yesterday, I am not a navy person and neither do I know what plans the Russian General Staff had for the BSF.  But I can say this: Slava-class guided missile cruisers were designed in the 70s as aircraft carrier destroyers.  For this purpose, they were equipped with very powerful missiles, superb (by 1970s standards!) S-300F,  OSA-MA SAMs, 6 AK-630 point air defenses, and a lot of (old) electronics.  Since there are no aircraft carriers in the Black Sea, I suppose that the Moskva main role was as a command ship (its main canons don’t provide the range needed to support amphibious assault operations) and also as a relatively powerful mobile, floating, radar.  The Moskva was hit by something about 50km south of Snake Island which means that she was also probably watching the movement of ships near/from Romania.  Frankly, that is not a task for a guided-missile cruiser.

[Sidebar: as to what actually caused the explosion, my personal best guess is a Ukrainian mine detached by the recent storm and drifting southwards which the Russians failed to detect.  That would explain the hull breach which later resulted in the Moskva taking in water and sinking while in tow.  I still don’t buy the “Ukrainian 2 “Neptunes” version at all, if only because the Moskva had very solid air defenses while bad weather makes minesweeping very hard.  But we will probably never find out for sure, unless the members of the crew reveal what really happened]

Considering that the Ukraine has NO navy at all, I don’t see how the loss of the Moskva would hamper or significantly complicate any BSF operations (navy folks, please correct me here if I missed something!).

The Moskva also had an important role in the eastern Mediterranean (Syria) and yes, there is probably where she will be missed the most.  I hope that this loss will provide the impetus to massively accelerate the modernization of old Russian (well, Soviet, really) ships and the construction of new ones.

I would even be inclined to think that the deployment of hypersonic ASM has not only made aircraft carriers obsolete (at least against Russia) but, by the same logic, has made old Russian/Soviet “carrier hunter killers” obsolete by implication.  Nowadays, even SMALL missile boats can fire Russian hypersonic missiles thousands of kilometers away, so why bother with really big ships in anti-carrier operations?  Range?  Okay.  Firepower?  Okay.  Bigger and better sensors?  Okay.  But not in the Black Sea.  And not with a minimally modernized 1970 era ship.

Conclusion:

There is no doubt that Russia fought superbly during the SMO and there is no doubt either that the Russians probably calculated that “just” a SMO would be sufficient to achieve the Russian goals (immediate: protect the LDNR, intermediate: denazify and disarm the Ukraine and long term: change the European and world collective security arrangements) was wrong.

Russia has decided…

It is now becoming almost certain that a real, much larger, war to crush the Ukrainian military will be needed, and it will have to be fought with much larger forces and means. 

The West has decided…

The Empire of Hate and Lies has decided to “go max” and is acting exactly as it would be in preparations for a much larger war in Europe.

For example, with the steady stream of mass expulsions of Russian diplomats, there is a very real possibility that Russia and the US/NATO/EU will sever their diplomatic relationships, something traditionally considered as the last step before a declaration of war.

One of the best things the Kremlin could do now is to carefully study how the Iranians since 1979 (!) managed to successfully:

  • Never be drawn into a war they did not want (except the one launched by the West and the USSR following the Islamic Revolution which Iran won, by the way)
  • Deter the Anglo-Zionist from direct attacks on Iran
  • Survive both sanctions and even a blockade
  • Defeat US PSYOPs (remember Neda Agha-Soltan?)
  • Actively assist in the liberation of other countries around the world and, especially, the Middle-East
  • Superbly combine political pragmatism with deep religious piety and idealism
  • Preserve their economy (albeit with major difficulties, but not collapse!)
  • Preserve their Islamic societal and civilizational model
  • Remain truly sovereign
  • Maintain a rock-solid morale throughout it all

If Iran could do that, why can’t we?  I have an answer to this question, but I won’t offer it until the end of combat operations.

As I have also mentioned many times, Russia is a project, a ‘moving target’, a society that is recovering from at least 300 years of foreign domination (especially spiritual and political) and a society that is STILL changing, very fast in many aspects.

Yes, Russia has a superb military and immense resources.  But that is not enough.

Some say that the next “New Russia” was “born in the LDNR”, and I hope that they are right, not in the sense that Russia needs to copy all the decisions (often bad ones too!) of the LDNR, but Russia does need to purge herself from those in positions of power who are just stuck in the past or unable to adapt to new realities.

Can Russia denazify the planet?  By herself, no.  At most she can militarily destroy all of Zone A, but only in a mutual suicide act of desperation (the US nuclear triad is still mostly functional, in spite of its problems).  But can Russia and the rest of Zone B denazify the planet?  Absolutely.  Even “just” Russia and China together are more powerful than the rest of the planet combined, add India to this and you have a truly unstoppable force.

The Empire is already dead, but like a stinking unburied corpse, it still has enough “toxicity momentum” to continue to threaten the planet until the USA is both denazified and disarmed.  That will take a lot of time, even with the recent massive acceleration of the pace of events.

So no quick fix, no quick solution, no quick victory (or defeat for that matter).  This is not want Russia wanted, but that is what she got.

May she make the most of it to transform herself into the civilizational realm she was for centuries.  That could be the biggest homage to those fighting for the future of Russia today.

Andrei

PS: I want to remind you all one more time that if the USA and Russia openly and directly clash militarily, I will immediately “freeze” the blog until the situation is resolved in one way or another.  I am a guest, a legal alien (“Green Card”), in the USA and it is not my role to speak if my country of current residence and my country of ethnic origin are at war with each other.

UPDATE1: I should have mentioned that there have been large demonstrations in Serbia in support of Russia.  So far, Serbia is the only country with a strong pro-Russian part of the population.  No, not all, of course but MUCH more than in any other country, at least that I am aware of.  I want to thank all our Serbian brothers and sisters for standing by us!

UPDATE2: Russian sources are reporting that the nonsense at the border has resumed again, and folks are waiting for hours and even days to get across the border.  If true, this sounds like outright sabotage to me.

Nice Chinese girl

video 3MB

Russia Announces Full Control Over Mariupol; Shoot-Down of Cargo Plane Carrying NATO Weapons

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The Russian Ministry of Defense has announced that Russian forces now control “all of Mariupol” after the surrender of 1,464 Ukraine troops.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region, told CNN the city was “no more,” leaving Russians with nothing left to seize.

“The enemy may seize the land Mariupol used to stand on, but the city of Mariupol has been wiped off the face of the earth by the Russian Federation.

NATO WEAPONS DELIVERY SHOT DOWN

There is now also word filtering out that Russian air defenses have SHOT DOWN a cargo plane carrying a shipment of NATO Weapons for Ukraine, but this is dicey . . .

Russia claims it downed a Ukrainian transport plane carrying weapons “in the Odessa region.”

There are no Ukrainian transport planes flying there, but there were some flying from Turkey to Poland.

At this point, the flag of the plane is believed to Be Ukrainian, but that is *NOT* confirmed.  (Could be a NATO Plane)

Some Sources, primarily Russian, claiming that the Aircraft shot down was a NATO Military Aircraft carrying Weapons to Ukrainian Forces in Odesa, but again this is extremely unlikely. However, if found to be true, oh boy . . .

Hal Turner Editorial Remarks

Flying from Turkey (Drones) to Poland (the central distribution point of NATO weapons) ultimately entering Ukraine?

If this is one of the planes shot down, then in one fell swoop, Russia has put Ukraine, Turkey, and Poland, on notice that NATO weapons shipments are not safe anywhere.

Bold move by Russia.

Still have to get all the facts and, of course, see how this plays out.

HAPPENING NOW: Avostal Steel Plant in Ukraine Being Mercilessly Bombed

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ASOVSTAL Steel Mill now under heavy bombardment and burning.

The Ultimatum for Ukraine troops to put down their weapons and surrender by 9:00 GMT has long expired. The militant AZOV Brigade Nazis had a chance to leave and survive; they chose not to.

About one hour ago, the Russian Army ordered all units to attack the plant.  It is being mercilessly bombed right now and is on fire.

2022 04 18 14 26
ASOVSTAL Steel Mill now under heavy bombardment and burning.

UPDATE 3:16 PM EDT —

Ministry of Defense of Russia: Basements with militants at the Azovstal plant in Mariupol will NOT be stormed.

Instead, Supersonic bombers, Tu-22M3 Backfire-C, will bomb the plant with high explosive demolition bombs FAB-3000. Then the Russian forces will be use Heavy Flamethrower System TOS-1A Solntsepyok to toast the remaining survivors.

TOS-1 is a Soviet 220 mm 30-barrel or 24-barrel multiple rocket launcher capable of using thermobaric warheads, mounted on a T-72 tank chassis. TOS-1 was designed to attack enemy fortified positions and lightly armoured vehicles and transports, in open terrain in particular.

Rufus police saves baby

This is how it is done. be the Rufus. video 3MB

Exclusive: Russian geo-economics Tzar Sergey Glazyev introduces the new global financial system

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The world’s new monetary system, underpinned by a digital currency, will be backed by a basket of new foreign currencies and natural resources. And it will liberate the Global South from both western debt and IMF-induced austerity.

By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and cross-posted at The Cradle.

Sergey Glazyev is a man living right in the eye of our current geopolitical and geo-economic hurricane. One of the most influential economists in the world, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a former adviser to the Kremlin from 2012 to 2019, for the past three years he has helmed Moscow’s uber strategic portfolio as Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

Glazyev’s recent intellectual production has been nothing short of transformative, epitomized by his essay Sanctions and Sovereignty and an extensive discussion of the new, emerging geo-economic paradigm in an interview to a Russian business magazine.

In another of his recent essays, Glazyev comments on how “I grew up in Zaporozhye, near which heavy fighting is now taking place in order to destroy the Ukrainian Nazis, who never existed in my small Motherland. I studied at a Ukrainian school and I know Ukrainian literature and language well, which from a scientific point of view is a dialect of Russian. I did not notice anything Russophobic in Ukrainian culture. In the 17 years of my life in Zaporozhye, I have never met a single Banderist.”

Glazyev was gracious to take some time from his packed schedule to provide detailed answers to a first series of questions in what we expect to become a running conversation, especially focused to the Global South. This is his first interview with a foreign publication since the start of Operation Z. Many thanks to Alexey Subottin for the Russian-English translation.

The Cradle: You are at the forefront of a game-changing geo-economic development: the design of a new monetary/financial system via an association between the EAEU and China, bypassing the US dollar, with a draft soon to be concluded. Could you possibly advance some of the features of this system – which is certainly not a Bretton Woods III – but seems to be a clear alternative to the Washington consensus and very close to the necessities of the Global South?

Glazyev: In a bout of Russophobic hysteria, the ruling elite of the United States played its last “trump ace” in the hybrid war against Russia. Having “frozen” Russian foreign exchange reserves in custody accounts of western central banks, financial regulators of the US, EU, and the UK undermined the status of the dollar, euro, and pound as global reserve currencies. This step sharply accelerated the ongoing dismantling of the dollar-based economic world order.

Over a decade ago, my colleagues at the Astana Economic Forum and I proposed to transition to a new global economic system based on a new synthetic trading currency based on an index of currencies of participating countries. Later, we proposed to expand the underlying currency basket by adding around twenty exchange-traded commodities. A monetary unit based on such an expanded basket was mathematically modeled and demonstrated a high degree of resilience and stability.

At around the same time, we proposed to create a wide international coalition of resistance in the hybrid war for global dominance that the financial and power elite of the US unleashed on the countries that remained outside of its control. My book The Last World War: the USA to Move and Lose, published in 2016, scientifically explained the nature of this coming war and argued for its inevitability – a conclusion based on objective laws of long-term economic development. Based on the same objective laws, the book argued the inevitability of the defeat of the old dominant power.

Currently, the US is fighting to maintain its dominance, but just as Britain previously, which provoked two world wars but was unable to keep its empire and its central position in the world due to the obsolescence of its colonial economic system, it is destined to fail. The British colonial economic system based on slave labor was overtaken by structurally more efficient economic systems of the US and the USSR. Both the US and the USSR were more efficient at managing human capital in vertically integrated systems, which split the world into their zones of influence. A transition to a new world economic order started after the disintegration of the USSR. This transition is now reaching its conclusion with the imminent disintegration of the dollar-based global economic system, which provided the foundation of the United States global dominance.

The new convergent economic system that emerged in the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and India is the next inevitable stage of development, combining the benefits of both centralized strategic planning and market economy, and of both state control of the monetary and physical infrastructure and entrepreneurship. The new economic system united various strata of their societies around the goal of increasing common wellbeing in a way that is substantially stronger than the Anglo-Saxon and European alternatives. This is the main reason why Washington will not be able to win the global hybrid war that it started. This is also the main reason why the current dollar-centric global financial system will be superseded by a new one, based on a consensus of the countries who join the new world economic order.

In the first phase of the transition, these countries fall back on using their national currencies and clearing mechanisms, backed by bilateral currency swaps. At this point, price formation is still mostly driven by prices at various exchanges, denominated in dollars. This phase is almost over: after Russia’s reserves in dollars, euro, pound, and yen were “frozen,” it is unlikely that any sovereign country will continue accumulating reserves in these currencies. Their immediate replacement is national currencies and gold.

The second stage of the transition will involve new pricing mechanisms that do not reference the dollar. Price formation in national currencies involves substantial overheads, however, it will still be more attractive than pricing in ‘un-anchored’ and treacherous currencies like dollars, pounds, euro, and yen. The only remaining global currency candidate – the yuan – won’t be taking their place due to its inconvertibility and the restricted external access to the Chinese capital markets. The use of gold as the price reference is constrained by the inconvenience of its use for payments.

The third and the final stage on the new economic order transition will involve a creation of a new digital payment currency founded through an international agreement based on principles of transparency, fairness, goodwill, and efficiency. I expect that the model of such a monetary unit that we developed will play its role at this stage. A currency like this can be issued by a pool of currency reserves of BRICS countries, which all interested countries will be able to join. The weight of each currency in the basket could be proportional to the GDP of each country (based on purchasing power parity, for example), its share in international trade, as well as the population and territory size of participating countries.

In addition, the basket could contain an index of prices of main exchange-traded commodities: gold and other precious metals, key industrial metals, hydrocarbons, grains, sugar, as well as water and other natural resources. To provide backing and to make the currency more resilient, relevant international resource reserves can be created in due course. This new currency would be used exclusively for cross-border payments and issued to the participating countries based on a pre-defined formula. Participating countries would instead use their national currencies for credit creation, in order to finance national investments and industry, as well as for sovereign wealth reserves. Capital account cross-border flows would remain governed by national currency regulations.

The Cradle: Michael Hudson specifically asks that if this new system enables nations in the Global South to suspend dollarized debt and is based on the ability to pay (in foreign exchange), can these loans be tied to either raw materials or, for China, tangible equity ownership in the capital infrastructure financed by foreign non-dollar credit?

Glazyev: Transition to the new world economic order will likely be accompanied by systematic refusal to honor obligations in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. In this respect, it will be no different from the example set by the countries issuing these currencies who thought it appropriate to steal foreign exchange reserves of Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Russia to the tune of trillions of dollars. Since the US, Britain, EU, and Japan refused to honor their obligations and confiscated the wealth of other nations which was held in their currencies, why should other countries be obliged to pay them back and to service their loans?

In any case, participation in the new economic system will not be constrained by the obligations in the old one. Countries of the Global South can be full participants of the new system regardless of their accumulated debts in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. Even if they were to default on their obligations in those currencies, this would have no bearing on their credit rating in the new financial system. Nationalization of extraction industry, likewise, would not cause a disruption. Further, should these countries reserve a portion of their natural resources for the backing of the new economic system, their respective weight in the currency basket of the new monetary unit would increase accordingly, providing that nation with larger currency reserves and credit capacity. In addition, bilateral swap lines with trading partner countries would provide them with adequate financing for co-investments and trade financing.

The Cradle: In one of your latest essays, The Economics of the Russian Victory, you call for “an accelerated formation of a new technological paradigm and the formation of institutions of a new world economic order.” Among the recommendations, you specifically propose the creation of “a payment and settlement system in the national currencies of the EAEU member states” and the development and implementation of “an independent system of international settlements in the EAEU, SCO and BRICS, which could eliminate critical dependence of the US-controlled SWIFT system.” Is it possible to foresee a concerted joint drive by the EAEU and China to “sell” the new system to SCO members, other BRICS members, ASEAN members and nations in West Asia, Africa and Latin America? And will that result in a bipolar geo-economy – the West versus The Rest?

Glazyev: Indeed, this is the direction where we are headed. Disappointingly, monetary authorities of Russia are still a part of the Washington paradigm and play by the rules of the dollar-based system, even after Russian foreign exchange reserves were captured by the west. On the other hand, the recent sanctions prompted extensive soul searching among the rest of the non-dollar-block countries. western ‘agents of influence’ still control central banks of most countries, forcing them to apply suicidal policies prescribed by the IMF. However, such policies at this point are so obviously contrary to the national interests of these non-western countries that their authorities are growing justifiably concerned about financial security.

You correctly highlight potentially central roles of China and Russia in the genesis of the new world economic order. Unfortunately, current leadership of the CBR (Central Bank of Russia) remains trapped inside the intellectual cul-de-sac of the Washington paradigm and is unable to become a founding partner in the creation of a new global economic and financial framework. At the same time, the CBR already had to face the reality and create a national system for interbank messaging which is not dependent on SWIFT, and opened it up for foreign banks as well. Cross-currency swap lines have been already set up with key participating nations. Most transactions between member states of the EAEU are already denominated in national currencies and the share of their currencies in internal trade is growing at a rapid pace.

A similar transition is taking place in trade with China, Iran, and Turkey. India indicated that it is ready to switch to payments in national currencies as well. A lot of effort is put in developing clearing mechanisms for national currency payments. In parallel, there is an ongoing effort to develop a digital non-banking payment system, which would be linked to gold and other exchange-traded commodities – the ‘stablecoins.’

Recent US and European sanctions imposed on the banking channels have caused a rapid increase in these efforts. The group of countries working on the new financial system only needs to announce the completion of the framework and readiness of the new trade currency and the process of formation of the new world financial order will accelerate further from there. The best way to bring it about would be to announce it at the SCO or BRICS regular meetings. We are working on that.  

The Cradle: This has been an absolutely key issue in discussions by independent analysts across the west. Was the Russian Central Bank advising Russian gold producers to sell their gold in the London market to get a higher price than the Russian government or Central Bank would pay? Was there no anticipation whatsoever that the coming alternative to the US dollar will have to be based largely on gold? How would you characterize what happened? How much practical damage has this inflicted on the Russian economy short-term and mid-term?

Glazyev: The monetary policy of the CBR, implemented in line with the IMF recommendations, has been devastating for the Russian economy. Combined disasters of the “freezing” of circa $400 billion of foreign exchange reserves and over a trillion dollars siphoned from the economy by oligarchs into western offshore destinations, came with the backdrop of equally disastrous policies of the CBR, which included excessively high real rates combined with a managed float of the exchange rate. We estimate this caused under-investment of circa 20 trillion rubles and under-production of circa 50 trillion rubles in goods.

Following Washington’s recommendations, the CBR stopped buying gold over the last two years, effectively forcing domestic gold miners to export full volumes of production, which added up to 500 tons of gold. These days the mistake and the harm it caused are very much obvious. Presently, the CBR resumed gold purchases, and, hopefully, will continue with sound policies in the interest of the national economy instead of ‘targeting inflation’ for the benefit of international speculators, as had been the case during the last decade.

The Cradle: The Fed as well as the ECB were not consulted on the freeze of Russian foreign reserves. Word in New York and Frankfurt is that they would have opposed it were they to have been asked. Did you personally expect the freeze? And did the Russian leadership expect it?

Glazyev: My book, The Last World War, that I already mentioned, which was published as far back as 2015, argued that the likelihood of this happening eventually is very high. In this hybrid war, economic warfare and informational/cognitive warfare are key theaters of conflict. On both of these fronts, the US and NATO countries have overwhelming superiority and I did not have any doubt that they would take full advantage of this in due course.

I have been arguing for a long time for the replacement of dollars, euro, pounds, and yen in our foreign exchange reserves with gold, which is produced in abundance in Russia. Unfortunately, western agents of influence which occupy key roles at central banks of most countries, as well as rating agencies and key publications, were successful in silencing my ideas. To give you an example, I have no doubt that high-ranking officials at the Fed and the ECB were involved in developing anti-Russian financial sanctions. These sanctions have been consistently escalating and are being implemented almost instantly, despite the well-known difficulties with bureaucratic decision making in the EU.  

The Cradle: Elvira Nabiullina has been reconfirmed as the head of the Russian Central Bank. What would you do differently, compared to her previous actions? What is the main guiding principle involved in your different approaches?

Glazyev: The difference between our approaches is very simple. Her policies are an orthodox implementation of IMF recommendations and dogmas of the Washington paradigm, while my recommendations are based on the scientific method and empirical evidence accumulated over the last hundred years in leading countries.

The Cradle: The Russia-China strategic partnership seems to be increasingly ironclad – as Presidents Putin and Xi themselves constantly reaffirm. But there are rumbles against it not only in the west but also in some Russian policy circles. In this extremely delicate historical juncture, how reliable is China as an all-season ally to Russia?

Glazyev: The foundation of Russian-Chinese strategic partnership is common sense, common interests, and the experience of cooperation over hundreds of years. The US ruling elite started a global hybrid war aimed at defending its hegemonic position in the world, targeting China as the key economic competitor and Russia as the key counter-balancing force. Initially, the US geopolitical efforts were aiming to create a conflict between Russia and China. Agents of western influence were amplifying xenophobic ideas in our media and blocking any attempts to transition to payments in national currencies. On the Chinese side, agents of western influence were pushing the government to fall in line with the demands of the US interests.

However, sovereign interests of Russia and China logically led to their growing strategic partnership and cooperation, in order to address common threats emanating from Washington. The US tariff war with China and financial sanctions war with Russia validated these concerns and demonstrated the clear and present danger our two countries are facing. Common interests of survival and resistance are uniting China and Russia, and our two countries are largely symbiotic economically. They complement and increase competitive advantages of each other. These common interests will persist over the long run.

The Chinese government and the Chinese people remember very well the role of the Soviet Union in the liberation of their country from the Japanese occupation and in the post-war industrialization of China. Our two countries have a strong historical foundation for strategic partnership and we are destined to cooperate closely in our common interests. I hope that the strategic partnership of Russia and the PRC, which is enhanced by the coupling of the One Belt One Road with the Eurasian Economic Union, will become the foundation of President Vladimir Putin’s project of the Greater Eurasian Partnership and the nucleus of the new world economic order.

Rufus runs in to rescue others

This is how it is done. video 2MB

In America; Fertilizer and DEF Fluid Shipments Being Limited

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On the heels of rail carriers canceling grain shipments, CF Industries warns that FERTILIZER rail shipments are now being halted during spring planting

According to an April 14th announcement from CF Industries, American railroad; Union Pacific is halting the delivery of fertilizer shipments right in the middle of peak planting season for farmers. CF Industries warns that,

“railroad-mandated shipping reductions [will] result in nitrogen fertilizer shipment delays during the spring application season and that it [will] be unable to accept new rail sales involving Union Pacific for the foreseeable future.”

This means that Union Pacific is essentially dropping fertilizer shipments and grain shipments all across America. Put another way, America’s food infrastructure is being deliberately shut down.

“CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CF), a leading global manufacturer of hydrogen and nitrogen products, today informed customers it serves by Union Pacific rail lines that railroad-mandated shipping reductions would result in nitrogen fertilizer shipment delays during the spring application season and that it would be unable to accept new rail sales involving Union Pacific for the foreseeable future. The Company understands that it is one of only 30 companies to face these restrictions. ...”

It continues…

“CF Industries ships to customers via Union Pacific rail lines primarily from its Donaldsonville Complex in Louisiana and its Port Neal Complex in Iowa.

The rail lines serve key agricultural areas such as Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and California.

Products that will be affected include nitrogen fertilizers such as urea and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN) as well as diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), an emissions control product required for diesel trucks.

CF Industries is the largest producer of urea, UAN and DEF in North America, and its Donaldsonville Complex is the largest single production facility for the products in North America.”

DEF Does not “Go Bad.”

According to manufacturers, Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) doesn’t degrade nearly as quickly as people assume. For example, at 86°F, DEF has a shelf life of a year.

REMEMBER: Do not equate shelf life to spoiling like food, as DEF will not go bad. It will lose some effectiveness, and the SCR will dose at a higher rate, but it won’t “go bad.”

If maintained at a constant temperature, DEF manages to stay for several months. For example, at 74°F in Los Angeles, Diesel Exhaust Fluid has the shelf life of 44 months.

American “Vaccines KILLING People of Color” at TWICE THE RATE of Whites

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Biden Administration Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has admitted during a Conference that “Vaccines are killing people of color, Blacks, Latinos, and Indigenous people, at about twice the rate of white Americans.”

The video, from the White House Convening on Equity, appears below

Video

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Yet to this very minute, they are still running commercials on TV and radio, telling people the vaccines are “safe and effective.”

Are you a Ready Rufus?

When “shit goes down”, will you be ready to handle things? video 3MB

French Onion Dip

This is easy to make. It tastes great! And man oh, man does it go great with Wise® potato chips.

OIP C.IUdXxFzrzT9mXbIBuWCi9wHaLH
OIP C.IUdXxFzrzT9mXbIBuWCi9wHaLH

Ingredients

2022 04 19 18 43
2022 04 19 18 43

Procedure

  1. In a large saute pan over low heat, add oil and butter. When butter is melted, add onions and saute stirring occasionally until golden brown and caramelized, about 35 minutes. Add shallots and some salt and saute for 15 minutes more until onions and shallots are dark brown. Remove from heat and let cool for 5 to 6 minutes, then chop into 1/4-inch pieces. Set aside to cool to room temperature.
  2. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, combine sour cream, mayonnaise, celery salt, Worcestershire, salt and pepper. Fold in onion mixture. Chill at least 1 hour or overnight, prior to serving.

Cook’s Note

Dip can be pureed until creamy. If too thick, add milk to get desired consistency.

Here comes China: The world rotated one more time

By Amarynth for the Saker Blog

The world rotated one more time since the last report on China.

So, what do we know?

China is rock-solid behind Russia in all of Russia’s objectives, and in some instances, up ahead.

It almost seems as if an agreement was, if not stated, then understood. Russia will do the shootin’ for now, and China will keep the economic boat afloat. We see consistent commenting such as China is a consistent stabilizing force in a changing world

Overall NATO is feeling the pressure and ‘resetting’ and trying to clone itself as Aukus in the east while trying to strengthen itself in the west. We have Stoltenberg announcing: “What we see now is a new reality, a new normal for European security. Therefore, we have now asked our military commanders to provide options for what we call a reset, a more longer-term adaptation of NATO.”. In this speech, he announced that plans are being worked up to transform NATO into a major force capable of taking on an invading army and states that NATO deepens partnerships in Asia in response to a rising “security challenge” from China.

Yet, in the east, the Quad is one less, given India’s refusal to follow the U.S. regarding Russia.

Japan has been asked to join Aukus as a Japan, US, Australia, UK alliance intending to project a strong regional balance of power against China, Russia (and maybe India then?) in Asia. This Aukus will then have synergy,, they say, with Japanese technologies in areas such as hypersonic weapons and electronic warfare. Somehow I don’t see Japan as a suitable switch out for India, but then again, we’re dealing with desperate last gyrations of a world hegemon here, trying to project that it still has many friends.

A quick look at India. These days, if you see a country being threatened, you know already that they have started decoupling from so-called western democracy and Blinken has just threatened India yet again. He says the US is “monitoring rise in rights abuses in India” So, suddenly the US cares about human rights abuses in India. This bellicose rhetoric is not effective and way beyond its sell-by date.

It is clear that Russia is decoupling from Europe, and this started before sanctions. But did you know that China is decoupling from Britain, Canada, and the US? This is a brand-new trend. China’s top offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC Ltd. is preparing to exit its operations in Britain, Canada, and the United States, because of concerns in Beijing that assets could become subject to Western sanctions. As it seeks to leave the West, CNOOC is looking to acquire new assets in Latin America and Africa, and also wants to prioritize the development of large, new prospects in Brazil, Guyana, and Uganda.

Apparently trying to deal with those three countries has become painful and CNOOC is seeking to sell “marginal and hard to manage” assets. Quoted are red tape and high operating costs in the western climes.

In the Asia region, we also saw the ease with which Imran Khan was relieved of his post as Prime Minister. I don’t believe this is the end of this story, because the citizens of Pakistan are truly unhappy. https://www.rt.com/news/553734-us-involved-imran-khan-departure/

So if you were thinking that while the Ukraine war is hot, the Pacific is cool, that would be a mis judgement.

The new cry going out is if we’ve censored all the Russian voices, how can we allow the Chinese voices to carry water for Russia. We have to cancel them too! (These people deserve to go and live underground in bunkers!)

Taiwan keeps the war propaganda at a fever pitch by releasing a China Invasion Survival Guide.

Taiwan’s All-out Defense Mobilization unit has released a guide for citizens in the event of a war with Beijing, complete with comic strips and tips for survival, locating bomb shelters, and preparing food and first aid provisions.  The guide has been planned for some time, and comes as local officials look to extend military service beyond the current 4 months. https://t.me/rtnews/23455

Nancy Pelosi was planning to visit Taiwan. China made its displeasure known widely and loudly. And Pelosi immediately contracted Covid and had to suspend her trip.

From the Australian side, the propaganda is flowing strong. Here is a very fine video with Brian Berletic and Robbie Barwick, explaining exactly what happened with the contretemps in the Solomon Islands, as well as the overall trajectory and the speed thereof, of Australia’s belligerence against China. This video contains some interesting statements and supporting data. Seemingly, if Australia interacts with Island Nations like the Solomon’s the idea is to build infrastructure suitable for war, so, building a port must be suitable for US aircraft carriers, and building a road must be suitable for landing US airplanes. If China interacts with these very same Island Nations, the idea is to build infrastructure that can benefit their population and this is now clear among all.

https://odysee.com/@LandDestroyer:8/australia-vs-china-solomon-islands:7

Is it over? No, not by a long shot. Aussie minister pays ‘unprecedented coercive visit’ to Solomon Islands over China security pact. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202204/1259266.shtml

I’ve come to enjoy China’s spokespeople. They are sharp and do not miss a trick. Acerbic and incisive commentary is the order of the day. This is a good example, and please note the tone of the Western journos .. If you have never spent time on one of these, it is an education. The western journos try and beat the spox to death with repeated questions loaded with innuendo. https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/202204/t20220411_10666750.html

It is quite clear that China is not leaving the issue of Biolabs behind. They have just about daily coverage in various media about it.

SEOUL, April 12 (Xinhua) — U.S. military biological facilities in South Korea are serious threats to local residents’ safety, said a South Korean expert, as the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) continues with a scandalous program involving experiments with living toxic samples. #GLOBALink

https://english.news.cn/20220412/a7d456ef4d5c4b7bab7fa07305aa6333/c.html

China will never forget epithets like “China Virus” and “Wuhan Flu”. Take a good look at this image titled Poison Disseminator.

word image 13
word image 13

 

China had to evacuate +- 2,000 Chinese citizens from the Ukraine. From media, it was a successful evacuation. They have also repeatedly made their stance clear on the Ukraine.

https://www.silkroadbriefing.com/news/2022/03/08/chinas-foreign-ministry-position-on-russia-ukraine/

The main focus is humanitarian. China released a five-point position statement supported by a six-point humanitarian plan

The position statement is:

First, we persevere in promoting peace talks in the right direction. We hold that dialogue and negotiation are the only way out, oppose adding fuel to the fire and intensifying confrontation, call for achieving a ceasefire and ending the conflict, and support Russia and Ukraine in carrying out direct dialogue.

Second, we persevere in upholding the basic norms governing international relations. We advocate respect for the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, and oppose putting small and medium-sized countries on the front line of geopolitical games.

Third, we persevere in preventing the resurgence of the Cold War mentality. We do not agree with the “friend-or-foe” camp confrontation, firmly promote international solidarity, advocate the vision of common, cooperative, comprehensive and sustainable security, and respect and accommodate the legitimate and reasonable concerns of all parties.

Fourth, we persevere in upholding the legitimate rights and interests of all countries. We oppose unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law and call for safeguarding the international industrial and supply chains to avoid harming normal economic and trade exchanges and people’s lives.

Fifth, we persevere in consolidating peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region. We firmly uphold the principle of amity, sincerity, mutual benefit, and inclusiveness in our neighborhood diplomacy, guard against the introduction of bloc confrontation into the region by the United States through the “Indo-Pacific strategy”, accelerate the promotion of regional integration and cooperation, and guard the hard-won development momentum in the region.

Wang Ji describes the six-point humanitarian plan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEmMgB8psVY

While China is doing its best to create a level playing field and do real humanitarian work, they are not hiding the fact that they hold the US/NATO fully responsible for what they see as an action that was forced onto Russia.

Inside China, it is all about economic miracles. Taking a huge bow now in their theater of urgent needs is seeds: Chinese Seeds, Chinese developed, and Chinese local seeds. The seed companies of the west are unwelcome with the IP registration of their seeds and China will hold its ownership over its seeds.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202204/12/WS6253c2e2a310fd2b29e563d6.html

The Shanghai lockdown provided endless China-bashing opportunities for western commentators. Tucker Carlson jumped on this horse and did his part for the anti-China campaign with a litany of complaints, a bunch of pixellated videos that are propaganda material, never having spoken to anyone actually living in Shanghai, without an idea of China’s principled management of Covid and without understanding the levels of the lockdown – complete political projection of US so-called values.  As we have seen so many times from the USA’ians, trying to fight his political battles on the back of the Chinese (or anyone else, for that matter).  He also perceivably has no idea that the Chinese lockdown supports the people with food and medicines, and it is not like the west. So, he looks at this with western eyes and truly, he has no clue. It is exactly the same that the world complains about .. it is: “We are right and exceptional and we know better.” Because China makes its own rules, Carlson calls it wrong. He is totally committed to the idea of US manifest destiny and his way is the right way.  Carlson is anti a war with Russia for political purposes but show him China as a possible war partner, and he blooms with bloodlust.

It is truly better to listen to those that are actually living there and can actually speak the language.  It is so that people believe the MSM when that very same MSM says something that they like and rail against that very same MSM when they say something that they don’t like.

David Fishman tweets: So it’s CRAZY that we have to do this, it’s also incredibly fascinating from a supply chain/logistics/economics perspective. We are in the process of re-inventing the food distribution network in Shanghai. It’s all based on the newly prevalent concept of Group-Buying.

If you really want to know how people live through a 14 day lockdown, a 14 day lighter lockdown if no Covid presents itself, a closed and open-loop system, and then thereafter no lock down. I would recommend that you click on this tweet and read all the parts:

So it's CRAZY that we have to do this, it's also incredibly fascinating from a supply chain/logistics/economics perspective.

We are in the process of re-inventing the food distribution network in Shanghai.

It's all based on the newly prevalent concept of Group-Buying. Nerdy🧵

— David Fishman (@pretentiouswhat) April 7, 2022

Let’s hear from someone who is actually right there:

LIVE update on the situation in Shanghai, China https://t.co/kR1RUsHLL8
— Andy Boreham 安柏然 (@AndyBxxx) April 11, 2022

And Jeff Brown weighed in as well. Special explanation to address the many concerns global citizens have about China’s “Zero-Covid” policy, with Shanghai now in the headlines.

https://jeffjbrown.substack.com/p/special-explanation-to-address-the

And so there are to my knowledge hundreds of people reporting that they get their food delivered, they take part in group buying, they mostly get what they want but sometimes not and we see things like this:

Very touched by this. My wife failed for the nth time to buy milk via group buying during the Shanghai lockdown and was lamenting about it on WeChat.

5 minutes later a neighbor put this on our doorstep, refusing anything in exchange.

THAT is the China I know. pic.twitter.com/Z9rJDwOWyo
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) April 13, 2022

The lesson here is that if you want to know what is happening in China, listen to the people in China. Now, they are not brutally suppressed and silenced. Online media is bigger than ever. What is frowned upon and can get you into hot water, is if you are rude and rude to others. State your case, don’t be rude and you will be fine with social media communication.  (Somewhat like the concept of Saving Face).

No, China is not killing 25 million people in Shanghai.

There are thousands of made-up and anti-China video clips breathlessly being passed around by the usual suspects.  I saw one that purports that the Chinese are breaking down their 5G towers.  It was a clip from the umbrella riots in Hong Kong where the rioters were breaking down public infrastructure.

Is everything perfect? Of course not. Are their people struggling? Of course. Was there food distribution problems initially?  Of course.  Is it easy? Of course not. Are most people content with the decision to do a phased lock-in of a city of 25 million people? Most of the ones that I’ve regularly followed are, if not content, they understand the reason and trust the Chinese Zero-Covid policy. Westerners need to start understanding that the Chinese people are part of their government and that they actually believe the government does what is best for the people and they have evidence and proof of this, because they are part of a very inclusive system.

Cyrus Janssen is a regular commentator on China.  He does not like the Shanghai lockdown.  This is his thread, and take a look at what the Chinese actually answered.

I'm very worried about Shanghai and the future of #China….what's happened in the past few weeks has changed the future of China. Some of you will agree with my analysis and some of you won't, but here is a thread 🧵 on the #COVID19 situation in #Shanghai:

— Cyrus Janssen (@thecyrusjanssen) April 13, 2022

The conversation in China is different from the conversation in the west.  Their current concern is future management of Covid.  They have concerns that their Zero-Covid strategy needs to be adjusted.  They are in the process of refining its strategy.  They do not have concerns about their strategy, because they have the numbers.

The last report that I have is as of Saturday.  The Shanghai port STILL operating smoothly, with berthing efficiency better than 2021. The average waiting time for ships in Port is under 24 hours, and all the production units at the port maintain normal 24-hour operations, except in extreme weather. In 2021, the Port moved 47 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs), ranking first globally. Throughput of international containers exceeded 6 million TEUs for the first time.

Trade between Russia and China skyrocketed. Paul from the Sirius report states it as follows:  “Western experts fail to grasp that the Global South is around 87% of the world’s population, is in its ascendancy and has a myriad of vertical growth markets now in play and is embracing the multipolar world. West meanwhile is in terminal decline.”

China and Russia trade in Q1 rose 28% to $38.2bn equivalent.

In 2021, trade turnover between Russia and China hit a record high of $146.88 billion, having surged 35.8%. In December, the Russian and Chinese presidents agreed on creating infrastructure to service trade operations between the two nations without third parties.

The ASEAN surpassed the EU to become China’s largest trading partner. China’s imports and exports with ASEAN jumped 8.4% yoy to 1.35tn yuan in Q1 accounting for 14.4% of the country’s foreign trade volume.

Beijing’s economic and trade cooperation with other countries including Russia and Ukraine remains normal.

Beijing has refused to join sanctions against Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine, saying cooperation between China and Russia “has no limits.” The two countries have been switching from the US dollar and the euro to local currencies in trade to avoid possible sanctions.

It’s all digital currency for the years ahead for China. Make a strong distinction in your mind between CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency), Cryptocurrencies and China’s digital currency. They are not all the same.

Russia is increasing its holdings in Yuan. This is explained as underscoring the falling credibility of the US dollar, as the US has been weaponizing the dollar as a financial weapon instead of a trusted international payment currency.  This via Xu Wenhong, a research fellow at the Institute of Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

From the Here Comes China newsletter by Godfree Roberts, we see this:

Cainiao, Alibaba’s logistics arm, rolled out a digital end-to-end e-commerce logistics service that includes pickup, warehousing, supply chain, customs clearance, and last-mile delivery.  You may think this is for China internally and it might well be so, but China has now something like 3,000 warehouses across the world, supporting the products that the belt and road transport, to get to the last-mile delivery.

Earlier I referred to the Quad as well as to the fact that China is doing its own selective decoupling. The Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, which runs through Mongolia, is specifically aimed at reducing any Chinese dependence on Quad Members.

To conclude before we get to a lighter note, the west has no competitive edge any longer in trade, very little in war if we look at it as of today (they can still wipe us all out and turn us into glass), and have no honor left. They are not serious people and cannot be allowed to try and run our planet any longer, exclusively to their own benefit.

From Godfree’s newsletter about one of China’s minorities that I had actually never heard of. The Naxi, one of China’s 55 ethnic minorities, have long been popular with anthropologists, but its folk music is routinely overlooked. A new album hopes to change that. It might not be your style, but something different and away from war is always welcome.

Video

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Chinese first grade graduation

A MUST see. Pretty classic. video 5MB

Pretty Chinese girls in bikinis

Some nice girls showing off clevage in fine nice bikinis. video 4MB

Tender Pork Spare Ribs

Celebrity Chef used this braising method for baby back ribs, here is a variation of it for pork spare ribs.

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Tender Pork Spare Ribs.

Thus, the seasonings are changed to fit the meat, and there is an increased cooking time. Almost all reports indicated great satisfaction with the ribs, and pershaps you all should give them a try as well.

They’re really tender and the meat is so flavorful that you don’t have to add BBQ sauce unless you want to.

2022 04 19 18 49
2022 04 19 18 49

Rufus delivery guy

You are not your job. You are beyond that. Be the Rufus.  Video 3MB

Ukraine Refugees in Ireland suffering strange new illness

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Almost 30 Ukrainians at a Cork County refugee center in Ireland, many who arrived within the past 48 hours,  are being treated for a mystery illness.

The individuals – all based at a facility in north Cork – complained of feeling unwell on Saturday with several saying their symptoms worsened overnight.

The symptoms ranged from headaches, nausea, dizziness and high temperatures to coughing.

A group of 47 Ukrainian refugees had arrived over the past 36 hours at an emergency rest center at Banteer in north Cork.

All are understood to have arrived in Ireland over recent days after travelling here from Ukraine and bordering countries.

As a precautionary measure, both local GPs and paramedics attended the Banteer facility.

Assessments are now underway by the medical teams in a bid to determine the precise nature and source of the mystery illness.

While full Covid-19 precautions are being taken, coronavirus is not believed to be the primary suspect.

Cork is currently in the grip of major bouts of ordinary flu and cold outbreaks.

Cold and flu medications sales across some parts of Cork have soared by over 80pc over recent weeks.

UKRAINE BIOLABS THE SOURCE?

The existence of Biolabs inside Ukraine, being run by the US Department of Defense, may be implicated in this.

The existence of these labs was exposed as Russia began demilitarizing and de-nazifying Ukraine. If any of the pathogens inside any of those labs were loosed, then the cause of these sick Ukrainians is a massive concern.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

It would not be unheard of that someone did something like this deliberately.

Ireland is a small island which is basically Bankrupt, where they want 80% of the population dead because Brussels took all the pensions, whose population are no longer bright enough or liberty-minded enough to question or challenge what restrictions are imposed upon them, as witnesses with the COVID fraud.

Ireland basically became a zone of locked-down mask zombies doing everything they were told, even though none of the masks or lockdowns had much effect upon the spread of COVID.

In fact, the population of Ireland is now so pathetic, that local councils ORDERED families to take in refugees . . . . into private homes . . . . and the Irish just do as they’re told.  No fight-for-freedom  seems to be left in them at all.

The fact that the population there is so malleable and compliant might make the island an interesting place for a bio-weapon test.

Some of the sociopaths running various governments might have decided to loose some strange new disease on an island, where people coming and going can be tightly controlled, to sit back and watch how a potential new bioweapon spreads and kills.

Drunk Vietnames girl

Getting a drunk chick home is always a hassle. But this is extra difficult being in rural Vietnam. Sheech! video 8MB

OPINION: America is now broken beyond repair. Only force of arms can stop its total destruction

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You know America is now broken beyond repair because states are literally at war with each other.

Have you seen the busloads of illegal aliens being shipped out of Texas and into Washington, DC and into Delaware? Could you ever even IMAGINE states forcibly doing things like this to each other?

We also have States – like California – boycotting other states, like Florida and many others, over the laws enacted by citizens of those other states.

I mean step back for just a second to a quiet place and clear your thoughts. Then try to look from an outside, big picture perspective, and let it sink in for just a moment.

The very first thing that will flood over you is there’s no playbook for where this is going. Since when have we had two powerful states begin an actual physical counter attack.

That’s really something more then sending a message. It’s aggressive and provoking.

The union is fracturing and it’s largely passed-off-as (and accepted as)  “politics.”    It’s not politics; it’s Civil War.

Really take a sec to feel the gravity of states using physical means to effect change. That’s a big one.

There is an endless corrosive force causing the union to deteriorate at a grinding pace.

If we could stop everything and take inventory of the damage thus far, we’d see that it’s already too late. Its not going back together like it was say, in 2005, without force.

Meanwhile, the population is arguing among themselves over which politician they will allow to control their basic human rights.  The ignorance and outright idiocy of the masses is frightening.  They don’t even TALK about “liberty.”

American’s are all talking about the same things this Easter Holiday weekend:

The Fact that their children will never have any type of life close to what we had. No owned home, no beater winter car, no wife, or husband potentially, no decent paying wage job, a crappy diet.

Mom and Dad’s legacy won’t last. Any inheritance will get eaten up by inflation as well as their retirement fund.

The Southern border invasion – ongoing at the invitation of our public servants in Washington.

Covert war with Russia happening right now in Ukraine, and looming direct, open war with China looming.

Empty retail everywhere.

Heartless greedy people abound.

Even the church we attend could care less about the situation with housing. Which is really weird as Easter Sunday is here.

The Nation is Divided more than it ever has been.

I’ve never seen it so hopeless. I have hope but it’s shaken to the core.

Most people do not understand the ramifications of what’s occurring.  They also do not realize that past predicts future.  They will likely willfully resist understanding even as the effects of this roll over them.

The GLUE (Christianity) that held America together, has been dissolved. (When the United States was created, America was almost 100% Christian, and TAKEN SERIOUSLY)

As America falls headlong into DEPRAVITY and MORAL COLLAPSE, we can recall a WARNING:

"...we have no government armed with power
capable of contending with human passions
unbridled by morality and religion.

Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry,
would break the strongest cords of our
Constitution as a whale goes through a net.

Our Constitution was made ONLY
FOR A MORAL AND RELIGIOUS PEOPLE.

It is wholly inadequate
to the government of any other."

- John Adams, founder and second president

In 1979 was the first time I read the Bible cover to cover. All I can say is that I didn’t think it would take this long for all that Revelation stuff to start.

I think COVID Horseman One of the Apocalypse.

I think Horseman Two is the red horse, war. We are here.

It does not get better and the US will not be rescued.

We are heading into the ultimate SHTF scenario. The Bible says it will be the worst time that anyone has ever seen on this planet and that if He did not return, all flesh on this planet would be lost.

Does that mean that all flesh will have turned into machine? Is that what the mark of the beast warning is about, that we cannot be saved if we take the mark? Is it because of transhumanism? You bet it is.

Now is the time to get as off grid, down low, and out of sight as possible. Hide your stored food. Don’t talk about it with neighbors unless they are prepping too and are working with you.

War is coming to US soil. Some will survive, but your guns will not save you. Only Jesus can save you, and the Holy Spirit will direct your path to hide you, so it’s time to get real about what is actually coming.

Of course, this is going to occur on God’s schedule, not mine or yours.   He may have more than a few twists and turns planned, even if only to allow more to be saved from what’s coming.

He’s been quite merciful in granting time for people to repent, given the perfidy and abominations currently extant in the world, and getting worse daily.

It might be a longer race than you or I anticipate, so be sure to pace yourself – you don’t want to burn out before the end arrives.

Someone recently told me “The plan is to break the United States into 4 new nations.”  The northeast, southeast, Midwest, and west coast.

I thought about it and it seems to me that once you realize this, everything that happens makes sense.

The only way they can get global government is to break the United States apart.

China and Russia are on board and that’s why the typical Republican voter stands with Russia and the typical Democratic voter stands with China.

Both countries are flooding both sides with their own propaganda designed to further divide the country.

The WEF fans the flames on both sides knowing a break up allows them to better push their build back better.

Wall St. knows they will fail but they also know what the back up plan is, and it’s why they’re moving everything Florida.

All 4 parties have a vested interest in watching America be split apart so all 4 are working together even though their end goals are all not the same.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) will have massive influence over the northeastern region – including eastern Canada – as the UN will be the head of their global government. New York will be the capital and they will operate out of their region of old America.

The Russians will have a lot of influence over the Midwest and Southeast – there’s speculation Alberta, Saskatchewan, NW territory, the Yukon, and Alaska will join the Midwestern/Southeastern bloc stretching the new nations lands from western Alaska to Southeastern Florida.

Like Russia it will be sparsely populated but incredibly energy rich.

These regions are largely conservative and thus already set up to be friendly with Russia.

The Russians will ally with this nation and run roads over to Alaska and down into the midwest for trade.

The bankers will operate out of this region.

The west coast nation will likely encompass Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii and western Canada. This region will be largely controlled by the Chinese as these populations are already friendly towards China.

All 4 regions will be used in some fashion by all 4 groups but all 4 groups will position themselves to be friendly with at least 1 region. WEF for the Northeast, Bankers for the Southeast, Russians for the Midwest, China for the West coast.

Anyone hoping for a return of old America must move to the Midwest and Southeast now.

Although we will be weaker than we are today we still have a fighting chance in these regions when all this goes down.

When you really sit back in a quiet place this is what you realize… They’re gonna break the nation into 4 and practically everything they’re doing is in preparation for this; Unless Americans step up and start emitting some well placed bullets.

Think that’s harsh?  Let me show you “harsh:”

$30 Trillion in debt is catastrophic. And that’s just the current book debt.

Unfunded liabilities in the next 20 years are over a $100 trillion.

The welfare state exceed $1.1 trillion for fiscal 2016. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reported 66% of the welfare state were immigrants.

And what are they still bringing-in across the southern border?   Yea.  More immigrants.  ILLEGAL ONES to boot!

Exactly what would you say should be done with the people doing these things?  Exactly what, about their deliberate choices, can be fixed?

“Vote them out” you say?   You fool.  The election in November 2020 was outright stolen.  There is no voting them out anymore.  The whole election system is a fraud.

The courts refused to hear election cases; so the courts are a fraud as well.

The whole system has become a corrupt, immoral, out-of-control, tyrannical, joke.

There are no peaceful means to redress grievances anymore.

November 2020 and January 6, 2021 demonstrated to me that our Constitutional Republic is all but dead. I decided that January that it was time to give up hope for a nationally recognized leader to restore the Republic.

I just know that a legitimate movement needs a recognized leader, otherwise it’s just disorganized rabble that’s easily labeled and discredited as “terrorists” then picked off as lone wolves.

It is time for people to move to areas that contain concentrations of like minded people. If you’re a freedom loving constitutionalist that’s living in a blue city or State, it’s time to move, now. Even if you take a temporary financial loss, it will be worth it in the long run.

States are now conducting open aggressive acts toward each other and towards the federal government.

As a nation, we have crossed the Rubicon, there’s no going back to what America once was; what past generations hoped it would be. The corruption and treason runs too deep.

Don’t be like so many victims throughout history, the ones that clung to a misplaced sense of hope that things would get better or that things really won’t get “that bad.”

History books show those are the ones that wound up in front of firing squads, in gulags, or murdered in their homes.

Don’t view it as running, it is more about consolidation of power, strength in numbers, and having your family somewhere safe instead of behind enemy lines.

We in the USA have been heading the same direction as the former Soviet Union for quite some time now…..the journey is just picking up steam as the inevitable becomes obvious to more and more of us….there isn’t a damn thing “united” about The United States anymore….time to accept that simple fact.

The gig is up.

Going to college, having a job and a family, working hard to pay off a home for a chill retirement? Its all dead now.

So what’s the plan? Just live in daily fear and survive until the next shoe drops?

There are very few choices now. Food and basic survival will drown out all other issues. It’s the desperation I’m worried about. People do fucked-up shit when they are desperate.

Is there a limit to what you would do if your child was looking in your eyes and crying from hunger? No.

That’s when the gloves come off and shit gets real.

Hold on tight. There is more to the story.

If this country is ever demoralized,
it will come from trying to live without work.
- Abraham Lincoln

Demoralization of the target audience
is yet another step in successful mind control.
- Joost Meerloo

They are contaminated; they are programmed to think
and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern.
You cannot change their mind, even if you expose
them to authentic information, even if you prove that
white is white and black is black, you still cannot
change the basic perception and logic of behavior.
In other words, these people... the process of de-
moralization is complete and irreversible.
- Yuri Bezmenov

The incoming collapse is going to hit so many unprepared.

Its not myself I worry for, its the rest of society and how to navigate their foolishness and impending downfall, for being shortsighted and distracted, while the government unraveled the economy over the past decade.  Pretty much since QE began, which ultimately would doom us all in the long run. And here we are.

Until the Keynesian tribe rot is gone it WILL remain broken no matter what new bullshit they try.

If you want to know what the future of the country looks like, visit Detroit. This is what is eventually coming to the rest of the country. Burned out buildings, 50% unemployment, corrupt and criminal politicians, bribery, graft, gangs, drugs, casinos, prostitution, devastating environmental pollution. No place is it safe to walk in Detroit or you risk getting mugged, shot, or beaten even in broad daylight.

This malaise is now spreading to the suburbs. In Detroit, it started seeping into the surrounding towns, like Lincoln Park, Melvindale. But now it is going even further into suburbs further away.

I’ve always said that if you don’t have a thriving, safe city, then the disease will spread. The suburbs of these cities like Detroit are getting caught in the same downward spiral. If Detroit were prosperous and safe, it would cascade to the surrounding communities, like it did in the 1920s when it was one of the wealthiest cities in the world.

Same with Chicago.  Same here in New York.

There is no going back, no do-over, and no fixing this. Get ready.

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One of my favorite Chinese girls

She’s just so darn cute! Here she is exercising in her home with her little doggie. video 4MB

Russia says it destroyed Ukrainian air defense systems gifted by unidentified European country

Slovakia gave an S-300 system to Ukraine last week but says theirs wasn’t hit. Which system was hit is unknown.
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NO Dumping : No more transfer of Western pollution to Asia tolerated :

Another big shipping line is refusing to export the West’s plastic waste.
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Workers short the trash at Bantar Gebang landfill in Bekasi, West Java province, Indonesia. Published April 15, 2022
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As of today (April 15), the world’s third largest shipping line, will no longer accept deliveries of scrap plastic on any of its ships. CMA CGM’s ban is a milestone in a global backlash against wealthy nations—especially the US—dumping plastic waste in China and Southeast Asia.
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China used to be the biggest destination for scrap plastic; in 1992, the country imported 72% of all plastic waste, which it would recycle and use in manufacturing. But as China’s economy has grown, so has its domestic plastic waste output. Now the country has plenty of its own plastic to recycle, without accepting imports from abroad….
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How we enter buildings in China

This is mature technology, and is starting to become more and more common. Even here in tiny Zhuhai, China. video 1MB

Spain outraged at the arrival of a US nuclear submarine in Gibraltar – Euro Weekly News

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Do not be ashamed of who you are

You are NOT your job. You are never your job. It is just what you have to do while you are working on other things. video 2MB

Ukraine: Russia set to launch ‘space war’ to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites

Dmitry Medvedev, a close ally to Vladimir Putin, announced a plan to destroy Elon Musk’s Starling satellites in a United Russia party document.
Should have done this from the beginning when Musk openly activate Starlink satellite to support Ukraine Internet…
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China increase export tariffs

The export tariff on ferrochrome — used in stainless steel — will rise to 40% from 20% starting Aug. 1, and the levy on high-purity pig iron will increase to 20% from 15%, the Ministry of Finance said. Export tax rebates will be removed from 23 items, including some cold-rolled coil products, it said.
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US inflation and interest rates: why the Fed needs help from China

Since the inflationary pressure on the US is partly a consequence of supply chain dislocations, fast and hard rate hikes won’t be enough if Chinese production does not get back into top gear
Such considerations are why investors expecting the US dollar to strengthen against the yuan may be disappointed
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China’s got problems, but inflation ain’t one of them

The PBOC’s fear of too loose a monetary policy appears to have subsided
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We’re building the universal network of encyclopedias.

A lot of people have complained to us about how biased Wikipedia is, how there needs to be an effective alternative or a decentralized network of encyclopedias.

But we are not building an alternative encyclopedia. We are networking together all the alternatives. Nobody has ever done this before, and it’s about time somebody did. This is what we should have done with Wikipedia in the first place.

Crowdsourcing has been replaced by a panel of experts because the Crowd turned out to be run by a few cynical manipulators and a lot of Useful Idiots nodding enthusiastically.

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Chinese girl

I think that she is a stunner. video 7MB

Raising Chickens 101: How to Get Started

I thought that this would make great “food for thought” to those of you in the United States that are staring at really high prices for chicken eggs.  THis is from “The Almanac” and all credit to them.

Why Should You Raise Chickens?

There’s a lot to like about raising chickens in your backyard. The eggs are a real temptation—tastier and fresher than any store-bought eggs, and better for baking, too. The shells, along with the chicken poop, can be tossed right into the compost pile. Much of the day, the birds entertain themselves, picking at grass, worms, beetles, and all of the good things that go into making those yummy farm eggs. Plus, with their keen eye for insect pests, chickens make for great gardening companions.

Remember, though: Nothing good comes easy!

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DIY chicken coop.

Things to Consider Before Getting Chickens

  • First, check local town ordinances to ensure that keeping chickens is even allowed in your neighborhood or if there is a limit to the number of chickens you can keep at once. The last thing you want is to invest time and money into preparing for chickens and then find out that you can’t even keep them!
  • Make sure you have the space for a henhouse or a full-size chicken coop. It has to hold a feeder and water containers, a roosting area, and a nest box for every three hens. A proper coop should be large enough that you can stand in it to gather eggs and shovel manure comfortably, but a simple henhouse can be quite a bit smaller. Plus, any housing must be sturdy enough to keep your chickens safe from all the predators out there! Here’s how to build a chicken coop in your backyard.
  • Chickens need food (and water) daily. Feed is about $20 per 50-pound bag at my co-op, but prices vary depending on your location and the quality of the feed. How long a bag lasts depends on the number of chickens that you have.
  • Hens will lay eggs through spring and summer and into the fall, as long as they have 12 to 14 hours of daylight. Expect to collect eggs daily, or even twice a day.
  • All year ‘round, you’ll have to shovel manure. Yippee!
  • If you go away on vacation, you’ll need a reliable chicken-sitter—and they can be scarcer than hens’ teeth!

How to Raise Chickens: Flock Size, Spacing, and Start-Up Cost

How Many Chickens Should I Keep?

Chickens are sociable creatures, so plan to keep three to six birds. With this amount, you’ll always have a steady supply of eggs, since an adult hen lays about two eggs every three days, on average.

Chickens are most productive in the first two years of their lives; after that, egg production will slow, so you’ll need to think about replacing your flock with younger birds eventually. Young chicks can be bought from suppliers quite easily, or you can hatch your own if you have a rooster (which we do NOT recommend). Read more about raising baby chicks here!

How Much Space Do Chickens Need?

Ultimately, it depends on which breed of chicken you’re raising. According to the University of Missouri Extension, one medium-sized chicken needs at least 3 square feet of floor space inside the coop and 8-10 square feet outdoors. The more space, the happier and healthier the chickens will be; overcrowding contributes to disease and feather picking.

The birds will need a place to spread their wings, so to speak: a sizeable chicken run, for example, or a whole backyard. (Our hens have lots of outdoor time. They have places to take a dust bath and catch a few rays.) Either way, the space must be fenced in order to keep the chickens in and predators out. (Predators include your own Fido and Fluffy, too!) Add chicken-wire fencing to your list of equipment.

How Much Does Keeping Chickens Cost?

All of this costs money, of course. The materials to build and furnish a coop and a 20×5-foot run—including wood, fencing, and hardware—are going to set you back at least $300. If you can’t do this work yourself, you’ll also be buying skilled labor.

Overall, expect to spend between $500 and $700 when just getting started, depending on the size of your flock, coop, and run.

Gardening with Chickens

Most folks who keep chickens do so largely for the constant supply of fresh eggs, but did you know that keeping chickens can be also be beneficial for the garden?

When the gardening season has finished for the year, let the chickens into your gardening space and watch them go crazy! They’ll uproot the stems and stalks of weeds and gobble up any damaged or overripe vegetables that remain. They’ll eat any weed seeds or insects they find in the soil, and will peck apart and digest vegetable remnants, especially broccoli stems, carrot tops, chard, and kale. After that, they’ll scratch the ground and peck out hidden worms or insects, mixing up the soil in the process—all with endless enthusiasm and curiosity.

Chickens don’t only provide a constant supply of fresh eggs—they produce an endless amount of manure, too. Luckily, chicken poo can be composted, aged, and eventually added to the garden. In about 6 months’ time, you will accumulate about 1 cubic foot of manure per chicken.

During your daily cleaning of the coop, collect and pile up the chicken poop and used bedding materials. The best decomposition occurs when the pile is 2 parts poop to 1 part bedding materials. Lawn clippings and fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps, as well as leaves, twigs, and shredded paper, can also be added into the mix. Soak the pile and, over the next year or so, wet and stir it regularly to add air. A temperature of 130°F to 150°F is recommended to eliminate bacteria.

More of Raising Chickens 101

Still interested in raising chickens? See more of our beginner’s guide below:

A Rufus tale

Be the person that makes a difference. Be the Rufus. You might fall flat on your face, but it doesn’t matter if you are successful or not. What matters is that you try. video 7MB

Conclusion

A little bit of minor planning right now can guarantee a nice supply of breakfast eggs that would go a long way to help reduce your daily food expenses. Don’t be like the rest. Provide services, have skills, and minor prep work now could really be advantageous in the future for you all.

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Soft boiled eggs over toast.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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There’s an army of ‘bots, and expats demanding that China drop it’s testing and restrictions on coronavirus. Here’s the story why.

The destruction of Russia's Guided Missile Cruiser "Moskva" is prompting calls in Russia for the "special military operation" to be upgraded into a formal declaration of war with Ukraine.

Ah.

It’s a world in turmoil.

Don’t you know.

Ukraine. Taiwan.

Meanwhile… Big, big organized crime throughout the United States. (Excluding the organized crime syndicate known as the “US government”.)

While…

R.6f67154e32c883e91d8f38c2a8625bc8
President Biden

A senile old man, with obvious dimentia is starting to wage war against China and Russia

AND…

India

WITH…

Iran simultaneously.

What. The. Fuck!

is this a nightmare senario, or what?

And inside of China, there’s the kiss of American Propaganda…

There’s an army of ‘bots, and expats demanding that China drop it’s testing and restrictions on coronavirus. They say;

"Stop testing China. It's a waste. You are taking away from people's FREEDOM™. Give it up."

It’s obviously a narrative that has origins from the United States government. The coordination is massive.

The coordination is massive.

And with this coordination comes understanding on the reasons and origin of the narrative

2022 04 16 16 48
2022 04 16 16 48

Keep in mind that China is not going to drop its restrictions while in the middle of a war. There is no way.

This is true. Whether or not it is made official by the United States media or not.

China considers this a DEFCON situation. It is a state of war. And that is all that is important.

2022 04 16 16 49
2022 04 16 16 49

Both Russia and China have extensively documented the United States concerted bioweapon assault and carpet bombing exercises since 2014.

It is official.

It is loged as complains at the United Nations, and it is codified in the joint agreement of super-dooper-friendship between Russia and China made 4FEB22.

So please realize the severity of the situation.

And PLEASE stop comparing China to the piss-poor failure of the United States controlling the light and trivial version(s) of Coronavirus. They are not the same. China is conducting full-spectrum testing for multiple viruses. (Same cost as for a singular virus, don’t you know.)

It’s a DEFCON situation.

2022 04 16 16 52
2022 04 16 16 52

And now, the United States is going “off the deep end“.

Off the deep end = To overreact; to let one’s emotions carry one away.

Yeah. They are “losing it” big time.

Losing it = To start becoming crazy, insane, or mentally unstable.

It is critical that bioweapons be permitted to suppress China, and that will not happen if China remains at DEFCON. So thus you now have the massive anti-China-Coronavirus-policing movement hitting all media right now.

2022 04 16 16 52a
2022 04 16 16 52a

As if, somehow by some magic wand, public opinion is going to influence the Chinese leadership to get off DEFCON and pretend that nothing is happening…

…fat chance.

2022 04 16 16 51
2022 04 16 16 51

I have documented the situation extensively. So, I am tired rehashing the same things over and over again. If you want to dive deep then go into my indexes.

MAIN INDEX

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Let’s continue.

Please ignore the screeching on your forums, your feeds, and e-mail chains. China is in survival mode during a state of war. This is the reality. So shut the FUCK up if you don’t understand.

Ok…

As is my pervue, I will continue to document this curious state of affairs and the on-going situation in my own way. I also include food, cats, China, and pretty girls with a selection of curiousities to throw off the ‘bot farms, the troll roll-calls, and the DDOS attacks. Ah. It works like a charm.

And to that end, we begin with some great coffee.

How to make the perfect cup of coffee

Drinking in the day’s first sip of coffee is like paradise massaging the taste buds. It is, as one coffee-in-a-can company figured out long ago, the best part of waking up.
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Coffee.

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For a single moment at your favorite coffee shop, or while your fingers hug your favorite mug in the kitchen, you’ve been taken to the scene of your last vacation – the day’s worries momentarily melting away, letting you breathe in the serenity of sunshine just as the caffeine smacks your brain.
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Realizing that is exactly why getting the first cup of the day right is so important for any coffee-lover. Nail that perfect cup once, and you won’t want to go back.
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In brief, making the perfect cup of coffee will require three elements, above all else: the right water, the right roast and – this is the biggie – your attention.
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Tempting as it may be to throw your grinds in a Mr. Coffee machine and walk away, it likely won’t produce the results you’re looking for. Show your coffee some love in the brewing process, though, and it’ll give you heaping amounts – or at least a few tablespoons worth – of love in return.
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Below, find the highlights of what you need to know to brew the perfect cup of coffee.
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Finding the Right Roast

Fact: There really is no precise rule on when a roasted coffee is best consumed. But you can count on a fresh roast producing a quality result.
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What you’ll want to do in the search for the right roast and roast age is ask questions of who’s selling you the roast.
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Some coffees (many of them, actually) are ones you’ll want to consume within five days of their roast date for optimal results, while many more are fairly consistent in quality for about a month after the roast date.
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But what flavors you extract are entirely dependent on how porous the beans become over time and how they react to water. And that’s a giant “question mark” even the most talented barista can’t erase.
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If you want to know if your beans are stale, though, pay attention to how it pours in the cup. If you’re not seeing a head – that slight foam that bubbles at the top of your cup – you’ve likely waited too long to use your coffee.
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Getting the Right Water Quality and Temperature

Though it may not be the most pleasant way to think of it, the flavor profile of your coffee depends on how much you’re agitating the beans. Or, rather, how much water is agitating the bean.
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The temperature of your water is what will matter most in determining a coffee’s flavor: Pour at a lower temperature (185 degrees) and you’ll extract fewer of the bean’s nascent flavor notes and end with a more bitter taste; pour at a higher temperature (205 degrees), and you’ll discover a coffee that’s extracted more from the bean.
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This is the process of hydrolysis shaking loose different compounds in your coffee.
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Also important, as you might guess, is the quality of the water you’re using.
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In short: The fewer the minerals in the water, the better. Because tap water quality varies from city to city, invest in a top-shelf filter like a Brita.
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Also, never re-boil water that’s been through the heating process (yes, we know how convenient it is to leave water in a kettle), and wait about 30 seconds after heating your water to actually begin pouring over your coffee.
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And, if you really want to be a chemist about it, test your water to make sure it’s in the range of pH 7.
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Get Your Grind On

Not all grinds are the same; there is no one-size-fits-all grind size for making a quality cup of coffee.
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And, in truth, what constitutes the “right grind” is entirely based on your taste preference.
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But you do need a grinder.
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The two basics to consider when grinding your coffee: Do you want a sweeter cup, and do you want a caffeinated cup? A finer grind – which means smaller particles with a larger surface area to slow the movement of water — will extract more of a coffee’s flavor notes, while a coarse grind will produce a cup that packs a Mike Tyson-level caffeine punch.
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types of coarse ground coffee
types of coarse ground coffee.

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Also, if you’re using an older roast, you’ll almost always want to aim for a finer grind to ensure you’re getting as much flavor as possible.
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Mixing coffee grinds, too, can ruin your perfect-cup-chasing effort.
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To avoid this, clean your grinder after every use, even if it’s just a tap-tap to the machine to shake loose bean debris. It might not be obvious, but those leftover coffee grinds from last Sunday’s brunch will make your fresh roast a lot more bitter.
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One last point of note for grinding: There is also no standard system for grind settings – as ideal as that might be, in a coffee utopia. A “4” on your machine might be a 12 on a different one. Be careful.
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The Impact of Brew Methods

Naturally, one of the biggest variables in how your cup comes out is what you’re using to pour.
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Use a Chemex – or any similar pour-over tool – and you’ll concoct a cup that’s silkier and generally more acidic. (Or “brighter,” if you’ve heard the term before.) It’s the preferred method for coffees that have citrus or floral notes; with a Chemex filter, coffee is less exposed to water and all-around less bitter.
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chemtrex
chemtrex

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By comparison, a French Press – which no one can definitively say was invented in France, by the way – will produce an oilier, more full-bodied cup of coffee.
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French Press.

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Think: More velvet than silk. Because it’s a steeping method, you’re likely to get a more consistent taste with a French Press, regardless of roast or targeted coffee flavor notes. But it’s especially ideal for an earthier coffee.
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Percolators and batch brews, meanwhile, will offer a reasonably consistent result for your coffee, but also offer less control over the process.
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s l1600
s l1600 Percolator.

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Meanwhile, an AeroPress – by all means it’s own beast to tackle – will give you more of a hybrid of the Chemex and a French Press methods, offering up an abundance of versatility with how it’s used.
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AeroPress.

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How to brew a cup of paradise(joe) using a French Press

Finally, here’s the step-by-step of what you need to know to brew your ideal cup – using a French Press. Outside of the coffee machine that might still be lingering in your pantry from the ‘80s, the French Press is what most of us will be familiar with as manual brewing. So, here’s a rundown of what you need to do to perfect your cup (or two) of coffee.
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1

Measure your coffee.
The standard ratio is approximately 2 tablespoons of coffee per 6 ounces of water. Don’t be afraid to add a few extra beans to be on the safe side – you can more approximately measure out your coffee using a scale after it’s ground.

2

Grind your coffee.
Alright, this is where the coffee-making process really begins. Go for a finer roast if you want a sweeter cup of coffee, or a coarser grind if you’re aiming for a satisfying, weighty bitter. Make sure the grinder is clean before using, then feel free to press the magic button.

3

Prepare the water.
You’ll want to prepare the water last, to ensure the water is the temperature you’re aiming for. Pour from the filter, and let the water sit off from the boil for about 30 seconds before immersing your coffee grounds in the French Press.

4

Pour.
Saturate the grounds evenly with a smooth, steady pour that will agitate the coffee grounds. Do not put the lid on top of the brewer just yet.

5

Soak and stir.
Let the grounds absorb the water for approximately 30 seconds before stirring – a few gentle motions using the back of a spoon around the top layer of the mixture and along the sides, to immerse any grounds that are stuck.

6

Brew.
Let the water extract from the grounds for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Less than that, and you’ll find your coffee may be too sweet or even sour. Any longer, and your coffee will be over-extracted and unappetizingly bitter – so, set a timer.

7

Plunge.
There really is no wrong way to push here – just a simple, even push-through of the filter down to the bottom. However, it’s not a clogged toilet – don’t exert too much force or, of course, your coffee will splash. Or you may break the machine, if it’s glass.

8

Pour.
Word to the wise: The flavor notes of your coffee will change as the cup cools. If at first you’re not tasting what was intended, let it continue to setup. What you taste when it’s piping hot is not what you’ll taste when it’s cooled to a lukewarm temperature.
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Final coffee thoughts…

Just like paradise is in the eye of the beholder, so too is the perfect cup of coffee. The joy of coffee – beyond those transporting effects its caffeine kick offers in the morning – is how much experimentation is involved. It’s the ultimate test of trial and error. Don’t be afraid to experiment with grind sizes, coffee roasts, water temperatures and brew methods until you find your “just right” cup of coffee. Let your taste buds be the map to paradise.
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Plausible Deniability: Was Russian Warship Sunk by American Harpoons (and AEGIS)?

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By Nauman Sadiq for VT Islamabad

In a significantly escalatory move, Ukraine’s Operational Command South announced Thursday that it hit a Russian warship with a “Ukrainian-made Neptune anti-ship missile” that was operating roughly 60 miles south off the coast of Odesa in southeast Ukraine and that it had started to sink.

“In the Black Sea operational zone, Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles hit the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet—it received significant damage,” the Ukrainian statement said. “A fire broke out. Other units of the ship’s group tried to help, but a storm and a powerful explosion of ammunition overturned the cruiser and it began to sink.”

Russia’s defense ministry claimed the “accidental fire” on the Soviet-era guided-missile cruiser Moskva had been contained, but left the ship badly damaged. Though the Russian statement initially claimed the cruiser “remained afloat” and measures were being taken to tow it to port, it later admitted the warship had sunk as four Russian ships that had gone to the Moskva’s rescue were hampered by bad weather and by ammunition exploding on board.

Late on Thursday, the Russian ministry said in a statement: “The cruiser ship Moskva lost its stability when it was towed to the port because of the damage to the ship’s hull that it received during the fire from the detonation of ammunition. In stormy sea conditions, the ship sank.” The statement added the crew had been safely evacuated to other Black Sea Fleet ships in the area.

Russian news agencies said the 611-foot-long (186 meters) Moskva, with a crew of almost 500, was commissioned in 1983 and refurbished in 1998. It was one of the three cruisers in Russia’s formidable Black Sea Fleet. The Moskva was armed with a range of anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles as well as torpedoes and naval guns and close-in missile defense systems, including 16 anti-ship Vulkan cruise missiles with a range of at least 700 km (440 miles).

Reportedly, the warship was also carrying S-300 anti-air missiles, which are crucial to Russia’s air-defense capabilities over Crimea and Ukraine’s Kherson province, captured by Russian troops in early days of the military campaign. It is the first time Moscow has lost a cruiser since German planes sank the Chervona Ukraina (Red Ukraine) in 1941 at Sevastopol – the Crimean naval base to which the Moskva was being towed when it sank.

Maksym Marchenko, the Ukrainian governor of the region around Odesa, said the Moskva had been hit by two cruise missiles. “Neptune missiles guarding the Black Sea caused very serious damage,” he said. The Neptune missile that is claimed to have punched a hole in the Moskva’s hull was developed and upgraded by Ukraine from a Soviet missile design. It is fired from a mobile launcher with a range of 100 km.

Western officials reportedly described the Ukrainian claims to have hit the Moskva with anti-ship missiles as “credible”. A senior US defense official noted that five other Russian vessels that had been as close as or closer to the Ukrainian coast than the Moskva had moved at least another 20 nautical miles offshore after the explosion, suggesting an effort to get out of range of Ukrainian missiles.

“In the wake of the damage that the Moskva experienced, all of the northern Black Sea ships have now moved out, away from the northern areas they were operating in,” the defense official told Guardian.

In retaliation for sinking the warship, Russian forces for the first time, since scaling back Russia’s offensive north of the capital announced at the Istanbul peace initiative on March 29, struck military targets in Kyiv, Kherson in the south, the eastern city of Kharkiv and the town of Ivano-Frankivsk in the west, though there were no immediate reports of casualties.

Although Ukraine claimed the Russian warship was struck by a “Ukrainian-made Neptune anti-ship missile,” developed domestically based on the Soviet KH-35 cruise missile that became operational in the Ukrainian naval forces just last year, Politico reported on March 16 that Kyiv had specifically demanded “long-range anti-ship missiles” from Washington.

“A Western diplomat familiar with Ukraine’s requests said Kyiv specifically has asked the US and allies for more Stingers and Starstreak man-portable air-defense systems, Javelins and other anti-tank weapons, ground-based mobile air-defense systems, armed drones, long-range anti-ship missiles, off-the-shelf electronic warfare capabilities, and satellite navigation and communications jamming equipment.”
Lending credence to the reports the United States has already delivered Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Ukraine, the Washington Post reported on March 5: “During an official visit, a Ukrainian special operations commander told Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and other lawmakers that they were shifting training and planning to focus on maintaining an armed opposition, relying on insurgent-like tactics.

“Ukrainian officials told the lawmakers that they were frustrated that the United States had not sent Harpoon missiles to target Russian ships and Stinger missiles to attack Russian aircraft, Moulton and Waltz said in separate interviews.”

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 7, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley revealed that US and NATO countries have collectively provided roughly 60,000 anti-tank weapons and 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons during NATO’s “weapons for peace” program to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24.

Although Milley did not specifically mention providing Harpoons to Ukrainian forces, according to informed sources, caches of anti-ship missiles had also been provided to Ukraine’s naval forces deployed in Odesa in southeast Ukraine.

In addition to the CIA’s clandestine program for training Ukraine’s largely conscript military and allied neo-Nazi militias in Donbas in east Ukraine aimed at cultivating an anti-Russian insurgency in Ukraine, and the US Special Forces program for training Ukraine’s security forces at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part of the country bordering Poland that was hit by a barrage of 30 Russian cruise missiles killing at least 35 militants on March 13, the Pentagon revealed last week that it had also been training Ukrainian troops that were inside the US before Russia launched its invasion.

The Ukrainian soldiers were participating in a pre-scheduled professional military education program at the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School in Biloxi, Mississippi, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, according to Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby.

That school is a security cooperation school, operating under the US Special Operations Command in support of “foreign security assistance and geographic combatant commanders’ theater security cooperation priorities.” The Ukrainian forces received “training on patrol craft operations, communications and maintenance,” Kirby said.

Since the conclusion of the course in early March, the Department of Defense provided the group “additional advanced tactical training” on the systems the United States has provided to Ukraine, including on “the Switchblade unmanned aerial vehicle,” Kirby said.

Several batches of Ukrainian naval cadets trained at the Naval Training School in Biloxi, Mississippi, have already returned home to Ukraine and were deployed in Odessa and the rest are now headed back to Ukraine.

Besides receiving advanced tactical training on operating the Switchblade kamikaze drones and unmanned coastal defense boats, included in the additional $800 million in military assistance to Ukraine announced by the Biden administration on Wednesday, the Ukrainian naval cadets also received training on operating long-range anti-ship missiles in the United States.

Reportedly, the US-trained Ukrainian naval forces deployed in Odesa in the southeast scored two hits of Harpoon anti-ship missiles on the Russian guided-missile cruiser Moskva operating 60 miles south off the coast of Odessa that punched a hole in the warship’s hull and ignited a blaze that, in turn, caused the massive amount of ammunition loaded on the cruiser to explode, and the battleship subsequently sank to the bottom of the Black Sea.

To return the favor of halting Russian military campaign north of the capital and focusing on liberating Russian-majority Donbas in east Ukraine, practically spelling an end to Russia’s month-long offensive in the embattled country, NATO powers have announced transferring heavy weapons, including combat tanks, armored personnel carriers, long-range artillery and even helicopters and Soviet MiG aircraft, to Ukraine to escalate the conflict.

The latest $800 million military assistance package to Ukraine announced by the Biden administration on Wednesday includes 11 Mi-17 helicopters that had been earmarked for Afghanistan before the US-backed government collapsed last year. It also includes 18 155mm howitzers, along with 40,000 artillery rounds, 10 counter-artillery radars, 200 armored personnel carriers, 500 Javelin anti-tank missiles, and 300 additional Switchblade drones.

Besides direct military assistance from the United States, the rest of NATO member states are also pouring in significant amount of heavy weapons in Ukraine. Czechoslovakia used to have the most advanced military-industrial complex in Central Europe during the Soviet era. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and subsequent separation of the “conjoined twins” in 1993, the Czech Republic has inherited the Soviet weaponry. Famous of its arms black market, Czech weapons have been found in war theaters as far away as Syria, Libya and South Sudan.

The Czech Republic had delivered tanks, multiple rocket launchers, howitzers and infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine among military shipments that had reached hundreds of millions of dollars and would continue, two Czech defense sources confided to Reuters.

Defense sources confirmed a shipment of five T-72 tanks and five BVP-1, or BMP-1, infantry fighting vehicles seen on rail cars in photographs on Twitter and video footage last week. “For several weeks, we have been supplying heavy ground equipment – I am saying it generally but by definition it is clear that this includes tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, howitzers and multiple rocket launchers,” a senior defense official said.

“What has gone from the Czech Republic is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The senior defense official said the Czechs were also supplying a range of anti-aircraft weaponry. Independent defense analyst Lukas Visingr said short-range air-defense systems Strela-10, or SA-13 Gopher in NATO terminology, had been spotted on a train apparently bound for Ukraine.

One agreed shipment authorized by the German government includes 56 Czechoslovak-made infantry fighting vehicles that used to be operated by East Germany. Berlin passed the IFVs on to Sweden at the end of the 1990s, which later sold them to a Czech company that now aims to sell them to Kyiv, according to German Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

After the scuttled aircraft-transfer deal that would’ve seen Poland handing over its entire fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine in return for the United States “backfilling” the Polish Air Force with American F-16s last month, now Slovakia was in talks with NATO about an arrangement that could allow Bratislava to send fighter jets to Ukraine, Prime Minister Eduard Heger told reporters on April 11.

Considering that the Biden administration has already announced delivering 11 Mi-17 helicopters in its latest $800 million military assistance package to Ukraine, therefore in all likelihood the Slovak aircraft-transfer deal is also going to go through. The Slovak prime minister did not put a number on how many MiG-29 aircraft Slovakia would provide to Ukraine, but the country is reported to have around a dozen.

Eduard Heger said his government wanted to “move away from reliance on the Soviet MiGs” in any case. “This is equipment that we want to finish anyway, because we’re waiting for the F-16s,” he added, referring to US-made jets that Slovakia was scheduled to receive in 2024, though Bratislava could receive American fighter jets earlier as soon as it transfers the MiG fleet to Ukraine.

Asking for permanent US military presence in Central Europe to deter Russia, though making an artificial distinction between “permanent deployment” vs. “rotational deployment at permanent bases” in order to sound like a peacenik, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley proposed before the House Armed Services Committee:

“My advice would be to create permanent bases but don’t permanently station (forces), so you get the effect of permanence by rotational forces cycling through permanent bases,” he said. “I believe that a lot of our European allies, especially those such as the Baltics or Poland and Romania, and elsewhere — they’re very, very willing to establish permanent bases. They’ll build them, they’ll pay for them.”
“I do think this is a very protracted conflict and I think it’s at least measured in years. I don’t know about decades, but at least years for sure,”
 said Milley. 

“I think that NATO, the United States, Ukraine and all of the allies and partners that are supporting Ukraine are going to be involved in this for quite some time.”

We are now facing two global powers: China and Russia, each with significant military capabilities both who intend to fundamentally change the rules based current global order. We are entering a world that is becoming more unstable and the potential for significant international conflict is increasing, not decreasing,” – Gen. Milley

Ukraine war: Germany boosts military aid budget to €2 billion

This comes with the huge billions of dollars from the Untied States. So much money is just pouring into Ukraine. This is the direct result of the outcome of propaganda that Russia is losing the war!

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OMG! This is such a classic!

It’s truly America. This is from the 1970s, and Mary Harman, Mary Harman truly represented life during that period of time.

What American think.

I pulled these quotes from “Free Republic” and it give a pretty good idea about the thoughts on what Americans think about the war that Russia is involved in and how America plays into the mix.

Maybe Putin will get whacked by his own people.

2 posted on 4/14/2022, 9:09:33 PM by rrrod

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For the record, Putin was more democratically elected than Joe Biden.

5 posted on 4/14/2022, 9:12:05 PM by blackberry1
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Putin is beginning to look like hitler in the bunker who was moving around imaginary divisions to defend Germany. He is already taking out anyone who he thinks failed or opposed him. Bad news because hitler let the whole place go down rather then admit defeat.

11 posted on 4/14/2022, 9:16:43 PM by Mouton
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Nukes are all Putin has. His navy is incompetent. His ground forces are a 1500 klics away in Ukraine and not very successful. His AF has yet to achieve supremacy. But his nuclear forces are present. Threatening to use them is all he has and he is insane enough to do it. In the old CP days the Politburo would have removed him, either to a Black Sea dacha or to a state funeral. But now?????

16 posted on 4/14/2022, 9:22:04 PM by xkaydet65 ( )
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Well if Russia’s nuclear arsenal is like the rest of their military, then half will fail to detonate at all and the other half will hit Russian cities due to a targeting error.

20 posted on 4/14/2022, 9:24:59 PM by apillar

They are fully influenced by MSM Vault 7. They belive the Kool Aide that they swill. Obviously to most CONSERVATIVE Americans, war is a true spectator sport. It will never “hit” home. They believe.

I will hate to tell them differently.

A curious find.

From DM, who said, “Thought you might be interested in this article. My first thought was that they could be preparing to use it to make a dirty bomb for the alleged false flag in NYC on the 18th (assuming the “Looking glass” shit is real). Do you think it could be used feasibly in such a device, or would it be too small to have any noticeable effects?”

Nuclear Device Missing from Stolen Vehicle in Philadelphia (msn.com)

Nice find, but 8 millicuries of Cesium-137 isn’t going to do too much. The big threat is this incident can be used as part of a larger narrative stream.

Russia sends formal letter warning US to stop arming Ukraine: report

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BY SARAKSHI RAI – 04/15/22 7:51 AM
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Russia has sent a formal letter to the U.S. warning that shipments of sensitive weapons from the United States and NATO were exacerbating tensions in Ukraine and could lead to “unpredictable consequences,” The Washington Post reported.
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The letter, which was viewed by he Post, added that the U.S. has flouted the rules governing the transfer of weapons to conflict zones.
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According to the letter dated Tuesday, Russia accused NATO of impeding early peace negotiation with Ukraine “in order to continue the bloodshed.”
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The State Department declined to confirm any private diplomatic correspondence.
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However, a spokesperson added that it can confirm that along with allies and partners, “we are providing Ukraine with billions of dollars worth of security assistance, which our Ukrainian partners are using to extraordinary effect to defend their country against Russia’s unprovoked aggression and horrific acts of violence.”
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The news of the diplomatic letter comes as President Biden announced an additional $800 million in military assistance to Ukraine this week, which for the first time included advanced munitions that the war-torn country has requested.
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“The Ukrainian military has used the weapons we are providing to devastating effect. As Russia prepares to intensify its attack in the Donbas region, the United States will continue to provide Ukraine with the capabilities to defend itself,” Biden said.
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The information warfare being waged to enforce a single narrative about the war in Ukraine. 

It may be worse than McCarthyism, which was defeated by its own excesses. Today’s information war against individuals and media who do not adhere to the Western-government-enforced narrative on Ukraine is part of a long history in the U.S. of officially crushing dissent. With the advances of technology for both surveillance and censorship, we might be in the most chilling atmosphere yet for thought control. Will it too be brought down by its own excesses?

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Princess Diana Meets Mr Bean In 1984

unknown history in photos 12
Princess Diana Meets Mr Bean In 1984.

The Professor Builds a Telephone to Call for Help – Gilligan’s Island – 1966

I well remember this episode. I think I was five years old when I last watched it. LOL. You don’t need to watch the whole thing. Just stick your head in for a peek and move on.

Kinzhal and Kalibr with nuclear warheads:  ‘Limited’ Tactical Nuclear Weapons Would Be Catastrophic

Experts say the risk in Ukraine is not the deployment of a giant “strategic” weapon, but a “tactical” weapon with a smaller warhead that causes localised devastation.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin has given orders to increase the alert level of Russia’s nuclear forces and has made veiled nuclear threats. The blatant aggression against Ukraine has shocked Europe and the world. The war is a tragedy for Ukraine. It also exposes the limits of the West’s reliance on nuclear deterrence.

Deterrence refers to the idea that possessing nuclear weapons protects a nation from attack, through the threat of overwhelming retaliation. This concept is widely credited for helping prevent war between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine casts a harsh light on its downsides. Most obvious is that Putin is using nuclear deterrence not to protect Russia but rather to have his way in Ukraine. Russia’s nuclear weapons deter the West from intervening with conventional military forces to defend Ukraine. Despite scattered calls in the U.S. for the creation of a “no-fly zone” over some or all of Ukraine, the Biden administration has wisely resisted. In practice this would mean shooting down Russian planes. It could lead to World War III. On the other side of the ledger, NATO’s nuclear weapons presumably deter Russia from expanding the war to NATO countries, such as Poland, Romania or the Baltic states. Thus, the nuclear balance of terror likely deters a wider European war but leaves Ukraine to struggle on with only limited support and perhaps eventually to be swallowed. On balance, NATO states do not seem very reassured by their vaunted nuclear deterrence. They continue to worry about the (remote) possibility of a Russian conventional attack beyond Ukraine.

This is not the first time Putin has rattled the nuclear saber. He also did so in 2014 during Russia’s invasion of Crimea, when Russian leaders talked openly about putting nuclear weapons on alert. In 2015, Russia threatened Danish warships with nuclear weapons if Denmark joined NATO’s missile defense system. Putin likes to wave about his nuclear weapons as a reminder to the West (and perhaps to himself) that Russia is still a great power. In the current crisis, Putin clearly wants the US and NATO to know that if the West were to intervene with military force on behalf of Ukraine, he might reach for his so-called tactical (or “nonstrategic”) nuclear weapons.

In the world of nuclear weapons, tactical means an exceedingly large amount of explosive energy and strategic means even larger. Most nuclear weapons today are variable-yield, or “dial-a-yield,” providing a set amount of explosive energy that can range from fractions of a kiloton to multiples of a megaton. (For example, the U.S.’s newest version of its B61 nuclear bomb can release 0.3, 1.5, 10 or 50 kilotons of explosive energy. In comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kilotons.) Russia has about 6,500 nuclear warheads in its arsenal. Of these, the ones of largest yield—the “strategic” weapons—are deployed on submarines, bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

But Russia also possesses some 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons kept in storage facilities throughout the country, developed to be used against troops and installations in a small area or in a limited engagement. Such weapons can be launched on the same short-range missiles Russia is currently using to bombard Ukraine, such as its Iskander ballistic missile, which has a range of about 500 kilometers. And these are not the only tactical weapons that could be deployed; the United States has about 100 nuclear “gravity bombs” (with less sophisticated guidance) stationed around Europe.

Tactical nuclear weapons exist because each side fears it would be deterred from using its big city-razing weapons by their very destructiveness. By making nuclear weapons smaller and the targeting more precise, their use becomes more thinkable. Paradoxically, while this makes deterrence threats more credible, it also makes the arms more tempting to use first, rather than simply in retaliation.

No one should imagine, however, that it makes sense to use a tactical nuclear weapon. A thermonuclear explosion of any size possesses overwhelming destructive power. Even a “small-yield” nuclear weapon (0.3 kilotons) would produce damage far beyond that of a conventional explosive. (For a graphic depiction, the interactive site NUKEMAP, created by nuclear historian Alexander Wellerstein, allows you to simulate the effects of a nuclear explosion of any size anywhere on the planet.) It would also cause all the horrors of Hiroshima, albeit on a smaller scale. A tactical nuclear weapon would produce a fireball, shock waves, and deadly radiation that would cause long-term health damage in survivors. Radioactive fallout would contaminate air, soil, water and the food supply (Ukrainians are already familiar with this kind of outcome because of the disastrous meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986).

No one knows if using a tactical nuclear weapon would trigger full-scale nuclear war. Nevertheless, the risk of escalation is very real. Those on the receiving end of a nuclear strike are not likely to ask whether it was tactical or strategic. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on February 6, 2018, then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis stated “I do not think there is any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game changer.” Russian leaders have made clear that they would view any nuclear attack as the start of an all-out nuclear war.

Especially worrisome is the possibility that the war could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons. By increasing the alert level of Russian nuclear forces, Putin increases the risk of nuclear use through miscalculation or accident in the fog of war. In the worst scenario, if the war is going badly, Putin could reach for a tactical nuclear weapon out of desperation. While this is still unlikely, the risk is not zero. And increasing that risk is unacceptable. Although innumerable nuclear weapons have been tested over the years, not one has been used in warfare (or terrorism) since 1945. The 77-year-old tradition of nuclear nonuse—the nuclear taboo—is the single most important accomplishment of the nuclear age. It is a primary obligation of leaders today to make sure nuclear weapons are never used again. Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov should stop threatening nuclear weapons. Other leaders should express shock and outrage, and make it clear that nuclear threats are irresponsible and unacceptable.

Nuclear deterrence comes with tremendous risks and enormous costs. The arguments in favor of deterrence, although sometimes convincing, are not always true. We must acknowledge that nuclear deterrence could fail. That’s why, despite the trillions of dollars spent on nuclear arsenals, no one sleeps soundly under a nuclear umbrella—especially during a crisis such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Marriage advice from a group of women

unknown history in photos 16
“Marriage Advice For Young Ladies From A Suffragette, 1918. The Pamphlet Is On Display At The Pontypridd Museum In Wales. The Suffragette Is Unknown”.

Who is Creating a New Chinese Boogey Man? (An Examination of Modern Psychological Warfare)

By Matthew Ehret

Since many good people have found themselves susceptible to the narrative that China is the global supervillain conspiring to overthrow western Christian values by any means necessary, I believe some lessons should be brought to bear.

  1. Anti-Nation state fanatic George Soros stated at the 2020 Davos Summit that China has become the greatest threat to his vision for Open Society (right behind Trump’s USA). This was echoed by Lord Malloch Brown’s 2020 Global Government Speeches.
  2. China’s deep alliance with Russia and the increased integration of the Eurasian Economic Union with the 135 nation strong Belt and Road Initiative form the basis of an alternative multipolar paradigm has kept imperialists up at night for the past several years.
  3. The prospect of a US-China-Russia alliance has been one of the greatest threats to empire which peeked in the weeks before COVID-19 arose onto the scene as the US-China Trade Pact successfully entered its first phase (and has since fallen into shambles) as well as Trump’s repeated calls for “good relations with Russia.”

Amidst the surge of anti-China media psy ops published across Five Eyes nations, countless patriots of a conservative bent have found themselves absorbed into a red-scare manic hysteria while forgetting that the actual causal hand of British Intelligence has been caught blatantly running the overthrow of nation states for decades (including the 2016-2020 to run regime change within the USA itself).

Understanding the nature of the current psy ops, and new red scare deflection underway, it is necessary to review some seriously underappreciated facts of recent history, and since former secretary of State Sir Henry Kissinger (a genuine Knight of the British Empire), figures prominently in this story, it is wise to start with his relationship with China.

Although he is celebrated for being an “enlightened” liberal politician who helped China open up to the west after the dark days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution by extending western markets to China, the truth is very different.

A devout proponent of world government and population control, Kissinger had been the tool selected during a particularly important period of human history to advance a new ordering of world affairs.

2022 04 16 10 22
2022 04 16 10 22

The Division of the World Into Producers and Consumers

Since the world was taken off the gold reserve system way back in 1971, a new age of “post-industrialism” was unleashed onto a globalized world. Humanity was given a new type of system which presumed that both our nature and the cause of value itself were located in the act of consuming. The old idea that our nature was creative, and that our wealth was tied to producing, was assumed to be an obsolete thing of the past… a relic of a dirty old industrial age.

Under the new post-1971 operating system, we were told that the world would now be divided among producers and consumers.

The “have-not producers” would provide the cheap labor which first world consumers would increasingly rely on for the creation of goods they used to make for themselves. “First world” nations were told that according to the new post-industrial rules of de-regulation and market economics, that they should export their heavy industry, machine tools and other productive sectors abroad as they transitioned into “white collar” post-industrial consumer societies. The longer this outsourcing of industries went on, the less western nations found themselves capable of sustaining their own citizenries, building their own infrastructure or determining their own economic destinies.

In place of full spectrum economies that once saw over 40% of North America’s labor force employed in manufacturing, a new addiction to “buying cheap stuff” began, and a “service economies” took over like a cancer.

2022 04 16 10 24
2022 04 16 10 24

 

To make matters worse, the many newly independent nations struggling to liberate themselves from colonialism were told that they would have to abandon their dreams of development since those goals would render the formula of a producer-consumer stratified society impossible to create. Those leaders resisting this edict would face assassination or CIA overthrow. Those leaders who adapted to the new rules would become peons of the new age of “Economic Hitmen”.

China and the West: The Real Story

By the time Deng Xiaoping announced the “opening up” of China in 1978, Kissinger had already managed the economic paradigm shift of 1971, the artificial “oil shock therapy” of 1973 and authored his 1974 NSSM 200 Report which transformed U.S. Foreign Policy from a pro-development orientation towards a new policy of depopulation targeting the poor nations of the global south under the logic that the resources under their soil were the lawful possession of the USA.

The NSSM 200 (titled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests”) outlined its objective “Assistance for population moderation should give emphasis to the largest and fastest growing developing countries where there is a special US and strategic interest”.

Kissinger, and the hives of Trilateral Commission/CFR operatives to which he was beholden never looked on China as a true ally, but merely as a zone of abundant cheap labor which would feed cheap goods to the now post-industrial west under their new dystopic producer-consumer world order. It was in that same year that Kissinger’s fellow Trilateral Commission cohort Paul Volcker announced a “controlled disintegration of western society” which was begun in full with the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes to 20% that ensured a vast destruction of small and medium businesses across the board.

Believing China (then still largely an impoverished third world country) to be desperate enough to accept money and short-term salvation after years of trauma induced by the Cultural Revolution. Under Kissinger’s logic, China would receive just enough money to sustain a static existence but would never be able to stand on its own two feet.

Unbeknownst to Kissinger, China’s leaders under the direction of Zhou Enlai, and his disciple Deng Xiaoping had a much longer-term strategic perspective than their western partners imagined.

While receiving much needed revenue from foreign exports, China began to slowly create the foundations for a genuine renaissance which would be made possible by slowly learning the skills, leapfrogging technologies and acquiring means of production which the west had once pioneered. Zhou Enlai had first enunciated this visionary program as early as 1963 under his Four Modernizations mandate (Industrial, agricultural, national defense and science and technology) and then restated this program in January 1976 weeks before his death.

This program manifested itself in the July 6, 1978 State Council Forum on the “Principles to Guide the Four Modernizations” informed by the findings of international exploratory missions conducted by economist Gu Mu’s delegations around various advanced world economies (Japan, Hong Kong, Western Europe). The findings of Gu Mu’s reports laid out the concrete pathways for full spectrum economic sovereignty with a focus on cultivating the cognitive creative powers of a new generation of scientists that would drive the non linear breakthroughs needed for China to ultimately break free of the rules of closed-system economics which technocrats like Kissinger wished the world adhere to.

Deng Xiaoping broke from the radical Marxism prevalent among the intelligentsia by redefining “labor” from purely material constraints and elevating the concept rightfully to the higher domain of mind saying:

“We should select several thousand of our most qualified personnel within the scientific and technological establishment and create conditions that will allow them to devote their undivided attention to research. Those who have financial difficulties should be given allowances and subsidies… we must create within the party an atmosphere of respect for knowledge and respect for trained personnel. The erroneous attitude of not respecting intellectuals must be opposed. All work. Be it mental or manual, is labor.”

Over the course of the coming decades, China learned, and like any student, copied, reverse engineered and reconstructed western techniques as it slowly generated capacities that ultimately allowed them press on the limits of human knowledge outpacing all western models.

Scientific and technological progress became the driving force of its entire economy and by 1986, the “863 Project for Research and Development” was announced which focused on areas of space, lasers, energy, biotechnology, new materials, automation and information technology. This project became the driver for creative innovation guided by the National Science Foundation and was upgraded to the 973 Basic Research Program in 2009 to: “1) support multidisciplinary and fundamental research of relevance to national development; 2) Promote frontline basic research; 3) Support the cultivation of scientific talent capable of original research; and 4) Build high-quality interdisciplinary research centers.”

The fruits of these long term programs was beginning to be felt and by 1996, discussion for a New Silk Road reviving the ancient trade routes connecting China to Europe and Africa through the Middle East and Caucasus was beginning with conferences hosted by Beijing under President Jiang Zemin.

One of the few western participants at these Chinese events was the Schiller Institute, whose founders delivered a full day seminar in 1997 describing the program that would finally come back to life in 2013 when Xi Jinping made it the focus of China’s foreign policy outlook under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Why did this program wait until 2013 to blossom onto the world stage when obvious momentum was already in motion in 1997?

“A French Woman With Her Baguette And Six Bottles Of Wine, Paris, France, 1945”

I am curious. Is this how baguettes are made in France today? Does France still have wine delivery services?

unknown history in photos 23
I am curious. Is this how baguettes are made in France today? Does France still have wine delivery services?

Chicken Paprikash

Spices lose their flavor over time but few as quickly as paprika, which starts out tasting of pepper and sunshine but deteriorates in but a few months to sawdust and bitterness.

02COOKING CHICKENPAPRIKASH2 articleLarge
Massive YUM!

For this recipe, get some new at the market: sweet or hot Hungarian paprika is best, but the generic article isn’t terrible and the smoky Spanish varieties known as pimentón de La Vera would not be out of place either, lending a deep, woodsy aroma reminiscent of cooking over an open fire. It’s a dish that pairs beautifully with butter-slicked egg noodles.

Hint. Hint.

But rice is fine too.

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2022 04 16 20 56

George Soros and the Attack on the Asian Markets

From May 1997, George Soros’ targeting of the Southeast Asian “Tigers economies” of Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Laos, and Malaysia with speculative short sales of their local currencies resulted months of vast anarchy across all of Asia and the world more broadly. Currencies collapsed from 10-80% over the next 8 months and took many years to begin to recover.

Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammed was brave enough to call out Soros’ economic warfare and did much to help his nation weather the storm by imposing capital controls to maintain some semblance of stability calling out the speculator saying: “as much as people who produce and distribute drugs are criminals, because they destroy nations, the people who undermine the economies of poor nations are too.” Chinese President Jiang Zemin followed suit calling Soros “a financial sniper” and stated he would not let the speculator enter Chinese markets.

As analyst Michael Billington astutely wrote in his August 1997 EIR report:

The ultimate target is China. The British are particularly worried about the increasingly close collaboration between China and the ASEAN nations, which are being integrated into the massive regional and continental development projects initiated by China under the umbrella of the Eurasian Continental Land-Bridge program. 

Such real development policies offer the alternative to the cheap-labor, colonial-style export industries of the “globalization” model- the model that has led to the financial bubbles now bursting worldwide.”

Forward full text from <redacted>.

The reasoning is solid:

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I just received this urgent msg. China has urged its citizens to keep physical goods and not paper money. There will be a huge round of inflation as the US, Japan, UK, Sweden, etc, are printing more and more money. So the Chinese are planning not to accept USD but only their RMB for payments,
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RECEIVED THIS CHINESE ARTICLE FROM CONTACTS IN GUANGZHOU…
ARTICLE CIRCULATING WITHIN CHINA REMINDING PEOPLE TO BUY CHINESE MADE PRODUCTS…
朋友,请你看清时势:


( Translated by tl )

Friends, please observe the current situation clearly:

中国大陆开始施行自我保护措施了!

MAINLAND CHINA HAS BEGUN TO IMPLEMENT SELF-PROTECTION MEASURES!

一是保护国民安全,大幅度减少入境人员。

#1. It is to protect the safety of the people and drastically reduce the number of people entering China.

二是保护国民资产,减缓实物出口。

#2. Secondly is to protect national assets and slow down physical exports.

当美国疫情爆发而长期得不到有效防治时,该国人员隔离、生产停滞、迅速消耗存量物资,又拼命降息、只懂得印钞票进行所谓经济刺激,实际上这是用纸币来掠夺实物,当这个国家存货实物极度匮乏时,纸币就贱如卫生纸,雷同如冥币。

When the U.S. ( COVID-19 ) epidemic broke out and there was no effective preventive measures and control for a long time… the country’s populations were isolated, production stagnated, and stocks of supplies quickly dwindled, and the Federal Reserve desperately cut interest rates ( to stimulate the economy ) including PRINTING BANK NOTES for the so-called economic stimulus. WHEN THE COUNTRY'S INVENTORY IS EXTREMELY RUNNING LOW AND SCARCE. BANKNOTES BECOMES AS CHEAP AS TOILET PAPER AND SIMILAR TO COPPER COINS.

如果是国际货币,则掠夺的是其他生产国的物资。 生产国换取的外汇,因为疫情,吃穿住行购物旅游都无法实现,还不断的贬值,持币者大亏。

AS THE DOLLAR IS AN INTERNATIONAL CURRENCY, IT IS EQUIVALENT TO PLUNDERING THE MATERIALS, LABOUR AND SERVICES OF OTHER GOODS PRODUCING COUNTRIES.

Due to this COVID-19 epidemic… food, clothing, housing, transportation, shopping, and travel could not be realized in the foreign exchange by the producing . country, and the value of the currency holders has continuously depreciated.

欧元、美元、英磅、瑞元,都是这样的货币,会逐渐冥纸化。 所以,中国明白了,哪一国疫情不治,大陆就不再拿实物去换冥币一样的外汇。

The Euro, the US dollar, the British pound, and the Swiss franc are all such currencies and will gradually become useless paper. Therefore, China understands that in any country where the epidemic is not under control, the CHINESE WILL NO LONGER EXCHANGE PHYSICAL OBJECTS FOR FOREIGN CURRENCY LIKE THESE COPPER COINS.

高筑墙,广积粮,p自我内部循环,保证财富不流失,等待《以物易物》或人民币国际化。

Build high walls ( TO ISOLATE ), accumulate grains, internal trade and consumption and ensure that 'wealth' is not lost, instead wait for "BARTERING FOR GOODS" OR THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE CHINESE RMB.

我们有此行动,估计越南、印度、马来西亚、印尼... 等生产国也会采取类似关门措施。

We have taken this action, and it is estimated that Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Indonesia... and other producing countries will also adopt similar "CLOSE DOOR" MEASURES.

大家都明白,谁拿实物换冥币,谁就是傻瓜。

Everyone understands that whoever exchanges real physical things for THIS COPPER COIN is a fool.

美国这个月内,增发1.9万亿亿美元,欧盟,日元也是大量印钞票。

Just within this month, the United States has issued an additional 1.9 TRILLION US DOLLARS, and the EUROPEAN UNION and the JAPANESE also printed a large amount of money.

全世界都在靠印钞票度过危机,人民币何去何从这很重要。 跟风的话,通货膨胀,苦果自己吃;不跟的话,等于人民币在抵消货币的通货膨胀,损失还是自己。

The whole world is relying on PRINTING MONEY to survive the crisis. It is very important to watch how the RMB renminbi will fare. If you follow the MONEY PRINTING TREND~ INFLATION WILL BE THE END RESULT; and if you don’t follow the trend, it means that the renminbi will be offsetting currency inflation ( when you trade and accept their Currency ) and thereby you sustain LOSSES.

所以,我们玩得很绝,不降息,用人民币双边结算。 想买我的物品,要么拿实物,要么拿人民币,美元我不要了。

Therefore, we are maintaining in an extremely STIFF SITUATION AND WOULD NOT CUT INTEREST RATES AND WILL ONLY SETTLED BILATERALLY IN RMB. If you want to buy my goods, we WILL NOT ACCEPT USD BUT IN RMB OR WILL EXCHANGE FOR GOODS ( BARTER ).

我们终于醒过来了,不再盲目大量出口,也看清许多国家"大量印钞票"只是在搜刮世界物质财富。

We have finally waken up…. NO LONGER BLINDLY EXPORTING LARGE QUANTITIES, but also NOTICED that many countries "printing a large amount of money" are just PLUNDERING THE WORLD'S MATERIAL WEALTH.

只要认清方向,永远不晚,我们不能再做赔本生意了,中国人照顾好自己的人民才最重要。

As long as we understand the direction… it is never too late. We REFUSE TO DO BUSINESS AT A LOSS. The most important thing is for the Chinese GOVERNMENT to take good care and look after the welfare of its people.

美国花一毛钱印了一张百元大钞(而且没任何贵重金属抵押), 要求买你的一百斤大米,这不是欺负人吗? 这是明目张胆的诈骗, 是无耻的掠夺。

The United States spent only ten cents to print a hundred-dollar bill (without any precious metal collateral) and asked to buy one hundred dollars value of your goods.

Isn't this CHEATING / BULLISH? THIS IS BLATANT FRAUD, A SHAMELESS PLUNDER.

美国想得很美,有求于中国帮他们度过危机,下一步可能停止贸易战,假装妥协,幻想用印出的大量美元疯狂抢购中国生产的物质,我们不会上当了。

The United States Painted a BEAUTIFUL Scenery and ASKS CHINA TO HELP THEM TIDE OVER THE CRISIS with a promise to stop the trade war, PRETENDING TO COMPROMISE, and using THEIR USELESS DOLLARS to buy Chinese-produced materials. We will not be fooled AGAIN.

让美国人去自己玩吧,我们不奉陪了。【 請转发】

Let the Americans and play by themselves, we will no longer be participating.

Actually, this has been circulating for months now. It’s old news. China is braced and ready for decoupling.

Greece says no!

Greece formally rejects US proposal to supply Ukraine with additional Russian-made weapon systems. Athens cannot compromise its defense capabilities, says defense minister.
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SEINFELD | BRA-Less Wonder

Enjoy this fine snippet of the Seinfield comedy that was a big hit back in the 1990s.

The Tumultuous Years of 1997-2013

With the advent of the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (whose meltdown nearly took down the world economy in 1999 if not bailed out by central banks), followed by the Y2K/tech bubble explosion of 2000, the world markets nearly collapsed on several occasions. 9-11 unleashed a new era of warfare which deflected attention from the rot of the financial system while derivatives were deregulated, and ‘Too Big To Fail’ banking formed in short order growing far beyond the powers of any nation state to rein in.

Under this period of destabilization, wars, terrorism and easy money speculation, China and its Eurasian allies moved slower to rebuild the physical basis of their existence with the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, long term planning, and a slow but steady focus on real (vs speculative) economic activity. The fact that China was among the only nations of the world to keep national controls over their central bank and maintain Glass-Steagall bank separation were not lost on the enemies of humanity yearning for a bankers’ dictatorship.

This process continued until it became evident that the western unipolar agenda would stop at nothing including nuclear war in order to assure the total subservience of all nation states, with Obama unveiling his Asia Pivot (air-sea battle) plans against China along with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) economic attack on China. The veil was now lifted to the true ugly face behind the liberal fascist smiles and it became clear that the full spectrum dominance military encirclement of Russia’s perimeter was being fully extended to China’s perimeter as well.

“No Soup For You!” | The Soup Nazi | Seinfeld

This is a classic. It’s an absolute classic. And it has developed into an American idiom; “No soup for you”. Check it out.

 

The Revival of the New Silk Road

It was in the face of this existential threat that Xi Jinping emerged as the new leader of China and a historic crackdown of party corruption on all levels Federal, Provincial and Municipal was begun in force while Xi’s 2013 announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative in Kazakhstan revived the New Silk Road/Eurasian land bridge policy of 15 years earlier.

Although China is often accused of intellectual theft, the reality is that it has begun to clearly outpace western nations becoming a pioneer on every level of science and technology. China now registers more patents than the USA, has become the cutting edge leader of high speed rail engineering with over 30 000 km, bridge building, tunneling, as well as water management, quantum computing, AI, 5G telecommunications, and even space science becoming the first nation to ever land on the far side of the moon with an intent to mine Helium 3 and develop permanent bases on the Moon in the coming decade.

All of these cutting edge fields of science and engineering are being organized by the ever-growing Belt and Road Initiative which has taken on global proportions and integrated itself into a deep alliance with Russia, Iran and over 135 nations who have signed onto the BRI Framework stretching from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Asia, and Europe.

This is the system which the USA and other western nations could have joined on multiple occasions, but which has instead been targeted as a global threat to western hegemony. According to the logic of those western utopians who refuse to let go of their old outdated 1971 script for a new world order, China’s New Silk Road must be subverted at all costs since it is very well understood that it would become the basis for a new world system as the old globalized paradigm comes crashing down faster than the Hindenburg.

The Real Perpetrators Laugh as a New Cold War Hysteria is Orchestrated

It is perhaps an irony that those figures who have been caught time and again attempting to destroy the foundations of both the USA, China and Russia have deflected attention from their own actions by promoting the idea that China is the USA’s natural enemy.

The reality is China is currently not only reviving the ancient silk road paradigm that focused on a harmony of interests and mutual self interest through economic and cultural exchange but they have also revived the spirit of President Sun Yat-sen’s International Development of China program in full.

In this 1920 document China’s first President outlined the superiority of the American system of political economy which he studied deeply beginning in his early student days in the USA, and upon which he explicitly modelled his new republican China and his three Principles of the People (premised on Lincoln’s principle of a nation for, by and of the people). Sun Yat-sen (a Christian Confucian revolutionary) is not only the beloved founding father of the republic of China celebrated to this day, but stated his views pro-American views in the following terms

“The world has been greatly benefited by the development of America as an industrial and a commercial Nation. So a developed China with her four hundred millions of population, will be another New World in the economic sense. The nations which will take part in this development will reap immense advantages. Furthermore, international cooperation of this kind cannot but help to strengthen the Brotherhood of Man.”

Both mainstream and alternative media outlets that tend to be sympathetic to conservative values have bit the bait and are now blind to the fact that those oligarchical social engineers managing the World Economic Forum and drooling over a new era of World Government, population reduction and technocratic feudalism are laughing at all of those fish in their nets whose ignorance to history and other cultures are leading them to their own self-destruction.

RUSSIA FURIOUS OVER SINKING OF MISSILE CRUISER “MOSKVA” – TALKING “WW3”

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The Russian people are enraged beyond words over the sinking of their Black Sea flagship, the Guided Missile Cruiser “Moskva” and they are already publicly saying on TV that they are in World War 3 with the United States.

Barrages of Russian missiles were launched late last night against at least 8 different “fronts” inside Ukraine, hitting targets in Kiev, Kharkov, Nikolaev, and elsewhere, causing thunderous explosions.

On Russian television, the mood was ferocious anger, and the remarks being made were specific: Russia is already in World War 3, Russia is at war with the United States/NATO, and more.

One source familiar with the unfolding events, told me the following:

The cruiser sank.

There were many victims on board. There was a monstrous explosion of ammunition and airborne missiles.

I think there may be several hundred dead, if not almost the entire crew.

So there will be a backlash.

That same source then SPECULATED what he believes the Russian response will be:

The RF Armed Forces will hit Bankovaya, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, the GUR building and other facilities in Kyiv.

In addition, a strike on the Baltic states or arms convoys in Poland or the Czech Republic is possible.

There will be strikes by the RF Armed Forces on bridges along the western border of Ukraine, on bridges in Kyiv, on bridges across the Dnieper.

There will be strikes on railway bridges in Western Ukraine and on transport hubs and interchanges, on junction stations, and so on.

There will be strikes on the barracks and control centers. Blows are prepared from all trunks. 

They will strike from the Caspian, from the Black Sea, from the Crimea, even from the Baltic and from Kaliningrad. There will be shelling by Belarusian artillery and Belarusian rockets.

The strike will be three waves, massive volleys, there will be up to a thousand missiles at the same time.

Heavy artillery, RSZO. In the Kiev region, Kiev, Kharkov, Nikolaev.

He wrapped-up his speculation by telling me:

WAR IS GOING TO A NEW LEVEL !!!

WATCH.

This story is still developing, check back for updates.

UPDATES – 8:24 AM EDT —

Russian Defense: We will increase the number and size of missile attacks on Kiev.

Russian Defense: More than 30 Polish mercenaries were killed in Kharkov.

Among the prisoners in Ukraine there are military personnel of NATO countries, said Senator Klimov of the Russian Federation Council 

“We already have prisoners among the military personnel of NATO countries, we will show all this when we conduct trials, and the whole world will see what really happened,”

UPDATE 8:32 AM EDT —

The United States has received an official Diplomatic demarche (note) from Moscow which says, in sum and in substance “Russia demands the United States stop arming Ukraine”  and then threatens “unpredictable consequences” if such arming of Ukraine continues.

This is stated in an official diplomatic note from Moscow.

Safety

I wonder how many accidents it took to “improve” the safety concerns regarding this?

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“Safety Regulations In The 1960s”

This is who is leading the United States right now

You all should be scared shitless. Watch this short video. And look at it, and watch it with a critical eye.

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What do you think? Is he capable? Is he dangerously inept? Is he really a puppet? What is President Biden?

What is going on

“The Western world today is on the verge of a catastrophe, which has come close to due to anti-Russian sanctions that are suicidal for Europe and the war unleashed by British and American intelligence services in Ukraine. We just need to persevere.” 

- Sergei Yuryevich

…Moreover, he predicted “Washington’s unleashing a world hybrid war against China and Russia… and escalating financial sanctions against Russia, up to the nurturing of a Russophobic-Nazi regime in Ukraine and the current armed conflict.”

Almost all of the academician’s negative forecasts were fully confirmed. But he thinks it could still have been avoided. “the tragic course of events that involved our country in a state of armed conflict with Ukraine.”

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According to Glaziev,

“it all starts with a multiple increase in energy prices, after which the economy plunges into a state of prolonged depression, the exit from which occurs through a “storm of innovations” after the collapse of financial bubbles resulting from the flow of capital from obsolete industries to the financial market.”

The aggravation of military-political tensions and the arms race, at the same time, are spurring the economy to enter a new long wave of growth based on a new technological order. So much has been said and written about the fact that a war for the United States, and preferably not a global one, is the solution of their own problems at the expense of someone else’s blood, that almost no one paid any attention to it.

And in vain, because it is not for nothing that the leader of the NATO alliance so diligently and openly avoids direct confrontation with Russia. Of course, under the guise of a peacemaker, preventing the third world.

At the same time, the post-COVID surge of China and India from Washington simply cannot turn their gaze. Not enough strength.

In the program article of the academician, it is no coincidence that it was noted that it was during such periods “a window of opportunity is opening for the economic breakthrough of new technological leaders, not burdened by tying up capital in obsolete industries.”

In parallel with the breakthrough of China and India “on the basis of a new technological order, the core of which is a complex of nano-, bioengineering, information, digital, additive and cognitive technologies”, something no less, and perhaps even more important, is happening.

“The transition to a new world economic order is unfolding,” when it is no longer private capital and entrepreneurial initiative, but “the state integrates the interests of various social groups around the common goal of increasing the people’s well-being on the basis of advanced economic development.”

At the same time, Glazyev is convinced that “on the domestic front, Russia has significantly strengthened.”

“Firstly, the influence of the fifth column of American agents of influence has sharply weakened, which, under the fear of confiscation of foreign assets, could not influence the President of Russia. Although the comprador oligarchy, in an effort to keep the savings exported from Russia, jumps out of their pants to prove their loyalty to Washington and London, they are seen there as a played card. Many foreign agents of influence, who daily poisoned the public consciousness in the media, simply fled.
Secondly, as a result of the imposed sanctions, the budget rule was automatically canceled, according to which the oil and gas revenues of the budget were invested in the obligations of the NATO countries. Now these hundreds of billions of rubles are placed at the disposal of the government and can be spent on constructive purposes.
Thirdly, with its sanctions, the enemy actually stopped the export of capital from Russia, which creates financial opportunities for doubling investments in the development of its own economy.
Fourth, freed from manipulation by American speculators, the ruble has strengthened significantly even without foreign exchange reserves. And due to the ban on transactions in dollars and euros, it becomes a regional reserve currency.
Fifth, the voluntary withdrawal of Western companies from the Russian market opens up previously unthinkable opportunities for import substitution.” It’s time to start the counteroffensive

Russia from Washington and London predict a drop in GDP by more than 10%. But Glazyev noted that “if you correctly use all these positive results for Russia of American aggression”, then instead we can get 10% of its growth.

It is only necessary to rebuild “the entire system of managing the development of the Russian economy on the basis of the principles of the new world economic order. Monetary policy should become part of strategic planning, and the banking system should work to invest in achieving the goals of social and economic development planned by the state.”

The Ukrainian crisis has been going on for the second month now, the battles are becoming more meaningful and even more fierce because of this, although the losses of the parties are currently on the wane. It is difficult to say how everything will turn out with the start of the big battle for the Donbass. There is less and less doubt that it will take place no one is going to concede.

However, when starting the special operation, in Russia, at least according to external signs, they did not take into account how powerful the hybrid rebuff would be – and above all, in terms of information. The West turned in its favor both the situation with refugees and the unprecedented atrocities of their Ukrainian wards.

However, in the end, everything results in the fact that, according to the definition of the academician, “in the heat of the anti-Russian sanctions, the United States was strongly substituted.” Discrediting the dollar and undermining confidence in the “world monetary and financial system based on it” can not only cost too much, but lead to their complete destruction. And a simple transition from the dollar and the euro to the yuan, for example, will not be enough.

The whole structure of informational pressure on Russia is now on the verge of collapse.

In conclusion, what does Glazyev offer in global terms. So, we have to

“quickly build a modern economic development management system based on the new world economic order, which has proven itself brilliantly in China, India and other countries. Create coalitions with them for the speedy formation of a new global monetary, financial, trade and economic system independent of the United States and its satellites.”

Full Article

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Ultimate Beauty

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But, you know guys… I don’t think there’s enough alcohol in the world, if you know what I mean.

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Princess Fatemeh Khanum Was The Princess Of Persia. She Was The Daughter Of King Nasir Al-Din Shah Qajar, Who “Ruled Persia From 1848 To 1896. She Was Considered The Ultimate Symbol Of Beauty In Persia During The Early 1900s”.

Gilligan’s Island – Gilligan’s WWII Mine

A fun little flashback to a far simpler time. You don’t need to watch this full segment, but it’s a nice image that takes and sends you bak to when time was far simpler and easier.

Ukraine as a US military biological test site

Materials of the briefing by the Chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation , Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov April 14, 2022

Thanks to the special military operation of the Russian troops, it was possible to obtain additional information about the military – biological activities of the United States on the territory of Ukraine , confirming numerous violations of the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons ( BTWC ).

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ScreenHunter

Taking advantage of existing gaps in international legislation and the lack of a clear verification mechanism, the US administration is consistently building up its military biological potential in various regions of the world .

Earlier, we presented a scheme for coordinating the activities of biological laboratories and research institutes in Ukraine by the United States. One of its elements is the Ukrainian Scientific and Technological Center ( UNTC ). The Russian Ministry of Defense managed to uncover its role in the military – biological activities of the United States on the territory of Ukraine .

Its legal status is determined by the Agreement of October 25, 1993, which was concluded between the governments of Ukraine , Canada , the United States and Sweden , as well as the Amendment Protocol of July 7, 1997.

The STCU is headquartered in Kiev and has regional offices in Baku , Chisinau and Tbilisi , as well as Kharkov and Lvov .

At the same time, the Expert Center for Chemical and Biological Threats of the Russian Ministry of Defense established that the main activity of the STCU is to act as a distribution center for grants for conducting research of interest to the Pentagon, including in the field of biological weapons .

In recent years alone, Washington has spent more than $ 350 million on the implementation of STCU projects .

The US Department of State and the Ministry of Defense are US customers and sponsors of the STCU . Funding is also provided through the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of Agriculture, Health and Energy.

Also, pay attention to the document prepared by the STCU curators dated March 11, 2022, which highlights the true nature of the activities of this organization. It notes:  …There is an outflow of scientific experts in the development of delivery vehicles and modern weapons who worked at Ukrainian institutions , as well as experts in the development of biological, radiological , chemical and nuclear weapons .

The most trained specialists with experience in working with dual – use materials and technologies ( there are from 1,000 to 4,000 of them ) found themselves in unfavorable professional and financial circumstances. This makes them vulnerable to siding with other states to participate in programs _ on the development of WMD, delivery vehicles and other weapons …  .

Using such formulations, Washington actually recognizes the work carried out by Ukrainian experts on the creation of means for the delivery and use of weapons of mass destruction and considers it appropriate to continue their financing.

The post of Executive Director of the STCU is held by US citizen Curtis Belayach. Born August 27, 1968 in California, studied at the California University of Management named after Anderson. He has a master’s degree in international finance and has been working in Ukraine since 1994.
Rest of article

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Meanwhile in Japan

Zombie vending machine?

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In case of zombies, break glass.

Nukes or Fertilizer Plant, You Decide: ‘EU-supplied’ S-300 launchers and surrounding area obliterated

Creepy footage. The moment of yesterday's most powerful explosion in Nikolaev. Damn guys, I don't like these mushrooms at all… https://t.co/RwqscCX2Be
— Seb Pearn

Russian forces have destroyed foreign-supplied S-300 anti-aircraft launchers in a number of precision strikes on Ukraine, the Defense Ministry, in Moscow, claimed on Monday. Days earlier, Slovakia reported the donation of a battery of old Soviet-made S-300 air defense missiles to Kiev.

In its regular briefing on the ongoing military action in Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry reported hitting a hangar “on the southern outskirts of the city of Dnepropetrovsk,” where “equipment from an S-300 battery supplied to the Ukrainian regime by one of the European nations” was hidden.

The barrage of sea-launched Kalibr missiles destroyed four S-300 launchers and as many as 25 Ukrainian troops in the Sunday strike, ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov claimed. He used the old name of the city, which Ukrainian authorities renamed Dnepro in 2016 to distance it from the Soviet period of the country’s history.

The Russian official also reported destroying an S-300 targeting radar in a separate overnight precision airstrike near Uspenovka. The general didn’t specify which of the multiple villages of that name in Ukraine he was referring to, and didn’t say whether the radar was part of the battery supplied by the foreign nation.

Last Friday, Slovakia announced that it had donated its only S-300 battery to Ukraine. The weapon system was part of the NATO member’s legacy from the Warsaw Pact days, when it formed part of Czechoslovakia. It was not clear how many vehicles were sent to Ukraine. A regular S-300 battery can have as few as four and as many as 12 launchers using a single radar to identify targets, and is controlled by a single command post.

Prime Minister Eduard Heger assured citizens that the country’s national security would not be compromised since “allies” agreed to boost its air defense in return. US President Joe Biden said his country would provide an American Patriot missile battery as a replacement and thanked Bratislava for agreeing to give the S-300 to Kiev. Elements of the Patriot system started arriving in Slovakia three weeks ago, according to its defense minister.

Responding to Russian claims on Twitter, Prime Minister Heger called them a “hoax” and “Russian propaganda.” The statement was apparently based on a denial that Slovakia received from Kiev.

Washington reportedly wanted another NATO member, Turkey, to strike a similar deal with Ukraine and send it a Russian-supplied S-400, which is more advanced than the S-300. Ankara rejected the idea, saying the system would remain in its possession. In 2020, the US imposed sanctions on Turkey for buying the S-400s from Russia under a deal signed in 2017.

Moscow attacked its neighbor in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics in Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols had been designed to regularize the status of those regions within the Ukrainian state.

Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.

Full Article

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Infrastructure in the United States

Just keeping things REAL.

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United States repairs.

The Prisoner: Season 1 Episode 1 – Arrival (Full Episode)

Let’s end this article with a full and great treat. If you know aobut who MM is and why MM exists, then you should well appreciate the plot and story line for S1E1 of the British Series “The Prisoner”.

This is a full treat. After a very successful career as a British spy, a follow up series known as “The Prisoner” was created. It discusses what do you do with Super-secret spies when they want and need to be retired.

It’s well worth the time to watch in full. Please enjoy it.

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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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United States Lieutenant General Roger Cloutier was captured in Mariupol, while fighting the Russians, and is already in Moscow for interrogations

Western Mainstream Media screams Putin is losing or Putin has lost. The heroic Ukrainian president has single-handedly beaten back the brutal Russians.

Biden screams Putin is a war criminal. That is, Putin's losing Russian army is commiting genocide on the winning Ukrainian hero defenders. Was that how the 300 Spartans massacred the Persians?

Do two lies make a truth?

America seems to finally want peace. The US warns China will face consequences if it does not stop Russia's war in Ukraine. 

So America wants China to use a magic wand (which it does not have) to stop a war that America started and which it is still fueling, otherwise America will start a war with China. 

Does America want peace or war? I still can't wrap my head around this one.

This is what happens when a country is run by lying hypocritical demented morons.

-PM

Lieutenant General Roger Cloutier was captured in Mariupol and is already in Moscow.

This proves BEYOND A DOUBT that America is not fighting a proxy war against Russia, but rather instead, is fighting a direct kinetic war against Russia inside a NATO proxy nation.

This will seriously escalate the global situation dangerously.

China perceptions

China, which has of late risen to the top of the United States enemies’ chart, is a bit harder to understand.

China is a legitimate global competitor with an economy now estimated to be larger than that of the US, but it has never suggested in any way that it wants a war.

Against that background, President Biden has declared that the United States has a “commitment” to defend Taiwan if China should attempt to retake control of the island.

If that conflict were to come about and the US engages in a conventional war against Beijing, it would find that the Chinese have considerable advantages in that they would be fighting on interior lines while the modern hypersonic missile technologies that they would deploy could devastate obsolete American aircraft carrier battle groups.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley has described the new Chinese missiles as “very concerning” and “very close” to being a “Sputnik moment,” when a panicked US accelerated its arms and space races against the Soviet Union in 1957.

And one should not forget that China is a major trading partner with the United States, producing many consumer items that are no longer manufactured in America.

Beijing also holds tens of billions of dollars-worth of US Treasury bonds.

If two countries ever had good reasons not to go to war it would be China and the US, but the threats coming mostly from Washington have been nearly continuous ever since President Barack Obama initiated his tilt to Asia.

The complete ineptness of US diplomacy also contributes to the sense of threat.

Logically, Washington should be playing off Russia against China to diminish any danger of war against two hostile great powers but instead it has chosen to antagonize both of themm simultaneously.

Whether the Europeans and the South Koreans and Japanese will follow the US on its march to oblivion is debatable.

One of the curious aspects of the news coming out of the White House, Pentagon and Foggy Bottom is just how hypocritical it all is.

Witness for example the groupthink assessment made by General Milley, who said

“We’re witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geo-strategic power the world has witnessed. They [the Chinese] are clearly challenging us regionally and their aspiration is to challenge the United States globally.” 

Milley is saying that China in particular, and Russia and Iran as well, cannot develop military technologies and take other steps to defend themselves without Washington’s permission.

The absurdity of that position should be obvious to everyone, but it has apparently not yet become clear to those in power in Washington.

-Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D.

Americans are in favor of war with Russia

You got to love the “logic” of these folks!

Russia intervenes in a country which neighbors it, thousands of miles away, and the US Americans see that as a threat to the USA.

And nevermind that the USA is the country which forced Russia into this war which the Kremlin spent eight years trying to avoid.

How is such a result even possible?  Here are a few options:

      1. A majority of US Americans are simply stupid and cannot think
      2. A majority of US Americans are unbelievably ignorant
      3. A majority of US Americans are brainwashed by their media and schools
      4. A majority of US Americans have been trained/conditioned to fear and hate whomever their rulers designate for demonization
      5. A majority of US Americans sincerely believe that the USA ought to be the planet’s cop and no matter where a conflict starts, even when that conflict started by the USA, they believe that it is Uncle Shmuel business to deal with it.  In their tiny minds, the USA has a God given right to intervene anywhere and attack anyone.
      6. A majority of US Americans perceive any truly sovereign country as a direct threat to their way of life.
      7. The PYSOP campaign to demonize Russia has been a resounding success.

A mix of all of the above is probably the most accurate cause for such a result.

Huawei speeds up bond sales

Company will issue 3 billion yuan (US$470 million) of short-term debt next week, a month after it sold 3 billion yuan in China’s interbank market

Huawei is reinventing itself, morphing from a hardware-centric model to a combination of hardware, software, and services

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Fox News explains how Russia is losing…

Next, I bumped into a Foxnews propaganda piece featuring a clown which, apparently, in some very distant past was a US Lt. General in the USA military, his last name is Kellogg.

I decided to give it a try and I have to say that I sat absolutely *transfixed* listening to him: according to him, Russia has already suffered a huge defeat at the hands of the Ukronazis and with NATO’s help the Ukraine can, and probably will, win this war.

And both that “general” and the presstitute “interviewing” him delivered that crock of shit with great gravitas and appropriate facial expressions (angled eyebrows, the way the journos try to look very sincere). I was expecting at least one of them to burst out laughing but, no, of course not.

These two simply lack both the brain and the humor to realize how terminally stupid and ridiculous they both sound.

A man who says with a straight face that delivering 20 Soviet era aircraft or S-300 to the Ukrainians will make a difference in this war is either a clueless civilian or a deliberate liar prostituting his (putative and now former) officer’s honor for a few bucks.

Russia is jamming GPS satellite signals in Ukraine

Russia is jamming GPS satellite signals in Ukraine, US Space Force says
By Elizabeth Howell published 1 day ago
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‘Ukraine may not be able to use GPS,’ a Space Force official told NBC.
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Russia should shoot down all the GPS satellites and let things lie.

A “Robin Hood Mentality” Emerges On The Streets Of America As Gangs Of Thieves Start To Prey Upon The Rich

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In the old days, we used to enjoy movies in which Robin Hood would “take from the rich and give to the poor”.  But in the real world things are not supposed to work that way.  In a civilized society, property rights are supposed to be respected.  Unfortunately, the truth is that the U.S. is becoming less civilized with each passing day.  At this point, a “Robin Hood mentality” is starting to emerge all over America.  Highly organized gangs of thieves are specifically searching for wealthy targets, and those targets are often being followed all the way home before being attacked.  I suppose that thieves must think that it makes a great deal of sense to target the wealthy, because robbing the rich is certainly a lot more lucrative than robbing the poor.

In Los Angeles, the police are openly admitting that over a dozen gangs are specifically targeting individuals that appear to have a lot of money…

More than a dozen Los Angeles gangs are targeting some of the city’s wealthiest residents in a new and aggressive manner, sending out crews in multiple cars to find, follow and rob people driving high-end vehicles or wearing expensive jewelry, according to police.

In many cases, they’re making off with designer handbags, diamond-studded watches and other items worth tens of thousands of dollars — if not more — and then peddling them to black-market buyers who are willing to turn a blind eye to the underlying violence, police said.

In recent years, it has become trendy to show off your wealth publicly, but I think that is going to change.

In our new environment, donning very expensive gear simply makes you a target.

According to Captain Jonathan Tippet, at least 17 gangs in Los Angeles are now conducting these sorts of attacks

According to Capt. Jonathan Tippet, who spearheads the task force, police have identified at least 17 gangs, most based out of South L.A. and operating independently, that are involved. There were 165 such robberies in 2021 and 56 so far this year, he said, including several over the weekend.

Once upon a time, criminals would approach and politely ask you to hand over your belongings.

Needless to say, those days are long gone.  In fact, these gangs often physically attack their wealthy victims without even saying a word

“There’s no chance or opportunity for these victims even to comply. They’re just running up to people and attacking them, whether that’s putting a gun in their face or punching them and beating on them,” Tippet said. “Pistol whipping them as well.”

In some cases, police determined that gang members inside high-end venues served as “spotters” for those outside, Tippet said, alerting them when wealthy targets were heading out.

Sadly, the pace of these attacks appears to be accelerating.

According to authorities, there have been five more just within the last 48 hours, including one in which a woman was run into “by a Dodge muscle car”

An LA woman was filmed being mown down by a Dodge muscle car so muggers could steal her watch as the city’s terrifying follow-home robberies soar.

The video from Monday, one of five such robberies that occurred over just 48 hours, shows the unidentified victim fleeing the muggers silver Dodge Challenger after they smashed her car window when she stopped at a light in Downtown LA.

There was a time when most violent crime was confined to the poorest parts of Los Angeles and those that lived in the wealthiest neighborhoods generally felt quite safe.

But now everything has changed.  Today, the largest increases in violent crime are happening in the wealthiest zip codes

The zip codes showing the largest increases are home to film and pop stars, including Beverly Hills, of “90210” fame, where Beyonce and Jay-Z have their West Coast house; Bel Air, of “Fresh Prince” Will Smith fame, where Jennifer Lopez now resides; and Los Feliz, where Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom share a house and where Angelina Jolie has resided since her divorce from Brad Pitt.

And in nearby Santa Monica, the Postal Service has actually suspended service because mail carriers were being attacked so often…

The United States Postal Service suspended service in a Santa Monica neighborhood after reports of repeated attacks on mail carriers.

In a notice posted at apartment mail boxes in the 1300 block of 14th Street, the USPS informed residents that service to the neighborhood is suspended. The letter cited several assaults and threats against mail carriers by an individual.

A state of complete and utter chaos reigns on the streets of the largest cities of California, but of course there is plenty of violence elsewhere too.

On Tuesday, a mass shooting on a subway train in New York City made headlines all over the world

At least 29 people were wounded on Tuesday after a gunman wearing a gas mask set off smoke grenades and opened fire inside a rush-hour subway train in Brooklyn, authorities said.

62-year-old Frank James regularly posted hate-filled videos on YouTube, and this shooting was obviously an attempt to draw a lot more attention to himself and to his hate-filled beliefs.

And it turns out that the FBI already knew all about him

It has now emerged that he was known to the FBI and was questioned in 2019 in New Mexico though it is not yet clear why.

He was cleared but was entered into the state’s ‘Guardian Lead’ system.

The Guardian Program is the bureau’s terrorist threat and suspicious incident tracking system.

James had been repeatedly arrested over the years, and this is yet another example that shows the foolishness of putting violent criminals back on the streets.

Of course if we tried to lock up all of the violent criminals our prisons would be packed beyond capacity very rapidly.  Violence is on the rise everywhere you look, and what we are witnessing right now is only just the beginning.

In New York City, the new mayor was supposed to crack down on crime, but instead crime rates just keep going up.  In fact, the number of subway crimes in March 2022 was 55 percent higher than in March 2021.

But we shouldn’t just pick on New York City.  Other major cities are seeing similar spikes in violent crime.

So if things are this bad already, what will things look like in this country when economic conditions get really, really bad?

You might want to think about that.

And if you have lots of money, you might want to think about ways that you can look “poorer”, because those that appear to be wealthy will be preyed upon more than ever in the days ahead.

Fearing GPS Jamming By China, US Air Force Wants To Send Extra Layer Of Satellites To The Geostationary Orbit

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China’s BDS accuracy comparable to GPS, even better in Asia-Pacific region: authorities – Global Times

After the “dirty trick” by foremer President Bill Clinton (where he turned off the GPS forcing a multimillion dollar Chinese rocket and it’s satellite to be destroyed), China has made their own GPS system. It’s known as the BDS, and is more accurate, safer, and better protected than the old American GPS system.

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Ukraine war map

12april2022 Ukraine map 1024x724 1
12april2022 Ukraine map 1024×724 1

German Eurolemmings

As for the German Eurolemmings, they have truly lost any sense of decency or even basic common sense: they are now seriously thinking about sending old Leopard 1 tanks to the Ukraine!

Let me explain something really basic here:

  • You cannot just send weapons to the Ukraine and have that make a difference.  I mean, yes, if you send AKs, bullet and clubs, they might get used.  But modern weapon systems require training.  They also require maintenance.  Then they need to be integrated into the rest of the armed forces.  Then your forces need to train and practice a lot to perfect their combat coordination.  Then you need a supply/maintenance/repairs network to maintain/repair your systems.  Advanced air defense systems require crews with sometimes many years of training.  Considering that the reinforcements sent by Kiev to the Donbass even include their Volkssturm, you can imagine how utterly useless the operators of the few weapons systems surviving the trip from Lvov to the Donbass will be.  And the interval between the moment this ancient S-300 goes live and the moment a Russian ARM hit it will be counted in minutes at most.
  • Next, old weapons (ex-Soviet or ex-NATO) are just fat targets.  In almost all cases, Russian equivalents are one or even two generations ahead, so why are all the EU sending them?  Well, for a couple of reasons, the main one is to get rid of them, since storage or recycling of such systems is rather costly.  The next reason is that it makes NATO politicians look “tough” – after all, if Zelenskii wants old tanks, artillery or air defense systems (he ain’t exactly a military genius either!) then, by all means, we give it to him and look like we are doing *something*.  By the way, the four S-300 sent by the Slovaks were, apparently, already destroyed in a strike yesterday.  And the Slovak taxpayer did not spend a penny on this.  How is that not a good deal for Slovakia?  Oh sure, this is an act of war, a casus belli, as are ALL but UNSC approved “sanctions”, but the Euroemmings Master Race are so superior in every sense to the accursed Rooskies that, screw that!  The only thing which can bring the Eurolemmings back to reality is a Russian strike on such a weapons convoy INSIDE a NATO member country because, as I have already explained, when the Eurolemmings to hide behind Uncle Shmuel’s back, all he will offer them are statements of support, outrage, freshly printed fiat money and the usual mix of threats, fear and hate western politicians always spew about Russia.  But the US won’t allow NATO to go to war with Russia over one such strike, especially if the Russians clearly explain what they did and why (I actually expect that quite a few “old-time” western officers will get a good kick out of their newfound NATO “allies” hysterics once that happens).
  • As I have mentioned in the past, weapons convoys in the western Ukraine (and, possibly, even inside Poland) make for easy and lucrative targets for the Russians.  Just mix in enough civilians and, voilà!, sooner or later you will have a “Russian atrocity”, something like “the Russians kill scores of innocent feeling Ukrainian civilians” or “the Russians attacked trucks clearly marked with red crosses” (FYI – the SBU and Azov uses red crosses on its vans and ammo/supply trucks!).  This is likely one of the reasons the Russians have, so far, chosen not to attack early on but to wait for solid intelligence and then strike the NATO forces/hardware when it is nicely concentrated somewhere.  Still, we know that Azov ALWAYS used civilians (especially those perceived as “not sufficiently patriotic”!) as human shields.  By the way, NATO taught them this technique.  Anyway, to expect NATO weapon convoys NOT to be protected by human shields would be simply stupid.  The Russians simply have to ASSUME that NATO/SBU/Azov will ALWAYS be surrounded by captive civilians.

Which brings us to the issue of false flags.

False Flags

Here are a few headlines about this topic:

Need I say anything more?

Even by British standards, this is the most pre-announced pre-publicized false flag in history, I am amazed I don’t see ads and previews for it on Amazon and Netflix…

I guess, I will just say that if the public opinion is being prepared for a Russian chemical attack (maybe even with the – apparently harmless –  “Novichok”) then we know for sure which side is winning and which side is not winning.

Why a False Flag?

There are a few other reasons why the Empire of Hate and Lies badly and urgently needs a false flag:

  • Mariupol has fallen and all the rescue or escape attempts have failed.  Yes, there are probably several hundred, possibly around 1000 Nazis still left in the deep and many underground facilities under the industrial complex, but they have become militarily irrelevant so the Russian National Guard forces are taking their sweet time to avoid any unnecessary losses on the Russian side.
  • Reports of Nazi atrocities are literally all over the place, especially on Telegram.  A few of these have leaked into the legacy corporate ziomedia thereby creating the first, still tiny, cracks in the official narrative.
  • Nobody knows what/who exactly is hidden deep in the bowels of Azovstal, but considering the immense efforts to get “it/him/them” out of there, the inevitable takeover of the underground floors by the Russians will result in some major embarrassment for the Empire, unless the Kremlin decides to show “goodwill” again and mistakenly believe that any such goodwill will be appreciated in the West.  IF there is a deal made, it will have to offer the Russians something really substantive and very quickly verifiable since just promises won’t do, not even with the Atlantic Integrationists (who are now busy rebranding themselves as “patriotic Russians”).
  • There are also lots of reports of atrocities in the Nazi-controlled Ukraine, including public floggings and executions.  Again, Telegram is flooded with such reports and footage and the Bucha false flag petered out without providing the needed “distraction” and return to the “correct” narrative.  The Ukronazis even reportedly told the Brits that they have no intention of abiding by the Geneva Conventions (what a surprise!).China import Growth rate in March is 15.4%, 0.1% lower than previous year and SCMP titled it “import collapse.”
China trade: imports unexpectedly ‘collapsed’ under coronavirus and Ukraine war pressures, but exports grew | South China Morning Post
Imports fell by 0.1 per cent in March from a year earlier, down from 15.5 per cent growth in combined figures for January and February
Exports grew by 14.7 per cent in March compared with a year earlier, down from 16.3 per cent growth in combined figures for January and February
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Apollo 13 | “Houston, We Have a Problem”

The battle of Donbass

UkraineFate MW 1
Ukraine Fate

A war with China?

And then there is China which clearly supports Russia, and which is clearly preparing for a war against the USA.  Even their minister of defense said so quite openly.  And here are two things the Chinese know for sure:

  • If the United States Empire defeats Russia, China will be next, thus China cannot afford a Russian defeat under ANY circumstances (and neither can Russia afford a hypothetical Chinese defeat at the hands of the Empire).
  • If the US and Russia go at each other in earnest, this will be the perfect time to not only solve the Taiwan issue, but to boot the US out of the Far East just as Iran booted the USA out of the Middle-East.  From the Chinese point of view, “just” liberating Taiwan is not enough – the US must be removed from Taiwan, Japan and even the ROK.  So yes, China also wants to denazify the planet, they are less blunt about it than the Russians, but it is clear to me that this world denazification plan was agreed to by both Putin and Xi.

The folks at the Pentagon must realize that – at least a sufficient critical mass must do so.  Yes, I agree with Andrei Martyanov, the former US generals on TV sound like ignorant infantiles, but I will never believe that all US military commanders are that stupid.

Mattis seems to be the person who deliberately botched the US missile strike on Syria to avoid a possible Russian reaction leading to war and General Milley called his Chinese counterpart to tell him that the US has no intention of striking at China thereby telling the Chinese that they are NOT in a “use them or lose them” situation, which would have put the entire USA in the very real danger of getting nuked by a desperate China.  In both of these cases, these generals appear to have contravened direct orders for the greater good of service to their country and protection of the US population of the imbecilic orders given by imbecilic US Presidents.  Mattis was “let go” pretty soon by The Donald while Milley was subjected to a vicious smear campaign.

So if “Biden” (meaning Nuland, Sullivan, Blinken or any other demented psychopath) gives the order to attack Russian forces I still want to believe that there will be a critical mass at the Pentagon to tell the “crazies in the basement” to finally shut up and get back to where they belong: the basement they crawled out of.

Everything seems to be in American freefall…

What’s It Like To Be In An Airplane That Is Falling From The Sky?

I was in a commercial jet that fell from cruising altitude. It was a small jet flying on a now defunct airline.

We had just started the descent when the plane tilted and the dropped out of the sky. Nose was pointed nearly straight down.

I was sitting in the aisle. People were screaming, yelling out – but I can’t remember the words. All kinds of crap was flying through the cabin and the flight attendant was no where to be seen.

My brother and Dad were in the seats behind me. I remember thinking about how sad my mum was going to be. And then looking out at the window at the ground.

After what seemed like an eternity, the pilot was able to regain control and the plane started to right itself again…. for about 15-30 seconds, before starting another uncontrolled descent.

It was more terrifying the second time around – the ground was far closer. I was certain that I was going to die and looked over at a blonde woman about my age sitting next to me. We hadn’t spoken the entire flight, but I reached out in some impulsive desire for human contact at the end…and we held hands as the plane fell out of the sky. I can remember looking at her face briefly, she was crying.

As the ground started approaching and you could make out things like trees and houses, I felt a sense of peace fall about me.

Death seemed to be certain but I didn’t care. It seemed like it was going to be quick and painless – but I remember being surprised that it was going to all end this way.

Then we started to feel the pilot struggling with the plane and it started to right itself again…and for a second time the plane pulled out of the dive.

It was still incredibly bumpy and people were crying and screaming out at every round of turbulence – everyone was waiting for the next and final dive.

When we landed, the young woman and I were still holding hands. People were dead quiet.

What was surreal was that the flight attendant got on the microphone when we reached the gate and thanked us for flying on that shitty ass airline and ‘hoped we would fly again’.

They brought a bus out and one of the pilots came out with us. He didn’t say a word, but his knee was shaking uncontrollably.”

But you know, people do survive…

“17 Year-Old Juliane Koepcke Was Sucked Out Of An Airplane In 1971 After It Was Struck By A Bolt Of Lightning. She Fell 2 Miles To The Ground, Strapped To Her Seat And Survived After She Endured 10 Days In The Amazon Jungle”

unknown history in photos 10
Juliane Koepcke

Back to the Ukraine

If it wasn’t for the US nuclear triad (old, but still formidable and capable!), I truly wouldn’t give a damn, but alas that is a luxury nobody can afford, at least until the USA is finally denazified and disarmed too.  But until all of Zone A is absorbed and re-civilized by Zone B, that danger will threaten every human being on the planet (and now even in the southern hemisphere courtesy of the comprador leaders of the US colony in Australia which have decided to paint a big Chinese nuclear crosshairs on their brainless heads!).

Okay, I will end with some major good news: the entire 36th Marine Infantry Brigade in Mariupol has surrendered!  That is over 1000 soldiers, including 300 wounded and 90 seriously injured.

2022 04 14 13 18
2022 04 14 13 18

Now, careful here, these are NOT the Azov forces hiding in the underground floors of Azovstal.  First, they are not Azov but regular Ukrainian military and, second, they were barricaded in the Illich industrial complex, near the Azovstal, but already cut off from Azovstal.

It is important to note that unlike the Azov Nazis, the Naval Infantry forces are NOT considered as Nazis by the Russians and that they will all get full POW protection under the Geneva Convention.

The very best the Azov people can expect is to be identified and arrested on suspicion of war crimes, crimes against humanity and all kinds of atrocities. If some of them are clearly clueless idiots who made some bad choices, they might return home one day after either being found innocent (a minority) or after serving their time in Russian jails.

Those found with tattooed swastikas or those who are already on the FSB wanted list will get harsh sentences in equally harsh high-security prisons.

As for Azov commanders, they have already been told by everybody that they will get no mercy. Which means that they will get interrogated and executed.

Declan Hayes
April 5, 2022
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Japan’s future, whether she likes it or not, will be with its East Asian neighbors’ Belt and Road Initiative when the U.S. 7th Fleet scuttles back to Pearl Harbor.

Although it is now 20 years since the English edition of my Japan: The Toothless Tiger best seller first appeared, everything that has since happened has confirmed its thesis that East Asia is a powder keg that Japan cannot contain.

Although China’s Belt and Road Initiative is inexorably falling into place, so too is the South China Sea. Although a British convoy, supported by German and American cruisers, recently sailed through the area, they, like the Australians, who are being butt hurt by Chinese sanctions, are not serious players.

South Korea, Taiwan and Japan are the region’s heavy hitters. Though Taiwan would give an excellent account of itself in any future encounter, there is little they could do when faced with overwhelming Chinese firepower. Taiwan could be East Asia’s Arch Duke Ferdinand moment.

South Korea, however, remains the real dagger to Japan’s heart. There are more than five million men under arms on the Korean peninsula – far more armed soldiers than either the United States or Russia maintains. Vladivostock, Russia’s military headquarters in the Far East, is only fifty miles away from North Korea! The resulting geostrategic rivalries make Korea the most militarized piece of real estate on the planet and it is the only place the United States has (repeatedly) declared it has locked and loaded nuclear weapons. As there is no way Seoul can be defended from a determined attack, the USMC is heavily embedded in Okinawa to where they hastily retreated at the height of the Korean War and to where they most likely will have to retreat again. Though Japan needs South Korea as a buffer state against North Korea and its historical Russian and Chinese sponsors, the Belt and Road Initiative would marginalize Japan and make her almost irrelevant to this Chinese minted version of The Great Game.

China views its own naval expansion as vital to protecting her sea routes and, just like Washington, Beijing is deploying her navy to ensure that the black gold continues to arrive to her shores. The fact that this policy poses a threat to Japan is not Beijing’s primary concern. They have the much more daunting task of keeping their vast nation afloat. For that overriding purpose, they need a strong navy to guarantee their oil supplies and a steely determination to defend and promote their national objectives.

Japan’s looming quandary is that, with Taiwan and South Korea, it has been a vassal of America’s East Asian policy, trading economic advancement for American political and military hegemony in contrast to China’s unfettered development. That bill is now due.

China is involved in a great strategic game that she cannot afford to lose. Kazakhstan is China’s natural bridge to the lucrative Iranian and Iraqi fields. Such a link-up would advance China’s standing as a world power. It would also cripple United States’ efforts to secure the Caspian Sea’s oil for the West. China also wants to secure central Asia’s economic cooperation to help mollify Xinjiang, which Erdoğan’s Muslim Uighur fifth columnists are charged with subverting. About 200,000 Uighurs live in Kazakhstan and opposition Islamic terrorist groups have their bases in Almata, its largest city. China hopes to neutralize this U.S. sponsored internal ISIS threat by its oil diplomacy in Kazakhstan, and its arms diplomacy in Pakistan, Iran and Iraq.

NATO’s ongoing belligerence in Eastern Europe has transformed the pipeline poker China has been playing with Russia and the other regional powers, forcing Russia and oil rich Kazakhstan to fully throw their lot in with China. Siberian oil will flow southwards to China and, if Korea and Japan wish it, onwards to them as well.

Iran meanwhile, is helping China wrest the vast oil reserves of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf from Uncle Sam . If Iran and China control the flow of oil from the region, the United States will lose control not only of the Caspian Sea but also of the Persian Gulf’s vast and vital oil supplies. Japan best urgently take stock.

China’s missiles nullify America’s capacity to militarily dominate Asia’s vast geography with its small, dispersed pockets of marine forces, whose forward deployment policy bases are much too vulnerable. Without forward bases in Asia, there can be no concentration of American military power: weapons cannot even be stored, let alone massed for use.

This vulnerability of their bases to Chinese missiles is America’s singular military weakness in Asia. America’s powerful Seventh Fleet cannot make up for the loss of Asian land bases. The Seventh Fleet cannot generate anything like the military power or psychological effect of fixed bases.

The most important of these forward bases are those in Japan. Guam, like mainland America, is simply too far away to fill this role. Okinawa is the pivotal, preferred spot. And China’s missiles are gradually making those bases redundant to America’s strategic thinkers.

China is devoting vast resources to her missile program. This is a war of nerves where time and, ultimately, technology, is on the side of Mainland China. This psychological aspect explains China’s widespread use of ballistic missiles, which are, in essence, really psychological weapons – paper tigers if you will. Although Taiwan might protect itself from an amphibious assault, protecting Taipei from surgical missile strikes – or the threat of surgical strikes – by Beijing’s ballistic missile units is a more daunting task. Beijing knows this and will continue to tighten and loosen the screws, as she deems appropriate.

Japan has a glass jaw, one that China could easily break if Japan does not act responsibly over the next few years. Japan is the only major nation in the world that has explicitly renounced war as a tool of policy. Article 9.1 of the Japanese constitution renounces war “as a sovereign right of the nation”. Article 9.2 asserts that “land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained”.

That said, Japan maintains very substantial “land, sea and air forces”. Japan’s military expenditures are, in fact, the third highest in the world. Tokyo has stockpiled over 100 tons of plutonium that would be relatively simple to transform into weapons’ grade material. Japan’s fast-breeder reactors (FBRs) have the capacity to squeeze over 60 times more energy from uranium fuel than can the light-water reactors of most other countries. Japan will, in other words, have the capacity to make more nuclear weapons than the combined arsenals of the United States and Russia hold. If nothing else, this arsenal makes an impressive bundle of bargaining chips.

Because its major challenges will come from the air, Japan has developed formidable anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic missile defense systems. Japan’s radar and its accurate Tomahawk missile technology far excel their American prototypes. Other Japanese strengths in miniaturization, automation, telecommunications and the development of durable, lightweight advanced materials further enhance their military capabilities.

Japan’s plutonium purchases have allowed it develop the necessary nuclear submarine technology to counter China’s blue water navy. Though impressive, a handful of nuclear submarines and a couple of batteries of missile defenses do not make Japan impregnable.

Bizarre as it seems, Japan’s expertise in these niche areas is a cause for concern in Washington. America fears lost market share if Japan exports its expertise – and, to develop the required expertise, Japan would have to copy the examples of Israel, Sweden, South Africa and other small countries and aggressively export. The United States fears that Japan would win export orders at its expense.

Japanese dual-use technological capabilities in commercial fields related to military use threatens the preeminent position American producers currently enjoy in the world’s arms’ markets. This is ironic as, historically, the United States encouraged Japan in its development of dual use capabilities. Spin-offs from the radio industry, for example, helped kick-start the Japanese commercial television industry, which eventually obliterated their American competitors.

Japan’s defense industry is, however, an inconsequential part of Japan’s overall industrial output. It accounts for less than 1 percent of Japanese gross domestic product (GDP) and even those firms, such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI), which are most heavily involved in it, are there mostly because of the spin-off technological benefits it has given them.

Whereas Japan has some particularly strong trees of knowledge, the forest overwhelmingly belongs to America. Japan just does not have the logistical depth of America or the European Union to be a major league player. While Japanese industry has established a global position in a wide range of critical modern technologies, Japan’s defense industry has lagged behind. At the systems level, military technology has simply moved faster than Japan’s ability to catch up.

Japan, in other words, does not have an autonomous arms industry. Today, the defense industry accounts for less than 0.6 percent of total industrial production, an almost insignificant amount in Japan’s overall context. Though Japan produces about 90 percent of its own military requirements, much of that is built under license from American firms and a considerable amount of the technology is black-boxed – sealed so that Japanese engineers cannot study and copy them.

In summary then, East Asia is in a state of chassis. Although Japan has neither the heart nor the materiel for what lies ahead, she, together with South Korea and Taiwan, must develop not only their autonomous defense systems but their own autonomous diplomatic voices as well. Japan’s future, whether she likes it or not, will be with its East Asian neighbors’ Belt and Road Initiative when the U.S. 7th Fleet, however belatedly, scuttles back to Pearl Harbor.

Shanghai Police Telling Citizens Protesting Lockdown “We are going to have a war with America”

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Sometimes, real facts pop-up in the strangest places.  This one is a doozy!

The City of Shanghai China has been in a new “COVID Lockdown” for a couple weeks.  23 Million people can’t even leave their homes.   No work.  No food shopping. Nothing.

Protests are erupting.  People want this to end.

Shanghai police inadvertently slipped-up while on-camera, and provided the __real__ reason for what’s going on:  This isn’t a COVID lockdown, it is economic warfare being waged by China, against the United States.  

By halting manufacturing in Shanghai and the surrounding region, parts and raw materials the US needs, aren’t coming.   As such, industry in the U.S. is forced to shut down.

So what was it the Shanghai cops let slip?

"I'm telling you this is not caused by our police.  This is a result of the whole international situation.  We are going to have a war with America . . . Don't you know?"

Here’s the video:

 

INTEL: U.S. Delta Forces and U.K. “SAS” Fighting inside Ukraine since February!

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A source in the French intelligence community reportedly informed a Le Figaro reporter last week that elite special forces from the UK and the US have been deployed in Ukraine since the start of hostilities with Russia in late February.

The claim was made public by the newspaper’s senior international journalist Georges Malbrunot on Saturday, the same day that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson paid an unexpected visit to Kiev. Although this information has not been officially confirmed, the British leader was reportedly accompanied by special SAS guards.

SAS units “have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, as did [sic] the American Deltas,” Malbrunot tweeted, citing a French intelligence source. He went on to say that Russia was well aware of the “secret war” waged against its troops by foreign commandos, according to the source. His information was mentioned in Le Figaro’s Ukraine updates.

The French journalist who returned from Ukraine after arriving with volunteer fighters told broadcaster CNews that “Americans are directly “in charge” of the war on the ground.”

The United Kingdom and the United States have been among Kiev’s most ardent military supports. Johnson is said to have personally urged his Ukrainian colleague, Volodymyr Zelensky, to continue fighting Russia until better terms are presented.

Russian Flagship “Moskva” Explodes in Black Sea off Ukraine; Reports Say it SANK

MoskvaMissileCruiser large
Moskva Missile Cruiser

The Missile cruiser ‘Moskva’ was evacuated after fire caused an ammunition explosion, “severely damaging” the ship according to a statement by the Russian Defense Ministry.  Ukraine is claiming they fired two “Neptune” anti-ship Missiles at the ship causing it to explode, but this is not confirmed.

The entire crew was evacuated after an ammunition explosion caused by a fire, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement cited by Russian media on Wednesday night. The cruiser suffered “serious damage,” the Russian military said, adding that the cause of the fire was under investigation.

The Slava-class missile cruiser, launched in 1979, is armed with 16 anti-ship missiles and many more air defense missiles, torpedoes and guns. It is part of the Black Sea fleet, and has been engaged in operations off the coast of Ukraine since February.

Ukrainian officials on Wednesday evening claimed that a battery of their Neptune anti-ship missiles hidden in Odessa had successfully struck the Moskva twice, setting the cruiser ablaze. Among those making the claim were Maksim Marchenko, head of the military administration in Odessa, and Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Interior Ministry in Kiev.

They did not provide any evidence for their claims.

It was just yesterday that the Hal Turner Radio Show reported to the world via Global High Frequency radio broadcasts on WBCQ and WRMI,  that NATO personnel were in Odessa with equipment that could provide precise coordinates on every ship in the Black Sea within 200km, and that the NATO targeting gear could be used to guide missiles to those ships.   One day later, Russia’s Black Sea flagship has now, apparently, been hit.

According to local reports – which HAVE NOT been verified – the Moskva was in the process of changing position to go after a drone which had achieved “radar lock” upon it.  That change of position seems to have placed the Moskva in the worst position imaginable as far as becoming vulnerable to a coastal launched missile strike.

Was the drone “radar lock” a NATO Drone?   Was the Radar lock a way to get the ship to change position to make it ripe for missile attack?

The answers to these questions may determine whether Ukraine – or the U.S.A. – gets retaliated against by Russia.  It may be that such retaliation would come with no warning . . . just like the Moskva had no warning.    We are in dangerous times.

Putin‘s final warning.

PUTIN: “I am now instructing our 4 combat regions that if USA and NATO dare to provoke us (around the Black Sea) and try to hit us with even ONE guided missile then you must hit them back as hard as possible.

Hit them fiercely until they kneel down for mercy.

If they retaliate, I command you to use nuclear weapons to hit their countries.

No need to think about the consequences.

I will be solely responsible.

Your duty is just to hit them hard until they kneel down begging for mercy.

Once the war has started I want you to subdue Europe in 5 days.

No need to think… just take over the 8 capitals of Europe.

From now on our Air, Land and Navy armed forces are on full alert.

I want the world to know who is the leader of the world.

What is USA… I am telling them they will be trembling in front of us.

They have been belittling and making fun of many countries but don’t they dare to try us.

Go to hell.

My view is that if the Russians have to live under USA’s mercy then what good is there left in this world!!”

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FLASH: KIEV BEING BOMBED . . . NOW

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As of 7:13 PM eastern US time on Thursday, 14 April, the city of Kiev, capital of Ukraine, is being heavily bombed by the Russian Army.  Video below.

No way to determine if this has anything to do with the missile strikes upon the Russian Guided Missile Frigate “Moskva” which exploded and then sank in the Black Sea last night.

UPDATE 7:21 PM EDT —

Explosions are heard near the government quarter, the Ministry of Defense and the SBU.

Powerful explosions and blackouts in Kiev.

Elsewhere now,  Reports of explosions and shooting in Kharkov.

Nikolaev – explosions.

Ivano-Frankovsk (Western Ukraine) – The last oil refining plant in Ukraine is being destroyed.

A good opinion about this chain of events…

Another realistic Russian ex-mil. opinion on the post-“Moscow” situation, https://t.me/mig41/16459, (Yandex translation):

[Forwarded from A spy to whom no one writes]

Missile defeat of the cruiser "Moscow" opens a new stage of hostilities in Ukraine

The priority direction of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with the support of NATO is the South of Ukraine in the direction of Crimea and Donbass

The situation around the attack on the cruiser "Moscow" has two dimensions: [1] military–technical and [2] public–media.

The military–technical part of this situation was described most fully (https://t.me/atomiccherry/429 ) the author of the Atomic Cherry channel, I recommend reading, a bright and deep mind that rarely makes mistakes in estimates.

I can add to the above only the unpreparedness of the Russian fleet for the active actions of the AFU, which lies in the weak intelligence and analytical capabilities of the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet and the Navy of Russia.

After 50 days of the operation, from which half of the time we observe the increasing scale and pace of enemy activity, there is no reflection.

Once again, we are faced with a critical underestimation of the capabilities of the APU.

The cruiser had no cover and acted alone, which is already quite a dangerous occupation.

So far, everything suggests that the ship was hit during a combined attack involving a UAV and the Ukrainian Neptune missile defense system with direct support from NATO (primarily in reconnaissance and targeting).

It is difficult to say what chances the ship had without cover with outdated radar and air defense in such conditions.

In the general picture of what happened , two points are of interest:

1. Did NATO reconnaissance aircraft take part (https://t.me/atomiccherry/430 )in the continuous illumination of the target, or only gave the exact coordinates. 

The first option already speaks of the direct participation of the British Air Force in a military operation against the missile cruiser "Moscow".

2. Whether the Turkish Bayraktar UAVs were used in the attack on the ship. It may also dramatically lower the degree of Turkey's relations with Russia.

Once again, we have received a painful lesson in competent and clear planning of the operation, unified and effective management of forces and means, which is critically lacking in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

The media and public reflection is extremely surprising. 

The media are trying to explain Ukraine's success with some kind of NATO miracle weapon, missiles that were able to magically hit the ship.

This cargo cult, the magical perception of war, takes society even further away from reality.

Russia has suffered a serious symbolic and military defeat.

And if the loss of the first large ship (BDK, in Berdyansk) could be written off as an accident, then the loss of the second is already a pattern that speaks of a dangerous underestimation of the enemy.

What conclusions and forecasts can we come to at the moment:

1. The naval blockade of Ukrainian ports is under threat. The Black Sea Fleet, due to its small size, cannot continue to lose (surface) ships. 
We need to look for other means to keep the coast and Ukrainian ports under control.

2. Attacks on the Black Sea Fleet will continue, primarily by the forces of the NSM PKR, whose range (up to 200 km) allows hitting ships of the Black Sea Fleet almost throughout the Black Sea, including the coast of Crimea. 

The Black Sea Fleet will be squeezed out of the Black Sea to the coast of the peninsula.

3. The main direction of the APU offensive is the South of Ukraine – Kherson and Mykolaiv region. 

Britain has repeatedly made it clear that the Black Sea ports of Ukraine, primarily Odessa, have strategic value for them.

Donbass is also being strengthened as an instrument of depletion of Russian and allied forces. The AFU grouping, which has been strengthening for seven years, is far from exhaustion.

4. The second center of forces is the Dnipropetrovsk region, as the political center of the South, which connects all the surrounding regions.

5. Crimea becomes a priority target of the AFU and NATO operations. This confirms the Pentagon's "bold" statement that the United States will provide Kiev with intelligence information on targets in the Crimea and Donbas.

Not only the Black Sea Fleet will be hit, but also the objects and forces of the Crimean ground group. 

It is critically important for the AFU to paralyze the logistics and replenishment of the "southern" grouping of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation operating from Kherson. @genshab

So my prediction from the other thread looks to be right after all.

Posted by: Boo | Apr 14 2022

Capture of US army major general

All evidence points to the United States directly involved in the war in the Ukraine against Russia.

Eventually, it will point to direct involvement of the United States directly involved in Taiwan Against China.

Right now, the situation is clear. Mainstream media “news” can say whatever it wants, but the facts are clear to Russia. And thus to China, and the rest of the world. There was information that the representative of the high command of the US ground forces, Lieutenant General Roger Cloutier was captured in Mariupol and is already in Moscow

The United States is in a hot kinetic war against Russia.

video 3MB

 

Americans in Ukraine oversaw a project to spread diseases by water

From HERE.

The analysis of documents relating to the military biological activities of the United States on the territory of Ukraine continues.

Briefing by the Chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation , Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov 04/14/2022.

" Thanks to the special military operation of the Russian troops, it was possible to obtain additional information about the military biological activities of the United States on the territory of Ukraine, confirming numerous violations of the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons (BTWC).

Taking advantage of existing gaps in international legislation and the absence of a clear verification mechanism, the US administration is consistently building up its military biological potential in various regions of the world.

The Russian Federation is constantly making efforts to create a mechanism for verifying compliance with the BTWC, but this initiative has been consistently blocked by the collective West led by the United States since 2001.

The existing Mechanism of the UN Secretary-General to investigate the alleged use of biological and toxin weapons, as well as the Geneva Protocol of 1925 on the prohibition of the use of asphyxiating, poisonous and other similar gases and bacteriological agents in wars and military conflicts, do not cover the verification of the biological activities of participating States. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague, also has no such authority.

Earlier, we presented a scheme for coordinating the activities of biological laboratories and research institutes in Ukraine by the United States.

One of its elements is the Ukrainian Science and Technology Center (UNTC), a seemingly non-public organization that has nothing to do with the Pentagon.

The Russian Ministry of Defense managed to reveal its role in the US military-biological activities on the territory of Ukraine.

In accordance with the statutory documents, the STCU is an international intergovernmental organization created with the aim of "...preventing the dissemination of knowledge and experience related to weapons of mass destruction ...".

Its legal status is determined by the Agreement of October 25, 1993, which was concluded between the governments of Ukraine, Canada, the USA and Sweden, as well as the Amendment Protocol of July 7, 1997.

The STCU is headquartered in Kyiv and has regional offices in Baku, Chisinau and Tbilisi, as well as Kharkov and Lvov.

At the same time, the Expert Center for Chemical and Biological Threats of the Russian Ministry of Defense established that the main activity of the STCU is to act as a distribution center for grants for conducting research of interest to the Pentagon, including in the field of biological weapons.

In recent years alone, Washington has spent more than $350 million on the implementation of STCU projects.

The US Department of State and the Ministry of Defense are US customers and sponsors of the STCU. Funding is also provided through the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of Agriculture, Health and Energy.

Also, pay attention to the document prepared by the STCU curators dated March 11, 2022, which highlights the true nature of the activities of this organization. It notes: 

“... there is an outflow of scientific experts in the development of delivery vehicles and modern weapons who worked at Ukrainian institutions, as well as experts in the development of biological, radiological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The most trained specialists with experience in working with dual-use materials and technologies (there are from 1,000 to 4,000 of them) found themselves in unfavorable professional and financial circumstances. This makes them vulnerable to going over to the side of other states to participate in programs for the development of WMD, delivery vehicles and other weapons…”.

Using such formulations, Washington actually recognizes the work carried out by Ukrainian experts on the creation of means for the delivery and use of weapons of mass destruction and considers it appropriate to continue their financing.

I will give the names of officials who were involved in the implementation of military biological programs.

The post of Executive Director of the STCU is held by US citizen Curtis Belayach. Born August 27, 1968 in California, studied at the California University of Management named after Anderson. He has a master's degree in international finance and has been working in Ukraine since 1994.

Eddie Arthur Mayer is the Chairman of the Board of the STCU from the European Union, and Phil Dolliff from the US is in charge of the work of the center, who holds the position of Deputy Advisor to the Secretary on International Security and Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs in the State Department.

Documents received by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation confirm the connection of the STCU with the American military department. The slide shows the official recommendation of the US Department of State, endorsing the cooperation of the STCU with the Pentagon's main contractor, Black & Veatch. The correspondence expresses the readiness of the vice-president of this company, Matthew Webber, to work with the STCU in the framework of ongoing military biological research on the territory of Ukraine.

In the period from 2014 to 2022, the Ukrainian Science and Technology Center in the post-Soviet countries (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan) implemented more than 500 research projects.

The American curators were primarily interested in dual-use research, for example, project 6166 "Development of technologies for modeling, assessing and predicting the impact of conflicts and threats of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction", project 9601 "Transfer of Ukrainian technologies for the production of complex dual-use materials to the European Union".

Many of them are aimed at studying potential agents of biological weapons (plague, tularemia) and pathogens of economically significant infections (pathogenic avian influenza, African swine fever).

Directly in the interests of the military department, the Center financed projects P-364, 444, and 781, aimed at studying the spread of pathogens of dangerous infections through insect vectors, wild birds, and bats.

Pay attention to the documents of the project 3007 "Monitoring of the epidemiological and environmental situation regarding dangerous waterborne diseases in Ukraine".

During the work, Ukrainian specialists, under the supervision of American scientists, systematically took water samples in a number of large rivers of Ukraine, including the Dnieper, Danube, Dniester, as well as in the North Crimean Canal, in order to establish the presence of especially dangerous pathogens, including pathogens of cholera, typhoid fever, hepatitis A and E, and draw conclusions about the possibility of their distribution by water.

As part of the project, the damaging properties of the selected samples were assessed, and the strains themselves were deposited in the collection and subsequently exported to the United States.

Here is a map of Ukraine's water resources. Its analysis shows that the results of the work carried out can be used to create an unfavorable biological environment not only on the territory of the Russian Federation, but also in the waters of the Black and Azov Seas, as well as in the countries of Eastern Europe - Belarus, Moldova, Poland.

Our concern about Washington's activities in Ukraine stems from the fact that, contrary to its international obligations, the United States has retained in its national legislation the norms that allow for work in the field of biological weapons.

The ratification of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 by the United States was accompanied by a number of reservations, one of which allows for the retaliatory use of chemical and toxin weapons.

Under the U.S. United States United and United Against Terrorism Federal Act, biological weapons research is permitted with the approval of the U.S. government. Participants in such research are not subject to criminal liability for the development of such weapons.

Thus, the American administration in this area implements the principle of priority of domestic legislation over international ones. The most ethically controversial studies are conducted outside national jurisdictions.

Thus, during a special operation on the territory of Ukraine, it was established that in the period from 2019 to 2021, American scientists from a laboratory in the city of Merefa (Kharkiv region) tested potentially dangerous biological drugs on patients of the regional clinical psychiatric hospital No. 3 in the city of Kharkov.

Individuals with mental disorders were selected for experiments based on their age, nationality and immune status. On special forms, the result of round-the-clock monitoring of the condition of patients was taken into account. Information was not entered into the database of the hospital, the staff of the medical institution signed a non-disclosure agreement.

In January 2022, the activity of the laboratory in Merefa was stopped, all equipment and preparations were taken to the west of Ukraine.

There are testimonies from a number of witnesses to these inhuman experiments, whose names we cannot disclose in the interests of ensuring their safety.

In conclusion, at one of the previous briefings, we described a technical device for the delivery and application of biological formulations, which was patented in the United States.

At the same time, it was noted that Ukraine sent a request to the manufacturing company about the possibility of equipping Bayraktar unmanned aerial vehicles with attached aerosol equipment.

It is a matter of concern that on March 9, in the territory of the Kherson region, reconnaissance units of the Russian troops discovered three unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with 30-liter containers and equipment for spraying bioweapon recipes.

According to available data, in January 2022, Ukraine purchased more than 50 such devices through intermediary organizations, which can be used to apply biological formulations and toxic chemicals.

We continue to analyze documentary evidence of the crimes of the American administration and the Kiev regime on the territory of Ukraine ."

Documents: https://disk.yandex.ru/d/GWeH18ux9aL17g .

Slides: https://disk.yandex.ru/d/f9KgolQWhxXueA .

Project 3007

Please check what Project 3007 is. Today in Russia it was reported that it was a Ukrainian project of infecting people with biological weapons by water, i.e. in the waters of the Black Sea. It was also reported that in the psychiatric clinic of Kharkov, experiments were carried out on people by American scientists using biological pathogens.

-Irina

The Long Dark Winter

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The government released the latest inflation data and the results were the worst we have seen in forty years. The retail number came in at 8.4% and the wholesale number clocked in at 11.2%. Of course, the retail number excludes the things that people buy, like food, fuel and housing. These numbers also rely upon the new math rather than old math used the last time inflation was an issue. By the old inflation standard, retail inflation is over 15%.

The political class is poleaxed by these numbers as they have been assured that inflation at these levels was impossible. Modern economic theory says that inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods. We now have top men in place to keep an eye out for this. They just need to manage the money supply to keep inflation under control. This assumption led the top men to assume inflation was transitory, the result of supply chain issues.

That should be the first red flag when looking at the economic data. Those top men that are supposed to have a handle on the money supply say they are as surprised as the rest of us that food has doubled in price. A month ago, they were talking about a series of exceedingly small rate hikes. Now they are talking about a series of substantial rate hikes to prevent inflation from going even higher. You get the sense that there is both panic and confusion among those top men.

One reason for this is the long period of historically low interest rates. What the Federal Reserve did forty years ago to tame inflation was remove money from the system by raising borrowing rates. The real creators of money are the banks, who create money through lending. By raising their cost of money creation, they create less money and the result is fewer dollars chasing goods. At its peak in 1980 the 10-year Treasury was going for 15% versus 2% currently.

In other words, getting rates back into the normal range means three or four times the current rates. The world is simply not prepared for such a thing. Think about what happens to the real estate market if rates simply double. Refinancing comes to an end and homes sales collapse. No one is trading out of their home with the 3% mortgage into a home with a 5% mortgage, at least not on purpose. This would be the new reality throughout the financial world.

The other problem with this approach is the massive government debt. The way government handles debt is not like normal people. They issue bonds, pay the holder interest, but never pay them off. Instead, they issue new bonds to pay off the old bonds and the cycle begins anew. Rolling debt like this works as long as the market for new debt looks like the market for old debt. If the Federal government has to start borrowing at two or three times the old rate, it is big trouble.

The other way the Federal reserve can tackle inflation is to sell its massive holdings of equities, treasuries and other assets. The latest balance sheet from the Fed says they are holding about $8 Trillion in assets. They can begin selling which removes cash from the system. Keep in mind that the value of the S&P 500 is about the same as the Fed balance sheet, so this is a powerful option. They added about a trillion in equities during Covid as a way to juice the markets.

Of course, this is not without consequences. If they liquidate that trillion in equities, they hoovered up during Covid, the market will go down. The tens of millions of retired people living on their investments will not be pleased. If they liquidate some of their $4 trillion in treasuries, those assets will lose value, which means the cost of borrowing by the government goes up. This is why monetizing the debt is like eating the seed corn during tough times.

Another problem for the Fed is the politicians have started a global economic war against the majority of the earth’s population. Exporting excess dollars to places like China, India and Russia is no longer possible. In fact, dollars are starting to come back to America in response to sanctions. When Washington declared war on the globe, the globe declared war on the dollar. At least in the short term, exporting extra dollars to the rest of the world is not a viable option.

This is why there is panic in Washington. Biden’s official approval rate is 40% and Congress has an approval rate of 20%. Now they are faced with grim choices that promise to be very unpopular. They can support a war on inflation that will result in a deep recession or they can let inflation rob the public. Worse yet, it is not all that clear the Fed can wage an effective war on inflation. Like a bug trapped in the spider’s web, they have nothing left but panic.

While the suffering of the political class brings joy to most everyone, this means normal people are going to suffer for an extended period. The gap between wholesale inflation and retail inflation says prices will keep rising. The war on the world will also put pressure on commodities like energy and fertilizer. That will put upward pressure on prices at all levels. Wages are not keeping pace, which means everyone is getting poorer by the minute.

When Joe Biden ran for office, he promised a long dark winter. Most people assumed he flubbed his lines, but it turns out he was telling the truth. The long dark winter of mismanagement and manufactured crisis now promises to extend into the summer and autumn. Worse yet, the people who created this mess are now tasked with solving it. It looks like the label for the Joe Biden regime will be the long dark winter of American decline.

 

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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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What I love about China

This video was posted on you-tube on Wednesday 13th April 2022. I later found out that a number of nations banned viewing of this video. I guess the content is too dangerous for you all to view.

That’s really strange, as the following videos about China were allowed…

Strange.

Never, the less, this article is a workaround to the video that was selectively blocked in certain nations.

The Original video on You-Tube

We start off with the video. See if you can access it. Here is the direct link to the You-Tube video.

For those who are denied the You-Tube video…

But for those of you who are denied watching this video, do not worry. I have the video here in three parts. Please download the parts and watch it in the privacy of your own home.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my “Broken Dreams Index”.

Broken Dreams

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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The calm period before all Hell breaks loose (with a 1980s tribute)

Lately I have been playing around with the You-Tube platform. I have added a few videos and am busy learning video editing and production. I have up loaded three videos so far, and I am learning so much by my myrid of mistakes. Hopefully, I will be able to provide MM readership with a steady flow of videos to suppliment the writings herein. Well. That’s my goal anyways.

We are in a “funny time”. The main stream American media (along wiht the Western media) are still playing the nonsense, but you know… the “worm has turned“. Ah. It’s all different now. The East is now going to rule, while the West slowly fades into the background.

Oh, don’t misunderstand, it’s still a dangerous time, but the verdict is in. A new world order is emerging out of the old, and there’s very few things that the old order can do to change things.

Here, we will continue on the collection of narratives as we document this great period of change, but keep in mind (as dangerous as this time actually is) the future is a foregone conclusion. The only issue at this time is the death count, and the speed at which the collapse of the West will occur.

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Escobar: Meet The New, Resource-Based Global Reserve Currency

Saturday, Apr 02, 2022 – 04:20 AM

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

A new reality is being formed:

the unipolar world is irrevocably becoming a thing of the past,

a multipolar one is taking shape.

It was something to behold. Dmitri Medvedev, former Russian President, unrepentant Atlanticist, current deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, decided to go totally unplugged in an outburst matching the combat star turn of Mr. Khinzal that delivered palpable shock and awe all across NATOstan.

Medvedev said “hellish” Western sanctions not only have failed to cripple Russia, but are instead “returning to the West like a boomerang.” Confidence in reserve currencies is “fading like the morning mist”, and ditching the US dollar and the euro is not unrealistic anymore: “The era of regional currencies is coming.”

After all, he added, “no matter if they want it or not, they’ll have to negotiate a new financial order (…) And the decisive voice will then be with those countries that have a strong and advanced economy, healthy public finances and a reliable monetary system.”

Medvedev relayed his succinct analysis even before D Day – as in the deadline this Thursday established by President Putin after which payments for Russian gas by “unfriendly nations” will only be accepted in rubles.

The G7, predictably, had struck a (collective) pose: we won’t pay. “We” means the 4 that are not large Russian gas importers. “We”, moreover, means the Empire of Lies dictating the rules. As for the 3 that will be in dire straits, not only they are major importers but also happen to be WWII losers – Germany, Italy and Japan, still de facto occupied territories. History does have a habit of playing perverted tricks.

Denial didn’t last long. Germany was the first to break – even before industrialists from Ruhr to Bavaria staged a mass revolt. Scholz, the puny Chancellor, called Putin, who had to explain the obvious:  payments are being converted into rubles because the EU froze Russia’s foreign exchange reserves – in a crass violation of international law.

With Taoist patience, Putin also expressed hope this would not represent a deterioration in contract terms for European importers. Russian and German experts should sit down together and discuss the new terms.

Moscow is working on a set of documents defining the new deal. Essentially, that spells out no rubles, no gas. Contracts become null and void once you violate trust. The US and the EU broke legally biding agreements with unilateral sanctions and on top of it confiscated foreign reserves of a – nuclear – G20 nation.

The unilateral sanctions made dollars and euros worthless to Russia. Hysteria fits won’t cut it: this will be resolved – but under Russia’s terms. Period. The Foreign Ministry had already warned that refusal to pay for gas in rubles would lead to a serious global crisis of non-payments and serial global-level bankruptcies, a hellish chain reaction of blocked transactions, freezing of collateral assets and closures of credit lines.

What will happen next is partially predictable. EU companies will receive the new set of rules. They will have time to examine the documents and make a decision. Those that say “no” will be automatically excluded from receiving direct Russian gas shipments – all politico-economic consequences included.

There will be some compromise, of course. For instance, quite a few EU nations will accept to use rubles and increase their gas acquisitions so they may resell the surplus to their neighbors and make a profit. And some may also decide to buy gas on the go on energy exchanges.

So Russia is not imposing an ultimatum on anybody. The whole thing will take time – a rolling process. With some sideway action as well. The Duma is contemplating the extension of payment in rubles to other essential products – such as oil, metals, timber, wheat. It will depend on the collective voracity of the EU chihuahuas. Everyone knows that their non-stop hysteria may translate into a colossal rupture of supply chains across the West.

Bye bye oligarchs

While the Atlanticist ruling classes have gone totally berserk but still remain focused on fighting to the last European to extract any remaining, palpable EU wealth, Russia is playing it cool. Moscow has been quite lenient in fact, brandishing the specter of no gas in Spring rather than Winter.

The Russian Central Bank nationalized foreign exchange earnings of all major exporters. There was no default. The ruble keeps rising – and is now back to roughly the same level before Operation Z.  Russia remains self-sufficient, food-wise. American hysteria over “isolated” Russia is laughable. Every actor that matters across Eurasia – not to mention the other 4 BRICS and virtually the whole Global South – did not demonize and/or sanction Russia.

As an extra bonus, arguably the last oligarch capable of influence in Moscow, Anatoly Chubais, is gone. Call it another momentous historical trickery: Western sanction hysteria de facto dismembered Russian oligarchy – Putin’s pet project since 2000. What that implies is the strengthening of the Russian state and the consolidation of Russian society.

We still don’t have all the facts, but a case can be made that after years of careful evaluation Putin opted to really go for broke and break the West’s back – using that trifecta (imminent blitzkrieg on Donbass; US bioweapon labs; Ukraine working on nuclear weapons)  as the casus belli.

The freezing of foreign reserves had to have been forecasted, especially because the Russian Central Bank had been increasing its reserves of US Treasuries since November last year. Then there’s the serious possibility of Moscow being able to access “secret” offshore foreign reserves – a complex matrix built with Chinese insider help.

The sudden switch from dollars/euros to rubles was hardcore, Olympic-level geoeconomic judo. Putin enticed the collective West to unleash its demented hysteria sanction attack – and turned it against the opponent with a single, swift move.

And here we all are now trying to absorb so many in-synch game-changing developments following the weaponization of dollar assets:  rupee-ruble with India, the Saudi petroyuan, co-badged Mir-UnionPay cards issued by Russian banks, the Russia-Iran SWIFT alternative, the EAEU-China project of an independent monetary/financial system.

Not to mention the master coup by the Russian Central Bank, pegging 1 gram of gold to 5,000 rubles – which is already around $60, and climbing.

Coupled with No Rubles No Gas, what we have here is energy de facto pegged to gold.

The EU Chihuahuas and the Japanese colony will need to buy a lot of rubles in gold or buy a lot of gold to have their gas. And it gets better. Russia may re-peg the ruble to gold in the near future. Could go to 2,000 rubles, 1,000 rubles, even 500 rubles for a gram of gold.

Time to be sovereign

The Holy Grail in the evolving discussions about a multipolar world, since the BRICS summits in the 2000s featuring Putin, Hu Jintao and Lula, has always been how to bypass dollar hegemony. It’s now right in front of the whole Global South, as a benign apparition bearing a Cheshire cat’s smile: the golden ruble, or ruble backed by oil, gas, minerals, commodity exports.

The Russian Central Bank, unlike the Fed, does not practice QE and won’t export toxic inflation to the rest of the planet. The Russian Navy not only secures all Russian sea lines, but Russian nuclear-powered submarines are capable of popping up all over the planet unannounced.

Russia is far, far ahead already implementing the concept of “continental naval power”. December 2015, in the Syrian theater, was the strategic game-changer. The Black Sea-based submarine 4th division is the star of the show.

Russian naval fleets may now employ Kalibr missiles across a space comprehending Eastern Europe, West Asia and Central Asia. The Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, linked by the Don-Volga canal, offer a space of maneuver comparable to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf combined. 6,000 km-long. And you don’t even need to access warm waters.

That covers around 30 nations: the traditional Russian sphere of influence; historical borders of the Russian empire; and current political/energy rivalry spheres.

No wonder the Beltway is berserk.

Russia guarantees shipping across Asia, the Arctic and Europe, in tandem with the Eurasia-wide BRI railway network.

And last but not least, don’t mess with a Nuclear Bear.

Essentially, this is what hardcore power politics is all about. Medvedev was not bragging when he said the era of a single reserve currency is over. The advent of a resource-based global reserve currency means, in a nutshell, that 13% of the planet will not dominate the other 87% anymore.

It’s NATOstan vs. Eurasia redux. Cold War 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and even 5.0. It doesn’t matter. All the previous Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) nations see which way the geopolitical and geo-economic winds are blowing: the time to assert their real sovereignty is at hand as the “rules-based international order” bites the dust.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in China, after meeting several counterparts from across Eurasia, could not have outlined it better:

“A new reality is being formed: the unipolar world is irrevocably becoming a thing of the past, a multipolar one is taking shape. It’s an objective process. It’s unstoppable. In this reality, more than one power will “rule” – it will be necessary to negotiate between all the key states that today have a decisive influence on the world economy and politics. At the same time, realizing their special situation, these countries ensure compliance with the basic principles of the UN Charter, including the fundamental one – the sovereign equality of states. No one on this Earth should be seen as a minor player. Everyone is equal and sovereign.”

Welcome to the birth of the new world system.

Tears For Fears – Head Over Heels (Official Music Video)

Ok. So I’m out of MAJestic on my own and waiting to be called in for “training”. At this time, we (my first wife and I) were living in the nice seaside community of San Louis Obispo in California. It was the middle to late 1980’s. We were living in a broken down van stuck in the end of a church parking lot, and I was working two jobs as a breakfast cook and janitor.

It was at that time that MAJestic tracked me down and called me into the base with work. But before that happened, we were living hand to mouth at the poverty level.

It was a special time. It was Spring and we lived in a “college town”, and the music of that time was unique. One of the songs of that time was “Head over Heels” by Tears for Fears. Here’s the MV of it. Please enjoy my flashback to the past.

What do you think of this flash back in time?

Goldman Sachs warns the dollar is at risk of losing its dominance, and could end up a lesser player like the UK pound

  • Goldman Sachs has said the US dollar faces a number of risks, and could become a lesser currency like the UK pound.
  • The US’ tough sanctions on Russia have raised concerns that countries around the world could try to move away from the dollar.
  • Goldman said the US’ foreign debts mean that foreign investors may become reluctant to hold dollar assets.

Here 1
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Here 2

Do you think that it is too late?

Simple Minds – Alive And Kicking (Live)

This is another one of thes songs of that particular period in time. Fast forward two years later, maybe three, and I am out of MAJestic and I am off trying to start yet again anew. Sheech! And this is the song that is playing all over the radio 24-7…

Homemade Biscuits and Gravy

Homemade Biscuits and Gravy ArticleImage CategoryPage ID 1138783
Homemade Biscuits and Gravy

This recipe will take your taste buds down South, to where good old-fashioned recipes are still king. Our Homemade Biscuits and Gravy recipe is full of so much down-home goodness, you’ll want to eat these homemade biscuits at breakfast AND dinner, which is perfectly all right by us!

What You’ll Need

  • 2 cups pancake and baking mix
  • 2/3 cup buttermilk
  • 1/2 stick (1/4 cup) butter, melted, plus 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 (16-ounce) package hot pork sausage
  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 1/2 cups milk
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper

What to Do

  1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
  2. In a medium bowl, stir baking mix, buttermilk, and the 1/2 stick melted butter until soft dough forms. Drop 8 equal spoonfuls of dough onto an ungreased baking sheet.
  3. Bake 14 to 16 minutes, or until golden brown.
  4. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, melt remaining butter; cook 1 to 1-1/2 minutes, or until browned. Add sausage and cook 6 to 8 minutes, or until no pink remains, stirring to crumble sausage. Add flour; mix well. Add Worcestershire sauce, milk, salt, and pepper; mix well. Cook 2 to 4 minutes, or until gravy thickens, stirring constantly.
  5. Cut biscuits in half and spoon sausage mixture evenly on bottom halves. Replace tops and serve.

The captured General in Ukraine is being rewritten

From an influencer, the background wikipedia on the captured American Major General Roger L. Cloutier, that I wrote about HERE, is being rewritten as we speak. Poof! New numbers. New dates. New backgrounds.

White board. That’s what the internet is today. A big white board.

Grow Alum Crystals That Resemble Simulated Diamonds

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Home-made.

Alum is found in the spices section of the grocery store. That little jar contains small white crystals that, with a bit of time and effort, grow a big alum crystal that looks a bit like a diamond. It only takes about an hour to grow small alum crystals, but getting a big crystals takes days to weeks.

All you need to grow alum crystals are alum, hot water, and a container. Choose a clear container so you can watch the crystals grow. While not strictly necessary, it helps having a way to tie and suspend a crystal in the liquid. This helps it keep an ideal shape. A coffee filter or paper towel keeps dust out of your project, while still allowing good air circulation.

  • 1/2 cups hot tap water
  • 2-1/2 tablespoons alum
  • nylon fishing line
  • pencil, ruler, or knife
  • 2 clean jars
  • spoon
  • coffee filter/paper towel

There are actually a few different kinds of alum. The edible one in the grocery store is potassium alum. It grows clear crystals. Other types of alum include sodium, ammonium, selenium, and chrome alum. Chrome alum grows deep purple crystals. If you have access to the other chemicals, feel free to combine them to see what colors you get. But, check the labels for safety information. Some types of alum are non-toxic, but others are irritants and not edible.

Grow the Crystals

    1. Pour 1/2 cup of hot tap water into a clean jar.
    2. Slowly stir in alum, a little at a time, until it stops dissolving. Don’t add the whole amount; just enough to saturate the water.
    3. Loosely cover the jar with a coffee filter or paper towel (to keep dust out) and allow the jar to sit undisturbed overnight.
    4. The next day, pour the alum solution from the first jar into the clean jar. You will see small alum crystals at the bottom of the jar. These are ‘seed’ crystals that you will use to grow a big crystal.
    5. Tie nylon fishing line around the largest, best-shaped crystal. Tie the other end to a flat object (e.g., popsicle stick, ruler, pencil, butter knife). You will hang the seed crystal by this flat object into the jar far enough so that it will be covered in liquid, but won’t touch the bottom or sides of the jar. It may take a few tries to get the length just right.
    6. When you have the right string length, hang the seed crystal in the jar with the alum solution. Cover it with the coffee filter and grow a crystal!
  1. Grow your crystal until you are satisfied with its size. If you see crystals starting to grow on the sides or bottom of your jar, carefully remove your crystal, pour the liquid into the clean jar, and put the crystal in the new jar. Other crystals in the jar will compete with your crystal for alum, so it won’t be able to get as big if you let these crystals grow.

Solving Common Problems

The most common problem people experience growing alum crystals is that crystals not growing. If you don’t see crystal growth within a day or two, there isn’t enough alum in the liquid. Gently heat the liquid over a stove or in the microwave and try adding more alum powder. Crystals only grow if the solution is saturated. This is the point where no more solid dissolves.

Crystal Growing Tips

  1. You can use sewing thread or other string instead of nylon fishing line, but crystals will grow on the entire length of the submerged string. Crystals don’t adhere to nylon, so if you use it, you can get bigger and better crystals.
  2. Alum is an ingredient used to make pickles. It makes them crispy.
  3. Don’t worry if you don’t want to bother with the string! Crystals grow just fine on the bottom of the container. Use a spoon to scrape crystals away from each other so they won’t grow together. The shape of crystals growing on a flat surface differs from the shapes that form when crystals are suspended.

From Hal Turner

I happen to be in the morbidity business; I'm the CEO of a large insurance group... Based on what it is we are seeing, the rates right now are excess mortality of 84% and excess of every kind of disease at 1100%. 

We are expecting a 5000% or so increase in excess mortality for this year (2022). 

An enormous number. 

I don't think that it's by coincidence, by the way, that Moderna has now just received licensure of their emergency use authorization HIV vaccine. So they gave everybody AIDS, and here's your salvation, another vaccine."  

-- Attorney Todd Callender

The video below is Attorney Todd Callender, whose comments are shown above.

When he says “So they gave everybody AIDS . . . ” he’s talking about the mRNA injections given out under the guise of COVID-19.

Quick investigation of the Preliminary USA mortality data for 2021 from the CDC reveals:

Total deaths – 3,447,405
Expected deaths – 2,948,273
Excess deaths – 499,132

0% increase = 1X, 100% increase = 2X, 200% increase = 3X, etc. 5000% increase = 51X.

499,132 X 51 = 25,455,732 excess deaths.  That is what Attorney Todd Callendar indicates the USA could see !

Add to that the 2.95 million expected deaths, and the result is:

28,405,732 total deaths for 2022.

At this rate all the injected will be gone by 2025, just as was forecasted by the population reduction charts posted on the Deagel web site for many years.

Deagel.com last original 2025 population forecast (before scrubbing it all) for Germany was 28 million.  For the USA, the chart that was “scrubbed” is shown below:

2022 04 06 15 51
2022 04 06 15 51

About one third of Germanys population remain unvaxxed. Today’s population is 83 million, so Deagel’s report may be quite accurate.

So the DoD guy who ran the Deagel website † 2021 knew about this “plandemic” since 2015? CIA connections huh?

Deagle has always had the forecast at the year 2025. The numbers may have fluctuated but the date never did.

Qualudes again

Well, is he right? Or is he fear-mongering? It’s hard to say. I am not a doctor, but I can read tables. I guess we will have to wait and see.

In the meantime, let’s go back to 1976. This song topped the Country and Western chart at that time. It’s about a hyptnomic sedative that was very popular at that time for recreational use. Known as the Qualude. I can tell you first hand, that it was an awesome drug.

It made you so very relaxed, but at the same time, so very lively. You just wanted to dance and have a great time. Don’t drive though. You are not safe behind the wheel of anything.

It was banned in the United States.

Pakastan thwarted a United States coup

Pakistan just narrowly thwarted the US’ regime change campaign against Prime Minister Imran Khan that was launched against him as punishment for his independent foreign policy.
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“Imran Khan claimed that Donald Lu warned the Pakistani envoy to the US, Asad Majeed, that there would be implications if the Pakistan PM survived the no-trust vote in the National Assembly.
PM Khan said that the no-confidence motion against him was a “foreign conspiracy” and he thanked Allah that it failed.”
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Why invest in diplomacy or in projects like BRI ? The return of investment is way way higher if Uncle Sam just perform regime change here and there and if successful, the interests of US will be taken care of by the puppet gov’t in place.

Article

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The Nations on Russia’s “Unfriendly List”

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1649204301750

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Voyage to the bottom of the sea: Terror

A fine throw-back to 1960s television fare. It’s well worth at least a ten minute watch. I lvoe the acting, the costumes, and the premise of a B-grade science fiction movie. Great for laughs.

Doomsday ‘Preppers’ Warn Of Hard Times Ahead As Preparedness Goes Mainstream

Authored by Allan Stein via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Food scarcity. Food vouchers. Food riots and flash mobs.

All of that’s coming – and soon, says Texas-based food scientist and “Health Ranger” podcaster Mike Adams, who sees dire events unfolding in America in the short term.

Texas-based food scientist Mike Adams, known online as the “Health Ranger,” sees food shortages and heightened security later in 2022. (Courtesy of Mike Adams)
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His advice: people need to get prepared now.

The thing to really watch for is the food inflation,” Adams said.

My position is we’re going to see food riots in America before the end of this year. We’re going to see flash mobs in grocery stores—especially for meat products.

“Grocery stores are going to respond with increased security and checkpoints. At some point, we’re probably going to see an attempt at price controls and rationing. 

And not on everything—certain types of things. It’s almost certain that the rationing they will attempt to enforce with a vaccine passport app that becomes a food rationing app,” Adams told The Epoch Times.

Adams is not alone in his predictions of hard times coming to America—and the world.

With food production buckling under the weight of runaway inflation, skyrocketing fuel costs, and fertilizer shortages, much of what’s in store is already “built-in.”

What Do You Want From Life?

The tubes was a group that was hitting the audiences when I was graduating out of university. They probably had one hell of a stage show. I don’t actually know, as I never watched them perform. However their album was a real hoot. As this particular song clearly indicates.

Unfertile Ground

In North America two years ago, it cost around $200 an acre to fertilize a 1,000-acre commercial farm, Adams said. Right now, with spring planting, farmers can expect to pay $1,200 to $2,000 an acre.

And consumers will pay for it in higher prices for basic necessities.

“Many farmers are deciding not to plant. In addition, the diesel fuel prices and diesel fuel scarcity is going into their equation whether they should plant,” Adams said.

The upshot, he said, is that fewer farmers are planting, which means less food to go around.

As a food scientist Adams is a big proponent of clean, organically grown food free of heavy metals, which he makes available through the online sale of “Ranger Buckets.” The demand for his products has seen extremely high since the COVID-19 lockdown began in 2020.

Adams said it takes on average six to eight weeks to produce 2,000 buckets, which typically sell out within 30 minutes to three hours.

Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the demand for survival food in the United States has been on the increase among a number of national suppliers.

“The supply chain in the United States continues to crumble. More Americans are realizing it takes four trips to different home improvement stores for parts to make home repairs, instead of all their needs being in one store,” said Lori Hunt at Practical Preppers in South Carolina.

“That is making folks realize this extends to everything: food, books, solar equipment—and considering Ukraine is a source for critical raw materials in the solar industry, this is going to get much worse in the coming months,” she told The Epoch Times.

“Many of our customers are moving toward energy independence, and this is making a greater demand and diminishing supply situation. We are urging our customers to be prepared for a 2–4 month wait to amass all parts needed for their systems. Many installers around the United States are telling us they are experiencing the same.”

Byron Walker, Founder and CEO of Survival Frog in Denver, told the Epoch Times, “We have struggled with supply chain issues and things only appear to be getting worse.”

Allied Marketing Research (AMR) reported that the global incident and emergency market, valued at $75.5 billion in 2017, is projected to reach $423 billion by 2025.

“Factors such as rise in need for safety and security solutions, owing to increase in natural calamities and terrorist attacks, implementation of regulatory policies for public safety, and the necessity for emergency preparedness drive the growth of the global incident and emergency management market,” AMR said on its website.

“In addition, the surge in smart cities is expected to drive the adoption of intelligent evacuation systems and surveillance systems, thereby fueling the incident and emergency management market growth.”

Miami Vice – IN THE AIR TONIGHT | Tribute Video

If you lived though the 1980s then you would really appreciate the television show “Miami Vice”. It defined cool. It was a mix of rock music, detective action, drugs, and fashion. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, was hooked on this show. In this this clip here, you will see so many famous actors when they were young and not yet famous. In hindsight, it’s all pretty silly. But, the video is great and well worth the three minutes to watch.

Price Hikes ‘Here to Stay’

In recent weeks YouTube survival “preppers” such as City Prepping and Alaska Prepper have been sounding the alarm that hard times are just ahead.

Matt the “Magic Prepper,” in North Dakota, said being prepared continues to go mainstream as a “financial and scarcity genre” in view of current global events.

“With food production issues, supply chain problems, a slow economic recovery from the pandemic, and the cascading effects of an overseas conflict, it seems rather clear that shortages, disruptions, and price hikes are here to stay,” Matt told The Epoch Times.

He said the situation in Ukraine has revived interest in preparedness in case of a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack.

“With the conflict creating volatile rhetoric from multiple global superpowers, we find ourselves closer to such an event than any point in recent history,” Matt said. “I operate under the assumption that there is and will likely always be more time to prepare.”

Still, the state of being prepared is “exponentially limited” by the length of time it takes to get prepared, and other factors, he said.

“Every dollar spent today is worth less in value toward preparations than a dollar you would have spent three years ago. Therefore, by waiting to begin, you’ll inherently be able to prepare less and less.

YouTube’s Matt the “Magic Prepper” in North Dakota says it’s not too late to begin preparing for difficult economic times ahead. (Courtesy of Matt the “Magic Prepper”)
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“This is most obviously apparent when you relate it to items such as ammunition. Stocking up on it now provides you with anywhere from 50 percent [to] 75 percent less ammunition for the same amount spent on it three years ago.

“Even if we find ourselves in the midst of a full-on economic collapse or hot conflict, training and learning skills will likely still be accessible,” he said.

Preparedness also requires the ability to network and communication, having supplies in sufficient quantity, a “hardened” location, and knowledge on how to survive an economic collapse.

“I have suggested to keep moving forward regardless of the events unfolding currently. If things finally fall apart to the point of relying on our preparedness efforts, we will have prepared as best as we could up to that point.

“I am making phone calls, appointments, and plans every day to try and enhance my own personal preparedness,” Matt said.

Given the economic protectionism of halting food exports from countries like Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, the world supply of grain is going to be severely limited, Adams said.

This, he said, will result in the “most extreme food shortages we’ve seen in our lifetime.”

Better Now Than Never

“It will begin about August and continue until the end of the year. A lot of this depends on [President Joe] Biden’s economic decisions on whether he allows U.S. oil companies to finish pipelines and do more drilling. If he does not we are going to see even more shortages throughout 2023.”

Out of chaos, however, Adams foresees a reawakening of freedom and self-reliance in the way we grow and produce food.

“I think this is a red pill moment for the people of the world that they need to be more self-reliant. We need decentralization of food production. I’m a big proponent of decentralization—food grown locally.”

The bad news is that only about 5 percent of people in the United State are prepared. But “the more people prepare, the less they panic when shortages appear,” Adams said.

Star Trek – Missile Alert

And here’s a nice brief section of a 1960s Star Trek show. It’s also a fun watch. Just enjoy the five minute vision of the past.

Its about “Gary 7” and his cat.

Rick Wakeman Journey to the Centre of the Earth Full Album 1974 YouTube

Oh my teenage years. This album brought my father and me together musically. He loved it due ot the classical influences, and I loved it for the blend of rock music. Not to mention the great story line.

Simple Minds – Someone Somewhere In Summertime

Another glimpse to my early years right out from the Navy after MAJestic implantation. Enjoy this look back in time.

Conclusion

Yah. It’s a funny time. Don’t get too worked up with and about it. Things are unfolding to the plans set forth. To us “peons” it seems like everything is going to shit, but if you step back, and look at the big picture, just maybe… just MAYBE the West won’t be able to turn the world into an inferno if these various indicators play out as they appear to.

Hold on but not too tightly.

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Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

Grasshopper Pie, Body Snatchers, Prank Gifts, Vaxx, Nanobots, crashing planes, CIA and their Nazi Operations, American collapse and treasure. Just another day at MM land.

Meanwhile, by every single fact we are able to observe, the decadent leaders of the West are acting as though Russia and China are Iraq and Libya. 

It appears that they genuinely believe they can use brute force and threats of brute force to come out on top in this conflict. 

(It’s also worth mentioning that the West, due to the ultra-low moral character of its leaders and the utter lack of any unifying ideal beyond anal sex, has lost the ability to cooperate cohesively as a single body in the way that the Chinese do.)

-UNZ

What do all these things have in common? They all are attributes of a period of time that is going though change. Some people might refer to it as an unravelling, while others might consider it the “second coming”. I think that it’s darn uncomfortable, and bothersome. It’s a period of change and it is nearing it’s peak.

Sheech!

I need a drink.

What? I’m already drinking. Oh, well. Color me silly.

This article has a bunch of videos. Most are small, but depending on your internet connection, they may or may not load. Just click on the link and watch them open up in another window. Most are really quick.

Strange stuff guys…

Strange and unusual things going on.

In China, a passenger aircraft took a highly unusual nose dive. Engines went full throttle, and the plane dove straight into the ground. It’s almost like the plane decided to commit suicide by ramming itself into the ground at full speed.

It’s not normal airplane behavior.

Don’t you know.

The unusual nature of this crash has everyone scratching their heads, and MM is no exception. Since this is Boeing plane that openly admits that the plane’s computer can override the pilot and fly itself…

So, and I do mean it … the software can take the input, decide the pilot is in error, and take over…

… so why have a pilot then?

Hum?

It is very concerning.

The opinions sent to me privately are running near 100% that the United States government / CIA are somehow involved in this fiasco. I would not be surprised if this is the case, but the truth is that I really do not know.

But…

You do know that we are going to flush out this issue.

Right here.

Right now.

MM style.

What I do know is that this entire event has shaken the Chinese people to the core. No one. And I do mean NO ONE wants to fly. Airline prices are now less than $5 USD to fly round-trip to Beijing from Zhuahi. It’s insane.

Just like the crash of the Hindenburg completely ended commercial travel by dirigible, it seems that this even will seriously impact commercial aviation inside of China. There will be far greater use of the High Speed Trains, and far less use of domestic air transport.

I predict.

The Hindenburg

From HERE.

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The Hindenburg bursts into flames.

In 1936, the future looked bright for rigid airships, the hydrogen-filled, lighter-than-air behemoths also known as dirigibles or zeppelins.

The Hindenburg, Nazi Germany’s pride and joy, spent one glorious season ferrying passengers across the Atlantic in its luxurious belly. The following year, the airship era screeched to a spectacular halt when the Hindenburg burst into flames while landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The disaster claimed the lives of 36 people and received an unprecedented amount of media coverage.

The Hindenburg was a 245-metre- (804-foot-) long airship of conventional zeppelin design that was launched at Friedrichshafen, Germany, in March 1936. It had a maximum speed of 135 km (84 miles) per hour and a cruising speed of 126 km (78 miles) per hour. Though it was designed to be filled with helium gas, the airship was filled with highly flammable hydrogen owing to export restrictions by the United States against Nazi Germany. In 1936 the Hindenburg inaugurated commercial air service across the North Atlantic by carrying 1,002 passengers on 10 scheduled round trips between Germany and the United States.

On May 6, 1937, while landing at Lakehurst, N.J., on the first of its scheduled 1937 trans-Atlantic crossings, the Hindenburg burst into flames and was completely destroyed. Thirty-six of the 97 persons aboard were killed.

The fire was officially attributed to a discharge of atmospheric electricity in the vicinity of a hydrogen gas leak from the airship, though it was speculated that the dirigible was the victim of an anti-Nazi act of sabotage.

The Hindenburg disaster marked the end of the use of rigid airships in commercial air transportation.

Forever.

Grasshopper Pie

A staple among southern desserts in the 1950s and 1960s, this creamy mint pie sports an Oreo crust, all of which makes it strange that it hasn’t remained as popular as it once was.
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Grasshopper Pie

This American retro dessert was inspired by the popular 1950’s chocolate-mint cocktail, and it was a favorite of Southern hostesses in the 1950s and 1960s. Originally, grasshopper pie always had a crust of either cookies or graham cracker crumbs, but today it is most often made with a base of Oreos, desiccated coconut, and butter, while the gelatine-set cream filling mainly consists of heavy cream flavored with crème de menthe—a sweet, mint-flavored liqueur—and melted marshmallows.

Grasshopper pie is usually so named because of its green color, though modern recipes may omit coloring the pie green. It was likely invented in the 1950s in the United States, and may have been inspired by a drink called the grasshopper developed at about the same time. It is a chiffon pie usually made with a cookie crust.

There is an earlier grasshopper pie type dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. Some versions of this pie from the Philippines used real grasshoppers. These insects are eaten in many cultures, and they can be used in various desserts, where they may be sugared and baked, providing a crunchy, and to some very appetizing, confection. The 1950s grasshopper pie bears little resemblance to versions produced that have insects as a primary ingredient.

Chiffon pies in the 1950s were often a combination of whipping cream, gelatin, sugar, eggs, and flavoring. In the case of the grasshopper pie, common flavoring used was alcohol in the form of crème de menthe, and sometimes other alcohols like crème de cacao. 

For teetotalers, mint flavoring could be achieved by using mint extracts instead, though these might still contain a tiny amount of alcohol. Green food coloring was a frequent addition to give the pie a light green color.

Most often the cookie crust is made with chocolate wafers, so that the pie has a chocolate and mint flavor. The crust is baked for few moments and then chilled. When the chiffon is prepared, usually over a double boiler, it is chilled and then spooned over the crust. The pie tends to be served cold and many love its refreshing mint taste.

There may be very large differences between classic recipes for grasshopper pie and modern ones. Since gelatin can be somewhat annoying to work with, many people now prepare the pie by melting marshmallows and blending them with milk or whipping cream, and sometimes cream cheese. Green food coloring can be optional, and when not used the pie could be called “mint patty pie” instead. Some people may prefer using a graham cracker crust, and other recipes advocate the use of specific cookies like Oreos®.

In the US, grasshopper pie tends to be most popular in the South, but other parts of the country enjoy it too. The pie rose in popularity especially up until the 1970s, but it is now served with less frequency. Many ice cream stores capitalized on the flavor of this pie by producing their own version with mint or mint chocolate chip ice cream and a cookie crust. Some ice cream stores are particularly known for their grasshopper pie variants.

-Delighted Cooking

The pie is traditionally served well chilled, topped with dollops of whipped cream, and decorated with dark chocolate shavings.

Grasshopper Pie

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Nice Robust Chinese girl

In American terms, we would refer to this “body shape
or “Body build” as “built like a Brick House”. It’s generally a nice compliment for a fine robust woman. In this case, a Chinese woman. video. 5MB

Lavrov’s History Lesson – Germany’s Downfall – Russian Forces Develop Routine

Great writeup on MoA. b is cooking at his best.

Th Saker has reproduced the transcript of a talk Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergej Lavrov has given three days ago. It is quite long with a Q&A at the end but it is a very good history lesson on how we got to the point that Russia felt it had to intervene in the Ukraine.

Here are just a few graphs of it. I recommend to read it all of it:

This meeting takes place against the backdrop of events now occurring in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly spoken at length about the origins of this crisis. I would like to briefly reiterate: this is not about Ukraine. This is the end-result of a policy that the West has carried out since the early 1990s. It was clear back then that Russia was not going to be docile and that it was going to have a say in international matters. This is not because Russia wants to be a bully. Russia has its history, its tradition, its own understanding of the history of its peoples and a vision on how it can ensure its security and interests in this world.

This became clear in the late 1990s-early 2000s. The West has repeatedly attempted to stall the independent and autonomous development of Russia. This is rather unfortunate. From the start of President Vladimir Putin’s “rule” in the early 2000s, we were open to the idea of working with the West in various ways, even in a form similar to that of an alliance, as the President has said. Sadly, we were unable to do this. We repeatedly suggested that we should conclude treaties and base our security on equal rights, rejecting the idea of strengthening one’s security at the expense of another.

Neither were we able to promote economic cooperation. The European Union, which back then showed some signs of independent decision-making, has now devolved toward being completely dependent on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the US. The story of Nord Stream 2 was the highlight of this change. Even Germany, which defended its interests in the project to the very end, was persuaded that the “project was not in its interests.” Germany and its people were told what their interests were by people on the other side of the Atlantic. Many other international areas were blocked despite our commitment to close cooperation on an equal basis.

Germany’s traitorous role towards Russia, especially under chancellor Angela Merkel, is laid out throughout the piece. The current chancellor Olaf Scholz, never a smart man, capitulated to U.S. demands to sanction Russia and thereby committed Germany to economic suicide.

 

2022 03 23 13 14
2022 03 23 13 14

That spells death for Germany’s machine industry. It is said to see my country come down like this.

Hey Olaf, when the U.S. illegally invaded Iraq for absolutely no good reason how many sanctions did Germany apply to it?

Russia has at least cited sound and understandable, if not fully legal, reasons for its current acts. It was by the way you, Olaf, and your predecessor who have let it come to this. Why didn’t you write a letter to Putin that declared that Germany will veto NATO membership for the Ukraine. That might have solved the whole problem.

There is some talk that Russia has screwed up its campaign and some even hope that it might be losing the war. That’s nuts.

Back when I was a military officer we ran yearly large scale ‘free running’ maneuvers. Over nearly four weeks my tank company had to switch positions several times a day and march and ‘fight’ in between. The first week was cumbersome with lots of errors made by everyone. The second week was worse. Everyone was sleep deprived and folks screamed at each other. We had several accidents and twice parts of the company missed turns and got lost at night. During the third week things became gradually better and more routine. The drivers knew where to put their tanks without much command. The camouflaging done by the loaders and gunners was fast. The food that found its way to us was still hot and maintenance was done in no time. In the fourth week it was all pure fun.

The reason behind it was that people needed to learn by doing. Before the maneuvers everyone had been ‘fully trained’. But a few days on the training range do not give the experience one needs in the real world. Driving and ‘fighting’ through real villages and cities, real camouflaging against an ‘enemy’ airforce, real dueling in the open landscape day after day are different than training range time.

Russia’s forces are now in their routine mode. They will now grind down what is left of the Ukrainian forces.

According to the Pentagon the Russian airforce yesterday flew 300 sorties over Ukraine, mostly at night. That are 50% more per day than last week. That means 300 Ukrainian weapon factories, ammunition depots, convoys and fighting position get destroyed every day, day after day. How long will it take until there are no more targets?

Andrew Milburn, a former Marine colonel, is in the Ukraine from where he reports for Task and Purpose:

The Russians are already adapting, and by doing so are narrowing the Ukrainians’ tactical edge. The one-sided culling of Russian armored columns that characterized the opening days of the war, and kept YouTube subscribers around the world happy, are a thing of the past. The Russians now lead their formations with electronic attack, drones, lasers and good-old-fashioned reconnaissance by fire. They are using cruise missiles and saboteur teams to target logistics routes, manufacturing plants, and training bases in western Ukraine. Realizing that the Ukrainians lack thermal sights for their stinger missile launchers, the Russians have switched all air operations to after dark. It may be for this same reason that Russian cruise missile strikes in western and southern Ukraine have also been at nighttime.

The Russians have learned to play to their strengths. While Ukrainian soldiers mock their Russian counterparts, they are deeply respectful of Russian artillery, an asset that the Russians are using more frequently to compensate for their infantry’s deficiencies. Several snipers I spoke with recently agreed that the Russians’ indirect fire capability was the most concerning — a result of sheer reckless mass rather than technical skill. They told some hair-raising stories to illustrate their point, and one amusing one: Ukrainian soldiers defending Kyiv commute to the battle in their own vehicles. After a recent three-day insertion, the sniper teams returned to their extraction site to find their cars all flattened by Russian artillery – a contingency apparently not covered by their insurance plans.

Overconfidence may obscure for the Ukrainians one salient fact about this conflict: Time is not on their side.

Posted by b on March 22, 2022 at 17:55 UTC | Permalink

Hilarious Prank Gift Packages To Surprise Your Friends This Christmas

How will you wrap your Christmas presents this year? Will you buy some expensive wrapping paper and then silently weep in the corner when you realize you have no idea what you’re doing? Or just give up entirely and pay someone else to do it? Lucky for you, one company out there is aiming to make gift wrapping a little more fun.

Pranko-O is a Minneapolis-based company that creates hilarious prank gifts, called Prank Packs. A fart filter or an earwax candle might sound insane at first but don’t worry – that’s where the ‘prank’ part of Prank Pack comes in. The products, sadly, don’t exist and are just gag boxes. But imagine your partner’s reaction when they were hoping to get a Pandora necklace for Christmas but receive a cheese printer instead – priceless!

Here’s a few for some inspiration. This is a Cheese printer. Surprise your friends!

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Cheese Printer. You’ll be amazed how you were ever able to live without one!

Here’s another. It’s a “must” for every pet owner.

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It’s a “must” for every pet owner.

And yet another. Fun for kids of all ages!

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Fun for kids of all ages four and older.

Confirmed: Nazis are the proxy army of the US imperialists against Russia in Ukraine

From HERE.

Couldn’t be said more clearly.

The former US secretary of defense and CIA director, Leon Panetta, admitted openly that

We are engaged in a conflict here. It's a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not ...”.

Referring to the Ukrainian forces, the US imperialist warhawk claimed that

"These are good fighters, they are small-unit operations, they are working well ...".

The description “small-unit operations” fits to proxy forces – mercenaries, rather than an organized national army.

As we mentioned in our previous article, for eight years, the NATO criminals and the “free” and “democratic” West, were provoking Russia by arming and training the far-right and neo-nazi militia groups who also infiltrated in the Ukrainian army and operate in East Ukraine against Russian populations. Which is something similar with what happened in the long-suffering Syria by the US proxy war against Assad. Only there, the US imperialists armed and trained some so-called “moderate rebels”, with most of the arms ending in the hands of ISIS islamofascists who spread chaos and destruction.
Panetta’s statements are essentially an official admission by the US side that this is the case.
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This also explains why the Russians are so obsessed with Mariupol, which appears that it suffered most from the war in Ukraine so far. It seems that they won’t retreat from their demand to Ukraine to surrender the besieged city. Not only because of its critical strategic importance, but mostly because it’s the base of the Azov Battalion, which is essentially the major US proxy Nazi force in the Ukrainian soil.
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Indeed: [emphasis added]
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In March 2015 Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the Azov Regiment would be among the first units to be trained by United States Army troops in their Operation Fearless Guardian training mission. 

US training however was withdrawn on 12 June 2015, as the US House of Representatives passed an amendment blocking any aid (including arms and training) to the battalion due to its neo-Nazi background. 

However, the amendment was later removed in November 2015, with The Nation reporting that the "House Defense Appropriations Committee came under pressure from the Pentagon to remove the Conyers-Yoho amendment from the text of the bill."

Azov published a media release on its website on 20 November 2017 stating that it had met with a foreign delegation of officers from the United States Armed Forces and Canadian Armed Forces on 16 November. 

Writing for Jacobin, Branko Marcetic says that members of Azov have been pictured meeting with U.S. military and NATO officials.
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This is a particularly revealing information because it proves beyond doubt that the US imperialist apparatus was very well aware of the nazi nature of the Azov Battalion. And did everything to overcome any political actions that were aiming to block any aid to its members.
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Recall that new information – coming from the elite section of the US think tank apparatus – proved that the US imperialists wanted to drag Russia into a war with Ukraine since at least 2019.
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Everything we wrote back in 2014 turns out to be right:
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What was left to do, for the moment, is to challenge Putin in order to drag Russia in an endless attrition war in East Ukraine and this explains to a degree Putin's hesitation to act like he did in Crimea. Against Russian army, of course, the West will not risk to put an organized military force, but only teams of mercenaries of private armies, as already did. It is certain, however, that, despite that the global economic oligarchy has lost valuable time because of its wrong moves, it will not give up its plans for Russia easily ...
Mapping proxy wars of the last decades around the globe we also wrote back in 2015 that the Ukraine conflict is a proxy war against Russia by the West, next to the Russian borders. Behind the color revolutions, one can always find US financed organizations. The Western allies would not dare to face directly the Russian army. In the Ukraine conflict one could find private armies of mercenaries. The most stupid action by the Western puppets was to support neo-nazis against the local Russian populations. This was something that exposed their real intention, which is to encircle Russia through puppet regimes who would permit the Western military presence in their territories.
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By aiding the nazis in Ukraine, the US and the West generally, lost their last remnants of their alleged “superiority” on matters related with democracy, human rights, or, international law. West’s moral bankruptcy and cultural decline are now irreversible and mark the beginning of the end of its global domination.
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CIA use Nazi forces

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A fine Chinese woman in red

In China, red is considered a lucky and happy color. I like this woman in this outfit. She is pleasing to the eye and I am sure that she would be fun to be with. video 2MB

Strange coincidences

I offer up this following graph. It shows an association between belief in the mainstream media (the United States government narrative) and number of mRNA injections.

The more mRNA injections you have, the more that you believe whatever the MSM (Main Stream Media) says.

graph1
Relationship between the official government narrative and mRNA injections.

Look over the results.

It is errie.

It could be a coincidence. It might be. But, you know, there are secrets, and secrets, and the United States is run by very selfish, sick, evil people. Something is up. But what?

What is going on?

I don’t know…

It reminds me of the old 1950s movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Imagine that you and everyone else are normal. You go to work, and you play. You go drive your car, and listen to the radio.

There’s a pandemic. Everyone must get these “special” injections.

Not a vaccine, mind you. But something “new” and “special”. And so you plan on getting one, but your entire community beats you to it. Everyone is injected with the “special” formulation but you, and so when you finally go into town to get your injection, you notice something different.

Everything is the same.

Yet everything is different.

You have a difficult time trying to describe what is do different. They all look the same. They act the same. They all have absolute perfect memories. But something is missing…

…you just cannot pin it down; you just cannot put your finger on it…

Well…

Everyone is mad. They are angry. When you bring up certain subject, you know that the person you are talking to will fly into a rage. There are simply things that you just cannot talk about.

  • Face masks.
  • Racial issues.
  • Russia
  • China.
  • Vacinations.

You think “everyone is so polarized”. But it’s strange. People were never so polarized. Not before. Now they are just really upset and really on a “hair trigger”.

The movie

In 1956 the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” came out.

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The narrative’s premise is most interesting.

A peaceful town is imperceptibly taken over by an alien force: Giant plant pods, products of atomic mutation, turn themselves into replicas of people. The pods turn human beings into faceless, emotionless automatons, incapable of any feeling, be it anger or love.

Once again, the image used is that of an initially normal and ordinary town, suddenly thrown out of balance.

“At first glance, everything looked the same,” the narrator says, “It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.” The rest of the film explores that “something.”

Called back to Santa Mira from a medical conference, Doctor Miles Bonnel (Kevin McCarthy) is greeted at the train station by his nervous nurse, Sally. Looking through his clinic’s window, everything “looks” the same:

Wally Everhard is talking someone into buying insurance, Bill Bittner is taking his secretary to launch. Yet something strange is going on. In the back of his mind, Miles senses a warning bell: “Sick people who couldn’t wait to see me, suddenly were perfectly all right.”

A general practitioner, Miles believes that, “the trouble is inside you!” thus recommending that she sees a psychiatrist.

The first “solution” to the problem is psychiatric help, with the film acknowledging the increasing popularity of psychiatry in the 1950s.

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“At first glance, everything looked the same,” the narrator says, “It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.”

Miles rationalizes his advice to Wilma by saying, “you don’t have to be losing your mind to need psychiatric help.” But Wilma is firm: “It’s a waste of time, there’s nothing wrong with me.”

Like many other films of the decade, Invasion deals with three issues: [1] the definition of normal and abnormal behavior; [2] the legitimate authority to label behaviors as abnormal or deviant; and [3] the negative effects of conformity, apathy, and complacency.

The film suggests that the town’s experts and professionals are not to be trusted. The police force, an agency entrusted with the legitimate use of physical force, can’t solve the problem. In fact, when Jack’s clone is found, they refuse to call the police, because cops tend to rely too much on logic and dry laws.

Miles represents the center of the moral center.

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“At first glance, everything looked the same,” the narrator says, “It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.”

He is a professional, but a general practitioner, not a specialist, thus able to see the problem overall, in its entirety.

Even so, Miles proves that his common sense and critical faculties as a responsible individual are more important than his narrow professional skills. Thus, when Jack first describes the problem he says: “Would you be able to forget that you’re a doctor for a while” .

For the duration of the film, Miles “forgets” his occupation.

The movie advocates independent judgment, common sense, intuition, and self-reliance, and shows suspicious toward anyone in a position of power or professional expertise.

Invasion, like Capra’s movies of the Depression era, singles out the role of an exceptional individual, a charismatic leader, in preventing society from dehumanization, from gradual transformation into an aggregate of unfeeling robots.

Sleep is the metaphor used to convey mass complacency and conformity.

The pods take over human beings when they are not alert, when they are (literally or figuratively) asleep, thus passive.

Escaping from town, Miles gives Becky and himself a large dose of pills to stay awake. “We can’t close our eyes all night,” he tells her, because “we may wake up changed.” “Sooner or later,”

Kauffman tells Miles, “You’ll have to go to sleep,” i.e. you’ll have to conform and join the majority.

But Kauffman also reassures him that as soon as he falls asleep, the pods will “absorb your minds, your memories, and you’re reborn into an untroubled world.”

The new world will be without love, ambition, grief, or any emotions, “Life will be much simpler and better.”

invasion of the body snatchers 1956
invasion of the body snatchers 1956

Indeed, during their escape, chased by every member in town, Becky can’t stay awake any longer and she falls asleep. “I went to sleep and it happened,” says Becky. “A moment of sleep,” narrates Miles, and “their bodies were now hosts harboring alien forms of life.”

Santa Mira is a typical small town; there is nothing special or distinctive about I; what happened in Santa Mira couldand would–happen in other towns. In most sci-fi films, the disaster first occurs on a local level before spreads all over the country.

The catastrophe begins in a small town, then moves to bigger regional centers, and finally inflicts the entire nation.

Attempting to get assistance, Miles first calls the F.B.I. in Los Angeles, but there is no answer. His call to the governor in Sacramento also fails; the circuits are busy in both places.

Invasion differs from other sci-fi features because there is no immediate confirmation of the hero’s report of the “strange” phenomenon by other witnesses; the conflict is between one individual and the entire community.

Invasion shows that the authorities, both scientific and political, are neither trustworthy nor competent.

Other films went out of their way to reassured audiences that they were “in good hands,” that politicians (or the military) and scientists would come to the rescue when needed. In contrast, Invasion’s ending is so tentative and abrupt that it provides no such reaffirmation, instead urging its viewers to be always alert.

kevin mccarthy2
“At first glance, everything looked the same,” the narrator says, “It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.”

Puckering fish look

For some reason, the Chinese women like to make these puckering fish expressions, as they view them as being very cute. I don’t know about that. Really. I just like a nice big smile, myself. video. 3MB

Sanctions

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Western production depends on China no less, than on Russia. And once again, on the tip of my tongue there is a Russian proverb with a deep meaning – what is good for a Russian is death for a German.
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And what will happen to the West, when Russia imposes her own retaliatory sanctions?
Consider this article…
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Immediately (in several European capitals), they realized that those sanctions, (introduced by them), would return to them like a boomerang and more than once

The words of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz about the reverse effect of sanctions against Russia can be called a sensation. It seems that the West is beginning to see clearly and see what damage they inflict on the economies of their countries with their own sanctions.

After the successes of the first days on the sanctions fronts, when Western countries managed to bring down the Russian stock market and the ruble exchange rate, a process of sobering up begins in European capitals and there is an acute desire to return the situation back.

By the way, the fall of the market and the collapse of the ruble did not become catastrophic for Russia . There was no default – Russia regularly pays its bills, and the ruble is slowly, but still winning back its positions.

A funny situation can happen with the stock market. Against the backdrop of a fall in the price of shares of Russian companies, Western investors began to actively sell them for next to nothing. Now the most interesting question is:

Who bought them?

Some European experts suggest that Russian business and the Russian government took advantage of the situation and bought almost everything for next to nothing. In other words, Russian companies have become Russian again. Forever at the bottom, the shares will not be and sooner or later they will go up, but they will no longer bring dividends to Western investors. And they will no longer have levers of influence on the Russian economy.

Chancellor Scholz , of course, did not talk about these deep processes. He spoke about the need to prepare and impose sanctions very carefully. The reverse effect of them should be surmountable for Western economies. But so far everything is working out exactly the opposite.

The imposed sanctions blew up the market and the prices of absolutely everything flew up.

Inflation all over Europe

Everyone knows the situation with gas – at some point it rose in price to a completely unthinkable 3,800 dollars. Now, thanks to the efforts of Gazprom, it has been brought down to an acceptable $1,050.

  • Oil prices rose, followed by gasoline and all fuel in general.
  • Steel and cast iron, building materials. Nickel. Aluminum. Products of the petrochemical industry and fertilizers.
  • Wheat and all food products.

The list can be continued, but this is quite enough to understand what kind of “return line” has flown through the European economy.

French President Macron is already talking about the introduction of food checks in the country for the poorest. In the Czech Republic, wheat and flour more than doubled in price.

In Italy and Spain, pasta and vegetable oil disappeared from the shelves, and in Lithuania, salt and soda.

And all this at a record level of inflation. In some European countries it has already exceeded 10%.

The West was sure that by depriving Russia of income from the export of energy resources and raw materials, they would bring it to her knees, but it turned out that Russia’s participation in almost any area is so significant that it immediately affects the economies of Europe and the United States.

Britain

Britain banned the import of products, incl. food, from Russia. In addition to raising prices for communal and gasoline, the British can part with their national dish – fish and chips, in other words – potatoes with fish.

For British Prime Minister Johnson, it came as an unpleasant surprise that most of the fish eaten in Britain is Russian. Iceland and Norway will not be able to provide even half of the amount that Russia was selling.

Britain urgently needs to find new routes for the supply of fish, otherwise unrest cannot be avoided and this is not a joke. For the British , fish and chips is more than food, it is part of the culture, it is their genetic code.

That is why such a heated debate broke out in the European Union today on the issue of an embargo on the import of Russian oil. Everyone is worried about the consequences of this step. Will this be another nail in the coffin of the European economy?

Russia’s retaliatory measures

But even more Europeans should worry about Russia’s retaliatory measures. Nothing is known about them yet, and this is scary. Retaliatory sanctions can set the European economy back several decades, and the EU is very unwilling to do so.

Reverse Sanctions

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Cute Chinese girl

I really like the Chinese girls. They are sweet, cute and they take care of themselves. Here’s a nice cute girl. video 4MB

Beef Stroganoff

Let’s talk about food.

Good. Healthy. Delicious. Food.

The story goes that this beef, noodles, and cream sauce dish exploded in America after U.S. servicemen, stationed in the dish’s homeland of Russia, brought it home after World War II.
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Beef Stroganoff.

Meat. MEAT. I love it, I really do.

My recent visits to my Vegetarian Restaurant, aside, I love and yearn for meat. Good tasty meat. Beef. Mutton. Pork. Chicken. Turkey. Meat!

I grew up in the heart of the United States. Pittsburgh. The land of steel, coal. beer and perogies. There, the basic food groups consisted of potatoes, cream of [insert mushroom, chicken, or celery here] soup, butter (or Land-O-Lakes margarine), tall cold glasses of milk with every meal and…meat.

I had a recent craving for beef stroganoff.

Although I ate this dish frequently as a child, I had yet to make it myself. The beef stroganoff of my youth was a retro reflection of my Polish-American-Irish upbringing – a nostalgic combination of ground beef, cream of mushroom soup, condensed beef broth, and low-fat sour cream.

Although I (of course) I could have gone out and had my fill of some delicious steak, turtle or mutton, I wasn’t really feeling that desire. I wanted to create something myself. I wanted a taste from my childhood, and you just aren’t goign to get that inside of China. No matter how hard you try.

I wanted comfort food, and I figured that beef stroganoff would foot the bill.

This is comfort food at its finest.

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Get your beef in some sputtering, aromatic, delicious SALTED butter. Work quickly – you’re just browning and the thinness of the meat doesn’t require much time in the pan. Set beef aside. Sauté your onions and garlic in the same pan.

After making a few (regional) tweaks to the Simply Recipes version, I came up with a winner. Gather up some easy basics: butter, beef, onions, garlic, mushrooms, sour cream (be sure to read my footnote on the sour cream!). If you have tarragon, nutmeg, and Worcestershire sauce on hand, even better.

Beef Stroganoff

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Meanwhile in America

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2022 03 24 19 44

Draft is a prelude for an invasion force

Why would the United States decide to institute a draft? Well, it seems that there are decisions being made and systems put in place right now. If you are an American under 35 years of age, you should be concerned.

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Screenshot.

US Draft

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Here’s what I have been eating

Some home movies. Actually not in my home, in various eating establishments in China. Oh, China is supposed to be in famine right now! OMG. My bad. Sorry to break the narrative.

Video 1 – Dongbei salad. 43MB

Video 2 – Sichuan beef and mushrooms. 63MB

Video 3 – Gung Pao Ji Deng 82MB

Some intel to share…

A while back I recieved some intel from one of my spook-ish sources. Good or bad, right or wrong, I just filed it away for “a rainy day” (It’s a play on an American idiom. It means, it’s valuable and interesting, but you don’t need it now. You save it for later.)

It’s how I run my life.

Good or bad, right or wrong. I just take all input, and consider it. File it, and move forward. Always move forward. You just cannot drop everything and take action on some other’s time-tables. That would be like running around, from tree to tree, pissing indiscriminately.

So I took the information. Filed it both securely in my email folders, and on my hard disk. And forgot about it.

It does not mean that I agree or disagree with it. It just means that there is nothing that I can do with the information at the time that I recieved it. So I put it aside. And, instead, work on things that I can do something about.

Month pass by.

After seeing that graph that connects mRNA with thoughts and political agreement with the United States government, it triggered my memory. There was something about this dialog that really seemed to connect to the events that I was witnessing.

The (archived) intel that I was informed on was directly related to this association.

The message suggested that there were vault 7 algorithms and frequencies that worked together in association with various ingredients in the <redacted> portion of the mRNA injection “stew”.

mRNA nanobots + Vault 7 + MSM “news” = Easily manipulated serf / slave

These associations would then “hand shake” with embedded subsonic frequences transmitted along “news” messages, of all sorts. Thus making the injected person, who is exposed to the “news” messages believe them without any critical thought.

Sounds far-fetched.

Perhaps…

I filed it away, as it was something worthy of further study.

And then I saw the graph, and I sought to revisit my communication on this subject. So, like the good and investigative fellow I am, I went to dig it out of my archives.

And it’s gone.

I mean, as in GONE.

The darnest thing!

All records gone. All archives gone. All backups gone. It’s a full spectrum erase. Oh, the folder is there. But it’s empty. Even the screen shots that I took and put in a special folder… it’s gone as well.

OIP C.PUIfTNrpU5w DYrL nP9tgHaCl
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What the fuck?

It could be a slide. I could be forgetting things. It could be an accident. I don’t know…

… what a coincidence.

It’s a nagging pain in the ass, that’s what.

Some more fun gag gift boxes…

I found this one funny. Perfect for getting your children to eat. Child refuses to eat? Just plop them down and watch them eat their hearts out. Children cry for more!

Oh, and Daddy won’t mind…

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Perfect for getting your children to eat. Child refuses to eat? Just plop them down and watch them eat their hearts out. Children cry for more!

This one is unique. Everyone wants their home to fill with the aroma of sizzling bacon. Now it can be an everyday affair.

“Breakfast fresh scent”.

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Everyone wants their home to fill with the aroma of sizzling bacon. Now it can be an everyday affair.

Who thinks up these things? “Millions of satisfied customers.”

Do you want to shake up your company? Hold a meeting where you announce that the company is going to save money by stop buying toilet paper. Instead, they will install these rotowipe devices in all the stalls. Make the announcment “dead pan” and watch the reactions.

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“Millions of satisfied customers.”

A Huge Cleavage

A huge cleavage is developing between the East and West in tandem with the Ukraine ops. The US State Dept. just sanctioned some Chinese officials due to "human rights". China didn't take well to it at all. Meanwhile, India is not going along with the Western sanctions on Russia and got threatened with sanctions earlier but the US has since backed off that threat.

Victoria Nuland is in India today trying again to coerce India into getting on board the sanctions train. I dont't think it will work.

Also, it seems that China and India are making renewed efforts to bury the hatchet regarding tbeir border duspute. It really seems like a great re-alignment happening, especially taking into account all the other countries not taking part in the anti-Russia sanctions.

Russsia essentially said "fuck it" in deciding to launch into Ukraine. If the West keeps it up, China will arrive at the same point.

Interesting times.

-Woogs

Speaking of “huge cleavage”; here’s a nice Chinese girl with an impressive chest… video 1MB

Russian Foreign Minister

Here’s the entire question being used against Lavrov:

"Why was the military operation launched now and not eight years ago? At that time, a pro-Russian “anti-Maidan” movement emerged in Odessa and Kharkov, which installed the Russian flag on top of the Kharkov regional administration without firing a shot. The city supported Russia. Now these people are hiding from shelling."

I find it impossible to verify the veracity of the question. I know in Odessa the police didn’t do anything to stop the Nazis from their killing and burning. I imagine a similar performance happened in Kharkov. Russia acted to save its strategic asset, Crimea, but clearly wasn’t prepared to intervene further.

Lavrov’s initial sentence is very honest:

"A lot of factors influence developments at each specific historical moment."

I’ve read both the English and Russian transcripts, and what I see by reading between the lines is commiseration by Lavrov with the questioner, not any attempt to mislead. Lavrov says They took advantage of our nature:

"We must have trusted them because of some naivety and kindness of heart, which is something Russians are known for.

"I have no doubt that lessons will be learned."

And if you’ve watched Lavrov while speaking his recent denunciations of the West, that Russia will never again put its trust in any part of the West, you’ll see the resolve that Russia will not get fooled again as it’s now taking everything into its own hands.

IMO, some part of all Russians, especially Putin, Lavrov, Shoigu, and other leaders, was burned and died with those in Odessa and in Donbass. They pled and pled and pled some more with the Western pukes to obey the fucking law put forth in UNSCR 2022–the Minsk Agreements.

But inaction and outright refusal followed by the breaking of it all by the fucking West. And now all the rest that was uncovered with the military operation!!

I’ll bet the fucking national debt that Putin, Lavrov, et al wish they would’ve done more in 2014 but felt they couldn’t.

The Syria intervention helped to provide some solace. But it’s very clear to Russia now that the Outlaw US Empire is the #1 predator state on the planet and must be neutralized somehow without resorting to nuclear weapons.

Yes, that’s how fucking serious this is.

Lavrov knows that gravity of the situation. It’s fucking existential!

And it’s that fact the West badly wants to cover up. And just as importantly, it’s that fact that we must try to expose and broadcast.

karlof1

Steak au Poivre

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Steak au Poivre

I’m probably going to catch some flac for this, but for me – it isn’t off the BBQ. No, no, no. MY perfect steak is done on a stove top (gasp!). Classically considered a French bistro dish, Steak au Poivre is my perfect way to indulge.  If you’re a meat lover, this post is for you.

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Simple and clean.

I think a part of what appeals to me so much about this recipe is its simplicity. The steak is seasoned with two ingredients: salt and peppercorns. It might sound crazy to coat two steaks with 2 whole tablespoons of peppercorns, but when they aren’t finely ground the spice is much more subtle. Dressing the meat this way also lets it shine through. This is beef at its best.

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What appeals to me so much about this recipe is its simplicity.

Using a cast iron pan is my second secret. These pans retain heat well and are practically non-stick. Cooking the steaks on high heat, turning ~once per minute creates an even, golden crust with no burning. Depending on the thickness of your steak, you’re looking for a total of 3-4 minutes per side for rare.

If there is a side of fat on your steak, render it down for a couple minutes by propping the steak up.

In the final minutes, we add some butter for extra flavour and to start providing the base for a delicious Cognac pan sauce. When the steaks are cooked to your liking, remove to a cutting board and tent with foil. You’ll be left with something closely resembling this:

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In the final minutes…

Up last is to create a rich cognac pan sauce that sends this over the top. In your pan, we will add shallot, (more butter), Cognac, cream, thyme and parsley. After cooking and reducing the sauce, we pour it over the sliced steak. When I have this for dinner, steak is all I need. There is something ridiculous & awesome about eating just steak for dinner, I hope you try it!

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Time to EAT!

Meanwhile in China

It’s a thing. Partly due to Coronavirus. Partly due to the plans for Space, and bases on the Moon and Mars. Cute. Odd. video 23MB

Digging up the e-mail

I was able to retrieve the email concerning the connection between mRNA “vaxx” and the United States government.

Now, I do not endorse the content of this e-mail. I just provide it in it’s raw form for others to  muse over. Please take it as it is. It is raw information that could be from anyone.

Anyone at all.

I am using anonymous email because this is above top secret information. 

You are correct that the vaccines will kill an estimated 70% of the US population due to prion disease.  This is being done to avoid world problems and reconstruct world society as described by the World Economic Forum (ocean acidification, food shortages, food poisoning and job replacement by artificial intelligence).

However, what is not currently known is that the chemtrails contain a mixture of advanced nanobots along with complexed radioactive materials (germanium, indium, etc) and a shielding material that releases hard to detect bursts of radioactivity (2 sec) on the back of the spine, femoral heads, pelvis, ribs and under the chin when exposed to nanorouter EMF.  

The nanorouters are powered by electric fields and local utility companies have conspired to alter their current to emit very high EMF and magnetic fields periodically to kill and injure through direct exposure to this radiation plus the activated chemtrail dust.  

The US government has contracted stalking activities to private companies such as Replica.ai (Lucas in San francisco) and has artificial intelligence monitoring large numbers of people through Patriot Act hacked cell phone sim cards, cameras, hacked routers and PCs.  

However, they have the ability to do additional spying due to the nanobot infestation.  Nanobots around the occipital lobe allow them to steal passwords and watch vision.  They also can do voice to skull transmission of voices, start terrifying abnormal dream sequences when initiating sleep, blank memories and control people through trance to commit suicide etc.  Low intelligence and highly opinionated people are extremely susceptible and literally zone out and lose their memory while they are being manipulated.

The nanobots also have a slew of programmed harassments that can be extremely disabling-hyperurination due to stimulated hormone secretion, waking people up from sleep due to external nanobots, depression, anxiety stimulation, simulated Mernier's disease where the room shakes up and down. If they are active you'll get tinnitus.  All of the symptoms stop once you are out of Wifi range.

The nanobots are magnetized and they are being used to shake housing structures apart.  All over the US buildings are having roof collapses due to smartmeter arson from power companies plus shaking by hidden resonance frequency generators which is known as the world hum.  The nanobot programs reduce the intensity of the humming so it sounds like typical noise but it is not.  The building shaking can be measured on a linear accelerometer (Physics Accelerator Toolbox app).

The chemtrail dust is how they plan to kill uncooperative unvaccinated people.  Planed flyovers seed beds and clothing with the dust and then it is activated and the person is slowly irradiated.  Due to the short half-life of the materials it is very hard to detect however a small EMF/magnetic field detector can be used to scan the areas.  As this is dust, vaccuuming and spongebathing it off is very effective before or during activation.

Resistors are also being targeted using the vircator microwave satellite targeting program as described at targetedjustice.com. It is very hard to shield requiring 12 layers of aluminum foil at the highest setting.  Pointing an emf detector in the area of strongest magnetic field will show you where the satellites are. Active vircators will show high EMF up to 106 V/m.

The buffered radioactive nanobot dust is being sprayed all over the world and is being used along with NSA hacked servers to control political leaders without their knowledge.  

This most likely is why Vladimir Putin has now invaded Ukraine. An invasion of Ukraine will most likely lead to an EMP strike that will damage the European illuminati.  Agents I have spoke with claim that the USA is currently controlled by the US branch of the New World Order/Illuminati and they seek to damage the European branch with the EMP attack.

The nanobots are also converting prions all over the world due to NSA hacking.

You are a targeted individual and can expect all of these attacks.  You need to take appropriate precautions to shield your equipment from hacking as well as from nanobot visual access (band of 10 layers of foil around the occiput with a strap works well.  The irradiation can cause bone marrow edema syndrome, severe abdominal pain, skin burning and back pain.

We are in a bit of a tricky situation on this one.  It probably is too late to stop the prion disease and we do need to have the European illuminati, religion and black antisocial behavior weakened however I have concerns about the excessive targeting as anyone who knows about their plans is having hits put out on them (including me) and the competency of the people running this thing.  Take appropriate precautions.

Covering beds with a plastic sheet until used to shield from the dust and shielding from vircator also is important.

Given the scope of this thing I doubt there is anything anyone can do.  The US Federal government is completely taken over, people are mind controlled and the population is being attacked with weapons we have never seen before.  Also, if we don't allow it to happen we suffer all the world problems that the WEF describes.  If we do then we will most likely be slaves to elite billionaires and forced to live in a controlled society.

<redacted>

Indeed it is far-out stuff.

It’s well beyond my understanding.

But…

It is the ONLY content that I have / possess that answers the strange graphic association posted above. Take it, and use it as you see fit. Personally, it’s way, way above my head. And I have no ideas; no clue how accurate or valid it actually is.

When I asked a person whom I greatly respect on the content of this, the response was thoughtful…

Whoever sent you that - just please PLEASE listen to the content of what the implications are for China - Xi is a WEF placement. This is NOT Unknown.  It’s literally on the WEF website. He pissed off the WEF and now he is going to be removed. China has been under attack since I have been warning you. It has. A company called Blackrock - in THIS fucking world line is the muscle of the WEF.

Want to know why we did Afghanistan so quickly? BLACKROCK provided allll of the security force in Afghanistan since 2017. We drew down troops but they never left. They changed uniforms and got paid a TON of cash. Look it up. So Blackrock decides to pull alllll of the security forces outside Kabul that it paid - as a message. 

Think about that - about 85% of security force outside of Kabul - gone. Like that. And all that kept the Taliban from overrunning the country was a small force. So - Biden left rather than get slaughtered. 

But to my point - The WEF has a stake in a securities trading firm called Blackrock that hired mercenaries - tens of thousands of combat veterans that you see fighting in Ukraine.

Look it up. 

I cannot speak about the specifics of ANY of that - at all - but I’m telling you - you hit paydirt.

And we ARE pulling out when the fight gets bloody. 

Blackrock is on Chinas doorstep. And I am telling you - nothing can prevent what they are doing. THAT I know from actual friend that is IN Blackrock. As a mercenary. 

This all is online. If you can’t access it through China ask someone to look it up. Also look up “Blackrock woke”. It’s fun. 

And if that is AI that created that email - fucking bravo. THAT is a programmer I want to hang out with.

And feel free to post my shit - just please keep the name out of it. But I know some of your people that emailed me and I gave them my thoughts. Ask how accurate so far. 

Again - I wish you all peace and happiness there - because our lights are going out soon.

Much love - <redacted>

Have you ever gotten the idea that you are somehow way over your head? Yeah. I get that all the time. It’s not that I believe everything. I listen. I learn. I drink. I move forward, and I adapt.

Everyone needs to learn, and adapt as situations permit.

Each and everytime I chat with the Domain Commander, on comm, it’s just a window into how much I really don’t know. WHile I know much, there is still so much more to learn.

Sometimes I just feel like I am a little ball in one of those old pin-ball machines. I’m just being batted around like crazy.

Take what is provided and move forward.

Always move forward.

And while you are at it; eat well.

video 3MB

Crab Rangoon

Although this fried crab dumpling fits in among postwar tiki culture and is often purported to be of southeast Asian provenance, it was very likely invented in America.

OIP C.dKAUGkBEnA7cVfxeWd1PmAHaLH
Crab Rangoon

It’s easy to make. Delicious to eat, and fun to try.

Crab Rangoon

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The United States Blinked

The United States is reposturing itself. This is occuring soon after the warning from China on a package of 2nd stage sanctions regarding Russia and Taiwan.
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Did you know that China bought none of the extra $200 billion of US exports in Trump’s trade deal. Imagine that.
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The US-China trade: Washington’s review of US$300 billion in tariffs cannot be ‘half-hearted’. You either do it and suffer the consequences or abandon it completely.
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“But what about the costs?” Ah. The Total Cost of U.S. Tariffs.
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From a neocon publication. The longer Trump’s China tariffs are in place, the greater the harm to America.
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Be the Rufus

If everyone did small, little things the world would be so much nicer, and so much better. video 6MB

Downfall of the USD

From one of my feeds…

The best way to accelerate the downfall of the empire is to attack its Dollar Hegemony (not the same as attacking America). 

I said that in my Quora posts "Trade War between China and America" and "Who will win the trade war" early 2018 at the beginning of Trump's "war by any means except guns" -- euphemistically termed trade war -- against China. 

Without the Dollar hegemony, America may have to act like a more normal country. Less unilateral sanctioning, less bullying, less acting like the Mafia, less war crimes, less color revolutions, less media lies, less war budgets, less war-mongering, less bases around the world, less profligate printing of money, less plundering of other countries, etc. 

Bullied countries will have alternatives. For protection, they will have Russia and for trade they will have China. All previous vassals of America, including European countries are welcome. Then we will have some peace.

Acting like a more normal country in a more balanced world is actually good for the powerless people of America. 

They may learn to demand for guaranteed basic housing, food, healthcare, and education rather than asking for more shit-paying soul-crushing slave-wage jobs or one-time checks that eventually go to the coffers of the 1% money-changers and MIC, giving those miscreants more power to ravage America and the world, meanwhile the national debt of Americans increases to generate the checks and the rest of the world suffers inflation, which is of course borne by the common masses of the world. 

Capitalism won't solve the problems. 

The fall of the empire may help people think differently or see more clearly how some countries with so many people and so little resources can live gainfully, peacefully, and happily together in a diverse yet harmonious society.

I'll share a passage from my book under chapter title "The Dragon's Dream":

"Where is this paradise? Is it on earth or is it only in his dreams (the dreamer's name means tattoo-dragon)? Where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all the children are happy and beloved. Where brothers and sisters neither slaughter each other, nor enslave one another, nor tell lies to everyone from morning till night, where the children love and help each other, share everything and take care of one another, and all of them live peaceful, fruitful, and happy lives. 

Where is this place? 

Is it China?"

Does this sound familiar? It comes from a Coen brothers movie, with a couple of changes and replacing Idaho with China. 

-<redacted>

Power reshuffling

China says Russia is an ‘important’ G20 member. It cannot simply be expelled by others, no matter what they might want. In short, Beijing has spoken up for Russia, describing it an “important” global member after the possibility of a major move against Vladimir Putin.
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Unfriendly Lists

Both Russia and China, and probably India (soon), have generated an “Unfriendly nation list”. These lists catagorize nations in accordance to their behaviors and put them into catagories.

  • Close relationship
  • Friendly
  • Neutral
  • Unfriendly
  • Enemy

These are not meaningless lists. They will be used to determine policy. And the policy that Asia uses against other nations is determined by where it sits upon these lists.

Today, President Putin made his first move in a chess game with the West. Gas will be sold to unfriendly countries only for rubles.

Putin wants ‘unfriendly countries’ to pay rubles for gas – ABC News
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Volunteers

In China, people; ordinary people, volunteer to help others. It is their nature to be the Rufus. They don’t ask for payment. They don’t ask for anything. They help others as it is their nature. Volunteers going to remote villiages to help others. Everyone being the Rufus. video 12MB

Cute Chinese girl

Yet another beauty. video 3MB

 

Chem-Trails

For the longest time I have dismissed the idea about “chem-trails” as just crazy “tin foil hat” conspiracy bullshit. Chem-trails are just water vapor at high altitude, don’t you know.

For the longest time. I believed this.

Then, I moved to China. It’s calm. It’s peaceful. It’s pleasant. It’s like walking slowly into a body-temperature pool of water.

And, do you know what?

There’s no “chem-trails”. None. As in zero.

So, maybe (I figured) that it was because that China has these stringent air pollution standards on all fuel. Except, well.. just how does that actually affect water vapor emissions? No clear answers.

But one thing is for certain; there are no vapor trails from aircraft of any kind, at any place, within China.

MM car ride in an industrial factory section of Guangzhou. video 43MB

None.

N-O-N-E.

Why? Why are there no Chemtrails in China? MM video 23MB

The Problem with the Nano-bots mRNA Vaxx and Vault 7

Ok, then. Let’s do a simple “sanity check”.

The big problem with this concept is that the American / Western “leadership” must be totally isolated from the effects of this control mechanism. How can you possibly isolate the leadership from Chem-trails, audio playing on the radio, media on television and movies, and the social networks on the internet.

Heck! They are addicted to them!

So, and the sanity check is clear, as brilliant and complex the system is, it will affect everyone within that society. No one will be immune. Sure, you might need to place yourself into isolation, but eventually, one way or the other, you WILL feel the influence of these systems. No one is immune.

The “leadership” might find a way to pretend getting an mRNA injection, but it’s a cut-throat world at the top. There can be all sorts of ways to place tiny nano-bots inside of your enemy to turn them into your pawn.

So, really…

No matter how hard they try, they will live within the very same, exact “echo box” that they subject their citizenry to. They will live inside an “echo chamber” of lies; lie that they ordered others to create.

Here’s a response to the lies on MSM. video 22MB

And now they are in an echo box of lies.

They are boxed in, and they believe the lies. They actually believe them.

And as leaders, they will make decisions based on those lies, and the entire nation;

They will start to say things that will sound crazy, and act in ways that will seem strange and crazy. They will act so very convinced of the strangest and most outlandish narratives.

And in doing so…

…by the leadership…

…the entire system will evenually be destroyed. Leadership needs REAL intel to make decisions upon. There is no excuse. You eaither have real intel (good and most especially bad) or you don’t. And history is clear. Bad intel results in very bad results.

We call those results; fiascos.

How can anyone possibly have a leadership that…

  • Does not take the mRNA Vaxx injection.
  • Does not read, watch or enjoy American media, social networks or media.

It cannot occur.

Maybe at some time, some radicals believed that it was possible. Maybe back in the 1960s, or 1970s they might have believed this. But in todays society. It is impossible.

Simply Impossible.

Perhaps, the reason why there is such an accelerated failure at all levels in the West is becuase the “leadership” has themselves been affected by their very own poison.

I shake my head.

How can they be so stupid?

Please ponder this thought.

Let’s take a break from this to let your mind relax. New subject. New thoughts.

Chinese respect

Boy locks himself in his bedroom. The fire station is called and they go to the house to break him out…video 2MB

Here’s yet some more gag boxes…

Now here’s a jigsaw puzzle that is suitable for the whole family. Just set aside a card table and get at it. It’s a true challenge.

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Want a challenge?

Plants cry for more! Amaze your friends!

Environmentially safe!

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Plants cry for more!

The latest in animal entertainment!

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The latest in animal entertainment!

The world needs more people skipping

If you cannot dance, try skipping. Smile. Skip as you walk down the street, and say nice things to people. While the rest of the world is on a roller coaster to Hell, you can stop that descent. Skip as you walk. video 15MB

Take care of yourself

We all might not look like this 20-something Chinese woman, but we can certainly smile and be great; we can do great things. Stop waiting. Start doing. video 3MB

Suppose you are a leader in the West

Just imagine that you are a leader of one of the major Western nations. And you best scientists come running to you; scientist that you believe and trust. And they tell you that the situation is DIRE for mankind. They tell you, convincingly that human population grown and energy depletion is unsustainable and that a major disaster lies ahead…

…and they offer senarios and solutions.

And the best one, whatever it might be, is one when a great mass of humanity dies off.

And you, as a leader believe them.

Perhaps you are an independent thinker. Perhaps you are a massive follower of social media and use twitter all the time, and are heavily influenced by Vault 7. What ever.

You believe them. In your heart; you believe them.

And their solution is to kill off 80% of the human population. ..

Insane. Unheard of. But, they present it in a clear and defined manner…

  • Intentionally cull the human race to 20% of it’s size … or…
  • Lose 100% of the human species and everyone dies.

What would you choose?

Truth or fiction

It does not matter if there’s such a real thing as “climate change”. What actually does matter is what the “leadership” believes. Because if they inherently believe that the world is going “to Hell in a handbasket”, they have the power, and ability, and the willingness to perform some really drastic actions.

Actions, mind you, that will affect you and your families directly.

Let’s eat.

Chicken Pot Pie

Likely another cost-cutting holdover of the Great Depression and World War II, this savory chicken and vegetable pie is now mostly found only in the grocery store freezer aisle. Don’t go there.
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Make up your own. It tastes better. It lasts longer. It’s easy to make, and great and easy to reheat in the microwave. Chicken Pot Pie, why didn’t we think about this sooner?
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2022 03 24 08 19
Chicken Pot Pie.

Chicken Pot Pie

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A strange thing about that plane crash

(If) the software of the plane took over the controls from the pilot… and we con’t know that this is what happened, but if it did… why in God’s Name did it decide to aim the plane straight towards the ground at full throttle?

How the plane behaved. video. 2MB

No self-respecting engineer, or software designer would allow that kind of radical action. None.

So, we are left with two POSSIBLE causes…

  • The sensors to the plane indicated that a nose dive at full-throttle was needed. Which suggests a very complicated mash-up of sensors.
  • Someone used software to hyjack the plane and intentionally decided to ram it straight into the ground.

Who would be so evil?

Man gets word that his entire family were on the plane and died. video 16MB

And here’s what’s left of the plane. video 4MB

The black box fight recorder has been recovered. I believe investigators are considering that sabotage is involved.

Talking about evil and the United States, let’s interrupt this train of thought to explore more gag boxes…

Here’s some more gag boxes…

Have your pet treat you as a king!

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Have your pet treat you as a king!

Take a nap anywhere and at anytime.

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Take a nap anywhere and at anytime.

And what about the Ukraine?

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

The West started this conflict, of course. I don’t know when they realized Russia was going to move into the Ukraine, but they had ample opportunity to prevent it by simply agreeing to the previous status quo. They appear to believe that they can create a protracted conflict in the Ukraine like they did when Russia invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s. 

That shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation. 

Ukraine has historically been a part of Russia. There is not really any such thing as a “Ukrainian identity” outside of being a vassal state. In the west of the country, they tend to feel closer to Poland, and there is some bad blood all around with regards to the USSR. But none of this is in any way similar to fanatical Islam. The US has backed neo-Nazism as a kind of “Ukrainian ISIS,” but you can’t rally a country around cartoonish neo-Nazism (particularly while the entire leadership of the country is Jewish).

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

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

-UNZ

Perfect for the busy man on the move!

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Perfect for the busy man on the move!

So what are we looking at here?

Well, as far as I can figure out, we have the following situations all moving ahead at this time…

  • The United States is pushing the world towards war.
    • They are crossing both China’s, and Russia’s red lines to provoke them.
    • They believe the myth of “American greatness”.
    • They believe that America has liberty and freedom.
    • They believe that a uni-polar world is necessary and there are no alternatives.
  • The American leadership are acting strangely.
    • President Biden seems to be senile with dementia.
    • Vice President Kamala Harris appears to be a “ding-bat, dunderhead”.
    • The US Senate are mostly radical neocon war-hawks.
  • The Coronavirus pandemic was strange.
    • All Western nations insisted in mRNA injections.
    • All Eastern nations treated it as a bio-weapon and used dead-host vaccines.
    • Western nations are all now “open”, while Eastern nations remain closed.
  • Full-scale on-going “hybrid-warfare” against the East by the West.
    • Military engagements, sanctions, trade restrictions on Russia.
    • Strange unusual events inside of China. All centering around American products, food, livestock, or systems.
  • A strong difference in the West vs. East societies.
    • Everyone in the West seem angry, agitated, and frustrated.
    • Thos in the East are calm, relaxed, happy.
    • No contrails in the East.
    • Hyper-inflation hitting the West.
    • Up-tick in some inflationary measures in the East.

But what does it all mean?

It’s not like I can just immediately agree that all Americans (and those in the west) have nano-bots, and chem-trail poisonings, and all the rest. I see strange behaviors, but I do not see any evidence that the cause is some kind of mad-scientist stew of frequency manipulation, vault 7, nano-bots, MSM algorithms, and the rest.

I have no proof.

And even if I did, I really wouldn’t know what to do about / with it.

So, in the interests of all…

We have to approach the strangeness, not with theories that suggest causes and answers but rather empirical study.

Empirical study

Empirical research is research using empirical evidence. You see evidence. You study it. You come to conclusions about it. You do not come up with theories on the causes. You just put all of the observations into one singular box.

It’s important that you put ALL of the observations in that box. Omitting one singular element can give you distorted or skiewed conclusions. So you collect all the observations…

  • An American-built plane had a highly unusual crash inside of China.
  • The plane possessed software that can override the pilot commands.
  • The plane is of the same make and model that had similiar crashes before.
  • “Conspiracy kooks” believe that this type of plane can be hyjacked remotely.
  • The crash came immediately after two warnings to Xi Peng (Blinkedin, and Biden) that there would be immediate consequences if China did not Sanction Russia.
  • It’s been one week now since the warnings. No other “immediate consequences” occurred (that the public is aware of).

You see, empirical study a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or experience. Here’s another example.

  • There are contrails all over the West.
  • There are no contrials in the East.

And…

  • Everyone in the West are agitated, upset, angry and frustrated.
  • Everyone in the East seems to be calm, realxed and comfortable.

And…

  • While there are exceptions, the vast bulk of injections in the West are mRNA.
  • There are no mRNA injections in China, and few in Russia.

Empiricism values some research more than other kinds.

  • A measure of “happiness” is relative.
  • While a measure of inflation is measurable.

Empirical evidence (the record of one’s direct observations or experiences) can be analyzed quantitatively or qualitatively. And from that, you can suggest what is going on…

  • Until MM mixed different subjects in the articles (food, girls, China, history), there was a near constant stream of Trolls, and hacking attemps on the site.
  • When the mixed subjects were introducted, Troll and DDOS attacks dropped to zero.

As well as come up with theories as to why it is going on…

  • Trolls and hacks use some <unknown method> to select the websites to harrass.
  • By mixing content within articles, the <unknown method> is bypassed, and the articles are no longer harassed or attacked.

About China

An interesing quote…

We are clearly facing down a world ruled by the Chinese. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that. But most of the discomfort comes from the idea that the Chinese are somehow going to rule us in the same fashion that the US has ruled the world since World War II. 

They have no such plans for us. The Chinese have a vision of conquering the world through commerce, rather than war, threats of war, and geopolitical maneuvering.

We started out on the issue of the economic dominance of the US, and that economic dominance is indeed the key to everything. However, US economic dominance was entirely a result of US military might. The reigning US philosophy for global economic dominance has been: “we will literally bomb you.” 

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

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

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

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

-UNZ

Cream Cheese Pumpkin Pie

Although pumpkin pie and cheesecake have obviously remained popular, this hybrid, a Kraft classic, has fallen out of favor.
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This variation on pumpkin pie comes from actress and writer Mae West. It appears in a 1933 community cookbook published by the Assistance League of Southern California, alongside contributions from several other Hollywood stars such as Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Constance Bennet, Marion Davies, and Cary Grant.

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2022 03 24 09 50

Unfortunately, Mae West doesn’t give us much information beyond the actual recipe. The pie is titled “Pumpkin Pie Robert,” but it’s unclear what the name “Robert” refers to – it could be the name of a person who gave her the recipe, or perhaps even the name of a place the recipe came from.

Mae West includes brandy in her recipe, which is pushing the boundaries just a little, since the cookbook was published in 1933 and Prohibition wasn’t repealed until the end of that year. She is far from the only contributor to this cookbook to do so, however, and finding alcohol in recipes from the Prohibition years isn’t at all uncommon.

The strangest ingredient in this recipe to me is the Nippy cheese called for in the topping. I wasn’t able to find out exactly what Nippy cheese is, although it looks like it was some type of cheese spread originally made by Kraft. It was apparently not the same as cream cheese, since Kraft made that too, but for lack of a better substitute I decided to go with cream cheese. Any kind of flavored cheese spread honestly sounds like it would be disgusting when combined with whipped cream, so I’m hoping that the original Nippy cheese was something neutrally-flavored.

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2022 03 24 09 52

Oh that Mae…

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2022 03 24 09 53

Pumpkin Pie Robert:

  • 1 1/2 cups pumpkin
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp cloves
  • 2 tsp ginger
  • 1/2 tsp salt (reduced from original)
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups milk
  • 2 oz/4 tbsp brandy
  • 2 oz cream cheese
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  1. Beat the eggs until light, then add the sugar, spices, and salt and beat until mixed.
  2. Scald the milk, then slowly add milk to the egg mixture while whisking constantly.
  3. Stir in the pumpkin and brandy.
  4. Line a pie pan with pastry (no recipe for pie crust is given in the book, so use your favorite recipe or store-bought).
  5. Pour in the filling. With a 9-inch pie pan, I ended up with some extra filling; the recipe is probably intended for a larger or deeper pan.
  6. Bake at 450 degrees for 10 minutes, then turn down the oven to 325 degrees and bake for another 30-40 minutes. Set aside to cool.
  7. Topping: whip the cream until stiff. Mash the cream cheese with a fork, then stir into the cream. Once the pie is cold, use a piping bag to decorate it with the cream cheese mixture.

Like many pies, this one is definitely at its best the day after its made. When I tried it on day 1, the flavors were much too strong, with the brandy in particular overwhelming everything else. The flavors melded much better the second day, although it was still a strongly-flavored pie. I did end up reducing the salt, since 1 teaspoon seemed much too salty to me.

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A nice fun pie. Goes great with coffee.

I liked the cream-cheese topping, but I think I am more of a whipped cream purist. I also wonder whether cream cheese was a good substitute for Nippy cheese, or if the original cheese was something more savory. There are people who put cheddar cheese on apple pies, although I’ve never heard of it used on a pumpkin pie. Was Mae West a cheese-on-dessert-pie person? (I am very firmly not a cheese-on-dessert-pie person – but cream cheese is ok).

Overall, my verdict is that this was a decent pumpkin pie, but it just wasn’t quite to my taste. Sorry, Mae West, but Amelia Simmons’ Pumpkin Pie is still the top historic pumpkin pie for me!

Here’s some more fun gag boxes…

Perfect during these days of Coronavirus.

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Perfect during these days of Coronavirus.

For ages two and older.

2022 03 23 11 45
For ages two and older.

Now with musical Accompaniment. Choose your own theme song.

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Now with musical Accompaniment. Choose your own theme song.

A unique, one in a lifetime gift.

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A unique, one in a lifetime gift.

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China is still under lockdown

Do not believe the lies that China is reconsidering it’s hard Coronavirus restrictions. Maybe the West has relaxed it’s stance dealing with the “pandemic”, but China has not.

China is still under DEFCON 2; they still accuse the USA of launching bioweapons against it, and they are VERY VERY concerned about the biolweapons labs in Ukraine. They will stay at DEFCON 2 until there is no longer any threat of bioweapon attack from the West.

Here’s a viewo of some of the many many volunteers fighting on this front. video 7MB

Renegade interviews Michael Hudson: Sanctions, the blowback

https://www.rt.com/shows/renegade-inc/552236-michael-hudson-sanctions-ukraine/

Ross [00:00:29] Welcome to Renegade Inc. Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, one thing is for sure the economic reverberations will be felt by everyone for years to come as the world divides between the West and a rapidly reshaping Eurasia.

Ross [00:00:49] Michael Hudson, always a pleasure to have you on the programme, welcome to Renegade Inc.

Michael Hudson [00:00:53] Thank you for inviting me.

Ross [00:00:55] Michael, sanctions, sanctions, sanctions is all we hear now. We’re sanctioning people. The West sanction people back to the Stone Age. What are the unintended consequences of sanctions?

Michael Hudson [00:01:05] Well, one is to serve very much like a protective tariff on the sanctioned country. For instance, when America made sanctions on European trade with Russia, Lithuania dutifully stopped exporting cheese to Russia. Well, the result is that Russia set up its own cheese’s sector, and now it’s self-sufficient in cheese. If you sanction a country, you force it to become more self-reliant and across the board, from agriculture to dairy products to technology, Russia is forced to become more self-reliant and at the same time to depend much more on trade with China for the things that it is still not self-reliant in. So America is bringing about exactly the opposite of what it intended. It’s hopeless to somehow isolate Russia and then be able to go after China without Russia. And instead, what it’s doing is integrating the Eurasian core, Russia and China, exactly the policy that Henry Kissinger warned against going all the way back to Mackinder a century ago that said, Eurasia is the world island, Russia and China could be the whole world centre. That’s what the fight is all about. Well, American sanctions are driving Russia and China together, and America has gone to China and said, Please don’t support Russia. It most recently, on Monday, March 14, Jake Sullivan came out and told China, we will sanction countries that break our sanctions against Russia. And basically, China said, fine. You know, we’ll just break off all the trade between East and West now and the East, Eurasia is pretty much self-sufficient. The West is not self-sufficient since it began to industrialise, and it’s heavily dependent on Russia for not only oil and gas, but palladium and many raw materials. So the sanctions are ending up driving a wedge between the European countries.

Ross [00:03:31] Don’t people who apply these sanctions think this through? Are they so short-sighted they don’t understand that these sanctions are going to build further capacity within Russia, push Russia further towards China, make that economic alliance concrete and, ultimately, you’re not going to be able to keep the lights on in in Europe? All the while underestimating the fact that from a food security point of view – take the U.K., for instance, a net importer of food – not appreciating the fact that, for instance, Russia/Ukraine, they create twenty five percent, a quarter, of all wheat annually. The estimation this year is one hundred and two million tonnes Russia and Ukraine, wheat. Don’t people realise that there’s going to be a massive knock on effect?

Michael Hudson [00:04:23] Yes, they do realise it. Yes, they’ve thought it all through. I worked with these people for more than 50 years.

Ross [00:04:31] Who are these people?

Michael Hudson [00:04:32] The neocons, basically, the people who are in charge of U.S. foreign policy? Victoria Nuland and her husband, Robert Kagan, the people that President Biden has appointed all around him, from Blinken to Sullivan and right down the line. They are basically urging people around the New American Century. They’re the people who said America can run the whole world and create its own reality. And yes, they know that this is going to cause enormous problems for Germany. They know that not only will it block the energy that Germany and Italy and other countries in Europe need through their oil and gas, but also it’ll block the use of gas for fertiliser, upping their fertiliser production and decreasing their food production. They look at this and they say, How can America gain from all of this? There’s always a way of gaining what something looks to be bad. Well, one way they’ll gain is oil prices are going way up. And that benefits the United States whose foreign policy is based very largely on oil and gas. The oil industry controls most of the world’s oil trade, and that explains a lot of the US diplomacy. This is a fight to lock the world energy trade into control by U.S. companies, excluding not only Iran and Venezuela, but also excluding Russia.

Ross [00:06:16] So as Europe pushes towards more and more green and renewable energy and this for the Americans they must think it’s a dreadful scenario insofar as they can’t sell the oil as Europe becomes or wants to become more self-sufficient. So ultimately, and Britain net zero, whatever that means. But but going down the renewables path, going down the solar path takes America’s dependency or dependency on America out the game, doesn’t it?

Michael Hudson [00:06:49] This is exactly the point that the European public has not realised. While most of the European public wants to prevent global warming and prevent carbon into the atmosphere, U.S. foreign policy is based on increasing, and even accelerating, global warming, accelerating carbon emissions because that’s the oil trade. Suppose that Europe got its way. Suppose if the Greens got what they wanted and Germany and Europe were completely dependent on solar energy panels, on wind energy and to some extent, on nuclear power, perhaps? Well, if they were completely self-sufficient in energy without oil or gas or coal, America would lose the primary lever. It has over the ability to turn off the power and electricity and oil of any country that didn’t follow U.S. diplomatic direction.

Ross [00:07:48] So when we take your analysis here and we think about how the sanctions are going to build capacity, push Russia and China together, when we start to look at sort of piggy in the middle, if you like the EU, when we’re thinking about America, the EU has had a sort of abusive relationship with the Americans for quite some time now, hasn’t it?

Michael Hudson [00:08:06] Well, that’s that’s true in the sense that EU foreign policy has basically been turned over to NATO. So instead of European voters and politicians making their policy, they’ve relinquished European foreign policy to NATO, which is really an arm of the US military. So yes, Europe has had a decent relationship with the United States diplomatically by saying yes, yes, please or yes, thank you by not being independent. Of course, if it were independent, the relationship would not be so friendly and decent.

Ross [00:08:46] So for countries that are net importers of food, need to keep the lights on, need heating and need cheap oil. How does this pan out? What does it look like for the UK? What does it look like for the EU?

Michael Hudson [00:08:59] Well, Vice President, Kamala Harris the other day said to Americans, Yes, life is going to be much more expensive. Our oil prices are going up and squeezing families. But think of the poor Ukrainian babies that we’re saving. So take it on the chin for the Ukrainian babies. So basically the United States is presenting horror stories of the Ukraine and saying, if you don’t willingly suffer now by isolating Russia, then Russia is going to roll over you with tanks just like it rolled over Central Europe after World War Two. I mean, it’s waving the flag of Russian aggression, as if Russia or any country in today’s world has an army that’s able to invade any other industrial nation. All military can do today of any country is bomb and kill other populations and industrial centres. No nation is able to occupy or rollover any industrial country. And the United States keeps trying to promote this mythology that we’re still in the world of 1945. And that world ended really with the Vietnam War when the military draft ended. And no country is able to have a military draft to raise the army with necessary to fight to invade. Russia can’t do it any more than Europe or the United States could do it. So all the United States can do is wave warnings about how awful Russia is and somehow convince Europe to follow the US position. But most of all, it doesn’t really have to. Europe doesn’t really have a voice, and this is what the complaint by Putin and Foreign Secretary Lavrov have been saying. They say that Europe is just following the United States and it doesn’t matter what the European people want or what European politicians want. The United States is so deeply in control that they really don’t have much of a choice.

Ross [00:11:15] When does the consumer start to feel this? When does the European or British consumer start to feel the pinch when these sanctions are enacted? And what does that look like?

Michael Hudson [00:11:25] Well, it depends on how fast the sanctions work. The United States said Well, in another year and a half, we’ll be able to provide Europe with liquefied natural gas. Well, the problem is, first of all, they’re not the ports to handle the liquefied natural gas to go into Europe. Secondly, there are not enough ships and tankers to carry all of this gas to Europe. So unless there are very warm winters, Europe is not going to have a very easy time for the next few years. And that’s only for oil and gas. It’s dependent on raw materials that Russia produces. For instance, palladium is necessary for catalytic converters. Titanium is necessary to make the screws that are especially used on aeroplanes that are strong enough not to buckle and break when winds go up and down and when they’re full. Russia even produces the neon and the crypton that are necessary for making some kind of electronic uses and also for many components that go into computers and information technology. There’s a whole range of exports that Europe is highly dependent on, and the United States has provided Putin with a whole list of these exports, saying, Well, OK, we’re going to fight against Europe buying your oil and gas but you can certainly sell us your heavy oil that we need since we’re not buying it from Venezuela. We certainly need the following list of critical materials that we need, like helium and crypton. These are our pressure points. Please don’t press on them. Well, you can imagine what Putin and his advisers are saying. Thank you for giving us this list of the pressure points that you’re exempting from the trade sanctions. I think if you really want a break in the unilateral, unipolar world, I think we should break now and see whether you really want to get along without trading.

Ross [00:13:51] Michael Hudson, welcome back, second half, Renegade Inc. Wonderful to have you. In that first half we followed the money, if you like. We talked about sanctions and the unintended consequences. I just want to pull back a little further if we can and just talk about the sort of tectonic shifts that are going on in the world. I spoke to somebody from Russia recently and what he said was very straightforward. He said, now what we have to do is begin to learn to live without the West. Do you think that that sentiment is proliferating across Russia now? Is that the mindset?

Michael Hudson [00:14:22] Well, if you read President Putin’s speeches, that’s exactly what’s happening. And Secretary Lavrov has voiced exactly the same feeling. There’s almost a disgust with the West and a feeling from Putin, Lavrov and the other Russian spokesmen, how could we everhave hoped to have an integration with Europe after 1991? Europe really was not on our side at all, and we didn’t realise that Europe is really part of the U.S. diplomatic sphere. It’s like all of Europe is now backing the attack on Russia. The best to do is reorient our economy towards China, Asia and Eurasia and become our own self-sufficient, independent centre

Ross [00:15:15] De-dollarisation and the amassing of plenty of gold by both the Russians and the Chinese. Just talk us through that.

Michael Hudson [00:15:21] Well, Ross, you asked in the first half of this interview how has American sanctions worked against it? I should have mentioned what you just mentioned, the dollar. The United States just grabbed all of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, just as England a few months ago grabbed all of Venezuela’s gold that was held in the Bank of England when Venezuela tried to spend this gold on buying medical supplies to cope with the COVID virus. So basically, the United States have said, if any foreign country holds its reserves in the United States or accounts in U.S. banks. If a country in the global south tries to pay its foreign debt by holding its reserves in US banks in order to be the paying agent on the interest on its foreign debt. And if that foreign country does something we don’t like, like trade with Russia or permit more labour unionisation or try to become independent in food, we’re just going to do what we did to Venezuela, what we did to Iran when we grabbed its foreign exchange reserves or what we did to Russia. And that means that other countries all of a sudden see what they thought was their flight to security, what they thought was their most secure savings, their holdings in U.S. banks, US treasury bill, all of a sudden, is holding them hostage and is a high risk. Even the Financial Times of London has been writing about this, saying, how can the United States that was getting a free ride off the dollar standard for the last 50 years, ever since 1971, when foreign countries held dollars instead of gold and basically holding dollars means you buy U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the US budget deficit and the balance of payments deficit. How can the United States kill the goose that’s giving it the free ride? Well, the answer is that other countries can only move into gold and there’s an alternative to the dollar because that’s something that all the countries of the world have agreed upon is an asset, not a liability. If you hold any foreign currency, that currency is a liability of a foreign country, and if you hold gold, it’s a pure asset. There’s no country that can cancel it, the Americans can’t cancel Russia’s gold supply that’s held in Russia, although it can grab Russian gold supply if it were to hold it in the New York Federal Reserve Bank or the Bank of England. So other countries are not only moving to gold, Germany is bringing its gold back from New York, the Federal Reserve, in aeroplanes back to Germany, so it’ll have its own gold just in case German politicians would do something the United States didn’t like and the United States would simply grab Germany’s gold. The United States sanctions, and it’s especially it’s grabbing on foreign reserve, has started a war that is dividing the world between the West and Eurasia.

Ross [00:18:40] A technical part to all of this because let’s face it, it is an information war and it’s also an economic war. Is it the FIRE sector that you point out – the financial, insurance and real estate sector. Is it that they want to continue the exorbitant privilege of credit creation, because ultimately, if you think about gold, there’s no counterparty risk. Gold is gold and it has been for millennia. Far from being a barbarous relic, by the way now, people are starting to realise the intrinsic value, especially as crypto falls apart. Can you just talk a little bit about this, the FIRE sector wanting the exorbitant privilege of creating credit?

Michael Hudson [00:19:19] This is really what the new world division and global fracture is all about. You’re right, Ross. If you look at after World War One, the American fight against Soviet communism, was basically a fight of industrial capitalism against the threat of socialism. But after 1991, and especially in the last two decades, America deindustrialised. So the fight is not by industrial capitalism against countries pushing their labour up. It’s a fight of neoliberalism against industrial capitalism or socialism abroad. It’s against industrial capitalism evolving into socialism. It’s a belief that, well, now that America’s be industrialised, how is it going to control the world economy? Well, it’ll control it through a financial means by being the creditor and foreign countries debt payments to America will enable it to make its military payments abroad and finance its trade deficit. But also, America’s purchase of key natural resources will give it natural resources when its purchase of takeover of real estate is going to essentially make the United States the landlord class and monopoly class, that mediaeval Europe had to hold the rest of the population in serfdom. That basically is the American strategy of neoliberalism fighting against countries that reject privatisation and financialization of their economy, and specifically financialization under the control of U.S. banks, U.S. private capital and allied satellite banks and capital from England or France or Germany. This is exactly the fight. Will banking and finance control the world economy or will other countries try to build up their own economies through labour and tangible capital formation?

Ross [00:21:27] Where do you stand on that? And I’m only asking you to predict the future, Michael. How do you think this plays out? Because the way you’ve depicted it is the rent seekers, the neoliberal rent seekers on one hand, and there are value creators on the other. And by the way, those two things don’t sit very well together, as we know. How does that play out?

Michael Hudson [00:21:51] Even though the United States is the largest debtor economy in the world, it’s a creditor vis-a-vis the global south and other countries and it uses its creditor position to take over their natural resources, real estate, oil and gas, mineral rights and public utilities and natural monopolies and that are being privatised in government infrastructure. It’s becoming basically the landlord monopoly class of the entire world. That’s the U.S. strategy, and that’s the key to why the world is fracturing globally. And in the past, the global south countries were unable to fight against this tendency in the 70s and 80s with the Vendome conference on. But now that China and Russia threatened to be a self-sufficient core in Eurasia, this is the great threat to the American dream of becoming a landlord and financier of the world.

Ross [00:22:50] How do you think this pans out?

Michael Hudson [00:22:52] Well, the question is whether the United States is if we can control the world, who wants to live in a world like that, let’s blow it up. The question is whether the United States will actually go to war. The only lever that it has left is to drop bombs and to destroy and make the world look like Ukraine. So from the U.S. point of view, Europe’s future and Eurasia’s future is the Ukraine. Look at what we will do to you if you don’t follow our policy. America has just moved al Qaeda very heavily in the Ukraine to sort of repeat in Ukraine and Europe what it was doing in Syria and Libya. And the United States says this is what we can do. What are you going to do about it? Do you really want to fight. But the rest of the world, certainly China and Russia says, Well, we’re ready to fight. So there is no telling what you. And it comes down to personalities. Putin has said, well, do we really want to live in a world without Russia? If the United States is to attack us, we might as well end the world. The United States says, Do we really want to live in a world that we can’t control? If we’re not completely in control, we feel very insecure and we’re going to blow up the world. So you have this countervailing position in a world where all the arms control has been dismantled by the United States in the last few years. The United States has withdrawn from all of the agreements that Russia and China have tried to promote. And Europe is standing by and apparently is willing to be the sacrificial lamb in all of this as Ukraine is being the sacrificial lamb. So the United States and Russia say, let’s fight to the last European. And Russia initially didn’t want that because it was hoping that Europe and Russia would have a mutual gain in trade and investment relationships. But now it doesn’t feel that way. And there may be a proxy war between the United States over the European economy, not necessarily bombing Europe, but trade sanctions, energy sanctions, the kind of disruption that Europe is going to be seeing in the next year is if it loses Russian oil and gas and minerals and also, I think Chinese exports.

Ross [00:25:25] Is there a moment where cooler heads prevail and suddenly the West and other places realise that they’re dependent from a food security point of view, from an energy security point of view that we are dependent? And is there a moment at that point that you can thaw a frozen conflict by saying, actually, if we both meet, we just take a step toward each other, actually, we can do something in a collaborative way? Now I get what you’ve said throughout the rest of the programme, and I give this a percentage possibility of about three percent, but isn’t there a strategy to say, actually, we’ve had all the grandstanding, we’ve had all the brinksmanship, we should now sit around the table and try and work something out?

Michael Hudson [00:26:03] I don’t see any cooler heads in the United States. The surprising thing is that here it’s the right wing channel, the Republican Fox Channel, is the only channel that’s taking the anti-war stand and is saying we shouldn’t be at war in Ukraine. It’s the only channel that’s talking about here is how Russia sees the world. Do we really want to take a one sided perspective or do we want to see the actual dynamics at work? So it was the Republicans and the right wing that is now primarily against the NATO war in the Ukraine. The left wing seems to be all for it, but the left wing of the Democratic Party is in office and I don’t see any cooler heads in the Democratic Party at all. And I’ve known many of these people for many decades, and they are willing to go to war for a death. There are still back in the world of World War Two when the fight was against the Nazis and anti-Semitism. They’re still living in a kind of mythology world, not in the real world. And the thought that the world can come to an end either doesn’t have a reality to them or as Herman Cain said, Well, somebody is going to survive.

Ross [00:27:29] Michael Hudson always a pleasure, a great insight. And, you know, it’s just refreshing to hear. Thank you very much for your time.

Michael Hudson [00:27:38] Well, thank you very much for having me, Ross.

Chinese Girl

Such a cute girl. video 3MB

More Sanctions On Russia Will Destroy Europe

From MoA.

On February 21 Russia announced that it would recognize the Donbas republics. A day later it did so. The ‘west’ immediately announced sanctions which in fact had been prepared in advance. On February 24 Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine.

The Russian ruble immediately took a big hit. It has since recovered a bit.

oday’s news will bring the ruble to a new heights.

Kommersant reports (machine translation):

Putin instructed to convert gas contracts with unfriendly countries into rubles

President Vladimir Putin instructed to issue a directive to Gazprom to convert contracts into rubles for unfriendly countries. In his opinion, supplying Russian goods to the EU, the USA and receiving payment in dollars and euros "does not make any sense for us." Against this background, the ruble moved to growth on the Moscow Exchange.

“Both the US and the EU have basically defaulted on their obligations to Russia. And now everyone in the world knows that obligations in dollars and euros may not be fulfilled. <...> It is quite obvious that in this regard, it makes no sense for us to supply our goods to both the EU and the USA and receive payment in dollars, euros and a number of other currencies. Therefore, I have decided to implement in the shortest possible time a set of measures to transfer payments for our natural gas supplied to unfriendly countries to Russian rubles,” Mr. Putin said at a meeting with the government.

The President instructed the Central Bank and the government to determine within a week the order of operations for the purchase of rubles on the domestic market by buyers of Russian gas. He claims that Russia will continue to supply gas "in accordance with the volumes and according to the pricing principles concluded in the contracts."

The dollar exchange rate on the Moscow Exchange fell below 100 rubles. for the first time since March 3rd. As of 15:37, the US currency is trading at 101.55 rubles. (-2 rubles). The euro exchange rate fell by 2.85 rubles to 111.65 rubles. The maximum dollar fell to 94.99 rubles, the euro - to 109.7 rubles.

The European Union, the United States, Great Britain and a number of other countries have imposed sanctions against Russia in response to the military operation in Ukraine, which has been carried out since February 24 on the orders of Mr. Putin. One of the measures was the freezing of about half of the Central Bank's gold and foreign exchange reserves ($300 billion).

To pay in ruble one first has to buy rubles. With higher demand for rubles and no change in supplies the price for the Russian currency will go up. As Russia is selling hydrocarbons and other resources for billions of dollars per day the ruble is likely to soon reach record heights.

On February 28 another round of sanctions hit Russia. The part of the Russian central bank reserves that were stored in the ‘west’ were frozen. The central bank immediately pushed its interest rate from 9% to 20% to prevent a flight from the ruble. This helped to lessen the damage but made credit expensive and has hit the future growth potential in Russia.

But with a high new rubles demand from the outside of Russia the central bank will soon be able to lower its interest rate to more normal levels. Credit conditions will ease and investment in Russia, to replace products that had so far been imported, will rise again.

Today’s move to demand rubles for hydrocarbons is only on of the many steps Russia can, and likely will take, to retaliate for sanctions from the ‘west’.

As I wrote previously:

All energy consumption in the U.S. and EU will now come at a premium price. This will push the EU and the U.S. into a recession. As Russia will increase the prices for exports of goods in which it has market power - gas, oil, wheat, potassium, titanium, aluminum, palladium, neon etc - the rise in inflation all around the world will become significant.

Meanwhile the New York Times writes:

As he heads to Europe, President Biden will press U.S. allies to help impose even more aggressive sanctions on Russia.

Biden demands that Europe suicides itself while he is protecting the U.S. industry. I hope that some people in the European capitals are still able to think clear enough to recognize the racket the U.S. is trying to run here:

Together with the economic devastation that U.S. and European sanctions on Russia are causing in their own economies this will end in regime-changes in several European countries. The U.S. is of course again protecting itself from as much as it can at the cost of others.

2022 03 24 10 05
2022 03 24 10 05

Tony Wood asks:

The question remains, why did all those who for so long foretold this war do so little to stop it, and so much to hasten the disaster Russia has now set in motion?

Indeed. Why didn’t the government of Germany guarantee in writing that it would veto any additional NATO membership? It would have solved at least half of the problem. Why didn’t any other NATO government do so?

And what are they doing now? Where are their initiatives for peace?

Wake up. Otherwise this will end in disaster. Not for Russia but for the rest of Europe.

Kids and cats

Ah. This is funny. Poor kitties, but they know that the big stupid humans can’t be helped. video 124MB

AGAIN! Reference to NUKES!

NATO'S STOLTENBERG SAYS ANY USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS WILL CHANGE NATURE OF CONFLICT, RUSSIA MUST UNDERSTAND THAT IT CAN NEVER WIN A NUCLEAR WAR.

UPDATE 5:10 PM EDT —

NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg said that NATO has plans in place to protect all allies from nuclear threat, and that there should be no doubt about its readiness.

MORE:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned of a “direct clash” between Moscow and NATO forces if peacekeepers from the military alliance are deployed to Ukraine.

Lavrov made the remarks on Wednesday while speaking to students and staff at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in response to Polish proposals for a NATO and international “peace mission.”

“Our Polish colleagues have already stated that there will be a NATO summit now, we need to send peacekeepers. I hope they understand what is at stake,” Lavrov said, according to Russian state-owned news agency TASS.

STILL MORE:

Russian lawmaker Alexei Zhuravlyov on state TV threatens nuclear strike on Warsaw, Poland and NATO forces or any peacekeeping contingent that might try to enter Ukraine.

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

This issue has been surfacing far too frequently of late, and there’s a very good reason for it:  The West has attacked Russia economically over the Ukraine situation, and has done it so badly that Russia is in actual danger of collapsing as a country.

The West seems to think that Russia’s only option is to sit back and take the sanctions, or change its behavior with Ukraine to abide what NATO and the west wants.

The Russian’s don’t see it that way.

The West PROMISED Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that they would “not move one inch eastward from the Re-unified East-West Germany” (1997).   Yet NATO did precisely that in the ensuing years, to the point were NATO nations are now directly bordering Russia.

Those NATO nations have NATO troops rotating in and out of them.  The West lies about it by saying they’re only there “temporarily” when in fact, as thousands leave after a few months duty, thousands more come to replace them.  The result: An ever-present NATO conventional force.

Then too, there’s the missiles.  US Missile Defense systems . . . now in several of the former Soviet Block nations, all aimed directly at Russia.

Ukraine was simply the latest Domino to fall in the long line of NATO expansion.  The reason NATO wanted Ukraine has to do with its proximity to Moscow and to Russia’s Strategic Nuclear missile silos.   If American missile defenses can be placed on Ukraine soil, they will have a flight time of only 5 minutes to Moscow, and less than ten minutes to Russia’s nuclear silos.  Russia cannot defend against missiles that are so close and can travel so far and fast.

Worse, the technology of missiles has evolved and now, the very same “conventional” missiles claimed to be “defensive” can be re-fitted with OFFENSIVE NUCLEAR WARHEADS within an hour.  And the re-fit can be done while the missiles remain in their launchers, so no one would know the missiles had been converted from conventional to nuclear.

These facts pose an existential threat to Russia, the very same way that Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba posed an existential threat to the USA under President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

What did Kennedy do?  He told the Soviets either those missiles had to go, or . . . .  the US would invade Cuba to destroy those missiles.   (Gee, the exact same cause for invasion that is now seeing Russia inside Ukraine!)

Yet no one screeched to President Kennedy about Cuba being a sovereign country that could align itself however they liked.  No one even questioned Kennedy’s decision that either those missiles go, or Cuba gets invaded.   The reason no one questioned it is because every RATIONAL person knew Kennedy was right.

Well, guess what?  Today, with the situation in Ukraine, Russian President Putin is . . . . right.  He is doing in Ukraine what then-US-President  Kennedy was preparing to do with Cuba.   It’s no different.

NUKES

Russia knows – and has said publicly – that its conventional military forces cannot compete against the collective force of NATO.   But Russia ALSO said (publicly) that they have the largest nuclear arsenal, and their hypersonic missile technology is far superior to all of NATO.

So the Russians, from the start, have made clear they fully understood what they were getting themselves into with Ukraine and the possibility of NATO involvement.  Russia would be forced to use nukes. Period.

They knew this.  They still know it.

NATO knows it too.

So why then, is NATO’s nitwit, Jens Stoltenberg saying today “ANY USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS WILL CHANGE NATURE OF CONFLICT, RUSSIA MUST UNDERSTAND THAT IT CAN NEVER WIN A NUCLEAR WAR.”  ?????

One possibility is that Stoltenberg knows that NATO has actual plans to get involved.   The latest iteration of those plans is for NATO countries to “enter” Ukraine as a “Peace keeping force.”   Russia has made it explicitly clear that if NATO tries such a move, Russia will engage NATO Troops in battle.  War will be the result.

Period End.

And since it is already established that Russia cannot win against NATO conventional forces, Russia would have to “go nuclear.”  Stoltenberg and the west think Russia wouldn’t dare.

Stoltenberg and the West are wrong.

Russia would.

They’ve said it publicly.

Several times.

The soyboys of the West think they can talk their way out of anything they do.  This time, they cannot.

The message from Russia seems to me to be very simple: NATO cannot have Ukraine as a member. Period.

American missile defenses cannot be placed on the territory of former Soviet Block nations. Period.

If my assessment of this Russian Position is correct, then either NATO accepts that these facts are real and stops what it has been doing since 1997 by adding former Soviet Bloc Nations and withdraws NATO troops and missiles from those nations, or NATO refuses to take “no” for an answer, enters Ukraine, and it is World War 3, with nuclear weapons, VERY VERY SOON.

Those appear to me to be the facts.

That no mass-media outlets in the West are bothering to report them to the general public, will leave their citizens blissfully ignorant, until the bright, white, flashes start.

Thankfully, YOU are not being left blissfully ignorant.  YOU have chosen to avail yourself of this web site and radio show and as such, YOU know what’s really going on.  We are being marched directly into a (NUCLEAR) World War 3.

MAYOR OF KYIV: "WORLD WAR III HAS ALREADY BEGUN AND UKRAINE IS THE BEGINNING"

Hal Turner

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A very fine and cute Chinese girl

She is very, very fine. Really nice build and look at that fantastic smile! My goodness, I could just eat her up, I’ll tell you what! video 3MB

Dream griddle and alarm clock.

Wake up on the right side of bed!

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Wake up on the right side of bed!

Joe Biden Speech

Interesting stuff…

“We’re at an inflection point [in] not just the world economy [but] the world that occurs every three or four generations,” the president said.

“[A general told me that] 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946 and since then we’ve established a liberal world order, and it hasn’t happened in a long while.”

“Now is the time when things are shifting and there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it. We’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”

Here’s what Russia thinks…

Biden says US must lead ‘new world order’

The 46th president highlighted the role Washington would have among the “free” states.US President Joe Biden raised eyebrows on Monday after he claimed a “new world order” would soon be established and that it was up to the United States to lead it.
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During a speech at Business Roundtable’s CEO Quarterly Meeting, Biden claimed the world was at “an inflection point” which “occurs every three or four generations” and that it was up to the US to determine the outcome.

“As one of the top military people said to me in a security meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946, and since then we’ve established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while,” the president said.

The comment raised eyebrows in both the US and around the world and resulted in ‘New World Order’ becoming one of Twitter’s trending topics on Monday.

The term ‘new world order’ has historically been used to refer to an era of great global change and has been used by politicians such as former US President George H. W. Bush, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

For decades, however, the phrase has also been the subject of a major conspiracy theory which alleges a secret, elitist plot to form an oppressive global government.

Politicians and government officials have previously received criticism for using the term – most recently Dr. Kerry Chant, the chief health officer of the Australian state of New South Wales.

“We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the new world order,” said Chant during a September Covid-19 press conference, prompting the term to trend on social media.

Journalists and other social media users criticized Chant for using the term, with former journalist Chris Urquhart writing that “government officials would be well advised to avoid phrases like ‘the new world order’ when they’re talking at press conferences about massive limitations on people’s freedoms.”

Some comments…

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2022 03 24 19 39

A Rufus has understanding

If you are not making the world a better place, you are contributing to it’s destruction. For God’s sake, be good, and kind. If you cannot. Then be neutral. But do not make others sad or hurtful. video 8MB

While the United States goes into hyper-inflation, China is stable

I really like how one prominent economics professor recently made this point

“They’re flying blind, and are too little, too late,” Steve Hanke says in disbelief, an Applied Economics professor of John Hopkins University. “It’s utter rubbish and nonsense” that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell sees supply chain issues as a root cause for inflation, he tells me, as we decipher the Federal Reserve’s latest official statements on the shape of the U.S. economy.

“The money supply in excess causes inflation, and the Federal Reserve appears to be almost clueless,” 

Hanke shares with me as we discuss last week’s conversation between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

“Obviously the Chinese know this,” which is why their inflation rating is less than 1%, the former Senior Economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers articulates to me.

Inflation is always destructive.

I can confirm that while prices have been rising inside of China, it is in no way resembling the kinds of inflation that is being seen in America, Europe or the rest of the West. The reason is simple. China has been managing the flow of USD for payments for decades. THis managment is intentional and it insulates China from inflationary effects of the USD due to poor management of debt by the United States.

United States Inflation Rate – February 2022

United States Inflation Rate Annual inflation rate in the US accelerated to 7.9% in February of 2022, the highest since January of 1982, matching market expectations. Energy remained the biggest contributor (25.6% vs 27% in January), with gasoline prices surging 38% (40% in January).

What happens when your QR goes orange

Everyone must take regular swab tests, and be up to date on their injections. IF you are not, your status goes from green to orange. This video shows what happens when you try to go though a tollbooth with an orange QR code in China. video 3MB

Three-Cheese Fondue

I got this easy recipe from my daughter, who lives in France. It’s become my go-to fondue, and I make it often for our family.

—Betty A. Mangas, Toledo, Ohio

What are you waiting for?

OIP C.Wqb p2vQCQp XFqMScXmtwHaC9
Three Cheese Fondue.

Crib Dribbler.

Perfect for hot soups, milkshakes, and energy drinks.

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Perfect for hot soups, milkshakes, and energy drinks.

Europe’s LARGEST Natural Gas Storage Facility: EMPTY

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Empty.

The largest natural gas storage facility in northern Europe is now EMPTY of gas.

The facility, run by (Russia’s) GAZPROM, dropped like a rock once Europe instituted economic sanctions against Russia.

With this largest facility now empty, industry will have to shut down for lack of fuel for heating and generation of electric.

With the largest storage facility now empty, the draw-down from all the smaller facilities will speed up by orders of magnitude, emptying them with ten days to two weeks.

What will Europe do when it has no gas to generate electric or to heat buildings?

Of course, all of this trouble has to do with Europe sticking its nose into the affairs of Russia-Ukraine.

Now that Europe is demonstrably running out of natural gas, watch for things between Russia-Ukraine-NATO to get VERY VERY VERY much worse, very fast.

Grandma Davidson’s Baked Apple Pudding

My savvy grandmother whipped up recipes like this homey cinnamon-scented apple pudding in the Depression years. Many of us still make them today. 

—Holly Sharp, Warren, Ontario

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Grandma Davidson’s Baked Apple Pudding

China is FAST

So President Biden thinks that it will be easy to compete against China. Americans think that it will be no problem, because America is exceptional, and great? This echo chamber in the Untied States that gives this illustion that China is dark, dingy, dirty and backwards, while America is so wonderful is a lie. It amazes me. Becuase this is what China is like… video 21MB

Chinese weddings

The Chinese have heart. Real, honest to goodness heart. video 22MB

China rebukes US as ‘world’s biggest human rights violator’

Beijing has promised “countermeasures” if Washington doesn’t revoke sanctions over Uyghurs
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Beijing has promised to respond in kind unless the US revokes the blacklisting of Chinese officials it said were guilty of human rights violations.

Speaking at a regular press conference on Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accused the US of “smearing China, oppressing Chinese officials for no reason, violating international law… and grossly interfering in China’s domestic affairs.”

Wang said Beijing will respond with reciprocal countermeasures if the US does not immediately revoke its sanctions.

The statement came after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused the Chinese government of committing “genocide and crimes against humanity” against the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority living predominately in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Region. He added that Washington has blacklisted Chinese officials who it said were guilty of human rights violations.

Wang responded in kind, calling the US “the biggest human rights violator in the world,” whose historical treatment of Native Americans “constitutes de facto genocide.” He also criticized Washington for the “long-lasting systemic racial discrimination” of black Americans.

Multiple global human rights groups have long accused China of oppressing the Uyghurs and forcing them to work in labor camps. Beijing has denied the allegations, insisting that the Uyghurs are studying in vocational education and training centers as part of state integration and deradicalization programs.

Blankeez

Now available in classroom sized versions.

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Now available in classroom sizes.

Creamy Chicken Vol-au-Vent

My friends and I have been getting together for "ladies lunches" for years. These vol-au-vents are the perfect no-fuss fancy food; they look complicated, but are actually simple and fun to make. Whenever I think of good friends and good company, I think of these savory pastries. 

—Shauna Havey, Roy, Utah

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Creamy Chicken Vol-au-Vent.

China can build

OMG! It’s insane how fast and efficiently that China can build things. You all just wait and see what happens when China and Russia build their Moon and Mars cities. video 23MB

A 737 crashed in China.

A Boeing 737 carrying 132 people crashed early Monday in China. Although Boeing’s 737 has faced extraordinarily high-profile safety concerns over the past three years, the plane that crashed Monday was a different version of the aircraft than the embattled 737 Max that shook Boeing to its core.

The cause of Monday’s crash has yet to be determined. The plane had been in service since 2015. The flight, operated by China Eastern Airlines, was flying from the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming to Guangzhou when it crashed.
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It’s crash profile; being a full-throttle nose-dive directly to the ground is highly unusual.
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Evidence suggests any of the following;
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  • Intentional Pilot (and co-pilot) action to destroy the plane.
  • Software override of the pilot commands.
  • Remote operation of the software to override the pilot.

The manufacturer of the aircraft has had problems with the software. Other crashes of similiar planes has been the result of software overrides of the pilot.

We do not know (as of yet) the real cause for this crash. But one thing seems clear, somehow the plane overrode the directions of the pilot. It put the plane in a nose dive straight towards the ground and set the engines on full-throttle, full speed, as it plunged towards the ground.

Why it did so, is unknown.

Yet, the United States government black operations regarding taking control of the software should NOT be ruled out.

This reminds me of HAL in the 1969 movie; “2001; A Space odyssey”.

2001 A Space odyssey

So, Boeing makes aircraft that can override the pilot. Brilliant! Why do you need pilots? How about having full robotic planes?

Maybe it’s because no one will fly in them.

Isn’t technology wonderful. Remember when fully automatic self-driving cars were crashing left and right? Yeah, I do. Well, somehow Boeing things that this would be a good thing to implement in passenger planes. Who would doubt it?

Anyways, I have to ask the moronic question of the day…

 "Well, with fully robotic planes, then why still have pilots, when the airplane can override the pilot?"

Well, perhaps its because you keep the illusion of human control, when the truth is that the software is in full control…

… as well as the “authorized” owner of that software who can control the plane and tell it to do whatever he/it wants. Like the United States. Hum?

Let’s talk about HAL. Specifically what it did.

HAL

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HAL

From the 1969 movie…

HAL is a computer system. And it is built into the Discovery One spacecraft, and is in charge of maintaining all mechanical and life support systems on board.

HAL also has several “eyes” placed periodically around the spacecraft.

About three weeks into the flight, Hal picks up a fault in the AE-35 unit, the system responsible for keeping the satellite dish antenna aligned with the Earth, and states that it will go one-hundred percent failure within 72 hours.

He suggests that they go EVA and replace the faulty unit with a new one.

Dr. David Bowman goes out and retrieves the unit. But when he brings it back and runs it through diagnostics, they can find no problem with the AE-35.

They radio Mission Control about the problem, and Mission Control says that Hal is in error predicting the fault.

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HAL

This is a bit of a surprise, as the 9000 series has a perfect operational record.

Noting that this kind of thing has always been because of human error when it has occurred before, Hal suggests that they go out and “replace the malfunctioning unit and allow it to fail.

Then it should be a simple matter to track down the problem.”

But by this time, both Dr. Frank Poole and Bowman are becoming suspicious of Hal’s behaviour. They climb into one of the EVA pods, out of earshot of Hal. Poole states that he has “a bad feeling about him”. Bowman and Poole suggest disconnecting Hal if he is wrong about predicting the fault.

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Bowman and Poole suggest disconnecting Hal if he is wrong about predicting the fault.

Unbeknownst to them, Hal read their lips through the window of the spacepod.

Translating their lip motions, Hal learns of their plans for his disconnection; according to Clarke, “he (will) be deprived of all his inputs, and thrown into an unimaginable state of unconsciousness. To Hal, this (is) the equivalent of death. For he (has) never slept, and therefore he (does) not know that one (can) wake again.”

Poole goes out to replace the supposedly malfunctioning AE-35 unit.

As he drifts through space to the satellite dish, Hal takes control of the pod and rams it into Poole, disconnecting his oxygen hose and venting the air in his suit, killing him.

Bowman, obviously distraught by the loss of his friend, goes out to retrieve Poole’s body.

However, while Bowman is out on his excursion, Hal shuts off the life support systems on the three astronauts in hibernation, which kills them all.

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Bowman in a pod.

After Bowman returns to the Discovery I, Hal denies him reentry into the pod bay. So Bowman has to maneuver the pod over to the emergency airlock. Unfortunately, in his haste to retrieve his friend, Bowman had not bothered to don the helmet of his life-support suit because he had not believed he would need it, making it very difficult to enter the emergency airlock, as he would have to travel through the vacuum of space in order to do so.

This, however, does not stop Bowman.

Risking the hazards of explosive decompression, he eventually gets inside, grabs a space helmet, and goes to Hal’s logic memory center to erase his memory.

There he pulls out the memory tablets that control Hal’s higher functions.

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Disconnecting HAL.

As his memory degrades, Hal begins to give off information programmed very early in his life, such as the date he became operational. When all his logic is gone, he begins to sing the song “Daisy Bell.”

His final act of consciousness is to play a briefing that Dr. Heywood R. Floyd pre-recorded about the Tycho Monolith before their departure, and the real purpose of the Discovery One’s mission. As well that the insane idea that the owner / designers of HAL programmed it to lie.

Now…

Please consider that any systems; any devices; any mechanisms designed by man should NEVER have the capability to override human input.

This is well descried by the move, with the HAL computer system, and it seriously seems to be the case with all these Boeing aircraft crashes.

I can POSITIVELY tell you that one singular event resulting is one singular death would  ABSOLUTELY stop the adoption of that system in other industires. It doesn’t matter what industry it is.  Ceiling fans. Clothes irons. Motorcycles. Chainsaws. Rifles. One fatality, and the system is gone and will NEVER be revisited.

But somehow these systems in airplanes and automobiles are exceptions. At least in American products.

One cannot help thinking, especially if you ARE an American, that the United States is involved and WANTS the ability of the software to override the driver / pilot in the vehicle.

If you accept that notion…

…then many of the software related “accidents” of planes and automobiles with these systems are used as mechanisms of control by the United States “leadership”.

Remember boys and girls…

… REAL secrets are secret.

Every evidence is that this is exactly what is happening. While there might be some debate on the nuiances of implementation, the technologies and the systems involved, one thing is unmistakable…

The seriously ODD behaviors of the United States government is best explained by this exact senario.

Think about it.

Break.

Animal death and spirits visiting

All this talk about plunging planes, nuclear weapons, bio-weapons and everything all initiated by the Untied States government is disturbing to me. They obviously have never experienced sorry and grief.

They are not NORMAL people.

There is something wrong with them.

Here’s how normal animals act…video 34MB

Bathe and Brew

Perfect for the jet-set on the go!

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Perfect for the jet-set on the go!

Funny and fun cats

Here are some really great examples of how much fun you can have with your cat friends. video 100MB

Amazing Cats

Cats areally are amazing. Just some great cat adventures. They are truly very special creatures. video 16MB

Happy times

Treasure the times that you have. Make them happy and share them with your friends. Cat love video 18MB

We all need each other now

Now, more than any other time in our lives, we need others. Make friends. SHare your time. Appreciate what you have. Make your life a good one. Be a Rufus. Show friendship. Show love. Show care. video 90MB

Be the Rufus

Take part in society. Stop being a spectator, and stop thinking that everything is someone else’s problem. The future depends on YOU. Take an active role in it. In every way, every day. Be the best you can be and help others. make the world a better place to live in. I believe in your. video 11MB

Make those around you smile

You will bring happiness to your environment. Smile. Say good things. Even if they are lies. Make your environment better. It’s quantum physics 101. video 120MB

Conclusions

I cannot say that one thing or the other is happening, and the causes and reasons for them. Later, I will ask the Domain Commander for some insight. However, right now, I know nothing.

Sure there might be all sorts of reasons for the observed behaviors, the strange actions by the USA and the West, and all the craziness. There’s really no way to really know the actual causes. So don’t worry about it. And believe me, as much as I want to know, the fact is, I don’t NEED to know.

I don’t know anything about chem-trails, nano-bots, or anything like that. I do know that everyone in the United States and the West are acting really, really weird. It’s like they are all having some kind of mass insanity.

After 30 years of glue sniffing euphoria, the US is now crashing. 

And when it realizes it is cutting off its limbs to keep its jaundiced organs alive, it will have to make major, and costly, changes in living arrangements. 

Mass transit in lieu of suburban sprawl. No more bloated military. A return to local industry and farming. Far more labor intensive cooperatives that actually do things and make stuff. Regional cultural and quasi-sufficiency. The end to industrial entertainment and woke academia. A resurgence of a proletariat based religion of hard work and respect. A return to classical literature and art. 

Oh, how to pay for it all on NO budget?

America is in shambles, but the leadership doesn’t realize it yet.  It’s like a family living off maxed-out credit, the family is stunned then the credit cards no longer work at the register.

That’s where the USA, and the EU are at right now.

Oh, they still have their shopping list, and two shopping carts filled with expensive steaks, groceries and all sorts of pricy items. But the cashier is there looking impatient, stamping her foot, and ready to call her manager. Oh, you have to pay in cash. She says.

Soon, very soon, the situation will accelerate to something bad.

It’s just really, really fucked up.

FUTURE

Evidence strongly suggests that the remote viewing of the 2025 by the Deagal Report is correct. It also validates the theory of Generational Turnings and the rise and fall of nations.

You will see many more strange things occur in the future.

We are not anywhere near the peak inflection point. But it is moving forward and I hope to be out of it’s way. I hope you all are as well.

BASIC PREP

Hyper-inflation is starting to hit the West. Be prudent.

Make sure that you have a garden, and a larder with lots of basics. Rice. Flour. Canned goods. Powdered milk.

Remember that one Burger King extra value meal is the same price as a massive bag of rice. Remember that one Starbucks coffee is the same prices as a massive bag of flour; and make sure that you have the tools to strain out the flour.

Learn to fish.

Own a bicycle, and use it. If you use it to ride to work one day a week, you will cut your commute expenses by 20%.

Have a solar panel to charge your phone with.

ADVANCED PREP

Have a good supply of your medicines, and lots of antibiodics. Set up a medical kit. Tell your doctor that you are equipping a sailboat for a long sea cruse, and give him a list of medicines for the first aid box. Get the prescriptions and fill it out.

It’s never too late to start. Do not plan on trying to go to the woods and forests. Those places will be crowded with the unprepaired. Your best solution is to “bug out in place”. Be mobile within your well-established community.

If you think that you can survive being alone, I’ve got news for you; that’s a fiction. Survivors are those that band together into groups. There’s strength in community. Read your history.

FUNDAMENTALS

For God’s sakes, turn off that bullshit “news”. It’s all screeching lies.

Have a skill, asset, ability, or feature that you can provide to your community that is beneficial to the community.

If you don’t have one. Get one. Learn, make, create or establish. Volunteer. Network locally.

  • Handiman skills.
  • Welding, plumbing, machining, autorepair.
  • Medical.
  • Farming, fishing, harvesting, growing.

It doesn’t mean that you will need to endure a post-nuclear fiasco. But in whatever changes that might hit your own individual communities, you will have the skills, networking and abilites to make you locally valuable.

Don’t believe me?

Ask PL. He’s doing this, and is very busy. Maybe too busy for MM here, but it’s the future. Participate. Make a difference. Smile. Socialize. stick to the fundamental basics.

Don’t get caught up in what you cannot change. It’s stressful, don’t you know.

Don’t get all wrapped up in the causes or the reasons, or the people behind the curtains. They won’t be revealed until the history books are written.

Be kind, calm and adaptable. Do your verbal affirmations. Be the Rufus. I beleive in you all.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

War! Podcast

This is my podcast on war! Particularly the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how it affects all of us strapped to the roller-coaster ride which it entails. It’s not really a streaming podcast as I had hoped, but rather a downloadable 6-minute movie. I explain it all in the video.

The Podcast

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2022 03 14 09 5aaa0

You can watch the video HERE, or download the ZIP HERE and watch it later on.

The Main Podcast Index

Podcast Index

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A first-hand experience at the starvation and famine in Shenzhen China by the Chinese CCP regime

Not the kind of title that you would expect from me, eh?

I woke up on Wednesday and found this article posted all over my LinkedIN feed. It’s from ZeroHedge, and discusses famine, starvation, disunity, sadness, in the evil gloom that lies under the shadow of the evil Chinese communist regime. The article goes to great lengths to describe a hopeless population, upset but powerless, to deal with on-going famine and the massive corruption of the CCP regime.

Here’s the article…

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2022 03 11 15 59

Well, I own a home in Shenzhen, and live across the bay from it. Everyday, I’m here, either looking at Shenzhen, or visiting it.

That’s what happens when you live next to a big city. You do know it’s population is 14 million people. That’s easily three times the size of New York City.

My relatives who live “on the island” (Long Island) feel the same way about “THE City” (New York).

Anyways. I live next door to Shenzhen, and own homes in Shenzhen. I visit it often, and I live right across the bay. From my living room, I can see the gleaming skyscrapers and glimmering light off the water.

I live in the Shenzhen region.

I live in the very place this article is written about.

It is now March. The same date and time when the article was written.

The purpose of this article is to present videos to show what life is like in Shenzhen, and the neighboring  areas under the evil repressive Chinese communist regime. Especially, and most notably, at the time that this article was written and published.

I think videos do better than some text written by a moron who doesn’t even realize that it doesn’t even snow in Shenzhen. Never has. Never will. It’s a fucking tropical area. Sheech!

Snow?

Blizzard? Give me a break!

Shenzhen?

It’s tropical.

When was the last time it snowed in Hawaii? Sheech!

So I went and took videos all week to illustrate what it is like in the Shenzhen – Zhuhai area; my home.

We start with food. After all, that’s what the article is all about. It’s about a lack of food, resulting in starvation, followed by famine.

Food

There is no famine.

No starvation anywhere in China. And certainly NOT in Shenzhen.

I swear, Western “news reports” have morphed into fantasy / science fiction episodes with very little resemblance to reality. I am convinced that they are handed a bullet-list of bad things to say about China, and then write a fantasy narrative based upon the bad things.

It’s got to be exactly that.

No other explanation is possible. Not even remotely.

Who is doing this? It must be the people, or entities, that pay them. Either a government, or an NGO aligned “fake” pseudo organization. It must be. It takes time, and effort to write these articles. They just don’t magically appear out of the air.

I took all of these videos the SAME WEEK that this “news” report wrote about starvation in the Shenzhen / China area. I filmed in different middle-class restaurants throughout this general region. (You can tell by the different dishes and tablecloths.) None of these meals were overly expensive. Just typical middle-class Chinese fare.

Since I don’t eat at Fast Food, you won’t see any videos of the fast food franchises that are big here in China. Sorry, but it’s not my thing. I tend to eat at home, and then go out once or twice a day to a nice, reasonably priced restaurant. So I didn’t change my routine. Just filmed the food to show that there is no starvation, nor famine.

Pork with peppers and bitter melon. Very delicious. I ate this in one of the many local malls. Sorry for the noise, it like the rest of China, are filled with many people enjoying their time eating delicious food. video 26MB

Very Spicy Beef. Here’s a different restaurant. This one specializes in beef. Very delicious. video 31MB

Chinese Sloppy Joe and a fine wide noodle salad. All so very delicious. You can see why I have gained so much weight since I moved to China, eh? video 35MB

Stuffed Baozi with vegetables. Very delicious. I love the meat versions, especially the pork version. This was particularly delicious. video 53MB

Some Chinese vegetarian food. All good and healthy. Tasty too, but you know guys, I do love my meats. LOL. video 42MB

Handmade noodles with peanuts. Very, very delicious. I think most of my American readership would love these food dishes. Too bad you cannot get them out in the States. Just here in China. video 36MB

Guys. You DO KNOW, that if there were REAL famine and REAL starvation, you would not see meals like this anywhere. In a nation with a population of 1.4 billion people, you would be overwhelmed.

Even posting pictures on the (so called anonymous) internet would get you targeted. In China, no one is isolated, and no one is alone. We are all connected together.

Toys – Legos

Here are some videos that I took in a toy store. These are Chinese Lego’s. Same lovely Lego brand, only marketed to the Chinese. Interesting cultural differences, eh?

Military Lego kits. If I were still a boy, I would really enjoy playing with these Legos. Especially the DF-41, and the J-20. video 31MB

Chinese Harbin Ice Festival. There are all sorts of fascinating Chinese-themed Legos for the local markets. And of course, since the Chinese have so many things to celebrate, the diversity of the products are pretty intriguing. video 30MB

Starving girls in Shenzhen

All of these girls live in Shenzhen. According to my untrained eyes, these girls don’t look like they are starving, unhappy or desirous of regime change for democracy™. I guess that I am not so good at picking out starving, hungry waifs like the BBC, FOX “news” and CNN are.

But what do I know? I only live here, and I have never seen anyone starve. And I’ve been living here or nearly twenty years.

But I am not a qualified “journalist”. I guess that to qualify, you must accept money from a Western government, and then write to their narrative. There are many who have “sold their souls” for some gold coins and baubles. It has generated a small cottege industry. Don’t you know.

No one is starving.

I think much of it has to do with the fact that the Chinese government believe that food is a natural Right, and makes sure that it is plentiful and cheap. This is considered a REAL Right.

Not the psuedo “Rights” like the United States has. You know a Right with exceptions

  • Freedom of Speech… controlled by the FCC, and Tech-oligarchy.
  • Right to bear arms… restricted by the government agency ATF.
  • Ninth Amendment… restricted by the FDA, FCC, NSA, and many, many others.
  • Tenth amendment…dead. A worthless, meaningless, phrase.

China believes that a fundamental Right is FUNDAMENTAL.

Of course, you’d never hear about that in the Western “news”. In that for-profit cesspool, everything comes at a price. It’s a land with a million tiny hands in your wallet.

Let’s look at the starving waifs yearning for freedom™ and democracy™…

We start with this slightly whisp of a lady…

video 2MB

And here’s the second gal. Love that fine tan dress. I like how it moves. You can tell that she’s hungry. After all, look at the sad and forlorn expression on her face.

video 1MB

Here’s a girl being sexy in the kitchen. Sorry that you can only see her backside. But I guess you might think that she is starving because she is not obese like so many American women. But that’s just cultural. The Chinese eat far better, healthier, and have far less stress than their American counterparts. video 5MB

Here’s another girl. She’s considered to be fat. In China, due to the diet, and perhaps genetics, the fat tends to go to the chest area, not to the stomach. As us, Americans and Europeans must deal with. I really think that the fact that GMOs are banned in China has a lot to do with it. video 2MB

This woman has great posture. I really cannot see the kind of starvation that resembles hunger like I saw when I lived in Pennsylvania. There, at that time, people couldn’t afford food, and with the collapse of the steel industry, many had to make due. They would fish, and eat rabbit, and other things to keep their bellies full. I’m not seeing it in China. Sorry. video 6MB

Elementary / kindergarten teacher. I suppose that this girl is borderline starving. You can tell by her sunken ass-cheeks and lack of stomach.

She reminds me of the many friends that I made when I first arrived in China. Many girls. Many dates. Many fun times.

But I must tell you, we all ate very well, and no one was starving. video 1.5MB

Life in Shenzhen / Nanshan / Zhuhai

Various “home” videos taken by myself. All in Shenzhen, and Zhuhai. All that I took with my fine four-year-old Huawei cellphone camera, with DouXing editing and music. Enjoy…

Afternoon outside my office. Video 11MB

Along the beach road. If you look at the water, you can see Shenzhen on the horizon. video 11MB

Riding the subway in Shenzhen. video 11MB

A view of the Shenzhen-Zhuhai-HK-Macao bridge. It’s that long bridge in the background. video 11MB

At the ferry port from Shenzhen to Zhuhai. This view is taken on the second floor of the Shenzhen side, where you go to the kiosks to get your tickets. video 11MB

One of our photo shoots. This was taken a few months ago. For you newbies, yea MM does photoshoots. It’s all a part of the affirmation campaigns along with thought direction for manifested reality, don’t you know.

Anyways, do these people look like they are starving and desirous for democracy™ and freedom™? video 26MB

Eating dinner in a small local restaurant at night. Friends, and family. That’s little mm playing with the cell phone. Oh, I’m so bad. Don’t worry, it was for less than 20 minutes. video 44MB

Here’s what it is like riding a bus at night. Do these people look like they are ready to revolt against the evil CCP regime? Sheech! You have got to be an idiot to believe the anti-China narrative. video 65MB

Prekindergarten education. Learning starts at two years old in China. Then there’s kindergarten, followed by elementary school, and military training, and into the pipe with middle school and upwards. video 45MB

What it is like on the streets. After all, the picture that is being sent to millions of people is  snowy winter Shenzhen filled with unhappy and starving Chinese. So what’s the real story? video 2MB

Conclusion

Most “news” out of the collective West (in this case referring to China) are nothing more than made-up, fabricated lies. Lies that have no resemblance to the truth.

It’s a well-funded (to 5 billion dollars) effort (by the United States federal budget) to demonize China to the point where all Westerners (and most especially Americans) are filled with hate and loathing towards China.

This is for a build up for a major war.

Make no mistake. The USA is on a War-footing. A war, that the United States expects to win. For, after all, everyone knows, that it is exceptional™.

You don’t have to believe me.

But here it is.

This is what it is like. This is what China is like in Early March 2022, while articles on Gab, Zerohedge, Free Republic, and FOX regurgitate the “starving Chinese” lies.

This is the real deal, and no, I am not “brainwashed by the evil CCP”. Sheech! And no, I don’t live in exclusive areas. This is what it is like.

Lower-middle class life.

In Shenzhen / Zhuhai China. Real deal reporting. Real home-made videos. Real experiences. Real thoughts, and real reporting. All for free.

Soak it in and take a good, hard look at what “news” you read. Becuase if one simple thing like this can be distorted and twisted out of reality, what else can be? Eh?

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my China Index here…

China

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Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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MM observations and thoughts about the war in the Ukraine – Part 2

Any nation that does not manufacture things, or have resources to exploit, cannot be a nation for long.

Here we continue on thoughts about the war in the Ukraine and the resulting Geo-Political realignments.

What is so significant about this time is that the massive build-up to the final death of America and the rise of Asia has begun.

This is part 2. Part one is HERE.

The first part went out, and I was deluged by a bunch of gung-ho ‘Merica types accusing me of all sorts of things. Sheech! My thoughts are what is going on between Russia and the Ukraine / USA / NATO is very simple;

Obey the agreements that you signed. 
If you don't, you risk war.

It’s not just me who believe this.

It’s EVERY FUCKING NATION on the planet except for the USA, UK, Australia, and NATO believes it.

And you cannot talk your way out of it, not matter how solidly you control the narrative. Your narrative is restricted to a very small “echo chamber” centered in the United States.

It is meaningless outside of it.

Ah.

2022 03 08 08 27
2022 03 08 08 27 From Moon Over Alabama.

Sigh. The sheeple have been vault 7 programmed to NPC status. Angry; very, VERY angry. Mindless. Devoid of the ability to understand fundamentals. Sigh.

2022 03 08 23 01
2022 03 08 23 01

About this article

Like the earlier article, we are going to go bullet point by bullet point in this one. Only the points will be a little better flushed out. But first; a map. This is day ten of the “invasion” (if you use the terminology of the United States), or the “special operation” (if you use the terminology of Asia.).

2022 03 08 09 45
2022 03 08 09 45

Now for the points…

[1] Ukraine / Russia conflict is a different kind of war

The "gloves are off". No playing nice. Fight Russia at your own risk.

The Russians are calling this a “special operation”. This is in opposition to the United States and Western termonology. They refer to it as an invasion.

I would argue that this is a type of operation which has never been seen before.  Ever.  

Andrei Martyanov coined a very good term, he called it a “combined arms police operation”.  

The term “combined arms” is, in the Russian military terminology, the “the main form of combat of modern armies, in which the efforts of formations, units and units of various types of ground forces are combined and coordinated with the actions of other types of armed forces“.  

This type of warfare can only be conducted by combined arms units and implies an operational-level dimension.  In other words, a combined arms operation has nothing in common with a police operation.

In this case, Andrei Martyanov is right.  

What we are seeing here is a police operation whose aim is to disarm and apprehend/neutralize a criminal force, which itself is so big that it is capable of operational-level warfare. But not strategic nor tactical level warfare. 

Normally, police operations are always on the low end of the tactical level spectrum (division, brigade, regiment, battalion, company, platoon) and rarely involve more than maybe a few APCs.  This is clearly not the case today in the Ukraine where combat operations are clearly reaching operational and even strategic levels.

The United States set up a puppet government in Ukraine with the CIA / NGO “color revolution” of 2014. They gained support from nationalists who adopted a fierce neo-Nazi stance, and who even reactivated the Asov SS Division. The official AZOV emblem is the ‘Wolfsangel‘.

During World War II, various units of the German Nazi army used this symbol, including the SS Panzer Division.

The USA then funded the Ukraine president lavishly with nearly 2 billion dollars in off-shore accounts. He, in return for that enormous wealth, allowed the USA to dictate his actions. NATO was set up operationally, and in every manner, bioweapons facilities and nuclear launch sites were all set in motion.

Ukraine became the fourth largest recipient of American military weapons and equipment. Russia found this unacceptable.

And, as such, demanded the expansion of NATO stop, and the removal of nuclear systems for its borders. Russia, after the resounding “no” from both NATO and the United States carried out it’s ultimatum.

Right now, what we are witnessing is a total gutting of the United States puppet government and neo-Nazi elements, and a return to Ukraine independence and sovereignty.

This differs from an invasion. Where one nation invades another to seize it’s cities, land, people and resources.

[2] Incorrigable Criminal Elements

Taking point [1] to heart, the Nazi elements wearing Ukrainian uniforms, and firing American produced heavy weapons are considered to be criminal elements. 

Those that join and support this band of criminals will be considered incorrigible foreign proxies desirous of prolonging criminal activity and will be hunted and killed. 

It's not just me pointing out this fact. 

Any one helping these criminals will themselves be treated as criminals.

Russia warns pro-Ukraine foreign fighters will be treated as criminals, not prisoner of war.  And are treated appropiately. 

Ukrainian President Zelensky says that already 16,000 foreigners have volunteered to fight for Ukraine against Russia. Websites are up to recruit, and the United States has set up training camps in Poland for them.

I hope that they made their peace with their families. This is not going to be a Yemen, Afganastan, Libya, or Syria.

The soldiers of the Chechen special forces have an order not to take mercenaries prisoner. 

They WILL be killed after information is extracted.

You may disagree with their decision process, and operational orders, but you have to face reality. You must accept things as they are, not as you want them to be.

[3] NATO Planned to Launch a “first strike” Against Russia

The movement of nuclear forces on the Russian border was intended to zero out the advantage of Russia’s hyper-velocity nuclear arment. That’s what this entire conflict is all about.

And Russia said NO!

"The Russian government decided to stop this situation and restore order in Ukraine,” wrote Nikolai Azarov, who served as Ukrainian Prime Minister three times.  

Through a message posted on Facebook on Friday, Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov claimed that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) planned a nuclear attack against Russia, taking advantage of the existence of geopolitical problems with Ukraine. And that Russia was forced to preempt that attack.

This was necessitated as a means to offset the offensive nuclear hyper-missile and SAM capability of Russia.

Anyone who cannot see that Russia was forced to lay down their "red lines", and respond to them being crossed, is an ignorant fool.

[4] Offensive Nuclear Warfare So… why piss around using conventional warfare in Ukraine?

Russia and China have formidable nuclear, city destroying capabilities.

Both the Russians and the Chinese possess hyper-velocity weapons that are able to [1] fly independently using AI, [2] evade and change course, [3] fire projectiles and vehicles, [4] are undetectable by radar, and [5] carry nuclear weapons. 

These are generations beyond anything that the United States (and the West) have. It will take decades for the United States to reach parity.

[5] Defensive Nuclear Warfare So what? The United States Military Empire is the largest in history, and armed with massive impressive weapons. There should be nothing to be afraid of.

Right?

America and its allies lie defenseless.

Both the Russians and the Chinese possess advanced ABM shields that are able to [1] track, [2] decloak, [3] intercept, and [4] render inert / destroy incoming missiles, systems, or aircraft. 

These systems are perfected and generations in advance of anything that the United States possess.

[6] Bioweapons What about other forms of weapons? Such as bioweapons…

They were put in play in 2017 under John Bolton, and backfired.

The United States is the undisputed leader in the development and manufacture of biological weapons. This continues in defiance of UN treaties. In fact, all of the new and novel viruses that plagued the world since the 1970s have been patented by the United States.

[5.1] Further, both the Chinese and the Russians have accused the United States for unleashing the Coronavirus B in China, Iran and North Korea in 2020. While inoculating the US and it's allies with Coronavirus A.

[5.2] China has accused the United States of using drones to destroy food and livestock from 2017 though 2021.

[5.3] Russia has accused the United States of setting up 15 bioweapons facilities on the Ukraine to Russian border.

[5.4] "Fact Checker" Snopes says that Bioweapons in use is a lie, that the United States would never do such a thing. Of course, they have been proven to be a propiganda outlet for the US government.

[5.5] Russia has acquired documents and supporting evidence from the captured bioweapons labs inside of the Ukraine. It's all over Chiense and Russian media. Nothing in Western Media.

This discovery of a laptop “smoking gun”, coupled by the likely shipment of Turkish drones modified for the delivery of toxic aerosols or other bio-toxins (identical to those that spread the swine flu to devistate the Chinese pork industy in 2017)  immediately prior to the launch of the Special Operation serves to explain the RF attack.

The modified drones are unconfirmed as of yet, but two Turkish Airbus freighters were tracked landing in Ukraine immediately prior to the attack.

The laptop is physical evidence of a close association between NATO and the Nazis. This association pre-dates the Special Operation and indicates NATO complicity in an attack on both Donbass and Crimea. Ref HERE.

[7] Russia is not isolated and alone

The full spectrum propaganda onslaught consists of article after article about how isolated Russia is becoming. The average ill-informed person would easily come to the conclusion that Russia is a pariah and isolated and alone. 

This is the desired effect, but not what is actually happening.

There is NOT one single thing that Europe, or America, or any of its allies provide to Russia that cannot be acquired from China. And China and Russia are joined at the hip. They are, and act as one.

Or, haven't you all been paying attention. Remember the massive document that they both signed during the Beijing Olmpics last month? You know the one; where MSNBC, Politico, and FOX "news" refered to it as "wordy gibberish".

In the future months or years, the American war-machine will ontinue to try to separte the two nations. They will propigandize a "mistake" and "fractures in the alliance".  It will fail. They will then steer directly towards China, and try to isolate a united Russia and China alliance.

[8] China

The USA (and it's Western pawns) are decoupling from a world that will not accept its leadership. 

Decoupling is not the end goal. It is the first step in establishing a return to a unipolar status quo.

The interm goal (in this process) is to destroy the rest of the world and have the United States be the sole remaining power. In effect, the lone "superpower" once again.

It sounds really bad. That is becuase it is.

To this end, the plan is for China to be isolated, and then destroyed. Leaving only the United States and it's proxies remaining. 

This is a pretty obvious plan. Again, it's only the ignorant who see otherwise. All the scattered "puzzle pieces" fit into a picture that describes this agenda.

[9] Chinese “Red Lines”

This action, to initiate a war with China, will necessitate that the Chinese "red lines" be crossed. China clearly defined those "red lines". Just like Russia did.

When that happens,  there will be a short and very nasty war.

"Red Lines" are absolute.

When the smoke clears, Taiwan will be integrated with the mainland, all American naval bases in the Pacific will be gone, as will be any carrier flotillas as well. You can expect the Hawaiian islands, and all the stateside naval facilities erased. 

I recon that it will probably be the "spark" that launches nuclear destruction of the United States mainland.

There will be mass casualties on both sides. 

The magnitude of which will depend on the skills of the leadership of the nations involved. Biden and NATO vs. Xi Peng and Putin. 

It is up to the reader to determine, for themselves, who are stronger and better leaders. Then come to your own opinions.

[10] The United States is NOT READY for a defeat

Most of the Western people; Americans, Europeans, Australians, and Japanese are of the strong belief that America (as the greatest military force in all history) can never be defeated. 

Never, as in absolutely, positively inconceivable.

The loss of every carrier in the Navy, the nuclear destruction of the top thirty American cites, and the ensuing chaos will absolutely crush the United States psyche. It's so absoltuely weak now that a feather could push it over. Imagine what would happen when the largest remaining intact American city would be Des Moines, Iowa.

Both Russia or China could do it right now, and the United States could not stop it at all. The only thing that the USA can do is to try to launch it's SLBMs from the remaining active boomer submarines.

To quote a scene from the movie "The Princess Bride"; It's inconceivable.

200
It’s inconceivable.

[11] The anti-Russia narrative of “a big Russian mistake” will end

The current US PSYOP narrative about the Russians being defeated and on full retreat will not survive this weekend.

It will now change. It will now shift to “Putin’s rape camps and torture of poor suffering Ukraine”.  

Remember all the accusations of genocide against the Serbs in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo?  This is what will happen to Russia next – a massive wave of accusations of atrocities and genocide.  

The (so-called) “free and democratic press” will now switch to the fabricated lies pushing the American people towards more War! War! War!

[12] The United States is running Ukraine

[11.1] Former Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is living in the United States embassy in Poland. 

[11.2] The orders for the remaining Ukrainian military forces come out of the American Embassy in Ukraine.

These two points clearly show that the United States is "running the show" and is in charge of everything in the Ukraine right now.

[13] New Global Transaction System

Discussed earlier. SWIFT is obsolete. But what does that mean?

Gold is an alternative. Both Russia and China barter directly in raw materials, physical products or gold / precious metals.

Any nation not able to do so, whether they have no factories, no resources, or no valuable metals, will be forced to rely on coercion to manage their trade. Already, much of the world is unwilling to accept this state much longer.

Keep in mind that not only is China the manufacturer for the world, China’s $3.2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves is greater than the $2.3 trillion value of ALL the world’s central bank gold reserves. 

The ability for nations to conduct trade will be polarized. Either [12.1] continue to use SWIFT backed with worthless paper, or [12.2] deal with a united Russia-China alliance backed by gold, material resources, and manufactured products. 

There are no other options. The choice will depend on the level of independence over coercion by the United States.

It's not just CIPS. It's not just a switch from one system to the other. The exchange rate in the system is tied to the value of the monetary unit in use. If most of the world transacts in gold, and the remaining few  transacts in American-backed paper, the exchange rate will reflect that.

Expect a plunge in the value of the USD globally, and with that will come geometric and even exponential increases in American (but not global) inflation. 

The inflation will be directly tied to the nations that continue to use the USD. 

So, in the future, inflation will NOT be a global experience, as all the alternative websites out of the USA are predicting. No. it will be a localized one based on the form of financial transfer.

[14] Putin’s popularity is not collapsing

The Western narrative is that the war in Ukraine is going to bring about the "fall of Putin". That's just PSYOPS. 

The truth is that his popularity is soaring. Western readers will be unaware of that, as all news from Russia and China are banned.

I have tons of videos that refect this. All you need to do is crawl out from the isolation net of the West.

[15] First World vs. Third World

I have documented the severe disconnect between what the West (especially Americans) believe and what is actually occurring. 

For instance, the term "First World" is used to describe the United States and Europe, while "Third World" is used to describe Russia, China and Africa.

That is wildly innacurate.

China is definitely, and certainly, First World. 

This is not simply my personal opinion, it's backed by just every measurable statistic. While the United States has fallen way, way, WAY  behind. It is approaching third class world. 

No new parks, infrastructure, advanced crime control. No energy friendly infrastructure, nor merit driven initatives. No high-speed public transportation, and crime and homelessness abound. Heck! Americans still use paper money. I'm not at all exaggerating.

[16] Sweden and Finland

The idea that either Sweden or Finland would enter the fray by joining NATO should send shivers up everyone's spine.

Russia's "red lines" are fixed and immovable. 

Thus, were Sweden or Finland opt to become members of NATO, they would be crossing the Russian "Red Lines". The Russian reaction to it will be harsh and direct. 

From the point of view of Russia these are non-negotiable "red lines" and crossing them is an act of war.

If forced, Russia will take on any country, including any NATO member country, which will assist the Ukrainians militarily.  

If forced, Russia will even fight all of NATO and the USA together and, if forced, she will use all her weapons, including nuclear ones.  

And if that means that the entire planet is nuked then, as Putin said, “we have no need for a planet without Russia”.  

All this is to say that Russia is not bluffing, Putin will not back down and that there is no price which Russia would not be willing to pay to prevail in this existential war.

Russia will not stop until her existence is made safe again.

[17] Nazi hardliners in Ukraine

You just cannot make this stuff up, but hard-line Ukraine nationalists have adopted the Nazi Germany regalia, systems, history and organization from the former Nazi Germany. And they are fanatic and radical in their beliefs. 

HERE and HERE.

For instance, they killed one of their own negotiators with the Russians for not taking an absolute to-the-death stance.

[18] Why defend the United States?

My personal opinions. But sheech! people. When you live in a place where the streets are clean, radicals of every kind (SJW, BLM, and KKK) are put in mental hospitals, the people are happy, and parks are everywhere… the USA really, REALLY looks like a steaming pile of dog shit.

In watching all the "news" and opinions flying about, I am just stunned. The individuals all talk that it is necessary to defend the values and democracy-based freedoms of the United States and those of Western Europe.

What freedoms?

What democracy?

The mere fact that American and Western access to Russian and Chinese news is banned is a sign FOR CERTAIN that there is no freedom. In both China and RUssia you can easily get Western news. Not so, the other way around. 

In fact, you cannot name one Right (in the Bill of Rights) that does not have exceptions. 

For instance, the second amendment has an entire agency (the ATF) whose entire purpose is to infringe on it and limit its use and application. The ninth amendment has the FDA. The first amendment has the FCC, and technocrats. But I will stop here. I have written many an article on this.

The USA is an oligarchy-ruled Military Empire. It is not a "democracy".

2022 03 08 09 02
2022 03 08 09 02

[19] The Ukraine war has already resulted in thousands of money-making for-profit corportations

Wow. That was quick! Eh?

2022 03 07 09 00
2022 03 07 09 00

[20] The United States “approves” or “will …”

I read articles all of the world, and they are disturbing to me.

US Tells Germany To Stop Using Huawei Equipment Or
US allows S. Korea
US allows NATO allies ...
US has allowed Poland to supply jets...

Let me remind everyone, that in a true democratically led world, no one nation would be able to tell another what to do. All nations would be souvern. But that is not so under a unipolar global kingdom such as the United States demands.

People should really reflect on the reality. 

The United States is a Military Empire and all those "Western democracies" are but proxy governments for use by the USA to do with as it pleases. And it chooses them to fight the wars it starts, while the war-mongering neocons sit safe and sound inside their plush mansions in the United States.

[21] Russia has already switched to Chinese banking

Instead of thinking that it "might happen", remember that you are dealing with a unified Russia / Chinese alliance. It "has happened".

Russian banks are fully on board with CIPS.

It has been confirmed that Russia is switching its whole system to China's UnionPay. 

UnionPay, an international payment system founded in 2002, received international status in 2005. Headquartered in Shanghai, the company reportedly operates in more than 180 countries across the globe, including Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Germany, Mexico, Cyprus, Thailand, India, Israel, Portugal, Croatia, Poland, Serbia, Hungary and Austria.

In the future, you will see more and more of these "well, it could, but..." things changed to "...is in place.".

[22] India has joined the Russian / China alliance.

It's not well publicized. But the alliance is really firming up. The majority of the world is sticking with Asia. 

Andrei has a very good video on this subject HERE.

[23] ASEAN nations

SE Asia/ASEAN: No on sanctions (outside of Singapore)

Aside from the casting of diplomatic votes, however, the response from Southeast Asian governments has been diverse — and, some say, muted. Singapore made the rare decision to impose sanctions on Russia, and Indonesia quickly criticized the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Philippines, a US treaty ally, flip-flopped and described itself as neutral. Meanwhile, Thailand and Malaysia have remained quiet.

[24] Gas to Europe has been cut

Sure you all know that. Right?

Westbound gas flows from Russia to Germany via the Yamal-Europe pipeline stopped on Thursday, while bids remained for supplies in both directions, according to data tracked by the pipeline operator Gascade. Russia covers nearly 40% of European gas demand with the Yamal-Europe route accounting for nearly 15% of the country’s westbound supply.

This will SUBSTANTIALLY affect the quality of life, and manufacturing inside of Europe. You cannot put a good spin on this. It will cause an increase in all prices for everything, as well as factory shutdowns and slow downs with will result in layoffs and unemployment.

[25] American and European PSYOPS have fled Russia

All the standard "news" media operations have fled Russia.

Why? Well, Russia passed a law that if you publish provable fake or false information, you WILL be held personally responsible and you WILL be treated as a military combatant, in disguise; fighting Russia.

All those desk-jockeys regurgitating NSA psyops informtion for the five-eyes are now looking at capture, torture and death. No wonder they are scared shitless and scurrying off like rats off a sinking ship.

Interesting, but I believe that this is a policy that is a copy of what Xi Peng implemented in China. 

That Chinese policy sure as fuck cleaned out the various CIA and NGO "rats nests" and stopped all the color revolutions in HK, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Shanghai. I've got tons of vieos showing the CIA assets rounded up. It's impressive as all Hell.

On a somber note. Most of the captured were interrogated and then killed. China does not play.

[26] This is a REAL war

Listen up people!

This is not Vietnam, or Afganastan, or Syria. This is a serious war; being conducted by serious, serious people. They have serious objectives and are fighting for their very existence.

Russia is fighting against a United States backed, proxy, Nazi fanatical organization that is well armed, and who's role is to prolong the fighting until death.

This is not a sports event.

Russia is trying to avoid mass destruction and civilian casualities. However, if that is not possible, then cities will be absolutely and positively flattened to rubble.

[27] Outside of the United States and NATO, billions of people root for Russia

Not the impression that you would get from Western "news" eh? 

Well it is true. China, and India are both cheering for Russia. Together that is 2 billion people. 

As well as almost all of Africa. That's another 2 billion people. 

All told, just by that rough estimation we are looking at 4 billion people in favor of Russians action, and perhaps a half a billion from the USA and Europe.

HERE and HERE.
.
And I might add the enormous Middle East. Who do you think that they are rooting for?

[28] Consequences of Sanctioning Russia

In the big scheme of things, everything will adjust to a "new normal". However, many Western corporations will be adversely affected.
.
For example, the EU demanded that all Russian leases on Airbus jets—over 500 of them—be cancelled. It also blocked the sale of Airbus parts to Russia and forbade Russian planes from being serviced. It also closed its airspace to Russian planes and Russia closed its airspace to EU planes in response. The EU also blocked the SWIFT payment system. This means the following things:

• The European leasing companies will have to pay Russia huge fines for canceling the leases but can’t because SWIFT isn’t working.

• The European leasing companies have to get their planes out of Russian territory but can’t because their flight crews can’t get into Russia and once they take possession of the planes the planes won’t be allowed to take off (airspace is closed).

• The planes can no longer be serviced according to the maintenance schedule, which means that in a couple of months they won’t be able to fly at all.

• Given that this is a force majeur circumstance, the Russian government can very easily nationalize these planes, including all of the intellectual property and patent rights contained therein, and start making their own parts and providing their own service.

• There are around 600 airplanes and helicopters stranded in Russia. Stock price of both Boing and Eurobus is not reflecting this fact. One leased plane makes between 50k to 100k per month. On top of that loss, these planes can be confiscated in case Russian property is taken.

• Given all of the above, the obvious choice for the European leasing companies to declare bankruptcy and cease operations. Company representatives have said as much.

[29] Numerous “War Hawk” American neocons want direct military conflict with Russia

A true “Death wish” fueled by ego and ignorance.

It's true, and very dangerous.
.
The Russians have the capability to launch an absolutely devastating first strike from their super quiet “black hole” nuclear submarines.

From positions just off the American coasts, those submarines could potentially reduce much of the United States defenses to ashes in just a matter of minutes.

Most Americans don’t understand how serious this threat is.

A nuclear war with Russia must be avoided, because the consequences would be unimaginable.

Thankfully, the federal government has issued some updated guidelines for how ordinary Americans should respond if a nuclear attack does actually happen…

Stay inside for 24 hours unless local authorities provide other instructions. Continue to practice social distancing by wearing a mask and by keeping a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who not part of your household.

Family should stay where they are inside. Reunite later to avoid exposure to dangerous radiation.

Keep your pets inside.

You may not last very long after such an attack happens, but at least you can help prevent the spread of COVID by practicing social distancing and by wearing a mask.

[30] Fertilizer catastrophie

Russia stopped all it's exports of fertilizer to the West. The West will now be forced to acquire it from secondary sources. Such as Bolivia.

Ollie Vargas reports from Bolivia: 

Bolivia was exporting fertilizer (urea) for $300 per tonne until last week. International price is now $900 per tonne since sanctions on Russia started and Russia stopped loading fertilizer for export.  Bolivia built its own nationalized fertilizer factory.  Brazil closed theirs after the neoliberal turn. Now, the price of urea and ammonium is going through the roof due to Ukraine conflict. Those who import it will be hit with severe inflation on foodstuffs.  

I argue that it might result in a combination of inflation plus scarcity.

[31] An interesting video on a Urkaine Military Base

The narrator walks around the hastily abandoned based. It was an obvious rout. They discuss that routs tend to happen when the operational leadership flees, leaving the rank and file soldiers to fend for themselves.
RT vid on abandon ukraine army camp. They left everything. .

[32] Nice summary about the Geo-political ramifications

Decent enough video. I watched it a second time and noticed that it had zero audio. I don't know if it is my side or theirs.
This Clif High video is about the predicament the world is in. .

[33] Peter Hitchens forcasted this event sequence…

He visited the Ukraine and could easily see a build up of events. A very interesting read.
Peter Hitchens says: “I saw what was coming. " .

[34] A decent SITREP channel for your reference

Best Sitrep channel with on map analysis I have seen so far. 

Frequent updates, and long impartial, detailed and accurate analyses of the situation. Definitely deserve much more publicity. Some gentleman from Singapore as I understand. Well worth it:

Defence Politics Asia .

[35] The goal is a long-duration war

This Video exposes the provocations of neo-Nazis who, by bombing and killing their own people, create a "pretty" picture for the Western media. 

This is once again showing the fact that the main goal of the West in Ukraine is to turn it into a second Afghanistan. 

https://youtu.be/yIS5Wik2r0E .

[36] British BBC instructs how everyone can attack Russan armor

BBC personnel now posting on Twitter how and where to throw a Molotov cocktail for Ukrainians who want to attack Russian vehicles. The BBC employee is telling them to throw the Molotov cocktails through the viewing hatches, and the air inlets of Russian military vehicles.

 https://twitter.com/BowenBBC/status/1499668674940133378?cxt=HHwWhICzqdut8s8pAAAA .

[37] Pakastan

Pakistan actually has a real leader, not afraid to speak the truth. So refreshing... if I was a Pakistani, I would be very proud... HERE. .

[38] The real story behind the scenes

This short video deserves a wide circulation.

https://dissidentvoice.org/2022/03/what-you-dont-know-about-the-war-in-ukraine/

[39] EuroUnion runs amok

Latvia citizens would see fines up to 700 EUR for "using illegal content services". "Not only rights of protected service providers [may be violated by use of illegal systems] but also customers might obtain services, which are illegal in Latvia". So, in other words, don't read any news out of Russia. 

EuroUnion runs amok...HERE.

[40] NATO evidence seized

The Ukraine was acting as a NATO member and taking orders fromt he United States, even though not formally part of NATO. This came just in from a german journalist living in Donezk, needs verification. Quick translation via Deepl:

Premier of the Donetsk People's Republic, Denis Pushilin gives emergency press conference. Detailed explanation and translation will follow tonight by Thomas Röper. The content of the speech in brief:

🔺A laptop was found on a hastily abandoned military base in Ukraine - which is registered with NATO

🔺 On it are data of American reconnaissance flights carried out over the Donbass and Crimea with unmanned drones in recent years (officially confirmed)

🔺This means that the Americans have passed on their data to the Ukrainian army, i.e. they support them.

🔺 Military strategic objects of Russia and the Donbass were marked on the maps created with these data

🔺 AND THERE ARE SAID TO BE NATO ATTACK PLANS INTO RUSSIA FOR MARCH 8 ON THE LAPTOP.

If this is true, then this is proof that NATO is supporting Ukraine in taking back the Donbass and Crimea by force.

NATO Laptop is now on sputniknews.com

NATO-Labelled Laptop With Intelligence Found at Ukrainian Nationalists' HQ, DPR Head Says

[41] Ukraine was a de-facto NATO military state

Not officially, of course. But militairily yes.

The fact is that the Ukrainian army is already de facto NATO army in everything related to Command and Control.

[42] News machines creating an illusion

The illusions created by the American (Western “news”) are off the charts. And yet, you know, people believe these lies. Meanwhile the United States is going to shit. Check out these screen captures…

  • First one…

Putin continues with the deaths of many a Russion while the valiant Ukrainians hold on bravely. 1000 Russians dead per day! Russian victory is NOT INEVITABLE! Don’t you know. And of course, the Russians hate him. That’s why protests are everywhere. Uh huh…

2022 03 08 08 13
2022 03 08 08 13

  • Second one…

Russian mistakes. Ukraine is “decimating” the invading Russians! Russian officer pleads for mercy! Russia now faces a quagmire… Uh huh.

2022 03 08 08 1a3
2022 03 08 08 1a3

  • Third one…

“Shows Putin is on the way out…” Yah. The Russian Ruble is on the way out, it’s collapsing every which way… Uh huh.

2022 03 08 08 1ww3
2022 03 08 08 1ww3

  • Fourth one…

Oh, and let’s not forget about the evil Chinese! the outright fantasies that Ukraine is really, really, really, really resisting well. The post is here: https://voxday.net/2022/03/07/russia-defeated-glory-to-ukraine/

If you read this post, Russia should be about finished and USA and NATO can just take a leisurely drive to Moscow to remove the current management and install new management.

I really don’t know who would believe this, because the actions the RF is currently undertaking does not even remotely match what is being said (i.e. not much escalation or change in plan of the RF nor new weapons systems coming on board at the moment)

2022 03 08 08 15
2022 03 08 08 15

. [43] Enemies of Russia The Russians have now officially declared all the following countries as “hostile”: from HERE.

  • All EU member States,
  • The USA
  • Australia
  • Albania
  • Andorra
  • Czech Republic
  • Great Britain (including Jersey, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar)
  • Iceland
  • Canada
  • Liechtenstein
  • Micronesia
  • Monaco
  • New Zealand
  • Norway
  • Republic of Korea
  • San Marino
  • North Macedonia
  • Singapore
  • Taiwan
  • Ukraine
  • Montenegro
  • Switzerland
  • Japan

What does this mean? At the time of writing (14:00 EST) all the Russians are saying is that there will be “financial and diplomatic consequences”.

I expect both diplomatic and economic sanctions to be announced in the coming days.  And they will hurt like hell. The two geo-political blocs are shaping up. These nations seem to be all part of the “uni-polar, United States led, Western block”. Those highlighted in red are the most signifigant members.

[44] Andrei predictions Here is how I see it and PLEASE tell me I am wrong!

  • The Ukraine has lost the war, she will be disarmed and denazified
  • The West is waging total informational and economic war against Russia and believing much of its own propaganda (which is fantastically dangerous!)
  • The western public has been sold nonsense about the Ukies being at the gates of Moscow and Russia being ready to surrender.  Which means that when the reality will become undeniable there will be A LOT of VERY butthurt folks out there pointing fingers.
  • Economically speaking, Zerohedge put it best: “Carnage everywhere“!
  • Even much worse will be the folks who will try to still overturn this outcome.  I am talking about the true nutcases in NATO (and in some sections of the USA ruling elites) which simply cannot even *imagine* that Russia holds all the cards, including the military one.
  • I can easily imagine, say, a Polish column with weapons and mercenaries crossing into the Ukraine and being wiped out by Russian missiles.  I ask you this: what will NATO do next?

In fact, let me rephrase my question this way:

Is it at all possible that this war can end without a direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia, keeping in mind that NATO cannot win and NATO cannot accept defeat?

Sadly, I don’t think so anymore, that kind of folly is a direct consequence of the Western PSYOPs which have convinced the folks in the West of two crucial things:

  • 1) Russia cannot win and
  • 2) Putin is bluffing.

I think that the folks in the Pentagon are smart enough to know that this is all bull, but what of the Eurorodents inside NATO and the EU?

[45] Details on the fighting As a reminder…

    • The Ukronazi armed forces are down to less than 25% of its original size.
    • Almost all the remaining forces are in some type or another of cauldrons.
    • Russia has full air supremacy
    • The Ukronazi fleet does not exist anymore
    • In spite of all the propaganda, no help from abroad will affect the outcome of this war
    • It appears that Russia will surround Odessa and eventually take control of the entire Ukrainian Black Sea coast

In other words, what seems to be shaping up is that Russia will soon have control over the entire Ukraine except for the western provinces (west of Vinnitsa and Zhitomir). In other words, the war is over, at least militarily.

[46] The FINAL “nail in the coffin” of Russian use of the USD

I really like Putin:

https://www.barrons.com/news/moscow-allows-russians-to-repay-debts-to-hostile-nations-in-rubles-01646655607

[47] China has made it formal

China will NOT participate in the American lead sanctions against Russia. Period. So stop asking. 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-03/china-rules-out-imposing-sanctions-on-russia/100877396

[48]  Australia formally demounces China and is building a military base to house forces to fight China

Australian PM denounces China and announces $10 billion nuclear submarine base

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday exploited the Russian invasion of Ukraine to launch another major military buildup, starting with building a $10 billion base for US, UK and Australian nuclear-powered submarines on Australia’s east coast, clearly directed at preparing for war against China.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/08/morr-m08.html

[49] No resistence from Bandera

According to the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, the special forces of the republic, which are taking part in the operation on the territory of Ukraine, continue to move into the country without meeting resistance from Bandera.

Kadyrov explained that the fighters regularly send him video reports on the execution of the order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.

"The cleansing of the territory from the criminal elements of Bandera is proceeding according to the schedule. Our soldiers are not meeting fierce resistance from Bandera," Kadyrov said.

https://www.mk.ru/politics/2022/03/08/kadyrov-chechenskiy-specnaz-ne-vstrechaet-soprotivleniya-banderovcev.html?from=article_mi_b

[50]  Italy seizes $156 million worth of yachts and villas belonging to Russian oligarchs

Looting civilisation in action across Europe, this time Italy and France 

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/italy-seizes-156-million-worth-of-yachts-and-villas-belonging-to-russian-oligarchs-01646510893

[51] Guidance on how to write Hit-Pieces against Russia

Support and resources for journalists covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine | International Journalists' Network.

Another gov funded propaganda machine against Russia.

https://ijnet.org/en/story/support-and-resources-journalists-covering-russian-invasion-ukraine

[52] Guidance on how to write Hit-Pieces against China

Global business journalism program in China open [Worldwide] | International Journalists' Network

Each and everyone of your are super qualify for the program, is an opportunity to experience first hand how this western propaganda machine operating inside China work,

https://ijnet.org/en/opportunity/global-business-journalism-program-china-open-worldwide

[53] China – Russia alliance is ROCK SOLID

China says friendship with Russia is ‘rock solid’

https://kathmandupost.com/world/2022/03/07/china-says-friendship-with-russia-is-rock-solid

[54] Venezuela

US officials fly to Venezuela for talks in apparent bid to further isolate Russia | Venezuela | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/06/us-officials-venezuela-talks-apparent-bid-further-isolate-russia

[55] America is now at war with Russia

Jesus! And Yikes! It’s true.

Listen to the thought process. It’s spot on.

Yes. The USA is at war with Russia.

A most excellent FOX “news” opinion section. Video HERE.

2022 03 08 22 41
2022 03 08 22 41

[56] Bye bye McDonald’s

McDonald’s has announced it is temporarily closing all of its 850 restaurants in Russia in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.9news.com.au/world/russia-ukraine-war-mcdonalds-to-close-850-stores-in-russia/aa4f51e5-de7e-4354-8372-d73eb616aaea?ocid=edm-nine.com.au-ninedaily--220309&mktg_scr=edm-ninedaily 

Note that if they announced or implied an open ended withdrawal from the Russian market they would be declared bankrupt and under new laws forfeit their assets. They might want to announce when they will be opening again.

[57] Blinkedin had a meeting with the Chinese

He told the Chinese deligation that the USA had talked with Taiwan. They had changed their position from "Go ahead and be independent, we will support you", to "No, do not even try to break away".

The Chinese reaction was "Thank you, but your words have zero value. You repeatedly lie and break treaties.".

[58] A captured “Russian Officer”

From MoA.

Russian soldiers are CLEAN SHAVEN.

2022 03 09 08 12
2022 03 09 08 12

[59]  Others are finally starting to agree with MM…

America Shoots Its Own Dollar Empire in Economic Attack on Russia

.

Yves here. The US is waking up to the blowback cost of its sanctions against Russia. You have to go well into Efforts to decimate Russian economy threaten to boomerang in The Hill to get to the part about US vulnerability:

Efforts to decimate Russia’s economy to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine could have serious and unpredictable implications at home for the U.S. and its allies….

Energy and food prices are the quickest way Americans could feel shockwaves from Russia’s decline, particularly if Biden takes action against Russian oil imports.

Crude oil prices are up roughly 20 percent over the past two weeks, enough to knock 0.2 percentage points from U.S. gross domestic product, according to economists at Goldman Sachs.

They also expect inflation as measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index to 0.2 percentage points thanks to “higher food prices, increased production costs due to rising commodity prices and increased transport costs due to shipping disruptions.”

[Rachel] Ziemba [founder of macroeconomic advisory firm Ziemba Insights] said a ban on Russian oil imports would largely be “symbolic” and simply send barrels to other markets.

“When we’re thinking of the cost-benefit analysis, it’s not clear to me that the pain here justifies the pain to Russia,” she said.

Michael Hudson gives an overview of the broader implications for the US.

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Empires often follow the course of a Greek tragedy, bringing about precisely the fate that they sought to avoid. That certainly is the case with the American Empire as it dismantles itself in not-so-slow motion.

The basic of assumption of economic and diplomatic forecasting is that every country will act in its own self-interest.

Such reasoning is of no help in today’s world.

Observers across the political spectrum are using phrases like “shooting themselves in their own foot” to describe U.S. diplomatic confrontation with Russia and allies alike.

For more than a generation the most prominent U.S. diplomats have warned about what they thought would represent the ultimate external threat: an alliance of Russia and China dominating Eurasia.

America’s economic sanctions and military confrontation has driven them together, and is driving other countries into their emerging Eurasian orbit. American economic and financial power was expected to avert this fate.

During the half-century since the United States went off gold in 1971, the world’s central banks have operated on the dollar standard, holding their international monetary reserves in the form of U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank deposits and U.S. stocks and bonds.

The resulting Treasury-bill standard has enabled America to finance its foreign military spending and support its deindustrialization-driven chronic trade deficits  by creating dollar IOUs that other countries accept. U.S. balance-of-payments deficits end up in the central banks of payments-surplus countries as their reserves, while Global South debtors need dollars to pay their bondholders and conduct their foreign trade.

This monetary privilege – dollar seignorage – has enabled U.S. diplomacy to impose neoliberal policies on the rest of the world, without having to use much military force of its own except to grab Middle Eastern oil.

The recent escalation of U.S. sanctions blocking Europe, Asia and other countries from trade and investment with Russia, Iran and China has imposed enormous opportunity costs – the cost of lost opportunities – on U.S. allies.

And the recent confiscation of the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, Afghanistan and now Russia, along the targeted grabbing of bank accounts of wealthy foreigners (hoping to win their hearts and minds, along with recovery of their sequestered accounts), has ended the idea that dollar holdings or those in its sterling and euro NATO satellites are a safe investment haven when world economic conditions become shaky.

So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two.

The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving dollar diplomacy a free ride.

I thought that de-dollarization would be led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on the United States.

But U.S. officials are forcing them to overcome whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.

I had expected that the end of the dollarized imperial economy would come about by other countries breaking away.

But that is not what has happened. U.S. diplomats themselves have chosen to end international dollarization themselves, while helping Russia build up its own means of self-reliant agricultural and industrial production.

This global fracture process actually has been going on for some years now, starting with the sanctions blocking America’s NATO allies and other economic satellites from trading with Russia.

For Russia, these sanctions had the same effect that protective tariffs would have had. Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture or industry.

The United States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic self-reliance on Russia.

When the Baltic states lost the Russian market for cheese and other farm products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.

Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate.

Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation.

The U.S. confiscations thus may finally lead Russia to end of neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating in favor of MMT.

The same dynamic undercutting ostensible U.S aims has occurred with U.S. sanctions against the leading Russian billionaires.

The neoliberal shock therapy and privatizations of the 1990s left Russian kleptocrats with only one way to cash out on the assets they had grabbed from the public domain.

That was to incorporate their takings and sell their shares in London and New York. As a result, domestic savings had been wiped out, and U.S. advisors persuaded Russia’s central bank not to create its own ruble money.

The final result was that Russia’s national oil, gas and mineral patrimony was not used to finance a rationalization of Russian industry and housing.

Instead of the revenue from privatization being invested to create new Russian means of protection, it was burned up on nouveau-riche acquisitions of luxury British real estate, yachts and other global flight-capital assets.

But the effect of making Russian dollar, sterling and euro holdings hostage has been to make the City of London too risky a venue in which to hold their assets.

By imposing sanctions on richest Russians closest to Putin, U.S. officials hoped to induce them to oppose his breakaway from the West, and thus to serve effectively as NATO agents-of-influence.

But for the Russian billionaires, their own country is starting to look safest.

For many decades now, the Federal Reserve and Treasury have fought against gold recovering its role in international reserves.

But how will India and Saudi Arabia view their dollar holdings as Biden and Blinken try to strong-arm them into following the U.S. “rules-based order” instead of their own national self-interest?

The recent U.S. dictates have left little alternative but to start protecting their own political autonomy by converting dollar and euro holdings into gold as an asset free of political liability of being held hostage to the increasingly costly and disruptive U.S. demands.

U.S. diplomacy has rubbed Europe’s nose in its abject subservience by telling its governments to have their companies dump the Russian assets for pennies on the dollar after Russia’s foreign reserves were blocked and the ruble’s exchange rate plunged.

Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investors moved quickly to buy up what Shell Oil and other foreign companies were unloading.

Nobody thought that the postwar 1945-2020 world order would give way this fast. A truly new international economic order is emerging, although it is not yet clear just what form it will take.

But “prodding the Bear” with the U.S./NATO confrontation with Russia has passed critical-mass level.

It no longer is just about Ukraine.

That is merely the trigger, a catalyst for driving much of the world away from the US/NATO orbit.

The next showdown may come within Europe itself as nationalist politicians seek to lead a break-away from the over-reaching U.S. power-grab over its European and other Allies to keep them dependent on U.S.-based trade and investment.

The price of their continuing obedience is to impose cost-inflation on their industry while relinquishing their democratic electoral politics to subordination to America’s NATO proconsuls.

These consequences cannot really be deemed “unintended.” Too many observers have pointed out exactly what would happen – headed by President Putin and Foreign Secretary Lavrov explaining just what their response would be if NATO insisted in backing them into a corner while attacking Eastern Ukrainian Russian-speakers and moving heavy weaponry to Russia’s Western border.

The consequences were anticipated.

The neocons in control of U.S. foreign policy simply didn’t care.

Recognizing its concerns was deemed to make one a Putinversteher. What foreign countries have not done for themselves to replace the IMF, World Bank and other arms of U.S. diplomacy, American politicians are forcing them to do.

Instead of European, Near Eastern and Global South countries breaking away out of their own calculation of their long-term economic interests, America is driving them away, as it has done with Russia and China.

More politicians are seeking voter support by asking whether they would be better served by new monetary arrangements to replace dollarized trade, investment and even foreign debt service.

The energy and food price squeeze is hitting Global South countries especially hard, coinciding with their own Covid-19 problems and the looming dollarized debt service coming due. Something must give.

How long will these countries impose austerity to pay foreign bondholders? Well? How will the U.S. and European economies cope in the face of their sanctions against imports of Russian gas and oil, cobalt, aluminum, palladium and other basic materials?

Any ideas?

American diplomats have made a list of raw materials that their economy desperately needs and which therefore are exempt from the trade sanctions being imposed.

This provides Mr. Putin a handy list of our pressure points to use in reshaping world diplomacy and help European and other countries break away from the Iron Curtain that America has imposed to lock its satellites into dependence on high-priced U.S. supplies.

But the final breakaway from NATO’s adventurism must come from within the United States itself.

As this year’s midterm elections approach,

Republicans are likely  to harp on  price inflation led by gasoline and energy as a Biden failure.

It’s not clear if the pro-Ukraine propaganda will have lost its effectiveness due to over-exposure.

But if Russia wins the war in short order, the Republicans could hammer on Biden for relying on costly, arguably ill thought out, and ineffective economic sanctions  America needs  Russian oil and gas exports.

Gas is necessary not only for heating and energy production, but to make fertilizer, of which there already is a world shortage.

That has been exacerbated by blocking Russian and Ukrainian grain exports to send U.S. and European food prices soaring.

Trying to force Russia to respond militarily and thereby look bad to the rest of the world is turning out to be a stunt aimed simply at demonstrating Europe’s need to contribute more to NATO, buy more U.S. military hardware and lock itself deeper into trade and monetary dependence on the United States.

The instability that this has caused could have the effect of making the United States look as threatening as Russia used to be.

European officials did not feel uncomfortable in telling the world about their worries that Donald Trump was crazy and upsetting the apple cart of international diplomacy.

But they seem to have been blindsided at the Biden Administration’s resurgence of visceral Russia-hatred by Secretary of State Blinken and Victoria Nuland-Kagan.

Trump’s mode of expression and mannerisms may have been uncouth, but America’s neocon gang has much more globally threatening confrontation obsessions.

For them, it was a question of whose reality would emerge victorious:

  • The “reality” that they believed they could create,

or,

  • The actual economic reality that lies outside of U.S. control.

Conclusion

It’s what it is.

It’s the start of the big pivot to a new global order; one where the United States is a minor “player”, and it’s proxy nations (NATO, the QUAD), become third world, poverty stricken, cesspools.

More changes to come, however the end result will be the same. There is no fucking way in Hell that American can maintain a unipolar command status. No bloody way.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Like it or not, a United Asia is galloping forward, and world is joining it NOW!

Illustration above; 2022 is the year of the "Wet Tiger".

America is not a happy country.

If the current power grid can't handle a night of 20 degree temperature without rolling blackouts, how will we plug 100 million electric cars into the grid? 

Is there any country that tax their citizens and sends some of it to America? Imagine, if you will, a world where every tweet and meme must be fact checked but not a ballot. How to stop drunk drivers from killing sober drivers? Ban sober drivers from driving. That's exactly how gun control works. Can we still order black coffee? Are brownies being taken off the shelf? Is White Castle changing its name? I'm sure Cracker Barrel is screwed. Can we still play Chinese checkers? Is that season still called Indian summer? No more Italian sausages? How far do you want to go with this foolishness? The 'Payday' candy bar is changing its name since it's offensive to those who don't work. Hell of a job, Democrats! You've managed to bring back the 1918 pandemic, the 1929 depression, the 1968 race riots and the 1973 gas prices - all at the same time.

In this article, we will provide a global Sitrep concerning the state of the world at the conclusion of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022. During this period, both Russia and China signed a very comprehensive agreement that defined a very detailed plan for global coorination and cooperation. And as I write this article, it is being implemented with great speed and gusto.

Here we will collect some articles, and misc brick-a-brack that will accumulatively (in total) provide a fine understanding of the global changes that are now occurring all over the planet. (Which, by the way, are NOT being reported on in the Western Media.)

Instead the Western media are reporting other things. Like this screen shot from the American “news” aggregator “DrudgeReport” 8FEB22.

Nonsense.

This article consists of related articles concerning various geographic regions thoughout the world. If you, the reader, think only in terms of your nation and may either Russia or China, you might this article collection to be a tad boring.

However, it covers a wade swatch of signifigant nation states. When you read the articles you will have a far better picture about what is going on in the world as the power-base shifts from a uni-polar world led by the United States to one that is multi-polar and not ruled at all.

We kick off this discussion with the United Nations.

[0] United Nations

"...demonizing china and russia at every turn and at such a scale, i was thinking the third war is imminent. now i know better, the entire world is against the empire. they abused propaganda and brainwashing tactics so much that only thing their adversaries need to do is just tell the truth."

-demonize | Feb 8 2022 22:17 utc

Rules for the World

by Observer R for the Saker Blog

BACKGROUND

On February 4, 2022, on the occasion of the opening of the XXIV Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, the presidents of China and Russia issued a document entitled:

Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development

This document sets a new level in the cooperation between the two countries in foreign policy and is their exposition of a common viewpoint for setting out the rules that the world should follow in politics among nations.

A key section up front contains the following:

“The sides call on all States…

...to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order, 

...seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role….”

The reliance on the United Nations (UN) as the major guiding rulemaker is an important point.

A major question concerning this reliance is the extent to which the design of the UN matches the current reality of the world distribution of wealth and power.

The UN was set up in 1945 according to a design that reflected the post-WWII distribution of economic output and advanced weapon systems.

Overall, it was based on the outcome of that war, with the winners getting the spoils and the losers getting the left-overs.

After some seventy-seven years, the situation has radically changed.

According to the CIA Fact Book,

China now has a larger economy than the US,

India is independent and has the third largest economy,

and India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea have become nuclear powers.

Japan and Germany each have larger populations and economies than either Britain or France.

And yet, the permanent members of the UN Security Council with veto rights are the same nations that were made members in 1945.

This is not a recipe for sustainable development of UN-based rules for a peaceable world.

Of course, there have been many calls for reform of the UN ever since it was founded.

A quick search for “reform of the united nations” turns up a cornucopia of websites dealing with the topic.

Everything from Wikipedia, various think-tanks, to the United Nations University has articles on the subject.

They point out in great detail the many reforms proposed and the far fewer reforms completed over the seventy-seven years.

All of them, however, tend to point out the immense difficulty in getting any agreement on any changes to the Security Council.

UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL ACTIONS

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) regularly concerns itself with various controversies around the world and adopts measures intended to ameliorate difficult situations.

However, there appears to be a lack of foresight in considering how the measures might be lifted when no longer needed or appropriate.

For example, the UNSC placed sanctions on North Korea over the nuclear proliferation issue, but now Russia and China would like to have the sanctions lifted, but this is blocked by the United States (US).

The UNSC also placed sanctions on Iran, some of which have now expired, but which seemed mostly to support the US interests.

With the benefit of hindsight, it would appear that Russia and China may have done better simply to have informal agreements with the other permanent members of the UNSC to institute sanctions and other measures when useful, thus leaving the two countries free to change tactics when the measures were no longer useful from their viewpoint.

This is especially true since both Russia and China are claiming to uphold the UN as the proper international body for making rules and would suffer great loss of face if they broke one of the UN rules.

The same is not true for the US since it is quite adept at following the “international rules-based order” that it conveniently makes up as it goes along.

The US claims to follow a higher order that is based on democracy and humanitarian issues.

Perhaps Russia and China knew what they were doing at the time, but it would be helpful to have an expert analysis of how they plan to avoid being trapped like this in the future.

UNITED NATIONS ORGANIZATION

Permanent membership in the Security Council is a bone of contention that will likely get worse as the years go by since some major countries are excluded, while some less prominent countries are included.

If China can be a member, then it will be more and more difficult to explain why India is not a member.

If Russia is a member, it still will be a question as to why Japan is not.

Having permanent members confined to the countries on the winning side in WWII will not be an adequate answer three-quarters of a century later and in light of all the changes that have transpired since the war.

If Britain and France are members, why not Germany and Brazil?

Is the criteria the possession of nuclear weapons, or the size of the economy, or the land area, or the population?

Now that India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have nuclear weapons, should they become permanent members?

Russia and China are again in an awkward position claiming the UN as the organizing force in the world, when the UN is obviously not structured to match the actual makeup of the world.

In addition, the UN headquarters was located in the US, reportedly because that was an inducement for the US to join the organization.

The fact that New York was undamaged by WWII and transportation was by steamship made it a logical choice at the time.

Now, however, travel is by air and there are many locations with good facilities and transport options.

In addition, the US places travel restrictions on diplomats trying to attend UN meetings in New York, and the UN employees also are subject to US rules.

Consequently, it would appear that a proper world management organization should be located in a small neutral country that possesses modern facilities and means of communication, and excellent air travel options to all other countries.

Another example of stress is the continuing issue of the Palestinians and the votes in the UN General Assembly on this topic.

The votes overwhelmingly go against the US position and yet next to nothing seems to ever be done.

There is no doubt that “safety in numbers” is a factor here—the US cannot sanction nearly 200 countries because they vote the “wrong way” at the same time.

In any event, the current UN setup is likely to experience continuing severe stress and instability in the coming years, unless these issues and likely others are addressed.

Some solutions could be helpful here also, since it bears directly on the Russian and Chinese positions concerning who makes the rules for the world.

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

Another factor that China and Russia need to address is the question of independence, neutrality, and impartiality of the various international organizations that promote and enforce international rules.

Several news reports and allegations have arisen concerning the activities of three such organizations: Interpol, OPCW, and IAEA.

Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization) is the subject of controversy because a general from the UAE was just selected as President despite vigorous opposition due to his qualifications and background.

The OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) is in the news with complaints over its investigations of chemical weapons in Syria. Whistleblowers have come forth with damaging accusations about the organization’s activities and its alleged bias.

The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is in a difficult position in checking up on Iran’s nuclear activities while not being able to check up on other West Asian countries’ nuclear activities. The Director just called for a change in the rules so that the IAEA could check up on Israel’s nuclear activities.

Many analysts suggest that there exists an undue influence on these organizations by the US, which prevents them from impartial operation.

Consequently, if the world is to move forward in a rules-based order using rules made by the UN and the affiliated international organizations, then China and Russia will need to exert more effort to ensure impartiality and more universal coverage of said rules.

This issue also applies to “international law” as it appears in court cases such as at the International Criminal Court (ICC), and in the various treaties such as the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

This is especially pertinent now that the US has announced that it will move from containment of China to competition with China.

The competition appears to be focused on the US and its allies in the West attempting to have more influence over the system of international rules than China.

The European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy essentially admitted that basis for competition when he stated in essence: He who sets the standards, rules the world.

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

The Joint Statement places a lot of emphasis on the various regional organizations that China and/or Russia belong to.

There is a favorable reference to the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, & South Africa (BRICS), although political changes in the constituent countries have made it less coherent.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is Asian-based, as are several others, including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The document contains many proposals for widening the involvement of these organizations in the many pressing issues confronting Asia.

A reading between the lines suggests that China and Russia plan to go ahead with getting a more robust set of rules for Asia, even if there is less prospect currently for agreements on world-wide rules.

CONCLUSION

China and Russia have issued a very long and very detailed statement of their goals for the future.

They specifically mention many international organizations and agreements, and provide concrete details about what they support and what they would like changed.

It is much more than a listing of political pious platitudes.

Nevertheless, it reads in large part like a political campaign statement for their domestic audiences and marching orders for their officials and bureaucrats.

It is, therefore, likely to be disappointing to those analysts who had perhaps expected something more concerning rules for the world.

The statements about relying on the UN and international law are fine as aspirations, but lack any specific proposals as to how to turn sentiment into reality.

For the past seventy-seven years, the UN has been under the major influence of the US and international law has been under the influence of the rules-based order designed by the US.

The Joint Statement does not directly provide clues about how China and Russia propose to deal with this situation during the next seventy-seven years.

Let’s look at the various geographical regions. We start with Europe.

It’s a destination / origination point for the BRI, and runs through the Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Xinjiang region (Uighur) of China.

[1] Europe

The US is losing its shit now. Putin should head to Berlin now and set out the alternatives in that flawless deutsche Sprache of his. The arrogance and hubris of a dying empire.

-Patroklos | Feb 8 2022 21:53 utc

China rail transports to Europe jumped

Did you know that the total number of China-Europe freight trains has risen to 50,000?

As of February this year (2022), more than 50,000 freight train trips between Europe and China have been made since the first Europe-bound train left the city of Chongqing in 2011.

▪️The China-Europe railway via about 70 routes connects 89 cities in China with 180 cities in 23 European countries with an average travel time of less than 20 days, which is significantly faster than shipping (about 70 days)

▪️The total cargo volume has exceeded 4.55 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) with IT products, automobiles and parts, chemicals, mechanical and electronic products among others with a total value of EUR 211 billion (the value of goods transported by China-Europe freight trains rose from EUR 7 billion in 2016 to EUR 65.8 billion in 2021)

▪️In 2021, the number of China-Europe freight trains amounted to 15,000 (1.46 million TEU, in comparison: capacity Ever Given 20,124 TEU), a Y-o-Y increase of 22%

▪️The share of China-Europe freight trains in total trade between China and Europe has increased from 1.5% in 2016 to 8% in 2021

▪️In 2021, the border point of Khorgos became the main port of entry or exit for China (previously, this was Alashankou; in 2021, 5,848 China-Europe trains were operated via Alashankou, while 6,362 China-Europe trains were handled at Khorgos)

▪️As of January 6, the average cost of transporting a standard 40-foot sea container by sea between China and Europe on 8 major routes was EUR 8,300, 5 times more than before the COVID-19 pandemic – by comparison, transporting a similar container from China to Paris by rail, costs was about EUR 7,000 (Drewry Shipping, SNCF) with subsidized transportation on the return route being cheap as EUR 1,800

▪️Rail accounts for only 5% of the total transport market between Europe and China but that number could double by 2030 (Drewry Shipping)

Side facts:

  • Containers moving between Europe and China must be switched to new rail cars twice, once at the China-Kazakhstan border and again at the Poland-Belarus border, since former Soviet countries use a different rail gauge than China and Europe
  • The total imports and exports between China and the European Union reached a total of EUR 728 billion (a Y-o-Y increase of 27.5%) with China remaining the EU’s largest trading partner, while the EU was China’s second-largest trading partner

I commented that 3rd graders could understand the concepts. 

Last week, I linked to this paper, "Indivisible Security and Collective Security Concepts: Implications for Russia’s Relations with the West". 

Indeed, the entire scenario we are currently within is all about Law, specifically the UN Charter and the basis it sets for International Law that's violated daily by the Outlaw US Empire. 

Monarchies make Unilateral decisions, while democracies supposedly do so only after having an informed public debate prior to the decision being taken, thus rendering it something other than unilateral. 

Thus, we have "fixing facts around the policy" by two clandestine Monarchies.

- karlof1 | Feb 8 2022 19:49 utc

Now, this is unacceptable to the United States. The BRI is a direct threat to the ability of the United States to control naval shipping, and isolate China, Russia and Europe.

Here is an article that discusses this matter…

America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies: The U.S. aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia

By Michael Hudson

The Iron Curtain of the 1940s and ‘50s was ostensibly designed to isolate Russia from Western Europe – to keep out Communist ideology and military penetration.

Today’s sanctions regime is aimed inward, to prevent America’s NATO and other Western allies from opening up more trade and investment with Russia and China.

The aim is not so much to isolate Russia and China as to hold these allies firmly within America’s own economic orbit.

Allies are to forego the benefits of importing Russian gas and Chinese products, buying much higher-priced U.S. LNG and other exports, capped by more U.S. arms.

The sanctions that U.S. diplomats are insisting that their allies impose against trade with Russia and China are aimed ostensibly at deterring a military buildup.

But such a buildup cannot possibly really be the main Russian and Chinese concern.

They have much more to gain by offering mutual economic benefits to the West. So the underlying question is whether Europe will find its advantage in replacing U.S. exports with Russian and Chinese supplies and the associated mutual economic linkages.

What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment.

If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need for NATO?

What is the need for such heavy purchases of U.S. military hardware by America’s affluent allies?

And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?

These are the concerns that have prompted French Prime Minister Macron to call forth the ghost of Charles de Gaulle and urge Europe to turn away from what he calls NATO’s “brain-dead” Cold War and beak with the pro-U.S. trade arrangements that are imposing rising costs on Europe while denying it potential gains from trade with Eurasia.

Even Germany is balking at demands that it freeze by this coming March by going without Russian gas.

Instead of a real military threat from Russia and China, the problem for American strategists is the absence of such a threat.

All countries have come to realize that the world has reached a point at which no industrial economy has the manpower and political ability to mobilize a standing army of the size that would be needed to invade or even wage a major battle with a significant adversary.

That political cost makes it uneconomic for Russia to retaliate against NATO adventurism prodding at its western border trying to incite a military response. It’s just not worth taking over Ukraine.

America’s rising pressure on its allies threatens to drive them out of the U.S. orbit.

For over 75 years they had little practical alternative to U.S. hegemony.

But that is now changing.

America no longer has the monetary power and seemingly chronic trade and balance-of-payments surplus that enabled it to draw up the world’s trade and investment rules in 1944-45.

The threat to U.S. dominance is that China, Russia and Mackinder’s Eurasian World Island heartland are offering better trade and investment opportunities than are available from the United States with its increasingly desperate demand for sacrifices from its NATO and other allies.

The most glaring example is the U.S. drive to block Germany from authorizing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to obtain Russian gas for the coming cold weather.

Angela Merkel agreed with Donald Trump to spend $1 billion building a new LNG port to become more dependent on highly priced U.S. LNG. (The plan was cancelled after the U.S. and German elections changed both leaders.)

But Germany has no other way of heating many of its houses and office buildings (or supplying its fertilizer companies) than with Russian gas.

The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest.

As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27:

“If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”[1]

The problem is to create a suitably offensive incident and depict Russia as the aggressor.

Nuland expressed who was dictating the policies of NATO members succinctly in 2014: “Fuck the EU.”

That was said as she told the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine that the State Department was backing the puppet Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Ukrainian prime minister (removed after two years in a corruption scandal), and U.S. political agencies backed the bloody Maidan massacre that ushered in what are now eight years of civil war.

The result devastated Ukraine much as U.S. violence had done in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is not a policy of world peace or democracy that European voters endorse.

U.S. trade sanctions imposed on its NATO allies extend across the trade spectrum.

Austerity-ridden Lithuania gave up its cheese and agricultural market in Russia, and is blocking its state-owned railroad from carrying Belarus potash to the Baltic port of Klaipeda.

The port’s majority owner complained that “Lithuania will lose hundreds of millions of dollars from halting Belarus exports through Klaipeda,” and “could face legal claims of $15 billion over broken contracts.”[2]

Lithuania has even agreed to U.S. prompting to recognize Taiwan, resulting in China refusing to import German or other products that include Lithuanian-made components.

Europe is to impose sanctions at the cost of rising energy and agricultural prices by giving priority to imports from the United States and foregoing Russian, Belarusian and other linkages outside of the Dollar Area.

As Sergey Lavrov put matters:

“When the United States thinks that something suits its interests, it can betray those with whom it was friendly, with whom it cooperated and who catered to its positions around the world.”[3]

America’s sanctions on its allies hurt their economies, not those of Russia and China

What seems ironic is that such sanctions against Russia and China have ended up helping rather than hurting them.

But the primary aim was not to hurt nor to help the Russian and Chinese economies.

After all, it is axiomatic that sanctions force the targeted countries to become more self-reliant.

Deprived of Lithuanian cheese, Russian producers have produced their own, and no longer need to import it from the Baltic states.

America’s underlying economic rivalry is aimed at keeping European and its allied Asian countries in its own increasingly protected economic orbit.

Germany, Lithuania and other allies are told to impose sanctions directed against their own economic welfare by not trading with countries outside the U.S. dollar-area orbit.

Quite apart from the threat of actual war resulting from U.S. bellicosity, the cost to America’s allies of surrendering to U.S. trade and investment demands is becoming so high as to be politically unaffordable.

For nearly a century there has been little alternative but to agree to trade and investment rules favoring the U.S. economy as the price of receiving U.S. financial and trade support and even military security. But an alternative is now threatening to emerge – one offering benefits from China’s Belt and Road initiative, and from Russia’s desire for foreign investment to help modernize its industrial organization, as seemed to be promised thirty years ago in 1991.

Ever since the closing years of World War II, U.S. diplomacy has aimed at locking Britain, France, and especially defeated Germany and Japan, into becoming U.S. economic and military dependencies.

As I documented in Super Imperialism, American diplomats broke up the British Empire and absorbed its Sterling Area by the onerous terms imposed first by Lend-Lease and then the Anglo-American Loan Agreement of 1946.

The latter’s terms obliged Britain to give up its Imperial Preference policy and unblock the sterling balances that India and other colonies had accumulated for their raw-materials exports during the war, thus opening the British Commonwealth to U.S. exports.

Britain committed itself not to recover its prewar markets by devaluing sterling.

U.S. diplomats then created the IMF and World Bank on terms that promoted U.S. export markets and deterred competition from Britain and other former rivals.

Debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons showed that British politicians recognized that they were being consigned to a subservient economic position, but felt that they had no alternative.

And once they gave up, U.S. diplomats had a free hand in confronting the rest of Europe.

Financial power has enabled America to continue dominating Western diplomacy despite being forced off gold in 1971 as a result of the balance-of-payments costs of its overseas military spending.

For the past half-century, foreign countries have kept their international monetary reserves in U.S. dollars – mainly in U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank accounts and other financial investments in the U.S. economy.

The Treasury-bill standard obliges foreign central banks to finance America’s military-based balance-of-payments deficit – and in the process, the domestic government budget deficit.

The United States does not need this recycling to create money.

The government can simply print money, as MMT has demonstrated. But the United States does need this foreign central bank dollar recycling to balance its international payments and support the dollar’s exchange rate.

If the dollar were to decline, foreign countries would find it much easier to pay international dollar-debts in their own currencies.

U.S. import prices would rise, and it would be more costly for U.S. investors to buy foreign assets.

And foreigners would lose money on U.S. stocks and bonds as denominated in their own currencies, and would drop them.

Central banks in particular would take a loss on the Treasury’s dollar bonds that they hold in their monetary reserves – and would find their interest to lie in moving out of the dollar.

So the U.S. balance of payments and exchange rate are both threatened by U.S. belligerency and military spending throughout the world – yet its diplomats are trying to stabilize matters by ramping up the military threat to crisis levels.

U.S. drives to keep its European and East Asian protectorates locked into its own sphere of influence is threatened by the emergence of China and Russia independently of the United States while the U.S. economy is de-industrializing as a result of its own deliberate policy choices.

The industrial dynamic that made the United States so dominant from the late 19th century up to the 1970s has given way to an evangelistic neoliberal financialization.

That is why U.S. diplomats need to arm-twist their allies to block their economic relations with post-Soviet Russia and socialist China, whose growth is outstripping that of the United States and whose trade arrangements offer more opportunities for mutual gain.

At issue is how long the United States can block its allies from taking advantage of China’s economic growth.

Will Germany, France and other NATO countries seek prosperity for themselves instead of letting the U.S. dollar standard and trade preferences siphon off their economic surplus?

Oil diplomacy and America’s dream for post-Soviet Russia

The expectation of Gorbachev and other Russian officials in 1991 was that their economy would turn to the West for reorganization along the lines that had made the U.S., German and other economies so prosperous.

The mutual expectation in Russia and Western Europe was for German, French and other investors to restructure the post-Soviet economy along more efficient lines.

That was not the U.S. plan.

When Senator John McCain called Russia “a gas station with atom bombs,” that was America’s dream for what they wanted Russia to be – with Russia’s gas companies passing into control by U.S. stockholders, starting with the planned buyout of Yukos as arranged with Mikhail Khordokovsky.

The last thing that U.S. strategists wanted to see was a thriving revived Russia.

U.S. advisors sought to privatize Russia’s natural resources and other non-industrial assets, by turning them over to kleptocrats who could “cash out” on the value of what they had privatized only by selling to U.S. and other foreign investors for hard currency.

The result was a neoliberal economic and demographic collapse throughout the post-Soviet states.

In some ways, America has been turning itself into its own version of a gas station with atom bombs (and arms exports).

U.S. oil diplomacy aims to control the world’s oil trade so that its enormous profits will accrue to the major U.S. oil companies.

It was to keep Iranian oil in the hands of British Petroleum that the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt worked with British Petroleum’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company to overthrow Iran’s elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh in 1954 when he sought to nationalize the company after it refused decade after decade to perform its promised contributions to the economy.

After installing the Shah whose democracy was based on a vicious police state, Iran threatened once again to act as the master of its own oil resources.

So it was once again confronted with U.S.-sponsored sanctions, which remain in effect today.

The aim of such sanctions is to keep the world oil trade firmly under U.S. control, because oil is energy and energy is the key to productivity and real GDP.

In cases where foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia and neighboring Arab petrostates have taken control, the export earnings of their oil are to be deposited in U.S. financial markets to support the dollar’s exchange rate and U.S. financial domination.

When they quadrupled their oil prices in 1973-74 (in response to the U.S. quadrupling of its grain-export prices), the U.S. State Department laid down the law and told Saudi Arabia that it could charge as much as it wanted for its oil (thereby raising the price umbrella for U.S. oil producers), but it had to recycle its oil-export earnings to the United States in dollar-denominated securities – mainly in U.S. Treasury securities and U.S. bank accounts, along with some minority holdings of U.S. stocks and bonds (but only as passive investors, not using this financial power to control corporate policy).

The second mode of recycling oil-export earnings was to buy U.S. arms exports, with Saudi Arabia becoming one of the military-industrial complex’s largest customers. U.S. arms production actually is not primarily military in character.

As the world is now seeing in the kerfuffle over Ukraine, America does not have a fighting army.

What it has is what used to be called an “eating army.”

U.S. arms production employs labor and produces weaponry as a kind of prestige good for governments to show off, not for actual fighting.

Like most luxury goods, the markup is very high.

That is the essence of high fashion and style, after all. The MIC uses its profits to subsidize U.S. civilian production in a way that does not violate the letter of international trade laws against government subsidy.

Sometimes, of course, military force is indeed used.

In Iraq, first George W. Bush and then Barack Obama used the military to seize the country’ oil reserves, along with those of Syria and Libya.

Control of world oil has been the buttress of America’s balance of payments.

Despite the global drive to slow the planet’s warming, U.S. officials continue to view oil as the key to America’s economic supremacy.

That is why the U.S. military is still refusing to obey Iraq’s orders to leave their country, keeping its troops in control of Iraqi oil, and why it agreed with the French to destroy Libya and still has troops in the oilfields of Syria.

Closer to home, President Biden has approved offshore drilling and supports Canada’s expansion of its Athabasca tar sands, environmentally the dirtiest oil in the world.

Along with oil and food exports, arms exports support the Treasury-bill standard’s financing of America’s overseas military spending on its 750 bases abroad.

But without a standing enemy constantly threatening at the gates, NATO’s existence falls apart.

What would be the need for countries to buy submarines, aircraft carriers, airplanes, tanks, missiles and other arms?

As the United States has de-industrialized, its trade and balance-of-payments deficit is becoming more problematic.

It needs arms export sales to help reduce its widening trade deficit and also to subsidize its commercial aircraft and related civilian sectors.

The challenge is how to maintain its prosperity and world dominance as it de-industrializes while economic growth is surging ahead in China and now even Russia.

America has lost its industrial cost advantage by the sharp rise in its cost of living and doing business in its financialized post-industrial rentier economy.

Additionally, as Seymour Melman explained in the 1970s, Pentagon capitalism is based on cost-plus contracts: The higher military hardware costs, the more profit its manufacturers receive.

So U.S. arms are over-engineered – hence, the $5000 toilet seats instead of a $50 model.

The main attractiveness of luxury goods after all, including military hardware, is their high price.

This is the background for U.S. fury at its failure to seize Russia’s oil resources – and at seeing Russia also break free militarily to create its own arms exports, which now are typically better and much less costly than those of the U.S.

Today Russia is in the position of Iran in 1954 and again in 1979.

Not only do its oil sales rival those of U.S. LNG, but Russia keeps its oil-export earnings at home to finance its re-industrialization, so as to rebuild the economy that was destroyed by the U.S.-sponsored shock “therapy” of the 1990s.

The line of least resistance for U.S. strategy seeking to maintain control of the world’s oil supply while maintaining its luxury-arms export market via NATO is to Cry Wolf and insist that Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine – as if Russia had anything to gain by quagmire warfare over Europe’s poorest and least productive economy.

The winter of 2021-22 has seen a long attempt at U.S. prodding of NATO and Russia to fight – without success.

U.S. dreams of a neoliberalized China as a U.S. corporate affiliate

America has de-industrialized as a deliberate policy of slashing production costs as its manufacturing companies have sought low-wage labor abroad, most notably in China.

This shift was not a rivalry with China, but was viewed as mutual gain.

American banks and investors were expected to secure control and the profits of Chinese industry as it was marketized.

The rivalry was between U.S. employers and U.S. labor, and the class-war weapon was offshoring and, in the process, cutting back government social spending.

Similar to the Russian pursuit of oil, arms and agricultural trade independent of U.S. control, China’s offense is keeping the profits of its industrialization at home, retaining state ownership of significant corporations and, most of all, keeping money creation and the Bank of China as a public utility to fund its own capital formation instead of letting U.S. banks and brokerage houses provide its financing and siphon off its surplus in the form of interest, dividends and management fees.

The one saving grace to U.S. corporate planners has been China’s role in deterring U.S. wages from rising by providing a source of low-priced labor to enable American manufacturers to offshore and outsource their production.

The Democratic Party’s class war against unionized labor started in the Carter Administration and greatly accelerated when Bill Clinton opened the southern border with NAFTA.

A string of maquiladoras were established along the border to supply low-priced handicraft labor.

This became so successful a corporate profit center that Clinton pressed to admit China into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, in the closing month of his administration.

The dream was for it to become a profit center for U.S. investors, producing for U.S. companies and financing its capital investment (and housing and government spending too, it was hoped) by borrowing U.S. dollars and organizing its industry in a stock market that, like that of Russia in 1994-96, would become a leading provider of finance-capital gains for U.S. and other foreign investors.

Walmart, Apple and many other U.S. companies organized production facilities in China, which necessarily involved technology transfers and creation of an efficient infrastructure for export trade.

Goldman Sachs led the financial incursion, and helped China’s stock market soar.

All this was what America had been urging.

Where did America’s neoliberal Cold War dream go wrong?

For starters, China did not follow the World Bank’s policy of steering governments to borrow in dollars to hire U.S. engineering firms to provide export infrastructure.

It industrialized in much the same way that the United States and Germany did in the late 19th century: By heavy public investment in infrastructure to provide basic needs at subsidized prices or freely, from health care and education to transportation and communications, in order to minimize the cost of living that employers and exporters had to pay.

Most important, China avoided foreign debt service by creating its own money and keeping the most important production facilities in its own hands.

U.S. demands are driving its allies out of the dollar-NATO trade and monetary orbit

As in a classical Greek tragedy, U.S. foreign policy is bringing about precisely the outcome that it most fears.

Overplaying their hand with their own NATO allies, U.S. diplomats are bringing about Kissinger’s nightmare scenario, driving Russia and China together.

While America’s allies are told to bear the costs of U.S. sanctions, Russia and China are benefiting by being obliged to diversify and make their own economies independent of reliance on U.S. suppliers of food and other basic needs.

Above all, these two countries are creating their own de-dollarized credit and bank-clearing systems, and holding their international monetary reserves in the form of gold, euros and each other’s currencies to conduct their mutual trade and investment.

This de-dollarization provides an alternative to the unipolar U.S. ability to gain free foreign credit via the U.S. Treasury-bill standard for world monetary reserves.

As foreign countries and their central banks de-dollarize, what will support the dollar?

Without the free line of credit provided by central banks automatically recycling America’s foreign military and other overseas spending back to the U.S. economy (with only a minimal return), how can the United States balance its international payments in the face of its de-industrialization?

The United States cannot simply reverse its de-industrialization and dependence on Chinese and other Asian labor by bringing production back home.

It has built too high a rentier overhead into its economy for its labor to be able to compete internationally, given the U.S. wage-earner’s budgetary demands to pay high and rising housing and education costs, debt service and health insurance, and for privatized infrastructure services.

The only way for the United States to sustain its international financial balance is by monopoly pricing of its arms, patented pharmaceutical and information-technology exports, and by buying control of the most lucrative production and potentially rent-extracting sectors abroad – in other words, by spreading neoliberal economic policy throughout the world in a way that obliges other countries to depend on U.S. loans and investment.

That is not a way for national economies to grow.

The alternative to neoliberal doctrine is China’s growth policies that follow the same basic industrial logic by which Britain, the United States, Germany and France rose to industrial power during their own industrial takeoffs with strong government support and social spending programs.

The United States has abandoned this traditional industrial policy since the 1980s.

It is imposing on its own economy the neoliberal policies that de-industrialized Pinochetista Chile, Thatcherite Britain and the post-industrial former Soviet republics, the Baltics and Ukraine since 1991.

Its highly polarized and debt-leveraged prosperity is based on inflating real estate and securities prices and privatizing infrastructure.

This neoliberalism has been a path to becoming a failed economy and indeed, a failed state, obliged to suffer debt deflation, rising housing prices and rents as owner-occupancy rates decline, as well as exorbitant medical and other costs resulting from privatizing what other countries provide freely or at subsidized prices as human rights – health care, education, medical insurance and pensions.

The success of China’s industrial policy with a mixed economy and state control of the monetary and credit system has led U.S. strategists to fear that Western European and Asian economies may find their advantage to lie in integrating more closely with China and Russia.

The U.S. seems to have no response to such a global rapprochement with China and Russia except economic sanctions and military belligerence.

That New Cold War stance is expensive, and other countries are balking at bearing the cost of a conflict that has no benefit for themselves and indeed, threatens to destabilize their own economic growth and political independence.

Without subsidy from these countries, especially as China, Russia and their neighbors de-dollarize their economies, how can the United States maintain the balance-of-payments costs of its overseas military spending?

Cutting back that spending, and indeed recovering industrial self-reliance and competitive economic power, would require a transformation of American politics.

Such a change seems unlikely, but without it, how long can America’s post-industrial rentier economy manage to force other countries to provide it with the economic affluence (literally a flowing-in) that it is no longer producing at home?

 

[2] India

Can we consider India a Democracy or a DemoCrazy?

India is essentially a fragmented country starting from its government. Take your pick on the other factors:

  • Corruption, cronyism, and abuse of government authority that have come to light in recent years
  • Powers of the bureaucracy have to be substantially curbed … a country overburdened by a massive bureaucracy, India has one of the lowest rates of per capita public sector employment of any G20 country.
  • The Indian state suffers from debilitating weaknesses that hinder its ability to raise revenue, adjudicate disputes, guarantee public order, and provide public goods.
  • It has the lowest tax-to-GDP ratio of any #BRICS country (a grouping that also includes #Brazil, #Russia, and #China). Indeed, it has one of the smallest ratios of any country in the #G20.
  • India’s security forces suffer from endemic personnel shortages. As of the end of 2011, only 77 percent of available posts in the civil police force were occupied according to the National Crime Records Bureau. (and yet it is part of #AUKUS).
  • Finally, India also struggles in its ability to provide basic services such as healthcare and education.
  • Caste hierarchies are alive and well.

For over sixty years, India, a low-income country occupying a sprawling geography and serving as a home to a dizzying diversity of ethnic and linguistic groups, has managed to survive—indeed, thrive—as a functioning democracy.

Its political system in particular has the capacity to confound even the most knowledgeable and insightful Indian, so it should come as no surprise that for outsiders, interpreting Indian politics can be downright daunting.

But trying to fit India into neat categories to get a handle on the South Asian behemoth misses much of the nuance at the heart of the Indian polity.

For instance, India’s politics have grown more regionalized, yet powerful forces of centralization remain intact.

Old caste divides have lost social relevance but often thrive in the domain of politics.

India’s party system is fragmented, but centralization has not disappeared

A dominant narrative about Indian politics over the last few decades has been the increasing regionalization of the political party system.

One way to measure this fragmentation is to compare political competition in India’s first general elections in 1952 to the most recent parliamentary elections of 2009. In 1952, 55 parties contested general elections, and in 2009, there were 370 competitors (see figure 1).

Of course, these numbers overstate the level of fragmentation because they do not account for the actual support political parties have among the electorate, but the changes remain large even when parties are weighted by the actual seats they win.

In 1952, this measure of effective number of parties in parliament stood at 1.7, and it has exhibited a more-than-fourfold increase over the past six decades, reaching 6.5.

Milan Vaishnav

Vaishnav’s primary research focus is the political economy of India, and he examines issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behavior.
The emerging federal nature of India’s electoral politics was given a shot in the arm in the early 1990s thanks to the rise of coalition governments in New Delhi, which provided a new set of incentives for aspiring regional politicians to abandon the dominant national parties and establish their own political outfits. 

While some of these new “regional parties” have strong links to subnational, separatist, or regional cultural markers, most simply draw support from a narrow (subnational) geographically defined territory. 

In this sense, several Indian parties formally classified as “national” by the Election Commission of India are actually regional in nature, such as the Nationalist Congress Party, whose success is largely confined to the state of Maharashtra.

As a result of these shifts, state-level politics are now the principal settings for political contestation, while national elections are increasingly “derivative.” 

While this does not mean that national elections are merely a sum of state-level contests, state-level politics is often the prism through which voters make decisions about national elections. 

For example, when state-level elections are held less than two years prior to national elections, voters are prone to reaffirm their state-level decisions when they vote in parliamentary elections.

 But when national elections take place midway through a state government’s tenure, more often than not voters punish the ruling state party or parties in national polls.

Indian National Congress

Moreover, fractures have developed within the two major national parties. Fragmentation within the ruling Indian National Congress (Congress, for short) is largely due to the leadership’s “dyarchic” nature.

Ever since the Congress Party’s current president, Sonia Gandhi, refused to assume the position of prime minister after the Congress came to power in 2004, handing over the reins to former finance minister Manmohan Singh, dual power centers revolving around these two figures have persisted. 

In reality, Singh occupies the throne, but Gandhi is perceived to wield the power. 

The wheels came off the arrangement during its second term. 

Now, the “divided leadership” within the Congress Party may be the most significant political hurdle to implementing badly needed political and economic reforms.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)

The problem for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is far more complicated.

The party boasts a surfeit of leaders clamoring for the post of prime minister. 

Many of the BJP’s most well-known personalities continue to jockey for greater visibility and stature within the party hierarchy—leading to frequent internal disputes. 

Complicating this picture even more is the fact that the BJP exhibits a significant amount of diversity at the state level. 

In the words of scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the BJP “is, for all practical purposes, a collection of six or seven state parties.” 

Furthermore, the leaders of the BJP in the states pledge their political loyalties to different national-level BJP leaders.

Yet, it would be premature to sound the death knell for the two major national parties.

In the 2009 general elections, the Congress and BJP won a combined total of 322 seats—or 60 percent of the overall count (543). 

Indeed, Congress’s vote share in national elections has essentially remained constant since 1996—hovering around 28 percent. 

(Yet due to the peculiarities of India’s winner-take-all electoral system, the number of seats the Congress has won with a roughly similar vote share has fluctuated wildly from election to election—see figure 2.) 

Both parties also continue to have a considerable presence at the state level. 

Nearly two-thirds of states (19 of 30) are presently governed by either Congress or BJP chief ministers, though several are in a coalition with regional parties.

States are the solution to India’s policy dilemmas, but also the problem

When India’s central government is unwilling or unable to take action on policy reform, its states are often heralded as the solution to gridlock or “policy paralysis” because Indian federalism gives the states considerable space for policy innovation. When the center fails, the respective states can usher in and lead intra-Indian competition for resources, investment, and talent, which produces a dynamic process of policy diffusion.

What complicates the picture is that the degree to which “good policies” are adopted often varies considerably within states. For instance, Gujarat has enjoyed fantastic economic growth rates and enormous investment inflows under Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s tenure.

In this sense, it is one of India’s most highly developed states. Yet, while Gujarat’s economic “model” is heralded, it a lags on health and family welfare, scoring near the bottom of India’s states on basic indicators of malnutrition.

The coexistence in Modi’s Gujarat of economic vitality with endemic malnutrition illustrates, in a nutshell, the promise and the peril of state-level leadership. Indeed, while there is a generally positive correlation between the level of development and malnutrition across India’s states, the states that thrive economically often “underperform” on addressing malnutrition (see figure 3 with Gujarat highlighted in red).

And when it comes to natural resource management states have strongly opposed reforms that would minimize their discretion and, therefore, their rent extraction possibilities. Consider the recent corruption scandal known as “Coalgate.”

A blistering report from the comptroller and auditor general accused the central government of using an opaque, uncompetitive, and ad hoc discretionary process for allocating nearly 60 licenses for captive coal mines across India. The report estimates that the policy led to $33 billion in lost revenue.

The central government is surely to blame for dithering in establishing a new, competitive policy for allocating coal licenses. But the states themselves played a starring role in the scandal.

The chief ministers of several mining-intensive states strongly opposed a change of policy and lobbied the government to maintain the status quo.

And state governments played a prominent role in recommending which private sector firms should receive licenses.

The Indian state is often overbureaucratized yet undermanned

Given the corruption, cronyism, and abuse of government authority that have come to light in recent years—ranging from the discretionary allocation of licenses governing 2G telecommunication spectrum to the procurement scandals which plagued India’s hosting of the Commonwealth Games—there is a strong sentiment within India that the powers of the bureaucracy have to be substantially curbed.

There is certainly a considerable need to curtail the worst excesses of the state, especially where the state’s heavy-handed role distorts economic incentives. For instance, transactions involving land—construction, mining, and infrastructure—remain a hotbed of corruption and malfeasance.

The regulatory intensity of the state with respect to land is extremely high, allowing politicians and bureaucrats to trade regulatory forbearance for bribes and kickbacks.

Yet, while the Indian state needs to cede authority over certain realms, it simultaneously needs to expand its authority in others.

Notwithstanding the widely held image of India as a country overburdened by a massive bureaucracy, India has one of the lowest rates of per capita public sector employment of any G20 country.

Furthermore, government employment in India (across local, state, and federal levels) is in decline.

The Indian state suffers from debilitating weaknesses that hinder its ability to raise revenue, adjudicate disputes, guarantee public order, and provide public goods. It has the lowest tax-to-GDP ratio of any BRIC country (a grouping that also includes Brazil, Russia, and China). Indeed, it has one of the smallest ratios of any country in the G20.

Admittedly, it is difficult to disentangle issues of policy choice from capacity, but there are ample signs that India is failing to enforce the taxes that are on the books.

For instance, a new investigations unit of the income tax department dedicated to recovering lost tax revenue has barely gotten off the ground one year after setting up shop thanks to a personnel shortfall.

The relative incapacity of the judiciary has been well documented. The Supreme Court reported in late 2011 that the country’s courts are saddled under the weight of 32 million pending cases. C

ourts at all levels—the Supreme Court as well as various high courts and district and subordinate courts—see their dockets grow rather than shrink year after year.

Meanwhile, India’s security forces suffer from endemic personnel shortages. As of the end of 2011, only 77 percent of available posts in the civil police force were occupied according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

Even if the state governments were to boost their recruitment and close the vacancy gap, India would still have one of the smallest ratios of police per capita anywhere in the world.

The armed forces too struggle with manpower shortfalls: the Indian army faces a shortage of 12,000 officers, or roughly 20 percent of its overall sanctioned strength.

Finally, India also struggles in its ability to provide basic services such as healthcare and education.

On education, for instance, it is true that India is growing ever closer toward achieving universal primary enrollment.

Yet, the quality of those activities that regularly take place in schools is, on average, abysmal.

According to the last several rounds of the Annual Status of Education Report conducted by the nongovernmental organization Pratham, the proportion of children aged six to fourteen who can read a simple paragraph has stagnated around 40 percent—with only marginal improvement over the past several years.

India’s economic crisis is largely self-inflicted

After over a decade of booming growth, the Indian economy was recently brought down to earth. In the quarter ending in June 2012, the economy grew at a rate of 5.5 percent—down from 8 percent the same quarter one year ago. While the International Monetary Fund now projects that growth in 2012 will dip below 5 percent, most independent observers forecast a quick rebound in 2013. A sustained period of growth at 5 percent or below, if such a situation materialized, would constitute a serious social and economic crisis for India.

In many ways, the particular success of India’s economy may have planted the seeds of its future slowdown. Reforms of the early 1990s, which involved industrial delicensing, reducing tariffs, and removing barriers to foreign capital flows, created a powerful new class of entrepreneurs who leveraged their political connections to entrench their positions in a newly liberalized economy.

These private sector winners, and their political allies, believed it was in their self-interest to obstruct follow-on, second-generation reforms that would further increase international competition in the economy or introduce more transparent and competitive processes for natural resource contracts.

Crony capitalism may have helped fuel rapid economic growth, but the rot in the system now threatens to swallow the whole thing up as the economy struggles in the wake of revelations of gross misgovernance and corruption.

There is also a perception that the roots of the current economic malaise are deeply political, from two years of unrelenting corruption scandals to a divided ruling party.

The situation was further compounded by the government’s missteps on key policy issues at critical junctures.

For instance, the government announced aggressive new anti-tax-avoidance policies that would retroactively levy taxes on business deals it perceived were structured to circumvent tax compliance.

This move rattled investor confidence and contributed to an atmosphere of heightened private sector uncertainty.

In an encouraging move, in mid-September the government announced a slew of long-awaited reforms, notably raising the price of diesel (which is heavily subsidized) and increasing foreign investment caps in a range of sectors such as broadcasting, multibrand retail, and civil aviation.

The government referred to these reforms as a “big bang,” but the current changes can best be described as a collection of modest steps.

Most political parties acknowledge the need for more fundamental structural reform; India’s administrative, regulatory, and legal machinery is hopelessly out of date. Yet the implementation of such reforms carries with it great political risk, discouraging bolder action.

Caste in India is declining socially, but remains strong politically

Social relations in India have long been defined by the peculiar tenets of Hinduism’s hierarchical caste system. But according to a recent study, the social inequalities that have historically defined relations between Dalits (lower castes) and non-Dalits have declined precipitously in the market-reform era.

Indeed, India now boasts a talented crop of “Dalit millionaires” who have formed their own Dalit Chamber of Commerce. Moreover, several groups have benefitted from reservations (or ethnic quotas) in government jobs, higher education, and political representation.

Yet caste hierarchies are alive and well in other areas. In one study, economists sent fictitious online job applications to firms, randomly manipulating the caste-based surnames of the fake applicants.

Large and significant differences in the treatment of applicants was seen in competition over call-center jobs, where “soft” or intangible skills are difficult to effectively signal through resume credentials alone, suggesting the persistence of discrimination against disadvantaged groups in certain sectors.

And there can be no doubt that a significant amount of political mobilization still occurs along caste or communal lines.

This is most glaring in north Indian states such as Uttar Pradesh, where rival political parties vociferously court opposing “vote banks” and speak of “caste equations.”

Yet, political mobilization along identity lines is hardly confined to north India: politically motivated communal violence in Kerala and the persistence of political divisions between the Kamma, Reddy, and Kapu communities in Andhra Pradesh are evidence of this.

Moreover, caste seems to still influence voter behavior across India. Some observers have heralded the delinking of ethnicity and vote choice by examining national-level aggregates of voter behavior, finding little evidence to suggest that a majority of any given ethnic community favors one political party over another. But when one disaggregates the data at the state level—which is the prime venue for political contestation—a majority of a caste group in many states votes in favor of one political party.

A closer look at state-level realities also suggests that some prominent leaders who have been celebrated for their perceived willingness to transcend caste divides in fact embrace caste—albeit in less overt, divisive ways. One prominent leader who is said to have risen above caste politics is Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in the state of Bihar.

In reality, Kumar has not ignored caste; he has simply played the caste card shrewdly. In his first term, Kumar instituted a “Mahadalit” scheme—earmarking government transfers for certain Dalit segments, namely those that fell outside of the traditional vote banks of his opposition—and established quotas in government jobs for lower caste Muslims.

Looking Ahead

Over the past two decades, India’s politics have grown far more complex. Economic liberalization, growing political competition, and increasing decentralization have fundamentally remade India’s political economy. Yet these new shifts have not completely displaced prevailing ideologies and proclivities.

In today’s India, liberalization coexists with the remnants of state-driven planning. Regionalization has expanded but has not completely taken over. And the bureaucracy’s authority has receded in many domains while becoming more entrenched in others.

Those looking to make sense of where India’s political project is headed in the years to come would be well-served to heed the words of Cambridge economist Joan Robinson: “Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.”

 The author thanks Reedy Swanson for excellent research assistance, Ashley Tellis and Frederic Grare for comments, and Devesh Kapur for useful conversations.

[3] Argentina

Here’s a pretty good summary…

Sitrep Argentina: Odious debt and Belt and Road

.

The president of Argentina as a matter of urgency approached President Putin in the day before President Putin left for Beijing.  They needed help with odious debt that the country entered into with the IMF.  This is the sequence of events in the last few days:

Argentina is trapped in $44 billion of odious debt from the US-controlled IMF.

Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández traveled to Russia and China, forming an alliance with the Eurasian powers, joining the Belt & Roadhttps://t.co/rTbO1ZGsPE
— Multipolarista (@Multipolarista) February 6, 2022

And…

Additional details from the Argentine presidency on the deal made in Beijing: https://t.co/bXEWO2UuUB

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) February 6, 2022

And then, one of the most interesting points in the second tweet: China reaffirmed its support for Argentina’s demand to fully exercise sovereignty over the Malvinas.

Argentina reaffirmed its commitment to the One China principle and China reaffirmed its support for Argentina’s demand to fully exercise sovereignty over the Malvinas. More: https://t.co/kSCICjsyFOpic.twitter.com/iMhhV63Uzz
— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) February 6, 2022

This is then how Zone B grows, with countries saying they have had enough of hegemony and taking clear steps to help themselves.

Trapped in IMF debt, Argentina turns to Russia and joins China’s Belt & Road

Argentina is trapped in $44 billion of IMF odious debt taken on by corrupt right-wing regimes.

Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, President Alberto Fernández traveled to Russia and China, forming an alliance with the Eurasian powers, joining the Belt and Road Initiative.

The United States constantly intervenes in the internal affairs of Latin America,

Washington sees the region as its own property, with President Joe Biden referring to it this January as “America’s front yard.”

Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, progressive governments in Latin America have increasingly looked across the ocean to form alliances with China and Russia.

Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández did exactly that this February, taking historic trips to Beijing and Moscow to meet with his counterparts Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

Fernández signed a series of strategic agreements…

      • officially incorporating Argentina into Beijing’s international Belt and Road Initiative,
      • while expanding economic partnerships with the Eurasian powers and
      • telling Moscow that Argentina “should be the door to enter” Latin America.

China offered $23.7 billion in funding for infrastructure projects and investments in Argentina’s economy.

In the meetings, Fernández also asked for Argentina to join the BRICS framework, alongside Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Xi and Putin reportedly both agreed.

“I am consistently working to rid Argentina of this dependence on the IMF and the US,”

Fernández explained.

“I want Argentina to open up new opportunities.”

The Argentine president’s comments and meetings with Putin and Xi reportedly angered the US government.

Argentina is trapped in odious debt with the US-controlled IMF

Argentina is a Latin American powerhouse, with significant natural resources and the third-largest economy in the region (after Brazil and Mexico, both of which have significantly larger populations).

But Argentina’s development has often been weighed down by…

      • debt traps imposed from abroad,
      • resulting in frequent economic crises,
      • cycles of high inflation,
      • and currency devaluations.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) – a de facto economic arm of the United States, over which Washington alone has veto power – has significant control over Argentina, having trapped the nation in huge sums of odious debt.

In 2018, Argentina’s right-wing President Mauricio Macri requested the largest loan in the history of the IMF: a staggering $57.1 billion bailout.

Macri was notorious for his corruption, and this was no secret at the time.

By agreeing to give such an enormous sum of money to Macri’s scandal-plagued government, the IMF knew it was ensnaring Argentina in debt it would not be able to pay off.

But this was far from the first time the US-dominated financial instrument had trapped Argentina in odious debt.

In December 2021, the IMF published an internal report admitting that the 2018 bailout completely failed to stabilize Argentina’s economy.

But when Argentina’s center-left President Alberto Fernández entered office in December 2019, his country was ensnared in $44.5 billion in debt from this bailout that the IMF itself admitted was a total failure. ($44.5 billion of the $57.1 billion loan had already been disbursed, and Fernández cancelled the rest.)

The Argentine government has tried to renegotiate the debt, but in order to do so the IMF has imposed conditions that severely restrict the nation’s sovereignty – such as appointing a British economist who “will virtually be the new economic minister,” acting as a kind of “co-government,” warned prominent diplomat Alicia Castro.

Seeking ways around these US debt traps, Fernández decided this February to turn to the two rising Eurasian superpowers.

Argentine President Fernández travels to Russia to meet with Putin

On February 3, Argentine President Alberto Fernández travelled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin.

“I’m certain Argentina has to stop being so dependent on the [International Monetary] Fund and the United States, and has to open up to other places, and that is where it seems to me that Russia has a very important place,”

Fernández said, explaining his motivation for the trip.

Fernández added that, for Russia, Argentina “should be the door to enter” the region, telling Putin, 

“We could be a venue for the development of your cooperation with Latin American nations.”

The two leaders discussed Russian investment in the Argentine economy, trade, railroad construction, and energy technology.

Fernández also thanked Moscow for collaborating with his country in the production of its Sputnik V covid-19 vaccine.

Argentina was the first country in the western hemisphere to do so.

The Argentine president even pointed out in their meeting that he has received three doses of the Sputnik V vaccine. Putin added, “Me too.”

Putin said the two countries agree on many issues, calling Argentina “one of Russia’s key partners in Latin America.”

Argentine President Fernández travels to China to meet with Xi Peng

Just three days after meeting with Putin, President Alberto Fernández travelled to China on February 6 to meet with President Xi Jinping.

In this historic trip, Argentina officially joined Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global infrastructure program.

Fernández and other top Argentine officials signed agreements for $23.7 billion in Chinese financing, including investments and infrastructure projects.

The funding will be disbursed in two parts: one, which is already approved, will provide Argentina with $14 billion for 10 infrastructure projects; the second, for $9.7 billion, will finance the South American nation’s integration into the Belt and Road.

There are three joint Chinese-Argentine projects that were reportedly at the top of Fernández’s list:

      • creating 5G networks,
      • developing Argentina’s lithium industry,
      • and building the Atucha III nuclear power plant.

Fernández also discussed plans for Argentina to produce China’s Sinopharm covid-19 vaccine, in addition to Russia’s Sputnik V.

Argentina and China signed a comprehensive memorandum of understanding, including 13 documents for cooperation in areas such as green energy, technology, education, agriculture, communication, and nuclear energy.

Fernández and Xi discussed ways to…

“strengthen relations of political, commercial, economic, scientific, and cultural cooperation between both countries,”

…according to an Argentine government readout of the meeting.

The two leaders apparently hit it off very well, with Fernández telling Xi,

“If you were Argentine, you would be a Peronist.”

Argentina’s incorporation into the Belt and Road comes mere weeks after Nicaragua joined the initiative in January, and Cuba in December.

Latin America’s growing links with China and Russia show how the increasingly multipolar international system offers countries in the Global South new potential allies who can serve as bulwarks against and alternatives to Washington’s hegemony.

While right-wing leaders in Latin America keep looking north to the United States as their political compass, progressive governments are reaching across the ocean to the Eurasian powers of China, Russia, and Iran, building new international alliances that weaken Washington’s geopolitical grip over a region that the US president still insists is its “front yard.”

[4] Africa

Thanks for the repost of the Russia/China manifesto joint statement. The SAD truth is, that NOWHERE, in the U$ MSM, can it be seen, or even read, to the U$ public...

THAT FACT, should speak volumes about managed perception..

-vetinLA | Feb 8 2022 21:44 utc

What is FOCAC? Three historic stages in the China-Africa relationship

The FOCAC partnership platform between China and Africa has produced increasingly deep and complex relations between regions. Africa has benefited from significant investments and China has developed extensive soft power. In its 22nd year, Shirley Ze Yu looks at four stages in FOCAC’s evolution and how they shaped the China-Africa relationship today.

This is the first of two parts exploring the history and purpose of the FOCAC partnership between China and Africa, and part of the China-Africa Initiative series with the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa.

The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was established in 2000 as a uni-multilateral partnership platform between China and 53 African states (all African states except Eswatini, which maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan).

Of the many partnership platforms Africa has today with a single external actor, FOCAC remains the most strategically intertwined and far-reaching in its depth, scope and level of cooperation.

In theory, the Forum creates a form of multilateralism in which all countries are equal partners, but the comparative weight of China’s state capacity effectively dictates 53 pairs of bilateral relationships under a single architecture.

So why was FOCAC created and what was it meant to stand for?

Contrary to the conventional belief that FOCAC was initiated by China, the Forum was created in response to a proposal by the then-African leader Madagascan Foreign Minister Lila Ratsifandrihamanana.

The new organisation would see China emulate other Western nations who were steps ahead in partnering with Africa, most notably the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the Africa-France Summit, the US-Africa Business Forum, the EU-Africa Summit, the Tokyo International Conference on Africa Development (TICAD) and others.

Contrary to the ad hoc nature of the EU-Africa Summit or Japan’s TICAD, FOCAC has been institutionalised with a clear operating architecture since inception, following two years of initial incubation.

FOCAC has evolved from a forum of diplomatic exchange and development-centric body to a comprehensive economic-political-security-soft power nexus, which advances China’s long-term vision in Africa.

It features triannual ministerial-level meetings with core secretarial responsibilities housed in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Commerce and Finance.

FOCAC’s evolution

The inaugural FOCAC meeting was convened in 2000 during Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s era.

In 2006, FOCAC gathered over 40 heads of states or governments from Africa for the first time, overseen by then Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Its elevation during the Xi Jinping era from 2013 to an all-encompassing strategic uni-multilateral framework spanned issues on health, the environment, trade, finance, security, politics, ideology and human development.

Among the eight FOCAC Forums held during this period, three were elevated to a China-Africa Leaders’ Summit, attended by heads of state and government: the 3rd FOCAC in 2006 in Beijing, the 6th FOCAC in 2015 in Johannesburg and the 7th FOCAC in 2018 – again in Beijing.

Not coincidentally, each summit redefined the form and scope of the uni-multilateral relationship.

Today, FOCAC has grown far beyond a single development parameter.

It has become the quintessential component of China’s grand strategy for the global South.

In Africa, in contrast to the continent’s old colonial powers, China’s soft power has deepened alongside its hard power.

Up until 2021, the Forum’s 21st year, FOCAC’s history can be divided into three historic, incremental phases. A distinct fourth phase has just begun.

The first phase of FOCAC: 2000-2006

Until 1996, four years prior to FOCAC’s creation, China’s level of wealth as measured by per capita GDP trailed that of sub-Saharan Africa.

China was a marginal player on the world stage, with scant economic presence on the continent.

FOCAC’s priority in 2000 was therefore deeper trade engagement.

A grander relationship was inconceivable given China’s capacity.

At the time of FOCAC’s first ministerial meeting in late 2000, China was on the cusp of accession to the World Trade Organisation, which subsequently enabled it to become the world’s largest exporter within the next decade and assume the title of the ‘World’s Factory’.

In contrast to Beijing’s global trade strategy at the time, which was overwhelmingly aimed at driving Chinese exports and a current account surplus, FOCAC’s trade agenda was always to attract more imports from Africa.

At the second FOCAC meeting in 2003, China offered tariff-free imports from Africa’s least developed countries (LDCs).

By the 2006 FOCAC Summit in Beijing, over 440 items from the LDCs could be exported tariff-free to China.

Two-way trade with Africa expanded 5.2 times during this period.

The second phase of FOCAC: 2006-2015

During this second phase, China advanced the partnership’s economic cooperation from trade-only to encompass foreign aid, direct investment, development finance and, since 2013, continental-scale infrastructure building under its Belt and Road Initiative.

At the 2006 FOCAC Summit, then-Chinese President Hu Jintao pledged to double China’s financial aid and offered $5 billion of preferential loans and credit to Africa over the next three years.

This debuted China’s ballooning presence as Africa’s creditor.

In 2007, the China-Africa Development Fund was established, boosting China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) across Africa.

Chinese companies were led to develop special economic zones, free trade zones and industrial parks on the continent; the next wave of trade growth needed an efficient supply chain and upgrades in production capacity.

China’s FDI in Africa grew 3.5 times between 2006-9 and by this point China became Africa’s largest trade partner.

Upon the initiation of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, China furthered its role as a direct contributor to Africa’s infrastructure building, prioritising power grids, special trade zones, ports, transportation routes and other prestigious projects, in which China provided a full range of capabilities including finance, construction, management and, often, equity partnerships.

The infrastructure programme fundamentally remained physical over this phase of FOCAC, only to pivot towards digital from 2015 onwards.

The third phase of FOCAC: 2015-2021

Over the period from 2015-21, China asserted security and political partnerships with Africa as core pillars of FOCAC and envisioned a ‘China-Africa Common Destiny’ – a China-posited ideational framework of an alternative global destiny. Africa was the first global region that China conceives as a quintessential sphere of its ‘China Vision’.

The uni-multilateral partnership was raised to a new, comprehensive level at the 2015 Summit, where Chinese President Xi Jinping strengthened the commitment to mutual political trust and ‘mutual security assistance’.

Over this period, China established multiple sub-categories of the China-Africa cooperation mechanisms.

These include the

  • China-Africa People-to-People Forum,
  • China-Africa Youth Leaders Forum,
  • China-Africa Health Ministers Forum,
  • China-Africa Media Cooperation Forum,
  • China-Africa Poverty Alleviation and Development Forum,
  • China-Africa Legal Forum,
  • China-Africa Local Government Cooperation Forum and
  • China-Africa Think Tank Forum.

These civic engagements naturally score Chinese soft power in Africa, in sectors ranging from education, media, law and political mentoring to rural development.

At the 2018 Summit, where 50 African heads of state and government were present in Beijing to accelerate the FOCAC agenda, Xi Jinping further named political cooperation an essential task for the partnership platform. Xi asserted China’s support for African countries to explore alternative development paths that suit their national characteristics, implying that China does not promote democracy as the only form of government leading to economic development.

China’s political engagement with Africa instead strives to enlighten a Chinese philosophical path to development: the ‘development-for-peace’ narrative, contrasted with the West’s long-held ‘democracy-for-development’ consensus.

By empowering the Communist Party in FOCAC political dialogues with African counterparts, an ideological front has been added to what had previously been predominantly government-bureaucracy exchanges.

China offered to train African political leaders in its country on elite university programmes, modelled on the leagues of the Harvard Kennedy School.

Beyond politics, China’s infrastructure development in Africa during this period evolved from the physical to include digital and technology spheres, intended to support Africa’s pursuit of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

Over this phase, China laid down submarine cable networks along the coast of Africa, providing large parts of the continent with high-speed and low-cost broadband access.

China has since developed Africa’s first public cloud, built data storage centres and provided software systems for national governments.

China’s technology infrastructure incorporates both hard and soft elements.

China has further ventured in joint space development, and promoted Beidou – a global satellite positioning system comparable to the Google GPS – to support satellite-based services on the continent.

Data collected from space has the potential to produce $2 billion a year in benefits for Africa, according to the World Economic Forum.

Since China helped Ethiopia launch its first satellite in 2019, China has partnered resolutely with more African countries in space exploration.

Unlike Russia, which considers African countries only space launch customers, China has provided space launch services and financing for countries to acquire satellites; $6 of the $8 billion cost of Ethiopia’s satellite was financed by China.

As outer space projects have increasingly become the ambition and pride of rising nations, China’s commitment to Africa’s space missions supports the African dream for this sector.

FOCAC has manifested the ‘China Vision’

From Beijing’s humble defining of FOCAC as a new form of partnership in 2000, to the Forum’s strategic expansion beyond trade engagement in 2006 and its all-encompassing relationship in 2015, China’s enormous growth on the continent has not been coincidental. The China-Africa Common Destiny defined at FOCAC in 2018 was China’s foreign policy holy grail.

As China’s global economic and military prowess further grows, with the country aiming to gradually step into the centre of the world stage by 2049, China has elevated the African partnership to a height none can rival.

But what does this mean for Africa?

The continent could become a formidable exogenous force that prototypes Xi Jinping’s China Wisdom (中国智慧) with an alternative path to national prosperity, peace and security – a force without democracy or western political values.

Read the second part in the series on the future of FOCAC.


Some trailing thoughts

A ‘Multi-Polar World’ order is emerging. I would like to suggest that the outlines of this emerging order are as follows:

1. The dominant pole of this Multi-polar World is that led by the alliance of Russia and China. Spanning Eurasia from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, this pole includes the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Eurasian Economic Union, and includes Iran, Iraq, Syria, and possibly, in the future, Turkey.

2. The second pole will be the remnants of the ‘Globalist’ empire, stripped, however, of Europe (ex. U.K.) and any Asian representation, i.e. the U.S., U.K., Israel and likely Canada.

3. A third group consists of countries that are currently either occupied militarily by the U.S. or are part of NATO, but are either economically dependent on China or are in economic competition with the U.S. This includes most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the GCC countries (KSA, UAE, etc.). These countries cannot be considered as poles by themselves, for while some of them may have the economic weight to be considered a pole, such as Germany and Japan, they lack the geo-political weight. These countries are likely to try to escape from their status as American (‘Globalist’) vassals and become independent nations dealing equitably with all the poles of the new Multi-Polar World. In my view, it is unlikely that the EU will survive the birth of this new-world order in its current form. At best it is likely to revert back to a European free trade area, in which each country will recapture its sovereignty and its own currency.

4. A fourth group consists of countries that, while not being a part of the Russia/China pole will be under its wing, with Russia providing military, political and geo-political support, and China providing economic support. This group includes countries which are currently either under threat from the ‘Globalists’ (ie. Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, etc.), are in turmoil due to exploitation by the ‘Globalists’ (ie. Chile, Argentina, Brazil, etc.) or are outright failed states (most of Africa). Under the protection of Russia and China, they will once again have a chance to overcome the anarchy of the past 20 or so years and to return to peaceful development.

5. A fifth group consists of what will likely end up as secondary poles of the Multi-Polar World. These are countries that today are both independent and have the geo-political and economic weight to continue to function independently. This group includes the likes of India and the ASEAN countries.’

The new order appears to be progressing apace. The commotion of the last year about Russia and Ukraine appears to be about trying to prevent Europe from ‘escaping from their status as American (‘Globalist’) vassals’.

Conclusion

The “rules based order”, where America makes the rules as it pleases is OVER. There is now a multi-polar global society, and the membership is being sorted out as you read this.

Preliminairly, it appears that only an handful of nations are sticking with the old-world American-led order.

      • The United States
      • The UK
      • Australia

Some are trying to “straddle the fence”…

      • Japan
      • South Korea
      • Canada
      • Poland

However, let it be well understood that most nations are embracing the Asian model.

The Asian model is one of society, of tradition, of help and of being a Rufus.

A Rufus makes the sidewalk on the street a little bit safer. His own time. His own costs. His own initative. Combined we all make the place a better place to live. Video 20MB

The change in the global economic situation will have catastrophic repurcussions economically upon the United States, but (the good news is) that it can be mitigated and leveraged. This would be conducted by adept handling of the entire global situation, and taking it’s domestic demons at home. Of course, those tasks cannot be outsourced and must be handled inside of the Washington DC “beltway”.

How capable the United States is with this effort has yet to be seen.

Never the less I, for one, look forward to a bright and sustainable future for the entire world.

The world is turning Rufus.

It’s a glorious thing.

Be the Rufus.

Guy finds a girl in distress in her car. She honks the horn at him, and they open the door to investigate. And there they find her in a dangerous state. They take action immediately. Be that Rufus.

Video 5MB

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Big massive changes to the global power leadership (who and what will lead) are in process right NOW

It’s the middle of the Chinese New Year 2022. There’s a Winter Olympics in Beijing, and both Putin and Xi Peng have presented to the world a blueprint for a massive and comprehensive new world order. It is based upon the UN,  and is designed to punish malcontent nations (without specifically naming the United States and it’s allies.).

And how are these major events being reported in the Western “news”?

Look…

All bullshit. All lies.

“Quarantine Hell”?

Nothing at all about the earth-shattering Xi Peng and Putin announcement. Everyone in the West must be kept dumb, stupid and ignorant. They must be taught to hate, and live in fear, and get ready for the next “freedom war”.

Here we are going to grab some various snapshots of what is going outside the American gulag and see what’s really going on.

Japanese companies refuse to decouple from China

“But while Tokyo has tried to wean its companies off China, even offering subsidies to Japanese groups to exit the Chinese market, it is clear that leaving China is easier said than done.

Japanese companies operating in China remain bullish: just 7.2 per cent of them said they were moving or considering moving production out of China in a September survey by JETRO, down from 9.2 per cent in 2019.

Naoto Saito, chief researcher at the Daiwa Institute of Research, said: “Japan Inc is actually increasing its investment in China, while also seeking to set reasonable limits due to geopolitical risks, and remaining aware of avoiding overdependence.” He added: “It’s unthinkable for companies not to consider the Chinese market at all.”

The Chinese market is “too large for us to ignore”, he added. “Given its size and the pace of growth, there would be no choice but to develop products for that market, in addition to ones for the western and Japanese market.”

Facing a rapid decoupling world, Murata and most of Japan Inc is sticking with the Chinese market, an outcome that runs counter to the advice from the Japanese government, which has been urging Japanese companies to diversify away from China.”

In Q1 2020, when the pandemic in China was at its peak, the Japanese government offered subsidies for Japanese companies to move their operations out of China. At that time, many people were asserting that Japanese companies and indeed foreign companies in general would leave China in droves. Fast-forward to two years later, has that happened?

Bloomberg makes a BIG mistake

published a headline that read, ‘Live: Russia invades Ukraine’. It went up on its homepage around midnight Moscow time and stayed there for nearly half an hour before it was removed and an apology for the mistake (https://lnkd.in/eg5WCMh3) issued.

Everyone should be cancelling their Bloomberg subscription … “real” misinformation that could have started World War III … or was that just the propaganda narrative some corners of our elitist are pushing ?

As I mentioned before, an entire package of videos, reports, interviews, and all the rest were all prepared to take advantage of a war in the Ukraine.

The West is unraveling fast, and everything is in free fall right now. The “man behind the curtain” is being exposed, and the threadbare curtain is rotten and falling off its pole

A war with Russia would be unlike anything the US and NATO have ever experienced

From HERE, with all credit.

In a recent press conference held on the occasion of a visit to Moscow by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke about continued NATO expansion, and the potential consequences if Ukraine was to join the trans-Atlantic alliance.

“Their [NATO’s] main task is to contain the development of Russia,”

Putin said.

“Ukraine is simply a tool to achieve this goal. They could draw us into some kind of armed conflict and force their allies in Europe to impose the very tough sanctions that are being talked about in the United States today,”

he noted.

“Or they could draw Ukraine into NATO, set up strike weapons systems there and encourage some people to resolve the issue of Donbass or Crimea by force, and still draw us into an armed conflict.”

Putin continued,

“Let us imagine that Ukraine is a NATO member and is stuffed with weapons and there are state-of-the-art missile systems just like in Poland and Romania. Who will stop it from unleashing operations in Crimea, let alone Donbass? Let us imagine that Ukraine is a NATO member and ventures such a combat operation. Do we have to fight with the NATO bloc? Has anyone thought anything about it? It seems not.”

But these words were dismissed by White House spokesperson Jen Psaki, who likened them to a fox

“screaming from the top of the hen house that he's scared of the chickens,”

…adding that any Russian expression of fear over Ukraine

 “should not be reported as a statement of fact.”

Psaki’s comments, however, are divorced from the reality of the situation.

The principal goal of the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is what he terms the “de-occupation” of Crimea.

While this goal has, in the past, been couched in terms of diplomacy –

“[t]he synergy of our efforts must force Russia to negotiate the return of our peninsula,”

Zelensky told the Crimea Platform, a Ukrainian forum focused on regaining control over Crimea – the reality is his strategy for return is a purely military one, in which Russia has been identified as a “military adversary”, and the accomplishment of which can only be achieved through NATO membership.

How Zelensky plans on accomplishing this goal using military means has not been spelled out.

As an ostensibly defensive alliance, the odds are that NATO would not initiate any offensive military action to forcibly seize the Crimean Peninsula from Russia.

Indeed, the terms of Ukraine’s membership, if granted, would need to include some language regarding the limits of NATO’s Article 5 – which relates to collective defense – when addressing the Crimea situation, or else a state of war would de facto exist upon Ukrainian accession.

The most likely scenario would involve Ukraine being rapidly brought under the ‘umbrella’ of NATO protection, with ‘battlegroups’ like those deployed into eastern Europe being formed on Ukrainian soil as a ‘trip-wire’ force, and modern air defenses combined with forward-deployed NATO aircraft put in place to secure Ukrainian airspace.

Once this umbrella has been established, Ukraine would feel emboldened to begin a hybrid conflict against what it terms the Russian occupation of Crimea, employing unconventional warfare capability it has acquired since 2015 at the hands of the CIA to initiate an insurgency designed specifically to “kill Russians.”

The idea that Russia would sit idly by while a guerilla war in Crimea was being implemented from Ukraine is ludicrous; if confronted with such a scenario, Russia would more than likely use its own unconventional capabilities in retaliation.

Ukraine, of course, would cry foul, and NATO would be confronted with its mandatory obligation for collective defense under Article 5.

In short, NATO would be at war with Russia.

This is not idle speculation.

When explaining his recent decision to deploy some 3,000 US troops to Europe in response to the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, US President Joe Biden declared,

“As long as he’s [Putin] acting aggressively, we are going to make sure we reassure our NATO allies in Eastern Europe that we’re there and Article 5 is a sacred obligation.”

Biden’s comments echo those made during his initial visit to NATO Headquarters, on June 15 last year.

At that time, Biden sat down with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and emphasized America’s commitment to Article 5 of the NATO charter.

“Article 5 we take as a sacred obligation,”

Biden said.

“I want NATO to know America is there.”

Biden’s view of NATO and Ukraine is drawn from his experience as vice president under Barack Obama.

In 2015, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work told reporters,

As President Obama has said, Ukraine should … be able to choose its own future. And we reject any talk of a sphere of influence. 

And speaking in Estonia this past September, the president made it clear that our commitment to our NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression is unwavering. 

As he said it, in this alliance there are no old members and there are no new members. 

There are no junior partners and there are no senior partners. 

There are just allies, pure and simple. And we will defend the territorial integrity of every single ally.”

Just what would this defense entail?

As someone who once trained to fight the Soviet Army, I can attest that a war with Russia would be unlike anything the US military has experienced – ever.

The US military is neither organized, trained, nor equipped to fight its Russian counterparts.

Nor does it possess doctrine capable of supporting large-scale combined arms conflict.

If the US was to be drawn into a conventional ground war with Russia, it would find itself facing defeat on a scale unprecedented in American military history. In short, it would be a rout.

Don’t take my word for it.

In 2016, then-Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, when speaking about the results of a study – the Russia New Generation Warfare – he had initiated in 2015 to examine lessons learned from the fighting in eastern Ukraine, told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that the Russians have superior artillery firepower, better combat vehicles, and have learned sophisticated use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for tactical effect.

“Should US forces find themselves in a land war with Russia,”

McMaster said,

“they would be in for a rude, cold awakening.”

In short, they would get their asses kicked.

America’s 20-year Middle Eastern misadventure in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria produced a military that was no longer capable of defeating a peer-level opponent on the battlefield.

This reality was highlighted in a study conducted by the US Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade, the central American component of NATO’s Rapid Deployment Force, in 2017.

The study found that US military forces in Europe were underequipped, undermanned, and inadequately organized to confront military aggression from Russia.

The lack of viable air defense and electronic warfare capability, when combined with an over-reliance on satellite communications and GPS navigation systems, would result in the piecemeal destruction of the US Army in rapid order should they face off against a Russian military that was organized, trained, and equipped to specifically defeat a US/NATO threat.

The issue isn’t just qualitative, but also quantitative – even if the US military could stand toe-to-toe with a Russian adversary (which it can’t), it simply lacks the size to survive in any sustained battle or campaign.

The low-intensity conflict that the US military waged in Iraq and Afghanistan has created an organizational ethos built around the idea that every American life is precious, and that all efforts will be made to evacuate the wounded so that they can receive life-saving medical attention in as short a timeframe as possible.

This concept may have been viable where the US was in control of the environment in which fights were conducted.

It is, however, pure science fiction in large-scale combined arms warfare.

There won’t be medical evacuation helicopters flying to the rescue – even if they launched, they would be shot down.

There won’t be field ambulances – even if they arrived on the scene, they would be destroyed in short order.

There won’t be field hospitals – even if they were established, they would be captured by Russian mobile forces.

What there will be is death and destruction, and lots of it.

Massive destruction of all American and NATO ground forces

One of the events which triggered McMaster’s study of Russian warfare was the destruction of a Ukrainian combined arms brigade by Russian artillery in early 2015.

This, of course, would be the fate of any similar US combat formation.

The superiority Russia enjoys in artillery fires is overwhelming, both in terms of the numbers of artillery systems fielded and the lethality of the munitions employed.

While the US Air Force may be able to mount a fight in the airspace above any battlefield, there will be nothing like the total air supremacy enjoyed by the American military in its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The airspace will be contested by a very capable Russian air force, and Russian ground troops will be operating under an air defense umbrella the likes of which neither the US nor NATO has ever faced.

There will be no close air support cavalry coming to the rescue of beleaguered American troops.

The forces on the ground will be on their own.

This feeling of isolation will be furthered by the reality that, because of Russia’s overwhelming superiority in electronic warfare capability, the US forces on the ground will be deaf, dumb, and blind to what is happening around them, unable to communicate, receive intelligence, and even operate as radios, electronic systems, and weapons cease to function.

Any war with Russia would find American forces slaughtered in large numbers.

Back in the 1980s, we routinely trained to accept losses of 30-40 percent and continue the fight, because that was the reality of modern combat against a Soviet threat.

Back then, we were able to effectively match the Soviets in terms of force size, structure, and capability – in short, we could give as good, or better, than we got.

That wouldn’t be the case in any European war against Russia. The US will lose most of its forces before they are able to close with any Russian adversary, due to deep artillery fires.

Even when they close with the enemy, the advantage the US enjoyed against Iraqi and Taliban insurgents and ISIS terrorists is a thing of the past.

Our tactics are no longer up to par – when there is close combat, it will be extraordinarily violent, and the US will, more times than not, come out on the losing side.

But even if the US manages to win the odd tactical engagement against peer-level infantry, it simply has no counter to the overwhelming number of tanks and armored fighting vehicles Russia will bring to bear.

Even if the anti-tank weapons in the possession of US ground troops were effective against modern Russian tanks (and experience suggests they are probably not), American troops will simply be overwhelmed by the mass of combat strength the Russians will confront them with.

In the 1980s, I had the opportunity to participate in a Soviet-style attack carried out by specially trained US Army troops – the ‘OPFOR’ – at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, where two Soviet-style Mechanized Infantry Regiments squared off against a US Army Mechanized Brigade.

The fight began at around two in the morning.

By 5:30am it was over, with the US Brigade destroyed, and the Soviets having seized their objectives.

There’s something about 170 armored vehicles bearing down on your position that makes defeat all but inevitable.

This is what a war with Russia would look like.

It would not be limited to Ukraine, but extend to battlefields in the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, and elsewhere.

It would involve Russian strikes against NATO airfields, depots, and ports throughout the depth of Europe.

This is what will happen if the US and NATO seek to attach the “sacred obligation” of Article 5 of the NATO Charter to Ukraine.

It is, in short, a suicide pact.

The anti-China speal is fully funded

Paid for by the United States government, and directed at the citizens of America, Australia, Japan and NATO. $7 billion dollars.

China warned you all…

China says US plans to pay athletes to ‘sabotage’ Winter Olympics

From HERE.

BEIJING—China’s foreign ministry and an official newspaper have accused the United States of planning to interfere with and “sabotage” the Beijing Winter Olympics by paying athletes from some countries to make half-hearted efforts in competition and to criticize China.

The allegations were made a week before the Games start amid tensions between the two superpowers that has included a diplomatic boycott of the event by the United States, which has been joined by several other countries.

Asked about the Chinese allegations, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on Saturday reiterated a previous position that Washington was not coordinating a global campaign regarding participation at the Olympics.

Here’s how the Associated Press uses that money…

Olympic teams raise concerns over quarantine hotels

From HERE.
BEIJING (AP) — Not enough food. Inedible meals. No training equipment. Some Olympic athletes unlucky enough to test positive for the coronavirus at the Beijing Olympics feel their quarantine conditions are making a bad situation much worse.

“My stomach hurts, I’m very pale and I have huge black circles around my eyes. I want all this to end. I cry every day. I’m very tired,” Russian biathlon competitor Valeria Vasnetsova posted on Instagram from one of Beijing’s so-called quarantine hotels.

Her problem wasn’t with any symptoms of the virus. 

It was the food.

Vasnetsova posted a picture Thursday of what she said was “breakfast, lunch and dinner for five days already” — a tray with food including plain pasta, an orange sauce, charred meat on a bone, a few potatoes and no greens.

She said she mostly survived on a few pieces of pasta because it was “impossible” to eat the rest, “but today I ate all the fat they serve instead of meat because I was very hungry.” She added she lost a lot of weight and “my bones are already sticking out.”

Well…

Maybe you should judge for yourself. Because the American “news” is just a fucking steaming pile of bullshit. You make the judgement. You watch, and stop reading a purposely funded effort…

Video and narrative by a few American athletes at the Olympics

Video 33MB

Wow!

So what is going on here? How can this “news report” be so differnt from the videos?

It’s easy. It’s called money and power.

Here’s another article. This one is from HERE.

HIDDEN HORRORS;  How China is using Winter Olympics to whitewash regime’s execution vans, concentration camps, black jails & torture

Wait! Can that be right?

Let’s have another look at the Olympics, and talk to some of the participants…

Video and Narrative 2

video 15MB

Let’s try again…

Video and Narrative 3

Video 38MB

Well…

Let’s talk about some of the under-reported aspects of this Beijing Winter Olympics. Heck, did I say “under-reported”? Nope, I meant Never-until-Hell-freezes-over will it ever be reported…

Russian entry into the Ice Hockey Arena

Amazing what can be done! Just amazing!

Video 3MB

Oh, and the kick off performance…

It is tied together with the Putin, Xi Peng plan for a new world order; a multi-polarity world. Watch it from that point of view.

Video 2MB

And the reactions to this performance is sometimes too emotional. Most Westerneer’s won’t understand why it is so meaningful to Asians.

It’s about inclusiveness, belonging and welcoming the little guys, the mistreated and the downtrodden into your fold as equals.

Video 4MB

One last video narrative…

Video 4MB

None of the Western “news” is reporting on the new Xi Peng and Putin agreement. But that is a key aspect of this Olympics at this time.

Just pretend that nothing is going on and act like nothing happened. It reminds me of a child trying to hide behind a curtain by hiding it’s eyes, while the entire body is fully exposed.

When I say that no one is reporting on it, I literally mean no one. What’s more they are not doing ANY REPORTING on the Winter Olympics at all.

Yahoo had one singular article on the Olympics. This is a screen shot of it…

Wow! Those cute girls with the lighted balloons were a “middle finger” to the world? Really?

Let’s look at the “article”…

The 2022 Olympics Opening Ceremony revealed this truth: China has a lot to hide

·Columnist
A day after the International Olympic Committee tried to claim these Games should be free of politics, the Chinese Communist Party staged an Opening Ceremony draped in dual-track political messaging for audiences both inside China and out that was as loud and clear as the fireworks that lit up the Beijing sky.

It was a sign of both Chinese strength in its ability to use the Olympics to spread its narrative and its hidden terror at the truth actually seeping out.

It ended with an affront to the sensibilities and a middle finger to much of the world, whose prominent governments — including the United States, India, Great Britain, Australia and Canada — refused to send diplomats to grant this absurdity any measure of legitimacy.

Then it gets bad

People are getting upset with this onslaught of focused hate…

Such as this gal.

Video 48MB

Now, let’s bounce to asking the question that many of us has pondered. Exactly WHY is Britian, Australia and Japan allowing themselves to pick a fight with China? What’s in it for them. Because as I see it, it’s a lose-lose senario.

There are no upsides.

Opinion | Who are the world’s good leaders?

It’s a topsy-turvy world out there. The world cries out for leaders who can steady the ship of state. Instead, we have a parade of fools like Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison and Justin Trudeau.

Boris is, undoubtedly, a gift to the entertainment world, but he doesn’t belong in government. Previously, he has parlayed his non-seriousness into his personal brand, from which he can wriggle out of any scandal. But this time, with “partygate”, the party is over. Like a kite dancing in the hurricane, he is crashing to earth. No one can trust a single word coming out of his mouth. With zero interest in the mundane business of government, he only comes to life at parties or in front of the camera.

Every time, when he opens his mouth, only hot air comes out. This time, not even his unruly, carefully curated, tousled hair can save him. Clueless about how to govern, and callous to the sufferings of others, he ordered the evacuation of pets over endangered people in the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul. Who knows what lurks in his dark heart? To him, life is just a game, to be played by his rules. He is the living embodiment of Etonian entitlement.

In foreign affairs, he is a one-trick pony, his sole role being a docile US stooge. He follows at his master’s heels into potential armed conflict where Britain has no business to be. He has forgotten the shame that has been visited upon Tony Blair in Iraq and looks likely to repeat that folly. Having decoupled from the EU, Britain’s most important partner, unfriended China, the world’s major rising power, and betrayed France, he now faces a country that demands its pound of flesh. What kind of drug-addled leader would send his country’s newest aircraft carrier out to the South China Sea, looking for trouble, in a region that has long ceased to be Britain’s sphere of influence, endlessly burning precious dollars his country can’t afford—all for the sake of reliving Britain’s imperial past?

Boris, you were born two centuries too late!

Without an ounce of common sense, or an iota of strategic sense, the best that can be said about Boris is that he is never dull. He is unprepared to govern, and unfit to lead. Woe betide any nation that picks Boris as helmsman. He has no clue where Britain is heading, only that he wants to go back to the past. But Winston Churchill he is not, with no idea about the future, no heart for the present and only an obsession with the past. I nominate Boris the geopolitical clown of the world, an expensive joke that Britain can ill-afford, good for boozy parties, but not for party politics.

Sitting one notch below Boris in the totem pole of fools is Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Despite his lineage, his CV is alarmingly thin. Trading on his name, this former bar-room bouncer has become top leader. For once Trump was right, calling the Canadian prime minister “weak and stupid”, allowing his country to be played like a pawn and dragged into a prolonged tug-of-war with China over Huawei’s CFO, whereas his father had studiously cultivated China as an ally. Under Justin, Canada has become the 51st state of the US, with none of the rights, and all of the complications of union. Under his father, neutral Canada refused to live in the pocket of the US, and had a moderating influence on its neighbor’s China policies. With his son’s total tilt towards the US, not a scintilla of that influence remains. It’s gone with the Trumpian hurricane. Foolishly, Trudeau signed up for 5-Eyes to contain China, sending Canadian naval vessels to the most combustible region in the world, the South China Sea. The US has an agenda on containing China which Canada ostensibly doesn’t share. No good can come out of this. If you go looking for trouble, you will find it, sooner or later. All it takes is an accidental cannon and you will find Canadian ships at the bottom of the ocean. And for what?

Trudeau’s one weapon is his good looks. But looks don’t amount to a hill of beans in building relationships. Yes, his looks can charm the pants off the wives of foreign leaders, cuckolding buffoons like Trump. Maybe that’s why Trump has a visceral dislike of Trudeau. But the world needs global leaders with brains, not political ‘gigolos’ with brawn.

Where Boris is funny, Trudeau is weak. Despite being a former bouncer, Justin is seen by Trump as a soft bullying target. Both Boris and Justin share a disinterest in the future, devoid of vision, of strategic awareness, of long-term planning. Both gravitate to photo ops. For this duo, style trumps substance. They are exemplary shallow leaders.

What about the leader Down Under? Oh well, this one takes the cake for suicidal stupidity. One word sums up Scott Morrison: pig-headedness. Previously, Australia enjoyed a comfortable relationship with China, its largest trading partner, a relationship that had been enormously beneficial to both. But, without provocation, Morrison decides to buy into US accusations of China’s abuse of human rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. As a Hong Konger, I can tell him he is dead wrong about my city. Hong Kong is a misgoverned place, yes. But that is because Beijing has given local leaders too long a leash for 23 years, letting US-funded activists run amok: It was a total abuse of freedom, not lack of freedom. For nine months, chaos and violence raged. They are Hong Kong’s Trump-like rioters.

As for Xinjiang, it is imported terror. The US response to 911 attacks was to invade Iraq on false pretenses, killing over a million innocent civilians. Where was Australia’s moral outrage then? China did not invade any country, only rounded up perpetrators for reeducation and job-training, then released them back into the community.

Morrison swallowed CIA propaganda whole.

Then he doubled down and demanded a US-inspired push to investigate China as the source of the coronavirus. By upping the ante, Morrison has derailed Sino-Australian relations, to the detriment of both.

Worse, he is committing billions to building nuclear submarines to counter China’s military rise. Didn’t he know that China must arm itself to fend off aggressive US containment?

What has China done to earn Australian enmity?

The militarization of the South China Sea islands is a matter of life-and-death struggle against US encirclement.

In the history of the world, have you ever heard of one country, trying non-stop for 70 years to encircle another country?

Should China fold its arms and wait for strangulation?

What would Morrison do if Australia were in China’s shoes? Australia would be entitled to the right of self-defense. With trade dollars dwindling, with billions siphoned off into building unneeded nuclear submarines for a non-existent conflict, where is mad Morrison taking Australia?

China and Australia have never been at war. If war breaks out between them, Morrison can take full radioactive credit.

The Taiwan affair had long been a sleepy affair, until America nudges Taiwan separatists into poking the dragon’s eye. As a Pacific country, Australia should do its part to cool the tempers, not fan the flames. So far, what has Australia gained from being a US pawn? Increasingly, Morrison looks like Australia’s Iraq-tainted Tony Blair. Instead of reaping the benefits of the Pacific Century, Australia is swaggering its way into a major needless conflict. I cannot think of an act of geopolitical stupidity more stupendous and suicidal than this.

Western reporters have baselessly and reflexively called President Xi of China “authoritarian”, misjudging him on how he handled the Hong Kong and Xinjiang unrest. They are too blind and biased to see that US judgments are nothing more than anti-China propaganda. Do you deny a sovereign nation’s right to quell imported riots?

Bye-bye Boris, so long Morrison, au revoir Trudeau. You have been proven unfit for office. As for Trump, this serial liar has been caught spouting over twenty thousand falsehoods during his four years in office, with over a thousand lawsuits under his belt. He may be out of office, but not out of the picture. With over 70 million Americans voting for a narcissistic madman, why are Australia, Britain and Canada still licking America’s boots?

By his competence in coping with Covid-19 alone, China’s leader, hands down, deserves an avalanche of accolades. No other leader has acted so decisively in “leveling up”, which Boris boasted but never delivered, smashing up monopolies and ending oppressive profit-making after-school tutoring, promoting “housing for living, not for speculating”, while lifting 800 million out of poverty and building the world’s biggest network of high-speed trains. If you go by achievements, there is only one clear winner in good government. If you call massive and unceremonious sacking of corrupt officials and keeping streets midnight-safe “authoritarian”, then give me “authoritarian” any day. With so many failed states littering the globe, only one leader thinks long-term and promotes “common prosperity”—and he lives and leads in China.

What it means to be British

Funny. Video 3MB

to be a brit-2022-02-06_15.41.40

Opinion | The world owes China an apology

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The West has wronged China, grievously. I say this more in sorrow than in anger. The gulf of misunderstanding between the two seems unbridgeable.

The US and the UK are joined by Australia in an ostentatious diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic games, citing its human rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

To me, as someone who has lived on the mainland, this accusation is the height of irony.

Today’s China is a morally-driven society, full of energy and yearning for economic equality. If you listen to a mainland official and a Hong Kong official speak, the contrast in style and substance is stark.

  • The former speaks of being at one with the people, of national reconstruction, of technological leaps, of selfless service to the people.
  • The latter is adrift in petty talk and lethargically unmotivated. They yak instead of act. If they underperform, their six-figure monthly salary is punctually paid into their bank account. A princely pension awaits.

On the mainland, they would have been turfed out.

The number of mainland officials who have been unceremoniously removed for misdeeds or failures is staggeringly comforting. The Hong Kong “accountability” system is a joke.

In mainland official circles, it is a do-or-die matter.

Chinese officials are paternalists, in that they see themselves as father figures who are entrusted with the welfare of the people.

Hong Kong officials are risk-averse, notorious for inaction, as action carries its own risk. Their first instinct is self-preservation. On the mainland a powerful risk-and-reward system kicks in, and that has made all the difference.

There is something else. Mainland leaders think long-term. They hatch plans that cover five, ten or even a span of a hundred years. Hong Kong officials, and for that matter, leaders in the West, think in terms of ad hoc programs or election cycles. That is why China, without debilitating foreign wars, has leapfrogged other nations.

The term “China speed” says it all.

Go to the mainland, and experience the world’s first truly cashless society. Even beggars have their own QR codes. With no one carrying cash, the streets are free of thieves and robbers.

It is 100% safe to go strolling in the park at midnight.

This is unthinkable in Detroit or LA.

It’s your funeral if you do.

There are no racist insults or attacks either. People’s obsession is their children’s education, not hating those who look different from them.

For a chronically poor country, this is about as close as the Chinese would get to living in an idyllic world. If you talk to Chinese citizens, they will tell you that they trust their government to do what is best.

How can they not?

Their government has wiped out poverty in nearly 130, 000 villages or for over 800 million people. If this sounds too good to be true, it is because this scale of poverty eradication has never been done in human history.

The Chinese don’t just talk the talk, but walk the talk.

And yet, there is not a ripple of approval in the West.

Super-success has made China ultra-rational and far less ideological. Ideology is only a veneer. China is governed like a corporation, sending goods to Africa, not troops. It builds its Belt and Road infrastructure for trade and to circumvent US encirclement.

If Confucius were alive today, he would be amazed to find his ideal realized after two and a half thousand years: The first nation that advocates universal prosperity and a common human destiny.

America’s fear of China is not ideological.

It demonizes China as a communist country to frighten its allies into an anti-China coalition, knowing that it is the only country capable of challenging American unilateralism.

Even if China were to officially rename itself a Confucian country, American paranoia will persist. Vietnam is communist, but posing no threat to American global domination, is welcome into a marriage of convenience.

The world must now decide which system is better for the global order.

China today is what America was during the Second World War—a do-good nation. Post-war,

America has abused its superpower status to start wars and topple regimes it doesn’t like. The adage that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” applies equally to nations as to individuals.

America’s relentless encirclement of China has only produced one result: unite the Chinese people against a hostile West.

The greater the hostility, the greater its internal unity.

China doesn’t seek world domination, knowing it spells nothing but trouble. If there was a Nobel Prize for good government, China would win it hands down.

The world is littered with failed states.

Mexico, to name just one, lives in fear of its drug gangs, with the beautiful beaches of Acapulco patrolled by gun-toting soldiers. No wonder, two-thirds of British polled prefer socialism as a fairer system.

This doesn’t mean that the Chinese system is without weakness. China’s biggest strategic failure is its lack of soft power. It may wield enormous economic muscle, but it has a clunky and crude image. When it reacts angrily to American provocations, Westerners treat that anger as signs of aggression. China is losing the PR war big time.

Style is substance.

In overwhelming numbers, Chinese students flock overseas to study science and technology. Few opt for the arts and humanities. China may boast an army of well-trained interpreters. In a nation with tens of thousands of engineers and scientists, there is not a single eloquent cross-cultural interpreter on the world stage.

The world is facing a choice between tribalist unilateralism or humane universalism, between rationality or extremism, between might and morality.

Cultural insight into what China is all about.

Curious. interesting. Stunning, really stunning.

Video 60MB

Why is America the greatest nation in the world?

This is a great scene from an interview with Jeff Bridges, and I have to tell you that it is very spot-on. This is the full scene.

video 30MB

Listen to what he said.

America used to be great becuase we were brave and fearless. We were informed.

Today, most American live in fear with whatever the latest evil threat is.

And Americans are NOT informed.

Not in the least.

So stay informed. Do not live in fear, and shut that god-damn Western “news media” off. It controls your mind and sucks the precious life blood out of you.

Let’s be real about what nation we are talking about here…

America the land of Billionaires and a permanent underclass of serf-slaves. It’s a horrible mess, and it’s a full idiocracty with nuclear weapons. It is a very dangerous combination.

Video. 42MB

OK, enough of that.

Now for some pretty Chinese girls. Video 1

Tall thin, leggy with a big chest. Video 1 4MB

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 3 FEBRUARY 2022

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THE ANSWERS.

Here they are.

Not good enough; not serious; no grasp of reality. NATO says it’s not to blame for anything and Washington’s willing to talk but only about a few things.

We did not see our three key demands adequately considered: stopping NATO’s expansion, refusing to use strike weapons systems near Russian borders, and returning the bloc’s military infrastructure in Europe to how it was in 1997.”

But, and this is the foundation for the next step in Moscow’s diplomacy offensive, both answers pretend allegiance to common security principles.

RULES-BASED INTERNATIONAL ORDER.

The West is always gassing on about this. Moscow’s next move will demonstrate that what they really mean is that they make up rules, break them whenever they feel like it, and order the others to follow them.

(A recent example of the mutability of the “Rules-Based International Order” is that gay rights are very important in Russia but not at all in Washington’s new “major ally” of Qatar).

Moscow will invite every signatory of OSCE declarations (for example, Helsinki, Istanbul and Astana) to formally re-commit themselves.

If they do, then Moscow will say “act on it now or we will”; if they don’t, then Moscow will say “we won’t either”. Remember R2P? If I were running Moscow, that’s where I would make my move.

THE BIG PRINCIPLE.

The big principle that Moscow is talking about is, quoting the 1999 Istanbul Summit, “(8) Each participating State has an equal right to security… They will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States… (9)

The security of each participating State is inseparably linked to that of all others.”

Kennan saw it in 1998: “Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia“.

Russia was weak then and NATO was strong; now it’s the other way round. NATO strengthened its security at the expense of Russia’s and now its security is weakened as a direct consequence of that very act. That’s the whole issue in a nutshell.

PLANNING.

What we see today has been planned in Moscow (and coordinated with Beijing) over a long time. Did it start with NATO expansion in 1999? US quitting ABM in 2002? Putin’s 2007 Munich speech? The destruction of Libya in 2011?

I don’t know but this is no sudden whim; it has 30 years behind it.

The preparations are complete, Russia is ready for anything.

NATO UNITY

NATO UNITY is crumbling. Maybe Croatia and Hungary aren’t so important but there are signs that Germany and France are not happy.

Europe has to understand that Washington is not its friend: it will sanction Russia to the last Euro and cubic metre of gas. But all we can realistically expect from Europe today are baby steps.

It will take time for the unpleasant reality to sink in.

NATO WAR POWER.

NATO’s a paper pussycat and so it is being shown to be.

Ritter explains that it hasn’t got the military muscle to influence anything. All it can do is destroy third world counties and lose anyway. I wrote this seven years ago and I see nothing to change; do you? Afghanistan? Iraq? Anywhere? Moscow has the military power and, despite the boasts, NATO forces would be just a speed bump.

RUSSIAN WAR POWER.

Russia can’t land an expeditionary force in Mexico and conquer the USA, or conquer Europe, or win a naval war in the South Pacific, or conquer Ukraine; its power projection capability is limited. But it can beat anybody at home. And that’s all its armed forces are there to do.

UKRAINE.

It must now be plain to everyone in Ukraine that their BFFs will only fight to the last Ukrainian. Their biggest cheerleaders are pulling out their citizens and moving their troops back.

Does Zelensky understand that there is precisely one actor whose word he can trust? Russia has been about to “invade Ukraine” since October and it’s amusing to watch Kiev try to strike a balance between “help me!” and “don’t ruin me!”: “at the moment, as we speak, this number is insufficient for a full-scale offensive…“.

Washington is dialling it back too. Another glorious NATO victory soon to be declared! Of course, Moscow never intended to invade and be billed for the repair costs of that shattered polity.

RUSSIA/CHINA.

Putin and Xi will be meeting on Friday. I expect a significant announcement. Beijing is perfectly aware that Moscow is fighting for it too.

AUDIENCE.

The West in its more orotund moments likes to call itself “the international community”. It isn’t. Others watch and notice. Moscow is talking to them too.

PUTIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.

I like to say that nothing they can invent about Putin surprises me. And then they do: he’s the reason aliens haven’t phoned.

China Elementary school

Celebrated for his ability to connect with the people through language -- Xi's often quoted maxims such as "do concrete work and take the lead," "a state thrives on practical work but wanes on empty talk" and "grab the iron bar hard enough to leave a mark" shed some light on how China can achieve so much in such a short period.

-China Today

All Chinese children have mandatory military training throughout their school years. It starts in Kindergarden, and continues weekly. Each grade they learn more skills, and are rated in their classes.

  • First grade. Marching, basic disipline, making beds, saluting, roll call.
  • Second Grade. Formations. Gun disassembly. Patrols. Self defense.
  • Third Grade. hand to hand combit. Target practice…
  • etc…

The following is either a Kindergarden or a first grade. You will note that they concentrate on basic military disipline and training.

Video 12MB

 

Another video. It’s a first-grade obsticle course. Video 9MB

More training.

Here the first grade students are taught how to rescue a teacher who is captured. Of course they are very young, and they are going though the basic skills but each year this training is built upon. By the time they are in middle school and go into the basic training they will be able to do all of this automatically without a second thought.

Video 14MB

Finally here’s a first grade roll call. Video 5MB

When did you learn disipline, respect and pushing yourself under obsticle courses? How do you think the West (led by the United States) can handle a one-on-one confrontation with talented, industrious, and lethal nation of 1.4 billion soldiers?

Maybe the United States should realize that teaching it’s citizenry to be afriad, fearful and to cower and hide is not the best policy.

Keep in mind

The American govenrment is constantly drumming up hatred against Chinese and Asians, and many of the (emotional and downtrodden) urban black populations are really getting riled up and really attacking the Chinese. Such as this video of a black woman hassling a Chinese-American woman waiting in a medical clinic.

It’s a good thing that the security guard is there and puts an end to the harassment.

Video 5.7MB

All this negative energy is going to boomerang back on the American people. Mark. My. Words.

Alexander Dugin: ‘Why a War Will be Good for Russia’

“Once the world changes, new horizons and opportunities will open themselves. The main thing is to get down to business”

Machine translated from Russian.

The Russia-NATO talks have taken the confrontation to a new level. Russia is firmly insisting on a formal refusal to accept the post-Soviet countries into NATO; the West persists in its position, offering in exchange something unnecessary and unimportant, or at least of secondary importance…

Moscow’s position in this case – and this is a new and important element – is not reactive and not passive, but offensive.

NATO has been actively pressuring us for 30 years, including during the whole of Putin’s 20-year period. But only now is Russia ripe to challenge this for real.

In big politics, only force decides everything. “For real” means “by force.

Moscow is taking a serious swing. And now it is impossible to take a step back, otherwise what for was it to take a swing at? We know from gangster movies and from the business of the 90s, and even from street fights, that to pull out a gun (knife, machine gun) and not shoot is almost suicide. Whoever goes for aggravation must realize that if he doesn’t, he will. We are exactly at this point now.

The unipolar world is finished. Contrary to the desperation of Biden and world elites to make one last attempt to save globalism and American hegemony – and this is the meaning of Biden’s campaign slogan (Bild BackBetter – “Rebuild Everything Again and Better”, i.e. “Back to the unipolar 90s”), or Klaus Schwab’s thesis at the Davos forum (Great Reset) – historical time is not reversible: Russia and China already represent two independent poles, solidarity on the major world problems. This means that multipolarity is established here and now.

In history, however, the change of the global world order, alas, is often carried out through wars. Without them, those who lose in no way agree to recognize voluntarily the obvious change. It is a kind of reality check…

Apparently, we still have to do what we should have done – and didn’t do – in 2014. Yes, the starting conditions are much worse, but better late than never. Nobody counts on “never” anymore. The Russia-NATO meeting showed that clearly. Both sides are ready to escalate, and to give in now means to lose irreversibly. The Kremlin clearly does not intend to do this. But the West simply cannot. That would not just be a loss of face, but an admission of defeat.

As usual, the Russians took a long time to get going, so now they must rush ahead.

Let us look into the world which is about to become a reality.

There will be no nuclear war. The stakes are too small for Washington to risk the total annihilation of humanity.

In principle, the outlined sanctions and the final demonization of Russia, the severing of its ties with Europe and the attempt to isolate it completely, exhausts the program of response. The West hopes, if not to prevent what is coming, then to manage in its favor its consequences. This will not be easy. But it is better to have the West as a full-fledged adversary than as a patron or ally (it will end – as it ended so many times in the history of Byzantium and Russia – in betrayal). The West’s claim to be the measure of universal values has failed. Even the West itself no longer believes in this. And other nations and civilizations do not have to share its historical pessimism and the onset of total perversion. Every nation has its own Logos. The Logos of the West has disintegrated into dust…

So, concretely: how will events unfold, if they do – rather than freeze into another nauseating pause?

Eastern Ukraine goes to Novorossia all the way. This is non-negotiable. It is a conscious part of the East Slavic world, always has been, contrary to the feral Russophobic propaganda. Novorossiya – the entire Left Bank + Odessa – has long been waiting for this to come true.

The new state should be immediately accepted into the Eastern Slavic Union, together with Russia and Belarus.

This project will require a new Idea.

Its main features are not difficult to see: Slavic Renaissance (tradition, identity, historical self-consciousness) + social justice that is — right-wing politics + left-wing economy, exactly what everyone is waiting for. We will lose the sixth column immediately after the first shot is fired, we won’t have to convince anyone — it will self-destruct from terror. Liberalism and Westernism will disappear, everything else – both left-wing and right-wing – will remain. This is where the task is to unite them in the name of the great goal. And so it will be.

The sanctions the West is threatening will finish the rest – you can’t think of a better tool to purge traitors and foreign agents. Only the patriots who have nowhere to go and nowhere to run will survive. And it will be their hour – our hour – delayed for seven sluggish years.

The question of Western Ukraine is open. We will hardly be welcomed there. But if we liberate the Ruthenians and transfer some of Kolomoisky’s structures to individual Kiev tycoons, (which are in the East, and therefore will be assimilated from the beginning of the campaign), something can be worked out. However, this will require not only military, but also ideological efforts. If something is taken away, something must be given. With the East of Ukraine everything is clear. With the West not everything, or rather nothing at all is clear.

Here lies the main problem – we can push the border much further to the west and bring our 20 million people back into their native Eastern Slavonic context. But American military bases are unacceptable for us, even on the right bank. However, once the world changes, new horizons and opportunities will open themselves. The main thing is to get down to business.

Although the main direction is west, it is important to differentiate our steps.

In parallel with the East Slavic Union, it is necessary to make the Eurasian Union a reality. The attempted uprising in Kazakhstan and the Taliban factor in Afghanistan reminded us that things are shaky in Central Asia too. We must act decisively there as well. Our friends and allies must quickly decide to what extent they are real friends. And to act accordingly, rather than to appoint Russophobes to ministerial posts. This will have to be paid for seriously.

We have a great ally – China, which has yet to go through something symmetrical with Taiwan and with the protection of territorial integrity – in Xinjiang, Tibet and in the border zones. Its support is key. The West is fighting a war on two fronts — with us, and with the Chinese. This is a unique opportunity – we are a military colossus, China is an economic colossus. Together we are comparable to the West and even outweigh it. And most importantly: they, in the West, are the past, we are the future.

It is important to involve other allies, especially Iran and Pakistan (we are about to have summits with these countries). In addition, it is necessary to secure at least the neutrality of Turkey and India, which is almost guaranteed.

And then we can start….

We are best at direct action. We get lost and confused in negotiations and time is running out. After the first decisive move is made, we will find ourselves in a new reality with new laws.

We’ll figure it out there.

Source: Telegram

Living in China vs Living in America – This is truly shocking…

On You-Tube, but well worth the watch. About ten minutes long. Precious.

Found HERE.

Now from Andrei at The Saker…

Unpacking the Russian-Chinese joint statement

From HERE.

Introduction:

First things first, this is a very long statement (5300 words).  It is also an extremely important one since it deals primarily with grand strategy issues (it discusses the “whats” not the “hows”).  To put it succinctly, this is a common vision of the future shared between Russia and China.  It is therefore also a common goal setting document.  Considering its scope and objective, this is most definitely a crucial historical document.

Next, it is really important to understand who the target audience of this statement is.  By definition, the target audience of such a document is the entire planet, but by its language I would argue that it is pretty clear that this is not a document addressed to anybody in the West (for one thing, it is too long for the average western reader and it is too long to be reprinted or read in full in the general press).  There is a saying which all Russians know: “the East is a delicate/refined matter” (it comes from a famous Soviet movie).  The style and contents of this joint statement shows that it is primarily aimed at the Russian and Chinese public, especially those in position of power: to a typical western reader the text itself looks long-winded and full of well-meaning platitudes.  The Russians and the Chinese understand each other much better, and not only can they read between the lines and they can evaluate what is said and what is only suggested.  The fact that some things are only alluded to does in no way make them less crucial.  Again, the audience here is most definitely not a western one.

Having said all that, I want to pick, roughly in order, some key parts of that speech and try to unpack what this joint statement really says.  This is a somewhat arbitrary selection, in reality, word letter and comma matter here, but for the sake of brevity, I won’t comment on the full text.  I do, however, recommend that you take the time and read it here: http://thesaker.is/joint-statement-of-the-russian-federation-and-the-peoples-republic-of-china-on-the-international-relations-entering-a-new-era-and-the-global-sustainable-development/

***

Key excerpts from the RU-CH Joint Statement: (emphasis added)

Some actors representing but the minority on the international scale continue to advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues and resort to force; they interfere in the internal affairs of other states, infringing their legitimate rights and interests, and incite contradictions, differences, and confrontation, thus hampering the development and progress of mankind, against the opposition from the international community.

Translation into plain English: the USA and a few of its vassal states want to maintain a world hegemony and ignore international law.  This is a threat to the peace and security of our entire planet.  We oppose this.

There is no one-size-fits-all template to guide countries in establishing democracy. A nation can choose such forms and methods of implementing democracy that would best suit its particular state, based on its social and political system, its historical background, traditions, and unique cultural characteristics. It is only up to the people of the country to decide whether their State is a democratic one.

Translation into plain English: there is no one way to establish real people power, and outsiders are, by definition, disqualified from judging the degree of “democracy” of any nation.  Each nation has the right to decide how it wants to live, how it wants to formally structure its people power and only the people of that nation can decide whether their country’s organization faithfully expresses and upholds their national values.  Outsiders cannot think of themselves as “teachers of democracy”.

The sides reaffirm their focus on building the Greater Eurasian Partnership in parallel and in coordination with the Belt and Road construction to foster the development of regional associations as well as bilateral and multilateral integration processes for the benefit of the peoples on the Eurasian continent. The sides agreed to continue consistently intensifying practical cooperation for the sustainable development of the Arctic.

Translation into plain English: we, the locals, are (and have been) building a Eurasian community which will encompass the entire Eurasian landmass and its adjacent Arctic waters.  This Eurasian landmass will be sovereignly ruled by those nations who compose it.

The sides are gravely concerned about serious international security challenges and believe that the fates of all nations are interconnected. No State can or should ensure its own security separately from the security of the rest of the world and at the expense of the security of other States.

Translation into plain English: security is always and by definition collective.  There cannot be security for some at the expense of the security of others.  The AngloZionist Empire’s notion of unilateral security is basically putting a gun to the head of each nation on the planet with the very explicit threat to pull the trigger if that nation dares to resist this typical act of imperialist aggression.

The sides reaffirm their strong mutual support for the protection of their core interests, state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and oppose interference by external forces in their internal affairs.

Translation into plain English: we are, and will, be standing side by side and we will jointly defeat those forces who are trying to prevent us from achieving and maintaining true, full, sovereignty.

The Russian side reaffirms its support for the One-China principle, confirms that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and opposes any forms of independence of Taiwan.

Translation into plain English:Russia will support the Chinese efforts to reintegrate Taiwan.  Russia has got China’s back.

Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose color revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.

Translation into plain English: China will support Russia in her efforts to prevent the USA/NATO/EU to turn the Ukraine into an anti-Russia or to overthrow governments friendly to Russia.  China has got Russia’s back.

The sides believe that certain States, military and political alliances, and coalitions seek to obtain, directly or indirectly, unilateral military advantages to the detriment of the security of others, including by employing unfair competition practices, intensify geopolitical rivalry, fuel antagonism and confrontation, and seriously undermine the international security order and global strategic stability. The sides oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized cold war approaches, to respect the sovereignty, security and interests of other countries, the diversity of their civilizational, cultural and historical backgrounds, and to exercise a fair and objective attitude towards the peaceful development of other States.

Translation into plain English: the West is trying to destabilize, subvert, control and destroy any country which is not willing to become a US vassal state.  NATO is an aggressive, violent and totalitarian superstructure whose aim is to prevent any country from achieving sovereignty.  It is just the latest iteration of Anglo imperialism.  It’s ideology is based on hate and projection of its own hateful worldview and ethos unto others.  It’s nature is imperialist and its motto divide et impera.  We will oppose that geostrategic malignant tumor together.

The sides are seriously concerned about the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom (AUKUS), which provides for deeper cooperation between its members in areas involving strategic stability, in particular their decision to initiate cooperation in the field of nuclear-powered submarines. Russia and China believe that such actions are contrary to the objectives of security and sustainable development of the Asia-Pacific region, increase the danger of an arms race in the region, and pose serious risks of nuclear proliferation.

Translation into plain English: AUKUS is yet a further iteration of Anglo imperialism.  It is dangerous and we will oppose it together.

The sides call on the United States to respond positively to the Russian initiative and abandon its plans to deploy intermediate-range and shorter-range ground-based missiles in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. The Chinese side is sympathetic to and supports the proposals put forward by the Russian Federation to create long-term legally binding security guarantees in Europe.

Translation into plain English: China fully backs the Russian ultimatum to the West.  The West’s rejection of the Russian demands also affects to Asia-Pacific region and, therefore, it affects and even threatens China’s national interests.  Russia and China have a common goal to resist the West’s imperialistic policies.

The sides note that the denunciation by the United States of a number of important international arms control agreements has an extremely negative impact on international and regional security and stability. The sides express concern over the advancement of U.S. plans to develop global missile defense and deploy its elements in various regions of the world, combined with capacity building of high-precision non-nuclear weapons for disarming strikes and other strategic objectives.

Translation into plain English: Russia will not allow the US to militarily encircle China and China will not allow the US to militarily encircle Russia.  Russia and China stand back to back and will protect each other, thereby foiling any Anglo plans to encircle either one, or both, of these nations.

The sides oppose attempts by some States to turn outer space into an arena of armed confrontation and reiterate their intention to make all necessary efforts to prevent the weaponization of space and an arms race in outer space. They will counteract activities aimed at achieving military superiority in space and using it for combat operations.

Translation into plain English: Russian and Chinese space programs will make a joint effort to defeat the Anglo attempts at militarizing space, both countries will help each other to develop future space capabilities and to create and deploy the means to prevent the US from threatening them from space.

The sides emphasize that domestic and foreign bioweapons activities by the United States and its allies raise serious concerns and questions for the international community regarding their compliance with the BWC. The sides share the view that such activities pose a serious threat to the national security of the Russian Federation and China and are detrimental to the security of the respective regions.

Translation into plain English:the USA clearly has an active biowarfare program.  Russia and China feel threatened by this and they will act together to stop the USA from developing illegal and dangerous bioweapons.

The Russian side notes the significance of the concept of constructing a ”community of common destiny for mankind“ proposed by the Chinese side to ensure greater solidarity of the international community and consolidation of efforts in responding to common challenges. The Chinese side notes the significance of the efforts taken by the Russian side to establish a just multipolar system of international relations.

Translation into plain English: Russia and China agree that the new, post Western, world order they want to achieve will be based on the brotherhood and solidarity of all those countries who, rather than exploiting the entire planet for the benefit of a few, want to see an international systems based on shared values rather than on greed and the oppression of the weak by the strong.  In that system, relations between countries will be based on international law and the United Nations as its cornerstone and not by some ad hoc “alliances of the willing” or any other such illegal nonsense.

They reaffirm that the new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ”forbidden“ areas of cooperation, strengthening of bilateral strategic cooperation is neither aimed against third countries nor affected by the changing international environment and circumstantial changes in third countries.

Translation into plain English:relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era” is pretty darn clear:  Russia and China are more than allies or “just” symbionts, the alliance they have formed is not a western-style peace of paper which can be revoked or ignored.  

Russia and China have decided to establish a true “friendship which knows no limits“, that is a brotherhood that is much bigger in scope and much deeper in nature than any formal alliance.  

The two countries see a common future and will stand by each other as two loving brothers.  

Note: the choice of words “friendship with no limits” has been carefully crafted to not make sense to a western audience which will see it only as “pious and vague platitudes with no binding obligations” but which will be very clear to those who come from the Russian and Chinese civilizational realms.  

Simply put: nobody in the West truly believes in “friendship” between states, only situational allies and personal interests.  

The concept of friendship has a very different meaning in China and Russia.  Furthermore, “no limits” is also nonsensical in western geopolitics.  

Again, to a Russian or Chinese audience the paragraph above means and expresses much MORE than any “alliance”, “treaty” or “agreement”.  Western political leaders simply cannot fathom or imagine what Russia and China are saying here – their minds simply cannot comprehend what is being said here.

Russia and China aim to comprehensively strengthen the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and further enhance its role in shaping a polycentric world order based on the universally recognized principles of international law, multilateralism, equal, joint, indivisible, comprehensive and sustainable security. They consider it important to consistently implement the agreements on improved mechanisms to counter challenges and threats to the security of SCO member states and, in the context of addressing this task, advocate expanded functionality of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure.

Translation into plain English: China and Russia will develop their full-spectrum security cooperation.  Just as the CSTO recently, the SCO will soon grow more powerful “teeth” and bare them if/when needed.  And don’t be fooled by the reference to “anti-terrorism” choice of worlds.  The recent CSTO operation in Kazakhstan was also an “anti-terrorist” one :-)

Conclusion:

The release of this joint statement is the geostrategic equivalent of Putin’s famous speech in which he described the new Russian weapons systems: it will initially be dismissed by western politicians who will then slowly undergo the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance).  This “limitless friendship” working towards a “community of common destiny for mankind” is the absolute worst nightmare of western imperialism and it is only made worse by the fact that there is absolutely nothing which the West can do to foil, oppose or even slow the progress of Russia and China towards their common goal and future.

Far from “attacking” the West or from invading anybody,  Russia and China have been doing something for years already and now what that “something” is is quite clear (at least to those with the sobriety and intelligence to see it):  Russia and China are simply leaving the united West behind, letting it do its own thing (political, cultural, economic, military and even spiritual suicide) while they built an alternative.

You could say that Zone B does not want to destroy or bring down Zone A.  Zone B want to offer an alternative to Zone A and then let each nation decide for itself what zone it wants to live in.

There is one word which is missing from this statement.  That word is “Iran“.

It is not missing because China or Russia don’t care about Iran or don’t realize how important Iran will be for the future of the Middle-East and even our entire planet.  They know that very, very well.  The reason the word “Iran” is missing is simple: while Iran is most definitely a friend and ally of both Russia and China, Iran does not share a “limitless friendship” or brotherly symbiotic relationship with either country.  Neither is Iran a full member of the SCO, yet (but will be soon). Talk about true diversity!  These countries have completely different cultures, histories and political systems, yet they fully support each other.  That is the “there is no one-size-fits-all template” model already being built before our eyes!  I also believe that Iran’s bid to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation was approved but in needs to be formalized (may be mistaken here)..  Yet both China and Russia understand that Iran is crucial, not only as a gateway for Russia and China into the Middle-East, but also as a crucial member of the supra-ideological system of alliances Russia and China want to create.  In fact, these countries have been helping each other for years already.  But there is more, look at this:

  • Russia is a democratic and “social” state, with a weird, and changing, mix of capitalism and traditional Russian collectivism.
  • China is a unique mix of capitalism and Communist state control
  • Iran is an Islamic Republic.

Talk about true diversity!  These countries have completely different cultures, histories and political systems, yet they fully support each other.  That is the “there is no one-size-fits-all template” model already being built before our eyes!  I also believe that Iran’s bid to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was approved but in needs to be formalized and fully implemented.

This model will attract and easily include those Latin American countries which will chose “21 century socialism” (primarily developed by Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia) ideology.  It will also be far more attractive to many African countries than the “western imperialist boot” (examples include Mali, Burkina Faso, Congo and, potentially many others).

The map below shows the current situation.

The Russian-Chinese joint statement tells us all we need to know about how this map will change in the near future.

Andrei

Underwhelming?

For all of you who think that the events and 6000 word statement is “underwhelming” take a note that…

Kremlin reveals number of approved agreements during Putin’s visit to China
There are 16 intergovernmental, interdepartmental and commercial documents

MOSCOW, February 4. /TASS/. A package of 16 intergovernmental, interdepartmental and commercial documents was approved as part of the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to China. The list of documents was posted on the Kremlin’s website on Friday.

The Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development was adopted during the Sino-Russian summit talks.

In particular, the Russian state corporation Roscosmos and the Chinese Satellite Navigation System Commission signed a cooperation deal in the sphere of mutual complementarity of the GLONASS and Beidou global satellite navigation systems.

The Russian Ministry of Economic Development and China's Ministry of Commerce made a joint statement on the completion of developing a roadmap for mutual trade in goods and services and signed a memorandum of understanding for deepening investment cooperation in sustainable (green) development areas.

The customs authorities of Russia and China signed a protocol on mutual recognition of the status of an authorized economic operator. The parties approved 11 intergovernmental and interdepartmental documents in total.

Four commercial contracts were signed during the visit. Gazprom and CNPC inked a long-term contract for the delivery of 10 bln cubic meters of natural gas over the Far Eastern route. Rosneft and Huawei sealed a deal on cooperation. Rosneft and CNPC signed an agreement on the deliveries of 100 mln tonnes of oil via Kazakhstan over a decade and approved a memorandum of understanding to cooperate in the low-carbon development sphere.

Video 2

Girl in a nice bouncy sweater. Video 2 4MB

What about India?

Ah. The “QUAD” to contain China, and now Russia. How does India fit in? Here’s an editorial from HERE.

US plays QUAD card during Beijing Olympics

The appalling decision by the External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to huddle together with his QUAD colleagues bang in the middle of the Beijing Winter Olympics may have unpleasant consequences. 

China sees QUAD as a US-led clique working to “contain” it. 

An action-reaction syndrome has once again developed. Beijing’s apparent retaliation by picking the Galwan hero as the Olympic torchbearer was not the end of the story.

Delhi swiftly crossed over to the US-led group to boycott the Beijing Olympics. Some protestors in Delhi also set the Chinese national flag on fire.

Even a moron would know China regards the staging of the Winter Olympics as a cherished moment.

President Xi Jinping’s toast at the Welcoming Banquet of The Olympic Winter Games on Friday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing exuded immense national pride when he said,

“China has just entered the Year of the Tiger according to the lunar calendar. Tiger is a symbol of strength, courage and fearlessness.”

That is precisely why the US, including President Biden himself, smear Beijing Olympics. Americans are bad losers. They feel impotent as China marches ahead inexorably while the US is declining irreversibly. Panic and hatred is setting in mixed with intense envy and helplessness. 

But what has India got to do with it? 

India did well not to join the US-led boycott of the Games initially. But it has since “tweaked” its principled stance when Washington mooted the idea to schedule a QUAD ministerial in Asia-Pacific on February 9.

Apparently, it occurred to no one in Delhi to ask Washington: “Why February 9? Why not after February 20?”

Plainly put, the upcoming QUAD ministerial on Wednesday is a contrived American sideshow to thumb the nose at Beijing bang in the middle of the Olympics.

This cheeky move by Washington is linked to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s regional tour to Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii “for a series of bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral engagements to advance our priorities in the Indo-Pacific.”

Obviously, it was hatched much before the Galwan hero appeared in the news cycle.

The US state department gave the customary briefing in Washington on the QUAD ministerial venture on coming Wednesday

“in this era of intense competition, changing strategic landscapes… (for) strengthening the security environment in the region to push back against aggression and coercion… “

(By the way, the briefing was timed exactly for February 4, the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.)

Interestingly, Assistant Secretary Daniel Kritenbrink who gave the briefing took umbrage at the China-Russia joint statement issued at Beijing earlier in the day following President Vladimir Putin’s visit.

Kritenbrink who is in charge of the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, in fact, came armed with a tirade against both China and Russia.

He said: 

“The (Xi-Putin) meeting should have provided China the opportunity to encourage Russia to pursue diplomacy and de-escalation in Ukraine.  

That is what the world expects from responsible powers.  

If Russia further invades Ukraine and China looks the other way, it suggests that China is willing to tolerate or tacitly support Russia’s efforts to coerce Ukraine even when they embarrass Beijing, harm European security, and risk global peace and economic stability.  

We have, unfortunately, seen this before.  

This marks the second time that Russia has escalated aggression towards a sovereign country during a Beijing Olympics.  

The last time was Russia’s invasion of Georgia during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  

The United States has had almost 200 diplomatic engagements with allies and partners since Russia created this crisis.  

We are focused on working with allies and partners, including in the Indo-Pacific, to respond decisively if Russia further invades Ukraine.”

Now, this is the other thing about QUAD.

It is no longer about containing China alone; Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy is poised to advance its ‘dual containment’ of China and Russia.

The Indian leaders travelling in the QUAD bandwagon ought to know that they are also being drawn unwittingly into the US’ dual containment of China and Russia.

Russia has been explicit in its criticism of the QUAD as a factor of instability and regional discord in the Asia-Pacific. The EAM cannot close his eyes and pretend he’s cherrypicking. The big-power rivalries are getting very serious, as anyone who reads newspapers can tell.

At any rate, the appalling thing is that India has now got into the US bandwagon, armed with a Galwan-hero alibi. And this is coming at a time when the tensions on the border have shown signs of easing and there’s hope of a better climate becoming available for further talks between India and China.

Isn’t this history repeating — US butting into India-China discourses in self-interest and India refusing to reject such attempts, which in turn triggering negative vibes that of course become grist to the mill of the clutch of operatives who all along wanted to fasten India in the American stable?

In these troubled times, how rationally and with maturity Germany is handling its difficult relationship with Russia offers some fresh ideas. Indeed, Germany has a far more painful and complex relationship with Russia than India can ever imagine with any of its neighbours. Yet, German Minister of Defense Christine Lambrecht has opposed any attempt to draw a link between between Nord Stream 2 and Germany’s differences with Moscow over Ukraine.

Equally, Berlin rejects calls for German arms deliveries to Ukraine and reportedly also blocked the export of German weapons by third countries like Estonia. As Marcel Dirsus, a German think tanker at the Institute for Security Policy at the University of Kiel, wrote this week, Germany has “moved beyond power politics, the national interest and militarism.”

It is borne out of a “historically-informed sense of security.” Dirsus writes:

“Whether true or false, the idea that dialogue is more effective than deterrence is deeply embedded in German political culture… Since the end of the Cold War, Germany has largely found itself in a position to trade freely with anyone and everyone without being constrained by rigorous considerations of politics or security.”

Indeed, what really brought down the Berlin Wall wasn’t missiles or tanks, but engagement — the strategy known as Ostpolitik. But then, German foreign policy is the way it is because that is the way Germans want it.

That is the cardinal difference between Germans and Indians. In our country, the public opinion roots for militarism with active encouragement from the establishment. Curiously, the Indian opposition too constantly taunts the government for not being aggressive enough toward China, a superpower manifold stronger than India.

It is not that the opposition politicians are illiterate, but they parrot what their constituents think — even if they themselves understand what’s at stake. To be sure, the EAM’s a priori assumption too is well-founded — that his decision to attend the QUAD ministerial is bound to go down well in the Indian bazaar, although he must be intelligent enough to know that it may weaken the nascent process at the border talks. Sadly, India comes out a loser in all this.

Movie “The Battle at Lake Changjin”

If anyone wants more fireworks, the Chinese-made Korean war epic “The Battle at Lake Changjin” is now up on Youtube. It’s got English subtitles and it’s free.

It’s very good, for a war movie, and it was pleasing to see the American army soundly defeated for a change.

Also it’s a good look at the Peoples’ Volunteer Army in comparison to the American Marines.

In one scene, the Americans are feasting on turkey dinners in tents while the volunteers are sharing cold potatoes in the snow. One take-away I had from the movie is that it’s a sign the empire is in decline.

https://youtu.be/j7AXdh3OpZA

Here’s a short scene (historically accurate) depicting how the Chinese fight. With overwhelming manpower and an intense devotion to sacrifice.

Video 90MB

abreviet-attack-scene-2022-02-07_11.20.32

Here’s a short scene (historically accurate) from the movie. It depicts the moment when the Chinese took over the American HQ…

video 54MB

abreviet-capture-scene-2022-02-07_11.04.40

Article by Vladimir Putin ”Russia and China: A Future-Oriented Strategic Partnership“ for the Chinese News Agency Xinhua

On the eve of my upcoming visit to China, I am pleased to address directly the large Chinese and foreign audience of Xinhua, the world’s largest news agency.

Our countries are close neighbours bound by centuries-old traditions of friendship and trust. We highly appreciate that Russian-Chinese relations of comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation, entering a new era, have reached an unprecedented level and have become a model of efficiency, responsibility, and aspiration for the future. The basic principles and guidelines for joint work were defined by our countries in the Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, the twentieth anniversary of which we celebrated last year. These are, first and foremost, equality, consideration of one another’s interests, freedom from political and ideological circumstances, as well as from the vestiges of the past. These are the principles we are consistently building on year after year in the spirit of continuity to deepen our political dialogue. Despite the difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic, we are striving to dynamically build the capacity of economic partnerships and expand humanitarian exchanges.

During the upcoming visit, the President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping and I will thoroughly discuss key issues on the bilateral, regional, and global agendas. It is symbolic that our meeting will take place during the Spring Festival – the Chinese Lunar New Year. After all, as the Chinese saying goes, ”make your whole year’s plan in the spring“.

The development of business ties will certainly be given special attention. There is every opportunity for this as our countries have substantial financial, industrial, technological and human resources allowing us to successfully resolve long-term development issues. By working together, we can achieve stable economic growth and improve the well-being of our citizens, strengthen our competitiveness, and stand together against today’s risks and challenges.

At the end of 2021, the volume of mutual trade increased by more than a third, exceeding the record level of 140 billion U.S. dollars. We are well on the way towards our goal of increasing the volume of trade to 200 billion U.S. dollars a year. A number of important initiatives are being implemented in the investment, manufacturing, and agro-industrial sectors. In particular, the portfolio of the Intergovernmental Commission on Investment Cooperation includes 65 projects worth over 120 billion U.S. dollars. This is about collaboration in such industries as mining and mineral processing, infrastructure construction, and agriculture.

We are consistently expanding the practice of settlements in national currencies and creating mechanisms to offset the negative impact of unilateral sanctions. A major milestone in this work was the signing of the Agreement between the Government of Russia and the Government of the PRC on payments and settlements in 2019.

A mutually beneficial energy alliance is being formed between our countries. Along with long-term supplies of Russian hydrocarbons to China, we have plans to implement a number of large-scale joint projects. The construction of four new power units at Chinese nuclear power plants with the participation of Rosatom State Corporation launched last year is one of them. All this significantly strengthens the energy security of China and the Asia region as a whole.

We see an array of opportunities in the development of partnerships in information and communication technologies, medicine, space exploration, including the use of national navigation systems and the International Lunar Research Station project. A serious impetus to strengthening bilateral ties was given by the cross Years of Russian-Chinese Scientific, Technical and Innovative Cooperation in 2020–2021.

We are grateful to our Chinese colleagues for their assistance in launching the production of Russian Sputnik V and Sputnik Light vaccines in China and for the timely supply of necessary protective equipment to our country. We hope that this cooperation will develop and strengthen.

One of Russia’s strategic objectives is to accelerate the social and economic upliftment of Siberia and the Russian Far East. These territories are immediate neighbors of the PRC. We also intend to actively develop interregional ties. Thus, the modernization of the Baikal-Amur Mainline and the Trans-Siberian Railway has been started. By 2024, their capacity must increase one and a half times through higher volumes of transit cargo and reduced transport time. The port infrastructure in the Russian Far East is also growing. All this should further enhance the complementarity of the Russian and Chinese economies.

And, of course, the conservation of nature and shared ecosystems remains an important area of bilateral cross-border and interregional cooperation. These issues have always been the focus of our countries’ public attention, and we will certainly discuss them in detail during the negotiations, as well as a wide range of humanitarian topics.

Russia and China are countries with thousands of years of unique traditions and tremendous cultural heritage, the interest in which is persistently high both in our countries and abroad. It is true that in the last two years the number of tourists, joint mass events, and direct contacts between our citizens has reduced due to the pandemic. However, I have no doubt that we will catch up and, as soon as the situation allows, will launch new outreach and educational programs to introduce our citizens to the history and present-day life of the two countries. Thus, President Xi Jinping and I have agreed to hold the Years of Russian-Chinese cooperation in physical fitness and sports in 2022 and 2023.

Certainly, an important part of the visit will be a discussion of relevant international topics. The coordination of the foreign policy of Russia and China is based on close and coinciding approaches to solving global and regional issues. Our countries play an important stabilizing role in today’s challenging international environment, promoting the democratization of the system of interstate relations to make it more equitable and inclusive. We are working together to strengthen the central coordinating role of the United Nations in global affairs and to prevent the international legal system, with the UN Charter at its centre, from being eroded.

Russia and China are actively cooperating on the broadest agenda within BRICS, RIC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as other associations. Within the G20, we are committed to taking national specifics into account when formulating our recommendations, be it the fight against pandemics or the implementation of the climate agenda. Thanks to a large extent to our countries’ shared solidarity, following the 2021 G20 Summit in Rome informed decisions were made on international cooperation to restore economic growth, recognize vaccines and vaccine certificates, optimize energy transitions, and reduce digitalization risks.

We also have convergent positions on international trade issues. We advocate maintaining an open, transparent and non-discriminatory multilateral trading system based on the rules of the World Trade Organization. We support relaunching of global supply chains. Back in March 2020, Russia proposed an initiative on ”green trade corridors“ that excludes any sanctions, political and administrative barriers. Its implementation is a useful aid to overcoming the economic consequences of the pandemic.

The XXIV Olympic Winter Games starting in Beijing are a major event of global significance. Russia and China are leading sporting nations renowned for their sporting traditions and not once have hosted the largest international competitions with dignity. I fondly remember my visit to Beijing in August 2008 to attend the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. Guests and athletes from Russia will remember the vivid performance for a long time, and the Games themselves were organized with the scale and exceptional hospitality inherent to our Chinese friends. For our part, we were delighted to host President Xi Jinping at the opening of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Sadly, attempts by a number of countries to politicize sports to the benefit of their ambitions have recently intensified. This is fundamentally wrong and contrary to the very spirit and principles of the Olympic Charter. The power and greatness of sports are that it brings people together, gives moments of triumph and pride for the country and delights with fair, just and uncompromising competition. And these approaches are shared by most of the states participating in the international Olympic Movement.

Our Chinese friends have done tremendous work to prepare well for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. I am convinced that China’s extensive experience in the excellent organization of representative international competitions will make it possible to hold this festival of world sports at the highest level. I would like to wish the Russian and Chinese teams impressive results and new records!

I send my warmest congratulations to the friendly people of China on the occasion of the Spring Festival, which marks the beginning of the Year of the Tiger. I wish you good health, prosperity, and success.

Video 3

She’s one of my favorites. Short, cute, big happy smile. She makes me feel good about life. video 9MB

Here’s another of her…

I’ve got to tell you, I really do like her presentation, and this is what China is like. It’s really nice, peopled with very nice people.

video 7MB

Unprecedented China-Russia ties to start a new era of intl relations not defined by US

Joint statement highlights close coordination, rejects US hegemony

Following the highly anticipated meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, China and Russia issued a lengthy joint statement that elaborated on shared views and consensuses on major global and regional issues and delivered a scathing rejection of the US-led West’s hegemony that increasingly threatens global security and stability, a move that experts say ushers in a new era of international relations.

During the meeting ahead of the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, Xi stressed the further deepening of “back-to-back” strategic coordination between the two countries in upholding international fairness and justice and adhering to the four consensuses in supporting each other’s sovereignty, security and development interests to better tackle external interference and regional threats.

The two countries’ broad consensuses on almost all core issues related to global strategic stability, expressed during the meeting of the two leaders and stated in the nearly 6,000-word joint statement, are extremely rare and will further boost close strategic coordination that helps ensure global stability and peace, Chinese experts said.

The joint statement, which focuses on international relations in a new era and global sustainable development, extensively expounded on common positions on democracy, development, security and order.

The joint statement mentioned US at least five times and contained the two countries’ common stance on a number of key regional and global issues, including…

  • firm oppositions or serious concerns over the expansion of NATO eastward,
  • the West-led ideological clique in the name of democracy,
  • the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy that threatens regional stability,
  • the trilateral security partnership among Australia,
  • the US, and the UK (AUKUS),
  • and US domestic and overseas bioweapons activities.In a clear rejection of the US-led West’s hegemony in international relations, the joint statement said that a small number of forces continue stubbornly to promote unilateralism, adopt power politics and interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, stressing that such acts will not be accepted by the international community.
    "It's the first time that China and Russia released such a long statement after the meeting between the two heads of state, which includes all the major issues and strategic questions and shows that China-Russia ties have reached an unprecedented level,"  
    
    -Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Friday.

    The world order has entered a new era, the Chinese expert said, noting that in the face of US hegemony – a product left behind by the Cold War mentality – China and Russia are the only two countries that have the capability to safeguard their core interests and sovereignty.

    "The solidarity between China and Russia gives a new definition to the world order, as they share the common knowledge about where the major threats to the global stability come from,"

He said.

In the joint statement,

  • China and Russia oppose the further expansion of NATO and called on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches,
  • to respect the sovereignty, security and interests of other countries, the diversity of their civilizational, cultural and historical backgrounds,
  • and to exercise a fair and objective attitude towards the peaceful development of other states.They also stand against the formation of closed bloc structures and opposing camps in the Asia-Pacific region and remain highly vigilant about the negative impact of the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region.

China and Russia are also seriously concerned about AUKUS, which allows cooperation on nuclear-powered submarines.

"The US is now touting its Cold War mentality and so-called China threat theory in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the so-called Russia threat theory in Europe, which prompted China and Russia to stand up against such zero-sum mentality," 

-Zhang Hong, an Eastern European studies expert from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Friday.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, unrest across Western countries such as the US Capitol protest last year shows how the illusion that “Western democracy is the destination of human beings” has collapsed, Zhang noted, adding that emerging countries are showing great vitality and increasingly contributing in international trade and economy, which have also been underscored in the shared views between China and Russia.

The two countries share an understanding that democracy is a universal human value, rather than the privilege of a limited number of countries, the joint statement said. And it is up to the people of a country to decide whether their country is democratic.

Developing countries such as China and Russia gradually found a development model suitable to their own national conditions after the Cold War, while abandoning the West-led Washington Consensus because they saw its inherent defects, which prompted China and Russia to be more vocal on a pluralistic global order, Zhang said.

China and Russia have been reiterating that there is no limit to bilateral strategic cooperation, a new form of partnership between major powers that has clearly made the US anxious. And a crucial factor behind such a limitless development in bilateral ties is the high degree of mutual understanding between the two powerful leaders on global governance.

Putin is the first foreign head of state to confirm his attendance at the 2022 Games last year, and the trip to Beijing was also his first overseas trip in 2022.

Putin said during the meeting on Friday that official visits during the opening of the Olympics have become a tradition, mentioning his visit to Beijing in the summer of 2008 for the Summer Olympics, Xi’s visit to Russia in 2014 for the Sochi Winter Olympics and the meeting in Beijing before the Winter Olympics.

Xi said that this rendezvous at the Winter Olympics, which also coincides with spring, will inject much momentum to China-Russia relations, saying that he is willing to work with President Putin to plan a blueprint for and guide the direction of China-Russia ties under new historical conditions.

How NATO visualizes war

It’s funny and pathetic and a comedy, but no. Real war is a terrible, terrible thing. It’s NOTHING to laugh about.

Never the less, this clip is actually funny.

video 13MB

A Chinese girl on the street

This gal has nice bouncing boobies. I like them, though I personally believe that she has seventh-generation “ergomax” breast implants to make those boobs jiggle like they do. It’s a nice effect, though terribly distracting.

video 2MB

The Year of the Tiger Starts With a Sino-Russian Bang

From HERE.

The Year of the Black Water Tiger will start, for all practical purposes, with a Beijing bang this Friday, as Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, after a live meeting before the initial ceremony of the Winter Olympics, will issue a joint statement on international relations.

That will represent a crucial move in the Eurasia vs. NATOstan chessboard, as the Anglo-American axis is increasingly bogged down in Desperation Row: after all, “Russian aggression” stubbornly refuses to materialize.

After an interminable wait arguably due to the lack of functionaries properly equipped to write an intelligible letter, the US/NATO combo finally concocted a predictable, jargon-drenched bureaucratese non-response “response” to the Russian demands of security guarantees.

The contents were leaked to a Spanish newspaper, a full member of NATOstan media. The leaker, according to Brussels sources, may be in Kiev by now. The Pentagon, in damage control mode, rushed to assert, “We didn’t do it”. The State Dept. said, “it’s authentic.”

Even before the leak of the non-response “response”, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was forced to send messages to all NATO foreign ministers, including US Secretary Blinken, asking how they understand the principle of indivisibility of security – if they actually do.

Lavrov was extremely specific: “I am referring to our demands that everyone faithfully implement the agreements on the indivisibility of security that were reached within the OSCE in 1999 in Istanbul and in 2010 in Astana. These agreements provide not only for the freedom to choose alliances, but also make this freedom conditional on the need to avoid any steps that will strengthen the security of any state at the expense of infringing on the security of others.”

Lavrov hit the heart of the matter when he stressed, “our Western colleagues are not simply trying to ignore this key principle of international law agreed in the Euro-Atlantic space, but to completely forget it.”

Lavrov also made it very clear “we will not allow this topic to be ‘wrapped up’. We will insist on a honest conversation and an explanation of why the West does not want to fulfill its obligations at all or exclusively, selectively, and in its favor.”

Crucially, China fully supports Russian demands for security guarantees in Europe, and fully agrees that the security of one state cannot be ensured by inflicting damage on another state.

This is as serious as it gets: the US/NATO combo are bent on smashing two crucial treaties that directly concern European security, and they think they can get away with it because there is less than zero discussion about the content and its implications across NATOstan media.

Western public opinion remains absolutely clueless. The only narrative, hammered 24/7, is “Russian aggression” – by the way duly emphasized in NATO’s non-response “response”.

Wanna check our military-technical gear?

For the umpteenth time Moscow made it very clear it’s not going to make any concessions on the security demands just because the Empire of Chaos keeps threatening – what else – extra harsh sanctions, the sole imperial “policy” short of outright bombing.

The new sanctions package, anyway, is ready to go for quite a while now, arguably capable of cutting Moscow off from the Western financial system and/or casino, and targeting, among others, Sberbank, VTB, Gazprombank and Alfa-Bank.

And that brings us to what’s Moscow going to do next – considering the predictable “extremely negative attitude” (Lavrov) from NATOstan. Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko had already hinted NATO knows perfectly well what’s coming, even before the non-response “response”:

“NATO knows perfectly well what kind of military-technical measures may follow from Russia. We make no secret of our possibilities and are acting very transparently.”

Still the American “partners” are not listening. The Russians remain unfazed. Grushko framed it in realpolitik terms: concrete measures will depend on the “military potentials” that could be used against Russia. That’s code for what sort of nuclear weapons will be deployed in Eastern Europe, and what sort of lethal equipment will keep being unloaded in Ukraine.

In fact Ukraine – or country 404, per Andrei Martyanov’s indelible definition – is just a lowly pawn in their (imperial) game. Adding to Kiev’s misery on all fronts, the head of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Alexei Danilov, all but gave away the (regional) game.

In an interview to AP, Danilov said that “the Minsk Agreements can create chaos”; he admitted that Kiev totally lost the war in 2014/15 and then signed the Minsk Agreements “under threat of Russian arms” (false: Kiev was soundly defeated by the Donbass militias); but most of all he admitted Kiev never had any intention of fulfilling the Minsk Agreements.

So Kiev, essentially, is breaking international law: the Minsk Agreements are guaranteed by the UN Security Council resolution 2022 (2015), adopted unanimously. Even the US, UK and France voted “Yes”. So breaking the law is not hard to do, as long as you’re enabled by “big powers”.

And on that invisible “Russian aggression”, well, even Danilov can’t see “the readiness of Russian forces near the border for an invasion, which will take three to seven days.”

Bring on the Dancing Horses

None of the above alters the fundamental fact that the USUK combo – plus the proverbial NATO chihuahuas Poland and the Baltics – are spinning around like mad trying to provoke a war. And the only way to do it is to Release the False Flags. It may be sometime in February, it may be during the Beijing Olympics, it may be before the onset of Spring. But they will come. And the Russians are ready.

The preamble has been staged straight from Monty Python Flying Circus – complete with Crash Test Dummy, a.k.a. POTUS yelling to comedian Zelensky that, in a trashy Mongol revival, “Kiev will be sacked” (to the sound of Bring On the Dancing Horses?); an outraged Zelensky telling POTUS to, c’mon man, back off; and the White House swearing that the US has gamed 18 scenarios for the “Russian invasion” (Lavrov: 17 were written by the intel alphabet soup, the 18th by the State Dept.)

Cue to non-stop, frantic weaponizing of country 404 – everything from Javelins to MANPADs to overpriced Blackwater/Academi-tinged waves of “advisers”.

Switching away from farce, not to mention misguided scenarios starting from the faulty premise of an “invasion”, the only rational move Moscow may be contemplating is to de facto recognize the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and send in a contingent of peacekeepers.

That, of course, would enrage the neo-con infested War Inc. matrix to intergalactic paroxysm, as it would nullify all those elaborate psyops geared to instill the Fear of God on the unsuspecting victims of the Remixed Khanate of the Golden Horde, burning and looting all the way to…the Hungarian plains?

Then there’s the tricky question of how to de-Nazify Western Ukraine: that will be a strictly Ukrainian matter, with zero Russian involvement.

The ghost of Mackinder is in total freak out mode contemplating in impotence the imperial brilliance of deciding to fight a two-front war against the Russia-China strategic partnership. At least there’s Monty Python to the rescue: the Ministry of Silly Walks has been gloriously revived as the Ministry of Silly Strategies.

Pride of place goes to the phone call placed by Little Blinkie to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi – which contains all the elements of a brilliant comic sketch. It stars with the combo behind that cipher, “Biden”, thinking that the Beijing leadership could influence Putin to not exercise “Russian aggression” against 404. On the sidelines, perhaps there could be some discussion about the “Indo-Pacific” racket.

The plot went downhill when once again Wang Yi – remember Alaska? – made shark fin’s soup out of Blinkie. The key take aways: China totally supports Russia; it’s the US that is destabilizing Europe; and were more sanctions to come, Europe will pay a terrible price, not Russia, which of course can count on a serious helping hand from China.

Now compare it with the phone call between Putin and Macron. It was, to start with, cordial. They discussed “brain-dead” (copyright Macron) NATO. They discussed the proverbial Anglo-Saxon shenanigans. They even discussed the possibility of forming a pan-European group – a sort of anti-AUKUS – with Russia included, curbing the influence of the Five Eyes and bent on avoiding by all means a war in European soil. For the moment, it’s all talk. But the game-changing seeds are all there.

Misguided scenarios insist that Putin skillfully exploited the imperial obsession with the rise and rise of China to re-establish Russia’s sphere of influence. Nonsense. The sphere was always there – and won’t move. The difference is Moscow finally got fed up with the heavy symbolism permeating the unresolved 404 mess: the intermingling of raw Russophobia in Washington and containment/encirclement NATO knocking at the door.

Metaphorically, this may turn out to be the Year of two – sanctioned – Black Water Tigers, one Chinese, one Siberian. They will be harassed non-stop by the headless eagle, blind to its own irreversible decay and always resorting to the serial Hail Mary passes of the only “policy” it knows.

The ultimate danger – especially for the European minions – is that the headless eagle will never let go of its former “indispensable” status without provoking another devastating war. In European soil. Still the tigers persist: in Beijing, before the Games commence, they will be taking yet another step to irreversibly bury the “rules-based international order”.

Video 4

She is another one of my favorites. She is relaxing like a fine spring day.

Video 4MB

And another of this fine Chinese woman

I really like her.

Video 2MB

What a Chinese home is like…

And, here’s a girl dancing in her house. You will notice the white stone floor and the walls and everythign else, including the cats in their cage (typical but not common). Enjoy the video.

video 4MB

Now, Let’s chat about ourselves…

When you get older, you start to look back at the moments where an opportunity presented itself to you and you didn’t take it. You were too afraid, or too fearful. You didn’t want to hear rejection. You were too fragile.

Nonsense!

You get older and you realize that the time is now. And you start making your life and defining your life on your terms, and if others don’t like it, well that is too bad. You just smile and move forward. Just keep on, keeping on.

Like in this video…

Video 100MB

Everything is forcing us to conform.

They use fear, lust, greed, and envy to move us, manipulate us and force us to either hide, or do things that are contrary to our best interests.

Not allow them to do that to you.

It’s a new world, and the rest of the world are embracing the idea that they can be themselves, and not be forced to conform to the American ideal. And they are relishing in it.

They can live their lifes without fear that one day the United States government will blow up their homes, strafe their children, ruin their economies, and enslave them; forcing them to eat McDonald’s hamburgers, drink Starbucks coffee, and become alternative sexual orientation friendly.

Video 5.2MB

Or, maybe not so traditional, perhaps more commercial, or merchantary. Such as this video. Enjoy it. Uh oh.

Video 9MB

The world is NOT bad, ugly and full of danger

Actually, the reast of the world is really rather nice.

Remember, the world is under YOUR control. Not the rich, the powerful or the rulers. It’s you.

Do not allow them to box you into some kind of fake reality.

Here’s where MM lives. This was what it was like today. This is the small park outside my complex front port. video 81MB

It’s a new world order and the future now is owned by Asia. It’s just that this fact is not being reported in the West. But whether it is reported or not, makes no difference.

The future has moved on.

So enjoy life and savor it. There’s a lot of good things all around you. The adults are now in charge of the world, and the spoiled brats that inhereted the reins of power in the United States are trying to pretend that it is not the case.

Savor life. Appreciate it, and stop living a life in fear.  Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Just control your reality. It’s nto that hard to do.

video 13MB

And remember that it’s a new world.

It’s a new world order, and MoA said it best…

The U.S. will say that the above is just some grand declaration with no meaning. But it is much more. It is a political program that China and Russia as well as their allies will be working on for the next decades.

Asian as well as European countries should consider if they want to support or oppose it. 

They should recognize that siding with the U.S. against China and Russia guarantees that they will find themselves on the losing side.

A final thought and parable

If South Korea sides with the USA against China, you can well imagine what Hell awaits them between China and Russia. Chian and Russia would disable everything in South Korea and let them fight North Korea on their own. With millions of hungry and angry North Koreans flowing Southward.

Same goes for Japan.

I really don’t think that they want to be the battlefield for America and it’s trans-gender rights, and progressive views on life, and hatred of all things Asian and traditional.

Any European nation that is desirous of sanctioning Russia will discover that they will be sanctioned by China; no medicines, no machined products, no electronics and all their products inside of China nationalized. They would be completely crushed.

Australia is currently run by idiots. They not only can’t take a hint, but they don’t understand plain words either.

Now, please consider the powerful trio of Iran, Russia and China.

Here is a parable of how this document all brings all three of them together.

Big thanks from Phil at Busted Knuckles. Video 20MB

Real Working Dogs-scene-2022-02-07_14.43.01

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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An assortment of bits and pieces regarding Geo-Political changes

It’s no longer in Poland’s interests to continue criticizing China simply to please the Americans.”

-Polish President Andrzej Duda announced

There is an insane level of activity going on right now this January 2022. Much of it is driven by the insanity out of the United States. It actually is causing me such distress that I have turned to the Commander for answers. And I will post them in a separate post.

In this article, we will look at a buch of what is goign on. It’s a snapshot of a world gone insane.

Former President Trump is going to run for reelection on 2024.

This time will be different. He knows what to do and what to say. As he has the best words. Video 14MB

China will jail those that fake pollution data

China does not play. The Corruption police are very activce inside of China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-28/china-jails-almost-50-steel-executives-for-faking-emissions-data

The American was quarantined at a dacha in the Leningrad region and trolled his friends and business partners across the ocean

I once told you about my American friend, who for some reason remained in quarantine in Russia. At the same time, banal greed played an important role in this – plane tickets jumped sharply in price and he, even being a person far from poor, kept waiting for them to become cheaper. And he waited until the flights were completely closed. Who cares, the full version is here:

“An American friend of mine wanted to go to the United States because of an infection, but he couldn’t, so he stayed in Russia and now prays for our country.”: https://na-zapade.ru/zametki/usa/moj-znakomyj-amerikanec-bill-iz-za-zarazy-hotel-uehat-v-ssha-no-ne-smog-ostalsya-v-rossii-i-teper-molitsya-na-nashu-stranu/

So, one of our readers in the comments left an extremely curious story about an American friend of his, which I can’t help but publish, because the case is very revealing.

“At my dacha, in the Leningrad region, 120 kms from the city, during the first wave of quarantine, an American lived. He lived for three months. He couldn’t fly across the ocean. Yes, our house is good, not “New Russian”, but all amenities, sauna, 30 acres. For fifty years now, the dacha has been in this place, even my father-in-law built it… Now, of course, everything has changed even more for the better.

You can’t imagine how he trolled his friends and business partners! How he broke their stereotypes about poor, drunk and backward Russia… Moreover, I do not take into account the cottage settlements that we have set up nearby-be healthy ! The Ladoga lake, clear ecology… No, just an ordinary village.

We gave him a room on the second floor, where he conducted conferences on zoom. The Internet is fast – it costs a penny. It looked something like this…

  • There are no restrictions — oh, no way!
  • The shops are full of goods-Oh, impossible!
  • There is no police, from the word absolutely-Impossible!!!
  • There are no drunks!! -“We don’t believe it!!
  • Delivery on the Internet of two expensive bikes bought and simulators) — You’re all lying !

And he gives them a photo or video from the store, from the cafe… Broken people’s stereotypes. Upset a lot of people…

He left with a photo of Putin on a hoodie and a hat with the inscription Russia. He writes that he goes to negotiations in this form. It helps

Author – Sergey Tyurin

Sergey Lavrov: If it depends on Russia, there will be no war. But we will not allow our interests to be attacked.

The head of the Russian Foreign Ministry gave an interview to the largest Russian radio stations, including Radio Komsomolskaya Pravda
Edward CHESNOKOV
On Friday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke with the heads of Russian radio stations – Komsomolskaya Pravda , Sputnik, Ekho Moskvy and Moskva Speaks. Aggravation between Russia and NATO was on the agenda. Recall that Moscow presented the West with a written demand to leave Eastern Europe and not accept Ukraine into NATO, to which de facto received a negative response. Here are the most interesting statements of Sergei Viktorovich on this and other issues.

ON WHETHER THERE WILL BE A WAR WITH NATO

If it depends on Russia, there will be no war. But we will not allow our interests to be attacked.

ABOUT “NATO’S RESPONSE” TO RUSSIAN SECURITY OFFERS

Our proposals to agree on the maximum distances for the rendezvous of combat aircraft and ships were ignored. But there are rational grains on certain issues. For example, on medium and shorter range missiles. It’s at least something. However, the main thing for us is to deal with the conceptual issues of European security. The West rips out one point from international documents: “every country has the right to choose allies” (that is, “Ukraine has the right to join NATO” – ed.). But there are other commitments in the OSCE documents: one cannot strengthen one’s security at the expense of others.
Against this backdrop, the American response is simply a piece of diplomatic propriety. And the “NATO response” is all saturated with a sense of its own exclusivity.

ABOUT THE POSSIBLE REACTION OF RUSSIA IN THE EVENT OF A NEGATIVE ANSWER

The President has already spoken about it. If our attempts to negotiate mutually acceptable terms fail, we will take retaliatory measures. To the direct question “which ones” the President answered: they will be very different.

ABOUT WASHINGTON’S REPRESSIONS AGAINST RUSSIAN DIPLOMATS

The Americans said: “It is customary for a diplomat to work abroad for three years – and then move to another position, leave the host country.” And they want to extend this principle to Russian diplomats in the United States. When asked whether there are similar thoughts about other states, the answer was “no”.
We propose to nullify everything that happened, starting with the ugly and petty move of the Nobel laureate Obama (the seizure of Russian diplomatic property in the United States at the end of 2016 – ed.). If the rudeness continues, we still have reserves to really even out our diplomatic presence.

ABOUT RUSSIANS IN KAZAKHSTAN

It is in our interests, in the interests of all CIS countries , that all citizens of the newly independent states remain where they were born. Ideally, I would prefer that Russians live peacefully and prosper in Kazakhstan and other republics of the former USSR.
I believe that not only the presence of roots, relatives in the RSFSR, but also in other republics of the former USSR should be important for preferential obtaining Russian citizenship.

ABOUT ANTI-RUSSIAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS IN THE CIS

A couple of days ago I read this article in “KP” (about the fact that in books for schoolchildren from the countries of the former USSR, Russians appear as enemy-invaders – ed.). I will not comment on what is written in textbooks in the Baltic States and Ukraine. But as for the CIS countries, we have already said that we are against nationalistic interpretations. Excessive assessments, which obviously and deliberately play into the hands of nationalists and radicals, must be avoided.

ABOUT RUSSIANS IN MINSK

There is an equalization of the rights of our citizens (as part of the rapprochement of the two countries in the Union State – ed.). A lot has already been done, but questions remain in some areas. We follow the processes of the arrested Russians in Belarus.

ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION AND THE USA

We seem to be playing different games. They have a baseball, we have a chizhik from a lapta.
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Lavrov: There will be no war if it depends on Russia

The Illegal Four Billion Dollar Disinformation War Against China

American war


USA Strategic Competition Act of 2021 – Part 2

All of the political and media mechanisms that led to the Iraq War are still in place and have been turned on China. The Strategic Competition Act of 2021 is simply a very well financed new weapon designed to suppress any and all alternative views in the media, and disinform and bribe other nations and even the United Nations to participate in this rapidly escalating series of crimes.

By Greg Brundage
https://lnkd.in/eyu5dmXW

Home invasion in London

The entire Western Bloc is in tatters. It’s crumbling, on fire and just dying left and right. here’s a home invasion in London. Check it out.

Video 12MB

China says U.S. plans to pay athletes to ‘sabotage’ Beijing Games | Reuters

Who is surprised? It’s the standard operating procedure.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-media-says-us-pays-athletes-disrupt-beijing-games-2022-01-29/

Chang calls American TSMC chip manufacture to be unfeasible, with $52bn in subsidies far too little

Chang, who retired from TSMC in 2018, claimed that the people arguing for bringing the IC chip supply chain into the United States from Taiwan were driven by self-interest.
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Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger advocated for more manufacturing in the US as “it is not safe in Taiwan and it is not safe in South Korea”, Chang said.
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All the time, while Intel hoped to secure funding from the $52bn subsidy package.
Rethinking the supply chain would be a challenge for everyone, Chang said.
“In the past, companies in the US or in Asia were growing and prospering thanks to globalisation and free trade,” he said. Chang cited Thomas Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat, in which the commentator analyses globalisation and the opportunities it creates for nations.
As US lawmakers look to invest $52bn in the American chip industry, the founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company calls the plan far too small for rebuilding a complete supply chain in the country.
Morris Chang, a US citizen who founded the group that is now the world’s most valuable chipmaker, says it would be impossible for the US to have a full chip supply chain onshore even if it spent far more — and that such a move may not be financially desirable in any case.
“If you want to re-establish a complete semiconductor supply chain in the US, you will not find it as a possible task,” Chang told a tech industry forum in Taipei on October 26. “Even after you spend hundreds of billions of dollars, you will still find the supply chain to be incomplete, and you will find that it will be very high cost, much higher costs than what you currently have.”
The US accounted for 37 per cent of global semiconductor manufacturing in the 1990s, but has fallen to 12 per cent, Semiconductor Industry Association data show.
Washington is campaigning to bring more chip production on to US soil, amid concern about an overreliance on Taiwan. The US Senate this year passed a $52bn bill to support domestic semiconductor manufacturing and R&D, though the package has yet to become law.
“Well, Tom, the world is not flat any more,” he said. “This is going to be a challenge for the Asian semiconductor industry, global semiconductor industry, including Intel.”
Chang’s comments were the first time he directly and publicly questioned Washington’s efforts to rebuild semiconductor manufacturing. His criticism comes despite TSMC’s move to build an advanced chip facility in the US state of Arizona in response to the government’s campaign.
Previously, Chang had said government efforts around the world to increase chip production could backfire, without specifying which countries. Sandra Oudkirk, director of the American Institute in Taiwan and the top US diplomat in Taipei, was among the audience at the industry forum.
Europe, Japan and China also are gearing up to boost production at home, offering government aid to ensure that chips — which enable devices from smartphones to military techs — will remain within their countries.
TSMC recently announced that the company will build its first chip facility in Japan, where Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said his government would support large-scale private-sector investment.

The Sacrifice

This is a scene from history. The Chinese people work together as one. The American planes would bomb Chiense bridges and then 20 minute slater the bridges would be repaired and up and working again. How?

Sounds like science fiction, but it’s true. Check out this amazing video. 17MB

Americans making a difference in the world…

Where does bullying come from?

"The Punishers" are a group of bikers who respond to bullied children's requests for help. After a year their intervention, no one has more bullized this child.

What are the origins of bullying?

The causes at the origin of bullying are plurime and attributable to individual or group dynamic factors: the child temperament, family models, stereotypes imposed by the media, education imparted by parents or school institutions and other variables connected to 'social environment.

The Swedish psychologist Dan Olweus was the first to use, in the 1970s, the term "bullying", to indicate the preputances of peer in his pioneering research on the school violence that led to the formulation of an antibullying program widely adopted in schools of Nordic countries.

According to the relationship an Everyday Lesson: #endViolence in schools half of the students between 13 and 15 years in the world – about 150 million – reported to have suffered violence from their peers at school and outside.

I think we want a collective effort to prevent these numbers worsening in the future.

Video

China discovers 100-million-tonne oil, gas reserves in Tarim Basin

Uh oh! No wonder the USA wants a war over the Uighurs!

2022-01-27 09:07:56Xinhua Editor : Li Yan

An oil worker inspects Sinopec’s Shunbei oil and gas field in Xayar County, northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Sept. 25, 2019. (Xinhua/Cai Yang)

China’s largest oil refiner Sinopec has discovered a new oil and gas area with approximately 100 million tonnes of reserves in the Tarim Basin of northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

These latest reserves in Sinopec’s Shunbei oil and gas field are estimated to provide 88 million tonnes of condensate oil and 290 billion cubic meters of natural gas, said the company Wednesday.

Analysts said the discovery would further improve China’s energy supply and help guarantee national energy security.

The Tarim Basin is a major petroliferous basin in China but is also one of the most difficult to explore due to its harsh ground environment and complicated underground conditions. Its oil and gas reserves are buried over 7,300 meters deep on average.

Sinopec’s northwest branch has ascertained reserves of 1.67 billion tonnes of crude oil and 94.58 billion cubic meters of natural gas here, with a total output of more than 140 million tonnes of oil and gas equivalents so far.

Changes for the Uighur Muslims in Xinjinag

So many positive things are going on inside China these days, it’s so very difficult to keep up. Of course none of it is being reported at all in the “Western news”. Most especially positive news for the Uighur Muslims.

Video 30MB

Xinjiang-uighur-desert-change-milk-cows-2022-01-30_10.33.00

None Dare Call It “Encirclement”…

Numerous reports in the West about China threats or influence towards the West are being published by the day but nothing is mentioned in these reports or media about the huge military encirclement of China by Western nations, lead by the USA.

… while Western media and politics on the other hand were in a great uproar and confirming the ‘China threat’ when Chinese President Xi Jinping mentioned “We will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us, anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

The 2022 US National Defense Authorization Act passed with no significant opposition in the House or Senate from both parties.

Despite little opposition, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees instead voted to increase this year’s already staggering allotment for the Pentagon by another $24 billion — specifically to better contain (or fight) China. For the majority, going toward the creation of hypersonic missiles and other advanced weaponry aimed at China (not defensive, offensive).

But no one or no bill calls it what it actually is…

…encirclement and containment.

Guangzhou

A nice video of Guangzhou. Here. 4MB

It’s all about money and power

How about if just a small part of this China research and reporting diverts inward towards the global humanitarian threats of the current warmongering or even war inciting policies.

It might be revealing and maybe we would come to more human perspectives and policies for a better world.

A part of today’s China perspective originates from about 120 years ago when Western nations discussed how to divide a then also encircled China among themselves. Mostly forgotten in the West but not in China, certainly not with respect to today’s developments.

People and institutes can dive “deep and smart” in reporting and media but encirclement, containment and war inciting policies are all but that…

Let’s start with the basal facts before creating threats and perspectives (often with lies and manipulation)

By the way, this also applies for today’s Ukraine conflict and the ‘Russia threat’.

China’s missiles.

A great little video.

China is ready. Video 2MB

China where everything vanishes.

From MoA

Editors and headline writers in the ‘western’ press seem to have certain cliches about certain countries.

It is why one can make lists with 111 headlines which say that Russia is weaponizing this or that.

Another one is that whatever happens in China must have come at a cost.

China is also the place where everything vanishes.

Note that the vanishing of long slow train journeys are under ‘threat’. That of course means that modern fast train rides come at a cost. This is like China curing cancer faster and cheaper than anywhere else but is going too fast with that. Pure nonsense.

So for the heck of it here is a list of all the stuff that is vanishing in China, mostly because it develops ‘but is going too fast with that’.

China J-20 Aircraft

Nice, tight little video. HERE 10MB

Washington Tightens the Noose around China

Michael Klare

January 17, 2022

Since he published “War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams” in 1972, Michael Klare has established himself as one of the world’s leading experts on US military foreign policy, warfare, weapons, military intervention, energy policies and the nexus between militarism and climate change.

I’ve known and followed him during all these years. Within the last few weeks, Michael has written two analyses pertain to the one-sided US Cold War on China that are frightening.

They provide you with cool documentation of the systematic planning and the impossible-to-understand sums the US has now allocated to this destructive – also self-destructive – project for the years ahead.

Western mainstream media will keep you in the dark about this perversely world-endangering policy. I call it that for the simple reason that the problems humanity faces which must be solved very rapidly through cooperation cannot be solved with the two largest economic and political powers in deadly conflict. This is the most significant diversion of attention and political energies – and financial resources – on earth at the moment.

Michael tells what you must know to take action – big or small – to stop this reckless US/NATO policy.

Here are the two articles:

[1] Michael Klare, Welcome to the New Cold War in Asia

Posted on

For a moment, imagine an upside-down military world. Instead of U.S. guided-missile destroyers and other ships regularly carrying out “freedom of navigation operations” near Chinese-claimed islands in the South China Sea and such destroyers no less regularly passing through the Strait of Taiwan between that disputed island and the People’s Republic of China, consider how any administration would react if Chinese naval vessels were ever more provocatively patrolling off the coast of California.

You know that official Washington would quite literally go nuts and we’d find ourselves at the edge of war almost instantly.

Or, in a similar fashion, imagine that Russia had moved nuclear weapons close to the southern Mexican border, was selling advanced weaponry and offering other military aid to Mexico, and acting as we’ve been doing in relation to Ukraine.

Washington would be up in arms, again all too literally.

Don’t misunderstand me: I hold no torch for either Chinese President Xi Jinping or Russian President Vladimir Putin. (And I suspect, by the way, that if Putin were foolish enough to invade Ukraine he might find himself involved in an updated version of the Soviet Union’s disastrous Afghan War of the 1980s in a far more explosive part of the world.)

I’m merely pointing out that the American urge to be militarily anywhere it wants to be on this planet in any fashion it chooses might not be quite what’s needed these days.

A new Cold War on an ever hotter and more pandemic planet?

Just what we really (don’t) need.

And by the way, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author most recently of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, points out, one of the other wonders of our moment is that, in a country where Republicans and Democrats can essentially agree on nothing — certainly not on spending money on the American people — the subject never in question is what’s still called “defense” policy.

Unfortunately, globally speaking, such spending of your tax dollars couldn’t be more offensive in every sense of the word. In this, fierce as the Biden administration has proved in Cold War terms, Klare makes it clear today that Congress is proving even fiercer.

I mean honestly, on a planet in deep doo-doo, where the major powers should be cooperating big time, having a post-Trump administration (with, admittedly, an old cold warrior as president) so ready to return us to a Cold War-style world seems, to say the least, both a tad out of date and a bit reckless as well.

The word “encirclement” does not appear in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed into law by President Joe Biden on December 27th, or in other recent administration statements about its foreign and military policies. Nor does that classic Cold War era term “containment” ever come up. Still, America’s top leaders have reached a consensus on a strategy to encircle and contain the latest great power, China, with hostile military alliances, thereby thwarting its rise to full superpower status.

The gigantic 2022 defense bill — passed with overwhelming support from both parties — provides a detailed blueprint for surrounding China with a potentially suffocating network of U.S. bases, military forces, and increasingly militarized partner states. The goal is to enable Washington to barricade that country’s military inside its own territory and potentially cripple its economy in any future crisis.

For China’s leaders, who surely can’t tolerate being encircled in such a fashion, it’s an open invitation to…

…well, there’s no point in not being blunt…

…fight their way out of confinement.

Like every “defense” bill before it, the $768 billion 2022 NDAA is replete with all-too-generous handouts to military contractors for favored Pentagon weaponry.

That would include F-35 jet fighters, Virginia-class submarines, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and a wide assortment of guided missiles.

But as the Senate Armed Services Committee noted in a summary of the bill, it also incorporates an array of targeted appropriations and policy initiatives aimed at encircling, containing, and someday potentially overpowering China.

Among these are an extra $7.1 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, or PDI, a program initiated last year with the aim of bolstering U.S. and allied forces in the Pacific.

Nor are these just isolated items in that 2,186-page bill.

The authorization act includes a “sense of Congress” measure focused on “defense alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific Region,” providing a conceptual blueprint for such an encirclement strategy.

Under it, the secretary of defense is enjoined to “strengthen United States defense alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region so as to further the comparative advantage of the United States in strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China,” or PRC.

That the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act passed with no significant opposition in the House or Senate suggests that support for these and similar measures is strong in both parties.

Some progressive Democrats had indeed sought to reduce the size of military spending, but their colleagues on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees instead voted to increase this year’s already staggering allotment for the Pentagon by another $24 billion — specifically to better contain (or fight) China.

Most of those added taxpayer dollars will go toward the creation of hypersonic missiles and other advanced weaponry aimed at the PRC, and increased military exercises and security cooperation with U.S. allies in the region.

For Chinese leaders, there can be no doubt about the meaning of all this: whatever Washington might say about peaceful competition, the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, has no intention of allowing the PRC to achieve parity with the United States on the world stage.

In fact, it is prepared to employ every means, including military force, to prevent that from happening.

This leaves Beijing with two choices: succumb to U.S. pressure and accept second-class status in world affairs or challenge Washington’s strategy of containment.

It’s hard to imagine that country’s current leadership accepting the first choice, while the second, were it adopted, would surely lead, sooner or later, to armed conflict.

More Chinese missiles

Nice video. HERE 4MB

Chinese missile practice targets

Nice Video HERE 2MB

The Enduring Lure of Encirclement

The notion of surrounding China with a chain of hostile powers was, in fact, first promoted as official policy in the early months of President George W. Bush’s administration.

At that time, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice went to work establishing an anti-China alliance system in Asia, following guidelines laid out by Rice in a January 2000 article in Foreign Affairs.

There, she warned of Beijing’s efforts to “alter Asia’s balance of power in its own favor” — a drive the U.S. must respond to by deepening “its cooperation with Japan and South Korea” and by “maintain[ing] its commitment to a robust military presence in the region.”

It should, she further indicated, “pay closer attention to India’s role in the regional balance.”

This has, in fact, remained part of the governing U.S. global playbook ever since, even if, for the Bush team, its implementation came to an abrupt halt on September 11, 2001, when Islamic militants attacked the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., leading the administration to declare a “global war on terror.”

Only a decade later, in 2011, did official Washington return to the Rice-Cheney strategy of encircling China and blunting or suppressing its growing power.

That November, in an address to the Australian Parliament, President Obama announced an American “pivot to Asia” — a drive to restore Washington’s dominance in the region, while enlisting its allies there in an intensifying effort to contain China.

“As president, I have… made a deliberate and strategic decision,” Obama declared in Canberra. “As a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future… As we end today’s wars [in the Middle East], I have directed my national security team to make our presence and mission in the Asia Pacific a top priority.”

Oh great. After absolutely pulverizing and destroying the middle East into rubble, the attention will now focus on destroying China and the South Pacific as well. Lovely. -MM

Like the Bush team before it, however, the Obama administration was blindsided by events in the Middle East, specifically the 2014 takeover of significant parts of Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State, and so was forced to suspend its focus on the Pacific.

Only in the final years of the Trump administration did the idea of encircling China once again achieve preeminence in U.S. strategic thinking.

Led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Trump effort proved far more substantial, involving as it did the beefing-up of U.S. forces in the Pacific; closer military ties with Australia, Japan, and South Korea; and an intensified outreach to India.

Pompeo also added several new features to the mix: a “quadrilateral” alliance between Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S. (dubbed the “Quad,” for short); increased diplomatic ties with Taiwan; and the explicit demonization of China as an enemy of Western values.

In a July 2020 speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Pompeo laid out the new China policy vividly.

To prevent the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from demolishing “the rules-based order that our societies have worked so hard to build,” he declared, we must “draw common lines in the sand that cannot be washed away by the CCP’s bargains or their blandishments.”

This required not only bolstering U.S. forces in Asia but also creating a NATO-like alliance system to curb China’s further growth.

Pompeo also launched two key anti-China initiatives: the institutionalization of the Quad and the expansion of diplomatic and military relations with Taiwan.

The Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue as it’s formally known, had initially been formed in 2007 by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (with the support of Vice President Dick Cheney and the leaders of Australia and India), but fell into abeyance for years. It was revived, however, in 2017 when Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull joined Abe, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump in promoting a stepped-up effort to contain China.

As for Taiwan, Pompeo upped the ante there by approving diplomatic missions to its capital, Taipei, by senior officials, including Health Secretary Alex Azar and Undersecretary of State Keith Krach, the highest-ranking members of any administration to visit the island since 1979, when Washington severed formal relations with its government.

Both visits were roundly criticized by Chinese officials as serious violations of the commitments Washington had made to Beijing under the agreement establishing ties with the PRC.

China is killing all the CIA spies inside of China

The United States doesn’t know what to do. Video 2MB

Biden Adopts the Encirclement Agenda

On entering the White House, President Biden promised to reverse many of the unpopular policies of his predecessor, but strategy towards China was not among them. Indeed, his administration has embraced the Pompeo encirclement agenda with a vengeance.

As a result, ominously enough, preparations for a possible war with China are now the Pentagon’s top priority as, for the State Department, is the further isolation of Beijing diplomatically.

In line with that outlook, the Defense Department’s 2022 budget request asserted that “China poses the greatest long-term challenge to the United States” and, accordingly, that “the Department will prioritize China as our number one pacing challenge and develop the right operational concepts, capabilities, and plans to bolster deterrence and maintain our competitive advantage.”

In the meantime, as its key instrument for bolstering ties with allies in the Asia-Pacific region, the Biden administration endorsed Trump’s Pacific Deterrence Initiative. Proposed PDI spending was increased by 132% in the Pentagon’s 2022 budget request, rising to $5.1 billion from the $2.2 billion in 2021.

And if you want a measure of this moment in relation to China, consider this: even that increase was deemed insufficient by congressional Democrats and Republicans who added another $2 billion to the PDI allocation for 2022.

To further demonstrate Washington’s commitment to an anti-China alliance in Asia, the first two heads of state invited to the White House to meet President Biden were Japanese Prime Minister Yoshi Suga and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. In talks with them, Biden emphasized the importance of joint efforts to counter Beijing.

Following his meeting with Suga, for instance, Biden publicly insisted that his administration was “committed to working together to take on the challenges from China… to ensure a future of a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

On September 24th, in a first, leaders of the Quad all met with Biden at a White House “summit.” Although the administration emphasized non-military initiatives in its post-summit official report, the main order of business was clearly to strengthen military cooperation in the region.

As if to underscore this, Biden used the occasion to highlight an agreement he’d just signed with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia to provide that country with the propulsion technology for a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines — a move obviously aimed at China.

And note as well that, just days before the summit, the administration formed a new alliance with Australia and the United Kingdom, called AUKUS, and again aimed at China.

Finally, Biden has continued to increase diplomatic and military contacts with Taiwan, beginning on his first day in office when Hsiao Bi-khim, Taipei’s de facto ambassador to Washington, attended his inauguration.

“President Biden will stand with friends and allies to advance our shared prosperity, security, and values in the Asia-Pacific region — and that includes Taiwan,” a top administration official said at the time. Other high-level contacts with Taiwanese officials, including military personnel, soon followed.

Russian Weapons systems

Picture says it all. video 2MB

A “Grand Strategy” for Containment

What all these initiatives have lacked, until now, is an overarching plan for curbing China’s rise and so ensuring America’s permanent supremacy in the Indo-Pacific region.

The authors of this year’s NDAA were remarkably focused on this deficiency and several provisions of the bill are designed to provide just such a master plan. These include a series of measures intended to incorporate Taiwan into the U.S. defense system surrounding China and a requirement for the drafting of a comprehensive “grand strategy” for containing that country on every front.

A “sense of Congress” measure in that bill provides overarching guidance on these disparate initiatives, stipulating an unbroken chain of U.S.-armed sentinel states — stretching from Japan and South Korea in the northern Pacific to Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore in the south and India on China’s eastern flank — meant to encircle and contain the People’s Republic. Ominously enough, Taiwan, too, is included in the projected anti-China network.

That island’s imagined future role in such an emerging strategic plan was further spelled out in a provision entitled “Sense of Congress on Taiwan Defense Relations.”

Essentially, this measure insists that Washington’s 1978 pledge to terminate its military ties with Taipei and a subsequent 1982 U.S.-China agreement committing this country to reduce the quality and quantity of its arms transfers to Taiwan are no longer valid due to China’s “increasingly coercive and aggressive behavior” toward the island.

Accordingly, the measure advocates closer military coordination between the two countries and the sale of increasingly sophisticated weapons systems to Taiwan, along with the technology to manufacture some of them.

Add all this up and here’s the new reality of the Biden years: the disputed island of Taiwan, just off the Chinese mainland and claimed as a province by the PRC, is now being converted into a de facto military ally of the United States.

There could hardly be a more direct assault on China’s bottom line: that, sooner or later, the island must agree to peacefully reunite with the mainland or face military action.

Recognizing that the policies spelled out in the 2022 NDAA represent a fundamental threat to China’s security and its desire for a greater international role, Congress also directed the president to come up with a “grand strategy” on U.S.-China relations in the next nine months.

This should include an assessment of that country’s global objectives and an inventory of the economic, diplomatic, and military capabilities the U.S. will require to blunt its rise.

In addition, it calls on the Biden administration to examine “the assumptions and end-state or end states of the strategy of the United States globally and in the Indo-Pacific region with respect to the People’s Republic of China.”

No explanation is given for the meaning of “end-state or end states,” but it’s easy to imagine that the authors of that measure had in mind the potential collapse of the Chinese Communist government or some form of war between the two countries.

How will Chinese leaders react to all this?

No one yet knows, but President Xi Jinping provided at least a glimpse of what that response might be in a July 1st address marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

“We will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us,” he declared, as China’s newest tanks, rockets, and missiles rolled by. “Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

Welcome to the new twenty-first-century Cold War on a planet desperately in need of something else.

CONTAINMENT ON STEROIDS: PENTAGON’S 2022 BUDGET SEEKS CHINA’S ENCIRCLEMENT

Analysis by Michael Klare, December 31, 2021

On December 27, President Biden signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2022, allotting $740 billion to the Department of Defense (DoD) for military procurement and operations over the coming year and setting key policy objectives. As in past years, much of the funding authorized by the NDAA will go towards fuel, ammunition, and the salaries of military personnel, but this year, more than ever before, there is a conspicuous focus on preparing U.S. and allied forces for a possible war with China.

This focus on China was first underscored in the Department of Defense Budget Request for FY 2022, sent to Congress last May. “China poses the greatest long-term challenge to the United States,” the request states. “Accordingly, DoD will prioritize China and its military modernization as our pacing challenge.” To meet that challenge, and provide for other military essentials, the Pentagon request called for projected expenditures of $715 billion in FY 2022.

But even the $715 billion in the administration’s original DoD budget request was not deemed sufficient for a majority of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who added another $24 billion to the FY 2022 authorization in order to further bolster U.S. forces aimed at China.

“The additional funding we secured… helps the United States remain the world’s leading military power,” said Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee. “Through this strength, the United States will be able to project force and deter conflict as we work to…check China’s malign influence.”

Most of this additional funding will be used to acquire more ships and planes to buttress U.S. forces assigned to the Indo-Pacific region and for programs intended to strengthen military ties with U.S. allies located there. Among other items, the $24 billion add-on will enable the Navy to procure a third guided-missile destroyer this year and for the Air Force to receive another six F-35 stealth fighters. Some of the additional funds will also be used to invigorate the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), a slew of activities aimed at bolstering U.S. military ties with its allies in the Indo-Pacific region and tighten the military noose surrounding China.

The PDI was established by the NDAA for FY 2021, and its stated goal is to “modernize and strengthen the presence of the United States Armed Forces” and to “build the defense and security capabilities, capacity, and cooperation of allies and partners” in the Indo-Pacific region. A total of $2.2 billion was allocated for this purpose in the FY 2021 NDAA.

For FY 2022, the Biden administration bumped the PDI budget request to $5.1 billion and Congress an additional $2 billion on top of that, bringing the total FY 2022 PDI authorization to $7.1 billion. Some of this will be used to acquire advanced military hardware intended for possible combat with China, including hypersonic missiles and a variety of unmanned surface and subsea vessels. In their Joint Explanatory Statement on the FY22 NDAA, leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees also directed the Department of Defense to devote more funds to vital non-munitions items, such as fuel to increase the day-to-day presence of U.S. military forces in the Indo-Pacific region.

Aside from the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, the FY 2022 NDAA is saturated with other measures aimed at bolstering the network of alliances aimed at containing China’s rise in Asia and buttressing U.S. military ties with Taiwan.

Section 1252 of the NDAA, “Sense of Congress on Defense Alliances and Partnerships in the Indo-Pacific Region,” constitutes a blueprint for a U.S.-led system of military alliances surrounding China and dedicated to its military confinement. It states that the Pentagon leadership should “strengthen United States defense alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region so as to further the comparative advantage of the United States in strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China.” Such efforts should include, among other things: enhancing U.S. military cooperation with Australia, Japan, and South Korea; “broadening the engagement of the United States with India, including through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue”; developing increased military ties with Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines; and “strengthening the United States partnership with Taiwan.”

Many other provisions of the NDAA, including the PDI, provide the funding for measures aimed at enhancing U.S. ties with traditional allies, such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea. But Taiwan represents a special case, in that it is not, formally, a military ally of the United States.

When recognizing the PRC as China’s legitimate government in 1979, the United States agreed to terminate its diplomatic relations and defense ties with Taiwan, and to withdraw all U.S. military forces from the island. At that time, Washington also acknowledged Beijing’s position that “there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.” Three years later, under the “Arms Sale Communiqué” of Aug. 17, 1982, Washington further affirmed “that it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan, that its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and that it intends to reduce gradually its sales of arms to Taiwan.”

Despite these pledges, U.S. officials have never been fully reconciled to the terms of the 1979 recognition agreement or the 1982 Arms Sale Communiqué. In accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) of 1979, the U.S. maintains quasi-official relations with Taiwan and provides its military with a wide variety of military hardware.

In recent years, and especially during the Trump administration, top officials have questioned the legitimacy of the “one China” policy and stepped up arms sales and diplomatic outreach to Taiwan. Increasingly, the island is being viewed by senior officials not as “part of China” but rather as an autonomous entity whose participation in the U.S.-led alliance system encircling China is deemed essential to American security – a view articulated by Ely Ratner, Assistant Secretary for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in December. “Taiwan,” he asserted, “is located at a critical node within the first island chain [stretching from Japan to the Philippines], anchoring a network of U.S. allies and partners that is critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

This outlook appears to have largely governed the NDAA’s stance on Taiwan. Section 1246, “Sense of Congress on Taiwan Defense Relations,” essentially claims that previous restraints on U.S. military ties with Taiwan can now be ignored given the PRC’s “increasingly coercive and aggressive behavior” toward the island. In contrast to the terms of 1982 Arms Trade Communiqué, it calls for the sale of increasingly sophisticated weapons to Taiwan. It also calls for joint military exercises between U.S. and Taiwanese forces, increased consultation between senior U.S. and Taiwanese military officials, and enhanced linkages (“interoperability”) between U.S. and Taiwanese maritime surveillance and air-defense systems.

Following on this, Section 1248 calls on the Secretary of Defense to conduct a study of Taiwan’s vulnerabilities to possible Chinese attack and to identify ways in which the U.S. can assist Taiwan in overcoming those vulnerabilities, including by providing advanced arms-making technology and through the sharing of intelligence data. Yet another measure, Section 1249, calls for a briefing on possible cooperation between the U.S. and Taiwanese National Guards.

Finally, Section 6511 directs the president to compose a “grand strategy with respect to China” and submit it to Congress in approximately ten months. Among other things, the “China Strategy,” as it is termed, is to include a comprehensive assessment of Chinese military, economic, political, and military challenges to U.S. global interests and the corresponding U.S. capabilities needed “to implement the national security strategy of the United States as they relate to the new era of competition with the People’s Republic of China.”

From China’s perspective, all this must represent a coherent and highly threatening blueprint to ensure permanent U.S. military superiority and to surround China with an impenetrable chain of hostile powers – an assessment that can only lead to greater suspicion and paranoia in Beijing while fueling a relentless and increasingly dangerous arms race.

Chiense girl

Bouncing outside. video 3MB

Sitrep China: As the competitors start entering the newly constructed Olympics villages the war beat goes on

By Amarynth and the Here Comes China Newsletter by Godfree Roberts

What were we talking about just three or four months ago? Remember? China was going to imminently attack Taiwan. There was wall-to-wall coverage.

The jingoism did not work. Nobody attacked Taiwan.

China stated that Taiwan will be integrated with the mainland at the right time, and follow the correct procedure. China is dealing with a recalcitrant province that historically is as a result of war.

Now, there is even a bigger outcry. Russia is going to imminently invade the Ukraine. So we see an exchange in the western rhetoric from territorial flashpoint Taiwan, to territorial flashpoint the Ukraine in an attempt to contain something, anything that could create the space for the US/NATO and western puppets to maintain power and hegemony.

Will it work this time? The jury is out.

This is on the eve of the Winter Olympics that has already started with qualifying competitions and competitors entering the Olympic villages. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1246696.shtml

A month or two ago, China gave what one could see as a request, but it can also be interpreted as stronger than that.

World expects ‘truce’ during Winter Games

A UNGA resolution, co-sponsored by 173 countries and adopted on Dec 2, asks all countries to observe the Olympic truce and stop hostile activities seven days before the Winter Olympic Games through to seven days after the end of the Winter Paralympic Games.

http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0115/c90000-9945122.html

This is consistent with the historical values of these games all the way back to Ancient Greece in the ninth century.

Even so, the provocation beat, and false information continues on.

Russia does not rule out military provocations from US, Kiev regime – diplomat

A Bloomberg publication that Chinese President Xi Jinping allegedly asked Russian President Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine during the Olympic Games is an operation of US intelligence agencies, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

China called this a despicable trick. “The report was purely made out of thin air. It seeks not only to smear and drive a wedge in China-Russia relations, but also to deliberately disrupt and undermine the Beijing Winter Olympics. Such a despicable trick cannot fool the international community,” Zhao Lijian, spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a routine press conference.”

https://tass.com/politics/1391903

The cowardly attacks on China itself also have not really reduced. We are just not seeing those as all eyes are on Russia

Chinese military calls U.S. warship’s trespassing a “serious provocation”

http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0121/c90000-9947625.html

Before this, we had the endless media announcements of who is going to boycott the Olympics (whether invited or not but they never said they were not invited, they just made it up), and then quietly, they asked for visas to attend anyway. It is all a show.  The Anglosphere has lost military supremacy as well as economic supremacy, and they are not elegant losers. In fact, they will continue to attempt to overturn any security balance anywhere in the world to appease their own hubris for total spectrum dominance or at least the appearance of that.

India for once spoke out and said they will not boycott the Olympic Games, as in these circumstances they will follow their policy of ‘neighbors first’. Uhm, who knew they had such a policy?

Out of 206 nations eligible to participate in the Olympics, only 14 have decided not to send their diplomats.  Of the 14, five quoted Covid as the reason, others do not have a winter olympics team.  Not because of some US led diplomatic boycott.

The backdrop to the Anglosphere being butthurt and trying to change the Russian ‘request’ for security guarantees into sole focus on Ukraine is not stopping the march towards a world order based on Law and not Rule by some flunky. China is not falling for it in their press, or in their spoken word.  This trend is inexorable and the Anglosphere has but limited time to change or to be run over.  The old games of money and guns, the warfare model based on coercion, are coming to an end.

Here are three examples of the world changing.

  • China launches Global South economic alliance to challenge US ‘unilateralism’ and ‘cold-war mentality’

China just launched a new economic alliance of Global South nations called the “Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative”.  Beijing said it seeks to challenge (US) “unilateralism” and the “Cold-War mentality,” and promotes “win-win cooperation”.

  • The Stans are now being ‘multi polarized’ and while Russia gathered them together with the recent military adventure in Kazakhstan, China is following and cementing the trend.

Xi to chair virtual summit commemorating 30th anniversary of China-Central Asia ties  http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/20220124/cdb72b8e378647a192152361a299c216/c.html

So, this meeting happened yesterday and the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, will be attending the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing.

  • Pakistan is sailing Chinese Frigates and contracted the construction of eight Hangor-class submarines, four Type 054A/P ships and medium-altitude long-endurance unmanned combat aerial vehicles from China.  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1246789.shtml

On the big picture, Chas Freeman has this to say…

The question is whether China will choose to accept an active role in stabilizing the region.  “Great power rivalry” or a putative Manichean struggle between China and democracy will not drive this decision.  

On the evidence to date, it will instead reflect the broadly overlapping national interests of China, Europe, India, Japan, and Korea, the fractious states of West Asia and North Africa, and the United States.  

All share a compelling interest in a stable Middle East whose quarrels do not export radicalism or endanger access to crucial energy supplies.

It would be in America’s interest for China and other countries that rely on Middle Eastern energy exports to share the burden of preserving global prosperity by coming together to safeguard the world’s energy trade.  

If China faces a choice in this regard, so does America.  

The United States can cooperate to mutual advantage with China, other rising powers, and the oil producing countries of the region, or it can overwrite obvious interests it shares with China and others with irrational antagonism and pursue a pointless game that no one can hope to win. 

Chas W. Freeman

A New Economic System

In terms of economics and trade, what I personally expect to see as a result of Putin and Xi’s talks while Putin attends the Olympic games, is a much revealed new economic system, which, on a transaction level, will start to be closely integrated across the non-Anglo world. The level of the reveal may be muted, and we may have to read the tea leaves to understand the size and scope of this change.

The driver of that will be the E-CNY, China’s digital currency, which will be massively rolled out for use at the Winter Olympics.  https://govt.chinadaily.com.cn/s/202101/27/WS601137c9498eaba5051c195e/e-cny-chinas-digital-currency.html

We also note financial integration in other spheres as the Russian Standard Bank clients are now able to transfer money to the cards of the Chinese UnionPay payment system. This is not a SWIFT transaction.

Overall, the anti-China rhetoric remains at top decibels. As you will see from the extra reading below, while we were watching Russia, the war propaganda against China did not reduce one bit…

The Great Western Wall vs Snow Niggers

From HERE.

You know about the Great Wall of China, right?  But have you ever heard of the Great Western Wall?

That is the immense wall which was built around the minds of the people of the West for the past 1000 or so years.  I will try to describe it using a few salient examples, but what I want to clearly state here is that these examples are only some I chose, but in reality, there are millions of them and they constitute a kind of “mental force field” which has (almost) no holes in it.  Until now.  But let’s first start with a few examples of what that wall looks like and how those enclosed by it think:

  • Say what you wish, or don’t say it, but everybody knows and understands that the so-called Western civilization (which in this narrative was not born from the Middle-Ages, but from Antiquity) is superior to all others.  Oh sure, we will pay lip service to the liberal ideas of Rousseau or the Woke insanity, but deep inside, we are the best, we will eventually prevail, and nobody can match, nevermind, beat us.
  • Russians are racially and culturally inferior.  Oh sure, they are mostly white, but they act like Mongols (something quite terrible in the average western mind which knows *nothing* about the Mongol Empire, this is even true on the UK Ministerial level!!!).  They are either soaking their brains with vodka, or they are planning devious and bloody attacks on the irenic and noble people of the West.  The term I suggest for them would be Russians are “Snow Niggers.
  • The Snow Niggers control way too much land and resources.  We need to bring them true democracy.
  • Russians have never known democracy, so they don’t even have the concept of “freedom”: true, we don’t really understand the distinction they make between “svoboda” and “volia” anymore than we understand the distinction between “pravda” and “istina” – but who cares, they don’t think like we do, therefore their concepts are irrelevant.
  • Russians cannot be trusted.  Ever.  Ask any of the people who neighbor Russia and they will tell you how horrible it was to live under Russian rule.  The fact that Russians (unlike the West) never committed genocide and that there are still 193 ethnic groups and over 100 languages in Russia herself is irrelevant.  The fact that not a single successor republic to the USSR became stable and viable – except Russia, that is – is also irrelevant.  All that Russian do is murder, rape, pillage and persecute everybody else, especially “gays”!
  • Russians have always used stupid tactics, they always throw a huge amount of poorly trained soldiers but animalistically stubborn/courageous at any enemy.  During WWII, the German military was vastly superior to the Soviet one and the German generals eons ahead of the rather dull Soviet ones, especially in tactics and operational warfare.  Germany only lost WWII thanks to the US and UK and their superb military academies.  Any Soviet victory is explained by “Stalin’s terror”, of course.  Then these brutes went on a raping spree and created a giant Gulag while US forces only delivered chocolate and cool music to the poor Europeans, including the Germans.  Then the US generously rebuilt western Europe.  End of story.
  • We have the best military in the world, with the best equipment and training.  The fact that we spend more on defense than the entire planet is the proof of that.  We also have the best intelligence community in the world, the fact that we have 17 “intelligence” agencies while others typically do with just a few (2-4 is typical) just further proves our infinite superiority (by some estimates, the total “peace budget” of the USA, combining military, intelligence and contractors is over a TRILLION per year!).
  • The entire world envies us – that is why we are the #1 destination for immigrants from all over the world.  Even the fact that we have by far the biggest penitentiary network on the planet, and one of the most barbarically brutal ones at that, does not deter these immigrants.  Clearly, the world loves us!

Trust me, I could go on for pages and pages.  I lived my entire life in the West, I was born in the middle of Europe (in Switzerland) and I lived about half of my life in Europe and half in the USA.  I am fluent in 5 western languages and understand quite a few more others (related ones, of course).  I have two US graduate degrees.  I know the West.  Most westerners who met me initially did not know of my origins, so they treated me like “one of them” until I mentioned my Russian roots, at which point their attitude immediately changed: “careful, he is one of them” was written all over their faces.

And, OF COURSE, there were (plenty) of exceptions to what I describe above.  But these exceptions were never numerous or influential enough to make a difference: Western countries always elect rabid russophobes: they all equally hate and fear Russia, they just express it in different manners.  So those westerners who do not live behind the Great Western Wall have made no difference, especially no difference to us, the Asiatic Snow Niggers.

Again, all this has been going on for close to a thousand years, but something has changed recently and stuff like this began to happen:

An (ah em) “leaked” photo.

And by “this” I don’t mean an F-35 missing its landing on a carrier and splashing into the water.  No, that F-35 is a perfect metaphor for the entire western civilization.

  • Official version: the F-35 is the most amazing military aircraft ever designed
  • True version: the F-35 is the most overpriced piece of semi-airborne shit in world history

Notice, corruption plays THE key role here.

Say what you want, but a country which designed and produced the F-16, the F-5, the A-10 or the breathtakingly beautiful Boeing 747 can produce superb aircraft.  And while all the US ‘stealth’ aircraft are overpriced and over-hyped, the F-35 is truly a masterpiece of corruption.  There is nothing the many extremely talented US scientists and engineers could do to beat the most corrupt people on the planet: the US ruling elites.  And, for the latter, the F-35 is a total, absolute, success.  I would even call it a triumph.

A personal recollection now: while a student in the USA, I had military force planning classes, taught by a VERY sharp USAF Colonel (who also worked for the Northrop YF-23 program).  His classes were a masterpiece each time.  One day, we did something funny.  We made a graph with, on one hand, the average cost of each new US fighter aircraft and, on the other, the money allocated for their acquisition.  Then we projected both curves and the result was quite hilarious, but also unforgettable: we saw that there would come a time when the entire US military budget would be just enough to produce only ONE, but very super dooper bestest of the bestest in the history of the galaxy fighter!  One!  Sadly, I do not remember what date we came up with, but I would argue that the F-35 is the real-world illustration of what our (tongue in cheek) graphic showed (BTW – the Lockheed YF-22 was inferior in design to the Northrop YF-23, the choice for the Lockheed candidate was made solely on political grounds: not to give it all the kickbacks to Northrop basically).

The year 1990 was the year when the YF-22/YF-23 made their first flight.  That same year, the Snow Niggers flew a modified version of the Soviet Su-27, called the SU-34, for the first time.  In my strictly personal opinion, the Su-34 is the single most formidable all-weather supersonic medium-range fighter-bomber/strike aircraft ever produced in Russia or elsewhere.  The fact that this design (originally based on a Soviet-era Su-27 interceptor) not only survived the horrific 90s when Russia was “democratic”, but has now fully matured to the absolutely amazing Su-34M version, shows how truly superb Soviet designers and engineers were even in the years of “Commie stagnation” under Brezhnev & Co.  This is what this true masterpiece looks like:

Su-34

You can read about its capabilities here or, better, watch this video.  Check out its actual characteristics, and it will blow your mind!

No, it ain’t “stealth”, but its formidable EW, avionics, missiles and radar negate the need for any F-22 like RCS.  And it sure is a big aircraft (think range and payload here).  But its capabilities are absolutely formidable, no other aircraft comes even close, not even current 5th generation ones, especially to the (much improved) current Su-34M version (which is still very much a 4th generation aircraft, but which does not need the full 5th generation capabilities to execute its missions, that is where the 4++ generation Su-30M2 and Su-35S would be used, or, if needed, the 5th generation Su-57.

I do not intend this post to be a comparison of the YF-22/YF-23/F-35 with the Su-34 or any other aircraft.

But I will ask a rhetorical question: why is it that the USA, the sole world superpower (especially after 1991 and the fall of the USSR) and world leader in everything produced such a piece of shit (aka “flying brick”) as the F-35, while the vodka soaked Asiatic Snow Niggers, while undergoing a truly apocalyptic phase like the 90s (TWO civil wars in Chechnia, one in Moscow in 93) produced a masterpiece like the Su-34?

And here we see the formidable power of The Great Western Wall!  That rhetorical question will be treated in any combination of the following ways:

  • Dismissed as “Putin propaganda”
  • Dismissed as factually incorrect (the correct version being: ours is SO MUCH better)
  • Simply ignored, blocked from anybody’s awareness
  • Explained by “the Russians steal all our secrets” whereas we invent real things (since the F-35 is actually largely based on the (much better!) Russian Yak-141, this is an especially funny argument to make).
  • “Specialists” will declare that the Su-34 is based on primitive and old technologies while the F-35 is the bleeding edge of aeronautics (which is false, but if it was true, these idiots are too stupid to realize what this statement implies about the intelligence and experience of actual warfare of each party!)
  • The same pseudo-experts will also fail to realize (or, at least, admit) that while the US MIC produced that abomination which the F-35 is, the Russians have just produced a similar aircraft, the Su-75, which has none of the flaws of the F-35, has broadly similar capabilities and for a small fraction of the F-35 criminally obscene price tag.

Western kids can peacefully sleep at night knowing that they are still part of the Master Race and that they are defended by Captain Murica style hyper-warriors with hyper-gadgets who can, and will, kick any Snow Niggers’ ass if needed!  Yeah!

Sweet dreams 🙂

***

But, seriously, why did I post all this stuff about US vs Soviet/Russian aircraft?

Just to illustrate the huge, immense, breathtaking difference between what I call Zone A and Zone B, the Great Western Wall being the monumental propagandist masterpiece which, at least so far, has kept the two Zones apart (the Zones themselves were originally a geographical category, but this is now changing, so let’s think of them as also a mental category).

(Truism alert!!)  We live in the age of the Internet, the ubiquitous smartphones (with excellent cameras!), the social media and too many ways to connect for any wall to stand, including the Great Western Wall!  Reality is now slowly seeping under, over, and even through this mental Great Wall and that has two main effects:

  1. It puts the western ruling classes into a total, abject, panic mode
  2. It stirs up doubts about the veracity of the Western propaganda machine in the heads of the western people (which only doubles the panic felt by the western ruling classes).

What recently happened in Kabul is just about the perfect illustration of how the Western Great Wall is collapsing before our eyes.

***

What about Putin and his ultimatum in all this?

In truth, the Russian ultimatum’s main goal was never to get the western Master Race to agree to negotiate with the drunken Snow Niggers, it was to bring down a major segment of the Western Great Wall: the West’s arrogant sense of axiomatic military superiority and narcissistic sense of impunity.  For decades we were fed a diet about how totally incredible the US and even NATO militaries were (forget about Iraq or Afghanistan!) and how the Russian bear was really only a paper tiger.  Just like the F-35 is the “bestest of the bestest” and the Su-34 “primitive” (we could also build it, we just don’t wanna).

Then why are the Snow Niggers not terrified of our “sanctions from hell” or “bestest militaries in the world”??

Why are our beloved (or maybe not so beloved) leaders so freaked out and clueless about what to do?

Could it be that reality is gradually achieving what scientists call “first contact” with the Western rulers and the serfs they rule over?

I will conclude with a question: what will it take to totally bring down that Western Great Wall?

The Su-34 sure did not do it.

How about the Su-34 as just one example, a tip of a huge iceberg if you wish, of what has happened in the entire Russian armed forces?

Nope.  99% of folks in the West still have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER that Russia can defeat both the US and NATO, even together, and that China is catching up at a phenomenal rate.

How about the total collapse of the western economies which have nowhere to “grow into” (by that they mean: “occupy a defenseless country and enslave them by trading valuable resources for worthless plastic beads”)?

Nope, not yet.  Not while much of the world still purchase dollars.

Now about the total collapse of the EU’s energy hallucinations (aka Greta Tunberg)?

Nope!  EU officials want to, I kid you not, sanction *Russia* by committing energetic and, therefore, economic suicide.  In Russia, we call that “scaring a hedgehog with a naked butt“.

So what about this Russian saying “those who refuse to talk to Lavrov will have to talk to Shoigu“.

Will anybody pay attention and realize what is going on?

Maybe.

But I am afraid that the drunken Snow Niggers will have to bring down that damned Western Great Wall, brick by brick, dollar by dollar, and even bullet by bullet (missile by missile would be more accurate).

But, don’t worry.  The drunken Snow Niggers won’t genocide you.  They are too “primitive” and “Asiatic” for that.

But neither will they pay much attention to you or take you seriously until you finally wake up from your 1000 years of self-delusion based on murderous ideologies and violence.

Russia’s future is on her south (Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle-East, Indian Sub.) east (Far East Asia) and north (Arctic).

I have no idea where the future of the West is.

Do you?

Andrei

.

How does one raid airspace?

China Launches Biggest Raid On Taiwanese Airspace Since October As CCP’s Pacific Perimeter Expands

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-launches-biggest-raid-taiwanese-airspace-october-ccps-pacific-perimeter-expands

Moon of Alabama did an exposé on how the ‘China Threat’ media cycle works: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/10/how-the-china-is-a-threat-fake-news-cycle-works.html#more

And before that, he teased apart the Taiwan Airspace or Air Defense Zone:  https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/10/how-ap-reuters-and-scmp-propagandize-their-readers-against-china.html#more

Godfree Roberts created a comprehensive list of current propaganda at the end.


China data points:  What are they up to?

Space

 

Common prosperity is the main driver of China’s values today.

“Common prosperity is not egalitarianism. To use an analogy, we will first make the pie bigger and then divide it properly through reasonable institutional arrangements. As a rising tide lifts all boats everyone will get a fair share from development and development gains will benefit all our people in a more substantial and equitable way”. Xi Jinping.

As part of the Common Prosperity drive, 6.5 million low-cost homes for leasing will be built across 40 major cities in the five years through 2025, Pan Wei, an official with the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, told reporters at a press conference.

No Corruption

On Tuesday, Xi told the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) to maintain “zero tolerance” for corruption (SCMP):

  • “There is still a long way to go to effectively tackle the more invisible, deep-rooted corruption and we still have a long way to go to eradicate it completely.”

China is the manufacturer of the world

Imports and Exports Hit $6 trillion for the first time in 2021. The total import and export volume of China’s merchandise trade was 39.1 trillion yuan ($6.15 trillion), a year-on-year increase of 21.4%. Compared with 2019, China’s 2020 foreign trade volume, exports and imports had increased by 23.9%, 26.1% and 21.2%, respectively.

China-Africa trade rose 32%, or $67 billion, to $254 billion in 2020, according to China Customs.

19 out of 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean had signed up for the Belt and Road, but some of China’s biggest Latin American investment partners – Brazil, Argentina and Mexico – have not formally signed up to the Belt and Road. Nevertheless, China is now the largest trading partner of Brazil, Argentina and most of the rest of South America.

Healthy Planet

Renewables will meet over 70% of China’s additional electricity demand in the next three years as coal’s role in powering the world’s second-largest economy continues to decline. Wind and solar farm installations will lift their combined generating capacity 75% to 930 Gw by 2024 from 600GW now.

Happiness and Trust

At the January 20th Foreign Ministry Press Conference, a reporter from MASTV asked: “The 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer [above], from the top global public relations firm, Edelman, finds trust among Chinese citizens in their Government in 2021 hit a record 91%, up 9% from last year, and the top globally. Overall, China’s Trust Index is 83%, up 11%, the highest in the survey. Do you have any comment?”

FM Spokesperson Zhao Lijian: “I noted relevant reports. The 2017 and 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer reports, as I recall, showed that the trust among Chinese citizens in their government was the highest in all the countries surveyed.

The figure in this year’s report hits a record high in a decade.

We have shared with you a 10-year survey by the Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government on China. It finds out that the Chinese people’s satisfaction with their government’s performance has been over 90 percent for years in a row, which is consistent with the findings of the Edelman Trust Barometer.  As a Chinese citizen and civil servant, I’m not surprised at all. “


Background on the USA backed HK “color revolution”

Background on the Hong Kong color revolution: https://www.fridayeveryday.com/under-the-surface-a-very-different-hong-kong-story/

A Forensic on the XinJiang / Uighur “genocide” nonsense…

A legal forensic take-down of the Xinjiang accusation of genocide and forced labor:  the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) substantially misrepresented and exaggerated allegations of forced labor in Xinjiang, having insufficient evidence to prove their claims.

http://www.cowestpro.co/uploads/1/9/9/7/19974045/cowestpro_working_paper_jan_2022_v2.pdf

Oil all over China!

Sinopec discovered yet more new oil and gas reservoirs in Xinjiang totaling 88m tons of condensate oil and 290bn cubic meters of natural gas.  So, do you get why the US wanted to destabilize Xinjiang via terrorist attacks in this region?

How a simple blogger exposed the supposed China experts in the West:  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1246795.shtml

Weaponized “Freedom of navigation” is ongoing

Two U.S. carriers enter S.China Sea, to ‘counter malign influence’ https://t.co/REorwjYKOOpic.twitter.com/O9J26y74Je

— Reuters (@Reuters) January 24, 2022

And…

 

The US Congress passed a $7 billion anti-China propaganda bill to villainize China and to exclude Chinese news from America. To put this in perspective, the 2020 budget of NASA is $20 billion dollars.

Ideological attacks…

Economic attacks…

Health attacks…

A Chinese “Spy” arrested…

This is one more example. We see big news headlines that a ‘China Spy’ was arrested. But when the man is quietly let go because of no evidence, they don’t bother to report that.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1246590.shtml

 

Tom Fowdy at RT reports as follows:

The Pre-War preparations are ongoing…

The US is now doing to China what it’s done in the build-up to every war

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/547290-chinas-global-image-worse/


Big thanks to Godfree Roberts

Thank you to Godfree Roberts who does a yeoman’s job to pull together the 50 most important data points emerging from China in one newsletter week after week.

It is getting very difficult to remain a generalist China watcher as the place is just so big and the pace of development is astounding.

I use but a fraction of the newsletter information.  This week’s long reads contain work by: Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., Ning Nanshan, Helen De Cruz & Pauline Lee,  and Wang Wenbin.

If you have an interest in China, go get the Here Comes China newsletter here: https://www.herecomeschina.com/#subscribe

There are a lot of behaviors being exhibited by those in positions of power in the US that seem disparate and odd. We watch Trump who is imposing sanctions on country after country, dreaming of eradicating his country’s structural trade deficit with the rest of the world. We watch pretty much all of US Congress falling over each other in their attempt to impose the harshest possible sanctions on Russia.

People in Turkey, a key NATO country, are literally burning US dollars and smashing iPhones in a fit of pique.

Confronted with a new suite of Russian and Chinese weapons systems that largely neutralize the ability of the US to dominate the world militarily, the US is setting new records in the size of its already outrageously bloated yet manifestly ineffectual defense spending.

As a backdrop to this military contractor feeding frenzy, the Taliban are making steady gains in Afghanistan, now control over half the territory, and are getting ready to stamp “null and void,” in a repeat of Vietnam, on America’s longest war.

A lengthening list of countries are set to ignore or compensate for US sanctions, especially sanctions against Iranian oil exports. In a signal moment, Russia’s finance minister has recently pronounced the US dollar “unreliable.” Meanwhile, US debt keeps galloping upwards, with its largest buyer being reported as a mysterious, possibly entirely nonexistent “Other.”

Although these may seem like manifestations of many different trends in the world, I believe that a case can be made that these are all one thing: the US—the world’s imperial overlord—standing on a ledge and threatening to jump, while its imperial vassals—too many to mention—are standing down below and shouting “Please, don’t jump!”

To be sure, most of them would be perfectly happy to watch the overlord plummet and jelly up the sidewalk.

But here is the key point: if this were to happen today, it would cause unacceptable levels of political and economic collateral damage around the world.

Does this mean that the US is indispensable? No, of course not, nobody is. But dispensing with it will take time and energy, and while that process runs its course the rest of the world is forced to keep it on life support no matter how counterproductive, stupid and demeaning that feels.

What the world needs to do, as quickly as possible, is to dismantle the imperial center, which is in Washington politically and militarily and in New York and London financially, while somehow salvaging the principle of empire.

“What?!” you might exclaim, “Isn’t imperialism evil.”

Well, sure it is, whatever, but empires make possible efficient, specialized production and efficient, unhindered trade over large distances.

Empires do all sorts of evil things—up to and including genocide—but they also provide a level playing field and a method for preventing petty grievances from escalating into tribal conflicts.

The Roman Empire, then Byzantium, then the Tatar/Mongol Golden Horde, then the Ottoman Sublime Porte all provided these two essential services—unhindered trade and security—in exchange for some amount of constant rapine and plunder and a few memorable incidents of genocide.

The Tatar/Mongol Empire was by far the most streamlined: it simply demanded “yarlyk”—tribute—and smashed anyone who attempted to rise above a level at which they were easy to smash.

The American empire is a bit more nuanced: it uses the US dollar as a weapon for periodically expropriating savings from around the world by exporting inflation while annihilating anyone who tries to wiggle out from under the US dollar system.

All empires follow a certain trajectory. Over time they become corrupt, decadent and enfeebled, and then they collapse.

When they collapse, there are two ways to go. One is to slog through a millennium-long dark age—as Western Europe did after the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Another is for a different empire, or a cooperating set of empires, to take over, as happened after the Ottoman Empire collapsed. You may think that a third way exists: of small nations cooperating sweetly and collaborating successfully on international infrastructure projects that serve the common good.

Such a scheme may be possible, but I tend to take a jaundiced view of our simian natures.

We come equipped with MonkeyBrain 2.0, which has some very useful built-in functions for imperialism, along with some ancillary support for nationalism and organized religion.

These we can rely on; everything else would be either a repeat of a failed experiment or an untested innovation.

Sure, let’s innovate, but innovation takes time and resources, and those are the exact two things that are currently lacking.

What we have in permanent surplus is revolutionaries: if they have their way, look out for a Reign of Terror, followed by the rise of a Bonaparte.

That’s what happens every time.

Lest you think that the US isn’t an empire—a collapsing one—consider the following.

The US defense budget is larger than that of the next ten countries combined, yet the US can’t prevail even in militarily puny Afghanistan. (That’s because much of its defense budget is trivially stolen.)

The US has something like a thousand military bases, essentially garrisoning the entire planet, but to unknown effect. It claims the entire planet as its dominion: no matter where you go, you still have to pay US income taxes and are still subject to US laws.

It controls and manipulates governments in numerous countries around the world, always aiming to turn them into satrapies governed from the US embassy compound, but with results that range from unprofitable to embarrassing to lethal.

It is now failing at virtually all of these things, threatening the entire planet with its untimely demise.

What we are observing, at every level, is a sort of blackmail: “Do as we say, or no more empire for you!”

The US dollar will vanish, international trade will stop and a dark age will descend, forcing everyone to toil in the dirt for a millennium while mired in futile, interminable conflicts with neighboring tribes.

None of the old methods of maintaining imperial dominance are working; all that remains is the threat of falling down and leaving a huge mess for the rest of the world to deal with.

The rest of the world is now tasked with rapidly creating a situation where the US empire can be dealt a coup de grâce safely, without causing any collateral damage—and that’s a huge task, so everyone is forced to play for time.

There is a lot of military posturing and there are political provocations happening all the time, but these are sideshows that are becoming an unaffordable luxury: there is nothing to be won through these methods and plenty to be lost.

Essentially, all the arguments are over money. There is a lot of money to be lost. The total trade surplus of the BRICS countries with the West (US+EU, essentially) is over a trillion dollars a year. SCO—another grouping of non-Western countries—comes up with almost the same numbers. That’s the amount of products these countries produce for which they currently have no internal market.

Should the West evaporate overnight, nobody will buy these products. Russia alone had a 2017 trade surplus of $116 billion, and in 2018 so far it grew by 28.5%. China alone, in its trade just with the US, generated $275 billion in surplus. Throw in another $16 billion for its trade with the EU.

Those are big numbers, but they are nowhere near enough if the project is to build a turnkey global empire to replace US+EU in a timely manner. Also, there are no takers.

Russia is rather happy to have shed its former Soviet dependents and is currently invested in building a multilateral, international system of governance based on international institutions such as SCO, BRICS and EAEU.

Numerous other countries are very interested in joining together in such organizations: most recently,

Turkey has expressed interest in turning BRICS into BRICTS. Essentially, all of the post-colonial nations around the world are now forced to trade away some measure of their recently won independence, essentially snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The job vacancy of Supreme Global Overlord is unlikely to attract any qualified candidates.

What everyone seems to want is a humble, low-budget, cooperative global empire, without all of the corruption and with a lot less life-threatening militarism. It will take time to build, and the resources to build it can only come from one place: from gradually bleeding US+EU dry.

In order to do this, the wheels of international commerce must continue to spin. But this is exactly what all of the new tariffs and sanctions, the saber-rattling and the political provocations, are attempting to prevent: a ship laden with soya is now doing circles in the Pacific off the coast of China; steel I-beams are rusting at the dock in Turkey…

But it is doubtful that these attempts will work. The EU has been too slow in recognizing just how pernicious its dependence on Washington has become, and will take even more time to find ways to free itself, but the process has clearly started.

For its part, Washington runs on money, and since its current antics will tend to make money grow scarce even faster than it otherwise would, those who stand to lose the most will make the Washingtonians feel their pain and will force a change of course.

As a result, everyone will be pushing in the same direction: toward a slow, steady, controllable imperial collapse.

All we can hope for is that the rest of the world manages to come together and build at least the scaffolding of a functional imperial replacement in time to avoid collapsing into a new post-imperial dark age.

The West Leaves Mummy’s Basement

After years of behaving like a teenager shadow boxing in the basement of his mother’s house, playing out the fantasy of knocking out Ivan Drago in the 1985 movie Rocky IV, the US and NATO find themselves confronting the reality.

SCOTT RITTER 

Being a member of NATO used to be pretty cost-free: fun even. You had a suite in the flashy new HQ, admired your flag with all the others, gloried in your excellent values. The biggest downside was that you were expected to provide a few soldiers to participate in the latest war in some dusty place. But, you could go home after destroying Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan and forget about it. Until the refugees showed up. And Washington really did insist that you buy some of its weapons and it was harder and harder to say no. And you started getting sucked into things that weren’t as much fun as you expected. But, overall, for the leaders anyway, it was an attractive deal. And most of you didn’t like Russia much, having edited your own communists out of the story and forgotten what the Germans did to you.

Russia was feeble and weak, going down, and certainly no match for “the greatest alliance in history“. But what happens when that teddy bear turns nasty? Blowing up countries from 20,000 feet, you had stopped paying attention. Lost wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq turn out to be poor preparation and the bear had been paying attention. But, you cry, NATO was supposed to protect me, not put me into greater danger!

And that is the dilemma that Moscow has been patiently preparing for you. On 17 December Moscow published two draft treaties. Here are the official English versions: Treaty between The United States of America and the Russian Federation on security guarantees and Agreement on measures to ensure the security of The Russian Federation and member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They should be read but, in essence, after reminding the USA and NATO of all the international treaties that they signed up to and ignored, they are asked to commit themselves again, in writing, in public. They must accept the principle that security is mutual. In addition the USA and Russia will not station nuclear weapons outside their territories – which will require the USA to remove some. Finally – and not negotiable – the USA and NATO must solemnly commit themselves to no more expansion. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov later explained why the drafts had been made public: “because we are aware of the West’s ability to obfuscate any uncomfortable issues for them… We have serious doubts that the main thing in our proposals, namely the unconditional demand not to expand NATO to the east, will not be swept under the carpet.” There is little expectation from Moscow that these demands will be taken seriously by the West. I outline my assessment of the “or else” here and again here. Others have done so elsewhere: Moscow has quite a range of options.

There were two rounds of talks in Geneva and a meeting with NATO. The US written answer was delivered on 26 January and, in Lavrov’s words, did not address “the main issue” of NATO expansion and deployment of strike weapons, although there were openings on “matters of secondary importance”. So here we are and we await the next step. It is, of course, quite certain that Moscow has the next step worked out and the ones after that.

Other events since December have been interesting. The CIA Director visited Kiev 17 January; the UK began supplying Ukraine with light anti-armour weapons (rather elderly as it turned out); the US is sending more and others are providing light AD systems; Canada sent some troops (mostly it seemed to help evacuate Embassy personnel); a senior German naval officer resigned after committing crimespeak; some US troops on heightened preparedness”. The biggest laugh was the evacuate-or-not dance: Canada, USA and UK, the three most enthusiastic cheerleaders for war to the last Ukrainian, are running, the EU is staying.

Other developments worth noting. On 3 January the P5 declared “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Iran and Russia showed close cooperation. Russian and Syrian aircraft made a joint patrol of all Syria’s borders; these are to be regular occurrences. Agreements with Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua in a range of areas, including military collaboration. And China’s Foreign Minister advised Washington to take Moscow’s concerns seriously. Only a fool would think these were random coincidences.

There was lots of opinion, of course. Much of it stunningly idiotic. My favourite is An Aging Vladimir Putin Hopes War Can Make a Sagging Empire Rise Again. I must confess that when one sees “aging” and “sagging empire”, Putin and Russia are not the first things that come to mind. But these are memorable as well: How Germany’s greed for gas, and another grubby deal with Moscow, could plunge Europe into an abyss and Is Germany a Reliable American Ally? Nein: Berlin goes its own way, prizing cheap gas, car exports to China, and keeping Putin calm. A cry from mummy’s basement: Why threat to Ukraine from Putin’s Russia is exaggerated – Gwynne Dyer: THE geopolitical question of the moment is: how important is it to humour Russian leader Vladimir Putin? The answer is: not very. From another couch warrior: Russia May Underestimate Ukraine and NATO. And lots of threats: eighteen response scenarios; “sanctions like you’ve not seen before“; personal sanctions. The US State Department complains about “Disarming Disinformation” and burbles that it’s “United with Ukraine“. First he said “only winners” could make demands, then he complained he didn’t have a seat.

But Moscow doesn’t want to “invade Ukraine”; if it did it would have to pay for it. In any event, the way Ukraine’s population is melting away, in another couple of decades, it will be uninhabited.

More rational thinkers exist. Scott Ritter, no couch warrior, knows that America couldn’t defend Ukraine even if it wanted to. The troops Washington has put on alert may be from the storied 82nd Airborne but they’re only light infantry. NATO no longer has the heavy forces and their support in place. But Russia does. There is no credible military threat from NATO. Many understand reality: Biden’s Opportunity for Peace in Eurasia; The Overstretched Superpower: Does America Have More Rivals Than It Can Handle?; Opinion: Ignore the hawks, Mr. President. You’re right on Ukraine. People in RAND realise that the weapons being given Ukraine will be useless. Worse than useless, in fact, if they encourage Kiev to start something. This fictional account describes what a Russia-Ukraine war would really look like – over in a day and all with stand-off weapons, a few special forces and the local forces.

There have been some second thoughts. Washington and its allies have been booming the “Russian invasion” threat as hard as they can but Kiev is trying to to turn down the volume – it doesn’t want to scare its principal backers away. No signs on 2 January, or 25 January. Delicate job this, as we see here: you have to say not now but maybe later. Now even Washington is trying to dial it down – after all, Russia has been “about to invade” for three months now.

But the real second thoughts are forming in Europe. By addressing its demands to Washington, Moscow has shown the Europeans where they fit on the tree. It’s Europe that will – again – pay for Washington’s conceits. Washington is always careful to exempt itself from the anti-Russia sanctions – no shortage of rocket engines or oil or titanium – but Europe can’t. Amusingly, the EU is complaining to the WTO about the counter sanctions Moscow put on food which ended a profitable export market. The two favourite sanctions Washington is pushing for are stopping Nord Stream 2 and kicking Russia out of SWIFT. Neither of these will hurt the USA but they will be devastating for Europe. Killing Nord Stream will be a severe blow to German industry. And, absent SWIFT, how is Europe supposed to pay for Russian gas imports? No wonder Germany’s Scholz wants a “qualified fresh start” with Russia as the Foreign Minister calls for diplomacy. An Open Letter in Germany. France’s Macron thinks the EU should start its own dialogue. Hungary’s Orbán is going there for another reasons but will surely be talking about this. Croatia wants nothing to do with the adventure. Bulgaria wants out. One entertaining climbdown was the British Defence Minister’s invitation to Shoygu to come to London; instead he will go to Moscow. Even Washington and London are starting to learn that the sanctions won’t be off-stage after all. London has been warned ther e could be a big spike in energy co sts and some big American companies have asked t o be excepted. As for sending troops, Washington’s not that “United with Ukraine“. NATO won’t; UK’s Johnson admits no NATO count ry is capable of a large-scale deployment in Ukraine.

We are coming to the end of the story. All those people in the West who thought they could ignore Russia’s interests are starting to suspect that they don’t have the leverage they thought they had. Russia is pretty sanctions-proof. It is the closest thing to an economic autarky on the planet: lots of territory, lots of raw materials, lots of water, lots of energy, all the manufacturing it needs, self-sufficient in food, well-educated people, backed up government, armed to the teeth. It’s pretty impregnable and it’s not run by fools. And it’s very closely allied to the biggest manufacturing power and population in the world. Not an easy target at all and almost impossible to hurt without hurting yourself more.

And all this to preserve the so-called right of a country no one wants in NATO to ask to be admitted. What a principle to die for!

Time for Moscow to tighten the screws. How much will Europe and the other NATOites be prepared to pay for being in a security organisation that does nothing but get its members into disastrous wars and make them insecure?

Putin and his team can allow themselves a small smile: they’ve been planning this for a long time. He warned us in 2007 and here we are today.

• • •

I can think of no better demonstration of Washington’s bankruptcy than Nuland’s appeal yesterday: “We are calling on Beijing to use its influence with Moscow to urge diplomacy…“.

(Republished from Russia Observer by permission of author or representative)

An illustration

This is an apt illustration of how China thinks and will deal with the United States. video 1.2MB

Biden Spits on Putin’s Request for Security

 

“The main issue is our clear position on the unacceptability of further NATO expansion to the East and the deployment of highly-destructive weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov 

Washington delivered a slap in the face to Moscow on Wednesday when U.S. ambassador John Sullivan provided a written response to Russia’s proposals for security guarantees.

The missive was given to Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko who did not reveal the contents but passed them on to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for analysis.

Lavrov, in turn, issued a statement on Thursday morning confirming our worst suspicions that the Biden administration has shrugged off Russia’s reasonable demands choosing instead to intensify the provocations that are likely to trigger a war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. This is an excerpt from an article at Tass News Agency:

 “The United States and NATO don’t seem to have taken Russia’s concerns on security guarantees into account when drawing up responses to Moscow’s proposals, nor did they demonstrate any willingness to do so, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday.

“The numerous statements that our colleagues made yesterday make it clear that as for the major aspects of the draft agreements that we earlier presented to other parties, we can’t say that they took our concerns into account or showed any readiness to take our concerns into consideration.” (Tass News Agency) 

Peskov is right, on the core issues the US either issued no clear response or refused to comply.

In effect, the US response was designed to look like Washington was honestly negotiating when in fact, they were merely reinforcing their original position.

The US response is essentially a defense of Washington’s commitment to rule the world by force and to ignore the legitimate demands of weaker states to provide even minimal security for their people.

If the US and NATO are allowed to pursue their present course of action, Russian cities and towns will be within 7 to 10 minutes of nuclear missiles located in nearby Romania and Poland.

Russia’s are being asked to live with a nuclear dagger pointed at their throats. This is Biden’s idea of global security. Is it any wonder why Putin does not agree?

Here’s part of what Lavrov said on Thursday:

 “There is no positive reaction on the main issue in this document. The main issue is our clear position that further NATO expansion to the east and the deployment of strike weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation are unacceptable.” 

Lavrov has summed it up perfectly.

While Sullivan was delivering his response to Grushko, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg issued a statement saying the Alliance “will not compromise” on potential expansion into Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics, as this clashes with the NATO’s principles.” Stoltenberg’s statement removes any doubt that NATO will not only continue its eastward expansion onto Russia’s doorstep, but feels thoroughly justified in doing so.

As we noted earlier, NATO’s response confirms that Washington is still committed to its overarching plan to rule the world by force regardless of how ordinary people are impacted by the policy.

On Thursday morning, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev reiterated the recently-verified claim that NATO’s eastward expansion violates the promises of US officials to Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

 “They promised not to expand NATO, but didn’t keep their promise,” Medvedev said speaking with the Russian media. “They say that ‘we did not sign anything.’ But we all know well who and when granted to whom such promises, such assurances….. They failed to keep their promises. They are now encroaching on our state borders.” 

The steady eastward movement of troops, the buildup of lethal military hardware, and the deployment of nuclear weapons all pose an existential threat to Russia that suffered horrific losses in World War 2.

The Biden administration seems to believe their sinister plan is working since people in the west generally believe reports in the media that the fake threat of “Russian invasion” is an honest account of what is actually going on the ground.

But there is no threat of a Russian invasion; the story was stitched together to divert attention from Russia’s security demands which are both reasonable and appropriate.

Once again, the media is shaping a narrative to fit the policy which is the very description of state propaganda.

In an effort to further downplay the importance of Moscow’s requests, US officials characterized their written response not as “a formal document but a set of ideas for further discussion.”

What this means is that Washington does not feel that that Russia is its equal so it does not feel required to enter into a treaty agreement with them.

Keep in mind, this response does not in any way meet the basic requirements that were clearly outlined by Putin repeatedly in December when he said that Russia wanted a written, legally-biding treaty that could not be sloughed off by countries that prefer to conduct an impulsive, self-aggrandizing, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants foreign policy that has left great swathes of the Middle East and Central Asia in an utter shambles.

Indeed, this may not be a “formal document”, but it is clear that there will be a formal document or there will be no agreement and no peace. The choice is Washington’s.

On the issue of nuclear missile sites in Poland and Romania, as well as, the development of military bases in Ukraine, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated that Washington was still open to discussion.

 “There’s no doubt in my mind that if Russia were to approach this seriously, and in a spirit of reciprocity, with the determination to enhance collective security for all of us, there are very positive things in this document that should be pursued,” he said. 

“Positive things”, says Blinken?

There are no “positive things” in the American response.

The response is a flagrant and contemptible rejection of Moscow’s core demands on NATO expansion and the deployment of nuclear missiles to locations on Russia’s border.

To understand what a fraud the Biden administration is engaged in, please, take a look at this brief excerpt from the draft treaty that Russia presented to NATO and Washington.

 The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them……

The Parties shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party.

Article 7

The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons already deployed outside their national territories at the time of the entry into force of the Treaty to their national territories.” (“Treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees,” Official Russian State Document, December 17, 2021) 

Is there anything ambiguous in the language of this document?

No, there isn’t.

The US was asked to respond in writing to these explicit demands. No one is in the slightest bit interested in Blinken’s vague pontifications on “positive things”. It’s completely irrelevant.

What Putin wants to know is whether US nukes are going to remain 7 minutes flight-time from Moscow and whether a hostile foreign army is going to be hunkered down in nearby Ukraine.

He wants to know whether Washington plans to put a gun to Russia’s head in order to increase its power in the region.

That’s what he wants to know, and that’s what this foreign policy debacle is all about.

What Blinken’s response tells us is that the provocations are going to continue unabated whether they ignite a war or not.

Even as we speak, the US is sending more lethal weaponry and troops to the Ukrainian theater while other NATO allies promise to assist in the effort. It is madness.

At the same time, President Joe Biden is threatening to impose “direct personal sanctions” on Putin if the Russian president takes action to defend the Russian-speaking people in East Ukraine.

The threat was issued just hours after the State Department told Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov that he “would have to leave the US by April if Moscow fails to meet certain demands made by Washington.”

While these may seem like trivial developments, the two incidents help to illustrate how relations between the two nations are fast deteriorating increasing the prospect of a tragic miscalculation that could precipitate a bloody and protracted conflagration.

A Quote…

In an interview, Putin said once:

“If a fight becomes inevitable, you must be sure to be the first to strike”.

This was something learned, he told, from his experience in the streets of Leningrad.

I am afraid he might be soon forced to apply this precept. I hope some sense prevails in the minds of US and NATO leaders and, if not publicly, at least behind doors, they keep trying to address Russia’s concerns.

MM Gut Feeling…

My gut feeling is that the USA is (as crazy and insane as it seems) planning a first-strike nuclear action against either Russia or China, or even both. My gut feeling is that they are seriously discussing it right now, and that are are some seriously insane people demanding that it take place. They are seriously discussing it. As in… WHEN.

Not…IF.

Jesus.

I sincerely hope that I am wrong.

But…

What I can positively tell you all is that EVEN if the United States tries to make a massive preemptive nuclear catastrophic strike against Asia, it will be too late.

It will be too late.

With both Russia and China, they are staffed with real talent; real experts, who are really serious about their roles and are there through merit and ability.

Not though blowjobs, polictical donations, graft, or inheritance.

Like America.

The truth is that both Russia and China has a gun pointed at the head of the United States. Both of them do. Right now. This is on all levels, nuclear, black ops, economic, financial, social, societal, and political.

The United States is still playing around with media to “control the narrative” while the world has moved well, well further than that.  The future is now firmly in the hands of Asia.

The Commander says that the Russians and Chinese are uniformly at

96% readiness.

That’s about the best you can get.

Seriously.

That’s substantially better than what was the case 8 months ago. It is no wonder that Russia and China placed their clear demands; set up their defined “white tents”.

They have a gun to the head of the USA.

When the USA reaches for it’s gun, it will be too late.

And they know exactly what is going on, how and why, where, and when, and everything else in between. They know. They know.

They KNOW.

And thus, it will be scene right out of the Sopranos. Like this…

Video

wack-1-2022-01-30_16.02.42

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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A war with China! What a great idea!

This article is yet another in a series trying to document the peaking collapse of the United States in all of it’s myrid ways. And it is kind of tiring, don’t you know. I’d rather just do other things with my time, but we; everyone of us, are now in the mist of one of the most monumental shakeups in the world. It’s really very stunning. We are living history right now.

So how about getting yourself a nice beer, and grabbing some toasted Italian or French crusty bread, and placing some cheese, onions, tomatoes, and olive oil and sit down and read this article. The world seems to be going down into the gutter, but that’s an illusion.

It’s only the United States, and those foolish nations that chain themselves to it.

Yum!

 

War with China! Another Bright Idea from the Yankee Capital

Discussions of war with China over Taiwan often assume a short, regional war won by superior American technology, after which things go on approximately as before.

A few observations:

Overconfidence

First, overconfidence is an occupational disease of militaries and militarists. Wars very often fail to proceed according to the expectations of the aggressors and not infrequently end in catastrophe.

The American Civil War was expected to be over in an afternoon at First Manassas; wrong by four years and 630,000 dead, equivalent to over six million today.

When Napoleon invaded Russia, he did not foresee Russian troops marching in Paris, which is what happened.

When Germany invaded France in 1914, it expected a short, victorious war of movement, and got four years of a losing attrition war.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, GIs sleeping with their daughters in Tokyo was not among their war aims, but it is what happened.

When the French went back into Vietnam after WW II, being catastrophically defeated by les jaunes at Dien Bien Phu was not a strategic objective.

When America invaded Vietnam, Washington did not expect a panicked flight from atop the Embassy.

When Hitler invaded Russia, GIs in Berlin were not in his plans.

When Russia invaded Afghanistan, it did not expect the same outcome that the Americans should have expected, but didn’t, when they did exactly the same thing.

The list could be extended. Caution often is a wiser plan than martial enthusiasm.

Overestimation of ability

Second, America starts its wars by [1] overestimating its own capacities, [2] underestimating the enemy, and [3] misunderstanding the nature of the war it is getting into.

There is probably a manual on this.

Usually the US has no end game and no “what if” plan in case the unforeseen occurs. These traits are clear in America’s wars since Korea.

The reason for this curious behavior is that war is only tangentially a rational endeavor, being chiefly a limbic, instinctually driven habit probably of genetic provenance.

War is just what men do, tribe against tribe, country against country, empire against empire, world without end. War is a major, perhaps the major, focus of human endeavor.

A glance at history reveals it to be chiefly a tapestry of war. The literature of civilizations reflects this: The Gilgamesh Epic, the Iliad, the Aeneid, El Cid, Orlando Furioso, Lord of the Rings.

Taiwan

Does America have a clear reason for defending Taiwan? It is not of vital importance to America, and arguably not even of minor importance.

The fact is, that very few Americans know quite where it is, and few can distinguish it from Thailand.

If it became part of China almost no one would notice.

Before getting into an unpredictable war with a massively populous nuclear power of formidable economic and military resources on the other side of the world, it might be wise to answer the question, “Why? What do we gain? How do we get out of said war?”

Regarding war in Chinese waters:

The US fleet has not been in combat since 1945, over seventy-five years ago.

American pilots have not flown against a competent enemy since 1973, almost half a century ago.

People’s Liberation Army Navy J-15 “Flying Shark” fighters parked about the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning

Enormous changes in technology and armament have occurred in the intervening years.

Nobody really knows what a battle of naval forces against modern antiship missiles would look like. Those who can guess are not sanguine.

Most warships today lack armor.

Anyone looking at what a couple of French Exocet missiles did to the USS Stark in 1987 would not bet on equally unarmored Ticos or Arleigh Burkes.

An aircraft carrier is a large bladder of aviation fuel wrapped around high explosives.

Look at the accidental launch in 1967 of one Zuni five-inch ground-attack missile aboard the USS Forrestal, igniting raging fires, cooking off bombs, killing 134 sailors and putting the ship in the repair yard for many months.

Militaries grow slack in extended periods of peace.

Training decreases to save money. War stocks of tank treads are cannibalized for training and aren’t there when war comes; the company that made them has gone out of business. Supplies of critical parts dwindle as budgets go to procurement of future hardware.

After all, nobody really expects war. Rapid mobilization, it turns out, is impossible.

Conscription?

If the war was not won as quickly and decisively as hoped, as it very likely would not be, would an American public already under severe economic stress support the heavy cost of a war having no obvious end point or relevance to their lives? Conscription?

Beltway thinking

Within the Washington Beltway many seem to think that China is Cambodia with more people.

Some in Washington harbor a residual belief that America is militarily supreme, that its mere entrance into war seals the outcome.

Think again, carefully.

Rand has wargamed regional war in the Strait and South China Sea and concluded that America has a very good chance of losing.

The Chinese are smart, and excellent engineers.

Chinese students dominate America’s best technical universities and the elite high schools. CalTech and MIT, for example.

Look at the Chinese space program, the upcoming 360 mph maglev trains using high-temperature superconductivity.

The Chinese are not little-leaguers. They have put many resources into antiship missiles specifically designed for US carriers. These, note, greatly outrange carrier aviation.

Iraq was predicted to be a “cakewalk.” China won’t be.

Japan

Allies? In naval circles there is much talk about the First Island Chain and an assumption that Japan will join a war against China to protect Taiwan, or at least let its bases be used by American forces.

Are we sure?

Japan is well within missile and air range of China.

Japan is within missile and air range of China.

All of its petroleum arrives by sea, and China has pretty decent submarines. Japan’s trade mostly moves by sea.

China is a crucial trading partner whose elimination in a war would devastate the Japanese economy.

Japan is close to China.

America is not.

Tokyo might worry that America would grow weary of the war and go home, as it usually does, and leave Japan, all alone, in a shooting war with China.

How would that end?

What stake does Japan have in the independence of Taiwan?

Today it trades with both Taiwan and China. If China absorbed the island, Japan would continue trading with both. Only the letterhead would change. Are we quite, quite sure Tokyo would want any part of this?

South Korea

South Korea?

Its cities and entire economy are within missile range of China. Does it really want to get into a shooting war with its huge neighbor, which has a land border with the peninsula, to maintain American hegemony in the Pacific?

Having gotten into a war, how would it get out?

The Koreans may have thought of this.

Wars as imagined inside the Beltway often seem to assume that the enemy will just lie there and be bombed without doing anything untoward or unexpected.

Are we sure?

The United States has 28,000 troops and their families within range of Chinese weaponry, the killing of whom would force Washington into desperate measures.

Could China encourage North Korea to attack southward, creating a two-front war far beyond Washington’s ability to handle? Or Kim to think he saw a chance and attack on his own initiative?

Might China annex Myanmar? Perhaps this is farfetched. Perhaps it isn’t. Remember that nobody expected China’s entry into the Korean war.

Taiwan

One might suspect that Taipei, seeing overwhelming forces arrayed against it across the Strait, will one day cut the best deal it can with Beijing rather than be devastated first and then have to accept whatever conditions Beijing chose to impose.

It could get a sweetheart deal as Beijing would much prefer this to invading with all of its risks.

Here is a factor I am not competent to judge, but that might be worth judging: The Chinese, as I knew them long ago when I lived in Taiwan, are (very) racially aware and nationalistic.

The Taiwanese are Chinese.

You can bet they know of the Legations, the Opium Wars, the Boxers, the burning of the Summer Palace, the Korean War.

As I write, the most popular movie on the mainland is about a Chinese victory over Americans in the Korean War.

What might a Chinese attack on Taiwan look like?

The Chinese general staff mysteriously does not confide in me, but a good guess is easy. The Chinese often do beach-assault exercises on their side of the strait, obviously practice for the genuine assault.

One of these turns suddenly into the real thing. Ballistic missiles crater Taiwan’s military runways, missiles in large numbers hit air defenses.

Troop ships head for Taiwan, getting there in eight hours at fifteen knots, helicopters and paratroops in less.

China’s large and reasonably good air force bombs and bombs and bombs.

After twenty-four hours, the US is still trying to decide what is happening, talking to the JCS, asking the President what to do.

Victory

Nathan Bedford Forrest, the talented Confederate general, is said to have said that the secret of victory is to “git thar fustest with the mostest.”

In the event of a surprise attack, how long would it take—in the real world, not in PowerPoint slides—for America to get there with how much of what?

If the Chinese got substantial forces ashore, it would be the end of the story.

Keeping troops out of an island is one thing, getting them out quite another. Not even John Bolton—perhaps not even John Bolton—can imagine that America could win a land war with China in Asia.

Selling the American public on a large war over things in which it has no interest would be difficult.

Under these circumstances, the chances are nonnegligible that the US would make loud noises, huff and puff, save face as best it could, and do nothing.

What would REALLY happen?

But let us assume that Washington fought and lost the regional war, Taiwan perhaps surrendering after the U.S. lost a dozen ships and a carrier was disabled.

What would Washington do after such a humiliation?

Never underestimate the influence of vanity on world affairs.

The hawks in DC have elevated titles and, sometimes, considerable ability, but they also have the same hormones and egos as patrons in Joe’s Bar in Chicago. A Chinese victory in the style of Tsushima Strait would end the world’s view of America as an invincible hegemon.

The fernbar Napoleons might well decide to up the ante and turn a regional into a world war.

This it would win.

“Win.”

Perhaps by blocking the Strait of Malacca and threatening the Three Gorges Dam. The expectation in the Pentagon would likely be that Beijing would see the futility of resistance and surrender.

But if it did not?

The REAL facts

America’s trade with China in goods in 2020 was $660 billion, $120 billion of that being exports, making it America’s largest trading partner…

Cutting this off would wreck the American economy.

This is far more than a matter of iPhones and cheap plastic buckets for Walmart. Though most may not know it, America is an economic dependency of China.

The US gets from China countless things it cannot make but cannot do without.

For example, cars require computers to control their ignition and transmissions. Where do we think these are made?

Companies like Boeing sound American but many vital assemblies come from China.

High-end semiconductors, crucial to today’s economies, come predominantly from East Asian companies, notably Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung, both of which would be hostage to Chinese attack.

The great majority of rare earths, critical to the manufacture of chips, come from China.

Similar considerations exist for industry after industry.

While America has the technology to make most of the things it gets from China, it does not have the manufacturing capacity, and would need years to develop it.

Has anyone in Washington checked industry by industry to see what the effects of the end of imports would actually be?

Further, China is the largest trading partner of most of the world, Germany and the European Union for example, and close with most of the rest.

If an American war took China out of the global supply chain, [1] the resulting depression would make 1929 look like the height of prosperity, [2] turn the entire earth against the US, and likely [3] lead to the lynching of everyone in Washington.

Never mentioned is that America is trying, with considerable success, to block China’s economic progress by preventing its acquisition of advanced semiconductors.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest and most advanced manufacturer of chips, is in Taiwan. Reunification of Taiwan with China would solve this critical problem. Beijing has probably thought of this.

Considering the costs, risks, and benefits if any of such a war, the question may be, “How bright an idea is this?”

China’s missiles could dust the US military in minutes — here’s what would happen if they tried

Alex Lockie, Business Insider US
 Apr 02, 2019, 10:38 AM
  • China’s massive missile forces could savage US air and naval forces in the Pacific, lighting up ports and airfields, and blowing up F-35s, F-22s, and possibly aircraft carriers before they could respond.
  • War-gaming experts point to this as a persistent problem with US forces in the Pacific, but it’s far from a clear-cut win for China.
  • The US has a number of ways it can predict, prevent, or blunt a missile attack, and once the US military and its allies kick into gear, China will face a mighty wrath.

Experts at the cutting edge of simulated warfare have spoken: China would handily defeat the US military in the Pacific with quick bursts of missile fired at air bases.

The exact phrasing was that the US was getting “its ass handed to it” in those simulations, Breaking Defense reported the RAND analyst David Ochmanek as saying earlier in March.

“In every case I know of,” Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defence, said, “the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”

Against China, which has emerged as the US’s most formidable rival, this problem becomes more acute. China’s vast, mountainous territory gives it millions of square kilometres in which to hide its extensive fleet of mobile long-, medium-, and short-range missiles.

In the opening minutes of a battle against the US, Beijing could unleash a barrage of missiles that would nail US forces in Guam, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and possibly Australia. With China’s growing anti-ship capability, even US aircraft carriers in the region would likely come under intense fire.

For the US, this would be the feared attack in which F-35s and F-22s, fifth-generation aircraft and envy of the world, are blown apart in their hangars, runways are cratered, and ships are sunk in ports.

The remaining US forces in this case would be insufficient to back down China’s air and sea forces, which could then easily scoop up a prize such as Taiwan.

Additionally, the US can’t counter many of China’s most relevant missile systems because of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty it signed with Russia, which prohibits missiles with ranges between 500 kilometres and 5,470 kilometres – the type it would need to hold Chinese targets at equal risk. (The US is withdrawing from that treaty.)

So given China’s clear advantage in missile forces and the great incentive to knock out the best military with a sucker punch, why doesn’t it try?

Politics

China could light up much of the Pacific with a blistering salvo of missiles and do great harm to US ships and planes, but they likely won’t because it would start World War III.

China wouldn’t just be attacking the US. It would be attacking Japan and South Korea at a minimum. Whatever advantage China gained by kicking off a fight this way would have to balance against a combined response from the US and its allies.

The US is aware of the sucker-punch problem. In the event that tensions rise enough that a strike is likely, the US would simply spread its forces out among its bases and harden important structures, such as hangars, so they could absorb more punishment from missiles.

Potential targets China needed to strike would multiply, and the deployment of electronic and physical decoys would further complicate things for Beijing. For US ships at sea, the use of electronic decoys and onboard missile defenses would demand China throw tremendous numbers of missiles at the platforms, increasing the cost of such a strike.

Key US military bases will also have ballistic-missile defences, which could blunt the attack somewhat.

The US also monitors the skies for ballistic missiles, which would give it some warning time. Alert units could scramble their aircraft and be bearing down on China’s airspace just after the first missiles hit.

Justin Bronk, a military-aviation expert at the Royal United Service Institute, pointed out at the institute’s Combat Air Survivability conference that when the US hit Syria’s Al Shayrat air base with 58 cruise missiles, planes were taking off from the base again within 24 hours.

Payback is a … consideration

Missiles brigades that just fired and revealed their positions would be sitting ducks for retaliation by the US or its allies.

Japan, which will soon have 100 F-35s, some of which will be tied into US Navy targeting networks, would jump into the fight swiftly.

China would have to mobilize a tremendous number of aircraft and naval assets to address that retaliatory strike. That mobilization, in addition to the preparations for the initial strike, may tip Beijing’s hand, telegraphing the sucker punch and blunting its damage on US forces.

While China’s missile forces pose a huge threat to the US, one punch isn’t enough to knock out the world’s best military, but it is enough to wake it up.

Now consider this…

It is not ONLY China. It’s fighting China + Russia together.

Together.

If all the studies point to massive defeats against China alone, imagine the horror when fighting a paired Russia and China together.

It is a suicide move.

Consider this.

Losing in a war is never a pleasant experience. I am sure that many generals throughout history can attest to this fact.

Consider what happened to the entire Nazi German Sixth Army when it was surrounded and trapped inside Stalingrad…

How German Field Marshal Paulus was taken prisoner

From Russian Insider. All credit observed.

Gaunt, pale and emaciated, the commander of the Wehrmacht’s 6th Army looked like a hunted animal to the Soviet military commanders.
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On the night of January 31, 1943, units of the 64th Army’s 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade broke through to the department store building in the center of Stalingrad, sealing it off from all sides. According to captured Germans, it was there that the headquarters of Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army was stationed. The Soviet ‘Operation Koltso’ (Ring) to defeat the enemy grouping encircled in the city was approaching its finale…

The “beast’s lair”

After the Soviet troops opened intensive fire from machine guns and mortars on the building at about six o’clock in the morning, the shooting from the German side stopped. White flags appeared from the ground and second floors. The enemy wanted to start negotiations.

On the order of the brigade commander, Colonel Ivan Burmakov, a group of negotiators led by Senior Lieutenant Fyodor Ilchenko headed for the department store building. A German officer who met the Soviet soldiers told them through an interpreter: “Our top commander wants to talk to your top commander.” To that, Ilchenko retorted: “Well, our top commander has many other things to attend to. He is not here. You’ll have to talk to me.”.

Ignoring the German officer’s halfhearted request to hand over their weapons, the Soviet negotiators started going down to the basement where Friedrich Paulus had his HQ. “The basement was literally packed with soldiers – there were hundreds of them here. Worse than a tram! They were all unwashed and hungry and they smelt to high heaven! They all looked desperately frightened. They had huddled here to hide from the mortar fire,” recalled the senior lieutenant. Hearing the sound of gunfire, Ilchenko made a grab for his holster, but it only turned out to be suicides.

The negotiators were met by the commander of the Wehrmacht’s 71st Infantry Division, Maj-Gen Friedrich Roske, and the 6th Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Arthur Schmidt. They led the Soviet soldiers to Paulus’s room. “The Field Marshal was lying on an iron bed without a uniform, in just his shirt,” recalled Ilchenko. “A candle-end was burning on the table, illuminating an accordion lying on the couch. Paulus didn’t greet us but he sat up. He had the appearance of a sick and physically exhausted man and his face was twitching in a nervous tic.”

Negotiations

An ordinary lieutenant could not accept the capitulation of the German commander and, gradually, representatives of the senior and top-level Red Army command started arriving at the department store. Several hours later, accompanied by several colonels and lieutenant-colonels, Maj-Gen Ivan Laskin, chief of staff of the 64th Army, came down to the basement. In an attempt to distance himself in every possible way from the capitulation, Paulus delegated the right to negotiate to Roske and Schmidt.

While the Field Marshal was “tidying himself up” in the room next door, the Soviet negotiators presented his generals with an ultimatum: The encircled grouping must immediately stop any resistance, lay down its weapons and surrender to the Soviet troops in an orderly manner.

Tired of waiting for Friedrich Paulus himself to finally appear, the Soviet commanders went into his room. The German commander, according to Laskin’s recollections, greeted the members of the delegation with a sentence in broken Russian: “Field Marshal of the German Army Paulus renders himself prisoner to the Red Army.” He apologized that, since his new rank had only been conferred on him on January 30, his new uniform wasn’t ready and he was compelled to appear in his colonel-general’s uniform. “And anyway, my new uniform will hardly be of any use to me now,” the commander added with a wry smile. 

At that point in time, the 6th Army in Stalingrad was cut into two groupings isolated from each other. As a result of the talks, the southern pocket of German troops, commanded by General Roske, was to capitulate. At the same time, Paulus declined to order the northern pocket to surrender on the grounds that, since January 30, its commander, Col-Gen Karl Strecker, was directly accountable to Hitler.

Inglorious end

Street fighting was still under way in the center of Stalingrad when German officers, accompanied by Soviet commanding officers, set off in vehicles to order their units to cease firing.

After all the formalities had been settled and the Field Marshal had received guarantees of his personal safety, he was led out of the basement, along with his staff officers. The area around the department store had by then come under the full control of Soviet infantry and Wehrmacht soldiers were clearing sectors that had been mined.

“Soviet and German soldiers who just a few hours earlier had been firing on each other stood calmly next to one another in the courtyard holding their guns in their hands or slung on their shoulder. But how shockingly different their external appearance was!” recalled Wilhelm Adam, adjutant to the 6th Army commander. “The German soldiers – ragged, in thin greatcoats over threadbare uniforms, as thin as skeletons – presented emaciated figures exhausted half to death, with sunken, unshaved features. The Red Army soldiers were well nourished, full of vigor and dressed in fine winter uniforms… I was deeply moved by something else. Our soldiers were not beaten, let alone shot. Amidst the ruins of their city which the Germans had destroyed, Soviet soldiers would pull a piece of bread or cigarettes or tobacco out of their pocket and offer them to the weary, half-starved German soldiers.” 

Sergeant Pyotr Alkhutov was present when the German commander was taken prisoner: “Paulus was haggard and clearly ill. He attempted to conduct himself in a suitably dignified manner, but in his condition it was difficult for him to manage. On that frosty morning in Stalingrad, it dawned on all the men of the Red Army and the overwhelming majority of the German soldiers that this was the beginning of the end for them and the start of our Victory.”

A car to the neighboring village of Beketovka, where the 64th Army HQ was stationed, awaited the Field Marshal. There, he would be interrogated by the Army commander Lt-Gen Mikhail Shumilov and the Don Front commander Lt-Gen Konstantin Rokossovsky. Ahead for Friedrich Paulus lay Soviet camps, work in the anti-fascist National Committee for a Free Germany and life in the GDR for the short time left to him…

On its way to the HQ, the car caught up with columns of German prisoners dragging themselves along the road. Unwashed, with unkempt beards, they wore comical-looking makeshift snow boots and were wrapped in towels and women’s headscarves.

Laskin gave the driver a sign to slow down to allow the German commander to observe them closely and thoroughly. “It’s appalling…” pronounced Paulus somberly. “A shameful capitulation, the terrible tragedy of the soldiers. And, until now, the 6th Army was regarded as the best field army in the Wehrmacht…” 

The rest of the story…

By February 1943, Russian troops had retaken Stalingrad and captured nearly 100,000 German soldiers, though pockets of resistance continued to fight in the city until early March.

Most of the captured soldiers died in Russian prison camps, either as a result of disease or starvation.

The loss at Stalingrad was the first failure of the war to be publicly acknowledged by Hitler. It put Hitler and the Axis powers on the defensive, and boosted Russian confidence as it continued to do battle on the Eastern Front in World War II.

In the end, many historians believe the Battle at Stalingrad marked a major turning point in the conflict. It was the beginning of the march toward victory for the Allied forces of Russia, Britain, France and the United States.

MM Comments

There is no doubt that the people inside of Washington DC are desirous of a war with China, and Russia. That is so obvious as to defy any statements to the contrary.

The big question is why?

When presented with this question, we are given the following excuses…

  • Insanity of the leadership.
  • The Leadership is in a dangerous “echo chamber”.
  • There is no leadership and the nation is on “autopilot” following instructions laid down thirty years ago.
  • Alien creatures took over the minds of the Leadership.
  • The Leadership are “Old Empire” entities.
  • The Leadership would rather die than take second place in the global stage.
  • A need to unify a fractured United States though war.

I don’t know the real answers.

I have my thoughts and opinions on this and I have discussed these previously.

What I am going to say here is that when anyone talks about a war, any war, but most especially one involving both Chian and Russia, you MUST also talk about what happens when you lose the war.

You MUST discuss what happens afterwards. Because I can tell you, it is impossible for the United States to win against any war against a unified Asia. Every single study, think tank, war game and analysis has verified this.

So ponder that thought.

Because the stage is set.

The American Leadership wants a war against Asia and it will lose. So what will happen afterwards?

Think about it.

What happens NEXT…

What ever remains of the United States will be quite different. It will be a complete blank sheet of paper and the victors will rewrite what will happen.

Completely.

It’s going to be very distasteful inside of a collapsed, ruined, and conquered United States. It will be very harsh.

The best thing that you can do is to be part of a local community and provide benefit to that community in every way possible. You shouldn’t wait until that day and that need occurs, but rather start now by laying a strong foundation in relationships with those around you.

And do your affirmations, and all the rest.

Be the Rufus.

Now let’s talk about something near and dear to my heart…

Goulash.

Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices. Originating in Hungary, goulash is a common meal predominantly eaten in Central Europe but also in other parts of Europe. It is one of the national dishes of Hungary and a symbol of the country.

My mother used to make it a couple of times a month, but I haven’t had it in years. None of my wives knew how to make it. You cannot get it in restrurants, and there’s no frozen versions of it anywhere in the supermarkets.

I am thus forced to day dream about it here.

Goulash.

Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices.

It shouldn’t be too difficult to make, don’t you think?

Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices.

There are different flavors and styles of this dish. All of them look delicious.

Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices.

Some have a nice hearty soup broth, with others are simply flavored meats like this…

Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices.

Well, no matter how you look at it, it certainly looks great, and would go well with some crusty bread, or rice. Oh, yeah, a nice salad or fruit plate, and don’t foget pairing it with a nice wine. Yum!

Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices.

Do you know what would be nice?

Go invite some friends over. Tell them that you are experimenting with Hungarian Goulash and would like them tom come over, eat a nice meal with wine, listen to some tunes, and play some cards. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

I really think that it would.

Goulash with a spoonful of sour crème on top.

Imagine the meal.

A nice loaf of bread. Some wine, maybe a chardonnay or a light red. Some kind of vegitable side. Maybe snow peas with garlic and spring onions. Or some slaw. The aroma fills the air.

Authentic goulash.

Just imagine it.

Big chunks of beef, potatoes, parsnips and carrots in a paprika riddled broth. Hot and steaming with crusty pieces of bread for dipping.

Really good paprika is the key to an authentic Hungarian Goulash ,or Gulyas. It is to be found everywhere in Budapest and it would be a good idea to try the different versions, both sweet and hot. There are good paprikas from Hungary found in most large supermarkets in the USA as well as online sources.

The goulash experience inside of Hungary…

Goulash.

Here’s a recepie…

And keep in mind and remember, the idea is a was to share your life with others in colorful, fun, tasty and interesting ways. I just cannot help but think that Hungarian Goulash might be a very good vehicle to achieve this.

Have fun together.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 2

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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Special Chinese New Years Eve Treat 2022

Please enjoy this video to get the feeling of what it is like in China right now. It is the New Years Eve. It’s a special time; a magical time. This video captures it exactly. Please enjoy.

video 14MB

chinese new year eve 2022-2022-01-31_08.27.58

 

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

More new Rufus videos to inspire – Tiger Pounce

It’s a new Chinese year. It’s a water tiger year. And it’s a fine time to remember to be the best that we can possibly be. In this installment, I offer up some fine Rufus inspirational videos that are found throughout the world and inside of China. Remember, that being a Rufus doesn’t depend on your wealth, where you live, what color of skin you have, or your career. It depends on your compassion for those who surround you. Be the Rufus. The world needs people like us.

Rufus Emergency Save

With children, it can happen at any time. You have to jump and take immediate action! video 5MB

Rufus father save

Again. You have to be ready. video 3MB

Rufus’s firemen help woman

A woman carries her baby to a group of firemen. They spring into action. video 5MB

Rufus fisherman

He rows to help. video 5MB

Rufus gets rewarded

A kind deed gets a reward. video 5MB

Rufus gives everyone a chance

Everyone deserves a chance. Instead of firing, she gets a promotion and some appreciation. Video 13MB

Rufus Great Collection

A great collection of Rufus events. Video 9MB

Rufus’s heart attack save

Video 20MB

Rufus helps out at a road accident

Video 17MB

Rufus helps a homeless family

Being a nice Rufus in the United States. Video 10MB

Rufus helps the children

The father buys the son a meal, and he eats cheap bread. The waitress gives him free food, and then the father gives the meat to his son. But the Rufus son will have none of that.

Video 5MB

Rufus helps a woman who collapsed on the bike

This is the whole video. Better than the abbreviated versions. I posted previously, or the segments in anthologies.  Video 20MB

Rufus honors the flag

A bus driver on January first sees a flag on the road. He stops and picks it up. A Rufus always honors the flag of the nation where he lives. It’s respect. Video 4MB

A Rufus is welcoming

video 10MB

Rufus makes the world a better place

video 7MB

Rufus making friends

And why not. Smile, and put a little bit of happiness in the lives of others. Just try. video 8.7MB

Rufus mid-drive save

A real time Rufus.

video 17MB

Rufus’ mud rescue

video 5MB

Rufus named Bob

Pleasant story. We have to adjust to things as they are, and not as we want them to be. video 6MB

Rufus not defective

I also think that this is a really nice story and illustration. video 6MB

Rufus Pay it forward

Yup. Pay it forward. Video 22MB

Rufus subway draw

Always a great series of videos. The idea is to use your natural skills, smile or abilities to make those around you smile. video 4MB

Rufus subway draw 5

Another. Remember that you can make the world a better place. . Video 4MB

Rufus thanks other Rufus for their help

video 4MB

Rufus trio boxes in a little boy

He has no idea what kind of a mess he is in. video 13MB

More Great Links in my Rufus Index here…

Check them out…

Rufus Index

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More stuff…

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Things are very serious now

Well, we all have been dealing with a host of disturbing Geo-Political actions originating out of the USA for decades. And over the last few years they have become more brazen, more outrageous and more daring. It’s been building up to a crescendo.

This build-up has triggered actions from the rest of the world, and the most notable being Russia, and China.

China and Russia has laid down “Red Lines”.

The United States ignored them.

The United States Has no idea…

Alex Krainer:

Western powers seem to have largely lost institutional brakes on waging war.

Someone cries “human rights,” and we seem prepared to obliterate entire nations with hardly any debate, discussion, or any long-term plan.

The consent for war, or “kinetic action”, is simply contrived by myriad think-tanks, often directly or indirectly funded by the military-industrial complex.

With unhindered access to the media, these organizations produce rhetoric that rationalizes hostility, demonization of targeted adversaries and justifications for war.

Today, as tensions with Russia have escalated to a boiling point, some of them draw historical parallels between today’s Russia and Nazi Germany. Among others, Victoria Nuland and Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger have recently invoked Britain’s 1938 policy of appeasement that caused the destruction of Czechoslovakia and empowered Hitler.

The insinuation is that today, Ukraine is Czechoslovakia, Donbas is Sudetenland and that Vladimir Putin is Hitler.

If the parallels were valid, they would imply that we should pay almost any price to avoid repeating Neville Chamberlain’s errors of judgment that plunged Europe into the tragedy of World War II.

Of course, the parallels are entirely false, but unfortunately, this is not widely understood.

Things are serious now…

Then Russia forced the United States to comply and answer their concerns in [1] writing and [2] in public about placement of nuclear weapons on the Russian border.

When it did get an “answer”, it was told to keep it secret. Which fell outside the Russian “demands”.

The content of the US response on security guarantees allows you to count on a serious conversation, but on secondary topics."

"There is no answer to the most important question – about the non-expansion of NATO to the east.”

“Our President will now decide on the next steps.”

-Lavrov

You know, over the last two months, the expression on the faces of Lavrov and Putin remind me of a scene from “The Sopranos”.

It’s very serious.

Pictures

For some perspective…

And his counterpart in the Ukraine that NATO and the USA embrace…

And now, let’s look at the military…

And here is what you have in the Ukraine…

And the NATO troops that will take on Russia…

The course of action

A “white tent” was set up and ignored.

Now the “red tents” are up.

From now on in, things are going to get very ugly. It is no wonder that all of Asia is very somber and serious right now.

They remember history. They know what needs to occur…

I won’t let what happened to my father happen to me.

The Sopranos

As I said, the expressions on the faces of Putin, Lavrov, and the generals are very serious. The color is drained out of their faces, and they seem gripped with steeling determination and dangerous determination. It well reminds me of a scene from the television show “The Sopranos”.

The Sopranos crew.

In it, the (mob boss) Tony had to kill a beloved cousin, and a long time childhood friend to prevent a massive gang war. He didn’t want to do it at all, but he knew that if he didn’t, many people would die.

This was the death of Tony Blundetto (Buscemi).

In that case, Blundetto killed Joey “Peeps” from the Leotardo crew (a different mob).

This was really a very, very bad thing to do and very serious.

Since Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) was intent on making Blundetto’s death the most painful event in recorded history, Tony did him a favor by making it quick.

In the blink of an eye — and the blast of a shotgun — Tony spared his cousin the torture he would have received in Leotardo’s hands.

So reluctantly, but determined, he got his shotgun and killed his childhood friend. Then he called the other mob boss where to find the body.

He hastened the death of his cousin, and prevented his long-drawn-out torture. He also prevented a long ongoing mob war.

You Tube

 

Scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9lbju1WpsQ

Scene on MM here

video 22MB

Tony Blundetto Dead – The Sopranos HD-2022-01-28_06.50.32

Conclusions

I am absolutely convinced that what ever “leadership” is directing things behind the scenes in the United States and in Europe, they have no fucking idea what they are dealing with.

Maybe it’s the notorious American “echo chambers” where they believe their own propaganda.

Or maybe it’s all the power, wealth and drugs that got into their heads.

Or, as late John Kenneth Galbraith noted,

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage”.

 

Whatever the root cause…

…It doesn’t matter. It’s now too late. The “white tents” were rejected. And the “red tents” are out.

Well…

This isn’t what anyone thinks it is, and judging from the American “news”, all the collective West are setting themselves up for some horrible things. Maybe America will endure. Maybe America will survive. Maybe America will emerge unscathed as the rest of the world burns. Maybe Jesus will come forth and protect all Americans because of their inherent worthiness…

But I will tell you this…

When cold-blooded killers believe that they need to hurt you, and hurt you bad, you need to RUN

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

.

 

Well, it appears that the Great Inflection Point of massive Geo-Political change has arrived!

I hope that I am not alone in being sick and tired of this pathetic, tiresome attempt to throw up a smokescreen and hide the inevitable reality of what is about to unfold. 

In case it isn’t completely clear to you yet, I would like to spell it all out. 

I am normally more cautious when making specific predictions, but in this case our immediate future has been carefully plotted out for us by Russia and China, with the US and its assorted puppets reduced to the status of non-playable characters in a video game who can only do one thing: hide behind a dense smokescreen of risible lies.

-A Short-Term Geopolitical Forecast

Well, we all have been dealing with a host of disturbing Geo-Political actions originating out of the USA for decades. And over the last few years they have become more brazen, more outrageous and more daring. It’s been building up to a crescendo.

This build-up has triggered actions from the rest of the world, and the most notable being Russia, and China.

During the last year, both Russia and China have established FIRM “red lines” that are absolute and that WILL result in very negative consequences for the United States if they are not treated seriously.

And they have not been taken seriously.

Well, the great point of inflection has been reached. The pivot point of Geo-political alignments and strengths is tripping RIGHT NOW.

Some “tell-tails”…

Black Operations 101;

Secrets are actually secret. Anything “leaked” in the news is a distraction and not an actual secret. Anything and everything you read in the American and Western Bloc “news” are intentional distractions. Real significant events are never reported on, and if so, it is long, long after the fact.

Thus, the purpose of the “news” media is a barometer. It’s a measure of what distractions are being put in place. The bigger; the more enormous the hyped up distraction, the more significant the actual events are.

And there is one major, significant,  distraction going on right now. It’s the “so-called” Russian build-up to invade the Ukraine.

In fact, it is so frenzied and hysterical that it is like a flashing neon red light and howling siren to all of us who have ever worked for the US Government. It tells us that “something big is up”, and to look for other things. These other things that are not being reported.

The lack of news coverage on these other things is an indicator of what is really going on.

Distractions are not what are happening. Their purpose is to take your focus away from the real events.

Do not focus on the distraction.

What is not being reported?

Let’s “cut to the chase“.

The largest American Navy build up in the history of America, and indeed the history of the earth. That’s what.

For some (only) God knows reason, the United States has decided to deploy most all of its massive naval forces off the Chinese coast. This includes five separate flotillas. Each one consisting of multiple aircraft and VTOL carriers, submarines and cruisers, destroyers and support vessels.

Along with that are elements of MAC (the Air Force Military Airlift Command) ferrying troops and munitions and arms to the Pacific. To include Korea, Japan, and other bases throughout the Pacific.

This is comparable to the build up for the Normandy Invasion of “D Day”.

In short, the largest concentration of United States Naval and Marine forces are now concentrated off the coast of China. And it is not being made public.

What’s going on?

What’s going on?

Within a few weeks, maybe days, Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi Peng will attend the Winter Olympics. During the event, they will formalize and make a number of significant and strategic Geo-Political policy announcements to the world.

No one knows what they will be.

What we do know is that they will be significant responses to a series of the United States malevolent actions, ignorance, and responses to its failure to take the “red lines” of both China, and Russia seriously.

Huh? You might ask.

What are the “Red Lines”?

Russia told the United States to [1] stop CIA backed “color revolutions” in and around the borders of its nation. (Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, etc.) And, [2] to stop the placement of nuclear-capable missiles and munitions on its borders.

When it did get an “answer”, it was told to keep it secret. Which fell outside the Russian “demands”.

The content of the US response on security guarantees allows you to count on a serious conversation, but on secondary topics."

"There is no answer to the most important question – about the non-expansion of NATO to the east.”

“Our President will now decide on the next steps.”

-Lavrov

China told the United States to also [1] stop CIA backed “color revolutions” in and around the borders of its nation. [2] To stop the placement of nuclear-capable missiles and munitions on its borders, and in its neighbors. It also [3] told the United States to STAY OUT of Chinese domestic affairs. Which means Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, and the Uighurs. All of which are internal domestic matters.

China never received any answers.

Both China and Russia told the United States to stop attacking the BRI trade routes in all the many flavors of hybrid-war that it has been engaging in.

So the USA ignored the “red lines”

The United States simply continued its actions.

Failure to show serious actions to avoid conflict, shows little respect for that national sovereignty of both nations. And is strongly suggestive that the United States plans to engage in a kinetic war with Asia.

Both nations are tired of the games, and “bullshit”.

They put up  their “white tents”, and offered branches of peace, and the United States ignored them.

So what is next, will be announced during the Winter Olympics.

Possible Consequences…

I can devote all sorts of speculations on what can occur. The top speculations are…

Formal Military Treaty between China and Russia. Not really needed, the relationship is far closer than any treaty, and both militaries train with each other. They share technology together, and have military liaisons in all of their military headquarters. It seems silly that this relationship would be formalized on a scrap of parchment. This would crush the hopes and dreams of the American neocon block.

Formal announcement of extraction from SWIFT. China and Russia might tell the rest of the world that if they want to buy goods made in China, and materials out of Russia, that they cannot use the US Dollar. This would send the US economy in a tail-spin.

Sanctions against America. This is taking a “page out of the United States playbook“, and giving the USA a “dose of its own medicine“. This would stop all trade between the USA and Asia, and any nation that wants Chinese products from Chinese factories will be punished and sanctioned if they trade with the USA. This would completely collapse the USA society.

Nationalization of American businesses and products. No longer any copyright protections. No more Coke, Microsoft, Ford, GM, McDonald’s. All their enormous profits inside of China will fall to zero, and replacement companies will take their place. This would create an economic depression, societal disruption, and political chaos like no other.

And more…

Conclusions

Of course, there are all sorts of other things that can happen. But we will find out soon enough what is going to happen. So there’s no point in too much speculation.

I don’t think that it will be “World War III”, though I can tell the reader that both China and Russia have knives at the throat of the United States right now, and if it tries and “funny business” there would be lethal consequences.

Let’s just wait and see.

But remember, boys and girls, don’t focus on the distraction. Focus on what is not being reported upon.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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Russian commentaries on the collapsing United States part 5

This is part five.

Lavrov said Russia is hoping for a written response in within a week. 

Olympics begin in about a week and a half. 

Martyanov and Orlov have suggested the possibility military alliance between Russia and China being signed in the meetings that will occur then. 

Formal alliance or not, I would think a joint strategy or ensuring Russia's and China's separate strategies complement each other will occur.

Russia with its security proposal,rather starting high, have started at the bare minimum they require which is a buffer zone in the age of hypersonic missiles.

This is how Pepe Escobar puts it. 

"In fact, whether U.S. and NATO functionaries like it or not, what’s really happening in the realpolitk realm is Russia dictating new terms from a position of power. In a nutshell: you may learn the new game in town in a peaceful manner, civilized dialogue included, or you will learn the hard way via a dialogue with Mr. Iskandr, Mr. Kalibr, Mr. Khinzal and Mr. Zircon."

In that article from 25th December his view on the Russia China partnership vs the US "Incidentally: any possible, future “counter threats” will be coordinated between Russia and China."

Dugin: Having Pulled the Gun Russia Must Shoot or Lose

Dugin applies "street-fighting" lessons to...the fate of millions

Let’s consider how the “pandemic” is changing the world

From an interview with Noam Chomsky, found HERE.

Q. What about the pandemic? You mentioned the Great Depression, and the effect that had on the US and Europe, but can the pandemic play a similar role in the sense of “We can do this together?”

A. It should. And there are some signs of it. So when you get to the local level, you do find people cooperating with one another, helping each other. In many poor places around much of the world, local groups have just gotten together to help people in need, sometimes in remarkable ways. The favelas in Brazil are among the most miserable slums in the world. I’ve seen them. They’re run by biker gangs, drug cartels. The police are also extremely violent. Well, what’s happened during the pandemic is that the gangs, the criminal gangs that have been terrorizing the favelas have been organizing people to deal with the crisis. In the favelas, plenty of people don’t even have water. They’re working to help people at least have access to water, to have access to vaccines, to help each other in need. If there’s somebody, an old man stuck in an apartment who can’t get food, they bring him food, things like that are happening on the ground. Now, go to the leadership level. What are they doing? They’re monopolizing vaccines for themselves. They are demanding that the huge pharmaceutical corporations, which are super rich, should maintain control of the exorbitant patent rights that were given to them by the neoliberal regime, a regime which is radically opposed to free trade.

And his thoughts about the changing workplace…

Q. What about work?

A. What’s a job? A job, for most people, is spending most of your waking hours following orders from a master, who is a totalitarian master. They can give orders of a kind that Stalin couldn’t have dreamt of. Stalin couldn’t have told people that you’re allowed to take a five-minute bathroom break or that you’re not allowed to talk to that person next to you. And maybe your master is kind enough to allow you the leeway, but it’s the master’s decision. That’s called getting a job. Today, most people think that’s the norm. They react like my grandmother did, and would, if you’d asked her if she was oppressed. That wasn’t always true. To go back to the early Industrial Revolution of working people, bitterly opposed this form of autocracy, which was taking away their dignity, their rights and keeps reviving today. Plenty of people are saying the same thing. In fact, many of the people who are just refusing to go back to work, the so-called Great Resignation, are saying it in their own way.

UKRAINE CRISIS: US ‘Toolboxes’ Are Empty

The toolbox is empty. Russia knows this. Biden knows this. Blinken knows this. CNN knows this. The only ones who aren’t aware of this are the American people, says Scott Ritter.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in a hastily scheduled, 90-minute summit in Geneva yesterday, after which both sides lauded the meeting as worthwhile because it kept the door open for a diplomatic resolution to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. What “keeping the door open” entails, however, represents two completely different realities.

For Blinken, the important thing appears to be process, continuing a dialogue which, by its very essence, creates the impression of progress, with progress being measured in increments of time, as opposed to results.

A results-oriented outcome was not in the books for Blinken and his entourage; the U.S. was supposed to submit a written response to Russia’s demands for security guarantees as spelled out in a pair of draft treaties presented to the U.S. and NATO in December. Instead, Blinken told Lavrov the written submission would be provided next week.

In the meantime, Blinken primed the pump of expected outcomes by highlighting the possibility of future negotiations that addressed Russian concerns (on a reciprocal basis) regarding intermediate-range missiles and NATO military exercises.

But under no circumstances, Blinken said, would the U.S. be responding to Russian demands against NATO expanding to Ukraine and Georgia, and for the redeployment of NATO forces inside the territory of NATO as it existed in 1997.

Blinken also spent a considerable amount of time harping on the danger of a imminent military invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces said to be massing along the Ukraine-Russian border. He pointed out that any military incursion by Russia, not matter what size, that violated the territorial integrity of Ukraine, would be viewed as a continuation of the Russian “aggression” of 2014 and, as such, trigger “massive consequences” which would be damaging to Russia.

Blinken’s restatement of a position he has pontificated on incessantly for more than a month now was not done for the benefit of Lavrov and the Russian government, but rather for an American and European audience which had been left scratching their collective heads over comments made the day before by President Joe Biden which suggested that the U.S. had a range of options it would consider depending on the size of a Russian incursion.

“My guess is he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] will move in, he has to do something,” Biden said during a press briefing on Wednesday. While presenting a Russian invasion as inevitable, Biden went on to note that Putin “will be held accountable” and has “never have seen sanctions like the ones I promised will be imposed” if Russia were, in fact, to move against Ukraine. Biden spoke of deploying additional U.S. military forces to eastern Europe, as well as unspecified economic sanctions.

Biden then, however, hedged his remarks, noting that the scope and scale of any U.S. response would depend on what Russia did. “It’s one thing,” Biden said, “if it’s a minor incursion and we end up having to fight about what to do and not do.”

Almost immediately the Washington establishment went into overdrive to correct what everyone said was a “misstatement” by Biden, with Biden himself making a new statement the next day, declaring that he had been “absolutely clear with President Putin. He has no misunderstanding, any, any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion,” and that there should be “no doubt at all that if Putin makes this choice, Russia will pay a heavy price.”

And just in case the President was not clear enough, Blinken reiterated that point following his Friday meeting with Lavrov.

Immutable

The U.S. narrative about Russia and Ukraine was immutable; Russia was hell bent on invading, and there would be massive consequences if Russia acted out on its intent. This was no idle threat, Blinken said, but rather represented the unified position of the United States and its allies and partners.

Or was it? In a telling admission, CNN’s White House correspondent, John Harwood, stated that the “minor incursions” statement by Biden was harmless, because (Harwood said) Putin already knew through sources that this was, in fact, the U.S. position. As for Europe and Ukraine, their collective confusion and outrage was merely an act, a posture they had to take for public consumption, since the optics of Biden’s statement “sounds bad.”

In short, the lack of an agreed-upon strategy on how to deal with a Russian incursion/invasion of Ukraine was an open secret for everyone except the U.S. and European publics, who being fed a line of horse manure to assuage domestic political concerns over being seen as surrendering to Russian demands.

Biden and his administration are old hands at lying to the American public when it comes to matters of national security. One only need look to Biden’s July 23, 2021, phone call with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani for a clear precedent into this inability to speak openly and honestly about reality on the ground. “I need not tell you,” Biden told Ghani, “the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there is a need,” Biden added, “whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of the posture taken by the Biden administration on Ukraine. Blinken has indicated that the U.S. has a toolbox filled with options that will deliver “massive consequences” to Russia should Russia invade Ukraine. These “tools” include military options, such as the reinforcement of NATO’s eastern flank with additional U.S. troops, and economic options, such as shutting down the NordStream 2 pipeline and cutting Russia off from the SWIFT banking system. All these options, Blinken notes, have the undivided support of U.S. European allies and partners.

The toolbox is everywhere, it seems—Biden has referred to it, as has White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. Blinken has alluded to it on numerous occasions.

There’s only one problem—the toolbox, it turns out, is empty.

While the Pentagon is reportedly working on a series of military options to reinforce the existing U.S. military presence in eastern Europe, the actual implementation of these options would neither be timely nor even possible. One option is to move forces already in Europe; the U.S. Army maintains one heavy armored brigade in Europe on a rotational basis and has a light armored vehicle brigade and an artillery brigade stationed in Germany. Along with some helicopter and logistics support, that’s it.

Flooding these units into Poland would be for display purposes only—they represent an unsustainable combat force that would be destroyed within hours, if not days, in any large-scale ground combat against a Russian threat.

The U.S. can deploy a second heavy armored brigade to Poland which would fall in on prepositioned equipment already warehoused on Polish soil. This brigade would suffer a similar fate if matched up against the Russian army. The U.S. can also deploy an airborne brigade. They, too, would die.

There are no other options available to deploy additional U.S. heavy forces to Europe on a scale and in a timeframe that would be meaningful. The problem isn’t just the deployment of forces from their bases in the U.S. (something that would takes months to prepare for), but the sustainability of these forces once they arrived on the ground in Europe. Food, ammunition, water, fuel—the logistics of war is complicated, and not resolved overnight.

In short, there is no viable military option, and Biden knows this.

Empty Sanctions Too

The U.S. has no sanctions plan that can survive initial contact with the enemy, which in this case is the collective weakness of the post-pandemic economies of both Europe and the U.S.; the over-reliance of Europe on Russian-sourced energy, and the vulnerability of democratically elected leaders to the whim of a consumer-based constituency. Russia can survive the impact of any sanctions regime the U.S. is able to scrape together—even those targeting the Russian banking system—far longer than Europe can survive without access to Russian energy.

This is a reality that Europe lives with, and while U.S. policy makers might think hard-hitting sanctions look good on paper, the reality is that whatever passes for U.S.-European unity today would collapse in rapid order when the Russian pipelines were shut down. The pain would not just be limited to Europe, either—the U.S. economy would suffer as well, with sky-high fuel prices and a stock market collapse that would put the U.S. into an economic recession, if not outright depression.

The political cost that would be incurred by Biden and, by extension, the Democrats, would be fatal to any hope that might remain for holding onto either house of Congress in 2022, or the White House in 2024. It would be one thing if Biden and his national security team were honest and forthright about the real consequences of declaring the equivalent of economic war on Russia. It is another thing altogether to speak only of the pain sanctions would cause Russia, with little thought, if any, to the real consequences that will be paid on the home front.

Americans should never forget that Russia has been laboring under severe U.S. sanctions since 2014, with zero effect. Russia knows what could be coming and has prepared. The American people wallow in their ignorance, believing at face value what they are told by the Biden administration, and echoed by a compliant mainstream media.

Propaganda About ‘Propaganda’

One of the great ironies of the current crisis is that, on the eve of the Blinken-Lavrov meeting in Geneva, the U.S. State Department published a report on Russian propaganda, decrying the role played by state-funded outlets such as RT and Sputnik in shaping public opinion in the United States and the West (in the interest of full disclosure, RT is one of the outlets that I write for.)

The fact that the State Department would publish such a report on the eve of a meeting which is all about propagating the big lie—that the U.S. has a plan for deterring “irresponsible Russian aggression”—while ignoring the hard truth: this is a crisis derived solely from the irresponsible policies of the U.S. and NATO over the past 30 years.

While a compliant mainstream American media unthinkingly repeated every warning and threat issued by Biden and Blinken to Russia over the course of the past few days, the Russian position has been largely ignored. Here’s a reminder of where Russia stands on its demands for security guarantees: “We are talking about the withdrawal of foreign forces, equipment, and weapons, as well as taking other steps to return to the set-up we had in 1997 in non-NATO countries,” the Russian Foreign Ministry declared in a bulletin published after the Lavrov-Blinken meeting. “This includes Bulgaria and Romania.”

Blinken has already said the U.S. will reject this.

The toolbox is empty. Russia knows this. Biden knows this. Blinken knows this. CNN knows this. The only ones who aren’t aware of this are the American people.

The consequences of a U.S. rejection of Russia’s demands will more than likely be war.

If you think the American people are ready to bear the burden of a war with Russia, think again.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

China Has Edged Ahead of Russia in Air vs Air Capabilities (With Russian Help)

The Chinese are amazing at tech

Editor’s note: The caveat is that Russia does not intend to fight pure air vs air battles. Russian doctrine envisages fighters and ground anti-air working together as a part of a whole. Nonetheless, purely looking at fighters China is now in the lead. Russia is still a little ahead in engines, but China has more advanced radars and better munitions. [— Russia still hasn’t managed to field an AESA radar.]

The old formulation that in the Sino-Russian alliance the Chinese are the economic superpower and the Russians the military superpower is one that will increasingly have to be amended. The Chinese are already the equals in military tech and may eventually pull ahead.

The text below is an abstract. For the entire 60-page report click here: Link.


The Soviet Union, and latterly Russia, have been the source of both aerial and ground-based pacing threats to Western airpower since the end of the Second World War. However, from a position of dependency on Russian aircraft and weapons, China has developed an advanced indigenous combat aircraft, sensor and weapons industry that is outstripping Russia’s. As a result, for the first time since 1945, the likely source of the most significant aerial threats to Western air capabilities is shifting.

Modern air combat is primarily decided by the balance of advantage in situational awareness. Given broadly comparable numbers, the force which can provide its aircrew with superior awareness of enemy position, track and identity will have a major advantage in any clash. In scenarios where situational awareness is relatively equal, missile reach and seeker performance, crew experience, aircraft performance, electronic warfare (EW) and countermeasures systems all contribute to the likely outcome.

Russia and China currently field superficially similar combat aircraft fleets. Both rely heavily on the Su-27/30 ‘Flanker’ family of combat aircraft and their various derivatives. They have also both pursued a fighter with low-observable (LO) – also known as stealthy – features, alongside increased multirole capability for their main fighter fleets. However, a clear Chinese lead is now emerging over Russia in most technical aspects of combat aircraft development.

The Flanker family of combat aircraft share: a large radar, optical and heat signature; potent kinematic performance; a relatively long range on internal fuel; and the ability to carry heavy ordinance loads of air-to-air or air-to-ground weapons. This makes them comparatively easy to detect and, in the case of Russian Flanker types, the lack of a modern active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar restricts them to relatively ‘brute force’ tactics using powerful but easy-to-detect radars and missiles which are outranged by their Western counterparts.

China has developed J-11 and J-16 series Flanker derivatives featuring AESA radars, new datalinks, improved EW systems and increased use of composites, which give them a superior level of overall combat capability to the latest Russian Flanker, the Su-35S. 

This advantage is increased by Chinese advances in both within-visual-range (WVR) and beyond-visual-range (BVR) air-to-air missiles. Unlike the latest Russian R-73M, the PL-10 features an imaging infrared seeker, improving resistance to countermeasures. More significantly, the PL-15 features a miniature AESA seeker head and outranges the US-made AIM-120C/D AMRAAM series. China is also testing a very-long-range air-to-air missile, known as PL-X or PL-17, which has a 400-km class range, multimode seeker and appears to have been designed to attack US big-wing ISTAR and tanker aircraft.

China has developed and introduced into service the first credible non-US-made LO, or fifth-generation, fighter in the form of the J-20A ‘Mighty Dragon’. Subsequent developments are likely to increase its LO characteristics and sensor capabilities, as well as engine performance, with construction of the first production prototypes of the J-20B having begun in 2020.

Overall, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and People’s Liberation Army Navy are rapidly improving their combat air capabilities, including a focus on the sensors, platforms, network connectivity and weapons needed to compete with the US in cutting-edge, predominantly passive-sensor air combat tactics.

The Russian Su-57 Felon is assessed as not yet having matured into a credible frontline weapons system, and as lacking the basic design features required for true LO signature. However, it does offer the potential to correct many of the Flanker family weaknesses with greatly reduced signature and an AESA radar, while improving the already superb agility and performance of the Flanker series. [The Su-57 doesn’t need to be as stealthy from the side and rear because unlike the Chinese very-long-range J-20 it’s not supposed to venture outside the air defense bubble. That said it is true that so far the Chinese have demonstrated more “stealth” tech than the Russians — and in much greater numbers.]

The Russian Air Force (VKS) does not currently field targeting pods for its ground-attack and multirole fleets. This limits the ground-attack aircraft to internal equivalents with inferior field of view and tactical flexibility, and the multirole fighters to reliance on either pre-briefed GPS/GLONASS target coordinates, radar-guided weapons or target acquisition using fixed seekers on the weapons themselves. This limits VKS fixed-wing capabilities against dynamic battlefield targets compared to Western or Chinese equivalents.

China is actively pursuing unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) designs with multiple programmes at various stages of development. Detailed assessment is hindered by tight control of information leaks by the Chinese Communist Party. Of those known to be in development, the GJ-11 subsonic attack UCAV appears the most advanced.

Russia is also pursuing UCAV-style technologies and has produced the Su-70 ‘Okhotnik-B’ technology demonstrator. However, it is not yet clear what degree of practical operational capability the Russian aircraft industry will be able to develop through the Su-70, especially given the demands for significant levels of in-flight autonomy inherent in UCAVs designed for state-on-state warfare in heavy EW conditions.

China’s advanced and efficient Flanker derivatives, as well as lightweight multirole fighters in the shape of the J-10B/C series and potentially a developmental FC-31 LO fighter programme, are likely to provide the leading source of non-Western combat aircraft from the mid-2020s onwards. Likewise, their air-launched munitions will increasingly outcompete Russian equivalents on the export market. As such, the development of Chinese capabilities should be closely monitored even by air forces which do not include the PLAAF in their direct threat assessments.

The possibility of technology transfer from China to Russia in the combat air domain could potentially increase the threat level posed to NATO by Russian airpower in the longer term, should such a dynamic emerge.

Source: The Royal United Services Institute

Petty

The US summarised:

ISS crews train in the US and Russia to understand the US and Russian parts of the station, if only for emergency evacuation procedures. The US has just cancelled the visa of a Russian cosmonaut due to visit the US for his USS-ISS training sessions.

How totally pathetic and spiteful.

This Is One of the Most Important Essays You Will Ever Read

“I passionately wanted to take a machine gun and cross the damned nine-story building in a long burst”

 

Editor’s note: Alexander Lebed was a Soviet soldier and general, a challenger of Yeltsin, the protector of Russians and Ukrainians on left-bank Dniestr, and of the Russian-Ukrainian state, the rebel Pridnestrovie (Transnistria) they had founded.

He was also the person who cut the Gordian Knot and delivered Russia peace from Yeltsin’s Chechen War after the latter handed him the negotiations as a poisoned chalice that he resolutely accepted knowing fully what it was.

He was the son of a Gulag survivor and participated in internal Soviet peacekeeping (in the late 1980s) in Azerbaijan, on the basis of which he wrote this important essay presented below.


“On the evening of the 7th, the “Time” program announced a huge earthquake in Armenia… The exact number of victims was unknown, but preliminarily, they were estimated to be huge – tens of thousands of people.

The announcer switched to another topic, but no one would listen to him. Moreover, someone turned the TV off. An oppressive silence hung in the lobby. Suddenly, a strangle sound burst into this silence – or rather, a gamut of sounds merged into a single, general, triumphant joyful howl that would become more and more intense.

In seconds, everything became clear. On the opposite side of the street, in front of the building of the district executive committee, there was a large residential nine-story building. Every window without exception was illuminated, and on every balcony, people were yelling, hooting, and laughing wildly. Empty bottles, lighted paper, and some other objects were being thrown down.

This nine-story building was not alone in displaying its cannibalistic enthusiasm. A similar pattern was observed in all nearby houses.

The area was shining and howling ecstatically. People who considered themselves civilized; to one degree or another brought up and educated; many, presumably, believers professing the commandments of the Koran – all these people in a unanimous impulse were indecently, barbarously celebrating the colossal alien human grief.

I passionately wanted to take a machine gun and cross the damned nine-story building in a long burst and somehow make the people who have fallen to the level of monkeys return to their human form again.

How many kind, cheerful, intelligent, welcoming people I have met among Azerbaijanis! What passionate, convincing speeches many of them gave to me! Where did they go, all reasonable and kind, how was it possible that they all disappeared in this foam and succumbed to the rush whose degree of infamy is difficult to determine?”


Editor’s note: Should a day come when we find ourselves in danger of falling down to the level of beast or ape we can only pray there might be an Alexander Lebed with a machinegun nearby to get us to snap out of it.

From Lebed’s memoirs, translated by Vigen Avetisyan at Art-A-Tsolum.

The 1988 Armenian earthquake killed 25,000-50,000 people. 

Is there a deal being prepared behind the scenes?

I have to admit that when I heard that the US has no intention of giving the Russians anything in writing I began wondering whether it even made sense for Lavrov to fly to Geneva.  Yet, Lavrov thought otherwise and flew to the Swiss city.  The outcome?  Meh…

The US wants another week to prepare a written reply.  Okay, that is some kind of result and I suppose that, considering what is at stake, waiting yet another week is okay.  Frankly, the Russians are acutely aware of two things:

  • US diplomats and experts are, at best, clueless amateurs
  • The War Party is in full-blow hysterics mode

So they decided to give “Biden” another week.  Like a teacher who agrees to give a particularly dumb student a few extra days to turn in his assignment.

What else?

Well, there is this: remember the rather weird words by Biden about a “minor incursion“? (since then, both Biden himself and Blinken has declared that Biden was misunderstood).

Today former ambassador McFaul, a true russophobic nutcase and certified imbecile, said that if the Russian soldiers go as far as Kiev this would trigger a full-scale response from the US and its allies.

Wait! What?

Since when do the Russian have to get their soldiers as far as Kiev to get sanctioned???

Before continuing, a few absolutely CRUCIAL reminders:

  • Russia neither wants nor has any reason at all to invade country 404, with all its intellectuals already long gone (most of them in Russia, low qualified refugees when to clean EU toilets), its deindustrialized wastelands, its many neo-Nazis and zero natural resources (they already sold it all).  In fact, most Russians are categorically opposed to any such intervention.
  • The only thing which could force Russia to use her ground forces would be a successful (and rather unlikely) Ukrainian invasion of the LDNR.  Russia currently does have the forces needed for such a counter-attack in her western regions.  She does not have the size of force needed to occupy the Ukraine.
  • Russia has the means to defang the Ukie military using only standoff weapons, Russian military experts believe that such an operation would take a week or even less.

In other words, the notion of a Russian ground operation to take Kiev is total, hallucinatory, nonsense. Ditto for the idiotic idea that Russia must invade in February before the frozen ground turns into dirt (Russian ground forces have no problems operating or fighting with dirt, snowmelts or any other natural phenomenon between -50C to +50C).  That is exactly the kind of crap McFaul always spews (with this uniquely paranoid eyes and freaked-out facial expression).  But the fact that McFaul is a drooling idiot does not mean that he does not have access to what is going on behind the scenes (Blinken is just as dumb, and he is in charge of the entire US diplomacy).

So what gave him this truly weird idea?

First Biden with his “minor incursion”.

Now McFaul with his “no Russian soldiers in Kiev”.

I can offer three possible explanations for that:

  1. The Biden Admin is doing a “April Glaspie” operation on Russia: tell the Russians that the US will do little or nothing as long as Russia only liberates some areas (presumably in the eastern and/or southern Ukraine) only to then take that as a pretext and declare some kind of war (probably not military, but political and economic for sure).
  2. The Biden Admin is really trying to get rid of the Ukie suitcase and wants to break up this monstrosity into smaller, much more manageable, successor states.  If so, I like the idea.
  3. The Biden Admin is ready to let the LDNR break-away and move under the protection of Russia.  Officially, of course, the USA will never agree to that, but they can present that as a problem they did not create and they could not solve alone either (or something else along similar PR lines).

Now, like I always repeat, there is a HUGE difference between “possible” and “likely”.  The explanations above are only *possible* explanations for the weird language coming out of Biden and McFaul.

I also hasten to add that I don’t think that Russia will accept any such terms because they only refer to the Ukraine and not to a new international world order with a new international security framework, which is really what the Russians are after.  And we are talking about verifiable, binding, security guarantees – not written, or even less so, oral, assurances.

However, if these proposals are made as one part of a much broader package of ideas, then they would be worth at least considering.

I have to tell you that my feeling is that the US has already at least partially lost control of the Ukraine and possibly even the EU.

Remember how I always write that when the US President is weak (which all of them since Bush Sr. have been) then the various branches of government and administrations begin doing their own thing, having a semi-official foreign policy of their own: one by the CIA, another one by the Pentagon, another one by Foggy Bottom, etc.?

Well, the same applies to US colonies: when the colonial master is weak and in deep crisis, the colonies begin feeling that they can act more independently.  For example, the 3B+PU gang are now clearly setting the agenda in the EU, and the old Europeans à la Germany of France have become quasi irrelevant.  Likewise, I am not confident at all that the real, hardcore, Ukronazis give a damn about what the US has to say, especially since the said Ukronazis seem to have the solid backing of the EU and parts of the Ukie government: just look at how Ze was unable to deal with Poroshenko – that will tell you a lot about the real correlation of forces in Banderastan.

This is the “tail wags the dog” thing on an international level.

All that is to say that I don’t find it likely that some big deal is being worked on behind the scenes.

But I do find it possible.

We shall find out soon, in one week or less according to the US side.

In the meantime the Ukies are massing a very large force right across the line of contact.  I think of these Ukie forces like I think of folks driving motorcycles without a helmet: organ donors.  Should the Ukies use that force to actually attack, the Russians will destroy that force in 24 hours or less.  The problem is that Ukronazis are 1) rather stupid 2) totally fanaticized and 3) utterly unaware of the realities of modern warfare.

By the way, from a purely US point of view having the Ukronazis wiped out by Russian strikes is not a bad outcome as it would get rid of loads of truly crazy and unsavory characters.

I think of it as a “de-nazification by Russia” (along the lines of the expression “suicide by cop”).

One more thing: remember the rumors about the Russian evacuating their diplomatic personnel from Kiev?  Turns out that it ain’t Russia, but the US and EU representations which are being evacuated (at least partially).

In the meantime, Stoltenberg wants Sweden and Finland to join NATO while many EU countries are now sending (small) forces into various locations in Eastern Europe.  The worst of them all, the Baltic statelets, are now shipping Stinger MANPADs to the Ukies.  Knowing how many Takfiris and neo-Nazis nutcases there are in Banderastan, this is absolutely, totally and terminally irresponsible!  Yet those demented idiots are doing it.  Typical.

I wish everybody a peaceful and great week-end!

Andrei

A comment

From Dennis Dennis

I must admit sadly that it s hard to find a wise and intellectual thinking American, therefore first I want to congratulate you for your wise and thoughtful ideas.

I am from Germany and in all discussions with americans I feel a taste of superiority and superficial thinking.

I am astonished about their neglect that russia is nuclear armed superpower which can in war end life on earth as we know.

If you talk all the time your opponent as unimportant and not to take serious than you got the public opinion easily that you do not be afraid about russia but we should all take russia serious when there is conflict with russia.

So first we must take russia demands for it s security very serious to have our security !

War is no option with russia and that must be clear to any fool !

Ukraine was not and will not be our main interest.

hat s the spehre of interest of russia and let it be. We can no have all regions in the world in our sphere of interest. We must differ between important and not so important.

And honestly europe did never want ukraine be part of europe and nato because we want to avoid conflict with russia at the very beginning and it s wise to do so.

The US must stop thinking it can control every country and region.

Simply said: avoid russia and try not to be close to russia for our own sake

Whats Next?

Tarik in the Vineyard for the Saker Blog

I’m not sure even a NATO mosquito could cross the Russian border unmolested. And when a bear is lethally threatened, it doesn’t posture; it charges in a mighty roar. So why the Russian ultimatum? There are many plausible motives, many of which are not mutually exclusive. I’d like to focus on an aspect that hasn’t been discussed yet.

The last ten to twenty years could be characterized as a rivalry between China’s desire to re-balance the world’s economy, and the US’s effort to maintain the Dollar’s supremacy. China rose on the back of Western consumerism. There is only that much the West economy can absorb of China’s growing production, and that limit has clearly been exceeded. If China is to pursue its economic development, it needs additional “advanced” export markets to sustain its growing middle class. This is the Chinese necessity underlying the BRI, it cannot grow without the world growing with it.

Until recently it was content with a simple strategy: Enter several disparate countries at a time and start economic projects. Soon enough the US intervened to discipline the offenders; but they cannot strike all at once, choices must be made. Meanwhile, China approaches another bunch with still more economic projects. The US gets slowly overwhelmed, while the projects advance two steps forward, one step backward. On paper, it looks like an expensive proposition, but that is the beauty of it, it’s all paid for with US paper, while gold is accumulated. This entire period is comparable to the early and middle stages of a Go game

There is a point however when all these mini economic hubs must consolidate into a unified stream of connections to realize their full potential. That means no more US military interference and economic/financial disruptions. It seems we are now entering the late stage when “eyes” must be locked and linked.

There is little question the latest Russian move was long prepared and discussed with China. We may assume a common goal, and that none of the recent events are coincidences.

China and Russia favor and promote inter-currency settlement of trades. The Digital Yuan (E-CNY, electronic China Yuan) is designed for this purpose and has just completed successfully its live trials. It is reasonable to expect its official announcement in the near future. There are rumors this will be done during Putin’s visit to the Olympics. Regardless of the exact launch date, preparation must be made against the predictably harshest US resistance to its international deployment. There’s little doubt in my mind that many, if not most of East Asia will readily incorporate the new crypto iteration of the Yuan. However the Kazakhstan events, which were clearly foreseen with great precision, essentially opened up the entire Central Asian economies to its eventual use. With the recent 400bn commitment to Iran and the ongoing Pakistani projects, one may merrily add them to the bunch. India is free to join whenever they deem it in their best interest. This brings us right to the doorsteps of the Middle East.

Let’s now briefly revisit the US’ choices taken during the middle stage game. Since East Asia was growing to displace the US and EU as China’s main trading partner, Washington initiated their “pivot East” strategy to disrupt their momentum. Because of the sorry state of both their economy and military, they had to “delegate” the task of containing Russia on its western border to the EU. The Ukraine, in this context, can be seen as the “pretext” for the EU to activate NATO in Eastern Europe. However, as “pivot East” was floundering, they further needed to draw on their middle east assets (it’s becoming increasingly difficult not to laugh at what I must write). To this effect, they devised the Abraham Accords to similarly delegate the task of containing the “Shiite Axis” to Israel and the Golf States. The first “casualty” of these infamous Accords was probably Pakistan’s definite defection to the BRI, which further precipitated the Afghani debacle. To correct that mistake they then tried another formation with India, Japan, and a few others, followed by AUKUS, which both turned into flops, guided by the same imperative to relieve the strain on their military in an attempt to remain relevant on all fronts.

To control the Middle East, the US needs control of Europe, if only to secure their supply line. And to influence Central Asia they must control the Middle East. Until now Washington was essentially calling the shots, while Russia and China adapted their plans to whatever was thrown their way. By submitting their security demands, Russia is signaling unequivocally it is now taking the initiative. While the reinforcement of the Ukrainian Army was first designed to pressure some Russian reaction so as to increase the European nations’ commitment to toe the anti Russia line, the resulting Russian built-up of forces and large scale exercises have effectively reversed the pressure. The bulk of NATO forces are now bogged down on the eastern European front in a self induced paranoia, severely restricting their possible redeployment elsewhere.

With the Russian ultimatum the US is now basically faced with the following choices. Sign the documents, which by extension will mean the Minsk agreement and opening of NS2, but would free NATO reinforcement to the Middle East, no matter how futile this would ultimately prove. Because if this happens Europe will quickly “organically” link to the Asian network and recover most of its sovereignty from the US. At that moment, the Middle East is lost.

By not signing, the choice becomes loosing the middle East or release the pressure in East Asia, in both cases China wins.

If they don’t reinforce the Middle East, Pakistan is soon to be followed by the entire region. Though there could be some fireworks in the process, once the dust settles the BRI will be staring straight at Africa, throwing its full weight at European and American interests on that continent. If that happens, Europe falls.

Finally if they do “save” the Middle East at the detriment of East Asia, the Asian power house will become such that no one will escape its gravitational pull for long.

It is not very difficult to see, in this context, that whichever region the US decides to forsake, it’s only a matter of time before they lose the rest. Of course, this all assumes they don’t first crumble under the weight of their debts. Will they turn nuts and try blow it all up? I can only attest that the one thing greater than their evil idiocy, is their cowardice.

“Russia plans to engage its nuclear weapons not against those countries where it was launched against Russia, but against the mastermind cities where the decisions were made. To be exact, it is Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other American cities. Please fully understand, in case American nuclear weapons are launched from, eg. Taiwan, or Poland, the response will hit New York or Washington.”  

-Russian Duma deputy, Yevgeny Fyodorov.

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You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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More new Rufus videos to inspire – Tiger Nap

It’s a new Chinese year. It’s a water tiger year. And it’s a fine time to remember to be the best that we can possibly be. In this installment, I offer up some fine Rufus inspirational videos that are found throughout the world and inside of China. Remember, that being a Rufus doesn’t depend on your wealth, where you live, what color of skin you have, or your career. It depends on your compassion for those who surround you.

Be the Rufus. The world needs people like us.

Japanese Beauty and the Beast

video 11MB

Motorcycle kit for those who cannot afford a car

This little bike is a hybrid bicycle / motorcycle. It supposedly gets much more from a tank of gas than a regular motorcycle because of motor efficiencies and the light weight of the bicycle. It’s a perfect hybrid solution for those that need to drive back and forth to work but cannot afford the gas to do so. video 20MB

Alert from a Jumper

video 19MB

All hands alert

video 17MB

Big Girl

This video is one that I constantly show to my daughter. I use it to illustrate how a “big girl” handles bad people. video 1MB

 

Rufus captures a criminal

video 2.6MB

Rufus climbs to the rescue

video 4.1MB

Rufus comes together in a pinch

video 27MB

Rufus’ community rescue

video 9MB

Rufus’ community saves a girl

video 4MB

Rufus compilation

video 35MB

Rufus’ corruption police

One of the biggest innovations that China has made on the world is a branch of the police that handles corruption at all levels of the government. It has greatly added to the public perception of the Communist Party being to serve the people, and it is an important driver as to why China is so successful today.

However, the rest of the world doesn’t seem to want to copy this innovation. And when you bring up the subject, you are just brushed off as making “silly talk”. video 9MB

Rufus COVID volunteers

All those people wearing and donning the hazmat suits inside of China are volunteers. They do so for FREE. They leave their jobs, their work, their families and take on this burden for FREE. True Rufus every one. Video 4MB

Rufus’ covid volunteers 2

More. video 9MB

Rufus defends the little guy

A great video. The people doing the menial jobs are underappreciated and treated harshly. It’s about time that people stand up and defend them. I love this video. video 11MB

Rufus doctor alert

video 41MB

Rufus subway draw

video 6MB

Rufus subway drawing, NYC

video 5MB

Rufus subway thumbs up

video 6MB

Rufus takedown of criminal 3

video 3MB

Rufus’ workers need some appreciation

video 11MB

Rufus works together as a team

video 7MB

 

Stop comparing yourself to others.

Stop. Just stop. video 4MB

 

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Koreans come to grips with the Chinese Ticktock videos

Ah.

I just read that wine is bad for you. It’s all over the Western “news” media. My guess is that soon there will be a temperance movement to rival the anti-smoking movement. For the “children” don’t you know.

It’s all so silly.

I really don’t think I want to live in a place that bans drinking wine.

Wine and cheese.

I mean, really! Wine is bad, but lard burgers deep fried are good. Sheech!

You know, the longer I stay outside the “West” the more insane it appears.

Dionysus cat agrees!

Dionysus cat.

It’s been accepted that the Western Bloc (in defiance of Donald Trump’s executive orders to the contrary) pretty much uses Tictok as an Application to make and share movies. It’s a division of the Chinese version known as Douxing. It is NOT the same thing.

In fact, most of the videos posted inside of China are banned by the non-Chinese versions.

Thus, because of that, the presentation of what China actually is; is withheld from the global readership. (It’s something that I do not fully understand why, but it offers strong hints of Geo-political manipulation for domestic consumption purposes on a regional basis.)

To get around this limitation, you must have a Chinese cellphone and install Douxing on it while you are in China.

Now, with that awkward introduction, let’s get to the meat of this article. Here is a South Korean group of video-blogers that take various Chinese Douxing videos and comment on them. I find that it is interesting, and amusing and telling on how the Korean society reacts to the Chinese society. Because, after all, they are both of the Han race.

Please enjoy this great peer into cross society insights.

2021 Overview

We start with this video.

At the end of 2021 were a bunch of videos that summarized the events of 2021. Some are actually quite good. Of course, most of the world outside of China has no idea what has been going on inside of China. Their government (especially if you are an America or Brit) won’t allow it. Here, the Koreans get to watch some of the videos and comment on them.

video 33MB

Chinese minorities on display

The Chinese honor, fund and keep the traditions and societies of all the minorities within China alive and prospering. Here is a selection of the various videos in this category.

The PRC officially recognizes 55 ethnic minority groups within China in addition to the Han majority. 

As of 2010, the combined population of officially-recognized minority groups comprised 8.49% of the population of mainland China. 

In addition to these officially-recognized ethnic minority groups, there are Chinese nationals who privately classify themselves as members of unrecognized ethnic groups, such as the very small Chinese Jewish, Tuvan, and Ili Turki communities, as well as the much larger Oirat and Japanese communities. 

-Wikipedia

video 40MB

CN Military

Of course, there are all sorts of videos about the Chinese military. Here, the Koreans get their first look at some fan, and government videos…

video 13MB

China VR

Chinese virtual reality similar to “Google Glass” is getting to be popular in the first tiered cities. video 38MB

Dancing to pop music done in traditional style

The song is from Jay Chou, but done traditionally. And the people dance to it in a traditional manner. video 14MB

Different personalities

This is a common theme inside Chinese culture. That you can have many different “faces” or side to your personalities. video 21MB

Girl Actor

A very famous girl actor. Perhaps you have heard of her or seen her in some movies, perhaps? video 10MB

Girl singing group

Here’s a group of girls that love to dress up and sing traditional Chinese opera. It’s kind of cool. video 10MB

Good vs Bad

It’s all about the Yin and the Yang. video 23MB

Gung Fu

What’s not to love? This is the real deal, with many Shaolin monks participating. video 26MB

Han Clothing

Very popular. On display here for thoughts and comments. video 13MB

Han Cosplay

These are videos of people dressed in Han Clothing and meeting in cosplay events and fashion shows. video 14MB

Honoring the family

This is a big thing. Not only does China have a firm belief in the importance of the traditional family life and culture, but it funds videos that are sprinkled in with all the other videos to remind people of the importance of family and community. It’s sort of how the LGBT “news” and “issues” are all being driven in the United States today. It’s a very big part of what China is all about. When was the last time that you saw a video or a commercial stressing the importance of family, community and care for others in America? video 14MB

I love how this scene mesmerized the movie critics.

Honoring the Rufus firefighters

In praise of Rufus. You just don’t see this kind of stuff in the West. video 14MB

In another time

In another time. Sigh. It reminds us, through these videos, that  while times, clothing and society has changed, we are still the same. We are still people who work, earn a living, have a family and participate within society. video 20MB

Little gung fu master

Great little guy! I love it. Video 29.5MB

Martial arts for morning exercises

I see this every morning. The people do these exercises all the time and everywhere starting at 5am. Here are some videos of them doing so. Great.

video 31MB

Stage dancing

Dancing and moves on the stage as part of opera and other venues. video 22MB

Sword dance

Sword dance. It’s a great way to limber up, and start the day, as well as manage a very good defensive posture in a battle. video 45MB

Sword exercise

Another group of sword exercises. Quite well done. video 24MB

Transformations

It’s all about change. Good stuff. video 11MB

Uighur Culture

And of course, the Chinese promote the Uighur culture and Xinjiang. And oh baby! The USA hates that. Great video 17MB

One last thought…

Dionysus is strongly associated with the satyrs, centaurs and sileni. He is often shown riding a leopard, wearing a leopard skin, or in a chariot drawn by panthers and has been called the god of cats and savagery. He may be recognized by the thyrsus he carries. 

-Dionysus - Crystalinks

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Russian commentaries on the collapsing United States (with some MM commentary as well) part 4

This is part four.

The situation is very weird. America has a President who is essentially a shit-stain in the seat of his expensive blue suit. So at least publicly, America is being governed by a shit-stain. America is just going to collapse. Not that this would be a bad thing.

America is devolving into an open rancid sewer along all the dimensions that constitute a Society…Americans are escaping into drug use and Fantasy Football-and into Fantasy in general….I can’t wait for that apex of American Civilization known as the Super Bowl half-time show in five weeks…

To para-phrase the tune Officer Kumpke from the 1961 Blockbuster Westside Story:We are doomed…We are doomed…We are doomed….followed by a young Russ Tamblyn doing a back flip into the septic tank-know as America….

-War for Blair Mountain

It is inconceivable…

For the USA to maintain global domance. Video 4MB

Completely Outplayed by Russia’s Diplomacy and Sabotaged by its Own Actions, The Outlaw US Empire is Now Having a Temper Tantrum

Since Russia issued its Security Demands which are listed in my previous articles, a number of excellent essays were published that filled in some important holes in the historical record that the narrative associated with the security demands omit.

The first is by Tarik Cyril Amar, “Russia is right: The West promised not to enlarge NATO & these promises were broken,” and details the two crucial promises made by the Americans that were subsequently broken, which constitute two of the Aces in Russia’s diplomatic poker hand.

The second excellent article is by Glenn Diesen, “How the EU found itself excluded from talks on deciding Europe’s future,” wherein he provides an answer to the following truism:

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In advance of the talks last week, Washington rhetorically agreed that European security cannot be decided over the heads of the EU and Ukraine, before then simply going ahead with the bilateral US-Russia format. Simply put, Washington cannot do diplomacy with Eurocrats in the room.

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But the most crucial cards Russia held were three additional Aces–The Three Cardinal OSCE Collective Security Treaties, The Charter for European Security, Istanbul 1999; The EU-Russia Common Spaces Agreement in 2005, signed in Moscow; and the latest, The “Astana Commemorative Declaration Towards a Security Community,” 2010.

Russia thus has a hand of 5 Aces, which are the two separate and later broken promises made regarding Germany’s reunification and Warsaw Pact’s decommissioning combined with no Eastern NATO movement, and the three separate OSCE Treaties on Collective European Security that all essentially say that no nation or group of nations can secure its/their security while making another nation insecure.

Either the Outlaw US Empire apologizes for its wrongdoings, or it breaks the three treaties atop the other two promises it’s already broken. Aside from overturning the card table, those are the only two possible outcomes. Russia has played its diplomatic hand superbly and has already won. The Anglo’s problem is which choice to make in reply.

What Blinken and NATO are doing is what sore losers and outlaws do when they’re caught-out–they draw their 6-gun. Clearly, the Outlaw US Empire can’t admit it was outplayed diplomatically, nor can it admit its dishonesty and issue an apology. It’s acting like a juvenile delinquent by throwing a temper tantrum.

China is in control of the automotive market

video 15MB

A Chinese-Russian Christmas tale ?

From HERE.

I spend my time, retreated from society, writing thinking and image-making. I’m presently writing a volume about Modernity. My perception is thus necessarily the long haul. Unfortunately these last few days the anti-system bloggers, who constitute my first source of information, were overtaken by too much fantasy for my taste.
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To console myself in this period of the Year I hereafter share a Geopolitical Christmas tale that is rooted in the last episodes of actuality.

As a preamble…

Power in today’s world is far more complex than a matter of military dominance. Moscow, Beijing and Washington have furthermore an acute understanding that the present Geopolitical contradictions can’t be solved by a world war which would simply cut the escape of their societies and plunge their citizens in a Berezina.

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In that sense Geopolitics has now to be viewed as the systemic complexity of the interactions between the open societal fields (internal and external) of all nations on earth.
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The present Geopolitical moment is a very special moment indeed. .

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    1. Two trends have been solidifying over the centuries of Western Modernity: On one side the center of gravity of the economy-world has been shifting, away from the West, toward East-Asia and more particularly toward China :
      .

        • This is the 8th such a shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world over the entire span of Modernity… What is different this time is that the center of gravity is leaving the territorial area of the Western civilization which explains the madness that has overtaken Western capitals

      .

      • On the other hand Western countries have been accumulating a multitude of side-effects over the last centuries of Modernity. The nature of these side-effects is double :  – damages to the habitat of living species (nature) through different forms of pollution – damages to the societal organization of the human species through the pollution of ever more individualism that is concluding presently with the cancer that is societal atomization.

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  1. The present moment is more particularly characterized by “The Great Convergence of Late-Modernity” :
    .

      • The convergence, within Western societies, of Neo-liberalism and Postmodernism has unleashed a superficial globalization of Western Modernity to the 4 corners of the world while internally this convergence has forced Western societies into – societal inequality – pauperism – hyper-individualism – a complete loss of meaning – an individual feeling of isolation – and so many more unfortunate facts that are all aspects of societal atomization which means that such societies are no longer united entities and in that sense successful collective undertakings are no longer in their reach (no shared worldview left to glue the individuals in a unified societal whole).

    .

      • The convergence, within nature, of a multitude of side-effects, that resulted from “the reason that is at work within the transformation of money into capital”,  were called “externalities” because capital refused to pay for eliminating their life disrupting character. These side-effects have thus been left to freely disrupt the equilibrium that has ensured the abundance of flora and fauna and more particularly the stability that ensured an ever increasing complexity of human societal life over the last 10,000 years.

    .

      • Lately the effects of these disruptions, within Western societies and within nature, have started to converge and are forcing humanity to face its predicament : “what now ?”. Most of us are oblivious to this predicament. But most scientists and some public decision-makers, a rarity in the West, are well aware of this situation… Those of us who listen carefully know for a fact that Beijing and Moscow are realist and are thus well aware of the extreme complexity of the present situation :

    .

        • An acute awareness has emerged in the minds of the realists that to face the predicament of humanity it is indispensable, first and foremost and also urgently, to solve 1.1. which basically calls for a new world order in which the West is forced to play by the new rules of the game that the community of nation decides upon.

    .

      • The United Nations’ effort to combat climate change has taught a few important lessons :
        .
        ***  the West will never contribute in an adequate manner for the bulk of externalities that it is directly responsible for
        .
        *** climate change is merely a symptom of the larger problem which is that the side-effects of Modernity are destroying the habitat of living species

A Geopolitical Christmas Tale…

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Moscow and Beijing are well aware of the disintegration of the cultural, social, and economic realities in the West that I sketched in 1.2. and in 2.  and they have patiently been waiting for the most propitious moment to initiate a strategy to placate the West. It so happens that their forecasting services alerted them to an exceptional convergence of factors that would culminate with the Beijing Winter Olympics.
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Whatever the Western propaganda might be trying to force in the minds, of the people of this earth, the fact of the matter is that Western countries, in 2020, have entered the greatest depression in the whole of Modernity and this depression is bound to last, at least 10 years but most probably more, creating massive poverty and misery while disintegrating the sickest among Western societies.
.
Covid like a pin first deflated the Western financial bubble in 2020. The FED’s response was the shuffling of uncounted trillions of dollars of paper around the economy in the hope of igniting the animal spirits on Wall Street. This was realized, among other, by :

.
—   Cutting Federal funds rate to a range of 0% to 0.25%
—   Purchasing massive amounts of debt securities with a questionable value
—   Colossal amounts of low interest rate loans to the largest primary dealers
—  Lending to banks against collateral in IOUs or commercial paper
—   Funneling cash to overnight repo-markets
—   Expansion of International swap lines
—   Massive amounts of funding to foreign central banks without swap lines
—   Cash to the banks against questionable paper collateral at the discount window
—   Support of the flow of credit to U.S. corporations
—   Lending to corporations through the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF)
—   Lending to households, consumers, and small businesses against asset-backed securities
—   Backstopping municipal and state borrowing
—   Etc…
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The result of this financial largess became visible in the second part of 2021. An ever increasing inflation sows misery in the poorest families and people resist this inflation by claiming higher wages which results in the multiplication of social conflicts.
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We furthermore recently discovered that all this would be topped this winter by a new wave of Covid infections. The forecasts indicate that the Omicron surge could push the number of infections to their highest level yet. The UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin projects that by the end of January, more than 500,000 people could catch the virus every day on average … with and estimated 3,876 deaths per day on average…
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In sum the West is confronted with :  societal disintegration + the greatest of all depressions + hyperinflation + social conflicts + a new Covid wave that could be worse than the earlier ones. The least we can say is that this is going to fatally weaken the US and the same can be said of Europe.
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And then came the following…

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2021-12-07 : Putin and Biden have a 2 hour video-talk about the Ukraine crisis.

2021-12-07 : President Biden says that putting American troops on the ground in Ukraine to deter a potential Russian invasion is “not on the table” and that he hoped there would be an announcement by Friday 9th of high-level meetings with Russia and major NATO allies to discuss Moscow’s “concerns relative to NATO writ large” and the possibility of “bringing down the temperature along the eastern front.”
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2021-12-15 :  Putin and Xi have a video call and discuss tensions in Europe and the “aggressive” U.S. and NATO rhetoric. Wang Wenbin, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, answered the following to a reporter who asked him what was the outcome of this video-call :
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“The world is witnessing the combined forces of changes and a pandemic both unseen in a century against the backdrop of complex and profound changes in the international and regional landscape. We believe that China and Russia, two permanent members of the UN Security Council, take on an important mission in defending regional peace and stability and promoting development and the revitalization of all countries.

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For some time, certain countries have been drawing ideological lines, building new military blocs and stoking regional tensions, which have all brought grave threats and challenges to regional peace and stability and global strategic stability. China and Russia firmly reject this.
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We will continue to follow the two leaders’ consensus, take up responsibility, unite all forces that love peace and support peace, and make active contribution to realizing sustained, universal and common security in the region and the wider world.”.There was no way for China to assert more clearly that it is siding with Russia in its demands…  but everyone seems to have missed the seriousness of the Chinese side ……except for M. K. Bhadrakumar who is one of the most lucid observers out there.Few people understand the meaning of the expression “the two leaders’ consensus”.  This expression relates to the will of their countries to see these two leaders in place for the long haul during the stabilization of the post-Western world order.Both countries, not in their unanimity but certainly in their large majority, have sensed since some years already that they have someone unique in  their present president. A person who outshines the other decision-makers around them in term of their stamina and their mental clarity. How is it possible, that the West does not get this, is beyond my understanding ?.2021-12-17 : Moscow releases the texts of two documents in the form of two draft treaties that many interpreted as an ultimatum of Russia to the West.2021-12-17 : Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg asserts the alliance’s prerogative to intervene in Ukraine and bluntly rejects Moscow’s notions that it could have a say on the alliance’s future expansion plans.2021-12-19 :  Christine Lambrecht, German Minister of Defense, Asserts that NATO was willing to discuss Moscow’s demands but would not allow Moscow to “dictate” to the alliance or its partners.By the 20th of December Western media were littered with articles belittling the partnership between China and Russia as “still having an artificial flavor” and suggesting that China would never fight the US along Russia.
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Ultimately, they proclaim, Russia will join the West in defeating China.
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But this is the propaganda of a rear guard of Western ideologues who are bluffing their way trying to force their madness on all nations that refuse to submit to their unilateral order.
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The Russian treaty/ultimatum has to be understood as a first act in a wider strategy that is being played out, in concert by Russia and China, in order to provoke the financial and economic fall of the US.
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But why pushing the US to fall precisely now ?

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Well the present context offers a unique opportunity. The Chinese sages never tired to repeat that if you are forced to fight you do it when your enemy is at its weakest !  And the present Geopolitical context announces the coming of the peak bacterial catalysis infesting Western wounds. This is why pushing the US to fall precisely now has the best chances to succeed.
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Now about China. It is without any doubt an a-religious country.

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Its early-power society grew, as the outcome of the cultural unification of its tribes, sometimes between 6000 and 5000 years ago. And thereafter it constantly actualized animism with present changing trends by topping it with add-ons in the same way as open-source software integrates innovations from the community… Now animism was a highly pragmatic knowledge formation approach that is rooted in observation over the very long haul that led to the induction of abstract principles from this observation. Animism remains in application today in its appellation of “Chinese Traditional Culture” which is  a form of animism+.
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This means that China is — a-religious — highly pragmatic — and a reserved nation with reserved individuals.
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What this means is that the Chinese thinking is not driven by ideology and is not experiencing the need to impose itself on others. Having said that the Chinese have been observing the vile racist aggression coming out of the West over the last few years. They have spoken little. They have observed and have been thinking hard. And now they are at the end of their strategic patience. Chinese leaders know darn well that they have not much of a history in diplomacy which means, if I may say so, that their practice has not had the time yet to grow into a perfectly polished whole. That is why China, in all humility, openly recognizes Russia’s ‘panache’ in the diplomatic field and now relies on it to position its own.
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So it was only natural for China to let Russia publicly initiate the decisive movement forward in their common play for a new world order. China publicly sided with Russia when it announced its treaty-proposal/ultimatum and what is most important is that China detains the weapon of last resort which is the termination of US dollar payments for the delivery of its goods and services. ;
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Fast forward…

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Russian leaders have informed their Western counterparts that if they do not start to negotiate soon they will take the necessary technical measures to make them understand that they are deadly serious. It seems that Westerners have understood this part of Russia’s argument. Russian leaders even went further and informed very publicly that if the West was participating in negotiations in order to drag them down they would use their technical means to awake Western attention.
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The latest news is now that negotiations will start in the beginning of January 2022. In the eyes of the Russians one month is amply sufficient to reach an agreement and if there is no agreement by the end of the month they say that they will act.
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Coincidentally President Putin and President Xi will meet in Beijing to open the Winter Olympics on the 4th  of February 2022 at Beijing National Stadium.  The Russian timing of the conclusion of its negotiations with the US and Nato coincides thus with the very public and media relayed meeting of President Putin and President Xi !  Ho ho…
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Now the fact is that the discourse of Russian leaders leaves no place for a 3rd alternative as a possible outcome of these talks. From what we hear it is  —  or “we have a deal” and the West accepts a retreat to its posture before the fall of the Soviet Union  —  or “we have no deal” and China and Russia, on the 4th of February, announce their further game-plan to the world.
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Some Russian officials have already announced that one of the measures that they could take if there is no agreement is to refuse payment in dollars for any goods they export…

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And the fact is that China’s Digital Yuan is ready for use by the Chinese public at large. By October there were already 140 million people who had opened “wallets” and remember that this digital yuan has been designed, over the last 7 years, to act as a new technical payment system for international exchanges that will thus for the first time be free of Swift’s intervention and Washington’s judicial long arm…
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This Digital Yuan will also be connected to block-chains that will handle  the currency exchange between Yuan and local currency, the final payment as well as tax matters, transportation matters,… all this promises to erase the hefty bank commissions and lengthy bureaucratic delays which should catch the attention of the buyers of Chinese goods while reducing the volume of exchanges in US dollars.
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To get a sense of how the digital Yuan is going to impact the world watch these 2 interviews of Richard Turrin who is one of the most knowledgeable English speakers about the subject.

Excuse my bluntness…

You tell ’em! Video. 15MB

Humanity’s fate will most probably be decided in this first quarter of 2022

The first quarter of 2022 will most probably be remembered, for a long time to come, for having decided humanity’s model of collective response to “the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity“. If I’m proven right then what happens in this month of January will be determinant for the future of humanity.
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So how best can we summarize the situation ?

1.  The general context of the 2020’s

To understand what is humanity’s present situation we have first to comprehend the context in which the nations on this earth are interacting today.
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1.1. The countering of Western hubris

After the fall of the Soviet-Union the West got caught up in a bout of hubris that completely detached it from reality. It thought that its liberal world order had triumphed, that history was coming to an end, and that it got crowned master of humanity. But the nature of reality is a bitch. It always finishes by erasing what goes against its way.
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So how is the nature of reality countering Western ways  ?
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1.1.1. The relations between nations are conditioned by the realities of their internal situations

    • societal cohesion glues the minds of the individual citizens in a collective entity that acts as one entity.    The fact of the matter is that Russia, China, and other non-Western countries are strong and cohesive societies.

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    • societal atomization un-glues the minds and makes it impossible for a nation to continue to act as one national entity.   The fact is that Western nations have engaged on an individualist path since many centuries and over the last 50 years they have atomized in a mass of self-centered egos who can no longer act as one nation.

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  • the fact of the matter is that societally atomized nations, in all circumstances, lose to societally cohesive nations

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1.1.2. Reactions to a Western centric International order

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Confronted to Western centric International organizations, that one-sidedly protect Western interests while their governance systems are one-sidedly being kept in the hands of Western countries, China and the bulk of the world population are creating new International institutions that better cater to their interests :  — the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)   — the Belt and roads (new Silk Roads) —  and the next institution that will dethrone the dollar of its world monetary reserve status could very well be on its way…
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Such new institutions are the sole defense mechanisms against Western non-democratic practices within the present international order. See for yourself.

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Europe has 2 representatives in the Security Council of the United Nations while India, Africa, the Tri-Continental-Area, and Latin-America have no representatives.
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This gives the West a majority in the Security-Council with a veto power while it barely representsely 10% of the world population.
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The same kind of hegemonic domineering is at work at the world Bank where the US has 15.56 % of the voting rights. Japan has 7.31 %. China has 5.42%. Germany has 4.17 %. The United-Kingdom has 4.05 %. France has 4.05 %,  India has 3.16%. Russia has 2.87%. Canada has 2.82 %. etc…
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Now the fact is that the deeper, the existing Western order is being countered by new institutions, the weaker that order becomes and the more pressing is the agreement, of all countries on this earth, about the structuring of a new system of world governance that could take on the predicament of humanity.
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Conscious of this China and Russia think that the time has come to confront the West to the realities of the present context.

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1.1.3. Fiat money is an instrument of exchange that is ruled by two First Principles

    • Contrary to what ideologies are peddling the money in circulation must be sufficient but may not surpass the exchanging needs of society. In other words, within the realm of the economic rules of the game, the economic actors need to have access to money in order to practice their exchanges. If the money in circulation does not satisfy their needs then the value of that money starts to increase and prices start to fall bringing about an era of deflation. But when the money in circulation surpasses their needs that money starts to lose its value and prices start to increase bringing an era of inflation.
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      The US has without a shred of a doubt engaged in monetary hubris over the last decades and more particularly over the last 3 years when the volume of dollars in circulation abruptly increased by nearly 50% while the economic activity of the country was flat at a near 0% growth rate !  In this context it is not surprising that reality would slowly be re-imposing its way. As a consequence the value of the dollar started to decrease and US citizens are confronted to increasing prices. Seen the canyon full of recent dollar creation there is no escaping its rout in value. US citizens will thus be forced to confront hyper-inflation while foreign exporters to the US will not escape the necessity to increase their prices. Some might even soon refuse to be paid in US dollars all together.
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      These realities are inescapable and the most important question that nobody dares to ask is “what happens when China refuses dollars as payment for its exports ?”.

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  • To use a fiat currency it is imperative that the citizens and the International community trust the emitter of that fiat currency. A dwindling trust in the emitter comes at the cost of the value of its currency and the citizens as well as the International community start to look for alternatives.
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    US citizens have visibly lost trust in the emitter of the dollar and those who are awake to the nature of monetary realities are converting their dollars in all kinds of other instruments among which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are the most visible. But citizens are also converting their fiat dollars in many other items like : art works, antiques, real estate, farming land, raw materials and all kinds of “real non-perishable goods”.  The International community has also taken notice and is reducing its holdings of US paper instruments while converting those in “real non-perishable goods”. Another avenue that the International community has been exploring is  — the replacement of Swift as the exclusive intermediary of International transfers of US dollars  — the replacement of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. China and Russia have created their own swift and China’s digital Yuan is available to import and export companies from China or working with China. If interested to understand how the system works watch these 2 interviews of Richard Turrin who is one of the most knowledgeable English speakers about the subject.
    China’s Central Bank Digital Currency by Fat Tail Investment Research
    Big Tech in China and the Digital Yuan by Oriol Caudevilla

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1.1.4. The military is a tool of last resort

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In a last resort the nation with the most potent military always comes out of the conflict as a winner takes all and it then automatically becomes the architect of the next cycle of International relations.

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2.  The present situation

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Russia feels cornered its back against a wall and it has had enough of all the bullying by Western nations.

2.1. The first round

In the words of President Putin Russia has no margin left to take a step back against the Western encirclement and it wants written guarantees about the principles of a level playing field that will give all parties confidence in their security. To that effect Russia proposed 2 treaties between itself and the West and its military-wing Nato. It also informed the West and the world that the negotiations needed to be short and to the point and that the treaties need to be signed immediately. If these conditions are not respected President Putin and others in his administration have informed that Russia would take appropriate military and technical actions to protect itself against what they describe is the naked aggression by the West against Russia’s sovereignty..

2.2. The 2nd round

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Some Western representatives rejected any compromise with Russia and in the footsteps of this news a propaganda campaign was launched against the imminent attack of Ukraine by Russia. Russia repeatedly denied this accusation and gave the West a time limit to answer its treaty proposals in writing. If no answer is forthcoming Russia promises to act. The West then proposed a meeting between the US Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister. This proposal seems to have been accepted by Russia which shows that its answer would be so grave that it prefers to try once more the diplomatic card. But by the end of this week, by the 22nd or 23rd of January, Russia will need an answer on the table or its credibility will be tested indeed and so it will be forced to act.

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2.3. The US plays the madman

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The United-States are playing the role of the madman that President Richard Nixon had initiated against the Soviet Union in the nineteen-sixties and they are betting that the Russians will not dare to confront them. But the fact is that President Putin would never engage in a dog-fight that he knew he could not win.

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3.  Without a deal Russia will move to shell-shock the USA back into reality

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In matter of fact only a very profound shock will awake Western big capital holders, and their servants the American and European public decision-makers, to the reality that their countries are cornered and have lost their military superiority.
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What kind of action could this be ?

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Military experts are without any doubt better equipped than I’m to answer this question. But it nevertheless seems to me that, in today’s web addicted world what will be determinant in Russia’s action will be to gain the world’s attention to the fact that the USA has been duly informed about the superiority of Russian missiles. In consequence Russian actions will be limited; sparing lives but destroying US and Nato most crucial infrastructure.
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This vision gambles on the following facts :

    • Russia has assurances from China that it stands ready to act

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    • the minds of US and European decision-makers are very deeply embroiled in ideology and can thus no longer think straight along the lines of reality

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    • to be shocked back into reality will unmistakably be sobering the minds of Western populations

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    • the minds of US old male decision-makers are still emotionally attached to the future fate of their grand-kids

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  • all this should unleash sufficient pressure in the minds of US decision-makers to stand back and try to find a face-saving solution that the Russians and the Chinese can agree with.
However one looks at today’s situation the fact of the matter is that not acting now equals to further submit the world to Western diktats that become more egregious by the day. This would necessarily lead to an outcome that is far worse than whatever would be the outcome of the Russian-Chinese gamble that I have tried to describe.
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USA policy is for the wealthy only

video 4MB

We’ve Seen the Ultimatum, What Is the “or Else”?

We are making it clear that we are ready to talk about changing from a military or a military-technical scenario to a political process that really will strengthen the military security… of all the countries in the OCSE, Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian space. We’ve told them that if that doesn’t work out, we will create counter-threats; then it will be too late to ask us why we made such decisions and positioned such weapons systems. 

Мы как раз даем понять, что мы готовы разговаривать о том, чтобы военный сценарий или военно-технический сценарий перевести в некий политический процесс, который реально укрепит военную безопасность <…> всех государств на пространстве ОБСЕ, Евроатлантики, Евразии. А если этого не получится, то мы уже обозначили им (НАТО – прим. ТАСС), тогда мы тоже перейдем в вот этот режим создания контругроз, но тогда будет поздно нас спрашивать, почему мы приняли такие решения, почему мы разместили такие системы. 

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko quoted by TASS

Moscow has issued an ultimatum to USA/NATO. It is this: seriously negotiate on the issues laid out here and here. Some of them are non-negotiable.

Ultimatums always have an “Or Else” clause. What is the “or else” in this case? I don’t know but I’ve been thinking and reading other peoples’ thoughts and some ideas/guesses/suppositions follow. They are the order that they occurred to me. Whether Moscow has such a list in front of it or not, it certainly has many “counter-threats” it can use.

Why now? Two possible answers, each of which may be true. US/NATO have been using “salami tactics” against Russia for years; Moscow has decided that a second Ukraine crisis in one year is one thin slice too many. Second: Moscow may judge that, in the USA’s precipitous decline, this will be the last chance that there will be sufficient central authority to form a genuine agreement; an agreement that will avoid a catastrophic war. (The so-called Thucydides Trap).

Of course I don’t know what Putin & Co will do and we do have to factor in the existence of a new international player: Putin, Xi and Partners. Xi has just made it clear that Beijing supports Moscow’s “core interests”. It is likely that any “counter-threats” will be coordinated. The Tabaquis have responded as expected but maybe (let’s hope so) Washington is taking it more seriously.

Other commentaries I think are worth reading: Martyanov, Bernhard, Saker, Doctorow. The Western media is worthless as a source of independent thinking (typical clichéfest from the BBC – bolstered by The Misquotation) but maybe the WaPo shows that the wind is starting to blow from a different quarter: “The Cold War is over. Why do we still treat Russia like the Evil Empire?

To my CSIS readers: the world is at a grave inflection point and the West had better concentrate its attention. Moscow and Beijing don’t depend on me for advice and I’m not talking to them: regard this as one of the briefing notes that I used to write. Moscow is serious and it does have real “counter-threats”.

MILITARY MEASURES

  • Moscow could publish a list of targets in NATO countries that can and will be hit by nuclear or non-nuclear standoff weapons in the event of hostilities. These would likely include headquarters, airbases, port facilities, logistics facilities, ammunition dumps, military bases, munitions factories and so on.
  • Moscow could station medium and short-range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad and Belarus. The latter requires agreement from Minsk but Belarus President Lukashenka has hinted that it will be granted. Moscow could then make it clear that they are aimed at NATO targets.
  • Moscow could station Iskanders and have lots of aircraft in the air with Kinzhals and let it be known that they are aimed at NATO targets.
  • Moscow could make a sudden strike by stand-off weapons and special forces that destroys the Azov Battalion in Eastern Ukraine. Moscow would see two advantages: 1) it would remove the principal threat to the LDNR and 2) it would change the correlation of forces in Kiev. It would also be a live demonstration of Russia’s tremendous military power.
  • Moscow could remind the West of the meaning of Soviet Marshal Ogarkov’s observation that precision weapons have, to a degree, made nuclear weapons obsolete. A prescient remark, somewhat ahead of its time 35 years ago, but realised now by Russia’s arsenal of hypersonic precision missiles.
  • The Russian Navy operates the quietest submarines in the world; Moscow could could make and publish a movie of the movements of some NATO ship as seen through the periscope.
  • I believe (suspect/guess) that the Russian Armed Forces have the capability to blind Aegis-equipped ships. Moscow could do so in public in a way that cannot be denied. Without Aegis, the US surface navy is just targets. Objection: this is a war-winning secret and should not be lightly used. Unless, of course, the Russian Armed Forces have something even more effective.
  • Russia has large and very powerful airborne forces – much stronger than the light infantry of other countries, they are capable of seizing and holding territory against all but heavy armoured attacks. And they’re being increased. Moscow could demonstrate their capability in an exercise showing a sudden seizing of key enemy facilities like a port or major airfield, inviting NATO representatives to watch from the target area.
  • The Russian Armed Forces could do some obvious targetting of the next NATO element to come close to Russia’s borders; they could aggressively ping ships and aircraft that get too close and publicise it.
  • Moscow could make a public demonstration of what Poseidons can do and show in a convincing way that they are at sea off the US coast. Ditto with Burevestnik. In short Moscow could directly threaten the US mainland with non-nuclear weapons. Something that no one has been able to do since 1814.
  • Does the Club-K Container Missile System actually exist? (If so, Moscow could give a public demonstration, if not pretend that it does). Either way, Moscow could publicly state that they will be all over the place and sell them to countries threatened by USA/NATO.

DIPLOMATIC/INTERNATIONAL MEASURES

  • Moscow could publicly transfer some key military technologies to China with licence to build them there.
  • Moscow could make a formal military treaty with China with an “Article 5” provision.
  • Moscow could make a formal military treaty with Belarus including significant stationed strike forces.
  • Moscow could station forces in Central Asian neighbours.
  • Russia and Chinese warships accompanied by long-range strike aircraft could do a “freedom of navigation” cruise in the Gulf of Mexico.
  • Moscow could recall ambassadors, reduce foreign missions, restrict movement of diplomats in Russia.
  • Moscow could ban all foreign NGOs immediately without going through the present process.
  • Moscow could recognise LDNR and sign defence treaties.
  • Moscow could work on Turkey, Hungary and other dissident EU/NATO members.
  • Moscow could give military aid to or station weapons in Western Hemisphere countries.
  • Beijing could do something in its part of the world to show its agreement and coordination with Moscow raising the threat of a two front conflict.

ECONOMIC MEASURES

  • Moscow could close airspace to civil airlines of the countries that sanction Russia.
  • Moscow could declare that Russian exports must now be paid for in Rubles, gold, Renminbi or Euros (Euros? It depends).
  • Moscow could announce that Nord Stream 2 will be abandoned if certification if delayed past a certain date. (Personally, I am amused by how many people think that shutting it down would cause more harm to Russia than to Germany: for the first it’s only money and Russia has plenty of that; for the second….)
  • Moscow could stop all sales of anything to USA (rocket motors and oil especially).
  • Moscow could announce that no more gas contracts to countries that sanction it will be made after the current ones end. This is a first step. See below.
  • As a second and more severe step, Moscow could break all contracts with countries that sanction Russia on the grounds that a state of hostility exists. That is, all oil and gas deliveries stop immediately.
  • Moscow could announce that no more gas will be shipped to or through Ukraine on the grounds that a state of hostility exists.
  • Russia and China could roll out their counter-SWIFT ASAP.

SUBVERSIVE MEASURES

  • Moscow could stir up trouble in eastern Ukraine (Novorossiya) supporting secession movements.
  • Moscow could order special forces to attack key nazi organisations throughout Ukraine.
  • Moscow could order special forces to attack military facilities throughout Ukraine.

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But I’m sure that whatever “counter-threats” Moscow comes up with will be powerful and surprise the West. My recommendation is that USA/NATO take the ultimatums seriously.

After all, the Russian proposals really are mutually beneficial – their theme is that nobody should threaten anybody and if anybody should feel threatened, there should be serious talks to resolve the issue.

Security is mutual:

if all feel secure, then all are secure;

if one feels insecure, then none is secure.

As we now see: when Russia feels threatened by what USA/NATO do, it can threaten back. Better to live in a world in which nobody is threatening anybody and everybody feels secure.

George Kennan foresaw this a quarter of a century ago:

I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. 

Some great marching

You know, I’ve never really paid attention to the “goose step” march. But when I came to China I learned taht it is realy just a part of what is a much more interesting march. It’s worh the watch. video 17MB

CAN THEY LEARN? ANOTHER US WARGAME DEFEAT

 

First published Strategic Culture Foundation. picked up by ZeroHedge, Verity Weekly, scottadamsshow, usanewsguru, invest.smola.com, alltopcash.com, patriotnews, financial world, in Spanish,

(Note: by tradition, going back to the first Prussian Kriegsspiel, your side is “Blue”, the other side is “Red”. Soviets did it the other way round.)

According to David Halberstam, when Washington was considering escalating its presence in Vietnam, a wargame was held to test options. More bombing aircraft were put into airfields in Vietnam; Red attacked the airfields. Blue brought in more troops to guard the airfields; Red started attacking the supply lines for those troops. More troops to guard the supply lines; more attacks on their support systems. And so on: everything the American side thought up was quickly and easily countered by the Vietnam team. The results were ignored: only a game, not really real.

Forward to 2002 and a very large and complicated exercise simulating a US attack on – not named, but obviously – Iran. The retired USMC general playing Red – a no-nonsense experienced soldier who didn’t believe technology was the answer to everything (especially the projected wonders that the wargame granted to the American side), scorned business-school buzzwords like “network-centric” – thought outside the box and used low-tech weaponry. When the US high-tech took out his communications, as he knew they would, he went silent – his communications were by motorcycle dispatch riders, coded messages in Friday prayers and similar old-school techniques. He fired more missiles that the Blue side could handle and sank most of the invasion force and finished off the rest with swarms of small boats. “The whole thing was over in five, maybe ten minutes“. The invasion force was brought back to life, the rules were modified to reduce the defenders’ abilities – the Red force commander was on the point of destroying the reconstituted landing forces – and the US side “won”. He walked out when he decided that the game was too rigged for him to bother doing anything; as he said in a report: “this whole thing was prostituted; it was a sham intended to prove what they wanted to prove“.

Each of these wargames was supposed to be a learning and testing experience. The first was testing what to do and how to do it in Vietnam, the second, more ambitious, was supposed to test the whole package of the new US military in every aspect – it is said to have cost a quarter of a billion dollars and involved 13,000 participants. What was learned from the two? Certainly nothing was learned from the Vietnam wargame – Washington went ahead and put troops in – just a few at first but rising to an incredible 500,000 at the height and dropped a fantastic number of bombs; corners were turned, light was seen at the end of the tunnel but everyone knew it was a lost cause and no one wanted to say so. The enemy countered and endured everything and, at the end, the US went home defeated. The war game turned out to be a rather accurate predictor of the future. And it doesn’t appear that the US military have learned anything from the 2002 experience either. Certainly nothing in Washington’s behaviour towards Iran gives the impression that the US leadership imagines it could be defeated if it attacks Iran.

Nor, come to think of it, is there evidence that it learned anything much from the Vietnam reality either. Afghanistan was, in many respects, a replay of Vietnam: a determined low-tech force countered everything the US military could think up. In 2018, Les Gelb, the compiler of the Pentagon Papers said:

You know, we get involved in these wars and we don’t know a damn thing about those countries, the culture, the history, the politics, people on top and even down below. And, my heavens, these are not wars like World War II and World War I, where you have battalions fighting battalions. These are wars that depend on knowledge of who the people are, with the culture is like. And we jumped into them without knowing. That’s the damned essential message of the Pentagon Papers.

And now we move forward two decades. Last October another wargame simulated a US defence of Taiwan against a Chinese attack. Another test of some high-falutin war-fighting concept. (One might parenthetically ask how many of these concepts are actually business-school ideas given the predilection of US generals for MBAs. Probably the worst imaginable preparation for what our USMC “Iranian” commander called a “terrible, uncertain, chaotic, bloody business“.) General John Hyten, Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman, and MBA, reported on the wargame:

Without overstating the issue, [Blue force] failed miserably. An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it.

The first thing that went wrong for the Blue force was that it suddenly lost all its communicationsas I have been saying (and the Chinese and Russians surely know) one of the fundamental assumptions of the US style in war-fighting is constant, reliable, assured communications. All its “smart” weapons need to be “talking” to their controllers all the time: stop the “talking” and they become immediately “stupid”. Then the US force was hit with wave after wave of missiles. And the rear areas were hit with waves of missiles. And that was that. And, in another wargame in 2020, Poland was annihilated by the Russians: Warsaw was surrounded in five days.

What stood out for me in Hyten’s refreshingly honest presentation was this: “studying the United States for the last 20 years”. Washington officials are not noted for their ability to see things from the other side’s point of view, but he certainly got that one right. China (and Russia and Iran) know that they are on Washington’s hitlist. They have been watching Washington fight wars for two or three decades (winning none of them, despite the hype); they know how Washington fights; they know its strengths and weaknesses. They have put a lot of thought into it. One might also observe that, while Washington fights its wars safely overseas, China, Russia and Iran have very strong memories of wars fought on their own territory. This gives them, as Andrei Martyanov is always pointing out, a rather different view of war – it’s not some affair of choice far away over there, it’s a horrible, deadly, bloody, immensely destructive process in your own home.

The United States has zero historic experience with defending the US proper against powerful and brutal enemies. It is a cultural difference, a profound one and it manifests itself across the whole spectrum of activities, not just the respective military-industrial complexes. In other words, Russians MUST build top of the line weaponry, because the safety of Russia depends on it.

Losing for them is not the American way of losing – no walking away, explaining away and forgetting away: it’s life or death. They take war seriously and they put the effort into thinking about how to defend themselves against an American attack. They know that air superiority and assured communications are the necessities of the American way of war; they know the US military expects to accumulate huge forces undisturbed. They haven’t used these years idly; they won’t wait for the Americans to leisurely assemble the force to bomb them. That’s why they have concentrated on EW and lots of missiles. The US won’t have secure communications, free air power or safe bases: Beijing. Moscow and Tehran, if they have to fight, will fight to win. And do whatever it takes; no umpire will appear to “call foul” and re-float the fleet.

In the real world, Ukraine’s “de-occupation” boasting was silenced in two weeks by a huge Russian mobilisation. Surely somebody in the Pentagon noticed that. HMS Defender’s adventure off Crimea (incidently the only one of the six ships of its class actually fit for sea – not, in itself, a very impressive performance) may also have taught some lessons about the consequences of silly gestures.

Nothing was learned from the Vietnam or Iran wargames, what about this one? General Hyten said:

the U.S. has reevaluated the joint warfighting concept. He said the new strategy being developed is “not quite a clean-sheet approach, because you can never take a clean sheet of paper if you want to get between now and 2030, you have to start with what you have.”

That sounds good – “clean-sheet” – but you know that nothing will really change. Vietnam was supposed to teach a lesson (and the US Army certainly did improve) but, essentially, it did the same things all over again in Afghanistan. For twice as long. I doubt that this exercise will cause the full-scale change that he’s talking about. Complacency will probably return.

Even so, one would like to be a fly on the wall when US senior military brief the President: “failed miserably”, Afghanistan defeat (coming soon to Iraq and Syria), Russian and Chinese military power, hypersonic manoeuvring missiles, EW, layered air defence. The briefings can’t be too upbeat, can they? Could this be why the big exercise in the Black Sea ended so quietly? Could this be in the background of the decision to stop trying to block Nord Stream? Could this be a reason why Biden asked to meet with Putin? The couch-warriors will never understand this of course, but perhaps one can hope that the generals will – Hyten seems to have but, just as American wars are a sequence of one-year wars because each commander kicks the failure down the road for his successor to worry about, his replacement may return to the complacency of being at the top of “the greatest military in the history of the world“.

But, one can hope they’ll learn a little humility.

A reality check on American “democracy”

Video 5MB

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 20 JANUARY 2022 by Patrick Armstrong

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ULTIMATUM. The EU is not in the picture – too weak and the US won’t fight for it; NATO ditto. Do Berlin and Paris start to see reality? London has invited Shoygu but is shipping PAWs to Ukraine. Russia keeps up the pressure – a not-very-reliable source says a nuke boat surfaced off the US coast. Lots of exercises – Guards Tank Army, social media videos of military equipment moving around. Live firing of the formidable Iskanders. Lost submarines in the Med. A representative tough-guy piece from a couch warrior (she of we have good int on Russia fame). It is now clear the US/EU/NATO are not going to fight for Ukraine – empty threats and futile sanctions are all Kiev can expect. But the SWIFT threat would be a big shot to the foot. Somebody notices that Russia is pretty sanction proof (Googlish from INOSMI). In short, Russia pretty much has the hammer. We see the fruits of Putin & Co’s long game.

DONBASS. It should be understood that the official position in Moscow at present is that the rebel areas are part of Ukraine and the Minsk Agreement provides a method for resolving grievances. (Note, BTW, given the constant refrain that Moscow must “comply”, that it has no obligation). But this position could suddenly change given that Kiev has never fulfilled any part (especially No 4) and that Kiev’s “allies” haven’t tried to make it. One of the many possible “Or Elses“.

GUNS. Improved Pantsir AD system coming. Completely modernised White Swan makes maiden flight. Three new subs this year. China-Russia-Iran naval drills start tomorrow.

TALK SHOWS. Russian TV loves long talk shows – Doctorow has an interesting piece on one of the most important. “Russian elites talk WAR: ‘Evening with Vladimir Solovyov,’”

PEDOPHILES. The Duma has passed a bill providing for life imprisonment for serial pedophiles.

HACKERS. Russian security is arresting members of the REvil hacking group at Washington’s request. They are thought to be behind the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline last year.

COVID. The Duma has postponed a bill requiring QR code proof of vaccination. There is a good deal of resistance to this in Russia.

NAVALIY. Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov, close allies of Navalniy, have been added to the state register of extremists. Neither is in Russia.

RUSSIAN DOLPHINS OFF US COAST. For your amusement.

CIA TRAINING. We learn that the CIA has been running training programs in Ukraine since 2014. Moscow has a good deal of experience of dealing with Washington-supported nazi resistance in Ukraine.

GALICIA. Anybody know why Ioseb Bissarionis-dze decided to put it in the Ukrainian SSR rather than giving it back to Poland in 1945? An important decision as it’s turned out.

KAZAKHSTAN. That didn’t take long, did it? All the CSTO troops are back home. They say at least 225 (including 19 police and soldiers) died, about 4500 injured. A lot of people in the security organs have been arrested, starting with Masimov, the head of the National Security Committee, some defenestrated; so the plot ran deep. (Here’s a photo of Masimov with – of all people – Hunter and Joe). If this were an attempt by some part of the US deep state to answer Moscow, it only shows how profoundly out of touch they are. Nazarbayev appears, everything’s calm. Interesting take on what it was all about here.

LESSONS LEARNED. Little countries often try to play off the big guys against each other. But Kazakhstan and Belarus have just learned that this isn’t possible today because Washington wants total control. Others will learn from these examples.

NUGGETS FROM THE STUPIDITY MINE. I don’t remember Soviet propagandists assuming their consumers to be as stupid as the creators of this do. Ummm – you told us that Putin tried to kill him, he’s completely in his power now: shouldn’t you at least spend a little effort coming up with some explanation for why he’s still alive to give interviews to you?

THE EMPTINESS OF FORMER FLAPS. ICAO supports Minsk on the Ryanair grounding last year – a few inconsistencies but no “air piracy“. And “Havana syndrome” bites the dust. Ah well, on to the next…

RUSSIA-IRAN. The two Presidents are meeting. The beginning of something big. Very Mackinderish.

SWEDEN. This week drones, last week the Russians were going to snatch Gotland. Years ago somebody in the Swedish security apparatus told me that these stories – “submarine sightings” in those days – were faked up by the people in the Swedish security organs who want it to join NATO.

A treaty with Washington isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. That’s just how I see it, surely saner and smarter men have also noticed this.

-Baxter

American Homeless

video 63MB

What War With Russia Would Look Like

Wendy Sherman thinks her aim in talks with Russian officials starting Monday is to lecture them on the cost of hubris. Instead she’s set to lead the U.S., NATO, and Europe down a path of ruin, warns Scott Ritter.
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If ever a critical diplomatic negotiation was doomed to fail from the start, the discussions between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine and Russian security guarantees is it.

The two sides can’t even agree on an agenda.

From the Russian perspective, the situation is clear:

“The Russian side came here [to Geneva] with a clear position that contains a number of elements that, to my mind, are understandable and have been so clearly formulated—including at a high level—that deviating from our approaches simply is not possible,”

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the press after a pre-meeting dinner on Sunday hosted by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who is leading the U.S. delegation.

Ryabkov was referring Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands to U.S. President Joe Biden in early December regarding Russian security guarantees, which were then laid out by Moscow in detail in the form of two draft treaties, one a Russian-U.S. security treaty, the other a security agreement between Russia and NATO.

The latter would bar Ukraine from joining NATO and rule out any eastward expansion by the trans-Atlantic military alliance. At the time, Ryabkov tersely noted that the U.S. should immediately begin to address the proposed drafts with an eye to finalizing something when the two sides meet. Now, with the meeting beginning on Monday, it doesn’t appear as if the U.S. has done any such thing.

“[T]he talks are going to be difficult,” Ryabkov told reporters after the dinner meeting. “They cannot be easy. They will be business-like. I think we won’t waste our time tomorrow.”

When asked if Russia was ready to compromise, Ryabkov tersely responded, “The Americans should get ready to reach a compromise.”

All the U.S. has been willing to do, it seems, is to remind Russia of so-called “serious consequences” should Russia invade Ukraine, something the U.S. and NATO fear is imminent, given the scope and scale of recent Russian military exercises in the region involving tens of thousands of troops. This threat was made by Biden to Putin on several occasions, including a phone call initiated by Putin last week to help frame the upcoming talks.

Yet on the eve of the Ryabkov-Sherman meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken simply reiterated these threats, declaring that Russia would face “massive consequences” if it invaded Ukraine.

“It’s clear that we’ve offered him two paths forward,” Blinken said, speaking of Putin. “One is through diplomacy and dialogue; the other is through deterrence and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression against Ukraine. And we’re about to test the proposition of which path President Putin wants to take this week.”

Lessons of History

It is as if both Biden and Blinken are deaf, dumb, and blind when it comes to reading Russia.

Ryabkov has alluded to a fact already made clear by the Russians—there will be no compromise when it comes to Russia’s legitimate national security interests. And if the U.S. cannot understand how the accumulation of military power encompassed in a military alliance which views Russia as a singular, existential threat to its members’ security is seen by Russia as threatening, then there is no comprehension of how the events of June 22, 1941 have shaped the present -day Russian psyche, why Russia will never again allow such a situation to occur, and why the talks are doomed before they even begin.

As for the American threats, Russia has given its response—any effort to sanction Russia would result, as Putin told Biden last month, in a “complete rupture of relations” between Russia and those countries attempting sanctions. One need not be a student of history to comprehend that the next logical step following a “complete rupture of relations” between two parties that are at loggerheads over matters pertaining to existential threats to the national security of one or both is not the peaceful resumption of relations, but war.

There is no mealy-mouthed posturing by Foggy Bottom peacocks taking place in Moscow, but rather a cold, hard, statement of fact—ignore Russia’s demands at you own peril. The U.S., it seems, believes that the worst-case scenario is one where Russia invades Ukraine, only to wilt under the sustained pressure of economic sanctions and military threats.

Russia’s worse-case scenario is one where it engages in armed conflict with NATO.

Generally speaking, the side that is most prepared for the reality of armed conflict will prevail.

Russia has been preparing for this possibility for more than a year. It has repeatedly shown a capability to rapidly mobilize 100,000-plus combat-ready forces in short order. NATO has shown an ability to mobilize 30,000 after six-to-nine-months of extensive preparations.

The Shape of War

What would a conflict between Russia and NATO look like? In short, not like anything NATO has prepared for. Time is the friend of NATO in any such conflict—time to let sanctions weaken the Russian economy, and time to allow NATO to build up sufficient military power to be able to match Russia’s conventional military strength.

Russia knows this, and as such, any Russian move will be designed to be both swift and decisive.

First and foremost, if it comes to it, when Russia decides to move on Ukraine, it will do so with a plan of action that has been well-thought out and which sufficient resources have been allocated for its successful completion. Russia will not get involved in a military misadventure in Ukraine that has the potential of dragging on and on, like the U.S. experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. Russia has studied an earlier U.S. military campaign—Operation Desert Storm, of Gulf War I—and has taken to heart the lessons of that conflict.

One does not need to occupy the territory of a foe in order to destroy it. A strategic air campaign designed to nullify specific aspects of a nations’ capability, whether it be economic, political, military, or all the above, coupled with a focused ground campaign designed to destroy an enemy’s army as opposed to occupy its territory, is the likely course of action.

Given the overwhelming supremacy Russia has both in terms of the ability to project air power backed by precision missile attacks, a strategic air campaign against Ukraine would accomplish in days what the U.S. took more than a month to do against Iraq in 1991.

On the ground, the destruction of Ukraine’s Army is all but guaranteed. Simply put, the Ukrainian military is neither equipped nor trained to engage in large-scale ground combat. It would be destroyed piecemeal, and the Russians would more than likely spend more time processing Ukrainian prisoners of war than killing Ukrainian defenders.

For any Russian military campaign against Ukraine to be effective in a larger conflict with NATO, however, two things must occur—Ukraine must cease to exist as a modern nation state, and the defeat of the Ukrainian military must be massively one-sided and quick. If Russia is able to accomplish these two objectives, then it is well positioned to move on to the next phase of its overall strategic posturing vis-à-vis NATO—intimidation.

While the U.S., NATO, the EU, and the G7 have all promised “unprecedented sanctions,” sanctions only matter if the other side cares. Russia, by rupturing relations with the West, no longer would care about sanctions. Moreover, it is a simple acknowledgement of reality that Russia can survive being blocked from SWIFT transactions longer than Europe can survive without Russian energy. Any rupturing of relations between Russia and the West will result in the complete embargoing of Russian gas and oil to European customers.

There is no European Plan B. Europe will suffer, and because Europe is composed of erstwhile democracies, politicians will pay the price. All those politicians who followed the U.S. blindly into a confrontation with Russia will now have to answer to their respective constituents why they committed economic suicide on behalf of a Nazi-worshipping, thoroughly corrupt nation (Ukraine) which has nothing in common with the rest of Europe. It will be a short conversation.

NATO’s Fix

If the U.S. tries to build up NATO forces on Russia’s western frontiers in the aftermath of any Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia will then present Europe with a fait accompli in the form of what would now be known as the “Ukrainian model.” In short, Russia will guarantee that the Ukrainian treatment will be applied to the Baltics, Poland, and even Finland, should it be foolish enough to pursue NATO membership.

Russia won’t wait until the U.S. has had time to accumulate sufficient military power, either. Russia will simply destroy the offending party through the combination of an air campaign designed to degrade the economic function of the targeted nation, and a ground campaign designed to annihilate the ability to wage war. Russia does not need to occupy the territory of NATO for any lengthy period—just enough to destroy whatever military power has been accumulated by NATO near its borders.

And—here’s the kicker—short of employing nuclear weapons, there’s nothing NATO can do to prevent this outcome. Militarily, NATO is but a shadow of its former self. The once great armies of Europe have had to cannibalize their combat formations to assemble battalion-sized “combat groups” in the Baltics and Poland. Russia, on the other hand, has reconstituted two army-size formations—the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 20th Combined Arms Army—from the Cold War-era which specialize in deep offensive military action.

Even Vegas wouldn’t offer odds on this one.

Sherman will face off against Ryabkov in Geneva, with the fate of Europe in her hands. The sad thing is, she doesn’t see it that way. Thanks to Biden, Blinken and the host of Russophobes who populate the U.S. national security state today, Sherman thinks she is there to simply communicate the consequences of diplomatic failure to Russia. To threaten. With mere words.

What Sherman, Biden, Blinken, and the others have yet to comprehend is that Russia has already weighed the consequences and is apparently willing to accept them. And respond. With action.

One wonders if Sherman, Biden, Blinken, and the others have thought this through. Odds are, they have not, and the consequences for Europe will be dire.

Iran, China, Russia to kick off joint naval drills in Indian Ocean on January 21 — media

The drills will practice various maneuvers, in particular, rescuing a ship swept by fire, releasing a captured vessel and firing against targets.

TEHRAN, January 20. /TASS/. The Iranian, Chinese and Russian navies will begin joint naval maneuvers in the northern Indian Ocean waters on January 21, the ISNA news agency reported on Thursday, citing the Iranian army’s press office.

The drills will practice various maneuvers, in particular, rescuing a ship swept by fire, releasing a captured vessel and firing against targets. The drills are aimed at strengthening the security of international sea routes, fighting piracy and maritime terrorism and exchanging experience, the news agency reported.

Russia’s Pacific Fleet reported on January 18 that the Fleet’s naval group made up of the Guards Order of Nakhimov missile cruiser Varyag, the large anti-submarine warfare ship Admiral Tributs and the large sea tanker Boris Butoma had arrived at the Iranian port of Chabahar for the joint drills of the Russian, Iranian and Chinese navies.

The Pacific Fleet’s naval task force departed from Vladivostok and embarked on its long-distance deployment several days before the new year 2022.

America has big hurtles in front of it

video 5MB

A Short-Term Geopolitical Forecast

By Dmitry Orlov

Ever since Putin announced his demands for security guarantees from the US and NATO (in brief, stop NATO’s eastward expansion, have NATO retreat to its positions of 1997 and remove offensive weapons from Russia’s immediate vicinity) we have been subjected to a barrage of irrelevancies from Western press:

• Are these security guarantees an ultimatum or a negotiating tool?

• Will the US and NATO agree to them or reject them?

• Will Putin invade the Ukraine or will he be stopped in his tracks through the judicious and timely use of frowning, head-shaking, finger-wagging and tisk-tisking by sundry and assorted Western luminaries?

• If Putin does invade the Ukraine, does this mean that World War III is finally upon us and we shall all surely die?

I hope that I am not alone in being sick and tired of this pathetic, tiresome attempt to throw up a smokescreen and hide the inevitable reality of what is about to unfold. In case it isn’t completely clear to you yet, I would like to spell it all out. I am normally more cautious when making specific predictions, but in this case our immediate future has been carefully plotted out for us by Russia and China, with the US and its assorted puppets reduced to the status of non-playable characters in a video game who can only do one thing: hide behind a dense smokescreen of risible lies.

First, Russian security guarantee demands are not ultimatums. An ultimatum is an “or else” sort of thing, offering a choice between compliance and consequences, whereas in this case both the noncompliance and the consequences will follow automatically. The West and NATO are, for well understood internal political reasons, unable to sign these guarantees; therefore, the consequences will unfold in due course.

Russia has demanded that both the US and NATO put their refusal to agree to the security guarantees in writing; these pieces of paper will be important moving forward. To understand why, we need to take on board the fact that everything within these security guarantees has already been agreed to by the West; namely, the “not an inch to the east” guarantee given to the Russians by the US 30 years ago and the collective security principle agreed to by all members of the OSCE. By signing a document in which they declare their refusal to abide by what they previously agreed to, the US and NATO would essentially declare themselves to be apostates from international law and order. This, in turn, would imply that their own security needs can be disregarded and that instead they deserve to be humiliated and punished.

Further, by putting their refusal in writing, the US and NATO would declare the collective security principle itself—specifically with respect to the US and NATO—to be null and void, meaning that if, for instance, the Bahamas, a sovereign nation since July 10, 1973, decides to reinforce its sovereignty by hosting a Russian missile battery pointed across the Gulf Stream at Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the US would have no say in the matter, and if the US did try to speak up, they’d get beat up with this very piece of paper they signed. “Do you feel threatened now?” the Russians would ask; “Well, maybe you should have thought of that when you threatened us by putting your missiles in Poland and Romania.”

The initial stated purpose of the two installations of Aegis Ashore in Poland and Romania was to shoot down Iranian missiles, which didn’t exist then, don’t exist now, and never would have taken a giant detour and fly over Poland or Romania in any case. Although the stated purpose of these systems was for missile defense, their launch platforms can also be used to launch offensive strategic weapons: Tomahawk cruise missiles with nuclear payloads. These Tomahawks are obsolete and the Russians know how to shoot them down extremely well (as they demonstrated in Syria) but this is still very annoying, plus seeding the Russian countryside with pulverized American plutonium would not be good for anyone’s health.

Thus, we should expect bad things to happen to these installations, but we should expect to remain rather ill-informed about the details. While the non-negotiations over the Russian security guarantee demands will be as public as possible (in spite of Western plaintive cries asking that they be held in private) the “technical-military means” which Russia will use to deal with Western noncompliance will not be widely publicized. The Romanian installation might become inoperative due to a newly discovered small volcano nearby; the Polish one might succumb of a freak swamp gas explosion.

A further series of unfortunate accidents may cause the US and NATO to become shy and reticent about encroaching on Russia’s borders. NATO troops stationed in the Baltics, a stone’s throw from St. Petersburg, which is Russia’s second-largest city, might complain of repeatedly hearing the word “Thud!” clearly and loudly annunciated, causing them all to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and evacuated. A US spy plane might experience a slight GPS malfunction causing it to blunder into Russian airspace, get shot down, and have its catapulted pilot sentenced to many years of teaching English to kindergarteners in Syktyvkar or Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. US Navy and NATO vessels, already prone to collisions with each other, underwater mountains and barges, might suffer an unusually large number of such mishaps in proximity to the Russian coastline, causing them to shy away from it. A large number of such events, most out of them transpiring out of sight of the public, news of them suppressed in Western press and social media, would force the mighty US military to confront an uncomfortable existential question: “Are the Russians still afraid of us, or are we just jerking each other off here?” Their response will be to go into denial and to jerk each other off harder and faster than ever before.

But if they are indeed just jerking each other off, then what about their policy of containment? What’s to contain Russia and keep it from recreating USSR 2.0?—other than the fact that the Russians aren’t stupid, learned their lesson the first time around, and Mother Russia will no longer allow a bunch of useless non-Russian ingrates to suckle at her ample bosom. “But when is Russia going to invade the Ukraine?” inquiring minds demand to know, especially those who have been paying attention to Western news sources claiming that Russia has amassed 100090 troops on the Ukrainian border (it hasn’t).

The latest theory is that what is preventing Russia from invading is the warm weather. Apparently, it has been unusually warm since 2014, which is why Russian troops haven’t rolled across the Ukrainian border yet. What have they been waiting for? The next ice age that’s due any millennium now? Instead, Russia just got the bits of the Ukraine it wanted—Crimea, the Donbass and a couple of millions of highly trained Russian-speaking professionals—all without staging an invasion, and is now waiting for the rest of the Ukraine to degenerate into its end state as an ethnic theme park and nature preserve. The only thing that’s not going well with this plan is that the Ukraine needs to be demilitarized, as required by Russia’s recent security guarantee demands.

But what if Russia’s security guarantees aren’t met and US/NATO continue stuffing the Ukraine full of weapons, sending in trainers and establishing bases? Well, then, those will need to be destroyed. This can be done by launching some rockets from small ships sailing around in the Caspian Sea, as was done to destroy ISIS bases in Syria; no ground force invasion needed. It won’t take much to prompt US/NATO to evacuate the Ukraine in a panic, seeing as they have already worked out plans for doing so and have announced that they won’t fight to defend it.

If that’s what unfolds, what do you think will happen next? Will the US start a nuclear war over the Ukraine? Umm… how about “NO!!!” Will the US impose “sanctions from hell”? Perhaps, but you have to understand that at this point in time the US and other Western economies can be accurately caricatured as a crystal vase full of excrement parked on the very edge of a high shelf over a hard marble floor. The hope is that nobody is going to sneeze because the sound pressure might cause it to go over the edge. Sanctions from hell do sound like they could cause a bit of a sneeze. Needless to say, the US will continue to talk about sanctions from hell and maybe even pass some legislation so titled, and claim to have sent “a strong message,” but to no effect.

Will Russia act immediately upon acceptance in writing the West’s refusal to provide it with the requested security guarantees? No, there is bound to be a delay. You see, February 4th is barely two weeks away, and that’s just not enough time to start and finish a military action. What’s on February 4th? Why, the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics, of course, at which Putin will be the guest of honor while US dignitaries weren’t even invited.

At the Olympics Putin and Xi will be signing a raft of major agreements, one of which may transform the already very strong relationship between China and Russia into an actual military alliance. The tripartite world order announced by Gen. Milley, in which the US, Russia and China figure as equals, will have lasted all of three months. With Russia and China acting as a unit, the SCO, which by now includes almost all of Eurasia, becomes more than just a geopolitical pole. In comparison, the US and the 29 dwarves of NATO do not quite add up to a geopolitical pole and the world once again becomes unipolar but with the polarity flipped.

And so we should not expect any military action to take place between February 4th and February 20th. Should any military mischief occur during the Olympics, which is traditionally a time of peace in the world, it is sure to be a Western provocation, since the Olympics are a traditional time of Western provocations (Georgia during the Beijing Olympics in 2008; the Ukraine during the Russian Olympics in Sochi in 2014). We can be sure that everyone is very much prepared for this provocation and that it will be dealt with very harshly.

The worst kind of provocation would be if NATO advisers actually succeed in goading the hapless and demoralized Ukrainian troops into invading the Donbass. If that happens, there will be two steps to that operation. The first will involve confusing the Ukrainians into walking into a trap. The second will be to threaten to destroy them using Russian long-range artillery from across the Russian border. When that happened previously, the Ukrainian government in Kiev was forced to sign the Minsk agreements that required the Ukrainian military to pull back and the Kiev government to grant autonomy to the Donbass by amending the Ukraine’s constitution.

But since the government in Kiev has shown no intention of fulfilling the terms of these agreements during the intervening years and instead has done its utmost to sabotage them, there is no reason to expect a new round of Minsk agreements to be signed. Instead, it will be the end of the road for Ukrainian statehood. Putin has promised exactly that. NATO advisers are likely to be frustrated in their efforts to cause the Ukrainians to attack: it is preferable for them to sit there being poked and prodded by their NATO handlers and nagged by US/EU officials and spies than to have their best and brightest obliterated by Russian artillery or to face a final round of national humiliation.

After February 20th, however, we should expect some new and interesting domestic distraction. It could have to do with Western financial house of cards/pyramid scheme finally pancaking, or it could be a fun new virus, or natural gas running out and causing a huge humanitarian emergency. Or it could be a combination of these: the virus can be blamed on China, the gas emergency on Russia, and the financial collapse on both. While everyone is distracted, an aircraft carrier or two might go missing, the Aegis Ashore installation in Poland might get totaled by freak swamp gas explosion and so on and so forth. But then nobody would take notice.

There will still be the major existential question nagging the US military/industrial complex: “Are Russia and China still afraid of us or are we just jerking each other off?” I think I know what answer Russia and China would offer: “Don’t worry about us. Just go on jerking each other off.”

Finally…

 

End of Part 4

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Comparison between American subways and Chinese subways

This article reproduces a very interesting discussion by an expat living in China named Jason. He, like MM here, is married to a Chinese woman and has a young child. He lives in a fifth-tier city in the hinterland, sort of like MM does, and he relates his experiences on you-tube for the world to see.

As a result, he has come under attack by both the BBC and CNN with their famous “gray filter” making his videos of bright and shiny China look gray and dingy.

In this series of videos, he compares the top American subway system in the top American city (New York City) with that of his fifth-tier “backwards” Chinese smaller city located in the middle of nowhere. It’s a great series. Reproduced in full and all credit to him, his wife and his child for providing it to us to view.

Video 1

He starts off going through the local Chinese subway stations, and the subway trains. It’s very interesting. Video 125MB

Video 2

Now, Jason finishes up in the Chinese subways and starts filming the New York Subway system. Amazing. video 86MB

The Complaints

I have noticed (since I posted this on LinkedIN) that many people defend the squalor in New York City. They say things like “China’s subways are new, while that of New York are old”. They argue that the comparison just “isn’t fair”.

The idea and the implication are simple. The argument is that you just shouldn’t compare new and old. You have to use the same metric.

Well, the metric is the same.

It actually is.

They are both subways, and they are maintained and operated within their own individual cultures. What the difference is between the different societies and the different governments.

Society

  • China = Social, family and community oriented.
  • United States = Individual, selfish, self-centered.

Government

  • China = merit based, and policed against corruption.
  • United States = Rampant corruption at all levels, oligarchy run.

Now, as far as the argument goes that the New York Subway system is old, it is a lame excuse. Yeah.

Well, so are the subways in Moscow.

They are old too.

But they are not in the same kind of disrepair as what we see inside of America. It has to do with funding maintenance, and a society of people who care about their surroundings.

Here’s the old subway system in Moscow.

Moscow subway.

And here is the old subway in Tehran, Iran…

Iranian subway.

And so, let’s also look at the old subway in North Korea.

North Korea’s marble-clad subway isn’t the image that might first spring to mind when thinking about a commute in North Korea. Taking the trip on the subway in Pyongyang comes cheap, and a ticket can cost just 5 Won ($0.004 USD).

North Korea.

Why is the United States infrastructure so decrepit?

Why?

You ask, why?

(MM turns and spits on the ground.)

Because the wealthy oligarchy has hoarded all the money for themselves, and left nothing for the rest of us. Did you know that New York City is the home for most of the billionaires in the United States.

Yeah.

Money to burn.

Not for you.

Billionaire goes into space.

What can be done?

The primary difference between the United States and China can boil down to two factors.

  • The Society
  • The Government

I do not advocate changing one’s society. If anything, I advise in strengthening it along traditional values and belief systems. Not changing it, and certainly not through massive programs of social reengineering.

That only leaves the way the government operates.

So, it is obvious that the United States form of government must change, the funding priorities must change, the control of society must change, and the financial arrangements must change as well as the type and extent of corruption.

… If the United States is to catch up with the rest of the world, that is galloping ahead full speed.

All must change…

…if America and its people want to catch up with the rest of the world. And live life in calm peace, traditions, and participate in meaningful roles within society.

If not…

…well, expect more of the same, only much worse.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my China Comparison index here…

CN-USA Comparisons

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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Russian commentaries on the collapsing United States (with some MM commentary as well) 3 of 3

This is part three of a three part series.

We pick up with the final comments on part two…

Russia is well-prepared for an all-out war with the west because they know that the American empire will not quit until they submit to Washington’s demands.  

Russia is ready, they learned a long-time ago when they were the former Soviet Union during World War II when more than 27 million Russian civilians and soldiers lost their lives fighting Nazi Germany within their borders.  

Washington is backing Ukraine’s aggressive behavior which will bring them closer to war with Russia.  

Although I believe cooler heads will prevail, anything at this point in time can happen with an out of control empire worried about losing their control over the planet.  

The US has its back against the wall, the question is what will they do knowing that Russia and China have the military capabilities including their new hypersonic missiles that can hit the US mainland at anytime.

The US-NATO forces would not prevail on a multi-front war with Russia and China, they should have learned a lesson in Afghanistan with the Taliban who had by far, a less-developed fighting force than Russia or China but had managed to defeat US-NATO forces after 20 years of conflict.  Washington and the Pentagon knows deep down that defeating Russia, China and the rest of their adversaries will be a difficult mission, but it seems that the psychopaths in Washington and Brussels live in a fantasy land and believe they can win this coming war.  

Let’s hope it don’t get that far because it would be disastrous for the entire world.

Pretty heavy stuff. It makes me think of food.

Good hearty and delicious foods, especially soups. Like a nice thick creamy soup. Maybe a cream of asparagus, or cream of broccoli. Don’t you know.

Thick cream of broccoli soup.

Ok. Let’s continue…

Dear America – You Are Delusional, and Failing at Everything You Undertake

Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Russia sanctions –  “All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly.”

“Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.”

This article from our archives was first published on RI in November 2017

Back in the days when I was still trying to do the corporate thing, I regularly found myself in a bit of a tight spot simply by failing to keep my mouth shut.

I seem to carry some sort of gene that makes me naturally irrepressible. I can keep my mouth shut for only so long before I have to blurt out what I really think, and in a corporate setting, where thinking isn’t really allowed, this causes no end of trouble. It didn’t matter that I often turned out to be right. It didn’t matter what I thought; it only mattered that I thought.

American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.

Of all the thoughts you aren’t allowed to think, perhaps the most offensive one is adequately expressed by a single short phrase: “That’s not gonna work.”

The end is near …
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Suppose there is a meeting to unveil a great new initiative, with PowerPoint presentations complete with fancy graphics, org charts, timelines, proposed budgets, yadda-yadda, and everything is going great until this curmudgeonly Russian opens his mouth and says “That’s not gonna work.”

And when it is patiently explained to him (doing one’s best to hide one’s extreme irritation) that it absolutely has to work because Senior Management would like it to, that furthermore it is his job to make it work and that failure is not an option, he opens his mouth again and says “That’s not gonna work either.” And then it’s time to avoid acting flustered while ignoring him and to think up some face-saving excuse to adjourn the meeting early and regroup.

I lasted for as long as I did in that world because once in a while I would instead say “Sure, that’ll work, let’s do it.” And then, sure enough, it did work, the company had a banner year or two, with lots of bonuses and atta-boy (and atta-girl) certificates handed out to those not at all responsible for any of it. Flushed with victory, they, in turn, would think up more harebrained schemes for me to rain on, and the cycle would repeat.

America seems to be blissfully unaware of how it comes across to the rest of the world
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It is probably one of the main saving graces of corporations that they do sometimes (mainly by mistake) allow some thought to leak through. The mistake in question is a staffing error in promoting those constitutionally incapable of keeping their mouths shut or shutting off their brains. Such errors create chinks in the monolithic phalanxes of corporate yes-men and yes-women.

Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.

The likelihood of such mistakes increases with the agony of defeat, which causes attrition among the ranks of qualified yes-sayers, creating holes that can only be plugged by promoting a few non-yes-sayers. However, this only seems to work in the smaller, hungrier corporations; the larger, better-fed ones seem to be able to avoid experiencing the agony of defeat for a very long time by moving the goal posts, outlawing any discussion of said defeat or other similar tactics. Eventually the entire organization goes over the cliff, but by then it is of no benefit to anyone to attempt to inform them of their folly.

It is much the same with governments, except here the situation is even worse. While the smaller, hungrier governments, and those blessed with a fresh institutional memory of extreme pain, do not have the luxury of lying to themselves, the larger political agglomerations—the USSR, the EU, the USA—have the ability to keep themselves completely immunized against the truth for historically significant periods of time.

The USSR clung to the fiction of great socialist progress even when it was clear to all that the cupboard was bare and there were rats gnawing through the rafters. The EU has been able to ignore the fact that its entire scheme is one of enriching Germany while impoverishing and depopulating eastern and southern Europe, neglecting the interests of the native populations throughout. And the amount of self-delusion that is still currently in effect in the USA makes it a rather large subject.

Regardless of how great the lies are and how forcefully they are defended, a moment always comes when the phalanx of truth-blocking yes-men and yes-women stops marching, turns and runs. This event results in a tremendous loss of face and confidence for all involved.

It is the crisis of confidence, more than anything else, that precipitates the going-off-a-cliff phenomenon that we could so readily observe in the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. I have a very strong hunch that similar cliff-diving exercises are coming up for the EU and the USA.

But for the time being I am just another disembodied voice on the internet, watching from the sidelines and periodically saying the unfashionable thing, which is: “This isn’t gonna work.” However, I’ve said this a number of times over the years, on the record and more or less forcefully, and I feel vindicated most of the time.

Internationally, for example:

Carving the Ukraine away from Russia, having it join the EU and NATO and building a NATO naval base in Crimea “wasn’t gonna work.” The Ukraine is a part of Russia, the Ukrainians are Russian, and the Ukrainian ethnic identity is a Bolshevik concoction. Look for a reversion to norm in a decade or two.

Destroying and partitioning Syria with the help of Wahhabi extremists and foreign mercenaries supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel while Russia, Iran, Turkey and China stand idly by “wasn’t gonna work”; and so it hasn’t.

Giving Afghanistan “freedom and democracy” and turning it into a stable pro-Western regime with the help of invading NATO troops “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. Western involvement in Afghanistan can go on, but the results it can achieve are limited to further enhancing the heroin trade.

Destroying the Russian economy using sanctions “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. The sanctions have helped Russia regroup internally and achieve a great deal of self-sufficiency in energy production and other forms of technology, in food and in numerous other sectors.

All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly. Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.

In the meantime, the world isn’t waiting for the US to shake itself out of its stupor.

The fulcrum of American influence in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia and the petrodollar. In turn, Saudi Arabia rests on three pillars: the Saudi monarchy, Wahhabi Islam and the petrodollar. As I write this, the next king, Mohammed bin Salman, is busy hacking away at all three: robbing, imprisoning and torturing his fellow-princes, working to replace the Wahhabi clerics with moderate ones and embracing the petro-yuan instead of the now very tired petrodollar.

Not that any of these three pillars were in good shape in any case: the defeat of ISIS in Syria was a defeat for the Saudi monarchy which supported it, for the Wahhabi clerics who inspired it and, consequently, for the petrodollar as well, because Saudi Arabia was until now its greatest defender.

The new guarantors of peace in the region are Russia, Iran and Turkey, with China watching carefully in the wings. American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.

And so here’s my latest prediction: Trump’s goal of “making America great” “isn’t gonna work” either.

The country is so far gone that just taking the first step—of allowing the truth of its condition to leak through the media filters—will undermine public confidence to such an extent that a subsequent cliff-dive will become unavoidable. It’s a nice slogan as slogans go, but Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.

Perhaps he will succeed in making America great… big piles of feces, but I wouldn’t expect much more than that.

I Found this…

American insanity.

The USA is Cracking Up Just Like the USSR Did – In Fact, They Are Related

“You see, ideology is a product of intellectuals, and intellectuals tend to be idiots, …  We are born equipped with MonkeyBrain 2.0 that can handle abstraction only too well but always fails when attempting to reconcile it with messy physical reality.”

“And so it would be a grave error to think that, just because communist ideology is idiotic, capitalist ideology is any less so.”

This article from our archives was first published on RI in November 2017

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It caused a lot of death and destruction, which I won’t go into because you can read all about it elsewhere. It also caused a great outpouring of new art, literature, architecture and culture in general, putting the previously somewhat stodgy Russia securely in the world’s avant-garde.

It also resulted in a tremendous surge of industrialization, rapidly transforming a previously mostly agrarian, though gradually industrializing nation into a global industrial powerhouse (at great human cost). But perhaps most importantly, the revolution destroyed all of the previously dominant institutions of privilege based on heredity, class and wealth and replaced them with an egalitarian social model centered on the working class.

And it demonstrated (as much through propaganda as by actual example) how this new model was more competitive: while the West wallowed in the Great Depression, the USSR surged ahead both economically and socially.

For all of its many failings, the USSR did serve as a shining city on the hill to the downtrodden millions around the world, including in the USA, fermenting rebellion, so that even there the one-percent ownership class eventually had to stop and think.

Reluctantly, they decided to stop trying to destroy organized labor movements, introduced state old-age pensions (misnamed “Social Security”) and declared a euphemistic “war on poverty.” And with that a “middle class” was created—so called because it was literally in the middle, having risen out of poverty but still safely walled off from the one-percent ownership class. But as we shall see this effect was temporary.

Eventually the USSR evaporated, as artificial, synthetic political entities often do. The reasons for this disappearing act are too numerous to mention, but one of the main ones was that the Soviet political elite turned itself into a much-hated, privileged caste, and then failed to reproduce, turning into a moribund gerontocracy.

When the old cadres finally started dying out, the new generation that came in included plenty of traitors who did their best to destroy the system and grab a piece for themselves. This effect was plain to see, but was it the root cause? When a complex system collapses, every part of it is touched to one extent or another, and it becomes impossible to say which one played the key role in precipitating the collapse.

With the USSR gone, the owners of the USA had no one to compete against and were no longer under any sort of pressure to maintain the illusion of an equitable and egalitarian society. Instead, they concentrated on two projects, one ideological, the other economic.

The ideological project involved wrecking what was left of the USSR to the greatest extent possible in order to paint a convincing picture of the horrible consequences of communism or socialism and to herd everyone toward wholeheartedly embracing unfettered capitalism. The economic project involved eviscerating the American middle class—a process that by now has largely run its course.

Since the creation of the middle class was a multigenerational project, so is its destruction. But the effects of this process on society are already plain to see: there is an overhang of still relatively well-off retirees while their children and grandchildren have greatly diminished economic and social prospects.

Meanwhile, the hastily erected scaffolding that created the appearance of egalitarianism has been knocked out. Organized labor is all but finished. Borders have been thrown open to foreign labor and cheap imports.

Entry into the middle class has been blocked through a variety of measures including the relentless dumbing down of public education, the equally relentless overpricing of higher education, the health care extortion scheme, the rationing of justice based on wealth and privilege, wealth confiscation using a succession of artificial real estate market bubbles and so on.

Overall, the former middle class is being whittled down to nothing the same way that the Chinese “coolies” were dealt with once the railroads had been built: don’t feed them much but give them plenty of opium (now being grown in Afghanistan under the watchful eye of Western troops). To sum it up: if you aren’t happy with the way things are going in the US, you have a choice.

You can of course blame Russia—for getting rid of the USSR. Or you can blame your owners—your one percent—who have owned you ever since the King of England appointed the Lords Proprietors.

Within Russia itself the commemoration of the October Revolution is no longer a public holiday. But there was a sort of commemoration held on the vast Palace Square in St. Petersburg, which I attended with my five-year-old son on my shoulders. It was his first time in a crowd of 35,000, and he was duly impressed. It was a light-and-sound extravaganza consisting of two shows which played in alternation.

On the vast semicircular facade of the General Staff building was broadcast a multimedia retrospective of the October Revolution that included the reading of historical documents (such as the abdication of Nicholas II) and works of poetry. It ended on an upbeat note—yes, many horrible events took place, but Russia is now reborn—with the General Staff’s façade painted in the Russian tricolor.

After the show, as we filtered out of the Palace Square and walked home along the Palace Embankment, my five-year-old son asked some good questions that he had formulated while watching the show. “Did a lot of people die?” (Yes.) “But Russia was then and is now?” (Yes, Russia has been around for a 1000 years and will probably be around for 1000 years more.) “Why do people have to die?” (Because otherwise we we would be full-up with useless old people and there wouldn’t be enough room for young people.) And then the obvious follow-up: “Why are we full-up with useless old people anyway?” (???) And finally: “Why do we bury dead people?” (Because they smell really bad.) “Ah…” A rather unsentimental youth, wouldn’t you say? But he was only one of the thousands of quite similar-minded ones who were in attendance that day, riding on their fathers’ shoulders or marching along. Welcome to Russia…One of the reasons why the USSR failed was because the idiocy of the ideology of Soviet communism became too painful to tolerate. In a sense, this was inevitable. You see, ideology is a product of intellectuals, and intellectuals tend to be idiots, making “intellectual idiocy” something of an oxymoron. We are born equipped with MonkeyBrain 2.0 that can handle abstraction only too well but always fails when attempting to reconcile it with messy physical reality. And so it would be a grave error to think that, just because communist ideology is idiotic, capitalist ideology is any less so.

By now most thinking people realize that capitalism has failed just has communism had. We can only hope that one day the US will do with its capitalist legacy what Russia has done with its communist one: turn it into a festive art installation that both children and adults can enjoy.

EPIC FAIL: Why Most US Weapons Systems Are Worse than Russia’s

Two reasons: complexity, and too much money

This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018

The F-35: Insanely expensive, its costs keep soaring – and it’s worse than Russian planes which cost 20 times less.
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Lately we have seen some good analysis on the limits and vulnerabilities of the American military in light of events in the former Ukraine and especially Russia’s demonstrated competence in Syria.

So we have the “what” of the issue, but how about the “why”?

As a U.S. Army veteran and a longtime resident of the Beltway—including four-and-a-half years living on Crystal Drive in Arlington, Virginia, which has probably the densest concentration of “defense” contractors anywhere in America—I think I understand what is fundamentally wrong with the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC.)

First and foremost, the MIC has long been incapable of producing durable, efficient, versatile weapons.

We don’t even have to look to the F-35 on this one.

(America’s latest fighter which has turned into a spectacular technical failure and massive  ($1.5 trillion!) expense  – see our super-popular article about how this plane stacks up against the Russian competition- edit)

Just consider the most basic item, the M-16.

The M-16 Assault Rifle

My field experience with this piece of junk is that it runs into problems in the presence of even a small amount of sand. When enough sand gets in to the chamber and mixes with the lube oil on the bolt assembly, the grit thus formed results in up to every second round misloading.

God forbid you should brush an oiled open breach against the side of your foxhole—you are out of commission.  In the absence of air or artillery support or sheer overwhelming numbers on your side, you are dead meat against anyone with a gun that functions in a sandy environment.  And why?  Because, as I was told in boot camp (whether it’s true or not), this thing is perfectly built to have zero fault tolerance.

Supposedly, just about every metal component in the M-16 is cast and/or machined to perfection rather than stamped.  Contrast this with Russian or Chinese weapons that are said to be built like can openers to spray lead under any conditions.  In other words, the M-16 is so sophisticated that it doesn’t work well.

It is now acknowledged that the M-16 with its 5.56mm rounds is insufficiently lethal beyond a couple of hundred meters, making it unsuited to long-distance firefights over open terrain (again those deserts, or perhaps shootouts between mountain ridges.)

The M-1 Abrams tank

Another great example – this can be a real dog.  The engine is a gas turbine, like with an aircraft, except that it is being driven around in deserts and even sandstorms, making it extremely finicky and high-maintenance.  (Would you fly your Boeing into a sandstorm?)  Of course, the Abrams was designed to fight in Germany where sand is not an issue.  But during the Iraq adventure, sand so tore up the turbine fans (or whatever) that over 1000 of these million-dollar “power packs” had to be removed and sent up for depot-level maintenance or refurbishment stateside.

Yes, that’s right—these things cannot even be fixed in the field.  All you can do is pull them out with a crane and ship them back to the civilians at enormous expense.  At the height of the Iraq adventure, around 2007, the maintenance backlog was so bad that even the national media got wind of it.

Of course, when you have the world’s reserve currency, you can afford all that and more—the entire world is paying for your wars.

But the waste and inefficiency are a fact.

The Basic Problem :  Excessive Complexity

I think the problem here is that American war planners and logisticians prefer originality, complexity, and/or expense-for-the-hell-of-it over versatility and ease of use and maintenance.  This is no surprise given America’s wealth and the longtime generous funding of its armed forces.  After all, every military reflects its own society.

Unfortunately for Uncle Sam, what he gets is equipment that may work very well in one environment but not another.

But so much for American equipment per se.  Let’s talk about Crystal Drive (a neighborhood in suburban Washington where many defense contractors have offices – edit.) —or more broadly, the MIC.

The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is failing on a massive scale

It is clear now that the MIC cannot build anything for less than 200 percent of its original planned budget (and that’s being extremely conservative.)  Nor can anything it cranks out nowadays meet performance or survivability expectations.  Besides the never-ending supersonic train wreck known as the F-35, we have other boondoggle failures such as the Littoral Combat Ship, which by all accounts is less capable and more vulnerable than the 20 to 30 year-old vessels it was supposed to replace.

Or, going back a few years, we see the Army’s “Commanche” helicopter, an intended replacement for the Apache, which blew through $6.9 billion—in 1983-2004 dollars, probably over $10 billion today—before the entire program was scrapped.  That’s right, over $10 billion for nothing—not one Commanche was ever delivered for permanent use to an Army operational unit!

Where did that money go, if they didn’t actually manufacture anything besides a few prototypes?  Did they spend $10 billion on PowerPoint presentations?

My brain cannot even wrap around this.  Can you imagine what Russia or China could do for $10 billion?

However, even that pales before the Army’s cancelled Future Combat Systems program, which burned through an estimated (no one knows exactly) $20 billion from 2003 to somewhere between 2012 and 2014 (depending on what termination milestone you go by), with almost nothing to show beyond a few prototypes, a lot of concept art, and a 29-pound toy robot made by iRobot of “Roomba” vacuum cleaner fame.  In fact, I can’t think of one big new U.S. weapons system that has succeeded in the last 25 years, other than perhaps the Stryker armored car (though some have argued that point, and I just don’t know enough about it.)

As pointed out by many other observers, part of the blame lies with our political system, where MIC corporations buy politicians and then receive favors in the form of contracts, whether or not the contracts make any sense. However, I think this is not the only problem, nor even necessarily the biggest.

Fundamentally what I think we have is systemic over-complexity resulting in nothing getting done, or done well anyway.

US intelligence agencies have the same problem

This is akin to the deep systemic crisis in Uncle Sam’s intelligence agencies, where from 9/11 to the Arab Spring to Crimea to the ISIS conquest of Mosul to Russia in Syria, the word is always “we didn’t expect…”  In this case, we have numerous agencies—some of them with overlapping functions—that are drowning in paperwork and garbage data (or too much data) and are almost totally useless.

As some readers will remember, it got so bad that in April 2014 the State Department released a photo collage aiming to prove that (among other things) a bearded Chechen battalion commander going by the name Hamza, who appeared in Russian TV footage of the 2008 Olympic War, was none other than the bearded, overweight Slaviansk militiaman going by the call-sign “Babai”—in other words, Russian special forces have invaded the Donbass.  (The New York Times ran with this and was then oh-so-vaguely and gently reproached by its own ombudsman.)

Shouldn’t this awful joke have been prevented by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is supposed to promote info-sharing among agencies and centrally vet all claims and conclusions—especially those being trumpeted on the State Department’s website or at its briefings?  Apparently not!

Bureaucratic bloat

On the other hand, what the U.S. lack-of-intelligence complex is very good at—besides hiring way too many buxom, flirty young things straight out of college and with no language skills or any experience at all (DIA and NGA, you know your ex-military managers like to beautify their offices)—is providing employment for tens of thousands of its own staff as well as tens of thousands of grotesquely-overpaid contractors, including those who build and run billion-dollar eavesdropping centers that have proven incapable of picking up anything useful, perhaps because when you try to listen to everything, you end up hearing nothing.

The lesson here is that the more offices and agencies, the more managers and political appointees who will seek to justify and expand their turf and budgets by shoveling out as much money on as many contracts as possible, as quickly as possible, in many cases even paying contractors to do little more than just sit around (sometimes at home) waiting for the next contract.  (I have seen this many times in Washington.)

Then you get so big that people simply trip over each other and the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

The US MIC worked great 50 years ago because less money and people were involved

So I think this is what’s going on not only in the intelligence apparatus, but in the MIC as a whole.  We have hundreds of thousands of staff and contractors as well as military officers assigned to liaise with them, all kinds of project managers and “six-sigma black belts” and other buzzwords, juggling millions of PowerPoints across the river from Washington and throughout the country, and they can’t field a helicopter after spending $10 billion on it.

Really?  How did this great country ever defeat the Japanese Empire?

Go to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington; you will see the most amazing things—e.g. generators designed to operate on the surface of the Moon, drawing electricity from the heat of plutonium decay—that were developed when there was no Crystal Drive, no Tysons Corner, etc.

Then go to the museum’s extension near Dulles airport and check out the SR-71 “Blackbird”, the fastest and highest-flying airplane ever built (this was about 50 years ago.)

How did they do it?

Although there were more men in uniform back then, the MIC itself (or should I say the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Homeland-Insecurity-Complex (MIIHIC)) – had but a fraction of today’s civilian workforce.  Luckily, most of those paper-pushing “systems integrators” and PowerPoint rangers did not exist.  Blueprints were drafted with pencil and paper.

Today, Uncle Sam can’t even build a heavy rocket engine, not to mention a good helmet or ejection seat for his F-35.

No hope for change going forward

So it seems that as a technical civilization we are degenerating.

Sure, there are constant advancements in microelectronics (a.k.a. integrated circuits) and the programs they allow, but in terms of heavy engineering—of which the MIIHIC and other government initiatives like the space program were at the forefront since WWII—it seems that the U.S. is tapped out.

And you know what?  Throwing more money at it is just going to make it worse.

The organizations with their budgets and their perfectly reasonable-sounding arguments for ever-greater budgets will grow, their workforces will grow, the contracting sector will grow, more shiny office buildings will go up, but the result will be an ever-increasingly-negative marginal return.

John McCain and all the other broken records in and out of the Pentagon will say we still don’t have enough funds to counter a pointless Russian invasion of parasitic, inconsequential Lithuania (currently headed by a longtime communist) or any other 1990s-era speculative wargame training scenario that somehow carried over into the public consciousness and morphed into the Greatest Threat to World Peace.

Of course, as long as the U.S. has the money to send gazillion-dollar armies and armadas against illiterate natives armed with sharp sticks and coconuts, this may not visibly threaten its hegemony.  Almost any problem or mistake can be papered over with money, for a long time anyway.

But eventually, even if the money spigot does not constrict, we will get to the point where the military really can’t be used as anything more than a façade or a gunboat road-show, hoping no one calls the bluff, because the stuff just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, or else is too vulnerable (witness the evacuation of the U.S. aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf after Uncle Sam found out that Russia has cruise missiles with a range of at least 1500km, or the ridiculous sail-around of China’s little islands which had the sense to infringe only very slightly and briefly on that country’s imaginary territorial waters), or the natives can devise their own countermeasures.

In fact, I would say we are at that point already.  Not to mention, the U.S. Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs are still so tapped-out after Iraq and Afghanistan that another major ground operation is unthinkable.  (At this point, Washington is more likely to launch nukes at somebody than risk another ground war.)

So you can anticipate a lot of hand-wringing and a lot more money being thrown into the breach.  That’s simply what the machine does; there is no chance to reform it, nor will the Hegemony dissipate willingly (although lately it’s done a good job of dissipating unwillingly.)

But all that money may as well be flushed down the can.

The threshold has been reached and it’s all downhill from here.

A Novice’s Guide to Drinking With Russians

If you find yourself in Russia, you will have to drink with Russians, one way or another. Follow this handy guide for advice on how to survive the experience

This article from our archives was first published on RI in October 2016

Contrary to popular belief, Russians are not alcoholics, and they do not drink just for the sake of doing so. However, Russians are happy to raise a glass to practically any occasion — a new job, a new car, Friday…but especially for a wedding.

As a rule, you have time to prepare for a bender, but sometimes trouble sneaks up on you. Say you get home from work on a Tuesday night having met a friend you had not seen for a long time in the subway. Isn’t this a significant event?

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Always be on the alert. There will likely be times when you will have to drink on a weekday evening or in the middle of the night. And definitely on Friday. And most likely on Wednesday: because everybody in Russia knows that Wednesday is a little Friday.

Russians drink other things besides vodka. But of course they do drink vodka. You should be aware that a Russian party is structured differently from parties in other parts of the world.

First, the alcohol is usually bought by the host. This solves two problems at once: at first the guests do not have to know that they will have to drink and then they do not have to regret that they were unable to switch to something else after wine ran out because they did not bring it. The table full of drinks is for all, so drink whatever you want. Just do not overdo it.

Brush up on your knowledge of all key events in world history, religion, politics, sports and arts, and make sure to form an opinion on all current issues, whether or not they seem important to you.

First off, when drinking, Russians are sure to start a conversation about lofty matters. If you do not take part in these discussions, you will run the risk of simply falling asleep at the table – or drinking more to avoid having to talk. Secondly, such knowledge is simply useful. Do not be afraid of expressing your opinion. All conversations and disagreements that take place while drinking will not be held against you — no one will remember them in the morning.

Around 11 p.m., there is unprecedented level of activity in Moscow supermarkets and convenience stores. In Russia, there is a law that says alcoholic beverages cannot be sold later than a certain time, although the time varies. In Moscow, it is 11 p.m., while in St. Petersburg, it is 10 p.m.

Russians like to make lengthy toasts. Of course, the toast depends on the circumstances, but the more solemn and important the event, the longer the toast. It is customary to take a glass in your hand at the beginning of the speech and not lower it until the speaker has finished. You should train yourself to keep your hand raised for a long time. After the toast, you must clink your glass against the glasses of all those present at the table. If you are a single girl, keep in mind that an old Russian superstition holds that the last person you clink glasses with should be an unmarried man – then you will marry soon.

In the West, it is perfectly fine to take a drink and put a half-full glass back on the table before you take another drink. In Russia, however, you have to drink everything in the glass at once, otherwise people will think that you disagree with a person who delivered the toast — for which he likely rehearsed for a week before the event.

The toast “Na zdorovye!” or “to your health,” which foreigners for some reason consider to be the most popular and appropriate toast to make in Russia, is not used by anyone. Ever.

To really prepare for drinking with Russians, watch the classic Soviet film “The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath.” This movie is always shown on New Year’s Eve, and everyone knows it. Even if you watch it before your visit, you are likely to have to watch it again. But besides being a classic Soviet movie everyone should know and the source of 95 percent of the references made by your Russian friends, it shows clearly how not to drink — and what can happen to you if your visit to a banya with your friends goes wrong.

To drink with Russians is an art and, like any other, you will not be able to master it at once. But you will never be bored drinking with Russians, and if you can endure the first few times, you may even grow to like this process. Probably you will. And, upon returning home, you will look differently at the wildest parties thrown by your friends, thinking to yourself “That’s nothing; in Russia, they call it ‘propustit po stakanchiku’ (to grab a drink).”

A video interlude…

Rufus bartender saves a girl from getting a roofie. video 11MB

China military are motivated, well trained and use state of the art equipment. video 7MB

The BRI is about helping the Chinese people domestically. video 5MB

The US Has Become Too Big, Too Diverse, and Too Corrupt to Survive

“Foreign malcontents can never be successfully integrated into a civilized society because they don’t even intend to try; they intend to conquer their host instead. … we have a much harder row to hoe than Old Europe because our own “invaders” are well entrenched and have been for decades, all the way up to the highest levels of government.”

This article from our archives was first published on RI in October 2018

We’re getting close to the end now. Can you feel it?  I do.

It’s in the news, on the streets, and in your face every day. You can’t tune it out anymore, even if you wanted to.

Where once there was civil debate in the court of public opinion, we now have censorshipmonopolyscreaminginsultsdemonization, and, finally, the use of force to silence the opposition. There is no turning back now. The political extremes are going to war, and you will be dragged into it even if you consider yourself apolitical.

There are great pivot points in history, and we’ve arrived at one. The United States, ruptured by a thousand grievance groups, torn by shadowy agencies drunk on a gross excess of powerrobbed blind by oligarchs and their treasonous henchmen and decimated by frivolous wars of choice, has finally come to a point where the end begins in earnest.

The center isn’t holding… indeed, finding a center is no longer even conceivable. We are the schizophrenic nation, bound by no societal norms, constrained by no religion, with no shared sense of history, myth, language, art, philosophy, music, or culture, rushing toward an uncertain future fueled by nothing more than easy money, hubris, and sheer momentum.

There comes a time when hard choices must be made…when it is no longer possible to remain aloof or amused, because the barbarians have arrived at the gate. Indeed, they are here now, and they often look a whole lot like deracinated, conflicted, yet bellicose fellow Americans, certain of only one thing, and that is that they possess “rights”, even though they could scarcely form an intelligible sentence explaining exactly what those rights secure or how they came into being.

But that isn’t necessary, from their point of view, you see. All they need is a “voice” and membership in an approved victim class to enrich themselves at someone else’s expense. If you are thinking to yourself right now that this does not describe you, then guess what? The joke’s on you, and you are going to be expected to pay the bill…that “someone else” is you.

In reality, though, who can blame the minions, when the elites have their hand in the till as well? In fact, they are even more hostile to reasoned discourse than Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, or Antifa. Witness the complete meltdown of the privileged classes when President Trump mildly suggested that perhaps our “intelligence community” isn’t to be trusted, which is after all a fairly sober assessment when one considers the track record of the CIAFBINSA, BATF, and the other assorted Stasi agencies.

Burning cop cars or bum-rushing the odd Trump supporter seems kind of tame in comparison to the weeping and gnashing of teeth when that hoary old MIC “intelligence” vampire was dragged screaming into the light. Yet Trump did not drive a stake into its heart, nor at this point likely can anyone…and that is exactly the point. We are now Thelma and Louise writ large.

We are on cruise control, happily speeding towards the cliff, and few seem to notice that our not so distant future involves bankruptcy, totalitarianism, and/or nuclear annihilation. Even though most of us couldn’t identify the band, we nonetheless surely live the lyrics of the Grass Roots: “Live for today, and don’t worry about tomorrow.”

The “Defense” Department, “Homeland” Security, big pharma, big oil, big education, civil rights groups, blacks, Indians, Jews, the Deep State, government workers, labor unions, Neocons, Populists, fundamentalist Christians, atheists, pro life and pro death advocates, environmentalists, lawyers, homosexuals, women, Millenials, Baby Boomers, blue collar/white collar, illegal aliens…the list goes on and on, but the point is that the conflicting agendas of these disparate groups have been irreconcilable for some time.

The difference today is that we are de facto at war with each other, and whether it is a war of words or of actual combat doesn’t matter at the moment. What matters is that we no longer communicate, and when that happens it is easy to demonize the other side. Violence is never far behind ignorance.

I am writing this from the bar at the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna, Austria. I have seen with my own eyes the inundation of Europe with an influx of hostile aliens bent on the destruction of Old Christendom, yet I have some hope for the eastern European countries because they have finally recognized the threat and are working to neutralize it.

Foreign malcontents can never be successfully integrated into a civilized society because they don’t even intend to try; they intend to conquer their host instead. Yet even though our own discontents are domestic for the most part, we have a much harder row to hoe than Old Europe because our own “invaders” are well entrenched and have been for decades, all the way up to the highest levels of government.

That there are signs Austria is finally waking up is a good thing, but it serves to illustrate the folly of expecting the hostile cultures within our own country to get along with each other without rupturing the republic. Indeed, that republic died long ago, and it has been replaced by a metastasizing mass of amorphous humanity called the American Empire, and it is at war with itself and consuming itself from within.

Long ago, we once knew that as American citizens each of us had a great responsibility. We were expected to work hard, play fair, do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and serve our country when called upon to do so. Today, we don’t speak of duty, except in so much as a slogan to promote war, but we certainly do speak of benefits for ourselves and our “group” of entitled peeps. We will fail because of our greed and avarice.

The United States of Empire has become quite simply too big, too diverse, and too “exceptional” to survive.

Video Interlude…

Rufus saves a lost little girl and reunites her with her parents. video 6MB

A beautiful Chinese girl. video 4MB

Western democracies are ONLY for rich people and corporations. They have and provide very little benefit to the work man, or the citizenry. That’s just the way things are. video 4MB

AMERICA: A Gigantic Clown Car Being Driven Into a Ditch

“This homework assignment should be given to the Democratic members of congress, since they are otherwise preoccupied only with hunting for Russian gremlins and discovering new sexual abnormalities to protect and defend.”

This article from our archives was first published on RI in September 2017

Poor old Karl Marx, tortured by boils and phantoms, was right about one thing: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Thus, I give you the Roman Empire and now the United States of America. Rome surrendered to time and entropy. Our method is to drive a gigantic clown car into a ditch.

Is anyone out there interested in redemption? I have an idea for the political party out of power, the Democrats, sunk in its special Okefenokee Swamp of identity politics and Russia paranoia: make an effort to legislate the Citizens United calamity out of existence. Who knows, a handful of Republicans may be shamed into going along with it. For those of you who have been mentally vacationing on Mars with Elon Musk, Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision — Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 310 (2010) — which determined that corporations had the right, as hypothetical “persons,” to give as much money as they liked to political candidates.

We’ve made important contributions to world culture…
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This “right” devolved from the First Amendment of the constitution, the 5-4 majority opinion said — giving money to political candidates and causes amounts to “freedom of speech.” The Citizens United ruling opened the door for unlimited election spending by corporations and enormous mischief in our national life. Then-President Obama — a constitutional law professor before his career in politics — complained bitterly about the opinion days later in his State of the Union address, saying that the court had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”

And for the next seven years he did absolutely nothing about it, nor did the Democratic Party majority in congress. Rather, they vacuumed in as much corporate campaign money as possible from every hokey political action committee (PAC) from sea to shining sea, especially in the 2016 presidential election starring Hillary “It’s My Turn” Clinton. It turned out to not be her turn in large part because the voters noticed the stench of corruption wafting off this toxic flow of corporate money, which Hillary was using to vastly outspend her billionaire opponent, troll that he was.

It’s been a heck of a ride, and it’s coming to an end …
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Of course, corporations have not always been what they are deemed to be today. They evolved with the increasingly complex activities of industrial economies. Along the way — in Great Britain first, actually — they were deemed to exist as the equivalent of legal persons, to establish that the liabilities of the company were separate and distinct from those of its owners. In the USA, forming a corporation usually required an act of legislation until the late 19th century. After that, they merely had to register with the states. Then congress had to sort out the additional problems of giant “trusts” and holding companies (hence, anti-trust laws, now generally ignored).

In short, the definition of what a corporation is and what it has a right to do is in a pretty constant state of change as economies evolve. And insofar as the current economy is sinking like the USS Titanic — and our republic as a mode of governance with it — surely the time has come to redefine in legislation the role and existential nature of a corporation in this polity. This homework assignment should be given to the Democratic members of congress, since they are otherwise preoccupied only with hunting for Russian gremlins and discovering new sexual abnormalities to protect and defend.

The crux of the argument is that corporations cannot be said to be entirely and altogether the equivalent of persons for all legal purposes. In law, corporations have duties, obligations, and responsibilities to their shareholders first, and only after that to the public interest or the common good, and only then by pretty strict legal prescription. It may be assumed that the interests of corporations and their shareholders are in opposition to, and in conflict with, the public interest. And insofar as elections are fundamentally matters of the public interest, corporations must be prohibited from efforts to influence the outcome of elections.

That’s your assignment Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership. Get serious. Show a little initiative. Do something useful. Draw up some legislation.

Get behind something real that might make a difference in this decrepitating country.

Or get out of the way and let a new party do the job.

Videos…

Rufus rescues a girl who jumps overboard. video 6MB

Rufus rescues a man carried away by a flowing stream. video 11mb

The US Outspends Russia 10X On Military, But They Are Equals. Why?

Another brilliant essay from Orlov in which he addresses the incredible bumbling incompetence of the US in contrast to Russia’s intelligent competence – Orlov is spot on.

This article from our archives was first published on RI in May 2018

“Russia is ready to respond to any provocation, but the last thing the Russians want is another war. And that, if you like good news, is the best news you are going to hear.”

A whiff of World War III hangs in the air. In the US, Cold War 2.0 is on, and the anti-Russian rhetoric emanating from the Clinton campaign, echoed by the mass media, hearkens back to McCarthyism and the red scare. In response, many people are starting to think that Armageddon might be nigh—an all-out nuclear exchange, followed by nuclear winter and human extinction. It seems that many people in the US like to think that way. Goodness gracious!

The curtain is falling on a country in serious trouble


But, you know, this is hardly unreasonable of them. The US is spiraling down into financial, economic and political collapse, losing its standing in the world and turning into a continent-sized ghetto full of drug abuse, violence and decaying infrastructure, its population vice-ridden, poisoned with genetically modified food, morbidly obese, exploited by predatory police departments and city halls, plus a wide assortment of rackets, from medicine to education to real estate… That we know.

We also know how painful it is to realize that the US is damaged beyond repair, or to acquiesce to the fact that most of the damage is self-inflicted: the endless, useless wars, the limitless corruption of money politics, the toxic culture and gender wars, and the imperial hubris and willful ignorance that underlies it all… This level of disconnect between the expected and the observed certainly hurts, but the pain can be avoided, for a time, through mass delusion.

This sort of downward spiral does not automatically spell “Apocalypse,” but the specifics of the state cult of the US—an old-time religiosity overlaid with the secular religion of progress—are such that there can be no other options: either we are on our way up to build colonies on Mars, or we perish in a ball of flame. Since the humiliation of having to ask the Russians for permission to fly the Soyuz to the International Space Station makes the prospect of American space colonies seem dubious, it’s Plan B: balls of flame here we come!

And so, most of the recent American warmongering toward Russia can be explained by the desire to find anyone but oneself to blame for one’s unfolding demise. This is a well-understood psychological move—projecting the shadow—where one takes everything one hates but can’t admit to about oneself and projects it onto another. On a subconscious level (and, in the case of some very stupid people, even a conscious one) the Americans would like to nuke Russia until it glows, but can’t do so because Russia would nuke them right back. But the Americans can project that same desire onto Russia, and since they have to believe that they are good while Russia is evil, this makes the Armageddon scenario appear much more likely.

But this way of thinking involves a break with reality. There is exactly one nation in the world that nukes other countries, and that would be the United States. It gratuitously nuked Japan, which was ready to surrender anyway, just because it could. It prepared to nuke Russia at the start of the Cold War, but was prevented from doing so by a lack of a sufficiently large number of nuclear bombs at the time. And it attempted to render Russia defenseless against nuclear attack, abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, but has been prevented from doing so by Russia’s new weapons. These include, among others, long-range supersonic cruise missiles (Kalibr), and suborbital intercontinental missiles carrying multiple nuclear payloads capable of evasive maneuvers as they approach their targets (Sarmat). All of these new weapons are impossible to intercept using any conceivable defensive technology. At the same time, Russia has also developed its own defensive capabilities, and its latest S-500 system will effectively seal off Russia’s airspace, being able to intercept targets both close to the ground and in low Earth orbit.

In the meantime, the US has squandered a fantastic sum of money fattening up its notoriously corrupt defense establishment with various versions of “Star Wars,” but none of that money has been particularly well spent. The two installations in Europe of Aegis Ashore (completed in Romania, planned in Poland) won’t help against Kalibr missiles launched from submarines or small ships in the Pacific or the Atlantic, close to US shores, or against intercontinental missiles that can fly around them. The THAAD installation currently going into South Korea (which the locals are currently protesting by shaving their heads) won’t change the picture either.

There is exactly one nuclear aggressor nation on the planet, and it isn’t Russia. But this shouldn’t matter. In spite of American efforts to undermine it, the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) remains in effect. The probability of a nuclear exchange is determined not by anyone’s policy but by the likelihood of it happening by accident. Since there is no winning strategy in a nuclear war, nobody has any reason to try to start one. Under no circumstances is the US ever going to be able to dictate its terms to Russia by threatening it with nuclear annihilation.

If a nuclear war is not in the cards, how about a conventional one? The US has been sabre-rattling by stationing troops and holding drills in the Baltics, right on Russia’s western border, installing ABM systems in Romania, Poland and South Korea, supporting anti-Russian Ukrainian Nazis, etc. All of this seems quite provocative; can it result in a war?

And what would that war look like?

Here, we have to look at how Russia has responded to previous provocations. These are all the facts that we know, and can use to predict what will happen, as opposed to purely fictional, conjectural statements unrelated to known facts.

When the US or its proxies attack an enclave of Russian citizens outside of Russia’s borders, here are the types of responses that we have been able to observe so far:

1.

The example of Georgia. During the Summer Olympics in Beijing (a traditional time of peace), the Georgian military, armed and trained by the US and Israel, invaded South Ossetia. This region was part of Georgia in name only, being mostly inhabited by Russian speakers and passport-holders. Georgian troops started shelling its capital, Tskhinval, killing some Russian peacekeeping troops stationed in the region and causing civilian casualties. In response, Russian troops rolled into Georgia, within hours completely eliminating Georgia’s war-making capability. They announced that South Ossetia was de facto no longer part of Georgia, throwing in Abkhazia (another disputed Russian enclave) for good measure, and withdrew. Georgia’s warmongering president Saakashvili was pronounced a “political corpse” and left to molder in place. Eventually he was forced to flee Georgia, where he has been declared a fugitive from justice. The US State Department recently gave him a new job, as Governor of Odessa in the Ukraine. Recently, Russian-Georgian relations have been on the mend.

2.

The example of Crimea. During the Winter Olympics in Sochi, in Russia (a traditional time of peace) there occurred an illegal, violent overthrow of the elected, constitutional government of the Ukraine, followed by the installation of a US-picked puppet administration. In response, the overwhelmingly Russian population of the autonomous region of Crimea held a referendum. Some 95% of them voted to secede from the Ukraine and to once again become part of Russia, which they had been for centuries and until very recently. The Russians then used their troops already stationed in the region under an international agreement to make sure that the results of the referendum were duly enacted. Not a single shot was fired during this perfectly peaceful exercise in direct democracy.

3.

The example of Crimea again. During the Summer Olympics in Rio (a traditional time of peace) a number of Ukrainian operatives stormed the Crimean border and were swiftly apprehended by Russia’s Federal Security Service, together with a cache of weapons and explosives. A number of them were killed in the process, along with two Russians. The survivors immediately confessed to planning to organize terrorist attacks at the ferry terminal that links Crimea with the Russian mainland and a railway station. The ringleader of the group confessed to being promised the princely sum of $140 for carrying out these attacks. All of them are very much looking forward to a warm, dry bunk and three square meals of day, care of the Russian government, which must seem like a slice of heaven compared to the violence, chaos, destitution and desolation that characterizes life in present-day Ukraine. In response, the government in Kiev protested against “Russian provocation,” and put its troops on alert to prepare against “Russian invasion.” Perhaps the next shipment of US aid to the Ukraine should include a supply of chlorpromazine or some other high-potency antipsychotic medication.

Note the constant refrain of “during the Olympics.” This is not a coincidence but is indicative of a certain American modus operandi. Yes, waging war during a traditional time of peace is both cynical and stupid. But the American motto seems to be “If we try something repeatedly and it still doesn’t work, then we just aren’t trying hard enough.” In the minds of those who plan these events, the reason they never work right can’t possibly have anything to do with it being stupid. This is known as “Level III Stupid”: stupidity so profound that it is unable to comprehend its own stupidity.

4.

The example of Donbass. After the events described in point 2 above, this populous, industrialized region, which was part of Russia until well into the 20th century and is linguistically and culturally Russian, went into political turmoil, because most of the locals wanted nothing to do with the government that had been installed in Kiev, which they saw as illegitimate. The Kiev government proceeded to make things worse, first by enacting laws infringing on the rights of Russian-speakers, then by actually attacking the region with the army, which they continue to do to this day, with three unsuccessful invasions and continuous shelling of both residential and industrial areas, in the course of which over ten thousand civilians have been murdered and many more wounded. In response, Russia assisted with establishing a local resistance movement supported by a capable military contingent formed of local volunteers. This was done by Russian volunteers, acting in an unofficial capacity, and by Russian private citizens donating money to the cause. In spite of Western hysteria over “Russian invasion” and “Russian aggression,” no evidence of it exists. Instead, the Russian government has done just three things: it refused to interfere with the work of its citizens coming to the aid of Donbass; it pursued a diplomatic strategy for resolving the conflict; and it has provided numerous convoys of humanitarian aid to the residents of Donbass. Russia’s diplomatic initiative resulted in two international agreements—Minsk I and Minsk II—which compelled both Kiev and Donbass to pursue a strategy of political resolution of the conflict through cessation of hostilities and the granting to Donbass of full autonomy. Kiev has steadfastly refused to fulfill its obligations under these agreements. The conflict is now frozen, but continuing to bleed because of Ukrainian shelling, waiting for the Ukrainian puppet government to collapse.

To complete the picture, let us include Russia’s recent military action in Syria, where it came to the defense of the embattled Syrian government and quickly demolished a large part of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Islamic Caliphate, along with various other terrorist organizations active in the region. The rationale for this action is that Russia saw a foreign-funded terrorist nest in Syria as a direct threat to Russia’s security. Two other notable facts here are that Russia acted in accordance with international law, having been invited by Syria’s legitimate, internationally recognized government and that the military action was scaled back as soon as it seemed possible for all of the legitimate (non-terrorist) parties to the conflict to return to the negotiating table. These three elements—using military force as a reactive security measure, scrupulous adherence to international law, and seeing military action as being in the service of diplomacy—are very important to understanding Russia’s methods and ambitions.

Turning now to US military/diplomatic adventures, we see a situation that is quite different. US military spending is responsible for over half of all federal discretionary spending, dwarfing most other vitally important sectors, such as infrastructure, public medicine and public education. It serves several objectives. Most importantly, it is a public jobs program: a way of employing people who are not employable in any actually productive capacity due to lack of intelligence, education and training. Second, it is a way for politicians and defense contractors to synergistically enrich themselves and each other at the public’s expense. Third, it is an advertising program for weapons sales, the US being the top purveyor of lethal technology in the world. Last of all, it is a way of projecting force around the world, bombing into submission any country that dares oppose Washington’s global hegemonic ambitions, often in total disregard of international law. Nowhere on this list is the actual goal of defending the US.

None of these justifications works vis-à-vis Russia. In dollar terms, the US outspends Russia on defense hands down. However, viewed in terms of purchasing parity, Russia manages to buy as much as ten times more defensive capability per unit national wealth than the US, largely negating this advantage. Also, what the US gets for its money is inferior: the Russian military gets the weapons it wants; the US military gets what the corrupt political establishment and their accomplices in the military-industrial complex want in order to enrich themselves. In terms of being an advertising campaign for weapons sales, watching Russian weaponry in action in Syria, effectively wiping out terrorists in short order through a relentless bombing campaign using scant resources, then seeing US weaponry used by the Saudis in Yemen, with much support and advice from the US, being continuously defeated by lightly armed insurgents, is unlikely to generate too many additional sales leads. Lastly, the project of maintaining US global hegemony seems to be on the rocks as well. Russia and China are now in a de facto military union. Russia’s superior weaponry, coupled with China’s almost infinitely huge infantry, make it an undefeatable combination. Russia now has a permanent air base in Syria, has made a deal with Iran to use Iranian military bases, and is in the process of prying Turkey away from NATO. As the US military, with its numerous useless bases around the world and piles of useless gadgets, turns into an international embarrassment, it remains, for the time being, a public jobs program for employing incompetents, and a rich source of graft.

In all, it is important to understand how actually circumscribed American military capabilities are. The US is very good at attacking vastly inferior adversaries. The action against Nazi Germany only succeeded because it was by then effectively defeated by the Red Army—all except for the final mop-up, which is when the US came out of its timid isolation and joined the fray. Even North Korea and Vietnam proved too tough for it, and even there its poor performance would have been much poorer were it not for the draft, which had the effect of adding non-incompetents to the ranks, but produced the unpleasant side-effect of enlisted men shooting their incompetent officers—a much underreported chapter of American military history. And now, with the addition of LGBTQ people to the ranks, the US military is on its way to becoming an international laughing stock. Previously, terms like “faggot” and “pussy” were in widespread use in the US military’s basic training. Drill sergeants used such terminology to exhort the “numb-nuts” placed in their charge to start acting like men. I wonder what words drill sergeants use now that they’ve been tasked with training those they previously referred to as “faggots” and “pussies”? The comedic potential of this nuance isn’t lost on Russia’s military men.

This comedy can continue as long as the US military continues to shy away from attacking any serious adversary, because if it did, comedy would turn to tragedy rather quickly.

  • If, for instance, US forces tried to attack Russian territory by lobbing missiles across the border, they would be neutralized in instantaneous retaliation by Russia’s vastly superior artillery.
  • If Americans or their proxies provoked Russians living outside of Russia (and there are millions of them) to the point of open rebellion, Russian volunteers, acting in an unofficial capacity and using private funds, would quickly train, outfit and arm them, creating a popular insurgency that would continue for years, if necessary, until Americans and their proxies capitulate.
  • If the Americans do the ultimately foolish thing and invade Russian territory, they would be kettled and annihilated, as repeatedly happened to the Ukrainian forces in Donbass.
  • Any attempt to attack Russia using the US aircraft carrier fleet would result in its instantaneous sinking using any of several weapons: ballistic anti-ship missiles, supercavitating torpedos or supersonic cruise missiles.
  • Strategic bombers, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles would be eliminated by Russia’s advanced new air defense systems.

So much for attack; but what about defense? Well it turns out that there is an entire separate dimension to engaging Russia militarily. You see, Russia lost a huge number of civilian lives while fighting off Nazi Germany. Many people, including old people, women and children, died of starvation and disease, or from German shelling, or from the abuse they suffered at the hands of German soldiers. On the other hand, Soviet military casualties were on par with those of the Germans. This incredible calamity befell Russia because it had been invaded, and it has conditioned Russian military thinking ever since. The next large-scale war, if there ever is one, will be fought on enemy territory. Thus, if the US attacks Russia, Russia will counterattack the US mainland. Keeping in mind that the US hasn’t fought a war on its own territory in over 150 years, this would come as quite a shock.

Of course, this would be done in ways that are consistent with Russian military thinking. Most importantly, the attack must be such that the possibility of triggering a nuclear exchange remains minimized. Second, the use of force would be kept to the minimum required to secure a cessation of hostilities and a return to the negotiating table on terms favorable to Russia. Third, every effort would be made to make good use of internal popular revolts to create long-lasting insurgencies, letting volunteers provide the necessary arms and training. Lastly, winning the peace is just as important as winning the war, and every effort would be made to inform the American public that what they are experiencing is just retribution for certain illegal acts. From a diplomatic perspective, it would be much more tidy to treat the problem of war criminals running the US as an internal, American political problem, to be solved by Americans themselves, with an absolute minimum of outside help. This would best be accomplished through a bit of friendly, neighborly intelligence-sharing, letting all interested parties within the US know who exactly should be held responsible for these war crimes, what they and their family members look like, and where they live.

The question then is, What is the absolute minimum of military action—what I am calling “a thousand balls of fire,” named after George Bush Senior’s “a thousand points of light”—to restore peace on terms favorable to Russia? It seems to me that 1000 “balls of fire” is just about the right number. These would be smallish explosions—enough to demolish a building or an industrial installation, with almost no casualties. This last point is extremely important, because the goal is to destroy the system without actually directly hurting any of the people. It wouldn’t be anyone else’s fault if people in the US suffer because they refuse to do as their own FEMA asks them to do: stockpile a month’s worth of food and water and put together an emergency evacuation plan. In addition, given the direction in which the US is heading, getting a second passport, expatriating your savings, and getting some firearms training just in case you end up sticking around are all good ideas.

The reason it is very important for this military action to not kill anyone is this: there are some three million Russians currently residing in the US, and killing any of them is definitely not on strategy. There is an even larger number of people from populous countries friendly to Russia, such as China and India, who should also remain unharmed. Thus, a strategy that would result in massive loss of life would simply not be acceptable. A much better scenario would involve producing a crisis that would quickly convince the Russians living in the US (along with all the other foreign nationals and first-generation immigrants, and quite a few of the second-generation immigrants too) that the US is no longer a good place to live. Then all of these people could be repatriated—a process that would no doubt take a few years. Currently, Russia is the number three destination worldwide for people looking for a better place to live, after the US and Germany. Germany is now on the verge of open revolt against Angela Merkel’s insane pro-immigration policies. The US is not far behind, and won’t remain an attractive destination for much longer. And that leaves Russia as the number one go-to place on the whole planet. That’s a lot of pressure, even for a country that is 11 time zones wide and has plenty of everything except tropical fruit and people.

We must also keep in mind that Israel—which is, let’s face it, a US protectorate temporarily parked on Palestinian land—wouldn’t last long without massive US support. Fully a third of Israeli population happens to be Russian. The moment Project Israel starts looking defunct, most of these Russian Jews, clever people that they are, will no doubt decide to stage an exodus and go right back to Russia, as is their right. This will create quite a headache for Russia’s Federal Migration Service, because it will have to sift through them all, letting in all the normal Russian Jews while keeping out the Zionist zealots, the war criminals and the ultra-religious nutcases. This will also take considerable time.

But actions that risk major loss of life also turn out to be entirely unnecessary, because an effective alternative strategy is available: destroy key pieces of government and corporate infrastructure, then fold your arms and wait for the other side to crawl back to the negotiating table waving a white rag. You see, there are just a few magic ingredients that allow the US to continue to exist as a stable, developed country capable of projecting military force overseas. They are: the electric grid; the financial system; the interstate highway system; rail and ocean freight; the airlines; and oil and gas pipelines. Disable all of the above, and it’s pretty much game over. How many “balls of flame” would that take? Probably well under a thousand.

Disabling the electric grid is almost ridiculously easy, because the system is very highly integrated and interdependent, consisting of just three sub-grids, called “interconnects”: western, eastern and Texas. The most vulnerable parts of the system are the Large Power Transformers (LPTs) which step up voltages to millions of volts for transmission, and step them down again for distribution. These units are big as houses, custom-built, cost millions of dollars and a few years to replace, and are mostly manufactured outside the US. Also, along with the rest of the infrastructure in the US, most of them are quite old and prone to failure. There are several thousand of these key pieces of equipment, but because the electric grid in the US is working at close to capacity, with several critical choke points, it would be completely disabled if even a handful of the particularly strategic LPTs were destroyed. In the US, any extended power outage in any of the larger urban centers automatically triggers large-scale looting and mayhem. Some estimate that just a two week long outage would push the situation to a point of no return, where the damage would become too extensive to ever be repaired.

Disabling the financial system is likewise relatively trivial. There are just a few choke points, including the Federal Reserve, a few major banks, debit and credit card company data centers, etc. They can be disabled using a variety of methods, such as a cruise missile strike, a cyberattack, electric supply disruption or even civil unrest. It bears noting that the financial system in the US is rigged to blow even without foreign intervention. The combination of runaway debt, a gigantic bond bubble, the Federal Reserve trapped into ever-lower interest rates, underfunded pensions and other obligations, hugely overpriced real estate and a ridiculously frothy stock market will eventually detonate it from the inside.

A few more surgical strikes can take out the oil and gas pipelines, import terminals, highway bridges and tunnels, railroads and airlines. A few months without access to money and financial services, electricity, gasoline, diesel, natural gas, air transport or imported spare parts needed to repair the damage should be enough to force the US to capitulate. If it makes any efforts to restore any of these services, an additional strike or two would quickly negate them.

The number of “balls of flame” can be optimized by taking advantage of destructive synergies: a GPS jammer deployed near the site of an attack can prevent responders from navigating to it; taking out a supply depot together with the facility it serves, coupled with transportation system disruptions, can delay repairs by many months; a simple bomb threat can immobilize a transportation hub, making it a sitting duck instead of a large number of moving targets; etc.

You may think that executing such a fine-tuned attack would require a great deal of intelligence, which would be difficult to gather, but this is not the case. First, a great deal of tactically useful information is constantly being leaked by insiders, who often consider themselves “patriots.” Second, what hasn’t been leaked can be hacked, because of the pitiable state of cybersecurity in the US. Remember, Russia is where anti-virus software is made—and a few of the viruses too. The National Security Agency was recently hacked, and its crown jewels stolen; if it can be hacked, what about all those whose security it supposedly protects?

You might also think that the US, if attacked in this manner, could effectively retaliate in kind, but this scenario is rather difficult to imagine. Many Russians don’t find English too difficult, are generally familiar with the US through exposure to US media, and the specialists among them, especially those who have studied or taught at universities in the US, can navigate their field of expertise in the US almost as easily as in Russia. Most Americans, on the other hand, can barely find Russia on a map, can’t get past the Cyrillic alphabet and find Russian utterly incomprehensible.

Also consider that Russia’s defense establishment is mainly focused on… defense. Offending people in foreign lands is not generally seen as strategically important. “A hundred friends is better than a hundred rubles” is a popular saying. And so Russia manages to be friends with India and Pakistan at the same time, and with China and Vietnam. In the Middle East, it maintains cordial relations with Turkey, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Iran, also all at the same time. Russian diplomats are required to keep channels of communication open with friends and adversaries alike, at all times. Yes, being inexplicably adversarial toward Russia can be excruciatingly painful, but you can make it stop any time! All it takes is a phone call.

Add to this the fact that the vicissitudes of Russian history have conditioned Russia’s population to expect the worst, and simply deal with it. “They can’t kill us all!” is another favorite saying. If Americans manage to make them suffer, the Russian people would no doubt find great solace in the fact they are making the Americans suffer even worse, and many among them would think that this achievement, in itself, is already a victory. Nor will they remain without help; it is no accident that Russia’s Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, previously ran the Emergencies Ministry, and his performance at his job there won him much adulation and praise. In short, if attacked, the Russians will simply take their lumps—as they always have—and then go on to conquer and win, as they always have.

It doesn’t help matters that most of what little Americans have been told about Russia by their political leaders and mass media is almost entirely wrong. They keep hearing about Putin and the “Russian bear,” and so they are probably imagining Russia to be a vast wasteland where Vladimir Putin keeps company with a chess-playing, internet server-hacking, nuclear physicist, rocket scientist, Ebola vaccine-inventing, polyglot, polymath bear. Bears are wonderful, Russians love bears, but let’s not overstate things. Yes, Russian bears can ride bicycles and are sometimes even good with children, but they are still just wild animals and/or pets (many Russians can’t draw that distinction). And so when the Americans growl about the “Russian bear,” the Russians wonder, Which one?

In short, Russia is to most Americans a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and there simply isn’t a large enough pool of intelligent Americans with good knowledge of Russia to draw upon, whereas to many Russians the US is an open book. As far as the actual American “intelligence” and “security” services, they are all bloated bureaucratic boondoggles mired in political opportunism and groupthink that excel at just two things: unquestioningly following idiotic procedures, and creatively fitting the facts to the politics du jour. “Proving” that Iraq has “weapons of mass destruction”—no problem! Telling Islamist terrorists apart from elderly midwestern grandmothers at an airport security checkpoint—no can do!

Russia will not resort to military measures against the US unless sorely provoked. Time and patience are on Russia’s side. With each passing year, the US grows weaker and loses friends and allies, while Russia grows stronger and gains friends and allies. The US, with its political dysfunction, runaway debt, decaying infrastructure and spreading civil unrest, is a dead nation walking. It will take time for each of the United States to neatly demolish themselves into their own footprints, like those three New York skyscrapers did on 9/11 (WTC #1, #2 and #7) but Russia is very patient. Russia is ready to respond to any provocation, but the last thing the Russians want is another war. And that, if you like good news, is the best news you are going to hear. But if you still think that there is going to be a war with Russia, don’t think “Armageddon”; think “a thousand balls of flame,” and then—crickets!

Passerby  on December 29, 2021  ·  at 4:42 pm EST/EDT 

The German army has it’s first trans officer, Anastasia Biefang, who is on record as saying “I love being taken in dark rooms”.

In 2014 the Belgian army discarded its Leopard tanks, as a cost saving measure.

I interpret this as: the West has been busy creating an army that corresponds to a political vision, not to military requirements.

And when I look at the Russian proposals, I don’t get an impression of an ultimatum. Rather, the impression is one of “checkmate”: the West can move any piece it wants, they are all losing moves.

Video…

A service-to-self sentience shows his real self and behaviors. video 2MB

China has developed mobile laser weapon based on Dongfeng EQ2050 4×4 tactical vehicle


According to a picture published on the Twitter account of @sugar_wsnbn on December 28, 2021, the Defense Industry of China has developed a mobile laser weapon system based on a modified Dongfeng EQ2050 nicknamed Mengshi, 4×4 light tactical vehicle.


Citing a U.S. Government report, China’s energy laser weapons program has a breadth and intensity that should greatly concern American and Allied defense planners. Some Chinese military experts expect that energy weapons will become more prevalent in 10 to 20 years and will dominate the battlefield in 30 years.

At the edition 2014 of Zhuhai Airshow, the China Academy of Engineering Physics displayed its “Low-Level Guard-1,” a 10-kilowatt electric-powered fiber optic laser. This fixed device consisted of a power module and an equipment module housing the laser and optical guidance/tracking systems. This apparently became the basis for the 30 kilowatts Low-Altitude Laser Defending System (LASS) first displayed by the Poly arms marketing company at a September 2016 military exhibit in South Africa. It claims to have a 4-kilometer range at the 30-kilowatt power level and is useful mainly for defeating swarms of small plastic drones.

According to our first analysis, the original crew compartment of the Dongfeng EQ2050 4×4 light tactical vehicle has been modified with a two doors crew cabin at the front and a fully enclosed compartment located in the middle of the chassis. The laser weapon system is integrated on a turret and can be lowered inside the vehicle in road position.

According to a Chinese source, the whole system is able to track and detect drones at a maximum range of 3 km and the laser weapon will be used to destroy UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) after detection.

The Mengshi or Dongfeng EQ2050 is a Chinese-made light tactical vehicle based on the design of the American Humvee, manufactured for government use by the Dongfeng Motor Group. In 2004 a total of 57 EQ2050 vehicles were sent to the PLA for trials and evaluation. The vehicle is now in service with Bangladesh, Belarus, Central African Republic, China, Gabon, Laos, Mali, Tajikistan,, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

The Dongfeng EQ2050 is powered Cummins EQB150-20 turbocharged diesel developing 150 hp coupled to a 5-speed gearbox. The vehicle can run at a maximum road speed of 120 km with a cruising range of over 500 km.

END OF PART 3

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When Hollywood still knew how to make movies; It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955)

Enter Ray Harryhausen, who I discovered myself by accident. In many  ways, he changed my life. Harryhausen has told us, time and again, the  story of how he saw the original "King Kong" on the big screen when he  was just a kid, of how he was inspired by Willis O' Brien's pioneering  special effects and of how that lead him to where he is today. In case I  end up in the movies, I foresee myself telling people the story of how I  was inspired by Harryhausen's work. Hopefully, the chain will go on. I  am kidding, of course, but it's a nice thought anyway.

While most  kids in the 90's would be oblivious of stop-motion (with CGI growing  popular), I was in awe of it. There is a sense of life in stop-motion  animated creatures. It's the kind of life that much of CGI lacks. No  matter how smoothly or realistically your computerized monster moves,  there is something more subtle that stop-motion captures better.  Harryhausen's creations seem to be thinking, or feeling, not just  moving. They have personality, an attribute that so many of today's CG  monsters lack. 

...

Harryhausen deserved better films and higher budgets (his films were  so low budget that at several times, the full extent of his vision  wasn't realized. It is now popular trivia that the octopus in "It Came  From Beneath the Sea" actually had only six tentacles as they couldn't  afford to build a model with eight). Though the films have inspired  several of us, it was, in most cases, only the special effects that kept  the films from being mediocre B-movie fare. It is sad that he didn't  work with greater talents. Imagine what would have come out of such  collaborations.

This master of animation was snubbed by the  Academy year after year for each of his films, the films not even  getting nominations for their special effects, until, years after his  retirement; they gave him an honorary Oscar, which, I suspect, is more  of an apology than a token recognition. I've read somewhere that  Harryhausen reasons his films didn't get recognized by the Academy when  they were released because they were shot in Spain, and not in  Hollywood. It makes sense. 

-Great Movies of my Childhood

It Came From Beneath the Sea was the first of several fruitful collaborations between producer Charles H. Schneer and special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. He wasn’t yet at the top of his game, but what he did provide inspired all of us young boys to fight enormous radioactive tentacled octopus.

The major creature in this low budget movie is a giant, six-tentacled octopus, which is galvanized into action by an H-bomb test.

Worse still, the monster is highly radioactive, rendering useless the normal means of defense against it.

Yikes!

It came from beneath the sea.

Scientists Donald Curtis and Faith Domergue team with atomic-submarine commander Kenneth Tobey to halt the creature’s progress before it begins to attack major coastal cities. Alas, the monster manages to reach San Francisco, wreaking havoc on the Golden Gate. It’s sort of an American version of Godzilla.

Good Gosh and darn it!

Movie Review 1 

I’m a simple guy, I see a movie about a gigantic killer octopus and I immediately buy it on DVD. I love campy 1950’s Cold War Sci-fi flicks. I find them to be genuinely fun and engaging. However, just like every sub genre, there’s good and bad. “It Came from Beneath the Sea” is a middling film.

Anytime the giant Octopus wreaks terror on screen, the film becomes a whole lot of fun. However, when the film substitutes these moments for a half baked love triangle the film quickly loses interest.

As with every giant monster film of the ’50’s the film is filled with commentary about living in an active nuclear world. Radiation from military testing has brought about this devastating monster. It then falls to a couple of scientists and a Navy officer to defeat the monster before it brings about the total destruction of San Francisco.

Most of the characters in this film fall into pretty standard genre cliches. There’s really nothing noteworthy about them; they’re fine. Where this film works best is in the action scenes. For the most part they’re really well done, it’s pretty obvious that the filmmakers are using miniatures, but there’s an undeniable charm to them. The creature design is also well done, and the use of stop-motion is effective in bringing the monster to life.

It came from beneath the sea.

If you’re into goofy giant monster films, then this is the kind of film you’d enjoy. For a general audience, this is the type of film that’ll bring about a lot of eye-rolling. “It Came from Beneath the Sea” isn’t the best monster film I’ve ever seen, but it does an effective job. I just wished there was a little more monster action.

Movie Review 2

Released the year after the influential monster movie classic Godzilla, It Came from Beneath the Sea was one of several attempts from around the world to capitalize on the success of Godzilla.

It Came from Beneath the Sea is one of the more well known giant monster movies to come out from this period.

I didn’t really know much about this film apart from the fact that it was following on Godzilla’s coat tails and that special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen was involved. While It Came from Beneath the Sea is far from being perfect, I still found it to be a fairly entertaining film.

It came from beneath the sea.

The film sees a giant octopus, whose feeding habits have been affected by radiation from H-bomb tests, rises from beneath the Mindanao Deep to terrorize the Californian coast.

The plot for It Came from Beneath the Sea is pretty good, with some interesting moments. It is a plot that seems really exciting on paper, but the execution needed to be much stronger than it actually is.

Throughout the film, there is a bland and monotonous voice-over that insists on dumping needless exposition. It also focuses heavily on the military trying to decide what to do about the giant octopus. These scenes are really bland and drain any and all excitement out of the film.

It came from beneath the sea.

There is also a love triangle between a sexually aggressive naval officer played by Kenneth Tobey, who declares rather than acts, and two scientists. One of the scientists is Professor Joyce, played by Faith Domergue, who lights up every scene that she appears in and is easily the best thing about this film. Joyce is a strong female character, unusual for this type of film from this era. She is independent, progressive and quickly brushes off any advances as soon they are laid on her. An underrated feminist icon if ever there was one! The other main highlight of the film is, of course, Harryhausen’s special effects. The whole sequence involving the giant octopus’s attack on the Golden Gate Bridge is fantastic. Harryhausen’s effects may be a little dated, but they are wonderfully charming. The giant octopus may not be his best work but, as always, it is a highlight. The direction from Robert Gordon is really solid and holds the film together well.

Overall, It Came from Beneath the Sea is a solid enough giant monster film. The plot is fun, but I feel that the execution needed to be stronger in order to get the mot out of the concept. The short runtime, however, makes it watchable and the Golden Gate Bridge attack is a satisfying conclusion. The performances are fairly average, with Faith Domergue being a particular highlight. Gordon’s direction is good and Harryhausen’s effects are great. It Came from Beneath the Sea is an enjoyable old school monster movie. A fun, if rather unremarkable, film!

Movie Review 3

Some Ray Harryhausen films you watch solely because of Ray Harryhausen‘s “Dynamation” and little else. This isn’t just such a film, but it might be the best example of it.

This would be Ray‘s first collaboration with producer Charles H. Schneer and they would go on to make some of Harryhausen‘s most famous films together including Jason and the Argonauts and of course Clash of the Titans.

This being their first though, it ends up also being their weakest, but they obviously lived and learned as they also never worked with director Robert Gordon again. Don’t worry about him though, he went on to make Tarzan and the Jungle Boy so his legacy is cemented.

It came from beneath the sea.

All of Ray‘s effects are great fun, how could a giant octopus attacking the Golden Gate Bridge not be?

Everything else though is a bit wooden, unimaginative and in some cases just plain weird. There’s this odd love triangle between Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue and Donald Curtis that plays out less like two men fighting over a woman and more like they’re… well… possibly trying to get her at the same time? I’m not sure what the hell was going on there, but it does add to the weirdness of the film.

Movie Review 4

It Came From Beneath The Sea is the kind of giant monster movie I can enjoy mostly guilt free. No appliances glued or stapled onto animals – just good old fashioned, cruelty-free Ray Harryhausen stop-motion. It’s how Willis O’Brian did it – it’s how the movie industry had done, and at that point in the ‘50s it had worked pretty well so far.

The premise is your good ol’ fashioned ‘50s creature feature – atomic testing woke up something big from the depths. The creature is now menacing the world of humanity and must be stopped. In this case, the “something” is a giant octopus, and it’s discovered by the US Navy’s first nuclear attack submarine.

It came from beneath the sea.

The film also has the twist of “the scientist nobody believes until it’s too late” being a woman, and her claims being dismissed not due to lack of plausibility, but explicitly because of institutional misogyny.

It’s still problematic – the scientist, Leslie Joyce (Faith Domeregue) ends up romancing her sexual harasser, but at least the film had the stones to call out institutional misogyny as a systematic issue that is a big problem – demonstrated by it costing lives.

The film’s effects are great – the climactic rampage through San Francisco at the end of the movie is very wonderfully done. It’s not quite at the levels of Godzilla (which hasn’t been made yet), but it does get things across.

It came from beneath the sea.

Otherwise, the movie is fine – it’s a brisk 74 minutes that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s a movie that’s enjoyable in its own right and, were it to end up on the new MST3K (or, for that matter, on Rifftrax), it’d also be a very fun watch there.

Final Conclusion

Well, aren’t you all tired of the pandemic, the Russian ultimatium that wasn’t, the Uighurs, and everything else? I certainly am. I jsut spent the most part of this morning breaking down the USA Western Bloc failures to interrupt the BRI. I’ve got to tell youse guys. I want a break.

I’m off to smunch on some fine, fine Suechuan food.

Sichuan cuisine is one of the most famous local cuisines in China. It has a wide range of materials and a variety of dishes. It is famous for its good use of spicy, and its unique cooking methods and strong local flavor is famous at home and abroad. Sichuan cuisine has become a brilliant pearl in the history of Chinese food culture and civilization.

I really want to get back to some OOPART stuff. I’ve got about 30 or so in the pipe in various stages of readiness.

Not to mention some stuff on world-line travel, and affirmations, and some Domain stuff as well.

Let’s just have some fun. Put aside the great Geo-political changes and just have fun.

Here’s some ideas for fun…

Idea one – Food.

A nice sandwich in a diner that you smuch with a cup of coffee or a more interesting beverage of your choice.

A nice sandwich.

Idea two – Art.

Visiting an art museum. Go out for the day and then get an icecream, or a coffee or a nice dinner out.

Visit an art museum.

Idea three – Local historical Museum.

Art is not your thing, eh…

Go out to the local historical museums in your local area. They are there, you just need to figure out where. Check out all the interesting curiosities that you find there.

Go out to the local historical museums in your local area.

They are everywhere.

You just got to find them.

Go out to the local historical museums in your local area.

Idea four – Go outside.

When was the last time that you took a spin on a bicycle. I’ll bet that for many MM readers, it’s been a long time. But I will tell you that when you get back on that bike it will be a true joy (provided there’s no snow about). LOL.

But if there is, then how about a snowmobile ride, a cross-country ski trip, or some downhill sking. Do something outdoors.

Do something outside.

Idea Five – snuggle.

With a loved one, a cherished pet, or a new friend. Just go out and snuggle.

Snuggle.

Idea six – Watch old movies.

Surprise yourself. Dig up an old movie and watch it. Just do it.

A scene from the movie “The Last of Shela”.

Have fun everyone.

Make the best of your life. One last idea…

Idea Seven – Be Groovy

It’s NEVER too late to be groovy, baby.

Groovy.

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The Western Bloc’s ruling class are really delusional psychopathic lunatics who are deluded by obvious drug abuse

.

Hum. Do you think the title is too soft? Maybe I should tell everyone what I REALLY think, huh?

Hum.

Yeah, today, one of my comments on LinkedIN was banned and erased because it was identified as “Disinformation”. I guess that I am now a “source of disinformation”. I’m bad news, you all.

Sigh.

I said that China was beautiful and that the skies are pretty much blue all the time, and that the pollution problem is pretty much going away.

I guess that this first-hand OPINION of mine is classified as “disinformation” and thus I lose my First Amendment Rights because the Tech Oligarchy says that Rights no longer apply to citizens using their platform.

Well, I can see and understand moderation of comments. I do it, don’t you know. No insults. No stuff about the Jews-Jews-Jews. No stuff about how great and exceptional the USA is. No stuff about how everything is going to change when Candidate XXXXX replaces President YYYYY in the United States.

But that’s just me.

But don’t call an opinion something else. Say what it is.

It is a comment that disagrees with the opinions of the owner of the website. Period. That’s all. Speak your mind. Look people in the eye (or in the cam) and speak your peace.

Sigh.

Hey! Does anyone still believe that America is free?

Banning speech is NOT FREEDOM. It’s something else. So why should the United States exist at all, if it does not represent what it says it represents? Why not call it as it actually is; A military dictatorship disguised as an oligarchy that operates a miltiary empire and is served by serf / slaves controlled by electronic means and fear.

This is all so silly. It makes me yearn for a simpler time….

A simpler time.

Simpler.

Well, maybe not THAT simple.

Maybe simpler like this…

A far simpler time.

Oh Baby!

Yeah. The age of big rail, and comfort. I love those ashtrays in the observation car. I can easily see myself drinking a cocktail, maybe a whiskey sour, and reading a newspaper. Perhaps checking out the prices on Stetson hats.

A cute dame besides me. Smelling like spring flowers, and wearing an lovely hat. Maybe a perfumed hankerchief with her phone number in red lipstick…

An Easier time…

A time when geeks were just regular (if shunned) people, not psychopathic megalomaniacs.

A time when geeks were just regular (if shunned) people, not psychopathic megalomaniacs.

A Nicer time…

…when women had a greater variety of color choices to select from. When women wore bigger earrings. When women would put their hair up when they went out, but put their hair down when they were behind closed doors…

Now, don’t they just look nice?

I like that everyone is holding a cocktail. I’ll bet the men-folk became used car salesmen, eh?

A Pleasanter time. A time when things were peaceful and easy going. Like Petticoat Junction, the Walton’s, or Mayberry RFD…

Cast of Petticoat Junction. There’s uncle Joe there. He almost served as a role model for me.

Oh, by the way, it’s easy to see why I had such a crush on the girls, don’t you know. Thin and trim. Lovely. Sweet, and kind. Nice eyes and great lips.

They were so fine

The girls were lovely, don’t you know.

One was a red head. One was a blonde, and the other was a brunette. They really covered all the bases in that family. I wonder the true story of their fathers. As I recall, it was never brought up.

It was a Cheaper time…

Twenty five cent fries at Burger Shef.

More comfortable.

I get a distinctive Peter Frampton vibe from this picture…

I get a distinctive Peter Frampton vibe from this picture.

A Happier time. No one is going to tell you what you can do, or say, or think. No one is going to get into your face for smoking a pipe, or having a beer…

A long-lost freedom.

It was our generation that made all the big and nasty weapons that the lunitic government leadership so proudly threatens the rest of the world with. We all should have jsut stayed one, gone fishing and smoked weed in joints.

And Safer… too.

A safer time.

Yes, I do miss all that. And sometimes, I feel that I was born just a half a decade too late. It’s an odd feeling…

This car’s a beaut, eh? Too bad I haven’t a clue as to what it is. (I do love the awnings over the windows in the house in the background.)

I missed out in this by just a few years.

Well, let’s jump back to reality.

The world seems to be going down the drain. It’s not. It just seems to be because all the United States is collapsing at all levels. Have you seen the boarded up downtowns in the cities, the mob riots in the malls and shopping areas, the police shoot-outs and gun downs, and of course the train swarms where gangs of pack urban society strip a train completely bare?

The USA is falling to pieces.

Why?

Because it is run by idiots.

The West’s ruling “elites” truly *are* stupid!

First, check this out:

American insanity.

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I would just add that to think that the Russian winter can prevent the Russian military from fighting is simply breathtakingly stupid.  However, since The Telegraph can post such nonsense, this goes to show that the general public in the West has also been stupidified beyond rescue and can be fed any bullcrap without batting an eye.

While the leaders of the (already dead) Empire are consulting meteorologists (or even astrologists?), they are completely missing the basic reality of modern warfare.  These seem to be especially unaware of three basic facts:

  • Modern warfare is primarily conducted with long range, standoff, weapons and this makes maneuver by fire far more important than maneuver by forces.
  • Modern warfare places a huge importance on integrated air defenses working together under automated battle management systems.  Modern air defense missiles can shoot down targets several hundred of kilometers away.  No western air defense system can stop hypersonic weapons.
  • Modern warfare is primarily non-linear, that is to say that it is more like soccer than like US football: each player (say a battalion tactical group)  “follows/opposes” another player rather than trying to hold a line and defend territory.

Those who think that Putin is preparing a WWII style attack simply don’t understand modern warfare at all.

I want to conclude with two small notes:

Strategic vs operational/tactical mobility

The US can very quickly deploy a military force pretty much anywhere on the planet were modern air defenses are absent.  This means that in terms of strategic mobility, the USA remains the leader in the deployment of a light force very far away from home.

Russian mobile forces are much much heavier than their US counterparts.  A Russian Airborne Division is fully mechanized, and comes with its own artillery, armor, EW, etc..  This weight makes it impossible for the Russian to use, say, IL-76s or An-124s to deploy such an Airborne Division (or brigade or even battalion) somewhere in faraway African or Latin America.  However, by this sacrifice of strategy mobility Russia achieves a operational/tactical mobility which US/NATO countries can only dream of.  Simply put, Russia does not have the means to deploy a full infantry battalion somewhere in distant Paraguay, but she does have the means to transport a major Airborne Force (up to several divisions) anywhere inside Russia (this especially applies to forces designated as the “reserve of the commander in chief”) or, very roughly, within about 1000km from the Russian border.  Once landed, that force will not only have a firepower mobile western forces can’t even begin to hope to acquire one day, they can also quickly relocate being, as I mentioned, totally mechanized (the move of the Rusbat from Bosnia to Pristina is a good illustration of this type of capability).

All of the above is to show how utterly stupid all the discussions about Russian forces being 100, 200 or even 400km away from the Ukie border.  If needed, Russia could easily move a very large force (again, fully mechanized) to the Ukie border or even into the Nazi-controlled Ukraine.  I do NOT believe that they have such plans (as Russia has much better options) but Russia definitely has the possibility to very quickly augment the 100k soldiers allegedly currently within 400km of the Ukie border.

Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc.

I hear a lot of speculations about Russian missiles (or forces) being deployed “Cuban Missile Crisis” -style to either Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua or other friendly nations in Latin America.  I would never say never (Putin loves to surprise), but in my opinion other than a reopening of the Russian intel basis in Lourdes, Russia will not actually deploy missiles in any of those countries.  There are a couple of reasons for that:

  • Russia has no need to move her missiles anywhere because she now has the means to strike at the entire continental United States with a wide array of long range standoff weapons.
  • These countries are all unstable to some degree, and the issue of protecting advanced Russian weapons systems (or forces) from possible political turmoil is a headache nobody in Russia needs.
  • Deploying weapon systems of forces in a sovereign country require close consultations and negotiations with the host country (including a so-called SOFA).  Why go through these headaches we Russian can act unilaterally without consulting with anybody?

Finally, not only can Russia threaten the continental United States without involving any third country, Russia can threaten US interests were they are the most vulnerable: abroad (especially in CENTCOM and in Far East Asia and Pacific region).  Personally, I very much hope to see some truly major Russian weapon systems deliveries to both Iran and China.  That being said, assisting Latin American counties like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Chile or any other country struggling for its sovereignty would be a very good idea.  Cuba would especially benefit from modern Russian air defenses and EW capabilities.

For the time being, let’s hear more about “sanctions from hell” and even “personal sanctions against Putin” or how the Russian tanks cannot deal with snow (or mud) in the exact same location where the USSR defeated the united Europe under Hitler in WWII or, before that, the united Europe under Napoleon.

Frankly, it appears to me that the 3B+PU crazies have totally taken over the Empire, and history shows how well that ends every time these “geniuses” and “hyenas” get involved in international politics.

And, finally, I really hope that Russia manages to finally protect the LDNR from the Ukronazis but WITHOUT any direct military intervention in the Ukraine (I have no problems with deniable, indirect, efforts to assist the LDNR).  Such a non-invasion would be the ultimate AngloZionist nightmare and I sure hope they get it!

Andrei

Conclusion

Well, it’s being run by idiots. That’s not your problem though. Their idiocy is running through everything. But you can use a filter to control the flow of bullshit in your life.

Do so.

Aim and strive to re-manifest the joys of life that have been bleached away from you over the last few decades. Strive to get them back.

Start small. Add affirmations. Concentrate on the pleasant memories that matter to you.

Whether dancing at the beach…

Dancing at the beach.

Driving a “real” car again…

Driving a real car again.

Having a family “sit down” dinner at the table, as a daily event… a very big THING. It’s very, very fundamental to having a good, happy and calm life.

According to Jill Castle, RD and founder of The Nourished Child, research about family meals concludes that they play an important role in children's growth, development and health. "Not only do kids who eat meals with their families eat healthier, they are more likely to get good grades, have higher self-esteem and lower rates of mental health concerns," she tells PEOPLE.

It can be challenging for any family to make time together as a unit, yet alone to do it on a consistent basis, but it’s these experiences that create a strong bond among family members, especially when children are involved.

"They are a huge help in modeling routines and behavior to our kids, for exposing them to a wide variety of food that we want them to eat, and for reconnecting after periods of being apart," Amy Palanjian, creator of Yummytoddlerfood.com and author of Busy Little Hands: Food Play! Activities for Preschoolersexplains to PEOPLE. 

"It's not always possible for everyone in a family to eat together due to schedules, and sometimes an adult may not be ready for a meal at the same time as a child and they may choose to have something like a glass of wine and a small snack while their child eats.

"It's the focus, conversation, and sitting down together without distractions that really matter—and it's okay if that looks different from a 'family meal,' " Palanjian adds. 

Experts talk to us about the significance of these family meal experiences, for both parents and children, and how effective they can be no matter how 'traditional' they are or aren't.

-People

Family sit down meal at the table.

Eating a meal with loved ones and freinds is the FIRST MOST IMPORTANT step in generating a safe, and calm environment for you and your loved ones. It is critical.

Oh, and by the way. Always remember…

You can have the last beer. You can have the last slice of pizza. You can’t have both.

Or having a fun picnic with friends and family. Drinking wine. Eating fresh bread and cheese. Enjoying the day and nature…

Having a fun picnic with friends and family.

Maybe eating some vintage food made by your grandparents. Dig out that old recipe book.

Dig it out.

Dust it off.

Decompile your grandmothers script writing…

Here is a loaf of Italian bread with an Italian seasoned meat loaf concoction, baked in an oven in aluminum foil and covered in melted cheese.

Yum.

No one makes thes things any longer. I guess it’s just too easy to go and eat at “Olive Garden” instead.

A wonderful concoction.

Vintage dinner recipe: Savory supper on a bread slice – Horseradish and tomato version

Look at these ingredients! OMG. Yum!

Ingredients

2/3 cup (small can) undiluted evaporated milk
1-1/2 pounds ground beef
1/2 cup cracker meal
1 egg
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 tablespoon prepared horseradish
1 teaspoon garlic salt
1 teaspoon Morton salt
3/4 teaspoon Ajinomoto (MSG)
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
2 cups (8 ounces) grated process-type American cheese
3 7-inch loaves French bread
Heavy-duty aluminum foil
2 medium-sized tomatoes (each cut in 6 wedges)
12 strips of cheese for garnish

Directions

Combine first twelve ingredients. Cut bread loaves in half lengthwise. Spread meat mixture evenly over cut surface of each half. Wrap heavy-duty aluminum foil around crust side of bread, leaving top uncovered. Place on cookie sheet.

Bake in moderate oven (350 degrees) 25-30 minutes. Garnish with tomato wedges and strips of cheese. Bake 5 minutes longer. To serve, cut slices across or diagonally.

Serves 6 (Or two hungry American men.)

Or, you know… being a Rufus. Change your life for the better.

video. 19MB

And one final word…

Be good. Be kind. And you all will be allright.

Love kitty.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Russian commentaries on the collapsing United States (with some MM commentary as well) 2 of 3

In the first part, we concluded with an article how the Chinese decapitated the CIA and NED assets inside of China. China identified who the spies were, captured them and executed them immediately. This occurred when President Trump and Mike Pompeo / John Bolton were trying to start a pro-democracy movement in HK, unleash bio-weapons to kill livestock, and try to coordinate saboteurs inside the Chinese mainland.

Here we continue.

But before we do, I would like to say that nothing is better on a long cold day than a hot bowl of soup that has been cooking all afternoon. Especially when it is served with a nice crunchy bread. Don’t you think so? I love the smells and aromas of a good pot of soup or a hearty stew.

A hearty stew.

Ok, let’s continue.

Let’s remember what America actually is today… Everyone in the world believes it is a cluster fuck

Face the facts, the United States is a cluster fuck, and it is pure idiocy to believe that it can act as a unified force to take on Asia. It’s truly mind-boggling. video 2.4MB

Let’s remember who really won the “Korean War” . video 6MB

The United States is in a state of crisis. video 2MB

A comment…

Yes.

Idiocrates  on December 29, 2021  ·  at 3:37 pm EST/EDT 

For me its more than a feeling. The US has a proven track record of not being able to negotiate. Their posture has been to ‘appear’ mad, insane to scare the enemy into submission. Its human nature: a normal person is usually afraid of a madman and what he might do.

However, now, the US not only appears to be insane, they ARE insane, after practicing it for so long.

Another point is that I think it is not enough for Russia to neutralize Ukraine, to remove it as a source of insecurity.
Without clear and present danger to the US homeland, without a serious and unambiguous threat to Uncle Shmuels digs all Russian action will be meaningless. The yanks don't give 2 shits about anyone i.e EU, Ukraine and even Israel (yes moneybags notwithstanding).
If Russian does not scare the Dejesus out of normal and decent Americans, none of the ruling elites will get the message.
Clearly time for words has passed.

Dear American ‘Liberals’: Everything You Think You Know About Russia Is Wrong

Russia is actually ahead of the United States on many issues championed by the American Left

This article from our archives was first published on RI in June 2015

We all know what it feels like to log onto the Newsweek-owned Daily Beast, or the puerile random listicle generator known as  Buzzfeed, and peruse the invective-laden anti-Russian, anti-Putin screeds contained therein. These hysterical publications serve a function; that function is to convince members of the American public who might balk at militarism that today’s Russia is a dangerous, dirty, backward, evil place, and its leader is some amalgamation of Dr. Evil and Emperor Palpatine.

Unlike during the lead-up to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the left took the lead in opposing the Bush administration’s reckless Middle East policy, American liberals have more or less given Obama a free hand in his dealings with Russia and the Evil Putin. Liberals opposed the Iraq War, and spent many an hour arguing with Bushies about the errors of his foreign policy. It just so happens that these individuals turned out to be right, but their insistence on facts, logic, and commitment to the truth have gone out the proverbial window when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. “Putin is just like Stalin,” my earnest, well-educated, liberal friends tell me. “His next target is Moldova and he hates gay people and Pussy Riot and now he wants to use prison labor to build the World Cup venues and he hates all women and doesn’t support women’s rights. I don’t understand why you are so pro-Russian.” I am pro-Russian because I can tell the difference between right and wrong. I can also realize when a country and a leader are being demonized to further an American geopolitical agenda. Furthermore, I can see that the more the United States tries to create some philosophical difference between the U.S. and Russia as existed during the Cold War, the more the former opens itself up to critique.

I guess it comes as no surprise when the U.S. mainstream media spends pages of copy wringing its hands over the deaths of con artists like Boris Nemtsov, but can’t find a smidgen of space to tell the story of innocent victims like Vanya – who suffered horrific injuries as the result of Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operation.” I would like to point out to the well-meaning urban hipsters who may be reading this that they are siding with people like John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and are being duped into supporting a neo-conservative war agenda. American liberals may not be on the same page with Vladimir Putin on many issues, which is great for them, because American liberals are not required to live in Russia. However, it must be pointed out that, in many ways, Russia is actually ahead of the United States on issues that tend to be dear to liberals’ hearts. Due to the constant deluge of invective on Russia’s “backward” slide, when I am aware of the precise extent and stench of America’s dirty laundry, these sanctimonious moral lectures from Americans on “human rights” don’t exactly gel with me.

Capital Punishment

Rather than getting its panties in a twist about a piece of legislation that a foreign country has merely proposed, perhaps the NYT would prefer it if Russia followed America’s lead and started executing its prisoners instead of asking them to repay their debt to society. Capital punishment in Russia has been indefinitely suspended – in contrast to the U.S.’s busy death chambers. Since 1976, the U.S. has executed 1,408 individuals. Thus far in 2015, 14 prisoners have been executed. Texas and Oklahoma alone are responsible for 637 executions. Even for those who support capital punishment, it cannot be denied that America’s death chambers have likely put innocent people to death. By contrast, when Russia entered the Council of Europe in 1996, Boris Yeltsin bumbled his way into abolishing the practice.

Capital punishment has not been reinstated under the administrations of Dmitri Medvedev or Vladimir Putin. In 2008, the UN took a vote on passing a moratorium on the death penalty. Russia was one of the 106 nations that voted in favor; the U.S was among the 46 that voted against. Despite the objections of countries such as the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Iran, the measure was approved. Not only does the U.S. far outpace Russia in use of the death penalty, America executes individuals who would not be eligible for the death penalty in Russia. Women, children, and the mentally disabled are exempt from capital punishment. The last person executed in Russia was Sergey Golovkin, a convicted serial killer. In fact, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has spoken out against the death penalty.

Rates of Incarceration

Perhaps the Russians do not need to clear out their prisons through the use of a barbaric and outdated punishment simply because they don’t have as many individuals in prison. Think Progress reports that the U.S. has the largest prison population in the developed world. Additionally, minority American men are more likely than their white counterparts to land in prison.

According to this chart, the incarceration rate in Russia lands somewhere between the U.S. states of Washington and Utah. You read that correctly. The entirety of the Russian Federation has a smaller percentage of its population in prison than the state of Washington. Washington has approximately 7 million residents; Russia has 143 million people. While Russia, China, and the United States overall have the highest prison rates per 100,000 people, the United States has 707; Russia has 470; and China has somewhere between 124 and 172. I wonder when I will see the New York Times gleefully trumpeting this fact as part of a smug commentary on the U.S.’s backward slide.

I also wonder how many World Cup venues could be built with just the population of the Louisiana penal system.

Recognition of Palestine

According to a Gallup poll, Democrats are slowly withdrawing their support for Israel. The left-wing Slate writes of the importance of Palestinian independence. Slate’s Josh Keating mentions naughty Russia in passing because they are unlikely to recognize Kosovo, but neglects to tell its readership that the Soviet Union voted to acknowledge Palestine in 1988. It’s safe to say that this is a cause for concern for many Western liberals, as the Guardian became rather worked up over the firing of an American professor because of his pro-Palestinian stance.

Gun Control

In spite of The New Republic’s dire warnings about drunken redneck Russians shooting anyone who looks at them cross-eyed, even with the new regulations, Russian gun laws are still considered to be restrictive. Even a cursory glance at Russia’s gun policy would make many GOP voters explode with rage.

Russia places limits on the types and number of firearms citizens can own – a very significant distinction from America’s “anything goes” gun policies. Possession of shotguns and other firearms is regulated by law, and gun owners must provide documentation and a “statement from a territorial police officer that weapons can be safely kept at the applicant’s residence” to their local police department.

Russian gun owners must also obtain a gun license. Gun licenses are valid for five years and have to be renewed. Russia also does not allow the controversial practice of open carry, which most American liberals oppose. Additionally, the Russian government requires that citizens who acquire a gun for the first time not only attend firearm safety classes and pass a federal safety exam, but they must also pass a background check. Sensible gun legislation. What a backward sewer!

Of course, perhaps I am being too hard on the United States. Russia doesn’t have the National Rifle Association buying off every politician from dog catcher to members of Congress.

Abortion

It’s been brought to my attention that Russian ladies need Western feminism. I disagree. Acquiring access to family planning is central tenet of mainstream feminism. American feminists have been trying for years to get conservative Republican politicians to stop trying to restrict their access to birth control and abortion. I am not here to argue for or against abortion. I am here to tell you that abortion is free and legal in Russia, and has been for quite some time. So what would the appeal of Western feminism be for Russian women? Are they going to give them something they already have? American feminists can’t even get free abortion and they can? So Russian women need feminism for what, exactly?

While abortion has been legal in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade, individual states have passed legislation placing limits on abortion. While legislators in the Russian Duma have proposed a bill that would limit access to abortion, the proposal seeks to limit state insurance payments for abortions. This is still more generous than American abortion practices, where no public money goes to pay for abortions. As of right now, abortions are available to women over the age of 16 up to the 12th week of pregnancy. No Russian woman seeking an abortion under her government’s health plan is required to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound.

Maternity Leave

Yes, Russian women have it rough without the vicissitudes of feminism. If only they lived in the more advanced and civilized United States, they could give up their maternity leave benefits. In fact, the United States is so far ahead of the curve in their lack of same that they are the only industrialized nation in the world that does not guarantee paid maternity leave for new mothers.

Educational Attainment

Russia has led the world in citizens with college degrees. A 2011 report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation found that 53.5% of Russian adults held a degree. Even though Russian women are not getting on board with feminism do not support FEMEN’s cultural appropriation of African protest, some of these college graduates (maybe as many as half) actually have ovaries.

Health Care

Health care continues to be a contentious issue in the U.S. Although Obamacare has lowered the percentage of uninsured adults, there are still 42 million Americans without health care. Russia, like many developed nations around the world, has universal health coverage. No, it is not perfect. Most systems like Russia’s face problems such as coverage gaps and budget shortfalls, but it is a system that Russia has had in place since Soviet times, and is a guarantee that it gives to all of its citizens. Also, did I mention there is free abortion?

Admittedly, I do not know much about the Russian health care system. They are protesting their right to hang onto their Soviet-style health care system. Although the Western media gleefully reported that Russians protested cuts in health care due to sanctions and low oil prices, I am pretty certain that citizens taking to the streets to express their displeasure with their government’s policy is a sign of a healthy democracy. Furthermore, taking sick pleasure in other people having a hard time because you don’t happen to like their leader isn’t what I would call progressive. It also doesn’t make America’s health care system any better.

The Down & Dirty

Since Russia will hopefully still be hosting the World Cup in 2018, it’s safe to assume that the Western press will continue to beat the same very dead horses they banged on about during Sochi – gay rights and Pussy Riot – because these issues take precedence over the humanitarian tragedy occurring right now in Ukraine.

Let me take my American liberal friends on a little tour, and show them why the focus on these issues is actually war propaganda. It’s very cleverly disguised war propaganda, but war propaganda nonetheless.

Gay Rights

Americans are exceptional. We know that. They are exceptionally specious when it comes to the issue of the LGBT community in Russia.

During the lead-up to the Sochi Olympics, we heard day after day after day how the “gay propaganda” law in Russia would soon lead to gay people being rounded up in cattle cars and shipped off to concentration camps in Siberia. The blame for all of this was laid at the feet of one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who calmly and rationally explains his views on the subject here. Despite the fact that Putin actually does not hate gay people, the Western press forged ahead painting a picture of a Russia where homosexuals are “hunted” with the full support of the Russian public and its demonic leader. In fact, when Russia jailed anti-gay nationalist Maxim Martinskovich for his crimes, it wasn’t good enough for the Daily Beast and CNN tried to take the credit, even though Martinskovich had been on the Russian government’s radar for a while and had actually been jailed in 2007. CNN even tried to claim that before his arrest, Putin was refusing to arrest Martinskovich, conveniently leaving out the fact that Martinskovich had fled to Cuba.

Facts continue to be pesky things for the U.S.’s campaign to vilify Russia over its LGBT record. The United States does not own the patent on LGBT equality. Far from it. Several U.S. States have “no promo homo”laws that are similar to the one passed in Russia. So I guess no Olympics for Utah. Oh, wait.

The existing laws alone would make the United States look hypocritical, but the number of states proposing anti-gay laws continues to increase. Twenty-eight states have proposed laws that range from religious refusals to anti-transgender laws. Indiana infamously passed a “religious freedom” bill earlier this year, and Michigan is moving forward with an anti-gay adoption law. Michigan already has a “right to bully” law, passed in 2011. As a matter of fact, Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law is nothing compared to the laws that exist in 79 countries – some of which are U.S. allies. Here are the countries where you can die for being gay. Please note that Russia is not among them – but Saudi Arabia is. Israel restricts same-sex couples from using surrogates. Likewise, the democratic and peace-loving Ukraine is the most homophobic country in Europe. And EU candidate Georgia isn’t much better.

One doesn’t have to agree with Putin’s views on the subject, nor do they have to be particularly supportive of Russia in general to see that it is being singled out and demonized

for a policy that was passed through a democratic process. To my knowledge, the U.S. has never changed a domestic policy simply because a foreign press was whining about how unfair it was, so I am uncertain why Russia is expected to do so.

Pussy Riot

You guys cannot be serious with this. How is walking into a church, interrupting a service, going into a sacred area of said church, dancing around like five-year-olds, and scaring a bunch of little old Russian ladies brave? Or a protest? Seriously? I am all for freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but if they wanted to protest Putin I am sure they could have found a service that he actually attended. Even then, I am doubtful that he would have cared. I am not religious myself, but I believe there is such a thing as freedom of religion, and people have a right to worship in peace.

Pussy Riot calls itself a “feminist punk band.” First of all, there is nothing feminist about Pussy Riot. They are grown women in their mid-20s who don’t mind men twice their age referring to them  as “girls.” Western Feminism 101 will tell you that calling grown woman a girl is degrading. Secondly, there is nothing “punk” about them. Punk is about being real, and challenging the status quo. If Pussy Riot is about being real, why did they change their name from the Russian “Bойна” to the English “Pussy Riot”? Perhaps because their intended audience is actually outside Russia?

Then there is the matter of their chosen venue. The original Cathedral of Christ the Savior was demolished by Joseph Stalin in 1931 and was rebuilt only after the fall of the Soviet Union. Considering that this church symbolizes the utter hatred of religion that was par for the course during Soviet times, it is little wonder that today’s Russians were so offended. Not only does the church have symbolic value, but the Romanovs were canonized there in 2000. It is where Yeltsin lay in state after he finally keeled over from heart failure in 2007. What exactly made them this angry that they chose this church for their protest? Were they murdered for their beliefs by Stalin? Were they shot and bayoneted to death for being the daughter of a tsar? Is this challenging status quo? Protesting in a cathedral that is charged with the weight of sad chapters in Russia’s history? Is that challenging the status quo, or being an insensitive brat?

And what exactly has the Russian Orthodox Church done to incur this ire? There have been no abuse cover-ups. There have been no sex scandals. There have been no Orthodox Christians with reality shows on TLC who pretend that their son isn’t molesting his sisters (and who maintain the support of prominent politicians). There was nothing”brave” or”heroic” about their performance, just like there was nothing brave or heroic about them throwing live stray cats at McDonald’s workers to “protest capitalism.” Personally I think they should have gone to jail for animal cruelty.

American liberals like to pretend this “song” was about Putin. There are only a couple of lines in the song that actually refer to Putin and the Patriarch. Most Western media claims they were arrested for “hooliganism” when they were charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Read that last part very carefully.  The rest is about how backward they think the Orthodox church is. That’s fine if they feel that way, but I am pretty sure there is no law in Russia that demands that you join.

Americans were outraged! How dare they? How dare they what? Employ their own laws? Prosecute crimes and hand out punishment i in a manner in which they see fit? And what if this had happened in the United States? You’re telling me that the country that lost its damn mind when Miley Cyrus gesticulated with a foam finger at the”sacred” VMAs would have looked the other way if someone protested in this manner at the National Cathedral in D.C. or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC? How about you go to Boston and interrupt Sunday mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross? I’m sure everyone would have been totally calm. Just like everyone stayed calm when Seth MacFarlane had a potty mouth at the”solemn” Academy Awards. Or how like nobody cared when someone spray painted graffiti at a national park.

I suppose I am not an arbiter of what is and what is not acceptable speech, and what is and is not a challenge to the status quo. But I do know that, had Pussy Riot not been little white girls, maybe the American media would have called them thugs.

I know Russia isn’t perfect, and that’s not the point. But whatever issues Russia has, I feel it is always better to let a country sort these sorts of things out for themselves. Take it from me, the U.S. has plenty of problems of its own. If anything, Russia should take the U.S.’s constant nagging as a compliment. After all, this is the same country that called Nelson Mandela a terrorist.

The United States talks all the time about winning “hearts and minds.” Through the sheer preponderance of facts in their favor, Russia has won my mind. I have freely given it my heart.

A video interlude…

Life in America 1. To understand the entire picture, you have to see the ENTIRE picture, and it is not pretty.  video 9MB

Life in America 2. The American government has failed it’s citizenry. It’s all one big pile of shit.  video 8MB

Life in America 3. Crime is rampant and it’s every man for himself. video 1MB

 

China Will Overtake the US In the Course of the Next Ten Years: Max Parry

 The US is faced with a long list of hot-spots and tensions.  Beginning with the situation in Iraq, where the Parliament has asked the US troops to leave.  However, the US has refused a withdrawal, and instead has announced the 2,500 soldiers will be kept on the ground, but in a support mission, not combat.
The tensions between the US and Russia are at the boiling point as Washington threatens, but President Putin replies, “We didn’t come to the US or UK borders, no, they came to ours,” he said recently.

Presidents of the US and China held a virtual meeting, but did not make headway in resolving lingering US-China trade war disputes.  Trump started a trade war in 2018 which has resulted in both nations paying higher taxes to bring in goods from the opposing country.

The US and other western powers have been meeting with Iranian officials concerning renewal of the Iran nuclear deal cancelled by Trump.  Iran says the removal of sanctions is a fundamental priority, and it is not clear if the US will accept those terms.

Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse interviewed Max Parry to gain some insight into these situations which are headlines in the international news.

Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst based in New York.  His writing has appeared widely in alternative media, including the Center for Research on Globalization, the Unz Review, Dissident Voice, and the Greanville Post where he serves as an associate editor.  He frequently appears as a political commentator for Sputnik News and Press TV.

1.  Steven Sahiounie (SS):  The US military is pulling out of Iraq. In your opinion, is the Iraqi military capable of preventing an ISIS resurgence?

Max Parry (MP):  First of all, the timetable for the expected drawdown of coalition troops from Iraq is still up in the air.  Until now apparently, the resolution passed by the Iraqi parliament following the Soleimani assassination was completely disregarded by Washington.

Initially, the ostensible reason for the protracted reentry of foreign forces in the country was to combat Daesh (editor’s note ISIS) and that pretext for the US-led combat mission expired nearly four years ago, yet coalition forces still remain.  Given the historical precedent set by American foreign policy, part of me tends to agree with the pessimistic fears that the announcement by senior US and Iraqi officials of the transition to an “advisory role” is likely just another cosmetic facelift for a continued U.S. occupation. While to some extent I am cynical that Washington has any real intention of withdrawing, the recent developments in Afghanistan arguably marked a turning point for waning US influence in the region so perhaps it is a real pullout of boots on the ground in Iraq after all.

I would note that the resurgence of Daesh, which had been mostly eliminated at the hands of the Iraqi PMU in the areas under its control unlike the former caliphate territory under U.S. occupation, began shortly after the inauguration of Joe Biden earlier this year. It also seems like whenever there is any inkling the US is going to leave the country, an ISIS terrorist attack conveniently occurs (never against the US bases though curiously) and gives the perfect excuse for Washington to remain.

Meanwhile, the U.S. frequently serves as the air force on behalf of the remnants of Daesh by targeting the PMU even as they are fighting ISIS across the border in Syria. At the end of the day, the U.S. uses Daesh as a strategic asset in the region to dominate countries like Iraq and the only hope for ISIS to be eliminated lies with the PMU, not al-Kadhimi and the Iraqi government which essentially allowed the U.S. to murder Soleimani and al-Muhandis on its territory and continuously provokes the Popular Mobilization Forces.

2.  SS:  The US/EU political pressure on Russia is increasing. In your opinion, how will Moscow react to this pressure?

MP:  The source of the tensions between the US/EU and Moscow is the absence of a security guarantee rightfully demanded by the latter from the West, Ukraine and NATO which are leaving Russia with little choice but to take a hard line against their provocations. It is Washington which has continuously withdrawn from arms reduction treaties and NATO that has enlarged eastward despite informal pledges not to expand made to the Kremlin at the end of the Cold War. Russia has no choice but to interpret this encirclement and unfriendly course of action as hostile.

I think we could see in Ukraine what we saw in Georgia back in 2008, one of the shortest conflicts in the history of warfare, where US and Israeli-backed Georgia provoked Russia by shelling civilians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  I believe the same kind of war crimes could occur in Donbass with Ukraine provoking Russia by escalating the conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk.  After all, the Russian troop buildup on its border was triggered by Ukrainian President Zelensky’s decree stating Kiev’s intentions to retake Crimea from Russia and Donbass from the Russian-speaking separatists.  I do not believe NATO is suicidal enough to directly attack Russia but I do see a potential hot war brewing between Ukraine and Russia with the West using Kiev as a cat’s paw for imperialism against Moscow.

3.  SS:  The Biden administration is in an economic war with China. How will this economic tension reflect on the world economy?

MP:  Fundamentally, if you take a close look at Biden’s Built Back Better initiative and legislation, on a geopolitical level it is basically a counter to China’s Belt and Road infrastructure project.

For example, its framework weaponizes the issue of climate change as means to single out China and the New Silk Roads to be punished by economic warfare, namely in the form of sanctions. The U.S. geostrategy is clearly dead set on containing China’s infrastructure development and investment of the global south. Meanwhile, at the G7, the World Economic Forum, and these other Western financial institutions we’ve seen them adopt this “Build Back Better” slogan in coordinated unison for the so-called “Great Reset” or Fourth Industrial Revolution, as some call it, in the wake of the pandemic.

We can see how the US-China trade war is playing out in the realm of big tech, with the success of TikTok and U.S. attempts to designate it a threat to national security.  Not to mention, there were the sanctions on Huawei. This is because China is on pace to overtake the U.S. as the preeminent country in the world not just economically but geopolitically in the next ten years and this conflict is taking shape in every aspect of the world economy.  The U.S. is desperate to halt the rise of Beijing in the global arena because while it has depleted trillions from the Treasury on endless wars and wasteful military spending, domestically it has been de-industrialized and outsourced virtually all of its manufacturing overseas since the 1970s. We are truly witnessing the emergence of a multipolar world and I believe these efforts by the U.S. to keep pace with China were not made soon enough to make any difference.

4.  SS:  Will the Zionist Lobby in the US be successful in preventing a new nuclear deal with Iran?

MP:  I don’t believe the United States is committed to a return to the JCPOA under Biden.  Iran has made it abundantly clear the U.S. must lift all sanctions imposed since 2018 after the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the agreement.  Biden has been in office nearly a year and has had ample time to make good on his campaign pledge, the ball has been in his court. Instead, we’ve only seen Washington demand further concessions from Iran regarding ballistic missiles, for example, if the agreement is to be re-implemented.

The Zionist lobby tried to sabotage the non-proliferation framework from being adopted and was instrumental in Trump’s move to kill the deal in total violation of international law. While AIPAC’s powerful influence over Washington obviously remains under the Democrats, Biden seems more concerned with using the abandonment of the JCPOA as a political football to score points against Trump and the GOP rather than follow through on returning to what was considered a foreign policy victory under Obama. I foresee a crisis coming to a head between the US and Israel which has become a pariah and total PR disaster for the U.S. where the tide of public opinion domestically is starting to turn against the Zionist entity. That said, I think we are still some ways away from any South Africa-like moment for the Palestinians, unfortunately.

5.  SS:  Is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project operational?  How is this affecting the relationship between Russia and the EU?

MP:  Construction of the pipeline was completed but it is not yet operational, awaiting certification from Germany’s energy regulator.  This has huge implications for EU-Russia relations and for the Ukraine crisis, as Ukraine is a transit country economically reliant on gas transit feeds the new pipeline would bypass.  The US would also be impacted because its economic foothold in Europe would be reduced.  In the midst of this, the EU and US are accusing Russia of using the pipeline and its supply of natural gas to Europe to its advantage.  These factors are all behind what is driving the crisis in Ukraine and the NATO provocations in the Black Sea against Russia.

Video Interlude…

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Empires Fall. Now It’s America’s Turn, and Russia Will Make It Happen

Russia is allowing the US to overextend before the cauldron collapses around it

This article from our archives was first published on RI in June 2018

It’s important for bullies to always win.  Because once their weakness is exposed they can no longer be bullies.

Empires don’t start out as bullies.  They start out as the reaction to the last Empire which became a bully after embracing hubris over humility.

Empires have to resort to bullying near the end because they are fundamentally weak.  They all over-extend themselves through currency debasement which, in turn, degrades the cultural advantage the society had over the previous Empire.

Donald Trump knows how to bully with the best of them.  I go back and forth about his status as a bully, however.  He is a mercurial figure whose unpredictability is predictable.

I see him more as Loki than the typical bully.  In other words, it’s probably fair to say that to Trump bullying is just another tactic.

So, as the head of the U.S., an Empire in the early stages of collapse, fundamentally weakened by two generations of empire building after the failure of Bretton Woods, Trump will bully his opposition because he knows that an Empire that is not feared is one that will soon be laughed at.

And when that happens, it’s game over.

Trump understands that the U.S. can no longer afford to pay for the post-WWII institutional order.  Europe’s been rebuilt but the EU is in the process of tearing it down for the sake of globalism.

And Germany is the one benefiting on our dime.

So, if you are opposed to the Empire, regardless of your politics, seeing Trump take it to the G-7 and, in particular, Germany should be welcomed.

Where you should be worried however, is how that same bullying is being turned on Russia and Iran.  In my latest article for Strategic Culture Foundation I remind everyone that none other than Mr. Realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, was advising Trump on Ukraine and Crimea in early 2017.

And after looking at the way Trump is prosecuting our relationship with Russia it’s clear to me now Kissinger had a stronger influence on Trump than anyone thought.

As the Kremlin Turns

The Left still screaming about Russia collusion are themselves delusional.  Trump hasn’t been secretly doing nice things for Putin behind everyone’s back.  There’s no coordination of policy between them.

I spent most of 2017 arguing with MAGA folks convinced that Trump and Putin were waging a secret war on the Deep State and the Neocons.  4-D chess arguments abounded.

When the reality was that while Trump and Putin keep in touch to ensure little direct conflict between the U.S. and Russian forces in Syria takes place, that is not evidence that Trump is soft on Russia in any way.

Not provoking a nuclear-armed country is not evidence of collusion, just functional brain cells.  A statement I can’t make about most of Trump’s critics this week.

This is an operating principle which governed this week’s summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as well.  Trump was smart to meet with Kim, who did outmaneuver the U.S. over the past five years, by achieving nuclear-armed status.

It forced the U.S. to the table and Trump, smartly, took the opportunity to save face and choose peace.

The same thing is not on the horizon with Russia today.

The Kremlin has moved on.  It would like a better relationship with Washington but it has no illusions about it happening.  To Putin’s credit he has not ruled out speaking with Trump, but as Alistair Crooke points out today, there’s little good reason for him doing so.

Trump has crossed so many lines with his Kissinger-inspired policy to force Russia to abandon its relationship with China through economic and political aggression that there’s little to be gained by chatting about anything other than the weather.

Beware the Cauldron

To beat a bully you have to let him over-extend himself.  He has to feel confident of your passivity in the face of his aggression.  That means if you slap him in the face, he turns the other cheek.

If you attack his friends, he doesn’t attack you.

For more than a year we’ve seen these things play out around the world vis a vis Russia in Syria and in Europe.  The attacks are both military, Syria and Ukraine, and financial, the Nordstream 2 pipeline.

I’ve detailed all of this at length over the past year.  Putin has taken so many shots to the chin that U.S. / Russian relations bear a great resemblance to the “Rumble in the Jungle” where Mohammed Ali let George Foreman punish him for round after round, expending himself in a futile attempt to knock Ali out.

And once Foreman’s arms felt like lead and his legs like Jello, Ali struck so hard and so fast that he stunned the world.

Russian military strategy is dominated by this type of thinking.  Lure your opponent in. Create a weak spot and allow him to attack it over and over.  Invite the chaos.  Allow him to think he is winning.

So here’s where we are today:

  1. If Trump is successful in getting Germany to cower before his sanctions regime that will, in turn, put Iran under heavy pressure financially and socially.
  2. That may yet lead to a formal withdrawal of IRGC Quds forces from Syria.  Yet another win.
  3. But, it will only happen if the U.S. leaves the border crossing at Al-Tanf.  Small pirce to pay.
  4. Germany’s government is on increasingly shaky grounds as AfD are making her life miserable in the Bundestag and her partner Horst Seehofer of the CSU, as Interior Minister is openly defying her over migrant policy.  
  5. The U.S. negotiates a deal with Turkey to control Manbij, possibly to undermine Russia’s relationship with Erdogan, keeping the Turks in Syria to complicate peace talks.
  6. Military conflict in Ukraine likely in the next few weeks with the UAF attacking the Donbass and an incident in the Sea of Azov.
  7. This supports a failing Poroshenko government in trouble before the election and sucker Putin into direct support which can justify more sanctions and keeping the EU on board because of “Russian Aggression” and “Not supporting the Minsk process.”
  8. Trump is openly tying sanctions and trade normalization with the Nordstream 2 pipeline in brazen mafia-style negotiating tactics further complicating Merkel’s life.
  9. Five more Russian companies were sanctioned this week over ‘cyber attacks.’
  10. He’s openly threatening major multinationals who do business in the U.S. for being a part of Nordstream 2.

I think you get the point.  I could go on for another page or two.

Closing the Trap

The point is that this is classic bullying behavior.  Trump is pot-committed, as poker-players say, to this policy.

Once you start with sanctions and threats, you can’t stop.  It’s go all the way or have your bluff called.  With Europe Trump holds aces.  They are dependent on the U.S. and their weakness will be the U.S.’s gain over the next year or two.  Europe’s sovereign debt crisis will explode and the U.S. will see massive foreign in-flows.

It’ll be a massive win but it won’t be the win.  And in winning over Europe it sets him up for the big loss; the fight for the Middle East and Eurasian integration.

His gambit with Russia and Iran becoming an all-or-nothing proposition.  Trump has just about pushed all-in.  Russia/Iran/China’s passivity has emboldened him. The fecklessness of the Obama administration creating dumpster fires in Ukraine and Syria, however, handed him bad cards and a dwindling stack.

He hasn’t won a hand in the Middle East yet.  Sure he’s made headlines but Putin, Rouhani, Nasrallah and Assad have won all the skirmishes that matter.  Any wins Trump has gotten were easy ones to pick up.  The framework for a deal has always been the same.  And no amount of Kissinger-style complications were going to change them.

Iran no more wants to stay in Syria than Putin wants to intervene in The Donbass. So, getting Iran out of Syria is easy.  All Trump has to do is leave.  Israel won’t like it, but it won’t be their decision.  Putin made that clear to Netanyahu when he visited Moscow.

The Kurds are the ones to make that decision for Trump, now that they are openly negotiating with Damascus after Trump backstabbed them over Manbij.

Without the support of the Kurds, the U.S. cannot stay in Syria at all.

So, when we reach the showdown hand Trump won’t have aces.  And the classic Russian cauldron will collapse in around him.  And losing there will be the end of the U.S. empire abroad.

And the world will rejoice.

Russia’s New Nukes Check-Mate a War-Happy US, Make the World Safer

Now that its aircraft carrier fleet, global ABM systems, and NATO has been rendered useless, the US can get on with dismantling its entire bloated, over-stretched, global network of military bases.

This article from our archives was first published on RI in March 2018
A lot of people seem to have lost the thread when it comes to nuclear weapons. They think that nuclear weapons are like other weapons, and are designed to be used in war. But this is pure mental inertia.
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According to all the evidence available, nuclear weapons are anti-weapons, designed to prevent weapons, nuclear or otherwise, from being used. In essence, if used correctly, nuclear weapons are war suppression devices. Of course, if used incorrectly, they pose a grave risk to all life on Earth. There are other risks to all life on Earth as well, such as runaway global warming from unconstrained burning of hydrocarbons; perhaps we need to invent a weapon or two to prevent that as well.

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Some people feel that the mere existence of nuclear weapons guarantees that they will be used as various nuclear-armed countries find themselves financially, economically and politically in extremis.

As “proof” of this, they trot out the dramaturgical principle of Chekhov’s Gun.

Anton Chekhov wrote: “Если вы говорите в первой главе, что на стене висит ружье, во второй или третьей главе оно должно непременно выстрелить. А если не будет стрелять, не должно и висеть.»” [“If you say in Act I that there is a gun hanging on the wall, then it is a must that in Act II or III it be fired. And if it won’t be fired, it shouldn’t have been hung there in the first place.”]

And if you point out that we are talking about military strategy and geopolitics, not theater, they then quote Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances…” and believe that it is QED. Now, I happen to agree wholeheartedly with Chekhov, when it comes to dramaturgy, and I agree with the Bard as well, provided we define “the world” as “the world of theater,” from which the worlds of geopolitics and nuclear physics are both dramatically different.

Let me explain it in terms that a drama major would understand. If there is a nuclear bomb hanging on the wall in Act I, then, chances are, it will still be hanging on that wall during the final curtain call. In the meantime, no matter how many other weapons are present on stage during the play, you can be sure that none of them would be used. Or maybe they will be, but then the entire audience would be dead, in which case you should definitely ask for your money back because this was billed as a family-friendly show.

Back in the real world, it is hard to argue that nukes haven’t been useful as deterrents against both conventional and nuclear war. When the Americans dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they only did this because they could do so with complete impunity. Had Japan, or an ally of Japan, possessed nuclear weapons at the time, these attacks would not have taken place. There is a considerable body of opinion that the Americans didn’t nuke Japan in order to secure a victory (the Japanese would have surrendered regardless) but to send a message to Joseph Stalin. Stalin got the message, and Soviet scientists and engineers got cracking.

There was an uncomfortable period, before the USSR successfully tested their first atomic bomb, when the Americans were seriously planning to destroy all major Soviet cities using a nuclear strike, but they set these plans aside because they calculated that they didn’t have enough nukes at the time to keep the Red Army from conquering all of Western Europe in retaliation. But in August 29, 1949, when the USSR tested its first atomic bomb, these plans were set aside—not quite permanently, it would later turn out—because even a singular nuclear detonation as a result of a Soviet response to an American first strike, wiping out, say, New York or Washington, would have been too high a price to pay for destroying Russia.

Since then—continuously except for a period between 2002 and two days ago—the ability of nuclear weapons to deter military aggression has remained unquestioned. There were some challenges along the way, but they were dealt with. The Americans saw it fit to threaten the USSR by placing nuclear missiles in Turkey; in response, the USSR placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Americans didn’t think that was fair, and the result was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Eventually the Americans were prevailed upon to stand down in Turkey, and the Soviets stood down in Cuba. Another threat to the deterrent power of nuclear weapons was the development of anti-ballistic weapons that could shoot down nuclear-tipped missiles (just the ballistic ones; more on that later). But this was widely recognized to be a bad thing, and a major breakthrough came in 1972, when the USA and the USSR signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Over this entire period, the principle that kept the peace was Mutual Assured Destruction: neither side would provoke the other to the point of launching a nuclear strike, because such a move was guaranteed to be suicidal. The two sides were reduced to fighting a series of proxy wars in various countries around the world, which were so much the worse for it, but there was no danger of these proxy conflicts erupting into a full-scale nuclear conflagration.

In the meantime, everybody tried to oppose nuclear proliferation, preventing more countries from obtaining access to nuclear weapons technology—with limited success. The cases where these efforts failed testify to the effective deterrent value of nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein of Iraq didn’t have any “weapons of mass destruction” and ended up hung. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya voluntarily gave up his nuclear program, and ended up tortured to death.

But Pakistan managed to acquire nuclear weapons, and as a result its relations with its traditional nemesis India have become much more polite and cooperative, to the point that in June of 2017 both became full members of Shanghai Cooperation Organization, along with China, Russia and other Eurasian nations. And then North Korea has made some breakthroughs with regard to nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, and as a result of that the US has been reduced to posturing and futile threats against it while South Korea has expressed some newfound respect for its northern neighbor and is now seeking rapprochement.

In 2002 the prospect of continued nuclear deterrence was set a major setback when the US pulled out of the ABM treaty. Russia protested this move, and promised an asymmetrical response. American officials ignored this protest, incorrectly thinking that Russia was finished as a nuclear power. Since then, the Americans spent prodigious amounts of money—well into the trillions of dollars—building a ballistic missile defense system. Their goal was simple: make it possible to launch a first strike on Russia, destroying much of its nuclear arsenal; then use the new American ABM systems to destroy whatever Russia does manage to launch in response. On February 2, 2018 the Americans decided that they were ready, and issued a Nuclear Posture Review in which they explicitly reserved the right to use nuclear weapons to prevent Russia from using its nuclear deterrent.

And then, two days ago, all of that came to a happy end when Vladimir Putin gave a speech in which he unveiled several new weapons systems that completely negate the value of US missile defense shield—among other things. That was the response the Russians promised to deliver when the US pulled out of the ABM treaty in 2002. Now, 16 years later, they are done. Russia has rearmed with new weapons that have rendered the ABM treaty entirely irrelevant.

The ABM treaty was about ballistic missiles—once that are propelled by rockets that boost the missile to close to escape velocity. After that the missile follows a ballistic trajectory—just like an artillery shell or a bullet. That makes its path easy to calculate and the missile easy to intercept. The US missile defense systems rely on the ability to see the missile on radar, calculate its position, direction and velocity, and to launch a missile in response in such a way that the two trajectories intersect. When they cross, the interceptor missile is detonated, knocking out the attacking missile.

None of the new Russian weapons follow ballistic trajectories. The new Sarmat is an ICBM minus the “B”—it maneuvers throughout its flight path and can fly through the atmosphere rather than popping up above it. It has a short boost phase, making it difficult to intercept after launch. It has the range to fly arbitrary paths around the planet—over the south pole, for instance—to reach any point on Earth. And it carries multiple maneuverable hypersonic nuclear-armed reentry vehicles which no existing or planned missile defense system can intercept.

Among other new weapons unveiled two days ago was a nuclear-powered cruise missile which has virtually unlimited range and goes faster than Mach 10, and a nuclear-powered drone submarine which can descend to much larger depths than any existing submarine and moves faster than any existing vessel. There was also a mobile laser cannon in the show, of which very little is known, but they are likely to come in handy when it comes to frying military satellites. All of these are based on physical principles that have never been used before. All of these have passed testing and are going into production; one of them is already being used on active combat duty in the Russian armed forces.

The Russians are now duly proud of their scientists, engineers and soldiers. Their country is safe again; Americans have been stopped in their tracks, their new Nuclear Posture now looking like a severe case of lordosis. This sort of pride is more important than it would seem. Advanced nuclear weapons systems are a bit like secondary sexual characteristics of animals: like the peacock’s tail or the deer’s antlers or the lion’s mane, they are indicative of the health and vigor of a specimen that has plenty of spare energy to expend on showy accessories.

In order to be able to field a hypersonic nuclear-powered cruise missile with unlimited range, a country has to have a healthy scientific community, lots of high-powered engineers, a highly trained professional military and a competent security establishment that can keep the whole thing secret, along with an industrial economy powerful and diverse enough to supply all of the necessary materials, processes and components with zero reliance on imports. Now that the arms race is over, this new confidence and competence can be turned to civilian purposes.

So far, the Western reaction to Putin’s speech has closely followed the illogic of dreams which Sigmund Freud explained using the following joke:

1. I never borrowed a kettle from you
2. I returned it to you unbroken
3. It was already broken when I borrowed it from you.

A more common example is a child’s excuse for not having done her homework: I lost it; my dog ate it; I didn’t know it was assigned.

In this case, Western commentators have offered us the following:

1. There are no such weapons; Putin is bluffing
2. These weapons exist but they don’t really work
3. These weapons work and this is the beginning of a new nuclear arms race

Taking these one at a time:

1. Putin is not known to bluff; he is known for doing exactly what he says he will do. He announced that Russia will deliver an asymmetric response to the US pulling out of the ABM treaty; and now it has.

2. These weapons are a continuation of developments that already existed in the USSR 30 years ago but had been mothballed until 2002. What has changed since then was the development of new materials, which make it possible to build vehicles that fly at above Mach 10, with their skin heating up to 2000ºC, and, of course, dramatic improvements in microelectronics, communications and artificial intelligence. Putin’s statement that the new weapons systems are going into production is an order: they are going into production.

3. Most of Putin’s speech wasn’t about military matters at all. It was about such things as pay increases, roads, hospitals and clinics, kindergartens, nurseries, boosting retirements, providing housing to young families, streamlining the regulation of small businesses, etc. That is the focus of the Russian government for the next six years: dramatically improving the standard of living of the population. The military problem has already been resolved, the arms race has been won, and Russia’s defense budget is being reduced, not increased.

Another line of thought in the West was that Putin unveiled these new weapons, which have been in development for 16 years at least, as part of his reelection campaign (the vote is on March 18). This is absurd. Putin is assured of victory because the vast majority of Russians approve of his leadership. The elections have been about jockeying for a second place position between the Liberal Democrats, led by the old war horse Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Communists, who have nominated a non-communist oligarch businessman Pavel Grudinin, who has promptly disqualified himself by failing to disclose foreign bank accounts and other improprieties and now appears to have gone into hiding. Thus, the Communists, who were previously slated for second place, have burned themselves down and Zhirinovsky will probably come in second. If Americans don’t like Putin, then they definitely wouldn’t like Zhirinovsky. Putin is practical and ambivalent about “our Western partners,” as he likes to call them. Zhirinovsky, on the other hand, is rather revenge-minded, and seems to want to inflict pain on them.

At the same time, there is now a committee, composed of very serious-looking men and women, who are charged with monitoring and thwarting American meddling in Russian politics. It seems unlikely that the CIA, the US State Department and the usual culprits will be able to get away with much in Russia. The age of color revolutions is over, and the regime change train has sailed… all the way back to Washington, where Trump stands a chance of getting dethroned Ukrainian-style.

Another way to look at the Western reaction to Russia’s new weapons is using Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. We already saw denial (Putin is bluffing; weapons don’t work) and the start of anger (new arms race). We should expect a bit more anger before moving on to bargaining (you can have the Ukraine if you stop building Sarmat). Once the response comes back (“You broke the Ukraine; you pay to get it fixed”) we move on to depression (“The Russians just don’t love us any more!”) and, finally, acceptance. Once the stage of acceptance is reached, here is what the Americans can usefully do in response to Russia’s new weapons systems.

First of all, Americans can scrap their ABM systems because they are now useless. Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had this to say about it: «То, что сегодня создаётся в Польше и Румынии, создаётся на Аляске и предполагается к созданию в Южной Корее и Японии — этот “зонтик” противоракетной обороны, получается, “дырявый”. И не знаю, зачем за такие деньги теперь этот “зонтик” им приобретать.» [“What is being built in Poland and Romania, and in Alaska, and is planned in South Korea and Japan—this missile defense ‘umbrella’—turns out to be riddled with holes. I don’t know why they should now buy this ‘umbrella’ for so much money.”]

Secondly, Americans can scrap their aircraft carrier fleet. All it’s useful now for now is threatening defenseless nations, but there are much cheaper ways to threaten defenseless nations. If Americans are still planning to use them to dominate sea lanes and control world trade, then the existence of hypersonic cruise missiles with unlimited range and drone submarines that can lurk at great ocean depths for years make the world’s oceans off-limits for American navy’s battle groups in the event of any major (non-nuclear) escalation because now Russia can destroy them from an arbitrary distance without putting any of their assets or personnel at risk.

Lastly, Americans can pull out of NATO, which has now been shown to be completely useless, dismantle their thousand military bases around the world, and repatriate the troops stationed there. It’s not as if, in light of these new developments, American security guarantees are going to be worth much to anyone, and America’s “allies” will be quick to realize that. As far as Russian security guarantees, there is a lot on offer: unlike the US, which is increasingly seen as a rogue state—and an ineffectual and blundering one at that—Russia has been scrupulous in adhering to its international agreements and international law. In developing and deploying its new weapons systems, Russia has not violated any international agreements, treaties or laws. And Russia has no aggressive plans towards anyone except terrorists. As Putin put it during his speech, «Мы ни на кого не собираемся нападать и что-то отнимать. У нас у самих всё есть.» [“We are not planning to attack anyone or take over anywhere. We have everything we need.”]

I hope that the US doesn’t plan to attack anyone either, because, given its recent history, this won’t work. Threatening the whole planet and forcing it to use the US dollar in international trade (and destroying countries, such as Iraq and Libya, when they refuse); running huge trade deficits with virtually the entire world and forcing reserve banks around the world to buy up US government debt; leveraging that debt to run up colossal budget deficits (now around a trillion dollars a year); and robbing the entire planet by printing money and spending it on various corrupt schemes—that, my friends, has been America’s business plan since around the 1970s. And it is unraveling before our eyes.

I have the audacity to hope that the dismantling of the American Empire will proceed as copacetically as the dismantling of the Soviet Empire did. (This is not to say that it won’t be humiliating or impoverishing, or that it won’t be accompanied by a huge increase in morbidity and mortality.) One of my greatest fears over the past decade was that Russia wouldn’t take the US and NATO seriously enough and just try to wait them out. After all, what is there to really to fear from a nation that has over a 100 trillion dollars in unfunded entitlements, that’s full of opioid addicts, with 100 million working-age people permanently out of work, with decrepit infrastructure and poisoned national politics? And as far as NATO, there is, of course, Germany, which is busy rewriting “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles” to be gender-neutral. What are they supposed to do next? March on Moscow under a rainbow banner and hope that the Russians die laughing? Oh, and there’s also NATO’s largest Eurasian asset, Turkey, which is currently busy slaughtering America’s Kurdish assets in Northern Syria.

But simply waiting them out would have been a gamble, because in its death throes the American Empire could have lashed out in unpredictable ways. I am glad that Russia chose not to gamble with its national security. Now that the US has been safely checkmated using the new Russian weapons systems, I feel that the world is in a much better place. If you like peace, then it seems like your best option is to also like nukes—the best ones possible, ones against which no deterrent exists, and wielded by peaceful, law-abiding nations that have no evil designs on the rest of the planet.

A video interlude again…

Video of American shuttered stores. video 36MB

China does innovate. That’s a fact. Video 28MB

The Future is with China. Video 3MB

Poking the Russian Bear: US-NATO Aggression and Russia’s Red Line

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On November 30th, a report published by Reuters ‘Putin warns Russia will act if NATO crosses its red lines in Ukraine’ said that Putin mentioned what is at stake if NATO expands eastward while they deployed the Aegis Ashore missile defense systems in Poland and Romania:
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The Russian leader, who questioned why NATO had ignored repeated Russian warnings and expanded its military infrastructure eastwards, singled out the deployment in Poland and Romania of the Aegis Ashore missile defence system.  He made it clear he did not want to see the same launch MK41 systems, which Russia has long complained can be used to also launch offensive Tomahawk cruise missiles, in Ukraine.

“Creating such threats (in Ukraine) would be red lines for us. But I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope that a sense of common sense, responsibility for both our countries and the world community will prevail,” said Putin

To make matters worse, US senators from the Republican party submitted a bill that calls for $450 million in military aid to the Ukraine with new sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project. The bill will also label Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism” according to a December 18th report from rt.com, Russia reacts to US ‘state sponsor of terrorism threat’:

On Wednesday, eight American Republican party senators submitted a bill, speculatively titled the ‘GUARD Act’, containing a range of measures designed to support Kiev. The proposed legislation would authorize an additional $450 million in military aid and impose new sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the recently constructed pipeline that will bring Russian gas to Europe through the Baltic Sea, which Ukraine and the US have strongly opposed.

The bill would also officially designate Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism” if Moscow advances militarily on its eastern European neighbor. In recent weeks, American and Ukrainian intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of “aggressive actions” on the border with Ukraine, including troop buildup, and said they suspected a Russian invasion could be in the works

Another important article from rt.com ‘China & Russia are ready to end US dominance of global finance’said that Russia and China are on the way to bypass the US dollar:

A financial partnership between China and Russia, the world’s largest energy importer and the world’s largest energy exporter, is an indispensable instrument for dethroning the petrodollar. In 2015, approximately 90% of trade between Russia and China was settled in dollars, and by 2020, dollar-denominated trade between the two Eurasian giants had almost reduced by half, with only 46% of trade in dollars. Russia has also been leading the way in cutting the share of US dollars in its foreign reserves. The mechanisms for de-dollarizing China-Russia trade are also used to end the use of the greenback with third parties – with advancements being seen in places such as Latin America, Turkey, Iran, India, etc. The US has been pumping out dollars to the entire world for decades, and at some point, the tide will change as the sea of dollars return home with increasingly diminished value

Russia and China has also been working on alternatives to the SWIFT system:

The SWIFT system for financial transactions between banks worldwide was previously the only system for international payments. This central role for SWIFT began to erode when the US used it as a political weapon. The Americans first expelled Iran and North Korea, and in 2014, Washington began threatening to expel Russia from the system as well. Over the past few weeks, the threat of using SWIFT as a weapon against Russia has intensified. 

China has responded by creating CIPS and Russia developed SPFS, both being alternatives to SWIFT. Even several other European countries have banded together with an alternative to SWIFT to curb Washington’s extra-territorial jurisdiction and thus continue trading with Iran. A new China-Russia financial architecture should integrate CIPS and SPFS, and make them more available to third parties. If the US expels Russia, then the decoupling from SWIFT would intensify further 

The US wants its dollar to remain king by any means necessary. One of the main reasons Washington went to war with Iraq was not only about oil, it was because Saddam Hussein had switched from selling oil in US dollars to accepting payments in Euros as retribution for US sanctions. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered by US-backed forces because he was creating an alternative currency which was a gold-backed African  dinar to replace U.S. dollars and Euros in the African continent.

A recent press conference, the US president and liberal war hawk, Joe Biden was asked about what consequences Russia would face if they invaded Ukraine’s territory. The liberal cheerleaders for war at CNN have been reporting what US and European leaders have been up to in regards to planning harsh sanctions on Russia because it’s President, Vladimir Putin  is misbehaving, therefore punishment must be served by the American empire, So how dare you Vlad for wanting to protect your country!, “the kinds of costs the US and European allies are discussing for Russia are “designed to be implemented very, very fast,” the official said, without detailing what those measures would be. “That is partly why we have chosen the measures that we are working on.” One of their actions is most likely to cut Russia off the Swift payment system since the US dollar is still the world’s reserve currency for the moment.  “The Biden administration has repeatedly said there will be severe economic consequences. Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan also made clear last week there will be further US defensive military support for Ukraine as well as US support for NATO countries on the eastern flank of Russia invades Ukraine”, continued:

I’ve made it absolutely clear to President Putin,” Biden said. “If he moves on Ukraine, the economic consequences for his economy are going to be devastating. Devastating, number one. Number two, we will find it required that we’ll have to send more American and NATO troops into the Eastern Flank, the (Bucharest) 9, all those NATO countries where we have a sacred obligation to defend them against any attack by Russia. And number three, the impact of all of that on Russia and his attitude, the rest of the world, his view of Russia would change markedly. He’ll pay a terrible price

In early December, rt.com also has been documenting what’s been happening with the Ukraine’s decision to recklessly build-up its troop levels in the Donbass region which is a clear threat to Russia’s security concerns:

Ukraine has now stationed well over 100,000 troops and large quantities of hardware in the war-torn Donbass region, the Russian Foreign Ministry alleged on Wednesday morning, amid rising tensions.  Speaking at a briefing on Wednesday, diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that “the Armed Forces of Ukraine are increasing [their] military force, pulling heavy equipment and personnel.”

“According to some reports, the number of troops… in the conflict zone already reaches 125,000 people, and this, if anyone does not know, is half of the entire composition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” she said.  Zakharova also condemned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for submitting a bill to the national parliament that would allow units from foreign armed forces to enter the country as part of multinational exercises next year.  According to her, such a move directly contradicts the Minsk agreement, signed in 2014 in a bid to end the fighting between Kiev’s forces and troops loyal to two self-declared breakaway republics

What’s even more dangerous is the talk of a first-strike option with nuclear weapons against Russia by Mississippi’s high-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Roger Wicker as reported by FOX news:

Sen. Wicker made the startling comment during an on-air interview where he was asked about the escalating situation abroad. Wicker, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he is ruling nothing out as a potential response to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty against Russia and its leader, President Vladimir Putin.  “I would not rule out American troops on the ground,” Wicker said, adding, that “We don’t rule out first-use nuclear action”

Let’s make something clear, if the US and Europe are considering a war against Russia through Ukraine, it can escalate into another nuclear standoff reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.

Russia is well-prepared for an all-out war with the west because they know that the American empire will not quit until they submit to Washington’s demands.  Russia is ready, they learned a long-time ago when they were the former Soviet Union during World War II when more than 27 million Russian civilians and soldiers lost their lives fighting Nazi Germany within their borders.  Washington is backing Ukraine’s aggressive behavior which will bring them closer to war with Russia.  Although I believe cooler heads will prevail, anything at this point in time can happen with an out of control empire worried about losing their control over the planet.  The US has its back against the wall, the question is what will they do knowing that Russia and China have the military capabilities including their new hypersonic missiles that can hit the US mainland at anytime.

The US-NATO forces would not prevail on a multi-front war with Russia and China, they should have learned a lesson in Afghanistan with the Taliban who had by far, a less-developed fighting force than Russia or China but had managed to defeat US-NATO forces after 20 years of conflict.  Washington and the Pentagon knows deep down that defeating Russia, China and the rest of their adversaries will be a difficult mission, but it seems that the psychopaths in Washington and Brussels live in a fantasy land and believe they can win this coming war.  Let’s hope it don’t get that far because it would be disastrous for the entire world.

END OF PART 2

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 2

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Russian commentaries on the collapsing United States (with some MM commentary as well) 1 of 3

One of the things that I really love about China is the speed and convenience of everything. Facial recognition, QR scans and payments, instant thermal scans and observation, not to mention the zero fees on all financial transactions. It’s really a fiscal paradise.

By big treat is to open up wechat, scan my local supermarket for sales on wine, and then face scan to pay and in ten minutes it’s delivered to my door stop. That would NEVER happen in the USA. Never.

But I do miss some things. Don’t you know.

I will tell you all that I truly miss an original “New York Style” pizza. You just cannot get it anywhere outside of the USA. And when I read the sad, sad news that the price of a slice is going to increase, well I must tell you, it caused a dark pit to form in my stomach.

Such is change.

What’s the matter with the moronic “leadership” in Washington DC today? Can’t they “get it”? You spend like crazy and eventually you and your families are substantially devalued. Your lifestyle decreases, and the value of the cash in your wallet turns to dust. Or maybe slime. Ooozy slime.

Pizza.

What’s the matter with these morons?

New York style pizza slice.

Long time MM readers will understand about the current Geo-political situation. As of December 2021, both Russia and China has had enough of the United States efforts to start world War III, and so they laid down terms.

China was first with “red lines” which America pretty much ignored, followed by Russia which laid down ultimatums.

People (!) facts need to be stated. Russia and China would not do this unless they had a firm “check mate” on the tarmac and ready to go.

Yikes!

This article consists of a bunch of articles from China and Russia concerning the Geo-political scene. It consists of some articles dating as far back as 2017 (at the start of the Trump presidency) and  includes others that are more recent.

This is part 1 of three parts.

All in all, you can plainly see that the rest of the world considers the collapsing American government to be ruled by absolute idiots that need to be “put to sleep” (which is a eutheism that means killed humanely) lest a global conflagration engulfs the world and destroys everything.

I post it here because of some insanity comments out of the United States on MM here.  Somehow one or two of my articles got passed around some American Conservative websites that the comments reflected a Hal Turner, Rush Limbaugh (dead) and FOX “news” viewpoint. Totally unaware of where they are, or what this site represents. They just skim read, skim comment, and depart.

The mind control apparatus is really in full swing there. And the people are just spouting insane nonsense.

So here is what the rest of the world is saying about the USA. No “America is not back” It’s dying…

The U.S. doesn’t have diplomats any more. Their foreign policy is “steal it, kill those who resist”. 

Of course there will be no negotiation. 

In any meeting they will do what they do best: use many words and try to confuse whoever is in the room, all the while watching for an opportunity to steal something.

Russia knows this. I’ve got my popcorn ready.

-Patrick

But before we get to the Geo-political nonsense, let’s talk about pizza.

I mean to say, I wonder if the “leadership” of the United States, in their quest to (so called) defend “democracy” actually eating pizza. I suspect that they are way too busy having their servants cook healthy and delicious foods such as steak and caviar for them instead of eating the kinds of food that us “normal’s” eat.

I just cannot picture Blinkedin eating a Big Mac. Can you?

Here’s a homemade attempt at a New York Style pizza. ‘ll bet that the elites in Washington DC doesn’t even know what this actually is…

Well, I’ll tell you what…

These Jack-asses in the “leadership” roles inside of the “United States” are morons and are so disconnected from reality that I sincerely and truly doubt that they know the difference between a Big Mac and a Whopper. As I really doubt it. Truth this!

Big Mac

And a whopper…

Whopper

Sigh.

They are probably too busy drinking their Chardonnay and eating their escargot to worry about how their actions influence the rest of the world. Well, boys and girls, a day of reckoning is fast approaching. Don’t you all know.

Washington Prepares to Fail in Ukraine

This chapter will not end well for President Biden or Washington’s political class.

It’s an indisputable fact: Washington leads the world in self-delusion.

Washington’s political class is poised to march into a hurricane of its own making in Ukraine, a perfect storm of foreign- and defense-policy blunders likely to plunge the American people into future crises and conflicts. Having refused to acknowledge Russia’s vital strategic interest in Ukraine, Washington now wants to subject Ukraine and the NATO alliance to a dangerous and unnecessary test by confronting Russian conventional military power. In turn, Washington and its allies now face a test—one that they could have avoided but are now likely to fail. First, the facts.

The Biden administration is spending $768.2 billion for national defense. Russia spends only $42.1 billion, less than the $48 billion spent by the Republic of Korea. Yet Russian ground forces are superior in capability and striking power to the U.S. Army and Marines, even if both countries’ ground forces were able to deploy to Ukraine.

Russia’s conventional-ground-force superiority stems, in part, from the strategic advantage of fighting close to Russia. Its potency is also a reflection of President Vladimir Putin’s insistence on fundamental defense reform and reorganization. The reform process involved years of struggle to expel old generals who resisted change and install new, resolute fighting forces, composed of young, single men with a profound sense of Russian patriotism and toughness. The policy has resulted in an operationally flexible grouping of smaller capability-based Russian fighting formations, designed to ruthlessly exploit the striking power of Russia’s rocket artillery, tactical ballistic missiles, and loitering munitions.

Far to the west and behind the Polish border sits an awkward collection of U.S. Army and NATO Ground Forces that, despite decades of cooperation, are still challenged to fight effectively as one force. In the last 20 years of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of America’s allies seldom had anything to contribute to our efforts, save a flag and inexperienced troops who were forced to operate under political restrictions. Thus, like the U.S. Army that leads them, the allied ground forces cling to the illusion that NATO can fight future conflicts on land the way Anglo-American allies did during World War II—with large, densely packed divisions, corps, and armies. These are lucrative targets for Russian strike formations.

Additionally, institutional policies to impose diversity and inclusion on the U.S. Armed Forces at the expense of demonstrated character, competence, and intelligence, demoralize our troops. As a result, the dedication, cohesion, and pride of achievement required to sustain America’s professional fighting force have been seriously damaged.

The implications are clear: A U.S.-Russian confrontation in Eastern Ukraine could easily resemble the 1940 Anglo-French experience, with the Wehrmacht provoking a serious backlash at home. Supply-chain bottlenecks, consumer-goods inflation, and soaring energy costs could all worsen if events in Ukraine spiral out of control. As more and more Americans wake up to falling standards of living, how will they react to yet another war for suspicious aims that have absolutely nothing to do with their own vital strategic interests, and make their daily lives even harder?

Reality is sitting on Ukraine’s eastern border, not in the South China Sea or in the strait of Taiwan, and there is ostensibly nothing Washington can do about it. The questions that should concern Washington’s political class are: Will NATO survive its ignominious retreat in the face of superior Russian military power? And, why is Washington conducting policy not from strength, but from weakness—a weakness thus far disguised by the outward show of military power against weak opponents without armies, air defenses, or air forces?

Nietzsche said, “War makes the victor stupid.” After 1991, America’s senior military and political leaders found many reasons to spend enormous sums on defense, but no reason to change the way U.S. forces fight, or to devise a national military strategy tied to tangible, concrete interests and the preservation of American national power.

As John Kenneth Galbraith warned, “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right.”

Washington’s corrupt and morally bankrupt leaders are walking into a minefield. If they embroil U.S. and allied forces in Ukraine, extraordinary discontent at home and abroad awaits them. However, like so many privileged classes before them, the Biden administration may prefer “complete destruction” rather than acknowledge that its most cherished beliefs are utter delusions. It’s safe to say that whatever happens in Ukraine, this chapter will not end well for President Biden or Washington’s political class.

Here’s a video!

America’s spending priorities are all fucked up! video 8MB

Insanity.
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And it is, don’t you know.
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Let’s talk about reality…

While the American elite oligarchy are busy eating their fine delicious foods, indulging in fun pursuits, the rest of America suffers. Their solution? To destroy the rest of the world for personal profit. And let the American citizens waste away in what ever conditions that remain. video 3MB.

The TRUE face of America.

As a German I am not happy at all. 

The MSM here is fiercely propagating the “Russia,China-bad, EU/USA/UK-good” narrative. 

They employ the usual agitprop techniques: the enemy has to be personified and then demonized, the ally generalized and blessed. And thus it’s almost always Putin, and almost always the USA, the EU etc.
Other techniques include not telling full stories, of which Ukraine is the best example. There is ZERO mentioning of UKR being a de-facto Neonazi Junta.
And so on and forth.
I am actually deeply afraid that our leaders gave “simply gone insane” and believe that the usual MO will continue forever. 

That is exploitation and gradual erosion of other countries to supply the locust-capitalism of the USA-dominated world. My parents believed in socialism of the GDR. It’s good that they are dead already. 

-Darkmoon

Sad. So sad.

Shocking facts and statistics about how corrupt the US economy has become.

This article from our archives was first published on RI in December 2018

Editor's Note: This is manifestly true in telecommunications as amply demonstrated in Thursday's article: Russia: $10/Month for Superfast Broadband, in US $70 for Slower Speeds - Survey of 195 Countries. At America's tech leader and having the biggest economy, cellular and internet access should be the cheapest in the world, instead it is the most expensive, and it doesn't work as well. Another article the same day addresses the problem from a different perspective - Conservatives have swallowed the (((free trade))) ideology hook, line, and sinker: Conservatives' Obsession With Free Markets Is Foolish, and Not at all Conservative.

Vibrant competition is absolutely essential in order for a capitalist economic system to function effectively.  Unfortunately, in the United States today we are witnessing the death of competition in industry after industry as the biggest corporations increasingly gobble up all of their competitors.

John D. Rockefeller famously once said that “competition is a sin”, and he was one of America’s very first oligopolists.  According to Google, an oligopoly is “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers”, and that is a perfect description of the current state of affairs in many major industries.  In early America, corporations were greatly limited in scope, and in most instances they were only supposed to exist temporarily.  But today the largest corporations have become so huge that they literally dominate our entire society, and that is not good for any of us.

Just look at what is happening in the airline industry.  When I was growing up, there were literally dozens of airlines, but now four major corporations control everything and they have been making gigantic profits

AMERICA’S airlines used to be famous for two things: terrible service and worse finances. Today flyers still endure hidden fees, late flights, bruised knees, clapped-out fittings and sub-par food. Yet airlines now make juicy profits. Scheduled passenger airlines reported an after-tax net profit of $15.5bn in 2017, up from $14bn in 2016.

What is true of the airline industry is increasingly true of America’s economy. Profits have risen in most rich countries over the past ten years but the increase has been biggest for American firms. Coupled with an increasing concentration of ownership, this means the fruits of economic growth are being monopolised.

If you don’t like how an airline is treating you, in some cases you can choose to fly with someone else next time.

But as a recent Bloomberg article pointed out, that is becoming increasingly difficult to do…

United, for example, dominates many of the country’s largest airports. In Houston, United has around a 60 percent market share, in Newark 51 percent, in Washington Dulles 43 percent, in San Francisco 38 percent and in Chicago 31 percent. This situation is even more skewed for other airlines. For example, Delta has an 80 percent market share in Atlanta. For many routes, you simply have no choice.

And of course the airline industry is far from alone.  In sector after sector, economic power is becoming concentrated in just a few hands.

For a moment, I would like you to consider these numbers

  • Five banks control about half of the nation’s banking assets.
  • Many states have health insurance markets where the top two insurers have an 80 percent to 90 percent market share. For example, in Alabama one company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, has an 84 percent market share and in Hawaii it has 65 percent market share.
  • When it comes to high-speed Internet access, almost all markets are local monopolies; over 75 percent of households have no choice with only one provider.
  • Four players control the entire U.S. beef market and have carved up the country.

    After two mergers this year, three companies will control 70 percent of the world’s pesticide market and 80 percent of the U.S. corn-seed market.

I knew that things were bad, but I didn’t know that they were that bad.

Capitalism works best when competition is maximized.

In socialist systems, the government itself becomes a major player in the game, and that is never a desirable outcome.  Instead, what we want is for the government to serve as a “referee” that enforces rules that encourage free and fair competition.  Jonathan Tepper, the author of “The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition”, made this point very well in an excerpt from his new book

Capitalism is a game where competitors play by rules on which everyone agrees. The government is the referee, and just as you need a referee and a set of agreed rules for a good basketball game, you need rules to promote competition in the economy.

Left to their own devices, firms will use any available means to crush their rivals. Today, the state, as referee, has not enforced rules that would increase competition, and through regulatory capture has created rules that limit competition.

Our founders were very suspicious of large concentrations of power.  That is why they wanted a very limited federal government, and that is also why they put substantial restrictions on corporate entities.

When power is greatly concentrated, most of the rewards tend to flow to the very top of the pyramid, and that is precisely what we have been witnessing.  The following comes from the New York Times

Even when economic growth has been decent, as it is now, most of the bounty has flowed to the top. Median weekly earnings have grown a miserly 0.1 percent a year since 1979. The typical American family today has a lower net worththan the typical family did 20 years ago. Life expectancy, shockingly, has fallen this decade.

So what is the solution?

Well, one of the big things that we need to do is to stop crushing small business.

In America today, the rate of small business creation has been hovering near all-time lows and the percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has been hovering near all-time lows.

In order for more competition to exist, we need more competitors to enter the marketplace, but instead we have been crushing “the little guy” with mountains of regulations and deeply oppressive taxes.

And you know what?

Many of the big corporations actually like all of the red tape because they know that they can handle it much easier than their much smaller competitors can.  That gives them a competitive advantage, and it creates a barrier to entry that is difficult to overcome.

When I was in school, I was taught that one of the reasons why the U.S. system was so much better than communist systems was because we had so many more choices.

But today our choices are very limited in industry after industry, and the gigantic corporate entities that dominate everything don’t really care if we like it or not.

We can do so much better than this, but in order to do so we must return to the values and principles that this nation was originally founded upon.

My suggestion is give the US 8 hours to evacuate Diego Garcia and then turn it to glass.
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Two birds with one stone.Its vital for the Empire who displaced the natives and far from any population centers. 

-Winston

Yah. More American fiasco…

Video 4.2mB

Yuppur. No question about that.

Laurent  on December 29, 2021  ·  at 3:20 pm EST/EDT 

Too many people in the west simply can not grasp the reality of the current world and simply refuse to negociate and to find an acceptable compromise.
Western rulers greatly overestimate their strength. This wrong assessment create two main problems: firstly they think Russia China Iran are bluffing (in their minds nobody is ready to fight them because of how strong they think they are) and if they are not bluffing then they are strong enough to win in any scenario (again because of how strong they think they are).

Ukraine is saying they and the west are ready to confront Russia militarily (words from the ukrainian ambassador to the US). The EU is saying that russian proposals are unacceptable and the pentagon deployed an aircraft carrier to deter Russia. It’s laughable but the pentagon did it anyway. It’s hard to expect something rational from people so detached from reality. Just look at the energy policy in the EU. It’s a catastrophe but they implement their policy anyway no matter the consequences. Now the EU wants to simply forbid any long term gas contract with Gazprom which means things are going te become even worse soon because Gazprom can not deliver enough gas without long term contracts which means without predictability.

We are basically in the scenario I talked about a few days ago: confronting Russia to regime change or break the country with “sanctions from hell” or worse to isolate China to then to start confronting China even more with Iran somewhere in between. I think that’s how the western hardliners decided to proceed. Their plan is based on the false assumption that first Russia has a weak economy and second that Russia is bluffing. I even think that when Russia will start to act unilaterally turning on the “pain dial” instead of getting the hardliners back to their senses the hardliners will go crazy talking about “Russian threat” and “Russian aggression” and they will use that to escalate more quickly. The war propaganda from western MSM will play a key role here.

Their are only two positive news. Firstly biden and putin will have a phone call tomorrow. Maybe things are not as bad as I think they are and a reasonable compromise will be achieved. I think anyone with a rational mind supports this scenario. Secondly the new S-550 mobile strategic missile defense system seems ready for deployment much sooner than expected and the system should be capable of striking spacecraft, warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles and hypersonic targets.

Do you know what this all reminds me of…

Yuppur.

No question about it at all. Roller Disco.

Roller Disco.

Roller Disco.

Don’t ask me why.

Is should be obvious to most aware and thinking people. Who understand Jimmy Carter and the “Russian Menace”. Roller Disco was popular during the Sunset years of the Russian Empire. Just like Tictok is popular during the Sunset Years of the American Empire.

Which brings me up to…

US and NATO Nuclear Lunacy Still Raving

While Civil Society and a global movement work steadfastly across dozens of fields for the abolition of nuclear weapons, planning, preparations, and rehearsals for attacks using deployed H-bombs and nuclear missiles are routine in the US military and NATO. Two years ago, the US Joint Chief of Staff published online, then quickly deleted, its thermonuclear mass destruction titled “Nuclear Operations, Joint Publication 3-72.”

Before the Joint Chiefs took it down, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists managed to preserve a copy. The manual relies on abstractions and euphemism to depict the unthinkable. It says,

“The employment of nuclear weapons could have a significant influence on ground operations.”

Of course “employment” means detonation, and “significant influence” means searing fireballs, vaporized victims, blast and shock-wave devastation, demolished hospitals and schools, vast firestorms, and permanent radioactive contamination of water, soil, and the food chain.

The manual explains that nuclear attacks create “conditions” without describing them.

It says,

“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability.”

Then, as if US presidents had never said,

“Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,”
the report pretends it can and should. 

“[T]he use of a nuclear weapon will…create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.”

US nuclear war practice takes place routinely with allied European militaries. “Steadfast Noon” is NATO’s code name for its annual nuclear attack practice, and Hans Kristensen reports for the Federation of American Scientists that,

 “This is the exercise that practices NATO’s nuclear strike mission with the B61 … nuclear bombs the US deploys in Europe.”

Jan Merička wrote in European Security Journal News Oct. 19, 2017, that Steadfast Noon is designed

“to simulate nuclear strikes…and was conducted from the Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium and Büchel Air Base in Germany, where US B61 thermonuclear bombs with the force of up to 340 kilotons of TNT are stored.” (FYI: Hiroshima was incinerated with a 15 kiloton US bomb.)

To illustrate the Pentagon’s ho-hum acceptance of mass destruction, it recently opened in Omaha its new, $1.3 billion Strategic Command headquarters for supervising and targeting the nuclear arsenal, and it named the building after General Curtis LeMay, who, the Omaha World Herald reported, designed and conducted the incendiary bombing of 60 Japanese cities at the end of WWII, bombing that “incinerated entire cities” killing as many as 900,000 civilians.

General LeMay’s motto and that of Strategic Command used to be “Death from Above,” but after the war it was changed to “Peace is Our Profession.”

In Germany, readiness for attacks with nuclear weapons is maintained by the USAF 702nd Munitions Support Squadron, which tends to Germany’s 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing at Büchel Air Force Base.

Headlines from last October’s bombing “theater” included, and …

  • “NATO Holds Secret Nuclear War Exercises in Germany,”
  • “German Air Force training for nuclear war as part of NATO;”

And from 2017,

  • “NATO nuclear weapons exercise unusually open”;

And in 2015,

  • “NATO nuclear weapons exercise Steadfast Noon in Büchel.”

While the uninitiated might be aghast, the US military plans and prepares all year round for nuclear attacks at its far-flung “Defense Nuclear Weapons School” of the Air Force Nuclear College.

According to the school’s website, one branch (of “Armageddon Academy”) is at the Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, the largest US military base outside the country. Other branches are in New Mexico, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Ohio. Outlines for this school’s ghoulish courses can been read online. (The site may have been altered since I first reported on it in last June.) For example, the school says boastfully that it…

“is responsible for delivering, sustaining and supporting air-delivered nuclear weapon systems for our warfighters … every day.”

Course outlines on the website include,

“Theater Nuclear Operations, a 4.5-day course that provides training for planners, support staff, targeteers, and staff nuclear planners for joint operations and targeting. 

The course provides an overview of nuclear weapon design, capabilities, and effects…. 

Objectives: …Understand the US nuclear planning and execution process; 

Understand the targeting effects of nuclear weapon employment.” 

Another class is, “Integrated Munitions Effects Assessment … a five-day course that provides students … proficiency in creating target models, developing attack plans using … nuclear weapons….” 

Students “will be able to import, edit, and modify target sites”, “Calculate probabilistic attacks against predefined targets; [and] develop attack plans using … nuclear weapons.…”

I am of the mind that setting the stage for nuclear attacks is both criminal and insane. Luckily, millions of people are involved in the newly invigorated movement to rid the world of such madness, via the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Read it sometime. At least you will have, unlike the American “leadership”..

Jose Garcia  on December 29, 2021  ·  at 2:54 pm EST/EDT 

I’ve seen better clown shows when I went to a PT Barnum and Bailey circus. This is beyond ridiculous. It’s more a symptom of insanity than anything else

A video interlude…

Did you all realize that throughout China, the school children are being trained on how to handle mass causalities, provide CPR and perform field triage? Yes, it is so, these are extra courses in additional to the military training that all school children get. video 36MB

The only language Americans really understand is this: to get a taste of their own medicine.

Until Americans are fearful of being bombed back to the Stone Age--just as America routinely bombs other nations around the world--the United Snakes of America will continue to do what it does best: lie, cheat, steal, exploit, bomb, invade, rape, and colonize with impunity as it has done since 1776.

Posted by: ak74 | Dec 30 2021 18:31 utc | 10

The West Resembles a Decapitated Rooster, Wings Still Flapping, Barely Flying

"Democratic elections are but a recent innovation, and a most uncertain one. For instance, during the 2016 election in the US, the establishment trotted out an entire array of craven, feckless, corrupt opportunists, and Trump knocked them all out with a feather ..."
This article from our archives was first published on RI in November 2018

When I was five and spending the summer in a small village a couple of time zones east of Moscow I witnessed the execution of a rooster. My brother and I walked over to a neighbor’s house to pick up some eggs. Just as we arrived the neighbor finally caught the rooster and chopped his head of.

The now headless rooster then put on quite an aerobatic performance that was quite amazing. After doing an unlimited takeoff he repeatedly soared and plummeted, executed several touch-and-gos (more like crash-and-goes, actually) and was undeterred by what previously would have been head-on collisions. I was by then quite familiar with the poor aerodynamic qualities of barnyard fowl and was duly impressed with the energetic and breathtakingly erratic behavior of a bird liberated from the mental straitjacket of its brain. Unfortunately, the performance only lasted for a minute or so. A word to the wise: I later learned that it is possible to prolong the show, should the need ever arise, by heating up the hatchet so as to cauterize the severed neck. More recently, I have learned that such sans-têteaerobatics are not restricted to chickens.

Figurative birds, of the mechanical variety, can exhibit something similar. A prime example is the greatest boondoggle in the history of military aviation, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It too is liable to losing its head, in the sense of the pilot blacking out. In addition to being ridiculously expensive (over $1.5 trillion in projected project costs) and plagued with problems (only half of the built planes are considered ready for any sort of mission and there are over a thousand known defects that haven’t been fixed, including ones that make it useless for air-to-air combat or ground support) F-35 pilots often report feeling sick and there have been many incidents where they lost consciousness, probably due to oxygen starvation and circulation problems.

In response, the fatally flawed jet’s maker Lockheed Martin, whose motto seems to be “One boondoggle deserves another,” has decided to add a subsystem. Called Auto-GCAS (for Ground Collision Avoidance System), it takes over automatically if it detects the danger of ground collision and the pilot fails to respond to the alarm and take corrective action. Auto-GCAS then throttles up and directs the plane upward, pulling a maximum of five g’s. What does that do to a pilot who is already feeling sick or is unconscious? Once a safe altitude is reached, the plane levels out and Auto-GCAS shuts off. If the pilot happens to be offline for good, the process repeats until the plane runs out of fuel and crashes. I hope that you are impressed with the sheer brilliance of the plan. A show designed to impress was recently staged at an airfield in Utah, where 35 F-35s took off, one right after the other. It has not been independently verified how many of them landed. Auto-GCAS is slated to be ready for use by 2024, but Pentagon’s planners are hoping to accelerate the process.

All of this made me wonder about the general behavior to be expected of hierarchically organized, centrally controlled systems once they are deprived of their control module. Auto-GCAS is by no means the worst case. For instance, there is the Russian Perimetr system, a.k.a. Dead Hand. If it detects that the Russian military leadership has been incapacitated by a nuclear strike, it will launch an all-out nuclear attack, obliterating the aggressor. This may seem like a really bad plan, but then attacking Russia is a really bad plan too, and one bad plan deserves another.

What makes this plan bad is that it doesn’t elicit the right response. The right response is: “Oh, we see, attacking Russia is sheer suicide, so let’s not do that.” But where’s the money in not planning to attack Russia? And so instead the “One boondoggle deserves another” crew sets forth to build anti-ballistic missile systems (which don’t work) and deep underground bomb shelters stocked with years’ worth of supplies (which is gold-plating; a large shallow grave to jump into when the time comes would work just as well).

And yet as far as planning for decapitation goes, Dead Hand is state of the art. Most other large-scale centrally controlled systems are woefully unprepared for the loss of their command modules. For instance, look at finance. After the financial collapse of 2008 it quickly became obvious that nobody competent or responsible was in charge.

The “solution” was for central banks to start blowing financial bubbles by zeroing out interest rates and flooding the world with new debt. Debt that expands much faster than the economy is garbage debt, and it gave rise to various other kinds of garbage: garbage energy from shale and tar sands, garbage money in the form of cryptocurrencies, garbage real estate investment schemes, garbage corporate balance sheets bloated with debt used up in stock buybacks, a large crop of garbage oligarchs gorging themselves on all of this garbage “wealth” and much else. Things look good while all this garbage is packaged up in financial bubbles, but once they pop (and as all children know all bubbles pop eventually) everyone will end up wearing the garbage.

There are plenty of examples of political auto-decapitation as well. In the US, Trump realized that he can become president simply by insulting all of his competitors (who richly deserved such treatment) and so he did. But now the hive mind of Washington is deeply at odds with the bumblebee-mind of Trump, and neither qualifies as any sort of a head, except perhaps in a strictly symbolic sense. Things are no better in Europe. In the UK, an anti-Brexit team is in charge of negotiating Brexit, struggling to make it as anti-Brexit a Brexit as possible.

That doesn’t seem like any sort of “headedness.” In Germany, Merkel is on her way out, and her replacement has the unenviable task of hammering together a governing coalition out of parties that are too busy knocking heads with each other. The multi-headed bureaucratic hydra in Brussels is not exactly popular with anyone. What is the recourse? Emperor Macron of France, perhaps? Is Europe ready to be headed by a diacritical character? (A macron is a horizontal line you place over vowel letters to represent a long vowel: Mācron.)

There are systems that are properly headless: flocks of birds, schools of fish, communes of anarchists, etc. They are anarchically structured and individuals within them take on temporary, task-based leadership roles as the situation demands and can only expect to be obeyed in accordance with their competence in executing the tasks.

But most of the human systems we have are hierarchically structured and require to be headed by someone. Democratic elections are but a recent innovation, and a most uncertain one. For instance, during the 2016 election in the US, the establishment trotted out an entire array of craven, feckless, corrupt opportunists, and Trump knocked them all out with a feather, not because he is any sort of proper leader, but because it was so easy.

For an even more amazing example of democratic failure, look at today’s Ukraine—the most recent experiment in Western democracy. There, a constitutionally elected, though remarkably corrupt and indecisive president was violently overthrown in 2014 in a US-managed coup and replaced with an American puppet so unpopular that yesterday he was forced to introduce martial law—just in order to be able to cancel the elections scheduled in three months and to remain in office de facto.

To produce a rationale for declaring martial law he sent some small boats on a truly idiotic mission. The boats sailed into a Russian-controlled high traffic zone in the Black Sea, refused to respond when hailed and then pointed weapons at Russian border patrol. For this they were duly arrested and hauled off to jail, and their boats confiscated. Previously, an ongoing civil war instigated by this same president resulted in some fifty thousand casualties, but no martial law was ever deemed necessary. What’s different now? Oh, the elections, of course!

If these are the fruits of democracy, perhaps the Ukrainians should consider going back to a monarchy. Dynastic succession has worked much better and for much longer periods of time. For instance, at the time of its annexation by Russia in 1783, Crimea was ruled by Shahin Girei, a descendant of Genghis Khan who was born around 1155.

That one dynasty, spanning 628 years, ruled the largest empire that ever was. At one point it included all of China, most of Russia, Korea, Persia and India, plus many lands in between. Genghis had decreed that no part of the Mongol Empire could be ruled by anyone who wasn’t a direct descendant of his, and so it was.

The Mongol Empire ended peacefully, with Shahin Girei abdicating his throne and accepting protection from Catherine the Great. Maybe that’s the plan, then: install a Ukrainian Emperor and immediately have him abdicate his throne and accept protection from Putin the Great. Then Putin will turn the heat and the hot water back on, the armed thugs will be marched off to someplace safe for disarming and de-thugging, and the nuke plants will stop breaking down.

Since we seem to be headed (no pun intended) for unstable and disrupted times, it bears pointing out that while democracy may be very nice when everything is going along according to plan, it is not particularly resilient in the face of severe disruption. And what is the plan now—in the US, or in the EU (or what will be left of it)?

We have some truly ghastly examples of the fruits of democracy in the form of the Weimar Republic in Germany or the Interim Government between February and October of 1917 in Russia. If you don’t fancy being ruled by headless chickens, consider picking a leader using whatever ad hoc procedure that works.

The idea is to avoid any more Robespierrian Reigns of Terror, Reichstag fires or October Revolutions—because we already know what those are like.

Another video interlude…

China is not Afghanistan. Any one who thinks so is a fucking idiot. video 3.2MB

China is not Syria. Anyone who thinks so is a fucking idiot. video 4MB

I have been watching the shitshow since Kosovo, more intensely so since Libya. I did my time in the US Marines in the early to mid 1980´s (helos) and was mentored by people with trigger time since WWII in various places around the world. They served both as enlisted and as officers, in different branches of service. I can offer a few perspectives, as somebody who just watched it all pass by, without any affiliation to current people whom are official. I kind of like it that way, because I learn about what is going on through a process which seems to be natural and holisitic, cheerleadering for no one side out of hand. Overall, I want more peace and less absolutely useless violence.

The Russians: in a nutshell they are very tightly wired. Their comportment during the heavy fighting in Syria said it all. They were absolutely professional, orderly and courageous. I could not believe what I was observing upon watching footage of Russian attack helicopter pilots engaging heavily defended targets, at extremely close range, over and over again. Their officers fought and died over there while leading, with barely a whimper. There is a reason why people fear the Russian military now and it is a sound position and appreciation of them in my book. They are not playing. This is also reflected in their political leardership at this point, which is exceptionally clear eyed.

The U.S.: The officer corps is a mess, thinking it is just a career path. They never tell it straight, are almost always worried about appearances and they ability to drive ships in the 7th fleet is a good place to start with for examples of this. The personnel themselves can be formidable but, the politics has probably made that completely impossible. Political leadership, coupled with extremely poor intelligence capacity and outright conceit at the decision making level has lead to one surprize after another. Weapons development and procurement has been used as if it´s only purpose was large scale theft. The biggest problems by far are they act as if nobody has any idea what they are doing or just can´t see where the are going …….. while at the same time relying on plans and direction from people who are cowards and are not prepared to sustain a good old fashioned paper cut.

You know, backing off and picking a new direction could be good for everybody. peace can help. Punks like Gloria and Hillary and that ilk in general are dragging us into an inferno. Russia will start removing pieces from the chess board with lighting speed and very soon, if they are not heeded. The party is over, the police are on the scene, my advice is go home and give it a rest. Fix our shcools and road systems, it is much safer and beneficial.

My take, thank you for letting me post it.

-John

Another video interlude…

China is not Vietnam. Anyone who thinks it is is an idiot. video 2MB

China is not Yemen. Anyone who thinks so is an idiot. video 3.4MB

NATO Preparing for Large-scale, High-intensity Armed Conflict with Russia?

 

We are at a Dangerous Crossroads in the History of Humanity.  

Rick Rozoff provides us with a selection of excerpts from major Russian media sources pertaining to the Russia- US/NATO confrontation on Russia’s Western border with Ukraine.

 The objective is to inform Western readers on how the official Russian media views and analyses this ongoing crisis which could lead the World into a World War III Scenario. 

The excerpts include statements by Russia’s Defense Ministry

***

Emphasis added

1. Russian Information Agency Novosti.

Graphics supplied by Anti-Bellum

Defense Ministry: NATO is preparing for a large-scale armed conflict with Russia

“NATO is preparing for an armed conflict with Russia , Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said at a briefing for military attachés and representatives of foreign embassies accredited in Moscow.

“The military construction of the bloc has been completely redirected to prepare for a large-scale, high-intensity armed conflict with Russia,” the colonel-general said.

He explained that the North Atlantic Alliance in its documents, including the military strategy of 2019, directly calls our country the main source of “threats to coalition security.”

At the same time, Fomin noted, the Rome Declaration is still in force, which states that Russia and NATO do not consider each other as adversaries. The parties confirmed this at the 2010 summit in Lisbon. [At which Dmitry Medvedev became the first and to date only Russian or Soviet head of state to participate in a NATO summit – RR]

Targeted provocations by NATO near the Russian borders are highly likely to lead to an armed conflict, the Deputy Defense Minister emphasized. As an example, he cited the attempt of the British destroyer Defender in June of this year to penetrate the territorial waters of Russia off the coast of Crimea. At the same time, the actions of the British Navy ship were provided by the American strategic reconnaissance aircraft RC-135.

As Fomin pointed out, the intensity of such flights in the Black Sea region increased by more than 60 percent compared to 2020, the number of sorties increased from 436 to 710. Strategic bombers B-IB and B-52H of the US Air Force flew 92 times against 78 in 2020 in the airspace of the Black Sea region with access to the conditional line of using weapons. To the west of Crimea, the planes flew up to the Russian borders at a distance of 15 kilometers.

“In total, this year, the command of the NATO Joint Armed Forces conducted 15 exercises in the Black Sea. In 2020, there were eight,” the Deputy Defense Minister continued.

The presence of ships and auxiliary vessels from non-regional NATO states “has become virtually permanent.”

“From January to December of this year, 30 calls of NATO ships were made, in 2020 there were 23 of them. The total duration of stay was more than 400 days, in 2020 – 359,” Fomin said.

Activity in the Baltic region

In the Baltic zone, aircraft of NATO countries made more than 1,200 sorties, and more than 50 warships went out for naval reconnaissance. More than 20 exercises were held in the region in 2021.

“At the same time, neutral states and our closest neighbors: Finland and Sweden are actively involved in coalition activities ,” the colonel-general noted.

He also stressed that after the US withdrew from the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, NATO actually ignored Vladimir Putin ‘s initiative to impose a moratorium on the deployment of new intermediate and shorter-range missiles in Europe and the possibility of developing reciprocal measures to remove existing fears.

“Every year, the NATO bloc conducts 30 major exercises, during which scenarios for conducting military operations against Russia are being worked out. Within the framework of combat training events, special attention is paid to the creation of strike groups near the borders of our country. In particular, a series of Defender exercises were held in May-June of this year. Europe-2021 with the transfer from the United States of America and Western Europe to the “eastern flank” of reinforcement troops of up to 40 thousand people,” Fomin said.”

***

At the same time, a contingent of about 13 thousand troops from the non-regional states of the bloc is constantly present in Eastern Europe. It has about 200 tanks, 400 armored vehicles, 50 guns and three dozen aircraft and helicopters.

====

2. From Sputnik News

Russian Defence Ministry: NATO Preparing for Large-scale High-intensity Conflict With Moscow

Moscow has expressed concerns about the concentration of Western alliance missile systems, troops, warships and aircraft near Russia’s borders, and NATO’s decades’ long eastward expansion. This month, the Russian Foreign Ministry formally signalled that it considers Ukraine to be a ‘red line’ for Moscow which NATO is strongly advised not to cross.

NATO is preparing for a large-scale armed conflict with Russia, in contravention of the Rome Declaration of 2002, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin has said.

***

From Drang nach Osten “Push Eastwards”

[Russia’s] deputy defence minister warned that NATO’s efforts to expand and strengthen its military infrastructure on its eastern flank have had a negative impact on the security architecture of the entire European continent, but are only one of multiple actions taken by the alliance over the decades to do so.

“In 1999, a military operation which was not approved by the United Nations was carried out in Yugoslavia. The bombing of Belgrade killed innocent civilians, and the country’s economy was disrupted. The disintegration of Yugoslavia led to a new round expansion of the bloc and the incorporation of Albania, Croatia and Montenegro, and after that Northern Macedonia,” Fomin said.

At the same time, he noted, the ‘Western partners’ continued to assure Moscow “of the absence of aggressive designs against Russia,” and that Russia believed these assurances, notwithstanding the freezing of interaction with NATO in 1999 in connection with the Yugoslav crisis.

Fomin recalled that the most significant expansion of NATO eastward took place in 2004, when the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the bloc.

This and other waves of expansion significantly increasing the alliance’s military potential on its eastern flank, he said, pointing out that NATO’s borders have moved over 1,000 km eastward, providing it with opportunities to use non-strategic weapons to strike targets inside Russia.

“For example, the minimum flight time from air bases in Estonia to St. Petersburg has been reduced to several minutes. Most of Kaliningrad region is within striking range of artillery systems alone….A significant number of pieces of infrastructure have been transferred to NATO’s disposal, expanding the possibility for the deployment and transfer of troops,” Fomin said.

The reference to Lakenheath is outdated.
.

The officer added that the bloc’s arsenal was beefed up considerably by weapons, vehicles and personnel of the former Warsaw Pact members, plus new ports in the Baltic and Black Seas, and an expansion of NATO’s naval forces.

From TASS

Russian Defense Ministry says NATO aims to deter, not engage with Russia

NATO has focused on the military deterrence of Russia while it used to prefer engaging in joint projects, said Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin.

“The current deplorable state of relations between Russia and NATO can be explained by the fact that the alliance has often resorted to using hybrid methods to contain Russia, combining dialogue with a build-up of military preparations,” Fomin said on Monday….

He said that the deterioration of relations between Russia and NATO began earlier than 2014.

“After the end of the Cold War, the Russian Federation has repeatedly made attempts to find new forms of engagement with NATO, to create a stable, equal system of European security for all,” Fomin said. “It would be wrong to believe that the deterioration of Russia-NATO relations began in 2014.”

“The declared goals of equal cooperation by the alliance were not fulfilled much earlier, in fact, immediately after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact,” he went on to say. “At the same time, Russia was then unprecedentedly open to constructive partnership with the West and carried out a voluntary demilitarization of the country on its western borders.”

Russia also withdrew its troops from the Warsaw Pact countries, the deputy minister said.

The CIA falsely believed it was ‘invincible’ in China — here’s how its spies were reportedly discovered and killed in one of the biggest blows to the agency

END OF PART 1

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Orders from Washington DC; When China Does Great things you must Question Its Cost in all articles

"I didn't graduate from the 7th grade to put up with this shit!" 

-Chef, "Apocalypse Now"

When I was growing up, my parents raised me on a steady diet of television. Back then in the early 1960’s my favorite shows were “Diver Dan”, “The Jetsons”, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”, “Get Smart” and “I dream of Genie”. These shows influenced me as I grew up. It was all about adventure, space and fighting those dastardly communists. Yikes!

Watching TV with mom.

I used to love Saturday mornings.

it would be a morning full of cartoons. I would go get a bowl of sugary cereal, add milk and even more sugar, and sit there in front of the television screen absorbing all the great child entertainment. My favorite cereals from those years were “Froot Loops”, “Coco puffs”, and “Rice Krispies”. I was, I tell youse guys, just a normal kid.

Watching the shows.

In those days, mind control via electronic media was unheard of. It had to be introduced and perfected, which it was indeed, over the next two to three decades.

Now we have very advanced systems to control the minds of people, and they do work. But every now and then, the absurdity of it all becomes so glaringly obvious. And it’s laughable. Really.

If it wasn’t so absolutely sad.

From MoA. Classic.

There seem to be general meme directives for ‘western’ outlets with regards to official enemies.

Russia is said to weaponize everything. The position of China is not (yet) seen as in military terms. The emphasis is on economic competition. Any undeniable Chinese achievement must be declared to have been a bad investment. The directive thus reads:

"When writing about China's achievements - question their costs."

The results:

Yah. There’s also an obsessed foreign policy subset of “weak/declining” china …

I read a few articles on China’s high speed train system, and in the most recent the cost versus revenue was a worry/criticism, even though it would be easy to argue or at least discuss about positive externalities worthy of subsidies.

Similar cost related criticism was laid on the huge program to develop new gas fields in Eastern Siberia and connect them with pipelines to China. It seems to be true that the long term contracts signed with China when the natural gas prices were very depressed were not best possible, but since those projects have to be considered in 20-50 year time frame, it was silly even then. Now the concerns about profitability of delivering natural gas to China in the future look hilarious.

There is an objective aspect in some “cost/global” articles. China is dominating so many commodity markets that decisions impacting import and export of China have tremendous impact on importers and exporters alike.

Most glaring is the lack of “at what cost” questions concerning the West. EU delays approval of North Stream II, but at what cost? Technocrats decreased investments in fossil fuels in EU and reliance on so-called clean fuels, but at what cost?

Both are phenomenal.

Madam Baerbock speaks her mind, but at what cost? This girl sends markets to panic which is not a part of her job description.

Ukraine “decreases reliance on Russia”, but at what cost?

Some estimate that the resulting losses are many times larger than gains from “western orientation”, western commentators do not attempt any such calculations. Freedom is worth every price if someone else pays for it (USA likes when the cost is born by EU, and EU likes when Ukrainians hold the short end of the stick).

Some thoughts…

Now I know to read any title that contains ‘China’ and ‘at what cost’ because it threatens the cult of U.S. hegemony.

1. Articles about environment: After skimming these articles, I agree, the ‘at what cost’ was so inappropriate for the content, it does look like it was planted, ‘will they succeed’ would have been more natural for these articles. Air quality has previously been notoriously bad in China, ongoing efforts to improve it was a very good thing.

2. articles about AI: ‘threatened by U.S.’ would be most accurate or some suitable alternative. This group of headlines says that China is vulnerable in the chip area. There is a condescending tone because it says, ML (Machine Learning) is data sets and processing power, and not so much about innovation, this is true. But I would not discount China’s ability to innovate. In using AI to implement a police state, ‘at what cost’, is appropriate here, as it conjures up everyone’s worst fears, even for our own govt. Pointing out how ML can be abused by a govt is a good thing. But even better is pointing out how it has eliminated rapes, kidnapping, child abductions, and fraud by leaderships inside of China is a great thing.

3. I can see how ‘at what cost’ can be used for the other categories but agree that the repetitious use wreaks of information war.

Infographic

Global Times provides this excellent infographic aimed directly at BigLie media’s propaganda meme as it’s titled, “China’s commitment to the world in 2021.”

Number two…

Number three…

Number four…

I am “chomping at the bit” in anticipation to see the United States versions of these meme’s.

Here’s an article out of Laos…

Laos.

‘The country that bombed you is your friend. The one that built your new railway is your enemy’

Major bridge across the Yuanjiang River along the China-Laos railway in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. Xinhua

Tom Fowdy / RT
 

This is the Western media’s bizarre messaging to the people of Laos, a nation that was carpet bombed by America, and which is now being vilified for accepting a new $6 billion railway line paid for by China.

Thursday was National Day in Laos, a celebration marking 46 years since the landlocked Southeast Asian nation deposed its monarchy and became a revolutionary communist state, an effort which was supported by Vietnam.

This year, the anniversary had added significance, as it saw the opening of a major new project, an electrified high-speed and freight railway system connecting the capital city, Vientiane with its northern neighbour, China.

The $6 billion project is part of the Belt and Road Initiative, and has been hailed as one of its flagship achievements. It is the first commercial and industrial railway in Laos, which, given its geography and the fact it is surrounded by mountainous terrain, has not previously had many options to expand its exports and generate economic growth.

Now, though, it has a direct rapid link into the world’s second largest economy and the world’s largest consumer market by population, and a connection to the booming ports of Guangdong. In terms of what it will bring to Laos, it is a game changer. So, what’s not to like about it?

To nobody’s surprise, the mainstream media have responded to the railway with the usual anti-China negativity. A plethora of articles sought to paint the project as a ‘debt trap’, promoting the accusation that Beijing loans countries money for projects they cannot afford and then exerts political leverage over it.

The Financial Times, for one, ran with a cynical article headlined ‘Laos to open Chinese-built railway amid fears of Beijing’s influence’. It implied that somehow Laos feels threatened or fears the construction of this very pioneering railway project (which the country’s own leader made sure he was the first to travel on). This suggestion of ‘fears of Chinese influence’ has become a common feature on such stories, which seek to cast doubt over anything positive China may be achieving or doing.

A common Twitter meme among pro-China users which has followed from stories like this asks: “but at what cost?” highlighting the frequency of such negative coverage.

And if you Google “China, but at what cost?” you can find a great many examples of articles published in major outlets. In producing such pieces, the broader intention is to depict Beijing’s actions as unwanted, threatening and constantly facing opposition. In the case of the Laos railway project, the ‘problem’ is it was financed by debt, and therefore it is not a positive step.

Yet this argument is as insulting as it is outright insensitive to Laos’ contemporary history. Anyone who knows anything about Laos’ relatively recent past will be well aware that China is not the country to fear, but the United States – the nation that dropped over 260 million cluster bombs on Laos and completely devastated the country as an extension of the Vietnam War, making it the most single bombed nation in history and claiming over 50,000 lives.

Many of these bombs remain unexploded and litter the countryside of Laos, continuing to kill civilians. In constructing the new railway, workers first had to clear the unexploded ordnance. How is it that the world and the mainstream media remain indifferent to this atrocity? And how, by any stretch of the imagination, can they claim that China is the true threat to Laos, and that the US and its allies act in the true interests of the country?

Herein lies the problem. Such a mindset symbolizes the elitism, chauvinism and self-righteousness of the countries of the West, which are ideologically inclined to believe that they stand for the ‘true interests’ of the ordinary people in the countries they profess to liberate.

Western politics peddles the assumption that through countries’ adherence to liberal democracy, they exclusively hold a single, universal, impartial and moralistic truth, derived from the ontological legacy of Christianity, and they have an obligation to introduce it to others. The West always acts truthfully and in good faith, while its enemies do not. And therefore, so the logic goes, any policy the US or its allies direct towards Laos is motivated by sincere intent and goodwill for its interests, and in turn, anything that China does is bad-faith, expansionist and power-hungry behaviour motivated by a desire to influence or control the country.

This creates the bizarre scenario whereby Beijing is depicted as evil and sinister for building a railway to connect to its neighbour – but we should forget America dropping millions of bombs on the country because it was done in the name of ‘freedom’. I’m sure you can imagine how the media would react if China did the latter.

Those who push this narrative predictably omit any insight into how Laos itself thinks about the situation. Another piece which took a similar stance, published in The Diplomat, was titled ‘Laos-China Railway inaugurated amid mounting debt concerns’.

But like the ‘fears of Beijing influence’ expressed in the FT, who are these ‘concerns’ from? The report cites the “Washington-based Center for Global Development” and what it merely describes as a “US based analyst” as sources who push the ‘debt trap’ narrative. But nowhere in any of these articles is there an actual voice direct from Laos who raises any fear of China, or objects to the railway’s existence.

Instead, they simply talk on the country’s behalf, obscuring the reality that a communist state which suffered from extreme levels of aggression from the US probably does not see its northern neighbour – and its most important economic partner – as a threat to its regime. With many more articles running variations of the same theme, there is minimal effort given to the consideration that the railway will help the country rapidly expand its exports, sustain greater growth and help Laos pay for the project.

The Laos-China railway has provided a textbook example of how the media can distort a story in order to fortify an incriminating narrative, while brushing aside brutal realities. We are shown a lopsided world, where the travesty of a country being bombed into oblivion with consequences lasting decades is ignored, and the preference is to try to convince us how that same country’s first commercial railway line is, in fact, what it should really be scared of.

It is a demonstration of how the power of the English-language, pro-US media distorts reality itself and how they can blow up an issue, yet hide the truth, by professing to care dearly about the wellbeing and interests of a country which the West poured death, destruction and carnage upon in the name of freedom.

Here’s an article out of Cambodia…

Cambodia

 

Cambodia-US Relations: Cambodia is not the enemy of the US

Two U.S. Air Force Boeing B-52D Stratofortress bombers over Cambodia, 1970. Original description: “Aerial bombing of Cambodia: Operation Menu”. Wikipedia

 

America believes that Cambodia is China’s vassal state. And it does everything to solidify that belief. At the end, they justify their sanctions against Cambodia for being too friendly with China whom the US considers as the “malign actor” and “revisionist state” to the hegemonic order with the US at the top.

But then how much is called overdependent? How much sanction is considered enough against the alleged malign actor?

Americans warn Cambodians to beware of lucrative interactions with China. But Cambodia’s trade and investment with China is less than 10% of the whole of Southeast Asia. Statistically speaking, countries that are close with the US such as Singapore and Vietnam are in fact the highest beneficiaries from trade and investments with China.

Media that are anti-China can lie about Cambodia’s overdependence on China but numbers don’t lie. Impartial academics should look into those number by themselves and make comparison to the whole region to verify and question their established prejudice. The so-called independent minds should not become the trash collectors of all bad press about Cambodia with many hyperlinks to the anti-Cambodia puppet media and organizations.

Cambodia is currently the most sanctioned country in Southeast Asia, even more than the military junta in Myanmar, and the fact is that there is no sanction at all against  communist Vietnam, who has no freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of expression. What does anyone say to these? None at all.

What does democracy mean to America when Cambodia is being treated this way by the American government and congress on the aspect of democracy and human rights?

Cambodia is among the few countries in Southeast Asia that has regular multi-parties election.

Cambodia is among the few countries where press, both domestic and foreign, operate freely, and some of the US’ affiliates like the Voice of America, the Voice of Democracy, and Radio Free Asia, bombards daily with verbal diarrhea against Cambodia as if Cambodian people are living in hell. Nothing can be seen positive from the point of view. And they still say that Cambodia has no freedom of expression.

Facebook operates freely in Cambodia. Internet freedom is among the fullest compared to countries in the region. Cambodian people are addicted to Facebook freedom. They really enjoy it. So long as they don’t defame, libel, slander, promote uprising, treason and the toppling of government, they are free to say anything.

Cambodia is hosting more than 5,000 civil society organisations but human right groups in Cambodia, funded by foreign governments, still has liberty to say that Cambodia lacks freedom of association as compared to Viet Nam which has only one state union. In the US, these organisations would have been banned or classified as “foreign agents”. According to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), passed in 1938, it is required that agents representing the interests of foreign powers in a “political or quasi-political capacity” disclose their relationship with the foreign government and information about related activities and finances.

But such kind of civil society organisations in Cambodia are hiding behind protection of their foreign embassies crying foul that Cambodia’s Law on NGO (LANGO) is too restrictive because they simply cannot disclose their finance and activities that are fundamentally foreign-owned, foreign-initiated and foreign-led.

What does America want from Cambodia? Does it want Cambodia to become the enemy of China and to fight China on America’s behalf? Where does Cambodia’s national interest stand in supporting the US and in making China its enemy? Where is the right to self-determination of Cambodia that the US often says that it respects fully? Does the US want Cambodia to commit suicide to express its sincerity in wanting friendship with the US?

Cambodia is considered as “gold-standard” in terms of cooperation with the US in area such as POW/MIA. Cambodia even accepted 300 Afghan refugees when only a few countries in the region are willing to do so.

But what does Cambodia receive in return? The US cut off scholarship for military students who are already in the US. The US imposed visa sanctions against high-ranking officials in the whole Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

They are sanctioning the very individuals that act as the main bridge of friendship and relations between Cambodia and the US.

This is too cruel a treatment from a friend. The US is treating Cambodia like an enemy.

While the US says that it stands with Cambodian people for its independence and march towards stable and peaceful democracy, Cambodia is in fact one of the most sanctioned countries in Southeast Asia, even worst than the so-called US enemies.

People might probably say sometimes, frankness is needed among sincere friends. But a friend should not express solidarity through piles of sanctions like what the US is doing towards Cambodia right now.

How could a friend be so cruel to treat another friend that way? What does friendship mean for the American government and congressmen?

Is this the best treatment that the American government can afford to Cambodia, which is the last beacon of hope of democracy in the Mekong region? Which country in the Mekong region that fares better than Cambodia in terms of democracy and human rights?

Cambodian people like America; they like American democracy; they aspire to have American democracy.

It is totally unfair for Cambodia that it needs to sacrifice its national interest to befriend with the US. Why is it so hard to befriend with the US?

The US should reconsider its relations with Cambodia from the heart, not from the brain of geopolitical strategy. The brightest brain like Henry Kissinger that was behind the dropping of millions of bombs on Cambodian people is not a friend of Cambodia. He is nothing but a war criminal. He should not be the one to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What does peace prize mean for an individual that was behind the killings of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian people?

Which US congressman and policy-maker want to become the next Henry Kissinger, the war criminal that won a Nobel Peace Prize?

An American B-52 aircraft is not smart to distinguish between the Viet Cong and Cambodian civilians. The fact is that they killed more civilians than the Viet Cong that the US considered as US’ enemies.

There is no better definition than “war crime” and “crime against humanity” considering the US’ acts against Cambodia during the 1970s. America should never forget that. American government, American people, American policy-makers, American congressmen should never forget that. America should remember their atrocity against Cambodian people during the 1970s. Cambodian civilians and government are not US’ enemy.

And another article…

China’s Belt and Road rail services booming despite Covid-19

A train carrying 33 refrigerated containers departs from the Tengjun International Land Port in Kunming, capital of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, for Laos. Xinhua

 

Beijing has inked more than 200 cooperation documents for the joint construction of the Belt and Road with 145 countries and 32 international organizations


Xinhua – Though the world remains haunted by the still ravaging COVID-19 pandemic in the year 2021, the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has seen a boom in promoting world connectivity.

Under the BRI framework, railway construction is expanding across the global landscape. The iconic China-Europe Railway Express, the China-Laos railway and the railway line in Tanzania have all recorded milestone achievements over the past year.

These important railway projects provide important pillars for the BRI, and also contribute their due share to improving the global supply chain and the COVID-19 fight.

LINE OF HEALTH AND GIFTS

During days just before Christmas, when people in Western countries are worrying that they may not be able to receive their Christmas gifts on time due to clogged shipping lanes, China-Europe trains from different regions were sending products to Europe without delay.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of China-Europe freight trains. By the end of October, the China-Europe freight trains plying along 73 routes have reached 175 cities in 23 European countries with more than 50,000 kinds of goods.

Amid the pandemic, the number of China-Europe express trains as well as the volume of freight have continued to break new records.

Data from China’s National Development and Reform Commission shows that during the January-November period, the railway service linking the two sides operated 13,817 trains, carrying 1.332 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), an increase of 23 percent and 30 percent respectively compared with the year 2020.

At the end of November, the cumulative number of anti-epidemic equipment transported by the China-Europe freight trains reached 13.43 million pieces and 103,000 tons.

“China is very important for the global supply chain. And in most cases it’s faster (than the ocean shipping). Therefore, it’s a useful alternative to use the train, and it’s reliable,” said Axel Mattern, joint chief executive officer of Port of Hamburg Marketing.

According to global logistics company MEDILINK, the initial freight rate of the China-Europe rail network is often two-thirds higher than that of sea freight, but the current price is very competitive.

The current freight rates of the China-Europe freight trains are basically the same as those of sea freight, but it only takes nearly half the time, said Logistics industry insiders.

KEY FOR TRANS-ASIAN CONNECTIVITY

On Dec. 3, the China-Laos Railway officially started operation. It marks a crucial step for the trans-Asian railway network, which has been brewing for more than half a century. Since then, the journey from Vientiane to the border with China has been reduced from 2 days to 3 hours, and the journey to Kunming, capital of China’s Yunnan Province, can be made in a day.

“The China-Laos railway is conducive to promoting the development of areas that are located along the line. Countries in the Greater Mekong Subregion, including Thailand, Laos and China, will benefit from trade, agricultural products, consumer products, investment and tourism,” said Pichet Kunadhamraks, deputy director-general of the Department of Rail Transport under the Thai Ministry of Transport, in an interview with Xinhua.

The railway is expected to reduce transport costs between Vientiane and Kunming by 40 to 50 percent, said a World Bank report, noting transport costs from Thailand’s Laem Chabang port to Kunming are expected to fall by at least 32 percent.

It is estimated that by 2030, the annual volume of commercial goods in transit through the Laos section of the China-Laos Railway will reach 3.9 million tons, it added.

This year coincides with the 30th anniversary of the establishment of China-ASEAN dialogue relations, and the two sides are advancing the BRI and the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025.

On Jan. 1, 2022, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) will officially enter into force. Experts believe that the BRI will lead to the construction of the trans-Asian rail network and promote regional connectivity.

ROAD OF DEVELOPMENT

In mid-June this year, a ceremony was held to launch the Ithaca-Mwanza section of the Standard Gauge Railway of Tanzania’s Central Line, the construction of which is undertaken by a Chinese company.

After the completion of this project, it will become an important route connecting Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and other countries, providing a pathway to the Indian Ocean. It is of great importance for promoting the economic development of the countries in the region and improving the living conditions of the people.

From the Tanzania-Zambia railway built in the 1970s, to the Djibouti-Ethiopia and Mombasa-Nairobi railways, and the Standard Gauge Railway of Tanzania’s Central Line, the joint efforts of China and Africa have created jobs, trade opportunities and a better investment environment, thereby contributing to local prosperity as well as to the improvement of the living conditions of the local residents.

As of Dec. 16, China has signed more than 200 cooperation documents for the joint construction of the Belt and Road with 145 countries and 32 international organizations, and financial institutions such as China-proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Silk Road Fund have expanded financing channels for infrastructure construction.

According to Bambang Suryono, chairman of Indonesian think tank Asia Innovation Study Center, for many countries, a major obstacle to escape poverty is the weakness of transport infrastructure, and in this regard, China’s success can set an example.

Conclusion

When you measure everything against the cost structure imposed by western capitalism, everything China does inevitably looks costly.

Totally absent from the analysis is the question of benefits.

The west thinks only of profits. China thinks of the benefits not only to China and the Chinese people, but to the countries and peoples with whom they do business.

The West = Personal Profit
China = Benefits for Groups of People

The long term superiority of such a strategy is blindingly obvious to any open minded observer. It’s the reason why China and Russia will eventually pass through this contentious period of change, and prevail in a new better world.

Many other nations see this, and they do remember how the United States treated / treats them. When the shit hits the fan, and it will, the United States will be broke, penniless, scorned and friendless.

No matter how you spin it, it will not a good situation to be in.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 2

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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China’s Excellent, Very Good Year

I am so tired of trying to counter the mega-onslaught of hate being generated out of the United States towards China. The redirection is working. Most American hate China and blame all their troubles on it, instead of themselves and their (so called) “government”. Well, let’s just deal with things as they actually are and not what the American government wants others to believe.

2021 was China’s best year. Ever.

by Godfree Roberts*

Amidst global gloom, 2021 was the best year in modern Chinese history. Here’s what they accomplished:

  • Eliminated extreme poverty.
  • Reached 96% home ownership.
  • Kept Covid death rate at 0.6% of America’s.

  • Grew the economy $2 trillion PPP, the fastest growth ever.
  • Became the richest country on earth.
  • Became the world’s biggest overseas investor.
  • Became the world’s largest movie market.
  • Produced nearly one new billionaire and 300 millionaires every workday.
  • Completed new train lines in seven countries, including Laos’ first.
  • Ran 15,000 cargo trains to and from Europe, up 30% YoY.
  • Joined RCEP trade pact, with 30% of global GDP and of the world’s population.
  • Sold $140 billion retail online in 24 hours (Amazon’s record is $5 billion).
  • Launched the first central bank digital currency.
  • Dominated scientific research and issued the most patents of any country.

  • Built three exascale computers that won the Gordon Bell prize for high performance computing.
  • Built a programmable quantum computer 10,000x faster than Google’s Sycamore.
  • Operated the first integrated, 3,000-mile, commercial, quantum communications network.
  • Brought online two gas-cooled Pebble Bed nuclear power plants.
  • Fired up two thorium-fueled reactors, eliminating uranium from power generation.
  • Released a Covid treatment that reduces hospitalizations and deaths 78%.
  • Made 55% of global energy savings.
  • Generated 1 terawatt of renewable energy.
  • Installed one-million 5G base stations, giving Tibet better 5G service than New York.
  • Communicated between satellites via lasers, 1,000x faster than radio waves.
  • Operated the world’s most powerful solid rocket engine, with 500 tonnes thrust.
  • Flew three hypersonic missiles around the planet.
  • Released a fractional orbital bombardment missile from another missile at 17,000 mph.
  • Simultaneously commissioned three warships, becoming the world’s biggest navy.

Expect China to maintain this pace through 2022 by launching, among other things, the first, greenfield, automated, 21st century city for six million knowledge workers. With 70% woods and lakes, the loudest sound will be birdsongs.


* Godfree Roberts wrote Why China Leads the World: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom and publishes the newsletter Here Comes China.

Videos

Delicious Toufu. video 22MB

Delicious eggplant . video 32MB

A nice visit to the nearby park. video 34MB

Pre KTV meal. video 65MB

Hotels are advanced. video 85MB

Chinese girls walking for the “line up”. Get ready for fun! video 32MB

Chinese girl. Typical. video 3 MB

Massive booby juggle. That’s one thing that the Chinese gals like to do. If you all got the boobies, then you are allowed to jiggle them. It’s cute actually, and I always get a big kick out of it. Jiggle jiggle jiggle. video 25MB

Hotel Room after some KTV fun. video 158MB

Now, I know that China is bad. I read all about it in the comment sections from moronic Americans and Brits. Ah like this…

World's most advanced censorship and surveillance regime with no freedom and a punitive social credit scheme. I admire the work ethic and manufacturing prowess but would rather live in a cabin the woods than submit to such a regime. Sadly, while losing ground in technology, our elites are catching up with their own repression and Woke overthrow of Constitutional rights.

Posted by: Fran Macadam

and this…

A totally deluded and mostly inaccurate summary. China is currently self-destructing because it is the only country in the world still trying "zero COVID". Their entire real estate market is close to collapse. They had terrible floods and large destruction of farm lands. Several dams broke, and the huge Three Gorges dam almost broke. Everybody wants to leave China, from Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang to Taiwan.

Posted by: Niall K.

Yah. The USA is exceptional. It has delicious “freedom” and “liberty” and all that wonderful “democracy”. You can see it everywhere…

video 50MB

But if that is what appeals to you. I say enjoy it. Me, I’m gonna stay here. eat delicious food. hang out in the beautiful sunshine, with the trees and the flowers. Eat delicious meals. Play with pretty girls and have lots and lots of fun.

Conclusion

I hope that you enjoyed this little update on China. Many things were left out. Such as the Space exploration accomplishments, and the energy accomplishments, and the environmental accomplishments.

Have a great day, and remember to always be the Rufus.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my China Index…

China

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Articles & Links

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Time for inspiration and Rufus videos I hope you all enjoy them (smile)

Picture above is a rescue cat. It calms and offers kindness to any suffering animal taken to the shelter. From HERE.

It’s a new Chinese year. It’s a water tiger year. And it’s a fine time to remember to be the best that we can possibly be. In this installment, I offer up some fine Rufus inspirational videos that are found inside of China. Remember, that being a Rufus doesn’t depend on your wealth, where you live, what color of skin you have, or your career. It depends on your compassion for those who surround you. Be the Rufus. The world needs people like us.

Video of happiness and joy

Be happy. Force the happiness around you. Make the quanta in your geographic area clean, light and positive. video 15MB

Making a positive change to the world around us.

Subway artist strikes again. Looks like Shenzhen. The woman is obviously sad and distressed. The subway artist tries to cheep her up. video 6MB

The cat…

Rescue of a man in a restaurant

This stuff happens. And you all need a Rufus nearby to save the day. Be the best you can be. Be kind. Be helpful. Be supporting. video 6MB

How to deal with a dog…

I found this hilarious. Maybe you will too. video 6MB

The cat 2

Military to the rescue!

China mobilizes it’s military to rescue and help others. Not them them around the world to occupy other nations and drone kill civilians. Scenes from the mobilization of military to protect the Hunan flooding of 2021. Compare these scenes to the New Orleans flooding. Not even close. video 45MB

Progressive gay man down the street…

China, like Russia & Poland, are very traditional nations. They do not accept this “diversity” of “alternative lifestyles” that are so fundamental to the “new” America today. .And in this video clip you can see just how the normal day to day Chinese people react when they watch someone acting oh, so very… American. video 5MB

By the way, we here at MM are not poking fun at the “alternative” lifestyle choices of those in the West. Instead, we are pointing out that in traditional nations in Asia find these behaviors odd and curious, and so they react to the new and unusual in funny and surprising ways.

Everyone visiting here should be proud of who they are, their lifestyle choices, and their life. It’s NOT our place to judge.

Arguing couple saved by oranges, a cat, and some compassion

Very interesting video. Couple argues. Old lady spills her oranges. Cat (black and white tuxedo) pokes his nose in to investigate and then… video 7MB

The cat 3

Man buys a set of crutches for a stranger

It’s a pain in the ass when your cane breaks. Don’t worry when there’s a Rufus nearby. video 7MB

Dog protects a toddler

Brave dog. Will not allow the toddler to crawl on to the road. video 20MB

The thank you song

All of the people performing all the Coronavirus testing, vaccinations and everything associated with it are volunteers. They leave their jobs and their lives and do it for no pay. They often work 12 to 16 hour shifts. Such is membership in the Chinese culture / society and communist party. This little girl is performing the “thank you” song and dance to them. video 25MB

More Rescue cat…

Christmas roadblock

Regional outbreak of Coronavirus, in a regional town. These people volunteered to leave their families to man the roadblock. They were NOT compelled to do so. They volunteered. While Christmas is not as important to Chinese as CNY, it is still a holiday and the Chinese do celebrate it. Everyone except these guys. video 23MB

Police take down compilations

In China, AI monitors all activity, and identifies the criminals in real-time. Then, the police go out and get the bad guys when they are unready and unprepared. This differs from the United States where the police must catch the criminals in the act, and often results in lethal shootings.  video 5MB

Beautiful HAN Outfits

I hope that these all put a smile on your faces. I love the way the dresses move. But call me a traditionalist. It’s not that these people are a Rufus, but rather that they are traditionalists and that they are enjoying life as such. They are not living in fear, afraid of offending anyone. They are comfortable and proud. They are confident. And being confident is sexyFirst up video 2MB

Second up. video 4MB

I really love this dress. I don’t know why. Purple is not really a preferential color. Third up. video 6MB

Fourth up. video 3MB

Those that wear these clothes love it. They wear it with pride and just typically wear tennis shoes or sneakers instead of the traditional foot wear. You can see them bouncing around. Being happy and light. video 6MB

More HAN dress fun. video 9MB

And one more HAN dress, just for the heck of it. The Chinese are proud of themselves, of their history and about what they have accomplished. They embrace it as they should with confidence and fun. You won’t find any “diversity directors” telling them that they cannot dress like this in the work office for “cultural misappropriation” or some other nonsense. Be yourself. The world needs more REAL people. video 3MB

A bunch of Rufus’s examples

Be the Rufus. video 16MB

Rufus Rescue

So many people run to help! video 1MB

Rufus stops a car

It’s driver-less and out of control, and he is just a lowly delivery guy. video 2MB

Chinese Police Raid on Kidnapping and Child abduction group

The Chinese do not play. Rescue the little girl. video 7MB

Final Rescue cat…

Happy times!

Some of the happy moments in China during 2021. We have reunited families, Happiness, volunteers raising their hands to help other during the flooding emergency, the return of political prisoners out of the USA and much more! video 20MB

More Great Links in my Rufus Index here…

Check them out…

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More stuff…

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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More new Rufus videos to inspire

It’s a new Chinese year. It’s a water tiger year. And it’s a fine time to remember to be the best that we can possibly be. In this installment, I offer up some fine Rufus inspirational videos that are found throughout the world and inside of China. Remember, that being a Rufus doesn’t depend on your wealth, where you live, what color of skin you have, or your career. It depends on your compassion for those who surround you. Be the Rufus. The world needs people like us.

Emergency Police Escort

video 7.7MB

In life you’ve got to work hard

Video. Smart kid. 4MB

Rufus Compilation I

Video 122MB

Love always

video 45MB

Love through windows

video 45MB

Rufus stands up for the little guy

video 3MB

Surprise the ones you love

Video 4MB

Rufus compilation III

Video 120MB

Young girl “Pioneer” is rewarded for her Rufus actions

video 6MB

Do not allow others to use you

video 5MB

Code RED at the Hospital!

video 6MB

Who’s your friend?

Video 6MB

Rufus takes care of child waiting outside for her mother

video 3MB

The hardest things are the right things

video 1MB

China Rufus hospital staff

video 6MB

Rufus Compilation Final

video 108MB

More Great Links in my Rufus Index here…

Check them out…

Rufus Index

.

More stuff…

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Some glimpses of China in terms of society, fun, fashion and what not

I am so tired of trying to counter the mega-onslaught of hate being generated out of the Untied States towards China. The redirection is working. Most American hate China and blame all their troubles on it, instead of themselves and their (so called) “government”.

Instead, today, we will just go over some elements of Chinese society. These are little “snapshots” or culture. Isolated pictures, and images, as you will (understand). And taken together it’s a fun look at the great diversity of life that is colorfully presented in such a huge and enormous nation filled with a huge and enormous population.

We are not going to talk about Geo-politics, Biden, Trade wars, hybrid wars, Vaxx wars or another American-centered subjects. We are just going to talk about life, and in China that means videos and fun. We’re not going to get too serious here, at least I don’t intended to, anyways.

I’m presenting them in no particular order, because after all, life kind of throws things at us in a seemingly random order as well. Though, you do know that you have had an intelligent hand in the development of your life… don’t you know.

Bar Scene

Here’s a girl singing to the audience in a pretty typical bar. Video 8MB

A Park in China

I think that it is lovely. Most parks inside of China re quite nice, and the government is constantly expanding them, and improving them in so many little ways. video 3MB

College Dorm

Dorm rooms in the USA are usually two people affairs; two people share a room. In England it is one person gets their own room. In China, the dorm rooms are six people share a room. Here’s a group of girls in their dorm room. video 6MB

Death by cute (part 1)

It’s a fashion thingy that found it’s way from Japan. It’s called loli. I like it. So does my little girl. Video 6MB

Death by Cute (part 2)

So much cuteness. video 3MB

The Chinese love to dance

It’s very common to see people dancing all over China. I mean that you NEVER see this in the ‘Stats, but you see it all the time inside China. video 3MB

Incidentally, this kind of view… the buildings lit up in the background, the blue sky, the open plazas are so very typical of China. It’s everywhere.

Han fashion (1)

It’s a fashion trend throughout China. It’s pretty popular and there are girls and guys wearing these outfits in the malls, the parks and on the subways. video 8MB

Han Fashion (2)

This is a sort of Chinese version of a medieval festival, only with Chinese culture and clothing. Continues video 7MB

Han fashion (3)

Here’s some more images from a different festival. video 5MB

Han Fashion (4)

Couple runs into each others arms. I love the expression on the little girl to the left. Cute. video 4MB

Han fashion (5)

Mother and daughter in the park. video 5MB

Han fashion (5)

On the subway. video 5MB

Being part of a group

In America, everyone is a “lone wolf”. If you are fired from work, you are alone, and no one stands up for you. If you are in a car accident, you are alone and no one helps you. Most Americans eat alone, pay taxes alone, mow their yard alone, and travel alone.

Not so in China. China is the land of groups and communities. Everyone is part of something bigger than themselves. And if they individually make a mistake, the group absorbs the mistake and moves forward. video 7MB

Peng G3

When I first saw this video I thought that it was some kind of photoshop video manipulation. Then I went to a Peng show room, and that an actual car feature! This is how the Chinese introduce new features into the market. I wonder when Detroit will start copying China? Hum? video 5MB

Sending your dreams aloft

It’s a tradition for the Chinese to put their dreams and wishes on a scrap of paper and then light the balloon to send them into the sky. It’s very beautiful. video 2MB

Shanghai

Yeah. Everyone knows about Shanghai. But it’s really impressive when you are there in person. It makes New York City look like a small village. video 3MB

By Sweety Boy

Thai song adopted by the Chinese pop scene during 2019 / 2020. video 3MB

Time Machine

China has gone through so many wars, struggles, occupations, poisonings, humiliation, and growth. There is a sub-culture that memes this historical trend. Here’s one such video. I call it “time machine”. Video 4MB

Time Machine 2

A second video. Same theme. video 7MB

Time Machine 3

Here’s a third video of the same “time machine” theme. video 13MB

Wedding 1

Chinese wedding. This is in a tiny remote village. Here we see the ritual of presentation before the parents and the town elders.  video 3MB

Wedding 2

Chinese wedding. They don’t throw rice. It’s too wasteful and the Chinese just don’t understand that American ritual at all.  video 5MB

Wedding 3

Chinese wedding. Bride presentation with her brides’ maids prior to the groom entry to “steal her” from her parents home.  video 3MB

Xinjiang HST

High Speed Train in Xinjiang province. These are all Uighur staffed, and serving the Uighur people. Of course, you would never see anything positive about China in the American “news”. It’s all a 7 billion dollar funded hate-fest. video 9MB

Conclusion

I hope that you enjoyed this little travel vacation. Have a great day, and remember to always be the Rufus.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my China Index…

China

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Rufus behaviors in a world gone mad. We all need to make the world a better place.

Here’s some fine Rufus inspirational videos to remind you that the world needs you. It needs you RIGHT NOW. You need to participate and make this world a better place. You need to go forth and help others, to participate in your community and to add calmness and kindness to the world that surround you. Be the Rufus.

What do I mean by being a Rufus?

The term “Rufus” is well known to long time visitors to MM. It describes service-to-others (STO) sentience and the related behaviors rather than the service-for-self (STS) sentience behaviors of the vast bulk of humanity. The details on sentience selection and why it is important are sprinkled throughout the Majestic Index.

Rufus is a state of behavior. A Rufus puts the community before him / her self. They do things without a profit motive of any type. They are kind, helpful and when they walk down the street they smile at people and make them feel good.

In some ways, being a Rufus lends itself to heroic actions, but in other ways it refers to being a significant person located in a geographic region.

While the rest of the world scrambles and claws towards money and power, and leaves a destitute and stripped world behind, a Rufus nurtures the world. He / she uses their creative abilities to make the world a better place.

You can go to my RUFUS INDEX. Start at the top and start reading all the posts. If after article 75, you still have questions, I will try to explain it to you better.

Long time readers recognize being a Rufus is showing kindness to others, being a hero when necessary, participating in the community and working to make OUR world a better place to live in. Chinese members of MM will recognize it as the expectations of volunteerism required of the Chinese Communist party, but that is just a name. It’s all people working together towards a common goal.

Some of these videos might take some time to load. Just click on the "video" link and allow it to load in a new tab or window. It will load faster that way.

I have received numerous comments (that I did not publish on MM) by people complaining that I didn’t have enough Rufus videos showing people in America being kind, helping others, and doing good deeds. Well, I tried to put the ones up that I could find, it’s just that they really don’t exist much in the for-profit every-man-for-himself nations. I have tons of police shootings, black people store robberies, car jackings, and videos of poverty stricken homeless from the USA. But Rufus behaviors. Not much.

Sorry.

We start with some hard working people. Just everyday people who do the dirty, nasty work, alone. In China they give most of their money to their families who live far away, and for years they work alone, pushing and striving to make the family live a comfortable life. This first video is for you … “average Joe”.

Rufus rescue in the ice

Be the Rufus. Make your life worthwhile. video 6MB

Saying goodbye to our beloved pets.

Video 20MB

You define who you are

video 6MB

Rufus Prevents a purse robbery

video 6.5MB

Bruce Lee

You must flow like water. video 2MB

Rufus compilation

video 103MB

An imbalance of power

Or, the perception of one’s power. As in the case of the United States today.

Video 4MB

Rocky tells it like it is.

You gotta be the best you can be. video 6MB

When there is a problem, a community of Rufus’s come together

Everyone pulls their weight. Everyone contributes. Everyone participates. video 14MB

Rufus compilation

A bunch of examples of fine Rufus behaviors. video 75MB

Rufus feeds a begger

Not that common in China any longer. But an opportunity to help out a fellow human in need. Be the Rufus. 7MB

Rufus dad teaches his daughter

Kindness. Compassion. Understanding. video 8MB

A fitting end to this article

Have some compassion and know that YOU have a purpose on this planet. Help others. Be the best you can be. Be kind. And you will find that the world around you will also become kind, calm and peaceful. Participate in life. video 32MB

More Great Links in my Rufus Index here…

Check them out… Rufus Index .

More stuff…

Master Index .

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Nuclear armed B-2 bombers with escort wings to be based inside of Australia to “counter” China for American “democracy”

It’s a never ending onslaught of war preparation, war provocation, and war stockpiling being generated out of the United States. There is ZERO talk about deescalation. I tire of all of this. It seems like the United States is driving the world to war and they aren’t stopping for shit.

There’s no real need for this.

China is minding their own business. Not harming anyone. Sure they make all the products, and are making them better, cheaper and faster than the bloat-ware that is found in the USA. But that is not a reason to kill them. It is a reason to copy them.

Sheech!

And every evil deed is Chinas fault. And China is doing this and that - it’s fucking bad news. My buddy - this past weekend emails me an article about the Chinese military doing something - the article was 7 years old. No matter. It makes China look bad - plaster it all over the news and blame China.

When the media - in America - and THIS I know to be true - because I fucking SEEN it - as soon as our media starts showing how the shelves are bare here - because they blame China - but what’s going to happen is right when it gets bad - they are going to show bare shelves here and stocked shelves in China. It’s to anger everyone - I say this specifically because the mass rage that is coming towards Asians is coming - fast. It’s the quickest way to take out an internal threat. Let the CITIZENS do it. -PL

And Russia; what’s the beef with them? It’s not like there are Russian and Chinese aircraft carriers in Boston Harbor are there?

Biden - in HIS infinite wisdom - decides he is going to play Russian Roulette - WITH RUSSIA - they named a suicidal game after the Russians! Again, the irony. So NOW - and let me be very clear - VERY. clear. The average person - people I know throughout the country - and I ask - alllllll know - the ONLY reason we are about to start lobbing nukes at ANYONE is because we all know the money laundering the Biden’s Clinton’s and Obama’s have been doing in Ukraine. It’s been their evil little washing machine AND AMERICA KNOWS IT. So now - people are even more antsy. -PL

Why all this bullshit?

To distract from the reality?

American reality

The thing is - to me - I am amazed by the psychology of it all. And the stupidity - holy shit dude - it’s like everyone is slowly becoming retarded. Like mad cow or something. -PL

video 38.6MB

First; who are the evil Russian communists?

They are people just like you and I. But the United States wants to engage in a war to distract Americans, and Russia and China are the enemies chosen for this event. Here’s modern Russia. Video 8MB

Canada Goose

Double arc.

Canada Goose puts spotlight on double standards against Chinese consumers

Canada Goose is feeling the wrath of Chinese consumers after their physical flagship store in Shanghai refused to refund a customer.

She tried to return a jacket the same day she bought it because the embroidering of the logo had an extra arc in the sun. The store refused, citing the company’s return policy for China: “No refunds.”

Netizens quickly pointed out that they have a 30-day return policy for Canada, US and UK. Now Canada Goose is under fire for their double standard.

With all this bad press, Canada Goose decided to refund the customer. But not before sparking a major discussion about brands discriminating against Chinese consumers.

Now LV and Gucci have also become targets as consumers quickly pointed out they have the same difference in return policies across countries.

You’re sick of me saying it but here it is again: The Chinese are the smartest consumers on the planet. They’ll find any discrepancies you have in your offers. And they have high standards.

Doing business here is not cheap. You need to account for dealing with the returns process. Cutting corners will get you in trouble.

What do you think? Are the companies justified in having different return policies for each country, or is this discrimination?

Now, let’s check out this little jewel;

Cockroach robot armies!

You betya!

Yikes!

Ok. Let’s see about the first amendment; “Freedom of Speech”. Does it still exist in America today? Nope. Not in the least…

US Government Threatens Writers With Heavy Fines if They Continue To Write for Sanctioned Russian Outlet

Freedom of the press - American style.
Natylie BaldwinDecember 07, 2021

Establishment institutions usually start their implementation of censorship and the throttling of press freedom by going after individuals and outlets that are small and/or not well liked by a cross-section of the public. The obscurity or general unpalatable nature of the target ensures the success of setting the precedent.

Most Americans have probably never heard of Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF) and many would be unsympathetic once they learn that the U.S. government claims it is a think tank and journal associated with Russian military intelligence, although no evidence is offered to back up this assertion, and SCF denies it has ties to the Russian government.

But years of anti-Russia sentiment in the political sphere and in most American media ensures that the claim alone will suffice to tar any Americans associated with Strategic Culture Foundation with a black brush.

I have confirmed that two American writers for SCF have received letters from the US Treasury Department in recent weeks warning them of fines of over $300,000 if they continue to write for the journal.

These threats are in response to alleged Russian interference in the 2020 US election and part of the US government’s enforcement of Executive Order 13848 signed by President Donald Trump in September of 2018 which sought to ascertain foreign interference in any future elections in the US and to punish those deemed guilty.

Threats to US elections included not only tampering with actual voting and its supporting infrastructure but “covert distribution of propaganda and disinformation.”

According to the Treasury Department’s April 15, 2021 press release in connection with the designation of SCF and other Russian entities to be sanctioned pursuant to the executive order, the US government stated its intent to target those they see as Russia’s enablers on behalf of its alleged program to interfere in US elections:

"Treasury will target Russian leaders, officials, intelligence services, and their proxies that attempt to interfere in the US electoral process or subvert US democracy," said Secretary Janet L. Yellen. "This is the start of a new US campaign against Russian malign behavior." (emphasis added)

The release also accuses SCF specifically, without evidence, of being directed by Russian military intelligence and that its articles spread “disinformation” – which appears to mean opinion and analysis that the US government doesn’t like:

The Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF) is an online journal registered in Russia that is directed by the SVR and closely affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. SCF is controlled by the SVR’s Directorate MS (Active Measures) and created false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials involved in the 2020 US presidential election. It publishes conspiracy theorists, giving them a broader platform to spread disinformation, while trying to obscure the Russian origins of the journal so that readers may be more likely to trust the sourcing…

…Treasury designated…the Strategic Culture Foundation pursuant to E.O. 13848 for having engaged in foreign interference in the US 2020 presidential election.

The ordeal started for the two American writers in July of 2020 when they each received a visit at their home from FBI agents inquiring about SCF and its connections to Russia. Daniel Lazare, an author and journalist told Finian Cunningham recently that the agents wanted to know about alleged links of SCF to Russian intelligence:

"I replied that I wasn’t interested because I regard the entire avenue of inquiry as bogus and a product of the anti-Moscow hysteria that’s running rampant in Washington. So the agents left. Everything was polite and low-keyed, and the entire exchange took no more than four or five minutes."

Similarly, Michael Averko, who had written for SCF since 2015, stated that two FBI agents came to his home in July of 2020 and asked about SCF ties to the Russian government. They told him at the time that he wasn’t in any trouble and didn’t have to answer their questions, but Averko was hesitant to say much, recalling what had happened to Michael Flynn:

"The only question I answered was on whether the SCF has any ties to Russian military intelligence. I answered by saying I can’t say for sure and doubt it. I added that my impression is that the SCF comprises politically interested Russians, who want to be involved with the issues they cover."

It wasn’t until November of this year that Lazare and Averko both received letters dated October 15, 2021 from the Treasury Department, delivered personally by the FBI. The letters advised that they were in violation of sanctions against SCF per executive order 13848 and were potentially subject to fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars if they did not stop contributing articles to SCF:

"[P]ursuant to Executive Order 13848 of September 12, 2018…all property and interests in property of SCF that are subject to US jurisdiction are blocked, and US persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them…[E]ach violation… is subject to a statutory maximum civil monetary penalty of up to the greater of $311,562 or twice the value of the underlying transaction."

When asked whether he thought this would set a troubling precedent for Americans who write for foreign media outlets, Lazare said he believed it would:

"Absolutely. Why not ban RT, formerly known as Russia Today? If the government is pissed off against Emmanuel Macron, why not go after Agence France-Presse? The US complains when Russia harasses western news outlets, yet it’s guilty of precisely the same activities at home. As far as I’m concerned, threatening US journalists with fines for writing for a Russian press outlet is a flagrant assault on freedom of the press."

Averko was a bit more circumspect and thinks the government believes because SCF is a relatively small outlet, it can more easily get away with sanctioning it:

"The SCF and its US based American writers are (in the overall comparative scheme of things) small potatoes and an easier target to beat up on."

Both writers say they know of other US contributors to the outlet who have received the same letter and are intimidated. Lazare stated:

"While I have no particular concerns in my own case, other journalists are so frightened that they’ve not only stopped writing, but don’t even want to speak about their experience with other reporters. No one wants to mess with the federal government because they know the feds can make your life a misery if they’re so motivated. So they’ve clammed up. If you’ve ever wondered what “chilling effect” means, this is it."

While US officials may be unlikely to go after major foreign media, it’s very possible this could be a precedent to go after smaller outlets with unsubstantiated accusations of foreign interference and spreading of “disinformation.”

Lazare is in the process of seeking legal advice about the government threats. Averko said he was considering it and believes it would probably be best for all SCF contributors who received the letter to work together on any possible legal claim, though he’s aware of at least one who is unwilling to do so.

This is another example of the US undermining its own purported democratic values, which it touts to the rest of the world, in order to punish those who associate with the latest bogeyman country while providing no evidence that this outlet is even guilty of what they assert. After WMD’s and Russiagate, it would be foolish to take US government claims at face value as we are again being asked to do.

Natylie Baldwin is the author of The View from Moscow: Understanding Russia and U.S.-Russia Relations, available on Amazon. Her writing has appeared in various publications including Consortium News, RT, OpEd News, The Globe Post, Antiwar.com, The New York Journal of Books, and Dissident Voice.

Let’s dive in and begin this discussion with this subject; Nuclear armed B-2 bombers with escort wings to be based inside of Australia to “counter” China.

Scheech!  How about a role reversal;

 "Mexico and Canada to base Chinese and Russian nuclear stealth aircraft to counter America."

Wouldn’t you think that would be enough to start a war, eh?

OK. First up. A lamb to the slaughter. The USA is turning Australia into a battle zone and a sacrificial lamb for “American interests”. Whoo woo!

From here:      https://www.the-sun.com/news/4175667/us-stealth-bombers-fighter-jets-australia-china-north-korea/

GEARING UP

US sends B2 stealth bombers & fleet of fighter jets to Australia as military threats from China & North Korea grow

And what about Taiwan having all the IC manufacturing capability?

Nope. China is getting it.

  • Foxconn new factory in Qingdao using 46 made by China lithography machines to produce chip (decoupling from the US and Europe technology)
    Foxconn has laid a new milestone for both its semiconductor business and China’s semiconductor ambition. Together with China’s Rongkong Group, a state-owned enterprise, Foxconn has invested in an advanced chip packaging facility in China’s costal city Qingdao. Through two intermediaries, Foxconn has a combined 27.5% share in the new facility, while Rongkong Group has a 46.85% share. Volume production will start in December, and by 2025 the plant is scheduled to reach its full capacity of 360,000 wafers per year.
    Currently, Foxconn has two chip packaging businesses under its wing. The first of them is ShunSin Technoogy, and the other is Foxconn’s own semiconductor division which oversights the Qingdao-based packaging facility.
    Notably, the packaging facility also serves China’s semiconductor industrial policy by using the country’s domestically produced lithography machines. The new packaging facility has reportedly purchased 46 lithography machines from SMEE to support advanced packaging technologies such as Flip Chip, Fan-In WLP, Fan-Out WLP, and 2.5D/3D.
    Shanghai Microelectronics Equipment Co. (SMEE), founded in 2002, is expected by the Chinese government to be its answer to ASML, the Dutch lithography machine maker that has dominated the lithography market. Earlier, SMEE only produces 90nm lithography machines. However, SMEE once announced that it would deliver China’s first 28nm lithography machines between 2021 and 2022. Even Huawei has indirectly cooperated with SMEE to solve the EUV chokepoint that has been derailing…

    https://techtaiwan.com/20210729/foxconns-new-chip-facility-what-does-it-mean-for-chinese-semiconductor-policy/

American military nuclear forces 101

Infographic…

America’s plan to destroy the world!

And who are all these terrible bombs and planes going to kill and destroy?

People like you and me. And some very pretty innocent girls. All for American “freedom” and “democracy”! Video 1.1MB

 

And what is specifically the plan to “Defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression”?

You can’t make this stuff up.

The following paper illustrates the kinds of options U.S. war planners are toying with when strategizing on how to “defend Taiwan”.

Recommendations that appear in the winter issue of Parameters, a quarterly publication from the U.S. Army War College include:

[1] The United States should lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render Taiwan unattractive to China by utterly destroying its most valuable industrial infrastructure, including destroying facilities belonging to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

[2] Fomenting social unrest by destroying Taiwan’s economy and arming insurgents for long-term guerrilla warfare on the island.

In other words, U.S. war planners think the best way to “defend Taiwan” is to raze it to the ground.

Just do great things…

Sigh. Remember…

Do your best. Be kind. Be fair. Try to work with people, and help people. You are not in a race to make the most money. You are in a situation called “life” and that means participation in your community.

Hate – Hate – Hate spews forth from American “news”

And the anti-China propaganda is really thick and heavy too. Check out this nonsense…

HIDDEN STRIKE

China feared to be hiding missiles in shipping containers for Trojan Horse-style plan to launch attack ANYWHERE in world

Disguised as a regular shipping containers, they can be sneaked on board a vessel to blend in seamlessly with the hundreds of others on board.

The sheer number of container ships in the world makes them harder to pinpoint than warships in the event of war.

Each ship could hide hundreds of dangerous ICBM nuclear missiles…

A dangerous hidden threat!

Like the fabled Trojan Horse, the missiles would be quietly smuggled into or near an enemy port on a civilian vessel before being unleashed in a surprise attack.

Rick Fisher, senior fellow in Asian military affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, told The Sun Online while Chinese have not officially confirmed they have the missiles – it is likely they have them.

And the it was warned in a study by Stockton Center for International Law that the weapons could violate naval laws.

Meanwhile, retired Navy Capt. Jim Fanell, a former Pacific Fleet intelligence chief, previously said a containerized anti-ship missile would add a significant threat to the US Navy.

It comes amid a new wave of tensions between the US and China as the Communist giant challenges Washington’s status as the world’s top superpower.

China is known to be aggressively developing its military and is squaring up to the US – expanding its reach around the world, such as in Africa.

A mock-up of the missiles first appeared at an arms fair in 2016 and since then there has been speculation since they may now be in service with China’s armed forces.

Mr Fisher believes the weapon fits with the Beijing’s military strategy and likely would be used as an offensive capability against their enemies – potentially being smuggled into foreign ports anywhere in the world.

Mr Fisher told The Sun Online “Chinese strategic preferences for surprise would strongly argue for acquisition” of the missiles.

These would be fitted to “nondescript small Chinese ships in order to mount surprise missile raids against shore defences to assist follow on amphibious or airborne invasion forces”.

Fisher said shipping container missile launchers can be smuggled through ports or via highway ports of entry

They could then be stored for years in a climate-controlled building within range of US military bases, and taken out when needed for military operations.

Mr Fisher said the containerised missiles would “offer China’s leadership a wide array of options”.

Washington would be in chaos, would not know against whom to retaliate
-Jick Fisher

This includes

“using larger container ships, thousands of fishing ships or stored containers in ports, to undertake military or terror mission strikes in a manner that can be denied if desired”.

“The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is fully capable of using containerized missiles to sow chaos when desired,” he insisted.

For example Chinese missile launching containers could be stored near the Port of Seattle.

The Chinese would wait for the day they can launch an electromagnetic pulse warhead-armed missiles over the nearby nuclear ballistic missile submarine base Fisher said.

"The EMP blast might take out electronics on the [submarines] and all over the base without having to launch a nuclear missile from China,” he said.
“Washington would be in chaos, would not know against whom to retaliate, and perhaps China uses American distraction to begin its real objective, the military conquest of Taiwan."

According to US officials, the weapons deployed in the containers are an advanced anti-ship missile called the YJ-18C, which is a version of the Russian Club-K weapon.

The missiles fit into a standard 8 feet wide by 8.5 feet high by 20 feet or 40 feet long standard shipping container.

An online animation showing how the Club-K can be fitted into a container shows how the top comes off to reveal the missile with the front making away for the guidance system.

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the missile has speed of up to Mach 3 –  three times the speed of sound or 2,300mph.

While not in the league of China’s hypersonic missiles, which can reach speeds of Mach 10, analysts believe they can still pack a punch.

So far the only record of missile being fired from a container ship is a picture of a test carried out by Israel.

A large number Chinese container ships enter US ports on the west and east coast making them well within range of the vast majority of the US fleet.

"If this capability is confirmed, it will require a completely new screening regime for all PRC flagged commercial ships bound for U.S. ports," Fanell said.

The Stockton Center’s study concluded that loading weapons on civilian vessels clandestinely could violate international law.

It wrote:

"Failure to comply with the law of armed conflict by surreptitiously incorporating merchant vessels into China’s warfighting/war-sustaining effort endangers civilian seafarers and puts all civilian ships at risk that may be operating in the area of hostilities."

POWER GAME

China is perceived as directly challenging the West for status as the world attempts to recover from the pandemic.

Beijing is making moves to establish a foothold in the Atlantic Ocean with a new series of naval bases on the west coast of Africa.

The country’s first overseas naval base was built years ago in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and it is steadily increasing its capacity.

And for some time, many have thought that China was working to establish a naval base in Tanzania, a country on Africa’s eastern coast that has a strong, long-standing military relationship with Beijing.

Meanwhile, China is also seen to have taken the lead in the next stage of the global arms race as it flew a nuke-capable missile around the world.

Hypersonic missiles are a game changer because unlike ballistic missiles, which fly into space before returning on steep trajectories, they zoom in on targets at lower altitudes.

China – followed closely by Russia – were already regarded as having the most potent hypersonic missile arsenals pouring billions into them but others had been seen as catching up.

But the shocking revelations of their missile test back in August has sent shockwaves through Western intelligence who fear they actually underestimated Beijing.

US intelligence and military officials were reportedly left stunned after China launched a rocket in space carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle which circled the globe before before speeding towards its target.

Just who are these evil communists that must be killed?

You know for “The American way” of “freedom” and “democracy”! Video 1MB

And now the USA is equipping all the F-16’s and F-35 fighter jets with the ability to drop nuclear bombs. Are they out of their fucking minds????

Well, you know, YES they ARE.

China and Russia BOTH treat any weapon system that can deliver nuclear munitions as de facto launching those missiles.

A good look at what America wants to destroy and kill

Soak up the reality. The United States is trying to get everyone to hate – hate – hate so that these people shown in this video will be killed. All for the greedy psychopaths to continue to rule. video 18MB

U.S. assembled the first B61-12 nuclear bomb for F-35A and F-15E

According to the report, the B61-12 bomb modernization project lasted more than nine years – such a long period was required for the design, development, qualification, and production of components.

Full-scale mass production of these bombs is scheduled to begin in May 2022. In total, the program is expected to produce more than four hundred bombs by the end of 2026. In total, the project should cost about $ 12 billion.

According to the US National Nuclear Security Administration, the modernization will keep the bomb in operation for another 20 years and “will continue to ensure the safety and effectiveness of weapons.”

It is known that B61-12 should replace other tactical versions of this bomb [-3, -4, and -7] and will probably be stored at US and NATO bases in Europe. The main carriers of this bomb will be F-35A and F-15E fighters.

What is a B61-12 thermonuclear bomb?

The B61-12 thermonuclear bomb belongs to the B61 family. B61 is the main thermonuclear gravitational bomb of the United States, actively developed amid the Cold War with the Eastern blog close to the USSR.

According to the characteristics known to the general public, B61 has the possibility of a complete explosion, ie. a full range of ignition and delivery options, whether by air or ground. The B61 is capable of reaching supersonic flight speeds. The dimensions of the thermonuclear bomb are 3.56 m long, 33 cm in diameter, and a total weight of about 320 kg. Military experts say that depending on the B61 version, the weight can vary.

The latest modification of the B61 is the B61 Mod 12 or B61-12. One of the tests of the B61 Mod 12 at the very beginning of its development showed that this thermonuclear bomb can penetrate underground and reach an equivalent ability to explode on the surface of weapons from 750 kilotons to 1.25 megatons.

Experts say that “underground penetration” was not planned, but it is good news, as B61 Mod 12 could become a successful replacement for B61 Mod 11, whose main function is underground penetration. The B61 Mod 11 is expected to be decommissioned by the end of 2030.

***

So who are these bombs going to kill?

Well, one thing that is omitted PURPOSEFULLY in American media is showing any humanity with the targeted enemies. there are no pictures that show Russians or Chinese people being human. Just these evil narratives, ugly narratives, and fear mongering dangerous narratives. Not here on MM. We are being blunt. These are the people that your government is trying to kill. video. 4MB

Why? Why kill the nice, cute and hard working people of the world?

For this “freedom”, “liberty”, and “democracy”? Are you out of your FUCKING MIND? video 29MB

So, who are these bombs, missiles and war machines going to protect?

Are they going to protect you from the “red menace”? Nope. It is just a way to maintain the status quo and keep the evil greedy in positions of incredible wealth and power. video 14.3MB

Sigh. Here’s Phobos.

Hell, you have to leave the earth to escape this madness.

Marian moon; Phobos.

And let’s not forget about the moon.

China sends lunar rover to probe object on far side of moon

My goodness.

Question: what is the longest time US roller exploring the moon or Mars?
Dose this mean that China roller is more advanced than the USA:
China’s Yutu 2 rover discovered the curious cube on the horizon in the Von Kármán crater in November. The solar-powered rover, which first landed on the moon almost three years ago, has now been tasked to spend the next two to three months investigating the object.

https://www.9news.com.au/world/chinese-rover-yutu-2-spots-mystery-house-on-the-moon/b3fcc9b4-d14e-4382-986f-af883b4f1952

America Today

Sigh. Be kind.

“Over the summer while working a DUI shift, I stopped out at a local gas station to grab a drink. While waiting in line, the lady in line ahead of me offered to purchase my drink. I kindly declined the offer and stated I’d get it but thanked her. The kind lady then politely grabbed the drink out of my hand and set it on the counter to purchase.

It’s it very common in my city for a citizen to purchase food or drinks for police officers. These kind acts do not go unnoticed and I feel blessed to work for a community that proudly supports law enforcement. Building community relationships goes a long way.”

Rufus

With all the bad news being thrown at you, how about some good news to offset it all and find stability in your heart; your mind and your soul? video

Sigh. Make a difference!

Sometimes following in your father’s footsteps can lead you to the most beautiful corners of the world .

Daddy’s big girl now.

Why the CIA is so frustrated with China…

Here’s what the Chinese AI social credit scoring system works. No wonder the CIA and the NED are all upset. Their agent saboteurs cannot do anything. Which is why all the CIA agents in Hong Kong were found, rounded up and  either deported or are spending long prison terms in China. video 24MB

 

Rufus tales

Be the Rufus like this bus driver that gives up his coat to warm up a high school girl on his bus. Video 12MB

Yu Beng Village(雨崩村), Deqing, Yunnan Province, China

China is big. It looks a lot like Switzerland in many places.

AI! I am getting off track…

So what is my point? News out the “West” is fear-hate-fear-hate.

But is that really helping you?

I say that instead, it is making you ill. It is hurting you mentally, emotionally, spiritually, socially, and all the rest. Know that there is a great life here for all of us to live and the answer lies in community. Whether world war III occurs, or the United States and the rest of the world just melts down, or the Prison Planet restructures itself is of no consequence…

…if you always do your best, work as part of a community of others, and do great things. Be the best you can be and be the Rufus that would make your grandmother proud.

Be that kind of person. Be that kind of Rufus.

video 22MB

A Final message for MM readership

Trust your gut instincts…

In 1981, a clairvoyant contacted British Rail to warn depot employees that she’d been having a recurring vision of a fatal train crash. In her vision, one of their blue engines hauling oil tankers crashed with devastating consequences. 

She also saw that the train number was 47216.

Managers took the warning seriously, as they were aware that the clairvoyant had assisted police on several occasions. They applied to have the number of the particular train changed to 47299.

In December 1983, the 47299 train was hauling an oil train when it collided with a DMU at Wrawby Junction. One person died, and it was concluded that a combination of equipment failure and human error was to blame.[6]
.
Afterward, the accident was referred to as an “amazing coincidence.”

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

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Why isn’t Russia and China responding directly to America’s hybrid wars, clandestine wars, and military provocations?

It’s a never ending onslaught of war preparation, war provocation, and war stockpiling being generated out of the United States. There is ZERO talk about deescalation. I tire of all of this. It seems like the United States is driving the world to war and they aren’t stopping for shit.

A top US general gave a stark warning about the risk of deteriorating ties with the two giant states. 

Vice Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General John E. Hyten told a think-tank meeting that conflict could easily spiral out of control. 

“We never fought the Soviet Union,” he said. “As for the great powers, our goal is to never go to war with China and Russia.” 

According to Hyten, such an event would “destroy the world and the global economy. It will be bad for everyone, and we have to ensure that we do not go down that path.”

And so everyone is asking these questions.

Why is the United States so fucking hell-bent on creating a major war? And, why isn’t Russia and China responding directly to America’s hybrid wars, clandestine wars, and military provocations?

The Greenville Post suggests…

An excellent read, by the way.

Observing the mounting provocations by Washington and its NATO puppet, many people in Russia (and abroad) think that Putin's response to the West has been weak, misguided and inordinately accommodationist, a form—in their eyes—of appeasement. 

They argue—as does Paul Craig Roberts—that Washington needs to be confronted far more clearly and decisively, with force if necessary, the way one confronts a depraved bully with a long list of crimes to its name. 

I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, as do many people who don't like seeing an arch-criminal get away with his ever-expanding reign of terror and intimidation. 

But, folks, this is a soup with some flies in it, and we need to pay more attention. 

While in a non-nuclear world that kind of thinking—giving a bully what he deserves— makes perfect sense, in a nuclearised world the cost/advantage calculus is far more complicated and the right response almost impossible to pin down. 

For it is certain that, at this point, an all-out nuclear war between the great powers, a war, mind you, precipitated by the United States and its vassals, besides its unprecedented horrors, is a war guaranteed to have no winners. 

This is not the kind of decision that any rational leader would like to make. 

So what is Putin or Xi to do? 

They face a ruling class that appears to be either technically insane or terminally cynical. Inhabiting a huge bubble of hypocrisy of their own making, drenched in the supremacist myths of US exceptionalism, US elites flail about the world impervious to reality or morality, while wiping their plutocratic asses in the UN charter governing the civilised behaviour of all nations.

Under such circumstances, hubris may blind them to the great risks inherent in their constant warmongering. 

But are they really blind and indifferent to the horrific costs, or—as Kissinger and Nixon once supposedly admitted—this is just a bluff to keep the enemy off balance?

Clearly, the Russians and the Chinese, led by rational and competent people, don't want to be forced to find out. 

A war between the great nuclear powers is a war with no winners in which the totality of the human race stands to be wiped out. 

They know war up, close, and personal in a way that is simply alien to most Americans, and seemingly forgotten by the idiotised vassal nations in what passes for a free Europe. 

Well, Russia and China haven't forgotten. 

The Soviet Union lost more than 27 million people in WW2, and thousands of towns and cities, plus almost 70% of its hard-won infrastructure and industrial base in her struggle to overcome the Nazi assault. 

China chalked up almost 30 million lives in casualties, an enormous figure even in a nation of over one billion inhabitants. 

In their eyes, it probably makes sense not to provoke the bully into a fight. 

Plus, there are powerful historical reasons for avoiding a shooting war as long as possible.  As demonstrated by the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, avoiding war while growing stronger with each passing day is not a bad strategy when confronting a monstrous war machine led by deluded and unstable people. 

The USSR, despite its many problems, was a much stronger and more resilient nation in 1941 than in 1939. Those two years allowed her to safeguard and reposition the assets she needed to survive the Nazi attack, and she did. (See for ex. OPERATION BARBAROSSA: MYTHS AND REALITY). 

The same can be said for the truly vertiginous development of Russia's modern military in slightly over a decade: the Russia of 2008 (when it had to subdue a NATO-prodded Georgia into some stupid adventurism) and that of today can't be compared from a military standpoint. 

Military-naval analyst Andrei Martyanov agrees: "Russia and her Armed Forces of 2021 and of 2008 are separated not just by 13 years, but by two generations of weapon systems and C4ISR."  

Let that sink in for a minute. 

In sheer speed and effectiveness, Russia's capacity for strategic development is second to none in the world, and is not to be matched or surpassed by the Pentagon in the foreseeable future,  no matter how many trillions it wastes on such pursuit. 

It's actually a systemic and cultural question not subject to a quick resolution. Ditto with China. Could that be the reason why Putin can afford to look "weak" and calm and non-confrontational toward Washington, despite a non-stop cascade of provocations and vituperations? 

Keep these things in mind as you read Paul Craig Roberts' persuasive indictment of the Kremlin posture. —PG

Paul Craig Robert thoughts on this matter…

I can't see Putin trusting any US agreement.

When Russi/Putin acts, it is sudden, swift, and WITHOUT WARNING

So why the PR, the meetings with Biden, Lavrov's diplomatic whirlwind??

Methinks it is to get domestic opinion firmly on his side, a rooted we-back-you-at-any-cost kind of grim determination. Polls show he is half way there. What's the magic #?? 66%?? I would think it in that range.

If this is the case, we have a grim scenario awaiting us in February.

-Les7

While US Whore Media and Whore “scientists” dependent on Fauci-controlled NIH and Big Pharma grants whip up fear over a relatively harmless “Omicron variant,” a real dangerous situation that I have anticipated for seven years is raising its deadly head.

The arrogant fools in Washington lost in their own hubris have been practicing nuclear attacks on Russia within 20 kilometers of Russia’s borders. 

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that Washington’s operation  Global Thunder rehearsed launching nuclear weapons against Russia from both western and eastern directions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Washington was not taking seriously Moscow’s warning not to cross Russia’s red lines.

Putin is correct.  But it is the Kremlin’s fault.

The only decisive action the Kremlin has taken in response to intense provocations from Washington and NATO was the Kremlin’s decision to accept the overwhelming vote of the people in Crimea to be reincorporated into Russia where the territory had resided for 300 years.  The Kremlin’s alternative was to lose Russia’s Black Sea navy base.

In a strategic blunder of the first magnitude, the Kremlin refused the same plea from the Russian people in the  Donetsk and Luhansk republics, territories that also had been part of Russia for centuries.  By refusing to honor the vote of the Donbass Russians to again be a part of Russia, the Kremlin subjected them to war and destruction by the Ukrainian army and various neo-nazi Ukrainian militias.  If the Kremlin had accepted the vote of the Donbass Russians to be returned to Russia, the conflict would have ended as Ukraine would not destroy itself by attacking Russian territory.  Without the ongoing conflict, Washington would have been unable to continue its machinations against Russia in Ukraine.

In an effort to salvage the situation, the Kremlin put together the “Minsk Agreement,” which Western powers were to support, but didn’t.  Thus, the conflict has continued to smolder since 2014, providing Washington with 7 years to use anti-Russian propaganda to define the narrative.

The Kremlin’s passivity and attempt to rely on agreements with the US and NATO to resolve a Ukrainian situation that Washington most certainly does not want resolved has convinced Washington and NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg that there is no fight in Russia, thus producing the situation that I have feared:  Washington has concluded that Russia’s red lines are merely rhetoric.

Many other Kremlin failures have contributed to this dangerous outcome.  The Kremlin still permits Israel to attack Syrian territory when one telephone call from Putin is sufficient to halt the attacks.  The Kremlin still permits the occupation of a small part of Syria by US troops and CIA Arab mercenaries hostile to the Syrian state.  The Kremlin receives massive insults to the Russian president and still refers to those insulting Russia as “our Western partners.”

These are not responses that create the impression that there is any force behind the Kremlin’s red line.

The Kremlin has also failed miserably in anticipating Washington’s moves, indicating an incompetent intelligence service or a willing disbelief in the Kremlin of Russian intelligence reports.  Despite its obviousness, the Kremlin failed to anticipate the invasion of South Ossetia in 2008 by a US and Israeli-trained and equipped Georgian army.  Putin was at the summer Olympics in Beijing.  The Kremlin failed to anticipate Washington’s obvious overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine and the replacement of a Russia-friendly regime with a neo-nazi regime. Putin was at the Sochi Olympics.

Washington simply will not take seriously a government incapable of paying attention to what is happening to its interests in its own backyard.

One might think that the Kremlin would learn by experience, but apparently not. With reports that half of the Ukrainian army is in the Donbass region threatening the Russian inhabitants, US Secretary of State Blinken threatens Russia with “serious consequences” if Russia protects the Donbass Russians.

Imagine, a cipher like Blinken, a person of no ability or accomplishments, a representative of a second-rate military power that discriminates against its own white troops, issuing threats to the world’s dominant military force. 

This is hubris run amuck, hubris encouraged by years of Kremlin low-key response to major provocations. 

As I have warned, the low-key Russian response, despite its good intention, encourages more provocations, and sooner or later Washington will go too far and cross a red line that will force a Russian military response.  My fear of nuclear war is the reason for my warning that Russia needs to put a strong foot down in order to stop the progression of provocations that can only end in war.

Why has the Kremlin been so meek in response to insults and provocations?  I have no inside information.  The speculations are that (1) the Kremlin wants the Donbass Russians to remain in Ukraine in order to water down the influence of anti-Russian attitudes in Western Ukraine;  (2) the Kremlin did not want to confirm Washington’s propaganda that Russia was rebuilding the Soviet Empire by reabsorbing the Donbass Russians in addition to Crimea;  (3) westernized Russian intellectuals have more confidence in the West than in their government;  (4) the Atlanticist Integrationists desire to be part of the West than to be allied with China;  (5) the Kremlin thinks that by continuing to be low-key and open to cooperation with the West all difficulties will be resolved;  (6) Russia knows the horrors of war and wants to avoid war at all costs;  (7) Russian billionaire oligarchs want the West as a haven for their stolen wealth.

All of these are sound reasons as far as they go. 

The problem is that all of these reasons ignore that Russia is Washington’s enemy of choice.  Russia is the enemy that justifies the $1,000 billion annual budget of the US military/security complex.  Russia is the enemy that strengthens Washington’s hold on NATO and Washington’s European empire. Russia is the enemy that keeps the Washington-abused American population loyal to the government that is destroying American liberty.  Russia is the enemy that can be blamed, along with China, for every failure of Washington.  How can the Kremlin forget that the hostility of the American Elite to Russia is so overwhelming that President Trump was confronted with a CIA/FBI/Justice Department orchestrated “Russiagate” for simply stating that he intended to restore normal relations with Russia?

Normal relations with Russia are impermissible to the extent that a President of the United States was removed from office in a stolen election after trumped-up “Russiagate” and “Impeachgate” attempts failed.  To complete the lesson to all future presidents that normal relations with Russia are impermissible, Trump supporters are being prosecuted for attending a rally in support of Trump, a rally now known as “the Trump Insurrection.”  Six hundred innocent people are held in prison in violation of habeas corpus and First Amendment rights.  Not even the US Constitution can protect them.

And this is a government that the Kremlin thinks it can reach an accommodation with!

God help the Russians and all of us as Washington’s provocations continue their march to war.

In a visit to Beijing in March, Moscow’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said that “the US has declared its mission is to limit the technological development opportunities of both the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China.”

Tarik in the Vineyard for the Saker Blog comments…

Putin claimed that ties between Moscow and Beijing “have reached the highest level in history,” while Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi insisted both countries “have always been the pillars of peace and stability in the world.” According to him, “the more unstable and turbulent the world is, the more decisive cooperation between China and Russia will become.”

Why Russia didn’t shoot anything down yet?

If Russia shot down a NATO bomber or ship flying or sailing where it shouldn’t be (or even a US one), who would dare respond in kind?

It begs the next question: Why Russia didn’t shoot anything down yet?

Things need to be put in perspective. So here is a third question: Why is the West and the US in particular, so dead set on confronting Russia and China at every corner, short of direct military attack?

It is not because they want to cut Russian gas to Europe (it would terminally break the EU economy and destroy its ability to store increasing dollar reserves), or repatriate jobs from China (systemically incompatible with dollar hegemony) , or even prevent the implementation of the BRI per se (because the matter of fact is that potentially it could become a huge new, and very much needed pit for excess dollars to find their home; if only it were done the “right” way).

When Kissinger invited China into the western world economy, it was understood that it would eternally accumulate dollar trade surpluses, and over time, become another EU or Japan.

In the case of the EU, the US had NATO, and for Japan they had their military bases to make sure these two would dutifully stockpile every dollar that comes their way. But nothing of the sort existed for China.

To make a story short; in the early nineties they took over the largest stash of natural resources that is Russia. With that in hand they thought they now held China on a tight leash.

Late nineties the Asian economic crisis hit; Beijing was livid. 2000 Putin takes over Russia’s natural resources, unleashing China.

The later enters a global buying spree of natural resources through its huge accumulated dollar reserves. Commodities’ prices shoot up, interest rates follow suit and triggers the subprime implosion and all its aftermath.

For all practical purpose, intentional or not, this was an unofficial war declaration. No doubt every central banker on the planet worth his salt understood a new player entered town. It meant business, and was to be reckoned with. US responds with an “epidemic” of color revolution everywhere China was laying the ground work for what was to become the BRI, and dramatically increases the pressure on Russia to force it back into the US$ fold.

Neither China nor Russia blinked. Instead the former announced to the world the official launch of BRI, and the latter openly challenged US military supremacy in Syria, and soon after started in earnest the distribution of S400s (almost as good as the atomic bomb, in diplomatic terms) to the world.

For those holding reservations about the above interpretation of events, please consider: the price of gold went from under 300 US$/ounce in the late 90’s to 1900 US$ by the end of the first decade, bear in mind that this in a market hated by all. To this day less than 1% of global private wealth is held in gold.

In 5000 years of history never did this ratio fall below 5%, even under the most exuberant times. Who was buying? While the western bullion banks acted as “sellers of last resort” with unlimited fictitious supplies on the Futures market to keep the price under cap, so did Beijing act as “buyer of last resort” on the spot market with unlimited dollar supplies from their trade surpluses, thus uncapping the price. The relevance of this is apparent when juxtaposed to the BRI project.

It is estimated tens of thousands tons of gold were disappeared in China; that enters the border but never show up; neither in retails nor official reserves records, but instead just somehow vanish in thin air. At the minimum it shows they’re preparing for a post dollar economy. Then again the BRI makes no secret that it intends to make use of local currencies worldwide.

There are two ways only to have any currency accepted. Either it is backed by the most powerful military, or alternatively it is referenced to gold. Anything else (eg. Petrodollar, Eurodollar…) is military backing under the guise of… and the BRI has also admitted its preferred option for trade account settlements.

Such monetary arrangement (no matter the exact actual architecture) would in short order annihilate any form of western prevalence and privilege on the global scene.

In itself it would just be an ego bruise, but when added to the staggering debt levels, it translates to guaranteed decades of servitude. That my friends is the crux of the matter, the unfathomable horror the west is facing. It is what keeps their elite awake at night, while the population imperfectly senses a looming day of reckoning whether under the traits of a yellow slit eyed giant dragon, a monstrous growling bear, a flood of melted ice, or an amorphous unforgiving pestilence, when instead they should really fear Shylock’s lurking specter and past due pounds of flesh.

Now that the real motive for the Big Boys’ quarrels has been defined, how would a war with Russia or China, even if only through a proxy (Ukraine or whatever) fit in this equation.

First of all the West or the US today is not comparable to say Napoleon’s France or Hitler’s Germany which “benefited” from industrial and military supremacy. It is those specific advantages that allowed them the privilege to make fools of themselves.

Without them, neither Napoleon nor Hitler would have ever thought of heading East. And I might add, nor would have the US embarked on the last 50 years of hegemonic delusions.

Today the latter has lost both trump cards, and with them, one might presume, the luxury to fantasize a swift military solution.

This leaves us with only a proxy war scenario. If realized, that option can only yield very short lived dividends that could never alter the natural course of the empire’s demise.

After all once the Ukrainian army is spent, that card is gone. In fact the Ukraine holds value as long as the status quo last, once the situation is resolved (which ever way that may be) it looses any bargaining stock.

The same holds true for the JCPOA, Syria, North Korea, Taiwan, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and so many others. And what bargaining may I be referring to? Well hold on tight: the West pushes for terms of a new partitioning of the world, while Russia and China expect its terms of surrender.

Sure, until say around 2018, all these pressure points were meant to force China and Russia reconsider the dollar’s role in the BRI and related projects. But then in March of that faithful year (if I remember well) Putin casually announced a panoply of hyper-sonic toys. If the subprime event was a “Wazari”, March 2018 was the “Ipon Seonage”, or basically a “checkmate”.

No doubt every general worth his salt must have raised an eyebrow or two, and every central banker realized the dollar was now naked, with neither gold nor the most powerful military on the planet to enforce it.

All the while Putin was giving his speech, the list of nations that were rejoining the BRI since its official launch and their commitment, were about to dramatically increase.

The practical effect was a gradual and ongoing abandonment of dollars in cross border regional settlement of trades, particularly in South-East Asia were the doomed currency is now considered almost a dirty word among regional players.

Consequently local currencies reserves are displacing US$, which are increasingly being spent on the acquisition of raw materials on the international market for infrastructure projects.

If it sounds like “déjà vu” it’s because it is.

The resulting inflationary pressure on the commodities’ market would again spill over to the interest rate market, triggering the September 2919 REPO event. Because of its brevity, I suppose, few realize how defining that moment was to what came next.

First the Fed met the burst from 0% to 10% on the overnight REPO rate with a 700+ billion US$ barrage within a matter of days to literally drown those darn, messy, uncooperative interest rates. Ever since that market requires a monthly 120 billion allowance just so banks may trust each other and perpetuate the myth of solvency. As the global economy stopped accumulating, or even off-loaded dollar reserves, the greenback’s velocity increased and soon will feel like hot potatoes. A rarely mentioned consequence of this phenomenon (at least I never came across it anywhere), is the severe restriction it imposes on newly printed dollar deployment outside US financial markets, lest it turns the already established price inflation into hyperinflation. Thus it renders the dollar useless as a tool for influencing foreign actors. Those loose dollars must be neutralized. A few months later COVID strikes in China.

Was it just one more sorry attempt to oblige China to reverse its “dollar policy” or whatever favorite narrative one may subscribe, isn’t as relevant as Beijing’s response was remarkable.

There were several instances in the last 20 years when China had to suffer some suspicious biological outbreaks, yet none of the measures taken ever even registered in import/export figures, GDP, or in any other major economic indicator.

Now suddenly under the pretext of one insipid flu-like germ, precisely when the West is shown at its most fragile financially, they decide to entirely shut down one major world industrial production hub.

Again, regardless of one’s view on that epidemic, there’s not a point in the entire space/time continuum where Xi and his team didn’t foresee the consequences of such measures, both on their economy and those of the West respectively.

The West was totally taken off-guard; no point in calling China, the damage was already done, trillions would be needed to absorb the shock, and thus they took the path of least resistance.

They doubled down on the COVID song, proactively shut down their economies to force unanimous political support for direct monetary support of the economy and markets. That the pandemic narrative also served as convenient cover for population movement control, was an extra bonus in an environment ripe for social unrest.

A few months later China unlocks and its economic indicators quickly resume to pre-pandemic levels, all while the US and Europe were still mired in frozen economies.

This showed the world economy did not depend any longer on Western lead. In fact the world can now perfectly do without the West all together.

Now it may still be early to assess with any certainty how the game is being played at this very moment, but based on the evidence over the last 2 to 3 years, here is a proposition which hopefully might offer an answer to our starting questions.

The earlier Putin “checkmate” referred specifically to global dollar dominance. Preserving regional dominion for a little while longer however seems still possible, at least in the minds of the western elites.

However such a region must be isolated from areas that do not submit to the dollar “order” (or whatever new cryptocurrency denomination they may come up with to implement their reset), since direct competition would instantly reveal the currency fraud that it is.

Hence the necessary world partition. In this new context, those pressure points whose main purpose was originally directed against China and Russia, can easily be repurposed to mainly close the ranks in the “salvageable” portion of the world.

That explains nicely the increased hysteria surrounding those sour points; not as means to strike fear in the hearts of Russians and Chinese (which is a ridiculous proposition when considering the ground facts), but to dig it as deeply as possible into their vassals’ hearts instead, with what military and economic might they still muster.

Then in order to preserve their currency’s “credibility”, at least within the remaining sphere of dominion, they need a replacement for the loss of those Central “dollar sinkhole” Banks and respective economies that are escaping to the multi-polar world.

So they “repurposed” (or just upgraded, I’m not sure which) a favorite of theirs: Global Warming, from an obstacle to the BRI momentum, to a black hole for infinite currency issuance.

The basic idea, apart from its green energy infrastructure component which at least is comprehensible to the mind, is to, through the carbon credit market, “financialize” various ecosystems’ contribution to decarbonization. Shares would be available for “investments”.

It’s not clear who or how the book value of these shares would be calculated, but one can be excused for assuming that value will prove as flexible as a COVID infection count.

I suppose the underlying logic goes something like this: ecosystems remove CO2 from the atmosphere, which saves our lives.

Since we can all agree that our lives are infinitely precious, no amount of investments can possibly realize the full valuation of those shares. Et voilàààà, the inflationary dilemma once and for all, forever and ever, eternally and for perpetuity finally solved!

Is it delusional? Of course it is. But as some real wise man said: People rarely think what they must, instead they tend to think what they need to think, when they need to think it.

Obviously the “Grand absurdity” in which their “Great Reset” is being implemented is the sure sign of their impending capitulation. Hence Russia and China patiently awaiting their acceptable terms, which probably means unconditional rendition.

The piper will be paid.

It doesn’t mean they want to destroy, humiliate, or otherwise submit to the West. It’s about facing responsibilities, and within this frame, figure out a convenient, or win-win agreement.

In such an environment a war makes little sense because there is no military threat against western leadership, only military containment.

In typical “Go” fashion, US and NATO bases that were previously seen as power projections enveloping the world, can increasingly be viewed as the boundaries of a shrinking space.

Funny thing is, Russia and China did try really hard to avoid this sorry state; the downright self-inflicted humiliation the West is facing.

Ever since the 1997 Asian crisis, Beijing tried real hard to convince the US to a strategy to solve the Dollar’s paradox in world trades.

During the first decade of the century as preparation for the BRI, they started heavily investing in global natural resources extraction.

Aside from the obvious practical reasons (BRI would require humongous amounts of resources), there was also a financial/monetary aspect.

The commodities sector was suffering from decades of under investments due to price suppression schemes by the usual suspects, in line with the gold price policies.

The idea then was to increase production so that the manipulative Future’s shorts could be gradually unloaded without triggering the typical inflationary bomb and the ensuing interest rate response, and thus freeing the Western banks from exposure at no loss.

At which point international dollar reserves could gradually be unloaded unto an increasing supply of commodities to the BRI, with also minimal (or at least manageable) inflationary disturbance.

Of course it implied a parallel incremental retirement of international dollars to a level commensurate to the US’ economy true size, probably through a series of devaluations against mainly gold. That was China’s plan. Not a bad empire retirement plan when considering where the West stands now.

Just as funny, had the US been agreeable to China’s and Russia’s proposal, better yet had they taken the lead after the USSR collapsed, to “resize” the dollar, neither of the Bear nor the Dragon would have developed their armed forces, instead dedicating their resources strictly to the economy.

The US could have retained Military supremacy and acted as a true policing force of the world, with all the benefits and honors attached to this function, and the eternal gratitude and support of all.

What a monumental waste those last thirty years indeed.

Okay, maybe all wouldn’t have been as rosy, so let’s just say it could have been a great opportunity for a beautiful dream…

MM answers

And kids, this is how World Wars gets started....

However, my fear is that the US and Israel will double down and not go quietly. Instead of upsetting the table and waking away when losing; they will flip the table over and rip open their shirt to reveal a suicide vest....

-A.L.

There are two possible reasons why the United States is acting like such a dick-head bully and Asia is failing to engage…

[1] America is dying. Let it die. When a person is dying, you allow him to go through the death thrall and stay out of the fray. America will be dead soon enough. There’s no rush to do anything. Russia and China know this and see this. They are watching in real time. Obviously they are guarded and concerned, but their projections obviously show a complete national collapse within the decades, if not much sooner.

[2] Asia is ready to put an end to it all. The death thralls of the empire is getting dangerous. But neither Russia or China will allow these matters to destroy them. If things become unmanageable, they will take the first steps, on their timetable in accordance with their rules. Both Russia and China are ready to take down the Untied States is such a way that the USA will not be able to launch a retaliatory strike. The complexity of such a mission is enormous, and so they are spending the time to make sure that retaliation would be impossible.

To a lesser extent are some other explanations. But I (personally) do not believe that they are valid.

[3] Wishful thinking. Both Russia and China independently believe that the ruling leadership of America will come to their senses and stop all this war-mongering nonsense. Just one or two more elections and it will all be over and change.

[4] Incompetence in Russian and Chinese leadership. Both the Russians and the Chinese are not competent, and have determined that the best actions are ones in which America is permitted to define the rules of engagement and the behaviors during conflict.

What is obvious is that both Russia and China have the ability, the technology and the capability to hurt the United States substantially. But they are not making any overt mores in this regard. The reasoning behind this is many, but I really see the options as I described coming to the forefront.

We will find out soon enough.

And so … the very next day after I wrote those comments…

Ukraine – Russia Makes Serious Demands, Warns Of ‘Confrontation’

From MoA

Following unfounded U.S. claims of an imminent Russian invasion of the Ukraine U.S. President Joe Biden and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin have held a virtual summit. Little has been released about its real content but the Russian follow up shows that the issues they talked about were deadly serious.

On December 10 the Russian Foreign Ministry published a statement that not only sounds like an ultimatum but seems to be meant as one:

We note US President Joseph Biden’s readiness expressed at the December 7, 2021 talks with President Vladimir Putin to establish a serious dialogue on issues related to ensuring the security of the Russian Federation. Such a dialogue is urgently needed today when the relations between Russia and the collective West continue to decay and have approached a critical line. At the same time, numerous loose interpretations of our position have emerged in recent days. In this connection we feel it is necessary to once again clarify the following.

Escalating a confrontation with our country is absolutely unacceptable. As a pretext, the West is using the situation in Ukraine, where it embarked on encouraging Russophobia and justifying the actions of the Kiev regime to undermine the Minsk agreements and prepare for a military scenario in Donbass.

Instead of reigning in their Ukrainian protégés, NATO countries are pushing Kiev towards aggressive steps. There can be no alternative interpretation of the increasing number of unplanned exercises by the United States and its allies in the Black Sea. NATO members’ aircraft, including strategic bombers, regularly make provocative flights and dangerous manoeuvres in close proximity to Russia’s borders. The militarisation of Ukraine’s territory and pumping it with weapons are ongoing.

The course has been chosen of drawing Ukraine into NATO, which is fraught with the deployment of strike missile systems there with a minimal flight time to Central Russia, and other destabilising weapons. Such irresponsible behaviour creates grave military risks for all parties involved, up to and including a large-scale conflict in Europe.

All the NATO action mentioned above directly endangers Russia’s security. It has to cease. Some of the steps taken must be reversed and Russia will have to be given guarantees that certain measures will not be taken. The statement includes this list of demands:

  • No more NATO expansion towards Russia’s borders. Retraction of the 2008 NATO invitation to Ukraine and Georgia.
  • Legally binding guarantee that no strike systems which could target Moscow will be deployed in countries next to Russia.
  • No NATO or equivalent (UK, U.S., Pl.) ‘exercises’ near Russian borders.
  • NATO ships, planes to keep certain distances from Russian borders.
  • Regular military-to-military talks.
  • No intermediate-range nukes in Europe.

That the above is not a “pretty please” wishlist has since been emphasized by several Russian authorities:

Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Monday warned of confrontation should the United States and NATO fail to give Russia security guarantees concerning its eastern expansion, the RIA news agency reported.

President Vladimir Putin has demanded legally binding security guarantees that NATO will not expand further east or place its weapons close to Russian territory; Washington has repeatedly said no country can veto Ukraine's NATO hopes.

The confrontation Ryabkov talks about would not be verbal if Russia’s red lines get crossed:

We have openly pointed out that there are red lines which we will not allow anyone to cross, and we also have certain requirements, which have been formulated exceedingly clearly.

Russia can of course veto the Ukraine’s entry into NATO. It can destroy the Ukrainian military, take the regions of Ukraine where a majority speaks Russian and create a new sovereign state from them.

The remaining agricultural Banderastan would be left for Poland and Romania to feast on. This would give Russia the strategic depth it needs and it would limit the NATO friendly coastline in the Black Sea to the south western parts.

A Russian attack on the Ukraine is however what western weapon producers and their adjunct think tanks, ‘experts’ and political hawks, mainly in the U.S., deeply wish for. It would isolate Russia, increase the U.S. role in Europe, justify increasing military budgets and end the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and other Russian export routes.

And that is the reason why Russia will not attack and use alternative measures.

Unless, of course, …

In a phone call with Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson Putin repeated the demands and explained his reasoning:

Like other Western leaders, Boris Johnson expressed concern about Russia’s alleged large-scale troop movements near the Ukrainian border. In this regard, Vladimir Putin provided in-depth and principled assessments of the current situation in Ukraine.

Specific examples of Kiev's destructive course on derailing the Minsk agreements, which are the only viable path towards resolving the internal Ukraine crisis, were given. It was also pointed out that the Ukrainian authorities are purposefully aggravating the situation on the line of contact and are using heavy weapons and attack drones, which are prohibited by the Minsk Package of Measures in the conflict zone. Ukraine’s policy of discrimination against Russian-speaking people was pointed out as well.

It was emphasised that all this is happening amid the active military “exploration” of Ukraine’s territory by NATO, something that poses a direct threat to Russia’s security.

With this in mind, Vladimir Putin stated the need to immediately begin talks in order to develop clear international legal agreements that can preclude NATO’s further eastward advance and the deployment of weapons that pose a threat to Russia in neighbouring states, primarily Ukraine. Russia will present draft documents to this end.

The NATO countries which push for further moves against Russia, mostly the Baltic 3 and Poland, see all their dreams endangered. They will resist any move towards a fulfillment of Russia’s demands. They are however not the ones that count.

It is the U.S., Germany and France that Russia is counting on to get some senses. The upcoming winter, which is predicted to be somewhat harsh, is a good opportunity to apply a little pressure to Europe and to show that it is Russia, not the U.S., which provides Europe energy security. The new Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer understands that:

In an interview published on Tuesday in the German newspaper Die Welt, Nehammer, who was elected chancellor earlier this month, was asked if the Austrian government will continue to support Nord Stream 2. He replied, “Of course,” adding that he expects the pipeline to begin operating soon.

“I don’t consider it necessary to connect Nord Stream 2 with Russia’s behavior in Ukraine,” he went on, referencing a recent political standoff between Moscow and Kiev. “The EU can only hurt itself by doing so. Nord Stream 2 doesn’t only serve Russia’s interests – Germany, Austria, and other EU countries will profit from it. Nord Stream 2 is a European project, which shouldn’t be used as a tool to pressure Moscow.”

This winter Russia will use its market power to press for a fulfillment of its demands. Russia has stopped to provide natural gas to the European spot markets. It continues to deliver in full to customers who have long term contracts. This will squeeze Poland and a few others who depend on the spot market in times of peak demand. Russia hopes that those countries learn that their excessive hostility towards it can have serious consequences.

As Russia has no direct tool to squeeze the U.S. it will need a different strategy to push Biden to change course. The current main foreign policy concern in the U.S. is China. Russia is therefore coordinating its strategy with it:

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping will discuss "aggressive" language from the U.S. and NATO during their virtual meeting later this week, according to the Kremlin.

"The situation in international affairs, especially on the European continent, is very, very tense right now and requires discussion between allies," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, according to a Reuters report. "We see very, very aggressive rhetoric on the NATO and U.S. side, and this requires discussion between us and the Chinese."

Notice Peskov’s use of the word “allies”. This is, as far as I know, new. There is no formal treaty between Russia and China that makes them ‘allies’ so the use of the word is highly significant.

This is a concern for an Asia pundit who fears that any Russian move on Ukraine would be accompanied by a Chinese move on Taiwan. To prevent that she urges the U.S. to end the endless confrontation with Russia and to concentrate on the far east.

We can only hope that Biden understands such reasoning, finally shuts up the Russia hawks and ends the conflict with Moscow.

Otherwise we will all be in for some interesting times.

Yes. The USA is marching straight towards war!

And it’s going to be horrific. Imagine DEMANDING Russia do this, and DEMANDING China do that. These demands will be met with extreme force. And I do mean EXTREME.

All of this reminds me of the scenes from the UK movie about the build-up to Nuclear war called “Threads”.

Threads.

Never a More Unsettling Strategic Landscape

From HERE.

It is the first time that others are dictating to the West rather than being instructed on how to conform to American red lines.

There was an almost audible sigh of relief echoing around western corridors. Though there were no breakthroughs in the Team Biden-Putin virtual meeting, the talks not surprisingly, were heavily focussed on the matter of immediate concern: Ukraine – amid widespread fears that the Ukrainian volcano might irrupt at any moment.

At the meeting: Agreed was the proposal to initiate ‘lower-level’ government-to-government discussion of Russia’s red lines and any halt to NATO expansion eastwards. Jake Sullivan, however, spilt a little cold water over that when he firmly emphasised that the U.S. had given no commitments on either issue. Biden (as advertised in advance), warned of strong economic and other measures should Russia intervene in Ukraine.

What was more notable however, was that the U.S. is ‘only’ threatening to sanction Russia, or to move more troops into the region, as opposed to posing explicit western and NATO militarily intervention in Ukraine. In earlier statements, Biden and other U.S. officials have been vague about what Washington’s response to a Russian invasion would be: warning repeatedly of ‘consequences’, even as it re-committed to Ukraine’s sovereignty.

So, should we all begin to breathe again? Actually, no. In fact, the immediacy of the Ukraine issue was always something of a red-herring: Russia has no desire to wade into the thick, cloying mud of a regional quagmire, however much some in the West would ‘love it’. And the Kiev forces are tired, bedraggled and demoralised from sitting in cold trenches along the Contact Line for months. They have little appetite to take on the Donbass militias (unless aided from the outside).

Nothing was resolved about what to do about the wider dark dystopia that is Ukraine – in all its various manifestations. President Putin raised the Minsk Accord, but nobody, it seems, was biting; the fishing line remained limp. Nor was anything agreed about what to do with the accumulating debris of what once was called U.S.-Russian ‘diplomatic relations’. The latter term (diplomatic relations) is now but a poor joke.

Celebration therefore, is not in order. The viscerally anti-Putin factions in U.S. and Kiev are furious: A U.S. Republican Senator, Roger Wicker has warned that in any stand-off over Ukraine, “I would not rule out military action. I think we start making a mistake when we take options off the table, so I would hope the president keeps that option on the table”. Asked what military action against Russia would comprise, Wicker said it could mean “that we stand off, with our ships in the Black Sea – and we rain destruction on Russian military capability”, adding that the U.S. also shouldn’t “rule out first-use nuclear action” against Russia.

So Ukraine festers on. If we are now to have a lull, then it is just that – ‘a lull’. The ‘hawks’ in U.S. and Europe have not raised the white flag: Ukraine is too good a weapon for their needs, to be tossed lightly aside.

This focus on the Ukraine crisis however, is to ‘see the trees, yet miss the wood’: We have three – not one – ticking landmines, ready to ignite. Three ‘fronts’: Each are distinct, yet closely inter-related, and are now threaded by unknown levels of strategic aims and synchronicity: Ukraine, Taiwan, and the faltering JCPOA Accord – which is now sparking untold angst in Tel Aviv.

The wood not seen for these three trees lies with the unresolved issue of European security architecture; Middle East security architecture; and indeed, of global security architecture. The existing rules-based order has passed its sell-by date: It provides neither security, nor does it reflect the reality of today’s Great Power balances. It has become a pathogen. Simply put, it is too fossilised in the post-WW2 lietkultur.

In a recent CNN interview, Fareed Zakaria, asked Jake Sullivan, Biden’s Security Adviser:

So what is it, after all your ‘tough talk’, that you have been able to agree with China; what has been negotiated? ‘

Wrong question’ was Sullivan’s sharp retort. “Wrong metric”, he said flatly: Don’t ask about bilateral agreements – ask about what else we have secured. The right way to think about this, he said, is:

Have we set the terms of an effective competition where the U.S. is in a position to defend its values and advance its interests – not just in the Indo-Pacific, but around the world…”. 
“We want to create the circumstance in which two major powers will operate in an international system for the foreseeable future – and we want the terms of that system to be favorable to American interests and values: It is rather, a favorable disposition in which the U.S. and its allies can shape the international rules of the road on the sorts of issues that are fundamentally going to matter to the people of our country [America] and to the people everywhere … “.

It is this maximalist lietkultur which is leading us to a point where these three explosive issues together risk a fundamental convulsion of the global order.

You have to go back a long way to find a moment when our world was as vulnerable to a sudden change in fortunes – what Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph terms, “The West’s nightmare: a war on three fronts”.

What is going on?

Well, it is certainly something very far-reaching.

And why the U.S. insistence on such an absolute stance for the global order – according to which other Great Powers get no right to set their own security red lines?

Well, it is because … the ‘four horsemen’ of the Great Transitions:

  • The Pandemic – leading into a global health regulatory system;
  • the Climate Emergency – leading to a global CO2 regime of credits and debits;
  • the tech and AI revolution – leading us into a global era of automation and ‘bots’ (and job losses); and fourthly,
  • the Transition from classical economics to that of global Modern Monetary Theory that requires a global re-set of the world’s mountain of debt that will never be repaid.

Sullivan’s vision of the ‘foreseeable future’ is essentially conceived around this ‘higher order’ project: The preservation of global ‘rules of the road’, framed to reflect U.S. and allied interests’, as the base from which the clutch of ‘transitions’ – health, climate change, managerial and monetary technocracy – can be levered from the national parliamentary prerogative, up to a supra-national level of business and tech managerial collectives of ‘expertise’ (devoid of accountability to national parliamentary oversight).

Separated in this way into such spheres as health precautions, climate recovery, fostering tech ‘miracles’, and money issuance severed from taxation – they sound non-ideological, and somehow almost utopian.

It was well understood that all these transitions would overturn long-standing human ways of life that are ancient and deeply rooted, and inevitably would trigger dissidence – which is why new forms of social ‘discipline’, and the usurpation of control from national accountability, to the supranational plane, is so important. It certainly isn’t making people “happy”, (as per Davos).

Hmmm! … the ideological underbelly to this ‘higher order’ re-set may be obscured from view, as non-partisan, but it is he who decides the international standards, the protocols, the metrics, and the rules for these transitions, who is Sovereign – as Carl Schmitt once noted.

Sullivan at least has the integrity to be frank about the unseen ideology to the re-set:

“We want the terms of that system to be favourable to American interests and values: It is rather, a favourable disposition in which the U.S. and its allies can shape the international rules of the road on the sorts of issues that are fundamentally going to matter to the people of our country [America] and to the people everywhere …”.

We are talking here of something which clearly goes well beyond the scope of the Biden summits with Xi and Putin, and the Vienna JCPOA talks.

President Putin has warned that any encroachment of NATO infrastructure or forces into Ukraine would not be permitted.

And that Russia would decisively act to prevent it.

Similarly, Iran has stated explicitly that any Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities will not be tolerated. It would result in the Iranian destruction of Israeli vital infrastructure across the full territory.

And Iran’ and Russia’s stance is identical with that of China in respect to Taiwan: President Xi made that plain in the virtual summit that he held with Biden on 15 November.

Xi warned that any move by Taiwan to secede is not permitted, and would be met by a military response.

In Vienna, Iran simply stated its ‘red lines’:

  • No discussion of Iran’s ballistic missiles;
  • no discussion of Iran’s regional role; and
  • no freezing of enrichment – as long as the mechanism for lifting sanctions and ensuring their non-recurrence is not agreed upon – effectively calling for a return to the original framework of the 2015 accord.

Iran demands binding guarantees that sanctions will not arbitrarily be re-imposed; that trade normalisation will not be informally hobbled again contrary to the terms of the accord, as happened under Obama (the U.S. Treasury Department pursued its own anti-trade policy, at variance with that of the White House); and that all sanctions must be lifted.

What should be noted here is the context: Note that the Iranian position is almost identical in content to that enunciated by Russia, vis à vis the U.S., in respect to Ukraine: Putin’s demand to Washington is that Russian interests and ‘red lines’ be formally acknowledged and accepted; that legally binding agreements be made in respect to Russia’s security in eastern Europe; and the absolute demand for no further NATO encroachment to the East, and a veto on any NATO infrastructure exported to Ukraine.

This is very new – in geo-politics, co-incidences of this nature don’t just spontaneously happen.

It is evident that the three powers are strategically co-ordinated, politically and likely militarily, too.

Western states are stunned: It is the first time that others are dictating to them – setting out their red lines – rather than being instructed on how to conform to American red lines.

They are disconcerted, and unsure what to do next.

And, as Anatol Lieven astutely notes, some actions would have grave strategic consequences:

“quite apart from the global economic damage that would result from a war in Ukraine, and the ways in which China would take advantage of such a crisis, the West has a very strong reason indeed to avoid a new war: the West would lose”.

Lieven continues:

“This would also risk becoming a world war; for it is virtually certain that China would exploit a war between the United States and Russia, thereby threatening the United States with the risk of two wars simultaneously – and defeat in both”.

For now, the U.S. and its allies repeat the usual bromides about ‘all options being on the table’; of crippling sanctions, and of an international coalition being formed to pressure and oppose such non-compliance.

For, without competitor compliance (or these states’ effective political isolation and condemnation), the higher project of raising these seemingly ‘non-ideological’ transitions to a supra-national sphere whose standards, protocols, etcetera (‘terms of the system’ in Sullivan’s words) will not be achieved.

It will not prove possible to upload a ‘Washington Consensus’ software update when these three states simply refuse Sullivan’s ‘rules’.

A strategic reset however will not come easily.

The west is embedded in meme-warfare, which makes a strategic order partition all the harder.

Any compromise on the narrative that Russia cannot have its own red lines; cannot dictate whether not Ukraine joins NATO; nor determine where NATO sites its missiles and nukes, risks Biden being seen as weak.

Republicans already pre-emptively have blamed what they call Biden’s ‘weakness’ for having encouraged ‘dangerous adventurism’ from Moscow.

Then again, perhaps these two summits – together with Iran’s stance in Vienna – represent the beginning of the end to the West’s Rules-Based Order, and a countdown to a new geo-strategic balance between the two axis – and ultimately therefore, to peace or war.

Meanwhile…

US bans UAE from hosting Chinese navy

So the UAE is not a sovereign nation? It is a vassal state under the thumb of America? From HERE.

During a conference call on 15 November 2021, President Joe Biden assured his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that his country was not seeking war with China, but only loyal competition. As for China, it rejects any form of rivalry and aims to establish “win-win” relations.

However, according to the Wall Street Journal, back in September the CIA had spotted construction activity for what appeared to be a Chinese naval military facility in Abu Dhabi.

That same month, National Security Secretary Jake Sullivan together with his Coordinator for the Greater Middle East, Brett McGurk, were dispatched to the Emirates.

The two American men presented Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (“MBZ”) with satellite photos, ordering him to stop the construction immediately or face “consequences”.

China currently boasts the most powerful navy in the world, outdistancing the United States. She built a naval base in Djibouti in 2017 to grapple (efficiently) with the threat of Somali pirates, then signed a secret agreement in 2019 to establish a base in Cambodia. In addition, she set up civilian naval bases in Pakistan and Sri Lanka which could quickly be repurposed for military use.

The United Arab Emirates are home to a large US naval base and, in order to safeguard their independence, also host a French base.

And the UAE response?

UAE threatens to pull out of massive military deal with US

From HERE.

The United Arab Emirates has reportedly threatened to quit a $23-billion military deal with the US over Washington’s tough requirements meant to shield the weapons against what the Americans call “Chinese espionage.”

The deal was made during former US president Donald Trump’s twilight days in office. On paper, it enables the Emirates to acquire American-made F-35 aircraft, Reaper drones, and other advanced munitions.

On Tuesday, however, The Wall Street Journal cited an Emirati official as saying,

“The UAE has informed the US that it will suspend discussions to acquire the F-35.”

“Technical requirements, sovereign operational restrictions, and the cost/benefit analysis led to the reassessment,”

The source added.

The Journal considered the development to be equal to

“a significant shake-up between two longtime allies.”

It tried to attribute the Emirati snub to Abu Dhabi’s partnership with Beijing and the latter’s growing influence in the region.

“The collapse of the deal would fuel perceptions within the Middle East and elsewhere that America’s decades-long role as security provider of choice in the region is diminishing,”

It wrote.

Among other things, the paper said, the US has long been concerned about Abu Dhabi’s economic ties with Beijing and its involvement with the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co.

Huawei provides the Emirates with its communications infrastructure. US officials and members of Congress allege, though, that the company is a national-security threat. The company and the Chinese government have denied such allegations.

An important comment

As one who played “duck, cover & kiss your sweet a*s good-bye” in my fourth grade grammar school during the Cuban/Turkish Missile Crisis, I still think that a repeat of such a memorable event is more probable than a European conflict.

The reasons are as follows:

1) As pointed out by many in this drinking establishment, the Russian leadership is pretty miffed that the Americans get to hide behind an ocean and Europe while the latter plays “Russian Roulette” with the crispness of Eurasia region. Methinks the Russians would prefer the Americans get to feel the heat for a change. At the same time, strategically, its better PR with the locals to threaten the Americans rather than their European cannon fodder.

2) The Russians have already given an indirect threat of moving mobile missile launchers into the Western Hemisphere. Read below in Sputnik. In that article the authors claimed that the Chinese have the capability of moving mobile launchers anywhere in the world inside shipping containers. This article was published the same day as Blinken’s assertion that Russia has no right to drawing red lines, and was picked up by Global Security, the Sun, and others.

https://sputniknews.com/20211207/china-hides-secret-missile-systems-in-cargo-containers-for-surprise-attack-anywhere—report-1091301280.html

Overlooked is a reference in Wikipedia, posted by who knows who, which describes just that with the the Club K Kalibr cruise missile. The article was posted a number of years ago, and is complete with a photo in a container launching platform and a reference to a 2011 showing at the MAKS 2011 Air Show. I’m sure US intelligence is aware of this fact, as it was also covered in navyrecognition.com in 2019. As I stated in the open thread when I first posted it, the Neo-cons are not that bright and need to be hit over the head emotionally to have that “ah-ha” experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M-54_Kalibr

3) One of the biggest televised events in the original stand-off was the blockade of Cuba by the US Navy. This is interesting in two respects. First, that maneuver is much more difficult due to much better aircraft transport and smaller rockets, and secondly it will be seen as hypocritical to a possible blockade by the Chinese of Taiwan and American stated “Freedom of Self Defense”, and “Freedom of Navigation”. It therefore underlines the notion of “spheres of influence” at a visceral level.

It’s getting to be a very, very interesting world.

-Michael.j

Putting all the pieces together…

Now I know it's serious.

-Keith Granger

[1] America has established who their allies are. (With the “Summit for democracy”.)

[2] It has promised financial outlays for their version of “democracy” to all the nations that will side with them. (Just look at the financial budgets out of Washington DC.)

[3] It is really pushing towards war with the nations that are not part of their coalition. (Russia, China, Iran, and any other nation that shows any kind of independence.) They are making bold demands, and pushing, pushing, and pushing for a response. They do not expect anything other than a localized strike, where they can then retaliate with the full force of their military currently in place.

To me, it is obvious. The United States has determined to wage war. Not just against China but against the entire rest of the world, and is now trying to determine who it’s friends and enemies are.

They are pushing for their “enemies” to “make the first move”. Then they will act, with systems already put in place and ready to launch.

No wonder China is building nuke swarm hyper-velocity missiles like there’s no tomorrow.

Maybe it’s because maybe there isn’t going to be one.

We will all be in for gruesome times. No need to play with words here.

-Pnyx

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 2

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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A fine Rufus reminder on the entry to a wet tiger year

It’s a new Chinese year. It’s a water tiger year. And it’s a fine time to remember to be the best that we can possibly be. In this installment, I offer up some fine Rufus inspirational videos that are found throughout the world and inside of China. Remember, that being a Rufus doesn’t depend on your wealth, where you live, what color of skin you have, or your career. It depends on your compassion for those who surround you. Be the Rufus. The world needs people like us.

Rufus climbs to rescue

A Rufus does whatever it takes to help and save others. video 4MB

Rufus dog stops an abduction

Be the Rufus. If this dog can be a Rufus, what is stopping you? video 2MB

Rufus’s on the bus

A real Rufus shows kindness and help when it is needed. Video 3MB

Save the Baby!

Rufus breaks into a car to save a baby left inside on a cold, cold day. Video 7MB

Rufus rescues a woman in distress

Video 3MB

A Rufus gives it back

A Rufus is not part of the for-profit scheme. Instead a Rufus is part of the community and supports others regardless of their roles or their situations. video 14MB

 

Bus driver stops woman from throwing baby over a bridge

Yikes! Fast acting Rufus bus driver. Video 3MB

Rufus Hospital Rescue

Rufus always ready to help. Video 1.3MB

Rufus police take down thief

A society of Rufus’s protecting the rest of us from criminals. Video 3MB

A Rufus overcomes all obsticles

It doesn’t matter if it is training, a situation, an illness, money or catastrophe. A Rufus endure and pushes towards success. video. 4MB

Rufus gives free food to delivery guy

Show some compassion. Be the Rufus. video 3MB

 

Rufus stops an abduction

Always alert, and always ready. Be the Rufus. Video 1MB

Rufus Parking Ticket

video 16.9MB

Facts of Life

A Rufus knows and understands these important rules of life. video 6.6MB

 

A simple act of kindness

You don’t need to be a hero to be a Rufus. You only need to add good things to the world around you. Use your talents. Make people smile. video. 5MB

 

More Great Links in my Rufus Index here…

Check them out… Rufus Index .

More stuff…

Master Index .

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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And now on the light side; A look at the Pakistan military

Have you guys ever seen the pomp and ceremony that constitutes the army and military of Pakistan? Well you should. It’s a sight to behold. Here, we take a moment to watch some videos of the Pakistani military doing various things. I have found it very interesting. I hope that you do as well.

It’s not what you would think, and it looks like they are making things much more involved and difficult than they need to. But, perhaps that’s their culture. Don’t you know.

I think it’s all a hoot.

Firing Artillery

Impressive video. 3MB

Changing of the Guard

Also impressive, and a tad comical. So very British. Video 14MB

Military in action

Very organized. Must be very tiring. video 3.1MB

Conclusion

Watching the military conduct their procedures and maneuvers is far better than fighting them in a war. Don’t you think? What ever you might think of this bit and their actions, know that when it comes to fighting and using their weapons, they are nothing to take for granted. They are quite capable and serious. And I for one, applaud them.

I hope that you enjoyed this little glimpse at the nation wedged between India and Afghanistan.

Oh, and one more thing…

Be the Rufus

Here’s a compilation of videos where everyday people, show their appreciation to others. Mostly teachers, janitors, cooks, beggars, drivers, lorry-men, and so forth. Video 60MB

 

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

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In a world gone crazy, it’s time for everyone to stand up and help others as only a Rufus can

Here’s some fine Rufus inspirational videos to remind you that the world needs you. It needs you RIGHT NOW. You need to participate and make this world a better place. You need to go forth and help others, to participate in your community and to add calmness and kindness to the world that surround you. Be the Rufus.

What do I mean by being a Rufus?

The term “Rufus” is well known to long time visitors to MM. It describes service-to-others (STO) sentience and the related behaviors rather than the service-for-self (STS) sentience behaviors of the vast bulk of humanity. The details on sentience selection and why it is important are sprinkled throughout the Majestic Index.

Rufus is a state of behavior. A Rufus puts the community before him / her self. They do things without a profit motive of any type. They are kind, helpful and when they walk down the street they smile at people and make them feel good.

In some ways, being a Rufus lends itself to heroic actions, but in other ways it refers to being a significant person located in a geographic region.

While the rest of the world scrambles and claws towards money and power, and leaves a destitute and stripped world behind, a Rufus nurtures the world. He / she uses their creative abilities to make the world a better place.

You can go to my RUFUS INDEX. Start at the top and start reading all the posts. If after article 75, you still have questions, I will try to explain it to you better.

Long time readers recognize being a Rufus is showing kindness to others, being a hero when necessary, participating in the community and working to make OUR world a better place to live in. Chinese members of MM will recognize it as the expectations of volunteerism required of the Chinese Communist party, but that is just a name. It’s all people working together towards a common goal.

Some of these videos might take some time to load. Just click on the "video" link and allow it to load in a new tab or window. It will load faster that way.

I have received numerous comments (that I did not publish on MM) by people complaining that I didn’t have enough Rufus videos showing people in America being kind, helping others, and doing good deeds. Well, I tried to put the ones up that I could find, it’s just that they really don’t exist much in the for-profit every-man-for-himself nations. I have tons of police shootings, black people store robberies, car jackings, and videos of poverty stricken homeless from the USA. But Rufus behaviors. Not much.

Sorry.

We start with some hard working people. Just everyday people who do the dirty, nasty work, alone. In China they give most of their money to their families who live far away, and for years they work alone, pushing and striving to make the family live a comfortable life. This first video is for you … “average Joe”.

Hard Workers

video 93.1 MB

Rufus Child high-rise rescue

Be the Rufus. video 14MB

Rufus respects his flag

You have to be part of something larger. A Rufus understands this. video 3MB

Rufus protects his young sister

Friends, family, community and country. A Rufus participates and makes a difference in the lives of others. video 1.3MB

Rufus helps a schoolkid

Who cares if you don’t know him. You help him. It’s the way of the Rufus. video 4MB

Bunny wants to be alone

We are never alone. So don’t isolate. Realize that our strength and our value comes from the community that we surround ourselves with. video 60MB

Rufus work together as a team

Just a line. But in a society, everyone must know their place. video 25MB

Commercialized cuteness in Japan

Japanese culture embraces cuteness. But cuteness is welcoming and attractive. In a weird way, it is attractive. We should spend out time planting flowers, trees, and make our little world better, prettier and calmer. It’s our duty as a Rufus. Video 11.7MB

Dog starts to maul kittens

You can see the blood on the second kitten to the far right. But Rufus mother cats will  not allow it. She fights the big dog with no fear what so ever. video 20.9MB

Chinese Pioneers first grade

Discipline. Working as part of a group. Leadership. participation. Striving to be the best for your community. These are the virtues of Chinese military training. Here’s a first grade military roll call for the Pioneers. video 6MB

Discipline. Working as part of a group.

Training starts in first grade, and they are so earnest and cute. China is building a nation of little Rufus’s that are poised to remake the world into a better place where everyone can live and prosper. Discipline. video 25MB

Rufus cares about the elders

A Rufus does NOT put their parents into a nursing home unless there is no other option. Family is part of our community. We have to accept our roles within that community and not discard others because they are inconvenient to us. video 25MB

Rufus rescue of dog on the tracks

In America some jackass tied a dog to the train tracks to watch it get run over. A guy risks his life to save the dog. video 38MB

How China treats expats

The world is not “us vs. them”. It’s one of sharing and community. Here’s why many expats like MM, enjoy living inside of China. video 124MB

We need to contribute, to help and be kind

The world needs us. video 71.6MB

Rufus keeps baby sleeping

Be mindful of the situation and conditions of others. video 21MB

Rufus stops woman from abducting a child

Be the Rufus. If we all work together to stop greed, selfishness, and for-profit psychopaths, the world WILL be a better place for all of us. video 3MB

Show some love

Why don’t you? video 2.1 MB

Be the Rufus Finale

Be the Rufus. The world needs you. Your community needs you. Together we all can make the world a better place to live in. All we need to do is be kinder and more considerate. video 106.2MB

More Great Links in my Rufus Index here…

Check them out… Rufus Index .

More stuff…

Master Index .

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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A second Rufus humanity post for a new year and new start

Here’s a mixtures of videos describing Rufus behaviors. When I mean being the Rufus, I mean contributing to society. I mean putting it out there, being helpful. Being kind. Refraining from anger. Refraining defensively when provoked. I means being the best you that YOU can be. Be that Rufus.

The following are some videos about people; humanity and being a Rufus. Some are sad, some are painful, some are good, and some are happy. Be the Rufus. Otherwise, why live?

Be the Rufus. Be family. Be the community that cares for it’s members.

I strongly suggest you watch the videos in the order presented to get the proper "effect" that I am trying to provide.

What do I mean by being a Rufus?

The term “Rufus” is well known to long time visitors to MM. It describes service-to-others (STO) sentience and the related behaviors rather than the service-for-self (STS) sentience behaviors of the vast bulk of humanity. The details on sentience selection and why it is important are sprinkled throughout the Majestic Index.

Rufus is a state of behavior. A Rufus puts the community before him / her self. They do things without a profit motive of any type. They are kind, helpful and when they walk down the street they smile at people and make them feel good.

In some ways, being a Rufus lends itself to heroic actions, but in other ways it refers to being a significant person located in a geographic region.

While the rest of the world scrambles and claws towards money and power, and leaves a destitute and stripped world behind, a Rufus nurtures the world. He / she uses their creative abilities to make the world a better place.

You can go to my RUFUS INDEX. Start at the top and start reading all the posts. If after article 75, you still have questions, I will try to explain it to you better.

Long time readers recognize being a Rufus is showing kindness to others, being a hero when necessary, participating in the community and working to make OUR world a better place to live in. Chinese members of MM will recognize it as the expectations of volunteerism required of the Chinese Communist party, but that is just a name. It’s all people working together towards a common goal. His video summarizes it up nicely. Be the Rufus. video. 27MB

Rufus Police

The duty of the police is to help society to be safe and secure. And when crimes are performed, to isolate the troublemakers and remove them from society. And when they do good, and are helpful they should be appreciated for their efforts. video 2MB

A Rufus shows understandings

Sometimes things are not what they seem. But when understanding dawns, then the Rufus can shine through. video

AI and social Credit Scores working together to catch criminal bad guys

China is rapidly able to catch the bad guys of society as all of China is wired for surveillance by AI computers, and everything is monitored. It might sound Orwellian, but the results speak for themselves. bad guys are caught and imprisoned long before they even realize that they were caught. video 15MB

Rufus saves a kitty cat

A country cat wants to nap in the middle of a road. Lucky for him a young Rufus is nearby. video 1MB

A unified COMMUNITY

All Rufus. All the time. video

Community

The role of government should be to support and protect it’s citizenry. Not pit one group against the other. And it shouldn’t allow people to go without food, work, purpose and shelter. China is a perfect example of a government that cares for it’s citizens, while America is the perfect example of a selfish tyrannical nightmare. Here, we compare China with America regarding homeless people. It’s like night and day. video 96MB

Read the subtitles.

Emergency it’s all hands on deck

It’s an emergency it’s all hands on deck and the emergency save of a baby. Go get them Rufus! Video 5MB

Rufus schoolboy helps lost child

Waits for the police and then hands over the lost wayward child. Video

Be the Rufus

We need to be kind to each other, to be helpful and to care about other people If everyone would do so then this world would be a great and wonderful place. video 67MB

Rescue of a drowning person

Being a hero is but a small part of what being a Rufus is. video 2MB

Be the kind person that everyone can rely on

You are not your job, your education, your career. You are not your image, your beauty, or your wallet. you are not your family or their standing in the community. You are yourself, and that means you are pristine and special. So be the Rufus. Make your life and the lives around you better. video 15MB

Rufus with an umbrella

Be the Rufus. video 3MB

Be the Rufus

Contribute.

Contribute and make the world a better place for all of us. Stop being so selfish, so greedy and so demanding. be more compassionate, kind and caring. be the Rufus. video 21MB

More Great Links in my Rufus Index here…

Check them out…

Rufus Index

.

More stuff…

Master Index

.

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Lets start the year off right with a fine Rufus humanity post

Here’s a mixtures of videos describing Rufus behaviors. When I mean being the Rufus, I mean contributing to society. I mean putting it out there, being helpful. Being kind. Refraining from anger. Refraining defensively when provoked. I means being the best you that YOU can be. Be that Rufus.

The following are some videos about people; humanity and being a Rufus. Some are sad, some are painful, some are good, and some are happy. Be the Rufus. Otherwise, why live?

Be the Rufus. Be family. Be the community that cares for it’s members.

I strongly suggest you watch the videos in the order presented to get the proper "effect" that I am trying to provide.

What do I mean by being a Rufus?

The term “Rufus” is well known to long time visitors to MM. It describes service-to-others (STO) sentience and the related behaviors rather than the service-for-self (STS) sentience behaviors of the vast bulk of humanity. The details on sentience selection and why it is important are sprinkled throughout the Majestic Index.

Rufus is a state of behavior. A Rufus puts the community before him / her self. They do things without a profit motive of any type. They are kind, helpful and when they walk down the street they smile at people and make them feel good.

In some ways, being a Rufus lends itself to heroic actions, but in other ways it refers to being a significant person located in a geographic region.

While the rest of the world scrambles and claws towards money and power, and leaves a destitute and stripped world behind, a Rufus nurtures the world. He / she uses their creative abilities to make the world a better place.

You can go to my RUFUS INDEX. Start at the top and start reading all the posts. If after article 75, you still have questions, I will try to explain it to you better.

Long time readers recognize being a Rufus is showing kindness to others, being a hero when necessary, participating in the community and working to make OUR world a better place to live in. Chinese members of MM will recognize it as the expectations of volunteerism required of the Chinese Communist party, but that is just a name.

Rufus cat

Love or just keeping each other warm. Who knows? But it sure is cute. video 1MB

Rufus during a crisis

When things go wrong, a Rufus is always there to contribute and participate. video 1MB

Rufus saves girl in subway

Quick action, without thinking results in saved lives. Video. 3MB

Rufus gas station attendant

video 1MB

A Rufus is organized

Here is how you sort out your cats. video 3MB

Rufus works and overcomes obstacles

Like this young Rufus. video 10MB

Rufus rescues a baby

Uh oh. Baby on the tracks and a train is approaching. What to do? Luckily a Rufus is there. video 1.4MB

Rufus rescue gone wrong.

Not every Rufus event ends up well. You have to try and keep on trying. You will not win every time. Just keep on being the Rufus. video 2.8MB

This is from my LinkedIN feed…

Suicide Awareness – Trigger warning. 
 
I’ve thought long and hard about posting about this, debating on how it would be perceived by the market, however, I decided to just speak from the heart. I do a lot for women in this market and now I also want to do a lot for men, men who account for over 75% of suicides.
 
Yesterday my friend Rob would have turned 36, for those who didn’t know him he was possibly the best broker the freight market had ever seen. He was referred to as 'an extraordinary talent, a maverick, an occasional handful but a lovely person with a genuine heart’.
 
At a young age Robert Byrne was made Director at one of the worlds leading broking shops, his billings were highly impressive, he was an incredible talent and a very good friend. He had the world at his feet.
 
I didn’t particularly like Rob when we first met, I found him rather arrogant, however, that was the thing with Rob, he was an extrovert who always spoke his truth and in reflection what I loved about him the most. He was who he was, and he didn’t shy way or change for anybody. Like marmite, you either loved him or hated him, love or hate him everyone agreed to one thing he was an incredible gifted young man. Rob was eternally fun, there was never a dull moment. We used to love karaoke sessions and as he used to phrase it cause ‘scenes’.
 
That’s why it makes it all so much harder that in April 2020 he decided to take his own life. He called me two hours before it did it. I guess this was his goodbye call, I am eternally grateful that I answered the phone, but I just wish he said, “I’m not ok, please help”.

Rob did have and could of had lived the most incredible life if he got his mind right. I can’t express the loss and waste that left so many deeply shocked and saddened.

I will never get my friend back; I will never have him wind me or call me for karaoke sessions. When I went through tough times Rob brought my spark back and showed me how fun life could be again. I do anything now to return the favor.

I hate the way men are raised to be tough, to man up and not encouraged to speak up when they are suffering. Suffering with depression, addiction, and a troubled mind.

I know most people reading this will be men and will probably not want to comment because of this awful stigma that surrounds mental health. But if you are reading this and you are not ok, you have addictions or demons that you are hiding away then please seek help. Please tell someone before its too late. Its ok not to be ok. You are loved and your life is worth living.
 
If you need help, please reach out. Here are some links below for help.
 
Samaritans – for everyone
Call 116 123
Email jo@samaritans.org
 
SOS Silence of Suicide – for everyone
Call 0300 1020 505 – 4pm to midnight every day
Email support@sossilenceofsuicide.org

And his photo with the author of the above…

Rufus rescue of janitor

video 10MB

Rufus rescues a boy

He’s stuck in a well, and the father is besides himself in grief and worry. What is a Rufus going to do? video 4MB

Rufus takes lost girl to her father

Be the Rufus. video 5MB

Spirit Rufus

There are physical and non-physical Rufus’s. Nothing to be fearful of. Just realize that what you fear is usually nothing worthy of fear. Accept and be gracious. video. 2MB

Rufus helps out a family

We all need each other. Stop being selfish. Help those in need. video 7MB

Rufus dog sings to opera

The only thing that I can say to this, aside that it is really cute, is that a Rufus is aware of the abilities of others. Obviously the owner is aware that the dog can hear the high pitched sounds of Italian opera. I am sure that the dog loved the performance. video 1MB

Rufus allows a sick man in a truck to pass

Single lane road. Can only pass in one direction.  Video 12MB

Subway draw

Maybe you don’t have the money to donate to charity, but you have a skill. Use it to put a smile on the face of others. Like this Rufus, drawing quick portraits for free. video 6MB

Subway Engagement

If you do enough Rufus related behaviors you will attract others that are full of life, and love. video 9MB

More Great Links in my Rufus Index here…

Check them out…

Rufus Index

.

More stuff…

Master Index

.

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Rufus humanity post for Christmas leading into 2022 it is our highest calling

Here’s a mixtures of videos describing Rufus behaviors. When I mean being the Rufus, I mean contributing to society. I mean putting it out there, being helpful. Being kind. Refraining from anger. Refraining defensively when provoked. I means being the best you that YOU can be. Be that Rufus.

The term “Rufus” is well known to long time visitors to MM. It describes service-to-others (STO) sentience and the related behaviors rather than the service-for-self (STS) sentience behaviors of the vast bulk of humanity. The details on sentience selection and why it is important are sprinkled throughout the Majestic Index.

Rufus is a state of behavior. A Rufus puts the community before him / her self. They do things without a profit motive of any type. They are kind, helpful and when they walk down the street they smile at people and make them feel good.

In some ways, being a Rufus lends itself to heroic actions, but in other ways it refers to being a significant person located in a geographic region.

While the rest of the world scrambles and claws towards money and power, and leaves a destitute and stripped world behind, a Rufus nurtures the world. He / she uses their creative abilities to make the world a better place.

You can go to my RUFUS INDEX. Start at the top and start reading all the posts. If after article 75, you still have questions, I will try to explain it to you better.

The following are some videos about people; humanity and being a Rufus. Some are sad, some are painful, some are good, and some are happy. Be the Rufus. Otherwise, why live?

Be the Rufus. Be family. Be the community that cares for it’s members.

I strongly suggest you watch the videos in the order presented to get the proper "effect" that I am trying to provide.

Rufus father rescues

Protecting the young ones is a top priority for the Rufus. Video 19MB

Rufus Child Protects Others

Caring for the well-being of others is a top Rufus priority. video 3.6MB

Rufus child holds open the door

It starts with caring and consideration for others. video 2MB

Rufus Husband

Awareness of your loved ones is a prerequisite for fine Rufus behaviors. video 2MB

Rufus fire crew

A Rufus always welcomes others to join them in their efforts. video 4MB

Rufus helps girl on scooter

A Rufus always comes to the rescue. video 3MB

Rufus tends to the volunteers

A Rufus participates in their community. video 23MB

Rufus student sings about his country

The Chinese are wildly patriotic. And they associate (naturally) their friends and family with their nation. Which is the exact opposite of America where it is “us vs. them” and “every man for himself”. Here we have a student singing about China in school. video 3.1MB

MM video

This is a video that I took of a nice elementary school girl handing out brochures for her parents business. She gets out of school and hands out the brochures to help her family while she walks home. video 22MB

Rufus park amusements

When your government supports the community, then the community provides a stable and healthy environment to exist, work and play in. Part of that is having amusements and other free things for the community to us. None of which are a for-profit model. video 4MB

Rufus review

Here’s a good review of some fine Rufus behaviors. Be the Rufus, or just be a nobody. video 14MB

Let me be perfectly clear…

We must be part of something bigger than ourselves. We are not machines that eat, are entertained, and propagate. We are living, breathing entities and we need to provide and treat others the same way.

Be the Rufus. It’s our highest calling. video 26MB

 

More Links in my Rufus Index here…

Check them out…

Rufus Index

.

More stuff…

Master Index

.

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

A interesting collection of time capsules

When I was married to my first wife, she told me a story about what happened when her grandmother died. Once this 90-something woman died, the “children” all went over to her old house “on the hill” and started probate on the belongings. And there they discovered that there was a very large, and very heavy bureau that had been against the one wall for as long as anyone could remember. And when they emptied the bureau, and moved the heavy massive piece away, they discovered a locked door.

When they opened it, they found a child’s bedroom dating from the 1920’s all perfectly preserved.

Apparently, my wife’s oldest uncle told the story that when he was five years old, he and his older brother, who was six went out playing on the frozen river, and the older brother fell into the ice and died. Since he was so young at the time, he had forgotten about the older brother and the event, but the grandmother simply walled up the room. Closed the blinds, shut the drapes and never spoke of the lost son ever again.

Inside was the room just as the boy had left it. With clothing on the floor, an unmade bed. Toys about, and other things of that period such as books, cast metal toys, an an old baseball mitt and bat.

It’s a fascinating story, and one that comes up time and time again over the years.

  • Time capsules are purposely built to contain interesting and unique items meant to be uncovered at a predetermined date in the future. This can often be a century or more after the capsule is buried.
  • Unintentional time capsules are something else altogether as they are far rarer and only appear when least expected. These are places and items lost for a time. But when they are revealed, they showcase what life was like in the past.

Here we can look at some other time capsules as we explore this interesting subject.

Lost Purse From 1957 Discovered In 2019

In 1957, a young woman named Patti Rumfola was attending Hoover High School in Ohio when something terrible happened: She lost her purse. That stroke of bad luck for Rumfola turned into an incredible discovery in 2019 when her handbag was finally found by a custodian.

Unfortunately, it was a bit too late for Rumfola as she had passed away in 2013 at age 71. Still, the purse was found, and with some Internet sleuthing, the original owner was identified. The handbag was given to one of her daughters, who had the opportunity to peek into her mother’s life from 62 years in the past.[1]

The purse, which had fallen behind some lockers, ultimately became an unintentional time capsule filled with the kinds of items you might expect to find in a young girl’s handbag in 1957. There were several pristine tickets to her school’s football games, a couple of library cards, a photograph of one of her friends, a wallet, and a small amount of change. Each of her five children kept a penny from the purse to remember their mother.

The Town Of Bodie, California

Shortly before the US Civil War broke out, gold was discovered east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. By the late 1870s, the site had grown to become a boomtown called Bodie with some 10,000 residents. By 1915, the gold was gone, and people had to leave the town for good.

Bodie became an unintentional time capsule because it’s more than 2,500 meters (8,300 ft) above sea level. In the early 20th century, it wasn’t easy to get in and out of the little town. As a result, the residents left most of their possessions there as it was too expensive to have them hauled over miles of mountain trails.

In 1962, California State Parks stepped in to establish the ghost town as Bodie State Historic Park. It is preserved in an arrested state, so nothing is disturbed except for the occasional repair to ensure that a wall or roof remains intact.

The place is exactly what people envision a ghost town to be. But more than that, it’s a glimpse back in time to the Old West without the kitschy tourist traps found in places like Tombstone.[2]

Completely Intact Shoe Store Rediscovered After Half A Century

From the 1940s to the 1960s, the Fashion Shoe Shop stood as a staple mom-and-pop store. But it eventually shut down. Years later, it was bequeathed to a man who went by to see what the property looked like. He found a shoe store that had been shuttered several decades earlier.

The shop was something of a step back in time as the shoe store looked just as it had when the doors were locked years earlier. Instead of cleaning out an abandoned space, the new owner found a treasure in perfectly preserved vintage shoes. As the shoes were still inside their boxes, they were preserved without damage from dust, mold, or anything else.[3]

The time capsule was also filled with fashion from previous eras. In such well-preserved conditions, the items were worth quite a lot of money. In addition, the shop had a Victrola Credenza Talking Machine full of vintage records, a vintage stove, and more incredible finds from 40 years ago when the shop was closed.

Abandoned Home In Ontario Revealed A Link To The Past

Not every abandoned property is a decaying mess that people should avoid. Occasionally, a place will turn up something surprising, which is exactly what happened when a home in Ontario, Canada, was discovered by an urban explorer in 2013.

The home wasn’t in the best shape. But looking past the “usual smell of decay and years of abandonment” revealed a hidden gem showcasing how people lived in the 1960s when the property was abandoned.

Inside the home was a plethora of items from the 1960s and earlier, including several musical instruments, a shaving kit, a shoeshine polish kit, a cache of vinyl albums, cartons of food far beyond their expiration dates, furniture, books, clocks, televisions, a gramophone, a piano, jewelry, and two complete sets of polished silverware, which are worth their weight in . . . well, silver.

It’s unclear why the home was abandoned with everything left inside. But it helps to paint a picture of the people who lived there more than 50 years before the property was rediscovered.[4]

A Shop Boarded Up For 30 Years In Lancashire

Typically, when a shop goes out of business, its contents are sold, the building is vacated, and then it’s taken over by someone else. But something that seldom happens turned up in Accrington, Lancashire, in October 2008.

As builders were working in the area, they uncovered a shop that had been boarded up for at least 30 years. Instead of a decrepit empty space, they found a perfectly preserved corner shop and ice cream parlor. It was filled with items from the shop’s earliest days in the 1920s to products dating to the early 1970s.[5]

These included cigarette advertisements from the 1950s, a magazine that went through the day-by-day happenings of then Princess Elizabeth’s tour of Australia in 1938, old-fashioned sweet jars, and ice cream spoons. The original owners had left the property over 30 years earlier without removing the contents.

Paperwork found within the shop dated back more than 80 years. It indicated that the establishment had belonged to the Boyd family for several generations. The building was renovated, but the items were preserved by the developer.

A Victorian-Era Pharmacy Hidden For 80 Years In Somerset Village

In the early 1800s, John Wellington opened a chemist shop at South Petherton, Somerset. He also sold groceries. After John’s passing in 1845, the shop stayed in his family for more than four decades. Then it was sold to W.C. White in 1887.

White operated the shop’s chemist side until he died in 1909. Then his son and heir, Charles White, continued with the grocery business only. Charles wasn’t qualified to dispense medications, so the store’s chemist side was sealed behind a locked door.

Despite having several other owners, it remained that way until 1987. That year, the shop was sold and the locked door was finally opened. Inside was the chemist shop precisely as it had looked when it was sealed 78 years earlier.

The Victorian-era pharmacy was purchased in its entirety by Flambards Theme Park in Cornwall. The shop was moved and reestablished exactly as it had looked nearly a century before. Some items didn’t make the transition—but not because they were damaged.

Certain chemicals were now considered dangerous and deadly. They were confiscated by the British Home Office. But everything else has been perfectly maintained and preserved.[6]

A Long-Forgotten Closet Revealed A Treasure Trove Of Civil War Artifacts

In 2010, the former Carnegie Library in San Antonio, Texas, was undergoing some renovations when something unexpected turned up. The workers found a closet that had been walled up in the early 1950s. Inside, they discovered a treasure trove of artifacts dating back to the US Civil War.

More than 200 items were found in the closet. Although most were from the Civil War era, the oldest was a priceless copy of the 1615 King James Bible printed in London. Beth Graham, a spokesperson for the library system, described it as “in astoundingly good shape for being nearly 400 years old.”[7]

At least one document was dated 1861. According to Graham, another was “a proclamation by the Governor of New Mexico calling up the militia to repel Confederate raiders coming into the territory from Texas.”

Several magazines were dated 1952, which suggests that the closet was walled up before the building housed the Hertzberg Circus Museum in the late 1960s. The library staff cataloged the items and put them on display at the San Antonio Public Library.

Parisian Apartment Left Untouched For 70 Years Discovered In 2010

In 1942, as the Nazis invaded Paris, playwright Solange Beaugiron, the granddaughter of Madame Marthe de Florian, fled the city. Beaugiron left behind her apartment but continued to pay the rent until her death at age 91, almost 70 years later.

It is believed that Beaugiron didn’t return at all between 1942 and her death in 2010. So the apartment remained closed. Initially Marthe de Florian’s home, it was filled with opulent furniture and paintings. All of them remained untouched.[8]

The apartment was finally opened in 2010. Although it was an amazing unintentional time capsule of 1940s Parisian life, it also contained many valuable artifacts. One such item was a portrait of de Florian by Giovanni Boldini. It sold at auction for €3 million, a record for the artist.

Other paintings by famous artists, ornate furniture, a piano, a phonograph, and much more were uncovered in the apartment. Somehow, the place survived World War II without a scratch as did everything sealed inside.

Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Chemistry Lab Found Hidden Behind Wall

From HERE.

Conservators working at the University of Virginia’s Rotunda have inadvertently uncovered a chemical hearth designed by Thomas Jefferson. The discovery is offering fresh insights into how chemistry was taught over 200 years ago.

The iconic Rotunda, constructed in 1826, is located on The Lawn of the original grounds of the University of Virginia and is currently undergoing renovations. Inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, Thomas Jefferson designed it to symbolize the “authority of nature and power of reason” and the separation of church and education.

Back in 1895, a fire destroyed much of the building’s interior. But during the 1850s, the chemical hearth—part of an early chemistry classroom—was sealed in one of the lower-floor walls of the Rotunda, which protected it from the fire. Recently, while preparing for the current renovations, workers examining the cavities in the walls unexpectedly discovered the lost chemistry hearth.

Back in Jefferson’s day, chemistry was taught on the Rotunda’s bottom floor. His collaborator, professor of natural history John Emmet, taught the classes. UVA Today explains how it worked:

The chemical hearth was built as a semi-circular niche in the north end of the Lower East Oval Room. Two fireboxes provided heat (one burning wood for fuel, the other burning coal), underground brick tunnels fed fresh air to fireboxes and workstations, and flues carried away the fumes and smoke. Students worked at five workstations cut into stone countertops.

Brian Hogg, senior historic preservation planner in the Office of the Architect for the University, said the chemical hearth may have been for Emmet’s use; the students may have had portable hearths with which they conducted experiments.

“Back then, the different experiments would get different levels of heat from different sources,” said Jody Lahendro, a supervisory historic preservation architect for U.Va.’s

Facilities Management. “For some, they would put the heat source under a layer of sand to more evenly disperse and temper the heat.”

According to Hogg, this may be the oldest intact example of early chemical education in the United States.

The University of Virginia will put the chemical hearth on display once renovations are complete.

Now some other stuff…

All of this stuff is interesting and a curiosity. There is no question about that. But what about today? What about your life now? What about things, people, places, food, friends, drink, pets and other interests? Well…

…lucky for you all, I have some videos that I am gonna deposit here for your enjoyment. And as you look at them remember that those relics that you read about are from another person’s time; another person’s life. But this time; this life, is yours NOW.

Make it a good one.

Please contribute. Don’t disparage.

Check out this guy who used to ice skate when he was in elementary school, and then life carried him away. Now, for the first time in 50 years, he tries to ice skate again. Not so easy is it? video

Remember!

You are not your age. You are not your color, nationality, your style, your wealth. You are not your job. You are not your career or your education. You are very unique and you are very, very special.

Never forget that.

Here’s a video where a middle-school student discovers what her dad does for a living. It’s a bit of a shock, but you know what…? It doesn’t matter. video.

What the world needs now is more understanding; more humanity; and more kindness. Help others. Be the Rufus. Show understanding, compassion and kindness. Help others. And when someone is in need, help them.

video.

Finally…

Do not be afraid to volunteer. You can join the volunteer fire department, be an auxiliary in the police. Help in the local community. Volunteer at the food pantry. Go to the local humane society and just volunteer. Be part of the community. Smile. Make friends.

Act like a real Rufus does. Video.

 

I hope you enjoyed this article. Please have a wonderful day.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

 

 

 

Another reminder of our recent past; parents, grandparents, and great grandparents in video form (2)

One of the things that I loved to do as a boy was to go through the history books in the stacks at the High School library. In particular, they had these illustrated books that went decades by decade and helps pictures and stories about what it was like to live there at that time. There was a book on the 1920’s. There was another on the 1950’s and so on and so forth. Of course there were many history books that I just loved, but these were special because of the great pictures and easy reading captions. This article is of a similar nature using movies from the past. I do hope that you all will enjoy it.

Here we list the movie videos with both an embedded player and a link. I strongly advise the reader to click on the link as it will open up in a new tab and allow much faster loading than relying on this article to view the video. In any event, I hope that you all will enjoy these videos.

1930s in America

You can watch the video HERE.

1890 France

You can watch the video HERE.

Trying to fly

You can watch the video HERE.

More inventions.

You can watch the video HERE.

1945 – The devastation of Germany

You can watch the video HERE.

1920s in America

You can watch the video HERE.

American carrier landings mid 1960s

You can watch the video HERE.

1940 war effort – England

You can watch the video HERE.

Beautiful women of 1920

You can watch the video HERE.

1920 train travel in Europe

You can watch the video HERE.

American city life 1920

You can watch the video HERE.

1950 America

You can watch the video HERE.

Conclusion

It’s a nice “rainy day” article. I hope that these videos remind you of how unique this time is, and how wonderful it is to enjoy it. Stop thinking that one of these days… something will happen. The time is now. So go forth, make some special treats for your cats. Put on a nice outfit and go out with a friend. Call your parents or your grandparents. Treat yourself to a nice cup of coffee and a pie at the local diner. Ride a bicycle.

Make your time special.

It will be gone soon enough. But you are here now. This is YOUR time. Enjoy it and share that enjoyment with others it’s ok. Just do it.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this in my Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some really pretty Chinese girls and learning about China (Nov21 issue A)

This is a continuation of my posts on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. It’s all good fun. The idea behind this, is of course, to help expose people to what China is like, and by doing so while watching pretty girls. As the women within a nation are the best description that you can ever get of a nation and it’s society.

I’ve been putting this all off for a while as I have been dealing with other things and other issues, and then today, I am reading comments to my posted articles on LinkedIN. And some of them are astounding on how absolutely STUPID Americans have become. I mean STU-PID!

"You have now idea what kinds of filthy lives the Chinese live."

I don’t?  I’ve only been living here for twenty years now.

And..

"You are crazy to ever want to live in that Communist sweat-shop. I hope that you enjoy your lack of freedom in that gulag."

Coming from an American in Philadelphia. Tell me about all that “Philadelphia freedom” eh? And…

"More lies from the fifty cent agitprop."

What’s an agitprop?

Sigh.

Ok. China is not just a match of the bulk of American middle class, it has surpassed it, and the bulk standard of living for the vast majority of Chinese is well beyond anything that Americans can ever hope to have.

Chinese homes are not made out of the cheapest materials or substances.

  • China windows = thick 6mm vacuum dual pane with aluminum anodized frames
  • USA windows = thin 3mm glass with cheap plastic vinyl frames.

Or the flooring…

  • China flooring = Real actual stone (marble, granite) on reinforced cement.
  • USA flooring = carpet over lowest cost plywood.

Or the doors…

  • China doors = Solid wood interior. Hardwood facing. Metal exterior doors.
  • USA doors = Interior doors are sandwich panel. Outside doors are typical vinyl.

In China, the typical family owns two houses all paid for and at least one car.

They enjoy working at companies with a two hour long lunch that includes nap time, and allowances for alcohol consumption . They get yearly bonuses.

They also have two months off a year for vacation that they must take. Nearly free healthcare. Top rate transportation and infrastructure, and for the vast bulk of the Chinese, only one singular tax. An income tax which is roughly fixed at 3%.

America cannot even dream of competing.

All, and the only thing that it can do, is lie.

The images

When you look at these women, look at their homes around them.

Or this one. These are typical kitchens. This is the real China.

The Girls

I’ve packed the girls up in neat zip files. You simply download the file, unzip it,  and they start watching the movies. 

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Most are very short. Under a minute, some are only seconds long. And some are screen videos with either me, my kid, my wife, or others talking in the background. Well, it’s a mess. If you think you can do better, then do so.

Some really awesome gals here. Like REALLY.

Some Examples

Here’s a video or two to show you what is inside these ZIP files. Don’t be the jackass that looks at the pictures, fails to download the content, and says “oh they are pretty, but American girls are so much more attractive”.  Download and view, otherwise the message is not provided.

It’s like going into a restaurant filled with delicious food, taking a few sniffs, and then leaving without tasting the food.  (Video)

Don’t be that guy. (Video)

Seriously now. Don’t be that jackass.

Lecture time

I notice that many of the Americans that talk with me are grouchy, irritable and demanding. I think that it is because their world is crumbling all around them and there is nothing that they can do about it.

They are wrong.

YOU can do something about the world around you. You can make your tiny slice of the world good, and decent and special. Like this person does…

And he strikes again.

Make the most of your skills and talents. He made these women smile. He made them happy. he made their day. He uplifted their spirits. What are you doing today? Are you making a difference in the world, or are you just going sit there and demand others work so you have something to criticize?

If we all work together

The oligarchy wants people to live in tiny boxes surrounded and manipulated by fears.

Just look at what amounts to “news” these days.

But if you venture out, and become part of your society, and when you participate with others. When you don’t ask for anything. You just be good, nice, kind and helpful… together we all can CHANGE the world.

Be the Rufus.

Please be the Rufus

Do the good works that make the world a little bit better place to live.

Do you want more?

I have more posts related to this in my Pretty Girls of China index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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A reminder of our recent past; parents, grandparents, and great grandparents in video form

One of the things that I loved to do as a boy was to go through the history books in the stacks at the High School library. In particular, they had these illustrated books that went decades by decade and helps pictures and stories about what it was like to live there at that time. There was a book on the 1920’s. There was another on the 1950’s and so on and so forth. Of course there were many history books that I just loved, but these were special because of the great pictures and easy reading captions.

This article is of a similar nature using movies from the past. I do hope that you all will enjoy it. It’s a trip down familiar places with unfamiliar people separated by generational experiences. These movies come to life using (Chinese) AI technology, and are wonderful. I do hope that you are as enthralled by them as I.

1950’s in America

In all these videos you have the option of watching them on this page or clicking on the link. I strongly urge you all to click on the link. This page is heavy with videos and unless you have super efficient internet access, it might take forever to load the videos.

Video HERE.

1970’s in America

Video HERE.

1940’s in America

Video HERE.

1900’s in America

Video HERE.

1920’s in America

Video HERE.

Single-wheel motorcycle

Video HERE.

1911 in America

Video HERE.

1930 American gym and health club

Video HERE.

Conclusion

It’s a nice “rainy day” article. I hope that these videos remind you of how unique this time is, and how wonderful it is to enjoy it. Stop thinking that one of these days… something will happen. The time is now. So go forth, make some special treats for your cats. Put on a nice outfit and go out with a friend. Call your parents or your grandparents. Treat yourself to a nice cup of coffee and a pie at the local diner. Ride a bicycle.

Make your time special.

It will be gone soon enough. But you are here now. This is YOUR time. Enjoy it and share that enjoyment with others it’s ok. Just do it.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this in my Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Another nice collection of pretty Chinese girls – look at what China is today

Here is another article in my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. This particular collection is a response to a Bloomberg article of never ending hate found on LinkedIN that was splashed all over Gab, Freerepublic, and the normal set of mouthpieces… FOX, CNN, MSN, etc. etc. etc.

Someone please screenshot his series of tweets and translate into English. I understand he has begin to criticize the western media ongoing negativity against China. 

One of his tweets claims his dream of being a journalist has been destroyed by the requirement to keep up the massive campaign of anti-China demonetization over the years of his journalism career. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/javihagen

Yada. Yada. Yada.

You know this multi-million dollar funded program of lies and distortions is really too high of a mountain for me to climb. So I won’t even bother. If you are still too brain-dead to see that it is all propaganda, then it’s not my business to change your mind. It’s your reality. Soak it in. How’s it going for you?

Are you a better person for believing that China is a pile of shit?

The idea behind these “pretty girls of China” articles is to give everyone a rather unique chance to see what China is… without someone yelling (at the top of their lungs) you are only showing the “wealthy” not the “real” people of China.

Yeah. Right.

What ever you say…

What ever you say…

This view is of the girls, or all sizes and shapes posting their videos on Douxing. Some are just being attractive butterflies. While others are just being cute and playful. Still others show off their wonderful eyes and nice cheeks. Some have amazing eyebrows (to die for – I’ll tell you what), while many have a nice backside, bouncy chest, or artistic arms.

Attributes that I love. By the way.

By looking at these videos you get to see what China is in all of it’s totality. You see the poor, the average, the wealthy. You see it all.

This is what China is.

  • Are they starving from famine?
  • Are the buildings in disrepair and neglect?
  • Are they yearning for (that delicious) freedom™ and democracy™?
  • Are they all wearing blue uni-sexy clothing?
  • Do they look like they are abused?

Today is a morning rain Thursday.

It’s right after the mid-autumn festival and normally it’s a cooler time of the year and dryer. Not this year. It has been hot and very humid. Being at the dew point for the last five or so days. Ugh!

Today we had a morning rain. This is what it looked like.

Anyways, that’s what it is like where I live. Video is from my back porch. My “laundry” porch.

You know, there is a calmness in the rain that I enjoy.

It’s a relaxing peace.

It doesn’t matter if you are in a car… or in a truck in a corn field… or if you are in a tent on the side of a gurgling brook. It is the same. Whether you are in a nice cozy bedroom, and reading a book in a gathering darkness living room. Or a porch…

…a rain is lovely. Don’t you think?

A lovely rain.

I’m a little hungry

As the rain falls, it’s sort of cozy inside. It’s dry. Nice. Quiet. Peaceful. A perfect time to snack.

So I made myself a “Back to School” sandwich.

A “Back to school” sandwich.

About the concept here…

Let’s get on to the girls of China, eh?

The idea here is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

She’s attractive. Right?

A typical girl of Communist China.

Girls and food

The girl above is most certainly a cheeseburger gal. Maybe with a pearl tea, a side of fries, perhaps a beer later on. Not too much though, and a nice stroll though a park. I can picture it.

You have to be able to viscerally imagine and image your role in the world that surrounds you.

A fine delicious burger.

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing. So it’s a pretty quick event once you download the archives and open them up.

Another beautiful girl of Communist China.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not.

For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

While I tend to prefer ladies with a more motherly and robust appearance, I find all of them to be very attractive. From the tall thin leggy beauties to the short cute little kitten like cuddle balls. One of the things that I enjoy about China are the oval face and the oval eyes.

Like this girl here…

You can learn so much about (Communist) China just by looking at the girls and the surroundings.

Girls remind me of food

Long time readers of MM will well know of my association of women and food. For some odd reason, I associate girls with types of food. Just like I associate guys with cars, truck, motorcycles and construction machinery.

I’m a Mercedes Benz C-class, if you must know.

If MM were a car.

Many times I will imagine myself taking this or that particular woman out and enjoying a nice meal together, having a great conversation.

Drinking some wine.

More talk. More wine.

A couple of jokes. Some crazy light-hearted stuff.

Just having a nice time. You know, dressed up a little bit. Shined and buffed shoes. Beard trimmed. Nice cologne. Finger nails manicured. A nice well chosen restaurant.

Or even if it is just a nice “burger joint”, you all can make it special with a theme. You eat and then go for a walk on the boardwalk, or explore a mall and window shop. Or even just ride those rent-a-bikes together.

There’s nothing stopping you from a fine delicious hamburger.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. Not everyone agrees what is beautiful or not. Which is just fine. I think that there is a woman for every man, and a man for every woman.

Or, in the case of the movie “Land of the Lost” (2009), maybe 7000 girls for every man.

A happy ending on “Land of the Lost”.

And I have said this many, many times before.

You all have to close that “idea” or concept that what you should do, should date, should eat, should consume, should inject your selves with, is what is being defined by your electronic media. It isn’t.

None of that garbage is real.

Try running a prayer / affirmation campaign based on the images and directions that you get off the media, television, movies or social media. Then you’ll see.

You, and only you, can define what you like.

Not media.

Whether it is an apple on the table, a new pair of shoes, a nice car, or making friends with someone. You are the only person who can make that decision.

Beautiful girls and women are all over the world. These are the girls of China.

Now, when I was younger, my tastes in women were shaped by the images and magazines of the time such as Playboy, and Penthouse. That’s all I had to go on, and as a young man, with my hormones a raging, all I could do is tremble as I asked a girl out.

Which most of the time was a failure.

But it’s all a growth phase that we all go through.

Now, all I want to do is meet folk, and share a meal, some drink and a laugh. And if we hit it off and have a great conversation, well, buy goodness gracious! That’s marvelous!

A fine healthy woman that I would love to share a hot pot and some wine with.

Guys.

You know it, or you will.

And eventually you reach a balance point where your hormones are under control and all you really want to do is get to know the girl, have a good time together, and enjoy the moments. And really as you get older this becomes more and more pronounced.

Yikes!

Men change as they age.

Nah. It’s all good.

You savor the steaks you eat. You enjoy the perfume she wears, you listen to her talk and enjoy the night air after the dinner. You joke, you laugh, and maybe sing a song or two while walking on the jetty.

Women are magical.

Women are magical and wonderful.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see. It’s their choice of clothing, the area where the video was filmed, the selection of music, the way their hair is done up, and so much more.

Each little video is like a window to the soul. Where you get a little glimpse of the girl behind the mask. That little presentation is just pure gold.

The pandemic (Bio-weapons attack) really put a clamp on everyone’s style.

Some have personality.

And some really do. While others just have a strong softness. Some are calm and composed, some are happy and light. And some are stunning and serious while others remind you of Summer carnival rides, cotton candy and “bear claw” cakes to s’munch upon.

A steak dinner girl. She reminds me of red lipstick, a dry red wine. Baked potatoes and candlelight in a high-rise restaurant.

Some have a great body.

They have long legs, or great dimples. Some have just long, long hair or dark, dark eyes. Some have a soft touch, while others have a careful composed prettiness.

Some have a great personality.

Some are special in ways that cannot be adequately explained.

A thin, curvy body, long hair. What’s not to love?

Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. Girls, ladies, women are like beautiful flowers that should be treasured and cherished. For they are all wonderful.

A little aside...

In 2004 - 2005 the Winter fashion for all the women in China were these knee-high boots. I have no idea what it was all about, but it drove me into a sexual frenzy every time I saw a girl in those things. And believe you me, they were friggin' everywhere.

Later on, Spring came and it was ultra-high mini-skirts and "ladder" high heels. (Yeah, 6" (150cm) high) High heels. Lord, how could you possibly walk in those things. But it was an awesome spectacle.

Anyways...

But do not mistake the cuteness of a tiger for the damage it could cause if you angered it. Chinese women are very, very capable people. You can take that “to the bank”. Never fail to understand that they are strong, knowledgeable and powerful in their own right.

Oval face with nice eyebrows. How is it even possible?

All are wonderful.

Such is the beauty of women. And for us, and for everyone, we need to appreciative the world around us more.

A beautiful girl of China. This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

That fat gal at the store that you see every day, she’s a kind, lovely beauty, who could use some TLC. There is nothing stopping you for saying hi, and saying something nice. Just do it, and if they don’t understand… well, don’t worry about it. Your mission is just to be nice.

It’s easy for me because the girls in China like to listen to others saying good and nice things about them. They get this big old smile. It’s like a sun shining though parting clouds. Try it some time.

Maybe if you two hit if off and don’t want to go out and get a coffee, how about a nice back or leg massage. Here in China it’s pretty cheap and a good way to pass a few hours. You just sit back and get pampered. I love it and I am a man, and all the gals I know think that this is a most excellent idea. It’s a great way to spend some time with someone you just met.

A nice relaxing massage. Yessur!

And that older woman wearing that elaborate outfit, just look at her, see how the light plays upon the details.

Oh, and I do love a cheerful gal with a sense of humor.

Cute and playful at any age. That’s how we should all be. Don’t you agree?

And that young girl going out with “her crew”, see the beauty of her age around and what they are doing. There’s a world of cheap eats out there. Ice cream cones to share. BBQ to enjoy. Little pockets of nachos and chips. French fries. Sushi.

Food and friends.

Lot’s of smiles all around.

What could possibly be nicer?

Share some delicious food with some new friends.

We have to be more aware, and certainly more appreciative.

When I meet a woman I always think of scenarios. Whether it is hiking in mountainous crags looking for the mysteries of the past, or having a cup of coffee in a pub on a foggy day. This is true whether it is images of romantic nights or just fun times on a train, or trolley. I always think of scenarios.

Cherish the moments.

Of course, I wasn’t always this way.

When I was younger, my mind was fully dedicated to sex and the more visceral elements of relationships. It’s that darn testosterone that all males have pumping through their body. But now that I am older I cherish so much more.

I cherish everything.

Most especially the little things. Like the details on her purse (You can tell a lot about a woman by her purse.) to the smell of her shampoo to how she treats her fingernails.

Oh by the way...
I do love those purses that have those little baubles and pockets and whimsy's all over it. But that is just me.

To the shoes she wears.

Notice the fingernails on this gal.

I do love the more sturdy and robust women.

The Videos

Let’s have a look at the videos shall we? I’ve got a bunch for certain.

What a beautiful set of legs. I would love to see her in a little black dress. I’d bet that she would look like steamed fish and oysters with a chardonnay.

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Collection one. FF-A

Download the archive HERE. 131MB.

 

FF-A

Collection Two. FF-B

Download the archive HERE. 155MB.

FF-B

Collection Three. FF-C

Download the archive HERE. 135MB.

FF-C

Collection Three. FF-D

Download the archive HERE. 196MB.

FF-D

Collection Three. FF-E

Download the archive HERE. 151MB.

FF-E

Collection Three. FF-F

Download the archive HERE. 141MB.

FF-F

You all might wonder why I am posting these pictures on the internet. But you shouldn’t.

Try to find pictures of beautiful girls from China using Google, Bing or any American or Western search engine. What you will get are stock images, advertisements, pictures of children, and professional photos associated with some Western “journalism”.

Google the women of China… this is what you will get.

What an American search engine thinks the women of China look like.

Nonsense.

This in these series of articles, is what it’s really like.

This is the real, honest to goodness deal.

Oh, and don’t leave yet! Let’s talk about the girls for a spell….

She is wearing a lovely short skirt, that flows outwards. What fun. I am a real sucker for cute dresses and skirts. I really am.

Cute skirts

I really, I mean REALLY, love cute dresses or shirt flowing dresses. They are like sunshine and flowers under a rainbow sky. They are like popcorn, and blueberries and cream on a hot Summer day. They are like lipstick, and smile and cute little purses big enough for a cell phone, some makeup and a tissue.

They are like this. VIDEO.

I just love how those skirts move. It’s like poetry.

TWICE – What is love MV.

Gosh! I just love those cute dresses! OMG!

Swish. Swish. Swish.

And I also really like the puffy yellow one, and the pearl dress to the right, don’t you know.

About the girls

These girls are mostly between the ages of 18 years and 45 years old. The vast bulk of them are in their late 20’s. In China, if you are a woman, the ages between 23 years old and 30 years old are the dating years where you look for a husband worthy to start a family with. In China, if a woman cannot find a man by the time she is 28, she is considered a Spinster.  And is considered unmarriageable.

This lass is approaching the unmarriageable age, and in a few months she will be considered a “spinster”.

The age to get married for a woman in China is between 25 and 28. If they do not get married their entire family will sponsor these date-a-thons where they will have these programmed courting-rituals where the girl and the boy (part of a long line of boys) will spend time together.

The family won’t tell the girl beforehand either. She’ll walk into the house, and before she knows it, she’s on the fast track to get married. In the USA we call this a “shotgun wedding”. Only in China it’s the other way around.

The fish shape is considered very attractive in China.

I don’t know about you’se guys, but all these girls look pretty darn marriageable to me.  They would be on the “A” list in any man’s personal list.

Isn’t China beautiful.

Comment

To give you an idea of just how evil the United States and their client nations (UK, Japan, Australia) are, they want to have a war with China, and start killing all these lovely, lovely people.

They want to kill all these women here for democracy™ and freedom™!

And don’t give me that bullshit that a war “isn’t going to happen”.

American Military expenditures as a function of GDP is higher than at any other time for any other war in the entire history of America. The USA is planning for a very large, long duration conventional war against China.

Hey!

I’ve got news for you all.

It ain’t gonna be conventional, and it isn’t going to be against China alone.

It’s going to be the USA (+it’s surrogate nations) against a unified nuclear Asia. And not to see that reflects a true head in the sand regarding the true and real situation in this world today.

So enjoy what you have around you now.

Enjoy what you have. Spend time with friends and family. If you see someone make friends with them. Especially if you want to know them better. There is no better time than right now.

Who know what it might lead to. Eh?

James Bond.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Why everyone from 6 years olds to those in retirement, within China, are all ready to fight tooth and nail to survive.

This article is about China. More specifically it is about the people of China and why everyone has military training, and why everyone is organized into military units, and why everyone is willing to blow up the rest of the world in a nuclear fireball without giving it a second thought. Yeah. It’s what all the bullshit out of Washington DC is saying, except they are not telling you that China is backed into a corner and this time…  THIS time, they are ready.

No. This is not your usual hate – hate – hate China bullshit that flows so readily out of the Western media mouthpieces. No, this is just an American expats view on what I see, based upon what I know, and in my discussions with members of other black programs. China is ready. Russia is ready, and Iran is ready, and the out of control “loose cannon” that America is is just about ready to have it’s wings clipped.

Don’t say that I didn’t warn you.

Introduction

I’ve written about all this before. I’ve discussed training for military warfare starting at six years old to the unification of the social structure, and the intense anger towards what happened in China by the Japanese. There’s no need to rehash much of that. You all can go through the archives.

The big news this week is how Australia has torn up it’s agreements with France and the EU to become the nuclear staging point for American submarines in the South Pacific. Big News! Except no one else really understands the implications.

Let this video tell you…

By hosting American nuclear weapons, Australia has now made itself a target for immediate decapitation were a war between the USA and China to break out. There is no way that it can remain neutral. All of it’s coastal cities are now at risk for total and complete obliteration.

Sheesh.

No one is taking China seriously and this is disturbing.

No one understands

Given the great ignorance in the Untied States and much of the West, it should be understandable. But it isn’t. I see otherwise intelligent people saying that a big buildup towards war is a good thing.  Maybe it’s because they haven’t held their loved ones in their arms while they died away in a painfully bloody broken death.

War is not a computer simulation.

War is not social media or a talk show.

War is not a newspaper you read while drinking your morning coffee. Nor it is a news feeds that you swipe away.

It is a nasty, nasty earth-shattering event. And it is coming to the West faster than you can what “wat”?

Even if the USA launches a first-strike nuclear salvo…

Systems are NOW in place to fucking throw America back into the coal age. You all do know what I mean by the coal age, eh?

It’s January 20th. Snow is blowing outside. There is no gasoline for your cars. All electrical systems are fried. Refrigerators are gone. Computer is a useless door stop. Cell phones are all dead. And you haven’t eaten for three weeks.

Coal age.

Here’s a small video of what each God Damn City in China has for their LOCAL RESERVIST CADRES… (VIDEO). Yes. This it the local reservist militia. Just imagine what the actual military would be like.

Local reservists.

Afghanistan it ain’t.

These are God Damn reservists guys. Do you have any fucking idea of what a war against China would be like?

It would be like a tiger against a Chihuahua.

No, it’s not going to be a throw back to the iron age (as I suggested before). Not the bronze age. Not the stone age. It’s gonna be into the coal age. The few straggling survivors will need to figure out how to make fire from sticks, how to tan hides for clothing, and how to farm without mechanized machinery.

75% of America will die.

Oh that’s so unfair, you might meep!

Some basic History.

Japan took over China and abused it horribly. This occurred after nearly 100 years of abuses of the British and European rule. If anyone thinks that China will “turn the other cheek” they are mistaken. China is ready for pay-back time. (video)

I do not blame them.

Somehow…

Somehow, everyone thinks that China is a peer manufacturer. Equal to that of the manufacturing giants of the West. Wrong. China is THE global manufacturer and they make everything and they have been busy making all sorts or reliable weapons systems for their 1.6 billion people nation. They do not play around.

(Video)

China does not play.

Learn to pay attention.

This is supposed to be a message to the American military establishment. Check out all those neutron bomb smart missiles. Yes, tactical missiles for use in conventional warfare. I guess that the American military are too brain dead to realize that any war with China will be nuclear.

Vehicle after vehicle of ugly, messy, dirty neutron warhead missiles. Some for taking out land targets like towns and cities. Some for taking out fleets of ships, flotillas and armadas. Some for blasting the entire sky into a fireball to wipe out aircraft assaults.

Watch it.

(Video)

Any war with China will be a nuclear war.

Why all this military posturing?

Well… The United States is being a fucking dick. The out of control giant is all about war, and the entire purpose of the QUAD is to support a war against China. Let’s be real. It’s not about fishing. It’s not about technology transfer. It’s not about immigration. It’s not about borders. It’s about conducting a war against China via the QUAD surrogates.

So China is ready.

Only an idiot (which pretty much describes most of the Western “leadership”) would still even conceive taking on Russia / China and Iran / North Korea simultaneously.

But you know…

While all this public display of terror and bluster is unsettling, let’s not forget what is going on behind the scenes.

Taiwan

What is NOT BEING REPORTED in the American “news”…

From PM…

An important event is going to happen tomorrow (Saturday;  Sep. 25th) but one can’t seem to find any news reports in the West about it.
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Taiwan’s Kuomintang, the political party of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, is going to elect a new leader. No one cares, right? Kuomintang has been totally discredited by its string of failures.
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Its young members have left the sinking ship in droves.
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There is no hope when all the candidates are well known imbeciles who know nothing beyond repeating the same drivel that everyone is tired of hearing.
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Yes, let’s get back to the 1992 Consensus and keep the ambiguous status quo forever, as if Xi will let that happen.
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I have a Taiwanese friend (an old ROC soldier, descendant of the Yunnan warlord’s clique) who is so disgusted with the KMT that he has given up hope that the party will survive.
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Until a professor and the principal of the Sun Yat-sen School  leaps into the fray, and over the course of one month, goes from being an unknown to the top of the polls over his three opponents, two of them with significant entrenchment in the party.
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His name is Chang Ya-chung [张亚中]. How does he do it? He advocates unification with mainland China to form One-China!

The grassroot support for Prof Chang is amazing.
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There are thousands of comments on Youtube clips in which the dark horse candidate explains his policy, and practically 100% supports him.
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It appears that he has stirred up a political storm.
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If he intends to push for unification regardless of whether he wins the KMT leadership or not, and therefore creates a movement, he may become a power to be reckoned with.
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In fact, Prof Chang could overturn the Taiwan political “applecart“.
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We are now faced with several scenarios all of which mean the realization of the One-China union probably within the next five years. Let me explain. It’s another long essay; have patience.
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I wrote in August of 2020 about a great strategic opportunity for China to unilaterally unify with Taiwan with minimal risk.
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It was based on the predictions, all of which were backed by simple observation, that (1) Trump would certainly lose the election (2) Trump would certainly not concede (3) Trump would therefore try to destabilize America in order to remain president (4) Trump would likely not succeed but he would create a royal mess (5) Biden would no doubt continue the war on China, and would use Taiwan as a pawn. Biden’s public protestations of America’s love of peace are laughable lies that will fool no one. 
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All of the predictions have come about.
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There was however an overestimation of Trump’s team. Trump was not surrounded by geniuses, and rather than stopping the legal ratification of the Electoral College’s votes in December, he used the mob to disrupt the formality at Congress in January. It was an asinine and meaningless task. Trump will suffer the consequences of his stupidity. 
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At the end of October 2020, just a few days before the presidential election, I wrote another article explaining how it would be possible for China to unilaterally effect reunification with Taiwan without much risk of bloodshed.
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One only needs to look at how Russia reunified with Crimea without firing a single bullet, and recently how easy it has been for the Taliban to reconquer Afghanistan to know that it’s possible.
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First of all, the narrative must be changed from “Unification by Military Force” or Wutong [武统] to “Defending Taiwan from Traitors and Foreigners.”
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I’d like to see anyone try to stop the PLA from doing its duty of defending the sovereignty of China.
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ROC soldiers are conscripted, most of them are ordinary young men and women with a family and the prospect of going home to live a long and fruitful life, hopefully in a peaceful and prosperous society.
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They’re not going to be stupid, as long as they understand that the PLA is coming to help them do their job, which is also to defend Taiwan from traitors and foreigners.
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Now, it is not possible that I was the only person who had the perspicacity to notice the strategic situation.
General Miley noticed it and he made secret calls to his counterpart in China before the election on Oct. 30th and two days after the Jan. 6 Trump revolution fiasco.
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Pundits and mouthpieces have made all kinds of comments on Miley’s secret calls to the enemy, but they’re all wrong. It was indeed as General Miley had explained, he was simply doing his job.
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General Miley called to deliver a tiresome Nixonian madman threat–we have a mad man at the helm and he may send nukes your way, so don’t do anything to give him an excuse.
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The poor general also had to deliver a contradicting message–at the same time, America is not falling apart; everything is hunky dory and the well-oiled machine is running smoothly.
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Which is to say, the Pentagon and the army are standing ready to attack when ordered. 
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If I was General MIley and I knew China had a window of opportunity to take Taiwan at no cost, completely turning the geopolitical tables on the US ring of fire around China, as well as controlling the majority of the world’s output in microchip, that’s what I would do to stop them.
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If I was China, I would of course ignore him.
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America is good at posturing and bullying small countries; just check out its wars since WWII.
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It will not destroy its dollar hegemony and the printed façade of its wealth by starting a nuclear war with China.
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Just think if you’re the owner of a vast orchard with your finger on a button that will burn everything to ashes, including yourself and your family, would you do it just to kill off squirrels picking nuts from your trees?
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I guess not.
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The madman threat is just a ruse. it won’t even fool the squirrels. As I said before, not a single American will die for Taiwan. The orchard owners are not as stupid as we think, or they would not be owners and we their slaves.
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I think, although I don’t know for sure, that China should know about all this, but it probably felt that a major factor was missing, and therefore preferred to wait for another opportunity.
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This factor is mentioned in the second article.
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Once the PLA takes Taiwan, how will China govern it?
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It is a headache if you do not know for certain that everything will run smoothly rather than turn into a bloody mess. China no longer trusts the KMT, whose leaders are discredited and ridiculed, how can China depend on them to maintain order?
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The emergence of Prof Chang and his army of ardent supporters from the general population provides a clarity that China needs for the Unification. .
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What China needs is to change its narrative of Wutong to defending China and Taiwan.
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The final contest for the KMT Chair is between Prof Chang Ya-chung and KMT Party apparatchik Eric Chu Li-luan [朱立伦]. The younger incumbent Johnny Chiang Chi-chen [江启辰] is a distant third. The fourth candidate Cho Po-yuan [卓伯源] is non-existent.
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Prof Chang and Eric Chu are in a dead heat.
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No one can predict the outcome of Saturday’s vote. Prof Chang’s participation and his Unification policy will at a minimum create a historic turnout.
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The dark horse candidate is already causing much excitement not only for the KMT but his carrion call for peace talks with mainland China is eliciting a groundswell of support from outside the party.
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This exposes the lie that people of Taiwan support only DPP’s (Democratic Progressive Party) policy of antagonism against China or KMT’s policy of the everlasting status quo of ambiguity.
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A new and powerful voice says let us negotiate for union and peace for prosperity and a future for our children, and it is resonating on the island. 
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Scenario 1: Prof Chang wins the chair and proceeds with his Unification plan. I won’t go into details here, but his plan is a viable one and receives quite a bit of grassroot support even at this early stage.
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It may have something to do with Prof Chang’s charisma and his ability to win all his debates by logic and eloquent elocution, letting his opponents expose themselves as morons and moral midgets.
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Assuming the Unification path becomes a KMT policy, it will culminate in the presidential election in 2024 as a contest of KMT’s peace with China vs DPP’s antagonism leading inevitably to war with China.
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If KMT’s candidate wins, then there will be a peaceful progression towards a negotiated unification.
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Let me place a caveat right here. It will likely not happen smoothly because the US will not let it happen. When push comes to shove, expect the chaos of Hong Kong to repeat on the streets of Taiwan or worse. 
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Scenario 2: Many obstacles stand in front of Prof Chang even if he wins the KMT Chair. He may have to resign because the party scuttles his Unification plan, his Unification MOU with China may not be passed in KMT, and the KMT presidential candidate may lose out to the DPP candidate in 2024. Then what? 
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Scenario 3: Eric Chu wins the KMT Chair, the comatose establishment of KMT breathes a sigh of relief, and goes back to their sinking ship, hoping the ship will somehow right itself by a miracle. It will not.
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So all three scenarios say Prof Chang’s plan will fail.
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How will Unification happen? It will happen because China now knows about the latent support for peace in Taiwan with the mainland. The Taiwanese people didn’t have a smart and courageous politician to take them to the promised land.
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But now they have Prof Chang.
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It is therefore important for China to change its narrative from Wutong to Defend the Homeland. It is a unifying call, and it’s not hard to understand what it means.
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China and Prof Chang should talk about Unification regardless of what official status Chang has. Hire Prof Chang as a Peace consultant if necessary. But direct talk means that Prof Chang will understand his potential role as the leader and organizer of an interim government in case the PLA needs to defend Taiwan from traitors and foreigners, most likely within hours and without bloodshed. 
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It will take time for Prof Chang, assuming he agrees, to prepare the infrastructure for such an interim government without violating any laws. .
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The reward to Prof Chang for doing this is the solemn undertaking by the Chinese government to provide a high degree of self-rule for Taiwan and to let the Taiwanese people run their own affairs despite China having effected unilateral unification.
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The five year period is a reasonable timeline, and by then, China will have surpassed the US in all aspects of wealth production, America will still be dealing with another Covid wave (I wrote an article explaining why), and Xi will be confident of success, establishing his legacy for future generations, so that the Central Committee of the CPC could start working on an orderly succession by bringing the next generation of leaders to the forefront. .
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Beyond that, all is murky and muck, but stay healthy and we will live to witness history.
 
PM

Remember – what’s really going on is not televised

We really do not know all of the story. We really do not know what everyone is thinking. What we do know is the visible actions that are taking place.

The news is talking about how Australia has torn up the agreement to buy submarines from France, and instead are going to buy them from the USA. Nuclear subs with nuclear weapons.

And that everything is under control with the QUAD meetings with Japan and India.

And the long-expected collapse of China is finally happening with the Evergrande collapse!

Nope. No. Not going on.

Evergrande

Evergrande’s share price collapse: The world’s biggest no-big-deal default
The monster debt crisis that utterly failed to cause any catastrophe this week was that of Evergrande, the Chinese property giant.
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Read in Axios: https://apple.news/AK9D5MyFXSmCoHX4VPBt7kg

Evergrande’s share price collapse: The world’s biggest no-big-deal default

The monster debt crisis that utterly failed to cause any catastrophe this week was that of Evergrande, the Chinese property giant.

Why it matters: Evergrande’s share price has collapsed to pennies, its bonds are pricing in a default with very limited recovery, and even its customers are demonstrating across China. But so far the broader repercussions have been minimal.

Driving the news: Global markets fell on Monday on fears that Chinese markets would collapse on Wednesday morning, when they reopened after a two-day holiday for the Mid Autumn Festival. When Shanghai did reopen on Wednesday, it closed the day up rather than down.

Between the lines: A deal with domestic bondholders, combined with the company’s deep political connections at both the national and local levels, have combined to reassure investors that the Chinese government will contain any fallout.

Evergrande is the first big test of the global financial system — and especially the Chinese financial system — since the pandemic-induced chaos of March 2020, when central banks around the world were forced to take unprecedented measures to prevent total collapse. So far, world markets seem to be coping just fine.

Context: By any measure, an Evergrande debt default is likely to be one of the largest in history of the world.

To put its $305 billion debt load in perspective, Argentina’s massive foreign-debt default in 2001 was about $93 billion; Greece’s restructuring in 2012 was about $200 billion; and Lehman Brothers had about $600 billion in debts when it filed for bankruptcy.

Those defaults shook entire economies. Evergrande, by contrast, seems to have been successfully contained.

Between the lines: Evergrande debt has always carried a low junk rating, and the company was being described as “the biggest pyramid scheme the world has yet seen” as long ago as 2017. As a result, investors in Evergrande, much like investors in bitcoin or GameStop, were acutely aware that they were taking a big risk.

Financial crises generally happen when (seemingly) safe assets unexpectedly default, not when risky assets do something that was largely foreseen.

The bottom line: It’s normal and healthy for markets to fall when giant companies fail. The fact that Chinese markets have been so sanguine this week implies the existence of some kind of “Xi put” — and the idea that Evergrande is, ultimately, too big to fail.

So what is actually going on?

We have a bunch of school-yard bullies hitting each other in the arms and congratulating each other on how tough they are.

The Asian kids are in a corner of the school yard, writing in their books. Planning things. Drawing diagrams in the sand, and taking notes.

The rest of the kinds in the school yard are playing but keeping an eye on both groups; the bullies and the smart Asian kids. They are not doing anything. Just watching and waiting.

Do not believe anything that you see in the “news”. The situation is still fluid.

Watch “Meng Wanzhou Wins Her Freedom!

US Drops Extradition Charges Against Huawei Executive!” on YouTube. I trust this report more than any on the western media …

Meanwhile, here’s some Chinese military videos…

Just some video that I collected. Some are training films. Some are recruitment films. Some are just studies. Some are personal videos. All in all a good mix. It will give you all a great idea about the Chinese military capability.

Group 1

You can download the Video Archive HERE.101MB.

Some of the films have children in it going through training. These are the elementary-school Pioneers (the Chinese cub scouts). Everyone in China gets full military training. Those older kids, are in middle school. They are the ones wearing blue slacks with the white line training and shooting AK-74’s.

You will see closeups of the various electronic weapons systems, and the state of the art Chinese SEAL and Special Forces troops as well. You will see some videos about how Japan came into China and killed off so many innocent civilians. And note that now that every civilian can fire a gun, and fight, that is never going to happen ever again.

Group 1

Group 2

You can download the Video Archive HERE. 257MB.

It starts off with some more middle school assault weapon training.

Next is the elementary school pioneers who undergo physical obstacle course training. Notice that they do it while carrying a full military rifle. Also note that it’s both boys and girls. No one gets a pass. VIDEO.

Boys and Girls no one gets a pass.

The third video is the reservists. China has an active military and the reserves that meet every few weeks. VIDEO.

Reservists practice and drill over and over and over and over.

Fourth video is for the young Pioneers. For inspiration and training. Very, very interesting.

It’s all your fault that all the people are being rounded up in the city.

So many interesting videos. Watch them all in this massive collection.

Group 2

Group 3B

Here’s another group. HERE. 381MB

Of course there are all sorts of interesting things in these videos.

Group 3B

Conclusions

Those videos are very interesting. Especially the ones where New York City is destroyed by a massive nuclear explosion. As you watch the movies, you can see that the military is infused in every aspect of the Chinese life. From elementary school through middle school and into college. There are layers upon layers of military. All driven by merit. All with the latest technology. All with a memory of how China has been hurt and abused int he past.

Next time you watch CNN, FOX, Hal Turner, or any of the rest and they are talking about hate – hate -hate China, keep in mind that it is a narrative based on insane levels of ignorance. There is not going to be any war against China, for if there were, America would cease to exist. While China might take a few dings, and then brush itself off and rebuild up bigger, better, faster.

Where SHTF in America it will be every man for himself, and that will be a fiasco.

So, don’t poke the Panda.

Realize that what you read is all bullshit propaganda. And that China has everything well under control. So turn off that propaganda outlet, focus on what you see around your life and your home, family and friends. That is what really matters.

What you read in the “news” is just a lie to anchor your thoughts towards a catastrophic fiasco. Ignore them.

Just go forth and live your life. Adults are in charge. Never forget that.

Just go forth and live your life.

Finally…

While this article is about China and it’s efforts to continue and thrive while the enormous American Military Empire has a hissy fit, do not think that that’s what is actually going on. Military Empires MUST have wars.

If they can’t have one with China right now, or soon, perhaps they can have one else where…

More than fifty-nine ships have massed in the central Atlantic Ocean, south of the Equator, in a non-shipping route area, and ALL have turned off their automated ship Identification transponders.

Ships massing off the coast of Venezuela.

No one can tell whose ships they are, or why they are gathering there.

Here’s a closer look:

Somethings up.

Somethings up…

Prep for an invasion.

Stand by.  What is this all about?

  • Invasion build-up?
  • Flotilla to collect Haitian refugees and send them to the Untied States?
  • Collect American Haitian refugees and send them back to Haiti?

Stand by?

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “China index” over here…

China

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A comparison of American Cub / Boy scouts and Chinese Pioneer Scouts

This is somethings that I have been wanting to do for a while now. What this is; is comparing the scouts programs for children. In particular we compare the programs found in the United States and those found in China. In America, the scouts are co-ed, which differs from what I grew up with. But that’s fine they are co-ed in China too. In China they are called the “Pioneers”. And they are quite active.

Actually, I don’t want to get into too much detail here. It’s not like a member of the American scouts is going to move to China and become a member of the Pioneers! LOL. Instead what this is; is a short visit to see how the philosophies of the two scouting programs differ.

Essentially, as far as I can make out, the United States scouting programs teach self-reliance, individualism, basic woodland skills, and obedience to authority.

Cub scouts of America.

While the Chinese Pioneers teach communication, working as part of a team, nationalism, and overcoming adversity.

It seems that the United States is about making the scout a better “rounded” person overall, while the Pioneers is a paramilitary organization that teaches defense of the homeland, strength during times of adversity, and leadership skills.

The United States Scouts

American Cub Scouts.

Cub Scouting is part of the Scouting program of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), available to boys and girls from kindergarten through fifth grade, or 5 to 10 years of age and their families. Its membership is the largest of the five main BSA divisions (Cub Scouting, Scouts BSA, Venturing, Exploring and Sea Scouting ). 

- Wikipedia

And the Boy scouts…

American Boy Scouts.

The Boy Scouts of America places the greatest importance on creating the most secure environment possible for our youth members. To maintain such an environment, the BSA developed numerous procedural and leadership selection policies and provides parents and leaders with resources for the Cub Scout, Scouts BSA and Venturing programs. 

-Boy Scouts

The Cub Scouts are one of the BSA’s premier programs, offering citizenship, character, personal fitness, and leadership for youth in grades K to 5.

Cub scouts of America.

The mission of the Boy Scouts of America is to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.

[Note 1] According to Wikipedia there were 21,000,000 males age 10 -19 in 2000 in the US. Also according to Wikipedia there are 2,739,692 boy scout youths (age 11-17). That would indicate that more then 13% of boys are in scouting at a given time. 13% of American Children are in the scouts.

Cub scouts of America.

I think it sounds ok. Don’t you?

It’s a program to help young youth to become better rounded individuals.

Chinese Pioneers

I do not know about this program as an expert. I know of it as a parent. And that is a little different. But I can tell you that being in the Pioneers is a very important step in your child’s education within China.

It is very, very few people who will not allow their children to join the Pioneers. Mostly Christian fundamentalists. No problem with the Chinese Uighur Muslims,

It is a program that runs in parallel with the education system that provides group and community activities, rallies, a sense of community and belonging, not to mention skills, training, and social interaction. It is a critical system of development within China.

The following is an article that says more than I could ever say…

Chinese Pioneers.

This is from the Global Times

“Be prepared to struggle for the cause of communism!” As other children saluted the Communist Party of China (CPC) and swore their loyalty on the playground, Tao Hongkai, 6, was alone in the classroom studying.

Tao, a primary student at Wuhan’s Shuiguohu Primary School in Hubei Province, was the only one among his 50 classmates to not join the Young Pioneers – a State-run organization of 130 million children under the leadership of the CPC.

Check out this video…

As a result, he was not allowed to wear a red scarf, the emblem of the Young Pioneers, or join any related activities.

“I envied them so much that I saluted in front of a mirror at home,” Tao told the Global Times. “But I never felt empty because I had my own goals.”

Chinese Pioneers.

Six decades later, Tao is a sociologist and an expert on helping Internet-addicted children.

“I could focus on studying and accomplishing my goal – to be a useful person in society,” he said, looking back to the days when he was not a Young Pioneer.

[Note 1] Almost every primary school student between 6 and 14 years of age in China joins the Young Pioneers, which is widely seen as being a great honor. Being excluded from the organization would be seen as a blemish on one’s record. 98% of Chinese Children are in the Chinese Pioneers.

However, in recent years, as social values have diversified, some parents have begun to doubt the meaning of their children being “successors of communism” and discourage their kids from joining the Young Pioneers. They say they worry their children might be influenced by an ideology at such an early stage of life.

Chinese Pioneers.

Chinese Christians don’t want to participate

Xiao Yan, a Christian from Shandong Province whose son is about to attend primary school, told the Global Times that she and other religious parents are reluctant to see their children become Young Pioneers.The Chinese Young Pioneers National Working Committee declined to comment for this story, only emphasizing that membership in the movement is optional.

Even though it is officially optional to join, in many schools, new members are elected directly by teachers without being consulted or the entire student body is forced to join up.

Chinese Pioneers.

“I will tell my child the difference between the communism and Christianity, and I will make myself clear that as a parent I don’t want him to join,” she said. However, she admits that “if my child insists, I will let him do so.”

Xiao suggested that joining the Young Pioneers should be conducted by a third party.

“Schools are a place to teach knowledge, it should stay out of politics,” she said, “So if children are interested to join, they can apply to an external organization.”

However, Xiao said most children from religious families choose to be Red Scarves, often for fear of being left behind.

Chinese Pioneers.

Don’t be left behind!

In a secular society where many people do not share religious convictions and are not too bothered about ideology, Xiao’s case is rare.

“Parents often ask the teachers why their children are not in the Pioneers yet, and if there is anything that they can improve,” said Ma, a teacher in charge of recruiting new Young Pioneer members at the elite Asia-Pacific Experiment School of Beijing Normal University.

In Ma’s school, 1,100 of 1,400 Grade 1 students are all members of the Young Pioneers. The rest are on the waiting list. The head teachers for each class elect candidates based on their overall performance. “Star students” with good grades and talents will be the first batch to join, others join in the second batch.

Chinese Pioneers.

“But no one will be left behind. All the children will join the Young Pioneers eventually,” she said.

Many students are reportedly upset and unhappy if they are not part of the first batch. Ma explained this division exists to motivate students to behave themselves and study harder.

“Being a Young Pioneer means being outstanding. Of course star pupils should join first and set a good example for others,” she said.

Chinese Pioneers.

Scarves not so red

Most Chinese elites follow a set political career path: Students who graduate from the Young Pioneers can expect to join the Communist Youth League and then compete to become full-fledged members of the Party.

However, this ladder is not always straight and narrow now. Some teachers reportedly accept bribes from parents in exchange for helping their children become Pioneers first, and some teachers have even put their own children at the head of the line.

Earlier this month, an online post accused teachers at Southwest Central Primary School in Foshan, Guangdong Province, of ensuring their children to become Red Scarves before anyone else. This attracted thousands of hits and broad debate on wielding this kind of influence.

The Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily quoted the school’s deputy headmaster Liu Xiuying as saying that some children in the first batch were teachers’ children, but that they were elected first because of their behavior and academic track record.

Chinese pioneers.

This was not the first time netizens had questioned the ideology of the Red Scarves. Last year, teachers from a primary school in Shaanxi Province gave green scarves to students with poor grades or bad behavior records, which drew criticism from both parents and educators, forcing the principal into an apology.

It was an easy leap for netizens to associate the elections of Red Scarves to the real world where power holds absolute sway.

Last year, the nickname of Five Stripes Boy, was given to Huang Yibo, 13, from Hubei Province who was pictured with a five-stripe badge on his uniform. The picture was to promote the Young Pioneers, but netizens said it resembled pictures of high-ranking officers. The Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday that a primary school in the province had canceled the use of the five-stripe badge to “let kids live as kids.”

Tao sees this phenomenon as a consequence of cultural deterioration.

Chinese Pioneers.

“I feel pity that some good traditions are fading and losing their meaning,” he explained. “It reflects concerns about the deterioration of China’s cultural, political and ideological environments.”

Considering this, some non-religious parents discourage their children from joining the Young Pioneers.

Fu Yongjie, the father of a young girl daughter from Shaanxi, said he would not push his child to join.

“What does a 6-year-old kid know about the goal of the Young Pioneers? I hope my daughter’s first lie will be denying she stole money to go out with her friends, not that she would struggle for a cause she doesn’t understand,” Fu told the Global Times.

Some religious parents have also expressed their concerns that they do not want their children to get involved with politics at such an early age.

Tao said the goals that the Young Pioneers are not always met, even once children join up.

“Interestingly, some badly behaved children I deal with are Red Scarves, that means being a member does not guarantee exemplary behavior,” he said.

Chinese Pioneers.

“Therefore, parents should not worry too much if their children are Young Pioneers or not, they should focus on their studies and their goals,” he continued.

Poor guidance

One reason why the organization has been losing its glory is also because Young Pioneers’ counselors, mainly head teachers or officials assigned by the educational bureau, do not know much about how to guide the Young Pioneers, Yan Kai, editor of Guangdong-based Children magazine, told the Global Times.

“Many children find it hard to accept the way they explain the organization as there are too many political terms,” he said.

The current generation of students has grown up with new media, which has become part of their lifestyle and affected the way they think, according to a survey issued in May by the Guangdong Provincial Social Sciences Academy.

It found out that half of the 5,000 students surveyed in 50 Guangzhou primary schools had microblogs and many had access to cell phones and iPads.

The education ministry announced in September that Young Pioneers activities would be listed as a required course in all primary schools, with one class every week for students from Grade 1 to 8.

Yan suggested that Young Pioneers’ counselors should broaden their approach to keep up with the new generation by organizing public or charity events rather than simply focusing on classes.

The organization also has a plan B. Earlier this month, on its 63rd anniversary, it announced that the Young Pioneers in Guangdong would now only receive counselors with master’s degrees.

Chinese Pioneers.

Three universities in the province launched a pilot project to create a new postgraduate program – children’s organization and ideological education. This aims to produce well-educated Young Pioneers’ counselors who could use positive discipline and show exemplary behavior to guide children, Xinhua quoted an unnamed director from the provincial working committee as saying.

There are over 170,000 counselors in the province. However, the pilot program will only recruit five students for 2013 although the provincial working committee said this number would increase according to the volume of applications.

“Those graduates can work in many education sectors like schools or NGOs. They will play a very important role in children’s education in the future,” the director said.

Chinese Pioneers.

Chen Xinyue, 12, who just graduated from Yahetang Primary School in Guangzhou this summer, was elected as the 2010-2011 excellent Young Pioneer of Guangzhou.

When asked whether she is aware that the organization has not lived up to its ideal, she said the title was a great honor but that she did not know much about what it mean to be an excellent Young Pioneer.

“I am really unlucky,” she said. “The reward was supposed to add some 5-10 points to my middle school entrance exam score, but the policy was canceled because some parents complained to the education ministry that it was unfair.”

Let’s look at some videos…

In China membership not only educates, but provides social scoring, and lays out a path for university and future careers. In America it is only a social club that helps one become a better person.

Here’s a bunch of videos that I’ve collected.

These little kids are tough little boys and girls and I really like how they use scaled down full-auto rifles firing smaller cartridges to train with.  When I say that China is a tough, tough nation that does not play, I really mean that.

Group 1 – 11 short videos

You can download the archive HERE. 79MB.

Tough little kids.

Group 2 -12 short videos

You can download the archive HERE. 67 MB.

Training in the use of firearms in elementary school.

Group 3 – 17 short videos

You can download the archive HERE – 17 Videos / 89MB

Tough little kids.

Conclusions

Throughout elementary school, Chinese children are encouraged to join the Pioneers. They become adept at working as a team, undergoing hardship, and learning basic paramilitary fighting, combat and shooting skills. Perhaps 98% join the Pioneers.

In Middle School, it is no longer optional. 100% of all Middle School students must take a two week “Boot Camp” military training every year while they are in school.

As all Chinese students study both English and Chinese, the students who graduate from High School make up the members of the irregular military force in their communities, were the need ever to arise. The best and the brightest are scored on their abilities, and their ability to become a Rufus. As China is a merit driven society, only the best can join the Communist Party, and then if they so desire go into the political administration of it.

USA – China meeting in Anchorage Alaska, in April 2021.

Which differs substantially from the buy-your-way into power, and set up a puppet show, “democracy” style. And you can see this.

USA-China meeting Anchorage Alaska April 2021.

China, being much larger than the United States is indeed a formidable giant, and the thought that somehow American (with Japanese and Australian military) could (somehow) invade China is a laughingly pathetic.

If you teach your youth to be strong, be tough, to overcome and to work as a team, there is nothing that they will not be able to accomplish.

Perhaps it would be best if America tackles it’s many, many systemic problems at home on the domestic front rather than worrying about what is going on at the other side of the globe.

And maybe, just maybe if the scouts would devote more time to community, communication and endurance, American wouldn’t be such a nation of ho-hos, donuts and booty wagging misfits.

Learning about the dangers of slingshots and chewing gum…

Teaching safety to cub scouts in slingshot use at the slingshot range.

…instead of having to rescue others in need during times of discord.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my China and America comparisons index…

USA vs CHN

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

Why do many of the girls of China resemble an Asian version of the large chested Dolly Parton

No. It’s not all girls. And no, it’s not even most girls. But it is a lot of girls.

It’s that in China, a fish-like shape is considered to be very beautiful and appealing. And so the women wear flattering clothes, and wear cute outfits. It’s really nice to go out in a restaurant and see the beautiful ladies go out and about. It’s like being in a beautiful garden full of wonderful flowers.

Here, we will present some of these appealing Chinese women for you to look at.

But first… Note that these Chinese girls look this way because they [1] eat healthy food, [2] have good traditional habits and [3] all maintain a healthy and vibrant social life.

And that is the key.

You must have a vibrant and healthy social life, with friends, and family, if you want to be healthy, and look great.

Chinese girls and American girls are the same

The fact is that if you remove the weight that many Westerners now have (due to poor diets, broken up families, fast foods, and GMOs) the women would resemble what is common in China today. the only difference between Chinese women and American women is that they are not eating GMO-laden food.

And they are not under stress.

And they eat good healthy food.

And they are active in a vibrant social life.

Here, we take a normal American girl (on the left). She has a robust rotund shape. And then slim her down to what the shape was in America before the rise of big AIG industry, GMOs and the rise of Fast Food. She is at a woman’s body shape mid 1960’s in America.

The girl on the left is a typical American woman, while the girl on the right is what she would look like in the 1960’s…

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

And if you look, you will notice that many Chinese women have bodies that resemble this 1960s era shape. If you look at the shape and the body proportions the current typical Chinese female body structure resembles the typical female body structure of American women in the 1960’s.

Here’s another one…

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

Who does she sort of look like from the 1960’s and 1970’s? If you pay attention, her body structure on the right side of the image greatly resembles the typical body images of actresses from the 1960’s and 1970’s. And this is no mistake.

Loni Anderson

Raquel Welch

Sharon Tate

Sharon Tate

Notice that when you slim down, the rest of the body proportions stay the same. That gives the illusion of a healthier and more swan-line or fish-like body. And in my mind, I think that American women are just as beautiful as Chinese or Asian or African women.

It’s just that the culture, the diet and the society has distorted them.

And GMO’s has played a major role, no doubt. Once can only imagine how the mRNA changes in the bodies of Westerners will react to GMO laden food. If the bodies we see today are the end result of sugars, starches, and GMO’s combined with a stress-filled environment, one can just imagine what horrors will manifest with an mRNA alternation.

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

France in the 1960’s

Did you know that you used to drink wine in French schools, have long lunches to savor the food followed by a nap, and then strolled back to school and work.

Then, when France decided to adopt the American / British “improvements” in society…

… such as wine replaced with sugar-laden soft-drinks…

France used to require children to drink their daily wine.

Last night I was standing at the counter of our local café on Boulevard Saint Germain, finishing off a last glass of wine after work before heading home for the evening, when I noticed something behind the bar. I thought I must have been reading it wrong (I was on my third glass) because it said in French: “Never more than one litre of wine per day… the correct serving: one quarter of a bottle per meal,” and then beneath in large capital letters, “HEALTH, SOBRIETY“.

France before it became British.

What kind of alcoholism prevention poster sets the recommended limit at one litre of wine per day? And are they suggesting we drink wine at breakfast? I suppose this is France…

“It’s from the 1950s”, explained Pierre, the owner of the Café Maubert. “I think it’s from a campaign when they were trying to stop everyone from drinking too much wine everyday. I bought it on eBay for 70 euros”.

Drink wine. It’s good for the health.

It would be worth mentioning here that it wasn’t until 1956, two years after the start of this campaign, that the consumption of alcohol was outlawed in French schools for children under 14.

Mothers were known to send their small children to the local schoolhouse with lunch baskets containing a bit of cheese, some saucisson … and a half bottle of wine or cider to drink.

-Messie Nessy

France implemented all sorts of “progressive improvements”. Not just the switching of wine for soda beverages, but other things as well. Such as…

… butter replaced with artificial margarine…

… and a two hour long lunch break replaced to a 20 minute cram and dash lunch…

… and the 65 religious day-off holidays replaced with 6 holidays a year, that people became fat, sad, depressed, sickly and obese?

Things were much better before these “improvements”.

Improvements?

Bread and cheese.

Pretty soon you will see the famous (and delicious baguettes) replaced with white American processed white bread loaves. Followed by cheese replaced with cheese-it in a can (or a jar). It’s more “progressive” don’t you know.

American improvements in the way we eat bread and cheese.

These improvements to our lives, as dictated by the powers that be, have created an enormous tidal wave of secondary effects that has destroyed the Western society and has wrecked ruin throughout our individual cultures.

And this is American “culture” today…

Walmart reality.

Bond girls – Chinese style

Here’s another picture. I think that the girl on the right resembles a typical Chinese lady today, and I can easily picture her in a 1960’s James Bond film taken in France in the 1960’s.

2021s American Girl / 1960s French Girl shape

She has that “Bond Girl” look, don’t you think?

Doctor No.

It’s not just women. It’s men too.

Everyone has ballooned up to enormous proportions by the crazy stress and piss-poor lifestyle choices available to people in the West.

I know that women do not like big, fat gluttonous men. I think that they prefer thinner guys that take care of their appearance and are strong and confident. At least that is what I like in a woman, and I figure that women are much the same as I.

You know, when I compare my pictures of me back around twenty years ago, when I first started to spend serious time in and out of China, to now, I am astounded.  In those days, I ran a three weeks in China, followed by a six weeks in the USA. And my body shape reflected that. I looked like a rather large American man.

Today, my physical size is  much slimmer, though I do believe that I have gained weight.

Funny that.

Thin and confident secret agent.

Just like men don’t really care for the rotund women in the pictures to the left. Everyone, men and women, want a healthy partner.

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

People want a healthy partner.

Not necessarily a weight lifter, or a marathon runner, but someone who takes care of their appearance, is a great conservationist, and is fun to be with.

Not just for sex, companionship and pride, but also for long life and healthy activities. Don’t you think?

2021s American Girl / 1960s American Girl shape

I think that it is important to live a lush, fruitful and enjoyable life. This means good food, good drink… wine instead of sugary soda. It means being around loving animals, dogs and cats.

It means taking pride in your appearance.

It means having an active social life with people who respect and trust you.

It means happiness, and good long health.

So I am not getting down on any chunkier women in the MM audience. As I too am getting a tad chunkier myself. But what I am saying is that we ALL need to start mixing up our social and friend and family circles around companionship, social interaction, and really good healthy food.

The weight loss will follow.

There’s something about have a great engaging conversation with people who you are comfortable with that will really tone up your body.

What would you rather do? Cozy up in from of your computer monitor and read what Washington DC is planning to do, or get dressed up, and meet some friends to the local pub, bar, brasserie, restaurant or lounge and just chat. Chat and smile. tell some stupid jokes that you heard a thousands times before. catch up on the latest gossip, talk some politics, and just enjoy the evening?

What is healthier?

What is healthier?

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

Life in your 20’s

Consider what it was like when you were slim.

You were probably in your youngish 20’s. Slim, going out with friends, and dating. Eating out. eating good food. drinking some. Enjoying life. Optimistic with a life in front of you.

Now, what’s your life?

Oh, it’s such a simple thing to say. It’s all that bad fast food that you put into your mouths. It’s this. Or, it’s that.

It’s everything else except what is staring you straight in the face. Instead of looking at the bigger picture.

Your lifestyle changed.

In history, those families that adopted a traditional lifestyle with an active social life, and fine delicious home-cooked meals by the spouse who was in control of the finances were all THIN. They were not fat, and they held a very important role in their communities.

You need to be part of a community, and you need to socialize.

Living in Boston

When I lived in Boston, I hardly ate fish. Why? Because it was outrageously expensive, and I simply could not afford it. But if I did, perhaps I would have avoided some of my later healthy issues that hit me a few years later.

You must plan.

So it’s expensive, well, go out and plan on a meal out with friends and have a fine delicious fish and lots of vegetable side dishes. Some wine. Lots of talk. Dress up a little smartly for it. make it a great event.

Do it often enough.

You will live much longer. I promise you.

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

“What’s going on?” You might ask.

Food and losing weight?

Here I am talking about going out and eating at the same time where I am discussing losing weight. How does it all relate. Ah. Let me explain.

You see your weight has no bearing on the amount of food you eat. Women in the 1960’s ate as much food as they do today. That is true for both China and the USA. The difference is what you eat, and how you eat it.

  • What you eat.
  • How you eat it.

These are critical points that you will not find anywhere else on the internet. I suppose it is another thing that make MM unique. Our weight is connected to our thoughts, and our thoughts are connected to our well-being. And our well-being is connected to our society. To lose weight, you must go forth and make yourself some good friends.

Even if I am full of bullshit, at least you will be with others and having a good delicious time at it.

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

Not about diet entirely…

So I am not talking about dieting or anything like that.

[1] I am not talking about those diets or loading up on salads. I am saying that you eat IN A SOCIAL VENUE as much as possible. Be it with family, or with friends. You should only be eating alone very, very rarely.

[2] When you eat, you should be eating a balanced meal of meats / fish / foul with three other vegetables and a staple. Be it rice, breads or potatoes. They might cost slightly more, but they are worth it. Don’t always select foods based on price and convenience.

American breakfast is often nothing more than disguised dessert. And we keep eating sugar throughout the day — in cupcakes, soda, even salad dressing. So many of the additional calories in our diet that weren’t there a few decades ago are coming in the form of sugar. Back in 1977, the average adult got 228 calories per day from sugar in food and drinks. By 2010, it was up to 300 calories a day. Added sugar consumption increased almost as much — 20 percent — among kids.

[3] All sugar laden drinks are out. You can have tea, beer, wine, water, or anything else you can think of.

People who drink soda have more obesity, Type 2 diabetes, tooth decay, and other health problems compared with people who don't -- the research on this is clear. And Americans are drinking way, way too much of the sweet stuff. According to Euromonitor’s most recent data, Americans remain the world leaders when it comes to per capita sales of soft drinks.

[4] Fast foods are NO NO NO.

Fast foods are NO!

American breakfast is often nothing more than disguised dessert. And we keep eating sugar throughout the day — in cupcakes, soda, even salad dressing.

So many of the additional calories in our diet that weren’t there a few decades ago are coming in the form of sugar. Back in 1977, the average adult got 228 calories per day from sugar in food and drinks. By 2010, it was up to 300 calories a day. Added sugar consumption increased almost as much — 20 percent — among kids.

Then watch your weight disappear. I honestly believe that social interaction is the KEY to all this problem that we are discussing here.

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

Oh, so you don’t believe me?

Overeating obviously leads to excess weight, right? A team of scientists says not so fast, it’s actually what you eat, not how much you eat that leads to obesity. Their study finds processed food and rapidly digestible carbohydrates may be what’s really behind society’s growing waistline.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 40 percent of American adults classify as obese. This places nearly half the population at higher risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. The USDA’s current Dietary Guidelines for Americans for 2020 to 2025 maintains the belief that losing weight “requires adults to reduce the number of calories they get from foods and beverages and increase the amount expended through physical activity.” 

...

Unlike the energy balance model, study authors say the carbohydrate-insulin model claims overeating is not the main cause of weight gain. Instead, the researchers say consuming foods with a high-glycemic load are the real culprit. These foods include processed, rapidly digestible carbohydrates.

The study finds such foods also cause hormonal responses which alter an eater’s metabolism, drives fat storage, and leads to weight gain. When people consume carbohydrates, the body increases the amount of insulin it secretes. This signals fat cells to store more calories and leaves fewer calories for the body to use as muscle fuel.

- Study Finds

Medicines…

Now, I know that there are other things that can contribute to weight gain, such as medicines. depakote is the worst. (If you need some control, try risperdal, it will slim you down three sizes and pop up your boobs three sizes larger as well. And you’ll stop smoking as a side effect.)

But it’s a MAJOR tranquilizer, and should only be taken if you have problems in that area.

But there are many other factors Yet, I argue that stress alleviation, and mitigation can be handled by social support groups. And as your stress goes down, so will your weight. So go forth make friends and eat well.

Anyways…

Why do so many Chinese girls resemble the large chested beauties of the 1960’s and 1970’s?

When you get fat, the excess body fat conceals your natural curves and body shape. You end up looking like a huge tomato, a squash or a big pear. When if you just keep fit, the other parts of your body; the chest, the legs, the hips will form in their normal proportions. this will give you a more chesty look, a more shapely look and a more healthier look. As the photos above illustrates.

Now there are all kinds of people in this world. There are tall, short, fat, thin, robust, and frail people. And what ever body you inherited at birth is just fine. Just keep it well maintained, and enjoy what you have. Feet it well. Use it to socialize with and enjoy your time on this planet.

The large busy girls of China

This is part of my “Beautiful girls of China” series. Here, we introduce the reader to China, and what it is today, by looking at the girls, women and ladies of China. In all cases the ladies are dancing, posing or just being themselves around their homes, businesses or city centers where they live.

By looking at them, listening to the music, and paying attention to their surroundings you will end up getting a very clean and pristine vision of what China is, what it stands for and what it is actually like.

For convenience, I have arranged the videos in zip files. I am sure that you will enjoy them.

Group AA. All very nice.

We will start with these gals. All are grouped in individual zip files.

Group AA-A.

Group DD. All exceptional.

This is where the beauty for this cover picture is. (Her individual video here.) Click on the folder to download the zip files.

Conclusion

There is nothing different between an Asian woman, an American woman, a Russian woman and an African woman. All are naturally thin with a nice swan (or fish) shape. The differences in body SHAPE that we see today are a function of the social and cultural climate that exists within the different geographic and national regions.

In nations that are toxic; that have a suppressed social life, where the foods are not really healthy, and where the lifestyle is one of isolation… the women (and men) get enormously fat.

In nations that are healthy; where society allows for personal interaction, and communication, and where fresh food choices are easy to obtain, plentiful and cheap, the people are thin and attractive with finely shaped bodies.

Thus is the difference that we see between the USA and China today.

Do you want more?

 

I have more articles like this one in my Learning About China by Looking at Pretty Girls Index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Some videos of Chinese Military showing the real deal in context to what is going on today

This is a massive article concerning China, and it’s military. And the point that I want to make is that China is a perfect organism wholly designed to prevent anyone from attacking it. It is like a vicious animal with spikes, poison, and large sharp teeth. Only a fool would want to attack it. It’s defensive. And I have a lot to say about this subject, as well as a ton load of videos to watch as well.

Poor countries are supposed to stay poor so that they can be exploited indefinitely for cheap labor and resources. When a poor country starts to pull itself out of poverty, that country will soon be pulled back down again through a mixture of warfare, sabotage, sanctions, and propaganda...all under the pretext of "protecting human rights." China has defied this rule by making itself wealthy. Accordingly, the propaganda directed toward it will only intensify.

Posted by: Donbass Lives Matter | Sep 1 2021 22:17 utc | 50

Keep in mind that you cannot learn things by only looking at one singular aspects. you must see the big picture, and then put the focus on the little aspects as they fall within that big picture. So this large article is going to cover other tangential things that help give you a better appreciation for the much bigger picture that is omitted in modern contemporaneous dialog today.

But first, I want to relate a little story.

The tale of Frank

When I was growing up, there was this man who lived with my maternal grandmother. She was my mother’s mother, and there was this guy called “Frank” who lived in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

My mother called him Frank. My grandmother called him Frank. My brothers and sisters called him Frank. My aunties and my uncles called him Frank. My parents called him Frank. No one said anything else at all about his relationship with my grandmother.

I assumed that, since he went by his first name only, he wasn’t a close friend. Because in the United States, close male friends are referred to by their last name. While close girl friends are referred to their first name.

He wasn’t an uncle, as all my uncles went by the name “uncle” followed by their first name. As in “Uncle Robert”, “Uncle Ralston”, and “Uncle Sonny”. In fact, my grandmother’s brothers and sisters were still alive, and I called them “Uncle Eddie” and such.

So I figured that he was a renter who helped my grandmother pay the rent.

Long afterwards, when my grandmother had a stroke, and died, I attended her funeral. And there she was laid next to Frank, who was, after all, my maternal grandfather!

And this surprised me.

And when I mentioned it, I was hounded and ridiculed and given so much shit. I will tell you that it was horrible and ruthless, and just obnoxious. What was I supposed to know? Make assumptions, absorb the relationship by osmosis? Jeeze!

There is a reason… a REASON… why there are job titles, positions titles, business cards, name plates, and all the rest in regards to family and business relationships.

It’s important.

It adds another dimensions to the relationships that will enable us to better understand things. For once you understand the deeper relationships behind something, you can better understand the events, and items and how they all fit together as part of the unified whole.

Think about that for a minute.

As it pertains to everything.

Here’s some Chinese military videos. Some are recruitment videos. Some are narrative videos. Some are “fan” videos. Some are something else entirely. In any event, these videos give a person a fairly good overview impression of the kind of military that China has.

China isn’t anything like what is portrayed. China does not play “nice”. Especially when it comes to defending China from crazed manicidal psychopathic wanna-be-Rambos.

And keep in mind that China is truly playing for “keeps”. If anyone wants to fuck with them, they will fuck you right back. Smartly.

Defensive Forces

If we talk about "representative government" we have to ask what kind of representation the weakest individual in society can get. I would submit that in the US the answer is laughable. In China, which takes surveys endlessly, prolifically and as a vital part of analysis and the systematic, results-based development of policy, one can argue very well that the weakest individual is much better represented than in the US.

Fact is, no one wants democracy. What anybody wants is good representative government.

Posted by: Grieved | Sep 2 2021 3:47 utc | 80

China possesses “defensive forces”.

Note that they are not “expeditionary forces”. They are harsh defensive forces and have no qualms about slaughtering anyone who tries to attack China in any way.

If you attack China, and China considers Taiwan PART of China, it will go nuclear in a nano-second.

China is NOT the USA. Do not believe the neocon propaganda about Taiwan this, or Taiwan that. China will take over the island in a matter or hours, and the world will left reeling. Those that want to get involved will be slaughtered mercilessly.

Listen up Japan!

Listen up Australia!

I am talking to you.  As well as your bosses on K-street in Washington DC.

So forget any fantasies about peasants with mass-produced AK-47 clones. China will fiercely decimate enemy force with tactical and theater neutron munitions from the “get go”.

A neutron bomb, officially defined as a type of enhanced radiation weapon (ERW), is a low-yield thermonuclear weapon designed to maximize lethal neutron radiation in the immediate vicinity of the blast while minimizing the physical power of the blast itself. 

The neutron release generated by a nuclear fusion reaction is intentionally allowed to escape the weapon, rather than being absorbed by its other components. 

The neutron burst, which is used as the primary destructive action of the warhead, is able to penetrate enemy armor more effectively than a conventional warhead, thus making it more lethal as a tactical weapon. 

-Wikipedia

The mere fact that no American strategic planners are taking into account this long standing military policy (since 1977, I believe) just shows how oblivious the planners are on K-street and in the Pentagon are.

Oblivious.

As in moronically blind to reality.

Somehow these morons believe that a war with China, on Chinese soil, will be a long-drawn out conventional war, in a far away land. Sort of like a larger Afghanistan.

Effects of a Neutron Bomb

The New York Times reported that “the nuclear weaponeers have unfolded a new brainchild, the neutron bomb, which will kill people while preserving buildings, tanks, and artillery.” 

-Air Force Magazine

Neutrons scattered around after the neutron bomb explodes, in soil, metals, food, etc. activates neutrons; this neutron activation is 10 times higher than that of an atom bomb.

The so-called neutron activation causes inanimate bodies to emit secondary gamma rays.

Thus, the Neutron bomb causes damage due to both neutron beams and gamma rays.

Since neutrons make the objects they hit emit gamma rays, each object becomes a mini-bomb after the neutron bomb is dropped and starts to emit gamma rays.

Lovely.

Who’d figure that your iPhone and Alexia would someday actually kill you?

Chinese DF-16 tactical surface to surface conventional and nuclear weapon.

The first effect of the neutron bomb is to scatter fast neutrons and gamma photons. The irradiation dose is up to hundreds of thousands of rad (radiation units) in open air beyond the explosion and thermal irradiation distance (150-300 m.). Let us remind that human beings die even in the face of neutron irradiation higher than 300 rad.

Fast neutrons are exposed to elastic scattering in the nuclei of light atoms, during which rebound protons are released, protons are strongly ionizing particles.

Thus, human beings are exposed to a strongly ionizing radiation.

As protons move through human tissues, they cause havoc with a very high energy per unit path. Not only that, the nuclei of some biological tissues become radioactive by capturing neutrons, as a result, countless radioactive foci appear in the human body, each of human tissues becomes a mini-bomb and begins to self-destruct with dangerous rays.

Herein lies one of the greatest dangers of neutrons; Neutrons strike living or non-living objects, making the atoms in front of them radioactive.

These atoms start to emit lethal rays and countless mini-bombs are born.

After the neutron bomb was dropped, buildings, tanks, etc. It is said that it will remain the same. In fact, both corpses and these inanimate things will become radioactive. Both the removal of the corpses, these buildings, tanks and so on. entering into it will mean receiving a high dose of lethal radiation.

Non-living things that remain intact can only be used with special protective clothing without irradiation.

One of the purposes of using neutron bombs is to instantly turn those who are exposed to the neutron into the living and dead.

The DF-10 can really turn your day into a neutron-saturated toasty BBQ.

The Neutron bomb alone can turn people into this. Other “normal” nuclear bombs cause burns and wounds with the heat of the explosion wave and glare and kill them immediately.

With the effect of radiation, neutrons will enter the brain and destroy the electrical connections of the nerve cells. Computers and electronic devices exposed to strong radiation will stop immediately.

Yeah.

That means all cars, internet, home appliances, televisions, radio, stop lights, alarm systems, electronic doors, elevators, and aircraft. It’s sort of like an EMF weapon only with the extra bonus of making everything highly radioactive.

Those exposed to a radiation of 3000 rad will remain unconscious for 3-7 minutes, then sober up…

… great. Right?

Not so fast…

…. within a week they will die of gastrointestinal bleeding; The entire digestive system from mouth to anus will become an open wound, the kidney and heart will weaken and the patient will bleed and die in fever.

Those who are exposed to 650 rad will not have an immediate effect, but the bone marrow that makes the blood cells will dry, the old blood cells will survive another 25-30 days after the irradiation, but their division will stop, the patient will die in 4-5 weeks as a result of anemia and inability to defend against germs.

That is…

…unless they have some mRNA modification that compensates for this effect.

Hum…

Anyways…

According to the British geneticist J. Edwards, the most terrible aspect of the Neutron bomb is this: The neutron bomb is such a bomb that its effect is not limited in time, after the Neutron bomb is dropped, many generations will be born as cripples and monsters, it is not up to anyone to prevent this, rays.

This painful consequence is inevitable as it destroys heredity molecules (genes).

The destruction will be the most in regions (cities) where people live densely.

All living things in an area of ​​8 km2 will die in 2-3 days at the latest as a result of lethal rays. In an additional area of ​​10 km2, 1-100 rad rays will be received. 2-3 km.

The Neutron bomb, thrown at intervals, will kill anyone caught outdoors.

Radiation at a distance of 400 meters from the explosion point of a 1 kiloton Neutron bomb is 418,000 rad. Even in a shelter reducing radiation 500 times, the dose would be 836 rad, which is twice the minimum lethal dose.

According to the American scientist A. Westing, a 1 kiloton neutron weapon will destroy 310 hectares of pine forests, 170 hectares of deciduous forest and 140 hectares of grassland, and it will take centuries to replace them.

In short…

… a neutron bomb is a far more lethal weapon than an atomic or hydrogen bomb. And the Chinese field these weapons on a tactical basis all over China. If you try to attack China, they will not scurry into a hamlet behind the donkeys and sheep (Syrian style)…

No, instead, they will start launching a barrage of neutron hyper-velocity missiles at you. And there will be NO place to hide.

The Chinese DF-12 surface to surface, short range ballistic missiles that can carry neutron warheads.

The good news is that you will have enough time to pray for a quick death.

That will be the best you can do. You wouldn’t dare pick up your rifle, pistol, or get into a vehicle. All that metal and material will be irradiating the shit out of you. That’s right. All the metal near you would be acting like one giant X-ray and microwave beaming radiation right at you.

China is an organism

In China…

Everyone works together and they are very, very patriotic.  Of course no one in the West understands this. It’s dog-eat-dog, and fight to be the “lone wolf”. You don’t kick an organized hornet’s nest and not expect to get stung.

Check out this video below…

The Chinese work together as one.

Nice. True. Historical.

China, the Chinese people act as one singular organism together.

And, you know what, it is even MORE SO NOW TODAY.

The Chinese learn from an early age

From the time they are able to walk, all the Chinese are taught to work hard, study, and be aggressive in everything that they do.

This is not a land of coddled wealthy, or diversity overweight wooble jaumbas.It’s not a land of prep-boys, or “silver spoon in the mouth” elitist “blue bloods”. It’s a land full of the hardiest people that you ever met, who are also the smartest people who you have ever met, and who also are the most determined people who you have ever met.

And what’s more…

These people are taught to live for the community. To fight for the community. To do the best for the community, and if necessary to die for the community.

Check out what it is like for those in kindergarten… Pretty amazing for four and five year olds. Please watch the entire video.

In kindergarten.

The Chinese students can only play electronic games during certain hours

Oh, you think that China isn’t serious?

My eyes almost popped out of my head when I read "Gamers under 18 will only be allowed to play online between 8:00 pm and 9:00 pm on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays". Real leadership... in 2021... I am flabbergasted.

I am a high school science and math teacher in Australia. That single policy in itself is game over.

Posted by: Rae | Sep 1 2021 21:15 utc | 38

And…

Earlier a math teacher stopped by to praise the new time limits on video gaming for young folks in China. I add my own 'bravo' to that.

And here's another one---the Chinese crackdown on celebrity 'culture'.

The Chinese National Radio and Television Administration on Thursday enhanced management on entertainment programs and related personnel, calling for boycott against individuals with illegal or immoral records, sky-high prices for stars and abnormal appreciation of niangpao, or feminine men.

How much of the West's descent into unimaginable societal degradation is due to young kids being raised, for generations now, not by attentive parents, but by TV and Hollywood?

The so-called popular 'culture' has long since imposed itself into the family home and pushed out the role of parents as guides for impressionable young folks.

Some have mentioned the west's dismal STEM graduate production. How are young people supposed to have an interest in math and science when most just want to be 'celebrities'? Or at least social media 'influencers'?

Like everything in society, from financial greed to bringing up children, things cannot be simply left to chance. That produces a garden full of weeds and thorns.

The CPC is truly a shining light in today's world!

Posted by: Gordog | Sep 2 2021 6:09 utc | 90

The Chinese exercise from an early age too

Physical health and well being is important to the Chinese. No couch-potatoes allowed. Every single school, at every single level performs strict dance, exercise and martial arts routines. All of them do this. They do this six days a week every single day.

Watch this video and be amazed!

Everyone exercises.

The Chinese can build up enormous constructions from scratch

Remember all those “Ghost cities” that the BBC, CNN and FOX “news” were all making fun of? Remember them. Oh, you don’t hear much about them today do you? Why not? Why isn’t the “news” getting right in front of China’s “grill” and bad mouthing them about “Ghost Cities”?

This is why…

They aren’t ghost cities any longer. Watch the video and be amazed.

A Ghost City.

As a result of US sanctions against Chinese companies, China is developing its own technology to cater for its internal market. Low cost, not Western, no manual. 

Low cost, because at the volumes of the Chinese internal market even a saving of a fraction of a cent is real money. Different from US designs, so no license fee needs to be paid. And little or no documentation in English - it's intended for the Chinese internal market.

Posted by: Passerby | Sep 1 2021 22:24 utc | 52

So you really think that the United States can compete against China?

Really? Have you seen what America has become? America is very, very weak right now. Here’s what all the major cities look like. Watch the full video.

The United States today.

Watch the full video to get the full effect. This is what America is today. And it is indicative of the culture and the society. It is a reflection of the failure of the government. Not only in structure but in the leadership.

And this nation actually believes that it is better than China is?

Well, it isn’t As clearly stated in this short video here

Video Group 1

Stuff you won’t see on FOX, CNN or the BBC.

Video Group 1

Defensive Suppressive Forces

China has a substantial sized rocket and munitions closet. All designed for mass saturation of broad swaths of terrain. These were perfected after the results of World-War II that showed how successful that the Soviet Union was in employing these weapons against the superior technological weaponry of Nazi Germany.

Check out this video

Video

 

In the American military circles this is considered worrisome, but not terribly so. The conventional belief in the Pentagon is that America would obtain dominance very quickly using the integrated computerized electronics systems and be able to use stand off drones and munitions with “pin-point” accuracy to selectively destroy any targets of this type.

I wouldn’t be so sure of this.

In a conflict between the United States and China, the United States would have ZERO “eyes in the skies”.

Video Group 2

Here’s some more videos that are worth viewing. You most certainly not see anything like it in American or western media. That’s for certain.

Video Group 2

China’s Top Rated Fighter Aircraft Chengdu J-20

The Chengdu J-20 “Mighty Dragon” (NATO Name: Black Eagle) is a single-seat, twinjet, all-weather, stealth, fifth-generation fighter aircraft developed by China’s Chengdu Aerospace Corporation for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).

Video here…

Video

The J-20 is designed to execute ground attack missions even in hostile environments. The aircraft can reach higher altitudes with its delta wings in supersonic speeds. It is larger than Sukhoi T-50 and Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor. The front portion of the prototype looks similar to the F-22 Raptor and the rear section looks like a Sukhoi T-50.

According to the neocon publications out of K-street in Washington DC, the F-22 is the best thing since “sliced bread” and the Chinese is only copying it. Only doing the copying very poorly.

Conventional wisdom holds that the J-20 is currently unable to face the US Air Force's F-22 in a straight-up dogfight. 

- Business Insider

I wouldn’t be so sure about this.

The United States has a terrible problem in overestimating their capabilities and down-plying that of China (to the extreme). Just keep in mind that any war involving these aircraft will need to land. The chances are slim that there will be any place to land once a war breaks out near China.

Group 3 of videos

Check this group out.

Group 3

The Chinese main transport helicopter

It resembles an American blackhawk, but aside from the shape it is a completely different vehicle. Check out the video below…

Mainstay Chinese transport helicopter.

A nice overview of Chinese military forces

Here’s a nice fun video.

Nice overview

Chinese battle aircraft are not only state of the art, but there are thousands of them…

Oh, and yes there are. This video…

Thousands of these planes.

Japanese sub limps home from contact in the South China Sea

Just a friendly warning, I’m sure.

You won’t ever see this in FOX “news”. This video…

Japanese sub limps home.

China is a nation of STEM NERDs

Stem graduates by country 2016

China: 4.7M
India: 2.6M
U.S: 570k
Russia:561k
Iran: 335k

Now you know why Netanyahu wants us to nuke Iran so bad to eradicate them like bugs.

So the top 3 countries that we target as enemies graduate 10 times more STEM students than we, the U.S. do and half of our graduates are foreign students. This is why Iran has a domestic arms industry that includes advanced RADAR. But we are still in denial about that as evidenced by us fretting over Iran getting their hands on Humvees and M4 rifles from the Taliban.

Our view of Iran, 'I think it is some kind of magic wand that stirs up the spirit of the truck engine, try turning it and see what happens'

---------------
Now some wise guy might note that India does not have an advanced military but that's because they suffer collective Stockholm syndrome from Britain. I have no idea why they love the Brits and west so much after all they did do them.

Posted by: Christian J. Chuba | Sep 2 2021 1:13 utc | 70

But…

And last time I checked, about 15% of those STEM graduates in the USA were . . . citizens of the PRC. I'm sure a goodly number are citizens of India too.

Posted by: corvo | Sep 2 2021 1:21 utc | 71

Video Collection 4

Some zipped videos here

Group 4.

What about those TicTac’s that buzz the American naval ships?

The "Tic Tac" incident.

Date:  November  14,  2004;  Location:  Pacific  Ocean

Jack  Sarfatti  writes,  The  USS  Nimitz  UFO  incident  refers  to  a  2004  Radar-Visual  encounter  of  an  unidentified  flying  object  by  US  fighter  pilots  of  the  Nimitz  Carrier  Strike  Group.  In  December  2017,  infrared  footage  of  the  encounter  was  released  to  the  public.  Prior  to  the  December  2017 incident,  early  November  2004,    the  Ticonderoga-class  guided  missile  cruiser  USS  Princeton,  part  of  Carrier  Strike  Group  11,  had  been  tracking  mysterious  aircraft  intermittently  for  two  weeks  on  an  advanced  AN/SPY-1B  passive  radar.

And what did they see?

Well, they saw this…

US Navy buzzed by UFO.

And what does this look like?

Well, if you have been paying attention to the technical side of what China is involved in, instead of what the latest bullshit is about 5G, Huawei, the pull-out from Afghanistan, and Vaxx issues you might have noticed this…

Chinese UFO.

And this…

Chinese Flying saucer.

And I won’t say anything else.

Do I really need to?

Video collection 5

Check out these zipped videos here…

Video group 5.

Do NOT underestimate China

But then again, most MM readers realize this. It’s just the rest of the West who read the “news” and get this completely false impression and idea of what China is. It’s not even a distortion. It’s a false reality. Check out the Video.

Do NOT underestimate China

Group 7

Here’s video group 7. HERE.

Group 7

Never forget that China is a Nuclear Armed nation

Am I repeating myself?

No I am not.

At the start of this article, I simply discussed the use of tactical nuclear “neutron” bombs. These are what the army uses to take out this hill, that city, or that carrier group. They clean out the area and then move in and occupy.

But what I am referring to here is the very dangerous, mega-large hyper-velocity ten warhead, nation crusher the MIRV ICBM the DF-41. These are strategic weapons.

They are designed to wholly crush and decimate a nation.

And thanks to Trump and Biden, China is now on a massive mass production rally regarding these horrific weapons. They are churning them out so fast that if they all were to be used, the target nation would be reduced to radioactive glass.

Thank you President Trump (and his enabler Mike Pompeo).

Thank you Joe Biden (and your enabler Tom Cotton).

You see, those fucking morons who talk about war with China over Taiwan, or the South China Sea or what ever is the “reason of the day” simply omit the fact that China will BURY the United States if it attacks them.

And the result will be global devastation, but you know, China will rebuild. China can and has that ability. America will not.

That that, will be that.

Check out this video.

DF-41

Never forget the China’s military policy is to swarm and overwhelm with tons of nuclear tipped missiles

Not simply one or two relying on precision computers.

But many, many, many.

Many.

As in A lot!

This is quite different from the American strategy of full-spectrum dominance based on computers and remote sensing. China, on the other hand, believes in overwhelming the target area and saturating it with the most deadly weapons available.

Check out this video.

Deaths by swarms of nuclear missiles.

Group 8

Here’s group eight (8). Lot’s of stuff here. Check out the video here.

Group 8

China flexes sea power with new foreign ship law – Asia Times

A security measure to prevent a preemptive strike.

A new Chinese legal requirement demands that multiple classes of foreign vessels traversing waters claimed by Beijing must [1] provide detailed information to state authorities and [2] take aboard Chinese pilots.

The new maritime law, which came into legal force today (September 1), threatens to inflame South China Sea disputes pitting China and Southeast Asian nations and stoke already rising tensions with the United States in the contested waters.

On August 27, China’s Maritime Safety Administration said in a statement that five categories of foreign vessels, namely …

  • submersibles, (as in submarines and SEAL insertion submersibles)
  • nuclear-powered vessels, (as in aircraft carriers, destroyers and subs)
  • ships carrying radioactive materials,
  • ships carrying bulk oil, chemicals, liquefied gas or other toxic substances,
  • as well as vessels that may endanger China’s maritime traffic safety…

… fall under the law.

Uh oh. There goes the American Navy! especially those pesky aircraft carriers.

Foreign vessels will be required to provide information including their ship names and numbers, recent locations, satellite telephone numbers and dangerous goods, according to the statement.

If their automatic identification systems do not work properly, they will need to report to China’s maritime authorities about their locations and speeds every two hours until they leave the country’s territorial waters, the statement said.

At face value, these are not necessarily problematic provisions – unless the definition of “Chinese territorial waters” is interpreted to include nearly all of the South China Sea, as claimed in its wide-reaching and hotly contested nine-dash line.

The new rules were first made public on April 29 this year after the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress amended the Maritime Traffic Safety Law (MTSL), which was established in September 1983.

A full English version of the revised law, translated by Peking University Law School, can be seen on the website of Steamship Mutual, a mutual insurance association in the maritime space that provides risk pooling, information and representation.

Read more…..

https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/china-flexes-sea-power-with-new-foreign-ship-law/

Oh! But Japan will act as a Proxy for the United States in a Taiwan conflict, eh?

Yeah. I read the bullshit propaganda out of Japan.

So you think that Japan can invade China, or fight China? Is that what you think?

Let me tell youse all something too. Just like the Chinese students do daily exercises, and study hard, they are also exposed to what Japan did to China, and it is burned into the soul of China. And if Japan wants to take on China, well then, China will be really ROUGH  back.

Oh! You don’t believe me?

What?

You do not know what I am talking about, eh?

Watch this entire video. It’s around four minutes long. Watch it. Watch the entire thing. Now, what do you think a nuclear armed China will do to the tiny island of Japan? Watch the video.

The Japanese inside of China.

So you think that China will somehow forgive and forget with japan starts attacking the mainland?

China is ready, so is Russia.

Do you all REALLY want a war? You all want to take on China for freedom™ and democracy™? Is that what you want? Well, China just wants to be left alone, but apparently that’s not good enough is it?

I guess not.

You all want to poke the Panda. And the Panda and Russia are as one today. You poke China, and you anger the Bear. You poke the Bear and you piss off China. Washington DC will be a water-filled radioactive crater before you have the chance to say…

…”Oh. Fuck”.

Chinese Boy Scouts

Here’s what boy scouts look like in China. Are you ready to fight them? Video HERE.

Tough boy scouts.

A bunch of tough first and second grade kids. Click to download the archive of videos.

Click to download the archive.

The Neocons say that if you kill the Chinese leadership that China will crumble

It’s a fantasy with no bearing on reality what so ever.

Xi Xinping was himself molded by the CR. He was sent to live and work with the peasants in the dirt and poverty of the countryside. When he was free to return to the city, he elected to return instead to the village he had lived in, and to continue his work there. They remember him now with great love, and there are documentaries available if one wishes to search.

The national leader of China has an understanding of the supreme value of "the people over all things" ingrained into his hands with dirt and blisters and blood. He came by his understanding experientially and honestly.

~~

The Communist Party of China (CPC) has at least 90 million members. One might think that, even on the scale of China's population, joining the CPC would be a routine matter. Xi Xinping applied at least 6 times (I believe actually 10 times in all) before the Party accepted him.

He worked his way into a meritocratic organization, and has worked his way to leadership through merit.

If we wish to understand what runs China, we must know how the CPC works. Here are 3 possible introductions, from Godfree Roberts:

The Chinese Communist Party
China’s Congresses in Action
Selling Democracy to China

Posted by: Grieved | Sep 2 2021 3:46 utc | 79

Here’s group 9

And here’s some active military videos.

I am just unleashing a true “mother load” of videos today. To talk about the Taiwan and a conflict on the South China Sea then you need to understand what the “players” are and what they are capable of. And boys and girls, the Chinese do not play. they are a serious, serious nation. Check out the videos HERE.

Group 9

To Counter U.S. Hostility China Moves Towards People Centered Policies

From MoA

In December 2001 China became a member of the World Trade Organization. That opened new markets for China’s industry and attracted a lot of foreign investment.

The growth in GDP that China has achieved since is breathtaking.

This development allowed China to make enormous investments in infrastructure. It also generated the resources necessary to eliminate poverty.

It is no coincidence that this development happened while the U.S. was wasting money on wars in the Middle East. As the U.S. is now step by step retreating from those wars to confront China the country needs to prepare itself for the new environment.

The introduction of more and more capitalistic features into China’s economy over the last 20 years has created imbalances.

  • Business tried to ignore or to gain influence over government structures and regulations.
  • Companies abused their workers.
  • Speculation by rich people created bubbles in the housing markets.
  • Cultural excesses that emphasized individualism threatened national unity.

These imbalances let the description of China’s economy as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ look empty.

Over the long run they would lead to dissatisfaction of a wide range of the public with the ruling political establishment. It was high time to eliminated the excesses the ultra fast development had created.

The government had to act to avoid future internal conflicts. Since the end of last year it has done so with the same efficiency that allowed it to stop and eliminate Covid-19 outbreaks. It does this ruthlessly without regards to stock values or investor interests.

Some six weeks ago I argued against Stephen S. Roach’s take on new Chinese regulations and described why the wider public in China will not care about ‘investors’ and will support those steps.

Since then the regulation campaign has continued with astonishing speed and breath. Here is a collection of headlines, published since my last take, that detail the development and the flood of new regulations and laws designed to set things right while keeping China’s economic growth going.

The new slogan for this era is now ‘common prosperity’, a policy that will reduce large wealth gaps while keeping reasonable monetary incentives and the market economy alive to allow for further development.

A pamphlet, written by a minor Maoist figure, that justifies these measures and puts them into a larger political context was widely published by Communist Party organs:

A commentary published widely in Chinese state-run media described President Xi Jinping’s regulatory crackdown as a “profound revolution” sweeping the country and warned that anyone who resisted would face punishment.

“This is a return from the capital group to the masses of the people, and this is a transformation from capital-centered to people-centered,” the commentary said, adding that it marked a return to the original intention of the Communist Party.

“Therefore, this is a political change, and the people are becoming the main body of this change again, and all those who block this people-centered change will be discarded.”

The author then goes on to set the ‘profound transformation’ into a wider, geopolitical context:

“China is currently facing an increasingly severe and complex international environment. The US has implemented military threats, economic and technological blockades, financial strikes and political and diplomatic siege against China,” Li wrote.

“The US has also launched biological warfare, cyber warfare and public opinion against China.”

“If we still have to rely on big capitalists as the main force of anti-imperialist and anti-hegemonism, or still cooperate to the US’ ‘tittytainment’ strategy, our young people will lose their strong and masculine vibes and we will collapse like the Soviet Union before we are attacked,” he said, claiming that the US had launched a color revolution against China through different channels.

The “profound transformation” underway in China aimed to respond to the US’ brutal and ferocious attacks as well as the current complicated international situation, he said.

The curbs on the entertainment sector were far from adequate as ordinary workers and people should become the main characters on screens.

People would benefit from the “common prosperity” goal after the education, medical and property sectors were reformed, he wrote.

While this sounds like Culture Revolution 2.0 it is assured that there will be no rampages of Maoist students through libraries or reeducation camps for party members.

Predatory capitalist George Soros claims in the Financial Times that these moves it will doom China’s economy. (See Michael Hudson’s counter here.) But people who, like Soros, argue against strong regulations forget that there are would be no markets without them.

Companies that only look at shareholder values are not sound and do not allow for a healthy society.

Just look Boeing and at the homeless camps in U.S. cities.

Aside from the ideological underpinning the new regulatory moves are populist. The masses will like them. They guarantee President Xi Jinping’s reelection at next year’s national party congress.

They will strengthen China’s unity in its competition with the United States.

China. Does. Not. Play.

And here’s Group 10.

You can watch the videos HERE

Group 10.

China is a very capable nation

China is cleaning up a few problems but I think it is also going into war mode.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Sep 1 2021 22:26 utc | 53

It is a nation of hard working, martial arts trained, studious NERDS. Most of the factories are inside of China. Not what passes for “factories” in the United States today. Which for the most part is nothing more than a nice office building in a “Industrial park” that houses cubicles staffed with accountants, diversity officers, attorneys, finance and marketing folk.

China is very capable. And if you want to to toe-to-toe, and head-to-head with them you had best be ready to accept the consequences of a harsh defeat and a life as a conquered nation. Check out this video here.

Michael Hudson v. George Soros on China’s Rejection of “Market” Capitalism

Earlier this week, the Financial Times posted a comment by famed investor George Soros, Investors in Xi’s China face a rude awakening.

This article would have been very useful if it had stuck to its headline warning, which is more or less along the lines that Xi has made very clear that he’s not going to allow investors, above all foreign investors, to exercise more influence in Chinese business and society.

However, Soros then goes on in a vein that the article subhead accurately summarizes:

“The leader’s crackdown on private enterprise shows he does not understand the market economy.”

Oh, contraire, China’s success has been built on learning from the mistakes of other Asian countries that developed quickly but then fell prey to financialization, particularly Japan, and had difficulties making the transition from being export and investment led to consumption led.

In particularly, Soros is cheesed off at Xi restricting foreign investment, particularly in stocks.

First, China is a capital exporter. It doesn’t need foreign funds.

Second, despite the Anglopshere idealization of public stock markets, China doesn’t need one either, although getting rid of the one it has now would be messy and very disruptive.

As Amar Bhide pointed out in a landmark Harvard Business Review article, Efficient Markets, Deficient Governance, anonymous, freely traded shares inherently lead to poor governance.

Public companies cannot share critical business information that investors need to make informed decisions.

Transient shareholders also lack the motivation and means to improve the performance of the companies they’ve invested in.

Bhide has pointed out in other venues that while all other types of investments, such as derivatives and venture capital, existed in pre-modern times, arms length share trading did not because stock is a legally vague and weak promise.

And despite the idealization of share ownership, it’s almost entirely divorced from the funding of business. The most important source for new investment is retained earnings. Second is borrowing. Share sales are a distant third. The overwhelming majority of stock trading is shuffling paper among investors.

The most charitable interpretation of Soros’ position is that he suffers from a China version of the saying attributed to Charles Wilson, “What’s good for GM is good for America,” which here becomes, “What’s good for people like me of course is good for China.” Except as Michael Hudson explains, it isn’t.

Below are sections of the Soros article, with Hudson’s remarks in bold italics:

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has collided with economic reality. His crackdown on private enterprise [what the classical economists called rent-seeking and unearned income] has been a significant drag on the economy [meaning the economy’s polarization concentrating wealth and income in the hands of the richest One Percent]. The most vulnerable sector is real estate, particularly housing. China has enjoyed an extended property boom over the past two decades, but that is now coming to an end. Evergrande, the largest real estate company, is over-indebted and in danger of default. This could cause a crash. [That’s just what is needed.]
….One of the reasons why middle-class families are unwilling to have more than one child is that they want to make sure that their children will have a bright future. [This is true of every advanced nation today. It is most extreme in the neoliberalized countries, e.g., the Baltics and Ukraine – Soros’s poster countries.]

We have skipped over Xi’s crackdown on the private tutoring industry…as if tutoring is essential to providing for security and an adequate standard of living for the next generation. How about strong public education, including remedial and advanced tracks, and vocational/technical training for those not bound to universities?

Back to Soros and Hudson:

Xi does not understand how markets operate [meaning that he rejects rapacious rent-seeking, exploitative free-for-all, and shapes markets to serve overall prosperity for China’s 99 Percent]. As a consequence, the sell-off was allowed to go too far [by which he means, too far to maintain the dominance of the One Percent; it seeks to reverse economic polarization, not intensify it]. It began to hurt China’s objectives in the world [meaning America’s neoliberal objectives for how it had hoped to make money for itself off China].
Recognising this, Chinese financial authorities have gone out of their way to reassure foreign investors and markets have responded with a powerful rally. But that is a deception. Xi regards all Chinese companies as instruments of a one-party state…
Pension fund managers allocate their assets in ways that are closely aligned with the benchmarks against which their performance is measured. [The tragedy of financializing pensions is that fund managers are rated on making money financially – in ways that hurt the industrial economy by promoting financial engineering instead of industrial engineering.]
Almost all of them claim that they factor environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) standards into their investment decisions. [At least, that’s what their public relations advisors advertise. Exxon claims to be cleaning up the environment by expanding offshore oil drilling in Guyana, etc. As for “social standards,” the neoliberal mantra is trickle-down economics: by making our stock prices rise, by stock buybacks and higher dividend payouts, we are helping wage-earners earn a pension, even though we are offshoring and de-industrializing the economy, de-unionizing it and “freeing” the economy from consumer and workplace protection laws.]
….The US Congress should pass a bipartisan bill explicitly requiring that asset managers invest only in companies where actual governance structures are both transparent and aligned with stakeholders. [Wow. Such a bill would block Americans from investing in many American companies whose behavior is not at all aligned with stakeholders. What proportion: 50%? 75%? More?] This rule should obviously apply to the performance benchmarks selected by pensions and other retirement portfolios.
If Congress were to enact these measures, it would give the Securities and Exchange Commission the tools it needs to protect American investors, including those who are unaware of owning Chinese stocks and Chinese shell companies. That would also serve the interests of the US and the wider international community of democracies. [So Mr. Soros wants to block the US from investing in China. That is President Xi’s objective also: China doesn’t need U.S. dollars, and is in fact de-dollarizing.]

There are a lot of reasons to criticize Xi and the Chinese regimes, but combating foreign influence and a bit late in the game pushing back against high levels of inequality are not among them.

And Soros presents himself as having superior insight into China, and then acts as if an American strike on Chinese public companies would dent them. Good luck with that.

Indeed.

Great rebuttal by hudson. Soros is fuming at china,its because he cant run his usual financial schemes and assert some measure of control on sectors of their economy. Why anyone listens to this documented nazi collaborator, and destroyer of economies, and the pound sterling is beyond me. China is not in the business of allowing these types to have input or dictate their financial policy. I applaud them.

Posted by: RC213V | Sep 1 2021 21:52 utc | 46

And Group 11

You can watch the videos HERE

Group 11

China is really, really, REALLY big and powerful

You would think that most reasonable people would understand this. But they don’t. I have been reading the Australian “news”. Oh Lordy! These Bozo’s actually think that Australia and Japan will physically invade mainland China and be allowed to march right into the cities and take over.

I don’t think so.

Watch this entire VIDEO BELOW...

China is really, really big.

From the voice of VOA; the official mouthpiece of America…

Americans want to fight China. Don’t you know…

I don’t believe it, but obviously the United States, though it’s enormous media is posturing towards a major conflict. And at this stage of the game, it looks like they want it to happen so badly that it probably will.

The Chinese leader tells cadres at the Central Party School that the ‘risks and challenges we face are conspicuously increasing’. Xi’s comments about the the need to fight to protect national security come amid ongoing tensions with the United States

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3147337/dont-expect-easy-life-and-be-ready-struggle-chinese-president

And remember what I said at the start of this article…

"... the point that I want to make is that China is a perfect organism wholly designed to prevent anyone from attacking it. It is like a vicious animal with spikes, poison, and large sharp teeth. Only a fool would want to attack it..."

A final word.

So the United States wants to go into a HOT war with China. Don’t be so sure on what will happen.

From an anonymous commenter…

Some American and Chinese virologists are developing the new Sinoamerican virus (let's call it "Sinoamerican 200") in a laboratory in Guangzhou. The virus is a combination of a modified porcine influenza H1N1 and the previous Sinoamerican virus (SARS COV 2). The Sinoamerican 200 will be disseminated somewhere in USA in November 2021.

Posted by: Kim Jong Il | Sep 2 2021 5:54 utc | 87

Let’s see what will happen in December 2021; around and just before Christmas time.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my China index.  Here…

China

.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Hemi-Sync Going Home Support Kit (Full Package) Part 2 of 2

This is part two of a large two part series. The series is a complete “study kit”. It consists of two series of sounds/music, of 11 and 12 files respectively, and an instruction manual included herein.

This post contains Hemi-Sync music / audio tracks. Hemi-Sync is a method of control that uses sounds to center the activity in the brain. When the brain is fully centered, it becomes easier to exist within this reality. Or even more specifically, easier to be able to use your consciousness to control your brain.

The files are FLAC files. Not MP3.

They should play on almost all cell phones and computers. If you have any doubt you can probably download an APP that will allow you to listen to them.

MP3 is the most popular format while FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a less known alternative. The main difference between the two is in how they compress the audio information. MP3 is a lossy format where parts of the audio information that people are not likely to hear are discarded. On the other hand, as the name suggests, FLAC is lossless.

-Difference Between MP3 and FLAC | DifferenceBetween

Hemi-Sync contains frequencies and audio wavelengths that are traditionally considered as “unnecessary” and thus is often removed using an MP3 format to cut down on the file size. That is why they are in the FLAC format.

MP3 vs. FLAC

This Post

This is the full training kit called “going home”

  • Part 1 – 11 FLAC files titled “Subject”.
  • Part 2 – (this article) – 12 FLAC files titled “support”

This particular package enables the person to train their mind to begin “lucid dreaming”, eventually out of the body consciousness movements, and other related activity.

The link will download a ZIP file. Just place it where you want, and copy the files in order, to the player of your preference. You should listen to them in order in one sitting. It will be around a half and hour of listening.

The Manual for this series

Here is the manual for using this series. You need to read it first before you start listening to the FLAC files and performing the exercises.

Going Home Manual

The Files

You can download the files by clicking on the images below…

File 1-12

File 2-12.

File 3-12.

File 4-12.

File 5-12

File 6-12.

File 7-12.

File 8-12.

File 9-12.

File 10-12.

File 11-12.

File 12-12.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Hemi-Sync Sub-Index here;

Hemi-Sync

.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Hemi-Sync Going Home Study Kit (Full Package) Part 1 of 2

This is part one of a large two part series. The series is a complete “study kit”. It consists of two series of sounds/music, of 11 and 12 files respectively, and an instruction manual included herein.

This post contains Hemi-Sync music / audio tracks. Hemi-Sync is a method of control that uses sounds to center the activity in the brain. When the brain is fully centered, it becomes easier to exist within this reality. Or even more specifically, easier to be able to use your consciousness to control your brain.

The files are FLAC files. Not MP3.

They should play on almost all cell phones and computers. If you have any doubt you can probably download an APP that will allow you to listen to them.

MP3 is the most popular format while FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a less known alternative. The main difference between the two is in how they compress the audio information. MP3 is a lossy format where parts of the audio information that people are not likely to hear are discarded. On the other hand, as the name suggests, FLAC is lossless.

-Difference Between MP3 and FLAC | DifferenceBetween

Hemi-Sync contains frequencies and audio wavelengths that are traditionally considered as “unnecessary” and thus is often removed using an MP3 format to cut down on the file size. That is why they are in the FLAC format.

MP3 vs. FLAC

This Post

This is the full training kit called “going home”

  • Part 1 – (this article) – 11 FLAC files titled “Subject”.
  • Part 2 – 12 FLAC files titled “support”

This particular package enables the person to train their mind to begin “lucid dreaming”, eventually out of the body consciousness movements, and other related activity.

The link will download a ZIP file. Just place it where you want, and copy the files in order, to the player of your preference. You should listen to them in order in one sitting. It will be around a half and hour of listening.

The Manual for this series

Here is the manual for using this series. You need to read it first before you start listening to the FLAC files and performing the exercises.

Going Home Manual

The Files

You can download the files by clicking on the images below…

File 1-11

File 2-11

File 3-11

File 4-11

File 5-11

File 6-11

File 7-11

File 8-11

File 9-11

File 10-11

File 11-11

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Hemi-Sync Sub-Index here;

Hemi-Sync

.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

Metallicman Donation
Other Amount:
Please kindly enter any notes that you would like to attach to the donation here:

 


	

Rufus humanity post. Time is too short not to be the best you can be.

Here’s a mixtures of videos describing Rufus behaviors.

Are you being the best that you can be?  Are you making the world around you a much better place? In a world of hate and strife, betrayal and trickery, the world needs people who will stand up and stand for something. Will you be that person? The world is filled with people who have been hurt by a corrupted society that uses, and discards others. These people need people like you.

Whether it is the use and discard nature of corporate America. Or the use and discard nature of American relationships. Or the use and discard nature of American culture. Or the use and discard nature of American finance…

… it NEEDS to change.

And if you are not living in America, but instead in a “Western nation”; a nation that has adopted this love for profits at all costs; like the UK, or Canada, or now Australia… then it is up to YOU to change things.

Stop waiting around for someone else to do something.

You step up (to the plate) and take a swing at life. Do you have room to adopt a neglect animal at the shelter; the one that no one will select? Will you go and buy a cup of coffee to the coworker? Will you go and say something nice to the girl that you hold the door open for? Will you “pay it forward” at the next toll-booth?

Will you do something good?

The Videos

The following are some videos about people; humanity and being a Rufus. Some are sad, some are painful, some are good, and some are happy. Be the Rufus. Otherwise, why live?

Be the Rufus. Be family. Be the community that cares for it’s members.

I strongly suggest you watch the videos in the order presented to get the proper "effect" that I am trying to provide.

BONUS

Be the Rufus!

Some thoughts

What are you doing to make the world a little bit better place?

It doesn’t take much, sometimes. But other times, like with a meat pie lady, you have to break a few rules to show your humanity. You must be more than just friendly. You must go out of your way to do the uncomfortable. Sometimes it ‘s a real hassle… just to smile. But do it anyways.

Don’t judge the measure of your worth is by the size of your bank accounts.

Do not measure your value by your career, or who employs you.

You are far better than that.

I am telling you differently. We must seek out others. We must make friends with them, and form associations, build friendships and relationships and share. Never, ever forget the rule of three. Be the Rufus!

Help others.

Make the world a better place.

I believe in you!

More Links in my Rufus Index here…

Check them out…

Rufus Index

.

More stuff…

Master Index

.

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Glimpses of the part of the Middle East that the United States did NOT destroy for democracy, and freedom

For the last 75 years, the United States Military Empire has been on a rampage attacking and waging wars, either overt, or covert all over the globe. It would utterly destroy it’s “enemies” and ignore it’s “friends”. And now today, we see the end result of this activity. Of the many, many trillions of dollars over the last 75 years dedicated to destruction and death, the American people live in squalor, destitution and poverty. A full 61% are so poor that they don’t pay any taxes, and in America that’s pretty darn poor!

America taxes everything.

Meanwhile, those nations who have been unscathed by the sheer might of the massive bloated gargantuan military wrecking ball, are unscathed. We can see China prospering. We can see Russia prospering. We can see prosperity all over the globe. And in this article we will look at the portions of the Arab world that the United States spared from destruction.

The following are some clips from the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and a few other nearby nations. They are not only doing well, but they are oozing with wealth and success.  Watch the videos. Really look at them.

This SHOULD be what America is, but isn’t.

Instead, the “leaders” decided to squander the wealth, knowledge, skills and resources of America towards the destruction of others. And listen to me, it’s all gonna come back in full force. The USA is not stopping. They are not turning off the “war machine”. Instead, they are gearing up to fight China and Russia.

Idiotic fools.

Don’t Forget Land Wars in Asia. “You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is to never get involved in a land war in Asia.”. This humorous quote from the film The Princess Bride has become received wisdom, echoed by no less than my former boss, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in 2011.

Anyways, look at these videos.

This is what America could have been, but isn’t because not only have the leadership failed Americans, but the entire system of government has been corrupted beyond repair. America will NEVER ever look like these videos. Simply because the current structure will never permit it to occur.

America is a nation for the rulers. Only for the rulers.

So suck in the videos and look at what you should be living. But which the government and your “leaders” discarded when they said “no soup for you!”.

In the November 2nd, 1995 Seinfeld episode “The Soup Nazi”, the main characters check out a local soup shop with an incredibly strict chef (played by Larry Thomas) who is nicknamed “Soup Nazi” for his rules about ordering. After Elaine Benes (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) attempts to subvert his ordering procedure, the chef utters the statement, banning her from the shop for an entire year.

The Videos

Final Thoughts

The common narrative in the United States is that the Middle East is rich and wealthy simply because they have a lot of oil.

This is all a big enormous lie.

If it were true, then everyone in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Texas would be millionaires. Nope. Something else is going on.

But what is it?

It’s a complicated issue with no clear answers, but the question still exists.

Why are the people who live in oil-rich Pennsylvania so poor, while those that live in oil-rich Middle East so wealthy?

I argue that it is like comparing apples to bananas. There’s all sorts of other issues complicating the matter. But I will posit that the society and the government that serves that society is the primary culprit.

  • Society
  • Government
  • Laws, rules, regulations = Graft and Corruption

Pennsylvania is a “democracy” in name, but functionally an oligarchy of the wealthy out of Philadelphia.

As such, they have created a stratified society where any wealth and benefits flow upwards, and those that exist and toil on the land are treated as serf / slaves. For the vast bulk of Pennsylvania citizenry, they live in cheap housing (mostly trailer parks), farm or work the oil and coal fields, and live off supporting government handouts.

Many rural Pennsylvanians live on oil and coal rich lands, but own no mineral rights. Instead they labor by mining them, are taxed for the labor, and the profits flow to the Pennsylvania oligarchy in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile you have places like Dubai which is in the United Arab Emirates. It has a government structure similar to that of Chinese “Communism with Chinese Characteristics”.

The President of the Federation is elected by a body known as the Supreme Council of Rulers. The Supreme Council is the top policy-making body in the UAE, and the President and Vice President are both elected from its membership for renewable five-year terms. Which is nearly identical to that of China.

They manage the nation based upon the well being of the vast and diverse citizenry. They do not manage it in favor of a select few, like it is done in the United States.

As such, but China, and the UAE are wealthy, prosperous, and thriving. When wealthy people start to get out of line, like we saw in China, or Saudi Arabia, the “corruption police” step in and stops their influence.

But that is one part of the equation.

Of the United States “War on Terror”, the indiscriminate bombing and destruction of those nations were all for the benefit for the American oligarchy. Not for the citizenry. After all, the local gas station owner, or the grocer or butcher, that school bus driver or the pastor at the local church really did not benefit one penny from the destruction of Syria.

Did they now?

No.

But, that’s where all the funds went.

Funds that could have improved the roads, funds that could have improved the schools. Funds that could have reduced taxes. Funds that should have been used to expand businesses. No.

It went to destroying things.

Here’s Syria after America saved it for democracy™ and freedom™.

America destroyed Syria.

Now the “news” media (and they are a de facto branch of the government today) is trying to spin the rapid American military escape from Afghanistan as a mistake…

…and the poor Afghanistan citizens will now look forward to a life of horror and squalor. “Oh, what about the children?” they wail on the “news” 24/7.

Nonsense!

Afghanistan and it’s neighbors.

Right now, those in Afghanistan see that they too can have prosperity and a solid and stable society. They see the prosperity of the Uighur Muslims in China (no, you won’t ever read about this in the Western press, but it exists never the less) and the stability of Iran and Pakistan.

They want that.

They can see it.

The Uighur Muslims are thriving in China. While the Afghanistan people suffered under the boot of America.

I think that empire will continue to pull tricks out of their ass to try and regain control of the global narrative, if not in Afghanistan, then elsewhere. We have a global cult who have been in control of society in the West for hundreds of years and I haven't seen any white flags being raised from their corner.

So, Afghanistan is going to join the multi-polar world and slough off the jackboot of empire. Lets hope the Taliban understand the example they are setting for the rest of the jackbooted world. I expect their living through 40+ years of conflict has sharpened their focus on reality quite well. I expect the reality they build will shatter some of the delusions of the West and its about time, IMO

Where is our civilization war going to rear its ugly head next?

Posted by: psychohistorian | Aug 21 2021 16:37 utc | 7

Crunch!

Here’s what the Afghanistan people see right over their border inside of China. This is what they see

Yes.

They see growth. They see prosperity. They see happiness.

They see their traditions not only upheld, but codified into law. They see a world that they want to be part of.

They see a world that they can be part of.

They see a world that they want to be a part of…

China wants Afghanistan to prosper.

And so does everyone else in the region.

Central Asian countries. The SCO. 
Military bases and relations with the USA
 
 
Kyrgyzstan
Since 2014, the USA used the Manas Air Base (unofficially Ganci Air Base) near Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The American troops vacated the base in 2020. It was handed over back to the Kyrgyzstan military. 

The Russian military base, a stone's throw from the former US military base, is still there.
  
Kazakhstan
On 02.06.2020   President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has declared that construction of a US military base in Kazakhstan is out of question. 

"The contract with the US biolab facility in Almaty expired and the Americans left the reference laboratory, only Kazakhstani specialists work there at the expense of our budget. Given the relevance of research in this area, we are ready for the most transparent cooperation with Russian specialists," Tokayev said. 
 
Uzbekistan
10.05.2021   As per the administration of US President Joe Biden, it would be best to deploy troops in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which border Afghanistan, which allows the US to quickly get into Afghanistan if necessary. However, the constitution of Uzbekistan does not provide for the deployment of foreign military bases and facilities in the country, the press service of the Uzbek Defence Ministry told RIA Novosti.
 
Turkmenistan
The United States has a small Air Force team, normally around seven airmen, who assist US aircraft to refuel at Ashgabat Airport, as part of this rebuilding and stabilizing effort for Afghanistan. Turkmenistan allows the US overflights of humanitarian cargo in support of stabilizing and rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan.
 
Tajikistan
There ain't no US military bases in Tajikistan. Tajikistan is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and hosts a Russian military base. From all the countries in Central Asia, Tajikistan has the frostiest relations with the United States. It's never gonna happen.
  
Pakistan
As Washington looks for options post-Afghanistan withdrawal, Islamabad isn’t going to roll out the red carpet. "Don’t Expect Pakistan to Host US Military Bases"  Imran Khan, PM of Pakistan said on 09.06.2021
  
Afghanistan
After the chaotic US military retreat from Afghanistan on 15.08.2021, Afghanistan is lost forever.

SCO
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is an intergovernmental international organization founded in Shanghai on 15.06.2001 by six countries: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.The SCO is an Eurasian political, economic, and security alliance. Currently, the main focus is on exchange of military and intelligence information.  Observer countries are: Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, Mongolia. Partner countries are: Turkmenistan, Armenia, Azerbaijian, Cambodja, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Turkey.Iran announced that all political obstacles are resolved for getting a full member of the SCO. The SCO countries represent half of the global population. (Compare that to NATO countries: 950 million people, 1/8 of the world population)

And with oil lines flowing through Afghanistan into China, the entire region is poised for great “Dubai style” wealth and prosperity.

Oil induced prosperity for Afghanistan.

The only way for the world to prosper is to recognize that the systems, used for centuries, that permits the wealthy to come and say into power is not healthy and must be discarded.

What is needed are new systems of governance and new ways of doing things so that the evil, the corrupt, and the mentally ill never ever, EVER get an opportunity to come near any kinds of power ever again.

The future of the health of the world is at stake.

Postscript

And forget about the West trying to keep war alive in Afghanistan. The UK efforts fell completely apart.

That a connection to a neighboring country would help the insurgents is, in my opinion, a misperception. Russia and China would come down hard on, for example Uzbekistan, if it would allow its border to be used to support the insurgency. Every neighbor country of Afghanistan now has an interest in a united Afghanistan at peace. That is why any insurgency against the Taliban will have no chance.

The Russian ambassador to Afghanistan agrees.

And this telling comment…

As long as the Taliban NEVER reopen the US embassy and also ban all the same western NGOs Russia and China have, any color revolutions are doomed to fail.

Posted by: Mar man | Aug 21 2021 16:41 utc | 8

What China is currently doing in Africa is very, very possible in Afghanistan. And the entire world knows this (with the exception of American and their “allies”). Just like China is building houses, roads, infrastructure all over Africa, it will do so in a stable INDEPENDENT Afghanistan.

This is in Africa TODAY…

And China has changed the entire world.

They are smart, talents, organized, and have the backing of the biggest most powerful military (Russia plus China) on the planet.

They are not stopping for shit!

And they are making the world a better place for EVERYONE.

And those wealthy few do not like this one bit, and they would rather destroy the entire world rather than relinquish one tiny iota of control. But they have never seen such an organized, powerful force before.

Afghanistan has. They see. They see how their Uighur brothers and sisters are doing, and they want that in THEIR lives.

And they will be working with China in the years and decades forward…

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An exploration of what it is like to live in Cambodia as a Chinese security professional

You know, all that you get out of the American “news” is manipulation, and fear mongering. Meanwhile the rest of the world continues to live, exist and prosper. One of those nations is Cambodia. It is a pretty poor nation, but it is growing.

Americans (and Europeans) might have noticed a “blip” on the media last year when Cambodia refuted all efforts by Mike Pompeo to absorb it into the American proxy military sphere. They wanted no part of that. Not only did they say so, but they bulldozed all the structures that the United States built for the nation as a symbol of “good will”. As well as capturing and ejecting the NGO “regime change” forces that were mobilizing to cause strife and discord.

Cambodia wants no part of that.

And it was a top-down decision.

Cambodia is next door to China, and China wants to help them develop. In the eyes of China, it is in their advantage to be surrounded by prosperity and happiness. When nations and people are happy and prosperous, there isn’t strife or conflict. Which is the exact opposite of what the United States has been doing over the last 75 years.

What an idea!

Surround yourself with good healthy societies, and then you interact and trade with them. Let them live their lives as they see fit.

Imagine that!

Here’s some short movie clips taken by a Chinese man (and his family) living in Cambodia. It is part of a private security force that attends important Cambodian officials. You will see scenes from city life, rural life, social life, and work life in the clips.  You will also notice that Cambodia uses American currency, and that the country is very, very poor.

You will also note that these clips are banned in the United States for some unknown reason. The American version of Tictok has banned this and some other sites from Cambodia.

I have no clue as to why.

I hope that watching these clips helps give you, the reader, an appreciation of other nations, other cultures and other ways of life. And no, it’s not at all like America. And perhaps that’s a good thing, don’t you know.

Start with the first video and then go down the list one by one. Most are very short, and easy to download and view.

The videos…

Conclusion

This was a little excursion out of the main stream media echo chamber and narrative. Never paid too much attention to Cambodia, eh? Well, that’s the way it is. There are all sorts of places all over the globe living life. These places live outside of the narrative of fear and manipulation.

So, in this instance, turn off the “news” about Afghanistan and how the world is collapsing in that section of the world. It isn’t. The American military presence left and they are sorting out the vacuum left behind. And I’ll tell you this, they want to be recognized as a stable and productive nation. Not an outlier.

So don’t believe the “news”.  Look around you. Look at what is going on elsewhere. Pay attention to things the media is not reporting on.

Smile.

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Be part of a community; there is strength in numbers. Be the Rufus.

Here’s a mixtures of videos describing Rufus behaviors.  This group was inspired by a Pakistani woman who explained why China is the sole nation surviving the Coronavirus bio-weapon attack. As she explained it, and I really concur, is that when the Chinese government told everyone to stay inside and wear masks that everyone did. But it was more than that. They didn’t do it for themselves. They did it for others.

They did it for the old lay down the street. They did it for the health workers who volunteered. They did it for the elementary school filled with children. And if you go through those videos taken during 2020 you can clearly see the signs that everyone was holding up on their porches and windows. That they believed in China, and that they are all part of something larger.

This is what a nation full of service-to-others people can do.

But in Service-for-self nations, it’s every man for himself. It’s “I can do my own thing”, and “if I have to lie, cheat, or pretend to have to wear a mask, it’s my right”.

The future belongs to those who are contribute to the greater good; to Rufus’s who are part of a community. To those Rufus’s who can contribute what little they have, and make the difference. If everyone just picked up some trash at the side of the road then wouldn’t the roads be cleaner? If everyone spent more time on their porches and invited other to play card with them there, wouldn’t there be a sense of community? If everyone did little things like smile and say a cheery word, don’t you think that the world would be a better place?

Here’s about twenty or so videos. About half of them show the local community running to help a person in distress. Like antibodies fighting a cancer; fighting a virus, the Rufus goes and does what ever is necessary. Be that Rufus. Be the Rufus!

The videos

Each video opens up in it’s own tab. I hope that you enjoy them.

Some thoughts

It’s a well known prepper axiom that you can have a ton load of guns and an unlimited supply of bullets, but unless you are a part of a community, you will be overwhelmed and killed. The “lone wolf” never survives in a conflict or an emergency situation. During times of strife, and emergency, we all need each other. One person’s strength can compensate for our individual weaknesses.

Somehow this basic, most fundamental aspect of humanity has been bleached out of the Western culture. Instead, it has been replaced with the idea that we are so much better being alone, cowering in fear inside our nice comfortable homes, and communicating by monitored electronic media. Uh huh.

And that our measure of worth is by the size of our bank accounts.

Well, I am going to tell you different. We must seek out others. We must make friends with them, and form associations, build friendships and relationships and share. Never, ever forget the rule of three. Be the Rufus!

More Links in my Rufus Index here…

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Some videos of China discussing global politics, what is actually going on and other neato things

This article is going for a kind of minimalist look where I present some “meaty” videos for you all to watch and ponder. And of course, it’s going to include China, because (well, you know) it’s the dominant force in the world today.

My intention is to provide a broad swath of videos that give the reader a fuller, and better understanding of China in all the many aspects of it. From personal to Geo-political, to social to governing, to people. By watching all these videos (and some are from myself) you will see exactly what China is today, free of the bullshit that you would find elsewhere on the internet.

I try to describe what is going on in the videos, but you can come to your own conclusions. Each video is from 15 seconds to five minutes long. Not really prohibitively large, but long enough to make the necessary points. Most videos presented are either banned, censored, or otherwise prohibited in the United States, Australia and the UK today.

I strongly suggest you watch each video one by one, in the order presented. I tried hard to put them in a balanced order to make a more reasonable impression to you, the reader.

This is what China is today..

Bridge Building in China

It makes America look like the corrupt, un-Godly moronic group of misfit nincompoops that it is. Here’s what the rest of the world thinks of America. Soak it up, and this video was made in 2017, and it’s only gotten much, much worse since then. HERE.

Night Life in China.

Here’s an expat walking around China at night. To those of you who are unaware, when the sun sets, China comes alive with activity. Kids, retired folk, workers and everyone come out to play and enjoy. No, it’s not a holiday. It’s just a typical night on a typical day in a typical part of China. HERE.

Give Credit Where Credit is due

In America it’s Communism is evil and bad, so says the person who knows nothing at all about Chinese communism, and who ASSUMES that it “must be horrible” because, after all Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, FOX “news”, Rush Limbaugh and CNN say so. You can trust them, right? Here’s who gets the credit for the amazing transformation of China. HERE.

Pretty Chinese girl in her house

For the last five years, the American (and Western) “news” media has cultivated the idea that the Chinese are poor, downtrodden, and helpless under a repressive communist regime. Don’t believe me? Google “repressive Chinese communist regime“. There are millions of articles with this them. And you know what? It’s all fucking LIES! Here’s a typical girl, in her typical house, in a typical small town, in a typical part of China. HERE.

End of the Year bonuses

Unlike the United States, China has end-of-the-year bonuses, monthly bonuses, and year-around award programs. And no, this isn’t a coupon for a cup of coffee, or a $10 gift card at Walmart. These are substantial bonuses equal to one to more months of salary. And on top of that, with the one to two month annual vacation, the companies offer generous dinner meals for the staff, and often they play these bonus award games. Like this one. You drink the alcohol, and you keep the money that it sits upon. HERE.

Facial Recognition is everywhere

Not only has QR replaced dollar bills and coins, but facial recognition is replacing key fobs, which (of course) replaced  keys. China is advancing in leaps and bounds. Seriously. HERE.

American attacks against China has no plan or goal

One of the first things that any student in the STEM fields recognize is that you MUST have a goal. Then you construct a plan to achieve that goal. But people who haven’t had that training, such as people who inherited their positions through wealth, relatives, or “connections” have no idea or concepts of plans, goals and objectives. And these are exactly the kind of people running the United States today. HERE.

A visit to the local clinic down the street

This is an MM video. here I narrative what my (old) clinic is like. I walk in and about. I show the traditional medicine offices, the Western medicine offices, the lab, and the pharmacy as well as the unhurried, easy going lifestyle that is so common throughout China today. HERE.

Some more Scouts

Here’s another video of the scouts. In general the scouts are a voluntary organization, while the middle School military train is compulsory. Never the less, the core ideas of community, society, achievement, merit are all strong Chinese characteristics. HERE.

Living next to a factory has it’s advantages

The bulk of the world’s goods are manufactured in China. The direct close proximity of these factories and the resulting personal and business relationships makes it very easy for wanna-be young designers and clothing manufactures to make limited runs of clothing and then sell them on social media. Such as this gal. HERE.

America is a Military Empire

In the last nearly 250 years of it’s existence, it has been involved in wars every single year since when it was founded in 1776. Only five years out of that time was peace, and only while the military-industrial establishment was retooling for the next war. Up until this week, America is currently fighting eight simultaneous wars with over 500 military bases all over the world. China isn’t like that at all. Listen to what Xi Peng has to say. HERE.

Africa is a rising star

With China’s help, both Africa, and the Middle East will experience exceptional growth and measurable, and tangible increases in their quality of living. China has set forth to make this a reality, and are busy building rail lines, hospitals, roads and much needed infrastructure to the people in these often (American instigated) war-torn nations. HERE.

A pretty girl.

I do like pretty girls. Here’s a nice pretty Chinese girl. There’s a softness, and a pleasantness that comes with life inside of China that I haven’t felt in the United States for decades. HERE.

An American comic tells it like it is

This one is classic. It’s funny because it’s true. There’s only one error in the video. He said that California is spending $6 billion dollars to build the high-speed rail line in California. The actual number is $77 billion plus an additional $6 billion to finish it by making the train to ride on the rails. HERE.

Chinese High Speed Train

These are commonplace all over China. They are cheap, fast, clean, and comfortable. They are far better than taking a plane. And the Chinese are all very used to them. HERE.

No one should underestimate China

This following speech snippet was twisted and distorted by the New York Times, and the standard neocon publications out of the North East of the United States. Who used this speech to declare that China was going to invade the world and displace the Untied States. This speech said no such thing. Instead, Xi Peng made it very clear that they will only be pushed so for before they bite back, and believe you me, you do not want to be on their bad side. HERE.

In America we salute the flag and say the “Pledge of allegiance”…

Here’s what they do in China. This is in a pre-kindergarden school. You must take note that the Chinese are very relentless patriots and since they serve their community and society, they think nothing of dying for it either. Any bull-shit ideas that China will run into the arms of “American liberators” for freedom™ and democracy™ is a pure fantasy. Check this video out! HERE.

Old Grandmother gives a wedding present

Even those on tiny incomes want to participate in good, happy and joyous occasions. Here we have an old little old lady grandmother giving a “red envelope” full of cash to the bride as her way of welcoming her to marry her grandson. Cute. Precious. HERE.

In a society where everyone participates…

The difference between the USA and China couldn’t be starker. In China, everyone participates and helps and works together for the greater good. In America it’s the “lone wolf” being the biggest and the baddest hoarding up all the money, and vacuuming up all the change so that they can sit on top of the pile of money. Here is what happens in China when you break the law. HERE.

China growth compared to America’s growth

Ai! It’s stark. China has grown, and no (it’s not like the USA) where only the rich become filthy rich and the rest suffers. Everyone inside of China has experienced enormous, and amazing increases in their standards of living. It is profound, noticeable and stunning. HERE.

MM posts a video

I made this video as I walked near my house. It’s just a bunch of first and second grade students hanging out together and playing near one of the family shops. It’s a young biker gang. LOL. HERE.

Africa is modernizing.

Soft power from China. America has decades (if not centuries) of proving pallet loads of money to local war-lords to buy American guns and weapons, so that those on K-street in Washington DC get rich. China has a better idea. They are surrounding themselves with prosperity. Those nations that have a growing middle class, that shun war, and want to be productive will become great friends of China. And that is what we are seeing in Africa today. HERE.

Chinese space station I

Congress and successive American presidents have forbidden China to have any access to American technology. This includes all rocket and space and avionics technology. So China had to build everything from scratch and just like the United States did in the early 1960’s, so did China, and now China has met, and surpassed the United States technology markers in space exploration. HERE.

A sexy video

Here is a Chinese woman making her family a fine delicious and healthy meal in the kitchen. Not only are women far better cooks than men (well, maybe not all the time, but in my case they are certainly much better than me) but they are expert financiers. No one can budget a household, AND provide daily tasty delicious meals like a woman can. And that’s my strong opinion in this matter. If you want to be healthy in body and mind, and you want to be free of financial worries, put the woman of the house in charge of fiances and domestic issues. Your life would be so much better. And besides, it’s so sexy! HERE.

Chinese and Russia Space Station II

There is also another video that also shows just how much larger the joint Chinese and Russian space station will be when it is completed. Of course, this is nothing that you will find on any of the Western media outlets. HERE.

Pretty Chinese girl

I am constantly amazed that Americans believe that all the women in China look like pre-adolsescent children. In fact, this was the argument that was used against me by the DA in Little Rock, Arkansas who actually made the point that the sole reason that I lived, worked and traveled to China was to indulge my fantasies of having sex with little children, and the Chinese women would naturally, by their child-like bodies would satisfy me. Disgusting. HERE.

Everyone Participates

When someone gets unruly, and rude, the rest of China will take action. This is their nation; their country. And it’s up to them to police it. And people must behave. There are far too many people, to not take an active role in society. HERE.

Hong Kong official discusses the HK Riots

It is no secret that the United States funded, armed, taught, organized and pushed for the (so called) “pro-democracy” riots. These riots killed dozens, caused massive hardship, interrupted the flow of life inside of China and caused millions of dollars in damages. Who is the ultimate culprit? Why, it is clearly the United States. HERE.

Chinese Scouts

In America we have “Boy Scouts” and “Girl Scouts”. But in China there is just “The Scouts”. And they learn discipline, culture, working together, and some basics of para-military training. I am always amazed and glad that China trains their children to be parts of the community, than a bunch of couch-potatoes that demand “me, me, me”. HERE.

Be the Rufus

In a society that has people caring for each other you will start seeing Rufus activities. Not because of some kind of reward, but that it is what you do when you are about others in your society. Such as this quick video illustrates. HERE.

America speak with a forked tongue

Here’s an interesting side by side comparison of (then) Vice President Biden telling the Chinese that America is committed to a “rising China”. And then next to it we see President Biden announcing to the White house press corps that America must stop China from rising at all costs. Sheech! HERE.

Nice Chinese girl

Here’s a nice Chinese girl. According to Arkansas she looks young. They told me that “everyone” in China looks like children. That’s the ONLY reason why anyone would ever want to visit that slimy, filthy, oozing, cesspool of pollution, crime and corruption. Look at her ooze childish filth! HERE.

Rural Africa now has factories

The Chinese have spent the time building factories, and training workers to make basic items in the  very remote villages and settlements of Africa. These areas used to be poverty ridden, and controlled by war-lords who lived on United States funds and corruption. But with the investments of infrastructure and a market for manufactured goods, the money now flows to these workers who make these products inside of Africa. HERE.

This vblogger was attacked horrifically by the BBC

They claimed that he was only saying good things about China because the communist regime paid him to do so. And then they took frames from his video, used photoshop to darken them, turn the lush green trees grey, turn the blue sky grey and then produced it to their audience of millions. Never a retraction. HERE.

The BBC tries to attack China on Global Warming

It’s unsuccessful. Anyone who knows anything about China will now defend China and no longer take the bullshit narrative at face value. That game is over. And here’s a nice video that illustrates this spectacularly. HERE.

BBC Journalist admits his directives

Pretty ballsy. After all, his future as a “journalist” in the West is now over.  He pretty much admits that the primary directives in most (heck, all) Western media is to malign China, and to provide a very false image and picture for the viewers of the BCC of what China is and what is going on. HERE.

Chinese cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is real and it is present today inside of China. The rest of the world, hidden behind agendas and fear-mongering has lied itself into a box, and the rising China, and all of Asia makes the rest of the world look like ignorant psychopathic used car salesmen in comparison, with collapsing infrastructure, a lack of morals, and no accomplishments except the theft of money from others. HERE.

This fellow tells you why the USA was in Afghanistan…

And also explains why the neocons on K-street in Washington DC are all “up in arms” and enraged over the American troop withdrawal. But don’t worry, the UK “news” media is already spinning how unstable that region is and the Biden made a “power move”, and yada, yada, yada. HERE.

Comparison in starting a business

Here’s an American telling you how it is when you try to start a digital business int he United States compared to one in China. The difference is striking and he is right. America is the land with a million tiny, tiny hands in your wallet all taking a million little bites of your money. And why no one in America is doing well today (unless they are a super wealthy oligarch). HERE.

Look at all those volunteers

First day of school. All those in red are not all teachers, but actually many are volunteers for their community. A mother brings her handicapped child to the school. Being a little kid, scared, and frightened on top of having a handicap, must be really difficult. Not so, if the school welcomes you as one of their own. HERE.

China is showing the way forward…

…And the United States leadership are petrified of it. Their cushy lifestyle, the belief that they are the “kings” sitting all on the top of the money pile, only works as long as the downtrodden slave-serfs are happy in their lot. But increasingly they are not happy, and they want change. And China is showing them the answer out. HERE.

A show of kindness

In a “dog eat dog” kind of society, everyone is living in fear, and hiding from others. They never stick their neck out for anyone else other than themselves. But in a society where the well being of the community is important, then everyone has a role, as this little girl clearly shows. HERE.

The duty of government is for it’s people

And if the government stops doing that, and / or doesn’t care or is unable to help the citizenry of that nation, then it must be replaced. We have seen this in China with the events of the “cultural revolution”, and then the efforts of Mr. Deng. Now, we see with great surprise how well China prospers when it’s government cares for it’s people. But we see the opposite in the United States. What went wrong? HERE.

Will you marry me?

This just happened at the Olympics. I guess that you all weren’t aware of it because it showed China in a good light, and that (of course) goes against American (and UK) “news” guidelines. HERE.

A five minute overview of what the Chinese Communist Party is

Here it is in a “nutshell”. In five minutes you get a very good, thick and comprehensive overview of what the Chinese communist party is, and why it has been so successful inside of China. It’s really quite well stated, and tell you as it is. Like it or not. HERE.

Inner Mongolia

Well, when was the last time you have seen a picture of Inner Mongolia? Don’t remember? Well, that’s understandable. There’s hardly anything on this subject in the Western press. Here’s an absolutely great video that covers so many subject areas, from infrastructure, to beauty, to planning, to nature. HERE.

Trade Tariffs

Well, what about those 20% trade tariffs that President Trump put on American products, and that Biden decided to keep in place. You know, “to keep the pressure on China”. What is going on? I have to tell you guys, the American leadership is so moronic it defies description. HERE.

Built like a fish

In the United States, when we see a well-built woman, we say that she is “built like a battleship”. Another term is that she is “built like a brick house”. African-American men, who almost uniformly prefer huge asses on women like to say “she has a big caboose”, or “she has some fine booty”. In China, an attractive woman is one that has the lines and shape of a fish. And so people say that she “has a nice fish shape” as this woman HERE.

Chinese Military

I’ve got tons of videos on the Chinese military. But let me just say that the Chinese believe in using enormous quantities of AI guided robotic missiles to destroy everything in it’s path before unleashing hordes of tactically trained professional troops to take over a given area. China does not play. HERE.

Oh, but China cannot innovate

They can only copy. Right? That’s the narrative. Isn’t it? Who are they copying with their bridge building machines? Who are they copying with their nuclear systems? Who are they copying with their 6G? Or their HarmonyOS, or their QR codes, or their High Speed Rail. The lies are so outrageous that when I hear someone repeat them, I no longer get angry. Instead I look at the person as being one of the most out-of-touch and ill-informed ignoramuses on the planet. HERE.

Playing with fire

In the United States, we have an idiom called “playing with fire”. It means to do something dangerous or risky. These provocations that the United States Navy is doing in the South China Sea could end up getting people killed. It’s not so much that I worry about China. They have time and time again, proven themselves to be intimately capable. But I would hate to see the seventh fleet destroyed with all those lives lost. HERE.

Dancing at night

I have discussed this numerous times. It all started with the “dancing grandmothers”, and now with the government’s help and direction, it has become a national pastime. Everyone loves to dance in China, and if you want to go and dance, you just go and do it. Woo woo! HERE.

Senator Mikulski warns that going against China would be very, very dangerous

I normally don’t care for her (personally). but she is actually quite right here. Pushing China like the USA is currently doing is very, very dangerous. And the morons in the control of the nation of America haven’t a clue as to how dangerous it can actually get. HERE.

Who are the CPC Members?

Another very good, and short video that tells you exactly what is going on and just how absolutely insane the Neocon United Sates radical military-lovers are when they make such outrageous pronouncements and demands upon China. Crazy! HERE.

Going to help others

A scooter gets in an accident in the middle of an intersection of two six lane highways. What happens? Everyone gets out of their cars and runs over to help the poor guy in his overturned vehicle. This is what communities do. They don’t drive slowly by and gawk or take pictures like an American does. HERE.

Conclusion

In the $4 trillion dollar budget passed by President Biden are billions of dollars to “suppress” China, further censor media so that China is villainized and made out to be an evil “thing” to be destroyed. It is my hope that this little article helps put things in perspective.

Do you want more?

This particular article is going into my China Summer Videos Index here…

Summer Videos

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You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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China

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Master Index
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Some videos from Russia. Mostly concentrating on Moscow and nearby communities

Here’s some videos of Russia. Please kindly pay attention.

Throughout America, we have been filled with these lies and false narratives about how terrible dark and horrible Russia is. Many of us still believe it because in this age of Tiktoc and you-tube, very few Russian and Chinese videos are permitted inside the United States. We all know how President Trump clamped down on the dissemination of videos out of China, and Russia follows the same model. Keep Americans ignorant; feed them lies and other things to cause them to be fearful, and then tax them.

Those in Washington DC make the world a dark and fearful place. Tell Americans that they are the best, and to be afraid of the rest of the world. It’s one big nasty lie.

Here’s some videos out of Russia. Most are centered in Western Russia which is rather nice. Don’t you know. there are twenty short micro videos. Most under two minutes, and if you click on the link they will open up on a new tab.

Conclusion

Today, Russia and China are very, very close. Putin referred to the relationship as symbiotic.

Symbiotic.
Characterized by or being a close, cooperative, or interdependent relationship

The relationship is strong, tight, and mutually beneficial to each party. They work together on all levels, and with the new global realignments, it would be wise to pay attention to Russia. Yes. Not just China, but Russia as well.

For the last 100 years, the United States has been the force behind the vast bulk of wars, famine, diseases, turmoil, terror, suppression and everything else bad that you find in the world today. From mindless corporate drones, to drug-induced street walking zombies, to massive prison complexes, the the Coronavirus pandemic, the United States has been behind it all…

For the world to move forward and embrace a new and better reality, this evil will need to be vanquished. Just like in the Tolken stories about the dragon Smaug, you need to destroy the monster before the people can live life freely.

I cannot see into the future, but it appears quite clear to me that the destruction of this evil is necessary to make the world a better and safer place. How it will happen is unknown, but it will have to happen. Sooner or later.

America is like this mentally ill alcoholic that is repeatedly raping the children in the neighborhood, setting fires to all the houses, and shitting on the sidewalks in front of your house. Sooner or later, he must go. There simply isn’t any other alternative.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Happiness Index, here…

Life & Happiness

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Master Index

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Bus Driver Stories – Dramatized true stories of fine Rufus Behaviors

Here’s a mixtures of videos describing Rufus behaviors.  They all occur on a public bus inside of China. There’s a few actual videos, and a number of dramatized videos. In almost every incidence, the dramatized event actually happened.

While it might be confusing for those who cannot read or understand Chinese, the videos themselves are easy enough to understand. They are presented here to show everyone to remember our humanity.

We are all part of something.

Never forget that. We are not isolated and alone.

We are part of something.

We belong. Be the Rufus that keeps the world happy, safe, and good.

Helping a young blind girl learn how to use a cane…

This is an actual video taken on a bus. The mother is helping the daughter learn how to use a walking-cane to navigate using the public bus transport system.

Mind your own business. Don’t get involved.

For the last fifty years of so there has been an assault in the West (and especially in America) of not to get involved. If you see someone being rude, you ignore it. If you see someone taking mistreatment, you look the other way.

In a real community, we treat others as family.

If you are an older man or woman, just saying “Why do you take this shit?” is often just enough to make the much needed point. As in this dramatization of an actual event that happened.

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Another dramatization that actually happened.

What happens when you lose your life (as in a fireman) to help others, and your spouse is heavy with an unborn child? What happens when others, not knowing your story, treat your family rudely and crudely?

We are all part of one great society and we all need to support each other. We need to stand up for each other, and support the weak. And we should have no tolerance for the rude and crude.

Here’s another true story in dramatized form.

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Be the Light for others to look up towards

This one is not a dramatization. It’s the real deal. A young “boy scout” is playing on the bus when a soldier boards the bus. And there is an exchange of respect and saluting. But notice what the soldier does afterwards with the young boy…

There is no excuse for being rude.

Age is not an excuse. Nor is color, race, wealth, or knowledge. We must start to accept that everyone has a story, a background and a life. And we are not the only ones with issue sand problems. This is a dramatization, but based on a true event.

Here’s what sometimes happens to a Rufus…

It can be an uncaring world out there. This is a dramatization of an actual event. A Rufus saves a little girl and then is abused by his boss, old people on the bus, and parents. Do not expect to get awards, or metals for being a Rufus. It can be very unrewarding.

Rufus event in the small town

A mother with her infant are driving down the road and she loses control. Luckily there are Rufus’s all around. Watch what happens. What would you do, if you were there?

Rufus saves girl from maniac arsonist

This video happens so quickly. The fire department are called in to put out a blaze in a house. They find a man who set fire to the house, beat up some elderly people, and is now holding a little girl hostage. Seconds count. Only a Rufus can save the day…

Show some humanity

And why not. True or false, this next video is a great example of how we all must work to make the world a better place. Titles, wealth and position is society are meaningless unless we contribute helping others. Be the Rufus.

And on the light side…

Ah. Kitties. I love them.

I hope that all of you are having a fine day today.  Thank you for reading this. -MM

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Beautiful Chinese girls modeling to Chinese pop music inside of China (1)

This is part of my “Beautiful girls of China” series. Here, we introduce the reader to China, and what it is today, by looking at the girls, women and ladies of China. In all cases the ladies are dancing, posing or just being themselves around their homes, businesses or city centers where they live. By looking at them, listening to the music, and paying attention to their surroundings you will end up getting a very clean and pristine vision of what China is, what it stands for and what it is actually like.

This is my own personal attempt to show others what I find so wonderful about China.

At the bare minimum you will at least get an opportunity to listen to contemporaneous Chinese pop music that plays all over the nation.

A beautiful Chinese woman in a wonderful flowing dress.

The girls and ladies come in all shapes and sizes. They all act and behave and dress differently. But the music selection and the short videos are wonderful in that it gives you a real idea what China is actually like. It’s the “feeling” that you get when you are here. And that is not easy to transmit. I hope that you all appreciate the images and visions that I present to you today.

Another lovely girl in China.

While I am showing images and videos of beautiful Chinese girls, I want to explain some of the great misconceptions about people, and relationships.

One thing that everyone doesn’t “get” (understand) is that when a couple wants to have sex, the Guy is always “ready to go”, and the woman “needs to warm up”. It’s not really accurate.

For men, watching a woman…

…being confident, looking good, smiling, acting cute; seductive, or just being playful is (de facto) foreplay. The mind, the thoughts and the emotions are engaged by watching the women be who they are. And when we say that it’s a “turn on”, we really meant it. Literally.

There’s few things more attractive to me than a confident woman, being herself, being clean, having a great conversation and eating delicious food. I think that many people don’t understand this. They think that being “sexy” is showing a lot of skin, and moving in provocative poses. That’s not true at all. Being sexy is just being yourself with all your faults and blemishes.

A normal, but very sexy girl. We all have to accept ourselves as we are, and be confident in that knowledge. That confidence makes us sexy.

In the following videos are girls being themselves, and showing their best images for the camera. And for me I think that it’s terribly sexy, and a great “turn on”. These ladies put the cream in my coffee if you get my mixed idioms, and they tenderize my meals. I like to believe that every single person on this planet, mean and women, are capable of being attractive.

All it requires is a good kind heart, and openness and willingness to be yourself. A kind of fearless acceptance of who you are. Smiling. Being open. And just engaging others. You are attractive.

Attractive Chinese girl on the escalator.

And while you are watching these ladies, please take note at the “feeling” you get. It’s a combination of imagery, motion, music, and environment. I can tell you that this “feeling” permeates all of China. From the smallest hamlets tot he largest cities. It’s a feeling of unity, of being one’s self, and pure unrestricted freedom. things that you really notice are missing in the United States today.

You do not need to show a lot of skin and wear skimpy clothing to be sexy. You just need to show personality.

When you watch the girls pay attention to the background. This is what China is. These are the homes that the Chinese live in. These are the buildings that they work in. These are the parks that they play in. These are the restaurants that they eat in.

Pay attention to the background. This is what China is actually like.

The video group A

I have broken down these videos into an easily downloaded zip file. HERE. Just download the file and open it up and start watching all the pretty girl videos.

Here’s a sample of part of the files…

Partial files from Pretty Girls 4AUG21.

Here’s Video Group B

You can access the files HERE.

And a quick display of what’s inside is here…

Pretty Chinese Girls part B 4AUG21

And some of these girls are…

Well, some you can just fall in love with them. Like this wonderful girl. She’s all about the delicious sundae (with a cherry on top) and coffee. Ahhhh!

And you do not need to be anything other than yourself…

There is nothing (to me) more attractive than a woman who is proud of herself, strong, yet oozing with kindness and softness. Like this lovely girl…

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Learning About China by Looking at Pretty Girls Index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

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An assortment of videos from Russia. It gives non-Russians an interesting perspective in this wide country.

When I was doing time, during my retirement, I met another spook. I was in a holding facility inside of Pennsylvania while my transfer papers were being “processed”. All in all it took around six months to process me and sent me to Arkansas. It’s a long story that I really don’t want to get into right now.

Anyways, I met him while I was in this facility. He was on my block and we were able to talk during chow, and during the one hour that we were allowed outside to exercise.

He was going through the same kind of “retirement” as I was. He too was being retired as a “sex offender”. Anyways, he was not part of MAJestic. But rather was attached to an agency in lose association with the United States Army.

Anyways, to make a long story short, he had a role in the transport of people and illegal materials back and forth between the United States and Russia. Oh yeah. What is illegal, and what is the purview of the United States government is a grey area that is often open to interpretation.

Now all that being said, I have met many, many fine folk from Russia and the former Soviet Union block states of Eastern Europe inside of Russia. Russia and China have decades of mutual collaboration and similar interests. The idea that somehow they hate each other is a narrative constructed by the “five-eyes-network” and their Washington Neocon masters. Typically Russians and Chinese get along together fine. They are both in Asia after all.

You know, it’s silly when you think about it.

It’s like saying that the United States and Canada are going to have a war, any day now, because of the long standing dispute over maple syrup and beaver pelt harvesting.

Anyways, he would tell me about the life that he had inside of Russia; living as it was, unofficially and without documentation He picked up the language and became a rather adept pugilist.

So with that as a lead in, and realizing that (aside from one or two visits that I cannot speak about)  I would like to display some videos from “Mother Russia” to give you all a taste and feel for the nation, the country and the people there.

Russia is the land of ice and snow.

And people think nothing of interacting in it. As we see here. What I like about this particular video is the calmness of the scene. I can well imagine myself in a small skiff paddling down a snowy stream in the dead of Winter as well.

The video can be downloaded directly HERE.

Russians, and other Nordic folk love to swim.

I don’t really get it, but apparently the clash of ultra cold water, and then followed up with a warm sauna is supposedly very relaxing. Or is it the other way around, I’m not sure. In any event, there are many videos of people doing this particular ritual.

You can download the video directly HERE.

Frolic in the field of Sunflowers

This is typical of the Ukraine, Poland or other Eastern European nations. I like the image and the relaxed calmness of the entire rural community. This is a nice calming video that I am sure will resonate in the one or two Russians that visit MM.

The video is HERE.

A family party

Sure the language is different and maybe they are eating sausages and potatoes instead of hamburgers and potato chips, but are they all that really different from Americans? I don’t think so. People are people and I love how the family gets together and has a good time. It reminds me of what it used to be back in the Untied States, pre-1990 at least.

The video is HERE.

After the United States has kicked the living shit out of all the weak guys…

…over the last fifty years. The rest of the world has put their collective foot down with a big “stomp” and said “Enough is enough!”. Seriously if the Biden Administration wants to get involved in a war with Asia the only thing remaining of the USA, once the dust settles, will be smoldering embers. You don’t fuck with the Russians.

The video is HERE.

Russians having fun.

Nothing like punching each other for the fun of it. Arm wrestling… Russian style. In Russia you are either strong or you ain’t worth “Jack-shit”.

The video is HERE.

More family celebrations.

Seriously this reminds me of what it used to be like. Maybe forty to fifty years ago in the Untied States. You know, long before all the psychopathic morns took control of the government, and made laws, and rules to “improve” things. Fucking Idiots.

The video is HERE.

Boxing Russian Style

Just another common Russian pastime. You get in the ring and throw some punches. Sort of how Colorado bars used to be way back in the 1960’s.

The video is HERE.

Russian people eat good.

Here’s some fine delicious steaks done up Russian style. What’s not to love? I personally think that it’s great. Don’t you?

The video is HERE.

Dancing.

Russians like the Chinese love to dance and they have these huge get togethers where everyone dances. Just like in China. It’s nothing like you would see in the United States though. Everyone stays inside and huddles in front of televisions or computer monitors.

The video is HERE.

Conclusion

Today, Russia and China are very, very close. Putin referred to the relationship as symbiotic.

Symbiotic.
Characterized by or being a close, cooperative, or interdependent relationship

The relationship is strong, tight, and mutually beneficial to each party. They work together on all levels, and with the new global realignments, it would be wise to pay attention to Russia. Yes. Not just China, but Russia as well.

For the last 100 years, the United States has been the force behind the vast bulk of wars, famine, diseases, turmoil, terror, suppression and everything else bad that you find in the world today. From mindless corporate drones, to drug-induced street walking zombies, to massive prison complexes, the the Coronavirus pandemic, the United States has been behind it all…

For the world to move forward and embrace a new and better reality, this evil will need to be vanquished. Just like in the Tolken stories about the dragon Smaug, you need to destroy the monster before the people can live life freely.

I cannot see into the future, but it appears quite clear to me that the destruction of this evil is necessary to make the world a better and safer place. How it will happen is unknown, but it will have to happen. Sooner or later.

America is like this mentally ill alcoholic that is repeatedly raping the children in the neighborhood, setting fires to all the houses, and shitting on the sidewalks in front of your house. Sooner or later, he must go. There simply isn’t any other alternative.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Happiness Index, here…

Life & Happiness

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

 

Be the Rufus; Some more extreme examples of personal heroism.

More videos of personal heroism in China. This is the late Summer 2021 edition.

Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full Articles & Links

Man with disabilities gives all his money to help those from the flood

Sometimes people go way over and beyond their abilities. This man with disabilities was so upset about the deaths from the flooding during July 2021, that he took all of his money, all of his savings and bought food and sent it off to the victims to help them. A Rufus in every way…

Rescue

During the massive sudden flood in China in July 2021, everyone was caught off guard. Many people were swept away by the raging water, caught underground, in subways, and in basements, and inside of cars. Those that weren’t were out in full force helping others. When you are part of a community, you become a natural Rufus.

Singing in thanks

Sometimes you just cannot help others. But you should show your gratitude. Here we have a school singing after China has controlled the Coronavirus. This was repeated all over China. The Chinese are the most patriotic people on the planet.

Disrespectful behavior

In Chinese society, you either participate to make it better, or you are an outsider, worthy of scorn. Here we have a chap that is acting very bad. He’s pinching the bottom of a girl minding her own business. So she slaps him, and reports him, and guess what? He’s doing time.

There is no place for rudeness

Here is a rude driver that arrogantly splashes a puddle on a police officer. This kind of behavior is tolerated in America, as well as other anti-social behaviors. Not so in China. Anti-social behavior comes at a cost, and it does affect social credit scoring. If you are an ass-hole your position in society plummets.

Not so in America, where all the ass-holes thrive. They screech! Freedom!

Quick save on the escalator

You are just minding your own business and you hear some gasps and yells behind you. You look up and there is this hearing impaired grandmother standing on the steps while an enormous heavy piece of luggage tumbles straight for her. What are you going to do?

Construction crew rescues boy

The high-rise is on fire. A young boy is trapped inside. What to do? How to rescue him? Luckily, next door is a construction crew full of Rufus’s and they are going to help rescue him. You need not worry when there are Rufus’s around.

Even in the darkest American distraught cities, Rufus’s come to help

Here we have a young child and a worried mother trapped on a building. What to do? Well, as long as there is one Rufus around everyone will come to help. And look at them. They come from every corner of the street, and from every building. Rufus’s are everywhere.

A Rufus acts instinctively

You see someone in danger and you spring into action. You don’t sit there wondering what to do. A Rufus acts. No time for selfies. No time to finish your burger. No time to see what your friends think. You Act.

Baby in crisis!

When seconds count, who can you rely on? The police? The fire? the old lady down the street? Nope, you only have you and it is YOUR time to shine. Be the Rufus anything else is a waste.

The BRI in Africa

China is offering all sorts of free building projects to improve the lifestyles of the people that trade with it. As a result there are tons of good will, and open markets for trade and a growth in the middle class. Here is Nairobi. They have better rail than Americans do.

After a flood…

You are looking for survivors and see this! What are you going to do? Take a selfie, or run to see if he’s still alive? Lucky for him, this was a Rufus, not a self-absorbed psychopath.

Emergency!

Out of nowhere a flood engulfs your town. Cars, trucks float ways, bridges collapse, and everyone is helpless. You managed to get to safety, but you see someone flailing in the water…they are being carried far away. What will you do? Say safe, or be the Rufus?

There’s a reason…

Yes. There’s a reason why China has been enforcing noise and air pollution regulations, and the offenders are not treated lightly. The environment is everyone’s concern and everyone must contribute to make the world a good and just place to live. And if you aren’t with the program, well…

Rufus level innovation

All over China we have facial scanning being employed. No longer will you need to press those dirty buttons, and go through invasive pat downs. Things are getting to the point that in China everything is fast, quick and seamless. From digital money, to key locks on doors. It’s all non-contact.

Boy prevents abduction

Some guy, looks drunk, but can be a dangerous predator approaches two kids and tries to carry one away. But the young Rufus will have none of this, and attacks the man. A real Rufus! His parents should be so proud!

Society that cares

it used to be that the Chinese didn’t care about anything. Just themselves. But this has changed once the government proved time and time again, that they are working for the best interests of society. And it affects everyone and everything all across the board. Even the tiniest details are taken cared for. This is how a functional society works.

A car flies off the highway

So you are driving down the road and you don’t even see the car have the accident. But you see that the car is damaged, crashed, and that there are people inside screaming for help. What are you going to do?

Appreciation

You see this all the time. The Chinese are oh, so patriotic. They want to contribute and to help. When the government sends people into  THEIR communities, they give back generously. It’s just the way people act when they have a government that represents their interests.

Di Di driver says NO!

In China, the equivalent drive share APP to Uber is Didi. Here we have a DiDi driver kicking the passenger out of his car because the guy was rude and horrible. Good going Rufus!

Rufus times two

All of us working together can make this world a place worth living. This idea of being alone; the lone wolf is a terrible mistake. In Military Strategy it is desirable for the enemy to do this, because it is easy to exploit. But not so in a healthy, functioning society. You work together. you donate your time. You help others. You be the Rufus.

Just an average person

A Rufus is just an average person, like you and like me. We don’t want fame, payments or accolades. We just want to live our lives, be happy and have friends that we can share our time with. That’s all. But every now and then something goes wrong, and a real Rufus has to take action. Like this lass here…

Kindness is within reach

All over Asia, and most especially among the Chinese-friendly nations, there is a strong impetus to start caring for each other, your community, your society and your environment. And to this end there are commercials being promoted. This is one of them. You won’t see anything like this in America, the UK, or Australia. But you will in the rest of the world. It is all changing.

An argument

We don’t know what goes on in the lives and minds of others. What we do know is that when you hear someone crying in distress, a real Rufus springs into action. They do not care about the consequences. They take action!

A talented rescue

Wow. Obviously this fellow had some sort of training. Superman or Rufus? You judge. Whatever he is, he is wonderful and he saved a life in the process. We should all strive to be the best that we can be. And in the process the Rufus inside all of us shines through.

Showing appreciation

Not only are the Chinese hyper-patriotic, but they 100% support their government, their police and their firemen. This is the welcome that the firefighters received in the flood damaged areas of China in 2021.

A young Rufus

A man is having trouble paying for his bus fare. Lucky for him there is a young Rufus nearby that wants to help. We all need each other. It helps keep the stress of day to day unexpected problems down, and generates good feelings all around. Be that Rufus. Young man, I salute you!

Emergency!

You are giving a girl a ride in your DiDi and suddenly she starts going into trouble. What do you do? Well, you must be calm and be the Rufus, and you call the police and drive her to the hospital. You don’t stop. you don’t think. You don’t do anything else. You be the Rufus.

Coronavirus staff

So many people are volunteering in China to help others. All those people assisting with the inoculations are all volunteers. They are not paid for what they are doing. They are giving and contributing in their society.

Here’s a group of hot and thirsty volunteers. They all wanted to get some energy drinks. But the woman running the register is a Rufus. She would never allow them to pay. So she paid for their drinks herself. She says that it’s the least that she can do.

A Rufus adapts

An ambulance carrying an accident victim overturns in a second automobile accident. She needs immediate care. What are you going to do? Lucky there is a Rufus nearby who owns a flat-bed truck and he helps the entire crew make it to the hospital. Be the Rufus!

Soldier rescues a downing person

You don’t know when the call will strike. You cannot prepare for it. You cannot plan for it. You cannot forecast it. All you can do is be the best you can be and when you are needed you simply go forth and help in whatever way that you can. We all need others in our lives. Be that Rufus.

Electric trike turned over

A man and his electric trike scooter goes belly up right in front of you. What are you going to do? Honk your horn like a rude American, or get the heck out of your seat and go and help him? Well I can tell you that it is the Rufus’s in this world that make it worth living.

Helping the animals

We should always help the animals around us. We must help them, and guide them. Often they can get hurt and highways are terrible on animals. From cats and dogs to horses, pigs and birds, we must help when we can. Like this fine Rufus here.

Electric wheelchair stalled in the street

So here is a crippled man on his electric wheelchair stalled in the middle of the street in the middle of a storm. Aren’t you glad that you are not him? Or not. Maybe you are a Rufus, and you leave your dry spot and help the poor guy out. Be the Rufus. Only a Rufus is worthy.

The tunnels are flooded!

During the flood of July 2021, many people were trapped in their cars, in tunnels and in subways, and as the water rose their only escape was out through the sewer drains. Here we have some survivors making their way to the surface and the Rufus’s that helped them.

Grandmother stops a kidnapping

She’s going home. Minding her own business, when she hears a commotion behind her. What? That six year old is being absucted. Not on her watch! So she springs to action. SHe things of nothing else. You go grandma! You go! A full-on Rufus

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Movie Review of What Dreams May Come as it pertains to the Alien Interview and Heaven

Based on a story by Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come is a surrealist tale of the afterlife. While there are numerous things in the movie that are visually appealing, and a compelling story line, the movie itself depicts some critical aspects of the “afterlife” and Heaven incorrectly.

Yet, it has some VERY IMPORTANT messages for MM readers.

What Dreams May Come would have to be one of the most intelligent, emotional, visually beautiful, and well acted projects ever to grace the screen. And when you add in the story-line that includes rescuing a loved one who is suffering from amnesia and needs to be rescued, you can see the value of the movie content.

Especially in light of the content of “Alien Interview”.

Aside from the faulty story-line, and the inaccuracies of the depiction of Heaven, I would like to use it to help depict what the non-physical reality resembles for a disincarnate entity that returns to it. And at that, this is the purpose of this article. It is to use already available imagery to describe the non-physical world(s) for purpose of education and understanding.

Brief Movie Summary

While vacationing in Switzerland, physician Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) meets artist Annie Collins (Annabella Sciorra). They are instantly attracted to each other, and bond as if they had known each other for a long time. They marry and have two children: Ian (Josh Paddock) and Marie (Jessica Brooks Grant). Their idyllic life comes to an end when the children die in a car crash. Life becomes very difficult: Annie suffers a mental breakdown, and the strains on their marriage threaten to lead to divorce, but they manage to struggle through their losses.

On the anniversary of the day they decided not to divorce, Chris is killed in a car accident. Unaware that he is dead and confused when nobody can interact with him, Chris lingers on Earth. He watches Annie’s attempts to cope with the loss and he attempts to communicate with her, despite advice from a spirit-like presence that it will only cause her pain. When his attempts only leave her more distraught, he decides to move on.

Chris awakens in Heaven, and finds that his immediate surroundings are controlled by his imagination. He meets a man (Cuba Gooding Jr.) whom Chris seems to recognize as Albert, his friend and mentor from his medical residency, and the spirit-like presence from his time as a “ghost” on Earth.

Albert will be his guide in this new life.

Albert teaches Chris about his new existence in Heaven, and how to shape his little corner of it and to travel to others’ “dreams”. They are surprised when a Blue Jacaranda tree appears unbidden in Chris’ surroundings, matching a tree in a new painting by Annie, which was inspired by Annie’s belief that she can communicate with Chris in the afterlife. Albert explains to Chris that this is a sign that the couple are truly soul mates.

However, Annie is overcome with despair and decides that Chris cannot, in fact, “see” the painting and destroys the piece. Chris sees his version of the tree disintegrate before his eyes which coincides with the painting being destroyed in the real world.

What dreams may come.

Chris laments he will not see his wife and encounters an Asian woman with the name tag “Leona”, whom he comes to recognize as his daughter Marie, living in an area shaped like a diorama she loved in life. The two share a tearful reunion.

Meanwhile on Earth, Annie is unable to cope with the loss of her husband. She then decides to commit suicide. Chris, who is initially relieved that her suffering is over, quickly becomes angry when he learns that those who commit suicide are sent to Hell; this is not the result of any judgment made against them, but that it is their nature to create “nightmare” afterlife worlds based on their pain.

Chris is adamant that he will rescue Annie from Hell, despite Albert’s insistence that no one has ever succeeded in doing so. Albert agrees to find Chris a “tracker” (who takes the form of Sigmund Freud) to help find Annie’s soul.

On the journey to Hell, Chris finds himself recalling his son, Ian. Remembering how he’d called him the one man he’d want at his side to brave Hell, Chris realizes Albert is Ian.

Ian explains that he chose Albert’s appearance because he knew that Chris would listen to Albert without reservation. Before they part ways, Ian begs Chris to remember how he saved his marriage following Ian and Marie’s deaths. Chris then journeys onward with the tracker.

After traversing a field containing the faces of the damned, they come to a dark and twisted replica of Chris and Annie’s house. The tracker then reveals himself as the real Albert, and warns Chris that if he stays with Annie for more than a few minutes he may become permanently trapped in Hell. All that Chris can reasonably expect is a chance to say a final farewell to Annie.

Chris enters the house to find Annie suffering from amnesia, unable even to remember her suicide and tortured by her decrepit surroundings. Unable to stir her memories, he “gives up”, but not the way the Tracker hoped he would; he chooses to join Annie forever in Hell.

As he announces his intent to stay to Annie, his words parallel something he had said to her when he left her in an institution following their children’s deaths, and she regains her memories even as Chris is succumbing to her nightmare.

Annie, wanting nothing more at that moment than to save Chris, ascends to Heaven, bringing Chris with her.

Chris and Annie are reunited with their children in Heaven, whose original appearances are restored. Chris proposes reincarnation, so that he and Annie can experience life together all over again. The film ends with Chris and Annie meeting again as young children in a situation roughly parallel to their first meeting.

What Dreams May Come

Initial Reactions upon “arrival”

In the movie, he wakes up and doesn’t have any bearings. He doesn’t know what is going on, and is disoriented. Yet shortly afterwards, a companion and a beloved pet help him find his way.

In “real life”, this only occurs for the youngest consciousnesses.

Most entities pretty much realize what is going on rather rapidly. They realize that they are out of their physical body, and that things are different, and that they can hear things and understand things with a clarity that they did not have before.

Typically, those who have gone through many reincarnations (over and over again) know exactly what is going on and then immediate move outward and away from where the physical body may lie. Those really (inexperienced) consciousnesses get confused and disoriented, but they immediate see friends, family and associations that come to them and help them during this crisis.

What Dreams May Come

So you need not worry. It is extraordinarily rare to be surprised once you stop cycling in and out of world-lines. You just stay on the Exit Template and hang out as a disincarnate spirit for a while.

Depiction of Heaven

It’s such an arty movie. The colors are great, the CGI is wonderful. The backgrounds and backdrops are immense and profound. All of which is true in the non-physical reality.

What Dreams May Come

And true to form, there’s all sort of things going on that our physical senses are unable to discern. Everything from strange beings, to odd constructions and enormous (apparently man made) constructions. There’s all kinds of “stuff” in the non-physical reality that surrounds our physical reality.

Lack of a Life Review

One of the most disturbing things to me, about the movie is the lack of a “Life Review”. This is the most common event that disincarnate beings experience. And according to Dr. Newton, it occurs after the people enter the “tunnel of light”.

What Dreams May Come

This is a fundamental aspect of the reincarnation process. You are born, live a life, obtain experiences, have a life review and then are re-injected back in the reincarnation process.

A Trapped Soul

Trapped by amnesia.

What an interesting story plot. You go to Purgatory to prevent someone from staying in Hell. They have no memory. So therefore they are helpless and being ignorant have no idea how to escape the Hell that they exist within.

But isn’t that what all of us are, at least according to the Tpe-1 extraterrestrial in Alien Interview?

What Dreams May Come

Trapped on a never-ending cycle of endless reincarnations.

Pets and loved ones

Our loved ones are easy to track down. We, however, often need some help. As they often are in special locations (Heavens?) that require assistance to visit.

Of course you can meet up with beloved pets in Heaven. There’s just a simple process that you must go through. That’s all.

Never fear!

The good things you do now, and the good relationships that you build will never leave. Instead they will persist and be supportive of your journey in the non-physical worlds.

The decision to return to Earth together

I have covered this process on selection of the pre-birth world-line template and mapping out the life prior to reinsertion. Certainly there is a major review process involved, as well as particular elements of schooling. Dr. Newton has also covered this subject extensively.

Just because it wasn’t explored in great detail in the movie, does not mean that it is a minor decision. It’s a very involved process.

The most important lesson

All of this is fine and nice. But the real situation is that once you leave your body as a disincarnate consciousness, you are still attached to the MWI. You are really not in “Heaven”.

You are still running the world-line templates.

You still experience time.

Only now, stuck in the “wave” form. You are not in a physical form, and thus cannot alter the physical world around you.

Exit Template

So while you will see all sorts of things that you might have been unaware of when you were in the physical, you are really not in “Heaven”. Instead, you are still stuck on your “exit template”.

Exit Template
This is the MWI topographical map that your consciousness was on and following at the time of your death.

While…

A Pre-Birth World-line Template
Is the world-line template that was arranged for you (and by you) to obtain life experiences when you are first born.

For most people, the “Exit Template” will be the same as the “Pre-Birth World-Line Template”. For MM participants that practice affirmation prayer campaigns, and who have experienced “slides”, the templates will typically differ.

Slide
The movement from one template map on the MWI to another.

So what ever trajectory your consciousness was engaged upon at the time of your death, you continue it without reinsertion to the physical body. And all that “stuff” all around you is just what what you would be seeing if you were in the physical.

Now…

You, of course, are free to explore all over the non-physical worlds. But only around your world-lines as defined by your template.

You need to exist the Physical Earth Reality. (Both the non-physical and the physical) That will take you out and away and able to enter “Heaven”. And this bridge is known as the tunnel of light.

Uh Oh!

That’s right!

Alien Interview

This is what the type-1 grey extraterrestrial had to say…

Eventually The Domain discovered that a wide area of space is monitored by an "electronic force field" which controls all of the IS-BEs in this end of the galaxy, including Earth.  

The electronic force screen is designed to detect IS-BEs and prevent them from leaving the area.

If any IS-BE attempts to penetrate the force screen, it "captures" them in a kind of "electronic net".  

The result is that the captured IS-BE is subjected to a very severe "brainwashing" treatment which erases the memory of the IS-BE. 

This process uses a tremendous electrical shock, just like Earth psychiatrists use "electric shock therapy" to erase the memory and personality of a "patient" and to make them more "cooperative".

On Earth this "therapy" uses only a few hundred volts of electricity.    However, the electrical voltage used by the "Old Empire" operation against IS-BEs is on the order of magnitude of billions of volts!  This tremendous shock completely wipes out all the memory of the IS- BE. 

The memory erasure is not just for one life or one body.  It wipes out all of the accumulated experiences of a nearly infinite past, as well as the identity of the IS-BE!

The shock is intended to make it impossible for the IS-BE to remember who they are, where they came from, their knowledge or skills, their memory of the past, and ability to function as a spiritual entity.  

They are overwhelmed into becoming a mindless, robotic non-entity.

After the shock a series of post hypnotic suggestions are used to install false memories, and a false time orientation in each IS-BE.

This includes the command to "return" to the base after the body dies, so that the same kind of shock and hypnosis can be done again, and again, again -- forever. 

The hypnotic command also tells the "patient" to forget to remember.

What The Domain learned from the experience of this officer is that the "Old Empire" has been using Earth as a "prison planet" for a very long time -- exactly how long is unknown -- perhaps millions of years.

And this the the critical part…

So, when the body of the IS-BE dies they depart from the body. 

They are detected by the "force screen".

They are captured.

They are "ordered" by hypnotic command to "return to the light".  

So thus you have this issue. How do you get off from the Exit Template as a disincarnate entity, yet still avoid the “Old Empire” traps?

Evasion and Escape

The Type-1 grey extraterrestrial continued on…

The idea of "heaven" and the "afterlife" are part of the hypnotic suggestion -- a part of the treachery that makes the whole mechanism work. 

So, the idea of a “Heaven” and a life in Heaven is part of this entire illusion.

To me what this sounds like is that (he / she / it) is saying that being a disincarnate entity does not NEED to enter a tunnel of light to proceed any further. That, the access to other “places” in the non-physical worlds is obtainable without entry to Heaven.

But…

So, when the body of the IS-BE dies they depart from the body. 

They are detected by the "force screen".

They are captured.

They are "ordered" by hypnotic command to "return to the light". 

We, as consciousness, must figure out a way to avoid the “electronic force screen, get captured and go into the light for memory erasure and reprogramming.

Mind Blown!

Now, long time readers to MM will recognize this next  little graphic. I used it in describing how consciousness enters the MWI from Heaven…

Remember this?

The consciousness is connected to the soul by a device. This device is known as consciousness.
Consciousness is the passageway or “tunnel” that connects the physical reality to the soul.

Here, I stated that the MWI was a bubble inside of a bigger universe known as Heaven.

And that the Soul resided inside of Heaven.

And thus our consciousness creates a path resembling a tunnel to get back to our Soul within Heaven.

But I no longer believe this.

I actually believe the Type-1 grey extraterrestrial that was interviewed in “Alien Interview”.

Reincarnation

Also from an earlier MM post.

If you look at this, it seems clear that the common denominator is that…

…going to Heaven always starts the injection process into a physical body as part of the reincarnation process.

The reincarnation process and procedure.

The extraterrestrial reports…

After the IS-BE has been shocked and hypnotized to erase the memory of the life just lived,  the IS-BE is immediately "commanded", hypnotically, to "report" back to Earth, as though they were on a secret mission, to inhabit a new body.  

Each IS-BE is told that they have a special purpose for being on Earth.

But, of course there is no purpose for being in a prison -- at least not for the prisoner.

Animal Heaven

As far as I am aware of pets, and animals do not enter a “tunnel of light” to go to their respective Heavens. And they do retain all their memories and other experiences when they reincarnate. This is true for dogs, for cat and for horses.

  • Animals do not enter a tunnel of light and retain their memories and self.
  • Humans enter a tunnel of light and lose their memories and get re-injected fresh with no prior knowledge.

The only exceptions seem to be young men, who were killed and then reinserted to the MWI quickly without further processing. They remember their prior life but not the earlier ones.

Failure to go to Heaven

Let’s look at what happens when the consciousness fails to go back to Heaven.

This is what happens…

So the immediate effect is that you stick to your Exit Template.

The Guardian Angel / Mantid

I can tell you that you DO NOT NEED to enter the “Tunnel of Light” to meet your “Guardian Angel” (otherwise known as a Mantid). You can take an injection of DMA for a brief but immediate consultation. And because of this fact, it seems quite clear that they are associated with you within this MWI.

What are they?

Catholic religion say that they are sent from Heaven. And that they dwell in Heaven.

It also says that there were good Angels and Bad Angels.

And the Bad Angels were banished to Hell. While the Good Angels stayed in Heaven.

I really do not know how helpful this Intel is.

One thing is for certain, there is no reason at all why you cannot meet your “Guardian Angel” or Mantid upon you death from the Exit Template. Though, I do not know if that is a good or a bad thing.

I can tell you that in my dealings with them, I never left the Reality Universe, and entered “Heaven”.

At least not that I was aware of. As far as I recall, all my dealings has been on the strange worlds that surround our Reality Universe in the non-physical realms.

Therefore, you MUST conclude that you do not NEED to enter the “tunnel of light” to meet with Angels.

Rabbit Hole

I just had a podcast today where I discussed Rabbit Holes. The idea is that once we get on a “binge” chasing after something, we often lose our way. We get caught up in the what it’s, and elaborations, and create extensive background stories to figure everything out.

Such was the case with Y2k, Mad Cow, and Exploding cell phones near gas pumps.

Today it is 5G radiation, Draco Reptilians, and Vaxx mind control.

And we just don’t want to go down that “Rabbit Hole” in regards to what happens once you enter the “Tunnel of Light”. Which is the great works that Dr. Newton has explored. Instead, we must dwell on the scant references that are based on what happens if YOU DON’T enter the “tunnel of light”.

Remember

Escape is possible.

The net result is that an IS-BE is unable to escape because they can't remember who they are, where they came from, where they are. They have been hypnotized to think they are someone, something, sometime, and somewhere other than where they really are. 

The Domain officer who was "assassinated" while in the body of Archduke of Austria was, likewise, captured by the "Old Empire" force. Because this particular officer was a high powered IS-BE, compared to most, he was taken away to a secret "Old Empire" base under the surface of the planet Mars. 

They put him into a special electronic prison cell and held him there.

Fortunately, this Domain officer was able to escape from the underground base after 27 years in captivity.  

When he escaped from the "Old Empire" base, he returned immediately to his own base in the asteroid belt.  

His commanding officer ordered that a battle cruiser be dispatched to the coordinates of the base provided by this officer and to destroy that base completely.

This "Old Empire" base was located a few hundred miles north of the equator on Mars in the Cydonia region.

What to watch out for

Consider this warning…

The most basic method to capture and immobilize an IS-BE is through the use of various kinds of "traps". 

IS-BE traps have been made and put in place by many invading societies, such as the one that established the "Old Empire", beginning about sixty-four trillion years ago. 

Traps are often set up in the "territory" of the IS-BEs being attacked.

Usually a trap is set with the electronic wave of "beauty" to attract the interest and attention of the IS-BE. When the IS-BE moves toward the source of the aesthetic wave, such as a beautiful building or beautiful music, the trap is activated by the energy put out by the IS-BE.

One of the most common trap mechanism uses the IS-BE's own thought energy output when the IS- BE tries to attack or fight back against the trap.

The trap is activated and energized by the IS-BE's own thought energy.

The harder the IS-BE fights against the trap, the more it pulls the IBS toward it and keeps them "stuck" in the trap.

Sounds ingenious and difficult.

Conclusion

There is a lot of speculation and misinformation concerning Heaven and the non-physical reality. Most humans do not want to die, have amnesia, and then return to start all over again in a new life.

Fuck that!

If The Domain sent ships to every corner of the universe in search of "Hell", their quest could end on Earth. What greater brutality can be inflicted on anyone than to erase the spiritual awareness, identity,  ability, and memory that is the essence of oneself?

But looking at what we do know, and then extrapolating from reliable sources a picture emerges of what happens and how we can handle ourselves upon death.

We emerge from the Exit Template upon death and stay there in the non-physical reality until we enter the “tunnel of light”. Then, all indications are that what happens is exactly as described by the Type-1 extraterrestrial in “Alien Interview”, and we are recycled back to live yet another life all over again.

The Doctor Newton writings, as great as they are, approach this situation as normal. That this is just the way it is, and that there are no other options.

The Type-1 grey extraterrestrial says otherwise.

The question now becomes [1] How do we avoid the “tunnel of light”, [2] Avoid and evade the electronic “force field” that exists around this physical region, and [3] go “elsewhere” and stop the entire cycle of death and rebirth.

Stay tuned. I do have answers!

And they employ the Type-1 greys, and (possibly) your “Guardian Angel” the Mantid assigned to you.

Although the military base of the "Old Empire" was destroyed, unfortunately, much of the vast machinery of the IS-BE force screens, the electroshock / amnesia / hypnosis machinery continues to function in other undiscovered locations right up to the present moment.  The main base or control center for this "mind control prison" operation has never been found. So, the influences of this base, or bases, are still in effect.

And to this end, they seem receptive to assist…

The members of the lost Battalion and many other IS-BEs on Earth, could be valuable citizens of The Domain...

Unfortunately, there has been no workable method conceived to emancipate the IS-BEs from Earth.

... until such time as the proper resources can be allocated to locate and destroy the "Old Empire" force screen and amnesia machinery and develop a therapy to restore the memory of an IS-BE."

I do believe that now is that time.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this one in my Heaven Index here…

Heaven

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I also have many more posts like this one in my Movie Index here…

MOVIES

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Movie Review of cannibal women in the avocado jungle of death

Col Mattel: "Avocados are vital to this nation's security interests. With the communists already in control of Nicaragua and Guatemala and El Salvador strife with revolution California is the last secure supply of Avocados in the free world. We're on the verge of a major Avocado gap!" 

Introduction

Life is often too serious. So, perhaps the best solution is to relax, and look at something silly. And there is perhaps nothing sillier than what Hollywood produces these days. And so, let’s look at one of the “crown jewels” of Hollywood.

Better than reading American “news”.

The Characters

  • Dr. Margo Hunt – Shannon Tweed! Professor of Feminist Studies.
  • Bunny – Every liberated woman’s nightmare, but she wants to be a feminist. This girl has more outfits than you can shake a stick at.
  • Jim – Bill Maher! Inept guide who once had a one night stand with Margo.
  • Dr. Kurtz – Another feminist, author of “Smart Women, Stupid Insensitive Men.” Throws herself into a pool of Piranhas in the end.
  • Colonel Mattel – Head of the National Security Commission on Avocado Affairs. He has one eye.
  • Piranha Women – Savage feminists who believe men should be killed and eaten with guacamolle dip.
  • Barracuda Women – Savage feminists who believe men should be killed and eaten with clam dip.
The plot is straight out of California.

The Plot

Talk about strange and wonderous things!

This film is full of camp, not only is southern California transformed into wild avocado jungle but it is inhabited by man eating feminists! Shannon Tweed, whose breasts have starred in numerous films, is a teacher of women’s studies!

Then of course there is Bunny, this girl is every teenage guy’s dream and every feminists nightmare – but she wants to be a progressive woman.

There are plenty of little gags here and there, most of them involving Maher and Bunny being boneheads.

Dr. Hunt is recruited by the U.S. Government to make liaison with the Pirahna Women and hires Jim as her guide.

After encountering vicious hippos, catfish, and Donnahews (men who knit and cook) the explorers discover the Pirahna women are led by a savage ex-feminist and poised to wage war!

Bunny nearly joins the cannibals but is unable to complete the initiation rite, which involves her making love to then consuming Jim.

Everything works out in the end though, Kurtz is slain, Jim and Bunny marry, and Dr. Hunt returns to her college.

A fun film with plenty of women running around in leather loincloths and tops.

Bunny: "Well, sometimes when I'm with a guy I wish that he would tie me up with red licorice ropes and then spank me...and then he'd eat the ropes... and then he'd free me...and then we'd make love while the philharmonic played 'Bolero.'" 

Things I learned…

  • Most of southern California is virgin jungle.
  • Girls just want to tear men into strips and eat them with gaucamolle dip.
  • An hour and a half of feminine nonsense punctuated with half-nude women is tolerable.
  • Bill Maher is the last real man but he looks fairly effeminate in a white neck kerchief.
  • There are leopards living wild in California.
  • Lost female tribes speak French.
  • If given a choice between Bill Maher or Shannon Tweed in their underwear I would pick the latter.
  • Bunny has a damn lot of clothes, what is up with this girl?
Goodness!

Stuff to watch out for

  • 3 mins – RANDOM GRATUITOUS BREAST SHOT!
  • 4 mins – Pretty pale skin for living in a jungle her whole life.
  • 14 mins – Now this is a shirt.
  • 18 mins – That’s a pretty small barrel for a .44 Magnum, maybe it’s a 44 Magnum divided by 2?
  • 19 mins – Bunny in one of many outfits, where she keeps them nobody knows.
  • 38 mins – Mallards in a tropical rain forest?
  • 46 mins – Just conjuring up cases of beer huh? But why Old Milwaukee? Ugh.
  • 75 mins – The compound must be right on the international date line, one side is day the other night.
Jim: "Okay, let's see...so she's going to make love to me, that's, that's good - but she's going to kill me and eat me, that's bad." 

Movie Clip..

Ugh. If there is ever a moment to capture, it is Bill Maher accusing Shannon Tweed of being a cannibal feminist. He makes a convincing argument. 

Do you want more?

Are you sure?

I have many more posts like this one in my Movie Index here…

MOVIES

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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The REAL reason why China converted all the for-profit schools to non-profit business entities

If you have been paying a little attention at the International scene, you will be aware that China “clamped down” on the for-profit school model that was working inside of China. By the singular ‘stroke of a pen”, many Chinese billionaires suddenly lost a ton-load of money. And the West (read: America and the UK) are all in Shock. “What are they thinking” they holler.

They don’t “get it”. They do not understand. They think that making billions of dollars in profits is a sign of success and vibrancy. But no. It is not.

Again, China is showing the world, that it’s primary role is to take care of it’s citizens first. And if a few billionaires are crushed in the process, then so be it.

China’s hammer blow to private education shows it will do whatever it takes to meet its goals

From HERE.  Tom Fowdy 26Jul21.

Perceived as promoting inequality and a hindrance to birth rates, tutoring in China has suddenly been transformed into a non-profit industry. It’s a ruthless reminder that Xi Jinping will always put the needs of society first.
.

In a spectacular display of government authority, China has, with the stroke of a pen, demolished its $120-billion private education industry by forcing it to reform into a non-profit initiative.

The move has cost at least one billionaire his fortune.

It follows a number of crackdowns waged by Beijing against various sectors of the economy which were deemed to contravene the national interest. The ruthlessness of such sudden decision-making has undoubtedly shocked Western observers and capitalist advocates, yet its purpose appears to be twofold.

As highlighted by Reuters, Beijing is dismantling a sector which is not only exacerbating the inequality of education among rich and poor, but is also increasingly perceived as an obstacle to the country’s fertility rates.

So now the hammer has come down on it as a social disruption. It shows that Beijing is prepared to do whatever it takes to meet its national goals, and is another example of how the Chinese Communist Party’s authority has stiffened against the creeping liberalization which the West once welcomed.

Education is of exceptional importance in east Asian societies, and is often considered a determining factor in a family’s status. Parents invest heavily in their children’s future, and as a result the systems in these countries often turn out to be extremely competitive, resulting in an intense commitment towards extra-curricular and out-of-school private study.

This has sparked the development of a huge private education and tutoring sector, with parents investing vast amounts of money to ensure that their children can be among the very best. It is admirable yet strenuous, and it inevitably has a knock-on effect on fertility rates, as each child effectively becomes a massive investment.

The example of neighboring South Korea, which is fully developed, illustrates how in a capitalist society, the zealous over-competitiveness of the education system is having negative effects on society. High-school-age children typically go to school, only to attend private ‘Hagwon’ classes afterwards, which often offer miserable working conditions for the teachers involved.

As a country that is developing fast, China has increasingly been heading in the same direction. Despite being a communist state, this has created a growing urban-rural divide, where the wealthy children of cities such as Shanghai are able to afford these educational boosters, but the poorer children of the provinces are left behind.

This is an obstacle for future growth.

Beijing also now sees this arrangement as dragging down its birth rate, which has become a national priority. A new white paper called for extensive reforms to enable people to be able to afford more children, including in education and healthcare.

As a result, Beijing has clamped down hard on this sector by instantaneously transforming it into a non-profit, sending shares plunging. The goal is not to end tutoring, but to make it more affordable and accessible to all, so the vices of inequality and capitalism cannot strangle society.

It’s a stark reminder that although China embraces market economics, it is nonetheless still a communist – state and under Xi Jinping, it is in many ways hardening its resolve to be so.

And this is, of course, precisely why the West does not like Xi.

The CPC chairman has reversed the trajectory of liberalisation in society, which Western observers once hoped would see China ‘evolve’ into a democracy. Instead, Xi has centralized and consolidated CPC rule.

His strategy is not so much tyranny, as has been caricatured, but based on an increasing belief that if China’s problems are to be overcome, the political will invested into it needs to more resolute.

The education saga helps explain why.

If the private education system was simply allowed to spiral out of control as a capitalist initiative – which is acceptable from a Western point of view – it would become an obstacle for the country’s other socio-economic goals and development.

Increasingly, we see this kind of ruthlessness shape Xi’s leadership of the country – such as at the start of the pandemic, when he imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, which was condemned by the West at the time, yet ultimately paid off.

Although the uncompromising nature of the Xi era has put China on a collision course with the West, it nonetheless may be what the country truly needs to move forward.

Many of his actions are arguably ‘necessary evils’ in the pursuit of a longer strategy, even if one believes they are morally troubling or even unacceptable.

The South Korean model of education is a warning sign of what can happen if an over-competitive educational culture is superseded by the demands of profit. Xi has just made sure this will not happen in China. It shows how the state is continuing to dominate Chinese society and drive forward its vision for the future, even if it means culling billionaires along that road.

Tutoring, healing, feeding humans, providing water and energy should be non profit. Why? 

Why should someone profit by providing basic services? 

Tell me why? 

Remark, non profit does not mean low wages nor free... it could mean efficient, fair, good and appreciated by customers, who would choose the best for them.
Hear! Hear!
Well I agree with the Chinese President because he believes that every child should have equal opportunity at the educational level. 

A poor family cannot afford expensive private tutoring maybe leaving the child from that poor family at a disadvantage when it comes to performance in exams, and the opportunity for a place at university. 

This is the best way to produce the best talent and China as a country will benefit in the future because of this policy.
I have always believed that countries should provide free education based on ability especially in science, technology, maths and medicine. Let them pay for their airy fairy degrees themselves. This is exactly what farmers have done forever, cultivate for best yield.
A brilliant management move by China. 

As it will stop a lot of inequalities, people will blend better with 0ne streamline education, much of one class people, unlike in many countries private schools with troublesome, violent separate races, of different castes. And private schools tend to stretch the boundaries with different courses, subjects and outlandish thinking---not good for a society. 

So much better to have one good public system only- let China show the way. The benefits for all people are ENORMOUS. I bet more than half of the people in the world will applaud 'the one education system.'
The corrosive capitalist mindset will surely turn China into a failed state like the US. It is a relief to see China protect itself and its people from the cancer that will subvert China and lead to its fall. 

Keeping an eye on the pro-West cabals inside China will protect it from suffering the same fate as the Soviet Union. Learn from History!

American and Western media are shocked!

And you can tell how they just don’t have a clue as to what is going on. Reading it, it sounds so “breathless”, “gasping”, “exasperated”, and “frustrated”. Read this article from HERE.

Jeeze! Get a fucking life woman.

I highlighted the “kill words and phrases“.

Can you possibly tell me that this wasn’t processed through AI to develop a thoroughly negative impression of China? And this is just one example of how Americans are manipulated to hate and demonize China.

Check it out. Learn something.

China is extending its regulatory storm from tech to education

Just as China’s regulatory storm against big tech came abruptly and brutally, Beijing’s deepening crackdown on private education companies is plunging the entire sector into an existential crisis.

China’s State Council and the Party’s central committee have jointly issued a set of rules (link in Chinese) aimed at curtailing the sprawling sector that has flourished thanks to massive funding from global investors and ever increasing spending from families fighting to help their children gain a better footing in life. After years of high growth, the size of the after-school tutoring sector has reached upwards of $100 billion, of which online tutoring services account for around $40 billion.

“The timing is also interesting as it coincides with the crackdown on the tech companies, and further confirms the intention of the government to regain control [of] and restructure the economy,” said Henry Gao, an associate professor of law at Singapore Management University, referring to Beijing’s sweeping regulatory overhaul of tech companies including Alibaba and Tencent, which have either been fined for monopolistic practices, ordered to give up their exclusive rights in certain sectors, or, in the case of Didi, have fallen afoul of national security rules.

China’s “double reduction” policy

The rules, released over the weekend, aim to ease homework and after-school study hours for students, which the policy dubbed the “double reduction.” They stipulate that companies teaching subjects covered in primary and middle school, which are compulsory in China, should register as “nonprofit institutions,” essentially banning them from making returns for investors. No new private tutoring firms can register, while online education platforms also need to seek new approval from regulators despite their previous credentials.

Meanwhile, companies are also banned from raising capital, going public, or allowing foreign investors to hold stakes in the firms, posing a major legal puzzle for funds like US firm Tiger Global and Singapore state fund Temasek that have invested billions in the sector. In a further blow to China’s ed-tech startups, the rules also say that the education department should push for free online tutoring services across the country.

The companies are also banned from teaching on public holidays or weekends.

Double-digit reductions in Chinese stocks

The looming rules, first reported by Bloomberg last Friday (July 23), immediately led to a sell-off last week in US-listed veteran education players such as New Oriental Education & Technology and TAL Education. In trading in Hong Kong today, where Oriental floated a secondary listing last year, shares of the company plunged 47% today. Meanwhile, Larry Chen, the former schoolteacher who founded Gaotu Techedu, a major online education player, fell out of the ranks of China’s billionaires.

Major education companies have been quick to say they will comply with the new government rules. New Oriental, the largest Chinese player in this space, said that the new regulations will “have material adverse impact on after-school tutoring services, a sentiment echoed by TAL.

The regulatory developments also spurred a broader $2 billion selloff in Chinese stocks, as the bar on foreign investment for education firms coupled with the crackdown on foreign IPOs after ride-hailing giant Didi confirmed to foreign investors just how exposed their investments are from China’s regulatory actions. Social media and gaming Tencent was down 7.7% in Hong Kong today after China told it to unwind its monopoly on exclusive music licensing rights, while food delivery giant Meitu was down nearly 14% after Chinese regulators today ordered better protections for delivery workers.

Why is China cracking down on education?

While the harshness of the new measures is surprising, the fact that they were coming wasn’t. In March, president Xi Jinping called after-school tutoring services a “social problem,” and in May he again lashed out at the industry’s “disorderly development.” Following Xi’s criticism of the sector, authorities set up a dedicated department to supervise it, including examining tutor qualifications and fees, as well as imposing a ban on teaching preschoolers primary school materials.

In addition to Beijing’s desire to put the brakes on tech sectors that it believes expanded too chaotically, the turn to education indicates the government’s worries about China’s dropping birth rate. One of the major purposes of the new rules is to “effectively ease the anxieties of parents,” as well as reduce family spending on education, according to the government document. A major obstacle for Chinese citizens to have more than one child is the sheer cost of doing so, and in particular the difficulty of securing a quality education, which authorities promised to address in May, when introducing the third-child policy.

One Chinese teacher Quartz spoke to noted that it may be middle-class families who feel this policy the most, given they are most likely to push their kids into tutoring. Affluent families, after all, can still engage private tutors or send their children abroad to elite schools.

“The new rules will benefit those who are in the grassroots class that don’t have much time or energy to supervise children’s studies,” said the teacher. “But for people like us who are in the middle-class bracket, we will be hit the hardest.”

The next target of China’s infinite crackdown

The new rules are yet another razor-sharp warning to global investors that high returns from investment in China Inc can turn into huge losses overnight.

Yuanfudao, one of China’s largest online tutoring service startups, raised $2.2 billion in two funding rounds partly led by Tencent in October, pushing its valuation to over $15.5 billion. But now it is unclear what will happen to the stakes held by investment firms, especially foreign ones, after the new rules dashed hopes of cashing out through upcoming IPOs.

“This incident highlights the crucial importance for global investors to have people who understand China, who can decipher investment risks from minor nuances in mundane government documents…Any company that wish to operate in China should put China’s regulatory uncertainties as the biggest risk factor,” said Gao, the professor.

The education sector is not the only one that needs to worry about government scrutiny, however.

On Weibo, many commentators have pointed at the housing market, whose skyrocketing prices have been cited often by citizens as a major difficulty to having children, as the next target of crackdown. In an analysis, Chinese financial columnist Jin Lun argues that any industry that is seen as contributing to people delaying having children will be a potential target. “High housing prices will also be cracked down as an ‘enemy’ that has been weighing down the birth rate. While the industry will continue to exist to meet demand, there is basically no hope of continuing to see housing prices rise,” wrote Jin.

Conclusion

This little article combines two other articles. The first was one from RT written by a long time Chinese observer. He describes what is going on and why. China is trying to avoid the “death traps that has so violently polluted the West.

The second article is how the event is “reported” in the American “news”. In this case MSM. It’ reads like a breathless hysterical document, and when you highlight the “Kill Phrases and words” the enormous density of them is strongly suggestive of AI processing.

How American “news” is written.

And as I have reported in the past, the “millions of dollars” to “control the anti-China” narrative funded by neocons is pretty relentless. This is just one such example. Can you possibly imagine what others might be?

Currently, Western Media is mostly inundated with lies about China since it's being demonized as the Enemy du Jour by the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals, so much of what's published is rubbish. 

...Chinese media has much greater credibility. I'll close by saying this older publication detailing China's national plan for implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as promoted by the UN contains the underlying rationale for many of China's policies.

Posted by: karlof1 | Jul 26 2021 20:32 utc

Meanwhile, in China, all is good.

I took some videos today. Enjoy. It’s a video (in five parts) of me walking out of my house, down the street, and getting a breakfast at Burger King. It’s everyday MM, but it will give you all a glimpse of what the “real” China is like.

Video One – Out the door

Video Two – Outside the Complex.

Video Three – Down the street.

Video Four – Burger King

Video Five – Past the quarantine zone.

Some thoughts…

I was in China teaching English in universities and to private students for much of the last fifteen years. I tried to go to a different province every year in an effort to understand China better. My subject was Oral English, and so my classes were entirely conversation. 

Some things I saw:

1) Chinese generally are intensely patriotic although they may disagree with certain aspects of Chinese systems.

2) Class leaders and local leaders are ELECTED. Higher level leaders are selected by committees.

3) Chinese fashion looks longingly Westward, imitating hip-hop and clothing and even playing some latest Western hits to attract people into stores.

4) China has 95% eliminated paper and coin currency.

5) Chinese somehow think Western faces are more beautiful. Nose and eye jobs are common. I tell them their features are considered beautiful in the West. They are unfazed. 

6) A mask is commonly worn for issues like a big pimple, a cough, or heavy pollution.

7) People generally follow rules without a problem, except when they don't. Cheating happens.

8) China has large land masses of designated minority areas with nominal or actual autonomous government. The population in these areas is not large, however. 

9) Many many of those pushing their children in after school programs are hoping their children can go study abroad, and even maybe move abroad eventually.

10) Chinese by and large don't know how high their standard of living is compared to other areas. The world ranking don't actually compare cost of living. With good public transportation, well-planned neighborhoods, cheap medical care and top notch education, I admire China.


Posted by: HelenB | Jul 26 2021 23:19 utc | 63

China resembles the America that I grew up in.

What America was.

Not the America of today, a land ruled by psychopaths, serviced by zombie-serfs and slaves, and decay all around.

This situation, where the stark difference is a “bitch slap” to the American government, the American leadership, and the American structure is too alarming. And the evil, corrupt leadership dos not like it one single bit.

America used to be a land with factories. Real. Honest to goodness factories. Places where things, parts were fabricated and made. Like this…

America used to have real factories.

Today, America has precious few factories. Most of what constitutes as a factory (on the government listings) are best described as “design centers”, and “corporate headquarters”. The buildings look nice, and it’s all so shiny, new and clean. But, it’s a land of cubicles, and accountants. Of lawyers, and Human Resources. It’s staffed by finance and marketing types. Very few actual engineers or workers.

Anyways…

You have heard it all before. Haven’t you?

It just makes me want to get with a beloved pet, a cat and just hang out or snuggle.

Just some pictures of people snuggling with their cats…

Snuggle 1.

Snuggle 2.

Snuggle 3.

Snuggle 4.

Snuggle 5.

 

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my New Beginnings index here..

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Articles & Links

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The Monroe Institute (narrated) Positively Ageless Self-hypnosis session (full)

This article contains audio files developed by the Monroe Institute. This session is titled “Positively Ageless”. It is a self-hypnosis session designed to reinvigorate the mind, consciousness, spirit and body. It is narrated and walks the listener into deep hypnosis.

This post contains Hemi-Sync music / audio tracks.

Hemi-Sync is a method of control that uses sounds to center the activity in the brain. When the brain is fully centered, it becomes easier to exist within this reality. Or even more specifically, easier to be able to use your consciousness to control your brain.

The files are FLAC files. Not MP3.

They should play on almost all cell phones and computers. If you have any doubt you can probably download an APP that will allow you to listen to them.

MP3 is the most popular format while FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a less known alternative. The main difference between the two is in how they compress the audio information. MP3 is a lossy format where parts of the audio information that people are not likely to hear are discarded. On the other hand, as the name suggests, FLAC is lossless.

-Difference Between MP3 and FLAC | DifferenceBetween

Hemi-Sync contains frequencies and audio wavelengths that are traditionally considered as “unnecessary” and thus is often removed using an MP3 format to cut down on the file size. That is why they are in the FLAC format.

MP3 vs. FLAC

This Post

This article consists of four audio files that needs to be listened to in sequence.

You need to do so in a quiet area where you will be undisturbed for one hour. And you need to put on headphones, or ear buds to transmit the sounds directly in a balanced method to your brain. You will need to lie down, or sit up, depending on your preference.

The audio track engages the listener to Hemi-Sync, and gives them an experience that is a type of self-hypnosis. You simply relax and listen to the woman “talk” you into a state of relaxation. For some people they find this particular set of music very relaxing and calming. For others, who prefer an over-wrought mind, find it uncomfortable.

The links will each download a ZIP file. Just place it where you want, and copy the files in order, to the player of your preference. You should listen to them in order in one sitting. It will be around a half and hour of listening.

This is an introductory post to give you an idea of how the brain / consciousness centering activity works.

Positively Ageless (Full Package)

These files tend to be large, so I would suggest downloading them one at a time. Otherwise you might have your browser crash or go *tilt*.

Each exercise is a “stand alone” session. They typically last around 40 minutes or so. It starts by walking you into a trance, then performing the functional task at hand, and then walking you up and out of the trance. I would imagine that you might want to perform one exercise one day, and then the next one the day after that. It’s all up to you.

The files

This is the instruction booklet that comes with the five files. It tells you what the “Positively Ageless” session is supposed to accomplish, and how best to listen and perform the associated exercises with it. It is a fundamental component to the five audio tracts listed above.

Important note

This particular singular file is a nice “kit” that you listen to to relax and settle your soul. It is perfect for undoing the noise, the “news” and the hassles of daily life. It serves as a “reset button” role in re-centering the position of your consciousness within your brain. It is an absolute necessity if you really want your affirmation prayers to work efficiently.

You need to lie down to maximize the effect, and you need to wear headphones or ear-buds for the effect to manifest. You just cannot simply have it playing as noise in the background. It will not work that way. The ONLY way that this will work is if you are wearing headphones (ear buds), and lying down on the bed.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Hemi-Sync Sub-Index here;

Hemi-Sync

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Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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The Monroe Institute – The Journey Home (full)

This is an introductory post. This article provides a special audio track to assist the interested person in exploring the non-physical world, calming the mind and body, and refreshing the personal energy that we all posses.

This post contains Hemi-Sync music / audio tracks. Hemi-Sync is a method of control that uses sounds to center the activity in the brain. When the brain is fully centered, it becomes easier to exist within this reality. Or even more specifically, easier to be able to use your consciousness to control your brain.

The files are FLAC files. Not MP3.

They should play on almost all cell phones and computers. If you have any doubt you can probably download an APP that will allow you to listen to them.

MP3 is the most popular format while FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a less known alternative. The main difference between the two is in how they compress the audio information. MP3 is a lossy format where parts of the audio information that people are not likely to hear are discarded. On the other hand, as the name suggests, FLAC is lossless.

-Difference Between MP3 and FLAC | DifferenceBetween

Hemi-Sync contains frequencies and audio wavelengths that are traditionally considered as “unnecessary” and thus is often removed using an MP3 format to cut down on the file size. That is why they are in the FLAC format.

MP3 vs. FLAC

This Post

This is an introductory post. This particular “kit” is a singular FLAC file from “The Monroe Institute”. It contains Hemi-Sync technology and is used to help people access their non-physical reality.

It engages the listener to Hemi-Sync, and gives them an experience as to what consciousness centering is all about. Do not expect any great experiences, enlightenment or seeing visions. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, it retrains the brain to be better organized. For some people they find this particular set of music very relaxing and calming. For others, who prefer an over-wrought mind, find it uncomfortable.

The link will download a ZIP file. Just place it where you want, and copy the files in order, to the player of your preference. You should listen to them in order in one sitting. It will be around a half and hour of listening.

This is an introductory post to give you an idea of how the brain / consciousness centering activity works.

The Journey Home (Full Package)

dBpoweramp Release 16.6 Digital Audio Extraction Log from 15 January 2020 08:43

Drive & Settings
----------------

Ripping with drive 'E: [PLDS - DVD-RW DH16AESH ]', Drive offset: 6, Overread Lead-in/out: No
AccurateRip: Active, Using C2: No, Cache: 1024 KB, FUA Cache Invalidate: No
Pass 1 Drive Speed: Max, Pass 2 Drive Speed: Max
Ultra:: Vary Drive Speed: No, Min Passes: 2, Max Passes: 4, Finish After Clean Passes: 2
Bad Sector Re-rip:: Drive Speed: Max, Maximum Re-reads: 34

Encoder: FLAC -compression-level-0 -verify

Extraction Log
--------------

Track 1: Ripped LBA 0 to 200676 (44:35) in 2:22. Filename: C:\Temp\The Journey Home\01 - The Journey Home._
AccurateRip: Accurate (confidence 2) [Pass 1]
CRC32: C56179A5 AccurateRip CRC: 05CC96D6 (CRCv2) [DiscID: 001-00030fe4-00061fc9-020a7301-1]
AccurateRip Verified Confidence 2 [CRCv2 5cc96d6]
AccurateRip Verified Confidence 2 [CRCv1 c03ec5f5]

--------------

1 Tracks Ripped Accurately

The files

Important note

This particular singular file is a nice “kit” that you listen to to relax and settle your soul. It is perfect for undoing the noise, the “news” and the hassles of daily life. It serves as a “reset button” role in re-centering the position of your consciousness within your brain. It is an absolute necessity if you really want your affirmation prayers to work efficiently.

You can play it while you are walking or resting.

I think that resting is best, but you need to wear headphones or ear-buds for the effect to manifest. You just cannot simply have it playing as noise in the background. It will not work that way. The ONLY way that this will work is if you are wearing headphones (ear buds), and either resting, exercising or walking.

With the best (by far) way to get the full effect of the system is to lie down in bed and allow the system to work.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Hemi-Sync Sub-Index here;

Hemi-Sync

.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

Metallicman Donation
Other Amount:
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A no frills edition of Chinese girls – a gaggle of girls to google, oogle and enjoy

Here is part ten of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. This particular collection consists of a very average selection of attractive Chinese girls, and you all might just be “blown away” by the content. Indeed, there are some favorites in here.

As I said, this is a “no frills” presentation. Download the zip file and open it up. Inside will be a bunch of pretty girls videos. I do hope that you enjoy them.

Of course, the idea behind this presentation is to show that the people in China, and most especially the girls, are good and fine folk that do not resemble anything that is being portrayed in the American “news” media. And when you watch the girls, listen to the (mostly) Chinese pop music, you will start to notice something…

…they are happy. They are well fed, the buildings all look like they are well maintained. They eat well, the night life is alive, families look normal, and these none of that crime, and LGBT ram-rodding down your throats like you would see in the West. It’s refreshing.

This is China. It’s the “real deal”.

And for “new comers”  it tends to be a bit of a shock. As they had no idea that Chinese women looked like this. They still hold on to the fantasies that are well promoted in the American press. But you know… it’s all a fiction.

Here’s what the girls in China look like…

Group AA

First up is this bevy of beauties. Some nice all around girls. For certain. The folder and files tend to be on the large size. Sorry for that.

You can get the zip file HERE. 490MB. It’s large and might take some time to download.

AA – A “buffalo wings” kind of girl

Here’s one of the girls from the mix. She reminds me of a dish that used to be common in the United States. They were called “Buffalo wings”, and you would get this basket of deep fried chicken wings and a small saucer of blue cheese dressing to dip them in.

Chicken wings girl.

I well remember one time in Syracuse New York, my wife (at that time) took me out to a restaurant on South Selina street, and we went to a (then famous) chain called “The Ground Round” and she bought me a set of eight “Buffalo wings” and clue cheese dressing to dip it in. The cost came to $120 something and just under her entire weekly pay check.

I wonder if the current crop of American leadership has ever had that experience? To live in a land where you work hard, and for your reward all you can afford is eight measly chicken wings. If you call that “exceptional government” then you have a hole in your head. China has a basic guideline that food, clothing, shelter, medical care, housing and clothing, as well as all government services should be affordable by 90% of the nation.

Anyways…

This girl reminds me of this basket of chicken wings.

And here is what a basket of chicken wings look like…

Buffalo wings.

By the way, does anyone know why this is called “finger food”, because sure as shit your fingers are gonna get messy eating these things.

Group BB

You can get the zip file HERE. 448MB. Again, it is a large file.

I tend to associate girls, women with food. It’s an association that I have, and I make no apologizes for it. Women are delicious, and so is food. Here’s some of my favorites from this group.

BB – Cream of Asparagus Soup girl

This lady reminds me of a nice bowl of cream of asparagus soup. With crackers, or those little “goldfish” crackers that you put in it. As well as a nice little mound of mild cheddar cheese, ground up and place don the top. And for some reason, I’m not quite sure why… A tall glass of mint iced tea.

Cream of asparagus soup girl.

If you compare her to the picture of an actual bowl of soup, you can easily see what I am talking about. Right? Or is it just me? This girl reminds me of this…

Cream of Asparagus Soup.

BB – (Not-a-Upside-down) banana split girl

This little cutie reminds me of an “banana split”. Served in a ceramic dish shaped like a boat, and a nice little flag on the top near the cherry.  Can’t you just imagine going to an ice cream parlor and sharing a split with her? I can. It would be wonderful.

(Not a Upside down) banana split girl.

Come on! Can’t you just picture yourself sharing a banana split with this lass, chatting and just handing out in a fine air conditioned ice cream parlor?

An “old fashioned” banana split.

BB – Poached eggs on toast girl

This little lass reminds me of a simple meal. Poached eggs on toast with salted butter, some peanut butter, chopped tomatoes, salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil. Oh, and orange juice. This is the kind of girl that is best enjoyed in the morning.

Poached eggs on toast girl.

This is a morning girl. And what is more, she is most certainly a poached eggs on toast kind of girl…

Great poached eggs on toast.

Group CC

You can get the zip file HERE. 299MB.

The following girl is representative of this particular group. She is most certainly a baked ziti lass.

CC – A Baked Ziti Lass

You would think that I would be eating baked ziti all the time. After all it’s cheap and delicious and it is easy to make and delicious if you take the time to add the proper meat, and cheese.  But guys, for me, that was not the case. I can never get it in China. And we tend to eat better than the cheapest foods that I grew up with. Further, I never ate it in prison, we mostly ate beans, global, artificial eggs and mashed turnips. So it’s been maybe two, possibly three decades since I enjoyed a fine well-made ziti dish.

And when I think of that dish I think of women like this. She is my ideal ziti girl.

My ideal ziti girl.

I can just see us going outside for some fresh night air, as the boisterous crowds in the orange lit interior carry on with singing, dancing and a clinking of glasses. Ziti is best served with wine; a nice red wine. And some crunchy Italian bread, some cheese, some olives, maybe some red lipstick on my collar…

…heh. heh.

And you know, maybe I’m wearing a nice tux. Not a rental. A custom fitted tux like the one I used to have years ago. Made out of a fine weave and dark blue material. Not a shawl collar. A nice set of cuff links and a chance to wear a very extraordinary bow tie. Maybe something in a vibrant red, or purple / blue pattern.

Oh, but I digress…

And here is what a deep baked ziti looks like…

Deep baked ziti.

CC – Australian Prawns girl

The largest shrimp that I have ever seen in the world come from Australia and they are called prawns. They are bout the size of a small chicken, and believe you me, they are delicious. It’s sort of like a cross between a lobster and a shrimp and so very tasty.

Well this girl reminds me of giant prawns.

On one of my trips to Australia, the staff took me out to a meal and we ate some prawns. they ordered two enormous prawns for me, and I surprised them by eating the entire things. Well, I was hungry!

Anyways, this girl reminds me of two giant prawns.

Giant prawns girl.

Australian prawns.

So very delicious.

Australian prawns.

Group DD

You can get the zip file HERE. 344MB.

The following is a notable girl from this collection…

I am always a “sucker” for a girl with a big smile on her face. The smile just attracts me to her. Smiles always do this. Don’t you know.

A smiling beauty.

Well…

I am going to call it “quits” for now. I hope that you enjoyed these tasty female delights and learned a little about China in the process. I have many more videos and I am going to post them when I get a chance.

Have a great day you all.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

Some videos of China taken by Metallicman in defiance of the Yahoo! report that China bloggers are being paid to say what we do

Yeah. It’s pretty silly. According to the MSM (American Main Stream Media) all those expats who talk about China, and show videos about China are lying. The real “truth” (they say) is that China is evil and dirty and nasty. So they warn their audiences to ignore anyone who is saying anything good about China.

Don’t believe me? Check THIS out…

"Some vloggers are suspected of co-operating with state-owned outlets to spread China's rhetoric to the world. But it's far from clear what really motivates them, or how effective this strategy is."

What strategy? We just film our lives and talk about our experiences. And those that don’t like it can howl all they want to.

It’s all so silly.

My Life

The following are some videos that I have taken as I live my life in Zhuhai, China. And I’ll just let you watch the videos and come to your own conclusions. This is what my life in China looks like.

I am not…

"...co-operating with state-owned outlets to spread China's rhetoric to the world."

I have spent 40 years in the United States, and 20 years in China. And I can tell you that my quality of life within China is SUBSTANTIALLY better than anything that the United States has.

And my videos show this.

It is so spellbindingly better, that I just cannot contain myself. All those things that I hated about America, but lived with, simply because I was told “there isn’t anything better” was a big fat lie.

And I am gonna shove that lie back in your faces.

A nice fish meal

Here’s one of my meals that I eat in China. This is a fish. It’s very tender, fresh, and tasty with all kinds of seasonings. I never had anything like this in the United States. At best I would get a small brook trout, or a river fish full of bones. But more often than not, it would be some kind of dethawed, deboned fish that was deep fried.

This is fresh fish. So tender. Cooked in spices and sauce. Eaten well with rice, and delicious vegetables.

Click on the picture to see the video.

Riding a Bus in Zhuhai China

Here’s a video that I took on a weekend when I rode a bus. It’s just a typical bus in China. Notice how quiet it is? Yes, all buses in China are electric and quiet. Notice the great air conditioning. Notice the relaxed atmosphere, and even though Coronavirus is pretty much under control, everyone is still wearing masks.

Lover’s Road

This is the road in front of my house. It’s called “Lover’s Road”, and many couples walk up and down it. I filmed it while riding a bus, and you can see one of the town bus stops in the front of the picture here.

Local Wines

I am not a “wine connoisseur” like you might find in the higher class circles of society. I just know my wines because I drink a substantial amount of wine all the time. Not the super expensive stuff. Just the low to mid quality stuff. And You could say that I am an expert on it. Not like there are “experts” who own a Ferrari, but rather “experts” because they work on the Ferrari’s.

Definition - What does Wine Connoisseur mean? A wine connoisseur is an individual who has deep knowledge of the subject of wine. This knowledge goes beyond knowing how to taste wine or having a deep appreciation. A seasoned connoisseur will, for instance, have the ability to assess a young wine and know its aging potential.

What is a Wine Connoisseur? - Definition from WineFrog

A school for one year old babies

In China, education starts early. Here is a school for toddlers up to three years old. The prices tend to be prohibitive for MM (personally), but I do like their programs and the subjects they teach and the general positive atmosphere. Click on the picture to watch the video.

Hunan Beef

I do enjoy a nice Hunan beef. This meat is cooked in tender little bite sizes and smothered in hot peppers which gives it that distinctive spicy flavor. I personally like it a lot.

Night time bus ride

This is the Jida city center area at around 8:00 pm at night. Jida is a section of Zhuhai where I happen to live. This video kind of shows what it is like at night. Notice all the people that are out. China is very, very safe. I personally believe that it is the safest nation on the planet.

Hunan Cauliflower

The best cauliflower is made Hunan style. It is cooked in bacon, with leeks, garlic, and spices. Very, very delicious.

A “birds eye view” of Jida in Zhuhai

This video is from Douxing. Also known as TicTok which is it’s “pale shadow” version available out in the West.

I live off to the left. This area is now being completely demolished. The road is being torn up and made into a nice lawn with walking paths. And there is a tunnel under construction that will go under this little hill and bypass all the traffic away from this park.

In fact, the entire sea coast is nothing but new construction for parks, malls, and scenic areas. In my entire time in the United States I have never, and I do mean NEVER, seen such an emphasis in parks, and human friendly free areas. In fact, the only thing that anyone ever cared for through my entire childhood was tearing down things to make money-making parking lots, and the like.

Outside of a mall at 6:00pm

This is the outside of one of the many malls in Zhuhai. The noise is the speaker telling people to line up and go through the temp checks, the QR location verification, the facial scanning, and the mask wearing prior to entering the mall.

To the right is a pile of construction machinery. They are a digging deep down. I suspect that it is part of the new Zhuhai to Zhongshan high speed rail, that will go underground in this section of the city. But I do not know for sure.

Notice the people. Do they seem like they are starving, and clamoring for “rescue” for the “American way of life”, and democracy™ and freedom™?

Cheaper than a cheap American “Value Meal” at Burger King

I eat very well in China. The food is good, tasty, prepared with care. There are no GMO’s. The establishments are sanitary, and clean, and the prices are cheap. Or said better, not exorbitant.

You see, the Chinese government believes that to serve the people best, they need to have affordable housing, affordable food, affordable medical care, and reasonable and affordable transportation. Which is quite unlike what is provided in America; the “for profit nation” where there is always a thousand tiny, tiny hands in your wallet. Check out the video…

And now for something different…

The USA has been probing Chinese defenses for years now. And China has “taken it on the chin”. But the latest bullshit about violating airspace and flying into Taiwan is pretty fucking ballsy and very dangerous. This next video is a depiction of an event that actually happened earlier this year (2021). Of course, you would never see this ever in the United States media.

Meanwhile in the United States…

My A#1 top posts are hard-running stuff on my SHTF indexes. Sure I get periodic hits on my KTV indexes, and some surprises out of the blue here and there. But the longest and most reliable source of new visitors are the SHTF articles. And the vast majority of the visitors come from America, and to a lessor extent Europe.

This video pretty much illustrates what Americans are “looking forward to”, and I am sure that it scares the living Dejesus out of them.

Putting it all together

I am absolutely convinced that American has been plundered by psychopathic personalities that took control of the government and “ran it into the ground”. They converted free citizens to a mixture of debit serfs, and slaves, and they are now scraping the bottom of the barrel (figuratively).  The endless spending on go-nowhere wars, the lack of infrastructure repair, the decline in education, and the rise of radical utopians, have all contributed to a dangerous slew of events.

What would normally occur at this juncture in time is that the people would rise up (one way or the other) and kill the leadership and start over fresh.

But the evil psychopaths in Washington DC know history, they might be evil, but they are not ignorant. So they have made it especially difficult for internal domestic resurrection. The only options that now lie available to them are;

  • Start World War III and direct the domestic anger outward to a figurehead. (Which is either China or Russia).
  • Or, a peaceful restructuring of the government like what happened with the Soviet Union to Russia.

What I am seeing is that Biden is trying to move America towards the second option, while there are enormously powerful self-interests inside of America that are pushing for the first option; World War III.

It’s a scary time for certain.

Discomfort is what happens as the population waltzes towards disaster. It happens each and every time. Consider the years leading up to the first American Civil War…

William  J. Cooper has written a magnificently researched account of the  political atmosphere that prevailed in the United States immediately  after the election of Abraham Lincoln and through the first shots of the  Civil War at Fort Sumter. 

What individual elements made up the call to  arms on both sides of the Mason Dixon line? 

Which persons were  conciliatory and which were belligerent? 

What contribution did the  nuances of the several political parties play in the mood of the  population? 

Was the Civil War inevitable no matter what action was taken  by Lincoln? 

Many  eminent  American Civil War historians tend to move  quickly throughout  the three year period preceding the onset of the War, as they move on  the War itself, however Wm. Cooper's work has  has  been devoted   entirely to a study of this critical era, and provides  significant  insight  as to the period's ultimate  result-- namely, the War itself.

Cooper   has  devoted  much effort to a study of the era's  significant  and   influential caste of characters, including an newspaper editor,  abolitionists, radical Republicans,, members of both houses of  Congress,and each of  the Presidents---both  sitting and  newly  -elected.. 

-Amazon reviews of "We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861" by Cooper, William J. (2012) Hardcover 

Examining the three prior Fourth Turnings may give us a window into where we stand and what may happen in the coming year.

We are in the thirteenth year of this Crisis. (The eleven-year anniversary was in September 2019.) Here we look at the three previous events.

  • The American Revolution Crisis
  • The Civil War Crisis
  • The Great Depression/World War II Crisis
A comparision of the last three "Fourth Turnings" in the United States.
A comparison of the last three “Fourth Turnings” in the United States. Full-scale war is shown in black. The vertical line running through them is 2019 when I made the graphic, and the comparative date in the previous turnings.
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You can see that in both the American Revolution crisis and the Civil War crisis, the wars took place BEFORE the target crisis date. And the events of World War II were immediately afterwards.
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If this was The Revolutionary War, we would be in the thick of it, right now and celebrating American independence. If we compare to the Civil war, you move the line over two years (2021) and you discover that we are in the middle of the “reconstruction period”. And if you compare to World War II, you would find that we are right before Pearl Harbor bombing and the destruction of the Pacific Fleet.
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Taking note of “The Fourth Turning” and the Strauss and Howe generational theory of predictive behavior in America, we note that their dates are close but seem to be off by a few years. In our case, the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle. That is three years later.Adjusting the Strauss and Howe dates to account for the delay in the catalyst, messes things up a bit. They predicted…

If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the  climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026. 

What will  America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning? History offers no  guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the  possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues,  from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume  that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible  tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary  hardship, but debasement and total ruin. 

Since Vietnam, many Americans  suppose they know what it means to lose a war. 

Losing in the next Fourth  Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could  mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even  our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own  ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of  societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or  beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.

There is a nice graphic that I composed for your purposes of planning out the next few years. I hope that it is helpful. Adding three years, gives us…

  • Crisis catalyst” in 2008.
  • Climax in 2023.
  • Resolution in 2029.

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But is that correct? Maybe it is really wrong…

Of course, you could argue the 2020 was the “climax” simply because it was one Hell of a shitty year. But you all know, it was a shitty year for everyone on the globe. Not just Americans. I argue that it was just foreplay for bigger stuff to come.

And it makes sense if you argue that 2020 was the climax. After all, if you include the “not ever reported” bio-weapons attacks as war, then the actual map looks like this…

But none of that matters. We are in the “thick of it” right now. We are smack dab in the middle of it.

We are in the middle of it right now.

Seriously, just because no one is reporting on what is actually going one doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. America carpet bombed China with eight (8x) strains of biological weapons from 2016 through to 2019 (John Bolton plan to create starvation), and three strains of human-lethal bio-weapons in 2020. Not to mention all the other “hybrid-war” activities that they were involved in.

We are not out of the danger zone.

But I think that we are gliding in and on the hot zone.

Therefore, we are living in the tranquil period that America was in right before World War II.  We cannot be passive about it. We must all conduct our affirmation prayers, and make sure that the nightmare that is being set up is contained to an area outside of our personal lives.

And with this in mind, now we can see why it is important for the American (and British) “news” to demonize China. As the dream of a long drawn out war in far-away distant lands, safe and protected is an ignorant “pipe dream”. But that is why us “bloggers” and expats in China are all disparaged.

We upset the narrative that nuclear war is a good thing.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Vlog index here..

V-Log

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

Peach cobbler, hobos, and the story of the old railroad spur

Today, I am going to present a follow up article to my earlier post titled the “MM blue plate special”.  Here we are going to follow the same format, with articles, photos and short videos depicting various things in no particular order. I hope that you all enjoy it.

We will start with…

A lasagna girl

And boy oh boy is she ever! This is the kind of girl that you would spend the day browsing the malls, looking at dogs and cats, and then going home to a nice home-cooked lasagna with a plain, but simple, dry red Cabernet wine. (Oh, and a nice side of fresh crunchy bread with some soft spreadable cheese and well-salted butter.)

I can see us talking on a bridge, and just being playful under the trees. She’s just delicious!

And the sad thing is that she has no idea. And I am not nearby to tell her.

If she only knew. If she only knew.

A fine lasagna.

Seriously! Who would not want to eat this, drink some dry wine, and have a nice fun conversation with a friend or a member of the opposite sex?

Can you possibly believe that some people just do not enjoy lasagna? I know I know. But what can I say?

A fine lasagna.

Night life in China

America is so very quiet. Canada is so very quiet. Everyone is inside alone, watching televisions, playing on the computer or doing their own things. Meanwhile, China which is a very social nation, everyone is out and about. This is a pretty good video depiction of what it’s all pretty much like.

Night time China.

This is America

Well, Americans are so numb to what America is today, that the images are just “ho hum”, but when I show them to other people they are in shock. They say “What? Where is this? Syria? The Middle East? Nope. Just another average day in a typical American city.

The USA has a death wish

An American Naval Vessel is trying to provoke a war between the Philippines and China, and trigger USA involved.

From Daniel…

From Global times, July 12th :”The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces expelled a US Navy destroyer that trespassed into Chinese territorial waters in the South China Sea on Monday, the day that coincided with the fifth anniversary of the so-called South China Sea Arbitration ruling.

..Without authorization from the Chinese government, the US guided missile destroyer USS Benfold illegally trespassed into China’s territorial waters of Xisha on Monday, and the PLA Southern Theater Command organized maritime and aerial forces to track and monitor it and warned it away, Senior Colonel Tian Junli, spokesperson of the command, said in a statement released on the same day..

The Xisha Islands are inherent territory of China, and the US military’s move seriously violated China’s sovereignty and security, damaged peace and stability in the South China Sea, and violated international law and international relations norm, Tian said, noting that this marks another irrefutable evidence of US’ militarization in the region with navigational hegemony.”

The name of the ship ringed a bell, USS Benfold, It is named after a war hero, I think they even made a movie about him ,that was during the, drums please … the Korean War. Maybe it has a significance, maybe not.

I think and really believe that the USA is so out of control that it is going to really provoke a major catastrophic event that will be difficult to unravel.

This is what is going on from the Chinese point of view. Click on the picture for the video…

Here we have a BBC camera crew filming inside of America

America is on it’s death throes. It is thrashing around terribly, and the world needs calm and cool heads to prevail. First a provocation aimed at Russia. Didn’t happen. Then a provocation aimed at China. Didn’t happen. To me it seems that a major “False Flag” is in the works…

…only this time, if America tries this nonsense, both Russia and China will hit them hard. Look at the wasteland of what constitutes America today…

What happened to America?

Evil, self-centered, service-to-self psychopathic personalities took over. And they molded and reshaped the nation into their idea of utopia. Today it is a place where fear abounds, and people believe that they are doing well because the alternatives are far worse. It is a place where everything has a price, and no one ever has enough money because of a thousand little hands in your wallet.

Americans need to wake up to the reality that it’s all a big, big lie. Yes. America is a big, big lie. Check out this video…

The big lie.

Why? Intentional control of the minds of Americans

A 70-Year War on ‘Propaganda’ Built by the CIA
Cynthia Chung

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”
– William Shakespeare (The Tempest Act 1 Scene 2)

War has always depended on a reliable system to spread its propaganda. The Arthashastra written by Chankya (350-283 BCE) who was chief advisor to the Emperor Chandragupta (the first ruler of the Mauryan Empire) discusses propaganda and how to disperse and apply it in warfare. It is one of the oldest accounts of the essentialism of propaganda in warfare.

Propaganda is vital in times of war because it is absolutely imperative that the people, who often need to make the greatest sacrifices and suffer the most, believe that such a war is justified and that such a war will provide them security. To the degree that they believe this to be true, the greater the degree of sacrifice and suffering they are willing to submit themselves for said “promised security”.

It is crucial that when the people look at the “enemy” they see something sub-human, for if they recognise that said “enemy” has in fact humanity, the jig is up so to speak.

And thus we are bombarded day after day, hour after hour of reminders as to why the “enemy” is not human like us, not compassionate like us, not patient, just and wise like us.

No doubt, war has been a necessary response when tyranny has formed an army to fight for its cause, but I would put forth that most wars have been rather unnecessary and downright manipulated for the design of a small group of people.

During WWI, on Dec 25th 1914, something rather unexpected occurred and a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front took place between the French/British soldiers and the German soldiers. Some even ventured into “no man’s land”, given its name since none left it alive, to mingle with the “enemy” and exchange food and souvenirs. There were joint burial ceremonies and prisoner swaps. A game of football took place as well. It is said that these truces were not unique to the Christmas period but that they were much more widespread during the holiday season.

These fraternisations would understandably make it quite difficult to return to combat against one another…for no apparently good reason. Some units needed to be relocated since they had developed friendships with the opposing side and now refused to fight them.

The lesson was quickly learned and propaganda was heavily pumped down the throats of the Allied countries, and by the course of just a few years, they no longer viewed the Germans as human.

The CIA’s Family Jewels and Operation Mockingbird

For us to understand the implications of modern propaganda and how it is used in warfare today, our story starts post-WWII with Churchill’s announcement of the “Iron Curtain” which launched the Cold War and has kept the East and West divided to this day.

Quickly after the Cold War was announced by Churchill, it was necessary to create a fervor of fear and paranoia amongst the American people in order to have them quickly forget the fact that the Russians were their greatest allies during both WWI and WWII, and to replace it with the image of a ghoulish race of boogeymen.

If Americans were to remember that the Russians had fought valiantly during WWII and had paid by far the largest sacrifice to the cause, that they had in fact been their comrades in arms against the brutality of fascism, if this were remembered then the Cold War division could never occur, and that was something that could not be tolerated by Churchill and the Empire. Thus terror was unleashed on the American people and McCarthyism was given precedence over the people’s right to question and form conclusions for themselves. That sort of thing could not be tolerated when the “enemy” could be anywhere; they could be your neighbour, your child’s teacher, your co-worker…your partner.

In order to combat the “threat” of Soviet “propaganda” entering the U.S. and seducing Americans, Operation Mockingbird was created as a form of “control” over information dissemination during the period of McCarthyism. Operation Mockingbird was an “alleged” CIA program that was started in the early 1950s in order to control the narrative of the news. Though this role has never been confirmed entirely, in the CIA Family Jewels report compiled in the mid-1970s, it is confirmed that Project Mockingbird did exist as a CIA operation and that it was guilty of wire-tapping journalists in Washington.

At the helm of this project was none other than CIA Director Allen Dulles, an enemy of JFK, who by the early 1950s “allegedly” oversaw the media network and had major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. Its function was to have the CIA write reports that would be used by a network of cooperating “credible” reporters. By these “credible” reporters spreading the CIA dictated narrative, it would be parroted by unwitting reporters (mockingbirds) and a successful echo chamber would be created across the world.

The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), originally named Office of Special Projects but that was thought to conspicuous, was a covert operation wing of the CIA and was created by the United States National Security Council (NSC). For those who are unfamiliar with the origins of the NSC and its close relationship with the CIA, who was born on the same day, refer to my paper on the subject.

According to Deborah Davis’ biography of Katherine Graham (the owner of Washington Post), the OPC created Operation Mockingbird in response to addressing Soviet propaganda and included as part of its CIA contingency respected members from Washington PostThe New York TimesNewsweekCBS and others.

The Family Jewels report was an investigation made by the CIA to investigate…the CIA, spurred in response to the Watergate Scandal and the CIA’s unconstitutional role in the whole affair. The investigation of the CIA would include any other actions that were deemed illegal or inappropriate spanning from the 1950s-mid 1970s.

We are told “most” of the report was declassified on June 25, 2007 (30 years later) hoping that people would have lost interest in the whole brouhaha. Along with the release of the redacted report was included a six-page summary with the following introduction:

“The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s.”

The most extensive investigation of the CIA relations with news media was conducted by the Church Committee, a U.S. Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated the abuses committed by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS. The Church Committee report confirmed abundant CIA ties in both foreign and domestic news media.

It is very useful that there exists an official recognition that false news was not only being encouraged by the CIA under the overseeing of the NSC during the Cold War period, but that the CIA was complicit in actually detailing the specific narrative that they wanted disseminated, and often going so far as to write the narrative and have a “credible” reporter’s name stamped on it.

But the question begs, “Did the Cold War ever end?” and if not, why should we believe that the CIA’s involvement in such activities is buried in its past and that it has “reformed” its old ways?

Western Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys News

In order to answer this question, let us visit the sad case of Udo Ulfkotte. Udo Ulfkotte is a well-known German journalist and author of numerous books. He worked for 25 years as a journalist, 17 of which were for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), including his role as editor. In his 2014 book “Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys News” Ulfkotte goes over how the CIA along with German Intelligence (BND) were guilty of bribing journalists to write articles that either spun the truth or were completely fictitious in order to promote a pro-western, pro-NATO bent, and that he was one of those bought journalists.

In an interview, Ulfkotte describes how he finally built up the nerve to publish the book, after years of it collecting dust, in response to the erupting crisis in Ukraine stating

I felt that the right time had come to finish it and publish it, because I am deeply worried about the Ukrainian crisis and the possible devastating consequences for all of Europe and all of us…I am not at all pro-Russia, but it is clear that many journalists blindly follow and publish whatever the NATO press office provides. And this type of information and reports are completely one-sided”.

In another interview Ulfkotte stated:

it is clear as daylight that the agents of various Services were in the central offices of the FAZ, the place where I worked for 17 years. The articles appeared under my name several times, but they were not my intellectual product. I was once approached by someone from German Intelligence and the CIA, who told me that I should write about Gaddafi and report how he was trying to secretly build a chemical weapons factory in Libya. I had no information on any of this, but they showed me various documents, I just had to put my name on the article. Do you think this can be called journalism? I don’t think so.

Ulfkotte has publicly stated:

I am ashamed of it. The people I worked for knew from the get-go everything I did. And the truth must come out. It’s not just about FAZ, this is the whole system that’s corrupt all the way.

Udo Ulfkotte has since passed away. He died January 2017, found dead in his home, it is said by a hear t attack. His body was quickly after cremated and thus prevented any possibility of an autopsy occurring.

You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

(Note: This article was published March 14, 2020) The Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act is a bipartisan bill that was passed into law in December 2016, it was initially called Countering Information Warfare Act. It was included together with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This bill was brought into effect just weeks before Trump was to enter office….hmmm, foreshadowing much?

Soon after the 2016 U.S. election, the Washington Post led the charge asserting that it was due to Russian propaganda that the U.S. elections turned out the way it did, that is, that Hillary had somehow, inconceivably, lost to Donald Trump and that the American people had been turned against her like a child caught in the middle of a messy divorce case. But there is no need here to set the record straight on Hillary, when Hillary herself has done suffice damage to any illusion of credibility she once had. That ultimately not even Hillary could hide the fact that her closet full of skeletons turned out to be the size of a catacomb.

But we are told that citizens do not know what is best for one’s self. That they cannot be trusted with “sensitive” information and in accordance act in a “responsible” manner, that is, to have a strong enough stomach to do what is “best” for their country.

And therefore, fear not subjects of the land, for the Global Engagement Center (GEC) is here to make those hard decisions for you. Don’t know what to think about a complicated subject? GEC will tell you the right way!

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would allow for the Secretary of State to collaborate with the Secretary of Defense, and other Federal agencies in the year 2017 to create the Global Engagement Center (GEC). The GEC’s purpose in life is to fight propaganda from foreign governments and publicize the nature of ongoing foreign propaganda and disinformation operations against the U.S. and other countries.

Let us all take a moment to thank the GEC for such a massive task in the cause for justice all around the world.

The GEC had a very slow start in its first year, however, it has been gaining momentum in the last year under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who seems especially excited over the hiring of Lea Gabrielle as special envoy and coordinator of GEC.

Mike Pompeo was the CIA Director from 2017-2018. On April 15, 2019, Pompeo participated in a discussion at the Texas A&M University where he voluntarily offered the admission that though West Points’ cadet motto is “You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.”, his training under the CIA was the very opposite, stating “I was the CIA Director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses. (long pause) It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment”.

This is apparently the man for the job of dealing with matters of “truth” and “justice”.

Lea Gabrielle was approved for her position by Mike Pompeo, what are her “qualifications”? Well, Gabrielle is also CIA trained, and while assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), she “directed and conducted global clandestine strategic intelligence collection operations.” Gabrielle also “deployed in tactical anti-terrorist operations in hostile environments”. After 12 years of active duty service, Lea Gabrielle became a television news journalist, who worked at NBC and FOX News.

Noticing a pattern?

The CIA really does not have the best track record for their role in “managing” foreign wars and counter-insurgency activities. In fact, they have been caught rather red handed in fueling such crisis situations. And these are the people who are deciding what information is fit for the American public, and western public in general, and what is not fit for their ears.

Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, See No Evil

On March 5, 2020, Lea Gabrielle testified on the role of GEC in countering state-sponsored and non-state propaganda and disinformation. Gabrielle states: “We have the full support of Secretary Pompeo who is committed to deploying a broad suite of tools to stop America’s adversaries from using disinformation, malign propaganda, and other tools to undermine free societies.” She goes on to acknowledge that the hearing is focused on countering Russian government and CCP disinformation and propaganda. She then goes on to outline her criticisms of both governments with no factual detail or evidence but rather generalised accusations and criticisms, obviously pulling from her experience as a news journalist for NBC.

Following this, Gabrielle proceeds to outline her “rules of engagement” in countering this offensive with what seems to be the beginnings of McCarthyism 2.0, amounting to a threat to anyone who dares not take a hard stance against Russia and China, that such a person will be considered complicit in essentially committing treason.

Gabrielle concludes,

Both the Russian government and the CCP view censorship, media manipulation, and propaganda as appropriate tools to control public opinion. Both exploit open, democratic societies to further their own ends while tightening controls around their own countries.”

Don’t worry, the CIA will eventually admit that they are elbow deep in all of the above, it just won’t be released until 30 years from now…In the meantime, I wouldn’t believe everything you read in the newspaper to stoke the fires for another war.

This article was originally published by Strategic Culture Foundation.

And to reinforce this narrative …

Just this morning, right out from Billionaire Bloomberg…

Sure…

The West refuses to see just how sick they are.

Instead of seeing the reality, the “West”, insists on believing the carefully constructed fantasy world that it has created and that it promotes on the MSM (Main Stream Media). It holds China up as an example of a big, bag evil empires, when it is nothing of the sort, and holds itself up as the “great beacon of light on the shining hill”; a fantasy that never actually existed.

Until these fantasies are destroyed, the “West” will continue it’s long, drawn out decay and destruction. Check out this video…

The West is collapsing.

Thinking Long Term…

China uses more concrete in a single year than all the concrete ever used by America in all of it’s history. 2021. Look at the stats. Period. China is growing and is a serious, serious nation. It’s engineering and manufacturing capabilities are formidable. And to discount this, or ignore it, is a mistake.

America cannot not simply flick a “light switch” and suddenly the American manufacturing system will roar into life. The spark of creativity has been extinguished in America. The drive to work, to produce, to contribute are all gone. The relationships between design, and fabrication are missing, and the regulations and laws are too corrupt, too stifling, and out of date.

When you look at the “so called” American Industry, you will see a lot of nice shiny office buildings staffed with planners, finance folk, accountants, and legal teams supporting Marketing. But very little in the way of hard, dirty, assembly machinery. The opposite is true in China.

Watch this video…

Meanwhile, What’s the news about in the USA?

When you watch American “news” it’s really quite different from what you would see in the rest of the world. Shootings, murders, kidnaps, rapes are so common place that they are hardly ever reported. The big news tends to revolve around plans for more taxes, higher regulation entities, and “think tanks” proposing renaming a new holiday or tearing down a statue.

However, sometimes the “news” can be funny. As this video attests…

Lancaster Pennsylvania

The last time I was in Lancaster Pennsylvania I pulled into a roadside restaurant and got myself a club sandwich, with fries, cole slaw, and a (bottomless) cup of coffee. Of course that was years ago. I wonder if you can still get that in the USA today. As I recall, I think it cost me about $3.50 or so.

A typical club sandwich.

Learning how to make my first sandwich

You know, I first learned how to make a sandwich when I was four years old. My girlfriend at the time; a beautiful lass named Mary, who was much older than me. She was five. Brought me into her house, up the stairs and hid me in her bed room. But being the good hostess that she was, she ran downstairs and brought up a bottle of ketchup and some slices of bread. She then showed me how to make my first sandwich.

As we were sitting there on her bed smunching, and chatting, her mother burst into the room shouting “Mary, why do you keep bringing up boys into your room?” and Scooted me away.

Sigh.

She was a bit of a rascally girl, don’t you know.

She also taught me how to steal from the candy store. But that is another story for another time. Right now I want to talk about sandwiches.

My first real sandwich was part of an exercise to obtain a “badge” as part of being in the cub scouts. It was there where I learned how to cut a tomato, get slices of cold cuts, cheese, lettuce, and how to add mayonnaise to it. I learned how to do it in my “den”, and my “den mother” taught me how to make the sandwich. Afterwards, we all sat down and ate the sandwiches with a bottle of orange Fresca.

A den of cub scouts.

About the Cub Scouts

The following excerpt is from HERE.

Cubbing, as it was first know, started in the United States in 1930.  However, it was in 1916 when Baden-Powell published The Wolf Cub Handbook that Cubbing became an official part of scouting in England and endorsements for the program began in the United States.  At that time, James E. West, BSA Chief Executive, felt that this new program might take adult leadership away from the Boy Scouts so initially he opposed the program.

It is interesting to note that in the beginning, each Cub den was led by a Boy Scout Den Chief.  It wasn’t until 1936 that the position of Den Mother was added as an optional position even though Den Mothers had been helping since 1932.  Still, that position was to provide support for the Den Chief. It was not until the late 1940’s to mid 1950’s that the Den Mother assumed full control of the den.

Dens were formed by age until 1986 when the phase in for grade level began, lasting until 1991.  In the beginning, Wolfs were 9 year olds, Bears were 10 years old and Lions were 11 years old.  They could enter Boy Scouts when they turned 12.  Until 1942, when a boy joined, he would start with the Wolf rank after completing his Bobcat requirements and work his way up regardless of his age.  During these early years, he could only wear his current rank and associated arrow points.

A fine painting by Norman Rockwell.

Speaking about food

As I have explained, I always associate food with pretty women. I don’t know why, but that is me. I think that it has something to do with the saying “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”. All the pretty girls were always trying to keep me well fed and satisfied.

And they are everywhere in China.

This woman is definitely a “Shepherd’s Pie” kind of girl. Check out her video…

While this girl is definitely spaghetti and garlic bread

This slim lady is all about the well stocked larder, the warm bread in the oven, and the spaghetti sauce that has been cooking all day on the stove. She’s the kind of woman that will insist that you have a clean napkin near you when you eat, and a glass of water with your meal whether you wanted it or not.

Check out the video.

This girl is a YUM!

And let’s not forget about the Summer time foods…

This beauty, with the well done eyebrows, and the big eyes is all about cut up watermelon, cantaloupe, and strawberries. She’s exactly the kind of girl that you would want to go out and have a nice light dessert, and then walk along the night city streets doing some window shopping and chatting.

These Chinese women are just lovely.

Peach Cobbler

What could be a more perfect ending to a summertime meal than peach cobbler? Savor the flavors of summer with sliced fresh peaches cooking away with butter and spices.

Peach Cobbler topped with French Vanilla Ice Cream.

The topping can made from pantry ingredients you have on hand and peaches can easily be substituted with any fruit you have depending on the time of year. The tang of the lemon juice paired with the sweetness of the peaches is perfectly balanced with the crisp topping. Want to make dessert even better? A dollop of fresh whipped cream or cold vanilla ice cream truly makes it the perfect way to end a summer night.

I must say that as much as I love this great and wonderful dish, it was not a staple in my home when I grew up. My mother never made peach cobbler. I never had the house fill with the delicious aroma of baked peaches. I never had that pleasure.

The trees of New Iberia, Louisiana.

But…

When I moved to Louisiana, I came to know the wonderful world of Creole Cooking , and the local folk in New Iberia that would make a most luscious peach cobbler that was “to die for”.

You can go on line and find a zillion recipes on how to make this most delicious dish.It’s so easy to make! It makes me wonder why my mother never made it. For the life of me, I just cannot recall her ever making it. Not even during peach season, and certainly not with canned peaches.

It’s easy to make.

I mean in “super dooper” easy to make!

One thing I do know is that I can tell you that it is best enjoyed when it is made in your home kitchen by friends or family, and where the aroma fills the house and you get a big monster sized bowl of peach cobbler topped with delicious French Vanilla ice cream.

I would take it to the porch, and sit on the rocking chair and eat while the sun set and the gathering dusk enveloped the large trees covered with Spanish moss.

Spanish Moss hanging from the huge trees of New Iberia, Louisiana.

Of course, no one wants to hear an old foggy guy talking about his past…

Right? I mean to say that my past doesn’t even resemble anything that you see today. It’s so different that it boggles the mind and astounds the cockles. As this video clearly shows…

How do you handle failure?

Some of those zoom and skype videos are cute and funny, but more serious things can and do occur. So what do you do? And how do you handle the trials in life? Will your blood Pressure go ballistic like Metallicman’s, or will you just relax and grab some Wise Potato chips and a cold beer instead?

Check out this video…

Fear is what is trapping many people into their slave-serf existence

You are being manipulated by fear. You are being lied to, and manipulated, and massaged until you run about like scared rabbits. And when a real emergency occurs, like an American bio-weapon, you think that the government is just doing “just another one” of it’s many many manipulative techniques.

Even though there are real and good valid reasons for strong and preventative actions. Like this video describes why China told everyone that the entire nation of 1.6 billion people, over four times the population of the United States, must all wear face masks in public…

Again, what is China really like?

Yeah. This is what China is really like, and narrated by a Vblogger who was condemned by Yahoo! as a member of the “Communist disinformation network” LOL. I mean the bullshit of the United States is so very think these days, you just cannot make it up!

A Fried Chicken kind of girl

When I see this beauty I cannot help but think of  fried chicken. Especially with a fine crunchy exterior served with hot steaming biscuits, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, coleslaw, and extra butter. this girl is the kind of gal that you would go into a restaurant with, the kind with a red and white checkered table cloth, a small flower in a vase, and a circular table with a window seat.

Strangely I don’t picture drinking wine, beer, or even Coke with her. I picture a locally brewed ginger beer. Oh, the fun we could have! Smunching, and eating. Drinking and talking. Looking good, feeling good, with the scent of her perfume wafting near me, and the fine crunchy feeling when you bit into that delicious chicken.

I tell you that I would pick those bones clean! I tell you what!

P.S. Look at her eyebrows! Aren’t they lovely?

Any day now…

Sure. Any day now, America will overtake China and remain the “king of the hill” and sit atop of the money heap!

The problem is that America is devolving.

What the wealthy oligarchy has created is a civilization filled with a rulership of “service to self people” that has manipulated a large swath of the population to be “service for another” people. When the entire nation should be “service for others”. Here’s a funny video about devolution.

Hyper-velocity nuclear tipped MIRV ICBM’s

Ever since Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump set their eyes on invading and attacking China, China has sprinted to catch up with America in nuclear warheads. Not just those old fashioned ICBM’s like America has, but the impossible to stop hyper-velocity, MIRV weapons carrying 10 to 15 warheads each about 1000 times more powerful than what destroyed Hiroshima.

Of course, you will never will hear about this in the Western press. To most Americans, China is a backwards third-world nation.

So you wanna “poke the panda” eh?

China is mass producing enough nuclear bombs to destroy every community in America larger than 1000 people. China is a serious, serious nation, and they DO NOT BLUFF.

But Hey! Enough of that shit…

Let’s talk about people, and our normal day to day battles with life. And I want you all to know that everyone has a story, and many have a library of stories that they could share. Here is one from a famous “little guy” actor. And his words ring true.

This is my call out to assholes…

The world is filled with them. They are self-centered, hurtful and cause great pain to all of us. People (!) if you have nothing good to say, then say nothing. The world needs good, kind and helpful people. Not war-mongering, evil sociopaths and wealthy psychopaths. We need to help others. Not to constantly keep tearing them down.

These bad thoughts and evil words hurt. And they can result in bad things happening. We need to undo their damage in what ever way possible.

Delicious yum!

This is something I have been missing…

Hobos

There’s some good write ups about hobos. In America today, many are becoming Hobo’s out of necessity. America is such a mess that all the social contracts are broken, society, culture, and the government have all become absolute failures. The people, now terribly in debt have taken to a homeless, nomadic lifestyle to survive. It might appear to be temporary, but knowing what I know about the value of money, and endless fiat currency, it looks more like the beginning of the end, rather than a temporary lapse in the economy.

As long as man has organized into society, there have been those on the fringe. These were people who, for one reason or another, just didn’t fit into polite society.

Such were the hobos of our nation’s past. We tend to think of hobos as bums who stole rides on trains and lived in shanty towns. But in some cases, they were traveling workers who would go where there was work and move on when the job was done.

Building this country required a huge amount of manpower, especially when you consider that much was built by human hands rather than power equipment. Projects like the Transcontinental Railroad and the Hoover Dam required workforces numbering in the thousands, and hard-working men who came and went with the job. They lived in shanty towns, because that’s all there was at the end of the tracks and they carried little with them, because they knew they’d be moving on.

These were tough men, accustomed to backbreaking work and long hours. They survived and endured, becoming a forgotten part of our country’s history. Yet the work that they did has often survived and become part of making our country what it is today.

-Off the grid news

Historically, many people have been forced into becoming hobos because of circumstances where jobs are so scarce that they have no choice but to travel from place to place in search of work.

There are many theories of the origin of the word hobo, ranging from a contraction of the words “Hoe Boys” to one from the words “Homeward Bound”.

In any case, the American Heritage Dictionary defines a hobo as “one who wanders from place to place without a permanent home or a means of livelihood.”

Every hobo has a moniker, a nickname grounded in habit or origin or appearance, like Redbird or Frisco Jack or Bookworm. Not every hobo wants to share his or her real name with the straights and the Square Johns.  A few, the ones trying to outrun something, won’t even talk to anyone new or strange.

But the dawn of the Internet and increased dissatisfaction with the 9-to-5 routine have led more and more people to wonder if earning a living while on the road is a viable alternative to the daily grind.

If you’re thinking about becoming an opportunistic and resourceful transient worker, keeping your costs low, your responsibilities simple, and your freedom intact, here are the questions you’ll need to ask yourself—and the preparations you’ll need to make.

[1] Remember the differences between hobos, tramps, and bums: hobos are people who travel and look for work, tramps are people who travel and don’t look for work, bums are people who neither travel nor look for work.
In a society of citizen consumers, to have nothing, to own nothing, by choice, might be the most radical politics of all. And it’s worth mentioning here that not every homeless person is a hobo. And as the hobo fades from the American scene—except as a visual or literary cliché—there’s more and more confusion on the matter. A hobo is homeless by choice. Even then, not every hobo is completely homeless. Most these days have a semi-permanent address somewhere for the winter. Especially the older hoppers.

[2] Take stock of your skills and experience. Historically, hobos have made their living from manual labor, but that doesn’t always have to be the case. Any skill that is in wide demand and does not require an extended time commitment can be useful to a hobo. As long as you can advertise your services and earn people’s trust (ideally through references), you can do anything. Some pursuits that lend themselves to this lifestyle are:

  • Landscaping and construction – Many migrant workers who cross international borders find work in this area, as it is the least demanding in terms of language barriers. Having experience is essential, however, as you’d be required to work with potentially dangerous equipment and machinery.
  • Farm hand – If you’ve ever thought about becoming a farmer, there are internships all over the world that offer housing, food, a stipend, and experience, in exchange for getting your hands dirty. You can follow harvest seasons around the country or around the globe. Progressive farms tend to provide better circumstances.
  • Fishing – Serve as a deckhand, cook, or fisherman as you travel the high seas.
  • Any web-based service such as writing, editing or programming.

[3] Establish Plan B. This is a serious, life-altering decision. Don’t abandon everything suddenly and disappear. You need something to come back to if your life on the road doesn’t work out. Make sure all your debts are paid and responsibilities are handled before departure. If possible, have some savings set aside before you go, that you can access while you’re on the road, if need be. Emergencies happen, and they cost money.

Hobo slang can be intuitive, or impenetrable, but it’s always colorful. For example, the “jungle” is just the communal hobo camp, usually near the railroad yard. Your “bindle” is your bedroll. Your “poke” is your wallet. “Hundred on a plate” is a can of beans, and the jungle kitchen is run by the “Crumb Boss.” The “bulls” are the railroad police. “Flyers” and “hotshots” and “redballs” are all fast freights. “Catching out” means hopping the train. To die is to “catch the westbound.” And understand this, above all else: A “hobo” is an itinerant worker; someone who travels and finds work. A “tramp” travels, but mostly does not work. A “bum” neither travels nor works.

And of course the whole thing runs on talk, endless talk. Because talk’s free; because even if you give away everything you own, or they take away everything you have, you still have your stories. And every story here begins as the same story.

[4] Be prepared. You may like the romantic idea of leaving with nothing but the clothes on your back and whatever is in your wallet, but that is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. You must assume that you will be sleeping, cooking, traveling, and essentially living outdoors, unless you decide to drive a car.

  • How will you get from place to place? Hobos are often associated with train-hopping, because this is what many hobos during the Great Depression did. A car can double as transportation and sleeping quarters, but keep in mind that gas is expensive, and upkeep on a vehicle is a major expense and if the expense bothers you, hitch-hiking is a good option since it’s free. Some hobos prefer bicycles, but this will limit your range (to warm weather regions) and limit how much you can carry. A motorcycle can get you where you’re going faster, but has maintenance requirements similar to those of a car, though not to the same degree. Buses are also an option: Greyhound, in the US at least, offers steep discounts when you purchase tickets a week in advance, and even more for still earlier purchases. Buy tickets at the station for the best deals; web purchases have an extra $3 or $4 tagged on whether the tickets are mailed or “on call”.
  • Where will you sleep? Unless the place you work can offer housing, you will have to sleep in your car (if you have one), urban camp, squat in an abandoned building, or stay in hostels or motels. Another option is using the Communities Directory online to find urban co-ops, land trusts, and other alternative housing arrangements, which often welcome guests. See directory.ic.org. Yet another option is a traveler’s network such as couchsurfing.com or globalfreeloaders.com, which offer free lodging to those who intend to contribute (in kind, or in other ways). Consider the costs and dangers associated with each.
  • Where will you take showers? Some campsites have showers, but many don’t, so you may consider purchasing portable shower equipment. You can also obtain a membership to a national gym chain and use the showers there (provided you actually work out and maintain your appearance).
  • How will you defend yourself? A nomadic lifestyle can be a dangerous one because you’re constantly putting yourself in unfamiliar situations, and you’re probably alone—both of which can make you a target for theft and assault. You’ll need to outline some precautions you can take, such as always letting people know where you are, carrying a cell phone – and only going places where there’s a reliable signal, having an alert system or weapon on you, etc. In addition, always know where you are so when you call for help you will be able to give them a location.

[5] Make a list of connections. Look at maps of the areas in which you’ll be traveling, and determine whether or not there’s anyone you know, directly or indirectly, who lives there. Ask your Aunt Sally if your great uncle Billy still lives in that cabin in the woods. Ask your friend if his cousin still works at the car dealership in Utah. Most important of all, ask them if it’s okay if you can get in touch with those people in case of an emergency. Some people might offer to make arrangements so that you can actually visit, which is always nice. (Just be a good house guest!)

I did a lot of hitchhiking right after high school. And one time my brother was out hitchhiking in California, and some tramps got a hold of him and told him ride the trains instead of hitchhiking, and so he rode trains. They came back, and that was in 1973. They were talking in a bar about riding out to see Evel Knievel jump the Snake River Canyon, and I started to listening to it, and I worked seasonal and stuff. I had some freedom there. I was in. And so my older brother....There was 11 of us gone out of St. Cloud and hopping freights, and I fell in love with it right away. I mean, I like hitchhiking because you get to meet a lot of different people, but the freight-train riding was like the freedom, you know? —Ricardo

Vintage hobo life.

[6] Make an itinerary based on the type of work you plan to do, the connections you have in place, and the places you’d like to see. Do as much research as you can beforehand. Make a list of places you can stay, eat, shower, camp, etc. It’s also wise to look up churches and shelters and any other services that are offered to the homeless. The more prepared you are, the more you’ll enjoy your travels.

My father was a hobo, born in 1898 in Frog Level, North Carolina. Ran away from home when he was 12 or 13, rode freights for about 17 years. He’s a wonderful storyteller, musician, singer. He was always the one to tuck me in bed at night. He would say, Two songs, one story. You get to choose one song, and I’ll choose one. I always chose Cocaine Jubilee, because he learned it out in the opium dens and it was a funny song. Then he would sing one, and he’d tell me one of his adventure stories. 

I remember when he’d leave every night, I’d think, I can’t wait until I’m old enough to do that. I started hitchhiking right out of high school and eventually was a student at Indiana University. I had the honor of doing a directed writing course which I could choose the professor. He said, You need to choose a good topic. And I chose hobos, and I said, Because I grew up with it.Gypsy Moon

[7] Learn the hobo code. Historically hobos relied on a shared system of symbols that let fellow travelers know more about their current environment.The symbols can vary from place to place and may no longer be used in many areas. Here are some symbols to get you started:

  • spearhead – defend yourself
  • circle with two parallel arrows – get out fast, hobos not welcome
  • wavy line (signifying water) above an X – fresh water and a campsite nearby
  • three diagonal lines – not a safe place.
  • cross – “angel food,” (food served to hobos after a party)

[8] Hit the road! Leave your roots behind. Find a place to live and work from day to day. See the sights of each new place you visit. Make interesting friends (you never know when they might lend a helping hand). Life on the road means that every moment is your own. With no schedule and no responsibilities (except keeping yourself healthy), you must decide how to best use your time to achieve a balance between work, travel, relaxation, and entertainment. Enjoy the variety that each day has to offer…you’re earning it.

When I was a really young kid, I lived in a neighborhood in Houston close to a big train yard. It’s had a hobo jungle there for a long, long time. I had a buddy named Dusty, and me and Dusty used to sneak out there in the field and watch the hobos. We used to watch guys get on and off the trains all the time, so we kind of knew how it all worked.

Dusty and I did catch a train, to Galveston. We just got on the train in the dark. We got down there, and we’re like, “We’re 60 miles from home, how are we going to get back?” 

Maybe half an hour later, there was a train going the other way, rolling real slow. We saw empties. We caught a train going the other way, and by sheer luck, it went right back to the same place we were at. We were just really lucky. —K-Bar

[9] Don’t hesitate to dumpster dive. You wouldn’t believe the amount of free undamaged food that is thrown away all the time. For the best results check behind smaller grocery stores and fruit markets, as they usually don’t invest money in a sealed garbage compactor (although these can sometimes be opened as well)—just be careful. Fast food chains are also usually good, but more traditional restaurants generally don’t waste nearly as much food—although if you are really hungry you can usually find at least something there.

The history of the hobo is the history of modern America. Starts right after the Civil War and the building of America’s great railroads. There had always been a small floating population of agrarian workers, but they were limited by geography and technology. They were regional. Local. Language historians and etymologists aren’t sure, but the word “hobo” may come from this original population of farmworkers: “hoe boys.”

The railroads change all that. After the war there’s an expanding displaced population available to ride—and help build—a transportation network running from coast to coast. As this is happening, America is industrializing too, and the need for a mobile work force, willing, adaptable and relatively inexpensive to transport, becomes evident. The hobo.

[10] Be tough. Physical toughness is essential for surviving in adverse circumstances. A lot of us in the survival  movement aren’t as physically fit as we need to be (me included). But toughness goes beyond just being physically fit. A boxer learns to take blows, just as he learns how to give them. Strength and agility allow him to give them, but toughness allows him to take them. If you’re not tough, you’re not going to be able to take the blows that life gives you; you’ll fold and just wait to die.

There are two types of toughness: physical and mental. Of the two, mental toughness can be harder to develop than physical. If your mind can’t take the blows and bounce back, you are at a disadvantage. Your mind has to be able to accept the changing reality of a crisis situation or a disaster, quickly overcome the grief, and move into survival mode. This is all about training. The better trained you are, the better you can adapt. Training also gives you confidence, so that you know you’re able to survive.

Don’t romanticize it. Empty your pockets. Empty your heart. There’s only what you carry on your back. There’s whatever you’re chasing and whatever’s chasing you. Maybe there’s some grace to be won in the burdens you bear, or in your swiftness, but at moments like this it feels like the price of your freedom is an unimaginable loneliness.

[11] Learn a variety of useful kills. Hobos did whatever the job called for. While they may not have been experts in any one trade, they were capable of working in a number of them. One month they might be busting broncos and the next swinging a double jack in a mine.

Today’s society has become so specialized that in some cases one engineer can only work on one part of a project. He’s lost when he looks at the rest. But in Henry Ford’s day, the guy who designed the engine could also design the body.

In a survival situation, you need to have a wide variety of skills. If your home is damaged by a hurricane and you need to make it safe to sleep in, you don’t have to be a master carpenter. But you will probably need to be able to cut boards and nail them together. You’re probably also going to need to know a little plumbing and electrical work.

[12] Develop a minimalist lifestyle. When you’re on the go, you can’t take a lot of extra baggage with you. You’ve got to cut things down to what you really need. Our modern lifestyle is so cluttered with stuff that we’d need a backpack the size of a semi-trailer to bug out.

In passing you’ll hear that “Dutch owns the boxcar,” and it won’t matter if they mean this literally or figuratively. The boxcar is a fixture in the Britt jungle, permanent. Long off the main line and set here years ago, it is a meeting place and a memorial, an antique keepsake and a hideout. Dutch sits with his gear at the north end of the car. Everything he owns fits in a knapsack. Heaviest thing he carries are his memories. Folks come and go, talking. The Dutchman is a focused listener. Intense, even at rest. As often as not, he’s up there with the younger ’bos, the newer riders, answering questions and giving tips. (For insight into this next generation of gutter punks and crusties and dirty kids, the postmodern hobos, search out the stunning photography of Mike Brodie.)

Learn what you need and then cut down to that point. If you’ve got stuff in your house that you never use, then why do you have it? Really, if you haven’t used it in a year or two, you probably won’t. So, pass it on to someone who can use it and make room in your life for what you need. You have to limit yourself to what was important, and if something wasn’t important, you need to let it go.

[13] Community is important for survival.

Hobos typically gathered together in communities, wherever they were working. That way they could help each other out. Cooking for 10 people is easier than cooking for one, and by doing so, everyone doesn’t have to carry a pot around with them. One would bring the pot and the others would bring the ingredients.

No one rides with the hobos, so let them ride.

When you’re part of a community you also tend to watch out for each other. If you’re by yourself, you might not see what’s happening to you. For example, hypothermia can set in in such a subtle way that you freeze to death, without even realizing what’s happening to you. But if other people are around, they’ll likely notice you’re not well and help.

[14] Learn to live off the land. Most hobos could recognize edible plants and those which could serve as medicines. While they bought food, they augmented what they bought with what they found. Knowing what you can eat can mean the difference between a full belly and starving to death. Knowing what you can use for medicine can also save your life. God has provided a wide range of foods and medicines in nature around us. But you’ve got to know what to use and how to use it. When you’re living that minimalist lifestyle, you really need that knowledge.

“It’s a hard life in a lot of ways. It probably shouldn’t be romanticized the way that it is. You get yourselves out there, and it’s cold, wet, and the steel is hard. It’s very dangerous. There are people out there that aren’t very nice. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It takes a lot. I’m a man of few words.

[15] Nothing is beneath you. Throughout history, there have been people out of jobs because they wouldn’t take one that’s beneath them. While I can understand that to some extent, that pride can be deadly. When things go bad, such as in a financial collapse, we’re all going to have to do whatever we can, no matter how much education we have or what we did before. There’s no room for pride when it comes to surviving a crisis.

“Everything I’ve owned, and everything I want in life, fits in this house [points to his knapsack], right in my pack. Anything that doesn’t fit in my pack, I can’t carry with me. I don’t want it. I can’t have it. It all gets left behind. It makes me a different kind of person. It’s given me something special in life. I’m not attached to anything. I wander with the winds. I know that a lot of people wish they could do the same.

[16] Quit worrying and do what you can

Part of the reason that hobos are seen as lazy and shiftless is that they weren’t worriers. They did what they could and left the rest up to divine providence. We could all learn from that. Yes, there is always a part that we are to do. If we don’t work, we’re not going to eat. But on the other hand, worrying never added a day to anyone’s life. When you’ve done what you can, just hope and pray it’s enough. The rest is beyond your capability.

Worry causes incredible health problems. High blood pressure is caused more by worry, than by any other reason. Why do you think they call it “hypertension?” That literally means, “too much tension” or “too much stress.” Quit stressing out and get to work. Do your part and then follow the example of the hobos, putting the rest in God’s hands.

You might need to become a hobo…

America is really in that bad of a state. Consider this video below. It’s not staged. It’s real Americans “on the street”. This is what happens when you intentionally dumb down an entire society of people.

This is not just worrisome, it is scary.

There are 62 million illiterate people in the USA, that is 39 million more than in China.

In the USA with its overwhelming military power, 1/5 of the population is illiterate. And all these people vote.

Kitty Anxiety

Poor kitty. Don’t worry, she’ll be back. Don’t worry. The girl was gone for ten days, and left the cat alone! God! That cat was probably worrying it’s little heart out! People never do this! At least get a house sitter, or someone to check on your cats, if you cannot afford to take them to the pet hotel.

Ten days!

 

A cat’s life in China

It’s sort of like this. And due to the urban situation, many people have cat backpacks and strollers that they take their cats with them with. That way they can go into establishments, and eat and drink and have a good time.

Which country has a better human rights situation?

If you watch the American “news” you would be inclined to believe that America has the best human rights. Which is strange as less than 13% of American trust their government. So how can you possibly have strong human rights and such a pitiful trust in government? Well, you just cannot.

Another beautiful Chinese girl

This girl is just a classic plate of over easy side eggs, with a side of rye toast and baked beans (erp. I mean grilled potatoes) with a tall glass of orange juice, a fine cup of coffee and a short stack of “flap jacks”. She’s a morning dew kind of girl, with perfection in her clothing, and sunniness in her smiles. check out the video.

A breakfast kind of girl.

Chinese Aviation

China has some serious cutting-edge aviation. These are all home designed, locally manufactured aircraft produced in mass quantities. Here’s a video to give you an idea of the extent and scope of Chinese aviation. Click on the picture to watch the video.

Chinese aviation.

Vibrato

This is a K-pop song performed by Stellar which is a Korean organization. Their membership is about one half Korean, and the other half Chinese. All are Han Chinese ethnically.

This particular song was released back a few years ago, but I must tell you all that the dance troupes in my office building (for a long period of time) would always practice this particular dance and the related moves.

All the girls love to dance it, and I would stand outside in the hallway, and watch them dance through the floor to ceiling glass walls. I must admit that I loved watching them all dance. Eye candy, so they say.

One dance practice was so inspirational to me that I just walked into the studio after a dance and invited all of them out to a dinner and KTV. I can tell you that we all had a great time afterwards. You just go in with a big smile and tell everyone how fantastic they were and how it would be personally important if you could buy them a meal and have some fun at a KTV.

Easy-peasy. Lemon-squeezy.

Click on the picture to watch the amazing dance video.

Vibrato by Stellar.

A fine baked potato girl

This fine woman is a “baked potato girl”. When I see her, I think of baked potatoes with creme cheese, and cut up bacon, spring onions, and olives. Not to mention the side of strip steak, and buttered green beans. When I see her, I think of a nice dinner, together. Talking. Just having fun.

A nice leek and eggs kind of girl

Here is a thin Chinese girl. She reminds me of a scrambled eggs and leek dish that is so delicious. I like to eat it with a side of hot peppers in oil (a very Hunan Chinese dish) and wash it down with some gulps of white wine. Of course, eating in a nice family-style Chinese restaurant.

Spaghetti and meatballs

One of the things that is difficult to get in China is Spaghetti and meatballs. You need to make it by scratch. And in China, a land without ground beef, you really need to get the meat, and grind it up yourself. Some fast and convenient American foods aren’t really all the accessible in China. Sigh.

One of the things that is difficult to get in China is Spaghetti and meatballs.

The old railroad spur

Just some cool pictures taken with a railroad theme. I love this theme. I hope that you all do as well.

Colorado circa 1900. “Mining camp at Chattanooga on Mineral Creek.” 8×10 glass negative by William Henry Jackson, Detroit Publishing Co.

Chattanooga thrived as a staging point for ore and supplies passing between Silverton and Ouray. The arrival of the Silverton Railroad in 1888 eliminated that need. The following year an avalanche wiped out most of the town and it was not rebuilt.

There’s plenty of slide evidence in this photo. Today, the BLM uses howitzer rounds nearby to trigger controlled avalanches. The Million Dollar Highway passes through.

This is one of the few Colorado photos by William Henry Jackson in the LOC. Most ended up with, I believe, the Colorado Historical Society.

April 1939. “Jersey City and Manhattan skyline.” 35mm nitrate negative by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration.

The intersection at the far left right above the trains is Jersey Avenue & 10th Street. The park is Hamilton Park. The building with the columns is not there any longer. Nor is the building with the kind of cupola adjacent to the park. But you can make out Harborside Financial Center in the distance, that was the key. Most the other industrial buildings in the distance are gone. Photo probably taken from the roof of the Erie warehouse bounded by Coles, 11th, Monmouth, and 12th.

Jersey City has always been a dense, gritty city with its share of slums. However, it was a pretty safe city until the 1960s, when things started to deteriorate. My grandfather, who lived in the Greenville section, used to say “Jersey City is getting so bad, the muggers are mugging the muggers.” He wasn’t far off. While it’s a little safer today, there are still many parts of the city where you don’t want to be walking at night. And the majority of the buildings date from the late 19th and early 20th century. Fortunately, the misguided highrise public housing projects are coming down (Currie’s Woods, Montgomery Gardens), and the JC waterfront is being built up to the point where its skyline has overtaken Newark’s as the best in the state. The spillover from Manhattan that started in the ’80s to escape the high cost & taxes continues today.

Syracuse, N.Y., circa 1905. “New York Central Railroad depot.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.

Oh, and what do you all think of this?

This came out of Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990’s. I don’t know if it is fake or real or what it is, however it sure is interesting.

Video 1

Video 2

If anyone has some further information or thoughts, please please tell me. I’d appreciate it.

And never forget to be the RUFUS!

Just because you are in Jail for tax evasion, crossing the street when you aren’t supposed to, or got in a fight and are in jail. The person you are is not what others say your are. Your worth is your ability to help others, be good, and to help improve the lives of all those around you. Be the Rufus!

Be the Rufus!

Chinese Air, Sea Rescue

A nice video showing something that you would NEVER see in the Western media. This is one of the Chinese Air, Sea, Rescue helicopters that are used to rescue people from the sea. I found it very interesting.

Chinese air, sea rescue.

Feels Like Summer

Shawn the Sheep is a great series of fun movies and videos. I have always enjoyed them. They had a movie and this following song was featured in the movie. It’s an up-beat happy, peppy tune that is Springtime and Summer, and ice cream all rolled into one. I hope you enjoy it.

Click on the picture to watch the video.

Feels like summer.

It’s time to turn in and chill out

MM needs some Me Me time. So there’s a bottle of cheap red wine, some slices of fruit, and peanuts waiting for me. I hope you all enjoyed this.

From MM’s home to yours; have a great evening.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

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MM Ghetto Blasters and Stardust Funk

Today, I am going to present a follow up article to my earlier post titled the “MM blue plate special”.  Here we are going to follow the same format, with articles, photos and short videos depicting various things in no particular order. I hope that you all enjoy it.

We will start with…

Philly Cheese-steak Sandwich

The cheesesteak sandwich is made up of thinly sliced steak that served hot with melted cheese in a long, crusty Italian roll. Peppers, onions and mushrooms are optional, but highly recommended (by me). It’s a popular street-cart food, with its origins coming from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Philly Cheese-steak Sandwich.

Chinese boy and girl scout “Jamboree”

In China, most things are co-ed, so there really isn’t a boy scouts,  or a girl scouts. It’s just “The Scouts”. Here we see the Chinese equivalent of a Scout Jamboree. It’s a really short video, but a lot of fun. Check it out.

Chinese Scout Jamboree.

Helping an old man cross the street

Oh, I know. It’s so “boy scout”. But really! Where is your humanity? We all need each other. We really do. No one is alone. We all all connected, and if we start treating each other as part of our family, then maybe… just maybe the world will be a better place.

Getting Married in Beirut

In 2020, Israel fired two Air to ground Thermobaric weapon to the Beirut port. This devastated one of the key ports for the Chinese BRI, Belt and Road Initiative. Initially, the American media heavily promoted the excuse that it was just accidentally self-ignited fertilizer, but when photos of the actual missiles were produced, the narrative quickly changed to birds and crows being misidentified.

Afterwards, (then) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gleefully announced that there was “substantial progress” in stopping the Chinese BRI in the Mediterranean.  You all can put two plus two together and realize what is going on. You don’t need a degree in Geo-political international politics to figure it out.

The following is a woman, on her wedding day, getting married in Beirut when the United States destroyed the Port of Beruit, via proxy using Israeli aircraft.

Cool video.
Getting Married in Beirut

Bathers at Atlantic City.

The Jersey Shore circa 1910. “Bathers at Atlantic City.” Many of them gamely striking a pose for the camera as they peer into the existential void. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.

Bathers at Atlantic City.

Did women wear corsets under their swimming suits back then? They all seem to have very slender waists.

Be the Rufus!

Man gets horrible news and lunges towards a high speed train!  Only a real Rufus can save him! Be the Rufus! It’s our highest calling!

Be the Rufus! It’s our highest calling.

Metal detecting

Ponder this…

Nice finds.

A typical park in China

In China the purpose of the government is to support and enrich the standard of living for the Chinese citizenry. It is not to make the richest people wealthier. Thus money, time and effort goes into making parks, improving infrastructure, and improving every aspect of the lives of the Chinese.

Here’s a typical park.

Mom Making A Kettle Of Apple Butter

Making a kettle of apple butter.

When I was growing up, one of my least favorite tasks was helping make apple butter. It seemed like it took forever, and it did indeed take the better part of an entire day – usually on a beautiful fall day that God must surely have provided for the sole purpose of running around and playing in the woods. But there I was, helping make apple butter while the precious daylight hours wasted away!

Yes, in the opinion of most any little boy, a day spent making apple butter is a day thoroughly wasted. First, you have to peel, cut up and wash about a million apples.

Then you have to gather a mountain of firewood and keep the flame burning nice and hot for hours on end…all the while stirring the smoldering apple butter non-stop until you’re old enough to begin sprouting facial hair. Of course about every six minutes throughout the day I would annoy mom just a little bit more by asking her if the apple butter was “almost done”…

And finally, after having asked for about the 10,000th time, she would say the two most beautiful words in the English language: “just about“.

Shortly after that she would break out the “cans” and start filling them up with the precious concoction that we had just spent such a large portion of our lifetimes making.

Finally, after all the pint and quart jars were filled, an amazing thing would happen: mom would give several jars of it away! I remember thinking “What are you doing, mom? After all we went through to make that stuff you’re gonna hand it out for free?

But that was mom, always being generous and sharing with others regardless of how hard she had to work to get something.

Reflecting back on those years, I now understand why mom did so much work for what seemed to me to be such a small “payout” – she had to. She had a large family to feed and little extra money with which to do it, and we kids had to do our part to help put food on the table. And now that I think about it, those were some of the best times of my life.

Saved by a Rufus!

A truck is out of control. The driver is unconscious, and it’s a treacherous mountain road. What are you going to do? Well, if you are a Rufus, then you know exactly what you should do!

Saved by a Rufus.

周杰伦、费玉清 – 千里之外 (Live)

One of the most famous Pop songs in China. Performed live of one of the Chinese talent shows by the original singers.

周杰伦、费玉清 – 千里之外 (Live).

Being silenced by the war-loving neocon cabal

All of us who live in China are used to this kind of bullshit.  Ignorant fucks accuse us for being paid to say good things about China. Why? because they read about it on their “news”. But what is “news”? Today, it’s a fully paid arm of the government, and if the government wants to demonize China, and you say “Whoa! That’s wrong.” then they will demonize you too.

I try to stay out of the fray. But it affects all of us here.

Watch and learn.

Being silenced by the war-loving neocon cabal.

Traveleze: 1959

This 35mm Kodachrome found in a thrift store is dated August 1959 and bears the notation “Jim, Bristlecone.” The color-coordinated Chevrolet truck and Traveleze trailer are a nice late-Fifties touch.

Nice. 1959. I was a baby at the time.

Where else could one stumble on something like this, nicely blown up for close viewing? 

I drove one of these pickups up in the Colorado Rockies with the Forest Service for two summers back in the mid '60s. Four on the floor (with a super-low stump-yanker first gear, good only for hauling heavy loads up 4% grades--most of the time you started in 2nd if you wanted to make progress), and yes, mine was two-tone as well. 

The rest of the stable included a '58 Ford F100, also two tone, and a couple of shiny new Dodge Ram V8s that were all-green, and two Jeeps, a Wagoneer and a CJ5. 

It was a joy and a privilege to motor around in such a beautiful mountain setting (much like in this shot) in such a cool vehicle. Thanks for the memory!

-DougR

季彦霖 – 选择失忆

Here is a typical Chinese MV. This is the kind of song that the chicks in the KTV would sing their hearts out to. I hope that you all like it.

季彦霖 – 选择失忆.

Meanwhile In Hawaii

There is a movement inside of Hawaii calling for separation away form the United States Federal Government. I am sure that many people on the mainland also feel this way about their own States. After all, if you get rid of the Federal government, automatically your taxes are slashed, and your income increase an easy 30%, not to mention Social Security, and forget about all those wars in far off and distant lands.

Heck! If Kentucky want’s to fight Kenya, go for it. But let those in Kentucky decide, not some rich oligarchy psychopath in Washington DC.

Ah. But you know, nah it will never happen. But it’s nice to see something that the mainstream, and the alternative will refuse to cover.

 

Ghetto Blaster

70s Ghetto blasters and boomboxes in the 80s existed long before pocket-sized radios were a possibility. Part of the era before the iPod, the MP3 player, and even the Walkman in some cases, people needed a way to take the clunky tech of an audio system with them outside.

Ghetto Blaster

The ghetto blaster sprang to life in 1969, introducing a large, yet still (somewhat) portable machine with multiple loud speakers. The Philips company was the first to discover the tech required to make audio “portable”.

In the early days, most people referred to these products as boomboxes. The name, in part, referred to the heavy, box-like design of the machine. Plus, most boombox radios also came with a bass-enhancing codec, which meant you got plenty of boom.

Margherita Pizza

Margherita pizza is a special variety of pizza that originates in Naples, Italy. In Italy, this pizza is a protected food, meaning that it must be prepared in a certain way to bear the “pizza Margherita” label, and the Italian government actually certifies bakeries that produce it.

This pizza is very simple, placing an emphasis on fresh, wholesome ingredients and high quality bread dough. It is also the basis for many pizzas served around the world; most people can probably obtain a version of it from a local pizza establishment, and cooks can also make it at home.

Margherita pizza.

A man collapses in a hospital

You go to a hospital when you are not feeling well. Well, what if you were delayed, and you are really in a bad state? Well, don’t worry, there will always be a Rufus nearby to help you when you need it most.

Be the Rufus!

Be the Rufus!

Another pretty Chinese woman

I do love to look at pretty women.

A pretty Chinese woman.

So, what is a ghetto blaster?

The name alone is enough to conjure an image of one of these products. In the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, most ghetto blasters were large, angular (box-shaped) devices.

Ghetto Blaster gone mobile.

While the features available from a ghetto blaster have changed over the years, they usually include:

  • An amplifier (with extra bass support)
  • Two loudspeakers (volume is a must)
  • A radio tuner (AM, FM, and sometimes DAB)
  • A cassette or CD player
  • A handle for portability

The cassette tape and CD player components of the modern ghetto blaster are quickly being phased out. Although you can find a new ghetto blaster with CD player components these days, it’s more common to simply play your music collection via Bluetooth.

A Ghetto Blaster is also known as a “boom box”.

Ghetto blasters need to be loud, versatile, and portable. In the past, designers used to slap a handle on a blocky machine and leave customers to figure out the rest.

This frequently led to people carrying ghetto blasters on their shoulders to make managing the weight a bit easier.

Today, more modern ghetto blasters from companies like JBL and Sony are a little more ergonomic. Some products come with straps so you can carry your radio like a backpack.

A Ghetto Blaster is also known as a “boom box”.

Others feature unique designs that make carrying the machine on your shoulder more comfortable.

A “Mexican” Plate

I happen to really like Mexican food, but unfortunately, I just can’t get it in China. Sigh. But no matter, Here we have some refried beans, some burritos, lots of cheese and rice. It’s really mouth-watering.

A “Mexican” Plate.

Street walkers in Vietnam

There are some interesting sights and sounds in Vietnam. Here’s a short clip of some “street walkers” in one of the main (foreigner) areas of Ho Chi Min city.

Street walkers in Vietnam. Be careful! They might be “Lady Boys”.

A New York Style Pizza

This is a type of American pizza known as a “New York Style” Pizza. It has a very thing crust, is long, and has piping hot cheese on the top of it. Us “locals” like to curve up the ends of it when we eat it.

New York Style Pizza.

80s ghetto blasters and the identity of an era

While Ghetto blasters in the 70s and 60s were available, it wasn’t until the 1980s when popularity surged. The ghetto blaster became the icon of a generation, acting as both a practical tool, and a status symbol.

A young man sits on his bicycle with his boombox. Cairo, Illinois. 1985.

Today, we still see boomboxes as a component of the 80s and early 90s aesthetic. Many leading artists use ghetto blasters in their music videos. Just look at “Hung Up” by Madonna, or “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga.

So, why did the ghetto blaster suddenly surge into the mainstream in the 1980s? There are a few answers to this question.

In the 80s, cassette ghetto blaster products were often associated with urban society. African American and Hispanic youths frequently carried ghetto blasters with them wherever they went.

Rapper LL Cool J holds a boombox outside of a concert. 1986.

In fact, the popularity that boomboxes had in this environment is what helped them to earn their new term “ghetto blaster”.

What to do if you have some fresh Italian bread and some tomatoes…

A nice idea. Especially nice if you add some friends and a few bottles of wine. Hint. Hint.

Are you getting hungry?

And how you do it / make it…

Something like this…

What a steak!

Now this is my idea of a steak!

How about this for a steak?

How mothers bathed their babies in the 1950’s

It’s a joke! But it does seem kind of funny how the mother is posing next to her new washing machine.

How mothers bathed their babies in the 1950’s.

Boomboxes start community bans

The problem with the boomboxes is that they play LOUD, and everyone can hear the “music”.

As is often the case when music incites a community, cities began to ban boomboxes from public places. Unlike standard radio sets, governments didn’t have complete control over what people listened to on their ghetto blasters.

It was just as easy to listen to your own cassettes and CDs as it was to tune into Kiss FM.

Young men and their boombox. Newark, New Jersey. 1987.

Ghetto blasters in the 80s grew in popularity as a versatile way to listen to all kinds of music. Some groups even started using these portable players to create music.

The boombox became instrumental to the rise of hip hop music. Curb-side rap battles often included a number of ghetto blasters. The fact that ghetto blasters could deliver more bass and volume than a standard speaker made it perfect for the rise of a new genre.

A young man poses with his boombox on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. 1985.

Aside from providing the soundtrack to many urban music battles, ghetto blasters also became a status symbol. The Beastie Boys embraced the ghetto blaster as a signature of their “rebellious” nature. The Clash always seemed to have a boombox with them.

Elsewhere, the devices appeared frequently in shows and movies. Just think of Fame, in the 1980s, or Flash dance, for instance.

Even the National Museum of American History once created an exhibition around ghetto blasters. The event, titled “Hip-Hop won’t stop” featured an insight into the impact boomboxes had on the urban underground.

Bruce Springsteen fans have a picnic with a boombox in the trunk. Location unspecified. 1985.

A pretty girl from China

From one of my “pretty girls of China” collections.

Chicago Pizza

This is what we call a “Chicago Deep Dish Pizza”. It’s sort of like a Pizza Soup and it is so very delicious.

Chicago Pizza.

I really like this picture

I don’t really know why. I think and believe that it teleports me to a different time; a quieter time and a more peaceful time. I think that it is lovely.

A nicer time.

Comfort food

For me, one of my favorite comfort foods is a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. My wife, who is Chinese, has a different comfort food. She likes snails, and shellfish. And my friend Mike, who is also Chinese, prefers noodles. Lots and lots of hot noodles.

We are all different. This is my “comfort food”…

Grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.

Guess the movie?

Can you guess which 1960’s American movie that these quotes came from? Hint: a song about “burning bridges” from the movie become a top pop hit.

A “star studded” cast.

What happened to ghetto blasters in the 1990s?

As ghetto blasters earned more popularity around the world, they also became more complex in functionality and design. By the end of the 80s, ghetto blasters frequently came with separate high/low-frequency speakers.

You could also access secondary tape decks so that you could record off the radio and other music systems.

Over the years, manufacturers introduced a host of new features, from balance adjusters and equalisers, to Dolby noise reduction tools, LED sound gauges, and CD players. Despite all of this extra functionality, ghetto blasters in the 1990s weren’t as popular as they used to be.

Teddy Boys in Tokyo’s Harajaku Park. 1986.

The problem wasn’t with the technology of ghetto blaster boomboxes. Rather, customers didn’t see the objects as capturing as much soul as their predecessors. Sometimes, when things in our history go “mainstream”, their impact can feel a little watered down.

Manufacturers jumped to add new bells and whistles to their systems to ensure that customers could have the latest and greatest tech. Unfortunately, the old-fashioned feel of the ghetto blaster wasn’t there.

On top of that, in the 2000s, when the ghetto blaster started to take on more high-tech functionality, it seemed to lose its retro appeal.

Breakdancers on 5th Avenue in New York. 1981.

The popularity of 80s ghetto blasters was about more than just what these systems could do. People loved the portability and impact of the boombox. However, it was the stigma attached to the device that really made having a boombox exciting.

People felt less inclined to risk the issues of carrying a boombox in public. After all, you could have all your music on the go with a Walkman, and you didn’t need to spend as much. In the 90s, an appreciation of music became a more personal, inward experience.

People weren’t as keen to blast their music in public places. We started to think of radio, CDs, and other audio experiences as more personal affairs.

A young man in roller skates and a pith helmet in New York City. 1970.

Even some of the more popular modern ghetto blasters available on the market today are equipped with headphone jacks for that very purpose.

Chinese military

You never see anything at all about the Chinese military in American (or Western press). It is always depicted as some kind of third world group of starving, illiterate peasants that are fielding hand-me-down Russian AK-47 clones. Not true. Here’s a nice video showing some of the weapons that China has developed on their own and field right now.

Chinese weapons.

Problems in America

All over the West are problems with kids and their parents who never had to deal with the consequences of their actions. Why? Because it’s “forgive and forget”. Well, maybe the judicial authorities are easy to “forgive and forget”, but not the victim and the perpetrators. So imagine my surprise in reading this…

A Pleasant life

You could say that this was me when I was on Parole and living in Erie, PA. Of course, at that time I was forbidden to have a computer, or a phone, or to watch movies. But I did have a cat, and a simple apartment where I lived alone. But I had a dream and a goal and my affirmations.

You all too will be able to move to more meaningful lives. Just use the time that you have now. Start making friends, and savor the elements of life more. Smell tomatoes in the store. Go to a bakery when it opens in the morning. Take a new walk down a street that you never walked on before. Make a point of smiling to one person and complementing them.

Your life will improve. I promise you.

Moving towards more…

Rejected by the editors

For some reason.

Girls being girls

And why not? Well, I love the dresses, and you will note that they are all having a great time together.

Girls being girls.

Guys being guys

And why not? To me they look like they are having a good time.

Guys being guys.

Guys and girls together

And why not?

It looks like fun, though I do think that the turkey is a “bit too much” for a picnic.

Guys and girls together.

Yet another Rufus saves someone

It’s up to us; me and you, to make the world a better place. Stop waiting on the sidelines. Stop waiting for the “perfect moment”. Stop dreaming and start doing. Once you be the Rufus all sorts of things enter in your life. You will be stunned. So stop being an observer, and start being a participant. Be the Rufus. Nothing else is worthy of you.

Helping others is our highest calling.

Barber Chair

I think these things are beautiful.

The rise of the modern ghetto blaster

The ghetto blaster of days gone by is often regarded a relic of history today. Think back to the 80s, and you’re sure to have an image in your mind of a ghetto blaster with cassette player functionality and a unique chrome trim.

While many people still have a place in their heart for old-fashioned boomboxes, it’s safe to say that the older models did have their issues.

Equaliser settings seemed to make absolutely no difference to the sound quality. The chunky and blocky design meant carrying your ghetto blaster was a real headache. That’s particularly true if you had extra cassette recorders and speakers to think about.

Man with a boombox walking among a crowd at the Taste of Chicago festival. July 3, 1988.

On top of all that, ghetto blasters also had a major problem with battery life. These portable devices often required a huge number of batteries. Filling a device full of 10-12 D batteries could leave it weighing anywhere up to 26 pounds.

Many of the updates appearing in the new ghetto blaster market come with a focus on correcting the key issues of days gone by. As society continues to embrace the idea of “public music” again, ghetto blasters are seeing a resurgence.

However, today’s consumers don’t want to deal with the old gripes of their parents.

UK Fresh Hip Hop event in Wembley, London. 1986.

Cassettes might have been the perfect way to store and carry music back in the 70s and 80s when they were small and cheap – but they’re not going to have the same impact now.

People want the freedom to stream their music digitally through USB sticks and Bluetooth connections instead.

A group of young men pose with a boombox on a subway platform. New York. 1983.

You may occasionally encounter a CD ghetto blaster which gives you the option to play older audio formats. However, it’s more common to find a portable device that looks more like a massive speaker than a CD player these days.

The modern ghetto blaster combines radio and Bluetooth to introduce something more portable than anything we had in the past.

艾热 – 风语画江湖

Here’s what some Chinese RAP music looks like. Enjoy.

艾热 – 风语画江湖

Rescue the babies!

A car carrying children falls into a pond. The mother cannot get out! What is to be done? You need a Rufus nearby. That is what you need. For a Rufus will help you. A Rufus will provide support. A Rufus will set things right! Be the Rufus!

Be the Rufus!

New York, July 5, 1921. “Lanier Hotel restaurant.”

Fried kidney only 20 cents. Note the sleeping mousers. What’s all that stuff on the floor? Sawdust?

Young girls on roller skates

This takes me back. I used to have a pair of skates like this. Obviously this pre-dates roller blades. It was a simpler time.

Young girls on roller skates.

Acts of kindness in India

The world needs more Rufus’s. Look what is going on in India! It doesn’t take much. But you too can help others. You too can make a difference. You too can be the Rufus.

Acts of kindness in India.

Washington, D.C., 1920. “Suffragettes voting.”

Well, I don’t know about you all, but I do love the place where they are at.

Washington, D.C., 1920. “Suffragettes voting.”

A hungry man sits down at a table in a restaurant…

And starts to eat the left over food that was left behind by the people who were eating there. He’s eating the few remaining table scraps when a Rufus comes and throws away the dirty food, and gives him is own brand new meal. It doesn’t cost much. But a Rufus participates. A Rufus helps. A Rufus makes the world a better place.

Be that Rufus!

Be the Rufus.

Summer is here

For me, nothing says “Summer” than a nice fire in the woods. Especially at dusk when the air chills a bit, the dusk glooms, and the insects start making those night-time noises that they often do. It’s a time of reflection, companionship, drinking and hotdogs. Never forget the food.

In most cases, it’s cheaper to buy a pack of hotdogs and buns than it is to buy some Doritos. So cut down the costs, and have more get-togethers. Spend some time with others. Have a good time. And talk. Just talk.

Make a campfire.

A Rufus participates in his community

It is very, VERY important that a Rufus be part of his / her community. You be helpful. You smile, and you be that light that others look forward to seeing every day. And when things go “South”, the Rufus is always there to “pick up the slack”; to make the world a better place. Maybe in a small way…

…but if everyone was a Rufus, well, there would be a lot less trouble and discomfort in this world. Be the Rufus, anything less is a disservice.

Be the Rufus, anything less is a disservice.

A Rufus is helpful

Not everyone needs to save someone in crisis. But it does not matter. A real Rufus is helpful. A real Rufus is considerate and caring. A real Rufus shows humanity.

Be the Rufus.

A Rufus is helpful.

John Ross says

Well, he said this truth.

John Ross says.

Why are Americans so fat?

Well, there are multiple reasons, but this chart summarizes the most critical ones.

For those of you that are trying alternative campaign ideas…

I have laid out a methodology on how to navigate the MWI through world-line travel. And the key to this is affirmation campaigns. But others might not like the discipline that it requires. If you want to try something easier, might I suggest this…

It’s up to us

It’s not up to the “elected” officials to make rules, laws and budgets. It’s up to us to make meaningful change. We need it. Do not be in denial.  We all need each other, and we need to step up to the plate, put away our fears and start making the world a better place to live in. We cannot control the entire world, or the country. But we can make a difference in our town and in our community.

Be the Rufus. Don’t be the spectator.

Be the Rufus. Don’t be the spectator.

Oh No!

What must this tiger be thinking?

Oh No!

Death Wish USA

As an American, I am often asked (innocently) what the heck the USA is doing? I mean it is behind an event trying to cause World War III with the Russians, it is trying to provoke World War III with Taiwan, and it is being so very cocky and dangerous at just about every level internationally.

I respond that America is desperate.

The American leadership has squandered everything it has and run the nation into the ground.

Now the people are starting to get really upset and angry. Their only answer is to point elsewhere…

"It's not Washington's fault... it's Russia!"

Or, of course…

"It's not Washington's fault... it's China!"

And you know what, the USA military knows, and the rest of the world knows, that the USA is in absolutely no state to pick fights with anyone. Not at all. America is not a nation of Rambo’s. It’s become something else.

So what the heck is going on?

I argue that the next video describes WHY the USA is acting so brazenly crazy…

Here’s a guy so desperate, so unhappy, so fed up with his life that he wants to commit suicide by police officer. And you know what? This is becoming more and more common throughout the Untied States.

Americas video highlight.
An attempt at suicide by police officer.

Van life 1960’s

Today, in 2021, many Americans now live in their cars. The failure of society, of culture, and of government has been colossal. And their solution? To have world war III with both Russia and China simultaneously. I think that they have a true death wish.

Van life 1960’s

A considerate Rufus

Notice how these Chinese Rufus street sweepers handle the spray nozzles when confronting pedestrians and motor bike riders. A Rufus is considerate. A Rufus makes the world a better place.

A place to get away from it all.

There is something about Ireland and Scotland that shouts peace and tranquility. At least in my mind anyways. And this picture of a “man’s castle” is the image of a nice place where a person can go to just be left alone. And you know what? Everyone needs to be left alone from time to time, don’t you know.

A “man’s castle”.

Be the Rufus!

Are you happy with the way the world is now? If not, do you want to change it? What about your life?

The first step in making meaningful change is to recognize that all change is local.

It starts with you.

Not by writing a letter to your Congress-person, or by waving a banner and staging a protest. It begins with you taking part in your community. Be a helping hand. Make a difference. this world of ours needs people that will help change it.

You can be that person.

Start small. Start simple.

Smile more. Be kind. Go out of the way to make friends. Complement another person.

DO YOUR PRAYER AFFIRMATION CAMPAIGNS.

I believe in you.

Be that catalyst for good, meaningful change. Be the Rufus!

Be that catalyst for good, meaningful change. Be the Rufus!

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

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MM blue plate special

Today, I am going to present something which I hope will become a periodic feature in MM. It is the “MM blue plate special”. My intention is to model it after my very popular “Holiday extravaganza” post that I made on 4 July 2021. Here, I would just place interesting tidbits and stuff. With no particular order.

What is a “Blue Plate Special”?

Throughout the decades of the 1920’s – 1950’s, a popular restaurant promotion was the “blue plate special.”  Served mostly at dinners and other simple eateries, the blue plate special was a reduced cost meal consisting of some kind of meat, (beef, pork, chicken, fish etc.), with a number of vegetables side dishes.

Meatloaf blue plate special.

It appears to have gleaned its name from the actual plates it was presented on.  Solid blue, or sporting a blue pattern, the plates were also divided into sections, a large one for the protein, and smaller segments for the vegetables.  Typically the items were pre-cooked and held at serving temperature.

Because they were not made on the spot, they tended to be a little “over cooked”. This allowed for alacritous service and more efficient turnover.

Over time, the blue plates got broken or disappeared. Today, there just isn’t any special plates that tend to be used.

I guess that the big thing about this meal was that the one plate meal saved time and money on dish washing.  This was very important at a time when people washed dishes by hand, and there was no such thing as disposable plates.

An American Diner.

While the “blue plate” sobriquet has all but faded from use, many modern restaurants still offer “specials.”  However, daily specials are no longer the sole domain of workaday eateries but rather unique meals where the cook makes up a batch of unusual food that they can serve on that day.  When I worked as a short-order-breakfast-chef in San Louis Obispo, California a “Blue Plate Special” might be something like “Stuffed Peppers”, “Cabbage rolls”, “Beef tips on rice”, or a gourmet omelet such as “Blue cheese and prosciutto ham omelet”.

How expats in China make their coffee

Not me. Someone else. But so very relatable. The white bottle that he is pouring in is called Baijiu . It is typically 53% alcohol.

Baijiu is a clear distilled liquor, which can be regarded as the national drink of the People's Republic of China. Its name translates as "white wine" but it is, in fact, a high-alcohol spirit. Chinese people will generally drink Baijiu with food, rather than on its own.

Click on the picture to watch the video.

A video of a man drinking coffee.
How expats drink their coffee.

America is collapsing and needs to blame someone…

America is collapsing all over, in so many ways. And part of it is a system that is unstable; this idea of “democracy”, but part of it is the evil psychopaths that run the country, and part of it is the dumbed down, balkanized population. But what ever the reason, it is a mess, and the United States desperately wants to point the finger elsewhere… to blame someone else.

Because if they can’t find a person to blame, the entire population of a America is going to rise up and lynch everyone in Washington DC on scaffolding.

Click on the picture to watch the video.

A video about why China is being villified.
A discussion on why America is vilifying China right now.

Riding on a Chinese High Speed Train

Personally, I love these things. Big and roomy. Easy and quiet. Cheap. Convenient. No hassles like at an airport. The Chinese have them everywhere. I wrote about them in a couple of posts, and here is just a quick blurb by a English expat on board one of the trains.

Some history. President Obama announced that he would establish a massive High Speed Train Network in America and funded it with billions of dollars. That same time, so did China. Today, America has nothing, while China has the most dynamic, largest and most elaborate high speed trains system in the world.

To catch up, President Biden announced that he is going to build a HST system that will be bigger and better than what the Chinese has done. And he is funding it lavishly. If you were to bet, how successful do you think that it will be?

Click on the picture to see the movie.

High speed train video.
Inside a Chinese High Speed Train.

This is how you eat dumplings in China

The dumplings are something that is truly unique, and you just cannot get them in America or the West. You get sort of a “fast food” version, and you certainly are not provided with all sorts of dipping sauces. Dumplings are one of my favorite foods in China, and I made this video below to show you why I love it so much…

Video on Chiense dumplings.
How to eat dumplings in China.

Riding a Subway in Shenzhen

This is a video that I took when I went to Shenzhen to deal with some matters. Everything in China is brand new, clean and very well maintained. You just have to compare this to the piss-poor pathetic subway systems in the West. If you aren’t comparing then you must be brain-dead. America doesn’t have anything even remotely resembling this.

Cool video taken by MM.
Subway in Shenzhen, China.

Family Dinner: 1952

From Shorpy HERE.

A family diner 1952.

The comments are just precious.

Mother's Swiss-dot curtains are torn on the left panel; her drain rack for her dishes is in its place by the drainboard. 

She normally uses her table for her counter space, but since the table is set for dinner, she's using her sink drainboard for her Sunbeam Mixmaster which whipped up the frosting. 

Ah, yes, that tiny black spray nozzle on the sink. 

Is that grated cheese in the cheese shaker or do they use a lot of salt? 

The younger daughter has her eyes on the boiled frosting cake, as would be mine as well. 

Father and the boy are eying the fried chicken. 

Deviled eggs on a side plate with lettuce? 

There are sweater 'pills' on the older daughter's sweater, at the farthest point West. 

Nice white bread, hard to find nowadays with all the nutritious breads forced on us in our stores. 

Father's hair is combed in a 'combover' on his bald spot. 

Bet any money that Mother's wrist watch is a Bulova. 

Mother ironed and 'starched' the tablecloth, so it must be Sunday. 

Father's shirt is ironed, older daughter's sweater is ironed, younger daughter's dress is ironed, younger son's t-shirt is ripped with holes. 

The plant at the window is a 'Wandering Jew.' 

The tin pots and pans are surely much lighter to lift than my All-Clad set today. 

All in all, the scene resembled by own childhood in 1952, right down to the floral design on the linoleum on the floor.

And then you have this…

In my grandma's kitchen was the soup ladle hanging above the stove. 

Having come from a Pennsylvania coal miner grandfather, my 'take' on this picture is that it was staged, posed and fully planned in advance (unless this was on a Sunday when they would have their best meal of the week). 

The other six week-night suppers were mostly home-made soup and bread, every kind of soup imaginable, more than Campbells could ever come up with. 

Having a large family, my mom said there was nothing else that could satisfy seven or eight hungry, hard-working people as a filling, hot and inexpensive meal like soup and fresh bread & butter. 

She was a master soup cook too, taught by her mother, and I was pretty much raised on soup, some heartier than others, but never disappointing. 

It can be time-consuming to prepare but I've never felt deprived and it really stretches your meat to feed any number of people. (If someone got a big chunk of chicken or beef in their soup, or too many clams in their clam chowder, we used to say "the string must have broke").

And yet another precious comment…

The logo in front of the sink is from Youngstown Kitchens. Yup, I grew up with them.

Yes. I really love Shorpy.

And all the negative “news” about China…

It’s all “hate China”, all the time. And if you believe it then you are sheeple. There simply isn’t any good news about China int he Western press; the Western “news”. During the last two weeks, China had an 8 hour spacewalk, a 100 year anniversary, the recording of sounds on Mars, a new joint moon-base plans, and an expansion of the BRI into Pakistan. What “news” did America report?

A quick video blurb about this strange behavior…

Hate China all the time. It’s what the American “news” media does.

Getting a ferry ticket at AI kiosks

Here is a short video that I took. It depicts what it is like to get a ferry in Shekou. These are the automated ferry kiosks, and you just scan your bio-metics and pay by QR. So fast, so easy. It’s really cool and very relaxed an unhurried.

Nice video that I made.
Getting a ferry in Shekou.

Trying to kidnap a middle school girl

Kidnapping and bad crimes still happen in China, but they are getting to be less and less frequent. Here is a favorite video of mine when a group of guys on a motorcycle tries to kidnap a middle school girl on her way home from school.

It’s one of my favorite videos.

Nice video.
Trying to kidnap a middle school girl.

Chinese military protecting the Uighur Muslims from American-backed terrorism

If you read the neocon publications out of America such as the National Review, you would get the impression that the Chinese military is a third world group of conscripts armed with cheap AK-47 clones. Not even remotely true. The Chinese are a serious, serious nation that DOES NOT PLAY.

Here’s a video (I posted this before) showing a group of Chinese forces that fight the American-backed Uighur “pro-democracy” terrorists out of Afghanistan. They protect the BRI which is the land route that bypasses the threat of American Naval blockade as part of the “QUAD”.

Good video.
Chinese military forces in Xinjiang.

Beach Road

This stretch of road is just two blocks from my house and it is named “Lovers Road”. I filmed it as I was riding home on a bus. You can see the statue of the “Fisher Girl” which is a major tourist attraction.

Right now this entire area is under massive renovation. New parks are sprouting up everywhere and all sorts of malls and waling areas are being developed. China has designated this area as an economic corridor for AI, robotics and IoT technologies and along with the influx of industry comes an equal investment into the supporting parks, green areas, public spaces and transportation hubs. In China the two go hand-in-hand.

Video while going home.
Road near my home.

Advertising Jeans

One of the trends in China today is to make your own designer clothing. You design it, and then you work with factories to make them, and finally you advertise it on Chinese media to sell. These videos are great where the owners or their models wear their uniquely designed clothing and promote them.

In this video, which was taken outside a woman’s bathroom, you can see this gal showing off her nice pair of jeans.

Nice jeans.
Advertising your own brand of clothing.

The New American Army

There has been a lot of talk about how Presidents Trump, Obama and Biden have revamped and reorganized the Army. It’s an “Army of one”; a transgender, a polite and kinder Army. You read about it, and you hear about it. But nothing says more than watching the proud fighting troops sing cadences as they perform drills in front of their barracks…

Check out the video.

The new American military.

Chinese Boy / Girl scouts

The American boy scouts and girl scouts have changed to reflect a softer, squishier and gentler America. Not so in China. Boy and girl scouts are co-ed and they are taught to fight, be the best they can be and endure.

Great video.
Chinese boy and girl scouts.

An Amazing Landing

I am sure that the pilot was well shaken up after this. I’ll bet that he went to the local “watering hole” (bar or pub) and got totally smashed. OMG! Check out the video…

What a landing!
An amazing landing.

Pre-Avatar: 1982

Found on Shorpy HERE.

Watching television 1982.

From the text…

A friend of mine and I "enjoy" 3-D on television in 1982, when there was a boomlet of local stations showing 3-D films such as "Creature from the Black Lagoon" using the anaglyph method.

This method used red and blue lenses to separate the images rather than the polarized system originally used in the theaters thirty years earlier. 

I say "enjoy" because the effect was problematic. 

If you had your color adjusted correctly it was possible to get a moderate dimensional effect out of the blur. With my never-rectified amblyopia, I could get it mostly when things were flying at the camera.

We're watching it on my Advent VideoBeam, no longer in the basement of my folks' house, but in my new digs in Petaluma. 

Fans of the yellow lamp will notice that it's already starting to deteriorate, the hinge holding the middle shade being secured with duct tape. 

Another indication of the absence of parental caregiving is the burst cushion of my red chair. 

Other necessary video room adjuncts visible are Ritz Crackers, a TV Guide (is that Farrah Fawcett?) and shelves full of Betamax tapes. 

Oh, and under my chair a metal file box storing my card catalog of said tapes. The blue binder contains a hand-typed list of just the cartoons. 

Computerization of the collection was still four years in the future.

Afghanistan – U.S. Sneaks Out At Night – Taliban Take Multiple Districts Per Day

This is awkward:

The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said. 

...

“We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram ... and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander said. 

...

Before the Afghan army could take control of the airfield about an hour’s drive from the Afghan capital Kabul, it was invaded by a small army of looters, who ransacked barrack after barrack and rummaged through giant storage tents before being evicted, according to Afghan military officials.

“At first we thought maybe they were Taliban,” said Abdul Raouf, a soldier of 10 years. He said the the U.S. called from the Kabul airport and said “we are here at the airport in Kabul.”

There is video from the empty base. Hundreds of cars were left behind. The network equipment in the headquarter was ripped out but the base hospital seems to have been left intact. There are even some useful medical supplies stocked there.

Meanwhile the Taliban continue their blitz operation to take over the country. They snatch up district after district especially in the north.

Taliban control.

The Taliban have probably some 3-4,000 fighters in the north-eastern Badakhshan province but they managed to take 90% of it in just 4 days, 14 of its districts fell in the last 48 hours. Some 1,500 Afghan government soldiers stationed there have fled to Tajikistan. The province capital Faizabad is now isolated and the only place that is still under government control.

Where Afghanistan borders China.

Something is quite curious with this. Badakhshan was a stronghold of the Northern Alliance which in the late 1990s fought against the Taliban. It is the home of the Jamiat-e Islami party which consists mostly of ethnic Tajiks and has its own militia. The leader of Jamiat-e Islami is Salahuddin Rabbani who is now also the chair of the government’s Afghan High Peace Council which negotiates with the Taliban.

The mountainous province has 1 million inhabitants. But here are 4 Taliban showing up in a car in the remote Wakhan district. They are not opposed by local militia but are welcomed by the local (male) population.

It is inconceivable that a brigade size Taliban force can seize Badakhshan in a few days and at little cost without having a deal with the militia of the dominant local party. Something must have happened behind the curtains that the media is not aware of.

Americans leave so much behind.

This is good news as a fast Taliban victory in the north will make a new civil war less likely. The neoconservative Long War Journal is aghast as it explains:

Afghanistan is at risk of complete collapse after the Taliban has made dramatic gains in recent days, striking at the heart of the Afghan government’s base of power in the north while seizing control of large areas of the country – often unopposed by government forces. 

...

Much of the Taliban gains have occurred in the north. The importance of the Taliban’s northern thrust cannot be understated. The Taliban is taking the fight directly to the home of Afghanistan’s elite power brokers and government officials.

If the Taliban can deny Afghanistan’s government and its backers their base of power, Afghanistan is effectively lost. The government could not possibly keep its tenuous footholds in the south, east, west, and even in central Afghanistan if the north is lost. If the Afghan government loses the north, the Taliban could take the population centers in the south, east, and west without a fight, and begin its siege of Kabul.

I currently do not think that there will be a long ‘siege of Kabul’ but a negotiated transfer of power.

The events of the last weeks show a more or less controlled retreat or defeat of demoralized government forces and a systematic takeover of most of the countryside and district centers by well prepared Taliban forces. Only the bigger province capitals have not yet fallen though some think that Mazar i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province, will fall tonight.

It seems that there is a willingness of at least certain parts of Afghanistan’s current government to let the Taliban take over the country without much of a fight.

That gives me hope that a further long conflict will be avoided. After more than 42 years of war Afghanistan needs peace. While the Taliban rule is harsh it is also somewhat just and certainly less corrupt than the U.S. imposed structures. Afghanistan must be given time to find a new balance from which it can then develop in a way that fits the local circumstances and the local peoples’ tradition and morality.

The last 42 years have shown that nothing else will work.

Chinese military concentration

Since Trump’s and Biden’s budgets have just “blown away” all records for military spending, China has taken notice, and has been mass producing nuclear hyper-velocity warheads, missiles and launch systems at a frantic pace. These weapons are impossible to stop, have artificial intelligence, incapable of being jammed, and uses stealth while traveling at hyper-velocities. They are decades ahead of anything the United States fields.

And China is churning them out like buttons from a button making machine.

Great video.
China is beefing up it’s self-defense forces like “there’s no tomorrow”.

A typical day in America

When I say that America is really “out of control” and in a bad state, it refers to behaviors and events that should not be occurring. What you see in the below video is NOT freedom. It is what happens when you live inside of ghetto that is treated as a prison-fortress.

Shootout video.
Life in America.

Pittsburgh

From where I grew up (well, at least where my parents and grandparents lived)…

January 1941. “Mill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Long stairway in a working class section.”

Talking about freedom in China

Here is a UK expat who has lived in China talking about “freedom” inside of China. It’s pretty good stuff, and he reflects the view of about 99.999% of us who actually live inside of China.

Of course, you would NEVER see this in the West. And it is censored and shadow-banned on Twitter, Google, Facebook, and You-tube. So go ahead and watch what is forbidden to you to observe…

A video about feedom in China.
Freedom in China.

Wife delivers a birthday meal to a fireman husband in China

Firemen eat in mess halls and live in barracks. Two weeks on, then two weeks off. (Depending on the location.) Here is a guy’s birthday and his wife and child came to visit him and brought him a special birthday meal (or other special occasion, I’m not so sure as my Chinese isn’t that good.) Great video.

Be the Rufus. Make a difference!

A special meal for a special person.

China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty

I remember talking about this fact with my brother, and he was like “yeah. I get it. China has helped some of it’s people”.

No. He didn’t get it.

The population of the United States of America is 330 million people.  In the fifty or so years on the American War on Poverty” hardly anyone was lifted out of poverty. In fact, today, a full half of the United States is in poverty and lives off welfare.

China not only produced results where America did nothing, but did it for nearly three times the amount of people. This is amazing!

Check out the video…

Video on lifting people out of poverty.
An amazing accomplishment.

What it is like to get a vaccination for COVID in China

This is a pretty good video, and it shows the organization and structure of how this is being handled in China. I will tell you that my experience is pretty much nearly identical to this. Of course, it was in a different geographical area, and a different building. This was in Zhongshan, I believe. Mine was in tiny Zhuhai. I actually own a home in Zhongshan.

It’s nice, but I love Zhuhai.

Nice video about getting a vaccination.
Getting a coronavirus vaccination in China.

Chinese Airport Security

Well, the Chinese are very understanding and humane about how they handle people They do not treat them as some kind of object.  Like the American TSA does. Check out this video.

Meanwhile in America

America is a God Damn cluster fuck. Doing “your own thing”.

Police killing a man in America.
America is one enormous cluster fuck.

A very interesting para-military video from China

You might think that this is a video about the Chinese PLA. But no it isn’t. This is a police detachment. Specifically the “corruption police”. Their job is to find and arrest powerful people who use their power, whether in government, or in industry to thwart the law. In China people like Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Nancy Polaski would never make it.

China. Does. Not. Play.

Great video here.
Chinese corruption police.

A great outfit

From Shorpy HERE.

A great outfit for certain.

The site says…

From the collection of film and 4x5 glass negatives I recently purchased that seem to have been taken in upstate New York about 1912. This is from a film negative that has been bent, hence the flare on the right side. The lady's dress is spectacular, and she is coordinated with gloves and white shoes. I don't think this was an inexpensive outfit.

The comments are great…

My wife and I have done historical costuming for years. The fabric of this dress is almost certainly worsted wool. It's surface smoothness looks like worsted and the folds and drapes are too full to be even heavy linen. The dress she's wearing in the first photo posted (the eyelet lace dress) is either linen or cotton or possibly even a blend of the two.

As to colors, that's harder to determine than you might think. Early black and white films didn't respond to colors in quite the way we expect nowadays. Silver halide is most responsive to the blue end of the spectrum. Colors from the other end often wound up overly dark. With glass plate negatives, special dies and filters could be used to produce a more accurate tonal map of the colors, but those didn't work with film at this time.

It wouldn't surprise me if the dress was actually bright blue with bright yellow collar and cuffs or something like that. Wool takes die especially well and so was often very brightly colored (particularly after the invention of aniline dyes in the 1850s).

And I do agree with this comment…

I know nobody cares what I think and I know many people who would never allow themselves to crack a smile in their posed pictures because it may not be "cool" or sophisticated, but this elegant lady would look a million times better, younger and healthier if only she would have smiled or at least put on a pleasant face. Instead she has a dour expression in both of the photos we've seen that makes her look gloomy and judgmental, with a superior attitude. Even Mona Lisa looks more approachable. Perhaps we will see a happy picture of her in the future. (That's my story and I'm stickin' to it).

The new Chinese fighter aircraft

After decades of being the second and third tier suppliers for American, French, German, and Russian aviation, China has developed and designed their own fighter aircraft, and by all accounts is cheaper, better, faster, more maneuverable, and superior that the top line American counterparts. Whether or not this is true depends on who you ask. Certainly K-street believes that American weapons systems are invincible.

Never the less, this is a great video of Chinese military aviation.

I most especially like the little Artificial Intelligence bee-sized hand-grenade that the Army uses.

A great video.
A great video of Chinese military aviation.

Being a Rufus

Just being kind to others is all you need to do to be a Rufus. Just some some compassion. Show some kindness. Show some understanding. Emote and help others. It’s our highest calling.

Watch the video.

Be the Rufus. It’s our highest calling.

A cool car

“1950 Nash experimental NXI.” The Nash Experimental International, basis for the Nash Metropolitan, piloted by Nash-Kelvinator Chairman George Mason with VP George Romney (Mitt’s dad) riding shotgun.

What it is like to travel on a Chinese High Speed Train

Here you can see why I love it. China and Russia are linked by rail , and a new High Speed Line is being established inside of Russia. Russia and China have a great relationship and as time moves forward it keeps getting better and better with each day.

Great Video
Going to Russia on Chinese High Speed Rail.

New wording inside of all Chinese passports

Ever since the neocons in America have been openly being hostile to China, and Chinese citizens, the Chinese have implemented changes and training and advice sessions to Chinese citizens who wish to travel abroad. One of the changes in policy is the text placed inside of each passport issued to citizens of China.

See the video below…

How a Rufus springs into action

This woman is wearing a red vest, which means that she is a volunteer. She is working in her community. Often older, these people play a valuable role and in this particular instance, I think that she was trying to perform some gardening, clean up of landscaping. And she collapsed. Instead of just standing round and filming it, a real Rufus springs into action.

Great video
A Rufus springs into action.

An American school

This was filmed in an American school. I do not know if it was a university or a High School (it appears to be an American university), but I can tell you that this kind of behavior shows a complete lack of control and discipline.  People ask me why I don’t give American citizenship to my daughter. Why?

I don’t want her anywhere near these piss-ant pampered, cocky moronic idiots. Watch this college student “doing his own thing”.

Some background; this young man is the END RESULT of the fire-hose of HATE directed at the Chinese, and the ONLY reason why he is being so God-damn rude is because the professor is Chinese. Thank you FOX news, Bloomberg, Hal Turner, and all the rest.

Video taken inside an American school.
An American school.

What America, the UK and Australia have planned for China…

Most people in the West have absolutely no concept of how poorly and malevolently the Western powers treated the Chinese. Whether it was getting hundreds of millions addicted to Opium, creating and forcing starvation, looting the land and it’s people, it was brazen and astounding in scope and depth. Here’s a little video of some of the rich Victorian ladies throwing rice onto the streets and the starving Chinese people running to collect it.

And this… watch it closely… is what America wants to happen again.

Watch the video.

A video that you will never see in America.
Throwing rice to the starving Chinese.

Cute Robot Dogs

These robot dogs are all so very cute. They were designed to be mass produced into a disposable “throw away” configuration, and are in production for the Chinese military. I can well imagine, about 20,000 of these cute little robots swarming a military base, and then detonating when their AI detects that it is near a target.

Video
Cute Chinese AI dog.

Notable American actors visit the North Korea DMZ

In some kind of silly, suicidal move, some very famous American actors decide to visit the DMZ border to South Korea. You can see Mike Tyson, and Henry Winkler, and William Shatner there. And they are just playing around, joking.

The Asians are a very serious people.

And the idiotic Americans are delirious and have no concept about how dangerous they are playing and dancing with death. This video, seems to have been forgotten, but this attitude has not changed. And I see this attitude being replicated, time and time again in regards to China, and Russia.

Watch the video.

North Korean soldier who will shoot to kill.

Rufus saves a woman and her cat

Nothing makes me feel better than to watch a true and real Rufus in action. A Rufus is a Service to others person, and when they leap into action, I feel so much pride in their actions. It gives me hope for the human species. Because right now, most especially in America, it’s every-man-for-himself, dog-eat-dog world of service-for-self psychopaths.

Great rescue video.
Rufus to the rescue.

Thank you for your smile. It made me see her again.

Sometimes, as we age, we lose those who matter to us. We lose lovers, family, friends. Daughters.

This old man hasn’t seen his daughter since she died so long ago, but this girl has the same smile that his daughter had…

A great video.
Thank you for your smile. It made me see her again.

A Rufus cares about others

There are all kinds of people in this world. Some, well many, have their own issues, demons and problems. We must do what we can within our community. In the video below we have a man who is known in the community as having “problems”. He’s not a bad person. Just has issues.

Unlike the USA, he isn’t shunned and told to lie on cardboard under a bridge, or sleep in a car, or shelter under a tree in a poncho. The community all pitches in and takes care of “one of their own”. having this sense of community is important. You are never alone. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

Be the Rufus. Everything else is a waste of your life.

Great video.
Be the Rufus. Everything else is a waste of your life.

Conclusion

I do hope that you enjoyed the “Blue Plate Special” article / post. Tell me what you think. If you found it enjoyable, interesting or beneficial, I’ll post more of them. If you don’t then I will stop. If you don’t care, well then, I’ll add that to my calculus.

The future is becoming more and more clear with each passing day.  Continue to protect your personal life. Make sure that you run your affirmation prayers, and make sure that they protect you and your loved ones from any strange behaviors on the part of the out of control American empire.

There’s a future ahead. By being aware of what’s going on the the rest of the world we can determine what our part in that world will be.

Keep focused.

Be the Rufus.

Our relationships with others will make our affirmations manifest. Nurture them. Protect them. become a meaningful person in your small group of friends and family.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

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Holiday extravaganza from MM to you all.

Ok, guys and girls. This is going to be a little bit of a strange article. I make no apologies for it. It’s going to be confusing, rambling, and apparently unordered, but that is by INTENTION. I fully intend to produce this article in this manner, and if you don’t understand, then it’s simply because you haven’t learned the most basic tenants of MM.

Life is complex.

You cannot isolate certain sections without influencing everything else.

Background

All through life we have been taught to do one thing at a time. We studied reading, then we put our books away, and then we studied History. Then we put those books away, and we went to gym class. After that, we change our clothes and studied Math. Everything was nice and compartmentalized. So nice. So neat, and so tidy.

But as we became adults we realized with a big shock that the world is not fine, nice, neat and tidy. It wasn’t that way at all. When we married a person, we inherited an entire slew of interpersonal relationships, not one singular one. When we went to work at a company, we were expected to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Not one singular one that we studied in school. We didn’t like this change. But we adapted to it. We adapted coping mechanisms. We learned to “multitask”.

But no one has breached the most basic point. Which is that life is complex, colorful, and encompasses multiple things, events, relationships, ideas, thoughts and emotions simultaneously. And unless we train our mind to handle and sort out this onslaught of data, we will be forever easily manipulated by it.

And what is what is going on today. People are being manipulated by the “fire-hose” of manipulation. And since people see things out of context, they believe the manipulations without questioning what’s going on.

Even the most intelligent and skeptical people fall into this trap.

An Example

Today, for example, is this little blurb on the “Drudge Report”;

So..

The Chinese military announced HOW they will attack Taiwan!

Well!

Well, I (being an interested person) ran to the site to see what is going on, and there is a very detailed explanation of a war plan. It looks like something out of a World War I American military college. Not something that the Chinese leadership would ever do.

So many interesting pictures, details and diagrams.

Ok. I’ll bite, where did this come from. I want to read the original.

Screen capture of the article.

So if you look in the article it says…

"An article in a state-controlled publication has offered a glimpse of a..."

Ok. So what is this article, and where is it? Who wrote it?

Nope. Nothing. But the article does go on to say…

"The article states: "The attacks against Taiwan’s airports would continue until [Chinese] surface troops had accomplished an assault landing.""

Ok. I want to see the article. I want to see it myself.

Still nothing. But it does say…

"the article states YJ-91 and CJ-10 cruise missiles..."

Still nothing about the source. Where did they get this bullshit? I want to know. So I read further…

"Finally, the article said warships and land-based rocket forces would wipe-out any remaining obstacles so the PLA’s marine corps..."

So I scroll down all the fancy graphs, and maps showing fighting. I scroll down the pictures of Chinese military. And I go all the way to the bottom of the page.

NOTHING!

The entire article is based on one big lie.

How do I know. I did a Baidu search. I did it in Chinese. There are no Chinese articles about this at all. It’s all made up bullshit.

Summary
Drudge said that the Chinese Government released this battle attack plan. Instead the truth is that a supermarket tabloid claimed to translate an important document in a Chinese magazine. Both of which are lies.

Many things

Right now the globe is a caldron of quanta seething and boiling over with the various interactions being generated out of the United States (and the UK).

It’s spitting quanta balls, and most humans are unable to grasp what is going on. They are being pelted with quantum “slime balls” and it hits them, manipulates their thoughts and sets the stage for some very, very bad and catastrophic things to happen.

And if you get your Intel from the American (or Western) “news” media, mainstream of alt-any, you are being deceived. Nothing like what is being stated is actually happening.

We need to see things AS THEY ARE. Not as what is being presented to us.

This article

It began simple enough.

I just wanted so show the real and true face of China.

And I do this by my very successful method of showing very pretty Chinese girls in their homes, in the public spaces, on bridges, inside restaurants and other places inside of China. And people come to MM to look at the pretty girls, and in the process see that the China that they see does not resemble anything like what is being showed at them out of the Western oligarchy.

So…

Here is a part of what was intended to be part 11A of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. (Don’t ask me about the interruption between series nine and the rest. It’s a long story. )

This particular collection consists of a very average selection of attractive Chinese girls, and you all might just be “blown away” by the content. Indeed, there are some favorites in here. And with each grouping, I have isolated and make a key social and societal point that I want to make.

These points are well understood by long time MM readers. But I “feel” the need to underline, or “underscore” these points so that the reader can best understand things in the proper context, and the most important context; THEIR context.

Undoing American propaganda

When you look at these women, please pay attention to the China that they are being filmed in. And ask yourself “Does this in any way represent the narrative promoted by the American MSM “?

And you need to.

The United States is out of control, and it’s going to get each and every one of us killed.

The western world is being led by people who are functionally insane, that is not hyperbole. 

There are any number of things that we 'could' 'should' 'might' or 'must' do about the situation but a lack of sane and workable solutions is not the problem. 

The problem is the vast concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a very few mostly unelected people.

People who would (and probably will) see the world go up in flames rather than relinquish their largely unearned and unwarranted power.

Posted by: MarkU
"No U.S. president will risk New York over Taipei City." one would think, but the crazies running usa foreign policy seem to have undue persuasion with usa presidents, as witnessed the past number of years usa behavior... maybe they want to go down in a blaze of glory? what do the end of worlders, or born agains think?? 

Posted by: james

Please kindly excuse me for my entanglement of thoughts, opinions, beauty, China, and Geo-politics…

Group A of Chinese beauties

And the first point that I want to make is that all you see on the internet is a fiction. It is a lie. It is a construction. Just like Hollywood has created illusions, so has the internet. What you read, and what you get has no bearing on reality. So the first point that I want to make is…

The reality is much better than what you read about.

According to the National Review, the Chinese are miserable and are just “pining away” for liberation from the evil oppressive Chinese government. You can see this oppression in the videos out of China.

oops!

What? There are NO videos showing this “oppression.”

What, oh, that’s right, Chinese videos are BANNED in the United States. Well, here we will show you just how oppressed the Chinese are. Here’s a typical woman just wanting to be liberated by the proud United States Marines from the “Bright and shining city on the hill”.

One of the Chinese girls from group “A”. Does it look like she is living in squalor and filth and needs to be liberated from the oppressive Chi-Coms for Democracy and Freedom?

Ah yes.

If these people actually believe what they write then they are delusional and need to be locked up in a mental institution for a long, long time. If they aren’t and they are lying. Then they need to be put in a situation where they can personally experience the horrific consequences of what they are tying to provoke.

Group "A" here. You can download a file of about thirty or so micro-videos of amazingly beautiful Chinese women. OMG!

But forget about the crazy man on the “shining house on the hill”. He’s really a mess and so fucking crazy that he’s not worth your time of day.

American neocons started the pandemic, tried to start world war III, and are constantly pushing and pushing to start a major war with SOMEONE.

But their reality is not YOURS.

So instead, Let’s concentrate on the girls. Ok?

Some of the girls from group “A”.

They are all awfully pretty, don’t you know. And when I look at them (like this particular beauty, for example)  I think of strawberry shortcake. I mean, really, when was the last time that you had a strawberry shortcake?

When was the last time that you had a strawberry shortcake?

Let me “single out” one especially delicious lady.

I choose this girl to discuss (in this particular instance).

Man! I do love a cute little pleated skirt.

Actually, this (particular) girl reminds me of a girl that walked in the restaurant where I was eating dinner today.

We ate some szechuan food.  It was truly delicious.

A “gaggle” of beauties came on off from work, they must have worked at the same company as they were all wearing the standard black and white office address code attire, and a lanyard around their neck with an ID QR code.

Szechuan food.

I love it when friends get together and are all happy and smiling. I like there attitude, and their nice fellowship.

She was a smiling, and chatting away, and while I wasn’t rude enough to eavesdrop, I could tell that they were all passionate.

This kind of event warms my heart and gives me hope for the future. You just cannot expect mankind; humans to grow and advance as a species, when they are living and toiling inside of sterile grey cubicles and chained to electronics media. No matter what the wealthy oligarchy believes.

They are wrong.

Anyways, this girl is most certainly a strawberry shortcake kind of gal. Admit it! You do KNOW what I am talking about, right?

Strawberry shortcake.

Just looking at her and her happy smiles and friendships put me in a great mood. It really does!

And so dusting off this old song from my parolee-bicycling days in Erie, PA, I present to you…

Group “B”

And the point that I want to associate with this next group of Chinese girls are that happy people are a real treasure. You need to associate with the happy, with the up-beat, with the cheerful, and the energetic.

I haven’t yet covered this, but we can exchange quanta (qi energy) from each other. Sad, disturbed, mentally ill, sick, upset and angry people can steal from you. And close association will them will drain you. Long term effects will destroy you.

Be around happy and cheerful people.

Happy people are a treasure.

Surround yourself with them.

One of the Chinese girls from group “B”. I am such a “sucker” for a nice wide smile, beautiful and clear eyes, and long lush hair. I mean it. The hair in Asia and in Africa are just amazing.

Group "B" here. It's about twenty five to thirty great videos of amazing Chinese women.

Some stunners, indeed.

Here I go again, with my association with food and beautiful women. There’s something that I just cannot “put my finger on” but I really associate beautiful and attractive ladies with food, conversation and companionship. And for me, well at least for me, that means food and chatting at a table.

This girl reminds me of an Australian meat pie. I guess you could refer to her as my “meat pie lady”.

Australian meat pie.

All men need a nice meat pie lady in their lives.

You all don’t probably “get” (understand) what I am trying to say. Women are like these big capacitors, or reservoirs that men can use to recharge. If the men give to them, the woman’s “battery” charges up and is there and provides the energy for the both of them (or more, if they have a family) and then combined, anything is possible a great meat pie lady can do this.

I think that meat pie ladies are not appreciated. They are the people that go visit a dying friend, and violate the pandemic restrictions to do so. They are the kind of people who will go out of their way to help a friend, a loved one, and an animal. They are natural Rufus’s.

They communicate with the unseen. They are in tune with nature, and the hidden. They can talk with faeries, and humans. They can understand things in a much greater scope than most of us can.

Meat pie ladies.

Totally and completely underappreciated.

Group “C”

And you know what? I’m going to talk about mothers.

Appreciate your mother.

Women are amazing. When the world is falling apart, they gather their family together and offer hope, comfort and protection. They help relatives, and provide a refuge from the storm. Whether it is Haiti, or Southern California. Real women are amazing.

A smiling girl from group “C”.

Group "C" here. It's about twenty five to thirty great videos of amazing Chinese women.

She is , and the rest of the gals are just lovely. This woman above embodies how I remember my mother. She was such a happy person on the holidays. But me, nah. I was a sultry spoiled teenager, and I made fun of her singing when she was cooking the meal for the family on the holiday.

I was such a little dweep-shit.

Family often takes people, roles, contributions as “givens”, without taking the time to think about how just very special these other people are. You all shouldn’t worry too much about your families and how the family dynamic exists. Just accept it as it is, and be the best you that you can be.

Anyways…

Women, especially (and mostly) those that smile and participate, are like precious treasures.

Precious.

Treasure.

And you know what this woman above reminds me of? I cannot help myself. They remind me of fresh vegetables and a fine delicious fruit salad. She reminds me of my mother, and in the Summer she would help us cut up fruit, and add cream and make a fine luscious Summer snack.

That’s what a true and fine woman can do.

They can evoke strong, visceral emotions, and trigger actions… which could lead to great things.

A fine delicious fruit salad.

Group “D”

Be part of something bigger.

Then you are never alone.

Video "D" cluster. HERE.

Lately I have been going through my old archives. I wrote a post on what it was like while on parole. And the situation there. And one of the groups that heavily influenced me at that time was the Japanese group Funky Monkey Babys. Of course, here I was, trapped in the United States under the jurisdiction of the Arkansas crew and in a “recovery / rehabilitation” system in Erie which was smack dab in the middle of poverty-central.

Both places had good people, I am sure. But I surrounded by the under-educated, the impoverished, the mentally ill, the survival-group of the criminal class, and the professional social networks that supported them. I felt very much alone and out of my environment.

I coped with the materials at hand. One of which was healthy up-beat music, my cat, painting, and my prayer affirmations with a goal of living an exceptional life inside of China. One of the videos that I watched, I just managed to dig up. Like all the music and videos from that time, they brought up memories of the things and images that I clutched to keep me going.

You know, I felt alone.

I was alone. It’s very different to have friends as a “sex offender”. So I was really isolated.

But then I would watch a video from Asia. Whether it is Korea, Japan, or China they all pointed to being part of something. Not being alone, and lonely. These videos pointed a way; a route and a direction for me to follow. They reminded me over and over that YOU ARE NOT ALONE. You are always part of something bigger.

As this video shows. This man is part of a trio of three people, but he always believed that he was alone. Nope. He was one of three. Together we are strong. Together we can do great things. Together we are significant.

Entire video HERE. Zip of the MV video HERE.

You are not alone.

You are NEVER alone. You are part of something bigger.

It’s just that those in the West (most ESPECIALLY Americans) don’t see this because the entire government and social structure is one of divide and conquer. Put people in isolation. Make them alone. Feed them drugs and passive entertainment. Get them addicted, and feed off them.

But in watching this video spoke to me. I could see that there was an option out. That I could join a society where I was an equal contributor and one where I was appreciated, and had a role. And now I am part of something bigger socially. And like this video, where the fellow was part of three. I am now part of a place, and a people that accepts, appreciates me.

We all need this.

Do not buy into the belief of isolation is being a “lone wolf” and that it will make you fantastically rich and wealthy. It’s a fucking lie.

Be part of a community.

Group D Videos HERE. It's about twenty five to thirty great videos of amazing Chinese women.

And here’s a little preview on what to expect…

But America is exceptional!

Today is the 100 year anniversary of the government of China.

Do you guys have any idea what happened in America on it’s 100 year anniversary? Yeah. It was right after the American Civil War, [1] the Federal government formally dissolved the tenth amendment (States Rights), [2] legalized slavery by renaming it “being a felon”, [3] destroyed the entire South-East of the United States under “Reconstruction”. And shortly afterwards went forth to fight wars with everyone.

All this, all these actions, have consequences. They are not “something” that “happened in the past”. All things must be bought and paid for. Even though those particular individuals have died, and their bodies have long rotted away, their souls, and their beings live off the quanta that they accumulated in those times.

Those quanta are still active. They are still “alert”. They need to be “dispersed”.

It is not that there is some great celestial “goal keeper” keeping score.

But rather, a recognition that the physical reality is far more complex than most humans realize. Everything is attached with everything else.

And since there is no such thing as time, the events and crimes against humanity that happened two hundred years ago still must be atoned for. The quanta-attachments are not settled.

It’s a “ticking time bomb”.

My guess is that during this generational turning, the build-up of the unseen must be rather enormous.

In America today

I am glad that I am not living inside of America right now.

It’s all starting to unravel.

But it is not being reported in that manner.

Here’s a scene from New York city…

Here’s another scene from the United States.

Just a “random” event. Nothing to see here. Keep moving on. Eh?

Some thoughts on stuff

What does food, pretty girls, media manipulation, bombs in New York, the concept of being part of something, and meat pie ladies have in common?

What?

They are all the outcomes of elements, of a host of events, that are occurring in the NON-PHYSICAL reality.

Our brains make it so that we want to keep things isolated in nice little neat boxes. There is a war in Taiwan, and it will be way over there and won’t affect anyone in Utah. Or, wearing a mask is a sign of loss of rights. Or that America is number one! And was, and is the best!

Really?

Yes. Really!

Silly, me.

Let’s take a look at the deaths for the “pandemic” shall we? It seems that America is actually the WORST place to be on the entire world right now. And the only way that you can justify this kind of “in your face” data is to deny it. To go around saying that the COVID is a hoax. To go and say that all media is bullshit, except the USA media, and so on, and so forth.

But that’s the bullshit that is being fed to Americans today.

You cannot take these selected snippets of information and consider yourself an expert on things.That is silly, but that is exactly what these “experts” in Washington DC, and those “think tanks” do. They don’t see the entire picture.

They write about China, and have written about China for five decades now, and never ONCE stepped inside the nation, learned Chinese, or had shao Kou.

They are like the guy in a restaurant that is complaining about a broken toothpick will ignoring the food, the table, the others in the room and everything else. Eventually he will rant on and on about that fucking toothpick, walk outside and get hit by a truck.

It’s the Fourth of July

America is NOT exceptional.

America is a failure, and American democracy is a failure. And these two truths must be reckoned with before the United States, and the people of the United States can get off their collective asses and start to do something about it.

I want to see America perform a course correction.

I want to see the American government to start caring for the American people. Not promoting one war after the other. They are going to get huge numbers of people hurt.

US strategy looks to be based on the thought that China will capitulate when the stakes become nuclear. Limited conventional war to blockade China at which point China capitulates. It is going to be an exceptionally bloody war if US goes down that road.  They will experience what Modi's "brave jawan" experienced in the Galwin valley. 

Posted by: Peter AU1

From all indications, the American oligarchy will not permit a controlled implosion of the American nation. They want to externalize it. They want to go out in a volley of hell and destruction.

That scares the living crap out of me.

But…

Be part of a community.

What we see is only a fraction of what there is

This is what I am trying to vocalize, but the subject is way too deep to get involved in.

Beauty, food, love, relationships, being good, Rufus behaviors, constructive efforts all are positives in building quantum associations in the non-physical reality.

While the build up of negative and destructive elements of quanta continues as well. Generational turnings are a release from the build-up. If the release is suppressed or avoided, the build up will continue until it becomes an enormous avalanche. And is very dangerous.

YOU MUST SEE EVERYTHING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS ACTUALLY GOING ON.

Most of what you see is a distraction.

However, when taken as a whole you can see that there is a great deal of bullshit, distortions, and illusions that are shrouding the judgments in the West. The greater the media influences, the less people are able to reason things out.

What is actually going on is far more interesting, and not all that gloomy. Those in Washington DC think that they know what is going on, but they are about 45 steps behind in the great game of Geo-political chess.

  • Rufus is the embodiment of the good.
  • Guns, wars, threats and destruction is the embodiment of the bad.

Let’s look at some videos, and images. Here’s some things to ponder…

Boy Gets a mangled leg. Rufus rescues him

This is real-life. This is in China….

Video HERE.

A Rufus rescues a baby on a skyscraper

This is real-life. This is in China…

Video HERE.

Scene from a popular American Movie

This is a fiction, but accurately describes what America is today…

The community gathers as one Rufus

This is in China today.

The video is HERE.

Rufus saves a drowning boy.

This is in China today.

Video HERE.

American exceptionalism!

Here’s an example of what America is today.

Video HERE.

Rufus saves a driver who has collapsed at the toll booth…

This is China. I would post these kinds of Rufus movies from America if I could find them. But they are getting fewer and far between as time moves on.

Video HERE.

China teaches and instills discipline in elementary school.

All Chinese students MUST take part in paramilitary training. The big major training period is in middle school. This is the most fundamental training for the formation of the Chinese “irregulars”. But certain geographical regions require earlier training in elementary school. Check it out.

Video HERE.

Here’s another video.

Video HERE.

And a third video.

Video HERE.

And keep in mind that the Chinese DO NOT PLAY. They are a serious, serious nation and they are fighting for their lives against a belligerent American Military Empire run by complete psychopaths.

Video HERE.

In the UK (An American client state)…

We see how far the rot has crept…

Video HERE.

Helping an old man cross the street.

Chinese style.

Video HERE.

And THIS is how much the Chinese people LOVE their government!

Soak it in. The American main stream media would NEVER show this.

Video HERE.

And this is Downtown America.

Soak it in. If you are an American you know how true this is. This guy was waving the flag of Puerto Rico which is an American territory. But that angered the illiterate urban youth who shot him dead.

Video HERE.

And this is America too…

It is not a healthy nation. She’s doing “her thing”, and all that “freedom” stuff. That’s why she is dead today. There is no freedom, just a bunch of words bantered about by the ultra-wealthy.

Video HERE.

A Rufus comes in all shapes and sizes.

In China.

Video HERE.

Meanwhile in Turkey

No matter where you are, or your situation, show some humanity.

Video HERE.

He’s only a delivery boy…

But he really likes this one girl. This is China.

Video HERE.

Just because the United States is completely falling to pieces, does not mean that the rest of the world is.

Actually the rest of the world is getting on far better now that there are some attack-dogs (China and Russia) willing to bitch-slap the out-of-control monster that the West has become. And with the guardians of tradition and sensibility in charge, the psychopaths have only one, and only ONE option, to maintain control. That option is destroy the world and hope that they can survive in their bunkers.

So is there going to be world war III?

What is actually going on? Well, you know there’s a great big build-up of negative energy, quanta, or qi in the United States right now. Not so much in the rest of the world.

Just in the United States, and it’s client nations.

And a release valve needs to be tapped. It doesn’t matter if it is a nation, a people, a place, a thing or something else. Understand what it is.

Accept it as it is.

Video is HERE.

Spread the good stuff.

Please be the beacon; the light that shines happiness to those around you.

  • Contribute in your community.
  • Smile more
  • Be helpful
  • Be the best you can be.
  • Participate.
  • Make friends, over and over, until you have some good ones.

Be part of a community. Once you are part of a group you will never be alone ever again.

My final present

Absorb this. The measure of our worth, as determined by our benefactors, is how we help and assist others within our community. For that defines our most important trait. A trait which gauges our relative value.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

So many beautiful women! Yet, why do Americans consider Chinese women to look like adolescent children?

The narrative is out there, and well known.

"Chinese women look like adolescent children, they are flat chested, petite, subservient, timid, and look like little "brown" waifs."

It’s not at all true. It’s not at all realistic. It’s a terrible distortion of reality.

And it irritates me.

Most especially because I was facing 80 years at hard labor in the hot cotton plantations of Southern Arkansas. And the litany of excuses used to turn my life upside down were spellbinding in the lies, distortions, corrupted understandings, and just pure hatred that spewed forth from the Arkansas legal system.

  • I painted in figurine oils, so I must have a sex fetish.
  • I quit my career as a “heavy hitter” upper-management Vice President in a technology company to take care of my dying mother, and that became “lives with parent, unemployed, with no friends”.
  • And all my travels to China were not for business. Instead they were to indulge into my wild sick fantasies of sex with women who looked like little children.

Oh. It’s all fun and games. That is, until you are behind bars, and everyone despises you. They sit at you. They sneer, and call you names. All on bogus lies, and accusations.

The beliefs of many Americans are shaped by the government, wealthy oligarchs, and a rabid group of for-profit televangelists that emphasize the collection of money to fight “the scourge”.

And I was “this close” from spending the rest of my life behind bars because some red-neck hicks believed that Chinese women looked like little children.

About the girls

Chinese women are many things. But scared waifs, brown skinned, short tiny and petite, and flat chested are not them.

Rural Nigerian girl. Often confused as Chinese by her oval eyes.

Sigh.

Here is part ten of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. This particular collection consists of a very average selection of attractive Chinese girls, and you all might just be “blown away” by the content. Indeed, there are some favorites in here.

I was told, directly to my face, that “Chinese women look like five year old children”. This is by the entire Judicial Department in Little Rock, Arkansas. Does this woman look like a five year old to you? To me, she must be at least over eight years old.

Let’s get on to the girls of China, eh?

That’s why you are here, eh?

The idea here is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people? And don’t you lie. It’s biologically encoded in all humans. (Bet you didn’t know that!)

And when I look at women, I look at them with different “eyes” than most do. Certainly, when I was younger I looked at at attractive woman and thought about sex. But that pretty much evaporated as life hit and I entered adulthood. Now when I look at an attractive woman I look at…

  • Form, and shape. This is my “artistic eye” that I use to judge what it would be like to paint her on canvas. Eyes are easy to paint. It’s the face frame is this more of a challenge.
  • Her personality. What characteristics she alludes.
  • Her body structure. I personally prefer a stout woman; a robust woman, that has a nice “fish shape”. But that does not mean that I am not attracted to other forms. A petite, or thin, or even short curvy woman are all attractive in “my book”.

And finally…

  • I always imagine what it would be like to go out. Maybe on a “date”, or simply just for lunch or dinner, or coffee. With them. Talking. Chatting. Looking good. Feeling good. Eating delicious foods, and drinking things in a nice slow pleasurably leisure pace.

And seriously guys. And then, say maybe mid-meal, I pretty much know how I want or desire to proceed with the relationship after the meal. Whether it’s going to be playful fun, a good friend, a ship that passes in the night, or something more substantive.

To Open the Files

Like my other posts.

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

A fine Chinese woman. She’s in her late forties, early fifties. She’s a “looker”, and attractive. She is in no way a “child appearing brown-skin waif”.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not.

For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

While I tend to prefer ladies with a more motherly and robust appearance, I find all of them to be very attractive. From the tall thin leggy beauties to the short cute little kitten like cuddle balls. But of course, most people from Arkansas think that my interest in these gals are because they look preadolescent.

A Chinese girl in her 20’s. She is attractive. But does not look like a child.

Really. Do you think that this beauty looks like a ten year old child?

I like women in all their attributes.

Just like I like cats in all their glory.

Women are like cats. You accept them as they are. You do not try to change them, or make them “better”. You live with them in peace and shared affection, or they will get up, leave the room, lick their wounds and find another place to hang out at.

Many women get this serious unsmiling look on their face. Not attractive. If you want to see attractive women, watch a J-Pop video. Like TWICE.

This gal has everything that I find attractive in a woman. Big smile. Clean appearance. Longish hair that is clean, healthy and well maintained. Robust Chest, is playful.  Is wearing comfortable clothes that fit her well.

TWICE “Heart Shaker”

You know, all of the girls of TWICE are ethnically Han Chinese. It’s a K-Pop group.

TWICE (트와이스) is a girl group consisting of 9 members: Jihyo, Nayeon, Jeongyeon, Momo, Sana, Mina, Dahyun, Chaeyoung, and Tzuyu. The band debuted on October 20, 2015, through the survival show Sixteen, under JYP Entertainment. As of February 2020, JYPE is partnering with Republic Records to help promote TWICE worldwide.

Here’s one of their videos. This one is “Heart Shaker”.

Notice how great and happy they “feel”. I argue that it is the smiles that they have. The smiles. The big glorious smiles! Watching the video will show that it’s the smiles that radiate…

Go ahead watch it. Pay particular attention to the smiles.

TWICE Official Accounts:
Official Website: twice.jype.com
Official Website (Japan): twicejapan.com
Twitter: @JYPETWICE
Twitter (Japan): @JYPETWICE_JAPAN
Instagram: @twicetagram
Instagram (Japan): @jypetwice_japan
Facebook: JYPETWICE
Youtube: Twice
Youtube (Japan): TWICE JAPAN OFFICIAL
Fan Cafe: TWICE9
V Live: TWICE
TikTok: @twice_tiktok_official
TikTok (Japan): @twice_tiktok_officialjp

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it.

This is true for the human sexes, as it is for animals, for flowers and for things such as building and art. Personally, I find art that massages the soul to be truly beautiful and inspirational. Which is why I have a complete index devoted to the subject.

If you had a choice, wouldn’t you prefer to surround yourselves with beautiful things, beautiful creatures, beautiful places, and beautiful relationships. It is up to us to attract and emit the same kinds of attractions. Whether it is beauty, kindness or happiness. We become what we emit.

Maybe that is why I associate women, girls, ladies with fine and delicious food.

Some women remind me of delicious steamy burritos covered in hot delicious cheese.

This post discusses Han Chinese women and why they do not at all resemble the American narrative. And I am also including a MM lesson here. Smiles will increase your relative attractiveness to others by a good three (3!) points. After all, four points are all you need to have someone consider you to be attractive.

  • Be clean and well-groomed. (+1)
  • Dress comfortably and be yourself. (+1)
  • Smile (+3)

You will attract others. With +5 points you will be unstoppable.

This is important if you are going out on a date, interviewing for a job, meeting in-laws for the first time, trying to get a customer, or just want to make new friends. Smile.

Again. Check out the smiles on these girls from the group TWICE. The song is called “Ooh-Aah.”

Go ahead watch it. Pay particular attention to the smiles.

As I have said before…

Being a man, eventually you reach a balance point where your hormones are under control and all you really want to do is get to know the girl, have a good time together, and enjoy the moments. And really as you get older this becomes more and more pronounced.

You savor the steaks you eat. You enjoy the perfume she wears, you listen to her talk and enjoy the night air after the dinner. You joke, you laugh, and maybe sing a song or two while walking on the jetty.

Women are magical.

When I think of women, I tend to think of doing things with them. You know like some Korean BBQ.

To go out, chat on in a mall, go window shopping with, and enjoy a nice meal. Maybe Thai or Viet food is always a pleasure with companionship. Colorful, tasty, delicious and relaxing. I can easily picture sharing a steamed fish and some coconut / pineapple rice together.

Delicious and savory South East Asian food.

 

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see. It’s their choice of clothing, the area where the video was filmed, the selection of music, the way their hair is done up, and so much more.

Like the clothes that they chose to spend the evening in, and the choice of shoes that they wore. Guys, you all had best be more attentive. Don’t you know.

I do not know what it is called, but boy does it look delicious.

Each little video is like a window to the soul. Where you get a little glimpse of the girl behind the mask. That little presentation is just pure gold.

They make me hungry.

I can’t help but think of buttered French baguettes, and some delicious soft cheese. Which reminds me of a friend that I was chatting with. She told me about the sad, sad story about how rural towns in France have been replacing their hand-made home-made (authentic) baguettes with machine made replacements. It’s horrible!

I mean… WHY! In God’s name; WHY?

Ah….(authentic) baguettes.

These wonderful, and delicious crunchy bits of Heaven are now being replaced by these pale imitations of robotic mass-production…

Fake baguettes have now flooded the rural French countryside.

For me, it is like replacing a nice dry red wine with grape soda. There is NO comparison.

For me it is like replacing a beautiful flower bed full of roses with plastic flowers stolen from a cemetery.

It’s horrible!

Notice the lack of air pockets, and the lack of a tough crusty exterior. No personality at all. Just a homogeneous blob.

Yuck!

I just cannot imagine any French person referring to this , this as a baguette.

Back to the girls of China

They like women all over the world, have beauty. And like elsewhere they all have their charms.

Some have personality.

Some girls have personality.

And some really do.

While others just have a strong softness. Some are calm and composed, some are happy and light.

Some have stories to tell, and adventures to experience.

Maybe you too can become part of their adventures.

Some girls are living an adventure.

 

Some have a great body.

Some girls work on physical training and it shows. I, myself, love to life weights. Though I have really toned down my passion in this area, I cannot help but admire the effort that these gals put into their program.

They have long legs, or great dimples. Some have just long, long hair or dark, dark eyes. Some have a soft touch, while others have a careful composed prettiness.

Some have a wonderful smile.

Some girls have a natural smile that is warm and inviting.

 

Some women are comforting.

They calm me. They sooth me. They relax me. They are like clean laundry blowing in the breeze on a sunny Spring day. Or like a nice toasted cheese sandwich that you eat with a bowl of tomato soup.

Some girls are like a nice toasted cheese sandwich that you eat with a bowl of tomato soup.

Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment.

Some girls look great in a particular outfit.

Girls, ladies, women are like beautiful flowers that should be treasured and cherished. For they are all wonderful.

But do not mistake the cuteness of a tiger for the damage it could cause if you angered it. Chinese women are very, very capable people. You can take that “to the bank”. Never fail to understand that they are strong, knowledgeable and powerful in their own right.

The girls of China tend to be very beautiful.

All are wonderful.

Such is the beauty of women. And for us, and for everyone, we need to appreciative the world around us more.

Some girls remind me of a cat that ate the bird.

Some girls take me to another time and place; and reality.

Some girls alter my reality.

And that’s what relationships do. So if you want to have a great adventure on your world-line travels hook up with a partner that will accentuate your world-line adventures through the MWI.

Some girls remind me of ravioli. Good. Warm. Delicious. Tasty. Pleasant aroma, and so fulfilling.

Some girls remind me of ravioli. Good. Warm. Delicious. Tasty. Pleasant aroma, and so fulfilling.

This girl reminds me of ice cream stands on hot Summer days. Maybe with a nice creamy orange-cream ice-cream. Or, perhaps a “Blizzard” with crunched up Oreo cookies as a topping. Or maybe a frosty root-beer float.

This girl reminds me of ice cream stands on hot Summer days.

As I have elaborated upon in other posts, I now associate women, girls and ladies with food. In fact, when I look at food I think of women. And when I look at women I think of food. I suppose that you all must think that I am completely bonkers in this regard.

But that’s just the way it is.

This gal reminds me of hot buttered corn, with Lays potato chips, dill garlic spears (pickles), potato salad, and Mr. Pibb. (An American soft drink.)

When I think of women wearing comfortable casual clothes I imagine us in the house together. She’s cooking on the stove wearing an apron. I know, I’m such an old fashioned chauvinist guy, and us talking. I sit there sipping on a wine, and helping her, maybe doing some food prep and she’s busy talking about this or that. Nothing too serious, but fun, light conversation that is engaging and delightful.

A delightful woman is like a fine loaf of bread, piping hot, out of the oven, hot and toasty.

Now, I know. I know. I mean it; I know that this is not what anyone really WANTS to hear.

They want to hear about sex, and porn. they want to hear about expensive clothing, makeup and beauty perfection. They want to hear about the salacious details on dates and relationships that have turned sour.

Not here.

(I’ve) been there. Done that.

I just want to have a good time and munch.

These two girls remind me of the silliest thing. I imagine left over meatloaf, on two slices of white bread with a bunch of ketchup on top. Don’t ask me why. Because I am not aware of the associative meaning.

And just because I enjoy the more curvy robust girls, that doesn’t mean that I do not find other women just as attractive. Some of my favorite girls are short, thin and very petite. But that is just me.

I like them all.

Just like I like Pizza, cheeseburgers, steaks and fried chicken. Don’t force me to choose. I just cannot. I love them all. And that is the same with beauty. There is no set idea of perfection, but rather a wide and diverse spectrum of characteristics that all work together to create an “image”.

A wonderful woman is like a fine roasted chicken. Tender and hot on the inside, and a bit crunchy on the outside.

We have to be more aware, and certainly more appreciative.

Not every girl is a “ten”. But that rating scale is based upon appearance alone. When the actual characteristics of a person consists of a wide spectrum of attributes. From appearance to personal grooming. To manners, the way that they talk, their friends, and their interests. To kindness, dreams, and opinions on life. Everything combines to a whole. And you all will not get that in a static image.

This gal reminds me of kite flying, a blanket on the lawn, two bottles of red wine (or chardonnay) and some hard crusty rolls with Gorgonzola cheese.

When I look at something, or someone who is beautiful it first strikes my interest. This is a normal reaction and there is nothing evil, disgusting or slimy about it. People naturally gravitate towards the attractive. But you know, and I am certain that some dog owners know, that even the most ugly dogs have characteristics that make them very special and beautiful in our eyes.

And that’s one of the great things about life.

It’s to experience beauty in everything. To appreciate beauty in everything, and to contribute to that beauty in good, substantive, and helpful ways. To make the life better for friends and family; to improve society and to rid the world of the evil, the confused and the horrible.

This girl reminds me of a jar of hot mixed vegetables. When I mean “hot”, I mean spicy. When you pickle vegetables with hot peppers. It’s oh so tasty. Like this woman here.

 

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

You all might wonder why I am posting these pictures on the internet. But you shouldn’t.

Try to find pictures of beautiful girls from China using Google, Bing or any American or Western search engine. What you will get are stock images, advertisements, pictures of children, and professional photos associated with some Western “journalism”.

Now this is sexy.

Nonsense. This is what it’s like.

This is the real, honest to goodness deal.

The Videos

  • All the Videos HERE. It’s all in one big zip file. Just download and open up and watch. I hope you all enjoy them. 337 MB.

Oh, and don’t leave yet!

Special Bonus

Here’s another TWICE video. Please pay attention to all the smiles, and the upbeat action. This one is a favorite of mine (and my daughter) because it was filmed in Boston. And I have many, many fond memories of Boston Massachusetts.

The song and video is “Likey”. As you watch it, please keep in mind that people are attracted to smiles. You might be ugly as shit, but a big toothy smile will open doors for you.

Chalk it up to MM survival hints 101.

Go ahead watch it. Pay particular attention to the smiles.

Do not forget that a nice big smile can open up many doors.

And if you are a woman, and you want to snag a man, a very special guy, then smell like donuts. (Just joking. Kind of.) Actually, though, there is an entire website to the science behind perfume selection in this regard. You might want to visit it here.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

It’s time, now more than ever, to be the Rufus in our world and society. Be the Rufus.

More examples of personal heroism. It’s mostly inside of China as that is all that I have examples of. This is my 2021 Dragon Boat Festival edition.

I accidentally mixed up my posted videos with the un-posted so if you saw a particular video, I still urge you to re-watch it again.

These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help?

Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand?

Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser. Click on the picture and the video should pop up or appear in a new tab.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full experience.

A kind act deserves respect

I argue that all of us must be the best that we can be, and to do everything being mindful of the kindness that we provide. That requires an understanding of the needs of others; empathy. Which is something that psychopaths, and sociopaths are unable to understand. (The Western oligarchical leadership.) Which is why it is so missing and devoid in the West.

Be the Rufus. Show your humanity.

A fisherman gets fished

Throughout China are these little fishing ponds. A guy owns some land, he has a bulldozer dig up a pond, he then stocks it with fish, and charges folk a few yuan to fish all day. It’s a nice pastime. Well, at least it is if you don’t try to get in the water when you don’t know how to swim.

Luckily there is a nearby Rufus to pull him out.

Discovery on the Beach

You are walking along, and you spot a turtle upside down dying in the hot Australian sun. What are you going to do? Are you going to continue onward, shrugging your shoulders, and saying “not my business”? Or are you going to help the poor defenseless creature?

I know what a Rufus would do.

A tri-wheeled electric truck wrecks

And it’s right there in front of you. What are you going to do? Are you going to drive by? Maybe pull an “American”, you know what I mean… slowly drive by, gawk through your window, and say “well, I’m glad it’s not me“. And then forget about the entire event while you go into a drive through for your triple-decker double-cheese deluxe super-sized mega-burger..

Nope. Life is about being the Rufus.  Be good. Be helpful. Anything less is below you.

A community pulls together

A community pulls together and everyone participates. They all work as a team. Even if many are just unskilled go-gooders. A measure of a truly functioning society is the amount of contribution that an individual can provide to that community.

In America how much was my contribution? Very little. I wasn’t allowed to. I had to register to participate. I had to pay to take classes, then pay for registration. Then once registered, I had yearly dues to contribute, and a series of up-grades in skill sets.

And that was just for being a forest-fire-fighter.

In China, EVERYONE participates. And you don’t need to register, pay a fee, or yearly dues either.

 

We must help others

It’s not just turtles, dogs, cat, people. It can be ducks, and geese. We all need each other. We really do. Is your life so busy that you cannot stop and lend a helping hand to a mother with her chicks? Are you so all-important that you cannot slow down and be the guiding light and the shelter in the storm?

Be the Rufus.

Like this woman obviously is.

A delivery girl feeds her baby

It’s tough when you are in your 20’s. You have broken out from the parents, and are now off on your own. But what are you going to do? You need to work, and you have a six month year old baby. What do you do? Give it to daycare? No money. Have a friend or family member watch? Not always possible.

What’s a Rufus to do?

A Rufus does what needs to be done. And if it means you work with the baby by your side, you do it. A Rufus is what we should all strive to be.

Freak Accident takes down the driver

Notice how this Rufus handles himself, and how everyone else tries to assist. People, we are all part of something much larger than just scraping by trying to survived in a world dominated by psychopathic and sociopath personalities. And for us to shine!.. To really shine we must actually be the best that we can be.

We must be the Rufus. Nothing else matters.

Coronavirus B-strain takes down an officer

The COVID-19B is a very nasty and lethal bio-weapon and when it first started to hit China, it came out of nowhere. People started getting seizures and dying on the spot. No wonder trump wanted to inoculate the American population with the safe A-strain.

What would you do, if you were the Chinese leadership and you started to see this? Why you would take the most extreme measures possible. That is what you would do. China acted in unison like a Rufus.

Collapse on the street

A man collapses right then and there. People stand around not knowing what to do. The kids look on. The man goes by busy on his way to work. The old lady looks on. A teenager takes a video…

But a Rufus gets on his hands and knees and does CPR.

In this world if you are not making the world a better place; if all you care about is greed, money, lust, wealth, power… and you have no humanity what so ever… then you are not living. You are a potato.

Be the Rufus. It’s our highest calling.

Bike wreck with children aboard

So a woman wipes out while carrying three babies. The bike splatters all over the road, and she is hurt, confused, and all the kids are crying. What are YOU going to do? You don’t know her, you have businesses to run, people to meet, deadlines to deal with and an angry boss? What will you do?

I’ll tell you what I would do, I’d help her. Be the Rufus. It’s you highest calling.

Blocking the spray

The world needs people to do a lot of little things, a lot of tiny kind actions. Like this man (or woman) here. The street cleaner is spraying the road and will probably ‘take out” the motorcycle rider. But not if there is a Rufus around. Rufus will block the spray. Rufus will provide shelter. Rufus will be there.

A nation for and of Rufus’s is unstoppable.

Rescue at a car accident

A car gets into an accident. People see this and run to the car to lend help and support. This is what all Rufus’s do. But if you want to instead by the bystander, the potato…not do anything… not render help and assistance then you deserve the society that you created. The world needs each other. We must be open, helpful, caring, understanding and accepting of others. No matter what.

Which pretty much explains why the United States is in the dire mess it is today. It must change. It must.

A truck driver hit and dying

You don;t know what the day might bring. You just do not know. But you do know that as long as there is a Rufus around, that you are not alone. That you will be helped, and that others will take care of you with no questions and without asking for money.

The Rufus is ALWAYS there to help.

A car accident

When a car gets into an accident, are you the kind of person that slows down to watch what is going on? Or, do you stop everything, get out, and offer help and assistance? You action during these periods of stress and turmoil are what defines who you are.

Are you a Rufus, or are you a potato?

A man is beating up a woman on the street

You are minding your own business, checking your messages and getting ready to go out for a nice dinner with friends and then home. When suddenly you hear a woman calling for help and you see a guy hitting her, kicking her, and wresting with her. What would you do?

Would you pretend nothing is going on, and look the other way, or would you be the Rufus?

Helping a little old lady

You would think that EVERYONE would be helpful to a really old and feeble lady. Nope. Not in today’s modern age. It’s every man for himself. And “only the strong” survive. Which is why everyone in America admires the multimillionaires that rule them. Not here. You are either a Rufus, or you are a potato. There is no “shades of grey” in this matter.

Be the Rufus.

Rescue of a drowning boy

A small dot in the wide expanse of water is struggling. Others notice, but they do nothing aside from screaming and yelling. Some film the event. But no one goes out into the water. No one wants to get wet. no one cares. No one is willing to get uncomfortable in the icy cold water.

No one, except a Rufus.

Be the Rufus, its our highest calling!

A classmate is down

A guy is going down the steps, falls and hits his head. Hes out. So what are you going to do? Nothing? Call the police? Stand by. Run past… or stop and help. The Rufus in you SCREAMS help this man. Now!

Be the Rufus. Anything less is below you.

Another Drowning

And another drowning. It’s another place, at another time… Hundreds of people watch doing nothing. Not the Rufus.

The Rufus does not wait.

The Rufus does not hesitate.

The Rufus acts.

Lending a helping hand

A Rufus will contribute to make the world a better place. A Rufus will be helpful, will participate, and will be selfless. When you have a nation were everybody works for the well being of the society as a whole, the entire society wins, and everyone benefits.

Such as this Rufus demonstrates…

Yet another drowning

People getting caught up in large sudden flood happens all over the world and is far more common than one would realize. When I was a boy in Western Pennsylvania we once had a night of heavy rain, the next day, when walking to school I noticed that the trailer park on the banks of the river was missing.

At night the entire trailer park with sixteen trailers went into the river while the people were sleeping. Eight died. Another twenty has never been found.

Be the Rufus. Contribute. Be helpful.

Warning others of danger

Torrential rain has flooded the road. In the middle of it is a sewer drain. The top is gone, and if someone were to ride into it the would have a very bad accident. Someone might even get killed. The Rufus doesn’t wait. The Rufus doesn’t sit by and film. The Rufus acts.

Are you a Rufus?

Participation in Society

You are in school. Everyone gets one and only one banana. One banana doesn’t have the skin on, and so it is undesirable. Are you and your friends going to let the last person in the line get the undesirable food, or are you going to “man up” step to the plate and do one for your crew? For your friends? For your classmates? For your society?

What would Rufus do?

Rescuing a child in distress

Your baby is in trouble. Your child is very sick and you are in a complete panic. What are you going to do? Well, there is a traffic cop in the middle of the road. So you run to him. Can he help you? Will he help you? What’s the story?

No worry. He’s a Rufus.

Being “Spiderman” to save a toddler

A baby has crawled on the ledge of an air conditioner five stories up. What are you going to do? Will you call the police? Will you call the fire department? Will you call an ambulance?

Will you wait for the coroner?

If you are a Rufus, you will take action. Just like these fellows did. Be the Rufus. It’s your highest calling.

Putting out an electrical fire

A young body sees an electrical fire. What will he do? Will he go and get his parents? Will he run out of the house? Will he pretend that nothing is going on? Will he pour water on the electrical box that is on fire?

TH

Helping others

People, old ladies, children and dogs all need our help. But most people don’t care. They are just off in “la-la land” playing the “grab everything I can before I die game”. You know like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. They only offer the appearance of assistance when it serves their purposes. Like the “Buddy” the White House dog under Clinton’s. When the utility was finished, these beings were discarded like old hamburger wrappings in the garbage.

A Rufus would never do that. A Rufus is kind to all. A Rufus makes the world a better place in very small bits and pieces. A Rufus is what the world needs right now.

Rescuing a child under attack

A child is playing in their front yard near the family car. Suddenly a dog comes up and starts attacking the child. No one is around. What can the child do? The dog is about the same size with terrible teeth and a mean bite. Well, luckily there is a cat nearby and the cat protects the child.

It’s a cat Rufus.

Flooding is causing road barriers to collapse

A Rufus participates in society. It’s not “other people’s problem”, it’s all of ours. And we all need to work together to make the world a better place for all of us to live in.

America has 300 million people. For the last fifty years they all, each and everyone, sat on their asses and demanded “me-me-me”, in fact the 1990’s was labeled the “me decades”. But imagine what America would look like today, if everyone pitched in… if everyone worked together. If everyone contributed to society. If everyone picked up litter for free. If everyone volunteered to scrub graffiti, if everyone contributed their time and effort. If everyone was more understanding, and more compassionate.

Like they are in China.

A Rufus doesn’t wait. A Rufus acts. A Rufus makes the world a better place to live in. Not for money. Not for fame. Not for appreciation. A Rufus does it, because it is the right thing to do.

Be a Rufus.

Oh, and in case you all were unaware. All the guys doing this in the video are delivery guys working for “Kangaroo Food Delivery”.

Girl choking on food.

You are eating with others. Maybe schoolmates. Maybe classmates. Maybe colleagues. Maybe family. When suddenly one of the girls stands up and starts to choke. What are you going to do? Are you going to sit there, and pretend nothing is going on, or are you going to do something? Are you going to help the person in distress.

Are you a Rufus?

An old cat

The cat is 22 years old. This is ancient and equivalent to 150 “human” years. But we are guys. We have things to do, our careers, taxes to pay, emergencies to take care of. And our beloved pets get sidelined. Children come, and the pets are ignored. They get old, and forgotten. Oh, we give them food and water, but mostly let them fend for themselves.

They get old. Their bones hurt. They have trouble using the litter box, finding where the food is, seeing and smelling. They no longer can jump, climb or get around.

Rufus would never ignore loved ones. Not young pets. Not children, and not old ancient pets either. A Rufus would spend time with the loved ones, comfort them, help them and show them compassion and humanity.

Helping a stalled electric scooter

An old man is stuck in the middle of a torrential downpour. He’s old, the scooter is stalled. The rains are horrible and the multi-lane road is flooded. Its rush hour and he’s fucked. He’s in the worst place at the worst time, and everyone wants to get out of there and go home.

That is…

…everyone except a Rufus.

Be the Rufus, it’s our highest calling.

Stopping a kidnapping

Once a Rufus hears struggles, screams and cries for help they act. They don’t turn their head and pretend that nothing is going on. They don’t stand to the side. They don’t become an onlooker. They take action.

Such as this woman did.

Be the Rufus.

School boys take down a mugger

Society should act like an organism. When a cancer starts to take root, the healthy cells need to coordinate their efforts to expel the bad. That is the way the body works when fighting colds and illness. And that is how a healthy society works.

But over the years, very unhealthy society’s have grown, became famous, and teach that their sick and twisted systems as being the best, and the ultimate in perfection. It’s a lie.

Healthy societies find the bad, and expel it. Such as this group of young boys and Rufus’s illustrate.

Military reservist takes down a mugger

Maybe you were trained to be a Naval Aviator, but you are scrubbing commodes now. Maybe you have three university degrees in engineering and astrophysics, but you are on a hard-labor chain-gang break up rocks. Maybe you  were a trained special forces operator, but you are now a “delivery boy” for fast food. And you see a mugging. What are you going to do? What are YOU going to do?

You be the Rufus. It’s your highest calling.

Conclusion

We do not know when the calling will come.

However, when it calls, you must take action. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive. But, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.

The world needs us now. More, now more than ever.


Be the Rufus, or be a potato. There are no other options.

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What our world will look like after a war with China.

I wrote this with Australia in mind.

With all the flood, and I do mean flood, of war-war-war narratives being pumped out of both Washington DC, Australia, and even India no one is even contemplating what the result would be. Somehow it is being “painted” in large brushes as some way to “suppress” China, and “prevent it’s rise”. All the time absolutely ignoring the facts of the matter.

Jim Christian says:

June 7, 2021 at 3:43 pm GMT  Lem

The benefits of war with China? Well we’ll finally be done with carrier-based task forces. You’ll find said task forces at the bottom of the South China Sea. Sorry about the boys, girls, gays, trannies sent to the seabeds but that’s what they get, too. Fuckem.

Now, unlike other articles and other posts, where time is painstakingly devoted as to WHY I come up with the conclusions that I have, I am going to do something radical. I am going to spew out what the fuck is going to happen, with near total certainty, if the dreams and wishes of these moronic idiots who want war come to pass.

People! Listen up!

World War III with China will NOT be a long drawn-out series of skirmishes off in distant lands. It will be fast, dirty, nasty, full of betrayals, and up front and personal in YOUR home town. It will not be “news” reports of fighting in far-off bum-fuck-astan. It will be on your front lawn, while you will be busy trying to deal with things you don’t understand under conditions that you have no hope of controlling.

Jim Christian says:

June 7, 2021 at 3:38 pm GMT

@BluEidDvl

A war with China? Laughable shitstorm. An invitation to get our dumb asses kicked, our ineffective air wings and carriers sunk exposing the MIL as a grifting operation designed solely to extract profit from the goyim. For decades. Man, when you talk about torches and pitchforks, that’s the crew you get after.

But first, some really basic ideas and concepts…

Basic Concepts

I am not going to waste my time going into the details. I have covered them elsewhere in exhausting detail. But for those of you who are new here, I will outline the basic points.

  • America has been engaged in a war with China since 2017.
  • America tried to start a famine using eight (x8) strains of bio-weapons targeting food and livestock. Neocon John Bolton ran this operation. They failed.
  • America tried to cause a color revolution in Hong Kong using NGO assets. It failed.
  • America tried to stop the BRI in XinJiang by making up a fantasy about Uighur Muslims. It’s still in process, but it has pretty much failed.
  • America launched three (x3) “novel” bio-weapons against the Chinese people on CNY in 2020. (COVID-19 B-strain, Dabieshan tick virus / SFTSV, Swine G4) Neocon John Bolton ran this operation. They failed.
  • America modified drones to spray bio-weapon particles in a mist over livestock and people. Not only did it fail, but the CIA assets turned themselves into the PLA.
  • America tried to destroy the largest and newest VTOL carrier by China. China retaliated by destroying the largest American Navy VTOL carrier. It was a “wash”.
  • America launched an eight (x8) carrier naval flotilla against China in the South China Sea in late 2020 before the American Presidential Election. It steamed home with no conflict. Trump fired his senior Chief of Staff as a result. The entire fiasco was a big failure.

Now that is what can be found on the “news”. Everything that is listed above is well documented, though only a small fraction actually was published in American or Western “news” outlets. To read what actually happened regarding the above, you just have to read foreign reports. Often in Chinese, Russian, Hindu, Pakistani, Japanese and Korean.

Astuteobservor II says:

June 8, 2021 at 8:00 pm GMT

It is called threat escalation. John mearsheimer puts it very well. It is basically demonizing the target in the eyes of your own population. And it works on a minimum of 80% of the stupid public. How dare China not kneel!!!

All you would read and hear is Wuhan lab leak, not an American bioweapon attack.

We do know that America is acting like a big bully. Has threatened both China and Russia and laid out their terms for the rest of the world to surrender or face extinction in March 2021 during the Anchorage Alaska US-China summit.

This caused China and Russia (along with Iran) to join forces. Today, Russian headquarters, and strategic military planning is completely integrated with Chinese military, and vice versa.  As a defensive force, Russia and China can now act as one singular entity.

anonym25 says:
June 8, 2021 at 5:05 am GMT

That is true, since Russia will step in. Russia won’t certainly lose her biggest ally in face of more economic sanctions and possible exclusion from SWIFT. Also, Russia knows that China is not responsible from this outbreak as they spoke with them as early as February 2020.

We also know that America has decided that the future battlefield for World War III will not be on American soil, but has established Australia to be the land that is targeted for war. And it is earmarked to become ruins like Syria is today. Like Yemen is today. Like Afghanistan is today. Like Iraq is today. And Australians are quite fine with this. Many are very willing to sacrifice their families, their children, their homes, their businesses for people like Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton and Donald Trump.

Many Australians are ready to die for the United States.

What we don’t know is the myriad of “black operations” against China. Most of which are not reported. We only hear a precious few things here and there that are oddities; suspicious oddities. A fire here, a missing plane there, the death of a key researcher, some missing American special force troops on “a training exercise”, and a software glitch.

Which is the way it works, don’t you know. Real secrets are actually secret. And if there is an inkling of what actually happened somehow hits the internet, immediate a flood of contrary narratives moves to bury the releases. Such as what happened with the “Wuhan bio-weapon accidental release” narrative to cover up the actual three-pronged bio-weapon attack by John Bolton.

Anon[347] • Disclaimer says:
June 9, 2021 at 4:52 am GMT

I am beginning to consider the possibility that our guys created Corona and then released into China in some dip-shit scheme to weaken China.

Anyways, both China and Russia have established “red lines” that the unilateral aggression’s by America and it’s allies dare not cross. If they do, an decide to cross those lines, then both Russia and China have warned that a MAD level response will occur.

anonym25 says:
June 9, 2021 at 11:02 am GMT

This is what Ron Unz has been saying from the beginning. If you look at it geostrategically, this is most plausible conclusion.

They released the virus in China but those who created it suffered a massive blow-back and even worse China came out of it even stronger than ever before.

They were hoping China would crumble but instead got stronger while they weakened. That’s why they are fanning out a major Anti-China propaganda campaign to contain her now openly with an overwhelming support of western citizens.

This frenziness displayed by western politicians is the reflection that China is on the verge an unstoppable economic powerhouse within a few years and they need to put the brakes right now. It is an implicit admission of desperation. The tussle between China and the US is going to dramatically intensify.

What is a MAD level response?

Mutually Assured Destruction, or mutually assured deterrence (MAD), is a military theory that was developed to deter the use of nuclear weapons. The theory is based on the fact that nuclear weaponry is so devastating that no government wants to use them. Neither side will attack the other with their nuclear weapons because both sides are guaranteed to be totally destroyed in the conflict. No one will go to all-out nuclear war because no side can win and no side can survive.

I idea behind MAD is that those that try to push the boundaries and cross the “red lines” would have a devastating war of the likes that their nations would never be able to recover from.

To many, mutually assured destruction helped prevent the Cold War from turning hot; to others, it is the most ludicrous theory humanity ever put into full-scale practice. The name and acronym of MAD come from physicist and polymath John von Neumann, a key member of the Atomic Energy Commission and a man who helped the US develop nuclear devices. A game theorist, von Neumann is credited with developing the equilibrium strategy and named it as he saw fit.

Proponents argue that the fear of MAD is the best way to secure peace.

One alternative to MAD, adopted by the Trump administration, and continued with the Biden administration, is fielding small sized nuclear weapons for “controlled” and target tactical strikes. This is an attempt to limiting the risk of MAD to “acceptable” levels and scope.

Life after a MAD level conflict would be unlike anything you would expect.

Mutually Assured Destruction is based on fear and cynicism and is one of the most brutally and horribly pragmatic ideas ever put into practice.

The idea that it is in place now, today, is a sign of how dangerous the United States is at this moment and point in time. Anyone who mistakenly believes that…

  • You can attack China, and Russia would do nothing.
  • You can attack Russia and China would do nothing.
  • That you can define a time, and a place, and a people to fight your war for you (e.g. Australia)
  • And that a “red line” is just “posturing” and is actually meaningless.

Are insane crazy.

American Advantage

All in all, taken as a whole, while America does enjoy a significant advantage in the size of it’s military, it’s enormous deployment capability, and it’s association with regional allies, it’s leadership are completely incompetent. Even if they were, somehow, to regain a level of maturity and sensibility, it might be too late to stop the “locomotive that they have set down on the tracks”.

Neocons Are Back With a Big War Budget and Big War Plans

Ron Paul wrote this prescient article back in 2018…

On Friday, President Trump signed the omnibus spending bill for 2018. The $1.3 trillion bill was so monstrous that it would have made the biggest spender in the Obama Administration blush. The image of leading congressional Democrats Pelosi and Schumer grinning and gloating over getting everything they wanted—and then some—will likely come back to haunt Republicans at the midterm elections. If so, they will deserve it.

Even President Trump admitted the bill was horrible. As he said in the signing ceremony, “There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill, but we were, in a sense, forced—if we want to build our military. . . .”

This is why I often say: Forget about needing a third political party—we need a second political party! Trump is admitting that to fuel the warfare state and enrich the military-industrial complex, it was necessary to dump endless tax dollars into the welfare state.

But no one “forced” President Trump to sign the bill. His party controls both houses of Congress. He knows that no one in Washington cares about deficits so he was more than willing to spread some Fed-created money at home to get his massive war spending boost.

And about the militarism funded by the bill? Defense Secretary James Mattis said at the same press conference that, “As the President noted, today we received the largest military budget in history, reversing many years of decline and unpredictable funding.”

He’s right and wrong at the same time. Yes, it is another big increase in military spending. In fact, the U.S. continues to spend more than at least the next seven or so largest countries combined. But his statement is misleading. Where are these several years of decline? Did we somehow miss a massive reduction in military spending under President Obama? Did the last Administration close the thousands of military bases in more than 150 countries while we weren’t looking?

Of course not.

On militarism, the Obama administration was just an extension of the Bush administration, which was an extension of the militarism of the Clinton administration. And so on. The military-industrial complex continues to generate record profits from fictitious enemies. The mainstream media continues to play the game, amplifying the war propaganda produced by the think tanks, which are funded by the big defense contractors.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy fact. Enemies must be created to keep Washington rich, even as the rest of the country suffers from the destruction of the dollar. That is why the neocons continue to do very well in this Administration.

And it just kept being pumped alive. When President Biden came to office, he increased the military budget to insane levels.

Thus we have the following most probable forecasts…

Things that no one is talking about.

If the “news” media are all talking about war, why isn’t anyone talking about how THEIR lives will be impacted. People (!) this is not going to be a “low intensity” conflict or “police action” in a far away place. It will be right there, at home, in your kitchen.

The Discussion

We will discuss, briefly, in an overview outline the highest probability outcomes for the following nations / locations were “red lines” be crossed.

  • Australia
  • The United Kingdom
  • Canada
  • Guam
  • Diego Garcia
  • America
  • Korea
  • Japan

Australia

Gosh, if you read the Australian “news” media the entire nation is gearing up to go off marching to China and fight for “freedom!™”, “Liberty!™” and “democracy!™”. All they need to do is hand each solder a jar of vegimite and a Fosters, and off he would go to die for Mike Pompeo!

It’s not going to happen that way.

Australia has agreed to be “ground zero” for a ground conflict. And America, and the Australian leadership are just fine with that. It’s (as they say in the land down under) it’s all “fair dinkum'”.

But China does not play.

Oh, maybe you didn’t hear me… let me tell you in words that you all can understand…

China . does . NOT . play !

Anyone who thinks that the Chinese leadership is going to be just fine and dandy engaging into a long, multi decade war on Australian soil is an idiot. Further, anyone who thinks that America will come to the rescue is also dreaming. America does what is good for the American leadership. No one else matters. they would easily throw Australia into the rubbish bin, if it gave America a slight edge in the international global standing.

The facts are that Australia is strong, but vulnerable.

  • Australia is self-sufficient in food and exports 7.3% to other nations.
  • Australia is 42% self sufficient in crude oil / gasoline.
  • Australia is more than self-sufficient in LPG.
  • Australia only produces two thirds of the amount of manufactured goods it consumes while most developed nations produce excess.
  • Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has fallen from almost 30 per cent in the 1950s and 60s to just under 6 per cent in 2020.

Were there to be a war, and after all that is what the “news” is talking about, we can expect the following…

  • Russia and China would team up together.
  • All shipping in and out of Australia to end. Australia would end up ringed with hunter-killer Russian and Chinese submarines.
  • All Australian military bases would be devastated by Russian Kh-47M2 Kinzhal and Chinese DF-3, DF-4, DF-31 and their submarine launched cousins the CSS-2, CSS-3 missiles. This is not a singular strike at the HQ building. This is a major flattening of the entire region by the cleansing of a nuclear warhead.

At this point in time, the Chinese leadership would see how the situation evolves. If Australia does not immediately surrender, then China would cleans the nation of people by eviscerating each and every major city by the cleansing effect of high yield nuclear weapons.

Which wouldn’t take much. Look at where all the Australian people reside…

By strategic nuclear warheads targeting the major population centers of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, and Brisbane, China could effectively decimate the entire population of the nation due to the debilitating effects of radiation, and the complete collapse of the support services within Australia.

Yes. There would be survivors. And I am sure that they would be mightily pissed off too. Do you suppose that they would vent their anger at China and Russia, or would they vent it against their government to sleepwalking Australia into a war for America? I don’t know.

So in summary…

Australia would survive a blockade. But exports and internal industry would take hits, and the economy would collapse to a point where many of the services and benefits currently offered by the government will no longer be feasible. How will this affect the nation? Will the people roll up their sleeves and with a “can do” attitude, survive and grow as a people, and as a nation? Or will everyone break off into little groups squabbling amongst themselves, and how will this affect the government?

Australia could survive a military strike against it. Sure there would be causalities, massive ruin, billions of dollars in damages, and turmoil. At this point, what happens is up to the leadership of Australia.

If they [1] sue for peace. Australia will probably be permitted to keep it’s government, and systems intact, maybe even get rebuilding support, but will no longer to act as part of the QUAD. If [2] they get angry and cling on to America for protection, then a full war footing can be expected as promised. And thus, what is next is what China promised

Australia could NOT survive a MAD level nuclear salvo. I don’t care how proud and mighty the Australians are, when you have no electricity, no potable water, no gasoline, no food, no medical care and you turn to America for help, you all will end up as the worst form of beggars. You all will be like Calcutta style poverty in the radioactive ruins of something that looks like Yemen, or Iraq.

The ONLY way to prevent any of these very plausible events from occurring is for the Australian people to oust their moronic and crazy insane leadership before everyone in the nation dies.

And no, it will not be anything like what the movies portray.

Mad Max.

The United Kingdom

The UK and Russia are trading partners, big ones at that. Additionally, the UK trades with China rather substantially. While the UK is part of the “five eyes” an pretty much follows the United States lead in everything that it does, if push comes to shove and a hot war is imminent, we can expect the following likelihood of things to occur…

By following the United States, you can expect that your life would be completely changed. You would need to adapt, and to strive in ways that you can’t even dream of today.

Betrayal. The UK would sit out of any global conflict with Russia or China. While they will say the right things and offer a minimum of assistance to the United States, actual participation in a hot war is very risky for them. They will sail their ships to the South China Sea, participate in war games, and say all the right things, when the shit goes down, Britain will play it safe.

But if Britain agrees to join the United States in any substantive way, then we can expect nuclear salvos to decimate all strategic cities, bases and facilities within the UK.

Here’s a big map. Copy it. Study it. Yikes!

Notice the location of homes, and their prices outside of the blast zones. If you think and believe that the UK wants to participate in the madness of the United States, then you might want to relocate to one of these areas. And live the movie “Threads“.

Yes. Nothing quite describes what a nuclear war would do to the UK than this movie “Threads“.

Absolutely terrifying, utterly disturbing. (Spoilers) 
charlieboy809 September 2005

Having just purchased this on DVD I was eager to watch it after waiting years to see it after it was unofficially banned from ever being shown on the BBC again. I was four when it was first shown and my parents switched it off, too frightened to watch it themselves never mind let me see it.

I have to say it is absolutely terrifying and utterly terrifying in the extreme. This could have actually happened! I was impressed by the way the film conveyed what it would be like if thousands of megatons of atomic bomb was dropped on the U.K. Normal life comes to an abrupt stop. One minute people are shopping in their local supermarket, going to the pub and wallpapering their new flat and suddenly they are plunged into Hell. Civilisation is blown back into the stone age.

The most scary part was the way the authorities were shown unable to cope with the scale of the attack (perhaps why the BBC never aired it again). We always think that it could never be that bad because someone would come to our rescue, someone would maintain control. But no, the bombs / missiles keep raining down and down prompting one traumatised emergency committee member to scream, "not another one!" They just did not expect so devastation and are completely helpless. Later soldiers shoot people for food, people wish for death and the emergency committee, those meant to be running things, die in the supposed protective bunker, trapped by rubble.

Ten years later, nothing is back to normal. What young people there are behave like wild animals, raping and fighting and speaking in a bizarre caveman manner.

Since the Cold War ended people have stopped being frightened of nuclear weapons. Everybody in every country should watch this film and realise that if there ever was a nuclear war, still possible with growing tensions between a superpower and its rivals, those left alive would wish they had been caught in the blasts and killed outright.

I don't recommend this for sensitive viewers.
From the movie “Threads”.

About the movie “Threads”

Threads is about the horrible deaths our political leaders have prepared for us.

From HERE. All credit, etc, etc…

I still remember back in the early eighties having vivid nightmares about mushroom clouds above my street. Probably I was aged around nine or ten, hearing rumors that the city of Hull was a target for a warhead due to our city once being a major shipping port, etcetera, so as a child it does play on you. It was on the radio, the TV, in magazines and people in the street talked about the crisis.

Then along came Threads — a BBC production so chilling, so merciless, that viewed today it still leaves an impression. The Day After was good, but retained some mellowness. When the Wind Blows is a very strong touching message, but the bad dog of nuclear holocaust movies has to be Threads.

Scene from the movie “The Road”.

The BBC I assume put it together just to inject sheer terror into the hearts of everyone watching. When I introduced my Horror Soulmate to this a few years ago, her face fell, literally fell. Threads pulls no punches about the aftermath of a nuclear bomb on any country remaining.

As a spider weaves its web, a narrated introduction explains just how society is a mass of threads connected and how this can basically make society weak.

Welcome to Sheffield, UK, 1984. News reports have begun to tell of building tensions in Iran between the United States and Russia. The first mention is captured briefly as a teen, Jimmy, spins his car radio dial as he sits overlooking the city with his girlfriend, Ruth. Life continues, day by day, regardless of the news. People sip in their local pub, a papergirl does her rounds, meanwhile the tabloids lap up the tension.

Jimmy discovers Ruth is pregnant so their parents all meet up, and they discuss how Jimmy wants to marry Ruth and have a place of their own.

A typed heading tells us that Sheffield is England’s third largest city with over 54,000 people living there. So as the United States hint at sending troops to Iran, the Soviet Union see that as a direct threat. Life still continues, everyone goes shopping, people go to work. We’re introduced to Clive Sutton, a man who, if war breaks out, is handed governmental powers in the city. He’s making phone calls. Nothing critical, just in case.

The United States have accused the Soviet Union of moving warheads into their new base in Iran.” Jimmy sits in the pub watching this report and discusses it with his friend. “Don’t it scare you what it might lead to?” Jimmy says. Meanwhile Britain commits itself to the Middle East tension. Anti-War demonstrations march throughout the streets. “You cannot win a nuclear war!” shouts a woman.

One day in Iran, B-52’s attack and the Russians strike back. In Sheffield citizens are in the throes of panic buying tinned food and other items, emptying stores who are upping their prices.

American buying up toilet paper.

Then a new fight begins, Soviets versus United States all out attacks on ships. Violence erupts in the streets and many families decide to evacuate their homes. Jimmy’s father watches, “Won’t be safe anywhere.

A neighbor states, “Nothing will happen.

Hospitals are cleared for any possible casualties. Many able patients are returned home. Panic evacuations creates chaos on the roads. Sutton goes underground with a small team beneath the town hall to form an emergency HQ.

Radios and TVs hand out ‘helpful’ messages in case of an attack. “You are better off in your own home. Stay in there!

Americans are told to “shelter in place”.

At 8:30, one morning, the streets are busy with shoppers on their search for supplies. Sutton’s team are discussing things when the attack warning suddenly comes.

Sirens echo across the city and hundreds of screaming people run in every direction. Jimmy and his friend hide under a truck. At 8:35 a warhead explodes above the city, power goes out and the blinding mushroom takes the area apart, as blasting winds tear around. Jimmy sees the cloud, he tries to reach Ruth. His mum and dad hide behind doors and a mattress, Ruth and her family close up their basement.

All HELL will break lose under a MAD scenario. Why are the “leaders” so Hell-bent on engaging in such a war?

Then comes the heat wave.

In total silence we see streets burn (some stock footage included), milk bottles melt, buildings crashing down, and a lot of burning corpses. 210 megatons hits the UK altogether, amassing approximately two to nine million casualties.

This is the power of Threads in a nutshell.

Unlike The Day After, when each character seemed to have some kind of knowledge of fallout, radiation, whatever and repeats it like a government issued health scare, in Threads, nobody knows a thing.

There are scared, not ready, just bewildered and terrified.

These are real neighbors, real shoppers, real families thrown head first into a nightmare. I suppose the closest comparison would have to be Jim and Hilda from the aforementioned When the Wind Blows.

The holocaust itself, I could easily bring up the last moments of The Divide as Eva leaves the apartment building basement and sees the remains of the city. Take that brief section and then continue it on-wards. You get the idea.

Survivors find themselves either trapped without air like Sutton’s team buried under the town hall, or burnt like Jimmy’s mother, or traumatized by the bodies of loved ones.

Then along comes the ashes and the radioactive fallout bringing blisters and sickness.

Scene from the movie “The Road”.

Food supplies fall under government control which causes violence in the streets and looting. As the days go by people become more desperate.

Ruth leaves the basement and walks the streets seeing what is left of her city. A woman cradling the charred corpse of a baby, hands playing with burnt Star Wars figures, a bandage-faced traffic warden (who incidentally became a sort of poster boy for the production, featured on the cover of the Radio Times) and overcrowded hospitals.

It’s all kind of downhill for the survivors from then on unfortunately.

There is an impressive gallery of burn and blister make-up effects (by John Humphreys who also worked on TV series like Doctor Who and The Young Ones, as well as Rawhead Rex and Charlie & The Chocolate Factory), along with some blood here and there that makes Threads special.

Like I stated earlier, it’s not out to be kind, or make friends, it wants to wave a dead child in your face, it wants you to almost taste the ash in the air.

Scene from the movie “The Road”.

Oh things can get really bad.

Here’s another movie review. This one is about the movie “The Road”, from HERE

The story is straightforward: America has been devastated. Habitations have been destroyed or abandoned, vegetation is dying, crops have failed, the infrastructure of civilization has disappeared.

This has happened in such recent memory that even The Boy, so young, was born into a healthy world.

No reason is given for this destruction, perhaps because no reason would be adequate. McCarthy evokes the general apprehension of post-9/11. The Boy and The Man make their way toward the sea, perhaps for no better reason than that sea has always been the direction of hope in this country.

Scene from “The Road”.

The surviving population has been reduced to savage survivalists, making slaves of the weaker, possibly using them as food.

We’ve always done that, employing beef cattle, for example, to do the grazing on acres of pasture so we can consume the concentrated calories of their labor. In a land where food is scarce, wanderers seek out canned goods and fear their own bodies will perform this work for the cannibals.

Although we read of those who stockpile guns and ammunition for an apocalypse, weapon stores on the Road have dwindled down.

The Man has a gun with two remaining bullets.

He is a wary traveler, suspecting everyone he sees. He and The Boy are transporting a few possessions in a grocery cart. He encourages his son to keep walking, but holds out little hope for the end of their journey…

…yes. And that is the way it will be.

There will be a long period, maybe decades, where the world will try to rebuild. Some nations will do better than others. Some will not.

I would guess that Australia wouldn’t fare too well, because they want to be the “tip of the sword” for the United States. But you know, Canada might survive all right. It just depends on whether they decide to sit things out or not.

Canada

Canadians like to think of themselves as independent of the United States, but the fact remains that the Canadian government is just a puppet government under the control of the American oligarchy.

From the movie “Threads”.

What might happen?

Anything, actually.

Interspersed throughout the movie are still shots that are all the more disturbing because they are beautifully done. 

They make me want to hammer Brian Williams in the face with a brick, for ever saying anything as stupid as “guided by the beauty of our weapons.” [wp]

Fawning media totalitarian proto-fascists like Williams, who accept and glorify the necessity of nationalized violence, are the facilitators that are going to bring about this sort of disaster, if or (more likely) when humanity finally decides to pull the toilet-lever and flush all of everyone’s hopes and dreams away.

Jackson sets us up for exactly that scenario.

We meet a typical pair of English kids from the 60’s: they go to the pub, they drink, they make out in the back of his Cortina, parked on a pretty bluff with an idyllic view of the city of Sheffield.

Well, it doesn’t seem idyllic, at first – it looks like a typical industrial town full of people hanging on the edge of working too hard, drinking their desperation away.

The movie gets rolling slowly, and – did I mention? – it gets worse.

Naturally, the girl gets pregnant, and there are some poignant “meet the parents” and “set up an apartment” scenes.

Brilliantly interwoven in the ordinary dreariness of their lives are flashes of news: the USSR has invaded Afghanistan.

The US issues an ultimatum and deploys B-52 bombers and troops.

There are reports of skirmishes. Life in Sheffield stumbles on, gut-shot, but not knowing it yet.

-FreeThoughtBlogs

Since 1945, the world has had a nagging question in the back of its collective mind—what would it take for a nuclear war to start?

After the Cold War, it seemed nuclear fever had died down in North America—sure, India and Pakistan both got the bomb, but that was really far away.

Those fears have escalated again recently as the United States has begun signalling that it’s willing to take unilateral action against China.

While China is well known to have a sizable and formidable nuclear force with both ICBMs, and hyper-velocity MIRV vehicles, these new developments come as international institutions go through a period of intense instability.

The good news is, a nuclear war might not be the world-ending cataclysm you would think it is.

The bad news is it would still be very, very bad.

The worse news is that there hasn’t been any kind of plan for how to deal with such an attack on Canada since the 1980s. Worst of all? Canadian experts think a nuclear exchange in our lifetime is just a matter of time.

Canada stands to get out of this relatively unscathed. But Vancouver, grab a seat. We need to talk.

How it starts

No matter how unhinged you think Washington DC might be and how terrifying it is that anyone in Washington is handling nuclear codes, none of the experts I read about, thought it particularly likely that America, as provocative as it is, is likely to be the one to shoot first.

While several experts pointed to a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan as something that could conceivably happen at some point, it’s doubtful that would end up with any North American cities becoming targets. Of the other nuclear powers, it’s hard to think of a scenario that sees England, France, or Israel (whose nuclear arsenal has never been confirmed) striking out at the USA.

The consensus was that both Russia and China would have far too much to lose by hitting directly at North America (proxy nuclear wars in parts of Europe or Taiwan, respectively, remain on the table).

However, as I have repeatedly stated, both Russian and China has made it absolutely clear that any provocation or military action that crosses a RED LINE would result in the unleashing of a MAD level retaliatory response.

When the bomb hits

According to NUKEMAP, an algorithm that combines data from Google Maps and available information on nuclear weapon capabilities, the initial devastation of a strike on downtown Vancouver would be considerable—a fireball with a radius of 200 meters would appear over the city as the bomb explodes in midair. Every building within a two-kilometre radius would be virtually destroyed. Almost everyone within 16 kilometres of the explosion who survives the initial blast immediately suffers third degree burns.

The tally: almost 30,000 dead and over 100,000 injured almost immediately.

While NORAD radar would detect any ICBM or submarine launch, the warning time would be roughly 25 minutes—nowhere near enough to even begin evacuating a metro area with a population of over two million.

What would make matters worse is that currently there are absolutely no governmental plans for minimizing the death toll should a nuke hit a Canadian city.

“There isn’t [a plan],” John Clearwater, author of Canadian Nuclear Weapons: The Untold Story of Canada’s Cold War Arsenal, told VICE. “We’re all going to die.”

During the Cold War, Canada did have plans in the event of a nuclear strike. In 1961, an underground hideaway was completed outside of Ottawa. Located 40 kilometers away from Parliament Hill, it was meant to house hundreds of government officials and military officers in case of a nuclear attack (it now functions as Canada’s Cold War museum). Dubbed a “Diefenbunker” after then-prime minister John Diefenbaker, it was one of over 50 such multi-story units built across the country.

Fred Armbruster, the executive director and founder of the Canadian Civil Defence Museum Association, said parts of Canada are still home to the rotting and overgrown remnants of nuclear bunkers—a surprising amount of buildings in western Canada, in particular, are home to long-forgotten shelters.

Canada still has nuclear bunkers.

People don’t realize the amount of bunkers that were constructed in Canada,” he said. “It’s phenomenal. For example, every single municipality around Edmonton has a bunker.”

Today, almost none of those facilities remain operational, mothballed after Canada got rid of its nuclear weapons in 1984.

“There was no more plan because there was no more expectation that strategic nuclear weapons would fall on Canada,” said Clearwater.

Crawl out of the fallout

In the immediate aftermath, thousands would die due to untreated injuries, dehydration, exposure, collapsing structures, and general unpreparedness in the face of such a disaster.

Armbruster pointed to the Fort McMurray fire as an example—just as nobody expects a nuclear attack, nobody was prepared for a blaze of that size. During the peak years of nuclear panic during the Cold War, information was regularly distributed on how to prepare for a strike—blueprints for bomb shelters, what supplies to have on hand, what to do if an air raid siren went off. In Fort McMurray, few had the emergency supplies or knowledge necessary to get through the ordeal.

“People didn’t have bottled water, they weren’t able to react. Many people ran out of fuel because they let their fuel tank go past half full,” he said of the lack of preparedness that preceded the worst wildfire in Canadian history. “Back in (the Cold War), they were sending out pamphlets to every single household educating people on how to be prepared for a manmade or natural disaster.”

When a largely unprepared population is faced with a disaster of this magnitude, it puts even more strain on governmental institutions like Public Safety Canada, who would have to improvise ways to decontaminate, shelter, feed, medically treat and house hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Nukemap3D Shows What Nuclear Bombs Would Do To Canada's Cities

If you've ever stayed up late in bed worrying what a nuclear bomb would do to Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver or Ottawa, now you can find out.

Nukemap3D, an extension to Google Earth written by Alex Wellerstein of the American Institute of Physics in Mayland, allows you to model what nuclear blasts of different sizes would do to literally any location on the planet. (There have been server issues with the site, but you can also access it here).

The website allows you to select the size of the bomb, from the 15-kiloton weapon dropped on Hiroshima to the 50-megaton behemoth Tsar Bomba tested by the Russians in 1961. You can also watch an animation of the mushroom cloud, see an overlay of the blast effects and fallout and get an estimate of causalities.

The results can be terrifying. A bomb as small as the "Little Boy" weapon used on Hiroshima would cause nearly 400,000 casualties if dropped near the CN tower in Toronto, according to the program. A Tsar Bomba would cause more than 3 million.

Those downwind from the blast would be affected by fallout, but even then, according to Schofield, it wouldn’t be apocalyptic. Airbursts, where a bomb detonates several hundred meters over its target rather than on the ground, cause a larger shockwave but also result in less radioactive debris.

Of course, there would be no cars, the automotive ECM’s would all be fried into slag by EMP bursts, nor would there be electricity, and internet.

“The general rule of nuclear weapons is, the radiation effect which is lethal is well within the lethal zone of the shockwave,” he said. “Radiation is not going to kill you.”

Still, he warned, leukemia rates would likely spike in affected areas for several years.

On the ground, Canada’s third largest city would probably rebound fairly quickly. While fiction would have you believe that nuclear weapons leave nothing but a scarred, uninhabitable landscape in their wake, Schofield said he wouldn’t be surprised if Vancouver was rebuilt in a decade or less.

The bomb that struck Hiroshima in 1945 was 20 kilotonnes—not that much smaller than the largest tested North Korean bomb. But that city’s population had returned to pre-war levels by 1958.

“Hiroshima … was built out of wood, [so] the whole place burned down,” said Schofield. “There were a couple of buildings that were 200 meters from the Hiroshima bomb that were still standing.”

Of course, China and Russia field nuclear weapons thousands of times more powerful.

Canada gets mad

Canadians would go through a pretty intense period of mourning and shock after the detonation. Then they’d get really ticked off.

“If a bomb goes off in Vancouver, most people’s initial reaction is: we need to get a bomb so we can threaten other people so they don’t bomb us,” said Schofield. “For Canada, I think we’d say we need a nuke and then we’ll probably revert to the Americans and have a much tighter security cooperation.”

In 2005, then-prime minister Jean Chretien refused to let Canada participate in the construction of a continental anti-ICBM defense shield.

Still, it needs to be stressed: the likelihood of Canada being involved is very, very, very low. Our lack of a plan isn’t necessarily a bad thing—as Clearwater points out, it just means resources are being used on things that actually matter, like diplomacy.

“We should not be wasting taxpayers’ money on a plan for something that results in our deaths,” he said. “We should be using a fraction of that money working towards a global zero [amount of nuclear weapons]. You can get a lot more working towards zero than you can distributing survival packs, shovels, doors, water purification tablets and blueprints for backyard shelters.”

So take heart, Canadians. Yes, your government isn’t doing much to prepare for a nuclear strike, but that’s because no one thinks they really have to.

Guam

Would the Chinese, or the Russians conduct Naval assaults on that tiny island? Would they saturation bomb it, and then invade using landing craft?

No.

They would erase it.

Depending on the detonation altitude and the mega-tonnage of destructive power, the  remains could vary from a radioactive flat glassed mound protruding above sea level to a underwater crater. It all depends on the “message” that the Chinese wants to make.

Scene from the movie “The Road”.

Diego Garcia

This island will also go the way of the Dodo bird.

The idea that it would be eviscerated by the cleansing effects of a nuclear blast is so high that I would put it at a 90% probability.

If, somehow, it would survive I would say that anything trying to reach it would be destroyed long before they reached the island.

As the tension between the USSR and US, dimly glimpsed in flashes, ratchets up, the viewer begins to feel a very real and inescapable dread. 

I’ve seen scary movies that build tension but nothing like this, before.

Perhaps the worst part is that the fragments of news could so easily match what is coming from Korea:

Both sides rushing troops to the area, chest-puffing, threats.

Jackson’s decision to set the film in Sheffield, which is mostly uninvolved in the war, was doubtless because of the practical exigencies of movie-making and his target audience – but the sense that all of this war stuff is going on somewhere else, is brilliantly rendered in the half-heard snatches of news.

I spend a lot of time trying to hear those fragments about Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Korea, Nigeria – and reading between the lines in Threads is so well done there were times that my hair literally stood up on my neck.

It’s all “somewhere else”, until – wham!

We see a bit of the “preparedness” efforts of the government – the town administrator is told to begin storing medical supplies, water, gasoline, and so forth – he’s a well-meaning civil servant with no idea what is looming over him.

But, then, nobody does.

That’s why Watkins made the movie, after all.

In the last few months the US has seen images of hundreds of thousands fleeing by car, of the traffic jams and shortages: now, imagine people trying to flee from something from which there is no place to hide.

There is another movie in this vein, Miracle Mile [imdb] but somehow it becomes a disaster movie with a bit of action flick hidden in it.

Threads has this methodical rhythm that somehow makes it clear that nobody is getting out of anywhere – I think a lot of that is a result of positioning the film in Sheffield, far from where anyone would expect war to come, and probably far from where anyone expected to do anything about it.

-FreeThoughtBlogs
Scene from the movie “The Road”.

America

America would suffer the worst effects of MAD.  This is non-debatable. I have covered this in the past. I have many many articles regarding this. You might as well go to my supreme master index to read about this.

 

 

 

 

 

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That’s one of the most powerful messages I took away from the movie (other than “the living will envy the dead”) ...

...the vast mass of us sit in the shadow of this horrible thing our leaders have planned for us, and we feel that there is nothing we can do.

Or perhaps there is nothing we should do because it’s all so far away.

But they built this for us – they planned this for us – they used our money and our work to fund it, and the very worst of them talk about it as though it’s a casual game of golf.

No halfway decent human being should countenance this thing for anyone.

We, the people of the world, should rise and rip our political leaders to bits for preparing this bath of fire for us.

Naturally, our political leaders have bolt-holes, where they expect they can hide and weather out the worst effects of their utter failure.

Jackson doesn’t address that directly, but obliquely and powerfully shows us how that works, as well: the mostly well-meaning political leaders of Sheffield take shelter in their command center under the town’s office building, and are trapped when the building collapses over them.

They die slowly and horribly.

But so does everybody else.

-FreeThoughtBlogs
From the movie “Threads”.

Korea & Japan

Both are allies of the United States. Both hold military bases that station American troops, and both do not want to get involved in a war with China. Were there to be a military conflict, I am near positive that both would prefer to sit out and be as neutral as possible.

However, if any nation, or both decides to actively participate alongside the United States in attacking China, the consequences will be horrific for those nations.

My guess is that World War II would be short lived and over quickly. As a result the events would unfold before these nations would be drawn into a conflict and would sort out their relationships with America after the smoke clears and the radioactive radiation does down. Whatever leadership remains of the United States, I am confident that these nations would dictate the terms, and would side with their Asian neighbors irregardless to what events happened in the distant past.

Aside from it’s terrifying military, America has no friends in the world except for a handful of nationalists in Australia and Israel.

The story follows its little cast of characters that eventually dwindle to one, the young pregnant woman. Then, the documentary aspects begin to pop in, with freeze-screens that blandly state facts that are so scary your mind wants to crawl someplace safe instead of reading them. 

I imagined I had a pretty good handle on nuclear war, but there are things I hadn’t thought of, which Jackson’s researchers did.

-FreeThoughBlog

We’ve all heard of nuclear winter, but I’d never thought of the plagues of rats and flies that would follow having 20 million unburied corpses (never mind the sheep, cows, etc) or the side effect on agriculture.

There was a report yesterday about an intensive care unit in a hospital in Puerto Rico that suffered a power failure and all the patients are now dead.

In Threads we see doctors throwing up their hands in despair at the uselessness of trying to help patients who will die from radiation exposure.

The medical infrastructure at Hiroshima and Nagasaki collapsed, similarly.

What Watkins makes us see is that it’s not a partial collapse, like “no power or water” but a total collapse. “No nothing.” Our modern civilization is tightly integrated and god damn it we depend on each other – it’s like a Jenga tower – politicians imagine that they can just destroy part of the world without affecting the rest.

Fucking morons.

Morison and Trump both believe that a nuclear war is winnable.

Jackson’s projections are that, after radiation and secondary die off, nuclear winter and the destruction of agriculture and supply, England would be back to medieval-level population again, 30 years after the war – about 1.2 million people.

England, frankly, isn’t much of a target, so their suffering would be long-term collapse.

That saying about “bombing someone back to the stone age”? It’s not funny or accurate: it’d be early iron age.

I have more in common with a typical North Korean peasant than I do with Kim Jong Un or Donald Trump or any congressman. So, do you.

We are all living under the threat of this thing, built by power-loving politicians and their Renfields, in order to make themselves more important.

They are the same people who talk casually about “axis of evil” when they’re actually founding members of the axis, themselves.

We need to finally acknowledge that the nuclear powers (in spite of what they said in the Non Proliferation Treaty [npt] they shoved down everyone else’s throat) never intended to do anything but achieve and maintain a monopoly.

Non-nuclear states are obliged not to make or develop nuclear weapons, but the nuclear powers will continue to maintain and upgrade their arsenals. And when was the last time that the citizens of the USA or Russia had any say in whether more nuclear weapons would be developed?

When it comes to nuclear war, nobody is isolated.

Compared to the hostile powers our own leaders have arranged against us, any disagreement any of us might have with a citizen from another country is piffle.

ISIS?

They are nowhere near the threat to anyone that the commander of the US, North Korean, Russian, (on down the list) is.

Sure, they are repugnant, cruel, murderers – but they are rank amateurs compared to our leaders, who are prepared to murder on a vaster scale and who, in fact, have pretty much murdered ISIS (and 50,000-100,000 noncombatants along with them)

I can negotiate with ISIS – probably it wouldn’t go well, but I can try – militant nationalism doesn’t permit negotiation at all: they make us pawns in their game and they’ll throw us in the fire at any moment without feeling particularly bad about it (unless it’s bad for business).

Why can’t we rise up and put these motherfuckers up against a wall and shoot them all?

anon[390] • Disclaimer says:

June 7, 2021 at 4:53 pm GMT
Trump is now demanding reparation from China. Full time China hate is his only schtick left, no one is listening to him on anything else. China hate is the only thing that could still get a few of his mindless minions riled up.

But you know…

…it’s a dangerous game these morons are playing.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Some videos of China showing all kinds of stuff, and a ton load of other assorted Chinese videos

This is going to be the “everything but the kitchen sink” kind of post. I wander. I spew out videos and pictures. I discuss things like girls and hot dogs. I even spend some time on Russia and then throw in some stuff about unhappy Americans. So I guess you can actually call it a true garbage bag of stuff. A “sack” of stuff.

There is NO set theme, for those of you who like everything nice and orderly. But rather this is like a messy mechanics work bench, a chef’s kitchen during the preparation for a large and elaborate meal, the living room after three two years olds entered it, or what happens when you give a dog a laxative and lock him in the house. The shit is everywhere.

And that is what this is, don’t you know. It’s a collection of videos that I picked up out of Chinese media, and what I myself recorded, as well as some interesting articles that are banned or not being presented inside of America these days.

I took a bunch of videos over the last few weeks. I am going to post some of them here so that you all can get an appreciation for what it is like here. And that’s really good.

I also have collected some more pretty girls videos. And I am going to post some of them here too. I mean, why not?

Pretty Chinese girl.

While I am at it, I have collected some Chinese military themed videos which are interesting if you follow that sort of stuff. And who in America doesn’t these days? After all America is a big enormous military empire. Even the multi-trillian dollar budget was just throwing billions of dollars to ramp up the already enormous military to fight world war III.

And some pork and beans.

Oh, and some other themes too. I guess you could call this the “kitchen sink” of Chinese videos.

As an aside, we have all been having mass testing for COVID. Really, really efficient. They announce it, then three days later, it’s all completed. In a city five times the size of Seattle.

Today I made myself some hotdogs. I suppose that I am getting homesick a tad bit. I do miss those days where (as a boy scout) I would gather around a fire and cook up hotdogs and marshmallows. It’s that time of the year, and if you have the means I would suggest you all go out and explore and have some fun in the countryside.

Cooking hotdogs the American way.

You all should go out and do this.

It’s cheap. As I recall, a package of twelve hotdogs was under a dollar. If you buy a loaf of bread, and some ketchup, you can end up feeding a family for under $5 USD. Just don’t forget the beer. Add a bag of ice for a $1, and there, for around ten dollars you’ve got the great makings for an outing.

Well, things might be a little bit more expense today. But still, the point is that it’s a very inexpensive way to have fun. And just doesn’t the memories evoke stirrings in your soul?

There’s nothing quite like watching the hot fiery embers while roasting a hotdog and drinking beer. It’s a special treasure. One that seems to be over-looked in today’s society.

But before we get into the videos, let’s see what Mr. Putin has to say. Like Xi Peng, he is a calm and stable leader. When he speaks the world listens. Unfortunately the Western press refuses to to report on it. Thus leaving Americans and their allies unaware of the events going on in the world that America is part of.

Of course Putin has things to say. America is one BIG mess, and it is angry, belligerent, cocky and arrogant.

Sometimes, it just seems to me that there a only a precious few “adults” in the room remaining. Us “normal’s” are like rambunctious high school students, and the American and European leadership are like spoiled three year old children.

Encino Man

Excerpts of Putin’s Meeting with heads of international news agencies, St Petersburg, June 4, 2021 

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/65749

VLADIMIR PUTIN

A. Causes of the Covid-19 pandemic:  

Allow me to refrain from speaking about the causes of the pandemic because so much has already been said about it that I think it makes no sense speaking on this topic, and I am unlikely to say anything new or intriguing.

Keep in mind that in 2020, both China and Russia filed formal complaints about the Coronavirus and the United State's role in it.

But I suggest we proceed from the fact that we have faced this pandemic and we are living with it now. The world has yet to overcome these challenges and restrictions and we must continue our joint fight as an effective outcome cannot be achieved unless we work together on combating the pandemic.

VLADIMIR PUTIN

B. RUSSIA-CHINA TIES (IMPACT ON INDIA) & RUSSIAN STANCE ON QUAD: 

Mr. Putin discusses the American led "QUAD", the "Asian NATO" that is designed to counter, contain, and suppress China.

We do (not) participate in this initiative, so I do not think I should give any assessments on the participation of other countries in it. Each country makes its sovereign decision about with whom, how and in what capacity, and to what extent it builds its relations.

Let me state, though, that any partnership between countries should not be aimed at being friends simply to align against someone else. We need to be friends with each other so as to achieve common goals, to solve the tasks that states face.

I will repeat once again that we do not see ourselves in this configuration.

However, this does not prevent us from working both with India and China. I do not see any contradictions here. Moreover, we have created conditions for India, China and Russia to be able to work within the same organizations and they are well known: we collaborate in BRICS, and the SCO, and we work together in the United Nations.

Yes, I know, of course, there are certain issues related to India-China relations.

But you see, there are always a plethora of issues arising between neighbors. But I know the attitude of both the Prime Minister of India and the President of the PRC, these are very responsible people and in their interactions they treat each other with great respect.

And I think that they will always find a way to resolve the problems and issues they face. The main thing is that extra-regional powers should not standing their way.

Mr. Putin wants the two nations of India and China to continue to work on their differences together, and he doesn't want "outsiders" (you know, like America) to interfere and cause problems.

As for Russia-India relations, I repeat, they are unfolding very successfully and in a trustful and traditional manner. We really appreciate this level of relations with our Indian friends.

These are relations of a truly strategic nature, as they cover a whole range of areas for interaction. They include economic issues, energy, and high technologies.

They also include the military-industrial complex, and here we are not only talking about the sale and purchase of Russian weapons.

I have already spoken about this more than once, that we have very deep and trusting relations with India, which manifested in the fact that we and India (probably the only such partner of ours) take up joint efforts to design and produce, including on Indian territory, cutting-edge and advanced weapons systems, including missile equipment.

Russia and India are working together to design cutting-edge military technology, and systems. This is R&D and NPD for brand new weapons systems.

But these are just a few; there are other areas in which we cooperate.

This is why I have no doubt that Russia-India relations will continue to develop consistently to the benefit of the peoples of India and the Russian Federation.

The outlook for India to work with Russia on strategic developments is highly positive.

C. RUSSIA-CHINA RELATIONS: 

You mentioned the [2011] Treaty, which undoubtedly played a vital role in the development of Russian-Chinese relations.

They are truly unprecedented in terms of the quality and level of interaction.

But we both understand that it is not just about the Treaty, although it really is a very important thing, an important document, and an important milestone.

The point is that Russia and China have many overlapping interests. This is what underlies the development of our interaction.

In this regard, one of the key fields of cooperation is the one you already mentioned at the start, and that is economic cooperation.

Quite so, several years ago now, President Xi Jinping and I worked out a plan to reach the $100 billion mark in our mutual trade.

Now I should tell you (you know about this) that we did actually reach this milestone, and more than this, even despite the challenges of the pandemic in 2020, we kept to that level. Despite the slight decrease, it amounted to 104 billion.

China and Russian foreign trade and cooperation is proceeding splendidly.

And I think that over a period of the next few years, as we agreed, as we wanted, we can reach 200 billion even by 2024, despite that slight decline. We have also discussed this with President Xi Jinping. The pace we have gained and the growth rate we have achieved in the first quarter of this year also confirm this.

It is of upmost importance that we cooperate across a wide variety of areas.

We are following global trends and we are increasingly focusing on the most important fields of high-tech.

I have repeatedly mentioned that we continue to work together in aircraft manufacturing, we are more and more expanding our cooperation in space, including the joint lunar program; there are very interesting prospects here.

Quite recently, you are aware, President Xi Jinping and I broke ground for four new nuclear reactors in China. This is very important high-tech collaboration.

Work continues in other segments in the energy industry too. On the other hand, I believe our cooperation in nature conservation and in the humanitarian field is no less important.

From year to year, we hold a variety of forums, all kinds of cross year projects.

This brings people ever closer together. All this requires good support in terms of infrastructure, so we are developing it as well. Quite recently, you know we have opened a bridge in one of the most important regions of the Russian-Chinese border.

Roads and rail between Russia and China are opening up, being forged and trade is increasing at an astounding level.

Russia and China are jointly working on major projects that have an international dimension.

As you are aware, China is promoting the New Silk Road idea, including in the economy. This is quite consistent with what we are doing within the framework of the Eurasian Economic Union.

The BRI benefits not only China but Russia as well.

We have many overlapping interests and fields of activity. I simply do not doubt for a second that we will continue to be as active as possible, keeping in mind both Russia’s and China’s interest in maintaining collaboration on the international arena…

… and this interaction is undoubtedly one of the most important factors of stability in international affairs.

The stability of the world depends on Russia and China working jointly and together in unity.

D. SUMMIT WITH BIDEN: 

You know, I am not expecting any breakthroughs following this meeting.

Now, what does that tell you all about how America is viewed by the rest of the world?

But I believe that (you are absolutely right) that, despite the disagreements, which were not created by the Russian side, we, nevertheless, have coinciding interests.

You have now mentioned some of the subjects that would be of interest to the United States and the Russian Federation.

This includes the solution of environmental problems, strategic stability and joint work to resolve a number of regional crises.

All this is highly important because this is linked with our countries’ security matters, considering intra-regional crises, such as in the Middle East. What do these unresolved crises lead to?

They cause an upsurge in terrorism, and this is extremely dangerous for everyone, including the United States, Russia, Europe and other regions.

These unresolved matters are the cause, and terrorism is the direct consequence of what is happening in these regions.

Strategic stability is extremely important.

Strategic military power is extremely important to maintain global balance and stability.

We don’t want to scare anyone with our new weapons systems.

Yes, we are developing them, and we have achieved certain results and successes here.

But all leading countries and leading military powers are doing this, and we are just one step ahead.

We realize that other high-tech countries, such as the United States and other states, will achieve similar results sooner or later.

Therefore I believe that it is better to reach agreement in advance on how we will live together in a changing world.

We are ready for this.

I assume that President Biden is a very experienced politician who has been dealing with politics all his life, he is well-versed in many of the problems I have mentioned because he was time and again involved in assessing similar matters, in different capacities.

This is why I hope that our meeting will be constructive. 

E. RELATIONS WITH GERMANY: 

Germany is one of our priority partners in the economy; on a global scale, it is one of our largest trade and economic partners, our largest partner in Europe and one of the biggest in the world after China.

We have a large number of friends in Germany and we have a strong interest in developing our trade and economic links.

Thousands of German companies operate in Russia, with our mutual investment amounting to $29 billion.

These are significant resources, and our business partners invest not in financial operations but in the real economy and real production.

We very much appreciate this and try to provide our help and support, which we intend to continue

In the political sphere, I really hope that, considering the special nature of our relations and our people’s particular interest in continuing cooperation, Germany’s future leadership will build its political relationships with Russia accordingly.

We are ready to fully cooperate to overcome all the difficulties you mentioned. 

It is true that Angela [Merkel] and I have a businesslike relationship, and I appreciate her a lot.

She is a very experienced politician and a straight-forward but reliable person.

If we have agreed on something, then I see – which is frankly surprising to me, but it is true – that she is consistent and knows how to defend her position.

We feel it too; we feel it in our joint affairs.

Some things we may like, some things we may not, but she is a reliable, stable partner. 

I would like stability and reliability to remain in the activities of the German government to come, too

Let me say this once again: Germany is an important partner for Russia, both in Europe and in the world, and we very much hope that the situation will consistently improve.

F. RUSSIA-US RELATIONS: 

The main thing that needs to be done is to treat each other with respect and take into account each other’s interests in the broadest sense of the word.

But this is not a general phrase, it is a meaningful matter.

It's not a platitude, or a saying. It's a very serious issue.

President Biden belongs, in my opinion, to the most experienced class of international politicians, as I mentioned earlier, because in different capacities and at various times over the course of many years, he has personally participated in the discussion and preparation of the decisions on all issues that matter today for the entire world and bilateral relations.

But it was not us who drove Russia-US relations into the state they’re in today.

We didn’t do this.

After all, we have never taken a single first step in matters that are detrimental to Russia-US relations.

Did we impose sanctions on the United States?

No, it was the United States that imposed sanctions on us and continues to impose them for every reason or for no reason at all, just because we exist.

But they will have to live with this, because Russia was, is and will be here.

Just as there is and will be the United States, which plays a very important role in the world.

I would very much like it to play a stabilizing role.

But in this context, in my opinion, Russia-US relations are also important.

To reiterate, I would very much like our meeting to be held in a constructive manner.

G. BELARUS: 

President Lukashenko explained to me, he did not order the plane to land.

There was a bomb alert and, as far as I remember, the captain, who could have landed in Vilnius, since the plane was closer to Vilnius than to Minsk, decided to land in Minsk.

Nobody forced him to land – at least this is President Lukashenko’s account of the events. That is it.

****

And I would like to strike the ball back to you: what do you think about President of Bolivia Evo Morales’ plane being forced to land in Vienna, escorting him off the plane and searching the presidential aircraft?

So, the same thing happened in Vienna; in Vienna they grounded the head of state’s airplane…

If you can ground the plane of the president of an independent country in Vienna, why can’t they land a plane in Minsk, especially if there was a signal that a bomb had been planted on board?

We just need to measure similar situations with the same yardstick, and not only in this case, but in general.

We need to get rid of double standards; you can’t always say that one person can do this, and another cannot.

Not with the United States. The USA is all about "double standards".

Let’s work out common approaches and come up with common assessments.

Using tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons to disperse demonstrations in Europe, and knocking out eyes with rubber bullets, is okay, but when there is an arrest in Belarus, maybe, done in a harsh manner, it is unacceptable.

Why?

Because European countries are democratic and they can do this in Europe.

Let’s then come up with acceptable ways of handling street protests and define what exactly is unacceptable.

Let’s develop common criteria and approaches, at least develop common definitions that will be understood by everyone the same way.

Then it will be easier for us to give assessments to the events that are taking place in various regions around the world, including Europe.

H. RUSSIAN VACCINE FOR EUROPE: 

The vaccine market is estimated at about $100 billion a year, probably even more

…the delays in registering the Russian vaccine in Europe are due to the commercial interests of those who are doing so…

…since they are thus gaining time for the competitors of Russian producers of the vaccine to take over the European market…

… since long-term contracts are being concluded for the supply of vaccines.

When the relevant European agency issues a permit to use the Russian vaccine in Europe, it will become clear that the market is already 100 percent full, and long-term contracts have already been concluded.

That’s it; the ship will have sailed for our companies.

We are the only country in the world that is ready to pass on technology.

We are doing so and starting production at foreign facilities.

We are ready to do this in European countries as well; we can see no obstacles here.

In fact, this is just another myth about the use of the vaccine. 

Before this, we had not produced vaccines at such a large volume, and primarily only for Russia.

I think that in July we will reach a production level of 20 million per month. We have enough for domestic consumption now.

I.RELATIONS WITH UK: 

The United Kingdom is one of few countries in Europe, and even the world, where economic relations continue to be on the up side.

Even last year – the pandemic year, when our trade with many countries slumped, trade with the UK grew by 54 percent.

This is record high.

So, if nobody interferes, everything will be good and mutual trade might help Russia turn from a withering country into a prosperous one.

If the USA doesn't interfere...

We strongly hope that Russian-British relations will contribute to this process…

The most important thing is that we have respect for each other, trust each other and hope that nothing occurs in the UK…

…that would allow us to come up with assessments like those given by the new head of your country’s intelligence service [MI6]…

…with respect to Russia [namely, that it is a declining power and behaves irresponsibly.]

J. PALESTINE PROBLEM: 

We welcome the normalisation of relations between different states of the region, including between Arab countries and Israel.

When ties between states are restored, it always benefits the peoples of these states.

At the same time, and we are now clearly seeing this, it is hardly possible to achieve a stable peace and a stable situation in the region without a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Here, we need to restore multilateral formats of cooperation and multilateral formats for discussing the problems at hand.

There are issues that require special attention from the international community.

Of course, overcoming inter-Palestinian differences is among the essential elements.

I think that this entire range (I am not talking now about Israel’s settlement policy etc., but many questions accumulated in that area), the entire range of issues, of course, needs to be studied very carefully.

And Palestinian settlement must not be pushed back to the periphery of international politics given the pressing nature of this issue and the importance of this problem not only for the Arab world but, I think, the entire world as well.

We very much hope that the issues of fundamental importance, namely, the creation of two states, including the Palestinian state, will be resolved on the basis of mutual interests of the peoples living in this region, and taking into account the future.

It is very important to look into the future, it is very important not to be guided by fleeting political opportunistic considerations, but to create conditions for a lasting long-term settlement.

K. DOLLAR AS WORLD CURRENCY: 

As for the dollar, I have already said that we are not trying to get rid of the dollar…

It’s not that we do not like the dollar because the United States is bad and it imposes sanctions on us, which forces us to get rid of it; of course not.

The question has a practical dimension. Let’s assume we are unable to make payments in dollars with our partners in defense cooperation.

Such as with Iran. -MM

You see?

We have a problem.

What should we do?

We switch to paying in national currencies or currencies of other countries.

Our US partners force us to do this.

We are not moving away from the dollar purposefully, we are compelled to do so.

When we do this, a system of financial relations with our partners is formed outside dollar transactions.

But why are the US political authorities doing this?

They are cutting off the branch they are sitting on and will crash to the ground in the end.

Everyone in the world can see this, you know?

Everyone can see it, hence the question about the reliability of dollar transactions.

This is leading to the decline of gold and foreign exchange reserves in dollars, and not just in our country, but almost all over the world, including US allies.

The volume of settlements in dollars is on the decline…

You will see that the volume of dollar transactions is decreasing every year, and gold and foreign exchange reserves in dollars are also going down, and not just in our country.

All of that is being done as part of some internal political processes in the United States.

The people who are doing this seem to operate on the premise that the economic power of the United States, its military and political power is so strong that it does not scare them – “we will get through this,” is what they are thinking.

America is about printing money endlessly without consideration of the mountain of debt that it is creating.

You know what the problem is? I will tell you as a citizen of the former Soviet Union. What is the problem with an empire?

And so he answers.

They think they are so mighty they can afford minor faults and mistakes. It is okay, we will buy these people and scare other people; we will reach an agreement with still others, give beads to those and threaten others with our warships – problem solved.

But he notes...

But problems are piling up, and there comes a time when it is no longer possible to cope with them all. And the United States is firmly and steadily following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union.

You don't say...

I will say it again: this is not our initiative. Some of our companies, for example, in the oil sector, are reluctant to leave the dollar, mindful of the volatility of national currencies. But if the United States continues to force them into this, eventually, they will find a way to de-dollarise their settlements and convert to national currencies or currencies of third countries. They will just find a solution, end of story. And this will be a severe blow to the dollar as the global reserve currency.

Multiple reserve currencies and units of account are a good thing for the global economy if we want to achieve a more stable situation in international finance and the global economy in general.

Nothing that you will find in the American “news”. Though you will find this understatement of the year…

Now that Mr. Putin said his piece, let’s get on with the videos…

Videos of pretty girls

"Chinese women look like pre-adolsecent girls. that is why all the child predators flock to China. So that they can have uncontrolled violent sex with these child-appearing women."

Long duration readers of MM know my love of the female form.

Chinese woman with a robust Chest.

Here’s just some more videos of Chinese girls being cute and attractive. I have other dedicated posts elsewhere, but I just wanted to throw some out right now and get them off my hard drive. Pretty girls, yeah, but I only have so much room. Don’t you know.

Chinese Hunan girl wearing her ethnic attire. (I just love Hunan food. You betya!)

Aside from girl after girl, I threw in two special videos.

  • One is a Tictok girl (just like these here) who died. And the hospital staff honoring her death.
  • A CGI showing the Chinese ideal.

Ugh. It’s a pretty big collection and it might take a little long to download. You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. 345MB.

Typical Chinese girl displaying her “fish shaped” body for the world to admire.

What is going on in America today?

I just read this most interesting article. It says…

Worn out and disgusted by crushing neoliberal policies at home and murderous neoconservative policies abroad, Americans elected a political neophyte who ran on a populist platform which criticized both Bush and Obama. Trump promised to “drain the swamp”, end the wars, and fight the establishment in the interests of ordinary people. This time for sure there would be change.

But the wars kept going, and the swamp got even fuller, and the US empire kept chugging along on the same trajectory it had been on throughout the Bush administration and the Obama administration. Despite all this, the Democratic Party and its allied media institutions acted as though some drastic deviation from the norm had taken place, insisting that the United States had been plunged from a free democracy respected around the world into an isolationist fascist dystopia.

In order to stop fascism, the American people had yet another people’s uprising against the corrupt status quo and… elected Obama’s vice president. Lifelong corporate crony and empire lackey Joe Biden now sits in the White House, advancing all the same murderous, oppressive, exploitative, authoritarian policies as his predecessors, as a result of the latest fake, decoy revolution against tyranny.

And that’s all mainstream electoral politics ever is in the US empire: a fake, decoy revolution staged for the public every few years so that they don’t have a real one. A symbolic ceremony where the public pretends to cast the abusive status quo into the sea so they feel like the battle against their oppressors has been won. And then their oppressors just keep right on oppressing them.

Every few years the public gets to choose between two reliable lackeys of the oligarchic empire, and then all of the evils of that empire get pinned upon the winner. The public then directs their rage at the lackey rather than the actual power structure which has been oppressing them, after which they have another election to rid themselves of the scoundrel once and for all. They hug, they cry, they celebrate, and the oppression machine continues completely uninterrupted.

And it is accurate, I believe.

As Gore Vidal once said:

“It doesn’t actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they’ve had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. A very small group controls just about everything.”
That small group is the plutocratic class whose legalized bribery and propaganda machine has immense influence over US politics, as well as the imperial war machine and special interest groups with whom the plutocratic class is allied. 

It is necessary to form coalitions of support within that power cluster if one wants to become president in the managed democracy that is the United States, and no part of that power cluster is going to support a president who won’t reliably advance the interests of the oligarchic empire.

From this point of view, the oligarchic power cluster is essentially running its own employees against each other and having them promise to end the injustices which are inextricably baked in to the oligarchic empire.

Americans live in a totalitarian state whose most important elections are rigged from top to bottom, and they’re fed news stories about Evil Dictators in other countries rigging their elections to remain in power.

Politicians cannot change the status quo to one which benefits ordinary people instead of their oligarchic owners, because the oligarchic empire is built upon the need for endless war, poverty, and oppression.

You cannot have a unipolar global empire without using violent force (and the threat of it) to uphold that world order, and you cannot have a plutocracy without ensuring that a few rulers have far more wealth control than the rank-and-file citizenry.

For this reason, even politicians who run on relatively progressive-sounding platforms are themselves a part of the fake decoy revolution unless they demand a complete dismantling of oligarchy and empire.

The politicians who present themselves as progressives in America today offer only light opposition to some aspects of empire and oligarchy, in effect merely supporting an oligarchic empire that gives Americans healthcare.

Since keeping Americans poor, busy and propagandized is an essential dynamic in the hub of a globe-spanning oligarchic empire, this is a nonsensical position; the oligarchs don’t want ordinary Americans to have money to burn on campaign donations and free time to research what’s really going on in their world, because then they might meddle in the gears of empire...

...A power structure built upon economic injustice will never permit economic justice.

The door to meaningful change in America via electoral politics has been closed, locked, bolted, welded shut, and barricaded with a metric ton of solid steel.

The only thing that can cause an end to the oppression and exploitation is an end to the oligarchic empire, and the only thing that can cause the end of the oligarchic empire is direct action by the American people: mass-scale activism, general strikes, and civil disobedience the likes of which the nation has never before seen, in sufficient numbers to bring down the plutocratic institutions which maintain the status quo.

The problem is that this will never happen as long as Americans are being successfully propagandized into being content with their fake decoy revolutions.

There is a zero percent chance of electoral politics leading to an end of the empire, but a concerted effort to spread awareness by those who understand what’s going on just might.

All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of awareness, whether you’re talking about awareness of the consequences of one’s addiction leading to their getting sober or an expansion of awareness of the injustices of racism leading to racial justice laws.

Making people aware that the mass media are lying to us about what’s real, aware of the horrors of war, aware of the underlying dynamics of the economic injustice which is grinding Americans into the dirt, that can lead to a chain reaction which sees the collective using the power of its numbers to shrug off the chains of oppression as easily as you remove a heavy coat on a warm day.

What’s needed is for the people to awaken to the truth. An entire empire is built upon a pair of closed eyelids.

Please read the entire article at the Greenville Post HERE.

Videos of Chinese Military Aviation

"The Chinese air force is a joke. The best that they have are 1980's old-Soviet Union hand me downs. All cobbled together with that shoddy Chinese workmanship and piloted by CCP members that would defect to the Untied States in a heartbeat."

It’s a narrative that has been pumped into the American heartland for decades. The truth is something all together different. Especially since 90% of the American military aviation, and parts are currently made inside of China. If China can design and manufacture for the United States Aviation companies, they can do so for themselves. Which is why we see all sorts of interesting home-grown and home-designed, and home-manufactured aircraft in China these days.

You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. 41MB.

Oh, I almost forgot about Pepe…

You know the drill. From HERE. All credit to the author and edited to fit this venue.

The upcoming G7 in Cornwall at first might be seen as the quirky encounter of “America is Back” with “Global Britain”.

The Big Picture though is way more sensitive. Three Summits in a Row – G7, NATO and US-EU – will be paving the way for a much expected cliffhanger: the Putin-Biden summit in Geneva – which certainly won’t be a reset.

The controlling interests behind the hologram that goes by the name of “Joe Biden” have a clear overarching agenda: to regiment industrialized democracies – especially those in Europe – and keep them in lockstep to combat those “authoritarian” threats to US national security, “malignant” Russia and China.

It’s like a throwback to those oh so stable 1970s Cold War days, complete with James Bond fighting foreign devils and Deep Purple subverting communism. Well, the times they are-a-changin’. China is very much aware that now the Global South “accounts for almost two-thirds of the global economy compared to one-third by the West: in the 1970s, it was exactly the opposite.”

For the Global South – that is, the overwhelming majority of the planet – the G7 is largely irrelevant. What matters is the G20.

China, the rising economic superpower, hails from the Global South, and is a leader in the G20. For all their internal troubles, EU players in the G7 – Germany, France and Italy – cannot afford to antagonize Beijing in economic, trade and investment terms.

A G7 rebooted as a Sinophobic crusade will have no takers. Including Japan and special guests at Cornwall: tech powerhouse South Korea, and India and South Africa (both BRICS members), offered the dangling carrot of a possible extended membership.

Washington’s wishful thinking cum P.R. offensive boils down to selling itself as the primus inter pares of the West as a revitalized global leader. Why the Global South is not buying it can be observed, graphically, by what happened for the past eight years. The G7 – and especially the Americans – simply could not respond to China’s wide-ranging, pan-Eurasian trade/development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The American “strategy” so far – 24/7 demonization of BRI as a “debt trap” and “forced labor” machine – did not cut it. Now, too little too late, comes a G7 scheme, involving “partners” such as India, to “support”, at least in theory, vague “high-quality projects” across the Global South: that’s the Clean Green Initiative , focused on sustainable development and green transition, to be discussed both at the G7 and the US-EU summits.

Compared to BRI, Clean Green Initiative hardly qualifies as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. BRI has been endorsed and partnered by over 150 nation-states and international bodies – and that includes more than half of the EU’s 27 members.

Facts on the ground tell the story. China and ASEAN are about to strike a “comprehensive strategic partnership” deal. Trade between China and the Central and Eastern European Countries (CCEC), also known as the 17+1 group, including 12 EU nations, continues to increase. The Digital Silk Road, the Health Silk Road and the Polar Silk Road keep advancing.

So what’s left is loud Western rumbling about vague investments in digital technology – perhaps financed by the European Investment Bank, based in Luxembourg – to cut off China’s “authoritarian reach” across the Global South.

The EU-US summit may be launching a “Trade and Technology Council” to coordinate policies on 5G, semiconductors, supply chains, export controls and technology rules and standards. A gentle reminder: the EU-US simply do not control this complex environment. They badly need South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

Wait a minute, Mr. Taxman

To be fair, the G7 may have rendered a public service to the whole world when their Finance Ministers struck an alleged “historic” deal last Saturday in London on a global, minimal 15% tax on multinational companies (MNCs).

Triumphalism was in order – with endless praise lavished on “justice” and “fiscal solidarity” coupled with really bad news for assorted fiscal paradises.

Well, that’s slightly more complicated.

This tax has been discussed at the highest levels of the OECD in Paris for over a decade now – especially because nation-states are losing at least $427 billion a year in tax-dodging by MNCs and assorted multi-billionaires. In terms of the European scenario that does not even account for the loss of V.A.T. by fraud – something gleefully practiced by Amazon, among others.

So it’s no wonder G7 Finance Ministers had $1.6 trillion-worth Amazon pretty much on their sights. Amazon’s cloud computing division should be treated as a separate entity. In this case the mega-tech group will have to pay more corporate tax in some of its largest European markets – Germany, France, Italy, UK – if the global 15% tax is ratified.

So yes, this is mostly about Big Tech – master experts on fiscal fraud and profiting from tax paradises located even inside Europe, such as Ireland and Luxembourg. The way the EU was built, it allowed fiscal competition between nation-states to fester. To discuss this openly in Brussels remains a virtual taboo. In the official EU list of fiscal paradises, one won’t find Luxembourg, the Netherlands or Malta.

So could this all be just a P.R. coup? It’s possible. The major problem is that at the European Council – where governments of EU member-states discuss their issues – they have been dragging their feet for a long time, and sort of delegated the whole thing to the OECD.

As it stands, details on the 15% tax are still vague – even as the US government stands to become the largest winner, because its MNCs have shifted massive profits all across the planet to avoid US corporate taxes.

Not to mention that nobody knows if, when and how the deal will be globally accepted and implemented: that will be a Sisyphean task. At least it will be discussed, again, at the G20 in Venice in July.

What Germany wants

Without Germany there would not have been real advance on the EU-China Investment Agreement late last year. With a new US administration, the deal is stalled again. Outgoing chancellor Merkel is against China-EU economic decoupling – and so are German industrialists. It will be quite a treat to watch this subplot at the G7.

In a nutshell: Germany wants to keep expanding as a global trading power by using its large industrial base, while the Anglo-Saxons have completely ditched their industrial base to embrace non-productive financialization. And China for its part wants to trade with the whole planet. Guess who’s the odd player out.

Considering the G7 as a de facto gathering of the Hegemon with its hyenas, jackals and chihuahuas, it will also be quite a treat to watch the semantics. What degree of “existential threat” will be ascribed to Beijing – especially because for the interests behind the hologram “Biden” the real priority is the Indo-Pacific?

These interests could not give a damn about a EU yearning for more strategic autonomy. Washington always announces its diktats without even bothering to previously consult Brussels.

So this is what this Triple X of summits – G7, NATO and EU-US – will be all about: the Hegemon pulling all stops to contain/harass the emergence of a rising power by enlisting its satrapies to “fight” and thus preserve the “rules-based international order” it designed over seven decades ago.

History tells uss it won’t work. Just two examples: the British and French empires could not stop the rise of the US in the 19th century; and even better, the Anglo-American axis only stopped the simultaneous rise of Germany and Japan by paying the price of two world wars, with the British empire destroyed and Germany back again as the leading power in Europe.

That should give the meeting of “America is Back” and “Global Britain” in Cornwall the status of a mere, quirky historical footnote.

Oh, and let’s talk about some food.

It’s near supper time, and it is early Summer. To me, that means buttered corn on the cob, watermelon, baked beans, hamburgers, fried chicken, tomato-onion-salad, cole slaw, and potato salad. Most of which you simply cannot get here in China.

Hamburger with a side of baked beans.

Well, you can get mashed potatoes at KFC, and potato salad at a Japanese restaurant. All of the others you can get, but they will all be cooked Chinese-style, which for the most part doesn’t resemble what I think about as hot Summer American food.

I’m not really complaining.

It’s that you adjust to your situation. You appreciate what you have when you have it. You realize that it is fleeting and the idea that you just “can always go out and get a hamburger” isn’t really true outside of the United States. Just like you just cannot go out in America and get some Hunan fish when ever you feel like it.

Now, it’s kind of “cheating” to take frozen fries, some left over chili and cheese and wrap it all up in aluminum foil to throw onto a campfire, but I don’t care. This is the year 2021, not 1854. You learn, you adapt, you strive, and you accept.

Some may call this cheating.

Once, I am fed…

… I have some videos about the Chinese military forces. Well worth a look.

You see, China must build up it’s forces. America is eyeing it for invasion. And it is not going to go away, back down, or moderate it’s position. Conflict is inevitable.

And the world spins around and around…

Meanwhile from HERE, we have this jewel from UNZ …

China Notes That the Same Journalist Pushing Wuhan Lab Hoax Pushed Iraq WMD Hoax

 

 

Neocons. They are some sick people.

China is inching dangerously close to dangerous anti-Semitism.

RT:

 China’s Foreign Ministry blasted the resurgent interest in the Covid-19 lab-origin theory, noting that the journalist behind a report about Wuhan scientists falling ill is the same one who peddled lies that led to the Iraq War.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin took aim at Michael R. Gordon, a national security correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and one of the authors of the report that added fuel to speculation about Covid-19’s lab origin.

“Not long ago, Michael R. Gordon, an American journalist, by quoting a so-called ‘previously undisclosed US intelligence report,’ hinted [at] a far-fetched connection between the ‘three sick staff’ at the Wuhan lab and the Covid-19 outbreak,” Wang said at a briefing on Friday.

“Nineteen years ago, it was this very reporter who concocted false information by citing unsubstantiated sources about Iraq’s ‘attempt to acquire nuclear weapons,’ which directly led to the Iraq War,” he charged, referring to the 2003 US invasion.

The WSJ piece, published on May 23, cites “a previously undisclosed US intelligence report” as saying that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell seriously ill in November 2019 with symptoms “consistent” with Covid-19 as well as a seasonal flu.

The report got picked up by other mainstream media, which recently began shifting their coverage on Covid-19’s origins from outright dismissing theories that the virus was man-made to admitting that a lab leak remains a possibility.

Gordon is supposedly not Jewish, but he co-wrote the New York Times pieces with the Jew Judith Miller.

Furthermore, I wouldn’t personally point to Gordon as the source for the “Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis” – I would point to the Jewish neocon Josh Rogin.

Rogin, like Gordon, spent years promoting various atrocity hoaxes in the Middle East and pushing wars for Israel, and is the original source for the version of the “Wuhan Lab theory,” that is currently circulating, writing a Washington Post column promoting the hoax on April 14, 2020.

The point of course is that everywhere you look, there are neocons – most of them Jewish – promoting this Wuhan Lab stuff. They are the absolute source of the claim – they and a Falun Gong Hong Kong CIA feminist woman, Li-Meng Yan.

She is claiming to be a “whistleblower,” despite the fact that she in no way meets the definition of that term. The term necessarily implies insider knowledge – usually, a whistleblower is an employee or former employee of the organization they are blowing the whistle on.

Though none of the media promoting her says it outright, there is an implication that she worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She did not. She worked at a university in Hong Kong when she was funded by Steve Bannon to write a paper making the claim that the supposed coronavirus is a Chinese bioweapon.

Bannon has recently been associated with Guo Wengui, a billionaire who was exiled from China for fraud and various crimes. In June of last year, Bannon declared that Guo is now the real ruler of China in a bizarre video on a boat.

While they were on the boat in front of the Statue of Liberty saying they were going to “overthrow the government of China,” they flew planes around with signs announcing their new government.

No one understood what was going on, and even Fox News reported on “confusion” regarding the banners and the livestream on the boat. The livestream has since been deleted, and there is no news from the Federal State of New China. But there is a Wikipedia page documenting this incredibly strange event.

Guo also runs a fake news website (I use that term in the most literal sense) where he published the Hunter Biden footjob videos.

The point is: this is a very weird operation, and it is absurd to take a person funded by these people seriously, as Tucker Carlson shamefully has.

(I’m not attacking Tucker over this, he’s overall great and is sometimes just really slow on the uptake, unfortunately – but it is shameful to get involved with a Hong Kong woman who was literally given money by Steve Bannon and his “Federation of New China” group to write a fake science paper.)

To pretend that she is a whistleblower, to pretend that political organizations funding papers with a predetermined outcome is serious science, is non-serious behavior.

The first time I heard the Wuhan lab leak theory it was being promoted by neocon extremist Tom Cotton. It was then promoted by neocon extremist Mike Pompeo, who was then in the process of trying to start a war with China. Now, it is being promoted by the Jews of CNN.

There is no one involved in claiming that the supposed coronavirus came from a Chinese lab who doesn’t have vested interests in starting a war with the Chinese. This goes for all of these Jews, as well as Steve Bannon, who has actually declared “overthrowing the government of China” (his words) to be his goal.

It’s very obvious to see how people who want a war with China would use this hoax, and it is great that China is making the link to the Iraqi WMD hoax. It truly is the same thing.

The United States is a country with a lot of problems. None of those problems are the fault of China. China is not promoting gay sex to children, they are not flooding us with millions of brown people, they did not steal our election, they did not take all of our freedoms and collapse the economy.

Our enemies are domestic and they are Jewish. Any attempt to fear-monger and attack China is intended as a distraction from what is going on in this country, and intended to stoke a war.

Furthermore, this “lab leak” nonsense is designed to get people to continue to believe in this coronavirus hoax.

I need a beer…

I swear, the United States is seventeen degrees shy of the loony-bin.

Everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else, and all of them are just shear nut-cases. I swear.

I’ll tell you… the world cannot take much more of this insanity. Something is going to break. Sooner or later

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Videos of Chinese Military Forces

"The Chinese military are nothing more than a bunch of uneducated conscripts that has been handed a cheapo AK-47 clone, and told to fight. They are a cake-walk and nothing to worry about."

Um. Don’t test them. The Chinese are a serious-serious people. And if they fight, they will be defending their homes and their families.

I’ve got some great videos showing the Chinese forces using some of their weapons. The one with their unique flame-thrower / plasma projectile weapon blaster is really interesting.

Some of the videos are propaganda with a rah-rah-rah feel. Others are just illustrative of the techniques and the means that the Chinese military train to use. And some are just interesting.

You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. 377MB.

Videos related to Technology

"Just some videos related to technology".

And here they are.

You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one.

Videos related to America

"America is the bight and shining house on the hill that everyone wants to emulate, copy and be part of."

Um. Sure.

Here’s a collection of videos that show how America is viewed upon by the rest of the world. Some of the videos are just scenes from things like the televisions show “cops”, while others are international scholars discussing the Role of America on the global stage, and it’s relationships with China. It’s good stuff. This is how America is viewed by the rest of the world.

You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. It’s 73MB.

Conclusion

I could use a beer. The world seems to be fucked seven ways past Sunday, and all I want to do is chill out, hang out with pretty girls, drink a few brews and munch.

BluEidDvl says:

June 6, 2021 at 9:46 am GMT • 5.1 days ago • 300 Words   

These times we’re living in are absolutely surreal. Not surprised though, we’ve been doing this for a long time now. Alas, a great many of my fellow White Americans will fall for it completely & be all in for a war with China.

None of them ever even contemplating what that would mean for us & the world. But, these are the same people who boast “we’re number one” when we rank at or near the bottom in positive stats for all developed nations, beset with crippling societal ills.

The same people who think we can vote ourselves out of this mess & Trump will win in ‘24 & somehow save the day. The same people who think our best days are ahead when our productivity base has been utterly gutted, our infrastructure is collapsing & our ability to maintain it & the skill set needed to sustain that productivity/infrastructure is slipping away. The same people who boast of “muh freedoms” when their freedoms & their children’s future is being pulled from right under their feet. The same people who think we’ll always be on top even when every example of history shows that every empire in history has collapsed.

We’re racing toward a cliff but they still think “god” is on their side & won’t let it happen or we’ll stay on top because, well, “we’re America”..

Utter denial & abject delusion seem to be a central aspect of our people..

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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A curious collection of wonderfully beautiful Chinese girls – Collection 9 – oh La La with images of food and delicious pastimes

Here is part nine of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. This particular collection consists of a very average selection of attractive Chinese girls, and you all might just be “blown away” by the content. Indeed, there are some favorites in here.

I’ve been spending way too much time dealing with the rubble of Metallicman after the three detailed attacks on my system, my content and my subscriber base. Apparently the people who attacked MM were not so worried about what I had been posting, but they wanted to know who have been subscribing to it, and since they couldn’t extract the data they tried to brute-force crowbar their way into the databases.

They failed, but boy or boy did they leave a lot of wreckage behind.  I guess, I really don’t know, but I guess, that their normal loopholes that they normally exploit revolve around the profit ends and the collection of data in that venture. And since I don’t do that, they were left scrambling to find other means to enter. All of which failed.

I wrote up a great post, that has been up for hours and no one is reading it. So I wonder why. Well they also corrupted my URL assignment code. Jeeze! Don’t these guys have better things to do with their time?

Well, I corrected the messed up URL and released the latest post about the movie Push and the United States media control. Why the Coronavirus narrative about vaccines resembles the science fiction movie Push. And it got zero hits. I mean What the Fuck! people. You asked me a questions and I wrote up a detailed answer and no one is checking it out. Really?

It seems really strange to me. Most MM readers are rather congenial, don’t you know. So I figure it must be a problem on my end. Sigh. So I’ve been debugging it all evening. Jeeze part two. Can’t I ever get a break?

But something else curious has been happening.

More than just a few people have been writing to me through the ‘back channels” telling me of similar events that they are experiencing. Taken as a whole, it seems that something bigger than just a nefarious hacking attempt has occurred.

I am a regular reader of your site. I am living in France, so I guess I must be 7 hours behind you. In any case, I experienced the problems on June 2, given the time difference from where you're at. Anyway, I had a "taunting" kind of dream very early in the morning and my husband couldn't stop bugging me. I couldn't gather my thoughts. He only calmed down and went to sleep after I started thinking that some outside force was using him as a conduit to bother me.

It was a blatantly ridiculous dream where someone tries to haunt me by saying "we know what you did in the past", which I brushed off and thought, "well i'm not the only sinner here hypocrite, and even then I'm a fucking saint by comparison"... But still, this is not a typical dream. Usually my dreams are just nonsense. It felt like it was a deliberate attack. A bullshit attack to be sure, but definitely felt "deliberate". I can't explain except that's how I felt when I woke up. I have no "proof". Just a very strong feeling, so take that as you will. 

Anyway, I wake up to my morning routine, which includes visiting your site for new articles. I see that your site is loading very slowly or not at all. I tried several times, but no dice. Then I immediately get a rash of appointment cancellations. I told myself to stay steady and remember my "homing thoughts" and to not break my stride. I also thought that this attack would not come if the resistance was not on the correct path. 

The next day, your site is working fine again. I get some additional perfect reviews and new appointments. I'm not saying the events I experienced are connected to what happened to you, but I had a sense that something was going to go haywire in the early morning of my suspicious dream. I was surprised to find out that Zhuhai experienced a suspiciously prolonged electromagnetic storm during this time.

Maybe you had other readers who experienced something strange or "off" the day your site got attacked. If this occurred, then it's definitely something worth remembering and keeping in the back of the mind for future reference. 

In any case, I (and I'm sure many silent readers as well) are grateful for your work and the information you put out there. 

-Anonymous M

Well, yeah. How the heck does someone not connected with the operation of the site also have odd and unusual experiences happening to them as well? So I responded…

Thank you for that. You are not the only one. Something has occurred, and it's bigger than what we humans understand. There was a battle, or reset, or "something". Call it an adjustment, if you want. But something happened. Yeah, you are not crazy.

Anyways…

Speaking of a “break”…

I’ve discovered another fine “white wine” that I have “taken a shine to”. It’s very cheap, and tastes great. But it’s at 43% alcohol instead of 55%. Never the less, aside from that, it’s rippin’ good. So it charges me up and refreshes me at the same time. Perhaps I have become more like Bender Bending Rodríguez who needs alcohol to function properly. Heh heh.

Bender Bending Rodríguez

I’ve been so wrapped up in dealing with the carnage that I haven’t had the time to enjoy the little pleasures in life. Like good food, good drink and fine companionship. Now that’s a shame, eh?

Let’s get on to the girls of China, eh?

That’s why you are here, eh?

The idea here is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people? And don’t you lie. It’s biologically encoded in all humans. (Bet you didn’t know that!)

Women look at other women with “different eyes” than men do. Of course, everyone knows this. Let’s look at this picture below.

Here’s my comments.

Her eyebrows are perfect. Just perfect. You can see the lines and details in them. very nice. Very sweet.

Nice robust chest with a very comfortable top, and the way that those jeans fit her is really awesome. This is the “go around town” outfit where you feel good and comfortable and wear the clothes like a second skin.

I like the necklace. But I wonder what is it’s significance. Does the letter “H” mean something, or is it just an accessory? Us guys usually haven’t a clue, but when we are out eating a noon meal with the woman in question, ti would probably come up as a conversation piece.

I have to say that her hair is distressed. It’s thin, and seems to be over processed. I think that she needs to seriously condition it. My guess is that she has been changing her hair color far too often than she should.

She looks to be in her 30’s. But this is China, she could easily be in her 40’s without any issue.

To Open the Files

Like my other posts.

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

Here is a younger lass. She’s in her 20’s. She have a very Asian face, and a very round face as opposed to an oval face. Like all Chinese, her eye color is brown. But with black hair and brown eyes, what’s not to love? I do love the way that he lips part, and the red color just matches her skin complexion. You will notice that the skin is pale. This is considered to be beautiful in China. Even in the Southern regions near Guangzhou.

She has a nice robust chest, and is wearing a cute top with a curious pattern. It seems to be embroidered, which (if you know me) is one of my loves. I just love embroidered work. Especially shirts and jackets.

Judging from the video, I would guess that she is in her middle 20’s and is healthy and fit. But I could be wrong. She might be 80 years old. It’s difficult to tell the age of a Chinese woman, don’t you know.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not.

For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

While I tend to prefer ladies with a more motherly and robust appearance, I find all of them to be very attractive. From the tall thin leggy beauties to the short cute little kitten like cuddle balls. But of course, most people from Arkansas think that my interest in these gals are because they look preadolescent. Really. Do you think that this beauty looks like a ten year old child?

This gal has everything that I find attractive in a woman. Big smile. Clean appearance. Longish hair that is clean, healthy and well maintained. Robust Chest, is playful.  Is wearing comfortable clothes that fit her well. And has hands that dance…

…do you know what I mean “that dance”…

…smooth articulated moments that move like water, and are graceful and calm. Peaceful and eloquent.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it.

This is true for the human sexes, as it is for animals, for flowers and for things such as building and art. Personally, I find art that massages the soul to be truly beautiful and inspirational. Which is why I have a complete index devoted to the subject.

But, what I consider to be beautiful might repel others. And likewise, what others find beautiful repels me.

Consider this work of “art”…

Is this “art”? Is this “beautiful”? Does this evoke the senses?

I argue that it’s a contemporaneous joke that is trying to capitalize on the current contentious political scene. Not any kind of work of value, no matter what your political persuasion is. Art evokes the senses and stirs the emotions. If it fails to do so, then it is not art.

But beauty comes in many forms and many shapes. While this particular post or article is about the beauty of Chinese ladies, I argue that beauty can be found everywhere. Look at cats for instance…

A beautiful cat.

And I have said this many, many times before.

If you had a choice, wouldn’t you prefer to surround yourselves with beautiful things, beautiful creatures, beautiful places, and beautiful relationships. It is up to us to attract and emit the same kinds of attractions. Whether it is beauty, kindness or happiness. We become what we emit.

Again. Nice eyebrows. Very Chinese eyes.

Short fingernails. She’s obviously a working or office girl. You try typing on a  keyboard with long fingernails. Oh, Lordly as if that’s going to happen. Not!

Nice chest. Very cuddly soft sweater. Personally I find the bright blue too garish for my personal tastes, but she looks good in it.

Now, when I was younger, my tastes in women were shaped by the images and magazines of the time such as Playboy, and Penthouse. That’s all I had to go on, and as a young man, with my hormones a raging, all I could do is tremble as I asked a girl out. Which most of the time was a failure.

But it’s all a growth phase that we all go through.

This chick has over processed her hair. I really don’t think that she should do this.  But in all fairness, she is going for a “look”. You can tell by her clothing and her lipstick color.

Notice the background. She is in a typical Chinese housing complex, and the view is very common throughout China.

Bing a man, eventually you reach a balance point where your hormones are under control and all you really want to do is get to know the girl, have a good time together, and enjoy the moments. And really as you get older this becomes more and more pronounced.

You savor the steaks you eat. You enjoy the perfume she wears, you listen to her talk and enjoy the night air after the dinner. You joke, you laugh, and maybe sing a song or two while walking on the jetty.

Women are magical.

I will bet that this girl (below) would be fun to be with. To go out, chat on in a mall, go window shopping with, and enjoy a nice meal. Maybe Thai or Viet food. Colorful, tasty, delicious and relaxing. I can easily picture sharing a steamed fish and some coconut / pineapple rice together.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see. It’s their choice of clothing, the area where the video was filmed, the selection of music, the way their hair is done up, and so much more.

Like the clothes that they chose to spend the evening in, and the choice of shoes that they wore. Guys, you all had best be more attentive. Don’t you know.

Each little video is like a window to the soul. Where you get a little glimpse of the girl behind the mask. That little presentation is just pure gold.

Some have personality.

And some really do. While others just have a strong softness. Some are calm and composed, some are happy and light. And some are stunning and serious while others remind you of Summer carnival rides, cotton candy and “bear claw” cakes to s’munch upon.

Like this girl below. I would love to ride on a merry-go-round with her, a roller-coaster, or just explore a fun house while snapping videos to post on Tictok.

Some have a great body.

They have long legs, or great dimples. Some have just long, long hair or dark, dark eyes. Some have a soft touch, while others have a careful composed prettiness.

Some have a wonderful smile.

Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. Girls, ladies, women are like beautiful flowers that should be treasured and cherished. For they are all wonderful.

But do not mistake the cuteness of a tiger for the damage it could cause if you angered it. Chinese women are very, very capable people. You can take that “to the bank”. Never fail to understand that they are strong, knowledgeable and powerful in their own right.

This girl below has artistic hands. Much like I have. She’s really pretty typical, but this particular pose would be really nice to paint in oils. Just remove the damn camera phone so that I can get a decent look at her face. You do know girls that there is more to your being than just your hips and chest. Your entire face is what presents your image to the world. Omit that, and you are just a thing.

I get it. You are proud of your attractive body. And I, like most me, appreciate that body. But when I am with a chick it’s how I picture us interacting together that means more than just the appearance. From the simple morning hello, to the nighttime escapades. What makes a person special is how they carry themselves.

All are wonderful.

Such is the beauty of women. And for us, and for everyone, we need to appreciative the world around us more.

Some girls just make me melt, and some with pony tails are just adorable. Here is a girl in a country backyard garden. It’s pretty typical China with blue skies, bright green colors and warm temperatures.

Oh, I guess that I am a tad bit crazy. When I see an attractive girl all I want to do is be with them and talk. Hopefully over food. This idea that I would associate attractive girls with food is nothing that I would ever believe when I was younger. But here we are.

In those days, I was always in a hurry. Eat, run, work at a frantic pace. Get laid off. Hustle to find new work. Work at a frantic pace to learn the job. Hurry up. Do the task. Complete the task. Crash. layoff. Repeat.

Now I savor life.

I savor the time that I share with others, and I appreciate the time that they devote in getting ready to go out with me. I appreciate the clothes that they wear, and the behaviors that they have. I pay special attention to what they have to say and why.

Speaking of food…

Here’s a random selection of some of the food and meals that I had over the last few weeks. Just like in my prayer / affirmation campaigns; “I eat fine, delicious and healthy food in a calm and relaxed manner with friends and family”.

Sweet and sour pork. Authentic Chinese Guangzhou style.

Sweet and sour pork is one of my favorite Chinese dishes. There is a sort of pale-copy of it in Chinese American restaurants back in the United States, but the real deal is fresh. It’s not pre-packaged out of a bag and cooked up on the stove like it is in America.

And here’s what I talk about when I eat beef….

Vietnamese style ginger beef. Oh so tender and so very delicious.

As much as I love a fine steak ( Filet mignon is my favorite), I do love those really tender slices of beef that are cooked oh so very right. So yummy.

The next meal was taken in a Dim Sum restaurant and the lunch meal was extraordinary. Of course, the main meals are great and tasty but make for great conversation pieces, like these little tank crapes…

Battle Dim Sum meal.

I love food in all of it’s many incarnations. And being in the Guangzhou area we get a fine selection of South East Asian food. I must tell you’se guys that Singapore food is just awesome, as is Malaysian, Cambodian, Thai and Vietnamese. Many of them have ingredients that are unavailable in the United States part of it is because of price, but a lot of it is because they are banned.

For the children…

…don’t you know.

Check out this nice Thai shrimp…

Sweet curried prawns.

We have some favorite restaurants that we hold VIP membership with. These “memberships” are an on going thing all over China. You get 20% off the price, a waiver of the various fees for tea, napkins, seats and rice, and preferential treatment. To get it you must deposit a few thousand yuan in the establishment and then you pay your bill drawing from that account.

And here’s a nice meal that I had in one of our “family restaurants”…

Pork neck and curried chicken.

For some odd reason, I now associate women, girls and ladies with food. In fact, when I look at food I think of women. And when I look at women I think of food. I suppose that you all must think that I am completely bonkers in this regard. But that’s just the way it is.

When I think of women wearing comfortable casual clothes I imagine us in the house together. She’s cooking on the stove wearing an apron. I know, I’m such an old fashioned chauvinist guy, and us talking. I sit there sipping on a wine, and helping her, maybe doing some food prep and she’s busy talking about this or that. Nothing too serious, but fun, light conversation that is engaging and delightful.

Now, I know. I know. I mean it; I know that this is not what anyone really WANTS to hear.

They want to hear about sex, and porn. they want to hear about expensive clothing, makeup and beauty perfection. They want to hear about the salacious details on dates and relationships that have turned sour.

Not here.

(I’ve) been there. Done that.

I just want to have a good time and munch.

And that young girl going out with “her crew”, see the beauty of her age around and what they are doing. As I have said, beauty comes in all shapes, sizes, ages, and types. And just because I enjoy the more curvy robust girls, that doesn’t mean that I do not find other women just as attractive. Some of my favorite girls are short, thin and very petite. But that is just me.

I like them all.

Just like I like Pizza, cheeseburgers, steaks and fried chicken. Don’t force me to choose. I just cannot. I love them all. And that is the same with beauty. There is no set idea of perfection, but rather a wide and diverse spectrum of characteristics that all work together to create an “image”.

I just love how she parts open her lips. What a very nice image.

We have to be more aware, and certainly more appreciative.

Not every girl is a “ten”. But that rating scale is based upon appearance alone. When the actual characteristics of a person consists of a wide spectrum of attributes. From appearance to personal grooming. To manners, the way that they talk, their friends, and their interests. To kindness, dreams, and opinions on life. Everything combines to a whole. And you all will not get that in a static image.

When I look at something, or someone who is beautiful it first strikes my interest. This is a normal reaction and there is nothing evil, disgusting or slimy about it. People naturally gravitate towards the attractive. But you know, and I am certain that some dog owners know, that even the most ugly dogs have characteristics that make them very special and beautiful in our eyes.

And that’s one of the great things about life.

It’s to experience beauty in everything. To appreciate beauty in everything, and to contribute to that beauty in good, substantive, and helpful ways. To make the life better for friends and family; to improve society and to rid the world of the evil, the confused and the horrible.

What I like about this particular picture is this model (and she is a model. She models trousers) is how comfortable she appears. She has a nice chest, thin waist, but the pants fit like a very comfortable glove. Haven’t you’se guys ever had clothing that felt so good when you put them on, that you felt… regal? Well, that is the feeling that I get from this particular picture.

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

You all might wonder why I am posting these pictures on the internet. But you shouldn’t.

Try to find pictures of beautiful girls from China using Google, Bing or any American or Western search engine. What you will get are stock images, advertisements, pictures of children, and professional photos associated with some Western “journalism”.

Nonsense. This is what it’s like.

This is the real, honest to goodness deal.

The Videos

Oh, and don’t leave yet! Let’s talk about the girls for a spell….

Talking about the Girls

Smiles that can open up all sorts of doors.

Let’s talk a little about the girls.

These girls are mostly between the ages of 18 years and 45 years old. The vast bulk of them are in their late 20’s. In China, if you are a woman, the ages between 23 years old and 30 years old are the dating years where you look for a husband worthy to start a family with. In China, if a woman cannot find a man by the time she is 28, she is considered a Spinster.  And is considered unmarriageable.

Yikes!

The age to get married for a woman in China is between 25 and 28. If they do not get married their entire family will sponsor these date-a-thons where they will have these programmed courting-rituals where the girl and the boy (part of a long line of boys) will spend time together.

The family won’t tell the girl beforehand either. She’ll walk into the house, and before she knows it, she’s on the fast track to get married. In the USA we call this a “shotgun wedding”. Only in China it’s the other way around.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

I don’t know about you’se guys, but all these girls look pretty darn marriageable to me.  They would be on the “A” list in any man’s personal list.

And no, someone had best hit those morons in Arkansas on their idiotic moronic  heads. They do not look like pre-adolescent children do they?

What age do you think this lass is? Ten or twelve?

A special bonus

Now here is a very special bonus that I am including in this article.

You know that the United States is all upset that China is forging relationships with nations in Africa, and the tried and true methods of giving wads of money to African dictators no longer works. And the Chinese help, infrastructure and investment is changing the nations of Africa.

But you NEVER see or hear about it.

China is leading the world in Change. Look at these beauties. Gosh their hair is so wonderful. And look at those eyes, and lips. My goodness!

Not once did FOX “news”, CNN, Salon, the Huffington Post, or Free Republic ever mention how the good works that China is doing inside Africa is transforming the societies there. It’s “soft power”, don’t you know, and America hates that. You cannot make money on wars when everyone is happy.

Here’s a video showing the good things that are happening in Africa, and not this is not a propaganda flick. Like all the videos in this article, this is the real deal taken by people who are participating in it first hand. Notice how beautiful the African ladies are. Notice how happy everyone is. Notice that they are providing a stable source of income and a future.

This is Africa today.

This is because of China. And notice how they are all speaking Chinese in Africa. It makes a difference when you are not blowing up their houses, machine gunning down their cattle, and carpet bombing their cities.

You can download the video HERE.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A rather nice collection of pretty Chinese girls – Collection 8 – This is China.

Here is part eight of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. And this one is a collection where I try to offer a different selection of all sorts and sizes.

Today is a nice lazy Saturday.

I went out to pick up some packages at the local “box store”, and then went off to the MeiYeJia quick-mart that I have mentioned before. It’s all so mellow. I passed one of the neighborhood kitty cats. He is a young gun. Maybe a year old, and taking a nice nap in the front. Like this…

Life is hard. Then you nap.

I went in to get a coke.

I don’t drink sodas like I used to in the United States. It’s far too sugary, and actually in China beer is just about the same price. So I tend to drink beer. But I wanted to get a “Black Coke” with is a zero calorie coke. I don’t care whether it has sugar or not. It’s just not as sweet as the regular coke.

And as I got it, I saw both of the children studying.

They are in first and second grade. And here it is on a Saturday at 3 in the afternoon, and they are there, next to their parents in their franchised quickie-mart, studying. So I slyly took a serendipitous photo of her while she was engrossed in her studies.

People. This is what China is.

First grader studying next to her parents in the family store on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

You would never see this in the United States.

Anyways…

Let’s get on to the girls of China, eh?

The idea here is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not.

For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

While I tend to prefer ladies with a more motherly and robust appearance, I find all of them to be very attractive. From the tall thin leggy beauties to the short cute little kitten like cuddle balls.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it.

And I have said this many, many times before.

Now, when I was younger, my tastes in women were shaped by the images and magazines of the time such as Playboy, and Penthouse. That’s all I had to go on, and as a young man, with my hormones a raging, all I could do is tremble as I asked a girl out. Which most of the time was a failure.

But it’s all a growth phase that we all go through.

And eventually you reach a balance point where your hormones are under control and all you really want to do is get to know the girl, have a good time together, and enjoy the moments. And really as you get older this becomes more and more pronounced.

You savor the steaks you eat. You enjoy the perfume she wears, you listen to her talk and enjoy the night air after the dinner. You joke, you laugh, and maybe sing a song or two while walking on the jetty.

Women are magical.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see. It’s their choice of clothing, the area where the video was filmed, the selection of music, the way their hair is done up, and so much more.

Each little video is like a window to the soul. Where you get a little glimpse of the girl behind the mask. That little presentation is just pure gold.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

Some have personality.

And some really do. While others just have a strong softness. Some are calm and composed, some are happy and light. And some are stunning and serious while others remind you of Summer carnival rides, cotton candy and “bear claw” cakes to s’munch upon.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

Some have a great body.

They have long legs, or great dimples. Some have just long, long hair or dark, dark eyes. Some have a soft touch, while others have a careful composed prettiness.

Some have a great body.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. Girls, ladies, women are like beautiful flowers that should be treasured and cherished. For they are all wonderful.

But do not mistake the cuteness of a tiger for the damage it could cause if you angered it. Chinese women are very, very capable people. You can take that “to the bank”. Never fail to understand that they are strong, knowledgeable and powerful in their own right.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

All are wonderful.

Such is the beauty of women. And for us, and for everyone, we need to appreciative the world around us more.

A beautiful girl of China. This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

That fat gal at the store that you see every day, she’s a kind, lovely beauty, who could use some TLC.

And that older woman wearing that elaborate outfit, just look at her, see how the light plays upon the details.

A beautiful girl of China. This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

And that young girl going out with “her crew”, see the beauty of her age around and what they are doing.

We have to be more aware, and certainly more appreciative.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

The Videos

Let’s have a look at the videos shall we? I’ve got a bunch for certain.

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

  • Collection one HERE. 51MB.
  • Collection two HERE. 69MB.
  • Collection three HERE. 85MB.
  • Collection four. HERE. 78MB.
  • Collection five. HERE. 92MB.
  • Collection six. HERE. 95MB.
  • Collection seven. HERE. 123MB.
  • Collection eight HERE. 156MB.
  • Collection nine HERE. 147MB.
  • Collection ten. HERE. 149MB.

You all might wonder why I am posting these pictures on the internet. But you shouldn’t.

Try to find pictures of beautiful girls from China using Google, Bing or any American or Western search engine. What you will get are stock images, advertisements, pictures of children, and professional photos associated with some Western “journalism”.

Nonsense. This is what it’s like.

This is the real, honest to goodness deal.

Oh, and don’t leave yet! Let’s talk about the girls for a spell….

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

About the girls

These girls are mostly between the ages of 18 years and 45 years old. The vast bulk of them are in their late 20’s. In China, if you are a woman, the ages between 23 years old and 30 years old are the dating years where you look for a husband worthy to start a family with. In China, if a woman cannot find a man by the time she is 28, she is considered a Spinster.  And is considered unmarriageable.

The age to get married for a woman in China is between 25 and 28. If they do not get married their entire family will sponsor these date-a-thons where they will have these programmed courting-rituals where the girl and the boy (part of a long line of boys) will spend time together.

The family won’t tell the girl beforehand either. She’ll walk into the house, and before she knows it, she’s on the fast track to get married. In the USA we call this a “shotgun wedding”. Only in China it’s the other way around.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

I don’t know about you’se guys, but all these girls look pretty darn marriageable to me.  They would be on the “A” list in any man’s personal list.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A Metallicman Video Narrative; Home in Zhuhai 8

Well, this is my eighth try at making a Vblog.

Home movies time! Woo! Woo!

I have gotten some positive feedback on them, and I appreciate it. I really do. I think that you can tell, at least, that what I experience doesn’t even remotely resemble the bullshit that pretends to be “news” out of the United States these days. China does not resemble anything like what is being “reported”.

The US government owns all the major media. Alt-left, alt-right, and mainstream. And they do not want anyone inside of China being made aware of the sheer bullshit that they are pumping out. They have blocked China from finding out what they are saying about it.

But that can be expected.

As the influence of the USA wanes, the people within the USA who promote hate, racism, and encourage world war III are going to find themselves on lists. Lists that they don’t want to be on, and which will get them into very, very “hot water” once they step foot outside of their protective enclaves.

But, you know, little-town local papers do have things to offer.

Like this, the Boston Globe. I like how it is laid out, and jeeze, $1 for 6 months is cheap. The only thing is that since I don’t live in Boston any longer, much of the “news” just doesn’t apply to me. Never the less, when I see it, I see hope.

I see hope.

Not everyone was bought out by the huge mega-companies, and dish out the processed swill out of Washington DC. There are people who report on local things, and local events, for local people.

Heck! If I were still in Boston, I would certainly contribute.

This vlog consists of a bunch of videos.

Some narrate while others don’t. What is special here is that (for all the videos on you-tube about China) note seem to tackle the kinds of “everyday life” that I want to provide here. For me, it’s nothing fancy. Yet when I show glimpses of my life to others outside of China, they seem to like it. Cool, I guess. So… this is just myself walking around the neighborhood; my house, and filming it while I discuss the world around me. I hope that you like it.

Keep in mind when you watch the videos, a comparison of your life, with what you are watching on my videos.

The videos

Video One. HERE. 94MB. Public internet is free in China. You can pay for great service at home, but all the public areas have free internet. This is because using the internet is considered a necessity inside of China. You need to for tracking, buying, registering and accessing. And inside China, it is against the law for anyone to profit off of people when they require access to fundamental services. This is a big change compared to the United States where there are a million tiny hands in your wallet and everyone makes a profit off of you.

Video Two. HERE. 319MB. Zhuhai is much larger than Seattle, WA USA, but far better managed. The role of a government is to provide services for it’s people, to protect them, and to allow them to live good, healthy and productive lives. it is not to treat them as sheep to be fleeced, debit slaves, serfs, or cannon fodder so that the oligarchy can profit off wars. For the last 30 years America has blown up thousands of mud huts, destroyed countless flocks of sheep and reduced hundreds of communities to rubble all in the name or personal greed. China didn’t. And what you see is China is what America should be, but isn’t.

Video Three. HERE. 95MB. This is another mall. This is on the center West side of Zhuhai, and  you can see that it isn’t so different from American malls. Or at least what they used to be, back in the 1980’s. You can see American restaurants such as Pizza Hut, and Hagen Dias and watch the average people come and go. Do they look like they are “evil”? Do they look like they are starving from famine? Do they look they they are being oppressed while living in a police state by the evil CCP? Does anything resemble “poor and deteriorating” infrastructure? Is the area full of pollution, litter, and refuse? Are the people eating dogs and cats?

Video Four. HERE. 305MB. Here we talk about bicycles and the reality of owning a bicycle in an American city. Most Americans who have cars do not ride bicycles, they just hop in their car to go anywhere. Walking more than a block is a rarity. In fact most suburbs and communities have pretty much given up on sidewalks. So most are unaware of the reality of owning a bicycle inside the United States. The reality is that it will be stolen, or chopped up. The urban ethnic youth just loves to steal your seats and tires for the hell of it.  It’s a fun pastime for them. (That’s what happens when strong parental leadership is missing from their lives.) We discuss life in China, and the love of walking and strolling because in China, the cities are designed for living. Not as a place that you look out the window of when you go from point A to point B.

Video Five. HERE. 34MB. A little park on the ocean. The entire coastline is a series of parks, walking and bike trails and rest areas. They are well maintained so that the citizenry can use them. This differs substantially from the United States where every beach has a for-profit parking lot where the local community can profit from. The role of the government is to provide an environment for the people to live and prosper in. Not one where the rich oligarchy can profit off the people and keep them living in fear so more money can be generated.

Video Six. HERE. 62MB. People contributing to the greater good. In America you will see a parking lot go up, and a park bulldozed. This happened all throughout the 1960’s and well into the 1980’s. And after a while the entire landscape was nothing but big large enormous empty asphalt spaces devoid of trees. Then when the business moved away, or when business died off, no one planted trees or grass. Instead they were permitted to collapse and fall into disuse. Not in China. This is because society matters. People matter.

I used to live in a small town in Massachusetts called Wrentham. For the longest time, both Wrentham and it’s neighboring town of Plainville resisted all changes and from the 1960’s up until the 1990’s no new business, or enterprises were permitted. This was true for the nearby community of Frankin as well. The entire area maintained it’s 1950’s charms.

Then the town elders decided to leave and move to Florida, and all of them left. And they all sold their property holdings to wealthy developers and within six months was all sorts of construction everywhere.

All of which held zero interest in the community, and all of which were money making, for profit enterprises run by their children.

You had the Wrenthan outlet mall, and the Wrentham water slide park, and a number of parking garages, and a few new strip malls, and after nine months the feel of the old Mayberry RFD community was displaced with semi-urban strip malls, and for profit venues.

Parking lots sprouted up. McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Panera Bread, Payless shoe store, and a Dunkin’ Donuts moved next to the old 1950’s style airstream diner, and the large oak trees were cut down to widen the road for heavier traffic flow.

When I left, right after 9-11, the local communities were outraged and all the growth was stopped. But what happened afterwards is unknown. Money could have changed hands, the the encroachment of modernity might have continued. I do not know.

That will never happen in China. China grows and builds and creates and makes, but the community and the society comes first. Not the profit can can be generated from it.

Video Seven. HERE. 30MB. One of my typical meals in China. You see, eating fish is very rare in the United States. When you do it is usually part of a sandwich, like a “fish fillet”, part of a chain like “Long John Silvers”, or deep fried like Southern Fried Catfish. Well, China cooks fish like they should be cooked, and while the bones need to be carefully removed by us Americans, the rest of the nation has no problem and eats the fish with glee and spits out the bones machine-gun style. Not only is the fish meal healthy and good for you, but it is so amazingly delicious.

Video Eight. HERE. 145MB. The beach in front of my house. I normally do not go to the beach, but it’s a pleasant place to be. Here you can see the guys roll up their tee-shirts to expose their bellies which is a very Chinese thing to do in hot climates. It’s called the “Beijing Bikini”. And it’s an on going joke.

You will also notice some little kids running around without clothes on or being partially dressed. It’s no big deal here. Kids are allowed to be kids. Unlike the United States where you could spend the rest of your life in prison as a sexual offender to being near them.

You will also notice that the access to the beach is free. You do not have to pay any fees or fines to go there. This is quite unlike many places in the United States today. This is a typical boardwalk and notice how it is protected with shady trees. Not left to bake in the sun because in America you need to pay for people to rake the leaves and it will cut into your profit margins.

Video Nine. HERE. 44MB. New construction everywhere. the Chinese have mastered the art of construction and people (!) they do not play. I have said this over and over and over again, but it is really true. And unless you are here and see it with your own two eyes, you will have zero comprehension of what you are dealing with, and that is most especially true if you get your Intel from FOX “news” or CNN.

Video Ten. HERE. 75MB. A toddler playground. I would guess that this playground is for children up to six years old, and requires supervision. You will note that there are many, many parents here. If anything happens, any one of them will come to the rescue. You will also notice that there are quite a selection of toddler appropriate play structures from mazes, to jungle gyms, to swing sets and rocking horses.

I am a big believer in age-appropriate playgrounds and outlets. You cannot have “one size fits all” and then make it so safe that only cripples on wheelchairs can use it safely. Play requires independence, safety with a level of risk. Sure, kids can fall, and things can go wrong, but in China all the toddler play areas come with a ton load of adult supervision, and no one is going to allow anything to happen if they can prevent it.

Video Eleven. HERE. 184MB. Wet Market. This is what a wet market is like. It looks a lot like a high-end American supermarket. And that’s because it is. The only difference is that fish are sold while alive. Thus the “wet” portion of the market. I ask, does Forbes, Rush Limbaugh, Hall Turner, or FOX “news” have any video of what a “Wet market” looks like. Nope. They just repeat the ugly narrative, and the ignorant believe it.

I know that I am a bit brash and “in your face” regarding this particular video, but I just read a fully bullshit article out of Forbes that angered me to no end. Still pushing the Wuhan “bat virus” hoax and the China dirty and filthy hoax. Jeeze!

Video Twelve. HERE. 75MB. Activity Center. This is a very common sight all over China. There are these little areas where you spend $5 USD for the kids to play safely. They can play with play-doh, splash in water, feed fish, slide and climb indoors, play dress-up, go to an activity table, play with toys, and paint, or build. The parents must be present, so it is not a Day-care. It’s something else entirely.

Video Thirteen HERE. 37MB. A Dim Sum restaurant. This is about as typical China as you can get, and these places are everywhere in the Southern crest of China. Everything is typical. From the tables and the table cloths to the tea, the types of people, the environment, the decorations and the food provided. This is China.

Video Fourteen HERE. 77MB. This is rush hour in front of a regional mall in a residential section. The sun is setting, the dusk is deepening, and the shade under the trees are lush, moist and green. It’s one of my favorite times of the day. This is when people go outside in China and gather together for meals, some companionship and just to socialize.

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told, it’s roughly 45 minutes in total.

Some key points

This is what China is like.

Is it dirty, smoggy, filthy? Do the people eat dogs and cats? Is the infrastructure failing, and flailing?

From Bing. “China City”.

Here’s a Bing search for “China Street”.

Is it a police state with constant “big brother” surveillance 24/7?

No it’s not.

From Bing “China people”.

What comes up when you do an image search for “China people” on Bing.

But it’s difficult to get the message through when the United States government owns 99.99% of all American media; mainstream, alt-Right and Alt-Left. NAd spend millions of dollars, with bot’s, AI, and armies of people to flood the internet with bad things to say about China.

They WANT to create the great lies of hate, and illusions of what China is.

From Bing. “China military”.

What Bing search engine comes up with when you do a search for “China military”.

Do you want more?

This article is going into a new sub-index that I am creating for it titled VLOG. You can access it here.

Video Blog

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

 

 

.

 

A Metallicman Video Narrative; Home in Zhuhai 7

Well, this is my seventh try at making a Vblog.

One thing is for certain it takes a different set of skills to do. And, maybe this methodology is better suited to me. I won’t have people complaining about spelling and grammar, or idiom mistakes so often.

This vlog consists of a bunch of videos. Some narrate while others don’t. What is special here is that (for all the videos on you-tube about China) note seem to tackle the kinds of “everyday life” that I want to provide here.

For me, it’s nothing fancy. Yet when I show glimpses of my life to others outside of China, they seem to like it. Cool, I guess. So… this is just myself walking around the neighborhood; my house, and filming it while I discuss the world around me. I hope that you like it.

Keep in mind when you watch the videos, a comparison of your life, with what you are watching on my videos.

The theme behind these videos areLook at everyday life inside of China”

The videos

Video One. 92MB. Reuse of discarded lighters, and hand sanitizers at the Zhuhai airport. This is common throughout China, but not so common in the United States. My experience is that the lighters are discarded in the United States.

Video Two. 56MB. Vet’s office part I. Bringing my dog into the vet’s office. What it is like and what is a going on. You get a very good idea about animal care inside of China with this particular video.

Video Three. 55MB. Vet’s office part II. Showing some of the customers to the vet clinic, and the pets that they bring in. It’s a big change from the American / UK narrative that the Chinese only eat dogs and cats. Isn’t it, eh?

Video Four. 29MB. This is a local government Social Security office. It reminds me of the United States Post Office. But I will tell you that they were efficient. You use the QR to apply and submit documents via the app. Then you arrive for your appointment. Waiting time is under five minutes, as the AI bases wait times on an individual-by-individual basis.

Video Five. 55MB. Playing with 5G AI in the local mall. You just scan the QR code and then run the APP. Then what you film interacts with the various programs and have you interacting with things. In the one that we choose, we point and push and do imaginary things in the air, and the APP interprets it to be myself pushing jellyfish, moving bubbles, tickling whales and chasing dolphins about.

Video Six. 69MB. A ride in the taxi through Jida, showing all the construction everywhere, and what it is like here in Zhuhai. I am told that China is ugly, filth and run by evil chicom crooks. I am also told that I am “blind” to the “real” China. Kind of difficult to buy a coke when you are “blind”, don’t you know.

Video Seven. 91MB. This is my local medical clinic in my neighborhood. It is in the old section of town, and filmed on a busy Saturday. As you can see, the things are a bit more used, distressed and in use. There is nothing wrong with that. The clinic will be replaced in a year or two anyways.

Video Eight. 21MB. This is a semi-normal, semi-regular meal that the MM household tends to have on the weekends. This particular meal is at a Vietnamese restaurant that we are VIP members of. (VIP membership is a regular feature throughout China.) And this dish is curried Chicken with potatoes and hot peppers with a side of okra. Actually how it is cooked makes all the difference in the world. It goes great with beer in a glass filled with crushed ice, pineapple rice with squid and shrimp, and shrimp / coconut chips.

Video Nine. 79MB. Pre-Kindergarden. Here you can bring your 9 month old baby to three years to Pre-Kindergarden. The babies, toddlers and youth learn social skills, stories, language and communication skills as well as some basic math, and history through stories, songs, and dance. Since many of the children are not toilet trained, and many are still nursing, the parents must be present with the children.

Yes, I can add streaming video code instead. And I am researching it. The thing is that I do not want code that is connected to the American oligarchy in any way. And most available codes are. 

Sure, you can host the video on your site, but the video will be directly tied to Google, which is then tied to the NSA, which is then under the control of the American Federal Government. So I am looking into this. 

I'll keep you all posted on my successes or failures in this matter. Maybe I'll ask Jeff Brown for some pointers....

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told, it’s roughly 45 minutes in total.

Some key points

This is what China is like.

Is it dirty, smoggy, filthy? Do the people eat dogs and cats? Is the infrastructure failing, and flailing? Is it a police state with constant “big brother” surveillance 24/7?

No it’s not.

But it’s difficult to get the message through when the Untied States government owns 99.99% of all American media; mainstream, alt-Right and Alt-Left. And then makes i had for people inside of China to post videos on You-Tube or Facebook.

They WANT to create the great lies of hate.

Do you want more?

This article is going into a new sub-index that I am creating for it titled VLOG. You can access it here.

Video Blog

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

 

 

.

 

A Metallicman Video Narrative; Home in Zhuhai 6

Well, this is my sixth try at making a Vblog.

Here's my MM dirty little secret; I'm beginning to get a little touch of Carpal Tunnel in my wrists. So I really need to lay off the heavy typing aspects of MM. Sorry, but I am a human and my body is a human body with all sorts of physical limitations. Ugh!

One thing is for certain it takes a different set of skills to do. And, maybe this methodology is better suited to me. I won’t have people complaining about spelling and grammar, or idiom mistakes so often.

This vlog consists of a bunch of videos. Some narrate while others don’t. What is special here is that (for all the videos on you-tube about China) note seem to tackle the kinds of “everyday life” that I want to provide here.

For me, it’s nothing fancy. Yet when I show glimpses of my life to others outside of China, they seem to like it. Cool, I guess. So… this is just myself walking around the neighborhood; my house, and filming it while I discuss the world around me. I hope that you like it.

Keep in mind when you watch the videos, a comparison of your life, with what you are watching on my videos.

The theme behind these videos areLook at everyday life inside of China part three”

As opposed to…

The videos

Here I am providing some videos, narrated as is my want, and thrown at you all with wild abandon. Yee Haw!

Video One HERE. 282MB. The tax office, a Chinese bird, and a six lane intersection. This first video is a honker, and it is enormous. It might take some time to download. Sorry guys.

Video Two HERE. 55.4MB. A tale in the elevator. Not much of a tale, rather just what it is like when you are captive inside an elevator with commercials playing.

Video Three HERE. 34.3MB. At the Chinese version of Social Security. If it reminds you of the US Post office, yeah, well, it’s all pretty similar. Except that in China, they are for more compassionate and nicer than what I remember everyone back in the States to be.

Video Four HERE. 40.5MB. At the mall and experiencing 5G AI by QR code. Well, almost actually, the AI and all that fancy stuff happened after I filmed this segment. Because, after all, you need the cell phone to active the AI effects.  And while they were impressive from a technical point of view… my hands moving jellyfishes and other fishes and bubbles about, I really just thought of it as a cute gimmick for kids.

Video Five HERE. 88MB. A ride in a taxi from the mall during rush hour. My daughter was playing with the kid’s version of Tictok and the noise in the background is one of her videos. Ai! Oh! LOL.

Yes, I can add streaming video code instead. And I am researching it. The thing is that I do not want code that is connected to the American oligarchy in any way. And most available codes are. 

Sure, you can host the video on your site, but the video will be directly tied to Google, which is then tied to the NSA, which is then under the control of the American Federal Government. So I am looking into this. 

I'll keep you all posted on my successes or failures in this matter. Maybe I'll ask Jeff Brown for some pointers....

And my point is…

This is my life. Please point out where I experience the same kind of narrative that the American (and UK) government says exists within China.

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told, it’s roughly 45 minutes in total.

Do you want more?

This article is going into a new sub-index that I am creating for it titled VLOG. You can access it here.

Video Blog

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

 

 

.

 

A super duper treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (7) – All super, all duper. Whoa!!

Here is part seven of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. And this one is a “mother lode”.

Definition of motherload

“…a huge shipment, large in quantity.”

The idea here is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking.

Like, (hey!) guys, you have no… NO!… idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.

Some have personality.

Some have a great body.

Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment.

All are wonderful.

Such is the beauty of women. And for us, and for everyone, we need to appreciative the world around us more. That fat gal at the store that you see every day, she’s a kind, lovely beauty, who could use some TLC. And that older woman wearing that elaborate outfit, just look at her, see how the light plays upon the details. And that young girl going out with “her crew”, see the beauty of her age around and what they are doing.

We have to be more aware, and certainly more appreciative.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Group 1 (Sorry it got lost in the sorting. I blame a host of problems resulting in a “perfect-storm” of erasure, deletion, and loss.)

Group 2 HERE. 129MB.

Group 3 HERE. 108MB.

Group 4 HERE. 112MB.

Group 5 HERE. 98MB.

Group 6 HERE. 107MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A Metallicman Video Narrative; Home in Zhuhai 5

Well, this is my fifth try at making a Vblog.

One thing is for certain it takes a different set of skills to do. And, maybe this methodology is better suited to me. I won’t have people complaining about spelling and grammar, or idiom mistakes so often.

This vlog consists of a bunch of videos. Some narrate while others don’t. What is special here is that (for all the videos on you-tube about China) note seem to tackle the kinds of “everyday life” that I want to provide here.

For me, it’s nothing fancy. Yet when I show glimpses of my life to others outside of China, they seem to like it. Cool, I guess. So… this is just myself walking around the neighborhood; my house, and filming it while I discuss the world around me. I hope that you like it.

Keep in mind when you watch the videos, a comparison of your life, with what you are watching on my videos.

The theme behind these videos areLook at everyday life inside of China part two”

The videos

Here I am providing some videos, narrated as is my want, and thrown at you all with wild abandon. Yee Haw!

Video one HERE. 77MB Futility, or a sense of belonging?

Video two HERE. 208MB. Banking and taxation within China.

Video three HERE. 163MB. Wasted away again in Lipton-baijiu-aville.

Video Four HERE. 123MB. At the airport.

Yes, I can add streaming video code instead. And I am researching it. The thing is that I do not want code that is connected to the American oligarchy in any way. And most available codes are. 

Sure, you can host the video on your site, but the video will be directly tied to Google, which is then tied to the NSA, which is then under the control of the American Federal Government. So I am looking into this. 

I'll keep you all posted on my successes or failures in this matter. Maybe I'll ask Jeff Brown for some pointers....

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told, it’s roughly 45 minutes in total.

Some key points

This is what China is like.

Is it dirty, smoggy, filthy? Do the people eat dogs and cats? Is the infrastructure failing, and flailing? Is it a police state with constant “big brother” surveillance 24/7?

No it’s not.

But it’s difficult to get the message through when the Untied States government owns 99.99% of all American media; mainstream, alt-Right and Alt-Left. And then makes i had for people inside of China to post videos on You-Tube or Facebook.

They WANT to create the great lies of hate.

Hey! Here’s the latest “news” about China today. What issues are being promoted, and how are they being described?

Does it resemble anything like what is really going on?

Do you want more?

This article is going into a new sub-index that I am creating for it titled VLOG. You can access it here.

Video Blog

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

 

 

.

 

A Metallicman Video Narrative; Home in Zhuhai 4

Well, this is my fourth try at making a Vblog.

One thing is for certain it takes a different set of skills to do. And, maybe this methodology is better suited to me. I won’t have people complaining about spelling and grammar, or idiom mistakes so often.

This vlog consists of a bunch of videos. Some narrate while others don’t. What is special here is that (for all the videos on you-tube about China) note seem to tackle the kinds of “everyday life” that I want to provide here.

For me, it’s nothing fancy. Yet when I show glimpses of my life to others outside of China, they seem to like it. Cool, I guess. So… this is just myself walking around the neighborhood; my house, and filming it while I discuss the world around me. I hope that you like it.

Keep in mind when you watch the videos, a comparison of your life, with what you are watching on my videos.

The theme behind these videos areLook at everyday life inside of China”

The videos

Here I am providing some videos of riding on a public bus in China, A video showing just the insane level of construction everywhere that is all over China, and what it is like to take my little dog to the vet.

Video one HERE. 39MB. Taking public transportation to get around.

Video two HERE. 23.3MB. Construction everywhere.

Video three HERE. 40MB. My dog visits the local vet for his shots.

Video four HERE. 72MB. A visit to the tiny Zhuhai airport.

Video five HERE. 107MB. A study of trash receptacles near my home.

Yes, I can add streaming video code instead. And I am researching it. The thing is that I do not want code that is connected to the American oligarchy in any way. And most available codes are. 

Sure, you can host the video on your site, but the video will be directly tied to Google, which is then tied to the NSA, which is then under the control of the American Federal Government. So I am looking into this. 

I'll keep you all posted on my successes or failures in this matter. Maybe I'll ask Jeff Brown for some pointers....

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told, it’s roughly 45 minutes in total.

Some key points

This is what China is like.

Is it dirty, smoggy, filthy? Do the people eat dogs and cats? Is the infrastructure failing, and flailing? Is it a police state with constant “big brother” surveillance 24/7?

No it’s not.

But it’s difficult to get the message through when the Untied States government owns 99.99% of all American media; mainstream, alt-Right and Alt-Left. And then makes i had for people inside of China to post videos on You-Tube or Facebook.

They WANT to create the great lies of hate.

Do you want more?

This article is going into a new sub-index that I am creating for it titled VLOG. You can access it here.

Video Blog

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

 

 

.

 

A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (6) – Many amazing beauties

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

The archive starts out with a lot of cute butts, and a lot of shaking. I do love girls that are soft and cuddly. That’s one of the fundamental differences between the sexes. Mean tend to be lean with muscles everywhere. Women tend to be soft and nurturing.

You can download this file archive HERE. 56MB.

Video Set B

This grouping is a fine OMG archive. I hope that you like it.

You can download this file archive HERE. 48MB.

Video Set C

Look at these girls. You can control how your life will manifest. You do that by thoughts, and verbal affirmations in a prayer campaign. What’s stopping you from making the kind of life that you yearn from materialize? What is stopping you?

You can download this file archive HERE. 61MB.

Video Set D

All you need to do is show some compassion to animals, to others, and to the down and out, and you have won my heart. You can look good, and be super attractive, and you will be noticed, but it is what is inside of you that will act as the glue that will hold your life and your relationships together.

You can download this file archive HERE. 61 MB

Video Set E

Yes this is China, and some of the outfits would get you arrested in the United States. That’s a fact. Oh, but I do love China.

You can download this file archive HERE. 53MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A Metallicman Video Narrative; Home in Zhuhai 3

Well, this is my third try at making a Vblog. I do believe that it is a popular thing to do and I am told that I could open up an account on You-Tube and get a bunch of followers. Well, maybe. If I wanted that.

One thing is for certain it takes a different set of skills to do. And, maybe this methodology is better suited to me. I won’t have people complaining about spelling and grammar, or idiom mistakes so often.

Here’s the videos in more or less the same kind of format as my first Vlog. Except that the videos are longer, and thus are bigger. They take more time to download.

This vlog consists of one cluster of three videos.

For me, it’s nothing fancy. Yet when I show glimpses of my life to others outside of China, they seem to like it. Cool, I guess. So… this is just myself walking around the neighborhood; my house, and filming it while I discuss the world around me. I hope that you like it.

The theme behind this video (or collection of smaller videos)  isLook at how polluted China is and compare it to the BBC, and the Bloomberg articles.”

What am I talking about?

Well, it is so easy to find pictures about pollution in China. That’s all the western media seems to talk about.

Like this,

And this,

And this, Look at the bikes and clothing. This picture is at least twenty years old. But what it is doing in a 2020 article?

And this,

And this as well…

About the methodology that I use…

The videos themselves are but a collection of short movies, and they are all zipped up. You just unzip to a folder and then just play the movies. It’s not as convenient as You-tube, but I won’t end up getting shadow banned either.

And I am tying to make a point.

From the article titled; “Officials have issued a red alert and warn that Beijing …

Obviously, what I see, and what the “journalists” are reporting on differs substantially. Why? Is it because I am lying, or that I am viewing China through “Rose colored glasses”?

Idiom: rose-colored glasses to see things as better than they really are to see only the positives in a situation (and therefore in a way that is unrealistic)

-Idiom: Rose-colored glasses

I do narrate, but … well, you watch.

China as described by NPR.

I really want you, the viewer, to “feel” what “my China” is like. It’s my reality. It’s my world. And, by extension, MM readers / followers’ world as well.

Toxic air catastrophe triggers scrap metal revolution in China

The videos can be downloaded here…

And I am truly sorry that they are so darn large. If you cannot download them, please accept my apologies.

Cluster One

Only three videos in this installment. But they are large. Please (again) accept my apologies.

Video one HERE. 100MB.

Video two HERE. 250MB.

Video three HERE. 247MB.

Yes, I can add streaming video code instead. And I am researching it. The thing is that I do not want code that is connected to the American oligarchy in any way. And most available codes are. 

Sure, you can host the video on your site, but the video will be directly tied to Google, which is then tied to the NSA, which is then under the control of the American Federal Government. So I am looking into this. 

I'll keep you all posted on my successes or failures in this matter. Maybe I'll ask Jeff Brown for some pointers....

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told, it’s roughly 45 minutes in total.

Some key points

The purpose of this vlog is to show how out of touch the Western media is with the day-to-day reality of those of us living within China. It is so absolutely crazy out-of-touch that there MUST be an agenda behind it. Certainly no “journalists” can end up being that absolutely incompetent.

And thus this incisive and detailed, and particularly important vlog.

I do hope that you enjoy it.

Ah.

Compare my reality with American reality

While I was filming these videos, this is the hysteria going on in America. Now compare reality against the perception of what is important via the “news”.

I mean, don’t you know, that it’s all bullshit.

So I am just gonna hang out here. Have a few beers, and eat some delicious food with some friends, both old and new. And that’s my reality.

Do you want more?

This article is going into a new sub-index that I am creating for it titled VLOG. You can access it here.

Video Blog

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

 

 

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A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (5) – What a batch of ladies.

This is collection five.

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

All these girls are lovely. There is one video that takes place in Vietnam; that’s the one with the girl on the arm of the Westerner. There is also a video of a hiding space inside one of the apartments. The Chinese have not forgotten their past. They have secret rooms and access areas no matter how safe the world appears at the moment.

You can download this file archive HERE. 56MB.

Video Set B

I threw in one American girl Tictok video for comparison purposes and one WTF video showing how the government monitors people via drones and gets you to help, safety or to correct bad behavior. I also threw in a Chinese translation app that is really handy to have around. Check them all out. The rest are all cute girls.

You can download this file archive HERE. 95MB.

Video Set C

Here’s an interesting group with one video of a guy in Vietnam trying to pick up some street girls on break, and some other pretty Chinese girls. I do like to show compare and contrast videos for the viewer and reader to see things in a different way that is not intuitively obvious.

You can download this file archive HERE. 46MB.

Video Set D

More beautiful Chinese girls, with one from Thailand. Can you determine which one?

You can download this file archive HERE. 57MB.

Video Set E

My favorite clothing model and a girl that has flesh colored tights but doesn’t want to be filmed. Ah. It’s all fun.

You can download this file archive HERE. 62MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (4) – More, more and more!

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

We start this set with an American girl. She’s not bad. Nice. Fun. Kind of cute. Then we follow up with the Chinese girls. Look, and see how they all present themselves. Some are elegant. Some a fun and playful. Some are nice, and others are exciting. All of this is what China is about.

You can download this file archive HERE. 56MB.

Video Set B

In this group I almost overdosed on cute. So many cute girls doing cute things. Why it just takes me back to a younger time, and an easier time. That’s magical. And that is what makes women so magical at times.

You can download this file archive HERE. 53MB.

Video Set C

Yes.  There are some beautiful girls here in this set. But the ones that I like the most are the girls being themselves in a normal situation, such as the girl in her college dorm room. You see, you don’t need to get all dressed up and made up to be attractive. You just need to be yourself. I find that amazingly refreshing.

That is not to say that I don’t like a woman to take care of herself. Because I really like it when she gets read, looks her best and goes out with me. But I really like the real girl. It’s the personality that makes the difference.

You can download this file archive HERE. 58MB.

Video Set D

Some girls are thin, some are beautiful. Some are cute, and some… well they just defy description. But each and everyone of them is appealing. It’s their dress, their actions and their choice of music that illustrate how they feel at the particular moment in time when they made that video. And they are all a treasure. A precious treasure that you just want to be near and appreciate.

You can download this file archive HERE. 44MB.

Video Set E

Some awfully wonderful girls here. Some would make great companions. But that’s just me, don’t you know.

You can download this file archive HERE. 51MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (3) – Lotta Lovelies.

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

Some very fine active chest action with these girls in this group. I also threw in (accidentally) a video depicting how this one particular crew of pick-pockets operated by crashing into people and stealing their belongings when no one was watching. Don’t worry, they were caught and are now in prison doing time, and organ harvesting. After all, they were really bad. But the girls here are nice, and I love the aggressive boob action. Hey! If you’ve got it, let it rip!

You can download this file archive HERE. 63MB.

Video Set B

Some of my personal favorites are here. Maybe you all would enjoy them as well. Huh?

You can download this file archive HERE. 61MB

Video Set C

This is a pretty good collection. The second video shows some KTV girls getting paid for their time at the club, and it’s a pretty interesting set up, eh? And there are some really cute girls thrown in the mix as well.

You can download this file archive HERE. 62MB.

Video Set D

This is a nice set. I sort of “polluted it” by throwing in two American Tictok videos into the mix. Can you figure out which ones? Take your time. It’s tricky as one girl is an Asian-American.

You can download this file archive HERE. 59MB.

Video Set E

There’s a video of an American and one of a Mexican lady in this mix. Can you tell who is who and which ones are not Chinese? It’s a fun game. I have personal favorites here, and I think that you all might appreciate them.

You can download this file archive HERE.  63MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (2)- Lots of beauties

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

You can download this file archive HERE. 13MB. Generally comparatively small.

Video Set B

Let’s play a game. I threw in one American girl from the American version of TicTok in the group can you find her? Look carefully. LOL. How would you describe her compared to the rest of the Chinese girls?

You can download this file archive HERE. 27MB.

Video Set C

Now the fun and games continue. I snuck in two (not one) American girls in this group. Can you find them? Can you identify them? Come on! It shouldn’t be so hard, eh?

Additionally, one of the videos, I think that it is the 9th one down shows an entire family. Note that the mother looks just a beautiful as her young 19 year old daughter. China is amazing.

You can download this file archive HERE. 76MB.

Video Set D

Here, we also have some girls from Vietnam thrown in to the mix. Can you identify which videos they are? Over all I strongly believe that there is a girl for every guy in this world and beauty only goes as far as to attact and get noticed, but it is the personality, the inner strength and their skills that maintain a relationship.

You can download this file archive HERE. 52MB.

Video Set E

Again, here there are many girls from China. They come in different sizes and shapes. Some are like beautiful flowers, while others are like cute little dolls, and still others are strong confident women. And for me, personally, all of them are attractive. I think that the beauty that a woman possess goes far deeper than what she displays to the world outside, and I hope that these little videos show that aspect.

You can download this file archive HERE. 53MB.

Video Set F

Again, some beautiful ladies that come in all sizes and in all shapes. This is why I have come to appreciate China. How many tattoos can you fin in this grouping? How many enormous asses, and how many are lifting their asses up high to wiggle for the world to see? Eh?

You can download this file archive HERE. 59MB

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

Examples about how the Chinese teach their children to be successful

When I was growing up, my father did his best to give me an education. And throughout this time, he repeatedly emphasized that my future depended on the type of job that I had, and the size of the company that employed me. Larger companies offered more opportunities than smaller companies, and the more education that I would have would provide two things for me. Firstly, they would increase the job pool that I could choose from, and secondly they would enable me to start off with a higher salary than others.

He meant well, and certainly that formula worked well for his generation, but my generation suddenly became the “disposable worker” generation and layoffs became more common than not, and no one ever ended up with a job for life. Couple that with my role in MAJestic, and it was really a dog-eat-dog survival life with more than enough highs and lows.

And what you want to do, as a parent, is to make sure that your children have it better than you. Maybe not necessarily easier, but certainly better; more opportunities, and a chance, a real honest-to-goodness chance that they will be able to make a life for themselves in a world that is subject to whims and changes beyond their control.

Well, I am in China. And the Chinese have seen dramatic changes in their lives over the last thirty years, and many generations of Chinese have sacrificed and existed in a situation where there just wasn’t much in the way of any opportunities. And so they remain cautious, but guarded, about their children.

And thus, knowing that the (proverbial) rug “could be pulled out from under their feet”, many middle-class Chinese do what ever they can to guarantee that their children are equipped with the kinds of skills to make it, and survive in a contentious and changing world. And while China (as a nation is secure and prosperous), things could change. And as such, no one is taking any chances.

The educational system in China is not only great, but absurdly so. Not only do elementary students learn Chinese languages, and history, but they learn English as well, and their entrance into university is predicated on their ability to speak and pass English qualification exams.

Which makes things very interesting, as I will often see children studying all the time, jut about everywhere. Couple that with secondary classes that their parents also provide for them. These other classes range from swimming to dancing, to archery, to martial arts and everything in between. Some go into robotics, while others study the arts. And with that in mind I would like to present some videos of Kindergarten to first grade Chinese students…

They are all zipped up in a small 30MB file. I think that you all will enjoy them.

You can get the file HERE.

Conclusion

These children are not the exception. They are the normal average. If America believes that it can compete against China then they will need to reconfigure the school curriculum towards STEM subjects, and less on the soft social and humanities. They will also need to be very serious about the environment hat they are raising the children within.

For a nation of “lone wolves” can never truly work together without fighting, squabbling, and performing uncharacteristically self-defeating behaviors.

Do you want more?

This article is going into the China vs. America comparisons index.

USA vs China

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

 

 

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A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection – New Firsts

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

After viewing this “treasure trove” of Chinese beauties, you too will have a better than average understanding about what Chinese ladies look like. Sure beats the stereotypical narrative by low-educated American sheeple…

"Chinese girls are all short, frail, little tiny women, that don't have chests and look like pre-adsolescent children."

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

I have to apologize that I have four videos of the same girl in this particular collection, but she models those pants so well. And I am a sucker for bouncy chests on thin girls, don’t you know… (giggle).

You can download this file archive HERE. 59MB.

Video Set B

This group highlights eight (8x) videos of a more robust woman that I personally find quite alluring. But that’s just me. But I will tell you that even though I enjoy the women who wear the short cute little dresses, what I really love are all those traditional clothing, whether it is Han, or as shown in this collection the “Gone with the Wind” style. I think they are awesome.

Aside from my personal love of big smiles, big hair and big chests, you will note that all these girls are inside of China. Does China look dirty, filthy, stinky or disgusting to you? What about the buildings? Does it look like things are run down, work out, or that the infrastructure hasn’t been repaired in a long long time? No. Of course not.

You can download this file archive HERE. 54MB.

Video Set C

The featured girl in this collection of videos is so sweet that I could fall heads over heels over her and not realize what I am doing. This collection kind of shows that it’s not so much the appearance that a woman has, but rather how she acts and carries herself. Being feminine is surely very attractive.

You can download this file archive HERE. 58MB.

Video Set D

This is a pretty large archive at 128MB. But as large as it is, the length of time for the movies are comparatively long as well. So that’s a plus.

I threw in a video of some Middle Eastern girls in the mix. Can you pick it out? Is it easy or difficult to sort out. LOL. The last video is of the same girl that is the first video, and she is from Hunan. She’s a Hunan girl. And in the last video you can see her mother next to her.  My father always told me that to see what will happen to the girl that you marry, look at her mother. I would argue that it’s not always a direct correlation, but it has some merit worthy of thought, eh?

You can download this file archive HERE. 120MB. Pretty large, and might take a few minutes to download.

Video Set E

This collection is much smaller than the previous one, and would end up loading much faster. It’s a great way to look at some fine Chinese girls quickly.

You can download this file archive HERE. 29MB.

Video Set F

You can download this file archive HERE. 53MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A Metallicman Video Narrative; Home in Zhuhai 2

Well, this is my second try at making a Vblog. I do believe that it is a popular thing to do and I am told that I could open up an account on You-Tube and get a bunch of followers. Well, maybe. If I wanted that.

One thing is for certain it takes a different set of skills to do. And, maybe this methodology is better suited to me. I won’t have people complaining about spelling and grammar, or idiom mistakes so often.

Here’s the videos in more or less the same kind of format as my first Vlog.

Well, actually, it’s a string of around 12 or so, 2 to 5 minute long videos that I have zipped together in a folder. You just unpack and watch at your pleasure.

I took extra care for them not to be as long as the other videos so that they would be easier to watch.

For me, it’s nothing fancy. Yet when I show glimpses of my life to others outside of China, they seem to like it. Cool, I guess. So… this is just myself walking around the neighborhood; my house, and filming it while I discuss the world around me. I hope that you like it.

The theme behind this video (or collection of smaller videos)  ishow China manages society, allocates resources, and works to improve the environment for it’s citizenry..

The videos themselves are but a collection of short movies, and they are all zipped up. You just unzip to a folder and then just play the movies. It’s not as convenient as You-tube, but I won’t end up getting shadow banned either.

This is all pretty much unlike the typical expat in China vblogs that visit this town, or that town and talk about what they observe. I do that as well, but overall, this effort is about me and where I live. The purpose of this particular segment is to concentrate on the idea that the role of the government, at all levels, is to improve the lives of the citizenry.

Something that has been missing in the American government for at least two centuries/

I do narrate, but … well, you watch.

I really want you, the viewer, to “feel” what “my China” is like. It’s my reality. It’s my world. And, by extension, MM readers / followers’ world as well.

Keep in mind this video by Bernie Sanders 30 years ago…

Thirty years ago, 90% of the Chinese people lived in absolute poverty. All they had was their skills and the ability to work hard. The government took time, planning and enormous investments to improve the lives of the citizenry.

Unlike the USA they did not decide to destroy the rest of the world. They used the money on their people. Not on the richest, and the desire to destroy everyone else. And you can see the results today.

That is what this Vlog is all about.

The videos can be downloaded here…

Group One

Group one HERE…73MB

Group Two

Group two HERE… 61MB

Group 3

 

Group three HERE … 51MB

Group 4

And this group is about me doing some shopping in the little stores that line the lower income areas.

Group four HERE… 43MB

Group 5

I discuss fixing my bicycle, automobile repair, and riding a bike in China; the most bicycle friendly nation on the planet.

Group five… HERE 65MB

 

Yes, I can add streaming video code instead. And I am researching it. The thing is that I do not want code that is connected to the American oligarchy in any way. And most available codes are. 

Sure, you can host the video on your site, but the video will be directly tied to Google, which is then tied to the NSA, which is then under the control of the American Federal Government. So I am looking into this. 

I'll keep you all posted on my successes or failures in this matter. Maybe I'll ask Jeff Brown for some pointers....

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told, it’s roughly 45 minutes in total.

Or around 12 minutes per VLOG group (1 through 4) for the bite-size MM version that I used to test on my computer.

I really hope that you are not too bored.

How the videos are set up

The first video starts off quiet and then I break out into my narrative. I really, and sincerely hope that you all can get the real “feel” for China like I have. And understand WHY I say that it reminds me so much about what the United States was like back in the late 1950’s, and early 1960’s.

Some key points

The purpose of this second Vlog is to underscore the role of government.

I look at China that has placed the fundamental and primary role of government to be to improves the lives of the citizenry at all levels.

This differs substantially from the role of the American government; which is to do the bidding of the wealthy oligarchy that put the “democratic” representatives into power within the government.

Each video takes one small item, often overlooked by other vloggers, and amplifies it upon this narrative. It’s not that they are wrong, but visiting a town or community for a week isn’t going to tell you or inform you the way that a long-term expat would.

And thus this incisive and detailed, and particularly important vlog.

I do hope that you enjoy it.

I love the steam locomotive in the background.

Ah.

You could reasonably argue that I miss the old culture, and the older styles of cars, clothing and other attributes of the past. you could say that I miss the prices and my now dead relatives. I suppose that many of those points are actually true. But with every good point, is an equally bad point.

And I suppose that people would argue that I am looking with fondness of the past. And it’s true, I am. But what I am describing is the “feeling” of that time. And I am comparing it to the “feeling” that I have now.

Today, here inside of China, no one is on the radio, or on the internet yelling at me to buy! Buy! Buy!. It’s only $98.98.

I am not hearing from radio, television or the internet about all sorts of emergency dangers and that the world is out of control.I don’t hear advertisements that ask if I am depressed, have marital or legal problems, or how great a pill will help me in my life.

Instead I hear that things are under control, and I see that with my very own two eyes. There’s a calmness in the air that I haven’t experienced since the 1960’s, and it is refreshing to experience it.

I hope that you too are able to experience it in my VLOG herein.

Compare my reality with American reality

While I was filming these videos, this is the hysteria going on in America. Now compare reality against the perception of what is important via the “news”.

Cox complains about 1,000-lb bear dominating coverage…

I mean, don’t you know, that it’s all bullshit.

So I am just gonna hang out here. Have a few beers, and eat some delicious food with some friends, both old and new. And that’s my reality.

Do you want more?

This article is going into a new sub-index that I am creating for it titled VLOG. You can access it here.

Video Blog

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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A Metallicman Video Narrative; Home in Zhuhai 1

Well, this is my first try at making a Vblog. I hear that it is a popular thing to do and I am told that I could open up an account on You-Tube and get a bunch of followers. Well, maybe. If I wanted that.

So I made a video.

It’s of my neighborhood.

Well, actually, it’s a string of around 12 or so, 2 to 5 minute long videos that I have zipped together in a folder. You just unpack and watch at your pleasure.

For me, it’s nothing fancy. Yet when I show glimpses of my life to others outside of China, they seem to like it. Cool, I guess. So… this is just myself walking around the neighborhood; my house, and filming it while I discuss the world around me. I hope that you like it.

The theme behind this video (or collection of smaller videos)  isthe feeling in China is near identical to the feeling that I had while a small boy living in the USA in the 1960’s”.

The videos themselves are but a collection of short movies, and they are all zipped up. You just unzip to a folder and then just play the movies. It’s not as convenient as You-tube, but I won’t end up getting shadow banned either.

This is all pretty much unlike the typical expat in China vblogs that visit this town, or that town and talk about what they observe. I do that as well, but overall, this effort is about me and where I live. It’s purpose and intention is to get you, the viewer, a “feeling” of the environment as opposed to someone watching a narrated adventure.

I do narrate, but … well, you watch.

I really want you, the viewer, to “feel” what “my China” is like. It’s my reality. It’s my world. And, by extension, MM readers / followers’ world as well.

The entire video set can be downloaded HERE. But, it’s super large at 392 MB. And many computers cannot download it due to the cache memory size, or clutter in their browsers. Like your’s truly.

So… Here’s the MM version. For me, I need to download things in smaller mouth-fulls.

Or if you keep on getting errors, you can download the file in small batches and then go folder by folder.

Yes, I can add streaming video code instead. And I am researching it. The thing is that I do not want code that is connected to the American oligarchy in any way. And most available codes are. 

Sure, you can host the video on your site, but the video will be directly tied to Google, which is then tied to the NSA, which is then under the control of the American Federal Government. So I am looking into this. 

I'll keep you all posted on my successes or failures in this matter. Maybe I'll ask Jeff Brown for some pointers....

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told, it’s roughly 45 minutes in total.

Or around 12 minutes per VLOG group (1 through 4) for the bite-size MM version that I used to test on my computer.

I really hope that you are not too bored.

How the videos are set up

The first video starts off quiet and then I break out into my narrative. I really, and sincerely hope that you all can get the real “feel” for China like I have. And understand WHY I say that it reminds me so much about what the United States was like back in the late 1950’s, and early 1960’s.

Some key points

One of the things that I am trying to get across is that China reminds me of what America used to be. Whether it was the 1950’s, 60’s or 70’s. It clearly has something, a “feeling”, a pace of life, a way of living, a society that has long evaporated away in the United States.

I argue that what America is today is a direct reflection on it’s leadership. And the fact that the leaders are not smart, (are terribly corrupt and behave as psychopathic fiends with no shame or attempt to hide their behaviors) reinforces this point. For them, being surrounded by sycophants and other psychopaths they are unable to see what they have created or the world that they live in is not good. It is not healthy and it is most certainly, not normal.

A Metallicman 1960’s America.

Ah.

You could reasonably argue that I miss the old culture, and the older styles of cars, clothing and other attributes of the past. you could say that I miss the prices and my now dead relatives. I suppose that many of those points are actually true. But with every good point, is an equally bad point.

And I suppose that people would argue that I am looking with fondness of the past. And it’s true, I am. But what I am describing is the “feeling” of that time. And I am comparing it to the “feeling” that I have now.

Today, here inside of China, no one is on the radio, or on the internet yelling at me to buy! Buy! Buy!. It’s only $98.98.

I am not hearing from radio, television or the internet about all sorts of emergency dangers and that the world is out of control.I don’t hear advertisements that ask if I am depressed, have marital or legal problems, or how great a pill will help me in my life.

Instead I hear that things are under control, and I see that with my very own two eyes. There’s a calmness in the air that I haven’t experienced since the 1960’s, and it is refreshing to experience it.

I hope that you too are able to experience it in my VLOG herein.

A “real” car. From Shorpy.com.

Compare my reality with American reality

While I was filming these videos, this is the hysteria going on in America. Now compare reality against the perception of what is important via the “news”.

I mean, don’t you know, that it’s all bullshit.

So I am just gonna hang out here. Have a few beers, and eat some delicious food with some friends, both old and new. And that’s my reality.

Do you want more?

This article is going into a new sub-index that I am creating for it titled VLOG. You can access it here.

Video Blog

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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Some fine examples of what Chinese ladies are like. All are in short video format.

This article is devoted to one of my more neglected sub-indexes. Which is the “learning about China by looking at Chinese girls” sub-index. Well, in this article we won’t be teaching you all all that much about China so much as we are showing you images of what the girls are like in China.

I know, I know… the American propaganda mills have been working over-time to make China look like an evil monster, dark, gloomy, sad and dirty. It’s nothing like that. But you know, the sheeple love to read things like that. It makes them feel good about their sorry lives.

So what I did was I got on my local internet and started collecting short videos made by gals here in China. They are in no particular order. I just went ahead and vacuumed them up as I found them. Over all, they are a great introduction to what the girls of China look like today.

I took the micro-videos and grouped them into batches of ten. Then I zipped up the file so that you can download all ten together. It’s much faster and easier for you to check out these ladies this way. I did make a point to put at least one “noticeable” worthy girl in each group. I’ll have you know.

But first…

Realize that just because the girls like to dance around on Chinese social media does not equate them to be the “standard, and normal” Chinese lass. They tend to stand apart in one way or the other as this video clearly indicates…

Video HERE.

What the American propaganda says…

But first, let’s see what kinds of images that you can find on American Internet and American websites that depict what Chinese girls must look like. OK.

This is a screen shot of a Bing Image Search…

Chinese girls according to Bing Search.

You know, there are ugly people all over, but seriously, the density of all these types of girls gives you the illusion that this is what all the Chinese girls look like. It’s not even remotely true.

Some Examples of Chinese Girls…

OK. Here’s some fun videos of come pretty Chinese girls.

  • Click on the link under the picture. It will download a ZIP file.
  • Unzip to a folder.
  • Then when you open the folder you will see the ten videos.
  • Click on the first one, and the computer will play all ten one after the other. You should be able to go through all the ten micro-videos in just over a minute.

Group 1

The ladies come in all shapes and sizes. Some are busty. Some are not. Some are short, and some are tall. All are lovely.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 2

Most of the Chinese girls like to wear tight fitting clothes. It’s the current fashion, I figure. I am not complaining. It’s like when I lived in California back in the early 1980’s, and all the girls wore these one-piece spandex suits that they rode bicycles in.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 3

All of these girls, no matter what size or shape, all have one or more attributes that are attractive to me personally. I think that it is their personality that comes out on these little videos.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 4

You will note that not all Chinese girls have long black hair. Many have brown or shades of brown hair. And while the predominant eye color is brown, there are other colors that manifest from time to time.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 5

When I look at these girls, a flood of thoughts assault me. And one of the dominant thoughts is, of course, sharing a bottle of wine with them and eating some fine delicious food.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 6

All of these gals have a story to tell. Wouldn’t you like to sit at a table, enjoy some fine food, play some games. Drink some wine and listen to their stories?

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 7

The gal on the bottom row in the middle is wearing some traditional Hunan clothing. I find the gals, the food, and the hilly countryside very appealing to me.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 8

The girl in the blue jeans is showing off her butt. It’s a pity that she doesn’t turn around so that we can see her face, and shape. But that’s the way life is. Sometimes people want to emphasize what they feel is their “best” physical attribute.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 9

Girl number two here is quite top heavy. I think that the outfit doesn’t do her justice. She might be better served with a long dress and a expansive top. But that’s just me, don’t you know.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 10

Having cleavage is a “thing” for girls in their 20’s in China, I guess. But you have to see them outside the work environment and in the clubs or KTV’s to appreciate it.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 11

The girl cutting up food is a real turn on. There are few things that get me more excited than a woman making and cooking dinner. It’s a fetish I suppose.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 12

This first gal in the golden spandex has a very nice butt. I could watch her a walking all day long, I’ll tell you what.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Some final thoughts

Now that I am older, when I look at a pretty and attractive lady, I think about going out together. I think about talking, eating fine delicious food, and drinking some nice alcohol. It makes me want to put on my “best side” also and just spend a lovely day or evening together. Engaging in free talk, and just having fun.

If something else happens, then great. If not, well, that’s fine too.

In every event, we would all have a great time. Talking, being our best and sharing our thoughts, our lives and fun together. It’s a precious thing.

One of the things that I really like about China is that you can speak freely to each other. You don’t have to worry about offending someone by your mannerisms, or your language or your subject matter. And this fact really becomes pronounced when I meet someone from the West who comes to China on a  visit and I immediately notice they stiffen up and get uncomfortable when I speak, or smoke or drink.

But what’s their problem. I offer them a cigarette. You know?

Jeeze! They are so imprisoned that they don’t know what freedom actually is.

Being afraid to say something, least the person gets offended is not freedom. Freedom is the ability to be yourself. So be it. Don’t try to please others. Please yourself. You’ll end up being a heck of a lot happier in return.

Throw in some fine delicious wine.

And some tasty food.

And some great conversation with some attractive ladies, and you have the makings of a wonderful time. I kid you not. You can believe  me on this. And that is really true if one of the ladies is an animal lover, a cook, a gardener, a history buff, a poet, an archivist, or a dancer. My experiences with these kinds of women has always been extraordinary.

And don’t even get me started on some of the prime MM subjects here. You’ll never get me to shut up!

Generally speaking in China, the more you can drink, the more respect you will earn. If you can drink excessive amounts of alcohol, still stand up, form relatively coherent sentences and follow proper Chinese drinking etiquette (see below), you’ll no doubt impress your table-mates and leave a good impression. If you fail, don’t worry! You probably won’t remember it anyway. Obviously never drink more than you can handle no matter what the pressure.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Pretty Girls of China Index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

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Some of the new “stuff” and developments that the Chinese are working on from a technology and gadget perspective.

China has been exploding with all sorts of new things, products and innovations. Most of which has yet to catch on in the West. There are many reasons for that, but the biggest one is regulation. People who possess new things; new products; new ideas, must get permission to use them. And in the West (especially inside America) this takes time.

For instance, in the 1990’s I was the Principal Engineer for a company that was leading the world in LED technology for automobiles. We were working on tail-lights, head-lights, and courtesy lights. We were pretty cutting edge for the time. And our products were great, and worked well.

The thing was that they could not be used in cars or trucks because the regulations that existed defined the characteristics of the lighting mechanism itself – an incandescent bulb, and not the end result; the ability to have a lighted area at a specific distance.

So in order to put our new, cheap and reliable system on the market we need to get around this “roadblock”. We had to petition to change the regulations to accept results-based measurement criteria as opposed to design-based measurement criteria. And when we started to do that, boy oh boy, did we “open up a can of worms”.

No one was happy.

It’s a long story and maybe I’ll get into it some other time. Anyways, LED technology did eventually enter the automobile market, and today it’s actually rare to see incandescent bulbs being used with the same kind of commonality that used to exist.

You must understand. Over the many years, the evil and corrupt, have corrupted business, technology and society and bent them to do THEIR bidding. And it was fine and well when no one noticed what was going on…

…and China has shown the way. Where big and small, everyone can live their lives and make, grow and innovate free of government interference’s. And while it is all possible that RAH! RAH! American exceptionalism will shine through…

…the fact is that it won’t.

Not until all those millions and millions of tiny little hands are out of your wallet. Sure, you can allocate 500 million dollars to a new hospital system. And you know what you will get? A bunch of reports “evaluating” the various studies on building the hospital system. You will not get a hospital.

All these little hands are put in place by decades of crime and corruption by the oligarchy. And they are not going away.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about this…

Yeah. You can buy a complete box of 20 for under $1 at the local store.

Crime and corruption has ruining America. And because the government has done absolutely nothing about it, it will not matter what pity saying the leadership says, what speeches that they make, what money they allocate. Because nothing will actually get done.

Look at this example…

Video HERE.

Innovation is really more than just a trivial interest of mine. My non-MAJestic career spanned four decades of R&D, NPD and new emerging technologies all across the board.

Not only was I dealing with what ever the fuck I was dealing with in MAJestic, but also I held my “day job” which was involved in R&D, and NPD.

And today…

America is clueless. Absolutely clueless.

Stuff that America hasn’t a clue about.

Stuff that when America innovates that it uses Chinese interns, and Chinese immigrants on visas to design, make and develop. They work inside an American company. And it is the American company that gets the credit. Not the Chinese engineers and scientists.

Look at the winners of the World Mathematics Competition; it’s America!

Woo! Woo! America is number one! Yee-Hawwww!

But look closely…

Here we are going to talk about some of the “cool” things in China now.

I can have thousands of videos as the Chinese are “out of control” in innovation, engineering and design. Some of which is silly, some of which is awkward, and some of which is just… hum. But I picked some of the more interesting technologies in this post. I hope that you enjoy them.

This is a video dense article. Please allow time for the videos to load. For the most part, they are worth it.

5G AI Flooring

Lighted floors with movies and animation isn’t new in China. They have been around for at least a decade now and are semi-common in movie theaters, malls and KTV venues. But the latest designs are really very cool as they have motion sensors in the floor panels and 5G AI responses. The result is really interesting. As in this video…

Video can be accessed HERE.

As you move, the tiles light up and react to you.

I can see some great applications on dance floors and other venues of a similar nature.

Interesting applications for the tiles

Actually, these panels are really cool. They can sense a person on them, and near them as well as what you are doing. And as such they react appropriately. LOL!

Each panel has it’s own little micro-computer. And can work independently or as part of a cluster of times.

Video HERE.

Wall based AI

And, of course, what can go on the floor can also go on the wall. As this video clearly shows. Again, kind of nice. But the applications can be astounding. Think of advertising boards where you can touch the advertisement and interact it in language (any) or where it could link up with your cell phone.

Video HERE.

Drone jellyfish

Here’s a new type of drone. It’s based on jellyfish, and uses a bladder filled with a lighter than air gas…

Video HERE.

I can see cluster of jellyfish drones are working together in a swarm…

…silently, quietly and stealthily. All performing non-invasive tasks where no one takes notice.

Debit Card Technology

One way foreigners will use #CBDC in China during the 2022 Olympics will be with a CBDC card and automatic exchange machine!

Banks are going all-in on CBDC as it represents their return from payment irrelevance and are showing their latest tech at the China Digital Summit. 

Bank of China just revealed an automated exchange machine that looks like it will see use at the 2022 Olympics. 

“Overseas nationals with valid passports can put foreign banknotes into the machine, which will issue a physical e-CNY card based on the exchange rate. The card looks similar to the card-based digital yuan hardware wallet that was seen back in January.” 

“The prototype of the e-CNY card for foreigners also has a small screen that shows the available balance of the hardware wallet and can be used in shops that have an e-CNY payment terminal.” 

The same machine will also likely take foreign ATM cards according to patent filings I saw months back. 

I'm certain a bank sponsored e-CNY app will also be available for the Olympics as foreign cards are now accepted for tourists on #Alipay and #WeChat Pay. 

Fun to see the new developments! 

-The Block Crypto

In China, the debit cards show just how much money that you have in the account in real time…

Video HERE.

Add and delete money easily with no fees

And here’s another video showing how you can add or delete money to the account. Note that there are no fees to do this like in the USA. In fact, everything is fee-free and so easy and instantaneous.

Video HERE.

Recharging remotely

Of course, in China everyone uses electronic payments and banking. So it makes sense for you to recharge the card as necessary from your cell phone.

Video HERE.

Not that having a card is necessary. Most people no longer carry cards. They just carry their cell phone and that is it. But having a card is really handy for other purposes, like to give a gift to children, or to allocate a budget for the purchase of a particular item.

Next year most Westerners will experience this card during the Olympics.

Huawei Ring Innovation

”The U.S. embassy in Denmark threatening to cancel its subscription with a local newspaper if it used Chinese telecommunications equipment is an example of "coercive diplomacy," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Friday.”

“The Danish newspaper Politiken revealed on April 25 that it received an email from the U.S. diplomatic mission in the country asking it to verify whether it uses electronic devices, including routers, modems, and electronic communications equipment, from five Chinese companies, namely Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision and Dahua and their subsidiaries and affiliates.” CGTN on Twitter.

-LinkedIN

Speaking of cell phones. Here’s a ring that you can use to control your cell phone with. Apparently it is an option on all the new Huawei phones.

Video HERE.

Huawei Automobile Innovation

Speaking of Huawei. You know Huawei hasn’t stopped with cell phones either. They have developed all sorts of really cool things for the automobiles. Not American automobiles, of course. For the Chinese automobiles. Like this…

Video HERE.

Granted many of the technologies are cool, but I don’t know how practical. Like this trunk opener. Maybe it’s all “Gee Wiz”, but do you really need it?

Video HERE.

Electronic window tinting

However, this next bit of technology is really cool. It’s self-tinting windows. Now available on Chinese cars. But, of course, it will takes years to be approved in America as you would have to run the SAE gauntlet as the various state agencies that regulate the innovation adaptation in automobiles. But in the rest of the world, it’s really cool.

Video HERE.

Swarm Drone Technology

Drones are “old news”. But what people don’t realize is that they are a Chinese technology with most of the commercial drones being made in China. And they are constantly innovating. The swarm drone technology is pretty much mature, and China has been using this for at least five years that I know of. What is really interesting is that the drones can create three dimensional images that your cellphone can scan in real time and link up with on the internet.

Video HERE.

Goopy Shit

Here’s some sticky goop for rodent, and crowd control. I’d hate to have to clean it up afterwards!

The direct video can be accessed HERE.

Fraken-camera

Here’s a Fraken-camera. It’s cool, and for a photography buff would probably be the “cat’s meow”, but gosh almighty it does seem like over kill, doesn’t it?

The video can be found HERE if it fails to load.

But you never see this in the American Media…

You NEVER read about Chinese innovation. So you assume that because you don’t see anything that China just is unable to innovate.

And with all the anti-China propaganda, this is what most American believe. Such as these quotes…

China doesn't innovate (central planning is incapable of innovation because creation/innovation requires market competitiveness and front-line payout/incentive).But central planning-based countries can cheat and steal. And that is what China does. 

-6 posted on 7/28/2019, 10:44:53 AM by RoosterRedux
Another sheeple on Free Republic chimes in…
Innovative my ass. Have yet to see anything innovative from the Chinese that they didn’t steal from us. That’s why they won’t fold to Trumps trade war. They know they would be screwed without their thievery.

-14 posted on 7/28/2019, 11:19:28 AM by Bommer

This is what Americans and the Western allied block think about China, but it is actually not true at all.

China can and does innovate. China has been the leader in innovation for a decade already. In fact, many people gloss over all the “tell tales” of innovation such as China lock on all the 5G patents, and it’s command of the patents on Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and manufacturing.

China today, is the leader in innovation.

You do not hear about innovation.

Instead all you hear about is how dangerous and evil China is.

And you know that this statement is true. The American media would rather die than say anything good about China. But what do you expect? America is a Military Empire, and it demands absolute servitude.

This too is very true.

In fact, this was so very obvious when you watched the absolutely arrogant Biden Administration layout it’s terms to a stunned Chinese audience in Alaska in April 2021.

Perhaps some clarity is needed WHY the American military Empire is so pissed that the Chinese isn’t backing down, and instead standing up to the Arrogant American bullies.

China knows what is at stake. It’s a merit-driven leadership that has read history, and know what to expect from America. So they have readied themselves against the huge dragon the snarls, spits fire, and eats up others in it’s never-ending appetite for gold, oil and riches.

China has prepared.

And America does not like it.

Not one bit.

I love this video. I posted it on another post, as this is a military unit stationed in XinJiang. But it’s an absolutely awesome video. And worth a look. China does not play.

I mean it.

China will use every method at their disposal to stop, and destroy radical CIA-backed terrorists from doing damage, and then they will go after their sources of funding, their training and their “safe” and “distant” handlers. As China grows, so does it’s muscle. If Turkey is involved, or if the United States is involved, you will see China establish covert and secretive units to take out the instigation elements (read: key people) in their homes in far away safe suburbs. It’s a new world.

Perhaps that is why America is starting to “shake in it’s boots”.

Let's see how safe AR Senator Tom Cotton, Neocon feels in his rural home in the mountains of Arkansas, or John Bolton, or Mike Pompeo. They might no longer be holding office, but they are still "pulling the strings and levers of power". China will put a complete end to all of this nonsense.

And it's war. Right?

This is what all these neocon jackasses have been saying. Read all their writings. Go ahead read the White House report when Trump left office, read the "Long Telegraph". They want to kill and remove the Chinese national leadership and replace them with Vichy people who will be puppets for their American global objectives. Of course China knows what the fuck is going on.

And it's fair game, eh?

You want to attack China. Well, it will fight back. With real, real claws. They have no fucking idea what kind of a "hornet's nest" they are kicking off the tree.

Watch the video.

This very cool video can be obtained directly HERE.

This is just a small picture of the vast array of defensive military that China has amassed to prevent any idiotic American dreams of another Syria, Yemen, or Iraq invasion for “democracy“, and to “rescue the Uighur’s“.

This entire video was filmed inside of Xinjiang.

Keep in mind that not only is the military presence large, but they are well-trained, run by merit, and utilize well maintained, state of the art equipment.

The idea that American troops can go into Xinjiang and “rescue the imprisoned Muslims from the concentration camps” is never going to happen.

Video can be obtained directly HERE.

But that’s exactly why the American propaganda machine is in full gear right now. To make it seem that China is one thing, that it really isn’t.

And we can see this is the comments on American Neocon websites…

“The PLA’s great weaknesses:”
I think you can add:

- Their recruitment pool has been halved by a government imposed one child policy that was maintained years after being understood as destructive by a government that can never admit mistakes.

- Their economy relying on resources (especially oil) that must be imported by sea along sea lanes that cross territory closer to and controlled by their enemies.

- Their economy relying on export markets made up of their major potential enemies.

- Their work force demographics currently transitioning from having a vast majority of highly experienced workers (those in the 45 - 65 age group) to having that group being retired.

-39 posted on 5/1/2021, 5:15:53 PM by conejo99
Obviously the commenters have never been to China, know nothing of China and repeat the neocon narratives as if they are factual.
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And, you know, that’s why they are called  “sheeple”.  They have strong emotions about something that they have never experienced first-hand. Only from what they read. And so they respond out of extreme ignorance like this…
The PLA’s great weaknesses:

- They have no institutional knowledge on how to maintain force cohesion under fire that is HITTING.

- They cannot prevent strikes by a modern military against their homeland.

- Many of their new weapons systems are cartoon images of the real thing. (their stealth does not work)

- Their logistical infrastructure for manufacturing these new weapons is hopelessly corrupt.

- They STILL cannot manufacture a decent jet engine in numbers.

- You can hear their submarines leaving Hainan Island from Pearl Harbor.

How crushing it will be to them when they are handed their ass.

13 posted on 5/1/2021, 8:30:22 AM by Mariner
It used to be an operational assumption that the rigid, doctrinaire command structure of conscript Warsaw Pact and Chicom forces would result in disarray when key leaders were lost on the battlefield, and by contrast, US forces consisted of individual soldiers ready to step up and take initiative and assume leadership roles when situations demanded. From what I read and hear, I'm not sure those distinctions are as clear as they once were. 

-23 posted on 5/1/2021, 9:44:11 AM by Joe 6-pack
I have been reading these China is going to collapse anytime now stories for 20 years. They have only gotten more powerful.

- 31 posted on 5/1/2021, 10:24:34 AM by setter
They can't do logistics - they have never had to move lots of men and material under pressure. Something the US military is VERY good at (sometimes to our detriment). 

-32 posted on 5/1/2021, 10:25:42 AM by Psalm 73
I have to laugh at this one. “China cannot do logistics“.
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It is always the same garbage narrative. China is an evil authoritarian regime and the people are huddled ignorant masses and they need rescuing from their evil overlords. Yada. Yada. Yada.
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The Civil Police publicly beat and incarcerate people daily, and sometimes torture and kill - its no secret except from the West. Filming is rare because of the plainclothes cops are everywhere and will stop and destroy the camera/phone - as are the ubiquitous State cameras watching for people filming.

-42 posted on 5/1/2021, 7:56:47 PM by PIF
Again, the illusions that these people have are comically insane.
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The only people on the forum that doesn’t agree with the neocon narrative are people who have actually been to China, or to Asia. And they say some sane things, but they are obviously in the minority.
.
No China did not ‘lie about’ their Covid totals, at least for the most case.

I am in Vietnam now. Some similarities between China, and Vietnam. And some BIG differences as well (like I don’t see Vietnam as a threat to America)

There have been a grand total of 35 deaths due to Covid.

Really.

Thirty five.

-48 posted on 5/1/2021, 11:15:04 PM by cba123

They are lone voices, often drowned out by the loud and the ignorant.

China does innovate. There are many technical devices that are made there that are not made here. Hell, you can't even find decent documentation for devices I use because no American companies neither design or make this stuff.

And of course there are some good comments.

America is the place where innovation is dying. How can we expect to produce engineers if there aren't jobs for them here?

26 posted on 7/28/2019, 10:17:45 PM by GingisK

He also responds to one of the sheeple’s comments…

..Have yet to see anything innovative from the Chinese that they didn’t steal from us...

Try to find something like an ESP32 that was made here first. Try to find a Bluetooth Low Energy transceiver on an XBee carrier that was made here first.

Those devices were both made in China. The ICs are made in the USA; however, there seems to be nobody here who will innovate products from them. Crap, people here can't get beyond Arduinos using peripherals that are created in China.

Few people understand how deep the damage to American innovation and engineering goes.

28 posted on 7/28/2019, 10:26:39 PM by GingisK

And this particular post addresses all the “Gung Ho” Sheeple that live off the illusion that the American media propaganda is correct…

... Few people understand how deep the damage to American innovation and engineering goes...
 
That's why I get so annoyed with the "Puff the Magic Tariff" brigades here on FR. Tariffs can work tactically if you have industries left to protect, otherwise they equate to putting expensive doors on an empty barn....while your horses are already grazing in the next county. A massive reduction in the Cost of Liberalism is the most important task to focus on.

30 posted on 7/29/2019, 4:45:36 AM by Mr. Jeeves

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A great rant from a Chinese expat in America who says “I want to talk about China”.

This is a wonderful rant by a girl currently in the United States. She is absolutely “fed up” with the anti-China news, attitude, and general opinions of American regarding China. And she want’s it all to end. She is shouting loud and clear “Shut Up!”

The Chinese people are getting fed up with the lies that come out of the American, and Western “news”. They are tired of it. They are starting to get angry about it. And it must stop.

I've got a bunch of small and short embedded videos in this article. You really need to watch them to get the full impact of this article. -MM

Again, here is a dialog rant by a Chinese-America who lives inside of America, but well knows the reality of her home nation; China. And so, being sick and tired of the endless lies, and bullshit from the American “news”, she lashes out…

I Want To Talk About China

China is nothing like the fake version that exists only in imagination, that is painted in the media and absorbed into the minds of the people who gape at me when I tell them, "You know, life in China wasn't really all that different."

By Lily Chang

“Where are you from?”

“China,” my mom says, with audible pride.

“Oh,” said the lady at the thrift store, her eyebrows disappearing into her thick brown hair. “Was it scary over there? Were you not allowed to say things or use the internet?”

“China is a repressive dictatorship where the government exercises total control over people’s lives. The citizens have very few human rights compared to in the US.”

“That’s not true,” my sister blurts out. “I lived there and it wasn’t like that at all.”

“Don’t talk out of turn,” said her fourth grade teacher.

“You know, life in China wasn’t really all that different,” I say.

I watch the shock in my friends’ eyes. Feeling awkward, I continue on.

“I went to school in the morning and came home at night. I had a lot of homework. On the weekend, I would go out with my friends, and we would go to the park, or go window shopping, and gossip about our teachers and classmates.”

They gape at me, and I change the subject.

I want to talk about China.

I want to talk about my country and the many years I lived there, the laughter and the tears and everything in between. I want to share the experiences that shaped me and the people that changed me and the places where it happened.

But I can’t.

I cannot because the China in their eyes, in their minds, is not the China I come from, where I lived for most of my life.

It’s a sick, distorted version.

It is like what you see through a funhouse mirror, except there’s no fun in this house, only propaganda and racism and lies.

From those materials they built this diabolical interpretation of China that exists only in fantasy, and put me in it like a doll in a dollhouse.

And thus I was expected to play my part…

…as (some kind of) liberated victim of horrific oppression, grateful for my salvation, for my new life in the “enlightened” west.

I refused.

I’m going off script.

We, the Chinese people, are spoken of like birds in locked cages…

(Being) afraid to sing, the keys held by a brutal totalitarian government that cares nothing for our welfare.

We are huddled together, suffering, waiting for civilized countries to swoop in and rescue us…

To rescue us from our awful plights, to unlock our cages and heal our wounds and set us free.

We are dehumanized, reduced to objects of pity and victims in need of deliverance.

And thus they cry, “I love the Chinese people! I only hate the Chinese government!”

But they cannot love us, because to them, we are NOT human.

We are things.

The citizens are not humans, but caged birds desperate for a fairy tale hero to save them.

The government and those who compose it, are not humans, but blood-sucking demons.

Yes. demons. Demons who are bent on surveilling, controlling, destroying the citizens for their own gain.

But all this is just a fantasy; a lie. It’s a make-believe world that doesn’t exist, and one that never existed.

The people of China are not caged birds, and the government of China is not a group of cartoonishly evil demons.

But, this is the China they built in their minds, that they project onto me when I stand in front of them with my yellow skin, black hair, brown eyes.

And I want to tell them, that’s not the real China.

The real China is neither a paradise, but nor is it a hell.

The people of China are not helpless caged birds, but human beings.

Human beings with hopes and dreams and interests and opinions and stories. And yes, human rights.

We can travel, and many do.

More than 100 million Chinese go abroad every year, for school, work, tourism, and other reasons.

We can practice religion.

Religion is not allowed to influence politics.

And it is especially not allowed to promote separatism, terrorism, or other types of extremist thought.

We can criticize the government.

We can even hold protests. 

But we cannot humiliate or slander our leaders, we cannot spread lies, and again, we cannot promote separatism or incite mass unrest. 

Maybe that seems like a lot of conditions. 

But swearing at our leaders isn't productive engagement. It doesn't lead to problems being fixed.

We can vote.

There are elections in China, but not for the president. 

The people directly elect district representatives to the People's Congress, who then elect representatives at the city and province level. 

These representatives, just like Congresspeople in the US, are responsible for expressing their constituents' suggestions and grievances. 

They provide oversight for politicians. And if they don't do their job, they can be fired via petition from the people.

All citizens of China are entitled to these rights. All fifty-six ethnicities.

The people of China are not caged birds, and the government of China is not a group of cartoonishly evil demons.

In fact, China enjoys high levels of support among the people – not because there are no other options, as often claimed, and not because we are brainwashed. To say so takes away our agency, puts us back in the cage. We are supportive because the government serves the people.

Because…

…they lifted 850 million people out of absolute poverty in 40 years (100 million just since 2013),

…built them free homes,

…provided them with jobs and healthcare and education.

(The government) invested into infrastructure to ensure people in the most distant areas can live a better and more convenient life.

(And they) traversed deep into dangerous mountains to find those in need of help.

Chinese people respect their government…

…because they made enormous financial sacrifices made to combat the COVID-19 pandemic…

… from the initial lock-down of Wuhan…

… to implementing the massive contact tracing infrastructure, to free treatment for all patients.

They built hospitals in ten days, then mobilized of doctors and medical equipment from all over the country to the center of the epidemic.

It’s been stunning.

Increased life expectancy.

Increased quality of life.

Unparalleled safety.

Absolute happiness.

That is what the Chinese government does for the people.

That is not to say things are perfect.

Corruption exists.

Incompetence exists.

Dissatisfaction with the government exists. And the people express it. They make their voices heard.

The government is constantly monitoring public opinion on social media. Vocal criticism, of which there is much, is noted and taken into account.

Government agencies have open comment boards online where people can leave complaints.

Responses are then published online.

      • Unpopular policies get changed.
      • Unpopular politicians get replaced.

Whether you believe this is because they want the best for the people, or because they’re afraid of being violently overthrown by angry mobs, the result is the same.

They want to know what’s working and what’s not working. The needs and desires of the population are heard.

In the end, the Chinese people and the Chinese government are one, and cannot be separated.

Together, they are not oppressors and the oppressed, or even the rulers and the ruled, but two sides of the same coin, working together for a better China and better lives for all her citizens.

China is like a “bee hive”…

And America and the rest of the West, govern like “herding kittens”. The only solution is to divide up everyone so that everyone is fighting and the wealthy get wealthier…

China is not a paradise.

There are problems and unhappy people and bad decisions and things that fall through the cracks.

But it’s nothing like “that” China; The fake version of China that exists only in imagination, that is painted in the media and absorbed into the minds of the people who gape at me when I tell them…

… “You know, life in China wasn’t really all that different.”

And no one believes.

Because everyone is living within this fake world image that does not exist.

I want to talk to them about China, but I can’t.

Not until they tear down that twisted caricature in their minds; that fake world that they have been taught to believe.

Not until they see China for how she really is, good and bad.

I don’t wish for everyone to love China, or worship China. I want them to know China, understand China. The real China.

And when they do, then we can work together, learn from each other. Become better. That is what I hope to see.

Conclusion

It’s a great impassioned rant. And the thing is, that it could be written by just about any of the 120 million Chinese people who visit the the United States and return back to China. To put this number in perspective…

Population figures;

Some perspectives on WHY this is going on…

…it’s to create an evil villain. One that the people can point their fingers at and say [1] It’s another Nazi Germany!, and [2] We must do something to free the poor people! It tends to unite people against a common cause so they don’t get their torches, and pitchforks on the way to lynch the assholes in Washington DC.

It’s called “atrocity propaganda”…

Atrocity propaganda
Atrocity propaganda is the spreading of information about the crimes committed by an enemy, which can be factual, but often includes or features deliberate fabrications or exaggerations. This can involve photographs, videos, illustrations, interviews, and other forms of information presentation or reporting.

And… it continues…

And…

Why this demonization is going on; it’s because the USA must be the biggest, largest and most powerful nation in the world. If it isn’t, then all of it’s faults, it’s history of evil deeds, and the massive flaws within it’s system, and the economic crimes will come to light… to an angry world that is just now waking up to the reality of what the Hell the United States has been doing for much of the last century….

Indeed, for certain…

A time has come…

But that is not what is happening,

What is happening.

The United States is a terribly corrupt and flailing military empire and it is sinking, going down the drain in so many ways that everyone can watch and understand what is going on. The only people that do not understand this fact are those who are so absolutely blinded by the American propaganda of “exceptional greatness”, and intentional censorship of the reality outside of America.

We call them “sheeple”.

They are people that are emotionally entangled about things that they have NEVER physical experienced first hand. Only by what they read or watched on the internet.

Comedians joke about it, but it is a real problem.

And here…

The Bottom Line

As the United States collapses there are a host of options available to prevent the collapse.

America could…

  • Convene an emergency Constitutional Convention.  And though it, seriously reorganize the government to be more efficient and more focused on serving the needs of the people.
  • Redirect spending. Control the terrible fiscal irresponsibility. And set up policing organizations for fraud and waste.
  • Work on Win-win solutions. Work with other nations to improve positive international relations on the basis of a win-win philosophy.
  • Shut down the Military Empire. Seriously reduce the global military empire and redirect it’s task to domestic needs.

But that is not what it is doing. Instead it is picking fights with both Russia and China. In both cases trying to provoke an “incident” so that America has an excuse to unify America against a common enemy. It doesn’t matter who, at this point in time, and stage in the game. It just needs some kind of big, fierce enemy.

Note what is actually happening…

  • The Military Empire is expanding.
  • Provocative actions are proceeding and it’s only a matter of time when one will trigger a serious war.
  • The debt is getting larger, not smaller.
  • And an enormous budget (by Biden) to correct infrastructure problems has been proposed with zero changes to the already corrupted and inefficient system that is supposed to support it.
  • America is trying to provoke military engagements.

This cannot end well.

Metalicman’s Interview

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A comparison of news articles from America and China

I have a premise that you can gauge the relative health of a nation by looking at what it is being promoted as “news” day in, and day out. While there are elements of information, promotion, propaganda, and scandal, over all by comparing the two sources you can get a general idea of the “social climate” in each individual nation. And from this, you can gauge it’s overall health and the direction of the society.

America

Here’s the “news” from Drudge on 29APR21…

Any articles about China are highlighted in Red.

China

Here’s the news from CGTN on 29APR21…

Chinese articles about America are shown in blue.

Comparisons

There are many comparisons that one can make.

For starters, in the articles about the “other” nation, it is very interesting.

  • American “news” warns about the bad things about China.
  • Chinese news reports on the given situations inside of America.

Most of the other news discusses the events that “buy papers”, or in other words, that are of interest to the readership.

Today, a huge segment of media has been taken over by video. While article about certain subjects continue to sell, a huge percentage of media rely on videos to get their messages across. In fact, all “news” organizations have video elements as part of their articles.

I’d post some from America, but almost all of the videos come from organizations that are banned in China because they are associated with American “alphabet” agencies.

Here’s some from China…

Videos.

In regards to videos, China is all about the latest technologies, the new space station and well, you get the idea…

This is very cool. 5G, AI controlled location and positioning overlay upon the arm…

Here, we have the new space station…

Here’s a pretty girl. She has this “fish shape” that is considered to be very beautiful within China.

Here’s another gal. This is another girl that is selling her light and easy pants. I like her. She has good appeal.

Of course the news about what is going on in India with the COVID-19 and the new “India Strain” is heartbreaking. Judging from the pictures it seems to be almost as bad as the “B” strain that was unleashed on China on CNY 2020. I wonder why you aren’t seeing these images in America?

And here’s one thing that you see pretty irregularly. It’s applications of technology that are in use. In this case we see a guy using a hand sensor to map out an old village that is being torn down for new homes.

And finally a comparison of cities for fun.

Conclusions

If left alone, with no major “fire-hose of disinformation” drenching everyone with the propaganda of the day, Most media are the same. They concentrate on the things that interest their readership.

Obviously, the hate-China narrative from 2016 through 2020 had an impact.

Chinese readership want to know about technology, good things, and what’s going on in the world. More or less presented in a “neutral” fashion and manner. American readership seems to want (whether they want it or not) things that are alarming, salacious, interesting, fearful or worrisome.

America…

The “news” from America tend to fall into these kinds of categories…

Salacious
Scientists say space SEX will be challenging...

Worrisome
India virus surge breaks health system... Developing...

Fearful
Your tech devices want to read your brain. What could go wrong? 

Alarming
Virus Alters Genes, Explaining Mystery Behind 'Long Haulers'...

And China…

While the news content and the presentation of it are quite different…

Exciting
China launches core module of space station 

Happy
Infrared cameras recorded the growth of a family-of-3 snow leopards 

New Possibilities
Xi: No one would be left behind on the way to poverty alleviation 

Curiosities
Watch traditional Tibetan costumes in 30 seconds

I believe that these trends are indicative of the way that the people think. As well as how the entire society thinks.

Perhaps instead of thinking about controlling people to do this, or to do that via fear (the American way), maybe you should give them hope instead. Provide hope, provide help and throw in a dash of compassion.

Its the Chinese way.

And a direction, that I must add, that President Biden is attempting to do in his most recent speech. It’s a nice change of pace from what most Americans have seen or been exposed to.

Maybe there is some hope for Western society after all.

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Images of societal reset. Here’s some reminders that conflict and change is often ugly.

Please note that this article has a large number of videos. It is important for you to watch them to get the full impact of the message. None of the videos are longer than four minutes, but they might take some time to download depending on your service provider.

There’s a bunch of dunder-head idiots inside the United States that wants to get involved in a war. Whether it is with Russia, or Iran, or China. They want a war. And they are justifying war like they are some middle-school boys planning on a swing set in the playground. It’s dangerous, but it’s all there in black and white.

Right up front in our faces….

Rep Ted Yoho had a PR nightmare this week after reportedly calling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez some ungentlemanly terms. Though this is the controversy du jour, we should not lose sight that actual policy is more important than sound bites. Yoho recently announced plans to submit legislation this week for the “Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act” that would commit the United States to war against China if Beijing attacks Taiwan. Such a proposition has long been popular in the Beltway. Before tying the United States to Taipei’s fate, however, a closer analysis is warranted.

-Should the United States Go to War with China if Taiwan is Attacked?

But, you know, this time is really different. Oh, now. The “boys” won’t be a marching off to war. It will pretty much be “game over” for the Old US of A.

They don’t seem to understand just how meager and vulnerable the United States actually is.

The truth is that America is so weak and disorganized right now, that the slightest “event” could have everyone fighting each other like a scene out of a Hollywood movie.

And to make this point, just how absolutely RIPE America is ready for social upheaval and tearing other Americans apart, I have to show a clip from a movie. It’s one that most non-Americans are confused by. But here, now that you understand the real context behind the deeper meaning of the scene, you can well appreciate it.

America is ripe and ready for this

Exactly… THIS…

Sorry that the quality is on the poor side. But the point is there. Listen to it, and embrace it.

American against American. Black against white. Urban against rural. Rich against poor. Spanish against Anglos.

Notice how the wealthy oligarchy observes and knows what is going on, but they either [1] divert their eyes because they don't want to see, or [2] watch the events with glee. Others also watching look up it with horror, disgust, and a state of trying to monitor the situation reasonably. This piece of video art is a masterpiece.

And I'm not saying that solely because they use Lynyrd Skynyrd music as the backdrop.

I am not the only one saying this. It’s pretty much well-established inside of America today.

America is ripe for ignition.

The church fight scene in Kingsman: The Secret Service is hands down one of the most memorable action sequences in recent history. But there are actually layers to what makes it so great – layers beyond the primal gratification we collectively derive from seeing someone (rightfully) get the shit kicked out of them. 

-Bosshunting

People are angry. They’re angry about the Covid lockdowns. They’re angry because they are losing their jobs and can’t pay the rent and feed their families. They’re angry because the stores are all out of the food and supplies they need to survive.

They are angry because they get beaten up by the cops if they don’t keep a certain distance from each other in public. They’re angry at the politicians who pretend to be helping but in truth are making things worse with partisan, self-serving bullshit. And African-Americans are angry because they find themselves — yet again — in the crosshairs of deadly racism.

In short, Americans are as mad as hell.

America is on the verge of an explosion. I can feel its rumblings already. My guess is it’s already started happening in a small way, and within the next year or two it is going to spread like wildfire.

Right now, virtually the entire country is in a really bad mood, and unfortunately some people will choose to resort to violence.

And it can happen in places that you might not expect.  For instance, an argument over social distancing rules at a McDonald’s in Oklahoma resulted in three people getting shot

But as our world gets even crazier, more people than ever are going to be going off the deep end.

Our nation is so deeply divided, and explosions of anger and hatred are becoming increasingly common.  So many Americans are willing to “shoot first and ask questions later”, and the shooting of a 25-year-old African-American man in Georgia is causing a national uproar…

-End of the American Dream

Rage

Take this…

People are screaming at each other a lot these days. The most recent example is a viral video, seen by millions of people since last week, of a woman who went ballistic because a service dog was sitting near her in a Delaware restaurant.

The dog in question belonged to a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder. But that didn't stop the woman from unleashing a three-minute, profanity-laced tirade. I'm sure all the diners at Kathy's Crab House lost their appetite that evening.

"It is disgusting to have an animal in a public restaurant ... I think it's gross!" the woman screams. (This is a family-friendly publication, so I can't print much more of what she said.)

It seems everybody is furious today. We've created a culture of outrage. People are offended, and if you aren't offended by what offends them, they are offended by your lack of offense.

We are addicts. We crave a daily fix of rage. We rant on Facebook and Twitter because we need a regular dose of vitriol to fuel our habit. Then we turn on a newscast to watch agitated political commentators throw more gasoline on the flames.

The rage burns on both sides of our political divide. White supremacists march with tiki torches to spread hate. Black Lives Matter activists loot stores and smash windows. Former NFL fans burn football jerseys on barbecue grills. Campus lectures require police protection because leftists have threatened right-wing speakers. Madonna drops expletives and threatens to blow up the White House because she's so mad President Trump won the election.

Is there anything we don't get angry about these days? Depending on which side of an issue Americans stand, we are offended by Starbucks coffee, Chick-fil-A sandwiches, Target restrooms, CNN, Fox, Nike shoes, the real cause of hurricanes or whatever the actress Jennifer Lawrence said yesterday.

Our rage has become so absurd that a shopper at a Hobby Lobby craft store was offended by cotton stalks (yes, cotton stalks!) in the fall décor aisle. She took her protest online and demanded that the store stop selling dried cotton bouquets for $12.99 because slaves were used in the 1800s to harvest the plants.

Honestly, it makes me wonder if the real cause of global warming is the alarming increase in human anger. We're going to burn up this planet with our rage if we aren't careful.

- Is America About to Explode? 

Ok, to America isn’t just being led by psychopathic madmen with an IQ of a sixth grader, but that the American people are all worked up in a lather; in a frenzy. And the pressure is ON.

Now, couple this environment with the wealthy aristocratic and oligarchy inside the Washington Beltway that want to start a war with China. You know for “democracy”, and “freedom”!…

Back to China

But back to the subject at hand…

… if the fucking morons in Washington DC really want to engage in a Hot War with China…

… they will be doing it with Russia as well.

As they both; Russia and China, share self-defense interests.

But forget about Russia.  (For now.)

Here’s how a neocon journal characterizes going to a hot war with china. Here’s one of the precious few “con” points of view. As most view points are “we can fight the world and win! Rah! Rah!” So I was greatly relieved to read this contrary article from the K-street in Washington DC.

Well…

…sort of at least.

There would likely be no dispute from any American that we affirm and endorse the prospect that the people of Taiwan ought to be free, deserve to determine their own form of government, and above all to decide whether it is in their interests to unify with China. But what price should America be asked to pay to underwrite the freedom aspirations of another country?

Any conflict against China over Taiwan would result in American service men and women being killed, likely in large numbers. China’s military has been built over the past two decades specifically to deter the U.S. from attacking them–via anti-access, area denial (A2/AD)–but if deterrence fails, to build a defense force that would be able to sink our shipsknock out our satellites, and shoot down our fighters from great distances; if it ever came to a ground war, they have more than 375 million military-aged males from which to draw for their Army.

And keep in mind that the TOTAL population of the USA is less than that. That’s right. There are more Chinese military males than Americans in total.

United States Population (2021) - Worldometer
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population

The current population of the United States of America is 332,526,757 as of Thursday, April 15, 2021, based on Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data. the United States 2020 population is estimated at 331,002,651 people at mid year according to UN data.

And they are not some idiotic, uneducated simpletons either. They are not “cannon fodder”.

But even he “get’s it” and understands the risks. Well, some of them at least…

Though Yoho was initially hailed as a more libertarian member of Congress, and even introduced a resolution in 2015 that would have reined in the president’s warmaking powers, the proposal to use U.S. troops for Taiwan’s defense is not characteristic of outside-the-box thinking championed by political renegades, but instead comes from the worst pages of the establishment’s playbook. 

Instead, the best way for America to help Taiwan would be to enable them to build an A2/AD defensive bubble of their own to deter China. 

But we must ensure our security first and foremost. Committing ourselves to a war against China for the benefit of another government would be a tremendous mistake because the cost to us could be a lost war, or a victory so expensive it bankrupts us and puts our own security in peril.

However you look at it, extending security guarantees to Taiwan is not in America’s interests.

-Daniel L. Davis

But he really doesn’t fully understand the risks. In his mind, and you read it for yourself, he has identified two possible outcomes of a war with China. Which are;

  • America could lose the war, and have to return home. (Vietnam, Afghanistan)
  • A victory so expensive it bankrupts the nation.

To which I must posit the most OBVIOUS outcome that for some reason the fucking idiots on K-street in Washington DC are somehow missing…

That World War III could erupt, all cities in America are destroyed, and the rest of the work sacks what remains, and America becomes a footnote in the history books. While a united-Asia administers a radioactive North America as a “backwater: for slave labor.

Here’s some video clips from various history/war movies. Let them serve as a reminder that any conflict with China, Russia, Iran or any combination will be up-front, personal, and on American soil.

Sierra Leon

This is about Sierra Leon. Rich oligarchy in the UK used the people of Sierra Leon to create a war of distraction so that they could mine diamonds. Here we see the one faction, the “rebels” enter a town and create havoc.

Sierra Leon War
Shooting an RPG during the Sierra Leon civil war.

Do not be under the impression that this cannot happen inside of America. America is terribly balkanized, and this is EXACTLY what the oligarchy needs to further their plans.

In Blood Diamond, the sinner ripe for enlightenment is Danny Archer (DiCaprio), a native of Zimbabwe who makes a point of referring to the country by its old colonial name, Rhodesia. A former Angolan mercenary, Danny now (the film is set in the late nineties) smuggles Sierra Leone diamonds into Liberia in return for guns and rocket-launchers, which go to the rebel army (the RUF)—the army we’ve seen mowing down women and children, training young boys to be rapists and mass murderers, and conscripting hardier men to work in the diamond fields. 

-NYMag

From Britannica..

Civil war

The difficulties in the country were compounded in March 1991 when conflict in neighbouring Liberia spilled over the border into Sierra Leone. Momoh responded by deploying troops to the border region to repel the incursion of Liberian rebels known as the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), led by Charles Taylor. Sierra Leone’s army came under attack not only from the NPFL but also from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), led by former Sierra Leone army corporal Foday Sankoh, who was collaborating with the Liberian rebels; this was the beginning of what would be a long and brutal civil war.

In April 1992 Momoh was deposed in a coup led by Capt. Valentine E.M. Strasser, who cited the poor conditions endured by the troops engaged in fighting the rebels as one of the reasons for ousting Momoh. A National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) was established with Strasser as the head of state. During Strasser’s administration the civil war escalated, with the RUF increasing the amount of territory under its control, including lucrative diamond mines—the source of the “blood” or “conflict” diamonds used to fund its activities. There were disturbing reports of atrocities committed against the civilian population not only by rebel forces but also by some government troops. Civilians were subject to horrific acts of mutilation, including having their limbs, ears, and lips cut off. Incidents of rape and forced labour were widespread, and many civilians were used as unwilling human shields or held in captivity and subjected to repeated acts of sexual violence by the combatants. Forced conscription was pervasive and made many civilians, including children, unwilling participants in the conflict.

And here’s the most important statement;

 Still, in the years after the war, Sierra Leone was consistently rated as one of the world’s poorest countries.

Any civil war in America will not be one that can be easily mended. A war will have long-term damage to what America is, and the fantasies that it stands upon.

Foreign oligarchs use people.
Wealthy oligarchs treat the world as their property and use people and citizens as pawns to do their bidding.

And make no mistake, a Civil War is result during any global internal war. this time, the nation will not be unified against a common enemy. It will remain balkanized where every “man for himself” will carve out their existence.

Of course, the scene is not from Blood Diamond, but it could be. The situation in Sierra Leon was very awful.

As I watched the senseless brutality, the shooting of mothers and children as they fled, I was torn up, divided. I thought, Why do I need to see this? Then I thought, This happened in Sierra Leone and is still happening in parts of Africa—I need to see it. Then I thought, If I need to see it, I need to see more than a sneering villain with an eye patch. I need to understand how this man—and the people under him—become the monsters they are.

-NYMag
But enough of the fiction.
.
The Sierra Leone Civil War was an armed conflict in the West African country of Sierra Leone from 1991 t0 2002. The war began on March 23, 1991, when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) under Foday Sankoh, with support of Liberian rebel leader Charles Taylor and his group, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NFPL), attempted to overthrow the government of Sierra Leonean President Joseph Momah.

The Sierra Leone Civil War (1991-2002)

Or, anywhere in Africa or South America

The story line is identical. It’s just the climate, the societies, and the people that are different. Do you think that because America considers itself a First-Class nation that it is somehow immune to these kinds of conflicts?

Do you believe that this would NEVER happen in the United States, simply because the wealthy people in the Untied States are kind, caring, compassionate and religious?

This is what happens when the government of a country becomes big, bloated and terribly corrupt…

The situation was further complicated when Siaka Stevens, the third prime minister, took office in 1968. He served for 17 years and during his term, created a one-party political system which led to the further dismantling of public administrative offices and extreme levels of corruption. In 1985, the fourth prime minister, Joseph Momoh, proved to be one and the same. Under his watch, Sierra Leone suffered an absolute economic crisis. Public officials were left unpaid and, in retaliation, many looted and destroyed government property and offices. This included public school teachers which led to the complete collapse of the public educational system. By 1991, Sierra Leone was one of the most impoverished countries in the world, and its citizens were dissatisfied with their living conditions. 

-World Atlas

A very important review. Does it sound somewhat familiar; like it might actually happen in America…

In 1982, as Sierra Leone’s government and economy worsened, a group of Sierra Leone University, Fourah Bay College students set up a paramilitary organization.

They were led by their group leader Alie Kabbah.

They fled to eastern Sierra Leone to form a political organization to rebel against the Temne tribe's All People’s Congress (APC). This was the governing party of the time. 

Their organization became the RUF.

Its objectives were to [1] overthrow of the Sierra Leonean government, [2] oust corrupt officials, and [3] re-allocate Sierra Leone’s wealth to benefit the general population

And you do not think that it could happen in the United States?

RUF with pistol.
America is RIPE for war. But on in a far away land, but rather back on US soil, up front and personal.

Wealthy oligarchs have plans for America.

Meanwhile oligarchs (working behind the scenes) tried to recruit people to do their bidding.

In Sierra Leon, throughout the 1980s, neighboring Libyans infiltrated into Sierra Leone with the intention of recruiting rebels.

This was part of Libyan President, Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s Pan-African initiatives to recruit dissidents against western influence in Africa. He wanted to create a "new Africa" where American influences would be removed completely.

Now, while training in Libya, Foday Sankoh from Sierra Leone met Liberian warlord Charles Taylor. 

The two decided to form a pact, or an agreement. After establishing a relationship, Sankoh and Taylor agreed to support guerilla wars in their respective countries.

Both had hopes of overthrowing their country’s governments and creating political change. 

And so it started.

In 1989, the Civil War in Liberia began.

Under the leadership of Charles Taylor, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) launched a guerilla war against the Liberian government. This led to Liberia’s civil war. 

He won the war, and came to power.

Once Taylor was in power in Liberia, he supported Sankoh’s invasion and guerilla war in Sierra Leone. For after all, they were close buddies and shared the same vision and objectives.

Or maybe you don’t think that these kinds of political alignments cannot happen. Like the Antifa, or the BLM, or the Marxists, or the Far-Right.

Civil war broke out in Sierra Leon in 1990 under the command of former Sierra Leonean army corporal Foday Sankoh.

He launched his first attack in villages in Kailahun District in eastern Sierra Leone on March 23, 1991. 

This small band of men who called themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).

After that he began to attack villages in eastern Sierra Leone on the Liberian border. 

The government of Sierra Leone, overwhelmed by a crumbling economy and corruption, was unable to put up significant resistance. 

Within a month of entering Sierra Leone the RUF controlled much of the Eastern Province.

And so it begins…

Fighting continued in the ensuing months, with the RUF gaining control of the diamond mines in the Kono district.

Then, they were successful in pushing the Sierra Leone army back towards Freetown. 

On April 29, 1992, a group of young soldiers led by Capt. Valentine Strasser, apparently frustrated by the Sierra Leon government's failure to deal with rebels, launched a military coup.

This ended up sending President Momoh into exile in Guinea. 

They established the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) with Yahya Kanu as its chairman. 

But Kanu was assassinated by fellow NPRC members, who accused him of trying to negotiate with the toppled APC administration. 

And so after a period of bloodletting, on May 4, 1992,Captain Valentine Strasser took over as chairman of the NPRC.

As well as thend Head of State of Sierra Leone.

And did it change anything?

No.

The NPRC proved to be nearly as ineffectual as the Momoh government in repelling the RUF. 

More and more of the country fell to RUF fighters.

By 1995 the RUF held much of the countryside.

They were also near the major populated cities, and were on the doorstep of Freetown. 

To retrieve the situation, the NPRC hired several hundred mercenaries from the private firm Executive Outcomes. 

Within a month they had driven RUF fighters back to enclaves along Sierra Leone’s borders.

So now that the new “reformed” government was able to suppress the RUF rebels, is that the end of the story?

No.

In January 1996, after nearly four years in power, Strasser was ousted in a coup by fellow NPRC members.

This was led by his trusted deputy Maada Bio. 

The new(est) government took immediate actions to change the course of Sierra Leon.

As a result of popular demand and mounting international pressure, the NPRC agreed to hand over power to a civilian government. 

Bio reinstated the Constitution and called for presidential and parliamentary elections. A a "democracy" was reconstituted.

Elections were held in April 1996. 

In the second round of presidential elections in early 1996, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, candidate of the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) defeated John Karefa-Smart of the United National People's Party (UNPP). Kabbah was a diplomat who had worked at the UN for more than 20 years.

So an internationalist took power of the democratic Sierra Leon.

And eventually, after nearly a solid six years of bloody fighting, parliamentary elections were conducted.  And this time, under the system of proportional representation.

South Vietnam

Let’s look at Vietnam.

Ah, most MM readers won’t even remember the daily newscasts about the “proud American soldiers who died”.

But let’s not look at the American side of the involvement. Instead, let’s look at the actions of the American puppet government set up in South Vietnam…

Corruption played a signficant role in thwarting American objectives in Vietnam by contributing to the South Vietnam government’s lack of legitimacy. The heavy handed and corrupt government of South Vietnam actually made the countryside fertile for the insurgency of the Viet Cong and the communist. Successive governments left much to be desired and too readily turned a blind eye to corruption and incompetence.

An important cause for dissension among the ARVN soldiers was the widespread corruption and war profiteering that prevailed, not only among the civilian population but also among military officers. Corruption, of course, had long been common in South Vietnam. However, as infiation increased in the 1970’s and military pay failed to keep pace, corrupt practices drove wedges between the troops and their officers. Corruption had another adverse effect; it siphoned funds that could have been used to buy critically short supplies and ammunition. It has been estimated that as much as 25 percent of ARVN’s military payroll was in the name of dead or deserted soldiers who were kept on the roll so that corrupt officers could collect their salaries.

Historical photo of ARVN soldiers.
ARVN soldiers of South Vietnam.

The Republic of Vietnam, headed from 1954 to 1963 by Ngo Dinh Diem, was venal, reactionary, inefficient, and corrupt. Although Diem inherited a functional administration from the French, he failed to pursue judicial, economic, and administrative reforms, empower subordinates to exercise government authority, or create a system of oversight to curb corruption. Consequently, corruption abounded in all forms. In spite of Diem’s personal revulsion of corruption, the Ngo family was the biggest practitioner of nepotism. His close relatives filled the top ambassadorial, cabinet, and civil service posts.

In 1960, the Groupe Caravelliste, comprising 18 senior Vietnamese politicians, publicly condemned regime oppression and corruption in detail. Weeks later, a poorly planned military coup provided the regime withthe opportunity to crack down even more, including the imprisonment of the Groupe Caravelliste. At this point, Diem began to withdraw into himself, reducing his circle of confidants, and isolating himself even further from the public view. Nhu began to step up his persecution of “subversives,” as well as factionalizing the officer corps through corruption, extortion, and espionage.

The United States attempted to “fix” the incompetence, corruption, and oppression of the Diem administration by having him removed from office by a military coup. However, the problem remained. Like the Catholic Diem, who failed to connect with the predominantly Buddhist population, the military leaders who took control after the coup complicated matters by perpetuating corruption and failing to take the war to the Viet Cong insurgents.

The effectiveness of the gradually professionalizing South Vietnamese Army deteriorated rapidly as soldiers in the field lost confidence in their leaders and the government. In a matter of months, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost credibility with the population it was supposed to defend and with its American advisors.

Within the government of South Vietnam corruption, nepotism, extortion, and incompetence remained the norm afterwards with various leaders all the way through to President Thieu in the 1970s. A province chief might be removed here or there and replaced with a more competent and honest leader; however, the same problems would continue.

Near a jeep.
ARVN soldiers at rest.

The top leadership of the government and army remained as dependent as ever on the United States. The Saigon government remained a network of cliques, held together by American subsidies, a group of people without a coherent political orientation, bent on their own survival. Free-flowing aid lined the pockets of South Vietnamese generals and bureaucrats, deepening the corruption problem, not solving it.

Corruption was (and is) endemic throughout the developing world and even, at times, in much of the developed world. To have expected South Vietnam to be an exception was perhaps unrealistic. In fact, corruption was widespread in North Vietnam as well as in the South, giving lie to a common assumption that there was something morally pristine about the highly disciplined North. In fact, the problem of corruption had become so acute in the North that, in 1967, Ho Chi Minh himself felt compelled to go on the radio and inveigh against this troublesome plague.

More ARVN soldiers of South Vietnam.
More ARVN soldiers.

In the 1970s widespread corruption and war profiteering prevailed, not only among the civilian population but also among military officers. Corruption, of course, had long been common in South Vietnam. However, as infiation increased in the 1970’s and military pay failed to keep pace, corrupt practices drove wedges between the troops and their officers. For example, there were reports that the wounded had to pay helicopter pilots to fly medical evacuation missions.

President Thieu did make efforts to remove some of the more corrupt senior officials from office, but his actions proved to be a mere drop in the bucket. Corruption had another adverse effect; it siphoned funds that could have been used to buy critically short supplies and ammunition.

It has been estimated that as much as 25 percent of ARVN’s military payroll was in the name of dead or deserted soldiers who were kept on the roll so that corrupt officers could collect their salaries.

ARVN tank.
United States supplied tank used by the ARVN military in South Vietnam.

Syria

And of course, we could look at Syria.

Do you all think that it is any different? Aside from the new vehicles, the different weapons and drone systems, and the kinds of “news” reporting, do you actually think that somehow the United States is immune from all this boomeranging back?

All you need to so is read some history.

And China…

…well China has a long and horrible history of invasions and abuse. They KNOW what it is like to be hurt, destroyed and sacked. They know.

And if you all think that they are going to allow some pot-bellied neocon from the state of Kansas or Arkansas cheer on a war against them without consequence, then you are very, very, VERY mistaken.

China – Nanjing

Most Americans have absolutely no idea what the Chinese went through and why they are the way they are today.

A person who goes though a divorce is far more understanding of someone in the throes of marital troubles than say an unmarried 20-year old. And this is true about nations as well. Perhaps the American leadership would be very hesitant on poking Russia or China if they knew what it was like to see your beloved homeland reduced to rubble.

The Nanjing Massacre refers to the 40-day slaughter committed by the Japanese army in the early stages of their invasion of China, which cruelly claimed the lives of more than 300,000 civilians and captured soldiers. One third of the city was razed and property losses were beyond count.

Some believe that the Nanjing Massacre, along with Auschwitz Concentration Camp and bombing of Hiroshima (the first use of atomic weapons in combat) were the three greatest tragedies of WWII. Some refer to the massacre as the “Asian Auschwitz.” 

-ChinaToday

Nah…

It would never happen in America. You see, America is “exceptional“.

On December 13, 1937, after seizing Nanjing, the Japanese army carried out a bloody slaughter of unparalleled savagery in violation of international law. 

As stated in the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, "Estimates indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanjing and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000....

These figures do not take into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning, or by being thrown into the Yangtze River, or were otherwise disposed of by the Japanese Army." 

The Chinese Military Tribunal for War Crimes in Nanjing stated in a verdict that "during the period from December 12 to 21, 1937, it was estimated that more than 190,000 Chinese prisoners of war and civilians were shot with machine guns in large groups by the Japanese Army and their bodies were incinerated… 

In addition, more than 150,000 people were killed in small or scattered groups, and their bodies were collected and buried by charity organizations. Altogether, more than 300,000 people were murdered." 

After capturing the city, Japanese troops employed all kinds of brutal methods in their killing, such as decapitation, skull splitting, slicing open the stomach, pulling out the heart, drowning, burning, cutting off reproductive organs, dismemberment, and piercing the vulva or anus. 

Equally unthinkable, there was a killing contest between two second lieutenants, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, to see who could win by being the first to kill 100 Chinese. When they met on December 12, Mukai had killed 106 and Noda 105. 

John Rabe, Wilhelmina (Minnie) Vautrin, and John Magee recorded the incidents of rape carried out by Japanese soldiers after the fall of Nanjing in their diaries, photographs, and films. It is roughly estimated that more than 80,000 women were violated in Nanjing, of whom more than 65,000 were killed. 

The Japanese army also committed frenzied acts of arson and looting. According to incomplete statistics calculated after the war, Japanese soldiers looted 2,406 sets and more than 309,000 pieces of appliances or utensils, 5,920 boxes and more than 5.9 million articles of clothing, 710 kilograms of gold and silver, plus 6,345 pieces of jewelry, 1,815 boxes, 2,859 sets, and 148,600 volumes of books, more than 28,400 ancient calligraphy scrolls and paintings, more than 7,300 antiques, more than 6,200 animals bred as livestock, and more than 720 million kilograms of grain. 

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East and the Chinese Military Tribunal for War Crimes in Nanjing, after collecting a large amount of evidence and confirming all the findings, pronounced death sentences for the principal culprits of the massacre, Iwane Matsui, Akira Muto, and Tadayuki Furumi. 

The crimes of the Japanese aggressors will forever be recorded in the history of the Chinese war of resistance against Japan.

-CRI

Or Germany…

Germany

Let’s not forget what happens to “scapegoats” when they are targeted for their “privilege”…

And not just in Germany. all the rest of Europe had to deal with the actions of a handful of crazed fanatics in Germany…

Europe

I suppose that I could go on and on.

And you all would turn off my MM and go watch cute and funny kitty videos, check out the latest vehicles out of Detroit, or look up Tender Pot Roast Recipe.

But all that you are reading…right now… in real time sounds AWFULLY familiar. Throw away the details and the names. Look at what is going on. It sounds like the kind of nonsense out of Sierra Leon in the 1980’s, or the bullshit in Saigon in the 1960’s in South Vietnam. It sounds like the bullshit leading up to “the war on terror” in the Middle East, or the crap nonsense made by Hitler as he demonized the Jews, or the Japanese demonized the Chinese.

Yet somehow…

Somehow, America can have another war with China, or Russia, or Iran or all three, and you know that magically it will happen in far away lands that Americans never herd of before.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!

China wants to fight the USA? It’s a nation of leadership by merit. They are not a military Empire like the USA. They just want for Chinese people to live in China free of foreign (namely USA) interference.

This idea that China wants war is ludicrous. It’s just political posturing.

Political Posturing
When someone pretends to have a particular opinion or attitude. This is done so that they can achieve their objectives without discussing the real reasons behind them.

It’s clear as day that the people who are running this (supposedly) Progressive Liberal Democrat administration, are actually war-mongering neocons.

And since this is the case, let me be very clear on my position on these matters.

Anyone who is desirous of a war with Russia, a war with China, a war with Iran are FUCKING evil. What is wrong with these people?

If you don’t think this is really happening, then you probably need to rethink that:

StratCom just issued a warning to Americans that we might be nuked as a result of the Biden Regime escalating tensions with these two nuclear powers.

Yes, they are that crazy.

But is there anyone, anyone at all inside the Pentagon that is really aware of what the stakes are today? Well, read this great article by Pepe…

Yes, and the regular disclaimers abound. All credit to the author. Formatted to fit this venue, etc.

Why the Empire of Chaos is Paralyzed

Fasten your seat belts.

What you are about to read is part of an internal report by one of my top business/intel sources in the Beltway for the past decade and a half. Readers who received it include JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, Evelyn de Rothschild and wife Lynn, Blackrock’s Larry Fink, Michael Bloomberg – who would never hire me as a Bloomberg columnist… – Blackstone’s Stephen Schwartzman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and other assorted Masters of the Universe. I received a copy with all their addresses – which for obvious reasons I cannot make public.

This is a MAJOR bombshell – in the sense that the financial Masters of the Universe are now fully aware of sensitive intel not shared with non-military players. The question is what they’re gonna do about it.

The section of the reports starts HERE:

“While Rome burns which I use as an extended metaphor about the hundreds of US cities that burned last summer, and the US faces internal disintegration, the Pentagon admits that the US cannot face a two front war.

The US cannot face a one front war in Europe alone and would be defeated in five to ten minutes. It is not widely known that the key means that the US has chosen conventionally to defend Europe was by its superior airpower which outguns the Russians. However, what also is not widely known is that the US will be defeated in Europe by the Russians in five to ten minutes by the Russian hypersonic missiles destroying all NATO and European commercial airfields including those in England as it merrily sends its warships towards the Kerch Peninsula.

Whether all of our F-35 trillion dollar aircraft will be blown up too in five minutes depends on how fast the US can fly them out of harm’s way to some foreign shore. The remaining key question then is whether the US can evacuate Europe fast enough via a Dunkirk exit to escape to England or whether all the US forces will join their NATO comrades in a Russian prisoners of war camp.

The answer is that it cannot escape as it would take more than the two weeks time to evacuate. This has been confirmed to me by the highest US military authorities.

The US use of recent sanctions on Russia was to send the message that the nation killer that they call SWIFT-CHIPS is in the US toolkit as the US reply to an invasion of the Ukraine. (It goes without saying that Nord Stream Two would be over and the pipeline presently in operation from Russia to Europe would be shut down.) The US thus is sitting back in this poker game in smug self-confidence that the Russians would not dare to invade the Ukraine, causing the US to pull the trigger on throwing Russia out of SWIFT-CHIPS payment system to their Iranian-style doom.

But the US has not seen the Russian cards in their hand yet, which would be to exercise their super financial weapon of closing the Strait of Hormuz with their ally Iran which is willing to cooperate, according to our best intelligence sources.

We have discussed this scenario with the Goldman Sachs derivative specialists in oil who predict the oil price would rise to $500.00 to a $1,000.00 a barrel on such a closing. This would result in a triggering and the implosion of the 600 trillion to 2.5 quadrillion derivative market. In effect, it would end up destroying the entire world financial system.

The cataclysm that would hit the US would lead (as in Germany did in 1933) to a 50% unemployment rate or more. This would automatically begin the instigation of the complete overthrow of the US government. A government right now.  which is barely hanging on by a thread (after last summer’s riots when the US military refused to intervene out of fear that its forces, as in Russia in 1918, would disintegrate along racial lines).

The defeat of the US in Europe would constitute the death knell of the US Empire as when Rome was sacked by Alaric. And make no mistake, there would be cheering all over the world.

[Now comes the killer part, which left me, well, speechless]

The myth of fissures between Russia and China should be dispelled by the following article in the Asia Times. There, where is sitting on Putin’s desk a major offer by a major company to finance the redirection of all oil and natural gas now going to Europe. Instead it would be redirected to China via pipeline.

It would constitute the largest commercial transaction in world history.

China could then depend on receiving from Russia the natural resources that presently come by sea.  And Russia can replace all European imports to Russia by substitution and where that is not possible from China.

This very deep article should be read very carefully. The hundreds of billions of dollars for this project are available today according to the highest intelligence sources.

Here is an important quote from the article:

“A closely guarded secret in Moscow is that right after German sanctions imposed in relation to Ukraine, a major global energy operator approached Russia with an offer to divert to China no less than 7 million barrels a day of oil plus natural gas. Whatever happens, the stunning proposal is still sitting on the table of Shmal Gannadiy, a top oil/gas advisor to President Putin.”

[And then the report links to my story]:

Definitive Eurasian alliance is closer than you think. And things are proceeding well in advance than anyone actually realizes. And America is in no state to take on any major global power as it currently stands. It’s a foolish exercise in futility, and a death sentence for the participants.

Modern America 2021.

So what is going to happen?

I hold no “magic crystal ball”. No one does.

If I could characterize the state of affairs inside the Untied States government today, numerous examples come to mind…

A Train Wreck

A bunch a crazed maniacal megalomaniacs are all crammed in the tiny engine of a locomotive, and everyone is trying to grab the controls to wheel and right this big, long enormous train back onto the tracks safely. Some are just there to stop the others. Some are earnestly trying to put the brakes on. Some are trying to increase the speed. Some are fighting among themselves, and some are lighting firecrackers at everyone's feet to see what will happen next. All are evil, out of control and running amok.

An Alien Monster trying to get out

The United States today is like the Alien monster that has incubated inside the host human (from the Alien movie). It is starting to get out, and the poor host is in a state of panic and fear.

I wrote an article on this theme. It is HERE.

Evil psychopath child playing with live dynamite

This is what it looks like. Especially after the "Long Telegram", and the Alaska meeting between China and the USA.

A suicidal man trying to get killed intentionally

It's almost that the people inside of Washington DC have no scruples, no idea of what reality is, and believe that they are somehow sitting on thrones in the clouds somewhere in their magical city of Olympus. Do they have a "death wish"? It most certainly seems that way, doesn't it?

What will happen, I don’t know. But keep your eyes open. Realize that the only idiots are in Washington DC and their colonies in the UK, and Australia. The rest of the world are watching from the spectator stands with popcorn in their right hand, and a Civil-Defense helmet in their left hand.

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A look at the Chinese “ghost cities” and what’s going on regarding them.

One of the often mentioned narratives regarding China can be found on the Alt-Right and Hard-Right websites in America. It’s the narrative that China builds these huge enormous “ghost cities”. That China builds these huge concrete cities that no one lives in, and that this is just another example about how “out of touch” China is with it’s people.

Well, of course, it’s a big bunch of misdirection, misunderstandings, lies, and intentional fabrications.

Yet, what is actually going on is far more interesting.

And if you study it, you see just how healthy the government of China is, and how proactive it is in caring for the Chinese people.

In this article we are going to take a look at one of these “ghost cities” and see what is actually going on. No. It’s not about how “out of touch” the Chinese government is, but rather how forward thinking it is. People in the West simply cannot imagine what is going on. This is simply because the size, the scope, the forward planning, and the belief that if everyone is “lifted up”, then everyone prospers.

It’s unheard of in the greedy West.

Here’s the video.

And NO, it’s not me. This is a video blogger that travels the world and speaks better Chinese than I do. He has a vblog called JaYoeNation. He’s pretty good. LOL.

Take a spell and let it download. If it is taking too much time, you can click on THIS LINK and down load a zipped-file and watch the video directly. It’s pretty good. Please enjoy.

You have got to see the pictures and this video…

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Judging a nation by it’s bathrooms, a look at China today

One of the often comments that I have seen is how absolutely terrible China is because all you need to do is go ahead and take a look at it’s bathrooms. And yes, this has been a very difficult impression to discount, because as recently as 2010, most public bathrooms in China has been absolutely horrific.

And when I mean horrific, I mean exactly that. They were totally and absolutely foul, disgusting, dirty, disease ridden death-traps filled with insects, vermin and open sewers. Horrible is putting it nicely.

Used to be.

Has been.

Not any longer.

But of course, with anything good, no one ever reports anything good about China. It’s all bad, and evil, and filthy stuff.

No one ever reports on the good.

Certainly not the United States.

Here’s a nice little video that works to dispel that illusion. Now, you all must keep in mind that pitiful toilets do still exist inside of China. You have a population that is four to five times larger than that of the United States. So it takes time to implement change. Yet, all in all, the changes inside of China are enormous and rapid. Especially when you compare it to the glacial changes inside of America.

Here’s the video.

And NO, it’s not me. This is a video blogger that travels the world and speaks better Chinese than I do. He has a vblog called JaYoeNation. He’s pretty good. LOL.

Take a spell and let it download. If it is taking too much time, you can click on THIS LINK and down load a zipped-file and watch the video directly. It’s pretty good. Please enjoy.

You have got to see the pictures and this video…

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Awesome Movies – Army of Darkness

Happy Easter everyone. I hope that you are spending time together with loved one, relaxing and chilling out. For the Metallic-family, we went out and visited a couple of new malls, and ate some fine delicious Thai food, and some mild Hunan food. With wine and beer. Of course.

Later on, it’s a nice long relaxing afternoon with some silly and easy to watch movies to chill to. Please let’s dust off this crazy movie and pop it in the VCR. Listen to the tape a whirl, and watch the movie with a bowl of chips and a chill out attitude.

The Background

The Evil Dead series, both in the cinematic and television forms, has a marvelously delirious history. An original film financed on a shoestring budget that plays its horror-centric tone mostly straight but with a few chuckle inducing moments, a sequel that is in essence a remake of the original and was originally supposed to follow the plot of the third film, said third film that goes off in a completely different direction, and now a TV series, 22 years later, that makes no reference to the third installment for legal reasons, therefore technically continuing the story of the first film but unquestionably borrowing the slapstick, overly comedic identity of the third movie. Few popular franchises can claim to having a developmental history has complicated and hard fought as Evil Dead, although one would struggle to consider that a virtue. All that being said, Army of Darkness, which premiered in 1992 but was only released wide in February of 1993, is arguably the most interesting, unique and important entry.

-popoptiq

The Characters

  • Ash – Our legendary demon-slaying, lady-killing, chainsaw-wielding, S-Mart employee. Oh, and he also accidentally invented breakdancing by slipping on milk curd.
  • Sheila – She knows that the best way to catch a man’s eye is to slap the snot out of him. She also knows that the best way to keep a man is to bear him male children, and not to have syphilis.
  • Arthur – Noble born leader of the blighted lands, a real goody-goody two-shoes.
  • Wiseman – One of the worst things about the dark ages is that the world was filled with all sorts of evil spirits, fantastic monsters, and eldritch magic. The Wiseman’s job was to know the weakness of every possible supernatural peril. “Silver weapons, running water, garlic, a charm made from the toe of a saint” – those sorts of things. Everybody else knew that the old freaks were just making it up as they went along, but nobody cared, so long as the wards worked.
  • Duke Henry – Red haired and bearded leader of the northern kingdoms.
  • Bad Ash – Created after Ash swallows a tiny version of himself, then grows two heads, then splits into two people…oh forget it, he’s an evil and rotting version of Ash. Turned into a firework.
  • Little Ash’s – These miniature menaces terrorize Ash for a while. Some get stomped, one gets eaten.
  • The Army of the Dead – Hundreds of skeletons that are chopped to bits, blown apart, or crushed.

The Plot

The Army of Darkness is a remarkably silly movie. And it is just perfect to watch on lazy Easter Afternoons.

The beginning of “Army of Darkness” makes a slight adjustment to the end of Evil Dead 2. Originally, Ash is sucked through the wormhole, gets dumped out somewhere in time south of the Renaissance, blasts a flying Deadite, and is immediately worshipped as a delivering saint by a group of medieval warriors. Here we have Ash mistaken as part of Duke Henry’s army, the force that Lord Arthur has just routed from the field of battle. Poor Ash finds himself a prisoner of Lord Arthur, locked in a stock and told to schlep it along.

Back in those days there were not any federally-funded maximum security prisons. Heck, there were not even any small continents or large islands so that a country of Queen-loving citizens could banish their criminals (and the criminals’ children, and their children, and so on) to lifelong incarceration upon the too-big-for-an-island / sort-of-small-to-be-a-continent. Lord Arthur’s solution to this conundrum is that the last of Duke Henry’s men are to be tossed into the Pit. Inside the Pit are Deadites. Obviously, Ash does not want to go into the Pit, but that is exactly where he gets pushed. Things look really bad for our hero, but the Wiseman tosses Ash his chainsaw as a Deadite closes in for the kill. Armed with his trusty chainsaw, Ash is more than a match for any demon. The Deadite quickly becomes just plain old dead.

After he climbs out of the pit, Ash recovers his sawed-off double-barreled shotgun, and then berates the unwashed masses of medieval citizenry (nobles, serfs, and vassals). The good Lord Arthur finds it difficult to say no to a man who carries a boomstick and who eats soul-eating Deadites for lunch. The nobleman can only glare as Ash takes up residence in the central keep, and sets about enjoying the service of the serving wenches. Even a surprise visit by a Deadite hag just further cements Ash in place as a royal thorn in Arthur’s royal side.

For his part, Ash effectively tells Arthur and the Wiseman that they can have the Middle Ages. All that Ash wants to do is go home. He does take a break from yearning for 1992 long enough to construct a mechanical iron hand to replace the one he lost in “Evil Dead 2.” He also puts aside his animosity towards Sheila (they had a rough start) and starts making it with the “Doth do maketh my heart warm with thy presence” sort of stuff.

I am not sure why Ash insists on returning to the present. Maybe he wants to avoid cholera, syphilis, and the Black Plague, but he will be doing that at the expense of a lot of quality time that could be spent eating grapes and wenching. Ah, wenching. Out of everything the Middle Ages stood for, I miss wenching the most. If you ever make it to 784 AD, make sure that you sample the wenches.

The Wiseman finally convinces Ash that the only way he can ever get back home is by undertaking a quest to recover the Necromonicon from a haunted graveyard. Now, Ash is an extremely groovy kind of guy, but he has a hard enough time staying out of Deadite-spawned trouble in his own living room. Mucking around in the land of the dead is going to have serious consequences. The first of those is that Ash gets chased around the haunted forest that is near the haunted graveyard by invisible motorcycles. The second issue created by Ash’s foray into the world of spirits, spells, and specters takes place inside an old windmill. A shattered mirror turns into a mob of tiny troublemaking Ash clones! They poke him with forks, drop things on his head, and generally make Ash wish that he had never had children of any sort. Once he gets the little hellions under control, Ash then has to deal with his alternate Deadite ego, Bad Ash.

One boomstick later, there is only one Ash standing. He is a bad-a**, but not Bad Ash.

Ash does finally reach the graveyard and recover the book (after dealing with two cursed imitation tomes). However, he does not correctly take possession of the Book of the Dead. Yep, Ash flubs “klaatu barada nikto.” As a result, the dead are woken from their endless sleep. Hundreds of skeletons assemble themselves into a massive army, with Bad Ash assuming command as the undead horde’s general. Now Lord Arthur has something worse than the proto-Scots and Deadite intrusions to deal with. Social Security was not created until the 20th Century; figuring out what to do about hundreds of the walking dead who refuse to stay in their graves is a big problem for a medieval noble.

Actually, Arthur and Ash decide to solve the problem the way that most problems were solved during the Middle Ages: they will have a battle!

To prepare for the battle, Ash and the other defenders of Arthur’s castle turn to the textbooks that were in the trunk of Ash’s car (the vehicle was also sucked back in time). I must say, Ash pursued some unusual subjects in college. How often does someone get to say, “That semester of ‘Steam Power 101’ really paid off!” in their life? Unfortunately, the hero has to make his preparations for Ragnarok without indulging in the time-honored tradition of pre-battle nookie, because Sheila is whisked away by a Deadite gargoyle. The next time that Ash sees his gentle lady, she is a Deadite witch and a real ball-breaker.

The Army of Darkness that attacks the castle finds itself on the receiving end of exploding arrows, catapult-lobbed bombs, and even a car that looks like the result of an Oldsmobile having sex with a windmill. Bones are crushed by the human defenders, but the walls are eventually breached, and Ash has a final skin-shedding reckoning with Bad Ash. The evil army is routed, and the only thing left for Ash to do is to go home to his own time. There are two different endings to this movie. In one, we see Ash back at S-Mart, defending the customers and employees from a surprise Deadite incursion. In the other, Ash hits the Rip Van Winkle bottle a little too much and sleeps well past doomsday.

I like “Evil Dead 2” more than “Army of Darkness.” Yet, this is an entertaining cult film. You could even call it a gruesomely groovy comedy. The movie is filled with Three Stooges-style slapstick, and the head-bangs and eye-pokes are so well done that I get nostalgic to watch some old Stooges’ shorts. Still, the reason that everybody loves Ash is that he has some great lines, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Stallone and Schwarzenegger action films of the 1980s, and he delivers them with style.

Things I learned from this movie

Ash finds himself thrown back in time and must discover the modicum of generosity he never thought he had inside him by fending off hoards of skeleton soldiers and a hulking evil version of himself in order to protect a small but brave kingdom before returning back to present day.
  • In ye olde days “public transportation” meant being chained to the nobleman’s horse and dragged along behind him.
  • Knights often fall for the old “your shoelace is untied” trick.
  • Department store employees know how to construct robotic limbs.
  • The difference between an ear and a pancake is academic.
  • Stonehenge was a public library.
  • Never mumble the magic words.
  • Jay Leno’s chin is the product of an unfortunate childhood accident involving a vacuum.
  • No ex-girlfriend is worth wrecking your car over.
  • When wrestling a skeleton, always remember that they are vulnerable to the backbreaker.

Stuff To Watch For:

Army of Darkness.
  • 5 mins – You know, “The Gods Must Be Crazy” would have been more interesting if the main guy had found a chainsaw instead of that bottle.
  • 10 mins – That guy obviously suffered from high blood pressure.
  • 18 mins – Pretty cheap for a double-barreled shotgun. Hey, did the barrel length just change?
  • 21 mins – You sound like my grandmother.
  • 26 mins – Detroit?
  • 32 mins – We have gone from “The Amazing Colossal Man” to “Gulliver’s Travels” to “The Manster” and now we are on “The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant.” What is next, “The Birds?”
  • 38 mins – Oops, looks like you found the dreaded Hoovernomicon: The Book of the Suck.
  • 51 mins – For a moment there I was worried that a song was coming on.
  • 53 mins – Skeletal musicians: +1 combat result.
  • 65 mins – Amy Winehouse?

Conclusion

Army of Darkness.
It is, in a nutshell, a melding of two films: an Evil Dead film and a medieval fantasy action comedy. No one in their right mind would seriously consider the movie to be an outright horror film. Granted, it features some ingredients that would be right at home in a horror movie, but so much of what Raimi and company want to provide is far more along the lines of an action adventure story soaked in the sort of slapstick humour Raimi is known for being a humungous fan of. 

-popoptiq

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Going through one of the poorer fifth tier cities in China, a video exposé.

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

But first…

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

The postman always drinks twice.

Not so serious things.

Or, maybe serious.

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

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

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

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

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

He’s sort of cute, eh?

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

Here’ to “the crew”!

Trailer Park Boys chilling out.

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

The human experience.

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

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

Designed to massage the gums.

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

Next up is a nostalgic picture.

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

With that in mind, look at this picture please…

The good old days.

…and then, boom!

We are back to serious things.

Where has Americans’ income gone?

By Ding Gang 

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

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

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

Where has Americans' income gone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that is some serious inflation!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yikes!

It makes me yearn for the good old days.

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

It is difficult to truly enjoy cheese.

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

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

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

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

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

Eh?

From HERE

Fondue is a traditional Swiss dish that is prepared from pieces of cheese, thermally melted with white wine in a special fondue pot – “caquelon”, to a creamy consistency, flavored with cherry rakia or cherry brandy. It’s tasted by dipping hard bread cubes, rolled in the melted cheese with special fondue forks.

 Fondue is a warm dish that can contain one or more types of cheese, usually Gruyere and Vacherine Fribourgeois. It is the main national dish of Switzerland together with с raclette. It is also known in the Eastern French regions Savoie and Franch-Comte since the 1950s where it is prepared with Beaufort cheese or Comte cheese.

Now, maybe the “officially correct” way of making fondue uses the dish, the forks, and the special cheeses. But we are just simple people wanting to have simple pleasures with our friends… RIGHT NOW.

Here’s a hint, you make use of what you have. And you call up your friends, and you add some wine. Some nice music, and you all work together to make that delicious cheesy fondue happen.

Delicious fondue.

And he continues on the narrative…

At the table, the fondue of melted cheeses is served in the so-called “caquelon” (a type of enameled, cast iron or ceramic pot) in which pieces of bread are dipped with a special fork with three prongs (there are also forks with two prongs, but they are mainly associated with the meat fondue – the Bourguignon or the Chinese type). The fondue pot (caquelon) is located on a metal pad (usually made of wrought iron) at the base of which is located the heat source (a heater or candles) that keeps the fondue at the desired temperature throughout the meal.

Fondue forks are long-stemmed with a round handle. A piece of bread or rarely potato slices (traditionally consumed with Fondue fribourgeoise) are dipped into the melted cheese stirring in a circular or a figure-eight motion of the fork. 

When removing the fork from the fondue, it should be rotated continuously in a circle so that the melted cheese doesn’t drip outside the pot. The soaked mouthful is served towards the mouth when the cheese is already cooled to a suitable temperature for consumption and thus a full taste is achieved.

It is a common rule for cheese producers to sell ready-made cheese mixes, especially for fondue preparation, which makes it possible to avoid the difficult choice of the cheese combination. In Switzerland, these cheese mixes can be found in supermarkets.

They are not generally found in the United States, and most certainly not in China.

But that’s the price you pay when you live in different areas. If I lived in Switzerland, I would be in “seventh Heaven” smunching on all that delicious food. I’ll tell you what.

There are many and varied Fondue recipes. For example, before beginning the fondue preparation, several cloves of garlic can be crushed at the bottom of the caquelon, then add the grated or sliced cheese and finally pour the wine.

The specific thin in the Fribourgeoise fondue recipe is that the wine is replaced with water. The fondue set is turned on on a slow fire while stirring periodically until the cheese is completely melted. Then pepper and other supplements are added according to the desired recipe, such as sliced in cubes shallots, morel mushroom, mustard, etc. Corn starch dissolved in a little bit of cherry brandy can be used to thicken and improve consistency in cases where more wine is added, for example, or when the fondue is more liquid.

Sometimes, a little bit of cardamom powder (which improves digestion) or other spices can be poured directly into the plate, where the cheese dipped bite is rolled right before consumption.

Finally, when the fondue is over, it is possible to have dregs or crust of toasted cheese, called “religieuse”, which is removed with a fork, sometimes it is quite difficult.

Also, at the end of the fondue you can add and prepare scrambled eggs.

Main varieties of Swiss cheese fondues

FONDUE CHEESE CONTENT
Moitié–Moitié 50% Gruyére and 50% Vacherin
Fribourgeoise 100% Vacherin Fribourgeois
Appenzelloise 100% Appenzeller
Neuchateloise 50% Gruyére and 50% Emmental
Central Switzerland 1/3 Gruyére, 1/3 Emmental, 1/3 Sbrinz
Savoyard 50% Emmental of Savoy and 50% Beaufort or Comté
Franc-Comtois 100% Comté

Now my deep secret…

I love cheese. Oh I really do. And you know you don’t appreciate things until you live without them. And that is so very true about cheese and China.

Like on hamburgers turning them magically into cheeseburgers. (It’s magical how it works.) You put the cheese on top of the burger after you cooked one side, and then you let the heat from inside the burger melt the cheese on to the paddy. You don’t rely on the heat around the burger to do it. Then you watch the cheese melt. It gets soft at the edges and then starts to wrap around the burger and starts to clutch it like a firm loving embrace.

Ahhh.

Turning hamburgers into cheeseburgers.

And…

As much as the delicious improvements to hamburgers come from cheese, so do improvements in just about anything else. You know like this…

Delicious cheeseburger.

Do you know what is better than thick gooey cheese on top of a cheeseburger? It’s thick gooey cheese inside of a cheeseburger. That’s what.

You know, it’s been years, but I used to make the “pizza burgers”. I would mix pizza sauce with the hamburger meat. Then put a chunk of mozzarella cheese in the middle of the patty and cook it that way. My only problem was that the meat would tend to crumble and resemble a “sloppy Joe” more than a burger. But it tasted oh so good. I’ll tell you what.

What a pizza burger is not…

There are many ideas of what a pizza-burger is. I’m gonna tell you all what it is not…

  • It is not a burger with pizza sauce instead of ketchup.
  • It is not an open bun burger (the top missing) with pepperoni slices.
  • It is not a mini-pizza the size of a hamburger.

And if you try to do an image search on Bing that is what you are going to find.  Sad. So very, very sad.

Not real pizza-burgers.

Nope. A real pizza burger has the burger consisting of meat and pizza sauce, and lots and lots of gooey melted cheese. That’s a pizza burger!

Smunching on a burger, and then enjoying life.

Maybe it’s time to go out and do some shopping. Eh?

Going shopping with Mom.

Moving on

You know that there is one very special thing that would really improve the taste of cheese. Aside from friends, and your favorite pets, and some nice tunes (music). Can you guess what I am thinking about?

Yes. You are right.

Alcohol.

Or, more specifically… wine.

Wine and a cheeseburger. So very delicious.

While I have my thoughts, other people are far better versed in explaining the nuances between the different kinds of wines.

A good hamburger is an indulgence. It is also pretty much always a little decadent, rich and hearty, which makes it a natural match for red wine. Sure, some white wines could work, and lots of sparkling wines too. But come on, let’s drink some red wine with our red meat.

  • A Red wine goes best with a hamburger / cheeseburger. You can tell if it is a red wine by it’s color. Red wine has a red color.

Below are some classic wine styles (and bottle recommendations) that pair with burgers, plus a couple of not-so-classic picks that worked well recently with a variety of burger styles — from a simple Swiss cheeseburger with all-American condiments, to a black-truffle-mayo-and-fried-egg stunner, to a bison burger with cheddar, caramelized onions and wasabi mayo.

I would never suggest a ho-hum wine just because burgers are, at the end of the night, just hot sandwiches with toppings.  With that in mind, only one of these 10 bottles rings up higher than $20. (140 RMB for those of you in China.)

Zinfandel

Not a “white Zinfandel” which is everywhere, but rather a “red Zinfandel”. A red Zinfandel wine is both fruity and spicy. Some fruit aromas such as raspberries, blackberries, cherries, cranberries. And there is a generous sprinkling of cinnamon and black pepper. Depending on the winemaking and ageing methods it undergoes Zinfandel can display a range of secondary and tertiary aromas.

Red Zinfandel Wine Information
The color of a zinfandel wine is deep red, bordering on black. Zinfandel is a spicy, peppery wine, with a hint of fruity flavor – berries or dark cherries are often the taste range. Zinfandel goes well with “typical American” food – pizza, burgers, and steaks. It’s hearty enough to match up with thick red sauces.

Zinfandel is one of the all-time classic burger wines. Big, jammy, juicy and spicy, it’s almost as if it were invented for this most-American of sandwiches.

Cabernet

A Taste of Cabernet Sauvignon | wine.co.za
https://wine.co.za/wine/wine.aspx?WINEID=41057

2021-2-16 · Cabernet Sauvignon is a noble variety red grape - and is usually deep red in colour, full-bodied, with dark fruit flavours. It arose out of an accidental breeding between a red Cabernet Franc and a white Sauvignon Blanc grape plant - which subsequently has become one of the most planted and popular varieties in the red wine world.

There used to be an old television commercial. I forget what was being sold. Maybe it was a Heinz product for “57 Steak Sauce”. Encouraging people to shake a particular steak sauce onto their hamburgers instead of ketchup, the TV advertising campaign went something like this:

"...Is a hamburger made of ground ham? No — it's made of ground steak."

As long as it is not a tannic powerhouse, a California cabernet sauvignon, best friend of the juicy steak, is probably going to be a good match for your burger. It’s got a rich flavor, and when you drink it after a bite of a fine thick, cheesy burger the taste really excels.

Oh, I get goosebumps thinking about it.

A nice Cabernet is my favorite, as well as a fine sweet Shiraz.

Malbec

Taste and Flavor Profile Malbec wines are dry, full-bodied, and exhibit rich, dark fruit nose and flavors like blackberry and red plum. They're juicy and jammy, with notes of vanilla, tobacco, dark chocolate, and oak. With medium acid and moderate levels of tannins, they pair well with food.

What Is Malbec Wine? - The Spruce Eats
www.thespruceeats.com/what-are-malbec-wines-3511186

Argentines love their beef, and they wouldn’t dream of eating one of their famous steaks without a glass of malbec. Naturally, malbec is also a great burger wine, with its velvety plum, blackberry, chocolate and earth.

Rhone varieties

The Rhône, a major river in France, rises in the Alps and flows south to the Mediterranean Sea. This river lends its name to the southern French wine region on its banks, the Rhône Valley, as well as its major AOC, Côtes du Rhône.

The indigenous grape varieties that grow in the region, like Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre, Viognier and Roussanne, are often referred to as Rhône grapes. So, regardless of their place of origin, wines made from these grapes are said to be Rhône-style wines the world over.

Rhone Blend
https://www.tastemonterey.com/rhone=blend
Definition: The Rhone region of France has a delightful selection of red varieties. There are 22 grapes allowed in the Rhone AOC, about half of them red. Most of these varieties are used as secondary blending partners, often comprising less than 10% of the blend. The primary red players of Rhone blends are Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre.

Can you imagine not seasoning a hamburger patty with a little bit of salt and black pepper? This is where the Rhone grape varieties come into play, especially the powerful and legendary syrah, which can range from floral to leathery, often with a bite of pepper.

Merlot

Most Merlot wines are thick and full-bodies. It’s sort of the “milkshake” of the wine world. It’s considered to be “heavy”, and if you are not used to it, it will get you drunk faster than the lighter wines. Because of this, you will need to drink it slowly and eat it with some fine beef or mutton.

A Taste of Merlot - wine.co.za
https://cellardirect.co.za/a-taste-of-merlot
The Eikendal Merlot 2017 has an attractive nose that reminds one of forest floor, violets, plums, black berries, cherries and peppery spices. On the palate the wine and full and rounded, with soft tannins and a rich taste of black berries and plums.

With richness and a silky mouthfeel, merlot is sort of the wine equivalent of a milkshake in this pairing scenario — if you consider that some people like the fizz and tang of soda with a burger, and others opt for a mouth-coating chocolate shake.

Here’s a picture where someone went into a White Castle fast-food franchise and got some sliders with their wine.

What a better moment than to think of Harold and Kumar…

Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.

So, here I am enjoying a home made cheese burger. (And no, I did not skimp on the tomatoes, and yes, I do enjoy a nice onion with my burger) and drinking it with a fine local wine; Great Wall. It’s a very reasonably priced good real wine. Basic. Just the way I like it.

And I thought that I would cruse the internet, like I used to back in the mid 1990’s during the Bill Clinton years. Back then I actually believed the “news”. Now I know better.

The state of American “news”

Let me say a few words about the state of “news” in America today…

It sucks.

Yup, that’s pretty much it.

Tell ’em George.

For Shits and Giggles

So, for shits and giggles I visited Free Republic to check out what narratives are being promoted these days.

I used to frequent it excessively. But it’s become the mouthpiece of the hard-right, and no longer stands for anything resembling free discourse. And my being perma-banned pretty much validated that belief. After all, what is more hypicritical than to promote the idea of a “Free Republic” where you can freely experss ideas, and then perma-ban a member because “your ideas and thoughts are not welcome here.”

No longer searching for truth and providing a medium for free exchange of ideas it has become a money making venue which now maintains a niche market that caters to a mixture of old-world-conservatives, war-mongering neocons, and the religious right.

One of the first things you learn once you've been out of the United States for six months or longer is just how absolutely bad the American "news" actually is. It's horrible. They lie, and they distort and they do everything in their power to make you afraid.

I check up on the American media enclaves from time to time so that I don’t go too far off the deep end. (It’s easy to do.) Hard right. Hard left. Mainstream. I mostly just scan the headlines. It tells me all that I need to know.

I try to give equal time to all the “news” venues. They all have soemthing to say. They all are visited by people who are searching. It’s just that they all manipulate to push their own agendas.

I am NOT saying bad things about liberals or conservatives, or moderates or any other flavor. I am saying that there are some seriously ill people with some very little minds, and very big mouths. If not properly corralled they will end up causing all the rest of us to endure some real pain.

Contemporaneous news…

BUCS Sign Brady To 4-Year Contract... 

Michelle Obama considers 'retiring' from public life... 

Rubio sides with Alabama workers in AMAZON union battle...

Bezos invited by Sanders to hearing on income, wealth inequality... 

Congress Leaning Towards Big Tech Breakup...

What the AT&T Split Teaches About Antitrust... 

GOOGLE Faces 'Very Large' EU Advertising Probe, Vestager Says...

Claims MICROSOFT's Stance on News Is Effort to Distract from Hack... 

'NEWSROOM' actress appears to have plagiarized NYTIMES essay... 

Spring forward forever? Push to keep daylight saving time year-round grows... 

UPDATE: 'Historic' snowstorm to pummel Wyoming, Colorado...

'6 FEET'...

'Impossible travel conditions'... 

USA had coldest February in 30 years... 

ISIS creates 'elite new cell of jihadis to carry out attacks on West'... 

Rioters Set Fire to Federal Courthouse in Portland 1 Day after Fencing Removed... 

MYSTERY: Number of twins being born at 'all-time high', researchers say... 

Two-Thirds of Italians Set For Lockdown as Pandemic Worsens... 

Germany declares 'third wave' has begun... 

LA primed for disaster, but virus took it to another level! 

HALF adults infected with virus have symptoms of depression... 

Mexico czar got infected -- then walked through Mexico City... 

EU Governments Push to Relax Ban on Travel From Rest of World... 

Maskless, boozing JETBLUE passenger faces $14,500 FAA fine... 

Latest hotel amenity: Free test... 

And yeah, Free Republic hasn’t changed, it’s still the anti-China crusade running hard and hot, plus the usual fearful articles, and a bunch of shit about anti-vax, anti-5G, anti-social reform, and anti-huawei. It’s anti-everything. Except for guns, walls, and war.

The only thing positive that I can say about it is that the culprits are pretty well brazen. They aren’t hiding their disgust about the rest of the world at all. It’s all pretty open, and well-aired. I’ve got to give them credit for that.

Yeah…

So I went through the first three pages and pulled out a slew of anti-China articles. And guess what? They are all from the same source. I wonder why they are spamming FR so aggressively?

Theyare all from the hard-religious-Right publication The Epoch Times.

What is The Epoch Times?. Dangerous Propaganda ...
https://medium.com/politically-speaking/what-is-the-epoch-times-e8f80d152a6f 

May 15, 2020 · The Epoch Times was started by John Tang in the year 2000 as a Chinese language newspaper. John Tang is a graduate of Georgia Tech who publicly supports the Fulan Gong...

All of the articles came from this singular source.

All of the anti-China articles are from this publication that advocates world war III to bring about global social change. Yeah, not all that different from other dooms-day-cults. Like Heaven’s Gate. Or the Jonestown Massacre in 1978. It’s curious to know that so many American conservatives are willing to listen, follow and fund a lunatic that follows in the same footsteps as the Jim Jones when he lead more than 900  followers to their deaths.

People do not drink the Kool-Aide that is being offered by The Epoch Times. It can lead you down a very dark, and scary, path.

Check out their religious-justified Anti-China war-mongering…

Let’s start here with this one. This one is simple. This article is just a rewording of a Reuters piece to bang-on China. Now the Reuters piece pretty much reports that the FCC is following the already in-place policies of the former Trump Administration. This republishing keeps the narrative alive. Giving the FR readership the idea that the Biden Administration is “keeping the heat on China”.

My comments:

It’s all fun and games for now. Just wait in ten years. When China and Russia tire of all this and the American electronic industry and software industry is under a graduated state of collapse. (Just like every other industry in America over the last few decades.) And then when it is tottering before the big fall, China, Russia and all of Europe pulls the rug out, and performs a “tit for tat” payback.

Oh, you all think that cannot happen?

How about this next article…

This one is a laugh. It’s implying and making statements that the Chinese people are fearful of what is going on and how the government is handing things. At a 93% Chinese approval rating the narrative doesn’t make sense. While I am sure that the local government is very active in Beijing, just as they are here, no one, and I do mean NOBODY is concerned. But the American readership knows none of that.

So they believe these LIES.

  • Beijing Pushes for Door-to-Door COVID-19 Vaccinations, Citizens Worry
    3/13/2021, 9:38:12 AM · by SeekAndFind · 11 replies
    Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Alex Wu
    
    Chinese authorities recently launched a door-to-door COVID-19 vaccination program in Chaoyang District, in the capital city of Beijing. Some residents shared their concerns with The Epoch Times over their distrust of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its propaganda about COVID-19 vaccines and the pandemic. Mainland Chinese media reported on March 10 that Beijing’s Chaoyang District began a new door-to-door vaccination program in residential communities and villages. The program is also carried out in five types of places such as government offices, the Central Business District (CBD), industrial parks, business offices, and school campuses. Chaoyang is where international companies, foreign...
    Now of course, all this anti-China narrative makes you think certain things about China. And since there are NO NAMES, and there are NO PICTURES, and there are NO VIDEOS, and no one is willing to provide links to the ACTUAL CHINESE DOCUMENTS, you all just believe what is being told. Yet the actual validity of what you read has as much worth as the ten year old riding the bike down the street.

And this one… it really cracks me up!

  • Nearly Half of Trump Supporters Won’t Take the CCP Virus Vaccine: NPR, PBS, Marist Poll
    3/13/2021, 9:35:04 AM · by SeekAndFind · 94 replies
    Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Samuel Allegri
    
    Almost half of former President Trump’s supporters don’t plan to take a CCP virus vaccine according to a poll by NPR, PBS, and Marist. The poll indicates that 47 percent of people who identified themselves as Trump supporters would not want to be vaccinated when the doses became available to them. Upon widening the demographics, the survey found that 41 percent of Republicans would not take the vaccine, compared to only 11 percent of Democrats saying they wouldn’t take it. In total, about two-thirds of Americans polled said that they’ve already taken a vaccine or would take one when they...
    Do you want something funny? Half the Trump supporters won’t take ANY vaccine, let alone one from China. But it’ll be hard for them to get the Chinese vaccine inside of America because it is not being shipped to America.

Uh Duh!

I’ll tell ya, you’ve got to be a fucking brainless morn to actually believe the bullshit that is being peddled in America today.

Here’s another…

  • 3 Deaths in 9 Days After Hongkongers Get China’s Sinovac Vaccine
    3/13/2021, 5:21:07 AM · by SeekAndFind · 12 replies
    Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Emma Yu
    
    Since Hong Kong began vaccinating the public with the China’s domestically-produced Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine, CoronaVac, on Feb. 26, three deaths in nine days have increased anxiety about the vaccine’s safety. On March 8, a 71-year-old man in Hong Kong died four days after receiving his vaccine shot. The patient was reported to be in good health before the vaccination. This was the third death in nine days in Hong Kong following a CoronaVac injection. It’s unclear whether the vaccine contributed to the deaths. Authorities have said they are investigating the causes of death. The first known death in Hong Kong...
    This one is simple. This article is just a rewording of a Jimmy Lai piece to bang-on China. He might be behind bars, and probably getting ready for organ harvesting, but his papers and media empire lives on…

…for now.

Hate. Hate. Hate.

And you all wonder why these sources and editors, and writers are being banned off the min platforms?

And here’s a hate spewing nonsense trying to associate the COVID-19 lite with China. You all want to know what these people look like to me…

  • Florida Gov. DeSantis Cancels All CCP Virus Fines Issued by Local Officials
    3/13/2021, 3:15:54 AM · by lightman · 36 replies
    epoch times ^ | 12 March A.D. 2021 | Lorenz Duchamps
    
    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order that will eliminate all fines issued by local government officials over the past year to people and businesses in the state who violated restrictions related to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. The order (pdf) was signed after the Board of Executive Clemency approved DeSantis’s proposal on March 10 to categorically remit all fines related to local government CCP virus restrictions. “I hereby remit any fines imposed between March 1, 2020, and March 10, 2021, by any political subdivision of Florida related to local government COVID-19 restrictions,” DeSantis confirmed in the order,...

It’s all war-mongering antagonistic bullshit. And if left unchecked it will lead to war. And people are gonna die!

Listen to me.

These NEOCONS are Dangerous.

The History of the Neocon Takeover of the USA

Copied as found with editing to fit this venue. It’s a good read and worth your time. All credit to the author.

This is the interview I just did with authors, Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, who have written a definitive 4-part article on the origins and the  history of the Neocon movement. The influence of the Neoconservatives has been catastrophic to the American government – and to much of the world, yet as they point out, it never seems to end. The authors describe it as an elitist cult; a rabid ideology which doesn’t rely on facts to justify itself.

This is the interview I just did with authors, Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, who have written a definitive 4-part article on the origins and the  history of the Neocon movement. The influence of the Neoconservatives has been catastrophic to the American government – and to much of the world, yet as they point out, it never seems to end. The authors describe it as an elitist cult; a rabid ideology which doesn’t rely on facts to justify itself.

Senator J. William Fulbright identified the Neocons’ irrational system for making endless war in Vietnam 45 years ago, in a New Yorker article titled Reflections in Thrall to Fear: “Cold War psychology is the totally illogical transfer of the burden of proof from those who make charges to those who question them”, leading to “The ultimate illogic: war is the course of prudence and sobriety until the case for peace is proved under impossible rules of evidence [or never] – or until the enemy surrenders. Rational men cannot deal with each other on this basis…But these were not rational men and their need to further their irrational quest only increased with the loss of the Vietnam War.”

This same ideology drove the failed War in Iraq – and now, they’re at it again, with their foolhardy saber-rattling towards Russia.

The birth of the Neocon movement grew out of what had previously been known within the Eastern Establishment as “Team B”, in which official policies were tested by “competitive analysis”. The first Team B was created by George H. W. Bush, while he was Director of the CIA. This brought together very unlikely bedfellows, such as the ex-Trotskyite, James Burnham and Right Wing business interests, both of whom lobbied heavily for big military budgets, advanced weapons systems and aggressive action to confront Soviet Communism.

This Team B/Neocon doomsday cult managed to weather the defeat of the Vietnam War and their non-fact-based analyses continue to maintain a stranglehold on US policy.

James Burnham’s nihilist, elitist vision was criticized by George Orwell in his 1946 essay, Second Thoughts on James Burnham, in which he wrote, “What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in the latter’s book, The Machiavellians] is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud… Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud.” In fact, George Orwell’s classic book, 1984 was based on Burnham’s vision of the coming totalitarian state, which he described as “A new kind of society, neither Capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon slavery.”

There are many well-known godfathers of the Neoconservative agenda of “Endless War”, the guiding principle of America’s foreign policymakers today but Gould and Fitzgerald identify James Burnham as by far its most important figure, although he is little-known today.

Burnham was born in Chicago, the son of an English immigrant father. He attended Princeton University and later Oxford University’s Balliol College. He briefly became a close advisor to Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, from whom he learned the tactics and strategies of infiltration, political subversion and dirty tricks. Gould and Fitzgerald note that the Right Wing Neocon cult of “Endless War” is ironically rooted in Trotsky’s permanent “Communist Revolution” and they describe how James Burnham helped to turn this into the permanent battle plan for a global Anglo-American empire. They write, “All that was needed to complete Burnham’s dialectic was a permanent enemy and that would require a sophisticated psychological campaign to keep the hatred of Russia alive for generations.”

In 1941, Burnham renounced his allegiance to Trotsky and Marxist idealism and he moved towards a cruel realism, with his belief in the inevitable failure of democracy and the rise of the oligarch. During the following years, he wrote several books and memos, predicting the rise of a technocratic elite. By 1947, Burnham’s transformation from Communist radical to New World Order American Conservative was complete, landing him smack into the loving arms of America’s Right Wing defense establishment during and after World War II.

In my own writings, I’ve noted that the use of the word “Freedom” by the US Government, whether it be “Freedom Fries”, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” or “They hate us for our freedom,” has completely mangled the significance of this F-word, certainly from a Constitutional perspective. Gould and Fitzgerald trace the bastardization of this word to James Burnham:

“Burnham’s Freedom only applied to those intellectuals (the Machiavellians) willing to tell people the hard truth about the unpopular political realities they faced. These were the realities that would usher in a brave new world of the managerial class who would set about denying Americans the very Democracy they thought they already owned. As Orwell observed about Burnham’s Machiavellian beliefs, in his 1946 Second Thoughts, ‘Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to use the masses.’”

With the CIA’s 1950 founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Gould and Fitzgerald write, “By its own admission, the CIA’s strategy of promoting the non-Communist Left would become the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.”

Today, it appears that this strategy has been a smashing success, where we see the so-called Left in the US playing the role of fulminating, pro-Establishment Statists, a behavior formerly relegated to the Right. Never, in my wildest dreams would I have imagined the “tolerant Left” behaving like an army of Phyllis Schlaflys!

Prior to the catastrophe that was the Vietnam War, the Right was the establishment. The factual defeat of the ideals which drove this war was instrumental to the rise of the 1960s Counterculture movement, which was an even bigger disaster for the Neocons than losing the war. The Counterculture needed to be co-opted by any means necessary and I believe this has been successfully achieved.

Gould and Fitzgerald write that, “CIA’s control over the non-Communist Left and the West’s ‘free’ intellectuals [enabled] the CIA to secretly disenfranchise Europeans and Americans from their own political culture in such a way they would never really know it.”

Gould and Fitzgerald cite historian Christopher Lasch, who wrote in 1969 of the CIA’s co-optation of the American Left: “The modern state… is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists, not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as ‘free’ intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions.”

We see this very much today, in the Late Night comedy of Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah and SNL, the staff writers of which are largely hand-picked from the Harvard Lampoon, where young comedians are trained in a particular brand of comedy that deftly implants a fascist philosophy of extreme elitism and which fuses the ideals of the old Trotskyist left together with those of the right-wing Anglo-American elite, aka the Deep State.

The product of this fusion is called “Neoconservatism” – or its sneaky twin, “Neoliberalism”. The overt mission of this ideology is to roll back Russian influence everywhere. The covert mission is to reassert British cultural dominance over the Anglo-American Empire, maintained through propaganda. Traditionally, comedy has been used as a form of social and political criticism. Today, it cows the hapless consumer into submission to the hegemony.

Gould and Fitzgerald then inform us about the secret Information Research Department of the British and Commonwealth Foreign Office known as the IRD, which was funded by the CIA and served as a covert anti-Communist propaganda unit from 1946 until 1977. Gould and Fitzgerald cite Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, which describes how the IRD spread ceaseless disinformational propaganda (a mixture of lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists working for major news agencies, including Reuters and the BBC and all other available channels. This was but one of many similar initiatives launched by the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board, including Project Mockingbird and the abovementioned Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The mind is the ultimate battlefield. In my next talk with Gould and Fitzgerald, we will go into how the Deep State has designs on our dream life, in such figures as Robert Moss, a former assassin who now gives New Age workshops on “Active Dreaming.” (Incidentally, the New Age Movement was a CIA subproject of MK Ultra mind control programs). The soon-to-be-released 5G network will enable Virtual Reality, as predicted by Gould and Fitzgerald’s book, ‘The Voice: An Encrypted Monologue’, which takes the reader through the process of reclaiming one’s own narrative from the “noize” of unrelenting psychological warfare that saturates our environment.

Check out their book, ‘The Voice’ here:
https://www.forbiddenmedia.com/product/the-voice/

All this neocon “firehose” of disinformation from the hard-right seriously give me a headache. It’s like this…

(Since we are talking about 1994, and the Bill Clinton years of surfing the “web”.)

Oh, and where was I, oh yeah…

Video on the fifth tier cities in China

Let’s move away from the American “news” and let’s see a taste of what real reality actually is.

Here we just provide a video that is making the rounds in China. A fellow from the UK, who lives in China, has been making various You-tube videos of his experiences in China. And you can come across these kinds of videos all over the internet. But what makes this particular video so special is that it isn’t a first or second tier city. He’s making videos in the smaller “back woods” communities within China. It’s the real deal.

You see, most you-tube videos are of expats exploring Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Cool and big cities most certainly. But they are first-tier enormous urban landscapes.  But those of us, like myself, live in the smaller communities.

Here he is visiting some of the “smaller communities”. To an American, or Brit, it looks like a city. To a Chinese person, it is considered a small village. It’s not big and it doesn’t qualify for high speed rail, or subway access. But it is still vibrant and alive as all of China is these days.

Here’s the video. Click on the picture for the video to open up in a new tab. It’s around 12 minutes or so long, and is narrated by a British expat. Please excuse his accent, and his “squirly” appearance. He’s a typical. Don’t you know.

I do hope that you enjoy it. It’s pretty much what it is like when you enter the Chinese version of “Fly over country”, and a “Red State”.

Now, go and get some cheese, a bottle of wine, some music and call up some friends. Time is too short to waste!

Do you want more?

I have more articles in my China experience section. Go here…

China Experience

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More secrets the American mainstream news keeps quiet about; Chinese families are twice as wealthy as Americans

Number 6:
Everybody votes for a dictator.

You know, the Western “news” is just propaganda. Nothing more. It is used to instill fear, control and manipulate huge masses of people, and to bludgeon them into predefined and specific types of behaviors. And of the many things that propaganda does (lie, distort, and emphasize incorrect narratives) is ignore real and substantive actual news. And yeah. They do this for a reason, don’t you know. And this article is going to talk about one thing that the American media is very quiet about; the Chinese people are much more prosperous than Americans are.

So forget that neocon belief that the Chinese people are shivering in fear and oppression from their all-power Chinese Communist overlords (it is the de facto narrative). They aren’t. They are overwhelmingly happy, approve of their government, and just living their life in near carefree abandon.

Which is why I enjoyed traveling outside of America. When I went to Australia, the relationships with the folk there reminded me of my boyhood days in the 1960’s and 1970’s. And when I went to South East Asia, it reminded me of the days of “keg parties” and “hanging out”… you know. Doing ‘nothin. It was glorious.

It was everything I hoped it would be.

In those lands I wasn’t barraged with “news”. Even being connected to the USA though Wifi (much faster than what you get in the States, and for FREE!) no one read the “news” like I would (do so). They just pretty much ignored it. It was a much smaller part of their life. Certainly much smaller than what we from the States would think. And as a result they were far happier because of it.

Imagine that!

The lack of regulations, rules, policing control, laws, and just about everything else that is part and parcel of the regulatory and all-controlling America is absent in Asia. And it’s just glorious.

But anyways…

The American (and Western) “news” is just a big mill and den of lies and distortions. It is at all levels, and if you haven’t figured this out by now, you are either stupid or have mental problems. They lie. they distort. They cause you to live in fear. They spew hate. They are just awful.

  • The dangers of 3G; your brain will cook when you answer your cell phone.
  • Oh, and 5G, that terrible Chinese radiation is much worse!
  • Mad cow disease will kill you when you eat a hamburger.
  • Y2K is going to have your toaster jump and strangle you in the kitchen.
  • Killer zombie hornets is going to attack your community.
  • Donate money now to SAVE THE CHILDREN in far away Africa.
  • Dangerous child abductors are prowling all over your neighborhood.
  • Ask your doctor about Prozac Plus, the new gateway to happiness!
  • You too can get a free trial of unlimited internet only $9.99, special conditions apply don’t you know…

Do something. Now! Now! Nowwww!

Number 6:
Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.

Do you think I’m exaggerating?  I’m NOT.  It’s just that when you view the “news” narrative out of context, at a time when the media onslaught has subsided, it seems just so very silly.

Silly.

Like mixing wine and chocolate.

Um. I take that back. Make that’s a good pairing. I’ll have to give it a try. Anyone game to experiment with me?  

Anyways back to the silliness about the United States. It is, really is, silly.

Sorry for being so darn harsh, but it’s true. American “news” is just plain silly. Like check out the latest “shit-storm” that’s a-brewing on Drudge today…

Ahem…

It’s sort of like this…

Anyways, lets leave the fairy tale world of American (and UK, Australian and Indian) “news”…

…and discuss something that really is intentionally omitted.

Number Two:
I'm the boss.

Number 6:
No. One is the boss.

It is the idea that not only is the rest of the world growing, and prospering, but that China is leading the pack and doing much, much… so much better than anything their American cousins can even realize.

What?

That’s right.

And that’s what happens when you have a capable, experienced leadership that is motivated to improve the lives of it’s people.

Observer:
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.

The Communist Chinese are wealthier than Americans.

Ouch!

How about that for rubbing your face in a pile of shit?

This article is from Yicai global. You won't find it in the States, unless you perform a serious search. It's not that it's blocked, but perhaps it's more likely "shadow blocked". It's not gonna find it's way into your daily news feeds.  Reprinted as found with editing to fit this venue. All credit to the author Ben Armour.

There has been a lot of chatter in the [Chinese] press about the Chinese government’s setting a growth target for 2021. And specifically whether or not it was able to achieve its longstanding goal of doubling incomes in the last ten years.

While this year’s economic prospects are clouded by uncertainty, a recent study by researchers at the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) indicates that China has already achieved its objective of building a moderately prosperous society (小康社会) – at least in its cities.

The study, published in the latest issue of China Finance, highlights the results of a comprehensive survey of urban families’ finances conducted at the end of 2019. It reports that median household net worth stood at CNY1.41 million or close to USD200,000.

  • Median household worth in China is $ 200,000 USD.

The US’s own Survey of Consumer Finances was last conducted by the Federal Reserve in 2016. If I adjust its findings for inflation, then median US household net worth was about USD104,000 in 2019.

  • Median household worth in the USA is $ 104,000 USD.

Thus, one can say that the typical US household is only about half as rich as the typical Chinese urban family.

Number 6:
[referring to the chess game] Why do you use people?

Chessmaster:
Some psychiatrists say it satisfies the desire for power. 'the only opportunity one gets here.

Number 6:
That depends what side you're on.

Chessmaster:
[quickly] I'm on my side.

Number 6:
[quickly] Aren't we all.

Chessmaster:
You must be new here. In time, most of us join the enemy - against ourselves.

How is this possible?

Since per capita GDP in the US is close to five times higher than in China, how can we explain such a surprising result?

The very unequal distribution of wealth in the US is a big part of the story.

The super wealthy is skewing all the numbers to be much higher than they would be otherwise.

The graph below shows that while median US household wealth is about half that of Chinese urban families, average US household net worth is about 80 percent higher than China’s USD413,000.

.

The ratio of average to median net worth is a measure of how equally wealth is distributed.

.

If everyone’s wealth was exactly the same, the ratio of the two net worth measures would be 1.0.  China’s mean household net worth is double its median. The ratio in the US is seven times, pointing to a much more unequal distribution of wealth.

      • The Ideal = 1
      • China = 2
      • United States = 7

China has far better financial, and social equality than America has.

What are the attributes that contribute to this situation? Reason one.

Median Income. Since it lies right in the middle of the wealth distribution, we can think of the median household as “typical. ”Half the families are richer and half the families are poorer than it is.

On average, American families are wealthier than Chinese ones. There are a lot of really wealthy American families that pull that average up.

But the typical American household remains poorer than its Chinese urban counterpart.

Note that I am making these comparisons in 2019 US dollars and am not accounting for the fact that a US dollar buys more in China than it does in the US.

Reason Two

A second reason that Chinese urban households are relatively wealthy is that home ownership is quite widespread.

According to the PBOC study, 96 percent of urban households own residential property. The corresponding figure for the US is only 64 percent.

Median Data

  • 96% of Chinese own their own homes.
  • 64% of Americans own their own homes.

The gap between US and Chinese in home ownership is even more striking at the low end of the income distribution. In the US, only one-third of the families in the lowest income quintile own a home. In China, 89 percent do.

Low Income Data

  • 89% of China’s poor own homes.
  • 33% of American poor own homes.

In fact, many Chinese families own more than one property: 31 percent of them have two and 11 percent have three or more. On average, each urban family owns 1.5 residential properties.

Chinese home ownership

  • Average family owns 1.5 homes.
  • 31% of Chinese own 2 homes.
  • 11% of Chinese own three or more homes.

Chinese family wealth does not simply rest on inflated real estate values.

Residential property represents just under 60 percent of household assets, with financial assets and other real assets (shops, productive equipment, vehicles, etc.) each accounting for close to 20 percent.

Moreover, from the information in the study, I estimate that the price-to-income ratio of these households’ residential property holdings at 3.7. This is fairly close to the median house price-to-income ratio in the US, 3.6, according to Demographia’s most recent survey.

  • Home price / Income for China = 3.7
  • Home price / income for the USA = 3.6

Reason Three

The third reason for Chinese urban households’ high net worth is their relatively low indebtedness.

Seventy-seven percent of US households have assumed some sort of financial liability (a mortgage, a car loan, student debt, etc.). In China, only 57 percent of the urban households have incurred such liabilities.

  • In debt to financial loans – USA = 77%
  • In debt to financial loans – China = 57%

Not only do fewer Chinese households carry liabilities, but what debts they owe are small relative to their assets. The debts of the median Chinese household, which does have liabilities, only amounts to 16 percent of its assets. In contrast, the median indebted American household has a leverage ratio of 36 percent of its assets.

  • American debt to assets = 36%
  • Chinese debt to assets = 16%

Reason Four

The final piece of the puzzle is understanding how Chinese urban households can have such a high rate of home ownership and such a low rate of indebtedness.

Chinese households do have much higher savings rates than their US counterparts and that is an important factor. But more important was the way in which the housing stock was privatized.

Up until the late 1990s, almost all residential property belonged to state-owned institutions, which provided low-rent accommodation to their employees. As part of the state-owned enterprise reform program, the government relieved firms of the burden of providing housing for their workers. Urban households were able to purchase their apartments from their employers at reasonable prices, leading to today’s high rate of home ownership and supporting urban prosperity.

A China First

(Yicai Global) April 27 — China may be the first country in the world to have reached a 96 percent urban home ownership rate, according to the central bank.

  • China has a 96% home ownership rate in the cities.

In an article the People’s Bank of China published in its China Finance journal today it also noted that the bulk of assets held by urban families is physical.

  • Chinese assets tend to be tangible, physical “brick and mortar” items.
  • American assets tend to be intangible, stocks, bonds, pensions, potential worth.

Home ownership in developed countries is mostly around the 60 percent level, according to data from Trading Economics. In the US, the figure was 65.1 percent at the end of last year, US Department of Commerce statistics show. The PBOC report puts China’s home ownership 28.5 percentage points ahead of the US.

  • Chinese home ownership = 96% (urban)
  • USA home ownership = 65.1%
  • Typical (developed country) home ownership = 60%

The reports also said Chinese urban households prefer risk-free financial assets, with homes making up nearly 70 percent and financial assets 20.4 percent.

The average wealth of urban households is CNY3.18 million (USD449,200), with a median value of CNY1.63 million, per the report. The difference between the two is about CNY1.55 million, indicating an uneven distribution of household assets.

Beijing, Shanghai and Jiangsu province ranked as the top three for family riches, with CNY8.9 million, CNY8.1 million and CNY5.1 million, respectively. The lowest three provincial-level units are the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Gansu province in northwestern China and Jilin province in the northeast.

Households in urban areas generally take out loans. Some 56.5 percent of those surveyed are in debt. Among them, the total owed per household is CNY512,000 (USD72,346), with roughly 54 percent owing less than CNY300,000, 35.6 percent owing CNY300,000 to CNY1 million, while the remaining 10.5 percent owe over CNY1 million.

Mortgages constitute the bulk of household debt.

Some 77 percent of indebted households have home loans averaging CNY389,000, making up over three quarters of total household debt. The PBOC’s urban resident household assets and liabilities research team from its Statistics and Analysis Department canvassed more than 30,000 households in 30 provinces, autonomous regions and cities across the country in mid-to-late October.

Wow.

It’s time to celebrate!

.

Um. No, this isn’t right. Not enough food.

A real celebration requires FOOD!

.

Ah. Much better.

Pretty Amazing Stuff

Yes it is.

So what is not being reported in the American and Western press? It is that China is not some backwards, dirty, disease ridden infested dark smoggy slime-ball nation. But rather, a growing prosperous nation where most people own their homes. Where most people are debt free, and those that are in debt with loans are not too worried about it as the debts are small relative to their income stream. It’s a big, big change when you compare that to America.

How can Americans (and others in “the West”) have this kind of idea? Well consider what consists of “news”.

Here, today is a headliner article…

Westerners are increasingly scared of traveling to China as threat of detention rises

...The dramatic detention of a handful of foreigners in recent years has instilled a deep fear in some people, especially those with politically adjacent occupations. As President Xi breeds a culture of nationalism and forges increasingly hostile relations with Western governments, some fear that if a diplomatic spat between their government and Beijing occurred while they were in China they could become a target... 

Um…

So just in this paragraph we see…

  • Dramatic detention of foreigners!
  • Deep fear is present.
  • President Xi breeds a culture of nationalism!
  • President Xi is hostile to nations in the West.

And that is just ONE lone paragraph.

Do I have to point out the absolute falsehoods, the manipulations, the distortions and the lies in the four bullet points above, or are you aware of the reality?

It’s a non-stop bullshit garbage narrative like this that is pumped relentlessly into the brains of Americans, non-stop, 24-7.

I makes me want to have a fine libation, and some delicious food, I’ll tell you what.

[over the opening of each episode - Number 2 played by various actors]
Number 6:
Where am I?

Number 2:
In the Village.

Number 6:
What do you want?

Number 2:
Information.

Number 6:
Whose side are you on?

Number 2:
That would be telling. We want information... information... information.

Number 6:
You won't get it.

Number 2:
By hook or by crook, we will.

Number 6:
Who are you?

Number 2:
The new Number 2.

Number 6:
Who is Number 1?

Number 2:
You are Number 6.

Number 6:
I am not a number, I am a free man.

Let’s take a look at what China is today, shall we. Here’s some videos (in no particular order) that I just pulled off my Douxing feed this morning. Just you click on the picture and it will open up in a new tab.

High Speed Trains.

There are everywhere in China. Fast. Cheap. Comfortable. Convenient. Takes you anywhere and everywhere. The American news is again talking about how soon, one day, America too will be as good as China. And the talk is all about having high speed trains, like China has.

Of course they never mention that America is literally twenty years behind China in this regard, or that America has already spent 77 billion dollars for a cardboard and fiberglass mock-up. Or that America started on the American HST at the same time that China did, but with over ten times the funding level. And while China today has hundreds of lines, thousands of Kilometers of track, hundreds of trains, and stations, the United States has nothing.

But some day soon. You just wait and see. Right?

In China, HST is average, normal, and no big deal.

Just click on the picture and the video will pop up in another tab.

Guangzhou

Guangzhou is a “working class” city. Much like Pittsburgh, PA is. It’s big. really big. But it’s got a real “local” feel to it. It’s not cosmopolitan like Beijing, or Shanghai are. It’s just full of average people. Going to work and living life.

Here’s some gals going out for a nice dinner, some great friendship and some wine. Wouldn’t you all wish that you were there with them? I do. I’ll tell you what.

Some young gals having a nice dinner in Guangzhou China.

Chinese Transport Air Force

The Chinese, since there have been so many restrictions placed on them by America, and the UK, were forced to develop their own systems. This is everything from their own space stations, and Mars lander to military aircraft, and computer systems. All “home grown” and mass produced at a frenzy and pace that is stunning to behold.

We hear about it all, but then when you see just how many state of the art systems are in use, it just boggles the mind.

A Typical Chinese family

Here we have a typical Chinese family in their home. Not some kind of dirt floored hovel, is it? Do they look like they are starving, and begging for American “democracy” to “save them”?

Why so many children? I thought that the Chinese kill babies and that you are only allowed to have one </sarcasm>. But take a look at the mother and her 19 year old daughter. The Chinese don’t age like Americans do, because they EAT MUCH HEALTHIER. No GMO hormones, and no one is taking anti-stress, and anti-depression medications.

Outside of Zhuhai

This chick is a dancing and carrying on in a park right outside the supermarket where I shop for my groceries. Yeah. It’s pretty much like this. This is obviously on the weekend, judging from all the people. Must be on a Sunday.

A typical park

The Chinese have made improving the lives of their citizens a top priority. This is ALL that the government does. I would say that a full 100% of their effort is towards helping the people, improving their quality of life, and setting up defensive measures so that evil people cannot run “color revolutions” against them.

Most parks are now, beautiful, well maintained, and tranquil. Like this.

Movie making

One of the big omissions in American “news” is that just about everything is made in China. But if you listen to them, you get the idea that China only makes cheap pens, rubber duckies and the low-end products for Wal-mart. It doesn’t. All of the high-tech stuff is designed and made in China. All of it.

All of it.

Like this movie camera kit that is used to make the movies that Americans are not permitted to watch. LOL.

All this is about reality

If the masses of people could think critically for themselves, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. By the way Rod, there is a war. It’s raging and has enveloped this planet. It’s a war for our minds. Many have been captured. I know, I see them every day. And I read what they write. 

-Ohio Guy

I think that most of us are living in an artificial construct; and artificial reality. it is one that is constructed and based upon lies and untruths. And so, believing these lies and untruths we live our lives, making decisions, and behaving in certain ways that do not… and should not.. be part of our reality.

I suppose that you could point this out to anyone. You could point at them and say..

"How dare you live like you do? Your ideas and your thoughts do not match mine. You must change and agree with me! For my reality, and my understanding is the only and correct way of thinking."

So, yeah. Let’s keep a real sense of perspective here.

It doesn’t matter what other people are doing. Not really. Not if they are Americans, or Chinese, or Zambians. All that matters is what you are doing with your life.

If you are happy, having fun, trust your government, then that is fine. You can keep on believing what you want to believe. You can keep on doing what you are doing, and listening to the news as you see it. It’s working for you. Keep it up.

But if you are not, then maybe you should reevaluate your life; your reality. You need to ask whether it is an actual reflection of the truth. Or instead, are you living something else instead.

Are you like “Number 6” in the 1968 television show “The Prisoner” where you live in a nice pleasant place, but you can never leave it. And no matter what you do, you never get any straight answers and never know your true and real situation?

"The Prisoner" is a unique piece of television. It addresses issues such as personal identity and freedom, democracy, education, scientific progress, art and technology, while still remaining an entertaining drama series. Over seventeen episodes we witness a war of attrition between the faceless forces behind 'The Village' (a Kafkaesque community somewhere between Butlins and Alcatraz) and its most strong willed inmate, No. 6. who struggles ceaselessly to assert his individuality while plotting to escape from his captors. 

-Written by Stuart Berwick <berws@essex.ac.uk>

I think that for many Americans, the answer is YES.

It’s all a big farce. Elections are held, but no one really has any power. The reality looks nice and pleasant, but there is this grinding negativity just under the surface, and no one ever gets to glimpse their real reality.

.

Since its initial telecast, back in 1967, this enigmatic classic has evoked every reaction from awe to contempt. Given the amount of serious critical attention THE PRISONER has received, and given that a whole society has been created in its honor, I'd say the awe has won out, and I vehemently agree that THE PRISONER deserves to be honored as one of the truly artistic programs created for commercial television.

However, I can also understand the frustration many viewers have felt. Over the course of its seventeen episodes, this offbeat spy thriller becomes further and further offbeat until it ultimately transforms into surrealistic allegory. I confess I'm not sure whether this transformation was intended as a complete surprise, or whether you were supposed to know where the show was going, but in either case, I think you can better appreciate the series if you can see the earlier episodes as preparation for what's to come.

THE PRISONER's title character is a British secret agent (series creator Patrick McGoohan) who may or may not be SECRET AGENT's John Drake. The story begins with him suddenly and mysteriously resigning, then just as suddenly and mysteriously being rendered unconscious and transported to a place known only as The Village, the location of which is known only to those who run it. The Village is a prison camp, but with all of the amenities of a vacation resort,. Attractive dwellings, shops, restaurants, etc. exist side by side with high-tech methods of keeping order and extracting information from those who won't give it up willingly.

Those who try to escape get to meet Rover, a belligerent weather balloon capable of locomotion, and seemingly of independent thought. It appears (to me anyway) that the authorities can summon Rover, send it away, and give it instructions, but that it acts more or less on its own initiative. Rover deals with fugitives by plastering itself against their faces, rendering them either unconscious or dead, depending on how bad a mood it's in. Twice, we see it haul someone in from the ocean by sucking them up into a whirlpool it creates.

Citizens of The Village, including those in authority, are identified only by numbers. Our protagonist is known only as No. 6 throughout the entire series. The Village is run by No. 2, who in turn reports to an unseen and unidentified No. 1. No. 1 is apparently an unforgiving boss, because No. 2 is always being replaced.

Shortly after he arrives in in the Village, No. 6 is informed, by the reigning No. 2, that he should count on remaining there permanently. If he cooperates, life will be pleasant and he may even be given a position of authority. If he resists -- well, the only restriction they're under is not to damage him permanently. To satisfy his captors, No. 6 need only answer one question: `Why did you resign?' His question in turn is, `Who runs this place? Who is No. 1?'

Most of the episodes deal with No. 6's attempts to escape, and/or his captors' attempts to break him, although there are a few side trips. Several episodes suggest that No. 6's own people may be involved with running The Village. Some of the episodes are fairly straightforward, while others leave you with questions as to exactly what went on. It's important to note that several of the more obscure episodes -- for example, `Free for All' and `Dance of the Dead' -- are among the seven episodes that McGoohan considers essential to the series.

And then we come to the final episode, `Fall Out,' which promises to answer all the burning questions the viewers have been anguishing over for seventeen weeks -- and which so frustrated and angered those viewers back in 1967 that McGoohan had to go into hiding for awhile. Of course, I can't reveal any of the really important details, because, as No. 2 says in the recap that begins most of the episodes, `That would be telling,' and as all of us IMBD contributors know, `telling,' is frowned upon. However, to come back to the point with which I started, you should be prepared for a resolution of an entirely different nature than the one you'll probably be expecting -- a resolution that forces you to rethink your entire concept of the Village, and of the intention of the series. If you aren't ready, you'll be frustrated. If you are, you can accept THE PRISONER is the spirit in which it was offered.

Yes. The 1968 version of the televisions show “The Prisoner” says it most clearly.

Astonishingly Original and Intelligent 
rlcsljo
14 March 2000

When I saw the first episode of this series, my jaw dropped in amazement. Here was a TV series that was entertaining and actually made you think. Nothing was ever what it appeared, no one had a real name, you never knew who was the good guy or the bad guy (or if they were one in the same!). The "final" episode was what could only be described as PSYCHEDELIC.

This TV series was, and still is, way ahead of its time.

Perhaps America today is a big prison. The inmates don’t realize that they are trapped in one, as it appears to be open and free. But in functional reality it is just one big enormous prison.

The New Number Two:
Good day, Number Six.

Number 6:
Number what?

The New Number Two:
Six. For official purposes, everyone has a number. Yours is number six.

Number 6:
I am not a number. I am a person.

The New Number Two:
Six of one, half a dozen of another.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my China and America Comparisons Index here…

China / USA comparisons

.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

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The Wandering Earth and other Chinese entertainment that can stun and make you scratch your head with a WTF question mark.

When I was very young, I would go with my father as he would run errands, take care of errands, and visit friends. These distant memories are from the early 1960’s at a time when America was competent, growing, healthy and full of promise. At that time, the only threats that faced America were the Beatles and the Soviet Union. It was a time when a single nickel (a coin) could buy you a long necked soda, and a dollar bill could purchase  a full hamburger platter at the local diner.

In those days my father would periodically  visit friends and drag me along with him.  Of course, I was always happy to go. In those days it was all very casual, and not formal at all. He would maybe tell them that he was going to stop by in a day or two, and then a few days later we would visit. Depending on the friend it might be us sitting in a dim living room while a show was playing, and my dad and his friend drank a beer or two. At other times it might be the two sipping coffee while soft jazz or classical music played in the background.

Father taking his sons out fishing.

.

I well remember one visit. I was given these sweet cookies to smuch on while the television set was on. The show had these dancing chicks moving and grooving inside these hanging cages. They wore long white boots that went up to their knees. They wore these scandalous dresses that exposed their legs, and had these large hairdoos. The would clutch on the bars of the cage and swing and sway to the music. Their super colorful outfits would be stunning, and they seemed to really be enjoying themselves.

There would be this small crowd of folk dancing under the girls. The walls would be a constant cascade of flashing colors and these bright colored blobs that would change shape like honey or syrup on the walls. The guys and gals were always so fashionable. Even I could see that. Yes. Even at that early age. They were all in their twenties, more or less. Ancient in my eyes, but my father said that he really liked watching them dance.

Go-go Girls.

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I guess that time changes. Duh! But you don’t realize it because most of the time the change is rather slow. For instance, at that time, the big scandal was the Beatles and their insane haircuts. They had bangs and the hair even touched the tops of their ears! Scandalous! And people started wearing patterned shirts. Then when I was attending middle school in the 1970’s we “graduated” to FM music. And an entire world opened up to us. No longer would we endure the static of the AM radio as we drove on a bridge, or when a big truck passed us on the road.

University years consisted of high-end stereo’s and these big ass speakers that inhabited our poster encapsulated cinder-block rooms. Depending on the friends that I was hanging out with we listened to either progressive rock, country and western, or The Grateful Dead which always seemed to lie in a class by itself. It wasn’t until the last few days of my final year that I was exposed to MTV. And when exposed to it, the girl that I was seeing at the time, and I spent hours in front of the televisions (in her parent’s rented hotel room) watching it.

Life is a cubicle. Heh heh. A taste of things to come. Yikes!

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Working life as an adult was pretty much a completely different  situation. I only listened to the music going to or from work. And given that most of the radio (the radio stations during the 1990’s were all pretty much gobbled up by enormous radio syndicates) presented a very bland and uninspired mix of “classic” tunes, I ended up escaping to talk radio.

Today, with the internet, you can watch videos, and encounter all sorts of music. All you dare need do is explore and use various applications that you might favor. Whether this is Trance, Disco, Country and Western, Soul, Reggie, Classic, or anything in between.

But in America, I’ve noticed the same-old, same-old reoccurring all over again. Big, powerful forces, are monopolizing the internet narratives. Whether it is the “news” or the applications that we use, everything in the United States eventually migrates to one or two “big guy” corporations that squeeze out everyone else. And they end up with a monopoly on whatever venue that they control. This is true, whether it is the “news” or music.

Big companies gobble up the little guys. The Myth of Capitalism tells the story of how America has gone from an open, competitive marketplace to an economy where a few very powerful companies dominate key industries that affect our daily lives. Digital monopolies like Google, Facebook and Amazon act as gatekeepers to the digital world. Amazon is capturing almost all online shopping dollars.

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But I am not in the United States. I am in China. And the music and “news” environment is quite different here.

Here, in this article we are going to chat a little bit about some of the more popular contemporaneous music that is floating around in China these days. And so, yes you are right, this is a China Music post.

The Wandering Earth

As the sun is dying out, people all around the world build giant planet thrusters to move Earth out of its orbit and sail Earth to a new star system. Yet the 2500-year journey comes with unexpected dangers, and in order to save humanity, a group of young people in this age of a wandering Earth fight hard for the survival of humankind. -IMDB

Here in this post. We’re going to talk a little bit about contemporaneous Chinese videos, music videos and movies. Life is too colorful and interesting to assume that the only worthwhile entertainment comes from the United States. It’s silly, and it’s false.  The world is filled with all sorts of interesting and provocative entertainment; you all just have to be aware of it.

So you give it a try and look about and see what is presented to you.

The very first video is a music video that was released in association with the Chinese movie titled “The Wandering Earth”. It’s actually a very very good movie.  It has a lot of borrowed elements obtained out of Hollywood.

(Which is for the most case, obtained through purchasing the Hollywood companies directly. As well as hiring the workers, hiring the actors, and the organizations and businesses that made the elements of Hollywood that we see today.)

Minus of course, the progressive “improvements” that you see in the latest Hollywood movies.

In a sense, the problem with “Ghostbusters” is similar to the ongoing problems with strong female characters in general. From the parts I saw, the approach to that movie was shallow and crass in that it painted nearly every male supporting character a bumbling idiot in need of female guidance. This was especially true of Kevin, the dim-witted secretary played by Chris Hemsworth.

I get that some of that approach was an effort to inject the kind of humor that made the original Ghostbusters so funny and memorable, but it really fell flat, almost to an insulting degree. It reinforced the notion men somehow need to be denigrated or taken down a peg for female characters to be strong.While it didn’t offend me, personally, it certainly undermined the story. 

A world full of idiot men isn’t that bad. That’s a huge part of the appeal for shows like “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy.” However, that kind of appeal doesn’t fit with that of Ghostbusters.

-The Mixed (And Misguided) Messages Of All-Female Movie Remakes

The Wandering Earth.

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Anyways back the “The Wandering Earth”…

This movie depicts a scenario that is quite cataclysmic and rather upsetting. It’s sort of a Chinese version of the American staple starring Bruce Willis.  You know which one… ”Armageddon”.  In fact I would even go as far as to say that it’s a cross between “Mad Max at thunder dome” and the “end of the world opus “Armageddon”.

It has everything. It has heroes, a greater purpose to save the world for humanity, people working together, interpersonal relationships, a Love story, technology, Fear and horror. All wrapped up in an exciting package.

Plus there isn’t any of that social revisionist nonsense that seems to drive American Hollywood movies these days.

This movie was released in early 2019 during the CNY holiday. And, it made a big splash all throughout China and the world with one major exception; The United States. The fact is that hardly anybody in the United States heard of the movie.

Here’s a Bing Search for Science Fiction movies in 2019…

Screen capture of a Bing search for science fiction movies made in 2019. The Wandering Earth is nowhere to be found.

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Oh, don’t misunderstand me. There were theater releases… a few. And some token showings. Here and…

…there.

But that’s it.

It’s not that the movie itself was banned, it’s just that all promotional activities for the movie itself was suppressed. You won’t find any promotional activities or promotions for this movie in the United States and there’s a reason for that.

And of course the reason is no longer in office.

Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.

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Anyways it’s an enjoyable science-fiction movie. And, um, it’s touching on many levels. It differs from American movies that were also made in the same year at the same time. And because of that you’ll notice that there are no gay people, lesbians or transgenders in the script.

It’s refreshing.

Now, it’s not that I have a problem with people of alternative lifestyles, it’s just that I don’t enjoy watching them. It’s the same way I feel when I watch two dogs having sex. It’s not repulsive, but it’s also not entertaining for me.

OK.

Don’t believe me. Check out this review…

“The Wandering Earth” cured my winter depression. 

Seriously: on opening night, I happily joined a packed Times Square auditorium-full of moviegoers watching this science-fiction adventure, which stars a talented ensemble of of Mandarin-speaking actors trying to stop the Earth from crashing into Jupiter. I left the theater hoping that “The Wandering Earth” would be one of this year’s Chinese New Year’s hits. It grossed $300 million in China during its opening week alone, a hopeful sign that we’ll see more entertainment as assured as this.

The setup might seem familiar at first. Two teams of astronauts fight to save the Earth years after its leaders transformed it into a planet-sized spaceship to escape destruction by an overactive sun. The first team is a two-man skeleton crew: the square-jawed Peiqiang Liu (Jing Wu) and his Russian cosmonaut buddy Makarov (Arkady Sharogradsky). The other is a small exploratory group led by Peiqiang’s feisty twentysomething son Qi Liu (Chuxio Qu) and his upbeat partner Duoduo Han (Jinmai Zhao). These factions respectively spend most of their time battling MOSS, an unhelpful computer in a remote space station; and exploring an ice-covered Earth in stolen all-terrain vehicles (some of which bring to mind “Total Recall,” specifically the tank-sized drill-cars).

But while director Frant Gwo and his writing team blend Cixin Liu’s source novel with elements from American-made sci-fi disaster films—including “Armageddon,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” and “Sunshine”—they synthesize them in a visually dynamic, emotionally engaging way that sets the project apart from its Western cousins, and marks it as a great and uniquely Chinese science fiction film.

For one thing, rather than build the tale around a lone hero ringed by supporting players, “The Wandering Earth” distributes bravery generously amid an ensemble that includes action hero Wu; rising stars Qu and Zhao; and comedy institution Man-Tat Ng, who plays a grey-bearded spaceman named Zi’ang Ha. The script, credited to a team of six, never valorizes a singular chest-puffing hero, nor does it scapegoat a mustache-twirling antagonist (not even MOSS, the sentient, HAL-9000-style computer program in the space station). 

The teamwork theme is cross-generational, too. Both Peiqiang and Ng (formerly the straight man to film comedy superstar Stephen Chow) are treated with reverence because they’re older, and are therefore presumed to have more experience and stronger moral fiber. The veterans work well with the film’s younger astronauts, whose optimism makes them as brazen as they are idealistic. 

This apolitical blockbuster about a post-climate-change disaster extends its belief in teamwork to the rest of the international community. The movie is filled with narrative diversions that reassure viewers that no single country’s leaders are smarter, more responsible, or more capable than the rest—except, of course, for the Chinese.

Second, “The Wandering Earth” looks better than most American special-effects spectaculars because it gives you breathing space to admire landscape shots of a dystopian Earth that suggest old fashioned matte-paintings on steroids. Although Gwo and his team realized their expensive-looking vision with the help of a handful of visual effects studios, including the Weta Workshop, they have somehow blended their many influences in bold, stylish ways that only Hollywood filmmakers like James Cameron and Steven Spielberg have previously managed.  

Third, the film’s creators breathe new life into hackneyed tropes. Gwo and his team take a little extra time to show off the laser beams, steering wheels, and hydraulic joints on their space cars and exoskeleton suits, to make the gear seem unique. And the storytelling goes extra mile to show viewers the emotional stress and natural obstacles that the characters must overcome while solving scientifically credible dilemmas (all vetted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences). This movie may not be the next “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but it’s everything “2010: The Year We Make Contact” should have been (and I like “2010,” a lot).

A week after seeing “The Wandering Earth,” I’m still marveling at how good it is. I can’t think of another recent computer-graphics-driven blockbuster that left me feeling this giddy because of its creators’ can-do spirit and consummate attention to detail. The future is here, and it is nerve-wracking, gorgeous, and Chinese. – Simon Abrams

The movie itself has a very interesting back-story.

For starters, no one wanted to make it…

Chinese movie industry had contacted some famous directors: James Cameron, Luc Besson, Alfonso... to name a few. All rejected the proposal. 

The job eventually landed on a not-so-famous director Frant Gwo, who was most passionate about the original story. 

Gwo and his colleagues wrote an outline of 25,000 words, which was way above normal. They spent 6 months together, working day and night, writing then rewriting the draft. In the end the draft alone has one million words. 

Each character you see in the film has detail background and stories.

And the funding for the film dried up. It was abandoned in mid-stride and left swinging in the wind for a spell.

Wanda Media originally invested heavily in this film, but later pulled out the fund for another romantic film. 

This move almost halt the film production, but luckily the team persuaded the actor Wu Jing to forfeit his pay, even made him investing in the film. Wu jing had one condition, that they must make it a "good film", which they faithfully achieved. 

The movie became a smashing hit in Chinese market, and Wu Jing will get his money back and much more. 

Interestingly, Wanda Group's other subsidiary, AMC theaters, is the major distributor of the film in the US. However, you will watch the film in subtitles without English voice dubbing.

A large portion of the story was removed from the movie. Leaving some head-scratchers as to what was actually going on…

Many scenes didn't make the final cut which made the story a bit confusing at times. 

For example, the original novel mentioned there's a growing distrust towards the United Earth Government among people as a conspiracy theory spreads stating that the Sun is not going to die any time soon and the whole Wandering Earth project is just a cover for elites to have total control over the population. 

This explains why those rescue teams carry weapons. And it also explains why Li Yiyi (the nerd) was very aggressive (swinging a wrench) when the main protagonists entered his truck as the truck was probably sacked by rebel forces. 

Also in the final scenes protesters are seen walking on streets of underground Beijing. This also explains why the "Firing Rock" (Lighter Core) is not stored near the earth engines. As earth engines are fusion cores and to start a fusion reaction it takes a lot of energy. 

It can be assumed that the "Firing Rock" (Lighter Core) is similar to a nuclear bomb and can't be lost to rebel's hands.

And there were some “nods” to actual events and international “tie-ins”…

The order in which the various international crews turned around to help push in the firing pin is the same order in which the various nations arrived to help China in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

When reading the American reviews, you will find that many of them are actually negative. Many were upset at the idea of people working together for the greater good. They wanted to see movies about singular heroes working alone and over coming odds.

Yeah.

The American way.

"While it might seem like it’s common sense to give up your seat on the bus for a pregnant person, it turns out some people don’t understand this concept and are so entitled, they think this world is entirely every person for themselves. 

Someone on Reddit asked if they were in the wrong for not giving up their seat on a public bus for a pregnant person after they had worked a long shift and had tired feet..."

-An unrelated discussion about giving up your seat to a pregnant woman.

They were also upset in the idea that the earth would pull together to save humanity.

In 2019, just about EVERY SINGLE REVIEWER believed that there would never be a threat or catastrophe that would end up pulling people together to fight a common cause…

…One year later the Coronavirus COVID-19 hit.

And the American audience was quite right.

In America it was every man (or women) for themselves. It was the rest of the world that pulled together to fight the common threat. Not America. Meanwhile a large segment of the population refused to work together and that proved to be an absolute fiasco with over a half a million deaths as of this writing.

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Incidentally, an ex-girlfriend's sister's husband just died by the Coronavirus. It started as a light shallow itch in the back of his throat. He thought nothing about it. Two weeks later it hit him like a ton of bricks. He was hospitalized, and died in the hospital.

Anyways, many of the movie reviews were terribly negative. In fact, the reviews were SO ABSOLUTELY NEGATIVE, and the lack of MOVIE PROMOTION within the United States points to suppression.

And so, yeah the American movie reviews were negative.

But that’s actually meaningless, because many of the reviews were from “bots”. And you can spot them easily. Most movie reviews on IMDB are either one sentence comments, or three or more juicy paragraphs with great details and comments about specific scenes. These reviews all fit the following profile…

  • One paragraph long.
  • Two groups. A low rating between 1 and 3, and a “high” rating between 4 and 6.
  • No specific scenes, or characters mentioned.
"The Wandering Earth is an overly ambitious, laughably implausible, thoroughly confusing, clumsily edited mess. The plot runs amok with too many hollow characters making stupid decisions without reason. Action sequences were so badly shot and edited it was hard to figure out what was going on. The CGI varied from passable to worse than a 90's video game. Acting was stilted and expressionless. Dialog was rambling and inefficient with an overuse of weird computer voices to explain what was going on. By the end I couldn't care less about the characters and fell sleep." 3/10

-Overly ambitious, laughably implausible, clumsily edited mess 

Thus, the movie drops to the bottom of all Science Fiction listings. It falls like a stone.

Shadow Blocking

Which is why you can’t find it in general searches.

I’ll tell you, this nonsense about trying to influence what others do by swarming ‘bots on comment sections is irritating. I can take it on Amazon, and other product venues, but in the entertainment world, it’s just irritating.

Anyways…

The movie was released with a number of songs. In this case, the song was有种 by孟美岐 . It’s a catchy tune, and is a great listen. It has all sorts of scenes from the movie, that many Americans (apparently) think are “stale”, “boring”, and “uninspired” according to the internet.

Check out the video it opens up in a separate tab.

Here’s the Music Video (it is in a zipped file) so that it will not take forever to download…

I think that one of the biggest problems that Americans have about this movie is that it is culturally too different from the American culture. This movie is about people coming together to fight a disaster. Whereas, in most American Hollywood far, it’s a single lone person who takes a lead to fight an enemy single-handedly.

  • Die hard
  • Armageddon
  • Commando
  • Predator
  • Terminator
  • Dirty harry
  • Death Wish

But as much fun as it is to imagine yourself in the hero role fighting impossible odds, the truth is that the reality is something far different. We all need to grow up a little bit and come to this conclusion.

Commando

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If the human species is to advance, it will be by group participation. Not by a handful of extraordinary people.

Don’t believe me?

How do you think a star basketball player would fare against an entire basketball team that trains and works together as one?

Plot Elements

The Wandering Earth.

The first plot element to go viral was an automatic “warm reminder” recited repeatedly by the giant carrier vehicles in the film, becoming somewhat of a catchphrase:

道路千万条,安全第一条;行车不规范,亲人两行泪。”
“Routes are countless. Safety is foremost. Unregulated driving, loved ones end up in tears.”

Not long after the film’s opening day, this robotic voice message could be heard both on Alibaba-owned navigation app Amap and Tencent-owned QQ Map, with variations also to be found on ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing.

People who had driven to reunite with family for the Spring Festival could also see these lines on public LED screens lining highways around Chongqing, Suzhou, and Shanghai:

On the way to Shanghai.

Anyways, long story short.

I personally believe (all internet manipulation aside) the movie “The Wandering Earth” appeals (resonates) to Chinese people because it…

  • Shows people working together for the common good.
  • Shows that governments can create huge constructions.
  • That by shared sacrifice, by both young and old, a future can manifest.

As such, these points are the opposite of what contemporaneous America stands for. In America…

  • The lone individual is far better than any group of people.
  • Governments cannot create huge constructions. Only private industry can.
  • No one need sacrifice anything. It’s a human Right to do your own thing.

No need to type away and aggressively tell me how wrong I am. I could be right or I could be wrong. It’s all a matter of opinion. Nothing more. Don’t get too caught up in it.

When I was a boy

Although news coverage brought increasingly disturbing reports as the decade progressed, prime-time programming presented an entirely different picture. The escapist fictional fare of prime time made little reference to what was being reported on the news. That began to change in the late 1960s and early ’70s, but the transition was an awkward one; some shows began to reflect the new cultural landscape, but most continued to ignore it. 

That Girl (ABC, 1966–71), an old-fashioned show about a single woman living and working in the big city—with the help of her boyfriend and her “daddy”—aired on the same schedule as The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–77), a new-fashioned comedy about a single woman making it on her own. In the same week, one could watch The Lawrence Welk Show (ABC, 1955–71), a 15-year-old musical variety program that featured a legendary polka band, and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC, 1968–73), an irreverent new comedy-variety show plugged into the 1960s counterculture. 

The 1970–71 season was the last season for a number of series that had defined the old television landscape, including The Ed Sullivan Show, The Lawrence Welk Show, The Red Skelton Show, The Andy Williams Show, and Lassie, all of which had been on the air since the 1950s or earlier. Such traditional sitcoms as That Girl and Hogan’s Heroes also left the air at the end of that season, as did a number of lingering variety programs.

CBS was the first of the three networks to radically overhaul its program schedule, eliminating several shows that were still delivering very high ratings. Such CBS hits as The Jim Nabors Hour (CBS, 1969–71), Mayberry R.F.D., and Hee-Haw were all in the top 30 the year they were canceled by the network. The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres were also eliminated at the end of the 1970–71 season, and not a single rural comedy was left on CBS, the network that had based much of its competitive dominance in the 1960s on that genre.

Even before 1971, however, more-diverse programming had gradually been introduced to network TV, most notably on NBC. The Bill Cosby Show (1969–71), Julia (1968–71), and The Flip Wilson Show (1970–74) were among the first programs to feature African Americans in starring roles since the stereotyped presentations of Amos ’n’ Andy and Beulah (ABC, 1950–53). Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was proving, as had The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (CBS, 1967–69) a few seasons earlier, that even the soon-to-be-moribund variety-show format could deliver new and contemporary messages. Dramatic series such as The Mod Squad (ABC, 1968–73), The Bold Ones (NBC, 1969–73), and The Young Lawyers (ABC, 1970–71) injected timely social issues into traditional genres featuring doctors, lawyers, and the police. In another development, 60 Minutes (CBS, begun 1968) fashioned the modern newsmagazine into a prime-time feature.

-The late 1960s and early ’70s: the relevance movement

When I was a young boy, I watched televisions shows such as “The Lone Ranger” and “Superman”. And even “Diver Dan”, and the “Man from U.N.C.L.E.”. Whether it was “The Rat patrol”, or “Mr. Ed”, the stories all revolved around a singular person and their adventures. You couldn’t help but believe that one person can become great, do great things, and make a difference in the world… all by themselves.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

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Not to mention that this singular person can become filthy rich and successful and have everything. All they needed to do was follow the dream offered to them by “democracy” and the promise of “freedom” and “Liberty” out of Washington DC.

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Perhaps I am not the only one affected by all this programming. Perhaps entire generations have been programmed in such a way as to believe that all is well and good as long as they stay separate and don’t form into groups or organize themselves.

It’s an interesting thought.

Why would the government not want people to form associations? It seems really odd you know. But with the television programming in the 1960’s and 1970’s came a direct drop-off and collapse of independent clubs and fraternal organizations. Organizations such as the Polish Falcons, the ELK’s Lodge, the MOOSE lodges, and the Good-fellas Clubs all were restructured. And this restructuring was NOT organic, as many of us are expected to believe…

I’ll have to revisit this thought over some beer and (with) some pretty girls.

Or…

Maybe something really different.

It’s been a while since I ate some Greek food, or at least the Americanized versions. Maybe I should smunch on some delicious lamb and drink some frosty ones instead…

Delicious Greek food.

Let’s talk about other music videos associated with Chinese movies.

The Great Wall

Starring global superstar Matt Damon and directed by one of the most breathtaking visual stylists of our time, Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers), The Great Wall tells the story of an elite force making a valiant stand for humanity on the world's most iconic structure.

-Amazon.com: The Great Wall [Blu-ray]

The Great Wall movie.

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Again, more mixed reviews. Most Americans hated it.

Why is this, one must wonder. Perhaps Simon Abrams can give us a clue.

Chinese/American co-produced action-fantasy “The Great Wall” doesn’t feel like a McDonald’s-ified version of a Chinese film. True, when square-jawed Matt Damon fights alien monsters side-by-side with Chinese soldiers, the film sometimes feels like a spectacular big-budget action epic with a golden-age western-style hero. But the makers of “The Great Wall” succeed where many westerns fear to tread, namely by un-ironically valorizing the selfless collectivism that has become a cultural touchstone of modern Chinese cinema. “The Great Wall” has significant problems—namely with Damon and sidekick Pedro Pascal’s lack of bromantic chemistry—but chief among its rewards is its ability to marry its Eastern and Western sensibilities.

Damon and Pascal play William and Tovar, respectively, wandering European mercenaries who are captured by the Chinese army of the Nameless Order shortly after they slay a mysterious green monster. The monster, they are told, is a “Tei Tao,” one of a horde of creatures that attacks the now-famous Great Wall of China once every 60 years. William and Tovar are initially unmoved by the Nameless Order’s considerable plight; they want to make their fortunes by stealing gunpowder from their hosts, and selling it to European traders. But eventually, William and Tovar’s agendas drift apart after William becomes seduced by the formal control and selfless zeal that defines the Nameless Order.

And who wouldn’t be impressed? The Nameless Order marches around in colorful suits of armor that come in hues of indigo, crimson and cerulean. They launch themselves at their enemies using pulleys, bungee cords, hot-air balloons, boulder-spewing catapults, and many, many arrows. Each crowd shot in this film is remarkable, but not because director Zhang Yimou (“Hero,” “House of Flying Daggers“) and his assistant directors know how to direct extras. On the contrary, the impassive faces of the Nameless Order’s soldiers remind us that all of these people, together, are remarkable. In that sense, the scene where William admits that he killed a Tei Tao “alone,” without the aid of Tovar or his slain mercenary colleagues, is a significant reminder of the film’s communal ideology: William, as an undisciplined loner, must prove that he’s worth just as much as a selfless Chinese soldier. 

The film’s action scenes also exemplify a sense of precise, shared responsibility that one rarely sees in action-spectaculars. The army works together as a unit, just as the Tei Tao do. You can imagine how hard that philosophy might be to enforce given that it demands a big enough budget to focus on two warring armies’ clashing maneuvers. But no, the film’s action set pieces are not only thrillingly large-scale, but visually rapturous, despite a preponderance of computer-generated imagery. There are a handful of well-choreographed and well-directed, Damon-centric action sequences, but it’s very easy to be seduced by scenes that focus on impersonal warfare. In the latter scenes, the art department flexes their collective muscles with every lionhead-shaped helmet and barbed offensive weapon. Who could remain unmoved after watching a group of individuals dangle, thrust, and throw everything they’ve got at a legion of deranged-looking creatures?

Unfortunately, the film slows down whenever it becomes a buddy comedy starring William and Tovar. If I had to guess, I’d say that screenwriter Tony Gilroy (“Duplicity,” “The Bourne Legacy“) was brought on to the film to punch up Damon and Pascal’s wobbly scenes of light banter. But there’s no spark between the two actors. In these scenes, Damon and Pascal perform time-honored roles that you’ll find in many Asian films: the Caucasian performers who look like they wandered onto the wrong set and are unsure of what acting is. Damon orates through clenched teeth, which suits his fight scenes, but makes him sound constipated. Combine that with a weird Irish-inflected accent that presumably is meant to be generically European—his character boasts about fighting in various European conflicts—and you’ve got a crucial black hole where your leading man should be.

Thankfully, “The Great Wall” isn’t really about Damon’s character. In fact, it works best when he’s part of a group, though he does predictably drift into a leadership role eventually. William’s story is an assimilation narrative, after all, one where the hero sees the error of his past and tries to fit into a society that values utilitarian goals over individual needs. “The Great Wall” is unlike any American blockbuster you’ve seen, a conservative movie with action set pieces that are actually inventive and thrilling enough to be worthwhile. See it on as big a screen as you can.

The point is that in China, it is the group working together for the group that defines what China is. While in America it is the individual doing his “own thing” under the watchful eyes of his approved overseer. No wonder there is a clash in cultures.

  • China – The group works together as one.
  • America – The individual is supreme and does his “own thing” alone.

And no wonder why many Americans despise this move with it’s pretense that the group can accomplish great things for all, as opposed to a lone hero that accomplishes amazing feats, basks in endless glory, climbs to the top of a mountain of gold and gets the girl in the end.

Never the less, America withstanding, the reviews from the rest of the world were interesting…

I just saw it in Romania in a good 3d cinema. The movie tells a legend. And it tells it so beautifully! The cinematography is breathtaking and for all the duration I was more than a movie spectator, I felt part of that legend, a character from that story, present among the troops defending the wall. If a movie succeeds in delivering such an experience, the rest is not important anymore.

In this point, I don t care anymore about plot holes or historical inaccuracies, because I came to cinema to see a fantasy, a Chinese legend with monsters and heroes. And there I was, in a war story, set in a different world, filled with amazing elements of the old Chinese culture, surrounded by exceptional warriors, beautiful landscapes and bloodthirsty monsters. I am very saddened to see the negativity among critics and public surrounding this movie. Complaining about historical inaccuracies or being racist about the mix of races is so misplaced. I hope people will go see it and ignore the bad criticism and prejudices about it.

-There are many legends about The Great Wall, this is one of them

And here’s one from China…

I'm Chinese and I don't think to have Matt Damon as the main character is a white-washing or anything racist. 

Some foreigners are needed to show foreigner's perspective of the magnificent China : the Great Wall, the weapons, the army, etc.While the CGI, costume designers and production staffs are whites, 90%+ of the casts are Chinese. Even the directors are Chinese. The director Zhang Yimou pick Damon by his artistic choice. 

This is not a Chinese film, nor a Western film, this is definitely a collaboration, which prove that if we human, from East, and West, if we trust each other and to work together, we could achieved great things. 

If even Chinese are not offended, why white people called this film racist?

-The Opposite of White-washing

Scene from the Great Wall.

Some Americans enjoyed the movie…

I'll be honest, I thought that this movie will be very bad. 

Came out in the month where movies expected to be blessed with negative reviews, it was no surprise that I thought it would be one of those ill-fated movies.

In the end, I've underestimated it.

"The Great Wall" follows William (Matt Damon), a mercenary who tries to obtain the "Black Powder", a deadly explosive, only to get caught in a battle against monsters that awakens every 60 years. 

For those who doubt that it will be good, mark my words: Don't underestimate this movie. 

The movie was a surprise all the way to finish. 

The acting was great, The visuals were amazing, the cinematography was breathtaking, and the action were incredible. 

Matt Damon as always gives a fine performance as the hero (Heck, even his Mandarin, although only a word, is very good). 

Andy Lau were also great as Strategist Wang in his first Hollywood movie. 

The biggest surprise was the female lead played by Jing Tian, she's really good and surprisingly, pretty fluent in English. William Dafoe (I not expect him to be in this movie) is also very great. 

Lu Han (Yes EXO-L's! It's EXO's Luhan!) is a scene stealer. 

Although he has a small role, He's very good at acting and truly one of my favorite characters in the movie. 

My criticism was it's plot. 

It's basic idea is like Independence Day with Chinese culture mix. Although it actually worked very well, but *SPOILER ALERT!!!* Kill the queen or we all die?", come on writers, you can do better than this. 

Another one is the length. 

A 100 minute movie isn't enough for a story with this kind of scale. If only the studio made it like 2 hours, it would be better for more character development and understanding the story.

Additionally, I don't understand all the negative reviews, especially from Chinese audiences. 

I'm a Chinese-Indonesian, and I absolutely love this movie. 

I saw criticism about the main lead being American. 

I'm telling you, there are 5 main leads in the movie, and *SPOILER ALERT!!!* 3 of them are Chinese, Plus most of the focus IMO are directed to the Chinese main characters. 

Another one is that the movie isn't based on the legend of The Great Wall. 

This is a fantasy movie, so of course it's not! 

The film even mentioned it in the beginning!!! 

To me, these negative reviews are purely hate for this movie. I think that most of them haven't seen the movie and simply hate it for no reason.

Overall it was a surprisingly good movie, and arguably one of the greater movies in January. If you want to see a fantasy movie, this is a perfect movie for you.

-I've never thought it would be THIS good.

 

Yes. Those that did enjoy the movie were much like this fella…

I can't stand these unfair and unreliable reviews.

So, this is my first review for a Chinese film. I would say I felt the same feeling of excitement when I watched Lord of the rings (LOTR). 

I even like The Great Wall more than the hobbit.

We've watch hundreds of movies with bad reviews and we knew that as long a film has at least one 10/10 fair review, don't hesitate to watch a movie. 

Ignore the noise of negative people. 

Let them get sick with their views.This is great movie that combines history and fiction. Enjoy it! Just like what the actors said.. "TRUST"!!!

-I enjoy it a lot. Ignore the critics.

Maybe it’s just misunderstood…

I love the movie. If you haven't decided yet whether to watch it or not, well, it is a very entertaining popcorn flick with a LOT of monsters. Enjoyable to look at and pleasant to listen to.Here I just want to point out a few facts about the movie that many people might get wrong, mostly because of their preconceptions.

Spoilers ahead.

First, there are apparently some "white savior" moments in the movie, but there are also a lot of "Chinese savior" moments. So who saves whom doesn't really matter. The wall was miles long and there were hundreds of thousands of monsters, so Matt Damon shooting down three of them doesn't really make that much difference. 

The true contribution that he made in the movie was that he helped capture a monster alive with his whaling experience in Spain, which makes perfect sense because the other characters, living in inland areas, probably hadn't seen a whale in their life. People simply have different experiences and helping out each other is great.

Second, the relationship between the male and female protagonists was not a romantic one. In the end, they became two soldiers who understood, admired and trusted each other. It is not a clichéd love story. So, the white guy did not get the Asian girl -- and there is nothing wrong if they did love each other.Third, the movie is very fast paced and full of details. Reserve your judgment when you think there is a plot hole or something like that. Have a happy discussion with others before rushing to an angry or condescending conclusion. 

For example, I noticed someone mentioned in his or her review, as an example to show how stupid the movie is, that the catapults could not move and yet could hit the target at different spots. The fact is the catapults could move and the movie spent one second showing you exactly that. 

Also, the Crane Corp, which I heard many people claimed to be useless, was actually practical and powerful in killing and distracting the monsters in that the only weak spots of the monsters were the eyes, which were difficult to aim at from far away, and the monsters were much more dangerous horizontally than vertically.

Last but not least, I'd like to talk about the message of the movie. Some people think the movie just wants to make money. Some think it is China's propaganda tool. While I believe there is some truth in both arguments, the movie can be interpreted from a much brighter perspective and is by no means meaningless. 

Actually the movie has so many meanings that it struggles a little bit to deliver all of them. Trust, greed, courage, sacrifice, and so on. Too many for the movie to have a definite and strong theme. One interesting interpretation I read is that the movie intends to convey that the US and China should work together to defeat terrorism, the core of which is an ideology whose iconic color is also green (like the queen of the monsters). 

My own understanding though is one simple message: what truly differentiates us is not race or culture, but what we believe and how we act. Not a wholly fresh idea but definitely a peaceful one, especially from a U.S.-China co-production.

To put it in a nutshell, the movie is much smarter and much more considerate than many people think. I hope there will be sequels or prequels that can be even better.

-An easily misunderstood movie 

Personally, I thought the movie was pretty epic, but swords and monsters isn’t really my thing. So I gave it a “6”. But the negative review are wholly out of line. If you want a story about magic, barbarians, and conflict on a grand scale this movie does deliver. But it’s made in China, so that is going to automatically turn off the American sheeple. There’s no denying that fact.

Sheeple hate the Chinese. It’s what’s bread into them after four sustained and aggressive anti-China propaganda years. It’s a fact of life. It’s what it is. No more and no less.

And, here’s the video that was released in association with this movie. It’s pretty good, and was on the tops in China for a couple of years. I have it zipped up, and presented when you click on the link. As I stated earlier, this is the music video that came out along with the movie. It’s how Chinese Cinema seems to release movies these days…

And then there is this movie…

Passengers

But this movie was well received in America.

The spaceship, Starship Avalon, in its 120-year voyage to a distant colony planet known as the "Homestead Colony" and transporting 5,258 people has a malfunction in one of its sleep chambers. As a result one hibernation pod opens prematurely and the one person that awakes, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is stranded on the spaceship, still 90 years from his destination.

“Passengers is a truly brilliant movie, it’s hard to place it into a genre, but it is very much a sci fi love story. The concept is a great one, and it poses a fabulous question, could you force someone to spend their life with you, or live a solitary life. The idea is very original and very clever, the special effects are breathtaking, and the cinematography is first class. The main trio of actors do a superb job, but it’s the dazzling Jennifer Lawrence that stood out for me.”

Here’s the zipped music video that was released in China along with the movie. The song itself was a long-duration hit as well. I don’t think that it did so well in the USA. It seems that there wasn’t enough “booty wagging” and transgenders LGBT activity to render it of interest to Americans.

And what this is all about…

The next video is not associated with a movie. It is just a simple Chinese music video. Note that it is about the future and the dreams that we all have.

Indeed this is what it’s all about…

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And seriously folks, I do wish and hope that your “Tomorrow 9” occurs for you. You have my wishes and good will. – Metallicman.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Chinese Music Index here…

Chinese Music Index

Articles & Links

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Ghosts, spirits, strange apparitions, and other mysteries that come from the non-physical reality and enter our physical experience.

Here, in this article we will spend a little bit of time discussing the non-physical envelope that surrounds our physical reality. This is the realm of the “spirit world” and consists of many strange and interesting sights, sounds and apparitions. It tends to frighten, but that is just ignorance and superstition influences. In reality, the non-physical world is just as real as the physical world is, with one exception. Our human senses are not able to peer into the reality that it cannot see.

But…

In many instance, the machines and the devices that we construct, are able to sense it. And if we configure the equipment to look for the right things, we could well be astounded at what we might find.

What would we find?

Well, aside from the natural world, we would find people and places, and things, and activities that are intended to be hidden from our human observation.

A quick review

For those of you who have just stumbled on this article in the MM universe, here’s a most basic primer. You know, to put everyone on the “same page” in regards to ideas and concepts.

We are consciousness.We are not a person, nor a body, nor a brain. We are consciousness. We temporarily reside within a body. But we are not that body. It’s much like this picture describes…

We do not share a universe. Our singular consciousness moves from static world-line to static world-line. We move from one world-line to another by our thoughts. Thoughts are the ONLY thing that consciousness can control.

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Instead of sharing a physical universe, where we are a brain that controls the movement of a physical person inside that universe (the Newtonian reality), we are something else. We are consciousness. Which is a collection of very, very, VERY tiny particles (many, many times smaller than atoms). And our consciousness moves from one frozen snapshot in time to the next.

Time is how this movement is perceived. In our universe there is no such thing as time. It just simply drops out of the equations. And what we have left is a universe of quanta. It is a quantum universe of possibilities. And the reality is that there is an infinite (or near infinite) number of world-lines. These are frozen “snap shots in time” that our consciousness moves through and navigates by thought.

So, over all, it pretty much looks like this graphic below. If we map out each world-line as a “dot”, and place the most-likely or highest-probability world-lines that our thoughts will take us, then our life-line would look something like this…

Our consciousness travels the MWI, world-line by world-line at the speed of thought. We view this movement as the “passage of time”. In this topography, we see a three dimensional landscape that represents the highest probability world-lines that we might visit at any given moment in our life.

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Thoughts are extremely important. What we think about steers us towards the world-lines that we inhabit.

  • If we think “bad” thoughts we will head towards world-lines with “bad” events.
  • If we think “neutral” thoughts we will head towards world-lines with “neutral ” content.
  • If we think “happy” thoughts, we will head towards world-lines full of happy events.

Everything is real to us. Each world-line is a real physical world. It is a frozen snapshot of time. And our movement though it is exactly how we experience time.

Our thoughts can influence the kind of life we live. Our thoughts navigate our lives, and while there are are various limitations placed upon us, we ultimately control what happens to us by our thoughts.

Our thoughts control our world-line navigation.

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World-lines are complex. Now each world-line has two components. They are a physical reality, and a non-physical reality. The physical reality is what we can sense with our human body. The non-physical is what we cannot sense with our physical body.

  • Physical-reality is what our human senses can sense, see and observe.
  • Non-Physical-reality is what our human senses are unable to see and observe.

And given the right conditions, the right technology, and the right circumstances, we can sometimes get glimpses of the non-physical world that surrounds us. And we are going to talk about this subject now…

Density Levels and Technological Advancement

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong.  When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted.  

It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance.  

And because it is so important to protect that core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit with the core belief.”

-ThinkSquad, 2015

Quantum particles are ubiquitous throughout our universe.  They are everywhere.  They are primarily comprised of minuscule small vibrating strings that vibrate and resonate at a very high speed or frequency.

[1] Understanding particle physics: 7) particles are quanta
[2] What are quanta? – quantum interactive
[3] A New Map of All the Particles and Forces - Quanta Magazine

As particles collect together in groups, or cluster together, their frequency of vibration shows down.  This has to do with the inherent inertial components of a group creation.    The bigger the group cluster of particles, the slower the frequency of vibration.

Vibrational frequency in the strictest sense that I refer to here, is not the physical component, normally referred to in the chemical sciences.  But rather the behavior of the vibrating strings themselves.  This is quantum level vibration, as opposed to atomic level vibration and the equivalent change in potentials.

Note: On the dimension of the physical.  The purpose of this article is to describe in an easy way, very difficult concepts.  To do so, certain “crutches” need to be employed, which many not be wholly accurate.  Truth be told, there is no physical space at all.  But the quanta themselves create this illusion.  In so doing, they create layers or dimensional boundaries.  Space and the illusion of space is one such creation.  Thus, within this boundary we can see that particles tend to cluster together in groups upon this fabric or cloth which is raw dimensionless space.

Those readers who have been following the nonsense that is often available on the Internet will be quite confused here.  When I refer to density, I am specifically referring to quantum level behaviors of groups of particles within a dimensional framework.

I am absolutely NOT referring to any of the “New age” redefinitions of “density”.  These new definitions are confusing.  These are definitions such as in the Cassiopaea and Ra materials related to extraterrestrial beings and consciousness.

Magnitude

Higher orders of existence utilize widely dispersed groups of quantum clusters.

Phew! Did I just say that?

OK. In other words, the more complex a "thing"... the greater the number of quanta that are are involved.

A pencil (you do remember those things, don't you?) has a set amount of quanta associated with it. yet, a living creature, such as a cow, would have many, many, MANY more quanta associated with it.

The difference between a pencil and a cow, can be considered a "higher order of existence".

And as the number of these quantum cluster increase, so does the number of interactions that they have with each other. Which is known as "entanglement". And thus they tend to disperse as they get more, and more entangled.

This way, they can maintain high frequencies of vibration, while maintaining a soul cloud consciousness.

This is important.  Read it again and study it again if your do not understand it completely.

As collections of quanta increase in size, so does the accumulated properties of the aggregate. It's synergistic, not additive.

2 + 2 = 8

As the properties of the aggregate increase, so does the resultant vibrations of those clusters. 

Vibration?

Vibration is this understanding relates to the wave properties of the quanta. While a bare and lonely individual quanta might have a low and sluggish pulse, when it interacts and entangles with other quanta, the vibrational rate increases. The more quanta that becomes entangled, the greater the vibrational levels attained.

At a certain threshold, the vibrational frequency becomes one that can support a consciousness. Which is pretty much why pencils don't have a consciousness, while cattle do.

Lower orders of existence rely on large, closely packed, groups of clusters.  These tend to vibrate at slower rates dependent on their size.

Such as a pencil, a stone, and a glass of water.

Because there are functional limits on the quanta that one can absorb into ones cloud as a function of density inertia, entitles tend to strive to grow and modify their quantum existence in such a way as to operate in higher vibratory levels.

Obviously the universe is populated with intelligence and consciousness. Otherwise, you would not be reading this. It is a natural evolution that quanta entangle with other quanta.

And part of this evolution is the increase in vibration of the entangled bodies.

As the size of the entanglement increases, so does the complexity of the entangled body as a whole, and at some point in time, consciousness evolves and manifests.

Thus, an entity that has a very large quantum cloud and that maintains it successfully at a high frequency of vibration is considered to have a high “spiritual” or “quantum” (light) density.

Many entangled quanta = rapid and profound vibrations.

These vibrations are known as "high frequency" and are associated with light. Thus they are considered to be of light density.

Their various frequencies overlap in great, beautiful patterns.

While, an entity, with a smaller quantum cloud, or one that operates at a lower frequency is considered to have a high (thick) density.

One must think of density as a jar containing all the quanta of a given entity.

An “advanced” entity will have a big jar full of quanta.  But that quanta will have a lot of space to move around in.

Conversely, a more “primitive” entity would have a small, mostly layered, jar of quanta.  The quanta would be clustered in a corner or on the bottom of the jar in a thick pile of goo.

We thus, say that the more advanced entity has a container (jar) of quanta that is less dense than the novice entity.

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Personally, I don’t like these terms because they are confusing.

Physical manifestations of quanta are slower and closer together in the physical world (thus, denser).  We also thus use the term to describe a lower state of energy.  Thus possibly, generating two polar opposites in meaning.

For all purposes here, please consider that one should have a quanta signature that is organized in pure basic forms of great physical expanse.  That would be opposed to tight, dense forms of quanta clusters.

Structure and order

Further, Higher frequency quanta organized as smaller discrete packets follow a more organized or pure structure.

Quanta clumps together though entanglements. These form structures, or "packets".

Quanta can combine together into “building blocks”. Much like this (as an example)…

The building blocks…

Their combined “dances” are more harmonic.  The coarser, less organized quanta follow a chaotic pattern.

(Not especially accurate, but good enough for the model that is presented here.  All quanta form patterns.  The more chaotic patterns are just extremely complex relationships, and thus appear to be confused, disorganized and complex.) 

A chaotic system is one in which infinitesimal differences in the starting conditions lead to drastically different results as the system evolves.

This concept was summarized by mathematician Edward Lorenz,” Chaos (is at the point) when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”

There’s an important distinction to make between a chaotic quantum system and a random quanta system.

Given the starting conditions, a chaotic system is entirely deterministic.

A random system, on the other hand, is entirely non-deterministic, even when the starting conditions are known.

That is, with enough information, the evolution of a chaotic system is entirely predictable, but in a random system there’s no amount of information that would be enough to predict the system’s evolution.  All of this predictability defines inter-dimensional order.

Variations

Other races, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, operate at different density levels.

Understanding that consciousness is connected with the number of entangled quanta, it should thus be evident that it is also tied to energy levels of existence.

A snail would have a different energy level than a dog.

A tiger would have a different energy level than a human.

A human would have a different energy level than an extraterrestrial from Tralfamador.

Since we can only perceive those at the most coarsest levels (the densest), we often are ignorant of many entities that cohabit the planet with us.

Sometimes, due to various physical events, we can occasionally perceive these other entities.

When we do they are often misinterpreted as spirits, sprites, ghosts, angels, demons and the like.    These creatures exist, but humans have a very hard time distinguishing what they perceive.

Generally, higher order frequency beings are usually benign and harmless.

It the fear of the unknown that causes many false and deceptive myths that propagate about these creatures through history.

Death

When a creature dies, the body remains but the consciousness exits the reality section of the world-line. It exists. It’s just that we humans are not able to “see” wave forms. We can only see physical things when the consciousness is attached to bodies in the particle state.

With the advent of cameras, and the technology that enables high “shutter speeds” and extended wavelength records, we can sometimes observe the departed in wave form. While the body is now long dead and has been removed.

This is actually quite common in hospitals and nursing homes. Such as this example.

See anything unusual about this picture?

Empty hospital room in a Senior Care Facility in the United States.

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Look at the mirror.

Here’s a close up view of the mirror…

Closeup view of a mirror in an empty Senior Care Facility inside of America.

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Spirits and other creatures that operate at higher density levels do exist and are quite common.

They contain both terrestrial derived entities and extraterrestrial entities.  Most do not really care to have dealings with humans.

And since they are of wave duality, they are able to enter the MWI at any point, independent of time. Which provides us some very interesting observations.

Here’s the spirit of a little (American Indian) girl wandering in the woods late at night and startling a buck (male deer) at a feeding station where a trail-cam was able to photograph the encounter.

Deer sees ghost on trailcam

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The ability to see humans, in the non-physical form is very common. They are generally associated with ghosts and spirits, and many people are fearful of them, but it need not be the case. When a person stops traveling the MWI in the particle form, they continue to do so in the wave form. And thus people can (if they are sensitive), or equipment can (if it is properly configured) observe and record these encounters…

Ghost caught on CCV outside a nursing home. Can you see him?

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Which brings up the interesting subject of “phasing“.

Phasing Ability

Some of the higher density entities, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial, have the ability to “phase” in and out of the lower densities.

it is the ability to lower your aggregate vibrational level to a point where simpler, and denser, entities and creatures can observe and interact with you.

Or, raise their level. Thus making them invisible to lower density entities.

This ability can make them invisible to humans on demand.  They do not need a machine, device or technology to cloak their person or activities.

Only the more dense entities need these types of devices.

In phasing, the energy state and vibration rates change out of the normal physical visual range (as seen by humans).  To be able to do this, the body must be capable of handling higher vibratory frequencies and states of existence.

Other animals, with different optical cones and different ways that their brains perceive vision, can often times see these entities, even when humans are unable to see them.

The principle behind this is simple.

Perception comes in many forms.

The form most commonly relied upon by humans is eyesight.  Human eyesight is a very limited mechanism.  We can only see in a very narrow band of frequencies and wavelengths.

Most of the universe operates at frequencies far higher than we can perceive.

For us to see these “other” things, we must either [1] speed up our ability to perceive, or [2] slow the frequency of vibration of the observed object down.

When a frequency of vibration of a given object is changed, it is known as “phasing”.

When the frequency speed is slowed down in such a way as it becomes observable by humans, we call that “phasing in and out of existence”.

The idea and concept that most other beings, entities, consciousness, and objects are unobservable to humans because of our limited range of perception is a fundamental one.

We, as humans, only observe a very small part of the world that we live in.

An example of phasing

Here we have a human (or humanoid creature) wearing a suit that enables them to “phase in and out” of the human observed reality.

The mystery of the Solway Spaceman - BBC News
The Solway Firth Photo, 1964,(Spaceman) UFO Casebook Files

The Solway Firth Photo, 1964

On 24th May 1964, Jim Templeton, a fireman from Carlisle in the North of England, took his young daughter out to the marches overlooking the Solway Firth to take some photographs. Nothing untoward happened, although both he and his wife noticed that an unusual aura in the atmosphere. n unusual aura in the atmosphere.
There was a kind of electric charge in the air, though no storm came. Even nearby cows seemed upset by it.

Some days later Mr Templeton got his photographs processed by the chemist, who said that it was a pity that the man who had walked past had spoiled the best shot of Elizabeth holding a bunch of flowers. Jim was puzzled. There had been nobody else on the marshes nearby at the time.

But sure enough, on the picture in question there was a figure in a silvery white space suit projecting at an odd angle into the air behind the girl's back, as if an unwanted snooper had wrecked the shot.

The case was reported to the police and taken up by Kodak, the film manufacturers, who offered free film for life to anyone who could solve the mystery when their experts failed.

It was not, as the police at first guessed, a simple double exposure with one negative accidentally printed on top of another during processing. It was, as Chief Superintendent Oldcorn quickly concluded, just "one of those things... a freak picture."

A few weeks later Jim Templeton received two mysterious visitors. He had never heard of MIBs: the subject was almost unknown in Britain then. But the two men who came to his house in a large Jaguar car wore dark suits and otherwise looked normal. The weird thing about them was their behavior.

They only referred to one another by numbers and asked the most unusual questions as they drove Jim out to the marshes. They wanted to know in minute detail about the weather on the day of the photograph, the activities of local bird life and odd asides like that.

Then they tried to make him admit that he had just photographed an ordinary man walking past. Jim responded politely, but nevertheless rejected their idea, at which they became irrationally angry and hustled themselves into the car, driving off and leaving him.

The fire officer had to hike five miles across country to get home.

- Landon Howell Owner & Editor - juiceenewsdaily.com

Examples of Consciousness phasing to wave forms…

Here’s some more examples of people who have died and the consciousness is still attached to the physical reality. Here’s another hospital CCV camera. On it was the short, few-second long video of a ghostly girl walking down the hallway…

The quanta of the deceased can sometimes be filmed

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Here’s another hospital CCV camera capture…

Children’s hospital.

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This ghostly figure was seen near the children’s ward at Leeds General Infirmary by hospital worker Andrew Milburn. There have been several stories of the sounds of footsteps in the corridors with no one around but nothing had been caught on camera.

Ghosts appear to be all over hospitals, don’t you know.

Spirit in the elevator.

They can be recorded in elevators.

This unsettling image was first posted to Reddit in 2014 by user EskimoJake. They claim that their friend who is a doctor, took this picture while working at a Bolivian hospital in 2010.

Supposedly, the doctor and his friends didn’t initially notice the elevator door opening as they were too busy laughing and joking around. When they did finally see it, there was no one inside.

She has nice long hair.

If you take a closer look at the ghostly figure, you can see that it appears to be a female with long, black hair. Her face looks pale and gaunt and she seems to be wearing a hospital gown.

Has the doctor actually managed to photograph a ghost in the elevator? If so, could it be that of a former patient? Perhaps even someone who may have passed away while being treated at this very hospital?

Ghost Nurse

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There is very little information available about this photo other than that it was taken at St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At first glance, it doesn’t appear that the camera has captured anything unusual at all. That is until you spot the ghostly nurse standing on the far side of the bed.

St. Francis Hospital was founded in 1955 and some claim that this photograph may show the ghost of a former nurse who worked there. With her long, white apron and hair neatly tucked under her hat, the figure’s appearance certainly resembles a nurse from that era.

The Little Girl in The Lunatic Asylum

This photo was taken in the Grevillia Wing of the Beechworth Lunatic Asylum in Victoria, Australia by ghost hunters Rayleen Kable and Allen Tiller. They took the picture while investigating the grounds at Beechworth and believe that it shows the spirit of a young girl kneeling on the floor.

The figure certainly does look like a child. It appears to be wearing a nightgown and it looks as though it is holding something in its right hand, possibly a doll or teddy bear.

Beechworth Asylum was famous for its lax rules regarding institutionalization. With only two signatures, a person could be committed. Almost ten thousand people died in the building, the patients often restrained and treated with electroshock therapy.

Beechworth is reportedly haunted by the ghost of a young, Jewish woman who was mysteriously thrown to her death from a window. Because of strict religious beliefs, her body lay decomposing on the ground for two days while a rabbi came from Melbourne to officially move the body. Several visitors claim they’ve even seen a young girl under the window where the incident happened.

Another traumatic tale is that of a missing patient who couldn’t be found for weeks. Finally his body was discovered by a local dog named Max near the gatehouse at the edge of the property. A search party was assembled to search the area and they eventually found the patient’s body up a tree. Since then, people have reported seeing a man wandering around the gatehouse at night.

Countless other paranormal sightings have taken place at Beechworth Lunatic Asylum. Visions of doctors walking down dark hallways, screams, nurses kneeling by bedsides, one ghost hunter says a demonic voice told him to ‘get out’ and leave the asylum.

Is it possible that this photograph has captured the ghostly vision one of the former patients of Beechworth?

Ghost of Patient Appears in Wheelchair

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This photo first appeared online sometime around 2012. It was supposedly captured in the Clemente Alvarez Emergency Hospital in Argentina by a staff member known only as Diego.

Here’s another photo of a ghost in a hospital. This one comes with his own wheelchair thingy of-sorts thing-of-a-jig!

Roaming the hallways.

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Around the same time, this photo was taken in the Kith Haven Assisted Living nursing home in Flint, Michigan. It shows a very similar figure rolling down a hallway in a wheelchair.

The employee who captured the picture said she saw it with her own eyes and quickly grabbed her phone to take a photo.

The apparition appears to have dark, sunken eyes and a wide open mouth. It also looks rather decrepit and thin. The white shirt that the figure is wearing seems to be too large for its frail frame.

And what of this?

The Hospital Demon

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This spine chilling photo first appeared on social media in 2014 and since then has become rather well known. The are several stories of its origin however the most common one is that a nurse in a hospital took a screen shot of a security camera that was monitoring patients in the ward. She claims that she saw a demon-like figure walking up and down the bed of one particular patient. It had long black legs, and eerie slender fingers.

When she went to the ward to check on the patient there was no sign of the figure in the room, however the patient’s vitals began declining rapidly and the person passed away shortly after.

While many believe the nurse’s story to be true, several skeptics claim that the ‘demon’ is nothing more than a series of objects that are coincidentally lined up, giving the effect of a lurking creature.

La Planchada

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Opened in Mexico City in 1847, Hospital Juarez is an active medical center known for sightings of La Planchada (“the ironed lady”), a ghostly nurse from the mid-1900s who appears in a perfectly pressed nurse’s uniform.

Over the years, La Planchada has come to be known for treating patients in the hospital’s emergency section, often bringing about miraculous recoveries. This photo is believed by many to be the only one to have ever captured proof of the ghostly nurse as she makes her rounds.

Like many ghost stories, there are several versions of tale of La Planchada. Some say she was a nurse in love with a doctor who rejected her and drove her to suicide; others claim she would euthanize patients to relieve their pain. Whatever her origins, La Planchada is known as a benevolent spirit and there probably isn’t a patient in Hospital Juarez who wouldn’t be happy to see her.

And there is this vision of the right instant in time when the camera shutter clicks on the right spot at the right time and discovers… this.

The quanta of the deceased can sometimes be filmed

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When a person dies, their quanta starts to detach from their physical selves and begins to enter the other dimensions in the universe.

Oh, here I go again! Not being specific enough.

The non-physical reality surrounds the physical reality in layers, like an onion. And many Eastern religions have mapped these layers and given them names like "astral plane", "causal plane", etc.

Once the consciousness is in the wave form it can do many things. Namely it can travel. Travel.

It can travel in the various physical reality.

It can travel through the various (onion layers) of the non-physical reality.

It can enter "the tunnel of light" and depart this universe and enter the universe of soul. From when the consciousness originated.

But...

It can travel within the MWI; the various world-lines itself. This it can do, as the MWI are part of our "physical universe". But many choose not to do so simply because it is rather boring for them to do.

To some this looks like ghosts and spirits, but there is no reason to be fearful.

This is a natural aspect of quantum realignment.

On occasion, due to specific atmospheric conditions, sometimes entities of souls can have various aspects of their being photographed.  When this happens, we are actually photographing the quanta “phasing” from the physical to another dimensional state.

Our equipment can record the wave lengths during transition.

Consciousness has form.

Did you notice something?

When a person’s quanta is photographed in wave form, or the transition to it (via “phasing”) it’s not a floating globe (as I have depicted throughout MM). It is the general shape and form of a body.

This is very important.

The consciousness has a FORM. It’s form tends to consist of the upper torso, and the head. Legs and arms might be present, but not always.

Fears, Frauds, and Boogiemen…

Now, let’s broach the uncomfortable reality. There are many, many frauds out there masquerading as actual events. Thus making it very difficult to compile a list of real examples of visions of the non-physical reality.

Thus, simply because there are so many hoaxes prevalent out there, anything out of the normal is discounted as a hoax, and a fraud. This is intentional.

On one hand, you have “experts” who use this avenue to acquire prestige within their respective fields. Such as in the Science Fiction movie “Contact” with actress Jodie Foster. In that movie was a couple of characters; Mr. David Drumlin, and James Woods (Michael Kitz) who played that role. They thwarted her every move, and constantly blocked funding, all so that he could climb the rings of power within the United States government. Personal power, and wealth accumulation, over the truth and science.

Photo of “David Drumlin”, as portrayed by Tom Skerritt from “Contact” (1997), alongside James Woods (Michael Kitz)

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And then on the other hand, you have profiteers. They create “ghost” websites and then generate content to scare people with it. These individuals create photos and videos to amuse, scare and titillate, and derive personal profit from ad revenue and product placement. Often their forgeries are rather good, or at least better than amateurs.

  • Top 10 Ghost WebsitesParanormal | Higgypop

    Then, of course, you have amateurs. These people just throw together some kind of hoax for “shits and giggles”. Their motivations are unclear, their ultimate goals are kept to themselves.

    And then finally, you have real mysteries. These are actual “real deal” events that cannot be discounted away oh so easily. These events are important because they offer us a glimpse into a world that we are not apt to observe normally. You might come across a photo here, or there, or a video on you-tube. But with the great collection of hoaxes out there, it’s really difficult to find convincing examples.

    Let’s look at a couple borderline cases…

What of ghosts?

You can see all sorts of things on the internet. But what is true and what is fake?

In this instance, you most certainly have a cat hissing at something at the other side of the door, and the housewife is not seeing anything strange. That is obvious. What is odd is the image of a ghostly figure in the door.

Was this figure photoshopped there? Intentionally, you understand, to create a ghostly narrative? Or, was the “back story” accurate?

The back story…

Supposedly, this image was captured on a computer cam. The cat was behaving strangely and hissing at thin air. No one saw the spirit, it was only recorded on the computer.

This photo dates back to 2013, perhaps even earlier. It isn’t known where this took place, but it is believed to be somewhere in North America. It could be a hoax, or genuine. No one will ever know.

It is provided here as an example only.

You see, it dos not matter to us whether or not it is a hoax. It is just a good illustration that different species can see different things. In this case the cat can sense things that the human woman cannot.

As we have discussed, the non-physical world for a cat is different than the non-physical world of a human. Thus they can sense things that humans cannot.

This isn’t just MM talking. This is well established physical and biological understandings. Different species can see different things and all of us perceive the physical reality differently than others.

What of ghosts of loved ones?

Here’s another borderline case. This backstory is much better, than a computer happened to be on that recorded a cat interaction with a porch door. This is a an intentionally left-on security camera.

An Atlanta woman believes her home security camera spotted her son’s ghost.

On January 5, 2019, Jennifer Hodge was in her bedroom when she received an beeping notification: her Nest security camera had spotted a person in the kitchen. The rest is a story right off the televisions show “Night Gallery”.

“I was laying in bed watching TV with my daughter, and I was just about asleep,” Hodge said in a Facebook post. 

“The phone was between us, and I got a notification saying someone was in the kitchen. 

My daughter was like, ‘Mum, there’s a person in the kitchen. It looks like Robbie.’ 

I was stunned. It did look just like him — beard and all.”

Robbie, Michelle’s son, died of an overdose in 2016. He was just 23 years old. Michelle and her daughter were reportedly the only people at home at the time of the recording.

What of ghosts who want to pose in pictures?

Pretty odd stuff.

But check them out. Fakes or real? No one knows.

Mystery Pale Chick.

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One could say it seems like ghosts really like to make an appearance at the parties they weren’t invited to. This is case like that. A group of friends were having a nice Easter brunch and they decided to take a picture of it. There was a mirror next to the table they were sitting at and while there is nobody but the people supposed to be there sitting at the table on one side of the photo, there is an extra person’s reflection caught in the mirror on the other side of the photo.

It looks like a woman with an extremely pale face, standing next to the table. All of the guests at the brunch claimed there was no one like that there with them and they had no idea who the person caught in the mirror reflection was.

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This picture was taken at Tantallon Castle near North Berwick. A ruined fortress badly damaged by an attack from Oliver Cromwell’s forces in 1651. The figure looks to be in period costume but no mannequins or costumed guides are used at the castle, adding to the mystery of the suspected ghost.

This photograph of the Combermere Abbey library was taken in 1891 by Sybell Corbet.

The figure of a man can faintly be seen sitting in the chair to the left.

His head, collar and right arm on the armrest are clearly discernible. It is believed to be the ghost of Lord Combermere.

Lord Combermere was a British cavalry commander in the early 1800s, who distinguished himself in several military campaigns.

Combermere Abbey, located in Cheshire, England, was founded by Benedictine monks in 1133. In 1540, King Henry VII kicked out the Benedictines, and the Abbey later became the Seat of Sir George Cotton KT, Vice Chamberlain to the household of Prince Edward, son of Henry VIII.

In 1814, Sir Stapleton Cotton, a descendent of Sir George, took the title “Lord Combermere” and in 1817 became became the Governor of Barbados. Today the Abbey is a tourist attraction and hotel.

Lord Combermere died in 1891, having been struck and killed by a horse-drawn carriage.  At the time Sybell Corbet took the above photo, Combermere’s funeral was taking place some four miles away.

The photographic exposure, Corbet recorded, took about an hour. It is thought by some that during that time a servant might have come into the room and sat briefly in the chair, creating the transparent image.

This idea was refuted by members of the household, however, testifying that all were attending Lord Combermere’s funeral.

A 13 year old girl takes a selfie in the car. Then discovers a strange boy in the back seat. What is going on?  You can see from her reflection in her sunglasses that the picture was taken while on the road. The adult who is driving the vehicle would know whether there was a kid in the back seat, you would assume.

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So this 13 year old girl takes a selfie in the car while her mother is driving down the road. No one is in the back seat, yet it appears that her photo captures an image of someone int he back seat.

Maybe true. Maybe fake. Who really knows?

Spirit in the balcony.

In 1982, photographer Chris Brackley took a photograph of the interior of London’s St. Botolph’s Church, but never expected what would appear on the film. High in the church’s loft, seen in the upper right-hand corner of his photograph, is the transparent form of what looks like a woman.

According to Brackley, to his knowledge there were only three people in the church at the time the photo was taken, and none of them were in that loft.
According to London Paranormal Database Records…

"Mr. Brackley was later contacted by a builder who recognized the face of one that he had seen in a coffin in the church."

Two chicks pose for a picture and then discover this when developed.

My goodness. This interesting photo was taken sometime around the year 2000 in Manilla, Republic of the Philippines.

According to The Ghost Research Society, two girlfriends were out for a walk one warm night. One of them entreated a passing stranger to photograph them using her cell phone’s camera (hence the low-resolution picture).

The result is shown here, with a transparent figure seeming to tug on the girl’s arm with a firm if friendly grip. Without further information on this photo, we have to admit that the ghost could have been added with image processing software. But if it’s genuine and untouched, it certainly qualifies as one of the best ghost photos around.

It’s pretty creepy.

It’s so very easy to modify pictures these days. Everything is digital, and Photoshop is everywhere. But you know, just because it can be done, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is being done.

Strange green boy.

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There was a controversial photo posted on Instagram by a news anchor, capturing a moment of the party she had thrown the night before. One of her friends was entertaining everybody by playing the guitar and singing, so she captured the whole thing with her phone.

Later, as she was going through the pictures, she noticed something strange in the background. It looked like a young boy peeking around the corner, trying to get a better view on the show.

After she posted the photo on Instagram, a wave of discussions started. People speculated that she faked the whole thing in order to get more media attention that could help her kick off her news anchor career, and others believed it was proof of yet another haunted house. No one can be sure what the truth actually was, but it indeed seemed strange.

Look up the picture and decide for yourself.

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The ghostly object concealed in this spooky Irish snap will really give you a fright. Taken more than 100 years ago, experts tried to explain the hand as trick of light or a ruffle in a shirt. But neither idea works out.

It’s all pretty messed up.

Who is this kid?

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The Amityville house is one of the most famous haunted houses in the world. The tales of the ghosts living in this house have spread so much that they have inspired a huge franchise known as The Amityville Horror.

Before this whole story started going around, the Amityville house was a place like every other and there was, what appeared to be, a happy family living there. One night, the man went crazy and he killed his wife, all of his children, and he committed suicide after that.

From that moment on, people have been claiming that their ghosts have still been living in the house. Paranormal investigators went there to see if there was a truth to that story and they took a photo of a little boy. The curious thing about that photo was that there were absolutely no children around at the time the photo was taken.

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CCTV footage showing a shadowy spectre emerging from a driveway and straight into oncoming traffic.

On November 19, 1995, Wem Town Hall in Shropshire, England burned to the ground. Many spectators gathered to watch the old building, built in 1905, as it was being consumed by the flames.

Tony O’Rahilly, a local resident, was one of those onlookers and took photos of the spectacle with a 200mm telephoto lens from across the street. One of those photos shows what looks like a small, partially transparent girl standing in the doorway.

Nether O’Rahilly nor any of the other onlookers or firefighters recalled seeing the girl there. O’Rahilly submitted the photo to the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena which, in turn, presented it for analysis to Dr. Vernon Harrison, a photographic expert and former president of the Royal Photographic Society.

Harrison carefully examined both the print and the original negative, and concluded that it was genuine. “The negative is a straightforward piece of black-and-white work and shows no sign of having been tampered with,” Harrison said.

But who is the little girl?

Wem, a quiet market town in northern Shropshire, had been ravaged by fire in the past.  In 1677, historical records note, a fire destroyed many of the town's old timber houses.  A young girl named Jane Churm, the legends say, accidentally set fire to a thatched roof with a candle. 

This photo was taken during an investigation of Bachelor’s Grove cemetery near Chicago by the Ghost Research Society (GRS). On August 10, 1991, several members of of the GRS were at the cemetery, a small, abandoned graveyard on the edge of the Rubio Woods Forest Preserve, near the suburb of Midlothian, Illinois.

Reputed to be one of the most haunted cemeteries in the U.S., Bachelor’s Grove has been the site of well over 100 different reports of strange phenomena, including apparitions, unexplained sights and sounds, and even glowing balls of light.

GRS member Mari Huff was taking black and white photos with a high-speed infrared camera in an area where the group had experienced some anomalies with their ghost-hunting equipment.  The cemetery was empty, except for the GRS members.

When developed, this image emerged: what looks like a lonely-looking young woman dressed in white sitting on a tombstone.  Parts of her body are partially transparent and the style of the dress seems to be out of date.

Other ghosts reportedly seen in Bachelor's Grove include figures in monks' clothes and the spirit of a glowing yellow man.

And now for something odd…

Who is the kid?

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This photo, taken on a cell-phone shows a group of girls posing for a picture in the middle of the lounge room. The young girl seen crying in the bottom right corner of the image refused to take part in the picture because she said ‘The little boy was scaring her!’ It wasn’t until later, when her mother was reviewing the photo that she realized what the little girl was talking about.

Take a look between the legs of the girls second and third from the left. You can clearly see the face of a young boy peering out from behind the group. If it was simply a shadow or optical illusion why did the little girl get so scared?

Security guard alerted by motion sensors.

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Theaters are believed by many to be common haunting grounds for ghosts. There is something about their unique atmosphere that seems to attract the supernatural. According to Mary Destany Martin, security guards at the theater at her local high school captured some weird photos of the school’s own resident ghost.

The security guards visited the theater after a motion alarm went off at around 1:00 early one morning. They didn’t see anything but took a photo on their way out, just in case. When reviewing the photo, a guard was shocked to notice the figure of a woman walking down the stairs of what he was certain was an empty theater. The figure appears to be entirely black and white, in stark contrast to the rest of the theater, giving her a strange, otherworldly appearance.

Yes. It’s pretty strange.

Who is this girl?

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One thing is for certain, she was able to trip the motion sensors. So she had substance.

A person appears from thin air.

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This photo was received from Denise Russell.

“The lady in the color photo is my granny,” she says. “She lived on her own until age 94, when her mind started to weaken and had to be moved to an assisted living home for her own safety. At the end of the first week, there was a picnic for the residents and their families. My mother and sister attended. My sister took two pictures that day, and this is one of them.

It was taken on Sunday, 8/17/97, and we think the man behind her is my grandpa who passed away on Sunday, 8/14/84.

We did not notice the man in the picture until Christmas Day, 2000 (granny had since passed away), while browsing through some loose family photos at my parents’ house. My sister thought it was such a nice picture of granny that she even made a copy for mom, but still, nobody noticed the man behind her for over three years!

When I arrived at my parents’ house that Christmas day, my sister handed me the picture and said, “Who do you think this man behind granny looks like?”

It took a few seconds for it to sink in. I was absolutely speechless. The black and white photos show that it really looks like him.

Spiritualist convention in Los Angeles, California.

This photo was taken on November 16, 1968 when Robert A. Ferguson, author of Psychic Telemetry: New Key to Health, Wealth, and Perfect Living, was giving a speech at a Spiritualist convention in Los Angeles, California.

Faintly appearing next to Ferguson is a figure that he later identified as his brother, Walter, who died in 1944 during World War II. At first glance, this might seem to be a double exposure or some kind of darkroom trickery, but this photo is a Polaroid (one of several taken of Ferguson at the time), making any kind of hoaxing quite unlikely.

Sefton Church

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Sefton Church is an ancient structure (started in the 12th century and finished in the early 16th century) in Merseyside, England, just north of Liverpool. This particular photograph was taken inside the church in September, 1999.

According to Brad Steiger’s Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits and Haunted Places, where this photo was found, there was only one other photographer in the church beside the person who took this picture. Neither of them recalled seeing the ghost or any flesh-and-blood person standing there who could account for this image. Because the figure is all in black, it has been theorized that the apparition could be that of a church minister.

It has been reported that a pub next door to the church, called the Punch Bowl, is said to be haunted by the ghost of a man in blue nautical garb, which has been reported there for many years.

A dinner event at St. Mary’s Guildhall in Coventry, U.K.

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On January 22, 1985, the Coventry Freeman organization were having a dinner event at St. Mary’s Guildhall in Coventry, U.K. Everyone in the group had her or his head bowed in prayer when this photo was taken — including a towering, mysterious figure standing top left. The strange cowled spectre appears to be wearing very odd clothing. The clothing looks like a kind of battle armor from the software game “Doom”.

Lord Mayor Walter Brandish, who was present at the dinner, said there was no one at the event who was dressed like that, and he could not explain the presence of the interloper in the photo. St. Mary’s Guildhall dates back to the 14th century and served as a prison for Mary, Queen of Scots.

Posing in a helicopter.

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Mrs. Sayer and some friends were visiting the Fleet Air Arm Station at Yelverton, Somerset, England in 1987 when this photo was taken. They thought it would be cute to take a picture of her sitting in the seat of retired helicopter.

No one, Mrs. Sayer insists, was sitting next to her in the pilot’s seat… although a figure in a white shirt can clearly be seen sitting there.

She told an investigator with the Society for Psychical Research that she  remembered feeling rather cold sitting in that seat, even though it was a hot day.
Other pictures taken at the same time did not come out. Worth noting is that the helicopter was used in the Falklands War, but there is no information as to whether or not a pilot died in that aircraft.

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Kim Davison from Queensland, Australia posted a picture on the Toowoomba Ghost Chasers Facebook page showing what appears to be the ghost of a young girl, who died in the same spot 100 years ago

Merry Christmas.

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It was what seemed to be a completely normal Christmas get-together; people sitting in their living room next to their Christmas tree and a pile of presents. Nothing curious about that at all. At least until someone decided to take a picture of that merry moment. After that, the moment wasn’t so marry anymore.

In the middle of the picture, there seems to be a ghostly figure squatting over the pile of presents. You can clearly see the feet that belong to this mysterious being.

After the photo was analyzed by experts, the conclusion was that the feet probably belong to one of the kids in the picture, and it was nothing more than a glitch in the camera. However, there still is some doubt since the child in question was wearing socks, while the feet in front of the present seem to be bare. Besides that, they are also too large to belong to the little boy in question.

Then you have this absolutely odd-ball photo…

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This photo was taken at Corroboree Rock at Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia in 1959. What does not seem to be a trick of light and shadow is a human form, semi-transparent, wearing what looks like a long white dress or gown. More curious, the figure seems to be holding something in the manner that a person holds a camera or binoculars.

High forehead, long back hair in a mullet style. Appears to be a male, wearing a long white gown, and holding a what?

One possibility is that this is a double exposure of a living person. In 1959, this image would have been captured on film.

If it is not a double exposure and this is a spirit captured on film, then a number of questions arise: [1] What is the entity looking and why? [2] Do they have cameras and binoculars in the afterlife? Or [3] is this an instance of a time slip in which the camera has recorded a scene from a different time?

My goodness!

Now this next picture is something that is concerning and allows your mind to wonder what is going on…

An abandoned house.

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When it comes to abandoned houses, it is quite easy to start a rumor about some paranormal activity. Most of the ghost stories actually start this way; “Once upon a time, there was an abandoned house…”

We’ve all heard something like that already.

However, there is one specific house that has drawn a lot of people’s attention after a picture of a ghostly figure was captured there. No one knows exactly who used to live there or what happened to the people living there previously.

There has been some speculation about different horror stories connected to this house and the ghosts inhabiting it. But the picture was quite clear; someone was standing in the doorway. We can’t be sure if it was just a shadow shaped like a person, but from the look of it, it surely seemed like a ghostly, transparent figure.

And some things are truly WTF!

Like this, for instance…

What is this?

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There was a girl who wanted to take some silly pictures of her cousins while they were playing. Instead of that, she captured something that can hardly be identified as anything else other than a potential paranormal activity.

The weirdest thing about this photo is that it’s impossible to say what we actually see in it. It is clear that there is some weirdly shaped gray and black figure behind the little boy, but it’s impossible to say what it resembles.

It is not a human nor an animal, but it clearly is something that has appeared only in the picture; nobody saw it in the room before or after that.

This picture is definitely unique and different from the others, which is what makes it even more disturbing and mysterious. What do you think the shape in the picture was? Or was it just another attempt to make an ordinary picture go viral?

Indeed, somethings just defy description.

In 2015, Kevin Brown snapped a series of photos on his iPad while he was at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History in Texas. Brown, who was there with his niece and two nephews didn’t see anything strange about the images at the time they were taken. It wasn’t until later that day that his niece noticed something very unsettling in one of the photos…

A big What-The-Fuck is thing thing?

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Yeah.

And here’s a close-up.

Photoshop? WTF?

And now for some more strange stuff…

Ah yes. there are all sorts of creatures and things out there. Both terrestrial and extraterrestrial.

And while it is easy enough to assume that every picture, and every video on the internet is a hoax of one sort or the other (because, after all many of them actually are) there are videos that can and do depict things that might…

…just might…

…describe a window into the non-physical reality that surrounds our visible reality…

…or might not.

But do not discount EVERY video and picture you see as a hoax. For they might, just maybe, give you an insight into the reality that surrounds us.

Webcams

There are numerous internet websites that post live feeds of “haunted” areas. These feeds have produced hundreds, even thousands of images that defy rational description.

Such as this one…

Willard Library Paranormal Webcams

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According to those who have worked at or visited the Willard Library, there is definitely a supernatural entity or two walking the halls of the building. To prove it, they have set up paranormal webcams so that ghost hunters around the world can keep a close eye out and send in screenshots when they spot something ghostly.

There are a few types of ghosts that have been spotted by viewers and patrons of the library. The most common entity to make an appearance on film is different colored orbs hovering in various places, usually the stairwell. However, employees of the library have reported spotting a Grey Lady and a young boy haunting this stairwell. They believe that the orbs are merely how the ghosts manifest on camera.

You can see a listing of different ghost-sighting webcams HERE.

Is that it?

Now, is everything that we sense related to the non-physical world that surrounds us, or are there other things involved?

Well, there are other things.

As you all recall, we travel the MWI as a lone consciousness. We share world-lines in a “ghost shadow” consciousness but actually meeting up with another consciousness where we are both the dominant consciousnesses on that world-line is a rare event. And sometimes, we can pick up some events that are difficult to explain as they involve both consciousness, the MWI, and physical manifestation.

Consider this graphic…

An observed cross-over event.

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Now consider this…

These two photos were taken in 1988 at the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Maurach, Austria.

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These two photos were taken in 1988 at the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Maurach, Austria. Several vacationers gathered for a farewell party at the hotel and decided to take a group photo. One of the party, Mr. Todd, set up is Canon film camera on a nearby table and pointed it at the group.

(The table is the white band at the bottom of the photos.) He set the self-timer on the camera and hurried back to the table.

The shutter clicked and the film wound forward, but the flash did not fire. So Todd set the camera for a second shot. This time the flash fired.

The film was later developed, and it wasn’t until one of party members was viewing the photos that it was noticed that the first (non-flash) photo showed a somewhat blurry extra head! (In the sequence above, the second (flash) photo is actually shown first for the sake of comparison.)

No one recognized the ghostly woman, and they could not imagine how her image appeared in the picture.

Besides being a bit out of focus, the woman’s head is also too large compared to the other vacationers, unless she is sitting closer to the camera, which would put her in the middle of the table. The photo was examined by the Royal Photographic Society, the photographic department of Leicester University, and the Society for Psychical Research, all of which ruled out a double exposure as the cause.

And consider this…

On July 6th, 2014, Martin Springall took a series of photos of his 4 year old daughter on a beach in Zushi, Japan. Springall, who was living in Tokyo at the time claims that no one else was around when he took the photographs and that he didn’t notice anything strange until he looked at the pictures later that night. In one of the images there appears to be a person in black boots standing directly behind his daughter.

Cute little girl posing for her daddy.

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When asked about what he had captured, Springall recalled, “I took a few pictures, and when I was looking through them at night, I noticed what appeared to be a pair of boots behind her in one of the photos,” he said. “I took several of her in the same spot, but only one had the boots.” My daughter is really shy, and she wouldn’t have taken a picture if there was someone standing behind her, which I would have definitely noticed.”

What are they talking about?

They are taking about this frozen moment in time…

A snap-shot of a world-line; a “frozen moment in time”.

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And then we have this…

Two girls playing around.

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There is nothing weird about two girlfriends taking a selfie while they’re alone. Or is there? The word “alone” is actually open for a discussion in this case. Those two girls were partying in a house all by themselves and nothing weird has happened for the whole time until they decided to take a selfie. While the girls stated that they had been all alone in the house, there is a clear reflection in the mirror of a third girl standing behind them. So who is she and what was she doing there?

Conclusions

There is a non-physical reality that surrounds us. It is present in every world-line and it tracks our reality as we experience “time”.

Other species can see things that we cannot. And we can see things (by using certain technologies) that they cannot sense.

Extraterrestrials, dimensional travelers, visitors, and intelligent entities hide from humans in “plain sight” by phasing out of our observation. This is how the human species is monitored, observed, manipulated and controlled.

It is nothing to get all “hot and bothered about”, it is just simply how it is done.

Additionally, there are cross-over considerations regarding the MWI and world-lines that can be recorded on film for a fleeting moment.

The truth is that we, as humans, do not understand the nature of our reality well enough to account for various odd-ball events that are periodically captured on film or video. Rather than automatically discount them as hoaxes, simply because they do not fit within the confines of our established world-view, perhaps we need to embrace a larger and more comprehensive understanding of the universe and our reality, instead.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my MAJestic Index, here…

MAJestic

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Life is always about balance. Here we talk about the money vs freedom balance. Because that is the big tradeoff in America today.

After I exited the US Navy and “hit the road” looking for work (at a time when there were no jobs to be found anywhere) I discovered a number of “life truths” that have reshaped my life since. One of these truths is about personal labor. Where is that “sweet spot”? The point where you work just enough to provide for your family and have a good comfortable life, and yet live a happy unstressful life.
Because…I strongly discovered, as many of you too have as well, that in America it is either all-of-nothing. You either work in a corporate environment, devote a life to a career and obey the dictates of Human Resources in dress, behavior and life, or…
…Or you starve.
There is no “middle ground”.
Now, this is not true for everyone. Over time many people have discovered ways to enable them to somehow skirt the two extremes. While other’s like myself had to learn the “hard way” and didn’t reach that point until retirement.
The American culture is one where it is “every man for himself”, and you are a “success” if you climb to the top of a mountain of money and lord your life over all the rest. It’s the “King of the Jungle” attitude and exemplifies such people as Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. 

Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

With the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down, including 41 percent of all black-owned enterprises. Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The cardinal rule of American social policy — don’t let any ethnic group get below the blacks, or allow anyone to suffer more indignities — rang true even in a pandemic, as if the virus was taking its cues from American history.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.

As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average. Achieving the world’s highest rate of morbidity and mortality provoked not shame, but only further lies, scapegoating, and boasts of miracle cures as dubious as the claims of a carnival barker, a grifter on the make.

...

Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. The republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of the world, more people today favor building a wall along the southern border than supporting health care and protection for the undocumented mothers and children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of children; in the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community? 

Flag-wrapped patriotism is no substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no match for love. Those who flock to beaches, bars, and political rallies, putting their fellow citizens at risk, are not exercising freedom; they are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it. 

Leading their charge is Donald Trump, a bone spur warrior, a liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the backbone of a bully.Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth lab. 

Canada is no perfect place, but it has handled the COVID crisis well, notably in British Columbia, where I live. Vancouver is just three hours by road north of Seattle, where the U.S. outbreak began. Half of Vancouver’s population is Asian, and typically dozens of flights arrive each day from China and East Asia. Logically, it should have been hit very hard, but the health care system performed exceedingly well. 

Throughout the crisis, testing rates across Canada have been consistently five times that of the U.S. On a per capita basis, Canada has suffered half the morbidity and mortality. For every person who has died in British Columbia, 44 have perished in Massachusetts, a state with a comparable population that has reported more COVID cases than all of Canada. As of July 30th, even as rates of COVID infection and death soared across much of the United States, with 59,629 new cases reported on that day alone, hospitals in British Columbia registered a total of just five COVID patients.

-Rolling Stone

Which pretty makes it difficult for the “little guy”. You know the one. Like you and I. Where all we want is just to be left alone, do our best to provide for our families, and have a little bit of fun on the side.

And the purpose of a nation, any nation, is to support and protect a society of “little guys” who all are trying to “live life in the pursuit of liberty”.

But you and I both know, that that is not what America is today. It’s a multi-tiered concentration camp. With the strongest mob bosses at top and he rest of us toiling for some scraps that they toss below from their stratospheric heights.

So, is America so corrupted, so out-of-wack that a average, normal, decent guy can’t have a family, a life without working himself to an early grave?

Yes. That’s the way it is.

In the United States, as of 19FEB21. Life expectancy is how long a baby born today can expect to live, on average. For males it was 75.1 years and for females, 80.5 years. The current life expectancy for China in 2021 is 77.13 years, a 0.22% increase from 2020.

No kidding.

The American Military Emprie

Have you ever wondered what it was like to live within a Global Military Empire like Nazi Germany, The British Empire in the 1800’s, and Ancient Babylon? Well, it’s pretty much like the way Americans live today.

There’s always an external threat that needs a war to fight. There’s always an increase , ever rising, in the prices for goods and services, and there’s always a feeling like society is slipping and going down hill. David Copperfield describes the life during the British military empire. And if you add cell-phones, trailer parks, and food-stamps you have America today.

.

And while I can discuss about how one “Hellfire Missile” can build a ton-load of hospitals, rebuild bridges, and feed entire families for a year, consider what other nations are using their treasury dollars on.

I am inside of China, and they are using their monies to build roads, bridges, hospitals. They are upgrading all infrastructure, and building parks. They are updating ferries, and there is a the construction of a new Mag-Lev rocket-train, even faster than the high-speed trains (already criss-crossing the nation), that will go from Shenzhen to Shanghai in three hours. Faster than a direct flight!

Chinese HST
Chinese high speed rail is commonplace all over China.

Local clinics are getting state-of-the art blood analysis equipment and patient diagnostic equipment. Clinics! Not like the USA where you need to get a doctors appointment to get you a hospital appointment, to get an analysis appointment to have anything done.

Blood work for my child, yesterday, occurred in 15 minutes. On site at a clinic. The entire cost was free. Because we are residents of the community. How much would it cost for us int he USA? How long would it take?

That is the difference between a nation that is investing in it’s people, and a Military Empire.

Sent to me by an influencer…

Back to the subject – Work & Life

I argue that when you live in a bad environment, whether it is a military empire, or a concentration camp, you are unable to find a work/life balance. It is just simply not possible. You have either one thing or the other thing. There is no balance.

So people find work-arounds.

If they do not, then they spend their entire life working and them when they reach retirement, they make do with what ever systems the government has in place for their retirement. And for Americans, it’s not good at all.

OK. Here’s a good article about this subject.

All credit to the author, reposted as found. No editing except to fit within this venue.

How to Come to Terms With Working For the Rest of Your Life

This is a question every man has to answer,

How did you come to terms with working full-time for the rest of your life?

I graduated from college this past May and just started my full-time job three weeks ago. I am a salaried employee with a required minimum of 50 working hours per week.

I’m grateful to have a job, but how the hell did you accept the fact that you’ve essentially been born to work? I see very few routes outside of working what feels like endless hours until I’m 60 (optimistic!) and can retire… to just sit around all day because I’m too old to do much of anything else

My friend, 60 is VERY optimistic if you just got out of college because the chances Social Security will be around in its current form by then is basically nil. That means most people that age are likely to work until they die.

All that said, there are a lot of options for what you can do on the working front. In fact, it gets back to my all-time favorite quote.

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” — Thomas Sowell

The best jobs require a lot of hours. You want to be a CEO, run a successful small business, or be a doctor, you are going to put in some serious hours to do that. You want the big house, the money, the prestige, you are going to have to work for it. You want to live somewhere expensive like NYC or San Francisco, then you should be prepared to work like a dog to make it happen.

If you are willing to forego that and make some lifestyle trade-offs, you may be surprised at what you can do.

For example, if you are outside of the big cities, you can live pretty well working 40 hours a week. Over time, especially if you get married to a woman that works, you can get yourself a house and have a vacation a year, a big-screen TV, and generally live comfortably. If you’re frugal, you can even save up some money doing that. Unfortunately, most people in that position aren’t frugal and they struggle when they get an unexpected bill, but that doesn’t have to be you.

You can take it even further if you like. Back in the day, I once had a roommate who has a fantastic salesman. He worked half the year selling and took the other half of the year off. If you want to live with roommates and keep it cheap, you may be able to squeak by working part-time. If you want to live out in the boonies with a little garden out back and some convenient land nearby for hunting and fishing, you may not have to work forty hours per week to do it.

 

What all this means is that you have real options in life. It just depends on which trade-off you want to make and guess what? The one with the most hours probably isn’t the best for everyone. There are guys who wake up one day in their forties with lots of money, but bad health and no one that cares about them because they have been working 70 hours a week from the time they were young until now. Are they better off than the guy who worked 20 hours a week his whole life, but took care of himself, had friends, and had a happier life? That’s a question you have to ask yourself.

It begins by asking what motivates you, what you want to have in your life and how much of your life you are willing to trade to make that happen.

And isn’t that the case?

What are you going to do? Work like a crazy madman on the quest to become another Donald Trump, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs? So that you can sit upon billions and billions of dollars, while the nice day beckons outside, the fish are biting, and the cute girls would dearly wish that you would ask her out for a stroll on the beach and a cup of coffee.

Where are your friends? Where are your family in all this? Is that all there is to life? Work as some kind of corporate drone, and then retire as a starving old man?

Maybe there is another way… or, not.

We really need to take a good hard look at what the work environment is inside of America today. And compare it to the work environment in the rest of the world. And let me tell you… it is not pretty.

The following article is reprinted in it’s entirety, and edited to fit this venue. All credit to the authors.

“I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday”: How “Office Space” got the modern workplace just right

Cubicles, layoffs, TPS report, flair — “Office Space” bombed at the box office, but endures because it was right

By Nikil Saval
The office could be any office. Cove fluorescents on a dimmer, modular shelving, the desk practically an abstraction. The whisper of sourceless ventilation. You are a trained observer and there is nothing to observe.

—David Foster Wallace, "The Pale King"

After the stock market crash, which emptied out the lofts and warehouses of San Francisco, eroding in an instant the frictionless, cloud-kicking fantasies of the dot-commers, another white-collar recession slung into place, and the office seemed to resume its role as the workplace everyone loved to hate.

Few cultural objects expressed this miasma of ill will better than the film “Office Space,” which appeared in 1999 at the very peak of the boom. Its theatrical run was a modest failure, but in retrospect it’s no surprise that a film so relentlessly dark and nasty would be overpowered by the delirium that gripped the end of the millennium.

This picture describes American workers all over America.

(From a reporter visiting a Microsoft annual meeting in 1997: “‘Why  are we at Microsoft? ’ bellowed billionaire Steve Ballmer, then the company’s executive vice president, to a crowd of nine thousand employees packed into the Kingdome, Seattle’s indoor stadium. ‘For  the money! ’ he screamed. ‘Show me the money! ’ The crowd responded with a roar: ‘Show me the money! ’ ”)

Running gags about staplers, misplaced memos, “Hawaiian Shirt Day,” and the specter of working lives wasted in dead-end, purposeless jobs for a gray tech company: no one appeared ready for that sort of humor in an era of raging exuberance—and anyway, the cubicle was dead, right?

Then the bubble burst; people woke up the following morning with their stock options erased; the beanbag chairs were gone, and they were in a cubicle again or unemployed  and desperately searching for a cubicle. “Office Space” found new life on the small screen, a medium that suited the office worker existence depicted in the film: long days huddled in front of a computer, followed by short nights exhausted on the couch, staring at a television.

What is good for the company?

In 1999 it barely recovered its $10 million budget in box office receipts; by 2003, it had become a cult classic, with more than two and a half million copies sold on video. (It screens on Comedy Central with the sort of mindless regularity that suggests a bored television office staff behind  it all. “What  do we fill the 2 to 5 p.m. slot with? ” “Fuck it, let’s just put on ‘Office Space’ again.”)

Everyone knows very happy white-collar people who can quote “Office Space” with as much fervor and accuracy as a pastor does the Gospels, and it’s a plausible  and routine  assumption that  repeated watchings of the film might offer a kind of therapy for stressed office workers:  a vent for an inarticulate rage that helps keep them humming away at bad jobs.

But anecdotally,  at least, it’s led to people quitting their jobs, and one Portland, Oregon, webmaster started a site, Bullshit Job, that doubled  as both a tribute  to the film and a page where workers could post all the insulting memos and e-mails their bosses sent out.

In other words, “Office Space,” and subsequent works in the general fraternity  of office satire, helped office workers recognize themselves as belonging to a particular kind of group—a recognition  that  the office always seemed to deny, since no matter where you were in the office, you were always presumed to be on your  way up. (Think of that line from the Stanwyck  film: “Baby Face is moving out of your class.”) And part of the brilliance of the film was its insistence that the jobs weren’t bad simply because the office workers were oppressed: they were intrinsically bad jobs, in a bad environment.

Promotion for years of dedication to the new office in the basement.
Promotion for years of dedication to the new office in the basement.

The setup for “Office Space” represents a larger shift in the understanding of office life. The paradigmatic narrative had been the entry of the rural woman into urban white-collar life, with its attendant sexual terrors; by mid-century, it was the travails of the middle manager attempting to avoid the conformist spirit of organizational life. But the plot of “Office Space”—reflecting the larger changes in the American economy—is about people being forced to leave an environment they hate, through layoffs; the same is true of the British show “The Office” (called, in an even more insulting euphemism, “redundancies”) and  of the  recent American novels of office life “Then We Came to the End” and “Personal Days.”

The prospect of losing one’s job forces the personal crisis: you come to know who your friends are, what your loyalties are worth, and what your job really is.

In “Office Space,” consultants come to examine the company’s structure  to give it a leaner  form; though their method  is unjust, they really do find people working useless jobs:

BOB SLYDELL ( JOHN C. McGINLEY) : What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customers, and you bring them down to the software engineers.

TOM SMYKOWSKI (RICHARD RIEHLE) : Yes, yes, that’s right.

BOB PORTER (PAUL WILLSON) : Well, then, I have to ask—why couldn’t the customers just take them directly to the software people?

TOM: I’ll tell you why. Because engineers are not good at dealing with customers.

SLYDELL: So you physically take the specs from the customer?

TOM : Well . . . no, my secretary does that. Or the fax.

PORTER : So then you must physically bring them to the software people?

TOM : Well, no. I mean, sometimes.

SLYDELL: What would you say you do here?TOM : Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don’t have to. (Screaming.) I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can’t you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

Tom Smykowski is defensive about his job, even though he can’t explain what it is he does. Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), the main protagonist, knows that his job—updating software for the Y2K switch—sucks, and he knows that it’s meaningless; from the vantage point of the new millennium, it seems especially useless.

Struggling to explain it to a waitress, Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), he says, “I sit in a cubicle, and I update bank software for the 2000 switch. Well, see they wrote all this bank software, and to save space they used two digits instead of four, so like 98 instead of 1998, uh, so I go through these thousands of lines of code and uh . . . It doesn’t really matter. I don’t like my job.”

Later Peter confesses to the consultants that his average workday consists of coming in fifteen minutes late and “just sort of spac[ing] out for about an hour . . . I do that for about another hour after lunch too. I’d say in a given week, I only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.”

The twist is that this honesty is exactly what the consultants prize—a kind of ironized version of the “truth-telling” organization man of “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” Though Peter stops showing up to work and wrecks his work space by dismantling his cubicle walls, the consultants offer him a promotion. “[He’s] just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him,” one consultant says to Peter’s boss.

In return, however, they fire two engineers with actual experience, who happen to be Peter’s friends. This sets in motion the increasingly madcap (and implausible) third act, when Peter and his laid-off friends try to program a virus that would scam the company they despise out of thousands of dollars. At the end of the film, one of the company’s disgruntled employees, the sublime mutterer Milton Waddams (Stephen Root), sets the building on fire.

Peter’s engineer friends have moved from Initech to its competitor Initrode; Peter himself takes a blue-collar job in construction—preferring the outdoor life to his stationary warren of cubicles.

“Office Space” occupies such a tremendous place in the American office worker’s imaginary about his workplace it’s a shame that its effect—or the effect of the larger discourse it’s a part of—has tended to be shallow and focused on the cubicle and dumb bosses.

The “space” in “Office Space” was largely a symbol—of an uncaring, even ruthless organization.

Its real targets were the unholy expectations of the modern workplace, which asked for dedication and commitment, offering none in return.

What do you say you do here?

It doubled the force of its condemnation by extending it to other kinds of workplaces. The waitress Joanna works in a chain diner called Chotchkie’s, whose absurd expectations closely resemble those of the office. Part of her job involves donning wacky buttons with slogans and symbols on them, called “flair.” At one point, her boss takes her aside to chastise her about her flair.

STAN (MIKE JUDGE) : Joanna! . . . We need to talk about your flair.

JOANNA : Really? I have fifteen pieces on (demonstrating).

STAN : Fifteen is the minimum, mmkay. It’s up to you whether you want to just do the bare minimum. Brian for example has thirty-seven pieces of flair—and a terrific smile.

JOANNA : Okay, so you want me to wear more?

STAN : (Sighing.) Look, Joanna,  people can get a cheeseburger anywhere, they come to Chotchkie’s for the atmosphere  and the attitude. That’s what the flair’s about. It’s about fun.

JOANNA : So . . . more, then.

STAN : Look, we want you to express yourself. Mmkay? Now, if you feel the bare minimum is enough, well, okay, but some people choose to wear more, and we encourage that. You do want to express yourself, don’t you?

Joanna’s boss occupies the same place as the office consultants: looking for intangible, personality-based outward expressions as signs of being a “straight  shooter”—rather than establishing obvious benchmarks that one meets simply to garner a paycheck.

Her suspenders laden with flair suggest nothing  so much as cubicle walls, decked out to show one’s “individuality.” The human attachments in “Office Space” were so strange and obsessive—Milton and his now infamous need to keep his red Swingline stapler—that it was hard to believe there was anything still left to express.

Those  still immune  to the satire  of flair, however,  are encouraged  to check out  the catalogs of the office supplier  Baudville, which offers, among other  choice items, rhinestone-encrusted lanyards as well as T-shirts  for appreciation weeks with slogans like “Smells like Team Spirit” and “I Put the ‘Zing’ in Amazing.”

After such knowledge as “Office Space” offered, what  orgiveness? How could one acknowledge the essential failure of the office to deliver on its promised utopia—and go on as if nothing had happened?

For many, the question was merely rhetorical:  they were out of work and stringing together temporary gigs as best they could. But for others, the dream of a better office lived on in different ways: some saw technology  as still offering a way of moving office work out of the office, into a broader  sphere of public life; others saw that the office needed to be made vastly more humane and responsive to its increasingly apathetic denizens.

These two paths were united by a single goal: the desire to make work enjoyable, to return it to an innocence that generations of workplace mistakes had rendered corrupt.

In an arresting and bleak phrase, the sociologist Max Weber had described the progress of rationality and scientific demystification as leading to a gradual “disenchantment of the world.” Something like that had happened  to office work: the rosy image of the office as a distinct,  and  distinctly  middle-class, alternative  to the travails  of factory  work  and other  manual  labor  had suffered too many jolts to survive. The office would have to be re-enchanted.

Excerpted from “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace” by Nikil Saval.

Nothing new, right?

Ah. You all know about this, and have watched the movie.

And maybe things are changing… at a glacial pace. For those of you who have planned a life independent of the corporate treadmill, you are truly fortunate. You own your own businesses and define your hours to your own liking and your very own familial needs.

But for the rest of us…

…those that were taught in our public schools that the key for success was working hard, getting good grades and working for a company that would take care of us… (and provide us with a great pension)…

…what of us?

The way that white collar workers do their work didn’t just happen that way, but it was a result of deliberate choices – from the architecture of the buildings that the work is done in to the furniture that the workers sit on. I hadn’t thought too deeply about it, thinking that the way things are was just a bit like the way things were, only with computers. I was wrong, and Saval tracks the changes, focused on the United States from the industrial revolution on. The white-collar worker has not been devoid of the standardization and alienation that the blue-collar worker had and rebelled against. The white-collar worker just never saw their white-collar chains; instead, they looked up, hoping to move up the ladder (no matter how false that metaphor is or was).

The potential for striving has, writ large, been the barrier to class to recognition of the white-collar worker for generations. The lack of upward mobility except for into the white-collar ranks is what led to unionism and workers improving their lots. The myth of upward mobility in white-collar terms is a form of social control that is not readily seen.

Saval tracks this, and it makes me think if this has been a deliberate move. As production has been mechanized, there are fewer production workers and more support staff in ancillary roles to production. As more workers move out of production and the workforce is more and more professionalized, white-collar membership is the mass of workers. It is the cube that keeps them apart and alienated. Maybe it is a prison of sorts.

-A Novel History of the Place of Work

What of us?

Where is our “life balance”?

American Work-Life Balance

  • According to the Center for American PROGRESS on the topic of work and family life balance, “in 1960, only 20 percent of mothers worked. Today, 70 percent of American children live in households where all adults are employed.”. U.S. Department of Labor statistics back up this data, and notes that 75% of those women working full time. I don’t care who stays home and who works in terms of gender (work opportunity equality for all – it’s a family choice). Either way, when all adults are working (single or with a partner), that’s a huge hit to the American family and free-time in the American household.
  • The U.S. is the ONLY country in the Americas without a national paid parental leave benefit. The average is over 12 weeks of paid leave anywhere other than Europe and over 20 weeks in Europe.
  • Zero industrialized nations are without a mandatory option for new parents to take parental leave. That is, except for the United States.

American Average Work Hours:

  • At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not.
  • In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.
  • According to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.”
  • Using data by the U.S. BLS, the average productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950. One way to look at that is that it should only take one-quarter the work hours, or 11 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (or our standard of living should be 4 times higher). Is that the case? Obviously not. Someone is profiting, it’s just not the average American worker.

American Paid Vacation Time & Sick Time:

The Impact of Too Much Work

I’m not telling you to work less hours. If you genuinely love what you do and are doing it for the right reasons, you are more than entitled to spend all of your waking hours plugging away.

But for many of us, more work leads to more stress and a lower quality of life. Without time to unwind, take care of your home, spend time with loved ones, enjoy our hobbies, connect with friends, and generally live a more balanced life. Stress is the #1 cause of health problems – mentally and physically. And there are few things that stress us out on a consistent basis like work does, especially when it takes away from all of the other things that life has to offer.

Americans are the Outliers

And if all of this data tells anything, it’s that we are the outliers, not the norm. Why are we the outliers?

  • Our companies fairly ruthlessly let people go. We want to keep our jobs and not be a ‘low performer’ compared to others.
  • The decline of the union has led to less paid time off and other leave benefits.
  • Cultural value of money over everything else. We love money, we want more of it, and we think money can buy happiness. And the more we work, the more we get paid.
  • It’s been drilled in our heads that we are lazy compared to emerging market counterpart workers in India, Mexico, China, and other parts of Asia. Who isn’t? And what is our mental image of the work environments in those locales? To validate those fears, our jobs are being outsourced to the cheap labor in those countries. In reality, the U.S. trails only Norway and Luxembourg (2 tiny countries) productivity per person.
  • Our legislative branch of the government (on both sides of the aisle) has been bought and as a result has shied away from passing laws that protect workers that every other industrialized nation has passed.
  • We generally don’t fight for our working rights. We take what is given to us.

What we All Need to Remember

What we all need to remind ourselves is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

  • It’s OK to ask to move to fewer hours at work.
  • It’s OK to take a week-long vacation if we need to.
  • It’s OK to ask to work from home.
  • It’s OK to take a month of unpaid leave while you raise a child.
  • It’s OK… you get the idea.

Don’t let life pass you by in the name of fear, circumstance, greed, or misguided hopes. Sometimes you just need to draw a line in the sand and say “enough is enough”.

And yeah.

I can hear it now…

If you don't like America so much, then leave. 'Merica is the best! Rah Rah Rah.

U.S. Americans’ Work-Life Balance Is Exceedingly Imbalanced

Research shows many Americans who receive paid time off are afraid to take it because of workplace pressures. But it turns out the European vacation mindset could actually help boost productivity.

The European Union’s Working Time Directive guarantees EU workers at least 20 paid vacation days per year, contrary to the United States, which does not have a statutory minimum annual leave requirement. Some European countries mandate additional time off; the UK, France, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, and Sweden all require 25 or more paid annual leave days. OECD data shows more time off doesn’t have to translate to lower productivity. On the contrary, some of the most productive countries, measured by GDP per hour worked, were in Europe.

The United States ranks far lower.

And don’t tell me that there are worst places in the world. Sure there are. But that is not the issue. The issue is [1] what is going wrong, and [2] how to fix it.

Belgium
Workers here enjoy an average of 8.6 hours of leisure per day—which trumps their 7.4-hour work days. Locals really value quality family time, getting home in time for dinner each night, and taking a full month-long vacation over the summer to coincide with school breaks.

Austria

Many offices in Austria have an 8–5 workday—except for Fridays, when employees are encouraged to go home at 3 p.m. Never ending “summer Fridays” aside, the country is also one of the best in the world for people looking to relocate; 80% of expats in Austria said their work-life balance improved since moving there (compared to the 53% global average).

Germany

The German government has several regulations in place to make sure its citizens don’t overwork themselves. And the work-hour regulations (Arbeitszeitgesetz) state that workers cannot put in more than 48 hours a week—or work Sundays or national holidays.

Luxembourg

Working on Sundays is outlawed in Luxembourg (though exceptions include maintenance and security jobs). The country also scores well in the sleep and vacation departments, with citizens getting an average of 7.2 hours of sleep per night and a minimum of five weeks paid annual leave—in addition to national holidays.

Spain

Although many employees do not take advantage of early afternoon siestas there is still an annual vacation allowance of 30 days.

France

French workers spend the most time—9.3 hours per day—devoted to leisure and relaxation. In 2017, France also introduced a law that allows workers the “right to disconnect” from afterhours work emails.

The French work hard, but the OECD thinks that gender inequality in the workplace is holding it back. While 78 percent of women work full-time, they say, “access to the labour [sic] market of mothers of young or large families could be improved but would likely require a more equal share of caring activities between parents.” In other words, women could be having a better work-life balance in France if their partners stepped up their childcare and were given longer paternity leave, and other support structures from their employers. That’s also a factor that affects U.S. families, where paid paternal and maternal leave aren’t mandated by national law.

Finland

At first glance, work hours in Finland look pretty similar to those in the United States: Monday through Friday, 8–5. However, their lunch breaks are one to two hours long. A great advocate of healthy living and rejuvenation, the government gave its citizens four “Nature Days” to celebrate its 100th birthday outdoors.

The Netherlands

Although the Netherlands only gives workers nine bank holidays per year, they compensate with the shortest work week of all the countries surveyed (averaging at 30.3 hours). Add to that 20 to 25 annual vacation days and extremely generous parental leave policies, this makes the Netherlands one of the highest-ranking countries for employees to enjoy a good work-life balance.

According to the OECD, the Netherlands had the best work-life balance in 2018, with Denmark, last year’s winner, losing out narrowly. In every area, the Dutch came out on top.

One of the big factors for the Dutch, says the OECD, is hours worked. “In the Netherlands, less than 0.5 percent of employees work very long hours, the lowest rate in the OECD where the average is one percent,” they write. About one percent of men work very long hours, compared with almost no women.” They define “long hours” as over 50 hours per week.

In the U.S., by comparison, the OECD says that 11 percent of employees put in long slogs, including 16 percent of men and 7 percent of women. The Netherlands has strict working week laws to prevent people working over 60 hours. Dutch culture doesn’t put as much emphasis on working till you’re exhausted, writes Business Culture, and encourages leaving leisure time. “They have clearly defined working hours and they respect them,” Business Culture writes.

You can take sick leave for up to two years and still receive 70 percent of your salary, according to a survey by the employment site Glassdoor. It’s the most generous sick-leave policy in Europe. Compared to the U.S., where there is no policy, it frankly boggles the mind.

Sweden
Sweden enjoys 25 annual vacation days, along with 16 months of paid family leave and 14 bank holidays per year, making it one of the more generous countries in terms of in Europe for employees.

Prisons in Sweden are meant to rehabilitate criminals, which helps explain why the country’s recidivism rate—how frequently people return to prison—is so low. In 2014, it was 40 percent, about half that of the U.S. And Swedish penitentiaries more closely resemble American offices or college dorm rooms than they do prisons, according to The Guardian.

Denmark
Denmark balances salary against cost of living well, and average daily leisure hours (8.8 per day) way outnumber work hours (6.6 per day). According to U.S. News & World Report, this is also the 2nd best country in the world to raise children. Both mothers and fathers are entitled to 23 weeks of parental leave, plus mothers get an extra four weeks of leave before their expected due date.

Unemployed workers in Denmark get 90 percent of previous earnings for up to 104 weeks, the most generous unemployment benefits in the EU, the Glassdoor survey said. This far outpaces the U.S., where unemployment pays 40 to 50 percent of earnings for up to 26 weeks.

Only 0.5% of Dutch employees regularly work very long hours, which is the lowest rate in the OECD, where the average is 13%. Instead, they devote around 16 hours per day to eating, sleeping and leisurely pursuits.

The Netherlands also boasts very low rates of youth unemployment, high literacy levels, below average levels of child income poverty and high levels of life satisfaction in childhood – over 93% of 11-15-year-old children report above average life satisfaction, for instance.

Work responsibilities are also shared among Dutch families, with the number of women in employment doubling from 35% in the early 1980s to 69.9% today, which is well above the OECD average of 57.5%.

There is also a strong sense of community in the Netherlands, where 90% of people say they know a friend or family member they could count on in times of trouble. This is slightly better than the 89% reported across other OECD countries.

Australia

The OECD reports that “when asked to rate their general satisfaction with life on a scale from 0 to 10, Australians gave it a 7.3 grade on average, higher than the OECD average of 6.5.” In the U.S., the grade is 6.9. Comparatively, though, Australia isn’t actually that good at work-life balance.

“Full-time workers devote 60 percent of their day on average, or 14.4 hours, to personal care (eating, sleeping, etc.) and leisure (socialising [sic] with friends and family, hobbies, games, computer and television use, etc.) — less than the OECD average of 15 hours,” says the OECD. It’s only just behind the U.S. in work-life rankings, ranking 32nd to the U.S.’s 31st. Less time for leisure and fun means a less balanced, more stressed country.

Brazil

In Brazil, work-life balance goes in a different direction: while only 7 percent of workers work long hours, the average income is significantly lower than the OECD average, and 64 percent of people have a paid job, compared to 69 percent in the U.S. The Brazilian economy is recovering from a slump, which is why working hours are currently a bit lower than other countries.

Ugh!

The average American works a staggering 1,836 hours a year, which is a good deal more than most of the world. Something something, the American Dream, blah blah blah. But with all that time put in at the office, Americans surely get loads of vacation days to keep them productive and not just freebasing K-cups on a day-to-day basis, right? Wrong. They’re definitely freebasing K-cups.

Compared to other developed nations, Americans get very little — if any — paid vacation time. As a small consolation, they do get approximately 10 days a year off for holidays.

Well, officially, that is.

GM required that you could only take the vacation during the plant shut downs, you had no ability to determine when you could take your vacation. And at that, you were required to keep your phone with you at all times to keep connected to the middle management in case you are needed.

So that’s a big issue.

It results in “burnout”.

Hey! Did you know that “burnout” is an American thing. yeah. Russians, French, and Chinese don’t get it. Just Americans do.

Dear BS Job, three months ago my boss told us that we would produce a draft without discussing the project requirements with the VP first, in our boss’ words to “show we’re innovative”. Then we’d share the project with upper management, “wow them” and “invite feedback”. [Ed: I love how ‘feedback’ basically means ‘harsh criticism’ these days.] We did so, delivered on-time no less, and it sat on the veep’s desk for nearly a month. A week before product launch, VP looks at our draft, tells us it’s all wrong, and we have to redo EVERYTHING! Of course the veep blames our boss and the boss blames us, even though we did everything we were told.

A recent report has found that the United States is the only advanced economy that does not require employers to provide paid vacation time. Almost 1-in-4 Americans do not receive any paid vacation or paid holidays, trailing far behind most of the rest of the world’s rich nations, according to the report.

“No-Vacation Nation Revisited,” released earlier this year by the Center for Economic and Policy Research reviewed the international labor laws impacting paid vacation and holidays in 21 rich nations. The countries included 16 European countries, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States, all major economies that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Some highlights of the report:

For the United States:

  •   Workers have no statutory right to paid vacations.
  • The sum of the average paid vacation and paid holidays provided to workers in the private sector ― 16 in total ― would not meet even the minimum required by law in 19 other rich countries, the report notes.
  • The lack of paid vacation and paid holidays is particularly acute for low-wage workers, part-time workers, and for employees of small businesses. (Workers in  small businesses are less likely to have any paid vacation (69 percent) than those in medium and large establishments (86 percent); only 49 percent of low-wage workers have paid vacation, compared to 90 percent of high-wage workers; part-time workers are far less likely to have paid vacations (35 percent) than full-time workers (91 percent).
  • The gap between paid time off in the United States and the rest of the world is even larger when legal holidays are included. U.S. law does not guarantee any paid holidays, but most rich countries provide between 5 and 13 per year, in addition to paid vacation days.

But Americans are so proud of the USA…

For other rich countries:

  •   Workers in the European Union are legally guaranteed at least 20 paid vacation days per year, with 25 and even 30 or more days in some countries.
  •   Canada and Japan guarantee at least 10 days of paid vacation per year.
  • Five countries even mandate that employers pay vacationing workers a small premium above their standard pay in order to help with vacation-related expenses.
  •   Most other rich countries have also established legal rights to paid holidays over and above paid vacation days.
  •   Several foreign countries offer additional time off for younger and older workers, shift workers, and those engaged in community service including jury duty and for activities like union duties, getting married, or moving.
“The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation days and paid holidays,” John Schmitt, senior economist and co-author of the report, said in a statement. “Relying on businesses to voluntarily provide paid leave just hasn’t worked.”

Rebecca Ray and Milla Sanes were co-authors of the study.

The center studied this topic initially in 2007, but since then, little progress has been made, the researchers noted.

“It is striking that six years after we first looked at this topic absolutely nothing has changed. U.S. law and U.S. employer behavior still lags far behind the rest of the rich countries in the world,” Schmitt added.

So let’s get back to “brass tacks”

People need to have a plan to manage their lives within a crazy, ever-changing society. One that is very fast, and proceeding ahead faster and faster with technological advances. You cannot count on work, society, or your government to help you out. You need to plan on how to survive within the confines of what is at your reach.

We need a plan. And it has to be better than fighting over every single penny, and grasping for every little thing.

You have skills. Improve them. Advertise them. Use them.

You are part of community. Embrace your role. Be helpful and supportive of others in your community.

Realize that no one can help you. You are on your own. And as such, strengthen your bonds with others in your local community and make sure that you and your family have a great work/life balance. It is critical for your happiness and critical for your health.

And while other nations, other peoples and other societies have it better than you Americans do, do not get all upset about that. That’s not your problem. Getting to have the same kind of happiness and life balance that they have, is.

It starts with you.

As American culture, society, and industry has become isolated from PEOPLE and their families, so has the American government. This “double tap” has caused a deep impression on the combined American psyche. And it’s not a good one. In fact, I can argue that this effect has been so horrible that it has created a downward spiral with the United States seems to be entrapped within.

Click

There was an Adam Sandler movie made in 2006 titled “Click“.  And this movie take a good comedic look at the Work/life balance that exists within the United States today.

Michael Newman (Sandler) is a hard working family man, who must please his boss (Hasselhoff), in order to get promoted. Problem is he gets less time with his family, and wishes for a remote in which he can control his life. This soon comes true for Newman, when he meets Morty (Walken), a crazy sales clerk, who has the ultimate remote. A remote in which he can do anything, including muting, skipping and dubbing his life. He finds this to be the opportunity in which he can not only skip every argument, but also skip to his promotion. He sees this as a good idea, until the remote goes horribly wrong. 

-Written by Film_Fan

It was Adam Sandler’s most underrated movie.His role was that of a ordinary workaholic of that time trying to put up a better living for his family but he misunderstood his priorities and try to make the family happy but instead went on avoiding their company. It a fine piece of art and a wonderful chemistry of husband and wife.

It’s a comedy, but it’s also a drama. It is something that maybe all of us need to take a good long look at.

Scrooge was granted visions of Christmas Past and Christmas Future, and reformed his life. What happens to Adam Sandler in “Click” is like what happened to Scrooge, except with a lot more Christmases. He needs more than one lesson and he gets more than one lesson. Way more.In “Being There,” the hero Chance has spent all of his life watching television. When he wanders out to freedom and is threatened on the street, he clicks a TV remote control to get another channel.
In “Click,” Sandler plays Michael, an architect who is given a universal remote that’s truly Universal. With it, he can take control of his life: freeze a scene, fast-forward, reverse, mute the sound, select the chapters of his choice and even witness his parents at the moment of his conception (that’s, of course, in the “Making of” documentary).Of course.

 

The movie is being sold as a comedy, but you know what? This isn’t funny. Yes, there are some laughs, as when he finds he can turn the dog’s barking up and down, or play around with the settings for hue and contrast, or when he discovers the picture-in-picture feature that allows him to watch the ballgame no matter what else is going on around him. But the movie essentially involves a workaholic who uses the universal remote to skip over all the bad stuff in his life and discovers in the process that he is missing life itself.

Take away the gimmick of the universal remote, and this is what a lot of us do, and it’s sad.

Yes.

That’s me…

…and yes. That’s you.

It’s not just sad, it’s brutal.

There’s an undercurrent of cold, detached cruelty in the way Michael uses the magical device. He turns off the volume during an argument with his wife. He fast-forwards through a boring family dinner, and later through foreplay. He skips ahead to avoid a bad cold. He jumps to the chapter where he gets a promotion. Eventually, he realizes the family dog has died and been replaced by another, his kids have grown up, his wife is married to someone else, and he weighs 400 pounds. It happened while he wasn’t paying attention.

Surprisingly good 
25 June 2006I walked into the movie theater expecting to see Adam Sandler make a complete buffoon of himself. However, when I came out I was impressed. There was a depth to this movie I did not see coming, and it took me completely off guard. "Click" proved to be a powerful, emotional, and humorous piece of work. There was a certain philosophical message in this movie, in which I think, we all take for granted. Adam Sandler did a great job in playing a work-aholic.

Like many other Sandler movies, this one lingers studiously over bodily functions. After losing enormous amount of weight, for example, Michael plays with a big flap of loose skin around his stomach, plopping it up and down long after any possible audience curiosity has been satisfied. During an argument with his boss (David Hasselhoff), he freeze-frames the boss, jumps on his desk and farts. When he puts his boss back on “play,” the boss inexplicably decides his secretary has put feces in his salad. Anyone who can’t tell poop from lettuce doesn’t deserve to be a senior partner.

They teach you that in business school.

Maybe that’s why she decided to have a sex change.

But I digress…

Michael is surrounded by patient and saintly people. His wife, Donna (Kate Beckinsale), loves him but despairs of reaching him. She has that standard wifely role of complaining when he has to work late and can’t be at the swimming meet/Fourth of July party, etc. Michael’s parents (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner) are sweet and loving but kvetch too much and talk too slowly, so Michael zaps right through the time he has remaining with them.

Like many of us do.

And then, before we realize it, they are all out of our lives forever.

We went ahead and chased that ‘almighty dollar”. We followed our careers, and we chased after the money to “make a better life for ourselves”, but you all know… it really wasn’t necessary.

As long as you can balance your TIME with your MONEY you will be fine. It is when you mistakenly believe that you need certain “essentials” instead of time with family and friends that things end up going wrong.

Here is the handy-dandy Metallicman cheat-sheet chart to help you all plan out your life…

And where are you on it right now?

It’s a valid question.

Now, let’s compare the work/life balance of Americans to the rest of the world, and let’s include the modern contemporaneous HR limitations about actions and behaviors on employees when they are not at work. Compare the USA work/life balance to the rest of the world…

America is truly the leader …

…in making a lot of money. But how about having a decent life to go along with that money that we all earn? I mean do we all have to end up becoming a mega-billionaire in order to be able to take a day off to watch our sons play a softball game? Do we need to work long, long days all the time, jsut to be able to afford one night out a week in a restaurant?

Think about it people!

The automobile

People now drive these amazingly expensive vehicles. They have all sorts of things. Such as heated seats, power windows, power seat adjustments, wifi, super-charged engines, custom colors and interiors, and all sorts of enhancements. And yeah. That is why they are all so expensive.

And to drive these cars, we all take out loans. Because the cars are so expensive.

But really, if you can get by without a car, you could save an enormous amount of money every month. And then use that money on the down payment on a house that you could rent out instead…

…or not.

The point is that you don’t really need an expensive car. If you have a great life, with great family and fantastic friends, do you REALLY need to have the most expensive car on the block, a ski boat, a pool in the backyard, and a five bedroom, three bath, McMansion?

I argue that you do not.

My co-workers got me a birthday cake, celebration at 3pm in the breakroom. Little did they know (nor did I) that the purpose of my prior meeting at 2pm with my manager was to lay me off. I was escorted out, I am in the parking lot, one of them just texted me now, photo of cake, saying they are “eating it in my memory”. hahaha I even requested that they all wear Hawaiian shirts, including me, so I got fired wearing my f___ing flowery Hawaiian shirt. Needless to say, I got no cake either.

And with that keep in mind that this need for making more and more money is a sickness. It is ingrained in our American culture and it is resulting in some very disturbing trends. Obesity, death rates, addictions, crime, and a general collapse of society. And any one who thinks that this all… this status quo needs to be preserved needs their head examined. It needs to change.

It needs to change.

Change starts with you.

I see cracks in the society that embraces this sickness, and while it all appears worrisome, it shouldn’t be. It should be welcomed. Because change is long, long overdue. America has to change. It’s citizens are dying in the society that the government has constructed for it.

Change starts with you.

Make your life a good one.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my life and happiness index, here…

Life & Happiness

.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

 

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Hemi-Sync Radiance (Full Package)

This is an introductory post.

This post contains Hemi-Sync music / audio tracks. Hemi-Sync is a method of control that uses sounds to center the activity in the brain. When the brain is fully centered, it becomes easier to exist within this reality. Or even more specifically, easier to be able to use your consciousness to control your brain.

The files are FLAC files. Not MP3.

They should play on almost all cell phones and computers. If you have any doubt you can probably download an APP that will allow you to listen to them.

MP3 is the most popular format while FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a less known alternative. The main difference between the two is in how they compress the audio information. MP3 is a lossy format where parts of the audio information that people are not likely to hear are discarded. On the other hand, as the name suggests, FLAC is lossless.

-Difference Between MP3 and FLAC | DifferenceBetween

Hemi-Sync contains frequencies and audio wavelengths that are traditionally considered as “unnecessary” and thus is often removed using an MP3 format to cut down on the file size. That is why they are in the FLAC format.

MP3 vs. FLAC

This Post

This is an introductory post.

It engages the listener to Hemi-Sync, and gives them an experience as to what consciousness centering is all about. Do not expect any great experiences, enlightenment or seeing visions. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, it retrains the brain to be better organized. For some people they find this particular set of music very relaxing and calming. For others, who prefer an over-wrought mind, find it uncomfortable.

The link will download a ZIP file. Just place it where you want, and copy the files in order, to the player of your preference. You should listen to them in order in one sitting. It will be around a half and hour of listening.

This is an introductory post to give you an idea of how the brain / consciousness centering activity works.

Radiance (Full Package)

“Immerse yourself in an ethereal “homecoming” of the soul with the frequency-raising music of Aeoliah and Hemi-Sync Aeoliah is internationally known for his healing and uplifting music that nurtures body, mind and spirit. Radiance combines the harmonizing and transcendent effects of Aeoliah’s music with powerful Hemi-Sync meditation frequencies to transport you into higher more expanded states of consciousness. The spiritual communions made possible by this divinely inspired composition are emotionally engaging; the feelings engendered deeply touching and profound.”

“Use for massage and energy healing work or for deep, experiential meditation. Instruments featured: piano synthesizers, flute, voice and angelic choir. Length: 61 minutes. Supports massage and energy work, deep meditation Features Hemi-Sync sound technologies to balance and focus the brain.”

  • Harmonic Resonance 10:44
  • Starseed Sanctuary 10:10
  • Inner Chamber 6:11
  • The Treasure 10:18
  • Hearts of the Future 6:03
  • Isis Maria 5:06
  • Ascension Activation Portal 8:29
  • Stargate 3:30

The files

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/01-Harmonic-Resonancegood.flac" text="Download 01" target="_blank"] 01-Harmonic-Resonance (FLAC, but slow download)

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/01-Harmonic-Resonancegood.zip" text="Download 01" target="_blank"] 01-Harmonic-Resonance (ZIP file)

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/02-Starseed-Sanctuarygood.flac" text="Download 02" target="_blank"] 02-Starseed-Sanctuary (FLAC, but slow download)

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/02-Starseed-Sanctuarygood.zip" text="Download 02" target="_blank"] 02-Starseed-Sanctuary (ZIP file)

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/03-Inner-Chambergood.flac" text="Download 03" target="_blank"] 03-Inner-Chamber (FLAC, but slow download)

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/03-Inner-Chambergood.zip" text="Download 03" target="_blank"] 03-Inner-Chamber (ZIP file)

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/04-The-Treasure.zip" text="Download 04" target="_blank"] 04-The-Treasure (ZIP file)

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/05-Hearts-of-the-Future.zip" text="Download 05" target="_blank"] 05-Hearts-of-the-Future (ZIP file)

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/06-Isis-Maria.zip" text="Download 06" target="_blank"] 06-Isis-Maria (ZIP file)

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/07-Ascension-Activation-Portal.zip" text="Download 07" target="_blank"] 07-Ascension-Activation-Portal (ZIP file)

[easy_media_download url="https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/08-Stargate.zip" text="Download 08" target="_blank"] 08-Stargate (ZIP file)

Important note

This particular group of audio files are perfect for undoing the noise, the “news” and the hassles of daily life. They serve a “reset button” role in re-centering the position of your consciousness within your brain. It is an absolute necessity if you really want your affirmation prayers to work efficiently.

You can play it while you are walking or resting.

I think that resting is best, but you need to wear headphones or ear-buds for the effect to manifest. You just cannot simply have it playing as noise in the background. It will not work that way. The ONLY way that this will work is if you are wearing headphones (ear buds), and either resting, exercising or walking.

With the best (by far) way to get the full effect of the system is to lie down in bed and allow the system to work.

Details

Label: Monroe Products
Release Year: 2007
Genre: Metamusic
Sample Rate: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2
Bits per Sample: 16
Avg Bitrate: 640 kbps
Codec: reference lib
FLAC 1.3.2 20170101
Source: CDRip (AccurateRip verified)

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Hemi-Sync Sub-Index here;

Hemi-Sync

.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

Metallicman Donation
Other Amount:
Please kindly enter any notes that you would like to attach to the donation here:

 


	

Humanity breaks out all over the world. Good signs are everywhere.

This post is about people. It’s about families. It’s about relationships. It’s about cultures, societies, and life. It’s about lifestyle. And I want to start the year with a good humane post that discusses these elements in our life.

Unlike previous years, there seems to be an increase in videos and movies about humanity. Sure there’s the action videos, and lots and lots of guns. There’s monsters and super heroes, but a new kind of video is emerging from the old. It’s a video about people and their humanity. And these videos are becoming more an more common.

This article, this post, highlights those videos.

Please kick on the picture to see the video. It will open up in another tab. Allow some time for it to load. Most videos are in the 20MB range, but one is 65MB. I do hope that you all will enjoy them as much as I have.

A Chinese video about a father and his daughter..

The night before my father died, he left me an email message. It was a stupid one-sentence email along the likes of “do you have the link for the website we talked about?” And I kept that message. It’s still there, sitting in a dusty file folder on my long disused Yahoo! account. And account I only refresh every year or so to keep my old archives and records intact.

The following is a video. It’s a Chinese video. It’s about a man, now an old man. He’s a man, a father, who likes to listen to the voice-mail message left by his (now dead) daughter. We don’t know how she died, or what their personal situation is. But we do know that they had a relationship, and hearing her voice was very important to him. So important that he has paid for her cell-phone account to stay active for years and years.

But then suddenly, her voice-message disappears. And a story ensues…

.

I hope that you all enjoyed this video as much as I have. You don’t need to understand Chinese. Just watch what is going on.

So what might the oligarchs think of Chinese people with their resounding support for the Communist Party of China? 

They will hate them  with every bone in their body, they will be furious that this country  resists and denies them a chance to plunder it - yet again. 

The  oligarchic death cult will be extremely angry that a single country  presents an excellent and achievable system of government and financial  management and community betterment to all the other nations on earth.
 
-Posted by: uncle tungsten | Jan  5 2021 20:48 utc | 14

Two strangers in Europe

This next video is about two strangers. It’s a European video. And they get stuck in an elevator. You know those places where you just stand and focus on the lighted numbers, the buttons or the advertisements on the walls. never communicating with the other people that you share that brief moment of time with.

Enjoy, it’s actually a little cute.

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That was good. Right? A nice fun and kind of cute video. But the message is important.

How are you going to behave this month?

A sense of community.

In the next video we have a typical small family run business. These places are everywhere in China. You can get a breakfast for under $1. Usually some hot Jiu (which is a rice porridge soup), some Baozi (which is a small roll with meat or vegetables inside), some noodles, and some sweet bean drink. The business is thriving…

…but there is an emergency and the entire family must leave now. And all the people are stuck with no one to serve them, and the family devoid of income for the say. What is going to happen? As these establishments typically don’t have doors, are out in the open, with the family living in the back room watching the store.

What is going to happen?

It’s all about community.

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It’s all about community and our role in it.

Lets look at what China plans to do over the next 5 years.  The article provides a very broad explanation then links to some  specifics at the bottom, the item about the Yangtze River Economic Belt  being most important. I found this bit of reporting highly important:
 
"More specifically, these days the government uses the five-year  plans to reinforce and complement the market dynamic by providing  regulation and guidance. That includes providing the legal and social  framework, such as issuing monetary and fiscal policies, providing  public goods and services, such as building high-speed rails, and  correcting for market failures like pollution."
 
There's a vast difference in focus between China and the West--China's sharply focused on its development in ways the West isn't  whatsoever, and it makes certain its citizenry knows that and everyone's  working as a team--every job has its own value and is important. 

The  best explanation I have is that China is doing while the West is watching and not doing; therefore, China continues to grow ahead of those standing watching with their jaws agape. 
 
China outnumbers the Outlaw US Empire by more than one billion people. That's a huge team working together to advance their nation and  themselves. 

Within the US Empire, at least 30% of the labor force is idle  and not even counted for unemployment purposes since they aren't  actively looking for non-existent jobs while about 24% of the active labor force is unemployed. That's 54% of your human capital that's not  being used at all to better themselves and their nation. Honestly, which  one has the better outlook? 
 
- Posted by: karlof1 | Jan  5 2021 22:57 utc | 28

Bravery, sacrifice and respect

The next movie consists of excerpts from a Chinese war drama.

Most Americans haven’t a clue to the fact that China has been embroiled in centuries of very, very bloody warfare. People have suffered well enough, and one of the great polices of modern Communist China is to avoid war and get off that “bandwagon” of exporting “communism”, or “democracy” to the rest of the world.

Instead, China has adopted a “live and let live” attitude, and all of China, from the laws, to the media play this narrative over and over.

Never the less, if you need to fight, you fight to the best of your ability. And you do your best. You fight for family, and your die for family. For in China your community is who you are.

Which is the opposite of what it is in America.

In America, it is “every man for himself“, it’s a “dog eat dog” world and you need to “carve out a life for yourself“, or you are a failure. So in America you don’t have teams. You don’t have families. Instead you have successful individuals.

Instead of Huawei’s leadership committee supported by the Huawei engineering group, you have Elon Musk.

You have Jeff Bezos, you have Hugh Hefner, you have Bill Gates, and you have Donald J. Trump.

In Chinese movies the emphasis is on being the best you can be as part of something bigger. While in American movies it is the individual that fights against all odds.

This next clip is a Chinese war drama. Notice the depictions of bravery for the community of friends. It’s all very Chinese, but maybe…

…just maybe…

…it’s that we are all part of something bigger, and we need to contribute to it.

.

War is not going to help humanity grow.

It’s working together, not fighting apart.

The tale of the thermos

In our culture, well in most cultures, it seems very odd to open up to strangers. It’s difficult to meet them, to talk to them without feeling a jerk. For in most societies the people that tend to come up to you are typically undesirable…

  • A policeman.
  • A beggar.
  • A mentally ill person.
  • A drunk asshole.
  • A mass murderer.
  • A religious zealot.

And so we avoid others. We stare at our shoes. We read our cell phones, we look at the scenery, we stare off into space. We do anything and everything possible to not engage into inter-personal contact with others. We self isolate. We go home to our dark home and there we stare into the flickering blue glow of the monitors until the next day, when we get up and drive alone to our destination.

This is undesirable.

Humans are social creatures. We need society. We need to communicate with each other. We need that inter-personal level of relationship.

The next story, is a cute one. It’s about a boy who wants to strike up a communication with a pretty girl, but there is nothing to “break the ice with”, just his thermos.

.

This is the central theme behind the first Howard and Kumar movie; Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (plus a heady dose of smoking that marijuana.)

Help others by active participation…

The next video is from the Middle East. And a man decides to help a beggar out. And maybe the point is clear. Rather than pass by, or rather than just give him a coin. Perhaps assisting in a more active way…

…even if it seems trivial…

…is important.

I personally believe that every action that we perform has meaning and substance. Everything that we do, and every thought that we have, all combine towards the reality that we create for ourselves. Maybe the fellow in the video cannot change this beggars life, nor does he want to. He just wants to help him out a little bit more.

The world would be a much nicer place to live in, if everyone stopped thinking about themselves and instead abandons the “for-profit” model embraced by the capitalist oligarchy out of Washington DC and starts going on the local level ….

…helping each other out.

.

And from Europe we have a similar themed movie. And in this one the same type of action is performed. The point should be clear, you all…

…all over the world…

…most especially in Asia…

…people are waking up to the realization that we all must contribute to the well being of each other, and that the greedy “mine, mine, mine…” oh, you are “bad and evil, we must destroy you“, and all the bans, the nonsense and the hate must end. It is a time that is long over due.

.

Funny thing about all these videos.

I pulled them off of DouXing which is the Chinese version of Tiktok. You know, the one that Donald Trump banned in the United States for “natural security reasons“.

Perhaps, if you are an American, you will need to destroy your computer now because you watched these dangerous videos with their dangerous ideas. You don’t want the American thought police to come banging in your door and arrest you.

Do you?

It always gets me when the American press says that there can't be peace without "democracy" and "liberalization."
 
Huh ...  try 20 million dead in America's wars since WW II. 
 
And as for "democracy," living in America I would love to see some of it. 
 
Posted by: Mike from Jersey | Jan  5 2021 20:41 utc | 12

Conclusion

I think the main problem are the two different approaches taken by  the US or Chinese, which are diametrically different.  The Chinese seem  to use a "Cumulative" approach, while the US is based on what I call "Winnowing" as a state. Take their respective attitudes towards the poor.

 First the Chinese; Cumulative, we are all in this together.  If everyone has a "job" be it ever-so lowly, selling food on a street  corner for example, then for the Chinese this is a "plus". The person is  more or less responsible for his own well being, is not a burden on the  State for handouts, and could be (potentially) taxable etc.  The object  being that ALL Chinese then become positive factors in the society.  They are also more motivated because they have a "place" in society. The  recent case of Jack Ma and an IPO is not the opposite, but he was  trying to get ahead by means that would have led to more unemployment -  on the back of the Chinese Government. He was not adding to the  cumulative good of the country. Only his own riches. (The Chinese do  have billionaires and riches - but are constrained by Corporate credit  ratings as explained on a previous - very interesting - thread. Thanks  to: psychohistorian | Jan 5 2021 2:08 utc | 162. The MoA Week In Review -  OT 2021-001)

 The US. The attitude is to beat out the chaff leaving only the "kernel". To "Winnow"  the population leaving only the top. ie the poor are sidelined, they  become a problem for the Government (needing support, food etc.). A net  negative value to US society. (The Rich also get handouts from the Fed.  as free money has become an habitude, but that is an another way of  winnowing out the chaff - as others do NOT get the trillion dollar  handouts) The poor have no "place" in a society that has rejected them  and so are less motivated. They must fend for themselves and are  expected to obey. If they do not there are always the police to enforce  obedience. 

 "Cumulative = win-win", and "Winnowing = Only the top win". 
 
 Posted by: Stonebird | Jan  5 2021 20:26 utc | 11

The world is changing, and it is a good thing. Awareness of it, and awareness of our role in the world is very important. And we do not need to subscribe to any service, pay any fee or provide any user login information to participate. All that matters is to smile, and be more open to the world around you.

Who knows what interesting people you might meet?

Do you want some more of this?

I have more posts along these lines in my Rufus index here…

Hero Stories

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index
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  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Some Christmas videos out of China. I hope that you enjoy them.

This is a quick and simple post. It’s just some Christmas videos out of China. Contrary what what you might read, China celebrates Christmas robustly. It’s just celebrated differently. That’s all.

These are not the best videos, the most profound or the greatest. They are simply the top listed ones on the Chinese music application KouGuo. (Which means nothing, actually.)

First up is a rather old music video. This one was made in the 1990’s (my guess) but pretty much illustrates what the meaning of Christmas is for many people in China. I would say that it’s not so much about buying presents, and “spreading good cheer” as it is about people and relationships.

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The next up… an Enya Christmas. This video is not a music video from the 1990’s like the first one. Instead, this is contemporary views of China on Christmas day. My guess is that it is either Shenzhen or Guangzhou. But I don’t know for certain. It’s a pretty interesting take on what it is like in China. Music by Enya placed with snapshots of daily life inside of China on Christmas day.

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And here’s another music video. This one is again older. Why so many older videos? Well, think about it. Why does everyone still watch “It’s a Charlie Brown Christmas”? It’s the same thing. Nostalgia.

Here’s what they watch in China…

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Of course, the media is overflowing with all sorts of American -produced Christmas themed music videos and “specials”. But do you really want to hear another rendition of “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” by Michael Bublé?

Here’s some typical Chinese Christmas fare…

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Of course all the television shows have a segment devoted to Christmas themed events and amusements. Much like they do in the United States. Here’s some typical fare…

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Another music video.

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I do hope that you enjoyed this post.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Music Of China Index here…

Chinese Pop Music

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index
  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

[wp_paypal_payment]

If you enjoy what you see, it would be helpful if you could assist in hosting this forum. A donation would be appreciated.

Rufus Tales and a healthy dose of commentary on the sunset of the American plutocracy.

As I get older, I no long paint in precise brush strokes. My pallet of colors tends to run together. It becomes big globs of paint, mixes of colors, and just a messy Mélange of materials. Thus you will find posts like this one; a confused jumble of colors and textures.

Here I am going to post some long overdue stories of heroism, exceptional selfless actions and noteworthy behaviors. I do so while the United States oligarchy / plutocracy is staring the crack-up / collapse. Indeed, you cannot maintain a society that’s solely focused in farming the citizenry for every ounce of effort that they manage. You just cannot have a “for profit” society. It doesn’t work.

Society is about relationships.

It is NOT about money.

And any nation that “doesn’t get it”, that doesn’t understand that most simple concept needs to experience the ultimate collapse that it deserves.

Here-in lies the rub: Most people regardless of whatever kinds of intelligence they may possess simply cannot believe that the post-War USA is as draconian as it demonstrably is. You are correct, it would scramble their brains to consider it because deep down they have this unpleasant subconscious awareness that their trinket laden "way of life" hinges on a web of plutocracy.
 
In addition the means to control currency is really the bottom line. 

It is simply a way to capture and monetize everything under the sun and this is exacly what the technocrats are fixing to do. Just listen to Uncle Claus, he's not one to mince words. And no, we are not allowed to leave.

"1) The Empire's policy is clear: nobody is allowed to opt out. Any success outside the system is an affront to the narrative and thus global hegemony. It is not allowed and, in fact, has been actively undermined by The Empire…an obvious and shameful point that faux patriots seem to gloss over.

 2) Controlling the debt based money system allows The Empire to shamefully fund its extortive activities and give the illusion of abundance and all the consumer comforts that come with the illusion. It is hard to get anyone, including loved ones, to recognize the illusion. Too many are mesmerized by shiny things and refuse to see the moral\ethical imperative for opting out of the illusion as much as possible "
 
Granted I am not full of answers here, but one thing that is quite clear is that in order to "do it yourself" you need to be free of the various chokepoints that have been set up. Call me crazy, but listening to some of the vids done by Ice Age Farmer sheds light on how things could be shut down but quick! Start with food and take it from there. 

-Posted by: Chevrus | Dec 17 2020 23:27 utc | 45

So here, in this post we are going to talk about being “the Rufus”. Which means to help others with no intention of profiting from it.

The videos are from China which is a nation that puts society over the individual and the self. This is in direct opposition of America that puts the individual (me, me, ME!) over society. It’s a matter of selfishness.

  • Service-for-myself.
  • Service-for-others.

I hope that you enjoy the videos and get something from them.

Why now?

Looking at all the hundreds of thousands of Americans standing in line waiting for handouts at charities across your country is disgusting and disturbing.
 
Watching YouTube videos of hundreds of thousands of people waiting in line to claim their food stamps less than a week away from Christmas is disgusting and disturbing.
 
Your country is disgusting and disturbing.

-Anonymous Coward

Have you been reading the (American) “news” lately?

A nation by merit

I am going to start this post with a video that helps describe what the leadership of China represents. No, it’s not a charismatic union organizer (Obama), a casino boss / mobster (Trump), a Texas Oil Billionaire (Bush), or a snake-oil salesman (Clinton)…

…they don’t get into the leadership positions by their connections, great PR promotion, or graft…

..or by conning the mindless multitudes (the mob rabble) to “vote” for you…

…they get there through merit. They get there through ability. They get there through a structured program of “hard knocks”. All those in leadership positions in China, not only were at the top of their class at the most difficult university to get into, but they also had to humble themselves working hard, demeaning jobs at poverty wages to fully appreciate what work is. It’s part of a long-duration program that grooms the Chinese leadership for the future.

The Chinese leadership are SALT.

Jolie does an excellent job as the action heroine.
Jolie does an excellent job as the action heroine. When Bruce Willis makes crash landings in the original “Die Hard” movie, at least he winces in pain and it takes him a few moments to regain composure. In “Salt”, when Angelina Jolie jumps consecutively onto six moving trucks on the freeway, she’s flying right up and instantly running at Olympic record pace, sort of like the original Terminator except sporting lipstick. Throughout the movie, she decks secret service agents faster than they can graduate out of combat training if she’s not pushing out of moving vehicles going 70 mph while wearing handcuffs, although the officers forgot to put the cuffs on behind her. The idea is that she is a superbly trained heroine that is constantly underestimated.

.

The next video is of a young Chinese boy.

The Chinese are taught to calculate and be the best that they can possibly be. Check out what he does. No, this is not a fun exercise that has no practical application in the “real world”, it is a skill of processing information, under stress and duress, and providing solutions.

When Mike Pompeo strutted into China with his neocon list of demands, his porky jowls jiggled in moist anticipation that China would be forced to kneel in front of him. But he did not anticipate, nor understand who he was dealing with. to this day; to this moment, most Americans and American leadership somehow think that the Chinese leadership is just a Chinese-speaking version of American leadership.

No, they are not. They are something else entirely.

Watch and learn.

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But what good is this?

Americans would ask, “but how can you profit from this skill?”

But that is not the point.

In China, and the Chinese philosophy, people are part of a society, and they contribute to that society. It’s not the “lone wolf” that gobbles everything for themselves. If you have something to contribute, systems are put in place to benefit from your contributions.

  • America = “lone wolf” = Do things yourself, become a rich man or be a failure.
  • China = “part of a team” = Contribute, and share in the group profits or losses.

This young man demonstrates that he has impressive skills and abilities. Abilities and skills that can (eventually) be put to great use for the society, and his community as a whole. You can well understand that the leadership will put him in a training plan that will lead towards leadership positions so that he can do great things for the Chinese society as a whole.

In American, on the other hand, we are amused at his quirky skill. We see if we can use him to obtain money for ourselves, maybe put him on a talent show, and pay him a small stipend in the process.

Societal differences

The differences in the two societies; America compared to China can result in some interesting differences. One of the biggest is in helping others, and in the motivations why you would help someone. In America it has been (for all practical purposes) outlawed.

Consider America.

And of course, Americans ask what are the legal ramifications if they help someone…

We all have to look deep inside ourselves. Are we a Rufus? Or, are we Bystanders?

Saving a man from a fiery death

Here, in China, we have an average guy, a delivery man, who goes to save a man who had an accident and is on fire and probably dying…

Bad Guys and Good Guys

Here we have a bad man. He breaks something in a busy intersection. Instead of cleaning up his mess, he just rides off and leaves it for others to deal with. He is what we call an “asshole”.

Then we see cars and people drive past this mess. No one does anything. It just lays there inert, waiting to blow out someone’s tires, cause an accident or create havoc.

Then comes the Rufus…

Baby near death!

OMG! What happens when your tiny infant or young child is unresponsive. the poor thing is only one year old. They start turning blue and they cannot breathe! What are you going to do?

The man is a traffic cop, by the way.

It’s not all about money

From the two-minds blog

When Social Capital Becomes More Valuable Than Financial Capital 
December 17, 2020 
 
This devaluation of financial wealth--and its transformation to a dangerous liability--  will reach extremes equal to the current extremes of wealth-income inequality.  
 
 Financial capital--money--is the Ring that rules them all. But could this power fall from grace? Continuing this week's discussion of the idea that that extremes lead to reversions, let's consider the bedrock presumption of the global economy, which is that money is the most valuable thing in the Universe because the owner of money can buy anything, as everything is for sale.  The only question is the price.   
 
 Reversion to the mean is a statistical dynamic but it is also a human social dynamic:  for example, once the social / financial / political pendulum reaches Gilded Age extremes of  wealth/income inequality, the pendulum swings back. The more extreme the inequality,  the greater the resulting extreme at the other end of the pendulum swing. 
 
 In the heyday of the postwar boom in the early 1960s, finance--banks, lending, mortgages, loans,  investment banking, derivatives, futures, FX, all financial market trading, research firms,  hedge funds, mutual funds, etc.--was about 5% of the economy. It now exceeds 20% of the economy,  and its actual role and impact is much larger than 20%. Finance is now the dominant force in the  economy in terms of wealth creation and influence. 
 
 (This parallels healthcare, which went from less than 5% of the economy to 20% in the same time span.) 
 
 While finance creates some jobs, it is essentially extractive: it produces no goods,  it extracts wealth from the goods-producing economy via debt and speculation. 
 
 Thus a reversion that reduces finance back to 5% of the economy can be expected.  How will this reversion to a much more constrained and modest role in the economy play out? 
 
 There is much to be said about such a complex and consequential process, but today  I want to focus on one potential dynamic: the idea that social capital--our connections  and loyalties to groups and other people--will become more valuable than financial wealth,  i.e. "money." 
 
 The past 45 years can be characterized as the ascendance of finance: finance rules everything.   Most people would say this has been true for all of human history, but it isn't quite so simple.   
 
 In many instances, loyalties, membership and devotion to causes far outweigh the influence of money.   In periods of severe labor shortage, labor has more value that money, in the sense that labor  sets the price of labor rather than capital setting the price. 
 
 This article caught my eye a few weeks ago: The Rich in New York Confront an Unfamiliar Word: No  The pandemic is causing inequality to soar,  but increasingly the privileged are discovering that they can't bend the world to their will. 
 
 The wealthy are accustomed to buying whatever they want with money, and the possibility that  there might be limits on the power of money is shocking to them.  
 
 These limits might take political forms such as regulatory limits on what wealth can buy,  they might take financial forms such as bans on certain speculative skims, and they might  also take social forms, where people refuse to provide some good or service for cash  because they've been reserved for family, friends or exchanges within trusted networks  where membership cannot be purchased at any price. 
 
 Here is a simple example. Let's say I have an in-law unit adjacent to my house.  It's been promised to a family member, and so when a prospective tenant offers me $1,000 a  month to rent it, I decline.  
 
 In the unmoored, soulless world ruled by money, the prospective tenant reckons the "problem"  (my refusal) can be solved with more money. So he offers me $1,500 a month.  I decline,  because the bonds of family are more important and valuable than a few more dollars. 
 
 The "problem" for the wealthy isn't money; the "problem" is that social ties, obligations  and commitments are more valuable and binding than money. 
 
 The wealthy assume that "everyone has a price," a truism proven by Jeffery Epstein, who  bought his way into Harvard, MIT, etc. with bundles of cash. 
 
 But as the status quo unravels, the wealthy will discover that not everyone can be bought.  Indeed, accepting a big bribe might terminate all sorts of much more valuable connections. 

The time has come when we need to place an emphasis on our place in society, our relationships, and our purposes in life. The soul-less pursuit of more and more “stuff” to prove how wealthy your are as an indicator of wealth not only generates and glorifies psychopaths, but it is (in itself) inherently dangerous.

Consider America…

…and the rest of the ‘West”.

The Wealthy have their own set of rules…

The poor have their own set of rules…

You see, in America, your measure of value is how much money you have. If you are poor, or middle-class you are considered to be unimportant and disposable. If you are wealthy, you are considered to be significant and important. It’s a very clear distinction, and that is the way it is.

But that does not really matter in the big and real scale of things. This reality is associated with our current set of physical reality templates. And as such, knowing this, you all just must do your best with the “hand of cards that you have been dealt”.

A Rufus contributes and does his best no matter what!

Here we have another young man. A boy, actually, who has lost an arm. But that hasn’t stopped him. It’s not a limit on him, his ability or his dream. He pushes and he strives and he does his best no matter what.

What is stopping you?

How people in a healthy society work together

As I grew up in America there became a rising realization that if you tried to help someone you could get sued for doing so, you could end up braking some law, or rule or regulations and it would hurt you personally. So over the decades, Americans started to become less helpful of others, more self-centered, and more isolated for each other.

This was never healthy and is a sign of the decay of a culture.

"The “generous stranger” who spent over $500 on cookies so two Girl Scouts wouldn’t have to stand in the cold, has been arrested by U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency."

He violated FDA regulations.

Not so in China. You are part of a society and it is your duty to participate.

Take a look at this video and notice how everyone runs to help the man in distress. The run to help fro the East, from the South, from the North, and from the West. They all run to help. It’s what healthy societies and cultures do.

In America

This next video shows normal everyday citizens (members of the neighborhood) working together. And it takes place in America. Americans please (kindly) take note. This is how communities work. They work together.

A stranger arrives in their community. Whether he is associated with Antifa or the BLM is not specified, but he has left the urban enclave and entered the suburbia ring around the city. Inside his back pack are such things as duct-tape, wire ties, spray cans of black paint, flammable materials, fireworks and other similar items.

In an attempt to prevent the BLM riots from expanding outward from the urban centers, those that live in the suburbs have set up community groups to defend from the rioters, and the probing (recon) elements of the organizations that instigate the conflict.

Here we have one such interaction.

In my mind, when you work as part of a group, or a team, or participate in the defense of your community, you ARE a Rufus. For you are participating into something bigger and better than yourself, and you are not doing it for personal benefit, money or wealth.

A bad man

The world is filled with all sorts of people. Some are just angry and do some really bad things. Some are just idiots, or just terrible people. But what are you going to do when you meet them?

What are you going to do when they are tearing up your community, your life, and your neighborhood gas station? What are you going to do?

Are you going to stand back and call the police? Are you going to film it and post it on Facebook? Are you going to sent it to Twitter with a socially important hashtag, or are you going to drop everything and take action immediately?

Firing a guy in China

In America, over the last three decades, “letting someone go” has become so common that it has become part of the industrial / cultural landscape.

Scene from the movie “Office Space”.
The core of Office Space is the absurdity of office life. Mike Judge’s  comedy wasn’t the first to seize on this, and the second-half of the  20th century is filled with examples of people feeling like meaningless  drones in a corporate existence that holds considerable sway over the  lives of individuals while also divorcing individuals from their  individuality. Peter (Ron Livingston) chooses to meet  absurdity with absurdity, becoming disconnected from a workplace that  has no connection to him. But through it all, Office Space has  just that—space. It’s a workplace that’s both uncaring and  unpredictable, but it also functions as a home station and place of  security (until Milton (Stephen Root) burns the building down).     

-Collider

While it is outrageously common in the United States, it is quite different inside of China. It is not so common in China. Aside from being against the law, there are procedures that a company must follow and strict rules on what they must pay you.

Here we have a worker being let go. He carries his clothing in his suitcase behind him. As all factory workers live inside the company dorms (typically). What we see is his boss putting one years salary in a cigarette box and gives it to him. This would never happen in the USA.

The last time I was let go was on Christmas eve, right before the Christmas luncheon. No severance pay or warning or anything like that. They gathered my gear and left it on the company stoop on the parking lot and had security escort me out.

.

The point of this is simple, you don’t need to be a hero saving people. You just need to be a decent human. You help others and you understand how they must feel and you help them. You don’t just spit on their CV and push them out the door, American style. You help them.

You be the Rufus in your every-day behaviors.

And for all my my long term MM readers, listen up! It will be your EVERY-DAY actions from which your will be judged upon. And yes, it’s not a religious fantasy. YOU. WILL. NEED. TO. ANSWER. FOR. YOUR. BEHAVIORS.

Speaking of the movie “Office Space”, there’s been a major shift in the American working “lifestyle” since that movie came out…

Twenty years later, offices haven’t gone anywhere, but our economy has drastically transformed. When Office Space was released, we were in the middle of the dot-com bubble, which didn’t burst until 2000, so Office Space  is a story told in relative security. Peter’s job sucks, but he has a  job. The question isn’t “Can we get work?” but “What is the quality of  our work life?” The job is a given, and, being that it’s a  40-hour-per-week office job, Peter presumably has healthcare benefits  and so forth. The film’s conflict and comedy comes from Peter rebelling  against his workspace. But what happens when that workspace is no longer  a given?   

 Office Space isn’t unrecognizable twenty years after its  release, but we’re in a far different world. We’ve gone through the  Great Recession and an economy transformed by the Internet in a way that  was only beginning to surface in the late 90s. Initech, Peter’s  company, would likely have been absorbed into a larger tech giant, and  for the part of writer-director Judge, he’s gone on to explore that  world in his HBO series Silicon Valley. But  that show tends to explore the working world from the top down. We see  it from the hustling creators of Pied Piper to the buffoons leading tech  giants like “Hooli” (i.e. Google). Rarely do we see the lives of the  working drones, and even if we did, it would be more specific to the  Silicon Valley lifestyle.     

 What hasn’t really been explored is how the gig economy has transformed the lives of the modern worker. You have huge companies like Uber, AirBnB, and others technically letting the individual run their own hours, but it’s the crushing life of a freelancer who’s been abused by an indifferent system. Once again, you have the clash of the individual against the corporate life except the setting has left the office and moved into an individual’s home, car, and anything else they could possibly use for even the slightest profit while a tech giant reaps most of the rewards. 

There’s definitely room here for the dark, absurd comedy that Office Space provided because while Judge’s follow-up film, Idiocracy, tends to be cited more and more, there are definitely lessons to be had from Office Space and its rebellion against a monolithic and random culture. In the world of Office Space,  you can devote years of your life to a company, be laid off  unceremoniously by people who don’t know you, try to commit suicide,  decide against suicide at the last minute, and then get hit by a drunk  driver, which results in serious injury but also a seven-figure  settlement. The illusion of control that the office job—and really any  job—provides, would fit nicely to the setting of the gig economy.     

Of course, you can’t really call it “OfficeSpace  without the office, and that’s okay. While the setting was obviously  essential to the 1999 comedy, the larger story is one of workplace  malaise and frustration. The inanity Joanna (Jennifer Aniston)  has to suffer through is just as mind-numbing and ridiculous even  though she works in the service industry and Peter works in information  technology. The workplace is the problem, and I’d love to see a story  that shows how that problem evolves when the workplace is your life  rather than something you can leave at the office.   

  -Collider

Rescue of a child in distress.

Here we have a traffic cop, a policeman that basically helps resolve fender benders, and traffic accidents, answering the cries of a mother in distress. Her cries of terror is heart-rendering. The anguish is real.

But watch what happens.

The Rufus shows compassion

Compassion and understanding are in short order today.

The West has tossed those elements of the human nature into the trash bin, and have instead embraced a belief that the amount of money that you accumulate is a measure of your success in life. Just look at the articles in the American “news” media. It’s all about the super-rich and the super wealthy. Very few articles are about people who don’t earn a few million dollars per year.

Yet…

Yet when their physical body dies, and the consciousness goes from the particle form to the wave form, and they are out there roaming in the non-physical realm, they will have to answer for their behaviors. And in that realm, the new swimming pool in their third mansion, or how they bought a fruit basket to their house maid is not going to “cut it”.

We are measured by who we are and what we do and how we treat each other. (And something else, covered later on, in this post…)

Like the humanity that is displayed in this teacher….

It is all about watching heroic actions or is something else more important here?

Ah yes. It’s great to watch heroes in action, isn’t it? But it’s not just that. Please gauge your reactions to watching the videos. How do you feel?

  • Do you feel pride in that someone did the “right thing”?
  • Or did you feel repulsion that someone was a “sucker”?

That, I strongly believe, is determined from where you come from. If you are from the “dog eat dog” streets of New York City, you might feel differently than say a person who was raised on the corn-fields of Iowa.

That should be somewhat obvious.

But is it just urban vs. rural experiences, or is it something deeper?

Or, in other words, would a person from the mega-city of Shenzhen China (14 million people), have a similar reaction to a person from the metropolis of New York City (5 million people)?

I argue that there is something much more complex going on, than the density of population where you live, having an impact on your societal behaviors.

It makes me think.

Contemporaneous Chinese POP music

Yeah. I have been thinking a lot about this lately. I believe that the music of a nation is a reflection of it’s society. And China, being a nation of nerds, that maintain an existence within a firmly specified society has their own types and styles of music that reflects these characteristics.

You can probably discount my thoughts in this matter. But you cannot deny that there is a significant difference between American music videos and Chinese, or Indian, or Japanese for that matter. I like to believe that it is due to culture and society, but to nail down the exact elements remains elusive.

Lets look at this.

There's so many different types of songs and musical styles. How in heck can you use them to illustrate that cultural and societal differences can become a window towards the way Rufus behaviors manifest?

First up – 张韶涵 – 破茧

This is so very Chinese, and there’s so many elements involved that you just need to see it yourself to try to figure out what is going on here.

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Can you figure it out?

I can’t. It seems to be a complex, boy and girl relationship along with a society of friends. Friends that are fighting forces that threaten their happiness – kind of thingy.

It’s so hard to sort out. But, over all I see a theme of relationships, friendships, working together, and fighting against something or someone that threatens their lifestyle.

…Pretty universal.

Or is it?

南征北战NZBZ – 穿越 (Live)

What makes all this difficult to sort out is that music videos are about all sorts of things. And you just cannot point to one or two and say that that is what the culture represents. For instance, here is a MV from a Chinese rap group (you probably didn’t know that they existed) singing about…

I don’t know…

…life?

Here’s the dangerous three man rap group called NZBZ. (NZBZ = 南征北战). The song is called 穿越.

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You can probably recognize the English words and phrases being used.

I think, but I could be terribly wrong, that it is a celebration of being who you are. Or something along those lines. More or less.

More…

…or less.

陈雪凝 – 绿色

This chick is one of the top pop artists of 2019 into 2020. She’s a Shenzhen girl as you can tell by the backgrounds in the video. This is one of her most famous songs. It’s about …

…well, you all try to figure it out.

.

Lyrics are HERE.

若不是你突然闯进我生活
 我怎会把死守的寂寞放任了
 说不痛苦那是假的
 毕竟我的心也是肉做的
 你离开时我心里的彩虹
 就变成灰色
 说不心酸那是假的
 如果我真的没那么爱过
 爱着一个没有灵魂的人
 世界都是黑色
 若不是你突然闯进 我生活
 我怎会把死守的寂寞 放任了
 爱我的话你都说
 爱我的事你不做
 我却把甜言蜜语
 当做你爱我的躯壳
 你的悲伤难过我不参破
 我也会把曾经的且过 当施舍
 不去计较你太多
 从此你在我心里
 只剩绿色
 说很快活那是假的
 你的名字依然那么深刻
 每个字都刺穿我的心脏
 那鲜明的痛是红色
 若不是你突然闯进 我生活
 我怎会把死守的寂寞 放任了
 爱我的话你都说
 爱我的事你不做
 我却把甜言蜜语
 当做你爱我的躯壳
 你的悲伤难过我不参破
 我也会把曾经的且过 当施舍
 不去计较你太多
 从此你在我心里
 只剩绿色
 呼
 若不是你突然闯进 我生活
 我怎会把死守的寂寞 放任了
 爱我的话你都说
 爱我的事你不做
 我却把甜言蜜语
 当做你爱我的躯壳
 若不是你突然闯进 我生活
 我怎会把死守的寂寞 放任了
 爱我的话你都说
 爱我的事你不做
 我却把甜言蜜语
 当做你爱我的躯壳
 你的悲伤难过我不参破
 我也会把曾经的且过 当施舍
 若不是你突然闯进 我生活
 我怎会把死守的寂寞 放任了
 爱我的话你都说
 爱我的事你不做
 我却把甜言蜜语
 当做你爱我的躯壳

And a raw translation…

If it hadn’t been for you breaking into my life
How can I let go of the loneliness of death?
It’s false to say no pain
After all, my heart is made of meat
The rainbow in my heart when you left
it turns gray
It’s false to say no
If I really didn’t love it that much
Love a man without a soul
The world is black
If you hadn’t suddenly broken into my life
How can I let go of the loneliness of death?

Love me and you’ll say it all
Love me for things you don’t do

But I put sweet words
When you love my body

Your sorrow is sad and I don’t break it
I’ll also take what I used to do as a charity
Don’t count you too much
From then on you are in my heart
There is only green left
It’s a fake to say you’ll live soon
Your name is still so profound
Every word pierces my heart
The distinct pain was red
If you hadn’t suddenly broken into my life
How can I let go of the loneliness of death?

Love me and you’ll say it all
Love me for things you don’t do

But I put sweet words
When you love my body

Your sorrow is sad and I don’t break it
I’ll also take what I used to do as a charity
Don’t count you too much
From then on you are in my heart
There is only green left

Call.
If you hadn’t suddenly broken into my life
How can I let go of the loneliness of death?

Love me and you’ll say it all
Love me for things you don’t do

But I put sweet words
When you love my body

If you hadn’t suddenly broken into my life
How can I let go of the loneliness of death?

Love me and you’ll say it all
Love me for things you don’t do

But I put sweet words
When you love my body

Your sorrow is sad and I don’t break it
I’ll also take what I used to do as a charity
If you hadn’t suddenly broken into my life
How can I let go of the loneliness of death?

Love me and you’ll say it all
Love me for things you don’t do

But I put sweet words
When you love my body

It’s a difficult song to translate directly. Don’t you know. Maybe a Gemini in the MM audience might be able to help decipher this complex array of thoughts, Ideas and emotions.

And that is it, isn’t it?

The differences in society and culture, in the language, and in the behaviors can really have an impact on whether you are being a Rufus within the confines of your baseline template.

So what am I getting to here?

Well, there’s a lot that must be said but the English language is insufficient for the task. So I am flailing. I am trying to use music videos to expound on my narrative.

If I were to expand upon what I am trying to say, I would argue that [1] we must be the Rufus in all cases.

However what a Rufus actually is depends upon the [1a] culture and society that [1b] your soul has established for your consciousness.

You cannot be an American (say), and try to act or behave like a Chinese woman or an Japanese man would act. That is not in “your cards”.

Being a Rufus means that you must work within the kit of behaviors that you must take on given the initial template of behaviors that you have been granted at birth. This is true, EVEN if you move to another location and another society that is different from your initial conditions.

Or, to put it better, be the best that you can be. Stop trying to copy another person, or their culture and background. Be you, but make sure that you are the best you that you can be.

To help illustrate this, let’s look at a MV from India.

Karunesh – Punjab

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So what is going on here? Well, it’s hard to tell, but you can be well assured that a person from India would well understand the complex interplay of relationships and issues that are being hinted at.

Just like you might have a difficult time understanding what is going on in the Chinese videos.

The relationships between the daughter and her father might be difficult for an American to understand, as can be the relationship between her and the young man. We can’t be an American and pass judgements on her or her family simply because the initial set of pre-birth world-line conditions between us are incompatible.

All that we can do is do OUR best in our life, and applaud others when they do THEIR BEST in their respective lives. Do not try to put them into your circumstances, and your culture.

Different places have different cultures, rules, and societal norms. For me, I find it difficult to understand the Indian culture. Because it is [1] old, [2] complex, [3] stratified with a caste system (that America is devolving into), and [4] industrialized with elements of the new intermingled with ancient tribal complexities.

A Rufus in India would operate under different conditions than a Rufus in America, or China, for example.

But I live in China, and I am an American.

So yeah, you will need to take those facts into account. What I view as Rufus actions might differ considerably from what you might. This could be especially true if you are from India, the Middle East, or Russia…perhaps.

Never the less, let’s consider this narrative in the believe that you must do your BEST no matter what, and strive forward, no matter what.

America has changed, while I have stayed the same

Did you know that the American military has eliminated the tough “basic training” in favor of a “softer”, more “gentle” training system. One that emphases the high technology needs of the American military while at the same recognizing that modern American “millennials” are often loathe to join the military. This new military is intended to be better than before and world class.

I was raised in an America where you need to push yourself to be the best. It was a land where you has “a shot” at a better life, if only you studied hard, worked hard, and found yourself a “good company” to work within. But, boy oh boy, has times changed. Today, America represents something else entirely…

Indeed even the military has changed. The days of “basic training” are over. It all has been replaced with a kinder, more sensible military. One that will be experts in servicing the very complex military hardware that the nation fields. In the new America, individual strength of character, morals, and striving to be the best you can be has been discarded and placed into the rubbish bin of history. Today’s modern America is one of socially-aware, kind and gentle folk who would have no problem pushing the red button to obliterate an enemy city, or unleash a swarm or hunter-killer drones upon the civilians in a city.

Well… I have my own opinions about this. But I do believe that we should always strive to be the best that we can be… no matter what. And that is one thing that I like about China. That basic belief is ingrained in all the Chinese people from the moment that they are born to their individual lives as they grow older.

How does this attitude manifest…

To see what [1] being the best you can be, [2] working as part of a larger whole, [3] contributing, and being helpful, and [4] being the Rufus during times of need, we can see how it manifests within China.

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And check out how road-work is done…

TWICE – Likey

But is that all there is?

Work? Superiority in sports? Or in the military? What about day-to-day social interaction?

And here’s a MV from South Korea. Yes, each and every video has a different “flavor” and a different subject matter. This is what is known as “K-Pop”. This group is an all girl group that pretty much perform the dance routines that all the dance troops in my office building do.

.

It’s just a happy, up beat, and light video. Also, I like it because it is filmed in Boston. And you all should know that I miss Boston terribly.

It’s not deep.

It’s just light, happy and positive.

Does that mean that that’s all there is? No. It just means that a key aspect of our life, at least the attractive part of it, is associated with happy light feelings, emotions and relationships.

Being the Rufus should be what we do when things go wrong. But aside from that, we should always strive to be the “bright and shining example from which others can emulate”. (Shades of MAJ here!)

And who can argue with that?

Do you want some more?

I have more posts in my Rufus Index here…

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Some micro-videos of China showing elements of contemporaneous Chinese society along with notations and comments.

And that is what this is, don’t you know. It’s a collection of videos that I picked up out of Chinese media. I have highlighted certain parts of the videos for your attention and I comment on it. It’s not really a complete investigation into Chinese society, but rather snapshots of what exists today. And if you look carefully you will be far better served to see it for what it is, instead of the heavily promoted narrative that China is bad.

I like to think that these videos are fun. They are not made by the Chinese Government as part of a pro-propaganda campaign as the folk on Alex Jones claim. It’s just average folk posting videos. Much like average folk in America have been using Tiktok. Same thing, more or less.

Please click on the picture to watch the movie. It will open up in a separate tab.

Small Business Opportunities

When I was a young boy in Bridgeport, CT I had a “girlfriend: all of 5 years old. She was much older than the 4.5 years old boy-of-the-world that I was growing up to become. Anyways, in our neighborhood, it tended to be lower middle class and the time frame was the early 1960’s.

Everyone had a side business that they were running out of their basements. Our neighbor had rabbits in cages that they performed experiments upon for the United States government. And there were others who operated small stores out of their living rooms. My “girl friend” had a father that made rock sugar candy and other elements out of big 55 gallon drums in their basement.

We used to sneak down and get a string or two out of the big barrels and chew on them as we went off adventuring as part of our childhood.

You really don’t see that much any more. Few people try to operate their own businesses out of their residences for money. It is too expensive, not just in the regulations and OSHA requirements, but the IRS, the DHS, and just about everyone else will have a say at to what you are doing. And if you break one of the millions of unspecified laws, you can be guaranteed a trip to jail, if not prison.

Americans tend to no longer have self-employed businesses out of their homes any more.

But this is not the case in China.

For the ladies trying to get started in their own clothing line…

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To the guys who want to make things out of steel, and bars…

Most Westerners will probably relate to this story…

But the Chinese think small and then work their way up. Westerners like to think big and try to sustain it no matter what.

Here’s an interesting story about the “high life” that Westerners have become accustomed to within China, while the rest of the Chinese nation toils on a mere few dollars a day.

From Frans… (and NOTHING having to do with Metallicman)…

This is a story I have to share, it is sitting in my mind for too long.
In  this story, I do not mention the real names of the people involved.  Instead, I use either initials or an alias. People, familiar with this  story will obviously easily recognize who's who.  Please don’t share  this story with others.
  
From 2009 to 2012 I worked for a small WOFE, owned by a Canadian businessman; let's call him "Bill G."

We had a manufacturing plant in the Southern suburbs of Shanghai and a luxurious headquarter in Jingan district. 

Bill  and I were the only foreigners, working in that company, making medical  devices for clients in various European countries. We didn't had  Chinese or American clients. 

Bill had earned some money in Saudi Arabia and moved to China in 2005 to establish the new company. 

Bill  had the appearance, but not at all the personality of Leonard Cohen.  Bill was by all means a special guy. He was irascible and very  short-tempered. Several times per week, he was loudly scolding Vivien,  his private secretary or other Chinese people of the middle-management:  the purchase manager, finance manager, quality manager, production  manager and very often the HR manager. (She was loudly crying, each time  he scolded her)
 
I was the Engineering Manager, and to be  honest, Bill paid me very well. I was also often acting as the General  Manager when Bill "disappeared". That happened quite often and nobody,  not even his ex-wife or his son in Canada knew where he was or why he  was away. 
 
One day, after I submitted my expense note from  a business trip to Hong Kong, he blustered to my office and started an  abuse tirade to me. I shouldn't have booked a business class ticket and  stayed in 5 star hotels. "do you think you're working for MNC here ?" he  shouted. (Yes, I have worked 15 years for MNC before and I was used to  business class flight tickets and 5 star hotels). During his tirade, I  packed my laptop and other belongings and called a taxi to leave. When  he noted that, he asked what I was doing.  I explained him that I no  longer wanted to work for him. He returned to his office but when the  taxi was there, he came to me to excuse him. He promised never to do  that again and I stayed. 

That was only 3 weeks after I worked for Bill G.  We later had many other collisions. 

One  day, when we were traveling in the company car (both with our private  secretary) to potential new suppliers in Ningbo,  we got another  explosion. He wanted to buy an old fashioned, yet solid, cheap, but  highly unsafe cutting press, while I wanted a much more automatic,  modern machine with all kinds of safety protection screens and devices. I  threatened him, saying that in case he would buy the unsafe machine, I  would write an email to him with cc to the local police station,  explaining that he, not me, will go to jail in case of a work  accident.   After another abuse tirade, he agreed to buy the machine I  proposed. 
 
He was terribly envious on me because I could  speak Chinese with everybody in the company and he, in spite of all his  efforts, couldn't. He rented a private teacher to learn Chinese, but he  didn't had the perseverance to learn to speak some sentences. Every day,  at the back seat of the company car, he used his carton cards with  Chinese characters and their meaning. I told him he shouldn't learn  hànzì characters but instead learn pinyin and speak Chinese. But he  didn't accepted my recommendation because his Chinese private teacher  was full of the beauty and cultural significance of hànzì characters. 

One  day, he said to me (probably out of envy) that I shouldn't "lower  myself" by speaking Chinese to the people in the factory !  He also once  said to Mr. Zhao, the production manager: "I'm the company president, I  expect everybody to speak proper English with me". 
 
From  time to time, he blustered to the workshop, climbed on a pedestal (a  couple of palettes) and started shouting to the poor assembly workers,  almost all very young Chinese girls who came from the countryside to  Shanghai and who didn't understand one single word of his tirade in  English. 
 
One day, he came to my office and sat down in a  corner, silently.  When I asked him what was wrong, he explained that he  finally realized that there was something wrong with his attitude. He  had decided to go to Tibet for 3 weeks and convert to Buddhism there.  When he came back, he was indeed much calmer and controlled, but after a  while, his tantrums returned, albeit less often. So then he registered  for yoga classes. With a private teacher, every evening one hour. It  indeed helped a bit. 
 
At the end of 2011, his daughter  came over to Shanghai to study Chinese language at Shanghai Normal  University. She went back to Canada one year later. 
 
At  the Chinese New Year dinner (and the KTV afterwards), Bill didn't knew  well how to behave. Sometimes, I or Lina (the HR Manager) had to take  the lead. It was an act, not a spontaneous party. 

One day, Bill  invited a potential new customer from the USA for a factory visit. They  came over with 3 people; none of them had ever been to China before.  During the dinner in a famous, very Chinese restaurant, one of the three  pushed his chair away from the table and refused to touch the food. He  was "afraid to be poisoned". Really !
 
Bill was living in a  big luxury apartment in Huangpu district. With an attached small  apartment for his Ayi. When I told him that opposite to his compound,  there was the biggest escort service company of the globe, he acted as  if he didn't knew. There indeed were several thousands of girls (and  boys) working there and luxury cars were driving in and out the basement  day and night. But he didn’t knew it. 
 
He didn't trust  people, he was unable to build a stable relationship with Chinese  people.  "All Chinese are cheaters" he often said. No wonder he was in  constant conflict with staff, suppliers and our European customers.   Vivien, his Chinese private secretary, acted to the outside world as if  she supported Bill unconditionally.  

One day, when he once again  messed up the whole factory, the workers threatened to strike. I called  his brother (let's call him Rob G.) back in Canada in an attempt to  persuade Bill to be more reasonable. Some days later, Rob came over and  stayed in China for a while. He finally gave up his job as policeman to  act as a handyman and go-between between Bill and the production staff.  By the way: Rob was very different from Bill. He was a man of the world,  although he had a very particular language with a lot of spicy words.  He was living in a house in the famous Thames town in Songjiang, far  away from his brother. 
 
One day, we got an official letter  from the local government, announcing that, because of the hot weather  (and everybody in Shanghai switching on their air conditioners), the  whole industrial park would be switched off from the electricity grid  for two weeks. When Bill was in utter panic, preparing an email for our  clients to announce the shut down, I was able to calm him down. And went  to the other factory owners in the industrial area. In a meeting that  afternoon, we decided to send a  Chinese factory boss to someone of the  local government to persuade them to not switch us off. The hongbao  (small fee) that we collected from each of the 12 owners was very  convincing for the guy from the government. We were not switched off  from the grid. 
 
To release his stress, Bill decided to go  to a Jazz club every Saturday night. He paid for a private table, right  in front of the Jazz orchestra and invited Vivien, his Chinese private  secretary (she was happily married to a chief constable) and his  daughter (when she was in Shanghai). He didn't had real friends. I, as a  Jazz music addict, went to that same club for years, usually sitting in  a more dark corner in the back. Every time, he invited me  enthusiastically at his table but I often declined as I didn't wanted to  expose my friends to his behaviour. 
 
Because of a new EU  commission regulation, we got in trouble with the sales one of our core  products in Europe. And consequently Bill's company came in financial  trouble. Before, I had tirelessly tried to convince Bill to increase the  sales price of our products. As I had, much more than him, excellent  contacts with our clients, I knew that they would be prepared to pay a  bit more for our services. But he didn't listen to me. Instead, he  started to cheat both our suppliers and customers. He didn't pay  suppliers, some of them entirely dependent on our products. He borrowed  money from our main customer and never paid it back. 

I told him that he should fire me because the company could no longer bear the cost of my salary. But he didn't. 

Sometime  later, when I returned from a trip home (and to one of the customers),  he asked for a private meeting in a restaurant near to my home in  Shanghai. There, the high word came out. Right before, I told him I knew  why we were there. During my trip to Europe, the day before I returned,  he had secretly fired my tooling manager, quality engineer and my  private secretary.
 
I still today have excellent contacts  with all the former people of that company. Back in 2017, Mr. Zhao, the  production manager, who also had taken over my tasks, called me to  inform me that Bill once again disappeared. Two days later, when the  salaries to the (remaining) workers had to be paid, Bill had blocked all  bank accounts. I recommended Mr. Zhao to close the factory. 
Today,  Bill is still without a trace. Even his ex-wife, his son, daughter or  his brother don't know where he is. He's certainly not in China anymore.  Some people suspect that he is living in hiding in Venezuela.
 
When  I was living in Suzhou and went to that Jazz club in Shanghai, I met  there by big coincidence Vivien, Bill's ex private secretary. She was  drunk and hooking up with an older American guy, something I haven’t  seen her doing before. 

When I said to her "Hi Vivien, how are you  doing ?" she replied: "Hi Frans, you're looking well, but I'm no longer  Vivien, I’m Christine now".  I was speechless. 
 
Last  year, Mr Zhao started a brand new company in Songjiang from scratch. He  has gradually taken over the manufacturing of some of the products we  made before. He has the full confidence of our former clients and  suppliers. When I was there last year, he had only five people working  for him but the future of his new company looks bright.  

-Bill Brockenblock 

Ah.

But enough of that. China has changed. It’s a new world out there and the high powered days of living well inside of China are merging to a new reality.

Relationships

This world is filled with all sorts of people. But humans are humans, men are men and women are women. It’s how we interact with each other that is important.

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That’s the ol’ softie in me. Don’t you know.

Incidentally, the restaurant that they are both working in is a “Hot pot” restaurant. Basically it is a big pot of soup that you dip meats and vegetables into. Much like a Fondue. However, you also then dip it into sauces after you eat it, and you get to make your own sauces. It’s all very delicious. In the background we see a guy spinning what looks like pizza dough. Nope, that is how you make noodles in China. You make it by hand and that is what he is doing.

Now, you all might be confused, but this is taking place in a restaurant where they both apparently work, which is something that you can see by the aprons that they are wearing. My guess is that this is the very famous restaurant chain; Hai De Lao.

haidilao
https://www.haidilao.com/en/index/index.html

The Haidilao  brand was founded in 1994 in Jianyang, Sichuan. Since 1999, it has  gradually opened up markets in Xi'an, Zhengzhou and Beijing. In 2015,  our restaurant opened up in Taiwan was, and 10 stores have been opened in Taiwan by now. In 2017, our restaurant opened up in Hong Kong and opened two stores by now.

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Yeah.

Hotpot. Great in the colder weather. As it tends to steam up my glasses. LOL.

Hai De Lao Hot Pot. The meats are a selection of beef, chicken, mutton, and pork. Note the meatballs and the various vegetables that you can add as well. Not shown are the noodles, fish, shrimp, and all the other things that you can fry inside the vats of tasty oils in front of you.

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A “Brick House”

In America we refer to a strong stout woman as being built well. Or as we say “built like a brick house”. You can find these women all over the world. Not just in the United States, but in China as well. Here is a woman that I would consider a “Brick House”.

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Speaking of relationships, here’s some more girls.

Girls that resemble friends of mine

Here are some girls that resemble some of my friends that I have inside of China. As you can well guess they are nice and really sweet. They are smart too, and really interesting. Each one is like a book… full of stories and adventures.

Many I have met in the KTV’s, but also others that I have met in my day-to-day activities. All are really nice, and they are absolutely great conversationalists.

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This next girl reminds me a lot of a friend that I met at my last KTV trip. She was a lot of fun, but unfortunately I was drinking fake VSOP and that really took away from the full enjoyment of the evening. Word to the wise, when the alcohol is in question, don’t drink it. Buy your own. Bring your own, or stick to beer.

Contemporary versions of Chinese pop

Here’s a couple of contemporaneous renditions of a very popular Chinese pop song by Jay Chou. The song itself is around ten years old, but the singers breathe new life into it, and it’s all very lovely. This is the kind of music that people sing when they go to KTV’s and get drunk and belt out a song or two.

The name of the song is 千里之外.

But the new versions will not make any sense, or give you an appreciation for what is going on unless you watch the original music video. And that is why I have embedded it here…

千里之外 the original MV

Please click and watch this cute four minute mini-drama.

It’s in *.mkv format.

MKV files are actually multimedia container formats. An MKV container can incorporate audio, video, and subtitles into a single file—even if those elements use different types of encoding. For example, you could have a MKV file that contains H.264 video and something like MP3 or AAC for audio.

-What Is an MKV File and How Do You Play Them?

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The video is in the MKV format, which should be read by both windows and Microsoft systems. However, if you are unable to view the video, you can access it here…

https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzgzMDIxNTUyMA==.html

The song is about life, relationships, and taking opportunity even at the cost of love. Ouch!

Oh. You have to let those your love move on with their lives…

Screen shot from the original MV.
Screen shot from the original MV.

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In the video is a story about a young boy and girl.

The boy is just a handyman, but the girl is a singer and she is destined for great things. She gets an opportunity to become a great singer, but she won’t leave the boy. She loves him, don’t you know. And she wants to day with him. No matter what.

Screen shot from the original MV.
Screen shot from the original MV.

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And then one day, her big break happens. A big important man comes to her and offer her an opportunity of a lifetime. It’s an opportunity that you just do not turn down. It is something you just don’t say no to.

And she says no.

But the boy loves her.

He can’t allow her to waste her life with him.

So he tells her to go. He forces her to go. He grabs the contract and says “yes” before she even knows what’s happening.

Screen shot from the original MV.
An opportunity of a lifetime.

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Yes, and she leaves. Three years later, she returns. Rich and famous. But the boy is there. Just the same old job, making ends meet. And the song has a refrain about your loved ones moving on to bigger and better things, while you are left behind…

Screen shot from the original MV.
I send you away beyond a thousand miles…

The Lyrics to 千里之外

Jay Chou – 千里之外 (Far Away)

Chinese Lyrics

"Far Away (千里之外)"
 (feat. Fei Yu-Ching)
 
 屋簷如懸崖風鈴如滄海我等燕歸來
 時間被安排演一場意外你悄然走開
 故事在城外濃霧散不開看不清對白
 你聽不出來風聲不存在是我在感慨
 夢醒來是誰在窗台把結局打開
 那薄如蟬翼的未來禁不起誰來拆
 
 我送你離開千里之外你無聲黑白
 沉默年代或許不該太遙遠的相愛
 我送你離開天涯之外你是否還在
 琴聲何來生死難猜用一生去等待
 
 聞淚聲入林尋梨花白直得一行青苔
 天在山之外雨落花台我兩鬢斑白
 聞淚聲入林尋梨花白直得一行青苔
 天在山之外雨落花台我等你來
 
 一身琉璃白透明著塵埃你無暇的愛
 你從雨中來詩化了悲哀我淋濕現在
 芙蓉水面採船行影猶在你卻不回來
 被歲月覆蓋你說的花開過去成空白
 夢醒來是誰在窗台把結局打開
 那薄如蟬翼的未來禁不起誰來拆
 
 我送你離開千里之外你無聲黑白
 沉默年代或許不該太遙遠的相愛
 我送你離開天涯之外你是否還在
 琴聲何來生死難猜用一生
 我送你離開千里之外你無聲黑白
 沉默年代或許不該太遙遠的相愛
 我送你離開天涯之外你是否還在
 琴聲何來生死難猜用一生去等待 

English Lyrics

Beyond A Thousand Miles (Faraway)
           
The roof is like a cliff ,the wind chimes are like the blue sea I wait for the swallow to return
 The time has been arranged to act out an accident you quietly leave
 The story is outside the city,the heavy fog won't disperse,can't see the dialogue clearly
 You cannot tell by listening the sound of the wind doesn't exist,it is me who is sighing with regret
 I waken from the dream ,Who is at the windowsill opening the ending?
 That future which is as thin as a cicada's wings cannot withstand being torn apart by whom
 
I send you away beyond a thousand miles,you are silent, black and white
 The silent era perhaps it shouldn't have been,the too distant love
 I send you away Beyond the end of the sky,are you still there?
 Where is the sound of the piano coming from? It's hard to predict life and death I use all my life To wait
 
I hear sounds of tears so I enter the woods searching for the white pear flower I only get a row of moss
 The sky is beyond the mountains,the rain falls down on the flower stands, I'm grey at the temples
 I hear sounds of tears so I enter the woods,searching for the white pear flower I only get a row of moss
 The sky is beyond the mountains,the rain falls down on the flower stands I wait for you to come
 
Glazed white all over you,transparent like dust your flawless love
 From the rain you come,the poem becomes sorrowful I'm drenched now
 
Pick up the lotus from the water surface,it's as if the shadows of the boat sailing are still there,yet you don't come back
 Covered by the years,the flower you spoke of blossomed,the past becomes blank
 
I waken from the dream,Who is at the windowsill opening the ending?
 That future which is as thin as a cicada's wings,
 cannot withstand being torn apart by whom
 
I send you away beyond a thousand miles,you are silent, black and  white,the silent era,perhaps it shouldn't have been,the too distant love
 
I send you away beyond the end of the sky,are you still there? Where is  the sound of the piano coming from? It's hard to predict life and death I  use all my life
 
I send you away,beyond a thousand miles,you are silent, black and  white,the silent era,perhaps it shouldn't have been,the too distant love
 
I send you away,beyond the end of the sky

 Are you still there?
 Where is the sound of the piano coming from?
 It's hard to predict life and death
 I use all my life To wait

https://lyricstranslate.com

The remakes of 千里之外 (Far Away)

The first “remake”…

In this, we have a British talent show. Very similar to “America’s Got Talent”. And it takes place in the UK as you can tell by the judges and the musicians. Of course, it is being judged by both British folk and by Chinese folk.

I think that this young Chinese lass has great potential and an outstanding voice. And when she hits those high notes, I just get goosebumps. It’s pretty exceptional, and a real surprise to the song. A real twist. I’ll tell you what.

The first remake… sung by a lady named 阿兰.

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And the “classic version”…

And the classic version that everyone and their grandmother sings to in the KTV. When you watch the other “judges” and the audience look up to the ceiling, open palm their hands, and have that “far away” look in their eyes, it is this guy that they are emulating…

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And it is indeed grand.

The song sung in Hong Kong

Here’s another fellow in Hong Kong. This guy really belts this song out. Check it out. It’s pretty much an attention grabber. It’s two singers 林峯、and 王祖蓝 and they both sing 千里之外.

Now for the BEST version

This is the BEST version, and I just love it. In fact, I think that I like it better than the original, or the KTV versions. It just stands on it’s own. I think that female singer just really makes this version so very, very special.

She is BREATHTAKING.

If you want to download the next file directly click on this button. It is one of my most favorite renditions.

If you don’t, then no problem. Just click on the picture below.

You will also notice the show and the audience. This is all China. And as stupid and crazy as the show appears, this is the normal kind of thing inside of China. With those strange cartoon sounds, the text bubbles that float in the air, and the really strange dressed television hosts. Yup. It’s all China.

Hey!

This gal is a stunner!

Yes. She is breathtaking. I rarely say this about a woman, but in this case, her beauty, her confidence, and her stance is just… well, astounding… and breathtaking.

I just love her strong confidence, and womanly charm.

As I have said, it’s my favorite version.

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Are you tired of this song yet?

I think that I have beaten this dead horse long enough. LOL. I guess that none of the neocons in the Military-Industrial Beltway in Washington DC has ever heard of this song, could care less about the Chinese people and their society, and just want to destroy things so that they can get a new addition to their third mansion.

But that is just my opinion.

Comparisons

We need to compare China with America for some real educational benefit. Let’s take a glimpse at some American Country and Western music…

…and some urban music.

One of my personal favorites… (*.mkv format) is Tim McGraw singing about his plans to get out of the rat-race and get down to a more stable and slower pace of life. I really enjoy this song and what it represents to me. (On a personal basis.)

Music of the American Countryside…

Jen, this video is for you. 

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Music of the American Urban Areas…

This is pretty typical. If not threatening to steal, kill, rape or murder, the gals sing about how tough and strong they are and how invincible their “booty” is.

“It’s a very sassy song, very kind of woman empowerment,” Lopez said in a behind-the-scenes video posted to her YouTube page. “[It’s] kind of giving you taste of what you give out, letting guys know that we’re not going to take any junk."

-Jennifer Lopez flashes her butt in risqué new music video

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I have my own opinions about all this. I guess that music represents the society that it originates from. But I am the outlier.

I am a minority opinion.

The Internet rages on and on about this last video…

Sometimes, a song is so steamy, the only logical next  step is a super-sexy music video. For that, we can thank trailblazers  like Prince and Madonna, who established the right to show a little skin  in music videos like "Kiss" and "Express Yourself." 

MTV deserves its  share of credit—can anybody ever forget their first time watching  t.A.T.u.'s music video for "All The Things She Said"?—but then YouTube  blew up, and suddenly you could watch any steamy music video any time you wanted.  

It became a sort of guilty pleasure, listening to a great song while  watching a hot person do hot-person things like make out with someone  equally good-looking, move their hips like no one was watching, and wear  an outfit so tight you  wonder how they got it on in the first place. 

You could spend hours  watching gorgeous celebrities pour suspiciously watery milk on their  Spandex-bound bodies (we still love you, Fergie!). And, if we're being  honest, we have spent hours watching that (and we still love you, Fergie). 

If I had a choice between the strong woman singing the Chinese song, or J-Lo singing about her empowered butt, I would choose the Chinese Lady (金志文 and 白雪). Not the American gutter trash.

But that is just me.

Chinese Gals

Now, after watching J-Lo promote her booty I have to ask myself if this is what America has become?

And maybe I’m a “little out of it” being inside of China.

Maybe the comment that I have become too distant from what America stands for. Maybe I am not “with it”. That I need to get more in tune with what America represents…

…”democracy”…

Just ask the “Doctor of Democracy” himself, El Bush-Bo’ Limbaugh.

But I don’t stand shoulder to shoulder with the evil psychopaths in Washington DC. I stand with the founders of the United States who believed that the United States must stay a Republic. And that once a “democracy” it will turn into an oligarchy, and in short order, a military empire.

They were right, by the way.

But to be honest, if America stand for people like Mike Pompeo and big booty, I don’t know if I really want to be part of that reality. It’s uh…”yucky” don’t you know.

Actually.

So anyways, here’s a sampling of the chicks that surround me in China. And no, they are not all big, black and stacked with enormous “booty”. They are just average and come in different sizes and shapes, just like they are supposed to. And I am just fine with that. Short, plump, big, thin, robust, or petite. I love them all.

For instance, here’s a tall thin skinny girl…

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I like her, she’s a cutie.

Next up is a “village girl”. We would call her “corn fed” back in rural Pennsylvania. We see her dancing about with her hat, and her arm protectors. Ah. It’s so China.

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Common Chicks

Moving on, let’s check out this chick. She is really a rather common archetype and is the kind of girl that you would meet time and time again in all the adult venues and establishments. She’s cheerful, fun and playful.

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I know, I know, you all want to see more than just pretty girls. Well, I’m going to get on to it. I promise.

This next girl is dancing in a restaurant.

Most restaurants in China have private dining rooms. You just book the room, and you close the door and you eat in peace. It’s everywhere, and depending on the establishment, you can have a bathroom, a television, a tea set up, and a Majong table. You just have to go to the right restaurant, and the cost for the room isn’t all that expensive either. So most people tend to use the rooms than to sit in a big open eating area like you have to endure in the United States.

Check it out…

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Now, I would like to continue with (yet) another girl.

I would say that she is pretty typical. And she really is. I can go to just about any public area and point out tens of girls that look just like her. And see, not all girls in China are all that busty. So don’t get confused. I think she is cute and having fun, and it is that sunny disposition that I just love and can eat up.

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Maybe I should have called this post learning about China by looking at pretty girls part 75, eh?

Parking Garages

I’ve covered this before, but the parking garages in China are beautiful, clean, well-lit, and attractive. And I have mentioned it before, it sure is a drastic contrast to the dungeon-like dark, dingy, dirty, cesspools that Americans use to part their cars in.

Here we have a typical chick dancing inside one of the parking garages that are everywhere.

At a train station

Have any of you guys gone to what constitutes American trains lately? Yeah. I’m talking about Amtrak. And yeah, it’s pretty awful. All the train-stations combine the worst elements of Detroit and the US Post Office. Well… not all of them are like this. Some are nice. Especially the ones near the large Urban Areas.

Amtrak Cincinnati Union Terminal
Amtrak Cincinnati Union Terminal

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Well, I think that American rail is under utilized because of the cultural differences between the USA and China. I have to ask the reader, just how often do you and your friends and family ride American rail?

Well, with the massive network of High Speed Trains in China, The rail is used extensively. It is cheap, clean, well taken cared for, and is often preferable to flying in aircraft. The Chinese rail network is vast.

Here is a cute chick inside a Chinese rail terminal. Yeah, they all (stations that is) kind of look like this, more or less…

In a grocery Store

Here we have a chick dancing inside a small town supermarket. I do like these places and the prices are truly affordable. But don’t expect to get high grade Western food there.

Road Construction

When I lived in PA, that’s Pennsylvania for all you’se guys who aren’t aware of the Pennsylvania slang, the local department of transportation was constantly “fixing” the roads. You would think that the roads would last more than a few months, but then again, the very next season, more millions of dollars needed to be dished out to pay for road construction.

The potholes in PA are a big long-time, on-going, joke.

They’ll never get fixed. It’s just a big ol’ slush fund for the wealthy to siphon money from Pennsylvania taxpayers. But, anyways, I well remember one summer when it too two entire seasons lay down a new bridge. That’s five to six months. A real slow pace, and the disruption of our lives in the local community was horrific.

That’s what happens when you have a nation run by corrupt bankers.

China is a nation of engineers, builders and designers. And it shows. It’s not just two complete 6000 bed, and 10,000 bed hospitals going up in two weeks like what happened in March 2020. It’s everything.

Here’s a bridge going up in one day.

China DOES NOT PLAY.

Chinese Idea of Beauty

It all has to do with the shape of the face. Sure there are numerous characteristics that might mitigate the value of a person’s beauty. However, for the most part, if you are clean, have a good complexion, are pleasant, and have an oval face with strong thick black hair, you will pretty much be considered attractive.

I would say that this next chick has a face that well-represents the Chinese idea of beauty.

Average Life

Here’s just two girls going for a walk in the city.

It’s very common, and this is what it is like. It shouldn’t matter one way or the other, but the Mike Pompeo narrative is that the XinJiang Muslims are terribly repressed within China. That the Chinese people are starving, and hungering for “freedomTM” and “democracyTM” and they can’t wait for the great American military to invade and rescue them!

And the lonely Muslim women are forced to sleep with government officials…!

China forces Uyghur Muslim women to sleep with govt …
https://www.opindia.com/2019/11/china-uyghur...

Nov 08, 2019 · Han Males are sleeping on the same bed as Uyghur Muslim women in China whose male family members, often husbands, are locked up in ‘reeducation camps’ in conformity with a diktat by the Chinese regime, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported last week. The information comes from government officials who spoke to them on the condition of anonymity.

Really?

You must be brain dead to believe this propagandized bullshit.

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Oh, by the way. These videos are from Tiktok and WeChat. Both of which was banned by Trump / Pompeo. So if you watch them you are risking a life in prison for …

…I don’t know.

The official reason is “national security”, but when the DOJ asked to prove it the administration came up empty handed. Never the less, if you are an American, you’d better slam your computer shut, and erase everything before a NSA or DHS SWAT team breaks down your door and takes you off for questioning….

Speaking of an average life, here’s two chicks running in Chinese park in the dead of winter.

Improvements to selfies

Many Chinese women like to improve their pictures by adding special effect and other colorful enhancements. I don’t really like them, but then again, I am from the “old school”. I guess to “each their own”…

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Here’s an article out of the United States in Yahoo! that disagrees with me.

They say that the Chinese ideal is thin with big eyes. Yet they don’s provide any pictures of this ideal, and I can tell you that it is not something found in China. But you can read their opinions yourself here…

Nowhere is this difference more obvious than on Chinese social media, where you won’t find any of the contouring, lip-lining or thighbrows that fill Instagram feeds in the United States. In China, it’s all pale skin, big eyes and rosebud lips.

The fair-skinned standard: There are overlaps in how each  nationality shoots its self-portraits: Chinese girls take photos at an  angle to slim their faces, just like selfie queen Kim Kardashian West recommends.  Chinese women are also influenced not only by their own country’s  ideals but also those of neighboring East Asian countries like Japan and  South Korea, all of which favor slim figures and youthful,  innocent-looking beauty.

Combined with imported Western beauty  ideals like large breasts, these influences have fused to create a very  definite Chinese physical ideal with little wiggle room for women who  fail to meet the standard.

“Chinese beauty ideals basically come  from the media: TV shows, celebrities. A lot of Chinese beauty ideals  are quite Western,” Chinese culture expert Janny Chyn, who provides  cultural immersion tours through her company Shanghai Pathways, told Mic. “The main difference is that we like white skin.”

Many women in China strive to be baifumei: pale,  rich and beautiful (with a heavy emphasis on pale). The ultimate  baifumei is actress Fan Bingbing, adored and emulated for her  translucent white skin, large eyes and “melon seed” (oval-shaped) face.

“There is a strong standard of beauty in China, and it requires you to  be as white as possible, with big eyes,” Thibaud André, consultant at Daxue Consulting in Beijing, told Mic.

Cute wins out over sexy: Flick through Instagram in the U.S. and you’ll likely see a lot of flesh, especially in the summer. Everybody from Kardashian West to Drake  has been known to get a little thirsty on social media. Not so on  Chinese social networks like Weibo, where big eyes, bunny ears and cute  slogans abound. And it’s not just among teenagers.

“The big  difference is that we want to be cute. You will see women pretending to  be teenagers when they are grown-ups,” said Shanghai Pathways' Chyn. 
 
“Pretending to be cute is never offensive. It’s more controversial to be  sexy. If you’re cute, no one can disapprove.”

One Chinese guide to taking selfies says “innocent and cute”  photos will always prove the most popular and are also easy to take.  That means less vamping and less makeup aimed at overt sexiness. While  girls all over the Western world might have been sucking on bottle caps  last year to get Kylie Jenner’s lips, women in China are more likely to underplay this feature, using lighter or coral lipsticks.

This  desire to be cute also manifests itself in big, puffed-out hamster  cheeks, a sweeter alternative to the more overtly seductive “duckface.”

When skinny trumps curves: There’s no denying that Americans feel huge pressure to be skinny, what with 20 million American women  experiencing a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in  their lives. Social media plays its part in promoting skinniness,  glorifying thigh gaps and spreading "fitspo“ slogans. But the recent movement  to embrace plus sizes, along with the popularity of curvier celebrities  like Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and the Kardashian crew, has brought a bit  more variety to social media that makes space for curves. (See: ”belfies.“)

Chinese  social media, on the other hand, sees the glorification of skinniness  above all else. This has led to a number of selfie trends, including one  challenge  to twist your arm behind your back to touch your belly button and  another to stack coins on your collarbone to demonstrate thinness.

”[Actress]  Angelababy represents the beauty standard right now, super slim,“ said  Daxue Consulting’s André. "All over Weibo, Chinese women are posting  pictures showing how slim and how white they are. That’s definitely a  trend.”
And while America isn’t perfect — a curvy body is still  more celebrated when it includes a slim waist — there is at least some  diversity in the types of bodies deemed attractive.

“Americans  prefer a fit body, a fit figure. It doesn’t need to be skinny, it  doesn’t need to be chubby but it needs to be fit and healthy looking… In  China I only hear, ‘Girls should have really thin bodies,’” said one  participant in an Asian Beauty Secrets video about American vs. Chinese beauty standards.

Who needs makeup when you can digitally edit your selfies? Selfie trends like contouring and strobing have changed what products many American women have in their makeup bags, as we prioritize looking “camera ready.”

Not  so in China. Although the cosmetics market is growing, women there  still wear far less makeup than girls in the states, according to André.  There’s little need for special selfie-ready makeup when you can use  apps to change what you look like instead.

“Our selfies are very  high-tech,” Chyn said. The functions on Photoshop-like apps lay users’  beauty desires bare: The most popular Chinese beauty app, Meitu Xiuxiu,  allows you to whiten your skin, slim your face and make your eyes  impossibly huge. By contrast, Facetune, an app used by Tyra Banks, focuses on whitening your teeth, smoothing out skin and applying more makeup.

Understanding  the pressures women elsewhere face might be just the thing to make us  examine where our own beauty ideals come from. Maybe we’ll even put down  the bronzer, delete the Photoshop app and face the world as we really  are. Just maybe.

Ahhhh

The “news” out of America is about 80% bullshit, 10% truth, and 10% out of the “outer limits”.

I have yet to find even ONE armpit selfie in China, and I have been looking!

This reminds me of an event while I was in university. Friday was designated as “wear jeans if you agree with LGBT rights” day. Well, since I and about 90% of everyone else in the university ONLY had jeans, we were left with two options; [1] wear the jeans or [2] stay home and miss class. Most, like myself, came to class wearing jeans.

It had nothing to do with anything else.

I think that most Chinese Goth folk are taking selfies because they are human, and it’s a thing that everyone is doing. Not that they are trying to “protest” the “evil communist tyrants”. Or whatever the Mike Pompeo narrative is today.

Gyms in China

Yup. China has gyms and the rates are pretty reasonable. The only thing that I do not like is that they tend not to be air conditioned. That is because the Chinese believe that you need to sweat to get rid of the bad chi (energy) inside of you.

While people are realizing the importance of sport for health and better  appearance, fitness industry is also booming in China in recent years.  More and more people become members of fitness studios  and the fitness apps are being used everywhere. 

With the technology  development and the changing lifestyle of consumers, the fitness  industry also needs to work on new concepts to adjust people’s needs for  fitness in the future. Fitness industry in China was facing transformation. 

Instead of working  out in gyms and fitness studios, nowadays fitness can take place  everywhere. Due to the high penetration rate of smartphones in China, fitness apps are well used  by fitness enthusiasts. People can easily get fitness tips, find  fitness studios and get connected with other fitness enthusiasts and  professional trainers with apps in their smartphones. 

According to rough estimation, there were nearly 100,000 fitness studios  in China. Most of them were opened in bigger cities.  Beijing and Shanghai are the Chinese cities with the biggest market for  fitness studios. 

Fitness studios with innovated concepts are also first  introduced to these two metropolises. 

To be noticed is that the numbers  of fitness studios in second-tier cities are growing faster.  Considering the brands and types of fitness studios, the Chinese market  has showed a great variety. 

While the big chains owning hundreds of  studios are still expanding, the smaller boutique studios which focus on  more individual personal training for certain groups are becoming  increasingly popular. And people are apparently willing to spend more in these boutique studios. 

With the growth of the fitness market, the consumption of high-tech  sportwear and wearable devices are also expected to grow. 

Fitness  studios with high-tech apparatus might also be more competitive in the  market, while the less qualified trainers are facing the pressure from  their customers who can get professional information from various  channels. The future of fitness industry should be a cooperative  competition of various industries and sectors with more highly  personalized and individual offers. 

-   Fitness industry in China - statistics & facts | Statista                                         

Chinese Beaches.

If you perform a google search about beaches, or swimming in China you will see these images of hordes of people all crammed together. It’s actually funny. that’s not the way it is at all. It is the narrative that the American government wants people to think. But not the way it really is.

The Chinese beach lie.
The American view of Chinese Beaches. Pretty crowded and impossible right?

.

So what is it really like?

Well, I have a house on the beach. And every day I see it, watch the sun rise and the sun set on it and watch the people come and go on it. And NOT ONCE did it ever resemble what you might find on the American websites, search engines or “news” articles.

Here’s some images of what Chinese beaches look like. It’s the real deal, you-all.

.

And here is another young lass… She’s a bit on the thin leggy side, but you know, isn’t she attractive though? Look at that smile. I love her confidence. Smile (check). Confidence (check). Beach (check). Small bikini (check, check, check).

Dance Class

Dancing is very popular in China. Perhaps the biggest “craze(s)” lies in the styles related to “Spanish Samba” and K-Pop. In my office building on my floor (were) two K-pop dance troops and one Samba studio. Making my floor about 50% devoted to dancing with pretty girls of all ages.

.

The girls above seem to be middle school age. My guess.

Forward Thinking

Global Times editorial celebrates moon mission and poverty elimination, a tandem neither the Outlaw US Empire nor any other nation has achieved. The key as ever is balance:
 
"For a long time, some people believe China has not done enough to  balance these developments. Voices have existed that China invested  excessive resources to fields such as aerospace. Despite difficulties,  compared to other countries, China has tried its best to reach a balance  and has achieved positive results.
 
"Since China implemented the reform and opening-up policy, the most  prominent and well-known national goal has been achieving a moderately  prosperous society. People's livelihood and fairness and justice have  always been the focus of attention in Chinese society. A  technology-centered national strategy and people-oriented economic  development have highly integrated. 
 
"In the past few decades, the Chinese people have been developing the  aerospace field, but their livelihood has also been improving. The  lunar exploration project is not a political vanity project - it is well  within the ability of Chinese society.
 
"The progress in high-tech areas such as aerospace has pushed up  China's strategic competitiveness overall. At the same time, people are  living better lives. Without the advancement in high-tech areas, China's  prosperity would lack the backbone and long-term guarantee....
 
"China has long implemented a market economy, but has maintained  the guiding role of the government. This prevents our market economy  from repeating and hovering at a low level, and also prevents us from  being satisfied with the low-end prosperity of the global value chain.  The Chinese nation's self-motivated spirit continues to release  momentum, successfully supported by the country's system. Thus, we can  move forward in a balanced manner and with a clear sense of direction."  [My Emphasis]
 
This same methodology can be seen in Putin's governance and also  glaringly absent from all Neoliberal driven nations, which partially  explains their problems. I'm going to single-out this one sentence from  the concluding paragraph for it admits a truth no Neoliberal nation has  even acknowledged:
 
"There are unlimited possibilities in space, and most resources that support the human being's future development must be outside the Earth." [My Emphasis] 
 
I know of no major nation that has admitted directly or through its  main media voice that the earth is finite with a limited amount of  resources that will govern the overall degree of potential development.  For me, that means China has admitted to itself that at some future  point there'll be a requirement to shift to a steady-state type of  political-economy for all nations and thus the world. 

That's a far more  advanced view of economics from the Neoliberal model that doesn't admit  to scarce resources or that there's a limit--a Junk, unrealistic model  to be sure. 

Classrooms

School is much more intense in China than it is in America. For starters, all the children must learn English AND Chinese. Their classes are very regimented, and success is mandated by culture. If they want to be an individual and “go their own way”, it is not permitted. they must work as a team, be a team player and do their best. Failure is not an option.

Final comments

What the American (and British) media presents as “China” has very little resemblance to what it actually is.

Pompeo unloads on US universities for China ties
https://apnews.com/article/technology-mike-pompeo...

Dec 09, 2020 · Pompeo took aim at universities across the U.S., claiming they refused to address the Trump administration’s concerns about China’s attempts to influence students and academics. He specifically called out the president of MIT, alleging he refused to host Pompeo’s speech, and a senior official at the University of Washington over a case ...

And…

Exclusive -- Mike Pompeo: China Infiltrating Our ...
https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/12/14/mike...

Dec 14, 2020 · In September, Pompeo  said he was “hopeful” that branches of the Confucius Institute — an  organization run by the Chinese government — across America’s colleges  and universities would be closed by the end of 2020. The Trump  administration designated the Confucius Institute’s programs as foreign  missions of the Chinese Communist Party.. China is a greater threat than Russia in the ...

And…

Pompeo vows tough U.S. stance on China but is open to talks
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/21/pompeo-vows-to...


Aug 21, 2020 · Pompeo said the Trump administration is open to talks with Beijing but the U.S. would maintain its tough stance. “President Trump is serious about protecting our information, our networks and ...

China is depicted as an evil, dirty, corrupt, tyrannical “regime”. When in reality it is a single-party, social democracy based on Confucian values and traditional culture. Over the last four decades the nation has worked hard to make China what it is today, and what it is…

…is really astounding. It is a middle class neighborhood populated with hard-working, intelligent people. They are fiercely patriotic, almost hysterically so, and all the nonsense from (former) President Trump and his side kick Mike Pompeo are all lies.

Pompeo blasts China for suppressing coronavirus ...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pompeo-blasts...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid harsh blame on China on Sunday for engaging in what he called a “classic Communist disinformation effort” and for working “to make …

As a sanity check, here is a video of the the events in China during 2020.

As you watch the three minute video can you identify which items that you are aware of from the Western news media?

Go ahead, watch and count the number of events that the American and British “news” media reported on…

Do you want more?

I have more post like this in my China Index and all the sub-indexes.

China

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index
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Snapshots of life in China. Surprise! It doesn’t look anything like Alex Jones says it is.

Here are some videos taken around China during the Summer of 2020. During this time, China has pretty much recovered from the Coronavirus, but remains guarded and cautious. The rest of the world is still fighting the virus, and the United States is a “basket case”. The videos are a collection of home movies that I took and Tictok videos from the original platform Douxing, which has always been banned in the United States.

Incidentally, all those laws being made in the United States about banning or changing Tictok or Wechat has absolutely ZERO effect in China. 

American laws end at the American shoreline, and as far as the influence that they will have, it will be minimal. The primary generation of income for all the Chinese companies come from within China itself.

So, as an example, Tictok revenue in the USA is less than 2% of what it makes in China.  

Here, I use Alex Jones as an example (in the title) as he is pushing the “China Bad” narrative (generated by the Pompeo CIA / State Department) very rigorously. He, like others of his market segment, (such as Rush Limbaugh and Hall Turner) use China as the scapegoat for all the problems that America is experiencing. It’s a convenient villain.

It’s also absolutely and completely false.

It's like a fight in a school yard between two bullies. The teacher comes out to break it up. And one of the bullies points to the teachers car and yells"Someone is trying to steal your car!"

China does not look anything like these multi-millionaire television and radio personalities say. And because they are so very, very, very far off the “deep end” in their speculative fantasies, those that listen to them, end up making decisions based on bad intel.

They make bad decisions based upon their illusions instead of based on reality.

Such as Donald Trump / Mike Pompeo when they decided to “institute a regime change” in Communist China “for the Chinese people”.

Not realizing that the Communist Government IS the people of China.

Not just in "flowery words" and "pithy sayings", but really in reality. Their entire society is structured as that of an individual having membership within something greater.

America, is set up the opposite. It is a nation of "lone wolves", or individuals who fight alone and reap all the benefits of their hard labors for themselves alone.

So the Pompeo speed and the Trump public positioning, is of course very silly, and absolutely insane that a (supposedly capable) government would even dare publicly announce such a strategy.


"Ah. I do not like their government. We will do everything to destroy that government. We will build a coalition to enable us to destroy it as a collective group.

We are doing it for democracy, and freedom, and for the people of China."

Now, for the record, I have listened to these television personalities for decades. For the longest time I believed every word that they said, as they provided me with a news and opinion outlet that was not (then) available on the “mainstream American press”. And in so believing everything, I became a rabid nationalist conservative.

Then life happened.

Uh oh.

I saw how “Justice” actually works, and how absolutely out of touch the mainstream conservative narrative actually is with the many facets of American society. Some things just did not add up. (How can a nation be a Republic with the election of Senators? If America is so great, why was I always “treading water” and desperately trying to play “catch up?)

I started to move to the left (politically) and for the longest time I oscillated back and forth between left and right trying to find a “middle ground”. I guess you might say that I was a Libertarian at heart. I just pretty much wanted to be left alone. I wasn’t hurting or harming anyone. I just wanted to be left alone.

If America was the land of the “lone wolf”, then let me take on that role. Leave me alone! As it is my right as an American!

No one in the USA would let me.

There was always something I was doing wrong. From not wearing a seat-belt, to smoking in a restaurant, to drinking beer on Sunday, to not reporting a sale (I made to a friend) to the IRS. It got so bad that I was afraid to do anything. When I was driving, I would always look at my speedometer if I saw a police car. I would only carry just “enough” money in my wallet so that I wouldn’t be questioned “why” I had so much money. It was NOT a life that I wanted to live.

Then I moved to China.

Whoa! Was it nothing like I expected!

I expected something out of a dystopian novel. I expected darkness, pale faces and dour expressions. I expected goose-stepping security guards everywhere. I expected sadness, grey skies and a bleak landscape. I expected third-world hovels, and a remote and impossible to reach ruling class. I expected filth, squalor, bad habits, nasty behaviors, and oppressive regulations and endless lines of bureaucracy.

I expected the “cardboard cut-out” illusion that has been drummed into my head for the last six decades.

I did not see it.

I saw something else.

I saw FREEDOM. Real, honest to goodness, freedom. I saw people who were living life without fear of the police. I saw people who were able to save money. I saw people smoking (gasp!) at their desks at work (gasp!) and pin-up of nude girls on the office walls (gasp!) and buying beer at lunch as if it was nothing. Nothing! I saw people that had hope and dreams and a strong belief that their government would stick by them, and help THEM when they needed it.

Oh….

Let me show you what I saw, and continue to see, in China to this day…

Each picture contains a movie. Please click on the picture to watch a movie that will open up in a new tab that will illustrate the story within the picture shown.

The videos

Here are some videos that I have collected and that provides some sort of “snapshot” of life in China. Good or bad, you can say that [1] it is different from that in the United States, and [2] that it doesn’t at all resemble anything like the news media (on all levels) say it is.

And that is the point.

These videos are a selection of videos that point to how life is within China in various aspects. They are a mix of some “home videos” that I took (like the first one) and videos that I have collected using various Chinese APPs. I suggest you check them all out.

Conclusion

One of the many things you learn when you leave the Untied States (or any of it’s satellite nations, like the UK or Canada) is that the world looks nothing like the American media says it is. In fact, it looks absolutely and stunningly different.

This goes as far as what other nations are like. As in the example of China. To, just how welcome all the Americans are when they are busy “spreading democracy and freedom” to the rest of the world. Like here…

.

Or, being an example for the rest of the world to emulate. Like how the United States has handled the Coronavirus. As shown clearly in this video…

.

The future belongs to people who will work together as a society for the benefit of all. Not to those who take, who demand, and who do not contribute. Their ideas no longer work in this small place that we call the earth. Being selfish is not going to help society as a whole. We will all need to work together.

The best example that I can give is this;

You can be the best basket-ball player in the world. But up against a team of other players, who are all well trained in working together, you will lose. You will fail spectacularly. 

Don’t be selfish. Work together to make the world a better place. That is what China is trying to do, and you can see it if you study the culture long enough. The opposite is the United States. Lead by a “self made” man who accumulated piles and piles of riches all by himself.

Be part of something greater. Work as part of a group.

Or die alone.

Do you want more?

I have many more posts along these lines in my China Index. You can see it here…

China

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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More pretty girls and learning about China by looking at their videos.

This is a continuation of my posts on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. As with my most recent posts, just click on the picture to open up a short video of the girl. It’s all good fun. The idea behind this, is of course, to help expose people to what China is like, and by doing so while watching pretty girls. As the women within a nation are the best description that you can ever get of a nation and it’s society.

Do you want more?

I have more posts related to this in my Pretty Girls of China index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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More pretty girls within China (8) and why finding the right girl is important.

Here we continue, yet again, with more videos of Chinese beauties. In each case, the video is associated with a picture, and if you click on the picture, a video will open up in a new tab. These videos were all taken during the months of June and July 2020 within China, and posted by the respective girls on those dates. I find all of these ladies quite lovely and I hope that you, the reader will agree with me on this.

I suppose that I tend to post in clusters of related posts until I am tired of it, and the Metallicman audience grows tired of my articles. There’s much going on in the world today. With Pompeo saying that “new” techniques and methods must be used to “suppress China”, at the same time that two complete invasion carrier fleets are steaming towards China…

UGH.

Enjoy the pretty girls.

Do you want more?

I have more posts along these lines in my Pretty Girls Index, here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

[wp_paypal_payment]

Learning about China by looking at pretty girls (6)

In this post, I am going to get back to posting some information about China and living there. In particular, I will post using a new format, that maybe you readers might find easier to use and more interesting. Gosh, I hope that you all will like it! This post consists of videos, short videos, of Chinese women. They are indexed by a static photo with a brief paragraph description.

Simply click on the picture that you are interested in, and a new window will pop up that will have the video of the girl. Most videos are under 15 seconds, so it shouldn’t take long to download or to appear. Just allow the videos to load. If there is a lot of internet traffic, it might take some time.

The Girls of China.

Learning can be fun, as long as you are with a pretty girl to show you things.

Do you want more?

If so, you can have some fun in my China index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls
China

The rest of the world is living life, what is holding you back? Is it the belief that you are somehow “special”?

Americans are constantly reinforced how dark and gloomy the rest of the world is. They are told that America must fight wars all over the globe to “free people” from the evils of Communism, and “to spread democracy” and the “American way of life”. It’s all a big nasty lie. The rest of the world is doing just fine thank you. And Americans need to straighten up, get their collective shit together and stop putting their nose in everyone else’s’ business.

This post consists of some videos from the rest of the world. And no, it doesn’t look like a “save the children” commercial either. People are living life, having fun and just enjoying themselves. They are not probed, monitored, reported on, and over taxed. They are doing just fine. And we are going to have some glimpses into their lives right about now.

Meanwhile in America

Ah. The Drudge Report offers us a snapshot of how America is doing. It’s a fucking mess, I’ll tell you what.

I will tell you how bad things are.

I know that change is a normal art of life, but man….

And yet, if you go on American social media it’s still the same old narrative. America is so fantastic and so wonderful and so great that it must be the “will of God”, and all the rest of the world is evil. America needs to get involved and “teach them lessons”.

Today, Sen. Ernst says, we face a different supply chain threat: China.
"We rely on communist China for far too much," she explains.

She hasn't only been talking about the Chinese threat. Sen. Ernst recently wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in which she stressed that the U.S. must be more aggressive toward China, particularly after the communist regime's mishandling and cover-up of the coronavirus. China's role in the pandemic resulted in the loss of thousands of American lives, as well as devastating economic consequences.

-Joni Ernst Focuses on China in First TV Ad of the Year

Oh Fucking Brother!

"...the communist regime's mishandling and cover-up of the coronavirus..."

Please give me a fucking break.

The videos of people dying all over China during CNY were everywhere.  I myself have collected thousands.  And while this was going on, you had President Trump telling everyone that "nothing is going on", and that you don't need to wear a mask. The idea that there was some sort of coverup is just political theater.

What “mishandling”?

Six days after discovery, everything went public and under lock-down. If anyone is mishandling anything it is the idiots running the United States right now.

Anyways…

America is in bad shape. And the general “rule of thumb” (historically) is to claim some foreign threat. Then launch a war, claiming that it’s all in “self-defense”. Right now, the build up is all against China.

But if Trump loses the election, the build up will be redirected against Russia.

And if so, then it looks like the John Tutor narrative will really start to have some legs...

… Nuclear War.

But of course, the PTB, the Oligarchy aren’t thinking this. They just simply cannot envision a life where they are not inside their nice comfortable homes living life and sipping tea while fondling with their pearl necklaces. They cannot envision major change on the order of Genghis Khan level disruptions.

Instead, they are pushing the same, tired old, narrative…

Export “democracy” to the rest of the world so that they can be as fantastically wonderful as Americans are, with all those American “freedoms”!

American freedoms in action. Let's export this to the rest of the world!
American freedoms in action. Let’s export this to the rest of the world! Woo woo!

Well…

Let me tell you’se guys. The rest of the world doesn’t want any “American exceptionalism”. They just wish to be left alone, and the dearly wish that America would just “go away”.

Why?

Because the are NOT suffering. They are NOT some starving village out of a “Save the Children” commercial. And most people are very, very far removed to that 0.0003% of people who live in the elitist bubble in Washington DC where stocks, bonds and public manipulation are the norm.

They are having fun.

They are living life.

Having fun like everyone used to back in the day, in America before all those progressive "improvements".
Having fun like everyone used to back in the day, in America before all those progressive “improvements”.
Here's some glimpses into the rest of the world. The images are from South East Asia. This includes Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Burma. Now, there is a lot of cultural back-and-forth going on in these areas, so there is a chance that I am mixing up a few regions with nearby societies. lease excuse the mistakes if appropriate.

Burma Music Video

Most Americans don’t know where Myanmar is.

It’s a small nation West of Thailand. It’s relatively poor, but peaceful. The only time most Americans hear about it has to do with some military excursion one way or the other. Then suddenly the news is plastered with buzz-words and trigger phrases. You know the drill “democracy”, “military junta”, “regime” and “communist”.

But aside from that, Americans are kept ignorant.

Myanmar map.
Myanmar map.

Americans just do not care.

“Out of sight is out of mind” as we all used to say.

At most, Americans might look at the news and see what constitutes as a video portrayal of events and daydream of starting a KFC franchise, introducing those “poor starving people” to ATM machines, and American social media. Not realizing of course, that they already have all of this. Each and every bit, only under their terms. Not under the oppressive terms of the iron-fisted American empire.

Anyways…

Here’s what it’s really like.

This is what the rest of the world is like.

And while you Americans were out having a BBQ with some chicken, some hamburgers, bags of potato chips, and watermelon, this is what other people were doing. While you were flying the red, white and blue flag on your porch, and drinking some fine Budweiser beer or PBR. Only…

Only…

Only…

…they didn’t need an official government holiday to do it. They just went out and lived life. Because for the rest of the world, just about every day is a holiday.

Check out this (partial) MV video from Burma…

Burma music video.

Ah it’s one of my favorites.

Now for some bad news…

THE PENTAGON IS PREPARING A NEW WAR IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA
Political Islam against China
by Thierry Meyssan

You are probably aware that you are incompletely informed about what is brewing in Myanmar, and you probably haven’t heard about the military coalition that is preparing to attack that country. And yet, as Thierry Meyssan reveals here, these current events have been in preparation by Riyadh and Washington since 2013. Don’t take sides before you read this article and digest the information.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article198141.html

All in the name of “freedom” and “democracy”…

But, take a gander. Do these people seem to need “democracy”, or “The American way of life”, or “American exceptionalism” that Donald Trump so loudly proclaim?

DO you really think that they want ANYTHING that America exports right now?

Do they look like they eat a lot of McDonald’s hamburgers, are all worked up and stressed about the IRS reporting dates, the up coming November elections, the new laws on social distancing on beaches or fishing? Nope. They are not. Because that nightmare world that all Americans live within is far, far removed for the lifestyle, and the societies of the rest of the world.

Thirteen years ago my life changed forever.

Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State and the most credible person in George W. Bush’s cabinet, made the case for war in Iraq on February 5, 2003.

As a young military intelligence officer at the time, watching from a makeshift army base in Kuwait not far from the Iraq border.

Back then I was a true believer, trusting that the government was a force for good “making the world safe for democracy. . .”

But that night it all changed.

Powell told the world unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, an assertion that history has proven categorically wrong.

But within the intelligence community, many people knew the appalling truth immediately.

That night it became clear to me that the government was lying and that the whole case for war was being fabricated.

It was crushing, like finding out everything I’d been told throughout my life was total bullshit.

So for the first time, I broke out of the spell and began questioning. Everything.

I started learning about the extraordinary political power of the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about.

That led me to the fraud of many previous wars going as far as the Mexican War in 1845, one deeply criticized by Abraham Lincoln himself.

That led me to the Constitution, to which all military officers swear an oath to support and defend…

… and it surely didn’t seem like supporting or defending the Constitution in waging an ill-conceived, illegal war.

Needless to say I couldn’t talk to my professional colleagues. Everyone was so gung-ho, I felt like an outcast.

When I returned home, things didn’t improve.

While I was away the country had noticeably turned into a police state.
Yet people seemed oblivious to the change, drinking in the propaganda like a spiked punch bowl.

All the loud, bombastic nonsense and pledges of allegiance were merely illusions masking modern day serfdom.

-Simon Black

And now, well America is really knee-deep in shit. And it desperately needs a major military conflict for the PTB to stay in control and they are all “chomping at the bit” to make it happen.

It’s terrifying.

Yes. I know. I am in a “safe place”. And I know that change is going to happen. But, you all do know that I want peaceful change. Not violent change. And these elitists sitting in Washington DC are just delusional. On both sides of the isle. They do not know what they are asking, and the result will NOT be what they expect.

Hey!

Did the starvation of China work? How about the mass riots in Hong Kong? What about the UN going against the Uighur “concentration camps” (nonsensical, but still) or of course the COVID-19 bioweapons attack against China on the CNY eve 2020? How did it all pan out.?

Do you all somehow think that a war with a major power is going to be a “walk in the park”?

The United States needs to leave the rest of the world alone.

It needs to concentrate on it’s own problems and start fixing things.

No one believes the United States any longer. All the masks of self-righteous truth and Godliness has been stripped away to expose the evil dark underneath.
No one believes the United States any longer. All the masks of self-righteous truth and Godliness has been stripped away to expose the evil dark underneath.

Instead of filling their own pockets and letting the rest of the nation suffer. And that is what is going on right now. Those trillions of dollar bailouts are not going tot he citizens. They are, instead, going to the politically connected and the cronies that support the PTB. This is not good…

It’s like throwing kerosene on a smoldering fire.

Yet…

The rest of the world is living life. Having fun. Chilling.

Let’s go to Thailand.

Local Thailand Music

Of course, in Thailand you can hear classic American Rock blaring from the bars and nightclubs, but if you listen carefully and go outside the tourist areas you can find real genuine local music. And it’s all pretty darn cool.

One of the most curious things that fascinated me is that the local music, and the styles all tended to resemble the hotter sections of Southern Mexico. And I am not the first to notice it.

A curious new trend has emerged in Bangkok, where young Thai men are identifying as “Mexican gangsters.” 

On the outside, many of these Thais resemble the Cholos who inspire them. Their clothes, tattoos, and hairstyles emulate those sported by real homies.

What became clear is that the Thai obsession with these groups is simply an appreciation of their aesthetic. All of the men we spoke with were captivated by “the clean and simple style” that “worked well in this (Thai) weather,” as one gang member said. 

So while they might appear and look like Mexican gangsters, they really emulate their style and appearance. As they both have a similar build / stature, a similar family lifestyle, a similar society, and similar weather. One should not, however, think that they aren’t able to handle themselves were “push comes to shove”. Thailand is the land of “kick boxing” and they do not play.

I dont know about the clothes but on a hand to hand combat fight my moneys on the thai boys! 

They would kick their ass in about 2 seconds with that martial arts shit! 

As for the idiot who wondered wtf this story got to do with anything? Get the f**k outta here! U need a change of pace sometimes! 

I saw a little woman from thailand once bring a grownass man to the floor with a damn broom handle once honest! If i hadnt seen it myself i wouldnt have believed it! 

I was like dayuum!

Anonymous
March 20, 2014 at 11:19 PM

Perhaps what most separates the Thais from the Mexicans they imitate is that almost all of them hold innocuous 9-5s as teachers, policemen and bureaucrats. Many are family men, and some admitted to consulting their wives before getting certain tattoos.

Thailand Music Video

In a nutshell, this is a brotherhood of style-conscious men who bond over baggy white shirts and gothic-baroque tattoos.

That’s not to say that the Thais don’t have an understanding of the fierce take-no-shit Cholo attitude. Thanks to Youtube and movies they’re very much aware of that culture’s hyper-aggressiveness and machismo. One Balcony Pain gang member – Mr. Shiro Local – bared his inner gangster to us when he rapped a few lines from an original song he had written called “Fuck the Popo” in which he compared corrupt Thai police to parasites in his scrotum. 

Such outright vitriol is rarely directed towards people in authority in Thailand, where the dominant culture is one of extreme deference towards the powerful. Yet, you’d be hard pressed to find Thais who disagree with Mr. Local’s assessment of Bangkok’s cops. Perhaps a little more Mexican gangstah chutzpah is exactly what Thailand needs. 

Just some local Thai men being themselves and living life.

Nice. Eh?

Local societies doing local things. People living life.

Good. Right?

Well…

Not everyone thinks so…

Trump, Pompeo and Bolton.
Trump, Pompeo and Bolton.

Now all this is going on while the PTB and the Oligarchy are moving military forces around the world. Both the American and English forces are moving in preparation for the World War that America so desperately needs…

What this article in fact announces is the state of war between the Anglo-American Empire and the PRC which with characteristic euphemism is called "hybrid". 

https://www.ft.com/content/20910e6d-5ae7-4026-aaee-947e22c3dd60

"Britain’s armed forces pivot east to face growing China threat
Security and defence review dominated by ways to counter Beijing’s hybrid warfare"

The FT as a mouthpiece of the Establishment is announcing that the conventional warfare elements are being mobilised as cover for covert operations already in progress for at least 18 months.
By placing visible assets near the "front" any PRC responses to covert action can be dressed as provocations justifying selective escalation.

Since the AAE is aware that it is unable to challenge PLAN elements in Chinese territorial waters or EEZ, these naval elements serve to inhibit or disrupt maritime traffic toward or from China.

The preoccupation with repeated instances of viral infection not only consume resources but reinforce the negative public image of the PRC and force its "self-isolation".

Since at the same time the promoters of the "pandemic" are determined to drive Trump out of office at all costs, both to restore control over the W**** House and hence the state bureaucracy and to continue the rollout against China and Russia unobstructed, there is little reason to expect any change in the WHO status before December.

By that time the scale of basic economic disaster will require the draconian "public health (in fact policing) measures" on a far more coordinated scale than at present is apparent.

We are going through what might best be called an indoctrination phase. This is a shift from overt criminal policing or political repression to a general "health and safety" doctrine- already well anchored in Britain and the US (the white dominions).

My gut feeling is that the protests in the US are in fact a managed "watertight integrity" test. The natural anger and opposition to all sorts of real and imagined injustice is being selectively detonated. This will starve the real opposition of the "oxygen" it needs to resist the next phase of suppression.

It would be nice to think that it is all more chaotic and less subject to management than I describe above. However, I see little cause for optimism of this sort.

Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
魏巴克

Yeah.

I know that it is depressing. It’s like you have this really nice calm life. It’s fine and tranquil and then suddenly American planes zoom overhead and release a fireball that completely wipes out your small village.

Americans spreading “democracy”.

Like what happened in Panama…

In Libya…

In Afghanistan, Syria…

And many, many other places…

Syria before and after America spread "democracy" and let them have a fine taste of American "freedom".
Syria before and after America spread “democracy” and let them have a fine taste of American “freedom”.

Hey! I know it’s depressing.

You want to know what’s even more depressing?

It’s that any attack on China or Russia will end up with nuclear attacks on American soil. And yet somehow, somehow and in some crazy way, the American and British PTB Oligarchy leadership doesn’t think that this will happen. Thinking that a war with China will be limited to conventional weapons in the South China Sea is absolutely foolish.

What is the matter with these people?

  • It will not be limited to conventional weapons.
  • It will not be limited to the South China Sea.

Don’t they realize that on the grand scale of things that you just cannot move about… being a destroyer of things and NOT have some “flash back”?

Look at these videos.

America is a bubble of insanity.

Has anyone seen this from Rod Campbell of Australia Institute? He claims thousands of bot accounts controlled by US government spread the Wuhan bioweapons narrative nearly 5 million times in the first half of 2020:
 
https://www.facebook.com/HongKongGoodNews/videos/200057774713941/

The life of the people in the rest of the world is…

… normal.

The life of Americans in America is…

…abnormal.

People… the rest of the world is not like this. The rest of the world is normal and doing well. The rest of the world is living life and having fun. They are not in the same kind of extremes that Americans are enduring.

It is like night…

… and day.

Having fun at the clubs in Thailand.
Having fun at the clubs in Thailand.

They are not living in this bubble of extreme freak-out that exists within the USA today. They are innocents. They are just minding their own business. And when the brave American bombs start dropping, there will be a response…

… you want to avoid the areas where the response(s) will end up.

Come on…

Look at the rest of the world.

What about life in Cambodia?

How about checking things out there…eh?

America Needs a War

As I am trying to make the point, I want you the reader to pay attention and listen. It’s simple really.

  • Americans are living within a “bubble”.
  • The rest of the world lies outside this “bubble”.

They are happy, doing well, and want to be left alone. They are now protected with strong military alliances with peer-capable weapons, serious and powerful leadership, and an understanding of the stakes and the evils of the American Military Empire as it exists today.

America needs a war. It is the only technique remaining in the arsenal of control that will allow the United States to stay coherent and not break apart through internal division.

The severity of the internal American discord is an indicator of how serious the projected war that America wants…

…and the rest of the world is aware of this.

If you all think that the Chinese, and the Russians are going to sit back and allow the America to go initiate a global war to preserve their control over the rapidly crumbling American structure…

…you are sadly mistaken.

Right now, and keep this in mind… China is STILL at DEFCON ONE. Last week they just called up all of the national reservists. All of them. (What? You didn’t see this in the American or Western press did you?) If you think that China is going to permit the five aircraft (2 + 3 = 5) carriers heading to China right now, and the two invasion flotillas to be a threat, you are crazy.

Chinese and Russian military advisors have been having a flurry of meetings over this last month.

Do not think that the rest of the world is going to sit back and pretend that nothing is going on? Don’t be silly. The leadership of both China and Russia are experts that obtained their positions through merit. Not though some diversity checklist and under-the-table bribes.

Meanwhile…

…In Cambodia.

Party Time in Cambodia

It’s “party time”. There, just like it used to be in America, people would customize their vehicles and make them into mobile party-centers. Then all they would need to do is go to an empty parking lot and have a good time. Sort of like this…

Cambodian Music Video

Yeah.

The rest of the world is just having fun. They are just enjoying themselves. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But, you would never know that this was going on from reading the American news…

To Americans within their own bubble, they are convinced that they are “special”, and “wonderful”, and all is “great”.

How could they get this kind of idea?

Well…

It’s because it has been drummed into them ever since they first started attending school, and getting participation trophies for showing up.

But…

I’ve got news for everyone.

Americans are NOT special. In fact, most aren’t really functional at the most basic level. The PTB realize this, and many people are starting to wake up to this frightening situation.

Here’s one…

The following is the full text of an article titled “RAW TRUTH: Why 97% of lives really DON’T matter at all to the future of humanity” by Mike Adams. It was found on Natural News and all credit to the Author.

The opinions are of the author and not necessairly that of Metallicman. So please take advisements. Realize that there are changes and you need to be a participant or else you will be flushed down the drain with the rest. Be advised.

Aside from that. Realize that other people are starting to "wake up" and look around...

RAW TRUTH: Why 97% of lives really DON’T matter at all to the future of humanity

Sunday, July 05, 2020 by: Mike Adams

(Natural News) The mantra of “Black Lives Matter” has been pounded into our heads 24 hours a day, and we’re told it’s an enlightened, progressive statement while anyone who claims “White lives matter” is somehow a racist bigot. Even worse, those who utter “ALL lives matter” are now threatened with being killed by this Harvard graduate, and people are being fired from their jobs for claiming “all lives matter.”

In truth, almost no lives really matter to the future of humanity, and that’s because roughly 97% of the people are oblivious, clueless consumers who are doing absolutely nothing to help secure a legacy of truth and freedom for future generations.

If you are sitting on your ass, watching The View and devouring Weight Watchers donuts as you allow the TV to fill your brain with mush, your life actually doesn’t matter. If you were to cease to exist, nothing about the future of human history would change one iota.

If you are still watching CNN and predominantly using Facebook, Twitter and Google because you don’t realize all the voices of truth have been banned by the authoritarian Left, your life probably doesn’t matter. You are nothing but a mind puppet of the globalist-run corporate propagandists (Big Tech and Big Media).

If you conform to the insane demands of the progressive left-wing fascists because you cower in fear over being “cancelled,” your life doesn’t matter, either.

If you’re not standing up against the lunatic left-wing mob to defend logic, reason and rationality, your existence really doesn’t matter. You aren’t changing history; you’re being used as a “useful idiot” to help achieve the aims of the anti-human globalists who despise human populations.

If you’re not fighting for the right to speak, the right to disagree and the right to question the lunacy of the mob, your life doesn’t matter.

If you’re doped up on a dozen prescription drugs to the point that you’re mentally incapacitated and can barely process events happening right in front of you, your life doesn’t matter. (But you might get nominated as the Democratic Presidential candidate, notably.)

If you vote for candidates based on political tribalism without having any real clue what those candidates stand for, your life doesn’t matter.

If you think you are owed everything without having to work for anything, your life doesn’t matter.

If you think the answer to today’s existential threats to our nation, our freedom and our Bill of Rights are no big deal and everybody should just “think positive,” then your life doesn’t really matter. You will accomplish nothing that matters.

Approximately 97% of the lives of Americans today don’t matter one bit. They are NPCs — Non-Player Characters — also known as PLFs (Programmable Life Forms), and they will do whatever they are told by the media, the corporations and the fake establishment “authorities.” They add exactly zero value to society and if they vanished tomorrow, the course of human history wouldn’t be altered one bit.

Here’s a video showcasing some members of the 97% — the clueless masses whose lives are pointless and inconsequential. Watch as they explain how the United States of America achieved its independence “in 1964” by fighting “the Civil War” against “America.” Seriously… and two of them are teachers!

Whose lives matter? Those who are informed and who make a difference. The 3%.

Only about 3% of the population have any clue about our history and are actively engaged in shaping our future. That’s fewer than 10 million people nationwide.

It is these 10 million people who will determine our shared future and whether or not we end up enslaved under left-wing tyranny or are able to reclaim our constitutional republic and defeat the anti-American forces that are rising.

So out of a nation of 330 million people, about 320 million lives make no difference at all. They are what globalists call “useless eaters,” and they are on the list to be exterminated via global depopulation efforts that are now underway via the plandemic and the coming coronavirus “vaccine.”

Another way to look at this is by simply being active in the effort to spread the truth and defend humanity against tyranny, you matter more than any 33 other people who are oblivious. Your life “counts” more, in other words, because you’re fighting to make a difference. And the 97% figure for the clueless masses is actually quite generous. The real number is probably more like 99%, which means one active, aware person “matters” more than 99 other people who are clueless.

What makes your life matter isn’t the color of your skin or your political affiliation. What determines whether you matter is how committed you are to fighting for human freedom and opposing authoritarianism and tyranny. Notably, people who really matter are self-selected: They alone determine that they wish to take a stand and make a difference. No one can appoint you to this position of relevance; you must seize it for yourself and become a person whose life really does make a positive difference in the world.

How to make your life matter

If you are an oblivious conformist who surrenders to the lunatic mob, your life is pointless and redundant. But if you want your life to really matter, you must break away from the mob and start thinking (and acting) for yourself.

There are many, many people who have set the example of independent thinking that you might allow to inspire yourself to do the same:

… and many others. There are lots of examples out there. Are you among these types of independent thinkers who challenge the status quo and work to truly empower and uplift humanity with wisdom and knowledge?

Don’t go through life on a pointless, narcissistic rampage of a cult-like obedience to the puppet masters of our time: Think for yourself. Learn history. Share knowledge. Branch out and away from the content controllers at Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter. Change the channel and stop allowing yourself to be brainwashed by CNN, MCNBC and NPR.

Use alternative platforms for sharing real knowledge, like…

  • Brighteon.com
  • Spreely.com
  • Parler.com.

Seek out uncommon knowledge and use it to empower yourself. Create your own channels and post your own videos, texts or articles.

Freedom is so easily accessible that you can find it by typing a URL into your browser. Instead of typing “Facebook.com,” type “Brighteon.com” and discover a whole new world.

Be someone who matters.

Change the future for the better. Join those of us who are doing this work every single day, dedicating our lives to protecting human freedom and a sustainable future of abundance and liberty for all.

97% of lives don’t matter, but yours can. What will you choose to do with it?

Be the Rufus

Make no mistake. Those that will survive and be permitted to procreate and live life through this tumultuous time period with be those that are aware, kind and knowledgeable. But most certainly have the kind of sentience deserving of mankind.

Sitting on a couch, smunching on pork rinds, and demanding that taxes get raised so that you can still keep using your food stamps is not representative of the future of mankind.

This is…

The rest of the world is starting to fight back.

The rest of the world is changing.

The way things have been is coming to an end, and people are starting to fight back. They demand stability, families, and stable relationships. They tire of the vermin… rich and the poor that prey on the rest of society. Now, with the proper tools, and the proper motivation they have declared a new order of society.

Have you noticed?

  • The CIA/NED instigation of the Hong Kong “pro-democracy” movement and the pay-offs of the Judges to let the criminals have a pass. Even when it came to killing people, damaging critical infrastructure, and maiming people.

And…

  • China changing the law. Throwing out the judges. Shutting down the CIA/NED “safe spaces”. Arresting and severely punishing the wrong-doers. Organ harvesting with life-time of hard-labor in the salt mines for many many years. No wonder that even Joshua Wong has disbanded his organization.

It’s all starting to come down. It’s all starting to fall apart.

USA compared to China. 2020.
USA compared to China. 2020.

And the petty criminals and the evil folk in positions of power must change or else they will face the consequences.

Remember this;

A functional nation devotes 100% of it's time, energy and resources on bettering the lives of it's people.

If it is unable to do that, or devotes a smaller percentage of time, money and effort to the domestic needs of it's people, it is disfunctional.

The world, and the human race, needs functional, healthy and substantive people, organizations and governments. Anything less MUST be purged and culled from existence.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this in my Happiness Index here…

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While the United States is busily celebrating their “freedom” on the fourth of July, this is what the rest of the world is doing.

Not knocking “freedom”, mind you. I think it’s very important. It’s just that what passes for “freedom” in the “Land of the Free” isn’t freedom at all. Freedom is the ability to own property. And… the property is inviolate. Meaning no one can tax it, regulate it, or put retainers on it in any way. And if you look at things that way, then you see that Americans have just about ZERO freedoms.

But you heard me freak out about this before, right?

A true and real measure of "freedom" is the cumulative amount of worth of everything that you own THAT IS NOT taxed, regulated, associated with fees, or subject to seizure. 

Under this definition the actual amount of “freedom” that most Americans have is ZERO. Everything in the United States is both regulated, and taxed (not to mention subject to seizure). That goes from your home (even after you pay off your mortgage, you still need to pay taxes on it), to your car (duh!), to every item you purchase with state and federal taxes associated with it.

Face it, Americans have zero freedom.

And no screeching at the screen is going to change that fact. Don’t yell at me. Don’t blame me. Don’t get all “hot and bothered” and shoot up an innocent school full of kids.

I am just pointing out the obvious.

Now, here we are going to watch videos of the rest of the world. A place where if you buy a house it is yours. You own it. You don’t pay taxes on it, or deal with regulations on it in any way. When you buy some cigarettes there are no taxes on it, or when you drive a car you don’t need to have it inspected or “approved” for road use.

Freedom. You either have it or you don’t.

Freedom can be measured; it is the cumulative monetary value of everything you own that is NOT subject to tax, regulation, fees, or seizure by any government.

Go ahead. Add it all up. See how free you are.

So watch these videos and see what the rest of the world looks like without that “great American freedom”. We are going to look at the “communist” China. You know, where if you own a house you NEVER need to pay any taxes, property, or school on it. Where you NEVER have to have it inspected or regulated by the central headquarters, and where you NEVER need to “show your papers” to the police when you are walking down the street.

Freedom is the ability to own things… real ownership… free of regulation… free of taxation… free of fees and reporting of any kind at any level.

Feel special yet?

And we are going to Segway from a discussion on freedom, and why it is important, to Rufus behaviors...

And then to sentience...

And then back to why "freedom" matters.

Video 1 – Having a home recording studio

So what’s so great about having a home recording studio? These have been common in the United States since the dawn of radio. What’s the big deal?

Well…

You are right.

These things have been in the United States for years. What began in the basements and garages of the 1950’s and 1960’s, migrated to churches in the 1970’s to keep out of the laws of intense regulation and scrutiny. Then after a brief period of relaxation under the Reagan administration, they all came back and most recording studios in the United States today are highly regulated, “for-profit” affairs.

The days of home recording studios in the United States are pretty much over.

Not so in the rest of the world.

Here we have a video of a home recording studio in China.

It’s not taxed. It’s not regulated. It’s not subject to workplace rules and IRS reporting procedures. It’s not subject to inspection by the various local and state and federal boards. It’s a private, personal space that is used for whatever a person wants it to be used as and the government (in this case Chinese) has absolutely ZERO say on how it is managed.

There are no lit up “exit signs”. You are permitted to smoke inside if you want and there are no fire extinguishers or “people capacity” stickers on the walls. The height of the recording desk is not specified. Nor is the temperature of the room, the decorations or sound isolation foam. It’s all up to the owner to determine. Not the government.

A life where you can own a home recording studio, free of taxation, regulation, fees or rules is far freer than one where everything you do is under the scrutiny of some kind of government organization.

Freedom. You either have it, or you don’t.

There are no grey areas in this issue.

But, but, but you NEED regulation to have a modern functioning society…

That’s the narrative isn’t it?

"Well, China is a developing country. It is a third-world shit-hole. It is where people eat dogs, and cats. Get coronavirus at filthy "wet-markets" and evil mean people riding bicycles try to pick your pocket every chance they get. It's no secret that they all yearn to move to America and be free!"

This narrative, that you NEED regulation to have freedom is an oxymoron. It is one of those never ending lies that are repeated over, and over, and over again, and the stupid ignorant people believe it. They don’t pause and think about what they are saying…

That you NEED to have all this regulation because that is how a modern society works.

"Regulation is a necessary evil. It is how America became great. It is because of regulation that we have trains, bridges, skyscrapers, and the post Office. Take away regulation and America would be back to the stone age."

Wrong!

Regulation serves one thing, and one thing only. Standardization of utility. That’s it.

The idea is that if you make everything one way, and that way is standard then the number of accidents and mishaps will decrease because you have centralized the rules and made a unified standard that everyone by abide to.

  • Like the sizes of steps on a stairway.
  • Like the minimum width in a doorway.
  • Like the minimum number of pages of paper in a pad of paper.

This next video is Nanshan. It’s a suburb of Shenzhen, China. This is the escalator up from the subway below. Now, Shenzhen is a “new” city. Just thirty years ago it was just a sleepy fishing village with some dirt roads and some fishing boats.

But China decided to take a “spin” with this new concept that Ronald Reagan was promoting (at the time) called “Reaganomics”. And Mr. Deng implemented capitalism to communist China.

China constructed a “economic bubble” and implemented every single element of Reaganomics into that bubble. From low taxes, to low to absent regulation, to every other aspect of it. China went full-speed ahead on this “experiment”.

And while President Bush put an end to the American experiment with Reaganomics, China plowed forward…

Shenzhen is the result…

Shenzhen is a pretty awesome place. Not because of Reaganomics so much as the freedom from government regulation.

Freedom. You either have it or you don’t.

Freedom has nothing to do about the economy

There is this unspoken myth in the United States that America is “exceptional” because of it’s “freedoms” and it’s “democracy”. And that the tremendous advantage that the American economy has globally, is proof of this.

That is false.

Let it be absolutely clear that the economy of a nation has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are free or not.

There are people in the poorest sections of Africa and South America that are far freer than Americans are.

Remember, boys and girls, a measure of how free you are is the cash value of the possessions that you have that is not taxed, regulated or has associated fees or can be seized from you.

So…

Here we have some poor kids in the heart of Africa. Their poor clothes had no fees, taxes or regulations when they bought them. Their homes are untaxed and unregulated. And yet, and yet, they are happy and living life.

Of course, I do get this. I do understand.

For many, many years Americans have been taught that being great is the accumulation of wealth, and America is thus great because it is a leading economic power.

But, people, the accumulation of things and paper scripts is not success. It is not happiness. It is not joyous abandon. It is not freedom.

If there is one thing that I have learned over my many, many years is that real freedom has a calming effect on your soul. You stop caring about others, worries about things, or getting all entangled and wrapped up in all sorts of drama.

There are so many things that Americans think are true that are not…

While I am discussing truths and reality here, let it be absolutely understood that we all (all over the world) have been fed a steady diet of lies and untruths and distortions all our lives.

It goes back thousands of years.

But we can point our fingers to just about every aspect of science and society.

  • When the emergence of science came about in Europe, suddenly all stories and tales of non-physical creatures became myths.
  • When money lenders (banks) can manufacture money though the invention of interest… the net trade off was a decrease in value of everything.
  • When the lie of “democracy” equals “freedom”…
  • Or that a strong national economy is a sign that God favors that nation.
  • Or that being smart, intelligent or getting good grade somehow equates to wealth.
  • Or that being popular is a desirable trait that with make a person happier.

Lies, lies, and more lies.

People(!) for the human society to survive this great period of change, we will need to readjust our perceptions on what is real and what isn’t,

In truth, much of what has been force fed (over the last 50 years) through the American media are half-truths and lies. They are designed to convert individual non-established sentience’s to follow a service-for-self or a service-for-another sentience. When in reality, pure and real freedom comes with the third sentience; service-to-others.

Be the Rufus.

Be the Rufus

Ah. But what does being a “Rufus” has to do with anything?

How is it connected to wealth? To fame” To “freedom”? To “democracy”? To science, to society…?

We have gotten so wrapped up on the trivial…

Society is the bedrock of our personal experiences. It is from personal experiences that our sentience manifests and fills in. And thus it is who we are and why we do things. It is our roles in society. It fills out and establishes our place… our experiences and whether or not our lives are fulfilling.

So, I urge everyone to stop listening to the bullshit narratives.

Be the Rufus.

Not only will you obtain better and more enjoyable experiences, but your soul growth and quanta entanglements will end up being of a far higher quality.

It all goes to this.

Taxes and regulations are said to be necessary for a “modern” well-functioning society. That is a lie. They are not. That is what the service-to-self people want you to believe.

Migrate towards a service-to-others sentience. Be helpful and make your life a worthwhile one.

Be the Rufus.

Be the Rufus

Conclusion

The ONLY way that the oligarchy PTB that continue to maintain their level of absolute control is to keep individuals separate. The most tyrannical governments in the world are those that praise the individual and not the group. It is when you praise the efforts of a singular lone person, that everyone else starts to believe that the entire universe is based upon the idea of “every man for himself”.

That is a service-for-self mentality.

But that is not how it works.

Service-for-others sentience is always unhappy in places where freedom is suppressed. And even though they are told over and over again 24-7 that they actually are "free" they know, in their bones, that this is not the case.

We are consciousness. And we inhabit a physical body that migrates though a long stream of world-lines to obtain experiences. These experiences are what causes our quanta to clump together and form associations.

We can be selfish. We can “master” our physical environment though greed, power and selfish exploits. And all of these experiences will also contribute to the creation of the soul consciousness.

But it is a dead-end. It is a trap.

Why?

Because humans ARE NOT singular “lone wolf” creatures. We are social animals. And thus the best sentience for us is one that the physical elements of our being match up with the spiritual elements of our being.

That is service-for-others sentience.

As social animals, we occupy a social role. We contribute to society. We help others. We make the world a better place. We do so in small ways, but we do so…

Street worker buying clothing for his young daughter. He only has so much money. So he has to count out the money carefully to buy some clothes so that she will not be laughed at during school.

The great sorting is upon us. How long this will last is unknown. It might last for a century in total. Though it might be over in as short as ten years. Most certainty there will be all sorts of elements of change here and there in different geographical areas over time.

You cannot control the world, but you can control your little part of it.

Be the Rufus.

Why does it matter?

A service-for-self person will do their intention affirmations over and over again, and still have trouble manifesting their desires. No matter what they get, they will still want more. Bigger, better, more and more. They will never be satisfied. So that when one reality manifestation occurs it is what makes them happy.

That is because their WANTS will always be a “want”.

A service-for-others person will find that their prayer affirmation intention campaigns will have a strong degree of permanency with it. When it happens, and their dreams manifest, they will be free to concentrate on other elements of their intention prayers / desires.

Like this…

How things manifest is subject to the sentience of the person making the intention campaign.

Be the Rufus.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Rufus Index, here…

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More escapist entertainment to get our minds off of the COVID-19 coronavirus lock-down emergency.

Here’s some more escapist, mostly upbeat or odd, movies to help release you from the insanity that has become our daily ritual. These movies and shows were not chosen because they were praised by critics, or because I was paid to recommend them (Under some kind of money-making scheme.). Instead they are generally, known (and forgotten) movies that have the ability to carry you away to another time and another place.

And that is what is important

Don’t you know.

To be able to carry you away to a different time, and a different place, and a different lifestyle.

And, in this case, for me… way way back to my 20’s. That in-between stage from during the transition from High School to adulthood. As a young man, being strong and healthy, and with options all over the place…

So when you watch these movies you can forget the life that you live now. You can forget your boss, the need to buy groceries, the dog wanting to go outside, and the bills piling up on the kitchen table. Instead you can escape to a quieter time; a time when things were simpler, and the entire world was yours for the taking.

It can transport you to a time when the “news” only lasted for thirty minutes, and just gave summarys of events, not panels of “experts” endlessly debating if Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are racist.

It will transport you to a time when people seemed a little bit happier, a time when that grey storm cloud wasn’t hovering over their head, and a time when … well, it was possible for you to be anything you wanted to be.

We will start with a relatively unknown movie.

Hot Dog The Movie (1984)

This movie will absolutely cart you off to the 1980’s, to the land of ski lodges, big hair, and vibrant colors in the snowy mountains. It’s funny, silly, up-beat and has a positive up-lifting music track. All in all, perfect for these uncertain times.

Who knows what surprises you might discover when trapped inside a gondola with a "snow bunny"?
Who knows what surprises you might discover when trapped inside a gondola with a “snow bunny”?
Did you ever own white Vuarnet Cat Eyes? Are you stoked that padded ski sweaters are coming back in? Did you ever want to be the toast of Tahoe, ski all season long, party every night and hang out with a wacky bunch of ski bums with names like Thrasher and Squirrel?

Then check out this early 80's classic (I know, it came out in '84, but it's SO '82).

Harkin Banks is the wunderkind from the sticks who hooks up with Dan O'Callahan. Dan is the good time Squaw Valley veteran who's a permanent fixture on the competitive ski scene, sharing slopes and hot tubs with his party hardy co-horts: the nutty Squirrel Murphy, who digs zinc oxide, sexy ski bunnies and long gondola rides; Kendo Yamamoto, who doesn't speak much English, but can tear down the mountain like a Kamakaze; punk rocker, Thrasher, who dances to his own tune, even at parties; and a host of semi-nameless others.
The "rat pack", just some friends that want to ski, drink and have fun together. What's so wrong about that?
The “rat pack”, just some friends that want to ski, drink and have fun together. What’s so wrong about that?
But what would a crazy party flick be without some bad guys?

Enter Rudy Garmisch, zee Austrian ski champ and nemesis of the Squaw Valley locals. He and his loyal "Rudettes", mostly nameless guys and fraulines also from zee Austrian slopes, push some of the locals out of the upcoming competition with promises of good television ratings and new sponsorships from internationally minded companies.

Uh-oh, ol' Dan's not happy with that at all!

Toss in a battle over a cute blonde runaway, Sunny, and you have a recipe for trouble on the slopes.
Oh. I had Sonny-side-up. Und, I had Sonny-side-down. Und, I had Sonny-side all zee way around!
Oh. I had Sunny-side-up. Und, I had Sunny-side-down. Und, I had Sunny-side all zee way around!
Not to worry, all's well that ends well. After all, what tiff can't be settled over a friendly game of Chinese Downhill? Not sure you wanna play? No worries…there's nothing one of Dan's famous "Leg Spreader" cocktails can't fix. 

And to top it all off, there's some fantastic ski footage set to even more fantastic early 80's music. Why they even bothered to make Ski School in the early 90's was a mystery to me - how could they do the ski party flick any better than Hot Dog? 

Surprisingly enough it was also pretty damn good. But Hot Dog: The Movie is still the original and the best.

THE classic early 80's ski flick 
colparker4 February 2003
It's a movie about sun, fun and friends. It's about having fun and just enjoying life. Oh, and by the way, there isn't any sort of political correctness either. It's PC free - you all!
It’s a movie about sun, fun and friends. It’s about having fun and just enjoying life. Oh, and by the way, there isn’t any sort of political correctness either. It’s PC free – you all!

You don’t need to know how to sky to appreciate this movie. It’s just a lot of fun, a lot of smiles, and just some good old vibes.

"What the fuck is a Chinese downhill?"

You are not going to be sad after watching this movie. Instead you will be in a good joyous mood and wondering just why… why you never took up skiing.

Risky Business (1983)

Just about everyone of my generation knows this movie. It’s the movie that made Tom Cruse the screen actor that he is today. But let’s be real. When was the last time you watched it?

For me, It’s been at least a decade, perhaps two. And I have talked to some of the younger folk who have never heard of this masterpiece. Can you believe it?

Well, for some fun, I downloaded the torrent and checked it out. (My betaMAX tape is lost somewhere under a pile of dusty boxes.)

It took me away.

It blew me away.

On a number of really curious levels…

As a young businessman he learns how to manage time and resources. He tries to keep his overhead down, while maximizing the profits.
As a young businessman he learns how to manage time and resources. He tries to keep his overhead down, while maximizing the profits. Look at how young Tom Cruse is.

Well, after decades, I finally sat down and re-watched this. And ohhhh there were so many things that I had forgotten, and so many things that I can see with my older eyes of experience. It will carry you back to a time long ago when business opportunities can just fall right into your lap, unplanned and ultimately successful.

It’s partially remembering what it was like having the entire house to yourself when your parents are away…

…and it’s partially about exploring what it’s like to have a relationship with a strong and positive female…

… and it’s partially about what it was like before the decades of greed and spite took over America.

fun, funny, and smart 
8 February 2003 | by pompaj 

Most funny comedies aren't very smart. They're funny because of individual jokes that play by themselves, without relying on the overall plot. Risky Business is an exception and the reason why it works so well, is because it tells a simple story that could really happen and would also be a lot of fun. 

You're a high school kid, your parents go on vacation for a week, leaving you the whole house to yourself. That's the setup. 

A friend calls up a call girl, she shows up, and the entertainment begins. 

This movie is smart enough to know what kids think about at that age, sex, and it holds nothing back. It is very clever at times and has a strong character in Joel, played by a young, energetic Tom Cruise. Another thing that this movie understands is mood and tempo. Everything hits the right beat. Smart and funny is an ideal combination and this movie achieves it.
Risky Business is all about a young man who learns about how to make and manage money with a female partner.
Risky Business is all about a young man who learns about how to make and manage money with a female partner. He handles finances, and she handles operations and labor.

The thing is, this movie not only takes you back to another place…

… but it gives you context. You can see what transpired in the last four decades and your experiences, right or wrong. It will give you an appreciation of things at so many levels. It’s worth a re-viewing.

"Money may not buy happiness, but it will buy the things that will Make you happy" 
mercuryix-121 December 2006

There are too many reviews of Risky Business for mine to have any relevance as a movie review. However, this movie is for me a time capsule of the era I saw it in, and a photograph of the future to come in American culture.

I saw this movie when I was 22 in a tiny college theater with a date. I remember several disconnected things about it: The movie was much more interesting than my date was, the music by Tangerine Dream was hypnotic and fit the tone of the film, which struck me as being more depressing in places than funny (although there are some funny moments in it), and it gave me a glimpse into a world that I thought was fictional. 

It turned out I hadn't experienced the world it was presenting yet. 

When Cruise asks his friends what they plan to do with their lives, one's answer is very simple and focused: "Make money". Another friend adds: "Make a LOT of money".
I well remember that when the movie first came out, I was amazed at the idea of a cordless phone.
I well remember that when the movie first came out, I was amazed at the idea of a cordless phone. Here we have a scene where his friend is pushing the idea of calling in a prostitute for the night.
It turns out the movie was precognizant of the next ten to twenty years of American culture; the absolute obsession with making money through any means necessary, legally or illegally, regardless of consequences to yourself or others. 

Then taking that money and buying the things that will make you happy: a porsche, a big house, and most importantly, a hot babe in your bed, that will only be there as long as the money is. 

Internally discovered happiness? A quaint notion created by the poor who can't afford the toys that validate your existence.

I am sure that the filmmaker would be the first to say that the movie parodies the hollowness of the "American Dream" of acquiring wealth to buy creature comforts, but too much of the time it feels like it celebrates them. 

At the end, the hooker stays Cruise's girlfriend only as long as he continues to make her money; she even says "I'll be your girlfriend...for a while". 

Real loyalty there. But then, she is a hooker, and is being honest. 

She in fact is presented as the only person in the film that is not a hypocrite. 

She has no illusions that money & sex make the American world go 'round, and doesn't pretend herself to be otherwise; unlike Cruise and the rest of his friends. 

In the end however, she is still hollow, the values the kids pursue are hollow (they are only after sex, not love), and the movie feels as deep and solid as a glossy magazine ad for a Lexus.
Ah. His "partner" has a love for night time rides on subway trains.
Ah. His “partner” has a love for night time rides on subway trains. The scene, the music and the situation are all hypnotic.
Even over the obsession of greed, however, the film illustrates the complete alienation of the modern American teenage male: alone, isolated, judged by his peers with the kind of car his dad lets him drive, his clothes, and whether he can get laid or not. 

The emphasis is on sex, not relationship. 

There is no rite of passage into adulthood, no guidance from parents who more often than not are as distant from their children as the cardboard cutout parents in this film.

In short, as depressing as this film is when you step back from it, it paints a frighteningly accurate portrait of how superficial and narrow a world, yet directionless (except for accumulating superficial wealth) a young boy's world can be. 

There are no values taught in this film, because there are none available as examples. And that is the environment too many kids are subject to. That is what was so disturbing to me about the film at the time I saw it, yet it took 20 years to understand why (as I was, like most kids my age, in the same vacuous and bankrupt culture this kid was in at the time).

There are 300% more suicides committed by 14 year old boys in America than any other age group or category. This movie explains why.

Seven stars, not for humor, but for photographing the beginning of an era that lasts until this day. The message from Enron, WorldCom, Martha Stewart and others for American kids will be: Don't get caught. A message which is slowly becoming the only "moral direction" left in American culture.

This move will not only take you back forty years to a time where your reality was something quite different, but it will give you perspective in the reality that you now inhabit. And at that, this movie is worth viewing again.

One Crazy Summer

Here’s a fine 1980’s escape. It’s got what we all need today…

No, I’m not talking about super heroes that got bitten by a radioactive spider, guys dressed in black trooping around in flack vests and holding assault guns, or super-dooper CGI special effect animation. I’m not talking about bullets that hang in the air, or magical powers that you can use to push people away with the wave of your hand. You won’t find ugly monsters or effeminate millennial men trying to get a woman to seduce them…

This movie is about silliness on the beach.

It is politically incorrect, very dated, and outrageously stupid. It is precisely what America needs right now.

The cast of "One Crazy Summer" hams it up for a group portrait.
The cast of “One Crazy Summer” hams it up for a group portrait. The 1980’s were a time of many things, but one of the things of value was that Hollywood has reached it’s stride. From the 1980’s into the 1990’s Hollywood produced a broad range of movies Movies that catered to average people. Not movies that targeted a set demographic or political interest.

It’s a simple fact that there are many of us from generations from long ago who grew up loving those loopy John Cusack comedies made by Savage Steve Holland. And while I prefer there other more bizarre, out-there flick, Better Off Dead, it’s hard for me to dislike One Crazy Summer.

This is a movie I grew up loving wholeheartedly.

One Crazy Summer was a follow-up to Better Off Dead, returning Cusack and Curtis Armstrong from that film.

I cannot say enough good things about this movie. From the warped mind of Savage Steve Holland comes this superior laughfest. First, I have to say that I haven't seen many movies that start out with a David Lee Roth tune. This could be a good or bad thing.
I cannot say enough good things about this movie. From the warped mind of Savage Steve Holland comes this superior laughfest. First, I have to say that I haven’t seen many movies that start out with a David Lee Roth tune. This could be a good or bad thing.

Cusack is Hoops, following graduation pal Joel Murray(George)to Nantucket for the summer to each some fun on the beach. He picks up his kid sister from “Generic Elementary” school with her sick dog and the adventure begins…

Hoops finds himself embroiled in a feud with a blonde, buff punk named Teddy Beckersted whose lecherous father has designs on bulldozing over homes of a neighborhood to build a giant condominium. Sigh. So 1980’s.

One of the homes, needing it’s mortgage repaid belongs to Demi Moore (Cassandra). Yikes!

However, there’s a sailboat race. And it might be their only hope of saving Cassandra’s grandfather’s home. You see it has been won by Teddy over the past many years and they need to fight for it. Yet, Hoops is deathly afraid of boats over water.

But, with the help and motivation of newfound Nantucket friends (..such as the goofy auto-mechanic twin brothers!), George, and budding love-interest Cassandra, perhaps Hoops can come to terms with his fears and win the race to save the neighborhood.

Armstrong has a supporting part as the son of a kooky, manic weapons salesman, General Raymond(..SCTV’s Joe Flaherty in an inspired bit of casting), Ack, who uses the training from his father to assist Hoops and company in their goals to win the race.

 This movie is all about leaving your troubles behind and getting away for the summer to Nantucket. Hoops is afraid of boats, but has no choice when his friend George launches his clunker onto the ferry at the last minute. He shacks up with future love interest Demi Moore, the worst actress in history. But she is pretty young and 80's looking in this one. They finally hit mainland and meet a whole host of odd characters.
This movie is all about leaving your troubles behind and getting away for the summer to Nantucket. Hoops is afraid of boats, but has no choice when his friend George launches his clunker onto the ferry at the last minute. He shacks up with future love interest Demi Moore, the worst actress in history. But she is pretty young and 80’s looking in this one. They finally hit mainland and meet a whole host of odd characters.

Memorable scenes include Bobcat getting stuck in a Godzilla suit (!) running rampant across an entire model of Aguilla. I love how the smoke and fire is coming out of his mouth as he does so (a cigar was thrown into his costume), and the Japanese investor loving the presentation.

Beckersted (Mark Metcalf, barely recognizable as Teddy’s rather unhinged pops)’s condominium…

… Hoops being chased by deranged cub scouts wishing to perform first aid…

… George a victim of toxic flatulence…

… Bruce Wagner’s nutty Uncle Frank’s increasing insanity every time he tries to better his chances to win 1 million dollars from a radio show…

… and the wonderful Billie Bird as George’s grandma who actually bills the group after a meal!

Jeremy Piven as(you guessed it)a brutish jerk who associates with Teddy and causes trouble for Hoops and his posse, the yummy Kimberly Foster as Cookie (..Teddy’s girl who attempts to make-out with Hoops while he attends a luncheon with his father), and the one-and-only William Hickey as Old Man Beckersted, who will not reward his son and grandson an inheritance if they lose the sail boat race.

Demi Moore is cute, but this is Cusack’s vehicle, though Bobcat and Villard steal most of the scenes their in.

Again, some delightful animation from Holland are sprinkled throughout the movie (Hoops is an artist, appropriately).

The movie comes to a happy ending via boat race on the lovely waters of Nantucket. Cusack and co. build a riff raff boat and blow everyone out of the water, despite some unfair play along the way. So they get the trophy, house, and Cusack ends up in a liplock with Demi. Despite the cheesey story, there are some really funny moments in this one. Some of my personal favorites are: the guy getting stabbed during the hat toss at graduation, Uncle Frank getting launched out of the bathroom window, and Bobcat getting stuck in a Godzilla costume.
The movie comes to a happy ending via boat race on the lovely waters of Nantucket. Cusack and co. build a riff raff boat and blow everyone out of the water, despite some unfair play along the way. So they get the trophy, house, and Cusack ends up in a lip-lock with Demi. Despite the cheesy story, there are some really funny moments in this one. Some of my personal favorites are: the guy getting stabbed during the hat toss at graduation, Uncle Frank getting launched out of the bathroom window, and Bobcat getting stuck in a Godzilla costume.

Dream a Little Dream (1989)

Sometimes a movie can take you back… way… way back to a time that you have almost no recollection of. Can you remember what it was like when you were 14, 15 or even 16 years old?

An accident puts the consciousness of an elderly dream researcher into the body of a bratty teenager. The problem? The kid prefers dreamworld limbo to real life.

-IMDB

There, in the tumultuous middle school years we have forgotten what it was like. For, and that is true for most young people, don’t really come into their own until their final years in High School.

This movie will transport you to that time.

And at that, it is valuable. On that reason alone.

The lives of a crusty old scientist and a bratty, teen Michael-Jackson-wannabe are about to intersect in a paranormal way. Coleman Ettinger seeks to break down the door of reality through studied dreaming; Bobby Keller wants Lainie Diamond, the girlfriend of his high school friend Joel, a handsome school jock. As Coleman persuades his wife Gena to join his experiments, an accident knocks their bodies out of existence, along with Bobby's consciousness. Coleman's consciousness winds up in Bobby's body while Gena's ends up buried and asleep inside Lainie's. Only when sleeping can Coleman contact Bobby and elicit his help in putting things back, except that Bobby smugly prefers limbo over his aggravated life as a modern teenager.

-IMDB
This movie will teleport you back to your middle school years.
This movie will teleport you back to your middle school years.

Bizarre dream sequences are only a small part of this fabulous fantasy comedy starring Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, Jason Robards, Piper Laurie, and Meredith Salenger.

Bobby Keller (Corey Feldman) lives his life day to day, as he puts it. He is failing all his classes, his parents don’t talk to him, and he is head over heels in love with Lainie (Meredith Salenger), although he dates Shelly.

But, an accident involving Bobby and Lainie and Coleman and Geena (Jason Robards and Piper Laurie) causes Coleman to take over Bobby’s mind and body, and part of Geena’s mind takes over Lainie.

Now, Coleman has to find a way to switch back and get his wife back. But, Bobby isn’t so willing to, unless Coleman can correct his screwed-up existance, while helping him to get Lainie.

Lainie was a "hottie" in the movie.
Lainie was a “hottie” in the movie.
A Touching Film 
crice-149 July 2009

It's difficult to me to review this film, for the simple reason that I was 15 when I saw this movie. It was made for me. It was made for teenagers trying to figure out life, love, getting into college, and dealing with adults. I loved it.

It was the best by far of the "body-switching" genre that seemed to dominate the 1987-1990 period, but rarely was a teen drama tackled with more earnestness and via such a bizarre but interesting plot. Whatever the reason, it works and instead of being just another body switch comedy or teen fluff, it truly becomes a beautiful film that deserves its cult status.

Favorite scenes: The opening scene intercut with the opening credits involving Bobby and Dinger (Corey Haim) talking about Bobby’s infatuation with Lainie…

… as well as singing the blues and why Dinger’s leg was broken (reason: his mom ran him over with her Volvo)…

… the accident scene, the dream sequences, the scene where Bobby discovers that he’s Coleman…

… and when they were having a hard time going to sleep…

… the scene in the gym when they were dancing to the rock version of “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, and the closing credits with Bobby and Coleman dancing to the same song.

Just handing out with your high school friends. It was a different time and your worries and concerns were all quite different then.
Just handing out with your high school friends. It was a different time and your worries and concerns were all quite different then.

This was a wonderfully romantic movie with an original plot. It was adorable, and Corey Feldman was kinda cute, despite the Michael Jackson look, something he was into for a few years.

The Dream sequences were really interesting, filmed in a strange blue tint.

The movie also had an interesting plot, and great music (especially Frank Sinatra’s “Young at Heart” and both versions on “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”).

I highly recommend it to anyone who likes the two Coreys, good acting, creativity, or body switching movies.

Better Off Dead… (1985)

This is another movie that I had on BetaMAX.

But it’s a true classic.

I well remember when I first viewed it. I was in Ridgecrest, California, and I had gotten off the base at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, and pulled into the video rental store in a strip mall right outside the main gate. When I walked in, they had this movie playing and everyone was standing in the shop watching it. So I asked what the movie was, and then I went and rented it right there and then.

I should go as far as to say that all the John Cusack movies from the 1980’s are fine escapist flicks today. All of them are silly, charming and sweet. Nothing is too serious. Nothing is too dangerous…

… and there are no superheroes!

There are also no gun fights, no SWAT teams dressed in black, no making fun of traditional roles… no gays… no lesbians… not transgenders… no CGI monsters, or special effects where people can jump to the top of a building. None of that nonsense.

You won’t be assaulted by “role reversals” and insulted by snide anti-male jokes.

It’s all just good fun.

This one's hilarious! My family have borrowed several lines from this film and use them as inside jokes. John Cusak stars in this film about a teenager whose girlfriend dumps him for the Captain of the ski team. The film has enough skiing in it to satisfy most ski buffs, but it's not really about skiing. It's about relationships more than anything and the results are absolutely hilarious.
This one’s hilarious! My family have borrowed several lines from this film and use them as inside jokes. John Cusak stars in this film about a teenager whose girlfriend dumps him for the Captain of the ski team. The film has enough skiing in it to satisfy most ski buffs, but it’s not really about skiing. It’s about relationships more than anything and the results are absolutely hilarious.

What makes this a cut above is the composition of sight gags — ‘How to build a space shuttle out of household items’ is in the foreground, and then the eye pulls back to reveal the mother battling a sea monster in a pot, which frustrates her attempt to cook it…

Cusack frets over an impossibly broken binding, and in the same frame the ‘paperboy from hell’ appears on a weatherized delivery bicycle…it’s priceless stuff.

This is one of those movies where you are with your friends twenty years later and go, "I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS" and the room jocularly erupts and instigates discussion. If you find yourself easily amused, can see the humor in the way life hands you a sour glass of milk to wash down life's trials in love, then you MUST see this Classic Movie.
This is one of those movies where you are with your friends twenty years later and go, “I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS” and the room jocularly erupts and instigates discussion. If you find yourself easily amused, can see the humor in the way life hands you a sour glass of milk to wash down life’s trials in love, then you MUST see this Classic Movie.

Better Off Dead is the zaniest movie that I think I have ever seen. Let’s just recap what this movie has in it.

  • We have a guy that attempts suicide but he can’t even succeed at that.
  • There is his best friend that declares that a mountain they are on in the dead of winter is pure snow, saying ” Do you know what the street value of this is?”
  • We have a father that is trying to speak the lingo of his kids and fails miserably.
  • A mom that cooks food that literally slides off it’s plate.
  • We have a math class full of genius’ that get upset when they don’t have homework to do.
  • Lane has a younger brother who orders books on how to pick up trashy women and learns how to build rockets.
  • We have the entire male population ( and Barney Rubble ) that wants to go out with Lane’s ex-girlfriend now that they are broken up.
  • There is two Oriental guys that want to constantly race Lane and then broadcast it over the loud speaker on their car.
  • There is Porky from the Porky’s movies basically playing the same role here.
  • Dancing hamburgers.
  • A basketball team that grunts.
  • And of course the most relentless paper boy in the history of paper delivery…
If there was ever a role that John Cusack milked until it mooed, this one would have to have been it. His portrayal of Lane Meyer will forever be remembered in high school lore as the Ultimate Champion of the Underdog. I laughed so hard my sides ached and tears were running down my cheeks. What has long been a cult classic, this film did an excellent job of portraying the awkwardness of those teenage years that all adults thank God every day that we now have behind us.
If there was ever a role that John Cusack milked until it mooed, this one would have to have been it. His portrayal of Lane Meyer will forever be remembered in high school lore as the Ultimate Champion of the Underdog. I laughed so hard my sides ached and tears were running down my cheeks. What has long been a cult classic, this film did an excellent job of portraying the awkwardness of those teenage years that all adults thank God every day that we now have behind us.

Whoooooooo! I’m out of breath.

So why do I mention all of these things about the movie? Because all of these little issues combine to somehow make one of the funniest and zaniest movies you will ever see.

Better Off Dead is so full of energy that there is enough material in here for ten movies. But Savage Steve Holland makes it work. Don’t ask me how, but he does. I think I’m going to stop here because if you haven’t seen this movie you have to see it now. This is a completely original film and it also one that no one will ever have the guts to make again.

This is one hell of a film.

Captain Ron (1992)

Captain Ron* - (I think I'll have a…   ...a Margarita!)

-The best movies of 1992

Are you tired of the daily grind? Do you want to have some adventure and excitement in your life? Most men in their 30’s would ascribe to this sentiment. And it is exactly this that makes this next movie so special.

What happens when you are living the married life, the life with a job and a boss? When you are playing the role as a father at home, and a worker at your work? Is that all there is to life, you ask?

Maybe you dream about chucking it all way…

Hopping on a steam tramp and going somewhere… anywhere… other than here.

You need a break, a vacation a… reset.

Ya! This is pretty common in America. The society and laws are all pretty repressive. No vacation for you, and pay your taxes, and everything else. You can relax by watching movies that make fun of you. That’s your reality. Deal with it.

OK. I’m not going to elaborate more than what all this means. You all need to take a break and a vacation from life right now. You need to get out and have some fun. You need more than just a change. You need a slap in the face change…

Adulthood has lots of perks: No more homework, you really can eat whatever you want, and you eventually become a good 90 percent less angsty. However, one major drawback is you no longer get a spring break (or a summer break, for that matter). Being an adult means work never stops and vacations are rare. But! That doesn't mean you can't still vicariously enjoy spring break through your favorite movies. Is it the same as escaping to a pristine beach? No... but it is cheaper, so there's that.

There are awesome spring break movies from every era, but the '90s in particular were big on vacation movies. While not all of them focused on spring break, they did showcase the joys of travel, downtime, and relaxation. Basically, all the things you can't just drop everything and do on a whim because you have responsibilities now. Bask in the joy of those simpler times when you naively thought summer would never end and life really could just be one long vacation in the sun by planning a spring break movie night with your closest friends.

Make mixed drinks with tiny umbrellas and throw pillows all over the floor slumber party style as you watch one of these '90s gems — after all, you are an adult and while you may not get a designated spring break, you make your own rules now.

Movies about vacations gone awry are my favorite kind of movies. In real life, you want your vacation to go smoothly, but watching a movie family's vacation go from crazy to crazier is always hilarious. Captain Ron is no exception. Watching Martin Short get shown up by the cooler than cool Captain Ron during his own family vacation is a madcap story that might just make you glad you have to work all spring.

-Bustle

Let’s look at a forgotten gem of a movie… Captain Ron.

A family in Chicago inherits the yacht formerly owned by Clark Gable. They decide to sail it from the island of Ste. Pomme de Terre to Miami, and they sail with the assistance of Captain Ron and their lives will never be the same again
'Captain Ron' is a great movie! The plot is simple, & so is the movie. That is what make sit so much fun. Yes, most of the movie is translucent, but it works so well. Kurt Russell shines as Capt. Ron Rico, who has been hired by the Harvey family to be the drive their boat from a Carribean Island to Miami, FL. While he bumbles from one scene to the other, Capt. Ron manages to be successful in the end. All of this makes Martin Harvey(Martin Short) furious, while his family loves Capt. Ron.
‘Captain Ron’ is a great movie! The plot is simple, & so is the movie. That is what make sit so much fun. Yes, most of the movie is translucent, but it works so well. Kurt Russell shines as Capt. Ron Rico, who has been hired by the Harvey family to be the drive their boat from a Carribean Island to Miami, FL. While he bumbles from one scene to the other, Capt. Ron manages to be successful in the end. All of this makes Martin Harvey(Martin Short) furious, while his family loves Capt. Ron.

This is wonderful movie, one of my favorite movies of all time! A family inherits a sailboat and decides to flee the urban rat race. They don’t realize that they will have to over come many hurdles, including aspects of them selves, Capt. Ron, the boat and the environment.

The daughter plays a teenager that is simultaneously apathetic and nearly out of control. The son is a kid who hasn’t taken an interest in life until now. The father assumes that Capt. Ron can’t know anything while the family begins to believe that it’s the father who doesn’t know anything.

This movie was one of the triggers to me moving to a tropical island to live, oh and to buy a boat.

This film has a little bit of everything in it. Adventure, pirates, lots of excitement, and plenty of laughs. It is one of the most enjoyable movies I've watched. If you just want to relax and sit back and laugh, CAPTAIN RON is a movie you won't want to miss.
This film has a little bit of everything in it. Adventure, pirates, lots of excitement, and plenty of laughs. It is one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve watched. If you just want to relax and sit back and laugh, CAPTAIN RON is a movie you won’t want to miss.

I don’t understand the many poor reviews I have seen from the “professional reviewers”. I think this movie is incredibly funny in a quiet sort of way. I have seen it many times. It reminds me of the many Jackie Gleason Honeymooners I have seen over and over. I know what punch line is coming and I begin laughing before the punch line is even delivered.

Martin Short is not his usual manic self and this is refreshing. Kurt Russell is a master as he plays against the heroic roles he has played so often.

The play of the use of “gorillas” versus “guerillas” is laid back genius.

By the end of the movie, I actually found myself nostalgic for the sense of freedom and fun that only Captain Ron can steer you towards
By the end of the movie, I actually found myself nostalgic for the sense of freedom and fun that only Captain Ron can steer you towards

Ignore all the stuffed shirt, up-tight pinheads who couldn’t loosen up if a gun was held to their collective heads. Treat this movie as it should be…FUN! This is the film that keeps us going through the winter until sailing season…then we take the video along on board.

Martin Short and Kurt Russell are TERRIFIC together, and Mary Kay Place? Who’d have known what a versatile actress she is, after all, most of us only had Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman to judge her by. The kids certainly do add a fine finishing touch to this hilarious crew.

This movie was not created to win an academy award, it was created to be lighthearted and fun and it far exceeded that goal.

Every time i want to laugh, when i see this movie on, i catch a glimpse. This movie is guaranteed to make you laugh. And Mary Kay Place is such EYE candy for us men. She represents the type of woman we men would ask to marry. Beautiful yet supportive of her family and children.
Every time i want to laugh, when I see this movie on, I catch a glimpse. This movie is guaranteed to make you laugh. And Mary Kay Place is such EYE candy for us men. She represents the type of woman we men would ask to marry. Beautiful yet supportive of her family and children.

Kurt Russell is THE man! One of the most under appreciated actors in Hollywood, Russell takes what would have been a run of the mill comedy and makes it HILARIOUS!!!

Captain Ron Rico is about as laid back as laid back can be. He’s an ex Navy boat driver whose been through one too many squalls, not to mention a stint in rehab. A treasure chest of worldly knowledge, he’s never at a loss to relate his exploits even when it comes to his glass eye, “Won it in a crap game a few years back.”

At first glance he’s a man you wouldn’t trust to float an inner tube, but as he proves to Martin Short throughout the course of the movie, he’s “far more cunning than first suspected.”

After all, you gotta love a guy who as he’s sipping beer with Short’s young son, he tells the young lad that he just caught his parents “Playing hide-the-salami in the shower.” I crack up just writing about it.

This is a very funny movie that never really hit the headlines. No idea why, but maybe because I am a sailor myself, I can appreciate the humour. Well worth watching if you want to lose yourself in the Caribbean lifestyle from your cold and damp apartment in winter.
This is a very funny movie that never really hit the headlines. No idea why, but maybe because I am a sailor myself, I can appreciate the humor. Well worth watching if you want to lose yourself in the Caribbean lifestyle from your cold and damp apartment in winter.

But besides Russell’s stellar performance, there’s BEAUTIFUL locations and photography, a catchy reggae soundtrack, and enough laughs from the rest of the cast to make this a most enjoyable film to pop a bowl of popcorn to and enjoy with the family.

As for me….I wanna go out drinkin’ with Captain Ron!

‘There’s Something About Mary’ (1998)

This movie was filed in Woonsockett, RI when I was actually living there. Which is a pretty old blue collar town, quiet and kind of boarded up. “Going to seed”, some might say.

This movie is great escapist fare.

Thirteen years ago, Ted (Ben Stiller) landed a prom date with the most popular and beautiful girl in school, Mary (Cameron Diaz). Unfortunately, the date wasn’t meant to be, for Ted has his manhood damaged right in front of Mary, and ends up in the hospital instead of the prom.

Owwww!

What makes this work...is its a dead-on hard hitting comedy. The Farrley Brothers spared no one: male or female, handicapped or able bodied, black or white, rich or poor, job or not, straight or gay, animal or vegetable, blonde or brunette, educated or not. It is NOT a cinematic masterpiece so don't look for one, it is not a punch line comedy or slapstick comedy, it is sophomore humor done very well because you're going to be laughing at what you think you shouldn't no matter how much you want to say you would never laugh at something like that.
What makes this work…is its a dead-on hard hitting comedy. The Farrley Brothers spared no one: male or female, handicapped or able bodied, black or white, rich or poor, job or not, straight or gay, animal or vegetable, blonde or brunette, educated or not. It is NOT a cinematic masterpiece so don’t look for one, it is not a punch line comedy or slapstick comedy, it is sophomore humor done very well because you’re going to be laughing at what you think you shouldn’t no matter how much you want to say you would never laugh at something like that.

Thirteen years later, Ted decides to track Mary down, and have a second chance with his dream girl. He hires sleazy private eye, Pat (Matt Dillon) to find her for him.

Pat finds her, and she’s grown up beautiful.

Pat decides he wants to date her. He stalks her, finds out everything she wants in a man, and poses as just that. Meanwhile, Ted has been led to believe that Mary has become fat white trash in a wheelchair. Pat and Mary start dating.

The Farrley Brothers added in "some things" that...well... may have just happened to you at some point in your adolescence, and put a comedic/gross quality to it that shocks you into laughing at it. All through the film you might laugh because you're thinking, "Better them than me".....even if it was you!
The Farrley Brothers added in “some things” that…well… may have just happened to you at some point in your adolescence, and put a comedic/gross quality to it that shocks you into laughing at it. All through the film you might laugh because you’re thinking, “Better them than me”…..even if it was you!

Well, by the end of the movie, every man who is involved in the story has tried to make a move on Mary.

We all know how it ends, but it’s one funny ride.

The funniest gag in the movie involves a NEW brand of HAIR GEL (compliments of Ted, and tested by Mary). I won’t tell you what’s really being mistaken for hair gel, but when you find out, you’ll laugh so hard, you gag.

Not for eveyone's taste, even those who think they know comedy, but this is that kinda comedy that is hard to do once you've reached maturity and forgotten what it was like to laugh at simple things. This is as simple as it gets. Don't put too much into it, it is what it is, and to me, it was really funny!
Not for everyone’s taste, even those who think they know comedy, but this is that kinda comedy that is hard to do once you’ve reached maturity and forgotten what it was like to laugh at simple things. This is as simple as it gets. Don’t put too much into it, it is what it is, and to me, it was really funny!

This movie knows what a comedy of this type should be like. Each gag goes somewhere, and is really big. They’re usually extended scenes with punchlines.

Me, Myself, and Irene goes for the cheapest laughs you can find, but There’s Something About Mary takes it’s time, carefully planning each gag, in order to make it gut-bustingly hilarious. That’s just what this movie is. 10/10.

‘Wayne’s World’ (1992)

Maybe you might have forgotten this flick. But, I’ll bet you that you can remember some scenes as clear as a bright day on a fresh Spring morning.

This is a positive and happy, and yet terribly silly movie that is just perfect for these dark times of fear and uncertainty.

Wayne is still living at home. He has a world class collection of name tags from jobs he's tried, but he does have his own public access TV show. A local station decides to hire him and his sidekick, Garth, to do their show professionally and Wayne & Garth find that life is no longer the same...
This is the film that catapulted both comedians' careers into the stratosphere. 1992 is an interesting time in alternative rock history between the peak of grunge in 1991, and the coming crest of the "punk revival" in 1994 with Green Day, Offspring and Rancid. Wayne's World reveled in this new "alternative rock," music a concept which was at the time much more flexible than it is now. Rife with irony, alternative rock was eventually the name given to the music that blended aspects of rock, metal, punk, pop, and eclectic "weirdness." While Wayne is the more metal half of the excellent duo, Garth is the grunge/nerd/"punk" side of the equation.
This is the film that catapulted both comedians’ careers into the stratosphere. 1992 is an interesting time in alternative rock history between the peak of grunge in 1991, and the coming crest of the “punk revival” in 1994 with Green Day, Offspring and Rancid. Wayne’s World reveled in this new “alternative rock,” music a concept which was at the time much more flexible than it is now. Rife with irony, alternative rock was eventually the name given to the music that blended aspects of rock, metal, punk, pop, and eclectic “weirdness.” While Wayne is the more metal half of the excellent duo, Garth is the grunge/nerd/”punk” side of the equation.

Ask most men within a decade of my age in either direction to list the 100 best movie scenes of all time, and the scene from “Wayne’s World” where they sing/lip sync Bohemian Rhapsody in the car will be on more lists than not.

Heck! It might even make every list.

Not designed for the “critically acclaimed” snob set, Wayne’s World, the film adaptation of the extremely popular Saturday Night Live skit by the same name, targets its audience perfectly and never even enters the water, let alone jumps any sharks.

The movie is true to itself from start to finish.

Heavy metal rock and roll fandom provides the backdrop for a non-stop train wreck of social satire. Only in 1992; and only in Meyer's and Carvey's comedic genius could Aurora, Illinois ever seem so cool. Wayne's World, in the film's plot, is the name of a Cable Access television show (dare I say "DIY") hosted by Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar. Rob Lowe plays Benjamin, an advertising scout/producer who is looking for talent to promote a chain of video game arcade stores. He finds his muse in the low-brow witticism, promptly signs the boys, and sets them up in a proper television studio.
Heavy metal rock and roll fandom provides the backdrop for a non-stop train wreck of social satire. Only in 1992; and only in Meyer’s and Carvey’s comedic genius could Aurora, Illinois ever seem so cool.

The plot centers around an opportunistic television producer named Benjamin Kane (Rob Lowe), who, with funding from an arcade owner, turns Wayne’s World into a slickly produced national show.

You would think that this would be a good thing. But alas, it’s not.

The transition caused it to lose touch with its audience, and causing friction between Wayne and Garth, who feel they have sold out their fans and their roots.

A love interest is tossed to Wayne in the form of Cassandra (Tia Carerre), in triangular form due to the attention paid to her by Kane as well as Wayne.

Rob Lowe was excellent as the sleazeball junior television executive, while cameos abound from the rock world, including Alice Cooper and Meat Loaf. Though not publicized as much as the other quotables from the movie, my personal favorite scene was when Wayne and Garth were each laying on parked cars, and Garth starts whistling the closing theme from Star Trek.
Rob Lowe was excellent as the sleazeball junior television executive, while cameos abound from the rock world, including Alice Cooper and Meat Loaf. Though not publicized as much as the other quotables from the movie, my personal favorite scene was when Wayne and Garth were each laying on parked cars, and Garth starts whistling the closing theme from Star Trek.

The pop-culture cuisinart responsible for most of the SNL skits was working in overdrive in this film, and that’s a good thing. Everything from product placements, to gratuitous sex, to lame plot devices were lampooned.

 Wayne's World, in the film's plot, is the name of a Cable Access television show (dare I say "DIY") hosted by Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar. Rob Lowe plays Benjamin, an advertising scout/producer who is looking for talent to promote a chain of video game arcade stores. He finds his muse in the low-brow witticism, promptly signs the boys, and sets them up in a proper television studio.
Wayne’s World, in the film’s plot, is the name of a Cable Access television show (dare I say “DIY”) hosted by Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar. Rob Lowe plays Benjamin, an advertising scout/producer who is looking for talent to promote a chain of video game arcade stores. He finds his muse in the low-brow witticism, promptly signs the boys, and sets them up in a proper television studio.

You might have seen this move before, but a re-watch is always in order for some much needed “positive vibes”.

‘Dazed and Confused’ (1993)

There is not a single movie that portrayed my Junior / Senior year in 1976 / 1977 than this movie. To say that it is accurate is an understatement.

Wooderson: Let me tell you what Melba Toast is packin' right here, all right. We got 4:11 Positrac outback, 750 double pumper, Edelbrock intake, bored over 30, 11 to 1 pop-up pistons, turbo-jet 390 horsepower. We're talkin' some fuckin' muscle.

This movie is EXACTLY what it was like for me in 1976. My Junior year. It was exactly what was going on including my Orange (goat) GTO!

What a great, great movie. If you want to know what being in High School in the mid 70's was like, rent this film. 

I grew up in the metro Manhattan area. We didn't have the freshman hazing, and few of us could afford the cars (although we sure knew about them and lusted after them), but the rest of this movie is so dead on about my experience of High School in the 70's that it's scary. 

Every character in the film corresponds with someone that I knew during that time. 

Yes, there was a lot of pot smoking, yes, obtaining beer was quite easy for underage kids…

I used to buy it in bars when I was 16. 

We made pipes in shop class. 

We hung out and had parties at night, drove the streets drinking beers and smoking joints listening to the same music. 

There were no youth centers though. 

The girls that I knew were as beautiful, and also struggled to get into their jeans. They used pliers too, but they also put them on while they were wet to further get that skintight look. 

There was no HIV virus to worry about, Herpes was not a big thing then, the biggest worry was getting pregnant. 

Everyone was having sex… 

All of these facts also were no big deal. 

Most of my peers grew up just fine, and now are upstanding pillars of the community. Many today would like you to believe that this is an example of the road to ruin. 

It was an incredible great time. 

The film has interesting character development, with the same types I remember. Philosophers, heads (now called stoners), bullies and waifs. 

This is my American Graffiti and it is perfect. Waxing nostalgic? Perhaps, but anyone that didn't live through that time will sill love the dialog in this film, as it deals with the universal experience of that point in one's life. 

This is high school in the 70's. Check it out.

Almost a Documentary... 
goodwynn191914 July 2005

The first day of summer vacation leaves a group of ’70s teens exhilarated and ready to party. Their raucous activities might remind you of the debauchery you got up to in the good old days. There are so many scenes that we all have lived, and personal flashbacks will flood your mind.

Either way, the feeling of complete freedom makes this movie a must for anyone starving for a vacation.

This movie takes you back to a time when you had absolutely no worries. It was a time when everything was in a kind of dull haze and everyone was walking in some kind of a fog.
This movie takes you back to a time when you had absolutely no worries. It was a time when everything was in a kind of dull haze and everyone was walking in some kind of a fog.

What makes “Dazed” work so well is that it gets the LOOK of the mid-to-late 70s just right, particularly the hair & clothing styles. Secondly, the actors pull off the material expertly. In fact, a large part of the film’s success is the excellent casting choices. Both are no easy feat. Speaking of the actors, you get a few up-and-comers here: Matthew McConaughey, Milla Jovovich, Ben Affleck and one or two of lesser note (as far as future popularity goes).

Slater: Are you cool, man?
Mitch Kramer: Like how?
Slater: Okay.

All the standard school archetypes are here: the jock who parties on the side, the bullies, the hot sister and her little long-haired brother, the black dude, the hot (feminist) teacher, the streetfighter, the cool guys, the geekier crowd, the babes, the guy who graduated years ago but still hangs around, the mentors & mentees, etc.

A Time Machine Trip Back To The Texas Summer Of 1976 
Oracle29594 February 2005

I graduated in 1976 from a high school in North Dallas and this entire movie is so spot on it's scary. 

It is my favorite film. I've seen it hundred's of times and every time it's like watching it for the first time. Only someone that was there and lived through those days could have directed such a movie. 

I drove a 70 dark blue Chevelle SS 454 with a 4-speed, over 400 HP and all of the goodies Wooderson described. Starting that car up, listening to the roar of that engine and burning out in 1st gear while in a thick cloud of blue smoke in front of the high school at 3PM while wasted......doing over 80MPH in 2nd gear....oh yea! 

I feel sorry for the teenagers today that drive the limp wrist fluffs of metal that pass themselves off as cars these days.

I was a stoner like Pickford smoking weed non-stop. 

Some mentioned that the heavy drug use was not too common. Well, at our school it was beyond common. Before school, during school (in the bathroom and football field) and after school. Our school had a smoking area outside the cafeteria where everyone went to light up.

The opening scene with Aerosmith "Sweet Emotion" slowly building up and Pickford driving his Goat and girlfriend in the school parking lot kills me every time. 

I cannot imagine a better opening scene for the movie. That was pure genius. 

The funny thing is Linklater did not show getting licks from the coach or the principal. For all the "uninitiated" back then all a coach or an asst. principal had to say was "Smith, I want to see you back at my office now". 

Our coach had a paddle he personally made that he kept on his wall over his desk. It had about 30 holes drilled in it and it was covered in black electrical tape! When that one came down you knew it! Now with all the PC people coach would go to jail for "assaulting the poor boy" Hell, back then it was called character building. As I remember from the 7th grade on licks were given out.

The soundtrack. Best ever. 

Might as well be back at White Rock Lake or Lake Ray Hubbard on a Friday night getting wasted. Head East was a nice touch. Every time I listen to that soundtrack I remember things I have not thought about in 25 years. 

The man that portrayed Pickford's dad was dead on. Accent, demeanor along with the big caddy and the tennis playing wife in the mini-skirt and puffed up hair.

Some of the reviewers mentioned they did not think it was too realistic showing/mixing a lot of sexual activity among the freshman girls. That is another point I must dispute. 

Maybe at their school in their town of 500 or their strict upbringing but at our junior high and high school the freshman and younger girls were pretty wild. 

I mean really "wild"! 

This is coming from someone who "lost it" at 12. So insinuating things about a 15 or 16 year old freshman is pretty tame. 15 and 16 year old's were the "world travelers" to us 13 or 14 year old guys.

There is something about this movie that pulls me back over and over again. It's hard to describe. 

I'm not sure what it is. Am I a Wooderson that enjoys reminiscing? Am I someone that prefers simpler times? Am I someone that is so sick of PC people that a movie like D&C is like a breath of fresh air? 

Was there something magical in the air back in 1976? 

The country was celebrating 200 years of freedom. Now within the last 30 years it seems that most of those freedoms have been slowly whittled away with and all that is left is a former shell of the old. 

Especially after 2001.

The best scene? To me it's a toss-up between the opening "Sweet Emotion" GTO in the school parking lot and the Emporium scene with "Hurricane" playing in the background while (The Past) Wooderson, (The Present) Pink and (The Future) Mitch walk into the Emporium while the camera films every little nuance in slow motion. 

The cockiness of Woods, the mellow Pink and the innocence of Mitch. Put that scene on slow motion and study their faces and the reaction shots of their peer's faces as they acknowledge their presence.

Your own personal time machine if only for an hour and a half. Slip the DVD in, turn the lights down low, take a couple good strong hits and wash them down with a few Tallboys. Use your imagination and for the briefest of time you are back in 1976. I wish they made more movies like this instead of the sugar coated pablum coming out of Hollywood nowadays.

Remember this?

Howard Hughes died, 
Robin Trower-Bridge of Sighs, 
Jeff Beck, 
Kawasaki Z1, 
Kawasaki 750 triple 2-stroke, 
45 cents a gallon gas, 
104 octane gas, 
Frampton Comes Alive, 
Bad Company - Shooting Star, 
Elvin Bishop - Fooled Around and Fell In Love, 
Jimmy Carter, 
Dirty Mary, 
Crazy Larry, 
1969 Dodge Charger 440, 
2 Lane Blacktop, 
3 finger lids, 
windowpane, 
Diamond Dogs, 
J. Geils, 
Midnight Special, Wings Over America tour, 
Bad Company - Movin' On, 
Mott The Hoople - All The Young Dudes,
SD 455 with the Big Bird on the hood, 
Marshall Tucker Band - Heard It In A Love Song, 
Emerson, Lake and Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery, 
Edelbrock Tunnel Ram with Holley Double Pumpers, ...

...getting high at dusk while listening to Pink Floyd's "Time" and looking at the Dallas skyscraper skyline against the setting sun.

If you do then Dazed and Confused is right up your alley. If you don't then still watch it, the characters in D&C cover all generations, just the cars and clothing have changed.
Dazed and Confused is a lot like the time in which it takes place. The film doesn't have much of note to say, but you get the sense that it has a good time just being there. By 1976, Vietnam was in the rear-view mirror, as were much of the struggles of the previous decades. It was almost like people were sick and tired of caring about things and just wanted to get wasted. Notice how nobody seemed to care when their teacher was trying to tell them about the 1968 Democratic Convention or our "aristocratic" forefathers. There is a certain innocence about the period that our up-tight and violent world of today could use right now.
Dazed and Confused is a lot like the time in which it takes place. The film doesn’t have much of note to say, but you get the sense that it has a good time just being there. By 1976, Vietnam was in the rear-view mirror, as were much of the struggles of the previous decades. It was almost like people were sick and tired of caring about things and just wanted to get wasted. Notice how nobody seemed to care when their teacher was trying to tell them about the 1968 Democratic Convention or our “aristocratic” forefathers. There is a certain innocence about the period that our up-tight and violent world of today could use right now.

And then you have the standard school experiences like parties at friend’s houses, keg parties, fleeing bullies, dealing with coaches & teachers, flirting, the possibility of sex, hanging out, meaningless conversations, fights, smoking pot at school or in your friend’s bedroom, etc.

Like “Fast Times,” “Dazed and Confused” is a joy to watch — whatever your age — because it successfully takes you back to the high school years with all its joys & agonies.

Cynthia: Maybe the 80s will be like radical or something. I figure we'll be in our 20s and it cant' get worse.

Some don’t like it because it’s more of a slice-of-life film than a plot-driven, contrived story. The plot here is simple: It’s the last day of school and the youths want to celebrate. If they can’t party at their friend’s house (because the dad catches wind of their plans) they’ll have a party at the park or wherever, but they WILL party. The rest of the film involves their interactions within this context.

Our film shows us the trials and tribulations of kids just looking to get high, drunk, or just save their butts from being paddled on the last day of school. Not much of note happens in this film. We just see kids doing what kids are still doing. They are all just out to have a good time.
Our film shows us the trials and tribulations of kids just looking to get high, drunk, or just save their butts from being paddled on the last day of school. Not much of note happens in this film. We just see kids doing what kids are still doing. They are all just out to have a good time.
Slater: Oh, a little weed, you know. There may be a beer bust later on.

I’ve heard some complain that the film conveys a terrible message.

What message?

There is no message.

The message is that school’s out and it’s time to celebrate! Besides, there are a few positive points that can be mined from the proceedings: the arrogant bully gets what’s coming, make a stand and fight when you have to (even if you get beat up), ultra-tight pants must be put on with pliers & the help of a friend, be true to yourself, etc.

But — really — this isn’t a movie to look for deep messages, its simple purpose is to take you back to the school years — in this case, 1976 — and all the fun & painful experiences thereof.

 There is nothing at all pretentious or preachy about any of the subject matter. We see some cool cars, tight jeans, long hair, and just about anything you would associate with this time frame.
There is nothing at all pretentious or preachy about any of the subject matter. We see some cool cars, tight jeans, long hair, and just about anything you would associate with this time frame.
Don Dawson: You know that Julie chick? Loves you. You want her? Gotta play it cool, you know. You can't let her know how much you like ?cause if she knows, she'll dump you like that. Believe me. Like, if she asks you if you want a ride, you say, "No, I've got my own ride, but maybe I'll see you later." Sounds stupid, doesn't it? It works.

No review of “Dazed and Confused” would be complete without noting the excellent soundtrack. You get some great rock/metal of the 70s like “Sweet Emotion,” “School’s Out,” “Stranglehold,” “Do You Feel Like We Do,” “Love Hurts,” “Paranoid,” “Rock & Roll Hootchie Coo,” “Rock & Roll All Nite,” “Slow Ride,” “Cherry Bomb,” “Tuesday’s Gone” and many more.

Here’s some quotes, and slang, that my generation can most certainly relate to…

  • “Alright, alright, alright!” — Wooderson
  • “Shotgun!” — Slater
  • “It’d be a lot cooler if you did.” — Wooderson
  • “You cool, man?” — Slater
  • “‘I’ve got my own ride, but maybe I’ll see you later.’” — Dawson
  • “You gotta keep on livin’… L-I-V-I-N.” — Wooderson

‘Wild at Heart’ (1990)

I’m going to close out this post with a slightly more serious flick. This one is surreal, but anyone that was in love with someone who’s parents hated you would relate to this movie.

Indeed.

It was hard enough finding a girlfriend in high school. But finding one that had parents that approved of you was just about impossible. Here is a movie … perhaps taken to extremes… that illustrates the lengths at which a mother would go to in order to “protect” her daughter.

Lula's psychopathic mother goes crazy at the thought of Lula being with Sailor, who just got free from jail. 

Ignoring Sailor's probation, they set out for California. 

However their mother hires a killer to hunt down Sailor and hurt him. 

Unaware of this, the two enjoy their journey and themselves being together... until they witness a young woman dying after a car accident - a bad omen.

Yah.

It’s something that I know all too well.

The opening scene to Wild At Heart features Nick Cage ferociously beating an assassin to death. Heads are rammed against walls, fists are lunged into guts and what results is a brutally bashed corpse with brains pouring out of it’s head. This kind of high-octane violence which is fueled by maniacal characters and deranged intervals creates a fantastic effect. One which has so much impact and so much individuality to it’s merit that it turns out to be one hell of a movie.

Recipient of the prestigious Palme d'Or award at Cannes, David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" is an amazingly brilliant spectacle for the senses. Bold splashes of deep red, curiously staged musical numbers (Nicolas Cage does his own singing – and he's great!), and the continuous references to "The Wizard of Oz" help create a surreal and dreamlike texture to the narrative.
Recipient of the prestigious Palme d’Or award at Cannes, David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” is an amazingly brilliant spectacle for the senses. Bold splashes of deep red, curiously staged musical numbers (Nicolas Cage does his own singing – and he’s great!), and the continuous references to “The Wizard of Oz” help create a surreal and dreamlike texture to the narrative.

This is simultaneously a thrilling road movie and a revelation of small town, American country folk. The two protagonists, Sailor and Lula (Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern) are so in love with each other that they’d go to extreme lengths not to be separated.

Their separation is exactly what Lula’s crazed mother wants, as she believes that Sailor is a cold-blooded murderer who is putting her daughter in danger.

Her anger is so fierce that the viewer becomes slightly scared by her: her manic fits of rage where she plasters herself in red lipstick; her bizarre paroxysms fueled by numerous cocktails.

All of her slight idiosyncrasies and mannerisms well up to create a very intimidating mother.

She sends out a hitman to dispose of Sailor and bring back her daughter, but the lovely couple are on the run from her and the law.

Sailor and Lula (excellent performances from both Nicolas Cage & Laura Dern); two broken souls passionately in love, flee the vengeful wrath of Lula's mother Marietta, who for reasons of her own will stop at nothing to ensure the lovers are kept apart. Diane Ladd practically steals the show in her brave portrayal of Lula's psychopathic mother Marietta.
Sailor and Lula (excellent performances from both Nicolas Cage & Laura Dern); two broken souls passionately in love, flee the vengeful wrath of Lula’s mother Marietta, who for reasons of her own will stop at nothing to ensure the lovers are kept apart. Diane Ladd practically steals the show in her brave portrayal of Lula’s psychopathic mother Marietta.

Sailor and Lula meet up with some very strange characters whilst travelling far away from Lula’s mother.

The eccentricities of ‘Tuna Town’ in Texas, the insane car accident victim and Lula’s nutcase cousin who believes that “the man with the black glove is coming to get him”.

It’s all rudimentary David Lynch fare. He has mastered the art of contemporary film making: a clever blend of black-comedy, violence and fantasy.

Gut wrenchingly violent in places, hopelessly romantic in others; Lynch has crafted an adult fairy tale worthy of multiple viewings. Recommended to those who enjoy and appreciate abstract methods of film-making – a definite 10/10!
Gut wrenchingly violent in places, hopelessly romantic in others; Lynch has crafted an adult fairy tale worthy of multiple viewings. Recommended to those who enjoy and appreciate abstract methods of film-making – a definite 10/10!

The viewer builds an empathy for the two main characters, as it would be a terrible thing to see their undying love for each other shattered.

The other characters in the movie all seem to want to destroy that love.

Sailor’s character, although violent and hard-bitten, seems the most normal of the lot. It takes a sane man to make sense of all the insane folk in America’s underbelly.

He puts up with a lot from everyone, but all he really wants to do is escape from it all with Lula.

They meet an assortment of weird people, especially Bobby Peru, and also Perdita Durango, who has appeared recently in a film with her name as the title, also written by Barry Gifford. It is classic David Lynch, with a homage type theme to the Wizard of Oz. It has the sensuality and eroticism later seen in Lost Highway, the violence and gore, the head sequence after the bank robbery being graphic, and a general uneasiness throughout. But it is a darkly humorous and transfixing piece.
They meet an assortment of weird people, especially Bobby Peru, and also Perdita Durango, who has appeared recently in a film with her name as the title, also written by Barry Gifford. It is classic David Lynch, with a homage type theme to the Wizard of Oz. It has the sensuality and eroticism later seen in Lost Highway, the violence and gore, the head sequence after the bank robbery being graphic, and a general uneasiness throughout. But it is a darkly humorous and transfixing piece.

Summary…

Well, while you are trapped in this slow-motion nightmare you might as well make the best of the situation. Now, rather than watching horror and adventure movies out of Hollywood, how about checking out some more light hearted fare for purposes of escape…

If you want to relive your school years…

  • Hot Dog the Movie
  • One Crazy Summer
  • Risky Business
  • Dream a little dream
  • Better off dead
  • Dazed and Confused

If you want to relive your 20’s…

  • Wayne’s world
  • Something about Mary
  • Wild at Heart

If you want to just escape from your life as an Adult…

  • Captain Ron

In any event, it’s great escapist entertainment. Certainly at least one of these movies will strike a cord within your soul. Have fun.

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Escapist entertainment during a time of stress; some suggestions.

This is a very stressful time that we are all enduring. many stores and factories are closed, and many people are locked inside their homes. No one is sure when the prohibitions will be lifted, or what they will do to catch up with their bills.

It’s the COVID-19 SHTF event.

The thing is, that when we try to turn on the internet for escape we are blitzed with a combined narrative; it’s either [1] hate-China or [2] fear-the-corona-virus. I mean can’t we get a break? Why does the US government feel the need to constantly and incessantly manipulate the media and try to control us all. Can’t they just take a holiday, or something?

Jeeze!

Well, I am not the government, and I do have some suggestion of what you all can do. So, here I provide some thoughts on what you can do to escape from this nightmarish assault.

Let’s start with a list of some movies and television shows. Shows that you can use to pull up interesting escapist entertainment to look at.

Now, rather than list well known movies, or the latest in special effects, instead I have decided to put together a list of 1980’s feel-good movies, and 1960’s – 1970’s forgotten comedies. The key driver here is “overlooked” and / or “forgotten”. (With the first one being “unknown” to anyone under 50 years old.)

I do hope that at least one movie or show listed here will remind you of some pleasant memories . And that maybe… maybe, you would use my suggestion as a seed to take you on a trip. A trip far away from the current frustrations of modern locked-up life.

We start with a pretty well-known movie. At least well-known to my generation.

The newer generations not so much.

Though, you would be surprised at how many people under the age of 30 never heard of it. Which is a shame. The movie is a classic and it’s all about growing up with your first heart-pounding crush…

Sixteen Candles (1983)

Climax of the movie when Samantha gets her birthday wish.
Climax of the movie when Samantha gets her birthday wish.

The tale is classic. American teenager Samantha (Molly Ringwald) is despondent that her entire family has forgotten her sixteenth birthday. You know, being so caught up are they in the wedding of her sister. Now, Samantha has a crush on a classmate of hers. He’s Mr. Bo-Hunk; Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), and she wrongly thinks he has no interest in her.

Oh, but we do find out what happens…

This John Hughes film is one of the best romantic teen comedies in history. 

Starring 2 of the Brat Packers, Molly Ringwald, playing the lovesick Samantha, and Anthony Michael Hall who plays "The Geek", he practically stole the entire movie with his one-liners. 

His friends were the best, it's funny to see John Cusack as one of his geeky friends, and I just noticed Joan Cusack makes a small appearance in this as the girl with the neck brace on. That's funny. 

I recommend this classic to anyone who likes romantic teen comedies. 

Oh and whoever said that "Sixteen Candles" was perverted, all i have to say is WHAT? What is perverted about this movie, American Pie was perverted, this movie is a classic. There was ONE scene of nudity and it lasted about 3 seconds. I give "Sixteen Candles" 10 out of 10!!!!

- LittleRascal-15

Matters are not helped by a party that evening at school, at which much mayhem breaks out, nor by the chaotic wedding day itself.

"They Fucking forgot my birthday!!!"... 

These are the immortal words spoken by SIXTEEN CANDLES heroine Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) in the ultimate 80's teen comedy. 

This movie has become a classic to those born in the 70's, like myself, and I now consider it a "guilty pleasure". Its a movie we all grew up with. 

Didn't we all know a person like 'Farmer Ted', or a hot queenie like the blonde he hilariously gets. It was every young freshman's fantasy. This funny flick is also a relic of the 80's that is not all that dated.

The jokes still work (as long as you see it uncut) and it is neat seeing things of the not so distant past be on display. Floppy disks, headgears, leotards, etc... 

Time has not been so good to the featured stars. Ringwald and Anthony-Michael Hall, who was born to play this role, and this one only, have all but disappeared. The biggest stars now are blips on the screen here: Joan (in a headgear) and John (a geek) Cusack. The film is like a toy you can't put away.

Some situations are beat, but at least Paul Dooley adds an extra dimension to the father. Too many of John Hughes' teen-angst comedies of the era feature tissue-thin parental figures. 

This was the first and best of the so-called "brat pack" movies, and will always hold a place in 1980's filmmaking history. Girls learned never to lend their underwear to a geek and we all learned that high school is just a phase, easily forgotten as time goes on.

-Don-10229 March 1999

Now, maybe you have already seen that movie ten or twenty times and do not care to re-watch it. No problem.

Seriously.

No problem.

Maybe get yourself a nice bag of chips. Pour it into a nice big bowl and grab yourself some beer, or like me… a nice glass of wine. (Just a reasonably cheap red will do.)

Relax.

Stop allowing the “news” and those that control it and the internet to control you.

Some Lays potato chips that I bought. The Chinese really like all these odd kinds of flavors. This particular flavor is a white grape drink soda drink flavor.
Some Lays potato chips that I bought. The Chinese really like all these odd kinds of flavors. This particular flavor is a white grape soda drink flavor. Who figures? Eh? For me it was a cross between Korean style barbecued squid with Hunan spices or plain “American style” potato chips.

So, now that you have some fine tasty chips… a nice beverage of your choice, and (hopefully) a companion or two (can be a loved one, a trusted pet, or some children), settle down to some friendly escapist enjoyment.

I'm drinking red wine, so I think that it could be paired quite nicely with a white grape soda flavored potato chip.

With that being said, how about a feel-good television show.

I really like the world of Mayberry RFD. Nothing ever seems to go wrong in it. Seriously, nothing bad or really serious ever happens in it short of a cat getting stuck in a tree, or an arrest for a broken tail light.

It’s all just good, safe escapist enjoyment.

The Andy Griffith Show

The Andy Griffith show.
The Andy Griffith show.

This sitcom was spun-off from an episode of The Danny Thomas Show. In that show, Danny Thomas was arrested in a small North Carolina town. The character of the small town sheriff turned out to be so popular that they made a complete show around him.

Of course, named “The Andy Griffith Show”, and focused on Sheriff Andrew Jackson Taylor in the small town of Mayberry.

Andy Taylor was a widower with a young son (Opie) and the pair of them lived with Andy’s Aunt Bee – famous for her most excellent pies.

Andy’s Aunt Bee was famous for her most excellent pies.
Andy’s Aunt Bee was famous for her most excellent pies.

Crime in Mayberry was of the distinctly petty variety and much of the comedy centered around Andy, his family life and working life especially with his somewhat stupid deputy (and cousin) Barney Fife.

Andy wouldn’t allow Barney to load his weapon for fear he would shoot his own feet off! He allows him to carry a solitary bullet (usually in his left shirt pocket).

Throughout the show’s run, Andy had two love interests – the first was druggist Ellie Walker, and then later schoolteacher Helen Crump whom Andy ended up marrying in 1968.

Sheriff Andrew Jackson Taylor

When Andy Griffith decided to call it quits with the show it was still popular and the network decided to carry it on under the new name of Mayberry RFD with Ken Berry in the lead as councilman Sam Jones.

Also a most excellent show.

Griffith helped with the change over by appearing in the first episode (it was in this episode that he married Helen and the pair then moved away from the town).

A typical day in Mayberry with Andy and councilman Sam Jones.

I know. I know.

Mayberry RFD is more about hotdogs and hamburgers instead of potato chips. It’s a show about mowing lawns on hot July afternoons, pitchers of icy lemonade on shady porches, and tree-houses that hide in the back yard. It’s about comic-books, airplane models that hang from the bedroom ceiling, and classmates that you play baseball with. It’s about watermelons and fresh buttered corn on the cob.

And I really do emphasize. I really do.

Maybe something along these lines, eh?

What's life without a nice tasty home-cooked hamburger?  Not much, I'll tell you what. Hey!  How about taking notice of that nice beer in the background...
What’s life without a nice tasty home-cooked hamburger? Not much, I’ll tell you what. Notice the cheese! (No tomatoes, though. Bummer.) But hey! How about taking notice of that nice beer in the background…

Oh, and speaking of hamburgers and beer…

F Troop

This is just a fun silly television series that I used to watch when I was in elementary school. LOL.

But now, after decades of the rigors of Life, I have come to appreciate it’s silliness. And yes, silliness has an important role in our lives. If you disagree with me, then leave. You can go ahead and split up your time between CNN and the weather channel.

As an aside, American Airports have non-stop CNN coverage, or the Weather Channel. Chinese airports have silly light slapstick entertainment, Mr. Bean style. Why do you think that the two philosophies are so different?
F Troop
F Troop

This show is a military farce about the gallant incompetents of F Troop. It all takes place at “Fort Courage” way back in 1866 Kansas. This was an interesting time period, being the final days of the Civil War.

The CO was the wide-eyed, bumbling Captain Wilton Parmenter (Ken Berry). You see, he had been promoted from Private during the last days of the war. Imagine that! Private to Captain. What did he do, you ask? Well, he accidentally led a charge towards the enemy with a sneeze that sounded like “Charge!”

The episodes were fun and creative.

V Is for Vampire

Count Sforza, an emigrant from Transylvania, arrives in town. He comes in a hearse, has pale skin and has a crow he calls "Brother." The men of F-Troop suspect he may be a vampire, given the count's tendency to say, "Good evening," regardless of the time of day. When Jane can't be found, O'Rourke, Agarn and the Captain decide to check out Sforza's spooky mansion.

Bill Koenig

Reveille is played at 10 am “because of the three hour time difference” and that even though rations and pay allotments are drawn for 30 men, only 17 are stationed at the fort (the other 13 are allegedly “Indian scouts out on patrol”). LOL.

Perhaps the United States government were taking notes, eh?

Unbeknownst to the captain, Sgt. Morgan O’Rourke (Forrest Tucker) had already negotiated a secret – and highly profitable – treaty with the Hekawi Indians. These Indians were led by Chief Wild Eagle (Frank De Kova) from whom he also had an exclusive franchise to sell their souvenirs to tourists via O’Rourke Enterprises.

The treaty benefited both sides. This is because it permitted the Indians to trade and upgrade their living conditions, and the troops to maintain the illusion that they were involved in a deadly land war. While all the time no one was actually in danger.

The only flaw in this otherwise happy arrangement was the troublesome Shugs, a genuine war-mongering tribe (with whom there was no peace treaty) who occasionally went into action.

F Troop is a happy, go-lucky television comedy that would NEVER be permitted to air in today's modern progressive America.
F Troop is a happy, go-lucky television comedy that would NEVER be permitted to air in today’s modern progressive America.

Corporal Randolph Agarn was O’Rourke’s chief aide and assistant schemer and Wrangler Jane the hard-ridin’, fast-shootin’ (and very scrumptious) cowgirl who ran the post office and was out to marry Parmenter.

Other soldiers in the troop included Hannibal Dobbs, the troop’s bugler – who couldn’t play the bugle – and Troopers Duffy and Vanderbilt.

A lot of colourful Indians passed through the Fort in one-time special appearances. Some of those included Wise Owl (Milton Berle); Roaring Chicken (Edward Everett Horton); 147-year-old Flaming Arrow (Phil Harris) and Bald Eagle (Don Rickles).

LOL.

Other special appearances included Sgt. Ramsden (Paul Lynde) and Wrongo Starr (Henry Gibson).

F Troop was an entertaining enough production which, in similar dubious taste to Hogan’s Heroes made light of a deadly serious period of history.


Let’s look at a movie.

Maybe television shows aren’t your thang, eh?

Well, let’s go and check out a teenaged boy science fiction movie from the 1960’s. It’s got all the elements of boyhood dreams. the title says it all… adventure, shipwrecked, on a lone desolate place… Mars!

And it’s got a monkey!

But first, movies like this remind me of food. They really do. Often, as a boy I would go raid the refrigerator and heat up some leftovers that were sitting inside. I would use the microwave rather than the stove, and there were always some good delicious leftovers. Back then, in the 1960’s the US dollar was still worth around twenty five cents, and middle class families could afford to eat. Not like today where it’s actual value is a fraction of a penny.

I would often make up a sandwich from scraps that I would pull out of the refrigerator.
I would often make up a sandwich from scraps that I would pull out of the refrigerator.

Anyways, I would pull out some pork-chops and applesauce, or maybe some meatloaf (and make a sandwich from it), or perhaps some left over lasagna. I would hurriedly scramble and whip up a quick meal with the commercials were rolling…

Of course, more often than not, I would just end up making a “Dagwood” or a hoagie out of all the fixings in the fridge.

Anyways, back to the movie…

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
"Special-effects wunderkind and genre master Byron Haskin (The War of the Worlds, The Outer Limits) won a place in the hearts of fantasy film lovers everywhere with this gorgeously designed journey into the unknown."

Robinson Crusoe on Mars tells the story of US astronaut Commander “Kit” Draper who must fight for survival when his spaceship, Elinor M, crash-lands on the barren wastes of Mars.

Oooh…

The story begins with the Elinor M orbiting Mars on the first official probe to test the planet’s gravity. Aboard are Draper, Colonel Dan McReady (Batman‘s Adam West) and Mona (The Woolly Monkey), a monkey, space suited for medical research.

The perfect mix of period science fiction for pre-teen boyhood dreams.
The perfect mix of period science fiction for pre-teen boyhood dreams.

McReady and Draper suddenly realize that their craft is on a collision course with a giant meteor. Yikes!

In a split-second evasive action, the spacecraft swings too far off course and is dragged inexorably down by the gravitational pull of Mars.

McReady and Draper separately abandon ship with McReady taking charge of Mona.

Despite its retro rockets, Draper’s ejection capsule crashes on landing, wrecking the craft and leaving food and water for only a few days. Exhausted, Draper falls asleep only to wake up suffocating for lack of air. Without oxygen, he can sleep only an hour.

The true hero of the movie; the spacesuited monkey Mona.
The true hero of the movie; the space-suited monkey Mona.

Draper sets out to find McReady but in his search only locates Mona. With no more than a few hours oxygen, Draper seems doomed.

Lightheaded, he passes out but is miraculously saved when little yellow rocks, burning and giving off bursts of gas, revive him. This gas is pure oxygen and Draper devises a method to feed the oxygen into his regular tank.

Imagine that! Little yellow rocks…

Several weeks later, a spacecraft appears over Mars and then lands.

Draper, sure he is being rescued, runs to the ship only to discover that it is not from the USA or even the Earth. Watching the ship, Draper suddenly sees a figure detach himself and run in his direction. The two face each other warily.

A stranded astronaut recording his audio diary within a martian cave. Wait until you see the alien. He looks like something out of per-Aztec Mexico. LOL.
A stranded astronaut recording his audio diary within a martian cave. Wait until you see the alien. He looks like something out of pre-Aztec Mexico. LOL.

Gradually, Draper allays the fears of the newcomer and they settle down for the night.

With the arrival of the newcomer – who Draper jokingly dubs Friday – his worst problem, loneliness, has gone. Slowly, over the months, Draper teaches Friday English, and together, wondering if they will ever be rescued, set out to explore the Martian terrain.

Not a movie that will leave you wondering about life. Not so much.

It’s just a silly enough pre-adolescent movie for young boys that was written int he 1960’s. But, you know what? Maybe that’s what we need right now. Maybe we need to “escape” and forget our life for a spell. To give us a break and to relax our minds somewhat.

Now, as a man, I prefer other (ahem) more adult pleasures.

Manly adult pleasures.
Manly adult pleasures.

Beer, wine and VSOP can help. But you know, if you don’t watch out it could consume you instead. So I would recommend just some lighthearted escapist shows and movies. Nothing too serious or upsetting.

Oh, and enjoy with something delicious to eat.

Newhart

If you have lived through the 1980’s then you knew all about Newhart. This show as a hoot!

The cast of the television show "Newhart".
The cast of the television show “Newhart”.

In this series, Newhart played Dick Loudon, a writer of “how-to” books who moved from New York to Norwich, Vermont to realise his dream of running a country inn. His smart, funny, and sexy wife was named Joanna (played by Mary Frann).

As with Newhart’s previous comedies, there were numerous quirky supporting characters. Tom Poston (who had been a frequent guest on the earlier show) was the inn’s unhandy handyman, George Utley, and Julia Duffy played the vain and spoiled Stephanie Vanderkellen (an heiress working as a maid at the 200-year-old Stratford Inn – Stephanie replaced her less interesting cousin, Leslie, after the first season).

Stephanie’s boyfriend, Michael Harris (Peter Scolari), was an insufferable 1980s yuppie and producer of a local TV show, Vermont Today, which Dick began hosting a few years into Newhart’s run.

Perhaps the most memorable, and certainly the most unusual, characters were three bizarre backwoodsmen, of whom only one ever spoke (until the final episode).

Larry, and his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl.
Larry, and his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl.

“I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl,” was their stock introduction. They could always be counted upon to enjoy any activity that would disgust most people.

The trio of backwoodsmen known as Larry, Darryl, and Darryl actually made their first appearance in the series’ second episode. Dick hired their “company,” Anything for a Buck, to unearth the 300-year-old body of a woman buried in the Stratford Inn’s basement. The audience’s reaction to the brothers did not go unnoticed by Newhart and co-creator Kemp, and they were one of the first additions to the regular cast when Newhart underwent a makeover after season two.

-13 fun facts about the Newhart show.

William Sanderson, who played Larry, graduated from Memphis State University with a BBA and JD, but the acting bug bit him before he sat for the bar exam. Despite this educational pedigree, Sanderson remained very much a good ol’ Memphis boy at heart. While working on Newhart he sipped Jack Daniels and read the Bible in his dressing room between takes, and he constantly chewed tobacco. He had a habit of leaving his spittle cups all over the set, to the disgust of his co-workers.

Tony Papenfuss (First Darryl) and John Voldstad (Second Darryl) are both classically trained actors who had years of stage experience on their resumes when they landed their Newhart parts. Both actors’ agents actually advised them against accepting the roles, since they were non-speaking parts.

Newhart is a classic piece of 1980's television. It described America leading up to the Bill Clinton Presidency and thus was free of all the political correctness mumbo-jumbo that followed it.
Newhart is a classic piece of 1980’s television. It described America leading up to the Bill Clinton Presidency and thus was free of all the political correctness mumbo-jumbo that followed it.

Everyone in town sold their property to a Japanese corporation, and the finale included a parody of Fiddler on the Roof, and ended with Newhart waking up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette and explaining that he’d had a very strange dream (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the famous 1986-87 season of Dallas.)

Best Episode - Season 6 
Episode 121: “Take Me To Your Loudon” (Aired: 10/26/87)
It's Halloween, and the townspeople believe the town is about to be invaded by aliens.

A beloved excursion, many fans cite this installment as their very favorite of the entire series. They’re also likely to use it in evidence of the show’s supposed bent towards the surreal.

You see, this story doesn’t totally forsake logic — it just asks that we find it in the broad, heightened, and not all together relatable depictions of some of the characters. That‘s the reason that it’s hard to believe and thus seems “surreal.” 

It's Halloween and the Stratford is having a costume party, Michael has the station run the film "War Of The Worlds (1953)" on TV and the townsfolk believe they are being invaded by aliens from outer space.

A hilariously funny episode, in the top five best in the series. The laughs are non stop, George is the Cowardly Lion from "Wizard Of Oz', Dick the Tin Man, Joanna is Vampira, Michael dresses as a Canadian Mountie and Stephanie (naturally) is a princess. Harley shows up and tells about the invasion when he sees the movie on TV. Michael sees a chance for the same kind of panic Orson Welles caused with his radio version of "War Of The Worlds". Dick tries to be the voice of reason to the wacky towns people but they just accuse HIM of being from outer space! And Larry, Darryl and Darryl show up with their funniest introduction ever.

I think it represents the era most accurately, and, as such, is the most valuable.

And now, while we are at it, for another classic 1980’s movie…

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

Ferris Bueller takes a day off from school.
Ferris Bueller takes a day off from school.

Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) is a born con artist. When he’s not talking a mile a minute to his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck), he’s stepping aside, facing the camera and addressing the audience.

In his dedication to the joy of loafing, Ferris convinces his parents he’s ill, the student body starts raising money to save his life with a kidney transplant, and the dean of students thinks all sorts of people are dying.

But Ferris isn’t dying. He’s just lying, and it’s the ninth time in the same semester.

He convinces Cameron to ‘borrow’ his father’s irreplaceable 1961 red Ferrari, and then swing by school to kidnap Sloane.

A large part of the film (directed by John Hughes) is then devoted to elaborate schemes designed to keep Ferris and his pals out of school: Answering machines are fixed, a fake body run by strings attached to a doorknob rolls around in Ferris’s bed to fool concerned and nosy parents, a sickbed message is recorded through a loudspeaker to answer the doorbell and deter inquisitive truant officers.

While the kids are bulldozing their way into an expensive restaurant, catching a ball game at Wrigley Field, and staging their own musical production number from Grease in the middle of a mysterious parade the principal – determined to catch Ferris red-handed – slinks around like a CIA agent on secret manoeuvres.
While the kids are bulldozing their way into an expensive restaurant, catching a ball game at Wrigley Field, and staging their own musical production number from Grease in the middle of a mysterious parade the principal – determined to catch Ferris red-handed – slinks around like a CIA agent on secret manoeuvres.

Hold the phone . . . if it’s a holiday, with floats and marching bands and 10,000 extras, why does anyone need to play hooky from school in the first place?

Brat-packer Charlie Sheen appears in a side-splitting cameo role as a drugged-to-the-eyeballs boy that spiteful sister Jeannie encounters at a police station. To get the necessary spaced-out effect, full method acting would have been a step too far, but Sheen did keep himself awake for 48 hours before the scene was shot. LOL.

If life is far too serious for you now with the COVID-19 pandemic a raging, perhaps some good old-fashioned Ferris Bueller wisdom might be in order.

I do believe that we all need to take a lesson from Ferris Bueller in today's day and age.
I do believe that we all need to take a lesson from Ferris Bueller in today’s day and age.

Oh, and while I am on a 1980’s bender…

Weird Science (1985)

Weird Science (1985)
Weird Science (1985)

Triumphant geeks have always been a common theme of writer/director John Hughes, but that triumph was never achieved as raucously as it was in 1985’s Weird Science – a screenplay which took the high school movie guru just two days to write.

Among the feats of sex-starved no-hope geek boys Gary (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith): vanquishing a psycho older brother, gaining popularity and acceptance at school, and best of all, getting the girls – both the computer-generated kind and the real kind.

With a little Frankenstein-type mission on the brain, Gary convinces Wyatt to sit down at his souped-up computer and go to work on an interactive onscreen lady friend.

But with the lightning brewing outside, the bras atop their heads and the Barbie doll hooked up to the hardware, it’s inevitable the boys take things a little too far . . .

Lisa, the Frankenstein creation of two 1980's nerds.
Lisa, the Frankenstein creation of two 1980’s nerds.

Behold Lisa (Kelly LeBrock). Named after the computer (the Apple Lisa) on which she was designed, she is beautiful, brilliant and capable of some treacherous hocus-pocus. She also does their washing, cleaning and cooking – feminists will loathe this film.

Lisa fast becomes the boys’ well-needed mentor of cool. She brings them to a steamy nightclub, where they’re instant hits with the regulars; she hosts a whopper of a party at Wyatt’s house, where her duties include freezing Wyatt’s absurd grandparents and dealing with the gang of killer mutants who crash the festivities.

Weird Science (1985)
Weird Science (1985)

But most importantly, she teaches Wyatt and Gary how to stand up for themselves – which in this case, means facing off against the gun-toting, wedgie-bestowing older brother Chet (Bill Paxton), and, as if that’s not bad enough, a beastly biker type (played by Vernon Wells, reprising his Mad Max 2 role).

It’s enough to say that in the end, everyone gets what they deserve.

With that geek-dream-come-true premise and a quirky, catchy theme song from Oingo Boingo, Weird Science quickly became a favorite of the timid and nerdy. It is all 1980’s and it WILL carry your back to another time and place.

I know, I know…

Too many 1980’s flicks.

You all probably thought that I was going to give you REAL GENIUS (1985), and indeed I was. Nothing quite says the 1980’s more than this movie. For some reason it just carries me back… way back to that time. The music. The fashion. The “feeling”. Man, if you want to escape, nothing is better…

Ahhh Heck.

Real Genius (1985)

Female geniuses have bowl-cuts, no social boundaries and never sleep…

You can tell how dated this movie is. Instead of having a creme frappichino latte at a coffeehouse, the gang go ahead and drinks some beer and hamburgers together. man! Don't you just love it?
You can tell how dated this movie is. Instead of having a creme frappichino latte at a coffeehouse, the gang goes ahead and drinks some beer and hamburgers together. man! Don’t you just love it?

As a child of the 80s, I have a soft spot in my heart for creatively-executed movies from this period. At their worst, 80s movies become dated more quickly than films from nearly any other period in film history. At their best, 80s movies reflect the cultural undertones of an exciting time where humor and optimism were rampant in films despite the specter of cold war, the advent of AIDS and a rocky economy.

Oh, and did you know, dorm room closets are a fine place to put an entrance to a secret lair…

Terrific nostalgia trip down 80s memory lane - loved it! 
by heisenberg8313 November 2005

Had very fond memories of this film as a kid in the 80s. Still holds up even today. DVD widescreen format shows off how well directed this movie is. Val Kilmer is terrific as the genius slacker hero. The whole cast gel well together, and the dialogue is very sharp and well-written (reminded me of TV show Scrubs in places). Had me laughing out loud in many places - rare for a modern version like American Pie. Lots of tasty 80s musical montages scattered throughout. Something really likable and positive about this movie, leaves you feeling really good at the end. Highly recommended - really hasn't dated at all. An enjoyable trip down 80s memory lane!

Real Genius takes the happy, go-lucky optimism of the 80s and superimposes it on the grim topics of military research, cold war espionage and assassination. The movie is set in a west-coast college (see Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford) and makes full use of the hyper-intelligent, eccentric dialog you might expect in elite California academia.

Yup.

And eating hamburgers gives you very large breasts!

The sound track from Thomas Newman (Less than Zero, American Beauty and many others) is technically complex and involving and fits the movie perfectly.

In this classic 1980's movie, our heroes get to play with lasers and other cool things like popcorn.
In this classic 1980’s movie, our heroes get to play with lasers and other cool things like popcorn.

At times, the movie suffers from the usual poor depiction of science (see lame computer applications and some bad blue screen work on aircraft) and unbelievable scenarios (see water slide in lecture hall and ice sledding in dormitory). But we all know that top secret military computers use 6-character passwords…

Despite these forgivable breaches, the Neal Israel’s unique dialog is truly brilliant, the situational comedy is eccentric, and the humor is uplifting.

Getting even is a moral imperative!

Val Kilmer is outstanding in his portrayal of Chris Knight and I lament his departure from this odd and extremely intelligent form of comedy (See Top Secret) – Though Kilmer has been involved with “better” movies since, I don’t think he has ever been more genuinely entertaining.

One of the all time best 80's college movies 
by thirdi  3 November 2001

Val Kilmer is hilarious as a college genius on par with Einstein, but is more interested in partying and chasing girls. A new arrival to the campus, Mitch, is a brilliant 15 year-old whom Val takes under his wing and tries to get to loosen up and have a good time.

There are probably some important themes and ideas to analyze within this movie, but for me it's just an old-school personal favorite that I've seen about 100 times. Great 80's music soundtrack and funny performances. William Atherton is perfect as the self-important, snobby professor, and another highlight is Robert Prescott, who plays his butt-kissing, nerdy assistant "Kent".

A movie that asks the question, isn't life experience just as important for education, as classrooms and books? A very funny, fine film that is up there with "Animal House" in my opinion.
The bag guys get "their's". I love it. It's a good feel-good escapist movie that take you back to pre-Clinton America.
The bad guys get “their’s”. I love it. It’s a good feel-good escapist movie that take you back to pre-Clinton America.

I think this movie is a must-watch for anyone who enjoys science, comedy and the 80s genre, or for anyone who is planning on attending a technology school on the West coast. This movie may not depict reality, but it communicates a hopeful spirit we could all use more of in today’s world of harsh reality. Besides, Any problem can be solved with a catchy 80’s pop song and a montage.

Oh, and don’t forget, Jesus wants you to stop playing with yourself.


Ah, what can I say. The 1980’s was “the shit”. It’s great escapist clap-trap as it occurred at a time that predated all the political correctness nonsense of the Bill Clinton years, and the Military Empire building of the Bush years. It’s just a nice time capsule that will take you back to a time when people were not so easily offended and when people were ok with just being ok.

With that being said, I am going to offer up just one more 1980’s movie. This movie is a tad bit more obscure. Indeed finding it is near impossible, but OMG is it awesome.

Water (1985)

Water is a funny satire about West Indies-style politics and the decline of British colonialism. It is also a kind of raw smack in the face of commercialism and the media.
Water is a funny satire about West Indies-style politics and the decline of British colonialism. It is also a kind of raw smack in the face of commercialism and the media.

British comedy-writing legends Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais wrote this funny satire about West Indies-style politics and the decline of British colonialism in the Thatcher Era. Elements of the story were also inspired by the 1982 Falklands conflict (when Argentina invaded the British overseas territory in the south-west Atlantic Ocean).

An extremely funny film 
sxct16 June 2004

I am quite disappointed with the average for this film. I found it to be one of the funniest films I have ever seen. 

The cast is superb and the script, although not one of the best written, is filled with humor that was was made even better by the acting. It was filmed on the island of St. Lucia. 

It's a story of a company drilling for oil and accidentally discovers mineral water, a substance that is even more valuable than oil. But it is important to keep it a secret. Jimmie Walker, who I don't particularly like, plays the part of a radio dj and does it wonderfully. Michael Caine and Brenda Vaccaro are fabulous as is everyone else. 

Please give this film a chance. I think it might be one of those little surprises that come along every once in a while.

Set on a fictional Caribbean island (Cascara) owned by Britain but largely left to its own devices, the story centers around the discovery of a lucrative resource – the natural mineral water of the title – and the reaction of people on the island and other nations.

Location shooting for the fictional British Caribbean colony of Cascara took place in the real former British Caribbean colony of St. Lucia in the West Indies.

Water has a plot that is all over the place, but I have to admit the fact that the personal fights between the governor and his wife being broadcast all over the island really cracked me up.
Water has a plot that is all over the place, but I have to admit the fact that the personal fights between the governor and his wife being broadcast all over the island really cracked me up.
...of Houston Texas 
lavean on 13 December 2001

I thought this movie actually had some very funny and memorable lines...The characters are so stereotyped that they have all become caricatures...from the French Commandos on the beach who when they are breaking out their emergency rations are having the menu read to them by a Sergent who informs them that it will be "accompanied by an unpretentious St Emillion which will amuse even the most cynical palate"...the American Colonel who can't see the target for the Limbo dancers...when the guerilla mets the oil man he calls him a "Yankee capitalist imperialist...of Houston Texas", says the oil man extending his hand.

It was produced by George Harrison and has Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and a lot of other name musicians involved in the soundtrack.

It has a nice way to spend an hour and a half. 

No it has no deep hidden meaning nor will it change your life or make a social statement...but then I watch movies as a bit of escapism...this is one I sought out to own and when it comes out on DVD will buy it in that format as well.

The stand-out cast features Brits Leonard Rossiter, Billy Connolly, Maureen Lipman and Fulton Mackay and Americans Valerie Perrine, Fred Gwynne, Ruby Wax and Jimmie Walker.

Jimmie Walker, everyone…

Jimmie Walker plays the sole radio DJ in the sole radio station on the tiny island. He's hilarious.
Jimmie Walker plays the sole radio DJ in the sole radio station on the tiny island. He’s hilarious.

The charity rock band featured at the end of the movie – The Singing Rebels – features George Harrison (whose Handmade Films produced the movie), Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and Jon Lord (of Deep Purple).

OK.

Maybe you don’t have the attention span for a movie. So let’s look at a nice 1980’s television show. Something that will take you to a land far, far away.

Maybe a little too far…

Let’s look at the classic…

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

A small-town housewife struggles to cope with the increasingly bizarre and violent events unfolding around her. It’s a way that the media was preparing America for the Bill Clinton years.

Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.

Set in fictional Fernwood, Ohio, this deliriously demented serial focused on the beleaguered heroine Mary Hartman, an average American housewife. In the first season, Mary suffered the travails of mass murder, adultery, venereal disease, homosexuality, religious cults, and UFO sightings, before she finally succumbed to a nervous breakdown on a syndicated talk show.

Then, things start to get crazy…

Wow, what a bizarre show 
7 July 2000 | by A-Ron-2 

This was one of those seminal moments in television history, because the 70s seemed to be more open to experimentation and strangeness than certainly the 80s and definitely the 90s.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was a show that was unclassifiable by any standard of TV today. Now, I haven't seen the show in about 15 years (I watched the whole series on tape at a friend of mine's back in the mid or late 80s), but I am sure that it would be just as bizarre and wonderful today as ever.

Martin Mull was brilliant as the psychopathic wife beater, Barth Gimble. I hope that TV Land or some other such channel will pick this show up, because I would really love to see it again.

A more insightfully absurd and comically astute series has not been made. Mix the daily grind of ALL MY CHILDREN, the experimentation of MONTY PYTHON, the self-absorbed and urbane existentialism of WOODY ALLEN and the offbeat quality of BLUE VELVET and you have MARY HARTMAN MARY HARTMAN.

Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.

I grew to love Mary Hartman’s kitchen (and other Fernwood locales) as if they were an extension of my own town and home. Too bad the show couldn’t have lasted longer than it did.

Candide in a consumer society 
melvelvit-1 written on 31 May 2008

A sharply satirical soap opera about a modern-day "Candide" (Louise Lasser) and the dysfunctional pre-fab Americana she inhabits. 

In the opening episodes (beginning 1/76), Mary has to contend with her impotent husband, indifferent daughter, pervert grandpa, hot-to-trot sister, and the massacre of a local family (along with their 2 goats and 8 chickens) but it seems the waxy yellow build-up on her kitchen floor subliminally affected the mass media-influenced Mary more than all the domestic drama combined. 

The absence of a canned laugh track can make viewers feel they're either losing their mind or experiencing a darkly comedic, penetrating pop-culture parody. Possibly both. I loved it then and I love it now!

For a brief period of time, somewhere around 9-11, I was fortunate enough to have viewed, for the first time in 20 years, the first episodes in which Mary is held captive by the guy who “killed the whole Lombardy family, two goats and six chickens”. And thus, from the vantage point of my 40s, I was finally able to really “get it.

Mary Hartman is one of the great emblems of the distress of the mid-20th century American woman. Her hair in childish pigtails while wearing those little girl dresses, Mary was an example of the overly-consumered, growth-stunted American housewife trying to function while in a semi-daze.

...The other thing that makes this tough on reruns is that Mary Hartman was so much a part of the 70's. What's hard to explain to people who weren't there, is how weird the 70's were. 

The whole country was in this very odd mood, partly giddy, partly freaked out, partly numb. 

I don't know if I can explain how Mary Hartman fit in to that, but it did and maybe not enough time has passed where it won't seem dated. 

The other thing is that the show had a whole parallel life running at the same time in the live soap opera of Louise Lasser's sudden fame. Her personal trajectory towards a nervous breakdown tracked Mary Hartman's. 

Do I need to remind everyone of her bizarre interviews in Rolling Stone, her bust for cocaine, and her appearance as the host on SNL, in which she also had a nervous breakdown. 

Years later it came out that this was not faked, that she was ready to refuse to appear on the show minutes before curtain time, and only agreed to appear once Chevy Chase convinced her that if she didn't go on, he'd go on in her place wearing a wig.

-outnaway  9 March 2009
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.

Her confrontations with adultery, contemporary feminism, and countless other social issues (often found within her own family) while trying to be the perfect little housewife and mother makes her eventual nervous breakdown more than just another crazy plot twist.

In actuality, it was an inevitable progression.

Compare her and her friends and neighbors to Carol Burnett’s Eunice and other 70s television characters like Edith Bunker and you’d have a rather fascinating college course, I think. Perhaps I need to put one together!

Remember when Loretta came over to bring Mary Jell-O with Cracker Jacks suspended in it?

So, for those of you who have a similar fondness for this groundbreaking, offbeat series and to those who have never seen it, here’s to bringing Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman back in reruns.

A demented,glorious, masterpiece 
coop-1616 February 2002

Truly one of the greatest-and least remembered -TV shows of all time.I loved this show back in the seventies. It was a rich tapestry of comic-and touching- characters, exemplified by the naive heroine, Mary Hartman,and her friends, perhaps most unforgettable of whom was would be Country Music queen,Loretta Haggers, played by the sadly underused -and brilliant-Mary Kay Place.

But then this show was rich in fine acting-Dabney Coleman, martin Mull, and Marian Mercer, among others.If the Comedy channel can rerun "soap" why cant they rerun this masterpiece?

I know that it is tough to decide.

Just go hop in the car, and go through a drive through and get a burger. Then on the way ponder which movie or television show to watch. I always find it easier to think on a full stomach. So have the burger and then settle down and choose one…

Burger King's Whopper.
Burger King’s Whopper.

Conclusion

When you are living in a stressful and uncomfortable situation, it is time to sit back, enjoy a frosty beer and disconnect. It will relax your mind and permit you to recover. Nothing is better than reliving times that pre-dated the chaotic life that Americans now live.

Pick your “poison”;

  • Sixteen Candles
  • The Andy Griffith Show (Mayberry RFD)
  • F-Troop
  • Robinson Crusoe on Mars
  • Newhart
  • Ferris Bueller’s day off
  • Weird Science
  • Real Genius
  • Water
  • Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

Pick one. Rent it, torrent it, or Netflix it.

Get some food and drink.

Take care, and enjoy life. The coronavirus will pass. America will be changed and a new “normal” will manifest. In the meantime, relax.


I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have more in my Movie Index here…

MOVIES

Articles & Links

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Some cool videos of everyday people performing heroic feats.

As most American are “sheltering in place”, and the cloud of COVID-19 is slowing evaporating from China, I think that many people are stressed, and feel uncertain about their lives. I really do not think that the $1000 gift from Trump in the $2 trillion dollar emergency bill is going to amount to anything Mostly it’s the rich bankers that are going to pocket millions of dollar. Most Americans realize this. So this results in fear and uncertainty.

It need not be that way. There was a time when America was self-reliant and self-contained. Men went about and conducted their business freely. They never had to ask permission, report their actions or pay taxes to the American government. They were on their own and self-reliant.

They were heroes.

Here are some videos of normal “everyday” people performing heroic actions. I do hope that they can inspire you to be the best that you can be.

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Boy helps old man.

An old man collapses while crossing the street. But a young boy goes forth and helps him up. This is a good story and a great lesson that we all need to take heed of. Good going son. Good going.

Video HERE.

Woman rescues children from burning car.

Here’s a woman who braves the engulfing fire that has trapped young children inside a car. Does she pause? Yes, but then she steel’s herself and brave the heat, the fire and the smoke. She does what ever she needs to. She must go and save the baby. It’s her sole purpose and focus.

Video HERE.

Thief stopped by shopping cart.

Purse snatcher tries to make a get away. Unlucky for him that there are others in the parking lot who are aware and ready to deal with this miscreant properly. Nothing like a spare shopping cart to take care of problems.

Firemen rescue trapped family.

Firemen are all heroes. Here we see some Chinese firemen rescuing a family that is trapped inside a burning building. This is why they exist. This is their job, however that does not mean that they are not heroes. They are and their actions are heroic.

Rescue of a boy in the street.

This is a head-slap event. What the Hell is this kid thinking? He’s going to run out in the middle of an 11-lane super highway? Lordy! You need to keep your eyes on the children at all times, that’s for certain.

Emergency CPR.

An old man collapses on the sidewalk. A stranger sees this and immediately starts emergency CPR on him. It’s all captured on film. This is what heroes do. They don’t get on CNN and talk about how great they are. They live quiet lives and help others when the need and time comes.

Climb up to rescue the children.

Bravery is what we see in hindsight. True heroes react immediately without thinking. Here we have a man crawling on his 6th floor porch to get to the apartment above to rescue some screaming children.

Prevent an accident.

Kids do the strangest things. Like perhaps riding out into a busy traffic road. What are you going to do? Allow him to get squished and turn into jelly, or are you going to do something about it, eh?

Catch a falling child.

OK. So you are walking down a sidewalk and you hear frantic screaming up above you. You look up and it seems like someone is outside the building scrambling, but that they might fall. What are you going to do? Maybe call 9-11? Maybe pretend nothing is going on?

I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have others that are similar to it in my Rufus Index here…

Hero Stories

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Awesome Movies – Galaxy Quest (1999)

Any geek can proclaim “Live Long and Prosper.” An even lesser geek will  require you to “Use the force.” A truly hardened, experienced, and  involved geek however will tell you “Never give up, and never  surrender.” 

-doblu

If you love Star Trek, then you would love and appreciate Galaxy Quest. You see, there is a reason why this movie (which is NOT set in the Star Trek universe) is considered one of the best Star Trek movies.

It’s a comedy, ai, that is certain. But it appeals and has appeal to anyone of us who has fallen in love with the characters, the narrative and the tropes of the Star Trek universe.

Galaxy Quest is special. It really is. Galaxy Quest has everyone in the theater laughing. It cut across ages and backgrounds with a very simple premise…

…you are what you believe yourself to be.

You are  what you believe yourself to be.
You are what you believe yourself to be.

Which is, after all, the exact same premise that the movie “Bronco Billy” was based upon.

'Galaxy  Quest' couldn't be better. It's not a mockumentary, it's not a Star Trek  parody. It's pure comedy based on the Star Trek legend with excellent actors and absolutely brilliant production.

The visuals are  magnificent. You would expect nothing but mediocre stuff for a space  comedy, but this is not the case with 'Galaxy Quest'. These are the best  effects for a space movie, since 'Starship Troopers'!

The story  is also very original and interesting. Not only jokes on thin air, but a  great story nonetheless. The triumphant ending is beautiful, it  elevates you! In fact, it would easily compete with the some of the best Star Trek stories of all time.                                   
              
- atzimo           

This movie is not only about the television series, but it is also about the fans.

Indeed, science fiction conventions can be a lot of fun, and a real hoot. If you ever have the chance to check one out, please do so.

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

At shows you will meet all kind of folk.

You will meet the seemingly useless get-a-lifers, the just-for-fun guys, and the not-so-rare I’m-only-in-it-for-the profit gang.

Never give up, never surrender!

You will meet actors who loved the whole shebang, actors who loathed it, and actors who didn’t have a clue what was going on.

Fandom is a very big place, with room for all sorts of people.

This film  was amazing.  I saw the trailers and swore I'd never watch it. A couple  of friends overruled this after watching it in the theaters, and I'm  glad they did.

Not only is this film an amusing spoof of Science  Fiction Fen-dom, it's a brilliant action-adventure/science-fiction film  in its own right.  The only other film I can think of that is a  righteous satirical look, yet a splendid example of the genre, is the  Fifth Element.

Galaxy Quest Has It All. Beautiful women in scanty  clothing.  Love interests.  Computers.  Space ships.  Ugly and evil  monsters.  Blasters. Arcane martial arts.  Dynamite catch phrases.  And  best of all, the very population that is satirized is the group that  Saves The Day.

The dialogue is brilliant - you'll find yourself  quoting from this film regularly.  The acting is marvelous.  Tim Allen  doing William Shatner doing a Heroic Spaceship Captain is worth the  rental all by itself, not to mention Alan Rickman's memorably dry  performance as the I-Am-Not-My-Strange-Looking-Alien character.

The  first thing I thought upon leaving the theater was that I had to see  this film again.  The first thing I thought upon seeing it again was  that I would have to own this movie.  Check it out - you won't be sorry.                                       
              
- tygirrl           
Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

And Galaxy Quest got it right–the conventions, the costumes, the geeks, the groupies, even the mocking “mundanes” who attend cons looking for kicks. It took notice of all the science fiction cliches, acknowledged them, and then twisted them to its own comedic purposes.

Galaxy Quest captured not only the silliness of fandom, but the inspiration of it.

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

In the end, the demoralized and cynical actors found strength and meaning in the same characters which stereotyped them.

The fans of SF, are what makes this movie classic!
The fans of SF, are what makes this movie classic!

The geeks saved the day. The good guys won. The bad guys provided entertainment to masses of fans. Things blew up. And isn’t that what science fiction is all about?

This is what I would call a PERFECT film. 

As a long-time Star Trek fan I  have waited for a movie which had that total feelgood factor, not a spoof, but a humorous and heartfelt homage.  

A film which shows fans in a good light, in a way that, of course, we can laugh at ourselves, but in an unoffensive and entertaining manner. 

I never thought it would arrive, and so in GALAXY QUEST, I found one of the best films in cinema  history. 

Everything is spot on. The story is fantastic, and telling it  from the point of view of normal people was great.  Making them play  those stereotypes that we know and love was just the tip of the iceberg, and everyone played the parts superbly. 

The special effects speak for  themselves.  When the Protector leaves space dock...Wow.   When she goes  through the minefield...Wow!  When Tim Allen faces the biggest rock  monster since The Never Ending Story...Wow Wow WOW! 

The score is also  great, capturing the adventure of the old Star Trek shows, and the epic  scope of the story at hand. And then there's the way everything just comes together at the end into a sensational package of laughs, thrills, sometimes bitingly moving scenes, and a genuine feeling of warmth inside. 

Go and see this, buy the DVD, whatever.  Just see it. Never give  up, and never surrender! 

- selfy_nagus 

The entire cast was excellent, especially Tim Allen and Alan Rickman doing their best Shatner and Nimoy impersonations. Special credit must go to the four actors who played the naive aliens. Their wide-eyed innocence reminded me of the quality that drew me, and draws children of all ages into the world of science fiction.

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

This movie didn’t rely on vulgarities or overt violence. It didn’t need to resort to meanness or cruel jokes, either. While it poked fun at science fiction and its fans, it never resorted to the kind of mockery you see in other films.

A beautifully-crafted film, Galaxy Quest is a love letter to sf fans of  all sorts everywhere. The characters are perfectly drawn, the story is  well-written, and there's the right amount of goshwow to make the whole  thing work perfectly. And it's funny as hell in all the right spots.

Tim Allen is amazing. He's got his Shatneroid character down perfectly.  He's a vain, pompous clown who finds out what a laughingstock he's  become, and when he gets a chance to redeem himself, he pounces on it.

Sigourney  Weaver is a delight. Sexy without trying, her character Gwen DeMarco is  as far from Ripley as you can get. Alan Rickman is flawless as  Alexander Dane, massively talented Shakespearean actor who's been stuck in this Spockish role for years because he played it too well. Darryl Mitchell is great as Tommy "Laredo" Webber, and Sam Rockwell is  hilarious as Guy, the hack actor stuck in the middle of something that scares him silly.

The two actors who really stand out are Tony  Shalhoub and Enrico Colantoni. Tony plays Fred Kwan with understated  glee, while Colantoni plays Commander Mathesar with a smiling  earnestness that makes you firmly believe everything he's saying.

The  supporting cast is incredibly talented. Robin Sachs is perfect as  Sarris, Patrick Breen essays his role as Quellek beautifully, and Missy  Pyle amazes as Laliari.

But it's still Tim Allen's movie above all else, and he makes the most of it.

A  final note: this movie wouldn't have worked nearly as well if not for  the production design work of four of the greatest artistic talents in  science fiction: Simon Bisley, Brom, Wayne Barlowe and the lengendary  Berni Wrightson. Barlowe is an expert in xenobiology, and designed the  Thermian's native form. Wrightson's quite possibly the best horror  illustrator of all time, and Sarris and his minions are his work.

My  favorite moment in the film? the point where Alan Rickman gets his  first look at the NSEA Protector II for the first time... his look of  astonishment is a joy to behold.

Like The Last Starfighter, this is a popcorn movie with a message. See it with your kids. 

- Ludwig_Meyer 

Galaxy Quest is a solid, funny movie. Go see it. Take the kids. Go see it and see it twice.

On the way to adventure!
On the way to adventure!

Some Dialogues

 Brandon (Justin Long)
→ I just wanted to tell you that I thought a lot about what you said.

Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen)
→ It's okay, now listen--

Brandon
→  But I want you to know that I'm not a complete brain case, okay? I  understand completely that it's just a TV show. I know there's no  beryllium sphere...

Jason Nesmith
→ Hold it.

Brandon
→ ...no digital conveyor, no ship...

Jason Nesmith
→ Stop for a second, stop. It's all real.

Brandon
→ Oh my God, I knew it. I knew it! I knew it! 
This movie is a true classic.
This movie is a true classic.
 Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver)
→ What is this thing? There's no useful purpose for there to be a bunch of chompy, crushy things in the middle of a hallway!

Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen)
→ Gwen —

Gwen DeMarco
→ No! I mean, we shouldn't have to do this! It makes no logical sense! Why is it here'!

Jason Nesmith
→ Because it's on the television show.

Gwen DeMarco
→ Well, forget it! I'm not doing it! This episode was BADLY WRITTEN! 
[Witnessing Fred Kwan having sex with Laliari] Oh, that's not right! 

But wait! There’s a documentary…

“Never Give Up, Never Surrender,” the “Galaxy Quest” documentary, highlights the magic of the 1999 film.

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

The flick earned its “cult classic” status by putting sci-fi superfans in the role of the hero and perfectly balancing the subtleties of comedy and drama. 

The fans of SF, are what makes this movie classic!
The fans of SF, are what makes this movie classic!

“Never Surrender” features intimate interviews with almost the entire cast of the original film (excluding, of course and sadly, Alan Rickman, who died in 2016), including actors Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Justin Long and Sam Rockwell. The film also interviews writers, the film’s director and other behind-the-scenes people who made the film possible. “Never Surrender” even features cameos from sci-fi legends like “Star Trek” actor Wil Wheaton and “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof.

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

This documentary explains why, despite an initially disappointing turnout at the box office, “Quest” has become one of the most beloved sci-fi movies of all time. It was even dubbed “the best ‘Star Trek’ movie” by Wheaton in the documentary, despite being, well, not a “Star Trek” movie.

“Galaxy Quest” isn’t unique because it’s a sci-fi parody. Other films, like “Spaceballs,” spoofed “Star Wars” and other sci-fi classics, but there has always been something unique about “Quest.”

The "Captain" of Galaxy Quest.
The “Captain” of Galaxy Quest.

As the documentary explores, the film isn’t a campy or “cheesy” spoof movie; it isn’t strictly a comedy (though I believe anyone would be hard-pressed to watch it without cracking up at least once).

There are some movies that are better watched while you are not eating.  'Galaxy Quest' fits into this category as I made the mistake of watching  it while having dinner and I almost choked several times. This is one  of the funniest smart comedies I have seen. The film is brilliantly  executed and it brilliantly spoofs the science-fiction-spaceship genre.  But the film isn't mere silliness as it does have a soul and tells an  action adventure story of 5 has-been stars of a famous Star-Trek-type TV  show that got cancelled two decades ago. The screenplay is great and  the dialogues are witty fun. There is no crude humour or  over-the-top-out-of-context joke.

The special effects wonderfully  add to the spoofiness. The monsters and aliens are a 'treat' to watch.  An intelligent comedy isn't easy to make as the maker has to pay close  attention to line delivery, characterization, situation, comic timing  and direction. 'Galaxy Quests' fulfills all criteria from start to end.  Tim Allen as the pompous hero, Alan Rickman as the whiny has-been  'Shakespearean'-actor-forced-to-play-an-android, Tony Shalhoub as the  funny Fred, Sam Rockwell as the terrified-of-being-the-first-one-to-die  Guy, Enrico Colantoni as the gullible Mathezar and last but not least,  the incredibly sexy Sigourney Weaver as the tired-of-playing-dumb-blonde  Gwen (the total opposite of her famous Ripley character) play their  parts.

I'm glad that I bought this film on impulse yesterday as  most American spoofs I have seen, like the abysmal Scary Movies (puke)  or the silly Screams (yawn) and the ridiculous Naked Guns (okay this  last one was kind of funny) hardly have anything more to offer than  silliness. Actually I was given the choice between this and 'Naked Gun  33 and a Half' and i'm glad I made the right decision. 'Galaxy Quest'  definitely surpasses these films by several miles as I wouldn't even  mind calling it one of the best comedies. 

- Chrysanthepop 
Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

The documentary is pretty good.

It’s a movie with real heart. While you might giggle as a panicked, rambling Rockwell says, “My character isn’t important enough for a last name, because I’m gonna die 5 minutes in,” while descending to an alien planet, you may soon have tears in your eyes as Quellek the Thermian dies in the arms of Alexander Dane, or Dr. Lazarus (Rickman).

"It's  this little movie. It's not a part of a franchise. It was just made by  pure heart alone by a lot of people, and because of that heart, I think,  it had a massive, lasting impact," 

-Roth Cornet, a producer on the  documentary.
Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

And the documentary similarly has a few tender, teary-eyed moments. For example, with the mention of Rickman, who passed before a proposed “Galaxy Quest” series on Amazon could be realized, it is hard to not feel sentimental as the cast, one by one, describes what it was like to work with him and how badly they all miss him. “If you love Alan Rickman, that’s the moment for me, when we talk about Alan passing. I got choked up,” Cornet said

The documentary has a few surprising, heartbreaking and hilarious tidbits about Rickman you can look forward to. 

Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest.
Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest.

The team behind this documentary has considered it a passion project and has pushed to make it happen, Cornet said. “Something like this highlights [that] when people love something and they come together, it can really, really, really have a huge impact on their whole life, even just a little movie about a TV show. And we’re making a documentary about a movie about a TV show,” she added about the meta nature of the documentary, which dives into a movie about actors in a “Star Trek”-esque television show. 

Cornet added that the creators aimed for the documentary to be “an hour and 25 minutes of delight.” And in my humble opinion, it is just that. 

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.
 By Blake French: 

As I walked out of the theater in which I  screened "Galaxy Quest," I thought how surprised I was to have enjoyed  what seemed as a cheesy family spoof. But the film turned to be an  action adventure with some really hilarious moments. I loved the film.  It has qualities of a successful science fiction drama, but also  contains a variety of comical characters that had the whole audience  overwhelmed in laughter. "Galaxy Quest" is right up there with "Toy  Story" in merit, it entertains adults and children alike, standing out  as one of the year's best family films. 

The story details the  adventures of a canceled television science fiction fantasy cast,  similar in content to "Star Trek." "Galaxy Quest" is the name of the  program. In their years, the stars, including Jason Nesmith, Gwen  DeMarco, Fred Kwan, Alexander Dane, and Tommy Webber, were some of the  biggest, most popular names in TV. Now, their means of making a living  is signing fans' autographs for a price and being cast in amateur  presentations.  
Never give up. Never Surrender.
There is very detailed character development  here. The characters are wonderfully cast and brilliantly portrayed.  Unfortunately, most family films don't contain the patience for such  necessary material. We bond with these characters; they are likable,  funny, energetic and independent.  These individuals are the key of  success to this kind of movie.

 The real plot begins when strange people come to Jason beging for him to  save their existence from a powerful evil force who wishes to wipe them  out of the universe forever. Naturally, at first our television star is  skeptical, but when the strange people turn out to be humble aliens and  transport Jason to their spaceship, he realizes this is something  serious. The aliens begin to explain that they think he and his "Galaxy  Quest" team are the only people in the universe who can save their race.  He rushes to the members of his old cast and tries to justify his  experience. He says that there are extraterrestrial creatures who  require the help of their "Galaxy Quest" characters. None of his friends  believe him, but once again give in when they find themselves  transported off earth, onto the creature's spaceship.  Of course, the  aliens don't realize that their hopeful heroes are simply out of work  actors, but who needs to tell them? So it is up to Commander Peter  Quincy Taggart, Lt. Tawny Madison, Tech Sergeant Chen, Dr. Lazarus of  Tev'Meck, and Lt. Laredo to save the day for our innocent and haunted  alien life forms. 

"Galaxy Quest" is a slapstick comedy that is  smart, and does not go over the edge with its humorous material. It  leaves room for several other essential elements such as happiness,  romance, honesty, excitement, and contains a dramatic purpose. The story  is very original, and contains a firm theme of action in its premise.  It also has lots of outstanding visual effects and sight gags that are  effective and interesting to watch.  
The Galaxy Quest team discovers that things are going really bad.
The Galaxy Quest team discovers that things are going really bad.

A Television Show?

Paramount is currently putting together a television version of the 1999 Dreamworks film!

Hopefully, this show will be even better than the show in the film. Or not, and that will totally be its appeal! Whatever happens, today is an awesome day for sci-fi comedy fans everywhere. Paramount, we salute you.

Galaxy Quest.
Never Give up. Never Surrender!

Deleted scenes included on the DVD:

  • Tech Sargeant Chen helps an engineering crew solve a difficult problem without offering any insightful help whatsoever.
  • Alexander is presented his living quarters: an empty room save a bed of spikes and a daunting toilet.
  • An alternate version of a scene in which its revealed Jason and Gwen were old flames.
  • Guy overreacts when his foot gets caught in a rock, and Jason does his “rugged pose”.
  • Alexander uses an acting method to figure out the rock monster’s “motivation”.
  • Gwen rips open her uniform to seduce two enemy soldiers, before crushing them with a door. (Part of this scene was featured in the trailer.)
  • General Sarris revives himself and attacks the crew while crash landing.
The Galaxy Quest team.
The Galaxy Quest team.

Remember…

Never give up and never surrender!

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

I do hope that you appreciated and enjoyed this little post. I have more in my Movie Index, here…

MOVIES

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

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Awesome Movies – The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension

The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension (1984) is a film written by Earl Mac Rauch and directed by W.D. Richter that is one part B-Movie, one part Action Adventure, one part comedy, and one part political satire.

-All the Tropes 

Are you finding yourself taking life too seriously? It’s easy enough to do. I do it all the time. But, don’t worry we can remedy that. Here we look at a decidedly silly science fiction classic that should be in everyone’s home library. It’s titled “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension” and it’s funky strange enough to pull you out of your funk and set you down for some delicious movie time.

Why is this movie important at this time in our lives?

I personally wouldn't invest a lot of emotional energy in the hope that  things will go back to normal. "Normal" is gone forever. Even before the  virus the only consistent pattern we've been seeing is things getting  stranger and stranger. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. 

- Caitlin Johnstone  

The Characters

It’s so strange that you’ve got to love it.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension
  • Buckaroo Banzai – Peter Weller! Brilliant particle physicist and neurosurgeon, he is also a martial arts master and plays in a band.
  • Lord John Whorfin – John Lithgow! Evil leader of the “Red Lectroids.” Buckaroo vaporizes him.
  • Penny Priddy – Ellen Barkin! The lost twin sister of Buckaroo’s deceased wife.
  • New Jersey – Jeff Goldblum! A cowboy at heart, this neurosurgeon partner of Buckaroo is joining The Hong Kong Cavaliers.
  • John Bigboote (Bigbooty! Hehehehe!) – Christopher Lloyd! Red Lectroid from planet 10, shot by Lord Whorfin for talking back.
  • Rawhide – Clancy Brown! (He played Kurgan in “Highlander.”) Member of The Hong Kong Cavaliers, poisoned by a Red Lectroid.
  • Perfect Tommy and Reno – Two of The Hong Kong Cavaliers. Tommy has some serious bleached hair.
  • John Parker – Black Lectroid, sent to help Buckaroo save Earth before his people are forced to destroy it.
  • John O’Conner – Vincent Schiavelli! (He’s been in lots of stuff, the teacher in “Better Off Dead” and the subway ghost in “Ghost.”) A Red Lectroid. Vaporized.

The Plot

There’s a plot here somewhere. It’s just a tad confused.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension

This movie has more famous people in it than most blockbuster films! Look at them all! Just look at them!

What we have here my friends is a seriously out in left field piece of work.

Buckaroo Banzai and his partners have just perfected the “Oscillation Overthruster” and it allows them to travel into the 8th dimension.

Why did we miss all the ones between? I dunno!

How can a 3rd dimension being interact on the 8th? I dunno!

Lord Whorfin is trapped on Earth with a select group of followers, he wants to steal the overthruster and free all the Red Lectroids from exile in the 8th dimension.

Then they will return to their home on the 10th planet and defeat the Black Lectroids!

Black Lectroids are the good aliens by the way, they’re also all Jamaican oddly enough.

Need a romance in here somewhere so Buckaroo runs into Penny while performing at a club, she’s the lost twin sister of the woman he loved. (She died, we don’t really know how.)

Well, the Black Lectroids can’t let Lord Whorfin escape Earth, they are fully prepared to precipitate a nuclear war if necessary.

They do have the courtesy to shock (literally) Buckaroo so he can see the alien’s true forms.

With his elite band of six shooting scientists, The Hong Kong Cavaliers, Dr. Banzai is able to defeat Whorfin and save Earth.

Do you get the idea?

What more do you need?

Okay, how about Christopher Lloyd running around and everyone calling him “John Bigbooty?” Or Jeff Goldblume as New Jersey, decked out like a cowboy – he even has black and white spotted luggage.

Gateway 2000 luggage!

Watch the film two or three times, the plot is there…

…somewhere.

Things I Learned From This Movie

Yup. I did learn a thing or two.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension
  • Neurosurgeons shouldn’t tug on things they don’t recognize.
  • Rocket powered pickup trucks don’t look right.
  • The 8th dimension looks a good deal like what you might see through an electron microscope.
  • New Brunswick, Maine is a tough town.
  • Aliens with bird like ships should stay well clear of Earth during duck season. Especially you, yeah you, darn Romulans.
  • Alien Lectroids have nads.
  • Hologram viewing glasses are made out of bubble wrap.
  • Girls: Never try to get intimate with some guy carrying a electric charge.
  • Bacteria can affect people via television.
  • Good aliens appear to hail from Jamaica.
  • Four star generals should not use the phrase, “I’m barely holding my fudge.”
  • Alien thermal pods carry parachutes.

Stuff to watch for;

If yer gonna watch it, take the time to notice these selected highlights…

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension
  • 7 mins – This is some serious high tech stuff!
  • 10 mins – Buckaroo is driving through a mountain?
  • 13 mins – John Lithgow is applying electric current to his tongue!
  • 23 mins – If Peter Weller was bawling out a song to me I’d do the same thing.
  • 32 mins – Somebody shut Penny up, damn blonde…
  • 48 mins – That little asian guy looks funny riding a Harley.
  • 50 mins – Awful lot of folks named John.
  • 53 mins – What the heck did the alien kill him with? Spit?
  • 60 mins – Yeah, why is there a watermelon there?
  • 78 mins – These guards don’t notice a double decker bus?
  • 85 mins – Now that is a mad looking slug, um thing.

Some Pictures.

Check out these screen caps.

 When it was released in 1984, W.D. Richter’s (Late for Dinner)   incomparably droll comedy was misunderstood on every level:  diluted  by editors, wrongly promoted as a straight sci-fi flick,  trashed by  many critics, and scorned by the public. Only a  scruffy band of  cultists have kept the film alive over the  years, but given the higher  ’90s profile of Buckaroo costars  Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, and John Lithgow (previewing his  3rd Rock From the Sun demented-alien shtick 12 years ahead of  schedule), it may at last be worthy of a mainstream audience. Or  vice versa.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Kicking off with an expository title crawl that apes Star Wars and is, if anything, even more incomprehensible, Buckaroo  plays  like chapter 27 of a Saturday-matinee serial, and too bad for   you if you missed the first 26. All you need to know is that  Buckaroo  (Peter Weller, exuding Zen coolth) is a world-famous   physicist/neurosurgeon/rock star who leads his Hong Kong  Cavaliers to  overthrow the Red Lectroids from Planet 10 while at  the same time  wooing his ex-wife’s long-lost identical twin  (Barkin). That’s skipping  the Rasta aliens, a mysterious  watermelon, and the bit where we find  out Orson Welles’ 1938  ”The War of the Worlds” broadcast actually  wasn’t a hoax. 

-EW

Oh, it’s so very 1980’s.

Brain surgeon, rock musician, adventurer Buckaroo  Banzai is a modern renaissance man and has made scientific history. He  perfected the Oscillation Overthruster, which allows him to travel  through solid matter by using the eighth dimension. Along with his  crime-fighting team, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, he must stop evil alien  invaders from the eighth dimension who are planning to conquer our  dimension. He is helped by Penny Pretty, the long-lost twin sister of  his late wife, and some good extra-dimensional beings who look and talk  like they are from Jamaica.
                                                      
Greg Bole <bole@life.bio.sunysb.edu>                                           

Conclusion

Have you looked around lately? Don’t you think that the world is taking itself a little too serious? Eh?


I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have others in my Movie Index. Here…

MOVIES

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
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COVID-19 coronavirus videos collected by 1MAR20 – 5

Here’s a bunch of videos that I collected during the (so far) six week long quarantine that everyone in China experienced. The videos are a selection of virus related subjects but generally relate to how China handled the biological weapons attack, and how society adapted to it. As of this writing, things have stabilized and people and companies are cautious and careful in their actions and movements.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Video 1 – New technology helps locate sick people.

Xi Peng has made a call out to all of China to help fight this deadly and lethal COVID-19 virus. The results have been astounding. From people running inside and handing wads of cash to the police (I have about a zillion videos on this), to people buying masks out of their “own pocket” and giving them away, to making food for all the workers… everyone is involved. This COVID-19 has really pulled the Chinese nation together. While before it was hyper-patriotic, today it is on a completely different level.

Here’s one of the latest innovations from the Shenzhen factories and R&D development centers. It’s already in mass production and the “word on the street” is that they will be handing these out to all of the police agencies all over China. Check it out.

Video 2 – America just doesn’t get it…

Nope, America just does not get it. The illness is a biological weapon. It is designed to be stealthy and hide within people and shed when they feel fine and normal.

So what you want to do is avoid crowds.

If you are trying to stock up for an emergency or SHTF event, you do not wait until it happens. You prepare years in advance. That is why they are called “preppers”.

Look at these fools. Do you see any of them wearing a mask? What about gloves? How many do you think are going to disinfect their clothing, wash their hands, or sanitize their car keys?

If the COVID-19 hits America, it will be like shooting fish in a barrel.

America is not anywhere as prepared, organized or run by talented and experienced leadership like China is. It just isn’t.

Video 3 – The new technology.

The new technology of the thermal imaging headsets are now in production and available. You can see them on the streets along with the flying drones and robots that are making sure that everyone is “with the program”.

America doesn’t have any of this. And won’t for years. 5G is bad for you don’t you know. It’s gonna give you brain damage, don’t you know. It’s gonna fry your brain… don’t you know…

Video 4 – Community pitches in.

China is hyper-patriotic. This is something that is unknown in the Untied States because everyone is in this propaganda bubble where everyone in China wants to move to America for “freedom” and “democracy”. Where the Chinese can’t wait to “throw away their chains” and over through the vicious tyrannical Chinese government… don’t ya know.

Here’s a common scene. The local kitchens feed the police, militia and volunteers with delicious meals. This looks to me like Guiling meifan. It’s a very delicious and spicy dish of noodles and pork.

Video 5 – Military decontamination team decontaminates the taxis.

When you are in China, most of what you will see are the civilian militia in their (either) red or orange jackets, or the hospital staff in their (either) white or blue NBC suits and masks. Most of the military presence is behind the scene. Like here…

Here is what happens before the taxis go out and about. They cycle back to their staging area for continuous decontamination by the military NBC troops.

Video 6 – Seriously sick man tries to break out of quarantine.

Yup, so you are in quarantine and you are ill and not thinking right. What you should do is call the police using the APP or the hospital and wait until they come and get you. But that’s not what this fellow does. He hops in his cart and tries to smash through the roadblock and escape on his own…

Video 7 – Xinjiang decontamination.

The Uyghur Muslims are on board with the program and are participating in the decontamination of their communities, their cities and their people. Here we have them working and participating side by side with the Chinese military crews working to decontaminate the communities in Xinjiang.

You would think that if the American narrative is correct, that the Chinese wants to exterminate the Uyghur Muslims that they would just simply let the illness run it’s course, right?

Conclusion

After about this bunch of videos I’m going to give it a rest for a spell. As you can clearly see, China is organized and working together to fight this terrible biological weapon. While it has put a dent in the Chinese economy, it is recovering.

Compare that to the levels of panic and ineptitude in the United States. It’s where “it’s every man for himself” and no one is trusting the government. Lord help the people in America. They have no idea what a shit-storm this biological weapon could end up being.


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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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COVID-19 coronavirus videos collected by 1MAR20 – 4

Here’s a bunch of videos that I collected during the (so far) six week long quarantine that everyone in China experienced. The videos are a selection of virus related subjects but generally relate to how China handled the biological weapons attack, and how society adapted to it. As of this writing, things have stabilized and people and companies are cautious and careful in their actions and movements.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Video 1 – Airport Screening

While there are all sort of roadblocks and check points in China at this time, there are multiple stations at airports. This is what it looks like.

One thing, notice the lines… yeah.

They are not absurdly long like they are int he United States. When I left the USA, I had to wait in a line for three hours while TSA processed me. In China it is professional, quick and of short duration.

Video 2 – What it was like when China went into DEFCON ONE.

When China announced that the nation was under a biological weapons attack and that everyone should stay in their homes under “lock down” conditions, it was eerie. It was like a horror movie.

Suddenly sirens were blaring, messages were popping up ont he televisions, and on all the social media. Drones started to fly about telling people to stay inside and the various police, military, and militia were called up to secure roadblocks and quarantine regions of society.

It was like this…

Video 3 – Inside of one of the quarantine facilities

The Chinese government has set up large containment facilities for people who were collected at roadblocks or who have come to the hospital for treatment. These facilities are policed and maintained by hospital staff and nurses 24-7. Here is what it is like at night…

Video 4 – Hitting in Italy

This COVID-19 broke out of China and has mutated to attack other races aside from Asian. It is active in Iran, Korea (both North and South) and Italy. Here is a news-woman on Italian television reporting the news before it was publicly known that the coronavirus exploded in Italy.

I do hope that this poor girl is going to be ok.

Video 5 – Quarantine in a hotel

Not all quarantines are held inside retrofitted stadiums and public schools. Hospitals have also been converted to quarantine stations in the smaller towns and communities. Here’s one where everyone is outside the door waiting for the thrice daily medical checkups and supplies.

Video 6 – Locked inside your home

If you are ordered to be quarantined within your home, special precautions are taken. Here we see that a police official marks the door with a notice that people inside are possibly infected and the at the entire home is under quarantine. Then they put on a alarm, where any removal or movement will trigger an alert. Finally, everything is connected via WeChat and QR code so that the quarantined people have instant access to the police and hospital if they need anything or are having an emergency.

Video 7 – A reminder that this is not the flu.

To this day, even now in March, the American media is still proclaiming that the flu is far worse. Donald Trump is calling the COVID-19 a “hoax” and has put off the responsibilities for dealing it to his vice President Pence. Such is the American bubble of ignorance.

I think what is happening is that American media is a propaganda arm of the “deep state”, and now even the American leadership believes the lies and twisted narrative. It’s a dangerous situation.

Meanwhile, how in God’s Green Earth can you possible believe that the Flu is anywhere near as bad as this? You never see people collapsing on the street from the flu. Never.

There are more videos to explore…

Continued-graphic-arrow

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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COVID-19 coronavirus videos collected by 1MAR20 – 3

Here’s a bunch of videos that I collected during the (so far) six week long quarantine that everyone in China experienced. The videos are a selection of virus related subjects but generally relate to how China handled the biological weapons attack, and how society adapted to it. As of this writing, things have stabilized and people and companies are cautious and careful in their actions and movements.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Western media about China: 

Xi Jinping is not the president but the "paramount leader" of China. Chinese media don't bring news because they're the "mouthpiece" of the Party  

China doesn't fire officials, it "purges" them 

China doesn't requisition private hospitals during a health emergency by passing laws, it "seizes" them 

Chinese leaders don't strengthen laws, they "concentrate power" 

China doesn't give out loans, they "trap" countries in debt. 

China doesn't punish corrupt officials, they "net" them 

Chinese media doesn't report news, it reports "propaganda" 

China doesn't revise counting methodologies, it "under-reports" cases 

Chinese companies don't innovate, they "steal IP" 

Chinese people are not patriotic, they're "brainwashed" 

Chinese provinces don't win PISA tests, they "selectively nominate the best schools".  

-Maitreya Bhakal on Twitter @MaitreyaBhakal Feb 13. 2020 

Video 1 – Virus strikes a motorcycle rider.

The thing is that this virus comes with a one-two punch. It is light and you seem to get over this minor cold, and then it goes into remission. It borrows deep. Then out of the blue, while you are feeling just fine and normal, it will suddenly strike you. It will be sudden and you can be doing anything. From walking, to riding a motorcycle to driving a car.

Once the virus hit, there was an increase in vehicular accidents on the highways and roads. Some of them seemed strange. Like the woman who was just pulling out of the driveway and crashed into the wall unconscious. Or the truck driver that ran over the car ahead of him, or the delivery truck that ran through a red light and crashed into the trees. Or, the truck that drove clear off the die of a tall bridge. These stories are horrifying.

Like this motorcycle rider…

Video 2 – What it is like when you are tested as positive at a road block.

My brother asked me what it was like if you went through a road-block and you were tested positive for the illness. Well, it’s like this. They just cannot test for the illness, but they can test to see if you are having any symptoms of an illness, and if you are, they will sequester you and pull you aside and take you into to quarantine. Like this…

Video 3 – When it strikes it is sudden and swift.

WHen the second phase of the illness kits, it’s a Knock-out punch and it is sudden. This video says it all. It is frightening and alarming.

 I keep hearing that this isn’t as bad as all the hype makes it look.

 I would like to remind the people saying this that this particular virus was CUSTOMIZED IN A LABORATORY.

 Who knows what it will mutate into now that is out in the world FOREVER? 

-Busted Knuckles

I just cannot grapple in my mind how anyone can possibly say that the flu is worse than this. Obviously they are back-seat drivers who are just paper-pushers living within their own sweet bubble. Well, you all had best wake up. The reality can get to be pretty harsh. I’ll tell you what.

Video 4 – Medical staff collapsing from the KO punch when the illness strikes

I’ve presented many such videos of hospital workers collapsing during this emergency. Sometimes it due to exhaustion, but more often than not, they contract the COVID-19 illness and succumb to it. It’s a very sad and tragic situation, indeed.

Sadly, many hospitals are experiencing this event and watching their staff succumb to this frightening illness; this evil horror.

Video 5 – Remote temperature and vitals check on quarantine housing.

The Chinese have been very proactive in using drones to check on the health of the people under quarantine. As can be easily seen in this video.

Video 6 – Collecting some infected people that refuse to stay in quarantine.

here we have a family of people that are infected. They know that they are infected. So they were put under house quarantine, and they broke quarantine. Thus they became a risk to the community. So the police came to seize them an put them into more secure quarantine facilities.

Video 7 – Road block

This is what a road block looks like on a highway off-ramp. It is pretty much the same all over China.

These roadblocks are covered in other posts as they are both interesting and come in all sorts of sizes and shapes.

Video 8 – Going back to work.

Now that most of the Chinese factories have reopened, new procedures are in place. The factory, as a closed eco-system must maintain the strictest health guidelines for safety and control of this serious COVID-19 virus. Here is a video that pretty much shows what it is like throughout China today…

Video 9 – Some closeups of the Chinese decontamination vehicles.

Here’s a video that shows a decontamination vehicle close up. It gives you a great idea of what it is like and it’s design. These vehicles are handed out to the local communities but they are military vehicles. The Chinese have a complete army of them, and they are now in all the top tier cities.

Unlike most military vehicles, they are not painted green or grey. They are used during public DEFCON ONE emergencies so they are treated as part of the hospital units. So they are painted white like the ambulances are.

Conclusion

This is a very unique time in this world. Yes, not just for China but for the world. This event is unheard of, or at least the modern incarnation of it is. It’s a horror movie right out of “12 monkeys” where an evil man tries to kill a huge swath of the global population by releasing a virus on Christmas eve. Funny how this hit stride during CNY eve.

I have hundreds of videos to post, and I will get to them as time permits. In the mean time please be safe.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you would like to check out the full index of the Trump Trade War activities, you can go here…

Trump Trade War

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
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  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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COVID-19 coronavirus videos collected by 1MAR20 – 1

Here’s a bunch of videos that I collected during the (so far) six week long quarantine that everyone in China experienced. The videos are a selection of virus related subjects but generally relate to how China handled the biological weapons attack, and how society adapted to it. As of this writing, things have stabilized and people and companies are cautious and careful in their actions and movements.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Video 1 – Worker gets struck by the Virus

We start this post with a reminder why the COVID-19 virus is so concerning. It has a “one-two punch”. When it first hits, the effects are very mild. Then later, the KO punch hits.

You catch it, and then it incubates for around two weeks. On the third week it starts shedding the virus to everyone around you. If you touch something, it will stay on that surface for up-to twelve hours.

Then, sometime around the fourth week, you will start to not feel well. You will have a slight fever, and a mild sore throat.

You will have this for about a week and then it will go away.

But…

It hasn’t gone away. It’s digging in deep. It’s infecting your vital organs. It’s burying in deep.

Then from two to four weeks later… it erupts.

Many people just pass out, while others go into shock and spasms.

Here we have a person experiencing the “knock out punch”.

Video 2 – Asshole spreads the COVID-19 infection intentionally.

China has an enormous population. It is four times the size of the population of the USA. In fact, there are more Chinese that speak English than there are Americans.

Chew on that for a while.

Anyways, there’s assholes everywhere. Here we have an asshole with the virus trying to give it to everyone in the apartment building.

Obviously she’s got something wrong with her.

It is precisely because of people like her that China has enacted such draconian containment measures.

Video 3 – Westerner joins the local militia.

In China during this period there are numerous levels of participation in handling this crisis. Since China went DEFCON ONE the military are all involved, as were all the military reservists. Police, Fire and Hospital services at all levels worked around the clock. Local community militia were called up and recruited residents to help the.

In this video we have a non-Chinese as part of the militia and is out setting people up for some of he free screening centers that went up everywhere. Unlike the USA, you don’t need to pay money to get tested.

It’s not a for-profit model.

Video 4 – People are dying from this illness.

"That happened to us just like throwing from happy festival to a resident evil film in 24 hours!"

-Rui Meng Wang

This video puts into words something that is entirely missing in the American media at all levels. People are dying. Families are being hurt.

This is not just something you do for geo-political advantage. This is serious business, and has serious ramifications.

Video 5 – The KO punch hits.

This video below best shows how this virus works and why it is so dangerous. For when the second phase of it hits you, it is sudden and you just collapse right then and there. This is true whether you are standing, walking, riding a bicycle, or driving a truck…

Video 6 – Not everyone wants to cooperate.

Some people are fearful. They fear the government. They fear the police. They fear the hospitals. And when they are often confronted with that fear, they react like a wild animal.

They flee.

And it is up to the police to corral them and secure them so that they don’t infect the rest of the community.

Video 7 – Decontamination in process.

The clothing used by the fire frighting crew differs from the hospital crew. Aside from being colorful, they are full spectrum NBC suits. Here we have them undergoing a decontamination procedure.

Under this DEFCON ONE emergency, everyone is playing a role and doing their part in it.

Conclusion

This virus is a very serious illness. No wonder people consider it a biological weapon. It is very important that we take this virus very seriously and do not be lax in our habits.

When I see pictures of Americans, and videos of Americans stocking up on supplies to “ride out” the virus, I am shocked. So here they are… a silent virus that hides in your body before it attacks, and what do all the Americans do?

They go out in public in the midst of enormous crowds of people and do so without wearing a mask.

That is the height of insanity.

Maybe it’s because of the near relentless attacks on China and the narrative that flu is far more serious. Perhaps it is because Donald Trump called this virus a hoax. Or maybe it’s just that Americans are truly that stupid.

Who knows?

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you would like to check out the full index of the Trump Trade War activities, you can go here…

Trump Trade War

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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COVID-19 Coronavirus related videos within China. (Continued)

Here’s a bunch more videos taken during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in China during the 2020 CNY holiday and going into February of that year. These videos are very interesting. Please check them out. They all tend to be short, but since there are so many… around 20… they might take some time to load.

So…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Keep reloading as necessary to collect the videos. If you are watching on a computer put this in a separate tab and allow it to load at it’s own speed. Depending where you live it might take up to an half hour, though most people shouldn’t have to wait nearly so long.

Sorry about this.

Video 1 – Breaking Quarantine

China is an enormous nation. There are all kinds of people in it. No matter how serious the emergency, there will be that 1% of Jack-Offs that think that the rules do not apply to them and they can do as they please. When this happens, the police need to step in and isolate the malcontents. Because all it takes is but one person and he can infect three hundred others in a matter of hours, and then suddenly the entire city starts to collapse.

Here we have a Jack-ass trying to break through a quarantine check point. These road-blocks are everywhere and you must obey them. Some are set up by local communities. Some by local police. Some by military, and some by local industry. If you try to run through, you will be stopped. You will be apprehended, and you will go to prison.

Video 2 – Breaking Quarantine 2

Here’s another one. This is a checkpoint at a highway. It’s been my experience that these checkpoints are at every toll booth and at every road-side rest area. You must obey them.

They are staffed by police, traffic police and military. You do not mess around. This is a serious, and very serious illness and containment is crucial.

Video 3 – Breaking Quarantine 3

Here’s another example of a person trying to break quarantine. You can see that not only is he not obeying the check-point, but he is taking it on himself to be a one-man wrecking-crew and starts to tear apart the entire road-block setup.

Video 4 – Shutting down a roadblock

All things end. Now certain areas are easing up on their quarantine restrictions. Thus, it means that things are starting to return to normal in certain areas. Here we have a video of a policeman shutting down one of the quarantine roadblocks.

Video 5 – Collapse 1

Medical worker collapses or almost collapses in a hospital. This is beginning to become rather common in the various hospitals that work with this virus. It’s a very serious and lethal viral agent and every care must be taken to control it.

I have all sorts of videos about the dressing and undressing procedures in this highly lethal environment. But you know, if you accidentally touch an infected article of clothing during the undressing procedure, you too could become infected.

Video 6 – Collapse 2

Here is the inside of a bank. In the lower part of the screen we can see a person just collapsing on to the floor. This kind of collapse is rather common with this illness. When it strikes it hits you suddenly and strongly.

Video 7 – Policeman Collapse

Here’s a police man that collapses in one of the police stations. All people who are out and dealing with the public are starting to see their ranks decrease and more and more members contract the illness.

It’s horrible.

Video 8 – Street Collapse

The Western media narrative is that it only strikes the old and the feeble. It’s amazing that they still maintain this fantasy. Especially the American media. Most everyone can contact this illness, and there are patients as young as ten months and as old as 95 years getting sick and ill from it. here we have a young chick getting struck down at a gas station.

Video 9 – Discovering you have the virus and being told you must go into isolation.

So imagine what it must be like. You are not feeling well, so you have some suspicions and you go to the the hospital. They run a few tests and then discover that you have COVID-19; the coronavirus. At first you would be in a state of shock and denial. Then you might panic and flee. You do not want to spend the time in the hospital. Like this poor girl.

Video 10 – Going into Quarantine.

And this is what it is like when you are sick and told to go into Hospital Isolation. You are collected and driven to an isolation ward. Then you are assigned a room, and some gear. The rest of your belongings are sterilized or incinerated and you are held there in isolation until you get better, or off to the hospital if you get decidedly worse.

Video 11 – The coronavirus hits suddenly.

This coronavirus is hitting everyone suddenly. You are just doing your job when suddenly you feel woozy. You start to wobble, and you get tunnel vision. Then the world goes black. This is what it is like.

But not to worry. CNN and FOX says the Flu is much worse.

Video 12 – Infected trying to break out of quarantine.

In this video we have a community that is infected. Large numbers of people have been taken into the various hospitals in the surrounding region. Those that remain were not tested to be sick… two weeks ago. But might actually be sick.

Here we have a fellow trying to run the gauntlet and escape from the quarantine.

Video 13 – Arrest for not wearing a face mask.

During this DEFCON ONE emergency you cannot go outside unless you wear a mask and are scanned for a fever. No exceptions. Everyone in China knows this. Yet there are those miscreants that think that the law does not apply to them and when they are refused to board public transportation they fly into a rage and cause all sorts of turmoil.

Video 14 – Refusing to go into Quarantine.

Here’s a chick who was tested to have a fever. She wants to break out of the quarantine area and go her own way. She does not want to go into isolation. But the illness is so very serious that she doe not have that option. So she is taken down and hauled off to the isolation ward.

Video 15 – The virus hits with a sudden ferocity.

This is what it is like. You are having a dinner. You drank a coke and ate some pork and suddenly you are not feeling well. While some people just get tunnel vision and black out, others just go into seizures and all sorts of bad things start to happen. Like this poor fellow….

Video 16 – Virus wipes out a hospital staff member.

Many hospital personnel are ending up catching the virus. It’s a terrible thing and they are working long hours and tirelessly to fight this conflagration. But they can get sick, and when you start to see one of the nurses or doctors starting to wobble and lose control, you need to help them out quickly. This is a serious and lethal virus.

Video 17 – This is what it is like all over China.

This is how you go onto the public buses. This is how you enter your apartment building. This is how you enter your place of employment. This is how you enter public buildings such as police stations, hospitals or transportation hubs.

Everyone must wear a mask. There are no exceptions.

Everyone must take a temperature reading, and spray their clothing with disinfectant solution. Everyone must abide to the rules or you will get arrested. There is zero tolerance for non-compliance. PERIOD.

Video 18 – Pretty Girl

This is why it is absolutely critical to stay in isolation and not get this virus. You are getting ready to go out with your friends and suddenly you do not feel well. You have a seizure, black out. You regain composure and then have another seizure. Than you black out again. It repeats over and over…

But don’t worry. The flu is far worse, don’t you know. That’s what CNN and FOX all are saying. You can go on Drudge and What-Finger-News and it’s all the same MONOLITHIC narrative. Funny that! So believe them.

Or see the reality with your own two eyes…

Video 19 – Building multiple hospitals.

When I check out the comments on social media there’s a bunch of detractors complaining about China-this and China-that. Oh, Xi Peng didn’t do enough. Oh, the Chinese stole a biological weapon and is trying to kill their own people. All sorts of just bullshit nonsense. All of which is supremely irritating.

Donald Trump would not be able to build an emergency hospital in ten day, let alone three of them So shut the flying fuck up.

Check out this, the third hospital being built in Wuhan to help handle this emergency.

Conclusion

This is a serious illness. All evidence points of a biological warfare event. At least that is exactly how the Chinese government is treating it. While the American main-steam and (alt) media are all treating it as not as serious as the flu. Well, you you ever see the flu do what you see on these videos, then go ahead and make up your own post explaining to the world that this is a big ol’ “nothing burger”.

More to follow. Please be safe.

I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have other posts that you might be interested in that can be found in my Trump Trade Wars index, here…

Trump Trade War

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Noteworthy Movies – Barbarella or when WTF becomes a historical norm.

 Great Tyrant: "You're very pretty pretty pretty." 
 Barbarella: "My name isn't Pretty Pretty. It's Barbarella."   

I first watched this movie as a young boy in the local movie theater. I was a fan of science fiction, but this movie confounded the daylights out of me. I did appreciate all the nudity. That was cool. But I just could not follow the plot. The spaceships did not look like what I expected, nor did the roles that the characters played. I watched the movie and then went home and forgot about it.

Time moved on.

I refused to have any association with Jane Fonda. She turned me off with her “radical” anti-American stances, and her adoption of progressive Marxism. I did not agree with her. I did not appreciate her. I did not like her, and I wanted nothing to do with her.

Time passed.

Barbarella in the orgasimatron.
Barbarella in the orgasimatron.

I got older. I started to travel the world. I started to see how different the United States was, and how out of step it was with the rest of the world, it seemed to me that the United States was in a very small bubble and that everyone inside was convinced that the lands outside that bubble were horrible, terrible places. And those people had no idea just how manipulated and fooled they were. Or, how dangerously manipulated they had become.

So I accepted this reality.

Not my problem. Nothing that goes on in the USA is my problem. I just wanted to chill out. Drink my wine. Eat delicious food and play with pretty girls.

Then… the Coronavirus hit.

China treated it as a biological weapons attack and went into complete national lock-down. And I, I was stuck inside my house with nothing better to do than to watch movies and drink beer. (I had a stack of beer that I was meaning to get around to anyways…)

And as such, I started to watch old movies from the 1960’s. For often these movies are not behind a paywall. (Most aren’t. The James Bond 007 movies, for some strange reason, were.) Anyways, the movies from the 1960’s and the 1970’s were awesome to watch. They are cheap entertainment and great escapist enjoyment.

And so I rediscovered Barbarella.

I chose movies instead of televisions shows because I don’t know if I could handle a few seasons of Flipper, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Hazel, My Favorite Martian or Mr. Ed.

LOL.

Anyways, Barbarella was awesome…

Barbarella is a movie that is as campy as camp can be and in spite of the low budget sets, crude execution of plot and overtly sexual dialogue, it holds your attention. This film is based on a French comic book character and it exposes you to the wonderful world of the bizarre, 1960s era, fantasy film culture... and that's why I love it. 

-Amazon

And what a glorious escape to the 1960’s it is!

Barbarella has no trigger discipline.
Barbarella has no trigger discipline. Barbarella (1968) – Jane Fonda

The Characters:

  • Barbarella – Jane Fonda! Ted Turner’s little communist is sort of an intergalactic special agent.
  • Duran Duran – HEHEHE! (Sorry, his name gives me the giggles, and according to Leonard Maltin that is where the band got it from.) Mad scientist intent on conquering the universe, generally out to cause hate and discontent. Eaten by the Magmous.
  • Pygar – Last of the ornithothropes, he’s an Angel, literally.
  • The Great Tyrant – Attractive and evil ruler of Lythion, she likes the word “pretty.”
  • Dildano – Inept revolutionary who wishes to overthrow the evil empire, zapped into the fourth dimension.
  • Professor Ping – Kind scientist who assists the unfortunates banished into the labyrinth, also zapped.
  • Marcan – Barbarian guy in charge of herding wild children (Now that’s daycare.), he saves Barbarella from the evil kiddies and introduces her to some old fashioned loving…
  • Alfie – The ship’s computer.
  • The Magmous – A presence which surrounds the city and feeds off evil, it appears to be a huge lava lamp.
Barbarella  is a movie that is as campy as camp can be and in spite of the low  budget sets, crude execution of plot and overtly sexual dialogue, it  holds your attention. This film is based on a French comic book  character and it exposes you to the wonderful world of the bizarre,  1960s era, fantasy film culture... and that's why I love it. It's a  "gem-in-the-rough" waiting to be discovered by a new generation of  fantasy film lovers. Enjoy ! 

-Mark
Barbarella exploring her new world.
Barbarella exploring her new world.

The Plot:

Ho Chi Minh’s favorite exercise queen stars in this amazing piece of science fiction, oh yes, Jane Fonda.

What really amazes me is the movie’s PG rating, considering the fact that Barbarella’s antigravity breasts go bouncing through more than a few scenes sans clothing. (Plus there’s another woman hanging from leather straps later on.)

Don’t try and give me all that, “It was the 60’s.” crap either.

Our heroine is dispatched to prevent a new weapon from destroying the harmony of the known universe.

This  is a teenage Jane Fonda with very little (often no) clothing on. The  plot is silly as are some of the scenes but I was a teen when I first  saw this movie and a film featuring an often naked Jane Fonda in many  very explicit sexual encounters still arouses my now 67 year old senses.  A a serious Sci-Fi flic it is not, but it is a snapshot of 1960's  culture presented in an often hilarious manner. 

-Old Wet Cat

If one thing was threatening harmony it is this movie’s groovy soundtrack, I was torturing the cat by humming snippets to it. (Kitty actually fled the room.)

After her spaceship crashes things really get weird, she encounters wild children, leather robots, Pygar, the Great Tyrant, and carnivorous parakeets.

When Barbarella finally locates Duran Duran (Hehe! Sorry…) the scientist is a madman, seeking to conquer the universe and give her a fatal orgasm.

Yes, that’s right… death by organism.

I didn’t stutter my friends, he straps the woman into a strange “pleasure organ/piano” thing and plays a tune which should kill her with ecstasy.

It doesn’t work, though.

This  is a really amazingly funny movie, at once a good sci fi, sex  goddess-creating classic, it is also deliciously quirky.  I mean, can  you picture a spacecraft whose interior is fur-lined?

Fonda is  Barbarella, a kind of futuristic bimbo - in part the product of a highly  developed permissive society - who is on a mission to, well, you have  to see it to believe it.  Somehow, Vadim really pulls it all off, though  I suppose it is best to see this in an altered state of consciousness,  60s-style.  Really, tho, it is hard to stop laughing at this, while  taking in an engaging story and unforgettable imagery.  Really, this is a  classic.

Interestingly, while living in France, I bought a bunch  of Barbarella paperbacks out of curiosity and discovered to my delight  that the movie is actually very faithful to the original comic - even  the dialogue follows the crytptic utterances of the characters closely.

Fonda  is perfectly cast.  She is stunningly beautiful in youth, at the apex  of her stardom in many ways, and you can tell she is having fun with  this role.  But the acting of the others is also very good and fun, from  DuranDuran to the sexualised angel in his nest.

Recommended warmly.  This is weirdness that works extremely well. 

-Robert J Crawford

Barbarella shorts out the machine and it bursts into flames.

Soon after this the Great Tyrant sets free the Magmous and all heck breaks loose.

The end.

If that wasn’t warning enough I’m telling you now: This movie is all over the place and insanely groovy.

It  is somewhat difficult to describe Barbarella. It is bizarre, sexy,  funny, and a definite 1960s sci-fi classic. 

It is not a movie for  children (no way is this a PG- it was originally rated M for mature  audiences). 

There is nudity and sexuality interlaced throughout the  movie, and I must say that Jane Fonda was definitely in her prime when  she starred in this (eye candy supreme). 

The bizarre scenes (including  the metal-toothed biting dolls) could give kids (and adults) nightmares.  

There are some cute little blue bunnies hopping around though. The  special effects are extremely funny, but that adds to the total feeling  of the movie. In other words, do not view this film with a serious mind.  

The cast includes some very good actors (including Ugo Tognazzi, John  Phillip Law, Marcel Marceau, David Hemmings, and Milo O'Shea) who must  have had some fun making this movie. And, without a doubt, Jane Fonda  was the perfect choice to play the lead role. 

-D.Dalton

After the shock of watching Barbarella strip out of her spacesuit in zero gravity (She’s obviously laying on plate glass with the camera above her.), I noticed the red shag carpet covering the spaceship’s interior top to bottom.

For a state of the art spacecraft her ship had some issues, like the acid trip view screen and a disturbing habit of colliding with solid objects, like a planet.

Let’s not forget this is the future and all the messy pleasure associated with that disgusting habit of sexual intercourse has been overcome…

… now you just take a pill and hold hands…

…until Barbarella gets her pipes cleaned by Marcan, then she does agree “Wider is…” I mean, “The old ways are better.”

Barbarella  strapped to the orgasimistron.
Barbarella strapped to the orgasimistron.
I find "Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy" to be a psychedelic, costume,  music, metal teeth doll, Jane Fonda and shag fun fest.  

This 1968 film  was made after the French comic books Barbarella by Jean Claude Forest  which the movie in my opinion does a good job of giving you an almost  comic book feel.  

Most will likely find the special effects to be of low  quality, especially if you prefer the special effects of today.  I  however, find them to give all the more comic book feel of the time and  enjoy the psychedelic appearance of many of them.  

The film was directed  by Roger Vadim who was also married to Jane Fonda at the time.  In  short if you like 60's "B" movies with the features I describe in the  first sentence this film might be for you.  If however, you don't like  60,s "B" movies and the items I mention in the first sentence you will  likely disagree with my five star rating, so be warned. 

-The Tally Ho

Things I Learned From This Movie: 

  • Orange shag carpet is the ultimate in spaceship decor.
  • Stingrays are used as draft horses on other worlds.
  • Sadistic children scream like a flock of seagulls.
  • In the future sexual gratification is achieved by taking a pill and holding hands. (My thoughts exactly…)
  • Orchids are not very filling.
  • Angels make nests.
  • Public suicide chambers need to be clearly marked.
  • Parakeets are carnivorous.
  • Having some woman smoke me in a bong is the stuff nightmares are made of.
  • The world will be swallowed by an evil lava lamp monster.
The movie is very 1960's and includes all those psychedelic elements.
The movie is very 1960’s and includes all those psychedelic elements.

Stuff To Watch For: 

  • 5 mins – RANDOM GRATUITOUS BREAST SHOT! (Wait, this is PG?)
  • 17 mins – Earth’s number one agent was just captured by two eight year old girls.
  • 19 mins – These weird kids are feeding her to mechanical dolls.
  • 43 mins – It’s a flying sundae of death!
  • 47 mins – Lady, how exactly do you plan on hiding his wings?
  • 64 mins – Should have paid the electric bill Dil-dan-o…
  • 72 mins – Now that’s a password.
  • 76 mins – RANDOM GRATUITOUS BREAST SHOT!
  • 77 mins – Is there a guy in that bong?
  • 79 mins – Duran Duran (Hehe!) has her in this weird piano/organ thing, it’s sucking her clothes off… …and, um, doing other things.
Barbarella with the other chick that undresses for the movie. I forget what her role was, but I did admire her knockers.
Barbarella with the other chick that undresses for the movie. I forget what her role was, but I did admire her knockers.

Conclusion

I refused to watch this movie for years.

It’s an emotional thing that I had retained since Jane Fonda bad-mouthed the USA back during the Vietnam war. While I do not like what she did, I can now see that the USA somehow got way, way off course and became a war-mongering empire that uses people like myself as “cannon fodder”.

Anyways, I by chance, watched this movie and was astounded by the immersion in 1960’s culture and absolute weirdness. I am frankly astounded by it. It’s pure, and it’s sublime.

It’s a great movie to watch. Especially while drinking beer and eating a delicious sandwich. Don’t you know. Have your wife make a Jack-Reuben up for you, you will not regret it.

A fine home-made Jack-Reuben sandwich. Goes great with chips (especially Wise potato chips - perfectly salted) and a nice (must be icy cold) beer.
A fine home-made Jack-Reuben sandwich. Goes great with chips (especially Wise potato chips – perfectly salted) and a nice (must be icy cold) beer.

All glory to the Great Tyrant!


Barbarella with the flying man...oh, what's his name.
Barbarella with the flying man…oh, what’s his name.

I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have others in my movie index. You can reach it here…

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Unusual Movies – Greenslime. When Hollywood made movies without social justice agendas.

I am old enough to remember going to the movie theater to watch this flick. It was on a Saturday afternoon, and my folks gave me a dollar to watch it. I was ten years old. Back in those days we watched movies for fun, or barring that, to stay out of our parent’s hair and let them have some time alone.

Here’s some fun “elevator pitches” for science fiction movies. 

How about  having astronauts land on an asteroid that’s on a collision course with  earth? Wait, it gets better— to save the world they have to use  drilling equipment to bore holes in the rocky surface to plant nuclear  bombs inside and blow the renegade asteroid into space dust. 

Not working  for you? 

Okay, try this one on. How about having an alien life form that looks harmless in its infant state brought aboard a space ship. Then it breaks loose, transforming into a monstrous killing machine that slaughters the crew one by one!  

- Horror News

Lately, most of the larger (high budget) movies out of Hollywood are nothing more that venues to ram-rod social justice “improvements” down our collective throats. This policy certainly started long ago. Maybe back during the Clinton administration, but it most certainly became heated up to a degree of red-hot insanity during the Obama presidency.

Now we have a 007 “James Bond” flick that going to have a new transgender LGBT “woman of color” in the role of secret agent. Funny how she looks like a morph of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. Yuck!

The face of the new progressive, modern "James Bond", 007. This woman looks like someone morphed Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton together. Oh, how enlightened! How so very progressive!
The face of the new progressive, modern “James Bond”, 007. This woman looks like someone morphed Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton together. Oh, how enlightened! How so very progressive!

Anyways, let’s get back to the movie at hand; Green slime.

This is a movie perfect for the eleven year old boy inside of all of us. It’s got a cool retro 1960’s sound track. (It’s got) Cool miniatures with all sorts of detail like something out of Fireball XL-5. It’s got spacemen exploring a rogue asteroid and carrying space rifles (!). It’s got a love triangle with a handsome man with a chiseled face, and the girls all look like they came out of a 1960’s playboy magazine.

And it’s got monsters.

Lots and lots of monsters.

Right out of the gate you can feel the movie itching to get to the good  stuff– that song barely lasts a verse and a chorus before Robert Horton,  as Commander Jack Rankin, arrives at space station Gamma 3 ready  to head up a very dangerous mission– landing on a strange asteroid and  exploding it out of its collision course with Earth.  

-Trailers from Hell

What’s not to love?

I saw THE GREEN SLIME in 1968 at the Omni Center Theatre in  Atlanta Georgia with my brother and cousin and was awestruck and  terrified as only a 6-year-old boy seeing a movie called THE GREEN SLIME  in 1968 could be so I’ve always had a huge soft spot in my heart for  this film (I was lucky enough to attend a 16mm screening at Cinema  Wasteland a couple of years ago and it held up great). 

I mentioned three  things that I think make THE GREEN SLIME so enduring. 

One. The title, THE  GREEN SLIME is so perfect and unpretentious that Saturday matinee  audiences in 1968 had to know exactly what was in store and I can’t  imagine anyone feeling let down. 

Second, THE GREEN SLIME has one of the funkiest title songs in cinema history. Written by Charles Fox (who  would go on to write the themes for THE LOVE BOAT and HAPPY DAYS) and  accompanied by a frenzied drum beat and blaring electric guitars  (someone edited the song to clips of battle scenes from the film and  posted it on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKESo2ofEcw).  

THE GREEN SLIME theme is a blast and was even released as a single!  

Third, the poster is my absolute favorite from the 1960’s. The bold  colorful artwork features the emerald cretins in an action-packed outer  space battle with flying spacemen while holding a terrified Luciana  Paluzzi in a skin-tight metallic spacesuit in the foreground (an outfit  like nothing she wears in the film). 

The poster is a throwback to the  “bug-eyed monster” posters of the 1950’s and the artwork even graced the  cover of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” #57 in 1969. I have an original  THE GREEN SLIME three-sheet (40 x 80 inches) and it’s proudly displayed  in my den along with my Resin Green Slime model kit and vintage “The  Green Slime are Coming!” button.
  
- My Favorite Movies: The One About the Green Slime That I Saw at the Theater When I Was Six  
Greenslime movie poster.
Greenslime movie poster.

The Characters

The plot of THE GREEN SLIME play like a precursor (or parody) to ARMEGEDDEON and then ALIEN as a  runaway asteroid, known as Flora (!), is determined to be on a  collision course with earth. 

Rugged astronaut Jack Rankin (Robert  Horton) is ordered out of retirement to command Space Station Gamma 3,  an enormous ring-shaped outpost populated by a detachment of scientists  and military personnel, and stop Flora before it destroys our planet.  

Onboard Rankin meets his old flame Lisa (Luciana Paluzzi) and her  fiancée, Commander Vince Elliot (Richard Jaeckel), Rankin's former close  friend. 

Rankin, Elliot and the sinister Doctor Halvorsen (Ted Gunther)  land a shuttle on the asteroid, depositing explosives in an attempt to  nuke Flora. 

They succeed, but a small wad of pulsating green jelly adheres itself to Dr. Halvoson’s spacesuit and is brought back to the station unobserved. 

The crew celebrates with a groovy party featuring nurses in short skirts and high heels shimmying to 60’s electronic tunes, unaware that the oozy green stowaway is morphing into a deadly tentacled creature out to electrocute everyone in its path.  

Attempts to kill the slimy beast backfire as each drop of its blood  grows into a new monster until Gamma 3 is infested with these waddling critters collectively known as…

...The Green Slime!! 

- My Favorite Movies: The One About the Green Slime That I Saw at the Theater When I Was Six 
  • Commander Jack Rankin – This guy wouldn’t stop smiling if a rabid weasel was in his shorts; he would just grin and give you a thumbs up.
  • Commander Vince Elliott – In charge of the space station and not very happy Rankin is senior to him. A rash man who gives one Green Slime a hug. (That means he dies.)
  • Lisa Benson – Woman torn between loving Rankin and Elliott.
  • Dr. Halvorsen – Head researcher aboard the space station, he gets seriously fried.
  • General Jonathan Thompson – Gruff senior officer, his main role in this movie is sweating.
  • Captain Martin – Elliott’s right hand man, for some reason he looks natural in a white motorcycle helmet.
  • The Green Slime – Alien life form which feeds on energy and even a single drop of blood can regenerate into new creatures. Incinerated.
The Green Slime has the secret weapon every B-Movie needs-  Richard Jaeckel. 

Jaeckel was a prolific, academy award nominated actor  who bounced between supporting roles in big budget films and starring  turns in B-pictures. In fact he was nominated for a best supporting  actor Oscar for Sometimes A Great Notion (1970) right after he starred in The Green Slime.  

What made Jaeckel so special was that (like Shelly Winters) he always  delivered a class-A performance in any film, regardless of its quality.  If you watch The Green Slime carefully you’ll notice that he’s always moving, or emoting— giving the audience a little something extra.  

He never steals scenes from his co-stars, but he’s always the most  interesting thing onscreen. 

 - Horror News   
Exploring the mysterious and dangerous asteroid. Yikes!
Exploring the mysterious and dangerous asteroid. Yikes!
THE GREEN SLIME was an American/Japanese co-production shot in Tokyo with a mostly American cast (extras are Japanese or played by  American servicemen stationed in Japan) and a Japanese director giving  the film a stilted, off-the-wall international quality. 

It was shot in  English but crudely post-dubbed and the whole cast has English monikers  regardless of their ethnicity (exotic Italian beauty Luciana Paluzzi plays…..Lisa Benson!).  

Square-jawed Robert Horton (a TV actor best known for starring in WAGON  TRAIN) delivers a comically wooden lead performance as the arrogant and  condescending Rankin. 

As Elliott, Richard Jaeckel seems to have more  fun with his role and he makes a good space hero (Jaeckel stayed in  Japan to costar in the equally absurd LATITUDE ZERO before returning to  Hollywood and Oscar-nominated the next year for SOMETIMES A GREAT  NOTION). 

Luciana Paluzzi had made a splash as Bond girl Fiona Volpe in THUNDERBALL in 1965 and makes for equally sexy here. 

Director Kinji  Fukasaku went on to make cult items MESSAGE FROM SPACE in 1978 (a gonzo  STAR WARS knockoff starring Sonny Chiba that featuresmassive  sailboats in space!) and the controversial “teens- killing-teens” epic  BATTLE ROYALE in 2000. 

THE GREEN SLIME’s toy-like special effects are hardly realistic, but there are a ton of them and most are ambitious and imaginatively designed. The spaceships look like models because they are models and the fact that they are way overlit doesn’t help. 

It’s  the monsters themselves that make THE GREEN SLIME so memorable. 

Squat  and lumpy, with one giant red eye surrounded by many smaller eyes, the  rubbery, tentacle-waving gremlins were played by Japanese children in  clumsy suits. They seem more than a bit silly today but, with their  high-pitched electronic squeal, were pretty nightmarish to young  audiences in 1968.  

 - My Favorite Movies: The One About the Green Slime That I Saw at the Theater When I Was Six  

The Plot

Packing more goofy models and props than most Godzilla films comes this lovely piece of b-cinema.

I still want to know who starched Commander Rankin’s face while he was smiling, either the guy is a loon or he’s on some serious happy pills. Prozac boy gets things done though; when you have a rogue asteroid hurtling toward Earth he’s the man to call. (Not Bruce Willis, mind you.)

... a brilliantly artificial and eerily vibrant landscape which writer  Richard Harland Smith accurately described as perfectly evocative of the  Major Matt Mason space station and lunar base command toy sets of the  1960s, reproduced with full-scale reverence and a dash of pop sci-fi  psychedelia.

-Trailers from Hell  
Fighting the oozy and tentacled greenslime monsters.
Fighting the oozy and tentacled greenslime monsters.

When the astronauts land to place their bombs they find the asteroid is inhabited by strange blobs of glowing slime that are drawn to the equipment. After blasting off and barely escaping the massive explosion (Imagine an orange and brown papier mache’ ball with half a stick of dynamite inside and you’re golden.) the heroes return to Space Station Gamma 3.

Just because The Green Slime predates Alien and Armageddon  doesn’t mean it’s some visionary piece of science fiction cinema. On  the surface it’s a subpar space opera with rubber-suited monsters,  cheesy miniatures and a cast of B-movie veterans struggling to kill  aliens while keeping a straight face. 

But despite its myriad of  deficiencies The Green Slime is a charming time capsule of mid  sixties camp. 

Watching its colorful “mod” sets, plastic helmeted  astronauts and man-in-a-suit monsters is like sprawling in a bean bag  chair, sipping a can of Schlitz while feeling the luxurious shag  carpeting beneath your toes.

Scientists aboard the Gamma-3 space  station discover a massive asteroid careening towards earth. 

UN Space  Command dispatches their bravest and squarest jawed astronaut (Robert  Horton) to command the mission to destroy the deadly celestial body,  which looks like a cat toy you’d find moldering under the couch. 

But our  hero has a long simmering feud with the space station’s commander  (Richard Jaeckel) who stole his fiancée (Luciana Paluzzi) who happens to  be the space station’s resident doctor. Putting their differences aside  they land on the asteroid, drill holes, plant nukes and zip back to the  space station, barely escaping the atomic blast. 

The earth is saved, but during their escape a small bit of green slimy alien life adheres itself to an astronaut’s space suit and hitches a ride to Gamma-3. 

Due  to the station’s high oxygen (or testosterone) levels the little blob of  space spooge sprouts into a menagerie of man sized monsters shooting  electricity from their tentacles. 

Will the astronauts defeat the alien  invaders? Will the big haired sexy doctor dump her beau for her brick  headed ex fiancé? Will our two heroes finally give in to their seething  homoerotic tension and be as god made them? Its all part of The Green Slime experience. 

 - Horror News 

Unfortunately, for everyone, some of the slime was carried back on a space suit. It soon evolves into a tentacled creature! So the thing kinda looks like Sigmund the Sea Monster – he never fried anyone with several thousand volts of electricity. (Yes, I know it’s the amps that get you.) This gives a nice excuse for Elliott and Rankin to have a power struggle over who is in charge, the latter a firm believer in “shoot first ask questions later.”

This poor doctor went back into the midst of the greenslime monsters to get his papers. Bad movie Doc. Bad move.
This poor doctor went back into the midst of the greenslime monsters to get his papers. Bad movie Doc. Bad move.

Another unfortunate fact about Green Slime: even a single drop of blood will grow into a new monster. So now you have dozens of pissed off Sigmunds running around electrocuting the crew, good job Rankin.

In the end humanity is saved by crashing Gamma 3 into Earth’s atmosphere, incinerating the Green Slime. Thank goodness something stopped them besides THROWING your laser rifle. The characters often unload at point blank range without effect. Soon as they throw the weapon it goes right through the monster’s eye. Even if you don’t like watching “spacemen” wearing white 1960’s police motorcycle helmets firing “laser guns” at waddling masses of latex monsters you have to love the title song.

Fighting the deadly greenslime inside the space-station.
Fighting the deadly greenslime inside the space-station.

Things I Learned From This Movie: 

  • Asteroids look like a Gobstopper which has been under the refrigerator for ten years.
  • Movies are less interesting from a phone’s objective.
  • Pulsing green muck plays heck with interstellar golf carts.
  • People can stand up and walk around while experiencing ten G’s.
  • Never let a bitter exgirlfriend tend your wound.
  • Alien life is best represented by green soap suds.
  • Space station security guards wear white motorcycle helmets with a little space symbol on them.
  • Golf carts are not four wheel drive.
  • Laser rifles work better as spears.
  • Never hug an ungrounded Green Slime.
The most charming thing about The Green Slime is how the  filmmakers lovingly revel in its cheesiest elements. 

Those miniature  rocket ships don’t zip by in an instant— instead the producers proudly  linger on them as if they were unveiling 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968).  

The unconvincing rubber monsters aren’t confined to fleeting, shadowy  glimpses— Nope, they’re given long loving close-ups under brighter lights than a baseball game. 

I love the filmmakers for having the balls  to do that. Plus Alien never had a rocking psychedelic theme song. Why Richard Delvy’s title tune, actually entitled The Green Slime, never made it onto Lenny Kaye’s classic psychedelic music anthology Nuggets is beyond me. 

The Green Slime’s other achievement is compressing entire plot of Armageddon into the first fifteen minutes. Why couldn’t Michael Bay have done that? 

 - Horror News  
The Gamma 8 space-station.
The Gamma 8 space-station.

Stuff To Watch For: 

  • 2 mins – Nice miniatures, ahm.
  • 13 mins – For some reason this scene is making me horny.
  • 25 mins – Bad dubbing!
  • 48 mins – White motorcycle helmets?
  • 64 mins – RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A FLASHLIGHT!
  • 70 mins – The explosion took out half of the model space station, but not that flimsy door?
  • 75 mins – Elliott could use some boxing lessons.
  • 83 mins – Jack, I’m going to kick your smiling self in the testicles. What do you think of that?
Our brave hero and attractive love interest.
Our brave hero and attractive love interest.
The Green Slime was a coproduction between America’s MGM  Studios and Japan’s Toei Company LTD. But oddly for a Japanese based  production, the entire cast, right down to the extras, is entirely  western. This presented Toei with a genuine casting challenge. 

As a  result the crew of Gamma-3 are a mix of struggling American fashion  models plucked from Tokyo’s fashion runways and American sailors on  shore leave from the nearby Yokosuka Naval base. 

That’s right, those  glamorous young models were thrown together with guys who’d been stuck on an Aircraft Carrier deployed off Vietnam for six months! 

Take a good  look boys… cause this is what you’re fighting for! 

Hidden among the  space stations impossibly pretty female crew is blonde haired Linda  Miller who, a year earlier, had been the lead in the Japanese American  co-production King Kong Escapes. If you ever wake up with a hangover skip the Advil and coffee and try a double bill of The Green Slime and King Kong Escapes— your pain will be forgotten. 

- Horror News  

Conclusion

In 1968 my eight-year-old pals and I absorbed the adventure of The Green Slime and took that template to the playground, turning every jungle gym or set of monkey bars into the Gamma 3. Looking at The Green Slime  today I confess I am not seized with the urge to run over to the nearby  elementary school and start back up where I left off 46 years ago.  After all, there are plenty of reasons to put away childish things, to  bid a safe farewell to childhood and our nostalgia for it. (My bathroom  scale insists this is so.) But for me The Green Slime beautifully recreates a playground of the mind to match the one I had to leave behind.  

-Trailers from Hell

This movie will never get an Oscar award. But it’s a great movie for a rainy day, and fantastic to spend with a case of beer, some friends, a pet and loyal dog (or cat), a loved one and some potato chips. Not the flavored kind, mind you, good “old fashioned” American style salted chips… with dip. Lots and lots of dip.

This is the perfect movie to enjoy when you are stuck inside (like during a biological weapons attack like I am) or whether it is raining cats and dogs outside. Make sure that you have an ample supply of chips, dip and beer. I'll tell you what!
This is the perfect movie to enjoy when you are stuck inside (like during a biological weapons attack like I am) or whether it is raining cats and dogs outside. Make sure that you have an ample supply of chips, dip and beer. I’ll tell you what!
In closing, if you wake up craving a piece of nostalgic science fiction fromage The Green Slime  is exactly what you’re looking for. And don’t forget to sing along to  the psychedelic theme song (later covered by the Fuzztones) for a  totally immersive experience. Everybody sing… You’ll believe it when you find… Something sreamin’ ‘cross your mind… GREEN SLIME… GREEN SLIME!  

 - Horror News   

I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have other movie review in my Movie Index. Please feel free to check them out…

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First Hand Report – China during the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Pictures and narrative.

The pictures and narrative took place in the time period from say 10FEB20 to 18FEB20. This was during the height or the peak of the “Wuhan Coronavirus COVID-19” event. The Chinese government treated this event as a biological attack, and the entire nation and military went into DEFCON ONE. I, as an expat, had to make a “visa run”. It was scheduled months before, and the deadline was rapidly approaching, so I left my apartment and ventured outside to experience the world around me.

Visa Run

But first, we need to explain what a “visa run” is.

A visa run is a short trip over an international border designed to reset the visa in the originating country of the trip. Many countries which have visa-free travel or grant visas on arrival have a set amount of time that you can be in the country. 

-What is a visa run?

Most nations are not like the United States, where you enter and you are not monitored or have to check in with the police or anything like that. I live in China, and I have to make periodic checks to both the Chinese customs, and the police stations to keep them aware of what I am doing and what I am up to.

My time for a visa run was fast approaching, so I made a visa run to Macao via the HK-China-Macao bridge. It was easy for me to do. The bridge is right in front of my house. So I took the bus, and one stop later, I was at Customs and Immigration.

Life during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

Well, the life is… boring.

Everyone stays inside of their house. They have food and groceries delivered, and watch a heck of a lot of movies. It’s terribly boring. Imagine being cooped up in your house.

And that goes double for the dog.

He doesn’t understand. He’s just sitting there crossing his legs and whimpering. He keeps looking at the door, and pleading with his eyes. But, nope. Sorry dog. You can bring in an unwelcome “visitor” very easily as you vacuum up every scent you can detect.

So, anyways…

I geared up and ventured forth outside of our place.

Gearing up

Well, the first thing is really simple. Aside my my clothes, I made sure that I wore an outside windbreaker that I could wash in the washing machine when I arrived home, and had a bottle of disinfectant to spray my clothes and shoes when I got back into the house.

Of course, I wore a mask and latex disposable gloves.

All set to go to the Customs office and renew my visa.
All set to go to the Customs office and renew my visa.

Some people wear a hat and then wash it with the clothes upon returning. But I figured that I would just wash my clothes upon arrival and take a full shower. Which I did.

Getting the Bus

Since I live so close to the HK-Macao-Zhuhai bridge, I just went to the bus stop and took a bus. It’s an easy ride, and almost all buses (with the exception of #99) goes to the main station near the Customs office.

That center is a massive mall / customs / transportation hub about the size of an airport. This was my first time visiting it, and while I had seen it from the outside for years, I had never ventured inside the complex.

Bus stop near my house. Takes you straight to the Customs / Immigration center complex.
Bus stop near my house. Takes you straight to the Customs / Immigration center complex.

There wasn’t too many people out and about. Firstly because I left at nine in the morning. But, of course, the big and real reason is simply because everyone is staying inside their homes, and not venturing out unless it is an absolute emergency.

View from the bus stop. You can see Macao across the bay. The buildings to the right are in downtown Zhuhai, known as the Gongbei district. The buildings to the left are the apartments, and casinos of Macao. At night they are really rather pretty and the lights of the "Sands" is clearly visible.
View from the bus stop. You can see Macao across the bay. The buildings to the right are in downtown Zhuhai, known as the Gongbei district. The buildings to the left are the apartments, and casinos of Macao. At night they are really rather pretty and the lights of the “Sands” is clearly visible.

Here’s another view from the bus station. I like to call this road “Billionaires road” because the houses are all expensive, and large. Most people don’t need a five bedroom apartment with four bathrooms, and three rooms for maid’s quarters.

Bus station facing the apartments for the well-heeled.
Bus station facing the apartments for the well-heeled.

Here’s another view of Macao. Mostly Zhuhai has excellent weather. This day trip was no exception, with temperatures in the low 70’s and sunny. There were a few people out. One or two jogging with face masks on…

The cleaning workers who attended to the trashcans, the sweeping of the sidewalks and the tending of the bushes. All of whom wore masks, gloves and protective attire. They were also busy disinfecting everything multiple times.

China does not have a Welfare Program like the United States has. 

If you want a hand-out you need to beg for it. The government will give you "Jack Shit". However, they will offer you work. Anyone who is willing to work can get a job, a small paycheck, a roof over their heads in a small barracks and three meals a day.

The work that is provided is most the janitorial and gardening type, of which you can see in the early mornings.
Another view of Macao.
Another view of Macao.

At the Customs

Now I am not permitted to take pictures and photos inside the Customs complex, but let me tell you that it is enormous. It is, like many of the Chinese public works; new, clean, modern, and well maintained.

It is built and designed to be the transportation hub for the Zhuhai – HK – Macao nexus and it’s size belays that fact. It is part customs complex, part mall, and part airport / bus and ferry center. It’s enormous, and I was a little taken aback by the size and scope of it.

Now, do not get the wrong impression.

The regular customs office in Gongbei is also enormous. And it is full of people and much used. But I figured that I would take a spin at this new complex for two reasons…

  • One, it’s next door to where I live.
  • Two, the bus to Gongbei (#99) is not available due to the COVID-19 out-break.

So after getting lost and finding my way, I made it into the complex and it was empty!

You see, the buses from HK to Macao has stopped because of this Coronavirus event. That that represents the bulk of the passenger traffic to the customs complex.

So of the thirty entry stations, only one was open, and there were only four people in front of me. Amazing!

Inside of the Macao-HK-Zhuhai customs complex.
Inside of the Macao-HK-Zhuhai customs complex.

Things went well.

People were nice and polite as they always are. They don’t growl at you like the American customs officers in Chicago do. Nor will they pull you aside for “special screening”. They asked me what I intended to do in Macao and I told them that I was just making a visa run. They said “Oh, ok”, and let me go on my merry way.

The layout was very convenient.

The Macao customs officer was sitting right next to the Chinese customs officer. You took two steps and were processed immediately.

They didn’t have the customs robots that I was used to working with. But it really didn’t matter to me. That novelty wore off a year or so ago. I was just happy to talk to a real person. Though they did do a bio-metric scan of my face and left palm print. Which is pretty normal.

The only thing out of the ordinary were the four health check stations that I had to go through.

  • Leave China.
  • Enter Macao.
  • Leave Macao.
  • Enter China.

But these weren’t really a hassle. I just filled out a form and got my temperature measured at my forehead, my wrist and scanned by thermal body imaging.

Leaving the Complex and back into China.

Because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) almost all of the stores, the shops and the restaurants were all closed. It was just like being in a large airport early in the morning before anything opened up. It was quiet and spacious and lonely. The only things moving about were the cleaning ladies, the observation drones, and the mobile police robots.

The police robots were just these big white Segway robot thingys. They were going up and down the boulevards and hallways announcing the situation and imploring people to be extra clean, not to touch surfaces and if you feel ill to report that to an attendant immediately.

Leaving the customs complex. It was all quiet and deserted as all foot and pedestrian traffic was on hold during the emergency.
Leaving the customs complex. It was all quiet and deserted as all foot and pedestrian traffic was on hold during the emergency.

Arrival Home

All in all, the entire event took under an hour. This is perhaps a world record! Sometimes it would take me a full half a day to complete the customs system. You might get behind a tour bus and have to spend hours waiting in line. But today the event was smooth and easy.

I hopped on the bus and a few minutes later I was back home.

Leaving the bus station and heading back to the house. I took this picture crossing the street from the bus station, and you can see the enormous HK-Macao-Zhuhai bridge in the background.
Leaving the bus station and heading back to the house. I took this picture crossing the street from the bus station, and you can see the enormous HK-Macao-Zhuhai bridge in the background.

Of course, there are these big red banners telling everyone to be extra careful. To stay inside. To avoid other people and if sick tell the authorities. It warns about intentionally spreading the virus, and speaks of being a unified nation fighting the virus emergency together.

Warning banner on one of the fences. These banners are everywhere.
Warning banner on one of the fences. These banners are everywhere.

Eventually I was able to enter my complex. I passed the complex guards who opened up the gate for me, took my temperature and registered my time in their login clipboard and police APP on the phone.

Of course, my apartment complex consists of various buildings and each building requires an electronic FOB or pass-code to unlock the doors. On the doors are the government notices about the emergency and a quick QR code to immediately contact the police for help and assistance.

Front door to my building.
Front door to my building. Note the coronavirus notice proudly displayed on the doors.

Registering with Police

But wait!

I’m not done.

You see, I still must tell the police that I exited China, and returned. I do this for every visa run. So I needed to take a hop over to the local police office and register into my database.

Grab a bus to the police station.
Grab a bus to the police station. So I went to the bus station and grabbed a bus. The police station is only a few stops away, and so I grabbed a bus and rode it to the nearby police station.

There’s only a few people on the bus.

When the bus arrived, a second employee came down and measured my forehead temperature. He made sure that I wore a mask. If I did not wear a mask, I would not be permitted onto the bus.

I also wore latex gloves. About half of the people wore gloves. Most were those very flimsy PE gloves that you use when you are eating messy foods like sloppy joes, or fried chicken. But I, have a supply of gloves, from some of my chemical businesses. So I am well equipped in that arena.

About three years ago, all the buses in Zhuhai were replaced with electric buses. They have been running without problem now for these last three years. They are really quiet and if you are not careful, they will sneak up on you and you might miss you bus.

I know, it’s happened to me more than once.

They normally play music, soft Chinese music either Chinese pop or Chinese traditional music, but the buses were quiet. No audio on any of the buses, and the few people on the buses were quiet. They all sat apart from each other and were afraid to touch anything.

Quiet bus ride, with quiet passengers. Riding on a quiet street. Most people were either inside, working remotely to their offices, or getting things fired up int he factories. Very few restaurants were open.
Quiet bus ride, with quiet passengers. Riding on a quiet street. Most people were either inside, working remotely to their offices, or getting things fired up int he factories. Very few restaurants were open.

The television on the buses normally shows videos related to public safety and local news. Here the videos were all about the safety of Chinese citizens and steps that you must take to survive this emergency, and to contribute and participate in the health and well-being of the country.

Public announcement on the bus video monitors.
Public announcement on the bus video monitors.

Arrival at the police station wasn’t a big deal. They were getting back from their lunch break and lunch nap. One officer came over and updated my records. I’m in the system, so he just updated the information and I was free to go. Maybe took me two minutes.

Then I went and walked a little bit. To stretch my legs and maybe grab a bite. I heard that both McDonalds and KFC remained open through this emergency, and I wanted to see if I could get myself a burger, fries and a coffee.

I could have taken a bike, they are everywhere. But I just felt like walking.

Walking down the street in Zhuhai.
Walking down the street in Zhuhai.

Maybe the reports were wrong.

I did see some food delivery bicyclists riding about and delivering food. This was (yellow) Kangaroo, and (blue) Er-Le-Ma.

I didn’t see much going on.

Some decontamination trucks were spraying the roads and saturating the trees. These trucks were white. Not the military camouflage that you would expect. The Chinese, I guess, only feel the need to paint military vehicles in olive green colors if they will be used in battle-zones. For urban and civilian environments they tend to be either white or black.

It’s a cultural thing I guess.

View down the street. Some cars are out and about, but mostly things are awfully quiet.
View down the street. Some cars are out and about, but mostly things are awfully quiet.

Back to the house a second time

Well, nothing is going on. So I just took another bus and went home. Everyone is inside and factories are just opening up. Most of my factories are at about 60% staffing, and it’s a slow slog. Things won’t be back to normal until March.

Meanwhile we are still taking orders.

Some of our Australian and New Zealand clients want us to source alternative suppliers out of China, and we have. They are about 40% more expensive, take about 25% longer to make and have an unverified quality history.

The rest of the clients (those in Europe and Africa) are still placing healthy orders with us. In fact the orders out of Europe are on the increase. Especially for Germany and England.

Anyways, I got off the bus and started the walk home from the bus station.

Front of a nearby apartment complex.
Front of a nearby apartment complex.

But the signs are there, and very few critters are moving about. I did see a feral tabby cat. She just looked at me with my mask on my face. I guess that I must have looked strange to her.

I said hello, and went on my merry way. She then got up and slaundered in the opposite direction.

Another red banner.
Another red banner.

Conclusion

This is just a narrative of my one trip outside my apartment during this biological weapons attack on China in January / February 2020. You don’t have to believe me that it is a biological weapons event. You can watch CNN and FOX and listen to what they say. But the Chinese government is treating it as a biological weapons event and that is all that matters.

Was the 2020 Wuhan Coronavirus an engineered biological attack on China by America for geopolitical advantage?
It does seem farfetched, doesn't it? That the United States will risk World War III, using nuclear weapons, by launching a coronavirus inside China during the 2020 Chinese New Year celebrations? But that is exactly the scenario that I fear has occurred. Here we discuss this horror. If this is the actual case, and it is actually intentionally engineered and used against China, it means that the USA is flirting with global nuclear annihilation. This is nothing that should be treated lightly.

SHTF is real, and preppers take note.

The reality, however, is not anything like you would expect. Its not a scene out of the “Walking Dead”, or some scene from “12 monkeys”. It’s something entirely different.

Anyways, this is what the REAL DEAL is like. It’s not the narrative that you might see in the American media. Whether it is FOX, CNN, or Alex Jones.

You all, be safe. Be happy and be healthy. Best Regards.


I do hope that you enjoyed this post. You can view more in my Trump Trade Wars Index…

Trump Trade War

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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Awesome Movies – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – 007 James Bond

This is one of my personal favorite James Bond films. There’s something about a hidden mountain lair staffed with brainwashed beauties, and surrounded by armed henchmen on ski’s that appeals to the teen-aged boy inside of me. Not to mention the idea of wearing a kilt where the women reach underneath and write notes on my inner thighs…

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service has often been described as the dark horse of the James Bond franchise, in part due to its atypical ending and for its one-off Bond actor, George Lazenby.

Its reputation unfortunately tied Lazenby’s ill-reception, Majesty has been gaining steady recognition over the last few decades with many now noting it as one of the best Bond films ever produced and some even going so far as labeling it the best.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service will probably always remain the  most controversial entry in the Bond series, thanks both to its  unusually human and romantic story, and the notorious casting of novice  actor George Lazenby as OO7. Some think these elements ruin the film,  while others hail OHMSS as the best Bond ever. I wouldn't go that far in  my praise, but for me this is still one of the classic Bond films, true  to Ian Fleming's original vision and arguably showing OO7 in a more  realistic light than any other film in the franchise.

To get the  Lazenby issue out of the way first, it is certainly true to say that he  lacks the charisma of the man he (temporarily) replaced, Sean Connery,  and his impossibly chiselled jaw is somewhat irritating. However, he  does look the part, and for a first-time actor he turns in a remarkably  assured performance, particularly in the fight scenes but also in Bond's  more tender moments, most notably in the highly emotional finale. If  Lazenby had gone on to make more Bond films (and it was his own decision  not to do so) he could well have developed into a very fine OO7, but as  it is I still find his performance in OHMSS perfectly acceptable, and  not damaging to the film in any way.

The film itself represented a  conscious attempt to get back to Fleming after the increasingly  extravagant antics of Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. Director  Peter Hunt, who had edited the classic early Connery films, was very  keen to remain faithful to Fleming's original story, and as a result  OHMSS has an unusually strong emphasis on character and plot, with the  gadgetry and humour found in most Bond films largely jettisoned. 

Rather  like From Russia with Love, OHMSS feels like a real spy adventure, as  Bond tracks Blofeld down and even adopts a disguise as he infiltrates  his arch-enemy's Alpine hideaway, Piz Gloria. Where this film is unique,  however, is in the level of emotion it invests in OO7's relationships  with others. We see this early in the film when Bond quarrels with M and  submits his resignation, a sequence which really brings out the  affection which both M and Moneypenny have for him, but which M  especially prefers to keep concealed. This affection is brought out  again near the end during Bond and Tracy's wedding, when Q sheds his  normal exasperation and shows us his fondness and respect for OO7.

However,  it is of course the relationship between Bond and Tracy which gives the  film its emotional heart. OHMSS sees Bond fall genuinely in love for  the first and only time, and personally I found the film's romantic  scenes both tender and touching, particularly for being so unexpected in  a Bond film. The casting of Diana Rigg as Tracy helps immeasurably in  making us believe in this romance, as she is a rare example of a proper  actress taking on the role of a Bond girl, and her dynamic, spirited  performance makes it easy to see why Bond would fall for her and marry  her. It also helps the film's tragic conclusion, itself unique in the  Bond franchise, pack far more of an emotional punch than might otherwise  have been the case.

Of course, the film has more going for it than just an unusually human Bond.

Hunt  directs with great skill, and the Alpine scenery that dominates the  film looks absolutely stunning. There is no shortage of great action  either, the highlights being a tense and gripping ski chase and an  equally thrilling bobsleigh pursuit. Telly Savalas makes for a very  effective Blofeld, understated and sinister, and his Rosa Klebb-like  henchwoman Irma Bunt is played with relish by Ilse Steppat. There are  also echoes of FRWL in the character of Draco, Tracy's father, who is a  charismatic Bond ally in the style of Kerim Bey. Special mention should  be given to John Barry, who produced his greatest Bond soundtrack for  OHMSS. The opening instrumental theme, with its sombre and foreboding  tone, sets the serious mood of the film, while the classic We Have All  the Time in the World, sung by Louis Armstrong, is the perfect  soundtrack to Bond and Tracy's doomed love.

However, while OHMSS  is undoubtedly a classic Bond film, it just falls short of my personal  top five for two principal reasons. The first of these is that the film  is too long, primarily because the central section, where Bond  infiltrates Piz Gloria in disguise, is dragged out for far longer than  was necessary. Blofeld's plan to use beautiful women as carriers of a  devastating eco-virus is the other main weakness, because it is totally  preposterous and does not fit into the film's serious nature. I must  admit also that, good as Lazenby is, I do wish Connery had agreed to  make this film, because with him on board, and a little more editing, I  think it could have been the best Bond ever, even beating FRWL. As it  is, OHMSS is still a very strong film, its bold deviations from the Bond  formula paying off handsomely. It is just a crying shame that it did  not perform better at the Box Office, because this would encourage the  Bond producers to shift to the high-camp, comic style that would  dominate the franchise during the 1970s; sadly, it would be more than a  decade before a serious, Flemingesque Bond would reappear on the big  screen. 

-  Orpington 

How true are these statements? Is it really just the one with the bad James Bond whose ultimate saving grace is that it’s forgettable; or, has it truly earned its place in the top echelons of the 007 series alongside From Russia with Love, Goldfingerand 2006’s Casino Royale?

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
People used to dress better, carry themselves better and smoke better than they do today. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
[Major Spoiler Alert] On Her Majesty’s Secret Service finds James Bond (Lazenby) desperately trying to track down head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas) following the events of You Only Live Twice.

His trail having run cold after two fruitless years of searching, M (Bernard Lee) removes him from the case.

Distraught and obsessed, Bond takes a leave of absence and accepts an offer from criminal mastermind Marc-Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti) for a clue to Blofeld’s whereabouts in exchange for a marriage to his only daughter, Tracy di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg).

Bond, having previously saved Tracy from a suicide attempt, accepts and soon finds himself in the Swiss Alps where Blofeld is devising a new international blackmail plot revolving around a gaggle of brainwashed beauties.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Imagine having a secret lair populated with a bevy of girls from all over the world, and all that on top of an enormous mountain. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

From this point, the second half of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service continues as a practical nonstop chase as Bond attempts to escape Blofeld’s mountainous fortress.

 Let me give it to you straight, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is an  absolute, 100% triumph. All the elements work well, firstly there is  Peter Hunt's direction. Hunt should have been handed the Directors reins  on a Bond movie long before this. He adds action and excitement and  blends this in the most stilted and calm manor. In truth On Her  Majesty's Secret Service is a return to the less Gadget and Comic Book  laden world of the likes of Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, and  echoes the Flemmingesque thriller world of Dr No and From Russia With  Love. Those who dont like the first two additions to the Bond series  dont flinch, On Her Majesty's Secret Service has a strenghth and style  beaming with enegy and excitement twinned with realism. never seen in a  Bond Film before or since.

This will always be remembered as  George Lazenby's go at Bond. It is also remenbered as the one Bond that  flopped at the box office. Well, on a budget of $9million and with  worldwide grosses of $80million, hopefully the notion of disapointment  will disapeer. There is also the fact that the Video and DVD versions of  the movie consistently outsell all other Bond Titles worldwide. George  Lazenby is an absolute revelation as Bond. I had my doubts but was still  interested to see how he did. Lazenby rivals Connery in the Romantic  and Action scenes and does pretty well with the dramatic scenes. In  truth he is the most under-rated Bond. He makes a very believable  Flemmingesque Playboy. He looks good in a tuxedo, on ski's, with women,  in punch ups. Lazenby is helped by a strong support cast. Diana Rigg is  beautifull and very believable as the Contessa, Tracy, with whom our  James falls in love with, and eventually marries. Rigg displays a full  range of acting and beauty to make her the most memorable of Bond Girls,  and for one, wich i dont mean to sopil, inparticular. Telly Savalas is a  very creepy, chilling and enjoyable Blofeld. It could be said that he  is the most memorable of Blofeld's. He is obviously having the time of  his life with the part and it is a pitty he didn't play the character in  future outings. There is also the return of M, Q in a rather quiet  outing this time, and a Moneypenny, heart broken at the notion Bond  could marry anybody other than herself.

Now, if you add to all  the above some of the finest action set pieces in motion picture history  you have an idea of the scale of this epic. The Alpine sets, and Skiing  and Bobsled chases really bring out the purest sense of adventure. On  Her Majesty's Secret Service is the most memorable Bond Movie from my  Childhood. I remember watching this one Christmas eve with my  Grandparents, and their house looked very much like Blofelds Alpine  Fortress [Without the Ladies, alas]. The movie has really thrilling ski  chases, you really do believe a man can ski, and once more think you are  skiing with him.This is very much THE Christmas Bond movie. It is also  soaked with some delightful christmas themes by the master John Barry,  composing perhaps his best Bond theme. We Have All the Time in the  world, sung by Louis Armstrong is a beautifuly moving song, made all the  more so by Tracy's fate at the end of the movie. There is also Barry's  rousing On Her Majesty's Secret Service Theme, unlike anything ever  heared in cinema's or movies before.

But it is the realism  between the characters and the story that helps make On Her Majesty's  Secret Service work. By far the most under-rated of the Bond movies, and  a strong contender for the Best Bond Movie of all time. This is the  greatest. Bond movies should try to be to be like this in future. Go and  see it for yourself, dont listen to the the negative reviews. You have  all the time in the world. 

- Dock-Ock 

From incredible ski pursuits to bell tower brawls and icy crash derby car races, Bond is pushed to his most vulnerable, breathless limit as he barely dodges a never-ending army of goons in fantastic (and, at one point, literal) cliffhanger fashion.

When he is eventually tracked down by Tracy, she is as much a reprieve to Bond as she is to the audience.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
I well remember this movie where the hero, James Bod, sits wearing a kilt and surrounded by very attentive women who hang on every word he utters. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Unfortunately, their escape is only half successful as Blofeld causes a massive avalanche that blankets both Bond and Tracy leading to her capture as a hostage.

With M powerless to sanction an official rescue, Bond teams up with Draco to launch a full scale assault on Blofeld (which includes an awesome shot of Bond sliding across an ice covered walkway belly first into battle with a machine gun!).

After a bobsled run leaves Blofeld supposedly dead, Bond, realizing his true feelings for Tracy, marries her leading to a heartbreaking denouement as Blofeld enacts one last act of revenge and has her viciously murdered minutes into their honeymoon.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
In these older movies you could be very sensual, with a hint of sexuality, but not resort to overt crude sex. Here we have one of the chicks giving James Bond her room number. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a showcase of how to properly execute an epic Bond film.

Gone are the fantasy and over-the-top machinations of spaceship hijacks, rocket cigarettes, and secret volcano bases from the last film.

Though the overall threat level may be reduced comparatively, Blofeld’s plan remains one of global devastation keeping the stakes up to par with the two previous films but with a far more grounded approach (despite the ludicrous nature of the brainwashed girls being utilized for biological warfare).

The Best Bond?  Yeah, I think so. Like most people who are interested in James Bond, I  saw the films over and over on TV before I read any of the books. I then  got round to buying Casino Royale, and being knocked out by it - this  was somewhat different to Moonraker and all that Roger Moore stuff. So I  read the books in their sequence, seriously the best way, and by the  time OHMSS came round, I had a pretty good idea of who James Bond was.  And, I'm sorry to inform all the Seanophiles, James Bond is not Connery,  Moore, Dalton (though he came close, but is Welsh..)or Brosnan. Oddly  enough, given the choices, he's kind of like George Lazenby.

Sure,  Sean Connery was suave, sexy, and spoke rather curiously, Timothy  Dalton had the serious side sorted, Brosnan is sophisticated etc, Roger  Moore.. well, another time, maybe.

George Lazenby, maybe due to  his lack of experience, (though why is his debut so widely mulled over  in that respect.... it's not something that most actors are subjected  to?) is not so at ease with his surroundings, not so cocksure that  everything is going to work out fine as the others, and this is the real  James Bond. The one in the books. You can almost believe in this one.  And when things don't work out fine, you feel a weird familiarity with  him. He's just a man, though admittedly he's disproportionately talented  at a pretty impressive range of activities, from skiing to flying,  swordsmanship, shooting people, jumping out of things, carnal endeavours  etc.. Oh no, sorry, that's me. Well, anyway, I'm quite tired now. OHMSS  is the best of the films, though From Russia With Love contains  possibly the finest fight scene of all and maybe the best trio of  baddies (including a slightly peripatetic Blofeld)and is Connery's best.

George  Lazenby is the best Bond, because his talents - a certain naturalistic  charm, physical dexterity, and a capacity for possible failure - are  used brilliantly, and he is closer by far than any of the others to the  book-Bond.

There you go.

Oh, and Diana Rigg is the best  'Bond girl', though that description is not very fair to her, We Have  All The Time In The World is the best Bond song, and the theme tune is  possibly John Barry's finest work.. let alone being the best Bond title  theme.

There you go again.

Thanks for reading, and if you happen to disagree, well... you're wrong. Cheers. 

- qholway 

More significant is Bond’s personal journey at the heart of the picture which effectively sells the danger present.

Moreover, Majesty presents one of the rare instances where Bond is a true underdog – the metaphoric St. George vs. the dragon.

The desperate barrage of near misses is practically overwhelming and, for the first time since a few hints in Dr. No, we witness a Bond that is almost overcome with fear.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Just some of the gals on top of the isolated mountain. They are quite entranced by the appearance of James bond into their lair. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Heck, at one point, as 007 is trying to avoid Blofeld’s goons in a crowd, he accidentally runs into a polar bear-suited man brandishing a camera.

 Like "From Russia With Love," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is  filled with mysterious characters and realistic action… Blofeld's plot  involves germ warfare and his stronghold this time is a converted Swiss  allergy clinic… The film is loaded with action—ski chases, bobsled  chases, car chases, helicopter attacks, fights in the surf, fights in  the hotel, fights in the office… Peter Hunt succeeded in distracting the  audience from noticing that a new Bond was on duty… 

The new  Bond pauses to take a finger of caviar... Dom Perignon'57 and five-star  Hennessey brandy are his mouthwashes of choice... He discovers that he  lived with his aunt in Pett Buttom, and his family motto is 'The World  Is Not Enough.' He impersonates a genealogist to gain entrance to Piz  Gloria... He wants to take the head of SPECTRE to Augsburg (West  Germany) to verify certain records regarding his claim to a title... He  spurns a Mafioso one million gold dowry; uses telescopic sight from a  sniper's rifle to spot a beautiful young woman on the beach; wipes away a  Contessa's tears; drives his Aston Martin wearing a hat and smoking a  cigarette, and turns to the viewer saying in perfect seriousness, "This  never happened to the other fella."

The sixth Bond film takes  place all over Europe with a united nations of glamorous babes called  'angels of death,' where 007 finally meets his female match, falls in  love, and gets married… The motion picture is an emotional story that  reveals more of the world of 007…

It starts with Bond, ready to  resign from the Secret Service for being taking off Operation Bedlam...  With John Barry's best music, Bond reminds us of a whole bunch of  familiar faces... He begins to look over his mementos which include  Honey's knife belt from 'Dr. No,' and the strangler watch from 'From  Russia with Love.' The sequences from all the previous Bond films  reinforced the idea that this new Bond is still a member of the same  team, a man who answers to a crusty retired Admiral, and still is  engaged in sexy banter with a loving secretary...

It is Draco's  daughter though, the ravishing Tracy (Diana Rigg), who adds a bit of  class to the role of the Bond girl, and makes the film quiet  interesting... Tracy is the troubled woman who steals Bond's heart...  She is a spoiled woman wandering fully clothed into the sea... She is  dangerous with her red Ford Cougar, a broken bottle, and at the baccarat  table...

Gabriele Ferzetti is one of the most sympathetic Mafia  dons ever to charm the screen… Draco likes the fact that Bond is  interested in his daughter, and he's determined to help her find the  right husband… 

Telly Savalas' Blofeld does reveal sides to his  character previously unseen: the class snobbery—which M remarks upon,  and the vanity which Tracy flatters to force him off his guard, and his  irritation with one of his skiers who ends up in a tree... Posing as a  world-famous allergist, this bald arch-villain would only give up his  deadly scheme throughout the world if offered a complete pardon for past  crimes and a title...

Irma Bunt was perfectly portrayed by  German actress Ilse Steppat, who, unfortunately died soon after the  film's release… She is Blofeld's second-in-command, who keeps the  Count's attractive 'patients' under control...

Angela Scoular (Ruby) becomes Bond's first conquest when she writes her room number in lipstick on 007's inner thigh…

Moneypenny  (Lois Maxwell) hands her boss a request for two weeks leave rather than  Bond's dictated resignation... Her act results at once funny, moving  and warm: 'What would I do without you?' ask both Bond and M separately  once she's settled their contretemps...

"On Her Majesty's Secret  Service" features Barry's exquisite song, "We Have All the Time in the  World," which is sung with real emotion by Louis Armstrong... 

- Nazi_Fighter_David 

Lazenby’s bug-eyed overreaction at the sight is enough to make Bruce Campbell proud!

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Of course, James Bond seduces, and is seduced by a large number of very attractive chicks. All who want some of what he has to give. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Regardless, this approach leads to a far more gripping adventure and one that perfectly lays the basis for the film’s tragic ending.

Much has been said about George Lazenby’s performance in this film.

Is he the natural successor to Sean Connery? Very few (if any) would say so; however, what he lacks in charm and screen presence, he makes up for in sheer earnestness.

His most redeeming quality is that, outside of Daniel Craig, he is the best brawler in the franchise delivering vicious uppercuts and thoroughly selling all his fight scenes – particularly an early rousing mano a mano hotel fight.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
The boss, very manly, with a bow tie and pipe. Ah, me thinks that you wouldn’t be able to do this today in modern progressive London. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Beyond his athleticism (he would later train with Bruce Lee himself), Lazenby’s best scenes are centered on character actions that diverged significantly from anything associated with Connery’s portrayal – particularly Bond’s tender proposal to Tracy and his tearful reaction to her death.

In these fleeting scenes, Lazenby more-or-less succeeds in delivering a poignant, sincere performance.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Being a secret spy is hard work. If you are not killing people, you are off seducing them. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

If anything, what really bogs down Lazenby the most is the vestige of Connery.

Unlike Roger Moore who was given the opportunity to make Bond his own, Lazenby is put in the unenviable position of trying to emulate him.

 Having been a huge Bond fan since I was a mere lad in the early '80s, I  still don't know why I just recently saw this film for the first time in  2010. I suppose I must blame the fact that it is criminally underrated  and under promoted. It's very rarely shown on TV except on holiday  Bondathons (I love those!) and casual fans typically know nothing of it.  I've always considered myself more than just a casual Bond fan, so I  finally ordered the Ultimate Edition DVD recently and I INSTANTLY ranked  this among the all time greats of the series. Wish I had seen it  earlier, but no matter, I will view it many more times over the  years....

Lazenby's Bond was much more realistic and true to the  novels, a human being that is far more talented than most, but not a  superhero and in this movie not armed with numerous gadgets. He  certainly played the role with dignity and it's a shame he didn't return  for at least one more. But I am glad that Roger Moore was able to enter  the series in his prime shortly after this rather than waiting until  later, so it worked out.

Beautiful places have always been an  integral part of Bond films, and it doesn't get more beautiful than the  Swiss Alps. I'm going to make a point of visiting Blofeld's headquarters  (a real restaurant) one of these days. It must have been quite an  undertaking to build it in such an isolated place as they discussed in  the DVD extras. I also love Bond's modernized Aston Martin in this film  and the look of the film in general is just fantastic. And for home  theater owners, the avalanche scene sounds absolutely amazing on a  powerful system! I thought pictures on the wall in my theater room were  going to fall! 

SPOILERS: This film is unique in that Bond falls  in love marries for the only time in the entire series, but being Bond,  it was bound to end badly. A touching scene, the only real one in the  entire Bond series actually. His wife was a very memorable and  charismatic Bond girl and now I can put into context the visit that  Roger Moore made in the beginning of For Your Eyes Only. 

Bottom line, if you're a Bond fan, having this in your collection is mandatory. 

- Enforcer686 

From the awkward kilt get-up to some awful puns noticeably ADR’d in at the last minute (not to mention a badly conceived pre-credits fourth wall break that bizarrely refers to Connery as the “other fella”), the film may as well have been called In Sir Connery’s Public Shadow.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Just some of the great selection of gals on the top of the mountain. They all have their charms and are very attracted to a man with manly charms. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

It doesn’t help that in an attempt to hammer into viewers that this is indeed the same James Bond as Connery, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is full of constant call backs to the previous films, such as Bond looking over his office keepsakes from Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Thunderball

 I must admit I initially never gave this entry much of a chance.   Whenever it was on TV I tried to watch it, but I just couldn't get into  it.  Then last year, I saw a widescreen tape version on sale and decided  to buy it. When I finished watching it I was sorry I had ignored it for  so long.  It's very good.  I thought Lazenby did a good job as Bond,  and Savalas turned in equally good work as Bond's nemesis.  And Rigg is  as sharp as she is lovely. This is one for the collection. 

- cmt-2 
On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
James Bond meeting some of the gals on the mountain top. He’s quite the hit with the ladies. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

…a dwarf randomly whistling the tune from Goldfinger, and, most egregiously, a credit sequence that focuses on Connery-less clips from the preceding entries in the series!

 To understand the controversy behind `On Her Majesty's Secret Service,'  one must understand the events so impacting the spy genre by the time of  its production in 1969.  After the back to back tremendous successes of  `Goldfinger' and `From Russia With Love,' every hack producer and  distributor rushed to make spy movies.  

There were serious ones (`The  Spy That Came in From the Cold,' `The Ipcress File'), satirical ones  (`Our Man Flint,' `The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,' `Get Smart' ), and  incredibly silly ones (`The Silencers,' `Last of the Secret Agents,'  `Casino Royale').  `Casino Royale' was especially damaging, since it was  (VERY LOOSELY) based on a Fleming novel, and used the character of  James Bond, 007.  

In fact, in `Casino Royale,' nearly EVERYBODY played  `James Bond'.  `If we don't know what we are doing, how will the enemy,'  was the explanation `James Bond' (David Niven) gave to explain why MI6  was calling all its agents `James Bond'.  

To protect their franchise,  the producers of the `real' James Bond movies emphasized in their  promotion `Sean Connery IS James Bond.'   In a demonstration of   `gratitude,' Connery up and quit the series, leaving `On Her Majesty's  Secret Service,' which was shortly to go into production, without a  `Bond.'  

Arguably the most ambitious and difficult to shoot of  ALL the Bond films (at least to that time), it's a miracle ANYTHING  works in OHMSS. Much of the time it works VERY well, though the shaky  underpinnings of the first hour frequently threaten to undo it.  There  is so much choppy editing and dubbed dialogue, one begins to suspect he  is watching a foreign film. 

The second hour plus works much better, all  the more surprising since it was shot first. One reason may be that the  film went WAY over both shooting schedule and budget, and there was  enough made up `bad' press to put a great deal of pressure on the  producers, first time director, Peter Hunt and star, George Lazenby.  

In  the middle of it all, Lazenby's publicist announced that Lazenby was  not going to do another Bond (Lazenby is credible when he says that  announcement was not his idea. One suspects, from the bonus material,  that Cubby Broccoli planted that story to discredit Lazenby, should the  film fail). Add to all this the films' tacked-on, unhappy ending  (planned to be the prologue for `Diamonds are Forever'), which plays  completely against the humor of earlier moments, and it's a wonder the  film was NOT a dismal failure.  

Quite the contrary, OHMSS is one of the  BEST of the Bond films, filled with nonstop action, outstanding stunts,  incredible sound, the best score (along with `Goldfinger') and a  credible enough romance to lend it genuine poignancy.  Lazenby overcame  many tremendous handicaps: having to replace one of the best known and  popular actors in the world; he was 28, younger than  Connery when he  made `Dr. No'; he was completely inexperienced as an actor  (OHMSS was  Lazenby's FIRST movie, not just his first starring role); his accent  (thick Australian outback) and the INCREDIBLE physical demands (Lazenby  did many of his own stunts).  

Considering all this, Lazenby is downright  remarkable.  Certainly, in my opinion he is better than either the  snooty Timothy Dalton or the lightweight Roger Moore were in ANY of  their outings as Bond.. 

The bonus feature on the DVD concludes with  strong evidence that Lazenby became a scapegoat, despite the eventual  financial success of OHMSS. Lazenby, refreshingly displays no bitterness  that his career nearly ended as soon as it began.  He's had a  reasonably busy career playing character roles and we have OHMSS. Not a  bad deal at all. 

- Bob-45 

This backfires in a couple of ways: 1.) it keeps reminding the audience of Connery and henceforth how much better he was in the role and, 2.) it establishes the film in a firm continuity with what has happened before – a continuity that the film blatantly breaks by disregarding the fact that Blofeld and Bond have met before!

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
The girls are mesmerized by his appearance, mannerisms and behavior. Every man wants to be like James Bond. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

The Bond producers had shortsightedly adapted Ian Fleming‘s S.P.E.C.T.R.E. trilogy out of order (Majesty is actually the dark middle chapter between Thunderball and You Only Live Twice) causing significant narrative issues and also robbing the natural revenge-bent conclusion that You Only Live Twice aptly provided (akin to releasing Return of the Jedi before The Empire Strikes Back and attempting to place a band-aid on the story issues).

In the books, this was the first instance of Bond and Blofeld meeting face-to-face and since this was a more faithful adaptation, a choice was made to not have the characters recognize each other despite meeting at the conclusion of the last film (a choice easily unraveled by the opening credit flashbacks to Twice!).

 This is one of my favorite Bond's.  It has the best story and most  closely resemble the original novel.  It has become notorious for  featuring a one-time Bond, George Lazenby, but it surpasses most of the  later films.

Lazenby gets far too much criticism.  As a first  time actor, he is quite good.  Yes, his performance is mixed, but so are  several other actors, many with far more experience.  More time should  have been put into acting classes and rehearsal for Lazenby, to prepare  him for the role.  Instead, they concentrated on his look and  mannerisms.  This has been one of the failing aspects to the films; the  emphasis on sight rather than substance.

Diana Rigg is fantastic  as Tracy, which is to be expected.  Who else but Emma Peel could marry  James Bond? (wonder what Mr. Peel thought, or Steed, for that matter.)   Rigg is the first, and arguably the last real actress to play the female  lead in a Bond film.  Most are chosen for their looks and their  performance rarely rises above looking sexy.  Rigg has the looks and sex  appeal, but she also has the acting chops and tends to dominate any  scene she is in.

Telly Savalas was an interesting, yet mixed  choice for Blofeld.  He is quite charming, but not very menacing.  He  was far deadlier in the Dirty Dozen. Blofeld was far more effective  before he was seen in the series. Imagination was always far better than  reality.  Savalas seems more like a gangster than a megalomaniac.   Since I saw this after Kojak, I kept waiting for him to say, "who loves  ya baby?"

The stunts are fantastic and act in service to the  plot.  The ski chase is gripping and the tension builds throughout.   Although it becomes obvious in several scenes that Diana Rigg is doubled  by a man, it is not too distracting.

Ultimately, the story  raises this above the level of most Bond films.  The plot moves along at  a quick pace and there are few sidelines.  The jokes are kept to a  minimum and character is stressed.  The actions scenes are eye catching,  but never out of place.  The threat is believable and the final  resolution to Blofeld's plans works.  

Spoiler: The director has  said he would have preferred to open Diamonds Are Forever with Tracy's  death, and then lead to the search for Blofeld. I disagree.  I think the  death scene is one of Lazenby's best and it carries quite an impact.   It let's you know that Bond must return to his work to gain vengeance.  I  think DAF should have opened with a flashback to the scene and then the  hunt for Blofeld.  If the death had not occurred at the end of OHMSS,  then the opening of DAF would feel like a cheat, much like the opening  of the second Austin Powers film.  It would just seem like an excuse to  get rid of the wife and return to business as usual. 

- grendelkhan 

The only slim explanation is that Bond is in disguise (which consists of a pair of glasses – the epitome of incognito espionage – and a different accent) and that Blofeld has cut off his earlobes in the hopes of achieving a prestigious title. 

But hey, if it works for Superman, maybe it works for Bond too.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
A good secret agent is a professional in and out of bed. Here we have him catching up on some business relations. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Continuity issues aside, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service provides yet another positive up-step in the series in the form of Telly Savalas – hands down the best Blofeld to date (Christolph Waltz included).

Smart, menacing, and conniving, Savalas’ Blofeld is the anti-Bond, every bit as charming and clever as our hero. 

On the surface, he may not look as memorable as Donald Pleasence‘s take on the character, but he is far more effective and a true threat to Bond.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Telly Savalas makes a great villain. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Diana Rigg is as beautiful as she is brilliant as Tracy.

It never rings false that this is the woman that finally snags Bond’s heart.

Vulnerable but with a subdued fire ready to spring, Rigg is terrific, managing to effortlessly lift the struggling Lazenby in every scene they share.

I have read some of the negative reviews for this movie and I have to  say that I agree with NONE of them except for the slightly unnecessary  two and a half hour length. 

Regardless, this doesn't ruin On Her  Majesty's Secret Service in any way to warrant a serious complaint as  far as I'm concerned. As with the positive reviews this film received, I  agree with most all of them. For one, George Lazenby replacing Sean  Connery as Bond may have displeased some but I think he did just as good  of a job and would not have minded a bit if he became the next Bond for  a few more films. 

This movie also had some enjoyable action scenes;  some of which would later get mimicked in future Bond installments. The  bond girl is by far one of the best. 

To be a little more specific, this  bond girl plays a significant part in the Bond series as a whole that no  other bond girl shares. However, I won't reveal why that is because I  don't usually give spoilers for the courtesy of those who haven't seen  the films that I review. 

The ending alone for this movie got several  mixed reviews but I can say with certainty that had it not ended the way  it did, the Bond franchise might have come to an end. 

- thomas-williamson-ga 

Likewise, once they partner up in the second half escape, they make a memorable, natural team (I especially like Bond stealing kisses as she mercilessly drives enemy cars off the road!).

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
I’m not really a great fan of his plaid coat, but after all it’s another time and place. You need to take that into consideration. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Her wedding day demise (a death that shrewdly bookends a film that began with her suicide attempt) is a tragedy brought to fruition almost solely due to her indelible charisma – a gutsy move from the Bond producers whose films were mostly known for escapist fun.

Keeping in line with the grittier productions of the time such as Bonnie and ClydeMidnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service presented a natural, contemporary progression for the Bond series – a turn that was regrettably rejected in a 180° about face with the campy Diamonds Are Forever two years later.

Peter Hunt, stepping into the director’s chair after editing all the previous Bond pictures, shapes one of the most stylized film in the series.

 On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) is the first Bond film to replace  Sean Connery and the only film which Australian actor George Lazenby  portrays the role of James Bond. 

This film is probably the most faithful  adaption to the Bond novels, giving the film a sense of realism and  drama. 

James Bond is on a search for his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld  (portrayed by Telly Savalas) who had merely escaped his death from the  previous film, You Only Live Twice (1967). 

He encounters a beautiful  countess named Tracy (portrayed by Diana Rigg) who is the daughter of  Marc Ange Draco (portrayed by Gabrielle Fazzetti), boss of a huge crime  organization called the Union Corse. 

Due to Bond's detour, M (Bernard  Lee) suspends him from the mission, Bond responds to almost resigning  from the Secret Service as he is saved by Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) who  writes to M that he was going to take a several-week vacation. 

As Bond  falls in love with Tracy, he also finds connections to Blofeld through a  College of Arms professor, Sir Hillary Bray (portrayed by George  Baker). 

Apparently Blofeld is disguising as a Count running a clinic in  the Swiss Alps that supposedly cures allergies of all kinds. Bond  infiltrates Blofeld's base disguising as Hillary Bray, encountering  beautiful girl patients ("Angels of Death") from various countries. 

Bond  discovers the psychic therapy the patients go through while sleeping  with one of the patients. 

Bond's cover gets blown and is captured by  Blofeld, who reveals his plan to spread a pandemic that could wipe out  the world through his "cured" patients. 

Bond escapes the base through an  elaborate and well-choreographed ski chase as he encounters Tracy who  helps him escape from Blofeld's crew. 

Later that night, Bond proposes to  Tracy (something we will never see in a Bond film) and plans to quit  his job after this mission. Unfortunately, their time is cut short as  Blofeld kidnaps Tracy after another ski chase. 

Bond and Draco rescues  Tracy and blows up Blofeld's facility. Blofeld breaks his neck during a  bobsled chase with Bond, but manages to survive. Bond and Tracy get  married and are happily driving down the road until a sudden machine gun  fire from Blofeld's henchman Irma Bunt (portrayed by Ilse Steppat)  fatally hits Tracy. 

The film ends with Bond in tears (another thing  we'll never see in a Bond film) over his blood-shed Bride, as he murmurs  to a traffic cop that "We had all the time in the World". 

This  film was financially successful, but did not make a profit as much as  its predecessors did. 

The critical response was somewhat positive, but  was negative towards Lazenby's portrayal of James Bond. I would give a  lot of credit to the filmmakers (especially director Peter Hunt) who  polished Lazenby into a fine Bond. 

Considering how Lazenby did not have  any acting experience prior to this film, I would give him credit for  portraying that very emotional and tender side of Bond. 

Lazenby also  matched that physique of a Bond, as it is portrayed through the  excellently choreographed fight sequences. Despite those feats, Lazenby  quit the role of Bond from a bad career advice from his agent who saw no  future into the Bond films. 

I would also praise Lazenby for not  parroting Connery's take on Bond, as most actors would most-likely  parrot their predecessor's approach to the character. 

This film would  not have been as good if Connery was portraying his rough and  cold-hearted edge of Bond. On Her Majesty's Secret Service is a great  film with great action, story, and music that defines the true essence  and pleasure of a Bond film. 

- bock_g 

Some of the shots, composed by cinematographer Michael Reed, are incredible with a particular focus on reflections such as Bond wistfully recalling Tracy’s kidnapping while looking through a window…

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
The ski scenes are what everyone remembers this movie by. I however am a bit strange and instead remember it for the secret lair filled with a bevy of chicks. That was what really appealed to me as a teen-aged boy. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Suggestive of the story further delving into Bond as a human being (this is, after all, the film where we finally learn more about his history and family motto, “The World is Not Enough”), these artistic touches help accent the story rather than existing only to call attention to themselves.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
There’s nothing like showing a little bit of cleavage to get a man’s attention up. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

As mentioned before, Lazenby excels during the action scenes – sequences that run the gamut of creative staging and editing. Although there are a few minor quibbles such as Hunt’s preference for fast motion editing, the film’s set-pieces provide a sustained high-level of excitement with a few creative twists thrown in for good measure (such as a chase through evergreen forest with Bond on one ski).

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
It’s the romance and seductions scenes that the older James Bond flicks are remembered for. Today, there is an overload of hyper-action, and a near dearth of male-oriented seduction. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Fleming’s tenth 007 novel, is one of the most faithful adaptations in the Bond film series – very much a welcome sight after the Roald Dahl-scripted fantasy of You Only Live Twice.

As such, there aren’t many significant differences between the source and screen. By the same token, the film version follows the same path as From Russia with Love and Goldfinger with some minor improvements to the novel.

For example, the book has both Bond and Tracy successfully escaping Blofeld’s forces in Switzerland.

 Once, at the library, I had a flashback of something my history teacher  once told me.  "Without Soviet Union, we wouldn't have had a lot of  things." Then, someone mentioned, accurately, that Bond films owe their  existence to the hammer and the sickle.  Then he said, "Pooh, the Bond  FILMS!  Read the BOOKS.  They're good stuff.  The films are just bunch  of women and gadgets." So I went to look for Ian Fleming, and the title  that caught my eye was On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which is  recognized as one of the best books in the series.  I started reading  the book.  I was surprised at how slow pace and dark it was, and how  Bond wasn't this confident, suave character who always knows what to do.   Sean Connery is not, I repeat, not, Ian Fleming's James Bond.  Of  course, he is the best film version of James Bond, but he is too good a  suave character to be Bond.  I can't imagine a superspy who'd say  "Yeesss" as Connery does.

I must say, more than anyone, George  Lazenby is the James Bond of Ian Fleming's novels.  He is like Bond in  the books, trying to be smooth but always somewhat unsure.  He has a  command of the screen, that he isn't afraid to tell you he's there.  The  biggest gripe I have about Pierce Brosnan is how he sometimes doesn't  get a grip of things on set and his somewhat higher, softer voice (and  also how he pumps endless rounds of automatic fire upon enemies who have  a propensity for getting hit while he himself has to be missed by  endless rounds of enemy fire).  Lazenby has a voice that I imagine Bond  would certainly have.  I certainly don't think he was a bad Bond.  I  think he WAS Bond.  The other four actors have played their versions of  Bond, but Lazenby is the only believable, human, imperfect James Bond.   And his lines aren't that bad, come on.  The only poorly delivered line  was, "He had lots of guts."  I think he should have delivered that with a  bit more Connery, but that's a minor detail.

The stunts are  great and so is the scenery, and the only bad cinematics are in the ski  scenes when they show closeups from the front.  They look very fake, but  that must be forgiven for 1969 when it was made.  They did not have  Handicams and they certainly did not have Photoshop to blend projected  images as well as we can nowadays.  But they certainly do not distract  the excitement from some of the best snow scenes in 007 films.  The ski  chases which became trademark of James Bond started here.  It's funny  how in the book, Bond is very worried about skiing, since he's rusty  from not having skied for a long time.  The sled chase is excellent  also.

OHMSS is the only film where Bond drinks beer and gets  married.  Which brings me up to the next point, that Diana Riggs as  Tracy Draco (later Bond) happens to be perhaps the best Bond girl ever.   Without doubt, she is full of excitement and danger, not afraid to  strap on a couple of skis amid gunfire and avalanche.  Certainly not a  certain Natalya Simonova.  She is Bond's identical counterpart,  experienced but having gotten nothing out of relationships, and quite a  driver also.  She's the only Bond girl to really connect with the  audience, to make herself more important in comparison to Bond, but  that's part of the excellent novel on which the movie is based. Whatever  happens to her touches the audience more than whatever happens to Bond  (who, as we all know, will always somehow make it).  Her surprise  appearance at the Christmas celebration brightens up everything in an  instant, and the ending is probably the only genuinely sad scene in all  20 of the Bond films.

The opening scene is great in terms of  action, but I found it rather disappointing that for no apparent reason,  baddies want to kill Bond.  The book does it a lot better, and it  wouldn't have been much more difficult to do what the book did, although  that would not have provided the proper material to introduce the new  Bond with the immortal, "This never happened to the other fellow."  See,  how it is told in the novel is he spies on Tracy as she tries to drown  herself, and by this time Bond knows her.  He is spied on by Draco's men  who take him in, and the rest of the story is told in flashback, with a  car chase leading up to the casino scene and rendezvous, without all  this fighting mysterious bad guys in between.  But I thought the opening  sequence was quite good, even with the change-up.  It's just, with what  proof does Bond try to rescue Tracy?  She could have been just going  out for a swim.  It makes much more sense when he has already met Tracy.  Yet some of the additions to the movie are good, such as having Tracy  with Blofeld when SPECTRE headquarters is attacked.  It makes it that  much more personal.

This is my first review on IMDB, and OHMSS  gets a well-deserved 10 out of 10.  Bond in kilts, hypnosis, world  domination, and Blofeld's cat combine to make it a worthy experience.   Lazenby was not the best Bond, but perhaps the only real Bond.  OHMSS is  easily the best Bond film, and dare I say, the ONLY Bond film. 

- wontgetfooled622 

This leads to an implausible and less motivated reason for Bond to seek out Draco’s assistance for an all out assault on Blofeld’s base – especially since the novel has M sanctioning the attack rather than having his hands tied.

This has the unfortunate effect of keeping Bond’s personal initiative lower in addition to unwisely omitting Tracy from the narrative for a significant amount of time.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
A skiing scene. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Despite the overall polish to the novel’s film adaptation, there are a couple of missteps.

For instance, both the book and movie begin with Tracy’s beach suicide attempt; however, the book doesn’t present the event as randomly as the movie suggests. The novel spells out that not only has Bond met with Tracy but that they’ve already spent the night together (a scene that takes place later in the film). Guess the producers opted not to have the first woman George Lazenby slept with in the franchise attempt to kill herself afterword!

The novel’s approach to this opening is far superior.

Going by the movie, the scene plays out as not only coincidental but totally incomprehensible when you put all the pieces together.

Bond randomly follows a girl to a beach, stalks her with a rifle scope, somehow deduces that she is trying to commit suicide rather than a swim (which would have been supremely awkward if he was mistaken), rescues her, and then is attacked by her bodyguards (who really only had one job to do!)?

It could be implied that Bond had been tracking her due to her parental ties and possible Blofeld lead but the film later suggests otherwise.

While certainly not as egregious as Thunderball‘s pile of coincidences, this is certainly one of the weakest narrative points in the film.

 On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) in my opinion was the best film  of the series. I felt that George Lazenby was unfairly slagged by the  critics for his performance. He did the best that he could. His acting  fit very well for his character.

The direction moved the film at  an even pace. The action set pieces were impressive and Diana Rigg was  hot. Telly Savalas was excellent as Blofield, he gave the character a  suave touch. But you call tell that underneath his mack daddy act he was  all business, and violent business indeed.

Everything about this  movie had a cool aura to it. The stunt scenes were amazing (for it's  era) and the cinematography was beautifully shot. I had one bone to pick  with the film. The in jokes got a bit heavy handed. Other than that  it's a fun film. Too bad George Lazenby was demoted to B-Movie hell  after this flick (at least he got a three picture deal with Golden  Harvest where he made three classic action films).

I have to give this movie a high recommendation. If you love the James Bond series you'll enjoy this one. 

- Captain_Couth 

Outside of a few flaws here and there, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is very much one of the best in the series. Lazenby isn’t as bad as has been often ascribed and while it would have been interesting to see his continuation in further films had he not backed out, it is doubtful if the series as a whole would have continued as successfully as it did without him.

Though it’s a great shame that Connery didn’t get the opportunity to play Bond in this film, which saw a return to form to the more cloak and dagger thriller efforts of the earliest entries in the series, considering his fatigued performances in You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever this may have turned out for the best.

 On Her Majesty's Secret Service is directed by Peter Hunt and adapted to  screenplay by Richard Maibaum from the novel written by Ian Fleming. It  stars George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Ilse Steppat, Yuri  Borienko and Gabriele Ferzetti. Music is by John Barry and  cinematography by Michael Reed.

Bond 6 and 007 is obsessed with  locating SPECTRE supremo Ernst Stavro Blofeld. After rescuing beautiful  Countess Tracy di Vincenzo from suicide, this brings Bond into contact  with her father, Marc Ange Draco, who agrees to help Bond find Blofeld  in exchange for 007 courting Tracy. Blofeld is located in the  Switzerland Alps at Piz Gloria, where he is masterminding a fiendish  plot involving biological extinction of food group species'. Bond will  need to use all his wits to stop the plan from being executed, he also  has big matters of the heart to contend to as well...

Connery  gone, but not for good as it turned out, so into the tuxedo came George  Lazenby, an Australian model with no previous acting experience of note.  It would be Lazenby's only stint as 007, badly advised by those around  him that Bond had no future in the upcoming 70s, his head swelling with  ego by the day (something he readily admits and regrets), Lazenby  announced he would only be doing the one James Bond film. The legacy of  OHMSS is the most interesting in the whole Bond franchise, for where  once it was reviled and wrongly accused of being a flop, it now, over 40  years later, is regarded as being one of the finest entries in the  whole series. Yes it is still divisive, I have seen some fearful  arguments about its worth, but generations of critics and film makers  have come along to laud it as essential Bond and essential Fleming's  Bond at that.

Everything about OHMSS is different to what  Connery's Bond had become, the gadgets are gone and heaven forbid, Bond  got a heart and fell in love. He was a man, with real aggression, real  emotions and forced to use brain and brawn instead of mechanical  trickery. Changes in the production department, too, wasn't just about  Lazenby's appearance. Peter Hunt, previously the Bond film's editor,  directed his one and only Bond film, and Michael Reed on cinematography  also appears for the one and only time. New Bond, new era, but reviews  were mixed and in spite of making a profit of over $73 million  Worldwide, this was considerably down on previous films. The reviews  didn't help, with much scorn poured on Lazenby for not being Connery,  but really it's hard to imagine anyone coming in and not getting beat  with that particular stick! Box office take wasn't helped by the film's  length, at over 2 hours 10 minutes, this restricted the number of  showings in theatres, something that should be greatly noted.

Away  from Bond anyway, OHMSS is a stunning action thriller in its own right.  From the opening beach side fist fight, where uppercuts lift men off  their feet and drop kicks propel them backwards, to helicopter attacks,  bobsleigh pursuits (resplendent with punches and flinging bodies), ski  chases and a car chase in the middle of a stock car race: on ice!  There's enough pulse pumping action here to fill out two Bond movies.  But the Bond aspects are magnificent as well. Lazenby has wonderful  physicality and throws a mean punch, he cuts a fine figure of a man and  he's acting inexperience isn't a problem in the hands of the astute  Hunt. Lazenby is matched by Rigg as Tracy, the best Bond girl of them  all, she's no bimbo, she's tough (fighting off a guy with a broken  bottle), smart yet vulnerable, funny and heart achingly beautiful, her  interplay with Lazenby is brilliantly executed, so much so that when the  devastating finale arrives it has extra poignancy. A scene that closes  the film on a downbeat note and remains the most emotional scene ever  put into a Bond movie.

Savalas finally gives us a villain who can  compete with Bond on a physical level, making the fight between them an  evenly matched and believable one. He lacks Pleasance's sinister  fizzog, though the bald pate and Grecian looks marks Savalas out as an  imposing foe as well. The Swiss Alps setting is gorgeous, with Reed  capturing the scope magnificently, while some of his colour lensing in  the interiors soothe the eyes considerably. Barry's score is one of his  best, lush romantic strains accompany Tracy and James, operatic  overtures dart in and out of the Swiss scenery and the James Bond theme  is deftly woven into the action sequences. Louis Armstrong's beautiful  "We Have All The Time In The World" features prominently, perfectly  romantic and forever to be thought of as part of the Bond Universe.  Finally it's the great writing that gives us the best sequence involving  the trifecta of Bond, Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) and M (Bernard Lee). 5  minutes of class that gives Moneypenny an acknowledged importance in the  relationship between the two men in her life. It's just one of a number  of truly excellent scenes in the greatest Bond film of them all. 10/10 

- hitchcockthelegend 

With the best Blofeld, one of the strongest Bond girls, a great script, edge-of-your seat action and suspense, and possibly the best musical score in the series, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a winner providing a natural sense of pathos that the succeeding 007 films have rarely been able to reproduce.

Musings…

Did you know that this is the only fully Christmas-themed Bond film, complete with an original holiday song “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?” (a song that makes Disney‘s “It’s a Small World” seem macho by comparison)? Heck, if Die Hard can be considered a Christmas movie, why not a Bond film?

Who  knew that one of the grittiest Bond films of all time had a scene of  super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld decorating a Christmas tree?
Who knew that one of the grittiest Bond films of all time had a scene of super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld decorating a Christmas tree?

One odd note: as Tracy is revealing to her father that she is genuinely falling love with Bond, the scene keeps cutting to 007 ogling a playmate centerfold (a centerfold that he actually rips out and keeps!).

True love indeed!

While the shocking ending has been revered as one of the series’ most dramatic moments, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service provides another contender just minutes before.

Since Dr. No, the Bond films had established a hat-tossing trick that would introduce the flirty repertoire between 007 and Moneypenny.

 "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is a sadly under-appreciated Bond film  which is stylishly-directed and features an outstanding score, like  most of these early Bond films. Other than a silly self-referential line  in the teaser and some sappy romantic montages, "On Her Majesty's  Secret Service" is a thrilling adventure which sees Bond traveling to  the Swiss Alps to encounter villains and partake in dangerous action  sequences.

It sounds like a Bond film, alright, but this is  actually quite different from the formulaic films one would later expect  from the series, and the sort of film Bond was gravitating towards with  "Thunderball" and "You Only Live Twice". It certainly delivers on the  promise of sexual innuendo and lots of provocatively dressed women, but  it's a different sort of Bond in that it seems to be more straight-faced  and harsh, culminating in what is probably the saddest Bond ending.  It's also probably the closest to Fleming's version of Bond outside of  "Casino Royale", although "The Living Daylights" was also somewhat  similar to the literary Bond. As a Fleming fan it is nice to see the  Bond series take after the books. 

Lazenby, who has been  frequently criticized and is many people's least favorite Bond, actually  does a decent job of the role. He's nowhere near as good as Connery, of  course, but I thought that other than the scenes where he tried to  seriously emote, he carried the film with his charisma and physical  presence. I strongly believe he should have continued in the role.  Lazenby fits the content of the film, which is certainly far more down  to Earth than many other Bond films, and focuses heavily on hand-to-hand  combat in the action scenes, which is somewhat refreshing after the  overblown (entertaining, but seriously outrageous) action scenes in "You  Only Live Twice". This is a genuinely good script, with a solid plot,  good dialogue, and good characterization. 

It's not just a  throwaway action flick, it's an excellent espionage thriller with a  strong dramatic core, and as fun as things like "Goldfinger" certainly  are, it's nice to see one of these movies treat women as more than mere  sex objects, and it's interesting to see a Bond girl paired with a Bond  who reacts as a human would and not a cartoon character. Diana Rigg is  probably my favorite Bond girl. She gives a strong performance and is  helped by an excellent script which gives her a fair amount to do. 

By  staying closer to the source material, "On Her Majesty's Secret  Service" dramatically improves on its two predecessors and features some  of the best locations in the series, although I admit my familiarity  with the majority of the Swiss shooting locations gives me a nostalgic  view of things. "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is a strong contender  for the title of best Bond film. 

-  ametaphysicalshark 

As the wedded Bond and Tracy approach his Aston Martin DBS, he turns towards a teary-eyed Moneypenny and affectionately tosses her his hat.

It’s a quiet, beautiful moment between the two characters.

Perhaps a case of eerie foreshadowing, Lazenby’s gun-barrel sequence is the only one in the series where the dripping blood completely washes away Bond from the screen!

Conclusion

This is great escapist fun. It’s perfect for boys and men of all ages, and women like it too.

If you are bored, and want to kill some time, this movie will put you into a world and environment that is both exciting and refreshing. It’s a great romp into another universe.


I do hope that you enjoyed his article. I have others in my Movie Index here…

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Awesome Movies – A Boy and His Dog

“The year is 2024…”

A post-apocalyptic tale based on a novella by Harlan Ellison. A  boy communicates telepathically with his dog as they scavenge for food  and sex, and they stumble into an underground society where the old  society is preserved. The daughter of one of the leaders of the  community seduces and lures him below, where the citizens have become  unable to reproduce because of being underground so long. They use him  for impregnation purposes, and then plan to be rid of him.                 

-Ed Sutton

Here we have a movie where the chicks lay up with really thick foundation. Heh he. But, you know they really need to. It’s tough living in 2024.

Despite its ironically cutesy title (“A Boy and His Dog”) and a plot premise that might’ve come out of the Walt Disney archives (dog and boy share telepathic communication), this movie is about as darkly comic and acidic as anything Stanley Kubrick ever did (“Clockwork Orange”).

In the tradition of the great 70s dystopian/postapocalyptic scifis like “Clockwork Orange” (1971), “Rollerball” (1975), “THX-1138” (1971), “Soylent Green” (1973), “The Omega Man” (1971) and I’ll even throw in “The Stepford Wives” (1975), this movie has its appeal in a sort of minimalist presentation that presents a chillingly emotionless and sterile future.

The first half is something like Mr. Ed meets Mad Max, with its equal portions of chatty humor and dusty violence. But right in the first scene we realize that, despite the cute banter between boy & dog, there aren’t going to be many warm fuzzies. In the opening scene we learn that the boy (Don Johnson) is looking for female survivors so he can rape them.

At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
At parts, this movie gets so strange you can’t do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.

If you can swallow that highly disturbing premise, which the director makes no bones in presenting at the outset, then the rest should be an unsettlingly fun joyride all the way to the film’s very memorable punchline.

Things get really trippy in the 2nd half, and even though there’s minimal nudity, certain things happen which would make D.H. Lawrence blush (particularly involving a certain mechanical device attached to the male anatomy).

Definitely NOT a date movie, nor any sort of movie you’d watch with your parents or kids, “A Boy and His Dog” is really like a lost cousin of “A Clockwork Orange” or “Dr. Strangelove”.

Vic and his telepathically talking sheep dog, Blood, travel  post-apocalyptic Arizona.  Besides scavenging for food and sex, this  movie features old, terrible porn clips, evil Amish looking people with  clown makeup and possibly the greatest pun in movie history.  Blood  provides hilarious commentary to all Vic's endeavors, his comments while  Vic and a girl he finds have sex are particularly entertaining.  At  parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it,  which is definitely not a bad thing!  A Boy and His Dog is not  something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie  for late nights and all nerds.  A classic piece of science fiction. 

- emma505013 May 2004              

A Boy and His Dog is as surprising an effort that has ever come into the genre. It is a movie where imagination is pushed to its most cynical, rotten roots. It is a movie where a wealth of pitch black comedy awaits those who have no problem..

… with the repore between a slightly dim dude and a dog…

… a dog who seems to be part comic relief, part ‘get-your-head-out-of-your-ass’ voice of reason.


The Characters:  

  • Vic – Don Johnson! A solo who survives in the wastelands left after World War IV, he is constantly hunting for food and women.
  • Blood – Highly intelligent and telepathic mutt who pals around with Vic, in addition he has radar.
  • Quilla June – Brazen girl sent to lure Vic underground, though she wants to replace the ruling council by using the solo. Ends up as dog food.
  • Mr. Craddock – Jason Robards! Senior member of the ruling council and a very dour man.
  • Dr. Moore – Fairly boring member of the ruling council, though he has the best memory.
  • Mez – Female member of the council, not a pretty sight when laughing.
  • Gary, Richard, and Kenneth – Conspirators who follow Quilla’s lead, all three get their necks snapped.
  • Michael – Powerful robot which looks like a huge country bumpkin, if one of the ruling council points at you the wrong way he snaps your neck. Disassembled by Vic, but it appears the council has an entire warehouse full of replacements.
  • The Screamers – Apparently they are green glowing mutant elephants. (We do not see them, but they do glow green and sound like elephants.)

It should be way too ridiculous to be taken seriously as a piece of legitimate cinema, perhaps as some gonzo experiment that’s dug up by cultists for tongue-in-cheek purposes.

Yet, Jones’s film is, in its way, a weird landmark.

It’s a snapshot of a moment where the basic fronts of a 70s ‘exploitation’ flick (action, comedy, randomness of the 70s, nudity) are put through the perspective of a filmmaker with brains and talent to make it stick in your mind.

This disorderly pre-Mad Max spree is one of the most entertaining  post-apocalyptic future movies ever made. You know why? Because it has  no taste and in that, it has no inhibitions about the questions it asked  about what will happen after the world is spent by nuclear war. It asks  about how procreation will happen, how basic sexual feelings will be  satisfied, and other things. It has a genuinely original plot involving  telepathic dogs that are more literate than their human  masters,gunfights wherein the dogs direct their human masters, an entire  society underground that discerns who is apart of them or not by  wearing clownface at all times, and other crazy things.

It's a  wild, crazy, tasteless, sex-obsessed adventure that affords the viewer  one of the greatest luxuries of the movies, one that is rarely  completely fulfilled, which is unpredictability. It's so inventive in  every way that you don't know what happens next. Even the comical theme  song is so out of place for the genre of the film, but the theme of a  boy and his dog makes it suitable. A Boy and His Dog is not a great  film, but it's worth watching repeatedly and showing our friends.  Another buried treasure. 

- jzappa 

This is extremely low budget but not bad. The conversations between Vic and Blood are hilarious (and Blood’s face and movements totally match the dialogue).

I love the bit when Blood asks Vic to name the presidents (remember, this came out in 1975). He responds “Nixon, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy…” When they meet Quilla (about an hour in) the film falls apart. The sequences down under are, at first, scary but get quickly repetitious. But it leads up to a twist ending which is great.

This was issued in 1975 with a horribly exploitive ad campaign. It showed a woman lying down on the ground. You don’t see her face–just her body and all she’s wearing is a shirt and covering her breasts and other parts. Blood has a paw on her and a proud look on his face and Vic is standing beside him holding a gun! The implication is obvious and the rape aspect of this bothered a lot of people.

At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
At parts, this movie gets so strange you can’t do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.

The Plot

Armageddon is a difficult thing to rationalize, lending itself to outlandish scenes of violence and debauchery. The idea of a pubescent Don Johnson wandering the lonely wastelands guided by an intelligent and telepathic dog is a new one on me, but for some reason it all fits. Particularly so when the pooch in question has a bottomless stomach and spouts an endless stream of acidic criticism at Don Johnson. (Often complaining about Vic’s libido. A dog complaining about a teenage boy’s libido, I love it!)

The two lead an idyllic life, scavenging for food and water in the desolate landscape, but sometimes Blood is able to sniff out a female companion for Vic. For some odd reason all the women are in hiding, other than a ravenous and horny Don Johnson hunting them I can’t imagine why.

Well he ends up following Quilla into an underground fallout shelter, there the last “civilized” remnants of society are carrying on tradition. Country fairs, ice cream, and prizes for the best canned goods in addition to trapping fertile males from the surface to impregnate the young women.

At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
At parts, this movie gets so strange you can’t do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.

Before you start thinking this is not a bad deal let me explain. Vic is immobilized and his genitals attached to the equivalent of an electronic milking machine. (Aiiiieee!) In short succession the lucky brides are wed to him, presented with a bottle of special sauce, and sent on their way. Nearly incapacitated by blue balls the ferocious young man stages a retreat from the complex after being freed, taking Quilla with him. The first (And last might I add.) marital problem results when Vic discovers his faithful pooch waited outside the shelter’s entrance this entire time and is on the brink of starvation.

Zany and fun to watch on a rainy day, plus the girlfriend will never look at your faithful hound the same.

Things I learned from this movie:

  • Dogs would make excellent history professors.
  • Porn films used to suck, in a real bad way.
  • Men are confused and a little put off by women who want sex.
  • There is a fundamental difference between “hang” and “harangue.”
  • A secret and powerful society of mimes inhabits the underground areas of our planet.
  • Green plants grow nicely underground, even without artificial light.
  • Interrogating a dog is pretty darn difficult.
  • Nobody expects a crowbar in the middle of a bouquet.
  • If a very large, but slow moving, man is trying to break your neck I suggest running away.
  • Dogs make the worst puns.
 At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
At parts, this movie gets so strange you can’t do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
Surely  those who were looking for nothing more than what Hollywood usually  delivers when they invoke the words "science fiction" were disappointed,  because this movie resembles the usual horror or action film  masquerading as sci-fi very little. 

Its source material is a novella by  Harlan Ellison, a writer who's recognized by many in the sci-fi  community as a master on the same playing field of "psychological  sci-fi" as Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. 

From Ellison we get a very  dark tale about a strangely human dog and his boy. They live in a  post-apocalyptic wasteland where Phoenix Arizona used to be, and hunt  women and food with the same predatory zeal. But when Vic (or as the dog  calls him, Albert) is lured into a surreal society living in a large  bomb shelter, their friendship is threatened and Vic is almost forced to  become a sort of sexual machine for the good of the State.

Just  to run through some of the aspects of the film that I enjoyed, I really  liked Tim McIntire's voice work as the dog, perfectly crisp like a  cranky old man. How exactly the dog knows so much or is able to speak to  Vic is never really explained, but I think there's a clue in that Lou  (Jason Robards, Jr.) believes that Vic has spoken to a dog he encounters  in the shelter. 

That, along with the "Committee's" seeming obsession  with recounting facts and figures almanac-style, makes me believe that  the dog actually came from the shelter. Perhaps he was sent there to  "observe" Vic, as Lou tells him they have been doing for some time, and  he rebelled against their control. Like all good sci-fi the idea is  vaguely proposed but never explained.

Don Johnson did pretty good  work here, I mean it doesn't strike you as all that impressive at first  but when you think about the fact that he had to do so many scenes with  just this dog as his co-star it's a pretty tough act to pull off as  well as he did. 

Susanne Benton was decent in her role as well. I loved  when she tried to sweet-talk the dog, basically the same way that she  treated Vic. Vic seems confused about her intentions all the way up to  the end, which is excellent -- if he had figured her out completely then  the ending would just feel mean-spirited instead of humorous. 

As it is,  it's as if Vic believes he's making a sacrifice but the dog knows  better and turns it into a joke. By the way my girlfriend thought the  last line was too tacky but I thought it was perfect, it gave narrative  closure to the film as well as filling in those who might not have  understood the scene with the campfire.

Honestly the only  performance I wasn't crazy about was Jason Robards'. There's these great  scenes he gets to play with Alvy Moore ("Green Acres") and Helene  Winston (great laugh she's got... she didn't make a lot of movies but  strangely enough just this week I saw her in Curtis Harrington's "The  Killing Kind"). 

He just has no energy, I guess that's the way he wanted  to do it but it's annoying how he kind of mumbles through the dialog and  I just didn't feel that the dialog was supposed to be quite that  casual. 

Basically I just did not like the way he decided to play the  character, I didn't think it was scary at all. His android assistant,  like a twisted American Gothic, is pretty strange though. 

Plus I never  understood why everyone down there was wearing clown makeup. Was it the  idea of the forced smile? 

Anyway, I salute the film because I think it  was a brave decision to make it as it is and not to try to turn it into a  more conventional thing with romance or too much action. I think I can  see some influence from this movie on George Miller's "Road Warrior"  (though I was told that he claims he hadn't seen it), and definitely on  "Slip Stream" with Mark Hamill from the 80s. 

But this isn't really the  kind of movie that was made to fall into place inside the pantheon of  "sci-fi" anyway. It's a closer relative to "Electra-Glide in Blue" and  other films of the early 70s that explored the bitter end of "hippie"  idealism, the same trend that Hampton Fancher was trying to catch onto  when he wrote his first drafts of the film that eventually became "Blade  Runner." 

Frankly I can't remember seeing another sci-fi film that is so  close to the feel and ethos of the most transgressive and  anti-establishment sci-fi of the 1960s.                                       
              
- funkyfry 

Stuff to watch out for:

  • 1 min – You have to respect any film that starts off with nuclear war.
  • 8 mins – That is Phoenix? I see that it has not changed much…
  • 23 mins – Don Johnson apologizing to a dog ladies and gentlemen.
  • 25 mins – Good dog! Hehehehe!
  • 37 mins – Blood just managed to kill a full grown man who was armed with a rifle?
  • 45 mins – Sort of a canine teleprompter…
  • 46 mins – RANDOM GRATUITOUS BREAST SHOT!
  • 71 mins – Now, will Vic eat that or wipe it on his clothing?
  • 78 mins – The true colors of Quilla’s womanhood come to light.
  • 79 mins – That is about fifty yards I guess, easy shot with a rifle…

Conclusion

Watch the movie. It’s a great romp into 1970’s science fiction. And, as such, perfect for a nice lazy afternoon, or a boring evening at home.


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Is the American mainstream media narrative correct? That the Wuhan coronavirus isn’t anywhere as bad as the seasonal flu?

The virus is proving to be far more contagious than the flu, having  spread from 300 people in mid-January to more than 75,700 as of Thursday  morning. 

-CDC

That’s the American mainstream narrative; that the Wuhan coronavirus isn’t serious. It isn’t as bad as the flu, and the flu kills thousands of people each and every year. So that there is nothing to be worried about.

I strongly disagree. However, you shouldn’t take my word for it. You just need to watch some movies of what is going on in China today, and come to your own conclusions. Right?

Look, see, watch.

Think for yourself. Come to your own conclusions.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Video 1 – Almost too late.

You are not feeling well. So you finally decide to go to the hospital. You’ve been putting it off. It’s just a sore throat you thought. But, now you are feeling dizzy and getting tunnel vision. You should have went earlier. You know that now.

You look at your cell phone but the sweating in your hands make scrolling and pushing the buttons really difficult. So you ask your friend to help. They help you and get you in the car.

Just like the flu, right? Only the flu is much worse, right? The American media has all this pegged. Do not worry. The flu is far worse.

Here’s from USA Today…

 So far, there have been an estimated 19 million cases of flu,  180,000 hospitalizations and 10,000 deaths in the U.S. this influenza  season – including 68 children, according to the Centers for Disease  Control and Prevention.

Worldwide, seasonal  influenza epidemics cause 3 million to 5 million severe cases every year  and kill up to 650,000 people a year, according to the World Health  Organization.

"That just far surpasses the  amount of cases compared to the novel coronavirus," Colburn said. "If  you didn’t travel specifically to Wuhan, China, or have contact with a  person with suspected or known coronavirus, your chance of contracting  this is extremely low." 

-USA Today

Now, this advise and write-up seems rather silly when you look at it. If you were in China, and were to read this, you would shake your head in pure disbelief. Because what this news “report” is saying DOES NOT AGREE with what you are witnessing.

This is what the Chinese people are starting to notice…

Almost too late.

Video 2 – Registering people at a clinic.

So you are sitting there at the table talking with people, helping them with the paperwork and interviewing them… then you don’t feel so hot. Just like the Flu, right? You’ve seen policemen and doctors collapsing in front of you with the flu, right?

Well… actually no. You don’t see them collapsing. Nor do you ever see American police inside American emergency tent-clinics registering sick people, either. But somehow, yes somehow, the flu is worse.

You know the WHO data on the seasonal flu includes deaths from impoverished areas, where people live in primitive homes and huts, do not have adequate sanitation and medical care. And we are all supposed to believe that that data is representative of a modern, civilized and state-of-the-art nation.

It’s illusionary, and deceptive. As this propaganda from USA Today proves…

 There’s a deadly virus spreading from state to  state. It preys on the most vulnerable, striking the sick and the old  without mercy. In just the past few months, it has claimed the lives of at least 39 children.

The virus is influenza, and it poses a far greater threat to Americans than the coronavirus from China that has made headlines around the world.

“When  we think about the relative danger of this new coronavirus and  influenza, there’s just no comparison,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a  professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt  University Medical Center. “Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in  comparison. The risk is trivial.” 

-USA Today

Have you EVER seen ANY American policeman collapse from the flu in the line of duty?

Passing out at a clinic.

Video 3 – Another casualty at the hospital.

Don’t wait until the last moment. If you are not feeling well, rush to the hospital. You see this kind of stuff all the time with the flu, right? It’s common knowledge, right? Every flu is like this, Right?

Screenshot 7FEB20.
Screenshot 7FEB20.

While it is true that people with the flu try to get better at home, and serious cases are sent off to the hospital, no one ever collapses at the front door or in the car-port. But this is what is happening with this virus.

This kind of thing amazes me.

How can anyone see scenes like this, and still have the audacity to claim that the flu is worse? That it’s all just hype?

 Influenza rarely gets this sort of attention, even  though it kills more Americans each year than any other virus, said Dr.  Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics, molecular virology and  microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Influenza  has already sickened at least 13 million Americans this winter,  hospitalizing 120,000 and killing 6,600, according to the CDC. And flu  season hasn’t even peaked. In a bad year, the flu kills up to 61,000 Americans.

Worldwide, the flu causes up to 5 million cases of severe illness worldwide and kills up to 650,000 people every year, according to the World Health Organization.

And yet, Americans aren’t particularly concerned. 

 -USA Today 
Hospital problem.

People, this is what is called propaganda.

Now, propaganda only works when the audience is kept ignorant of the true state of affairs. If you control all the news, in all the various forms, you can control the actions of the people.

This is why the American propaganda controls three branches of news;

  • Mainstream news
  • Alt-left news.
  • Alt-right news.

And make no mistake, the Alt-Right news is just as manipulated as the mainstream media news is. What’s the Alt-Right news saying?

“This is a biological weapon. Stolen by China. Used on their own people for eugenics purposes.”

Yes. Absolute nonsense.

OK. Let’s go back to the mainstream news propaganda;

“This is a natural virus. Harmless, but with a scary name.”

Video 4 – Policeman getting sick at his station.

The problem with this virus is that it is stealthy and fast acting. You can get it, and then it sits inside your body making you super contagious, and you will feel just fine and wonderful. Then, it will hit you suddenly. You know…like the flu! NOT!

Sick people in China are handing over their phones to the police and medical teams. They use the GPS tracking information to compare who they might be in contact with. They are quickly discovering chance encounters with infected people, and that the virus “jumps” from the infected (but feeling normal) person in a matter of seconds.

Like this…

 Infected in 15 seconds while he bought vegetables at the market.
 GIC Team GICexpat 6FEB20

 A 56-year-old man in Ningbo was recently confirmed as a newly found case to have contracted the novel coronavirus after visiting a food market in the city’s Jiang Bei district on January 23. The confirmation was released to the public on February 4 by the district’s official social media account.

 What’s especially surprising about this case is how fast the man contracted the virus.

 Video surveillance revealed that it only took 15 seconds for him to be fully exposed, as neither he nor the 61-year-old woman standing next to him while picking out vegetables at the same stall were wearing protective masks.

 The woman is believed to have had contracted the virus a few days prior while attending a blessing ceremony.

 The man and woman, now both affected by the 2019-nCoV, did not know each other before crossing paths at the Shuang Dongfang market.

 Unfortunately, 19 people who subsequently came into close contact with the newly-infected 56-year-old patient have already shown positive signs of infection. All of them have been put under isolated medical observation for further examination. 

Meanwhile, the mainstream American news is still on the “don’t worry, be happy” narrative.

 Fewer than half of adults  got a flu shot last season, according to the CDC. Even among children,  who can be especially vulnerable to respiratory illnesses, only 62%  received the vaccine.

 If Americans aren’t afraid of the flu, perhaps that’s because they  are inured to yearly warnings. For them, the flu is old news. Yet  viruses named after foreign places — such as Ebola, Zika and Wuhan —  inspire terror. 

-KHN

And the Alt-Right conservative news is also parroting this more or less. They argue that this is all nonsense. That it isn’t all that contagious. Here’s from the Moon of Alabama blog…

... We had documented in an earlier post that neither the infectiousness nor the mortality of the novel Cornoavirus are especially severe. This New York Times graphic also explains that. 

The ONLY reason that the virus is being contained is because the entire fucking nation went DEFCON ONE.

This is not the flu…

Video 5 – Woman is not feeling well.

So you go outside to run an errand, then suddenly you don’t feel right. You feel dizzy. So you stand there puzzled, and then you pass out. Just like everyone does every flu season. Right?

That’s the American mainstream media narrative…

 Some doctors joke that the flu needs to be rebranded.

 “We should rename influenza; call it XZ-47 virus, or something  scarier,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center  at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

 Measles in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed 5,000 people in the past year — more than twice as many as Ebola. Yet UNICEF officials  have noted that the measles, which many Americans no longer fear, has  gotten little attention. Nearly all the measles victims were children  under 5. 

 -KHN 
Screenshot 7FEB20.
Screenshot 7FEB20.

Personally, I think that Selco said it best…

I know now that bad things can happen, and one more important thing, actually I believe it is most  important:  

I no longer believe government and authority, not at all.   

When they really doing their best to assure you that everything going   to be fine, you can be sure that something bad is happening. 

Video 6 – Truck driver passes out at the wheel.

My take on things is that this Wuhan corona virus has a potential to become Apocalyptic. I don't like what I am seeing now.
 
Posted by: blues | Feb  5 2020 16:36 utc  

Every flu season you always hear about truck drivers unable to drive because of the flu, right? They just pull over and die at the side of the highway, right? It’s an every year occurrence. Right?

 Some people may worry less about the flu because there’s a vaccine, whose protection has ranged from 19% to 60%  in recent years. Simply having the choice about whether or not to  receive a flu shot can give people an illusion of control, Schaffner  said.
 
But people often feel powerless to fight novel viruses. The fact that an airplane passenger spread SARS to other passengers and flight crew made people feel especially vulnerable. 

  -KHN  
The “Virus Hunter”, world renowned Columbia University Professor, Walter Ian Lipkin came to  China and met with Zhong NanShan, China’s lead epidemiologist in fight against #CoronaVirus.   

A few points are of significance:  

1. Lipkin said he spoke for hours with Zhong, and exchanged different views. But ultimately he trusts Zhong, because Zhong is a humanitarian.  

2. The infection ratio of the CoronaVirus is probably Underestimated. The fatality ratio is probably Overestimated.  

3. I repeat, America’s top scientist already came to China. Lipkin also fought alongside Zhong and China during SARS in 2003.  

These perspectives are very important! Please remember!  

Most sobering of all, 35-year-old Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, the CoronaVirus whistleblower who was charged with spreading rumors of virus last month, died of CoronaVirus himself hours earlier.  

Video 7 – Doctors pass out.

Ignoring the reported 2019-nCoV  #s for China (which are suspect) but taking into account reported #s only for countries outside  China (and assumed to be reasonably accurate), the calculated death  rate (1/212) as of this morning is (rounded up) .5%.  Hardly  Apocalyptic.
 
Posted by: Trisha | Feb  5 2020 17:02 utc 

And another thing about the flu is how it completely shuts down hospitals, and causes the doctors and nursing staff to pass out and stop working. Right? After all, the flu is far worse. Right?

 Hotez, who is working to develop vaccines against neglected diseases,  said he worries about unvaccinated children. Most kids who die from the  flu haven’t been immunized against it, he said. And many were previously healthy.

 “If you’re worried about your health, get your flu vaccination,” Hotez said. “It’s not too late.” 

   -KHN   

Video 8 – Police take you away.

This morning on Canadian TV: Worldwide infected 24,0000, death toll in China 450, let's say 500
 
Here https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00154-w
 
I found:
 
4 February 11:00 GMT — Cases in China pass 20,000, so 25,000 seems reasonable.
  
Then from CNN, 17 min ago (they are hardly conservative  with numbers):
 
What we're covering here
 
The virus: The coronavirus outbreak has killed 492 people worldwide, the  majority of which are in China, and infected more than 24,500 people  across 25 countries over 30 days.
 
Some math:
 
fatality percent:  500/24500*100 = 2.04 % => really high mortality rate, almost as much as common flu.
 
Population infected in China: 20000/16 billion =  0.002 % which proves that this is a horrible horrible unstoppable virus
 
In other countries a bit less, per this site https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/countries-confirmed-cases-coronavirus-200125070959786.html
 
Australia 14, Germany 12, India 3, Malaysia 12, Singapore 28, South  Korea 19, USA 11, Vietnam 10, Canada 4, Russia 2, UK 2, in total over 25  countries. 
 
Percent countries where at least 1 case discovered: 25/195 = 13%,  => really world wide spread. 

Of course, since the flu is so deadly, the police will come to your house if you have the flu. They will break down the door, and they will haul you away to the hospital for your own good. Right? That’s what always happens with the flu. Right?

Forcefully removed from their home.

Video 9 – Military biological decontamination units.

Screen shot of the graph of contaminated cases over time. 7FEB20.
Screen shot of the graph of contaminated cases over time. 7FEB20.
I'm not so sure that the Coronavirus is so innocuous as some would  have us think, simply because of the way China has reacted to it.  Why  quarantine tens of millions if it is no big deal?   Do you trust China  to provide accurate statistics if they are seeing a huge fatality rate  with a highly infections organism?
 
Zerohedge  has posted an article showing that there was a "mistaken" post showing  much more serious numbers, which indicated a 16% fatality rate.  With a  high R0 value and an airborne pathogen, that reportedly has shown  transmission via fomites (spreads through touching of contaminated  surfaces), this would be approach the lethality of the organism  portrayed in the movie "Contagion". 
 
Posted by: Perimetr | Feb  5 2020 17:32 utc | 15 

Of course, every flu season has the local national guard, and military forces performing vehicle sweeps and decontamination procedures using truck mounted machines and chemicals. They scrub the air and make sure that everyone is safe. It’s normal, every flu season, right?

Military mass decontamination of entire cities.

Video 10 – Containment centers.

The one thing that would scare China the most, I think, is if the  virus was infectious before symptoms appear. A virus able to spread  wholly undetected can be a nasty piece of work, specially one that's  seemingly a new addition to our species' ills, because we don't have any  innate immunity around for the time being - if things go badly, a big  chunk of the total population can get infected.
 
 Posted by: Clueless Joe | Feb  5 2020 17:44 utc | 19 

And, of course, the yearly flu containment centers are always active. Right? After all, since the flu is so much worse, and far more dangerous, there is nothing to worry about. Right?

The virus is contagious at least 5 days before symptoms appear, I  have read some reports that say 9-14 days before symptoms appear. Which  is why it is out of control. Taking temperatures to screen is like  pissing in the wind
 
Posted by: Per   | Feb  5 2020 17:48 utc | 22 

On the Alt-Right is the narrative that China is lying, and that hundreds of dead are piling up. Well, I’m not seeing that. Not first hand, not second hand. It’s all nonsense.

And people (!) nonsense = propaganda.

This situation is serious. No doubt. The Chinese are treating it as a DEFCON ONE event, and that shows how serious it is. However, it is contained and things are adjusting.

Here is a comment on MoA that speaks some sanity…

Now crematorium nonsense is back, only being applied to China. The  only people who buy this ridiculous story are ones who haven't ventured  into the sunlight from their parents' basement in years, and have for  certain never further from their trailer park than the local Walmart.  How else is it that anyone can imagine that the big problem with  covering up a large number of deaths is just the problem of disposing of  the bodies? What about family, friends, and coworkers of the deceased?  How about creditors? Who thinks they will just shrug and forget about it  if the person who owes them money disappears?
 
The only people who can seriously consider the narrative of cremating  bodies to hide deaths are ones who cannot conceptualize people on the  other side of the planet who speak a weird language as actual human  beings with full lives. Delusional Americans for whom the world is just  another TV show, and Chinese people are just extras in that show with no  backstory or future whom nobody would notice if they died unless their  body blocked the sidewalk or something.
 
If you, dear reader, are leaning towards believing the crematorium  narrative, ask yourself if simply disposing of the body would work at  erasing anyone you know, like one of your parents or children? Kinda  silly to think that would make you forget them, huh? 

So why imagine it  would work in Russia or China? 

Answer: The only way you could believe that is if your understanding of those places was just a shallow caricature; a cartoon.
 
Posted by: William Gruff | Feb  5 2020 21:19 utc | 65 
Containment barracks.

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More videos of China taken during the CNY Wuhan Coronavirus emergency part 2

Here are some more videos taken during the Chinese New Year Coronavirus emergency. At this time, and when these videos were taken, the Chinese government pretty much locked down most cities, and placed travel restrictions everywhere else. Everyone must wear a mask, and everyone must stay indoors unless it is an absolute emergency and they NEED to get out.

... These are the same type of precautions recommended during the cold and  flu season. I only began wearing a mask after the lockdown started Jan  23. Right now, I am following the public health recommendations, and  staying in my apartment as much as possible. Currently I am trying to  figure out if I can work remotely, reading papers at home, even though  face-to-face is much more effective. A health hotline has been set up so  that foreigners at our lab can get medical help, if necessary. The  biggest problem is eating. 

...

 I went to the grocery store today, and everything was orderly. There  were no shortages; but then again, I was there early and a line was  forming at the vegetables.

  In this health emergency, it is everybody's responsibility to protect  others and ourselves. I do not want to spread the disease and I do not  want to catch what other people have. Currently you cannot drive. There  is no public transportation. My friends are scattered across Wuhan, and  right now, all over China and the world, since it was Spring Festival.  The only way to get in contact is by phone and the messaging tools like  WeChat and QQ. The social isolation I hope will slow the spread of the  coronavirus, but some people are trying to run away from it.

  The US government airlifted a group of Americans out of the city. I  decided to stay. I have a job here. I have friends here. It is a  commitment and a contract. This thing will pass. I really like the  street I live on. I like the food. I like hot and dry noodles. I like  the Wuchang fish. I like the atmosphere in Wuhan, and people are down to  earth. I walk down the streets and go to shops. When you live somewhere  awhile, you become part of the community; it does not matter if you are  a foreigner or not. I will continue to stay in isolation until the  outbreak is over, and I will go back to work.
  
-Stephen C. McClure spoke with Li Lei. 

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Video 1 – Construction of a hospital in ten days.

The Chinese do not mess around. They have decided to build two hospitals in Wuhan to handle patients, and they are making it happen. It is absolutely astounding.

 As two makeshift hospitals are being constructed in Wuhan, Hubei  province, in a bid to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus,  ministry-level government departments, organizations, businesses and  people from all walks of life are lending a helping hand to the  projects.

 Central government subsidies will mainly be used to buy medical  equipment to ensure concentrated treatment for infected patients,  according to the National Development and Reform Commission.

 More than 2,000 workers from five design and construction units-the  China Institute of Architectural Design and Research, the China  Construction Third Bureau, Wuhan Hanyang Municipal Construction Group,  Wuhan Construction Group, and Wuhan Airport Development Group-have  participated in the Huoshenshan Hospital project, according to China  Business Journal.

 Meanwhile, Xinhua News Agency has reported that the Wuhan bureau of  State Grid Corp, the national electricity provider, has already  installed substations and laid cables at the construction site.

 A Sinopec Group gas station near the site is providing free services  for all vehicles carrying building materials. The company has also  provided 16,500 liters of diesel fuel and 1,000 cans of lubricating oil  to back up construction work.

 Communication companies, including China Telecom Corp, have built 5G  base stations to ensure easy contact between the project's engineers and  will lay cables for normal digital communications once the temporary  hospitals begin operations.

 Employees of an environmental technology research company in Beijing  have provided services to prevent wastewater seepage during the  construction process.

 Meanwhile, officials in Pingyu county, Henan province, have sent an  impermeable membrane, which had been intended for a landfill project, to  the construction site. 

 - Donations and volunteers flood sites in Wuhan  
A livestream shows trucks, earthmoving equipment and building work in full swing at the construction site of two special hospitals in Wuhan, Hubei province, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak.
A livestream shows trucks, earthmoving equipment and building work in full swing at the construction site of two special hospitals in Wuhan, Hubei province, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Video 2 – Scanning people boarding a bus.

Under the current state of emergency everyone must wear masks and be constantly scanned for fever. Here we see people being scanned prior to boarding a bus.

Video 3 – Community unloads hospital supplies for the new hospital.

As the new hospitals are going up, supplies are being made and brought in. It’s not just masks and gowns. It’s complete operating rooms, beds, and general hospital equipment. Everything is being replicated, from the operating room to the lowest janitor gear.

  On Sunday night, a logistics company in Hubei transported 240 metric tons of steel to the site.

 A company in Guangdong province, which produces medical ventilators,  donated 144 machines worth 175,000 yuan ($25,000) to Huoshenshan  Hospital on Monday.

 In addition to construction materials, food and electrical appliances have also been donated by businesses across the country.

 China Mengniu Dairy Co said it had provided milk worth 8 million yuan  to construction workers and frontline medical employees. 
Meanwhile,  Midea Group, an electrical appliances manufacturer, donated more than  550 air conditioners to the Huoshenshan project and sent 100 employees  to install the machines, according to the company's social media  account.

 On Sunday, the new facilities also received 1,100 televisions and 400  air purifiers from Skyworth Digital Technology Co. The televisions will  allow voice calls between doctors and patients, thus lowering the  cross-infection risk, according to Beijing News.
 Meanwhile, a group of military veterans from across the nation volunteered to help the Huoshenshan Hospital project.

 Jiang Jing, a former member of the People's Liberation Army Air Force, journeyed to Wuhan from Zhanjiang, Guangdong province.

 "I am responsible for managing warehouse resources, handing out  medical supplies including masks and raincoats, and arranging meals for  construction workers," he said.

 Retired soldier Wang Guohui drove more than 300 kilometers from  Shenqiu county, Henan, to bring 4 metric tons of homegrown vegetables to  the workers.

 "The Wuhan people are united and striving to conquer the enemy. I  want to make my own tiny contribution. I only felt at peace when I had  brought the vegetables in person," said Wang, when he arrived at 9 pm on  Jan 24, Lunar New Year's Eve.

 Liu Yingjie, a construction worker from Shanxi province, drove 800 km  to the site with some colleagues. After a break of just four hours, the  men started work installing the prefabricated wards.

 "Given the acute situation, we must finish the project as quickly as  possible so patients can be treated," Liu said, adding that his father  led a team of construction workers during a renovation project after the  2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan province. 

- Donations and volunteers flood sites in Wuhan 

Video 4 – Roadblock medical scan.

There are roadblocks everywhere. Here’s a typical one. You must get the scan or you will be apprehended. They are making sure that sick people are contained. Now this virus is really tricky in that you can be totally healthy and still infect people. But, all things considered, they are doing an admirable job keeping the sick isolated from the general population.

 It's 4 am on Monday when my colleague, Yi Bingkun, and I finished the  night shift. It's the 50th hour since we arrived in Wuhan to help fight  against the novel coronavirus. The situation here is far more grievous  than what we imagined, with more suspected cases and an acute shortage  of medical staff. We are here to bring them hope, but it seems that we  assume more responsibilities.
  The ward was almost overloaded during our first night shift and we  continued to receive more patients. My colleague and I plunged into work  without delay after wearing protective suits.

  However, an emergency occurred when a patient went into sudden  cardiac arrest when we had just changed shifts. Kun (my colleague Yi  Bingkun's nickname) rushed to give chest compressions to the patient and  I called a doctor for help.

  The patient, unfortunately, died of severe illness after all rescue  measures failed. The patient's family, however, sent their gratitude to  us. Their every single "Thank you" makes me feel warm and that the  efforts we've made are worthwhile. 

- Nurse battles coronavirus on the frontline 

Video 5 – Disinfecting vehicles.

Military protocols are being used in the disinfection of vehicles, gear and equipment. These trucks did not appear out of the blue. The PLA has a complete army of these vehicle to handle nation-wide biological warfare attacks.

Video 6 – Police roadblock

Here is another police roadblock. It’s pretty common and it is more or less the same set up when I left my relatives house to go to the airport.

Video 7 – Can only ride the bus wearing a mask.

If you do not wear a mask you will not be permitted to be in public. You must wear masks in public. As this is a super contagious disease.

High Contagiousness 

Indeed, if we  compare how SARS spread out in 2002-2003, it is hard not to notice how  much more contagious nCoV-2019 is compared to SARS. 

It took SARS three  months to reach to the point of 300 cases between November 2002 and  February 2003. In the climax of SARS, the daily number of newly  registered cases in Mainland China never exceeded 200 cases. 

In  comparison, on 28th January 2020 alone, 1459 new cases of nCoV-2019 were  reported nationwide, including 315 cases in Wuhan. In just a week  between 20-28 January, the number of patients with nCoV-2019 exceeded  the number of all SARS patients confirmed in Mainland China between  2002-2004! 

Mainland China had just 5327 cases of SARS, but nCoV-2019  already had 5974 registered cases by the end of January 28th, 2020. 

- Coronavirus: Summary to date & insights  

Video 8 – Throwing away all the food.

When the government told everyone that they had to stay inside… not only in Wuhan, but in the entire nation, so many events were canceled. Not just the millions of parties and dinners, but also weddings and other oddball and religious celebrations. All the restaurants are suffering. Here we have all the meals in a big banquet being thrown away because the event was canceled.

Given the decorations, it appears to be a wedding party.

Video 9 – Not wearing a face mask.

Some people just don’t “get it”. You must wear a face mask and you must avoid people. You only go out if it is an emergency. But, some people, they think that they can flaunt the rule of law and do as they please. Here we have a dimwit woman demanding to do as she pleases and she doesn’t care if she lives of dies.

Video 10 – Fumigating the city.

Here we have a typical fumigation team. All the cities are being disinfected and fumigated. No exceptions. Everyone is assisting and working on this most terrible issue and event.

Continued-graphic-arrow

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Videos regarding the 2020 Coronavirus and how the Chinese residents coped.

This post is very top-heavy with videos that were taken at the start of the 2020 Chinese New Year at the same time that the Coronavirus outbreak. As I post this, all the roads have roadblocks and police in hazmat suits are performing 100% checks for the illness. It’s a frightening and terrifying time.

At the time that this is posted, you are twice as likely to die from this illness than to recover from it.

At the time that this is posted, you are twice as likely to die from this illness than to recover from it.
At the time that this is posted, you are twice as likely to die from this illness than to recover from it.

Everyone is terrified of this. We have seen videos of people collapsing and all sorts of bad things with this virus. It is very dangerous, and extremely lethal.

Luckily, the Chinese government has stepped in and has taken proactive and rapid action. It is really quite astounding what they have put in place. I dare say that America could never begin to match this kind of response. Already, there is a change in the trajectory of the vector of this most serious illness.

Here we have some videos that I have collected off from Chinese social media. They all tell a story.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

All roads are blocked. Everyone is staying home and all holiday festivities are shut down. No one is going out, having fun or being social in any way. Everyone is hiding inside their homes.

Roadblock

These roadblocks are everywhere. Not only in Wuhan. They are nation-wide. All cities have roadblocks, and there are police at all the train and bus stations, not to mention airports, bridges, ferries and all hubs of transport.

Most are manned by police and local government security agents. Further, housing has the private security that are naturally “deputized” as an arm of the local police and they are also conducting strong security checks and monitoring.

The military are also present. They, in their various forms, are helping in the control of population, the distribution of supplies and monitoring of traffic. Everything is all quite ordered. It’s all very organized.

Wuhan virus roadblock.

China is building two new complete hospitals in Wuhan to handle the emergency.

The first hospital is to be completed in ten days. The second will be completed shortly afterwards. These two, concrete and steel, full-capability hospitals will augment the tent-city military hospitals that are positioned in and around Wuhan.

The Chinese have mobilized and hospital equipment and gear are in route and there are no excuses. Truckloads, boat-loads, and plane-loads of supplies to equip these hospitals are in route and on the way to staff these new constructions.

Mobilized construction of a new Wuhan hospital.

A patient recovers

This is a particularly lethal virus. However, people can fight it naturally and recover. The ratio right now is that two people die for ever one that recovers. However, there is hope that a cure and inoculation can be developed quickly. In the meantime, the sick are told to fight it off. The old, the feeble and the sick cannot do so well, and thus they die.

In fact, one patient – a wealthy man in Wuhan, left the hospital and told the staff that he will not stay in the hospital to wait to die. So he took off and sped away. The police are right now trying to find him. The mere presence of him in a room with you will contaminate everyone around him. It’s like a scene from one of those horror / science fiction movies.

A patient recovers.

Hospital workers are working around the clock to contain the illness.

I have seen video after video of tied and passed out hospital workers. They are over-extended and many have been working for 72 hours straight with no breaks. Some, like this gal inject solutions to keep them going through this prolonged emergency.

Hospital workers keeping on the job.

Instruction videos are all over the internet on how to use and wear a mask.

You can expect this, but it’s pretty stunning. The workers, and the staff are taking it on themselves, on their personal accounts, to teach others how to hand this emergency. They are doing so as Rufus-style heroes and heroines. This is really wonderful, and for once, a good use for social media.

Here we have an instructional video on how to properly wear a face mask.

How to wear a face mask.

Individual towns are erecting roadblocks and stopping everyone from going in or out.

You know, it’s not just only the local governments that are placing roadblocks. The citizens and individuals within the rural communities and housing communities within the cities that are doing so as well. These small groups have set up these road blocks and are keeping everyone out of their communities.

Not everyone agrees with the government in staying home. Additionally, there are stubborn old people, poor people who are isolated and outside the major communication channels and just “hard-headed” fools that want to do their own thing.

No one is being permitted in or out of these communities. How do I know? I’ve got all my relatives locked inside at least three different communities.

Local community roadblock.

People are handing out free face masks.

Heroes come in different sizes and shapes. All the stores are sold out of face masks. But some people have supplies of them. You know, like factories, like clinics, like paint supply stores. The workers and the owners are then taking their stock and handing them out to others. It’s a kind gesture and a very important thing to do during this emergency.

Handing out free face-masks.

Police and militia are going up and down the streets telling everyone to stay inside.

Instead of fireworks exploding for hours on end, the streets are eerily quiet. Instead, troops of public service officials are marching up and down the streets with bullhorns. They are announcing people to stay inside their houses and not to go out. They are telling them to keep clean and avoid crowds. They are doing this because all taxi, DD, public transportation and buses are shut down.

These are the “town criers” for people who are not tech-savvy and monitoring the radio, the television, the internet, and the social media.

Town criers announcing to stay inside the house.

Roadblock inspection on a major highway.

All of the traffic on the major highways are pulled over and go through inspection. They are monitoring everyone for fever and making sure that ill or sick people are not out and about.

This is the best that they can do, because (as we know now) the incubation period can be from 0 to 14 days, and the person will not be aware that they are sick, but they will be high contagious. So the best thing to do is to secure everyone inside their own individual homes and not be out and about.

Highway roadblock and inspection.

Hospitals are overflowing.

What do you do when a large percentage of a city of 14 million people are sick? The hospitals are overcrowded, and the staff overworked.

Luckily the Chinese military has stepped in and they have clinics in tent cities all over Wuhan. Here, we have shipping container operating rooms, and other military systems used with great effect to help.

Here’s what it’s like. Can you imagine this in say New York City or Chicago?

Hospitals are over-flowing.

Communities are taking matters into their own hands.

Some communities will not take no for an answer, and they have established local militia to guard the communities to keep them in quarantine. These militias are quite different from American militias. Where you would find people toting AR-15, and AK-47 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, wearing camouflage clothing, and wearing Alice-harnesses. In China, they would wear something very visible to identify themselves as militia, and they would be armed with very sharp and lethal cutlery. And, please, make no mistake… they know how to use them.

Local militia in China.

Special equipment and care must be taken.

This novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), is so lethal and so contagious that it strains the most commonly available hospital equipment. Workers must wear special bio-hazard suits to work with it and handle the patients.

The different levels of hazmat suits.
The different levels of hazmat suits.

As a result, the Chinese government has all the manufacturers working overtime, 24-7, non-stop to make new suits, new masks, new respiratory systems, and rapidly produce more medical supplies. There are tons of videos of workers making these articles of clothing, face masks and other medical and emergency gear.

Now, rather than post those videos, here’s a video showing just the kind of special gear that the hospitals need to utilize to fight this viral agent.

Hospital staff in full protection gear.

Hospitals must equip their staff with gear that is classified as Biosafety level four. This is the kind of gear that hospital workers require to use at this time.

What are Biosafety Levels (BSLs)?

There are four biosafety levels. Each level has specific controls for  containment of microbes and biological agents. The primary risks that  determine levels of containment are infectivity, severity of disease,  transmissibility, and the nature of the work conducted. Origin of the  microbe, or the agent in question, and the route of exposure are also important. 

-CDC

“BSL-4 builds upon the containment requirements of BSL-3 and is the highest level of biological safety. There are a small number of BSL-4 labs in the United States and around the world. The microbes in a BSL-4 lab are dangerous and exotic, posing a high risk of aerosol-transmitted infections. Infections caused by these microbes are frequently fatal and without treatment or vaccines. Two examples of microbes worked with in a BSL-4 laboratory include Ebola and Marburg viruses. “

Biosafety level four. This is the kind of gear that hospital workers require to use at this time.
Biosafety level four. This is the kind of gear that hospital workers require to use at this time.

Military are mobilized.

Not well reported outside of China, is the fact that the Chinese have fully mobilized their military.

They are not only treating this emergency as a precursor to a pandemic. But, and note-worthy, they are treating it as a WMD… a biological attack and have mobilized their entire military force to contain it.

Biological warfare (BW)—also known as germ warfare—is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi with the intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war. Biological weapons (often termed "bio-weapons", "biological threat agents", or "bio-agents") are living organisms or replicating entities (viruses, which are not universally considered "alive") that reproduce or replicate within their host victims. Entomological (insect) warfare is also considered a type of biological weapon. This type of warfare is distinct from nuclear warfare and chemical warfare, which together with biological warfare make up NBC, the military initialism for nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare using weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). None of these are considered conventional weapons, which are deployed primarily for their explosive, kinetic, or incendiary potential. 

- Wikipedia 
The military are mobilized.
A biological attack is the intentional release of a pathogen (disease causing agent) or biotoxin (poisonous substance produced by a living organism) against humans, plants, or animals. An attack against people could be used to cause illness, death, fear, societal disruption, and economic damage. 

- Biological Attack Fact Sheet | Homeland Security 

Medical Staff are divided into “task groups” all lead by a viral specialist.

The Chinese have organized trained experts in both viral agents, and biological warfare. These are health professionals that have been dispatched to all the hospitals in all of the cities. They are the experts that will guide and lead the individual hospitals through this emergency. They know what to do, how to handle things, and the proper actions to take.

Experts arrive at a hospital.

Airplane scanning of passengers.

Of course you are constantly being scanned to see if you have a fever or are showing any sign of contamination by this viral agent. Here is a video of some staff checking the patients on board a plane.

That’s about it for now. I’ll post more videos when I get a moment. Please allow these videos to download. They are certainly interesting and provides you with a better idea of what is going on in China, compared to what CNN and FOX can provide.


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Video snapshots of China; uncategorized, just some cool stuff.

As 2019 year of the pig is drawing to a close, and the 2020 year of the rat is starting to happen, I would like to post some videos of China that are just cool, interesting, or special in one way or the other. These videos are unsorted, and each one has a brief narrative describing what it’s all about. Some involve heroes, like our good friend Rufus, while others are just WTF. Please, all these are just fun postings. Please kindly enjoy.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Video 1 – Child Labor in China.

You know, I have been working in manufacturing for decades, and I have hardly ever saw a child working in China. Though, if you believe the British media, it is commonplace. It’s just another reason to bash the Chinese. Those dastardly bad Chinese…

Well, you can see children from time to time, working. They do so alongside their parents. They do so helping the family in the family business. And, I’ll tell you what, when I see it, it makes me feel glad. For there is nothing better than spending time with your family and working together so the family flourishes.

Here’s a video of child labor in China…

Child labor inside of China.

Video 2 – Traditional Family Life

In the next video, we have a son bringing his girlfriend to his father to introduce them. The father, being widowed, makes a meal for them. But it’s pretty modest. The girl, looks it over, and shows her disapproval.

But you see, China is a traditional nation with traditional values…

So what does she do? She goes into the kitchen and cooks. She explains that she needs to take care of the family and do her part so that everyone can be healthy and happy.

Traditional families are not something out of the “Handmaids Tale”, it’s about roles and shared responsibilities. It’s about respect and care and concern. It’s not “every man fend for himself” that is the norm in America today.

Check it out…

Son brings girlfriend to his father.

Video 3 – The importance of mass transit

Mass transit can be found in almost all the major cities. This includes America, the EU, Russia and China. Where China differs from America, is that there are many levels of public transport. Often there are buses, rentals, scooters, trains, monorails, subways, and everything in between. The only thing missing are horses.

In the USA, mass transit is generally limited to buses (unless you are in a very big city).

This following video clearly shows, in a few seconds, why mass transit is preferable to privately owned automobiles in a Chinese city…

Mass transit in China.

Video 4 – Girl proposes

In a traditional nation, everyone has roles. But China, being Chinese (of course), has traditions with “Chinese characteristics”. In the Chinese environment, the woman and the man both can reverse roles.

So instead of the man working and the woman staying home to tend the family, it can be reversed. Or, switched from time to time, or shared with shared responsibilities. It all depends on the family.

Here is a cute video. A girl proposes to the boy she wants to marry. I personally think that it is great.

Girl proposes to a boy.

Video 5 – Tough Chinese girl

Yeah, I have to admit that I love Chinese girls and women. I love the beauty, the intelligence, and the work ethic. I also greatly admire their toughness. They are like cats. They ain’t afraid of shit.

Don’t fuck with them.

Tough little girl.

Video 6 – Strangers rescue an infant locked inside a hot car.

We think that we can lock an infant inside a car, that it would be safe. Sure, it’s hot and sunny out, but we left the engine running and the air conditioning on. You’ll only be gone for twenty minutes… more or less. What could go wrong?

You could be delayed and the car can automatically shut off.

That’s what.

Here we have strangers trying to rescue an infant from a steamy hot car… on a beach parking lot… in 100 degree weather. The baby is passed out and unresponsive.

What would you do? What would Rufus the hero do?

Rescue of an infant from a hot car.

Video 7 – Helping a woman under attack.

These stories of heroes and “Rufus” are my favorites, and I just cannot let a day go by without posting one or two of them. Here is another video. In this video a woman is under attack by a man. Lucky for her other men, all around her, come to her rescue and subdues the assailant.

You’d never see this in the United States, where it is customary to allow the crime to happen and you don’t get involved. Least you be sued by the person, or arrested by the police, not to mention fired from your job for bad behavior.

Watch these heroes spring into action…

Helping a woman in distress.

Video 8 – This kid can’t drive fer shit!

Here’s a kind of funny video. This kid somehow thinks that the purpose of roads are to drive upon. So, what does he do? Well he hops on his little scooter and takes to the streets. In the process, he crashes into just about every car around. Yikes!

Can’t drive for shit.

Video 9 – Beautiful Chinese girls.

Here’s a video showing the ideal Chinese idea of beauty. Personally, I find all these ladies quite attractive. Now, aren’t they just lovely?

Beautiful Chinese girls.

Video 10 – Uyghur Muslim arrested for killing Chinese school children in Xinjiang.

This video is very interesting, but it needs to be seen. This is an interview with an Uyghur Muslim in prison. He discusses why he killed and hurt others, and his expectations of going to live in paradise with seventy black-eyed virgins.

According to the American mainstream propaganda, and the alt-right propaganda machine, there are millions of Muslims in China under detention and unfairly arrested.

Well, it’s a big ol’ lie, and I have covered this elsewhere.

Uyghurs in Xinjiang

One of the reasons why the Western press can get away with such lies is because the Chinese do not like to promote the violent acts. They believe that it should be kept hidden from the general populace. That is to day, it is the business of the government to protect the people from the acts of barbarism and savage behaviors of these individuals.

In 2019, the Chinese government began releasing some of the videos depicting why these people are in prison. This one in particular is very interesting. He’s one of the men that the NED propaganda machine is promoting as an “innocent” Muslim that is unfairly locked up. China, in response, posted videos of his terror spree, and his confession.

Funny how the American (and British) media ignores the retort.

The individual shown in the video is one of the people that is trying to be released to America and claiming that the Chinese are being too brutal to him. Yea. Right. What about the brutality that he unleashed on the poor fella in the video?

As if the brutality that he did in the first few frames of the movie isn’t brutal enough…

Uyghur Muslim in detention in China.

Yeah. That was awful.

Video 11 – Elephant rescues a downing man.

Meanwhile in Thailand, watch how this pachyderm comes to the rescue of a man being carried away by monsoon floodwaters. You go my large enormous friend! It’s a feel-good video to make up for the nasty Uyghur Muslim business preceding it.

Elephant rescues a downing man.

Video 12 – Cute girls meets cute boy.

Life is too short not to spend some time on cute things. I like this video. It’s cute and is a way for one girl to get a date for her girlfriend. Granted that it might not work every time, but in this video it works. And you know what? Maybe that’s all that matters. Eh?

Cute match-up.

Video 13 – The “real deal” sings in a restaurant.

Imagine that you are minding your own business and enjoying a nice meal in Pizza Hut. Then sitting right next to you is a famous actor who comes up to you and starts talking. Like Robert De Niro or Tom Hanks. What would you do?

In China, many restaurants have a microphone where you can sing. So, if the mood strikes, a person can belt out one or two of their favorite songs. Actually, many times they are actually quite good. The Chinese view singing as a popular pastime and something worthy of doing.

Check out this video. It’s the real deal you all.

Real Deal.

Video 14 – Rescue of a trapped cat under the road.

Here we have a cat, or a cat with a litter of kittens that is trapped inside a narrow storm drain crevice. The entire community gets together to rescue the kitty. It’s a great story and full of feel-good vibes. I hope you all like it and enjoy it as much as I have.

Save the kitty!

Video 15 – Happy CNY you all.

I am posting this post on Chinese New Years eve. That is 24JAN20. The year of the Pig is ending and it is going into the year of the rat. Already my family, my friends, my business colleagues are all eating these never-ending enormous banquets, drinking and quaffing enormous types of alcoholic beverages and passing out thick “red envelopes” of money to each other. It’s a great time and very festive.

Fireworks are exploding all around the house to shake away and scare away the bad “unseen” spirits from affecting our life and future prospects. The kids are playing and having fun, and KTV parties are very common. Everyone is posing their fun on Wechat and Tictok, and it’s a great time.

The only thing different this year is that the sickness outbreak in Wuhan has everyone wearing masks. Heck, even I wore a mask to the airport. LOL! (They are sold out everywhere. Don’t you know.)

Have a wonderful new year everyone. Let’s have a great prosperous years, and great times with our friends and families! Meanwhile, this is what my CNY looks like…

Enjoy!

CNY KTV party.

I hope you all enjoyed this. Have a great and wonderful new year!

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Why America is unable to shake off the grip of the oligarchy that controls it, a great video that explains it all.

Now that President Trump has released almost all of the documentation related to the President Kennedy murder, a full picture surfaces. It’s an ugly one, indeed. We now know in full detail how the President was assassinated, who the people were who participated in it, who covered it up, and the motivations behind it. It’s very interesting, but a very long study because it touches on a number of principles that Americans are uncomfortable with…

  • The wealthy guard their money and power ruthlessly.
  • They have complete control of the American media.
  • They have complete control of the American police.
  • They have complete control of the American military.
  • They treat Americans as farm animals (cash cows).
  • They kill anyone that stands in their way.

The following video is a long one, but is very complete. Watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYyw8mDDqPE&feature=youtu.be

We can now see the entire state of affairs about what our nation is, what is actually stands for and how it actually operates. So when I speak about the “oligarchy”, it should be taken to mean…

Oligarchy = Secret American Government

And, as such… it has affected everything. From technology acquisition (MAJestic), to geopolitical interactions, to society. Our world, our nation, the life that we live is what has been created for us by this oligarchy.

Yupper.

Let that sink in.

There will be a reset of sorts within America, but how it will “play out” and evolve is anyone’s guess. What you can expect is that the oligarchy will not relinquish their control or power easily. That a return to a more democratic representative, or republican form of government is impossible without serious conflict. And, that there will be a period of discomfort during this adjustment period.

I do NOT know how it will evolve. Certainly there are both human and “other” elements that favor the status quo, and they will permit an enormous amount of strife, as long as they can control it’s outcome and utility.

Those that control the United States are far too powerful, too dangerous, and too ruthless for removal. As such, the individual must plan accordingly.


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Be the Rufus; more examples of personal heroism in China. Part 21.

More examples of personal heroism in China. This is part twenty one.

Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full experience.

Video 1 – Man has a seizure

Here’s a guy that is having a seizure while waiting for an elevator. What would you do if you saw this happening? Would you just go your merry way and do nothing, or would you try to get help or yet… try to him him yourself? What would YOU do?

Video 2 – Man threatens to send baby into the river.

Stresses of life can get to you and can make you do strange and dangerous things. Here, we have this man with a young child threatening to jump into the river. If he jumps both would die. He holds his young daughter. What to do…?

Video 3 – Scooter accident.

Yes there is an accident and the rest of the world moves on. No one cares. But then there is a Rufus… a hero that comes tot he rescue. The guy is not moving. The accident is in the middle of the road and this intersection is a big intersection. Maybe six lanes or larger. What would you do?

Video 4 – Old man in crisis.

There are so many old people in China. Many of them are in their late 80’s and 90’s. They are moving about and buying groceries and such, but they often have a difficult time with things. Many times they need help. Will you be the Rufus and help them?

Video 5 – Muslim terrorist has hostage in elementary school.

Here we have a Muslim terrorist that is convinced that he will go to Heaven as a martyr if he kills innocent children in a kindergarten. All he needs to do is should “God is great” and start slicing necks. Then he will be killed in the act and be rewarded by Allah with 70 black-eyed virgins. Yup. He actually believes this nonsense.

How would you handle it?

Video 6 – Man having trouble while driving – asks policeman for help.

You are driving the car and suddenly you start having trouble. Your body is not reacting right and you cannot drive any longer. Lucky for you that you see a police car. So you flag it over and they help you…

Video 7 – The most emotional and moving video ever!

A woman dresses up as a nurse and steals a new born baby. This is the same thing that has happened time and time again before. In fact, in video 18 or 19 I have a video where the stolen baby was reunited with his real mother… 30 years later.

Anyways, this woman dressed up as a nurse and stole the baby. The mother is horrified, but you know what? They found the woman and raided her home…

Check it out!

The baby is returned…

The baby is returned to it's moma.
The baby is returned to it’s moma.

Video 8 – Man stops a purse snatcher on a motorcycle.

Innocent bystanders can become a hero in an instant. While the lady two blocks down the street is screaming her lungs out, this young fellow takes action. He stops the motorcycle rider dead on the spot. A real Rufus!

Video 9 – Man helps a dog cross the street.

Dogs, as great as they are, sometimes need help. The smarter dogs know that trying to cross a street is dangerous. So what are they going to do? Well, good thing that there is a Rufus near by to help.

Video 10 – Rescue of a woman from a submerged car.

She is drowning. Hurt, and under very muddy water and the car is sinking fast into the mud. What are you going to do? Be the Rufus!

Conclusion

We do not know when the calling will come.

However, when it calls, you must take action. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive. But, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.


If you enjoyed this post, please click on this link and check out the rest of my Rufus series…

Hero Stories

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Be the Rufus; more examples of personal heroism in China. Part 19. After Christmas Edition.

More examples of personal heroism in China. This is part nineteen. THis is a collection compiled the day after Christmas in 2019. We’ve got some nice micro-videos to start the new year off with.

Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full experience.

Video 1 – Mother and son reunited after he was kidnapped in 1989 at 4 years old.

Stealing children, especially young kids, is a problem all over the world. Sometimes they are sold off for sex slaves, but more often than not, it is just a person that wants to have a young son to call their own.

This man was four years old in 1989. He was stolen and snatched. His parents thought that he was long dead.

Then imagine their surprise when he got a routine gene DNA test. They are becoming rather common in China. Like when you want to have a child, you need to have the DNA approved by the government. So he submitted his DNA and low and behold, he is not who he thought he was!

This is his reunion with his real natural mother.

His father died the year earlier, broken hearted, believing that his son was forever gone.

Video 2 – Boy collapses in an icy pool.

Life is like that. Everything seems nice and fine. Quiet and eventual. Just some small puddles. It’s a little chilly out, not arctic temperatures. SO the boy wants to climb about and just be a boy. Then the unthinkable happens…

Video 3 – Bystanders stop and capture a robber that preys on old people.

This is a robber that accosts older men and women. Often in their 90’s, and often feeble. Both in mind and body. Only this time, a pair of Rufus’s notice what is going on. They go after the thug, chase him down and give him a real tongue lashing, I’ll tell you what!

Video 4 – Fire alarm in a kindergarten.

Everyone in Chinese schools must be able to evacuate quickly and simply. It can actually be amazing to watch. No one wants a repeat of 411. Check it out.

Video 5 – Man saves a dog trapped with a waterfall.

This man is saving a dog that is trapped in a waterfall. Watching this makes me feel good inside. I am reminded that there just might be hope fo the human species after all.

Video 6 – Preventing a sled riding accident.

This kind of things (I’m sure) happens all over America in the Winter. I think it must of happened to me more than a few time. Boy and kids being what they are, are always getting into trouble. Lucky for them, an adult is around to save the day.

Video 7 – Tackling a purse snatcher.

Purse snatchers can think that they can get away and not be caught Little do they realize that there are “watchers” all over the place and it’s up to us, as individuals, to keep the peace and right the wrongs. Be the Rufus!

Video 8 – An entire village pulls up a car.

In China, no one is alone. This can come and be a real problems at times. But, there is a plus side to it. People, friends, community all pull together. They help each other out. It’s not at all like the “lone wolf” mentality that is so persistent in the United States.

This is not a submarine. It’s a car that fell into the icy river below.

Video 9 – Woman helps a heavily loaded motorcycle.

People helping people. I love it!

I love this chick, and man does she have strong legs. But what really attracts me to her is her willingness to help others. What a gal! She for certain put a big old smile on my face.

She didn’t have to.

She could have just kept minding her own business, don’t you know.

Video 10 When chemistry goes bad.

Anyone who has had haz-mat training and MSMD training in industry know that you must respect chemicals. Out-gassing is dangerous, as is the chemical reaction when incorrect quantities are combined. It can suddenly go South very, very quickly.

Like in this video…

Thank you for reading this.

God bless.

Conclusion

We do not know when the calling will come.

However, when it calls, you must take action. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive. But, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.


If you enjoyed this post, you might want to check out the index of these types of posts. Please kindly go here…

Hero Stories

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Some of my favorite links and browser bookmarks.
Here are just some pretty decent websites, bookmarks, URL's and sites that I would like to share. I think that there is something here for everyone. These, in my mind, are the "cream of the crop" of underappreciated websites, and some places that you all might want to visit.
Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
The history of how Australia obtained Sheilas; the story of The Lady Juliana, The 18th-Century Prison Ship Filled With Women.   This is the story of the Lady Juliana. This was a special ship designed to convey female convicts from England to Australia. The idea was that a boat load of female convicts would happily link up with a colony of convicts in Australia. Thus making everyone very, very happy, and reform the colony in New South Wales.
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Gaslighting
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
The Navy is scrapping the F/A-18 Hornet.
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight
What High School taught me about Diversity.  Here we look at idea of "diversity" from the point of view of what it was like in my High School years. For my High School was fully and intentionally diverse. And at that time, there were two techniques of grouping people.  These techniques were by [1] merit, and [2] by random association. Or in other words; "diversity". Thus we can compare diversity against merit as the criteria used in a selection process.

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1
Be the Rufus, part II. More tales of heroism.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 3.
Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 4.
Here are some more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 5.
Here are even more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like int he same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 6.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 7.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 7.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 8.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 8.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 9.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 9.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 10.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 10.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Be the Rufus; more videos of personal heroism in China. Part 16.

More videos of personal heroism in China. This is part sixteen.

Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full experience.

Video 1 – Boy helps man after being hit by a hit and run driver.

This is why China has cameras everywhere, and facial recognition. The hit and run driver was caught and tried and is doing hard time in a Chinese hard-labor prison. You do not hit a person and then speed off…

Video 2 – Girl being dragged forward on an escalator.

Big kudos to the hijab wearing woman that rushes to save her! Do not allow the inherent biases of the radicalized Muslim elements to color your views on everyone else. There are good people everywhere. Rufus’s abound. You just don’t know who they are.

Most times they don’t know either.

Video 3 – Taking a beating.

Sometimes we are our own heroes. We take the beatings of life… unfair, uncalled for, undeserving and we move onward. We continue and we push and we strive. Sometimes, being a hero… being a Rufus is to just keep being excellent when the entire rest of the work is pushing for you to give up.

Video 4 – Emergency run to the hospital.

When there is an emergency, the baby is sick and cannot breathe… what are you going to do? In this case we have a terrified mother and a baby with difficulty breathing. The child needs to go to the hospital immediately…

Video 5 – Allowing people to pass.

Being the best that we can be often means being helpful, kind and considerate of others. This can be helping a person, or doing more than that. What ever, you time on this planet, in this body is a short one. Make the most of it.

Be good and kind to others and don’t ever expect any kind of payback.

Video 6 – Being the Rufus.

Being the Rufus means being an everyday hero. It means being the best that you can be, helping others, and not being manipulated by the wealthy, the media or the powerful. It means doing things on your terms in your way.

Be the Rufus.

Video 7 – Young boy wants to meet his hero.

This is a cute video and shows that the players care about their fans. And yes, the kid did not need to interrupt the interview and the bodyguards shooed him away, the football player showed that he had heart and was supportive of his fans. He’s a true Rufus.

Video 8 – Not all heroes wear capes.

But what they do actually do is be the best that they can be. In every way, you must strive to be the best of who you are. Your rewards will be many. Check out this young girls writing ability.

Video 9 – Train track emergency.

Check out the Rufus that drops everything and comes to the rescue of this motorcycle rider who spilled right on top of the train tracks. He’s a real Rufus, that’s for sure!

Video 10 – Community.

We are all part of a community. You have your immediate family, then your friends, and then your local community. We need each other and that need is a a real and important one. Take care and embrace it.

Thank you for reading this.

God bless.

Conclusion

We do not know when the calling will come.

However, when it calls, you must take action. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive. But, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Some of my favorite links and browser bookmarks.
Here are just some pretty decent websites, bookmarks, URL's and sites that I would like to share. I think that there is something here for everyone. These, in my mind, are the "cream of the crop" of underappreciated websites, and some places that you all might want to visit.
Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
The history of how Australia obtained Sheilas; the story of The Lady Juliana, The 18th-Century Prison Ship Filled With Women.   This is the story of the Lady Juliana. This was a special ship designed to convey female convicts from England to Australia. The idea was that a boat load of female convicts would happily link up with a colony of convicts in Australia. Thus making everyone very, very happy, and reform the colony in New South Wales.
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Gaslighting
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
The Navy is scrapping the F/A-18 Hornet.
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight
What High School taught me about Diversity.  Here we look at idea of "diversity" from the point of view of what it was like in my High School years. For my High School was fully and intentionally diverse. And at that time, there were two techniques of grouping people.  These techniques were by [1] merit, and [2] by random association. Or in other words; "diversity". Thus we can compare diversity against merit as the criteria used in a selection process.

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1
Be the Rufus, part II. More tales of heroism.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 3.
Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 4.
Here are some more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 5.
Here are even more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like int he same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 6.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 7.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 7.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 8.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 8.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 9.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 9.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 10.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 10.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 12.

More stories of personal heroism in China. This is part twelve.

Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full experience.

Video 1 – Police take down a dangerous man.

This is the kind of things that policemen are trained for. But, I’ll tell you what, if no police are around, it will be up to you to step in and save the woman. Would you be up for it?

Video 2 – Man hanging off the side of a bridge.

So here is a man that is hanging off the side of a very, very tall highway bridge. Why is he there? What is going on? He’s got to be either crazy or in distress. What are you going to do?

Video 3 – Capture a purse thief.

Purse thief’s and purse snatchers used to be very common in China. Today, with all the video surveillance, it has pretty much eradicated the crime. But, not completely. These criminals know where all the blind spots are. They have mapped them out, don’t you know.

However, outside of the blind sots you can sometimes observe people chasing after them on foot. As in this video.

Video 4 – Lost little boy.

Here’s a young boy. He’s lost. Terribly lost and he needs help. Lucky for him that there is a police man nearby and he know that when he is in trouble to turn to the police for help. And thus…

Video 5 – Passed out from exhaustion.

The work of a fireman is very difficult. They take every ounce of energy that they have to just keep going. Then, when they are back at the station, they can relax and release…

Video 6 – Produce driver lends a helping hand.

Heroes come in all forms. Even if all you are doing is transporting sugarcane to the processing factory, or shrubbery to a new housing development, you can lend a hand. Such as this fellow does…

Video 7 – Kitten training to be a good mouser.

In functional societies every one does their part. In traditional conservative societies, like communist China, everyone has a role.

The two family types and how they work.

Here, we have a young kitten learning to be a good mouser. This what I call “on the job training”…

To understand the concept of family roles within society, the link above, and this one below (they open up in a separate tab) would be able to help a lot…

How to manage a family household.

Video 8 – Don’t jump, girl!

Saving others. It’s the way of the Rufus.

Video 9 – Help the ambulance get on its way.

This is common in the USA where it is the law!

It isn’t elsewhere in the world. In China there aren’t laws all over the place telling you what you can or cannot do; what you should do or should not do.

To learn more (opens up in a separate tab)…

Freedom & Liberty in China

Anyways, in China, all citizens are expected to do their part to make society better.

Be the Rufus. Not because you are obligated though the force of law, but because that is who you are. Be the Rufus.

Video 10 – Fire alarm!

Whether you are in the USA, Australia, Canada, Russia or China the situation is the same. When your name is called, you leap into action!

Thank you for reading this.

God bless.

Conclusion

We do not know when the calling will come.

However, when it calls, you must take action. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive. But, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Some of my favorite links and browser bookmarks.
Here are just some pretty decent websites, bookmarks, URL's and sites that I would like to share. I think that there is something here for everyone. These, in my mind, are the "cream of the crop" of underappreciated websites, and some places that you all might want to visit.
Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
The history of how Australia obtained Sheilas; the story of The Lady Juliana, The 18th-Century Prison Ship Filled With Women.   This is the story of the Lady Juliana. This was a special ship designed to convey female convicts from England to Australia. The idea was that a boat load of female convicts would happily link up with a colony of convicts in Australia. Thus making everyone very, very happy, and reform the colony in New South Wales.
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Gaslighting
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
The Navy is scrapping the F/A-18 Hornet.
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight
What High School taught me about Diversity.  Here we look at idea of "diversity" from the point of view of what it was like in my High School years. For my High School was fully and intentionally diverse. And at that time, there were two techniques of grouping people.  These techniques were by [1] merit, and [2] by random association. Or in other words; "diversity". Thus we can compare diversity against merit as the criteria used in a selection process.

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1
Be the Rufus, part II. More tales of heroism.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 3.
Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 4.
Here are some more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 5.
Here are even more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like int he same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 6.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 7.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 7.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 8.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 8.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 9.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 9.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 10.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 10.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 11.
Here are some more stories, videos and micro-movies of personal examples of heroism, and being a Rufus. They all take place in China, because, that is, well, where I live. Here you can see that personal heroes come in different sizes and shapes and that being a hero is our highest calling in our world. Be the hero. Be the Rufus.
Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
It is our highest calling to help others in need. Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Be the Rufus and make the world a better place.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 14.
It is our highest calling to help others in need. Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Be the Rufus and make the world a better place.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 9.

More stories of personal heroism in China. This is part nine.

Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full experience.

Video 1 – Save the little kitten.

Kittens and little children (and puppies) don’t know the dangers of roads. Plus, the drivers often cannot see the little critter and thus it can be quite dangerous for them. Here we have a Rufus stopping a truck so that the kitten can be saved…

Video 2 – Young boy returns a wallet.

Rufus comes in all ages, races, sizes and dispositions. Here we have a little boy returning a wallet. Well, he’s trying to, at least. He’s a good boy, and I would be proud of him were he to be my son…

Video 3 – A split second to save a girl.

Sometimes, you react without even thinking. You just reach out and save someone from a terrible accident…

Video 4 – Rescue from the ice.

Here is one of the most terrifying of rescues; trapped in the ice. When I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, there were many of my classmates that died from walking on an ice-frozen river and fell through the thin ice. It’s not just that the water is cold, but that you can easily sink down and get trapped under the ice with no way to break out.

Here we see Rufus running to the rescue.

Video 5 – Rescue from drowning.

But it’s not just the water and ice. Even int he middle of the summer people can get hurt in and around the water. I well remember on Cape Cod where people would just be standing in ankle deep water and a wave would crash over them, and a under-tow rip-tide would wash them out to sea.

Dangerous and horrifying.

Video 6 – Stop the car and get that pickpocketer.

What would you do if you were in a car driving along and see someone committing a crime? Would you stop and help the person being stolen from or would you ignore it and just keep walking… NY city style? What would you do?

Video 7 – Giving birth in the hospital lobby.

OK, so you are pregnant, and you start going into labor. You hop into the car and you make it to the hospital, but uh-oh… it’s too late the baby is coming out right there and then! Yikes!

What do you do?

Video 8 – Here’s to all the workers that take shit with a smile.

This is a tribute to all the workers who take shit as part of their job. You are not alone, many of us has had the exact same situation.

Video 9 – Bus driver emergency detour to the hospital.

Here’s a bus driver that sees and emergency and then takes a detour from his regular bus route to save someone. Be the Rufus. Even if it might cost you your job.

Video 10 – Help with an overturned wheelchair.

Talk about bad luck. This poor sap is stranded in the middle of a busy intersection and is unable to do anything. Would you go forth and help him?

Conclusion

We do not know when the calling will come.

However, when it calls, you must take action. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive. But, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference.

Help others. It’s our highest calling.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Some of my favorite links and browser bookmarks.
Here are just some pretty decent websites, bookmarks, URL's and sites that I would like to share. I think that there is something here for everyone. These, in my mind, are the "cream of the crop" of underappreciated websites, and some places that you all might want to visit.
Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
The history of how Australia obtained Sheilas; the story of The Lady Juliana, The 18th-Century Prison Ship Filled With Women.   This is the story of the Lady Juliana. This was a special ship designed to convey female convicts from England to Australia. The idea was that a boat load of female convicts would happily link up with a colony of convicts in Australia. Thus making everyone very, very happy, and reform the colony in New South Wales.
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Gaslighting
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
The Navy is scrapping the F/A-18 Hornet.
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight
What High School taught me about Diversity.  Here we look at idea of "diversity" from the point of view of what it was like in my High School years. For my High School was fully and intentionally diverse. And at that time, there were two techniques of grouping people.  These techniques were by [1] merit, and [2] by random association. Or in other words; "diversity". Thus we can compare diversity against merit as the criteria used in a selection process.

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1
Be the Rufus, part II. More tales of heroism.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 3.
Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 4.
Here are some more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 5.
Here are even more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like int he same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 6.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 7.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 7.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 8.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 8.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 9.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 9.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 10.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 10.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 11.
Here are some more stories, videos and micro-movies of personal examples of heroism, and being a Rufus. They all take place in China, because, that is, well, where I live. Here you can see that personal heroes come in different sizes and shapes and that being a hero is our highest calling in our world. Be the hero. Be the Rufus.
Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
It is our highest calling to help others in need. Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Be the Rufus and make the world a better place.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 14.
It is our highest calling to help others in need. Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Be the Rufus and make the world a better place.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 6.

More stories of personal heroism in China. This is part six.

Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full experience.

Video 1 – Children makes some emergency road work.

Well, some kids are walking along and spot a hole in the middle of the road. Would they walk on by? Would they hurry on home from school and say nothing? Or, perhaps, they would try to be the Rufus. Maybe they would place some warnings so that others won’t fall into the hole.

They would be the Rufus.

Video 2 – Dog rescues a lost kitten.

True story. This little kitten is alone, and cannot find it’s mother. However, it sees a big dog, and so it follows it. The dog knows that it is following him. So he leads the kitten on. He helps it up the stairs, and into the house. He’s a real Rufus dog.

Video 3 – Emergency care in the hospital lobby.

Yes, we know that the hospitals are there to help us get well. But what if… what if… you just make it barely in time? What if you are so sick that you cannot make the ER or ICU? What then?

Well, surgery and emergency procedures will need to take place in the most inconvenient places.

Video 4 – HK citizens capture and hold a “pro-democracy” protestor for the police.

Most people in America have no idea just how unpopular the terrorists are in HK. They are called “pro democracy” liberators by the American press, but that’s just propaganda because the entire movement is funded by the CIA managed NED. It’s part of a much larger global politics gambit.

Hong Kong and the NED CIA operations.

Anyways, the regular day to day HK citizens absolutely do not like these kids setting fire to buildings, destroying malls, subways, and setting people on fire and hitting people on the head and killing them…

… here’s some people on the way to work that snagged one of those “protestors” who was bounding a Mainland Chinese person to a pole. The bystanders, stopped him. They unmasked him, and called the police to take him away.

You would never see this kind of thing in the United States. Americans have been accustomed to take the “shit” from the BLM and Antifa terrorists. The police just stand by watching, and if anyone reacts to the terrorists, the police arrest THEM instead.

In China, a traditional conservative nation, they just do not tolerate young thugs.

Video 5 – HK Citizens chase away a gang of “pro-democracy” protestors from blocking a major road.

Here’s another video. Some of these “protestors” are trying to block traffic, causing the delay of people going to work during rush hour. The HK citizens aren’t having any of that. They stop their actions and chase them away…

This is who is funding the Hong Kong protests, and no, they are not organic.  Here we look at the protests in Hong Kong and who is funding and training them. For they are using sophisticated urban combat techniques, as well as creating very sophisticated bombs, and handmade weapons. Obviously, some agent wants this group to cause damage and trouble in Hong Kong.

Rufus prevents events from spiraling out of control.

Video 6 – HK police give fair warning to some “pro democracy” protestors that are starting to organize before a riot.

During riots, the NED set up stockpiles of gas masks, weapons, and set up communication points. But, don’t you know, all communication is monitored by the police, and so they know who is behind all this and who is sponsoring the event. So the police come out and offer fair warning to the organizers and participants.

Fair warning.

The US involvement in the HK "Democracy Now" movement.

Again, you would never see this in the United States. The police would shoot first and ask questions later. And, people (!) you know this is true.

The Rufus gives fair warning and avoids violence.

Fair warning results in less casualties.
Fair warning results in less casualties. Meme from the Hong Kong concerning American support for “pro democracy” terrorists.

Video 7 – Local citizens stop a mugger.

If you are driving along, and you see someone rob or steal, what would you do? Pretend nothing happened? Ignore the event? Or, would you take matters in your own hands, stop the car… get out and stop the crime?

Be the Rufus.

Video 8 – Stranger gives CPR to delivery man in distress.

When someone is in trouble, would you drop everything and come to their aide, or would you pretend that it’s none of your business? Be the Rufus. Make a difference.

Video 9 – Bus driver secures the safety of his passengers before he collapses.

Here’s a bus driver. He is having a problem. Maybe a stroke. Maybe a heart attack. Something. What ever, he pulls off to the side of the road. He tells everyone to get out, and then exits and collapses right there on the pavement.

He put the lives of others before himself. He was the Rufus.

Video 10 – Subway doors trap a girl like a vise.

In general, Chinese subways are new, modern and state of the art. As such, they are very safe. Yet, like everything else, things and accidents happen and often it is an unfortunate person who wasn’t expecting anything that gets caught up and trapped in a bad situation.

Like this…

Conclusion

We do not know when the calling will come. However, when it calls, you must take action.

It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive.

However, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Some of my favorite links and browser bookmarks.
Here are just some pretty decent websites, bookmarks, URL's and sites that I would like to share. I think that there is something here for everyone. These, in my mind, are the "cream of the crop" of underappreciated websites, and some places that you all might want to visit.
Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
The history of how Australia obtained Sheilas; the story of The Lady Juliana, The 18th-Century Prison Ship Filled With Women.   This is the story of the Lady Juliana. This was a special ship designed to convey female convicts from England to Australia. The idea was that a boat load of female convicts would happily link up with a colony of convicts in Australia. Thus making everyone very, very happy, and reform the colony in New South Wales.
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Gaslighting
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
The Navy is scrapping the F/A-18 Hornet.
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight
What High School taught me about Diversity.  Here we look at idea of "diversity" from the point of view of what it was like in my High School years. For my High School was fully and intentionally diverse. And at that time, there were two techniques of grouping people.  These techniques were by [1] merit, and [2] by random association. Or in other words; "diversity". Thus we can compare diversity against merit as the criteria used in a selection process.

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1
Be the Rufus, part II. More tales of heroism.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 3.
Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 4.
Here are some more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 5.
Here are even more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like int he same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 6.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 7.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 7.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 8.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 8.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 9.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 9.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 10.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 10.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 11.
Here are some more stories, videos and micro-movies of personal examples of heroism, and being a Rufus. They all take place in China, because, that is, well, where I live. Here you can see that personal heroes come in different sizes and shapes and that being a hero is our highest calling in our world. Be the hero. Be the Rufus.
Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
It is our highest calling to help others in need. Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Be the Rufus and make the world a better place.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 14.
It is our highest calling to help others in need. Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Be the Rufus and make the world a better place.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The most popular song in China this fall; Wolf Disco.

What is the hottest song in China right now? Apparently, a little rap song called Wolf Disco has been making waves, with its take on what life was like in the late ’90s and early 2000s in China. Journalist Yew Lun Tian (from ThinkChina) is reminded of her own teenage years, as she delves into what makes this song so popular.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Wolf Disco by Gem is the hottest song in China this year. (At least according to sohu.com.)

野狼 Disco
野狼 Disco

Journalist Yew Lun Tian comments on this song…

A Singaporean friend recently asked me about this year’s hottest song in China. And a friend from China quickly shouted out the answer: “Wolf Disco (野狼 Disco)!”

The song gets in your head with its refreshing blend of Cantonese singing, dialogue in northeastern dialect, and Mandarin rap.

I felt really out of touch, and checked out the song as soon as I got home. I listened to it once — and was hooked. I wanted to hear it again and again. No cliched description could do justice to the penetrating power of this cutting edge cultural icon. A netizen put it well: “This is an amazing song that gets to your head and heart, and leaves you wanting more.” 

野狼 Disco

Wolf Disco by Dong Baoshi, stage name Gem, describes a man (“Uncle”) hitting the dance floor, showing off and trying to pick up young girls at the disco, circa late ’90s to early 2000s. The song gets in your head with its refreshing blend of Cantonese singing, dialogue in northeastern dialect, and Mandarin rap. Gem’s earnest but seriously inaccurate Cantonese pronunciation when singing “Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home” is especially funny, as he nails the endearing side of mainland Chinese when they try their hardest to sing Cantonese songs despite being no good at the language.

The song’s catchy beat and easy but evocative lyrics get people hooked; you just feel like dancing along. “To the left, draw a rainbow/and to your right, draw a dragon”; “Everybody put your head down/both hands to the front, wave them around”; “Hands to your head, move your hips/like you’re fretting”. 

野狼 Disco – 1

For the mainland Chinese audience who exercised en masse in primary school, went for social dances as adults, and joined square dances in the neighborhood during their twilight years, those lines would be somewhat uncanny. Listening to Wolf Disco is more satisfying than watching Psy’s Gangnam Style. No wonder some netizens say their three- or four-year-old kids have Wolf Disco as their morning alarm.

The song does not avoid or overuse the Hong Kong element, but uses it  to just the right degree for entertainment purposes, while not being  political.

With its brand of nostalgia, the song touches the hearts of the older crowd. The imagery of the dance hall and the references to Hong Kong popular culture capture the collective memories of a generation of mainland Chinese, as well as Chinese in the Greater China diaspora, including myself. “Slicked back hair, beeper call, 007 on the dance floor/Northeast b-boys in the house”, conjures up the hairstyles, beepers (known as pagers in Singapore), and dance moves of the time, while “Aaron Kwok hands across your chest” brought me back in a second to my pimple-faced days, singing and dancing along to his hit song Love You Endlessly (《对你爱不完》).

野狼 Disco – 2

Many years ago, the hip young people in northeast China had their fun in entertainment joints that played Cantonese songs; big shots found triad bosses in Hong Kong movies cool, like the way Uncle “feels like Tony Leung in Infernal Affairs” (see note below) when picking up girls.

When Gem was producing Wolf Disco, Hong Kong was not yet in full-blown chaos. The song does not avoid or overuse the Hong Kong element, but uses it to just the right degree for entertainment purposes, while not being political. For example, just as Deng Xiaoping previously declared “horses keep running, carry on dancing” to say nothing will change under “one country, two systems”, Uncle says “the song keeps playing, carry on dancing” to hide his embarrassment at failing to pick up girls.

Wolf Disco is so popular not just because it brings together borrowed elements from Hong Kong and Western music genres such as rap, but because it uses these external elements to authentically tell the story of a young person from northeast China. Gem calls this combination “garlic-flavoured vaporwave” — vaporwave is a Western music subgenre that combines ’80s and ’90s music with electronic sounds.

野狼 Disco – 3
Many netizens say the epitome of cheesiness is authenticity, and they  are moved by the song’s depiction of a young person who does not lose  their authenticity.

And then, while most people would take off their jackets when hitting the dance floor, Uncle’s “leather jacket stays on, don’t matter the heat”. In an interview with GQ, Gem explained that in northeast China, a leather jacket is cool, and a symbol of manhood. Some people only have that one presentable item of clothing — you can be wearing rags on the inside, but the outside has to look smart. This shows the face-loving quality of people from northeast China, and how tough it was for them when the economy in northeast China cooled down.

Many artistic elites have analyzed this phenomenal song and noted the concept of a “cheesy high” (土嗨); the presentation and/or content may be cheesy, but it still gets people high. Many netizens say the epitome of cheesiness is authenticity, and they are moved by the song’s depiction of a young person who does not lose their authenticity.

Gem has created a cultural phenomenon with Wolf Disco. (Internet)
Gem has created a cultural phenomenon with Wolf Disco. (Internet)

The way I see it, while many people go to high-end bookstores and restaurants and share photos with friends to hint that they are more westernized, artistic, and sophisticated, it works better to be plainly and unabashedly cheesy. While many stores try and attract customers with empty sales pitches, people like it better when one is not shy to show and laugh at their own lack of sophistication. When people are swept up by globalization and get nervous or anxious that their foreign language skills are inadequate, it is extremely satisfying to hear the language of one’s hometown loud and proud on the big stage. 

In 2019, a year of anniversaries, official publicity is full of big stories and lofty emotions, people would welcome a bit of unsophisticated, ordinary food for the soul.

野狼 Disco

Download the full MV

Here is the full music video of this song. It is subtitled in English and Cantonese. And it is an enjoyable video that tells the story of a young man’s dreams in NE China. It’s around 40-something MB, so grab a beer and let it download in full.

Lyrics

心里的花我想要带妳回家

Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home

在那深夜酒吧哪管它是真是假

In the late night bar, don’t matter if it’s real or fake

请妳尽情摇摆忘记钟意的他

Sway your body, forget the one you love

妳是最迷人噶 妳知道吗

You’ve caught my eye, don’t you know

这是最好的节拍 这是最爱的节拍

Here comes the beat, it’s the best, the favorite

前面儿哪里来的大井盖 我拿脚往里踹

Is that a manhole cover? Gonna kick it aside

如此动感的节拍 非得搁门口耍帅

I’m feeling the beat, just look cool outside the door

我蹦迪的动线上面儿怎么能有障碍

Clear the way, I’m heading to the floor

大背头 bb机 舞池里的007

Slicked back hair, beeper call, 007 on the dance floor

东北初代霹雳弟 dj瞅我也摇旗

Northeast b-boys in the house, DJ staring, I’m trippin’

不管多热都不能脱下我的皮大衣

Leather jacket stays on, don’t matter the heat

全场动作必须跟我整齐划壹

Everybody gotta follow my moves

来 左边 跟我一起画个龙

To the left, draw a dragon

在妳右边 画一道彩虹

To your right, draw a rainbow

来 左边 跟我一起画彩虹

To the left, draw a rainbow 

在妳右边 再画个龙

And to your right, draw a dragon

在妳胸口上比划一个郭富城

Aaron Kwok hands across your chest

左边儿右边儿摇摇头

To the left, to the right, just shake your head

两个食指就像两个钻天猴

Two fingers like sky rockets

指向闪耀的灯球

Point ’em at the disco ball

心里的花我想要带妳回家

Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home

在那深夜酒吧哪管它是真是假

In the late night bar, don’t matter if you’re real or fake

请妳尽情摇摆忘记钟意的他

Sway your body, forget the one you love

妳是最迷人噶 妳知道吗

You’re the hottest, don’t you know

玩儿归玩 闹归闹 别拿蹦迪开玩笑

Play around, mess around, but get serious when you’re dancing

左手一晃真像样 右手霹雳手套

Wave my left hand, glove on my right

金曲野人的士高都给我往后稍一稍

Disco savages take a step back

没事儿不要联系我 大哥大这没信号

Don’t be calling me, no signal on my bigass phone

小皮裙 大波浪 跳起舞来真像样

Leather mini skirt, major curves, looking so fine with her moves

喷的香水太香 好想和她唠一唠

Her perfume delicious, wanna get up close

感觉自己好像梁朝伟在演无间道

Feeling like Tony Leung in Infernal Affairs

万万没想到她让我找个镜子照一照

She tells me to look in a mirror, major burn

手照摇 舞照跳

My hands keep waving, carry on dancing

假装啥也不知道

Act like I know nothing

没有事 没有事 看着天空笑壹笑

I’m fine, I’m fine, I smile up at the sky

使劲儿扒了扒了前面儿的士高的小黄毛儿

Slapping the disco noob in front of me

气质再次完全被我卡死别跟我闹

Throwing all my shade on him, don’t mess with me

来 全场 一起跟我 低下头儿

C’mon everybody put your head down

左手右手往前游

Both hands to the front, wave them around

捂住脑门儿晃动妳的垮垮轴

Hands to your head, move your hips

好像有事儿在发愁

Like you’re fretting

心里的花我想要带妳回家

Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home

在那深夜酒吧哪管它是真是假

In the late night bar, don’t matter if you’re real or fake

请妳尽情摇摆忘记钟意的他

Sway your body, forget the one you love

妳是最迷人噶 妳知道吗

You’re the hottest, don’t you know

来 左边 跟我一起画个龙

To the left, draw a dragon

在妳右边 画一道彩虹

To your right, draw a rainbow

来 左边 跟我一起画彩虹

To the left, draw a rainbow 

在妳右边 再画个龙

And to your right, draw a dragon

在妳胸口上比划一个郭富城

Aaron Kwok hands across your chest

左边儿右边儿摇摇头

To the left, to the right, just shake your head

两个食指就像两个钻天猴

Two fingers like sky rockets

指向闪耀的灯球

Point ’em at the disco ball

来 全场 一起跟我 低下头儿

C’mon everybody put your head down

左手右手往前游

Both hands to the front, wave them around

捂住脑门儿晃动妳的垮垮轴

Hands to your head, move your hips

好像有事儿在发愁

Like you’re fretting

时时刻刻妳必须提醒妳自己

You gotta tell yourself

不能搭讪

Not to get friendly

搭讪妳就破功了 老弟

Otherwise you’re a goner, buddy

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

The US involvement in the HK "Democracy Now" movement.
How the USA can win a trade war.
Chinese reaction to the Trump Tariff Wars.
China's Global Leadership
Popular Music of China
The logistics of relocating a facotry from China back to the USA.
Hong Kong and the NED CIA operations.
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Why are Americans so angry?
Evolution of the USA and China.
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year
Trade Wars
How to get work in China if you have HIV.

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions
A polarized world.
America's sunset.
Trump trade wars  - Phase One
Asshole

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Some Fun Videos

Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.

Some fun videos of China - 1
Fun Videos of Asia - 2
Fun videos of Asia - 3
Fun videos of Asia - 4
Fun Videos of Asia - 5
Fun videos of Asia - 6
Fun videos of Asia - 7
Fun videos of Asia - 8
Fun videos of Asia - 9
Fun videos of Asia - 10
Fun videos of Asia - 11
Fun videos of Asia - 12
Fun videos of Asia - 13
Fun videos of Asia - 14
Fun Videos of Asia - 15
Fun videos of Asia -16
The best way to cook marshmallows.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Navy is scrapping the F/A-18 Hornet after 30 years.

It’s true, and boy does it make me feel old. When I joined the Navy, this was the latest thing. The talk was that it would replace the F-14 Tomcat and the E-6 Intruders. Never did happen, though.

The single-seat F/A-18 Hornet is the nation's first strike-fighter. It was designed for traditional strike applications such as interdiction and close air support without compromising its fighter capabilities. 

- The US Navy -- Fact File: F/A-18 Hornet strike fighter 

I well remembering seeing my first Hornet up front and close. It as at NAS, NASC Pensacola , Florida. It was a typical Florida day with blue skies and cumulus clouds at just under 1000 meters. Hot and sunny. We were wearing service khaki’s with garrison caps.

An aviator was practicing on a Boeing CH-47 Chinook nearby. Turn to port, then turn to starboard. Over and over. It was making a racket but we didn’t mind. The huge awesomeness of the F/A-18 Hornet lay there in front of us in all of it’s glory.

For me, this retirement of the F/A-18 Hornet is the end of a historical milestone. Here is a nice video, and it is my tribute to this great aircraft.

I never had the opportunity to fly this wonderful beast. My future lay elsewhere, but others in my class did. Today, the latest incarnation of this monster is the “Super Hornet”, and by all accounts, it’s quite an aircraft.

My “hats are off” to anyone who has had the opportunity to fly this wonderful machine.

"Overall, the Hornet was my first love. I’ll always look back fondly on flying the F/A-18C and often times I miss it. However, there is no doubt the Rhino is the jet I want to fly off the boat into combat. Great question, keep them coming!" - Forner Naval Aviator G.M.
“Overall, the Hornet was my first love. I’ll always look back fondly on flying the F/A-18C and often times I miss it. However, there is no doubt the Rhino is the jet I want to fly off the boat into combat. Great question, keep them coming!” – Former Naval Aviator G.M.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1
Be the Rufus, part II. More tales of heroism.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Be the Rufus. More stories of personal heroism.

This post describes some stories of personal heroism. Included are some micro-videos that depict some acts of heroism. I personally believe that inside all us, we all can be a hero. We just need to take on the mantle when needed and go forth and do what is necessary.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Emergency in route to the hospital.

Sometimes it’s part of our job. Like when you are a hospital worker like a doctor or a nurse. Sometimes it isn’t. You are just an innocent bystander minding your own business. But when you are called, what are you going to do?

Neighbors

Sometimes it’s just you and a neighbor down the street is in crisis. You need to go out and forth and help them out. Ar you up for it? Can you lend a hand to the best of your ability. Or will you try to cover your face so you can ignore the problem like a coward.

You get friends and you all work together. You help. You do what ever is necessary. Be a man!

You alone

Sometimes you are alone. No one is there to help you out. You are on your own. What are you going to do? Seconds matter. Are you going to wait on the sidelines. What would you do?

Notice the others, totally oblivious to what is transpiring next to them.

Rescue a person in distress

You are at a train station, or a stop. You check you phone and are waiting for the train to pull in, when you see someone crawl onto the tracks to kill themselves. What are you going to do? Let them die? Or are you going to risk your own life to save theirs? Be the Rufus.

Notice the others. Too little. Too late.

Baby fallen into the icy cold water

What will you do if you see a baby in icy cold water in January? Would you pull out your phone and call the police, or dive right on it and save the kid? A hero would stop thinking and risk his own life to save the baby.

Notice the others milling around with their hands in their pockets. Useless.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Chinese reaction to Donald Trump tariff wars…

Not, that I want to get too political, but this video that is playing all across China pretty much says it all. It’s all about the Trump Trade War. And it shows how the Chinese feel about it.

This post is about a movie that is playing all over China this Summer. It is allegorical. While it is a story about a British Boxing champion, and his involvement within China, there are very CLEAR parallels about what is going on in the Trump Tariff situation.

China has this alligorical movie about the Trump USA trade war with China that has been playing all over CHina during the Summer of 2019.
China has this allegorical movie about the Trump USA trade war with China that has been playing all over China during the Summer of 2019. It’s well worth the watch, and it says quite a bit if you only just listen.

Viewing it garners mixed feelings from the precious few Americans who have watched it. There are two types of reactions;

  • [1] On one hand, Yeah! They don’t like the tariffs and trade situation. Great! Well, tough cookies! Suffer! See what we care. We can wait this out. You must play by our rules. If you don’t like it, well then too bad! We can always find other trading partners.
  • [2] On the other hand, well… um… maybe China would be a far better friend than an enemy. Who knows what they are really capable of or have planned.

Rush Limbaugh comments

To understand the situation let’s look at Rush Limbaugh. He’s a major voice in Conservative circles in America, and perhaps one of the few Republicans that haven’t sold out the American people for some song and dance. You know, like Jeff Sessions, Jeb Bush, and John McCain has. He’s still a trooper, slogging through the Washington swamp, and enduring the slings and missiles from the American mainstream media.

Here’s what Rush (El’ Rush-bo) has to say on the “Trump Chinese Tariff issue”…

RUSH: 
So the president started here with China. He is dead set on winning  this trade war with the ChiComs. 

Now, the thing about this that I think will go over a lot of people’s heads unless there’s somebody like me  explaining this, is he takes what to most people is a complex issue: The China trade deals. 

I mean, it is a miasma to a lot of people. 

It’s so  convoluted and confusing that nobody knows really what the stakes are.  

Why is it happening? 

What’s it all about? 

Trump takes this complex issue that nobody has even paid attention to for decades and does his best to make it understandable and important, and here is how that sounded.
THE PRESIDENT: 
We’re talking to China. We’re not ready to make a  deal. But we’ll see what happens. 

But, you know, we’ve been hurt by  China for 25, 30 years. Nobody’s done anything about it, and we have no choice but to do what we’re doing. 

We called them on manipulation, and they brought their numbers back, and they brought ’em back rapidly. 

We have an open dialogue. 

We’ll see whether or not we keep our meeting in September. If we do, that’s fine; if we don’t, that’s fine. But it’s time that somebody does what we are doing.
RUSH: 
When he talks about “the numbers,” he’s talking about their  currency manipulation. They tried to deflate their currency on  Wednesday, and it worked to the point of rocking our stock market down  900-some-odd points, and then Trump had some harsh words for ’em and  they revalued the next night, and the stock market rebounded. 

Of course,  the panic that ensued on that one day when the market dropped 900  points was typical of the kind of reporting we get in the media today.

Rush is correct. This is exactly what has happened. (More or less.)

Though, the truth is closer to the fact that China has been keeping the USD-to-Yuan rate artificial for the last twenty years or so. Not, as you might have the impression, naturally at 6.3:1 and then suddenly changed. So yes. They stopped propping up the rate, and it fell like a brick and messed up the USA stocks.

However, how it is being reported is a bit of a lie and a manipulation.

As reported; The USD to Yuan rate has been normal for the last twenty years. Suddenly China manipulated it’s currency to hurt the USD.

But that is a partial truth, equating to an outright lie. The last twenty years has been anything but normal. Here’s a better picture…

The True Situation: China has been artificially propping up the USD – Yuan exchange rate to slow down it’s hyper-active business section for the last twenty years. It has done this for selfish reasons, and the USA has benefited with this exchange rate. When the Trump Tariff wars hit a “road bump” the Chinese stopped propping up the exchange rate. They did so purposefully, (I personally believe) in order to aid in their tariff negotiations with President Trump. They did this to achieve negotiation advantage.

The trade wars initiated by Donald Trump has had an effect on China, though it is not as severe as the mainstream America makes it out to be.
The trade wars initiated by Donald Trump has had an effect on China, though it is not as severe as the mainstream America makes it out to be.

So yeah. The exchange rate was artificial.

And yeah, China affected it, causing a drop in the USA stock exchange.

However, the details on this event and this exchange are not being reported accurately at all. Instead it is being reported in such a way as to make it appear that China is manipulating the currency exchange rate for their benefit. When the exact opposite occurred. They STOPPED manipulating their currency rate.

Want to know more?

Confusion in America.

So even El’ Rush-bo is confused. He’s sitting pretty in the USA. He’s never been to China. Knows nothing about China except what he’s read from “experts”. Most of whom haven’t been to China in years.

Hey! If I am going to talk about golfing (for example). I sure as heck better know the difference between a driver and a putter. What a slice is, and how it differs from a hook. As well as to know what a "slow green" is.

I just can't watch a baseball game, eat a hotdog and chat about golf, when I have never been on a golf course. Played a round. Or owned any clubs.

Rush calls them “Chi-Coms”, Chinese Communists. Which they actually call themselves, but which means something totally different when heard by a Chinese compared to an American.

American Person;
"Chinese Communism" means hard-core tyrannical Marxist government. Similar to what is present in North Korea, and Cuba.
Chinese Person;
"Chinese Communism" is socialism with Chinese characteristics. 

There are no political parties as all of the Chinese people want the same thing; a traditional life that is safe from interference. Free Market Reaganomics implemented by Mr. Deng in the 1980's led to the "great recovery" resulting in what China is today.

I would say that the problem with American media is that no one ever really … I mean… really reports. They just put their own individual “spin” on the day’s events. Their popularity within America is determined whether their audience agrees or disagrees with what they have to say.

Even if it is completely and totally wrong.

How the American mainstream media reports the effect of the Trump Tariffs on China as a while. Absolutely not accurate at all. Bloodied, but in no way knocked out of the going.
How the American mainstream media reports the effect of the Trump Tariffs on China as a whole. Absolutely not accurate at all. Bloodied, but in no way knocked out of the going.

The goal of the American mainstream media is to manipulate the people. This manipulation serves a purpose. It keeps Americans living in a constant state of fear and anxiety, from which they can be easily manipulated. Much like sheep, cattle, or chickens. They have been doing so for decades.

American mainstream media manipulation of reported content to invoke fear and mob-behaviors in the public by controlling the dialog.
American mainstream media manipulation of reported content to invoke fear and mob-behaviors in the public by controlling the dialog.

The Movie

Now, this here is the Chinese response to the Donald Trump “Trade War” with China. It is a (sort of) friendly warning (China to President Trump) that is playing in all the movie theaters in China this Summer.

Bet you all weren’t aware of that!

I wonder why? Where’s all those “Chinese experts” and “China policy planners”, aren’t they aware of this? What about all those “talking heads” on the mainstream news, and the conservative political commentators?

No where to be found.

That is simply because they are all actors playing a role. Which, of course, is to manipulate. They tell you what YOU WANT TO HEAR, or arouse a fear to manipulate you to take some kind of action.

Nah. They have about as much awareness about China, as you the reader does about the block buster Pop hit 芒种. Which is absolutely zilch.

News reporting in America is dead. It only took about twenty years for the people to start realizing it. Today, it’s all just actors and actresses reading scripted lines. Those rare few that remain genuine to their beliefs, such as Rush Limbaugh, are only as good as their experiences. Without personal first-hand experiences, they are just fellow strangers espousing opinions.

Anyways…

This micro video runs for 1.47 minutes. It’s short but sweet and is a message straight from Beijing to Washington. I do think that it is worth a watch, even if you don’t like China, Chinese people, or Chinese food.

Watch it for the reasons why other Americans have watched it… to either gloat and feel superior, or to sit back and ponder the enormity of the situation.

I think it is well worth the watch, and so here it is…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

—– Video Start

—- Video End

WISE UP!

The “old rules” of global politics will no longer work.

Oh, you don’t think that it has anything to do with trade? Watch the clip again, and pay attention to the English dialog…

Who do you think you are?

You collect money from me. You don't share it.

Do as I say.

You are not qualified to make deals with me.

And the discussion continues…

If you quit, you can take this business too. I can get anybody to take care of it.

And then, the sheer arrogance of the Westerners reaches an explosion point when he says…

Will somebody get this yellow piece of fat to get out of here!

After that we see how the Westerner battles and demolishes the Chinese man. It’s strong. It’s vicious, and he dies.

He’s dead. The Westerner has won.

Then, it’s payback time.

That's the clip and that's the message. The point is that Westerners misunderstand politeness for strength and advantage. It takes merit, skill and ability to defeat arrogance, bravado and strength.

Now, let me tell you my take…

America is a global power on the decline.

China is a rising global power.

China would prefer to work with America for their own benefit. While America would like to use China to advance their social-economical standing.

Well… duh!

You might not want to hear this, but it is true. Compare the stats. How many new parks were built in the USA compared to China? How many skyscrapers? How many bridges? How many High Speed Trains? How many hospitals? How many new schools.

Of course, the statist would simply point and say “ah, well… China is a third world nation, it doesn’t take much to move it forward“. Except that it isn’t, and wasn’t. The tyranny of communism devastated it. It took up until 1976 until it was finally vanquished, and Reaganomics was instituted by Mr. Deng that turned the nation around.

Don't thank Mr. Deng. Yes, he introduced it, but it was the Great Ronald Reagan that introduced the technique to the world. Too bad that the Bush dynasty made fun of it, and allowed progressive politics under the guise of RINO activists to force America to become what it is today.

Meanwhile, [1] China is growing. That is simply not mistakable.

And [2] America, held down with the burden of progressive Marxism, a swamp-like government filled with crooks and swindlers, is on the decline.

But don’t believe me. Look at the charts why don’t ya…

Why there is a trade tariff war between the USA and China now.
Whether you believe me or not, this chart tells the entire story quite succinctly. The “trade wars” is happening and reaching a peak in 2019 simply because the United States wants to remain the dominant economic leader in the world. It’s all really that simple.

These kind of charts abound, and while they might differ by a few months one way or the other, the message is all quite clear. The USA is in decline, and China is ascendant.

Chart of real GDP comparing the United States with China. Check out the dates. Now compare the dates with the implementation of the Trump Tariff Wars.
Chart of real GDP comparing the United States with China. Check out the dates. Now compare the dates with the implementation of the Trump Tariff Wars.

Americans don’t want either of these two things to occur. They want the status quo. They want inflation to stop, and for the march of progressiveness to end, and for them to get back just a few of the freedoms that they have lost over the years. Nothing too demanding. Just a few things…

Some things to ponder

It’s pretty difficult to “bring back American industry” to America when all the manufacturing talent is Chinese. Yeah. That’s right. Who the heck do you all think has been making those products that you have been buying for the last 20 to 30 years? Elves? Dwarfs?

Here, Manufacturing Talent represents skilled and educated factory professionals. Process engineers, manufacturing engineers, build planners, tool and die makers, test and quality experts and other similarly skilled people.

America used to have them. But spending twenty years in soup kitchen lines has caused many of them to change careers and take up other occupations. Most especially during the Obama presidency.

It’s going to be pretty difficult to disassemble the manufacturing equipment, and process tanks when they are now the property of Chinese nationals. When a non-Chinese company wants to operate in China they must create a joint-venture with a Chinese national. This person will, by law, own 51% of the company and if forbidden by law to give controlling interest to a non-Chinese person. (Which is why WOFE business structures were created in China.)

Just to put this in perspective, a single automated "break"... the machine that cuts and folds sheet metal panels is the cost of an Lamborghini. A company is not going to start from scratch and order up five or six of these units without passing on the costs to the consumer.

It’s going to be pretty difficult to train American workers to work in the (brought back) factories. American can do the work. Though it will be at roughly 10x the rate of the Chinese worker, and maybe 20x if it is a union factory.

You see the only people that can train them will be denied the required H1-B or Q1 visas (as all are now in the hands of software engineers out of India).

Even if everything went well, it will take a minimum of two years to “bring a factory back” to the United States. There are regulations to meet, people to pay off (and yes, boys and girls, capital-project bribery is common in the United States), and agency approvals to meet. After all, consider the difficulties and hurtles one must go through to make sure that the tiger-striped bo-bo fly isn’t endangered.

These are all HARD and REAL issues that no one is addressing.

At that, the company owners will need to make a strong business decision.

China does not mess around. They are a serious, serious nation that deserves respect.
China does not mess around. They are a serious, serious nation that deserves respect. Do not poke the dragon. They have read the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, and they well know Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally .

This decision is, “what is the easiest and most cost effective solution to the Trump Tariff Wars with China?”

  • Leave the factory in China. Allow the USD-Yuan exchange rate to plummet, and charge American consumers for the difference.
  • Relocate the factory to the United States. Retrain staff from scratch. Order brand new processing equipment all over again, from non-Chinese sources. Have the equipment paid for out of the capital budget (somehow). Wait until it is made, debugged, and then start trial production in two years. In the mean time, work out other temporary “work around” solutions.
  • Relocate the factory to a cheap labor nation other than China. Here there would be the same issues as with relocating the factory to the United States. However, it will cost less to do, have far less regulation to deal with, and will have substantially reduced labor costs.

The answer is clear.

So, if American companies start to do this, how will it benefit America and Americans?

The Bigger Picture

Both the IMF and the World Bank now rate China as the world’s largest economy  based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), a measure that adjusts  countries’ GDPs for differences in prices. In simple terms, this means  that because your money stretches further in China than it would in the  US, China’s GDP is adjusted upwards. 
 
And it won’t be too long before China’s economy surpasses the  US’s by other measures, too. The Centre for Economics and Business  Research (Cebr) predicts it will happen in 2029. 

- The World Economic Forum

Every world leader can see the trends and using the forecasts as a kind of crystal ball, they can see where to “place their bets” for long term trading and economic policy. It’s not with the United States.

Ah. You don’t believe me? Well, check out the data…

Europe views China as the world's leading economic partner. Not the USA, and long term strategies and alliances will increasingly indicate that fact.
Europe views China as the world’s leading economic partner. Not the USA, and long term strategies and alliances will increasingly indicate that fact.

And while there are all sort of other factors that might enter the picture, and alter the outcome to some degree or the other, the fact is quite clear…

The USA can no longer afford to conduct business as usual. The world is changing. And like the contentious business climate (1980’s through 2010) that forced companies to down-size, up-size, re-size, re-structure and go though all sorts of gyrations (while the bloated US government just got bigger and bigger), the US government will have to go through that as well.

  • Requires a serious downsizing of the military and the scope of it’s use. America can no longer afford fighting eight nations simultaneously, policing the globe, operating thousands of military bases on foreign lands and being the proxy fighting force for the global oligarchy.
  • America requires a serious downsizing, or elimination, of numerous agencies. They are too large. Far too bloated. Filled and staffed with inefficient workers that take in far too much operational costs compared to their output.
  • Requires “Business Level” staff cuts, and budget cuts all across the Federal Government.
  • Requires a serious replacement for the Federal Reserve. (Of course!)

None of this will be easy, and it will be fought aggressively by the progressive cabal.

Group photo of the American Senate in 2019.
Group photo of the American Senate in 2019.

Knowing this, and the reader must agree, these steps must be taken immediately to sustain and continued American economic dominance in the global arena.

Oh, and about 芒种…

Now, here’s your opportunity to “get a leg up” on all those “experts” pontificating on China and the Trump “trade war”. Learns something that these “experts” haven’t a clue about, why don’t ya.

Yeah, 芒种 is a very popular song all over China, and everyone is singing and dancing to it. It’s sort of a Austin, Texas version of a Korean pop song, done to Chinese traditional beat.

Look, all that I am saying is that unless you open your eyes to see things AS THEY REALLY ARE, and stop listen to the news that tells you what you want to hear you will follow the pied piper to a very dark place.

Most Americans haven’t a clue as to what China is, how it operates, and how formidable it is. They think it is a backward, but huge, version of Mexico, North Korea, or Cuba.

They are convinced that the ONLY things China makes is cheap and inexpensive junk products. Not realizing that China has been supplying most of the world’s electronics for decades and designing and manufacturing the engines, mechanisms, and equipment used in high end cars and jet aircraft for years as well.

Americans pontificate on this false narrative, carrying on and on about the “junk” that “China floods” the USA with. Not at all giving credit to the American retailers that are actually the ones doing it. Factually, China manufactures just about everything. But most of the low-quality and cheap products end up in the USA simply because the American retailers want it that way.

Which is really strange when you think about it. The disconnect between reality and perception is so amazing and so stark that it is mind-blowing to me.

"OMG! What my friends and family think about China is so... so... off the wall, and nonsensical that it blows my mind. China is really, really, REALLY not what everyone thinks. They seriously have no idea, and they are wrong... really wrong about everything."

-My intern Aijia (from London) discussing the perceptions her friends have of China compared to her experiences after spending one month in China.

As far as all that “freedom” that everyone talks about having in America…

The USA hasn’t been a Republic since the 12th amendment.

It hasn’t been for small government since the American Civil War, and the citizens haven’t had any Rights since President Wilson and FDR changed the Constitution. Not to mention given Congressional power to the Judicial courts, and Federal agencies.

What Rights do you have if you have to pee in a cup to work?

Today America is a progressive Marxist “utopia” and it is only a few short years away from full implementation of hard-line Stalinist controls. Yes. It is. It really, really is.

How democracy ends.
How democracy ends.

Just follow all the “bread crumbs” from President Wilson , through FDR up to and including Clinton and Obama. America today looks nothing like the 1789 Constitution. (1776 Constitution + 1789 Bill of Rights.)

Point of no return.
Point of no return.

America is not what everyone thinks it is.

With that being plainly understood take note. China is not what everyone thinks it is either.

The fastest trains are in China.
The fastest trains are in China.

Ya all, best open up your eyes before it’s too late.

Trade wars are dangerous things to get involved in.
Trade wars are dangerous things to get involved in. Ultimately you want a win-win situation where every party gets some advantage.

While I do appreciate what Donald Trump is trying to do with the Chinese, he’d best stop listening to the moron (deep state RINO plants) that are advising him. They are only going to get the USA backed into situations that will be very uncomfortable.

Tariff wars with China.

How America handles this ascendancy of China at this time, will determine the future relationship with the largest and (will be) the most important nation on the planet. I do think it would be a very good idea to keep on their good side.

For our children.

Just sayin’ you all.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Why are Americans so angry?
Evolution of the USA and China.
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Some Fun Videos

Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.

Some fun videos of China - 1
Fun Videos of Asia - 2
Fun videos of Asia - 3
Fun videos of Asia - 4
Fun Videos of Asia - 5
Fun videos of Asia - 6
Fun videos of Asia - 7
Fun videos of Asia - 8
Fun videos of Asia - 9
Fun videos of Asia - 10
Fun videos of Asia - 11
Fun videos of Asia - 12
Fun videos of Asia - 13
Fun videos of Asia - 14
Fun Videos of Asia - 15
Fun videos of Asia -16
The best way to cook marshmallows.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 16)

We continue in our video exploration of Asia. This episode has some really great and noteworthy entries. Especially the Chinese reaction to the Trump Trade War.

Before we get moving on to the videos, let’s talk a little about the screen splash above. It is from the music video by Kid Rock called “First Kiss”. It is a tribute to the care-free and easy life of the 1970’s when people would go about and have fun and drink together.

Scenes from the Kid Rock song tribute to the 1970's lifestyle in the song "First Kiss".
Scenes from the Kid Rock song tribute to the 1970’s lifestyle in the song “First Kiss”.

Morning & Evening group exercises are still a common sight

When the Chinese government co-opted the “Dancing Grandmother” network, no one knew what to expect. They thought that at the bare minimum that it would tone down all the noise and obstreperous racket that infested the Chinese cities. Well, by making it part of the “healthy China” initiative, it has become very popular.

Read about this program, and why it exists here; (Don’t fret the link will open up into another tab. It’s a good read, I’ll tell you what.)

Fat China

Anyways, it is just as popular as ever and everyone from elementary and middle school ages to 90-year old grandmothers participate in the group dances (and learn a few dance moves in the process).

China responds to the Trump Trade War

China wants and desires very much to be on friendly and peaceful relations with the USA. In many ways, traditional conservative Chinese are very much like their American counterparts. They understand why Trump is doing what he is doing and feel that he is a formidable businessman. Not the “joke” that CNN, and the UK Guardian make him out as.

That being said, the attitude in China is that if you want to have some competition (say in sports, or in this case) in business, then they will fight to win. The Chinese will unleash everything, and they do fight to win.

So While Trump is instigating the “tariff wars”, exerting influences on up-and-growing tech companies (like Huawei), negotiating with other nations to stop doing business with China, and using CIA dirty tricks in Hong Kong, the Chinese are not sitting back. They released the brakes on the yuan-USD conversion and let the market decide. So far, the value of the yuan is falling relative to the USD, and now everything made in China is 30% cheaper relative to what it was before Trump.

But it’s more than that.

You might not like China. You might be under the impression that China is hard-core Marxist (it’s not), or you might be under other misconceptions as spread by the Western media. But one thing is very clear to anyone who has had any dealings with the Chinese; they don’t play around, and they fight to win.

The Chinese fight to win.

Here’s one of the more popular movies this Summer and you should look at it from the point of view of the Chinese in a “trade war” with the West…

Look at it as a friendly, but serious, message to Trump from Beijing.

Oh, you don’t think that it has anything to do with trade? Watch the clip again, and pay attention to the English dialog…

Who do you think you are?

You collect money from me. You don't share it.

Do as I say.

You are not qualified to make deals with me.

And the discussion continues…

If you quit, you can take this business too. I can get anybody to take care of it.

And then, the sheer arrogance of the Westerners reaches an explosion point when he says…

Will somebody get this yellow piece of fat to get out of here!

After that we see how the Westerner battles and demolishes the Chinese man. It’s strong. It’s vicious, and he dies.

He’s dead. The Westerner has won.

Then, it’s payback time.

Get together in Thailand

In the United States, at least during the 1960’s, the 1970’s, and well into the 1980’s mu friends and I would go cruising in our cars up and down the town streets. We would then go to specific spots. Much like the “Moon Tower” in the movie “Dazed and Confused” where we would party.

Which always involved beer, and often some kinds of other libation.

Hanging out
Hanging out. During the 1970’s we would all hang out together with friends and go drinking, singing, and dancing together in the countryside. At that time we would listen to Led Zep, and other classics of the 1970’s.

I don’t know if this is still an activity in the Untied States.

For some reason, I don’t think so. Simply because it would be one of the first things that busy-body democrats would try to regulate, fine, fee or make laws against.

Yah. You know this is true.

First Kiss by Kid Rock
Screen shot from the song “First Kiss” by Kid Rock. It’s a tribute to the days when young folk would go riding around the town and hanging out with each other. While many Americans wish and yearn for those day again, they are not gone. They might be banned or difficult int he USA, but the rest of the world still celebrates those times…everyday.

Well, it’s still a popular pastime in the rest of the world. Here’s what it’s like to gather with your 20-something friends and play around with along the Thailand-Cambodian border…

Everyday China

This next video takes place in Shanghai at night. yeah it’s super-typical. But what I would like to point out is some of the very common elements that are found all over China, that you might miss if you were not aware of it all.

When you watch the video, please pay attention to the painted road markings on the road. Notice that they have incorporated solar powered LED lighting that flashes to alert people. Notice the body cameras, radios, and lighting on the police officers. Notice the streets how clean they are and devoid of trash, as well as notice that there isn’t any graffiti anywhere.

You will also notice the raised walkway surfaces on the sidewalk. This is common all through China. It is for blind people so that they can make their way around town.

Watch the video and look for those things…

Hiphi – The Chinese Tesla

Of course, the vast bulk of storage batteries, electric motors, automotive controls, and complex wiring systems are all made out of China. (Outsourced from the USA since the mid 1990’s.) Therefore, it should not be any surprise that China is leading the world in the production of electric and hybrid vehicles.

Bet ya didn’t know that.

Not only are there more vehicles (on a quantitative basis) made in China, but there are far more models, types and variations. Heck, here in tiny Zhuhai, almost all the buses have been fully “green” (all electric) for two years now.

I like them that way. So quiet.

Big difference from the noisy gas-powered behemoths that lumber along.

Here’s one of the car brands. I place it here not because it’s the best or anything like that. I just like the design and the style. Oh, by the way, you can’t buy it in the USA. It’s going to be another ten or so years before the automotive regulations catch up with the innovations out of China. (That’s why the implementation of LED’s on American cars took 15 years, don’t you know. And, only five years in Germany and the UK.)

We become conditions to accept our chains.

This video is addressed to my fellow Americans, not all of them, but rather to the trolls who don’t read anything that I post. Those that don’t study the issues. Those that refuse to look at things from a third-person point of view and are not listening to my warnings.

– Warnings –

  • China is growing and it is not what you think it is.
  • China is a serious nation, run by serious people who got into positions of power through merit, not popularity.
  • China plays to win.
  • America was established as a Republic. But, today it is an Oligarchy.
  • We have grown used to the loss of liberty and freedom that America now represents. We do not realize that America today is the absolute opposite of what it was first established as.

Most Americans live a life in ignorance and fear. They don’t realize just how far down into tyranny they have fallen.

For instance, we pay taxes, and watch as the government overspends it. That is NOT in the benefit of the citizenry.

We believe that we own houses and cars, yet both are subject to confiscation by the government. That is NOT ownership.

We must submit to regulations, pay various fees for the most simple tasks and ask permission to do anything from selling lemonade in your front yard, to fishing.

People that is NOT freedom.

Americans do not realize how conditioned they are to their life as a serf. They have no idea that all these things are all chains and bindings that restrict their freedom.

Like this video aptly illustrates…

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 15)

We continue with the video exploration of Asia, as well as my often cantankerous narrative. As we proceed, let’s talk a little bit about the splash screen above. It’s from the wonder 1960’s movie “Our man Flint”, which is a sort of parody of 007 James Bond movies.

Our Man Flint is a 1966 American action film that parodies the James Bond genre. The film was directed by Daniel Mann, written by Hal Fimberg and Ben Starr, and starring James Coburn as master spy Derek Flint. The main premise of the film is that a trio of "mad scientists" attempt to blackmail the world with a weather-control machine. 

-Wikipedia.

James Coburn stars as super-spy Derek Flint in this action comedy which takes the tongue-in-cheek wit of the James Bond series and shifts it into high gear.

Flint is an ultra-sophisticated operative of international intelligence agency Z.O.W.I.E.

He’s a master of martial arts, electronic gadgetry (his cigarette lighter can perform 83 special functions), languages both human and animal (he can communicate with dolphins in a pinch), and even gives ballet lessons to the dancers of the Bolshoi.

Being a specially trained secret agent, he is able to rest most comfortably in the most unusual circumstances. Here he is getting a full weeks rest in a few hours by using his super powers of concentration.

So when his fellow agents begin dropping like flies, Z.O.W.I.E. assigns Flint the task of finding out who the killers happen to be.

One of the things that I, and many others, enjoyed is the bevy of attractive women that secret agents always seemed to have surrounding them. It comes with the territory… that is, as long as you know your real purpose… heh heh.

In LIke Flint with all the girls.
While James Bond was obviously the king of the international spy boom of the 1960s, there were many pretenders to the throne – Dean Martin’s Matt Helm, the Men (and Girl) From U.N.C.L.E., Richard Johnson’s Bulldog Drummond, television’s Maxwell Smart. even Neil Connery as 007’s alleged relative in Operation Kid Brother. The only super-agent who came close to Bond on the big screen was James Coburn’s know-it-all Derek Flint, the man from ZOWIE (Zonal Organisation for World Intelligence and Espionage).

Flint is the sort of fellow who meditates by suspending his life functions for a three hours, fills his spare time by compiling a dictionary of dolphin language or teaching ballet in Russia, and lives in a chic, gagdet-filled penthouse with four varied glamorous girlfriends.

It doesn’t pretend to be a serious thriller, though Coburn – the man who made silver hair and roll-neck pullovers into icons of cool – has some Bruce Lee-tought martial arts moves in acrobatic fight scenes which require him to toss stuntmen around the room.

By the time of the third James Bond film, 1964's Goldfinger,  the spy craze had exploded across pop culture, spattering the walls  with poison blow-dart ink pens and steely-eyed, ultra-virile heroes.  

Perhaps the Cold War fantasy adventures of "real men" ruggedly  vanquishing godless Commies and other evil empires, all while bedding  improbably beautiful women, were a meat-eating guy's antacid against the  discomforting reflux from real global tensions — not to mention  home-grown indigestion embodied by the Beatles,   antiwar protests, and the Women's Movement. 

Plus, utilizing the Cold  War for entertainment sure simplified things for moviegoers and  TV-watchers. Head-throbbingly complex geopolitical currents were reduced  to sprightly three-act suspense dramas that could be wrapped up within  two hours. 

Guns, gadgets, and girls were the primary colors of the  comic-book spy universe. Certainly there were serious-minded Bond  imitators, such as the Harry Palmer series starring Michael Caine. But  someone was bound to play the genre for laughs, and in short order the  Bond spoofs outnumbered the Bond movies themselves. 

In fact, the film  version of Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale, hit the  screen in '67 as a clowned-up comedy. 

Cocktail crooner Dean Martin  starred in four mixed efforts featuring soused secret agent Matt Helm.  Then as now, a Hollywood trend didn't end until it was well past tired,  and titles such as Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, both starring Vincent Price and his army of lethal fembots, made sure that we all tired quite thoroughly. 

The best of the spy-spoof bunch was 1965's Our Man Flint,  a hyper-kitschy and entertaining time capsule starring James Coburn as a  Bond surrogate played so straight you could shave with him. 

This  tongue-way-in-cheek action comedy garnered favorable reviews and became  Fox's third highest grossing film of the year. Coburn — terrific with  this dry, crackling material — is Derek Flint, ultra-secret agent aiding  Z.O.W.I.E. (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage). 

Our Man Flint  made a shrewd move by sticking to the Bond template.  The brilliant and  resourceful Flint works alone, follows each clue to the next level,  employs superhuman physical and mental prowess, beds gorgeous gals, gets  captured, and prevents World Domination in an orgy of destruction at  the evildoers' secret volcano island. 

However, instead of being a  bozo-nosed vaudeville like the Austin Powers movies, Our Man Flint out-Bonds the Bond films by respectfully retooling the familiar Bond elements and then turning the knob to 11.  

-DVD Journal
Flint with many beautiful women.
There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in beloved spy spoof Our Man Flint when an extra blatantly cops a feel from a curvy, scantily clad actress. This unintentional detail probably as much about Our Man Flint’s place in the firmament of swingin’-’60s camp as anything else in the picture. Released at pretty much the zenith of the “spy craze”—clinched by the James Bond films and carried on by slew of imitators on screens big and small—Our Man Flint introduced private superspy Derek Flint, as portrayed by the inimitable James Coburn amongst bevies of “babes.”

The plot is the usual hokum and Edward Mulhare isn’t really eccentric enough to compete in the villainy stakes, but Coburn is plainly enjoying himself so much, and the trimmings are so stylish, that it’s impossible not to enjoy.

Jerry Goldsmith provides a jaunty, hummable score. Coburn and Cobb returned, in similarly lightweight style, in a sequel, In Like Flint, which took the super-agent into outer space a decade before Roger Moore got there in Moonraker. The character later reappeared, played by Ray Danton, in Dead on Target, a 1976 TV pilot that didn’t go anywhere.

Flint with more women.
To the extent that Our Man Flint works, it does so due to its tossed-off wit. For instance, like the odd mismatch of names and faces for mad scientists Doctors Krupov (Rhys Williams), Wu (Peter Brocco), and Schneider (Benson Fong). And let’s not forget the sheer oddity of Coburn, the toothy, gangly character actor who nevertheless charms his way into stardom here with laid-back cool. You know, there’s definite nostalgic appeal in the shag-adelic style, which laid the groundwork for Austin Powers (which sampled Flint’s Presidential-hotline ringtone).

This movie is a classic of the spy-genre, in its all-out parody glory.

Age has only added a new sheen of humor, as we guffaw at the retro aura such as the kung-fu grips, the 1960’s womanizing, go-go dancing, and ridiculous faux-buddhist upper-class chicness.

Our hero, having just returned from teaching ballet  at Moscow's Bolshoi, is called into service. Z.O.W.I.E. agents have been  killed while seeking the mysterious masterminds behind G.A.L.A.X.Y, an  organization controlling the world's weather and holding humanity  hostage to a plan for a scientifically regimented (and otherwise  wonderfully beneficial) new world order. 

While enforcing The American  Way, Flint performs impromptu surgery, stops his heart for prolonged  periods, repeatedly annoys his flustered boss (Lee J. Cobb) with his  undisciplined ways, invents a Zippo lighter with 82 functions ("83 if  you want to light a cigar"), traces a poison through a bouillabaisse  recipe served in only one spot on Earth, jump-starts a man's heart via a  light bulb socket, wisecracks with British Agent "Triple-O Eight,"  judo-chops gangs of bad guys, avoids disintegration in an  electrofragmentizer, and finds his four live-in lovelies ensnared within  G.A.L.A.X.Y's Dr. Evil-like H.Q. 

Supported by Jerry Goldmsith's way  groovy musical score, Flint does it all while keeping his tux spotless,  his demeanor cool, and his women satisfied.

Comparisons between Flint's pastiche heroics and the Austin Powers series are obvious. However, Our Man Flint and its sequel, In Like Flint,  are exaggerated burlesques of their own time and the pop superspy  tropes that flourished then. Therefore, we can more accurately compare  the Flint flicks with Scream or Not Another Teen Movie,  two  sendups of contemporary conventions and clichés that had grown so  familiar to audiences that laughter was the only response left.  

-DVD Journal 

Our Man Flint is an essential entry in the genre of parody, and actually manages to stand on its own without knowledge of what it is trying to parody in a way that the more recent (and less sophisticated) Austin Powers has managed to do.

Yet where Austin Powers is slapstick hilarity, Our Man Flint is buffoonishly mock-serious…. a parody style that fits the spy-film genre far more comfortably and more satisfyingly… and has aged remarkably well for a highly topical parody.

All that is asked of me, I shall perform.
Derek Flint (James Coburn) is America’s answer to James Bond but, unlike his British counterpart, Flint is a bona-fide master of, well, everything: Disguises; Karate; Languages; Gadgets; Ballet; Zen (Flint ‘relaxes’ by suspending his stiffened body between two chairs, one under his head, one under his heels. No special effects or support required, Coburn could actually do this). Women throw themselves at him, and men want to be him. Everybody, that is, except his frazzled old boss Lloyd Cramden (Lee J. Cobb) who, against his better judgement, must persuade Flint to come out of retirement when the evil Galaxy corporation unleash their wicked plot to control the world’s weather. Flint’s globetrotting takes him from New York to Marseilles to Rome and, finally, to Galaxy’s island hideout (which bears a striking resemblance to the Fox Ranch seen in many other films), a spectacular paradise full of bikinied beauties spouting phrases like, “All that is asked of me I shall perform.”
And guys, you may want to think twice about watching Our Man Flint  with a wife or girlfriend. As part of their broad comedic approach,  both Flint films unashamedly parade coprolitic sexual attitudes that  would make even Mr. Powers wince. 

By their nature, '60s spy movies bared  a phallocentric revolt against the era's "sexual revolution." Our Man Flint  is giddy and harmless while still being sexist in ways that no one  could get away with today. Flint's sybaritic lifestyle includes a  Manhattan penthouse staffed by a quartet of pliant babes who, it's  clear, exist to provide him with anything he desires. 

The sexy  villainess (Gila Golan, Miss Israel 1961) likewise falls into his arms  and bedsheets within minutes. 

The film's final third is an adolescent  male Disneyland of bikini-clad centerfold models brainwashed to be  smiling, willing "pleasure units" who "offer their bodies for the good  of G.A.L.A.X.Y." 

Although played for good clean "Yeah, baby!" fun, the  scenes of Joe Blow henchmen queuing up to enjoy the "units" like Happy  Meals might even leave a few Maxim readers squirming. (Another  raise of an eyebrow is occasioned when, as the space age lair  self-destructs, we watch Flint and company cheer while hundreds of  uncondemned people, including a crowd-scene's worth of those "pleasure  units" we just saw, are blown to smithereens.) 

-DVD Journal  
In LIke Flint movie.
Our Man Flint contains lots of nods to his more famous British counterpart, James Bond, in several silly ways. At one point we encounter a celebrity agent known only as ‘0008’ (Bob Gunner, who looks a bit like Sean Connery), a spy with his own series of novels. Flint asks if the criminal organization known as SPECTRE could be involved, and 0008 replies, “It’s bigger than SPECTRE!” Earlier in the film, Flint is initially offered a Walther PPK and a briefcase with a concealed throwing knife – as seen in Dr. No (1962) – which he dismisses as crude.

This is a great movie.

It takes you back to a time when it was fine to talk about sex, and sexual situations without offending anyone. As such, it is a precious look at a world that the United States has lost and may never recover again. I would suggest the reader go ahead and watch this movie. Watch it before it is either banned, or the person who views the movie get penalized by the up-and-coming social-scoring methodology.

Anyways, back to Asia…

Sword Dance Exercise – China

It’s perhaps a cultural thing, but the first time that I visited Asia, I went to Hong Kong. There, at the wee hours of 5 am (jet lag, don’t you know) I saw the early risers get up and do their daily morning exercises.

Some would exercise doing Tai Ji, others would do the group dances, and others would do various forms of martial arts. The most popular is a kind of Kung Fu with fans (the “fan dance”) and others using swords. Here’s a cute video of a girl who is obviously a master of this kind of exercise / kung fu / dance. Taken in mainland China…

Cambodian Singer

I came across this gal singing her heart out in this music video. It think it’s well done, but might sound a little strange to our western ears. I love how she is putting all her emotion and passion into the music and song. I also love the simplicity of it. You don’t have a lot of bling, and complex African-American rhythms with huge assed girls wagging their asses all over the place.

I think that this gal is from Cambodia, but she could as well be from Laos or Thailand. I do think that she is great and she is certainly worth a listen.

No it’s NOT easy.

I commented on an essay that I found on LinkedIN the other day. In it, Fionn Wright wrote his comments on a statement by one of Donald Trumps’ advisors. Who said…

“The Chinese economy is crumbling. It's just not the powerhouse it was 20 years ago." 

- White House Economic Advisor Larry Kudlow‬ August 2019.

This is a pretty drastic comment. “Crumbling”? WTF. Ain’t nothing “crumbling” don’t you know.

So, Fionn Wright wrote…

What a simple Google search tells us: Chinese Economy: 1999 GDP: 1.09 trillion (nominal) Figure for 2019: 14.2 trillion (nominal) That’s 13X 

1999 GDP per capita: $3,800 (PPP) 2019 GDP per capita: $19,520 (PPP)  More than 5X 

The #ChineseEconomy has also surpassed the US in terms of PPP and is #1 in the world 

Larry Kudlow is the “Economic” Advisor to the #WhiteHouse So I have to assume that he knows this If he is referring to the #GDP growth slowdown, it’s still 3X the US 

That would lead me to the conclusion that he is consciously misleading people The main problem here is not that he’s lying (or really incompetent) It’s that a lot of Americans will actually believe these kinds of “absurd” statements as Ian Bremmer puts it (People in Britain do too - welcome to #Brexit) 

Business Insider, CNBC, MSN and a host of other media sources publish this as if what he is saying makes sense. If this isn’t #FakeNews I don’t know what is? 🤷‍♂️  

And, you know what? He’s right. Compare the numbers.

So I wrote…

The propaganda is flowing hard and fast. Do not think that the recent upsurge in HK protests is organic. Trump is involved in full-scale passive-aggressive economic warfare. But, you know what, the Chinese are the toughest on the planet. 

I hope that things ratchet down a peg or two. 

All in all, pretty benign.

I just agreed with him, and argued that there are forces bigger than us that are taking place. Donald Trump is fighting this war on behalf of the American people, and China is striking back. Both are formidable forces, and I hope that it gets resolved soon.

To which case, this Mr. Caspar Smeets (A pro-Gay Activist, who works as a design director) responded to me most aggressively…

Could you not promote the Chinese Dream in its own right without your political rants and America-bashing; on LinkedIn out if all platforms? You tell us zero news, sound so childish, unnecessary, uninspiring, and boring for someone claiming to help people achieve their Chinese dream, which incidentally is of course based on an American concept. Go play on Twitter or something where you can start your own private trade war. 

Pretty uncalled for. But that’s a Jack-Ass for you.

He’s from the UK and living in Oman. He knows nothing about China, never been to China, and comes at me out of the blue with this kind of response.

I’ll tell you what, it’s disheartening. For me, as the target of such shit, it hurts. It’s sort of along the lines of this…

Well, then out of the blue, a fellow comes to my defense. He writes…

 Caspar, got out of bed the wrong side this morning?   

The conversation continues. With sparing banter back and forth from the antagonist, who eventually admits to why he was so nasty responding to my rather bland opinion. He says…

Don't get me started on happy go lucky western people getting all smart about a totalitarian, repressive, rascist dictatorship over the back of America. 
  • Totalitarian, I can understand. There is one party. The traditional party. If you want anything other than conservative, traditional China, you will suffer.
  • Repressive, it depends on who is being repressed. I’m not gay, transgender, I’m not a SJW trying to force other people to do things such as banning straws, or turning playgrounds into “safe spaces”. I’ve been living here heading towards two decades. So far, I’ve never been repressed.
Playground Comparisons
  • Racist? China has over 65 minorities, and invites everyone into the nation (provided they have something to contribute). They have enormous public work projects all over the world and are almost single-handedly building up a middle-class in Africa.

This Jack-Ass doesn’t even realize that I am a conservative, American-expat, Trump follower who lives in China. That I wish peace between both nations. That I recognize that both sides have valid arguments and are engaged into a trade war that I hope, will soon be resolved.

He just shows just how off-the-wall insane these progressive democrat Marxists are. They really, really are just like those NPC meme’s you see on the internet.

NPC Meme describing progressive Marxists
NPC Meme describing progressive Marxists.

At which point, my rescuer replies…

Well, at least we're all in agreement about the US being a totalitarian, repressive, racist dictatorship. That's something we can build on. 

Ugh!

Moving away from the nonsense…

In case you are all wondering, I dropped out of this nonsense a long time ago. Every nation has it’s strengths and weaknesses.

  • America = Oligarchy. With citizens treated as serfs for profit. Maintains the appearance of a Democracy (Modified Republic into a Democracy) with zero accountability. The Oligarchy control the mobs by offering social re-engineering efforts via propaganda outlets.
  • China = Single party, traditional conservative Chinese.

Which is better?

It depends on who you are and your role within the stratified communities that make up those two nations. Different people have different situations and thus would have different points of view on this.

Certainly if you are wealthy, America is best for you. There are two sets of laws, rules, public discourse, and juridical systems that favor you. They favor you to a point that the government will pay you at tax-time rather than you owing money to them. They favor you to a point that you can commit treason, sell of American assets, get people killed, and break just about every law in the book including the systematic rape of children, and be allowed a pass.

Also, if you are dirt poor, illiterate, lazy, slothful or have addictions, America is also better. As you will be taken cared for and given special treatment than the rest of society. Thus people with mental illnesses, the gender confused, and those misfits that are not trying to fit within society will be cared for with “special” treatment.

However, if you are a working “stiff”, middle class, with ambitions to move up the social ladder, then most certainly China will offer you more opportunities, take less of your money, and provide a much healthier place for you to raise your family within.

That’s just the way it is today.

A comparision of the social-economic favortism that the countries of CHina nd the United States can provide for their citizens.
A comparison of the social-economic favoritism that the countries of China and the United States can provide for their citizens.

The United States, being an oligarchy, is perfect for the massively wealthy, or the incredibly poor. The nation has systems in place for people within those two spheres of influence to prosper within.

China however, provides advantages for the vast bulk of the citizenry, say 80 – 90%, though it is an environment where the poorest and the wealthiest may find disadvantage.

Looking at the nations as automobiles

Here’s a fun exercise for those of you who don’t like to read charts, tables and look at numbers. Think of each nation as a car. That’s it, think of each nation as a wonderful car.

Now, the United States started off with the most pure and perfect automobile design ever conceived in the history of the world. God created man. Men creates governments. The governments serve man so that they may serve God.

Wonderful. Pure and simple.

So this is America as it was designed and forged back in 1776…

America as desgined. Simple, robuste and pure. This is an image of what America (as designed) would look like. A beautiful Bughatti.
America as designed. Simple, robust and pure. This is an image of what America (as designed) would look like. A beautiful Bugatti.

But, you know, times change. People want to make “improvements” and game the system for their own benefit. You know, like ignoring the tenth Amendment, setting up “free Speech restriction zones”, and of course going “Red Flag” on gun laws. Sort of like this post…

Parable about America

Anyways, all these changes has resulted in America looking quite different from it’s original intent. Indeed, today America looks something like this…

This is what America would look like if it was a car.
This is what America would look like if it was a car.

Of course, other nations would look quite different.

China, where I live, would be more direct, traditional, conservative and functional. It’s rather harsh on the rules and doesn’t throw money away on trivialities. So, for China, it might look something like this…

This is what China would look like if it was a car.
This is what China would look like if it was a car.

To better understand the point that I am trying to make, you can check out this link below (it opens up in a separate tab)…

Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

Sex Doll Technology is really advancing…

In China there are two industries that you (the reader) should keep your eyes on. One is the robotic industry, and the other is the sex-doll industry. Both industries concentrate on specific features, function and utility. However, both like to use human appearing body structures.

As both industries lie within close proximity of each other geographically, I can well anticipate cross-over technology advancements within the next five years. Just like how China took the personal drone industry from zero to the powerhouse it is today.

El paso shooting survivor’s mother left her gun home the day of the mass shooting by a radical progressive Bernie Sanders follower…

OMG! I just read this today. Check it out…

“Christopher Grant said he recognized the sound of gunshots, “So I ran toward my mother to try to shield her and I’m like, mom — cause my mom, she’s a gun-wielding grandma. She carries a snub nose Smith & Wesson, .38 special with a built-in scope in it, everywhere she goes,” but she did not have it on her.

“An hour before we went to Walmart, she decides, ‘We’re just going to Walmart, I’m going to put it in my room.’ So when I went to her, no gun. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you got to be kidding me.’”

Grant ran off and saw the shooter in the Walmart parking lot and started to throw bottles at him to distract him. The shooter then started to fire his rifle at him, hitting Grant.”

Not the best way to make money…

The police broke up this counterfeiting ring. Here’s a video of their operation. I found it interesting.

OK, let’s move on…

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 14)

Yes. Here we are going to explore Asia. This entire post is devoted to this. Except that we are going to take just a little bit of time to talk about something else.

As we continue in our video exploration of Asia, and my various rants of stuff, let’s first explore one of my all time movies. You know which one, don’t you? It’s from the photo splash screen above.

The movie is “Casablanca”, and it’s a classic.

I am so amazed at how many millennials have never heard of this move, nor watched it. It is stunning to me. Which is, perhaps, why I am going to spend a larger than usual amount of time writing about it.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Lost in Love in Casablanca.

Casablanca is a film about the personal tragedy of occupation and war. It speaks to the oppression of the one side – and the heroism and self-deprecation of the other. From opportunists, to isolationists – from patriots to disenchanted lovers – the film has everything a man or woman would enjoy.

I cannot go with you or ever see you again.

Bravery, courage, intrigue, romance, beauty and love. Leading actors to please any appetite.

Watching this film is to step back to a world that doesn’t exist – yet to know it. It is to experience lives that have never been lived – but are “real to you.” It is to know pain and joy, pride and pity for characters that are a fiction – yet are so real that you can’t help but get lost in their story.

So what exactly is so special about it? Is it its great genre mix, never  equaled by another film? When we think of 'Casablanca' first, we  remember it as a romantic film (well, most of us do). 

But then again,  its also a drama involving terror, murder and flight. 

One can call it a  character study, centering on Rick. And there are quite a few moments of  comedic delight, just think of the pickpocket ("This place is full of  vultures, vultures everywhere!") or the elderly couple on the last  evening before their emigration to the US ("What watch?"). 

But  'Casablanca' is not only great as a whole, it still stands on top if we  break it apart and look at single lines of dialog, scenes or  performances alone. 

Amazing cast, memorable dialogue, unforgettable story. Through this film, Casablanca will always live in my heart and I will think of its characters as family.

Seeing it for the first time is truly the start of a romance with ideals that will live in you long after credits end.

Casablanca 1
Not only is the dialog great, it’s unforgettably delivered, especially by Humphrey Bogart (“I was misinformed.”) and Claude Rains (“I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here”). Many of scenes have become a part of film history; the duel of ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘La Marseillaise’ is probably one of the greatest scenes ever shot, and the last scene is probably even familiar to the few people who’ve never seen ‘Casablanca’.

The Nazi envoy, Major Heinrich Strasser puts it: ‘Human life is cheap in Casablanca.” Of course because a man may be executed in its crowded market before Marshal Pétain’s portrait or where a charming girl may guarantee an exit visa by spending her night with the Prefect of Police…

Rick’s Café is the point of intersection, the espionage center, the background for Allied offensive, the focal point as refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe seek to gain exit visas to Lisboa…

The interesting club so well organized, leads to an open arena of conspiracy, counterspies, secret plans, black market transactions, in which the games and fights are between arrogant Nazis, patriotic French, idealists, murderers, pickpockets and gamblers around a roulette wheel, where a ball could rest on Rick’s command against the settled number 22…

Casablanca a love lost.
The cast is one of its main strengths, not just Bogart and Bergman but also the fine supporting cast. Rains, Greenstreet, Lorre, and the others are indispensable to the atmosphere and the story, and each has some very good moments.

“Casablanca” is an adventure film which victory is not won with cannons and guns… The action, the fight, the war takes place inside Rick’s walls rather than outside…

But who is this Rick? What is his magical power? His secret weapon? Rick is the anti-fascist with hard feelings, the former soldier of fortune who has grown tired of smuggling and fighting, and is now content to sit out the war in his own neutral territory…

Hum... A little like myself, eh?

Even loyalty to a friend doesn’t move him as he refuses to help Ugarte, a desperately frightened little courier who is fleeing from the police…

Casablanca 3
This is a film that MUST belong in every video collection in the U.S. is not in the world. The stories about it’s making are legendary from the constant rewrites to the apocrypha of casting stories. What is amazing to me, and the reason I believe it holds audiences almost spellbound in successive viewings, is the connection with the horrors of World War II was almost every single cast member.

Emphatically, Rick says, “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

Play it again Sam.

Ah, but we know he will do just that in a very short time, for into his quiet life comes a haunting vision from his past, the beautiful woman he still loves and bitterly remembers…

But…

But…

But, she is married to an underground leader and she desperately needs those papers Rick conveniently now has in his possession…

OMG!

The cynical Rick’s facade of neutrality begins to weaken as he recalls the bittersweet memories of his past love affair, memories triggered repeatedly when the strains of “As Time Goes By” come from Sam, his piano-playing confidante…

But “Casablanca” basic message is a declaration of self-sacrifice… War. World II demanded all!

The words stated by Rick at the airport had their impact: ‘The problems of three people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’ It goes without saying that Bogart is incomparable when he seems most like himself…

His way with a line makes “Casablanca” dialog part of the collective memory: ‘I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray. You were blue.’

Rick and lost in love.
Everyone in this film is fabulous, but it is the chemistry of Rick (Bogart) and Ilsa (Bergman) been truly holds the film together. When I saw this film almost frame by frame in the limited book series of classic films that were produced in the late 1960s, I was stunned by the subtlety of facial expressions that conveyed so much of Rick Blaine’s character by a marvelous actor Humphrey Bogart.

There is a reason why he was named the actor of the century. While every person in the film becomes a real flesh and blood presence, the story of Rick and Ilsa is the center of this cinema feast.

Intermixed in this intrigue are all the fascinating and beautifully acted supporting roles…. With his customary skill, Claude Rains plays Major Renault, a prefect of police who is like Bogart in many ways…

He, too, claims neutrality, but is definitely against the Nazis…

He is Rick’s most devoted adversary, tauntingly calling the man a “sentimentalist” and delivering his share of cynically amusing lines…

But, what about us?

When he makes a small bet and is encouraged to make a bigger one, he remarks that he is only a “poor corrupt official.”

Ingrid Bergman is fascinating as the lovely heroine, the mysterious impossible woman of an impossible love, the tender mood of every man, the love-affair, the quality of being romantic, the traditional woman enclosed by two rivals, symbol of a besieged Europe…

Time to say goodby.
CASABLANCA is the best treatment ever of the ancient theme of the love triangle. Set in World War II Casablanca, a Moroccan city under the control of the collaborationist Vichy French government, the movie starts with a news wire that two German couriers have been murdered and their letters of transit stolen. Each letter will permit one person to leave Casablanca to a neutral country.

Paul Henreid is Victor Laszlo, the anti-Nazi resistance leader, seeking in Morocco the two letters of transit signed by General De Gaulle…

Here’s looking at you kid.

Sidney Greenstreet is the black marketeer on good terms with Rick, the rival owner of the ‘Blue Parrot,’ the acceptable face of corruption…

Peter Lorre is Ugarte, the racketeer, the dealer of anything illegal, the killer, driven into a corner by the Vichy police, who has given Rick two letter of transit…

Enter Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, owner of the shady but cheerful Cafe Americaine. Rick  is a cynical and hard-nosed man whose motto is, "I stick my neck out  for nobody." Like many a cynic, Rick is an embittered ex-idealist, still  nursing his wounds from being abandoned by his lover Ilsa (Ingrid  Bergman). By chance he falls into possession of the missing letters of  transit. 

Enter  Ilsa, who comes to Casablanca on the arm of Czech Resistance leader  Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a few steps ahead of the Nazi police. We  now have three people and two letters of transit. Who will reach  America, and who will stay in Casablanca? I know no other movie that so  perfectly balances humor, romance, and drama. 

The  soul of good drama lies in presenting characters with hard choices, and  few choices are as hard, or as illuminating of the protagonists'  makeup, as the choices in CASABLANCA. All of the characters must decide  what they will give up for love, for honor, and for themselves. The  scenes of Rick and Ilsa's love, years ago in Paris, are some of the  finest romantic scenes in cinema. 

And  the humor, particularly in the person of Casablanca's Prefect of  Police, Louis Renault, has contributed dozens of dry witticisms to our  everyday language - "I am shocked! Shocked! - "The Germans wore gray,  you wore blue." - "I was misinformed." - "It would take a miracle to get  you out of Casablanca, and the Germans have outlawed miracles." 

So  perfectly blended are these three major elements that you cannot point  to a single shot or scene that should have been eliminated from the  movie. Never try to watch only one scene from CASABLANCA; you will  inevitably be absorbed until the very end of the film. It is little  short of miraculous that the chaotically mismanaged shooting of this  movie resulted in such a magnificent final product; it speaks volumes  for luck and for Owen Marks' and Michael Curtiz' post-production  editing.  
At the table in Casablanca.
A scene still from the 1943 Academy Award®-winning film “Casablanca” features (l to r) Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Paul Henried and Ingrid Bergman. Bogart received an Academy Award nomination in the Lead Actor category while Claude Rains was honored with a nomination in the Supporting Actor category. “Casablanca” received eight Academy Award nominations in total and won three Oscars® including Best Picture. Restored by Nick & jane for Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans Website: http:www.doctormacro.com. Enjoy!

Conrad Veidt is the very essence of German rigidity, unfeeling, unconcerned about life, but firmly believing in the foolish ideology of his Nazi compatriots…

“Casablanca” covers many highlights: The Marseillaise against the Horst Wessel song inspiring sequence; the blissful days in Paris; Ilsa’s emotional words to Rick in occupied Paris; the champagne toast; Ilsa’s request to Sam; the poetry of the magic words and the beautiful voice of Dooley Wilson; Captain Renault’s words in the airport; and the farewell…

The magic that developed from the teaming of Bogart and Bergman is enough to make a new romantic figure out of the former tough guy…

To his cynicism, his own code of ethics, his hatred of the phoniness in all human behavior, he now added the softening traits of tenderness and compassion and a feeling of heroic commitment to a cause…

They helped him complete the portrayal of the ideal man who all men wished to rival…

Casablanca and the fat man.
In December 1941, American expatriate Rick Blaine owns an upscale nightclub and gambling den in Casablanca. “Rick’s Café Américain” attracts a varied clientele, including Vichy French and German officials, refugees desperate to reach the still-neutral United States, and those who prey on them.

Although Rick professes to be neutral in all matters, he ran guns to Ethiopia during its war with Italy and fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Petty crook Ugarte boasts to Rick of “letters of transit” obtained by murdering two German couriers. The papers allow the bearers to travel freely around German-controlled Europe and to neutral Portugal, and are priceless to the refugees stranded in Casablanca. Ugarte plans to sell them at the club, and asks Rick to hold them.

Before he can meet his contact, Ugarte is arrested by the local police under the command of Captain Louis Renault, the unabashedly corrupt Vichy prefect of police. Ugarte dies in custody without revealing that he entrusted the letters to Rick.

One can look at hundreds of films produced during this period without finding any whose composite pieces fall so perfectly into place…

Its photography is outstanding, the music score is inventive, the editing is concise and timed perfectly…

Bogart’s and Bergman’s love scenes create a genuinely romantic aura, capturing a sensitivity between the two stars one would not have believed possible…

Rick in love in Casablanca.
Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman starred in “Casablanca,” the Oscar®-winning film of 1943. Bogart was nominated for an Academy Award® in the Lead Actor category for his portrayal of Café Americain owner Rick Blaine. In total, “Casablanca” received eight Oscar nominations and won three, including Best Picture. Restored by Nick & jane for Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans Website: http:www.doctormacro.com. Enjoy!

“Casablanca” is a masterpiece of entertainment, an outstanding motion picture which brought Bogart his first Academy Award nomination (he lost to Paul Lukas for “Watch On the Rhine”) and won Awards for Best Picture of the Year, Best Director and Best Screenplay…

 There is a scene about halfway through the movie Casablanca that has  become commonly known as 'The Battle of the Anthems' throughout the  film's long history. A group of German soldiers has come into Rick's  Café American and are drunkenly singing the German National Anthem at  the top of their voice. Victor Lazlo, the leader of the French  Resistance, cannot stand this act and while the rest of the club stares  appalled at the Germans, Lazlo orders the band to play 'Le Marseilles  (sic?)' the French National Anthem. With a nod from Rick, the band  begins playing, with Victor singing at the top of HIS voice. This in  turn, inspires the whole club to begin singing and the Germans are  forced to surrender and sit down at their table, humbled by the crowd's  dedication. This scene is a turning point in the movie, for reasons that  I leave to you to discover. 

As I watched this movie again  tonight for what must be the 100th time, I noticed there was a much  smaller scene wrapped inside the bigger scene that, unless you look for  it, you may never notice. Yvonne, a minor character who is hurt by Rick  emotionally, falls into the company of a German soldier. In a land  occupied by the Germans, but populated by the French, this is an  unforgivable sin. She comes into the bar desperately seeking happiness  in the club's wine, song, and gambling. Later, as the Germans begin  singing we catch a glimpse of Yvonne sitting dejectedly at a table alone  and in this brief glimpse, it is conveyed that she has discovered that  this is not her path to fulfillment and she has no idea where to go from  there. As the singing progresses, we see Yvonne slowly become inspired  by Lazlo's act of defiance and by the end of the song, tears streaming  down her face, she is singing at the top of her voice too. She has found  her redemption. She has found something that will make her life never  the same again from that point on. 

Basically, this is Casablanca  in a nutshell. On the surface, you may see it as a romance, or as a  story of intrigue, but that is only partially correct.

The thing  that makes Casablanca great is that it speaks to that place in each of  us that seeks some kind of inspiration or redemption. On some level,  every character in the story receives the same kind of catharsis and  their lives are irrevocably changed. Rick's is the most obvious in that  he learns to live again, instead of hiding from a lost love. He is  reminded that there are things in the world more noble and important  than he is and he wants to be a part of them. Louis, the scoundrel, gets  his redemption by seeing the sacrifice Rick makes and is inspired to  choose a side, where he had maintained careful neutrality. The stoic  Lazlo gets his redemption by being shown that while thousands may need  him to be a hero, there is someone he can rely upon when he needs  inspiration in the form of his wife, who was ready to sacrifice her  happiness for the chance that he would go on living. Even Ferrai, the  local organized crime leader gets a measure of redemption by pointing  Ilsa and Lazlo to Rick as a source of escape even though there is  nothing in it for him. 

This is the beauty of this movie. Every  time I see it (and I have seen it a lot) it never fails that I see some  subtle nuance that I have never seen before. Considering that the  director would put that much meaning into what is basically a throw away  moment (not the entire scene, but Yvonne's portion) speaks bundles  about the quality of the film. My wife and I watched this movie on our  first date, and since that first time over 12 years ago, it has grown to  be, in my mind, the greatest movie ever made. 

-A Masterwork for all Time
A great romance.
“Casablanca” is a great romance, not only for being so supremely entertaining with its humor and realistic-though-exotic wartime excitement, but because it’s not the least bit mushy. Take the way Rick’s face literally breaks when he first sees Ilsa in his bar, or how he recalls the last time he saw her in Paris: “The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.”

There’s a real human dimension to these people that makes us care for them and relate to them in a way that belies the passage of years. For me, and many, the most interesting relationship in the movie is Rick and Capt. Renault, the police prefect in Casablanca who is played by Claude Rains with a wonderful subtlety that builds as the film progresses. Theirs is a relationship of almost perfect cynicism, one-liners and professions of neutrality that provide much humor, as well as give a necessary display of Rick’s darker side before and after Ilsa’s arrival. But there’s so much to grab onto with a film like this.

You can talk about the music, or the way the setting becomes a living character with its floodlights and Moorish traceries. Paul Henreid is often looked at as a bit of a third wheel playing the role of Ilsa’s husband, but he manages to create a moral center around which the rest of the film operates, and his enigmatic relationship with Rick and especially Ilsa, a woman who obviously admires her husband but can’t somehow ever bring herself to say she loves him, is something to wonder at.

My favorite bit is when Rick finds himself the target of an entreaty by a Bulgarian refugee who just wants Rick’s assurance that Capt. Renault is “trustworthy,” and that, if she does “a bad thing” to secure her husband’s happiness, it would be forgivable.

Rick flashes on Ilsa, suppresses a grimace, tries to buy the woman off with a one-liner (“Go back to Bulgaria”), then finally does a marvelous thing that sets the whole second half of the film in motion without much calling attention to itself.

Time to go in Casablanca.
Love and sacrifice during WWII underlie the story about a café owner named Rick (Humphrey Bogart), and his link to two intellectual refugees from Nazi occupied France. Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) seek asylum here in politically neutral Casablanca and, like other European refugees, gravitate to Rick’s upscale café, near the city’s airport, with its revolving searchlight.

Rick is a middle-aged cynic who also has a touch of sentimentalism, especially for people in need, like Ilsa and Victor. The film’s story is ideal for romantics everywhere.

I wish I didn’t love you so much.

Sorry, for that long narrative. Let’s get back to Asia, shall we.

Faded. Music in China.

First stop is a DJ version of the song “Faded”. Faded is a song made popular by Alan Walker. It is very popular in China. As such, there have been many people who have used the song and music to manufacture “DJ” versions of the song.

There are many of them. Some of the best mix a kind of pop-rock with guitar solos and a background of war and machine-gun fire. Others, just take the melody and mix in Chinese dialog.

When done this way, it becomes a track that would evoke period of deep reflection while remembering the words of others who may or may not have been close to you. In the example below, you can well guess the complexity of those thoughts even though most would not have a clue as to what anyone was saying.

DJ Ricardo – Faded (英雄联盟台词版)

El Rusbo’ notices the roar of silence…

You know, El’ Rusbo had a great dialog on his progam on 7Aug19. In it he discussed what is going on while the American news media are going full-bore anti-Trump, anti-middle class America. Here’s an excerpt…

 
Trump Support Grows Stronger — and More Quiet — by the Day
Aug 7, 2019 
                                            
x----snip

 Well, it’s not entirely true, but I’ll try to make the point. There  aren’t any, per se, Republican voters right now. There are Trump voters.  There are Trump supporters and everybody else. Most of them are  Republican, and Trump’s approval rating within the Republican Party  still stands at 90 to 92%, and it may be even higher now. Those people  are totally behind Trump. They are fully, quietly supportive of Trump  and his agenda. They grow stronger and more quiet by the day, and that’s  the great dichotomy. They are growing stronger, but they are shutting  up.
 
They don’t want to make themselves targets. But they are seething out  there. This is what I think the breakdown is. I think there are more  and more Trump voters. Trump’s approval rating is at 49%. You go to  state by state, and some states show him the losing there, but this is  16 months before the election. So there’s way too much time for any  polling data here to be accurate. It’s nothing more than an interesting  point of conversation at this point. But I really think that tends to  describe the political lay of the land.

 And the one thing that I think that is happening (just to reinforce  this) that nobody is reporting on at all — not even what you would  consider friendly outlets like Fox — is I think that the base support  for Trump is solidifying and I think it is growing because I think those  people are seething. They are the ones being called white supremacists.  They are the ones being called white nationalists. They are the ones  being blamed for all this, and they know they are not responsible for  it, and they know that Donald Trump isn’t responsible for it.

 They know that most of the rhetoric in this country that is inciting  extremism emanates from the left. Most of the activity that incites  extremism and violence emanates from the left. Do I need to give you the  organizations? Antifa. Black Lives Matter. I could go down the list.  Planned Parenthood. These are people who do this as a way of life. The  basic Trump supporter (you), you’re just out there. Some of you are  probably not totally invisible, but the grand majority of Trump  supporters is just out there seething.

 Look, I think I’m a typical Trump supporter, as far as you can define  “typical.” And I am. I’m seething over this stuff. Each and every day,  I’m seething over it. Now, don’t misunderstand. This doesn’t mean I’m  depressed. This stuff literally ticks me off! Every time I hear these  clowns throw out the term “white supremacist,” “white supremacy,” it  ticks me off, and it makes me want to defeat them even more. It makes me  want them to go down in flames even more — and in this, I believe I am  typical. 

I like his phrase “seething”.

It is what is going on. Be advised.

Chinese Hospital

China, as an enormous nation, has a wide hospital network. These include smaller local clinics and hospital branches. Like in the United States, they also have training and teaching hospital as well. The quality varies from region to region, but it is very easy to find a hospital suitable for what ever problem ails you.

In general, I have found the hospitals to be competent, staffed with caring and trained workers, and while the appearance varies from one hospital to the next, most Chinese hospitals are up to date and equipped with the latest in technology.

Aside from the handful of village hospitals that I have attended, most hospitals (and I have attended them for various reasons, many and yes, many times) all tend to look like this…

All with costs and prices far, far, far, FARRRRRR below what you would find in the United States. I think that the reason for this is that if the hospital or doctor tries to scam you or work in some kind of “kick-back” scheme through insurance or other legalized-bribery method, the Corruption Police will be unleashed.

Many regulations, agencies that require registration to work, fees, and other hidden costs are legalized ways for collecting bribes. Over the last 100 years, people have gamed the United States to extract as much money as possible from the citizens living there.

People, you DO NOT WANT the corruption police crashing through your window at night.

Thailand Beauty

My other posts were so serious with all the protests in China, and all that. I know these people “just want” “freedom and democracy”, though they are trying to appeal to Americans who live in an Oligarchy disguised as a Democracy (as evolved from a Republic). It’s all messed up.

The world has been gamed by the wealthy over the last 100 years, and now most people are serfs working on a plantation where everything they do has some kind of cost associated with it. This is most especially true in the United States and the UK. No so much elsewhere.

Life is all about love.

Here is some “lighter fare”. This is a cute girl in Thailand. I like the local rural restaurant that looks like an airplane, the green lush trees, and the blue skies. If it wasn’t for the gold temples over the next hill you would think that it’s in China.

Chinese Beauty

For comparison purposes, here is a similar video of a girl in China. As you can well see, that while the fashions are different, and the behavior and demeanor is different, there is a similarity that cannot be ignored. Ah. I do so love Asia.

European Beauty

Sometimes I get emails from trolls and other confused people. They seem to be under the impression that I need to curb what I write, or present so as not to offend anyone.

Nonsense!

If you are offended you can leave. I am far too old and too grouchy to tone down my thoughts for someone who has the emotions of an infant.

That being said, I do not want people to think that I do not appreciate other forms of human beauty. I am an equal-opportunity girl-watcher. I find so many women beautiful, and you would be so absolutely stunned at how wide ranging my tastes are.

For starters… here’s an European beauty. Isn’t she awesome? Wouldn’t you just love to take her out on a date, eat some fine steak or fish with a nice wine, and then go to a club or jazz bar? I would. I’ll tell you what.

OMG! I am such a sucker for a big toothy smile, and big hair. (Hint, hint to all you heavier girls out there…)

How to Cook Chicken Legs – Chinese Style

Here’s a quick video on how to cook chicken legs on the stove in a pan. This is the traditional Chinese cooking method, as most Chinese do not have ovens. It is not only tasty and healthy, but it uses far less electricity than cooking in a stove.

And as I finish this particular bunch of micro-videos about Asia, take a deeper look into my life as an American expat why don’t ya.

The Cafe American.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
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Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 12)

Thank you for continuing with me in the adventure.

But first, let me explain the photo splash at the top of the page. That picture is of two of the band members from the 1980’s hit rock/pop group “Tears for Fears”.

The Seeds of Love is the third studio album by the British rock/pop band Tears for Fears,  released on 25 September 1989.. The album, which reportedly cost over  £1 million (GBP) to produce, retained the band's epic sound while  incorporating influences ranging from jazz and blues to The Beatles, of  which the latter is most evident on the hit single "Sowing the Seeds of Love". 

-Wikipedia
Tears for Fears – Sowing the Seeds of Love

Sometimes I really wonder about what is going on in the Western world these days. Back in the 1980’s, yes things weren’t perfect, but at least you knew that there were two genders, that a water fountain was GMO free, and that the English Queen was not transgender.

Now, today, you haven’t a clue. The news media completely and absolutely lies about everything and changes the narrative left and right. For instance, consider the latest mass-murdering shooter…

The Liberal Progressive socialists in charge of the American mainstream media and the software giants have rewritten the narrative of the events that transpired.

He was a Obama-following Antifa member, and now his history was changed to a crazed Trump QANAON.

There’s only one thing…

Real Conservatives, if pushed to violence, would not strike out at innocents. They would attack the instigators, the leaders, and those that finance what ever problems that they are dealing with. This fellow attacked innocents. Ergo – not a conservative.

Leftists Change Shooter Patrick Crusius’s MyLife Page

No kidding!

You have this Antifa progressive Obama follower who shoots up a ton load of people in a Walmart. Immediately the news media is blaming Trump for “Right Wing” Violence. When it was no such thing. Now, plastered all over the internet is the rewritten narrative that he was a Right-Wing Trump following kook and guns must be banned.

Perhaps, a little peek at what the news media did and handled this is in order, eh?

Some history…

A Walmart in Texas was shot up in August 2019 when a gunman rampaged through the store using an AK-47 clone. The event is known as the Cielo Vista Mall shooting in El Paso, Texas. He left a manifesto where he claimed to be a follower of Trump and wanted to kill all the illegal aliens in Texas.

Sounds pretty damning. Why it fits exactly the mainstream press narrative of a typical Trump supporter.

Then they got the guy.

Washington Examiner reporter Anna Giaritelli posted the name and a photos of the alleged shooter, sourced to law enforcement. “A law enforcement official in El Paso told me the Walmart shooter is in custody. His name is Patrick Crusius of Allen, a town in Texas outside of Dallas. He is pretty young, having just turned 21 years old this week.

A law enforcement official in El Paso told me the  Walmart shooter is in custody. Patrick Crusius of Dallas. Just turned  21 years old this week. pic.twitter.com/CEJh6rYij1

— Anna Giaritelli (@Anna_Giaritelli) August 3, 2019

But don’t ya know, Patrick Crusius has a profile on MyLife.com.

MyLife is an American  information brokerage founded in 2002 as Reunion.com. 

MyLife gathers  personal information through public records and other sources to  automatically generate a “MyLife Public Page” for each person, described by MyLife as a “complete Wikipedia-like biography on every American.” 

While people can edit their data, the software organization MyLife can change and rewrite a person's profile at will.

So, you would think that the American mainstream news media would take this information and disseminate it to the public? Nope…

On 3AUG19, at 2:46 PM the website MyLife had this profile for the deranged killer Patrick Crusius. It was quite clear. His original profile at 2:46 said he was a registered Democrat.

Look for yourself…

The deranged killer Patrick Crusius is a progressive democrat.
The deranged killer Patrick Crusius is a progressive democrat.

While he was in jail, right after the police caught him, there were some changes made to his profile. How? I do not know. What I do know is that his political affiliation was changed from Democrat to Republican on the day of the mass shooting.

Here is the changed profile. Check the dates and times. Notice what they wrote on the Summary…

Leftists rewriting history
Mall shooter has had his past history rewritten.

Yes. The leftists wrote;

"Before becoming a mass shooter / murderer, Patrick was a registered Republican, and Evangelical Christian. A former campaign worker for Donald Trump, he was also a QANON conspiracy theorist, and INCEL. "

Ethnicity was changed to African American, as well. WTF?

Now, if that wasn’t bad enough, it was changed yet again…

Leftists rewriting history yet again.
Leftists rewriting history yet again.

By Saturday night it continued to be revised. Now including anti-Jewish racial slurs and all sorts of the things that fit the CNN black & White narrative of what a Conservative is.

Progressive Democrat Socialists rewriting the MyLife profile for a mass muurdering Antifa member.
Progressive Democrat Socialists rewriting the MyLife profile for a mass murdering Antifa member.

Now what can we take from all this nonsense? Well…

Do Not Believe What You Read on the Internet

As far as his political leanings are concerned… traditional conservatives do not harm innocents. Only progressive leftists do. Don’t believe me? Crack open a fucking history book won’t ya?

Last minute commentary…

It seems strange to me that all of a sudden this push for gun bans and Red Flag laws, and "Alt Right" violence. It is almost like the time-table for the Hillary / Socialist take over of the country never reset after the election of Trump. 

It's like everything is just following the same timetable that was put in place under Obama.

Here are six posts that discuss this matter in detail…

What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6

OK. That being said, let’s move on out of the 1980’s and into contemporaneous Asia…

Bring back the Summer, lover…

I really like this.

I haven’t figured out what it is. Is it a movie? A cartoon? A music video? A narrative? Or what. Whatever it is, I like it.

Imagine this in the USA… not!

You would NEVER see this in the United States. It would be considered cultural misappropriation.

Remember, boys and girls, China is a meritocracy. You must strive to be the best that you can be, or go begging in the streets. There is no room for sloth, welfare moms, and freeloaders.

Remember everyone…

Universities in the United States have been discriminating against Asian students because their success makes racial minorities look and feel bad. Do not think that there will not be some kind of blow-back to their social re-engineering efforts. Ah. You do not mess around with the Chinese. Fools.

As we used to say in Pennsylvania…

You can put on lipstick, curl the hair, wear eyelashes, and put on a nice dress… but a pig is still a pig.

Diversity quotas are like putting lipstick on a pig. It might sound good, it might make the pigs happy, but very few people will actually find the pig beautiful.
Diversity quotas are like putting lipstick on a pig. It might sound good, it might make the pigs happy, but very few people will actually find the pig beautiful.

Welcome to YiChang…

China has so many cities. Many (so called) towns would pass as large cities in the United States. Here’s an example of the small town of YiChang. Check it out why don’t ya…

Religious girls in Thailand

Just look at these beauties. They are so very yummy.

You know as I get older I really realize that it is our actions that complement our inherent attractiveness. It is how we behave, and how we interact with others that define our overall appearance.

Chinese Aviation

Aviation. I love it whether it is my very own background in American Naval Aviation, or aviation elsewhere, it is an interest and a passion of mine. Yes it is. Sort of like cats, dogs, and pizza. It’s like how I feel about pretty girls and red wine. I love it all.

Here we have a nice video (micro-video natch) concerning Chinese aviation.

Moving up… stay up

The Chinese culture is one of merit. That permeates the entire society. Anyone who tries to cheat, or get special privileges is pretty much shunned. They are known as “Fu er di” and pretty much considered the rich spoiled kinds of society.

Oh yes. The wealthy buy spots for their children in (the easy to bribe) American colleges, but the vast bulk of Chinese society is based upon merit. Every movie, and every song reinforces this notion.

Here is just a small snippet of how this all manifests within the Chinese society.

Yeah. You show that gal that you moved way past her…

Hong Kong Protests

Yeah. There are these “wanna have democracy” protests in Hong Kong. The American media promotes it as a some sort of a “proof” that China is gonna fall apart any day now. Yah right.

Don’t hold your breath.

China and Hong Kong are totally separate entities. Sort of like how Pago Pago in American Samoa is different from Kokomo, Indiana. (Bet ya didn’t know that Pago Pago is a part of an American territory.)

Yup. Hong Kong has their own government and their own laws, and pretty much Beijing allows them autonomy in their affairs. If it didn’t, you would see many changes in Hong Kong that would better fit the traditional Chinese social model. Hong Kong is NOT run in the way Beijing prefers.

Of course, you would never know this, or even have a clue to this situation by only reading American news media. Their role is to keep Americans ignorant of the true situation, huddled and fearful, and easily manipulated to follow heard and group behaviors.
Screen shot of Drudge Report American news aggregator, taken Sunday 4AUG19. What a load of nonsense.
Screen shot of Drudge Report American news aggregator, taken Sunday 4AUG19. What a load of nonsense.

Now, that being said, here’s a video from the Hong Kong government about the situation.

You’d NEVER see this on American mainstream media. It doesn’t fit inside the narrative.

Actually there is so much information regarding this, that I am afraid that I will need to post 4 or 5 videos about the protests to help put things in context. This is done in the next part – part 13…


I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 8)

Let’s continue on our exploration on Asia. But first, let’s chat a little bit about the splash screen image above. It’s from the 1980’s classic “Ferris Bueller’s Day off”.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a 1986 American teen comedy film written, co-produced, and directed by John Hughes, and co-produced by Tom Jacobson. The film stars Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller, a high-school slacker who spends a day off from school, with Mia Sara and Alan Ruck. Ferris regularly breaks the fourth wall to explain his techniques and inner thoughts. Hughes wrote the screenplay in less than a week. Filming began in September 1985 and finished in November. Featuring many landmarks.

-Wikipedia
Ferris Bueller having fun during a parade in downtown Chicago.
Ferris Bueller having fun during a parade in downtown Chicago.

Ok, now most of the people reading this, knows quite well about this movie. It’s not obscure, and unknown. It’s a classic.

 High school student Ferris Bueller wants a day off from school and  he's developed an incredibly sophisticated plan to pull it off. He  talks his friend Cameron into taking his father's prized Ferrari and  with his girlfriend Sloane head into Chicago for the day. While they are  taking in what the city has to offer school principal Ed Rooney is  convinced that Ferris is, not for the first time, playing hooky for the  day and is hell bent to catch him out. Ferris has anticipated that, much  to Rooney's chagrin. 

-IMDB

Ah, but what does this all matter. Right?

Ferris Bueller making the most of his day off.
Ferris Bueller making the most of his day off. What is your excuse?

How about some quotes, perhaps that can pull in some context. Maybe, what do ya know…

 Economics Teacher: Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? 
 Simone: Um, he's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's  girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the  girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's  pretty serious. 
 Economics Teacher: Thank you, Simone. 
 Simone: No problem whatsoever.      

You see, looking at the crazy life that we live can really be put into perspective if we are in a correct frame of mind; that of the third person perspective. For it is often difficult to see where we are because we take it all in so personally.

Seriously.

Don’t believe me, eh?

Ok. Here’s a screen shot of the today’s (when I composed this post) Drudge report. I want to ask you something. Is this “news” representative of your life?

Is it representative of the lives of others in your community? It is representative of the future course of life that you and your family will eventually need to embrace?

Drudge report screen capture.

Will Pizza with insect toppings ever be part of your life?

It’s all nonsense.

Nonsense designed to manipulate you. The rest of the world is plowing forward, and completely oblivious to the machinations of the American oligarchy. I urge you, yes you, to ignore their manipulations and open your eyes. the world does not need to become the next American battle field “for democracy”.

Let’s take a look at the rest of the world, for once…

KTV Booths

Yeah. In China, people like to belt our a number of songs or two in an hour to release “stem”. Sort of how I used to scream (at the top of my lungs) “Carry on my way-ward son” when I was driving in my car.

Carry On Wayward Son - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry_On_Wayward_Son

"Carry On Wayward Son" is a single recorded by Kansas and written by Kerry Livgren for their 1976 album Leftoverture. In 1977, the song peaked at No. 11 on the US Billboard Hot 100, becoming their first top 20 entry in the nation. The song was certified Gold by the RIAA on December 18, 1990. 

Come on… certainly you too liked to sing some Country and Western music or a sappy love ballad… Eh? Right?

Well, in China, a lot of people hold their emotions inside. They keep them stifled down…down…down below and never let them out. But when they sing, they can let their emotions out. So it is very popular to sing in KTV’s.

Here we have KTV mini booths were you and a close friend can sing your heart out. It’s really quite awesome. For me, it would be singing NZBZ (南征北战NZBZ《不再遥远》 感受“速度与激情”). I’ll tell your what!

南征北战NZBZ《不再遥远》 感受“速度与激情”
南征北战NZBZ《不再遥远》 感受“速度与激情”

I really like this three man rap group. It speaks to me. Heh heh.

NZBZ screen capture.
NZBZ screen capture.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

南征北战NZBZ – 穿越 (Live)

Anyways, here’s a really cute video of some girls coming out of one of those very cute KTV cubicles. It’s short but cute, and this is the way it really is.

This is China today.

Anyways…

School in Thailand

Here is a nice short clip about visiting a school in Thailand. But you, as maybe an American, never realized that other nations have schools eh? Yeah. It’s something that is considered unimportant.

Friends are so very important…

The Chinese believe that the group of friends, family and community is more important than the individual. That is quite the opposite of what is taught in the United States where the lone dog, the wolf individual is the most important. The democratic party ties to embrace, somewhat, the Chinese model of course leaving out the core strengths. Leaving it as just a simple collection of platitudes to manipulate the huddled masses of humanity.

But the truth is that we need each other. We form societies because we need each other.

People, we need each other.

It is our friends that make our life worth living. They care for us. they build us up. They help us and confide in us and we give back to them in support.

The Chinese will NEVER forget their history

China has a broad and varied history. It is a story of troubles, adventure, and strife. We, as Americans, like to think that we are strong and proud of our “freedom”. People, you have no idea what is like to suffer from 25 centuries of conflict. Heck, it is normal to have your family eviscerated and your daughters used as sex slaves.

But, China has never forgotten. And now, now… now.. they are not taking any chances.

Here’s a cute reenactment of some history. It could be from any year, as it is quite generic. But to tell you the truth, the Chinese have dealt with trouble and strife for many, many centuries. They have never forgotten, and the government does not buy into the “progressive reality that the past should be forgotten.

No. Instead it should be remembered, and never… NEVER … forgotten.

On Being a Father

I really love this little video clip. It is exactly on point as to what it is like when a woman advises her husband (or boyfriend) that she is pregnant with his child. i will tell you what, it is what all real men aspire to. To have a family with a woman who loves him and a child that he can rise as his own.

Anyways, this this the real deal. It is taken in China, but for that matter, it could have been taken anywhere in the world. It’s all the same. Us men, yearn for times like these. Real women, be not afraid. Men want and desire to have a family.

This is the real deal.

This is the real deal. You all.

This is how it works out. Any man who would not have this reaction is not a man. He’s still a boy. All men… real men… have this reaction. We all… yes, every one of us… want to have a family. It’s in our deepest being.

That is a real truth.

I’ll tell you what.

Bonus – How I got together with my wife.

This is the way it happened. I tell you the truth.

More information here…

How I got married in China.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 6)

Let’s continue on our adventure into Asia, but first let’s chat a little bit more about the splash photo above.

Image is from the movie Kelly's Heroes. Let me tell you that that is a fine, fine movie to watch with family on a lazy August afternoon. Just get some icy cold beer and enjoy.

Here’s a quote from the movie to wet your appetite…

Kelly's Heroes Quote 1

Here’s another quote with a pic for your entertainment. Ah. What a great movie!

Kellys Heroes 2

OK. Now let’s continue on our exploration of Asia. First stop, China and how they build houses.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

How Houses are Built in China…

Houses in China are built quite differently than how they are built in the United States. Instead of a concrete slab with a wood-frame pole structure with particleboard floors and wall to wall carpet with drywall, the Chinese build out of cement.

The create a strong cement structure and lay down polished stone over it. Here we see a guy making a small house (LOL)…

A really small house.

And people, that’s exactly how it’s done.

Sappy Vietnam MV video

What? You think that music videos only exist in the United States? Nope. Every nation has them. Just like every nation… every single one… has their very own local bands and local music.

You should listen to some of them out of Australia, and Poland. Pretty darn awesome! I’ll tell you what.

Here’s an older video from Vietnam. I place it being made sometime during the 1990’s. You know when Bill Clinton didn’t have sex with that intern. LOL!

Nice to have in the car…

Back to China.

This is a pretty nice innovation. You inflate it by plugging it into your cigarette lighter. If you have an American car, the chances are that it won’t have a cigarette lighter plug. You can thank the progressive democrats for that “improvement”.

Link

No problem. You can inflate it by blowing air inside the mattress. However, it might take a while. Truth. It might take you an half an hour or so using that method.

Don’t fret though. China makes tons of little micro air pumps that operate off of the USB. So you can either use your automobile USB socket or bring your laptop into the car and inflate the sofa using that plug.

You see just imagine the kinds of fun that you can have in a little subcompact with this kind of sofa mattress. You can keep the toddlers occupied. You can let the dog stretch out. You can kick back and take a nap during lunch, or maybe play with that girl you find rather fetching.

Maybe like this fine lass…

Nice Chinese girl and George Clooney doesn’t even notice…

Yeah. Big Hollywood names get their big pictures plastered all over Asia. It’s part of the Marketing strategy to saturate the commercial markets with images of the well-known and famous.

Don’t ya know.

Night Market (in the daytime) – Vietnam

Vietnam has changed quite a bit since the 1960’s. And yet in other ways it hasn’t changed at all. I mean the mountains are still there, and all the hub-bub about “climate change” the weather still is pretty much the same as what it has been for centuries. The lush banyan (forever) trees are still there. The birds still sing their songs, and the air is all pretty moist and hot.

Time change. People, cultures and society changes. However, people are still people. Boys are still boys and girls are still girls, and that progressive narrative about there being 65 different kinds of genders is nothing more than the ramblings of a crazy person that is socially incapable of fitting within society.

Pretty Girls in Vietnam from the 1960's.
Pretty girls still exist in Vietnam. Here is a dated vintage photo of a pretty Vietnam lass taken in the 1960’s. She is wearing a cute western dress, rather than the more traditional Vietnam dress and hat.

Here’s a nice vintage photo of a Vietnamese food market. Look at it. Study it. Cool huh? Notice the tin can to the far right of the photograph. Looks like the American people wanted to help the Vietnamese, and tell them so in English…

But, only one thing… They speak Vietnamese, French and Chinese in Vietnam. Not English. At least not at that time. So, what’s the purpose?

Look. Study the picture. Note the placement of the tin can. Note the quality of the photograph.

What’s in the photo? Breads. Rolls. Donated butter. Donated oil. Tins of sardines. Not typical Vietnamese fare. Oh, yes they do eat rolls, and baguettes. It’s the French influence, don’t ya know. They do use butter. But the preponderance within one photo tends to be a little deceiving.

American media for ya.

Notice the can in the Vietnamese food market.
A vintage photo of a 1960’s Vietnamese food market. Notice the tin on the far left of the picture. The words on it says that the tin was donated by the United States people. Pretty cool, except for one thing. It’s in English. In Vietnam at that time they spoke and read only three languages. They were Vietnamese, Chinese and French. It seems that all that English writing is for propaganda purposes. Propaganda, not for the Vietnamese people, but rather for the Americans who would look at the photo from the American mainstream media.

Oh, but don’t be confused.

They eat fine delicious food in Vietnam. And many of it is though a strong French influence. There is a restaurant in Taiwan that makes fantastic Vietnam food, I’ll tell you what.

Delicious Vietnam food in Taiwan.
From the article; My first bite into Nuong’s bánh mì thịt evoked in me a sensation that could only be described as “same same, but different” in comparison with bánh mì in Vietnam. It was delicious, especially the perfect firmness of the Vietnamese ham. In a way, the sandwich was very similar to a typical bánh mì in Saigon, yet quite different. For starters, the pickles had a different tanginess to them, owing to the use of non-Vietnamese vinegar, which is similar to the condiment you might add to your hủ tiếu somewhere in District 5. The unorthodox addition of authentic Vietnamese-style char siu made the combination pleasantly sweet and chewier. But the starkest differences were in its main components. Source.

Here’s a modern micro-video of contemporaneous rural Vietnam and the food market there. Now wouldn’t you all want to have one of these Po’ Boy / Grinder / Submarine what’s ya call it’s… fresh from the market counter here?

Oh, and speaking about the fine Vietnamese food experience, here is another photo

Delicious Vietnam food with a French influence.
From the article; “Taiwanese flour is so different. It’s sweeter and chewier,” she explains. Her “baguettes” are coated with vegetable oil almost immediately after baking — the secret to their crunchiness after being toasted a second time. Different varieties of bánh mì are made to order when customers appear. Lò Bánh Mì Pasteur’s homemade pâté is several shades darker than those in Vietnam. “The Taiwanese like eating jiànkāng [healthy], [so] we don’t use preservatives. That’s what makes the commercial pâté so pinkish,” she adds. Source.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 4)

Thank you for continuing on my micro-video narrative. But first, let’s chat a little bit about the splash screen photo above.

About the splash-screen photo above. It's a screen shot of the movie "Kelly's Heroes". It's a World War II movie made in the 1960's that is loosely based upon the actual events during the war. 

You see, as Germany was collapsing, a bunch of Americans wanted to go ahead and seize all the gold that Hitler had squirreled away. It's a great movie, and the pop song "Burning Bridges" came from that movie.

You only have to mention the film ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ and within seconds everyone is firing off quotes from the film – our non WWII friends really do look at you as if you are  some type of weird sandwich…

Kelly's Hero screen shot.
Hey! Don’t you go giving me off any of those bad waves.

Has to be one of the best war films of all time. So here is a challenge – how many of these quotes can you remember? And how many can you get into a conversation today…

Let’s start with…

Quotes from Kelly's Heroes

Anyways, go ahead and chat with your friends. See how many remember the movie Kelly’s Heroes. It’s a great conversation starter. Sure better than talking about the new female 007 who is going to rock the movie world this year.

Not!

Just look at this pathetic picture. I look and I see that the producers are seriously Jonesing for a Michelle Obama (or Oprah Winfrey) leadership role to pave the way for a 2024 Presidential Election candidate. (Wanna bet this isn’t the case?)

Black Female British Actor Lashana Lynch to Play New '007 Agent'
Black Female British Actor Lashana Lynch to Play New ‘007 Agent’. Hint. She’s a diversity hire. (wink wink). Can’t wait to watch the latest James Bond flick… not!

Yeah. Just like they made so many Hollywood movies with female Presidents that looked markedly like Hillary Clinton during the last ten years. It’s ground work to prep the American population subconsciously.

Now…

I argue that the significance of this role placement is associated with the r/K survival strategy which pretty much establishes a Marxist social dominance within America under the r survival strategy. It’s all pretty obvious to those of us who are paying attention.

If you haven’t a clue as to what I am talking about, then check out this link…

r/K selection theory

So, when you have a society (like the “great society”) giving away all sorts of free-things (you know, to “eliminate” poverty), you end up with a society of abundance. People can live off the dole. They don’t have to work. They don’t have to compete. They don’t have to survive. They turn in to r-strategists.

Now, back to Asia…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Puddle Jumper

One of the things that I really like about the world (not just Asia) is flying in “puddle jumpers” into the smaller more rural airports and visiting the countryside. Here is a small micro-video about flying into the Tachiletk airport near Thailand.

tachileik
Adventures may or may not come with a map. But no matter what, enjoy yourself and savor your experiences.

That’s what adventure is all about.

Here is a photo that kind of tells you where Tachileik is located. It is in Myanmar near Northern Thailand. (It is near Myanmar and near Maesai, Thailand.) It is a religious place with temples and mosques, as well as monasteries and pagodas.

Tachileik
Tachileik, near Maesai Thailand. Seriously, wouldn’t you like to visit this place?

Oh, yeah. Speaking about travel, let’s inject another great quote from the great movie Kelly’s Heroes. I mean, why not?

Here's some quotes from the great movie "Kelly's Heroes".

I mean. So many positive waves. Maybe we can’t lose!

That’s one of the advantages of travel. So many positive waves.

Return of the Monkey King

Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, is a melee agility hero,  best known for his slippery nature and his ability to do Mischief,  deceiving his enemies by turning into trees and other objects. Armed  with his magic extending staff, the Monkey King slams the ground with Boundless Strikes, and leaps to the treetops to have advantage over his foes with Tree Dance.

-Wikipedia 

Now, the Monkey King is a big thing in China. Everyone knows about the Monkey King and admires it. But for me, as an American, I don’t see the big deal. I think that it is a cultural thing. Like about how Jarts, and click-clacks were popular in the 1970s’.

You remember those eh?

“At Least He Didn’t Have Access To Jarts” Say Authorities Of Florida School Shooter
“At Least He Didn’t Have Access To Jarts” Say Authorities Of Florida School Shooter. No kidding. That’s what the detectives said.
 Trying to extract some positive from the horror in Florida, local  authorities reflected today on how much more carnage the school shooter  could have caused were it not for sensible regulations.

 “At least he didn’t have access to Jarts because they are thankfully banned in this country.”

 The outlawed lawn toys feature sharp metal tips designed to stick  into the ground when the Jart is lobbed underhand causing it to fall in a  large parabolic arc. 

 “This could have been so much worse.”
 
When  asked what could be done to prevent tragedies like this happening  again, they say they are staying focused on making sure this is as bad  as it gets.

 “Our number one priority right now is to ensure the Jart ban  isn’t repealed, and, beyond that, we are taking a serious look at banana  peels.”

-Breaking Bourgh
     

Ah, cultures can be so interesting.

Link

Anyways, back to the Monkey King…

Check out this short micro-video about the Monkey King…

OK, now after connecting Jarts to the Monkey King, and Kelly’s Heroes with those positive waves in Northern Thailand, let’s talk about kitties…

Ah. But first, look at what I discovered…

Cheetos are being changed so that they will not resemble President Trump.

Now for the kitties after looking at bright lime green Cheetos…

Butting Heads with the Kitty Store Owner

I do think that many cat lovers might appreciate this micro-video…

This is in China, and no, it’s really quite rare for the Chinese to eat pets like dogs and cats. That’s one of the lies propagated by the American mainstream media. They want to keep you all huddled, isolated and afraid of others.

They want you to sit inside your house, work as a serf, pay your taxes and obey your “betters”.

The River Runs Through it…

Speaking about China. Here’s a nice video of a small rural town in the hills. I guess that you could say this is a little like San Louis Obispo in California. Only the Chinese are far more religious than those progressives in California. Look at the hill. There you can see lighted Buddhist statuary.

I like this video.

This video reminds me of how nice small towns can look like when the politicians are being policed by the “corruption police” and are unable to “game the system”, “funnel money” away from projects, and generally abuse their positions. You know, like they do in the United States.

Hey! You do know what I am talking about don’t you?

Rush talks about inner city corruption.

Yeah. Crime and corruption was pretty bad in China up until 2013, when roving militarized “corruption police” started their crack-downs on corruption. Anyone who says that China is full of corruption today is a fucking idiot. (Or barring that, just horribly misinformed.)

It is nothing like it was.

China is VERY SERIOUS about corruption and crime. They know that the nation cannot survive unless they are able to take control over the high-level corruption that has made China famous two decades ago. So they declared war on corruption. But no, this wasn’t like they do in the USA, where enormous sums of money are dished out to “influencers” and “blue panels of experts”.

Nope.

Targets are identified, systems are put in place. Evil people are rounded up. Many are tortured and incarcerated. Some are killed.

Today, most Chinese are petrified of tangling with the Corruption Police. Arrest means their lives are effectively over, both literally and figuratively.

Corruption Police Arrest
One of China’s most-wanted fugitives suspected of bribery was brought home on Friday from the Republic of Guinea, following cooperation between the two countries’ law enforcement departments. Pei Jianqiang, 48, former director of import and export department of China Enterprise International Cooperation Co, was suspected of bribery and fled in November, 2009.

China launched a “Sky Net” campaign in April, 2015, with aims to bring back 100 suspects who were accused of economic crimes and have fled overseas. Pei was listed as the No. 10 suspect. Law enforcement officials from China and Guinea collaborated on the investigation, which confirmed that Pei was hiding out in Conakry, capital of Guinea, and running a bath center.

Pei was arrested on Dec 25 and sent back to Beijing Friday afternoon.Operation Sky Net launched In December, Huang Yurong, former Party chief of Henan Provincial Highway Administration and another fugitive on the list, surrendered herself to the police and returned from the United States where she had fled in 2002.
China takes corruption very seriously.
(150509) — BEIJING, May 9, 2015 (Xinhua) — Chinese police escort Li Huabo (C), the second suspect from China’s “100 most wanted economic fugitives” list, upon his arrival at the Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, capital of China, May 9, 2015. Li was repatriated Saturday as part of operation “Sky Net”. The Sky Net campaign aims to return fugitives for trial. (Xinhua/Chen Yehua)(mcg)
Corruption Police arrest corrupt civil servant.
In January 2013, Hebei Xinhe County Police notified Guangxi Dongxing Municipal Police that between 2008 to 2011, the former Director of Baoding City Mancheng County Bureau of Land and Resource in Hebei Song Jianzhong used his power to illegally profit and collect 1.5 million RMB in bribes, and when faced investigated by the relevant departments fled to Vietnam with his mistress. Photo is of about 6pm February 5th, Mong Cai Municipal Police in Vietnam handing the suspects over to Guangxi Dongxing Municipal law enforcement officials. Picture by Zhuo Huang/CFP.
Corrupt offical arrested.
After over 20 days of investigation, in the afternoon of February 5th, Song and his mistress, Ren, appeared in Mong Cai, Vietnam. Mong Cai Police successfully arrested the two. In January 2013, Hebei Xinhe County Police notified Guangxi Dongxing Municipal Police that between 2008 to 2011, the former Director of Baoding City Mancheng County Bureau of Land and Resource in Hebei Song Jianzhong used his power to illegally profit and collect 1.5 million RMB in bribes, and when faced investigated by the relevant departments fled to Vietnam with his mistress. Photo is of about 6pm February 5th, Mong Cai Municipal Police in Vietnam handing the suspects over to Guangxi Dongxing Municipal law enforcement officials.

Corruption Police is exactly what America needs today.

Make no mistake. It’s Long…long… LONG overdue.

Anyways, back to the video, pay attention to how clean the streets are. Notice how nice the houses are. Corruption turns nice communities into Detroit, or Baltimore. Look, and pay attention.

When there is corruption, the buildings fall into disrepair. The streets fall apart and have potholes, and the general standard of life is very poor. You can ALWAYS judge the level of corruption in a non-industrial community by how clean and well taken cared for it is.

If things are not so well taken cared for, and there are funds earmarked for maintenance, then you know that the levels of corruption are rather enormous.

Savage in a Parking Garage

On a lighter note. Let’s go Savage in one of those hyper-clean underground parking garages in China. It’s a thing, and I quite like it; those super clean parking garages. In the USA, it’s all damp, bare cement with dimly lit lighting. Yuck.

It’s so refreshing to be in a place where public places are treated as worthy of respect.

Back in the day, Americans used to take pride in their public spaces. Trees were planted in parks to provide shade. Benches were placed, and painted every year. Picnic tables were set up and yearly repaired and maintained. Roads and bridges had yearly inspection teams, fully funded, and taken cared for.

America of the past.
There was once a time when being an American was something special. It was not spit upon by members of Congress. The moneys to repair public works were on the local, not Federal level, and everyone was part of a community that participated. Not isolated, and living in fear facing an electronic box.

That all ended during the progressive onslaught around 1913 or so. Then it became something different. It went from “America for all of us”, to “What’s mine is mine, and I’ll give you a little bit if you obey me.”.

Now, back to China garages…

Ah it’s so refreshing.

Sure beats what you see in America everyday. Here is a typical photo of an American woman. It doesn’t matter where you go in the Untied States, or what city you visit, you will always be able to easily find American women that look like this…

American beautiful woman.
American woman shopping in Walmart. I wonder where she works? What do you think she does for a living? Do you have any idea how well she performed in school, and what she must be like as a person? People! We owe it to ourselves to reverse the obvious progressive decline of the American society.

Jackie Ma

China is a land of merit. You either do your best or fail and suffer the consequences. Much like America used to be when it was first founded. As such, I want to put a plug in for Jackie Ma. For he represents what China is today.

Sort of how Hillary Clinton represents what America is today.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 3)

About this photo splash. This is a scene from the classic 1980's movie "Better off Dead". Hey!, you know, if it's too hot outside, or it's raining, today might be a great opportunity to call some friends over, get a couple of cases of beer, and order some pizza and watch this grand old classic. What do ya think?

But first… speaking of the 1980’s classic movie… here’s a noteworthy review…

Movie review- better off dead.

Hey! Try this. You go into a restaurant where everyone is waiting for a table. Than, when things are kind of quiet, say very loudly “I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS!”

I guarantee that you will find other fans of this crazy movie, and get into some interesting conversations, and maybe… just maybe make some nice new friends in the process. Try it…

I want my two dollars.

Let’s continue forward, shall we…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Shenzhen Dogs

Seriously, the dogs of Shenzhen are treated quite differently than any where else on the planet. I don’t really know why, though I do have some (worthy of discussion) theories.

Now, most people reading this will not have a clue as to what is Shenzhen, or where it is. That’s understandable, given what the American media has devolved into. But it need not be difficult. Shenzhen is the Chinese city next to Hong Kong. It is like this…

Map of Shenzhen, and Hong Kong.
Here is the map of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Shenzhen has 14 million citizens, and Hong Kong only has 8 million people. To put that into perspective, New York city has 6 million people. There is a constant flow of people in and out of HK though SZ. As many people who live and work in Hong Kong, actually have homes and residences inside Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is a very young city, and many people, before they have children will adopt dogs as pets. (And cats too. But, here we are talking about dogs.)

As such, Chinese culture enables them to treat their pets very specially. This can manifest as wearing clothes, hairdos, nail treatments, massages, and all sorts of special dog treats and toys. Now some have taken the more drastic steps in treating them like children, even training them to walk up right.

As this video attests…

I’ve got a ton load of movies of Shenzhen dogs. If you want me to post more of them, just send me a note. And, I’ll make up a complete post only on Chinese dogs.

Migrating Fish…

It’s tough being a fish. I don’t know what the story is on this, but it sure is interesting. Why are they taking this road? And, where do they expect to go to? Ah. It’s all a big mystery.

Oh, and a special message to the jack-off trolls. No, this is not photo-shopped. Why waste your time trying to convince me otherwise?

Passing the class…

It is tough being in a meritocracy. You have to get the best grades and do your best or else you WILL be begging in the streets. It’s the Chinese way.

Do your best, or suffer the consequences.

 The National College Entrance Examination, commonly known as Gaokao, is an academic examination held annually in the People's Republic of China. This Standardized test is a prerequisite for entrance into almost all higher education institutions at the undergraduate level. It is usually taken by students in their last year of senior high school, and there has been no age restriction since 2001. The exams last about nine hours over a period of two or three days, depending on the province.  

-Wikipedia

China has the yearly exam that determines the fate for millions of students. This exam covers everything, and does not award “diversity points” to “balance the score” in favor of protected classes of people like corrupt nations do.

With that introduction, you can now better understand this micro-video…

This is quite different than the United States where it is being instituted to permit racism, wealth-favoritism, and other ways to game the system.

racial discrimination by liberal universities against Asians.

Shanghai at night

Well, this is no big deal to me, but to a first time visitor, it makes a great impression. Shanghai is a modern, cutting-edge, beautiful Chinese city with large Western influences. If I would be so bold, I would say it is perhaps one of the most beautiful, cleanest, and most diverse cities on the planet. Most certainly better than London, Paris, or New York.

Today, if you want to graduate from the university and get into Banking or Finance, you migrate to Shanghai. It’s the odd man out that would instead go to Los Angeles, or Chicago to start a banking career.

Personally, while the Bund (the river with a nice wide walking boardwalk) is nice, I myself prefer the old city and the tight streets, the cool and interesting buildings, and the fine delicious night food that seems to be everywhere.

Rural Swimming Hole

This could be just about anywhere in Asia. Though, to me it looks a lot like Thailand or Vietnam. Water-holes and swimming areas are a natural environment that should be protected and cherished.

Boy in his tree house.
Whether it is a swimming hole, or a tree-house in an apple tree, people need to go forth and be out in nature. Oh, and by the way, don’t forget your friends, your pets, and some delicious food and drink. Icy cold beer is always a pleaser. Make sure that you remember to bring a bottle opener if you go the glass-bottle route.

I well remember how, in the 1960’s and the 1970’s, many (if not all) of the waterholes and ponds in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana were being filled in, or paved over for “safety”. Oh, you know, “for the children”. Yet, was any children actually ever hurt? Nope. Just an excuse used by the timid and fearful to control others…

If you can take your grandchildren, or children, or friends to a watering hole in the United States, then you should consider yourself lucky and truly fortunate. These gems are becoming rarer with each passing day.

In the mean time, spend more time outdoors and spend time with the people that mean things to you. Life is far too short not to.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is going on in Hollywood? Have they lost their collective minds?

Here, I argue that Hollywood is not using their innate and basic movie-making skills when pandering to their progressive causes. I argue that not only are they losing money in the process, but they are alienating their viewership base. I thus offer some suggestions to this end to prevent a hemorrhaging of the Hollywood profit model.

Ah. Hollywood.

So famous, and so taken for granted.

The more that I think about it, the more that I am convinced. Indeed, I am convinced that those in Hollywood have found a new profit model. As, it seems, the movies that they are releasing today do not follow the traditional profit model.

Traditional Hollywood Profit Model
You know; you make a good movie, and people pay to watch it. If the movie is really good you get rich. If the movie is poor, you lose money. 

Today, however, it seems that there is a totally different profit model being followed.

Contemporaneous Hollywood Profit Model
Some wealthy oligarch gives you an enormous sum of money to promote some sort of social justice cause and you pocket the money. Whether the movie is popular or not has no bearing on the profit motive.

Yeah. That’s pretty much it. Isn’t it?

Hollywood has become a SJW propaganda arm.

Listen to me.

It’s like a nightmare that no matter how hard you try to run, it never ends. It’s like wack-a-mole. As soon as you hear about one bout of obscenity, there pops up another. Ugh!

License To Drive, the comedy that starred the two Coreys (Haim  and Feldman) and a young Heather Graham in 1988, is being rebooted with  female leads thanks to producer John Davis and 20th Century Fox. 

-Deadline

These kinds of reports flow pretty hard and fast. Yet, I wonder. Just who is this John Davis, and what inspired him to make all-female leads?

League of Extraordinary Ladies

Ah. But this is not the only all-female Hollywood production. If it was, we would just accept it as it is on face value. But, no. It is part of a long on-going trend towards flooding the American movie scene with pale imitations of great movies. All of which that pander to the feminist-wing of the SJW movement.

The first film of Kevin O'Neill and Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentleman remains  most known for the fallout between star Sean Connery and director  Stephen Norrington. Connery hasn't acted since, and Norrington hasn't  directed. 

The new film is being produced by John Davis, and he's  promises a more "female-centric" take on the material for the upcoming  reboot. No director has thus far been appointed, though, but it's very  much an active project. 

-Den of Geek

Yeah. John Davis strikes again! Just who is this John Davis, and why does he want to do this?

I’m being truthful in this. So please, hear me out.

My off-hand impression is that he wants to avoid the SJW backlash and be associated with the Casting Couch like Harvey Weinstein. He needs to protect himself. So he panders to the SJW folk.

I do not know if this is the actual true case or not. What I do know is that is the most likely explanation for the observed trends. Yes. In my “outsider” mind, the most likely scenario.

Casting Couch
Harvey Weinstein “Casting Couch” Oscars on Hollywood Blvd by artist Plastic Jesus.

I’ll bet you all that there’s a lot of truth in this supposition. Trust your gut instincts, boys and girls.

And for what?

That we, the movie watching public has to endure SJW crap all because John Davis took liberties with his casting couch. Is that why Americans need to put up with all these pale imitations of our treasured movies? Because the producers in Hollywood are afraid of the Weinstein-backlash?

OK.

So the The League of Extraordinary Gentleman is going to be redone. What’s it gonna be called? The League of Extraordinary Ladies. After all, “he promises a more “female-centric” take“. Groan.

It’s a new world.

I used to treasure going to the movies.

Then for a while, I worked as a Movie Theater Manager for a cineplex in Corpus Christi, Texas. (Mann National Twin.) I loved everything about it. I loved the atmosphere, the smell of popcorn, the drapes, the lights and the projector booth. Yes, the hours sucked, but it was “showbiz”.

I loved the movies.

It was important to me. I enjoyed it. It was a good two hours of relaxed imagination. I could go to a movie and be teleported into another world, into another time and another place. If the movie was truly great, I would be moved, put into a great mood, and ponder the lessons of the movie for weeks afterwards.

Strictly Ballroom.
People, it is not our similarity to others that makes us special. It is the uniqueness, and our differences. Yes, being a full woman is just as great as being a full-on man. Why try to pretend that our roles and feelings are interchangeable? We are unique individuals with strengths, emotions, and all the warts that one can well imagine. It is our differences that we should promote and admire, not our similarities.

Not so today.

I don’t know about youse guys, but I have stopped watching movies. I ditched Netflx, and any movies I use are either bought, viewed though a much cheaper paid service or through Torrents. These new “improved” movies are all dog shit.

They really, really are.

Why the “new” movies suck.

These new movies promote the progressive socialist narrative. Which is;

  • Everyone is inherently equal.
  • Differences between all of us must be eliminated.
  • There are no biological differences in gender.
  • Anyone who does not agree with the above is evil.

Yet, for all the promotion of this nonsense, the fact remains that only women can naturally have babies. That babies cannot be created naturally without a male sperm. And that these differences manifest in all sorts of social and cultural constructs that have similarity to each other irregardless of geolocation or historical venue.

So, now we have Hollywood wanting progressive equality. You know like in China where everyone wore the same type of clothing. Or in Cambodia where all the intelligent people were killed.

When you try to PUSH that narrative on Americans, we tune it out and walk away.

Oceans 11 Reboot

The trailer for the new all-female “Ocean’s 11” reboot was unveiled this week. The Hollywood Reporter called it "the capstone 2017 needed." 

Most regular people called it awful and stupid.

What  else could it be other than awful and stupid? It’s a reboot of a remake  of a remake, which means it already has all the fun and freshness of  dried vomit. 

The feminist twist just gives it an extra touch of preachiness and pandering, like a vomit stain that comes to life and  lectures you about the patriarchy. 

-Dailywire

Hey, I have a message for all the Hollywood Producers out there. Stop doing things out of fear of the SJW crowd. It has been my experience that most of what we are afraid of never happens.

To quote from the great movie “Strictly Ballroom“; A life lived in fear is a life half-lived.

“A life lived in fear is a life half lived.” 

-Fran (Strictly Ballroom)

Out of touch with the movie audience.

I sat through the (all female) remake of The Ghost-busters and it was like watching people push needles in little puppies eyes. Ouch it hurt that much. Seriously, just how out of touch can people in Hollywood be to produce such a horrific and painful movie?

The answer is way…way… WAY out of touch.

Seriously. Do you, yourself, personally want to spend time watching this kind of drivel that you are producing? Or, do you think that "normal" Americans are some sort of cattle that you can prod about and feed what ever GMO-enhanced nonsense you desire?

How in the world can anyone, most especially a talented producer, even try to improve upon the Ghost-buster franchise with an all-female flick? Don’t they realize the huge numbers of people that they will alienate?

Message to Hollywood;

Are you all that friggin' blind NOT to realize how out of touch you are with your audience? 

You need to fire your marketing groups because they are spending way too much time in urban high-end Starbucks, and not doing enough "grass roots" research.

Hollywood is a business model. And you, yes you (!) are throwing it out the window so nonchalantly that it astounds me and just about everyone else in America. What exactly is your malfunction?

Maybe that’s it. They don’t understand that they are being very offensive to Joe and Suzy Normal in viewership land. Or… maybe they know, but do not care.

Listen to me.

Yes. Radical feminism, even when presented comically, is offensive.

Radical Feminism is Offensive.

But I expect it won’t be any worse than the fantastically terrible and  pointless female “Ghostbusters” film from a few years ago. 

That one set  the bar for the others, a group that will soon include a  female remake of “Lord of the Flies,” and a female remake of “Dirty  Rotten Scoundrels,” and a female remake of “The Rocketeer.” 

There's also  a female remake  of some movie called "License to Drive," originally starring Corey  Feldman and Corey Haim. The movie is being described as a "female  version of 'Superbad.'" 

I was going to joke that they’re even planning a  female “Expendables” but then I checked and apparently they really are planning a female “Expendables.” 

-Dailywire 

Hey! I don’t want to be rude, but for Pete’s Sakes!

Are you all so afraid of the twitter mobs, and SJW types that you would willingly torpedo your friggin’ life’s work? Are you so timid, and worried about what they might think? Are you so terrified that you might end up in prison?

If so, then you disgust me.

We had the chance, but we were scared. We walked away. WE LIVED OUR LIVES IN FEAR.

-Doug Hastings (Strictly Ballroom)
We lived our lives in fear.
In the movie “Strictly Ballroom”, the father sees a repeat of his mistakes in his son’s actions. During the pause when the son is deciding on what to do, the father screams out (don’t make the same mistakes we made) ” We had the chance, but we were scared. We walked away. WE LIVED OUR LIVES IN FEAR. “.

Do not live a life in FEAR.

I am actually astounded that so many well-known and well-established Hollywood producers are so timid and fearful. You have created great works over the decades. You have made movies that us “normals” loved and admired.

Yet, you are all willing to throw all that away, and replace your great works and talent on producing mediocre sub-par movies to appease the radical feminist movement.

In fact, what is so astounding about this, is that the (so called) movement only has a mere handful of active radicals. The rest is all twitter farms, Facebook farms, and other electronic illusionary measures. They look bigger than they really are.

You can stand up to your fears.
You can stand up to your fears. “In all likelihood, Luhrmann’s film’s attacks on the Dance Federation are just… attacks on the Dance Federation. Luhrmann’s mum was a ballroom dance teacher herself (much like Scott’s parents in the film), so the director presumably grew up with more than a little exposure to the world of competitive dance. There’s a broader message about close-mindedness running through the film – a message that might be even broader than you’d think, if this Luhrmann quote is anything to go by: “It sounds incredible, but we did it at first in response to the Cold War…it was a statement that the individual is not ALWAYS without power.””

Here’s how the rest of America reacts to these progressive causes…

When the Football game on the television set in the local sports-bar starts having (what can best be described as) a Black-hate-fest against “White Privilege” Neo-Nazi rally style that television set gets turned OFF.

When a commercial tries to accuse me of toxic masculinity, I stop using their products. Hey! Growing up, I was the kid being picked on. I do not, absolutely and positively, do NOT appreciate being lumped in with bullies simply because we share the same gender. I set my sights on that product range to OFF.

And when a movie, television show, or actor wants to preach to me in ways that I find RUDE, demeaning, insulting, or in any other way, distasteful, I leave and turn it all OFF.

What’s the matter with youse guys? Or are you all too weak limp-wristed to understand what an insult is and what isn’t?

Tony Soprano
Tony Soprano tells it like it is. Maybe you don’t like his frankness, or his tones, or the choice of words that he uses. However, he is speaking clearly and directly.

Listen to me now.

Or is everyone in Hollywood stuck in an echo-chamber? Are you all being lead around by the cleat in your noses by some radicals that enslave you by fear? Is that what you are?

What are you? Let your creativity shine through.
Whatever the intent, Strictly Ballroom’s moral has a simple resonance. As you’d expect, the film concludes with a triumphant scene of Scott and Fran quite literally dancing to their own beat at the Pan-Pacific Championships. We’ve learned that Barry’s tale of Scott’s father (Barry Otto) jettisoning his chances through refusing to bow to convention was a lie. We’ve learned that Barry’s reign as president was fundamentally corrupt. But, critically, we never learn who wins. While the precise target of Strictly Ballroom’s satire might be unclear, its underlying philosophy – that art is about creativity, not awards – is unmistakable.

I write this to Hollywood, the producers and all those people who have added life, adventure, and romance to the films that I have loved. Do not allow your great works to fade into rust. Do not allow those who want to force you into fear-controlled boxes, destroy your great works. For they are doing so.

Do great things. Stop pandering to those who are driving your actions by fear.

Meanwhile…

Female James Bond

Watch out! Here comes a new “improved” 007 James Bond!

They’ve decided to kill the James Bond franchise by making the next 007 a woman. This is just stupid. Bond is a male fantasy: we kill the bad guys while dressed well and looking sharp and get all the hot women. No man will want to go see Super Chick do that…nor will women, I suspect.

The James Bond franchise will shake things up completely for its  25th instalment, casting a black actress to take over from Daniel Craig  as the new 007 – since re-doing old stories with a PC angle is easier  than writing new ones.     

The UK’s Daily Mail  reports that British actress Lashana Lynch will take over from Craig as  codename 007 in the as-yet-untitled film. The movie will reportedly see  Craig retain the title role, however, being called out of retirement in  Jamaica for one last mission. 

The revelation is not so surprising in an era when 
political correctness has become something of a new religion – and 
naturally, the casting has somewhat ironically prompted much 
divisiveness on social media, where there have been both celebrations of
 the daring move and anger that the long-established brand of the male, 
martini-sipping Bond would be fundamentally changed forever.

People…

What is wrong with Hollywood that they cannot see that this is a big mistake?

The thing that puzzles me is do many women want to see male leads taken by females? 

I  am a great believer in equal rights and when I was about 13 led a, what  now seems very amusing, protest at my school because girls had to take  cookery while boys took metalwork and not being particularly interested  in cookery  I was far more interested in getting my hands on a welding  implement! so I naughtily took the majority of my class to stand in line  outside the metalwork classroom week after week until the headmaster  got fed up and we girls were allowed to have three weeks of metalwork,  the metalwork teacher was a lovely man who was very much on our side and  showed us how to design and make jewellery, i wish I still had the  pendant I made.  I made a lot of enemies though, the boys in my year  hated me because the cookery teacher refused to take them into her  classroom and teach them and so they had to do extra maths lessons  instead and the cookery teacher never forgave me for being so  disruptive.  Everything had changed by the time my boys were in school  and they had cookery classes with the girls and the girls had what is  now called 'design and technology' together with the boys.

But this is just silly, what next? Goldiluke and the the three bears?  a remake of the sound of music with a singing monk?  

-Cobis

How is the 007 franchise improved? Why, by replacing the lead and iconic male figure with a strong female figure. That’s how! Of course all the social progressives are so excited about this latest remake and are flooding their social media accounts with all sorts of praise!

When is someone going to stand up and say this new female James Bond is a load of bollocks??

The  clue is in the title, James Bond is a man, stuff this equality shit!  It's a flipping film character! What next? Cinders a male, Jaws 4 as a  dolphin! Get a grip ffs

— Telvis (@Telv1s) July 15, 2019 

Why I just can’t wait to see a strong female version of James bond, seducing weak-willed men who are just comic jokes and props. Yessur! That will be fun to watch.

NOPE!

Someone needs to BITCH SLAP those idiots that think a re-gendered James Bond is going to be a success. Yeah, just like the re-gendered Star Trek was…

Re-gendered Star Trek

Really bad writing - in fact the worse I have ever seen in a show.  They  hired show-runner from the CW with no sci-fi experience (and CW is  bottom of the barrel in a time when there are tons of good content out  there on streaming services).   

They hired her because they wanted a female show runner and didn't look past gender when setting up the show. Star Trek Discovery is really really bad - If you wondered what network TV is putting out these days, this is one you should watch one episode of to see how bad a show can get.  

This is a perfect example of what happens when someone casts a show based on social justice warrior checklists and has a team of untalented  writers putting out garbage. CBS will not cancel the show because it would be embarrassing for them and the ratings they get are from football and not this show (all access).  

Forget the social justice warrior nonsense, this show is unwatchable if you watch everything star trek. 

-Christopher T (Rotten Tomatoes on Star Trek Discovery)

But hey! If it is so good then why is it universally considered the absolute worst Star Trek franchise out there? Most fans feel like this fellow…

Jesus **** Christ this show is dog **** It's like a horrible soap  opera that is terribly written and it couldn't be further from what Star Trek was when it was good. It's a mess that morons are going to lap up.  The writers of this show can go **** themselves. 

Or this fellow…

This is not Star Trek, it's a show centered in the character of Michael  Burnham, and I had enough of her. 

The "know it all" attitude, the  dramatics, the never stop crying, the every plot centered around her is  highly unnerving. I liked Captain Pike a lot and Saru as well, but the  other characters get on my nerves as well, the camaraderie between them  seems forced, and there is too much drama and crying.

Other problem is the Klingons, that ugly prosthetic that make their faces look rubbery and the muffled voices. Horrible! 

Or this fellow…

I am actually glad Gene Roddenberry is dead so he did not have to see  this abomination. 

Well if he was alive he would not have allowed this  awful show to move forward. It might have made a decent action show but  this is in no way shape or form a Star Trek. 

Just call it something else  or cancel, please? 

I am almost sorry I lived long enough to see my  beloved series destroyed. 

It’s pages upon pages of dislike…

Can this tripe get any worse? Don't bother, go watch The Orville instead. The true new home of ST. 

People, you should NOT rely on twitter or electronic media to determine whether or not a show is popular. Those things can be easily spoofed by electronic farming. You should go into the fan communities, into the areas where most people enjoy these shows and talk to them FACE-to-FACE.

Meet people who live outside your community. This includes your community of business associates, your community of friends, and your local geographical community. You need to reach out to those outside your world.

You will find that in just about every case, people would prefer a NEW movie franchise based up new characters, instead of altering a well-established franchise to fit a SJW narrative.

Truth This.

Anyways, back to James Bond.

Female James Bond

James Bond in Dr. No.
James Bond in Dr. No. James Bond got into all sorts of interesting situations. Often with women who used their beauty to seduce him into compromise. Though he was better than that and always had the upper hand.

There are actors and actresses timidly commenting on the absurdity of gender-swapping this character…

Mirren added: “But that time was different; we could never even have imagined a woman playing that role.”

The actress’ statement comes just two days after former Bond girl Halle Berry said casting 007 as a woman would be a bad call.

“I want women to be tough but I don't know if Bond should be a woman,” the 50-year-old told Entertainment Tonight. 

“I mean, that series is steeped in history, you know from Ian Fleming’s stories. I don't think you can change Bond to a woman.” 

The Die Another Day actress went on: “We can create a new Bond  character that's a woman, and give her a new name, based on that  theory. 

“But I don't know if Bond should be a woman.” 

- Could Helen Mirren be the first female 007? 

There are all sorts of rumors of who will play the new female version of James Bond. Knowing what I know of the idiots in the coastal cities, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is played by Omarosa Manigault.

I call them idiots. Why? Because they are permitting a profitable enterprise to collapse. All to the disdain of its’ shareholders.

What? You think that there are no alternatives to Hollywood? Do you think that it has a forever lock on movies, music, and entertainment? You think that Bollywood will never encroach on the American audience, and that China will never take over...

Have you been paying attention lately?

Nope. You are all in your closed progressive Hollywood bubble, and it is getting smaller and smaller and soon you will suffocate within it. 

Progressives are all for change… as long it is change that they can control. But, you know what? It’s a fantasy. Control is only an illusion. Most of your life there are forces that are beyond what you can control. The only thing that you can control is your very own actions.

That’s all.

So for goodness sakes. Don’t live a life in fear. Stop pandering to the radical feminists.

Female Captain Jack Sparrow

Let me get this straight. Casting Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow wouldn’t really be fitting. So, what’s the answer?

Why, you need to cast a strong woman in this role. Sort of a female version of Captain Jack Sparrow. Maybe a Jacklin Sparrow. yeah! That will just bring in swarms of people to sit through a two hour long feature length movie.

Captain Jack Sparrow
So Captain Jack Sparrow is going to be cast as a woman in the latest remake or spawned sequel to the Pirates of the Caribbean. I understand that there have been female pirates in the past, but a gender swap of a famous character is not the way you go about these kinds of things.

Stop pandering to the radical feminists.

All Female Ghostbusters

Director/co-writer Paul Feig's no-one-asked-for "Ghostbusters" remake  opens with a big "ugh" and never recovers. 

Naturally, it's a joke aimed at Donald Trump and his supporters -- a heavy-handed haha about an "anti-Irish fence." 

Yep, even before the movie can even cast its spell, the spell is shattered forever by divisive partisanship. From there,  instead of relaxing, you're on guard throughout for the next left-wing sucker punch. 

 -Daily Wire 

Yeah, this went over like a lead balloon.

It was absolutely positive revolting. It was an insult to the original movie, the cast, and all the moviegoers who watched it in theaters when it came out… bought the Betamax tapes, the VHS tapes, the DVD discs, or rented from Blockbuster or viewed it on Netflix.

Screenshot of Ghoastbusters review of the all-female version.
Screenshot of Ghostbusters review of the all-female version. Captured before the Internet could rewrite the historical dialog.

It was a total and complete cluster-FLUXXX.

Look at this cluster of losers…

All Female Ghostbusters
One of the worst movies ever made in the history of movies was the ill-advised remake of Ghostbusters. In it they used females in all the leading roles. It fit them like putting a sock over a snail. It did not fit. NO FRIGGIN’ WAY.

Did I like it? Hell no! I’d rather swim in a pool of pig feces than endure that monstrosity… that horrid… horrid insult to humanity ever again. What the Hell were they thinking?

They weren’t. That’s the point.

As expected, Feig's disaster has a flaming feminist chip on its  shoulder. Every male character is either an asshole, an idiot, or both.  

Which begs the question: Where in the world does this grudge emanate  from? Certainly not the original that gave us Weaver's classy,  independent, sophisticated Manhattan woman and Annie Potts' knowing,  street-smart receptionist.  

-Daily Wire

Read some of the reviews of this monstrosity…

Stop pandering to the radical feminists.

Female John McClane

Why not? Eh?

I mean you’ve got Ocean’s eleven all female, and all the classics are being remade into the progressive socialist narrative, of course there will need to be an all female version of Die Hard.

So…

John McClain
John McClain in the movie “A good day to die hard”. He always plays an average Joe, a regular guy who is confronted with extraordinary circumstances where he and only he alone must confront. Which is the core MALE attribute in all MEN.

These has been no announcements on who would play John or Joan in this role. (My guess is that the backlash has been so negative, that the articles are pulled off the Internet within hours of being posted.) Though, I am betting that it might be someone like Mindy Kaling.

There are more than just a few remakes of movies planned. Some one with deep, deep pockets is flooding Hollywood with all sorts of cash. Seems like a Barrack Obama, or George Soros trademark.

Pause and let that sink in…

I just can't help but think that all those many, many programs that were put in place over the years had some kind of financial feed-back mechanism (illegal, of course) for "social progress".

Or, as I have been saying… stop pandering to the radical feminists.

A (female) American Werewolf in London

Well, the original movie featured a guy who was bit by a werewolf while in London. Why not a female? Well… it’s coming true. It’s been announced.

Heck! Why stop there.

Make her a hijab wearing LGBT transgender person. Right? That way the movie goers can get the full force of SJW immersion, as well as sticking a sharp knife into the sides of all those deplorable Trump followers. Eh?

Besides, it’s well known that London is a progressive global city with Muslim majorities. It would make absolutely and perfect sense. There are far, far, FAR more Muslims in London than Americans.

Yeah.

Make the American Werewolf in London a Muslim.
Make the American Werewolf in London a Muslim. It would be quite fitting. Yeah. Everyone would be breaking down the doors to get in.

Escape from New York

Oh, it’s Snake Plissken all right.

Only this time he is dispatched to New York city to save and rescue a female Senator from the clutches of the despicable deplorables entrapped inside that urban ghetto. I’ll bet you 8 to 10 that she will look a little like Hillary Clinton, Maxine Walters or some other prominent liberal democrat.

Great fare for the cash-heavy urban blacks that follow this narrative.

Untitled Female Expendables

Yeah. An all-women expendables. I suppose that it all began here when some feminists were musing about the take over of the industry.

It has long passed the silly, and entered the world of the absurd.

The expendables.
The original Expendables had enough male movie stars in black to go around. It’s possible some of your relatives are in this picture.

In defiance of history. In defiance with genetics, and the social variances between those with “Y” chromosomes and those without it, this movie is moving forward.

Hey! All youse guys in the room, raise you hand up if you want to watch this absurdity. Obviously the marketing group in Hollywood was on crack when they promoted this film. Why not alienate 99% of the “Expendable” viewing audience, won’t ya?

Stop living your life in Fear of the radical feminists.

Stop living your life in fear of the radical progressive feminists.
Stop living your life in fear of the radical progressive feminists. You need to start living life on YOUR terms, and not let others define what your legacy will become.

Stop living your life in fear. Stop pandering to the radical feminists. Stop allowing them to define what your film legacy will become.

All of Me

Instead of Steve Martin, you now have a woman in the role.

A dying millionaire finds her soul has been transferred to the body of her lawyer. A remake of the 1984 comedy 'All of Me'. 

-IMDB

A life that is lived in fear is a life that is half-lived. Stop allowing your fear of the radical feminists to define your legacy.

Overboard (2018)

It’s a role reversal of the original comedy. Instead of a rich woman falling overboard and forgetting who she is, it’s a rich man who falls overboard.

Kate Sullivan is a single mom of three daughters who works two  jobs while studying to be a nurse. She is assigned to clean carpets on a  yacht owned by spoiled, arrogant playboy Leonardo 'Leo' Montenegro. Leo  makes rude remarks towards Kate and fires her without pay when she  refuses to bring him food. When Kate calls out his behavior, Leo pushes  her off the boat along with her cleaning equipment. Meanwhile, in  Mexico, Leo's sisters Magdalena and Sofia are tending to their ailing  father. Furious when Leo is announced as his successor to run the  family-owned company, Magda decides to visit him. That night, Leo slips  off the yacht and falls into the ocean unnoticed. He wakes up on a beach  with amnesia and no recollection of his identity. He wanders through  town and eventually reaches the hospital. Magda finds him and leaves him  there unclaimed after learning he has amnesia. She returns home and  falsely reports that Leo has died. Sofia suspects Magda is lying. 

-IMDB

Stop allowing the radical feminists to define your life.

Ocean’s Eight (2018)

Debbie Ocean gathers an all-female crew to attempt an impossible heist at New York City’s yearly Met Gala. Pretty much the same plot as the original Ocean’s Eight, only with role reversal. It’s expected to be a great hit with all the progressive millennials in the Untied States today.

This  is just another Hollywood attempt at "Hey! Lets take a classic movie  and flip the casts gender!!!" It's pure pc propaganda. The only reason  that I'm giving it a 2 is because I don't trust these ratings sites  algorithms to take 0's and 1's into account. They may be getting smarter  though and will stop dropping any score below 5. 

-MysticDingo
Just  an all female Reboot of a good and beloved Movie Trilogy. Rihannas  poorly acting skills make this film unwatchable. Don´t do this to  yourself and watch that movie, except you are a fat Feminazi that  rather watches a bad movie with female cast than an actually good movie  with diverse group of men. 

-Metacritic
                                                                 Another gender swap movie  trying to show equality and how "empowered" women are.. It belongs in  the garbage bin along with the people it caters to.

- Zisis151  Jun 10, 2018                         

Stop living your life in fear. Make the best movies that you can make and fear not who you offend.

Make the best films that you are able to. Do not pander to the radical feminists.
Make the best films that you are able to. Do not pander to the radical feminists. A life lived in fear is a life half-lived.

What about all these remakes?

Well there certainly seems like everything is up for grabs in Hollywood. Everything, apparently, can be recast now as either all-female roles or gender swapped. It’s the progressive way. Don’t you know.

But all this is being done absolutely wrong. They are redoing successful films to fit a SJW narrative. Of course, it is bound to fail. People, you produce movies and shows to ENTERTAIN. Not to lecture, or push a particular political agenda.

Concentrate on entertainment.
Concentrate on entertainment of your audience.
Concentrate on the entertainment of your audience.

Concentrate on entertaining your audience.

Some Ideas

Here’s some ideas on how to properly implement progressive ideas into Hollywood movies in such a way that you will not alienate your viewing audience.

First of all, you can have strong female roles that are uniquely female. You do not have the need to apprehend those roles from men…

Entertainment.

The purpose of movies are to entertain. There are many ways to do this. But, no matter what, do not be under the impression that Hollywood has the sole ownership of this medium.

If Hollywood continues to produce lackluster films, the cash-paying audience will start to ignore the movies as not worthy of their time. They will go elsewhere.

You need to entertain.

Thirdly, absurdity is fine.

It’s ok. Everyone knows that this is fiction. So you can create movies as off-the-wall as you would like.

Now. Here’s some ideas…

  • Some are all-female.
  • Some are gender swaps.
  • Others are race or religion swaps.

It’s all part of the new progressive reality. Come on! You’ve got to be fair about it all, right? But only, this time, please concentrate on entertainment.

The Rat Patrol.

Here we have a famous 1960’s series about four men who fight the Nazi’s in Africa by riding jeeps in the desert. We could gender swap them to four women. We could modernize them. Yeah! That’s right. Four women riding high, machine gunning ISIS warriors in the hot desert heat.

They can all be Muslim, head scarves and all, and are fighting the evil ISIS’s and their paternity, and Privilege. They can all wear veils, and long flowing African outfits and carry Tommy guns and Beretta’s under their flowing garments. They could rescue captured women at slave auctions, perform night raids in ISIS camps, and assassinate ISIS leadership.

Have them attractive. Have them wear attractive Arabic clothing. Something like this beauty…

Acacia clothing label.
Beautiful Muslim woman wearing the latest in fashion.

Have them riding specially modified Lamborghini’s and Ferrari’s. You know, with a twin barrelled .50 caliber machine gun, and all sorts of 007 James Bond style high-tech gadgetry. Make it a cross between Raging Women getting back at people who abused them, and a fully equipped mad-scientist lair. Take elements from Miami Vice, and blend it with a little bit of Doctor Phibes.

Make it DIFFERENT.

Oh, and make their outfits extraordinary. Make women want to wear Arabic styled clothing.

You need to understand. By using a “Rat Patrol” template you can create an entirely new series with entirely new characters and situationals without any association from whence the idea was derived from.

Be brave. Push yourself.

The Rat Patrol took place during a tiny sliver of time (5 years) when the Nazi’s actually controlled portions of Northern Africa. I propose the much longer period of time (8+ years) when the ISIS controlled Syria.

The Rat Patrol.
The Rat Patrol: The Rat Patrol is an American action and adventure television series that aired on ABC between 1966 and 1968. The show follows the exploits of four Allied soldiers — three Americans and one Englishman — who are part of a long-range desert patrol group in the North African campaign during World War II. Their mission: “to attack, harass and wreak havoc.

The Munsters

We can have comedies.

Here, we could gender-swap Herman Muster for Harriet Munster, and have Lester (instead of Lilly) as his wife. (Or, maybe a same-sex relationship.) Maybe she could be an Uber driver who is also a Rastafarian who uses comically conspired voodoo on riders in her car.

It would be in color instead of black and white. It could take place on 1313 bad luck lane on a hilly portion of San Francisco. They would be on food stamps, and live in a “colorful” section of town.

Use different theme music. Maybe some kind of upbeat rap.

Make it outrageous. Make it stand apart. Make it so offensive to everyone, and make fun of everything, and the more politically incorrect the BETTER.

have jokes that cater to both Conservatives and Progressives. Mix it up. Make it outrageous!

Grandpa will be replaced with a vampire transgender Grandma, you know, like a Frankenstein creature gone loopy. And the kids can stay the same. That would work, wouldn’t you all think? As an added bonus, we could have Eddie Munster a Muslim Female, and his sister a black transgender gender-less person with three boobs.

The more absurd, the better.

The jokes can all be about modern progressive lifestyle where everyone is just as crazy as they are, and how it is like to fit into modern life in San Francisco. Have them fall in love with an Antifa activist, and have them play checkers with lit candles.

The gags can abound.

For instance, Fido can be free-spirited saber-toothed tiger. Each week with a different hair style and color. They could have ties to the Addams Family, and Harriet Munster can work at the county morgue. They can make comments about the staff filming the episodes, and joke about Hollywood insiders.

Just let it out and sway in the wind.

The Munsters.
The Munsters is an American sitcom depicting the home life of a family of benign monsters starring Fred Gwynne as Frankenstein’s monster-type head-of-the-household Herman Munster, Yvonne De Carlo as his vampire wife, Lily Munster, Al Lewis as Grandpa, the over-the-hill vampire who relishes talking about the “good old days”.

The Andy Griffith Show

You can take traditional America and turn it on it’s head. Just take a normal traditional show and twist and distort it into something completely different. Use different names, and different circumstances.

How about an all-woman Andy Griffith show.

Yeah in small town Mayberry RFD, a woman sheriff and her female deputy keep order in the town. You’ve got a female Otis, and a female Gomer, and a cast of characters that includes a female hairdresser, a female mayor and the daughter of the sheriff. Call it Mayberry Woman’s Auxiliary RFD.

Put elements of food in it. Each week, nice juicy closeups of food porn. All with oozy melted cheese, and sizzling images of meat, and slow motion cutting of fresh bread.

Now, don’t look at me cross-eyed. It could work.

If you are willing to step outside of your West-coast bubble, do some REAL marketing, and brush off some good-old-fashioned movie skills and work… work… work.

The Andy Griffith Show
The Andy Griffith Show is a syndicated family situation comedy series created by Sheldon Leonard and Aaron Ruben, which was broadcast on CBS for eight seasons from 1960 to 1968. Episodes involve Sheriff Andy Taylor (played by Andy Griffith) and his family and friends’ life in a small rural town called Mayberry, North Carolina.

All Female remake of Kelly’s Heroes

Of course, we should have a rolling good time with a all-female remake of Kelly’s Heroes. How about that?

During World War II, Lieutenant Kelly learns of a  German bank located behind enemy lines containing 16 million dollars in  gold bars. His platoon, led by Big Joe, has three days of R&R  coming, so, with the aid of hustler Crapgame, anachronistic hippie  Oddball, three Sherman tanks and a touch of irreverence, Kelly leads his men deep into French territory to steal the gold for themselves. 

-123 Movies

Do it differently. Have the gaggle of gals break into a military base and steal three tanks and then go on a USA-wide bank-robbing spree. Put it in the mid-1990’s and play popular Grunge music from that time period. Have it so that they end up having a parade of people following them sort of like “Forrest Gump” in the running scene.

Model the FBI and other police agencies as a kind of updated “Keystone Cops”.

Have the news media reporting but as a real parody of themselves. Show them making up news, interviewing actors pretending they are eye-witnesses, and generally clueless.

Make it a cross between the movies “9 to 5”, “One Crazy Summer”, and “The Great Train Robbery”.

Follow the same kind of model that was used in the movie “Brother where art thou”; the tales of the adventures of Ulysses. You couldn’t tell the source inspiration for the movie could you?

Kelly's Heroes.
Film is based upon a true incident. The caper was covered in a book called “Nazi Gold: The Sensational Story of the World’s Greatest Robbery – and the Greatest Criminal Cover-Up” by Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting. The heist was perpetrated by a combination of renegade Nazi and American officers. It was also listed as the “biggest” robbery ever in the Guinness Book of Records, in the 1960s.

The Dukes of Hazzard

In this remake, we can have an urban version of the Dukes of Hazzard.

Only it can be about a gang of black urban youth called “The Dukes” who live in a fictional section of Chicago called “The Hazzard” which is a dangerous old industrial area. (You know with pits of sulfuric acid, rusty chains hanging everywhere, lots of metal grid scaffolding, and tons of long deserted buildings and machinery.) They fight the corrupt “Boss” of the town as they cart meth from one end of the town to another, while dealing with the local constables and a pimp that goes by the name of Boss Hog.

Oh, and they drive in a pimped out white BMW that they call the Lil Layzie . The series can feature different rap songs every episode. It could work. I tell you.

The Dukes of Hazzard.
The Dukes of Hazzard is an American action-comedy television series that was aired on CBS from January 26, 1979, to February 8, 1985. The show aired for a total of 147 episodes spanning seven seasons. The series was inspired by the 1975 film Moonrunners, which was also created by Gy Waldron and had many identical or similar character names and concepts.

Roots

Oh boy! I can see all the BLM howling. But, it makes sense, actually. The very first slaves to the Americas were Irish. It might not be the politically correct thing to say, but it is historically truthful.

Of course the progressives have done their best to rewrite this narrative. You can find their rebuttals at the very top of all the Google and Bing search results. But, it's not a fantasy. Personally, it's a small part of my very own family legacy.

Yeah, now let’s have a gender swap and race swap of the television series Roots. Yeah. After all that is what progressiveness is all about, isn’t it?

Or is it about POWER?

Conclusion

You can gender swap all you want using similar themes and context, however the movie (or television show) should stand alone on it’s own merits.

You absolutely cannot produce a female version, or a different racial version, of a long held and long established character, theme or franchise successfully.

The reason for this is simple. People gravitate to the familiar, and are repelled by that they are unaccustomed to.

You should branch out and try something different that can stand alone and aloof. Give it depth and breadth and substance. make it immersive, and people will fall in love with your for it.

Follow the Lord of the Rings model.

You will know that you are successful when few people would associate your new creation with the movie or show that you might have spawned if off of.

The failures (in Hollywood movies) that we see today, are due to inappropriate pandering to an aggressive SJW army for “progressive justice” in lieu of actual content that can be successfully monetized.

I argue that while there might be protective and conservative reasons for accepting this pandering venue, it is counter productive in the long run.

As such I argue that the creative license should be used creatively, and in such a way that the final product cannot, would not, or in any way be associated with some sort of SJW revisionism effort.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight

Articles & Links

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When Hollywood was capable of making decent movies; The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Here is a movie that I loved as a kid. There are people who think that it is a piece of Satanic propaganda. I disagree. I just think that it is a chunky tongue in cheek, campy, pseudo horror flick from the 1970’s.

Here’s my take on this masterpiece of camp.

They just don’t make ‘em like The Abominable Dr. Phibes* anymore. In fact, they just don’t make ‘em like Vincent Price  anymore, either. Dr. Phibes, first off, is the definitive role that  Vincent Price was born to play, and second off, is firmly embedded in a  different time. He belongs to the era of 1950s EC Comics horror titles  such as “Tales from the Crypt,” “The Vault of Horror,” and “Weird  Fantasy.” 

-All Horror

A Satanic Movie?

Well, well. It turns out that the Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey has claimed that the main character in this Vincent Price film was based on him.

I would have never even associated Vincent Price with any kind or works of Satan. He was, after all, just an actor who played Satanic roles to the “T”.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a 1971 British dark comedy horror film, produced by Ronald S. Dunas and Louis M. Heyward, directed by Robert Fuest, written by William Goldstein and James Whiton, and starring Vincent Price and Joseph Cotten. 

Its art deco sets, dark humour, and performance by Price have made the film and its sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again cult classics. 

-Wikipedia.

Anyways, this character’s name is Dr. Anton Phibes and he’s an organist, researcher, medical doctor, biblical scholar and ex-vaudevillian who has created a clockwork band of robot musicians to play old standards at his whim.

Now, in hindsight, seeing as how nearly all of these things match up with Satanist LaVey, I can kind of see his point. Kinda.

Though, this movie isn’t going to be useful for recruiting anyone to follow Satan, I’m afraid.

“I won’t do another Phibes film unless Robert Fuest directs it. He’s the only person in the world who is mad enough to direct the Dr. Phibes films. He’s a genuine, registered nut! He even looks like a madman. He’s all over the place, like an unmade bed. What imagination he has. They were all his ideas…. Bob has never done anything that was nearly as good as the Dr. Phibes films.”
— Vincent Price, 1979

The Movie

Dr. Phibes main ballroom.
The film begins with a dark figure playing gothic music on a huge pipe organ. The audience for this recital of sorts seems to be having a wonderful time…until you look a bit closer. They are all mannequins seated in positions that give the illusion that they are enjoying themselves in a lavish nightclub. Then we see the first appearance of Vulnavia (Virginia North). Though she never speaks a word through the entire movie, Vulvania has quite an impact. Vulnavia and the organ player proceed through a highly ritualized chain of events, gliding through loading an automobile with a large box, driving to a swank part of London and arriving at a large British mansion.

The sets in this movie are amazing and lavish.

This movie is one I can’t be quiet about. It’s one of the strangest and most delightful films I’ve ever seen.

Dr. Phibes (his particular field is never given) is an underground  aristocrat in early 20th-century London, who is bereaved of his late  wife Victoria after a fatal car crash. Phibes himself is also presumed  dead by the authorities, since his own car went off a cliff when he was  en route to his wife. Victoria died on the operating table, the doctors  unable to help her, and now Dr. Phibes has sworn vengeance against the  doctors he blames for his wife’s death.

So what, he’s going to  hire lawyers and sue for malpractice? Oh no, much too common. He’s going  to kill them off one by one! To do so, he’s going to hatch contrived  murder traps based (very loosely) upon the ten plagues of Egypt  mentioned in both the Quran and the Bible. What, do you expect him to  take a gun and shoot them, like a bourgeois commoner? Nope, his traps  involve several species of animal, in between intricate mechanical  devices that must have cost a fortune to research and manufacture for  this single use. He also has a pendant necklace for each victim, which  he will hang around a wax bust of its target after a successful kill and  melt with a blowtorch. 

 -All Horror 

Dr. Anton Phibes died in Switzerland, racing back home upon hearing the news that his beloved bridge Victoria (an uncredited Caroline Munro) had died during surgery.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 2
On team Phibes, we have his mute but fashionable assistant, Vulnavia (Virginia North). When she isn’t running errands for Dr. Phibes transporting cages of deadly animals around London, she’s dancing up a storm with him in his underground ballroom or providing moral support playing a violin that’s color-coordinated to match her current outfit.

The truth is that Phibes has survived, scarred beyond belief and unable to speak, but alive. He uses all of the skills that he’s mastered to rebuild his face and approximate a human voice.

Oh yeah. Aside from all that, he also may or may not be a tad bit insane.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 3
The police, led by Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey), keep a stiff upper British lip as they scurry around England trying to put together clues to all the steampunk devices and menagerie of exotic creatures. They’re pretty far behind the mad Dr. Phibes and don’t catch up very quickly. The targeted doctors themselves aren’t exactly elusive prey either, as they’re all dupes who spend more time nurturing obsessions with stag movies or model trains than taking the police warnings seriously. When caught, they have a tendency to sit politely and accept their deaths rather than do something so un-British-like as get up and run away, because they haven’t been excused.

Now, Phibes believes that the doctors who operated on his wife were incompetent and therefore must pay for their insolence. So he does what anyone else would do: visit the Biblical ten plagues of Egypt on every single one of them.

Now people, listen up! That’s how you get revenge, and do it properly.

The Tale of the Killdozer.

Phibes is, of course, played by Vincent Price. No one else could handle this role. Or this movie.

There’s hardly any dialogue for the first ten minutes of the movie. Instead, there are long musical numbers of Phibes and his clockwork band playing old standards. In fact, Phibes doesn’t speak for the first 32 minutes of the movie.

Anyone who asks questions like “Why?” and says things like “This movie makes no sense” will be dealt with accordingly.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 4
But we haven’t gotten around to Phibes himself yet! He’s disfigured from his own accident, so he wears a mask that bears a remarkable resemblance to Vincent Price, and he’s rendered unable to speak, so he has to plug a huge-horned Victrola into a cord on the side of his neck and mime along with his own dubbed dialogue. He completes this eccentric performance by being a fashionable man-about-town, and his disfigurement doesn’t stop him from having unbounded pride in his appearance, as his face is plastered as a logo on the walls of his mansion and even the tinted windows of his car.

After the first few murders, Inspector Trout gets on the case. He becomes Phibes’ main antagonist for this and the following film, trying to prove that all of these murders — the doctors and nurse who had been on the team of Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotten!) — are connected.

Phibes then stays one step ahead of the police, murdering everyone with bees, snow, a unicorn statue, locusts and rats, sometimes even right next to where the cops have staked him out.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 5
Dr Phibes spends his free time playing an organ in his underground lair, accompanied by a whole orchestra of automatons dubbed “Dr. Phibes Clockwork Wizards.” His other pursuits include delivering rambling eulogies to his late wife, to whom he has built a shrine. In a career with some serious ham and cheese in it, Dr. Phibes is one of Vincent Price’s hammiest roles!

Vulnavia

Dr. Phibes is assisted by the lovely Vulnavia. We’re never informed that she’s a robot, but the opinion of others, she actually is. Both she and the doctor are the most fashion-forward of all revenge killers I’ve seen outside of Meiko Kaji and Christina Lindberg.

Writer William Goldstein wrote Vulnavia as another clockwork robot with a wind-up key in her neck. Fuest thought that Phibes demanded a more mobile assistant, so he made her human, yet one with a blank face and mechanical body movements.

 "Easy does it. I think it's a left-handed thread." 

— Policeman unscrewing a victim impaled by a unicorn horn,  The Abominable Dr. Phibes 

I still like to think that she’s a machine, particularly because she returns in the next film after her demise here. Also — Fuest rewrote nearly the entire script.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 6
The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a cult classic today, even amongst the non-horror muggles. The film plays a strident note in between camp and grotesque, with art-deco sets and baroque flourishes everywhere. While there isn’t much to the story beyond “madman kills people in obsessive revenge,” the style trumps the substance. One minor quibble is that the scenes involving animals, in those pre-CGI days, didn’t get the animals full cooperation and seem to be more cuddly than threatening. And of course, the whole thing is dated and intentionally corny, so if you like your horror serious, this isn’t the film for you.

The Key to the Heart

After killing off everyone else — sorry Terry-Thomas! — Phibes kidnaps Dr. Vesalius’ son and implants a key inside his heart that will unlock the boy. However, if the doctor doesn’t finish the surgery on his son in six minutes — the same amount of time he had spent trying to save Phibes’ wife — acid will rain down and kill both he and his boy.

Against all odds, Vesalius is successful.

Dr Phibes -misc
The Abominable Dr Phibes is a camp masterpiece. It has a sublime elegance – what other film could offer up a scene where a man’s blood is drained to the accompaniment of a woman in furs standing outside playing a melancholic violin solo. There is such a droll sense of humor at work here – like the moment Vincent Price’s deformed title doctor pours a glass of champagne and then tips it up to his neck to drink, or puts a finger dipped in the vegetable juice to his neck to taste the flavor. There is the joyously droll moment where Maurice Kaufman is impaled against the wall on the horn of a unicorn head fired from a cannon, with the bumbling police then having to unscrew the body from the wall, while arguing over which way the thread of the horn’s screw runs.

But… Poor Vulnavia.

Vulnavia, in the middle of destroying Phibes’ clockwork orchestra, is sprayed by the acid and killed while the doctor himself replaces his blood with a special fluid and lies down to eternal sleep with his wife, happy that he has had his revenge.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 8
The Abominable Dr Phibes is a camp masterpiece. It has a sublime elegance – what other film could offer up a scene where a man’s blood is drained to the accompaniment of a woman in furs standing outside playing a melancholic violin solo. There is such a droll sense of humor at work here – like the moment Vincent Price’s deformed title doctor pours a glass of champagne and then tips it up to his neck to drink, or puts a finger dipped in the vegetable juice to his neck to taste the flavor. There is the joyously droll moment where Maurice Kaufman is impaled against the wall on the horn of a unicorn head fired from a cannon, with the bumbling police then having to unscrew the body from the wall, while arguing over which way the thread of the horn’s screw runs.

The Ten Plagues

If you’re interested, the ten plagues Phibes unleashes are:

  • Blood: He drains all of Dr. Longstreet’s blood
  • Frogs: He uses a mechanical frog mask to kill Dr. Hargreaves at a costume party
  • Bats: A more cinematic plague than lice from the Biblical plagues, Phibes uses these airborne rodents to kill Dr. Dunwoody
  • Rats: Again, better than flies, rats overwhelm Dr. Kitaj and cause his plane to crash
  • Pestilence: This one is a leap, but the unicorn head that kills Dr. Whitcombe qualifies
  • Boils: Professor Thornton is stung to death by bees
  • Hail: Dr. Hedgepath is frozen by an ice machine
  • Locusts: The nurse is devoured by them thanks to an ingenious trap
  • Darkness: Phibes joins his wife in eternal rest during a solar eclipse
  • Death of the firstborn: Phibes kidnaps and the son of Dr. Vesalius

I love that this movie appears lost in time. While set in the 1920’s, many of the songs weren’t released until the 1940’s. Also, Phibes has working robots and high technology, despite the era the film is set in.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 7
Vincent Price gives the best performance of his life as a madman, seemingly trapped inside his own face, all the time delivering hilariously flowery eulogies to his dead wife via speaker-phone. There is that marvelously wicked little chuckle he gives, sitting sniffing a daisy as he watches one victim go down in a plane. He’s perfect. The scenes in the house as Price and the lovely never-speaking Virginia North sweep across the ballroom floor, amid painted Art Deco cycloramas and a clockwork orchestra have a beautiful, elegant sophistication. There is also a superb score.

There’s nothing quite like this movie. I encourage you to take the rest of the day off and savor it.

A Satanic Film?

How does Phibes live up to being a Satanic film? In my opinion, Phibes embodies one of the nine Satanic statements to its utmost: Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek.

Indeed, the men and woman whose negligence led to the loss of Phibes’ wife were never punished. Phibes had to become their judge, jury and yes, destroyer.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 10
If you are planning on spending some time this weekend watching a movie, whether in the comfort of your own company, or with a sweetheart or friend, I’d like to recommend The Abominable Dr. Phibes for your evening’s selection. In this cult horror classic directed by Robert Fruest, screen legend Vincent Price is the eponymous Dr. Phibes, a reclusive genius who can build incredible musical automatons, play a mean organ, waltz till the cows come home, and still manage to exact his carefully cultivated plan of vengeance, all while wearing great capes.

On the other hand — or hoof, as it were — Phibes is the exact antithesis of the ninth Satanic sin, Lack of Aesthetics, which states that “an eye for beauty, for balance, is an essential Satanic tool and must be applied for greatest magical effectiveness.

It’s not what’s supposed to be pleasing—it’s what is.

Aesthetics is a personal thing, reflective of one’s own nature, but there are universally pleasing and harmonious configurations that should not be denied.” So much of what makes this film is that Phibes’ musical art is just as essential as his demented nature and abilities.

Music is the core of his soul, not just revenge.

Vulnavia from the first Dr. Phibes movie.
If you are planning on spending some time this weekend watching a movie, whether in the comfort of your own company, or with a sweetheart or friend, I’d like to recommend The Abominable Dr. Phibes for your evening’s selection. In this cult horror classic directed by Robert Fruest, screen legend Vincent Price is the eponymous Dr. Phibes, a reclusive genius who can build incredible musical automatons, play a mean organ, waltz till the cows come home, and still manage to exact his carefully cultivated plan of vengeance, all while wearing great capes. Assisted by his stylish, silent accomplice Vulnavia (Virginia North), Phibes carries out murderous revenge, styled (if a little loosely) after the Ten Plagues of Egypt, on the various medical professionals he believes botched his wife’s medical treatment and caused her untimely death.

Back to Dr. Anton LaVey

Another point of view comes from Draconis Blackthorne of the Sinister Screen: “This is an aesthetically-beauteous film, replete with Satanic architecture as well as ideology. Those who know will recognize these subtle and sometimes rather blatant displays.

Obviously, to those familiar with the life of our Founder, there are several parallels between the Dr. Anton Phibes character and that of Dr. Anton LaVey – they even share the same first name, and certain propensities.”

So maybe it is a kind of homage to Satanist Dr. Anton LaVey.

Conclusion

Homage or not, it’s a great movie, and a fun watch. It’s not like anyone is going to be seduced to the dark side by this movie. It’s just plain campy fun.

 This film is an intriguing tale of revenge. The sets are “70s  spectacular” and the performances by Price and North are extraordinary.  There are a few elements that really make this horror movie work:

 • The murders are done in very creative and ingenious ways, using intricate devices and techniques. (Somebody watched The Abominable Dr Phibes before writing the horror movie Saw I’m sure)

 • Vincent Price pulls no punches in his over-the-top portrayal of the  good doctor, and makes him believable, as only Vincent Price could.

 • Humor and levity intermix with horror and intrigue, and this rescues The Abominable Dr Phibes from being a total cheese-fest.

 • The style and, well, “bigness” of the visuals, characters and music  result in this not just being a great Vincent Price movie, but a work  of art where every element fits together just right.

 The Abominable Dr Phibes showcases the brilliance of 70s  style and of the mastery of Vincent Price. Many of the younger folks may  have missed him altogether, which is a shame. I do think, though, that  one of the best contributions that the freak-show Michael Jackson has  made to the world is introducing Vincent Price to a whole new generation  of horror-buffs by using his voice in the pop music hit “Thriller” from  the 80s. Now, watch The Abominable Dr Phibes and REALLY get a taste of what made this man great. 

-Horror Freak News

Some cool links

Torrent Links

You can watch it for free if you don’t mind waiting a half an hour to half a day to download the torrent.

For those of you who are unaware. Torrents are parts of files that are spread out in tiny packets all over the internet. You use a "Bit Torrent" client to vacuum up all those little bits and pieces of the file. It then assembles the file into a movie that you can watch. The time that this takes can vary from a few minutes to weeks depending on how popular or obscure your searched file is.

You will need an application to manage the download. I recommend the free application VUZE. To download the video is thus easy. Install VUZE, and then click on one of the following torrent links.

Depending on where you live, you might not have the freedom to access these sites and the ISP might block them from access, or the search engines might black out their search results. Americans, in particular, might have some real problems. Therefore, I listed the most accessible torrent sites available to Americans. Pirate Bay and 1337X. I think that Kick Ass Torrents is still blocked for all Americans.

Google and Bing will most certainly block certain websites, and avoid others at the request of the United States government. From “Uncle Sam’s” point of view, you go after the “low handing fruit” that the vast bulk of Americans use. Then ridicule the outliers as “misfits”, “deplorables”, and “Nazi’s”.

Kick Ass Torrents
The international website “Kick Ass Torrents” was seized by the Department of Homeland Security. The reason being that they offered royalty free downloads of copyrighted movies and music. Thanks to President Obama, visiting any of these websites is a federal crime that Americans are forbidden to visit. Even for a nano-second.

As far as privacy is concerned, Bing will alter the behavior of the Search Engine if you live in the EU.

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Jason and the Argonauts
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
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Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
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When Hollywood still knew how to make movies; The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

I have composed a number of posts that involved special effects by Ray Harryhausen. I listed them simply because, as a boy, the visuals and the adventure that was portrayed in the movies greatly appealed to me. They influenced me. Which was something that is most certainly lacking in the latest Hollywood fare. (That is, unless you are an LGBT with an inferiority complex.)

Here, I want to discuss another of his great works. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

Sinbad and his crew intercept a homunculus carrying a golden tablet. Koura, the creator of the homunculus and practitioner of evil magic, wants the tablet back and pursues Sinbad. Meanwhile Sinbad meets the Vizier who has another part of the interlocking golden map, and they mount a quest across the seas to solve the riddle of the map, accompanied by a slave girl with a mysterious tattoo of an eye on her  palm. They encounter strange beasts, tempests, and the dark interference of Koura along the way.

-AVXHM  
The golden voyage of Sinbad.
The golden voyage of Sinbad is a classic in itself. It too held claim to all sorts of creative monsters, some huge, some multi-limbed, some that flew, and others that were magical. All of which were amazing to me.

The Movie

It all starts to unravel when Sinbad fires an arrow at a strange creature that flies over his ship.

As the creature dodges the arrow, it ends up dropping an amulet it is carrying. Let me pause here for a second. A strange creature? It’s carrying a magic (we suppose, after all what other purpose would an amulet have) amulet, which it drops, and Sinbad gathers up.

Kali
Kali is a multi-armed creature creation that Sinbad must battle with. You can well imagine the problems and issues that you must contend with when dealing with a six armed purple creature.

Sinbad makes landfall, and almost immediately meets an evil sorcerer. We know he is evil because he immediately engages Sinbad in fisticuffs. His attempts to forcibly take the amulet from Sinbad is rebuffed.

The sorcerer’s name is Koura. He’s a fellow that you don’t want to get tangled up with.

So Sinbad seeks out a safe haven, and is eventually granted refuge by the benevolent ruler of the city, known as the Grand Vizier. This fellow too has tangled up with Koura. For today he has been forced to hide his face behind a beaten gold mask. You see, his face is all terribly disfigured after Koura burnt it away with a fireball.

Golden Voyage of Sinbad.
Check out the slave girl that tags along with Sinbad. Yowsa! ( Actress Caroline Munro ) This is how she spends the majority of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Gordon Hessler, 1973). Yet, despite the ludicrous neckline and the constant layer of oil/sweat she still manages to draw your eyes up and away from her chest and towards her eyes. It takes a lot of presence to up-stage that bust, but Munro had it by the ton.

The Vizier shows Sinbad a companion amulet and the drawing of a third one. All three amulets form a map that leads to a fountain of youth on the island of Lemuria.

Harryhausen’s creations include the winged, miniature homunculus; an  ensorcelled figurehead that tears itself loose from Sinbad’s ship; a  one-eyed centaur; a gryphon that guards the Fountain of Destiny; and,  most impressively, a six-armed statue of Kali which performs an Indian  dance before dueling against Sinbad’s men with six swords. 

It’s really  the Kali sequence that makes this such a memorable film. 

With his  typical attention to detail, Harryhausen hired an Indian dancer (Surya  Kumari, also a noted actress and singer) to choreograph and perform as  Kali with one of her students strapped to her back. 

The dance was then  scored with Indian musicians, and the sudden switch in flavor (as our  ears have already been conditioned to an hour or so of Rózsa’s romantic  adventure music) is in synch with the charged, magical atmosphere of the  statue coming to life. 

For the swordfight, nearly as elaborate as the  celebrated skeleton battle in Jason and the Argonauts, stunt  choreographer Fernando Poggi tied three of his men together to rehearse  the action with the actors, then removed themselves and let the actors  shadow-box before the cameras, with Harryhausen’s Kali to be added  later. 

It’s a showstopping fight and, it must be said, far more rousing  than the typical poke-with-spears action that so many Harryhausen action  scenes become (or, in fact, the earlier scene with the ship’s  figurehead). It’s one for the highlight reels. 

 -Midnight Only 

With the complete amulet, The Grand Vizier will be able to stop Koura’s ravages on the kingdom. And so Sinbad and the Vizier set sail on an expedition to Lemuria.

Caroline Munro
Listen up. After Caroline Munro was in a 007 film, she entered in one of my all time (yes my absolute all time) favorite cult movies. That’s right. Caroline’s first big role was in 1971, opposite Horror legend Vincent Price in “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” – playing the deceased Mrs. Victoria Regina Phibes. What a woman. What an actress!

However, Koura desires the amulet too. As all bad guys learn sooner or later, there is a price when using dark magic. His use of the amulet has taken it’s tool. For each time he used it, a little bit of life was stolen from him. Thus, he needs and covets that amulet in the vain hope of regaining his youth. You know, the youth and life that each spell he casts steals from him.

Koura sets sail determined to stop them. And thus, the adventure movie begins…

Some Background

It all sort of began with the movie The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). This movie was a landmark in fantasy cinema, and was often imitated over the next decade.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.

Most importantly, it brought to prominence the name of special effects man Ray Harryhausen and his fantastical creatures. Now, Ray Harryhausen was more than just a specialist in the process of stop-motion animation. He was a genus. Here, it is much like claymation. Created figurines are meticulously moved and photographed one frame at a time.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Sinbad (John Philip law) fights the centaur while (slave girl) companion Margiana (Caroline Munro) stands in the background. That’s all very interesting especially how the centaur is pictured.

He was so successful at it that Harryhausen went on to build a substantial career in this field over the next two decades.

He found a nitche in the world of Greek mythology. He would revisit the Sinbad mythos twice, here and later with the movie Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is one of Ray Harryhausen’s most acclaimed works and one that shows him at the height of his art.

The golden youyage of Sinbad.
Ray Harryhausen demonstrates that special effects don’t need to be state of the art to be edge of the seat, this film sees the adventurer and his crew on a quest to defeat evil magician Koura and solve the riddle of a mysterious interlocking golden map. Sinbad must fight his way past several of Harryhausen’s ingenious stop-motion animated monsters along the way, including a one-eyed centaur, and his own ship’s wooden figurehead, magically brought to life.

Most Ray Harryhausen films tend to be set around Harryhausen’s provision of profound creature effects. Which unfortunately tended to make the real actors and their intervening action rather wooden. However, as a child watching these movies, I noticed none of that.

The same is true with the dialog. No matter how chunky or cheesy it appeared, it always appealed to me. The quest for adventure screamed at me, and the livid monsters occupied my young impressionable mind.

The golden voyage of Sinbad 3
Seriously, just how many movies do you find a griffin doing battle with a minaraur or a cyclops – minataur hybrid? Not often. Well, this movie has this and much, much more.
 When I was a child, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger  (1977) were one and the same – a four-hour Sinbad miniseries, with all  the islands, wizards, beautiful girls, and Ray Harryhausen monsters  randomly distributed so that I wasn’t exactly sure which belonged to  which. 

Understand that every trip to the video store meant that I would  stand there, staring at all the boxes, ruling out the R-rated films or  anything that looked remotely adult (verboten when I was a child), and  eventually, inevitably, I would grab a Ray Harryhausen movie and hand it  to my mother or father, who would just say, “This one, again?” 

Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Mysterious Island  (1961), or a Sinbad movie. These films were the foundation stones upon  which my imagination was built. 

Even though the early 80’s belonged to  George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, I always held the Harryhausen films  in special regard. Before I even learned his name, I knew these films  were connected – I recognized the stop-motion animation and the look of  the monsters. (Of course that centaur only has one eye. He’s probably  related to those cyclopes in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.) 

These films had special  special effects. Having watched just about every non-R-rated fantasy  movie on the video store shelves, I knew there was a significant  difference between One Million B.C. (1940), the Victor Mature movie with lizards and armadillos posing as dinosaurs, and One Million Years B.C.  (1966), the remake with Harryhausen’s pterodactyls lifting Raquel Welch  off the ground. 

You can’t dress a lizard up to look like a pterodactyl.  

The funny thing is that I was appreciating the films from a  point-of-view that was already becoming outdated. The days of  stop-motion were coming to an end, with his swan song, Clash of the Titans  (1981), released around the time that I was just beginning to  appreciate his films. 

Though both Lucas and Spielberg used stop-motion  effects in Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), by the end of the decade The Abyss (1989) would announce a new direction for cinema tricks. 

-Midnight Only

Both Brian Clemens and Ray Harryhausen plunder world mythology somewhat indiscriminately. Which more often than not resulted in a kind of peculiar multi-cultural polyglot. Not that it matters, of course, but it is curious.

The golden voyage of Sinbad 4
Caroline Munro looks splendid in her costume, low cut almost everywhere. The rest of the cast support well. Tom Baker is excellent as the villain Koura. He makes him sympathetic; what drives him is common to all people. He just uses different means to gain his ends. He dominates the scenes he is in and it is a pity that more big screen roles never came his way. He was the best ‘Doctor Who’ in the BBC series, in my opinion of course. A good fantasy romp to appeal to the adventurer in all of us. Did I mention Caroline Munro’s costume? Oh, I did.

Today, as an adult, I guess that I am more of a purist. But as a kid, nah… who the heck cared? Consider their broad paintbrush. There is Kali from Hindu religion, a griffin and combination centaur/cyclops from the Greek myths, the homunculus from mediaeval alchemy, Lemuria, and of course the backdrop from the Arabian Nights cycle.

As an aside, did you know that the idea of Lemuria was first posited by biologist Ernst Haeckel in the 1870s. It preceded the notion of continental drift. It was used with the belief of a sunken land in order to  explain how lemurs managed to get between  Africa and India. Later, this theory was bastardized and quickly appropriated by the 19th  Century Theosophist movement.
The golden voyage of Sinbad 5
‘Golden Voyage’ is much better than the later ‘Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger’ and equal to the earlier ‘Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’. The Harryhausen creatures are impressive. Stop motion animation does give solidity to the image, more so than the usual CGI effect. There are some fine ones here including a one eyed centaur, a homunculus, a griffin, a six armed statue, a ship’s wooden figurehead. The story is standard but the effects, the locations and the plot weave together well. There is also a dry humor in the dialogue which is entertaining. Scenes like the sword fight with the six armed statute (with six swords!) or the final confrontation at the fountain of wisdom (or something like that) are exciting. The great Miklos Rosza’s music adds considerably to the atmosphere. John Philip Law is OK as Sinbad and does attempt an Arabian accent unlike the usual English one, but the role isn’t Shakespearean and he does well enough.

All of this trivality is far less important than the spectacular beauty of Ray Harryhausen’s various set-pieces. Which, by this time, were at the absolute peak of their form.

Harryhausen offers us [1] a six-armed statue of Kali brought to life in a sword-duel; [2] a to-the-death battle between a griffin and a cyclopean centaur; [3] a magically animated ship’s figurehead; and, best of all, [4] the homunculus that Tom Baker brings to life, teasing and prodding it, as it lies pinned to a table.

Sinbad the sailor using an early version of Google Maps.
Sinbad the sailor using an early version of Google Maps. This is a fine fantasy/adventure film, and definitely one worth watching by any fans of the genre, as well as Ray Harryhausen fans. The main problem is that the film tends to meander at times. There are also a few minor problems with direction or editing, such as the less-than-convincing sword fight in the cave near the end of the film. Also, the mostly episodic nature of the script lessens the overall impact. It often feels like a string of short stories arbitrarily strung together, although in the end, the overarching goal ties the film together well enough. But what “short stories” those are!
Harryhausen, who made this film with his longtime collaborator and  co-producer Charles H. Schneer, was careful to separate this film from 7th Voyage; he seemed to dislike the label of “sequel.” (In his 2003 book An Animated Life, Harryhausen states that he and Schneer even “strenuously” tried to avoid the term regarding Eye of the Tiger, curiously enough.) 

Indeed, the viewer need not have seen the former film, though naturally it exists in its shadow. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is a classic of fantasy filmmaking to stand beside its chief inspiration, The Thief of Bagdad (1940). 

Golden Voyage  is just another fun Harryhausen movie, the perfect way to pass a  Saturday afternoon. 

Law does a credible job as our new Sinbad (replacing  7th Voyage‘s Kerwin Mathews), embodying Harryhausen’s image of the Arabian Nights hero: handsome, athletic, but not a bodybuilder. 

The  story, conceived by Harryhausen and revised, polished, and scripted by  Brian Clemens (of the TV series The Avengers, as well as Captain Kronos,  which also featured Caroline Munro), sends Sinbad on a treasure hunt on  behalf of a disfigured Vizier in a golden mask (Douglas Wilmer, Jason and the Argonauts).  

Their quest involves retrieving the lost pieces of an amulet, which  will point the way to an ancient, magical source of great knowledge and  power. 

There’s always an evil magician in pursuit, of course, and in  this case it’s Baker’s Prince Koura, who controls gargoyle-like  homunculi and lusts after the same prize. 

The story might be  perfunctory, but it’s well-paced, with attractive location shooting in  Spain to stand in for both the fictionalized Middle East and Lemuria. (Plans to shoot in India – which would have provided a wonderful look to the film – were discarded after hearing horror stories about “appalling  red tape and bureaucracy” encountered by other Hollywood productions shooting there.) 

Composer Miklós Rózsa (The Thief of Bagdad, Ben-Hur) is the ideal stand-in for 7th Voyage‘s Bernard Herrmann, capturing the appropriate “Orientalist” feel. 

 -Midnight Only 

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is also notable for many of the up-and-coming stars. There is Tom Baker who, the following year, would become the fourth incarnation of tv’s Doctor Who (1963-89). There is cult queen Caroline Munro; and Martin Shaw, later hunk hero of Clemens’ superior action man tv show The Professionals.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad 7
The script, production/set design and costumes easily propel you into a captivating fantasy world, and Harryhausen’s creatures, as always, are a delight to watch. No, they’re not exactly realistic–no more realistic looking than cgi, in my opinion–but I’m not looking for realism when I watch a film like this. I’m looking for brilliant artistry, especially if it is an adventure with pretty girls, and Harryhausen’s stop-motion animated creatures fit the bill.

Conclusion

This is a great movie to introduce the kids to, to spend a lazy hazy august afternoon, or just to relax to. There are some amazing scenes, and nowhere else in movie-land will you see a six-armed statue of Kali which performs an Indian dance before dueling against Sinbad’s men with six swords. I enjoyed it and I think that maybe you the reader would enjoy it as well.

Ray Harryhausen’s other films

Links

Torrent Links

You can watch it for free if you don’t mind waiting a half an hour to half a day to download the torrent.

For those of you who are unaware. Torrents are parts of files that are spread out in tiny packets all over the internet. You use a "Bit Torrent" client to vacuum up all those little bits and pieces of the file. It then assembles the file into a movie that you can watch. The time that this takes can vary from a few minutes to weeks depending on how popular or obscure your searched file is.

You will need an application to manage the download. I recommend the free application VUZE. To download the video is thus easy. Install VUZE, and then click on one of the following torrent links.

Depending on where you live, you might not have the freedom to access these sites and the ISP might block them from access, or the search engines might black out their search results. Americans, in particular, might have some real problems. Therefore, I listed the most accessible torrent sites available to Americans. Pirate Bay and 1337X. I think that Kick Ass Torrents is still blocked for all Americans.

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Jason and the Argonauts

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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When Hollywood still made good movies; Jason and The Argonauts (1963)

Here we look at a wonderful, much under-appreciated, movie with special effects by Ray Harryhausen. It’s title is “Jason and The Argonauts” and it is simply beyond awesome. Words cannot describe what an impact that this move had on me as a young boy in the 1960’s.

But I will try…

There is a spectacular sequence in Harryhausen's most popular picture  "Jason and the Argonauts" in which Jason and his crew do battle with  seven sword fighting skeletons. 

This is surely one of the greatest  special effects sequences in motion picture history. There are shots in  which the screen is filled with the men fighting all seven skeletons.  

This means that Harryhausen would have to move each of the seven  skeletons such that they match the chaotic live action footage of the  men mock-fighting, shoot a frame, move them again one by one, shoot a  frame, and so on. 24 frames make one second of action. 

It is hard to  imagine how Harryhausen did all the special effects on his films solo  (save for his first and last films, on which he had help). And it is not  surprising that the skeleton sequence from "Jason" took him four months  to complete. 

 -Great Movies of my Childhood 

This was one of those films I always remember seeing as a child and I will absolutely never forgot those skeletons which I think is Ray Harryhausen’s best work.

Ah. The skeletons

Summary

It’s Greek mythology placed on screen; larger than life.

(Well-known & quite famous) Greek hero Jason takes a group by ship to search for the Golden Fleece. It’s not an easy sail. He uses the latest in nautical technology for the time, including a high-tech ship complete with magical navigational aides. However the crew has to encounter several dangers on the way.

The dangers start to raise their ugly heads when they lay anchor at an island to obtain provisions. You see this island is filled with bronze statues. In case you are unaware, bronze statues at that time was equivalent to swarm drones, and Mach-3 jet fighters.

Since these bronze statues are so valuable, the crew starts to get some funny and crazy ideas. One of the crew decides to go into one of the bronze statue guarded tombs. You know, to “look around”. He sees a beautiful gold sword, and of course… he just has to have it. So he takes it….

Big mistake.

This act wakes up Talos. Talos is the guardian of all the tombs. Thus, Talos comes to life and attacks the crew. Now, Talos is this big terminator bronze statue. It goes on an absolute rampage killing, crushing and destroying everything.

The good news is that eventually Talos is destroyed. Though, not without a cost. For during their escape from Talos, their ship is destroyed.

So, here they are trapped on the island. They start to explore it. They search for food water, and (perhaps) loot. While on the search of the island, they come across a blind man. This poor fella is being attacked by two cheeky Harpies who keep eating his food.

Eventually, they all get captured.

They continue their journey and encounter Neptune (he’s a major player; a God of that time) and arrive at their ultimate destination. Which is the island where the Golden Fleece is.

Before getting the Golden Fleece, Jason must fight and kill a Hydra. A Hydra is a many headed beast that likes to eat humans. Well, (spoiler alert) he does manage to kill it. The best part of the movie is of course those skeletons near the end. Jason manages to defeat them when they fall off a cliff into the sea. Hooray!

This has to be one of, if not the best, of Harryhausen’s movies. And, Bernard Herrmann was responsible for the excellent music.

The Movie

Jason and the Argonauts battles it out with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as the most popular Ray Harryhausen epic. I know that I have a difficult time deciding which movie is better. (Though, Ray Harryhausen has indicated that Jason and the Argonauts his very own personal favorite. )

They certainly must have had fun filming it.

The crew filmed many of the scenes on beautify sunny Italian locations. These locations gave the movie special significance, and I’m sure the jealously of the rest of Hollywood. For at that time (when the picture was produced) most “sword ‘n’ sandal” movies were shot on Hollywood stages, or barring that, in the California desert a mere few hours drive away.

This movie is chock full of testosterone-filled animation interspersed with actors engaged in theatrical dramatic scenes. The colors, the story line, the visuals, and the novelty all play a significant role in the success of this movie.

In the wake of computer generated graphics, Harryhausen's work may strike some as dated, but this is actually part of its charm, for we will never see its like on screen again; it has a certain visual appeal not found in contemporary films, and Harryhausen's creations always have remarkable personality.  

Topping the cake is an absolutely superb score by Bernard Herrmann. This guy is so good, and the music so powerful, that it’s mentally difficult to separate his music from Harryhausen’s amazing images. (This is my plug for this artist.)

At the time, this movie was the F/X dream, for that time period. Much like how the movie The Matrix revolutionized movies and scripts. This movie set a pace and a high bar for other adventures to follow. And, I am sad to say, it was so high that few movies did actually follow.

Jason on board his ship.
Jason on board his ship. The film as a whole is very much like a superior sword-and-sandal epic of the 1950s and 1960s, very colorful and over-run with manly men and beautiful dancing girls. A bit slow to start, once the story line is established the pace leaps forward–and we are treated to some of Harryhausen’s most enjoyable creations, including Talos, the bronze statue; two of the most evil looking harpies you can imagine; a really nasty hydra; and Harryhausen’s most famous (and his own personal favorite) bit of work: an attack by skeleton warriors.

This movie is an adaptation of the Greek story about Jason and the Golden Fleece.

Most people will find this film an excellent choice as a “family night” film. As for Harryhausen fans–the film is a must-see, must-own, and must-watch as often as possible!

In Greek mythology, the Golden Fleece is the fleece of the golden-woolled, winged ram, which was heldin Colchis. The fleece is a symbol of authority and kingship. It figures in the tale of the hero Jason and his crew of Argonauts, who set out on a quest for the fleece by order of King Pelias, in order to place Jason rightfully on the throne of Iolcus in Thessaly. Through the help of Medea, they acquire the Golden Fleece. The story is of great antiquity and was current in the time of Homer. 

-Wilipedia

Luckily, the movie adaptation doesn’t take too many liberties with the root mythological tale. Though purists would argue that it actually does go off the deep end (This opinion varies considerably depending on which source is consulted.).

In this movie, we have the interplay of the Greek Gods, and their role over the lives of men. The movie places the Gods in a gilded Olympus paradise. The well-paired Zeus and Hera, are husband & wife deities that work out their domestic squabbles by playing chess games. Only the chess games use ambitious mortals like Jason.

All in all, they manage to keep tabs on Jason’s adventures by viewing a kind of celestial television. (!)

Jason and The Argonauts
Jason and The Argonauts. Jason was an ancient Greek mythological hero who was the leader of the Argonauts whose quest for the Golden Fleece featured in Greek literature. He was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcos. He was married to the sorceress Medea. He was also the great-grandson of the messenger god Hermes, through his mother’s side.

The Olympian interludes add a wry humor to the proceedings. Though, myself, I found life on Olympias rather dull and boring.

Jason shows up as the “man with one sandal” to fulfill a curse placed on the venal King Pelias. I know, I know… It’s difficult to translate. I just figure that it’s a matter of identity politics and leave it at that.

The wild quest to bring back the prize of the Golden Fleece gets a thumbs-up from the collected deities. I figure that this is mainly because Pelias wants Jason out of the way.

Thus, the King sends along his son Acastus to make sure that everything goes as planned.

With a crack crew of athletes and warriors, including the popular Hercules , Jason sets sail in a proud ship built by Argos. After tangling with various fantastic obstacles (after all, that is what heroes do) put in his path by Zeus, Jason reaches the far-off land of Colchis.

Oh Jason. He falls in love with the sorceress Medea. But what do you expect. He falls victim to treachery. It turns out that Medea’s father King Aeëtes has absolutely no intention of allowing the Argonauts steal his nation’s most prized possession.

A great deal could be written about the numerous choices made in  reconstructing the story for a modern movie-going audience, but for our  purposes, we are going to zero in on one of the film’s most memorable  components. No, not Jason. Not Argonauts, either. I’m talking, of  course, about the mountainous man of bronze, Talos.
 
There’s a wealth of reasons why Jason and the Argonauts continues to entertain over half a century later, and Talos is most certainly one of the biggest. 

Literally. Brought to life through the inimitable stop motion effects of the late, great Ray Harryhausen,the towering Talos appears early in the film to give the Argonauts a considerable thrashing after Heracles unwittingly disturbs his slumber.  

It’s generally unwise to steal broach pins from the gods for use as a  javelin, but Heracles evidently didn’t get that particular memo.

-GRST 202 Blog

Of all of Ray Harryhausen’s movies, Jason and the Argonauts is closest to his heart. In life, he found mythological fantasies more exciting than science fiction monsters. As such, he wanted very much to tell the story of the Golden Fleece in classic terms.

Talos
It shouldn’t take much brain power to reason why Columbia Pictures produced Jason and the Argonauts as a fantasy epic in the early 1960s. As one of the oldest known hero tales, Jason’s quest is chock full of what we would nowadays consider archetypal elements of the genre: the stoic protagonist, the repulsive villain, a dangerous romance, a clearly defined objective, impossible odds, and of course, a series of treacherous obstacles that provide the spectacle. In short, it’s an easy sell.

The film is of course now a legend unto itself and contains some of Harryhausen’s most difficult animation and classiest designs.

  • The bronze giant Talos creates an intimidating sense of scale as it stalks Jason’s men on a beach.
  • The harpies scream and claw as they’re captured, apparently animated while under a net.
  • The seven-headed Hydra is Harryhausen’s most successful mythological creation, a beast so well designed that it seems biologically credible.
  • The skeletal “Children of the Hydra’s Teeth” do much more than top the single skeleton warrior in 7th Voyage. Soldiers battling armies of the dead recur in classical paintings, giving the combat a macabre edge. The sight of Jason and his swordsmen fighting them en masse is also a brilliant substitute for the lame battle scenes of other sword ‘n’ sandal epics.

Indeed, those skeletal beings were a triumph of Harryhausen’s F/X technique. Truthfully, the sequence must have required more animation work than the rest of the movie put together. You can easily see this, as the seven skeletons fight in so many individual camera setups.

Unlike most Harryhausen set pieces, the skeleton battle constantly cuts to new angles. With so much happening simultaneously in each shot, it’s hard to keep up — which prompts the use of words like, “breathtaking”.

 Talos, of course, has a history deeply rooted in classical Greek  myth. Often considered the earliest conceptualization of a robot, Talos  is usually found associated with the gods Hephaestus and Zeus. Sometimes  he’s a leftover of the Zeus-created bronze generation, other times he’s  the offspring or father of Hephaestus, sometimes he’s a gift from Zeus  to King Minos, other times a gift from Hephaestus to Zeus – the  permutations are endless. 

Regardless of the myth, however, one connection remains consistent: the Cretan word from which Talos derives his name – talios, meaning “sun” – was frequently used by those islanders as a name for the king of the gods himself.  Not only does this shared use of the term allude to the giant’s  immense power, but it also hints at his role as a somewhat paternal  figure. Indeed, Talos was known as the tireless guardian of Crete, a  sentinel who would circumambulate the island three times daily to  moderate the behavior and livelihood of its citizens.  

Moreover, he would vigorously defend his land from any intruders, and  in keeping with his solar-derived name, his preferred method of  executing perceived threats was, by all accounts, incineration.  Depending on who you ask, the giant would either snatch up poor souls  and leap with them into a flaming vat, or he would heat up his own  metallic body to incredible degrees and scorch his opponents through  mere physical interaction. 

His  love of turning folks to ash was unfortunately excised from his  on-screen debut, but that does not make his appearance in the film any  less memorable.

 Though traditionally depicted as Crete’s conservator, Jason and the Argonauts finds  Talos holding watch over the aptly named (and movie-created) “Isle of  Bronze,” placed there by Hephaestus to guard Zeus’s armory.  

-GRST 202 Blog 

Kids back in 1963 reacted strongly to almost everything in the picture.

Tipped off by Famous Monsters magazine, many of us waited anxiously for the next jolting effects scene to begin. We were also thrilled by Nigel Green’s hale & hearty Hercules and cheered the announcement of his name. We fully accepted the idea that a strong man shouldn’t have to be so buff that he couldn’t walk through a normal door.

Famous Monsters Magazine
Tipped off by Famous Monsters magazine, many of us waited anxiously for the next jolting effects scene to begin. We were also thrilled by Nigel Green’s hale & hearty Hercules and cheered the announcement of his name. We fully accepted the idea that a strong man shouldn’t have to be so buff that he couldn’t walk through a normal door.

As in The Magnificent Seven, the assembling of Jason’s all-star collection of sailors / assault troops primed us for what we hoped would be the greatest sword & spear battle of all time. And… and we were not disappointed.

Jason fights a giant bronze statue.
One of the most legendary adventures in all mythology is brought to life in Jason and the Argonauts, an epic saga of good and evil. As a mere boy Jason, the heir to the kingdom of Ancient Greece, witnesses the murder of his father at the hands of his ruthless uncle, Pelias.

The film’s smoothly professional acting impressed me.

With all of those classy English accents flying about, Jason and the Argonauts had a credibility that the various Sons of Hercules lacked. Even the middle-aged Laurence Naismith looked righteously rugged, dressed only in a loincloth and clinging to the prow of the Argo: “Pull ’til your hearts burst and your backs break!”

 You see, Talos might be made of bronze, but he draws his life force from a single vein flowing down his back to his heel, where it is stopped by some sort of large plug. Whether described as a nail or a pin, that plug naturally  gets pulled at some point by one of the heroes, thus draining Talos of life. In many cases that hero is Medea, who uses trickery to deceive the  living statue, while in others it is the Argonaut Poeas who knocks out the stopper with his trusty bow and arrow.  

Seeing as how the adventurers have yet to encounter Medea at this point  in the film and that Poeas is absent entirely, the eponymous hero himself takes up the deed, acting under the guidance of Hera. Even  disregarding the aforementioned characters’ absences, it makes sense to  thrust this duty upon Jason in this context. As his first act of true  heroism, the defeat of the Talos establishes Jason as a courageous leader and a man fit for this epic quest – someone capable of navigating the many challenges that lie ahead. 

-GRST 202 Blog  

In his old “Film Fantasy Scrapbook” Harryhausen mentioned that he was impressed by the fact that the hero Jason’s big quest is really a raid for loot. He believed that the Argonauts are little more than thieves.

Those foreigners beyond the clashing rocks have exactly what Greece needs, a magic charm that brings peace, plenty and prosperity.

Jason as a nice-guy hero doesn’t get in the way of the colorful supporting actors and the giant monsters. However, it’s quite odd to see Medea as virtuous. After all, she sells out her father, her country and her religion for a fling with the new boy in town.

Obviously, there’s a reason why the movie doesn’t dig into the psychology behind the myths. And it shouldn’t. For Jason and the Argonauts is a splendid fantasy of spectacular adventure no more and no less.

Jason fights a many headed monster.
Jason has been prophesied to take the throne of Thessaly. When he saves Pelias from drowning, but does not recognize him as the man who had earlier killed his father, Pelias tells Jason to travel to Colchis to find the Golden Fleece. Jason follows his advice and assembles a sailing crew of the finest men in Greece, including Hercules. They are under the protection of Hera, queen of the gods. Their voyage is replete with battles against harpies, a giant bronze Talos, a hydra, and an animated skeleton army, all brought to life by the special effects wizardry of Ray Harryhausen.

It’s been a long time since I last watched this movie. It was on a blistery “school day” when all the roads were iced over, and I was around ten years old at the time. Never the less, the torrent that I watched was spectacular, clear and colorful.

Jason and the Argonauts attend a party.
The legendary Greek hero leads a team of intrepid adventurers in a perilous quest for the legendary Golden Fleece. Jason has been prophesied to take the throne of Thessaly. When he saves Pelias from drowning, but does not recognize him as the man who had earlier killed his father, Pelias tells Jason to travel to Colchis to find the Golden Fleece. Jason follows his advice and assembles a sailing crew of the finest men in Greece, including Hercules. They are under the protection of Hera, queen of the gods. Their voyage is replete with battles against harpies, a giant bronze Talos, a hydra, and an animated skeleton army.

I have read reports that there were alterations to the original film.

For years, 16mm copies of Jason  placed Medea's temple dance way out of sequence, before the Argonauts  reach Colchis. The Blu-ray of course fixes this while improving on all  earlier home video releases. Grover Crisp of Sony wisely chose a  slightly taller 1:66 aspect ratio, which adds image to the top and  bottom of the frame while placing narrow pillars at the sides of the HD  image. Harryhausen purists will be pleased to see less cropping of the  effects. The added color detail of Blu-ray brings out hidden character  in the main title artwork, and gives the green highlights on Talos'  bronze skin more definition. Likewise, the Golden Fleece is returned to  its impressive sparkly-but-organic look -- the golden glow effect has  been toned down quite a bit. 
A beautiful woman rides with Jason in the movie Jason and the Argonauts.
What kind of adventure would Jason and the Argonauts be if there wasn’t a beautiful woman to lead and inspire? That’s what tradition, history and legends all say. And what about this lass. Such a lovely and attractive woman.

I do like the movie, and it’s an absolute fact that the movie uses clever camera tricks and some well made miniatures. Yes, of course the effects all look out dated now but they still surprisingly, look convincing enough and at times they are even still simply breathtaking and spectacular to look at.

Especially of course the legendary, fantastic end fight against the skeleton warriors. The story is like good entertainment should be; Adventurous, exciting and simple to follow. The movie truly is non stop fun entertainment to watch with lots of spectacular moments with the legendary skeleton fight as the ultimate highlight.

You don’t have to be a fan of ‘classic’ movies in order to enjoy this movie, everyone should be able to appreciate this movie and be entertained by it, especially when you are a fan of ancient Greek tales.

Something that is not praised enough of this movie is the musical score by Bernard Herrmann. The movie is not exactly filled with impressive and memorable actors. As many movies as I have seen in my life, I don’t think I have ever seen any actors from this movie in any other movie, with the exception of course of Honor Blackman who will always be remembered for playing the Bond girl Pussy Galore in “Goldfinger”.

But this movie clearly isn’t a character-adventure movie, it’s a special effect adventure movie. The special effects are really the most important element of the movie. So for the fans of special effects this is especially most definitely a must see. A movie that should be fun and enjoyable to everyone, of all ages.

The Gods do like to play.
The Gods do like to play. Here is a scene where two Gods conspire to have some fun, and create some hurtles for Jason and the Argonauts to overcome. Ah, such is Greek myth.

Heracles is presented, not as a young ripped body builder, but as one would expect a middle-aged strong man to be: Formidable, a little grey and a little swaggering. It’s a perfect imagery.

Argos, the ship builder, is tan and fat, as one would expect the veteran of many sea voyages to be.

The crew looks like what one would expect a crew of ancient Greeks to look like. The acting is not spectacular, but sincere. No one looks embarrassed to be in this movie. It is tight with great special effects…

It’s wonderful for children…

Outstanding battle scenes.
As entertainment this movie is perfect. The movie is a fun adventurous one, with lots of spectacular moments and fights. From a technical point of view this movie is even a masterpiece. The stop-motion scene’s created by special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen is simply brilliant and makes this movie one of the most influential and important one’s, when it comes to special effects.

The seven-headed Hydra is another technical marvel.

Talos. There are some other nifty creatures for Jason and his crew to battle, but for me, the most impressive of them all turns up first: the gigantic Talos, the Man of Bronze.

I was a kid when this came out, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment when the huge, crouched statue came to life, turned his head towards the two men below him (his bronze head screeching with the tear of metal), climbed off of his pedestal, and proceeded to chase Jason and his men.

Fantastic movie with great visuals.
What do I like about this movie…besides Harryhausin’s special effects? Besides the frenetic battle with the skeletons and the seemingly hopeless fight against the statue of Talos? I like the way the people are presented, I suppose…

Talos was giant like Godzilla, but as single-minded as the Terminator: all he wants to do is track Jason’s crew down until he kills them all. This gave me nightmares.

Tom Hanks, who was also a kid when this came out, has said: "Everybody thinks that 'Citizen Kane' was the greatest movie ever made. But if you were young in 1963, you know the real answer is: 'Jason and the Argonauts.'" 
Jason and the Argonauts - the bossman.
This is his finest movie. Possibly. His first “Sinbad” film in 1958 had one moving skeleton for the hero to fight; this one has a whole platoon of them, each part painstakingly moved one tiny distance at a time personally by Harryhausen through stop-motion techniques.

In today’s world it may seem below standard compared to computer effects, but for those of us growing up in that time period, the Harryhausen style of special effects will continue to bring back warm memories of those years. With computer graphics, you see it and like it the first time you see it, but then many movies of today have the same and it becomes moot.

Jason and the Argonauts was one of those few movies at the time along with the Sinbad saga that lives on in your heart. The pace of the film is perfectly put together along with the many creatures, 7-headed hydra, huge fish-man, huge metal man and skeletons fighting is what makes it a classic which lives on in the hearts of those growing up in the sixties.

Dealing with flying Harpies.
Back in 1963 I was only 5 at the time, but I can still remember seeing and watching the movie and being totally awed with the effects created by Ray Harryhausen. Flying and attacking harpies! My goodness!

I enjoyed this as a kid, but now I look at it with different eyes.

Consider the subsequent misery of Jason and Medea, a gory tragedy of domestic abuse and revenge. It’s sad. No wonder there was no sequel to Jason, as the official follow-up is a timeless lesson. Perhaps it’s a lesson on what happens to women who love ambitious and unscrupulous glory-hunters.

Never the less, even with this glimpse of foreboding, I still enjoy the movie.

Greek myths are coded chronicles of human weakness, vice and crimes. I think that smart schoolteachers, politically restrained from addressing real-life issues, can use the Greek original tales to make kids think about the harsh facts of life.

A quiet moment.
Jason and The Argonauts is a great film to watch and escape reality. This is one of those movies that you know is not real but you just enjoy it and have fun watching it anyways. I think this film is underrated because it was not given one Oscar nomination. For certain, I think this film should have been nominated for Best Art Direction and Set Decoration, at the bare minimum. Not to mention, Cinematography, Bernard Herrmann’s Original Score and Film Editing.

As I have already mentioned, the scene that I remember the most (and pershpas what everyone else remembers as well) is the Skeleton Fight at the end which took Ray Harryhausen and special effects crew three months to create that entire sequence.

Talos had me frozen with fear and the Hydra and the skeletons were sights my eyes could not believe. I think that for first-time viewers, you might be somewhat primed for something similar to other movies of this kind of adventure, but Jason and the Argonauts will definitely be anything but what you are expecting.

This is a Great movie and I encourage all of “The Lord of The Rings” fans to watch this and see a great masterpiece of classic fantasy and old fashioned special effects.

A many headed beast.
The fascinating odyssey of Jason in search of the Golden Fleece. This is an adventure movie in the old style, with no pretensions, no pomposity… The genius and pioneer of the special effects Ray Harryhaussen gave us a handful of superhuman creatures who make things quite difficult for the brave Jason. Some may think this special effects or the movie itself are obsolete. OK, now read this: the movie was made 43 years ago, Harryhaussen made them without computers or digital effects… so, show some respect!! In short: the movie is just fantastic.

Most, if not all, children love the film.

And for all one’s intellectual talk about the vulgarising of mythology and the crudity of the screenplay, there is no denying that this movie is spectacular on many levels.

It is blatantly obvious to all viewers that Harryhausen contrived to bring a lot of sparkle, excitement and fun into the world of fantastic cinema. At this he absolutely succeeded.

Gods help the boat pass through.
To regain his rightful place as the King of Thessaly, Jason must traverse deadly seas to the land of Colchis where a Golden Fleece of magical powers is housed. Assembling a crew of the toughest men around, and aided by the Goddess Hera, Jason and his Argonauts set sail unbeknown that perils await at every port.

For sure it’s got a “B” movie heart, and no film in this genre is without a high cheese quota, but it’s technically one of the genres best and for daring do shenanigans it has no peers.

The gorgeous Mediterranean photography courtesy of Wilkie Cooper (Dynamation 90) goes hand in hand with the boisterously mythical score from Bernard Hermann, while Chaffrey's direction of the human aspects is solid and safe in preparation for Harryhausen's magic to move in and take over. The cast may not cover themselves in glory, and yes at times some of them are a touch wooden, with only Honor Blackman (Hera) and Nigel Green (Hercules) seemingly able to grasp the sense of fun that is meant to be had. 

Here, in this movie, we have a big quest adventure containing harpies, a hydra, a giant bronze statue intent on destroying all, clashing rocks, angry gods and a brilliant Harryhausen skeleton army – well it’s all good, really isn’t it!

Here’s an interesting review, but I forgot from whence I dug it up from…

'Jason and the Argonauts' is a truly family fantasy-adventure film,  directed with wit and excitement... Beverley Cross's fine script is both  imaginative and literate, and Bernard Herrmann's score is stirring... 

The  word "Argonaut" comes from a tale sung of the strongest and bravest  band of heroes ever assembled in Greek Mythology... This myth chronicles  Jason's quest for the 'gift of the gods,' and the restoration of his  family's throne... 

There is an interesting theme that runs  through the entire motion picture: man must manage alone without the  help of the gods whether they exist or not... 

In times past,  fate ruled men's lives completely... The gods often amused themselves  with the puny mortal men below... Fate is still an important factor in  Jason's time (He has been prophesied to overthrow King Pelias...), but  man chooses his own life's course... Jason lost his believe in the gods,  and Zeus questions what has taken the place of man's faith in the  gods... Jason replies: "The hearts of men. "

Jason rejects Zeus'  offer to supply him with 'a ship and a crew,' and assembles dozen of  Greece's greatest heroes, including the legendary Hercules...  Nevertheless he accepts Hera's pledge to help him with the information  and advice... 

Jason has learned that prayers to the gods are not  always answered... "The gods are best served by those who want their  help least," Zeus alibis... When humans obtain the help of the gods,  they know they must push forward... For instance, when Triton holds the  quaking mountains, the Argonauts still must navigate their ship away  from the dangerous rocks that continue to fall...

Jason dared to  speak of the end of the gods, and challenges Zeus when he eliminates  Talos, who guards Zeus' treasures... And when the Argonauts imprison the  evil harpies whom Zeus sent to torment a desperate sinner, Zeus admits:  "If I were to punish every blasphemy, I would soon loose all loyalty  and respect." 

Of the gods, Jason says, "In time all men will  have to do without them." Such words alarm Zeus, and he recognizes as  much to Hera, whom he considers "almost human" for staying with him  despite such weakness... But the gods still have enough power to do  their will... At the picture's end Zeus tells Hera that he will allow  Jason and his pretty Medea to enjoy 'each other,' but he adds, "I have  not yet finished with Jason... Let us continue with the game another  day."

Todd Armstrong is the young and hot blooded Jason who  schemes to seize the Golden Fleece from King Aeetes, and saves Pelias  from drowning one day, losing his sandal in the river... 

Nancy Kovack is Medea, the provocative high priestess of Colchis who is charmed with love for Jason and aid him in his quest...

Gary Raymond is Acastus, the son of Pelias sent to disrupt the voyage by causing dissension in the crew...

Niall MacGinnis is Zeus who decides to challenge Jason and the Argonauts with many trials...

Honor Blackman is the cunning Hera, the queen of the gods, who outmaneuvered  Zeus, and intervened on several occasions to facilitate Jason's tasks...  Hera wishes to destroy Pelias because he was treacherous and her temple  was profane... 

Michael Gwynn is Hermes who transports Jason to Olympus to speak with the gods... 

Jack Gwillim is King Aeetes who collects the hydra's teeth from its seven heads, and confronts Jason high on a cliff...

John Cairney is the clever Hylas who uses his intelligence to beat Hercules in a test of skill... 

Douglas Wilmer is the nefarious Pelias, who plots a devious plan to send Jason on an impossible quest, in a faraway land, to fetch the magical Golden  Fleece... 

Nigel Green is Hercules, the bravest and strongest  warrior who vows to search the Isle of Bronze until he finds his friend  Hylos...

Patrick Troughton is the old and weak Phineas cursed  with an insatiable appetite and the flying harpies left enough putrid  morsels for him to survive his torment...

'Jason and the  Argonauts' is a tale of love and betrayal, friendship and fortune... It  is nearly 40 years old but it still holds up as one of the semi-classic  mythological fantasy which provides a framework for some splendid  stop-frame animation... 

Jason and the Argonauts is a fun movie. 

The open ended nature of the story does hurt the film, but just come for the classic effects.  Fans of mythology will enjoy the adventure, and it could introduce kids to classic stories.  Jason and the Argonauts is definitely worth revisiting or seeking out if you’ve never seen it.

It’s also perfect fare for those lazy dog-day afternoons, or snowed-in weekends. It entertains on numerous levels. It is visually appealing, and wondrous overall.

Links

Here’s some links that you all might find of interest.

Torrent Links

You can watch it for free if you don’t mind waiting a half an hour to half a day to download the torrent.

For those of you who are unaware. Torrents are parts of files that are spread out in tiny packets all over the internet. You use a "Bit Torrent" client to vacuum up all those little bits and pieces of the file. It then assembles the file into a movie that you can watch. The time that this takes can vary from a few minutes to weeks depending on how popular or obscure your searched file is.

You will need an application to manage the download. I recommend the free application VUZE. To download the video is thus easy. Install VUZE, and then click on one of the following torrent links.

Depending on where you live, you might not have the freedom to access these sites and the ISP might block them from access, or the search engines might black out their search results. Americans, in particular, might have some real problems. Therefore, I listed the most accessible torrent sites available to Americans. Pirate Bay and 1337X. I think that Kick Ass Torrents is still blocked for all Americans.

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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When Hollywood still made good movies; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1957)

Ray Harryhausen was a mainstay of my childhood. His movies were regular features on the Saturday matinees — on television, not in theaters; I’m not THAT old! — and they sucked me in every time. How could they not? No sane young boy would be anything but engrossed by giant creatures slugging it out with heroes in sandals, and Harryhausen’s creatures were AWESOME.

-Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

It’s no secret that Hollywood has gone over the deep end and into the abyss of the bland and uninteresting.

It’s a combination of things. Firstly [1] , an over reliance on CGI and computer animation has somehow replaced decent story-telling and the passions inherent in the traditional movie genre. Secondly [2], the invasion of Political Correctness and rewrites for the LGBT crowd, and the war on white males, and traditional male roles has pretty much isolated Hollywood to the Land of the Loons. Thirdly [3], an over reliance on classical superheroes… you know, suddenly by magic, a person gets super-powers… get’s dull really quick. Finally, fourthly [4], just how many sequels do you need to make before the customers stop coming to the theaters?

Here’s some examples of contemporaneous Hollywood fare…

Yup Hollywood is going the way of the Dodo Bird, and like their political leadership, haven’t a clue as to how absolutely ridiculous they look to us “normal’s” in the audience.

But, at one time, Hollywood was truly the stuff of dreams. There, the studios produced some amazing movie flicks. These were the stuff of dreams, and tales of adventure. And, for I, a young boy… Hollywood movies took me to places where my imagination could soar and explore.

Let’s talk about one such movie. The Ray Harryhausen classic “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”.

The Tale of a Lifetime

The visuals in the movie were amazing. Anyone who has seen this movie when it first came out (late 50’s) was forever a different person for the better. This dynamic even continues to this day too.

Millions saw this when they were in their teens or younger and it brought out an array of emotions the body had not experienced before. There is wonder, adventure, thrills, suspense, love, good, bad, and monsters that make you wonder how can you fight them and live? Sinbad shows you all this and more and he became a role model and hero for the multitudes.

No doubt, it is an amazing movie.

Come on! Seriously. Giant birds, crabby cyclops, dragons, skeleton warriors, and a snake woman? Just another day at the office for Sinbad the Sailor.

Throw in an evil sorcerer, a mutinous crew, and having to not only rescue his fiancee, but also find some way to un-shrink her. Talk about having too much on “your plate”. You can well understand why this particular Sinbad set about his seventh voyage with a stern and brave face, very little humor and negligible cheer.

This movie is genius.

Other films of his have very challenging special effects too. If you  have not watched any of his films, YouTube them and watch the brilliant  sequences. That'll convince you. Try the sequence where the cowboys try  to "rope" Gwangi, in which Harryhausen had to painstakingly match the  ropes on the live action footage to the ropes on his stop-motion model.  Or the tug of war in "Mighty Joe Young,"  using a similar technique. Or the sequence with the giant bird from  "Mysterious Island," which works well with Bernard Herrmann's goofy  score. Or the Washington destruction scenes in "Earth vs. Flying  Saucers." Or It from "It Came From Beneath the Seas." Or Pegasus in  "Clash of the Titans," or Medusa, from the same film. Or anything from  "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," my personal favorite film of his. 

 - Great Movies of my Childhood  

This was a movie that I couldn’t tear my eyes from. I was totally and complete immersed in the story line, though as a young boy, it was kind of difficult to follow. Never the less, the visuals were amazing and absolutely drew me in.

Now the story is a classic. It’s an adventure, so of course, you pull the story out from classic adventure stories that have stood the passage of time.

Apparently this is a pretty old classic story from the 1001 Arabian Nights, of course no longer taught in schools as not progressive enough. It is the story of adventure when a ships crew makes an unexpected stop at an island.

Fortune fall upon us all

The best thing about this movie is that there Hasn’t been any remakes of it.

It’s true. Can you imagine what the remakes would be like? OMG! I just get sick trying to imagine it all…

  • 1970s – The first sequel; Sinbad falls in love with a black single-parent woman.
  • 1980s – “We Are the World” meets Sinbad the Sailor.
  • 1990s – CGI animation, heavily pixelated and dark.
  • 2000s – Matrix style fight scenes with the three headed chick.
  • 2010s – X-men join forces with Sinbad to fight the Cyclops.
  • 2020s – Sinbad is a woman, as are the entire crew, all females.

Storyline

Sinbad is a man of the world. A seaman who travels the known world. As this is his seventh voyage, we knew that he was well experienced in the ways of monsters, magic and pretty attractive lasses. He has a crew of trusty seamen, and ship that is pretty state-of-the-art for the time-period.

So off he goes. His ship and crew sail off towards adventure…

Dinner for the one-eyed horned cyclops.
Dinner for the one-eyed horned cyclops. You most certainly wouldn’t want to be caught by this fella, and my goodness, who knows what fate you might be expected to endure. You know, when salt and pepper get into your eyes, it hurts!

He sails and sails.

When Sinbad finally spots land, he doesn’t yet know what island it is. (He didn’t have GPS, and Google was of absolutely no use to him.) He just doesn’t know that the island’s name is Colossa. Hum. Colossa could that have something to do with the word “colossal”? You’d think he’d take a hint.

Nor does he know that it’s the ancient world’s equivalent of Monster Island. Now, for some reason or the other, Sinbad has his old lady on board with him. She’s a real cutie, and can you blame him. After all, he’s the famous Sinbad.

Her name is Princess Parisa. She has cute dimples, a nice rack and a very curvaceous backside. You see, she and Sinbad are going to be married and help seal a peace pact between their two lands. It kind of sucks for her, but she gets a hero in the bargain, and all in all, by the standards of society at that time and place, it’s a pretty sweet deal for her.

Grant (who would go on to marry Bing Crosby) is an absolute delight as the princess, the kid playing the genie in the lamp should have been annoying but was actually quite a charming little tyke, and Torin Thatcher is wonderfully bombastic as the evil wizard Sokurah. They help carry the human element of the movie in a way Mathews’ Sinbad never does. 

 -Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad 

Once he makes landfall on the island, he demonstrates just how preoccupied he must be with the impending wedding. You can tell, because he makes some really boneheaded decisions. You know, decisions that would charitably be called “insane.”

A cyclops looking at his dinner.
This colorful adventure is the screen version of one of the classic tales from “1001 Arabian Nights.” It tells the story of Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant). When they unexpectedly stop on the island of Colossa on their way to Baghdad, they find themselves battling all types of dangers, such as evil magicians, man-eating Cyclopes, fire- breathing dragons, and sword-wielding skeletons.

So, let’s say you’re on a mysterious island in a world where terrible monsters still run amok occasionally.

Let’s also say that you notice strange footprints in the sand. These strange footprints are not only odd because of their shape (cloven hooves – eek!), but also because they are so far apart. As someone notes, this is indicative of a rather large stride and by extension, a rather large creature.

Now what could that possibly mean? I mean, what would you do, if you saw hoof prints that large?

Multi-headed multi-bird thing creature.
Multi-headed multi-bird thing creature. What would you do if you confronted a strange chick the size of a fire-truck? And, by chick I mean a bird, not a cute young lass.

Okay, let’s say you know all that and still you venture forth into the unknown.

Now, you have landed on this mysterious island. You and your crew starts to walk upon the sandy beach. And now when you walk further up the beach you notice carved in the side of a mountain, a strange face with the mouth being the entrance of a cave.

Not an everyday occurrence.

What do you do? Well, in spite of it being painfully obvious that this is the front door of a cyclops house, you decide to do some pretty messed up things. I mean, haven’t you ever learned that some things say “keep out” and run for the hills. But NOOOOO!

What does Sinbad do? Well, he decides to run right the hell in there just to see if anyone is home!

The pure awesomeness of this movie is evident when you observe a one-eyed horned cyclops with goat like legs confronting a chained dragon.
The pure awesomeness of this movie is evident when you observe a one-eyed horned cyclops with goat like legs confronting a chained dragon. Now you would think that the dragon would trump a one-eyed cyclops… you know that old depth-perception angle. But the movie has a number of surprises for the viewing audience.

What do you think happens? Yup. It’s a lot of screaming, yelling, terror and blood and guts. Not to mention a chomp and gulp. Yes, it’s a story of lots of guys getting chased by a really pissed off cyclops.

Enter a sorcerer named Sokurah.

He’s a bald guy with a magic lamp that saves Sinbad and his crew by using the genie’s powers to erect a transparent barrier to keep the cyclops back. I’ll bet that you didn’t know that Genie’s had the power to erect repulse fields, did you?

Now, I have some bad news.

Unfortunately this doesn’t stop the cyclops from chucking big rocks at the departing boat. This causes everyone on the boat to fall overboard and in all the confusion Sokurah loses his magic lamp.

Now, this magic lamp is really special. Think of it like the latest iphone, or the keys to the Lamborghini. It contains a Genie. But this Genie is not just like any other Genie. Those “lower” Genies have wish-limitations. Most can only grant three wishes. Not this Genie. No. He instead grants unlimited wishes.

Obviously the loss of such a power, such a lamp, is a big disappointment.

Sinbad meets a princess.
In the scenes featuring a shrunken Princess Parisa. Now look at this mess. How are going to have sex once they are married? And what about the children? Obviously Sinbad has to do something, and thus Sinbad does his best to help her. In the process goes on an adventure of a lifetime. It is one filled with strange sights, strange and dangerous beings, and magic of all sorts and types.

Again, there is a lot of treading water, splashes and panic.

Once back on board his main boat, Sokurah demands that they return back to the island. You know, after all, it’s pretty cool having a Genie with unlimited wishes. Heck, if it was me, I’d go back.

No. Sinbad is a different person.

Sinbad refuses Sokurah’s entreaties to go back to the island and retrieve his lamp which by this time has fallen into the hands of the cyclops. Sinbad says “No time, baldy. I’m gonna get married to my most excellent girlfriend. And, you know what? I still have to hire a band and D.J. for my wedding, but you’re welcome to come to my bachelor party once we’re back in Bagdad.”

Meetup with a Genie.
Here we have a tiny miniaturized princess inside a Genie’s bottle to talk with the Genie face to face. What a movie! You know, Harryhausen spearheaded a turn from scifi monsters to mythology and adventure for the first time with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. In this movie he ended up crossbreeding special-effects-based spectacle with traditional swashbuckling heroics. For the first time, in this movie, Harryhausen got to make a feature in color, and he debuted his new technique, called Dynamation, which allowed more sophisticated, layered interaction between photographic elements.

Sokurah offers to provide some entertainment at some of the pre-wedding festivities in hopes of currying favor with the Caliph.

The Caliph of Baghdad (Alec Mango) feels the same way, even after Sokurah amazes the court by conjuring up a snake-woman. Yes, this SOB ended up turning Parisa’s maid into a snake woman. Talk about violation of a work contract!

Meanwhile, he continues to try to convince Sinbad to go back to the island.

Snake woman maid.
Now how would you like your pretty maid to be changed into a a snake woman medusa. Especially a blue one? Not exactly a nice way to curry favor. Obviously this warlock has a real lack of people skills.

He starts to look into the future. He starts by looking into the future of Sinbad and Parisa’s lands. Not surprisingly perhaps, he sees only bad things for everyone. This (unfortunately) doesn’t earn him a ship and a crew of men, but does earn him an ass kicking out of Bagdad.

It is only when the princess is shrunk by an evil spell, the breaking of which requires the shell from the egg of the giant Roc – which (what-da-ya-know) resides on Colossa – that Sokurah can get his expedition mounted, with Sinbad in command.

But it’s not that everything is perfect. With a crew made up of a handful of his bravest men and some of the most desperate convicts in the Caliph’s prison, he has to contend with potential mutiny at every turn. It’s a constant bickering, fighting and arguments. Ugh! In fact, the men are driven almost to madness before they even reach Colossa.

The Genie with Sinbad's future wife.
The Genie gets along with the future Mrs. Sinbad. She crawls into the Genie’s lair and it’s all sort of like the lair from the television show “I dream of Genie”. Together they work out and hatch a plan.

Once there, at the island, they continue to find problems and strife. Obviously, they find terrors as great as the Cyclops and the treachery of the magician, but something else happens. Future Mrs. Sinbad; Parisa – in her tiny state – also discovers the beautiful world inside the lamp, and the lonely boy Genie (Richard Eyer) who inhabits it.

They strike the bargain that, when Sinbad’s bravery is added to the equation, will bring their quest to an end. If, that is, they can all survive the dangers that Sokurah puts in their path.

Sinbad at the helm.
Sinbad at the helm of his state of the art, ocean going vessel. He is the fellow in command, and he over comes everything to achieve his goals and his dreams.

At this point for the record, I would note that when he was told this, no one specifically said that he wasn’t supposed to stop by the princess’s bedroom and use a magic potion to shrink her down to the size of a corndog. It’s a strange world we live in, and when you start mixing magical spells, potions and evil sorcerers together, you will find many surprises awaiting you in the bedroom.

Clearly, the only way to fix this is with the help of a very powerful sorcerer.

Sinbad finds Sokurah just as he’s about to leave town and pleads for his help. It turns out to be no problem for Sokurah to reverse the spell. In fact, he knows the counter-spell and only needs to procure one ingredient. It’s the shell of giant Roc’s egg.

A pensive Sinbad.
Oh, you think that you have it tought in your life. Imagine what it would be like with magic spells, monsters, evil wizards and jealous women. It is no wonder that Sinbad is so pensive.

Ah, the shell of the egg.

But that’s only available on the island of Colossa and we already know you don’t want to go there, right Sinbad? Well, right?

Still politics are politics, and if you don’t play your cards right, the result could be war! Thus, with the princess’s father immediately threatening war on Bagdad (despite Bagdad obviously having nothing to do with the incredible shrinking Parisa – but that’s an argument for another time), a shift in policy occurs and the next thing you know, a ship is being outfitted. As such, a big crossbow is being built and Sinbad is attempting to recruit a crew.

But where would you get a crew from for what is surely a suicide mission right into the heart of monster country?

Sindbad with lovely Parisa.
Sindbad with lovely Parisa. Obviously back up to full size with all the curves in the right places, and ready to experience all that life can throw at her.

Where do most guys for suicide missions come from?

Indeed, you find them at the toughest prison in whatever location the recruiting is being done in! I was thinking that we might be in for a Dirty Dozen-style affair with off-beat characters each with a specialized skill (forger, demolitions expert, scrounger, drunk) that would come in handy for this trek.

The "Big Leagues" Arabian style.
The “Big Leagues” Arabian style. Sinbad and his lovely future bride at the club with the biggest players in the known world (at that time). They are eating fine delicious and exotic foods, and experiencing all the earthly pleasures and delights available to them. Partying on Arabian style.

However, the intention of them being so vicious and crazy that they turn out to be the best dang fighting machine ever assembled doesn’t happen. Instead, these cons are so vicious and crazy that they mutiny as soon as they set sail. Not only that, but they attempt to take over the ship!

Unsurprisingly, the movie is filled with fantastic creatures and some very impressive visuals. The cyclops is a fearsome beast with great animation (based on the critter from 20 Million Miles to Earth) and fantastic integration into most scenes. This guy ranks right up there with the best of Harryhausen. A climactic skeleton battle is also highly impressive, with stunning choreography providing some damned impressive integration with real actors. It’s a stunningly well-realized scene. 

 -Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad 

Things don’t go any more smoothly once they hit Cyclops Island. If you can imagine. Treasure, a genie, and guy getting roasted alive are among the highlights.

Sinbad promising his future wife that everything will work out fine once he takes care of shopping.
Sinbad promising his future wife that everything will work out fine once he takes care of shopping. First on the list; the dairy isle. He has to go ahead and get some rather large eggs.

Conclusion

This is by far the best of the three fantasy adventure movies that Kerwin Matthews (Sinbad) made during this era. If you have the time and the inclination, I would strongly recommend a rewatch of this movie. Preferably on a hazy hot dog-day afternoon in August, or a cold snowy blistery Saturday afternoon in January. I promise that it will reawaken the boyhood in you (if you are a man), the nurturing and strong lady in you (if you are a lass), or complete revulsion (if you are gender-confused).

Links

Here’s some decent links that you all might want to take a look at.

Torrent Links

You can watch it for free if you don’t mind waiting a half an hour to half a day to download the torrent.

For those of you who are unaware. Torrents are parts of files that are spread out in tiny packets all over the internet. You use a "Bit Torrent" client to vacuum up all those little bits and pieces of the file. It then assembles the file into a movie that you can watch. The time that this takes can vary from a few minutes to weeks depending on how popular or obscure your searched file is.

You will need an application to manage the download. I recommend the free application VUZE. To download the video is thus easy. Install VUZE, and then click on one of the following torrent links.

Depending on where you live, you might not have the freedom to access these sites and the ISP might block them from access, or the search engines might black out their search results. Americans, in particular, might have some real problems. Therefore, I listed the most accessible torrent sites available to Americans. Pirate Bay and 1337X. I think that Kick Ass Torrents is still blocked for all Americans.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 5).

Here we continue with a selection of micro-videos that amply illustrate what is going on in Asia this summer. There is quite a bit going on, let me tell you all. And it is all so very different from what you would find in the West that it becomes noteworthy, though rather difficult to classify individually. Here, the videos depict China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Roller Skating

Roller skating is a thing in China. It really is, and it is a great way for a young couple to go on a date followed by a nice dinner, and a walk afterwards in the cool night air.

Roller skating rink
This is an old roller skating rink that used to be popular in Oregon. In those days, many young couples and friends would come and skate the night away.

America used to have very many roller skating rinks. All during the 1920’s up through into the 1980’s young couples, and friends would go out to go roller skating. Sometime around the early 1990’s America adopted a more progressive society. It was one which people stopped spending time with each other, and instead became connected electronically. As a result, roller skating rinks fell in disrepair and disuse.

Which is just sad.

In China, the roller rinks are more like bars, or disco clubs. they feature loud music, flashing lights, and various amusements like barriers, cone paths, and other things for a person to navigate around.

Chinese roller skates.
Here is a pair of Chinese roller skates with a set of carbon fiber boots, with LED spinners in the wheels. This is very much a part of contemporaneous China.

Also four-wheel (LED) lighted skates are very popular. In fact, I would say that the market share for this “Roller Derby” style shoe is about equal to that of a roller blade shoe.

The very odd thing about China, and I don’t really understand it, is that many Chinese like to skate backwards. They don’t like to skate forwards like us Americans do. Strange. Yes. But, cute, too.

And here’s another view. Note that many of the skating rinks have bars, and in this next video we can well see the girls hopping on the skating floor that is part of a trampoline arrangement. Pretty cool huh?

Bubble Tea.

 Bubble tea is a tea-based drink  that has gained a lot of popularity in recent times and has quickly  spread past its native boundaries of Taiwan. Initially popular with  Taiwanese schoolchildren, it is now becoming a favorite among adults for  its sweet taste, unique ingredients, and for its huge range of flavors.

 What is Bubble Tea?
 Bubble tea, also known as pearl milk tea, boba juice, boba tea, and bubble milk tea, is a Taiwanese tea-based drink. It is also called as tapioca tea, as tapioca balls are the main ingredient in this tea.

 Bubble tea consists of a tea base (white, green or black) that is mixed or shaken with milk or other fruits,  and fruit jelly or tapioca balls are added, which sink to the bottom.  Ice is often blended into the mixture, which results in a slushy or  smoothie consistency. There are different fruits and flavors that can be  used in bubble tea and the most popular varieties are bubble milk tea  and bubble milk green tea.

 Combined with the variety of teas, the amount of milk, and the choice  of fruit jelly or tapioca pearls, there are thousands of combinations  of bubble tea. Each of these has different nutrient compositions, which  offer excellent health benefits. 

-Organic Facts

Bubble tea is a staple all over Asia. I had my first bubble tea back in Shreveport Louisiana back in the early 1990’s. Then in completely disappeared. I don’t know what happened. MWI shifts? Cultural variances? Changes in tastes and attitudes? Who really knows?

Maybe Wilder has an idea...HERE.
A typical bubble tea selection.
A typical bubble tea selection. This one, in particular, is from Vietnam. These drinks are a favorite all over China.

Anyways, bubble teas can be bought anywhere in Asia. It’s a sweetened milk tea with chewy tapioca pearls. It’s pretty good. For me, though, as common as it is, I just prefer to drink Southern style mint orange-slice Iced Tea.

And people, this is what it is like. The gals and guys dress like this (as these hoodies are their office uniforms) and this is the full “real deal” treatment.

The Vast Chinese Deserts…

China is an enormous nation. It has everything from long coastlines, to huge mountain ranges, and yes… it has enormous deserts as well.

The two main large deserts within China.
The two main large deserts within China. This includes the famous Gobi, as well as the relatively unknown Taklamakan regions. There are also other much smaller deserts as well.

There are two main large deserts within China. This includes the famous Gobi, as well as the relatively unknown Taklamakan regions. There are also other much smaller deserts as well.

Check it out…

Boy Meets Girl.

I happen to like this micro video. Thus I place it here. People, these kinds of videos, made by local Chinese folk, aptly describe the culture, the styles, the attitudes and the way of life of the modern Chinese man and women.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia.

Here are a selection of micro-videos that amply illustrate what is going on in Asia this summer. With that being said, let it be well understood that there is quite a bit going on, let me tell you all. And it is all so very different from what you would find in the West that it becomes noteworthy, though rather difficult to classify individually. Here, the videos depict China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan.

I hope that you all will enjoy these micro-videos and visions of Asia as much as I do.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Local Popular Music

All through Asia there are small groups of musicians that are making their scene. They are notable in very many ways. One of the things that I like about them, are their own individual uniqueness. You won’t find clones of Nicki Minaj here. Thank goodness.

Of course, I have other earlier posts that delineate the many, many musical venues and styles that are present in China. What I happen to like is the way that traditional music is fuzed with popular Western musical styles. Merged, they result in a very interesting sound.

Such as this example.

Here’s the full song. Listen on to it.

封茗囧菌 sung by 三国恋

Tom & Jerry

Who would figure? Everyone in China, from two year olds to great-grandmothers love the American comic strip Tom and Jerry. They are, by far, THE most popular thing in China. Don’t ask me how this came about, or even why. I haven’t a clue. I really do not know.

There are 246 Tom and Jerry cartoon suppliers, mainly located in Asia. The top supplying country is China (Mainland), which supplies 100% of Tom and Jerry cartoon items respectively. These products are exported globally. 

Outside of China, Tom and jerry cartoon products are most popular in North America, South America, and the Mid East.

Here are some shoppers in a grocery store checking out a Tom and Jerry cartoon on the television screen. I mean, it’s an enormous hit! Look at the expressions on their faces. My goodness!

Come on! Any society that loves Tom & Jerry can’t be all bad. Really!

Pouring Tea for Congress

China is all about face, and the importance of ritual. They view the collective society as more important than the individual, and so they have adopted various rituals and ways of doing things that seem so strange to our free-wheeling progressive lifestyle in the United States. And yes, in case you are confused, America today is quite a progressive-society. All you need to do is step outside the borders of the USA and compare it with other traditional conservative nations.

The People's Republic of China practices the system of people's congress. China's Constitution stipulates that all power in the People's Republic of China belongs to the people, and the organs through which the people exercise state power are the National People's Congress and the local people's congresses at different levels.

- National People's Congress

Here we have the auditorium for the Chinese version of Congress getting served tea in the proper ritualized manner. In China everything is about tradition, and “face”.

Face (Mianzi) The concept of “face” or “self-image”, known as Mianzi in Chinese, is core to Chinese culture and one which is critical to understand. It can be loosely described as someone’s social status or reputation in the eyes of others and is integral to both social and business dealings.

- Chinese Culture 101 

Come on! Those three videos are all pretty cool. You do have to admit. Well, there are many more. However…

Too many videos will slow down the loading of this page, so I have broken this most into multiple pages so that you (the reader) can enjoy. Please click on the link to go to the next part of this multi-part post.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 2).

This is the second page of a multi-post that provides various micro-videos and photos (with narrative) that describe modern contemporaneous Asia. That includes China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand. And, again, here is my warning about low-bandwidth connections, high peak usage, and too many open tabs…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Summer in Rural China

Rural areas all over the world are beautiful. I love the thick forests with the lush plant life. I love the meadows, and the brooks. I love the streams, the lakes and large white fluffy clouds that dance upon the sky. It is the same in Amish country as it is in a rural Hunan province in China.

Latest Fashion in Thailand

All through Asia, women like to wear traditional clothing. Not only are they flattering, and comfortable, but they are also quite a fashion statement. This is true in China, as it is in Japan, and Korea. Here are some of the latest in “traditional Thai” clothing.

You see, the fashion world is no longer lead out of Paris or Italy. Because they have off-shored and out-sourced their design teams to Asia. Those very same design teams now make and design clothing for the local Asian populace and they are very, very popular.

Getting Selfies in the Mall in China.

Everyone loves selfies. I guess that is why there are such things as “selfie sticks”, and tripods. You see this all the time, a girl is getting a selfie, or making a movie, or acting cute. There are thousands of such videos all over China. Some are creative, and some are just cute in their simplicity. Such as this one…

Modern Kung Fu in China

Kung Fu is still practiced in China, and it is more popular than ever. You can also see the remarkable videos of the various types of hand-to-hand, or foot to head combat that is always popular in China.

Too many videos will slow down the loading of this page, so I have broken this most into multiple pages so that you (the reader) can enjoy. Please click on the link to go to the next part of this multi-part post.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 4)

Let’s continue with our exploration of cute and unique China with these following examples…

Many people that I met were curious about China, but their impressions of China would end up with words like ‘communist,’ ‘pollution’ and ‘no Facebook.’ While many facts are true, the contemporary, living and multifaceted Chinese life is rarely heard of. 

-Tinyeyescomics

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Disco Swimming Party

The Chinese have a great love for being together and having fun and partying. Often they mix singing, dancing, and (of course) drinking with their other pleasures. As any other normal adult would. Here, we look at a typical swimming pool and their weekend festivities.

And, yes… this is TYPICAL.

I, myself, enjoy swimming. As a boy we would swim in the ocean and in the various pools around the community. This was true whether it was a private club, or at a friends house. I have always associated Summer with pools, and I think that all kids should have the same kind of fond memories attached to swimming and Summer as I have.

After all, who doesn’t want to go have fun?

Beach Scene
Photo from the late 1940s and early 1950s of some gals on the beach. You can well imagine a nice day, some fine food and friendship. Not to mention walking and swimming along the shore. Such memories I have of those times.

Back in my middle school days, all of us kids were part of the YMCA after-school swimming program. When ever they had one of these programs, my parents were the first to sign us kids up for the classes. I became quite good at swimming, and that later turned into an asset once I joined the US Navy.

After school, we would hop onto a bus and it would carry us over to a nearby town for our lessons. I seem to recall that the trip would last around a half an hour, and the entire time at the YMCA might have lasted around three hours. I suppose that gave our parents enough time away from us kids for some private time. Heh heh.

The YMCA had an indoor pool, but we would also go use outside pools during the Summer months. I had friends who loved to swim in the rivers and lakes, but they were way too dirty for my personal sensibilities.

Swimming in the Summer
For me, my time around the pools pretty much looked like this. Even at the pool where we were a member, my parents would pay for me to take swimming and diving lessons. I learned well how to do many dives.

Being with friends and noisy kids is part of the swimming experience. And, you know what? I think that it is great. I really do.

There will be plenty of opportunities for other kinds of beach and swimming pool adventures in your future. That’s life. Some will be great. Some will be not so great. Some will have you walking on the beach hand-in-hand with someone you love and care for dearly. Some experiences will involve alcohol. Some experiences will involve a group of close friends, with music, food and other pleasures.

I think that the best thing about life is to enjoy it as it is happening.

What I mean is that time is short and it is fleeting. You need to know that if you are always goal oriented, you will miss out in the opportunities and adventures that lie all around you right now. There is a saying to “take the time to smell the flowers”, and that is very true, but the saying has become trite and over used.

Appreciate you life as it is happening TODAY right now. You might not get another moment exactly like this one in the future.

1960s swimming pool
What are your favorite moments when you grew up? Can you be evocative of them? Was your childhood like the movie “On Golden Pond”? Or, maybe it was like the movie “The Goonies”? Enjoy what you have while you are living it.

OK, now going back to China.

Yes there are all kinds of ways that you can have fun at pools and on the beach. Just like in the United States or in an exotic holiday resort. You can go to pools, public water and pool parks, and even have your own pool where you would invite your friends over for some fun and frolic.

Here is a micro-video of a Chinese public pool. There are some things to note.

Unlike the video above, this one isn’t so rambunctious. It is quieter and more peaceful. It is not designed for groups of people to party and have a good time at. It is, instead, designed to relax and have a nice spa-like experience with friends and family. You will also notice that there is a huge canvas awning overhead. This is typical in China and most gals do not want their beautiful white skin to get dark.

You will note that the water is not deep either, and that there is a bench all along the sides of the pool for people to sit up and rest within the water. In this pool it is sort of like a cross between a whirl-pool and a regular pool. It is a place to relax, while the other video was a place to get crazy and have fun in.

Studying with Roommates

Most colleges and schools in China are dorms where there are from four to eight students crammed into one room. It is cozy, and over time, everyone develops a very close bond together. I used to think that this was terrible, but once I started to make Chinese friends, I saw the advantages of this.

You form “tribes” or “families” what are self-supporting.

G-friends dorm room
It is common all over Asia to form close-knit “tribes” or extended family as part of close living conditions. Seriously, you cannot get much closer together than living in Tokyo or Hong Kong. Here is the dorm that the K-Pop group “g-friends” live in.

This is very important when you are away from home for the first time, and need to have friends and associations for support, emotional health and friendship. In China, having friends and family is of extreme importance.

Dorm room occupancy comic
The Chinese typically share a room with four to eight others. The American often shares with one other person, and the British get their own private rooms to themselves.
I’ve experienced student dormitories in three countries: In the U.K. I have my own private room with shared public space; In the U.S. I shared my dorm with one roommate; In China, I used to live with 5 girls in the same room. 

This lack of privacy must be shocking for some of you, but in a country with 1.3 billion population, space is always a problem. 

While there are many inconveniences for not having enough private space, on the bright side, sharing a room with someone also makes you learn quite a deal about communication, responsibilities and tolerance. 
 
-Tinyeyescomics 

Here is a typical dorm room scene.

You will note that the room is rectangular with beds on stilts that lie over the study desks. This is not everywhere, but seems to work well. I have seen other arrangements, of course. You will also note that, like college dorm rooms all over the globe, the students decorate it to their own personal tastes.

I particularly like the swing chair. It’s actually pretty popular in Chinese dorm rooms.

Japanese Invasion

There is a movement toward wearing traditional Chinese clothing all over China. I personally love it, and enjoy watching girls wearing their really cute outfits. Well, girls (all over the world) enjoy dressing up and wearing different outfits. From time to time you will see these girls getting dressed up in period fashion and Japanese fashion. It’s all pretty darn cute.

Here we have some Chinese gals getting involved in some of the Japanese fashions in Shanghai.

Pretty Crazy, huh?

Of course, you do need to put this into perspective. Any “invasion” from Japan is not about displacing traditional Chinese culture. Rather it is about enjoying your own uniqueness within China. You see, in China there is no such thing as “cultural appropriation” that is a bunch of progressive hooey that is all the rage in the United States. In China you can pretty much be who ever you want to, and no fat overweight pink-haired feminist is going to scream in your face about it.

That enables the Chinese to enjoy their history, and their culture without any disdain or apologies.

And they do so. They are very proud of their culture and when given the opportunity, they will happily don traditional clothing and be themselves. Here we have a girl from one of the Southern regions of China. I believe (but am not sure) that her culture is from the Hainan island area. (Incidentally, the women have traditionally covered themselves in tribal tattoos. This is something that is NOT carried over with modern Chinese ladies. They prefer to leave their bodies unadorned.)

You can see the cross-cultural influences from other ethnic regions within China here.

The headdress is borrowed from some central Chinese cultures, and the flower in the hair is from the South Pacific with a relationship influence (flower on the right if married, on the left if single). In the Northern part of China, you will see the ladies wear long dresses with coverings on their arms. In the Southern sections (where it is HOT) you will find them wearing mini-skirts and loose clothing.

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next past which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 1)

China is a big country, with a huge population. At any given minute there are all kinds of things going on, from the curious to the absurd. That’s pretty much what makes travel so enticing. You are exposed to new ideas and new ways of doing things. These new ways might be better or worse. Yet, the fact that they are different adds value to your experience.

If the new experience is better, then you can see where your previous assumptions might be wrong. This is what happens when you move out of your “comfort zone”. You learn that what you are accustomed to might be wrong or problematic. A good example of this is paying for drugs overseas. Drugs are cheap just about everywhere outside of the USA.

If the new experience is worse, then you have a better appreciation of what you have come to accept and live with. A good example is going to the public toilet in rural China. You really start to appreciate Western-style public restrooms.

I created this post to illustrate that there are many ways to do things, and often these other ways might appear odd, strange or simply curious to someone who is not used to them.

You know, when I first visited China, (back around 1993 or so) many of my (new) Chinese friends thought that a “hamburger” was exactly what McDonald’s made. They had no idea what American food was, and their only exposure to it was McDonald’s or KFC.

McDonald's burger.
A McDonald’s cheeseburger. It’s ok to eat. It’s nothing fancy, but rather plain and mass-produced fast food. The “meat” is too processed and full of preservatives, and the toppings are rather pedestrian. The bread roll is bland.

They were surprised when I explained to them that hamburgers are something totally different from what you would find in most (not all) American “fast food” restaurants. They didn’t believe me, and had a very difficult time visualizing it. So, what I had to do, was make up some home-made hamburgers on real rolls, with fresh fixings to show them.

A real hamburger.
This is how a hamburger is supposed to be made. It is 100% real beef. The roll is fresh and has a crunchy outside crust. It has fresh vegetables, and is cooked just right.

Well, China is like that. They often do things different from we are used to seeing. And because of that, that kind of exposure, let’s us view things that we have taken for granted over years and years of exposure.

Maybe we need to take a look at why we do certain things in certain ways. As such, we can start to question if the things that we are accustomed to, are really the best way to do them.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Monkey Style

I was raised watching David Carradine in the television show Kung Fu. I, like many of my generation became entranced by his Shoulin kung fu style. I, as well as most Americans, at that time, only knew of two ways of battling bad guys. (Aside from shooting them, and boxing them.) That was by using Karate, or Kung Fu.

Kung Fu television scene
For many Americans, we learned about Kung Fu through television and movies. Television brought Kung Fu to our livingrooms, and exposed us to the shaolin style of kungfu.

After a few decades of this, we became exposed to martial arts through watching Bruce Lee, and other notable martial arts actors on television. It seemed like all of the best martial arts originated out of China, and more specifically, out of Hong Kong.

With this being our only “education” into the world of martial arts, it is no surprise that we Americans have come to assume that this is the best and (perhaps) the most effective style to fight in martial arts. It is our lack of exposure to other styles that gives us a false understanding of what is available to us personally.

Perhaps we should be exposed to other techniques and methods. Even if they appear odd or strange to us. They exist, because they when performed with mastery, are superior fighting forms.

Other styles of Chinese martial arts include, but are most certainly not limited to:

Wushu: Known more in the contemporary world as not really a style, but more as a sport or a showmanship of forms.

Tai Chi: A very popular internal martial arts style that is characterized by its breathing techniques. Millions of people practice this martial art for relief of stress, meditation purposes, and health and balance in their stress-filled lives.

Kung Fu: King Fu is used in the contemporary world to describe the many styles of martial arts in China. There were additionally various sub styles of Kung Fu from both Northern and Southern China. Whereas the Northern region boasted Shaolin, Eagle Claw, Long Fist and Monkey Style and the Southern region laid claim to Wing Chun, Hung Gar, and Choy Li Fut.

Shuai Jiao: Shuai Jiao was one of the first martial arts in China. Shuai Jiao was taught to the troops by means of utilizing the horns on their helmets and throwing as well as ground fighting was the main focus of this martial art.

Here is a micro-video of a monk performing “Monkey Style” Kung Fu. What do you think? Do you think that it would stun the attacker, or have him roll on the ground laughing?

You see, or maybe not, the point here.

This style is both humorous and unexpected. It’s difficult to fight someone who cannot be predicted. And the humor is disarming. This technique is not for everyone, but it has advantage, and in life… that’s what we need. A little bit of advantage.

Here’s another video depicting scenes of a Chinese movie character that utilizes such actions to disarm his opponents, and obtain advantage in situations. It’s sort of like the book & movie “The Scarlet Pimpernel”.

Moving on to a totally different subject, but still a little odd and crazy is what happens when you drink too much.

A Little Too Much To Drink

Now this is China, don’t you know. Everyone drinks alcohol as it is part of the culture.

In America we would go home to sleep things off, or maybe crash on some stranger’s porch or in our car (Heaven forbid we drive home). Rarely do we try to walk home. Though, I have seen people riding a bike home after closing time at the bar. (You know, that almost all bars in the USA have Cinderella hours. That’s right, they are not open all night. Yeah, crazy, huh?)

It’s 5:08 AM. She obviously left the club, bar or KTV, and is having a bit of trouble getting oriented. Lordy, you would think one of her friends would help get her home to bed.

This poor chick had a little bit too much to drink. I think. Either that, or her world is just spinning around and around.

Training a K9 Police Dog to perform CPR

I’ve seen people train police dogs. There are all kinds of movies and shows depicting this. I have seen them take down a “bad guy” wearing a padded suit. I have seen them run though obstacle courses. I have watched them sniff for drugs, and locate bombs.

But, I have never seen them be trained to give CPR.

Well, this is China, and they are not afraid to try new things and push things to the limits. This is a cute and interesting video of a young police K9 puppy being trained to perform CPR on a downed police officer.

Three videos are enough for one post. The band width would never permit you to load too many more. So please kindly go to the next section to check out some more crazy Chinese videos.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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What Visiting a Park in China is like (part 2)

This is the second page of an on-going post describing what Chinese parks are like. If you would like to start at the beginning, please go HERE. Otherwise enjoy…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

The Views are Beautiful

There is no question that the views are glorious. For beautiful is a word that just doesn’t cut it. I love the fresh air, the scent of the trees, and the cool breezes that caress my face. There is a certain romance with the way the forests are and the rocks and stone. I find it enthralling.

You might wonder why the stones have these traditional Chinese characters on them. Well, I have.

Well, it turns out that this is what the Chinese like to do. You know, like how Americans like to put a plastic pink flamingo (or an entire flock of them) in their front yard, or those plywood cutout of bent-over granny’s, or flying duck whimsy’s in their yards. Or those gnomes… Or those buried bathtubs with a statue of the Virgin Mary inside…

Or putting folding chairs in the parking spots on the streets of Pittsburgh…

Kitsch America
During the 1950’s and the 1960’s Americans would put these Pink Flamingos in their front lawns. It was considered a very trendy thing to do at the time. Now, it is looked upon as Kitsch.
Kitsch, also called cheesiness or tackiness, is art or other objects that, generally speaking, appeal to popular rather than "high art" tastes. Such objects are sometimes appreciated in a knowingly ironic or humorous way. The word was first applied to artwork that was a response to certain divisions of 19th-century art with aesthetics that favored what later art critics would consider to be exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama. Hence, 'kitsch art' is closely associated with 'sentimental art' .
-Wikipedia

Travel within the Park

Often you might need or opt to take a tram or light-rail train to some of the more remote areas in the parks. This can be an amazing experience.

Often you will ride in and out of the clouds. You will pass under and through trees and vine tangled gorges. You will watch light glimmer off of shattered stone surfaces, and witness rainbows form over enormous cascading waterfalls.

Wildlife

Being China, you will see all kinds of native flora and fauna that is unavailable in the rest of the world. Bird watchers end up experiencing some special treats.

The birds not only look different, but they make different sounds as well. Instead of hearing “cup of tea” from a grackle, you might hear some kind of prehistoric screech that seems like it belongs in a grade B horror flick.

Entertainments

Being a mountainous nation, the Chinese love to take advantage of the natural beauty and scenery. As such, they enjoy building recreational themed structures and venues on the tops of mountains and the sides of cliff faces.

It is pretty common to have these enormous swings that you can ride from one mountain top to the other, or glass floored bridges that you can walk in the clouds by…

There are often all kinds of fun things to do. There are many, many kinds of amusements. I personally like the hour-long water slides that go down the mountain. Awesome! It’s like you are riding some of those logs in the hills of Sacramento (Auburn), California back in the gold-rush days.

Remember them?

Wooden sluice
Here is a sluice from the gold rush days. The water would be diverted and used to help mine, process and separate the gold. In cases of timber logging, the sluices would not have such drastic bends and curves.

It’s sort of like this. And yes, you can experience this kind of ride all over China. It’s as common as bumper stickers on cars. It’s as common as having packages stolen off your porch once Amazon.com delivers them (or the UPS does). It’s as common as shoelaces on shoes.

It is sort of like this…

Riding down one of these things reminds me of a scene from the old television show Here Come the Brides.

There was a scene, in a long ago, half-remembered scene, where they rode down the sluice to get away (?) from some bad guys (?). All this kind of reminds me of that. I well remember wanting to ride one of those trees going down a sluice. Ah, it didn’t happen until over fifty years later. Eh?

The brides lived in an area much like a Chinese park.
Screen capture from the late 1960’s – early 1970’s American television show “Here comes the brides”.

There are all kinds of different versions of this. From little life-raft thingys to miniature go-carts, to mechanics roller beds . Here’s another version at a different park…

It kind of reminds me of sled-riding in the dead of Winter on snowy January nights in Western Pennsylvania. The logging roads in the woods would be blocked off from traffic, and the snow would be packed down by snowmobile. Then the cub-scouts would organize a “wiener roast” or “hot dog” party at the base (or often) at the summit of the hill.

Well, that’s enough micro-videos for this section. Let’s go to the next page of this post to see what other surprises that await us in the parks of China.

Now, let’s go to the next part of this post. (If I throw in too many micro-videos nothing appears and the post takes forever to load.) So to continue, please go follow this arrow…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Popular Music of China; Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing.

Here we provide a mixture of the popular music now currently trending in China. Strangely, most Americans are unaware of music outside of the USA shores. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it, but there you have it. The Chinese have their own pop groups, their own rap groups, and their own version of Country & Western music. Additionally, music from Russia is amazingly popular, as well as selected Australian, and American music.

We are gonna talk about all of this. In fact, if I might be so bold, we are going to look at the music from the point of view of culture. Or, in other words, how the Chinese cultures influences the Chinese music scene and why it is similar or different from the American music scene. (As the case may be.)

Due to SEO rules and server limitations, this post is divided into multiple posts. (At least ten, but I lost track of my count. It’s a “bunch” of posts. heh heh.) Of course, we’re gonna need to do this in order to keep the bandwidth hogs to a minimum. There’s a ton-load of videos and audio embeds involved here.

The music is identified by group and song title, and you can hear and check out the music and videos as attached. Where possible, I have also provided direct links so that you the reader could investigate the groups, the songs or their compilations on your own. Just cut and paste into the browser.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Romanian translated Bulgarian Rap is popular in China

Let’s start with “Dependent” also known as Пристрастен (зависим). This is a Eastern European song that I (and many of my friends) thought was Russian. But, nope. It’s Eastern European.

Yah. It crashed it’s way into the hearts and minds of the Chinese. Russian pop music is very popular in China. You can hear it on the radio and the various music APPs. Further, the music can be heard all over China. From coffee and tea houses to Majong parlors.

You know… I just have to laugh at how politically correct the United States has become. When trying to research the background on this song, I found this link at the very top of the Google Search results…

Anyways, you just simply won’t be able to find any of this information (provided herein) by using Google as a search engine. In fact, most American based search engines will be rather useless in trying to find this kind of information.

You need to understand that American search engines are dedicated to searching American-interest subjects in English. The determination of what would of interest to an American is determined by computer algorithm, which is in turn, determined by an American software engineer. More often than not, a 20-something millennial, located in California.

Our future.
The future face of America. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents how modern American millennials view the world and what they plan to do with it.

To find similar search results, you will need to use search engines that are not tied to Google. You need to go “deep diving” using non-USA based search engines. Or, at least, American search engines that aren’t so aggressive in American-centrist information searching.

Try Search Encrypt for better search results. Google was great back in the late 1990’s then they got in bed with the rich and powerful. Now they have other objectives, and you, my dear reader are the product for their enjoyment and profit.

Search Encrypt

Our first song; “Dependent”

Back to the music. Here is the top Russian Romanian song translated into Bulgarian for the Chinese audience. This is the first song on my list.

Dependent…

And here is the lyrics of it, in the off-hand chance you would like to sing along. Credit to the fine folks who collected the lyrics HERE.


Пристрастен (зависим)

Събуждам се, нов ден е.
Без теб съм в леглото.
Без никаква мисъл.
Живея, както си е.
Без теб съм наобратно
Не мога да се обърна. (пристрастен)
 
Липсва ми да изрека
твоето име сега.
 
Пристрастен, към дългите нощи безмълвни.
Пристрастен, към целувките ти огнени.
Пристрастен, и не зная как да се излекувам
Пристрастен, към теб...
 
Събуждам се, нов ден е.
Будилникът звънна
Нищо не се е променило.
Но ти, ти не идваш
Да ми кажеш че е свършило.
Да ти кажа, че ти простих.
Простих ти.
 
Пристрастен, към дългите нощи безмълвни.
Пристрастен, към целувките ти огнени.
Пристрастен, и не зная как да се излекувам
Пристрастен, към теб...
 
Пристрастен, към дългите нощи безмълвни.
Пристрастен, към целувките ти огнени.
Пристрастен, и не зная как да се излекувам
Пристрастен, към теб... (х2)

Ok. Yeah. I know you were expecting to listen and hear Chinese songs in Chinese. Well, just hold your horses, won’t ya. The Chinese love all kinds of music, and yes that includes American music. Which has a good and a bad side to it.

For instance, they never went through the two decades of Kenny G sax performances like us Americans have endured. Still, to this day, you can hear ol’ Kenny G belting it out in Chinese elevators, at Chinese Ice Cream parlors and along the many Chinese mall walkways. Ugh!

Kenny G playing music.
NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 14: Saxophonist Kenny G performs at Hard Rock Cafe, Times Square on January 14, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/and credit to Getty Images)

Anyways, if you want to listen to the entire song, just cut and paste the title and paste into your Youku player. It will look a little like this. That is, of course, unless the procedure is not blocked by the software oligarchs in California…

Example 1
Youku example when searching for the Bulgarian song that is popular in China; Dependent.

Once you do this simple task, all the versions of the song will pop up. Awesome!

Cut and paste example
Screen capture of the cut and paste action of Dependent into the Youku player.

Chinese Music in China

Now, here’s some of the most popular music in China in 2019. Ya all, had best buckle up…

Let’s start with a tune brought to us by 苏潭潭. this is a fine song to sing in the KTV. Slow songs are great. I’ll tell you why. Personally, I like to sing Country and Western songs because they are slow and have a pace that I can sing to.

You know, if you are not careful, your Chinese friends will ask you to sing Beat It”, by Michael Jackson. Ugh! That has happened to me on more than one occasions. Yikes!

This song is well paced, and easy to sing along to. Perfect for the Chinese audience.

Well, moving on…

Now, you would be hard pressed to ride in a taxi, or DiDi without hearing this song. Let along go to a bar, club or eat at a restaurant. In fact, I heard this song today while I was eating my Whopper in Burger King. LOL!

This was brought to us by NCF-艾力.

Music Rotations

This song is very popular. And, it always SEEMS to be in some kind of music rotation with this other song. I happen to like it a lot.

Music Rotation

This other song is very Chinese(y). A cute girl sings in a cute way about difficult subjects and life. I guess that that has an appeal to many people through out Asia. Not only in China, but all over Asia.

Here, check out the song…

I do not know who makes up the song rotations. Perhaps a DJ can fill me in on this. I would imagine that there would be some kind of method and methodology involved. However, I have to assume that it would be profit based, and would be subject to the indicators of such measurables. Eh?

I remember one listening to El Rusbo (Rush Limbaugh for all your folks out there in Rio Linda) while he was talking about his early years in the radio business.

He had this story where his job was to listen to the radio rotations (the songs and how often they were played) at the various competitive radio stations. He said that he learned a lot about the business buy understanding why the songs were played at certain times and which ones were selected.

He left it at that. What I took from his story was that there is a science to the music rotation that is provided to the consuming public. Perhaps that too, is the reason why the songs are all in the same music rotation.

Here is another song that is easily on music rotation…

What you can find online…

I did a baidu search. There, I was able to find all sorts of fans singing popular Chinese songs. Ugh! So, so many. It’s a major hobby in China; singing and dancing. Like this chick (next). She is singing a selection of popular songs in China, and she’s not half bad. You go girrrl!

Do not freak out, this is a software player using flash. If you are having troubles or don’t want the hassle, just bypass this video…

Please take Note: If the embedded IQIY player is taking too long to load, one potential reason is that American USP’s have to go through the NSA. It’s for our “protection”, don’t ya know. Also, you have to accept the reality that IQIY directly competes with You-Tube and Netflix. As such, the player is a direct threat to the huge mega-monopolies in California. So Americans need to be “protected” both from the evils of the Internet, and dangerous non-American businesses out to make a buck.

In general, if you are dealing with American sites, in America, the process is rather quick. The USP’s send out the data in bursts that cycle in and out of the NSA approved servers faster than you can blink your eyelids. If however, you are using non-American websites, there will be a delay.

I used to be like most people. You might argue that is is due to transcontinental losses on the cables. However, but most cables have been replaced with fiber optics. And what that means today is that that particular excuse just doesn’t hold up “in court”…

Well, maybe it would in the 9th circus court.

Actually, and unfortunately, most of the lag is due to government “protections”. I like to think that is is the government’s way of keep my mail box free of spam. (BTW; if so, they are doing a pretty piss-poor job at it.) I like to think that the government is looking out for my best interests. You know, catching the “bad guys”, and saving the world for “democracy” (with a small “d”).

You all shouldn’t get too hot and bothered about this. The same is true with China. You do know that China is not connected to the internet, like the USA is? You do know this, right? China is one big…huge… enormous… intra-net. It’s an intranet. Thus, the Chinese government can control what access the citizens can have on internet content.

Intranet

Just like America does. Only, um… they use other criteria than America does, for other reasons and other purposes.

The debate on what these other criteria are, and how they differ from the USA can (often) result in lively discussion. So for now, let’s just agree that both the USA and China polices the incoming internet traffic, and if anything is slow or difficult to load, you need to recognize that it is due to the nation (and their policies) where you live.

So just hold on. If it is still taking too long to load, you can skip the above mini-player and move to the next post. Lucky for youse guys, aside from the IQIY player, most of the embedded micro-videos are all on American servers. (Heh heh. I plan ahead.)

Now, I have one more micro-video that I want to include. There is a kitty-cat in it, and so I just cannot help myself. LOL. Who doesn’t like dogs, cats or pretty girls? Eh?

Now, of course, all of these videos are going to be impossible to load unless this post is broken up into smaller chew-sized portions. So to continue, please click here…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go back to the start of this series, please go HERE.

Links about China

Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Business KTV
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.